by submission | May 27, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
Dust whirled in a sunbeam. The early dawn was sapphire. A monomorph somewhere about seventeen, with gentle eyes and regrown arms, walked down a vernal glen. They saw two hares and three toddlers in the bordering woods. Branches of a birch wavered in the sky as a bird warbled in its nest.
They foraged for much of the morning and into the afternoon, occasionally stirring pill bugs that had gathered in shady nooks and moss. After nine hours, they returned to their tiny dwelling, with a twine sack full of plants. There they made a meal of dandelions, honey, mushrooms, and pine nuts; then they slept for some time. And when they awoke, two newborns were by their side, and in a year, when the pair could walk, both went away and grew up with the other forest toddlers, as they had once done, too.
225,228 denizens, simple and self-generating like themself, went about the thirty-four-hour days in much the same way-wandering, rearing, playing, napping, foraging-without memory or recollection of the bygone histories, pandemics, and wars of the dead distant sphere from which the modified genome came. The arcadia was the only world the sheltered offspring knew, and they all had no concept to question it, only an urge to occasionally thank the drifting entities singularly called Keeper.
On the outer side of the vast dome habitat with a self-healing emulsion shield, which an autonomous AI system had maintained for ten-thousand years, rains and comets descended on shiny, icy wastes. Mornings faded into grey and black and then turned into sapphire morning again. Rings of moonlets and meteoroids mingled over the glowing bright horizon.
by submission | May 26, 2021 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
Time has no business in a cemetery. It stands by the gates, weeping at each new monolith.
Within the pine casket, at the bottom of the open grave, the red chrome tendril pushed inside the corpse like a train entering a tunnel. Mechanical discs tore a path through the wasting brain matter and poised momentarily before a golf ball-sized milky deposit.
Upon the host’s death, the See withdraws into the skull. The most macabre bus stop.
The tendril’s tip separated like shell armour and open mouth dived into the milky sac, vacuuming up every last drop and piping it up to a chamber strapped to the calf of the Archon standing beside the grave.
Under a grey sky, the Archon watched the funeral draw to a close, waiting for the tendril to finish retracting. Basking in fugitive sunlight that had escaped its cloudy warden, the Archon peered through grief to a parade of white gravestones lying below a cloud of cherry blossom. The Archon grieved for the swathes of See rotting across the battlefields and the grave impact their loss had on the archive.
Solemn stillness creaked to life at the ceremony’s end and a darkened widow turned to the Archon’s carved face and gently took the outstretched hand. She barely felt the tiny sting in her wizened palm, the pain ceasing almost immediately.
With dignity, the Archon proceeded to shake each person’s hand. The micro palm needle subtly sampling skin cells and depositing See subdermally.
Afterwards, seated in a beige café, a sudden downpour heeded the tired cotton oilskin to pool on the marble laminate. The Archon withdrew a faceted pebble, flushing it with the DNA cell data recovered from the needle implant. The pebble throbbed pink analytical glyphs.
A chanced sip from steaming coffee and a glance towards the wetted street-front.
Through the steam covered glass, people scurried under another downpour. The Archon imagined the See, clinging to nerves inside them like a mycelium skeleton. Silently soaking up human experience for the archive.
Subsonic tones turned an ear. The pink pebble soothed to blue. The analysis was complete. The ceremony had been bountiful. Over half the descendants attending the funeral were laden with active See. A quarter more were viable hosts, now dosed with See via the implant.
Later, as sunlight dared a second escape, the calf chamber hummed. The See harvested from the corpse had been read and sent to be assimilated into the archive.
The Archon expected the usual unremarkable read. A lifetime of experience mostly expunged for having no unique informational value to the archive. Lives today were long but malnourished in adventure, innovation or invention. A disappointment that riddled the Archon to the core. The archive had near-on stalled in its growth. Humanity preferring the safety of an armchair over a rocket ride to Mars.
The Archon trembled with disbelief at what the pebble displayed. The quantity of unique data added to the archive was magnitudes greater than any previous host. Delving deeper, revealed an extraordinary life hidden behind a mirrored iris portal. The Archon immediately stood, rushing out into a thunderstorm, chasing a dead memory.
By midnight, far away inside a hidden lichen covered monument, the Archon stood before the mirrored iris.
A hesitant touch and the chamber flooded with a purple hue and a black hole slowly grew within the iris. A milky white skeleton made from mycelium floated into the room.
“Dead men tell no tales” a vibrating voice announced.
