by submission | Jun 25, 2017 | Story |
Author : Anthony Rove
King Alexander—that was the name he had chosen for himself, anyway—leaned back on his throne. It wasn’t very comfortable. After a lifetime of resting his considerable girth on plush synthetic fabrics, the primitive wood-on-iron chair hurt his backside. He disliked the austerity imposed on him by indigenous tech. But then again, he wasn’t here to be comfortable. He was here to win. And victory was so damn close he could almost taste it.
The Royal High Priest stood at attention directly across from the throne. It (Alexander was never quite sure whether the beasts he had dubbed the “Macedonians” had any proper gender) was a short, squat, two-legged thing. At a quick glance, the creature looked like a shrunken, pale, misshapen human. It had a face, two black eyes, and a gaping central opening that might charitably be called a mouth—although it wasn’t used for speech.
The High Priest’s chalk-white skin began vibrating. A tiny device lodged in King Alexander’s ear canal detected the delicate series of pulses, and whispered its translation,
“Glorious God-King Alexander, I have excellent news from the front. The campaign was successful. Paris has been taken, and Napoleon captured.” Alexander leapt from his throne and raised his meaty fist into the air. Alexander had never been a dancer, but after clinching the semi-final, he felt like dancing. He shuffled his feet rhythmically while the High Priest looked on patiently. After a few moments, Alexander managed to compose himself.
“They didn’t try to hurt him did they?” he asked. The High Priest shifted its weight back and forth. Over the last year and a half, Alexander had learned that this seemingly nervous movement actually indicated bemusement.
“Of course not, my Lord. Even the most brutish foot soldier knows better than to try to harm a God.”
“Right. Yes. Of course. Just making sure.”
The man who called himself King Napoleon arrived in King Alexander’s throne room a short while later, escorted by two Macedonian guards. He arrived unfettered and surrounded by a dim, blue light.
“Leave us.” boomed Alexander in the most god-like voice he could muster. The guards obeyed, leaving the two men alone in the throne room. King Napoleon let out a prolonged sigh and extended his hand. King Alexander shook it vigorously.
“Good game, Alexander.”
“It really was. If you had asked me six months ago, I would have said you were going to crush me for sure.” Napoleon winced at the compliment.
“Yea, well stuff happens. I have to admit, poisoning our wells was a good move. Scared the crap outta ‘em. Made ‘em think I couldn’t manage our resources. They pigeonholed me as a war-god.” King Alexander understood entirely. Even if the locals were a bunch of savages, it was extremely difficult to keep up the veneer of omnipotence.
“Although,” Napoleon continued, “I’m not quite sure how you managed to get your guys around my sentries at all.” Alexander grinned.
“I’ll tell you after I’ve won the championship on Trappist-1e.” At this, Napoleon managed a weak smile.
“Well, enjoy the perpetual winter. After this hell-hole of a planet, I’m sure you’ll be glad to get out of the heat.
“Out of the fire and into the ice box,” Alexander agreed. “The other good news is that the locals on Trappist-1f are supposed be a little bit more tech savvy than these guys. Hopefully they’ve figured out how to make a comfortable throne.”
“Well, best of luck. I’ll be watching on the casts. But now, I’ve gotta catch my ride back to Earth.”
by submission | Jun 24, 2017 | Story |
Author : Andrea Friedenson
“Such an expressive planet,” Lana said. I watched the reflected light from her monitor flow reds, greens, and blues across her perfect face as she admired the image of Earth that floated before us. The data visualization made the planet seem to shimmer as surface temperature, population movements, and emotional tides all shifted.
“I just wish we didn’t have to lose sleep to watch it,” I said. I was hoping this would lead to a her napping on my shoulder. It had happened before. But this time, she was too distracted.
“Why do you think they leave so much of their communication unencrypted?”
