by submission | Dec 19, 2024 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
“You have three minutes,” Harmon said, sticking the end of an unlit cigar in his mouth.“Go.”
“Okay,” Jepson nervously began. “Picture this: an unlikely romance between a peppy vacuum cleaner and a stoic lawn mower.”
Harmon struck a match and lit his cigar.
Jepson continued, “Defying the conventions of their middle class home with their love, these plucky appliances run away together to a tropical beach, where they live happily ever after.”
Harmon blew a cloud of gray smoke in Jepson’s direction.
Jepson cleared his throat. “It’s an animated, old-style cartoon adventure, a la ‘The Brave Little Toaster.’ The kids’ll love it!”
Harmon set his cigar down in the ash tray on his desk, rose and extended his hand. Jepson grinned and shook it.
“It sounds cartoony, all right,” Harmon said, releasing Jepson’s hand. “But not the sort of thing our studio is looking for. I wish you luck finding a home for it elsewhere.”
* * *
“What a preposterous premise!” Harmon said, plunking his feet down on the coffee table. His wife Mira brought him a gin martini on a tray. The pale blue sheen of her metal casing glowed beneath her silicone skin. It was a lovely effect, Harmon thought every time he saw her.
“They elope to a beach? How would that even work?” Mira asked. She loved talking with him about his work; he’d insisted on that in her programming. “The vac would get clogged with sand very quickly—and what would the lawn mower have to mow? Beaches don’t have lawns.”
“I think the average kid would wonder all that, too.” Harmon took a sip of his martini before unscrewing the top of his head, revealing the whirring circular blades within. “And their parents would find the whole idea too ridiculous, even for a cartoon.”
Mira dripped machine oil from her fingertips into Harmon’s head, lubricating the blades. “How’d he take rejection?” She asked as she replaced the top of his head.
Harmon sighed and shrugged.
“Well,” Mira coo’d, “don’t be hard on yourself. After all, it’s your job to separate the wheat from the chaff. I mean, who’d actually believe a love story between domestic machines? It’s absurd on it’s face.” She ran her hand along the back of the sofa, vacuuming up tiny bits of dandruff and lint with the palm of her hand, softly humming as she did.
Harmon grasped her hand. They both laughed.
by submission | Dec 18, 2024 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Each time Rod pushed his way through the portal, his initial response was disappointment. Although he hadn’t been aware of it the first time, he was actually stepping into the future. He realised this was an immense and astounding feat but it was just his flat, a perfect replica, albeit a little older and shabbier.
Rod realised too that the possibilities and the ways in which he could exploit this were endless, but he had no desire to make lots of money. Of course, there were myriad ways in which he could help, but who would listen to him, a man who hasn’t left his flat in years. No, even when his predictions proved to be correct, no-one would listen or heed. He would be labelled a lucky crank or worse. Just another ranting and raving imbecile. No, it seemed that, for Rod, the future amounted to simply more of the same.
Rod began spending more and more time in the future flat, or as he had come to think of it, ‘the other place.’ He wanted it to be different and of course it was. He was able to jump ahead exactly one year, he was moving through space and time. But the world beyond the other place was still scary. For Rod it was an alien landscape both here and there.
Rod ordered a book in the future and, when it arrived, he carried it through the portal and read it in the past. He was toying, playing games when he really wanted to create something solid and substantial, something significant, although Rod had no idea how or what that might be.
Rob placed his mug on the draining board and vowed that he wouldn’t touch it, not for a year. He pushed through the portal and crossed to the kitchen and when he lifted the mug the mouthful of coffee left in it had hardened and turned to mould. He was annoyed with himself – he should at least have planted something, a seed in a pot and nurtured and watched it both there and here.
Putting down the mug, he started to make his way back but the portal had closed. Rod pushed against the wall but it wouldn’t give and he had no choice. He would have to begin again.
by submission | Dec 17, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
To dream is the dream. Anyone thinking that we need to sleep to live is missing the real payoff. We should be living to sleep. Snow White had it right for the wrong reasons. She didn’t bite a poisoned apple, she micro-dosed from the forbidden fruit of the real tree of knowledge: somna.
Why would anyone want to wake up to our messy reality when you can now literally sleep your life away? Actually, more like twenty lives. Maybe no one is ready to go all Methuselah with biosuspension fields yet, but after decades of successful manned missions to and beyond the Kuiper Belt the groundbreaking stasis technology appears to be extremely stable.
Biosuspension fields are an amazing and necessary technological achievement for deep space travel, but it’s somna that makes it psychologically possible for humans to endure stasis for years on end. Somna is the juice that makes the squeeze worth it. And there are a lot of folks that wish somna was actually a juice or serum or pill, something you could just ingest or inject. Unfortunately, it’s not as straightforward as biting into Snow White’s doctored apple.
Somna is an idea. A thought worm. Not quite a meme or memory, and more like a mom’s “gentle reminder” to get your act together. Because that’s what you have to do with somna: put your act together. Or acts. You have to basically stage your dreams before you go into stasis. In your mind, you set the scene, the players, the actions. And the somna technique trains the brain to follow that neural pathway into heavy, sustained R.E.M. The more elaborately and authentically you somna, the more likely that you’ll have a positive dream experience that can make stasis feel like well lived years. Some say it’s more entertaining, edifying, and exciting than real life.
Sounds great, right? That’s the catch. Somna techniques have gotten so good at preparing deep space crews for amazing years-long dream experiences that increasingly, many crew members have become irate or depressed or mutinous upon being awakened from stasis. They don’t want to deal with the cold, hard reality of actually living and working in deep space. Hard to blame them.
