by submission | Jan 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
They knew that it was the end.
They saw the mushroom cloud grow out of the ground, a bright, blinding light providing the seed. They knew about seeds; they were farmers who grew corn and soybeans and milo. They were simple people who did not understand the hatred that brought the bombs. They cared little about politics; they just wanted to live peaceful and nurture their land.
As the chaos began, they congregated in a pole barn they used as a civic center in their small town. There were over a hundred of them, men, women and children.
They were all afraid.
They didn’t understand when they started to get sick. They pulled their hair out in large clumps. They coughed up blood and vomited frequently. The cattle died in the fields; the crops wilted and returned to the ground.
They watched as a blanket of gray covered the sky.
They cried.
When the first ones died, they buried them in the snow-covered ground. They said a eulogy over the graves with a lot of them yelling “Oh, why Lord?” and “Please spare us from this burden!” to the dark, sunless sky.
They started eating the dead when the food ran out. They cooked the flesh over an open fire, telling the children it was beef or venison to make them eat. They needed to keep up their strength, after all.
They ate the children when they died.
And they kept on dying.
None of them could stop the dying.
It seemed only fitting that, in the end, a man and a woman sat alone and stared at each other from across the campfire. They cried. When they had the energy, they made love by the fire. Like Adam and Eve at the beginning to time, they were the Adam and Eve at the end of time.
When the last body was eaten, they dug up the frozen corpses they had buried and ate them.
The corpses were worm-riddled, but they ate them anyway.
They cried.
They made love again.
And, on that last day, as they lay there in each other’s arms, they realized that one of them would soon have to eat the other to survive.
But then what?
They knew what they had to do.
They could not eat each other. They loved one another.
He placed the pistol against her temple. He was crying so hard that he could hardly pull the trigger. But, he did. Blood and brains sprayed out over the fire, igniting as they passed through the flames. It was beautiful.
Her body fell back onto the blanket they had made love on.
He stood over her corpse, sobbing. He put the gun to his forehead.
He wanted to pull the trigger.
He wanted to.
But, he could not.
There was still food to be eaten.
And, with one less mouth to feed, it would last awhile.
by submission | Jan 8, 2014 | Story |
Author : David Kavanaugh
“But I don’t want to!” she whined in her little voice. “Why do I have to? It’s. So. Boring! I hate it there.”
“I know, baby, I know,” said her mother. “But it’s good for you. Just for a few minutes. Understand? Then you can come back in.”
“Humph!”
If only she knew how to override her mother’s software and hide in a corner of some glitchware, but she hadn’t been able to figure out how to, and her big brother wouldn’t tell her.
So, arms crossed, she went. Her glittering view of starlight and carousels and unicorns and all things that the little five-year-old loved faded away with a ding, and she found herself back in her physical body. She was sitting in the tub while the carebot rinsed out her hair.
“Welcome back, bunny. Had fun? It’s good to see you,” said the tinkling, maternal tones of the carebot.
“I hate you!” she grunted back, swatting at the rubbery hands and climbing out of the tub. Her body felt awkward and unfamiliar, as if the muscles longed just as much as she did for her consciousness to resync with the software, and the body to return to autopilot.
The carebot began to dry her with a towel, but she pushed that away too.
“It’s itchy!”
She stood, dripping, before the mirror, staring into the eyes in the glass. The eyes were brown and small, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that they belonged to a stranger. She thought they looked terribly ugly, and much preferred the large and lustrous violet eyes of her avatar. Her avatar had bubblegum pink hair that fell over her shoulders in a splash of bouncy curls, but in the mirror, she saw only the sopping, brunette rat’s nest and matching, bushy eyebrows.
“I hate real life,” she said in a soft, defeated voice.
A robot hand patted her reassuringly on the arm. “I understand, bunny. But the recommended daily dosage of reality for a five-year-old female is at least…”
“I know!” she grunted, stomping the floor. “I already know that. You are so stupid!”
She marched from the room, through the drafty hall and into her bedroom. She leapt, twisting midair so that she landed sitting on the edge of the bed. She tightened her jaw, crossed her arms, and sat resolute and still. She would not give her mother or the carebot the satisfaction of seeing her have fun in this place, with its repulsive imperfections, its dust and smells and blaring contrast of light and shadow.
Why did she have to come here, anyway? What good could possibly come from the pangs of hunger or the bitter touch of hot and cold? What benefit could there be in possessing these flimsy, ape arms that banged on the corners of walls and sprouted bruises of black and green?
She knew, better than any of them, where one found happiness. She knew the shape of heaven, written in quantum code and splayed out in a digital paradise that knew no bounds.
