by submission | Sep 14, 2021 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
Franco had fainted. It was 105 degrees in the city, and despite all the warnings on radio and television, he had insisted that he would go birdwatching.
Franco had heard that a male bobolink had been sighted in one of Detroit’s many tallgrass prairies. Local birders were posting breathless reports that a bobolink was in Detroit for the first time in decades.
@nighthawk2001 wrote: “It’s like I keep saying. Detroit is the future of birding. Detroit is the future of everything. If you believe in re-wilding, move to Detroit! #Detroitisbirds #Detroitwillsavestheworld
@warblerprothonos added: “We must talk to the city about turning our city prairies into parks. #parksavespecies #endangeredetroit
When Franco came to, the bird he’d come to see was sitting on his chest. It kept flapping its black and white wings furiously, sending tiny breezes Franco felt on his chin. The bird’s flapping wings broke Detroit’s oven-like stillness.
The heat fascinated Franco. A few years before, he’d travelled to Death Valley in summer and parked his car in Badwater Basin. Locals told him he was trying to kill himself, but Franco said, you don’t go to Death Valley trying to avoid the possibility of death. It had been 126 degrees the day he’d gone down into the valley. That morning, Franco told the prostitute he’d hired to stay with him all night, “I’m going to make sure my body remembers this day until I die.” She told him, “Why don’t you just stick your head in an oven? It’d be about the same.”
The bobolink fanned its wings and hopped up to the top of Franco’s chest. It turned one eye to him and then the other but said nothing. Franco could hardly believe what was happening. When his father died, he’d been sitting in a lawn chair in the backyard of his childhood home. Franco was almost asleep when a sparrow landed on his arm to wake him. The bird didn’t move even when he opened his eyes and his arm quivered despite his best attempts at remaining perfectly still. The sparrow -a male- stared at him for many moments before flying off.
The bobolink ambled up to Franco’s chin and stood looking down at him. The bird could have pecked his eyes, but Franco felt no danger. Why was the bird interested in him? Had it decided to save his life?
He watched the bird preen itself. It dropped a wing feather on the point of his chin, which Franco could feel balancing there like a seesaw. Then the bobolink bent forward and tapped Franco’s bottom lip with its beak before flying off.
In his pocket, Franco kept a flask of whiskey. It was a local product, Canadian Club, manufactured across the river in Windsor. He’d taken a tour of the Walkerville plant once, watching the distillers do their work. The guide told him all about the barley they brought in on boxcars, most of it coming from far away. “Why don’t you use local barley” Franco wanted to know. “It’s not the proper quality,” the guide said.
The whiskey felt good going down, but Franco knew he’d better get back to his car and drink some water. He had no idea how long he’d been out. The bobolink had not told him, but Franco figured that the bird had watched him faint and knew, in its birdlike way, just how long he’d been unconscious. If only he spoke the language of bobolinks.
Just that morning Franco had listened repeatedly to a recording made by ornithologists at Cornell University. He planned to use it to help him track down the bird he was searching for. Was there some Ph.D. who knew how to talk to these birds? Of course, there was. They just needed to spend the necessary time watching and listening, making their recordings, then taking them back to their big computers where they could break the chatter and songs down to the old binary of 1s and 0s. Then they needed some more time to set up an immersion program where all they heard was bobolink speech for weeks at a time.
Franco suddenly realized how badly humans needed birds. Human beings needed to make sure that birds were around to provide details about the many changes happening in the city at any given moment. Think about how many things birds saw that humans couldn’t because they lacked wings or couldn’t fit through the many keyhole spaces that make up any urban landscape. How many crimes might a bird help the police solve because of what they’d heard or the microscopic bits of evidence they found?
Then again, there were dozens of different bird species, so why did bobolinks matter more than, say, starlings or sparrows? Was it because they were prettier? Or was it because their absence made the human heart grow fonder?
At his car, Franco drank a thermos of water. Then he tried to start his engine, but the motor failed to turn over. He opened the hood and discovered that the starter wire, the power lead, was frayed. It was covered in tiny teeth marks.
by Julian Miles | Sep 13, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m running down a corridor lined with tall computers. There’s a government goon hot on my tail. What scares me most is his non-stop shouting about “can’t fire on the slippery bastard because hitting a system will ruin my shot at promotion”.
