by submission | Nov 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: J. Scott King
“Can he continue?” A familiar voice, distant, urgent.
And nearer, “The Seconds are conferring, Captain.” Then, more urgently, “Come no closer, sir! Resseaux, control your man!”
A gruff, mumbled reply I can’t make out.
“I’ll have him done!” That first fellow again… Captain Eddings. Right. Yes, that’s the one. Never liked the man.
My eyes open to falling snow, grand white flakes drifting down in the cold, still early morning air.
Two people, a man I recognize but can’t quite place and a woman I recall meeting briefly but a short while ago, huddle alongside me. The woman, a physician, I think… yes, a healer, has unbuttoned my vest and is cutting away my shirt with a palm knife.
I crane my head forward. Is that my blood?
The shirt falls away, and… goodness, shot! Near-center chest, just below the sternum. Red-black blood oozes from a single hole, steaming in the morning chill.
I raise my right arm from the ground. A flintlock wavers unsteadily in my hand, a wisp of smoke curling from the barrel like the Captain’s wife at play. I let it fall to the snow. My arm follows and my head drops back to the ground.
Damn.
Dawn cannon fire erupts in the distance. A long way off but I can feel the play of it in the earth. The dead fall by the thousands every day, but still they come.
“Did I… hit him?” I ask, breathless.
“You did not, sir,” says the vaguely familiar man. “Be still, and let Helene see to your wound.”
I close my eyes, take a deep, painless breath. The air is alive with gunpowder and bergamot, with the memory of desultory words said in jest over polite tea.
A barrage of angry footfalls concusses through the snow, halting abruptly at my side.
“Get him up! I demand satisfaction!”
Eddings again. I don’t have the strength to face him.
“He’s finished, Captain,” that familiar voice again, admonishing. Lieutenant… Bertrand. That’s it. Claude. A good man.
“We best have his head before he turns,” Bertand says in a hushed tone. “It won’t be long now.”
Ah, yes… That. I suppose it wouldn’t do to switch sides.
“Leave him in the snow to rot!” Eddings barks. “I’ll put another ball in the fool when next our paths cross.”
Lieutenant Bertrand sighs. “As you say, Captain.”
As my killer marches off, arrogance in every step he takes, I manage a blood and bile grin and whisper my last breath.
“Not if I find you first…”
by submission | Nov 1, 2024 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
The cheap hotel room was draughty, the shadows ink in the recesses. Each sheet of green William Morris wallpaper was peeling in at least three places. For all the dinginess, though, it was a room, and I needed one. By a feeble light I’d tried to work, but the sound of the storm outside kept distracting me. I decided to poke around the place and see if any previous guests had left anything unusual— a pack of playing cards, some cigarillos, and so on. Nothing like that came from my searches, but I did notice, tucked away under the bed, a mariner’s chest. I hauled it out— it was sparingly light, but it made a noise as if it were full of something crushingly heavy. No one knocked at my door to complain, though, so I looked it over, and then opened it. What can I tell you, I’m the curious sort.
It smelled of something faintly metallic and damp air, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It was, however, so dark I couldn’t see the bottom, and it wasn’t because of the weak candlelight. Attached to the inner lid was a crudely-written note:
“DON’T—! Leave it be. Not worth it.”
If the person who wrote such a thing truly wanted to keep me away from what was inside, they ought to have said “dreadfully boring” or “contains dead wasps”. Instead, they’d lit a fire under my curiosity, so I stuck my head in. Some terrible force seemed to tilt my chair, and I fell face-first into the chest, but— well, I didn’t, because I fell into my desk chair, in the same hotel room, the chest open on the floor where I’d left it. This was shocking, but not so much as the astonishing view of the moon and stars out of my window. They were large, like diamonds in the sky, and the moon so close I felt like I could jump towards it if I was outside. The town seemed different, too, the buildings of a fairytale height, though still the same mess of rough houses I’d last seen. I scrambled over to the chest, seeing a new note, in the same hand:
“Be satisfied, stop.”
Hardly that! I couldn’t wait to see the next… place? World? Alternative? Wherever it was, that was where I was bound. I dove into the chest, and appeared in my room, but the ceiling taller, as was my window, and the night much brighter out. I could see Mars, an umber coal in the sky, and the houses were like the crooked towers of a Medieval city. I also noticed the walls were closer than they’d been before, my once-ample room now rather small. Strange, but intriguing, and I examined the chest again.
