by submission | Jan 29, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Thang Danang balanced the hypodermic on the tip of her index finger.
Reckless.
Irresponsible.
Crazy.
That’s what her cousin Luc had called her. He’d yelled that her visions of their family ancestors weren’t real, that she was hallucinating.
Thang had pointed to her great grandmother Binh sitting in her finest silk near the gene editing equipment in her lab. “Ask her if I’m hallucinating.”
Throwing up his hands, but trying to dial down his tone, Luc once again tried to explain.
“Thang, I think you’ve got melioidosis. It’s caused by the bacteria Burkholderia pseudomallei. You’re a scientist. A very good scientist. Look it up. It’s a soil bacteria found here in parts of Vietnam. You must have gotten some dirt in a cut or rubbed your eyes when your hands were dirty. Melioidosis can cause an inflammation of the brain and induce hallucinations. You’ve got a disease. A disease that can be treated.”
“I’m not sick,” Thang said.
“You are!” He motioned around the room. “We’re the only ones here and yet you keep insisting our long dead ancestors are with us.”
“They are.”
“They are not, Thang!” Luc raised his voice again. “And they are not directing you to try this crazy experiment. It is wrong and it is dangerous. And you are sick!”
Luc was adamant.
But Thang was certain. The certainty of her ancestors convinced her. For days they’d been appearing in her lab, exhorting her to listen to them. To believe in their dao duc, their virtue and integrity. Her many, many ancestors had come to provide her with the power to protect all her family past, present and future.
And Thang believed the world was her family. As a geneticist, she knew at the mitochondrial level we are all one. And at the behest of her ancestors she was ready to instigate a change at the cellular level that would bring humankind even closer together.
So many of her ancestors had been taken by violence and war, or by the dislocation, crime, disease and famine that war fosters. They were begging her to end humanity’s endless cycles of violence. And Thang could.
In the hypo balanced on her finger was the enzyme she’d developed over years and had methodically tested on a variety of mammals. These were lab animals that displayed overly aggressive and belligerent behavior. Thang’s enzyme radically altered that behavior. Eliminated it. At the genetic level.
Thang had a cure for violence. For war. Her ancestors were sure of it and told her so. Only Luc stood in her way. He was a neurologist. A good scientist, too, and Thang respected him. But, he said she was sick. Out of her mind.
Wild.
Thang looked from Luc to her long gone great grandmother. The living and the dead. The present and the past. She clasped the hypo. Who did she owe more to?
Wild Thang knew the only answer.
The future.
Luc was too slow to react, as she plunged the hypo into the meat of her thigh and depressed the plunger.
by submission | Jan 28, 2022 | Story |
Author: Tara Mukund
“Imagine a giant slice of cake. Multilayered galore. Now replace all the baked matter with Earthen substance – rock, soil, water, and most importantly, humans. There’s your Anthropocene. Now, what if the Anthropocene were anthropomorphic?”
The TV blares at me as I stand transfixed in front of it. A human-esque Anthropocene? Isn’t that essentially a really (and I mean really) scary faux-human who wants to kill me?
A circular blob, somewhat resembling the Earth, floats onto my TV. It features a rotten version of the globes I’ve seen all my life. There’s a ring of eyes circling the Earth’s axis of rotation.
I think I get it. Anthropocene. Anthropo-cene – scene – seen – vision – eyes.
The eyes start to shift furiously. Each individual one lasts for a second, then cuts to another eye. The new one is sometimes entirely different, other times similar. Many of the eyes remind me of cartoons. I’m pretty confident that I just saw a solitary Sesame Street Cookie Monster eye flash by – b-eye. I also think I saw an Ai-Da eye, but that could just be me projecting.
Why shift? It’s almost impossible to focus, it destroys the personability of the supposed anthropomorphic character before me.
Oh! Anthropomorphic. That’s it. Anthropo-morphic – morphing – metamorphosis – transformation – shift.
Huh, it’s an epoch, humanized.
The TV continues to screech.
“Our state-of-the-art Morcene™ model shifts through every single artificial eye ever placed in the public eye. A perfect blend of anthropomorphism and human creation!”
Public eye. I – eye – chuckle, wondering how the narrator stopped themselves from doing the same. Somehow I’ve wound up fixated, watching an advert for a twisted Library – L-eye-brary – of Babel.
Why so many eyes, though? They could’ve placed a pair of eyes solely on the front. But then again, how would we define ‘front’? As much as we make the Earth anthropomorphic, it’s not going to stop spinning, just as much as it isn’t going to start sprouting tufts of hair on its supposed ‘back’. Makes sense.
