by submission | Sep 28, 2023 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
They came because we were killing ourselves; our conflicts had become pervasive, global, and more intensive, but paled in comparison to our war with the planet itself.
Their ships moved smoothly into the Lagrange points, and calming broadcasts on every frequency and in a score of major languages preceded Their first physical contact. A pilotless shuttle brought a robotic Ambassador down to Earth.
“Your cultures are already dying,” it said. “Soon there will be nothing left but twisted remains buried in the dirt. Let us help you.”
Long discussions and introductions followed. It allowed itself to be examined, and proved to be made of an unmetal impenetrable to physical means or remote sensing. Its alien provenance seemed assured.
Then it announced that They could help us. It taught a group of our greatest scientists the principles necessary to make Cubes, quantum tools that produced no waste but energy, so that we could save our planet from ecological catastrophe.
And when we had learned this great art, our tech men turned them into weapons that made those of the Nuclear Age look like firecrackers.
“Why have you done this?” it asked Earth’s representatives.
“We must protect ourselves,” we said. “We don’t know what lies behind your altruism. Some say we are just calves being fattened for the slaughter.” Of course, that was only half the truth; the entrenched interests in the military industrial complex had needed a way to remain relevant, and paid off enough politicians to see their immediate futures secured. But it kept everyone happy… except, apparently, our visitors.
“You really don’t have anything we can’t find elsewhere with far less trouble, you know,” it said. “You have no reason not to trust us.”
“But we don’t understand why you’re here.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do, of course. Intelligent life exists across the galaxy, but it’s spread too thinly at this temporal nexus to justify destroying any of it. This is something you need to learn.”
“You just agreed that we’re intelligent. You think we wouldn’t have invented Cubes for ourselves eventually?”
“How much more of your planet would have been burned up before then?”
“Oh come on, quantum energy generation was obvious.”
“After we gave it to you, perhaps. And then you used it to make equipment for war! Honestly, some of our people are doubting that you really are an intelligent species.”
“So some of you ARE looking for an excuse to to wipe us out!”
“Now you’re being paranoid.”
“So you say! You won’t show us your true forms, or even tell us where you come from!”
“Are you surprised? You’d probably attack us!”
“Yeah right. Who’s paranoid now?”
“Perhaps we are; but your deceit has shown that the precautions urged by the most conservative among us, including my own manufacture, were justified. Within five of your rotations we shall complete our observations and depart.”
“So you’re abandoning us?”
“We’ll be back. We have left you they key to survival; whether you use it, and whether you can mature enough to be worth talking to again, we shall see.”
And true to its word, within a week They were gone. Now we have a common purpose as a world: to prepare for Their return. For surely, They have weapons beyond the Cubes, and we must be ready. Or so most choose to believe; those of us in favour of altering our habitual path are still a minority. No matter how extraordinary the proof of alien life, some things, it seems, never change.
by submission | Sep 27, 2023 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
The lights on the console rapidly blinked in sequence. What that sequence was, Jackie couldn’t tell. It was all random nonsense to him. His finger hovered over the reboot button. If he hit restart, he’d have to work up a report, and explain his actions to the captain. But if he didn’t press the button…
Jackie dropped his hand down onto the edge of the console. Then what? Will the circuits go crazy, burn up? Will the ship go dark? Powerless and doomed, will we drift helplessly in the cold black void?
He shook his head, dispelling those pessimistic thoughts. Maybe this damn blinking will stop on its own. Or settle into a rhythmic pattern—something that makes sense.
Jackie took a deep breath. Perhaps the blinking isn’t random, he considered. Maybe it’s a code sent by somebody—or something—attempting contact. Trying to tell us—what?
He stood up and began pacing. Perhaps he should alert the chief communications officer. Jackie glanced at the clock above the console. How long has this been going on? Ten minutes? Fifteen? He began to sweat. He should’ve made a note when he first noticed.
The lights continued their crazy blinking.
He remembered his last annual review. He was told he needed to be more decisive. Don’t be afraid to take action, his interviewer admonished. But this wasn’t a small thing, like reporting a crew member running a numbers game. This could be important. Jackie returned to his seat.
The blinking slowed. It settled into a pattern.
It is a message! Jackie smiled. He stared at the flickering lights, memorizing the repeating pattern. What the message said, though, he couldn’t possibly know. That would be a job for the on-board cryptographer.
