by Julian Miles | Nov 15, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The man makes his way down the street with care. It’s the care of old age, where a misstep could lead to a fall. As I get closer, I see it’s also wariness. This man doesn’t trust the things about him. Up close, I see he’s not that old.
He gives me a nod.
“Evenin’, trooper. Stuck on the roaming night patrol, eh?”
Looking about, I move my assault beamer to side port, as it gives me the best line to the blind spot behind him. Putting it in ‘wary’ mode, I grin at him.
“You know our routes?”
He nods.
“I know most of them round here. I also know you must have annoyed someone something fierce to get sent out for this walk on your tod.”
He’s got that right. Sergeant-Major Nompins doesn’t like me.
“You’ve served, sir?”
“Save the polish for them that likes the taste, trooper. I did my time. Went in a Private, came out a Corporal. Seven years, three tours. Betelgeuse was a doddle, Sirius wasn’t much fun, then I drew a short straw and got sent to Mintaka in time for the downshift.”
‘Downshift’. The reason Orion’s Belt has only two stars now. Humanity doesn’t know how the Triclaws managed it, but our attempt to invade their home world failed when they moved their planet out of the way, an event that generated an exotic energy shockwave that devasted several nearby systems and stars – or used them for fuel. We still don’t know which.
“You were on the Banjax?”
“No such luck. I was on the Wyx.”
The Banjax was tail end Charlie in the invasion fleet, spared the worst shockwave effects by the ships ahead of it acting as collapsible shields. The Wyx had been one of the scout ships. It was mid-transfer to hyperdrive as the shockwave hit. It drifted in Hirschian subspace for two years before a combat engineer named Wola Ruxon, working with Emelia Laesmann – who would go on to marry Emil Hirsch, after meeting him because of the Wyx tragedy – managed to return them to reality as we know it. What the rescue teams found in the Wyx has remained classified ever since.
“You knew Ruxon and Laesmann?”
“I’m Ruxon.”
I snap him a salute.
“It’s an honour to meet you, sir.”
The revolver is levelled at my face before I register his move.
“I’m no hero. I’m just the lucky sonofabitch who had the skills that Emelia didn’t. She knew what we needed built. I could build it.”
“You saved ten crewmembers.”
“We bonded more men and women with parts of the ship in ways the boffins still don’t understand. We tried to bring thirty back, and killed over half. It’ll never be heroic to me. I had to shoot the ones who couldn’t die.”
“Couldn’t?”
“The Philadelphia Effect is an awful death sentence, because unless your brain gets merged with something solid, you live. No matter what your body has become a part of.”
How do you reply to that?
He cocks the gun.
“Trooper… Down!”
My legs respond to his tone. The revolver roars. The person creeping up behind me with an executioner’s baton drops sideways, almost headless.
The revolver has disappeared by the time he reaches down to help me up.
“Mean streets hereabouts, trooper. Never take your eye off your proximity scanner, even when you’re chatting to a former member of the corps.”
I bring my assault beamer round so I can see the scanner.
“Just two comrades chatting, Mister Ruxon?”
“That’s it, trooper. Nothing special. Carry on.”
by submission | Nov 14, 2021 | Story |
Author: Mina Rozario
I am lying on a sandy beach nestled somewhere in the arm of a spiral galaxy. Myriad stars loom above, mocking.
/Always moping/, I hear Rania’s voice echo. /As if it’s that bad being the last human in existence—look at all the space you now have./
Even in life, my sister’s words had been biting, though there was always a softness beneath the sting. When I had paid for a CompanionChip implant decades (or centuries; I’ve never been very good at tracking the passage of time) ago, I’d wanted it to be just like her, even though she had long been dead. Rania—rather, the CompanionChip—and I don’t always agree, but these past few years, we’ve both been sure something else exists near one of those stars. Human scientists had been certain that nothing on Earth could have been the cause of my extreme longevity.
/Reach out/, says Rania enthusiastically. /You still have that old frequency emitter kit. It would be fun to find a benevolent alien. Or a freakish cosmic monster./
Typical Rania. She encourages me to do things, to pick up hobbies, as if I didn’t have tomorrow to start them, or the week or the century after that. At any rate, in a few billion years, the sun will rapidly engorge and cook the Earth to a crisp, leaving no trace of my accomplishments behind, though there is a chance I will survive even that.
