by submission | Jul 20, 2022 | Story |
Author: David Barber
An old spacer complaint is that home is never where you left it.
Spacers end up in bars like this. Relationships don’t survive years out in the dark, but that doesn’t matter here, one loner recognised another.
Perry listened to them arguing about racing. They dismissed the sport because it was playing at something that had been their lives.
“The Worlds’ Cup,” grumbled someone at the bar. “Ion drives and gravity slingshots. It’s just trundling round the planets.”
“At least there’s some skill in light sails,” declared another. The Inner System Classic had just finished.
But they kept their real gripes for fusion torch racing. The Voyager Trophy was coming up again, all the way out to Voyager 2 and back. Billed as the toughest race.
Perry kept quiet, but the spacer with the prosthetic eye remembered something.
Hadn’t Perry been involved with the Trophy a couple of years back? Conversations faltered and heads turned.
She’d signed up the Ada Swann as a safety ship. Already far out in the Kuiper, she was well positioned for Voyager, and if the race went to plan, all she had to do was sit and monitor the comms traffic.
Racers were going slowest as they rounded Voyager, before plummeting sunwards again. That gave the Ada Swann, built for endurance rather than speed, a chance to intercept.
But the lead ships had turned and gone when there came a distress call from the Estrada Silva, a singleship competitor with a runaway burn.
Over the years, every spacer in that bar had heard radio voices calling for help. Sometimes a rescue was possible. Sometimes you could only listen.
As Perry understood it, António Esteves Ferreira had been out of his seat when some fault ramped up the torch, dropping him the length of his cabin and breaking bones, a high-g burn that emptied his fuel tank.
Perry had nightmares after that, full of alarms and red lights, trying to climb back to her own seat with limbs too heavy to lift.
“Don’t see the point of safety ships,” the spacer accused Perry, his lens gleaming.
Others spoke up. In their time perhaps they’d plucked someone from the dark, or a ship had matched orbits to help them. The alternative was doing nothing. Surely some chance was better than none?
But the singleship had flashed past the Ada Swann, and around the bar they thought that was the melancholy end of it. They started arguing about what they would have done. The dark did not forgive. Still, they railed against it.
Perry waited to tell the last part.
A badly injured pilot, on painkillers. Just hang on, she told him, though they both knew help wasn’t coming.
Then she saw an actinic spark in her telescope. Ferreira had lit his torch again, burning the last dregs of fuel, not to slow down, but accelerating onwards.
Perry looked round at these spacers who had made the unforgiving dark their home. Didn’t they feel something had been lost? Once people chased down game or fled from predators. These days it was just running in circles against the clock. You only played at things when they didn’t matter.
“Civilisation caught up,” someone shrugged. ” I remember when Vesta Port was just some tunnels. Now people have jobs.”
There was a resentful air. “Go tell cruise ship captains.”
But Perry had heard the faint voice from the Estrada Silva. At least he would beat Voyager to the stars, Ferreira had whispered. None of those racers would catch him now.
“A challenge for you. First to the worlds of Centauri.”
by Hari Navarro | Jul 19, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I have been in this asylum for so long that its corridors have become my arteries and its rooms my veins. I really feel more than a little lost, and my gums are covered with a grainy film. I don’t know why I stopped here.
I don’t know why I was stopped here.
Why I got so used to this thing I became.
I became this thing because I was used, why?
Paint.
It glosses in crooked layers upon the old school steel chair at my back and it begs to fall in clumps from the walls of this stoic hall as I sit. Go ahead fold room, surge in if it is your fuckin’ will. No, it’s just colour and nothing more… but then, its tint hums and it sparks and I reach for invisible things.
What was in that cocktail that you mixed with your thumb as you passed it on to me? Your kiss upon lips whose callouses warn aginst your whisper.
I laugh and I swallow and I taste something I ate from you yesterday.
My glass glints, so smug as it offers your depravity up and spills it down and over my hunched and blistered flesh. I want to breathe but there is only but dust, the ruin of woody things that once were.
Remember trees? They were huge browny greeny yellowly creatures made of books.
Roots remember things because they are always digging into the past.
I rub my sin into the mound and I wonder why I love your laugh. It’s a bit raspy, maybe that’s the hook? But there must be more than that, or maybe I just listen to simple things.
I know it’s not me and I know you give it no mind but what is this thing that prods you to rapture? The planet is ceasing. The planet is nothing more than a sand-strewn canvas and just look at our finger jabbed art. Watch how very soon all trace of us will disappear as the page it is turned.
You think I flood myself with fashion but I’m only swimming to find the thinnest of lingerie. You stole in the night and wear all that I was. You took me away from the dribbles that stream at my thigh.
