by submission | Mar 21, 2010 | Story
Author : Jacqueline Brasfield
I was 18 years old when they’d captured the first howlers.
Mom and I stayed up to see the first footage of them flash across the TV screen on the 11 O’clock news, blurry images of hollow-eyed men and women wearing orange jumpsuits, their arms hanging limply and obediently at their sides. I felt a pang of disappointment. From all her stories I expected them to be fierce, savage, proud creatures struggling and straining at their chains. I expected them to be warriors. They looked no more savage than my science teacher at school. Mom said I shared a connection to them. I didn’t know what she meant.
On the screen, three figures stood proudly at a podium adorned with microphones from various news agencies. My mother spit down at her feet when the camera panned over their faces – two men, one woman, all impeccably groomed. One of the men wore a military uniform decorated with medals, and it was he who spoke to the camera.
“We’ve prepared a small statement regarding the hybrids and then we’ll move to your questions.”
My mother spit again and took a long swallow of gin straight out of the small glass bottled held in her hand. I’d never seen her drink before.
“It is with great pleasure that we can confirm we have successfully located and retrieved all of the hybrids. The last remaining rogue tribes were identified and brought into protective custody for their integration into the United States Military Evolutionary Hybrid Unit. The success of the device used to free these hybrids from their condition continues to prove effective and provide a stability and peace of mind these individuals will not have ever known. All of them have been offered training and assistance and the opportunity to serve this great nation, and we can confirm we have 100% uptake on this offer. The public is safe once again – if not safer. We believe these hybrids will make the finest soldiers in the history of the United States military forces. My colleagues and I will take your questions now, on the understanding we cannot reveal information that is classified.”
Immediately, a flurry of questions came from the mob of journalists off camera. My mother turned off the TV before I could hear any of the replies.
“Why’d you turn it off?”
She sat there in the dark for several long seconds before answering me.
“Because they’re lying, Ben. About everything. All the stories I’ve told you. All of their history. Does any of that suggest to you that they would willingly give in to slavery and bondage? That they would agree to serve those who rape the land, and poison the water and kill the innocent?”
I opened my mouth to speak, to tell her no I did not think they would, but she was quick to interject.
“And do you think they’ve really caught all of them?”
She looked over my shoulder as she said the words, eyes fixed on something behind me. And that something began to move, causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up like orderly soldiers.
“Mom?”
I turned quickly to look behind and stood frozen at the sight before me. A woman more bone than skin prowling forward on bare feet. Her movements were alien and animalistic and savage. She spat haughty words at me in Russian that I didn’t understand.
I thought her the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my life.
“Meet the resistance Ben,” my mother murmured. “Meet Katja, your mate.”
by submission | Mar 20, 2010 | Story
Author : Chris Deal
It’s the only story the news is talking about today: twenty years since the fall, since the wall came down. My boy asked me if I remembered it, where was I when I heard it had come down. Told him I was right where he was, asking my father what it meant, the wall coming down, the people separating. I told my boy, I told him my dad said it meant we could be together again, undivided by petty differences.
My boy, he said my dad sounded like a smart man.
He was, I told him.
What I didn’t tell him was that I was lying. I wasn’t sitting with my father when the wall came down. I was there. I held a sledgehammer in my young hands and I swung that thing over and over, until my muscles ached of acid and my shirt was soaked with sweat, clinging to me in the cold night.
What I didn’t tell him was that I was on the other side of that wall.
That wall wasn’t to keep people inside, but to keep them out.
What I didn’t tell my boy was my father, he remembered the first wall, way across the ocean, the remnant of another war, long before the last one. One country divided from itself, not one country cut off from the rest of the world. Families separated, not entire cultures. He knew his mother wasn’t born in here, but he never asked where I met her. He never asked where we lived before him. There was the way it was now, the way it was before, but he never cared about anything from then. Him, he had an entire life ahead of him, an entire world to see. He would never have to see his homeland tear itself apart, people of a different color removed from their homes, sent to a land they only knew as stories from their parents, grandparents. The war in our borders was a history lesson for him, not real life. He would never have to kill to preserve what was right.
My boy grew bored of the news, and he started surfing the neural-net.
One day, he may ask more about my father. He may ask about the before. He might ask about the wall that ran the full course of the borders, the guards who patrolled in jeeps with gauss rifles, the camps we sat in before being dumped on the other side, the constant broadcasts from the leader, the man who put an end to heterogeneity and proclaimed through homogeneity we would better ourselves, the man who declared war on the other, who defined that there was an other, the man who became a martyr before the revolution was complete, before I held that hammer and brought down that wall.
