by submission | Nov 17, 2020 | Story |
Author: Connor Long-Johnson
We haven’t forgotten the moment the monsters came, and we still pass on the stories of that day. They descended in their rocket ships, cutting holes through our peaceful skies and filling our air with their toxic fumes.
First, they came in drabbles, then in droves.
The hoards greedily stretched their hands over our fields, our forests, and our skies.
The Interplanetary Peoples Agreement is what they called it up there, where they make the decisions for the rest of the galaxy. Down here we call it The Suicide Pact.
We should never have made a deal with humans.
They brought wonders we could never have imagined, flying machines the size of continents, powered by fusion drives.
Language, words we have never heard of like megacorporation, capitalism, and petroleum, flew from their mouths and swayed into our ears like leaves to the ground, finding new life in the rich soil of our curiosity.
Their arrival gave us unspoken promises that we might escape our terrestrial bonds and fly among the stars, our dreams powered by human industry.
We willingly welcomed them, our arms and minds open.
Our curiosity set ablaze, burning brightly like the dual suns above.
Then the rumble of thunder signaled the arrival of the warships.
The dropships descended like carrion to feast on the carcass of Praxion-5.
We cowered while The Federation raped our planet, too weak to fight but too loyal to flee.
The starlight fled as The Undoer, the flagship of the Federation’s fleet, entered orbit over the Ebony Continent.
The fission drill opened a fissure the size of the Great Crystal Glacier in the desert. Turning the black sands to glass in search of fuel for their conquest of the stars.
Leaving us on our knees, the humans left, their hunger unsated.
by Julian Miles | Nov 16, 2020 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Hey, Pete. What’s the name of this station again?”
“Celeste.”
“Appropriate.”
“Hush up, Davy. Get back to duty or the captain will murder us.”
“If he does that, he’ll have no-one to pilot or fix the ship.”
“Good argument, but I don’t want to listen to another of his speeches.”
“That’s a better argument.”
“Okay. So: what’s in the box, Davy?”
“Nothing, Pete.”
“Thank you for that. What was in the box?”
“No idea.”
“Scan the transit data.”
“There isn’t any.”
“Davy, the logistics computer told us about this anomalous box. Therefore, it was scanned.”
“Could the box be anomalous because it’s here without transit data?”
“Give you that. Okay, describe the box.”
“Can’t you see it?”
“No. The internal cameras are down in some sections.”
“So you can’t see me?”
“The captain can see your biotelemetry. I have nothing.”
“It’s a metal box. Two metres long, one high, one wide. There’s a nine-point locking mechanism in the lid, with an external lever.”
“Who’d open an unidentified shipment?”
“Don’t think that was the problem. See this?”
“No, Davy, I don’t. What is it?”
“There’s a hole in the lid. About a hundred mil in diameter. The metal is curled outward. It’s right next to where the lever is now.”
“You think something punched through the lid and let itself out?”
“Yes.”
“How thick is the metal?”
“About ten mil. It’s a laminate. Middle layer must be what prevented scanning of the contents.”
“Not unusual. But you think an unknown something arrived in a box from we don’t know where, got itself loaded into the holding bay, then let itself out and is now roaming the station?”
“Makes more sense than mass hysteria causing everyone to jump into the lifepods and leave.”
“So, after dumping the lifepods to hide its presence, what did it do with the bodies?”
“How many could you fit in an airlock if you stacked them?”
“On this ship? Standard four-suit locks, so I’d guess five across, maybe eight high.”
“Around 40, then. How many lock cycles have there been in the last week?”
“Apart from us, three. That’s odd. All Lock B, and at four-hour intervals. Last one was midnight last night.”
“How many crew should there be?”
“Around a hundred.”
“The math works.”
“Davy, why? Why would some lethal thing be sent here? It makes no sense.”
“Pete, this station is the furthest out. If you wanted to test something, this is the place.”
“Test?”
“To see if the plan to get it in here works. To see how deadly it is.”
“They’d have to monitor it.”
“Not if it went back to report.”
“In a pinnace? The range is tiny. Even if it scavenged the lifepods for boosters.”
A huge vibration shakes the station.
“Pete, what was that?”
“Hang on, Davy.”
“Pete?”
“Davy, that was our ship explosively undocking. Passive displays show it’s pushed the station out of stable orbit.”
