by submission | Jul 28, 2018 | Story |
Author: Susan Cornford
Breakdowns always happen at the worst possible times and places. I was already running late on my last cargo run between the Four-Parsec star group and home base. If I got a little creative with my log entries, the old crate could be pushed up to just a bit more than the maximum cited in the specs. It could, until all the warning lights lit up like a super-nova. Sigh!
Nothing had actually exploded or imploded, so I eased her down to a crawl and looked for a place to set down for repairs. Doing them in space is fine, but finding a planet where you can siphon up a few essential atoms will save you a great deal in expensive replacements. Scanning showed a very usable spinning ball of elements that even had a compatible range of gravity, atmosphere and temperature so I could do without a spacesuit.
There was only one tiny problem. It was inhabited and The First Rule of planetary landings is: “Never interact with the locals”. This is not a problem in places where the light wavelengths make you and them invisible to each other. But no such luck in this case. So, I had to chance it, using only a masking emanation around the ship and myself.
I got down to work and the dry, sandy soil was perfect raw material for my needs. Soon all I had to do was to wait until all the atoms re-aligned themselves into the speed-boosting components that would let me make up for lost time. So, I had a look around for entertainment.
The locals mostly seemed to be bi-ped creatures of about my mass, covered with a layer of some kind of animal or vegetable fiber. They communicated with sound waves that came from the top part of their bodies, and apparently perceived light and movement with two pivoting balls in the same area.
There seemed to be quite a few of these creatures, milling around outside one of the caves that were numerous in the area. Some of the sound waves being produced were more high-pitched than I’d noticed to be usual. On close inspection, liquid was also abnormally flowing from their perception-balls. Another of the creatures arrived and was surrounded by the rest. I could tell by movements that the newcomer wanted the rock that was blocking the cave to be moved away. There was much waving of appendages, shrill noises and flowing liquid. But the rock was moved.
By then I was consumed with curiosity, so I popped into the cave to see what the cause of all this excitement was. The locals would just perceive me as one of the small, flying things that they waved their upper appendages at. There was another of the creatures in the cave, all bound up in even more fiber layers than the others. Its metabolic rate was almost down to zero and about to be extinguished. Now, I’m always being told that I’m too sentimental and I should harden up my soft crust. So, I know I shouldn’t have done what I did but, for goodness sake, how much difference could it make? One little jolt from the reviver pen and the creature was up like a shot and ambling back out of the cave to join the others. I’ll never forget the sound they kept making, over and over: lazarus, lazarus, lazarus!
And, you know, it was funny but it seemed to me, just for a moment, that the last creature, the newcomer, could somehow see me as I really am.
by submission | Jul 27, 2018 | Story |
Author: David K Scholes
Canberra Airport
Australia 2045
“The Qantas flight QF 2134 that left Perth for Canberra 10 years ago and never arrived,” Bathr hesitated. “It is held, ageless, in a time vortex – held for eternity or until the vortex collapses.”
My heart leapt at this announcement. The thought that my husband and two children might still be alive – somewhere. After 10 years it was almost too much to hope for.
“You can’t trust it,” pleaded my sister. “You can’t trust this Alien. By its own admission, it is a convicted criminal. Before the destruction of its prison starship approaching Earth, there was a telepathic burst warning us of it. Even listing some of its crimes before being cut short.
I wasn’t listening to my sister.
Whatever it might have done on the other side of the Universe Bathr had done no wrong here upon Earth.
When its escape pod ejected we tried to shoot it down. When it landed we attacked it. To no avail. Bathr rendered the military – soldiers and armoured vehicles alike – immobile. In defending itself Bathr did not kill any of its attackers.
We knew Bathr had power – which had also been demonstrated in other ways. When it had saved the burned and dying survivor of an oil tanker crash by giving the man a part of its own life force. Not for the first time I wondered how such a being could possibly have been considered a criminal on any world.
We also knew Bathr was preparing to leave us.
I spoke knowing that Bathr had already divined my thoughts. “Is it possible to save them? To collapse the time vortex and bring them back to us? ” I dared to hope.
“It is possible,” Bathr replied. “It would require a considerable expenditure of energy.”
“You can do this?’ I was pleading now.
It nodded – slowly but definitely and I had no reason to doubt it.
“For these humans,” Bathr added “the occupants of QF 2134, no time at all will have passed. They will not be a day older than when their flight first began. They will have no idea that so much time has passed.”
