by Julian Miles | Dec 12, 2017 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The cooling towers hum less at night, as the temperature drops in the world above. ‘The World Above’. Oh, how our leaders love that title. They use it everywhere, usually presented in ways that used to be reserved for heaven and similar post-death nirvanas.
“Tea?” Susan nudges my arm.
I look down to see a cup of chestnut-coloured brew. I take it, forcing a smile. Susan has adapted better than I. It would be petty to spoil the moment in a fit of pique.
The world was going to hell with fanatics of every stripe hacking at each other while good people were left to shore up the burgeoning masses with steadily increasing taxes. Even corporations stepped in to help governments cope as the global population exceeded all resources.
In better times, the outbreak between North Korea and America would have been limited. However, when Chinese intervention forces rolled into Pyongyang, little Kim let rip with everything he had at every country he feared. He had a lot more than outside observers predicted.
Things quickly fell apart in the aftermath. My grandfather spoke of ‘infrastructural dependencies’. I never realised that meant if you deprive an urban population of basic needs for six days, it’ll turn feral.
Fortunately, father maintained a place in Silo One, a modest six-bedroom affair in the upper tiers. After settling in, it was good for a year. Rationing was tiresome, but proportionate share based upon your gold reserves had been agreed as a fair method. What father had failed to grasp was that his gold trove was, in real terms, trivial. We should have taken residence in Silo Five – where our reserve would have been roughly on par – but father always insisted that one started as high as one could. After his strategies to secure our station failed, he took to gambling to top up his dwindling reserves. When that tactic failed, we found settling debts down here was a merciless thing: mother simply failed to return home one night, as she belonged to someone else! I railed at father until he tried to beat me down, at which point I decamped to Susan’s parent’s place. I found her alone, nursing her mother, as her father had moved in with a billionairess up on Tier Six.
And so, our descent began. Everyone we asked for help denied us – seeing our plight as where they would be if they frittered their reserves on non-essentials like helping others.
I remember the Tiering meeting so well. Susan and I sat, dressed in our best, and not clutching at each other like some desperate couple from a black-and-white movie; which is how we felt.
Mister Grooms summed up: “Roderick, Susan, it saddens us to see members fall. However, there is still a place for you. Mister Tasker will explain your obligations when you arrive on Tier 209.”
Mister Tasker was forthright: “To remain, you will need to earn a token reserve. I recommend choosing cooling tower duty.”
We took the hint and became cooling tower cleaners. One of us worked while the other cared. A year later, both our charges died within a month of each other, cancer taking her mother and alcoholism ending my father. We wept tears of grieving, guilty joy, realising we could change our shifts so we would have time together.
Those below Tier 100 have never seen the upper tiers. They regard Susan and I as curiosities to be avoided. At least we have each other, and, up on these tower ledges, we can pretend for a while.
by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 11, 2017 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“Do you know what happens when a black star dies?” Tony asks, rhetorically, not waiting for an answer. “It collapses in upon itself, and in one last gasp, ejaculates a single burst of energy into the void.”
His assistant nods, numbly, pen to paper but motionless, unsure of whether this is something she should be writing down.
“Consider the size of the universe, think about the odds of such a burst of the purest concentration of energy hitting a planet with life on it, let alone this,” he pauses waving his hands about, searching for the appropriate words, “this shit hole,” he finishes.
She writes ‘shit hole’ on the notepad.
“And of all the forms it could have taken, cockroach, palm tree, a blade of fucking grass, but no, it coalesces into the form of a man, or mostly man, a kind of androgynous whoever.”
She writes ‘androgynous’, followed by a question mark.
“You can’t keep energy contained like that, not in a fleshy meatsuit, you have to let some of it out, obviously, and what more obvious a form of energy expression than music?” He walks to his desk and pushes piles of paper around recklessly until he uncovers a package of cigarettes, from which he extracts one and lights it, drawing deeply and waiting for the nicotine rush to wash over him and subside so he can speak again.
She writes ‘Hepafilter’.
“Have you ever heard a piece of music and been unaffected?” He waits until she shrugs. “I mean, not ‘get up and dance’ affected, but you either love it or hate it, or it makes your foot tap or stands your teeth on edge, but it affects you, right?”
