by submission | Feb 12, 2011 | Story
Author : Matthew Velez
I miss the rain. It’s been years – I’ve long since lost track of how many – since I saw it last. Since anyone saw it last. It’s been so long that no one really remembers it anymore, except for what you’d find in dictionaries. I remember rain as being so much more than those bland descriptions. I remember falling asleep to it, listening to the soft, even sound of running water, distinct from yet blending into all else. I remember sitting by windows, letting my mind wander while tiny droplets formed patterns on the glass, ambient light casting tiny shadows. I think I’m the only one who remembers, but all I have are faint flickers of memory.
I live in a city of mist. An endless fog blankets the entire city, providing moisture without the need for rain. A fog that is unobtrusive, casting what it hides not in opaqueness but in shades of gray. No one remembers the onset of the mist; it simply was and now is. All that we remember was that before the mist, there was rain, and now there is none. With the mist came a loss of knowledge; we lost contact with the world, with our own history, where we came from. No one, save for maybe the City government, knows where the City is, what country it is a part of, how old it is, or even what its real name is. All we call it now is ”The City.” We know of nothing else.
One day, I tried to leave. It wasn’t because I was dissatisfied with City life; it’s a laid-back place. It was due to wanderlust, an urge to see what was beyond. I wasn’t really doing anything else, anyway. So, I packed my things and walked on the main road for hours. The City was big, but it wasn’t infinite. Eventually, all that was left was the road itself, with no other ground I could see. The only sounds were my lonely footsteps upon the asphalt. Gray-white mist surrounded me, blanketing my clothes with a faint dampness I couldn’t feel. The road kept going. I looked back to find that the City was out of sight, hidden by the now-opaque mist. I knelt down by the side of the road and reached for the ground beside it. It was a hard, unnatural substance, the same color as the mist. It felt almost like the steel used in buildings, but somehow more organic. It was wet with condensed mist seeping down into cracks I could barely feel.
I continued. Nothing happened for ages, until I heard a sound. A steady, even sound splashing in the distance. A sound that I identified immediately, even though I hadn’t heard it for countless years. My pace quickened as I heard the rainfall from my childhood. Eventually, I saw it: a shimmering form breaking the opacity of the mist. The white fog gave way into more color, a sickeningly gray-brown earth extending beyond the horizon. It was entirely featureless. The rain fell unceasingly, causing faint wisps of smoke to emerge with each impact. I slowed my pace, until I felt a thick pane of glass in front of me, barring my progress. It bore no seams or faults. There was no way in or out. Its only peculiarity was a plaque etched in the glass. It said, in large, plain text,
“The City is all that is left. There is nothing else. Turn back now.”
The acid rain continued to fall on the remains of the world.
by submission | Feb 7, 2011 | Story
Author : Ryan Swiers
From the sand she raised herself. The desert wind had coursed over her exposed flesh and the gritty pain of its wake made the effort slow. Sleek tendrils of sand rolled from her back. She realized a layer of the sand had once been her skin. She could feel some of it filter through her skeleton, passing around bones and organs and pocked limbs, surprised that it hadn’t claimed all of her as a fossil.
She stopped to rest on her hands and knees. Nine feet ahead she saw her discarded helmet. The color had left it. She swayed—an old, obstinate fruit on a wind-worn branch—to shake away the remnants of the desert floor. Careful, let it ease out. Don’t want the important things to go too. It was a slow, exhausting ordeal this resurrection.
To pass the time while her strength recovered she fiddled with the error in her date system. She picked at it like a child would a scab. Errors like these gaps in time and memory were becoming more frequent. Hadn’t she just done this?
Star alignment gave her the local time. That was easy, but when had she fallen? An estimate put her between twenty three or twenty three hundred days. And the time before that? Maybe a millennium. Who could say?
A human expression came to her: time can heal all wounds. True, in her case, it could; not many humans would bother rising from the dead much less wear their worthless skin again. Yet, this wasn’t what the expression meant.
“Forget it.” She said. Memories fade and rinse the soul clean.
Awake now, she felt scrubbed, thoughtless, and relieved. Forget the errors.
It was time to get up. Make new ones.
Although, maybe another five minutes. It was Monday after all.
by submission | Feb 6, 2011 | Story
Author : Zachary Murray
My mind came awake before my body. I was thankful that the sense of detachment was short lived, and it was good to feel the warmth of the fluid that filled the tank around me. I hated being in the tank. The whole breathing liquid aspect of it always left a bad taste in my mouth, and the regular sting of electrical pulses was the closest thing I could imagine to being cooked in a microwave oven. They said the shocks were to prevent muscle atrophy, but to me they were just a pain in the ass. I tried to laugh at the joke I stumbled upon, but having your lungs filled with fluid makes it difficult.
It’s not hard to get restless when you’re stuck in a near perfect state of sensory deprivation. I tried to open my eyes, but all I got for my trouble was a searing glimpse of the life-lights that lined the tank. It was still amazing to me that they had figured out how to keep a person alive off of light alone, for short periods at least, but they could have at least included a dimmer.
At that point I figured I may as well get comfortable, not that I could change anything of course, as there wasn’t much I could do until the techs pulled me out. In pre-jump training they told us to refrain from violent movements when we first woke up. They wouldn’t want us to break their fancy equipment after all. I could still see their smiles as they told us normal tank extractions averaged only five minutes, and not to be alarmed if it felt longer.
