by Julian Miles | Mar 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The man sitting in the waiting room looks like a typical, middle-aged office worker. His suit might be his best rather than his daily wardrobe, but from freshly-shined shoes to carefully slicked-back hair, he’s a shining example of average as portrayed by media outlets for decades.
Cleon, the new recruit, turns from the one-way panel.
“Why on earth did the powers that be call this Joe in?”
Taram, the one tasked with mentoring Cleon, sighs.
“If you’d read the briefing pack delivered to your preferred device this morning – another of the ones I said should be read before you arrive at your first designated location each day – you wouldn’t need to ask.”
Cleon waits. Taram offers nothing more. With a start, Cleon pulls out his phone and scans through the briefing pack.
“Picotech?”
Taram smiles. At least the new dork is a quick reader.
“Correct. Mister average is Bernard Royus.”
Cleon looks back at Bernard, then down at his phone, trying to reconcile the two extremes.
“He’s so, so…”
“Ordinary?”
Cleon nods.
“We think it’s deliberate. He doesn’t stand out, except for being an early adopter of synthetic prostitutes. Which, when you factor in his unique nature, is no surprise.”
“Is he aware?”
“We’re sure not. We’re also convinced he’s subconsciously guided in some things, for example: intimacy partners. Anything that could conceivably betray what he carries is behaviourally managed to mitigate even a slight risk.”
“Yet we’ve left him free to wander about?”
“You wouldn’t believe the number of people he interacts with who are members of this department. From those who collect the bins he throws anything away in to those who intervene to ensure any bodily soil is contained. This man is the single biggest mission we’ve ever had.”
“Why?”
“Agent Cleon Daniel, think it through, and do it openly. Consider this a mission exam.”
Cleon swallows. Exams are unarguable. You pass or you get transferred somewhere you can’t be a risk. Sometimes that’s a graveyard.
“Bernard came to our attention after a road accident in Devon. His car was found blown to pieces about him, but he was apparently unharmed, apart from having no memory of the previous week. That gave us the excuse to call him in for irregular ‘check-ups’.
“His body is permeated with microscopic machines. The term ‘picotech’ has been coined to describe them. Nothing like them have ever been encountered anywhere else. Some of the materials they are made from do not appear in the periodic table. The postulation initially made as a joke has been reluctantly accepted as fact: what’s in him came from an extra-terrestrial source.”
Cleon snaps his fingers.
“That fact changes how we handle this. Such advanced technology and stealth, but we have no visible opponent. We’re in the dark. All we can do is limit the exposure to what he carries and disseminates. Everything that comes from him has to be securely contained to limit the spread of the picotech into the environment.”
He puts his phone away.
“We’re waiting. Something modified Bernard Royus. Was he intended to be a Typhoid Mary, a hub, some other form of infiltrator, or is he an experiment in his own right? We simply don’t know. We have to make sure Bernard lives a contained life. On top of all that, there’s the possibility he was meant to be discovered.”
Taram nods.
“Well done. That last possibility is the scariest thing. Many fail to pick up on it.”
Cleon sighs.
“Justified fear of the unknown. Terrifying.” He grins: “Exhilarating.”
Taram smiles. Cleon is going to fit right in.
by submission | Mar 13, 2022 | Story |
Author: Jonathan H. Smith
The Earth Café was a new restaurant tucked away in a part of town where Calyx would have never gone — had she not yearned to cheer up her grandfather. The tables were adorned with various oddities donated by the original settlers – the remaining odd-hundred wanting to preserve the memory of their inter-galactic past. Her grandfather was among that dwindling group.
“You should have let me take you to see the Ultra Scope instead,” Calyx said, while her grandfather played with the steely keys of a typewriter.
“I had one just like it, you know?”
“Pop.” She held his wrinkled hand across the table. “That’s all in the past now.”
“You remind me so much of your mother,” he said with a glassy smile in his eyes.
“We’re worried, Pop. Let your family – let me — help you. There’s a life here for you, but you have to be open to it.”
He took a deep sigh and let Calyx take him out for the day. He thought eating his old favorites would quench his pain but being there only made him feel more distant from his past.
“Here it is,” Calyx announced. “The Ultra Scope.”
After waiting in line for more than an hour, they finally stepped in front of the massive cone. “You go first, Pop.”
His sweaty hands gripped the handles as he veered into distant space. “You really can see it all,” he exclaimed.
The technician programmed in the highlights most came to view – the diamond river on Zento, the silvery winds of Guskor, and of course, the colliding suns of XA-079.
“I’d like to see Earth,” Pop said. Calyx rubbed his back and nodded.