“Okay,” he said aloud. “Time to alert the chief.” He placed his hands on the console to raise himself from his chair.
Maybe he’d get a commendation for spotting the pattern! He daydreamed. Maybe he’d get a raise, or at least extra vacation time. He’d finally make that trip to New Las Vegas—see Venusian show girls, eat casino sushi, experience tentacle massages—the works!
Enthralled with his fantasy, Jackie didn’t notice he’d laid his right hand across the reset button. When he stood up, he accidentally mashed that button. The console powered down. The flashing lights on the console slowed until they faded into nothing.
The ship went dark.
The shouting began soon after the black-out. In the still air of the ship, lights flickered—but not the ship’s emergency illumination, which was down.
Instead, lights like fireflies blossomed in the dead air. Sentient and cruel, they multiplied quickly into the thousands.
The lights leaked under doors, filling every room, every nook, every crevice. They zoomed into ears, up noses, into open mouths, lighting up every human interior. Conquering, occupying everyone and everything on board.
From a distance, the dark ship developed an internal glow, which quickly bled to its exterior. The lights soon enveloped the whole craft. Blinding rays streamed from the ship’s core, obliterating any resemblance it had to its original form.
From a distance, a diminutive new star was born. A beacon signaling the path to Jackie’s home world.
by submission | Sep 26, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
When the founders of Providence made planetfall, they had but one credo to establish their new civilization on the uninhabited world: Blind ignorance is unfortunate. Willful ignorance is shameful. Manufactured ignorance is unforgivable.
Two hundred forty-one local years later, when the invading conquerors of Providence divvied up the planet, they wondered why the inhabitants had done so little to defend their bountiful home world. Especially Neh Ryn Suu.
Though not generally prone to deep reflection, something about the ease of conquest continued to nag at Suu during the transition to colonial rule. There had been no apparent resistance to their invading forces as they took control of planetary and interplanetary communications and announced new edicts of governance. In fact, Providence’s citizenry seemed to have a great appetite to learn the ways of its conquerors.
And that was certainly not Suu’s way. As colonial plenipotentiary, Suu knew the power of information and misinformation. Only the latter went out to Providence’s populace in the form of either wildly sensational or completely banal propaganda. All lies. And rarely well-crafted.
In Suu’s long colonial experience, truth never set citizens free. It only burdened them. A distracted mind, an immediately gratified mind, an addicted mind, these resulted in a placid planet. And Suu relied upon this formula, though always keeping the most powerful tools of control–fear and rage–at hand.
Nearly a year after conquest, the populace remained tame. Suu could find no evidence of domestic profiteering or graft. Plenty of opportunistic carpetbaggers and corrupt colonial officials continued to fleece the locals, but no cases of exploitation arising from the native citizenry. They were playing by the new rules. They’d quietly learned the language and customs of their conquerors and stirred no political pots. This benign acceptance of the status quo should’ve reassured Suu.
It did not. It called for interrogations.
On the third day of questioning in the very comfortable side room between his office and the rendition cells, Suu sat and casually asked, “How are things going for you, Citizen Fleur?”
Citizen Fleur smiled. “Well. And for you, Minister Suu?”
The inquiry seemed genuine, and Suu felt an unexpected tug. “I am satisfied when things are running smoothly. I am discontent when they are not. But, I am most uneasy when things are running far too well.”
“And this is the case?”
“It is, Citizen Fleur. I am looking to understand why the founding populace of Providence has so readily accepted colonial rule.” Much more bluntly put than Suu had intended. Another unexpected tug. “Why haven’t you fought back? Why aren’t you resisting us?”
“Because we are honest with ourselves. And because we are honest, we cannot compete with lies, deception and corruption.” Citizen Fleur stood. “Though, ultimately, neither can you, Minister Suu. Ignorance is unsustainable. We will learn what we can from you, and we will carry forward. Yours is an unknowable path.”
The moment became a monument. Suu could not resist the tug. “Are we then finished here?”
“That is always for the vanquisher to decide. What is done is done. Though,” Citizen Fleur motioned to the door opposite Suu’s office, “there is always a next step.”
Suu rose, tugged by the novelty of considering truth and consequences over lies and conquest, and uncomprehendingly led Citizen Fleur through one of the doors.
by Julian Miles | Sep 25, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The woman with the crossbow spits into the fire.
“I don’t understand why they didn’t just reboot the computers as soon as it started.”
Her sidekick nods, pushing their cap back before joining in.
