by submission | Mar 16, 2021 | Story |
Author: David Henson
When I was a kid, a couple buddies stomped on ant hills and bet baseball cards on who could sizzle the most bugs with their magnifying glasses. I didn’t play. Oh, I wanted to. But I didn’t have a magnifying glass. Sometimes you do the right thing for the wrong reason.
I’m reminded of the smoking ants as I spin the giant wheel. Sparks fly like comets as the pins scrape the pointer. The audience is silent but for a few whimpers. “Ninety-seven,” I call out. Everyone checks the number glowing on their neighbor’s forehead.
“It’s her,” a man says, pointing to the woman sitting next to him.
“No,” the woman says. “He’s number ninety-seven. Not me.”
They usually try something like that. It never works. The aliens are monitoring the game from … wherever they are.
A disembodied voice claims the winning number 97. The aliens speak our language with an accent that makes each word impossible to understand. Yet when they stop talking, you know what they’ve said.
I don’t know what the alien holding number 97 wins, but I know what the woman loses. She begins to sweat. Smoke wisps from her, then billows. Finally she bursts into fire, screaming and contorting. The flaming dance. The dancing flames. How can we know the one from the other? I’m so numb from all I’ve seen, I don’t even look away.
A voice tells me to spin again. A man’s number is up. A little girl, who looks to be about my son’s age, clings to the man till a woman pulls her away just in time. The man doesn’t even scream. I think he’s trying to not upset the girl. It doesn’t work. This time I turn my head.
Sometimes the aliens give everyone the same number. I spin and spin till a voice says “Jackpot!” I’m allowed to take cover backstage. The aliens don’t intend for me to die by fire. Then a new audience is marched in by armed humans. As with me, their families are being held hostage.
Occasionally the payout is massive. My spins are beamed to screens in packed arenas around the world. Thousands, maybe millions, are sent to their deaths, and an alien becomes rich beyond their wildest dreams. Kind of like our super lottos before the invasion.
Why was I chosen to spin the wheel? Because a number I didn’t even know I had came up when a different wheel was spun. Why not spin the wheel themselves or use a random number generator? And why bother explaining things to me when I’m little more than an ant to them? It’s all part of their game. They want me to understand the full horror of what I’m doing. They even told me why they burn people whose numbers I spin. So the aliens can bet on the decibels and milliseconds — as in how loud the humans scream and how long it takes for the first flame to erupt.
I’m instructed to spin again. As I reach for the wheel I feel my arm rub against the holstered handgun the aliens gave me. They’re wagering on how long I last before I use it on myself. None of them will be winning that bet anytime soon because if I kill myself what use will my wife and son be to them? So I keep spinning and people keep burning. Sometimes you do the wrong thing for the right reason.
by Julian Miles | Mar 15, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The sign on the small shack reads ‘Booth 7’. The gate next to it is a long steel pole with heavy chains hanging down.
The uniformed man looks unimpressed, in the way that gate guards have honed to perfection in the many centuries since guarding gates became a vocation.
“Department 51. Fifty… One? Like Area 51?”
The man sitting in the car blinks sweat from his eyes and sighs.
“Something like that.”
“So you’re here to see what the boys and girls brought in last night?”
The man in the car stops blinking. Sweat rolls across his glassy eyeballs as he stares at the guard.
“I wasn’t aware of anything of significance being discovered where that aircraft came down, soldier.”
The guard salutes. Another trait honed by gate guards since time immemorial is the ability to know, without question, when an odd-looking stranger trying to get in is actually so powerful he or she could bring all sorts of trouble down upon them.
“Sorry, sir. I’ll still have to call it in, sir.”
The man in the car nods.
The guard picks up the handset and punches a button.
“Colonel Edwards? Sayers, Booth Seven. I have someone from Department 51 demanding entry, sir.”
He listens for a moment, then puts the phone down, steps out, and walks the gate open. The driver goes by without acknowledging him.
After closing the gate, he re-enters the booth. His partner looks up from the screen she’d been pretending to work at so as not to get involved.
“Sounds like you dodged that right.”
He heaves a sigh of relief, then raises a finger.
“Funny how the Colonel didn’t ask for the bloke’s name.”
His partner pauses, then snatches the handset from the cradle.
“Line’s dead.”
They look at each other, grab their rifles, and dart round to the back of the booth.
“Where’s the line go?”
“We’re at the end of the spur that strings the booths together. It runs from Booth 1 to the base along the side of the main access road.”
“You stay here.”
He watches as she grubs in the earth until she pulls a cable into view. With a grin, she heads off along the fence, dirt spraying as the cable comes up. She disappears into the distance.
A fair while later, she comes sprinting back.