The phone chirps. It’s a strange sound, like no ringtone I’ve ever heard. Certainly nothing I chose. I tap my earpiece and wait for the hissing to subside. Her voice is calm.
“How are you doing?”
“Coming to the end of a hall lined with computers. I’m being chased.”
“Go through the door, then smash the security panel.”
“Speaking of that security panel…”
“02411.”
I punch the code. The door opens. A bullet from behind spins me through it. Screaming in pain, I bounce off the wall opposite and stagger back to slam my elbow into the panel on this side. The door slides shut, cutting off the view of the goon sprinting my way from the crouch he took to shoot me. I hear him hit the door. Hear him shoot the door.
“Can you continue?”
“Yes. He only shot me in the bulletproof vest.”
Listen to me, all fired up on near-hysteria and CCE.
“Sounds like that Chemical Combat Enhancement is working.”
“So let’s get going before it runs out.”
She told me where to find it, how to use it, even warned me about taking too much.
“Don’t worry. It’s only a short way now.”
I run down the corridor, then go through a blast door and hurry down a long staircase.
“There’s a guard at the bottom. They’ll be wary. Have the amber card in your hand ready to show them.”
“Halt! Identify yourself.”
The guard is partway up the stairs.
I raise a hand.
“I’m getting ID from my back pocket.”
It seems to take ages to get the card out. The guard visibly relaxes, then salutes and steps to one side so I can pass. I nod as I rush past. Very soon now, he’s going to be told the truth, and his gun is a lot bigger than the one the goon in the corridor has.
“The amber card goes in the slot on the door.”
It opens to reveal another corridor, then closes behind me. I pass several doors on my way to the one at the end, a faded green door that leads into a place that looks like a dirty workshop. Over in a corner is a cage containing a woman in a stained lab coat.
“Say nothing. I’m here to get you out.”
She looks puzzled, and relieved. I use a club hammer to smash the padlock off the door.
Time to get more guidance.
“What now?”
“Lever up the manhole cover in the centre of the room, then the one under the big tool trolley. Help her into that one, close it, then put the trolley back. You take the other one. Leave the lid off.”
“I’m a decoy?”
“Yes. You’ll be safe. They’ll fixate on finding her.”
The voice hasn’t let me down for a year. Helped me make a new identity, and enough to live comfortably forever.
After exiting the maze of sewers, I yield to curiosity.
“Before I throw this phone into the incinerator across the road as instructed, please satisfy my curiosity.”
“She’ll be my mother. She told me about the mystery man who helped her escape certain death. Then one of the prototypes she built connected me to a phone destroyed years before I was born.”
Huh?
“After you told me when you were, I realised what I had to do.”
by submission | Sep 12, 2021 | Story |
Author: Daniel Mainwaring
“Fuck! He’s not breathing,” whimpered Kai. His friend was delirious when they dragged him from the crashed vehicle but he had slipped into unconsciousness as they laid him out on the desert floor.
“Stop freaking out, Kai,” Eli retorted. “He’s breathing, he just fainted. My Dad is going to fucking kill me. He hasn’t let anyone drive this yet and now I’ve wrecked it.”
“I am telling you he is not going to make it,” insisted Kai. His comment was greeted with a finger to the mouth as the operator finally answered Eli’s call.
“Emergency rescue, please state your need,” said the robotic voice on the end of the phone.
“We’ve had an accident. My friend needs emergency attention. I don’t know where we are. We are lost.” Eli and his friends had never ventured far from home. This area was completely alien to them.
“Don’t worry,” replied the operator, “we have your location. Emergency rescue is on the way. Due to the remoteness of your location, the ETA is 60 minutes.”
“Shit,” shrieked Eli. “It’s going to take them an hour to get here, Kai.”
“He’s breathing again,” replied his friend, “but we need to find help.”
The darkness was suddenly disturbed by the introduction of two bright lights beaming in the distance.
