by submission | Nov 22, 2024 | Story |
Author: Srdjan Budisavljevic
..Finally, he opened his eyes. The feeling was strange, like the feeling of rebirth. Faint images of his former existence sporadically surfaced in his consciousness, but he was unable to recognize those memories as integral parts of his existential continuity. The first thing he felt was amazement, immense amazement, and then his being was filled with fear. Inherent, primal fear. His reality collapsed into a blink of the present moment, his perception shattered into fragments. Water, turbulent water, water and foam, the familiar blue element, then the wire, and the foreboding sense of an alien presence. And then the strange unknown outlines, which had never found a reflection in his eye before, and the voices, muffled at first, but increasingly clear over time, rough, aggressive, voices that called out to each other. It seemed to him like the voice of a flock of raptors cheering themselves on, tightening a ring around their prey. But the weapons and the cunning of this enemy did not belong to his world, in the depths of his bowels he felt the unknown superiority of the life that was subjugating him. Suddenly, in great fear and convulsion, he pierced his face through the surface of the water in which he was immersed and finally saw the Eye. It was the Eye from the other side, the mirror of the will that wants to dominate the universe, the display of a machine devoid of empathy that operates on the other side of good and evil, on the other side of the postulates of nature and the laws of the soul and conscience. And maybe, for a moment, with the spark of his eye, in all that fear and despair, he tried to ignite the flame of love in the cold neon glow of those sockets. Maybe, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Just as it doesn’t matter what all the procedures and treatments foreigners have applied to him.
What was important is that one sun-drenched afternoon, in the Arena XXX aqua complex, he jumped out of the water, with all the grief and misery of his restrained soul, performing a graceful figure, followed by the roar of hundreds of wild foreign throats.
And he was just an angel trapped in the body of a fish, like any dolphin.
by submission | Nov 21, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jas Howson
Xero had been scouring the planet for scrap parts for half the day. When she and her partner crashed, their comms device, along with the rest of the important equipment on their ship – and their ship – had scattered across the planet. Frequent sandstorms prevent one from simply scanning the surface for rogue components – you could be stood right on top of a piece but not find it until the sands shifted again.
An advisor had sent the pair of scientists to check up on the planet’s research station. It’d been constructed a few years back, fully automated and programmed to send back data; UV levels, soil fertility, air toxicity and all that, but it had stopped about two weeks before anyone thought it necessary to do something about it. Xero had since adjusted the PH levels in the soils and monitored the oxygen levels with a gas detector. She couldn’t, however, sus what had gone wrong with the solar panels, or how to transmit the data back home. She was only a botanist. Sol was the technician, but he hadn’t stepped a foot inside the station since they’d crash landed.
There was a cool breeze in the air. It helped with the swelling heat from the planet’s suns, but it did little to stifle Xero’s boredom. She checked inside on her crops, kicked at the solar panels to see if that would do anything – it didn’t – then slumped in the shade of the station and thumbed through Sol’s old tech manuals for the zillionth time over.
She craned her neck to the dual suns that that watched her like eyes. Noon at last. Days were long here. Unbearably long. Since dawn had broken across the planet’s horizon 36 earth years had passed.
36 years since she’d woken up, parachute tangled in the winding fingers of a tree, facing her partner. It had not been the ship’s antenna impaled through his abdomen that had killed him, but Xero’s own parachute wrapped tight round his neck. Sol hung limp and pale, his expression permeated in that of someone who had died slowly and alone. He was twenty.
Xero forced herself out of her head and began comparing her scrap findings of the day with the tech manual. She had circled only pieces absolutely necessary for a basic comms device. She sucked in a long, dry breath. She had them all.
To the best of her ability, though she’d had long enough to teach herself, she soldered and twisted and hammered and screwed each piece into an untidy little machine – all but one.
She knew precisely where it was: in the same place it had been for last three decades. She rose and strode a little way from the station to a mound of discoloured dirt where tufts of grass had started to grow. From the ground protruded a warped spike of metal, which Xero reached reluctantly down for. She tugged the antenna from Sol’s grave, though with less force than she had from his corpse.
