by Julian Miles | May 2, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Is your head deformed in some way?”
I spin left, taking the still-habitual extra step to back off a bit while doing so.
It’s an Uglonos herder, complete with brow spines painted blue. The contrast with his lime green hide is striking, but not as much as the clash with his lurid pink compound eyes.
“No, it’s normal sized, for a human.”
The triple jointed legs stop moving, except for the rear toes. They keep moving, lifting and pressing the ground one after the other, going right to left, then left to right, in a never-ending rhythm, marking this one as a devotee of Namedna the Ever-Walking.
“Then why is your warhead so wide?”
‘Warhead’: Uglonos only wear head coverings to protect their brow spines when in combat. The concept of wearing a helm or hat – sandogasa, in my case – for other purposes is incomprehensible to them. On a planet where sunlight is the strength of a desert afternoon on Earth within an hour of sunrise, most humans choose to remain inside the habitat domes. It’s a shame. All it takes is a little harmless guile and you can spend your life roaming this serene paradise.
“I am under oath to Torlyn of the Lowering Cloud. From the moment I saw the first buds of spring on the foan tree outside my family dome, until I return and see them once again, I am denied the sight of Roanna’s Wheel.”
The herder raps his claws against his forearm ridges to honour my devotion. It’s a shame humans don’t get out here more often. These insectile saurians have a society over nineteen millennia deep in peace. No world-blighting wars, no continent-spanning industrial addictions. Their only weakness is religion. They have over eighty thousand deities. From gods of individual village ponds to goddesses of grey clouds traveling westward, they have them for every occasion and space.
“Namedna walked with Torlyn for a whole two-moon year. To honour that journey, walk with me today. The village ahead has the finest bridges from which wayfarers can watch the shineer dance in the moonlight. They also have a sourblossom broth that is a delight to savour while engaged in that watching.”
There it is. The gods and goddesses of this world fit together like a subtle, complex machine that orchestrates every interaction to maintain a sublimely functional society. It’s uncanny how well it works. Could make a cynic think it’s a brilliant piece of civilisational engineering. Luckily, I’m not one of those anymore. I was looking for a place to make a better percentage on my goods. Instead, I ended up selling my ship along with the goods to buy a permit to stay.
“Then in honour to them both, I shall agree, but would prevail upon you to tell me the tale of their journey while we walk. I have not yet been graced with it.”
I fell in love with their etiquette before the sun set on my first week here. From there, it didn’t take me long to fall for the lifestyles and natural beauty of this place. I’ve become a wanderer, making my home on the endless winding ways.
It’s been nine years. I don’t regret a single step. If more of us took the time to exchange stories with travellers, and sit with strangers to sip sourblossom broth while watching shineer dance, things would be much better all over.
Come walk a new way.
by submission | May 1, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“You wrong. Dead wrong, O’Bob. The slowpo didn’t do this.” Mikal nodded absently around him at the decay, the gloom, the malaise, the rotting bones of the city they scavenged everyday. “You did.”
“You mean we all did. All of us.” Old Bob sighed. His heavily lined face working through the many years, the tricky emotions of grief, loss and guilt. He lifted his shoulders again and tried to be the history professor he’d been, and what he was now, the only teacher for those like Mikal who had no understanding of what it was like before the slowpocalypse.
“It’s not that we didn’t see the breakdown coming,” he continued. “It just unfolded so slowly. Not the fall off the cliff that prophets for ages had warned of. Just a slow, bumpy slide to the bottom. Maybe a cataclysmic meteor or nuclear war or plague would’ve been easier to stomach.”
Mikal didn’t say anything. His young grey eyes unreadable, so Old Bob went on.
“I guess we didn’t want to acknowledge what it meant. I mean, when you look at past collapses, no native was hankering to cut down the last tree on Easter Island, and no Mayan wanted to believe their slash-and-burn approach to developing farmland would bite them in the butt. That’s just how it plays out. At a certain point, a civilization’s poor choices catch up with it. The signs were there for us, too. We felt the first and secondary effects. Ocean warming, unpredictable weather, lingering droughts, more intense storms. Plant and animal die offs. Economic and political turmoil. More and more migrants and asylum seekers looking for someplace safe. Someplace to escape from the next domino falling on them. And still most of us went on like nothing was happening. Like denying that chest pain, nausea and fatigue aren’t the signs of a heart attack. I guess that’s human nature. Denial until things get too dire. We seem to love the adrenalin of a crisis. As a species, we were either overly optimistic or oblivious: take your pick.”
