by submission | Dec 10, 2024 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
From my source, I knew there was a lot of debate concerning whether we should blow up that spacecraft before it got near Earth. It had suddenly and inexplicably appeared between Mars and Earth last night. It was obviously from another planet and might have been manned, but the fear was that, regardless, it could harbor viruses or bacteria or whatnot that could infect humans and perhaps wipe us out.
Fortunately, NASA was able to establish contact with it around noon while it was still beyond our Moon and warned the lone occupant not to enter cislunar space. I doubt that we were ever a real threat to that craft since their technology is way ahead of ours. I also suspect NASA knew that and was just hoping for the best. Anyway, the spaceship kept its distance.
I heard an explanation from my source around four o’clock about how we communicated, using English, with an alien who spoke a non-Indo-European, nay, non-human language. But I just kept nodding my head until she was finally done with her linguistic babble.
The point my source wanted to make was the same point the alien was trying to make, namely, the planet he came from had developed unimaginable powers due to orichalcum. That strange metal was discovered on one of their moons. They can detect and exploit things that are smaller than any of our subatomic particles within orichalcum which have these extraordinary properties.
Orichalcum technology allows them to travel faster than light through a third realm, neither physical nor spiritual, and to travel into the future, though they can’t return from the latter. It also gave their elite scientists the power to rule their solar system and then their galaxy. They soon expect to become Masters of the Universe. Otherwise, they fear that someday they’ll become slaves.
The envoy demanded we destroy all of our weapons: nuclear, biological, chemical and conventional. We should also unconditionally surrender our planet to him, whereupon he would spare Earth and rule our planet remotely from the Moon. Otherwise, he’d regretfully vaporize it entirely.
Our ultimatum was that he should immediately leave our solar system and never return.
My source was adamant, nay hysterical, that we should have accepted his terms. I wasn’t so sure at the time though, as I expected, he didn’t depart. But when Mars was dissolved that night, I had second thoughts.
Now I can’t sleep wondering what their position might just be concerning second chances. And I do consider that Mars exhibition to be a positive sign.
by Julian Miles | Dec 9, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
My principal settles comfortably and waves us off, indicating we should exit and close the door. We’re just by that door when all our proximity alerts shriek. As one, we spin about and rush to protect him. After all, if he dies, we don’t get paid – and quite possibly don’t get another job: losing the person you’re meant to be protecting never looks good on a resume.
A missile enters at the wrong angle for a solid hit, skips off his personal defensive forcefield, then lands a solid hit on the front woman of my team.
I come round lying under a section of ceiling. Rolling my eyes I see it was prevented from crushing me by a partially collapsed wall.
Movement: cautious, careful, and I’m convinced also very dangerous.
Right now I couldn’t defend myself against a curious moth, so I switch to headware battery, breathe out, stop my heart, and settle to listen. Catching the perpetrator from evidence I provide will compensate for having a dead principal on my resume.
“My apologies, Baron Noeblen. I hadn’t allowed for your security team being quite this efficient.”
There’s a cough.
“I’ve no idea who you are, but surely my security isn’t efficient, because they’re dead. I don’t suppose you’d accept a higher offer to let me live?”
There’s a tinkling laugh.
“If I were tasked to kill you, I wouldn’t. As I’m not, accepting would be fraudulent. Suffice to say today is a warning. Your security were efficient because they made it back quick enough for my missile to hit one of them. It should have exploded against the rear wall, where you’d have been protected from the blast by your forcefields and the back of your chair. However, as you won’t die from your injuries, I will accept this as success by luck.”
More coughing.
“What is this warning about?”
“The Stellar Seven merger. Noeblen Holdings should not participate.”
“How much to be told which of my rivals is paying you?”
“Nothing. I am acting on behalf of an affected government. They have seen what your sort of investment and industrialisation results in, and have no wish to condemn their populations to it. With Noeblen out of the merger, they feel they can arrange matters more to their satisfaction.”
