by submission | Mar 8, 2015 | Story |
Author : Connor Harbison
The sand got everywhere.
Lieutenant Sawyer cursed her luck. Others from her Academy class had postings all over the galaxy, on exotic planets and flashy space stations. Only she was stuck here on this assignment.
Aurelia IV was her home for the foreseeable future. Its nickname was ‘The Beach’, but no beach Sawyer had ever visited hosted Aurelia’s killer sandstorms, boiling temperatures, and obstinate insurgents.
Aurelia’s colonial government had been overthrown in a bloody coup. Now the Sawyer and the other marines had reestablished order in a few large cities, but the outlying areas remained unsecured. Countless patrols through rural towns and villages did nothing to improve their situation, though each mission did seem to require a blood toll from the marines passing through.
The locals always unnerved Sawyer when she marched through their homes. They’d stare at her and the other marines with dark, sunken eyes. The eyes told one story; submission. These were not insurgents. Those “freedom fighters” lived in caves out in the desert, not in the towns.
There was one villager, in one nameless cluster of mud huts, who Sawyer couldn’t get out of her mind. A boy, or a man really, with startlingly blue eyes. Through the visor of her power armor those eyes jumped out at Sawyer. There was fire in those eyes.
Sawyer spotted those eyes half concealed in the shade of an alleyway during the next sweep of the village. She broke from the column to investigate.
Down the alley and around a corner, through the back streets of the village the boy with the blue eyes was always just out of reach. Finally he ducked into a hut and she followed him.
Even their bedrooms were sandy, Sawyer noted with disdain. When this assignment was over she never wanted to see sand again. The blue eyes hung there in the gloom, boring into her.
Those eyes proved more adept at getting past power armor than any insurgent’s IED. Soon Sawyer was stepping out of her shell, feeling truly vulnerable for the first time in months. The eyes appeared to glow in the dim hut interior. As they approached Sawyer could swear the two bright blue orbs grew, until they dominated her vision.
Sawyer let out a small gasp at his thrust. Then there was warmth. Wetness. She smelled iron, and tasted it too. As Sawyer’s vision faded, the last thing she saw was those two bright blue eyes, shining in triumph.
by submission | Mar 7, 2015 | Story |
Author : Joe Essid
The air felt greasy as Shane climbed off his Harley into a tropical Virginia July evening.
Even shirtless, in ruined jeans and a leather vest, Shane felt clammy. Only the wind, all the way from Leavenworth and freedom, had kept him from melting.
Above him The Grateful Dead boomed from an apartment’s stereo. A little chill shook him, a cool draft and a spear of light far brighter than the glare off the windshield of a parked GTO nearby.
Laughter slipping over the music helped him shake off the spooky chill. He looked up at curtains in an Arabesque print.
Ignoring sly looks from a couple of lovely coeds, Shane mounted the cement steps and opened the building’s front door. He took his sweet time, engineer’s boots thudding. Maybe Carla would hear them, but he doubted it over Phil Lesh’s hypnotic bass line.
An icy breeze tickled Shane’s back between the top of his vest and the hair growing long again. He smelled disinfectant, saw another spear of light, shuddered for a moment.
He threw open Carla’s door.
The warm haze of music and pot smoke was dense. For a moment, no one noticed. Then a man’s voice, warped by his buzz, croaked out “It’s Shane!” He came for a bear hug, but Shane put out a hand and looked for her.
Two years had changed nothing. She swayed toward him with a tinkling of the many bangles and a swishing of a gypsy’s skirt over the tops of her bare feet. Her exposed midriff flashed at him.
“Like that belly jewel, Carla.” A bad first line, but she hugged Shane until the air left him, as the others watched, stoned and amused.
She whipped off his aviator sunglasses, her long blonde hair framing his face for a kiss.
“You owe me a dance, Shane. C’mon.” Someone put The Stones’ Exile on Main Street on the turntable and, as if on cue, set the needle down on “Torn and Frayed.”
Carla led, as any Queen would at a ball. She twirled her man around.
“You were framed, but now you’re home.” She whispered into his ear as they swayed. “You won’t leave again, lover?”
“Never,” Shane answered. “Never.”
They kissed again. And the air grew very cold.
Shane sat up, nutrient tubes and Dream wires jangling in a plastic echo of Carla’s bangles. Beside him, evacuation tubes removed piss and shit.
He struggled up, looking across the ward to the other Dreamers, all smiling with eyes closed. Which of them was at the party? Was a woman named Carla there? What algorithm brought them together?
Shane’s liver-spotted hand quivered over the Dream wires, now crimped under his body.
“Mr. DuBois needs a reboot, Padmini.”
A dark-skinned woman with kindly eyes was already reaching for him.
