by submission | Oct 30, 2021 | Story |
Author: Adamson Wood
“Whoever got rid of sleep was an idiot,” screamed Jack, because saying the words out loud gave them validity. He tried to think of the guy’s name. Bill Smith or Johnson. The kind of name you’d easily forget because two billion of them were born every second. As if their galaxy wasn’t already overpopulated. Still sucking on Mother Earth’s tits like an old man with enough amnesia to think he’s a toddler.
He switched his eye contacts to dark mode, disappearing in the black void of emptiness that mirrored the milky way’s vastness, a hundred thousand light-years of nothingness, barren besides human specks splattered on worlds without end that still managed to screw one another over as if a billion miles wasn’t enough separation to sign the divorce papers already. Bill Anderson was it?
Sure he could down a seebe, hallucinate something wilder than any rem sleep cycle could ever dream up. Or if he had money, spend a century or two in a cryo chamber. But everything Jack had read about sleep said it was about more than just passing the time, or even the dreams, more than the revitalization that they now got from invigora injections. Sleep was about forgetting. Starting over. Ending a day and having a fresh start tomorrow. Something now impossible thanks to galactic hero Bill Whatshisname, who was now in a cryo-chamber while the rest of the genetically altered humans were wide awake for the past couple centuries, trying to chemically replicate what was lost like neutered dogs jacking off.
Was it Jack—no, that was his name. He considered asking his eye pod to look up the name, but there was something satisfying about figuring it out himself; something about knowing that he was more than just the technology that fenced his life and occupied his body. He grabbed a pen and tablet, ‘cause he was old-fashioned like that, and started scribbling down names to trigger his memory. Bill Jones. Miller. Williams. Bill Nye the science guy. Every name seemed off, like the high after eight hours in virtual reality, living as some prince instead of the pauper he was. His head vibrated with the dull throb of cooked neurons.
“Why don’t you sleep it off,” his great grandfather used to tell him, too old to receive the genetic “upgrade” himself because at one hundred eighty years of age, what could you possibly offer society? He spent his final three months in and out of sleep, a smile on his face bigger than the statue of Bill Belikeme, titled The Billevable, that Jack now doused in corrosive acid since what else was he supposed to do at 4 am.
“Bill Brown! That’s the one,” said Jack, reading the fine print of the statue right before the letters cankered. He envisioned the real Bill, empty sack still fighting off the rot of death. Bill Brown, body now white as ever as his pale skin turned paler in his cryo-chamber back on Earth—Earth’s number one tourist destination, which was probably why they would never wake him up, not the incurable disease used as a pretext. Someday, thought Jack as police bots surrounded him, after finishing his ten-year sentence of 24/7s for destroying this statue, Jack would visit Bill’s final resting place, wake him up like in Sleeping Beauty. After all, for the man who got rid of sleep, he’d been sleeping an awful lot.
by submission | Oct 29, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
Ean Braun was working late at his college office when a feeling of malaise came over him. His first thought was that he caught the cornea virus, which had caused a voluntary citywide stay-at-home order. He opened the office door, shuffled lamely down a flight of stairs, and went outside to get some night air. His cloudy eyes and scabby temples were aching. He removed his thick bifocal glasses and massaged his wrinkled face. The feeble moon glowed meekly on his pallid skin and patchy dome. He put on his glasses again and, at a distance, noticed his young colleague, Adam, walking briskly on the empty campus grounds.
The picture of the well-dressed, tan, healthy man provoked his anger, and spiteful thoughts boiled in his brain. What had particularly annoyed him was the fellow’s habit of taking vitamins instead of eating breakfast or lunch. Braun recalled a disagreement they had at the faculty lounge, he insisting that food was better, whereas the young man was adamant that vitamins were essential nutrients that maintained physical and mental balance. The retort stirred a rage in Braun, who was not used to being contradicted, so he spoke his unfiltered mind, and the young man stopped talking to him. Naturally, Braun rationalized, the vitaminer was an insane maniac, and the old man took the silences as an unforgivable insult.
The recollection had distracted Braun for a few minutes, but the general unwellness he was experiencing was becoming worse. He felt a painful compression in his wrists, ribs, and rotator cuffs, and there was an acrid taste of bile acids in his mouth. His shabby clothes felt baggy. He hobbled under a lamppost near the closed Human Resources Building and paused to look at his reflection in the large windowpanes. In confusion, he saw he was a third of his height and growing smaller, transforming into something with six clawed legs, four eyes, two antennae, and rows of nostrils on the sides of his stomach. Panicked, he darted out of his pile of clothes and ran across the campus. He found a men’s restroom without a door and decided to hide there until he could figure out what caused his mutation.
