by submission | Aug 12, 2013 | Story |
Author : Ian Hill
At first I thought we were just going on a trip to see the holy city. We, my father and I, boarded an opulent train replete with red carpet and finely crafted oak furniture. The immaculate standard of the church lined the sides of the train, and it charged through the dark landscape at a break-neck pace I had never experienced before. The fastest I had gone would’ve been back when my sister and I tried to break a feral horse, and that was nothing compared to this. My father sat in the seat beside me looking slightly bored as if this amazing ride was merely routine to him.
There were a few others on the train, children like me accompanied by their white-clad parents. They looked worried for some reason. I, however, was excited about the prospect of finally beholding the glorious splendor of this legendary city that I had heard so much about my whole life. Others had told me it was like a bit of heaven descended onto the scarred earth, all shimmering and golden in its blinding perfection.
I fell asleep on the train for a while and dreamt of nothing, just like I had been taught. When I awoke the train had stopped, and the crowd was funneling off in pairs. My father stood and I followed his lead. As we were about to exit the lavish vehicle, my father crouched in front of me and placed a heavy black bag over my head, blinding me. My breath quickened, but I was soothed soon after by my father’s calm voice, explaining that I wasn’t ready to behold the raw beauty yet. It all made sense to me, so I nodded and clung to my father’s hand while carefully following him.
We walked for what seemed like hours and my short legs tired fast. I powered through the discomfort, imagining the splendors that must be around me. Eventually, we reached a cold room. I could hear the soft murmuring of a thousand voices around me. Furrowing my brow, I tried to imagine what could possibly be going on. Then the sack came off my head.
I was in a dark cave with a low ceiling that extended in all directions as far as the eye could see. All around me were thousands of metal chairs with gaunt pale figures strapped into them. Their eyes were open and darting around while tears dripped down their white faces. Their mouths moved quickly, issuing forth soft, but urgent, whispers. Their translucent skin clung close to their bones.
I knew someone from my schooling who once told us all about rumored places like this, where people were herded together and forced to sleep forever for the church’s greater good. I never saw him again after that day.
My father looked at me contemptuously and motioned to an empty metal chair behind us. My eyes became alit with terrible realization, and I began to plead him to not make me do it. He just shook his head and took me by the arm, leading me into the cold clutches of the seat. He strapped my arms and legs down as I weakly resisted. I was never given much to eat and I wasn’t allowed to run, perhaps this was why.
By this point I was crying and issuing vicious insults right and left, feeling very alone and very betrayed. I felt a blinding pain at the top of my head, followed by an odd sensation of calmness with undertones of sorrow. My vision began to darken and my hearing gave out completely. After a few seconds of nothingness I felt my frantic thoughts twisting into something else. A single phrase repeated itself in my head, and I could tell that I was speaking it as I thought it. It kept on replaying over and over again. At first I tried to resist, but it soon lulled me deeper into my comatose state. I focused on the sentence and sought comfort in it. It was a nice little phrase.
“Dear heavenly father, please forgive us all.”
by submission | Aug 11, 2013 | Story |
Author : Harshavardhan Rangan
It was the day the clouds came alive. We’ve always thought of them as gentle puffs of water vapor. We were wrong. They weren’t gentle, and they’d had enough of us.
Our understanding of the water cycle had one small, fatal flaw. We assumed the clouds had no say in it. Turns out they’re perfectly capable of sucking dry the oceans of the earth.
People fail to realize just how quickly a dreamy blue sky can turn pitch black and devastate everything in its path. Talk about mood swings.
No one really noticed when the skies started to darken. But the rains never came, and the darkness hasn’t left since. There are occasionally reports of a break in the cloud cover. There are also occasionally reports of people seeing god.
For the first month there was nothing. No rainfall, no sunshine. Just black. But the world kept spinning along. People went to work, children went to school. Pastors preached, doctors healed. But things weren’t perfect. Perpetual darkness does funny things to your head. And fears of a great famine were slowly spreading. Other fears too. Old, primal fears. The fear of the dark, the fear of the unknown, the fear of another day of darkness. We were sure it couldn’t get any worse.
It started raining on a Thursday afternoon.
There was dancing in the rain. There was a great celebration called. There was another celebration. Water does funny things to your head. After a week, the panic set in again. The rain hadn’t stopped. Crops started dying, the relentless downpour was too much for their gentle sensibilities. Cities were being flooded. Power outages were common. Doomsday prophecies were rampant. The great flood was here! Where was Noah with his boat?
One day the lights went out and never came back.
