by submission | Aug 2, 2020 | Story |
Author: Anjan Chatterjee
ROVID-87 decimated dogs. That was over 700 years ago.
For my research, I was combing through old books in Central Archive. Only a few books survived the disasters. I was trying to understand dogs and what happened to them.
A terrorists’ virus had spread through the Web and destroyed all digital information on drives and clouds before 2406. Later, in the aftermath of the climate catastrophe of 2442 to 2475, bacteria evolved that fed on paper, leaving few analog records intact. These remnants were sealed in sequestered libraries. Rarely did anyone, including scholars like me, get access this old knowledge. It took me three years to get permission.
After decontamination and quarantine in the Archive antechamber, I entered that hallowed space. The reading room had a hush about it. High ceilings, low light, private carrels. A few silent scholars glided by, their eyes downcast under the watchful eye of the librarian, who was ever vigilant for information anarchists.
I was fascinated by the animals called dogs. I had found an obscure reference to them being our best friend. What did that even mean? In the archives, I discovered that humans were carriers for the ROVID-87 virus that made its lethal jump into our canine companions. Some best friend we were. The descriptions of dogs were fantastical. These mythical creatures had worked on farms, pulled sleds, hunted with people, sniffed bombs and drugs, raced around tracks, and pranced in beauty pageants. Even more incredibly, dogs lived in people’s homes. People collected their excrement and lay with them in the same bed.
The pictures of dogs made it hard to imagine that they were one species. There were tiny dogs, large dogs, skinny dogs, fat dogs. Dogs with long hair, dogs with short hair. Dogs with droopy ears, with pointy ears. Alert dogs, lazy dogs. Long tails, no tails. Every shape and color imaginable. That diversity ended with ROVID-87. The pure breeds were the first to go, delicate creatures that they were. Then curated mixed breeds and precious ones. Scientists observed that when left to their own mating devices, dogs converged into the same phenotype. They weighed thirty to forty pounds and were brown and wiry. Junkyard dogs. From the aftermath of ROVID-87 to the climate catastrophe these feral dogs were the only ones that roamed the earth.
Deep Hunger followed the climate catastrophe. It was the second time that humans betrayed their best friend. This time intentionally. Dogs died so people could live.
There it was. The history of dogs. The history of our duplicity. It was a lot to take in. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a world of dogs, a world before ROVID-87.
As I opened my eyes, I saw my reflection in the glass of my carrel. The seeds of a thought grew from the pit of my stomach. I am brown. Wiry. About 150 pounds. Across the way, I looked at the vigilant librarian. She was brown and wiry. About 130 pounds. Another scholar walked by, lost in thought. An inch or two shorter than I am, they were brown and wiry. Maybe 145 pounds.
I thought of everyone I knew. Young, middle-aged, old. Family, friends, lovers, colleagues, strangers. Brown and wiry. One and all. Could it be that we humans were also physically diverse before the disasters? Some short, some tall? Some slender, some broad? Thin noses, wide noses? Round eyes, narrow eyes? Straight hair, curly hair? Every shape and color imaginable?
I laughed at myself. What a silly idea. My imagination was running wild. Just like feral dogs of yore.
by submission | Aug 1, 2020 | Story |
Author: H.B. Varley
She held the baby close. One hand nuzzled his head, the other laid upon his mouth. They laid curled in the back of the car, below the seat and the windows. She didn’t let him see, and kept him close to her chest, so that her heartbeat might calm him. He was quiet… for now.
There was still bloody glass where the creature had struck through the front window, puncturing the driver’s chest, the stinger passing through bone and muscle and the leather seat as if they were all cotton. He had died instantly, and for that she was glad; his sputters and gasps for life would surely have panicked the child. After that, the great shadow had stalked away, and slowly, quietly, she brought the baby close and climbed into the back.
And there she waited with him, waiting for him to try to speak, to cry, anything that would give them away. It had not gone far, she knew this. They never did. They stayed close until they were certain there was nothing left to eat.
