by submission | Mar 31, 2024 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
When everything is going well, I can’t relax. I just wait and worry for something bad to happen. So when I got a promotion last week, naturally I expected something ugly would happen, perhaps a leaky roof or maybe a hurricane. But this time, no matter how hard I looked for an upcoming disaster, what actually happened was not even remotely on my radar screen.
We’ve only met once before, at my wife’s college reunion. And that must have been ten years ago or more. According to my wife, you’re an excellent defense lawyer and she urged me to send you a missive informing you of my situation and asking for your assistance.
To catch you up, I’m happily married with four delightful kids, have a good job and had a bright future. I was hoping to take my wife and kids on a two week vacation next year to the Central Planet. My youngest really wants to visit Spaceland and I’m sure my wife would enjoy the Blue Resort.
Anyway, this morning I received a Retro Notice from the Office of Retrocognitive Justice stating that I got away with murder in another universe eons ago. I didn’t even know I had been incarnated way back then. Personally, I don’t even believe retrocognition is real. I suspect it’s all smoke and mirrors based on inferences from an abundance of facts plus savvy guesswork and a dash of luck.
Regardless, I know nobody has ever beaten a retro rap. Judges sitting on the Retrocognitive Courts are all hand-picked by the Supreme Minister of the Central Planet. And no one has ever eluded the Retro Force. I’ve heard they have video and audio devices hidden everywhere and a host of informants.
To make a long story short, the summons ordered me to appear in court next Wednesday. The crime listed was strangling an innocent young woman for sport. I’m shy, eager to please and pathologically honest. I wouldn’t steal a cup of coffee and I even pick up litter now and then and dispose of it properly. Hardly the criminal type, much less some heinous monster.
The last highly publicized person tried for a retro crime that I remember was that governor of the Outer Moon. He was a popular fellow with a pretty wife but perhaps too ambitious. There were reports that he wanted to become Supreme Minister of All the Moons. I had always just assumed that the retro trials were show trials to eliminate political rivals. I don’t have any political enemies. In fact, I didn’t think I had any enemies at all.
I need a good lawyer and you’re the only lawyer I know. I think the fact that your brother is on the Retro Force could be an advantage in trying to get me a light sentence. And I know you and my wife were an item back in college and hope you’re still fond of her.
For my sake but also for my wife’s and kids’ sake, I hope you can see fit to represent me. Please respond as soon as possible, hopefully today for a meeting later today or early tomorrow morning. I’m scared and I’m desperate.
by submission | Mar 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
Athabasca was a town of gas and coal. No wind or solar were allowed. Local officials said the Lord would return by fire while windmills and solar panels could only mar the landscape. And fire in a town of coal and gas was, naturally, a lovely thing.
On a plain not far away, a group of officials who had arrived from afar, were testing what they called “Sol 2.” It was a secret, but they spoke about their project whenever they went for pie and coffee because they assumed Athabascans were too stupid to understand what their work was about.
They took but one simple precaution: when they spoke of Sol 2 they said the name in Greek. On paper, it looked like this:
Σολ 2
One day, over coffee and pie at the Antler Café in Athabasca, it occurred to one of the officials that the spoken Greek sounded pretty close to English. Henceforth, the group decided to refer to their project in Hindi, whose phonemes none of them could properly pronounce. Sol 2 in Hindi looked like this:
सोल 2
When it was ready, Sol 2 happened after midnight. The black sky became as bright as the noon day. On the surrounding plain, a treeless expanse as dry as fossils, the shifting dust burned like little galactic fires.
Workers on the overnight at the gas plant saw the flash through a window. Miners coming up from the coal seam also saw the conflagration and didn’t know what to think. A boss yelled at them to get back to work, but they punched him in the abdomen, stole his hip flask, and locked him in a supply shed.
An infernal gust reached across over the wide-open lands between Athabasca and Sol 2. This burning wind scorched the faces and hands of several coal miners. Passing around the flask, the victims toasted their vengeful God.