* * *
My sister and I looked up. The skies had been emptied of air traffic and now a storm like no other gathered.
Bathr seemed unaware of us now and appeared to be focussing all of its energies on the task at hand.
The storm that I later came to realise was a time storm began to abate and in the clearing skies above a lone aircraft came into view. “It’s QF 2134, it’s QF 2134___” came the announcement directly from the control tower. “The pilot says everyone on board is okay and what’s all the excitement about!”
My heart soared higher than I would ever have thought possible. A joy I never thought to know again.
As the flight touched down I realised I had forgotten about Bathr.
The beautiful alien was now a mere shadow of itself. The effort had been too great and it was dying. The collapsing of a time vortex requiring more power than we of Earth could ever know.
“What made you a criminal?” I asked hoping it would have time to reply.
“I was convicted of giving too much of my life force to save enemy children.” Bathr hesitated, “and I, I closed off a local area timeline to _____.’
Bathr didn’t finish but I couldn’t imagine what he did as being anything less than noble. Much less a crime.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 26, 2018 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Dax found his usual seat in the back corner of the cafeteria and unpacked his lunch.
He laid out a sandwich, a can of iced coffee, and an orange on the table in front of him, then fished a lock-blade knife from his jacket pocket and set about peeling the orange.
“Hey, army kid!”
There were snickers, and Dax looked up to see a crowd of the school football team gathered behind their quarterback.
“I’m not an army kid,” Dax continued slicing the orange, drawing the knife blade from pole to pole, reducing it to equal sized wedges.
“Well, you lost your arms didn’t you?” Again the laughter and the boys exchanging high-fives and shoulder punches in amusement.
“It was an accident, just leave me alone.” Finished with the orange, he rested his hands on the table, still holding the knife.
“They look pretty real army kid, I heard they tore off at the shoulders, that must have been gross!”
Dax twitched visibly, the memory of a summer job cleaning metal fabricating equipment, and a machine that jolted to life when it should have been offline was burned forever into his brain. The sudden searing pain, the shock, the blood-loss, and waking up in a hospital feeling like his life was over.
“Can you punch really hard?” The quarterback was talking again. “Can you crush things with your bare hands?”
The company, to avoid a lawsuit, had flown Dax halfway around the world and had him fitted with the latest in prosthetic tech.
“They don’t work like that,” he glared, just wanting to be left to eat his lunch in peace, “I’m not like that.”
From a table nearby someone spoke over the crowd. “Show him the knife trick, the one from that Alien movie.”
There was a murmur through the group.
“What knife trick?”, the boy was determined now, “Show me!”
Dax slouched, staring at his untouched lunch before pushing his seat back, standing up and walking around the table. He stopped in front of his tormentor who, wary of the knife, took an involuntary step back.
Dax turned and put his left-hand flat on the table, fingers slightly apart.
“Put your hand on top of mine, just like this.”
There was a moment of hesitation before the rising chatter of the crowd forced him, and the boy placed his hand on top of Dax’s.
Dax yanked his hand out from under, and slammed it down on top again, pinning the boy’s hand beneath his.
“What the…?” he started.
“Don’t move, or this will hurt,” Dax instructed, not looking up.
With his right hand, he tapped the table with the tip of the knife blade in a downward stabbing motion between the thumb and first finger, then lifted the knife to bring it down again between the first and second.
He repeated this, slowly from one end of their hands to the other, tapping the table lightly each time with the blade between the fingers, close but not touching flesh. He paused for a moment, looked sideways at the boy. The growing silence was suddenly replaced with a deafening staccato as he repeated the stabbing circuit, moving back and forth between their fingers with blazing speed and uncanny accuracy, tearing holes in the tabletop but never once looking down.
After what seemed like an eternity, he raised the knife to eye level and drove it down with as much force as he could muster, aiming for the thickest part of the back of his hand.
His prosthetics engaged full safeties, stopping the knife blade mere millimeters before breaking his skin, and freezing his arms in place.
The boy yanked his hand away, staggering backward.
“You’re fucking crazy man, you stay away from me you fucking freak!”
The rest of the group backed away, and Dax closed his eyes and waited for them to fade from his awareness, and for his arms to unlock.
After a few moments, he sat down, closed the lock blade and put it back into his coat pocket and stared, no longer interested, at his untouched lunch.
