by submission | Jul 19, 2020 | Story |
Author: Ken Poyner
Stoyan looks down at the broken glass.
“You would be this awkward if you had six legs,” he says.
And I probably would be. No matter what else, this host-an-alien program is proving a way to expand perceptions. I am learning oh so much. Stoyan is teaching me all about awkward. He wouldn’t say clumsy, oh self-consciously no, but he would admit awkward.
Mina two doors down is hosting a gas-based visitor. Most of the day he spends swirling about in his translucent orb, tapping out short messages, emitting revelations about the universe he seems to think Mina would love to know. At night, he lets himself out, is sustained in the ambient air pressure as a string of glittering vapor. He quietly had been having sex with Mina in her sleep for two weeks before she knew it, if you want to call what he does with her sex. Now that she knows, she hasn’t attempted to stop him. She doesn’t quite yet know how she can, or whether she should.
Stroyan is waiting for me to sweep up the glass. This is the second breakage this week. All the while, Mina and I and others in the guest program catalog what each visiting alien species can and cannot do, which bends and folds they cannot accomplish, what corners befuddle them, what passions drive them. When they finally get comfortable, settle into an accommodating niche, that will be our time to strike.
by submission | Jul 18, 2020 | Story |
Author: Nick Carter
Blackness. Brilliant light. Twinkling suns. It was beautiful. He had never seen anything like it. Even from the starship, it wasn’t like this. There, he was held back by man-made metals and alloys. “Barriers,” he thought. Barriers holding him back from the true beauty of the world. The universe. No more. Almost. He still had a spacesuit keeping him at bay. He was so close to being free, free from the restraints of an artificial existence. No longer would he be held accountable for trivial responsibilities. No more checklists, long shifts, or drama from other crew members. He gazed out towards one of the smaller stars in his view. So much potential, unparalleled, really. So much possibility for great civilizations, monumental accomplishments. It was all probably happening right now. New life sprouting upon thousands, millions of planets. Old life continuing to grow and develop an understanding of their world, or about to die out, like a soft breath over a flame. And he wouldn’t see it. He would not get to witness any of it. Which was the objective of his mission? Was. It was no longer his mission. He did not have to carry it out anymore. It was someone else’s job. This gave him no comfort. He wanted this mission. This was his mission. No more. He looked at his oxygen levels. Very low. Two minutes until depletion. He looked on this in sorrow. He floated in serenity for what seemed like hours. No thinking, just feeling. Feeling his gloves, his boots. The warmth they provided. He could also feel the cold. The cold from the outside. The cold from the universe. He could feel its touch. He welcomed it. One minute. He listened, but could only hear his breathing. Thirty seconds. He did not want this, but where would be a better place to perish? Twenty seconds. He was among the stars. Ten seconds. He took off his helmet, the last barrier, and felt the cold embrace of the cosmos. He was home.
by submission | Jul 17, 2020 | Story |
Author: Brian Maycock
Free drinks for life.
I was nineteen when I said yes.
The machine announces its intentions with a gentle hum. A can is dispensed.
I feel dizzy, nauseous.
I’ve hardly slept for the last week. We’re going to lose the Mitchell account and it’s my fault. I could lose my job. This morning’s meeting is my last chance to get things back on track.
I look at the can. Its logo: the smiling face at its centre.
I can’t do this. Not today. Not right now.
The train station’s exit is right in front of me. If I can just get outside. I hurry towards the door.
There is another hum, the clank of another can landing in a dispenser.
I increase my pace. There is a third vending machine by the exit doors.
I pass it. Hum. Clank. The automatic doors remain closed. I look at my watch. I’ve got twenty minutes to get to the meeting. I can’t be late.
I take the new can from the dispenser, click it open and begin to drink it.
The doors slide open with a sigh which, the can now empty, I echo.
A contented sigh is the reaction that’s required, and the doors remain open while I put the can in the recycling box that accompanies each vending machine. I walk out into the street. My stomach cramps and burns.
I was nineteen. I am thirty-seven now. I am diabetic and medically defined as morbidly obese. The chip embedded in my spinal cord is less than a millimetre in circumference. They let me hold it in its sterile wrapper as I lay in bed in the clinic while the anaesthetic kicked in.
It is all about the best deal these days. Competition. Incentives. Choice. I’m the only Lifer I know.
Which isn’t saying much. Since my wife left me two years ago I don’t get out. My life revolves around my job at the advertising agency.
I am sweating badly by the time I reach the hotel. A conference room on the sixth floor has been booked, where I will present my vision for moving forwards.
Crap.
There is a vending machine by the elevator. I am close enough for my chip to activate the vending process.
Nowadays it is everyday to top up your chip with credit for twenty cans. For a dozen energy bars. A four-pack of masks. You can cancel, change, you are in charge. And all the while your chip and the vending machines are sharing so that they know you as well as you know yourself, if not better.