She nods.
“Imagine what a black star averting death can do, how that kind of energy worms its way into each and every body, tunes us to a common frequency and kind of weaves us all together.” He takes a long slow pull on the cigarette, watching its reflection in the window as the white paper tube is slowly consumed by the crawling orange glow against the blackness of the city outside.
She absently draws a row of stars across the page, each with a continuous stroke, crisscrossing lines without lifting the pen.
“And the crazy thing, we’re all so screwed up, nobody stops to consider that maybe, maybe this really is a star man, not just some crackerjack musician with a hypnotizing voice.” He plucks out another cigarette and lights it off the first before crushing the spent one out in the ashtray. “We’re all pointing our antennae to the sky, decoding static we’re getting from the great black nothingness looking for alien life, while we’re playing a real live star man’s music on our car stereo’s without a fucking clue what it really is.”
She starts filling in small parts of each star, where the crossing lines have created little shapes inside each one.
“And while we’re cluelessly consuming his energy, what happens? Booze, and drugs, and women, and pollution, and disease.” He takes another long pull of the cigarette, then blows the smoke out before fully inhaling. “And these bloody things,” he hollers, waving the half-smoked cigarette in the air for effect.
“And after we absorb all of his energy we’ve pretty much killed him again ourselves, haven’t we?” He stops speaking and stares at her.
She shrugs.
“Do you know what a rare opportunity we had, and we blew it?” He turns back to the window, looking through the glass up into the darkness.
“You only have to turn on the news to realize how much of our world he must have been holding together.” Smoke drifts slowly against the glass, and he watches it roll off in waves. “I give us five years, tops.”
by submission | Dec 10, 2017 | Story |
Author: Vivienne Burgess
I remember Agni on your lap, myself on the faded mat in the mess hall, practicing knots. Agni couldn’t keep his head on his shoulders, but I was listening. You started with the small things, shutting your eyes to speak, said it was important to pass on the details. In the middle of the year, you’d go camping in the forest with your friends. Trees blooming purple-white and you’d lie under them early in the early morning, listening to the bees. Before we lost the seasons there were distinct feelings outside, the cold was very sharp and the light was easy to be in. Sometimes, vehicles went by overhead, narrowly missing each other, to the tune of some elaborate clock that was just as far away. These were huge, huge machines as small as fingernails, leaving white trails of smoke that from below, you said, could have been speed boats on the ocean. Depending on the time of day these trails would be orange or pink or bright, bright yellow. And in the evening, the sun might catch the metal underside of the carriage and force a glint into your eye. This was when you could look at the sky without goggles. When there was more land to the country than there is now. Not enough people noticed at first. Then one day there was significantly less distance between the coasts, you found you had more neighbours in less space, and the problems that seemed far away were all around you and impossible to avoid. After the heat came the cold. Rinsed the sky of colour. Some people despaired; found cliffs, bought rope, didn’t bother with a note. Others took it on the chin. Agni was in a deep sleep so you carried him to the children’s tent, lay him down among his brothers and sisters. Penguins do this, come together to keep warm. Penguins also steal each other’s children. You talked about things like they still exist. On purpose, I don’t know. In this place it doesn’t matter whose blood is whose. Agni is all of our sons, like I am all of your daughters. You had darker hair when Agni came along. He was so warm everyone came to put a hand on him. Telling this one always made you smile, eyes still closed. There was a bad, bad cough going round and most of those people are gone now. You tucked me in beside Agni and I showed you my knot. You said it was perfect, best knot you’d ever seen, looking down at me like I was someone you didn’t know. Next morning I had my first bleed. A beginning and the end. We carried you far from camp, the earth anywhere too hard to dig. We made a circle, holding hands. A song was sung. Agni and I stayed the latest. He wanted to be near you and I noticed a shadow on his chin, the first of dark hairs. That day is very small now. I’m scared I’ll lose it inside all the others. I am learning to skin rats with the older girls and make a spit for roasting. When I have the energy I walk out to the mound of bodies and touch your grey face, preserved in ice. I try to hear the bees. My stomach is very big with Agni’s child, feels like another warm one to me, and I am in pain getting to sleep. To relax I think of penguins, a big warm ball in the cold; think, in certain lights, colour might be coming back to the sky. But how would I know. You took all of that with you. At night I dream of dust.
by submission | Dec 9, 2017 | Story |
Author: Anthony Rove
I am sorry, Samuel. You are thirteen and a man. Today, we go to The Grid.
