by submission | Nov 24, 2012 | Story |
Author : Alexander Polkki
The sales associate places the tablet in front of me. She delicately sets her nails on the screen and it comes to life, brimming with imagery, with iconography. We are living the revolution. She’s waiting for me to say something. My silence challenges her.
She reaches under the counter. Brings out a smaller tablet, stands it up. Touching the screen, the same icons brim to life. I want to say it’s like the travel size version of a chess set, but then I remember what chess was like, concentrating on small, plasticized pieces in the car. Thinking moves ahead while trees and old barns breeze by. Perhaps one day we’ll stop to take pictures of the places and things that hold meaning for us, but not ever really needing or expecting to.
She’s brought over a monitor. She rotates the tablet and leans it against the larger screen, at an angle. She spins the smaller one, standing it up in front. This new family is waiting. The silence deepens and I can tell she’s starting to wonder why I came in here.
She waves her magician’s hands over the three screens, and they blend, one into the other. She waves her hand again and icons open. Footage of trees and barns flit by across them all. She takes the tablet by two corners, cocks her head as if she’s saying something. She places the chessboard, back-lit, on the glowing counter, and invites me to play.
by submission | Nov 21, 2012 | Story |
Author : Aaron Koelker
They came like mountains in the night. Great behemoths of lumbering shadow that walked with thunderous grace. With beards of moss and fur of grass, they looked down upon the intruders without a hint of malice. Their great round eyes of polished stone showed only apathy as they descended into the valley out of a starlit horizon, striding over the peaks of the mountains in a single breadth.
With the ferocity of a gardener tending to the weeds, the titanic creatures swept aside portable aluminum buildings, flattened tents over their sleeping occupants and hurled their vehicles into the surrounding sea of stumps and unsightly crags; what had once been a lush forest teeming with life only days before.
At a height equal to that of the giants, the world remained relatively quiet. A low booming here and a distant wail there, but the upper night remained stubbornly calm. Far below, however, among their thick splintered feet armored in dark bark; there was complete chaos.
Men screamed as hell fell around them. Screeching metal and shattering glass formed a chorus of discord while the fuel stores erupted into a destructive beat. A handful of the victims managed to gather their weapons, though they proved useless against the colossal assailants.
On the side of camp furthest from the chaos, the USSV Artemis rumbled her engines into their start-up cycle. Her small pale pilot whispered a frantic prayer to his unseen god, light-years away on earth, he thought, and safe from the terrible wrath of these earthen creatures.
Through the Artemis’ exterior cameras he could see an approaching mass of men scurry beneath the ship’s hull and into the safety of her belly. Scientists and mercenaries alike, armed and unarmed, clothed and naked, all fled before the might of quiet giants.
Despite the ship’s natural thrumming and vibrations, the pilot could sense the rhythmic tremors of the approaching behemoths. The quakes were so unnerving that the pilot wanted nothing more than to flee into some dark recess of the ship and leave his job to some other, braver soul. Other pilots had been brought along for the expedition, though all of them had yet to appear on the bridge, and he realized he was too afraid to move regardless. He stayed and monitored the start-up cycle for the next few brief, endless moments.
No sooner did the console light up green across his board, the mercenary captain appeared on the bridge. A thick, aggressive man with a red face.
“We’re clear to fly! Go!” he screamed, sweat and spit dislodging under his jerking movements.
“Are they all on b-b-board?” said the pale pilot.
“As many as we’re going to get! Go! Go!” He flailed his arms upward.
The pilot leaned over the flight console, flipping a lever that retracted the blast-shield from the forward viewport. The curtains rose on the tragic show that had once been their research camp. A heap of aluminum that had once been a field-lab lay against the bow of the ship. The massive stocks of lumber and local fauna they had mined for research had already been completely scattered or flattened.
The USSV Artemis groaned as she left the alien soil, shrugging off the wasted field-lab.
“Faster!” the captain screamed, pointing. “It’s coming!”
