by submission | May 7, 2011 | Story
Author : Marlan Smith
Tark stared at the diagram. It was a golden square, clearly valuable, more valuable than the machine it came off of. He honestly didn’t think he would ever have found salvage this far outside of the galactic rim.
“What are they?” asked Pim. He was looking over Tark’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” said Tark. “Do you think we should call HQ?”
“Are you kidding?” said Pim. “We have explicit orders not to get involved in alien civilizations. Lets just keep the salvage and go.”
“But these ones are so weird looking.”
Pim sighed and floated to the far side of the bridge. He hovered for a while at the controls, touching this and that display. A meter wide square appeared suspended in the middle of the room. A representation of the golden artifact glowed in the center.
“Okay, look,” said Pim. “We’ll make a cypher okay?”
“A cypher?” asked Tark. “Why don’t we just try to contact them?”
Pim glared at him. “Look, you’re lucky I’m willing to allow this.”
“Okay okay, fine,” said Tark. “Let me program the message then.”
“Do you even know what to say?”
“Yeah there’s an audio transmission from the planet.”
“Fine,” said Pim, tapping the controls with a slender finger. “Then afterwards can we just go?”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll go.”
Tark held the square in his digits while the rest of the probe was crushed, cubed and reduced to its elements. In another chamber, a figure stood, ambiguous behind the glass. Pim tapped at the controls and turned to Tark.
“You’re sure they look like that?”
“Yeah,” said Tark. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know,” said Pim. “Just seems kind of odd. You don’t see many life forms so thin. And golden? Really? Do they carry some sort of isotope in their skin?”
Tark shrugged. “I guess. They’re clearly spacefaring, so they must have holographic technology. If they looked any different than what’s on the plaque, they would have just shown us in three dimensions.”
“So they’re flat? That’s ludicrous.”
“Look,” said Tark. “Trust me. When they meet the cypher, they won’t even be able to tell it apart from their own. It will blend right in, talk to a few of them. We’ll watch the whole thing cloaked, then we leave.”
Pim sighed again. “I swear, if HQ fires us for this, I am never forgiving you.”
“Trust me.”
The cypher was a thin creature, golden skinned and asymmetrical. It walked on the flimsy balls of its feet out the door and into the delivery pod. Pim watched it go with some skepticism.
“I don’t know… are the arms supposed to be lopsided like that?”
Tark held up his three fingers in a dismissive gesture. “Would you just trust me for once?”
They watched through the cypher’s eyes. They watched as the pod landed and the door opened into a lush, green forest.
Phyllis Guntmeyer had been walking her pomeranian when Spunky began to bark. A man stepped from behind a nearby tree–no, not a man. It was a cardboard cutout of a man, frozen in a waving pose. It was golden, naked and flat as paper. And it moved!
“HELLO FINE SIR!” it said. “I WOULD LIKE FOR TO VISIT A NEARBY TOWNSHIP!”
Its mouth was an animated gash in a line-drawing face, a living paper puppet, eight feet tall and impossibly thin. Its bent raised arm waved and twisted like a shaken saw blade.
Phyllis screamed, clutched her chest and fell to the ground.
Pim turned to Tark, his three eyes glaring. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?”
by submission | May 4, 2011 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
Words cannot describe the light, the heat, the impossible closeness of a star. In this place, even with the best shields science could build, the sheer intense pressure of solar power is more than I can even attempt to explain.
Of course, it was worse outside the flare rooms. I cupped my hands to the comm and hissed, “I can’t open the gates!”
“You have to!” Her voice knifed through me. “There are literally two gates and I’m safe! All you have to do is open them two feet!”
“I can’t take the risk,” I said. “You’ve been out in it too long, and the flare is at its highest peak. If I open the gates we’ll all be bombarded with radiation. I have to save the mission.”
“I AM the mission! And I’m clean, the radiation hasn’t gotten me yet, it’ll be hours before it builds up that much!”
“Kang was with you,” I said. “Where is he?”
“I lost him, I don’t know. Just open the gates! One foot, even just half, I can squeeze through!”
“I can’t.”
She was so close. I ached to reach through the comm and stroke her hair, tell her everything would be all right, but I couldn’t lie to her or myself. She’d been careless. They both had. To be careless, this close to a star, was death.
The mission was everything. I tried to turn off the comm. I couldn’t.
“Let me in! The shielding is burning away! Just open the gates! You don’t even have to admit to it! I’ll take all the blame, I’ll tell them you were unconscious, let me in!”
Where was Kang?
“I’ll do anything you ask! Anything at all! I know I turned you down before but I’ll do it now! Anything, everything! Just please!”
He’d been with her, down there, outside the flare rooms and closer to the shields than anything in the station. I had taken their last reports, they said they were on their way up… it had never occurred to me that they might not make it. When the flare warnings went off, I sealed the rooms like I did every other time.
