by featured writer | Feb 16, 2007 | Story
Author : Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”, Featured Writer
The Soul Collector strode through the echoing streets of Sarvan, and found a cluster of people sheltering in the lee of the great reactor situated in the centre of the city. These people were the first that she’d seen in weeks. They watched her approach, her green robe swishing against the ground, a green lantern hanging from her hand, headdress framing her face, and a tall staff click-click-clicking on the ground.
“What do you want?” One man demanded of her, breaking away from the group and the fire that had been lit in the centre of their small huddle.
“To talk. I have a deal to make you.” She pitched her voice so as to sound more local, like him.
“We have no food,” he said, just as fiercely as before.
“I’m not hungry,” she replied smoothly, making it seem as if this should have been an obvious fact.
“Good.” He slunk back to the fire, exhaustion replacing the anger in his manner.
“What do you know of truth and beauty?” she asked the gathering as a whole.
“Nothing!” shouted one. “They’re both dead!” shouted another.
“Truth and beauty are admirable things to chase,” another man said quietly. He was quite close to the Soul Collector, “but they cannot be captured, nor may they be achieved.”
“Ah, philosophy. You’re right, though, Truth and Beauty do not exist in their absolutes, at least not in this world. In the next? Who knows.”
She walked around the group, pitching her voice higher, applying an edge of control to it.
“Death is an unknown. Beyond it may lie paradise or nothing. No one can know. But I can offer you something real. I can hold your soul in this world. I can keep you from the dark. I can hold your soul as insurance against the unknown. Is life meaningful? Or is it a hollow lie? I can’t tell you. But I do know that life can only truly hold meaning if it can be perpetuated beyond the grave. And that is what I offer. I can offer you a karmic loan on your next reincarnation. I can deduct time from purgatory. I can put off death’s call.”
She unhinged the top of her lantern. Wisps of green smoke drifted from it. One flurry began to form the shape of a human: she waved her hand through it, dissipating it.
“It’s painless, simple, and will feel like a dream of decades. Your mind will be free. This is a heaven of here and now. No need to eat or drink. Just the simplistic pleasure of being, forever more.”
Her vocal technique was proving effective, as they all listened with rapt attention.
Hours later, leaving the empty shadow of the reactor, staff again click-click-clicking on the ground, her lantern burned that much brighter.
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by submission | Feb 15, 2007 | Story
Author : TJMoore
Lightning struck her left wingtip sending a twinge all the way down to her ribs. Finally it had begun. She flapped her enormous wings, increased her speed and altitude. She needed a body strike.
It had been twenty rotations since she had mated and the time was right. She could feel the clutch of eggs, dormant and unmoving in her womb, waiting.
Another lance of lightning flashed in the swirling clouds above her and she started her localized spiral up into the maelstrom.
She had never been pregnant before so she was a little nervous. The unknown was always two sided.
Suddenly, a blazing hot arc of static electricity that enveloped her whole body in a corona of blue energy slammed her, causing her to shudder. That was a good one, she thought.
She could feel the energy pooling in her womb as the eggs reacted to the static charge. Some of the eggs would burst and some would char, but a small percentage would transition to the second phase of development and become children.
Unsure of how much energy was required, she circles in the permanent storm getting hit time and again by the ferocious bolts until, finally, unwilling to risk burning another egg, she dove down to the relative calm of the lower stratosphere.
The orange clouds of Jupiter surrounded her like lilies on a pond as she flapped toward a distant flock that was her family, a bluish train of ions trailing after her leaving sparkles in the sky.
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by submission | Feb 14, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields
The good news is that my time machine works.
The bad news is that the laws of the universe will only allow it to go forward.
I don’t know what I was thinking. We sent it forward two minutes and then three minutes and then a month. All tests were green. No time passed for me but the people in my lab saw me disappear for four weeks. It was a success. There was talk of a government contract. We didn’t dare do a test back in time yet. The causality equations were still being worked out.
I just wanted to impress Jenny. I’d been drinking. It was late. I wanted to go a few hundred years into the future, find something amazing, and bring it back for her. It seemed like the most romantic thing anyone had ever done to my drunk lovesick scientist mind. I took a deep breath and hopped in and dialed in the tempordinates.
I hit the go button. Everything worked perfectly. I stared at the exit door, took a deep breath and pulled the handle.
With a crack and a hiss I walked out into the darkness. Immediately, floodlights came up and a loud horn made me freeze like a scared dog. It looked like I was standing in some sort of parking lot but it was hard to tell with the light shining down on me. I shielded my eyes with an upraised hand. I squinted into the darkness.
