by submission | Mar 18, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
This is how it ends.
I turn the corner with coffees for us and everything, everything, is on the front yard. I don’t know how she did it (I wasn’t gone long) or how she did it (I thought she loved me). My eyes race over it all and stop at the porch, at her standing there.
I had never dated outside of the Vim Catal and never thought I would. This girl, this Earth girl, convinced me it could work. Her people seemed to see the value of objects as we did; she did not seem to be an exception.
No appreciator of things could throw a complete set of Dorbid Melume’s vidis onto a front yard, a place where they could not hope to avoid scratches, or complete disruption from their proximity to the equally cast out vintage Wultonizers even now sending up a small shower of sparks as they spill out of their encasing Braxe fields.
How could I gather her up in all of my arms after this? How would I feel holding the woman who carelessly scattered my many signed hololids, objects expressive of my earliest attempts at discernment and preservation? How could I forget that in my arms I held the one responsible for the degradation of the only existing near mint copy of Uttie’s “If Space Be My Home” to merely good? Wouldn’t I be haunted in such a moment by images of a rare bust of Prialc, Space Emperor for twenty seven seconds, sinking into the fertile soil of our Ohio?
Perhps I am not meant to hold her again. Her eyes are as steely as Yorka Tleuz’s on the cover of the inaugural issue of ReWtIk, likewise facing me as its spine bends to cracking while I look up and away from it. The sky is dark, very dark. There is, as the Earthers say, a strong chance of showers. This can only be intentional. Can this be a test? It looks like a goodbye, a goodbye with teeth, and not the little things the humans call teeth.
She was the one to draw me in. Her dwelling had copious amounts of unused space, I liked that about her. Her muted interest in collecting was not so strong as to interfere with my own, also a plus. All about her person hung the most pronounced loveliness, this likely sealing the deal. Many times she questioned her own beauty, doubting it for some unknown reason. It was difficult, in these times, to not bring up the general aesthetic shortcomings of humans as a whole.
Rain drops strike my top tuft. A decision is required. I take it all in with a deep breath of Ohio air. I take it all in and hold it, inscribing a full sense memory. Only when the completed nub drops into my back pouch do I act. I reach down with my non-coffee holding middle arms and stretch out the atavistic gliding membrane unique to my federated clan. The winds of the advancing storm carry me onto the porch. Her expression changes. Either she sees that there is so much more to me or she really wants the coffee I hold out to her, still steaming.
I can’t know what’s behind her eyes as I can the tears out front. I reply in kind. She grabs one of my elbows and pulls me into the house with her; it looks to be one hell of a storm. I pull the door closed behind us.
This is how it begins.
by submission | Mar 16, 2011 | Story
Author : Jordan Whicker
We’d been asking the wrong question all along.
It was first posed by some fringe intellectuals: “Do they feel pain?” Initial research showed that yes, stimuli that might be regarded as ‘painful’ would invoke any number of reactions that could be described as self-preservatory. The breadth of these reactions even raised some eyebrows in the academic world and garnered one or two op-ed pieces in some of the more liberal media outlets. Aside from the canonically expected mechanisms like flinching and defensive posturing, a whole subset of pheromonic and what could only be described as supra-neural – neural firings that existed within the organism but at the same time beyond it – illustrated the very depths of our ignorance on this particular topic.
Research continued at a snail’s pace after that point, funded mainly by the type of eccentrics who were likely to have read past the headline of the spattering of articles that actually made it to print. Yellow donate buttons nestled into homepage corners and direct appeals from a plethora of sites that together didn’t garnish one-thousandth the traffic of a celebrity gossip blog represented humanity’s devotion to the fledgling field. Not that this matters, necessarily, as even if we reallocated the entire budget of the Department of Defense and conscripted every biologist, chemist and physicist in the country would we have begun to ask the right question in time. A question that after the fact seems as clear as day and even easier to answer: “Do they feel anger?”
Yes, they do. We know that now.
For many thousands of years we have fine tuned our dominance over the beasts of the earth. Cows bred too fat and too apathetic to move at more than a trot. Pigs confined to one room prisons, their madness and that of those around them the only available distraction. Chickens that reach slaughtering weight before they have time to grow bored of their confinements. Although numerous, none of them ever posed us a threat.
We slipped, though. Let them into our neighborhoods, cultivated them in our parks and around our schools. Along our highways and surrounding our airports. There is nowhere safe left – nor was there anywhere that ever really was.
We all remember the morning that the trees awoke. Those few of us that still live, at least.
by submission | Mar 13, 2011 | Story
Author : David Bastin
“Why,” asked the Captain, “have the engines all stopped?”
The Chief Engineer grinned. “You never were a man to ask an easy question?” he said.
The Captain raised his hand and repeated himself.
“Why, he asked, “have the engines all stopped?”
The Chief Engineer chewed thoughtfully on his thumb. “Forces,” he observed, “vary as the square of the distance between them and light is a constant ….”
The Captain raised his hand again.
“Why, exactly” he asked, “have the engines stopped?”
***
“Similars,” said the engineer, “pull apart.” He cupped one hand and swirled the index finger of the other one around it.
“Tensions,” he said, “translate into angular momentum and things shrink.”
“And we know,” he said, “ that implosions go exponential at the Omega Barrier.” He spread his arms wide.
“Poles,” he explained, “go to unity, and at the geomorphic horizon, space-time inverts ….”
He punched one hand with the bunched fist of the other.
“And that,” he declared, “is where and when it happened!!”
The two men studied each other.