He didn’t want to hurt himself, he didn’t want to hurt anyone at all, not really. He just wanted that to be his choice.
by submission | Jul 25, 2018 | Story |
Author: David Henson
When I finally got my M-plant, I couldn’t wait to try it out. I went to a local cafe, approached a woman wearing a TP earring and touched my TechPath lapel pin.
She immediately raised her index finger. I held my fingertip to hers, and we both thought backwards from 100 by sevens. Once paired, we practiced sending and receiving simple images, mainly different breeds of dogs, to each other. I noticed her pooches all had dark, sad eyes and drooping tails. Then she shared with me that her brother recently had died. He hadn’t wanted to wait his turn for a qualified physician to insert the telepathy device into his cerebral cortex, but had instead risked going the trepanning route with some back alley charlatan.
Irene and I finished our coffees and agreed to meet again. I felt I was going to enjoy life as a TP. I think everyone did. On my thumb.
There were growing pains as techpathy spread through the population. One was Pink Elephant Syndrome. You know, try not to imagine a pink elephant, and it will pop into your mind. Well, before you sent a thought, you had to picture your transmission image. Mine’s a monkey with a plate of spaghetti on it’s head.
PES struck me one evening when I was having dinner with Irene. I’d developed deep feelings for her, but wasn’t ready to let her know. Don’t think of a monkey, I told myself and immediately pictured a baboon with a big red butt. Don’t imagine a plate. White porcelain with a gold ring. No spaghetti, no spaghetti, no spaghetti. Linguine with marinara. That’s ok. Linguine’s not spaghetti. Spaghetti is thinner. Mmmm, spaghetti. No! I knocked over a waiter with a tray of food when I jumped back, too late, to get out of range. That’s how I learned Irene wanted to be “just friends.” We still are. In fact, I probably owe her my life. On my shoe.
Eventually, there was a backlash from the Protectors Of Optimal Privacy when rumors of a gen-2 M-plant circulated. People with a Thought Snatcher Implant, as the POOPers called it, would have true mind reading capability. No pairing. No transmitting. The TSI would snatch thoughts from anybody with an M-plant. Fear of the TSI drove some people to have their devices removed. On the tree.
Then the POOPers hacked the HUC — the “impenetrable” Heisenberg Uncertainty Cloud, which every techpathic thought flashed through as it went from one person to the other. Now we’re suffering a plague of nursery songs. For nearly a year, every person with an M-plant has been humming This Old Man, Mary Had A Little Lamb, Alouette, Alle meine Entchen — whatever their earworm dictates. People can’t sleep, eat, or work. Suicides and divorce rates are up. There’s a global depression. On the door.
I’ve learned that by deep breathing and concentrating on something — math exercises, playing my clarinet, telling a story like this — I can keep my earworm at bay a few minutes. Then it bores its way back until I can muster the strength to tame it again.
There’s a long waiting list to get M-plants removed. I’m trying to hang on till it’s my turn. I almost went to a trepannist, but Irene talked me out if it. Sweet Irene.
… I just realized I should go back.To the beginning of this story. I left out something important. Breathe … breathe … No use. I can’t continue now.
All I can do now is give the dog a bone and go rolling home.
by submission | Jul 24, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro
I crawl through the flap in the folds of my midnight sheets and touch her again. I touch the cold stipple of her naked skin and it is not the hollow caress of dreams. I am not in that place where images scatter and reform into half-remembered fragments, this is not a dreamscape deprived of the tactile – this is real.
I cradle her, enveloping her in my arms in an embrace that has me clutching for the shifting sinew beneath her flesh as it gently detaches, molting from her frame. I hold her together. I must hold it together. I kiss her and taste her death, the crunch of scorched flesh that lines the ripped gape of her mouth.
She died speaking to me, filing a field dispatch from the desert of some fucking planet the numeric classification of which now escapes me. A number that will soon be forgotten too by those who sent her there, her massacre mediocre and but one of many.
I was the battalion surgeon, but, unlike the brave of the past who forged my profession amid the chaos of battle, I struck a more civilized stance. Boldly stepping into battle, vicariously in the form of a medi-drone, one I controlled from a deep-buttoned leather clad hell many light years from the boom and spark of war.
I had developed the diagnostic and surgical probes that lived inside the exo-armor within which she had sat in the desert and waited for the call to surge.
Impenetrable war suits that relayed vitals back to me in an instantaneous cheat of time and distance. Of course, we could have sent drone-soldiers to fight as well, but we humans we just love the crunch of boots on the ground.
