by submission | Mar 3, 2019 | Story |
Author: Ian Hill
We showed each other our wounds in the iron room.
I saw the soft sump of skin on her head where part of her skull had cratered, and she peered at the fused and welded tendons that twisted the back of my leg. I felt her erratic heartbeat, and she counted all the places where my veins were knotted. I found an interesting cluster of lesions in the shadowy hollow where the bone under her eye was shattered; as I studied these, she stared back at me, tracing the bifurcations of a burn across the divoted dome that was my scalp.
As we got to know one another better, we felt the need to help the other. The thin, taut layer of tissue scraped over her ribs was always wrenching into whorls. I tried fruitlessly to mash her cramps smooth, and she creaked all the while, mouth twitching and eyes rolling. Another time, she carefully excised the worms from the festering place under my arm. But, in the end, we were no doctors; I could not unwind the torsion of her entrails, and she could not extract the poison from my thickening blood. We were terminal partners in that cold, sourcelessly bright room. But still, our angular, dazzling chamber was better than the white beach above where we had met. The cruel things were up there, amorous for more mangling.
The most affecting part of her body was her stomach. That torsion I mentioned before—that terrible writhing of the viscera—had forced some of her organs outward. They bulged against her thin abdominal wall, distending, showing dark and murky and purple as they slumped against her lap, barely retained by a thin layer of skin and fascia. The bloated bumps of hernias were nothing compared to this turgid sac that she had to cradle, lest something horrible happen. My eyes were often drawn to the lumpy coils, to the warm bag of maybe liver, maybe diaphragm, or maybe something new. We were changing, after all.
I tried not to look at her stomach, and she hid it from me in shame, hunching forward, folding her arms and gathering it all in. It frightened me, those unaccountable shapes, lobed and bruised so abhorrently. There were parts of me that revolted her, I know: where my scapula was exposed and sewn with marrow-seeping fissures, where my skin was so desiccated that it wept ash, where my hand contorted into a strange, convulsive club. But she never showed fear, even as convulsions wracked me and bent me into strange shapes.
It turned out that my disgust was well-founded, however. She was sleeping, one time, and I was staring at her sidelong. Something in her gut was churning, distorting. I stared with horror as one of the swollen protrusions crawled back into her. She made a strange sucking noise and turned, mercifully blocking the view. I forced myself to sleep. The next morning, I woke to a sharp intake of breath.
“Oh, God,” she said.
I glanced at the floor and saw a little pink thing quivering there. It was naught but a pile of neoplastic slag, almost—but not quite—formless. I looked away.
“What is that?” she whispered.
“It came out of you.”
We ended up pushing the pulpy thing into the corner, turning our backs, and simply ignoring it. This was for the best.
After a while, it denatured, and it became just another bit of unidentifiable, wholly inert sludge. But she was changed. Her wounds got worse. She withered, and she was glad. I watched it all, and I grew, and I spread. I wondered what I would become.
by submission | Mar 2, 2019 | Story |
Author: Bart Williams
Jeremy awoke to see Karen hovering over him. She covered him with kisses until he was aroused and then they made vigorous love.
“Good morning, birthday boy,” she said. Jeremy looked up at Karen’s perfect face, hair and skin. He never tired of her. He started to get out of bed, but she pulled him back for a second round.
“Early installment on your birthday present,” she said.
“You mean there’s more?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Hurry up and get dressed.”
Jeremy appreciated himself in the bathroom mirror. Lean, taut and toned. Not bad he thought. As a freighter pilot cruising near light speed most of his life, he didn’t age much. But in earth years he just turned three hundred. All his natural family were gone, but he had Karen. She was his fourth wife. He barely remembered the others.
Karen said she had a surprise for him. She called the mobileer and they drove to Galactic Pet.
There were aisles and aisles of glass cages, some room size, filled with the latest designs. Jeremy found it fascinating, though he’d never had a pet before. He liked the mini hippos, which were household practical and could fit in your bathroom tub. There were exotica like the rat-snake hybrid with two heads on a cylindrical body that tried to eat itself. They moved on to the legacy models and saw a Labrador retriever by ModiPet ™ that had all the standard features, including a remote.
“I like this one,” said Karen. “Of course, it’s your gift, honey, you decide.”
Jeremy chuckled knowing it was really Karen’s gift to herself, but he didn’t care. He actually liked the dog. He named him Bowser.
