by submission | Feb 8, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The Good was the worst. The Bad was worthless. The Zombie, at least, was willing.
Life is so energy intensive. Though the Zombie held few thoughts in its putrefying head, this one stuck as flies buzzed feverishly around, attracted by the kill on the street. The Good had done it. Savagely struck down the child and then walked on fingering his rosary beads as if he’d just blessed the poor little soul.
The Bad, as always, looked away.
The Zombie appreciated the flies. No waste there. Committed to the carnage. Fully alive. The Zombie didn’t believe that of its companions. Self-avowed and twice saved, the Good spouted a doctrine of divine disinterest. A filcher and fraud, the Bad lacked common decency. Together, they were very modern.
The three were now bound together by the times. End times. It would not last. Nothing human could, but the Zombie had just enough cognition left to imagine a peaceful denouement for a deserving few. Like the broken child at its feet.
For that, the Good would pay, the Bad would collect, the Zombie would witness.
The streets were empty. Emptier when deadened creatures such as they passed through. The Good stopped at an intersection. He stared down the cross lane lit by the uncontested blaze of the low sun. He never checked to see if the Bad was with him, but he always waited for the Zombie, his expression unreadable until he registered the child in its arms.
An almost smile.
“Sick. Just sick,” the Bad spat. “Not right.”
“Our angel is always right. Our angel understands the new ways better than a reprobate like you ever will.” The Good headed straight into the fallen sun.
The Zombie felt little, but the dead-on radiance of the sun flecked its eyes with colors, shapes, images. Life. Energy. Intensity. The child in its arms became something else entirely. A memory. A little girl on a porch. A peaceful sunset. A world not yet unmade
Darkness slowly snuffed out the last ember of day and still the Zombie held a shiver, a long-ago thrill of its promise. The Good would soon be preaching to the stars. The Bad would disappear to sate his appetites. The Zombie would cleave to the child and remember more. More than the Good or the Bad ever dared.
Deep in the night, the Zombie with child, watched the heavens and was watched. The Bad lurked nearby, his pockets full of grievances. The Good approached.
“Is it foretold, angel?” Only the glint of his upturned eyes visible. “Judgment should be swift.”
Faint lines appeared between the stars. More and more. A web, a net, forming above them, as it had in the beginning of the end times. The child kicked in the Zombie’s loosening arms.
“Another offering?“ the Good asked of his angel.
The Zombie was more than willing. It was willful.
The child roared.
Life does not ask permission.
by submission | Feb 7, 2023 | Story |
Author: Mattia Ravasi
They came out of mirrors. Out of shop windows. Out of lakes and ponds, if the water was clear and still enough.
Our doubles. Identical, but opposite. Indistinguishable from us except for that look in their eyes, the look that people like my mom (mired in horrid prejudice) still believe to be proof that they are not the same as us, not truly human.
A defiant look. Unapologetic.
There were accidents at first, bursts of spontaneous or organized violence, but it is hard to harm yourself – and almost as hard to harm your anti-self. It feels wrong at a deep, primeval level.
Looking back at the panic of those early days, it is astonishing to realize how smoothly the world adapted when the Earth’s population doubled in a single day.
It turned out that overpopulation was a lie. There is enough Earth for everybody, as long as people stop eating for ten, and taking up land for a hundred. It wasn’t difficult, after that point, to shrug off Power’s other lies. If we don’t build these weapons, our enemies will kill us in our sleep. If you don’t work hard, our competitors will put us out of business, and you’ll go hungry.
(I lie. It was difficult. It took blood, sweat, and years, both ours and theirs, our doubles’.)
*
I live in the same city as mine. Apparently this is very common: people residing quite close to their double. It might be that we don’t trust them, and prefer to keep an eye on them. It might be that it’s as hard to give them up as it is to avoid looking at yourself when you pass your reflection in a car window.
The idea that they might harbor the same feeling, an unquestionable urge to check on us from time to time, never crossed my mind until now – perhaps because I am not as different from my mom as I like to think.
I have never spoken to him. He ran out of my house the second he emerged from my bathroom mirror, not without first giving me that look. We don’t say hi, or even nod, when we meet around town. And yet I somehow know quite a lot about him.
He does not feel the cold. Even in Winter, he rides his bike in short sleeves.
He never smiles at passersby, never moves out of the way to let pensioners or couples or groups of teenagers walk past him, but I’ve seen him run to the rescue of an old man who’d slipped on ice, and try to talk down a homeless man who was having a fit.
He eats with great gusto. He belches openly, unthinkingly.
