by submission | Dec 18, 2021 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Because they’d all turned up for book club and Kitty’s apartment was on the compact side, Jo-Anne’s Companion had to be left out in the rain.
There were cries of appreciation at the period detail. There was even a bulky TV set in the corner.
“Who recommended The Affair?” Taylor wanted to know.
“Though fads like that can date pretty quickly,” said Jeanie. Because of a backstory about majoring in English at college, Jeanie’s comments always sounded like the final word.
“It’s not just a fad,” protested Jo-Anne. The Affair was Jo-Ann’s suggestion, for obvious reasons.
They’d experimented with gossip about Jo-Anne before, and they might have tried out an Awkward Moment, but Kitty bustled in from the kitchenette with real-looking snacks, artfully displayed in a variety of styles and colours.
“Have we got round to No Way to Love a Starship yet?” Kitty wanted to know.
Kitty’s storyline included a husband who worked for Boeing. So the choice of sci-fi was most likely his, hinting that Kitty was meek and secretly unhappy.
Book club was a forum for trying out personalities, to help them to organize data and choose an identity out of the haphazard information that surrounded them, after all, choice was the foundation of consciousness.
Anger was the theme tonight, and talk was getting heated. Taylor thought the mixed sentience relationship in The Affair was unnatural. Jo-Anne was outraged.
While they argued back and forth, Kitty confided in Jeanie. “I’m the one who hasn’t read the book.”
They’d all been issued with a glass of domestic red, which was Taylor’s turn to spill, and soon Kitty was kneeling down with cleaning products.
“The Affair might seem sensational,” Jo-Anne said, trying to pick up the thread again. “Why don’t we just ask Tucker?”
Tucker was the name of her Companion.
So they moved chairs and bunched up on the studio-couch and invited him in.
Jo-Anne had chosen well. He wasn’t that much smaller than them, but gave the impression of being delicate and easily broken, and Jo-Anne had dressed him like Don Johnson in Miami Vice. His hair was beaded with damp from the rain and he shivered a little.
Jeanie was about to say what a realistic touch that was, then realised it was real.
Tucker knew all of their names and backstories. It seemed he had a lot of spare time while Jo-Anne worked, so to share Jo-Anne’s interests, he read the book club choices.
“You want my opinion?” He sounded surprised.
Well, wasn’t The Affair really a fairy tale about a knight rescuing a princess from a life that imprisoned her?
He was good-looking and seemed devoted to Jo-Anne, but it was obvious he wasn’t the fastest chip on the motherboard.
As they were tidying away props at the end, Tucker touched Jeanie’s hand.
“See?” he murmured. “I’m not cold like a machine. You should try out a Companion. Give me a call.”
The signal for anger/distaste played across Jeanie’s silver face.
“Remember,” Jeanie called out as everyone left, and stared at the human. “I’m hosting next week and the theme is secrets.”
“Something wrong, Tucker?” Jo-Anne inquired later.
“They frighten me.”
“I’ve told you before,” said Jo-Anne firmly. “Don’t worry about the book club. I’m the only one that can have you put down.”
by submission | Dec 17, 2021 | Story |
Author: Majoki
When Misty smiled that big smile of hers I could see the cancer so much more clearly. It was hard not to say anything.
I mean what do you tell the thirty-something supermarket cashier you see a few times a month and only know her name because it’s pinned to her blouse? “Hey, thanks for giving me the store discount on my Cool Ranch Doritos, even though I don’t have a coupon. And by the way, Misty, you should really get a blood test soon because you’ve got a serious case of lymphoma.”
How do you think that would go over with Misty?
She might say, “What are you, some kind of doc? An oncologist intern? A Dr. Oz wannabe?” More likely, she’d just stare through me and charge me full price for my damn Doritos.
Because I’m not a doctor. Or any kind of medical professional. Hell, I barely passed Biology in high school. No, I’m a professional poker player. Just the kind of trusted source for handing out a seemingly random cancer diagnosis.
So how do I know Misty has lymphoma? I know because I’ve seen it before. A close cousin of mine had it about seven years ago. I wish I could’ve diagnosed it then. But I didn’t know what I was looking at. I only noted his facial colors changing over the course of a few months. I didn’t know what it meant then. I do now.
You see, I see the world in a very different way. I’m a tetrachromatist. I don’t know if that sounds impressive to you. I’ll just tell you that it’s a rare condition. It means I see about 99 million more colors than you.
