by submission | Nov 30, 2019 | Story |
Author: Griffon Kaye
You sit on the bathroom floor to smoke, on the thin rug, back hunched up against the tub. Whatever, your back hurts anyway, twenty minutes on the hard floor isn’t going to make it any worse, you’re not that old yet.
Sit in the bathroom because it’s the only room in the tiny apartment that doesn’t have a smoke detector. It has a vent although you don’t run it because it’s goddamn loud and because you like to watch the smoke swirl up against the window in the dusk.
You were in a bad place today, did okay at work but came home early to the empty apartment and kind of slipped down. You’re getting sick of the way things are here on Earth: nothing too wrong with any one thing, but a sense that this isn’t where you want to be soaking into everything. Tired of the day job, same shit every day leaving you jumpy as hell and pissed about it. Tired of the weird weather, although you know it’s only strange compared to your home colony. Earth is a lot warmer and wetter than Mars. It leaves you sleepless, breathless some nights, sweaty and exhausted in the morning.
Funny considering how you sold your soul to the military in the first place for a shot at getting off the red-dirt space-slum, only to end up here. After discharge you finally landed in the glossy manicured suburb you used to fantasize about- trees and grass and chrome, the nine to five job with the soft, wealthy crowd who’ve only ever pulled a trigger in VR. If this was what you wanted, why does it make you want to climb out of your skin so bad?
You miss the cold you spent years cursing. Drag on the cigarette between your teeth, the end hot enough to sear, glowing gently like a thruster on slow burn. You didn’t die out there the way you thought you would. You breathe out innocent silver smoke, all cancer and tar on a molecular level, wonder if maybe you should give space one more shot at killing you. Tap the cigarette on the edge of the jar lid you’re using as an ashtray, wedge your feet up against the cabinets. Check the bandage on one heel, rubbed raw this morning while you pounded out another extra mile in your battered trainers. Got sick and dizzy after, but the physical work keeps you a little saner. You can’t stand the idea of getting soft, and anyway you don’t smoke as much as you used to, so your lungs can suck it up.
Now, though, it’s almost dark out, and you’re still sitting on the bathroom tile in a haze, your eyes starting to sting. Don’t think about how it’s only Monday, don’t think about another week of work or the bills or the phone calls you have to make, don’t think about how you’re tired and scared that this is all there is, some fucking reward for playing hero out in the endless void, getting run ragged and shot at and sent back to play house. Push yourself up, take a couple of pills to sleep because it’s looking like one of those nights and you’ve been up since five-thirty. Turn your head and catch sight of a single, bright point of light in the darkening sky, through the open blinds: a planet. Turn your head away again, smoke the last of the cigarette so quick your chest burns.
by submission | Nov 29, 2019 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
I was twenty minutes outside the airport going 65 on the interstate headed to a meeting to smooth some feathers; my illustrious job. Watching the road around me I passed a bus on my right, in front of that was a small red hatchback, then an eighteen-wheeler dump truck with a dirt payload. My eyes continued to scan forward and in front of me, the lane was clear for a quarter-mile. I came alongside the little red car and saw at a sideways glance that there was a family inside. Two boys in the back seat between the ages of nine and twelve, laughing and poking each other, a mom in the passenger seat, turning around also laughing, and a smiling dad driving with hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. My mind registered the family…and then they were gone.
The safety latch of the dump truck had come undone and the hydraulic cylinder sufficiently leaked, tipping the front of the dumpster just high enough that it couldn’t fit under the overpass by inches. It caught and brought the massive rig to a jarring halt. The red car with the family inside disintegrated into the back of it. The bus behind sandwiched what was left and exploded the gas tank. This all happened in my peripheral vision, then I was beyond it. I frantically checked my rear-view mirror and saw only an erupting cloud of brown dust, like a CGI movie avalanche. Nothing came through the miasma and it was if the world behind me was swallowed up.
I wanted to stop, even though there was nothing I could do. But I didn’t. I just drove on. I arrived at my hotel sometime later, met with the clients, had dinner and drinks and the meeting was a success. I didn’t mention the incident although it probably would have been an interesting conversation piece.
