by Hari Navarro | Feb 19, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The little girl clutches into her blankets and runs her cheek over the ancient concrete veins that etch into the great wall at her side.
“I love the wall. It is strong and tall and beautiful and long, isn’t it Dad?”, she says, thinking with the scrunch of her lips.
“Tell me, again, who built it, please…”
“Again? You’ve heard this story, maybe, and this is just a rough estimate, a bazillion trillion and two and a half times. How about you tell me the story?”, says her father as he looks out through their acid-strafed hermetic bubble, and across the undulating flotsam of the now dimming Sonoran wetland sea.
“Well, in the beginning, there were no houses on the wall. There was no monorail, no shops, there were no buildings at all sprouting up and out from its sides. There was nothing. Just wall. On one side, there was wall and on the other side there was more wall looking back at it. Why was it just a wall, Dad?”
“Because the man who built it wanted a barrier, not a city.”
“Why?”
“Because he wanted to stop people from crossing from one side to the other. Remember, there used to be a border where the wall stands now. Many years ago, before the deluge… before the resumption.”
“Why did they want to cross?”
“Many reasons. Running away from stuff. Running toward stuff. Running stuff… Hey, it’s time for sleep.”
“Dad.”
“Yes.”
“What’s your favourite drink?”
“Corn Squeezin’s.”
“That’s alcohol, isn’t it Dad?”
“It most certainly is.”
“Belen’s mum told her that her Dad came home so drunk the other night that his auto-pilot got arrested for drunk droning.”
“Christ, that reminds me, your father will be landing any minute. Best for us both that you be found deep in Sleepsville.”
“You’re scared of him, aren’t you Dad?”
“More than fear itself”, he smiles.
“They’re going to build a pool at my school.”
“A pool. In my day, there wasn’t enough water to drink, let alone swim in.”
“Yup, it’s going to be made of transparent polymer forged in New Qalqilya. It will go right through the wall from one side to the other, right under the football pitch. I think it’s much more fun that we all live here together, it’s better than a border, isn’t it Dad?”
“It is, and you’ll be able to swim from one side of the city to the other. But you really, really, really… did someone say really?… need to sleep.”
A silent alarm flashes, a signal of the family transport’s imminent arrival.
“Buenas noche, Dad.”
“Tisbah Ala Kheir, Gal. Go to sleep. Sleep. Eyelids getting heavy, shutting…”
There is a gentle scratching and the sound of hydraulic clamps locking, as the drone settles on the pad above their heads. Dimmed internal lights automate, and a decontamination lift whooshes into life and begins to lower from the ceiling.
“Dad?”
“Toilet?”
“Nope”, she says, awkwardly now sitting, her face burning in excited recognition as her father steps into the light. “Papa!”
“Glass of water?”, her father smiles as he kisses her Dad’s cheek and, tiredly, drops his briefcase, it too flopping to the floor with a resided sigh.
“No. When I’m big, I’m going to build walls. Huge strong walls that reach out across the dead water. And I will keep adding to them and adding to them until I find the lost tribes. We can all be together. Like a bridge. That will be good, won’t it?”, said the little girl, gesturing excitedly with the tentacle stubs of her shoulders.
by Julian Miles | Feb 18, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The view goes negative, then my tummy does the thing where it tries to chuck everything out whichever end is the nearest.
It’s an hour before I can pick up the coffee left by an orderly barely older than my little sister. She doesn’t say a word. Literally runs off as soon as she’s put the cup down.
I need to clean myself up. Then someone needs a crash course in datamancer etiquette.
Stalking down the corridor in clean fatigues, I can see people moving away. I’m sensitive enough to read data as it passes by, and able to adjust it by act of will. It’s not hard to detect the clumps of electrical impulses bundled up in lifeforms.
“Specialist Leeson. What are you doing away from your post?” Sergeant-Major Ipswich sounds annoyed.
“I’m not at my post because it became irrelevant. I’m looking for the shitstick who gave permission for someone to let off an EMP within a half-kilometre of me without warning. Honestly, SM, I’m trying to help, but all your side seem to be able to muster is piss-taking and casual negligence.”
