by submission | Dec 2, 2018 | Story |
Author: Michael Mieher
Friday, December 18th, 2043
Day 503 of the 3rd Mars Pilgrimage joint SpaceX/OneSpace mission.
“I’m sorry Captain Shu.”, First Officer Griffin Musk said, trying to keep his exhaustion from showing. “Even the ISS and Peary Station are dark, Literally dark. No lights or even thermal readings. The radiation readings we picked up aren’t as widespread as we feared, but between Israel, Syria, and the Korean peninsula…. well that’s where all the atmospheric dust is from.”
“Thank you, Griffin.” Captain Shu Chang of the Keyi Hua-Mayflower looked out the window at the Earth below. “We need to know what the hell happened before we send anyone down there. How is your team doing retrofitting the Plymouth for remote landing operation?”
“They’re almost finished, Captain. Another 36 hours and they’ll be ready. Scotty is a miracle worker. Her team is pulling double shifts.” Griffin paused. Then hesitatingly said, “We may want to consider a different landing site though.”
Captain Shu slowly turned back to Musk, “Where?”
“Australia sir. The Outback, as they say. We’ve picked up some radio noise sir. Shortwave. We think it might be native language.”, explained Musk
“Dr. Banalandju is from Australia,” said Shu.
“Yes, Captain,” agreed Musk, “She is in Communications now. I asked her to try…”
(The door suddenly opened, hitting Musk in the shoulder)
“CAPTAIN!”
“Yes, doctor.”, said Captain Shu calmly, “Come in. What do you have?”
“THERE ARE SURVIVORS IN COOBER PEDY!”, exclaimed Dr. Banalandju
“Slow down doctor,” Captain Shu said much more calmly than he felt. “Where?”
“Sorry sir” Dr. Banalandju took a deep breath. “Southern Australia, plus other locations they said, but right now only in Australia.”
After a long pause, Musk asked, “So what happened?”
“Hackers!”, said Dr. Banalanju, then turning back to the captain, “They said it was hackers. Various DoS attacks and viruses. All aimed at the agriculture syndicate control satellites, food distribution services, delivery drones, and even networked kitchen appliances. Everyone just starved!”
“Or worse,” said Musk
“There must be more survivors. Rural areas. Preppers.” said Captain Shu. Then, “Griffin… your father? You mentioned he had….”
“Shelters.”, finished Musk. “Yes, Captain. He called them Boring Sanctuaries, but if there was any way to get a message to us, he would have.”
“Captain.” interjected Captain Banalandju.
“Yes, doctor?”
“My People. They said the first month there were hundreds of international radio contacts, but it dropped off over the next 6 months. The winter was incredibly cold. We are the first contact from Outsiders in over a year, with one exception…”, she trailed off.
“What exception?”, asked Captain Shu
“Well…. crazy as it seems, it sounds like Spam.” after a pause, Dr. Banalandju continued. “They said they keep getting the same message over and over again. The message claims to be from a Nigerian Prince stranded in South Africa with millions of dollars.”
“That’s got to be Xavier!”, exclaimed Griffin.
“What?”, asked Dr. Banalanju looking puzzled.
“His brother doctor.” Captain Shu explained. Then turning back to Musk “Your twin if I recall?”
“Yes, sir.” Musk said calmly, but he couldn’t hide the smile. Or the welling tears.
“Well then,” said Captain Shu, smiling at his First Office. “Send a message to the Prince of Nigeria that the First Bank of Coober Pedy is ready to receive his millions.”
Dr. Banalandu and First Officer Musk joined their Captain in an uncharacteristic moment of laughter.
Then sounding serious again, the Captain said, “The Outback should have plenty of good places to set this bird down. Find me an LZ.”
“Yes SIR!”, said Musk, turning towards the door.
“And Griffin.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Don’t hit Uluru.”
by submission | Dec 1, 2018 | Story |
Author: James Lawrence Rhodes
“There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.” – Dante Alighieri
The tender and sun-reddened skin had begun to peel, large flakes revealed raw nerves. Alakai was not alone in her suffering. Her shipmates suffered the same fate.
The sun was vicious in its death throes, like an aging lion ready to lash out at anything that neared. Desert stripes raked the Earth; huge patches of brown where only roaches could thrive. Alakai studied it on the large screen in the refugee lounge.
Alakai’s green Polar home looked singed and baron from the distance of the last life vessel. That greedy orb behind it, stealing the sky. Alakai would be a grandmother by the time her feet felt soil again if she could bring herself to be.
