by submission | May 27, 2012 | Story |
Author : David Hartley
We’ve longed for this, the end of all times, echoed the rampant philosophers, baying for the choicest sound-byte to sing the species out. I flick the radio off, return us to silence. Better that than cloying intellectual redemption. I look to you, to your belly where propagation lies, wondering again what flush of nonsense brought about that defiance, wondering again if that is a baby pushing against your rags or a statement. You smile, as if that alone could reverse things, however much I wished it could.
Outside, the liquid creak makes itself apparent and your smile dies; closer now.
‘Shall we?’ I say. You are already rising, one hand cradling the bump of ambiguous potential, the other limp by your side, grasping for nothing. No weapons now, no point. No more bows and arrows, no lightning.
Together we lift away the rug-door and bow out to the balcony. There are two of them in the courtyard below, inspecting every brick, every wire and lump. Each touch is cautious; when something crumbles they whine and try to push the bits back together again.
Your hand slips into mine, grips. I purse my lips, whistle.
Creak, squeak, chatter, snap, they wheel on us and we stand firm; representatives of a fragile race at the weary end of its tether. It is almost immediate now; flails retracted, whip-limbs recoiled. Armed only with inspection fibres, softly, slowly, they creep, scuttle, and scramble up, over, and all around us. Their eyes, such as they are, have faded from scanner red to sky blue, an imitation of the expanse above perhaps.
They caress for hours and we resist squirming under the tickles. They spend a long time poking and measuring your bump, returning to it each time the rebellious unborn kicks or fidgets. I watch each grope from the edge of my sight, hands running cold with sweat. They inspect that too; catching drips, drinking it maybe. But we hold on tight, force of will, and not one touch hurts or discomforts.
Invader guilt, they have called it. A sudden cease of destruction replaced by this unease. No victorious mothership, no enslavements, just a mute confusion, a hasty sheathing of tendrils. We had been war-torn before they arrived, waging our own myriad paths of destruction across the globe, bending hell to cause devastation for obscure reasons. Perhaps, after all, they were just trying to join in. Trying to make a good first impression.
Our friends cease their inspection and we retreat. Throughout the night they build and build and build. By morning, a new Starbucks stands in the courtyard and they are gone.
by submission | May 26, 2012 | Story |
Author : D. R. Pinney
The other side of Ray’s bedroom door was the universe. A brilliant collage of billions of galaxies spreading out through all of infinity just over the threshold. The sight of it was so staggering that he fell back, an insane scream rising but failing to escape, like in a dream. He must be dreaming! When he realized there was no possible way that something like this could occur in the waking world his scream of unabashed terror left his lips as shameless, uproarious laughter.
‘Man,’ he thought, getting to his feet, ‘I must’ve fallen asleep downstairs with Star Trek on.’ It made perfect sense to him. When the conscious mind finally gives in to its exhaustion the subconscious acts goes into hyperdrive, dissecting all its backup data it received that day in wild and marvelous ways.
All day and night Ray had been filing his taxes. The new software he downloaded was supposed to make it easier but it only pissed him off worse than ever and the hideous glow of the screen gave him a troll-sized migraine.
Every few minutes he would look away from the blasted thing to the Trek marathon on one of the local broadcast station. He’d never been a Trekkie or Trekker growing up and all the series blended together in a Menagerie (wasn’t that the title of an episode?) of alien diplomats, planets that looked like southern California, phaser blasts, torpedoes and cyborgs. He didn’t watch it because he cared much for whatever was happening on screen, it simply offered a little escape from the monotony.
At one point, when the concept of time had slipped from him, he looked up and saw a ship, which wasn’t the Enterprise, cruise through a vibrantly colored, unnamed nebula, sending the cosmic gasses spiraling out into space. The image was tranquil and surreal in the gloom of his dinky apartment.
He thought he remembered thinking, ‘There’s more out there than taxes and dead-end jobs. There are planets where they live for the beauty and awe of the universe that we ignore by filing taxes and downloading software,’ but wasn’t sure, he may have said it out loud.
All his life he had dreamed of doing things the people around him thought impossible. That didn’t necessarily mean space travel, maybe just Earth travel, he’d even settle for coast to coast travel. There were mysteries in the world he wanted to be a part of. But couldn’t. He had to be practical, that was what the world told him to do. Too many nights he wondered what would happen if he just tried it, took the first step forward.
Given the extreme pressure he had been under his subconscious had a LOT of room to stretch and really try things out once he finally surrendered to sleep.