Oh, nephew. Shed your tears in here with me. You are a man now. And, as a man, it is okay to be frightened. It is okay to cry. I cry sometimes too. Sometimes, I am so scared that I press my palms against my ears until I can’t hear anything except my own blood pumping away.
But we men must always cry in secret. Don’t ever let anyone else see you cry. As of today, it is up to you to protect your mother and your sister and everyone else. The women have enough to worry about, eh? They worry about the food, and the shelter, and the tribunal, and the disgusting heretics. That is a lot to worry about. They don’t need to worry about the ‘tons as well. We protect them from the ‘tons. And we do our best to protect them from the fear, too. So finish crying before we leave. Fear is an infection. Don’t contaminate them.
I know you’ve heard stories about the ‘tons. I know because, when I was a boy, other boys would drive me crazy with these tales. My friends would insist that some ‘tons are over fifty feet tall—as big as a pre-incident building! They would tell me that some ‘tons are so small that they could crawl into a man’s ear without him even realizing it. There is truth to these stories, nephew. But do not dwell on them. Instead, reflect on your catechism.
In the beginning, God made the world and God made man. And man lived in harmony with the world. As long as God played the role of the creator, and mankind played the role of the created, it was good. But Samuel, you know that mankind is too arrogant for such an arrangement to last. Mankind insisted on becoming the creator. And mankind created its monstrosities—the ‘tons.
The first ‘ton’s which mankind made were small, no bigger than a man’s fist. They were metal, but not particularly hearty. However, mankind had foolishly endowed them with the four essential qualities of life: movement, discernment, aggression, and reproduction.
The ‘tons were meant to be weapons—attack dogs. Once released, they could topple entire nations in a matter of weeks. By design, they were supposed to move only in certain places; to find only certain kinds of people; to kill only a certain number; to build new ‘tons only a finite number of times.
But the ‘tons slipped the leash. It took only one error. A single ‘ton refused to stop reproducing when it was supposed to. It kept assembling more ‘tons in its own image. Its children began building more in turn. Once they could repopulate unchecked, the ‘tons evolved just like any other living thing. Now they have no artificial limits. They kill indiscriminately and without limit. Today, there are no more nations to topple.
Just when the end seemed inevitable, God once again became flesh. In the Second Coming, Christ did not die to atone for our sins. No, we must atone for our own sins by living in this broken world. Instead, Christ built The Grid: that divine work of technology which keeps the ‘tons away.
In exchange, Christ commanded humanity to stop tinkering with its petty machines. Your brother, Levi, broke this covenant. Attempting to harness electricity in any fashion is unforgivable.
Today, you expel your brother from The Grid and watch the ‘tons devour his body. Today, you see the price of sin.
by submission | Dec 8, 2017 | Story |
Author: Kate Runnels
Ara studied the Avatar for a moment, liking what she saw. It wasn’t enough like her to raise suspicions if anyone she knew played the game, but she would be comfortable playing in this body she had tweaked from the stock body given by the game developers.
Especially when she hooked into the game in the fully immersive world with the new sensory impressions. Not death, obviously, but so many other aspects from taste to the feel of wind and water and other sensations.
A clone you control in a world vastly different from the megacities of Earth. An escape from the pollution, continual terror attacks, food shortages, water shortages, and rampant crime on the street in every megacity.
Ara and countless other gamers had been waiting for years for this MMO RPG; the launch of Avalon. This resonated with her coming from London and seeing Stonehenge through protective glass. And many other English historical sights. She could touch grass, feel stone, pet a horse. And then she caught a glimpse of her real body in the reflection of an opaqued window. This wasn’t her true body, this weak flabby body, but that of her Avatar.
At first, after the release date, it was easy to leave the world of Avalon, but she did leave it, to go to her crap job. But for many, it became an addition. Even Ara succumbed, losing weight. Not even leaving the game to eat or shower or change. The world of the megacity was so grey and blah. Ara soon lost her job.
