by submission | Apr 25, 2015 | Story |
Author : Suzanne Borchers
I am programmed to destroy the invaders’ outpost by pushing a hidden button on my exoscreen that is surrounded by artificial hair. While probing the captured alien’s centralized core, my masters discovered the invaders seem to trust a particular creature. I was reprogrammed into that image. I am repulsed by my disguise and must continually readjust that rejection. I cannot permit myself to think about anything except pushing that button.
But first, I must infiltrate their defensive sentries. I approach them filled with revulsion, but pretend friendliness. I cower and lower myself to the ground to scrape my belly as I crawl toward the sentry on the left. I’m programmed to wave a tail and to whimper. I want to fight the programming but continue to imitate the alien’s creature.
“Hey, look at the dog,” he says to his partner. “Here, fellow, don’t be afraid.” He reaches his hand toward my face. And I do not bite him, as he rubs behind my synthetic ears. Wait—why does that feel good?
“Watch it, Roy,” his partner says. “He might bite.” I force my gaze to shift to the partner, and whine. “What’s he doing here?” I don’t like the partner. He could ruin the plan.
“Jeff had a dog stowed away in the ship. Maybe when he was taken, the dog was also but escaped.” Roy’s fingers continue to rub my neck and back. I reach up to his hands for more. “He’s probably hungry and thirsty.”
The partner approaches me and I stifle a growl. A growl? I push against Roy. I feel myself lifted up and cuddled against his chest. Cuddled?
“In a couple of digits, when Ivan and John relieve us, I’m taking him inside. I’ll explain it to the captain and we can all share him. Maybe he can help us somehow with these recalcitrant aliens.” Roy hesitates, then says, “Maybe he can bring us a bit of home.” I pant and smile. Smile? Roy’s warmth feels good. I search my programming and cannot find out why.
I’m carried inside.
I am surrounded by warmth and soft words. I rest beside Roy. And now I cannot permit myself to think about anything except that button. Continually I search my programming for a way to dismantle it.
His fingers are too close to its hiding place.
by submission | Apr 24, 2015 | Story |
Author : Lee S. Hawke
Cxx61 stares down at the knife embedded hilt-deep in his chest. It’s so cold. Without thinking, he takes a breath, then stutter-shrieks in pain as his muscles shift and contract around the blade, shredding himself from within. He has no measure for how much this hurts. His body shakes and spits and coughs, trying to live.
The man in front of him, his murderer, watches him dying with a polite smile. “I’m going to cut you open,” he says quietly. He reaches towards the hilt of the blade. Cxx61 feels it before he hears the horrible ripping sound. Flesh and meat part and he screams and screams.
Bizarrely, his last thought is that the blood staining his clothes and pooling around his dead body doesn’t feel quite right.
#
Cxx61 startles awake. He looks down. He’s in military gear, and he knows through force of habit that if he touches his cheeks they will come away flaked with camouflage paint. He looks up, expecting to see his team around him, but he is alone in an empty clearing that shouts target.
The déjà vu hits him like a train. It’s so quiet. There’s nothing but the sound of his harsh breathing and the peaceful wind. He hears a whisper of leaves and before he can think he’s bolted. Dirt and decayed matter scud underneath his feet, his breath comes in short gasps that stings through his side. He knows in the marrow of his bones that he is being followed, and that knowledge consumes his brain until he doesn’t even remember his name, he just remembers the feeling of dying, over and over and over again.
He trips and staggers. The sharp whine of a bullet passes his ear and he throws himself flat on the ground. The impact is like a crowbar to the ribs, and he has a horrible feeling he’s died like that before as well, beaten to death in a back alley.ˇ
The almost-but-not-quite memory has him up and sprinting again. Moments later, he hears another high-pitched scream and then his legs collapse from underneath him. He feels the horrifying, nerve-burning pain that tells him his spine has been severed.
Soft footsteps on the grass. A boot kicks into his side and rolls him onto his back. He looks up through the dirt and blood and agony and his murderer is there, the same as ever, face so plain as to be anonymous, smiling that polite, self-satisfied smile.
The man kneels down by his side like a minister. “I’m going to slit your throat from ear to ear, you pathetic bitch.”
And he does.
#
A body lies comatose on a government table. A squat, branded computer watches over him, occasionally flickering with pre-programmed code. Thin wires connect to his brain, and his eyes are covered in strands of sheathed electricity. Occasionally, the fingers twitch and there is a faint hitch in the breathing, almost a moan, but then it slides back into the regular rhythm of sleep.
