by submission | Jun 19, 2019 | Story |
Author: Elaine Thomas
Somewhere, in a forest, lightning strikes a tree.
Elsewhere, in a cabin, a man tosses a log onto the fire. Startled, the man jumps backward, then laughs at himself. He knows any slight moisture left in wood as it cures can emit a high-pitched whistle when flames lick at it. He has heard the sound many times. Still, this one sounded almost like a scream. He shakes his head at his own silliness, adds more wood to the now roaring fire, warms his hands holding the palms forward in the glow, then turns both body and mind back to other ordinary tasks.
The crackling blaze and radiant heat of an open hearth keep the dark and the cold at bay. Thus has it been since the earliest primitive residents of this planet discovered fire, millions and millions of flames ago, a powerful and comforting presence through the centuries.
Smoke crawls up the chimney and surfaces into the air, where it dissipates, although not really. Instead Smoke hangs above the roof, spreading, waiting, knowing more will come. So, too, has it been since the earliest residents on this planet discovered fire.
Once free and floating there, Smoke evaluates its situation. There is no loneliness here. It knows other trees in other forests in other lands all around the planet will replicate its being, are replicating it. It knows new forms based on mass production and chemicals will join it. It knows the process will move across the universe, planet by planet, from caves to cabins to corporations. Smoke will not be alone long, at least not as it understands time. Such is progress, Smoke reflects, in a manner of thought as diffuse and unsubstantial as its very being.
More and more Smoke continues to be released and spread, joining all that has already been set free, over eons covering the surface of the world. As it slowly blocks any warmth and light from above, the planet’s residents respond just as Smoke knew they would. They struggle to control their environment. They seek their own benefit. They light more fires, burn more logs, destroy more forests and other resources in order to create warmth and light from below.
As Smoke accumulates in the air, the process speeds up. Residents of the planet cease to see the sun burning in the heavens, yet heat becomes trapped and magnified by Smoke. No one sleeps well as light breaks boundaries between night and day. Forest fires rage. Polar bears starve as habitats change. Choked plant life withers. Water and wetlands recede. Food becomes more and more difficult to grow or obtain, then impossible. Generation by generation, the planet grows dark and lifeless, enshrouded in Smoke.
In the mythology of the planet’s residents, the creator they pretended to worship once destroyed life through drowning, then promised on a rainbow that would never again happen. It would be fire next time, they prophesied, but they forgot that where there is fire there is Smoke. And after the fire Smoke remains.
by Hari Navarro | Jun 18, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I killed something inside myself last week. It had been slowly killing me for years so, I have to say, it came as somewhat a relief.
I’d been contemplating it for some time. But the gumption to actually follow through wasn’t easy, you know? I’d always retract when the inevitability of its demise tap, tap, a tap tapped at my mind.
I looked into every aspect of its life, I took stock. I stalked its routines, passing judgement on every detail. Where even the scent I inhaled, as I stood in its bathroom and popped the lid of its favourite shampoo became proof positive of the wanton beast that it was.
It’s strange, but this desire to kill it seemed like it was an actual thing. A misshapen cog maybe, catching and clicking in my head. It got loudest when I was at the gym. I was so sure others could hear it too. So I would run, my legs churning so as the swelling blood in my ears out-thumped my brain’s loathsome and incessant taunt.
I couldn’t escape it even as I sat in the Bar Red Cafe and licked at my cappuccino and smiled out through my beautiful friends, and into the ruddy specks of dust that whip from the crags of this exquisite soundless world… tap, tap a tap tap.
I think, maybe, I am the most beautiful thing in this colony. I really do. I have it all, and a Gucci bag to carry it home in.
I graduated from college at the end of last year with honours but I shouldn’t have wasted my time, I have money. I think I should be a model. I look after myself. I catch the sun, not the real one, it’s far too dim to bronze my tight skin just perfectly so. Sorry, enough of my blessed, doomed, wasted, poor little rich kid lament. I just wanted the noise to stop.
I found hacking myself to pieces really was as difficult as it sounds. But I am very handy with a blade. I can hone that edge like those swords in the films that slice through candles without inducing so much as a flicker.
I stabbed it and left it for a day, you know, to let the blood congeal. That was one very long first night, I tell you, death is such a cold thing to have in your bed.
But I worked all of the next day, dividing it into manageable sections. Firstly, I’d tested my blade by running it along and scything the fine hair on my arm. Then the fiddly bit, shearing the meat from its host. I cut up the pieces as small as I could, cubed them, I guess, you would say.
I’m no expert when it comes to anatomy, so it would have been helpful to know just how best to dig. Stay in school kids. It was so deep and a fair amount of hack and slash ensued, but I got there.
