by submission | Oct 11, 2018 | Story |
Author: Lisa Conti
Until today, I had only seen government-sanctioned flames. And I had never felt them; never known how heat could change so rapidly with distance. Never smelled smoke. Never felt so guilty. Of course, I would never take fire above ground; and I would never burn anything, I mean, not really. I know that it’s people like me who jeopardize our safety. I’m sorry.
Her face is still with me as if it’s permanently scorched onto my retina; orange-lit skin and expressive, flipbook eyes. Maybe those eyes are the only ones who’ve ever really seen me. She looked at me and smiled. I think she saw my spirit. I can’t let her flickering image go.
And then the questions come. Why didn’t I ask her when I had the chance? Is black money your only income? Have you ever been burned? Do you believe in the ban? Is Tana your real name?
I unbutton my shirt, take it off and fold it into a small square. I inhale one last breath through the thick cotton then slip it into a zip-lock bag. I shouldn’t save the evidence, but I ignore my good sense and tuck it into my bottom drawer. I follow her instructions for the rest and drop each clothing item, one-by-one, into the bathtub. I wash my hair and drip five drops of eucalyptus oil into the hot water stream. The steam folds the smoke away, and I emerge an obedient citizen again.
We haven’t had a wildfire since the Climate Control Act of 2022. In the last fifty years, asthma, COPD, cancer, autoimmune and inflammatory disease rates have dropped dramatically. Global temperatures, sea levels, and icebergs remain constant. Yet today, Tana gave a below ground unsanctioned fire tour. And today, I smelled smoke for the first time.
by submission | Oct 10, 2018 | Story |
Author: DJ Lunan
Clarke peered mesmerised through the tiny pod’s porthole at the forested planet, verdant, moist and fertile stretching to the horizon. He smiled, doubting it could save his soul, but it was certainly rescuing his mood. Six years wearing a HAZMAT suit in 50 degrees of direct sunshine, digging by hand through briny pans to unearth and capture colonies of salt termites, had left Clarke with limited memory of the colour green, or the texture of water on his skin.
So happy to have left the desert, he’d been hard-drunk persistently during the three weeks’ voyage to his next assignment – prospecting.
“I hate these green planets, they may look placid, but you need to be on your toes, termite-diviner!”, screamed Messina as she battled to align the Sunship with the planet’s gravity.
“Looks like paradise to me, Messi!”, replied Clarke.
It was one week since the communique from HQ directed them here; ‘Our intel is 80% potential for super-mites and great-hoppers. Take Clarke for recon and sampling. Report back.’
“Empty air”, Messina noted.
She was right, no clouds, nothing flying, no large animal heads, no plane-eating snakes.
“Odd. We any intel on the ecosystem?” asked Clarke. Messina was sweating, her eyes darting across the canopy looking for danger.
She finally realised gravity equilibrium, brought the Sunship into hover mode 100 feet above the canopy.
“None. I’ve prospected planets like this before. If we don’t get attacked by something big in the next couple of minutes, there’s a good chance it’s a plantation. And termite-boy, we are still intact! Get ready, 30 seconds.”
Clarke stared out mesmerised. But, like staring at a stereogram, slowly the unerring regularity of the canopy loomed, making his eyes spin. If this is a plantation – then for what and by who?
Worse still, without GPS data, this would be old-world exploration: man-in-a-pod on a strong rope with a collecting jar.
He looked quizzically at Messina, a hundred questions bursting. She winked, releasing his pod, and he fell at blistering speed through the blinding sunlight of the cloudless planet. The pod crashed through the canopy, jerking to a hard stop ten feet above the ground. The triple-butted graphite-steel amalgam rope, rippled up and down, leaving Clarke bobbing like a dinghy in an estuary.
The lush planet had disappeared. Under the canopy, there was nothing, just white earth. It was a plantation. The trees were planted regularly five metres apart in all directions. Each tree had a massive buttress with familiar indentations indicating termite species. But the scale was massive. The trees towered over 200 metres, with termite buttresses extending up 20 metres. These termites would be massive. And valuable. The intel was right, but the eerie silence was unexpected.
