by submission | Jul 10, 2019 | Story |
Author: JT Velikovsky
They say, (well, Science says) the human brain is wired to love natural rural scenes.
So, call me an old-fashioned Utopian, but… these days, I always have my brain-computer interface re-design, re-sculpt, and re-paint, my realtime-vision of the city I live in.
Augmented Reality. It overlays perfectly-rendered three-dimensional graphics onto objects in the visible world. I can’t tell, they’re not the real thing. So–instead of concrete skyscrapers towering above me–I always see: giant redwoods. I mean truly gargantuan ones… Draped in lush green vines.
And instead of endless columns of cars clogging up the swarming city streets, I see miles of mammoths, migrating in millions as they trudge along a well-trod earthen track… (Sometimes, just for some variety, it `swaps’ vision of the mammoths out for giant ants, or other enormous prehistoric insects… I can watch those for hours… Sunlight glistening in rainbows on their shells as they amble along.)
And–the bustling city human crowds–for me–are all dressed in `caveman’ bear-skins, rather than their business suits… Their briefcases become old wooden clubs; their cell-phones are sea-shells. People no longer talk on a phone, but instead just listen to the sound of the ocean inside the shell… No-one texts a message, but instead I just see them tracing out a swirled shell-pattern, with their fingers. I like it that way.
The sounds I hear are all synthesized, too… No more inner-city engine-roars, screeching tires, car alarms, police-sirens… Just: serene animal sounds… The rumble and screech of the Jurassic jungle.
But–mostly, the soothing silence…? The whisper of the breeze in the tall trees. And that pungent smell of the ancient forest: fecund fresh earth, and moist fungi–instead of all those car-exhausts, rotting city rubbish, septic sewer-ooze.
A really funny thing… I really don’t miss all that Euclidean city geometry–and all of those strange, straight parallel-lines of brutalist buildings and byways… The square swathes of all those cement sidewalks.
All gone, for me!
I much prefer this new, ancient natural rural world… I feel at home.
They tell me that all the Dystopians instead have their realities `painted over’ with: bombed-out buildings, scorched landscapes. Mutant zombie critters roaming the ruins, instead of the people… (It’s not my thing…)
My own brain-interface even makes my sense of taste match that of the ancient past… So everything I eat tastes and smells like raw meat. But I do miss the ice-cream… And, burnt bacon.
I could ask my digital interface just to rewire my brain, so that I was equally-pleasured by the sights, sounds and smells of the actual city, as it is now… As, we had made it. All: parallel and perpendicular.
But–billions of years of biological evolution baked into a bipedal brain are not so easily undone.
And can we ever really believe all that we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch? Last count, we had eight senses, not just five. Some studies even suggest–with our technology upgrades–we have twenty-two senses(!)
You can alter the observer, or the observed. The perceiver, or the perceived. Or both.
I like to think that both me, and my environment, are: co-evolving. An emergent synthesis.
So, call me an old-fashioned Utopian…?
I’ll hear it.
Decoded as primeval guttural grunts, as we stroll in the ancient cities of tomorrow.
by Hari Navarro | Jul 9, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
“You are going to sleep with me”, said my wife as she stepped out of the future and spoke to a man who wasn’t me.
“You’re so strange”, smiles the man as he touches her fingers and pushes the hair from her eyes.
“First you will cup my breast and pin me against the wall in the bathroom of the hospital in which your mother lays dying. You will tongue my lips and I’ll contract the pathogen black rot of your lies. And I will carry their stain and I will pass it on down to my children.”
“That’s rather dramatic. I think I told you she was sick, but how did you know she’s dying? Doesn’t matter, Look, I’ve only known you a few months but I can see you’re sad. I’ve seen you with him. Your boyfriend. I see you walking together and it’s as if you’re strangers. You deserve better.”
“I forgot about my husband and my children, I forgot as I lay down with you. I escaped with you, though you took me nowhere and together we lied to them all.”
“Married? You’re not married, are you? And if you have children then you’ve kept them very quite. Do you have them locked up in a box?”, smiles the man who isn’t me.
“My children are my life”
“If this is the future you see for us, then, I have to say I would never lie to you. You are so full of potential. Maybe, you need someone who really cares to tell you sometimes, is all.”
“The day I told him about us was the day I tore him in two. But he stayed with me. For years and years and years, he stayed. He loved me best he could but the drip, drip, drip sticky filth of what we did just never stopped”
“There’s no need for this. All I want is to have a little fun. You’re over-thinking.”
