by submission | Nov 30, 2020 | Story |
Author: I.W.Ray
I don’t know what I am anymore. My river is the Styx but am I a ferryman, a passenger, or a trespasser? I fear no coins will ever pass through these hands. I am alone, the singular soul who has devoted an eternity to this endeavor. No, that’s not the right word. Eternity implies a purpose and a direction.
[Captain, calculations for DF456A in progress. 5 percent complete.]
Every time I try to capture it and start the multi-dimensional folding process, I trigger something. The star and I are reset and get tossed in time and space. Sometimes I’m close to it and other times I’m light-years away. I eventually find it and start the process all over. It is possible. This time I will get it right. Even the improbable can favor a fool.
[Captain, calculations for DF456A in progress. 20 percent complete.]
I folded other stars into gems and sold them for the price of a small galaxy. It is a dangerous, illegal, and vulgar profession. If you made only one you were a legend. It’s even better if you didn’t slaughter multiple planetary systems to get it. I had three. Then I happen upon it by accident. A star that moved through time and space. A star that would never know old age or death. A miracle that will be a trophy for me, the greatest star hunter in the known universe.
[Captain, calculations for DF456A in progress. 60 percent complete.]
I imagine that it is laughing at me but the truth is I’m an insect trying to capture a deity. In my dreams, I talk to it. I threatened it. I bargain and plea with it but it never answers me. It doesn’t matter for I will win this battle of wills. I too can be everlasting.
[Captain, You have multiple incoming messages and one call.]
I heard. The news was a foreign body that lodged in my ear. The computer repeated itself. I didn’t answer but raced to the panels to check my status. I was right back in my original timeline and part of space. The star brought me home? I’ve been home all this time? My fresh young planet was close enough to be on the view screen.
“You’re coming home now my baby. It’s been too long.”
“…Mo…ther? Mother?”
“Yes, it’s me. I haven’t heard from you in years. Please come home. I want to see you. You promised.”
[Captain, calculations for DF456A are 100 percent complete. Initializing protocol on your command.]
“Baby?”
“Just one more job mother, then I’ll be home forever.”
by submission | Nov 29, 2020 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
My sister’s eyes would never be warm or human again, now showing only metallic, sparkling haze from a Tantalus Worm wriggling in her infected body. She could walk, again, after agonizing, bone-breaking seizures evaporated from the powers of her disgusting, infesting companion. There is no cure…no treatment for Plyon’s Syndrome, outside of becoming host to a parasitic alien worm found on forbidden Allo-23.
“Can you understand, Celia? Can you hear?” I whispered. She struggled forward under her physical therapist’s guidance while navigating padded hand posts over a trying recovery exercise.
“We know you, Bruce.” A warbled response made me shudder– a trilling commingling of high and low pitches—but not Celia. There was shared distress in the message.
“Is…is it painful?” I shadowed her staccato struggling. Her head swiveled to me, eyes glittering in phases from gold to silver.
“Be thankful,” it bellowed. “We ancient races abandoned warrior bodies and violence before your inner worlds had life. We devolved, never again to harm. Our purpose is to serve in healing. We give no pain– only hope.”
“I want to speak to Celia, not you,” I snapped back at the remnant. Her dragging bare heels left trails of blue liquid. Doctors warned how parasites released toxins as a permanent aftereffect.
“Bruce…don’t be upset, please.”
Her voice soothed. Listening to recordings for years, as disease ravished her capacities, failed to calm his anger over a paralyzed ballerina. Politicians promised Mars’ soils were safe. Children frolicked barefooted on resurrected sea beaches. Celia was the lone survivor of a generation now remembered only in night skies as dry Deimos catacombs circled a dying Mars colony.
“No, dear Celia…never…forgive my impatience. I despise this dark dwarf planet in the Kyper Belt becoming your dreary home, as our last hope. Do you understand you must stay? No going back?”
Celia nodded.
“You discovered us,” the deep voice returned. “We did not seek you. It is agonizing to enter your forms, but we do it, relieving her terrible curse. She will thrive here…even dance again. You will see, but she must remain. Your governments will never let us leave this planet. They fear us.”
