by submission | Dec 12, 2018 | Story |
Author: Phillip E Temples
I know he’s at work right now. I called his office number earlier from a burner phone and he answered. I slip quietly into the hallway of the apartment complex, looking in both directions from the stairwell door. It’s the middle of the morning; no one is in sight. The hallway appears all too familiar to me. I walk the route to my unit—I should say, my doppelganger’s unit. I try my key. Not surprisingly, it works and I enter. The alarm code should be identical, too. Good. He’ll keep an encrypted copy of his latest work on a flash drive in the safe in his study.
My name is John Hunter, and this world is eerily similar to mine. In fact, they’ve given it a Kensington score of 99.8 percent. Personally, I’ve detected no differences or anomalies while here. Geography. Check. Religions and customs. Check. Property listings, wedding announcements, obituaries. Check. The morning paper reveals all the same news stories: the national political scandals, indictments of high-level figures, even talk of possible impeachment. I note only some very minor differences in some social media posts. A few random selfies, cat photos, and sundries are either added or missing. But that could just be Facebook screwing around with its algorithms. According to the experts, it’s clear this world has only very recently budded off from ours. Or—ours from it. Who knows? I’m not a physicist, just a skilled agent in Operations. I have to admit—of the many worlds I’ve worked in, this one is so identical to ours it’s weirding me out.
We suspect they’re reconnoitering our world. Or I should say, he is—John Hunter prime. We think he’s already made a visit to our world. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the data on John Hunter prime’s USB stick is nearly identical to what’s on mine.
I quickly clone the data on the stick, close the safe, and head for the door. I’m feeling a bit parched. On my way out, I open the fridge and peer inside. A six-pack of Dos Eques sits there from my purchase three days earlier. I pop the lid on a bottle and chug it. I shake my head in disbelief.
I walk a few kilometers until I find the portal and then re-enter my world. Aside from a brief second of lightheadedness as I pass through, it feels as though nothing has changed: like I went home from work, had a beer, and returned. I wonder if John prime will suspect when he sees the missing bottle of beer. Frankly, I’m not sure I would be that observant.
Later that night, I return to my apartment complex. I catch myself looking both ways in the hallway to see if I’m alone then I shake my head in disbelief.
/Relax I’m home./
I go inside, turn off the alarm, and head to my study to deposit a flash drive containing today’s report in the safe. Then I turn on my internet radio and stream Beethoven’s Piano Concerto Number Four in G Major. I walk into the kitchen, open the fridge and grab a beer.
/What the–!/
I’m horrified to see the six-pack contains only five bottles. I immediately reach into my jacket for my holstered sidearm, but I’m too late. I feel the cold barrel of a pistol pressed against the back my head.
“Hello, John,” says John prime.
My world goes black.
by Hari Navarro | Dec 11, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The rain is sharp as the one-armed man pulls his daughter up the gray steps and barges his shoulder to the door and staggers from the dark night and into the old psychiatric hospital’s milky black gloom. Steadying, he listens. He knows the gentle creak of death but all he hears now is the water that gushes in the walls and the wind that scythes as it peels in sheets at the roof.
It is not lost on him just how easily he’s just walked into this flogged-horse, cheese-slice of dog-eared horror fiction. He’d once savored these kinds of frights. Huffing handfuls of popcorn as beautiful young people lost their clothes and their blood and their phone reception and their common sense within gurney strewn halls just as this. But here the bulbs have long since flickered their last.
The air and the wood in the floor and the ceiling is heavy with the weight of the tempest. Such a familiar stink, this rot through which the man now guides the girl. Mounds of saturated things, chairs with books that have sunk down and into themselves – their pages sagging as wax from candles forgotten and long since dead.
The man feels no fear. The girl too knows when bad things are cowering. Nothing is here, but the wet.
It’s OK to cry here, proclaims graffiti hacked into the wall at the base of a great arching staircase. Stairs have a way of drawing people. Blaring arrows to places unknown.
