by submission | Oct 5, 2018 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
Charles Hooper had been away for twelve years. No one was precisely sure where he went, though there were indications he had joined the Space Corps as a volunteer for the generational residents and the new settlers on the Martian and the Jupiterian moon colonies.
He had maintained only occasional messaging contact with his family and friends, so when he returned, his presence was really quite unexpected. He was forty years old and somewhat of a stranger. His general sensibility had changed; he was slimmer but still broad-shouldered; and he had taken on a foreign accent, that distinctive mélange of misplaced stresses, pauses, and intonations that characterized the off-world versions of Universal speech.
First, he visited his sister and brother-in-law, then his father and mother, and later a number of his childhood friends. He did not reveal much about what he did while away, except to say he had traveled variously back and forth through the transit ways between Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; had worked different long- and short-term contracts; and had done miscellaneous kinds of public and private services for organizations, institutions, and individuals.
His laconism suggested he either took no interest in his diverse occupations, or he was trying to put some unpleasantness behind and move on. No one knew for sure. He was, however, eager to announce that he had met and fallen in love with someone a year ago when he worked at a forest biome in a Bernal Sphere, an extraordinary person—understanding, intelligent, compatible, and beautiful—despite their different worlds, cultures, and beliefs. She was called Y’jk U’ik.
Hooper described her in quaint, effusive terms as his star-begotten goddess. He added, to everyone’s surprise, that he and she were wedded, and she would be arriving on his world after a five-week preparation period. Although she was approved to relocate, she still required, among a few other things, the necessary inoculations and vaccines to strengthen her immune system against the many strains of bacteria and viruses that would be new and potentially harmful to her outside her home sphere.
When everyone naturally asked to see her picture, they were confounded that Hooper did not keep any virtual image files. But it was not really pressing, they reasoned, to pursue the trivial matter of appearance. All sorts of inter-world consummations with all sorts of specially adapted off-worlders were common now. As long as the nuptial unions between the partners were consensual, their personal happiness was their social and moral right.
After his first week, Hooper spent the next four reestablishing his on-world residence status, attending rapid cognitive updating sessions to catch up with cultural life, doing his mandatory fifteen civic labor hours in any field he had abilities commensurate to, and gathering things for Y’jk U’ik at his publicly subsidized domicile. She had many special needs, especially shade, pure water, and purple vegetables, for she was also UV sensitive and a quite particular vegetarian.
On the day of her scheduled arrival, Hooper received a signal message from the regional spaceport. Because of his wife’s delicate physical condition, she would have to be shuttled in a specially equipped medical vehicle to his home. He waited impatiently. His relations and friends nervously organized a welcome party, anxious about her health.
The vehicle arrived. Hooper opened the front door of his domicile and asked everyone else to wait. He went outside, spoke something foreign and indistinct, and led his partner inside. Standing before the two, Hooper’s sister, brother-in-law, parents, and friends beheld Y’jk U’ik in a sublime rapture of speechlessness. The woman whom he had described as the quintessence was, as far as they could discern, a massive, patchy, upright, shell-less, pink-brown snail. She slithered forward on a mucus secretion, her four antennae and long siphon spread out like tentacles.
by submission | Oct 4, 2018 | Story |
Author: Janet Shell Anderson
The thing I just saw dead on the road is huge.
It’s not human. I’m glad of that.
I stop, back up, hear no sound of coming traffic; no one’s around. Since it’s early October, the fields look shaved, most of the corn already harvested. I haven’t been out this way for a long time. Thousands of crows swing over my path, dive in black swoops, rise, plunge again in uncanny formations. Why do they do it? Two houses close enough to the road for me to see, tucked into their windbreaks against the powerful northwest winds, look like they’re hiding. Dust drifts along the side of the road.
The dead thing’s sprawled across the centerline. At first, I think it’s a coyote, but it’s at least one-hundred-fifty pounds, looks like a wolf, not a dog. But what wolf is this big? Turkey vultures wheel in the increasing wind, waiting for lunch.
Right by the road, like a skeleton of a long-extinct dinosaur, a boney central pivot irrigator’s stored for the coming winter, too big to fit in any shed. The sun glints on it. No one’s around the farmstead. No cars. It’s dead quiet.
