by submission | Nov 26, 2020 | Story |
Author: David Barber
“What did you say this place was called?” repeated the alien.
“The Large Hadron Collider.”
The man’s name was Theo Jacobson, and before the aliens came, he’d been in charge here. This was where debris from colliding protons had sparkled through the ATLAS detector. It would have been lethal to stand here once. He couldn’t get used to the silence in these vast cathedral spaces.
“Such efforts your kind put into science.”
“Such foolishness,” added its Shadow.
The aliens always went about in pairs; the True and its Shadow. Like so much else, the significance of this eluded us.
The True waved a three-fingered hand. They assumed human form for our convenience, they said. Perhaps they hadn’t looked very closely. “Explain its purpose again.”
The man was weary of all this. “The Higgs boson.”
“A made-up particle.” Grinning, the Shadow waved its arm through the yellow steel tubing of the safety rail.
Holograms, the scientist in Jacobson protested. Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Without thinking, he did the experiment and the alien offered no resistance to his hand.
“You are in love with matter,” declared the True, unconcerned. Much of what they said sounded like quotes. “You expect us to be flesh, but we are beyond all that.”
Its Shadow butted in. “Hadrons. Bosons. Holograms. Your science words explain nothing.” It had a go at laughter, sounding like a creaky door.
Jacobson had tried to make sense of what they had told humankind, how the New Agers and astrologers, the believers in spirits, crystals, and magic had been right all along.
It was nonsense. He banged his fist on the safety railing and the sound boomed round the detector hall. I refute it thus!
“Either you are tricking us, or all of science is wrong,” he persisted. “Occam’s razor.”
“Not wrong,” said the True. “But shallow. Like a puddle.”
Politicians and the media had taken to parroting opinions like these. There had been a surprising groundswell of schadenfreude at the plight of scientists.
“We once saw the world as you do,” the aliens had explained in a famous interview. “Then we learned that there was a deeper reality.”
They insisted that sometime around the Renaissance, humankind had taken a wrong turn. Prayer worked in the Middle Ages, miracles were common, and a bag of saint’s bones had power. We should believe more, not less.
The aliens had announced themselves from every TV in the world. A simple magic, they told our leaders, as they popped up at secret meetings, in secure bunkers, in bathrooms. Something anyone could learn to do.
The Shadow was remorseless. “Textbooks only the clever can understand, ever more expensive machines for these rituals, endless theories. This is what you called physics.”
Of course talk like this was nonsense. Science found out how the world worked, but it was hard work, and the aliens had told us we didn’t need to bother.
“What was wrong with steam engines and horses?” the True asked, almost sadly.
Jacobson did not answer. He had glimpsed the future and it did not include him.
“Anyway,” concluded the Shadow. “Most of your kind preferred things the way they were.”
It wouldn’t happen all at once, but in a generation or two, their best minds would be wrangling over alchemy. They had traveled too far and too fast. Imagine if they had gotten loose in the universe.
Soon, the cloaked alien starship could slip away.
by submission | Nov 25, 2020 | Story |
Author: Tyler James Russell
We shook her and asked if she was okay but she wouldn’t budge. Even when Davey tugged on her jacket and said Mommy she held her position on the sidewalk like it was something that might be taken from her. She clutched her briefcase, a paper bag of groceries.
911 was already overloaded. Marissa pressed her face to the window while Davey held his belly. I hollered. The operator, thinking it was meant for him, waited for me to speak and I waited for him to speak and in the end, neither of us did.
Outside, Trish still hadn’t moved. I apologized to the kids, held them, the kind of patient that only comes after losing your temper. It was almost dark. We pulled back the curtains and worried, made faces, but she was impenetrable. What are you supposed to do? In the end I went out barefoot, plucked a few groceries from her hands, but even when I said her name, snapped in her face, it was like only her body was there.
For the rest of the night I kept the curtains drawn, and glued myself to speculations. Apparently, this was going on everywhere, all kinds of people. A lot of women, but not only. A stripped-down newscast showed strings of people along highways—Black, Hispanic, you name it, all frozen in place. Corners crowded with question marks. A transgender woman wore a shirt that said, “Until.”
“Experts say this is voluntary,” a newscaster said. It begged the question, expert in what? “That they all chose it, together, at a designated time.”
Another anchor, obviously crying, said, “Nobody knows. What is happening to these people, and will it happen to us too?” After the commercial, she was gone.
I didn’t do this. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t my fault.
In the morning she was still there, still frozen. For days they didn’t move, didn’t eat. Some fainted, others shrugged off paramedics urging them onto gurneys. Counter-actors—spurned spouses, I imagined, involuntarily now-single parents—screamed in their faces. The kids branched around her like little rivers on our way to the restaurant where the waitstaff wear animal costumes, but even there three employees just stood in the way.
“Ignore them,” a manager sighed.
What gave them the right to just stop in the middle of their lives? Don’t we all have problems?
