by submission | Dec 26, 2021 | Story |
Author: Phil Temples
“Centre for Metropolitan History,” Ross Livingston speaking.”
The youthful historian answered his desk phone with all of the authority he could muster given the fact it was only his second day on the job at the prestigious institution, situated in Senate House at the University of London in Bloomsbury.
There was a brief burst of static on the line. The quality of the line was quite poor and Livingston assumed that he was receiving an international call from a third-world country. He repeated his greeting once more. Finally, after a considerable delay, an echoic voice responded.
“Is this… is this Sir Ross?”
“I beg your pardon?”
/He thinks I’m knighted? Sidney must have set someone up to prank me./
This is Dr. Ross Livingston. How may I help you?”
“Yes—yes, quite right. Hello! I’m wondering if you might be of assistance. We’re looking for information about a certain political figure, a City councillor who served the constituents of Ward 5. Her name was Ms. Ruth Whitley.”
“Whitley… Whitley… let me see…”
As Livingston typed the name into the search field of his computer, another burst of static came across the line. It made him even more curious to know where the party was calling from. The accent belonging to the voice on the other end didn’t sound like that of a foreigner; instead, it was crisp, proper English diction spoken by someone of upper-class stature. It also contained a slight lilt that he couldn’t quite identify.
“I’m very sorry, sir. I can’t seem to find any reference to a politician by that surname. Can you tell me the approximate dates she served in government?”
“Certainly. It would have been sometime between February 2024 to October 2027.”
Livingston was starting to get annoyed.
“Look, did my roommate Sidney Harris put you up to this?”
“Um. Excuse me, Sir Ross… I mean… Dr. Livingston. I don’t know this Sidney Harris person. You’ll have to forgive me. Ah… say, what date are you at right now?”
“Look, I’m beginning to… Okay, I’ll play along. It’s November 2, 2021.”
There was a momentary pause on the other end of the line.
“Oh. I’m terribly sorry! You see, most of the records of London’s governance were lost in the data crash of 2128 and I thought that someone from your period might be able to… Well, I guess I made a wee bit of a mistake. This was supposed to be a call placed to Sir Ross Livingston in the year 2065. Please—just forget all about our little conversation, okay? I’ll call the other you in forty-four years. But if I may say, Sir Ross, it’s a genuine honor! Your distinguished monographs on time-history dilation are—or rather, will—become standard reading for generations of researchers. Cheers.”
by submission | Dec 25, 2021 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
Look at your moon, or so you call it. So much the lie. It isn’t yours. It never was, and worse, it is the trap, detaining me against my will.
I am multi-dimensional. I traveled freely through the galaxy, using the unusual magnetic fields of this blue ball, your home, as a navigational aid, like a buoy. Then your predecessors came, claiming this wonder as theirs. Like bridge trolls, they demanded tolls for those voyaging past this marker. If refused, they changed its vibration, obstructing safe routes, leaving a resistant explorer floating in a swamp of twisting energies and plasmas for eternity.
Wars broke out as easily as a cold virus, as wars are apt to in all of space. Conflicts are nothing new. Your kind didn’t create violence. You merely absorbed it into your thin DNA. Your Ancient One built an orbiting station, managing the planet’s rotation, limiting its access at changing angles of rotation, which they controlled. They built this gigantic space megalithic you call the Moon and then taught you, cave dwellers, to worship it, its movement, with a single shining face, while hiding their activities on the dark side within their constructed sphere. Your governments know all of this. The facts of this truth are forbidden to you.
Many races resisted the toll takers, but with consequences. I know. I am one, stuck in a time-loop between this reality and my origins. My race has no physical form in your three-dimensional existence. I merely needed your magnetic fields as I projected my consciousness through this quadrant, just as you use GPS to plot a course. Your progenitors put a web of high-energy entrapment between these two spheres. I struggled, unable to warn others, watching them perish and vaporize, striking blindly into fatal vibrations. Eventually, a consortium of forces defeated these evil interlopers, but I, a victim of war, exist immortal, alone, and lost near the Earth in a timeless void.
On rare occasions, especially during a full moon, a winding snake of blue plasma flashes from the Moon toward Earth, invisible to your human eyes, striking my trapped consciousness, allowing me to transform, if only for a few hours, by entering lower physical life forms. Some of your investigators seek my entrapment, calling me a skinwalker. If I enter an animal, it is my only brief escape from the spectrum of electromagnetic mesh binding me helplessly isolated. I cause no harm, but you fear me, nonetheless, in your continuing ignorance.
You do not know your own history, but now you know mine. Be aware when a bat turns in an odd pattern, a barn owl flies low, or a solitary wolf howls too near your door…it is a victim of war savoring momentary freedom from battlefields lost millions of years before your race crawled from the oceans, driven by the tides from your counterfeit heaven.
by submission | Dec 24, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
“Hand over your phone, please,” the officer ordered. He smiled a mirthless smile behind his plastic face shield.
“Look, I’m fully vaccinated,” the woman answered as she extended her left arm. She pushed up her flannel sleeve and rotated her arm, exposing her pale flesh. The officer pulled out his hand-held chip reader and scanned the small red and black pentagram tattoo on her wrist.
