by submission | Mar 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jake Christie
“Hundred and fifty bucks.”
Harry looked at the tiny vial in the clerk’s hand, filled with a slightly opaque purple liquid, then back at his face. “For that much?” he asked.
The clerk nodded. “This is the top of the line stuff, man,” he says. “The Jimi Hendrix. Nothing like it.” The door chimed, another customer coming in. There was a line starting to form. “If you don’t want it…”
“No, no, I do,” said Harry. He pulled his cash from his pocket and started peeling off bills. “How many, ah…”
The clerk held the vial close to his face and squinted in. “Three hits, I’d say. Unless you want, you know, an experience.”
Harry handed over the money and thanked the clerk. The vial felt cool in his fingertips, colder than the rest of the room, maybe colder than it should have been. Like it wanted out of that vial. “Is there a place here?”
“Sure,” said the clerk, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “In the back.”
The back room was like the other side of a coin, the complete inverse of the front. Where the front was all antiseptic and shiny, counters and vials and hard corners, the back room was soft and inviting. Lots of colors, lots of curves, and a lots of people in chairs and on mattresses, their heads lolled back, their eyes closed or looking at something that wasn’t there. There was no music, just the rhythmic sound of breathing.
Harry found a comfortable spot and rolled up his sleeve. He took out his syringe and poked it into the vial, then slowly pulled out the plunger. A third of the purple liquid disappeared from the vial. Then half. Then all of it. He tapped his finger against the needle, took a deep breath, and stuck it in his arm.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. Blackness enveloped him. He listened to the sound of his breathing – in and out, in and out. Then, even that faded away. He was left in darkness and silence, floating out of this specific place in space and time. No longer sitting in the back room. No longer himself.
It started as a dull rumble, like a highway off in the distance, then grew louder and louder. It wasn’t a highway, it wasn’t an earthquake. The rumbling became more distinct, into voices – a sea of voices, all screaming.
In the darkness and the roar, Harry suddenly felt that he was no longer lying down. He was standing, there was a warm breeze blowing on his face. And there was something in his hands – left handed, even though he was a righty.
He opened his eyes and looked out over the crowd. Thousands of people, hundreds of thousands. All staring right at the stage, right at him, and cheering. He heard one voice, close to the stage, say his name: “We love you, Jimi!”
Harry plucked the pick from his mouth and stretched his fingers around the neck of the guitar. He’d never learned how to play, but it had always been his dream to be a rock star. He always wondered what it would feel like. And now, he knew how to play. He knew how to play everything.
Somebody in the back room was playing a Stradivarius at the Met. Somebody else was playing trumpet with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. Harry was holding Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, in Jimi Hendrix’s hands.
“I love you too,” he said. “We are the Jimi Hendrix Experience. This next one is called ‘Purple Haze.’”
by submission | Mar 20, 2014 | Story |
Author : Tom Coupland
Dropping from his vantage point, Sijen kicks out, snapping the neck of the first guard. Hearing his partner’s choked scream, the remaining patrolman swings about, weapon leveled. Rising from his landing crouch, Sijen’s blade like hands take the man below the rib cage. Intestines, stomach, lungs, burst in turn. Continuing the fatal movement, vaulting over the ruined body, Sijen sprints off down the corridor, followed closely by the two white shadows that are his brothers. Their goal is close, but time is short.
Passageways stretch out all around them; a trick of perspective making their target larger on the inside than it had looked on their approach. They takes turns at speed, navigating their way through the labyrinth, following the route etched into their minds. Drawing ever closer to their target.
Alarms ring out. Days of preparation at the monastery have reduced time to a crawl for the covert boarding team, high pitched alerts become deep undulations of sound. Even with their ear piercing intent removed, their meaning is clear, the time for subterfuge is over, but the team have nearly arrived. Signalling farewell, Biji breaks off to head towards the nearest power relay. Their aim, as for them all, clear in his mind.
A flash ahead. Sijen leaps towards the ceiling as the projectile whispers past, followed shortly by the dull crack of its firing charge. Beneath him now, Dijen snakes towards the hardened firing position protecting the hatch that leads to their target. Skin changing from ghostly white to burning red, Dijen unleashes the microfilm suit’s power supply as he closes. He is not the one that must reach their goal.