“Look,” said Kai, “someone is coming. They can help us.”
The lights were heading rapidly in their direction, sending plumes of dust into the air as a noisy engine headed in their direction. Unnerved, Eli grabbed Kai by the neck and dragged him behind a sand dune as a small truck pulled up alongside their unconscious friend.
“We don’t know anything about the folks around here,” whispered Eli, “they could be dangerous.” Kai nodded in agreement as a mysterious figure dressed in khaki and white emerged from the truck. The hairy creature was like nothing they’d ever seen before.
“What the fuck?” squealed Kai, “it’s an alien.”
“Grow up,” retorted Eli, “It’s just some joker in fancy dress.”
“No,” insisted Kai, “look at its face. It’s mutated.”
Eli peered at the mysterious figure who was now crouched over their helpless friend. Its monstrous nose hung over its gaping mouth. Hair protruded from its eyes, and its ears were like small moons circling a sun.
“Fuck,” whispered Eli, “it’s an alien, it’s a fucking alien. It’s probably psychic or something. It’s going to drag us off to a lab and experiment on us.”
The ground seemed to move as a series of metallic vehicles suddenly emerged from the darkness. Bizarre looking figures dressed in green, emerged from angular machines and seized remnants of the duo’s wrecked vehicle. A figure, with a green bowl on his head spoke into a small black device.
“This is Major Jesse Marcel,” said the creature, “we have a bogey down and one body. Our location is just outside of Roswell, New Mexico.”
Looking on in horror, Kai grasped his friend’s slimy green hand.
“I don’t understand their language,” he mumbled meekly, “but I think they’re hostile.”
by submission | Sep 11, 2021 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
There was a fur farm, the Edward Fur Farm, in Livingston County, about fifty minutes northwest of Detroit. When a group of city-resident foxes, whom Detroiters called “sentients,” got wind of the farm they planned to pay it a visit.
The foxes did not like being called “sentients” because that epithet only applied to a narrow band of their intelligence: the ability to understand American English. In other words, because the foxes responded with sensitivity and understanding to the human culture of Detroit, humans thought them sentient. But, of course, they understood so much more of the world.
At least since the time of European contact with the indigenous civilizations of Turtle Island, foxes were depicted by the settler culture as mechanical and non-adaptive. They were dumb animals, possessing a limited number of instinctive responses to danger. They were hunted, trapped, shot, and later farmed for their pelts. They were exploited mercilessly by those who roamed the forests and prairies of North America. The only thing foxes seemed to know how to do, according to their tormenters, was the old “fight” or “flight.” A fox would flee from trap, arrow, or rifle, or she might defy her pursuer and then die by her defiance.
But evolution is a curious thing. And what human beings considered to be a permanent condition, that is, their rule over foxes was only a historical phase.
It took the foxes of southeastern Michigan centuries to grok the words, phrases, and idioms of human speech. But they detected human contempt for their presence very quickly; this contempt fueled their interest in their new neighbors, who were now their prime enemies. The foxes learned the painful lesson that there would be no coexistence with settlers unless they could become as ferociously cunning as even the dumbest of these. Any fool could fire a weapon, but no human being could crack the mind, the paradigm of the fox. Meanwhile, the sentient foxes learned English. They trained themselves to use tools; they stole guns and knives; they prepared themselves to use them. They became urban guerillas, not unlike the Tupamaros of faraway Uruguay or The Shining Path of Peru. But the story of their terroristic exploits is for another day.
When the sentient foxes learned of the Edward Fur Farm, they determined that this would be their first mission of liberation. They studied Livingston, learning its character. It was a place of would-be hunters, of folks who liked guns, and who knew how to use traps. It was a spot where a fur farmer didn’t have to worry that the barbarity of his practices would offend his closest neighbors. Livingston was also the anti-Detroit, a community that defined itself in opposition to everything the nearby metropolis stood for or had ever represented. (And now that included sentient foxes.) County residents liked how they had plenty of trees, fences, and distances to keep neighbors blithely unaware of what happened next door. In such secrecy, the sentient foxes figured an animal liberation mission would succeed.
