by submission | Sep 17, 2011 | Story |
Author : Phillip Riviezzo
Mother warns me not to go too high, to stay safe and not ascend too many decks. It’s where the Things Above live, and they are dangerous. They hate us and want us all dead – thankfully, they’re too soft and weak to come down to our homes. Not that Mother need worry, since climbing too high hurts. I went up twenty decks once, the furthest I’d ever been, and I think I almost died. The gravity was so strong there, I could barely move, and I could feel my heart stressing to keep blood pumping. Supposedly, there are fifty decks, and past the fiftieth deck, the world ends. So we live down here, and They live up there.
According to the storytellers, passing down ancient songs and tales, it was different once. We didn’t always live here, in the belly of our Ark, kept warm by the glow of Mother Core and lulled to sleep by the rumbling of Father Drive. Once, the storytellers claim, we lived on an Ark that was round like a ball, not long and cylindrical. On the ball-Ark, everyone lived on the top decks, and there was no difference between the Things Above and us. But that Ark broke, the stories say, and we left. The people of the round-Ark moved to our Ark, and we flew away. They say this was a hundred grandfathers past, so no one knows what is truth. What happened next, though, is more interesting.
In most stories, everyone lived close to Mother Core and Father Drive at first, and were all happy. But some people were weak, or lazy, or stupid – they had no skills or knowledge that was useful to all people, and they refused Mother Core and Father Drive the reverence and worship they deserved. So they were cast out, banished to the far upper decks to live their lives and the lives of their children exposed to the darkness of the nothing. As they left, Mother Core cursed them, froze their bodies so that they and all who came after them would remain in the shapes they were. They would receive none of Mother Core’s gifts, gifts she bestowed upon those who remained loyal and useful, to make us better at what made us special first.
There are other stories, though. They are less popular, and people do not tell them when the Coremen are around, since it makes they yell about heresy and hit people with their clubs and claws. The other stories start like the first ones do, with all the people leaving the round-Ark in our cylinder-Ark, but they are the opposite of the first stories. In the other stories, all people started high, at the top decks. But there was not enough room for everyone, so some people went down. It was decided, the stories say, by the size of one’s pockets – people with bigger pockets stayed high, while those without were forced down, closer to Mother Core and Father Drive where the ‘shielding’ was weak.
Sometimes, I understand why the Coremen dislike these stories, because they make no sense. Wouldn’t people with big pockets be better to carry tools, and so live closer to where tools are needed? Why wouldn’t people wish to be close to Mother and Father? They care for us, and in turn we care for them. It is us who heal Mother Core when she is sick, and soothe Father Drive when he tires. Can the Things Above claim to be healers for their dark gods? I don’t know, or care – I like it down here.
by submission | Sep 15, 2011 | Story |
Author : N.R.Messer
I’ve been going at it for months now. Searching, weeping, trying to find her — my Angelica. But, in my haste to undo the past, my desire to forge my own fate has quite possibly damned me from the start of this journey.
Although married for four years, Angelica and I were still very young-and very much in love. I, a physics major and she, a student of veterinary medicine, lived in very different worlds. But our lives collided and swirled together beautifully from the start. On a crisp, white, December night, in a pub drunk on spirits and holiday cheer, our life together began. So it’s not without theatrical spin and romantic fate that she would bring me to that very pub-years after our vows-to tell me she was dying.
Malignant Intracranial Neoplasm-brain tumor.
I felt as if I were in a mid-day nightmare, it couldn’t possibly be true. But; after months of treatment and referral, I accepted the inevitable. I was soon to lose my best friend, my lover, my companion.
There were options though-there were always options. Options however, that didn’t come without risk. Brain damaged, comatose, or the already inevitable deatd — but found much earlier. Regardless of my pleas, she accepted her fate.
Not long after her funeral, in a drunken stupor-made light by not even the lowest of self pity-I realized I had not in fact accepted what she so calmly had, that fateful evening on Bewer Street.
