by submission | Sep 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
“Twenty-five quid”, the androgynous doorkeeper said, looking bored despite the deafening beats and boisterous atmosphere in the club behind him/her. I waved my hand over the ID scanner/ electronic debit transfer and hoped I had enough cash left for tonight’s shenanigans.
The bouncer was practically a wall of muscle and eyed me with impassive scrutiny. Even his eyeballs looked like they spent time on a universal gym. Guys like him were bred in test tubes, raised on steroids, protein and barbells and hired out to places like this by private security companies. What a life.
I slipped past him into the humid, smoky, inferno. My ears naturally adjusted to the volume, filtering out the damaging frequencies as my eyes compensated for the darkness, smoke and ultraviolet light.
I scanned the gyrating crowd. The usual suspects were here. Dougal stood out like a sore thumb. At nine feet, he towered over the other patrons and his mane of platinum hair glowed vividly in the black lights. Lennix was prowling. Her lithe figure moved with feline grace as she shamelessly seduced an obviously blitzed out emo-infant sucking a blinking soother. I wondered what his parents were thinking when they ordered that particular mod for their unborn. There was simply no accounting for taste. Tabitha was all breasts and hips, as usual, flashing her excessive cleavage to all who cared. Someone told me her gene mod included ample back support. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least.
I couldn’t see my chums, so I elbowed my way through the twisting, spinning, bobbing, slithering dancers, aiming for the bar. Someone caught my arm.
“Oiy, Maggie!” Damian squealed, his forked tongue darting salaciously across his thin lips.
“Hello, Damian. Long time no see.”
“Felicia’s looking for you.”
I nodded and let the crowd push us apart. I didn’t like being too close to Damian. Something about his pupil-less red eyes gave me shivers.
“There’s a ghirl what makes me horny”, a musky satyr slurred in Scottish brogue as I sidled up to the bar. His furry legs were obviously fake, but the horns and hooves looked real enough, as were the overpowering pheromones radiating off him like waves. “Cannae I buy you a drink, pett?”
I ordered a triple scotch. I was anything but a cheap drunk. My mother’s work, I’m sure. My mods included a ridiculously high metabolism and resistance to alcohol, which usually sucked, but at times like this it was a blessing. You take what you’re born with, I guess.
Thirty quid later he was less impressed by my womanly charms, but his pheromones were starting to affect me. I was grateful when Felicia tapped me on the shoulder and broke the aroused trance I was settling into.
Felicia’s unique epidermal mod was fascinating and beautiful. I don’t know how they did it, but the constantly changing melanin patterns were truly breathtaking. I kissed her long and hard, releasing my mounting desire triggered by the Satyr’s chemical excretions.
“Care for a third?” goat man crooned when we finally broke apart.
“Toss off, Puck.” Felicia said as she led me toward an empty booth, arm around my waist. “I’ve got wonderful news”, she whispered in my ear.
“What is it?” I asked as we cuddled in the shadows.
She patted her belly and grinned coyly.
I knew immediately what she meant. After six attempts, our in vitro transgenic hybrid had finally taken root in her womb. I smiled. Extensive gene mods had left us, like most people, infertile, but with enough cash and skilled doctors anything was possible.
We were having a baby!
by submission | Sep 2, 2012 | Story |
Author : Sierra Corsetti
He’s late again, which is becoming the norm. Unless he decided to jump off a high-rise on Level Three without his parachute again, I have no reason to worry.
I’m on Level Twelve in a bar that stinks of vomit and cheap liquor. Like Rex’s lateness, that’s not unusual either. Toilets don’t flush up, and when you’re at the bottom of a twelve-story city, you’re fresh out of luck.
I strum a few more notes on my guitar and unplug from the amplifier. Nobody’s listening and I’m not getting paid, so what’s the use?
They finally want me up top. The Dean sent a nice little note this morning saying if I come up, I’ll have all my training paid for and my mom will get the best care they can give her. And I’ll have a job where I can get a view of something more than gutters. But…
Rex shows up and throws back the rest of my drink before I realize what he’s doing.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says.
I sling my guitar across my back, toss some money to the bartender, and follow him outside. We step onto his hoverboard, me with my arms wrapped around his waist from behind, and take off.
He smells like fuel and grease, with a hint of the soap he uses to try and scrub the grime off. It’s all familiar to me, a part of me that I can’t imagine living without. I reach up for a moment to ruffle his hair, and know from the way his head tilts that he’s smiling.
The ride takes an hour, with transfer stations and all, but we finally set down on the top of the med center on Level One. We can see the sunset from here, but I suspect Rex chose here tonight because he knows something’s up. When I called him, I told him I wanted to talk. We both know that’s never a good thing.
“You could have all this,” he says after a long silence, and sweeps his arm to indicate the horizon. The honey-red sky lights the reflective windows of the tall buildings on fire, nearly blinding us if we look at them from the wrong angle.
“You could help people,” he presses when I don’t reply. “Sick people. Like your mom.”