I have a prototype inside me. Because of the health issues associated with my weight, I have been told that taking it out is too dangerous.
A can rolls into the dispenser. I can’t walk up six floors and the elevator won’t admit me until the vending process is complete. I gulp down the sweet liquid as quickly as I can and feel the pain and heat begin to build inside me once more.
The sweat is falling into my eyes and I can barely see the elevator button as I press it. The doors oblige. I take deep breaths. As long as I can make it to a bathroom to wash and try and smarten up before I go into the meeting it will be fine.
When I stagger through the door, the vending machine in the bathroom greets me with a can, smile side up. I begin to weep.
by submission | Jul 16, 2020 | Story |
Author: David K Scholes
Through the Unified Mind I perceived the vastness of this Einstein-Newton Gap. One of the tracts of interstellar space where neither true teleportation nor even hyperspace travel were possible. You just had to crawl across these “gaps” at just sub-light speed. Nor, by its creator’s design, could this snail’s pace travel be circumvented by inter-dimensional or inter-reality travel. It had been tried and you just ended up back where you started.
The mighty Streene Star fleets stretched across the gap as far as the Uni-Mind could perceive. Each fleet crawling along at just under light speed. If just one of them got across the gap there would be nothing to stop these masters of hyperspace and their otherwise near-omnipotent technology.
Our Earth star fleet enhanced by the Prime Non-Corporeal stood ready. Defensive shields and offensive weaponry augmented to another order of magnitude. The Prime’s energies flowing within and around each of our ships and enveloping the entire fleet.
The leading Streene fleet was approaching the edge of the gap. While within the gap they were vulnerable and beyond it they were not.
Four other Uni-Minds were present. Briefly, they melded into a single Ultimate level Uni-Mind resulting in a level of cosmic awareness and consciousness that the mind’s few corporeal participants could not even have imagined.
The Streene were hit just before they emerged from the Einstein-Newton gap. Inconceivably vast swathes of abstract energies from the Ultimate level Uni-Mind combined with the full offensive physical energy firepower of an Earth Starfleet hugely enhanced by the Prime.
The first of the colossal Streene fleets was stopped just within the Einstein-Newton gap but at a cost. The Ultimate level Uni-Mind fusion was broken down into its four smaller Uni-Mind components and then almost immediately broken down further into the individual participant minds that were dispersed like chaff back to their corporeal and non-corporeal hosts. I suspected this was no great inconvenience for the non-corporeals but more of a problem for the corporeal participants such as myself.
Even with the protection of the Prime, the Earth star fleet suffered heavy losses.
As my consciousness returned to my mere corporeal body lying inert within the Earth Fleet flagship I was deeply troubled. Had we suffered so much simply to have repelled only the first of the Streene formations?
Within the consciousness of the Ultimate Uni-Mind the second of the Streene fleets had loomed ominously close and I had thought the Prime would be arranging an immediate re-grouping of our forces. Yet back with the Earth fleet I was able to view the progress of the other Streene fleets from a different perspective. Even though enhanced by the Prime the Earth Fleet view of events was not at Uni-mind level. I saw in human terms just how distant even the second slow-moving Streene Fleet was.
The Prime had more urgent matters to attend to and might choose an entirely different set of defenders and even form of defence in its next encounter with the Streene wherever in the latticework of gaps that battle might take place. In this Forever War.
The remainder of the Earth Fleet and almost all elements of the Ultimate Uni-Mind were no longer required. We had served our purpose for the Prime.
Nor could our residual Earth Fleet even consider staying on alone at the edge of the Einstein-Newton gap to repel the intruders.
By the time the second of the immortal Streene fleets arrived at the edge of the gap, we would be a ghost fleet with all of us dead for millennia.
by submission | Jul 15, 2020 | Story |
Author: Mina
Karo-Pik landed the one-man shuttle in a clearing, high in the mountain chain that crossed the largest continent on Kymera but below the tree line. He exited the craft as the sun rose, casting an orange glow to his golden eyes. Eyes that could spot a beetle in a moonless night adjusted to the increase in light. The sun glinted on the scales that covered his powerful bi-pedal body. The only evidence that remained of his humble origins, before the gen-gineering age and mutagenesis was a byword for progress, was that he still had four limbs and a nominal sex that was no longer visible. The human shell had been modified and improved so that no vulnerable spot remained, like the ridiculously fragile neck documented in pictures before the Gen-Esis movement took hold. Colour still signalled your role in life and Karo-Pik’s bottle green scales signalled him as a member of the ruling elite.