“We can presume the captain is dead, then.”
“That’s cold. But yes.”
“Is this station really dead?”
“Absolutely. Even the orbit stabilisation systems are useless.”
“Then I’ll start tearing out communications gear and filling the second pinnace. Even if it’s been smashed up inside, we should be able to launch into atmosphere and survive the landing. You grab as much food and water as you can.”
“Don’t forget charge packs, Davy!”
“Good reminder. How long do we have?”
“No idea. Let’s get off this death sentence as soon as possible.”
“See you in pinnace two.”
“Looking forward to it. Well, the not dying bit, anyway.”
“Love you to. Get moving.”
by submission | Nov 15, 2020 | Story |
Author: Jatayu
When David first met her she seemed sad, but afterward, when their time had expired she held him close, asking him to stay a little longer.
When he came back the next week her eyes lit up and she smiled just a little, unsure if it was okay. They made love, each trying to please the other. She kissed his body and face, responding to his touch, whispering his name. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, rousing only when the concierge came to knock on the door.
David came back every week and soon every few days and, though expensive, their trysts lasted longer each time. She asked him what he liked to eat and every Friday they would have a late dinner on the balcony. There in the sun’s last warmth, he would tell her about his day and never ask her about hers. She asked questions and listened, her eyes always on his face, her fingers caressing his cheek or touching his hand.
Once, he mentioned a woman he was fond of and a look of hurt crossed her face. She gripped his fingers tightly and whispered,
“But you’re mine!” as tears slid down her cheeks. He stood up and drew her to him, whispering his love, kissing away her tears…
*
” I’m sorry sir but our units are not for sale.”
David regarded the dapper little man before him.
“She isn’t a unit. Her name is Christine and I love her. And she loves me. Please, name your price and I will meet it.”
The dapper little man named an exorbitant figure, but David was a wealthy man. He would have paid twice as much without blinking.
When David went to her apartment and told her what he had done, she trembled with excitement and threw her arms around him, weeping with joy.
“Oh my dearest, I promise you I will make you so happy!”
“Sweet woman, you already have.”
And they lived happily ever after.
*
The dapper little man was on the phone,
“TeleGen? Hi. We’ll be needing a replacement for our Christine model xj- 243622. Oh? Well. Tell me about the new models…”
by submission | Nov 14, 2020 | Story |
Author: Kathleen Bryson
We only travel at night and we only travel in a small pen. The pen is an invention that means we can keep our time travelling in a small place so we can’t create anomalies. We only travel at night is a phrase that popped up in a dream of my mine and now it is our motto. We explore dinosaur worlds but we cannot explore the future as it has not happened yet and it has not happened yet. We explore Ming dynasties and the less salubrious. We keep inside these little KFC buckets we call pens so it is not much fun so far despite how much we paid for the series of individualised vacation packages. Also everything is dark. Because we only travel at night.
Last week we travelled to 2006. The craze back then was big cities like Rome, London, Berlin, Budapest creating fake beaches and people coming out in bathing suits and umbrellas on the sands poured over concretes. It was just that it was so dark because we only travel at night and it was like entering a house party after its peak; people overdrunk and the floor sticky.
There was a flyer amongst the grains for a new floating pool named after Josephine Baker based on one in 1973, so we took inspiration and also travelled to Paris in 1973. There was the floating pool in the nighttime Seine and like the fake beaches the floating pool was community-minded, set up with lap lanes. No one was swimming at the late hour but we bobbed the pen around for a few floats to see the concentric circles rising, to make a mark upon this old time, but the circles on the water just grew and then faded. And like the fake beaches the floating pool in the inky river was a fake on a fake, an elaboration on something already curlicued. Like the previous sentence. We only travel at night.
We only travel at night. We are meta upon meta. We are the sunless thing that reflects the thing. We hate metacomments on the process, as pure evil as critiques of 1) one’s creative process or 2) good sex. We watch these other times like television shows. So we cannot claim Baudrillard is wrong. We consider however Baudrillard’s own writings on simulacra just reflections themselves too, the fractals spoiling. Or, worse, the water circles fading, we never were and really we never weren’t.
by submission | Nov 13, 2020 | Story |
Author: Kathleen Bryson
We succumbed to space tourism at last and went last week to see the prickly end of the sun, you know it’s always got those jutting little rays like in a good graphic design, and we petted the end of one sunbeam. It was furry like a sun kitten, oops I mean a sun dog, you know what I mean, something small and cuddly, or maybe you don’t; we petted and stroked that little star till it purred. You, being a former professional face-painter, mentioned that based on this experience you might have in the past constructed something marvellous for a paying child: a beautiful dandelion masterpiece from ear to ear.