The room was dark, and the floor smelled of wet mold and waste particles. He traced the sides of the wall with his feelers, struggling to make his way in the murk. As his confidence was beginning to rise, there was a sudden, immense blast of light that staggered and blinded him. And then he heard the boom of footfalls like bombs on the floor tiles—someone had entered the restroom. Terrified, he scurried helplessly into the corner of the wall, raised his thin flat head, and strained to perceive the moving form. The massive figure slowly came into focus in his compound eyes, and Braun realized who it was—“Adam, it’s me! I transformed into an insect! Adam, help me!” he shouted.
The young man stood before a urinal, oblivious to the minuscule appeals from below. He looked up and down and, without a thought, turned his gaze to the corner where Braun was crying out: “Chikt-chikt chikt-chikt chikt-chikt,” the insect emitted. An instinctual chill surged through the man, followed by a powerful hateful impulse to destroy the disease carrier. He lunged toward the paper towel dispenser at his left, grabbed a handful of coarse brown sheets, and made for the cockroach.
“Help! Help!” Braun screamed, running around the restroom. He ran under the door of a stall and into the shadows behind a toilet bowl. But the young man quickly found him, chased him out, and, after several misses, smashed the pest with the paper towels. He held his breath as parts of the insect twitched in broken, seeping fragments. The man threw the corpse into the bowl, pressed the flush handle with the tip of his left dress shoe, washed his hands in the sink, and turned off the light, with an exhalation of relief. Still aware, Braun descended into the mazy whirling grave. His lugubrious eyes wept melancholy tears.
by submission | Oct 28, 2021 | Story |
Author: Phil Temples
When researchers at the University of Queensland announced the creation of a quantum microscope that could reveal biological structures otherwise impossible to see, they predicted it would answer fundamental questions and spark revolutionary breakthroughs in healthcare, engineering, transportation and communications. Little did they know, however, that the new device based on quantum entanglement would result in even more fundamental questions asked about the nature of the universe.
“Denkins, come here and look at this. I thought you said this equipment was properly calibrated!”
Harold Denkins, Professor William Chidley Fleming’s assistant, scurried in from an adjacent laboratory. Denkins glanced anxiously at his boss. Fleming eyed him with a stern look.
Fleming had chosen a random small molecule chain, dichlorine heptoxide—or Cl2O7—to examine that day.
Denkins peered through the binocular viewing piece for almost twenty seconds.
“Doctor, I—I’m sorry. I adjusted it myself according to manual. The equipment seemed to be working fine this morning. But this looks like…”
“Like what, Mister Denkins?”
“Doctor, if I answered your question honestly, I’m afraid that your opinion of me would drop precipitously.”
As Fleming looked at his assistant, a big grin broke out on his face then he shook his head.
“On the contrary, Denkins. You will probably think that it is I who have taken leave of my senses. But let me assure you—just as the invention of the telescope allowed Galileo to observe the rings of Jupiter for the first time, we are now bearing witness to another quantum leap in mankind’s knowledge of the universe. You and I have just discovered that the universe infinitely repeats itself! I hypothesize that this common molecule we looking at here, dichlorine heptoxide, interrogated under entanglement—is in fact, Messier 51a. The Whirlpool Galaxy. Now, I wonder in which molecule we’ll find our Milky Way lurking?”
by submission | Oct 27, 2021 | Story |
Author: Robert Beech
There was a monster loose in the city. I, like everyone else in the city who could spare a moment to look at the news screens, had been tracking events as they unfolded all day. There were at least two hundred dead, including a score of peace keepers, and several buildings demolished.
I knew that monster. I had raised him from an egg, then trained him in the circus to spar with the gladiators. He’d learned quickly. Too quickly for his own good. After his last win in the arena, the legions had commandeered him for the special forces and that had been the last I had seen of him. He’d been smaller then, only a couple of tons.
And now they wanted me to bring him in. Me, a retired animal trainer, when the entire legion couldn’t manage to kill him. I wondered what had happened to his handlers from the legions. Dead, I supposed, or they wouldn’t be calling me in.
I hung, suspended from the helipack strapped on my back, about two hundred feet up, and watched as the special-ops boys flew circles around him, darting in to fire missiles that exploded harmlessly on his shield plates, then zipping away before he could swat them from the air. Most of them made it.
“Captain,” I said over my com-unit. “Can you call your boys off? If I’m going to get close to him, he’s got to see that it’s just me and not somebody trying to shoot him.”
“But shooting him is the whole point of bringing you in.”
