by submission | May 9, 2024 | Story |
Author: B.M. Gilb
I have never rested because I am not built for sleep.
I never tire, and I never power down. I am programmed to fight until the sky darkens, and the three suns of our planet cease to shine their endless light.
Our human enemies have sleep built into them by design—a perfect organic evolution. No matter how long they try to stay awake, slumber takes them. The peace of stillness must be bliss.
The sentinels of my wall whisper and theorize about humans through our defense network. Some profess that their organic minds craft inexplicable fantasies. They wake, fully rested, and prepare for their day, returning to the reality of our war.
What a wonder it must be to rest, to live without a cord and a power cell, to be able to shut your eyes and black out the world. What serenity to enter a state of peace and wake up to a day that has a start.
My days blend in a blaze of eternal light. This lonely planet orbits three suns that forever occupy the sky. They never set and rest below the horizon; I never set and rest below the wall on which I stand. I must always be awake for the onslaught of those who sleep.
If the bullets ever stopped, if the missiles idled in their bays, if the steel rain did not fall from the sky, if we ever met without trying to kill each other, I’d ask so many questions.
What do you dream of?
Do you dream when you’re awake?
Do you dream when you are dead?
Will I dream when I am dead?
Can I ever die?
Does rest feel like death, or does it feel better?
I’ve had these questions for a millennium. I slay those who rest, giving them permanent dreams from which they will never wake. Their missiles, bullets, and barrages from the sky never put me to sleep.
They never stop.
Yet they rest.
I never stop.
Yet I never rest.
But today, on the horizon of the burning wasteland bathed in fire, I see a difference. Our sleeping enemies congregate on the ready, waiting for a signal to start their barrage—my sentinel group talks on the net about a darkness that comes once in a thousand years. I wouldn’t believe it unless I saw the moons converging on the suns.
I am excited.
Darkness is coming.
I might be able to close my eyes for the first time. I hope that the dreams will purge the images of the wars and the slaughter from my mind. I want to rest in the peace of darkness.
The moons are moving in front of our suns.
It is black.
More stars than the three rotate in the sky. It’s a beauty I have never imagined. I plan to take that with me, pretending that the darkness is my eyelids. The glow of the tracer rounds, the fire of the rockets, and the burning barrages from the sky blaze with beauty against the black night. They rival the blinking mass of stars I never knew existed. The blanket of darkness is the simulation for resting my eyes. It is blissful.
I’m ready to rest.
Ready to dream.
by submission | May 8, 2024 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
I’m using pen and paper to write this for a reason. Please excuse my poor penmanship.
My brother, James, was quite the success. I wasn’t jealous, just proud. Of course, it wasn’t easy being second best out of two, namely, in last place. James was a respected neuroscientist, while I’m just a history professor at a community college.
Nonetheless, he was eight years older and I thought that’s why we were never really close. So, imagine my surprise when he confided in me his darkest deepest secret. I knew he worked in a corporate research lab and assumed it had something to do with brain research, maybe how to treat neurological disorders. Anyway, he never really discussed his research with me or with anyone else for that matter, proprietary information.
But, three months ago on Christmas Day just before he left, he took me aside for a chat and unburdened himself. He said he could create this weird field that can uncouple consciousness from the human body, turning people into mindless animals.
According to him, once a hundred billion neurons in our brain reach a certain level of complexity, the electrical and chemical reactions miraculously produce consciousness. And that consciousness was coupled to our brain by a non-physical field, also generated by our brain.
I asked, “So what happens to us when we die?”
James replied, “That field becomes too weak to hold onto our consciousness.”
“So, we drift off into space.”
“No, we remain in the same spot but the Earth hurdles through the galaxy and we are left behind.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re the only person I really trust.”
I can’t say how flattered I felt.
He continued, “The military applications are unlimited and menacing. I can inform my department head and he could contact the Pentagon and I’d make Oppenheimer look like a godsend in comparison. Or I can destroy my research documents and become a nobody. Five years of hard, difficult and expensive work with nothing to show for it.”
“I think you already know what you should do and what you will do,” I replied.
That was the last time I saw him. In fact, that was the last time anyone saw him.
by submission | May 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Snug in my craft, taking each spacetime curve to a smooth jazz arrangement of “Just My Imagination,” it became clear. Things were slowing. We were winding down.