Then you grabbed it with both hands, the perspective was working in your favour, you grabbed it with both hands and you started to knead our sun like bread. It was the opposite of yeast; our sun grew smaller and smaller; you held a glowing piece of amber between your thumb and forefinger eventually, and then you swallowed it down. Ouch, you said. It’s hot! Hot-hot, not spicy hot, you clarified, but as if you needed to tell me that.
It is permeating your stomach walls, I told you as a secret, it’s not going to make it to your digestive system. It’s in your uterus now.
The sun was further gone than that by then; it was in your bloodstream; your blood was yellow. You were a yellow-bellied coward. You were a hot-golden-blooded regular gal. Our sun, our Sol, became even more insignificant than that; it was only in your mind; it was in molecules; it was working from an entirely new periodic table of elements, atoms, smaller than the clinic, smaller than the ultrasound, smaller than the insufficient nurse’s acronym for something spontaneous, SAB, outer space.
I think we need some space, you said, after you swallowed our sun.
by submission | Nov 12, 2020 | Story |
Author: Harry J. Bentham
A deep vista of stars rested in the boundless black, subordinate to the rays of a single white sun above the time-scarred wastes of the surface. There stood cliffs, cruel and capricious, and the winds piped in an endless song through deep canyons. For eons that planet had rested, as some monument to the remotest past.
Now, with purpose, a disturbance arose within the vast cosmic void above that hitherto undisturbed realm. A trail of cloudy matter had formed distantly in the dark heavens, spearheaded by a glittering bullet of silver and gold.
The gales, hallowing the supreme isolation of the world, were pierced by a shrill and insolent new sound. Only minutes later, the source of the violation hurriedly descended. Halo-like rings of light traced the arrival a graceful apparatus, resembling a metallic disc crowned by an array of dark spikes and antennae. For a moment it hovered over the stone, even as a sphynx-like body of rock stared on.
No sooner had the disc fully settled on its landing gear than a bipedal form stumbled from a glowing bay, now opening at its wing. A curious mask covered the face of the visitor, with grotesque goggles and black garb occluding any sign of flesh on that uninvited species.
The figure stopped with confident bearing, looking to the solemn face of the sphynx-shaped guardian of rock with suspicion. As if for reassurance, he then tilted his head to regard the glint of the mothership gliding so far above. A second figure stepped forward, a little more nervous than the first, almost recoiling under the stare of the beastly form and face in the stone gazing down on them.
Neither figure said a word, so imposing were the howls and bellows of the developing storm sweeping those unvisited rocks. The leading figure produced some radiant rectangular device, with an evidently benign optical purpose. He held the pane resolutely against the desolate vista of grey and white. The man turned steadily, regarding with greatest interest the visages that seemed to protrude from all the strange rockfaces, capturing every contour of the skyline through that window he held.
Dismissively, the leading figure gestured for the other to return to the warm glow of the bay at the wing of the disc. The nervous man beat his own ear with a gloved hand, as if he had missed some inaudible instruction from his superior. He looked again with caution upon the weird visage of stone. But the rays of light from the white sun migrated and grew in intensity, and under that new brilliance the features of the sphynx appeared to recede and give way to only the twists and caprices of bare geology.
The peculiar craft, still lit with its open bay and its halo of spinning light, waited for the figure to return. Some minutes passed, but the explorer still stood. Then, with great caution, the man stepped back up the ramp at the disc’s wing. The bay drew shut.
With new yellow lights blinking upon it, the rapport of the trespassing vehicle with its gleaming mothership returned. It ascended vertically with ever-increasing haste, its own shrill artificial whine overpowering the whisper of the winds.
All things fell silent for a moment, before the eons-long song of the planet’s wind restored its sovereignty over the sterile cliff faces and ravines. Soon, with the setting of the sun, grim shadows grew once more. The vague but somber impression of the face upon the head of the cosmic sphynx had returned.
