Eulogy

Author : Sharoda

My father died today, not from the invaders but from old age.

When the First Wave was discovered heading for earth I was still young. I can remember everyone sitting around the TV watching the talking heads as they pretended they had a clue what was going to happen; everyone except my father.

I remember him talking to friends and relatives about how bad this was and how people should prepare. They called him a doomsayer; he said he knew how Noah felt when he started building the Ark. He didn’t care, he started to organize.

By the time the First Wave hit most of the world was convinced that E.T was coming to welcome us to the wonders of the universe.

Hundreds of millions died in the first attack, they hit every major population center. Few places were able to mount any kind of defense much less a counter attack. My father’s group of “crazy’s” from their bases in the Adirondacks was one. They were the core of what became the North American Resistance.

After the devastation of the First Wave many people were ready to give up and let the invaders take over. My father called a meeting of what leaders could be found. The assembled leaders were filled with a patriotic fervor by my father’s impassioned speech. It ended with what became our rallying cry.

“Not one grain of sand, not one blade of grass, not one leaf from one tree will I give up. This planet is ours!”

“NOT 1” was painted, scratched, chiseled, and blasted into every surface.

The resistance grew and within a month we brought down an intact machine; more followed. We learned their language, their science, their codes, their history and their plans for earth; we learned that, though still far away, the Second Wave was already in route.

We fought them on the ground and developed tactics that took advantage of their weaknesses.

Still it was years before we were back in orbit, in ships that combined their technology and ours. In the first attack on a First Wave mega ship my father was the commander. Many told him he should stay on the ground where it was relatively safe.

“What if you get killed”, he was asked more than once.

“What if I don’t go”, was always his answer.

Three of the seven ships came back but the mega ship was destroyed.

Years of grinding war continued as we drove them from the skies and from every corner of the planet; then more years of preparing for the Second Wave.

We met them just outside the orbit of Saturn. We destroyed or captured most of their ships. When commanders asked about prisoners my father, now the elected Planetary Leader, answered simply “Not 1”.

My father was not young when the invasion started. Now, as the new fleet is nearing completion, the years have finally caught up with him.

Every day dozens of people come to the house, just to see him. We don’t turn anyone away as long as they’re quiet and respectful; they always are.

Tomorrow I’ll talk to the fleet commanders as they prepare the Third Wave, our Wave, our attack on their home world. I’ll remind them of my father’s last words. “Not 1”, he said and then closed his eyes for the last time.

My father died today, of old age.

In a world that was invaded, where more than a billion died simply for being human, which has been in a planetary war for decades, it means only one thing. We’ve already won.

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Cancerman

Author : Asher Wismer

“It’s spreading, isn’t it.” It was not a question. James looked wan, as always, but now his voice was tinged with a hopelessness that I had never heard before. It almost broke my heart.

“I’m afraid,” I said, “that the cancer has spread to your lymphatic system. Frankly, I’m astonished that you’re still talking.”

“Doesn’t matter, I guess,” he said, and looked out the window. The first battery of tests we’d done had discovered an astonishing amount of cancer running through his body. The cells had metastasized at an alarming rate, decaying from his stomach, where it had started, through his chest cavity and lungs. I hadn’t been kidding. James should have been in a coma at this point. Tests had shown some of his internal organs literally riddled with cancer; some of them were just masses of cancer cells in a vague organ shape.

“So what tests do we do next?”

“There’s nothing left,” I said, and felt terrible. James was a family man, working in construction. His wife had a good job downtown and his kids were in their teens, but the rapid deterioration meant the had only a few months to live.

If that.

“After it gets into your lymph system,” I continued, “it’s more or less over. We simply can’t treat it fast enough.”

“I figured as much.” He didn’t look sad, not really. Just resigned, and that was almost as bad.

I laid a hand on his shoulder, trying to be comforting, and he reached up and patted it absently. “Do you want to call your family?”

“No. They knew going in what was happening. They’ll be fine.”

I didn’t quite know how to take this.

“Aren’t you worried about leaving them behind?”

“You know,” he said, looking up at me, his hand still clasping mine, “I think we all knew this was coming. Who knows, maybe I’ll get to come back sometime and see them again.”

“Perhaps.” I left to see other patients, and the image of James looking forlornly out the window stuck with me all day.

***

“I’m not cut out for death duty,” I said. “It’s too grim, too depressing.”

“It’s part of your job,” said Alex, the attending doctor for my shift. “You have to be able to handle situations like this.”

“What if I just work pediatrics?”

“You think kids don’t ever die? Anyway, this is mild. You just wait until you have to sit with a dying patient all night, waiting for the last breath to come. You’ll find yourself PRAYING for his death.”

“Anyone ever tell you about your great bedside manner?”

“I watch too much TV. Are we done for the day?”

“I guess,” I said, standing to leave. “I just wish there was a way help him.”

“I’ll agree with you on one thing,” he said. “It’s amazing that your cancer patient is still alive. I looked at the samples they took; it’s spreading faster than I’ve ever seen.”