In the past months, I’ve heard stories of a lot of cattle found ripped apart. Some of the local farmers swear there’re Satanists out here.
I swat flies away, get back in my truck. Why is no one out here? Somebody’s got to get this mess off the road.
I notice there’s still some corn in a field a half mile away. Odd it hasn’t been harvested. It’d be a good day for the big combines to be finishing up. I see one sitting in a nearby field, not moving.
Most people say they don’t like this kind of countryside, flat, empty, nothing but corn, corn, corn, the occasional farmhouse or tall, white, concrete grain elevator, railroad tracks going off to empty horizons. I see the masses of sunflowers along the road, the wide sky. It’s home. Beautiful. I’ve missed it.
I drive on, need to get to the Platte River, have work there. I go through a town, tiny place, ten houses, a bar. No lights on. A big dog moves through the dying hydrangea by a small white house with Halloween pumpkins on the front steps, and then I see the creature better and it’s not a dog, over three feet high at the shoulder, wolfish head, long tail. Where are these things coming from? What in the hell are they?
I keep going west as the wind picks up, feel a pressure drop, as if a storm’s out there, way west, beyond the Platte, beyond this grassland, spot a dead calf in a pasture, not much left but bones, pass a lone, derelict house. Its windows are smashed, door open. I’m am tempted to stop and see if anyone’s there, if they’re all right, but as I slow down, a Black Angus steer stampedes into the road. I swerve to miss it and see in my rearview mirror, by the high grass near the sunflowers and the ditch, a canine pack, all big. The steer bolts into a field, hurtles to a line of cottonwoods. Twelve animals tear after it, lift voices in a two-toned, harmonic howl. Are these timber wolves? Down from Minnesota? What are they?
Seeing a sign to the Interstate just ahead, I turn onto a gravel road, slow down. Dust swarms up behind me. I hear more howling and hit the gas. Four miles later, I brake for the paved curve onto the Interstate.
No one’s on I-80. Not in either direction. I turn on the car radio, get static, slow down, look at my cell. Nothing. A strong wind batters the car, and I see, far ahead, the first signs of black clouds, a big storm that squats on the horizon.
What did I read months ago in one of those magazines by someone who hates fly-over country? Sneering at us all, implying we’re morons, he claimed there could be could be anything out here. Abandoned towns. Robot farms.
Dire wolves.
by submission | Oct 3, 2018 | Story |
Author: Thomas Desrochers
“I give this gift to the people of tomorrow. On the precipice of this great twilight I take comfort in knowing that as our ports run dry and our rails rust the people of the world will always have access to the materials needed to shape the world around them and, by extension, themselves. We no longer march toward the grave; the future of the world is open to those who would be its stewards.”
Foreword to Apis ferrum
Edward Fuller, 2073
Jason’s hives were just below the top of Janacek’s dome, set in a shelf cut into the earth, exposed to the southern sun but protected from the biting evening winds. The hundred of them were lined up in a single dizzying row, fuzzy with activity as foragers returned before sunset. Fullers’ bees were different from the old world’s honey bees – half the size, with a kaleidoscopic metal carapace, and longer lived by a factor of twenty.
So The Book said. Jason had read The Book, of course – all Fuller beekeepers were required to – but he had no way to verify the claims. After seven hundred years, who was to say?
Below the edge of the shelf the dome sloped three hundred feet down to the plain below. It was late spring and the flowers were in full bloom. Fuller’s flowers, all of them, chest high perennials with extraordinarily deep roots.
In the three weeks that the iron flowers bloomed each hive would produce fifty kilograms of high-grade blud, the thick resin-like honey typical of fuller’s bees. The five thousand kilograms that Jason’s hives produced would bake down into two tonnes of ore that was nine parts iron, one part copper.
Jason looked out over the valley, at the growing evening shadows. It was a single rusty carpet punctuated by the stubborn green dots of lonely gardens and underlain by the deep black of Fuller’s foliage. Apiaries here and there. The Book said that an area rich in Fuller’s flowers could support ten hives per acre, and Janacek’s dome and the valleys around it were nearly seven hundred acres. Three hundred and fifty tonnes of superior iron blud a year: Janacek’s dome was the most productive apiary within a fortnight.