‘Even the Lord thinks our jobs are a sacrilege,’ one said, and the others agreed.
‘Poorly paid sacrilege,’ another muttered to muted laughter.
In the morning, the miners went home, and their wives shrugged at their wounds as just another workplace insult.
But the daughters and sons weren’t so dismissive. They looked at their fathers and knew better. Ask no questions, accept no answers, but keep seeking. More than one child had seen the flash while reading comics with a flashlight or listening to an interrupted radio program. They had felt the burning wind shake their homes and woke up to shingles littering their front yards. Walking in their neighborhoods, they found dead rodents and seared birds lying in the road.
No one blamed the coal mine or the gas plant. And the kids were smart enough to know that Athabasca officials were too unimportant to have had any hand in anything. Bolo tie wearing types who called themselves decisionmakers might posture and puff themselves out, but the only thing they ever did was carry out things bigger people in distant places wanted done but didn’t want to be held accountable for.
At the fairgrounds, the coal miner kids gathered. They looked at the wind scored grandstand, now embedded with bits of feather, fur, and silt, and discussed how the scale of what had happened was greater than Athabasca. They were good positivists after all, building their conclusions on the available evidence and taking steps to kick up further clues.
One girl, who had worked as a waitress at the Antler Café recalled seeing men in suits, without bolo ties, come in for coffee. They used funny sounding words and laughed a lot, making jokes, she was sure, at her town’s expense. She told her friends these were the men behind what had happened. She also understood that in Athabasca, things happened because greater forces were always at work.
That afternoon the group, numbering perhaps fifteen, appeared before the town hall. Any group of teens, no matter how few in number, was considered a mob in Athabasca, so a confrontation was inevitable. But more noteworthy than the mob was how they were dressed.
Two girls were dressed as windmills. They wore silver monochromatic clothes and held desk fan blades above their heads. Two boys held painted corkboards across their chests made to look like solar panels. The other eleven or so had covered themselves in coal ash. One boy had a kangaroo rat hanging from his neck. A girl had purchased fake blood capsules and fed them to her friends. They began to drool red streams down their chins.
A different girl tossed coal ash around like fairy dust. She danced in joyous circles and all of her peers cheered. Passersby stopped and gaped and waited for someone to come and lock the kids up.
But arrests weren’t to be because one boy, the one with the rat around his neck, was wearing a proximity suit. He set himself on fire. As he burned, the girl scattering ash continued to frolic and her peers kept cheering. Then the burning boy sat on the ground, unfastened the dead rodent from his neck, and held it up to the heavens. He said,
‘Oh, sun! You’re come at last. You’ll be happy to know how well we’ve prepared!’
by submission | Mar 29, 2024 | Story |
Author: Marcel Neumann
After years of living in an unjust world, being disillusioned by an ideology I once thought held promise and having lost faith in humanity’s collective desire to live in harmony, I decided to live off the grid in a remote Alaskan village. Any needed or desired supplies were flown in by a bush pilot who became my only contact with the outside world. Which was fine with me. The man had offered several times to fly me down to Juneau to catch up on world news, but I had gained an aversion towards people in general, so I declined.
As time passed, I noticed my heart was not keeping me going as it once had. I brushed it off as simple fatigue. When the heart attack happened, I had the pilot fly me to Juneau International Airport, where an ambulance took me to the hospital. It took nearly a week for me to recover from heart surgery. I felt I was strong enough to venture out into the hallway outside my hospital room. Surprisingly, no one came after me as I made my way to the elevators. I had managed to dress myself, so anyone who passed by me had no reason to assume I was a patient. I pressed the button to open the elevator door and waited, keeping an eye out for any large, duty-bound orderly coming to take me back to my room. I noticed people acknowledging one another with a gesture I had never seen before. They would tap two fingers over their chests. There were subtle nuances in their facial expressions and body language as well. A peacefulness exuded from them, which seemed foreign to me. People greeted one another with what appeared to be a genuine desire for the other’s well-being. I sensed a jovial, positive vibration coming from the people around me. I pressed the button for the elevator door once again, anxious to leave this eerily alien world in which I found myself.
