by submission | Nov 30, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Barber
An agency employed Morgan as an instructor for the alien tourists.
They wanted to visit, but not encased in space suits or lumbering robots. They wanted the genuine experience, blending in without the screaming and gunfire of the first time, so now they wore human bodies like gloves.
Morgan was qualified to teach English as a foreign language, though by an irony of the process, their gloves retained the ability to speak English like a native. He glanced around at faces blank as dinner plates.
The elderly balding man was Mr Frank Belknap. Sammy Beck was the one with the tattoos and wasted veins. Morgan wondered who rented themselves out like this. But then, what kind of alien would want to wear Sammy Beck?
Yesterday, Morgan came back to the classroom with a coffee, and found them all hunched over in their seats, wrists and arms bent like a preying mantis, silently snapping jaws in unison. A reminder that these weren’t people.
It was near the end of the brief course on how to pass as human. It covered the basics of eating, excretion, shopping and sex, hopefully enough to get by for a few days without the locals calling the cops.
They sat round a table in a bar, which Morgan justified to the agency as a practical test. To pass, each had to order a drink, eat some peanuts and use the restroom.
Frank Belknap had a queasy fascination with the drinks on offer.
“Excreted by micro-organisms, you say?” He held his beer up to the light. “But they are dead now? The ethanol kills them?”
Everyone else either gulped the glassful, or sipped and left well alone.
Buying drinks was a success. Perhaps monetary exchange was universal. The eating practical not so much. Peanuts still fell out of mouths.
Morgan took a deep breath. The restroom business had been a nightmare. Just sex then.
“Listen up guys. There are quite a few rules—”
“May I ask a question?” This was Sammy Beck.
“It’s what I’m here for.”
“Funerals.”
Funerals weren’t covered in the course; in fact, Morgan didn’t think they were even mentioned in the handbook.
Expressionless faces swivelled towards Morgan like radar dishes.
He cleared his throat. “You do know what funerals are?”
“Ashes,” said one.
“Heaped earth.”
“The coffin and its perplexing cargo.”
“And you want to see one?” It was better than his vague plan with hookers.
There are funerals all over the city every day. What these graveside mourners made of his class visit he couldn’t imagine.
The priest’s voice rose and fell, just audible over the rain pattering on umbrellas.
“Such mayfly lives,” murmured Sammy Beck.
Afterwards, Morgan let them watch the backhoe filling in the grave. He was proud how they stood in respectful silence, and perhaps that was why he found himself telling them about his dad’s death; how he’d squeezed his hand tight, as if that could stop him slipping through his fingers.
He saw them savouring his words like fine wine.
Tourists offer payment for such conversations now, and snap pictures of coffins.
Their alien flesh endlessly renews itself by clever tricks of the science we envy so much. Is that why they are obsessed by our mortality?
These days they pay top dollar to witness life support turned off, live as it happens. Special rates to watch euthanasia. Also executions, for the connoisseur.
by submission | Nov 29, 2023 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
Driven out of Selene Station by the furious outbursts typical of the frustrated but truly powerless, Sheila and I went looking for space to reflect; we ended up making a mostly silent, three-hour crawler ride to one of the old prospector shelters three craters over. It would do for the night, and maybe for longer – as I’d expected, the power cube and life support were functional, and the clear geodesic dome over the living area was still intact.
The quiet here was a blessing. No-one was knocking on doors to discuss or debate or report the news and the dire predictions that were circulating, and we’d escaped the shrill voices and thinly-veiled hysterics in the corridors. Now we could actually relax, and think.
“I always thought that mutually assured destruction was an urban myth,” she said, eventually. “Something to scare us into trying to be better people.”
“No, the warheads were always there, even though we stopped talking about them.”
“But why now? What went wrong? Were we just blind, not to see this coming?”
“The wars in South America have been going on for a long time. But populists elsewhere started using them as an excuse to crack down on immigration, which oh-so-coincidentally raised tensions with their own neighbours. A few elections, sloganeering and pandering dog-whistles later, and someone felt backed into a corner. I guess they thought a short, victorious war would keep the voters onside. Except that their little expedition triggered another conflict, and that one another, until the whole world’s involved. And then some idiot loses patience and presses the button. Game over. Madness. Maybe we deserved this, for letting it happen.”
“What about us? What happens now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really?” she asked.
“Not beyond the obvious. No more supply runs, we’ll have to make do with what we can produce here. No luxuries for a while, certainly. It’ll be tough, lots of belt tightening. No more advice, either, no suggestions or ideas from Ground Control. And of course, knowing that there’s no going home: I don’t think people are ready for how hard that’s going to hit. More depression, and no meds to deal with it. So more suicides.”