“You leave me out here and I’ll leave something for the next crew! Something that tells them what you did! I’ll make sure you never work crew again!”
The shields were very sensitive. Maybe the flare was false, just an artifact from the star.
“Promise me you’ll continue my research? I worked here from the beginning! My name, my legacy!”
Or maybe she killed him. I might never know, if I couldn’t find his body after the flare was over.
She had been quiet for a long time. I tapped the comm. “Sasha?”
“I can feel it now,” she said. “I know it’s silly, but I can feel the radiation eating me away from the inside. You were right. I’m sorry.”
“You and Kang never came back,” I said. “I didn’t know you were still out there.”
“It’s not your fault. I can see it coming through the shields.”
“Sasha, push the button.”
“Button?”
“On your suit, the one you should never ever push? Push it now.”
Silence. If she pushed the button, it would inject a vein with a full gram of morphine. She’d be dead in a few minutes, no pain.
“Kang?”
Her mind was going. “It’s ok,” I said, and my voice broke. The flare would be finished in a few days, and then I’d take care of their bodies.
“Just close your eyes. Everything’s ok.”
by submission | May 3, 2011 | Story
Author : Noah Katz
“Where were you when you first opened your eyes?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“Ah, but you can,” Falero insisted. “The instant should be fresh, as near to you as the ground beneath your feet.”
Antigone slackened her pace, beginning to study the floor. Black tiles stretched to the end of a high row of shelves stocked with books and collected treasures. To her left, a trio of antique globes was flanked by sextants, boxed compasses, and sailing ships cast in miniature.
Falero’s voice pulled her from these considerations, asking again: “Where were you?”
“You want me to lie to you. I won’t do that.”
Falero hummed a note of appreciation. “I need to know and you are going to tell me.”
“No… I don’t know what you want. I can’t tell you where I am or how I got here, but I feel like I need to be here… with you. This fits.”
“Good. Now tell me where you were when the first images came to you. We must have this before we can proceed.”
Suddenly Antigone found herself speaking: “A field.” She could feel the force of the memory flowing through her, illuminating dark regions in her brain. “I was alone in a field surrounded by tall grass. There were flowers… fences… mountains in the distance.”
“A strong image,” Falero whispered. “The moment clings to you, as it should.”
“How do you know that what I’ve said is truthful?”
Her guide stopped abruptly. Antigone stumbled forward, caught herself, and turned to face him. “It was unexceptional,” he laughed. “A lie would excite the senses.”
“You can’t know that. I could just have easily described the streets of a city or the interior of a house.”
“But you didn’t. Your description was fragmented, incomplete. Authentic memories are never as clear as you’d want them to be. Lies, on the other hand, are designed as they are spoken. We make their construction obvious.”
Antigone was silent.
“I can teach you to remember.” Falero swiveled, reached blindly to a nearby shelf and extracted a book covered by a thick film of dust. “When you’ve mastered those parts of your mind which seem most inaccessible, all of our knowledge will open to you.”
“That’s what this place is; a knowledge bank. And you’re keeping records…”
Falero smiled and pried the book open, waving his free hand over the pages. Antigone focused on the hand, its soft paleness, the warmth trapped within. All at once she saw the hidden architecture: a fine mesh of wires running over the veins and into the shadow of his sleeve.
“This is just one beginning, Antigone… one of the billions of memories that we can unlock.” As he spoke, dust rose from the book and gathered above his hovering hand. Brightly-colored motes came into the dust and sculpted figures: a hooded soldier hunched behind his shield, archers raising bows, whole armies assembled on faint ground. Antigone watched as the warriors clashed in a noiseless war and began to dismantle one another.
The page turned beneath Falero’s hand and a new scene replaced the battle. A man and woman stood together on a footbridge overlooking a river where blue flower petals floated. Ripples stirred the water, pushing dust from the projection in small, slow circles.
“Why are you showing me this?” Antigone asked. “What does it mean?”
“We invest a part of ourselves in everything we create. The past has disappeared, but we can still kindle the lost light of those minds which are no longer with us. All we have of them is what they made.”
by submission | May 2, 2011 | Story
Author : John Eric Vona
You didn’t see them with planets anymore. After the first billion years of Andromeda crashing into our galaxy, all the planets had been torn away from their stars, lost in the flurry of criss-crossing suns as the two galaxies collided and spun back away from each other, a pair of dancers twirling through the eons and the lightyears. Our sun survived, an atom in the arms and fingers connecting the galaxies, closer to what remained of Andromeda than the dying core of the Milky Way.
We didn’t know where Earth was.
It mattered very little. But then, what did it matter that we were out there at all? We were no longer part of the universe, just watching it. That was Bonnie talking. It took her a couple billion years, but she had gotten into my head.
