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.
by Julian Miles | Jul 13, 2020 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
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After the old nations fell, the survivors formed tribes. They argued, fought, and reformed into smaller tribes, always defined by ever-shrinking differences and increased fanaticism. When a tribe reached stability, it promptly set off to find other tribes to fight. For a long time after the ‘Years of Anger’, vicious skirmishes flared up as old hatreds manifested, driven solely by learned bias – because the causes were long gone.
These days, there are few enough of us that fighting is a last resort, except when confronting cannibal tribes. Where we go from here, I do not know. This is my last diary entry, for I now believe there will be none who need written knowledge for generations to come. We have become savages.
To any who read this, I hope you do so in brighter times.
Daniel Mapmaker.
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“You finished painting on the rocks, my Daniel?”
“It’s called ‘writing’, Martha.”
“So you keep telling me. Still don’t see why you need to capture words before the air takes them away, but you’ve always been strange.”
“But good for making and teaching children, so you keep telling me.”
She giggles.
“Mama was right about that. Said your pappy had been a right brute, and only made one to follow him. Told me to ignore what I didn’t like and take what I needed. Said you’d learn, and that you’d always do right, no matter how much you didn’t like doing it.”
“Your mama was smarter than me.”
Martha sticks her tongue out: “She said that, too.”
He smiles. Look at me now, papa. You said you’d rather teach than kill, but to have a future with humans in it, you had to be a killer before being a tutor. I said it didn’t have to be like that. You smiled and said I’d change my mind. Here I am, agreeing with you. I wonder if that afterlife you spoke of was full before you got there? A lot of people died, after all. Guess I’ll find out, one day. Until then, I have a tribe to look to.
“Mapmaker! Which way?” Edward grins and raises his hands in entreaty.
Daniel waves to his eldest and points westward. Edward nods.
“Gather yourselves! We go toward the sunset. It’ll be a long haul, but our Mapmaker knows where better land can be found. We’ll have to fight to get there, so don’t miss a chance to speak your heart to those about you. You never know who’ll be left to come to the evening campfires.”
Daniel swings his pack onto his back with a surge of pride. That’s his son. Using a decent vocabulary to effortlessly lead and inspire a hundred people who have difficulty counting past five, and no interest in learning how to.
Martha swats his backside.
“Giddy up.”
“I will get you for that later.”
She winks: “Counting on it.”
He takes a few careful steps, settling the load. Then he strides down to join the tribe. Where they’re heading for used to be called Cornwall. Papa said there was something about the weather there that would make it a good place to settle when the foraging and farming couldn’t support the number of people the tribe would eventually attract.
Hope you were right about that, papa. Otherwise I’ll be finding out about spaces in your afterlife much sooner than I’d like.
by submission | Jul 12, 2020 | Story |
Author: Elizabeth Hoyle
“Come on, Calla! The meteor is almost here! We need to get to the shelter!”
I thought my door would last at least five more minutes of Paul’s battering. He grabs my arm, attempts to wrench me away from my telescope. I push him away.
I keep my eyes, covered with the strongest sunglass goggles I could find, trained through my telescope. On the meteor that should have struck by now. But it hasn’t and it won’t, so long as I keep looking.
I discovered my power when I was little. It was wintertime. The snowflakes had been dying quick deaths as they struck my window. I started watching, fascinated. It took me a long while to realize why my window grew covered in perfect, unique, unmelting snowflakes was not the force of the storm. It was me.
I tried to figure it out. I did small experiments to discover that my gaze could keep things alive, provided I didn’t blink too often. No one guessed, even when my mother was dying and she miraculously lived long enough so Paul could come back from a field trip he’d been on and say goodbye. They thought the redness in my eyes was from tears.
My brother is now throwing things at me.
“This is important,” I hiss under my breath. “Leave me alone.”
“The Disaster Agency said that no one is supposed to be above ground when it got this close.” His voice is high with panic.
“Radio the nearest station. Tell them to deploy the deflector fleet.”
“It’s too late for that and you know it! Calla, we’ve got to go!”
“It’s not too late, trust me! The deflector fleet will work!”
I force myself to blink quickly. The meteor’s afterimage burns my eyes. I’ll most likely go blind after this. It’s so odd to think that in keeping the world alive, I’m keeping the meteor alive, too. If it hits, it dies, too.
“What the hell are you doing, anyway? The Disaster Agency said you shouldn’t look at it.”
“Trust me. Go call them!”
The Disaster Agency was formed when more meteors started entering Earth’s atmosphere. All they’ve achieved is scaring everyone with their lack of organization and resources.
