by submission | Sep 21, 2024 | Story |
Author: C.R. Kiegle
I was a genius inventor and a foolish woman. I was the mortal to transcend the bounds of my own lifespan and invent time travel, the one to beat that final constraint of the universe. I watched the classic plays of the ancient Greeks as they were first performed in Athens, travelled to planets colonized in distant futures, and spent nights at the bars frequented by my childhood baseball heroes in their earlier years of adulthood. I was limited only by the constraints of the bounds of time itself, where the final temptation waited for me.
The darkness of the before. The chaos of the silent sea that lay before the beginning of time itself. Oh, how I longed to experience it- that churlish realm before time itself first ticked, a place in which only something divine could exist in. Yet it lay beyond my bounds, as my device could travel only within time, not before it.
But it could travel to the darkness that lay in the afterwards.
The darkness of the universe after the last black hole finally fell apart and entropy claimed its ultimate victory.
I may not have been able to join the divine in the before, but with my device I could join them in the after. Carefully putting in the date I had best approximated from my travels, I set it so that I would spend just three minutes in that empty darkness.
If the before was a chaotic sea begging to be let lose, the after was distinctly not. As I sat there in the emptiness in the suit that compromised my time travel device, I was not hit by the feeling of muchness that I had expected. If chaos were the before and entropy the one to bring about the afterwards, as I had reasoned, then certainly what lay beyond the end of all things had to be that same force of chaos eating away at itself for all the rest of time.
And yet the sea I encountered was at rest. In my three minutes, I felt a sense of calm and completeness such that I would never feel again in my life, a sense that I would forever long for and find myself in pain to be without. Looking back, I think now that it was the feeling of the completion of every story that the universe had to tell. All the stories that had been held back before the start of time fueled that churlish sea, and now each of those stories had reached their ending. The majestic births and deaths of stars, the constant expansion of the cosmos, and even all the beautiful and fleeting lives of those that lived throughout the vastness- all that was meant to be had been, and never would be again. Only I and the divine could ever experience this afterwards of quiet, and in the stillness I wondered if even the divine ever dared to visit this place.
Then the three minutes were up and I was returned to my own time. I took off my suit, put it in a box, and buried it deep under the earth. I got married, had children, watched those children have children, studied sunsets and rainfalls and breezes through green summer trees and felt nothing at all. I had turned to the last page of the book- not my own book, but the book that comprised all books- and spoiled it all.
by submission | Sep 20, 2024 | Story |
Author: Emily Kinsey
I was trapped. I awoke from a dreamless sleep with a start, unsure how the fire started. (Although, if you ask me, it was probably my brother’s fault.) Flames licked through the open bedroom door and thick black smoke obscured the lone bedroom window.
The fire blazed a jagged scar across the wallpaper to my left, unearthing a small, never-before-seen door, hidden beneath the layered paper. I could see light through the slits and alongside the crackling of fire, I could hear the distinctive sound of someone knocking…and knocking…and knocking.
The door swung open, and a woman appeared in the doorway; an entrance to a different world lay just beyond her.
“Quick, in here!” the woman said, holding the door ajar. “Now!”
Unsure, I hurled myself through the opening. Landing hard, I kicked the door shut.
The woman stood and straightened her suit. “That was a close one.”
“How did you do that?” I coughed. My nose and throat burned; my eyes blurred against the too-bright white hallway. “What is this place?”
“My sincerest apologies, we should have come for you earlier,” the woman said. “But we’re busy today. Lots of glitches.”
“Glitches?”
“They’re common this time of year,” the woman said, helping me to my feet. She turned and guided me down the brightly lit hallway. “We’ve no idea why.”
“Am I dreaming?” I peered down the long, narrow corridor. I couldn’t see a beginning nor an end, just an endless expanse of doors. “Did I die in that fire?”
The woman pinched me.
“Ouch!”
“Hurt?” she asked.
“Yes!”
“Then you’re still alive.”
“Why am I here?” I asked.
“Because you don’t die in a fire,” the woman said.
“I don’t?”