He grabs my arm. Mistake. He lets go and hastens away, convinced there’s a knife fight going on outside the Officer’s Mess.
Slamming through the doors to the command centre, I lean on the console next to the orderly who delivered my coffee.
“Could you get the idiot behind that EMP to come up here, please?”
She stammers. I delve into the console’s data lines and divert the tactical feed from Zone Six to a vending machine in the canteen. Unhappy shouting starts.
I raise my voice: “Which twit ordered the nearfield EMP?”
Shouting continues. I shut off the main display.
“Hey, people. Who ordered the EMP?”
A voice from behind me: “Release the data or I will shoot.”
I turn, slowly. A balding man in an overtight officer’s uniform. He’s got a lot of stripes on his chest and upper arms. He also has a revolver pointed at me.
“If you shoot me, the system crashes.”
“We’ll reboot it.”
I glance at the orderly and smile: “How long for a reboot, Trooper Barrett?”
She sits up: “About thirty minutes, Specialist Leeson.”
I look at him: “How much war can you lose in half an hour?”
He goes a little pale: “Technowitch bullshit. The interference will drop when you do.”
This man is a senior officer in the army that found, honed, and trained me. He hasn’t got a clue.
“I’m an ‘electrosensitive’ with ‘chronic hypermanipulation’. Street slang for me is ‘datamancer’.”
“Boojuns to scare the natives. You’ve just got supercomputers up your fanny.”
The f-?!
His eyes close and he drops like a sack of spuds. Behind him stands a dangerous-looking gent in baggy fatigues and warpaint: bright eyes, big grin. He cracks his knuckles.
“Excuse me, Lieutenant-General Renvers. I’m Sergeant Malc Green, one of your ‘point removal specialists’. This young lady has been kind enough to save my sorry arse twice in the last month, and is about to crawl through three kilometres of mud to fondle a cable so I can slip past enemy detectors, kill someone, and get out of occupied territory once again. Therefore, mind your fucking manners.”
You could hear a pin drop.
Malc takes a deep breath, then winks at me: “Ready to get dirty, witch?”
“Only for my favourite Uruk.”
I smile at him and restore the feeds.
As we head out, Malcolm pauses by Trooper Barrett and whispers: “Dunno ‘bout you, but I’d take the cartridges out of that revolver before he wakes up.”
by submission | Feb 17, 2019 | Story |
Author: Gerard Baars
Surging forward he crosses the sonic boom, his toned body unaffected by the turbulent forces. Accelerating he hits the second boom. Then the third, fourth… G-forces now threaten to rip his body to shreds, but his perfect physique shrugs it off. Hairless, naked except for the streamlined genital sack, he pushes on, emotionally dead, but mentally alert, consciously slips his mind into a higher sphere.
He skirts the wide circular arc, pushing his angular momentum to the max. Perfectly balanced between the competing circular forces he sails on. Aware of the approaching challenge he moulds his body into an extended pencil shape. Taking a deep breath he hurtles into the vacuum tube of the hadron collider. The magnetic fields increase his velocity the more. Homo sapiens has breached another evolutionary barrier. Aware of the laser photons speeding towards him from the left, he eggs his body on. Closing in on the collision point he blanks his mind and gains a few vital metres per second. Rushing forward, ever forward he senses the blinding light of the beam to his left and powers through with a few nanoseconds to spare. The laser beam hits the opposite wall, breaches the tube and the shock wave surges towards him. Mentally he has flattened his feet to receive the shock wave. It hits him and instead of engulfing him, forces his body forward even faster.
Now into free space again, he senses a dimensional portal ahead. Moving is right elbow millimetrically, he deviates into the new dimension. Not slowing his forward movement, his mind wallows in the peace, leaving the stress of his near annihilation behind. But he quickly recovers not allowing this ennui to slow him down, and takes the next portal back into his own dimension. An energy barrier approaches and he takes the jump. One, two, three levels higher. Yes, he is now more energetic than any other human body and hurtles forward at unprecedented speeds. Reaching beyond the mental state he nears nirvana. Another energy barrier overcome, he powers forward even faster.
