by submission | Jul 13, 2021 | Story |
Author: David Henson
As I’m looking for cheddar, I notice a Chamenileon drop a dozen eggs to the floor. Sobbing and turning blue, he puts the yolk-dripping carton in his cart and heads for the front of the store. I haven’t liked nor trusted the Chamenileons since we let them take refuge here, but this one weeping and bluing over broken eggs intrigues me. Learning about him seems more interesting than continuing my search for extra-sharp. No grilled cheese for me for supper.
I wait by the exit as the fellow, glowing red, apologizes to the cashier for breaking the eggs and insists on paying for them. I trail him outside, note what kind of car he gets into, then hurry to my own on the other side of the parking lot. I fear I’ve lost him till I see his SUV pulling onto the street. I step on it then ease off when I’m a couple lengths behind.
I almost lose him but for sneaking through a crack between yellow and red. When he enters a driveway, I note the house number and street then go home.
Returning the next day, I park a block or so away and walk to his house, which is painted the mandatory black and white to denote its Chamenileon occupancy. I see he’s having a garage sale. I linger in front of his house as if I’m looking over the merchandise. There are boxes of women’s shoes, and racks with hanging dresses and tops.
As I’m standing there, the guy comes out of the garage with slacks draped over his arm. As he crams them onto one of the racks, he glows blue again. When he sees me, his blue tinges maroon. He asks if I’m interested in buying something.
I’m not sure what to say — I followed you yesterday, but I’m not a stalker even though I’m here at your house today? — so I go to one of the racks and hold up a blouse. This isn’t easy for me as I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a personal encounter with a Chamenileon.
“It was my wife’s,” he says. “She … passed away a few weeks ago. I couldn’t bear seeing her clothes every time I go into our closet.” He’s almost indigo.
When he starts to apologize for going on to a stranger, I can’t help but hold out my hand and introduce myself. Never thought I’d shake with a Chamenileon. Whatever the color for surprise, I’d be turning it now if I were one of them. He says his name is Stanley-eon, adding the required suffix to his name. We chat awhile. I end up buying a blouse that I drop off at a charity. I don’t mention where it came from.
Back home I realize I haven’t eaten. I do that a lot these days. I crack a couple eggs into the skillet. As grease spatters, I think about the Chamenileon. Maybe I was drawn to him because at some level I sensed we’re both trying to find our way after our worlds have been turned upside down. His in more ways than one.
I start to flip the eggs over easy but in my mind hear my wife’s voice saying “You know you can get salmonella from runny eggs.” I turn the spatula edge-wise and break the yolks.
I’m having friends over to watch the game tomorrow. They’re a good group. I wonder how they’d feel if I invited Stanley-eon? Stanley.
by Julian Miles | Jul 12, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They’re on to me. Not bad. Three continents, sixteen countries, four passports, and two illegal border crossings later, the one scientist shouting about me has, finally, received a fair hearing. Way to go, Gerald. I hope it makes your fortune, for all that it’ll never make up for what you’ve lost.
Too bad they’ll never get to me in time. It would be ironic to be the first person saved by their hastily-assembled remedy.
Time for my last Tabultin. Stuff’s been around for years, just another drug to combat flatulence. Still don’t know how they found out it kept the worst of the deleterious effects at bay. Probably some old bloke with a crappy diet somewhere surprised them by not dying quickly, so they analysed his blood, then asked what he was taking.
In case you’re starting with the last entry and working back, my name’s Nancy. I was a nurse, until I got set up to take the fall to save some doctor’s reputation. After that, life went downhill until selling my eggs and unsavoury gig work were all I had.
Then came Gerald Bacan and his drug testing. There were several levels of involvement, but the highest offered accommodation, regular meals, even a salary! I applied for that, and got accepted.
Gerald’s project came at a hefty price: military backing. He admitted his work could be weaponised. He also took pains to hobble any such efforts. In the end, they were pointless. One of the sera turned out to be deadly.
Batch 1.11Y.4g, ‘Illya-G’, hit Volunteer 84, Dav Mikalos, like a truck. Barely had the needle left his arm when he collapsed. He died the next day. Everyone who had been in the room with him died within a week. Everyone who came into unprotected contact with his body died within two weeks. This included Helen Bacan, Gerald’s wife. As Gerald was away, appearing before a committee in Washington, he missed it all.