“The wire’s been cut! Our end is spliced into a line that runs out towards the woods beyond the fence. Our radios are dead, too.”
He grips his rifle tighter and looks about.
“What in tarnation is going on?”
The orange and blue flash of the base disappearing in a sphere of crackling energy is all the warning they get. She dives behind a weed-covered concrete divider left behind after resurfacing work on the road. He stands there and watches.
The blast tears him from his feet. His flailing form disappears over a low hill. She braces her back against the divider, willing it to hold. Heat sears exposed skin and chars clothing.
After what seems an age, she rolls to her knees and looks towards the base. A cigar-shaped turquoise object rises from the pall of smoke that shrouds what remains. It hovers, swings about, then accelerates away towards Edgewood.
She lifts her radio and switches it to a general military channel. It clicks and hisses reassuringly.
“Break-break. This is Private Mally Clarke at Camp Fitzgerald. Lone survivor, declaring security breach and disaster state. Emergency, emergency.”
While waiting for the helicopters to arrive, she decides on what will be left out of any reports she makes.
by submission | Mar 14, 2021 | Story |
Author: Christopher DePree
The probe was named Starchip. This marvel of miniaturization contained cameras, a battery and processors, and only weighed a few grams. Several of the wealthiest people on Earth had funded the tiny trillion-dollar spacecraft whose ambitious task was to sail to the nearest star.
On the Vernal Equinox of 2030, it was accelerated to 20% of the speed of light with the focused energy of an enormous laser on the surface of Earth. Rolling brownouts in Florida almost scuttled the launch. It would take 21 years to travel to Proxima Centauri, and 4 years for the first images to come back. The Green Bank Telescope would receive the signals.
Starchip was one light year away when the first radio signal reached the Green Bank Telescope in 2036. Its signal carried an image of the Sun seen from interstellar space, one tiny point among thousands. In the press release images, the Sun was circled in blue for emphasis. India and China were at war.
In 2048, when the second signal reached Earth, the miniature probe was 3 light years away from the Sun. It sent an image of Proxima Centauri, its target. The US had collapsed into smaller nation states, and West Virginia was part of the Appalachian Coalition. The Green Bank Telescope could no longer steer. Most of its internal electronics had been scavenged. Bullet holes dotted the 110-meter dish.
The first radio waves bearing images of an ocean-covered planet orbiting Proxima Centauri from Starchip washed over the campfire-dotted mountains of West Virginia in 2055. The Green Bank Telescope lay partially collapsed, its supporting beams jutting like the stripped ribs of a great beast.
by submission | Mar 13, 2021 | Story |
Author: Gorilla Sapiens
“You know, not everyone here, is… mortal?”, she said, as she sat down next to me.
A wedding feast, the ornate cake had been cut, the waitstaff had cleared away the tables, the DJ had played “their song”, the bride and groom had shared the first dance, the dancers now crowded the floor, and I? I…? I rested on a cheap plastic chair, on the sidelines.
“It seems to me then, that more than one of us here, is a god.”, I replied, factually. “Do you watch them, as I do, their brief lives moving in staged progression from birth to death, intersected with periods of love, horror, fascination, sadness, disgust, gladness, despair, enlightenment, and discovery? Or do you think of them as playthings, like the other gods?”, my eyes narrowed, “Take care in your response, it will color my reactions.”
“I think,” she paused, looking up at them… “that they are beautiful.”
And I will never forget her eternal smile, as I rose with purpose for the first time in a thousand years, “PREACHER!”, I roared, “YOU HAVE ANOTHER WEDDING TO PERFORM TONIGHT!”
by submission | Mar 12, 2021 | Story |
Author: Christopher Bresnahan
David clings to his notifier, its screen illuminating the unshaven shape of his face with implosive, blue light. He can flit to any camera screen in the world, and out of the millions of options he chose the Vishnick Ophthalmology Center.
8:32 am, and Dr. Laura Vishnick begins with a 25 milligram dose of sedative for the patient as well as eyeball analgesic.
The camera is adjusted to capture a top-down view of the patient’s eye, which stares at the light above it like some lantern-obsessed fly. David draws closer to the notifier so that his nose is pressed against the glass. For two weeks he has studied Robert Langston’s case of cortical cataracts from the confines of his apartment, and now the surgery has finally begun.
And Dr. Vishnick has made the initial incision: 6mm long, 0.3mm deep, with an AAO certified scalpel. Now for capsulorhexis, as she inserts forceps into the anterior capsule of the lens.
A grin reveals David’s plaque-plagued canines as he watches the spider fang instruments cut into Langston’s eyeball.
“Turn your volume down.”
David ignores the voice in the apartment: his girlfriend. Her elongated, yellow fingernails swipe at the notifier, attempting to adjust the volume herself. He hisses and pushes her away. She crawls to the opposite corner of the apartment and crouches over her own notifier, a carpet of unkempt hair hiding her face.