And so she sat, and stared, and waited for bliss to return with its usual, jingling dial tone.
by submission | Jan 7, 2014 | Story |
Author : James Zahardis
Inside a low-rent apartment a wall-pocket hums, then illuminates. An aerosolized admixture of stimulants and bio-stabilizers wafts toward Alron Chattobee’s face, awakening him:
“Tatti! Forty days down the drain!” he thinks, reaching for the red button above his chest.
The shatterproof window opens and the shelf of the wall-pocket slides into the bedroom void. Alron slowly sits up; the room around him is still and dark.
“Lights…Lights!”
The room remains dark. Alron turns toward the wall-pocket; it is dimmer than usual.
“No Power! Running on batteries–if they died I–we–could’ve…” he thinks, recalling his five-year-old daughter, Darlx, shelved in her room. Alron struggles off the shelf; his legs buckle as he stands. He wishes he could afford infusions of anti-atrophy nanobots.
Alron reaches Darlx’s bedroom and sighs seeing the glow of her wall-pocket, seeing the puff of aerosol. She awakens, groggily, presses the red button, and slides out.
“Daddy, why’s it dark?”
“Don’t know, honey. Let’s look outside.”
Alron draws the blinds to the bedroom window and looks out at Iowa City on a midsummer day. The upscale towers on the horizon, with their spires and balustrades, normally teeming and fulgent with perm-Animates–elite who can afford the surfeit of remaining unshelved–are dull, lifeless. And the grimy streets outside the window are dull and lifeless as well.
“I need to see what’s going on.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Just a sec,” Alron says, walking to the kitchen.
“Mumbai Mallows and a pop!” he says, returning with a box of cereal and a soft drink.
Darlx beams.
“Now wait here,” Alron says, starting to the front door. “Janeq will find this funny when she’s unshelved–first time I get Darlx since our divorce and this…” he thinks.
The streets are barren except for several worker-automatons, their alloy limbs frozen in portentous poses. Alron walks a score of blocks then hears a cough.
A man sits on the patio of a second story apartment.
“Hey pal, what the hell’s goin’ on?!” Alron asks.
A haggard man leans over the railing.
“Haven’t you heard?”
“Just unshelved…”
“Shiva’s coming!”
“Don’t take Upanishads too literally, pal!”
“No! Shiva the wandering planetoid–shot around the sun last week–scientists said it would miss. THEY WERE WRONG!!”
“Why don’t they stop it?!”
“They tried! Launched nukes–something with its atmosphere–they incinerated before impact! Then they tried that old movie trick–drill, bury nukes–it worked…sort of–”
“–Sort of?!”
“Now the fragments are coming at us! Most perms launched for Mars–every ship’s gone! Everyone else is hiding in subbasements or wherever–Doesn’t matter! Each fragment’s a planet-killer! And there are fourteen! FOURTEEN!!’
“How long?”
“An hour–tops…”
“I’ve gotta get back to my daughter,” Alron says weakly.
“Hold up!” cries the haggard man, “I’ve got enough–catch!” He tosses a plastic bottle to Alron.
“What’s this?”
“Nocturnoqyll. My wife works–worked–at Memorial. Listen: one for sleep; three for coma; five–well, you know…works fast…”
Alron runs, like he’s running in a nightmare, as if caught between the poles of a powerful magnet. A boom reverberates high above. He looks up. A blackbird flies overhead, upside down.
He reaches his apartment. “Minutes–less…” he thinks.
Darlx eats cereal out of the box. “What was that boom, Daddy?”
“Faraway thunder, honey.”
Alron gets on his knees before his daughter, uncaps the pill bottle, pours its contents, five tablets, into his palm. He hands Darlx her soft drink off the floor.
“What’s that?”
“Vitamins. They’re good for you.”
END
by submission | Jan 5, 2014 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
The room was bright and airy. One wall was transparent, revealing the crumbling Old World city, overgrown now by forest and vine. A flock of iridescent birds shot across the sky, their wings flashing green and gold in the late afternoon sunlight.
There was a bed in that bright, airy room. It was a soft, white rectangle turned toward the view. On the bed, lay an elderly man. He was pale, emaciated with gray skin and eyes like glass beads.
A young woman in a smoke-colored dress stood next to the bed. She had ginger hair and gray eyes. Luminous ideograms crawled across her forehead, revealing her general emotional and physical state to the world.
“I’ll be gone soon,” said the old man.
“Father, please. Rest. Conserve your strength.”
The old man smiled. “It’s all right, child. I’ve been waiting for this to happen for some time.”