“You’re a settler, aren’t you?” The technician asked. “No one else ever asks.”
The remnants of Earth came to focus before Pop’s eyes. He breathed in deeply to steady himself.
The planet he once knew and loved – that magnificent cerulean globe – now fragmented into twisted, ashen cylinders. Over 12 billion dead, he thought, why us?
“It’s so we could have this Pop,” Calyx said, reading his mind. “So, life could go on.”
“I just feel so guilty. Without you, my angel, I don’t think I would have looked back.”
“I know, Pop. I’m proud of you. You’re a hero.”
They walked away from the Ultra Scope. He had finally faced what had been left behind.
“I just wish your mom could have come with us.” He squeezed Calyx and cried.
The blue-hued sunset was rimmed with fiery purple accents. He watched it with wonder, only now accepting that it wasn’t some oddity. This was home. Tomorrow, he told himself, he would stop holding back. Tomorrow, he would stop apologizing for being alive.
by submission | Mar 12, 2022 | Story |
Author: Randall Andrews
“You all know about the meteorite that fell near here last month,” said Ryan Dunne, recently tenured professor of geology. “I’ve been studying the two recovered fragments and have discovered something remarkable. As you can see.”
With a flourish, Ryan whipped away the sheet covering his sole visual aid, a gray metal plate covered with a complex pattern of grooves etched in tightly packed, perfectly spaced concentric circles.
“Unlike more typical iron-nickel meteorites, this one contains an astonishing variety of rare-earth elements in unusual alloys. It’s magnetic and faintly radioactive, which is why I used this radiation shield during testing.”
“It’s beautiful.”
Ryan turned his attention to Mindy Kim, the ASL interpreter of the university’s chemistry department head, Dr. Dane Allister, and the only non-professor in the group. Catching the look of awe on the young woman’s face, Ryan realized the words had been her own. He glanced back at the etched metal sheet, considering it anew.
“I suppose it is,” he agreed, offering her a nod. A mistake.
Allister exploded into a frenzy of sign language, his hands slashing through the air like he was shadow boxing as his young interpreter cowered.
When it was over, an awkward silence filled the room as Ryan struggled to find his place again.
“When I exposed the first fragment to a low-level dose of microwaves, it triggered a snap alignment of its molecular structure. Its magnetic strength spiked exponentially, and it became superconducting.
“Room temperature superconductivity has incredible potential applications, but there’s a twist—the effect didn’t last. An hour later, the molecular alignment within the stone collapsed, and now the process can’t be repeated. Worse, those unique alloys were just formed as the meteorite passed through our atmosphere, and their half-life is extremely short. Weeks.
“I just made the discovery of a lifetime, and all I have to show for it is this radiation shield grooved up by a potent magnetic field. There has to be a way to take better advantage of the second fragment while there’s time. Questions?”
“What will you do with that metal sheet?”
Ryan thought he’d anticipated the likely questions, but not this. Allister’s assistant clearly didn’t grasp the situation. The lead sheet wasn’t important except as a clue to the real mystery—the meteorite—which he was about to explain when Allister’s hands flew into motion again, carving the air inches from the young woman’s face.
“Speak my words,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “You’re a former art major who never finished your degree, and nobody cares what you think.”
Ryan’s stomach twisted. For Allister to force the girl to relay his comment wasn’t just rude—it was cruel.
An hour later, the group dispersed unsatisfied but in agreement that the right course of action was sure to be discovered—given a bit of time.
Ryan hoped so. A bit of time was all he had.
***
(Two months later, on the other side of campus)
“Two months ago, I arranged a meeting with some of the university’s top scientists,” Ryan said, addressing the crowd. “We were discussing a discovery I’d made involving a rare meteorite. One other person attended that meeting, someone who was there to serve merely as an interpreter. Her presence proved serendipitous.”
At Ryan’s signal, art students began pulling away the sheets covering the twenty-three plates of various metals that ringed the room, all wondrously etched by the second fragment’s briefly intensified magnetic field.
“And now it’s my pleasure to introduce Mindy Kim, the brainchild of this unique exhibition of naturalistic art, which we have lovingly dubbed Serendipity.”
by submission | Mar 11, 2022 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
“Breaking in was easy- you’re way behind the times old man.”
I nodded. “Could be. I never trusted all the high-tech solutions to everything. Only use that stuff when I have to.” My dogs growled. I hushed them.
My captor chuckled and pet my dogs. “You’re all right. Most of the old crows we corner start the shrieking or bellowing thing. Glad you didn’t.”