In a move of pure desperation, I sold every worthwhile item in my possession, and invested in blind hope and heartfelt raging passion. With all my financial and mental prowess, I designed, engineered, constructed, and executed a machine with the intent of crossing over to a parallel world. A world in which my love was still alive. But when I found only a gravestone and suicidal doppleganger, I plunged myself towards the next prospective universe. World after world, grave after grave.
I began to find comfort in the idea of suicide myself, as I strayed further and stranger away from my home world.
A renewal of faith came to me in the form of a double-edged sword after I crackled through the quantum walls of one particular world, when I found only browning grass at the increasingly familiar cemetery plot. She was still alive. The second sword’s edge struck me however, when I discovered a terminally ill Angelica waiting for death’s cold hand, in the same hospital we spent so many late nights in before. Those blessed-but brief-last weeks were, for me, a message from God himself. Press onward.
But now I question from which god the message came. Months I’ve traveled now, and at every crossing, the worlds become stranger, more…alien. I wonder how long, if in no time at all, until I find myself in a world in which Angelica was never even conceived. But onward I continue. Barreling through on a single straight path. Knocking through unseen barriers like sheets of rice paper. I must decide soon: continue on blind? Or discover a way to turn around. Before it’s too late for even myself.
by submission | Sep 11, 2011 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
When they described this planet to me, rogue, free from its orbit, adrift in space, I pictured a world of devoid of light, a world enveloped in darkness. But to my surprise, as I walk through the ruined city, protected from the vacuum of space by an environmental suit, my way is lit by the glistening of a million stars. With no atmosphere, the starlight passes unrefracted to the surface. It’s like looking up into a populated metropolis, like seeing an echo of what the city had once been.
I pull my eyes away. We have no time for stargazing. The planet will soon drift too far for our ships to follow, and we have a mission to complete. I order my team to canvass the large buildings to our left and right, while I walk, somewhat nostalgically, through the park in the center. I can direct the entire operation here, alone with my thoughts. I wonder. Who were the people who once stood here? What were their names? Did they know that their planet would one day be torn from its sun, sent drifting in space like a wandering vagabond?
The ruins of a great obelisk lie before me. The man it was meant to honor is now forgotten. All that effort to honor a single person, wasted. I shake my head. I’m getting sentimental.
Turning my back on the ruins, I see a member of my team approaching. I can’t even tell who it is until he speaks. The helmets make it impossible.
“Sir,” he says. “We found the document, or what’s left of it. It was nothing but dust. It appears some rubble from the ceiling shattered the glass seal meant to preserve it.”
I sigh into the breathing unit in my helmet. So that’s it. Another piece of history lost. One stray rock, a twist of physics, and our mission is a failure. It took us months to find this site, years to plan the expedition. And it’ll be decades, maybe even centuries before our propulsion technology advances enough for us to return. I try my best not to look disappointed as I order everyone to salvage what they can and get back to the lander.
As I watch the planet drift away from our ship, I say a silent prayer for the people who died on that planet when disaster struck. I thank God for my ancestors, the people who were off world, the people who were spared the catastrophe. And I say goodbye to Earth, the rogue planet, doomed to drift forever in the vastness of space.
by submission | Sep 10, 2011 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson
They ate. They ate everything they could. It was as simple as that. If a solar system contained even one planet with significant life forms in abundance, they came. They landed and they ate, every tiny scrap of organic material in their terrible paths.
Giant gray machines ravaged the landscape. Trees and fauna stood no chance as they were mulched at will… and the beings that ran, crawled, swam and slithered faired no better as machines eventually caught up to all of them. Each and every living organism was pureed into food for the Gluttons. This was the name mankind had given them, once the fact of their approach had been revealed via the galactic network of communicating species.
To actually transverse between star systems physically as opposed to communicating by light-language was nearly unheard of, except for parasitic beings such as the Gluttons, who existed only for conquest and further gluttony. A species so devoted to their ways that they sacrificed generations of their already long-lived individuals to transverse the gaps of nothingness over centuries, with no other purpose than to find more food.