The pilot didn’t bother to look, opting to push the engines to their limits.
“No!” the captain cried in anguish.
The pilot looked up then, into the polished stone eye of the beast. A servant of this alien planet’s own Mother Nature, her wrath incarnate. Her thousand-foot, stone justice.
by submission | Nov 20, 2012 | Story |
Author : Jack Holt
No one knows why the Darkness came back to life that day, but Stron the Peerless was sent to deal with it. There were others who knew the ancient ways of commanding the power of the Darkness, but none had studied them so single-mindedly as Stron.
It was forbidden to use the power of the Darkness, of course. It was too dangerous. Too powerful. So Stron’s obsession brought him only poverty, chastity, and scorn. He was Peerless, for no one cared to be his peer.
Then the Darkness awoke unbidden.
Eight hundred years before, the Darkness had carved a gorge a mile long into the ground. Now Stron passed the point where shattered boulders gave way to slick, glassy stone. He didn’t even look at the words etched in obsidian –every child learned them by heart:
“We came from the Darkness.
“In the Darkness we slept for fifty centuries. We soared through blackest space undreaming, and the Darkness tended to us. It cloaked us. It preserved us. It nourished us. Until we reached a world full of life.
“The Darkness descended upon this world. It thundered through the skies. It gouged the earth. It boiled stone with tongues of flame. And when it ceased, we emerged from the Darkness and conquered this world.
We owe our lives and everything we have to the Darkness. And here, the Darkness now sleeps, as we once did.”
At the end of the gorge lay a labyrinth of metal, and beyond that, the Bridge to the Darkness. No one had been here in centuries, but Stron found his way through it with ease. He had studied every map and chart and historical record ever made about this place, until he had recurring dreams of wandering these pathways looking for… something. In the dreams he knew, but in the morning he could never remember for what, though.
Finally, he reached the Bridge. It was just as he had imagined. His heart raced, but his head felt clear and calm. Time seemed to slow down. He wondered, is that was something the Darkness can do? Then he breathed deep, and carefully enunciated each syllable of the words that even after a lifetime of study he only vaguely understood.
“Computer, emergency shutdown, all systems. Authorization code Romeo Charlie Sierra.”
“Acknowledged.”
Then Stron the Peerless felt his way through the now lightless room to the captain’s chair and spent the happiest moments of his life sitting quietly on the bridge of the once proud Interstellar Colony Ship ICS-3173, “The Darkness”.
by submission | Nov 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Phro Metal
A chill autumn breeze blows through the trees lining the old, cracked cement path. Their leaves whisper like the fragmented cries of an artificial intelligence trapped on a dying CPU. Save for the weary pale glow of a single, distant skyscraper light, the midnight sky is blacker than a disconnected monitor’s lifeless stare. Homeless, nearly feral cats wander between the tree trunks, playing dismissively with terrified field mice.
A lone man treads down the path in heavy, wooden geta. His even pace clacks, clacks, clacks rhythmically on the cement. Twin swords rattle quietly with his every step, though he pays them hardly any notice. The beauty of his slow, steady march is marred by the jerking of cybernetics running desperately low on power. He would be a pathetic figure were it not for his quiet, burning gaze.
Not far ahead, a lonely street lamp glows like a once-brilliant firefly slowly dying of radiation poisoning. Drawing closer, a small crack splits across the man’s stoic countenance and relief is writ large in his eyes. A few more steps and he finds himself under the lamp, bathed in its yellow hue. As he tosses his head back to expose his face to its rain of photons, steel glints in his neck and shimmers from his right hand. Bathed in the light, his once-labored breathing slows to a low, monotonous rhythm like the mournful melodies of a Noh play. As the light pours over his body, his guard slips and he finds himself tumbling back through memory.
