by submission | Mar 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : John E. Geoffrey
It was at the time when the stars were right and a full moon stood over the desert, when a rose bloomed over the ruins of the ancient, nameless metropolis, the name of which had been banished and forgotten over the course of the millenia (but which once, a long time ago, in another eon entirely, had been called Vienna).
It was when a single drop of blood fell on the ground of the most central Ziggurat which had seen the sacrifices of millions in the long, empty millenia between the empires of the Humans.
It was then that the Devourer of Souls rose from the depths of Earth to demand his rightful place, to feast on the fears and terrors of the human scum that had taken over what should have been rightfully his, to devour the souls of each and ever…
“You and every damn fool who got himself trapped in this place, pal,” one of the hooded figures standing on top of the Ziggurat said, with the voice of someone who had heard speeches like this before.
“Silence, mortal!” the Devourer of Souls, the Drinker of Blood, Mangler of Spirits exclaimed.
He did not like to be interrupted. “I will be grateful! You have loosened the chains that have bound me for an eternity, for that I will kill you last! But don’t squander…!”
“The ‘kill you last’ routine,” said a second hooded figure to the first. “You owe me a drink.”
“Crap,” said the first. “I thought he’d have more style. Yo, big one!”
“WHAT?!” the devourer was getting more and more irritated by the scum that kept interrupting him.
“Stop right there.” said the hooded one again. “Let’s get some facts straight oh mystical one. Are we mortals?”
“What? You… oh.”
“Yeah, no mortals here right now. Second question: are there any humans left in the world?”
“Of course there… oh. What? But. Where is everybody?”
“About that: humanity managed to kill themselves a while ago. Never understood what they did but they just died like flies overnight.”
“I think it was more like a week.” said the second figure.
“Ok, maybe it was a week. Anyway it was damn fast.”
“Point is, everybody’s dead, Dave. I can call you Dave, can’t I?”
“Actually some of them kept around for years afterwards, just skulking and looting before the radition got to them.” his partner went on.
“Yes, but they didn’t seem to need any help getting rid of each other.”
The first one glared at the second before he addressed Dave, the Destroyer of Souls again.
“Anyway, they’re gone now. You’re out of a job. Question: do you have something to do now?”
“But… But I didn’t destroy anyone!”
“Yes, I know, you and me and a few hundred others. There are hundreds of destroyers of this and that around, ancient demons of whatever. None of them managed to get any destroying of humans done and all of them woke up a bit late. Blablabla. Anyway, more important question: Ever played any roleplaying games?”
There was a moment of stunned silence.
“What?”
“We are trying to get a Dungeons and Dragons group going but we need someone to play the cleric. Just say yes or no, we got another ancient god over in the Hungarian plains, but I think he was banished there before they invented writing, and that’d make it difficult.”
“Hmpf… Do you allow evil characters?”
by submission | Mar 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : Ion
Jim was excited. He gleefully danced about as the elevator slowly squeaked downward. He was thinking about the popcorn he had saved from that convenience store he found a few weeks back and how this would be the perfect opportunity to pop it. Its not like he hadn’t found other tapes before, he had a collection of hundreds, many brought back from the brink of destruction before the elements or radiation could get to them. They kept him company. They reminded him of the time before the bombs. Most of all though, he learned things from them.
He had been camping that Autumn. Trying to get in one last trip before winter set in. Sure he had an emergency radio, but who would contact him? The blasts were so far away, they didn’t even wake him up. No one there to worry about him after that. On his way home things slowly crept in. Everything was rubble. They few people he did come across, were not pleasant.
He tries not to think about it now, as the elevator reaches its destination. He is too excited about this tape. Nearly all the news stations had been destroyed. All but this one. He had seen it in a commercial in one of the last tapes he found. WKQQ, Channel 8 news, reports live from its headquarters in Midtown Nebraska. Such a small town. Really out of the way for most people. Sure, it had been looted to the ground. All the food gone, no books in the library, but who would take tapes without the equipment or electricity to watch them? Jim was lucky in that respect. No one would laugh at his solar truck now.