Mankind learned of their approach with nary a decade to spare. Earth would be on her own now as any chance of communicating with another intelligent species for assistance as to how to deal with the invaders was long past. Earth’s leaders gathered. Together they analyzed the information package that had been sent in light-language from one helpful alien race some fifty-five light years distant.
This was our only hope, a life preserver tossed to us just in time to, “head ‘em off at the pass” so to speak.
In the end it was a tiny probe, a mere three meters across that sailed out on the solar wind to meet the approaching horde. In truth the Gluttons never gave it any mind, a useless weather satellite to be tossed aside with indifference, they let it cruise by without concern.
As it spread its tiny cargo amongst the fleet of marauders its self-destruct clock began to count down… and by the time the little probe exploded into oblivion the nano-bots had already breached several hulls, and were now burrowing into whale sized gray beings with rough rocky skin. Each tiny android had a series of compounds aboard, so small some elements contained but a scant few molecules. Once inside their hosts, they began to experiment… until the chink in the armor had been discovered. A message was sent back to Earth as the invaders slowed and fell into orbit around their blue prize.
When the first wave landed they met what they expected, the resident intelligent race surrounding their landing party with what looked to be primitive war devices. Unconcerned they launched their armored mulching machines into action.
The first trees began to die as the grey goliaths raped the land. The Gluttons followed close behind, gorging themselves on the organic exhaust of their leviathan food processors. Forest animals and lake fish began to add to the invaders’ menu when suddenly…
The humans unleashed, directly into the intakes of the machines, a boiling spray of the most glorious shimmering sunshine. And as the spewing feeding snouts began to exhaust the deadly element into the hungry mouths of the approaching aliens, they started to die by the thousands.
Who could have guessed that the Gluttons’ one and only yet deadly allergen would be one of the solar system’s rarest elements? Luckily for mankind we had now had the ability to turn lead into gold for more than a century.
by submission | Sep 9, 2011 | Story |
Author : Douglas Kissack
Every day I am losing more of my sight. Every night, the edge of the moon blurs a little more. I can no longer see the stars. In its way, this slow drift into obscurity comforts me. It reminds me of my mortality.
The city streams by several thousand feet below as the zeppelin glides through still night. Rock and metal flow together, a light-specked river, as above a cold wind snaps through the zeppelin’s mainsail. I lean over the railing, straining to make out individual buildings, and try my best to ignore the scraping of talons against the elevator wing. There is a thunk as Aryan lands on the deck.
The HARPY joins me at the rail, c-fiber wings retracting silently into his back. For a few minutes we stand and say nothing. I can hear his eye shutters irising as he tries to infer my line of sight.
“I don’t understand,” he says at last, rotating his head toward me. “Every night you come out here. What do you expect to see?”
“Nothing,” I reply, trying to keep everything out of my voice. My hand rises, almost unconsciously, to feel the silver cross that rests beneath my shirt. Aryan knows about it. I know it irritates him, but he sees no harm in me keeping it.
“Your body is failing. We offer you treatment.”
“I’m not interested.”
“You would let yourself die?”
“Death is natural,” I say, smiling.
In the ensuing silence I can feel him contemplating forcing the surgery upon me. But he knows that I would escape it afterwards. At least that much humanity tends to remain after the procedure. “I see,” he says. “Why do you wear that cross?”
“Who are you?” I ask, ignoring the question he has asked me a hundred times and more. “I mean, who were you before?”
For a moment, I think he is going to respond. Perhaps this time I have caught him off guard. Perhaps, somewhere within that network of wires and nano-tech, he has a vague recollection of his past. “I don’t remember,” Aryan finally says. “It is not important.”
“It’s the most important thing there is,” I respond. “It’s why you will never understand.”
Something changes about him. Aryan shifts his weight from talon to talon, then, without warning, throws himself over the railing. I watch moonlight spark from his body as he plummets towards the earth. He fades from sight before I can see him protract his wings. Maybe this time he won’t bother.
Below, the city streams by. Through this final journey, I have kept track of the latitudes and longitudes. Somewhere ahead of us is the Dead Sea. Below the ruins of Jerusalem lie, sinking slowly beneath waves of metal.