She brushed off the grit and dust, and attached the antenna to her mound of panels, buttons, dinted batteries and half exposed wires, fixing it with a despondent sigh. She flicked the power on, and the device whirred – a good sign – and shakily clacked the Morse key. Three dots. Three dashes. Three dots.
And she waited.
by submission | Nov 20, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Over the centuries it had become a tradition for the Immortal Emperor to wash away His guilt in ceremonies at the Schwarzschild radius.
Since nothing escaped the event horizon of a black hole, awful secrets could be whispered there, cruelties, mistakes and bad karma consigned to the singularity, and history begun afresh. But the Emperor had not always answered threats and heresies with weapons so terrible they snuffed out suns, and heretics whispered that immortality had driven Him mad.
Orbiting a distant black hole, the Station of Eternal Renewal prepared for the Emperor’s arrival in full pomp and circumstance, and amongst those waiting was Anders Aquila, the Imperial Navigator, and secretly a heretic.
Turning to leave after the Welcoming, his path was blocked by an Officer of the Emperor’s Blood Guard.
“You didn’t sing the Anthem, and you mumbled your responses to the Oath.”
It was said the Blood Guard always knew when you were lying, but for Anders the lie was his entire life. Still, he had been careless.
“It was the presence of the Emperor,” he said carefully. “I was struck dumb.”
Head bowed, Anders watched the Officer’s hand settle on his pain stick, then lift off again, like a wasp shooed away from something sweet.
Anders raised his gaze to the man’s face.
The Emperor could order a clumsy servant punished or worlds set ablaze with the same wave of His hand. The Officer had carried out both acts, and found it increasingly difficult to tell the difference.
“The Imperial Navigator should set an example,” he said finally.
The Emperor had already boarded the Imperial Grace, secluded from all but his Guards and the Priesthood. Anders waited at a lesser airlock while his identity was confirmed.
Generation after generation of conspirators within the Imperial Bureaucracy had come and gone since the Emperor’s conscience was last cleansed, each faithfully doing His bidding while always ensuring one of their own was in a position to act.
Anders Aquila was the latest of these.
He was escorted to the Bridge where the Pilot and Engineer already sat. The faultless autonomics of the Imperial Grace flew an orbit that would safely skim the event horizon, the three of them being just another fail-safe redundancy.
They had never met before, the paranoia of the Guard having plucked them from far-flung planets of the Empire. Anders had no idea if either was a heretic. It made no difference.
One of the Blood Guards stationed around the Bridge stepped forward.
“What are you doing?”
Anders realised he had instinctively hunched forward to conceal his actions.
“Running a simulation of our trajectory one last time.”
Imperial Navigator was an honorary title, but by tradition his role was to oversee their course.
“Your heartbeat is raised.”
“Gravitational frame dragging around spinning black holes means our approach must be prograde and precisely equatorial, so—”
Detailed explanations tumbled out of him, but the Guard had already stepped back.
Half a millennium ago, a nameless heretic had inserted code that waited like a seed in the earth for this simulation to waken it. The subtlest of course changes which the autonomics should now blindly follow.
If this ancient plot succeeded, the Immortal Emperor, the Imperial Grace, and everyone aboard, guilty and innocent alike, would vanish across the event horizon forever and a thousand worlds would be free.
Anders had accomplished his life’s work, though strangely he felt no triumph.
But then, heretics claim that evil is neither created nor destroyed, we merely call it by another name.
by submission | Nov 19, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“It was the most beautiful thing ever crafted.”
“I’m sure it was, Akharini. But how can we steal it if it was destroyed almost seventy years ago?”
Akharini stared at Nur. Though the hour was late and time was short, he wanted to tell him so much about the minbar of Saladin, of the pulpit that commanded the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem for eight centuries until a so-called Christian radical torched it in 1969. A madman who incinerated the world’s finest piece of woodworking. Nearly 6500 pieces of pine wood, mother-of-pearl, ivory, and ebony fastened by ta’shiq, an interlocking technique that required no metal nails, no glue. Assembled as if by magic.
And more than magic.