When the elevator door opened, I realized I had accidentally pressed the button for the maternity floor. A young girl stood peering into the viewing window. I cautiously approached. Her smile was infectious, her aura bright and inviting. I asked her which baby was hers.
“They all are.” She looked at me with twinkling blue eyes. When she laughed, I felt stupid for believing all ten babies belonged to her.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she touched my shoulder, sending a warm feeling of acceptance through my whole being.
“Actually, I am just window shopping.” The statement brought another resounding laugh. She shook her head indicating again she was only joking. The girl seemed to enjoy causing my dazed look of bewilderment with her witty comments. When a nurse came to the window holding a baby wrapped in a white cotton blanket up to the glass the new mother took a deep breath. Her following words this time caused me to let out a raucous laugh.
“The green one is mine.” She smiled at me as her eyes began to flood with tears. I felt my face flush. Thirty years is a long time to be away from civilization. What I saw beneath that blanket defied all reasoning. The nurse touched the baby near its torso and tapped it twice. “Two hearts.” The girl whispered. She then turned towards me and tapped me once.
When the tall reptilian man approached, I did not fear him. The harmony I wanted to see in the world was not of a terrestrial nature. It took something a little extra.
by submission | Mar 28, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
They call us the new DJs—Dream Jockeys—because we stitch together popular playlists for the masses. I think it lacks imagination to piggyback on the long-gone days of vinyl playing over the airways. But that’s human nature. Always harkening back to something familiar, something easy to romanticize, something less threatening. I guess there are similarities in what DJs did then and what we do now, except rather than trying to insert things into popular culture, we now work to extract them.
‘Export’ is the kinder term that our marketing overlords use. Still, modern DJs like myself are in the extraction business. We mine dreams. We dig through countless live-streaming dreams every day and night, weaving together real-time dreams from the thousands of amateur and professional Casters who wear a neuromitter when they sleep. It’s as trippy as it sounds.
And the tech is as scary as it sounds. Neuromitters amplify and broadcast any detectable neural network activity. Even Alice probably wouldn’t have gone down that rabbit hole. But, she’s fictional and we’re not—so, of course, we burrowed down into our nether consciousness. Even though the tech was glitchy as all get-out in the early days, humans being humans, we kept prying this particular Pandora’s box open until today the tech is highly refined, widely reviled, and strictly regulated.
Makes sense. If our last bastion of privacy exists only in our heads, then who’d be willing to part with that. In the pioneering days of thought-casting tech, some folks would try casting a presentation to share a particularly complex or nuanced idea, but it inevitably led to embarrassing moments. I mean, who can really control their fleeting thoughts enough to stave off feeling that they are being asked stupid questions or getting distracted by the attractiveness or unattractiveness of someone near them.
Nobody really wants that level of transparency brought to their thinking.
So, other than in high-profile criminal cases or national security investigations, neuromitting tech cannot be compelled on an unwilling soul. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t those willing to strut their imaginations, especially when your subconscious has the reigns and provides social cover for you. Damn the Ego and Super-Ego, full speed ahead! Our species also tends to give the subconscious a lot of moral leeway, so there’s always built-in plausible deniability for the content of our dreams: just blame that damn Id.
We did and loved it. A prurient pursuit at first, dreamcasts, quickly became booming business. It was embarrassingly inexpensive to produce wilder-than-wild content. Fresh faces, outrageous situations, impossible puzzles. The masses gobbled it up. Dreamcasts were on everywhere. And, to media titans, that meant the content was ultimately going nowhere.
The big streaming services wanted control of the product. So, the smart money watching the dreamcast feeds began to hack the trends and recognize the anomalies—the real talents, the Casters that they could make into stars.
And once they tagged those nascent Casters with a knack for conjuring dreams that mesmerized the masses, they needed us. Dream Jockeys. They needed us to find, curate and cultivate these casting icons.