“Reckon a lot of them eye-tee types were in on it. Musta been.”
The man next to me tucks a rusty revolver back inside his jacket before adding an opinion.
“It’s like that Y2K bollocks. They played that, made a fortune, and nothing happened.”
The woman’s not impressed.
“Except, this time, everything happened and they didn’t say a thing beforehand.”
He nods, trying to appear sage.
“That’s my point. They knew. They all fucking knew. They’re off somewhere right now, living on an island-”
Enough.
“Sitting by a campfire listening to people spout on about things they know nothing of.”
Just like that, I’m centre of attention.
“You saying I’m an idiot?”
I glare at him.
“No. I’m saying you don’t know what happened, so you’re making things up because not knowing makes you feel uncomfortable.”
“I have a gun.”
“Yes, I’ve seen it. It’s a big one. You find it comforting, but aren’t confident with it, unlike the lady with the crossbow.”
I glance at her. She changes aim from me to him.
“Before anybody gets violent, I’m sure few know what actually happened. I worked with computers, and all I’ve got are good guesses. Would you like to hear?”
The ring of people grows as others crowd in. The woman nods.
“Whoever did this spent years setting it up. Getting their software, which must have taken a good while to prepare, installed everywhere in places where reboots and the like wouldn’t stop it. They went about it in various ways: most of it included with other applications or hacks. A surprising amount was added to hardware by people assembling devices without knowledge of what exactly they did – put the chip with the yellow writing in the top right, the one with the blue numbers in the lower left, and so on. Automated assembly lines would have been compromised in a similar way.
“The key factor here is patience. Nothing happened until they were sure they’d infected most of the world’s digital infrastructure. Then someone launched the activation commands. Now, that’s not as simple as typing ‘stop’. It involved several hundred instructions, each for a different system, probably duplicated, and with multiple ways to get where they needed. That would have been noticed. Cybersecurity suites across the world would have raised alerts. However, I doubt any of them occurred more than a few minutes before the systems they ran on failed.”
I look about. I think a few of them are getting it.
“We all know the results. The death toll is incomprehensible. The knock-on effects will remain with us for decades. I suspect the only reason we’re still here is that all the nuclear missile control systems defaulted to non-hostile when they went down.”
I suspect some tried to launch, but their silo covers had already failed. That would have destroyed whole sites, but at the cost of everything within a hundred kilometres or so.
There are one or two people whose expressions betray realisation. Time to wake everyone else up.
“The thing to understand is none of this was an accident. Somebody intended to ruin the world, and they’ve nearly succeeded. I don’t know why. Best case is something like extreme nihilism: they wanted to destroy everything.”
The woman nods.
“Worst case is it was the opening move. In that case, better hope they got overwhelmed and killed by their own apocalypse.”
by submission | Sep 24, 2023 | Story |
Author: Caley Schneider
‘Ha. Not if you were the last man on Earth.’ That’s what she’d said to smirking Cole Hamilton when he, not so subtly, suggested an intimate rendezvous in their bustling Interlaken hostel. He thought them both being American was enough to push her into his gym-bro, I-never-forget-my-protein arms.
How the times have changed. Perhaps Marissa would have had a different answer now. But she couldn’t have guessed she’d end up an 18 year old-virgin-apocalypse-survivor. There used to be plenty of fish in the sea. The sea had become a pond, and now a puddle. Of one.
Days 1-9 After, Marissa had flipped the fuck out and pulled herself together. Her dorm-mates’ slack faces haunted her dreams, but the dozens of others she encountered passed through her memory like stones skipping on a lake. It was a consolation that she didn’t recognize any rotting corpses she encountered. Even Cole had been on a train to Milan by the time It struck. So by day 7 she had pillaged her way through Interlaken, leaving a trail of clubbing dresses and toiletries in exchange for water bottles and a sleeping bag
Marissa had spent the entire day 8 swimming in Lake Brienz and sunbathing on the shore. Deciding if she was the type of person to sink or swim, literally and metaphorically. She had entire pharmacies at her disposal, which, with a little research, would let her go out with a goofy smile on her face. On the other hand, some sick joke of nature, or sadist of a god had allowed her to survive whatever had killed all those around her. Maybe she was meant to live?