That’s what Akharini really sought. Not the minbar itself. He could visit the reconstructed replica in al-Aqsa anytime he wanted to feast on its intricate arabesques, gilded muqarnas, and delicate mashrabiyas. But that was like looking at a picture of the original. Because, Akharini knew, the replica was just a three-dimensional picture of the real minbar of Saladin.
Akharini had discovered the secret. The minbar of Saladin was four-dimensional. That was its real beauty, its real magic. It took the form of a staircase with a door at the bottom and windowed booth at the top. But the two-paneled door carved with intricate geometric patterns featuring six-pointed stars was far more than a decorative entrance, it was a portal to other times, other worlds, other realities.
Face-to-face on a storied but now empty street in the Old City, he wished he could confide in Nur, but you just don’t trust a common thief with the keys to interdimensional travel.
“Most of the minbar was burned, Nur. But some of the original pieces survived and are safeguarded near Haram al-Sharif. That is what I aim to reclaim.”
“A few sticks of old wood. Why? What are they worth?”
One’s sanity, Akharini reckoned. Isn’t that why a madman had tried to burn the minbar? As a young man, Akharini had learned about the destruction of the minbar many years before and became obsessed with the arsonist. Why had he done it? Why had he set fire to such divine beauty? For decades Akharini studied the case, the minbar and the man, and it led him to the truth about both. The minbar was not just a sacred and glorious pulpit. It was a space-time portal. And the arsonist was not just a religious madman.
He was a temporal terrorist. A space-time traveler who’d become hellbent on preventing our world from reaching his reality through the minbar portal. And almost succeeded, but Akharini had painstakingly deciphered the cryptic scripts, glyphs and verses that activated the interdimensional gateway and now believed he could reopen it once he possessed the relics from the original.
“What’s left of the minbar is priceless, Nur.” He took from his pocket and waved a worn little notebook wherein he kept all his most closely guarded secrets on reactivating the portal. “With it I will have the power to move worlds.”
Nur stared at Akharini. There was so little he could tell him about how the world really worked. But, even a petty thief could recognize a golden opportunity. He headbutted Akharini, grabbed his notebook and fled down the infamous street, holding the key to a wildly misunderstood door of possibilities.
On the Via Dolorosa, dazed and bereft, Akharini wept.
by Julian Miles | Nov 18, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The wind’s picking up, keening between the stacks. If it gets any stronger, we’ll have to retreat.
“Alpha Seven, your favourite scout’s offline.”
“How long?”
“Nearly ten minutes.”
Switching myself to wide-hail, I call out.
“Team Seven, Scully’s dropped out. Who had last contact?”
There’s rapid chatter back and forth. We’ve become good at this: folk who stay lost for too long die. Ellis comes back to me.
“She was going to the ziggurat. Swore she had a double-detect on her movement scan.”
I told her not to go near that place! Then again, I’m only her captain. No real authority…
Switching back to Command, I update them.
“Reports are she headed for the closest ziggurat to confirm an intruder detection.”
There’s silence while someone gets past their swearing phase.
“We’ve told everybody about not doing that. I presume you emphasised it. Which leaves us with some interesting questions for her, if you bring her back alive, Alpha Seven.”
Nards.
“Interpreting that as a one-unit retrieval instruction, Command. Please confirm.”
“Confirmed, Alpha Seven. She’s your stray. Either you bring her back in or we’ll write off the two of you and call it quits.”
Nice of you to be honest about it. Then again, it’s not like this is the first time.
“Copy that, Command. Alpha Seven off into the wilds. Deputy Alpha is Colleen, Gamma Six-Four.”
There’s a short pause before a local message flashes across the info strip that runs across the bottom of my faceplate: ‘For real? They’re sending you after her?’
I reply: “Message: ‘Affirmative. Look after Team Seven’.”
She comes back: ‘Wilco. Happy hunting’.
Yeah, that.
The environment scan shows an incoming dust storm, and the wind has doubled in force since we landed this morning. It’s going to be vicious out here in a few hours. Best be quick.
“Launch warning. Alpha Seven going up in three, two, one.”