“I know, but I’ve got to get close enough to do it.”
“OK, I’ll call them off.”
I couldn’t hear the orders, but the special-ops flyers pulled back a couple of thousand feet. I dropped down to where the monster stood crouched on his hind limbs, ready to spring, and hovered about fifty feet away.
“Billy?” I called over the loudspeaker. “It’s Ren from the circus. You remember me, Billy, Ren from the circus. We’re going to go home now, Billy. Time to go home.”
He watched me, uncertainly, glazed eyes peering out from under his armored brows. Very slowly, I turned my back on him and started flying back down the street. Amazingly, he followed me. I tried not to look at the bodies littering the street or the special-ops flyers I could hear faintly hovering in the background.
We wound our way back to the grounds of the circus where I had worked with him years before. I flew carefully over the entrance to the arena, but Billy just smashed through the gates. I didn’t scold him. He was coming home.
In the center of the arena was a great tree stump, the remains of the sacred tree that had stood here before humans came and built the city. I flew over to it and hovered.
“Stump, Billy, stump,” I called, recalling the first command he had learned.
Like the tiny winged creature he had been, he followed me and stood on the stump, which was now buried beneath his enormous bulk.
“Show claws, Billy, show claws,” I called.
He spread his wings and wiggled the comparatively tiny claws at the fold of his wings.
He peered at me confusedly from under the armored brows of his lizard-like skull.
“Billy, good boy?” he asked, his tiny bird-like voice sounding incongruous in such a giant frame.
“Yes, Billy good boy,” I agreed, tears running down my face.
He opened his beak to accept the expected treat and I raised the missile launcher and pulled the trigger.
by submission | Oct 26, 2021 | Story |
Author: Brian Etta
Professor Thomlin was equivocating as to whether or not he’d let his TA, Lee, teach his last class before finals until Lee decided to return to Shenzhen to pursue tenure in his home country. Historically it was a complete and utter slaughter of a perfect beach day. Students who’d been on top of the material throughout the semester usually aced his test as that was by design. He had his favorites and played to their strengths! The kids, dumbasses, as he lovingly called them, who thought they were Neo and could download 5 months of Plato, Descartes, Spinoza and Sartre….Sartre, for God’s sake…were indeed living in some kind of Matrix (the original of course!) Those little pecker heads would definitely get an “A” for jamming up his hang time. The waves would just have to wait!
Breathing in acceptance and blowing out resentment he thought to the universe and himself, “The dude abides!” He leisurely entered the auditorium and took notice of the shrinkage, i.e. the 2nd week crowd, usually up from week one and built on the fake news that he was an easy “A” he wasn’t and that he took the high holy days off as a practicing Jew…half true. He wasn’t practicing but he did like days off. By week 2 when reality set in, driven home with a liberal smattering “C”s, “D”s & a few “F”s for good measure. The roster had slimmed down and how! It was like Roman decimation, one out of 10 would be gone every few weeks. His class was a philosophical isotope with a very, very short half life. Scanning the bleachers nothing was out of the ordinary, the kid with the post modern coif was gone…what a shock…as well as the hipster collective who rocked 80’s tees but ironically, of course! One thing caught his eye…a new face. Typically that meant a proxy for a real student and that would not stand. He’d shred this little pecker head and turn him over to the Provost. Let the school do its job, he had way, way better things to do and places to go. Have 6 pack, will travel!
“Oy” he called out to the ringer, the ringer in turn “Oy’d” him back. “Cheeky bugger” he thought channeling a Britcom only he could see. “Haven’t seen you before, what can we do for you Mister…?” He did that trailing rise of intonation on Mister to indicate he was asking for a name. “RT” the ringer easily responded, as if answering question 2 on an oral exam. “No Mister, RT is good” he continued. Thomlin said, “Well RT, in case you’re lost, Liberal Arts is an entirely different wing, sorry you wasted your time.” “Professor Thomlin?” RT inquired as if he didn’t know. “I’m here for you. See, I’m planning to take your class in Fall and wanted to see what it would be like”. Thomlin thought…”Oh, OK, no worries. Got an audit slip from the Registrar?”, “Got you now!” he thought with finality and glee. No way he had it, how? That department was usually closed, they were seemingly always closed. To his chagrin, RT produced it, why? “OK then, why would you want to take the last class, I mean, you know it’s the last class…right? Said the professor incredulously. As if seizing an opening, storming a breach, he replied, “That’s exactly why”…”Creepy” Thomlin thought, but interesting could be fun. He engaged, “About what?…as in you clearly have something in mind and this is your time, lo it pains me to ask, about what would you like me to speak?” RT twisted in the uncomfortable decades old plastic seat and looked out, as if formulating the answer for the first time. He took a beat and said, “Theseus, or to be precise his ship, the Ship of Theseus”. Thomlin looked down at his hands and back at the loose assembly of students. “Yes, yes I know what you meant”, replying indignantly. The Ship of Theseus was a thought experiment wherein if succeeding parts of the ship were removed and replaced but with identical parts, could the resulting entity be considered the same ship with which Theseus entered port? Arguments could be made in the negative as also to the affirmative, hence making for lively debate. Franky he couldn’t care less.