But nobody can help my mom’s ALS. Even with all the prosthetics and drugs that enhance liver performance and muscle tone and eyesight and whatever else a person can possibly want.
“I could give her nurses and painkillers, nothing more.”
“It’s better than nothing.” Which is what she has right now, but he doesn’t say that.
And what would I have? More money than I’d know what to do with, a posh apartment, glamorous clothes, and people calling me Doctor Allie instead of ‘hey you.’
“But I wouldn’t have you,” I say, and turn to face him.
The look in his eyes could kill me, I swear.
“You’d make do,” he manages.
“And would you?” But he can’t answer that, and neither can I.
The sun’s nearly set now, and we’ve both begun to shiver in the growing dark. We’ll have to leave soon before the night security force comes out, but we can wait a little longer.
by submission | Sep 1, 2012 | Story |
Author : Chris Louie
Zanth was cool. He had this bad-ass helio-rocket that could take us out to Moon 2 and be back before curfew. We were always adept at breaking the rules, which was no small feat, considering the punishments for some of the stuff we did. Smoking space-pot, punishable by limb reallocation. Swearing, punishable by castration. And most of all, drawing, punishable by banishment to Io.
Drawing was his favorite activity. In my lifetime, it’s always been illegal to draw anything that doesn’t exist in the natural world, but Zanth would draw the most bucolic, crazy scenes. “This thing standing next to the tree, that was called a cow,” he’d say, pointed to his latest masterpiece. I was fascinated. Not only was the tree missing its electrical panel, there was this four legged–THING that was unlike anything else I’d ever seen. “An animal,” he’d say.
“An animal.” A scant two paragraphs in our grammar-school history books. “Animals: Extinct by the time of the great Fusion Revolution of 3:RR67, animals once littered the landscape, ruining the environment with their feces and using up valuable resources that could have been used for humans,” the books said. No pictures.
“I dream these,” Zanth would say, and the oddest things would appear on the paper. “Cats.” “Kangaroos.” “Beetles.” “What kind of cities did these things live in?” I’d ask. Zanth told me that they didn’t live in cities, that they were free, freer than the beta-humans whose wings took them to StrataCity and beyond, freer than the astronauts laboring in far-flung colonies, freer than ourselves. They had no language, yet they lived in violent peace. There was no order for the animals — there was just existence.
“They were assigned no Purpose by the Administration at birth?” I asked. “They had no purpose, except when we forced them to work in our fields or raised them to be slaughtered and eaten,” he said, and it frightened me, that this “cow,” this peaceful looking creature, once lived solely to be gutted and devoured by people. The playful-looking “dogs” had their tails cut off or ears clipped. The fascinating “insects” were killed outright, exterminated by home dwellers. “This went on for thousands of years,” Zanth told me.
“Until the Fusion Revolution, right? That’s when…they became extinct, because they hadn’t evolved to modern life like humans and beta-humans. They were obsolete,” I said, but Zanth was shaking his head. “No. They killed themselves. As unintelligent as we thought they were, they all acted in concert. When the first blades of grass started to glimmer with enhanced circuitry, it was like they all knew, all the animals at once, that the earth wasn’t a nice place to live anymore. Not that it had been in a long time for them, but it had become…hopeless.
“And so the next day, after the Fusion Revolution, people woke up to find that all the animals had died. They had given up.” Zanth started to cry, which I made him stop, because a patrolman was nearby and crying is punishable by electric flogging. We flew out to Moon 2, but the volcanoes didn’t seem as beautiful that day. We were both silent.
That was all a few years ago. Zanth went on to pursue a Permission to Create Art grant, but was kicked out of school when he was caught doing unauthorized doodling. I eventually went to medical school, and now I screen humans who are potential Beta Morph candidates. I never heard from Zanth after his stint on Io, but occasionally, in my sleep, I dream of Them. The animals, running across hills, swimming through oceans, climbing about trees. And silently, carefully, I cry.
by submission | Aug 28, 2012 | Story |
Author : Nick Lewandowski
Lucy sat at her usual table, skimming the news on her phone.
It was therefore some time before she noticed The Crazy Man.
Youngish, with rumpled clothes and dark, tortured eyes. All together he looked like someone who spent a great deal of time on airplanes, particularly trans-continental flights, and therefore found it exceedingly difficult to get a decent night’s sleep.
Drug addict or artist, she decided, though he was awfully patient for a drug addict.
“May I help you?”
“Lucy Curtis?” he spoke with an accent Lucy didn’t recognize. Vaguely Eastern European. He rolled the “L” gently and pronounced the “U” like the deep “oo” in “loose.”
“Yes?”
“May I ask you something?”
“Have we met?”
“Perhaps. In a manner of speaking that is to say.”
Lucy set her phone down.
He took the seat across from her without asking permission. When he spoke next his voice was hushed. “I am something of a writer hoping you would listen to my idea for a story, to see if it would be well-received from your demographic.”
“My demographic?”
“Young women with radiant eyes.”
Had he been clean-shaven and had his breath not smelled suspiciously of refined ethanol Lucy would have been flattered. That did not stop her from blushing furiously.