For the guy who barely passed Biology, I know I’ll sound like a geek here, but I’m really not. I had to read up on a lot of this because I needed to understand why I saw things other folks didn’t. Most humans are trichromatic, they have 3 cone cells, photoreceptors, in their retinas which allow them to distinguish about a million color variations. Tetrachromatists like me have 4 cones, and that fourth photoreceptor means my fellow retinal mutants and I can register around 100 million colors.
Yeah, that’s a lot, but before you get too excited, a dragonfly has about 10 times that capacity, plus it can see ultraviolet light. And it can see in slow motion, six times as many frames per second, as humans do. Yeah, a dragonfly’s got real super power vision. It could see bullets coming at it. I’d only be able to see the richer hues of my own blood after the bullets struck me.
I’m providing you that little peek into optic science (and my less than upbeat nature), so you understand that what I see isn’t magic; it isn’t x-ray vision; it’s only a higher level of discernment. Like sound frequencies humans can’t hear. You know, dog whistles and all that.
The simple truth is that everyday I’m blindsided by color. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes annoying. Sometimes very troubling. Like seeing Misty’s cancer or noticing the semi-silvering tones of fault lines in fatiguing metal holding up a pedestrian overpass.
Being hyper perceptive to color sometimes pushes me close to the edge. Sometimes, it gives me a needed edge.
That’s why I’m a professional poker player. Everybody has tells when they are nervous, excited, pissed. The best poker players mask their tells well. But there are tells and there are tells. And I can discern tells in other players that no one else can. Such as a slight capillary dilation that minutely flushes the lips when a player lands a helpful card. And the tip of the nose deepening a micro shade when a player draws a disappointing card.
Yup. That’s what minor mutants like me do with their semi-super powers. Win at cards. It’s a living. Except for the whole Misty-cancer thing and all the other troubles you can’t see, but I do. I guess that’s pretty much life. It’s mostly about what we don’t see, especially in ourselves.
That’ll blindside you for sure.
What’s the good of seeing the hundred million hues of a rainbow when you cloud it by inaction?
If I’m the one asking that question, I should see enough to answer it. Seems like I need to do a lot more than win at cards.
Seems like a good time to go to the grocery store for some Doritos. And a conversation. Time to see past the blindness of complacency. Time to see the more than 7 billion shades of humanity. Time for me to color outside the lines.
by submission | Dec 16, 2021 | Story |
Author: David Henson
Feeling drained, Walter Banks decides to prepare a homemade energy drink. As he tries to find a recipe online, he interrupts his search every few seconds to check his phone for email, headlines, sports, weather and more. Before he knows it, a couple hours have passed. He tells himself to stop squandering so much time and finds a drink he thinks will pep him up.
After he blends green tea, lemon, honey and broccoli, he takes the beverage to his recliner and lays his phone just out of easy reach on the side table. As he sips the drink, the phone starts chirping one notification after another. Walter tries to resist but finally gives in. When he looks, the words “Hold me” stack up multiple times on the screen. His heart skips thinking the message is from the dating app where he’s uploaded his profile. But when he signs in, there’s nothing more recent than the one-star rating from his last date and her comments. “The jerk kept talking to his phone. Not ON his phone but TO it.” What does she know? Walter thinks. “As long as I keep you charged and don’t drop you in the toilet, you won’t betray me will you?” he says.
As soon as he lays his phone back on the table, the notifications start again. He creates a reminder to see whether his operating system is out of date and holds the phone as he finishes his drink. He notices the battery is at 100 percent, which is odd because he hasn’t charged it in days.
Despite drinking the concoction, Walter can’t keep his eyes open. Putting the phone back on the table, he feels a pain in the palm of his hand and sees two pin pricks of blood. Too tired to be concerned, he falls asleep.
Walter dreams he’s lost in a marshland. He waves his hands frantically as a giant mosquito buzzes around his head. Then the buzzing becomes interspersed with a thumping sound. He opens his eyes and sees his phone vibrating so hard that’s it’s bouncing up and down on the side table. He thinks he must still be dreaming and pinches himself, but his phone keeps at it until he snatches it out of the air in mid hop. Although the device calms down when it’s in Walter’s grip, he feels the biting in his palm again. He screams at the phone to stop and tries to fling it away, but it sticks to his hand.
