by submission | Apr 2, 2011 | Story
Author : Richard Chins
Blue Squadron stood swiftly to attention. Milk dipped eyes stared blankly back at me.
Unfeeling? Indifferent?
I feel a cloud pulse behind its eye, catch a fleck of black spinning uncontrollably in its peripheral vision.
Truth and love. A dark, well trod vision slides into view. I push a smaller child and take his bike. My Mum calls my Dad an offworlder. A dog screams, my girlfriend goes to war and doesn’t come back: I see her laughing in a bunker restaurant in old burnt out London. I find a pebble with a staircase carved perfectly into it. There is blood in my cough.
I am sweating. I squirm, the beads taste thick and curdled.
My mind slips always toward the dark. Awful secrets howl their names. To turn and fight, it draws me in; I feel it tighten as I focus. But to ignore it… Terror! Thick waters drag too fast, too strong; a man insults me from across the bar; I hide it from her; I laugh as he takes my beating.
The eye is sweating, but it does not reach its cheek; it does not fall like a tear. I am a bad man.
Still standing to attention, somehow I claw my eye from its gaze. I hear my hand flap and tear at my side. The truth is ripping me apart.
It blinks, reaches for its holster, I taste blood. The gun points over my shoulder, a man’s head explodes. Six people to the left of me are sick. Someone is covered in one of the traitors, someone is screaming for mercy.
by submission | Apr 1, 2011 | Story
Author : Martin Sumner
We used to joke that they put something in the water.
Cully was the first to go mad, when he was still only sixteen. They don’t approve of that kind of language, of course; he had a ‘nervous breakdown’. Started sending cigars in the post to his friends with cryptic notes. Back then we were all beginning to fall quietly into the margins, but Cully was exploding, his personality ripping apart very publicly. Last time I saw him, he was a couple of days away from being sectioned. I heard he still has to walk fifteen miles a day to keep on top of the visions. Thirty years, thats a lot of miles.
We were the brightest boys and girls from the rural communities, rounded up, tested, sent to the Academy in town. For most of us, that was a five-hour round trip: I never saw my village in daylight until the summer holiday. Our parents thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime – something they were never afforded. A higher education, exacting standards, movement into and within a social strata to which we could not otherwise pretend. A closed door opened.
No-one asked why.
Skinner was the oldest of us all, he was like a father-figure on the daily bus-grind, looked out for us. A gentle giant. One day I heard he put some kid through a plate-glass shop-window in self-defence. Out of the Academy, into Borstal. (They don’t call it that anymore). I never saw him again.
In my village school, I was a brilliant young prodigy. I enjoyed it: being cleverest. Best at everything. When they told us we were being tested for the Academy, I knew I was in. No-one else from my village made it, except one. Funny thing was, she was my sweetheart. Her name was Helen. We lost touch.
Everyone on the bus was the brilliant young prodigy in their own community. Things were about to change, though. In the Academy, it seemed quite suddenly, we were less than average. Simple problems became insurmountable. Rapidly developing academic skills of our childhood decayed into bland incompetencies. We became a group shunned by the rest of the Academy as dull and peculiar. Became shunned? No, we were that from the start.
Nowadays Jeffers lives back in his old village, a mute crank, target of malicious gossip and harangued by gangs of small children. Rande drank himself into oblivion. I heard he died recently, found dead on his mother’s lawn. Morton is probably dead too, opium-related. Moxy, those curls, those teeth, that sharp wit (I loved her, secretly): disappeared by the Special Patrol. Griffen I heard was relatively prosperous, an antique dealer. And a sexual monster, so the rumour goes. Bad things happen around him.
Funny thing, I don’t remember what actually happened to us at the Academy. Five years we were bussed in and out, bright young things who became marginal, mundane, lost. What did we gain? What did we learn? Why did we go, daily, like lambs?
Me? I managed, as best I could, for thirty years. I’ve not been good at much. Failed relationships, money problems, depression. Irregular employment. Reclusive periods. Just last year, I split in two. Half the time, an angry, mute little boy runs riot in my head. A silenced prodigy slipping his harness. I’ll be in the mad house soon enough.
Speaking of which, I got a note from Cully today. It said, They Won’t Ever Make You Better. It said, You Are Lost. It said, Don’t Drink The Water.
by submission | Mar 31, 2011 | Story
Author : Iain Maloney
I can’t recall how long I’ve been here. I sleep at odd hours: fitfully, but in bursts. Because everything else has changed, I do not heed the dregs of the old world. Dark and light, night and day.
To the west; where the sun slinks away was my home. It is in darkness now, submerged beneath the waves. I sit on this cliff. It was once a football pitch, now a headland. Below me, around me, is alive: moving, pushing, pulling. I always imagined a climax. Everyone did. An explosion, an implosion – wind, rain, the arid heat of a desert compressed into a nanosecond burst. It wasn’t like that. Slow. Imperceptible. The tide didn’t turn. It’s so simple. The tide didn’t turn. It kept coming, coming, coming. Met obstacles, flowed away, rose, eroded. There’s not much left now. Not much but water. And this goalmouth. One of the posts has sunk. The water is eroding below me causing subsidence. A water-logged pitch.
Don’t know what happened to the others. Dead, I suppose. I should feel grief but there’s nothing. I climbed. I climbed until there was nowhere higher. So I stopped. I can swim but there is nowhere to swim to. I can wait. There doesn’t seem much else to do.
Wonder when the last game was played on this pitch? Its erosion is recent. Did they stop when the reports came through? The approaching ocean, the deaths, the destruction? Did they, out of sympathy, out of fear, out of the overwhelming urge to survive, did they cancel matches? Games arranged months, years previously? Or did football triumph? Conclusive proof that it is more important than life and death.
