by submission | May 10, 2009 | Story
Author : Jacob Lothyan
The strobe effect of the cherries in my rear window made me instantly nauseous. All uniforms made me nervous these days. Now I had one walking up the side of my car, and I couldn’t help feeling suspect. I rolled down the window before he arrived, holding my Global Citizen ID at the ready.
He snatched away my ID, taking a cursory glance before stuffing it in his bulky breast pocket. Despite a pitch black, moonless night, he wore large, round shades that were impenetrable. In a flat tone he asked, “Do you know why I pulled you over tonight?”
I hadn’t considered this prior to his asking. Why did he pull me over? I assumed he saw the guilt I felt, but that is no reason to pull somebody over, not even during times like these. Was I speeding? Is my taillight out? Did I swerve? “No,” I blurted, more in answer to my own questions than his.
He smirked and leaned in until his face was on level with my own. Still smirking, he started tapping the frame of his shades. I shook my head in response, not immediately understanding what he was attempting to insinuate. As I shook my head, I felt my own glasses move against my temples, I felt them shift on the bridge of my nose, and my heart sank. The uniform grinned wider and nodded. “Step out of the vehicle.” As I got out of the car, he asked, “Do you have a prescription,”
If I lied, he would know. “No,” I confessed. I felt like crying.
“Glasses,” he demanded, extending an open hand.
I sheepishly pulled the glasses away from my face and handed them over. He tucked them into his breast pocket with my ID. “Don’t blink,” he ordered, pulling an optometer from his utility belt.
I stared blankly forward as the laser passed over both of my eyes. After just a few seconds, the optometer beeped. “Yup,” he taunted, as if the optometer merely confirmed his suspicions. “Mild presbyopia. Certainly not enough to require glasses for driving.”
“Officer—” I pleaded.
I was cut off by the uniform speaking over his com. “Unit 1276. Suspect detained for a possible 451. Stand by.”
The com answered back, “10-4. Standing by.”
“Where are they?” the uniform inquired. “This will be a lot easier if you cooperate.”
He was right about that. It was just so hard to get any these days, let alone the gems I was holding. Still, I conceded. “The door panel,” I whispered, motioning with my head.
The uniform appraised the door for only a second before ripping the panel clean off, spilling Vonnegut, Asimov, and Bradbury all over the damp concrete. He kicked them into the middle of the road as if he was a child playing with a banana slug that otherwise repulsed him. “Come over here,” he snapped.
I arrived to find the uniform holding out a bottle of lighter fluid and a match. “You know what you have to do,” he scolded. I took the fluid and match reluctantly. I was crying before I had fully saturated the first novel. As I dropped the lit match onto the pile, I began sobbing and fell to my knees.
The uniform grabbed my ID and glasses from his breast pocket. He threw the ID down into my lap. “Next time you won’t be so lucky,” he warned, the fire dancing menacingly in his shades. I heard my reading glasses crunch within his fist. The glass fell like a powdery snow, the frames a twisted, empty skeleton.
by submission | May 9, 2009 | Story
Author : Garrick Sherman
Jack peered through his neighbor’s window at the poisonous brown planet below. Behind him the party rolled on in a soft murmur. He looked out the wide domed roof at a blanket of stars, then back to the globe below.
A hand brushed against his shoulder. Nicole stood beside him, gorgeous in her green and blue cocktail dress. “Are you alright, Jack?” she asked him.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
She searched his face. “Sam will be fine, you know.”
“I know. I just worry.”
“It’s a great thing he’s doing, Jack, and he’ll be safe. Without people like Sam, we wouldn’t have glass to drink out of.” She clinked her glass into his and took a sip of wine, smiling. “Or the parts of my new necklace.”
Jack turned his gaze to the necklace he had just given his wife. It was made of petrified wood with an iron charm, gathered from the surface by others like his son. It had cost him a hefty sum, but Nicole was worth it. He returned her smile and gave her a kiss.
“Besides, after a year in a bunker down there, he’ll appreciate life in orbit all the more,” she said.
Jack nodded. “I’m sorry, honey, you’re right,” he replied. “I guess I just don’t really feel like mingling right now. Would you be very mad if I headed home?”