“No one is answering!” I jump as Paul’s radio shatters against the wall. He used to throw things when he was afraid when he was little, too. “Either you tell me what you’re doing or I’m going to leave you here to melt!”
My jaw suddenly hurts and I can’t seem to make my muscles relax. I’ve been so afraid of becoming an elixir of life that I can’t tell my brother about my power, even now, when all of this still might not mean anything. My telescope goes dark as Paul reaches up to cover the lens with his palm.
“What are you doing? Get away from there!”
“You need to come with me,” he yells, ripping my goggles off. I dive to the floor, grab them, and try to sit back down, but Paul shoves me away.
“You don’t understand; you have to trust me!”
Everything rumbles beneath us, as if a killing blow struck the planet’s heart. It’s too late, for everything. Paul grabs me and we fall to the floor, scrambling under my bed for protection. I fight against him, but he pins me down, holds me still. It seems he’d rather fall down and take me with him than try to prevent or escape the fallout.
by submission | Jul 11, 2020 | Story |
Author: William Torphy
“You’re messing with nature.” Dean’s tone is vehement. His green eyes flash. “Haven’t we done enough of that already?”
“Of course I’m messing with nature,” she replies. “Nature is screwed. Only intelligent interference can rescue it.”
“Someday, Catherine, this obsession is going to bite you in the hand.”
Dean Chalmers is a professor in the Department of Environmental Science. He’s generally easy-going and docile, but lately, he’s grown critical toward her, his objections conventional and tiresome.
Dr. Catherine Traylor is the pre-eminent champion of De-Extinction Science. She is a cheerleader among DNA scientists who makes the practice look sexy. Photographs of her—long, dark hair framing an attractive face with high cheekbones—crop up everywhere, from the pages of scientific journals to HotScienceChicks.com. Traylor teaches biophysics at a state university where she spends most of her time in the school’s biotechnology lab, developing DNA cocktails that promise to drive defunct herds out of extinction directly into the global marketplace. A pet food corporation provides the university with a large research grant in the expectation of reaping financial rewards from her findings.
Dean laughs through his thick red beard. “You have to admit, Cath, that you’ve come up with some pretty strange objects so far. Wingless passenger pigeons, a hairless wooly mammoth, a three-legged dodo.”
The last wasn’t hers, and she angrily pulls away. He doesn’t understand. Her work promises to bring a host of species back from oblivion. But De-Extinction Science is technically exacting, involving a complex process of extracting DNA molecules from fossil remains of the extinct specimen, isolating and identifying its genetic sequences in order to recreate a living form.
Not that Dr. Traylor isn’t used to skeptics. She preaches to dubious peers at scientific conferences and frequently encounters questions about “ethics” and “morality, which she deftly avoids answering by extolling the value of “a more diverse environment.” But her work has ignited the public’s imagination: TV executives slaver over the possibility of a ‘Weird Nature’ series, children fantasize about pet dinosaurs running around their back yards and their parents envision amazing Instagram photo opportunities.
The big break-through arrives when her overworked graduate assistants sequence a femur bone that was recently found by paleontologists in Nova Scotia, the remains of a dog-like animal that once proliferated but mysteriously disappeared around 1200 BCE. When its DNA patterning is successfully completed, Dr. Traylor proclaims it a perfect candidate for extinction reversal.
She tells the news to Dean one night in bed after a rather pallid sexual episode.
“I’ve found a wild dog.” Her face is flushed with excitement. He knows she couldn’t be referring to him.
“A three thousand year-old specimen. We’re bringing it back.”
“That’s great, Cath. If you don’t get the Nobel Prize, there are plenty of ribbons you could win at dog shows.”
She lurches to the other side of the bed, tired of his sarcasm
“Just kidding, my love.” He hugs her, nuzzling his ginger beard against her neck. “I need you really badly right now. Woof-woof.”
But she has other plans in mind, breaking up with him the next morning via interdepartmental email. She’ll then begin the work of sequencing genes gathered from a wineglass left on the coffee table, from hairs in the bathroom sink, and fingernail cuttings she’s managed to gather.
She issues very specific orders to her grad assistants: “The species was feral, of course, but we’ll regulate the Y-chromosome toward domestication.” Then, as if an afterthought, she says: “And we’re adding a new sequence to the mix. Genes for green eyes and a reddish coat.”
One assistant raises objections: “You’re asking us to compromise our protocols. I thought that we were legally constrained for revivification only, not alteration.”
