by submission | Feb 27, 2022 | Story |
Author: Dave Ludford
Molly sat on the brow of the steep hill smiling expansively into the hazy distance as the light from the artificial sun gradually faded.
“I wish these days could last forever. The view from here is just breathtakingly beautiful,” she said to the inert figure lying beside her.
“Me too, Moll. Me too,” Jud replied. “We should just enjoy them while we can, I guess.”
“But it’s so unfair,” Molly continued, her brow creasing in consternation, her voice much louder. “How come they get to decide who lives and who dies? We didn’t even put up any form of resistance. We just totally capitulated and it was done and dusted within hours.”
“They get to choose because they won, ergo we lost. The humans have a saying, ‘To the victor, the spoils.’ Something like that. The virulent plague that attacked us was just too overwhelmingly powerful. Besides, we’re humanoid AI who aren’t configured for any form of conflict or violence. There was absolutely nothing we could do, you know that.”
“But there must be something…oh, what’s the use? We’re…”
“Exactly. We’re doomed anyway. These bugs think they’ve won a significant victory here and are now in a position to rule this world. But we’ve been abandoned, left to rot on a dying planet by the consortium of human billionaires who quickly got bored with the new toys they’d created and the seemingly idyllic playground they dumped us in. We’re dying, Moll, all of our crude life support systems are failing daily and we haven’t the wherewithal to repair them without assistance, and we both know that’s not going to happen.”
Molly began to chuckle softly. “Jud, what do you think the bugs’ reaction will be when they discover…you know…that this place isn’t at all what it seems. All that effort and the resources they’ve wasted on this glorified theme park. For them it’s been a pyrrhic victory.”
“May not be the first time it’s happened to them. I guess there’s a speculative element to these things. They’ll just write it off as a bad job, get the hell out and go someplace else where they may get lucky.”
“Perhaps…” She was silent for a short while, then added: “Why do you think our human masters got bored with us? Why go to the vast expense they did just to dump us and forget us?”
“I don’t know, Moll. Any number of reasons. Perhaps they got fed up with playing God and like the bug invaders will just move on to other things. All I know is that we’re slowly but surely dying, and soon it’ll all be over for us.”
“What an absolute waste.” A slight pause then: “Jud, what about us? You know…”
“We’ll look after each other until the time comes…there’s no script, we’ll just have to deal with the situation as it happens. Whichever of us goes first will do what’s necessary for the other.”
“It would be good if we went together.”
“Unlikely, but yes, I’d prefer it that way too.”
***
Several days pass before the first of the invader’s ships roars away from the planet as the light begins to swiftly fade once more and another long night yawns like a void ahead of him. Jud tenderly holds Molly’s lifeless body in his arms and watches in silence as several other ships begin their departure routines, suspecting he’s the only one of his kind left alive on that ill-fated world.
by submission | Feb 26, 2022 | Story |
Author: Burgess Speed
He wasn’t sure when it had happened. It could have been the night before while everyone was sleeping.
It could have been that morning when no one was looking.
Or maybe it was accomplished by imperceptible means right under the noses of everyone.
There was one thing, however, of which the boy was certain—his father had been replaced.
Oh, he looked the same all right, and sounded the same. But the boy knew it wasn’t him.
All day he waited for something terrible to happen. For some awful revelation of alien or demonic identity.
But nothing did.
The next day, his mother was replaced.
The day after, his entire family.
Following that, everyone he knew was replaced.
He tried not to let on that he noticed.
Then, one morning, he awoke to discover that everyone was exactly who they were supposed to be.
by submission | Feb 25, 2022 | Story |
Author: Lewis Richards
I remember my first week here, exploring the neighborhood, seeing the power walking soccer moms and their husbands in their little bubbles of suburban bliss, stopping by the park and watching their children play, doing the maths, and realizing just how lucky I had been.