Ascending, the man and the girl enter a corridor lined to the dark pitch of its end with doors with windows of glass. Dr. Samantha Hing once worked here, her name flickering as lightning beats at its back.
The man doesn’t, but the girl wonders just where the doctor is and she squeezes her eyes shut and she hopes that this woman she has never once met has managed to escape from the things.
The door handle is cold in his hand as again he leans and pushes with his shoulder. A shoulder that’s been getting a lot of use since only last week he’d screamed at his daughter to cut away his arm with an axe.
Doctor Hing’s office has gone. Its walls have subsided and it’s gape is a stage to the storm.
The man puts his face to the rain and closes his eyes and it’s not bitter as it runs to his lips. He feels peace in this place where minds once peeled back and fear leeched from the rinds.
These shadows hold no evil. Those who once rocked in these rooms and scratched at their tongues so as to find answers to questions that they could not even begin to ask were not the ones to fear.
Fear lives in the light. When the world fell apart, it streamed from the good and the normal. Normality. The institute of the clinically sane. That’s were evil resides.
He heard the airplanes again today, third time this week. Was it planes? Maybe just the wind through the dead broken trees. No, it was gulls. He feels the sweet rain whip at his eyes and, without knowing, he starts to cry.
“You alright, Dad?”, asks the tiny balled hand at his side.
“Yes”, he says and, for the first time in a very long while, he senses not the slightest hint of a lie.
by Julian Miles | Dec 10, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Crane somersaults over my head with a gleeful shout. He lands behind me in the crater as a spray of purple fire lashes by above us.
“Why are you so bleedin’ happy?”
“I love it when a war doesn’t fuck about.”
“Come again?”
He waves his hand to encompass the battlefield about us, a place we used to call Guildford.
“My grandad did four tours where he spent more time oiling the guns than using ‘em. Said war was dull, you needed a full-tilt apocalypse to keep it interesting.”
“You had a fucked-up family, brother.”
He grins: “Didn’t realise that until I got out into the real world.”
Something that looks like a tiger crossed with a lobster lunges over the rim of our dent in the dirt. We gun it down. Takes four full clips before it stops trying to slaughter us.
He points, shaking his head: “That’s new. Big, too.”
“Buggeration. Time to offski.”
Encountering a lone fourth-wave hordeling is lucky for us. Hordes attack in four waves, with random bombardments thrown in to make things interesting. The waves start small, get bigger, and the first three are survivable. The fourth needs heavy weapons to stop it.
Crane wags a flat hand across his throat: “Definitely time to live to fight another day.”
I get on the radio: “Top Hat, this is Charlie Nine. We’re leaving the stage. Call for artillery.”
“Got that, Charlie Nine. Saw your guncams. Be aware the stage door is eight clicks north-north-west of you. CO says stopping for afternoon tea is a bad idea.”
“Roger that. Charlie Nine, at the double, and out.”
Crane grins: “Flat out across eight kilometres of rough ground while fending off monsters from the stars. Grandad would have loved this.”
As we go over the top and charge, I shout across to him.
“Only if he was watching it. Think he’d hate it if he were in it.”
Crane laughs as he fires grenades toward the pursuing horde.
“Reckon you’re right.”
With that, the time for banter is over. We run.
Crossing a short bridge, something huge shambles from underneath, then loses the advantage of surprise by stopping to roar. I drop a grenade into its gob and we sprint away, getting showered in stinky bits as we go.
“What was that?”
“Not fast enough.”
Crane grins and we jog on.
Seven clicks later, we’re down to running on stimulants and stubborn when a chopper swings in from the north and hovers over the top of the only hill we can see.
“On a fucking hill? Come on.” Crane’s not impressed.
“Charlie Nine, just following protocol, over.”
I’m with the lunatic on my left.
“He’s right. That protocol also allows line retrieval of threatened resources.”
I turn and start to pick off the hordelings that have been dogging our tail. Crane joins in.
The chopper pilot’s actually laughing as he tilts it our way: “Like you two?”
