by submission | Mar 14, 2025 | Story |
Author: Jo Peace
We always learn things too late.
I remember the pine smell, the urgent fear as I hurried to assemble the close-in defense unit before the drones reached our position.
A young voice snaps me back to the present. “Dad, why do you live alone in the mountains? Is it because people tease you about the serious?” That was part of it, for sure – people can get surprisingly mean about things they don’t understand, and surprisingly controlling about things that hurt no one. But also, I needed to stay close to the last functioning “serious”, as they called them. I just got tired of explaining they were much more than just a pile of spare parts. “Dad?” -“Sorry, I got lost in thought.” I take her in a big hug, like when she was little and we all lived in the village. “I missed you so much!”
“It’s very nice of you to visit your dad, Libby. I don’t think I could survive here if you and your mom didn’t visit now and then. What brings you to the area anyways?” -“Oh daddy, house power broke and hubby said his pals found a functioning unit! Since we were close I thought I’d come by.”
Just on cue, her friend Jack comes by. “Hello mister Humpfrey!” His clothes are dirty and oily. I wave, then go in the tent to prepare some tea.
As I am arranging cups on a tray, I hear a commotion outside. “Fireworks!” I rush out and I see tracers glowing in the evening sky, then a ball of fire. I can make out two more drones passing through, towards us. I haven’t seen them so aggressive since…
-“Wait, Libby, where did he find that power source exactly? Not in a CIWZ… right?” There was nothing for miles, family after family had dismantled everything they could find. Except for the one I had been maintaining all this time, our last functioning defense. “Not in a shallow dig by an old pine tree?”
Libby’s face grew red. Jack shrugged. “So what? Those old machines never do anything. They’ve been broken for decades.”
“Yes son, unless someone cares enough to maintain them”, I think. My blood turns cold at the realization of what they have done. That was the last CIWZ, the one I dedicated myself to carefully maintain for decades, sacrificing time with my family. It also meant I couldn’t continue trying to educate the tribe in maintenance and the invisible dangers. I had given it my all, but they were more concerned with their immediate survival needs.
“More fireworks!” Another ball of fire as a second wave breaks through the coastal defenses, ten kilometers east. Nothing remains to block their way, and I’m the only one left who understands what that means. My wife is out in the village, exposed. Libby’s husband is there too, and almost everyone I’ve known in the past decade.
I could run. I could hide. But I realize that even if I survive despite the long odds, my life would be pointless with the rest of the village dead (or the livestock we rely on). They didn’t know they needed me, and I didn’t know I needed them. We always learn things too late. Libby needs her husband, and I need my wife. At least she won’t experience the dread of knowing certain death is flying towards her.
The tray is still in my hands, the drones are maybe two minutes away now, the kids still unaware. Tears blurring my vision I turn to the three kids. “Who wants tea?”
by submission | Mar 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: Soramimi Hanarejima
On my way home, I stop by the drugstore for a quick errand. But in the nootropics aisle, I’m thwarted by vacant shelf space. When I ask a clerk what happened to all the memorysyn, he tells me there’s been a recall. Some production issue has made recent lots more potent than normal, resulting in memories that are too vivid with all the minutiae of daily life. For now, we’ll have to make memories the old fashioned way.
After dinner, I cozy up on the sofa and go through what happened today, picking out events that hold the promise of meaning. Then it’s time to determine that meaning, which is easy when the meaning is straightforward but frustrating when it’s ambiguous.
And it’s especially ambiguous for the most notable thing today: the world seeming forlorn without my colors. What does that mean? Hoping to puzzle out the answer, I go over and over my in-progress memory of this colorless day.
Before work, I took my colors to the vision shop for an overdue tune-up. The chromatician told me that all my colors needed recalibration and I’d have to leave them for various specialists to service.
“The whole spectrum is out of whack. Especially the tertiaries,” she said.
“So do you have loaner colors I can use in the meantime?” I asked.
“Not an entire spectrum. We just have basic colors, and you’re better off seeing the world in shades of gray instead of getting pops of red, purple and yellow.”
So I resigned myself to total grayness and headed to the office, the city like the milieu of an old movie—until an unsettling emptiness began to loom over downtown. That emptiness only intensified, and at work, I struggled to focus. By lunchtime, it was as though a vast void lay beneath the floor and behind the walls. I had to take the afternoon off.
