by submission | Nov 16, 2019 | Story |
Author: Glenn Leung
The night the stars spoke; I was listening. It was not light they sent us, but a series of electrical pulses in M code picked up as instrument static. They sent it all at once, bypassing the lightyears through what we now call Hyperspace. They have been watching us through the ages, across the infinite expanse, taking notes.
“It is time. We should talk,” was the message from three hundred thousand stars.
Many in power were sure about what it meant. We had just celebrated Pax Centennial, a hundred years without any type of regional or global conflict. We were finally deemed mature enough to get invited to a galactic fellowship. What else could it be? Beings that could send simultaneous signals across several hundred lightyears must no doubt be enlightened.
It fell on me to send our reply. I did not write it; that was something the politicians wanted credit for. I was just in charge of translating it to M code and transmitting it towards the North Star, which sat at the center of the three hundred thousand. We have no Hyperspace technology, but we were sure the stars could pick it up. There is no way they would send us a message expecting a few hundred years of wait time, would they? I learned to question my many assumptions on this job, so I wasn’t as sure about this as the politicians were.
“We are here and listening,” was to be our reply.
Hardly anyone knew M code in the 25th century, or what the ‘M’ even stood for. I could send cat pictures in binary and no one would know to stop me. I wasn’t going to do that obviously, but I felt I needed to take responsibility somehow, being the original receiver and all.
Remember I said I learned to question assumptions? Well, one of the assumptions I’ve been questioning is the nature of this hundred-year peace. You have mentioned how many things in this world don’t seem to make sense, and I agree. I don’t believe the Pacific ruins were part of a failed habitat experiment. The designs don’t look at all like they were made for housing people underwater. There are also those mysterious books that were written in a language no one remembers, and satellite images of run-down buildings near the equator. Near the equator where barely any life exists! Let’s also not forget the strange skeletons that were dug up last month. Were there more than fifteen known species of animals sometime in the past?
Naturally, I questioned the stars’ intentions as well. If they have truly been watching us, they would have the answers to these puzzles. Many of us choose to ignore the obvious, but the stars probably would not. Of course, these are just more assumptions, but I think I’m justified in making some. After all, I need to mitigate risks.
“Give us more time,” is what I sent as a reply.
We have not heard back. There are too many possible reasons why.
This is where I need your help; you who dabble in ideas shunned by polite society. There are gaps and lies in our knowledge of the world, and I want to uncover the facts. It is our best shot at understanding the true intentions of the stars. I know it’s a lot to ask, but we are dealing with a very uncertain situation here.
We need to know how much we messed up.
by submission | Nov 15, 2019 | Story |
Author: Jeff Hayward
The fluorescent lights switched on flickering and humming – the clock on the wall read 6:00 AM. Patrick sat up in his bed, wiping the sleep from his eyes. He stood up unsteadily, using the steel sink to gain his balance. He shuffled the few steps to the toilet and did his business.
Once finished, he started on the rest of his morning routine – sink shower, brushing his teeth and then a few minutes of stretching and exercises. Years ago, he would spend hours exercising each day, but slowly over time his workouts had changed to support his aging body.
A loud buzz rang out and the bolts securing his cell door released. Patrick glanced at the door to see Officer Stanz through the small thick glass window. The thick steel door swung into the cell.
“One last brown bag, Patrick. Will you miss them?” asked the guard, grinning.
“Of course,” answered Patrick. He walked slowly across the 8 x 12 foot cell to retrieve the bagged meal – always a plain bologna sandwich and apple.
“I’ll be back to get you at 10:00 AM for the… the, uh…” the guard stammered.
“It’s ok, officer. I know. I’ll see you then.” Patrick replied.
At 10 AM, Officer Stanz returned to the cell. Patrick had been ready, sitting patiently at his small desk reading an old crime mystery by Raymond Chandler. He wasn’t going to finish the story in time, unfortunately.
The prison guard led Patrick down the hall towards the execution chamber. Inside, Patrick was strapped onto the padded chair in the center of the small room. A woman in a navy lab coat approached him. She held a tablet computer in one hand, and a small circular device in the other. She placed it on Patrick’s left temple and made a few taps on her tablet.