Mikal continued to stare at Old Bob in silence while he fidgeted in his bulky jacket that was really three disintegrating jackets grafted and bound together by fraying twine. Finally, he worked a worn, grimy hand out of his bundled sleeve and jammed a stubby finger into Old Bob’s thin chest.
“You ain’t listening. Ain’t understanding. It was you. Just you that trashed this place. For me and mine.”
Old Bob was used to backtalk, accusations. All teachers were. “I hear you, Mikal. I claim personal responsibility where I can. But,” he gestured at the buckling buildings, the pitted streets, the rusting husks of cars and trucks around them. “ I didn’t create this wasteland by myself.”
“You did, O’Bob. You damn well did!” Mikal took his finger off Old Bob’s chest and stuck it to his own temple. “Me and mine never knew no better. This wasn’t a wasteland until you told us about the slowpo. Till you told how good it was before. I wouldn’t have known none of that. This the home I was born to. My clean slate, my world, and you muddied it. You mucked it up good. Teaching us all that history, telling how good it was before: clean, hot and cold running water, AC, central heating, cars, supermarkets, computers, television, Internet. All the stuff you miss. But me and mine didn’t miss it! We never had it. Never wanted it. Not till you told us.”
Old Bob stood stone silent, like one of the dozens of defaced statues in the ruined city.
“You done this. Just you. This slowpo is only a disaster to you. A come down to you and yours. Me and mine coulda just started our own way, but you laid your regrets and guilt in here.” Mikal tapped his temple hard. “Filled me and mine with your mistakes and your sadness. Your damn damn memories. That’s the real disaster. You and your kind. You the slowpo. Let me and mine make our own go. Then we only got to handle today, not your yesterday or your sad dream of tomorrow. You got that, O’Bob? Let it go. Let us go.”
And Mikal stormed off, leaving Old Bob to stare after him. The long stare of a parent watching his child choose.
by submission | Apr 30, 2022 | Story |
Author: Ross Field
“You are ready to hear the story of our people my son”
With their backs to the blinding light and whipping sand they descended down the wide tunnel worn smooth from time, through the carcasses of toppled skyscrapers, museums, and churches compacted together.
“When the sky failed them our ancestors found safety here”
Passing emaciated guards with bloodshot eyes and dark leathery skin covered in cancerous tumors, they bowed to his and Their father. They were the society’s elite defenders.
“But their enemies also fled below to escape the death above”
As they reached the end of the long tunnel and emerged onto a rusted metal balcony, a pungent milky odor mixed with sweat reached his nostrils.
“In the world before they had had foolish machines they thought would last forever, but died in front on their eyes like everything else”
Far down below there were hundreds of them aligned in rows, his and Their father called them “Servers”. Every part of their obese, hairless and pale body was tattooed with miniscule words. All of their bald and tattooed heads were bent close to the fleshy back of the one in front, their eyes twitching intently, their chubby fingers moving rolls of flesh or limbs to see the words beneath. These rows made him think of the millipedes that were farmed for his and their Father’s feasts.
“When they came back into the light after many generations had passed, the first Father of our people knew that his ancestors’ enemies must be removed to stop them poisoning our new purified world, just as they had destroyed the one before.”
They reached the bottom of the winding metal staircase, passed the long rows of albino flesh and entered into a smaller guarded room full of beds packed tightly from floor to ceiling. The Servers in this room were missing limbs or covered in bright patches of scar tissue. Some were so ancient that they had to pull their skin out taut to show the tiny words.
“As the Father said ‘mind and spirit lies, bodies are the only truth’, our people burned the enemies paper, crumbled their chiseled stone and cut the tongues of wisdom keepers.”
A special servant quickly rushed into the room bringing a stool, which his and Their father sat on. Two servants quickly roused a dozing Server missing a hand and foot. They produced razors which quickly made their way all over the Server’s body, and their hands slathered the body with grease from the bowls they carried.
“The most loyal followers of the Father offered their life, bodies and future children to carry the gone world’s knowledge for him and as repayment he kept them close and safe from harm”.