***
“Why,” asked the Captain, “have the engines all stopped?”
The Chief Engineer spoke with sure and certain confidence.
“Because,” he said, “something broke!”
by submission | Mar 12, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
It was the last day of the forty third reign of the Enduring Prophet, and all was right with the world.
The prophet was now bed-bound, and it was widely expected that soon his spirit would leave behind this mortal form, and appear incarnate in his successor: a boy groomed from childhood to take on the mantle and the spirit of the Enduring Prophet.
At least, that was how the monks told it. The worldly city-folk smiled at such stories when they heard them. Their ancestors had believed in continual reincarnation, but these days most people accepted that the actual procedure was that when the monks saw the Prophet was getting on in years, they selected a boy, tutored him to become their figurehead, and continued their own rule by proxy. It was a neat enough system, and the monks tended to rule wisely. Over the years, the concepts of reincarnation and divinity had become a pleasant story, truly believed only by peasants and children.
Shortly before noon, the Enduring Prophet sent for the boy. Today, the child’s name was Kai Lo, a name that would be taken from him if and when he took the mantle. The Prophet needed no name. The boy was solemn, old before his time with the burden of responsibility. He knew what was coming.
Before he entered the Prophet’s chambers, a monk stopped Kai Lo and spoke to him. Wen Chan had looked after the boy for the five years since he had been brought to the monastery, had become almost a father to him, and his tone was gentle and grave.
“Kai Lo,” he said, “Do you know what is asked of you today?”
“I do.”
“And you will do as you have been asked?”
The boy nodded. Wen Chan paused for a moment, and when he continued the words were less ceremonial.
“Should you not wish this, if you are not ready for the burden, it can be taken from you.”
For a moment, his eyes seemed to plead with the boy. Kai Lo shook his head.
“It is my destiny.”
Wen Chan said no more, simply led the boy into the room. The hum of machinery grew louder as the door opened.
An hour later, the monks lowered the flags around the monastery entrance. The crowd gathered before the gates knew what this meant. The funeral and coronation would take place this evening.
In his bedchamber, the boy no longer known as Kai Lo heard the sound of the crowd outside. It had been a long time since his hearing had been this acute. There was a fresh pleasure in these first few days after the transfer, where everything felt new. After a while, it became normal again, but for a few short days he felt capable of anything.
The boy hadn’t struggled, hadn’t resisted when the technicians placed him in the machine. His pious sense of duty had lasted until the transfer had taken place, when something akin to shock had passed across the face of a boy suddenly trapped in a dying old man.
Sometimes, the prophet felt remorse for the life that he ended, the body he stole, but it was just how things were. His people needed a leader, and there were some prices you had to pay.
He stepped towards his balcony, basking for the first time in the roar of the crowd.
It was the first day of the forty fourth reign of the Enduring Prophet, and all was right with the world.
by submission | Mar 11, 2011 | Story
Author : Erik Goranson
Jane and Ellis floated parallel to one another across the vast canvas of space, eyeing the marble-like planets that slowly crept past them. Their skin reflected the starlight with a dull orange sheen. Ellis had called it ‘planet gazing,’ an activity he apparently thought suitable for a date.
“Do you see that one below us?” Ellis said, pointing to a round blue mass.
Jane shrugged.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked. “I’ll bet it’s beautiful on the surface, too. Like the way the dust begins to spiral when a star is forming.”
“Something like that,” Jane said. She didn’t understand his excitement. Planets were nothing interesting. They were just stars without the fire; black holes without the absence of color; asteroids with an atmosphere. They were just specks of light that littered the sky. The only remotely interesting thing she knew about planets was that the gas in their atmosphere were extremely lethal. Big whoop, she thought. Floating, atmospheric rocks of death. Ellis sure knew how to impress a girl.
“I’ve read about how gravity works differently down there,” Ellis said. “You wouldn’t be weightless anymore. You’d have to rely on your muscles to get around. You’d have to pry yourself off the ground and,” he paused, thinking. “walk. That’s what it was called. ‘Walking.'”
Jane was skeptical. “But how would you survive the gases?”
He hesitated. “With hazmat suits?”
“We’d only need suits?”
“And a place to live, I guess. But we could send some terranauts down there and have them build some pods or something,” he said.
Jane wasn’t impressed. So planets were atmospheric rocks of death that they could live on. So what? She was starting to think Ellis was a fool with his head stuck in a childhood fantasy.
“Would that really be worth it?” she asked. “It seems like you’d be constantly working to keep the nature out. Seems like it would be a pain.”
“You really think so?” Ellis said. “I think life’d be much better down there.”
“In an environment that could kill you?”
He nodded. “It’s beautiful down there. There are mountains of rock that would trace the sky; oceans of hydrogen that would reflect the starlight. Down there, the atmosphere would affect the spectrum of light. There would be color everywhere—sunlight alone would be more magnificent down there than we’ve ever seen. And with that kind of beauty, our petty problems would disappear. We’d stop being so careless and arrogant down there. We wouldn’t fight over money and resources and religion down there. We’d be too distracted by the beauty of it all. We’d finally come together.”
Jane felt her disapproval fading. It was a wonderful vision, a world without conflict. “Maybe you’re right,” she said.
“Maybe?” Ellis asked. “Wouldn’t you be stunned by that kind of beauty?”
“Too bad it’s only a dream,” she said.
Ellis wrapped an arm around her, and to her surprise, she welcomed it.
“Just you wait,” he said. “Someday we’ll walk down there.”