“He isn’t reporting much pain now. Maybe it’ll be easy.”

“Cancer is a mutation of the cells, changes them irrevocably, and the human body can’t handle that. Theoretically, if you lived long enough, your body would convert over to pure cancer cells. You’d be a cancer vegetable.”

“Maybe the cancer would leave the brain alone.”

“What, and make him immortal? I saw that movie. It sucked. Listen, you should see the staff therapist. Talk it out a little.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

As I left, I idly scratched the palm of my hand, where James had held it.

Damnable itch.

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Small Unit Action

Author : Michael Varian Daly

Tzisoc knew they were about fifteen miles south of Zhytomir, but until they saw the rail line and the village just to the east – Vertokyivka she believed – they had no map fix.

Artillery ‘crumped’ to the north, fellow Black Guard units fighting their way into Zhytomir itself.

She brought the troop to a halt in the village’s abandoned fields, letting the horses graze upon whatever they could find. In the dry heat of mid-August, that wasn’t much. She was still amazed at the stunning primitiveness of Russia during this time, even this far west.

She sighed, checked out her little command; twenty six Sisters, their horses, three extra mounts.

“Too many First Timers in this Wave”, she thought. She had gone from private to sergeant in five months because of that. That was also why they didn’t spot the Maxim gun until it opened up, a languorous ‘tat-tat-tat-tat’.

They had learned enough to pull back rapidly instead of gazing about open mouthed. The Germans missed completely.

“Green,” Tzisoc hissed, as she dismounted several yards back.

“Corporal Kaminel, take Second and Third Sections around to the right! Pin them down!” she told her second in command. “First Section come with me!”

As Tzisoc and seven troopers moved around to the left, the sharp crack of Mosin-Nagant carbines could be heard, answered by the Maxim gun…and the flatter crack of Mausers.

“They’ve got infantry,” Tzisoc said. The others nodded.

They found a low rise on the German’s left flank. Tzisoc spread her troopers along it and kept moving left.

She could see the Germans now, their coal scuttle helmets moving around in a trench line. She brought her rifle up, fired.

One of the helmets flipped back with a satisfying spray of blood and meat.

She hugged the earth as slugs zipped over head, thumped in the dirt. Then First Section opened up and the bullets stopped. She took a quick look; no Germans.

She was up and running in an instant. “This is going to get me killed,” she thought. But she had signed up knowing The Black Guard’s motto; Mors Amatricum Nostrum…“Death is Our Lover”

Halfway to the trench a German appeared. She shot him in the chest.

Then she was in the trench. Another German. She shot him in the face. A third German came at her with a shovel, knocked her rifle away.

She screamed a war cry, leaped upon him, dagger out. She could feel the bone and gristle through the hilt, feel his death rattle, smell his bowels voiding.

She heard a ‘thunk’ to her left. The chest-shot German had just pounded a potato masher against the dirt.

“Oh, shi…” The blast set her hair and uniform on fire. Metal tore into her face, eyes… PAIN!

whiteness

Her body was still spasming violently when the Mandroid Medtechs cracked the Sim Tank. A Pneumodermic injector shot her full of hormones and supplements. She went limp.

She awoke in a deceptively simple hospital room, bright, sunny, no medgear visible, but it monitored her to the subatomic level.

A Sister came in wearing a white coat, her hair in a Service Pageboy. Tzisoc noticed the silver outlined black star insignia of The Black Guard pinned to her coat.

“I’m Nesrood, your counselor,” she smiled. “I hear you bought the farm.”

Tzisoc laughed. “Only five months in.”

“You’ll do better next time,” Nesrood said. She pointed to her insignia; the black star had a red III and a white V. “I died the first two times.”

She pulled a clear package out of her pocket, handed it to Tzisoc. “Welcome.”

It was a Black Guard pin. When Tzisoc’s skin touched it, a red I appeared. She grinned with sheer joy. “Yes, I’ll do better next time.”

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Clouds In Her Coffee

Author : Greg Ashworth

The weather was terrible. It always was these days. The fluctuating temperatures, the driving rain, the harsh winds – all this was to be expected.

Sarah sat alone in the corner of the coffee shop, her eyes somehow distant, as she browsed the Net, aided by her neural implants. A tear crawled slowly from her dark eyes, and made its way down her porcelain cheek. The coffee shop a small, rustic affair, with dim lighting, which was somehow not entirely unfriendly. There were a several small, round synthetic wood tables, few of which were occupied. Long shadows were cast by the flickering argon lamps that lined the walls.

Sarah looked up, and then back into the swirling darkness of her coffee cup. She stared intently for several minutes. An old, ragged man looked up from his espresso, as if disturbed, then thought better of it, and returned to his own melancholy world.

Sarah’s deep, thoughtful gaze continued unabated, as if she was challenging her cappuccino to blink. There was an eldritch energy in the air now. The thick brown liquid began to rage in its ceramic prison, the foaming coffee thrashing and turning in the cup. The weather worsened outside, and the coffee shop began to echo with the pounding hail, hurling itself at the small glass windows, hammering against the seemingly ancient tiled roof.