“Car accident,” she volunteered nonchalantly. “Well, here we are, door number five hundred and thirty-three,” she said stopping in front of a door only distinguishable from the rest by the glowing blue number emblazoned above it. “This is where you were supposed to be today.”
“I’m really not dreaming?”
“You are absolutely, unequivocally, not dreaming,” the woman said, checking the time on her wristwatch. “Now, here you are, your door. You just need to walk through it.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Just another cog in the wheel,” the woman said. “Now, Kate, the door….”
“Where does it go?”
“Forward.”
“I want to go home.”
“It doesn’t go backward.”
“I can’t go home?”
“You can go through this door.”
Dejectedly, I walked through the threshold. The room was pitch-black, and I was no longer standing but sitting and strapped in a chair. I regretted my decision immediately. I wanted to go back to the hallway of infinite doors.
“Kate? What are you doing here?” a voice asked in the darkness. I recognized it. It was my father. “How did you get in the backseat? You weren’t there a minute ago.”
“I don’t know,” I trembled.
“She appeared out of thin air!” my brother cried. I could vaguely make out his form buckled in the seat next to me.
“How did you do that?” my father yelled.
“I don’t know!” I shouted. “There was a fire, and a door, then a woman, and she said I’m supposed to be here right now.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” my brother said.
My father turned to glance at me. “A fire?” The car jerked to the left and a large redwood tree loomed just beyond the windshield.
“Dad, look out!” I called, but too late.
I heard fracturing metal and felt a sensation of floating weightlessly through the air, the fleeting world turning on its head, then, nothing at all.
by submission | Sep 19, 2024 | Story |
Author: Rosa May M. Bayuga
It was one of those days when she thought she had a great sense of smell. Freshly-baked bread, raindrops, laughter, screams and wounds and hurts, she could smell them all. She could smell the smoke from the pyre of fallen leaves that her father poked with a stick in the backyard of her childhood home. She could smell the flowers whose names she didn’t know from the byways and alleys and side streets and dirt roads she had ever walked on. She could smell shadows and sunbeams, failures, and forsaken dreams.
There was something funereal about the smell that came to her that day. It was a mix of melting candles, incense, and heady blooms, a certain scent that belonged to places of eternal rest. And the sad thing was that she couldn’t place where it was coming from. She looked around the room, opened doors, peeped at corners, even went outside to her little pocket of a garden to find out if there was something there. But she found nothing … nothing.
A sudden stab of pain coursed from her left chest, spread to her back, went up her neck, and traced a path through her breasts. Then and only then did she notice it, a-pouring and a-leaking, a-begging and a-mourning from deep within her. Tears, it was the smell of tears, long pent-up, long forgotten, tears that burned in pyres, tears that watered wild flowers in alleys and byways, tears of shadows and sunbeams, of screams and forsaken dreams.
She gathered the tears as offerings, and laid them, quietly and carefully laid them, before the tomb of her broken heart.
by submission | Sep 18, 2024 | Story |
Author: Soramimi Hanarejima
I’m getting a cup of coffee in the office kitchen when suddenly there you are—as the image of yourself you’ve created by projecting your thoughts into mine—fully occupying my attention the way you always do: with emphatic presence. This time in the form of a hard grimace at the garish posters blaring motivational maxims and the shelves stocked with over-sweetened snacks that are speedy little vehicles to but one destination: a sugar rush.
“Management here has this compulsion to maximize,” I explain. “If something has a fraction of a chance of boosting productivity for a fraction of the team, it’ll be put into action.”
“But doesn’t this stuff have the opposite effect on someone like you? I mean, the posters are a real eyesore, and the free food—if it can be called food—is gross.”
“Yeah, but you tune it out after a while, then you’re just your ordinary self most of the time. Probably not too different from the library. Aren’t you mostly just you there?”
“I am, though maybe a more mellow version of myself. Being surrounded by books is calming. Maybe too calming.”
“To the point that you need the excitement of imagining yourself into my workplace? Why not imagine some exoplanet lush with alien life?”