I turned, wondering what punishments I would face returning to my red planet. The death penalty for visiting Allo-23 was still enforceable. Outposts on Saturn’s moons might accept me, but they were cold, hostile environments far from terraformed gentle summers on Mars.
“I can’t stay. I used all my influence to get this far. I’ll have to leave my rank and status behind. How will I keep in touch? How will I know you are safe and recovering?”
“Touch her hand, for just a moment,” the therapist whispered. I noticed the assistant’s gloved hands. I wondered. A trick?
“Go ahead, Bruce. It’s okay,” Celia said quietly.
I lightly pressed her dry, bruised skin on top of her hand gripping the bars. It was electric…startling. I blinked hard, pulling away, flashing lights pulsing in my eyes. Tinnitus deafened me and then receded.
“What!” I blurted out before my vision cleared. I saw myself, and the therapist, as if viewing outside my body. I was looking through Celia’s new eyes.
Words appeared in my head, in her voice, clear and sweet from childhood. “We can see each other and talk when you think of me, no matter how far away. It is the Old One’s gift. Now we will always share without interference from Mars’ oversight. This is our love that can never be quarantined.”
by submission | Nov 28, 2020 | Story |
Author: Adam McDaniel
In the world, there are many secrets–those that bare themselves to the mighty, those that bare themselves to the wise, and those that bare themselves to the fool.
The mighty find the will to lead. The wise find the strength to rule. The fool only finds himself.
And on the night the breeze fell down the mountain to tempt the moon’s light to bed, there were no mighty armies making camp in the glen. Nor pilgrim or sage waiting for divine whispers on the night wind. There was only a fool.
A fool, lost and lonely.
It is a fact that the many earthen spirits of the valley, the mountain, and the sky revel in the revelation of the fool. Some think this because none would believe them should they reveal it to others. Others say the mind of the fool, unconditioned by the bulwark of reason, is particularly open to the lessons of the otherworld. Or, that the foolish possess the disposition of children, whom many spirits envy and appreciate.
These are only partial truths, some (depending on the otherfolk) more true than others. But there is a truth that is pervasive enough throughout that it bears mention:
Though you may stare at the naked nymph and watch as her thin and creeping fingers course through her hair and down her neck as it stretches–do not think yourself unseen.
For she sees through the eyes of every beast in the forest and knows from the gossip of the trees and stones the location of any wanderer in her domain. And if she did not wish to be seen, you would not see her. And if she did not want you to watch, she would not bathe.
The fool bridles himself with the guilt of the watcher, without the fear of being watched. For if the fool were aware of her sight, there would be no secret to be revealed.
It is the secret of nakedness which drives foolish men to watch. In the guilt of their watching, such fools act as beasts. Their eyes smolder and burn at the sight of the mistress of the forest, and she bends herself to tease the gaze until the guilt of society is superseded by the furious lusting of a beast.
Thus her wonder dances ‘round the fool’s bestial want, and just as she sees through the fox, the meadowlark, or the bear, so too does she see through the eyes of the fool.
There is nothing more powerful than a secret. And there is nothing more costly than power.
And it is perhaps the greatest secret of all, that which leads the fool to believe he has seen something which is not meant to be seen. For anything put before a fool’s eyes is to be looked at, yet not everything a fool sees is to be believed.
The spirits who would sell their secrets to fools often demand a price much more steep than those pandering to the mighty or wise. For both the commander and the king seek the spirits’ audience fully aware of what they have to lose, yet the fool barely knows what they have to gain.
So when the breeze proceeded down the face of An Mhangarta to follow suit with the moon in its disrobing, and happened upon a lonesome fool… in the breeze, it’s said, howled the cry of a hungry wolf.
by submission | Nov 27, 2020 | Story |
Author: Stephen Dougherty
The four-month voyage to The Mirror came to an end when the faintest light of the instruments filled Navigator TwoJade’s eyes with figures. The engines fell silent and a barely perceptible feeling of fulfillment bathed the deck of the Excitation. The other Jades allowed themselves to open their eyes but quickly closed them again at the sight of the instruments’ glow. Raised towards the only window of the small craft lay OneAngel, her hands flat on the communicators. It was her job to make the Excitation talk.