When my boy asks, I’ll tell him. For now, though, he can keep on as he is.
I’ll remember for him.
by submission | Mar 14, 2010 | Story
Author : Petter Skult
“How was the game?” Ann asked as Jeremy crawled through the hatch. She had to wait with the answer until he had pushed it close, metal screaming.
“It was awesome!” He replied breathlessly, as he threw his bag off his shoulders and went directly for his cot to change clothes. “Jenny and Ahmed’s characters planned on having a garden party for Jia – that’s Mark’s character – on account of her getting that promotion.”
Ann chuckled lightly, continuing to fry that morning’s catch, the smell of meat permeating the whole container.
“Hey mom, what’s a ‘water cooler’? My character is supposed to go there to meet all of his new workmates, but I have some trouble imagining it.”
Ann explained what a water cooler was, and for good measure what it meant to ‘shoot the breeze around the water cooler’. Jeremy listened intently while gathering his .22 rifle, clearly making mental notes. She tried to keep the ruefulness out of her voice. By the time she was finished he was ready to go. He was already looking a bit glummer. Ann felt sorry for him, having to go out there again. When she had been his age…no use thinking of it.
“When’s the next game?”
Jeremy lit up.
“We talked shifts; I’ll be on night for the next week, Ahmed, Jenny and Mark are all crazy as well, but we thought Wednesday the week after that.”
“That sounds wonderful, dear. Be careful up there now.”
“Of course mom. See you tomorrow!”
Jeremy crawled back topside for his evening guard shift. Ann continued frying the ever-grey little pieces of rodent, stirring them in the sudden silence with her wooden fork. She was thinking absently of water-coolers and garden parties and promotions and regular jobs. Things that her children might only know through make-believe, role-playing games they play when they get together for those brief moments when there was no alert, no danger, no attack.
Still, she was happy they were allowed those moments of escapism into a world so completely foreign to their own.
by submission | Mar 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Credentiality
Cynthia was reluctant when it came time to leave the Machine Monastery. Nobody had predicted that machines would be Buddhists. Crazed killers, perhaps. Indifferent to humanity, perhaps. Cold calculators, almost certainly.
She had learned the tactile pleasures of sanding the walnut sides of an imperfect jewelry box she had made herself with hand tools. The visual pleasure of brushing a finish with a wet edge.
The empty contentedness of sweeping a floor. The ragged exhaustion of breaking out old concrete sidewalks with a sledgehammer and hauling them to a skip. The gleam of a toilet scrubbed clean.
The machines had done all these things, mostly better than humans could, and had found the same peace from their lessons. Cynthia would go back to her life in the city, where her finance skills would pay the bills, and where machine and human craftsmen continue to do their jobs with the labor-saving tools that made mass production cheap. But perhaps in the summer she would take another vacation to the mountains east of town, away from the noise, and rejuvenate with the joys of manual labor.
by submission | Mar 12, 2010 | Story
Author : William Garnett
The day the universe stopped expanding was the same day all the traffic lights failed to turn. But it wasn’t just the traffic lights. Cars didn’t start. Dogs didn’t bark. Radios were silent. Microwaves paused. Automatic drive-thru teller machines didn’t take cards and didn’t dispense any money. Nothing moved. All was at a stand still, and no one noticed because no one could think or remember, or even forget. No one could point it out to anyone else.
Then the universe began to contract. But no one really noticed it, because with the contraction of the universe, everyone’s mind and perception also began to shrink, so that any forward thought process ceased to occur and so people regressed and slid back along the evolutionary scale and grew hair in places where there had been none. They tore down the cities and set them on fire. They tore down each other in ways they had read about but had thought they would never do again because they had evolved to a point where popping brains out of a neighbor’s head was something only beasts did. But they were beasts now and couldn’t think straight or forward anymore. Blood ran thick on the broken sidewalks–on all the failed and burned infrastructure.
Men fought each other over women and killed each other’s young to ensure the advancement of their genes, which was ridiculous, because everything was regressing and going backwards so that the very idea of advancement itself was impossible, and the genes themselves would never survive. But they did it anyway. The blood lust that had never fully left the species reemerged to full strength as bodies were dismembered and emptied of their guts.
The universe continued to shrink, and as it shrank, all life regressed to globs of cells, and then just to cells, and then just to tiny strings of mindless amino acids. Eventually, everything was reduced to molecules, and then atoms, and then quarks, and strings, and then nothing.
The nothing regarded itself and found it paradoxical that it could do such a thing, and as it regarded itself, it found itself lacking and then once again it attempted to make something out of itself.