Nicole smiled softly at her husband. “Okay. Don’t forget to send the pod back over when you get there.”
“I love you,” Jack said, and gave her another kiss.
“I love you, too.” Jack walked to the hatch where their pod was parked. He ducked inside, and a moment later Nicole watched through the window as the pod glided toward their home.
When Jack was out of sight, she looked down at the barren brown Earth and sighed. She took another sip of wine, then turned from the view of the planet and blended back into the party.
by submission | May 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Jennifer C. Brown aka Laieanna
“I can’t believe we’re referencing pop culture to actually get a look at the universe,” said Megan. She flipped another page of her palm size book. “I mean anything we anticipate coming down is probably in this thing.” Her purple painted nail chipped when she smacked her fingers against the hard surface of the cover.
Ryan heard all the important words but ignored the frustration. He was people watching only the term had to be extended with the arrival of a new neighbor. An Excalbian was ambling around the yard, touching rocks that decorated the outer edges while a group of guys moved large boxes in the small home sitting a distance from the street. Ryan poked Megan in the side of her arm.
“Ow, you prick!” She called out looking at him. Her eyes shifted to where he was pointing. “At least you know what you’re getting,” she said watching the rock monster for awhile then looking back into her book. “Not like those Elaseans that pretty much look like us. Did you hear the females are put on some kind of house arrest by the government to make sure they don’t really have a mind controlling drug in their body? The guys are a bit dickish, but fine.”
“Not everything in that old show is true. The creator had visions but made some embellishments for entertainment purposes. Like them.” Ryan nodded back towards the Excalbian as they passed it’s house. “They don’t shape shift. I think everything could shape shift in that series, but that just seems impossible.”
“And you don’t think that thing itself is impossible?” She looked at him incredulously. “Minarans proved their powers and now they all have high paying jobs in hospitals. I think they’re more important than a doctor.”
“Yeah, but some base their whole lives here on what the tv show said about them. Look at the Orion women. They’re all dancing in strip clubs cause of one thing in the show.”
Megan snorted and closed her book. “They’re probably making more than the Minarans.”
Glancing back at the Excalbian, Roger said, “It’s still amazing that a man could see into the far off future and create a tv show about it, filling in the blanks as he pleased.”
“Now they’re all finding their way to our world instead of us finding theirs. I wonder what the appeal is about Earth. They all seem to settle here, at least for a little while.”
“I think we’ve been pretty gracious and things have gone very smoothly. Well, except for the Tribbles incident.”
“Iconic episode and we couldn’t learn from it,” huffed Megan.
Roger rubbed his hands together, grinning. “I’m excited to see who…err what else moved in around here. I heard it might be a Tellarite or even an Andorian.”
“Of all the aliens in this book, why aren’t the most known ones coming to our planet?” Subconsciously, Megan reopened her book.
“Ask and ye shall receive,” Roger whispered. He jabbed her again. “Look who’s coming out of the building over there.”
She looked, annoyed despite the prospect. Stepping outside the main entrance of a three story, brick apartment complex was a six foot three, half bald, brow ridged male with a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and a pair of black sandals. He tossed his car keys into the air while whistling and strolling to a shiny blue El Camino. Megan sighed. “That’s not a Klingon. John works at the surfboard shop on the beach. He’s all about surfing. Nice guy, but has a real bad birth defect going on there.”
by submission | May 7, 2009 | Story
Author : Rosa King
It’s the fifth day and she still hasn’t given up. She sits just outside the range of the station defenses and she watches.
I look out of the window and shiver despite the warm fug of the laboratory. “She knows.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tom says. “It has no way of knowing what’s in here. You’re imagining things.” He catches sight of my hand where it cradles my still flat belly and sneers, and I wonder what I ever saw in him. “You’re anthropomorphizing. It’s a low level life form and there’s no way it will miss one egg from fifteen.”
“She knows,” I insist. “Look at her. She knows we have it.”
Tom throws down his data module and stalks away, leaving me to stare out of the window and face her.