I got pulled into my current gig after being recruited from a Day Dreamer channel. Let me just say that a Day Dreamer that holds the interest of an outside audience is a rarity. Daydreaming is so individual, plus you have the privacy issues of consciously bringing other individuals into your daydreams and broadcasting their images and voices without their permission. Dreamcasters got around this because of the whole subconscious thing. The legal parallel is intent and control. Kind of like invoking an insanity defense, which based on some of the most popular Caster’s dreams was very much the case.
Day Dreamers have a very refined skill which depends to a remarkable degree on their level of in-the-moment storytelling. Still, daydreaming streaming lacks the freshness, energy and unpredictability of the subconscious. That’s why Casters rule, and why discovering a Caster whose dreams have mass appeal is the grail.
And, I think I’ve found the one true grail. Her name is Lottica. She’s nine years old and her dreams are sublime. They are Beauty. Yes, capital ‘B’ Beauty. And no DJ but me knows about her. A doc I know gave me the lead after Lottica’s mother came in worried about the dreams her daughter would tell her she was having every night. I convinced the doc to have the mother bring Lottica in for some tests to rule out any medical conditions like a brain tumor. I loaned him a neuromitter. During her exam, the doc put Lottica under with the neuromitter and recorded her dreams.
Holy Chrislam! She is the one true dreamer!
Lottica’s dreams will change us all. And probably kill us all. That’s the problem. I’ve found the grail. But one drink from it and we’ll forget everything.
Everything.
Lottica’s dream vision is perfect. She not only casts dreams, she casts a spell. She creates a world apart. A Beauty that all must seek. No one will want to live in this world anymore. They’ll want to live in Lottica’s heaven.
And there’s only one way to get to heaven.
by submission | Mar 27, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Like nuclear weapons before them, the plagues each side kept hidden were too terrible to use; instead they waged sly wars of colds and coughs, infectious agents sneezed in trams and crowded lifts, blighting commerce with working days lost to fevers and sickness; secret attacks hard to prove and impossible to stop.
This time the letter from his fictitious pen-pal in Germany is written with black ink and in capitals. Warned, he does not open it but goes down to the basement.
Donning mask and gloves, he switches on the fan that draws air into the biohazard cabinet. Carefully slitting the envelope he discards the letter; it is the pinch of viral dust in one corner that he taps out into a broth of Bacillus subtilis.
Such a pleasing concept, like binary nerve agents or sub-critical hemispheres of plutonium; not lethal until brought together. The bacteria was common enough and harmless, until reprogrammed by this smuggled virus.
After incubating the bacterial culture for 48 hours, he would add a gelling agent and then smear it on door handles, lift buttons, supermarket trolleys and keypads of ATM’s across the city.
He would be patient zero, but he was a patriot and believed in his sacrifice, whatever that might be.
Later, when he goes out to his car, they fell him with a taser without any warning.
“You’re under arrest,” someone snaps, as a needle stings his neck and darkness takes him.
He wakes in a biosecure room.
A previous suspect had a capsule implanted beneath the skin of her inner arm. When popped, it released a geneered hemorrhagic virus into her bloodstream, like Ebola but airborne. Her first hacking coughs had infected the interrogation team, then the whole building.
Although he’d been scanned and minutely searched while unconscious, they were taking no chances and his interrogators watch from behind armoured glass.
“How did you catch me?”
They ignore this. “Tell us about the virus.”
He knows nothing of the epidemic he would have unleashed. His ignorance is deliberate, so that however brutally questioned, he has nothing to confess. This was understood. It was all part of the game.
But they persist. Was it the modified polio virus? The same one the others in his cell possessed?
“It’s being sequenced, so you might as well tell us.”
“There are no spy cells. We work alone, you know that.”
“Why this escalation from respiratory infections?”
He shrugs, but is happy to speculate. If he cooperates perhaps they will spare him, though he doubts it. The bleak truth is that his own side had already sacrificed him.
