by submission | May 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
I first saw the torso during my commute down the interhighway. It lay against the concrete median, looking so much like trash that at first I didn’t recognize it. The car was going fast enough that later I thought I’d imagined the outstretched arms and rather noble head, so I tagged the location and set a reminder to watch for it the next day.
When the reminder beeped the following morning I started recording video on the left side of the car. Traffic was heavy and I didn’t want to take the car off its automation, so I looked ahead down the median while glancing at the locator on the windshield display.
The torso was still there. It had traveled three meters from its location, either on its own or via the blast of air from passing cargo-haulers. The arms were still stretched out from the trunk, as if it was grasping, and I caught a glimpse of tangled dirty black hair.
Later I watched the video. The torso was female. Black hair fluttered, tangled, down past a beautifully sculpted face, the tip of its aquiline nose rubbed raw from the concrete, slim abraded shoulders still draped with remnants of a black blouse, synthetic breasts angled and squashed into the grooved median boundary. The torso ended near the lower back, where hydraulics and control lines snaked out onto grimy concrete. Slow-motion video replay showed its hands and fingers moving.
It looked like a high-level courtesan or attaché. I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten there, perhaps dropped from a pedestrian walkway a quarter-kilometer back. I couldn’t understand how maintenance vehicles hadn’t swept it up. I couldn’t believe it was still alive.
The third day I watched the locator for the torso’s location. I reached out and gripped the steering control with a half-kilometer to go, switched off automation, then disabled the cars chiming manual control alarm. I’d never driven at these speeds, so when I took control the car swerved across two lanes. In the next lane a huge cargo-hauler swerved to compensate, and as I pulled the control to slow I saw its operator, hands in the air, glaring at me through the perspex side-window. As my car slowed the hauler re-compensated, pushed into my lane, and nosed into the median.
The snake-line of cargo pods followed, whipping against the median and then out again. I yanked the control back, slowing further, my heart beating as the hauler again compensated, the connected pods jerked against the median and flailed out into the lane. Two end pods, wheels stuttering and screeching, tipped to the side, and the shock traversed the interlink and pushed the cab over on its side, grinding against the median.
I brought the car to a complete stop, a hundred meters from where the torso had last been. The hauler had come to a stop, too. A thick blue liquid spilled from its forward pods, and smoke rose in wisps from the cab. I unbuckled my restraint and rose on shaky legs from the car, ran down the lane as cars and haulers screamed past on the open lanes. The operator crawled from the overturned cab and systems squelched the fire, so I ran past, through where the blue goo pushed and flowed against the median, and I searched for the torso.
It wasn’t there. I might have miscalculated, or the blue plastic might have engulfed it, but all I saw were the deep scratches and grooves rising in the median —where the torso had clawed its way to freedom.
by submission | May 2, 2010 | Story
Author : C. Clayton Chandler
They came out of the sky like plumes of fire, these green-skinned sickos with their saucers and their death rays shearing the air, burning atmosphere, coasting smooth and cool out of the everlasting vacuum beyond the bounds of gravity, of reality, of everything we’ve ever known or truly believed.
Hundreds of them, thousands of them, a nation of interstellar marauders gunning for our territory, trailing those torrid banners of flame to herald their arrival.
We didn’t have a chance.
Me and Jane, we grabbed the kids and ran. Away from the chaos in the air. Through the chaos of the streets.
Everyone was running. Everyone was screaming. They weren’t screaming anything in particular, really. Weren’t running anywhere in particular, either. Just moving and making noise, flapping their hands and shielding their eyes and acting like I suppose you’d expect people to act in the face of an extraterrestrial invasion.
“Daddy, what’s happening?” Debbie, clutching the elephant doll we just bought her, what, ten minutes ago? Her hair flapping away from her shoulders and tears snaking down to her chin.
“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”
I knew. Debbie knew. Everyone knew what was happening: every cheesy sci-fi movie from the 1950s had just sprung to life. Low-budget nightmares from a hundred years ago were about to walk the streets.
But instead of taking the time to explain all this, I grabbed Debbie’s hand and dragged her back to the museum, where we could huddle and hide between the stuffed wolves and elephants and lions and all the other creatures that once walked the earth. Before there wasn’t any room for them.