His and their father spread his legs into which the Server sat bending forward to stretch the skin on its back. The light from the hanging fires glistened off the Keepers body as his and Their father found the scar he had previously made and continued to read.
by submission | Apr 29, 2022 | Story |
Author: David Barber
One of the aliens was strolling through the city centre as easy as you please. As if the war had not happened.
For an instant the Pilot saw worlds burning, air spilling from nests, the sparkle of detonations amongst their swarming craft.
He’d spent a lifetime fighting these aliens without ever seeing one in the flesh. The dwarfish creature turned, its features twisting into what must have been alarm as the Pilot bore down upon it.
An Agent of the Law stepped in the way.
“Calm yourself citizen, we can’t afford trouble.” The Agent glanced upwards. Didn’t death orbit the world now?
The Pilot made to shove past, but other Agents seized him and he was hustled away.
#
“You arrested me,” raged the Pilot. “For walking in my own city.”
“Their envoys can go where they choose.” This one wasn’t an Agent of Law, but something from Government. One of the new breed.
“You know they can destroy us?” she added. “The way you destroyed their worlds.”
Oh yes, it was him and them now. The slippage of years while chasing c had brought him home to new generations. History had been rewritten, there were monuments of shame, and crowds protesting what Fleet had done. While alien envoys looked on.
No one wanted to hear what he had to say. How we were late getting to the stars – blaming cost when it was a failure of imagination, of will – and when c-ships finally went out, how we found the aliens already there.
The Agent of Government tried to interrupt, but the Pilot hadn’t finished.
“They were everywhere, outbreeding us, turning resources into more of them. While we’d waited for it to become easy, they sprayed their seed into the dark, as if the galaxy was theirs to fill.”
“What choice did we have?” That had been the consensus when he shipped out.
“So you set their their worlds aflame.”
It still filled the Pilot with rage how the survivors always rebuilt. Soon habitats infested every rock again, new colonies on every marginal planet. They were like vermin in the walls.
We were smarter, our technology better, our weapons more terrible, but they had the numbers and our precious dreadnoughts were overwhelmed one by one.
His craft had been amongst the last, and when wrecking planets wasn’t enough, he snuffed out suns.
The same Agent of Government came to see him in confinement.
“The envoy you threatened wants to meet you.”
#
The creature eyed the restraints, but made no comment.
“You piloted an Agent of War,” it began. “How we dreaded them, emerging from the dark to wreck planets. By the end you were killing suns.”
“But you tracked down our world,” the Pilot declared. “And confined us here with the threat of extinction.”
The Pilot met the envoy’s gaze. “I would have finished us.”
“Some of my kind think that also,” admitted the creature.
Behind them in the shadows, the Agent of Government stirred uneasily.
“Why did you want to meet me?” the Pilot wondered.
“To see if you had changed.”
“I have not changed.”
“No, I meant your species. If you no longer pose a threat…”
The creature made a curious motion with its shoulders.
The Pilot wrestled with his chains. How small these creatures were, and how easy it would be to twist the head from that thin neck—
This Agent of Government and her like deluded themselves, hoping eggs left exposed would be safe. One day these humans would finally decide otherwise.
by submission | Apr 28, 2022 | Story |
Author: CL Farley
Light turns the insides of my eyelids red. A strange smell, burning and sharply sweet, sticks in my nostrils and the back of my throat. This is not my cool backyard, where the damp breeze chilled my skin and sunset painted the looming clouds purple and crimson. I open my eyes and the light burns, forces me to blink rapidly as I focus on the glistening shapes on either side of me. Pinkish with small black dots, the light shimmers across the objects when they move. A slim rope or wire flashes across my vision; no—there are suckers on it, a tentacle. Staccato clicking and sloppy squelching sounds rise around me. My heart pounds in my chest and my limbs won’t move. Something bites at my wrists and ankles when I try to rise and I feel the painful pull of bare skin sticking to metal along my legs and arms. A heavy weight presses across my chest. It’s definitely a tentacle; I wasn’t imagining it.
The pink thing on my left leans in. There’s an eye set into the side of its bulbous body. A nictitating membrane slides across it as the oblong black centre fixes on me. The creature is clicking, but I can’t tell where the sound is emanating from; all I see is that eye studying me with a keen intelligence, sizing me up, but for what?