A strange thing to do in front of a drug addict-cum-writer.
“What would you say,” he began, “if someone told you a story about a woman. A woman very much like yourself, who a certain young man loved very much. The most important difference between this couple and yourself being they understand their world, their whole universe, in fact, is just one in an infinite series of universes.
So when a terrible accident takes this young woman’s life her lover will travel from world to world, universe to universe, that is, seeking the variation that is most like her, hoping he may once more bask in the glow of her smile, if only for the briefest moment. Because only then will he find peace.”
At the end of this breathless monologue a heavy silence hung in the air between them, like a corpse dangling from a hangman’s noose.
Somewhere behind them mugs clinked on a tray.
The young man stared at her with his dark, tortured eyes.
By now Lucy had gotten the distinct impression he was neither a writer nor drug addict, and whatever the real purpose of this conversation might be it was certainly not market research.
She smiled weakly. “It sounds lovely. Very romantic.”
His expression softened. Some of the color returned to his face. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
He reached into his coat and removed a small, ornate pistol.
Lucy’s jaw dropped. Her mouth and lips began forming that fat “O” shape that is a pre-requisite for all full-throated screams of terror.
“Thank you so very much,” the man said, so softly this time that his lips hardly moved and truth be told it was more a long sigh of relief than an actual sentence.
He squeezed the trigger just as Lucy started screaming.
A bolt of lightning (in retrospect that’s what Lucy believed it most clearly resembled) shot from the barrel. For a brief moment the man became a black, vaguely-human form shrouded in pale red light.
Gradually the glow receded.
When it had faded out entirely Lucy was out of air. She was not finished screaming, really. Not by a long shot considering she now had a charred human skeleton for company. Her vocal chords simply refused to resonate any longer.
And worst of all, she realized, he was SMILING.
by submission | Aug 27, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
The holy city resembles a colossal dodecahedron two and half thousand kilometers thick. The reflection of a billion suns slip across its twelve quicksilver surfaces as it speeds through space, yet the bowels of the craft remain dark, as it has for millennia.
Then there is light.
Triggered by unseen hands, hidden machines whir into motion performing pre-programmed functions. A complex series of green pinpoints blink on and banks of blue, crystaline eggs flicker to luminescent life. Slowly, the frosty wombs clear revealing sleeping toddlers within.
A sun-like orb flares into being at the center of the craft, illuminating a lush oasis wrapped around the inner walls of the sphere. Twin rivers spiral from an equatorial lake twisting into either hemisphere, flanked on either side by a forest of metallic, tree-like structures rising above dense foliage. Dangling from leafless branches are strange crimson fruit; bulbous, opaque membranes, veined and throbbing with organic fluids. Elsewhere, within a hundred and forty four thousand crystalline eggs, the first born awaken to a new morning.
Years later:
Gay laughter resounds throughout the enormous garden chamber as naked multi-racial youths frolic under the warm eternal sunlight.
A boy and a girl stand alone by the river looking up in wonder at the pear shaped, fleshy masses hanging from one of the metallic trees.
“What are they?” The girl asks.
“They’re the second born..” The boy answers, studying the veins radiating over the membranous orb, tracing them to where they thicken and pulse at the stem.
“From the Old World?”
“Yes.”
“When will they join us?”
“When we’re home.”
They stare at the throbbing fruit. After a time, the girl speaks. “I want to see what’s inside.”
The boy says simply, “It’s forbidden.”
“It can’t hurt to look inside just one. Besides, I’ve seen one fall before,” the girl lies effortlessly, “Long ago. They just shriveled up.”
The boy has no reason to doubt her. There has never been cause to tell a falsehood here. His own curiosity wins out.
Just one. They vow.
Gracefully, the boy scales the thick metal trunk and edges onto a limb. He tugs at the thick, rubbery stem of the nearest fruit, but he cannot dislodge the mass.
“Here!” the girl whispers, waving a sharp stick from a nearby shrub. “Use this.” She lobs the branch up to him.
He plunges the pointed end into the dangling bulb and it bursts open with a gout of reddish brown fluid. The puncture quickly widens from the weight of the sac’s contents and the boy glimpses a figure floating in the remaining ooze. A foreign, earthy odor assaults his senses. He gulps fresh air and leans in for closer inspection.
The figure awakens suddenly, screaming, its pupiless eyes bulging wildly. Startled, the boy loses his grip and falls awkwardly from the branch, smashing his skull against the steel trunk, soaking the turf in dark blood.
Father Rasmussen is yanked from an insensate oblivion into a world of blinding agony as his unformed clone is prematurely awakened in its artificial womb. His undeveloped lungs burn and his body convulses, but his mind is intact, ringing with the last command made by the Armaggeddon Angel who took his life. “Remember”, they ordered. “Remember and teach”. And he does. He remembers everything; humanity’s fateful history, his home destroyed by aliens playing God. He remembers the one hundred and forty four thousand infants found without guile, protected in a vain hope to cure humanity’s Evil. He takes his memories and his knowledge with him as he dies a second time, thousands of light years from home.