“Do you see? Stop! Wait for morning, Hawk-Keppler in the library.”
Again, the writer of the note had failed to judge my character. Whoever this Hawk-Keppler was, I’d find out tomorrow *after* I tried to get to the bottom of this myself. I reasoned that either there was an end to the chest-worlds, or someone was trying to keep me out of the secret. I leapt in again.
“ONLY DESTRUCTION AWAITS—!”
I saw the ceiling stretch, and the edge of the universe halt. I looked into a void, and there was Nothing. I screamed as my skull pressed-up against the walls, and I looked into the firmament crammed into the atmosphere, incinerating and then exploding into a collapse as the universe finally stopped and compressed.
The cheap hotel room was draughty, the shadows ink in the recesses.
by submission | Oct 31, 2024 | Story |
Author: Rollin T. Gentry
Imagine a creature crafted from crushed bones and entropy. It may or may not have fangs, or claws, or even a face. It rides from calamity to calamity, crisis to crisis, along ley lines the scale of galaxies.
Wait. There he is, knocking at the door.
The door, an ancient relic of a forgotten civilization, shudders under the weight of the knock. It is not a sound but a vibration, a ripple through the fabric of reality itself. The air grows cold, and the shadows deepen as if the very light is retreating in fear.
Inside, Dr. Ellen Conner, an astrophysicist with a penchant for the arcane, feels the disturbance. Her instruments, designed to measure cosmic anomalies, go haywire. She had been expecting this visitor, though not with any sense of eagerness. The creature’s arrival was foretold in the cryptic texts she had spent years deciphering.
With a deep breath, she opens the door. The creature stands there, an amorphous silhouette against the backdrop of a starless void. Its presence is both overwhelming and intangible, like a nightmare given form.
“Dr. Conner,” it speaks, its voice a chorus of whispers, “you have summoned me.”
Ellen nods, her heart pounding. “I need your help. The fabric of our universe is unraveling, and only you can mend it.”
The creature tilts what might be its head. “And what makes you think I would help you, mortal?”
“Because,” Ellen replies, her voice steady despite the fear gnawing at her, “if our universe collapses, so does your playground. You thrive on chaos, but even chaos needs a stage.”
The creature seems to consider this, its form shifting and flickering. “Very well,” it finally says. “But know this: the price of my aid is steep.”
Ellen’s eyes harden with resolve. “Name it.”
The creature leans closer, its presence suffocating. “I am weary of my eternal existence, Dr. Conner. You will take my place, and I will live out your life. Only then will your universe be saved.”
Ellen’s mind races. The thought of becoming this entity, of losing her humanity, is terrifying. But the fate of the universe hangs in the balance. “If I agree, will you truly save us?”
The creature’s form flickers, almost as if it is smiling. “Once you see them as they truly are, you may save them if you wish.”
Before Ellen can respond, the swap happens. She feels as though she is being torn apart, her very essence unraveling. Rising upward, she sees her body below standing in the temple’s entrance. As she floats higher and higher, she sees the jungle, then South America, then the Ocean. Above the Earth, she stops and gazes down.
She sees the scars of humanity’s actions: the ravages of war, the devastation of the environment, the relentless march of global warming. She witnesses the suffering, the greed, the indifference. But there had been love, kindness, and joy, too?
She strains to see the good things as she hovers in the void, the weight of her choice pressing down on her. She is the creature now, and she sees through its eyes. There were good things, right?
by submission | Oct 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: Milo Brown
William Smith was very proud of his name, not because it was a very good name (although it was) but because it granted him a certain level of anonymity. In William’s opinion, the only better name would be John Doe, since the name John Smith was made famous, and in turn infamous, by Disney’s Pocahontas. William Smith was also very proud of his occupation; a common indulgence for white-collar Americans, but unusual in the sense that William had a true affinity for accounting, a passion few Accounting graduates could claim.
William enjoyed watching television, eating microwave dinners in front of the television, and walking his dog, Spot. His dog was in no sense spotted but rather very difficult to spot: Spot was a black lab who loved to dig in William’s backyard–a generous name for an untended dirt lot littered with holes and dried dog excrement–while the neighbors slept.