Messina barked through the intercom, “Clarke, stop gawking and get sampling.”
Clarke complied, activating the sampling arms, four vacuum cleaners, each sucking twenty grams of organic material into jars. The white earth was dry, with desiccated pine needles, dust and what looked like turtle-sized termite shells.
It conjured memories of pine forests in lowland Scotland, planted with gold-rush gusto when softwood prices were high. But spent twenty years gestating standing soulless, soundless, dry and empty – an arid oasis among the peat bogs and persistent rain. But they were owned, bankrolled by old-families who were banking on their share of the logging prices as royalty.
“Looks like an abandoned colony, Messi.”
“Where are the critters, Clarke?”
“More importantly, who owns this plantation and where are they now?”
“Darn forest planets – always complicated.”
“Give me the desert anyday. Let’s go, Messi”
The line crackled.
“Messi…”
The pod began to bob and weave.
by Hari Navarro | Oct 9, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
“Will there be zombies?”, she asks and I shake my head no and we weave around the discarded limbs and the stalled cars and sodden newspapers with pages that no longer flick and away from this city of rot.
“You do know who I am…”, offers the slug that sits at the wheel. His words more statement than question.
“No”, I lie.
Eyes flick from the rear-view mirror and he squints the fat folds of his lids and his gaze it licks at my sister and I shrink her down and beneath the hood of my shoulder.
I do know him. The billionaire grinner who cooed at the screen and beat at his chest but who then vanished when death it blew in from the sky.
Oh what he missed tucked away deep down in his castle. The succulent shards that we chewed from the wind. Aliens that bore harmlessly into blood and then travelled on up to our brains.
Such a deal we were offered as they stole away thought and yet left the body intact. No twitching, no sagging flaps of green flesh, no, this was a fresh kind of horror. Where purulent minds they rot, they drip from ears and yet our husks they crave for tomorrow.
“You’re safe now”, he says. But there beneath the fat of his tongue a sweating perversion it lays.
How he hates to venture out into this filth, but he must. He must gather us in. He will strip me. Though not my sister, not just yet for she is to little and he is surely no fiend, and he will wash my body with spice.
He will kill the brain that now beats in my head and with a muzzle he’ll gate off my bite. With pliers he will pull the scratch from my fingers and forever I’ll paw at his feet.
I hold my sister close and feign sleep as the vehicle accelerates and I think of before. How I’d loved all things black and I shudder as I peep to the dark and the night it forms thick in my mouth.
Elevator doors bordered with a flurry of ornate gold leaf open now deep down in the hill. The slug he steps out and he swivels and beckons with the thick smirk of his grin.
“Come”
I walk towards his impatient embrace and my sister follows just at my back and the doors they hiss closed with a snap.
Reaching my hand back she passes a thing pulled from beneath her filthy thick jacket and I stab it up and into his head. Then nothing, not even a gurgle, as he drops a dead flop to the floor.
An alarm sounds and the doors lock tight and though we don’t know it just yet they will never once open again.
“Slice the tendons at his heels”
I sit with my sister covered in blood. The slug writhes hobbled and bound in the foyer and the dark wall of monitors before us flickers into light. Our eyes they widen as room after room is revealed: Expansive wine cellars and fresh water tanks and vast food stores and tennis courts and swimming pools and gardens with trees and libraries and…
In the shadow toes they begin to contract in the mess that seeps across fishnet stockings and pools at the floor. Teeth clench at the ball in her mouth and something deep in her bones it recalls just how so very long it has been since she ate.
Since they all ate.
by Julian Miles | Oct 8, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
On a far balcony, people are starting to panic. A crystal goblet flashes rainbow reflections as it tumbles, the hand that held it snatched backwards so quickly the goblet falls straight down. The holder was my target: now more a thing of art and geography than a man in an expensive suit.