He now hits the entropy barrier and is enthralled by the peace and ease of motion. He hurtles, surges, ever faster, ever freer. Somewhere way, way, behind the finishing bell tolls. Blissfully unaware, he knows without knowing that no bell tolls for him or ever will. Forward, ever forward, he hurtles on outrunning space. Even time now is no barrier. Forward, speed, acceleration, speed, hurtling, surging, powering, forward, forward, forw…….
by submission | Feb 16, 2019 | Story |
Author: Richard Wren
“Aaaagh!” It was always a shock to return, to feel the meat encase him again, to stare out through balls of jelly. Felix Bonaparte, time traveler, twitched his body to relieve his aching joints and waited for his heart to stop racing.
With eyes now closed, and in a fetal position, he concentrated on calming his rapid breath. Okay, that was better.
The worst was over. He was home. Rolling onto his back, he pushed with his legs to slide sweatily across the soft flooring. Now, propped into the corner of the dim little room, he felt his muscles gradually relax.
Felix loved to travel but wished it was more like H. G. Wells and those other stories. If only he had a slick, shiny machine with flashing lights and data screens. In reality, time travel was more of an art than a science. A matter of focusing on the moment – any moment, and then simply being there. Easy once you had the knack, but not everyone allowed themselves to be released into the currents of time. Most people preferred a limiting, single reality.
Felix Bonaparte – not his real name, had been traveling for most of his life, firstly by shocking accident then, after resisting Ritalin and other childhood drugs, deliberately. Teachers said he had a wandering mind.
As a youth, he had followed various boyhood whims. He had gawped at dinosaurs tramping through primeval swamps, watched dramatic, blood-stained battles and had admired the building of the great pyramids under the ancient Egyptian sun. Now, more mature and satiated with the spectacles of history, he was a connoisseur. He specialized in French history of the eighteenth century, a time of great change.
His last trip had been to his favorite place – the sumptuous palace of Versailles. It wasn’t just the elegance and social intrigue that he enjoyed. Even the hard lives of the servants and courtiers held a fascination for Felix.
Would M. Hardouin be able to create the spun sugar sculpture he boasted for the Duke’s visit? How much longer would The Marquis de Lafayette continue his dalliance with his chambermaid? It was all a real-life soap opera, both subtle and dramatic.
Of course, only his focus moved there – roaming the mirrored corridors like a ghost. His body always stayed here in the cushioned little room.
He had visited the palace a dozen times without the problem of seeing himself from a previous jaunt. His earlier foci were no more visible to him than they were to the locals. By the same spectral token, he could observe but have no effect on what happened around him.
A little smile trimmed his mouth. Why hadn’t those story writers thought of that? Goodbye time paradoxes.
The little smirk widened to a grimace. Damn! He could feel what was coming next. It happened like this sometimes – uncontrollable spasms and reflex actions as his body adapted to being full again. It shook, laughing uproariously at those narrow-minded old tellers of tales.
Thankfully the padded walls and securely tied straps of his jacket prevented him from serious damage from his frantic contortions. He paused to grab air before another exhausting bout of laughter, accompanied by bodily thrashing, rolled him around the echoless room. Opposite him, set in the cushioned door, a little flap slid open for someone to peer in, then immediately shut again.
He was safe in his little box with its gentle lighting and comfortably tight clothing. Beyond, in nearby cells, he could hear the anguished shouts and wails of other returning travelers.
by submission | Feb 15, 2019 | Story |
Author: Michael Hopkins
It knew itself as awareness. No center. No end. Awareness. It did not know its name. It had no I. A perturbation arose – from where? The agitation expanded – a significant change. It grew. It caused disruption – a point of focus with hope for discovery – all new concepts for it. It asked why. It hoped it would speak its name.
Scientist arguably decided that the universe was billions of years old. From the pinprick of the big bang it was expanding in all directions at the speed of light. Intelligence, as measured through the development of languages (approximated at seven thousand) were starting to disappear. But as the dialects of man dwindled, with increased attention to the universal tongue of mathematics, the languages of animals were discovered and categorized: the song of whales, the chirps of birds, the movements of bees, the barking patterns of dogs. Beyond these, the languages of what were once thought to be unintelligent objects made themselves evident.
