by submission | Nov 7, 2010 | Story
Author : Matthew Banks
Here I am. I’ve made it all the way to the end. I always said I would. I told them I would outlive the Universe.
I was born human, so long ago that the memory is nothing more than a faint impression, a whisper. I lived and loved. Of that I’m fairly certain. But now it’s all forgotten. Most of my life is forgotten. A trillion years is to my lifetime as a bacterium is to a planet. All that time, most of it dark, all of it lonely.
We wanted to be immortal. We always had. The individual rejects death, fights death. Darwinian programming, as it turns out. The longer you live, the more you can mate. In theoretical terms, I’m the perfection of the organism, but in real terms, I’m useless. I never reproduced, even when I had a real body. In reality, I’m a failure. That thought has been echoing through my mind for eons.
I lived in an age when the dream of immortality could be realized, and it was. I was a savant among immortals. I wanted it more than any of them. I longed for it more purely, and I would have it at any price. We multiplied, and without death, we grew crowded. Even without physical bodies there were too many of us. There were trillions of us, each centuries old, each enormous, and we ran out of room. The old dilemma: competition for limited resources. We had hoped it would never rear its head again.
The first to die did so by choice. They felt they had finally lived long enough, that the ambitions that drove them towards immortality had finally been fulfilled and that they could walk into that darkness satisfied. They had exhausted every pleasure and desire. Nine-tenths of us went that way. The rest expanded to fill the available space, and the dilemma returned again. That’s when we started to fight, to consume each other. I was the victor. It couldn’t have turned out any other way. I wanted it more than any of them.
And I wanted more than that. I wanted to expand. I wanted to be huge. I ate the Earth, the Moon, the planets, the asteroids, the sun. In a billion years I ate the galaxy. In thirty billion years I had eaten what humans had once called the visible universe and I was spreading at nearly the speed of light, a gigantic nebulous octopus, throwing tentacles across the stars. I ate everything. In my colossal brain, I thought every thought that could be thought and lived every experience that could be lived. In essence, I re-played the entire history of the universe, and then the history of every universe that had ever been or could ever be. There were no gods until I was born, and now there are no gods again, for I am silent. There is nothing to speak about.
Eventually, I stopped eating and watched the Universe expand. Watched the last stars fade into darkness. Watched the dark galaxies crash into one another and unravel. Watched as the last faint tremor of starlight was redshifted into invisibility and the last star froze into ice.
Now the Universe is stretching itself thin, and spacetime itself is tearing, abyss and impossibility spilling through the rips. I know how the story ends. The new universe will well up through the cracks in the old one, and I will be obliterated. But I am at peace. In my lonely exile, I have outlived the Universe.
by submission | Nov 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
I was walking down 87th Street toward Fifth Avenue when a man ran around the corner. He was half-obscured at first by the diesel fumes of a departing bus, but he ran kicking his way through the newspapers which littered the sidewalk, straight toward me.
He wore nothing but a loincloth. He was skinny but his muscles stood out in high relief, his body covered in something like dust which streamed off as he ran toward me. His face was almost cadaverous, with dark circles under his eyes and livid bruises on his temples and cheeks. His eyes were filled with rage.
The man stopped in front of me. He was trembling, but it wasn’t cold. We stood there, still for a moment in the din of the city, and he pulled back his arm, reached out and punched me in the face.
“That’s for the fossil fuels!” he said.
I stumbled back against the wall of a condo building, my face numb, blood streaming from my nose, and watched as the man turned and ran back around the corner. I pushed off from the building, angry and bewildered, and half-heartedly walked toward the corner.
On Fifth Avenue silent columns of white light sprouted from the pavement and lanced up through the clouds. Men and women dressed similar to the man who assaulted me emerged from the base of the columns and walked toward the people who stood watching. I watched as a young woman stepped from a column near the wall across the street —the column cutting harmlessly through the poplar trees— and began to walk toward me.