That thought was of little comfort to me since I didn’t have a clock to look at. Not that I could have opened my eyes long enough to see it even if they had bothered to include one in the tank with me. I could still remember how pissed I’d been after my first dunk. No one does well their first time and I was no exception. I came out swearing, my fists ready, and I didn’t calm down until they told me I’d only been awake for three minutes. Those three minutes had felt like a lifetime though, and just thinking about it made my chest feel tighter.
To pass the time I contemplated some violent movements I hoped to show the techs when they pulled me out. My dark reveries came to an abrupt end when my tank shook hard enough to send me bouncing from side to side. Several choice curses came to mind as I floundered around, but once again the fluid in my lungs kept me from expressing myself.
When things were once again still, and nothing else happened, I sat trying to decide if I should be getting nervous or not. I’d just come to the decision that everything was probably fine when the grow lights kicked off and I was surrounded by darkness. I realized the electric pulses had also shut off along with the lights. Oddly enough I missed the sensation. The tank felt much smaller as I hung there waiting, and I couldn’t help but remember that the lights never went off during training.
by submission | Feb 5, 2011 | Story
Author : Rebecca L. Brown
They hop-scotched their way to work, jumping between the numbered squares and collecting coloured stones as they went. The inner child told them they had to. On arrival, they coloured for the proscribed amount of time, the thick, waxy crayons clutched in two hands. The best pictures would go up on the wall.
They had replaced the inner child recently, moving from the almost teenage predecessor to a toddler barely old enough to qualify. There had been a general shift from skateboards and sparkling lip sticks to dollies and story time. Sally hadn’t minded too much, the glitter had gone everywhere and grazed knees had become tiresome, even when they were regularly kissed better.
Before they had the inner child, she had heard, there had been nobody to kiss it better when you fell down or make sure you coloured between the lines. With the rise of automated processes and the ban on travelling for pleasure, there had been mass suicides in a world where the majority lived lives filled with the meaningless and the mind-numbing.
This was better.
Soon, it would be nap time. Sally’s crèche mother would round her up with the rest of her group and they would go (holding hands, two at a time) to their mat. Afterwards, there would be milk and cookies and time for show and tell.
Today, she had brought a flower to show the inner child. She thought he would appreciate the bright purple colour. The inner children were chosen from those babies who were too sick to exist outside of the life support. Through their machines and speakers, they could live through their city populations. The last inner child’s favourite colour had been red. Nobody asked where they went when they grew up.
The flower was in a little vase on her desk. She drew a flower on her paper and coloured in the petals.
by submission | Feb 4, 2011 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
“Twenty minutes to launch, Shortfall”
“Roger that, Command. Shortfall ready for launch.”
“Copy. Stand by.”
Lt. Commander Warren Sheffield looked over at his co-pilot, Major Emery West, who was busy with his own checklist. “Almost that time, Em. You ready?”
“Are you kidding me? Who in his right mind would be ready for this?”
“You volunteered, smart ass, same as me. Besides, they’ve been launching the satellites this way for a couple of years now. This is just the next step back into space. And the mice were ok.”
“Great! From mice to men. Whatever happened to chimp trials? Oh, yeah, the ASPCA and the ACLU. Never should have taught the little bastards to sign.”
Sheffield grinned over at the other man, who flipped him the bird. They both focused back on their pre-launch tasks and the minutes dragged by.
“…5…4…3…2…1…Activation.”
The bottom dropped out from under the two men, followed by an odd sliding motion as the crew module rotated one hundred eighty degrees. This at least gave them a slight pressure at their backs, and took the edge off the nausea.
West, as Science Officer, kept up a running commentary into the recorder. “Hundred miles. Two. Three-fifty. G-gradient steady. Glow from ports increasing. Auto-polarization effective. Heat negligible. Two-thousand miles. Three. Phase two imminent.”
Both men settled deeper into their seats and watched the dial wind down to zero.
An elephant dropped on their chests.
There was no more commentary. The sensors would record what they could, and later the men would fill in what they could from their tunnel vision, near black-out memories. For now the weight just went on and on. And on. And on.
Finally, after both were convinced it would never end, it did.
A circuit was tripped, communications was restored, and they were weight-less. Traveling faster than man had ever gone.
“Shortfall, this is Command. Shortfall, this is Command.”
“SON OF A BITCH! It worked! Command, it worked!”
“Roger that, Shortfall!” Sheffield could hear the cheers in mission control in the background. “We have reacquired your telemetry now. You both are showing elevated blood pressure and pulse.”
“Yeah, well, that was a definite E-ticket ride. We’re fine, aside from some bruising.”
“Good to hear. Tracking has you right in the groove. Get some rest boys. You’ve got to go on that ride again in just under eleven hours.”
“Roger, Command. Shortfall out.”
Eleven hours. Sheffield stared out the forward port at the moon. Not four days. Eleven hours.
Eleven hours until they slipped out of faze with the rest of the universe and plunged through the core of the moon to bleed off the momentum they had acquired from dropping through the Earth, and accelerating out the other side. Hopefully, to be left sitting at rest a bare hundred yards from the remains of Armstrong’s Lander.
He listened to West whispering into the science log.
“The mice made it!”