She heard a bristling crunch nearby, a claw upon concrete. Again, and again, drawing closer and closer to the stopped car in the middle of the road. She felt her heart race, and she wanted to scream, but to make a sound was to kill them both. She held the baby a little closer, begging whatever would listen that he stayed quiet, stayed asleep.
And there was a cry, a baby’s howling. It sent through the air and she could hear it clearly.
It was far away, above them. A young child cried, a baby no older than the little boy she kept so close.
And the bristling stride turned to a charge, a pounce off of the ground. She heard wings spread and buzz off, droning on loudly, sailing away, the baby’s cry instantly drowned out.
She heard the cry go silent, start up again, as if fighting restraint. But soon the beat of the wings stopped, and another scream joined the cry.
by submission | Jul 31, 2020 | Story |
Author: David K Scholes
“It’s the third time this week I’ve tried to put through holographic calls via the real-time galactic link,” Mary sounded frustrated. “Nor have I done any better using instantaneous or delayed messages on the Universe Net. I can’t run a business this way!”
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“With the holographic calls I can’t get through to a physical being or an AI or even a limited intelligence, limited response AI. If I’m lucky I get a mindless pseudo-sympathetic automatic audio-only response which won’t let me leave a message. If not there’s either the most eerie silence or some very scary run-arounds.
“With the Universe Net,” Mary continued “I get the response that my message cannot be delivered within a meaningful time frame. Or I get a message undeliverable response. Or the e-mail gets re-routed to some exotic planet the other side of the Universe and if I get a reply it’s too weird to understand. Even with advanced Universe translation software”.
Have you considered the Universe Dark Net or even the Extra-Dimensional Dark Net?” I asked. “The criminal elements have a vested interest in keeping communications reliable.”
Mary looked at me with distaste. “I wouldn’t be caught dead using the Universe Dark Net, all those vile alien criminals nosing into my business and as for the Extra-dimensional Dark Net – who knows but I might unwittingly bring down an extra-dimensional alien invasion upon us.”
“If it’s important enough could you try teleporting to a world where galactic communications are more reliable?” I asked.
“Teleportation links are down for most places of worth,” responded Mary.
“A crude tele-shunt would be out of the question?” I enquired receiving no reply other than another look of distaste.
“I suppose you could actually go there – to some of your more important business locations using a transportation of last resort mechanism. If you can communicate from one of these locations then you won’t need to actually visit the rest of them.
“Dismissing any suggestion of the mystical approach I assume you are talking about virtual reality travel which is just that!” Mary was dismissive.
“A sufficiently advanced mind can re-program the travel machines so they can’t tell the difference between real and virtual locations,” I responded. “Also with the inbuilt fail-safe switch if you did “accidentally” go to the real rather than virtual destination you can always hit the switch and return to your real point of origin”.
“These are desperation measures not to be seriously considered!” Mary lectured me. “For mystics and thrill-seekers only and not the way to run off-system businesses. It’s getting so you can’t run a business off-system anymore,” she sighed.
I wondered if this increasing unreliability might spell the death knell for intergalactic commerce. It vastly increased the opportunities for fraud on a galactic level.
“You might have to consider more limited near-space investments in the future. Such as within Sol including the outer Sol stations. Where both the galactic link and physical transportation still seem reliable.” This was the only sound advice I could provide to Mary.
How strange I thought. Back in the day when communications and many forms of transportation here on Earth were unreliable. Telephone failures, mobile phone black spots and network failures, problems with access to the internet, early problems with holographic calls and local teleportation. Now in a world of near-perfect on Earth planetary communications and transportation it seems that all the problems have gone off-planet.
Perhaps, as we did on Earth, they will iron out these bugs.
It was a big perhaps.
by submission | Jul 30, 2020 | Story |
Author: Craig Finlay
You’ve kept a list of firsts ever since you were six and learned you were the first generation of humans to be born on a generational space ship. You knew this earlier, but for some reason six is when it clicked, what first really meant. While reading a book about Leif Erikson you looked at the cold, miserable-looking men in their little open-topped boat battling through the North Atlantic and realized you’d be in a book someday too. So you started keeping lists of firsts, for posterity.