He urges the popcorn to hurry up and pop as he begins diagnostics on the tape. He is in luck, it is in good condition and will not have to be restored. Good old Midtown. No one would hold a grudge against Midtown. He pops it in as the popcorn finishes and has a seat. He presses play on the tape labeled “Presidential Address 10/17~”. He watches as the news runs for a minute, but then is interrupted by an emergency broadcast. This is it he says to himself, on the edge of his seat. This is where I will finally find out what happened. As if confirming his suspicions the president sits at a cluttered desk in what looks like a very sturdy bunker. Jim listens as the president talks about a computer network and watches as the president begins to pick up objects off the desk and assemble them. Is that toilet cleaner? And bacon? His heart sinks and he begins to suspect this is some kind of parody. But the president goes on. What is all this about sharing? Leaked information? What is the president doing with all that stuff on the desk?
These questions race through Jim’s mind as the president drops the bombshell. He is giving up. The whole world is giving up. There is no way to combat this new threat. The president pauses to assemble a particularly difficult part of the device he is building. During this pause realization sets in. The president is building a bomb. Out of household components. The information has been posted all over the internet. They cannot stop it. They’re giving up.
The president wishes Jim the best of luck and presses a button on the top of the device. The tape is interrupted with static. Jim sits alone.
by submission | Mar 2, 2012 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
“Icarus to Daedalus! We have primary stabilizer failure! Repeat, we have primary stabilizer failure! We’re losing altitude. Please advise!”
The lieutenant was shouting, screaming into his microphone, trying to raise his voice over the sound of his ship as it careened off its intended arc. Their test flight was supposed to bring them in a slingshot around the Sun before launching into deep space. Daedalus had been given the higher, safer arc through the Sun’s coronasphere. Icarus meanwhile had apparently strayed too close to the Sun and was now plunging towards its surface. The historic irony of the situation was not lost, even in the midst of crisis.
“Icarus to Daedalus, please respond!” the lieutenant shouted, trying his best to steer the ship up, away from the ever growing solar horizon, and back on its intended arc. Bolts rattled, engines roared, warning lights beeped and blared all over the cockpit. It was everything the lieutenant and his copilot could do to keep themselves from plunging directly into the Sun. As they continued to try to hail the Daedalus, their eyes met briefly. Each saw the look of cold acceptance dawning on the other’s face.
“Damn!” the lieutenant said, tossing his microphone aside. It was like something out of a nightmare. They’d trained for this mission, run countless simulations. They’d calculated and practiced every detail. They were ready. And despite all that, they found themselves in a hopeless situation. The cockpit was getting ever hotter, ever closer to the bright, burning star below. There was nothing the two men could do but steer into it and accept the inevitable.
“Wait.”
The lieutenant checked his instruments, ran the numbers in his head. It might work, but they’d risk being boiled alive in the process.
“Take us down!” he shouted.
“We’re not giving up yet!” his copilot answered.
“No, take us down! Take us closer! We can increase our speed and take a different arc out!”
The copilot said nothing, but just looked at his superior in disbelief.
“The computer can plot the course, just do it! That’s an order!”
Knowing there was no time to argue, the copilot nodded. Believing it to be the last act of his life, he turned Icarus’s nose down into the horizon and set the engines to full burn. His grip on the steering controls tightened, as the sweat on his hands evaporated at a rapid rate. His hands, his face, even his lungs felt like they were on fire. Inertial dampeners began to buckle, causing the man to feel himself pinned to his chair. He could barely keep the ship on course as his vision began to fade. Seconds, minutes passed as he clung to consciousness, almost wishing that death would simply take him and end it all. Any second their wax and feather wings would finally burn up, and Icarus’s journey would be over.
And then they saw black skies ahead, stars shining faintly, then brightly before them. The heat dissipated. The shaking stopped. For the first time in what seemed like ages, they could hear themselves think. Icarus had survived her journey, with the lieutenant and his copilot intact.
“Icarus to Daedalus…” the lieutenant sighed. “We made it. Superstition be damned, we made it…”
Nothing but dead air come back over the line. There was no sign of the Daedalus anywhere. Somewhere along the line, she’d lost her flight path as well. But unlike Icarus, she had not emerged on the other side of the star.
Daedalus was gone.
by submission | Feb 28, 2012 | Story |
Author : Asher Wismer
Jack realized he’d been shot. The pain lanced up his leg, shooting through his hip into his chest, and for a moment, he thought that another of the flying bullets had struck home. Instead, the pain receded, only a slight twinge as his armor took over and tightened around the wound, and he took two steps and launched himself into the sky.
The flying drones surrounded him. He ignored them — they were more for distraction than for damage, and they couldn’t do anything to his armor anyway. At the apex of his jump, he activated the graviton thrusters and powered over the building, turned at speeds that threatened whiplash, and landed with a bone-jarring thump on the roof.