He regarded the expanse of the incalculable number of worlds and possibilities they held with a wonderment he had never known. This was the sort of thing the word beauty was meant for and yet it fell embarrassingly short.
For a moment he hoped that he wasn’t dreaming. He hoped that he could step away from this comparatively minuscule space into the vastly enormous outer space. Perhaps he could catch a ride on a passing comet and visit the most distant burning emerald in the sky.
The notion filled him with enough pure white excitement that he felt he might fly there on his own.
“What the hell?” he said. “If this is a dream there’s no harm in trying.”
He closed his eyes and stepped forward.
by submission | May 25, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“Captain,” exclaimed chief engineer Chen, “the quanto-gravitetic drive has been hit! If we don’t reverse the polarity of the phase rectification circuits within the the next three minutes, the magnetometric decouplers with be completely de-energized!”
Captain Rodriguez frowned. The sneak attack from a hostile Fomalhauti starship had taken out the SS LaForge’s primary warp field initiators. “Chief,” said the captain, “I need power from the quantum instantiation generators routed to the tachyonic transmitter array.”
“But, Captain,” Chen replied, “there’s no way the Heisenberg manifold can take that kind of punishment. The magnetohydrodynamic conduits will undergo an exponential quantum re-entanglement feedback before the Bussard ramjets can possibly compensate.”
The LaForge shuddered as she was struck by another Fomalhauti barrage.
“Captain,” said the ship’s navigator, “we just lost the monopole capacitors! The ship’s superluminal transrelativistic flux inversion sensors just went offline!”
Rodriguez slammed his fist on the armrest of his command chair. The situation was untenable. “That’s it!” he roared. “Chen, I want you to channel an anti-meson stream directly into the turboencabulator, even if it means sacrificing the entire photino containment chassis!”
Another shudder. Another Fomalhauti direct hit.
“Sir,” said Chen, “if I open the anti-meson stream to full power, then I can’t guarantee the singularity transducer won’t undergo a quantum tunneling cascade that will make every superconducting isoprocessor on the ship suffer a causality paradox.”
“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” said the Captain. “Now, I want all the ship’s quark inverters set to–”
Captain Rodriguez never finished his sentence. A Fomalhauti missile destroyed the LaForge killing all aboard. A subsequent investigation by the United Earth Interstellar Defense Force Committee on Combat Operations resulted in a new engagement protocol being implemented. In all hostile encounters with the Fomalhauti that came after, all UEIDF starship captains were required, until such time as hostilities had ceased, to limit his or her orders to the words “Return fire.”
by submission | May 23, 2012 | Story |
Author : Alex Bauer
The light on the wall is green. The machine beside her is on and receiving. The walls bleed nuclear colors like a pool of oil before shifting to uniform white. First session in years, motivated by some desperate nostalgia. The machine hums, squat and blinking, next to her. Now he comes in, sits at the end of a long steel table, sighing.
“Why did you wake me?” He says. His voice is jerkier than she remembers, more pained. Expectant. That, more than anything about present circumstances, chills her to the bone.
“Can’t we talk? I want to just talk.” She says, unsure with his attitude. “It’s been a while.” The room is stark white; the only smudge to its banality is she and he. He practically glows here. The only place he ever has, she thinks. The thought too bitter to stamp out. His face is vague as if he were a stone in a river. Worn by too much time, too much self-correction. Brown eyes that were once blue cup her in the palm of his gaze.
She looks away, looks to the doctor watching from somewhere behind the one-way mirror taking up the right side wall.
“Mm,” he burbles. “Suppose it has. You’re the one who wanted to see me every morning. So, here we are. Though I think a lot more mornings have passed between this one and the last, you know.”
She flinches. He drums his fingers on the table, looking at a point between his hands. Considers it. Always considers it. Something hot catches in her throat, finding herself unable to speak for some time. The strange aeroshape of a gun sits between his hands like she’s always imagined. The coroner’s report hasn’t faded like his face. Single exit wound out the back of the head. His front teeth knocked out by the cycling of the receiver.
The machine hums, squat and blinking, next to her. A strange tickling sensation at the base of her skull. Digital blood pours out his mouth. He laughs, looks down at his now stained clothes, the chipped front teeth on the table.
“Just let me go.” The fading memory says. “Please. You came in here for nothing. This isn’t some weird absolution.” He looks at her again, his eyes reflecting all the pain she felt. Too long since she’s been here, too long since she’d let this memory out. “Do you even remember my name? Do you?” Panic writhed its way down to her very pith.
He favors her with a bloody smile. “Of course not.”