They decided to celebrate by taking Bowser to MetroPark. They took Bowser off the leash, set the remote to “play” and off he went into the dog park. Other models were there playing and they watched like proud parents.
“Do you think he’s playing a little hard?” Karen asked. Jeremy looked over to see Bowser humping a cockatiel Dalmatian mix. The cock-a-dal’s big wings were in an agitated flutter. Jeremy adjusted the remote and Bowser hopped off to face them expectantly.
“Hey, watch this,” he said and pressed a second button.
Bowser dashed to the fake fire hydrant and lifted his leg to pee. Jeremy hit “repeat fast” and the dog did a hundred pee lifts in the next minute before Jeremy hit “stop.” Bowser looked up, panting and tail wagging.
“Jeremy, that’s so cute,” Karen said.
The sun had now come out and Karen wrapped her arms around her husband. She balanced herself against him as she leaned her body back to catch the warmth.
Suddenly she froze, then fell and began to twitch violently.
“Karen! Karen!” Jeremy said, as he knelt beside her on the grass. Her eyes stared out blankly, their deep blue color beginning to fade.
“You’re OK, you’re OK, don’t worry,” Jeremy said. He sharply twisted her head to the left and her shaking stopped. He inserted his index finger deep into her ear until he felt a click, then lifted up her side panel.
“Ah, Karen you are an old model but I love you. Lucky for you I brought the first aid kit.” Jeremy pulled something out of a small bag on his belt and placed it into Karen’s head.
“I should get you replaced,” Jeremy said, trying to make a joke.
Karen’s eyes twitched just so slightly.
“I am sorry, honey. I didn’t mean that. I really didn’t.”
by submission | Mar 1, 2019 | Story |
Author: Ian Hill
Maisie swept through the workshop, skipping from bench to shelf and beaming at everything. As she went, the loose sleeves of her shoulder-draped coat knocked over little bottles of gears and springs. Her astrakhan lapels gathered ceiling-sifted motes, and her velvet vest turned from purple to gray. Her hair was soon thick with that agitating admixture of dust, soot, ash, and ossified spores that clung to everything on the city’s borders. This didn’t bother her, though; should she need it, a rubber-faced breathing mask with a ridged oxygen hose swung from her hip, expressionless lenses flashing iridescent from their oily coating.
Maisie hadn’t been to the workshop since she was a child. Her grandfather had willed it to her a decade ago, but only that morning had her access card updated to let her in. Such delays were expected, especially with buildings once used for perimeter security. But now she was here, and she loved it with all of its tiny, featureless dolls; all its green-barred lamps; all its mallets, spools, and chunks of hewn soap. Maybe she would move here among the curled wood shavings and hand-braided wicks. The colorful medals hanging from her collar surely warranted such a whimsical shift.
Maisie’s wandering eventually took her to the tower’s balcony—a parapet-guarded overhang that afforded a fantastically unobstructed view of the outer wastes. The city’s walls were high, but now—finally—she was higher, and she could look out at that rotting sprawl and really see what people had wrought. Her excitement hardened into a lump. All was gray and brown and leached out there in the swidden desolation; mangled buildings flowed into each other, sucking swells of mud swirled in slow maelstroms, and trash heaped up in tremendously decayed mountains. Spore haze danced sickly at the horizon, and evil, dark vapors surged to and fro, rolling through black valleys and leaving shimmering trails of melt. A constant rain of what look like blighted stars showered the wasteland; everywhere one of the tiny, dazzling fuzzes landed, a flash of light went out and etched things into char.
Maisie watched the bizarre display for a while, eyes reflecting the fitful plague. Then, a flash of pink in the murk drew her attention. Someone was moving around down there, picking between mounds of refuse, meandering aimlessly. Maisie leaned over the guardrail and squinted. It was too far to see, so she ducked into the workshop, retrieved a brass telescope, and, with one boot braced against the steel, propped herself up like a surveyor and looked again.
There was a little girl out there. She wore a stained jumper, and she trailed a doll from her right hand. Maisie’s heart leapt. She watched as the child scoured mold from mirrors, picked maimed toys from sludge, and played fetch with a leprous dog that followed her around. At one point, the girl climbed to the top window of a gutted, rolled hotel and pretended to be a princess. It made the woman’s heart ache.
Within the hour, Maisie was knee-deep among the scum and corruption, mask on face; at least its nose was stuffed with sweet-smelling herbs. At length, she found the little girl in a sort of glade of garbage, wheezing and petting her fungal puppy.