“Just light off the parking lot,” she said, adjusting a heavy window shade to block a spear of whiteness reflecting off a slab of pavement. For just a second, Shane glimpsed hazy air and dead tree trunks beyond the glistening shells of the ground cars.
“Shane, You tugged your Dream wires loose. I’ll turn you, then back to the fun. I’ve been watching your party” She kissed his paper-thin forehead, where only a few white hairs remained. “Bad boy. She’s there, waiting.”
Padmini ignored Shane’s feeble protests and eased the Dream out from under him. With hands as strong as Carla’s she twirled him back into a grateful sleep.
“Wish I’d lived then.” She cut sad eyes toward the drawn shades.
Carla pulled Shane close again.
by submission | Mar 6, 2015 | Story |
Author : Decater Collins
Two years ago, they wouldn’t have been able to afford such a house. Debra didn’t like thinking about before.
“We can afford it now. That’s all that should matter.”
“You’re not worried about it being too remote?”
“Look at this bay window.”
The house was lovely. A dream home, the brochure said. Get it while it’s still here.
“Okay, we’ll buy it.” Stephen reached for his checkbook then remembered no one took checks anymore. He grabbed his phone instead.
Debra huddled excitedly with the agent, forcing Stephen to wander his new house alone. He’d never owned anything so expensive before. But then again, money didn’t mean what it used to.
They agreed on minimal decoration. The fewer possessions the better, at this point. Stephen was reading a new bestseller on the Buddhist rejection of attachment. All Debra said she needed was a television.
“Does that mean you don’t need me?” They both laughed awkwardly.
“Stop teasing, silly.” But he noticed she didn’t contradict him.
Every week, Debra came home with a different car. She said her old ones kept slipping but Stephen wondered if that were true. He knew a thing or two about statistics and, though it was possible she was just incredibly unlucky with her car choices, the scientists kept saying that everything was random. Debra’s cars shouldn’t be more likely to slip than anyone else’s. If anything, these days it seemed there were more cars than people. He wished she’d pick a car and keep it. At least for a month. Some consistency would help him pretend that everything was normal.
Stephen brought home a dog from next door. “The neighbors slipped.”
“As long as you clean up all the poop,” was Debra’s only comment on the matter. She had never liked dogs, even before.
“Maybe I won’t have to if it just slips.” She gave him a look that said she didn’t appreciate the joke.
“Just make sure you clean it up, okay?”
They’d lived in the house about six months when the foundation slipped. Sometimes it was hard to know where the boundaries were. One page out of a book might slip, or an entire city block, like what had happened in Florida. At the office, he’d heard about a guy who’d lost just one eye, but otherwise was fine.
The house was no good without the foundation, so they picked up and moved next door. Except there was no bed, just a bunch of sofas. Debra and Checkers didn’t seem to mind.
“Why are you always so hung up on everything? At least we haven’t slipped.”
“Aren’t you scared?” He’d never asked her about it before. He wasn’t frightened of her answer so much as her asking him in return.
“A little. What if it hurts? What if only a part of me slips? What’s it going to be like on the other side?”
“The scientists still don’t know if there is another side.”
“I read they are sure. They just don’t know if we’ll survive the slip or not.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
“Are you scared?”
“I’m scared I’m going to be the last one to slip. I don’t think I could stand being here alone.”
The next day, Debra didn’t come home. He tried calling her phone but the number was out of service. He knew she was probably just tired of being with him, the same way she got tired of a new car in less than a week, but it was easier to tell people that she’d slipped.
With Checkers around, he didn’t miss her so much.
by submission | Mar 5, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
I raise my hand and wave to get Scott’s attention as he walks into the restaurant. He comes over and joins me in the booth. He gestures at my drink.
“Is that whiskey? Never seen you drink anything stronger than red wine. Something up?”
“Yeah. Remember a couple of weeks back when you, me, Angela, and Kim had dinner? You mentioned you’d grown up in Warren, Michigan on a street called ‘Loretta Drive’ and Angela corrected you and said it was ‘Loretta Avenue’?”
“I remember,” says Scott. “I got out my phone and googled it. Angela was right. It was ‘Avenue,’ not ‘Drive’.”
“But you’d been so certain. I mean, it’s where you grew up. How could you have been wrong about something that basic?”
“I don’t know. But I was. Look, Tim, what’s this about?”
I finish my drink. The waiter takes a drink order from Scott and I order another drink for myself.
“I’ve been noticing some similar things since we got back,” I say. “Subtle things. A picture of me as a teenager wearing a shirt I have no recall of ever having. The water faucet on the back of my house being about a foot to the left of where I remember it. That sort of thing.”
The waiter brings our drinks. Scott consumes half of his with one swallow.
