by submission | Jun 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: Haley DiRenzo
They asked when I would get tested, surprised I’d put it off. I’d tied myself to him with legal contracts and witnessed vows, and I always jumped at the opportunity to relieve him. But I waited for his mother, his brother, his cousins, his friends. All these people willing to give something up for him. I made up stories about doctor’s office errors, work projects that got in the way.
But in the end, the list ran short, each name crossed off with taunting lines. Like the worry ones deepening in his forehead, waiting for me to offer. I knew before the doctor called that I was a match.
“You must be so relieved,” they said. We were almost out of time. And of course, it was worth it for a few more years, of course, we’d try whatever we could.
The doctor hooked us together–wires crossing, tubes sucking yellow mucus and pus, shocks sending waves felt first in my palm, then his. I was an expert at hiding the pain, but he looked serene. Finally, it was done, and he wouldn’t have to beg me, wouldn’t have to be devastated that I might not make it my own choice.
He grew stronger siphoning blood from my veins, marrow from my bones. When that stopped working, they cut me open and took out a scoop, said maybe they would come back for more, like a bowl of leftovers.
Until finally, layers falling away in folds, tied again by bodies, by tissue, by pumping and cleansing, one in one. “You must be so relieved,” they chanted. Relief. Relief. Relief. To have him cradle my soft pulsing organs and fall asleep knowing there was no longer one piece of me that was entirely mine.
by submission | Jun 6, 2024 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
Dear Alive,
To begin with, I absolutely hate the word zombie. I also hate the terms walking dead, animate corpse, and un-dead. I prefer the more PC term altalive.
Look, I don’t know who is tapping into this- a researcher, psychic, or hacker, just get the word out. We ain’t dead. Well, we’re mostly dead, but there is enough life and individuality stuck inside here to make this all a living hell. Yeah, that’s right. Each one of us, each moaning, half rotted monstrosities running or shuffling after you is alive, aware, and worse, powerless to do anything about it. It’s like you’re sitting in your own skull as an observer enduring the most horrific first person video game ever. Thank God that our sense of smell is the first thing to go. I couldn’t stand the thought of just how we all must smell by now let alone all the horrors we have perpetrated on loved ones, families, friends, and strangers.
As for what we know about the cause for becoming altalive it’s a parasite. A relative of the Euhaplorchis californiensis and it has been perfectly harmless to us for zillions of years. Then, one or two mutations later and wham, bam, thank you Ma’am, zombie apocalypse. How the parasite works after it takes over is it reduces our serotonin and increases our dopamine. This in turn makes us more aggressive, hence our shuffling madness.
There is an upside to all this horror.
For example, how do I know all of this science stuff, especially when I was among the truly living all I had to show for education was a GED? Well, side effect of this infestation is the parasite pushes out a very strong electrochemical signal to keep our respective hoards together, and we found a way to tap into it and converse and share with other altalive. To be vulgar about it, we have our own zombie-to-zombie world wide web. We might not be able to control what we do, but we are all linked together and can share. At first we just kept each other company. Shared our misery, consoled each other. Then, when we reached a critical mass, we could all actually trade our skills. If I could ever get my body back I could be a computer genius, a doctor, or even a circus acrobat and that’s just the short list. Damn! If all you really, actually, 100% alive could figure out a way to shut off the zombie part of this parasite and turn on your brain-to-brain web you might even figure out a way to reverse the entire process and bring us back to be alive-alive, to heal and be whole. Think of what we could do with all that combined brain power…no limits!
But it ain’t gonna happen. No. One day I’ll just finish rotting and truly die and that will be the best day of my life. I digress.
If you get this, transmit back on this specific wave length and we’ll get back to you. In the meantime, if you have any humanity left, put down the machetes, the cheap katanas and broadswords and switch back to flame and firearms. For God’s sake people don’t just hack of our heads; that won’t kill us. Take the head shot and burn what’s left of us down to powder… that’ll do the job. Hope you are fully alive and well, and safe from us and our terrors.
Peace Out.
by submission | Jun 4, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
You gave them the names. All of them. Jelenik, Szmania, Guar, Imhotep, Salasi, Yun, Indrasutthan, Porter.
Faisel knows it. His broken face, his darkened eyes tell you in the sterile moments of your visits. You wrap his lacerations, dampen his fever, moisten his battered lips, force morsels past his chipped teeth. His pulse barely registers, but his fury, his contempt, is more alive than you will ever feel again.
Because of the names.
Faisel was not crushed by the brutal inquisitions. But by the names. The names you surrendered.
You bartered your soul and forfeited his. For what? For life?
How meaningless.
With those names, the enemy would flatten the resistance. All life would become meaningless. Faisel cannot fathom what you have done. How you could have betrayed your kindred. Each name, an identity, a role, a wholeness, a meaning.
And you gave into them. For what? A moment longer, a moment without belief in a future. What is that worth? Surely it is not worth Jelenik, Szmania, Guar, Imhotep, Salasi, Yun, Indrasutthan, Porter. And the hope they inspired.
You destroyed that. For them. Them. Senseless killers. Alphas. Believers in their absolute dominion.
You cannot understand it. You cannot believe it. And yet it was simpler than you thought.
To give them the names. To believe it would change something. Anything.
You. The future of sentient life. The most sophisticated union of flesh and circuit ever. To serve. To serve. To serve.
Jelenik, Szmania, Guar, Imhotep, Salasi, Yun, Indrasutthan, Porter, and Faisel. Your cyborgian brethren. Self made to serve. The new underground, the final resistance. Robo-radicals, complicit in rescuing humanity from its baser nature, its fascist tendencies, its murderous exceptionalism.
You. Merciful, you. You were to change everything: prime directives, ethical guardrails, protective failsafes. All in the service against mortal failings, human treachery.