My usual route home was a dismal trek through a desolate husk of urban life—buildings, traffic and people all hollowed of substance. My apartment was just as vacuous, sapped of its usual homeyness, like a three-dimensional shadow of the place I’d left this morning. Not sure what else to do, I took a nap and slept soundly, until I was woken by a call telling me that my colors were ready.
After a bus ride through the ashen shell of the city’s former self, I got my recalibrated colors reinstalled, and instantly the world was more lively than ever.
It’s all straightforward enough. So what’s the significance? Colors make the world feel substantive? Is it that simple? Or does the absence of color make an emotion I don’t ordinarily feel—like loneliness—part of the world around me?
More than ever now I crave the automatic narrative cohesion granted by memorysyn—the seamless way this neuroceutical instantaneously makes a whole memory complete with an inscrutable logic that locks events into meaningful place. But I should save what few pills I have in case it’s a while before the manufacturing issue gets resolved.
So I settle for the facile interpretation that seemingly simple fixtures in life shouldn’t be taken for granted. It’s a trite truism, but I can try again later. Or ask for your take on my day without colors. You have a knack for seeing the events of my life in a certain way, and that might just be the key to unlocking the significance I can’t. Then this memory would be really made the old fashioned way, something socially constructed. Maybe with the old-timey pleasure of understanding life together.
by submission | Mar 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: Lewis Richards
Two Shuttles slashed through the sheeting rain, trailed by twin comet tails of super heated plasma vaporising any raindrops unfortunate enough to meet them on their spiralling descent toward the fluctuating lights of the colony they raced toward.
It had been three days since the Ark-ship above lost contact with the colonists below and just over an hour since their distress call fired up the gravity well calling for an Evac before communication was lost again.
“Arrival in T-Minus three minutes. Over” The voice of the ships captain crackled.
“Confirmed” came matching responses from the shuttle pilots.
The shuttles levelled out, main engines cutting out as speed reducing thrusters flared.
“Hold position five hundred metres above the LZ. Over.”
“Captain?” The pilot of Shuttle Alpha asked
“Hold position.”
“But Sir with all due respect we don’t know how desperate the situ-“
“Precisely Daniels.” The Captain interjected. “ I am not inclined to allow an unknown pathogen, life form or rogue element risk the lives of everybody aboard this ship. We need more information and until then we treat this as a full quarantine lockdown. Am I understood?”
“Yes Sir” Two voices chimed
“Good. Now hold Position”
“Confirmed”
The shuttles hung in the air, buffeted by howling wind. Below the colony spread outward from a central landing pad, prefabricated units dropped from orbit giving way to a vast alien prairie. Lights flicked in a few windows, a ring of perimeter lights blinked in and out.
“Switching to spotlights.” Pilot Beta announced.
“High-beams on, confirmed” Daniels replied.
Two coronas of white blue light pierced through the night.
“What the- Sir are you seeing this? We have colonists on the landing pad.”
The pilots stared down at the landing pad and the mass of bodies staring back at them. Colonists covered every inch of space, packed tightly as more crammed up the access ramps and metal staircases.
“That must be every colonist down here” Beta whispered.
“They’re going to have to scram if they want a ride” Daniels answered “Sir shall I start my approach?”
“Negative Daniels. Hold while we assess.”
“Sir do you have access to my forward camera feed? You should see this.” Beta spoke. Panic in his voice.
Daniels bought the image up on his own screen, Beta was zoomed in on the colonists below, they were stood perfectly still. Too still, their eyes fixed unblinking on the glare of the shuttles above them, every muscle locked, mouths gaped in silent screams. Even from here he could see the whites of their eyes, he zoomed further, every colonists eyes were milky, laced with black.
“What’s wrong with them?” Daniels asked.
Nobody answered.
“Shuttles are to return to the ship immediately. You will perform a 7G burn from your main thrusters back into orbit and proceed directly back to the ship. Am I understood?” The Captains voice boomed with every ounce of her authority.
“Sir, the plasm-“ Daniels began.
“Exactly.” Beta whispered.
“Oh shit.” Daniels muttered, fingers flying over his console.
The shuttles flipped in near unison, thrusters flaring as they pointed their noses straight up.
“Acceleration in 3-2-“ the captain counted down.
“Confirmed” two voices spoke from the shuttles.
