by Julian Miles | Dec 7, 2020 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The cargo bay seems deserted. It should be packed. We know someone performed a ‘war action’ here. They overrode emergency reseal functions and warning routines, closed off internal access, then dropped the environment fields. We don’t know why. Also, the venting of the bay was actioned from inside. That’s the detail that bothers me: somebody killed themselves to do this.
“Mikey Four, this is Pattison. We’ve secured all the dumped ships. They’d all been locked in unsealed states nine hours before the bay was vented.”
Colson chuckles.
“This ride has left weird and is headed toward menacing.”
He’s right.
“Too true, partner.”
The lights come on. The place is a typical cargo bay, done in regulation shades of pale blue or grey. Except for the copious amounts of red daubed across the floor and up the walls to about twice human height.
I gesture to the décor.
“Welcome to menacing.”
He turns completely about.
“Pattison, this is Colson One. Please inspect dumped ships for unusual traces.”
“Colson One, this is Pattison. Was about to call. Looks like some of these ships hosted bloodbaths. Savah, our Dadil Huntswoman, tells me the spatter patterns are right for a large predator slaughtering human-sized prey.”
All vessels and stations have Giger’s Alien on their safety displays. Any form of new infestation could do for us all. His creation encourages paranoid proaction.
“Where are the bodies?”
Colson has a point. I don’t want to be the one to answer, but he and I are first recon. It’s our job.
With Savah’s analysis in mind, I set the forensic reconstruction to ‘track’ the massacre from the traces. Four drones flit from my backpack. Now to find something to do while the process completes.
Turning around, I see Colson standing in the centre of the bay. He’s motionless. I jog over to him.
“What’s up?”
He doesn’t reply. I see his head is back, like he’s looking at the ceiling above. I move round so I can see into the same section.
“You see?”
His whisper is my saving grace. I shake my head and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Yes. It’s not DSHS.”
‘Deep Space Hallucinatory Syndrome’ can happen to any human spacer without warning. There’s no cure except to get, and stay, planetside.
“That’s all of them, isn’t it?”
I set off a Mass Casualty Alert. It lets those who come next prepare, and gives me access to additional routines. Looking up at the tangle of bodies and hull sealant, I wait.
294. All personnel, minus one…
“Last one triggered the venting. Let’s go find them.”
She’s in the dented emergency control room. Barricaded the door, patched herself up, then dragged the needed kit onto the floor rather than trying to stand one-legged..
“Her name was Siobhan O’Malley. There’s a note scrawled on the wall: ‘Never seen the like. Tripeds in body armour. Two clawed arms on the right, giant pincer on the left. Disabled our systems before making entry. The one that got my leg goes with this bay.’”
Entry!
“Code Red, all units. This is Mikey Four. Check all ingress points for unrecognised traffic. Shoot first.”
The silence lasts for five minutes.
“Mikey Four, this is Pattison. Ventral lock records an unidentified docking nine hours prior to venting. It departed four minutes after we arrived in-system. Residuals indicate it probably exited near L5.”
We entered at L4.
“Relay a Code Red to everything within range: ‘New hostile sentients. Technically advanced, stealthy, very capable, and lethal.’”
Colson adds: “Likely they’ve struck before.”
True. But now we know.
Thank you, Siobhan.
by submission | Dec 6, 2020 | Story |
Author: Kathleen Bryson
The moon was out that night and had turned to a slight pink. Taffy coloured, maybe cotton candy fresh from the sweating fairground. The moon was pastel. That is how one can be delicate about things; the moon can set a good example. I walked inside the house and there you were again. The whole world had died. And wasn’t it weird, I was always spitting at the end of us that I wouldn’t get together with you again even if you were the last person on Earth. We never get together again. Other than me, now you were the last person on Earth
I asked whether you had done the dishes yet because you hadn’t. And you never had done them when we were together either.
I want to work on the painting. You expressed this quite forcefully and threw a cup of coffee not in my direction but towards the door.