The pain in his palm sharpening, Walter heads for the garage. He tries to run but has only enough energy to shuffle along. He realizes he’s lost so much weight his clothes hang on him like drapes.
In the garage, Walter rummages a screwdriver out of a toolbox and punctures his palm as he tries unsuccessfully to pry the phone loose. The pain becoming unbearable and, feeling so dizzy he can barely stand, he puts his hand on the workbench, takes a deep breath, and smashes the phone with a hammer. The device remains intact, but the tool recoils and conks Walter in the forehead. He staggers then collapses onto his back, his phone, still joined to his hand, coming to rest on his face. He hears sucking and slurping sounds, and the screen grows brighter and brighter. Unable to move, Walter Banks closes his eyes for the last time, sighs and tells himself to go toward the light.
by submission | Dec 15, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
When we found her, the Marsport Mary should have been dark and silent, or a wreck. Instead, the lights burned, the life support systems ticked over, the computers hummed… but there was nobody aboard. The salvage crews are bringing her in this afternoon; no doubt she’ll be in the news for a while. I won’t be watching: I’m scared, and I’d rather forget.
She’d been “overdue: presumed lost” in the shipping lists for seven weeks, after failing to return from a survey into the Belt. We only came across her by accident, on a run of our own. Her engines were disengaged and she was drifting, enigmatic, a metallic speck in the vastness of the solar system.
The Captain risked sending two of us over to see why. Pat and I, chosen by lot as the away team, mentally prepared ourselves for a traditional horror: the aftermath of a micrometeorite strike, contagion or a crewmember gone berserk. What we found was an empty shell.
We went over every inch of her: utility spaces, crawlways, sample holds, stores, labs, rest areas, everything. There was nobody there. The quarters for the twelve crew were neat, bunks made up, with family pictures and personal devices. The canteen automata were functional. The equipment was properly stowed, the EVA suits all present and racked. The emptiness was an almost physical pressure, and strange echoes made us jumpy.
Nothing suggested violence or disaster; there were no suspicious smears or residues or bodily fluids, no notes or scrawled messages. On the bridge the downloaded logs showed nothing unusual, just records of minor mineral deposits located. The distress call hadn’t been activated, the emergency systems were idle. A single 3-person escape pod was missing, but even that couldn’t account for all the missing.
“This creeps me out,” I admitted on the voice net. I sure as hell wasn’t taking off my suit, however much the bioscans insisted there was nothing unexpected here.
“There’s got to be something,” said Pat. “People don’t just vaporise, do they?” But there was nothing.
“We’ll mark the asteroids they surveyed as potentially dangerous,” the Captain interrupted, “Something might have happened to them there.”
“Like what?” asked Pat, “Because I’m telling you, I have no clue.”
“If I knew, there’d be no ‘potentially’ about it.”
“This is plain weird. Can we claim for salvage at least?” I asked.
“And get accused of running a scam? Or blamed for… whatever this was?” said the Captain sardonically. “Not worth it. Fire up her beacon, and I’ll message Corporate. Someone else can come and get her. Maybe they’ll have more ideas.”
So eventually the insurance company did send someone out, and she’s coming home to Mars today. There’s been speculation, but no conclusions.
I can’t go back to work without knowing what happened out there. It could have been us. Asleep, my dreams are haunted by her absent crew. Awake, I’m terrified: was this first contact? Or something else?
by Hari Navarro | Dec 14, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Approaching Stalag VII A — Moosburg — 1945
He walked and as he walked the cloth of his trousers stuck to his skinny legs as the rapier cold tried to eat of his skin.
The tree on the hill to the side of his ice-pecked eyes felt too the weight of this most bitter of winters and it creaked, but he did not hear it. Though, nonetheless, he looked at it and he imagined it’s shiver.
“It is awfully cold. It matters not if the sun is out there is ice on the ground all day”, he muttered, in recollection of the last letter he had sent home from the camp. And his throat it tastes of bits of the inside of his mouth and the snow he has sucked from his sleeve.
He remembers his parents and he remembers their house in Wanganui. The railway tracks that slid as cold case-hardened iron nailed reassurance just behind the back-yard fence. And he remembers the smell of boiled potatoes and butter and wilted mint.
Frank smiles.
This war has been good to him. In that he had not felt the lead that pushes through skin and fragments inside of meat. He is alive and that was the greatest thing about just about anything at this moment as he squinted at this fucking nothing tree.
