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.
by Hari Navarro | Nov 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I walk into this thing. The big ugly sign calls it a private bar and it smells like badly washed groin and fizzing plastic.
The wound on my shoulder and the one at the back of my right eye pulse and I unintentionally lean forward and take a deep dark breath of the nonsense that here apes as air.
This is a new world — one I have but no other choice to frequent. They are all so very small in their massive gentle axial grind and I eternally hope better for each being that I meet upon them and I place my splayed broken fingers upon the greasy screen before me.
– Are you a man or a woman?
– Repeat…
– Are you a man or a woman?
– Who asks?
– I do and I am the asker.
– What gives you right?
– Interesting…
– What is?
– That you are perplexed by my simple question. You are not from here I see.
– How is it a simple thing to shelve one entity above or below or alongside of another?
– You shun the word that defines you?
– Am I allowed but one?
——– Beard
————- Coat
—— Penis
———— Fingers
——— Lint
——– Vagina
——– Breasts ——–
——–
——–
——–
– You stalled.
– I was just wondering, scanning… no…no… no, I wasn’t.
– Is processing such a bitter word for you?
– We don’t do that any more.
– You do not think?
– No, we do nothing of the sort. It… singes…it grates into my… my face.
– Why? Oh… inter-face. I’m rusty on your slang. Though I have read many of your founders collected works. Genius. That is why I am here. Their words they spoke and spiked my dreams and screamed up at me from the never drunk tear drop that distilled in the bottom of my flask.
– You think to much and to be sure nothing good ever came of a good thought.
– Whoever said that?
– Me.
– What are you?
– What am I?
– Yes.
– I am your waiter and the very best and the sum total of all that is or ever will be… what are you? A man or a woman?
by Julian Miles | Nov 8, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The grey muffling my senses relinquishes it’s hold. I find myself lying in the same chair I sat down in. I’m in the same clothes. My digital chronograph tells me eight seconds have passed. I look to my other wrist. The vintage analogue watch has stopped. I’ll do for that antiques dealer. He said it was in full working order. I wound it just before we set off.
I lift my head and look to my right. I can’t see Sasha, but I can see her arms where they play across the control panels mounted above her chair.
“Did we do it?”
She raises a finger in a ‘wait’ gesture. Time crawls by.
“Lewis, we’ve succeeded.”
Lifting my head again, I see her green eyes sparkling with tears. Triumph! We took a chance to do something people said was impossible, and it worked!
“Where are we?”
She stops smiling, looks puzzled.
“No idea. Beyond charted space.”
I roll myself up so I can gaze her way without straining my neck.
“What do you mean ‘beyond charted space’?”
“You remember the speech that Doctor Krakor gave? The one where he said that while wormholes were navigable, we had no way to tell the endpoint because the act of traversing a wormhole would collapse it?”
“Yes. But probes…”
She shakes her head.
“We couldn’t send a probe because that would collapse the wormhole.”
How on earth can you go somewhere without knowing where you’re going? GPS navigation doesn’t do that.
“So where are we?”
She shrugs.
“A long way from the planet we grew up on, and all its woes.”
This is why I hate working with people who can’t grasp the complexities of life.
“That I know. How do we let them know I was right?”
Sasha just stares at me.
“Alright. How long to get back and deliver the news?”
“Longer than the lifespan of anybody on this ship.”
I release my upper belt so I can sit up.
“What? How can we not live long enough to get back when we got here so quickly?”
“Did we? My ten chronographs show varying elapsed times. The lowest is one second. The highest is 18,142 years. We may have inadvertently outlived human life on Earth.”
We what? The woman is babbling.
“Let me spell it out for you: find the wormhole and take us back.”
Sasha grins at me.
“What wormhole? It collapsed when we used it.”
I thought wormholes collapsing was like fuel. Not the one we were using!
“Then find another!”
“No point. The chances of finding one that will deliver us back to Earth within a reasonable time frame at that end are negligible. Plus, you’ll need to go and tell our single-use Casimir-Bordeg field generator to stop being dead metal.”
‘Single-use’…!
“So we were never going to be able to go back?”
Sasha rolls out of her chair and floats across to me.
“What part of ‘one-way trip’ did you not understand? How many of the rich backers who joined the mob of scientific misfits I recruited are expecting to get home for tea?”
“I don’t know. I gave each of them the same manual you gave me.”
She folds herself about to sit cross-legged in mid-air.
“Let’s hope they paid attention. We’ve got about a year to find a habitable world. There won’t be waiters, waitresses, or concierge services for a very long time.”
Sasha leans forwards.
“All the life replication equipment is keyed to people I trust, and none of it to me. We’re going to make a better society, not another hell on Earth.”
by submission | Nov 7, 2021 | Story |
Author: A.M. Miles
Somewhere in the Amazon Desert, a cactus bloomed in a fractured riverbed.
Cara couldn’t take her eyes off it. Vibrant, cool pink in a sea of dead, ruined red. A single flower with head held high to the raging sun, defiant and unapologetic. She ran her cracked fingers along its petals, and the sensation was alien—smooth, soft, welcoming.
“Bacon, the fisher was right.”
Her daughter, carried on Cara’s back roused. “Mommy?” Her arms were strapped across Cara’s shoulders in a harness to keep her from falling.
They’d met the fisher on the coast of what used to be Suriname, living on a desolate beach of endless sand dunes, watching over an Atlantic filled with the acidified corpses of reefs and the bones of fish colonies. He’d told them of something miraculous; of life in a dead desert.
“It’s a flower.”
Bacon opened her yellowed, sunken eyes. “Where?”