I squint at the TV as the eyes spin. They don’t come in pairs, almost out for lonely walks (shifts?). I try to count the number of eyes – multiple times, I must add – and arrive at a reasonable estimate of 20-22.
Oh, it’s our time, our epoch. If each epoch were a globe, the eerie – eye-rie – orb would be ours: the Anthropocene.
“A library of all the eyes comes with your Morcene™! Who wouldn’t want to collect every eye ever? In stores today!”
I wouldn’t want the fiery – f-eye-ry – gaze of the Eye of Sauron anywhere near me, that’s for sure.
The eye-Earth-orb fades away.
I stare at the TV waiting for a PSA to conclude this joke – explaining how we’re destroying our planet, so much so that there’s an entire epoch whose name boils down to ‘age of human impact’. I wait, and I wait, but it doesn’t come.
The Morcene™. It’s real. Up till that point, I probably could’ve been the creator of this sardonic yet serious advert – eye jokes and all. We had the name ‘Anthropocene’, and now we have the model, primped and ready-for-purchase. And yet, we have no large-scale, transnational measures to counteract the harm we’ve done to our planet.
＊＊＊
I chuckle again at the memory of the Pillsbury Doughboy’s lone eye finding itself on my TV screen as I stand in line at my local Costco.
My Morcene™? My anthropomorphic Anthropocene? My humanized epoch? It’s now propped on my bedside table. Whether it’s supposed to be a reminder to act, or an object to chuckle at, even I couldn’t say.
by submission | Jan 27, 2022 | Story |
Author: Donna J. W. Munro
“The most intelligent creature wasn’t some begging dog or the hump crazy dolphins,” Randal said to Sophie as they walked the perimeter of the bowl valley waste they guarded. “It’s crows.”
In the distance, a crow laughed at the sky and landed on a gnarled branch that grew from the cracked-up river wash, dry now for fifty years.
Sophie nodded. She’d heard it before. She shifted the rifle further back on her shoulders and glanced through the binoculars to where the crow hopped from the branch onto the ground, picking through pebbles.
“Why, if crows ran the world, we’d probably all be better off,” Randal said, probably for the millionth time.
Not a lot to do out in the wastes of Ohio. Maybe in Manitoba there were green things that grew, but here there was just grit and wind to guard. Still, Sophie didn’t complain. They had it worse down south, living underground because of heat. The interfilms whispered about cannibalism in the caves.
If Randal wasn’t such an idiot, he might have tried to eat her when she’d stumbled across the ragged mountains begging for water from his evaptank. He took her in. Made her his little sister. Back in the old world, they’d have called Randal an imbecile or a retard or some other awful thing. But in this world, he thrived. Things made sense to him and he became the protector of this bit of land.
He collected up living things and protected them in his hill cabin, a buried fortress of shipping containers lined with the flotsam of the old world. No one came here because… there was nothing here. But Randal managed to find the occasional rabbit, worms, a stray cat, and even some little green things he sheltered and grew inside the hill. He’d found her. Any other guy might have mauled her, raped her, killed her for meat. Randal didn’t eat meat. He couldn’t hurt a fly. And the raping? He wasn’t interested in it.
Just a big strong kid with a good heart here at the end of the world.
“Randal, why do you like crows so much?”
He smiled rolling the shovel he carried across the ridge of his shoulder.
“I dream about crows all the time. When I do, the evaptank gets more water and we find plots of fat earthworms to eat. They bring me good luck. Beside you, they’re the only things left around here that talk. Caw-Caw!”
Sophie nodded, pulling her feathery, black skirt up to step over a branch.
“What if I told you that you were the only person left on earth, Randal, and that the crows are taking care of you as best they can. They make up all those stories about other places. Other people. To keep you happy. For old time sake. What if I told you that you are their special pet?”
Randal twisted his mouth as he did when he thought deeper than his pool allowed. “There’s worse things, right Sophie? I’d rather be a crow’s pet than some monster eating babies like they say on the interfilms. But wait… what you say can’t be true, because you’re here. You are a person like me. Don’t be so silly, Sophie.”
She smiled and leaned in toward him, pecking him on the cheek.
“Right, right, Randal. Even so, you’re right. Let’s get back and eat. I bet the rabbits are hungry, too.”