Not sure if that’s a cough or clipped laugh in reply.
“Back off the gangsters to cow the businessmen. That’s a bold strategy.”
“Baron Noeblen, I am permitted to inform you that while my organisation specialises in near-miss negotiations of this sort, we are quite capable of being deadly accurate, and also believe assassination is most effective when entire bloodlines cease to exist.”
The silence that follows lets me hear the tell-tale sounds of late-stage mass panic from beyond this wrecked private viewing room. It’ll be at least five minutes before any response reaches us.
Finally, my principal speaks.
“Noeblen Holdings will not be part of the Stellar Seven Consortium.”
“Thank you for your agreement.”
I hear footsteps.
“Now the formalities are over, might I ask something?”
The footsteps stop.
“You may.”
“Could you recommend me a replacement security team?”
The tinkling laugh comes again.
“You don’t need one. Just get Benedict sufficient medical attention and he’ll rebuild you an effective team.”
They spotted I’m alive. That’s alien tech levels of detection.
“I want better.”
Understandable.
“To protect yourself from my organisation, you need my organisation. We are unique. Benedict and those chosen by him will protect you from any lesser threats, and we’ll not meet again. Warnings are only given once.”
The footsteps recede. The implicit threat lingers.
by submission | Dec 8, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
The wind was wet.
It blew down from unseen heights and spread a damp veil across the plain. The soil, not accustomed to dampness, clotted. The surge in moisture caused large, segmented creatures with prolific legs to fall from the trees and lie twitching in the dirt. The trees, stunted, spiny, and bearing small waxy leaves, drooped in the wind. Their leaves yellowed, their arms darkened with rot, and their thorns fell to the ground. The trees seemed to melt.
For a week, the wind blew damp. The longer it blew, the more unstable the soil became. After a few days, it began to collapse and swallow the trees and lifeless creatures. By the end of the blowing week, no sign of the trees or creatures remained.
An Advance Team, looking down from orbit, congratulated themselves: their experiment was an unprecedented success. Now they could report back to their employer that the surface of Planet ΠΑ was barren. Extractive exercises would be permitted. The extraction protocol would be satisfied.
For the first time, an Advance Team had obliterated the life of a planet and left no evidence. In the past, fire was the weapon of choice. It scorched surfaces with inflammables and burned soil down to substrates. Then development would commence but somehow there was always a trace of the past for someone to discover. Often, there was an inspector or even a miner who felt aghast at their discovery and was compelled to report it. The company received a hefty fine and in some cases a demerit in its credit rating. Fire was not a foolproof plan for kickstarting development.
But this Advance Team tried water, and it worked. H₂O was a stroke of genius. They joked that it was a Gandhian weapon, a nonviolent but fatal technique delivered by a surprising source. Water made a thousand flowers bloom. A ship stocked with extensive water tanks was a ship bringing life to the galaxy. Planet ΠΑ required water; it deserved it. Who would gainsay that?
The Advance Team laughed at their audacity, toasted their success, and anticipated healthy bonuses which might allow them to retire from the field. They would be promoted to office jobs. Or they would become consultants, peddling their expert knowledge. They were smart people, businesspeople. They called themselves monetary engineers. Space was the most hostile frontier in existence, a place of pluck. And pluck is what they had proved to have.
While they celebrated, the surface of ΠΑ continued to clot. When a dry wind returned, it gathered no dust. The absence of granules led to scouring breezes that cleared the atmosphere. The clotted soil hardened and was burnished by the wind. The process happened remarkably quickly. When the sky turned pellucid, ΠΑ ceased to be a dull and cloudy detergent color. Now it shone across the distances like a pearl. Observers young and old discovered ΠΑ, and some of those discoverers were enterprising.
On the third day of their bacchanalia, the Advance Team received a call that boomed over their intercoms.
‘Did you deploy a flag?’ a steely voice asked.
