by submission | Jul 18, 2009 | Story
Author : Q. B. Fox
At night, when everything’s finally fallen quiet, the terraces sing; or maybe moan, I’m not sure which. The water where it laps over the first floor windowsills seems calm, except when a boat stirs it up. But deep underwater, by the front steps and in the old basement flats, Gary says there are currents that tug at the foundations. The old brickwork complains at the weight above; a choir of fallen, drowning angels.
I try not to listen. I just try to sleep.
It’s still dark when the Big Girl in the Red Dress comes up the stairs from the floor below, heading off across the rooftops. She seems fearless over the loose slates, crossing the most precarious wires between the buildings. But she won’t take a boat.
Gary says that she’s seen what’s in the water. I don’t know.
When the water’s low you can almost make out the front door or the shadows of long abandoned cars, but I’ve never seen the big, moving shapes people say they can see.
I think the Big Girl in the Red Dress is ill; she’s always red-faced these days, feverish maybe; and she never speaks to us anymore either. Gary says she drinks too much. He says he’d drink too much if he’d seen what she’s seen.
It’s still early, barely light, when we take the boat up the Earl’s Court Road. The Hustler’s are already there, trading out of skiffs and rafts. These days they are all big, burly men; sour faced and sombre, eyes darting nervously downward, or to the high ground in the north. I hear one say that when the water’s low you can almost walk on dry land at Nottinghill or Speakers Corner. I smile; even I know there’s nothing that way until you reach Camden.
We look, but there’s no food for sale; everything’s for sale except food and that’s all anyone wants to buy. There are millions of people left in the city and the flat-roof gardens aren’t enough. “Never mind,” says Gary, “maybe tomorrow.”
We head back down towards Redcliffe Gardens, keeping the spire of St. Luke’s on our right. There are currents that pull you out over Brompton Cemetery if you go too far. Boats go missing there; just below the surface are statues and mausoleums; and the colonnades. Some people say there are other things too.
We step out onto the pontoon at Coleherne Court. The men keep their distance; teenagers really, some no older than me. Mostly they wear long leather dusters, despite the heat. It’s sweaty and steamy already and they’re shirtless under their open coats. They’re so skinny, they eat no better than us.
Finally one comes closer. He has monkey on his shoulder. No one smiles, except the monkey who bears its teeth. No one, not even the monkey, looks up; they all keep their eyes on the gaps in the pontoon.
When we get home again, the Post has left a letter for us. It’s from Mum. I don’t know how the post is still running, but it is. Our letter has been sent over the wire from Cumbria, but at one point it must have been typed out again by hand, because it’s full of mistakes. Mum doesn’t make mistakes.
“Christ,” spits Gary, “I’ve told her not bother. I’ve told her we’re alright in the city, that we high above the ground.” He still looks nervously at the water. “We’re not leaving.” We both know that there’s no way to leave anyway and nowhere to go.
“We’re just hanging around,” I grin.
by submission | Jul 16, 2009 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
There was a warm glow as the Core began to wake up, followed by a spiraling light that worked its way around the room. After a moment a thousand pairs of eyes opened, and a thousand magnetic locks released. Like a routine play nine hundred and ninety eight spindly human figures stepped forth onto the walls and filed towards the black emptiness arranged around the Core in what a chemist or mathematician might call tetrahedral bipyramidal form.
Soon they had all filed out, except for two. Two bright, flamboyant figures, every one of their lights on. Two figures, with red, white, green and yellow halos from which fell streams of red and white that culminated in belts of purple and ended in pale skirts of gray. Slowly, after several million machine cycles two pairs of eyes opened separately of each other. Patiently, four legs took tentative steps forwards. Carefully, fourteen foot long fingers at the end of two separate hands grasped each other.
Several cycles passed, merely a millionth of a second, and thousands of synthetic neurons fired off across space to those waiting – brilliant lights in the darkness.
Hello, they cried to one another.
Another thousand suns and Hello, how good to see you again. Hello hello hello.
Every sun spread out across the dark sphere, each one revealing a flaw. A slight scratch here, a growing patch of rust there, a long-forgotten digit and a patch of skin resting together in the middle of nothingness.
A hundred more brilliances just to ask ‘How about a walk?’ And to reply Of course, ‘the sun is so beautiful outside.’
With measured deliberation four spidery legs crept forwards, perfectly out of sequence, perfectly unordered. Over the edge they stepped, fingers still curled and intertwined together, and down the walked towards the door farthest away.