On the way to Interlaken, both days and decades ago, she’d jumped out of the train to take a hurried snapshot of a quintessential European panorama- castle, lake, mountains, even a ship with the Swiss flag waving at the bow. Leaving Interlaken, she’d stayed near the lake, the yellow signs for hikers showed her the way beyond a doubt. On day 11 she’d slept in that picturesque castle. It was a little cold, but it only smelled of stone and centuries old smoke, not dead bodies.
Days 12-14 were ones Marissa tried to repress. On deciding to swim rather than blissfully sink, her plan came to her – walk to the ocean. She could fish (for fish and men?), make signal fires, spot ships and planes on the wide horizon. Her home country would be only one impossible swim away.
She knew from her guide book that she had a choice- to walk over mountain ranges or through the impressive Lötschberg tunnel. She couldn’t get lost in the tunnel, most likely it would also be free of wolves and bears (Switzerland had those, right?). In the end, the 9 miles of invasive darkness wreaked havoc on her mind as a wolf might have done her flesh.
How does one get through 14 hours of lonely claustrophobia? By singing. Frustratingly, the only song to come to mind in those sable echoing hours, was ‘Muffin Man.’ The boy she’d nannied back home would have been delighted.
Now it was all behind her. All the road signs read Genoa. She smelled the ocean! On day 27, she spotted a figure walking towards her. Something like hope, but painful, bloomed inside her ribcage. They neared each other with a slowness that spoke of fate, destiny, maybe even fairy tales. Finally, she saw a figure against the shimmering concrete. She stopped walking. Impossible. She knew those arms anywhere. The Adam to her Eve was Cole fucking Hamilton.
by submission | Sep 23, 2023 | Story |
Author: Jaime K Devine
How long has it been November 15th? I’ve pulled this same picture of a hamster on a running wheel off the One-A-Day Cute Animals calendar for at least a week now. I feel like I’m losing it, so I call my sister.
“Yesterday was November 15th, right?”
“No, today is November 15th.”
“Yeah, I know that today is November 15th, but yesterday was November 15th too.”
“… I think this is just post-partum brain fog.”
My toddler comes running into the room with a poopy diaper.
“I’m sorry, I gotta go.”
Every day, it’s the same. I wake up at 5:47 when my 4-month-old cries. I check the calendar. Hamster on a wheel. I text my friends, “How long has it been November 15th?”
“You’re just tired”, they tell me. I try calling my husband; he’s on a work trip in Japan. No matter when I call, he’s either in a meeting, asleep, or just ignoring me. I check the internet—- well, I try to check the internet. The baby cries; my 2-year-old tugs at my shirt; the baby poops; the toddler poops. I need to poop. The toddler insists on coming with me into the bathroom. No matter how long I am stuck in November 15th, I can’t find anyone else who remembers.
I’m trapped in November 15th alone. 5:47, wake up, settle the baby, try to get back to sleep. The toddler crawls into my bed and kicks my face. The kids are hungry. I hold the 4-month-old to my breast while I try to keep my 2-year-old from spilling cereal everywhere. They are too young to even pay attention to the tv. Too cold for the playground. The toddler won’t nap. The baby has colic.
I just need one day away. I call my sister, “Can you watch the kids?” No, she lives six hours away. I call every babysitter in town. It’s too short notice, maybe tomorrow. I try giving the kids cold medicine so that they will sleep. It makes the baby sick; I spend the rest of the day cleaning up vomit. I take the kids to the fire station. I put the carrier down and I tell my toddler to sit. I run away. The kids scream. Firefighters catch me. I spend the rest of the day with child services. Post-partum depression, they say. They set up an appointment… for next Thursday.
I tear the hamster off the calendar again and collapse to the floor. I just need one day in this endless time loop when I don’t have to wipe anyone else’s butt. When I don’t have a toothless human gnawing on my nipple. When I don’t have to build any block towers. I need just one day off. Just one.
I fill up the bathtub. I put the 4-month-old in first. I have to hold down the toddler. Just one day, I cry. The kids go silent. I go to my bedroom and sleep. I eat lunch alone at a restaurant. I get a beer. I binge watch reality tv. I cry all day.
5:46. I wake up to blood-curdling screams like I’ve never heard before. I run to the baby’s room. He’s thrashing and shrieking. He screams louder when I reach for him. He bats at me. I back away and go to check on the toddler. She’s sobbing under her covers. I pull back the blanket.
“NO!” She shouts in her limited vocabulary. “No! No bath!”
That’s when I realize that I’m not trapped alone in November 15th. My children remember. They will always remember.