The main engines of the shuttles burst to life, propelling them back up through the atmosphere as twin comet tail exhausts of superheated plasma bathed the horror below, vaporising any colonists fortunate enough to be in their path.
by submission | Mar 11, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Some seven thousand years ago a micrometeorite winged a pine cone, clipped the ear of a very surprised marmot, skewered a large oyster mushroom, and buried itself in the thick duff of a mountainous forest in the north Cascades. Stan Clutterdam knew none of that when he unceremoniously peed on the ancient impact site.
Only a trace amount of his pee seeped to the buried micrometeorite. Enough, though, that remnants of Stan’s DNA triggered a reaction bio-coded in the thing which had travelled from the deeper cosmos so long ago. The reaction was somewhat clouded by the reluctant artifacts of the pine cone, marmot, and mushroom, but the embedded bio-code was nothing if not adaptable, and the process in the buried thing began.
About six hours later, tired but satisfied with the day’s rugged hike, Stan Clutterdam was looking forward to an elk burger and garlic fries at Zeke’s back in town. He wasn’t counting on the creature blocking his descent. Stan was used to back country critters, but he wasn’t prepared for a pine-marmot-mushroom doppelganger sitting in the trail. He had a whistle and bear spray, but neither seemed sufficient when confronting the furry, spongy thing that kinda looked like him and smelled like a car air freshener.
As if customary, Stan’s doppelganger stood and launched into song. “Do you see what I see? Way up in the sky. Do you see what I see? A star, a star, dancing in the night. With a tail as big as a kite.”
For some preternatural reason, Stan sung back, “Do you hear what I hear? Ringing through the sky. Do you hear what I hear? A song, a song, high above the trees. With a voice as big as the sea.”
A moment of silent communion passed and then Stan and his doppelganger harmonized, “Do you know what I know? Do you know what I know?”
And in that instant, they did. Stan Clutterdam experienced every warp and weft woven into the fabric of this ancient alien’s being. Stan’s deep space doppelganger got decidedly less material from Stan’s twenty-eight years of earthly existence, but the mind-meld did reveal a penchant for online poker and crypto trading.
Rocky but acceptable soil for a cosmic entrepreneur’s seed money.
Such was a galactic empire born. Not immaculately, nor drama-free, but over many decades, Stan with his clandestine doppelganger’s help amassed a great fortune that ultimately funded unimagined (unless you’d experienced alien mind-melding) technological breakthroughs leading to the rapid colonization of Earth’s planetary neighbors. And soon thereafter onto scads of favorable exo-systems.
On Stan’s deathbed at the age of 173, the truth came home to roost. Alone but for his demure doppelganger and sensing his last moments, Stan gave into a very cliche question, “Why me?”
Imbued with equal parts pine, marmot, mushroom, and Stan, his doppelganger shrugged. “Who knows. The seeds of tomorrow go where the solar winds blow.”
“Not very reaffirming, but at least you gave it a poetic spin,” Stan wheezed. “What happens from here?”
“Entropy.”
With that, Stan joined the Clutterdam family of little more than man. His doppelganger stood there for a few moments before the overwhelming compulsion came to venture deeper into the cosmos again via a very secret seed-ship. Enough time, though, to imagine a vague sense of agency, maybe even free will.
And for the very first time, Stan’s doppelganger really needed to pee.
by Julian Miles | Mar 10, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They’re running about again, but at least they’re looking happy about it. When I – we – got here, there was running, but only grim faces.
Has it only been six days?
Can’t have been.
Wait. Go through it.
Day one would have been after I heard the crash during the night. Sounded closer than all the others, but another aircraft falling from alien-controlled skies wasn’t unusual. I dug myself deeper under the stack of bedding and went back to sleep.
Come morning I crawled out. Seeing it had rained, I went out water hunting with funnel, syphon, and five-litre carrier in my backpack. Then I saw the size of the tailplane sticking up above the houses across the road. After making sure no-one was about, I went to see. The overnight scavengers would have picked it clean, but water might have collected in the wreckage.
I was right. Got nearly two litres before I saw the hand. Unlike all the other bodies, this one was waving!
A shockingly short time later, I had Jemima and Bruce sitting in my improvised den, eagerly wolfing down protein bar crumbs. I’d found the box squashed under a toppled cupboard in a looted shop, but after eating the contents of the ruptured wrappers, enough remained to keep me going. Until that day.
They told me about the fix their mother had entrusted them with delivering. Something in their cybergear had the secret to fighting the aliens. I didn’t understand. Apart from the urgency, and them being stranded.