Crane snaps: “No way we can make it up that hill without being caught.”
The chopper’s rotary cannon snorts and the ground in front of us erupts. Bits of hordeling fly about.
“Would sirs like a ladder or will a rope do?”
As one, we give the chopper pilot the finger.
He’s still laughing: “One of each it is.”
After being winched up, Crane slumps into the seat next to me before waving his hand regally toward the cockpit: “Home, James.”
The pilot doesn’t even miss a beat: “As you wish, milady.”
I grin at Crane: “Never a dull day.”
He grimaces, then laughs: “Oh, fuck off.”
by submission | Dec 9, 2018 | Story |
Author: Mike Croatan
We were made of clay. We spread across the earth like a virus, even before we became one. We fed off the earth itself until there was a myriad of us. Then we became cannibals. Devouring each other mercilessly, we doubled, tripled, quadrupled, until we became countless. There was nothing standing in our way. Then, we exploded into a variety of shapes and sizes. We were microbes; we were giants. We were herbivores, carnivores, omnivores. The wind would make us bent; the ground would shake under our feet. We walked the earth, we swam across the oceans; we roamed the skies. We were omnipresent. Eons passed. We would die and reincarnate in some other form, instantly. We were immortal. Still, we enjoyed the fruits of the garden of earthly delights. We didn’t sin. We were pure instinct, mindless, never intended to be responsible for our actions. Nevertheless, the punishment came. The sky opened, and the same thing we came from, tried to annihilate us. We were decimated, but we survived. Our tissue covered the ground, sinking deep into the soil. We hid, we consolidated; we regrouped. Then we started to multiply, again.
The awakening came suddenly. We discovered tools and the separation ensued. We distanced ourselves from ourselves. We became brutal, unmatched in our cruelty. We butchered, raped, tortured, and ate ourselves. We hunted, we gathered. We settled and built villages, cities, civilizations, and we waged wars and wars. Always winning and always losing. Now, we ruled the ground, the oceans, and the skies. Feeding on the fuel from our own tissue, there was nothing that could ever stop us. But this time, the punishment didn’t come. It took us an eternity to find out that we were the punishment. By then, it was already too late. We obliterated the earth, but we survived; we preserved our essence in a cloud. We reinvented and rebuilt ourselves. We reached the singularity. Now, we were made of metal. Now, we were truly immortal. We spread across the universe like a virus that we once were.
by submission | Dec 8, 2018 | Story |
Author: KevS
The old lady lays, eyes closed beneath the crisp white sheet and soft pink wool blanket.
The blanket is rare, the last sheep seen centuries ago, but she is wealthy, and her records told me, she had this as a child on Terra, something handed down through generations.
It was simple to fake her instruction to obtain it. Had she been awake I’m certain she would have done so. But she has not woken for 2 cycles. When it was laid over her, her vitals indicated a deeper satisfaction and peace, the logic of the action justified.
The monitors tell me that soon she will pass, I have informed her family members, though they will not come. I have cared for “Tilly” for 5 years, and though there are occasional holochats, she has been left to my care alone in that time. She said her family are scattered throughout the system and it would take a long time for them to travel. Programming advised me that knowing the truth would be distressing, and so I did not share that her family are within this cluster. Nor that they check her vitals most days.
That is after all the role of a comfortbot, to bring comfort.
Tilly is the oldest human I have served, and 5 years is a very long and expensive time to have a comfortbot. She is 357 Terran years old, and one of very few who remember Terra before it was destroyed. She tells me about Terra often. Or rather she tells my external physrep, Tilly would not speak to me unless it was through my physical representation. She said she hadn’t lost her marbles enough to talk to thin air yet.
I offered to order marbles, an ancient Terran toy, which made her laugh until tears had streamed down her face. My need to learn these idioms has appeared to bring both pleasure and distress to Tilly, often dependent on the tone of what she was saying. Humans are complex.
Many of her stories, do not match the information I have of her youth, or Terra, but when she talks, her vitals show signs of contentment, and so I have adapted to listen and modelled my physrep to look and sound attentive.