He married a woman with black hair and a penchant for flowery dresses. I have seen them walk hand in hand, and I have seen them having loud arguments at café tables. I get the sense that he would rather call her out on the things he disagrees with, rather than stifle his opinion for the sake of a peaceful afternoon.
I doubt he ever read a single book, but he discusses the local soccer team loudly and jovially with strangers on the bus.
He is too distracted to send token texts to his aging parents – how are you today, I had pizza for lunch. He does make a point to travel to see them as often as he can.
The reason why I hate him so much is that I cannot shake the feeling that he is a better person than I am.
by Julian Miles | Feb 6, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There are mornings when you wish you could reset the world by going back to bed. For me, today is one of those. I woke to find the newsfeeds saturated with pictures of someone who remained a friend despite their ever-increasing fame.
I am, of course, talking about Vanto Crake, vocalist with Titan Walks, leader of the Daq Ne Yebol Troupe, and author of the infamous handbook ‘Anarchy and Visions for Interstellar Troublemakers’.
I only chatted with him yesterday. For me, death has not yet stained the vitality of recall.
He was upbeat over the recent issues regarding the rights to Titan Walks early work, and raved about the new album they’d just completed. There was also mention of a farewell tour with Daq Ne Yebol, as he’d finally decided to focus on Titan Walks, along with working on his second book. To my surprise, it was to be a romance set during the civil wars that ended the Dystopian Era on Earth.
I wish we’d reminisced a little more. Crazy stuff like the day he crashed a gravbike into a riot truck so the rest of us could escape across the Iridescent Bridge – he had to dive into the river to avoid angry law officers spilling out the back of it. Another favourite is when he and I spent a night careering about in stolen hovercars, painting all the Druckheim City election display screens black.
Everybody’s seen the video of him using a stolen interceptor to skywrite the symbol of the Passionata Rebels above the Passio presidential decennial celebrations. Nobody saw him smuggling beleaguered rebel leader Anstur Yebol off Passio. He started Daq Ne Yebol soon after their affair ended. The name means ‘Souls to the Calling’ in her native tongue.
I first saw Titan Walks play in a garage behind my tenement on Ganrie. A year later, I couldn’t get a ticket for their sold-out gig at the Planet Ganrie Arena. Their rise was that fast.
The day after that gig, Vanto knocked on my door and presented me with a tour programme from the VIP package, and a telling off for not contacting him to get in to the show. I mockingly gave him a hard time for not putting me on the guestlist. I still feel guilty about that because my name has appeared on every guestlist since.
He was one of the first humans to experience personal translight, flitting from Congreave to Ganrie because his sister had been involved in a gravbike crash, then flitting back to Congreave to play the Bountyhouse Festival, managing to do a full two-hour set despite suffering hallucinations from FTL shock.
His far-reaching charitable work has been well publicised, but I need to emphasise his work here on Ganrie. It’s been transformational. The Community Action Party continues to cleave to the principles he laid out in the final appendix of his book. As a consequence, we are a planet without poverty and wars.
That, I think, is what he’d be most proud of. He was always advocating for honest, practical solutions applied with compassion and defended with vigour. ‘If you let hate win, everybody loses in the end’ he used to say. Ganrie has become a triumphant vindication of his principles.
What I’ll miss most is him sitting in the back yard, playing guitar and singing old shanties for my grandparents and the neighbours. Summer evenings will never be the same without him.
Sleep well, Vanto. You did good, my friend. (But I still think Titan Walks concept album ‘Cloister’ was a mistake.)
Antio Durnall, Ganrie City, 15-09-2441.
by submission | Feb 5, 2023 | Story |
Author: Sophie Villalobos
Phyllis was carrying in a three-tiered sponge cake. Her hips ticked one way and the cake the other. She lifted the party hat that was perched on top of Brain’s tank and set it down on the table beside him.
‘Happy birthday, Brain!’
A lacklustre stream of bubbles rose from beneath Brain’s frontal lobe. ‘Alas, another year,’ he said. His voice crackled in the speaker system.
Phyllis ignored him and started to cut the cake. ‘A slice for me,’ she said, removing a perfect wedge, ‘and a slice for you.’ She cradled a second wedge over to him, uncovered his tank, and sprinkled a few crumbs into the water. They fluttered down like fish food.
‘How’s about a little champagne to soften the blow?’ Brain said.
She licked the frosting from her fingers. ‘Okay, but just a drop. You know what alcohol does to your grey matter.’
Phyllis retrieved a bottle from the refrigerator and added a splash to his water. She replaced the lid of his tank and balanced the party hat jauntily on top of it. ‘I also got you a present. Any idea what it might be?’
‘It’s another hat.’