“Except to an Archon”
The fellow spindly Archon grasped a shocked hand and slowly merged their archives.
by Kathy Kachelries | May 25, 2021 | Story |
Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer
Ollie McNeil used to be a person, or so the rumors said. He came to the glades when the glades could still grow grass, before the floating villages, when the mosquitoes were smaller than the shrimp and the shrimp were safe to eat. Not that Ollie ate, of course. He got everything he needed from the windmill.
Jake called him Old Man Ollie, though he was only kind of a man. No one could dispute the old part, though: his human eye was like smoked-over glass and his lips curled in where his teeth used to be, lending a slurred twang to his language. Composed mostly of metal, Ollie was too heavy to go out in the boats, but his strength and precision made him useful in other ways. He was the only Glader strong enough to pull the barge in before a storm, and he could knot a net even faster than Mrs. Johnson, much to Mrs. Johnson’s dismay.
Like most of the Glader children, Jake knew of Old Man Ollie before he was old enough to swim, but he didn’t meet the man until a drowning fever tore through the village when he was eight. After his father choked in his sleep, Jake was sent away from the floating village and left to wait in a sickhouse on the muddy shore, to die or live depending on the whims of the fever. Only Old Man Ollie knocked on the door, bringing dried fish and purified water fresh from the windmill’s filter.
“Ain’t you afraid of getting sick?” Jake asked as he tore into on the leathery meat.
“Can’t catch the drowning if you don’t have lungs,” Ollie said with a shrug, and although the gesture carried a faint pneumatic hiss, its warmth was like porridge after a week on the ponds. Immediately, Jake’s fear of the half-man vanished, and despite the village’s best efforts, it never returned. If Old Man Ollie was an outcast, then Young Man Jake would be an outcast as well.
Most of Ollie’s time was taken up with maintaining the windmill, which jutted out of the muddy pond like an ancient castle and was even older than he was. Unlike the Gladers, he could make sense of the symbols and digits on the ancient displays, and he always seemed to know when a wire needed to be redrawn. The windmill spun slowly, lazily, but it generated an immense power that hummed through its deepest core and could be stored in white coffin-like slabs, sleeping until a need arose. These slabs seemed to cause Old Man Ollie an endless amount of misery.
“Capacity’s down,” he’d mutter, and Jake would nod in sympathy. This was a common refrain, and as far as Jake could tell, there wasn’t anything to be done about it. There was also “gotta run the cycle,” which sounded mostly harmless, and rarely, “wind’s gonna overload ‘em,” which was much more urgent and was followed by a scramble to disconnect wires at the top of the structure. The windmill was an essential part of the village’s life: it powered electric lights and fans that stirred the miasmatic air in the summer heat, but most importantly, it ran the water purifier. It also ran Ollie, who drew power a few nights a week using a wire in his arm.
Although he spent his spare time at the windmill, Jake’s job was on the ponds, pulling in nets and traps with the others who were old enough to work, but too young to start a family. That’s where he was when he noticed the first signs of the storm.
“We should head in,” he said. Surprisingly, the others agreed. Storms were common but this one seemed ominous: the horizon was hidden behind dark sheets of rain, and the clouds boiled red in the setting sun.
By the time Jake made it to the windmill, Old Man Ollie was well into the task of managing wires. “Give me a hand,” he called, and Jake obeyed. By the time the white slabs were fully disconnected the rain had reached the Glade and the wind whipped against the building like a wet rag, creating heavy sounds that rain had no business making.
“Big one,” Jake said, and Old Man Ollie nodded. He was watching the slabs with a dull frown, and he raised an arm to scratch the rippled skin below his eye.
“They’re still losing capacity,” he said.
“Eh?”
“The batteries. Look. They’ve been off for an hour and they’re already down to 96 percent.” He pointed at a lighted panel beside one of the slabs, and although Jake didn’t understand, he gave a nod of agreement.
“What are you gonna do?” he asked.
Ollie was silent. Jake stood up to take a closer look at the panel, as if the bars and rings meant anything at all.
“You can just plug them back in, right? After the storm’s over?”
“Yeah,” Ollie said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Yeah, sure, we can plug them back in. They’re going to keep losing capacity, though. One day they’ll run dry and they won’t hold a charge at all.” He leaned against the wall, which groaned slightly at his weight, and Jake settled onto a heap of nets waiting for repair.
“That’s a long way off, though, right?” Jake asked.
“Fifty years or so,” Ollie said. “Maybe sixty. We’ll see.”
“So a long way.”
“You could say that. Sure.”
The rain continued, and Jake could hear the windmill’s blades creaking as they strained against the gale. It seemed like the storm would go on forever, the way storms always do, but Jake knew the morning would break red and angry and the lake would be full of fish, full of detritus, full of opportunity. They’d reconnect the wires and the white slabs would fill up again, just like before. Everything would be fine.