The girl at the other side of Alakai’s table sat with her legs up on the chair and her arms wrapped around her knees. Sobbing for a lost home, friend, lover, parent…
They watched the screen until the Earth had faded from sight. For an hour the sky looked the way they remembered it. Scarlet, like it had been when Alakai was a child. She kept watching until it was a bright and distant star and then she closed her eyes.
by submission | Nov 30, 2018 | Story |
Author: Mark Thomas
If time travel has taught us anything it’s that inevitability is a slippery subject. My story became mathematically more likely each time I ingested a tablet, but it was never absolutely certain.
Every clock puncher understands that he or she will eventually encounter multiple versions of themselves. Ordinarily, glimpses of alternate life-possibilities are easy to ignore because those iterations are so similar in appearance and temperament to the “original” that the strongest emotion they can inspire is a weak form of self-love.
Unfortunately, the being I encountered on my last journey was significantly different in one important respect.
My time-shadow was happy.
The simulacra had utterly abandoned his temporal-vacation to embrace the retro-environment. He had violated protocol and common sense to go native.
I must have immediately suspected the dark transition, otherwise, why would I have insinuated myself into a crowd of people and followed him that day? I waited for him to emerge from a record store clutching a paper-wrapped package. I hid behind the trunk of an enormous elm as he sauntered through a corner of the park. I watched from an adjacent doorway as he stopped at a bakery to purchase a small bag of pastries and then at a newsstand to exchange a few coins for a morning paper. Ultimately, my time-shadow skipped up the steps of an old brownstone where a youngish woman was sitting, drinking tea from a mug. At the counterfeit’s approach, the young woman put down her mug, stood up and wriggled her fingers inviting physical contact.
The two clumsily embraced then entered the townhouse. Soon I heard music waft from an open window and the sound of unrestrained laughter.
You might be “envious” of people you don’t know. Someone wins the Copley medal for science, for example, and you wish you could experience that same sense of self-satisfaction, that same level of material success and public adulation. That’s an unfortunate character weakness, but it isn’t a debilitating passion. You are “jealous,” however, of people you know intimately. There is a profound sense of unfairness attached to the contemplation of another’s success when the person shared, to a great extent, your own opportunities and talents. That sense of aggrievement can easily become pernicious. Why, you ask yourself, did good fortune light on the person standing next to you? Why were you overlooked?
I know this must be difficult to understand, but I quickly developed an intense jealous hatred of myself and once I realized this was the case, I could neither bear it nor suppress it.
I waited outside the brownstone for twelve hours.
It was evening when my time shadow emerged, whistling, from the doorway. He skipped down the steps and crossed the street, passing right in front of a railed alcove where I was hiding. His movements were strobe-like as he walked through patches of darkness alternating with bright circles of illumination from the streetlights.
I pursued him quickly, and silently, but he glanced over his shoulder at the last instant, and horror filled his eyes as my weapon descended. I clubbed him with a heavy wine bottle I had pulled from one of the garbage cans in the alcove. The glass didn’t break, even when I let it drop from my fist to clunk on the sidewalk bricks.
I’m not sure which sound I heard first, a female voice screaming from a stoop behind me, or the wailing of a siren.
A policeman approached me tentatively, hand hovering over his holster, but we were soon face to face, eyebrows raised in a mirror image of recognition.
end
by submission | Nov 29, 2018 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“Ouch! That hurts!”
Clint Aurelius pulled back his tattoo needle from his thirty-something assistant wincing under his application. Clint took some deep breaths while resting his hands from arthritic agony.
“No intent to harm…just tidying your history a bit at day’s end. Some script needed sharpening.”
“I appreciate it. I want readers to tell my story because someday old recorders like you will be gone.” The assistant adjusted his shoulders, cracking his neck vertebrae to increase relaxation.
“One last touch to finish. I’ll read you shortly. You did a terrific job today coordinating all the people’s tattoos and customer traffic. I couldn’t manage without you.” Aurelius scanned his workmanship, adding a single line of fine ink to letters fading near edges of his flesh canvas.
“How did this happen, Clint Aurelius? You know your name and your history without writing. You have a great name, but I cannot remember mine.” His assistant stepped down from the workbench to stretch and ready for his identity reading.