They were mostly mundane. You couldn’t tell the difference between the historically important and the personally important so you just recorded everything. Sorting it out would be a job for historians. First goal scored in soccer. First A on a math test. First time you saw a dead body. First time your fingers crested a girl’s hip and found their way down that eternally mysterious landscape you’d been obsessing over for years. First prayer and, several minutes later, first time a prayer wasn’t answered. First kill.
You were on the weekly trip to the greenhouse with Mom and Dad and Stella holding your hand the whole way as you skipped 10 meters at a time through the light gravity of the inner ring. It was warmer there, drawing heat from the power core. Perfect for plants and the misting sprays hung so long in the light gravity you didn’t need to pretend like you’d ever seen a cloud.
The odd way things impose when you’re too damn small to use the world correctly. Not just the adults and the air you could see but the banks of ferns and the ever-novel soil that held them. You’d taste it, quickly. And every time knew you missed it somehow, despite never having had it, never having walked on Earth.
And really, that was it. The knowing of it all. What Stella told you. That we’d never leave the ship. That we were born to fly the ship and we would die, too. We’d teach our children the ways and workings. Let them fly into the orbit of some other sun. Your parents were so angry when you asked them about death and children and Stella promised to never ever tell you a secret again you little twerp.
So it seemed fine, you found a tree frog in the greenhouse that clung to the underside of a hemp tree leaf. There were very few but you found one. Low, where you could see just fine. Uncle Mack said you could be a Southerner, not a Yankee yet. As if such had meaning still.
And it clung to glass when you placed it there. And to your hand when they told you to put it back, clung green and still. You managed it into your hands. It seemed fine that you squeezed tighter and tried one great leap to get out but your hands closed too quickly. And fine too when you returned it limp to the leaves.
Stella was right and she had a way of saying something that was self-evidently true and somehow make it seem profound. But you had nothing to say to Mom and Dad and Uncle Mack when they asked you again and again about the frog and why you squeezed it until it went limp and laid it back on the leaf. Staring then, just staring and not saying anything, at the same knot of grain on the tabletop Mom’s heirloom, real wood. Staring and hoping you could bore into the rings of the knot and make a hole big enough to climb in, just you and a frog that still breathes and clings, and finally make an escape. Later, you wrote it in your journal – the first thing you killed. Small frog, April 5, 2127.
They didn’t ask you if you ever wanted to be a part of this trip, of course – how could they? Who has the luxury of being asked permission before they’re born? And everyone finds themselves in odd atmospheres now and then, something that felt fine, because they’re moving through it for the first time, too. There’s no damn reason for it, no greater take.
Not when you’re six.
Six is such a goddamned mystery.
The following week you ate your first pickle, and recorded that it was yucky.
by submission | Jul 29, 2020 | Story |
Author: Marvin Thiele
It was 2050 and the clocks were striking thirteen. Technological addiction was widespread. Everyone sat on their couch, headset on, enjoying artificial utopia.
VR was about five years old, and everyone was already bending over backward for it. The simulations, you see, weren’t fixed, like paintings, books, or movies. In VR, one could alter anything with a mere mental command. Think, and ye shall receive.
Daily life had been eradicated, kaputt gemacht. With the advent of automation, entire grocery stores, fast-food restaurants, and inter-continental highways were now in the hands of robots.
There were no jobs. The government sent out money and that was that. People ordered take-out, took a dump, and went back into the VR, back to those fake, titillating women perpetually pleading for sex…
Tough world to be an artist. We floundered about on the surface of a bottomless ocean waiting to drown.
The Musee du l’Ouvre had closed. MoMa too. People weren’t showing up anymore. No one cared about the Mona Lisa or the Starry Night. There was nothing interesting about a still image—a non-digital one—constructed by a flawed human being.
With all this over my head, I got perpetually drunk and sad.
One night, out of frustration, I drew a stick man. I put a rope around his neck and hung him from the ceiling fixture. I crossed out his eyes and wrote on his shirt: Art is Dead.