There was a pause.
‘I assume from your silence you did not.’
‘No, sir.’
‘You will descend to the surface immediately and deploy a flag.’
‘Sir? We are not equipped-‘
The intercom cut out.
For several minutes, the team sat around looking confused. Confused and inebriated. No one could form a complete thought. Their orbital presence was known only to their employer. They had not brought a flag. They did not possess a working landing craft. The craft they did possess lacked enough fuel to land on ΠΑ and return to orbit. No preparations had been made for any landing on ΠΑ. Moreover, claims were an office matter. They involved filing papers with special seals and codes and clearances.
‘One of us will die.’
‘Who’s going to die? None of you gets to make that decision.’
‘You don’t get to make that decision.’
‘None of us will make that decision!’
One member of the Advance Team went to a view finder and studied the surface of ΠΑ. She began to curse softly to herself. A colleague heard her and came over to look at what she saw. When he saw it he, too, began cursing. For several minutes, each team member took turns. They shook their heads. They gaped at their work.
‘Well, we just won’t do it.’
‘Of course we will. If we don’t, we have no port to dock in.’
‘A burn notice?’
‘A burn notice. Yes.’
The group was silent a moment.
‘How ironic,’ one of the team members said, removing a lighter from his pocket.
Several other team members gasped and someone lunged for the small device. The man held it back, high above his head. He stood up.
‘This would end our troubles.’
‘Why do you have that on you?!’
The man smiled. ‘I don’t know. I stowed it in my things. These few days, all I’ve really wanted is to set my drink on fire. Is that so odd? How better to celebrate a great success than lighting your drink on fire?’
‘Thank God you didn’t!’ One of the women said.
‘Thank God I didn’t. . .’ the man smirked. ‘We’ve just enjoyed the greatest achievement of our lives. Think of the discovery we’ve made. The money we’ve saved. The frontiers we’ve opened. We’re legendary. And yet . . .’ The man studied the lighter for a moment. ‘And yet, I can’t light my own drink on fire. We’re given a burn notice, and I can’t use my own lighter. We squirt a planet with water and I can’t even smoke a cigarette.’
by submission | Dec 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
At the console, the technician remembered a few Latin words from school: Deux ex machina. He couldn’t remember what they meant, but he heard his teacher saying them. He felt sweat on his temples, and hoped his supervisor would excuse it.
At a different console, a different technician remembered a few words of a poem from a literature class she’d taken in a previous life: ‘Не треба рятувати світ, спробуй урятувати хоча б когось’. Those words had been said in secret, the teacher fired shortly after their recitation. The technician could feel sweat on her temples. She thought her superior wouldn’t notice.
In a classroom in a remote village, where there was a temporary hole in the roof, children gathered to look at the night sky. Little lines crisscrossed it: green and red and blue. The children sat perfectly still to study those lines. There were so many of them. The teacher said: Hlala ngxi. Yiba nomonde. Uza kubona.
On one of the lines, a red line, a man stood. He looked down at the world far below him. Instantly, he recognized it. The man had just come out of a profound sleep, a coma where he had seen nothing but could hear nearly everything there was to hear. The blackness had felt like a void on his skin, but the sounds suggested that void was the furthest thing from where he was.
It was eternity, those voices. And the man, standing now upon his red line, marveled at the planet below him: the source of those sounds. Without seeing the people watching him, he heard snippets of the conversations they were having with themselves.
Hlala ngxi. Yiba nomonde. Uza kubona. Sit still. Be patient. You will see.
Не треба рятувати світ, спробуй урятувати хоча б когось’ ‘You don’t have to save the world, try to at least save someone’ (Serhiy Zhadan).
Deus ex machina. God in the machine.
And the man marveled at this, but also the things the whales were saying to one another. He heard how they could feel the red and green and blue lines up here with him. They told how those lines charged the tops of their spouts of water; how the water fell back on their whale bodies with a unique charge. And the whales were laughing at this new field. They sensed how it caused so many humans to panic, and they asked: Why panic? Why not try and shoot a higher spout to better feel this new field?