So, she’s talking and I’m interrupting. It was dawn and the sun had just spilt across the endlessly undulating dunes, sucking the nights’ shadows back along the wind-carved waves that fingered their every surface. Then a sound, like the crack snap of thumb against finger…
The round hit her just below her left breast, slicing through the impenetrable and exploding next to her skin. Ripping upward the entirety of her shoulder plate erupted beneath her chin, severing her face in two.
She came to me six days after she died, I thought she a dream, one shredded from the shock that kneads behind my eyes and steals the moisture from my throat, but I could smell her blood as it soaked into the sheets. I could smell it and I smiled. I knew it was her but I didn’t reach out. I didn’t want her to scare and leave, and though the next day she was gone I knew she would return.
Her body lays still on the sand upon which she fell, forgotten, her suit still transmitting data as she rots in the sun. I watch the incoming feed every day, noticing the subtle changes as she gently breaks away.
I search for her every night, lost and tangled in the sheets. She is always there, though her skin is now stretched and purple. I hold her close and I weep as I feel her bones afloat in a sea of petrifaction ooze… Our marriage was far from perfect but she loved me… right?
She wouldn’t have come back if she didn’t love me. If she knew about what I did… she wouldn’t have come. She’d have stayed there crumpled and dead on that stained desert plane of a seven hundred and thirty-five gralloched souls.
But she came back, she came back for me.
by Julian Miles | Jul 23, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“‘The shell is the key’? He said that?”
“Yes. The carapace is the most remarkable aspect of this truly unusual species. In layman’s terms, it’s a pico-honeycomb that has all the useful properties of a hybrid of Kevlar and graphene. Add the light-diffusing filaments that cover it and it’s a perfect natural armour against our weaponry.”
“I always thought the ability to resist our weaponry was a bit too convenient.”
“The ‘tailored genocide’ and ‘monsters under control’ rumours? Scientist-Commander Greven says they’re nothing but conspiracy theories. Even with humanity on the brink, civilisation still needs urban legends.”
“So what has he come up with?”
“It’s an ultra-low frequency sound weapon, derived from some obscure Third Reich research.”
“Good grief, he went a long way back.”
“That’s why Scientist-Commander Greven leads us. He’s brilliant and committed; humanity’s best chance.”
“So when do we get this new super weapon?”
“It was deployed last night. Take your position, Sergeant. This should be quite a show.”
Silence falls and the thunderous noise made by the approaching legions of mutated six-legged death becomes clearer.
The vibration starts at the edge of perceptibility. It rises to become something not-quite audible that shakes everyone’s guts and makes fillings in teeth dance. Cries of pain cut the silence as the oncoming horde pauses. Suddenly, each of the coupe-sized creatures starts to rotate in place, their legs beating a frenetic rhythm as they spin faster. Screams of disbelieving horror rise as the creature’s movements synchronise and their bodies bulge and contort. With chitinous concussions, each monster expands and extrudes knobbly tentacles from under distending carapaces. As one, they all stop spinning. Triangular eyes glow on the truck-sized outlines just visible through the swirling dust
Sergeant Maxim slaps Captain Leon hard to break the man from his wide-eyed paralysis.
“It would appear someone has decided where their best chance lies. Of course, it could be a diabolical piece of combat holography by our enemies, but as they’re supposedly a mindless destructive force, what possible use could they have for tactics?”
“Sergeant, as we’re about to pulped by an unstoppable foe, let’s drop the veiled speech.”
“Works for me. Those monsters are under control. They’re being used by something else and Scientist-Commander Greven is either an idiot or a traitor. Whether his actions were guided or misguided, I would dearly like to take a squad of our most dangerous and have a pointed discussion with him to clarify his position.”
“Will this ‘chat’ result in his death?”
“Of course. Whatever he is, he’s no use to us. We’re going to need to form a resistance and develop some new tactics.”
“To the devil with only taking a squad.”
“Pardon, Captain?”
“All units, this is Captain Rufus Leon. Fall back, get airborne and re-rig for counter-insurgency. All transports to use stealth mode and reform post-sundown on my beacon.”
“Sir?”
“I’ve had a suspicion that you’ve clarified, Sergeant. How did he know the exact frequency to trigger their growth?”
“Could be coincidence. More likely, the highest treason ever.”
“Precisely. Move out!”
