by submission | Sep 1, 2012 | Story |
Author : Chris Louie
Zanth was cool. He had this bad-ass helio-rocket that could take us out to Moon 2 and be back before curfew. We were always adept at breaking the rules, which was no small feat, considering the punishments for some of the stuff we did. Smoking space-pot, punishable by limb reallocation. Swearing, punishable by castration. And most of all, drawing, punishable by banishment to Io.
Drawing was his favorite activity. In my lifetime, it’s always been illegal to draw anything that doesn’t exist in the natural world, but Zanth would draw the most bucolic, crazy scenes. “This thing standing next to the tree, that was called a cow,” he’d say, pointed to his latest masterpiece. I was fascinated. Not only was the tree missing its electrical panel, there was this four legged–THING that was unlike anything else I’d ever seen. “An animal,” he’d say.
“An animal.” A scant two paragraphs in our grammar-school history books. “Animals: Extinct by the time of the great Fusion Revolution of 3:RR67, animals once littered the landscape, ruining the environment with their feces and using up valuable resources that could have been used for humans,” the books said. No pictures.
“I dream these,” Zanth would say, and the oddest things would appear on the paper. “Cats.” “Kangaroos.” “Beetles.” “What kind of cities did these things live in?” I’d ask. Zanth told me that they didn’t live in cities, that they were free, freer than the beta-humans whose wings took them to StrataCity and beyond, freer than the astronauts laboring in far-flung colonies, freer than ourselves. They had no language, yet they lived in violent peace. There was no order for the animals — there was just existence.
“They were assigned no Purpose by the Administration at birth?” I asked. “They had no purpose, except when we forced them to work in our fields or raised them to be slaughtered and eaten,” he said, and it frightened me, that this “cow,” this peaceful looking creature, once lived solely to be gutted and devoured by people. The playful-looking “dogs” had their tails cut off or ears clipped. The fascinating “insects” were killed outright, exterminated by home dwellers. “This went on for thousands of years,” Zanth told me.
“Until the Fusion Revolution, right? That’s when…they became extinct, because they hadn’t evolved to modern life like humans and beta-humans. They were obsolete,” I said, but Zanth was shaking his head. “No. They killed themselves. As unintelligent as we thought they were, they all acted in concert. When the first blades of grass started to glimmer with enhanced circuitry, it was like they all knew, all the animals at once, that the earth wasn’t a nice place to live anymore. Not that it had been in a long time for them, but it had become…hopeless.
“And so the next day, after the Fusion Revolution, people woke up to find that all the animals had died. They had given up.” Zanth started to cry, which I made him stop, because a patrolman was nearby and crying is punishable by electric flogging. We flew out to Moon 2, but the volcanoes didn’t seem as beautiful that day. We were both silent.
That was all a few years ago. Zanth went on to pursue a Permission to Create Art grant, but was kicked out of school when he was caught doing unauthorized doodling. I eventually went to medical school, and now I screen humans who are potential Beta Morph candidates. I never heard from Zanth after his stint on Io, but occasionally, in my sleep, I dream of Them. The animals, running across hills, swimming through oceans, climbing about trees. And silently, carefully, I cry.
by submission | Aug 28, 2012 | Story |
Author : Nick Lewandowski
Lucy sat at her usual table, skimming the news on her phone.
It was therefore some time before she noticed The Crazy Man.
Youngish, with rumpled clothes and dark, tortured eyes. All together he looked like someone who spent a great deal of time on airplanes, particularly trans-continental flights, and therefore found it exceedingly difficult to get a decent night’s sleep.
Drug addict or artist, she decided, though he was awfully patient for a drug addict.
“May I help you?”
“Lucy Curtis?” he spoke with an accent Lucy didn’t recognize. Vaguely Eastern European. He rolled the “L” gently and pronounced the “U” like the deep “oo” in “loose.”
“Yes?”
“May I ask you something?”
“Have we met?”
“Perhaps. In a manner of speaking that is to say.”
Lucy set her phone down.
He took the seat across from her without asking permission. When he spoke next his voice was hushed. “I am something of a writer hoping you would listen to my idea for a story, to see if it would be well-received from your demographic.”
“My demographic?”
“Young women with radiant eyes.”
Had he been clean-shaven and had his breath not smelled suspiciously of refined ethanol Lucy would have been flattered. That did not stop her from blushing furiously.
A strange thing to do in front of a drug addict-cum-writer.
“What would you say,” he began, “if someone told you a story about a woman. A woman very much like yourself, who a certain young man loved very much. The most important difference between this couple and yourself being they understand their world, their whole universe, in fact, is just one in an infinite series of universes.
So when a terrible accident takes this young woman’s life her lover will travel from world to world, universe to universe, that is, seeking the variation that is most like her, hoping he may once more bask in the glow of her smile, if only for the briefest moment. Because only then will he find peace.”
At the end of this breathless monologue a heavy silence hung in the air between them, like a corpse dangling from a hangman’s noose.