/Really? You plan on twiddling your thumbs for the next few billion years? When was the last time you wanted to try something new?/
I have no idea. I have the vague sense that I’ve done everything from brush calligraphy to virtual reality design, but it’s all lost in the fog of my memories. The only thing that comes mind is a recollection of Rania’s bewildered sigh when I pointed at a glossy photo in a book as a child, declaring, “I’m going to go there one day.”
The image depicted nebulas fanning swathes of color, the darkness of space overtaken with speckles of light like fireflies.
“There?” My sister’s mouth had quirked. “It says right here that this is a thousand years away if you travel at the speed of light.”
I had set my chin stubbornly. “I can wait.”
/How silly you were/, says Rania dryly.
I roll my eyes.
/Mankind did get close to interstellar travel—centuries ago—but the knowledge is lost. You’ll never get the chance to go now./
She pauses slyly. I wait.
/Not unless you find someone else out there. Whoever made you near immortal./
I sigh. “Very clever. All of this to get me to do what you wanted me to do in the first place?”
/Don’t be ridiculous. It would be good for you to meet someone./
“I have you.”
Rania’s voice was tight. /Even implant chips don’t last forever./
I give a half-smile despite the lump in my throat, then clamber to my feet. I do indulge my sister from time to time. Trudging back to the crumbling, moss-covered building I call home, I find the frequency-emitter collecting dust in a corner. I’m not sure when I last picked it up, but the device gently hums to life when I turn it on.
I begin tapping out a broadcast. If someone, somewhere, exists even a hundred light years away from me, the reply will twice that long to arrive. But I don’t mind so much. Counting down the days until the sun burns out, I have nothing but time.
I sit back, and we begin the wait, Rania and I.
by submission | Nov 13, 2021 | Story |
Author: Ruby Zehnder
Dord was burning at both ends.
“Quit flaming so much,” his mother warned. “You’re gonna go solid.”
Dord ignored her. He was young and full of energy. And besides, this whole solid thing. It was just something old flamers made up to scare the young.
He decided to kick it up a notch. Just because he could.
He started spewing photons. Yellow-blue-indigo-ultraviolet-X-rays-gamma rays. He was excitable enough to reach all the high states, and he didn’t care if his parents thought it was dangerous. Dord was feeling so cocky that he decided to go for the big one. Plasma burning. Star level energy consumption. Sure he had heard rumors about the E=mc-squared equilibrium. But that was all just hypothetical crap. All the philosophical garbage about flaming out and tearing a hole in space and being sucked in by a gravity sink was ridiculous. Imagine a Masshole that trapped you into spatial dimensions. Everyone knew that energy states could never exist at such low temps. You’d have to reach temperatures in the minus 273 degrees Kelvin range to get trapped. Oooh, he was so scared. What a joke. Not in this universe. Mass was just theoretical. It couldn’t possibly exist. Besides, it felt so good to just burn it up.
“Dord, stop plasma burning. You’ll start a proton-proton chain. You’ll go solid,” his mother warned again more loudly.
But, of course, he ignored her as he pushed up his consumption.
“Ahhh…” Dord exclaimed as he reached the plasma state and felt the power of a fusion reaction pulsing through his being. So this is how it feels to be a star. He had read about star beings. They only existed for millions of years before they depleted their energy and went solid.
But so what. Being a star – was totally worth it.
by submission | Nov 12, 2021 | Story |
Author: Riley Meachem
The day I finally had enough of it all, I hiked with my rifle all the way to the old amusement park, shooting any of the slow-creatures I encountered. By this point, their faces had mostly been subsumed by the spores, so it was easy to separate them from their old selves. I remembered the amusement park from when Denny had been little, but I hadn’t thought of it before that day.
It was dark when I got there, but the sun was coming up, and the slow things were more active at night anyway. I saw them shambling behind me, glowing phosphorescent from the fungus that had eaten away their brains, and soon everything else.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to get the Ferris wheel up and running, but if a stoned high school kid could do it, I knew I could, too. I timed my entry just right, just as the horde of them began to shuffle around the corner and into view. The ascent was slow, but that was for the best. More time to prepare the shot.
I wondered, as I took the first shot, if this was how Charles Whitman felt. Or Oswald, or God. As I gradually rose away from the things I increasingly saw as unworthy of life, of the label humanity, I thought it must be.
My first shot was a kill. The next one blew threw a fungal skull and removed the leg of another. There were more of them than bullets, but I didn’t mind. I was still only half way to the top.