“Oh, I did that already. Not an exoplanet but a high seas adventure. And yeah, I could go off into another daydream, but as important as it is to take breaks from reality, it’s also important to consider what reality is like for other people. And I realized I’d never done that with you. I’ve just assumed I know what your workday is like because you’ve told me so much about it.”
“Complained so much about it, you mean.”
“Let’s just say you’re very vocal about what you don’t agree with.”
“So now it’s time to find out if things are really that bad. Or…”
“Or?”
“Rescue me from this banality?”
“Too bad I can’t get you out of this as easily as I got myself into it.”
“At least you can save me from this corporate cliché for a few minutes by imagining something interesting here.”
“I have just the thing.”
Before I can ask what that is, the head of a giant bird with lazuli plumage rises from the floor, its amethyst eyes and ivory beak followed by a long neck and flapping wings with sparkling flight feathers that sweep through us. For a moment, it occupies the entirety of the kitchen before departing, the ceiling no obstacle to its ascent.
If only I could ride this magnificent bird away from all the tedious work that awaits me, I’d never—
Then comes the rest of the flock, fledglings and all, countless birds of various sizes streaming past us, lifting toward a sky I imagine as a dazzling dawn that will give way to a blue they will disappear into.
The upward avian torrent tappers to a trickle that continues to mesmerize me until finally, it’s just you and me, grinning.
by submission | Sep 17, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Generals like to look good. Even in the 34th century. Even after a thousand years of war. They like polish and shine and finely fitted uniforms, so they like me. Their tailor.
Otherwise, how could a simple tailor expect to live through the entire Sidereal War. Only the most powerful could dictate who got the famously expensive treatments to extend life hundreds of years. In my case over a thousand. A tailor. I guess I’m a strange yet rather appropriate thread in the fabric of life.
A life that has measured the means, cut the patterns, sewed the seams for a lot of death in this seemingly endless war. Because my job is to make the generals look natty and therefore confident, I feel culpable for the perennial war’s carnage. You see, generals talk a lot when I’m fitting them, sharing their thoughts with the room which I’m in, because I’m of no considered consequence.
On this day of the war, like every day of the war, generals were whispering and wise-cracking in the halls, when I was called to the Commanding General’s office, a somewhat spartan space in the otherwise palatial Freedom Citadel.
Upon entering, the CG motioned me to his side. He was hosting a cadre I’d never seen before. They were not generals, not even military, maybe not even human. They certainly weren’t dressed like any person I’d worked with in my thousand years of tailoring.
“Ah, Citizen. We need your assistance,” the CG began. “Our guests here are offering us transformational support in battle, but are afraid they won’t be taken seriously before the Security Plenum, clad as now. I expect you can address that.”
I nodded because that is what one does before the CG.
“Very good. Please sketch some new regalia for our guests while we finish our discussion.”
In a corner, I observed. Noting the newcomers’ lithe and elongated limbs. I listened. Heeding the intensity of the debate. These potential off-world allies promised decisive victory, though at the cost of widespread misery.
When the delegation was dismissed, the CG sat at his desk. A desk older than either of us. Crafted from a rare tree that had lived hundreds of years before the Sidereal War began. Absently, the CG traced the polished grain with a finger.
“Ideas, Citizen?” he finally asked.
I produced my sketches. Trim pseudo-uniforms that rang familiar no matter what the former allegiance, no matter what the DNA, or lack thereof.
The CG smiled. “All a matter of convention, eh. We see what we want in the well dressed, the well pressed.” He continued to stare at my drawings for a long moment, and when he spoke, he spoke past any conventional ideas sketched there.
“They are offering us an end, Citizen. To the war. To all we have known for a thousand years. It would mean a terrible escalation, a knockout punch, but with a recoil that will leave humanity reeling. A means to a very mean end.”
I nodded because that is what one does before the CG.
He rose, seam lines falling in immaculate place. “I believe you’ll recall, Citizen, that almost 250 years ago when I made rank, you tailored my uniform. I thought it a perfect fit when I tried it on, but you suggested a slight alteration. A somewhat seemingly trivial change. You told me that the hem of my trousers didn’t break cleanly at my shoes. Do you remember what you suggested?”
