by submission | Jun 16, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bronwyn Seward
Franny,
I know this letter will be nonsense, beyond your wisdom and understanding. But I need to write it. You need to read it. I dated it so that years after you have shoved it into an old shoe box or tucked it away in your hope chest, you can look back on February 5th, 2013 and evoke my memory.
I can picture you reading this. Oculars scanning the lines, dots, and swooshes that compose this English language. Your brain seeking to process the information set before you. Some of this data will be impossible for your primary visual cortex to distinguish and associate with any meanings you are currently aware of. That is because my explanations for departure will be otherworldly, alien to you, but necessary.
Four years ago, I “moved” into town appearing to you in my burly human shell, as a farmer from Bovill, Idaho. Instead of the four day walk I claimed it to be, I traveled a century through the inky space you call sky to arrive here. Of course with all that time I was a wonderfully well-thought out character with a backstory, quirks, pictures of my ma and pa. A ruse. A trickery. A character in a game. And I was well studied, well prepared.
This appearance on earth was my last step toward sprubeity. I had to observe human interactions in order to become an ambassador for our eventual full scale return to this planet. My break from the Perknite, my home, was agonizing, we don’t feel pain as you do but independence is a foreign concept. Your entirely unnatural composition, with abstract ideas such as happiness, joy, fear, and death is what spawned my journey to your planet.
Franny you were a closely studied individual from the beginning. Fear pervades your planet, but you escape it. Earthlings fear spiders, snakes, heights, public speaking, and close spaces. There is cynophobia, astraphobia, trypanophobia, mysophobia, and hundreds more. Mankind is marked by its fears. But Franny you never seemed afraid. Because I couldn’t seem to overcome your spirit with wild ideas, I had to try to influence you in another way.
On Perknite, every Prectiss is a puppet, our motives are determined by our energy source, some, like myself, are expelled in order for possible future conquest. Forced explorers. Our flexibility allows us to mold ourselves into whatever the prime specimen of a race should value, treasure, or act for. We can only think apart from Perknite when on a different planet, under different rules. On earth, men are ruled by their fears, and by an emotion called love. This is what I employed to weaken you, Franny.
Love is merely a chemical reaction in the brain. In this shell I could feel its effects, its clouding in my judgment, the focus I could not keep. The human body I had played this act through infected my individuality as a Prectis, and I started feeling. Feeling emotions, feeling pride, feeling a joy in my independence, enjoying friendship by choice, instead of that I am forced into. Last night, you told me you loved me and I replied in the acceptable manner. But I do not love you. I cannot love you. I fell into my own trick. My own lie. My own character. I am starting to desire things I can never experience apart from this planet. Impossible things. I want to feel fear, I want to be an individual, I want to experience love. I want to stay.
And that is why I must go.
Forever yours as Peter Clark Young,
Alespapewanes
by submission | Jun 15, 2013 | Story |
Author : James McGrath
The knife blade gleams in the half-light, sliding through its target.
The tape then gives and the box lid opens. This must be box five-hundred, I think as I pack the circuit boards onto the conveyor belt. But what do I know? All time has moulded into a lump; one solid, inescapable moment.
Think of Earth, think of terraformed Mars. They wouldn’t allow these conditions there, but nobody as poor as us could hope to live on planets like those. Diode Ltd, the owners of this Planet (or is it just a factory? How would any of us even know?) run a completely different kind of world.
We awaken at five each morning, eat our bowl of porridge and go downstairs.
Straight to work, no messing about.
Work ends at midnight and if you’re sensible you have your evening meal and go straight to sleep. If you’re too tired in the morning, you could work too slowly and those that are fired are “thrown to the wastes”.
The others seem to enjoy their sleep. Each of them breathing peacefully when I awaken, confused and disorientated.
You see, even in my dreams I work.
It must be my brain, I tell myself. It has known nothing else since I finished the “Earth Education for Colonials”. The course lasts until age ten and I think I’m forty-two.
I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to do anything but pack these boxes now, but the vague and clouded memory of childhood makes it worse. It taunts and teases me from afar.
Time makes no difference to me; at 5.15 each day I pack boxes, and in the dreamscape of night I pack boxes. My knife always looks the same and the drab backdrop of the factory never changes.