I placed the “piece” on the Internet for one hundred million dollars, as a statement, as my fundamental critique of the world.
*
A week passed, and I was called by an unknown man. He expressed an interest in my sketch. As we neared the end of our conversation I had to know,
“Why?”
“Because it’s the least I could do,” he said.
“Why is it the least you could do?”
“Because I made VR. I programmed everything. I spent years interviewing test groups, refining the technology, getting it just right, dispensing with every error. I’m responsible for the state of things. I know that all the museums have closed, that all the movie theaters are empty, that all the symphonies have disbanded. I know just as well as you do about the way art has slipped off everyone’s mind, how it has disappeared surreptitiously down winding streets and lightless alleyways. But, please! Accept this as my apology. No, as my eulogy.”
“You are the Devil,” I said. “I think you’ve ruined the world.”
A day later, I walked to the store, and I did indeed mail off the drawing. In the evening, I went into my room and sat on my bed, congratulating myself. I looked at my bank account and the one hundred million dollars.
It was my first sale.
Yet, for whatever reason, I couldn’t get the happy mood to last and just ended up crying in a long cathartic fashion.
I thought about the past. I thought about how people used to work to survive, how they used to live in a way that would let them keep living, how it was never about getting there but about the going.
I figured it was as good a time as any. I fastened the rope and took a black marker to draw some crosses over my eyes. I kicked the chair out at just the right angle so that I could look identical to my drawing.
On my ragged white shirt, in giant black marker, read the words:
Art is Dead
And that, I thought, should do.
by submission | Jul 28, 2020 | Story |
Author: Gerard Mulligan
As she requested, he had retrieved the red blanket from the bed upstairs and thrown it over her feet as she lay stretched out on the sofa. She had murmured thanks and was soon falling asleep with her hands instinctively covering her stomach. He waited, hovering over her, for anything else she might need. Only when she actually began to snore gently, did he pull away and drift over to the table to sit and read the paper. God, he thought, glancing through the black headlines, this world was a total mess. War, war, and more war blotted every page. They only finished one when they had started another.
After a few minutes, he had had enough of the paper. He took up the coffee and looked out the window onto the street five stories down. A light rain fell outside. Four months to go before the baby was born. They were getting there. Four months was a long time though. Behind him, on the wall by the door, the clock ticked. In three hours, he had to be at work. He hated working nights. He knew that he would probably not get to sit down again until well after midnight. Still, the rent and bills had to be paid. And it would be worth it. This was a good home. A fresh home. They had arrived just in time though, another few years and the place would have gone to hell. Still, for the moment, everything was still reasonably good. It could be all brought back. As he had been told during his introduction, there was no ‘irreversible damage’ yet. They had time to fix everything. Once they had the right people in place.
Their child would be among the first. Yes, some of the early stacks had been here for nearly twenty years now. Some were already preparing to leave their birth homes and head out to take the positions to mold this new home. However, everyone knew the first stacks rarely ever rose to prominence. They did the ground-breaking work, prepared the way as such, but it was the stacks that came after which really reaped the rewards. There was endless debate about why that was. He reckoned it was because simply by then there was enough of them, after forty years or so, to forge the links around the entire planet needed for good governance. The first stack was too spread out on too many continents to really connect up. That was why he had waited until volunteering to come here. By the time their child was leaving school, there would be plenty of them in government and civil roles so finding a suitable position would be much easier.
The clock ticked on. He had to get up. He needed to get the uniform ready, shower, and pack some food for the night ahead. No matter where he went, he always had to work. So many planets, so many jobs. All the same no matter where it was. Work was work. Maybe soon, he might have to think about giving it up and settling down. He still fondly remembered the first planet. What a place. Days that went on forever and water as clear as the air itself. That was a good planet. And more-or-less colonized by now. They were already thinking of giving it a ‘Settled’ designation. Maybe then, in twenty or so years, when the child was reared, he would give it some more thought. But until then, he had to work. He stood, leaving her sleeping peacefully, and went to get ready.