“Mr. Stephens – you were convicted in 2051 for 3 counts of first degree murder. Under the provisions set forth in the Criminal Deterrents Act of 2038, you were sentenced to 17 successive life sentences of seventy years or natural death, whichever occurs first. You have successfully completed your first sentence, and will now undergo temporal transference, your consciousness transmitted to your physical body in 2051 where you will begin your second term.” said the woman. “Do you have any questions?”
“No, ma’am.” said Patrick.
The woman tapped several times on her tablet, and Patrick suddenly felt a searing pain from his temple, his vision obscured by a blinding white light. After a few seconds, the pain was gone, and his vision returned.
A man in a navy lab coat standing beside him said, “Mr. Stephens. You have just completed temporal transference. It is May 3, 2051. The second term of your sentence has now begun.”
Patrick was led back down the hall to his cell by a tall prison guard with a thick mustache. The clock showed the time as 10:07. He looked at the name badge of this guard and remembered the man who would be his jailer for the next 7 or so years.
“Officer Thompson – could I request a book from the library? Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler.” asked Patrick.
“I’ll check on it. Brown bag lunch will be delivered at 12.” said the guard, as he closed the cell door.
Patrick looked around his 8×12 foot cell, sighed, and then dropped to the floor and started on a set of push-ups.
by submission | Nov 14, 2019 | Story |
Author: James A Brown III
“Well, I guess it’s time to head out.”
“Where to?”
“Grandagar.”
Sri tapped some keys behind the bar and read the display, his face glowed a deep reflected red then blue as he worked down the list of ingredients.
“That’s going to be a thousand credits.”
“Sure thing.”
Sri began to mix the blend, bright fluids moved through hoses, and into the glass in front of him.
“What’s there?” Sri asked.
“Interview.”
“Really? Got a good shot at it?”
“Yeah. I’m one of the few who can not only speak Zeln, but I’ve got months on a Piccadilly Decruster. The giants are paying massive for someone to help clean them up after an incursion.”
“Nice.”
Sri finished the glass, but moved it out of sight as he placed another, and started filling it, his customer not noticing.
“How long is the job?”
“Forever if you want. They have a solid immortality package as well as some pretty sweet enhancements, all paid for. Stick it out for a couple hundred years and you could probably buy a fringe planet outright.”
“Wow. That’s amazing,” said Sri. “Congrats, man. By the way, do you know a Constance on Praelen Sil?”
“I don’t know anyone there. Too crowded. Heard it can take days to get there due to the backup. No cocktail can get around it either.”
“Okay, just wondering. You kind of looked familiar and my implant thought maybe you knew her. Okay, your drink is ready. Best of luck to you.”
“Thanks.”
Sri’s customer took the drink down in one large gulp.
“Hey, wait a sec. That doesn’t taste like a Grandagar mix. That tastes more like Prae…”
The customer faded away, his scream of frustration fading out before anyone else could hear it. Sri smiled.
“Yeah, sorry man. By the time you pop in at Praelen Sil, I’ll be settled and the giants won’t care about what happened here. Besides, I have years on those Decrusters. I’m more qualified.”
Sri jotted down a notice ending his employment, took off his apron and tossed it on the bar. He downed the drink he had set aside and smiling, set the note on the apron before fading away.
by submission | Nov 13, 2019 | Story |
Author: Ken Carlson
“Hello and welcome to Burger King. How may I help you,” said the disembodied out of the drive-through speaker in a dark parking lot off Interstate 5, Tacoma.
The voice belonged to Chad Stearns, 16 years old, 120 pounds and already drained of hope.
He mumbled to himself, off-mic. “Maybe to kiss my…”
“Chad!” Elizabeth Huckley crowed from the French fry station. Elizabeth was the miserable night manager. The two of them were the only ones to show up tonight.
“Sorry, just joking,” he said.
Elizabeth bellowed, “One more word and you’ll be out of a job!”
