by submission | Aug 2, 2022 | Story |
Author: Mikki Aronoff
“But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,/If your Snark be a Boojum! For then/ You will softly and suddenly vanish away,/And never be met with again!” (Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark)
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans” (Stephen Hawking)
*
They’re rumored to come tonight. We feel safe in our ragtag group, scrape lawn chairs across the parking lot onto the weedy patch opposite Our Lady of Sorrows, set up evening watch. We — the cook, the courtesan, the clerk, the cuckold. All recently made redundant, joined by grief and depletion and beer.
“Wish in one hand, piss in the other,” sneers the cuckold. “See which fills up first.”
Then, in slow descent from a starless sky, shimmers like fingernail tracings across the firmament skirt the periphery, slippery as elms, shiny and paperless as our future demands. The steeple now sports a corona, and damp rises like yeast.
“Pulp fiction!” clucks the cook, our snarky skeptic, trembling.
“Come to momma,” I cry, my once-coveted bosom heaving.
A flotilla of flashing orbs like midges starts its swarm around our heads. Harmonics thrum low, then shrill, pierce our eardrums like shattered glass. Cook wets his pants.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” whimpers the clerk, our cosmic pluralist, making the sign of the cross.
Startled lurchers commence a howling, the tallest trees surrender their crowns. Grackles flex wings over fledglings as water seeps up from the ground. Wormy sludge creeps up to our knees, feet and chairs sucked snug into mud.
Tiny spaceships circle and dive. Vibrations taunt our retinas, peel away thoughts like Escher’s Bond of Union unwrapped. Earth burps the smell of sulfur and roses. Our tongues wrap around citrus and salt. A shudder below shakes us from sleep into heed.
Then: another spin of Earth. Soil wicks the wet from our trousers and tops, soaked with sweat and squirming nematodes. Our breathing slows, shoulders sink, arm hairs flatten again. All but one of us walks towards home, unclear as to where we have been.
by Julian Miles | Aug 1, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Damn them. They make you envious, make you hate yourself, your life, every breathing minute of your existence. I hated them, but it got me thinking.
How pretty is too pretty? There has to be a threshold. Under it, you’re plain or acceptably good looking. Over it, you’re a walking insult.
Insult to what?
That’s where it all opened up to me. Being pretty isn’t just about genetics – okay, they help. But the truly enraging pretty things work hard at their annoying lives. Self-indulgence, self-denial, discipline, they have it all. Even the ones without wealth are easy to spot. They work all the time to look good. Not to live. No. They just exist to make others feel bad about themselves. No purpose beyond being things for the less fortunate to aspire to.
I’ve always been good at mathematics, and my programming skills are adequate. So I sat down and wrote myself a program. Tried to make a name that would be an acronym of ‘pretty’, but gave up. Named it DEADPRETTY – and that’s when the big plan started.
A world without pretty people. Just average types getting by as we always do.
That fired me up. I spent eight years taking DEADPRETTY from basic media scanning to full profiling with illegal privileged access. For that, I got a job with the government infotech division. Read-only access with no data withdrawal was easy to arrange and conceal. I also upgraded a few things. Got promoted a couple of times. But the pretty people still grated on me.
The transfer to Janus Habitat got me where I wanted: an environment where I could stage a controlled test. Then came my first real problem: how to kill lots of people effectively?
That took me a while. In the end, I went for a two-stage process: the first makes all the people available for killing. The second sorts the pretty from those who will survive.
DEADPRETTY is my opus. It reviews a person from birth to now, evaluating every little thing they have, did, or do. After that, it calculates how pretty they are. That stumped me for a while, but in the end, a percentage was easiest: one hundred percent being the perfect pretty thing who has everything, is physically flawless, and possesses a mind able to perpetuate the crime of their existence. Most people fall in the forty to sixty percent range. For this test, I set the threshold to seventy-five.
At midnight I set the program to execute. It took complete control of the habitat in less than ten minutes. Within an hour, everybody except me was unconscious.
The assessment phase is taking longer than expected. I only have a nineteen-hour window before the next ship docks. Which is why I’m doing this, of course: to make this viable. Reprogramming the evaluation criteria is fiddly, but the predicted completion time falls to under eighteen hours.
Damn them. They even look pretty when dead! Arrayed in their gaudy clothes across the walkways and parks of Janus Habitat, their colours picked out by the intensity of the night lighting. From my drone view, they look like jewellery scattered across the ground. Beautifully irritating.
A needle stabs into the back of my neck. No! How did I…? My fingers fumble across the control boards. As my head slams down on the console, I see my life laid out on the screens. Someone’s comment is highlighted: ‘a workaholic who seems to hate everything about himself’.
Damn the pretty things. Damn them all. I never allowed for them being infectious.
by submission | Jul 31, 2022 | Story |
Author: Rachel Sievers
The sun baked the earth creating a wafting air current that reminded Regina of what the ghost of bacon would look like. “Damn it is hot,” she whispered to herself as she moved over the black of the abandoned road. She could move to the side of the road but the cactus seemed to reach out and grab her with every step. It was hotter but slightly less painful.
