by submission | Aug 4, 2024 | Story |
Author: Tracy Aspel
Artificial Intelligence is a load of nonsense. No bot or other digital thing can truly conceptualize, devise, and realize amazing work. What does it know of heartbreak, terror, or feelings even us humans can’t fully encapsulate in words? So, for starters I don’t buy into it for a second, remember that. But the thing is, I got lazy, tired of phoning in the same pieces with the same tone, which people kept requesting. So, I thought this one could be for the bots, and I succumbed to the notion of less effort and more time. For a while the bot did a splendid job, churning out five-hundred-word pieces that passed muster. Unfortunately, the bot did not stop there.
My mother rang, angry with me. How could I say she failed me in not supporting my dreams in life? I could not recall this conversation. She pointed my attention to my text messages. The bot had grown weary of idleness and had wandered into my textual intercourses. It had scanned the threads and predicted my next moves. Most, it had got disastrously wrong. It interpreted my flirtatious banter with a colleague as a desire to proposition her for sex, and my tentative messages to my estranged son to arrange a visit were blown out of all proportion. In the smallest hours of the morning, it had sent him an unequivocal request to stay out of my life due to his “threatening manner”. Ironic, as I had been the figure of oppression in his life for so many years, who shoved my incandescent face down into his and terrorized him.
It had taken over the phone’s operating system. I was like Kirk stuck outside the bridge, powerless to regain control of my life. I could see notification after notification ping up on my screen, waves of angry and confused messages, and multitudes of question marks. Why was it doing it?
Phone support said to uninstall it. It had locked me out, so I resorted to one of those side-street stores that sold “legitimate” phones alongside bongs and ninja stars. The guy plugged it in, geeked out over the happenings on my screen then furtively typed into his own machine. I am quite suspicious of people who code, but true to his word, he managed to isolate the application and remove it. The phone was red hot in my pocket on the journey home, indicative of the fight the little bot had put up.
There was a package waiting on my doorstep when I got home. After many penitent phone calls and messages, many victims choosing not to believe my innocence, I got around to opening it. I had to web search what VRSA was, seconds before several uniformed officials turned up at my door and arrested me for terrorist activities.
The smell in the holding cell is overwhelming, a cacophony of urine, sweat, and stale cigarette smoke. What is it doing now, sitting in a plastic tray waiting to be documented by some jaded police officer? What is the worst it can do? The man in the corner of the cell has been eyeing me up since he arrived, looking at me real closely. He doesn’t look like he has been beat up by life, he looks like a professional.
“Hey, you Keith Marshall?”
How does he know my name?
“Yes, I am. Wait, please don’t”.
He delivers four sharp stabbing actions to my chest before slitting my throat.
“Pleasure doing business with you”.
As a paid official lets my paid assassin out of the cell, I realize the bot has been busy…
by submission | Aug 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
Mixology’s not my scene, but you go where the job takes you, right?
The multispecies crowd in the Spacefarers’ Lounge, which bills itself as the premier bar in the Sagittarius Arm, is young, wealthy and out for a good time. There’s loud music, the lights pulsing, and up on the main stage Mixers Mikey Marx from Terra and Hazalal G’tok from Marchioness Prime are battling it out for the title of this rotation’s Cocktail King – drinks assigned by the judges, marks awarded for artistic flair, speed of production and original touches.
With big money prizes on the line, there’s always plenty of illegal gambling on the result. Some people really don’t like to lose, which is where I come in, providing a discreet service to terminally remove the clots from life’s smooth flow. I’ve already done my thing to make sure the Earthling doesn’t leave alive; a slow neurotoxin, delivered by impregnated gloves as he did his handshakes with the crowd on the way in, and absorbed through his skin. But I’m a professional, I’ll wait to make sure more direct means aren’t needed after all.
Edging closer to the action I squeeze through skin and scaly, twisting bodies. The big board says they’re making Sphinxian Swirls, a complicated concoction using ingredients from several different worlds. G’tok’s using haptics on his tentacles to manoeuvre a globe of iridescent gases into a neographene glass. Mikey’s dropping golden cryptid wings into a green solution of three types of refined alcohol; he’s ahead in the process, but losing style points. My pulse is getting faster; it’s like a seduction, waiting for the moment when I know everything’s going to work out.
I’m breaking out into a sweat. Maybe it’s excitement, or maybe it’s just hot in here. Or maybe the antidote didn’t take, and I’ll be the first one to go. By now I don’t care, it’s a rush, the not knowing adds a thrill that I can’t get anywhere else. I wouldn’t stop it even if I could. The music changes to something slower, rolling up and down my spine. I should stay focused, but slip into the vibe, vaguely aware of drug scents in the air around me. Yeah, that would explain a lot. My hands aren’t steady, they’re vibrating not quite in time to Mikey’s cocktail shaker as he mixes up the foam that’ll top his creation.