“Will you smile at your wife tonight when you still have the stink of my sweat on your skin? Will you feel shame as tomorrow you sit at your table with your son and you look over his shoulder at the couch where you pushed me down and pulled at my hair?”, said my wife as she remembered the last moments of my life. When I looked at her and she knew that old age had robbed me of every thought but that still I saw just what she’d done.
“I love my wife. But I love you, too”
“You won’t and you don’t have to believe me, but I came back. I lived a long life with this chaos we wrought. And you, well, you went on with your wife and your children and you lied for yourself the most splendid of lives.”
“You’re fucking sick”
“When he died I broke and I fell and when I got up I was young again and back here at this fork in the road. I thought it was a chance to repair what I did but it isn’t. Things are not as they were. I am not married and my children they do not yet exist. It is you with the family now.”
I walk up to my wife, my girlfriend, as she sits in the Cafè with a man who isn’t me. I smile and I shake his hand firmly and I hope that he smells the cooling beads of his wife’s sweet sweat as it drifts to him down from my skin.
by Julian Miles | Jul 8, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The sirens start to wail.
“Run!”
John turns as he shouts, swinging a rucksack of stolen provisions onto his back. By the time we see torch beams flicking about in the hands of guards heading this way – the section where their spotlights aren’t working – we’re all running for the fence.
“Keep up, Jinny.”
Easier for you, Em, you’re taller and it’s all legs. Back here in the shortarse division, we get to dodge and hide more often.
Which is what I’m off to do. There’s no way I can make the fence. I’m not convinced Em can, but at least she has a chance.
Sliding under an overturned truck I pull myself up against the back of the cab, hopefully merging the outline of my form with the accumulated crap already under here.
I hear a shot. Nothing to do but wait. Hopefully they aren’t led by zealots determined to exterminate the evil scroungers threatening the glorious New Era government by stealing a few cans of food.
The night is criss-crossed with searching beams.
A scream. Em! Sodding hell, how am I going to tell Trev? Little Em will be five next week.
Footsteps approaching: one person, no torch.
“Vardy!” The shouter is a long way off.
“Here!” The owner of the footsteps.
“You get that screamer?”
“Body went down into the scrap. You want it, come out tomorrow.”
Oh, Em.
Footsteps pass the overturned truck, then come back.
Another shout: “Not worth it. Come in. We’ll do a final sweep to the fence line.”
“Gimme a moment. Breathing’s playing up.”
The footsteps stop and someone leans against the truck.
Same shouter, further away: “Catch up when you’re sorted.”
“Roger that.”
I hear Velcro rip and then the sound of someone taking a big pull on an inhaler.
“The problem with sliding under something in a hurry is that you leave a big skidmark if you forget to brush it away.”
I’m dead.
Footsteps crunch and scuffed boots come into view. They start kicking about, obscuring the trail I left!
“Your tall friend has broken her ankle. She’s flat out in what’s left of the grey container between here and the railway line. Wait until the follow-up sweep passes in about twenty minutes, then you can retrieve her. They won’t try to fix the gap in the fence until daylight, so you’re good to get out that way. Mind the sentry drone. They rotate for recharge every hour or so and the procedures are slack, so they bring one in before sending a new one out. You’ll have a ten-minute window.”
I can’t believe I’m about to chat with a Domestic Army trooper.
“Window?”
“The time you’ll have to get through that fence and leave the area.”
“Why are you-?”
“Too old to run with the resistance, and my lungs are too fucked anyway. My choices were Pensioners Workhouse or Domestic Army. I chose the one that lets me look like a loyal citizen while making sure the system doesn’t work like the New Era Mandate says it should. Damn sure there are more like me, but surveillance means we can’t trust anyone. In a way, it makes the disruption better: it’s all disjointed, and they’re looking for an organisation.”
He sighs.
“Some days, I do things I’m not proud of. Other days, like tonight, I get to do a little good. Anyway, I’m off to look for intruders I’m damn sure I won’t find. You have better luck next time. Ciao.”
The footsteps retreat. Our unknown saviour is gone. What a way to survive.
by submission | Jul 7, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Barber
The flag of the Kingdom of Florida features a white ibis, and supporters of beleaguered King Rollo consider it patriotic to pin ibis feathers to their caps. After the recent troubles with Atlanta, it even looked disloyal not to.