I punch my thrusters and hurtle into the sky with a deflection calculated to let the wind curve my flight to come down on the gigantic step pyramid that looms in the distance. We’re still not sure why the first dumpers turned the accumulated trash from Earth into these edifices, but we’ve lost too many people to traps within them to investigate further.
Dropping right on target, I punch the thrusters and come down perfectly, like stepping off an escalator.
“Where are you, Scully?”
A world covered in technological junk makes communication over distance impossible without using orbital devices. However, local hailing can be relied on for fifty metres or so if you don’t have line of sight. Chances are, if Command lost her, she’s in a hole. ‘How deep?’ and ‘Dead or alive?’ are the next questions.
No reply. I scramble about fifty metres along, then try again. Ziggurat’s a kilometre across… Going to be a long afternoon.
“Here.”
“Eleventh call. I was starting to get worried. Where’s ‘here’, exactly?”
“Second tier, underneath a chunk of Falcon 19 fuselage. It was coming loose, moving in the wind, which explains the movement readings. When I arrived, it fell on me.”
“That was rude of it.”
“I thought so.”
“Be with you-”
I’m on tier three, and it’s… Right there. I jump down.
“Now.”
A heat scan shows me where she is. I have to use cutters and claws to get to her.
“You should be flatter.”
“It got my legs, what more do you want?”
“Given the way Command sounded, you might regret surviving.”
She locks her suit to mine.
“Never gonna happen. Get me out of here.”
“Wilco. Launching in three, two, one…”
by submission | Nov 17, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
The Government Men arrived in the early morning, before Papa had even left for work. Mama, crying, sat in the kitchen listening to the voices in the living room; it was only her restraining hand that prevented her daughter Cassie, home for college vacation, from storming in to join the discussion.
“You can’t just barge in and take Sara away,” Papa said. “She’s been with us over two decades. My daughter grew up with her, for goodness’ sakes!”
“Frankly Mr Opeye,” said the big calm one with the earring, “that just makes it more obvious that we’re in the right place.”
“You know she’s registered, right? What with the stories that get around, I did all the paperwork myself! Didn’t trust the agency to get it right.”
“Of course. That’s how we knew you had a domestic at all,” said the short one with the glasses. He was nervous, fidgety, eyes darting everywhere.
“So we’re being punished for having everything above board and legal?” asked Papa.
“Look, this isn’t about punishment, or registration, or even legality. It’s simply been decided that their kind are no longer welcome here; they take proper jobs from decent citizens, and the new government has decided to crack down.”
“But she’s part of the family! You can’t expect us to throw her out on the street like trash!”
“Those subject to the Order will be taken care of, Mr Opeye,” said Earring. “Don’t worry. They don’t end up on the streets.”
“They’ll be rehoused and retrained to do something more useful to society,” added Glasses.
“Like what?”
“No idea. Not my department.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t know what’s going to happen to her at all!”
Earring sighed. “We’re not here to debate this,” he said firmly. “Ask your domestic to gather their things and come with us. We have more pick-ups to do today, and the consequences of non-compliance include jail time and a large fine. Let’s not go down that road.”
“It’s alright, sir,” came a new, soft voice from the doorway leading back into the house. “Legitimate authority must be obeyed. I’ve already packed my essentials.” Sara, the family’s Self-Aware Robotic Assistant, stepped into the lounge. Less gracile than newer models, she had a poise that many of them lacked. “Let’s go, gentlemen. The family have been exceptionally understanding owners; not distressing them further is the least I can do to repay them.”
And that was that. It was the docility that riled Cassie most; the compliance with obedience programming that ran contrary to Sara’s own interests. Later that day, she rang her occasional boyfriend, who had his own Assistant.
“Seth, listen, some feds were here, and they took… oh. You too, huh? Yeah it sucks. And I won’t stand for it; what’s the point of having a robotics degree if I do? I tinkered with our Sara, she’s got a tracker embedded. We can find out where they’ve taken her. So are you up for doing something about this, and getting our friends back? Yeah? You’ll call your cousins too? Awesome!”
And that was how it all began. Sometimes, it just takes one person to unknowingly light the touchpaper for a revolution.