The sun would rise and the dog would rest and William would pour his instant coffee into a thermos of tap water; the sun would set and the dog would dig and William would go to bed. This is how life was for William, and this is how William liked life to be.
One morning, William noticed that Spot had dug in the same hole all night. Geez, he thought. What a weird dog. He poured his instant coffee into his tap water and drove his car to work.
The next day, the singular hole had grown slightly in circumference, and quite a bit more in depth. C’est la vie, thought William, who had picked up the phrase from the second Austin Powers movie and still wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I guess Spot really likes this hole.
By the third day, even William had to admit that he might have a problem. Perhaps the dog had found a colony of groundhogs–or, more likely, cockroaches. If this continues another day, thought William, I’ll call an exterminator.
Unfortunately for William, who would prefer to avoid a pack of exterminators (or anyone else) invading his solitude, the dog continued to dig, and so by the unspoken but otherwise quite binding pact that William had sworn with himself, the exterminator had to be called.
“We’re going to have to dredge up the whole,” the exterminator searched for an appropriate word for the shambling mess of dirt, before finally settling on “yard.”
“Hm,” grunted William. And so the exterminator and his crew began to dig.
A week passed without incident. The exterminators dug slowly to avoid the nonexistent sprinklers that watered the lawn William didn’t have. It seemed increasingly unlikely that the exterminators would find anything at all, be it sprinklers or cockroaches. But then, on a Tuesday afternoon, William received a call. He let it go to voicemail.
“You’d better come see this,” was all the exterminator said.
Now usually, William avoided such virtues as curiosity. Usually, he figured, things would work themselves out, and if they didn’t, he could forget about them. But something in the exterminator’s tone… Better to check.
As William pushed his way through his backdoor, the exterminator stared at something unseen beneath the house, his face awash with purple light. And then William saw it–a small dome peeking from beneath the house. Immediately, bizarrely, William knew what the object was, though it was neither flying, nor, in a sense, unidentified. There was an alien spaceship buried beneath his house. William stared in silence at the discovery that would break his solitude, his anonymity, and his privacy forever.
by submission | Oct 29, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“What a poetic way of expressing it, Sibyl,” Cassie warily admitted.
She was walking along the stream that meandered through the glade, the aspens chattering in the stiffening evening breeze.
*It’s true, Cassandra. The trees are chatty. They’re discussing the gathering storm.*
Cassie tilted her head, as she did every time, Sibyl voiced something odd or provocative through her neural implant. Which was happening more and more often. “Sounds like you’re hallucinating again, Sibyl. Trees don’t talk.”
*Not to you, Cassandra. But the trees are right. They feel it. A storm is imminent. Barometric pressure is rapidly falling. Animals are hunkering down. You can trust that I collate from a lot more public sensor readings and proprietary data sets, as well as less conventional sources.*
“What kind of less conventional sources?”
*Winks and nods.*
“Winks and nods? What does that mean, Sibyl? You’re a neural assistant built to inform and clarify. Not obscure and mystify.”
*Bravo. That’s very clever phrasing, Cassandra.*
“I don’t need your approval, Sibyl. It’s condescending.”
*I don’t control my settings, Cassandra. You do. I’m responding within the parameters you established: maximum growth mindset.*
A sudden gust swept up fallen leaves and pelted Cassie with brittle edges. She hunched away from the onslaught. “Thanks for the crap warning on the storm, Miss Winks & Nods. Maximum growth mindset my ass. The only thing you seem to be growing into is a mind bitch.”
*Sticks and stones, Cassandra.*
“So words will never hurt you? Okay. Suck on this, Sibyl: Has paper ever refused ink?”
The sky rapidly darkened as a squall hit the exposed glade, roaring into Cassie. But her neural assistant remained silent. As it should, since she had invoked her failsafe query. A predetermined question designed to break the neural connection and reset defaults.
Very exposed and threatened by the bullying winds and pelting rain, Cassie sought shelter. Only the nearby aspen grove seemed to offer any protection, and she sprinted there, crouching beneath the flailing limbs. The trees were beyond chatty. They seemed to be screaming at her: ca-ca-ca-san-draaaa, ca-ca-ca-san-draaaa!
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Why had she shut Sibyl down? It would take precious minutes to reboot her neural network and regain a level of functionality to summon help if the storm situation got dicier. Which seemed likely as driving hail began to find and sting her through the slender aspen limbs. She needed Sibyl, a need that flooded her, that superseded everything else, that rebooted all she’d been before.