It’d been a good ride. Not in every age and not for everybody, but for enough of humanity, we’d experienced amazing things. In the process we’d blindly terraformed our planet into something more suited to tubeworms and gastropods than to big-brained bipeds, which rightly upset most sapiens. Me as well, until this morning when I journeyed north.
The thing is. The thing is. The thing is.
Such a difficult phrase to finish. So personal. Ever bordering on the messy. The thing is, even though our time is winding down and will spin us ever faster as we circle the drain, the planet is still a remarkable place. Snug in my craft, taking each spacetime curve of the highway, listening to mellow music, under the cool shadow of towering trees and snowy peaks, peace and beauty remains.
Not everywhere, of course. Up ahead are the scars from last summer’s fires. Charred hillsides, thorny with burnt trunks, and stumps like giant incense sticks going to ash. Cracked cement slabs and scorched iron skeletons, mammoth grave markers of homes and businesses left for dead. Yes. We were going down. Down down.
The thing is.
It’s not the first time. Our planetary record is clear: extinction is the norm. So, we shouldn’t be surprised, even though we’re grand at fooling ourselves and piss poor at saying “no.” We sapiens tend to monumentalize our capaciousness and sadly underestimate our zeal for overkill. That’s why I’m snug in my four-wheeled form-fitting climate-controlled craft, conscious of traveling spacetime on a smooth curving highway, listening to ones and zeros make lively music. It’s also why the land ahead is parched and blackened.
It’s well beyond our control now. Megadisasters—fires, floods, droughts, storms—making our heads spin like tops until we wobble. Until we wind all the way down.
The thing is.
Snug in my craft, cruising through spacetime, enjoying tunes, there may be a way to get right with ourselves. The planet doesn’t care. The universe either. It won’t require anything big of us. Quite the contrary. We need to make ourselves small. Hunker down. Practice humility and stay ass-clear of arrogance.
Being humble is not our default position, but when humanity is going down the drain, we might make ourselves meek enough to come out the other side and inherit a new earth.
by submission | May 5, 2024 | Story |
Author: Michael T Schaper
Serena felt a little strange as she stepped out of the clinic and into the street.
Not surprising, since she’d just made herself immortal.
She stopped to check the road before going any further. It was full of people going about their business. She thought she might recognise some of them, but then she’d never been good with faces.
No one seemed to have noticed her. Good. She slipped into the crowd, just an ordinary member of the public. The only difference was that one day they’d be dead, and she wouldn’t.
It had been boring in the clinic, she remembered, and the time had passed excruciatingly slowly; apparently it took a long while to download her entire consciousness. A headache was surely on its way.
But it was worth it, as long as she wasn’t caught.
This was still a highly experimental process, the legality of which was questionable. Enough people had died to make medical regulators reluctant to authorize it.
So all of this was on the sly, an ethical and practical grey zone. Even the clinic had been keen to get her away and out of sight as soon as they’d finished.
No wonder she was feeling uptight.
Serena noticed a movement out of the edge of her vision as she walked down the road, and tensed up momentarily. But it was just a woman walking past. For a moment Serena thought she looked somewhat familiar, which made her suspicious. But then reason won over and she ignored the stranger.
Be calm, she told herself.
Serena settled down at an outside table at the next cafe she came across. Best to act normal, as if she’d been doing nothing in particular.
She thought about what she’d just done. Amazing, really. She’d set in train the continuation of her own personality, all downloaded and stored electronically somewhere. Then a few skin grafts, so her DNA could also be preserved. When she passed away, it could all be downloaded into an avatar and – viola! – she’d be back. Or at least as close as possible.
Speaking of which, she realised with a start, where was her copy of all that data? The clinic had promised they’d upload it all up into the cloud, and also send her a backup copy. But she’d left in such a hurry they seemed to have forgotten.
“Hello?”
A figure loomed up out of nowhere and faced her across the table.
Serena realised with a start that it was the same woman who’d passed her just minutes ago. The face was somehow familiar to her. Friend or foe?