But she couldn’t stop. Like any addict, she needed that great and greater bit to feel anything- needing more to experience that rush from her first high.
Erik, a first responder, shook his head at his partner. “Another one, huh?”
“Do you play Avalon,” asked Michelle.
“No. What about her?”
“The brain gives a response similar to dreaming. She just won’t wake up.”
Erik scowled. “So what?”
“The game has become her reality now. This-” Michelle pointed to the rundown cramped apartment – “is her nightmare. We’ll process her like the rest and see if we can revive her. It’s a shame she has to hide in a game.”
Erik smiled. “She your type?”
Michelle shrugged without answering.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 7, 2017 | Story |
Author: Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“Look we rescued you, correct?”
“Yes, but-”
“You were floating in a derelict colony vessel. You were a corpsicle. A cryo refugee. We could have LEFT you there!”
“Yeah, I know. You revived me and the other two hundred surviving sleepers. I get it. I’m grateful! But-”
“THIS IS THE SIXTH TIME. And that’s just YOU! That doesn’t count the rest of your kind.”
“Hey, you have to understand. A food replicator is a miracle to us. We’re only human.”
“This is the first ship in the Union that will need to place restrictions. THE FIRST SHIP! It’s EMBARASSING!”
“We’re imaginative primitives new to your time. Like cavemen would have been to us. I’m sorry.”
“Look at this list. You wanted to eat each other?”
“Not literally. Just a taste of consequence-free human meat. And once we found out we could submit each other’s DNA, it just became a party game. Come on. Admit it. You’re curious.”
“NO, I AM NOT.”
“And from there, it was a small hop to tasting all the species onboard we’ve never seen before. Those Tulexians are delicious!”
“I’M a Tulexian, you monster.”
“Okay, I can see how cannibalism, no matter how victimless and consequence-free, might be…. frowned on.”
“Oh, can you?”
“Glad to see sarcasm is alive and well. But what else have we done that’s so bad?”
“The ship’s power went down to 15% this morning.”
“Ah, yes. That.”
“You wanted a….let’s see…I have it in my notes here…a ‘turducken but with every edible animal in the universe’.”
“Yes”
“The main viewscreen crashed in the bridge. The whole ship went down to emergency power.”
“So THAT’S what that was. I was pretty freaked out. My replicator got SUPER hot”
“It was trying to complete your meal! Do you KNOW how many edible animals are in the universe?”
“No?”
“Taking into account that there are 8.7 million species on your Earth alone and there are 237 planets in the Union…..”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Your replicator was literally trying to apply the animal-within-animal turducken principle to…double checking here…yes, 2,961,933,238 recorded animals. That’s nearly three billion layers of meat.”
“In the shape of a turkey”
“Yes. In the shape of a turkey.”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t do that again.”
“You can’t. We’ve made it a protocol in the computer that you can no longer do that.”
“Okay. What about an eternal moebius pizza just coming slowly out of the replicator forever?”
“What? No.”
“Anatomically accurate cakes using medical records of fellow crew members?”
“Listen…”
“Bowls of rice with famous paintings on each grain?”
“OKAY THAT’S IT! You’re banned.”
“What?”
“We’ll bring you replicated nutrients and set up a kitchen in the quarters of you and your fellow wakened cryosleepers.”
“Let me have the replicator for ten more minutes. PLEASE? I want the replicator to fry me a copy of your delicious dorsal claws. Then we’ll be cool. We cool?”
“By Tursuk’s tears. No. No, we are not cool.”
“Oh, I just KNEW you wouldn’t be cool about this. I should have eaten a copy of your FACE while I had the chance!”
“By the Hammer of Sherindal! Such depravity. The restrictions stand.”
“Well NOW what are we supposed to do? It’s a long journey back to Earth.”
“We have many means of entertainment available. Although, I’m curious, how come you all haven’t been giving us the same kinds of problems with our holodeck?”
“You guys have holodecks? Can we try that out? That sounds cool.”
“Oh……by Tharlat’s hairy claws. Computer, initiate holodeck lockout procedures alpha prime. Union personnel only.”
“Oh come ON! You guys are the WORST!”