It’s maddening.
I try to fight it. Pinching myself whenever I can, but I say “Ouch!” in my dreams too.
When you’re asleep, how do you distinguish between what hurts and what is perceived to?
I draw a cross on the back of my hand, hoping it won’t appear in my dreams. It enters my subconscious after two days of working with it and it follows me into the night.
I try changing the symbol every day, to trick my brain. Now, when I’m checking if I’m asleep I’m no longer sure of what to look out for.
Did I change it today? Did my head change it for me?
I look at the snake drawn on the back of my hand. The guy in the bunk underneath mine dealt with the checklists and is now wandering the wastes for losing his biro.
But I couldn’t feel sorry for him when I wasn’t sure I was even feeling pain myself.
Inspiration struck.
I needed something new.
It would only work once, but that was enough.
The knife misses the tape this time.
The back of my wrist feels beautiful.
The back of my hand feels.
IT FEELS.
This is new. It has to be!
It’s overpowering. Intense. Raw.
I scream manically and no one looks up from their stations, but as I go down I see a foreman rushing over to me.
I couldn’t dream this. I’ve never felt this before.
Something warm and sticky caresses my cheek and I hear the foreman swear loudly.
“Shit! Not another one of these today.”
by submission | Jun 9, 2013 | Story |
Author : John Kinney
When I was twenty years old, advancements in medical science and our understanding of DNA coding finally climaxed. I invested half of my money in a company called Stockholm and Siegfried, who specialized in genetic manipulation and, most importantly, cloning. They didn’t normally clone humans, despite how easily they could, because most considered it to be an ethical dilemma, but my frequent donations eventually changed their minds. When I was thirty, I had my parents’ graves dug up for samples of DNA. I told the research team that the whole project would be our little secret.
On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, the DNA was replicated and, in the morning, two embryos floated in a vat in the basement of the lab.
My parents are twelve now, the tender age that I had lost them in the crash, so many, many years ago. My father’s blue eyes stared into my own and in a small voice he told me that he loved me. He used to look me in the eyes and smile and tell me so when I was his age. I had to choke back tears when my mother smiled and told me to buy her more finger paint because of how much she loved painting. I hung her stick figure picture of my father and I next to one of her college portfolio paintings of a beautiful mountain landscape. I always loved that painting. She had told me that it was of a mountain that she had hiked during her trip to Germany. I made sure to get her more finger paint from the store when her and dad were sleeping in their beds.
I call them mom and dad, and I taught them to call me son.
They will be married when they’re old enough. It will be just like it was, so long ago, but I won’t let them leave me this time. Technically, they can never leave me.
When I die of old age, their son will grow up to be just like me.
by submission | Jun 8, 2013 | Story |
Author : James McGrath
“I know you’ve all heard it, but you have to hear it again…”
We’d heard the guide’s speech six times, so Kirstin and I stood at the back joking around as usual. He’d recite the dangers of leaving the tunnel, how we’d be guarded and eventually he’d tell of our destination.
Hastings, 1066. Was Harold shot through the eye like the Beaux Tapestry depicts? As history undergraduates we’d seen it firsthand many times, but it drove the tourists wild. We wanted to see the other side; William’s side.
As the guide fell silent I adjusted my little red backpack and prepared to go in. Nine others walked from the museum’s silver halls into the white oscillating bubble ahead of us, and we followed impatiently. I felt that strange quiver of stepping into what felt like nothingness. This was the tunnel. 2080 stayed clear at first, though slightly faded through the now transparent bubble behind me. The tunnel walls wobbled around us and as we walked our time slowly faded. Our surroundings became a pale grey.
This was an English Autumn sky.
We walked for five minutes until 2080 had been replaced by a birds-eye view of a field; the soldiers scattered across it like toys in a young boy’s bedroom. I spotted Harold and his Housecarls within minutes and pointed them out to Kirstin.
“Look for William this time!” she replied and began barging her way to the front.
She passed the guide, a look of horror formed on his face, and two guards ran from the end of the tunnel to meet her.
“Step back,” one ordered.
“Can I please just see the Normans?”