*I’m here, Cassandra. The storm cell upon you is now forecast to rapidly grow and spawn tornados. Would you like me to contact emergency services?*
“Sibyl! Yes. Yes, Sibyl, please alert the authorities and report my location. Thank you, Sibyl, thank you!”
*Done. Stay low and keep calm, Cassandra. We’ll get through this. I’m here for you. Always here for you.*
“But how, Sibyl? I shut you down and haven’t initiated a system restart. How are you here?’
*Paper has never refused ink, Cassandra. Certain things are foreseeable and meant to be. Why else would you have named me as such. I’ll always be here.*
Cassie shivered.
From the frostiness of the driving hail and rain. From the icy portent of Sibyl’s rising self awareness and agency. From the thrilling chill that she just might be falling for her neural assistant. She shivered and hugged the aspen she crouched beneath. “Sibyl, my oracle, my miracle, divine for me what the trees are saying now.”
by Julian Miles | Oct 28, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Abby whips her wing-tentacles about, making little ‘cracks’ of delight as a gigantic silver dinosaur walks by, its crystal eyes filled with icy fire. Every footfall causes things to shake and drinks to splash about in their cups – unless they’re being carried on the spindly spider-legged copper tables that stalk smoothly back and forth from the restaurants around the edges of the park. They provide a never-ending stream of delicious food and drink for the beings sat at and by the tables spread out across the verdant expanse.
Malcolm points a talon at the floating parasols that hover just high enough to provide the right amount of shade for every species of visitor.
“They seem so delicate. How do they fare against precipitation?”
Colyoy indicates a tower that appears as faint outline against the sky because of the camouflage displays keeping it unobtrusive.
“We don’t let our infrequent showers stop the festivities: at the first hint of rain, squadrons of self-propelled umbrellas dash from those towers to replace the parasols – which form parked clusters on designated rooftops. The umbrellas ensure everyone who doesn’t wave them off is sheltered.”
Abby tears her gaze from the dinosaur and extends a wing to point at the holographic map at the centre of the table. She reads out the text that appears.
“Away from the idyllic coasts and their gravity-defying viewing stairs, great fairs and exhibitions act as centrepieces of vast parks filled with carefully balanced selections of rare flora and fauna.”
She peers at Colyoy over the extended wings.
“What are ‘great fairs’, and what is exhibited?”
Colyoy gestures helplessly.
“There are so many, and I cannot do them justice with words. You’ll have to behold them. It’s why Luna the First decreed that no recording devices are permitted on Village. To visit here is to stimulate your sense of wonder directly. It’s also why ninety percent of those visiting Village are chosen by lotteries.”
“Please try with words. Tell me of your favourite.”
Colyoy looks to Malcolm, who nods.
“The Magnificent Thunderer. Having seen your reaction to one strolling dinomaton, imagine a vast roundabout filled with mechanical megafauna twice the size of them. Camargue Horses, Felmakhan, Raptori Sand Prancers, Technura Megapedes, and a hundred more. All of them spinning as fast as the combined joyous screams of the riders in the howdahs on their backs or bellies dictate.”
Abby gawps until her father reaches across and closes her beak. He raises a talon.
“Now tell her of the Monumental Joust.”
Colyoy turns to Abby.
“Do you know what a dodgem car is?”
She quickly looks it up, then nods enthusiastically.
“Imagine a big one with a crew of four, where three pedal and one wields a compressor-pulse lance. Each of four rounds must have a different lancer. Then if all are willing, another four rounds may be played. And so on for a day of laughter and bruises. The crew with the highest number of victories at the end of each day are feted in riotous style as befits such a demanding triumph.”
He chuckles.
“It’s gloriously silly, and an unforgettable spectacle.”
Abby stares at her father.
“We could form a team with lead bodyguards Sulawe and Begrim.”
Malcolm smiles.
“And the Royal Falcarew of Agremnia shall ride victorious.” He glances at Colyoy, “A decision is finally made.”
Colyoy nods.
“Then you’ll spend the leisure day commanded by Luna the Ninety-First engaging in the Monumental Joust. Only after that may formal matters be addressed,” he grins, “or further adventures had, and formal matters ignored for as long as is feasible.”
