by submission | Oct 29, 2023 | Story |
Author: William Torphy
I’ve always heard voices, whispers actually, from another dimension. I exist between worlds, suspended between the quotidian concerns of one and the timeless aspirations of another. People call me distracted, ditsy, and sometimes even disturbed. They have no idea of the chorus that sings to me every day, multitudinous tales of hardship and celebration, disappointment and love.
They are usually women, consoling voices of mutual understanding whispering their secrets. But men sometimes speak sympathetic words too, loving the way humans should love without guile or greed.
I speak with the dead, not because they don’t talk back, but because they listen. There’s a fundamental difference between these two qualities. I always have an earful to tell them, usually about the others who are dead.
I remember my father only dimly He was a pilot chosen to be an astronaut who left my mother and me behind to explore the stars. He could have refused to go if he loved us more than emptiness. He would argue about that, I suppose. Not about loving us, but about the emptiness.
“There are billions of stars and planets up there,” he told me when I was seven, days before he went into space. “Worlds filled with mystery. Everything that is, except for this tiny ant globe is up there.” I guess he loved that world more than us, because he never returned.
My head is filled with the voices of mystery, never mind space. I’ve attempted to call in my father from the farthest reaches, but he has not yet come through. I have so much to tell him of our little world, the one he so willingly deserted. I will tell him about those with whom I speak, voices from some space other than his outer. I will inform him of my mother and the others who have passed into the infinity. Whether dead or alive, with his silver ship forever circling in space, I will hear from him someday. He will call to me from some dark corner of the universe, telling me tales of all he’s seen, as I remind him of all he’s missed down here.
by submission | Oct 28, 2023 | Story |
Author: Graham Mossman
I loved Afterfone when I was alive, but now I curse the jackass who invented it. They started by calling their dead friends and family, but then they realised that by building in a universal translator, they could call all kinds of interesting people from history. It was a huge hit, and that jackass became a billionaire.
I read in a newspaper poll (when I was alive and reading) that the most popular day to use an Afterfone was Halloween, and the most called person was Hitler. I’ve no idea whether the callers were haters or admirers, but either way, Adolf does not get any peace in the afterlife. It’s not torture like you’d see in paintings of hell, but it is relentlessly unpleasant. It’s like when you’re on a long flight trying to get some sleep, and the guy next to you keeps waking you up to tell you his life story. You just want to be left alone to rest in peace, but there’s always someone nudging you awake, wanting to chat.
I’m told Hitler is still Number One these days, but with three million calls in the year since I died, I’m now in the top ten, sandwiched between Mother Teresa and the Marquis de Sade.
Why so popular?
Because I was that billionaire jackass who invented the Afterfone.
by submission | Oct 27, 2023 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
You know how sometimes you enter a room after a while, and you just know that someone’s been in there? It’s not your imagination. It could be an aroma so slight that you don’t consciously notice it. Maybe something’s not quite in the same place it was before. Perhaps the dust has been disturbed so subliminally that you wouldn’t normally realise. But something triggers you, and you don’t know what. Eventually, people a lot smarter than me came up with tech that could detect the smells and identify where dust had moved, and give us all some peace of mind. That’s what the OmniSniff (“The Nose that Knows!”) does. So I took the company’s courses, splashed out on the kit, and set up as a freelancer, consulting to PI’s and police departments. Never thought I’d be pinned as an accessory to murder, though.
The first OmniSniff was a great success, but you still didn’t know who’d been in your hypothetical room – only what lotion or perfume they’d put on, or where’d they stood. People demanded more. So the geeks went back to the drawing board, and OmniSniff 2.0 is not only smaller and faster, but it sucks up DNA strands from the ambient air, too. It’s been a revolution in forensics – I mean, if the husband’s twists are the only fresh ones around, odds are that it was him that did the wife in, whatever his alibi, am I right? The company got a lot of publicity from that, and I got more competitors.
Since then the criminal underworld’s come up with countermeasures, of course: from expensive helix-killing sprays (which are now detectable) to cheaper material collections designed to just overwhelm and slow down the detectives. I did more courses, but they’re a lot more expensive now, and you have to keep requalifying to keep up. My net income’s gone down, not up.
So when a guy in the bar who said he was a sensie scriptwriter researching a new show offered me a big credit transfer for a couple of hours just talking about my job over some coffee, I jumped at the chance. Who wouldn’t?
And yeah, okay, it was me that told him that really, the only way for a criminal to beat the OmniSniff is not to leave any DNA at all. But so what? I mean, unless you’re wearing a space suit (kind of conspicuous), that’s next to impossible, right? And that’s all I said, I swear!
How was I to know that he’d go back home, wait a week, and then hack his household butler unit, programming it to smash his wife’s brains out? I mean okay, it kind of makes sense, robots don’t leave DNA, but seriously? Of course he was caught. It took the cops maybe 10 minutes to check the thing and find out there was no mechanical fault or memory glitch. He’ll do thirty to life, and serves him right. Idiot.
But now they’re trying to say it’s partly my fault? That I gave him the idea? That’s just unfair. I tell you, I need a new career – it’s not just the OmniSniff that sucks.
by submission | Oct 26, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Broz
I knew the stars would fall, and they did.