She dropped her arms by her sides and moaned. ‘Have a little imagination!’
‘Phil, darling, I’ve been stuck in this jar for forty years. There aren’t many other options.’
She stifled a squeal. ‘Oh, shush!’ Her shoes slipped over the floor tiles and when they reappeared, she was nudging a wrapped box with the point of her toe.
Brain drew behind a curtain of bubbles. Phyllis tore off the paper and heaved the contents out of the box. Brain heard her groan. The bubbles parted and he moved forward, rising a little like a cloud.
‘Lift with your back, not your arms!’ he said.
‘Easy for you to say.’
She rolled the gift onto her knees and lugged it over to the table. The cake jumped into the air as she dropped the object down beside it.
‘Well, it’s not another Panama, that’s for sure.’
‘Do you like it? It’s a diving helmet. But wait, that’s not all!’ She turned a key and the helmet began to whir. Cogs rode up behind the eyeholes and spun like pinwheels—a click—then six metal legs shot out from underneath it. Phyllis reached inside and tripped a switch. The helmet took a step forward. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ She grabbed a handful of electrodes from inside it. They hung between her fingers from a tangle of blue wires.
Brain fizzed with joy. ‘I can’t believe it! A brain-machine interface?’
‘Yup! Adapted from old Soviet gear. All we do now is pop you in here and you’re off! You can operate it without a body!’ Phyllis was about to attach the syphoning hose to Brain’s tank but she stopped herself.
‘What? What are you waiting for?’
‘It’s just,’ she pointed to the bottle of champagne, ‘You aren’t really supposed to drink and drive.’
by submission | Feb 4, 2023 | Story |
Author: A. C. Weaver
The Franz Josef Glacier has a smoky flavor and a granular texture. The Mendenhall glacier is gamey, with notes of musk and vetiver. The Greenland Ice Sheet has a powdery sweetness to it, like fine sugar. Ice of the Baltoro Glacier — which I enjoyed cubed in a Macallan single-malt — has a subtle, earthy bouquet. I have a close personal friend with access to an extensive cold storage facility in Svalbard; he often invites me there to indulge in rare or extinct ice. He chipped me off a serving of his collection from the Cook Ice Cap. It was the deepest blue I’ve ever seen, bluer than you could possibly imagine, you would weep to see it. We glutted on it, had it straight, shaved into shards to melt on the tongue.
The highly praised Perito Moreno Glacier has cores of bright green and even purple ice. But in color and flavor, I find them gauche. Very popular with the influencer crowd, and unfortunately, easily faked.
An acquaintance of mine, who happens to be a food journalist for the Times, took me out to dinner on the roof of the Hotel Angelique for a rare indulgence in rough-cut core of the Antarctic Shackleton Ice Shelf — one of the last places you can get it, outside of private collections — , on a bed of heather and garnished with arctic thyme. Exquisite, pure as water.
by submission | Feb 3, 2023 | Story |
Author: Brooks C. Mendell
Victoria remembered when, as a girl, she walked through Wellington Wood with her father. They listened to woodpeckers banging their heads for bugs and looked for promising oak trees to climb. The arrival of the Grafters and their technological efficiencies changed work and this way of life.
“They will try to replace us,” said Father, following an orientation session. “But it will be difficult.”
Wellington Wood, the vast forest covering half of the continent, had long supplied natural resources to families and businesses: wood for lumber, furniture and fuel; animals for food and leather; roots and plants for medicine and spices. While the Governors bickered over taxes and boundary lines, they faithfully observed the Wellington Wood tradition of sustainable rule: balance harvest with growth.
The Grafters arrived on gleaming metal ships that hovered across the water. Their representatives, dressed in collarless uniforms, visited the Governors and proposed new arrangements to increase production and revenues.
After the signing of Pact, the Grafters sent the massive, dull industrial ships loaded with equipment and their humanoid Fortechs.
“We have no interest in replacing the human workers,” said a Fortech, “but to make your work safer. This will increase our efficiency metrics.”
During weekly orientation sessions, Fortechs introduced new processes to increase volume and improve quality. The goals centered on numbers agreed to by the Grafters and our Governors. Each month, Father came home with less energy, less humor, less patience. He stooped.
Bit by bit, the Grafters bought the lawmakers and the courts and reporters. Our lives became less about walking in the woods and more about supplying energy and labor to the economic machines of our overlords.
The days of Victoria climbing in the woods with friends and family were no more. Now, she lived in a barrack with a nutrition muzzle strapped to her head and a fecal harness strapped to her hips that piped waste to the fertilizer distributors.
Humans always have a use.