I sighed. The humans’ openness was a favorite topic of hers. All of the other known Hominoidean species were like ours, with layers of privacy, formalized paths towards intimacy. Our sociologists had long ago agreed that this etiquette was the basis of our current prosperity. Ritual contained and sublimated our natural violent tendencies into universally-understood gestures and language, which prevented war and preserved genetic diversity. The prevailing academic consensus dictated that without etiquette, we would devolve into bloodthirsty troglodytes in less than three generations.
But somehow, the humans had developed a society with the barest whisper of shared ritual. Each individual dumped out every thought upon whatever other individuals were proximate, sprayed his or her feelings across the electronic communication systems they had somehow come together to engineer like a berlip marks a jaj. To the rational person, it was disgusting. But to Lana, it was a miracle.
It was why we had deployed this space station, disguised as a dusty rock in orbit around Earth. The humans had of course noticed us, even come out to greet us in their clumsy way, but interaction was outside the scope of our mission. We watched them bounce around on our station’s shell and were able to collect granular data with a non-lethal dosage of radiation. Lana had cried and said it was the most rewarding experience of her life. I retreated a few layers of intimacy to give her the privacy to process her emotions. It had taken me weeks to re-establish our connection.
Now we sat together in the dark. The only observers on the late shift. But she hadn’t looked at me once. Her eyes were wide and stayed on the monitor as she said: “Don’t you wish sometimes that we could be like them? That we could just say what’s on our minds and in our hearts?”
I said: “No.”
by submission | Jun 23, 2017 | Story |
Author : Jules Jensen
The gray fur was dry and dull. The small hollow horns on his head were curly and crooked. She stroked a finger over the horns. He closed his eyes, like he enjoyed the touch. The claws on his four paws were long. They needed to be trimmed at least once a week, according to her mother. But she couldn’t stand the thought of cutting his precious weapons that saved his life so many times in the arena.
He was contentedly curled in her lap, now closing his blue eyes and rubbing a paw over his flat, monkey-like face. She let him sleep, while she focused her attention elsewhere, looking out of her window. Her dad’s car just pulled up, and he was opening the back hatch. He was unloading the new battler.
She thought that they were done with the neighbourhood brawls when Mighty retired. She wondered what would happen now. It was illegal to have two battlers in one household.
As if sensing her thoughts, or maybe he smelled the newcomer, the creature on her lap jolted upright.
“Don’t worry, Mighty, I wont let them get rid of you.” She said, giving the creature a hug. He was tense and quivering.
“Stay here.” She got up and left the room.
Down the stairs, she stopped by the front door just as her dad came in. He gingerly held a cage that contained something roughly the same size as Mighty. The creature inside was an ugly thing, leathery black skin and six legs, white eyes and huge ears.
“What’s going to happen to Mighty?” She asked, but her dad ignored her.
“This is Shrill. I bet we can totally take out the Johansen’s bird now.” He explained to his wife, who smiled and clapped her hands together happily.
“Mighty could take out that bird.” She muttered in annoyance, too quiet for her father to hear, but her mother looked at her.
“Mighty is too old.” Her mother replied, and her father put the cage down on the floor and went to the kitchen, clutching a wad of paperwork.
“What’s going to happen to him now?” She asked, and her mother quickly looked away. She followed her husband into the kitchen, but spoke over her shoulder.
“You know the rules, honey.”
“But he’s a pet now. He hasn’t fought in ten years.” She followed her parents, feeling the teenage fury start to build up in her heart.
“Which is why we need a new fighter. The extra money will be quite handy.”
Her father was already reading over the papers. Her mother smiled, all happy and gooey at the thought of having a battler again, and being a part of the community after years of absence. Then she frowned and looked down at the floor.
Mighty came trotting in, claws clacking on the floor as he leisurely went to his food and water dishes by the fridge. He left behind paw-prints of black-brown gunk.
“What’s that he’s tracking in? Did he go in the garden again?” Her father asked, finally looking away from Shrill’s papers. She ignored him and curiously followed prints back out to the entryway, where her father had left Shrill’s cage.