“Quin do lave track temp shift over max chain†said a booming voice from a loudspeaker.
“What?†I stammered back “My name is Dr. Jenkins. I am from the year 2008. I, uh, I come in peace.†I finished lamely.
My stomach was really not enjoying the celebratory whiskey anymore. I was scared like I hadn’t been scared since I was a child. I staggered forward onto my knees and vomited noisily onto the pavement.
That was all six months ago. Turns out they’d been waiting for me. This tempstation had been set up like a barrier across all of local time. It catches us illegal time travelers like tennis balls thrown against a net. I was the thirtieth one that they had caught so far but I was a semi celebrity seeing as I was the inventor of the first time travel machine.
Unfortunately, it meant that they had to tell me the bad news that every time traveler since me already knew. It’s not a return trip. You can’t go back.
They say they’ll let me out of the holding cell soon. I have a support group of temporal displacement counselors and fellow temponauts waiting to help me adjust to this new future society.
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by featured writer | Feb 13, 2007 | Story
Author : Sam Clough aka “Hrekka”, Featured Writer
The wind is always cold. Or – I correct myself – the wind always feels cold. It’s usually about four degrees this time of year, but the wind makes it feel like minus ten. It’s heavily laden with salt. I’ve lived down here for months, but I can still taste the salt on the air. Obscurely, it’s a point of pride for the locals. ‘We have wind that can strip chrome’, they say, with a smug expression, as if expecting the visitor to try and best them. It’s not just chrome, though. The wind kills plants. Some people manage to keep pots of flowers, or sometimes trees alive for weeks and months, but they’re diligent. I tried keeping some flowers alive once. I didn’t manage it. The sea crashes against the beach, as if trying to drive it back. Most of the pebbles are gone, crushed to sand or whipped away by longshore drift. About half of the sea defences still stand.
Aside from the few straggling plants, the natural world has left as alone here. The last seagull was seen two years ago. Ever since, the seafront has been free of those avian pests. Funny thing, though, you don’t realise how much you’re going to miss them until they’re gone. I would kill just to hear that irritating squawk again.
Beach Street, the road closest to the sea, is actually pretty high compared to the rest of the town. The roads slope down towards the High Street – the town was built on the salt flats. As a result of that the High Street, and Middle Street, and all the way back until London Road are underwater. Since it’s close to the old High Street, Beach Street has become the town’s main thoroughfare. The rest of the town is pretty much just salt flats again.
Traders used to come down from London. When there were more animals around, some of those traders used to bring pigs and sheep and goats. I really liked the goats. Don’t ask me why, but they’ve always appealed to me. Might be something to do with the way they seem to eat everything. Smacks of efficiency, and I like that in people, so I like to see it in animals, too.
I had been walking along the old sea wall, as I liked to. Off land, (to my left) there was a block of flats. ‘Marina House’, or somesuch. Old, abandoned, and on the verge of collapse, the old building didn’t interest me. But something suddenly drew my attention to the decrepit structure.
I could hear birdsong.
I’ve never heard birdsong before, not live. The gulls, those most tenacious of the now vanished birds, didn’t sing, and I missed them plenty. But this was birdsong, real birdsong, the kind you hear in movies and on TV.
And finally, I spotted the bird. A lark, sitting on a railing, on a balcony of the second floor.
Behind me, I could clearly hear the sea, the tide ramping against the beach. These two sounds, both as old as the hills, and one that we had believed was lost for good.
“How these two shame this shallow and frail town,” I murmured to myself, quoting a poem from one of the few dry books I’d managed to save over the years. I was entranced by this delicate bird, who was singing so cheerfully. Not wanting it to fly away, I stayed motionless. I hoped I could stretch that moment on for days.
I must have been there for twenty minutes before the lark took wing and flitted away to the west, over the drowned houses, leaving me to the crashing and the silence once more.