“You worry too much,” Jake finally said.
“I do,” agreed Old Man Ollie. “I do.”
by Julian Miles | May 24, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Space, the never-ending frontier, the long night, the sea of stars. That last one should have given us a warning. Look what we did to the seas of Earth: filled them with our discards to the point where we nearly choked the planet.
“Ping ping ping, Reiter.”
“Three hits?”
“Close formation, no movement.”
“Leftovers.”
Saldi hums the first few bars of a death rite from Chal-Dy-Mer, her homeworld.
“What are the words that go with that?”
She pauses for a moment, lips moving as she translates.
“It loses a lot, along with the rhyme and meter, but put roughly, it’s ‘let them who scavenge from graves, be taken in their stead, that the number of evil hearts be reduced, and life be better for it.’”
“I could get behind the idea. Shall we?”
She nods.
We switch to manoeuvring thrusters and sidle up to the trio. A quick look confirms our suspicions: these freespace burials have been looted. The coffins have been stripped of panels; corpses broken in the haste to remove anything that might be of value.
“Stripship?”
That would be my guess, too.
“Agreed. Two-suit team on umbilicals cracked them open. One tore the coffins apart, the other smashed through the bodies. I’d guess they chucked it all into a haulage sack and got wound back in. Done and gone really fast.”
“No point in looking for identification. I’ll get samples for the Book.”
The Great Book of Remembrance: a huge database containing DNA samples from every cadaver found drifting, along with any names or identifying marks remaining.
We’ve been blundering around out here for nearly five hundred years. Our dead have been recognised navigational hazards for the last three hundred. The sheer arrogance of casually punting corpses into space caught our neighbours, the Cheteny and the Klact, by surprise. Took them a while to work out a currently spacefaring race was being so inconsiderate. When they found out we also let our lost ships stay lost, they pointedly enquired if we were going to pay them to clean up after us.
Starside Recovery Division was created soon after that. Spacers can call us to come and deal with any debris they come across. We’ll either handle it directly or refer it to the owning race. Our clearing up is done with as much reverence as we can spare, and always guarantees the sanctity of any cadaver enclosures and their contents.
Strippers make a living by scavenging from the dead. Stripships turn that ghoulish activity into a business in relics and scrap. Frequently, a stripship will support their own crew as well as acting as a hub for a mob of independent strippers.
“Where’s the nearest sun?”
I check the navigational archives.
“A month at sublight. We’ll need to burn them.”
Our preferred way to let cadavers go is to send them into a star. I like to think that fits with the intent of the original burials. However, when doing so would mean sending what amounts to an unmonitored missile on a long journey, we use ship armaments to vaporise the remains instead.
“Sad but true. I’ll back us off. You ready the beamers.”
Saldi leaves us slowly drifting away from the sombre cluster. I bring the dorsal battery to bear and task the starboard side anti-meteor quadmounts with catching any scatter.
She and I chorus the SRD saining for the dead.
“Now we lay thy bodies down, that thine souls may find surcease should it have been denied them. Requiescat in pace.”
Blinding energy beams make the remains coruscate, then disintegrate. The long night resumes.
by submission | May 23, 2021 | Story |
Author: Leon Taylor
“I am not going to live next to a mansion of six-foot cockroaches.”
“It’s their right,” his wife said.
“Since when did cockroaches have rights?”
“Since the Alien Rights Act of 2037.”
“I know. I wrote it.” The Senator watched the movers lug boxes into the house configured like a muddy conical nest. Two aliens directed the crew, waving their feelers, chirping in glissandi, their midsections turning blue with excitement. “Abstract rights are fine. But this is real time. What are we going to do when they have a hootenanny?” He looked down the tony street, crammed with aliens crawling towards downtown Alexandria. He drew the felt curtains with a snap and rubbed his square jaw in a creditable facsimile of thinking. He was fortyish and fit, with snapping green eyes and close-cut blonde hair. “We’ll have to buy them out.”
“We don’t have that kind of money.”
“Madeleine does.” He dialed her number. “Have you seen the new neighbors?”
“I can’t even pronounce their names.” Madeleine was loud, white-haired, and built like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
“Just spit a bit. Or ignore them, because we’re going to buy back their lot in a week or two.”
“Isn’t that the old Patterson property? Sounds expensive.”
“Not as expensive as psychotherapy. We’ll do this the fair way. You own four-fifths of the lots in the neighborhood, and we own one-fifth. Therefore you will buy four-fifths of the Patterson property and we will buy one-fifth.”
“I will, huh?” Click.
