by submission | Jul 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : Matthew Wells
We watched her give her life for ours and we hated her for it.
To be fair, when we learned someone would have to stay behind, no one else volunteered. And she’s not the type you might typically associate with bravery. That made it all the more painful. A forty-something sales rep. from somewhere on the other side of the Dog Star, Lucelli was mother to three adult daughters and wife to a station operations manager.
When I think of her, I see those gray-green eyes watching us desperately push away from the dock. We didn’t ask her to stay. She didn’t draw the short straw. She simply said she would.
And no one objected.
The shuttles limitations forced the decision, and the pilot was quick to say that he would, of course, have stayed behind if his job wasn’t so critical to our escape. For a moment, I wanted to throw him to the dogs by claiming that I could fly the Peavey, just to see him squirm. But I had my own excuses, as did the hundred and six declaring other matters of absolution.
While we waited impatiently for the engines to warm, a researcher asked Lucelli why she had come to Hells Breathe Station. She was following up on a sale of desks and storage shelves made by the station a month ago. It was supposed to be just a day’s visit.
I think the reason why we resent her is because there was no hesitation in her decision. She gave instructions about what to tell her family and even helped finish loading our supplies.
I don’t want to give the impression that Lucelli was eager to die or to be a hero; there was real sadness in those eyes. Still, she appeared calm and collected as the hatch closed.
Really, she made the easier choice. How are the rest of us supposed to live with ourselves?
And perhaps I hate her most. I was supposed to get everyone off safely. But, does being Station Director mean I should have stayed behind? Why didn’t one of the Nobel Prize geezers volunteer. Or, the visiting senator? I don’t see them being vilified.
So, why must I be the one beneath the unending assault?
Lucelli’s husband seems like a descent fellow. Our line of work is similar; it demands good organization, communication, and patience—patience because people can react strongly in the face of anxiety. And if we find that we are the ones losing our stable grip, can we not be forgiven?
I’ve lost count of the number of blows. No doubt my nose is broken and I’m missing some teeth by now. Surely, his knuckles are fractured. Can’t really blame the man.
And really, it’s all her fault.
by submission | Jul 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
It was with trepidation that the Secretary-General of the United Nations brought his lips near the microphone to make the first verbal attempt to communicate with the 1,500 spaceship armada that had infiltrated the outer solar system. With a steady voice he said, “On behalf of the people of Earth, I bid peaceful greetings to the visitors to our solar system.”
It was expected that it would take perhaps 35 minutes for the message to reach the fleet and as long for a response to be heard back. To everyone’s surprise, the reply was immediate.
“Yeah, hi there. Sorry to just barge in like this, but we have orders to repossess your gas giants.”
The Secretary-General and the other dignitaries who heard the message were stunned.
“Would you please explain how you are communicating so quickly over hundreds of millions of kilometers and explain what you mean by ‘repossess your gas giants’?”
“We put a satellite in orbit around Earth to convert between your radio communication and our tachyon pulses which are faster than light. It also translates languages,” came the reply over the speakers. “Your world’s account with PlanetShield Incorporated is 65.5 million of your years delinquent. The company hired Interstellar Repo — that’s us — to collect the four gas giants PlanetShield sold to your ancestors to gravitationally sweep up asteroidal and cometary debris in your star system so the inner planets wouldn’t get pummeled.”
The United Nations delegates looked at one another in utter astonishment. The Secretary-General composed himself and spoke. “There was no intelligent life on our Earth 65 million years ago.”
“You’ve got that right,” replied the alien. “No intelligent life form would try to protect four rock-worlds with just four gas giants. Not only does this solar system have a large comet cloud, it’s got a great big asteroid belt right outside the orbit of the fourth planet. You really need six and ideally seven or eight gas giants for proper coverage.”
“No,” responded the Secretary-General, “I mean there literally were no beings on this world who could have engaged in any sort of business agreement to celestially engineer our solar system 65 million years ago.”
The U.N. delegates heard what sounded like papers being shuffled over the speakers. “Let’s see,” said the alien. “Large reptilian beings, some bipedal, some quadrupedal, most with scales, some with feathers, collectively dubbed ‘dinosaurs’ by subsequent dominant mammalian species. Sound about right for 65.5 million years ago?”
“Yes, but–”
“Got the signed contract right here.”
“But the dinosaurs went extinct! We believe an asteroid struck the Earth and–”
“Well of course an asteroid struck the Earth. Those cheapskate dinosaurs went with a package designed for a star system half as big as this one. And then they didn’t even pay for that. And I’m afraid under the terms of the contract responsibility for payment devolves to Earth’s dominant life form after the 90 kilandra trial period, or 65.5 million of your years. Well, folks, the ships are in position around the outer planets and we’re ready to warp out.”
“Wait!” screamed the Secretary-General. “If you take those planets Earth’s orbit will change. Our civilization will be destroyed!”
“You can use the satellite to send a tachyon pulse to contact PlanetShield Incorporated if you want to negotiate a new contract. No hard feelings, I hope. We’re just doing our job.”
The speaker went silent. Telescopes and space probes quickly confirmed that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were gone.
“Hmm, think we could get by with five gas giants?” asked a delegate.
by submission | Jul 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : M.W. Fowler
She has legs that she keeps up with a regimen of oiling, tensioning checks, and recalculations. She could have downloaded all of her famous dances into them, but somehow, that didn’t seem right. After all, she wasn’t a toy, and she had earned her career through hours of sweaty practices and sweaty stage directors.
The wrong step, the wrong trip or jump, she reminds herself, and it will be given away, this game.