I remember the first time I went to one of the grotty old dive bars towards the outskirts of town, seeing the way the men inside watched me dance to the music pumping out of the beat-up jukebox, weighing up their options, unconsciously determining which of them would make a move, completely unaware that in fact, I was determining which of them had the strongest genetic material for what I needed.
The one I picked – attractive, but not enough the stand out in a crowd, strong, but not enough to be anything other than the perfect average joe, the perfect disguise. I remember the look in his eyes, the sheer pleasure as I lead him out of the bar, back to my house. I remember his eyes on me as I lead him down, through the basement, deeper, never questioning why the walls went from old wood to cold, gleaming metal.
I remember his eyes when I removed my disguise – from pleasure to terror when he saw my skin was the color of the sky, but by then it was too late for him. I didn’t see his eyes once the genetic extractor was activated and he was reduced to a slurry of proteins and chromosomes which I used to fertilize the dormant eggs I’d produced on my trip here.
Now though, I see his eyes again. I see them in the cashier while I checkout at the grocery store, I see them on the TV in the newly elected state senator – youngest ever. I see them in the police deputies and the mayor’s assistant, spreading their influence and the dominant genetic material from their maternal homeworld.
I see them in my youngest daughter too as I walk her to a craft similar to the one I arrived in, its solar sails extending and carrying it across the ocean of space to a new world to start the cycle anew. The 5th launch in as many weeks.
I’d already sealed the fate of this planet the minute my first eggs hatched, but it wouldn’t hurt to speed up the process. So back to the bar I go.
by submission | Feb 24, 2022 | Story |
Author: J.D. Rice
“Everyone, I’ve come to a decision.”
My voice echoes into the warm air of my helmet, the moisture fogging my visor and obscuring the view of the stars. The fog lingers for only a few seconds before the air filtration system of my suit recaptures the moisture and begins reprocessing it for delivery into my feeding tube. Beyond the suit, the cold, blackness of space presses in on me from all sides, though I feel none of it. The darkness cannot get in. Not yet, anyway.
“I’m sorry, but I have to say goodbye.”
My visor clouds again briefly, before I hear the faint hiss of sunction as the suit does its work. I wonder how long I’ve been staring at these stars.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” my wife asks. Her voice sounds ethereal and distant, not at all like the static one usually hears over the radio. “You’ve worked so hard to get where you are.”
“Dad,” the voice of my fully-grown son says. “Do what you need to do. We’ll be fine.”
I cannot picture his face. When I imagine him, all I see is the little boy who waved goodbye when I strapped myself into this suit for the first time. As the cabin doors closed, he even blew me a kiss.
“Daddy, don’t go,” I hear my little boy say.
Other voices, friends and family from back home, start to chatter their opinions on my plan. Some advise caution and patience. Others applaud my bravery. I don’t know how long I listen to them. I don’t know how many arguments I have or how many words of encouragement I offer, before the silence finally comes again.
The fog clears, and I see the vastness of space before me again.
How many years has it been? Five? Ten?
This suit is supposed to keep me alive indefinitely, recycling resources, synthesizing needed nutrients, running on a powercell that will last centuries. Tiny, electric pinpricks stimulate my muscles and keep them healthy and strong. A person could live seven lifetimes in this suit, without a physical want in the world. Stay alive and wait for rescue, that was the name of the game. But my rescue was never coming.
Not that I should have known it. The final mechanism of the suit, the one that makes it humane, was the powerful sedative that’s supposed to kick in after the first few hours of waiting. That way, no matter how long it took for help to arrive, you’d sleep the time away in blissful ignorance.
But my suit has failed in that last task miserably.
“How will you do it?” my wife asks, the pain evident in her voice.
That was, afterall, the chiefest question of them all. How does a person kill themselves when they are trapped in a suit designed to keep them alive indefinitely?
“I’ll scratch,” I answer, placing my hand on an all-too-familiar spot on my leg. “It may take me years, but if I focus on one spot, I’ll eventually be able to wear this material down and end it all. Nothing lasts forever.”