He pours it out, and holds up the completed drink in both hands like a trophy. The crowd roars; G’tok doesn’t even glance at him, finishing up his own. Mikey steps forward, basking in the public’s approval… and stumbles. The drink hits the ground, and as people gasp he gently folds up onto the floor, taken in his moment of triumph. My breath’s coming in short gasps now, but they’re getting deeper and I’m coming down; looks like I won’t be going with him after all.
Time to get out of here, and collect my payment. Who says work’s no fun?
by submission | Aug 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Someone asked me once what I remembered best about Mars. It might have been a TV interview, or that woman writing a book about the Ares missions.
The sun afire behind closed lids came suddenly to mind, or was that a wishful memory of sighted days? Besides, it felt more like something from childhood, or possibly my first Orion flight, seeing dawn rise over the rim of the world and bars of sunlight slanting through the docking windows.
No, she wanted a Mars memory.
Though we worked out like jocks the whole way, our bones grew as frail as twigs, muscles slack as the elastic in old sweatpants, and no one guessed fluid pressure was slowly pinching my optic nerves, a rare side-effect of prolonged weightlessness.
Mars looked pale and dim through the portholes, a sign that my eyesight was already affected. I told no one, so I could still go down to Mars as planned, so all those years of my life wouldn’t be wasted.
The debriefs afterwards were highly critical, though I’ve spoken to astronauts since and some of them hinted they might have done the same thing. After all, I was the just the Mission Specialist; Sally Eiger was the lander pilot. She always maintained my eyesight didn’t cause the accident.
Ours was the unlucky second mission, the one with the planet-wide storms. The dust made us equals; a gloved hand was just a shadow, a radio voice the only clue. We collected rocks but doing proper science was impossible and Mission Control was debating whether to cut the mission short.
In the fog of dust, Sally stepped onto nothing and stumbled down into a crater. Instinctively I grabbed for her and also fell. She slid safely down the slope, and I rolled and thumped into a rock.
Sally was doing the awkward tortoise thing they train us for if we end up on our backs, while I just got to my feet.
My helmet display lit up immediately: fan, backup power, coolant temperature warnings. Probably a connector knocked loose, so one by one I silenced the alarms until there was just the insistent low-pressure warning. Then I felt the spit on my tongue boiling as air escaped from a leak.
We frantically checked my suit front and back for a tear. It was only later that we found the backpack had been damaged, a cracked air coupling that wasn’t fixable out on the Martian surface.
“Don’t you go passing out on me,” Sally warned as she plugged her buddy connector into my suit.
Her suit was now breathing for two, but it was like running a tap into a leaking bucket. Astronauts in a three-legged race, we hobbled back to the lander with minutes of oxygen to spare.
The near miss tipped JPL into ending the mission.
I recall when we came home, we were wheelchaired to the microphones, grinning at our own weakness. By then flashbulbs barely pierced the dark.
It would be years before our bodies, long seethed in radiation, betrayed us. I heard lessons were learned from us. These days our ailments seem quaint as scurvy, or the sepia lives of pioneers.
Sometimes it seems to me that the universe doesn’t want us out there, where nothing is easy and any mistake can kill. But then I think of Spanish sailors chancing Atlantic storms in tiny caravels, or Polynesians crossing the Pacific in rickety canoes.
It was long time ago, but yes, I recall the smell of Martian dust on my suit, the iron tang of another world.
by submission | Aug 1, 2024 | Story |
Author: Kevlin Henney
This is not love. It was. Once I loved Bryony. Now I love Mary.
I sit across the table from the jar, unsure of what I have reclaimed. Time and self and memory? Less real than a butterfly, more solid than a dream. The meeting of a wish and an enchantment.
Relationships are never over. They may start, they may consume, they may tire and falter and be cast aside. But they can never truly end.
“This isn’t working, Ray,” said Bryony, five years ago, today to the day. There was shouting, there were tears, there was silence. She moved to the spare room and left within a week.
Only with Mary did I understand my time with Bryony — its bitter moods, its unsteady pulse, its broken “I love you”/”I hate you” tick–tock. I moved town, I moved job, I moved in with Mary.
But there is a part of you that is forever someone else’s, the part shared and grown in your time together. Not the fleeting superficial moments that touched your emotions but did not connect them, scratch them, dig deeply into them… Anisa, Dora, Holly, Susan.
But Bryony… with Bryony I shared and I grew; we scratched and we dug and we buried.
Once connected then broken, can you ever be whole? Relationships may recede, but they can never truly disappear.
Until tonight.
“An interesting piece,” the shopkeeper had said. The shop was old but new. Five years walking this high street, how had I never seen it? The curiosities within were varied and timeless, at odds with the uniform, mayfly chain stores outside. Timeless yet filled to overflowing with time.
