by Hari Navarro | Mar 5, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The Prisoner
Lucian Lockley is in a cell on the moon. He lays on the stainless steel bench and his eyes take leave and run up the side of his cage. The walls seem to angle inward. Elongating in his mind until they all but touch at a point miles above his head.
Earth. That filthy scratched eyeball that spins miles below the back of his mind. A wasted rotting place. Paradise, he thinks.
He wants to go back. But he never will. He wants to smoke and watch television and fuck other people’s wives. He wants to slide the Earth’s dirty sheath deep down into his skin. He wants to feel its warm sweating tongue, as it licks through the halls of his veins. He wants to play with his kids.
It’s been years now since the end arrived and a new beginning began. When wealth and circumstance again divided us up into tribes. How fast the richest of the rich raked at our resources. How swift and neat as they built, and then ascended to their purgatory villas in the sky.
And, here, they will wait as we that were left wipe away the shit, the filth from sides of the bowl.
“You’re gonna need a bigger rock. There are so many more just like me. This new time, it’s an incubator. They’re not repairing the Earth, they’re acclimatizing to it. Only the fool now awaits a new Eden. My beautiful, Eden”
The Prisoner’s Wife
Eden Lockley is laying stretched out on her now half-empty double-bed. Her gaze follows the peeling seam of the wallpaper and her walls too stretch, like monolithic slabs above her head. But these do not taper, they just go on and on until they fade to a blur.
She touches the spot where her husband once lay and she loves that his warmth isn’t there. The crack in her eye-socket hurts as she squints and she calls on out into the nothing.
“I’ll shovel in the street. I’ll feed the furnaces as they swallow back down this waste that we laid. I’ll step atop the tiny minds that seek to control me and I’ll climb right up from this hell. I’ll heave up my children and we, too, will live in the clouds. Adapt. Overcome. Kill, if I have to. But I will win.”
The Prisoner’s Lawyer
Leonardo Tito sits on a bed, surrounded with his toys, deep within his sprawling inflatable mansion. A grotesque puff of opulence, that tethers to a cable that holds it 35,786km above the Mariana Anchor Station, deep beneath the polypropylene sea.
The whiskey stings. Its memory pours into his sunken morning eyes and his walls, they appear to slope outwards, and they funnel the most devilish things.
A seething spillage that engulfs him now as he huddles. His clients. Surface dwellers that he allows up into his world, so he can bask as they fawn and scrape for the heady treats that he forces down into their mouths.
“The river…”, he sighs.
Animals. No matter how he cleans them. No matter how he scents and smooths their skin, he cannot rid them of this new world’s acrid taunt.
Tomorrow, he’ll descend. They’ll again bow as he walks to the river. He will wade out into its bubbling swirl and though its acids will feast, he will sit and he will smile and he will lay down in the surging clink lap of its flow.
by Julian Miles | Mar 4, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Another flawless afternoon.
“Spin for me.”
I smile and cut a perfect seven-twenty, poised on one heel, arms spread to imitate the mantling of an eagle. As I come to a stop, I let a flash of dragon wings spread down from my outstretched arms before dropping the visuals, transferring, and collapsing into a heap on the couch next to Lizzie.
She squeals, slaps me, then rests a finger on the end of my nose, the other hand raised in admonition: “You promised to stop using instant transference.”
Sinking deeper into my slump, I sigh: “Habit. Too easy to do magic when there’s a yottahertz CPU with a billion cores handling the reality.”
The admonishing hand slaps my forehead: “No-one knows the specs of Heart or Mind.”
“Some might do. It’s only been forty years.”
Lizzie tilts her head in surprise: “Hadn’t thought of that. It’s not like we can ask them, though.”
She’s right. The Ecofleet is still underway, Alcubierre drives sending us toward the eighty-six destinations most likely to tolerate Earth fauna. Until the drives are shut down, each vessel of the fleet is isolated. Even after that, the distances involved will hamper communication. According to some theories, the Earth we try to communicate with may never have known us or may not even have evolved homo sapiens.
“Duty calls, dancing man. I’ll be back in a few thousand ticks.”
She vanishes, leaving an echo of a laugh.
I switch the enviroscape from lounge to Kingley Vale. A friend dragged me there just before we departed. My reluctance yielded to slack-jawed awe as I beheld great trees and primal landscape, the last protected place in the UK, home to the relocated Stonehenge, serene under the biggest Eden dome ever built. Thankfully, I had capture gear in my daybag, so was able to snapshot the place for my personal envirolib.
It’s here I find my peace, a longing that provides no solace. It’s here I understand the increasing number of voyagers who refuse to exit their personal enviroscapes.
We’re humanity renewed, escaping catastrophe and mortality, taking our vision to the stars in great arks, each filled with the seeds of a whole new Earth. Eighty-six strains of humanity will grow from this scattering, guided by the digital host that brought them forth. A wondrous future created by the genius of man.
I don’t think I’m the only one who hides away to cry virtual tears that never hit the ground. We left Earth, righteous and smug about getting to live forever while growing our world anew.
To live forever. There it is. I have eternity to look forward to, yet all I want to do is rest my palms against an ancient tree in a valley forever lost.
Lizzie appears next to me. She looks about in sad-eyed wonder: “Every now and then, I realise full spectrum capture was inadequate.”
I whisper: “He was right.”
“What?”
“The man who showed me Kingley Vale was some variety of pagan. I gave him a hard time about that. The last thing he said to me was something I laughed at. I wish I hadn’t.”
“What did he say?”
“‘It’s not the land that belongs to you, it’s you who belong to the land. You can’t convert another planet to be Earth.’”
Lizzie takes my hands.
“He spoke the truth. All we can do is remember why we yearn and guide our branch of new humanity to do better. Make sure they know they belong. Let them become caretakers as well as a civilisation.”
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.