Sijen breathes a prayer for his brother, as the waves of heat and sound from his sacrifice wash over him. Reducing the magnetic output of his suit he returns to the floor and races to the breached hatch, diving through the smoke and flames onto the bridge. Operators nearest the door, incapacitated by his brothers sacrifice, can be ignored, but there remain three, lurching to their feet, hands grasping at holsters.
A tremor, signalling the loss of his remaining brother, vibrates through the ship. Darkness engulfs the room, confirming his success. The darkness is brief, yet still it is interrupted by three desperate flashes of light. Popping into life, the emergency lighting illuminates Sijen striding towards the central command chair. Lacking Sijen’s heightened vision and lethal speed, in the dark the three hadn’t stood a chance.
It’s time to perform his role. Jacking into the central pedestal he shifts into the realm of pure data that controls the ship. Nearing the engines representation the pressure on Sijen’s mind becomes close to unbearable, sweat beading on his brow as he wrestles with the ships systems for control, face contorting with effort for the first time during the operation to save his world. Breaking through he takes power from, the soon to be redundant, life support systems, forcing fuel regulators to open far beyond their safety limits.
Klaxons replace alarms. The ship simultaneously crying out for aid and warning any aboard to leave. Sijen, assuming a meditative pose before the viewing screen, bids his home farewell. His mission complete.
#
A new star pierces the darkness above and a moan passes through the vast congregation gathered before the grand cathedral, high on it’s hill at the centre of the capital. A soft lament for the fallen swells from the brethren. It rises and falls, drifting on the wind, out into the quiet of the night and the population of the city knows time has been bought, paid for with blood. Time it so desperately needs. Time to finish it’s preparations for what was to come.
by submission | Mar 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : cchatfield
The small group marched forward in loose formation, swaggering with the confidence that their training would kick in when needed. The sandy landscape offered no threats, no hiding places, no life.
Their destination: a lone tower, hidden in a secluded valley lined with flat, open rocks.
“Looks like it was built to last,” commented the leader.
The tower stood a hundred feet high, pale sunlight illuminating its simple apex. The rusty surface silently boasted of the hundreds of years it had stood untouched and promised tenfold more.
“It’s just up there?” asked the navigator, rubbing his hands.
The leader nodded, “Should be a stairwell. And don’t get excited, we don’t know what the security’s like.”
They soon located a door leading to a winding stair that filled the entirety of the tower’s innards. It opened to a dark room and the group of mercenaries froze, alert for booby traps. They knew from experience that the ancient treasure hoarders had perfected the technique of turning empty spaces into dangerous surprises.
They entered slowly, adjusting to the darkness.
“We got it,” whispered one of the mercenaries, eyes wide at the sight of the altar sitting on the opposite end of the room. An archaic padlock hung limply from an unassuming chest seated in the place of honor. Guns held tightly, all attention focused on their quarry.
Off to the side was a standing oval, four feet tall. It resembled a woven basket, braided with dusty metal strands rather than plant fiber. The navigator motioned towards it with his gun. “Looks like a cocoon doesn’t i-”
A razor blade grew from his throat. The rest of the team was in motion before he hit the floor. They ducked and rolled to avoid the flying whips of metal hissing around the room. A few strands of razor thin wire bisected the leader. Thicker vines of ropy cord snarled the second and third-in-command. In a moment the group had deteriorated into a pile of corpses on the floor, the echoes of their sparse gunfire bouncing into oblivion.
Fully unwrapped, a small robotic figure tread softly around them. Green orbs acted as eyes on a childish body. Hundreds of wires fanned from her head in a constantly writhing, prodding cloud. They worked quickly, dissecting the team and slipping the remains through a thin grate to land with dull clacks on a pile of bleached bones.
After inspecting the chest for signs of damage, the mechanical girl stood over the leader’s cooling form. The corner of a picture peeked from his pocket. While the wires busily stripped bodies on the other side of the room, she snatched it and folded it into plated metal hands.
Their job done, the girl regained her position in the corner. She unfolded the picture, her emerald eyes feasting on the image while the wires reassembled, sheathing her form.
The tower, built to last, crouched in silence.
by submission | Mar 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jay Haytch
One exception
She stood at the threshold and looked out at a burnt world.