The use-to-be of the city rose miles in front of her, its black silhouette rising like a black witch’s fingers on the white background of sand. She looked around at the city that used to be Las Vegas. “What I wouldn’t give for it to be twenty years ago.” Adjusting her goggles, she moved towards the city on the highway, she’d be there by nightfall.
The before of Vegas danced in her mind. Bright lights lit up the mini beauties of the world, the pyramids, Italian canals, and the Eiffel tower. Travel the world in a night. Regina would give all her numbered days to see those sights in all their glory again, instead as the sun set behind her she saw the ghosts of what had been.
Time had not been kind to Vegas. The sand seeped into the streets and the hot sun bleached everything into a faded version of itself. The bodies, which had littered the streets, were small versions of what they had been. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” Regina whispered to herself as she moved around the corpses as she entered the Las Vegas Strip.
Crawling through the broken glass of the front door of The Flamingo Regina was happy to see the interior had been saved from the bleaching of the sun, but not from the bodies. She moved through the casino and up the stairs in the back.
Thirty years ago, she had been a Flamingo girl. Dressed in pink and white cheap lingerie she had taken pictures with tourists for five to twenty dollars a picture. She smiled as she moved up the service entrance and into the best of the guest rooms.
Taking a crowbar from her backpack she broke the suite room doors until she found one that had not been filled with the dead. Regina had been around enough death for a thousand lifetimes and she was willing to go down in luxury to have a room that was unoccupied.
She emptied her backpack on the floor and took inventory of her supplies. The mini fridge had long ceased blowing cool air but hard alcohol kept forever. The snack bar was another matter, Regina had learned that the hard way.
Laying back on the bed, she picked up the first of the mini bottles and tipped it back. “To humanity,” she said and took down the burning liquid. Vodka was her favorite and so she took those first. She saved the whisky for last for when she would be the drunkest so she wouldn’t taste it.
She sipped the fourth and fifth mini bottles enjoying their flavor and thinking. She had lots of time to think now. “It came so quick,” she whispered to the bottle. “The day it all ended.” It was her favorite subject to talk about when she was drunk. The end of the world. No one had predicted it, they were too busy with false elections, wars overseas, and North Korea getting nuclear warheads to see the real threat.
“They weren’t green,” Regina laughed as she sent the seventh mini down and the laughter sounded strangely like a sob. Then she laughed for real because she was sure that when hostile aliens from the outer galaxies came they would have been green.
by submission | Jul 30, 2022 | Story |
Author: Brian Maycock
In one hour, he would be free.
Murty grinned.
Smiling was not against the rules, not strictly speaking, but if a guard saw you smiling there was a good chance a beating would follow.
They might think you were laughing at them or hiding a secret. Or simply wanted to impose a reminder that prison was not a place where the inmates should be smiling.
Murty kept on grinning. What was one more beating?
When he had been detained, he was a punk with blood on his hands. Even so, he entered the Not Guilty code in the justice interface and recorded a pack of lies as his testimony.
The Deportation ticket came out all the same. Sixty years imprisonment on board a correctional facility deep in space.
His last sight of Earth was a sliver of light as the shuttle door shut. Two weeks later they docked and he walked out into his new world.
One where cells lined the walls for miles in every direction and the sounds of thousands of inmates screaming and snoring and ranting never ceased.
Where buzzers sounded to mark that it was time to eat or sleep or exercise.
Where excrement seeped from blocked drains and small, dark flies filled the air.
He had been nineteen when he arrived at the facility. He was seventy-nine now.
His sentence was almost served.
One hour and counting down, he told himself as his cell door was buzzed open.
A guard took him to a booth and ordered him to undress. He stood there, a collection of bones and scars, as light spat from pinholes in the booth.
He figured this was meant to kill the bugs which lived on him. A few did drop off and lay thrashing around by his feet, but most kept scurrying around regardless.
He was hurried out of the booth and pointed to a new all-in-one grey suit hung on the wall. This itched more than the damn bugs ever had when he put it on.
An appearance before the Governor followed.
He intoned a lecture about penalties paid while Murty fought the urge to break the man’s neck.
It was a scrawny and would have snapped easily but the pleasure would have been fleeting. Not a good enough trade for the freedom that was coming his way.
The Governor finished and dismissed Murty with a wave. Outside, a line on the floor led the way to a fat metal door.
A buzzer sounded as he approached and the door slid open.
Murty stepped through.
This was it.
He was being released.
The door now behind him closed, which left just one more.
A final barrier.
When this opened, the water in Murty’s body would boil and the air would be ripped out of his lungs into the vacuum of space to which he had been exposed.
In fifteen seconds he would be unconscious and in ninety seconds he would be dead.
But he would not die a prisoner.