“That’s… pretty bleak.”
I shrugged helplessly.
The Earth rose, and in the dark we could make out the pinprick marks of Armageddon marching across it.
“All we can do is carry on,” I said. “It’ll be a new and much smaller world for all us. Let’s hope we don’t screw this one up as well. We’ve got nowhere else to go.”
by submission | Nov 28, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Think thinly, my daughter,” the mother counseled as they approached the verge.
A few steps ahead, her daughter did not look back, did not break stride.
“The boundary may be abrupt,” the mother cautioned, then warned, “You don’t want to slip over.”
“We’re like bugs at a window. We’ll know when to stop.”
Bugs at a window. The mother’s heart shrank from her daughter’s conceit.
They continued in silence as the land jumbled and pulled away from itself. An active place, a thin place, where the borders between worlds remained uncertain.
Her daughter stopped at a line of house-sized boulders, dark gaps which reached back and drew forth. Her posture told the mother, “We’re here.”
Even the mother could feel it now. Threadbare. There was little to hang onto, little to leverage. Very thin. Very fragile. How could she not worry for her daughter? “Are you able to get a firm grasp?”
“I don’t need much. Not like you.”
The accusation stung. As if she were a hindrance, flawed, the reason her other daughter had disappeared. The mother, because she was a mother, held the hurt close until her heart smothered it.
Capable as they were, the mother knew, her daughters lacked cohesion. They were not tied to this reality as she was by joy and regret. It provided the mother a coherence, a unity of expectation, that her daughters’ youth resisted like a virus. Their identities were as changeable as the other worlds they sought, and into which her elder daughter had looked, then been lost.
In a way, her younger daughter’s vanity was hypnotic. Her surety enough to separate them forever, yet the mother would not let go. Especially in this thinnest of places, this most slippery of spaces. “Hold my hand,” she bid, and her daughter curiously obeyed.
“Where?” the mother asked.
Her daughter motioned with the hand holding her mother’s, so that, together, they were pointed towards the smallest of the gaps between the stone behemoths. “Cozy. That’s what my sister liked.” She led the mother to that verge, the veil pulled so thin she didn’t need her inner sight to mark the crossing. “Well, Mother, are we just bugs? Or do we break some windows and get my sister back?”
There was nothing wrong with being a bug, the mother had learned. Bugs respected boundaries, were hardwired for a certain order. Not her daughters. Not any child. Until they created their own world, they could not freely live in any.
Her other daughter had chosen rashly, passed through, and vanished. It is one thing to see beyond the veil and quite another to fight one’s way back.
The mother felt time and space thinning. She’d been here before. Membranes and passages stretched to breaking. Forced apart by another will, another belief, another reality ready to be birthed.
Her daughter released the mother’s hand, stepped to the verge, and swept aside the veil, the darkness of the passage. A welcoming radiance gleamed far forward. Her boldness blinding. “Light makes might. Let’s go, Mother.”
She disappeared doubt like a dictator, so what could the mother do, but follow and suffer another world for the lives she’d always bear.
The bugs on the other side took notice.
by submission | Nov 26, 2023 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
Standing on the deck of the ship, he watched the dead planet hanging in the void in front of him. It’s lustre had gone, its greens and blues replaced by a uniform dull brown. The automated systems confirmed it. There was no life on the world in front of him, not even microbes. The Earth was completely dead.
He felt sad that his home had gone. Not surprised though. He even felt a little bit of hope, which didn’t quite make sense…
*
The two imposing security personnel led Peter to a small room, plonked him unceremoniously down on a chair and left him there, blinking across a table at the stranger seated opposite.
He still felt groggy, which was no surprise. He’d been in hyper-sleep for a week whilst the vessel underwent its trans-light journey to Argus, the fourth planet in the Ross 128 system. Here he’d planned to start his new job, a twenty-year contract that would set him up nicely for retirement back on Earth. Yet, no sooner had his sleep pod wakened him, than security had grabbed him and taken him here, to this quiet annex of the ship.
“Hello Peter, I’m Rob. I know that you’re still recovering from hyper-sleep, but it’s important that you listen to what I have to say.”
Peter mumbled an acknowledgement.
“So, Peter, your pod monitors your brain during hyper-sleep. Pods are designed for the period of unconsciousness during trans-lightspeed travel to be dreamless. However, your pod indicates that you entered REM sleep. I want you to tell me about your dreams.”