“Successful removal noted. You are stood down while the projection is reconfigured for this deduction.”
I heave a sigh, drop down, and crawl from the rooftop. The heat radiated by the air conditioning stacks should conceal my presence from thermoscans and my stealth suit will keep me from being seen, providing I move slowly. Laborious manual checking of security footage might find me, but will reveal nothing. Just another anti-corporate fanatic distinguished by the use of an anti-personnel missile instead of a rifle or bomb. They know about the theft of the missiles and will write this off as an unfortunate occurrence of domestic use. I must have bought it from the organisation who stole the weapons.
We stole them, and will use them with care for targets we cannot reach by other means. Ideally, our work should be achieved without overt displays of murderous violence. As little disruption to the everyday as possible is the aim.
“You have three minutes to get below ground. They’re instituting an area-wide snapshot.”
For a victim of his standing, it’s not surprising. The proximity of enough satellites to allow it is inconvenient, but lift shafts are ideal for plummeting thirty floors. The trio of crash foam grenades combine with my armour to ensure I’m only going to be bruised tomorrow.
Scrambling from the foam, I exit the shaft into a basement car park. It’s the work of moments to pop the lid on a drain and quickly make my way out, disappearing into the sewers.
Our founder, Jason S, enshrined our duty: “Corporates are not evil. Governments likewise. Only people can be evil. Presented with a regime where moral codes are at odds with accepted mores, the influence and protection of the pack will encourage aberrant behaviour. The mission must be to remove those who would enable environments of evil within the organisations they influence or lead. No casual slaughter, no public presence.”
His influence inspired the work that led to IDEAL, the program that assesses the power balances and shifts that wrap our world in layers of influence and reliance. From its impartial assessments, there comes a list of targets and a sequence in which they need to be removed. Each success results in a re-evaluation of the remaining target pool. Some targets drop as the one who would have led them to do evil has been removed. Others rise as a new evildoer rises to prominence in the inevitable power-vacuum created by our action.
It’s a slow task. To be sure, we have to be meticulous within an application of predictive mathematics like never before.
We’ve made mistakes. Two of our own have had to be targeted and killed. There is much about this work that makes many of us uncomfortable. But, we are agreed: what mistakes we make are still better than the evils we prevent.
I often ask myself if we are the ultimate necessary evil. If IDEAL targets us as the final targets of our work, I will have my answer.
by submission | Oct 7, 2018 | Story |
Author: Michael Hopkins
Olivia told me she saw a double rainbow. She said it just as she stepped through the front door. Water dripped from her long brown hair onto the wood floor entryway, she said it was a sign from god, an answer to her prayers. This was after she saw the funnel cloud, raised her hands to the sky, and prayed that the tornado would shift direction away from our Wisconsin house. The storm intensified; eighteen people were killed one town over.
We watched whales off the coast of Cape Cod. Olivia held her hands over the water. I need to calm the tides, she said, I’m getting sick. The waves disappeared. Praise the lord, Olivia said. Seven humpback whales and three fin whales beached the following day: dead on arrival.
This heat is oppressive; I can’t breathe, Olivia said as we lay on the pristine white sand of Siesta Key Beach in Florida. She raised her hands and the air cooled. The next day a red tide swept through the area. Thousands of dead fish, turtles, and a few dozen manatees washed onto beach.
It was in the boundary waters of upper Minnesota, a place far off the grid, that helicopters found us. Olivia was sedated. I will ask god for deliverance, she said to me before her eyes shut.
Make her love you, they had ordered; you’ve done it before. Have some fun, they said. In a few months, the bio-electric mycelium DNA in her brain will have spread. She will forget her identity. You will be her control panel. Orders for deployment will follow.
She was more than a person altered, weaponized, to control the elements. Her innocent belief in a higher power, something much greater than herself, endeared me to her. Her crooked smile, the magical fragrance of Rive Gauche perfume. An angel I wanted to protect from being turned into a demon. A woman in whose arms, I felt safe.