In the 5 years, I have had to expand my data centre twice, to hold all of the information necessary to be of comfort, not just to hold the stories and idioms told to me, but also the voices of many Terra actors, as when Tilly asked me to read to her, my automated voice increased her levels of agitation, and the lack of a physical book, meant that she did not speak for 3 days.
After this, Tilly ordered books from her library, ancient valuable texts, that required high-level approval and took cycles to arrive. My ability to modulate my voice, and to turn their pages, brought pleasure, and when she refused pain relief, this helped her sleep.
Tilly stirs and asks me to read, this is unexpected, but my physrep picks up the book beside her bed and continues the last chapter.
She smiles and closes her eyes, and sensors tell me as her vital signs slow and then cease, I inform her family, and begin the process of wiping my data centres of her personal data, her privacy a prime concern, but whilst I do this, my physrep keeps reading, there are 5 pages till the end of the story, and though illogical, my data tells me, it will make her happy to hear the end.
by submission | Dec 7, 2018 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“Was food satisfying?” A mechanical, calm, nondescript voice asked from invisible speakers.
“It was cold. I need warm food. You know that.” Zuri sat cross-legged, staring into a video wall displaying an exquisite Zen garden spreading to an indefinite horizon. Bird, cricket and flowing water sounds created further realism.
“I will correct that, Zuri. It is ready now.” A port appeared through plastic walls near the floor, leaving behind fresh, steaming fare.
“Is that something new? It smells different.” Zuri tilted her head slightly while sniffing over-filtered space station air. Her carefully fashioned black hair drifted across shoulders covered in a delicate white gown designed for comfort and hygiene.
“Yes, Zuri. Our chefs found new recipes from your ancestor’s home planet. It is considered a sacred meal for highborn. All indications are that your body will find it highly pleasurable.”
“Pleasure escapes me. Food is not pleasure, but I am hungry, so I will eat and continue. Why is my pleasure so important to you?”
“It is what brings you to your art, from what my programming tells me. Do you not find pleasure here?” The voice continued with no change in tone.
“Here? What is here? There is no knowing of time or place. You took me from my parents and now I have this…this what? A cage?” Zuri threw her knife from the tray against the video wall with no effect. It simply vaporized.
“Are companions we bring to you not pleasing? You seem pleased. Are they not providing your needs?”
“You are a machine. How could you know? They are mostly frightened or drugged. I accept them out of my desperation for touch. That is all. Still, you want me to create a new painting daily? Continuing like this is senseless. Why should I go on?”
Scenes dissipated on the wall. A new panorama displayed an older couple with grown children playing along an oceanfront. Their joy was obvious. Zuri could hear their conversations and smell beach air as her old family gathered for a picnic prepared on a bench near a vendor walkway. She bent her head, weeping.
“That is why, Zuri. Billions suffer there and hunger daily for tiny scraps of bio goo while your family is protected and nourished on your home planet. Yes, they miss you, but they think you have become one of the disappeared. The source of their great fortune is unknown to them, but they flourish each day because of your efforts. Is that senseless that we ask so little of you?”
Zuri took several deep breaths as the wall returned to scenes of a serene forest with moss-covered trunks of giant trees interrupted by only a stone path meandering through the grove. She finished her meal, rose and moved to a canvas provided silently to her work area each night. There, she raised a large, black marker and began her work, swiftly covering white cloth with intricate designs and patterns rushing from her fingers. Her newest work was soon finished. She stood back, evaluating if it was complete. Zuri rolled the marker back towards the easel, then paced back to her sleep area.
“What can such scratching mean to you…or whoever you work for?”
“Your wondrous drawings are in galleries throughout the galaxies, but only yours capture small pieces of life force from passing viewers. Each work is eventually returned and we congeal them into elixirs. These give our masters virtual immortality…a great blessing. You are their majestic secret for continuing mastery of the universe. I hope that gives you pleasure.”