We thudded, bounced, crashed off bodies as we careened up the steps. Jane kept pounding my back. Pushing my back. Urging me: Please please please. Willing me forward, but it wasn’t any use. Every earthling on the street was crowded against the doors, shrieking or shouting and shoving, smashing themselves against the bottleneck, desperate to get inside, as if the crumbling marble of a natural history museum could save us.
So I scooped Debbie into my arms. I grabbed Jane’s hand and we turned to watch strange spaceships knifing the smog.
One of them zipped down to skim the street, buzzing over cars and trucks that stood panting with their doors hanging open. It stopped to hover in front of the museum, kicking light off its spinning flanks, and I flinched as I waited for the ray guns to erupt.
Afterburners whooshed. Dust clouded up. The saucer crunched down on the flash-frozen traffic. A door hissed and yawned open and an alien spindled his legs down the ramp.
He stood looking up at us with eyes big as eight balls. His head was like a gourd turned upside down. An overbite showed rows of needle-pointed teeth.
He panned the shriveling crowd with those eight-ball eyes. Those black and emotionless orbs, they swept our gray eyes and knobby faces, our snowpowder wisps of hair. They searched the coal-burned clouds and bare dirt lawns surrounding the museum. And maybe he figured it out. Maybe he guessed that this planet wasn’t worth taking anymore. That the scout reports of green fields and luscious forests were outdated. That we’d squeezed our Earth of every last mineral, every drop of fresh water, every inch of space.
That he was fifty years or so too late.
His shoulders slumped. He turned and headed back to the ship.
Like this was a wasted invasion.
by submission | May 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Steffen Koenig
The ice from last night was melting on the rocky plateau that lay before him. It had been a cold night. Colder than the previous night, and certainly warmer than the nights to come. His limbs were numb and each movement was a source of pain. The horizon was a pale red, hazy strip. The sliver of light-creeping unwieldy over the jagged landscape-submerged the area into a dismal, surreal twilight.
He tried to get up, but his legs were unwilling to obey him. His entire body was shaking and he nearly lost consciousness once again. Thirst-he felt an inexpressible thirst. He moistened his chapped lips with the last few drops of water that he had. His parched throat felt like a grater, causing him great agony each time he swallowed. He hadn’t eaten for days. His stomach was now nothing but a useless, cramped muscle. Slowly, he stretched out his arms and felt around on the stone wall above his head, searching. He would have to climb higher, much higher. It couldn’t be much farther now. Just another few meters.
He desperately clutched onto a rock spur with his hands. With his last bit of energy, he pulled himself up and heaved his wounded body over the ledge. A wave of pain was sent through his body. His breathing was trembling and his lungs burned like fire. He knew that he did not have much time left. The thin air was beginning to take on an acidic taste to it, and he was having trouble seeing. He pushed himself off the ground and lifted his head defiantly.
A ray of sunlight, warm and forgiving, broke over the outer rim of the Valles Marineres and caressed his emaciated face. Suddenly, he no longer felt hunger, nor thirst. His pain-filled body only seemed to be a distant memory and, for just one moment, the light of the rising sun chased the desperation from his heart.
Then, the oxygen alarm of his spacesuit screeched in protest. It did not interest him anymore. One last time, he looked up at the fading stars. Finally, darkness surrounded him, and he greeted it with a smile.
by submission | Apr 27, 2010 | Story
Author : Dale Anson
We captured her javelin just short of a light year out from Earth. Javelins are small ships, roughly 30 meters long and about 10 cm in diameter at the widest point. Eighteen javelins were launched from a rail gun on the moon six years ago. Each javelin contained a small amount of maneuvering fuel for use at its final destination, and housed the downloaded contents of the minds of 64 people.
I’d been shocked when Allison told me the news that she’d been selected for a spot on the javelin mission. Literally millions of people had applied, and the computer programs had run for several months to calculate the optimal crew. I figured I had a better than passing chance since I work as a loadmaster for Virgin, but Allison got selected, not me. Those selected would have their minds installed into a dense carbon nano-structure, capable of holding the petabytes of information that described their minds. I begged with her not to go. Allison put me off, saying this was the chance of a life time.
I took some vacation days to drive her from LA to New Mexico, where she’d catch the flight from the spaceport to Aldrin base. I worked at her, trying to convince her not to go. The computers had secondary lists, I told her, she didn’t have to go. I offered to marry her, but she was determined to go. I held her tight during our last night together.
