by submission | Nov 20, 2010 | Story
Author : Brian Bartolomeo
Apparently I have a face that invites unsolicited advice.
“Are you even listening to me now?” my brother asked from the driver’s seat of his semi-classic car. “Aren’t you supposed to be a genius or something? What you need to do is to get a job that pays real money and pull your weight around here. We’re all tired of the position that you’ve put us in, so you need to move on.” His tiny, blonde girlfriend in the front passenger seat conscientiously ignored our heated argument in favor of texting rapidly while we all sped down the green corridor of a winding back road.
I tend to stonewall in uncomfortable conversations in hopes that the other person gets bored or shows a weakness, but I had heard enough out of my brother for the day. I leaned forward from the back seat and said, “I’ve done more ‘moving on’ than you have. How many swaggering, self-righteous bosses do you still have anyway? I keep losing count.” His only response was to upshift. I continued, “At least I have something to—” The car flipped.
I stood on the road and watched my brother’s car slide sideways on a patch of sand covering the road, hit the railroad ties lining the steep slope off the edge of the road and tumble over and down, twisting to absorb the impacts. Not twisting enough. I stood in horror and confusion. Wasn’t I supposed to be in the car? Was the sky supposed to flash those colors? Then I remembered. I remembered coming to myself and remembering again and again. I remembered that I wouldn’t allow myself to remember any of my previous efforts while I was in the car. That would defeat the whole point of the simulation.
I dragged myself over to the console to set the simulation up for another run. Maybe this time I would let it continue into the crash itself to see if I could have done anything to save my brother during that final collision. I had to force myself to face that memory again. I had to keep trying, keep tweaking my initial mood or my approach to keep me from provoking my brother over the edge. I couldn’t move on.
I had to know if I could have gotten it right.
by submission | Nov 18, 2010 | Story
Author : Cael Majin
There was a spider on his ceiling.
It hadn’t moved for as long as he’d been staring at it, which was… probably an hour now. Maybe two. He wasn’t knowledgeable in the acclimate taste of arachnidkind—were there brown recluses in this area? There’d been hoards if the damn things at his parents’ house—he’d found three of them in the bathtub at once one summer, fat ugly little monsters that hadn’t resisted in the least when he’d trapped them in a cup and flushed them down the toilet, accepting their dismal fates with motionless passivity…
If he moved, his bed creaked. It had always annoyed him, but it didn’t matter now because he didn’t want to move, not for anything. He decided to match the spider on his ceiling, will against will—he’d leave when it did, and they’d see which of them survived.
The sun set behind his unwashed cotton curtain, and he counted the remaining lights. One from his computer on standby mode, one from his state-issued laser pistol, flashing red as it charged on its cable, one from the newly-installed medical monitors, ready to alert him if his body began to change. The streetlights outside his window cast a sick yellow halo around the curtain. The spider cast a three-inch shadow.
At some point his cell phone vibrated on the table by his head, and he looked at it tiredly. It fell silent after several seconds of lonely beckoning, and remained so until a feeble beep let him know he had a voicemail. A few more minutes passed before he gathered the willpower to listen to it, setting it to speaker and letting it fall to the mattress, utterly unsurprised to hear Charley’s voice practically singing to him.
“David, you butthead. I know you’re there because you’re not here. Pick up!”
He shut his eyes and envisioned Charley, worried out of her mind about him. She and Zach had been killing him with kindness since that particular physical, falling over each other as they tried to figure out what to say, how not to offend—now it seemed they’d opted for the “just ignore it” tactic.
Which suited him fine.
“All right, fine. But you better be asleep, because we’re picking you up at the crack of two in the afternoon tomorrow. We’re going to act like five-year-olds all day. It’s going to be great.”
Zach had pulled a string and gotten them all off-duty the night before deployment, and they were tripping to the ramshackle amusement park erected in the civilian area. It had seemed fun at the time, because there was nothing like a couple of close-knit quasi-adults and the possibility of roller-coasters, but the thought of it now – being out among strangers, as if they’d see into him and see the illness – burrowed into his guts and squirmed around.