I really hoped it’s you that’s going to mop that up later, I was about to say to you. It doesn’t matter if you paint a masterpiece the only person that will ever see is me, I was about to say to you. I didn’t feel like having coffee thrown in my direction though. Our feral dog we had rescued three weeks ago had died, too.
I went out on the deck and stood barefoot on its slats. I had never thought about it before. Wood is organic but dead. We think it’s lively and natural foods but it’s dead. Our house here was on the tip of a field on the tip of the world. The fumes of the nucleovirus were salmon coloured and still some distance away. It was quite possible they would never reach us.
That was why the moon was pink though; it wasn’t for any beautiful reason. When we first got together you would sing corny songs to me like moon river or late at night when everything is still and the moon comes creeping over the hill but you know I never thought that it would be you when I was crawling across deserted streets in rags. I’ll be waiting patiently for you. Because I love you true. Oh yes, indeed I do. Oh baby come out, out, beneath the everglades. See the moon, see how she promenades… I had been realising for quite some time that I had been singularly, nightmarishly immune. I had seen a standing, walking person in the distance and honestly, at that point, I was not even fearful of attack by strange men the way I would normally and justifiably be. I was just grateful for another living person and I was so happy rising to my feet and walking towards the miracle and then my face fell. It had been fourteen years. Obviously, you weren’t too happy it was me either. But now we are stuck with us and there we are.
God, even when we were together we never had regular sex and now we’re not having sex at the end of the world either. I wonder whether I should go back inside the house which now stinks of weed from your artistic inspiration.
But I think I’m going to wait a little bit longer out here for a while. I’m looking at the moon and I wish it would turn some other colour. Blue moon maybe, that was always our song.
by submission | Dec 5, 2020 | Story |
Author: David Berger
They all lied.
The ones who went around suborbital and the first ones in orbit and the ones who went to the Moon and the ones who rode the space shuttle and lived on the Mir. They all must have felt it a little bit.
But they all lied.
They all talked about the silence and emptiness of Space, but that’s the most godawful lie in the history of Mankind. Space isn’t silent or empty. Space screams and is full of itself. Where are the aliens, you ask? Space itself is the alien! Space shouts at us: “Keep away! Get out! Stay away from me!”
And then it says something else.
You have to touch Space to hear it and know it. And I’m the one who did it. Actually. For how long? Long enough to hear and meet Space. Don’t laugh at me until you’ve heard me. Then lock me up; throw away the key. I don’t care because Space speaks to me, to me, now, twenty-four hours a day.
You all heard of the accident. You know how four systems failed simultaneously and I flew out, naked, into Space. For forty seconds, Space tore at me, ripped at me, screamed at me: “Keep away! Get out! Stay away from me!” Then, for five seconds more…
I was rescued, alive, from the noise and fullness of Space. Truth is, Space kept me alive. Kept me from boiling, freezing, exploding. For five seconds, Space talked to me, felt me.
Space loved me.
by submission | Dec 4, 2020 | Story |
Author: Stephen C. Curro
Clive Olsen reclined in his lounge chair with a sigh. It was past eight pm, and the city lights in the panorama window behind him glittered like a galaxy. Before him, a massive computer screen gave him a live god’s-eye-view of the factory floor of his new automotive plant.
Footsteps down the long hall grew louder until the door burst open. It was Clive’s ten-year-old son Maddox. “Hey, Dad. They said on the news that the aurora borealis is super strong this year!”
Clive nodded absently. “That’s nice, son.”
“Can we go see? We could fly to Alaska for Christmas!”
“Ask me again in an hour.”
Maddox left without a word. He knew that “an hour” meant “not tonight”.
Clive refocused on his new plant. Every second of every day, machines worked tirelessly to build, test and distribute the latest self-navigating cars. The plant’s AI had designed the cars, but Clive had designed the plant. Watching it work gave him such glee. It was one of many accomplishments that were nothing short of automated wizardry. Last year, Clive had designed the perfect drone delivery system for the Postal Service. Four years before that, he’d built an army of drones that now cultivated eighty percent of the country’s crops with only 0.01% waste. These were just a few of his company’s projects.