Eventually, the owner, identified as ‘Luigi’ by a fading plastic name tag on his tarnished waistcoat, edged nervously towards Sarah’s motionless form, tapped her lightly on the shoulder and pointed apologetically towards the small wooden door.

Sarah slowly dragged herself from her trance, shook her head sadly, tossing her long black hair over her pale, disheartened face. She sorrowfully made her way to the door, careful not to let it slam behind her. The hail stopped, and the clouds parted slightly. It began to drizzle.

A small piece of paper fluttered slowly to the rough stone floor from the table at which she was sat. An eviction notice.

It had been thought for the early years of the twenty first century that man was to blame for the steady decline of Earth’s climate. It was, but not in the way scientists had thought. Many years, and vast amounts of money were spent researching ‘greener’ sources of energy, and in reducing the now laughable ‘carbon footprint’ of the world’s population – all for nothing.

At some point, in the middle of the twenty second century, tests were done on a small group who claimed that their mood influenced the weather. It was a scientific and psychological breakthrough – man had been responsible for the worsening climate, but it was the increasing depression and declining quality of life of humanity what was causing it, utilising the long suspected telepathic field linking all living organisms to the place of their birth, and yet, the governments chose to do nothing. Money could not be made from increasing the happiness of humanity, only destroying it with their ‘green’ fuels and ‘carbon credits’, and so the climate worsened, as did morale.

These were the days that a simple letter, removing a student from her apartment, could cause a violent storm that resulted in the deaths of four people and hundreds of credits worth of damage.

These were the days when happiness would save the planet.

Sunshine glinted off the wet roof of the coffee shop, interrupted by shadows cast from passing air taxis, and laughter echoed from down a nearby street.

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Say It Ain't So

Author : J.R.D. Skinner

“So, are ya?” He’s maybe twelve, wearing blue shorts and a Mexico City Raptors t-shirt, a leg up on the wrought iron patio fence. My lobster is getting cold.

“What?” I ask.

I realize he’s holding up a thin rectangle the size of a credit card, alternating his squints to get the thing’s picture to match my face.

“CEO Benjamin “Crush ‘Em” Hinton?”

I remember signing off on licensing my likeness to FlatMedia last May, but I hadn’t seen the cards in the wild.

I ignore him.

That might have been the end of it, but a serving girl swings by my table.

“Your bill, Mr. Hin – Ben.” She says, smiling uncomfortably.

That’s what I get for flirting with the wait staff.

“It IS you! Could ya sign my card?”

He thrusts a red stylus and the card at me. I accept, mostly just interested in checking out the cheap display on the back. There’s a rundown of my resume; schooling, management experience, time spent on corporate boards.

I tap on New Youth Limited. Not much my rookie year, but the second I was apparently one of “The Resurrection Seven”, a voting bloc that saved N.Y.L. by moving from chemical processes to genetic engineering. I remember the vote, but I don’t remember anyone using the snazzy nickname.

Sliding through the listings, I notice some of them have been marked up in a child’s block script, often with arrows pointing to individual entries, notes like: “Bob may have had seniority, but not the votes!”

“Anywhere?” I ask.

“Sure!” He says with a sloppy grin.

I tap the pen icon.

“Is it true that you punched Director Jules Wilson?”

“Heh, yeah. I mean, Wilson always came in drunk, but he fucked up my presentation. When he started pawing at Kathy Reed I was just looking for an excuse.”

I look up, wondering if I’ve said too much for a kid his age, but he seems to be eating it up with moon eyes.

“You ever gonna work somewhere huge like Kalstock again?” He asks, face imploring. I scribble and hand him back his card.

“Maybe.”

His saucer eyes begin to droop.

“Hey,” I quickly add, “I mean, there’s talk that Kalstock may revisit their policy and have me back for another term, but its hush hush.”

He brightens. I imagine him lording the harmless secret over his friends for a week.

“Tedward says you got lucky with the Talibi Merger because CEO Norma Donald was kicked by Talibi’s oversight expert system. I think he’s a craphead. You’re so smart you must have done something.”

I smile, recalling my best maneuvers.

“I bought shares in a number of Talibi subsidiaries using various fake names. I put out a lot of crosstalk showing a lack of stockholder confidence. The system got nervous. I paid good money to insert low numbers into that week’s financial reports, and the system went to red alert. Things would have been fixed as soon as they saw the next round of numbers, but I used the whistleblower hotline to point out a lie on Norma’s resume involving her university rowing team. With so much bad happening so suddenly the computer thought the world was ending and booted Norma, the only one who understood Kalstock’s real intentions.”

The kid’s smiling the whole time I’m talking, but as I finish he turns and waves to someone. It’s then I see the New Youth product watermark on the back of his neck.

“Mr. Hinton – Carl Nochek, special agent of the Securities and Exchange Commission. You’re under arrest.”

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