She was barefoot and dressed in a simple dirty-white shift. Her hair hung limp against her face, grime embedded along her hairline. She stood in front of me and said simply, “I am Lisle. I am your great-great-great granddaughter. I am from the future.”
She seemed calm but her eyes were rimmed with red. Around us, out in the street and on the sidewalks, people were shouting in anger, commotion erupting everywhere. Lisle smelled like burnt dust.
“What?” I asked. “How did you find me?”
“You were radiating on all your eigen-frequencies,” she said, and she swung her dirty slender arm and slapped me, hard, in the face. Blood from my nose splattered across the sidewalk. Her fingernails were cracked and ragged.
“That’s for throwing your cigarette butts into the gutter,” Lisle said. “And for flushing your toilet too frequently.” She turned and walked toward the column of light.
The good news is that you’ll soon meet your children’s children’s children. The bad news? They are mad as hell.
by submission | Nov 5, 2010 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
The Heinlein-Schrödinger gate changed everything. “Anything is possible” went from platitude to a reality.
Schrödinger’s cat theorized observation sets reality, and Heinlein’s world-as-myth theorized that thought sets many realities. They were both right, and it’s my job to track unauthorized crossings.
My name is Spade, and I’m a reality cop.
The call came in about non-here weapons and off we went. To the retirement home.
My partner, Garrett, rolled out his flying carpet, telling me it would be faster. He was right, but, I’m still not comfortable with things from the fantasy side. I climbed on and it was as bad as I thought. It was faster than my car, however.
We arrived at the gate to a reality protected neighborhood. The gate guard forced Garrett to trade his carpet for horses.
It was another quarter-mile to the crime scene. Garrett hates horses.
We arrived at the scene of the disturbance to find a pair of grown men slamming laser swords together. The sparks were impressive, and they had obviously practiced not actually hitting each other. But, the swords were from a proscribed as dangerous reality, and the damage each had done to property while missing the other was impressive.
When we made ourselves known they quit and turned over the swords. I had to have a kid from this reality familiar with the other show me how to turn them into non-lethal foot long batons.
That was my day.
Sometimes, I miss gorgeous dames, bullets, and bird statues.
by submission | Nov 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Sean Maschmann
Sparky has never been the cleverest of cats. He’s a male tortoiseshell, a one in two hundred chance, so rare that Japanese fishermen used to keep them as good luck charms. The problem is, they are congenitally stupid. Sparky, who was named ironically, likes to sit for hours watching the shadows move. I think he can process things at that speed.
The shocking thing about Sparky is his ability to hunt. He’s fat as a baby seal and as stupid as anything, but he can stalk and kill a host of small creatures, from flies to robins. Once he even brought a still twitching rat in through the kitchen door. Amelia, our two year old daughter, laughed delightedly as Sparky disemboweled it on the linoleum.
“Sparky eating,” she sang. “Sparky good boy!”
My wife and I had to clean up the mess. Still, we love Sparky. He’s a good cat, even if his eyes are as blank and dark as flat stones.
Yesterday, Sparky was gone all day long. He never leaves the house for more than an hour or two. He needs to keep up his weight, you see. By the time we were having dinner, my wife and I were growing concerned; we decided to look for him after we’d done the washing up. Amelia, of course, was very eager to begin the search, and fetched her toy binoculars. She held them in her chubby hands and babbled incoherently.
The three of us began in our yard, calling his name and shaking a bag of cat food. Old Mr Marsden, our neighbour, poked his scrawny neck over the fence.
“We’re looking for Sparky!” intoned Amelia.
“Well, are you now?” asked Mr Marsden. “I hope you find the little fella. I haven’t seen him at all today. Usually Penny’ll feed him a bit of cream when he stops by, but I ain’t seen him.”
I smiled thinly. Cream is the last thing our Sparky needs. “Well, thanks Mr Marsden,” I said. We went out of our back yard into the field that abuts our row of houses.
Mr Marsden called as we left, “Look out now. Some of them teenagers was setting fires out there earlier. I seen the smoke.”
My wife and I raised our eyebrows at each other. Marsden is an old fussbudget.