“Hi,” Maisie said, voice distorted.
The girl looked up.
“Come to the city with me.” Maisie extended a gloved hand.
The girl smiled and made to stand, but she stopped. “What about Rufus?”
Maisie peered at the trembling mutt and shook her head. “He’s sick.”
The girl smiled even broader and plopped back down, carefree. “No thanks!”
Rufus rollicked; Maisie’s heart broke.
by submission | Feb 28, 2019 | Story |
Author: Suzanne Borchers
Her fingers fumbled with the fasteners on the uniform. She breathed out harshly and shook her left hand. Trying again to manipulate the loop, she cursed under her breath so that her crew wouldn’t hear the unprofessional words. They were at war, dammit, and she couldn’t allow anything less than perfection from them or herself.
Calm. She needed to relax, take the time for precision, and allow her fingers to find their strength and dexterity. Once more she attacked the task. Dammit! Why did some idiot decide officers needed loops and not Velcro fasteners? Velcro had been used for eons and then some designer changed the uniforms—why?
And why wasn’t her hand cooperating?
“Sir, may I help you?” her second-in-command’s syrupy voice interrupted.
Second would love to be in charge, wouldn’t he? Always watching her and waiting for a chance to catch a mistake in judgment. She was a mature woman with decades of service! She wouldn’t step down to this man only a few years out of academia. What did he know about running a starship? He had no people skills and one had to command not only the crew’s minds but their hearts.
“When I need your help, I’ll tell you.” He needed to remember his place in command. His face told everything that skipped through his brain. And a captain needed to control emotions and not show them so obviously. What was the fleet commander thinking when he draped this albatross around her neck? “Make your job easier,” he said. She swallowed a guffaw.
Give him a project to handle and he wouldn’t have time to stare at her. “Second, alert the crew to ready themselves for a battle drill.” There, that would keep his power-hungry eyes off her. And why couldn’t she move her left arm? She, who had always prided herself on control of others, couldn’t control her own muscles. What was happening?
“Sir, I didn’t understand your command.”
What was wrong with his ears? She deepened her voice and raised the volume when she repeated it.
Why were other crew members swiveling in their chairs to stare at her? Their faces registered confusion. She had to regain control. This was an insult!
“Second, we are to begin a battle drill! Alert the crew!
The second-in-command tapped his panel. She couldn’t hear his words. His quiet voice quickened her suspicions of mutiny. The bridge crew members appeared to be on the edges of their seats, watching her.
Tears began to tickle her eyes. She never cried. She blinked hard. She was the captain! She was in control!
The doors opened to admit the ship’s lead surgeon. As he approached her, he said, “Everyone back to your panels,” and they obeyed.
As Second stood next to the doctor, his face showed his emotion. What? He was sorry for her!
The doctor touched her arm. “Captain, please accompany me to the sick bay. You’re needed there.”
When did those two orderlies enter the bridge?
“I’m needed here, Doctor.” She had to stay in control. Why wasn’t her body cooperating?
When she awoke in Sick Bay, she scrambled to climb out of the bed. Her body pinned her down. Why didn’t her left side obey her command? She used her right hand to lift her heavy left arm. When had her skin become thin and wrinkled? When did brown spots cover her hands?
She was just an old woman.
She wept uncontrolled tears.
by submission | Feb 27, 2019 | Story |
Author: Moriah Geer-Hardwick
It was a good arm. You’re cognitive its loss will have negative effects. Absently, you work the fingers on your remaining appendage, one after the other. You seem to control a decent amount of movement and function. You ignore the barrage of internal damage reports cascading through your peripherals. There’s no time to process them anyway. A reflex prompt pulses through your chassis, jerking you upright. The command display reads, “Get up.” Tabbed beneath is the notation, “Incoming fire.”
Bullets shred the concrete pillar beside you. Bits of it spatter your nano-tube plating as you scramble away. You move fast, trying to stay low, but a round catches you in the leg. More damage reports. They can wait. You can still move, and right now, that’s all that matters. A tactical subroutine automatically calculates the trajectory of bullets, concluding the shots are originating from an elevated vantage point. Red target markers pop into your optical display, indicating the position of your attacker, on a rooftop across the courtyard. It occurs to you one of the things you miss most about the arm you lost is the very large gun it was holding.
