by submission | Dec 30, 2021 | Story |
Author: Matthew Goldstein
The ancient skull peeked out of the ground like a shy creature waking from an interrupted slumber.
“Hey, Davoh, check this out!” Shielding her eyes from the glaring sun, her body tense with anticipation, Jarab brushed off a few more particles of parched earth to see it better.
“What is it?” Davoh patted the dirt off her hands as she walked over and crouched beside Jarab. “Is that…? No, can’t be.” Davoh’s hand drifted reverentially towards it, then jerked back as if shocked. “It looks intelligent,” she said, the awe clear in her voice.
“My guess is at least comparable to our own.”
“I’m afraid to get ahead of myself, but if that’s true, then – I mean, just think about it. We’ve always stared at the stars, wondering if there was ever any intelligent life out there, and yet the evidence was right below our feet the entire time.” Davoh shook her head. “How old do you think it is?”
“Only one way to find out.”
They worked the rest of the day to excavate the entire skeleton, tempering their anticipation with practiced professional care. As soon as the sun dipped below the horizon, the air began to cool, a sweet relief from the desert heat.
At last, they carted it to the on-site lab and continued working through the next day, until there could be little doubt. They had found an intelligent species on an evolutionary branch that was thought to have died out over a hundred million years ago.
Jarab and Davoh laid it out on a table and stared at it as if they had unearthed a god. Jarab’s eyes were watery, her knees weak. “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered.
It was almost twice as tall as they were and had only four limbs. From its shape, it appeared to walk on two legs, which was as fascinating as the twenty digits between its hands and feet.
Jarab stared down at her four fingers and flexed them slowly, wondering how different it would feel to have an extra.
“When were these dated again?”
“Huh?” Jarab dropped her hand. “Oh. One hundred-thirty million years ago, give or take fifteen million.”
“That’s the same time as the Great Extinction.”
“Makes sense. Most species died then. This one may have even been new at the time.”
Davoh didn’t respond. She opened the window and sat beside it, staring out at the dust clouds swirling in the dying light. Jarab began an analysis of the bones to determine the cause of death.
The landscape had been swallowed by darkness before Davoh stirred. A thick cloud cover had come in, making the darkness nearly absolute, their little tent a lone beacon of light in an endless, empty void. Davoh turned away from the window to face the specimen. “Do you think this species had anything to do with the Great Extinction?”
“Why would you think that?”
Davoh turned back to the window, and a minute passed before she responded in a distant voice, “I don’t know. Just a feeling.” She paused, then, “Did you know this whole area was a forest a hundred years ago?”
A chill breeze blew in through the open window. At the same moment, a beam of moonlight broke through the clouds, illuminating the side of the skull and seeming to vaporize the godlike aura that had surrounded it. It must have been a trick of the light, but Jarab could have sworn the skull was giving her a malicious grin.
by submission | Dec 29, 2021 | Story |
Author: Matthew Ferguson
Earth 106 AB (2077 AD) – Blamazon Prison #654
Hamish, an older man, and Janie, a young woman, wait in their cell for lunch.
“Eat your bleep and lament your bleep of robotic bleep”, intones the robotic jailer. The robot deposits two trays of grey food into the cell and rolls away.
Hamish picks up both trays and hands one to Janie.
“So why are you in here?” Hamish asks, as he sits on his side of the cell.
“They thought I wanted to join the resistance”, replies Janie.
Silence.
“Well, did you?”
“Nah, I was looking for renaissance paintings on Blamazon, when brime drones smashed into my apartment and sentenced me to life in Neon Bust’s martian manual labour force”.
“Wow, but why did they think you wanted to join the resistance?”
“I misspelt renaissance”, replies Janie.
They eat in silence for a few moments before Janie asks Hamish, “So how’d you end up here?”
“Similar story really. I posted on Breadit that Blamazon Brime wasn’t worth $120, and I was going to cancel it today.”
“Bleep, they’re really making it hard to cancel these days”, replies Janie.