The trip from the Dark Earth was uneventful and seemed only a few hours to the crew who slept through it in dreamless suspension. The worlds and wonders passed them by until they reached a point beyond Pluto. Ten thousand miles ahead of them lay an object of unknown origin. Nearly two hundred miles across and forty miles high it was almost completely flat and just a few feet in depth. Its highly reflective surface had reflected the feeble light from the sun and caught the attention of the observatories on moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Just beyond the fringes of the solar system, it waited in silence.
The Excitation also now waited, tantalizingly close. OneAngel, lying before the long oval window, moved her head ever so slightly and thought “Run your preliminary checks before we move into place.” And the craft shared the thought instantly with the others.
Each touched their screens, imagined commands, and influenced numbers with their cool quick eyes. The machineries within the Excitation pulsed and breathed, the engines glowed, and the small dark ship started to move.
At the same moment, a flash of white light shone brilliantly for a fraction of a second from the surface of The Mirror. From its surface, thousands upon thousands of small spheres rose and moved slowly outward, like bubbles in water. The window on the Excitation reacted to dim the light and the crew moved quickly to respond. Once again, eyes darted, thoughts influenced, fingers danced. As they acted to understand this unexpected development the small spheres turned a deep green, stopped in their courses and started to vibrate violently. The crew of the tiny vessel fell unconscious. When they awoke, they found that the spheres had gone, and valuable time had been lost.
OneJade skimmed her instruments. Her sharp mind deciphered the data and projected her conclusion to the Excitation: “We have been unconscious for nearly twenty minutes. Scans suggest the vibrating spheres were a method of communication. She opened her eyes wide. There is a message.”
OneAngel looked through the window instinctively to see if The Mirror was still there. It was. Its liquid-like surface seemed to ripple and flicker. Connected together via their ship, the tiny crew all knew there was a message. And it was now displayed on their monitors:
WE ARE COMING. WE WILL ALTER YOUR SUN.
OneAngel transmitted a thought to the Excitation and her eyes flashed around her displays invoking commands to the ship. The engines glowed once again, and it moved gracefully towards The Mirror. A few minutes was all it took until Excitation stared directly at the center of the giant instrument. OneAngel faced forward, lying flat in her berth, and gave the command to transmit. She looked on as the message was sent into the heart of the device. Her heartbeat rose ever so slightly. This message too was displayed across their screens. It read:
THANK YOU
by submission | Nov 26, 2020 | Story |
Author: David Barber
“What did you say this place was called?” repeated the alien.
“The Large Hadron Collider.”
The man’s name was Theo Jacobson, and before the aliens came, he’d been in charge here. This was where debris from colliding protons had sparkled through the ATLAS detector. It would have been lethal to stand here once. He couldn’t get used to the silence in these vast cathedral spaces.
“Such efforts your kind put into science.”
“Such foolishness,” added its Shadow.
The aliens always went about in pairs; the True and its Shadow. Like so much else, the significance of this eluded us.
The True waved a three-fingered hand. They assumed human form for our convenience, they said. Perhaps they hadn’t looked very closely. “Explain its purpose again.”
The man was weary of all this. “The Higgs boson.”
“A made-up particle.” Grinning, the Shadow waved its arm through the yellow steel tubing of the safety rail.
Holograms, the scientist in Jacobson protested. Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Without thinking, he did the experiment and the alien offered no resistance to his hand.
“You are in love with matter,” declared the True, unconcerned. Much of what they said sounded like quotes. “You expect us to be flesh, but we are beyond all that.”
Its Shadow butted in. “Hadrons. Bosons. Holograms. Your science words explain nothing.” It had a go at laughter, sounding like a creaky door.
Jacobson had tried to make sense of what they had told humankind, how the New Agers and astrologers, the believers in spirits, crystals, and magic had been right all along.
It was nonsense. He banged his fist on the safety railing and the sound boomed round the detector hall. I refute it thus!
“Either you are tricking us, or all of science is wrong,” he persisted. “Occam’s razor.”