That night, alone in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed in my boxers, I popped the TV on. It was tuned into a news station and the story was about the accident. The reporter said that the truck had struck the overpass and damaged it so severely that the road above and the highway below were currently closed pending a safety inspection. The driver of the truck and the bus were both in the hospital in serious but stable condition. It had taken firefighters an hour to put out the inferno and rescue crews four to extricate the smoldering metal debris. They could not determine the occupants of the vehicle in between, as there was almost nothing left of the wreckage to examine.
I knew what had been there. A family. I turned it off and went to bed.
The room was pitch black and only the monotonous hum of the air conditioner filled the silence. My mind went back and envisioned the last, slow-motion milliseconds before the crash. I saw the family obliquely, alive and vibrant, members of this trivial planet. And just before everything went cataclysmic, my eyes almost completely off them and focused on the impending tragedy of the truck, the family went away. They simply vanished. Their seats were empty. The vehicle was unoccupied. I was sure of it.
Did they have the capability to instantly teleport to another location? Was mass dematerialization a possibility? Maybe divine intervention and they were lifted to a better place, saved from a horrific finality? Or was it just a needful deception of my own mind. I contemplated everything and soon fell asleep, my eyes closing and tearing up a little bit.
by submission | Nov 28, 2019 | Story |
Author: Chris Stewart
“Dr. Marco Nutrice. M-A-R-C…”
The council chairman, rumpled and sleep-deprived, interrupted, “Doctor Nutrice.”
The witness, far chipper, countered.
“Noo-trees”
“Pardon?”
“It is pronounce, noo-trees.”
“My apologies, Doctor.” Sighed the chairman. “We will skip the formalities. All of us are aware of who you are.”
“As I say three years ago…”
“Doctor, we know, nobody listened to you then. We know you were all but tossed out of the building. However…”
Another voice, further down the long desk cut in. “Mr. Chairman, I’d…”
“We discussed this already, Dale! Asked and answered!”
“Mr. Chairm…”
“Screw you, Dale! You think we want this? This is where we wanted to be? We are out of ideas and Object 445c is three years closer to dropping in to say howdy!” The louder he talked, the gooier his accent became.
“Why are you even here, Dale? Got a better plan?!”
“Well, no, but…”
“Christ on a crutch, Dale…”
The chairman fumed at the other member for a full half-minute, the gallery murmuring quietly until finally, he banged his gavel.
“Doctor. For expediency, I will summarize. Please clarify if I overlook anything, or otherwise mischaracterize your… proposal.”
Shuffling a well-read sheaf of papers, the chairman looked dejectedly at the rest of the council, then exhaled slowly.
“In the years since Object 445c was detected entering our solar system, a great many resources have been devoted to the matter. The world’s finest minds have conceived of and carried out numerous attempts to spare us calamity, and they have all failed. The last few projects remain, but continued data collection on Object 445c has made it clear they are certainly going to fail as well. As such…”
HONK!
Every head in the vaulted room snapped towards the nose-blowing sound.
“Dale, that’s it. Get the hell out! Bailiff! No, I mean it. You sonnovabitch, out!”
After several minutes and a surprising struggle; “As such, we have asked you back, Dr. Nutrice, to revisit your proposal on, ah…”
“Acquired Savant Syndrome.”
“Goddamn. You know what, I just can’t. Doctor, briefly, if you please.”
“Well, simply, we take volunteers, and we hit them on the head.”
The chairman, looking decades older, sighed. “Uh-huh. Continue.”
“See, in a small fraction of massive brain contusions, the patient recover, but now they have surprising talents. Some familiar, like math. Others, strange, like seeing music as physics. All of them bring fresh perspective to science! So, we use volunteers to try and make these savants, and we give humankind big leap forward in short time!”
Another council member leaned into their microphone. “Doctor, you propose we take a mallet to the heads of thousands…”
“Millions better. And not mallet, but si, hitting very hard.”
“Dear god. Millions. For the wholesale creation of minds capable of saving us from Object 445c?”
“Si.”
In the uproar, the chairman skipped his gavel, picked up his desk lamp and proceeded to smash it onto the desk. In the new quiet, he continued.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor, but your proposal will kill millions, cripple thousands…”
“Sadly.”
“For a few hundred beautiful minds in the hopes they can build us a fusion cannon or some shit.” The accent was dripping.
“Si.”
“Why would anyone volunteer, Doctor?”
“To be in history books? And their families, we take care of them.”
Someone on the council sobbed.
“Heaven help us, we are desperate, Doctor. But what if you’re wrong and we don’t stop Object 445c?”