He sighed and redialed. “We were, um, cut off. Look, you’re the old-timer here. We’re just the newcomers. You’ll get most of the benefits from throwing out the aliens. You understand how the neighborhood should look.”
“I’m the old-timer, and that’s why I won’t pay. I financed the heliport, the day care center, even the adult theme park. You can spring for the aliens.”
“How much?” he mouthed to his wife.
“A million, at least.” She pulled nervously at her dull gold wedding ring.
“Tell you what,” he said to Madeleine. “We’ll borrow a million dollars from you. I’ll pledge my salary as collateral.”
“Your Senate salary? That is what, two hundred thousand? No way. Pledge your home, or get accustomed to the buzz.”
***
“I was afraid that it wouldn’t work,” Zztzis said to her deputy spouse. “They were arguing so much that I didn’t think they would ever agree on a way to pay.”
“Humans are litigious. They have yet to evolve manners. And they are repulsive to look at. A pasty exoskeleton, and no decorative feelers at the mouth. I won’t be sorry to fly out of this place.”
“With a million bucks.”
“With a million bucks. Where to next?”
“A city called Los Angeles, with dozens of gated communities. They’ll be delighted to pay millions for the status quo. And then I think we can go home for a holiday. I can almost taste those succulent homegrown worms.”
by submission | May 22, 2021 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
Werewolf rage fell short at the cage’s impenetrable viewing glass, prevailing against the assault, aided by a low-gravity holding cell. The brief demonstration impelled Ensign Collier to fill his spacesuit diaper.
“First time seeing one up close Ensign?” Zemzia, a tall, blue Aurelian scientist pulled the collapsed Collier up from supportive space station carpeting. “Your first two envoys reacted similarly, but at least you didn’t regurgitate…did you?”
Collier pursed his lips, realizing other fluids had escaped his control. “No,” he replied, slowly. “But please don’t surprise me like that again. My heart’s strong, but I’ve just one.”
“A nuisance, I’m sure, for advanced deep space travel. No spare. Hmm, so you’re to report detailed evaluations of our purpose for being outside Saturn’s rings? I suspect the interrupted inspection by your two predecessors left important details from reaching your superiors.”
“Ambassador Zemzia, I wouldn’t know. They’re still hospitalized. I’m a logistics expert sent to evaluate your involvement in Earth’s history and processes. How can we cooperate in a congenial effort, now that we have reached this part of our solar system?”
“I assure you, Ensign, allowing Earth’s previous expansion in our system followed intense discussions with our allies. What you’ve seen here, in our treatment center, exemplifies genetic anomaly rehabilitation from your world, before mistakes spread. You’ve seen vampires, Sasquatch, mermaids, owl men, harpies, centaurs, and others, including the Skin Walkers. That’s a small sampling. It takes years of biological and psychological manipulations before reintroducing these irregularities back into your current race. We could do more, but this is a limited facility.”
“But why? Why the effort? And limited? Your station is half the size of Saturn’s moons.”
Zemzia turned her head slightly, perplexed. “All life is sacred to us, Collier. Even yours.”
At that comment, Collier’s fingers retracted into a terror grip. He remembered the jumbled state of earlier returning envoys. He regretted volunteering, having hoped to increase his rank.
“I’m glad you consider me…uh…worthy.” He hesitated, wondering at his wording.
“Being worthy is a separate matter. Still, our recovery rate is exemplary. We reinstall patients into your world after stabilizing their genetics and behavior. Some unfortunate cases of recidivism occur, like Hitler and Stalin, but most are productive immigrants.”
“Seriously? You’ve put these things back after abductions? How?” Zemzia’s startling revelation and its implication stunned Collier.
“They adapt. Some werewolves became linemen on Earth’s football teams. Vampires often become lawyers and politicians. It’s amusing that you still call them ‘blood suckers’ without knowing their origins.”
“I…this is outrageous! How dare you interfere?”
“Simple, Collier. It’s game management. Those with millions of years of advancement won’t allow your insanity loose in our galaxy. Your kind has seriously devolved, fighting wars in space. Look at water resource genocide a century ago on your own planet, and then decimating civil wars on Mars and Venus. We’ve done as much correctional effort as possible in our small operation. That is why we asked for representatives from your world to visit us immediately.”
“I miss the point, madam.”
“Here, look at this.” Zemzia activated a wall viewer screen near them. “See those stars outside your system moving this way?”
“Yes,” Collier replied, confused by the unexpected configurations on the star map.
“Those are not stars, Ensign. Those are thousands of massive holding facilities coming to collect all humans until we can deprogram your violence. I’m afraid you are all suffering from flawed DNA. Please call your superiors. Prepare your people for retrieval. After that, we have a nice room ready for you.”