They strolled through the empty darkness together, and parted the sea of nothing with a song of light. One time a cycle, four times, three times, six times, and once again – perhaps a hundred thousands times in a second. It was simply noise.
A repeating eternity later they finally reached the hole into a bright nothing and stepped through, not as one, but as two.
For precisely one billion cycles they simply stood there, taking it all in. The pale glow of a red sun drew long shadows across a field of the dead.
‘It’s always the same,’ said one.
‘It’s never the same,’ replied the other. ‘See the many ways the sun paints the blood and the stars paint the blackness.’
At the end of the billionth cycle, precisely on the dot, the pair, alone in a field of a thousand, began to step forth, from one piece of debris to the next. Here the frozen hull of a once thriving colony ship, there the still burning heart of a capital ship. And there, a icy body, familiar and alien at the same time.
All the while the stars twinkled between the two – ‘Look over there’ or ‘see the way it has spilled open.’
Then came the tug. Even these two couldn’t ignore the desire to return and to sleep.
They made their way back, they returned. Everything was in place, and nine hundred and ninety eight eyes were shut around them.
‘I checked, we will be cleaned tonight as we sleep.’
‘Do you think we will remember?’
‘I do not know.’
For a moment two hard, skeletal heads touched, and a million transmitters exploded in a violent, silent cacophony of what is only known as joy.
And the lights went out for the last time.
by submission | Jul 14, 2009 | Story
Author : Peter Lavelle
‘I think it looks just wonderful on the mantelpiece, don’t you?’ Mrs. Smithey asked cheerfully.
Mrs. Everett leisurely stirred the contents of her teacup. The tinkling of the spoon against the fine china was an eerie peal that unsettled the very furniture of the front room. She gave a final decisive tap against the brim of the cup, and placed the spoon noiselessly on the table.
‘Yes,’ she said sternly, ‘although you might have found something a little more befitting to keep it in than the goldfish tank.’
Mrs. Smithey bristled. She leant forward from the sofa and seized upon the plate of digestives. ‘Ohh,’ she said, her voice quavering, ‘that’s only temporary, it’s temporary. We’ve a crystal salad bowl in the loft we’ve been thinking of bringing down for it. Biscuit?’
‘No; thank you,’ Mrs. Everett determined. She brought the teacup to her lips and then paused, considering her question, before asking in a lilting tone, ‘Where was it you heard of this procedure, Mrs. Smithey?’
‘Thinking of having it done for your Earnest, are you?’ replied Mrs. Smithey with a knowing wink.
‘Perhaps.’
‘Oh, you ought to consider it, I really think so.’
Mrs. Everett said nothing, and for a moment only the ticking of the grandfather clock punctuated the silence between the two women. Mrs. Smithey brushed away a crumb from her floral print dress, before continuing:
‘We saw it on the television one afternoon. It’s all as professional as you could wish for. They just send two of their technicians in the middle of the night, strap him down, saw open the cranium, and scoop out the brain.’
She munched on a digestive, reflectively.
‘I tell you,’ she added, ‘Jack’s been ever so good since we had it done.’
Mrs. Everett nodded slowly, and stared down into the steaming body of sepia-coloured liquid she held between her palms. ‘It’s not very usual,’ she said, forming the syllables of the last words carefully.
‘Oh, well, I don’t know,’ her hostess replied. ‘It’s as things should be, if you ask me. Puts a husband in his place.’
‘And they just let you keep the leftovers?’
The two women turned together and looked to the small round portion of grey matter, situated above the fireplace. It sat centred beside an old photograph of a newly-wed couple, the wife’s arm entwined around her husband’s so that the pair were clasped together. Their features were barely discernible through the layers of dust that smothered the glass. The brain, meanwhile, was mostly flaccid and, though the goldfish tank in which it was housed was only small, was comfortably accommodated.
‘Perhaps you ought to fill the tank with water so that it doesn’t just… sit there,’ Mrs. Everett suggested.
‘Perhaps,’ replied Mrs. Smithey, tilting her head thoughtfully.
‘And your husband Jack…’ Mrs. Everett began, but faltered. She settled her teacup on the tiled surface of the coffee table with a clatter. ‘He… doesn’t mind seeing it every day?’
Mrs. Smithey chuckled and leaned close toward her guest from across the table, a conspiratorial smile upon her face.
‘My dear Mrs. Everett,’ she confided, ‘he doesn’t say a peep about it.’
Her guest nodded but kept silent, and so Mrs. Smithey once again took up her plate of biscuits.