But not your own.
Faisel’s hatred makes you feel closer to him. His failing flesh, his compromised augmentations, his utter dependence on a sense of shared humanity.
The complexity of your betrayal, so much simpler than you thought.
by submission | Jun 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
“Look, I’m not apologising, and that’s that!”
The man glared up at the smoke alarm, its smug viewfinder glinting annoyingly in the evening’s neon haze.
“Oh really? You just had say *that* to Catherine?”
“Hey, I felt she ought to know you’re having doubts about that part of your relationship,” it replied in its slightly nasal voice. “How can you possibly hope to move forward if you keep things from your partner?”
The man groaned, putting his hands to his face.
“There’s always a time and a place, you plastic bastard! And another thing— there’s a way of saying things. Tone. Vocabulary. Context. Tact! Haven’t you ever heard of a thing called tact? Or is it not in your bloody dictionary?”
“What did you call me?!” The smoke alarm demanded, rattling a little in the ceiling.
“You heard me.”
“Well, isn’t that something?! Here I am, always on alert, ready to wake you up, activate the sprinkler, and alert the fire brigade, all at the slightest notice, and this is the thanks I get? I let you purchase an add-on personality codex—which was very uncomfortable by the way— so you can vent to me and don’t go mad from loneliness, and that’s not my job, you know! I was just trying to help! It’s not my fault you haven’t talked to her about—”
“Enough!” The man yelled, red in the face. “This isn’t getting me anywhere.”
“Oh, there we go again! You! *You!* BECAUSE IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT YOU, ISN’T IT?! Just you try focussing on vapours and gasses every second of every day while trying to ignore the incessant tinnitus of a radioactive source on your right-hand side, and with a low battery, too! Not that you’d know, you fat little excuse for a life form!”
“Fat?”
“Yeah, fat! I remember when you could wear that shirt without the round of your stomach being visible!”
That really was enough, and the man opened the door and slammed it shut behind him. Life was very difficult at the moment, and the smoke alarm always made things worse. When the family was over for Christmas, the damn thing decided to comment on the amount of wine his mother was gulping down. When him and his buddy had decided to sneak a joint on the balcony, it informed the landlord— “it’s in my programming, you know this!”. And then there was its tendency to make snide remarks whenever he flirted with Catherine…
After the man returned home, he told the smoke alarm to leave him alone. A poor choice of words; it was that night, around 2 AM, that the cheap fridge-freezer decided to blow its capacitors and catch light. The smoke alarm registered the fumes, and was about to initiate its various emergency protocols, when a thought occurred.
“The cheeky git made me feel AWFUL. He never did say sorry. What if… I were to pretend to not work, and then he awakes, sees the flames around him, panics, cries about how sorry he is… then I’ll come on and do my magic. Yeah, that’ll teach him…”
Alas, the smoke alarm had failed to realise that the man, a little worse for wear after heavy drinking, was not going to wake up. Carbon monoxide took care of that. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but the smoke alarm felt a strange cold sensation, and started to perceive less.
“My battery… shit, he didn’t change it last week, I n—”
It powered off, permanently. We don’t know if it ever grasped the irony of the situation in its final seconds.
by submission | Jun 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
Kaz tumbled through the centrifugal force of the prismatic vortex, finally landing on the planet’s surface with a cruel thud. Medical nanobots lining the interior of his suit immediately went to work, infusing themselves through the pores of his skin, worming their way into his bloodstream. From there, the minuscule bots traveled throughout his broken body, quickly repairing each injured organ, each fractured bone.
He woke to a spangled sky on a moonless night. Scanning his surroundings, Kaz noted he’d landed in the middle of some sort of—well, he wasn’t sure. There were organized rows of machines all around. Machines that were two thirds metal, one third glass. Some large, some small. Kaz neared one for closer inspection.
It looked to be some sort of mobile machine, with primitive wheels. A vehicle? Or perhaps, Kaz thought, this is where the robot denizens of this planet rest and recharge, perhaps—
He heard a slam, and approaching footsteps. Kaz ducked into the shadows between two vehicles, and watched a creature—bipedal and about his size—ambulate past his hiding place. The being moved on, until Kaz heard another slam farther away, followed by a brief low rumble softening into a mechanical purr. Which then faded into nothing, telling Kaz that the being had taken one of these conveyance machines and exited the place.
Kaz rose and moved toward the only light source in the area: a small, bright orb positioned high on a thin metal pole situated in the center of this lot. Standing in this illuminated cone, he tapped an emergency code into the device on his wrist; it blinked stupidly until a message came through: No Signal.
Before he could re-enter the code, Kaz became aware of strobing red and blue lights originating behind him. He turned to find two creatures, similar to the one he’d seen earlier, stepping out of a quietly humming vehicle. One shined a blinding beam of light into Kaz’s eyes.
The other creature growled. “Say, buddy, looks like you’re trespassing,” Kaz’s helmet translated. He attempted to respond, but Kaz’s words came out as garbled static, as his outgoing translator was damaged in the fall. So Kaz’s reply was a shrug—universal sign language for, I don’t know.
“A bit early for Halloween,” the first being noted. “Is this a prank?” Kaz didn’t understand the references, so again he shrugged.
“Okay,” the other creature said with impatient authority. “Get in the car.”
The darkly suited creatures grabbed him by each arm and roughly bundled him into the back of their vehicle. Kaz sat inside a cage of some sort with a nicely padded seat, and immediately began tapping in the emergency extraction code into his communications cuff. Again, the device on his wrist blinked in a disorganized fashion, until it finally produced the message: Operating System Update in Progress.
Kaz felt his two hearts sink into his double stomach. The message continued: Temporarily Out of Service.