Murty smiled as the outer hatch of the airlock opened.
One hundred and five seconds of freedom.
The thought of this had sustained him for sixty years.
by submission | Jul 29, 2022 | Story |
Author: Chris De Pree
“How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them.” –Christian Huygens (1629-1695)
The rapidly moving silver sphere fragmented into hundreds of smaller reflective orbs in the outer reaches of the planetary system. Most of the objects followed trajectories to the four large gaseous planets. Using a combination of gravitational forces, attractive and repulsive, four of the smaller featureless spheres approached the rocky planets closest to the star. Each orb communicated with all the others. As a collection of nodes, they perceived the planetary system as a whole in all its variety, aligning time so that their communications were almost instantaneous.
One probe approached a small red planet with an enormous dead volcano fracturing one of its sides. A single orbit revealed several mechanical objects on the dry surface, but no biological or mechanical life. The atmosphere was cold and thin. Liquid oceans had been present once, but not for many billions of planetary orbits.
A second sphere used gravitational buoyancy to approach a planet-moon system, third from the star. Like the red planet, it was the correct distance from its parent star to potentially have liquid water at its surface. Protocols required the probes to search these planets most carefully.
The moon was smaller than the planet, and varied in color from almost white to dark gray, with many craters, large and small. No volcanic activity present. After a single orbit, the probe had mapped the locations of six disturbed sites on the surface where markings and features indicated non-geological processes. Using its internal gravitational ballast, the orb descended slowly to the surface at one of the sites.
As the metallic sphere hovered, a clear oculus appeared on its side and imaged a metallic structure with four legs. Nearby were a variety of parallel tracks in the fine dust covering the gray surface. There were patterned depressions in the dust indicating upright bipeds had walked here. Imprint characteristics indicated the approximate height, mass, and gait of the bipeds. A wave of attention and activity ran through the network of orbs.
A quick analysis of the tracks and the rate of micrometeorite impacts suggested the site had been undisturbed for several million orbits of the nearby planet around its star. A very thin rectangular object hung from a metallic post. The rectangle was solid white in color, but instruments behind the oculus indicated that it had once had alternating red and white horizontal bars, and small white shapes on a blue field. The white rectangle was made of different material than the metallic structure, with hydrocarbon compounds present. The oculus became opaque again.
The silver sphere accelerated away from the surface of the gray moon to explore its mother planet, shrouded in thick yellow clouds. The orb detected an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide with sulfuric acid and traces of nitrogen and other gasses. The probe dropped through the heavy atmosphere and emerged beneath the lower layer of acidic clouds to see a barren surface covered by mountains and valleys. Vast areas of liquid water had been present, but were now evaporated. The former oceans remained only as vapor in the thick atmosphere. Surface radioactivity levels were much higher than normal for a planet of this age in this part of the Galaxy.
The orb skimmed the hot, rocky surface of the third planet, looking for any indication of biological or mechanical life, and found none. It accelerated in an arc into the swirling clouds above.
The probes drifted together in the outer reaches of the planetary system, like a burst of dandelion fluff from some long ago childhood memory in reverse. Reassembled, the large matte sphere continued its Galactic census.
by submission | Jul 28, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The dog’s tail wagged. Or so it had seemed. Lhalam wasn’t so sure now.
She held back the sim-treat.
The dog nuzzled her sandal.
Curious. Curious for both Lhalam and the dog.
She powered down the dog and it stretched down at her feet as if sleeping. She watched it for some time before entering data from the session. She then went outside the lab, to the terrace where she sat and vaped, reassured by the jiggle and tumble of colorful leaves on the hillside maples.
Autumn already. And she had a deadline. A deadline Lhalam was determined to meet. The lab wanted to ship her first dogs by the holidays. Not impossible. Very probable. But she kept thinking about the dog’s tail.
What was wagging what?
Lhalam knew her dogs were safe. They were machines. Like dishwashers. Like radios. Neutral artifacts. Instruments subservient to the user’s wishes.
So, why did an apparent wag of the dog’s tail bother her so much? The action was within parameters. Within the guardrails she and the programmers had established. A machine designed to mimic a living creature had to have a certain amount of variant behavior. Almost autonomous.
A stronger breeze rattled the maples and a few leaves chased each other up the hill. One dropped on Lhalam’s table. She picked it up. Twirled the stem in her fingers.
How much of her behavior was predetermined? Hardwired. Seasonal.
The breeze picked up and Lhalam noticed how quickly the sky had darkened. She vaped deeply watching the bad weather approach from the foothills. A storm hadn’t been on her radar. Why not?
Had it been on the dog’s? Is that why its tail might have wagged?
They were sensitive. Precisely tuned instruments.
But tuned to what really?
What Lhalam perceived? What Lhalam determined?
What was really in her control? In anyone’s?
She shivered when the temperature abruptly dropped. The sky cracked with thunder as the storm bore down on her. Determined, Lhalam waited for it.
Waited for her answer.
