by Julian Miles | Dec 19, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“I find charcoal best for landscapes, but cityscapes demand ink to capture their harsh edges. Living things I always work in coloured pencil, layering basic colours to achieve the myriad shades that life grows in.
“For battlefields, it’s charcoal for the vista, and sharp pencils to pick out the monochrome details of death.”
Looking up from the canvas, I watch the Burclanic officer flicking its gaze between outlines of this street hatched out in pen, and my other hand lightly resting a midnight blue automatic against its throat.
“But for close combat, I prefer an 11-millimetre Arduvant machine pistol. The combination of nineteen rounds and crystalline acid in the hollow points make such colourful statements in fizzing blood on any medium they spray across.”
I smile.
“Would you like to become art, or shall we call this mutinous little episode over?”
It swallows slowly, then drops its weapon.
“Over.”
Using the hand holding the pen, I beckon my people forward.
“Good thing you caught me on my break. I’m not as reasonable when on duty.”
by submission | Dec 18, 2022 | Story |
Author: David Barber
This is the Ada Swann, limping into Vesta Dock on manual, which is illegal, but Perry won’t pay tug fees, so with automated systems off-line, she eases in the big ship by eye.
Dockside’s not handshaking your autopilot, Ada Swann.
“Maybe you’ve got a software issue,” says Perry, powering down. Previous owners had tinkered endlessly with the ship and she guessed these cascade failures were their doing.
No more cowboy spacer tricks, Ada Swann. Sort it out.
Later, making her way across the cavernous dock, a Jirt trotted beside her. “You got stuff need fixing, boss?”
Perry slowed, and encouraged, the tiny Jirt edged closer.
“Fix electrics. Fix machines. Fix—”
Dockside crew were passing and one aimed a kick at the creature. It squealed and darted away.
The docker shrugged irritably. “They’ve been warned to keep away. Don’t encourage ’em.”
Perry spent the morning trying to source obsolete electronics and came back in a bad mood. She’d gained a wary following of Jirt.
“These my Jirt,” one ventured. Perhaps the one from earlier. “Good at fixing broke ship.”
Jirt were fixers of things, all manner of things, this being their gift. Otherwise, a short, timid folk with faces cleft where noses ought to be, known for their feeble six-fingered grasp of money.
Perry had noticed their damp-rot smell when she piloted short-hauls on Pallas. Now it was here too, their shanties like weeds round docks and spaceports.
In The Weather Inn she sounded out spacers at the bar.
Opinion was unhelpful. What did she expect with everything routed through the pilot’s board?
“Get Jirt to fix it,” someone muttered.
Sometimes she heard an undercurrent of resentment, perhaps at the way she had come by the Ada Swann.
“Let `em on your ship, you never get `em out,” said another. “Like roach in the walls.”
“Anyway, spacers fix their own stuff, always have.”
“It’s the stink—”
“They like us,” a spacer confided to Perry, his prosthetic eye gleaming. “That thing with jokes, you know?”
One-liners pop flashbulbs in the Jirt brain. A glimpse of something cosmic. In exchange, they fixed stuff.
“Just keep a few jokes handy, like loose change for tips.”
“You’re not leaving here on manual,” the Dock Manager told Perry next morning. The woman gave Perry a hard stare.
Which meant dock fees until she went broke. Again, pull-out modules tested green, then crashed when put back. Perry set down her tools very carefully and went for a walk.
Out on the Dock, they’d cornered Jirt hanging round the Ada Swann. Trapped, the creatures darted about squealing in panic.
It seemed to Perry they had a lot in common. She swung wide the hatch.
“You’ll regret that,” a docker called after her.
While Jirt swarmed through the ship, chasing cables and peering at motherboards, one stayed close, stroking Perry’s hand.
Only humans were funny, it said. This being your gift. At least, that’s what Perry thought it said.
And when the Ada Swann glided out of Vesta Dock on autopilot, Perry knew she could never unravel what these Jirt had improvised. They were her crew now, their nest in an unused cabin, addicts huddled round old comedy shows, drunk on punch lines, the damp-rot odour thickening in anticipation of the moment the god seized them.
Perry would have to learn some jokes. This Jirt’s got no nose. Then how does it smell? Terrible.
Tell us how you do it, they pleaded sometimes, as if an accidental molecule in a flower might teach dreams; as if this was how opium poppies might feel, if they knew.
by submission | Dec 17, 2022 | Story |
Author: Immy Basmar
A lifetime ago, Velvet loved playing in the purple sands at the edge of town. Antiman, who spent all his days there, would chastise her for galivanting on the carcasses of gods and tell his stories of a long-forgotten race, whose metal bodies had ridden off to die all at once. The sand had been red at first, but the water washed them away piece by piece until only their stone hearts remained. With nowhere to go, they could only be crushed finer and finer, creating mounds that grew and grew.
Time has not changed him. He is as loud and battered at before, treats her as he did when she was barely a child.
“They were better than us,” he cries now, “We let them down.”
Age has turned her into a messy mound of flesh, desperate in ways she hadn’t been before, but not stupid. Beneath Ant’s tattered coat are poles and wires instead of an arm. But he is no god.
Even after all this time, he tells her only lies.
“Do you have a heart?” she asks then, “Will you miss me?”
Together, they make a one out of sand. He guides her, as best he can, dancing down the hill for the last time.
by submission | Dec 16, 2022 | Story |
Author: Sarah Klein
Fred didn’t return from space the same man.
Loretta noticed it immediately, but brushed it off. “He just needs to relax,” she told herself. She did everything she could to make him comfortable.
But Fred was anxious. Fidgety. Not eating as much as he used to. And it wasn’t getting better, it was getting worse.