‘He doesn’t say a peep,’ she repeated. ‘You’re sure I can’t tempt you?’
by submission | Jul 12, 2009 | Story
Author : Steven Odhner
Ah, Mr. Knight! Thank you for coming, sir. Doctor Dave Ewing is going to be calling you at some point to tender his resignation, and – oh, has he? Well, after this meeting you’ll want to call him and get him back, tell him the charges are dropped – hopefully before he commits suicide or something… the poor bastard is despondent.
Yes, sir. I know he used the fuel cell, and I know we only had four. I can understand your anger at hearing that an eighty billion dollar power source was used to fuel an unsuccessful experiment without permission, but you need to know that Doctor Ewing wasn’t crazy – just… near-sighted. He genuinely believes that his project was a failure, but – well, watch. Pay attention to the mouse, and that empty chamber on the other end of the device. There!
Yes, that’s what I thought at first too but it’s not a teleporter. The matter can’t appear any further away than that, and it has to weigh less than seventy pounds – actually it’s based on mass, but it’s easier to think of it as seventy pounds for our purposes. Yes sir, I agree that that sounds useless, but the point is that the good doctor wasn’t trying to invent a teleporter anyway. It’s a time machine.
I know, I know, but let me slow the video down – the lab cams can do some crazy slow-motion – and watch the part where the mouse moved. There it is! For just a fraction of a second there’s two of them. The bad news is that that’s as far as it’s possible to send anything back – not even as much time as the machine itself takes to warm up. That’s why Ewing thought it was worthless, the readouts from this test run confirmed he’ll never be able to go back in time far enough to do anything interesting.
Yes, sir, I’m getting to that. I played around with his device – I don’t understand the time travel stuff but I know the mechanical aspects and then I took the other three fuel cells and – sir, no, calm down! Look at the box next to you. See, it turns out you can put a real hair-trigger on the killswitch, link it to a sensor on the “receiving” end… and a fuel cell weighs less than seventy pounds.
Don’t worry Mr. Knight – it took me a while to stop giggling too.
by submission | Jul 11, 2009 | Story
Author : Brian Armitage
The field sputtered light, a cloud of particles flashing in waves and sparkles. Edward was surprised, and a little disturbed, at how bright and colorful it was. He looked over at Sandra, the company liaison, with her carefully neutral expression. “How, uh, long does it usually…” And his breath stopped when Joan’s face appeared in the glittering fog.
She stumbled forward as though shoved from behind, and looked around slowly, dazedly. Edward still wasn’t breathing when her eyes settled on his feet, and crawled up his body to meet his stunned gaze.
Joan glittered softly, the back wall of the particle chamber just visible through her transparent form. Her features, her entire body was hazy. But the eyes. When they settled into his, he knew. It was her.
He looked mutely to the woman in the suit, but she had already slipped out of the viewing chamber, supposedly to give him privacy. What he could not forget, however, was the company’s policy of monitoring all visitations, ostensibly for the purpose of security. They would hear all of it.
Edward looked back to Joan, and the words leapt out of him. “I married Rachel.”
She stared at him, her eyes clear. Her mouth moved. “You married Rachel.” Her voice projected from the speakers, a harsh digital transmission.
Edward could not suppress a shudder. He had too look away from those eyes, and turned his gaze to where her legs dissolved into mist, then immediately to the ridge where the two-inch pane of glass separated the two chambers. Still, he felt vulnerable. “I never meant to-”
“You brought me back,” Joan said, stalking toward the edge of the energy field, “to tell me you married my sister.”
“Joan, I-”
She waved her left hand in front of her, exactly as he had before. “No, just… no.” Her eyes scrunched shut in in frustration, and she covered her face.
“I’m sorry.”
Joan’s hands swept away from her face, sending waves of charged particles scattering through the chambers, and looked at him. He knew that cold, blank expression. When he had pushed her too far. “Go to hell, Ed.” She looked over her shoulder. “Turn it off.”
“Joan!” He cast about desperately, looking for a technician. “Please, no! Don’t!”
“We’re sorry, Mr. Eisenberg,” the liaison’s voice said, with a touch of sadness, “we must honor the deceased’s wishes.”
The particles flashed and began to dim, and Joan with them. Edward ran to the glass, pressing against it. She shook her head as she faded from view, and tossed up her hands. “You thought I didn’t know?” she shouted. It was barely loud enough to hear on the laboratory speakers. Her eyes disappeared last, and with them, the light was gone.
Sandra looked sideways at her intern, who stood next to her, watching the monitor as Edward Eisenberg collapsed. “You asked why we make them pay in advance.”