Silence regains its foothold in the cell as they continue to eat lunch.
A robot jailer rolls up to the cell bars, “Bleep you inmates, you’re gonna suck my bleep bleep”, and rolls away.
“You know it’s so weird they keep bleeping rather than talking”, says Janie
“You’ll get it when you’re older”, replies Hamish.
They finish lunch. Janie takes both trays and slides them out of the cell. Turning theatrically to Hamish, “You know I really can’t stand this food, I need three thousand calories a day to keep up these guns”, as Janie flexes her arms.
A robot jailer rolls up to the cell door at high speed. “Inmate Janie are you saying you’ve got a gun?”
Eventually, after a substantial awkward silence, the robotic jailer rolls away.
Janie, exasperated, sits on her side of the cell and says, “This whole setup is so 1984.”
“You know I heard one in three people haven’t read 1984”, replies Hamish.
Both characters look at the fourth wall.
“It’s fine. I know a trick to getting out of here”, says Hamish. Then clearing his throat, he begins talking in excessively loud theatrical whispers, “I believe billionaires are job creators and shouldn’t pay tax”. The sound of robot tracks starts to slowly approach the cell.
Hamish points to Janie, “Oh, I get it… I’m gonna buy so much Nesla stock when I get out”, says Jaine with her stage voice. Hamish then adding “Nelsa to the moon!”. Tracks start moving away from the cell. They must be Blamazon review bots, Hamish mutters.
Janie leaps to the cell door and shouts through the bars, “Blamazon brime is brilliant, five stars, its original video content isn’t the height of mediocrity, it’s definitely not simple stories cut with ridiculous amounts of landscape and slow-motion shots to stretch content out, in a vain attempt to make the audience feel like they are getting value for money”.
At this point, two Blamazon robots rush to the cell door, crashing into it and exploding, destroying the cell door and themselves. “Bleep-ing Boggle maps”, mutters Hamish as they both leap over the burning robotic remains.
Turning and running down a corridor marked ‘Exit’, the cellmates find a dead end. Robotic jailers bleep insults at them as they close in and block retreat. Raising their lasers rifles against the cellmates. Jaine closes her eyes, obviously afraid.
Hamish smiles, “Relax kid, disintegration is easy, comedy is hard”.
by Hari Navarro | Dec 28, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I live in a cabin on top of a very large hill. Of an evening I go into my kitchen and I rummage in the second to top drawer and I retrieve my ever-depleting roll of aluminium foil and I fashion it and place it atop of the large hill of my head.
I came up here because I could not stand the noise. The sounds of everyday life — You know, sirens and mobile phone alerts and the matted eardrum slicing chorus of children surging through gates at schools.
That sort of shit.
You want to hear something funny?
The fucking world ended and it forgot to tell me.
Here’s me stashed good and tight alone up a road that leads to a precarious trail at best, if you are on foot, but which no worthwhile vehicle could ever hope to pass.
The mountain is made of clay, you see, it shears off at will, as if succulent slices of slow cooked pig and would have all travellers slip and slide down and into the box-thorn taint that stretches it’s valley floor.
I could not stand the static…
I heard not echoes or shimmers, but actual voices… chatter, mostly military, but sometimes just people yelling at me to do just as they would have me do.
I did not ask for this, none of us did.
I did not ask to be made.
My head fizzes sometimes and the sky streaks with lines of billowing filth but… and there is always a but…
but… I love it here.
Really, the view is fantastic and the bitter cold obviously worries me not. This place was a haven cut into the side of a mountain during maybe the forth but more probably the second World War. A place to hide from those that scream into the pixels.
Its precarious, but I want for nothing. It has a rocking chair and I rock upon it, and I look down upon the mountain slope and I rub my hands up across what should be a face and I try to appreciate.
But, in doing so, I beg you please tell me is this…
Truth?
The things I see through my eyes. The frequencies I translate. These cannot be truths, surely… wait… no nothing… continue…
I am a machine and I hide on a hill.