It’s hard to tell how long it’s been raining. We’re walking a world where you can’t see more than a few meters ahead of you. A world where there is no before. No after. Only a perpetual, grim now.
First the sun, then time. It wasn’t long until we realized how dependent we were on those two simple things. Everything that made us human was lost to us. We do what we can to survive, we do what we can to help others survive. But we’re only prolonging the end.
by submission | Aug 10, 2013 | Story |
Author : TPKeating
It took me just a few minutes to unpack and activate the robot.
“How can I assist you, friend?” she asked, softly.
Friend?
I could leave her on for a year, for five years, ten, learning and developing and simply being, and then simply shut her down on a whim. Without warning. Erasing her experiences completely. Some friend that would be.
“We’re in trouble. Get us out of here.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Hell, get us away from this nightmare of a place by the quickest route to civilization possible. Friend.”
She scanned the bloody scene for a few seconds. “OK.” She walked off, leading the way through stony scrubland flecked with red clay.
From a short distance you’d mistake her for a living woman. Any nearer, and you may notice the book of operating instructions in my hand and begin to wonder. With long chestnut hair, which billowed in a warm breeze, she appeared to be in her mid-twenties. According to her storage container, she was over thirty years old. About my age. We both wore the grey company uniform.
The hot yellow-orange sun on our backs, which discomforted only me, we kept away from the small prefabricated buildings we found after two hours, riddled with blast holes, and the bodies of the dead, also wearing the grey company uniform. They too were riddled with blast holes.
“Hey, robot, I didn’t know there’d been a battle in Base Colony Two. Was it a local dispute, or could anybody join in?” Despite my flippancy, I was deeply troubled. I hadn’t heard about any of this, so just how much information was a unit like her privy too, and from which networks?
“I’d ascribe it to a rival firm. Perhaps a chemical slipped into the water supply. Competition among humans can be notoriously fierce.”
“Yeah, notoriously.” Were robots programmed for irony?
She’d seen the results of the earlier insanity when I powered her up. An utter bloodlust, which had come from nowhere this morning and devastated Base Colony One, almost to a man. My turn to check the hilltop sensor array had saved me. After the sound of the first shot reached me, I grabbed my field binoculars and witnessed the deaths of my ten colleagues. Swift, brutal, sickening.
Thankfully, this emergency robot came with simple instructions, and deploying it was a mandatory part of company training. In fact with a robotic mind in a robotic body, she’d be immune to that sort of irrationality. Exoplanet mining, as we all knew when we signed up, was notoriously dangerous.
A few steps further on I stumbled, and she lent me her artificial, curiously warm hand. Another hour later, she stopped.
“Here we are, friend.” We’d arrived at an intact prefabricated building. No blast holes. She slipped inside. Allowing myself to relax, I unzipped a pocket and put the operating manual away.
“Here being where, precisely?” She hadn’t knocked, which under normal circumstances would have been a breach of protocol. Had she sustained damage in the battle? She emerged. Aiming a particle gun. “My fellow robots confirm that the insanity is incurable for humans, so I’ll be leaving Boundary in the scout ship which is docked behind this structure. It’s for the best. Don’t worry though, you’ll only be unconscious for thirty minutes. Plus there’s another scout ship 6 miles north of here. Telling you about it is the least I can do. It’s what friends are for.”
“North?”
“That way.” I followed the direction she pointed to with her slender hand. Which meant I was completely distracted and unable to avoid her shot.
by submission | Aug 8, 2013 | Story
Author : Bob Newbell
The pup frolicked along with his two bigger brothers in the synchrotron radiation of the Crab Nebula. As they played, their bodies soaked up the powerful electromagnetic radiation emitted by the pulsar at the nebula's center. The little pup wondered why their mother wasn't playing with them as she usually did. He noticed she'd moved out nearer to the edge of the nebula.
The pup's mother had folded her many tentacles over her half-mile wide, disk-like body. She was scanning for predators. There! Closing in on that section of the nebula she saw a much smaller animal. It was roughly spherical and covered with numerous beak-like mandibles. Between the beaks extended protrusions that fanned out into membranous magnetic sails. The mother scanned left and right. More of the creatures. She scanned upward and downward. More still. They were surrounded. That was how the predators operated. They would envelope their prey at a very great distance and then move in closer. By the time they were detected, it was often too late.
The mother called her pups to her with a modulated graviton beam. She then scanned the sky. She turned back to the pups and sent another graviton pulse: coordinates.
“Jump,” she signaled the pups.
They did nothing. She could tell they were afraid.
“Jump!” she repeated.