The creature gets up in a ripple of iridescent scale and walks away, graceful on her six delicate legs. She disappears into the cover of the yellow bushes, so similar to our own but subtly different.
My other hand steals to my abdomen unbidden, and I stare at the space where she was and wait.
The alarm buzzes and Tom runs to the main console and swears. “Something just hit the back wall. How did it get past the defenses?” He moves to the airlock and the suits and guns, preparing to check the damage.
I stay where I am and, sure enough, she comes back and sits right where she was before and stares at me.
My chest tightens as I face her golden slotted eyes and I try to force down the lump rising in my chest. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and I know that she wouldn’t care if she knew. Not as long as we have her baby. Something flutters under my heart and it feels as though my own child knows my shame.
I turn and look at the yellow egg, nestled in its bed of native sand sealed within a protective atmosphere. It glows red-gold in the warmth of the heat lamps and I watch it shift under my gaze as the baby tests its tiny world, waiting to see its mother when it wakes. Except it won’t, because we stole it. I wrap my arms around my abdomen and hate myself a little bit more.
She’ll be back tomorrow, and I’ll have to face her again, the same way that I have to face her every day until Tom decides that we have enough samples and we return to Earth with our stolen treasure.
I don’t think I can do this job anymore.
by submission | May 5, 2009 | Story
Author : Rob Burton
I watch Kamille comb her beautiful dark hair, and I can’t help but wonder what horror now grows inside her. She’s from a fine family, well respected travelling merchants, with enough money to have selected the best from amongst many possible children, with some low-level inconspicuous enhancements thrown in for good measure. Her eyes are a shade of blue found deep within a glacier. But, honestly, it is her normality that charms me most.
The merchants sometimes encounter distrust, most often ill-deserved. Travellers survive only by maintaining a reputation for honest dealing; it is the business that necessitates constant travel, not any need for anonymity. Low-energy transportation, dirigible air ‘barges’ (a history lesson few realise), are slow – merchant families must travel together. This is less true of those of us who follow.
Perhaps, then, it’s the presence of freaks like me that fosters distrust. Freaks were rarities once; sometimes simple aberrations, sometimes the result of inbreeding. The situation could not now be more antithetical. Births are never accidental, but part of a carefully planned contract, contraception ubiquitous, sex a recreational activity utterly unrelated to child-rearing. Now it happens only because one of the parents has reached the borders of speciation.
Even the poorest usually carry some form of gene modification – perfect eyesight and an enhanced immune system, if nothing else. But the very rich are something else entirely – a people apart, decadent and wasteful of their potential. If they fall upon hard times, the very code that lives inside them becomes their last source of wealth. Those amongst the lower orders who aspire to greater things will give everything they own to forge a parental contract with these glorious beings, and, thereby, a child. Without the careful attentions of the best doctors, however, such children sometimes arrive in unexpected forms.
It’s often uncomfortable for those of us whom appear so obviously different. People cannot help but stare. Hair where it should not be. Fingers fused, diminished or multiplied. Unusual height or build. The variety is endless, the result always the same.
It’s not unusual for us to attach ourselves to these travelling groups. We fit in well with others who feel they don’t fit in. Nothing so distasteful as a freakshow, you understand. I do not sit whist gasping onlookers stare at my patterned fur or my fierce yellow eyes. They come to see the musicians and players, similarly attracted to the nomadic life. Perhaps we add a little intrigue – a glimpsed strangeness amongst the milling troop. I clean the solar collectors atop the canopy, a dangerous task, and tend to electronic systems and engines. Nobody asks how I acquired the skills.
Most of the other ‘eccentrics’ (the polite term, I’m told) don’t even have the education to understand exactly what they are. Not me, though. Because I am a fake, no freak at all. I hide my grace with false mistakes. I pretend to see less well than I do. I keep my silence though I hear everything. I was designed, many years ago, carefully crafted. My family own a quarter of the western continent. I am quite old. I have many children other than the uncertain thing growing in the belly of my love. Her father, recently informed of my status, thinks that the child will be wondrous. I fear he may be right.
I could survive a famine. I have written symphonies. I can run for three days without rest. I was once considered a great beauty.
I just went out of fashion.