He returns to the screen. The doctor breaks the cataract into fragments, shattering the clouded veil over the eye. David’s trembling hands convulse the screen. He emits strange, erratic laughter with each savage swipe of the scalpel.
The doctor rotates the forceps to break the cataract free from the lens.
David wriggles into a dance, hunched over on the balls of his feet. A stifled, primal dance, moving his body as if he’s pulling a key out of a jammed lock. He is frustrated, excited, euphoric, and queasy, but he doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t even notice; emotions pass through him like light through a window.
Dr. Vishnick irrigates the eye to reduce any swelling or lingering pain, and the procedure is finished.
A dilated pupil is all that remains, unblinking. It stares, absorbing the light shining above it, experiencing a reality no longer contorted by superficial distractions. Enlightenment. Then, the reality that has consumed David’s mind for two weeks vanishes to black: the transmission ends.
He exhales, then recoils from the stale stench of his breath. He slips his notifier into his pocket and stretches his hands, which feel odd without that familiar square of metal between them. He combs his hair with his fingers. He walks over to his girlfriend, Rachel, to apologize, but she slithers out of his embrace, entranced by a transmission.
He opens the sole window of their apartment and is flooded with the fertile scent of spring. The wind orders the hairs along his arm to stand, and the birds outside beckon him. He decides to go for a walk, to feel the rays of the sun seep into his skin once again.
The notifier rings as he ties his shoelaces: breaking news. He opens it instinctually and sees the International Auto Racing transmission. Helicopter footage of the race track, a red car mangled on the side of the road, a toxic plume of smoke billowing out of it. There hasn’t been an accident this terrible in at least ten years, he realizes. It’s fresh; the ambulances haven’t even arrived yet. He hunches over the machine and turns up the volume.
by submission | Mar 11, 2021 | Story |
Author: D Mackey
I’m setting up as the Pleiades come on shift. Like a lighthouse, their beams cut through the dark and cast long shadows over the forecourt as they turn slowly towards the Sun. Orion cycles out, and switches off one by one until it’s just the galaxy on the belt left shining. The noise of construction barely lets up as hammers strike, drills drone and saws cut; building a star, piece by piece.
A klaxon blares out as the Moon announces the start of the night shift, and the forecourt is now properly illuminated as Polaris and the Ursae turn to us. It should be Cygnus this week, but they’re having trouble with production, I hear. I brush the rime off the counter and begin putting out cutlery and napkins; soon it’s the sounds of sizzling, chopping and frying that fill our hearing, pushing away the industrial cacophony going on over our heads. Takeda over there managed to get some fish, the lucky git, so he’s chopping and filleting with the precision reserved for drug dealers, inching out every square micrometre of ammonia-laden flesh onto a bed of rice and seaweed, bulking it out with whatever vegetables he could scrounge from the bank.
He’ll get the Dog Rush when Sirius comes online, I know it, so I stop rushing and set out a couple of plastic chairs to sit and drink my coffee while I run some numbers in my head. Little does he know, but I found pork. Proper pork, too – not enough for, like, a chop or anything, but I could make a proper broth. Eke It out. I look under the counter and see the mushrooms are coming in well, so scrape a couple of layers off into a box. Should add some flavour.
Right on cue, Sirius crew starts yapping and Takeda’s throwing rolls and rice as fast as he can make them. I’m back behind the screen, boiling the broth and coercing the last scraps of miso from the jar. I’ve barely got my first bowls out by the time a crewman’s come up to take a break. She almost forgets to put her matter back on, but all I need to do is glance at the sign. “No Mass, No Meal”. She fawns apologetically and exhales a cloud of phlogiston around her hair as she takes up the noodles. I pass her the sesame grinder.
More follow; I dish up the broth, swirling and fatty, steaming in the cold light. A handful of flash-boiled noodles. Mushrooms. Onions. My last eggs, marinated in soy for what seems like decades. A pinch of garlic and chilli. The number of bowls on the counter stays almost constant at four as empty dishes replace full ones. Workers slurp on their noodles, getting them tangled in their projectors or in their helmets, splashing broth on the tools and jumpsuits. One goads their colleague into trying the jar of pickled naga I keep at the edge of the counter, and they’re soon gasping for water. The chaotic hubbub of relaxation keeps out the cold better than the moth-encrusted heat lamps.
The hours pass, and my supplies dwindle. The careless lights of Scorpio begin to chase away the Ursae, the Moon turns to its side and the horn blares out again. I start packing up. Above me, another chunk of star is riveted in place and blazes into life as it comes online. Tomorrow night I’ll be back with pancakes.