They reinserted a tracking chip into my neck, a new scar next to the one where I cut one out three months ago, when I took Olivia away. I was ordered to report to the Arkansas base in three days. I asked for a ride. They told me it was out of the way, not their problem, they said.
I watched the copters fly away. Heard the chuf, chuf, chuf of their rotors. Then, too soon, silence. An explosion. The cloudless sky glowed red, flames crackled.
It started to rain. Torrential rain.
I stood watch at the wood’s edge. She would appear, I was sure if it. Praise the lord, I would say. Yes, praise the lord, she would answer. We would hug, I would whisper in her ear the name of a far-off country, where this time, we would never be found.
Yes, she would say, just us, we’ll drift away. People will say I remember them; they were so much in love.
In the rain, I waited, watched, and prayed.
by submission | Oct 6, 2018 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
Dimitri sat up as the semi-viscous fluid keeping him alive in suspended animation oozed off his body. “Ship, how long have we been in fluid?” There was an unexpected pause that stretched longer than Dimitri would have liked.
“Commander, the ship logs indicate duration of fluidogenic suspended animation as 912,530 standard days.”
Dimitri reeled back in shock as he did the math: 2,500 years asleep. “Explain- why so long?”
There was the pause. “Collision with uncharted debris caused broad systems damage. Ships internal neural nets damaged beyond effective repair. Connection with 87% of our internal systems lost and no external signals could be transmitted.”
Dimitri winced. For all the power the ship’s AI had, this explanation meant it could only watch as the now compartmentalized systems went about their mission taskers. The left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. All their AI could do is watch as search protocols moved their ship farther and farther away, traveling methodically, relentlessly from system to system, until it found a habitable planet.
“Can you at least tell me where we are?”
“Affirmative. We are currently in orbit around an earth class planet somewhere in the EGS-zs8-1 galaxy. Survey has been done and there is no sentient intelligent or developing sentient intelligent life planetside. Colonization routines have been engaged. ”
Dimitri nodded. Finally a break, but his relief was replaced with a gnawing fear. Even in deep, fluidogenic suspended animation, one could not be maintained indefinitely. “How many survivors?”
There was a pause. “Four deceased due to undiagnosed existing medical conditions. Total survivors: 1,927.”
Dimitri sighed with relief. It should have been much worse. The “acceptable” losses given this long in fluid should have been close to 70%. Just the nutrient baths alone would need replenishing after so many years. Dimitri’s blood ran cold: nutrient baths…there couldn’t have been enough to sustain them. “What did you do with the deceased?”
“Deceased individuals were ejected from fluidogenic chambers and jettisoned into space as per mission SOP.”
Dimitri sighed. “Good. For a second there I thought you were going to tell me you dissolved the corpses for nutrient.”
“Negative. Necrotic tissue is unacceptable for nutrient bath conversion. Only viable tissues may be used in emergency nutrient protocols.”
Underneath the thick coating of fluid meant to keep him alive in suspended animation, Dimitri broke out in a cold sweat. “Explain emergency nutrient protocols.”
There was the long pause. “In the event of catastrophic loss or exhaustion of concentrated protein supplements, spermatozoa will be removed for the senior most male in the command structure and used to impregnate females capable of embryonic production. At no earlier than 112 days and no later than the 120 day mark, embryonic tissue is harvested from its host and injected into the nutrient bath where it is dissolved and absorbed by the crew.”
Slowly, like a cold, rising tide of effluent, the realization of what the AI was saying crept into Dimitri’s consciousness. “Two thousand five hundred years,” he mumbled. “30 generations per 1,000 years… 75 generations.”
Dimitri, threw himself out of the nutrient tank on to the deck. He stood and in a complex emotional mixture of disgust and sorrow frantically clawed off the remaining nutrient stuck to his body. As the protein-rich, viscous sludge accumulated around him, weeping, in shock and horror he wondered, “How many of my sons and daughters?”