A logic trigger recalls one of the internal damage reports you ignored earlier. This time, you glance through it. Struck by a high-velocity projectile, it states. Catastrophic structural failure, from shoulder to elbow. Severed connectivity from the rest of your frame. The impact knocked you to the ground. Yes, all that was obvious the moment it happened. Wait. Shoulder to the elbow joint were destroyed. Which means, nudges the logic trigger, everything else, including the very large gun, likely remains intact.
A bullet cracks into your left side, spinning you around and slamming you to the ground. Warning tags explode across your primary display, informing you that your lower extremities are currently offline. Yes, you are aware. Flat on your back, you watch, helpless, as your feet, then your legs, are chewed apart by gunfire. You claw at the rubble beneath you, attempting to drag yourself to safety, but before you can make any progress, the shooting stops. Confused, you look up and see squat little building is now obscuring your attacker’s path of fire. Mostly obscuring, you think, looking down at the wreckage that was once your legs.
A tactical subroutine estimates the amount of time it will take the shooter to relocate. You have at most four seconds before it can cross over to the next building and reestablish a line of sight. Quickly, you cast a signal out for the gun. To your surprise, it pings back instantly. You trigger its mobility function and wait. A second later you see it skittering towards you, its spindly legs frantically stabbing at the ground, propelling it forward. You raise your remaining arm, directing it to to the precise point where your attacker will come into view. At full tilt, the gun stutters around to match the angle, then leaps. It glides in a perfect arc towards your hand. At the same time, you see a combat sniper machine land gracefully on the rooftop directly in front of you. Reflexively, your hand goes to clench around the grip of the gun. As it does, a hand/eye sync error blips into your peripherals. Your fingers close a fraction of a second too soon. The gun deflects off of your hand and tumbles away, its spindly legs flailing wildly. “I never had sync errors with my good arm,” is the last information to flash through your central processor before a bullet shatters it into a thousand pieces.
by Hari Navarro | Feb 26, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The angel sits at the end of the Pope’s bed and toys with an errant strand of gold thread. Running it between thumb and finger, a residue flicker; a remnant of the mass shunt of energy that had pulled him here from across the universe, that which he can still taste as it lingers like sucked coins in his mouth, strobes into the ornate bedcovers design and sparks it into life.
The Pope, whose name was once Adam, awakens with a start.
“Who are you?”, he asks.
“Listen close. Time is of the essence”, says the angel, letting go of the thread, and so casting the ostentatious gape of the chamber back into its early morning gloom.
“If it’s violence you seek to lay here…”
“I’m an angel.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s so confounding. Your race is so devout, yet you struggle now to accept my validity. I’m an icon of your belief system. But you think me mad. You wail and throw yourselves at the coffins of the dead, though you are convinced that their essence has passed on to a better place.”
“What do you want? Or, are you simply content to sit there and mock?”
“You don’t understand, Adam. I’m not mocking. This is praise.”
The Pope sits upright, and he chews at the skin at his knuckle.
“Centuries ago we visited this world of yours. It was one of countless many that harboured life. We poked around a bit, got to meet a few of the locals and, then, we left. Didn’t think anything of it. Like I said, you are but one of many.”
“Tell me what you want.”
“Well, you see, the interesting thing was just how your species, it alone, how it interpreted that visit. We have been studying its evolution for many years. I mean, I know you were a primitive people but the way you inflated and combined and justified what you saw. How you gave supernatural attributes to people and places that were simply people and places. The place I come to you from, my home, it is the place you call heaven.”
The Pope’s eyes fill, and he shakes the tears to his cheeks.
“The cradle of our repentant souls…”, he breathes into his clasped hands.
“No. No, it’s not. It’s a planet and it has nothing to do with your races bizarre desire to live on past its own end”
“But you are an angel. I feel the light you carry. Please, tell me where we went wrong. Open the path to your kingdom…”
“I am an emissary for a very particular group of progressive… politicians, shall we say. Our civilization has no deities. Not for the lack of trying. We attempted over and over to replicate the type of social control that you managed here on earth with your gods. It never worked. Sure, we have wars but nothing as vicious and as divisive as your catalogue of God sanctioned destruction. Our kind marry who they want, they drink and eat what they want and when they die there is great mourning. Because we know there are no other lives to be had.”
“You want the texts, the scriptures. Don’t you? You want the word, so that your people can see the true light.”
“No, we want you Adam.”
“Come again?”
“We have your book. For years we called on our own great minds to spout its teachings. But none were believed, nor followed. We want to control the masses, Adam. Show us how. They will think you a god”.