Twelve hours earlier, the man was not alone. His companions numbered five, all dressed in the somber colors of the warriors who lived under the clouds of eternal night. Charged with a mission to dispel those unchanging shadows, to turn back the onward roll of environmental decay, they had headed into the Dark Realm where none of their kingdom dared venture.
Hour after hour, they had marched silently, their cybernetic eyes and composite legs guiding them over treacherous terrain and through forests of mute horror. The deeper they had journeyed, the tenser they had grown, but neither the shriek of a Darkling nor the howl of a Nightwolf had been heard. They all were springs clamped down tighter than physics should ever allow. Numerous times, snapping branches had brought their swords from their sheaths, but never were there enemies to strike.
And then the attack came. It was silentmore silent than the emptiness of space. And quickquicker than Mercury’s orbit of the Sun. With his companions dead before their heads hit the ground, the now lone warrior let his blade fly. Through steel, flesh, and bone, it cut deep and strong. Like the perfectly-placed steps of a wild cat, the man flew through the Darklings hidden amongst the shadows. When at last there was nothing left to kill, the man lit a tiny candle, said a silent prayer over the deceased and set off yet again.
Ten hours of ceaseless marching had brought him here to the first source of light he’d seen in days. As the light washes over his body, his dark brown eyes begin to glow, turning green as they grow brighter and brighter. After some minutes pass, his eyes are as bright as a full moon. At last, with a few blinks, he lowers his face. After seven deep breaths and a moment’s pause, he takes a step forward and then treads back into the darkness.
by submission | Nov 17, 2012 | Story |
Author : Christina Richard
It happened every Tuesday; we were lined up, yawning and drinking coffee as the wireless network light blinked from beneath our hairlines as we waited for our updates. What HR said when they installed the chip was that human networking technology was minimally invasive, and a huge career enhancer. Which employer, in this ravaged economy, wants to pay for staff development when employees could just upload new information from the business’s network? Information sharing, they said, was the new American way. They said the connection was disabled as soon as working hours were over. That as soon as five o’ clock came, your mind was your own again. But as I stood in line that morning, waiting for the training on new security update to be uploaded, I stared towards the back corner of the sea of cubes, where Billy Johnson used to be.
I looked around to make sure no one was watching me. Lucky that all the twentysomethings I worked with never left their cubes without music feeds plugged into the micro USB inside their ear canal. Me, I thought the little plug was painful; if it had not been a mandatory update, I never would have gotten the hardware installed. I held off on letting HR do it until the ultimatum came; install the update, or good luck finding another legal job out there. I came to work one day and saw nothing but an error screen in front of my eyes. I dropped my coffee and stained my blouse because all I could see around the corners of the angry red message box were the hallways leading to the update chamber.
Now here I was, in line again. The standards for network security were being raised since a hacker in Omaha had programmed a building of Wal-Mart employees to cannibalize each other, right there on the sales floor in the middle of the day. Just imagine the single mothers and old ladies without retirement funds tearing into each other, the smiley face buttons still pinned to their blue vests. It was declared a national tragedy. The new security updates were meant to prevent my coworkers and I from going zombie on each other. The line moved, and I was just a few spaces away from sitting in the leather recliner with the master computer feeding information into my brain.
I wondered what happened to people who refused the updates and quit. I’d never heard of it happening, but there were rumors about employees who got transferred. Billy was transferred, or at least, that was what the HR representative in the sinfully expensive suit told us. They said he was moving on to another government position that was “better suited to his abilities” after he hacked his supervisor’s brain and scored a three day weekend for his department.
I saw Billy’s wife in the supermarket a few days later. She was one of those careful people who examined the skin of each apple before letting it swish into the thin plastic bag. When I asked her how Billy liked his new job, her eyes went dull, like the life was being taken out of them, and the apple she was holding fell to the ground and rolled underneath a bin. Then her head snapped back up, and she smiled vacantly. “He’s doing fine. His new position is really a better fit for him,” she said. When she turned, I saw the wireless network light having a seizure beneath the brownish gray of her pixie cut.