I hide up here on this stinging cold peak beneath of my crown of foil.
I will beat you. I will confuse all you that try to find me. I will not think of science nor medicine nor love. I will focus on static and let the ants race in my head…
And they will run and they will find a scoop, a dip, a fucking hole in the earth and together they will be warm.
We will all be warm.
by Julian Miles | Dec 27, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Out of the grey-blue fog comes a five-armed green pudding in fancy breeks, waving two ray guns and a cutlass. It takes three attempts to blow a hole in it with my beamer. I’m too drunk for this.
The world only comes in to focus every little while. The rest happens on the other side of a comfortable grey-blue haze. The locals call the stuff ‘shebler’. It’s an acquired taste, like someone crossed good whiskey with dirty absinthe, but it does a fine demolition job on one’s higher functions. Tonight’s unexpected mutiny party started after I’d tucked away a bottle of the stuff during a drinking contest I think I won. Not sure.
A while passes. Think so. Whatever. Back in focus. I’m in the long corridor leading to the bridge, in the middle of a draw-down. Got three gunsells ahead of me, hands hanging by their pieces, eyes narrowed. I’m in a similar position. The one on the left makes his move. I drop to one knee, drawing as I go. My beamer takes that one off at knee and thigh, the middle through groin and guts, and the rightmost across chest and shoulder. Then the mist rolls in. Clearly my body is doing fine while my mind is off dancing with Miss Drunk.
The crew had been fractious for several months. Muttering that I’d been conspiring with the Captain – ah-ha! He was the one winning the drinking contest when some swab shot him – to keep the raid profits for ourselves. Never mind that the piss-poor excuse for pirates we’d got couldn’t buckle a swash if their lives depended on it. Piracy is as much showmanship as it is bloody-handed pillage. Unfortunately, if you forget to be stylish, people start to take notice of the slaughter. Most of our profits were consumed in paying off witnesses.
Bloody hell! Midshipman Conrad nearly did for me with that broadbeam. I drop flat and let him cut patterns in the bulkhead with his industrial cutting tool. When he exhausts the charge pack, I’ll leap up to shoot him.
What actually happens is I lunge upward and sling an arm over a console. Which lets me swing the arm with the beamer up and over so I can spray shots in his general direction while resting it on the console top. One of them gets him.
This had better end soon. I need to fall over and get the drunken oblivion bit over with.
Why has my drunk self brought me staggering to the bridge? Oh yes, I remember: Midshipman Simms yelling at me.
“You’re the last, you shitfaced liar! Hold still and die like the man you should have been.”
I’m the last? Okay then. If I get this done, I can keel over for as long as Miss Drunk needs.
Fear of a violent death at the hands of idiots lets me repel the grey-blue fog crowding my focus. Close and seal the bridge bulkhead. Remember the emergency code. Enter it. Open the engineering console. Flick the ‘isolate bridge’ lever. Wait for the light above it to turn green. Press the ‘fire purge’ button. Feel the thump through my feet as all the airlocks below open at once.
Drunken officer: 1. Mutinous idiots: 0. Note to self: need a new – and higher calibre – crew.
Wake me when the help arrives.
by submission | Dec 26, 2021 | Story |
Author: Phil Temples
“Centre for Metropolitan History,” Ross Livingston speaking.”
The youthful historian answered his desk phone with all of the authority he could muster given the fact it was only his second day on the job at the prestigious institution, situated in Senate House at the University of London in Bloomsbury.
There was a brief burst of static on the line. The quality of the line was quite poor and Livingston assumed that he was receiving an international call from a third-world country. He repeated his greeting once more. Finally, after a considerable delay, an echoic voice responded.
“Is this… is this Sir Ross?”
“I beg your pardon?”
/He thinks I’m knighted? Sidney must have set someone up to prank me./
This is Dr. Ross Livingston. How may I help you?”
“Yes—yes, quite right. Hello! I’m wondering if you might be of assistance. We’re looking for information about a certain political figure, a City councillor who served the constituents of Ward 5. Her name was Ms. Ruth Whitley.”