Aspen trees with their interconnected root systems, and ability to sway in the wind, which freed microscopic cells to be carried through the air to others of its type, were found to send messages of drought and fire over hundreds of miles.
Mycelium roots were determined to be the largest living organisms, connecting and communicating over thousands of miles.
The movement of the wind and seas, thought to be results of physical phenomena, such as changes in atmospheric pressures and the gravitational pull of the moon, were discovered to be complex dialects, with messages that gave rise to the climate transitions on the earth. The oceans, the large lakes, the small trickling streams carried their messages across the earth: water evaporated, molecules transmitted their utterances through the sky, the wind moved these codes, depositing information, to receptors, with rain.
The name of a god was thought to hold a final power; to know a god was to speak its name. Christ. Allah. Shiva. Vishnu. Elohim. Elah. Shangdi. Maykapal. Bhargava. Surendra. To know this name was man’s purpose for existence; its discovery, spoken aloud, as a prayer, would bring the purpose of man’s existence to an end.
Hebrew intellects searched the ancient texts for the all-encompassing name of god. The many representations all had their purpose. The Tetragrammaton YHWH: Yahweh: Jehovah, a piece, yet incomplete. The art of Kabbalah merged with the complexities of equation to divine the name. But it was the final discovery that gave the greatest hope.
Geologists agreed that the most inanimate of objects were alive – and had language. Stones spoke. The earth’s landmasses, once a single unit, had split into continents: separate parts that yearned to be whole. The 500,000 detectable earthquakes every year began to shape into an alphabet. Many, perceived by only the most sensitive scientific instruments, were seen as a constant chatter: words, sentences, and paragraphs. The largest destructive quakes were theorized to be shouts of pain, calling to their distant pieces. The religion of Gaia: a sentient earth, characterized these as soulful cries of longing across the chasms – lost love.
The earth went silent. As decades progressed with no quakes, the geo-linguists (a science to some, a religion to others), developed more precise instruments and found the mountains themselves spoke. The utterance of a single syllable took years. A word – centuries. The meshing of science and religion turned from the subatomic world for answers, to the macro, the large, the most visible of physical entities. It gave man hope that in the study of these ancient beings, the purpose of creation had focus, and struggled to speak the name of god.
Society, with its diverse economies, competing philosophies, anxious religions, and growing technologies, served to further divide man, rather than make them whole. Peace was always torn at its fundamental fabric by war. Love was subdued by hate.
When the sun grew in size by twenty percent (a surprise event that would reshape the theories of astrophysicists – if there were any to see it), all organic life on the earth was destroyed – in an instant.
The rocks continued to talk, for thousands of years, in the quiet of a dissolved humanity, and moved toward the first utterance of god’s name. When the sun expanded again, the earth was gone, vaporized – its quarks, fermions, and leptons, pulled apart, separated forever, blown in all directions to chaos, to nothingness.
It sensed the loss. It asked why. It wondered if it had a name. It became as it was before. It knew itself as awareness. No center. No end.
by submission | Feb 14, 2019 | Story |
Author: Jeff Hill
A woman is crouching in the bushes, patiently waiting next to the house of her estranged husband. He has to know, she thinks to herself. The neighbors see her, but they pay no mind. They know she’s harmless, and they know she’ll never actually confront him. But she’s not sure which is worse: the fact that she does not deserve their pity or the fact that they will regret their dismissal. “He has to know,” she whispers to no one in particular.
She walks over to the front door and surprises the few neighborhood watchers out walking their dogs, playing basketball in their driveways, and grilling burgers while drinking beers in their garages. She knocks, then rings the doorbell for good measure. Then she surprises everyone watching yet again, removing each article of her clothing, one by one, waiting for him to open up the door.
She has black ink all over her body, in what appears to be the words of an ancient, long-forgotten, seemingly dangerous language. The beers drip, the burgers burn, the basketballs roll down the driveways, the dogs nervously urinate, and a couple of the neighbors do, too. The door opens.
Her voice is simultaneously quiet and booming, her words seem to enter the whole neighborhood’s heads directly. A jilted lover, a sad separation, a reckless deal, and a town that would soon make national news. The woman will not be ignored. The woman will not be pitied. And as the clouds begin to blacken above her, she says she will not be forgotten.