“Turn the machine off,” a voice intones over the speakers. She looks at the mirror, sees only her own panicked rictus.
“You’re just talking to yourself again.” He says, shrugging. “Makes no nevermind. Too much guilt, too much booze. You tried to drink me away and got weepy eyed and came back to this looney bin to see what you could remember.” The gun solidifies on the table. He picks it up.
“Turn the machine off, ma’am.” The doctor says again. She very calmly reaches over to switch the machine off when he points the gun at her. Simple light and digital outlays set in the walls make it look real, but all the same, she jerks back.
“You remember this because it was yours. You remember the details more than you remember me. So, you feel guilty. It’s normal. Maybe not for as long as you have, but normal enough.” He leans back, running a wavering hand through blood-shiny hair. With a sudden jerk, he’s leaning forward, wavering and warping as if the world can’t contain him. Her mind can’t contain him. “Wanna see how I did it? It’s there. You think about it. That’s why you do this. You don’t even wanna know why, just how. You think about doin–.” She lunges, flips the switch, and he bursts apart in a fountain of light motes.
Silence. “Are you all right, ma’am?” Says the man on the speaker.
“Ye-yes. I…shouldn’t have come.” She says.
“Quite alright. This form of interactive therapy is only good for the short-term. It’s been too long. But…seeing what was said, would you care to step into my office? I think we need to have a talk. And not about your son this time.”
She nods, not trusting her mouth, stares at the machine as if it were something alive. Very gingerly, she peels the diodes from the base of her skull, winces at the few strands of hair plucked out with it. The walls bloom psychedelic before returning to their neutral state. She places them back on the table and looks at them there between her hands. Considers them.
Finally, “I think I’d like that.”
by submission | May 20, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Father Leibowitz gingerly placed the surplus sacrament back in the tabernacle. He turned to his congregation and sighed. It was a congregation of one: an old Jewish man named Schell.
Leibowitz pursed his lips. He and Schell had been the only ones at any mass for more than a year now. He quietly said his final prayers and went through the final movements, concluding service by sitting down with the wizened and hoary old man in a back row of pews. For some time they both sat in silent contemplation.
After a while Schell, ninety-eight years old and twenty years Leibowitz’s senior, started to talk. “You know, when the rabbi died and the synagogue closed I didn’t know what to do with myself. For a long while I stayed in my apartment, thinking and wasting way. Then, one day, I realized that I still have a place I may go to think and contemplate and talk to God.” He chuckled. “For all I care you are simply one of Judaism’s children. We are family.”
“Catholics are Judaism’s children?” The father chuckled. “You crazy old man.”
“I may be crazy, yet here I am. In times of trouble family must band together, don’t you agree?”
Leibowitz smiled a weary, tired smile. “I believe, Schell, that the times of trouble have passed. This is simply the end.”
The old Jew looked around at the aged, cracking walls of Saint Peter’s Basilica. The massive glass windows were dim because of the building’s position at the bottom of the New Rome Sprawl. Above them were kilometers of towers, roadways, tram-ways, walkways, and on and on and on in the perpetual twilight of the sub-city. The only light was cast by hidden diodes within the building, and ever these were failing. Shadows were rampant in this empty place. It was too quiet for even death to bother stalking the halls.
“You may have a point,” he conceded. “Yet I see no horsemen.”
The priest scoffed. “Apathy and desolation are surer heralds of the end than any cataclysm could ever hope to be.”
Off in a far corner a rusting maintenance bot fought back against the barbarian hordes of decrepitude brought on by time, a broken joint occasionally shrieking as only metal can. Dust swirled about in the shadows.
The priest coughed. “For us, at least, it is the end.”
“I’m sure there will always be those like us, tucked away in the corners of the world.”
“As if keeping some dark secret.”
“Like all humans do.” Schell checked his ancient brass watch. “It’s getting late, father. Would you care to join me at dinner this evening? It is Christmas Eve, after all.”
“I suppose you must be celebrating something Hannukah related as well,” said Leibowitz.
“Of course. Traditions aside, I don’t see what we can’t celebrate our own ways in each other’s company.”
Leibowitz mulled this over. “True enough.” He stood up, his joints cracking and protesting. Once he was upright he helped Schell up, and the two left the Basilica for the under city night. They walked with no fear because the local superstitions were more powerful than the fear of God ever was. They were regarded with curiosity, an oddity in a modern, noisy world. The old Jew, immortal and frail, and the tall, proud, and withering Leibowitz, the last priest and technical Pope of the Catholic Faith.
Back in the Basilica machinery screamed and dust settled unto dust as it always had and always would.