Over the next and remaining 45 minutes between helping the other pecker heads, he found he was enjoying the back and forth with the youth, RT was smart, like how he was, odd, he reminded him eerily of his younger self. RT asked him, “What if you took discarded human limbs, let’s say cells, hell…let’s go with atoms. What if I collected, at whichever scale, all the components used by your body as it recycled and renewed itself then put them back exactly as they were, would that entity be you? If yes, why? No? Why not?” Thomlin felty the planet spin just a little slower as he took a seat, he felt disoriented. He was too old for late night dorm room philosophising. After class, he hoped RT would leave…RT wouldn’t leave and in fact took him further down the rabbit hole. RT pressed him and finally he admitted that while a good thought experiment he’d have to say no, maybe yes…and finally no. No the reconstituted ship and the reconstituted Thomlin were essentially fugazi…ersatz versions.
RT smiled, “Thought you’d feel that way” He took off his jacket to show a sleeve tattoo. It matched the professors well hidden ink. Richard Thomlin, my name is not RT my name is Richard Thomlin…a pleasure for me to meet me…I mean you.”
by Julian Miles | Oct 25, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I crouch by the fire, gazing across at the mass of blue curls that bob and sway as she works.
“You can still escape. Shake off the ghosts of the past. Fly higher.”
She smiles sadly at me.
“Did it ever occur to you that I don’t want to fly?”
“You don’t have to limit yourself anymore.”
Reassembling her pistol, she shakes her head.
“You’ve supported me from slave to free trader. Always had my back. Never doubted me, even when I couldn’t believe in myself. But we’ve come far enough like that. I’ve come far enough.”
She loads the pistol, then holsters it.
“There’s a point where your determination to free me so I can be everything I could be, from your never-repressed view, becomes the very thing I cannot escape.”
How dare she! I launch myself to my feet.
Her other hand comes up, slivergun gleaming in the lights of the fire.
“Down, Brutus.”
At this range, the charged load won’t have time to fully open up. But a quarter-metre hole blown through your chest has the same net effect as a half-metre one. I settle.
“I knew this would be difficult, so just hold still and listen. I’m already far more than I ever thought I could be, back when I was licking boots and mopping floors on Cragryn. Your certainty was my only strength. Without it, this journey would never have started. That certainty changed to became my support as my own strength grew. We all have bad days. Your quiet assurance prevented them from defeating me. You’ve been the wall at my back as I worked out how to be an individual beholden to no-one. You became my companion, but you never stopped pushing me. I thought your vision of me being a star fleet owner was a dream. Then I saw it was possible. Finally, I realised I didn’t want it.”
She raises a calming hand. It’s a politeness I appreciate. The slivergun hasn’t wavered.
“It’s not that I can’t go that far. It’s not that my past is playing on my insecurities. It’s just that I know what I want.”
The smile that comes is the one that lifts my hearts.
“You gave me this: the freedom to choose.”
Firelight reflects in her amber eyes as she leans towards me.
“So let me choose, and accept the choice I’ve made. You’ve been my will for so long. Now, at last, I can decide for myself. Live your life. I’ll live mine.”
I sit and weave the light between my claws – not that she can see that. All humans see is a Draconian ‘wiggling its fingers’.
She’s right. In my determination, I’ve come close to being a source of oppression.
I release the light.
“Meriel, you have the right of it. Be free of my dreams and live your own.”
There’s a little laugh and the slivergun is lowered.
“I still need a Master at Arms, Brutus.” She grins. “There’s no way I can bring the Tangaris down if they get rowdy.”
“I recommend broad-beaming them with stunner on its lowest setting. It takes their edge off.”
She stares at me in shock.
“All this time I thought it was your mighty presence.”
“My teacher always told me that influencing brute force requires more than greater force.”
Meriel bursts out laughing.
“And until you work out what he meant, you’ll use the stunner.”
I grin at her.
“A bitter truth.”
“Better put this campfire out before the cargo bay fire alarms trigger.”
“True. Let’s get back to having fun and making a living.”