I admit that, in the end, I was more than a little proud of my neatly stacked pounds of flesh. Then, I flushed the lot, not all at once mind, away and down to dissolve in the subterranean shit n’ piss sea.
And that was about it. I killed it, I think. And now all that is left is me.
by Julian Miles | Jun 17, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
[Translation (from original German) of key document removed from Treasure Hunter site during Operation Rush North (9/16).]
OMITTED: Kriegsmarine document reference, location codes, et al.
Purpose of record: Confidential interview (sole record)
For Kriegsmarine: Lieutenant-Commander Rudolf Büchler (RB)
Interviewee: Captain Karl Drull (KD)
Record taker: Lieutenant-Junior Otto Maurer (OM – listening, not present)
Others present: None
Preamble: Infected Kriegsmarine personnel evacuated on F8-RL post repairs. Destination Trondheim. Treasure Hunter Station abandoned. Blue Sun Substation demolished. Minefield remains.
RB: Mister Drull, please state your affiliation for the record.
KD: Ahnenerbe SS under Project Baptist, reporting to Himmler himself.
RB: Be that as it may, the personnel flown out were dying. I want an explanation.
KD: It can be passed off as roundworm. Best that it is.
RB: Secrecy will not save lives.
KD: Those who can be saved, will be. Everyone will be discretely dosed. Leave be.
RB: You’ve been spouting portentous, veiled threats since you came aboard. That is no longer acceptable. Before you try blustering, let me explain: I will have my answer or you will be exiting the stern torpedo tube into the Queen Victoria Sea.
KD: What I say will be confidential?
RB: Absolutely.
OM – Note: Captain Drull is unaware of this record being made.
KD: I am part of the Ahnenerbe. I do not report to Himmler. I report to Leader Darré in Institute USG.
RB: USG?
KD: Exploitation of lost sciences. Leader Darré’s work has given us access to Sekhet-Aaru itself. I was the envoy sent to make initial contact with the Vrilya, the glorious beings who live therein. The Blue Sun substation contained the airlock over the passage down.
We had just established contact when Sub-Lieutenant Walik stormed in. The man was a religious fanatic who repeatedly tried to interfere, blindly mistrustful of the benefits we sought to gain for the Fatherland. He killed the guards at top and bottom of the shaft, then shot one of the Vrilya before we could intervene. They were profoundly angered by that, spraying us with a stinking mist, forcing us to retreat, to abandon our fallen. Your man Hoffman made it back the following day. He’d only been knocked unconscious by Walik.
When the sickness started, I contacted USG and they told me how to make a remedy from the chemicals we had. Hoffman and I managed to mix one dose, which I took as he seemed unaffected. I have kept him with me as a precaution.
RB: You antagonised the Coming Race? Surely they should have killed you with wondrous energy beams?
KD: The Vrilya regard engaging in hand-to-hand combat as evidence of inferiority. The mark of a pest species. The deathmist is their exterminator. A manufactured plague.
RB: USG personnel will dose my entire crew?
KD: Yes.
RB: Institute USG have made contact before.
KD: Several times. The Vrilya have barely been civil toward us. After this, who knows?
RB: Do they have other means to spread their pesticide? Like a Typhoid Mary?
KD: That’s not inconceivable.
RB: You fool. You still don’t see it, do you?
OM – Note: There is a single gunshot. RB calls for submariners Ebers and Marsch. They enter.
RB: Find Hoffman. Kill him. His body goes out the stern tube before this one.
OM – Note: They depart. There is a short period of tumult, then Marsch returns to inform RB that Hoffman is dead.
RB: Stop recording, Mister Maurer.
[Evaluation: whether lunacy, hoax or fact, this is problematical. There are several belief systems and organisations it would appeal to and could goad. Place this under 50-year FOIA exemption.]
by submission | Jun 16, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Henson
The days were all the same like links on a chain. I had to break free. Then came a flash in the middle of another toss-and-turn night. I got to the window in time to see a beam of light retracting into the sky. In the yard was a shape — glowing white, irregular with sharp edges and about the size of a person.
I went outside and circled the form, which appeared to be two-dimensional. When I pushed a stick into the shape, the stick disappeared and reappeared when I retracted it. I posted online several photos and a video of the vanishing stick. I eventually sat in a lawn chair beside the shape and fell asleep.
My first thought when dawn woke me was that it had all been a dream. But there was the form twinkling in the sunlight. I checked my postings and saw they’d gone viral. I went inside to clean up and was surprised the shape drifted along behind me.
I called in sick, uploaded more images and videos and spent hours watching the number of views explode.
A few days later, a local TV station sent a crew to interview me. I hesitated at first, concerned my boss might see I wasn’t really sick. But I didn’t like my number-crunching job anyway.