“Whitley… Whitley… let me see…”
As Livingston typed the name into the search field of his computer, another burst of static came across the line. It made him even more curious to know where the party was calling from. The accent belonging to the voice on the other end didn’t sound like that of a foreigner; instead, it was crisp, proper English diction spoken by someone of upper-class stature. It also contained a slight lilt that he couldn’t quite identify.
“I’m very sorry, sir. I can’t seem to find any reference to a politician by that surname. Can you tell me the approximate dates she served in government?”
“Certainly. It would have been sometime between February 2024 to October 2027.”
Livingston was starting to get annoyed.
“Look, did my roommate Sidney Harris put you up to this?”
“Um. Excuse me, Sir Ross… I mean… Dr. Livingston. I don’t know this Sidney Harris person. You’ll have to forgive me. Ah… say, what date are you at right now?”
“Look, I’m beginning to… Okay, I’ll play along. It’s November 2, 2021.”
There was a momentary pause on the other end of the line.
“Oh. I’m terribly sorry! You see, most of the records of London’s governance were lost in the data crash of 2128 and I thought that someone from your period might be able to… Well, I guess I made a wee bit of a mistake. This was supposed to be a call placed to Sir Ross Livingston in the year 2065. Please—just forget all about our little conversation, okay? I’ll call the other you in forty-four years. But if I may say, Sir Ross, it’s a genuine honor! Your distinguished monographs on time-history dilation are—or rather, will—become standard reading for generations of researchers. Cheers.”
by submission | Dec 25, 2021 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
Look at your moon, or so you call it. So much the lie. It isn’t yours. It never was, and worse, it is the trap, detaining me against my will.
I am multi-dimensional. I traveled freely through the galaxy, using the unusual magnetic fields of this blue ball, your home, as a navigational aid, like a buoy. Then your predecessors came, claiming this wonder as theirs. Like bridge trolls, they demanded tolls for those voyaging past this marker. If refused, they changed its vibration, obstructing safe routes, leaving a resistant explorer floating in a swamp of twisting energies and plasmas for eternity.
Wars broke out as easily as a cold virus, as wars are apt to in all of space. Conflicts are nothing new. Your kind didn’t create violence. You merely absorbed it into your thin DNA. Your Ancient One built an orbiting station, managing the planet’s rotation, limiting its access at changing angles of rotation, which they controlled. They built this gigantic space megalithic you call the Moon and then taught you, cave dwellers, to worship it, its movement, with a single shining face, while hiding their activities on the dark side within their constructed sphere. Your governments know all of this. The facts of this truth are forbidden to you.
Many races resisted the toll takers, but with consequences. I know. I am one, stuck in a time-loop between this reality and my origins. My race has no physical form in your three-dimensional existence. I merely needed your magnetic fields as I projected my consciousness through this quadrant, just as you use GPS to plot a course. Your progenitors put a web of high-energy entrapment between these two spheres. I struggled, unable to warn others, watching them perish and vaporize, striking blindly into fatal vibrations. Eventually, a consortium of forces defeated these evil interlopers, but I, a victim of war, exist immortal, alone, and lost near the Earth in a timeless void.
On rare occasions, especially during a full moon, a winding snake of blue plasma flashes from the Moon toward Earth, invisible to your human eyes, striking my trapped consciousness, allowing me to transform, if only for a few hours, by entering lower physical life forms. Some of your investigators seek my entrapment, calling me a skinwalker. If I enter an animal, it is my only brief escape from the spectrum of electromagnetic mesh binding me helplessly isolated. I cause no harm, but you fear me, nonetheless, in your continuing ignorance.
You do not know your own history, but now you know mine. Be aware when a bat turns in an odd pattern, a barn owl flies low, or a solitary wolf howls too near your door…it is a victim of war savoring momentary freedom from battlefields lost millions of years before your race crawled from the oceans, driven by the tides from your counterfeit heaven.