What surprised me the most was how they all gathered closer to the base of the wheel. Jostling and moving like children. “Me next! My turn!” Perhaps they agreed with my assessment of their humanity. Perhaps they wanted oblivion. Absolution. Whatever my bullets brought.
I passed the apex of the climb, and gently fell to the nadir. Shots would be harder to take now. When I reached the bottom, I wondered, would they swarm and consume me? Or would they wait? Would they let me go around again?
by submission | Nov 11, 2021 | Story |
Author: Shelly Jones
It had been easy to crush the pills, sprinkling them over his pasta like parmesan. She had been surprised how easy: that he hadn’t noticed, that she felt nothing as he nodded off after dinner, collapsing on the couch, eyelids heavy, muscles limp. Still, she hesitated, waiting an hour, watching him in silence, before standing over his supine body.
The emotional index indicator blinked on the metal chain around his neck. She reached down slowly, hands trembling, still afraid he might awaken. He had been angry before dinner, angrier than she had ever seen him.
“Whose handprints are these?” he had asked, pointing to a faded outline on the bedroom wall. She had been sorting laundry and was reluctant to look up, wary of his tone, knowing what would come next. “Did you hear me?” he growled.
“I guess it must be yours or mine,” she said quietly.
“Well it isn’t mine.”
“So?”
“How did it get there?”
“How should I know? It could’ve been there for years. When have we ever washed the walls?” She swallowed her words, regretfully.
“I think you screwed someone against this wall,” he spat, the emotive necklace flashing red as his anger downloaded to its circuits. She had never seen the chip turn that shade of vermillion; it dazzled her momentarily, before the blow.
Standing over him now, she sighed, remembering other accusations: the profile picture on a dating website that wasn’t her; performing sexual favors in the car when she took too long shopping. She unclasped the chain, slipping the device away from him. She held his anger in her hand, felt its heat seer her skin as she crushed his emotional circuitry in her palm. Letting the weight of it drop to the floor, she turned to leave.
by submission | Nov 10, 2021 | Story |
Author: Cesium
The stone fell to earth some distance west of the city, in the grassy valley of a stream running between two hills, and it remained undiscovered for several days. Once news had filtered up to the university, an expedition was dispatched to investigate the strange occurrences in the area. A large area had been blasted and churned up by the impact, and the remnants of the watercourse trickled uncertainly through the crater. The pack animals shied away and would go no further. The scholars shivered and set up a camp.
Inside the barren area, grasses, which normally sprang up wherever earth and water mixed, did not grow. Nor did rotting meat produce maggots. Iron set in the ground, on the other hand, turned brown and seemed to be being eaten away at. The water that flowed out downstream was tasteless and gave no nourishment.
“We brought illumination for our experiments, of course,” said the professor, placing a lantern on the lectern, with its elemental flame dancing inside the sealed glass tube, specially shaped to direct the light. “But inside the perimeter, they immediately went out.” A gasp went up from the audience as the professor produced a second tube, one which had held an identical flame just days before. Now there was only the faintest scattering of some kind of dust.
Inside the area, heavy objects fell at the same speed as light ones, and distant thunderstorms were not heard until after they were seen. Several people developed angry red burns on their exposed skin after working through the day. Those taking measurements at night fared no better, as the stars flashed and wavered, while the planets strayed from their assigned courses, spinning in wheels within wheels.
Screams echoed from the hut that confined a worker who had gotten too close to the rock. Convinced he had fallen through reality to another world, he raved about houses, so many houses, and lamps that glowed without fire, lining the roads black as night.
“What’s more,” continued the professor, “once we were able to set up the more precision instruments, we found deviations in every measurement. From the tendency of heavy elements to fall and light elements to rise, to the reactions between materials of different types. In the affected area, elemental water can be split using lightning, and then somehow transmuted into fire. We even took measurements that would imply the world is spinning.”
As the days turned into weeks, all the researchers developed strange ailments, and the rations they had carried did not seem to nourish them. The team decided to cut their losses and evacuate, packing up all their tools that had not degraded into uselessness, and their carefully notated data. They recommended that the area be sealed off, unfit for human habitation.
The professor stopped mid-sentence. The audience filling the lecture hall were staring at the extinguished lantern still standing on the lectern. A sunbeam from the high windows had hit it straight on, and continued on to paint the wall behind the professor, split into seven colors.