Doctor Nutrice smiled, too big.
“Ah, the best reason to volunteer! If it no work, unlucky volunteers, they will instead be the lucky ones!”
by submission | Nov 27, 2019 | Story |
Author: R. Michael
Jenny sat looking at the wonders out her window. In her right hand, she slowly twirled a bit of her silky, auburn hair, and in the other hand, she held a pen. Though intending to jot something down, she mostly just chewed on the end.
In her mind’s eye, she saw wind-tossed trees, the cool surface of a lake, a city – no, a small town. “Yes,” she thought, “that’s what I want.” The house she saw was small, surrounded by a field of tall flowers. Sometimes deer would come along to graze and on rare occasions a mighty buck.
Jenny then pondered what it would look like if snow softly fell around the quaint little house. “Snow seems so pretty. I wonder if any of the places we’ll visit will have it.” Her pen scrawled across the tablet. As she envisioned the biting cold and the crystalline flakes falling slowly and silently to the ground, she longed, even more, to experience it just once.
“Every place we go is oppressively hot and ends up uninhabitable. I wish we didn’t have to live like nomads traipsing from one place to the next just trying to survive.” Jenny thought as she craned her head up, once more captivated by what lay beyond the glass. Though young, a part of her realized there were people who would have traded places with her. The beauty and new sights Jenny had seen in her life were more than what most of humanity got to experience.
Still, Jenny’s heart longed for simplicity and quiet, just her, her brother and their parents. “Such is the life of an explorer’s kid,” she mused. Jenny remembered the anger she felt toward her mom for taking the job, but as she grew and made friends in her new environment, the homesickness slowly faded. Yet there was a part of her that wanted to make her mother suffer and to a lesser degree her father for going along with it. While writing, Jenny thought of none of that. It was a fantasy world, ultimately. After taking a moment to gaze out the window, her pen resumed fluttering along the notepad.
The little house she conceptualized was no longer surrounded by woods, but on one side there was a lake. On the water’s surface, she envisioned a family of ducks, smiling a little as she pondered how cute they must be in real life.
“How can I write such a story? Sure, I’ve seen things most people haven’t, but I also haven’t gotten to experience normal everyday life either. There is so much I’ve missed.” Jenny put the pen down, scowling at the paper in front of her as she debated whether it was worthwhile to continue or not.
“Arriving at planetary system in forty-five minutes,” a female voice spoke over the intercom.
Jenny sighed. The twin stars their next home orbited steadily grew larger, bathing her face in cold distant light. Beyond the two stars was a nebula. It wasn’t the first Jenny had seen, and she doubted it would be the last. All thoughts melted away as she soaked in the nebula’s beauty. Out of the corner of her vision, a brilliant blue and orange gas giant caught her eye. Orbiting the massive planet was a set of rings.
“Here starts another adventure. Maybe someday I’ll get to chase my dream instead of living someone else’s,” Jenny whispered to herself as she tucked the notepad under her arm.
by submission | Nov 26, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Barber
“So,” Hoffmann said to Cally. “You are the poet. The one who claims to hear meanings in queentalk that our software misses.”
The man from Transuranics GmbH had brought his own translator rig; Cally listened to it murmuring the subtext of pheromones and body language in his ear.
She had come here to write about the Jirt, and found she had a gift for understanding the queen’s utterances. Hoffmann was here to talk about pitchblende and the hive workers needed to mine it.
The queen interrupted him. “Reassure this one about the future.” The Jirt queen demanded reassurance almost daily now.
Hoffmann faltered, then began again with the advantage that would be gained over other hives.
The man understood nothing, Cally thought. Absently, she rubbed her eyes; the air in the royal chamber was thick with pheromones.
The queen’s mouthparts chattered with anxiety. “But who will remember this one?”
It seemed new queens erased all traces of the old, and though the hive endured, its nameless rulers faced oblivion.
In their conversations Cally had called her the Red Queen, not guessing how the human habit of names and remembering would be seized upon. Now it was an addiction and she had become the queen’s dealer.
Tell again how this one will be spoken of, the queen would insist, after a lifetime of egg-laying, trapped by her own body, and Cally would invent kennings and couplets, weaving words and stories about the queen.
In return, Cally became the female without offspring, a concept the queen did not comprehend. How could such a trait be inherited? It had proved impossible to explain the choices those prisoned by free will make.
