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.”
by submission | Jul 1, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
“Are you sure this is what you want to do, captain?” First Mate Smith didn’t sound like she thought it was the best course of action, and Ellie had to wonder if she wasn’t right.
“It’s not what I want to do,” she said resignedly, shoulders slumping. “However, I think this may be the only option we have. I think it’s our only shot.”
Ellie, First Mate Smith, and Council Advisor Lucas were the only people on the bridge, or the rest of the ship for that matter. Ellie was nearing fifty and had seen plenty of bad situations in her time on board her aging ship. Smith’s wife had died five years ago and the aged woman had stayed about the ship working, drinking, and generally remembering to forget. Lucas was on board because he had chartered the ship to bring him to Jackal Station under the guise of an ore-purchasing run – he needed to negotiate with the cartel leaders who ran the two and a half million person station and the ‘salvage’ crews and other operations that were run from it.
Negotiations had not gone well; They had left in a hurry.
Lucas looked down at his feet. “I think you’re correct. If they get the device working then nothing good will come of it.”
One of the salvage crews working out of Jackal Station had come across a wreck with a massive plasma caster on it of unknown origin. ‘Massive,’ in this case, meant ‘large enough to liquify Earth’s moon in a single blow.’
“But who says they can even fix it?” Smith objected. “They may not even have that sort of technical ability.”
Lucas snorted. “Have you seen this station? If they can keep it running and habitable then I have no doubt they can get this device working.”
Smith took a long drink from her flask. “’If’ seems like a poor reason to condemn two and a half million people to death.”
Ellen looked out the viewport at Jackal Station, gleaming in the distance. She sighed and began manipulating the ship’s controls. They began moving away from the station, slowly but surely. “You had better get your communique off, Advisor.”
“Alright.” Lucas looked like something in him had died. “Alright, I will.” He repeated as he began initiating a text transfer by way of quantum-mechanical manipulation of two sister atoms.
Minutes passed by. Smith had drained her flask quickly and produced a bottle of whiskey from… Somewhere. Ellen took a mouthful of it off Smith’s hands.
Fifty thousand miles out. One hundred thousand miles. Two hundred thousand miles. They stopped at half a million, and turned back around. Ellen began charging the ship’s capacitors.
Her ship was squat, but massive: Eight thousand feet long, seven hundred wide and seven hundred tall. It was normally used as a cargo hauler for bulk ore shipments, and while Lucas had been in his negotiations Ellen had gone and filled up her hold with solid rock and metal to bring it back to Saturn’s massive orbital refineries in order to make it look like she had a reason to be there.
The capacitors were charged. Everything was ready.
“This is it, then.” It wasn’t a question, however. The more she thought about it the more she realized there was no other choice.
“This is it, I suppose,” Lucas replied.
Smith just swore and began crying.
Ellen gave the ship the go-ahead.
They were going one fourth the speed of light when they hit Jackal Station.
by submission | Jun 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : Cheryl A. Warner
I have two minutes to live.
That’s a short time to sort out the sum of your life, but it will have to do. Up here, the only currency is air, and I’ve already run out.
They start calling you a “short-termer” when you reach the two-week mark. Both the guards and the other prisoners eye that red badge on your suit and give you a wide berth. We’re all up here to die, but when you only have a handful of days left, there’s danger in your eyes.
I didn’t take advantage. I didn’t yank anyone off the rail or try to cut through someone’s air line. I’ve already delivered all my evil to the world. I used it to cut down two women, beautiful, innocent things, then never wanted to hurt anything again.
I still get to die for it.
All that’s left of my vision are a few bright spots. I can feel my body shaking like it’s attached to a jackhammer.
I dreamed about floating off the rail a million times, hoped for it even. They only send the worst criminals up to the rail, those that are scheduled to die anyway. Murderers, all of us. Those of us that behave are granted shorter sentences. They call it justice. Only two years on the rail and I finally get to leave this place.
I’ve watched guys go through this, one every few weeks. It’s not pretty. I figure I’m probably blue by now.
I can still imagine the rail out there, just a thin silver line, the guys tethered to it like legs on a caterpillar. One day, they’ll finish it and there will be trains to the moon. If I had any air in my lungs, I would laugh. After two years, it still seems like the fantasy of some millionaire who read too many science fiction novels.
I know I should probably feel cold, but instead I just feel numb. They took my clothes before kicking me out into space. They need the suit for the next guy they ship up to the rail. Can’t waste it on a dead guy. I don’t mind. It’s the first time in two years that I don’t have plastic an inch from my face.
I imagine there are hundreds of us out here, floating along blue and bloated. A graveyard of earth’s vermin. Dumping us in space is an easy way to kill the infestation.
One day, maybe aliens will find us out here in the void. They’re going to think humans are ugly. They’ll be right.
Something is happening with my heart now. I don’t think it’s beating.
My two minutes must be up.