Somewhere behind them mugs clinked on a tray.
The young man stared at her with his dark, tortured eyes.
By now Lucy had gotten the distinct impression he was neither a writer nor drug addict, and whatever the real purpose of this conversation might be it was certainly not market research.
She smiled weakly. “It sounds lovely. Very romantic.”
His expression softened. Some of the color returned to his face. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
He reached into his coat and removed a small, ornate pistol.
Lucy’s jaw dropped. Her mouth and lips began forming that fat “O” shape that is a pre-requisite for all full-throated screams of terror.
“Thank you so very much,” the man said, so softly this time that his lips hardly moved and truth be told it was more a long sigh of relief than an actual sentence.
He squeezed the trigger just as Lucy started screaming.
A bolt of lightning (in retrospect that’s what Lucy believed it most clearly resembled) shot from the barrel. For a brief moment the man became a black, vaguely-human form shrouded in pale red light.
Gradually the glow receded.
When it had faded out entirely Lucy was out of air. She was not finished screaming, really. Not by a long shot considering she now had a charred human skeleton for company. Her vocal chords simply refused to resonate any longer.
And worst of all, she realized, he was SMILING.
by submission | Aug 27, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
The holy city resembles a colossal dodecahedron two and half thousand kilometers thick. The reflection of a billion suns slip across its twelve quicksilver surfaces as it speeds through space, yet the bowels of the craft remain dark, as it has for millennia.
Then there is light.
Triggered by unseen hands, hidden machines whir into motion performing pre-programmed functions. A complex series of green pinpoints blink on and banks of blue, crystaline eggs flicker to luminescent life. Slowly, the frosty wombs clear revealing sleeping toddlers within.
A sun-like orb flares into being at the center of the craft, illuminating a lush oasis wrapped around the inner walls of the sphere. Twin rivers spiral from an equatorial lake twisting into either hemisphere, flanked on either side by a forest of metallic, tree-like structures rising above dense foliage. Dangling from leafless branches are strange crimson fruit; bulbous, opaque membranes, veined and throbbing with organic fluids. Elsewhere, within a hundred and forty four thousand crystalline eggs, the first born awaken to a new morning.
Years later:
Gay laughter resounds throughout the enormous garden chamber as naked multi-racial youths frolic under the warm eternal sunlight.
A boy and a girl stand alone by the river looking up in wonder at the pear shaped, fleshy masses hanging from one of the metallic trees.
“What are they?” The girl asks.
“They’re the second born..” The boy answers, studying the veins radiating over the membranous orb, tracing them to where they thicken and pulse at the stem.
“From the Old World?”
“Yes.”
“When will they join us?”
“When we’re home.”
They stare at the throbbing fruit. After a time, the girl speaks. “I want to see what’s inside.”
The boy says simply, “It’s forbidden.”
“It can’t hurt to look inside just one. Besides, I’ve seen one fall before,” the girl lies effortlessly, “Long ago. They just shriveled up.”
The boy has no reason to doubt her. There has never been cause to tell a falsehood here. His own curiosity wins out.
Just one. They vow.
Gracefully, the boy scales the thick metal trunk and edges onto a limb. He tugs at the thick, rubbery stem of the nearest fruit, but he cannot dislodge the mass.
“Here!” the girl whispers, waving a sharp stick from a nearby shrub. “Use this.” She lobs the branch up to him.
He plunges the pointed end into the dangling bulb and it bursts open with a gout of reddish brown fluid. The puncture quickly widens from the weight of the sac’s contents and the boy glimpses a figure floating in the remaining ooze. A foreign, earthy odor assaults his senses. He gulps fresh air and leans in for closer inspection.
The figure awakens suddenly, screaming, its pupiless eyes bulging wildly. Startled, the boy loses his grip and falls awkwardly from the branch, smashing his skull against the steel trunk, soaking the turf in dark blood.
Father Rasmussen is yanked from an insensate oblivion into a world of blinding agony as his unformed clone is prematurely awakened in its artificial womb. His undeveloped lungs burn and his body convulses, but his mind is intact, ringing with the last command made by the Armaggeddon Angel who took his life. “Remember”, they ordered. “Remember and teach”. And he does. He remembers everything; humanity’s fateful history, his home destroyed by aliens playing God. He remembers the one hundred and forty four thousand infants found without guile, protected in a vain hope to cure humanity’s Evil. He takes his memories and his knowledge with him as he dies a second time, thousands of light years from home.
by submission | Aug 26, 2012 | Story |
Author : Jake Trommer
They called it Nouveau Katanga, a colony world of tremendous mineral wealth and great natural beauty. They said it was the gem of the Outer Colonies, a shining example of what humanity could do when it put its mind to it, colonize and terraform a rockball into a lush garden world.
And when the mining corporations and the planetary government decided to cast off the shackles of the Terran Hegemony, they said much, much nastier things. And the more perceptive amongst them said that those who didn’t read history were doomed to repeat it.