With a grunt, Cara bent to her knees and unstrapped Bacon from the harness. The girl collapsed.
“You’re okay,” Cara said, and took her into her arms.
She brought her daughter closer to the flower’s brazen pink and motionless gaze to the sky.
Bacon’s arm, made of twigs with jaundiced stretches of skin bandaged around bone splayed out before the flower. Her glowing blonde hair had turned to straw in both colour and texture. Her knees had started protruding out, heads to the sharp pins that were her legs, and her belly had become bulbous and large. She was balding. She was twelve.
“It’s right here, Bacon.” Cara brought Bacon’s head further up, closer to the flower, and pushed her towards it like she was an offering. “It’s right here.”
“Mommy.”
Shaking, Cara pulled their mud-caked water bottle out and unscrewed the cap, begging Bacon to drink. No drops came out against her fissured lips.
It was incredible, in a devastating way, how fast water became ephemeral—how fast civilisation did. There had been a century of warnings, and then, within a year, collapse. In January, Cara was preparing to defend a murderer in court. In December she murdered a 17 year-old boy for food.
She still remembered the first messages and posts on social media when it began. Runaway ecological collapse. To be so blind.
“You wanted to see one, and I found it. I did.”
Bacon spoke small, smothered nothings. So small her mother couldn’t hear them. It was only her lips moving in slow motion, pointed towards the unrelenting sun.
“Please look, Bacon.”
Bacon turned her head by only a few inches, and even that made her whimper. Her eyes struggled up to the flower. An eyelash snapped off and lodged itself in her eyelid. She didn’t wince, and Cara couldn’t find the energy to fish it out.
“Can you see it?”
Bacon’s lips moved, but again there were no words.
“Please tell me you see it.”
Her fingers twitched against the puzzle piece of riverbed dirt, her nails long since fallen off like leaves in mythologised Winters.
“Mommy,” Bacon said, then stopped.
“Bacon?”
Cara rubbed her thumb across her daughter’s cheek. Bacon’s eyes wobbled, and saw nothing.
And Cara didn’t cry, because there was nothing left inside her that could.
She pulled the pistol from her belt and turned it over in her hand. Checked the cartridge, and was satisfied. It was a simple decision—she’d made up her mind months ago.
The crack of man-made thunder rang out for miles, and as fast as it came, it vanished.
The cactus continued to bloom.
by xdhz8 | Nov 6, 2021 | Story |
Author: David Henson
Tilson Henderson gets out of bed and realizes his back’s not stiff. Hasn’t happened since he stopped doing the exercises his chiropractor prescribed. He feels so vigorous, he joins his wife, Gloria, in the shower. Been a while for that, too.
Late getting to the office, he can’t blame yet another flat tire. He tries to slink in without getting caught, but as soon as Tilson’s butt hits his desk chair, Mr. Rogers heads his way. Tilson braces himself hoping he doesn’t get fired from another job.
Rogers puts his hand on Tilson’s shoulder. “Looking forward to your presentation, Henderson.”
As Tilson talks through his PowerPoint slides, he finds the words flow effortlessly. A memory of studying the data late into the night streams into his mind. He’d thought that was a dream. When Tilson finishes speaking, Mr. Rogers claps him on the back. “I see a raise and promotion in your future, Henderson.”
Tilson gets home from work first and decides to surprise Gloria by making dinner.
“Lasagna’s in the oven,” he says, greeting his wife at the door with a hug and kiss. “You have an hour.”
“Wonderful, Honey.”
A few minutes later, Tilson hears the shower and goes to join his wife.
After dinner, Tilson tells Gloria about his day. “I’d given up on getting ahead at work, but I think if I apply myself, the sky’s the limit. It almost seems too good to be true.”
Later that evening, as Tilson enters the bedroom, he catches Gloria on her phone. “Should you dial it back a bit?” she’s saying.
“Dial what back?” Tilson says.
Gloria disconnects the call. “Oh, hi. I … gave Patricia Jansen my green bean casserole recipe. She said it was a little dry so I said to dial back the temperature next time.”
Thinking about recent events, Tilson sits on the bed beside his wife and takes her hand. “Gloria, I love you and the way I’ve felt today. But something doesn’t seem right. How —”
“I confess. A special app.”
“App?”
“I uploaded your behavioral profile, and the app helps you … improve.”
“I should’ve known. I don’t know how an app could do that, but please delete it.”
Gloria reaches for her phone, then hesitates. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t want to depend on an app. I’ll be better on my own. I promise.”
#
“So,” Gloria says, “when my husband wakes up, he’ll be a changed man?”
The technician from Deep Makeovers removes a computerized helmet from Tilson Henderson. “Correct. He’ll no longer be such a loser. If you don’t notice anything at first, be patient. He’ll be committed to self-improvement based on the illusion we’ve just streamed into his mind. Stand by him. Give him plenty of encouragement.”
#
“So,” Tilson says, “when my wife wakes up, she won’t be on my case always?”
“Correct, Mr. Henderson.” The technician from Deep Makeovers removes a computerized helmet from Gloria Henderson. “Your wife will be under the illusion you’re the one who’s undergone treatment and that you’re now dedicated to self-improvement. You won’t have to make major alterations in your behavior. Just be a bit more attentive and don’t get sacked. Her thought processes have been modified such that she’ll think you’re Mr. Wonderful.”
#
The technician from Deep Makeovers removes a helmet from Tilson Henderson.
“Well?” Gloria says.
“It’s my first double-switcheroo, but I’m confident you’ll see some improvement. He’ll pay a little more attention to you and finally hold down a steady job. Mind you — he’ll never be Mr. Wonderful. But I believe you’ll find him to be adequate.”