At the height of summer, when tree and shrub foliage was densest, the foxes set out on foot and reached the perimeter of the Edward Fur Farm quickly, making a fifty-mile journey in about twenty-four hours.
The farm sat just outside the hamlet of Parshallville, a place where any fox was considered fair game. No one in the region had any idea that there was such a thing as a fox that could, for instance, use a pair of wire cutters to slice through a barbed-wire fence. That is precisely what the sentient foxes did.
The fence around the farm stood twelve feet high, with barbed wire strung along its top between each line post. Even though the foxes could have cut a hole at the base of the fence, they made a point of showing their contempt for the farm by scaling it and vandalizing the barbed wire portion, tearing off as many wires as they could without sacrificing what little time they had for their mission on a short summer night.
Inside the farm were 30 yards of cages stacked one atop the next, covered by a metal awning. Inside each cage were minks and gray foxes, sable and even tanuki brought over from Japan. The Edward family packed every enclosure with so many animals that none could turn around.
The sentients cut the bolt on each cage. They spoke in barks to the foxes they freed, indicating their reason for their mission, and mentioned the distance they had travelled to the farm. They promised their liberated cousins a haven back in Detroit. The sentients wished to make a similar offer to the tanuki, the minks, and the sable but could only gesture with their bodies. The best they could do was to remain on all fours and strike a non-threatening pose. Since they intended no aggression, the other liberated animals followed them out of the farm.
The following morning in the nearby town of Brighton, a posse of men gathered at the corner of Main and 1st Street. The men were armed and angry. Word got out fast that someone had attacked the fur farm, depriving the Edward Family of their livelihood. The men debated whether to see the sheriff or to go on the hunt themselves.
In a coffee shop, older folks said it was PETA people who had snuck into town overnight. Anyone who claimed that animals were entitled to the same rights as humans, they said, was not just crazy, they were socialists. These liberationists were Cultural Marxists living on the coasts, people who’d never done a day’s hard work in their lives. The Deputy Mayor, who had stopped in for a cup of Joe and a cruller, told those assembled how his next-door neighbor’s daughter’s best friend had a cousin in that PETA organization.
It was an interesting day in Livingston County. For once, no one took the time to blame Detroit for something bad that had happened. Back in the city, the sentient foxes set about settling in their new neighbors and planning their next maneuvers.
by submission | Sep 10, 2021 | Story |
Author: Andrew Dunn
My ex hated the spaces between terraformed colonies on Mars. “There’s nothing there. It’s all dead.” She’d complain, as we glided through thin atmosphere, a meter over unforgiving land where bioengineered chaparral was taking root. When we still loved each other, I was never snarky enough to point out Anna’s contradiction: if there was nothing out there on either side of a road defined only by flashing white strobes every fifty meters or so, how could it all be dead? Instead, I used to try and point out strength in things thriving under a distant sun, in ground so cold and dry each footstep wisped up a ghost of dust that would dance in the air if the wind allowed. That was when we still loved each other.
I’d like to think when we stopped dancing together, we stopped loving, but that would be a daydream no different than the kind that drew homesteaders out of colonies and into the back country. Empty homesteader outposts littered the Tharsis Plain.
Outpost Hyacinth had long since emptied of people. Its storehouses were empty. Greenhouses were wind-battered. Towers that once wicked moisture from ember skies stood sentinel over decaying machinery and living quarters. In Hyacinth’s center, I found an assembly hall that had long since opened its roof to the sky. Inside, twisted aluminum spars whistled unnerving melodies ghosts that never stopped loving still danced to when outsiders like me weren’t there.
I’d never been there for Anna. That was why our hearts started emptying and never filled again. I crisscrossed the red planet, colony to colony, then caught rides to the nearest inhabited outpost. Thin atmosphere left me famished. In austere diners, I was dusting bowls of nutrient-rich medium with orange and lime flavor packets, and making small talk with young, pretty women. Sometimes, what happened later filed a different sort of space in my heart that wasn’t love or lust, but something in between. At daybreak I started out, backpack heavy with enough to keep me alive for a while.