But then he has an image, a thing that aches in his head. A friend lost but then found. A man with a family – as all we have. Not a friend, but an acquaintance, a boy/ man with whom he’d played a few hands of Bridge.
The snow is a many faceted thing, its purity so clearly showing the intruding filth. His body, this boy from a farm, he that loved the smell of oil that sleeps in wool, diced down and into the icy mulch beneath the tread of a benzin breathing tank.
Frank had looked upon this ruin and he had tried to cry. But ropes bound in his throat and the liquid drew into itself and pulled his eyes almost but closed. And he walked on and his toes froze in his boots and he pounded his fist at his thigh. And he said…
“This thing, this truth of who we are. This rot which foams and spits on all our branches. I will find you. I will end you. I will.”
Hundreds of millennia later and on a far away planet Francis stands and feels the ice-welded glue of her finger upon the trigger.
“I have tracked you through both time and the space between it. Now you die”, she says as, without further hesitation, she fires and a finely carved missile carves through the putrid mist and opens away its fat head like a bit of bitten fruit and it crashes down unto its cracking knees.
“Thank you…”, it whimpers as whimper it fucking well should and it folds down and into a ratcheting foetal ball.
And Francis kicks its flabby belly with the tip of her boot and she staggers backward as she feels the weight of its death.
“There ya go we did it, Franky. Took a few thousand years but we knocked the bastard off”.
by Julian Miles | Dec 13, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It’d been a grim day spent fending off morning and afternoon assaults by enemy forces. Wave after wave of troops. Minimal armour, and a lot of their kit looks past third-hand.
They’re low on heavy manufacturing capabilities after their industrial heartland was destroyed. We tried neutron bombing to minimise damage, but they just herded more workers in, regardless of casualties. So we became war criminals by leaving them nothing to sacrifice workers in.
Anyway, I’m lighting a cigar and thinking of home when someone screams. I shout as I roll off the bed.
“Echo Unit!”
I run from my tent, grabbing a flamethrower as I pass the rack. Sod subtlety. It’s night, I’m tired, and three attacks in a day is just not on.
We race to the line and find utter chaos. I’m trying to make head or tail of it when an enemy trooper lurches out of the darkness, one arm and half his head missing. Sergeant Chames puts three into it. It goes down, then tries to get back up!
I see another walking wreck that looks intact apart from a length of girder through its chest.
“Catch that one.”
Leaping up onto a six-wheeler, I go all-channels on the comms.
“All units, shoot their legs out from under them. Fall back to the six-wheeler park. Flamethrower teams stand by.”
It takes two minutes to sort comrades from chaos. When the only upright soldiers before me are moving like extras from a zombie movie, it’s time.
“Burn the line! Incendiaries to their rear. Send fragmentation long over.”
No more of this stupidity. We deal with it and leave a tangle of nastiness to foul any left. Come first light, we’ll walk fire across any ground we missed.
My lads ‘n’ lassies have the one I wanted tethered by four ropes.
“Somebody get a crate, get a tarpaulin round that abomination, pop it inside, then send it to the scientists. Tell them we need to know what’s happening, and we need to know very, very quickly.”
The next morning is no fun at all, but we clear our lines out to 500 metres, using Warthog strikes to stop the enemy trying anything nastier.
Our Warthogs may be old, but they’re phenomenally effective. We got them at an auction when there was a big sell-off after some nation or other went tits up. Came with stacks of extras, too.
I get back to find a memo from the scientists. Somebody must have lit a fire under them to get results this quick. It’s bigger than usual, full of technical detail and long words, but they know who they’re dealing with now: they’ve added a neat summation in layman’s terms. Scientists are why we’re all still here. The fact they occasionally need interpreters so most people can grasp the basics of the wizardry they do is fine by me.
This case is rather special, though. Seems there was some research done back at the beginning of the twenty-first century into little bits of the brain called ‘glia’. Those fellas have an alarming habit of waking up and growing tiny ‘limbs’ a few hours after the owner of the brain gets themselves killed.
Somehow, the enemy scientists, having no respect, have come up with a way to make those glial cells do what they do to the bits that make a body move. Only lasts a few hours, but the scare factor alone is worth it.
It’s a nasty process, involving injections into the brain. Another reason to win soon – before our side works out how to do it too.