The Book said the flowers consumed the bones of old buildings and machines that had been left to rot, a point often debated around winter fires and festival tables. What sort of place could give up so much metal and never tire? And yet a year before a boy on the coast had unearthed the bones of a great ship a kilometer long, made of steel. The ship was poisonous, killing those that spent too long there, but it raised questions. What kind of men had come before? And what power they must have had to build ships of steel!
No matter. Even if he fed off the bones of his ancestors, Jason took pride in harvesting Janacek dome, in being the latest in a line of Fuller bee keepers that stretched back to before Crisis. From nails to pots to rifles, a hundred thousand fortunes had grown from this place. This place with the faint perfume of the blooms, quiet buzzing, the gentle susurrus of the wind over the fields like a heartbeat. This place, with fat black clouds looming in the distance, ready to feed a dozen forges. Home.
There was a call to come to supper, the laughter of hungry children. Jason smiled and stood, back popping. The world was changing, flowers spreading. The humming of the bees followed, their droning flight an evening hymn.
by Hari Navarro | Oct 2, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
My grandmother is five hundred and ninety-two years old. Left to her own devices and the pitiless march of time this wonderful woman, who is actually my many times great grandmother, would have slipped away and into the finality of whatever the fuck death is five hundred years ago to this very day.
Its difficult for me to comprehend, but there are those in the world who don’t love their families. How content and relieved they must be as time it swallows the burden of age. But then, I am complacent. Not everyone is as filthy rich as we.
The money it took to develop the devices to snap our Nana away from the natural and over to synthetic cognition was as grotesque and it was well spent. It’s an ongoing syphon, but we’re family, we love her and it’s incomprehensible that we live this life with her no longer in it.
We implanted the electrodes that hang from her mind and through the wig that mimics the once tight white twist of her hair and fall as probing tentacles out of the sides of her face. How perfectly we caught that moment when she lost who she was, caught it and polished it and then handed it right on back.
This last Christmas we fitted her with an external drive, to store all the now countless names and birthdays and faces of her children and their children and their children’s children and theirs and theirs and theirs to come.
She once wrote a letter, when she still had fingers that wrote. She scrawled her name to a form and clearly she said that when her time it did come that no doctors should be called and that rather she thought to die in her room – surrounded by those that she loved.
But clearly her thoughts they were wrong.
Now as I walk down the hallway and the scent of the antiseptic hand-gel that I wring through my hands struggles to cancel the smell of bowels that involuntarily open and uneaten food that lays mashed in the cloche, I wonder.
Why, just why she would have wanted to end her life in this place? With these endless open doors that have forgotten about privacy and where the hollow cries of the lost they call out when all that they want is to go.
I’ve told her and told her there is no fucking reason for her to be in this place. That she could so easily exist for us in a great mansion of honed Scottish granite. But this is the one wish we allow her and strangely it warms, this the stark contrast of just how the poor they do suffer as they end and I am content as I enter her room.
There she is alone and many thousands of framed faces they plaster her walls and children’s art it hangs with them too. The crossword puzzle, its pages now yellowed and brittle, lays open on the tray at her lap, an unused remnant of the things she once did. And the rugby it loops on the screen.
I know she’d smile if only the muscles hadn’t long ceased to contract in her face and my heart again surges as her wail voice it croaks and begs from the hole in her neck.
“Don’t be silly Nana”, I say as I kiss her cheek and I know that she feels though her skin it swims behind plastic and she cries and she cries and I know just how grateful she is.
For Nana 1926-2018.
by Julian Miles | Oct 1, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The tip of the cigarette glows red as I slowly inhale. The taste of the black tobacco momentarily overwhelms my receptors. I wind their sensitivity down and cancel the ‘inhaled toxin’ warnings.