I knew why we were out there. I was the one who’d taken the expedition from idea to reality, convinced the Neo-Naturalists to bend on their firm stance that the galactic collision was meant to be humanity’s end, played off the sentiment of Perservivalists like Bonnie, the extreme minority of enlightened people who believed we should try to survive the collision. They gave me the ship to take an expedition into the afterlife, to write the prologue to humanity’s existence. Like most, I believed that the human journey had stretched to its end. The ship wasn’t meant to be an ark. We were on the last mission to expand human knowledge.
One of our astronomers had spotted the planet the “week” before. We changed course, a millennia passing relativistically overnight, hoping not to miss a spectacle as fragile as the last planet in two galaxies.
As we arrived, the door to the observatory opened behind me.
“You’ve got to see this,” came Bonnie’s ecstatic voice.
“I am,” I said. “A gas giant twice Jupiter’s size and redder than Mars.”
“After all we’ve seen,” Bonnie said, “we still compare everything in the universe to the objects from our tiny little oasis. But it’s not the planet I’m talking about. It has moons.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, pivoting to look at her. The light from the red sun filled the room, and her brown hair glowed amber.
“They’re habitable,” she said, handing me a computer sheet.
“For what?”
“For us!”
“The galaxies are destroying each other.”
“You’ve lived too long at relativistic speed,” Bonnie said. “On those moons, the galaxies wouldn’t even move in our grandchildren’s lifetime.”
Our grandchildren? We didn’t allow anyone aboard to even have children. I tried to ignore her and examine the data on the solar system, but she grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around.
“Do you feel the sunlight on your face?”
I rolled my eyes out of habit, dismissing her flare for the dramatic, but as the sun and its partner grew steadily before us, I saw a different kind of dance. Even with Andromeda and The Milky Way spinning all around us in their last, anguished throws, two sweethearts, a sun and a planet, slowly stepped in the loving embrace of gravity, the moons but winks of light between them like unborn children.
Humanity didn’t have to end, but we chose to let it.
“I’m not the only one onboard who feels this way,” Bonnie said, but in that moment, with her hands on my shoulders and the space around us suddenly full and warm, it wouldn’t have mattered if she was. Watching the delicate little worlds dance in the sunlight, something long asleep stirred within me.
by submission | May 1, 2011 | Story
Author : Ryan Swiers
James hoped the battery would run out soon. The manual had said it was only good for three hours moving, double that when not. He had been looking for Alex almost five now. There was only one more place to look.
The woods were wet and dark, almost as dark as the overcast sky. James crawled through the border of damp branches and rotten logs to get inside the clearing. This was his son’s favorite spot. A makeshift fort so to speak. Even had a large rock that could pass as a cannon. It had been real fun breaking his back on that project.
On the far side of the clearing they had built a lookout tower, a tree fort really, yet sufficient enough to spot any savages and aliens foolish enough to crawl into the lethal sights of a plastic rifle. James was sure he too had been killed more times than was humanly possible in his course through the thicket, across the no man’s land, and towards the base of the tree.
He called up to that dread sentry.
“Bud, if you’re up there, we’re not mad at you. Me and mom love you. Why don’t you come on down and we can get inside, get warmed up, get everything worked out, alright? What do you say little buddy? Alex?”
The tree only replied with fat beads of rain water. James asked again. No response.
“Come on, champ, let’s go inside.”
He braved a peek inside the tree fort, more worried that the boards would give under his weight than fear of another gun wound. The boy wasn’t on the stool or huddled by a railing or asleep under the shelter.
The rifle was gone though. James made to pull himself up further when his foot slipped. His piece of the railing fractured and fell with him. Shortly, he could see that the sky wasn’t as dark as the sudden black beneath his wincing eyelids.
He groaned, rocking the agony, not really succeeding. It felt like his back had been stabbed with a horse’s spinal cord. Don’tcha know, pardner, they call ‘em trap doors for a reason. Har har.
“Heehee.” Giggled the boy from nearby.
James rolled on to his side, pain forgotten, searching. “Alex?”
The ring of trees, the snarled fence, rock cannon, a toy chest, and an old wagon; no boy.
There was something else though. The grass rustled in a line towards him. Above this the gray sky bulged, water-streaked, distorted, like a fish-eye lens. The bulge subsided as the movement stopped in front of him.
There was a slight *click* near his head. The rifle. Scratch another Comanche.
“Alex, thank god.” He waved an arm. “Help your dad up, bud.”
Alex giggled again. The distortion moved away.
The guy in the store had warned him. You need to buy spare goggles, too. James had to admit now he hadn’t listened. Lesson learned. Never give your eight year old an invisibility cloak for his birthday.