He was typical of our veterans’ off-grid community’s main problem: bored rich kids from enclaved families who think they’re badass. Come way out here to kill us, take our stuff, just for an extra night of clubbing. No authority would help us. We don’t count.
A heavy crackle of static came over his coms.
“Ian,” a voice said on the verge of laughter, “you gotta come see this.”
My captor, Ian, motioned with his energy weapon for us to go outside. I nodded. I took a cigar out of my humidor. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead, old man. It’s your funeral anyway. Bring your doggies too.” I lit up my cigar and whistled for my dogs to follow.
We went out into the compound. There were about twenty-five total, male and female, all copping what they thought was the badass marauder look- zinc paint, lots of leather, skin, tribal fetishes. Kind of cliché really.
“Check this out!” One of Ian’s crew pulled back a corner of the turf revealing a bed of sharpened bamboo stakes. Ian looked over at me. “What’s that supposed to do? Make us go on tippy toes?” Ian slapped his boots. “Gel-steel. Stop a round and energy weapons and not even make us stumble. Scotty, stomp that shit.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, son.”
Scotty smiled a nasty smile. “I ain’t your kid old man.” He jumped onto my punji sticks… and straight through them to the eight-foot-deep pit lined with 36” carbon fiber spikes. Even though I couldn’t see, the sound was bad enough. The kid’s screams made the rest of his crew run over to the pit. I took several steps back.
A young lady on the opposite side of the pit looked up. “You are so dead Old Man!” With muscle-assisted armor, she easily cleared the pit… and into the second pit. That was my cue to turn on the sprinkler.
Enraged, Ian turned to me. “Think a little mud is gonna slow the rest of us down? Water? That all you got now?”
I shook my head. “Inhale.”
Ian looked puzzled. He sniffed. “Oh, excuse me. Crappy smelling water.” His bros and ghouls laughed. They didn’t get it.
I nodded. “Not water. Gasoline.” I flicked my cigar over Ian’s head. The fine mist of gasoline ignited immediately, and the screams of his crew made Ian recoil in horror. Some of his friends couldn’t take it and jumped in the pit finding death with Scotty and his girl a better alternative. Two of their vehicles collided while trying to get out of my compound. A third managed to clear the twelve-foot wall only to be hit by my ballista. It’s amazing what one can do when combining state-of-the-art targeting with ancient mechanical weapons. The kid in control crashed the ship. The resulting fireball was impressive.
Ian turned to me, tears of rage streaming down his face. Slowly he brought his pistol up. I whistled. My dogs did the rest.
I pulled out my old-fashioned smartphone and tapped it once. “Geezer to Base.”
“Base here. Go ahead Geeze.”
“Mission accomplished. Request clean up.”
“Roger.”
I smiled. “Kickin’ it old school.”
by submission | Mar 10, 2022 | Story |
Author: J.D. Rice
Fingers scraped against hard ground, seeking a handhold against the sulfuric winds that battered against the environmental suit. The sky rumbled with cold lightning, and hail battered the suit’s graphene plating, begging for entry as if it needed to escape the storm itself. Moments passed through the excruciating chaos. Hand over hand, the figure within the suit pulled themselves along, instincts completely driving their actions as they crawled about looking for shelter. They would find none. Against this barren, toxic wasteland, there could be no victory.
She kept moving away.
Some faint part of her thought she might stumble upon a crash site. Her own, maybe, or that of some other crew pulled into the gravity well of this wretched planet.
This monster, a strange and inhospitable amalgam of terrestrial planet and gas giant, had devoured its latest prey. Her ship was gone, she knew, ripped to shreds in the upper atmosphere. Her escape pod had barely managed to reach the surface, crashing violently and tossing her haphazardly down a crumbling hillside. She would be dead, had not the howling updrafts somehow blunted her fall.
Now, she was alone.
Her body ached, and her communicator was silent. No other escape pods had launched, the rest of the crew trying desperately to keep the ship together as it plunged towards the surface. Her cowardice had saved her life.
“But for what?” she thought, hands gripping the rock face more tightly.
Darkness enveloped her, broken only by periodic, violent flashes of lightning.
“On,” her body urged her, adrenaline still churning within her. “On. Survive.”
Her arms and legs continued moving of their own accord, half-climbing, half-crawling ever forward. The sediment, if you could call it that, was rapidly building around her – little chunks of rock, ice, and crystal blown about by an endless storm, collecting in huge drifts against the jagged, icy mountains that towered over her.
“On, on,” her body fought back against the analysis in her mind. “Don’t think, just move.”
But what was the point?