Charley’s voice stalled, losing a bit of its synthetic cheer. “Seriously, get some rest, D. Look, it’s not… it doesn’t change anything, alright? Nobody is afraid of you. See you tomorrow.”
“To erase this message, press seven. To save, press—“
He let the machine politely blather on until it disconnected itself and his phone went dark. The streetlight outside flickered a little—or had the spider moved just the tiniest bit? He watched it carefully, commanding his eyes to transform the silent speck into a living creature, whose life pulsed powerfully inside even as it clung there, motionless, for hours.
He would let it live, he decided slowly, even if it was a brown recluse. They’d shared this evening in silence and stillness, and he suspected he’d win this battle of patience. He’d probably still be lying here, drained of strength, by the time the creature disappeared back into the safety of its shadows.
by submission | Nov 17, 2010 | Story
Author : Cesium
When the food ran out, we all responded differently.
The Cythalans engineered themselves into cold-blooded pygmies, with slow perception and quiet metabolism, tending their meager crops with careful patience. They lay on the hills and watched the sun wheel about the sky, and sang songs that lasted for months.
They’re all dead now.
The arcologies of Hongdao were unroofed, and their occupants became photosynthetic, living off water, earth, and sun. Their buildings were wonders of glass and carbon, full of light and air, and the people’s skin was resplendent in all colors of the rainbow.
They’re dead now, too.
The people of Tashpan downloaded into mechanical bodies, powered by the tiny sparks of nuclear engines. They lived mostly as they had, their factories precisely calibrated for a sustainable rate of growth, and their science flourished like none before them.
I don’t yet know what happened to them.
The Stennish went further, and sealed their minds in blocks of computing machinery deep underground, powered by the heat of the earth. They lived in a shared fantasy, refugees from a physical world that could no longer support what they had once been.
They’re still around, I think, in some form.
I, the groupmind of Emnisi, I chose a different path. My 46,228,901 constituent humans boarded a ship, and in the outermost reaches of the system I created a tiny black hole. Safeguards were in place; it could do no harm to anyone else, but it was perfect for my needs. My ship was to slingshot around the singularity, approaching close enough for the time dilation to become enormous, and then drawing away. Two hundred years would have passed in a day, enough that the crisis would have been averted.
But there was a miscalculation.
I’ve spent a long time pondering where exactly the error was. It could have been human error, or a gap in my understanding of physical law. I hope it was the former, but I don’t have enough data to tell for sure.
When I escaped the pull of the black hole, I found the orbiting instruments and monitors long since ground to dust by micrometeoroid impacts. I had come forward in time not two hundred years but two billion, to a sun too hot and bright, and no sign of human life. The ship began its return journey down the star’s gravity well, but I found nothing to assuage my worst fears. I sought the children of Staenn and Tashpan and Ishiko, but I fear they have forgotten those ancestral names (and, indeed, the communications protocols).
After several minutes of shared thought, a shipwide referendum was held. By a 46% majority vote of my members, with 19% abstaining, I have decided to alter the ship’s trajectory and take it directly into the black hole. In a short while, we too will be gone.
by submission | Nov 14, 2010 | Story
Author : Hugh Downs
Royce Millison requested cremation. He had got the idea in 1908, early in his long life. He was neat and efficient and said he didn’t want his remains ‘to take up space’.
In 1991 he restated his desire, being a person who tends to repeat himself and believing he was near the end of the line. But then the Wackman Breakthrough increased his life span by thirty percent, and he lived to be one hundred and twenty-two. At a still vigorous one-hundred and twenty-one, he stated yet again his desire to be cremated. He had had a dream that he would be cremated three times, that his ashes would be scattered the second time and regathered the third. When he spoke about this, friends thought he had become senile. But he hadn’t; his dream was a prophecy.
One year later, the front wheel of his motorcycle dug into soft sand and he did an endo [this is a wheelie with your back wheel off the ground] from which he never recovered. He was cremated at 1115 [I wrote this in bold] degrees Fahrenheit. His ashes were deposited in an appropriate urn.