Helen and I had become friends. She’d confided in me her doubts as to the sanity of trying to save humanity from cataclysms. I thought her a little crazy in that.
I was one of those infected by someone who came into contact with the body. I keeled over, then woke up in a makeshift morgue. My metabolism slowed so much they thought me dead. I’ve since seen a couple of studies that match my pathology.
Being mostly paralysed for a day after coming round, I overheard some interesting conversations between various officials who were using the space by the door for ‘off the book’ discussions. While the topics were awful, it was the anticipatory glee that sickened me most.
Around then is when I became what you’d call crazy. It gave me clarity and motivation like I’d never experienced. After sneaking out, I raided the pharmacy; turned the loot into cash to get me started. I preyed on anyone, and at every opportunity. Didn’t have long: no time for niceties. I used public transport, hung out in crowded malls, packed restaurants, everywhere people congregated in the last throes of the joy at COVID-19 being ‘defeated’.
What gave me away was the text I sent Gerald: “My condolences. She was right.”
What let me get this far was the disbelief that met his claim of someone deciding to spread Illya-G in an effort to end mankind.
I love the silence of snow-covered woodland. Deep amongst the trees, where only wolves and white rabbits disturb me, I’ll feed the scavengers and decompose. Hopefully I’ve done some good for them with my passing deed.
Goodbye.
by submission | Jul 11, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steven Zeldin
Part of me is missing.
My friends, my family, they try to poke fun at it to improve my mood.
Yet something that was attached to me—that was me—is now an object sitting and rotting out there in the world.
I must replace that part of myself.
I have no idea what to do.
My doctors, they tell me—thankfully—that someone my age near me has had a stroke.
His brain is dead. But his arm isn’t.
They’ve done it for decades, they say. His arm could be mine.
It could. But I don’t know if it should.
“An arm is an arm,” they say. But that’s not true.
Mine was mine, and his is his.
Other doctors promise different things.
My nerves are intact. Little time has passed.
Replace it with a machine, they say. A mechanical prosthetic.
My brothers grin at me. “You could have a robot arm! We’re jealous.”
They are not jealous.
A perfect substitute for a part of me is not me.
When I complain too much, my parents lose their temper.
I am one of the “lucky ones”.
Decades ago, both choices were worse.
Prosthetic arms were plastic tidbits. They couldn’t move or even feel.
Transplanted arms had issues, too. Nerve regrowth was slow and stunted.
Before that, still, people just had to deal with it.
But I don’t feel lucky. The people who come after me will be lucky.
Sometimes it seems like the transplanted arm makes less sense.
“Nature is the best engineer. Its creations beat knockoffs.”
But nature is not an engineer. It is a random process that accidentally stumbles across function.
Plus, robot arms are still natural. Nature makes us, we make the arms.
The transplant arm’s a bit longer, a bit lighter. It doesn’t even look like me.
I would be attached to a part of a corpse.
Yet sometimes the prosthetic seems worse.
Someone hacked into my computer the other day. They posted vulgar things on the web.
What if someone hacks my arm?
“They wouldn’t. Top-notch security”, my doctors say.
That’s what the techies said about my laptop.
Someone could hack my arm and punch my mom. Or me.
Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know.
Yet I need to decide soon.
The transplant would feel more natural. The prosthetic could lift more weight.
I met a guy who has one of both. He’s happy. I feel bad for him.
I wish that, like some axolotl, I could regrow my limb from the nub.
Maybe, in the future, we could.
I envy those that will come after me.
I am trapped in the past of a better tomorrow.
by submission | Jul 10, 2021 | Story |
Author: Veronique Aglat
Devo was in bad shape. Red oil flowed freely from his arm implant. Lena reached into her bag and extracted a fat little jar with a screw top. She pulled her patient under a giant bamboo leaf. It would have to do. Hopefully, the drones wouldn’t spot them.
“Hold still,” she said.
“How can a metallic implant hurt as much as my flesh?” he said, grimacing.
“They connect it directly to your brain,” she said. Devo knew that already, but no one really understood until they got hurt.
“Can you fix it?” he asked.
The jar contained a slimy paste. Lena dabbed the implant and localized the cut.
“It’s the hose,” she said. “It’s cut lengthwise.”