She glares at him dismissively, making a mental note to downgrade his next performance report. “We need to stimulate radically adoptive evolution. Our sponsor is looking for a major breakthrough. If we don’t deliver, this lab will be shut down and all of you will go back to dissecting frogs.”
* * *
Canis docilis far exceeds even Traylor’s expectations. Luxurious soft auburn hair replaces his aboriginal mangy coat and beardlike ginger-colored strands sprout around its muzzle. The French female lab assistant exclaims with appreciation at the specimen’s wiry muscularity, calling him “tres sportif,” The cur still requires domestication, however, and a cadre of trainers and animal psychologists descend on the lab to administer behavioral modification. The research team especially enjoys tossing balls into difficult spaces and watching the clever way he retrieves them. Within a few months, the canis has grown remarkably docilis.
A press conference is finally called, sponsored by Pets-R-Us, which owns the formulation patent and rights of reproduction. Traylor stands before a phalanx of the media and triumphantly announces the results of her research: “This marks a great advance in DNA science that truly brings real world results. I have the honor and privilege of introducing Canis Docilis!”
Emerging on all fours from behind a curtain, the creature resembles a strange cross between a dog and a man. Its green eyes flash from a luxurious coat of red hair. Upon command, he trots over to Traylor, who rewards him with a Pets-R-Us Protein Puppy Scone.
The assembled reporters applaud and fall all over themselves to get a closer look, snapping pictures, and shooting questions.
“Have you chosen a name for him yet, Doctor Traylor?” one of them asks.
“Yes. His name is Dean.”
by submission | Jul 10, 2020 | Story |
Author: Thomas Andrew Fitzgerald McCarthy
Charday Dee Williams’ entire body froze in mid-step on the sidewalk at the intersection. That thing happened which she’d heard stories about all of her life. All thirty-five of her years had begun to flash before her eyes. Memories collided into one another like exploding icebergs. Beneath everything, tiny green lights shimmered. Zeroes and ones, like console data. A gleam filled her eyes and she had a sense of weightlessness, like something had detached from her.
Without warning, she felt something hard hook her around the throat. There was a merciless yank and a crushing force expelled the air from her chest as she was flung backward.
At the last second, she heard the metallic vibrations, the kinetic explosion and sizzle of exposed electrical wiring and she saw a delivery drone whir by her head, propeller blades hacking at the air, searching for victims, its motor and cargo aflame. The fiery drone deflected off a blue postal pin and cratered hard into the sidewalk.
An old woman was standing over her, leaning on a walking cane and smiling, as if her entire life had been leading to this singular moment of quick-thinking.
“Like my boyfriend says, I may be an old crank, but I can still give a great yank!”
Charday looked up stupidly at her savior.
For months afterward, Charday replayed the incident in her mind over and over again.
Evolutionary psychologists published academic papers claiming that the flash was a biological survival mechanism, the brain’s way of frightening the body into motion. Still, that only made sense if her brain had known that she was in danger. She hadn’t seen the drone until she was nearly lying on the sidewalk.
Charday thought about the flashing lights, the technology hidden beneath everything, like cybernetic circuitry beneath a thin veneer of flesh.
Somehow, it all seemed so obvious.
The flash was a download. All of her memories. Perhaps even her soul. By whatever had been expecting her flame to be extinguished. The where and who didn’t seem to matter. Comptrollers, aliens, a holosuite’s datacore, a video game’s memory banks.
Now she remained, empty inside, like a banana peel after its unripened yellow core had been plucked from it. Charday struggled to motivate herself. Everything seemed like unsaved progress. No matter what she did, it seemed as if it would never matter. What of all that remained unfinished? A family? Philanthropic deeds? That celebrated novel she hadn’t written? What would a record of her be without a Magnum Opus?
Finally, with no other recourse, she began to experiment with her own mortality. After every published novel, each newborn daughter, she would test to see if the universe had taken notice. She drove truckloads of food through warzones. She sabotaged a parachute and then mixed it in with five other backpacks in a game of skydiving Russian Roulette. She drove a motorcycle ninety miles an hour without a helmet through Nova Scotia.
But there were no more flashes.
Finally, she realized that the unknown that she now faced was no different than it had been in the time before the flash.
At one hundred and six years old, three generations of her descendants gathered before her deathbed. Charday’s great-grandson, a minister, remarked, “To believe that your life is unwatched, is to believe that the eyes of God are blind.” Looking back over her life, she marked the flash as the moment that changed her entire life—the jumpstart that she’d needed.
Pulitzer-prize winning novelist and award-winning humanitarian Charday Dee Williams died peacefully in her sleep.