Sept collected ibis feathers to sell in Titusville, though he made a better living if he shot ibis and plucked them bare. Of course, poaching royal birds was a hanging crime, but who would suspect a raggedy youth without a fowling piece, and carrying only a shortbow? Still, best to keep moving.
Trudging north round the Cape, with its rusting towers and shallow mosquito lagoons, Sept was musing why folk in older times ever built here, when he saw a shadow ripple along the dunes. For an instant, with the sunlight on its wings, it seemed like some great bird, until the thing flashed overhead, buffeting him wildly. No bird this. With a yelp of excitement, he set off in pursuit.
He glimpsed it perched on an open stretch of concrete, and arrived breathless just as the man was climbing down.
Even stooped as he was, the fellow stood a head taller than anyone Sept knew, and gleaming droplets hung from his thin frame at wrist and ankle; more shiny teardrops swung from his ears. He dripped like a bather rising from quicksilver.
“Don’t be alarmed,” the man called out. “I mean you no harm.”
“I ain’t alarmed,” countered Sept. This close he could put an arrow in the fellow’s eye.
“Good. But keep your distance.”
“Jus’ look at that thing!”
“What is the name of this place?”
Sept made a face at such ignorance. “Canaveral.”
“A legendary name. Those were gantries once, and launch pads.”
Sept hesitated, not wanting to sound foolish. “There’s stories about here. You one of them flying fellows come back to visit?”
“I had hoped not to be seen. Keep your distance I say.”
“Jus’ making sure it’s real,” said Sept, caressing a wing.
“After so long we might be susceptible to your diseases.”
“Feels like glass.”
“Good guess,” the man said, offhand, as he gazed about him.
“Where you from?” ventured Sept.
“A c-ship.”
“A sea ship? But…”
“Just passing. I will never see you again, nor your grandchildren.”
“Grandkids!” mocked Sept. “How old you think I am?”
The fellow shook his head, jingling like a wind chime. “There is something about ancient places.”
Sept pictured himself telling this tale, and knew some of the fellow’s trinkets would be convincing.
“Here is where it all began. Then you abandoned it. Do you know why?”
He was not from round here, Sept said, edging closer.
“You went your way and we ours. Are you happy with your choice?”
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
The man shrugged, tinkling. “So fragile, the past.” He sounded disappointed.
Sept sized him up. He’d seen unlikely fellows before who proved quick with a hidden blade. And his craft did have something of the hawk about it; the way it kind of bristled when you got close; a feeling that it watched.
“No, they were right,” the man said. “Going back’s a mistake.”
The moment to act passed, and Sept watched as the thing dwindled into the sky with a sound like wind in an organ pipe. Turning away, he caught a glint on the concrete. A silver droplet.
Generations of their wearers had gone through fierce selection in high radiation environments, retroviruses boiling from their DNA. Two days later, in a crowded Titusville tavern, Sept collapsed, crying that his eyes must burst.
The start of what survivors called the Weeping Plague.
by submission | Jul 6, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Henson
I wait outside the garage for one of the missionaries from Uklid. I have to admit life is better for most people since they arrived.
The Uklidins began with small enhancements like portable force field emitters they pass out like candy. Concerned about plastic bags clotting the oceans? Key the right code into your emitter and carry groceries in a force field. No umbrella on a rainy day? Pop in a code and out pops an umbrella, colored red with the built-in laser to brighten the gloom. Speaking of rain, the Uklidins promise we’ll be able to control the weather when their algorithms say we’re ready for such power.
The Uklidins also are advancing our medical capabilities, albeit far too slowly. To prevent overpopulation, their human longevity program is formulaically synced with space colonization knowhow they’re spoon-feeding us. By the time humans are living for hundreds of years, children will be playing throughout the solar system.
A female Uklidin appears in my driveway. They look like us except they’re all drop-dead gorgeous and about a foot taller than the average human. “I’m Hypatia,” she says. “You must be Albert. I understand you’re having trouble with your garage?”
I was so upset one day, I backed into the garage door. The Uklidins replaced it with a force field, matched perfectly, of course, to the color of our house. There are some things in the garage my wife and I have decided to part with, but I can’t steady my hand to turn off the force field. Not wanting to go into all of that with Hypatia, I tell her there’s a malfunction.
Hypatia steps to the emitter mounted by the door. In a moment the garage entrance force field vanishes, bringing the tricycle into view. She looks down at me and frowns. “Seems to be working.” Then she smiles. “Have you heard The Truth today, Albert?”
She’s helped me, now comes the sermon.