The dream was still strong in Peter’s mind. He recounted all that he could remember, describing arriving at a dead planet Earth.
Rob nodded, made a few notes on his pad and continued.
“There’s a lot about trans-lightspeed travel we don’t understand. Humans cannot sustain such travel while conscious, hence the sleep pods and automated flight systems. Don’t ask me to explain, I’m no physicist, but travelling faster than the speed of light has implications for our ideas of time. It’s a well-kept secret that interstellar travel allows the possibility of information leakage from the future. If a person crosses their own timeline, through a mechanism currently unclear to us, they get glimpses of their future. You’re not the first person to have such dreams. There’s a whole division dedicated to collating these premonitions, this information leakage. We’ve only a partial picture, of course, but it’s clear your return to Earth will be at a time when all life on the planet has been extinguished.”
“So I was dreaming about the future. About my future!” Peter exclaimed, trying to grasp the implications.
“Yes,” Rob responded, “You have to understand, that, in a very real way we cannot prevent, you’ve already returned to a dead Earth. We cannot stop this from occurring, but perhaps we can delay it.”
“How?” Peter asked, with a sense of foreboding.
“We’re going to send you on another trip,” Rob replied. “A longer one. Your final destination will be Earth, but you’ll be going via the Andromeda Galaxy. For you, asleep, the trip will last a hundred years at trans-light speeds. For us, outside your accelerated space-time bubble, a million years will pass. Time enough for us to move humanity away from Earth, perhaps even to scour all signs of life from its surface. Causality is happy, humanity survives. It’s win-win.”
“What about me? How do I win?”
Rob smiled.
“We’d like to thank you for your sacrifice.”
And with that, Peter began his journey back home. The long way round.
by submission | Nov 25, 2023 | Story |
Author: Richard Loudermilk
My child, never worry about how you would endure a catastrophe. You will find it amazing what a person can do when there is no alternative.
Look to the graves in our backyard, and yes, you are old enough to hear this. I took no pride in providing their occupants, but neither did I feel shame. The thieves would have left us to starve.
When I first saw the Man in the Sky, I was hardly older than you. He saved a town in Oregon from a mudslide, and I was fascinated. After he went away, I could listen to your grandparents tell stories about him for hours.
Years later, he came back. When the celebrations ended, some people asked why he left in the first place. I was too excited to care.
The Man in the Sky wasn’t talking, but he stayed busy. Sitting atop Mount Rushmore. Circling the Eiffel Tower. Lifting a train car above his head, perched on one of the pyramids.
Then I saw the interview, if you can call it that. Just him and the camera, answering unspoken questions. As unnerved as I was to see him in street clothes—no costume—his words were worse.
“I will no longer save you, because it never ends.”
He said he waited until everyone he knew was dead, which explained his absence.
“Soon,” he said, “I will begin giving commands. They will be enforced, no matter the consequences.”
When we saw the first command, nobody doubted it was from him.
He wrote it on the moon.
Just the date, followed by five words.
One year: no more whaling.
I had no idea anyone still did that, so maybe we were worried for nothing. By the time a year had passed, most everyone had forgotten, including me.
He hadn’t. The Man in the Sky began sinking whaling ships, and the footage was horrifying. Like a missile, he struck each vessel just below the waterline.
Some put their families on board, thinking that would make a difference. It didn’t, and that’s when I knew we were lost. This being, with unmatched powers, no longer felt obliged to use those abilities to prevent harm to humans. On the contrary, causing harm was not a problem.
The planet was outraged, and the old name no longer fit. Now he was the Fist in the Sky. I won’t tell you what I call him.
The world’s militaries rose to stop him. They couldn’t even slow him down.
The next command?
One year: no plastics and no gasoline.
Our old lives were gone. This was a loss, and we grieved poorly. Work stopped, schools closed, businesses went dark. Riots erupted within a week, everywhere. Our economy—along with all the others—cratered. For two months I kept the practice going, but a dentist can only do so much without electricity.
One of the eastern European nations had an offer. Providing no details, they assured all that their deal would be irresistible, that the Fist would agree and cease his hostilities.
Their prime minister declared he would present the offer in person, on the roof of his luxury apartment, where awaited the former hero.
To my surprise, he showed up.
As soon as he landed, a nuclear device was triggered, obliterating the prime minister, the city, and most of its residents. Horrendous, but this demonstrated just how few options we had left.
The Fist was overhead again that afternoon.
He gave the latest command yesterday, and I expect this is the final one.
One year: no new babies.