One of his onlookers crunches into an apple. Juice flecks off onto her police badge, and she wipes it off absentmindedly. “How much longer, do you think?” she asks conversationally.
Beside her, a man shakes his shaved head. Patches of smooth, charged fabric flex and sigh and mould themselves tighter to his skull. He looks at the screen and its light flickers against his face. “His log has 676 recorded instances of death threats, 1239 rape threats,” he says. He smiles politely. “I’d say this is going to take all day.”
by submission | Apr 23, 2015 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
They gathered, all of those interested in watching, at a position twice the distance Pluto was from the sun. Onboard the maiden ship, Corosin, Trya watched intently.
“It’ll happen soon,” Gavin said. He smiled, revealing a perfect row of teeth. Long ago, when Sol was still a yellow sun, humanity had eradicated tooth decay, cancer, and all other diseases.
“Do you think it will hurt?” asked Trya. Her blue eyes glistened in the artificial light.
“Hurt?”
“When Sol explodes?” she said. “How do you know it doesn’t feel pain?”
“Not at all.” He paused and thought on it a moment. “We’ve known Sol was going nova for thousands of years,” he said. “That’s why we moved out to the stars. Mankind will survive.”
“But what happens when all the suns in the universe go out?” asked Trya.
Gavin grinned. “Relax. That won’t happen for millions of years. We’re working on machines that can cross into other dimensions. By the time all the stars in the universe fade to black, we’ll simply jump into another dimension.”
“But what happens when all the stars in all the dimensions die out?” she asked.
Gavin nodded. “That’s a good question. By that time, we’ll have figured out a way of building our own stars.” He pointed toward Sol. “Imagine having a star just like Sol to replace Sol when it’s gone.”
“When Sol goes nova, it’ll be the end of the beginning of mankind,” Trya said. “Don’t you feel any remorse of it?”
Gavin shook his head. “Not really.” Then, his expression softened and he took her hand. “It’s Sol,” he said. “The birth star of mankind. It’ll go nova, explode, contract back down into a white dwarf, then transform again in maybe a million years into something else. It’s the nature of a star. Sol served its purpose.”
He turned to her. “Now, we have to honor Sol’s sacrifice.”
“By watching it go nova?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
They sat there for a long time, staring out the viewport of the ship. With the passing of each second, Sol was visibly shrinking. It was something Gavin had seen a dozen times before, but there was something that touched him emotionally about Sol’s impending transformation. He had lied to Trya about not feeling remorse for Sol. He did feel a pang in his heart for the star that had birthed mankind so terribly long ago.
The ship’s computer alerted them that Sol would go nova within minutes.
Gavin held her tighter.
“I don’t want Sol to go nova,” Trya said. “Why can’t things be like they were when we lived on Earth?”
“Mankind wasn’t supposed to stay tied to one world,” Gavin told her. “We were supposed to go out into space and explore. We did.”
“But we left Sol behind,” she said.
“Sol will always be a part of us,” he said. “And we’ll always be a part of Sol.”
The security claxon went off, but Gavin flicked a switch and shut it off.
Through the viewport, they saw the light go out of Sol. Darkness filled the cabin of the ship.
Then, a massive explosion filled the view port with light. The computer automatically adjusted the screen so as not to hurt their eyes, and Gavin and Trya watched as the newborn supernova Sol was born.
“I will miss you, Sol,” Trya said.
“We all will,” Gavin replied. “But it’s time to go home. I’ll leave a probe here to monitor Sol.”
Trya nodded.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
He dropped the probe, then turned their ship toward the stars and left Sol behind.
by submission | Apr 22, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
I handed the teenager her milk and syrup laden drink and went back to the cash register. Just then, a Yedla walked into the coffee shop. He was a good seven feet tall and had a row of sharp teeth in his two mandibles. The other patrons in the shop fell silent. As soon as he got to the counter, the intimidating looking alien fell on his knees, bowed his head, and held his webbed hands up with the palms facing me.
“Pree! Pree!” he said with a trembling voice. It was as close to “please” as the Yedla larynx would allow. His clothing was dirty and tattered. Five years earlier, he might have swaggered into an establishment like mine and simply taken what he wanted. Or he might have razed the building to the ground with his particle rifle just for fun. Now he was humbly pleading for the very thing that had quickly ended the Yedla invasion of Earth: a cup of coffee.
The Yedla had arrived in a fleet of twenty starships. They’d transmitted a message in multiple human languages saying they’d scorch the surface of the Earth if we resisted. Then they’d fired a few volleys to let us know they had the means. The Yedla were less of an invading army than a sort of interstellar street gang. They didn’t want to conquer Earth. They’d take what they found desirable and would kill and pillage for the pleasure of it. Then they’d move on and probably scorch the Earth anyway. At least that’s what they thought until one of them tried coffee.