Apparently the Hegemony government didn’t read much history, because when I and many other volunteers answered the call to defend Nouveau Katanga against the inevitable subjugation, they said it was unprecedented, disgusting, piratical. For us, it was simply the best business opportunity my kind had had since the Anh Loa Uprisings in the Nemean Abyss years ago.
There weren’t many of us in the first wave—just the officers and senior non-coms, the nucleus around which the N.K. government could build a proper army, but I recognized most of them. Old Ian Wicks, battle-scarred Dan Carton-Barber, even the buccaneering Johann Mueller, who I hadn’t seen since a Rakharan machine gun crew had lit him up during the Uprisings. The President is—was, I should say—one of the most charismatic men I’d ever met, and by the time he’d finished giving us his glory-or-death speech we actually kinda believed in the “righteousness of the cause”, instead of the cold hard cash we knew we’d be getting for this.
“It’ll never work,” said Mueller, over the lager he was nursing in the capitol city’s bar. We were all there, drinking, catching up on how we’d done since the last contract together. It was a bit awkward—apparently more than a couple of us had been on the opposite sides of one or two. “They outgun us by a considerable margin, and even with the mining interests bankrolling this—”
Dan poured himself another glass’s worth of the carafe wine he and I had acquired a liking for in the Abyss.”Win or lose, we’re still soldiering, still getting paid to do what we love.”
“And getting ourselves killed needlessly in the process?” Mueller shook his balding head. “Remind me again how you scheisskopfs talked me into this again.”
“Dosh, and loads of it,” I said after draining my glass. “I know soft sods like Dan and I are keen on soldiering for soldiering’s sake and all that, but those mining corps you mentioned are gonna make us all very rich men.”
With luck. But none of us were going to say that out loud.
Even so, that seemed to strike home for Johann. He’d always struggled with his personal finances more than the rest of us (though none could compete with Ian, who was so ridiculously scrupulous with his affairs that we were all fond of joking he should’ve been an accountant), so that alone was enough to recommend the job to him.
After a long meditative silence, Johann raised his glass. “A toast, gentlemen. To our hallowed profession.”
And as one we raised our glasses, bottles, tumblers, to belt out the ancient chant that had graced halls where professional soldiers had congregated since time immemorial:
“Vive la mort, vive la guerre, vive le sacré mercenaire!”
by submission | Aug 25, 2012 | Story |
Author : A. S. Andrews
Four months ago, it started. Everyone, everywhere, coughing. Day two brought bloody sores and panic, followed by the aches and fever of day three, the vomiting of day four. Day five dawned to thick, red scales, all over, even where your hair and nails used to be. They itched and burned and nothing helped. Day seven, gone. All symptoms vanished, leaving bald heads and bloodied nail beds. Lots of people died, twenty percent they say. More went crazy. Like the theories – aliens, bio-warfare, terrorists, space bugs from the downed satellite.
“Marry me,” you said three months ago. You slipped me your mama’s ring, and Uncle Joe married us.
Two months ago, Uncle Joe left his chapel for the fields, preaching hell and brim fire. Uncle Joe wasn’t the only one.
It’s back. Started a week ago. Difference is, not everyone gets sick the same day. It’s all the same symptoms – coughing, sores, fever, vomiting, scales. Except this time, on day seven, the scales get hard and yellow. And the whites of your eyes yellow and your pupils grow bigger and bigger, until your whole iris is pitch black. People are dying all over, lots of them before they even yellow. Some just disappear. Vaporized, they say.
You’re yellow now, and I have fever. “Let’s go out,” you say, “there’s a party.”
“An end of the world bash?”
You shrug. “Maybe this world.”
We go, we drink, we move through a strange crush of bodies, everyone sick. After, we sit stargazing in Uncle Joe’s field. He’s not preaching today – too weak. The Milky Way glitters above, same as always.
“Uncle Joe – he said to pray,” I say. “When it started up again.”
I think of Uncle Joe’s face, pained and red. He’d clasped his hands together and nodded at me, before another shudder came.
You smile. In the starlight, your eyes are reflective black orbs, surrounded by golden halos. “It’s not over yet,” you whisper. I want to ask what you mean, what you might know, but your soft kiss silences me, the coolness of your scales startling all over again. I close my eyes. “Until death do us part,” you say.
I start to speak, but cough instead. Your hand slips away. When I open my eyes, you’re gone, just like all the others who yellowed. Vanished. I scoop dirt, sifting it through my fingers. It’s gritty and dry, slightly sparkly, smells metallic. No hint of you left.
More theories, no answers. Teleportation, apocalypse, some freak hiding in an underground bunker, laughing. Damn freaks.
Uncle Joe died today.
I’m yellow now, sitting here where we last sat, staring at the stars, thinking of you. I see a shooting star, wish for life. Kiss my ring, it vanishes. Sky pulses, stars flash. The Milky Way shifts, changes, rearranges.
I see it now, written in the stars; my choice. Leave or die. But I have no choice. Wait for me. Until death do us part.