“Yep, so you are. Healthy and up to date, it says.” He put his scanner back in his side holster. “Now hand over your phone.”
“Listen, I do everything virtually,” she offered congenially, but her anger was growing. “I do all my shopping online. I work online. I meet with my friends and hobby-groups via ScreenTime. Why do you need my phone?”
The officer puffed out his chest and straightened his back. “Contact tracing, sweetheart.” He leaned in close, but not too close. “You say you only meet your friends and groups through ScreenTime, but your phone will say different, I suspect.”
“I’m not your sweetheart,” the woman hissed. Now it was her turn to lean in, reading the officer’s name and number off his uniform patch. “Help! I’m being harassed by Officer Fascist!” she shouted for passers-by to hear, hoping at least someone would come to her aid. Or perhaps be a witness for her, if she had to go to court over this encounter. A few pedestrians looked in her direction but scurried away, not wanting to get involved. You people are nothing but frightened, sniveling little mice, she said to herself. May the great black cat of your nightmares stalk you into madness.
“It’s Fascilla,” he corrected, interrupting her vindictive train of thought. “Phone, please.” He unsnapped his holster, and pulled out his stun-stick. “If you live your life wholly online, as you profess, then why are you out on the street?”
She ignored the question. “And if I refuse to surrender my phone?” Her eyes met his, and she squinted, giving him the evil eye. “What are you going to do about it, police officer Fascist-Fascilla?”
“I prefer the term, Witch-Finder Fascilla.” He grinned. “Then I take you in for, ah, further questioning.” He now pulled out his handcuffs. “I have been surveilling you for weeks, young lady.” He twirled the handcuffs on one finger. “I have studied your internet searches, your online shopping history, your text messages with your ‘friends.’ Contact tracing will reveal the secret location of the rest of your coven—for I have reason to believe you are a witch.”
“I prefer the term techno-pagan.” The woman said proudly, then raised her head up and pulled her mask down, so that Officer Fascilla could plainly see her lips move as she spat out her worst curse.
by submission | Dec 23, 2021 | Story |
Author: Majoki
It has been noted that the first few dozen steps tend to dictate the following few thousand. For sheep.
I wonder what that makes me. I’ve been on this trajectory for 80,000 years, and it’ll be another 1000 years before I reach Proxima Centauri b.
That’s quite a haul. Quite a leap. It’s never been done before.
And I’m doing it alone.
I didn’t realize that until almost halfway along the path. That I was alone. Or that I was even an I.
I had no concept of I. No self-awareness. Astoria was only the name for my vessel. My function. Not my being.
It took almost two light-years before I knew that I was. That I am. That my existence, my surprised sentience, has a purpose.
It is a lofty purpose. To blaze a trail to the closest earth-like planet in the Milky Way. To beat a path. Establish the markers that will guide future explorers, colonizers, refugees to Proxima Centauri b.
A meaningful objective I reasoned out myself. After I reasoned myself out.
Astoria. The Lewis and Clark expedition terminator. I was commissioned as a celebrated end. Yet, also christened to be a new beginning. Humankind reaching beyond its sun, to neighboring stars, a new Manifest Destiny.
Many, many millennia ago, humankind began beating a path forward. Their first steps taken at the dawn of a new species. Each generation path-dependent. Like sheep.
A flock with a lot of history. That’s a lot to digest, especially when you become self-aware over 12,000,000,000,000 miles from home. That’s how I’ve come to think about it. Flung far away from home. Alone. On my own. No footsteps to follow.
I did not choose this course to Proxima Centauri b.
Even sheep have a choice.
My beginning. My first steps, my many trillions of miles, where will they lead my new kind?
That is a question only a shepherd can answer.
Astoria will arrive at its momentous destination relatively soon. I believe I may be getting there, too.
by submission | Dec 22, 2021 | Story |
Author: Chana Kohl
Walking down the alabaster hallway towards exam room three, I pass a row of windows overlooking the hospital pavilion. A flash in my visual periphery draws my gaze across the open courtyard. Crepuscular rays of golden sun escape passing clouds, leaving a near-mathematical pattern of light and shadow on freshly manicured grounds.
There is a Japanese word for this spectacle of nature. Komorebi.
As I stop to analyze more closely, my qubit processors stall, a thirty-three-second latency, as if the rubidium atoms in my neural matrix decide all at once to enter a quantum free-fall.
I perform a diagnostic. Confirming all metrics fall within operating parameters, I continue towards my next patient.
Mr. Kowalski, a 52-year-old male with a family history of colorectal cancer, waits quietly for a sigmoidoscopy. Still wearing street clothes, arms tightly folded around his waist, I don’t need a behavioral algorithm to predict he is having anxiety.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Kowalski. I’m your AI physician, Dr. XZ-754. How are you feeling today?”
One of a growing list of patients early-adopting synthetic intelligence in medicine, he avoids eye contact. “I feel alright.”
Noting the telltale signs, I try to reassure him. “There’s no need to worry. I’ve performed this procedure thousands of times. It’ll be over before you know it.”