She applied paste along the cut. It provided a temporary seal. She leaned back to examine her work and evaluated Devo’s chances of survival at 50% after 24 hours. Too bad, he had an easy smile, a small nose and a square jaw, which Lena liked.
“Go, girl! You fixed me.”
“It won’t last, you have to go to the medic building”, she said.
“The medic building! It’s too far. I won’t last out in the open.”
Devo sat heavily on the ground, his adrenaline spent.
Lena closed her bag. She pulled the automaton bird from its special pouch and prepared to phase back to her base.
“Good luck,” she said and pressed the deployment button.
Nothing happened.
She tried again.
“Looks like you’re stuck with me,” said Devo. “We both have to walk back. Unless you want to get on the transport.”
“The transports are only for healthy miners,” she said in a monotone.
He knew that too. If you got hurt mining, you were on your own. There were hundreds of healthy miners on the sidelines, waiting to make it big in the Barrens. The vast majority of them died before their 20th birthday.
Lena looked up; the bamboo leaf was a flimsy shield against the drones. How had she thought it sufficient a moment ago?
“Come on!” she urged. “We need to find better cover.”
She pointed to a palm grove about a hundred meters away.
“Protection,” she said.
They ran. As a miner, Devo had scored highest in Strength and Vitality. Lena couldn’t keep up with him. She scanned the sky frantically, expecting the drones to spot them. They lucked out. Devo was already pulling palms together when she arrived.
Now that they were safe, Lena examined the automaton to assess the damage.
“If you fix it, will you transport both of us back?” asked Devo.
Birding a live miner could result in the death penalty. The Law stated that only implants could be flown. The best outcome a medic could expect for flying through time and space with a live miner was Forced Labor, and only in very special circumstances. For instance, if the miner was the father of their child, or their son. Devo meant nothing to her.
“Sure,” she said.
Her hands worked fast. As a medic, she had scored highest in Dexterity and Intelligence.
“What are you doing?” he asked every two minutes.
She finished dismantling the wings. The chip in the center was fried. She needed to find a miner’s corpse; their brain implant contained the spare part she required. She slanted her eyes to Devo’s injury.
“I can’t fix it,” she said.
He grunted in disappointment.
“Look, you have a better chance of reaching the medics without me,” she said.
He nodded. He had also scored high in Self-Preservation, Lena guessed.
“Let me put another layer of sealant on the crack.”
He extended his arm, but his eyes were already scanning the jungle. She took out a grey substance and stuck it to his implant.
“There,” she said. “Run for it.”
He did, for about fifteen seconds. The explosive she detonated tore him apart. His cries of agony attracted a handful of dragonfly drones, which ripped him to pieces while Lena waited, buried under palm leaves.
Back at base, she received a promotion for using the miner as a source of spare parts. Many admired her ingenuity. As Team Leader, a title that granted her supervision of thousands of flying medics, she added a set of emergency wings to every medic’s base kit. She had stomach cancer, which melted sixty pounds of muscle from her body. She developed psoriasis. Her daughter died of anorexia. Her youngest son became a miner.
by submission | Jul 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Riley Meachem
“Come over this instant!” That was all the message said. Henry didn’t know what to do with it. He stared at it for a moment, with a certain, deducing distance. He hadn’t been in contact with this woman for over a year now. That’s a long time to go without speaking to someone. A long time to be receiving urgent demands to ‘come over’ anyway. And the tone of her voice on the message—it wasn’t that of a hesitant ex, embarrassed, yet driven, full of need. This was an order. It was angry.
He knew, for certain, what must be being done to him. He was going to be framed, made the stooge stud who had fathered a child. She had chosen him of all her exes, the easiest to cow and break. There would be a child, and he did not want it, wanted no part in its upbringing. He deleted the message.
Then another one came. “Henry, I need to speak to you—it’s important!” The brevity was startling, and the insistence an affront. He blocked her number.
Several weeks passed. Then there came a knock on the door one day as Henry sat alone in his apartment. He opened it and found her standing there. As he had suspected she was pregnant. His face must have revealed his paranoia, for almost immediately she chuckled and said “Oh, don’t worry—it’s not yours.”
“Can I—get you on record saying that?” Henry tried to ask, but the words seemed feeble and heartless to him, and they died halfway out of his mouth.