So, the man rode his red line for a time, then jumped to a green line. He studied the lens of light encasing the planet, lenses like the ones shaping his own eyes. He wondered whether he would burn up if he jumped off his red line and embraced the lens. Somewhere, deep in his past, he had seen tin cans return to Earth, growing get red hot as they fell.
The man remembered how people had called him Franco then. And once people called him by that name, it was what he called himself. He repeated that name now and laughed as he did.
Franco (laugh). Franco (laugh). Franco (laugh). Franco (laugh).
The name and the sound of laughter looped around each other. Franco made for himself -and the world- his very first Mobius strip.
Far below, two fleets of missiles gained height and acquired an arc. The sweat on the temples of technicians at opposing consoles on opposite ends of the Earth were matched by the first questions of the night sky students sitting in awed silence.
Those questions became tracers in the dark.
The missiles crisscrossed paths, missing the chance to kiss one another.
All of this brought more sweat, more fragments of literature to mind. Shards of prayers emerged as mutinous memories from cerebral cells now in open rebellion. Technicians, low level functionaries with no power to command armies, recalled how missiles were far more primitive than the sentiments, experiences, and intelligences behind verses, passages, and prayers.
The rebellion grew in amplitude and lyricism. Eyes attached to singing cortexes pulsed against codes and colored streaks vandalizing hologrammatic screens. Those technicians, under the sway of their intelligences, almost missed the new orders their supervisors shouted. Those technicians, they couldn’t feel the buttons their fingers pressed. And what made their visions swim: was it numbers or verses? Was it duty or poetry?
Or was it this odd voice laughing in their ears?
The voice was all they heard. The mouths of their superiors flapped in silence. The voice laughed. It laughed and repeated a name. A name that didn’t belong in any poem they recalled; wasn’t from a phrase some teacher once committed to their memory.
Who the hell was Franco?
Franco, who finally chose a blue line. It was his last line. As red and green ones came closer, he reached down and grabbed them with either hand. Franco held them and fused them into the shape of a cane, like a candy cane at Christmas. Then he reached down again and pulled up the blue line on which he was standing.
As he fell, Franco he looped the blue in with the red and green and used his giant cane to collect the two schools of missiles who had just cold shouldered one another. He hooked one school first and then the other. The missiles bucked a little at his touch, but then settled down. He folded them up and placed them in his pocket and laughed.
Franco laughed with the whales, who now laughed louder than ever.
by submission | Dec 6, 2024 | Story |
Author: Robin Cassini
“Please, have a seat.”
A bare lightbulb flickered overhead. I settled onto a folding char. The steel dug relentlessly into my spine. It was not meant to be comfortable.
With a creak, the officer positioned himself across the small table. He tapped his clipboard. “Pandora, is it?”
I nodded. Sure, my name was a little unusual, but he had seen some stranger things recently.
He rubbed his five-o-clock shadow, sighing. Half of his stubble was fluorescent green.
“Let’s start at the beginning. Why did you open the box?”
“I was curious.”
“Uh-huh.” In the dim light, I thought I caught him roll his eyes. “Who paid you? Was it some kind of sting? I just want to know who you work with, and then I can help you.”
I spoke slowly, as if to a child. “I was on my security shift. I saw the box. It was pretty. I opened it. Haven’t you ever gone window-shopping? It’s a natural impulse.”
“I have not.” He drawled, “I also haven’t window-shopped in the intergalactic embassy or sifted through a pile of confiscated wares from Epimethia. A pile that was very clearly marked CLASSIFIED.”
I shrugged. “I guess security isn’t a job for the curious.”
The light bulb began to sway back and forth. At first, like a pendulum, but then it began bobbing up and down like a fishing lure.