Again the queen asked about being remembered, and Hoffmann cleared his throat. “I like to think we will all be remembered. By colleagues. And our children.”
Cally had not expected this corporate henchman to mention his children. Again, she fended off workers, like frantic to taste her. Something was wrong.
“We should come back tomorrow…” she began, but Hoffmann pressed on.
“As I am sure you will be remembered by your own offspring.”
“There is deception here. Our hives will forget us all.”
Within the queen’s great abdomen, organs that squeezed out the hive’s future no longer pulsed and contracted, and one by one, the scurrying workers also ceased their tasks.
“Still half this one’s eggs remain!” she proclaimed. A grotesquely painted dame might lie about her age in the same way.
“Raus, raus,” Cally hissed at Hoffmann. There were languages they kept from the Jirt. “Schnell!”
And as if she was only awaiting that signal, the queen seized the man in her jaws. His eyes bulged with horror and the queen shook him in a spray of blood.
Cally fled through tunnels and spaces filled with confused workers; she carried the scent of the royal chamber which was a protection and a curse. When she found the main exit jammed with struggling soldiers, she took a side passage, pressing herself to the walls as workers darted past, spraying alarm pheromones, the chaos spreading.
Afterward, there was talk of nuking the hive to teach the Jirt a lesson, but economic sense prevailed.
The hive had no history, Cally told the Transuranics people; barren queens were devoured by their offspring, the hive boiling with murder until a new queen prevailed.
Cally wondered how she might have answered the Red Queen, for it was true, flowers wilt, headstones forget, and in the end mourners become the mourned.
The queens that came after, she did not name.
by Julian Miles | Nov 25, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I love Christmas, everyone’s preoccupied or in a good mood.
A focussed gent like me can make a fortune. Times have changed, though: used to be all I had to do was hang around and look a bit down and out. That’s become a good way to get spat at, beaten, or even set fire to. Not that my people don’t do it, but it takes numbers and money to have a trio of thumpers nearby, ready to deal with the weak people who like to bully. I prefer to keep static begging for sizing up a target. That way, any donations are a bonus.
As for what my grandad loved to call his ‘flexible friend’, it’s still good. Crowded cafes, a couple of sly fingermen and we’re pulling a few hundred an hour in contactless alone. Then the pickpockets go in. I’ve got a room full of techies nearby, just waiting for cards and that lovely new phone you haven’t quite got round to securing. Give them a few minutes and suddenly you’re online buying all sorts of stuff. Especially if we landed your card info.
If we can’t get the data from your phone, we’ll ask your car. Turns out that even if you’re cautious with your phone, there’s a good chance you didn’t bother with your motor.
Harald Bluetooth united the tribes of Denmark. His namesake will hook up with any old device. Like the ones we carry to get your info or give our black hat a way into your data life.
Always gives me a warm feeling, knowing that when you get home to report the misfortune, you’ll find the house empty too. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who have all their details on their phone, including their security and access keys.
Complacency will do for you.
Even with paying the teams, I’m making over five grand a week. Easy money from people who work like slaves for companies they hate and leave their money in banks they don’t trust.
Complacency. Always sure things will get better. Always sure it’ll be someone else who gets had. You keep right on thinking that. Makes my life much easier.
So, there you are, sitting in your ruined ‘smart’ home, waiting for someone to get you some sort of connectivity, when it occurs to you that at least no one was hurt. You might have lost your possessions and money, but everyone’s okay. You’ll get by. Just have to get over the upset so you can be strong for the kids when they come in.
Your son goes out with music so loud over his earbuds a building could collapse behind him and he wouldn’t notice. As all I want to do is walk up and taser him, he’s done. How do I know? Because you mentioned it while complaining to your wife using the phone you neglected to secure.
Your daughter won’t spot us coming, either. She’s out with friends and we’ll take them all when they call a rideshare. It’ll call some of my people, because we hacked her cloud via your parental monitoring link.
Kidnap for ransom is a waste of time. Why bother finding rich people when any teen will sell? Traffickers pay good money, and all they want is English speaking and fit. Depending on your kids ability to grasp a situation and adapt, they could live a good life. Good for a cherished pet, anyway. The alternative being they’ll help a lot of other people live their good lives.
Right, enough banter. Back to my little empire.
Merry Christmas.