“I was one of the lucky ones when it struck,” Clint explained. “It was an emerging virus carried by every biting bug on the planet. It was everywhere in weeks with no way to stop it. Docs called it a biological traumatic brain injury.”
“What made you different, Aurelius? I mean, you know your interesting name.”
Aurelius paused, slightly amused. “It means, literally, a golden hill. Like others who had retired with early signs of Alzheimer’s, I feared to become a drain on society. I had retired as a graphic artist. My hobby was calligraphy. Strangely, that virus turned off my affliction while it destroyed other’s memories of their past, including their names. People could not record new memories. What skills they had morphed into general labor capacities.”
“So only a few of us could remember who we were?”
“There were enough with Alzheimer’s who recovered, creating stability for a while,” Aurelius continued. “But, in months transportation and electricity disappeared. Survival became difficult. Of course, there were no more great wars or regional squabbles, but instead a dizzying descent into widespread madness. That’s why compounds like ours became bastions for preservation against marauders and insanity. Now writers, like me, and those who can still read, keep daily memories fresh for the afflicted by repeating life stories from their backs. Most survivors live in a continual now, with little context of their past or any long-term future. Only their daily storytelling gives them a history for their moment.”
“Is our future that dark?” the assistant asked.
“There are other ramifications. People can’t form relationships. Each day readers meet to introduce couples by telling their skin stories together, but after a day, there is no memory capable of constructing bonding. There is no family building…no ability to understand birth or raise offspring. I have met and mourned with many writers that we will not see our grandchildren…that this may end our species. We who sustain provide love and care by serving to read the same stories repeatedly, while experiencing diminishing optimism that a few, still undiscovered, will survive this plague and reproduce. For now…there is only a fading hope.”
“That is chilling, Aurelius. Can you read me now, and the prayer written for all our clients today?”
“Yes. Let me tell your story.” Aurelius began his oration from his assistant’s tattoo: “Bless me, for I have forgotten. I was once an air traffic controller. My name is Hank Aurelius.”
by submission | Nov 28, 2018 | Story |
Author: Abigail Hughes
I know you made it clear we were not supposed to talk during our “break”, but I have something I need to get off of my chest and now that it is impossible for you to automatically know what I’m feeling, I have been reduced to contacting you through one of your appendages’ social media accounts.
This morning I woke up to silence.
There was no dull, internal buzzing of a million discontinuous voices competing for dominance. There were just my thoughts. Alone. Bouncing off the walls of a pathetic, singular brain. I hope you understand how traumatic this was. I had something on my mind and was completely incapable of silently sharing that something with you. Then it all came thundering down, the reality of it all, that no longer would I have access to your thoughts. Your memories. Your desires.
I kept waiting for you to return. I spent hours concentrating on that feeling of togetherness I had grown accustomed to. When I realized you were not coming back, that it was completely over – I cried.
Hard.
You did not see me at my best yesterday when I went into the cafe Yolanda works at. I was drunk, you probably smelled it on me when you sent the manager over. I know you infected him, I could tell by his watering eyes and concealed desperation.
I envied him.
He was trying to scream, fighting over the control of his vocal cords when you told me, in his wavering voice “It’s over. Go home or I’m calling the police”.
I noticed that you were occupying Mike’s brain now. I cannot phane happiness. It was a mistake introducing you two. The escapade is brutal in an entirely different way because this is not the first relationship I lost to the guy and I am positive it won’t be the last. I get it. He works an office job, brings home six figures and drives a Maserati. But let me ask you this, how many of you can fit into his car?
Three?
My bus can lug seven of you around, easy. Ten, even, if two of you lay vertically and one doesn’t mind the trunk.
I gave everything I had to benefit your mission. My cat, my brother, my landlord, my neighbors – you have assimilated everyone I know! Which, you can imagine, makes it obscenely difficult to get over you. And even though we are currently apart I swear if I find someone worthy of your consideration then I will send them your way without skipping a beat. I can’t help it, I love you I care about your goals.
I find myself living in the past, trying to pinpoint exactly where I went wrong. The one event I keep circling back to is the concert. I am sorry, Hive, I am so sorry. I had no idea that my love of Ska music was strong enough to encumber your ability of replication and assimilation. I know how much you have always wanted to mesh with a bass player. If I knew that an entire crowd of concert-goers angrily screaming lyrics and crumping in perfect unison would alert the band of our presence then I would have suppressed the urge to do so.
It is possible that I am overthinking things, but it is all I can do at this point. I am utterly alone with nothing but my thoughts.