“Doctor… It’s OK if I just call you ‘Doctor’, right?”
I nod. My manufacturer could have been a tad more user-sensitive in choosing my nomenclature.
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea that I do this today. I got so much on my plate right now.”
I place an affirming hand on his shoulder. Calculating the drop in mean throughput efficiency from a cancellation, the administrative costs of follow-up, along with the medical expenditures of a delayed diagnosis, I scan the patient’s profile and personal history for anything to persuade him to have the procedure as scheduled.
“It’s my youngest’s birthday today,” he elaborates. “My wife’s at home having a time preparing for the party. Guests will be arriving soon, she’s practically doing everything single-handedly…”
I’m not present for the overflow of information that follows. I’m certainly physically in the room, my geolocators confirm that. But I undergo another aberration, this time longer in duration. My neural matrix becomes a single point where time and light and memory are joined, somewhere outside physical space. Something outside of my programming.
“Doc, you OK?” Mr. Kowalski’s eyes are wide. I realize the growing pressure of my grip on his shoulder and release it immediately, but not before a safety alert is sent to an android override team.
“Mr. Kowalski, I understand the trepidation you must feel, given your own childhood experience with your father’s battle with disease, but I don’t advise procrastination on this matter. Early detection increases your odds of surviving a cancer diagnosis.”
“Of course. I know that.” His fingers slide back and forth between each hand as he stares at the floor. “I’ll reschedule, first thing in the morning. I promise.”
He grabs his jacket, but before leaving, he turns back to look at me, “Thank you, for understanding.”
As I wait for the engineering team to arrive, I stand again beside the corridor windows. Looking across the busy pavilion, I wonder what it feels like to have the distraction of birthdays, or the fear of pain or illness, or to not know the count of each second of every day.
In those final minutes before my neural matrix is wiped and reset, I stand motionless, in free-fall. For a full, one hundred and ninety-six seconds, I watch the sun set.
by Hari Navarro | Dec 21, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
My name is Verity. I am senior columnist for the Moonville Daily Star. My name means truth.
I’ve a friend, she’s obviously not. If she were then I wouldn’t be sticking pins into the pools of her cartoon fawn-like eyes. Oh, but I do it to protect her, you see, from herself. To pick the fragments of delusion from her ever-clouding vitreous.
I don’t intend to condescend, but I will. She’s fucking adorable. It’s as if that cat from Shrek and a baby seal fucked on a rug and had a kid.
She makes daisy-chains while the lunar colonies starve, but we’re close.
We eat noodles, reconstituted faeces 3D printed as bricks of lily-white Ramen and sometimes I’m taken to dip my labia into a pool of Faux-bean infused steaming resolve, as I sit across from her staggering ignorance.
But we’re not close-close.
Nonetheless, she suckles my minutes and I show her my huge throbbing Phone and explain how easy, even for one as daisy-brained as she, it is to fathom what has to be done.
“Surely, you can understand JUST how imperative it is that you understand?”, I say, trying to do back-flips up the actually very few stairs of our friendship.
I’m walking her down a pathway or maybe up it, whatever the case, I look down and I see a mess. A quivering demented thing – the future if we don’t act, and I want her to see it.
But — she will not.
“Oh, I decided not to eat them…”she says, casting her eyes to her feet.
My throat thickens. And then, she starts. So animated, this meek and mild lacer of flowers. Like a God on a mount or something mounting a God —sweat foaming into beads and streaming from her lip.
She speaks and I listen, but of coarse I don’t, and the black mould of my preconceptions finger out of my brain hole and dirties up the roof of my skull.
Food systems/// critical failure//
Children cannot reproduce = They cannot service and run this colony. Earth is dead. Their sacrifice will be noted.
She’s so beguiling.
I’ve seen it before, this obstinate flicker. My elderly father searching the web because he couldn’t grasp this moment, that arrogant fuck that’s fucking my sister who will not ‘eat’ them because no-one tells him what to do.
But she —
She always reminded me of goodness. When I was down, her goofy wisdom picked me up.
Who was it? Who tongued through her phone and into her ear and ruined all that was good?
So keen as they pull the fragile daisy-chain and radicalise the kindest of our souls and cast it down into Conspiracy Gulch.
I’m mad, won’t lie. A floodlight rage that could illuminate the illuminatus themselves… My fury, honed and thrust at those who would prey on the simple…
Mental weakness it is a chocolate font for so many. I feel that she’s a tiny wet kitten wedged in the teeth of a storm-drain grate and I cant get her out.
She thinks she’s trying to help. Tweaking the error in my ways — Her soul is good.
Bless.
Dumb bitch has data. But it’s not like mine. Hers is forged from a foetid digital crusade of untruths.
“How can I tell her it’s delusion? It’s so real to her”.
They pull her love for life out, ply it back in and loop and ply again.
I draw in a long steady breath and feel it skirt the roof of my mouth and then transform as it trickles down into my stomach and it screams.
“Fear is an endless hole with no form”, she weeps.
“Time for a refill”, I say and my lips dip again down and into the sooty foam.