With his latest AI up and running, Clive was planning to celebrate by taking his family on a long vacation to Fiji. Though Maddox wanted to see the…what was it called? Aurora boreal? Bor-reelus? More like boredom, Clive thought. Still, if the kid wanted a trip to the Arctic for Christmas, it was just a matter of telling the family jet’s AI to set a flight plan north.
The walls chimed. “Tanaka Kasumi is calling,” a gentle voice said.
Clive growled. “Put her through.” There was another chime. “Hello, Kasumi.”
“Good evening,” an icy voice replied. “You finally got that automatic interpreter to work.”
Clive gave a half-hearted chuckle. “Yeah, sorry about last time. Thank God it’s working now. Did you know the UN uses the same software?”
“My employers are irritated, Mr. Olsen.”
He sighed. “Don’t tell me they sunk another drone boat.”
“Anti-fishing radicals fooled the radar. It crashed into a giant rock.”
Clive suppressed a snarl. “So a vegan lunatic outsmarted you. Who’s to say they couldn’t do the same to a standard ship?”
“Perhaps your automated systems are not as functional as advertised?”
Clive gritted his teeth. “If you’re not maintaining the ships properly, that’s on you. I have changed the world forever!”
Maddox opened the door again. “Dad, the news said the sun is—”
“Not now.”
“But Dad—”
“I’m working!”
“Look!” the boy pointed to the window.
Clive wheeled around. The rage on his face evaporated.
The entire night sky was glowing. Brilliant green and red lights danced over the city, outshining the brightest building. Clive was so shocked that he almost forgot to breathe.
Then the lights intensified. The aurora borealis fell from the sky and dispersed over the city like a divine cloud. Simultaneously, the call with Kasumi dropped, the great computer screen winked out, and the lights died. Seconds later, the whole city was submerged in darkness.
The father and son stood in the ghostly light of the aurora. Maddox checked his phone, but it was as lifeless as a rock. In the distance, Clive could make out the shape of a self-nav jetliner careening to the ground.
For the first time in his life, Clive hated being right.
He had changed the world. Forever.
by submission | Dec 3, 2020 | Story |
Author: Tim Goodwin
Rosetta found herself with some downtime between contracts, and was within shuttle-distance: why not see mom? In person? Why not see Earth?
Her mother, bikinied and martinied, was polite, but opted for air kisses in lieu of hugging her dirty spacer daughter (still hoping all this was a phase) and invited her to the guest room to change for the pool and a welcome home cocktail.
“‘Guest room?’”
“Your old room, dear,” her mother said. “It has been two years. And please, don’t put any of…” she waved her undrinked hand at Rosetta’s spacesuit, “…on the bed.”
The room was now taupe. All. Taupe. And conspicuously devoid of Rosetta’s Star Trek models and posters of (hunky) solar-racer Traskor Sir Nadjal.
Rosetta dropped her helmet and duffel on the bed and saw her old bathing suit that her mother had dug out.
She had completely forgotten this bathing suit. It was, once, her second skin.
Then she disassembled her suit while pondering the tiny garment: the Yorklaussen, her coveted orange-and-white outer suit, still looking kinda new, although its finger tips were singed from underestimating an electrical panel on Phobos, and its boot latches were starting to slip. She unhooked the mini-PLSS, then her IRP. She shook out of the bulky temp suit. All of it stickered with the dust and grease and scrapes of Rosetta’s new life Out There.
“I hope your suit still fits,” she heard her mother sing-song out.
Rosetta undid her lucky neckerchief as she looked outside. The lawn was still travel brochure-green, the sky still cartoon-blue, the pool still reflected the sun, looking electrified.
It all somehow seemed…smaller.
And of course, her mother was lounging in that same beach chair, as manicured as always. Her skin was (cosmetically) luminous and (synthetically) taut, her hat ridiculously oversized, her sunglasses ridiculously bejeweled. She swiped, lazily, at the pages of a holobloid suspended in front of her, the occasional ad sounding like a musical trinket.