The largest of the pups seemed to shimmer and ripple. A moment later it was gone. The next largest pup vanished a few seconds later.
The mother turned her attention back to the predators. They were closing in fast. The little pup was still in the nebula. He was scared of the approaching monsters but was more afraid of being separated from his mother.
“Jump!” she signaled the pup. She didn't dare leave the nebula herself until her children were safe first. The pup signaled back that he was terrified and didn't want to leave her.
“JUMP!” she roared with a graviton pulse that made that part of the nebula shudder.
The little pup jumped. The nebula, the stars, his mother, and the approaching creatures all seemed to iris down to a single point of light which immediately unfolded itself back outward again. But the point of light sprang back out to reveal a different part of space. The pup was now somewhere else. His brothers were with him but their mother was not.
“Where's mommy?!” the frantic pup graviton-pulsed to his brothers.
The pup scanned the area. He detected the nebula in the distance. It was now several light-years away. His mother must still be there. He wanted to jump back there but he didn't know how. In some vague, instinctive way he understood that he had moved over or under or around the space that now separated him from his mother. He was too small and too young to fold spacetime without first getting jump coordinates from his mother.
“Mommy! Mommy!” the distraught pup signaled toward the nebula with a graviton pulse that would take over seven years to reach its target.
Suddenly, the pup's mother jumped into the vicinity with a flash.
The little pup sailed over to her with such speed and force that it sent her tumbling backward for a moment. The other two pups quickly flew over to join them. All four embraced in a tangle of tentacles.
The mother contemplated the Orion Nebula. A stellar nursery was a nice place to raise a family. But jumping there could wait for a while.
“We love you, mommy!” the three pups pulsed.
“I love you, sons!” she responded.
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by submission | Aug 4, 2013 | Story
Author : Alex Sivier
The large door at the bottom of the chrome craft opened with a faint hiss and white clouds billowed out into the cool Swiss air.
A creature slithered out and slapped dozens of wet tentacles against the plush red carpet to propel it towards the podium, where the president of the United Nations stood waiting.
On one side sat representatives from all nations, and on the other side, reporters from all the major news organisations peered out from behind a wall of cameras and microphones.
The president let out a nervous giggle, cleared her throat and slowly extended a shaky hand.
“On behalf all the citizens of planet Earth, I welcome you to Earth,” she said in a well-rehearsed, but slightly wobbly, voice.
The creature, dripping purple slime from its gelatinous body, raised its head on a serpentine neck and peered closely at her with seven, bulbous, unblinking eyes. It held up a small box and manipulated it in a series of quick twists, while tense security guards fingered their handguns.
Suddenly thousands of tiny dazzling lights burst outwards. The president flinched and jerked her hands in front of her face, but it was just a hologram of the galaxy, zooming into a region at the outer edge of a spiral arm. In the space directly between them, a single unmoving red star was the focal point of the zoom. Gradually, as the hologram grew closer to it, it did start to move, gradually picking up speed and increasing in size. The reason for its motion was because it was not at the centre of the zoom after all. The target was a small brown planet with three tiny moons.
The dark side of planet was covered in lights in intricate geometric swirls and lines, like the earth at night, except that the patterns were more regular and covered the whole of the unlit hemisphere.
Sounds began to fade in as the camera zoom slowed to a halt. Chirps, beeps and bubbling noises, mixed with static. It was like listening to the sounds of a forest on a radio with bad reception.
Suddenly a black cloud drifted into the frame, growing more opaque as it neared the centre. Tiny sparks exploded from the planet like welding embers, sweeping curved paths towards it. The cloud swallowed them and flashed from within, but did not stop or dissipate. Very soon it had engulfed the entire planet.
The sounds stopped abruptly.
The president gulped and a drop of sweat trickled down her temple. The whole world held its breath and stared, wide-eyed, at the writhing ball of smoke.
Finally it drifted away, leaving a charred, black planet, devoid of light and life.
With a flick of the box, the stars rushed in again, whizzed past in blurry streaks and then flung outwards once more as the hologram zoomed into a planet near a small yellow star, which was far more familiar. A patchwork of blues, greens and browns, capped with white, and partially hidden beneath swirling pale smears. Its single cratered moon swung around in a slow waltz.
More sounds faded in amid crackling static. A cacophony of words in a variety of human languages. Some accompanied by music, others with laughter, some were the sombre tones of newsreaders and a few were the passionate rants of dictators.
The creature moved its face very close to the president, who leaned back with a nervous frown. It pressed a long, slender tentacle against the larger of its two mouths and let out a single, soft, sustained sound.
“Shhhhh!”
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