The second drag goes down without alerts. I exhale and look about the swamp. A lone raptor, some serpentine vulture, is target marked, identified as ‘Pargorn, male, mature’, and then dropped from targeting as a non-threat. Apart from the lizard-bird, the sub-tropical wilderness about me is devoid of anything bigger than the occasional ‘Rogan’ – a bloodsucking mosquito/dragonfly hybrid that strikes like a high-velocity bullet.
I see one land on my forearm, slam its proboscis down, and watch the rebound crack the back of its tiny skull. It falls off, adding itself to the scattering of brain-impaled Rogans on the ground around me.
My third inhalation raises that question again: why do I smoke? I’m a cyborg. My only organic bits are inside a brain case that a nuclear blast couldn’t penetrate. The question baffled me for a while, until I realised I was missing the point behind the dichotomy of being a robot smoker. I’d carried on after my lungs got replaced because of a gas attack on Bantulan. Back then, a few bits of me still needed oxygen and I could get a bit of a nicotine rush. I just forgot to drop the habit when breathing became irrelevant.
But, I’ve realised the act of smoking helps me remember I’m human, despite the eternal architecture I inhabit. I’ll admit there are valid links to the post-coital cigarette at times, although I’m no longer sure it’s a worrying thing that I associate memories of sex with the achievement of killing. After all, I can only ‘let go’ by killing things. Sparring is not a hobby for beings with as much killsoft on board as I have.
I should be worried about that. My military service is classified and has been erased from my recollection. However, under the Terminus Road statutes, they may not remove anything that ‘compromises the fundamental nature of the artificial element’. Which means they weren’t allowed to uninstall anything. Guessing from my range of combat abilities, I think I’m better off not knowing the details of my career as a distributor of wholesale death.
Another Rogan hammers it’s brains out. My smoke is done. I flick it away, watching the glowing end spin as the butt describes a long arc. I remember the briefing note about low-lying flammable gas pockets in time to bring my arm up and shield my optics.
After the explosion, the Pargorn and Rogans are gone. Just me and the prone form of my target, Christine17. I could have killed her a couple of worlds ago, but the contract offers a big bonus for making sure she remains only inoperative, so her quantum trigger won’t wake up Christine18.
Lord above, I hope I never annoy anyone that much.
At least she’ll be able to watch aquatic life and passing flying things in the pool I’m about to sink her face-up in.
Before getting to that, I think I’ll have another cigarette. It’s not like these things can kill me.
by submission | Sep 30, 2018 | Story |
Author: David Hartley
Perhaps it would have been better, somehow, if this had been sample #142 or #96 or #305, something innocuous and meaningless but no, it was sample number one, the first, and he already wanted to taste it.
He’d tried blaming a few other things: it had reached some telepathic tendrils into his mind at the point of death and made him look at it hungrily because, hey, it wasn’t dead, it was just lying microscopically still, waiting to be ingested so its parasitic foetal cells could awaken and attach to his stomach lining and grow inside his blood.
Or: this was an important scientific experiment that needed to happen now before endless committees talked themselves into a tangle, and the whole thing got entrenched with the bioethics lot and tied up in the finickity parameters of some drawn-out lab test in which he would almost certainly not be involved.
Or: he needed to step up and be the pioneer because there were millions starving back home, billions soon, and here on Europa there was a nearly endless supply of these nutritionally rich organisms whose alarming rate of reproduction and ease of capture meant they were almost begging to be used to save an ailing species of twelve billion superior mouths.
But truth was, he just wanted to taste it. He just wanted, more than anything, the experience of pressing the monochrome dough between his teeth, feeling the spread of its fizzing oil across his tongue while that sharp, salty, oaky aroma filled his mouth and coated his throat and washed him through. He’d seen the salivation of the others. They’d all thought it. But none had the guile, or the access.
He slipped the scalpel from his sleeve, angled his body to block the cameras, and sliced out a decent chunk from the thirteenth petri dish of Sample #1. It was the part he’d identified, in his head, as the flank. The morsel and the scalpel went back into his sleeve as he lowered the thirteenth petri into permanent cold storage.
Later, as he cooked it, he thought he saw, just for half a second, the meat twitch into life. He grinned at himself. He chuckled, he whistled, he shook his head, for it must’ve been the spit of the oil, the kick of the flame, a trick of the eye.