He laughed and as he walked away, muttering happily about the rabbits and the plants in his burrow under the hill, Sophie walked a few steps behind. Parts of her broke off, black and feathery, and flew away, messengers carrying back word of Randal’s needs to the kingdom of crows. The flock of Sophie would keep him alive for as long as they could, for old times’ sake, but after him the whole world would be made up of crows.
by submission | Jan 26, 2022 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“Outrageous! Don’t you dare degrade my mother, you monster! She will never love you.” Pearl pushed her finger at Jake Rosetter’s dark, greasy, pockmarked forehead only half-visible behind his helmet’s face shield in the ready room near exit hatches for scheduled spacewalk repairs. He leaned back hard against blue steel lockers before slamming shut his cabinet.
“Back off, Tindal! What would you know? You haven’t seen her for twenty years. You’ve only got memories. We’ll make our own.” Rosetter yanked his underwear-lining zipper, quickly concealing a slender, four-inch wide, narrow ceramic ingot sealed within dull-gray metal welded to his thin aluminum safety lanyard. His necklace matched dented lieutenant bars on his spacesuit hanging on the adjacent wall. He finished dressing, pushing arms past inner suit linings, exposing silvery warmth gloves emerging through sleeves of his orange work suit.
“I don’t care what kind of pull you have with the Captain. You can’t take her out there. She never liked space. She never entered the void. She lived on Titan, discovering critical methane pools for your struggling Earth, dedicating her life for billions facing death from Earth’s glaciation, but they never knew her sacrifices. How dare you dishonor her legacy playing this damnable charade of passion? It’s not just heresy…it’s insanity.” Pearl pulled Rosetter’s arm as he reached for his outer space suit, delaying his exit.
“Claws off, civi! You know the punishment for grabbing elites?” With that, he pushed Pearl out of arm’s reach. “I won’t press charges, but you touch me again and even your mother’s love won’t protect you…not on this cargo ship.” He stiffened as he pulled the lower half of his exit suit off the mag hangar to a final dressing bench. Soiled outer sleeves and two repaired puncture marks portrayed dangers from off-world ship maintenance where micrometeorites rocketed around Saturn’s gravity. Rosetter pushed Pearl back further against adjacent lockers, hard enough to bang the petite black laborer’s head against metal frames. She came charging back.
“She forfeited her life for your kind, and this is your gratitude—imaginary love, keeping her DNA over your heart? After she died with her team caught in that Sotra volcanic ice blow, her shredded remains were congealed into that pendant. It’s our respect for lost miners. Her shield of dignity was sealed in Pallas City’s temple of high honor. You stole her essence to defile her in your disgusting indulgence.”
“Excuse me if I don’t get it. You’re a Titanese worshipper, as she was, so her soul is somewhere else in some heavenly dimension? Isn’t that what you call it?”
Pearl squinted, pulling her lips back in a snarl. “So what?”
“Cargo engs have no progeny to remember us. We have no legacy. We’re sterile as my suit. That’s the price we rejects from Earth’s declining gene pool pay to preserve their dwindling herd. All I’ll ever have for company in my brief life is one reconstituted clone made from some departed’s cells, but she’ll only survive for two years. I picked your mother for her honesty and loyalty, not some frivolous empty-headed celebrity.”
“I forbid it.”
“You’ll never see us together. The rule is “Never where they lived.” My one-time companion will only know me within this ship’s cramped quarters. I will honor your mother’s memory, as no one else can. Ghosting is reparation for those dying young while traversing deadly radiation belts. Maybe cloning isn’t ethical to you, but it’s legal. It’s the only love I’ll ever have. You had hers once. Now let me have mine.”
by submission | Jan 25, 2022 | Story |
Author: Claire Fitzpatrick
The street was long and empty, silent, save for the gentle sounds of dead branches underfoot, out of sync with the steady rhythm of Ginny’s steps. Here, the pavement was littered with fallen leaves, and she stepped around it, careful not to crush it underfoot. When she reached the end of her parent’s street she heard the familiar blare of the broadcast from the telegraph pole loudspeakers and looked over her shoulder. The televisions turned on one by one, swift and precise, like lighting out a candle. She looked down at her watch. She hadn’t noticed it at first – it had crept up on them, sneaky and unobtrusive. One day the news started at nine AM, then at a quarter to. The following week it was eight-thirty, and then a quarter to seven. Now it started at six. Her mother brushed it off. “It’s always been six, Ginny. You’ve such an imagination!”
She walked on, pausing at the intersection where the road turned off to the motorway. In a few hours the bitumen would be alive with the thunderous roar of horns and spluttering exhausts, a noxious perfume of benzene and diesel filling the air. But now, all Ginny could smell was the beach nestled behind her house. She inhaled the decay and regeneration, and lingered in the faint memory of roses in the gusts of coastal winds.
“Don’t move, or I’ll shoot!”
Ginny froze and raised her hands. The enforcement officer hurried across the street. He pulled a gun from his holster and pointed it at her head.