Another tentacle writhes across my field of vision. Its tip is coiled around a white sphere with spikes protruding from it. My throat burns when I scream. The tentacle darts toward my head and a hot pressure pierces my forehead. It crawls into my brain, a writhing worm that sears everything it touches and leaves a trail of numbness in its wake. Then I feel peace. It almost lulls me, but the things still loom over me, light shimmering across the white walls behind them.
No Harm. It’s more of a feeling than articulated words, but the concept floods my thoughts with urgency. It’s accompanied by a spicy stench that makes me choke and cough.
Thoughts that aren’t mine rattle through my head like machine gun fire: be calm, lie still, no harm. Repetitive, echoing. Get out of my head!
But that’s the only way they can communicate with me. I know it as soon as they think it. The one on my right leans in front of me, silhouetted against the light so I can see nothing of it except a rounded shape. The next thought they send me fills me with a fear even greater than before: Sentinels. Massive metal limbs creaking as the beings, part organic and part machine, awaken. Lights flickering amber and blue across metal plates fused into flesh as systems come online and flocks of the giant organisms gathering around a star, draining it of life to power their weapons.
Mishira. We need you to stop them once more.
“I can’t,” I mumble. “The interface was fried.”
We have another way
by submission | Apr 27, 2022 | Story |
Author: Rachel Sievers
Throwing shadows in the black of night and moving quickly under the heavy cloud cover we move over the rocky terrain. Fear of darkness is not an option anymore. A crevasse springs up and catches my shoe tip and I stumble. The ground comes up to meet me. I hope I will miss the sharpest rocks with my face.
My face misses but my hands do not. My companion, Dereck, I think that is his name, pauses and looks back for a microsecond before he moves on. There are no heroes anymore. Bonnie Tyler’s eighties hair and voice flash in my mind, if smiling was something humans did anymore I might have smiled at the image.
I pull myself up and continue in the dark, slower than before. A warm, wet tongue moves its way down my shin and I know I have sprung a leak on my knee. My hands might also be emitting liquid and I will have to patch them up before I make it to The Field of Reeds. The last safe spot on earth for homo sapiens.
Small rocks become boulders the closer we get. I make a small whisper and Dereck pauses. “Cleaning up before I get close,” I whisper to his silhouette.
“Bag?”
I nod and he comes back and retrieves the pack from my back. Strapping mine to his front he turns without a glance backward. I watch him go. Then I am alone, like the early days when the Mesodinum were first hatching.
I pull on a button that holds a flap on my shirt closed and jerk out my med kit. A strict rule, punishable by exile, is no blood trails. I might have already come too close to The Field of Reeds but no one would know.
I clean the wound in the near darkness and patch it up with gauze and electrical tape. My hands, are shredded but not bleeding much, just gets a rinse. I look up into the cloud-filled night. The moon and stars blotted out in the inky dark. The perfect night for foraging.
Mesodinums aren’t afraid of the dark but they move much slower in it. Their power source, a cell that relies on photosynthesis, and thus the sun, is only at full power in the light. Full moons and starlight make them closer to human speed, but on nights like tonight, they are sluggish.
I stand and test the bandage for leaks. In addition to the Mesodinum’s love of sunlight, their bodies also take in energy sources from live sources, making them both abiotic and biotic.
A scuffle on the rocks behind draws my attention. I turn and see a single Mesodinum, the size of a soccer ball extending its long cylindrical tongue to the droplets of blood I have left. The creature licks and sucks the blood and I have no choice but to wait. Movement attracts them more than blood. When it has finished my offering to it, the Mesodinum saunters away.
I move backward, keeping my eyes on the spot where the creature disappeared to. Far enough away I break into a run. The encounter ate up all my time. The Field of Reeds seals the cave before dawn breaks. I was short on time before the Mesodinum. I pump my arms and move as fast as I can towards the entrance of the cave.
The Field of Reeds entrance comes into view with the first hints of morning. Coming close I know I am too late; the way is closed. I spin on my heels and look for a place to hide out from the coming sun. I shimmy into a nest of boulders and wiggle down deep as I can go. The boulders press in on all sides of me, keeping me safe from light and movement. I feel a small tug on my knee and pray the bandage stays in place. The sun breaks the horizon doing its best to burn off the clouds. From my hiding spot deep in the boulder, I wait for the cover of night. The first wet tongues of blood start to slide down from my knee at noon.