If Karo-Pik’s perfectly symmetrical features had been capable of movement, he would have been frowning. He did not understand what had called him here. But the call was real, pulling him to the stream at the edge of the clearing and then down the slope following the singing, silver ribbon. The call, like a blinding beacon in a featureless void, pulled him to the mouth of a cave, then deep inside the body of the mountain until he reached a cavern lit by the luminous purple lichen on its craggy surfaces. In the centre of the cavern was a pool, its surface slick and glistening like oil.
Strands of black shadow collected over the liquid’s surface and coalesced to form the shape of – a rider on a horse? Karo-Pik could only base himself on memories of ancient records, as no horses remained in his time. A voice echoed in his head, cold, cruel, and contemptuous:
– So glad you could spare me some time, little lizard.
– What are you?
– Ah, you probably won’t remember my brothers: war, famine, pestilence, and death. They have, after all, been eradicated in your brave new universe.
– I don’t understand.
– Hmph! You have forgotten your own mythology. In any case, it was inaccurate, there were always five of us: war, famine, pestilence, death, and hubris.
– Hubris?
– Yessss, your mythology turned me into a snake in a garden with a tree of knowledge at its heart. But it really had nothing to do with good and evil.
– It didn’t?
– No, the real hubris was when you turned yourselves into infant gods, playing with the building blocks of life.
– Why am I here?
– Oh, you are here as a historian. I am giving you a chance to leave a myth behind you for those that will follow when you have been eradicated and creation begins again. The end will come with a whisper, not a bang. Consider it a chance to leave a warning that there were always five of us.
*****
Karelian yawned and tried to keep awake as Professor Bardel droned on about myths and legends. He had always found the Legend of Karo-Pik and the Fifth Horseman particularly boring. Nothing happened, just lots of talking. What the fuck were horses anyway? Legends were just an attempt to find an explanation for the unexplainable. No one knew why the Mosa-Ikans had disappeared throughout the known universe in the blink of an eye. Karelian yawned again, just ten more minutes then he would be able to leave the lecture on Origin Myths and head off to the class that mattered, Reverse Genetics.
by submission | Jul 14, 2020 | Story |
Author: David Henson
“Roger, I know you like vegetable soup, but I can’t stand that slurping,” Rhonda says.
“Aw, let me enjoy my lunch. You do things that bother me, too.”
Rhonda clicks her tongue.
“Things like that. So …” Roger exaggerates a slurp.
“Have it your way.” Rhonda picks up her phone from the table and launches her new sensory modification app. It automatically connects to a chip in her brain. She types: “When Roger slurps his soup, I’ll hear wind chimes.”
Roger shakes his head and puts down his spoon. “I know what you did.” He removes his phone from his shirt pocket and types a command. “Now, my dear, you can click a tongue symphony and it won’t bother me a bit.” He smirks.
Rhonda types: “Blur Roger’s smirk.” When she looks at her husband, a foggy oval replaces his mouth. She throws an eyebrow arch at him, knowing he hates that.
Roger types on his phone and says. “Tit for tat, my dear, tit for tat. In fact …” He tappity tap taps another command then grins and lowers his gaze to Rhonda’s chest.
Rhonda gasps. “Did you just eye-block my breasts? Or are you seeing another woman’s in their place?”
Roger’s face softens. “Sweetie, you know me better than that.” He slides his hand tentatively toward hers.
Not wanting to be tempted to make up yet, Rhonda quickly types: “Roger holding my hand feels like fire.” At the touch of his fingertip, she screams and jerks away.
“OK, I tried,” Roger says.
He and Rhonda proceed to duel sight and sound blocks and modifications until she can’t hear a word he says or a sound he makes. When she looks at him across the table, she sees only a patchwork of blurs, white splotches, and black shapes. She’s certain it’s the same with her for him.
Wanting to calm down and relax, Rhonda decides to do some sightseeing and alters her vision so that when she looks out the dining room window, she sees a panorama of the Great Wall of China.
As she admires the view of the wall dipping and rising from peak to peak, she recalls how she and Roger always dreamed of seeing it in person. They saved and saved, and when they were about to book reservations, they learned she was pregnant with Robbin. The Great Wall became a new nursery in their home. Roger said he’d make it up to her, promised to take her to the moon. Then came Robby. No China. No moon … No regrets.
Roger has a few irksome habits, Rhonda thinks, but he’s been a kind, loyal husband and good father all these years. He’s probably unblocked her with his app already and is pleading for her to do the same with him.
“Roger, Honey, I’m sorry.” She tappity taps her phone, and Roger comes back to normal in her vision and hearing. He’s slumped in the chair with his head back, his snores loud as a chainsaw.
Rhonda sighs and modifies her senses so that she hears his snores as cascading water and sees Niagara Falls out the window.
The sight and sound bring back wonderful memories. Rhonda scoots her chair close to Roger and holds his hand. It feels like holding his hand.