A group of Yedla had kicked in the door of a small coffee shop in Ohio. One of them was curious about the quintessential morning beverage and ordered the proprietor to give him a cup. The alien gulped down the java and almost immediately fell to the floor. He reportedly experienced two full minutes of ecstasy. Ten minutes later, he was convulsing in what physicians would later call Yedla Caffeine Withdrawal Syndrome.
Caffeine addiction spread like wildfire among the hedonistic marauders. Even the Yedla manning the vessels in orbit, once they heard about the exotic Terran hallucinogen, abandoned their posts and came down to the surface leaving their ships derelict and harmless.
Within three months of that first Yedla drinking a cup of coffee, the aliens were reduced to pathetic wretches. Some even resorted to rummaging through trash dumpsters looking for discarded coffee grounds. Earth had survived its alien invasion and the bean had proved mightier than the sword. The trick now is whether we’ll survive leapfrogging a thousand years ahead from all the Yedla tech the governments of the world are busily reverse-engineering.
“Preeeeee!” the trembling creature bellowed again. I broke down. I filled a big take away cup with light roast and handed it to him. He gulped it down and placed a shaking claw on my shoulder in gratitude before he shuffled out the door. I noticed several of my customers tear up. And I did, too. Five years ago, those aliens were the greatest existential threat Mankind had ever faced. Now, we can’t help but feel sorry for them.
by submission | Apr 19, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
It all started in the spring of 1977. I remember Sunday afternoon in Houston, in my future wife’s apartment, slouching on her couch while listening to public radio. The sunshine wafted through flowered drapes, dancing across her handmade Afghan, covering her asleep in a nearby chair, unaware of the coming alien broadcast. Chopin’s Polonaise went scratchy and incoherent. It didn’t wake her, but it caught my attention. A mechanical, bass voice rumbled, introducing himself as an alien commander. He stated listeners were chosen to help prepare for coming Earth changes, including our destruction. The warnings lasted a minute, faded and then went silent. The frantic voice of the show’s host followed just before an advertisement and a return to Chopin.
I called the station. The host answered…terrified. She was alone that weekend, without engineers. I asked what had happened. Her broadcast signal was interrupted after power surges. I asked if she had the FCC required show tapes. She did, but couldn’t get them until Monday. She asked me what I heard. When I repeated the message she freaked and hung up. On Monday morning I asked the station manager to listen to the tapes. He was abrupt and angry. Before he slammed the receiver, he said there were no such tapes and I was never to call again. So I dropped it. I came from a military family. I could smell a cover up.
I remembered part of the message: three quakes shaking the world, the four blood moons, craft rising from frozen tundra, something about a blue star, the white plague, dying children, and then the blue snow.
Now, in 2020, it all makes horrible sense. I didn’t know about the ‘Wow’ signal at SETI in August of ‘77. That was followed by the November Asteron alien broadcast in the UK. It was the year of warnings. Then came the crop circle phenomena. I never connected all of that with the increased UFO sightings. There were signs everywhere, but I missed the symptoms.
I never bought the global warming stories or the fringe element fears about chemtrails and government mold spraying programs. I didn’t see the connection with mycotoxin spores taking out flocks of birds, rivers full of fish and even dolphins or whales. I did note the skyrocketing rise in autism, COPD, asthma and immune diseases. Some hit my family, including Morgellons Disease. I still missed the symptom connections after the quakes, blood moons and even the blue comet. Maybe our government knew and was trying to condition us to survive. No one realized until too late that giant fissures in tundra of the sub-Arctic regions were left by ancient craft emerging for the new terraforming programmed millions of years prior.
Molds from the dinosaur extinction filled surface waters and aquifers. From those waters rose the white death: a new trichothecene mycotoxin. A child reporting headaches at supper would be dissolved in white cilia by morning. Spores spread to neighborhoods, cities and beyond. It went airborne with bird migrations. Like the 10th plague of Egypt, it took all the young mammals. By 2019 the entire planet was infested, just before the mold’s final deadly mutation.
As I record this message, in the last balloon community near the equator, the Earth is being swiftly enclosed by freezing carbon dioxide crystals generated from tropospheric conflagrations of methane escaping from thawing tundra and ocean hydrates. The gases cooled and spread from the poles, concealing sea and land with gigantic blue glaciers, now growing too deep and fast for any of us to ever escape. We were warned.