Then, on the news that night, an otherwise normal-looking man was handcuffed and gentled into a police car. He’d been arrested prowling the streets of Des Moines with a rifle. As they zoomed in on his face he showed a palm and two fingers, mouthing, “Beat that.”
I turned my phone off. I sat for a long time in the dark.
There was one else on the entire street. By now the groceries had gone bad in her hands.
I imagined a sort of abstract trauma-cloud in the air and thought of what it would be like to take that into your body, to own it, voluntarily or not. I didn’t get it though, not really.
“Please,” I whispered to Trish, “I just want to listen.”
But I also wanted her to hit me, to snap awake and take a dented soup can to my temple. I wanted to be emptied at her feet, bloodied and begging, a reckoning sprouting into the air like breathable atomic dust.
But she didn’t, of course. She just stood there, frozen, waiting.
by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 24, 2020 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
She studied his naked body as he slept, unconsciousnessly comparing the network of scars to a mental map burned into her subconscious. Every knife wound, bullet hole, piece of shrapnel, every evidence of every torture session, a testament to his fidelity.
There was no doubt of who he was, even with the marks of atrocities undocumented in her memory, she knew, without a doubt, this was the man.
Her entire life had been spent pursuing him, at least so much of her life she no longer had any memory of anything else.
Studying his philosophy, almost adopting it as her own.
Understanding his motivations, his beliefs with an intensity bordering on fanaticism, until she worried she would lose her sense of where she ended and he began.
She knew him, understood him, almost sympathized with him in a way she never believed was possible when this mission began.
And yet here she was.
So many insignificant lives lost, so much incidental collateral damage.
The killings, the bombs, the engineered catastrophes, in his name. For this. To get close to him, to get this close, to be sure.
As she studied the rise and fall of his chest, listened to the measured cadence of his breath, the sweat of each other’s exertions still fresh on his skin, she nearly forgot that he wasn’t a man. He was something else, something fabricated, an automaton manufactured by the other side for the sole purpose of sowing chaos and discord, a machine of subversive terror and destruction.
And she’d finally gotten to him.
She wondered if he even knew what he was, as he gave no indication that he did so. He spoke of his youth, the abuses by her people that had led him to become what he’d become. Were those implanted, those memories? Did he have any memories of his own, any memory of anything else?
She pushed her thumb inside her mouth into the top molars on the right side. Those were the instructions. They wouldn’t be tracking her until it was time, couldn’t be in case such a signal was detected. Instead, she’d left updates, cryptic messages on napkins and such in restrooms along the way to mark progress, but now she would be broadcasting her location and they would come for him, for them both.
“Thirty minutes,” they had said in the briefings, “we’ll have choppers on standby. Thirty minutes from your signal to insertion and evac.”
As she waited, she lay her head on his chest, felt the steady beating of his heart, listened to the rhythm of his breathing.
It wouldn’t be long now.
Absently she traced the line of scar tissue from a mortar strike where it followed his collar bone.
For a moment she felt something she hadn’t felt before, heat slowly rising in her chest. Was this guilt? Regret? Did she love him?
From the street one would have observed the light and heat of a small sun as the incursion unit nova’d, erasing itself and all evidence of the terrorist unit, then settling to the slow, steady task of reducing the building to ash while it waited for the fire department to arrive.
by Julian Miles | Nov 23, 2020 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Two guns: one an Earther automatic, the other a Lenkormian beamer.
“Holy Marduk, that’s a Grifone!”
And we have an enthusiast. I grin at the young trooper.
“Only by looks. It’s a custom Perez .557 automatic. I spent some time at his compound when I was stationed in Lima.”
He points to the white steel death on my other hip.
“Lenk or Kor?”
I do like a being who knows their xenohistory.
“Lenk body, Kor chassis. Genuine Lenkormian cell.”
He goes whiter than the weapon we’re discussing.
“A Forever Gun?”
I nod. Any second now…
He starts to bring his rifle up. The Forever Gun flits from its holster to be in my hand by the time I need to think ‘fire’. The beam goes through his right eye and exits through the left parietal.
“Stand down! Your fancy beamers won’t cut cerasteel.”
I turn to face the armoured warrior with Lieutenant’s stripes on the left chest. A man with that many service bars should be better than enthusiasts like the one I just killed. I level the Perez at him and put an armour-piercing round containing depleted uranium pellets floating in liquid Teflon through his stripes. Either load would be sufficient, but the excessive blend seems to really upset the people we need to annoy.
He hits the floor, blood already seeping around the torso plates. I hope they open him in a container. It’ll take ages to clean the smaller bits off a floor.
“I recognise that cannon blast. Have you started, Red?”
My overwatch. As the cliché goes: if you think I’m nasty, just hope I don’t need her to intervene.
“Ran into a gun collector at the gate. He recognised the combo.”
“Didn’t the cannonball go straight through?”
“That was mincing his Lieutenant.”
“Didn’t think you’d waste a shot. Okay: target is in the central compound.”
“That’s three gates and a couple of towers away?”
“Yes. While I would never doubt your abilities, it might be an idea to flush game.”