“Daddy, please…” I hear my boy say. “Don’t go…”
“It’s okay,” his adult self says. “He should have been asleep. He should have been rescued. If neither of those things happened, no one can blame him for ending his solitude.”
“Daddy… please…”
“Just go.”
My fingers move of their own volition, scratching, scratching, scratching in the same place they always do. I have had these conversations before, more times than I can count. Sometimes I remember them, sometimes I don’t.
Sometimes I even decide to live.
Not much longer now. Another year, maybe two, assuming my resolve holds?
“Tell me a story,” I say, trying to picture my son’s face. Is he married now? Does he have children of his own? “Tell me what your life is like. I’ll just drift here and listen.”
Scratch, scratch, scratch, go my fingers.
“We have all the time in the world.”
by submission | Feb 23, 2022 | Story |
Author: Katlina Sommerberg
Scarf concealing her throbbing face, Terry stumbled down the bus’s steps. Her employer, a real estate corporation masquerading as a burger chain, was twenty feet down the shit-stained sidewalk.
A child tugged on his leash; the tethered man stared at cartoon smiles advertising Terry’s employer’s products. The company logo—a pair of nested obtuse triangles, twinkling in the eyes of the giant face on the bus—reflected in the child’s eyes.
Terry swerved to avoid them, but one shoe tangling in the other’s laces, and her knee rammed the child. While her aching face formed a Fortune 500 smile, she stuttered an apology.
The child began crying.
The parent’s head swiveled to her, his eyes lolling her work shirt’s nested triangles. He grunted.
“Sorry, I—”
His throat gargled.
Terry stepped to the right. “Sorry, sir—”
One fly buzzed out of his drooling mouth.
Nope. Terry sprinted to her workplace.
The adult lurched after her, dragging the crying toddler along, until they stared, hypnotized, at the burger posters on the window.
Behind Terry, the doors clicked shut. Fingernails tapped against the glass.
Matt, the last of the day shift, blinked open his bloodshot eyes and waved her to the register. “Doctor?” he asked. He pointed a crooked finger to Terry’s maggoty cheek.
“No health insurance,” Terry grunted.
Terry and Matt jolted when a meaty palm thwacked the glass, shaking the door; a burger poster collapsed.
“I’ll fire up the grill.” Terry tightened her pony tail. “Short staffed or not, a horde’s a horde.”
by Hari Navarro | Feb 22, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I have an idea said the Bee, although he indeed had no method of audible speech. Just a prickle that happened to happen in her mind and spin and tickle across the surface of the sticky glossa in its face.
I believe that I will engage in a campaign of truly big-ass stinging. Not out of self-defence or predisposed attack or random malice. I think that I will just sting because…
Yes?
Because I am scared. And into the gape hole of my fear I wish to place a thick and ever swelling plug. Not unlike a tampon or an unwrapped newspaper left in the rain or a new mothers belly.
I have a question? You are but a Bee. Your life is so fleeting and yet you whittle your time talking to who… who is it that you think you talk to?
Myself most probably. I do not care in the least bit, or perhaps I do most entirely. But, and there is always a but, now I ponder should I insert the jagged edge of my last ever rapier hope into the flesh of just any stranger? Or should I search out the perfect target. Perhaps it matters not who we wantonly bash.
You are a Bee. I do not know why we are even having this conversation. Is it true you guys can smell fear and how the fuck do you know where you even as you clamber and build in the hive? I lose myself on the way to the fridge.
I sting I die. But I want to live. I want to see the colours as I float and they flex and wane upon the land. I want to smell life not fear… But, I also want to hurt something. If its not me then it will be the filthy phallus missiles atop multi-wheeled transports rolling down flag-lined avenues on parade that prick and bubble your skin.
You are but a Bee. Its true today icy sabres be rattling, bullets be licked and slid into their greasy breach and upon chairs in sterilized gymnasiums needles do swim through eager fat… yet through it all I fear nothing. I ain’t gonna die. I just am not.
If I could wish for only one thing then I’d wish I could live forever… just like you, said the Bee.