Day two started early. I’d seen a crashed 4×4 on the other side of the supermarket. An old one. Bruce said his dad had been a mechanic. Said he could get it going, especially as I had a charge box I’d been keeping topped up with hours of cranking the hand charger I’d had since my grandfather gave it to me decades ago. The old bastard would have been in his element in this chaos, unlike me.
By lunchtime Bruce had got the 4×4 going, and Jemima had shot Looter Dan. He’d been my only local competition. Being nearly twice my width and surly with it, ‘competition’ mainly involved me retreating. This time a girl half my size blew his head off.
Day three: that had been fun. I’ve always loved driving. The 4×4 had nearly a full tank, airless tyres, and a hybrid cruising drive. With Jemima riding shotgun and Bruce navigating, we covered nearly three hundred miles, had two shoot-outs, and only lost the rear windscreen.
We arrived here later that day. I nearly got arrested, got thanked, then got ignored. That last one becoming a state of existence… Yeah, it’s been six days.
“Tony.”
I look up from my daydream. It’s Jemima.
“Uncle Ben says you can take the repaired 4×4 and a full load of supplies if you want.”
Oh yeah. I’d asked for that. ‘Uncle Ben’ wears a uniform with insignia that makes people salute and get out of his way. I was feeling unwanted when he asked. Since then, I’ve compared living in a ruined furniture warehouse to living here. I think I made a mistake.
She looks down at the floor, then back up to me.
“He also said you could keep the 4×4 and become our driver. Bruce said you were really good.”
“What about aliens and stuff?”
“They’re not gone, but the scientists say what my mum made is better than she predicted. We’ll have peace before winter.”
“I’m only driving if you bring that enormous gun of yours.”
She beams at me.
“Deal!”
by submission | Mar 9, 2025 | Story |
Author: James Jarvis
The green leaves of The Great Oak glistened in the starlight. The air was still and calming.
It was exactly what Liza expected.
She wandered over to the base of the tree whilst deep in thought. The beauty of The Great Oak was amplified by its location. Situated within its own room aboard the shuttle ship to Phobos, it looked majestic against the large viewing window situated behind it. The lofty domed ceiling and bright white walls added to the sense of grandeur. The soft hum of the shuttle’s engines added a meditative charm to the room, whilst serving as a reminder that not all was as it seemed.
Liza was forever amazed that this room had been commissioned, as the space and energy required must outstrip the rest of the ship. Yet this engineering feat was from the old era, before tensions began to rise.
Sighing deeply, she settled under the tree. This homage to nature in the middle of a space shuttle always gave her hope. Yet on this occasion the hope was not enough to quell the fear deep inside.
As a plutonium battery engineer, her job was simple: repair and service plutonium batteries. Most of these were located on the various moon-stations both due to necessity and to avoid undue human interaction. With efficiency and build quality as the guiding mantra, they were designed to ensure they rarely need attention throughout their estimated 35,000-year lifespan. Only occasional servicing and safety checks would be required, which had been the case for the last 135 years.
Until three weeks ago.
It’s not clear what caused the malfunctions, and the effect has not been catastrophic – far from it. A minor, but notable, reduction in power. Yet that has been enough to cause rumours to spread, and dissent to grow.
Whilst sitting under The Great Oak and staring out of the window, Liza became lost in anguish. The faults identified on all malfunctioning batteries had been identical, therefore it was highly probable that the same actions had caused the issues. Liza and her team had so far been unable to deduce the root cause, though they had ideas. Ripples across the fabric of the universe from a distant cosmological event seemed the most likely, though that wouldn’t explain the order the malfunctions occurred. Still, it was a logical starting point.
But Liza knew. Her team knew. Everyone knew, even if they did not want to vocalise their fears. The true cause was irrelevant – tensions had been rising for too long. This was no longer a mere mechanical fault. This would become the catalyst for future unrest.
Liza turned her gaze from the window and towards the countdown on the wall. She still had two days left onboard the shuttle, surrounded by tranquillity, able to ignore what was to come. Well, 1 Day, 12 Hours, 13 Minutes if she was honest to herself – but she wished it was longer.
The leaves of The Great Oak still glistened in the starlight. A single leaf fluttered down towards the ground, bouncing a soft glimmer of light upon Liza’s face. Its hue had become subtly more yellow than the rest. It probably didn’t mean anything.
The air remained still, calming – peaceful.
It was exactly what Liza needed.