Five billion years later the sun had swollen to a radius of one astronomical unit, swallowing Mercury, Venus and Earth, and vaporising Mars. Along with everything else in the world, Millison’s ashes were recremated at 4,800 degrees Kelvin. This time they were scattered through the solar interior, gradually rising in temperature to one hundred million degrees Kelvin.
Sixty-two billion years after this, a universe, as neat and efficient as Royce Millison was, regathered his ashes in the Great Implosion and compacted them to negligible size. Then, at a temperature above one trillion degrees, it cremated them a third time.
He was not prepared for what happened afterward (if afterward is the right word for a time as distorted as that in the transition from one universe to another). Conditions inside the cosmic egg, in bending some fundamental physical laws out of shape, did the same crazy thing to entropy that allows a black hole to eject a television set. And here he was again (if here is the correct word for a place occupied by a new universe).
Although his memory of a previous life was hazy and at times haunting, Royce Millison was not surprised to find himself back in business, and not much changed – except for having a neurotic aversion to motorcycles.
by submission | Nov 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Jacqueline Rochow
Jones surveyed the carnage. Under the blood splatters lacing the bed and carpet, the young woman’s limbs were splayed at unnatural angles, her head twisted nearly backwards and her throat crushed. Bites had been taken out of her collarbone, and the bruising suggested that one of her breasts had been crushed rather severely while she was still alive. Her ribs were caved in on one side.
“The victim?” Jones asked.
“In the bathroom.”
Jones skirted around the supervising officer with a quick flash of his badge and found the boy crouches on the floor, eyes red, deep scratches up his arms. Whether the girl or he himself had made them, Jones wasn’t sure. He looked about nineteen.
“Peter?” Jones said softly. “I’m Tim Jones.”
“Are you here to arrest me?”
“No.” Jones crouched on the floor next to him. “I’m here to talk to you. What happened?”
“I met her at a party. Amy. We were drinking and having fun, and…” he started to sob.
“It’s ok, Peter. Was this party last night?”
The boy nodded. Jones handed him some toilet paper to blow his nose.
“Then what happened?”
“I walked her home. We got back here, and… and she invited me into her room, but… but I changed my mind.”
“And then?”
“And then I don’t know what happened.” Peter’s sobs became louder and turned into wails. Jones put an arm around his shoulders and waited patiently for him to calm down again.
“It’s ok if you don’t remember the details. Just tell me everything she did, ok? You came in the front door. Did she lead, or did you?”
“Sh… she did.”
“And then?”
“She asked if I wanted a cup of coffee. I said yes. She put the kettle on.”
“Good… what next?”
“She took my hands and led me into her room. Started taking her shirt off. We kissed a bit.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “She put her hand down my pants, and then I said I wanted to slow down. She took her bra off, and then she put some perfume on.”
“Perfume?”
“Yeah. And then…” Peter swallowed and shook his head. Subconsciously, Jones brushed the deep scars on his own arm where the leather restraints had bitten into his flesh all those years ago. Becoming a counsellor for Pherax victims required being exposed to it. He’d never forget that hunger and desperation as he fought to cross the room to the female officer on the other side… health, his own arms, the fact that she would shoot him in the head if he actually succeeded in breaking free and running for her, had all been irrelevant at that moment.
“Where did she put the bottle of perfume?”
“Uh… her dresser. Second drawer, I think.”
Jones stuck his head around the bathroom door and attracted the attention of a police officer. “Pherax, second drawer of the dresser. Get a hazmat team on it. Don’t let anyone else touch it or we risk having a violent orgy on our hands.” He went back to Peter. “Peter, listen to me. This isn’t your fault. That perfume is a special chemical, it changes the way you think. It makes men want to have sex with her, and for some men, it makes them violent. What happened… that wasn’t you. That wasn’t something you could control.”
Peter nodded, but Jones could see the memories of violently tearing apart and raping a woman reflected in the boy’s eyes, and he knew that Peter didn’t believe him for a moment.