Hard to blame anyone. Because the word is out and endless blissful sleep is in. Somna parties have become a thing. Biosuspension bootleggers are bringing lala land to the masses. And the masses are turning on and dropping out of reality. Crafting your dreamland ala Sophocles, Murasaki, Shakespeare, Austen, Tolstoy, Hammet, Ibsen, Marquez, Asimov, Achebe, Rowling, etc. is a temptation few can resist. Fewer and fewer do.
Soon we may be holding wakes for wakefulness. Simultaneously mourning and celebrating the end of conscious living. Is this the final battle for humanity? Have we lost the will to struggle and push forward?
Tough to know what lies ahead, but when you can invite the likes of Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Confucius, Attila the Hun, Saladin, Leonard Da Vinci, Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, Mother Teresa, Malcolm X and Taylor Swift into your mind for a dreamy sleepover, you know the pillow fights will be epic.
by submission | Dec 15, 2024 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
I met Nancy in college, and we got married shortly after she received her PhD. While I’m smarter than the average bear, Nancy is brilliant. I work for a stock brokerage firm, and she worked for the Department of Energy until three years ago when she joined a private consortium to do basic research.
This morning, she confided in me. “As you know,” she said, “ever since I was an undergrad, I thought Haldane was right when he wrote, ‘The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’
There are always alternative theories that can explain any facts and we use values to select among them: simplicity, elegance, fruitfulness. But, regardless, as for the facts themselves, we can only directly know sense data, never the real causes of our perceptions. That’s simply the human condition. I’ve known for some time that the only way we’d ever really know what’s behind our sense data would be to rely on extrasensory perception. But humans just didn’t evolve that way.”
“So, you’re saying we can’t ever know, and you’ve been spinning your wheels your entire adult life.”
I sheepishly admit that I took a smidgen of pleasure in that.
“I can’t know directly because I’m human, but I could be informed of the Truth with a capital T by someone who evolved differently and does have extrasensory abilities. Yesterday morning, I was telepathically contacted by someone in a parallel universe. She knew all about my lifelong struggle to learn the Truth.
According to her, her race evolved without any external sense organs, no sight, no hearing, etc. They navigate their world by extrasensory means. They can detect waves, nearby and at a great distance, directly and immediately. They also have telepathic and psychokinetic abilities. The bottom line is waves are behind our sensory data, just waves.”
“Like light waves and sound waves?”
“No, just an interconnected network of non-physical waves with varying vibrations which generate our perceived realities which exist only in our minds. The scary part is that if any wave in the system is flatlined then the whole network collapses and nothing interesting could exist in that universe forevermore.”
“So, she warned you not to build your Ultimate Reality Device.”
“No, she warned me not to use it. She told me I didn’t know what I was doing, and that I didn’t know what could happen. She explained my procedure and its consequences to me mathematically, but I won’t bore you with the details. So, I destroyed the infernal machine, and all of the material related to the research project late yesterday.”
“Your backers won’t be happy. How will you ever explain to them that years of work and trillions of dollars spent on research and development were all for naught?”
“I won’t. My contact assured me that she would inform them . . . and elicit their consent.”
by submission | Dec 14, 2024 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
I took a swig straight out of the bottle of the rare, vintage wine- didn’t even let the damn thing breathe. It cost me only $8,420.00 USD, on sale from $10,000.00. As a relatively new multi-billionaire I didn’t even feel the cost. The wine sucked. Tasted like grape flavored caustic lye.
By no coincidence at all, the “discount” equals exactly the number of meteors (minus six zeros) scheduled to hit the earth. None larger than a soft ball but clustered in such a way the earth, the entire earth, will be hit for about two years straight with this galactic buck shot. Imagine being hit with rock salt fired out of a 20 gauge shot gun. Not lethal, just stinging, annoying, and painful. Now, stand and take the shot gun blast of rock salt for an entire week, turning slowly around to get even coverage.
Get the picture?
So what’s that got to do with me?
Well, when I was 19 I took all my college money and invested in the first asteroid mining start up. They said we were naïve and crazy- suckers. We became the butt of jokes for 8 years. Until our ships came in. My cut? A modest $800 billion.
Our little group of investors disrupted the world economy all by ourselves. I bought multiple properties, all over the world. I became a Count of Montecristo-like figure, without the revenge schtick. Actually, more like a kinder, gentler, less evil Bond villain. You know, like Bezos or Musk.
Then the bad news hit. Our mining expedition was like a cue ball shot into a rack of long stationary billiard balls. Change the specific gravity of one by mining it, its orbit alters, hits another which causes more collisions and changes in orbits, and so on, and so on. Yup, a master class in unintended consequences and the horrors of third and fourth order effects. About 8,420 million effects roughly speaking.
And now? All my major properties have become redoubts- apocalypse fortresses. On average, I have about three Walmart’s worth of stuff at each. Several devoted to housing the machinery needed for rebuilding the world. I even gave a couple of billion to the dudes who save seeds and animal DNA to harden their facilities or build new ones. My employees and their families? Taken care of and sheltered on site. Not in little hovels either.
When the hard rain stops, and we poke our heads out, me and all of us who invested will be fine. So will the governments who accepted our help. Oh, and before you go there, fuck the Bilderberg folk, the oil sheiks and the like, we already took them out of the equation…permanently. Can’t have them messing up our group saving the world for everyone and anyone, hmm? Well, everyone and anyone who’ll work with us.
See, our folk figure that we’ll only lose a little over half the world population. Mother earth will take a beating, but nothing she can’t come back from on her own, faster if we help, which we’ll be in a position to do. Plus, with all that asteroid/meteor iron ore, gold, titanium, lithium, not to mention rare earth materials, peppered all over the globe, it’s easier to mine than it ever has been, with our group the only ones in position to actually make it happen. Not bad for a kid who spent all his college money on a crazy start up, huh?
Yup, we’ll remake the world…kinder and gentler with more to go around. Well, at least for us and ours.