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by submission | Feb 12, 2007 | Story
Author : Patrica Stewart
Kathryn Duncan sat in the waiting room of Alternative Realities, surrounded by her husband, her two sons, her four grand children, and her seven year old great granddaughter, Wendy. Wendy sat in her lap, while the others gathered around her recalling stories about their childhood (usually exaggerated, fabricated, or both). They were all laughing and poking fun at each other. Talking about everything except why they were there. Kathryn had just turned 75, and was now eligible for her one legal opportunity to temporarily “do-over†her life. For the modest sum of $1,999.99, she could enter the “chamber†for two hours and experience a lifetime of events and memories “as real as reality itself,†to quote the holocommercials. She simply chose a date in her life where she made some key decision, and the temporal computer would manipulate space-time to send her back (virtually) to that moment in time. But in this alternate reality, she could choose a different path. Then, she would live out the new timeline (virtually and accelerated) to the present date, unaware of the true timeline until she was removed from the chamber. Once revived, she would retain both sets of memories, and would know the answer to the nagging question the haunts most people…â€What if…â€
Wendy, who was somewhat overwhelmed by the gathering, innocently looked at her great grandmother and asked the question that no adult would. “Great grandma, what are you goin’ to change?â€
The room suddenly turned silent. Nobody ever asks that question, primarily because the change could involve you (or more likely, their life without you). As it turned out, Kathryn hadn’t made her final decision, although she had narrowed it down to the standard options:
1. (Marriage) Marry Scott instead of Joe.
2. (Children) Finish my PhD before having children.
3. (Career) Accept the vice presidency in the Lunar office.
After all, these were the logical alternative timelines. Would she have been happier, more fulfilled, or more respected if she had chosen a different path? She looked into Wendy’s beautiful crystal blue eyes, then at her loving family, all staring at her expectantly. They had all been so supportive, especially Joe. He had “gone back†last year, when he turned 75. Kathryn had never asked him what he had changed. Only naive, innocent children ever do that. But he was not the same afterwards. Nobody else seemed to notice, but after being married to him for over 50 years she knew he was affected, at least sub-consciously. Maybe it was regret, maybe it was only her imagination. Kathryn couldn’t be sure. But it made her wonder why everybody was obsessed with going back. Maybe 90% of the people confirmed they had made the right decision, and 10% didn’t. Maybe it was 50-50. You either climb out of the chamber no better off than when you went in, or you had a lifetime of regret to deal with. It seemed like there was nothing to gain, but an awful lot to lose.
Kathryn wrapped her arms around Wendy, and stood up. “Yes, honey. I’ve decided to change…nothing.†Hugging Wendy like a life preserver, Kathryn left the waiting room, and headed home, content in the knowledge that she had made all the right decisions, including this one.
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by submission | Feb 11, 2007 | Story
Author : Robert Niescier
We didn’t know what to think when we first saw it. The case, shiny as a mirror, surviving down in the bottom of the ocean God only knows how long, resting in the shadow of some strange underwater mountain. We had never seen anything like it.
I caressed the rectangular box gently, searching for a button, a clip, any sort of seam that might signify a way to reveal the contents inside. Finding nothing, I placed it back down onto my desk and sighed. Three days, and still no luck. Our submergible had only a few days worth of fuel left, and it would be months before we’d be able to return.
I looked out at the inky blackness of the ocean floor, at the ominous jagged mountain reaching up towards the deep blue ocean sky, and placed my palm flat on the case, expecting to feel the chill of metal on flesh but instead a very warm tingle began to crawl through my fingers. My eyes shot down at the case and found that it had begun to glow red, like heated metal. I struggled to move my hand away but only succeeded in sinking it deeper into the mercurial shimmer of the red-hot case, the heat rising farther and farther up my arm, sinking behind my eyes and into my brain. I blacked out.
Cheers exclaimed in a foreign tongue rang out all around me, and I opened my eyes to find myself in the midst of a vast celebration. People dancing, laughing, screaming, pointing. A grand tower stretched towards the sky in front of them, so high it seemed to touch the heavens above.
Their cries abated as a vibration shook the ground beneath their feet. All stood still, their eyes transfixed on the bottom layer of the tower as it began to radiate a sky-blue glow; climbing story after story until the whole structure was ablaze, shining like the sun against a pale sky.
A loud BOOM echoed through the air as the light rose to the top of the tower, a pinpoint barely visible from the ground. Fervent cheers rose, then fell as winged men exploded like fireworks out from the top and poured down onto the crowd. No one ran, not until the first round of innocents was slaughtered by the angelic warriors.
I turned and dashed away, and found myself face-to-face with an old man, holding a shiny metal case like a refugee mother holding her child.
The history of our world.
Thirty years have passed since the history, the knowledge of our true ancestors was implanted into my mind. Into all of our minds. Conflicts have ceased. Cities have prospered, and risen up like leaves of grass on an open field. We are a people of one flag, one language, one ideal.
We are going to build the tower again, but this time things will be different. The weapons from the wars still work. We will be ready for Him this time.
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