The cage was open, and Shrill was dead, throat torn open and oozing blood. Her mother gasped and put a hand to her mouth while her father just stared, dumbfounded.
“I guess we really can’t have two fighters in the same household.” She tried not to smile as she said it, and then she calmly went into the kitchen to clean the blood from Mighty‘s experienced claws.
by submission | Jun 22, 2017 | Story |
Author : Matthieu C. R. Cartron
“And why is it that you wish to explore deep space?” said Allen, the director of the space program.
It felt like an obvious question to Gyron. Why did anyone wish to explore the unknown? For the same reason no doubt.
“Exploration is the path forward for our kind,” Gyron said. “We cannot be afraid of what lies in deep space, for it is what we find in the darkness that may propel us forward. If I do not try then how can I expect anyone else to?”
Allen looked up from the table and stared into Gyron’s eyes.
“You are an ambitious man Gyron, are you not?”
“I like to think that my own personal interests are shared by the nation,” Gyron said.
“You have a wife and a young son Gyron. I will admit that you are the most qualified candidate to lead the mission, but you cannot expect to return home before the boy has completed school. And your wife, well, she will be far older than you when you return.”
“I understand this sir, bu-”
“I cannot help but notice, Gyron, that your own personal interests, your family and the mission, are in fact quite contradictory,” Allen said, leaning forward in his chair.
“I need this, sir,” Gyron insisted. “Once you’ve started on a path, you must travel to the end of it. I am determined to see all of my training, all of my hard work, materialize into something. And that will not happen. Not unless I go.”
Gyron pointed to the sky.
“I’ve dreamt of this my whole life sir. My name belongs in the history books; people must know what I can and will achieve. Please.”
*
Six months later, Gyron was gone. Aboard the V-76 model spacecraft, dubbed Father on behalf of a public vote, the crew of eleven men and thirteen women explored deep space. What they found was exciting, but they were unable to share it; sometime during the trip, the Father had lost radio contact with mission control—an expected cost of deep space exploration.
While it had only been two years for the crew, fifteen years passed quietly away on their home planet. When the crew of the Father returned home, they found the planet deserted, bereft of any human activity.
The people had left, and instead of returning to crowds of grateful citizens singing the praises of the Father, the crew was welcomed home by silence.
Gyron returned immediately to the house he had once lived in with his little family, hoping to find a clue that might guide him to them. But the house was empty, save for a small, toy spaceship that lay covered in dust on the floor of his son’s room. Oliver’s room.
Gyron plucked up the spaceship into his large hands and turned it over several times, feeling the jagged plastic scrape at his flesh. He began to quiver, and then finally sank to his knees.
On another day, Gyron might have grieved for his lack of fame or recognition, but today, it was his own introspection that drew him to the floor. He remembered that little spaceship. It was the same one Oliver had been holding as he had said his final farewell. The sobbing Gyron recalled his son’s soft eyes, and the words that had come out of his mouth.
“Father,” Oliver had said while hoisting the spaceship above his head.
“Why must you fly away when the spaceship is already here?”
by submission | Jun 21, 2017 | Story |
Author : Jules Jensen
I stopped and sighed, and then crossed my arms. This wasn’t a normal game animation, but there was no one out this far, so I didn’t have to pretend. A field of short grass met up with a lake. It was peaceful.
And it was hot. I hated the heat, but so did other players. The game helmet would stimulate their brains and tell them this area was hot, and most people didn’t want to be uncomfortable.
Maybe if I stuck around I’d die from heat. I thought I remembered something about extreme weather exposure. But that might just be their way to tell people not to stand in the fire.
I sat on the bank of the river and watched my shadow on the surface. I smirked. That was my name: Shadow-Over-Water. What was I thinking when I made that name? I don’t remember. I do remember being a twenty-something man that was dissatisfied with the doldrums of daily life, so when the game came out I jumped right in.
And it was great. Until I died. I don’t know how, but I felt it. I was still wearing the game helmet when it happened, which somehow made me stay alive in the game. My body is somewhere out there in the real world, being eaten by worms.