“I’m guessing this new virus isn’t designed to kill. They just want to overwhelm your medical services, to tie up resources with the long term sick. Do you remember those pictures of halls filled with iron lungs?”
He has no suicide capsule because all he knows are the names of handlers and trainers long since retired or dead. He had lived here now for sixteen years.
“They’re struggling to keep up with you,” he muses. “You encourage your researchers to be creative. It is your strength. What were we to make of outbreaks of contagious impotence, that epidemic of muteness, and wasn’t there amnesic flu?”
They stare at one another through the glass.
Such innocent times, before psychiatry was weaponized. Armies afraid to go outside; the compulsive counting virus; whole cities too sad to go on; scientists infecting themselves
with psychopathies so they would not be hindered by conscience.
by submission | Mar 26, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Dumouriez
I thought I was ready.
“I was on the precipice, looking down.”
Internal count of five. A long five.
“I was on the precipice, looking down.”
Count ten.
“I was on the precipice, looking down.”
I noticed a brief, impatient nod. The nod meant ‘again’. I thought.
“I was on the precipice looking down.”
No nod. But the Experts looked at each other and not me.
“I was on the precipice … looking down.”
Count of four. Too short?
“I was on the precipice. Looking down.”
“No …”
“No?” (Perhaps I shouldn’t have said it.)
“No.”
One of the others agreed, more emphatically. “No.”
***
Time wasn’t a factor, I thought.
The movement of the head was ‘when you’re ready’. Or I interpreted it as such.
“I was on the precipice-”
“No. The other.”
“Ah. Sorry.”
I looked in front of me. I didn’t think about hurrying.
“When the value exceeds four, begin.”
Ten.
“When the value exceeds four, begin.”
Ten.
“When the value exceeds four, begin.”
They said nothing. They made no movement. I sat up straighter.
“Save one and play one.”
Ten again.
“Save one and play one.”
Ten.
“Save one and play one.”
They offered nothing. Nothing – I was sure – was advancement.
“Suspension …”
***
I looked ahead. I felt utterly relaxed. I took my own cue.
“Egress. Confess. Regress. Ingress …” I held up my hand. I knew it was wrong. “Sorry.”
Smooth stone expressions confronted me. It wasn’t so bad. You just go again. Right? When you’re ready.
You’d guess you need to think, but you don’t. Thinking is the last thing you should do.
I took a breath, perhaps audible only to myself.
“Egress. Confess. Ingress. Regress. Obsess. Transgress. Address. Repress. Digress. Success.”
“Again.”
“Egress. Confess. Ingress. Regress. Obsess. Transgress. Address. Repress. Digress. Success.”
“Again!”
I went faster, because I could. “Egress. Confess. Ingress. Regress. Obsess. Transgress. Address. Repress. Digress. Success.”
“Repress, digress, success?”
“Repress. Digress. Success.”
“Obsess, address, transgress, regress?”
I stated it firmly. “Obsess. Transgress. Address. Repress.”
“Dispossess!”
Was it a joke? Whatever it was, they seemed to appreciate it.
“Suspend …”
***
For how long, nobody said anything. For how long?
Finally, one of them said: “Suspended …”
I wasn’t sure whether I was glad.
***
It was like we’d all left and come back, but we hadn’t.
Each one of them in turn looked at me and nodded. Mostly, these movements were uniform in duration and execution.
“I was on the precipice, looking down.”
Ten.
“I was on the precipice, looking down.”
Twenty.
“I was on the precipice, looking down.”
Thirty.
They looked at each other.
“Where were you?”
“I was on the precipice, looking down.”
“Were you on the precipice?”
I said nothing.
“Were you looking down?”
I made no response.
“Were you on the precipice, looking down?”
Still nothing.
“You don’t need to answer …”
I don’t know why I said it. “It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there.”
“Thank you very much.”
That was it.
They deliberated. They conferred. After a fashion.
“Yes.”
Another nodded.
“Yes …”
“Permiso …”
Were they convinced? Had I convinced myself?
I stood up and went towards the door. I didn’t look back.