I ram oily rags and used pads into my pillow and I sleep upon the smell of my very best blood. But in the morning I awake and I find my crooked self naked and tonguing the floor and oh how I know I am real.
I drink milk alone on my kitchen floor and I talk to the cold, cold tiles as they bite and play with the pores of my lazy ass. And I sing exactly like Chris Cornell.
Sometimes when I stagger I reach out and grasp at things that are not there. Not you but sometimes your clothes, that jacket that both you and I wore.
I think I belong here but that you do not.
I will paint my thick lips purple and rake scars across of my face, I will put out my eyes to escape you.
I immersed in a surge that is pushing me on. A current that pulls me gently away from the rock upon which you stand.
My tongue in your mouth meant nothing more than beats in a second. We have been together far, far too long.
I know of a place, an island on a distant planet I saw for sale on the screen. It has three houses and a jetty and paths and tall trees and it is drenched in places upon which you can press my body.
We are so slow as we move. I don’t think I’ll be able to hear you there.
And time ebbs and it pulls and plastic bottles and fantastical sea creatures dance and they dance again and they die. And, still I am here.
This planet is exceptional… for who else would have gathered in my ruined self? But as my body lays erect and obscene on the sandbank and the acid tide breaks and eats at the shells… I think maybe I need a grappa.
by Julian Miles | Jul 18, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I staggered from the wreck of the Templeton stark naked. I’d been submerged in a sensory womb, enjoying some virtual sports with colleagues from C-Shift, when all three dropped offline. I wasn’t to know their side of the ship had been torn asunder by a rogue asteroid. While I tried multiple options to reconnect, the Templeton hurtled out of control, rammed through the escort corvette Wiltshire, scorched itself featureless entering the atmosphere of Velomere, and carved a trench twenty kilometres long into the largest continent.
There isn’t a description for my shock when I exited the womb – convinced I’d done something wrong because of having to use the emergency manual release – and found myself standing in half a room, gazing out at burning forest as a wave of sensory-enhancement gel sluiced across the blackened floor and out across the ground beyond.
My attention lingered momentarily on the verdant hills I could see between clouds of smoke and steam, then the needs of the moment struck me. A childhood of foraging and making do surged back into mind. I grew up on Atalus, a backwater world that deliberately cleaves to a low-tech way of life.
My parents taught me to farm, forage, hunt if needs be, and the joy in making and repairing. I’d thought it all useless after I ventured off-planet. Turns out it was another win for the ‘just in case’ school of learning.
Four days later the survivors of the Wiltshire followed the smoke of my fire to the makeshift camp I’d established to house the dying survivors of the Templeton. The womb had saved me from a brutal battering and lingering death. All I could do was make twenty people comfortable. Those from the Wiltshire were in worse state, but only from the privations of the trek to reach me. Their conventional upbringing had left them unprepared for offline survival.
While their medical orderly tends to the dying, and the few who might now survive, I face the other nine survivors. My father’s words come to me, back from the first day he led me out into the wilds and watched while I tried to make head or tail of what to do first.
“Us human’s aren’t so good without our tools. We don’t react properly. Something that could be used as a weapon is comforting when you find yourself troubled and in the wilds. Without it, you’re instinctively on the defensive. You might not need to be that way, but your thinking has already changed. It might not be entirely detrimental, either, but every advantage counts.”
I point at the ground, carpeted with all the detritus a forest sheds.
“You’ll be collecting wood – or its equivalent here – for fires and to make shelter. Somewhere along the way you’ll come across a chunk that’s a little too big for one purpose, too small for another, but sits comfortably in your hand. Keep it. It might be useful, might even serve as a weapon – until you can upgrade to a suitable rock.” I grin. “More importantly, it feels good.”
Gatsbul shakes his head: “Pick up a stick? That’s your Atalunian survival wisdom?”
Yallit turns to him: “I think he means to be on the lookout for potentially useful things while foraging, and not limit ourselves to specific targets.”
Edrin nods: “The moral is that intelligence and tools will keep us going.”
Two more interpretations. There isn’t a correct one. That’s the idea.
Like my father said: “Give survivors a purpose, and something to think on. Both keep hopelessness at bay”.
by submission | Jul 17, 2022 | Story |
Author: David Henson
After work, I stop by to check on my father and find him carrying a flashlight around the well-lit house.
“Is everything OK, Dad.”
“It’s your mother.”
“I miss her too, Dad.”
“No, Son. This is your mother.” He holds up the flashlight.
His answer jolts me. “Dad, you don’t believe that’s Mom, do you?”
“Not the torch, Son, the light. Look, don’t you see her?” I squint as he aims the beam at my eyes.