We walked toward the river at the far end of the field. I couldn’t help feeling that Sparky would never go this far from the house. The sun blazed down on us as we called out our wayward cat’s name.
Suddenly, we heard a meow from the river bank. Amelia ran ahead with great excitement, almost tripping over some rocks.
We heard her shout, “Mommy! Daddy! Sparky found a toy!”
As we reached the river, we saw Sparky sitting and cleaning his paws, wearing his usual dazed expression. Behind him was a patch of singed grass. At his feet was a small metal object, not more than six inches long. It was open. There was blood coming out of it.
I still can’t believe the size of the rivets. They looked like they were made by ants.
My wife and I buried it last night after Amelia had gone to bed.
Sparky had to sleep off the meal for quite a while.
by submission | Oct 30, 2010 | Story
Author : John Newman
“Marcie just radioed in,” Brenda says as she slams another magazine into her M4. She has to scream over the popping gunfire, punctuated by the occasional boom of a grenade. “They can’t hold out any longer. Everything’s fucked.”
“Shit,” I mutter. Working the bolt on my Ishapore, I pop up and steady it on the pile of sandbags in front of me. When I speak again, it’s a shout over the chaos around us. “They’re falling back?”
“Can’t very well surrender, can they?” She pulls a grenade out of her kit bag, pulls the pin, lofts it over the sandbags. “Said something weird before she went off the air. I dunno, probably a Bible verse, or… shit!”
I follow her gaze down the hill, to the plain below. It’s all shadows, bumps in the darkness standing in for trees and an abandoned farmhouse. The only light comes from muzzle flashes and tracers arcing through the autumn air. But near the farmhouse, there’s a flicker of light. It glows and spreads, like a prairie fire. As my eyes focus, my heart sinks. The flames dance and coalesce into a giant pentagram.
“Summoner!” Brenda screams into the radio. “Summoner! Base, we need armor up here, now! Now! Now!”
Her voice is drowned in an otherworldly din from the plain below us, a thousand tigers roaring in enraged unison. The flaming pentagram has dulled to a glow in the grass now, and slowly the ground beneath it rises. It’s like watching a hill grow out of the prairie; then the soil falls away, and a pair of huge, bat-like wings rise up from the earth. As the muscled, red body emerges, I shake my head.
“Hold the line!” I scream over the din. “Hold, Goddamn you!”
But they’re not holding. Some still have their rifles resting on the sandbags, blasting away at the darkness below. Most are hunkered down, tears in their eyes, praying, crossing themselves. Six years of this crazy shit, and they still can‘t handle it.
Suddenly, the gunfire from below picks up. The demon is on its cloven feet now, wings spread wide as a football field, its shaggy, horned head towering over the farmhouse. As it advances, the cultists swarm around its feet. This is it, their big push.
“We gotta get out of here!” somebody screams. “Come on, man, we gotta get the fuck out of here!”
I close my eyes. Inhale. Exhale. Then, working the bolt on the Ishapore, I rise to my feet.
“Frank?” Brenda looks up from the radio. “Frank, what’re you doing?”
Standing ram-rod straight, I raise the rifle to my shoulder. Bullets whiz past me, but I notice them only distantly, like wasps flitting against a closed window. I can’t take this insanity anymore. A fatal wound would be like a winning lottery ticket.
I stare down the sights. Inhale. Hold it. Exhale. Squeeze.
The rifle roars, and I see it all in slow motion – the orange fireball at the end of the muzzle. The bullet exiting the barrel. How it sails over the field. How it catches the demon right between the eyes.
The thing stops, the wind suddenly knocked out of it. With a roar, it stumbles to the right. Then down it goes, all at once, face-first into the prairie, the impact shaking the Earth.
“Hell yeah!” screams somebody to my right. “Hell yeah!” Everyone’s on their feet now, rifles cracking up and down the makeshift breastworks.
I sink behind the sandbags and take a deep breath. Maybe they’re aliens. Inter-dimensional invaders. Whatever. This doesn’t prove shit.