I’m dangerous, but without my war machine about me, the second fire tower will turn me into prime cuts and carbon. Jogging towards the next gate, I use the Forever Gun’s ridiculous range to drop all three troopers before I get there. Sadly, I have to shoot their Lieutenant in the back as he’s too busy running. Never put a soft officer on critical duty.
“General Ranno! Remember the Twenty-First Keshichan Lancers? I’m Khevtuul Chloe Bastia, and I’m here to end your days!”
Four years ago he led us into an ambush. He used that betrayal to get himself a promotion into enemy ranks, going from Cherbi to General at the cost of the people who trusted him.
“Nicely over-the-top, Red. He’s moving.”
“Away from me?”
“You need confirmation?”
“As a Khevtuul, I reported directly to him. If he’s not running, that’s a body double. Politics and cowardice were his only competencies.”
“He’s exited the central compound, heading away, but slowly.”
“Do I need to crack another gate?”
“Use something splashy.”
I point the Perez at the distant gate house and thumb the integral laser designator. In the car park across the road, an assault drone ruins its camper van disguise by sending something fast with a thermobaric warhead to do my destroying.
As flaming bits of gate and soldiers rain down, I hear a chuckle.
“Konnichi wa, General-kun.”
The sky lights up as Saeko-chan fires the anti-ship beamer she affectionately calls ‘Torchy’.
“He’s done. Spread like smoking geography. Let’s go home.”
“Thanks.”
“Anytime. I love killing things with you.”
That’s my girl.
by submission | Nov 22, 2020 | Story |
Author: Emily Wilcox
She died today. Blonde ringlets trodden down into the hardwood floor. A world overlooking her, eyes slick with awe and grins stitched firmly just below. A kingdom, a fandom, whatever we were, we were building from the inside, elevating the pedestal in which we already stood. Like a princess, they loved her. Like a superhero, they beckoned her. Like a diamond, they were not worthy of her. And like a star, nearing the end of its lifetime (which I guess is exactly what she was), she was unstable, finite, destined to burst fiercely into the night. A supernova of gold and now dust.
She’s really gone.
I shouted, “Cut!” on set. Tried to pull her out of it. *Milking the role a bit*, I thought to myself. I hopped up, clapped my hands, shouted at the cast. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. Her life did not resume off-camera. But it ended – there on screen.
It was ironic really; *live television*, when there she lay, anything but.
by submission | Nov 21, 2020 | Story |
Author: Tyler James Russell
When a wall of bone and fascia bloomed from the earth a hundred miles from our village, my dead almost-girlfriend stood over my bed, waiting for me to wake up.
“You,” I whispered.
We’d been longtime girlfriends but only vaguely girlfriends just before she died, making out for the first time the same week a vein throbbed open and the rushing blood sledgehammered her brain. Now, in the dark, her eyes buzzed. Her hair floated and sang.
I didn’t know anything about the wall, not until later, picking up whispers on the road, second and third-hand. People said it was pollution, visitation, a further sign of the planet’s death. As far as walls go it was stupid, just erupted in the middle of a field, dividing nothing. You could walk all the way around it.
She was cold. Every time she opened her mouth, she sputtered. Like her lungs weren’t made for air now. We did our best. For certain things, it doesn’t matter. I imagined mirrors facing each other on either side of some watery barrier, trying my best to anchor her to this side, to me.
There were riots. Mobs and fires. Armies were called in. Some treated the wall like a holy place. A man with no mouth left it speaking. Allegedly a pregnant woman burrowed into it and came out with a baby that glowed. But then a parade of pilgrims arrived to be cured of their sins and one by one they touched their foreheads to the surface and it killed them. Their companions dragged the bodies away, then went back and took their chances.
* * *
When we finished, I felt whole. After she died, all my want had been sharpened to this tiny dagger, this lethal-need. Now I slept like I’d finally been stabbed with it.
But by morning she was wormy again, fly-covered. Centipedes crawled under her skin.
* * *
I set out for answers. It was dark, but everything was always dark. Even day was a shadow. Apparently, the same thing had happened in other places too—a jagged streak of deaths and short-term resurrections, bodies like wind-lifted leaves. Maybe it would have brought a better person hope, but the more I heard of miracles, the more I wanted to burn the world down. A black hole ate everything I fed it.
I followed the Moon-ring from horizon to horizon, heading west. Monolithic shapes drifted in the sky, so exactly the color of night I was never sure what I was actually seeing and what I only thought I was seeing. The wall, when I got there, was the same way. It grumbled and shifted, a thing constantly being born. There were ribbons of color in the air. I thought maybe I’d feel different when I saw it for myself, but everything was still the same.
Soldiers, mounted and armed, streamed out of the hillsides. The pilgrims closed their eyes, held hands in a protesting line. Just before they collided into slaughter, one by one, everyone lifted into the air, floating. I watched them pedaling their feet, faces giddy, in awe.
It made it easy for me to nab someone’s weapon and do what I did.