Of course I remembered. It’s never wise to forget what pleases a general. “I believe I said that we should take it down a shiver, sir.”
He looked up at me now. Really looked at me. Someone who’d lived through a thousand years of war. Someone who knew how badly frayed humanity was. How close to unraveling we were as a species. His unclouded eyes were asking me if we should accept the outsiders’ help, a massive escalation, at brutal cost.
“Achieving the form and line that makes for a clean break, often requires we take it down a shiver, sir.”
Ever so slightly, the CG nodded because that’s what one does when the fit is just right.
by Julian Miles | Sep 16, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Yet again, we’re a long way from home. As usual, I get everyone’s attention with a short blast of the klaxon, which – also as usual – prompts a round of rude guesswork over the comm as the likelihood of me ever having another sex partner.
“You’re still not funny, people. We’re on approach to Macho. Get ready. You know how badly this could go wrong. Sarah, what’s the scan count?”
She chuckles.
“Emma, if the various scans were actual weapons, we’d have been sliced to bits. Macho hasn’t become any less paranoid.”
Jahnee snorts loudly.
“Something to do with them being declared a brigand planet, by any chance?”
They loot other worlds because they’ve poisoned their own. ‘Brigand’ is the polite definition.
A wide-hail comes in.
“This is Macho Defence Control. State your business, back off, or burn.”
Nice.
“This is free trader Bluehammer with over a tonne of Bushmills Céad Bliain. Heard you’re in the market.”
Since the trade embargoes clamped down, they haven’t had a drop of legally imported booze, and we’re betting they’ve had nothing of this quality.
“A tonne?”
“One point one five, and someone’s missing it, if you get my meaning.”
“We hear that, Bluehammer. Follow route four. What class are you?”
“Firefly with a Dillingham lift conversion.”
“Land in bay ten.”
“Gotcha, MDC. I presume a dealer will visit?”
“You bet.”
I grin at Jahnee.
“If the dealer arrives, you and Mike are owners aboard. The rest of us are fluffies. You know the drill.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Prepare countermeasures. Get targeting coordinates for their defences. If we’re there long enough, sell the Bushmills. When Queen Gladys Ewing arrives with her kids, we get them all off this hellhole.”
Natalie sticks her head through the doorway.
“Got confirmation the resistance are ready to drop indirect fire on the co-ordinates we supply.”
She shakes her head.
“A resistance movement on the planet of misogynists. Holy hell.”
Sarah chimes in.
“We’re here to help the royal family escape King Frederick. Gladys is off to raise a force to come back and liberate with extreme prejudice. Crown Prince Talon is a baby. Crown Princess Trixabelle is nearly what they call breeding age around here.”
I suppress a shudder. Not going to ask.
We land hard: must get the shock absorption units serviced.
“APC incoming!”
Already?
“It’s being pursued by two limousines. One of them has a bloke stood on its roof with a machine gun in each hand, shooting at the APC!”
Macho by name…
“Okay, I’m betting the APC is Team Queen, and the hecklers are Team King. Swat the goons.”
Somebody’s ready on fire control, because I hear the ‘whoosh-hiss’ of our beam cannon firing. There’s an explosion nearby.
“Took shooter boy off at the hips and turned the rear limo into a crater.”
“What about the front limo?”
“It’s just pulled a screaming U-turn, and is retreating faster than it arrived.”
Yeah. I’d run from a hostile beam cannon, too.
“Okay, get the cargo lift ready, but don’t lower it until we see who’s in the APC.”
It slides to a stop and nine people erupt from it, five women, three kids, and a baby.
“Load all! Sarah, push targeting data on the channels Natalie hopefully provided.”
Natalie shouts up.
“Cheeky mare! What do you think we are, amateurs?”
I laugh.
We’re from Bluebird, anonymously helping abuse victims escape to better lives. As we’re free traders operating under aliases, there’s minimal chance of the abusers tracking us.
“All boarded!”
This one’s going to make history, though.
“Taking off in three, two, one…”