“Not wrong,” said the True. “But shallow. Like a puddle.”
Politicians and the media had taken to parroting opinions like these. There had been a surprising groundswell of schadenfreude at the plight of scientists.
“We once saw the world as you do,” the aliens had explained in a famous interview. “Then we learned that there was a deeper reality.”
They insisted that sometime around the Renaissance, humankind had taken a wrong turn. Prayer worked in the Middle Ages, miracles were common, and a bag of saint’s bones had power. We should believe more, not less.
The aliens had announced themselves from every TV in the world. A simple magic, they told our leaders, as they popped up at secret meetings, in secure bunkers, in bathrooms. Something anyone could learn to do.
The Shadow was remorseless. “Textbooks only the clever can understand, ever more expensive machines for these rituals, endless theories. This is what you called physics.”
Of course talk like this was nonsense. Science found out how the world worked, but it was hard work, and the aliens had told us we didn’t need to bother.
“What was wrong with steam engines and horses?” the True asked, almost sadly.
Jacobson did not answer. He had glimpsed the future and it did not include him.
“Anyway,” concluded the Shadow. “Most of your kind preferred things the way they were.”
It wouldn’t happen all at once, but in a generation or two, their best minds would be wrangling over alchemy. They had traveled too far and too fast. Imagine if they had gotten loose in the universe.
Soon, the cloaked alien starship could slip away.
by submission | Nov 25, 2020 | Story |
Author: Tyler James Russell
We shook her and asked if she was okay but she wouldn’t budge. Even when Davey tugged on her jacket and said Mommy she held her position on the sidewalk like it was something that might be taken from her. She clutched her briefcase, a paper bag of groceries.
911 was already overloaded. Marissa pressed her face to the window while Davey held his belly. I hollered. The operator, thinking it was meant for him, waited for me to speak and I waited for him to speak and in the end, neither of us did.
Outside, Trish still hadn’t moved. I apologized to the kids, held them, the kind of patient that only comes after losing your temper. It was almost dark. We pulled back the curtains and worried, made faces, but she was impenetrable. What are you supposed to do? In the end I went out barefoot, plucked a few groceries from her hands, but even when I said her name, snapped in her face, it was like only her body was there.
For the rest of the night I kept the curtains drawn, and glued myself to speculations. Apparently, this was going on everywhere, all kinds of people. A lot of women, but not only. A stripped-down newscast showed strings of people along highways—Black, Hispanic, you name it, all frozen in place. Corners crowded with question marks. A transgender woman wore a shirt that said, “Until.”
“Experts say this is voluntary,” a newscaster said. It begged the question, expert in what? “That they all chose it, together, at a designated time.”
Another anchor, obviously crying, said, “Nobody knows. What is happening to these people, and will it happen to us too?” After the commercial, she was gone.
I didn’t do this. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t my fault.
In the morning she was still there, still frozen. For days they didn’t move, didn’t eat. Some fainted, others shrugged off paramedics urging them onto gurneys. Counter-actors—spurned spouses, I imagined, involuntarily now-single parents—screamed in their faces. The kids branched around her like little rivers on our way to the restaurant where the waitstaff wear animal costumes, but even there three employees just stood in the way.
“Ignore them,” a manager sighed.
What gave them the right to just stop in the middle of their lives? Don’t we all have problems?
Then, on the news that night, an otherwise normal-looking man was handcuffed and gentled into a police car. He’d been arrested prowling the streets of Des Moines with a rifle. As they zoomed in on his face he showed a palm and two fingers, mouthing, “Beat that.”
I turned my phone off. I sat for a long time in the dark.
There was one else on the entire street. By now the groceries had gone bad in her hands.
I imagined a sort of abstract trauma-cloud in the air and thought of what it would be like to take that into your body, to own it, voluntarily or not. I didn’t get it though, not really.
“Please,” I whispered to Trish, “I just want to listen.”
But I also wanted her to hit me, to snap awake and take a dented soup can to my temple. I wanted to be emptied at her feet, bloodied and begging, a reckoning sprouting into the air like breathable atomic dust.
But she didn’t, of course. She just stood there, frozen, waiting.