When the reporter swept a stick, it disappeared as it passed through the form. “What’s the trick? Mirrors? Projectors?” I assured her it was real. She decided, fake or not, it was a good story. My shape and I got five minutes on the news. I also got fired.
The broadcast snagged the attention of a physicist at the university. He asked me to bring the shape to his lab. I realized his tests might make for some good posts.
The scientist reached a startling conclusion: The shape was comprised of nothing. No electrons, photons, quarks or even quantum vacuum fluctuations. It was Absolutely. Nothing.
I uploaded a video of the physicist describing the miraculous form and launched my own website dedicated to Nothing. I posted images of Nothing in a flower bed, by the kitchen sink, with a puppy. Nothing became an internet sensation. I monetized my website and thought I’d never have to work again.
One evening, I was out back admiring the night sky. Nothing, as always, was beside me. At the sight of a shooting star, I disappeared a finger into Nothing. “I wish you could talk,” I sighed.
Next morning when I awoke, Nothing was gone and a beautiful woman was in its place. “I’m the answer to your wish,” the woman said.
I thought this was a good thing. But when I uploaded a video of the woman explaining how she used to be Nothing, the views slowed to a trickle. Then came the comments — “Boring” … “Who Cares?” … “Fraud.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, the woman thought I should get a job as a website designer. She wanted us to start a family. She wanted a puppy. My head whirled. “I wish you could go back to the way you were,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
I deleted the video of the woman and promised my followers that the next day I would do the unthinkable: Stick my head into the shape.
That night I could hardly sleep knowing I would have Nothing to live for again. Sometime after midnight, there was a bright flash out back. I ran to the window just in time to see a beam of light pulling Nothing into the sky.
by submission | Jun 15, 2019 | Story |
Author: Phoebe Wagner
The saplings haven’t grown. This is expected.
We are prepped on day one—you will not see progress. Expect none. For this reason, the deployments are for three years. The generational weight was too much for the initial ten-year rotations.
We brag and boast—we could do it, plant the tiny green bursts for weeks, months, years, a decade. We know we don’t plant for our children or grandchildren. We plant for the millennia—and the next.
We walk the dusty loam in deerhide slippers, heavy skin bags slung across out shoulders, hefting found metal tools, fire-hardened wooden shovels, and spades.
The first month, we ache with the weight of roots.
Now, our moods lightning with the saplings bags until a starscape of green stretches behind.
Sometimes, we unearth a stump. According to the elders, the sequoias were some of the last to be harvested, but when whole cities died of the cold, when no materials remained to build storm shelters, when another hurricane was swirling inland—they came for majesty.
People died for the trees. Chained themselves, defended with guns, committed mass suicide. The trees became gods to some, ghosts to others, and survival for many.
We’ve never seen a live one, just the stumps unearthed from the loam and dust the roots once held in place.
The stumps were hacked to spindles. Sometimes, a hallowed, blackened center speaks to final fires in the California winters that never should have grown so cold.
The stumps tell a story of time. As we shed our bags and scoop away the dirt, it is a broken map appearing between our fingers. A maze of promises past—of breath and shade and all that shade breeds, of moss and leaves turning to hummus and leaves eaten from stems by insects now lost.
Each ring is a word in a poem, and as we shoulder our bags, as we scoop holes and ease in the saplings’ roots, we record the first line.
by submission | Jun 14, 2019 | Story |
Author: Kevlin Henney
The first sun set behind the mountains before she turned to look across the plain to the darker sky opposite. A new star had appeared on the horizon. Rising in counterpoint to the evening suns, it scored a white trail across the sky, dividing the world above in two. Then one new star became two, became three…
By second sundown the sky was combed with light, tidy parallels painted up from the edge of the plain, over and down to a ragged leading edge that chased the remaining sun into night.
By the curtain fall of third sundown they had caught up, completing their arc across the sky. The gone embers of suns were replaced by a blue–white glow. It was not the loss of sunlight that chilled her skin.
When had the ground started to hum? She felt it before she knew it. She felt the fear before she could think what to do.
The children? She could have gone back inside to wake them, to take them to the shelter, to tell them everything would be all right, to again wrap the truth in comfort and lies while holding them tight. The false promise that they could outrun everything that had happened to them. Outrun a marriage divided by war. Outrun a war dividing worlds, engulfing family after family, system after system.
The hum grew to rumbling harmonies, the horizon’s glow burst into a false and unstopping sunrise that reached up to swallow the painted streaks and remaining sky, that bled over the mountains, melting them as it flowed.
The sanctuary of this outermost system had fallen. An end approached her faster than sound. There would be no more running.
She would not wake the children. A lasting sleep was the peace she could finally give them.