I remember when I first met you, in the eyes of a beggar. You looked so out of place. Disoriented. Manic. Inhabiting an old body that you clearly did not know how to navigate. I was having a smoke outside of the restaurant, lamenting going in and closing. Then you came up to me, grabbed me by the shoulders, leaned in for a vinegary kiss and heaved countless writhing lifeforms into my mouth.
I was one with an organism larger than life itself.
I knew that I would never be the same.
And today, I am certain of the same fact.
Baby, I love you. I miss you. I will never forget you – especially because I see you on every street corner, grocery store and fast food chain in town. Plus, I am fairly confident that you have inhabited a news anchor on channel twelve. Which, I mean, congratulations – but I cannot help but wonder what she has that I do not.
I cannot stand the thought of living in this world without a collective consciousness splitting rent inside my head. I am willing to change.
I want you to know that I sincerely wish you the best of luck. I am certain that you will make the best overlord of the human race, and I cannot wait to see what the new world of like-minded individuals terraforming this planet to fit the needs of your survival will look like.
Call me.
Text me.
Assimilate me.
Please, just give me another chance.
by Hari Navarro | Nov 27, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Europa Nov. 22, 2122 [GMT] 5400 mSv
The submersible hovers in the heavy sodium sea 99.8 km below the Europan crust. Steadying it snaps to grid-coordinate: K-V-6-2.
“Damn. You sunk my battleship”, quips 2nd Lt. Percy Newberry in a joke he has told many times over. One that is yet to receive so much as a resided chuckle.
Expertly he maneuvers the craft, landing it astride this perfect trench. The leading-line they have followed now to this the chisel-point of its end.
“Looking good Canary One. Sub-surface achieved”, chimes in the command ship. Nestled high above among chaotic jutting spires and tectonically contorted sheets it waits and weights upon the radiation chewed ice.
Carter breathes deep as his suit is tethered and the umbilical communication and life support indicators are checked and checked again.
“It’s like you planned this. What flavor of darkness did you invoke to have the trench too narrow for the ship but just wide enough for an under-skilled boy-man contractor such as yourself to be lowered into?”
“I know the bosses daughter”
“You’ll not be the same after this. You’re the new Armstrong. The first man to actually step foot on Europa”, whispers 1st Lieutenant Herbert as she checks the seal of his visor.
“I can do without the hassle, Evelyn. Think I’ll just come straight out with a statement that we faked the whole thing”, he grins and he feels the warm flood of anticipation ooze into the pores of his face.
Slapping the side of his helmet she gives the thumbs up and there is a gentle hiss as he is hoisted and readied to be lowered into the dive-bay that now opens beneath his feet. The Lieutenant squeezes the com-link at her lapel.
“Think of something iconic to say. Command has changed plans. We broadcast live. No pressure”
Carter descends into this place that he’d never been but where his imagination had lived and bred since as a child he’d rubbed his finger across a tiniest slither of rock. A fragment from the edge of another sea. Serenity. Now so perfect a word.
The darkness clings like thick memories and he looks up and sees the flicker of the submersibles navigation lights and he is home.
Lost in his youth high on the iron roof of his grandfather’s garage. The weather-vane, a smiling steel whale gently it squeaks and the undulating iron at his back is still warm from the now long spent sun and his eyes they fix to the stars.
He barely notices as his feet touch down and his suit automatically calculates and redistributes its weight and suddenly the murk throbs and it pulses.
“We have visual. Confirm receive. Glare detected. Light source. Confirm”
But Carter is silent and the light it plays, filling the HUD that streams the curve of his visor with a hue that envelopes and pulls at his cells, dragging him into the glow.
Such a strange light this is that clings within the strafes of the warm tidal flex that undulate the walls of the trench. Things that aren’t there appear. Great robed beings all in a line. Heads hung, they beckon and bow.
“… confirm receive”
His feet feel light as they drag silently through this gauntlet of ancient ice and toward the increasingly narrowing fissure at its end.
“Confirm receive. Confirm?”
Nothing.
“LRV Carnarvon. LRV Carnarvon. We’ve lost contact with Carter. Rad levels normal. HR spiking… ”
“Carter. Carter. This is LRV Carnarvon. Respond. Carter!”
“I’m OK”
“Can you see anything?”
“Yes, wonderful things!”
“Please repeat… [Redacted// Carnarvon Corp.]