She wasn’t a geologist, just another space jockey hoping to make a quick buck on the interstellar market. She’d been the one to suggest this route, everyone mistaking her greed for some uncanny confidence or bravado. They all know the reputation of this planet. They knew it devoured ships with an almost ravenous hunger. They all went along with her anyway.
“Stupid fools,” she thought, slumping down in a prone position, hands over her head to buffer herself against the wind and crystalline hail.
She hadn’t been brave, hadn’t been clever. She was just another foolhardy idiot risking lives for a little gravity boost.
Now they were all dead, and she was stuck here, waiting for the planet to take her too.
The storm would strip the environmental suit away, bit by bit, it’s graphene slowly becoming one with the debris thrown about by the storm, spreading over the surface of this harsh world. Her body would be next. Her flesh would be stripped from her bones, and before long, the bones themselves would be battered, crushed, and churned into powder. Her presence scrubbed clean from a planet that had never welcomed her in the first place.
“Fight,” her body said weakly, but all she could do was pull into a tighter ball on the ground.
She knew her fate. Either her oxygen would run out, or she would lose containment. There were no other choices.
In the end, she would be just another victim, swallowed by the monster planet.
by submission | Mar 9, 2022 | Story |
Author: Brian C. Mahon
It takes Zax only one external sponson rotation after crawling out the sleep sack to yell, “Du’! This is complete crap!” Jackass throws a wrench at Viewscreen One, which, lucky us, I put a shield over.
“’Ey man, cut the gorbaj! We use that! I get it, dig? But we can’t cut orbit ‘til we got enough coin, and we can’t get enough coin ‘til we been here long enough to earn it.”
Zax turns red, then kinda purple, cheeks turning almost as purple as his hair. He tries to shove a cut-fingered glove in my face. Maybe if auto-grav worked, I’d take him seriously, but it’s hard to take a dang ol’ serious when rotating three-sixty.
“No! That’s not the problem! We’re stuck with this cut-rate planet’s bull eccentricity so’s we can’t work planet-side but half the time! We gotta wait out in this floating hovel ‘til the company slings us back on intercept, and while we waitin’, Novabus rate hikes coverage so we gotta stay out here even longer!”
I shrug. Novabus Insurance did hit all us exo-miners with a three percent increase. He ain’t wrong either about waiting. JupiCorp never sends pushers out on time, and we always at the pusher’s mercy to catch “Herbie” (HR 5183s if so inclined) on its return path to the survivable zone.
“I donno what to tell ya. Remember Hansen Jo Hanson? Man didn’t pay his insurance. Man didn’t pay to maintain his boosters, never upgraded control instruments when Skyward Tech pushed new software, never did a dang ol’ that cost him more ‘an he saw fit. Then what happened?” I push my bandana up so he can catch me staring.
“Well, yeah, things went bad for him.”
“Bad? C’mon Zax! Mans blew up! Booster flamed up his b-hole an’ sent him cartwheelin’ off the ionosphere! Bet Novabus heard all about that! Bet that’s why all us got tagged! You remember if Nova paid for it?”
“Naw an’ hell naw! Nova didn’t pay a dim!”
“That’s ‘cause he din’t get upgrades! That’s the model there, Z,” I says, tapping the side of my dome. “Insurance knows. Planned colony builders pay Jupi and the rest o’ the excavators for material close to the world sites, Jupi pushes money to Skyward and other manufactorums, businesses follow colonist money, and Novabus and their ilk keep an eye on ‘em all to figure who to leech money from ‘for safety’. ‘Oh, no update? Check page seven eighty-two of your re-entry supplement. See? That’s a hard no on payout.’ I mean, we just pit stops for the money train. Earnin’s never stay in hand long enough to look at, and we get just enough overhead to keep from gettin’ too ornery.”
“Yeah! Exactly! Meanwhile we gotta stay on scrap planets like Herbie just to get enough to get out!”
“Meantime, we make more money for Jupi, to give to Skyward, to give to Nova.”
Zax rolls his eyes. “Its such phage work.”
Knowing he’ll chew on this until he’s asleep again, I pull the bandana over my eyes. Can’t and won’t disagree with him. Life hanging out in a half-broke twenty-foot tube waiting on someone paid less than us isn’t exactly my childhood dream.
Viewscreen Two shows anti-grav’s on its fifth reboot, and Zax’s looks like he’s working the pre-start sequence to sobbing over the situation again. He’ll figure it out. Took me a couple orbits, but I learned, sometimes it’s just better to float on by. Soon as I hear the sniffle, I mutter, “’ey man. Welcome to the circle of life.”