The drones pulled off, not programmed to operate in the building’s defense sphere. For a moment, Jack was safe; he flicked the auto-medic on and felt relief as morphine flowed into his leg. Not enough to slow him, though; he took a quick look around and saw the stairwell door, which shattered under his foot.
Down the stairs and into the main lab. Around him, the lab’s automatic defenses activated and he shot them out, one by one, wincing as electricity slammed into his armor and flowed around the Faraday shell down to the floor.
Behind him, the main door cycled open. He spun and leaped behind the wreckage of a desk as the security team, themselves encased in armor, opened fire. They had weapons that would cut through his armor like butter. Instead of waiting for a break, he scuttled to the side and blew a gaping hole in the wall ahead. Before he fired his graviton thrusters, propelling him through the side of the building, he activated the contingency bomb and let it fall to the floor.
He was three floors down from the lab, falling fast, when the entire lab floor vanished in a pounding explosion.
The graviton generator saved him from pancaking on the pavement. Emergency vehicles circled into the parking lot, and for the moment, no one noticed him, standing up in the bulky armor that added two feet and one thousand pounds to his small frame. The comm in his helmet pinged.
“Did you get it?”
“Couldn’t get my hands on it,” he said. “I had to blow the whole floor.”
“That’s not what I paid you for.”
“That’s all I could do,” he said. “At least no one else will get it.”
“Fine,” the voice said. “Come back for debrief. I want to see the tape as well.”
Jack signed off without answering. Someone shouted and he started to run. Nothing on land except another armor unit could catch him when he went flat out.
It would take a few hours to fabricate the tapes, showing a much larger force in the lab, proving that he couldn’t get the virus out before he had to bail. His employer didn’t need to know that he never intended to steal it, but to destroy it. The virus was a horrible thing, and he knew personally what it would do if his employer got hold of it. He would never leave the armor, would die still inside it after, he hoped, a productive life, long or short.
Inside the armor, Jack felt the itch start up in his lower back, even though there was no skin there to itch. He ignored it; it would go away in time. His leg would heal as well, inside the metal skin that had replaced so much of his body.
Better this way, Jack thought. Much better.
by submission | Feb 25, 2012 | Story |
Author : Langdon Hickman
There wasn’t a conscious decision to eliminate sound. At least not one that anyone could remember. One day, the world woke up to silence.
No one was bothered by the sudden stark silence. It felt freeing, like a burden had been lifted. They wanted it, yearned for it. Each day was spent in radiant joy, their hearts beaming out love to each other. Crime rates dropped. Domestic violence almost ground to a standstill. Drug use practically evaporated overnight and those who once had judged the addicts of the world aided them in overcoming their withdrawal effects.
There had been a sound before the silence came. It was like an infection, a virulent sonic meme forcing its way through the veins and arteries of the sound-drenched planet like cocaine careening for the brain. One day, a song appeared on the internet. The file description was empty. It was entitled Song 1.mp3. It started spreading through forums and chat rooms at lightning speed, exploding into life almost the moment it became available. It was a curious song, just a throbbing dance beat, staccato synthesizers, cold washes of sound and steady pulse that almost demanded that you dance. It was an epidemic. It was uploaded to iPods, burned to CDs, recorded to tape, pulled to almost every medium imaginable. Missionaries and aid workers would show up to the poor areas of the world carrying it with them and would leave it in their wake on old boom boxes and Walkmen. The song knew no limits. The internet would not be its cage. It would live.
Musicians began incorporating it into their works. It was simple enough. The piece was skeletal, could fit comfortably almost any song with minor modification. Remixes were pressed, bedroom musicians pumped out material laced with Song 1 and its pulse. What was stranger was when older albums started to show the sound, as though it had always been in the DNA of the music waiting for humanity to know what to listen to. Every song on every album. A single pulse echoing forever.
People said that if you translated the synthesizer lines using a complex computer program, you’d see alien messages. Some said no, it’s Morse code and it says the name of god. The song became an obsession and decoding it became everything. But then the silence came.
Sometimes there would be gatherings, spontaneous and inexplicable, people joining together in masses of thousands in empty spaces without a word, without a sound. They would stand together and they would hear the pulse and then they would disperse. No one knew why. No one cared anymore. There was peace. Peace and the pulse.