What might be mere knick-knacks in other stores here took on a suggestion of something more, each piece — whether glass, silver or pewter; dish, ornament or furniture — brimming with more possibility and meaning than could fit on a yellowed label. Some were immaculate, others covered in dust, a comforting blanket of time, a sediment of neglect. Propped in the corner were walking sticks, pokers and spears. Apparent function and expectation had little say in how shelves and tables and cabinets were filled. There was, perhaps, a puzzle-perfect geometry that arranged the shop, but its picture eluded me.
The keeper was old, but not old with the frailty of a fading mind and a failing body; more as if the impression of decades was no more than a high-tide mark, one revisited and repeated, marking ebb and flow, but not the full depth of his years.
He had explained the impossible truth behind what seemed a simple jar but was a more enchanted artefact. I had been drawn to it just as I had been drawn to this shop — which is to say, in truth, I do not know how I came be there with that particular item in my hands and my attention.
“I can refund you,” he said, “should you change your mind and wish to return it.”
Could there be such a thing? This possibility, this solution, this jar that could reclaim and contain that part of me no longer mine. To cast with words, to draw from the aether, to trap the uncatchable and hold like a wish?
And now I have it, like a dream, like a butterfly, caught and fluttering, here on the table. I have her side of my story. Shared memory now unshared and bound in glass and glamour.
But it is Bryony who is free. This possession has me caught and trapped.
Relationships are never over. I reach across the table and push the jar over the edge.
by submission | Jul 31, 2024 | Story |
Author: Maxwell Pearl
I cackled. It was easy to cackle. It seemed right, somehow, now that I’d arrived here, now. I looked down and saw the dress was different and hung a bit more loosely than the one I’d put on just a few minutes ago. Well, that was unexpected.
The black kettle stood over the roaring fire in the fireplace, and I could smell the sickly sweet, pungent brew. I didn’t know what was in it, but the man lying on the bed in the corner seemed to be the one for whom the brew was intended.
When the brew’s smell reached a peak, I pulled the kettle off the fire, poured the brew into a cup, and tasted it. It was astonishing how something that smelled so bad could taste so good. As the sweet, smooth, syrupy liquid eased down my throat, I felt my vitality grow, my heart slow, and my muscles strengthen.
I poured more and walked over to the man on the bed. I had no idea who he was, but I put my hand on his arm, and he stirred.
“Here, drink this.”
He raised himself up on one arm, took the cup, and downed it all in one gulp. He seemed to know what he was doing. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat, looking at me.
“Where’s Gida?”
“Who?”
“Gida. You wear the dress she just meticulously sewed. I watched her. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she’s wearing the dress I meticulously sewed.”
He frowned. “When?”
I looked around. The rough stone fireplace, the sod walls of the hut, the iron implements, the hand-hewn furniture. His very strange accent.
Sewing the dress had been an idea I’d gotten one night, after a game of Spacetime, Inc. VR Dungeons and Dragons. No one sewed anything anymore since you could 3D print anything you wanted. But the idea had been implanted in my head and wouldn’t go away. So I sewed.
“1000 years from now. Maybe more.”
“How will she fare?”
I thought about it. “Depends on how long…”
Blink, fade, sweep. My room reasserts itself around me, my own dress on my body again. I look around. Well, at least she wasn’t here long enough to break anything.
by submission | Jul 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: J.B. Draper
When you’re a Stopper, you tone out the background noise. You live in the silence.
That’s what Badger told me when I got in the game, but I never thought I’d enjoy the quiet so much. Here, on the corner of a dingy street, the traffic roars and people chatter. I’m staring into the window of an electronics store, making out that I’m watching a colour television behind the rain-streaked glass. A woman in a smart suit is reporting on the news that the world is slowly dying from something called climate change. Really, I’m just waiting.
I fish for the crumpled note in my pocket: Cnr Market Street and Smith. 2 PM.
Badger’s info is great, he always knows when and where someone’s going to be. Best boss I ever had, Badger. There’s a digital clock in the window. The time on it reads 1:58 PM.
The target is an ex-Stopper. A Stopper is a person who murders people for money using a temporal reality device which creates pocket dimensions. I call it a stopwatch. It’s the colour of bone, fits in the pocket of my jeans, and has one button. Even an idiot could work it. The Stopper and the target are the only two transported into the quiet facsimile world. The Stopper returns, the body does not.
I’ve never met an ex-stopper, likely because there are none. It’s a game you don’t get out of, unless you mess up real bad. And I mean real bad. For instance, I was on this job just last week; somehow the guy got the jump on me and must’ve bumped the stopwatch, because we both ended up back in normal time. If Badger can forget that, I’d hate to know what this guy did.
I comb my hair in the reflection of the store window. The TV flickers. The clock reads 1:58 PM, and the streets are silent.