Rosetta remembered laying on her back out there, in this very bathing suit, watching the evening turn on the stars and planets, one by one, while her mother swiped pages or complained about whatever boyfriend she currently hated.
She needs to look up more, Rosetta thought, surprising herself with the revelation.
The last bit of her space suit to take off was her red Skinsuit: the micron-thin, skin-tight base layer that, amongst other magic tricks of science, sent the body’s own electrical output back into the muscles to keep them from atrophying in zero-G. A bacterial layer ate your stink; its picoskeleton kept your organs from wandering. Plus, it had a flap for “undercarriage business” of any and all sorts, so you never had to take it off (although the company that made Skinsuits strongly discouraged this).
The Skinsuit was her spacer body, she joked; taking it off meant being an Earther again.
She looked at all the taupe. Her childhood suddenly felt so far away. Tiny. Two years in space seemed to weigh so much more, it seemed, than eighteen years here.
Another ad chimed outside.
Rosetta put her hand to her collarbone, and made the motion that unlocked her Skinsuit. It whispered to the floor like a spider’s web.
She picked up the bathing suit, stumbled into it with some vigorous swearing, then looked at herself in the mirror and laughed.
Ridiculous.
It didn’t fit. But Rosetta didn’t mind; it wasn’t the only thing she had outgrown.
by submission | Dec 2, 2020 | Story |
Author: Robert Beech
The corpse had a handsome face. He had a strong jaw with a two-day stubble of beard, a straight somewhat aquiline nose, high cheeks, and full eyebrows over steel-blue eyes, now half-lidded in death. There was only one thing wrong with the corpse’s face. It was mine.
The revolver in his outstretched hand was mine, too, and the driver’s license in the stolen wallet in his pants pocket. Even his DNA was mine. He hadn’t stolen that though, it came with the clone.
The question was, how was I going to convince the police that it was the clone that was lying dead on the kitchen floor and not me? The laws against clones trying to harm their originals were clear and unforgiving. A clone that killed his original was terminated immediately; even the attempt was considered a capital offense. So, I hadn’t really committed murder when I got rid of him, I was just getting rid of a piece of malfunctioning hardware.
The problem is that the hardware had the same DNA I did. Blood tests weren’t going to help here, so how could I prove that I was me, and not some rogue piece of hardware that had just killed his original? Asking me something about my childhood, some half-remembered incident that I would know about and the clone wouldn’t, that might help, except that all my memories were backed up to the clone. That was the main point of having a clone after all so that if something irreversible happened to me, they could activate the clone and start over. Like backing your hard drive up to the cloud. I might lose a couple of days, memories of whatever had happened between the time I was killed and the last time the clone had been backed up, but essentially I could go on as though nothing had happened. Except for this time, something had happened. Somehow the clone had been activated prematurely, and it had decided to do away with the original, i.e. me. I don’t know how it had gotten ahold of my revolver. I keep that thing locked up securely in the gun cabinet, with the ammunition locked securely in a separate location. Of course, the locations of both the gun cabinet and the ammunition locker and the keys to both are among the memories that have been backed up to the clone, so he would have known where to find them. But you’d think I would have heard him prowling around through the house and loading the gun. I hadn’t.
The first thing I knew of the clone awakening was when I saw him standing over me with the big .44 magnum pointed in my direction, telling me to put my hands up, and calling me a damn clone!
I don’t know what made him hesitate, but thank God he did. Just the briefest hesitation before he fired, but long enough for me to dive for cover. Long enough for me to roll into the kitchen and then grab the kitchen knife and plunge it into his chest when he came running into the kitchen behind me.
And now, there he is, dead on the kitchen floor, my clone, wearing my clothes and with my driver’s license in the wallet in his pants pocket. I should take it out and put it in my pocket before the police get here. It’ll look more natural that way. Maybe switch shoes, too, his look a little more worn.