Speechless, I suggest we take a walk, hope the cool evening will clear his mind.
As we make our way around the neighborhood, I can hardly edge in a word as Dad jabbers to the spot jiggling jauntily beside him. It’s an older area where tree roots have heaved the concrete, so when gathering darkness fills in the dappling of shadows on the sidewalk, Dad asks Mom to lead the way and aims the flashlight ahead of us.
As we head for home, Dad’s conversation with Mom becomes animated. “The night air makes me feel spry again, Dear. How about you?” He cocks his head, says “Sounds good to me,” and picks up the pace.
Back at the house, I go to the kitchen for a drink of water. When I return to the living room, Dad is in the recliner, his pants undone, flashlight between his legs. I gasp and clamp my hand over my eyes until I hear his zipper.
“Sorry, Son. In my defense, it was your mother’s idea.”
Over the next week or so, I try to reason with Dad, but the light of Mom blinds him to logic. I think about sneaking out the batteries, but that seems cruel. I decide to go softly, confident Dad will come to his senses. In the meantime, he isn’t hurting anyone. He’s keeping the house tidy. His hygiene seems OK.
One evening, I get to my father’s place after nightfall. When I discover the house empty, I’m concerned till I hear murmuring and find Dad on the patio, the flashlight shining into the sky.
“Your mother said it was time to let go.” He slides the switch. Mom disappears. I feel a chill.
I stare up at the Milky Way and imagine Mom. After a few moments, a shooting star streaks overhead. When I turn to ask Dad if he saw it, he isn’t there.
by submission | Jul 16, 2022 | Story |
Author: Lorna McGinnis
Dear Valued Employees,
As you may know, the world will be destroyed next Wednesday. A massive asteroid will strike the earth at approximately 4:00pm PST, and that will be the end of humanity.
Unfortunately, additional requests for paid time off (PTO) in the interim cannot be accommodated as this would violate our two months’ notice scheduling policy. We expect you to show up for work promptly at 8am and remain in the office until at least 5pm.
Employees who violate this rule will be written up by their immediate supervisor, and repeated write ups will result in termination.
Any employee calling in sick must provide a doctor’s note.
However, we are able to honor any PTO requests made before the imminent obliteration of the planet became known as those are in accordance with our policy.
If you are deceased after 4pm on Wednesday and cannot work a full day, you will not be issued a write up. The company regards this as an extenuating circumstance. No doctor’s note will be needed in this case.
Best wishes to all of you during this trying time.
Sincerely,
Jane T. Marshall
Chief Human Resources Officer
by submission | Jul 15, 2022 | Story |
Author: Brian Etta
“Breath through the nose and out through the mouth” Justin let that instruction carry him. Sitting in half lotus he resisted the urge to itch as he scanned his body for sensations and in so doing produced and amplified them. There had to be something to that he thought, then he thought, ”Damn…another thought”. He was chasing a dragon. That one time the one sweet, sweet time that everything had aligned just so… sleep cycles, nootropics, caffeine, temperature maybe even the price of beans and the exchange rate with China, who’s to say what? But in that soft almost dream he saw her. There’d been something about the frequency, the high end that caused his brain to synthesise something like a small and gentle fountain, like in a public park. By letting go, not trying to hold onto it, his brain rewarded him with a show. The imagery was red against red, like what you see when you give your eyes a good rub. Coupled with that still feeling that only comes when the mind is zeroed out and can undergo a phase transition to something more solid but yet easier. The fountain morphed into a hibiscus, stamen and all but in a way did not…like the mind is able to do. Riding the wave, looking inwards but more like letting go, Justin was treated to a further transformation. The hibiscus was now a dancing woman undulating her dress in a manner reminiscent of Carmen Miranda. She seemed to smile at him then vanished as a car outside his window announced its passing via doppler effect. Damn, so cool he thought. He was hooked on meditation and was going to figure out how to replicate the effect and conditions to see “Carmen” again.
This day he took micro doses of various and sundry things given him by his naturopath, volume up and on the same track, “Icelandic Wilderness” or “Trail of the Caribou”…who knows? He found his mind quieted and emptied itself with ease and rapidity, he was ecstatic. He felt himself drifting like in shallow water and allowed himself to be carried further still. He was in the center of the universe embedded in tangible and inky darkness. He was the center of the universe. He felt out of depth and tried to rewind his state but couldn’t. He became aware of a slight but growing sensation, somewhat like soft but insistent tendrils that wouldn’t let him up. He wasn’t going anywhere…looking around he saw silhouettes, other forms in various configurations that all seemed trapped and resigned. The universe wasn’t his dream but rather he was merely one of many dreams of the universe…and the universe was about to wake up.