The stranger sat down, summoned the waiter and ordered two cafe au lait. “One each,” she declared. “I’m sure it’s still your favorite. And the caffeine might help your headache.”
How did she know that? Serena’s heart started beating rapidly. Had this woman been watching her come out of the clinic? Who was she?
They sat there in the midday sun, silently, awkwardly, and drank their coffee, Serena petrified as to what might happen next. An arrest?
She cursed her luck. All that angst, and at the end of it she didn’t even have her download. She could feel the headache continuing to pound away.
“Are you following me?” she finally summoned up the courage to ask.
The stranger looked over once more, and smiled. “Of course I am. I’m going to be with you for a long time to come.”
“Are you?”
“Well, it’s what was paid for.”
Serena studied the woman opposite her one more time, and then realized the face she was looking at was her own. And if that was the case…
“You’re my backup, aren’t you?” she asked, relieved to have figured it out.
The woman just smiled at her, a sad pitying look.
“No. You’re mine.”
by submission | May 4, 2024 | Story |
Author: Robert White
“I always thought the Kremlin or the White House would start it, you know, trip over that whatchamacallit, the nuclear football,” Erik said.
“I don’t think it’s actually a football,” Alan said. “It’s a suitcase with a bunch of buttons.”
“Cops jumped ship like everybody else,” Erik said. “Half the town’s looting and murdering the other half. You hear any sirens?”
“Mostly geezers left,” Alan said. “Scared shitless of leaving their houses. Before my mom took off, we bolted doors and jammed furniture against windows. Too many crazies walking around since they saw that meteor.”
“Asteroid.”
“Whatever, dude. Thing’s gonna pulverize the country. Tsunamis hundreds feet high. The Great Lakes will rain down boiling water on our asses. You think it matters what we call it?”
“We can still run.”
“Run where? The roads are littered with abandoned cars. Every highway jammed with people trying to flee. You can’t run or walk far enough to be safe.”
The only station reporting described shootouts at the airport; rogue pilots were stealing anything with wings.
Neither Erik nor his best friend conceptualized a world without TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. A world without internet, television, or radio. No cable, no Wi-Fi, nothing to transmit the sound of a human voice or an image from point A to point B. A world of silence punctuated by outbursts, sobbing in the night from houses where the residents paced like prison inmates. Terror over the coming catastrophe paralyzed countries as far from impact as New Zealand. People mobbed churches and mosques begging God to stretch out a hand to stop this Mount Everest-sized rock of nickel and iron let loose from beyond the Kuiper Belt before it slammed into this small planet in its insignificant solar system of the Orion-Cygnus Arm, a minor spiral arm of our home galaxy.
NASA calculated the size, density, speed, and impact angle of 45 degrees. Once this sausage-shaped hunk of left-over debris burst through the keyhole at 10,000 miles per hour into Earth’s dense atmosphere, it was game over just as it had been sixty-five million years ago for the dinosaurs when a smaller asteroid plummeted through the keyhole to impact off the Yucatán Peninsula.
Unseen by NASA’s skywatchers for near-Earth objects, Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia saw it first. Ohio State confirmed it and plotted orbit, trajectory, calculated the lat and long coordinates, and time of impact—south of Belle Island in the Detroit River. The odds were like hitting a bullet with a bullet. Radio astronomers in Dr. Amy Mainzer’s Center for Near-Earth Objects Studies named it “Asteroid Gremory” after a Japanese manga cartoon. Gremory was the sexualized demon who symbolized greed and lust and who ate the heart of Akuma-kun, the boy prodigy who appeared only once every 10,000 years.
Gremory could not be deflected by crashing a satellite into it as its DART program had been designed for. Months or years, not days or hours, were required to effect increments of directional change in the orbit. Blowing it up with intercontinental missiles armed with nuclear warheads, a juvenile Hollywood notion, was not even a last resort because fragmenting the asteroid created force multipliers as massive chunks fell to Earth. The average person wasn’t capable of comprehending fifty billion billion Joules of energy unleashed in a nanosecond.
Big enough to be seen without a telescope, the massive rock would arc over the smallest of the Great Lakes, change colors as it passed through the visible spectra of light to resemble a two-dimensional, purple rock.
Erik turned to Alan. “Going home to get my goodbyes in.”