One night at dinner, she noticed him absent-mindedly chewing a chicken bone, long past when the meat was gone. “Fred? Are you okay? Really?” She asked, and he snapped to attention, and then started to fidget.
“No,” he admitted quietly. “I don’t know what it is.. nothing big even went wrong with the trip. I just feel… like I can’t sit still. And it helps if I chew. I don’t know,” he said, putting his head in his hands for a moment.
“Well, I’ll go with you to Dr. Sands tomorrow,” she said, and Fred winced.
Before she fell asleep that night Loretta noticed him chewing a finger nervously but thought nothing of it. She saw something much worse when she awoke.
Fred had gnawed away most of the flesh on his hands and upper arms. Dripping viscera stained the sheets. His eyes were bloodshot, crazed, his face flecked with spittle. He looked up at her but continued chewing.
She screamed and jumped out of bed, picking up her phone. Then something long and green and slimy burst forth from Fred’s throat towards her. She took her cell phone and ran downstairs in horror. But when they arrived to take away Fred’s body, the little green thing was gone. Investigators started to assess the corpse, but didn’t believe Loretta about any little green thing.
Loretta spent a week away from the house at a hotel nearly an hour away. She did her best to distract herself. She told herself that her anxiety was understandably high, and of course she was going to feel like Fred did, but she just had to relax.
But the hotel maid found her in bed one day when she didn’t respond, chewing her fingers to the bone..
by submission | Dec 15, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
You know that feeling you get when you’re halfway to work and you realize that you can’t remember the last fifteen minutes of your drive. You know you’ve been gripping the wheel staring out the windshield, but you aren’t really there. Some part of your subconscious was driving, a deep reptilian part of the brain. Thank god for that cold bloodedness. We mammals are too fuzzy, too distractible, much like my cat.
I’m a bit fuzzy and distracted right now. Not halfway to work, but halfway to Zeta Epsilon V. It’s a blue rather nondescript star which might or might not hold the key to human consciousness. Impossibly near this blue star’s surface is an infla-grav portal that is not part of the Outreach. This portal predates human astraportation. It shouldn’t exist. It does.
I’m not the first to try to figure it out. I could be the last, though. The portal has become unstable. Inflatons are beginning to outnumber gravitons around Zeta Epsilon V. Soon that instability will go critical. So, I’m on my way, though I’m really not. Just my thought.
That’s the crux of this. All of what’s happening exists in human thought. Our consciousness. And no one really understands what that means. We get the neurologic electro-chemical underpinnings, but not the field dynamics. We don’t know if its particle or string based. Containment is a factor, though not an absolute, otherwise we would never have managed to Outreach.
This is a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts—and that’s not even certain. Consider your own consciousness. Your thought. Your mind. Naturally shaped by biological force and function, it seeks to transcend the physical world around it. The mind births ideas and dreams, notions and desires. It harbors innumerable pasts and futures while processing an ever more thinly sliced present. A momentary calculus under an infinite curve. In the simplest sense, a mind is its own universe of possibility.
It is the metaverse in a local nutshell. Because of this, stasis management of inflatons and gravitons have made Outreach possible. Thought unbounded. The metaphysical meets the physical and becomes philotic physics: consciousness traveling light years beyond light speed.
And, thus, I’m halfway to Zeta Epsilon V and still thinking about my cat. More to the point, thinking about its mind. My cat can’t Outreach—yet. Some say it must learn to upreach or we must learn to downreach, but that seems inelegant to me.
There’s a lot about existence that lacks elegance, but the concept of consciousness is not one of them. Thought is a field. What are the limits? What are the ties that bind? What are the barriers that block? Zeta Epsilon V may be the wellspring. It is not human sourced. It is not a ghost town, graveyard, purgatory, heaven or hell. It is an outlier.
Anomalies are the cornerstones of larger truths. Like my cat. It hissed as I left this morning. Just as my eyes turned inward, vacating for portage.
My cat is probably nipping at my fingers, pawing at my wrists. It knows I’ve left it again. It knows I’ve Outreached. It wants to come too, but not to be with me. My cat doesn’t think that way. Its consciousness is primal. Regal. Imperial. It seeks a universe to dominate.
We will battle in the far reaches of some universe. That’s my theory of Zeta Epsilon V.
It will hiss.
I will make it purr.
by submission | Dec 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Over the years Tanner had become highly attuned to his work and was able to spot the conspirators from afar. He could pick them out on a busy street, in a crowded bar or restaurant. This wasn’t ever based on anything concrete but he just knew. Perhaps it was because he had been obliterating these people for so long. Rubbing them out, the ones who conspired against and opposed the system, once they had been exposed after the fact.
Tanner had reported his suspicions hundreds upon hundreds of times and he had never been wrong. Each and everyone of those individuals had been found guilty and eventually their names appeared on The Eraser list. Occasionally Tanner will be appointed the case of one of his suspects and he always finds this deeply satisfying. He had been the first to recognise that this particular person was a potential agitator, someone who could easily stray and be pulled from the centre. Someone who would believe the lies and help to perpetuate the myth and now Tanner was able to wipe him or her from the face of the earth or at least from the system. To remove all evidence and any legitimacy that might still remain.
Tanner had often considered creating a pamphlet of his own, writing and distributing it anonymously. It would be a manual of sorts, offering advice on how to recognise the troublemakers, those challenging the system, but more importantly those who haven’t yet but who might.
Whenever he began putting it together in his head it always seemed absurd. The notion that people should be suspicious of others based on their haircut or the kind of clothes they wore, or which newspaper they took, the music they listened to, the books they read.
Just because someone visited the library and checked out a novel by a long ago formerly banned writer it didn’t necessarily mean that particular someone would become a conspirator. A pamphlet might help, yes, but really it would be little more than a list of traits and affectations, of mannerisms and possible signs and it wasn’t enough.