“I’ve got something to do. If you’ll —”
“I understand some earthlings believe God is an old person in a white robe.”
“I’m not so religious. If you’ll excuse me—“
Hypatia raises her arms to the sky. “Where do you believe it all came from?”
OK, there’s no escaping this. “The Big Bang, I suppose.”
“Before the Big Bang?”
“I’ve read about colliding branes.”
Hypatia shakes her head. “Before branes.”
My turn to shake my head.
Hypatia sighs. “Mathematics, Albert. Mathematics have no beginning or end. You and I are but songs from the stars, and stars are the music of mathematics.” A look of rapture captures her face. “The entire multiverse is a symphony, Albert, with mathematics the composer and conductor.” She begins shaking in ecstasy, her eyes rolling back.
When I reach to steady her, she grabs my wrists. Her touch burns, and wisps of smoke rise between her fingers.
“Do you believe, Albert?”
I want to tell her the truth, but when you feel like you’re about to burst into flames … “I believe,” I shout. “I believe.”
Hypatia loosens her grip. “That’s enough for today.” She touches a button on her collar and disappears.
I take a few deep breaths, roll my sleeves to hide the scorch marks on my shirt and load the pickup with the boxes of toys we’re donating. I pause at the trike, then steel myself, cut off the price tag and put the three-wheeler with the boxes.
I don’t know if God is a being in robes, an infinite page of calculations, or anything else. All I know is some songs are cut far too short.
by submission | Jul 5, 2019 | Story |
Author: Shon-Lueiss Harris
“Most patients don’t notice a thing until they head to the bathroom,” explained the doctor as he smoothed the sensors along his patient’s forehead. “How’s everything feel?”
Gene turned his head and began making expressions. “Everything’s great. I barely feel them.” His eyes flicked to the mirror hanging on the wall. The range of animated looks reduced into a singular image of disgust. “When will this kick in? I’m tired of seeing… that.”
“The system is already active. Your avatar will appear to anyone using a visual assistant. There’s a transitional period for you, though.” The doctor removed his gloves and grabbed a tablet off the table. “Think of it like warming up. It helps avoid the jarring effects of seeing another man looking back in the mirror.”
“Hence the bathroom.” Gene nodded, observing the synthetic flesh stretched and stitched around his prosthetic limbs. “What will others feel if we touch?”
The doctor smirked. “You’re hooked into the network. As long as there’s internet access any physical contact should reflect your avatar. Even, uh, vigorous contact.” The doctor cleared his throat. “If you catch my drift.”
“I think so. Thank you.” Gene glanced at the door. “Is there a recovery time or…”
“Discharge papers are in your email with additional information about the system. We’ll schedule a follow-up to see how it’s going, otherwise, you’re all set. Enjoy the new you.”
The new you. Those words repeated in Gene’s mind until he trembled with excitement. He decided to head for the waterfront. Lined with trendy bars and exclusive restaurants, all filled with the kinds of people too beautiful or too rich to drink beside someone held together with stitches and staples. Just parking in front of the bar made his heart beat faster.
He pulled the rear view mirror down and found two piercing eyes looking back. A man almost ageless with smooth skin spared from any blemish, scar or worry line. A man more perfect than Gene was or had ever been.
The bouncer stood with his arms crossed by the door. Gene’s heart skipped a beat as he caught the man’s attention. At once the bouncer’s eyes opened wide and he propped the door with one burly arm, even going so far as to bow his head.
“Welcome back, sir.”
Inside was all neon lights and fog machines. Gene passed the bar without paying it or the men and women fixated on him any mind. Walking along the edges of the dance floor, he took stock of the space. By the time he arrived at the backrooms, he had a list of changes in mind.
A man stood beside the door to the back office. His mouth fell open. “Sir, I didn’t realize you left.”
“That was the idea.” Gene shrugged and gripped the door handle. “I need some privacy. Don’t let anyone disturb me.”
Gene disappeared into the back before the guard could respond. Shutting the door quickly, he took care to fasten each lock.
“The fuck you think you’re doing?” challenged the manager, Henrick.
“It took me years to decorate this office,” Gene admitted, walking up to the desk. “I wanted people to feel at ease in here. You went another way.”
Henrick narrowed his eyes then gasped. His hand shot to the desk, just barely opening the drawer before Gene caught him by the wrist. They stood face-to-face in the dim light. It was like looking into a mirror.
“You took my life.” Gene bent the wrist back and grabbed Henrick by the neck. “It’s my turn to take yours.”