“So what are you suggesting?” Scott asks. “Do you think traveling through hyperspace did something to our memories? They checked us out really thoroughly after we got back and gave us both a clean bill of health. They even did full-body medical scans on both of us.”
“You’ve seen the surgical scar Kim has where she had her gallbladder out?”
“Yeah, when she wears a bikini. Not that I was checking out your wife or anything,” Scott says with a smile.
“The scar’s gone. She says she’s never had gallbladder surgery.”
Scott finishes his drink with a gulp and stares at me.
“Scott, this morning I spent two-and-a-half hours in a meeting with the administrator of NASA and a bunch of higher-ups trying to explain some discrepancies. Among other things, they wanted to know how the software for the ship got upgraded to a version that they’re just now completing.”
“What?! Tim, how is all this possible? We thrusted out to the orbit of Mars, completed a hyperspace jump one light-year away, stayed in the Oort Cloud for 30 minutes while the jump engines charged back up, then jumped back to Mars’ orbit. And we came right back to Earth.”
“Scott, the prevailing theory at NASA is that we’re from a parallel universe. This universe and the one we came from are nearly identical, but not exactly. So the street you grew up on and the clothes I had as a teenager and the women we married…”
“Okay, do the geniuses at NASA have a plan to get us back where we belong? Do we jump again? Are our counterparts from this universe in the world we’re supposed to be in?”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple. They think that every trip through hyperspace lands you in an alternate universe. We landed in a different world when were came out in the Oort Cloud. And in yet another world when we jumped back. They think it’s statistically impossible to ever jump to the same world twice.”
“So we’re trapped?”
“Yeah. And it also means you can’t use FTL to explore the universe. Not the same universe, anyway.”
The waiter returns. “Would you like any more Zack Daniel’s whiskey?” he asks.
by submission | Mar 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
“See, the smoke goes straight up. Nice day tomorrow, if we could go outside.”
“Meter still reads dangerous. Maybe the Van Allen will come back.”
“Out of our control. It’s the Sun. No wonder cultures worshiped it.”
The elder, Lester Simpson, rested on flat stones near the fire pit. He poked embers, making waterfalls of sparks spin above them in ascending gray clouds.
“You have sticks, Karen?”
“Yes, cleaned them before we left. Oh, here’s last of the marshmallows.”
“Like everything. Wished my boys had made it. We used to cook on the beach by the bathhouse in Frisco. Had to guard for itinerants at night, but campfires warmed us from summer fog and cold”
“Can’t imagine. Never made it to the ocean, but we did campfires in the Rockies—skies like a planetarium show. Best to leave all those memories back there.”
As they stuffed their giant white confectionery on the thin branches a rustling from the dying brush to their left made them turn. A tall stranger in a black jumpsuit moved toward the fire. His thin hands were up as he approached. His gate was hesitant. They could see his white hair and large, dark eyes, with a thin, expressionless mouth.
“May I join you,” he asked, stopping for permission.
“I guess,” Lester responded, holding his prize back from the fire momentarily.
“I don’t remember you from the caves,” Karen commented. Dim firelight cast harsh shadows across her teenage face as she shook her ponytail back over her shoulder.
“No, I’m not from this group. I’m a little lost, but I saw the light. Really cold tonight. I left my gear back there, in the brush, in case you were part of the gangs about.”
“We just finished cleaning them all out, “Lester interjected. “No need to fear. It’s safe for a hundred miles around. We’re preparing a little snack. C’mon. Sit.” Lester pointed at a nearby ledge.
The intruder turned his head slightly as he reeled back, but then moved to the designated seat.
“Remember, Karen, you let it get brown all the way around, and let it burn a little. You’ll see a blue flame. Then pull it out quickly.” Lester gave his instructions as he pushed a plump package deep into the waiting heat.
“I remember…but it has been a long time.”
In a few seconds the puffs expanded and bubbled. Karen’s were too close to the fire and began to drip off the stick. She yanked them away. She flicked some of the melting contents on the suit of the visitor. He rose quickly, squealing, running back into the darkness. They could hear a flurry in the bushes drawing away from their roasting.
“Gee, Les, I didn’t mean to mess up his clothes. Who acts like that?”
“Can’t say. Did you see how big his eyes got? That was weird. Definitely not part of the Carlsbad Caverns Tribe. Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get our crackers and chocolate bars ready. I remember how good these taste.”
Tashan Dustaro stood shaking before the telescreen, yelling to the command ship. “The stories are true. I met two. The adult taught his child to eat flesh from criminals they had just killed, after setting it on fire. Then they splashed it on me as if it were nothing. We can’t settle here. They crawl from caves at night like cannibal insects. Let’s move on to another planet that has the radiation we need. This is more than we bargained for when we disrupted their magnetic field. Don’t land. That is my report.”