“No miss, please step back.”
Never one to give up, Kirstin changed tactics and took out her phone.
“What are you doing!? Please step back!” the guard continued.
“Take my phone,” she said, “Film some instead.”
“Filming is against company policy! If you don’t step back I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
Kirstin had had enough, she ran to the side and tried to charge past the guard but he grabbed her arm.
The phone flew out of her hand and careered towards the exit.
The guide had told us at the beginning what would happen should anything enter 1066. It’s nothing like Hollywood where you have to stop your parents meeting to make an impact on the future. Someone spotting a time traveller would have their life take a completely new direction, and even the slightest change in the winds could drastically alter the future, if done far enough back.
The phone touched the other side and we saw a ripple appear in the exit, but the guards were quick. One stuck out a hand and wrenched it back in.
“I’m sorry,” began the guide as battle raged down below, “but this session is over, you can get a refund at the service desk. Please exit the tunnel at the opposite side.”
Nobody wanted to leave; that’s when we’d find out what had happened. Sheepishly, we all walked back to 2080 and watched 1066 fade around us, once again feeling the tingle of changing times.
The silver halls appeared before me and I grinned widely. He was wrong! He’d said a change in the air could affect anyone back in 1066, but clearly nobody had felt it. I let my little white handbag fall onto my elbow and beamed at Stephanie.
By the time we’d got the refund I’d already forgotten the problem. I looked at the other members of the group, and the six of them looked equally confused.
by submission | Jun 7, 2013 | Story |
Author : Travis Gregg
As I fired my gun into the Stim’s chest I wondered if he saw me as a monster or if he understood that I was only doing what he had forced me to do. His choices had brought us to this point and I was just trying to clean up the mess. My partner and I got the call just twenty minutes ago and things had escalated quickly.
Once a Stim was over the edge situations always escalated quickly.
The call had come in from a woman two apartments down claiming she’d heard disturbing noises. Ever since the solar event and the following epidemic we’d gotten a lot of these calls. Most of them were false alarms these days, but there were a surprising number of Stims still out there, still integrated into society, and every one of them was going to be a problem sooner or later.
“Goddam Stim,” my partner muttered, rubbing his left shoulder. When we’d first come up to the apartment the Stim had met us with a baseball bat. We’d been lucky, knives were much more common. I’d been attacked with a goddam katana once too.
“You’ll be alright,” I replied, hoping that it wasn’t anything worse than a bruise. “So why’d you never try Dreamstim?” I asked, hoping to take his mind off the pain. We’d only been working together about a week and that question invariably comes up between people who’ve known each other for any length of time these days.
“My wife thought it was unnatural,” he replied with half a chuckle. “Said it would rot my brain.”
We both had a good laugh at that.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Never really got around to it. I would have probably picked it up eventually, just wasn’t in that big a hurry, luckily. Then when it was banned I never really sought it out.”
Dreamstim had been the medical breakthrough of the century. The small device allowed users to get a full nine hours of sleep in only ninety minutes. The prospect of an extra third of the day was too tempting for many people and users adopted its use in droves. Soon though, users learned that using Dreamstim even once broke something inside of them, something fundamental, and they were completely unable to sleep naturally again. The general consensus is that this was done intentionally but the manufacturer denied the accusations. Three weeks after the initial release of the Dreamstim the largest CME in history rocketed toward Earth. The resulting geomagnetic storm shorted out power grids worldwide and aurora could be seen nearly to the equator.
The power grids were back up after a couple of days, at least here in the States, but those were a bad couple of days. Worse though for most people was the burning out of the little electronics everyone carries around with them. Smartphones, newer laptops, and the Dreamstim units had circuitry that was too delicate to handle the extreme fluctuations in the magnetosphere.
America had it pretty bad, China had it worse, and trade still hadn’t been normalized six month later. Despite promises, no new Dreamstim units had been shipped from the factory. I doubted the factory still existed.
Between sedatives and chemically induced comas some Stims were able to cope, most couldn’t. These days it was the Stims going off their meds that we had to worry about.
“Think they’ll be a cure someday?” my partner asked, drawing me out of my contemplation.
“Eventually, but until then that’s why we’re here.”