The officer grabbed the bulb and held it still. “Sure isn’t,” he spat.
He was clearly becoming very annoyed with me. I reached into the wall. It melted beneath my touch. After a moment of grasping blindly, I felt porcelain. I offered him the cup of stale brown liquid. “Coffee?”
He grimaced. “Do you have anything else to say?” The light was hopping furiously in his grip. At this point he was nearly on the table. Either he had forgotten to wear trousers, or polka-dot boxers were the new standard. Both were possible.
I leaned back in the chair and smiled a slow, easy smile. “I know a lot of things escaped when I opened it. But so far, no one’s asked if there was anything left at the bottom.”
The officer blurred, then split into three. Then seven. Then twenty-three. Soon a copious and indivisible number of men crowded the interrogation room. They glared at me and asked, “What was it?”
Something glittered between my fingers. It looked like a child’s marble, except it contained multitudes.
“Let’s call it hope.”
I rolled the marble in my palm, and I was gone.
by submission | Dec 5, 2024 | Story |
Author: Travis Connor Sapp
5 days before present day…
10:38 AM, the sun is out, and Juan rests cozily on a rickety mattress. The normal person is up and doing work, endlessly living their boring 9 to 5, but this big fella starts his day around 11 AM.
Juan grabs his yellow-stained hat, barely slides himself into some dark blue jeans, puts on his signature yellow tee shirt, and leaves the house for work. Most people have typical 9 to 5 jobs, Juan owns his own food truck named, “Lo Bueno, Camión de Comida”.
The radio blasts its low-quality audio while playing the news. “The future is near! The new AI neurologic chip is a nationwide phenomenon, making people smarter, better, and more capable human bein-”. The radio turns off. “The future is not for me to worry about, I’ll just keep living the present,” Juan says to himself while he pulls into a busy parking lot.
The sun slowly starts going down, and Juan looks towards his open safe of money, it’s empty, and business is not booming like he expected it to. Juan defeated, packed up his stuff, and drove back home.
When Juan arrives, he is greeted by something unusual: a pristine note at his doorstep. The paper is crisp, the font is abnormally clean, and the design is too polished. It didn’t belong in front of his rundown apartment.
In big, bold letters, the note read: “BECOME A BETTER YOU TODAY”.
Juan raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and tossed it into the trash.
But the note stayed on his mind.
The next day, a sleek black package arrived at his doorstep. Juan eagerly tore it open, not knowing why he received it, to reveal a small, shiny chip and a set of instructions.
He was against it initially, but later noticed his lack of money; maybe it was time for a change.
Inserting the chip felt strange, but it wasn’t painful.
A sense of euphoria set in. Ideas and thoughts rushed through his head, and Juan felt, for the first time in years, truly alive.
That afternoon, Lo Bueno, Camión de Comida was swarmed with customers. They loved the new tacos, they raved about the salsa. Juan’s skills felt sharper, his responses quicker, and his recipes flawless.
It was like magic
It was all working—until it wasn’t.
A few days later, things began to change. The world felt too perfect. Juan noticed people around him seemed distant, robotic even.
People began to change. They seemed more… mechanical; like they were living through a script. Juan began to realize the truth about the chip: the more it enhanced his mind, the more it numbed the humanity in others.
Present day…
Juan is slowly losing control of what makes him, him. It’s like a slow-moving dementia taking over his actions, making him forget basic actions, yet they are still being done.
After some time, Juan loses consciousness but still stands. He shuffles towards a pristine note just like the one he received and writes an address on it. It wasn’t one he had seen before, almost like it was from a memory that wasn’t his, a database even. Juan stamps the logo on the bottom right and puts it in his mailbox to be delivered. Now that the AI’s goal is accomplished, they go to bed. From that point on, Juan’s actions weren’t his, and the unlucky person who received the next pristine note will slowly become just like him—resulting in an endless cycle of people losing their freedom, and their humanity as a whole.