It wasn’t really a proper threshold. There was no welcome mat, for starters. Just a trod-over pile of rubble where one last stray missile had hit the city wall and left a person-sized crack. On one side, the city. On the other side… well…
No one had sealed the breach, even after all these years. Why bother? There was no enemy anymore. Nothing left out there, they said.
Behind her she heard the morning fanfare trumpet through the city’s loudspeakers. Time to get up and start the day, for everyone. No exceptions.
She looked ahead through the crack again. Blasted, fractured, cold, harsh desert. Barren rocks and brutal landforms. Grey. Lifeless. There were no windows in the city wall; this little crack was all the view its inhabitants could get of the rest of the world. It was all the view they needed.
Others had gone out before, of course. But no one knew what happened to them. They never returned. She knew as soon as she set one foot over the threshold, it was all or nothing. No one was allowed back in. No exceptions.
She hadn’t seen the orderly yet, but it didn’t matter. She knew it would be there. There was an unwritten rule that anyone could stand where she was and contemplate the outside for as long as they needed to, and the orderlies wouldn’t interfere. Until that person turned around.
Wait, there it was, in the doorway of a nearby building, watching. It had gifts for her if she would only head back to the city. A comfy leather jacket that would pin her arms tightly to her chest and a big bottle of serum that would make her happy and content again. For the rest of her life.
Some people took the orderlies up on their offer. They went back to being productive citizens and smiled a lot. Every day in fact. No exceptions.
Only the insane would think of doing what she was thinking of doing. The sane, they stayed put. The city, after all, provided a person’s every need.
She stepped forward, through the gate of civilization into who knew what. Though the grey was ahead of her, to her left and right – obscured by the wall until she’d passed the point of no return – there was green.
by submission | Mar 15, 2014 | Story |
Author : Glenn S. Austin
“Well do you think it did any good at all?” The President asked the others sitting around the large oval conference table in the command bunker.
The President asked the question to the entire room, but his tired eyes looked directly at his Press Secretary.
“It’s too early to tell Mr. President.” The Press Secretary was a tall, thin middle-aged man who looked like he would be more comfortable in a cubicle at a large accounting firm than sitting here advising the leader of what was left of the free world. “Most of the education we provided was for long term survival, over a period of months and years. We knew our training program was really only directed at the small portion of the population that would survive the initial catastrophe.”
“Yes, yes, I know, but we’re three months in now, do we have any indication as to what percentage took the training to heart?”
“Sir, the problem is that the ones who really learned from all of our educational programming, will not be jumping up and down waving a “Help Us” banner.”
The President raised his eyebrows; everyone knew that meant he wanted the speaker to elaborate.
The Secretary explained. “One of the re-occurring themes in all of the training was that staying hidden and off the grid was the best strategy for continued survival. No matter what the threat, it is always best to stay concealed from both the initial threat that brought down society, as well as hiding from other survivors who will just consume your resources, while reducing chances of long term survival.”
“Going to be tough to take the next Census.” Quipped the Chief of Staff, to quite a few chuckles around the table.
The President looked at his Chief of Staff and pressed for a better answer to his original question. “Well what real data do we have that any of our training programs had an effect?”
The Chief of Staff looked down the table at the Commerce Secretary.
Commerce took a second to look at the contents of a folder in front of her on the table. “Sir, our numbers indicate that the retail sales of bows, crossbows, and firearms increased, as the number of training programs increased. We feel that this correlation indicated the message was taken to heart by at least the folks who watched the training videos.”
“Do we have any idea how many watched the training videos?” The President asked, looking further down the table at the network executives.
The collection of suits looked around at each other and silently selected a representative. A large man cleared his throat as he stood up to respond. He looked directly at the president, “Sir, the collective ratings for our Zombie Apocalypse programming indicate over fifteen million repeat viewers. In fact our Zombie programs as a whole were the highest rated programs at one point.
The exec waited for a response and then continued when all he got was a nod. “Our Alien Invasion programs also faired very well with over ten million viewers, and another ten million watched the nuclear, loss of electric grid, and EMP blast, apocalypse shows.” The exec concluded, “We only had 7 years to provide the programs but we reached over 25 percent of the U.S. population with the combination of survival training education we provided.”
The President grinned slightly and addressed the table at large. “So the future of the USA and civilization now depends on couch potatoes who watched apocalyptic Zombie and Science fiction disaster shows. Let’s all hope they learned something!”