When she was young, her parents knew nothing of her dreams, her true dreams, and they made her dance. Traditional ballet. Neoclassical ballet. Contemporary ballet. And now this. Only the pointe shoes remain. She did not dance at prom. She stopped outside the overly waxed floor, her date’s hands—one on her waist, the other holding the spiked punch—and watched as her classmates danced with the freedom of ignorance to the dance. A freedom she had never known.
“Do you want to?” her date asked her. He was named Steven, and he nodded reluctantly towards the dance floor. “You know, the next song maybe?”
She ran her fingers softly along his at her waist and pulled his hand towards her breast. Steven left the punch on an empty table, and they found a dark spot of the world to park his car.
No. Her parents knew nothing of her dreams to dance the world into its cold, hard end. She would dance at it tomorrow. In front of millions, as they watched their galaxy fall away into an icy darkness that could no longer sustain life, she would dance from the safety of their new mobile planet in space. For them she would dance a dance that would end in the shaped shapeless becoming free.
She knows, though, now, after all of these years, that she was trying to free herself, not the dance. She is trapped inside the dance, inside the machinations of the world around her. They were floating away to their doom. Where were they going? Wherever it was, her legs had carried her there, and when she thought of it like that she began to wonder if she were really in control of the legs or if they had control of her.
She was old. What could they possibly want with her? They were the reason people talked about her age in wonderment: she dances like she is a girl. She was never a girl, she reminds herself, staring at the corner.
“And you,” she says to her legs, “you were never really legs.”
They rest, unmoving in their med-case, waiting for the engineer whose silence she pays handsomely to figure out if the trembling in her last performance was from the end of the world, like a change in the weather, or just the end of her career.
by submission | Jul 7, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
He thought that maybe he should be angry. After all, everything he had ever known was falling apart and there was nothing he could do about it. His hands shook with the energy of the blow-by self-consuming passion of intense anger, and his eyes were clouding up with tears. It really wasn’t fair.
Samuel screamed, shouted at the sky, shook his fists at the God he’d never believed in. Where was the bastard now, when everybody needed him more than ever? Gone, it seemed, to some other planet down the road where some other fledgling race needed their pot stirred and their morals directed.
Maybe this was God’s way of punishing man for overstepping his boundaries and assuming the role of creator when he was only the apprentice, like a parent who forces a child to figure out his own mess.
In the valley below Change writhed.
The news reports said it was an accident, an experiment in physics gone awry, changing the fundamental workings of space and time itself. As near as the scientists could tell there were no neutrons in the expanding haze. There were no electrons or protons, either. Really, there were no recognizable particles of any kind.
And it was growing, too, extending tendrils into real space like some sort of giant, horrifying, laws-of-the-Universe defying amoeba. Samuel watched one expand into the air above the zone of occurrence like some lance of the burning workings of the unknown, touching the air and turning it into something else. It was simultaneously too bright and too dark to see.
Samuel thought that he should be angry, but he wasn’t. He was tired. The world around him was falling apart and there was nothing that he could do about it, but hadn’t life always been that way?
The air had a cold November chill to it, and the leaves had all left for the winter. Everything seemed sharp, too in focus to be seen. Samuel sat back down in his lawn chair at the top of a hill over looking the End (Or was it the Beginning?) and picked up his bottle liquor. As he drank the warmth spread out through his stomach and into the deep and hard-to-reach places of his body and mind.
Surely there must be a way out of this, he thought, though for the life of him he couldn’t think of one. Perhaps if the same experiment that had gone wrong were repeated… But that was an impossibility now. The equipment was gone, the knowledge too. What else was there?
Most certainly there would be an end. That thought, at least, comforted Samuel in a way nothing else could. The black and bright nothings of something new lapped at the foot of the hill he was sitting on. Soon, while everybody else lived on running in circles from something that inevitably would always be front of them, Samuel’s life would be much more peaceful.
He gazed up, again, at the long fingers that extended further than he could see toward the cold reaches of space. There had always been a lingering question at the back of his mind his entire life: Was mankind’s dream of reaching the stars a joke? Was it the grandiose dream of a megalomaniac young race? He looked the the growing certainty before him. He looked at the shapeless hand stretched out toward Heaven, God, and Hell, and he knew.
Man had reached the stars and would grow out among the alien world and sights of space long after He was gone.
Samuel smiled.
He didn’t feel a thing.
by submission | Jul 6, 2012 | Story |
Author : D. Ahren Bell
Just watching him play brings a tranquil satisfaction. You hear about the joys of fatherhood, but its impossible to truly understand until you have a child of your own. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. The love, the trust, the warmth shared between father and son is a bond beyond compare.
I love the way Simon looks up at me with my eyes, happiness radiating from his smile. Everyday is a new joy. He is always learning, surprising me with his intelligence at every corner. I can take credit for very little of his achievements. Almost everything that he learns is learned on his own.
I love his cute little nose, cute little teeth, cute little toes. It’s so wonderful to see all of those little features, minutiae of my own.
Truly. The reason he looks so much like me is because he is me. My friends gave me a hard time about it; my mother and father were nearly furious. They all told me it was selfish, that I should find a mate and produce a child in the old fashion way. My sister hounded me, reminding me of the millions of children around the world in foster care while I felt the need to make a copy of myself.
But I wasn’t the one to make that decision; it was my other love, Simon’s mother. She insisted that I make a clone of myself. She wanted a little Simon. She didn’t think any changes in my genome were necessary for perfection.
I queried Siri, “What time is little Simon’s pediatrician appointment today?”
Her body-less voice came back as it always does, calm and a little flat, “Little Simon’s appointment is at 9:30.”
“Thank you Siri. I love you.”
The voice rang through the speakers throughout the apartment. “I love you too, Simon.”