“Henry, you don’t seem to understand.” She strode into his place of living, noticed a half emptied bottle of gin. She had drained it before he could so much as protest. “I don’t want this baby pawned off on a man. I want it dead, Henry. I want you to help me kill it.”
“What… you mean like… pay for an abortion?”
“No: I tried that. It’s not a normal baby, see. Something got mixed in with it, somewhere along the line. It’s not human. It’s eating me, Henry. Bits of me. Memories, thoughts, feelings, looks. And worse, it seems capable of sparing me. It’s mother. Trapping me in my own corpse. For God knows how many years.”
“Well how do I kill it?” Henry inquired, unnerved by this exchange.
In response, she removed a .380 revolver from her purse.
“Please” she whispered. “I’ve tried, but I can’t do it alone. I’m a coward. Please Henry! You are the only one I trust! The only one I ever really loved!”
That hurt most of all, somehow. He threw her out of his apartment and locked the door, but she stayed by the door for hours, screaming and begging for his help. Then abruptly, late that night, the cries tapered off, turned to strangled croaks, then nothing.
Next time Henry saw her, her eyes were oddly blank and glassy. Her motions rigid. She was right. Right and gone.
by submission | Jul 8, 2021 | Story |
Author: David Barber
“Hurry, Igor!” called Miss Frankenstein.
Outside, the electrical storm drew closer, and thunder rumbled over the thrashing treetops to the south. Everything now depended on snatching lightning from the skies. A month of unseasonable fine weather had driven her near mad with impatience.
After so much work, after so many disappointments, after waiting so long, success was within her grasp. Her searching gaze took in the laboratory. Her laboratory.
More hygienic than robbing graves at midnight; more scientific than sewing together bits of dead bodies. What had her uncle hoped to achieve in the long run? There was no denying the heroic surgery, but it was a performance, not science. And it had all ended badly, chasing off into the Arctic after his creature. Such a male thing to do.
Igor limped into the laboratory, sloshing a flask of murky broth.
“The dead microbial culture?”
Her assistant nodded.
“And the Vital Principle?”
For a moment Igor’s face clouded, then cleared. “Ready.”
“Then bring it,” cried Frankenstein. “Bring it, and we shall create history!”
“Yes, master.”
“And don’t call me master. I am not him and you are not my servant. The old days are gone, we work together now. You are my assistant in this great enterprise.”
Igor did not answer. Perhaps he preferred the old days, nails black with gravedirt, the spat of voltage on reanimation nights, a whiff of corruption about the place.
When he returned, there was something about his expression, those beetling brows failing to hide a shiftiness in his gaze.
“You centrifuged the Vital Principle?” queried Frankenstein. “Then resuspended it in fresh broth?”
More nods.
“And checked the pH? The pH is critical.”
On the rooftop above, electricity danced about lightning conductors, then down copper wires to crackle round Igor as he closed the knife switch.
“Think!” she admonished him, while the very hairs on his head stood up as if in terror. “Dead microbes reanimated! Tomorrow, plant and animals, then one day, who knows, my uncles’ dream. Even people!”
The modern miracle of electricity meets the Vital Principle – the nucleic acid extracted from living microbes. The dawn of a new age! Men of science did not believe the Vital Principle was merely a chemical. But she would prove them wrong!
For a moment she swayed, dizzy with fatigue and euphoria. Months of work neared its climax. Perhaps she misunderstood the look on Igor’s face. Again she explained.
“Electricity will infuse the Vital Principle into the dead microbes. We will show they can live again! But do not concern yourself, Igor, we will dispose of them safely afterwards.”
She almost giggled. “They will not escape like Frankenstein’s monster.”
Igor said nothing. Preparing the Vital Principle earlier, he had dropped the flask of E. coli, but luckily found another, labelled Yersina pestis, left over from his old master’s investigations into the Black Death.
He’d used that instead. She would never know.
Busy with the future, her attention fixed on a clock as the bacterial mixture fizzed and bubbled into new life, she fluttered a hand vaguely.
“Go and see what that commotion is.”
Outside, the electrical storm lit up the sky, freezing the angry mob for an instant like a flashbulb, all jostling pitchforks and torches, before they burst into the lab to smash this latest abomination, loosing something monstrous into the winds.