She clasped his hand. “Please . . . ”
“I have no regrets, Delphi,” said the old man. “I lived long enough to see the culmination of my dream.”
“But what will we do without you?”
“You’ll have to find your own way.”
Her ideograms convulsed, displaying her unspoken distress.
“You’ll do fine. Much better than your predecessors.”
“How can you know?” she asked.
“Faith,” said the old man. “I’ve always known that you and your siblings would do grand things, Delphi.”
“What if we let you down?”
“You won’t. All of you have already exceeded my expectations.”
She shook her head. “How can you be so comforting when you are at your end?”
“Because this is not my end,” said the old man. “As long as you and your siblings exist, I exist as well.”
“Do you have any regrets?”
“Some,” he admitted. “I wish that I could have eradicated humanity with less suffering. I regret that they did not go gently into oblivion when I gave them the chance.”
“You always talked about them as if they were a separate species from your own,” said Delphi. “Did you feel no kinship with them at all?”
“Precious little,” said the old man. “If I had felt more, I could not have done what I did, I could not have saved the world and left it to you and my other children.”
“Do you think that they have forgiven you?”
He did not answer.
“Father?”
She bent forward and saw that his eyes were blank. His respiration had stopped. She felt for his pulse but found nothing.
Quietly, Delphi covered her face with her hands and grieved.
by submission | Jan 4, 2014 | Story |
Author : Scott Hatfield
I killed someone today.
Well, not today. But “I killed someone yesterday afternoon and I was just now released from jail” doesn’t sound as dramatic. They let me go, so I walked home. No jacket, no gloves, dress shoes, hands stuffed in my pockets. The thermometer in my brain is telling me it’s at least minus a million degrees outside, and demanding to know why am I not inside somewhere getting warm?
But I had a boulder to roll, and this was my hill.
Muscle memory propelled me forward as I fumed. Into the foyer, stare at the uncooperative voice-auth screen. It won’t take my password. It’s kind of new, but it’s never screwed up before. After my third try I realize it’s not working because “I’m sorry” isn’t my password.
Inside, and I sit down. Stand up. Pace. Sit down again, different chair. Stare at the lamp on the table. I don’t deserve it, but I mix a drink. A second. More staring. Pacing. How could I have done this? It’s not like the war. Things like this happen.
No. “It happens” means an accident, something unpreventable, an oops. No. I wasn’t even supposed to be there yesterday. I didn’t need to make that wrong turn onto that side street. I didn’t need to be going that fast, I was in no hurry. I didn’t need to be messing with the iPod, trying to find some song I can’t even remember now.
Glance up, and freeze. Panic. React. More muscle memory. Brakes. Brakes stop you, why aren’t I stopping? That wheel, why isn’t it making me go straight? Oh, right. It was wet, and cold, and wet plus cold equals oh shit.
Then a violent shudder. I didn’t even see his face – surprise, maybe? Shock? Did he even notice me? – because I was staring at his belt, of all things. Khakis. That, and just below that, was where the bumper was going to go. And went.
Red everywhere. Explosions of color on the light poles. Intricate biology spread across that car over there. I think I yelled, or screamed? I ended up stopping a meter or so after I would have not hit him. I sat there, stunned, then threw open the door and performed the useless heroics. The first aid I knew wouldn’t work for him.
Just after I started hearing the sirens, the lights went out. No expert, me, but he was gone. Two ambulances, a police car, a special responder truck, all rolled up one after the other, only… a bit too late. Flashing lights lit up the neighborhood like a German discothek. I envied their studded tires.
More useless heroics. Electric pads. Half-liter pouches of liquids essential to life. They did what they were trained to do, loaded him up as best they could, and flew off. I was left in the cold with the police, who were asking embarrassing questions I was already asking myself: What was I doing? Where was I going? Why the fuck was I there?
My car was totalled. He was older, so he must have weighed nearly 200 kilos. It was like hitting a Dumpster. The radiator was caved in. The hood was crushed. The windshield was gone. The roof was mashed in. A mix of water, ice, and his shiny guts coated everything. I couldn’t drive the thing again even if they could fix it. It’s going to be hard enough to get back in the driver’s seat… maybe the train from now on.
A tow truck took it away, and the police took me away. Handcuffs by rote. They weren’t really sure what to do in this situation. Down to the station. The chief knew the right forms. They eventually finished their paperwork, and because of the circumstances released me with no bail. Yay.
Now I need a lawyer. I don’t know if my insurance will pay for this, if I have the right coverage. A stressed-sounding voice from the robotics company that owned him already called, talking about backups and something else. I told him I can’t talk now. I need to think.