This sucked, but it wasn’t home where his drunken old man, the pontificator about the importance of hard work and a job well done loved smacking him around. Now Chad was out earning a few bucks, which Dad would skim to buy more booze.
Chad finally heard something from the drive-thru.“We are here,” a mechanical voice responded. Chad checked the monitor and spied a beaten-up black van, idling with its headlights off.
The voice returned. “Does this electric board feature all your establishment sells?”
“It’s called a menu, sir,” Chad said. “How about a Junior Whopper, some fries, and a shake?”
“We are hungry. The menu will be fine.”
“You want everything on the menu? That’s gonna take a while,” Chad laughed.
“Fine,” the voice said, “We’ll take all that you can. We are hungry.”
The van pulled up. Chad saw the dark interior, yet he knew someone was there. He was handed a wad of cash, thousands, just not with an actual hand, more of a disembodied force.
“Elizabeth! We have an order for everything we’ve got!”
She waddled up to Chad, “If this is your idea of a joke, Chad, I’ll…”
She saw the cash and looked out to the van. She grabbed the cash, put it in the register and got to work.
In an hour, the food was ready. Everything the two of them could prepare and bag in that time was done. The food was handed off. Chad and Elizabeth were exhausted. The van drove away.
“Chad, you’ll be punished for what you said earlier,” said a sweaty Elizabeth. “I’m going home. You have clean-up tonight. The grill, the trash bins. It will be off the clock and you will be here tomorrow at 6 am when Brian opens.”
Chad stared at the mess from the biggest night this store ever saw. Elizabeth returned to the overly stuffed register, pulled out several bills and stuffing them into her purse.
The van returned to the drive-thru, dark as midnight when you die.
Chad leaned out the window and said, “Welcome to Burger King. How may I help you.”
“We are still hungry,” said the van voice, “for something nice and fat.” More dollars were thrust at Chad, more than he could make in a month at this joint, maybe a year.
Chad nodded. The breeze blowing his brown hair poking out from under his BK cap.
“Liz, there’s a customer here that wants to speak to the manager.”
She shoved him out of the way, stomping back to the drive-thru station.
“Hello and welcome to Burger King,” she said. “How may I help…”
Her screams were muffled as her body was lifted through the courtesy window into the waiting van. Chad heard a crunching sound, but he was probably mistaken. He made his way to the back door, set the alarm, and locked up; ending a long day with a satisfied customer, the mark of a job well done.
by Hari Navarro | Nov 12, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The great starving horde marched through space. No, they didn’t. They swarmed and, just as the hive-minded are apt to do, they toiled relentlessly, each individual an integral part of the whole.
Every last one a citizen and willing slave to its place and function as the collective of this ancient civilisation rose up from its dying world and took the form of a single mass. A great black-winged wedge to glide through the ink in search of that one thing all life craves – sustenance.
I’m not sure if you’ve read or, perhaps, you’ve been told that in all of existence there are but two worlds that harbour sentient life.
The first, of course, is Earth with its hierarchy of intelligence that, arguably, staggers down from humans and then to things that can be shot or caught in nets and, then, to things that squash beneath the tips of shoes and then onto some other insignificant organisms even smaller than that.
The other world, I forget now its name, is the afore-mentioned now dead rock from which the horde had set out. A place where microscopic Goliaths devoured all the things that swam in its sea and all the furry and feathered and scaled creatures that wandered the land and then, finally, although they had long toyed with the possibility of their preservation, they also gulped down the humanoids. The creatures that looked just like you. Mostly, save for that thing with the ears.
So these insects, for want of a better word, they cleaned out their larder and then set out into the heavens in search of a bite to eat.
It is only by chance that they happened upon your minuscule backwater speck of life. A water gripped rock upon which their great wedge could swoop and divide. You saw didn’t you as they dispersed into precisely targeted legions that cut down through the clouds and shunted your day into night.