The romance of prospecting stole me from Anna. I gave up a tech job to hike among the outposts and hunt for electronics, precious alloys, or anything else of value in places like Hyacinth, or the spaces in between. There were buyers in the colonies – recyclers, collectors, the occasional eccentric. Whenever I found something especially unique, I posted an image online to cue bidding even as I kept searching. Did it make sense?
What made sense? Regular freighter runs departing Mars left columns of rocket exhaust towering like ancient columns holding up the weight of the sky. Freighter work paid good. There were good paying mining jobs in the asteroid belt too. If anything made sense it was that I was one more dreamer in a long line that hitched their fortunes to uncertain tomorrows.
And don’t tomorrows begin with todays?
A small room off the assembly hall offered enough space to set up camp on scuffed linoleum. I set up my lantern, then heater, to ward off the chill, as I unfurled my sleeping bag. I was dreaming somewhere in Hyacinth I’d find the artifact every prospector dreamed of – something so rare or full of special the bids would soar.
It all left me empty though. No matter how hard I dreamed, it never filled the empty space in my heart Anna used to fill.
by submission | Sep 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
The Uppers in Mazui could not understand anything Sam Tek was doing. At first, they thought the problem was cultural, but he had lived in northern Atakia for six years. Next, they thought he was inexperienced, but he had a decade of experience. Afterward, they thought he was illogical, but he was consistent, formal, and organized. Eventually, they thought he was distant, but occasionally, they saw him chatting, smiling, or laughing with others in the quadrangle. Then, they thought he was sick, but the man they knew walked straight, stood tall, and often carried a purposefully weighted sports bag.
Everything about Sam Tek was incomprehensible, and he was driving the Uppers to consternation. What was even more vexing was that Sam Tek was completely unfazed by hard looks and group pressure. He was incredibly aplomb and calm, it seemed. And he always spoke civilly, even if directly, and periodically sent courtesy messages. The whole experience was anguishing to the Uppers, but no matter what techniques they tried, Sam Tek was unruffled. He went to work, completed his hours, and went home, all the time, every time. On a few occasions, he was slow and claimed “illness” when it happened. And it was in those cases that the Uppers tried to take their revenge on him for overturning their vertical domain of obedience and command. Yet Sam Tek never buckled, and he always rebounded as if nothing had happened.
The Uppers conferred one day to urgently discuss an issue Sam Tek had suddenly been raising. He wanted to exercise his communication rights. The notion was so outlandish and bizarre to the Uppers, some of them were hyperventilating.
“Why would he think he has rights?” the First demanded.
“The Obligation says there is a right to communicate,” the Second replied.
“Yes, but that is the right of our Organic Body,” the Third said. “Sam Tek is a resident Outsider on limited-term duties.”
“That is not how he understands it,” the Fourth added. “He submitted several extensive and detailed queries citing the terms of the Obligation, seeking explanatory addenda and memoranda.”
“Unacceptable!” the First shouted. “Who does he think he is?”
“He must think he is our equal,” the Second said.
“An Outsider our equal? Outrageous!” the First declared. “The sooner we are rid of him the better!”
“But he may appeal to External if we annul our side of the Obligation,” the Fourth cautioned. “He is very purpose driven.”
“Besides,” the Second added, “has he really done anything truly wrong? If the matter is cultural as we first supposed, maybe we have been experiencing a conflict of values over the past two years and have to endure the differences for the time remaining.”
“Then what should we do about his queries to communicate?” the Third asked.
“Hard as it may be,” the Second proposed, “communicate. Have the Division parley with him until he accepts the reality.”
“Would he?” the First asked.
“In previous cases, yes,” the Fourth answered. “It was very difficult, but if we repeat ourselves over and over, he eventually resigns himself to the situation.”
“What kind of man is Sam Tek anyway?!” the First exclaimed in disbelief.
“It is the wrong question,” said the Sixth, who had been quiet all the while.
“The wrong question?” the Third remarked. “What are you saying Nbr-Ack?”
“I spend a lot of time talking with Sam Tek at my office. He is not a meanly intended person. Sam Tek is human made, and he is an android.”