I watched from the observation deck as the midnight sky slowly brightened, burning with orange streaks, brighter than the hottest day, and I watched as the stars came crashing down.
Down through the dome that held our farm, down they came. Down again, bursting the water tower. Again and again the distant thumping of the stars, punching through years of dust and deep into the solid bedrock of the moon. Plumes like silent mushrooms grew.
I thought of you as the heavens rained down streaks of orange fire. Once we had burned hot like this, I thought, when you were here for a cycle, when we blazed bright like the sun, lighting up this moon all by ourselves.
Mine were the hands you needed to fix your ship. And so I put my hands to work, and you put your hands on my hands, your touch slowing me as I went, keeping me with you longer. And I fixed your ship, and she became flightworthy again.
Mine were the shoulders you needed for heavy lifting, to empty the holds and lighten your ship, so that it could break free from orbit again some day. You put your hands upon my arm as I carried it all, not sharing the burden, but leaning into me, and I bore your weight as well.
Mine were the ears you needed in the dark of the darkest nights, when the earth’s shadow hid us from the light of day, and cries and silence were all we had. And you put your hands over your ears, and you did not hear me, while I listened for us both.
And all along, you looked past me. You looked through me and past me, not gazing into my eyes but beyond them. I now know the difference, but I did not know it then.
You love me, you say. Your apology echoes faintly through the station, between the thumps of the falling stars. You thank me for everything, but you won’t be coming back to save me.
by submission | Oct 25, 2023 | Story |
Author: Toshihisa Nikaido
The woman jolted awake, surrounded by unfamiliar sterility. She didn’t know where or even who she was, until a cracked nametag dimly illuminated by a slit of light from across the room caught her attention—the letters “Ali” remained. She approached the faint glow, stepping on something sharp in the process. Her surroundings were too dark to determine what the item was or how badly her foot was injured, but she decided to pocket whatever she’d stepped on.
A heavy metal door slid open, revealing an endless corridor. One side boasted a spherical window showcasing an astonishing sight—Earth!
A noise rang from behind Ali. She spun, finding herself facing inhuman creatures looming from the depths of the dim halls. Fear consumed and paralyzed her.
“Remember your mission,” a voice echoed in her mind. “Our objective was to do a preliminary assessment of the planet and initiate the terraforming procedure.”
“You can’t do that,” Ali protested. “We’d all die.”
“Not us.” The alien’s appendage appeared to be gesturing toward Ali’s pocket.
Ali reached into her pocket and pulled out a small sharp object, the broken end of a nametag displaying the two letters “en.”
by submission | Oct 24, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
When I broke into the abandoned home, I hadn’t expected to stay long. I only wanted to get off the streets and out of the cold for a few days. I was pretty broken down. Being on the run for years will do that to you.
So, I’d hacked the home’s defenses and pried my way in. It was just my luck, though, that this had been a scrub’s house. The equipment was still there, though quite outdated: a classic ’37 Q-Res unit.
Only an old scrub like me would recognize it. Only an old scrub like me would want to boot it up, which is what I did. Damn mistake. Big damn mistake. I don’t know what that scrub who’d lived here was thinking, but it’s scrubber Rule #1 that you don’t store Residuals in your device.
When I booted the ’37 unit, it immediately linked to the home’s i-structure. I was to blame for that. In hacking the home’s protection program, I’d left the door open for the upload from the Q-Res. The result: a Residual immediately took up residence.
Epic cluster. I hate the term cosmic irony, but I’d just unleashed it. I’d spent the better part of twenty years scrubbing Residuals from homes, businesses, schools, hotels, you name it. Wherever remnants of past lives had settled and caused issues, I’d gone to scrub them out.
That used to be the job of shamans, witch doctors and exorcists, getting rid of an unwanted presence. It became the work of scrubbers in the early thirties after AI quantum consciousness was realized and led to an understanding of residual consciousness, the lasting space-time impact of intelligence, human or otherwise. Essentially, thought, perception, awareness left a trail—and sometimes a stain.
In the previous century, Carl Sagan postulated that we are the stuff of stars and in this century we learned we are the stuff of time as well. All past existences continue in the milieu of dark time, the byproduct of dark energy and dark mass (not matter).
Most past existences follow the enticing forces of entropy and hop on the Heat Death express. Some past existences resist and persist, keeping a certain potency and sometimes ferocity in their former surroundings. Residuals.
Over millennia, Residuals have been called many things. My years as a scrub only confused my thinking. I’ve dealt with terrifying presences and malevolent ones. Though most Residuals are merely fiercely loyal. Steadfast to a life I can only imagine they loved.
How lonely they must be. I realize that scrubbing them from a place did not remove their presence, it only sealed them away. Buried alive in death.
That’s why I was on the run. I’d given up scrubbing. Worse, I’d set about freeing Residuals. At the time, I didn’t know what I was hoping to accomplish. I guess maybe I thought I was leaving my mark by liberating these lost souls, before I became a Residual myself.
If I’d been releasing these unwanted presences for years, why then was I so worried about the Residual I’d just freed back into its oft-abandoned colonial home on the south shore of Long Island, New York?
Back to that cosmic irony. Entropy meets Amityville.
I think I was about to leave a mark.