They targeted the sentient and the swarm did adhere to every last living, breathing and thinking one of you. The first wave hit and they locked together, interconnecting their exoskeletons so that, once again, the many become the one. All life freezes in situ and in an instant all sound ceases, a global silence before simultaneously you could hear them begin to chew.
So there it is. That is how you ended, shredded away from the outside to the in by a bus load of ravenous tourists. The first wave passing back its masticated nutrition to the next wave that latches to its back and, then, back again to wave after wave until you have been replaced right down to your core.
But you had an unwitting surprise in store, didn’t you? You pass on a last little treat. A strand that twists within a tiny strand of your animal essence. A simple variation that locks their joints and closes them down and dooms them to never again budge.
They die, eventually, this time unable to escape from the hunger that throbs and claws in their heads. Though, even if they could, there is not but one crumb of sustenance left in the universe to be had.
At least the trees still look down, creaking in the wind above your morbid monuments. Statue remembrances as you bleach and flake in the sun.
So that’s the story, how in a single day the sentient life total for all of the cosmos was dialled back down to zero. Well, almost zero.
Zero, not counting me.
by Julian Miles | Nov 11, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
In the beginning, there was a world. It wasn’t a particularly unusual or outstanding one, just another ball of rock with a hot liquid interior and a solid lump at the centre. The usual early planetary phases passed without anything of note, then the meteor arrived. Sheer luck it hit water far enough from a volcano for the liquid to not be boiling. Sheerer luck it careened through the shallows before plunging into the deeps, fragmenting as it went. The microbes on that meteor hadn’t been anywhere so accommodating since their home planet blew apart. A rush of renewed life met the local forms and, surprisingly quickly, all sorts of interesting hybrids started ambling about.
“Are you doing the mental lecture to some hapless writer again?”
“Quiet. I’m not thinking at you.”
“There’s no need to snap.”
After a few false starts, life blundered from water onto land. Something like evolution got interrupted by another meteor loaded with flash-frozen biology from a dead planet. The results of that revamped the non-aquatic forms in many useful ways.
The first civilisation came and went, not achieving much. Likewise the second thru twenty-seventh. Every time it proved that reptilian sentients didn’t have much get up and go. The very few who did simply got up and went. Those that remained shrugged and went back to their day-to-day, waiting for the next extinction event.
“Still keeping us anonymous, eh?”
“What are you doing in my train of thought?”
“Admiring the view from First Class.”
Fast forward past a few millennia of same old, same old, and the reptilians were regularly being beaten to the top of the pile by primates. The smart apes tried several times to make something of themselves, but their two best attempts were foiled by subduction. After that, a couple of intervening ice ages didn’t help matters.
“Somewhat of an understatement.”
“I still don’t understand how – if we’re so smart – our expeditions missed out on the fact that sub-zero environments and cold-blooded researchers is always a recipe for disaster.”
“Overenthusiasm and no-one daring to ask some obvious questions of their venerated commanders, at a guess. We’re still terrible at challenging our own hierarchal structures.”
“You might just have hit the egg square on with that idea.”
Finally, a new civilisation achieved technological ascendancy, reaching peaks only attained by five of the ninety civilisations before them. Unusually, they reached that technology before their aggressive tendencies had been tempered, and managed to sustain the balancing act for several decades before the fundamental flaws of their founding premises started to erode the underpinnings of the societies that had evolved.
“Rather restrained. Last night we got to listen to you bang on for four hours about the shortcomings of their current civilisation model.”
“Last night I’d had enough recreational chemicals to reach evangelical. Today I’m merely dehydrated.”
It’s ironic that they’d just realised meteors had such a massive potential to influence life on the planet they’d come to call ‘Earth’ when, in a freak event, a trio of meteors ruined their failing civilisation and ushered in a new ice age.
When that’s over, it’ll be interesting to see what sentiences rise to the challenge of forming the next civilisation.
“‘A trio’?”
“I reckon they’ll take out the first, damage or even crack the second, but the remains of it, plus the third, will do for them.”
“I like that thinking, but I’d quietly put a cloaked super-dense core in the third. Just to be sure.”
“That’s underclawed of you. Consider it done.”