I dropped her outside the west gate of Spaceport America, she leaned in the window and gave me a quick peck. “I love you,” she said, but I couldn’t see it in her eyes. It must have been the way the morning light cast a shadow across her face. The last I saw of her was when she stepped onto a shuttle bus headed toward the distant buildings.
Technology is funny. When the javelins were launched, it was thought that they were the only way humans would ever be able to reach another star. The javelins are small and light, and the kilometers long rail gun launched them at a good fraction of the speed of light. Nothing invented by humans had ever traveled faster, and technically, still haven’t. It turned out that there is no need to travel that fast after the scientists figured out how to do the brane-bending trick and apply it to a large space ship. I don’t claim to understand the physics, but basically, the ship generates a field that bends space so the starting point and the destination are in essentially the same place, then moves the tiniest amount to complete the trip. Snagging the javelins mid-flight was only a little trickier — bend to a location in front of the javelin, and bend back when the javelin was within the ship’s field, and repeat about a thousand times to reduce the kinetic energy that the javelin was carrying to a managable level.
It didn’t take much for me to wrangle a spot as loadmaster on the ship sent to capture Allison’s javelin. I wanted to be there, and be able to talk to her as soon as her javelin was connected to the ships computer. We’d still have to figure out our relationship, six years have gone since I last talked to her, and she doesn’t have a body anymore.
I caught my breath as the screen came to life. “Allison!” I gasped. “God, how I’ve missed you.”
Her eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. “Dammit. I thought I’d never see you again.”
by submission | Apr 26, 2010 | Story
Author : Cael Majin
C’s hands are buried to the forearms beneath titanium straps, pressing the so tightly that C can feel the small capillaries that have already burst under the restraints, and will form bruises.
It asks again. “What is your identification?”
A grin, although there’s tired sweat stinging C’s eyes. “Come now, chancellor, we’ve been through this.”
“We will,” says the man – god, the man, and clinging so tightly to it – to the left of the processing robot, speaking over it, “continue to go through it until you admit to your crime. State your identification.”
“Can’t do that.”
Chancellor Sutton is tired of this game, leaning through the crackling field of static – it’s attuned not to harm him, he with his microchipped arms – and grasps C’s face in one warm hand. “You have been incarcerated,” he says. “You will never, ever be released from here. When your accomplices are found, they will be put to death. You have no cause, you are no valiant renegade. Tell me your name.”
“I have no name.” The restraints make it hard to shrug. “My friends call me C, and you can too, if you want. Let’s be friends.”
“What is your identification?” The screen asks again, ready with its brands.
“What is does this movement even stand for?” Sutton, bless him, genuinely doesn’t understand. “You admit you are human. Why will you not accept rehabilitation?”
C smiles. It burns a little. “Because I am human. So are you, chancellor. You’re human, no matter how many chips and labels and monikers you parade around to insist you’re not.”
“People have titles. It is the way society is run.”
“It’s still stupid. I have no name. I don’t want one.”
“You have no race? No culture, no ethnicity?”
“Would I be more or less human if I did?”
The processing screen hums quietly behind him. Sutton tilts C’s face, examining the scarred throat and arms. He just looks bemused. “Your surgeon is skilled, at any rate,” he says at length. “The entire medical staff couldn’t make out your gender.”
“Don’t have one of those, either.”
A moment passes, and C can see the confusion and revulsion so thick it’s almost a colour in the air. The metal-pressed bruises throb.
“Human,” C continues evenly, making sure the smile stays, “is something outside of identification tags. I won’t take your brands. I am not a number. I am not an American or a Russian or a man or a woman or a Jew or a member of the working class. I am human.”
Sutton’s frustration resurfaces. “You are a freak. You’ve mutilated yourself.”
“Drives you batty, doesn’t it?”
A cursor blinks on the screen, awaiting input in the form of the string of numbers that used to be tattooed onto C’s neck. It was scraped off; there’s a scar there now. Without it, C can’t even be catalogued into the proper prison cell.
“There’ll be more like me soon, chancellor. People are getting sick of this mass-produced inside-the-box shit.”
“They,” says Sutton icily, “will be executed just like you will be. Make your peace with God. I’d say you have about four hours.”
“Oh, I’m not religious,” C calls cheerfully as the chancellor exits the holding cell.
“What is your identification?” the screen inquires once more before the man snaps it off.