I like this as a final resting place. There is nothing left now but memories, and inevitably, football has its place. The last time I saw my father was at a game, back in Glasgow, Parkhead. It was years back, when I was a kid. My parents separated when I was a toddler. Dad was in the army, stationed all over the world. He came back once. I don’t know what caused it, didn’t really question it at the time, just accepted that this is how the world works. He took me to Celtic Park, like his father had done with him. Pass it on. I don’t remember who was playing, what the score was, but I remember the noise, the vibrations through the stand. The smell of passion, fear, anger. That’s how I remember my father, as a face amongst thousands of others, cheering, shouting.
I wonder is there’s anything of Glasgow left. They stopped broadcasting a few months back. The last pictures I saw were of water lapping round Edinburgh Castle, people crammed inside, the unlucky being pushed from the walls.
I’m hungry. There’s nothing up here but grass and goal posts. A half-time pie is all I can think of. Soggy and greasy, salty. Part of me refuses to accept that all this has gone. Am I just unlucky enough to have been stranded here, while elsewhere people are celebrating? Either way, it doesn’t matter. There’s just me now. Last man standing.
by submission | Mar 29, 2011 | Story
Author : Sevanaka
It is an unnatural sensation. A man is meant to stand; two feet solidly planted on the ground. Oh, for the sweet touch of earth between toes, grassy shoots tickling bare feet. Instead there is only a sinking sensation while the wind whispers its secrets; its guarded words lost to the noise of a singing hull slipping through the sky.
One by one the stars fade. Streaming clouds and slowly forming atmosphere obscure the shining motes. Constellations dim, and vanish. The radiance of the heavens, now reduced to a dull blur beyond the screens. This man is going home.
His hands ache from the grip he keeps on the console before him. His head throbs from the swinging acceleration. Planetfall used to be much worse, he knows, but that doesn’t mean he must enjoy the transition. Yet a ragged smile teases his lips with its presence – it had been ages since he had last seen home. He ponders, for a moment, the woman he is returning to. It has been a year. He has seen the stars, in all their glory, unfazed by clouded nights or city lights. He has been to the far reaches of human space. The quiet blackness that threatens to take you into itself. The edge, where the stars themselves beckon the souls of men with songs of light and brilliance, echoing secrets of a furious inferno.
And still he returns, to the woman he once loved. He stares again at the picture taped to the console. Stares and wonders. He remembers the struggle, out on the edge of sanity, where the pull of those fiery pins of light was almost too great… where the tug was in fact too great for some of the crew. She will not remember this. He remembers the fight, the struggle, to turn the ship back. He remembers the men that lost themselves to the blackness, who walked off the ship and into the nothingness. She will not. He remembers the siren call of the stars, how they begged for his company. She has never heard them speak, let alone sing.
He tries to clear his head, to shake loose these lingering thoughts of the stars beyond the stars, as the capsule jostles his tired body. A sharp jab of turbulence catches him off guard and he bites his tongue. He hears a curse growled in the cabin, and is surprised to realize it is his voice echoed back to him. Turbulence means atmosphere. Turbulence means he is moments from… his scowl quickly turns to a laugh: one of relief, of satisfaction – this man is going home.
But to what? It has been a year. The smile in the photograph seems so unfamiliar. But the feeling that tightens his chest, that feeling the stars could never provide, reminds him.
Falling. It is such an unnatural sensation.
by submission | Mar 28, 2011 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
Intro to Quantum Mechanics was the hardest class that I took during my junior year. String theory, field theory, and the Planck constant battered against the walls of my mind, and I was grasping none of it.
Weeks, than months passed and my grade continued to fall to the point where I was considering dropping the class. I had finally worked up the nerve to approach the professor when we had a guest lecturer that changed my mind and my life.
He called himself Dr. Charles Dodgson. From the chuckles, only two of my classmates got the reference. Dodgson shot the three of us a secretive little smile.
“What I’m here to talk about today is the mistaken belief of many of my colleagues in the wave function collapse of the Heisenberg Uncertainty. Now, now Professor. You know as well as I that the Multi Worlds Interpretation only gives the illusion of collapse in a single framework of observation.”
“But, what if, what if a mind could be trained to see past that illusion and follow all of the different wave paths? The observer always affects the observed. So I ask the question. Wouldn’t such a mind eventually be able to affect and interact with the observed wave paths?”
See, this is the part where everybody starts calling me a liar. I swear it’s true.
He turned and walked to the edge of the stage while standing still. He didn’t split in two like in the movies, or blur and morph. It’s just; one instant there was one and the next, two. They both grinned out at us.
Before we could call illusion, they both walked up to the professor and picked him up from either side. Putting the wild eyed man down, they continued to lecture in a bizarre stereo.
“What you have just seen is my interaction with a single alternate wave function, pulling another me from a different MWI. But, each action that each of us takes has trillions upon trillions of wave functions.” And they both turned and walked a few paces while standing still. “But they are all equally valid, and a trained mind can interact with them all. You may not believe me, but while I am here talking to you, I am also talking to classes in other cities, working as an auto mechanic, writing my third novel, and robbing a bank.”
He smiled his secretive little smile at us again.
“Actually, that last is happening in the quantum that you all perceive. And I’m sure all of you will shortly be questioned by the authorities, probably multiple times.” Three of him winked at us, turned and were gone. “All I can say is tell them the truth.
“On the quantum level, I’m not really here.”
And he turned and was gone.
The police came and asked their questions. They left unhappy with the answers, but the video of the lecture backed up all of our stories.
I did see Dr. Dodgson again. After my second interview with the police he came to me and offered me a position as his pupil.
I realize this makes me an accessory after the fact, but you see, officer, like Dr. Dodgson:
I’m not really here.