“What’s your name?”
“Ginny MacDougal.”
“Where is your uniform, Miss MacDougal?”
“I don’t have one.”
“So you’re not a sidewalk officer?”
“No.”
“So where are you going?”
“Home.”
“You have a television in your house?”
“I do.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
Ginny glanced at her watch. “Quarter to six.”
“The news will start in fifteen minutes. Do you live far?”
Ginny pointed to the end of the street. “Down there. Small white house with the red car.”
“What if something happened and you didn’t make it?”
“Like this interaction?”
“Don’t get smart!”
“I was getting some fresh air.”
“Is there air in your house?”
“Of course.”
“Well, there’s no reason for you to be outside at this time.” The officer returned the gun to its holster, pulled off a ticket from the machine strapped to his utility belt, and handed it to her. She took it quickly and stuffed it in her pocket. It was her second one this week. One more and she’d face a disciplinary hearing.
“You’re lucky I stopped you, you know. My partner would have set you straight to the Facility.”
Ginny swallowed a lump in her throat. The speculum left red rings around her uncle’s eyes that remained for weeks. Now he never left the lounge-room in case he missed the news. Her aunt had even purchased a bedpan. “Is that so?”
The officer nodded. “Know anyone in there?”
“No.”
“Well, you don’t want to. Now go home, Miss MacDougal.”
Ginny nodded and hurried off towards her house. Once inside, she slid the chain across the door, made herself comfortable on the lounge, and stared at the empty space where the television had been. She thought of her parents, propped up on their recliners, dinner trays on their laps, the technicolour lights bouncing of their slack faces, entombed within their lounge room. Tomorrow, she’d walk the long way home.
by Julian Miles | Jan 24, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Two figures meet outside the Ship o’ the Line tavern on Marquis III.
“No, no. You sit there. I’m more comfortable when I can see the ways in and out of any place I’m stopped in.”
The reply is a flicker of tentacles and a telepathic acceptance. After the slight visitor is seated, food and drinks are ordered from the hovering ovoid of a serving ‘bot.
Tentacles wave and a thought is sent.
“A revelation from my centuries amongst humans?”
A callused hand scratches at the stubble on his chin, then waves towards the spaceships standing amid the towers of the spaceport.
“The uncanny resemblance, come evening, between a harbour full of tall ships with their rigging and lines going hither and yon, and the spectacle of a free worlds spaceport filled with rocketships all festooned in stabilisers, conduits, and cabling.”
The tentacles ripple, then curl tightly as a more piercing question is communicated.
There’s a bark of laughter that trails away to a deep chuckle.
“No. We are, by nature, solitary wanderers. By the time we truly understand our longevity, we have forgotten our origins. Near death experiences take memories from us. Some of us seek that oblivion, spending lives as the most extreme daredevils or warriors for whatever cause offers the greatest danger. Others seek to avoid it, clutching memories like a miser hoarding money. I daresay an unknown number of us die after shockingly short – by our standard – life spans. Those who fall we never know. The fervid stories of our intergalactic powerplays and control of humanity are nothing but childish nightmare tales dressed in adult trappings. Your kind know our telepathic abilities to be rudimentary. No doubt you have encountered absolute refusals to believe that from some human groups.”
The slight figure nods slowly, then takes a quick sip of a luminous yellow beverage, the glow from which illuminates the quartet of dark vertical slots where it’s eyes should be. As it savours the drink, another question is silently asked.
“You need not worry. I’ve booked passage out of here on several ships. I’ll be gone, and damnably difficult to follow, by the time you compile and release the documentary. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to depart a place due to risk of discovery, but it’s nice to be able to do so with a modicum of grace for once.”
The next query prompts a snort of derision.
“We came to a tacit agreement with the authorities ages ago. Our potential for causing long term harm far outweighs any advantages we could provide. On top of that, there are superstitious criminal groups and religions with legends and traditions that predate the current ruling classes. We can bring a fearsome amount of grief down upon any who test us. That is not bluster, either. It has been proven several times.”
Tentacles flick again while food that looks like charred seaweed is consumed with gusto.
“I have no idea. I have been around long enough to develop a surety that whatever divinities might be attendant upon the drama called human existence have no great scheme for my kind, nor for humankind, be that of any relevance. We are, the universes are, and so the great and colourful dance goes on. And with that, so must I.”
The slight figure gestures towards passers-by, presaging a final question.
“I stopped wondering about that over 3000 years ago. Wasting too much time on something you can’t answer is a bad habit. Good evening to you.”
The figure strides away and disappears into the passing crowd.