Ever since then, I never died in-game. That made me worth a lot of points.
The sky let out a loud ding.
The patch was complete. Players would now have their points value floating above their heads.
I was terrified that dying in-game would mean my mind would be just as dead as my worm-eaten body. As much as I came to hate my existence in a world with no sleep, food, or reality, it was all I had.
A sensation on the back of my neck alerted me that someone was nearby.
Having no defensive bonuses and not being battle-ready meant that I died in a single hit. I didn’t even get to see the other player.
Pain raced through my body. Blinding white light surrounded me.
And then I was flat on my back. The air was suddenly cooler. I stared up at large blue-barked trees.
“New re-spawn location looks good, right?” A voice beside me made me startle. There was a girl right there, a warrior.
Her eyes focused mechanically on the air above my head, where my information would theoretically be displayed. I couldn’t see that kind of stuff, so I had no idea what it showed her. “At least you went and got it over with.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Your kill value resets every time you die. So if you don’t want to fight people, just don’t kill anyone, because a zero is worth nothing. That’s what I did.”
I wasn’t sure if I was happy that I wasn’t dead, or if I was disappointed that I was alive again. It occurred to me that I’d be doomed to wander the game forever.
But that also meant that since I didn’t need to fear death, I could actually do things. There were fun quests out there, apparently. I might even make friends.
The warrior got up. I scrambled to my feet.
“Can you help me get better gear?” I asked and forced myself to stand in the default pose, pretending that there was nothing special about me.
She didn’t reply for a moment. Then her character smiled again.
“Sure.”
I knew suddenly that I didn’t have to be alone anymore, and that made it feel like this life was worth living.
by submission | Jun 20, 2017 | Story |
Author : Charles Paul Wallace
Ashura contorted her body, thrust her arm through the jagged rip in the ship’s inner hull and aimed the flash-driver at the stuck bolt.
Which, as ever, refused to turn.
She slumped back down to the shrapnel-strewn floor and considered her possibilities.
One: give up; wait for the remaining air to seep into space; die.
Two: Leave the escape pod compartment without, somehow, suffocating in the vacuum of the rest of the ship, and locate any surviving tools that might help solve her predicament.
Three: keep trying.
One was not an option. The Pan-African Space Agency was on shaky enough footing already without adding cowardice to the catalogue of errors. If corners hadn’t been cut on the ship’s construction, if Commander Musonda hadn’t panicked when the alarm flashed into life…She was determined the last remaining survivor of the mission would show no weakness.
Option two seemed an impossibility. The asteroid-net had scythed through the outer hull, obliterating the rest of the crew in one fell swoop. Musonda’s death had followed swiftly once he made the mistake of severing the command capsule from the power module. The resultant blast of nuclear material had billowed through the vessel’s interior in seconds. Ashura had heard it all from where she had taken shelter by the escape pods. She had only survived the blowback by pure luck. Now, her one chance of survival lay with…
Option three: keep on trying and hope for the best.
Small hope though it was.
She stretched her arm through the tear in the bulkhead once more. Centimetres away, the bolt sat beside the pod’s release mechanism, unconcerned and indifferent to her attempts to turn it. She switched on the screwdriver for the briefest second. How absurd, that her survival should rest on the waning charge of this tool. How narrow the divide between success and failure. She grimaced; the same could be said for the entire mission.
The bolt, naturally, didn’t move.
She withdrew her arm and tried to think. The dwindling oxygen supply was making such an exercise near-impossible; she tried pinching herself, slapping herself, anything to clear her thoughts. The fuzz inside her head ballooned, a clouding, impenetrable miasma…
A memory came to her: her mother, on her hands and knees in their barn. The farm where Ashura had spent her childhood seemed to manifest itself around her, out here in the void. Her mother, arm extended inside the only cow they could afford, was desperately trying to pull its calf out before the beast expired from the effort. Sweat drenched her forehead. Ashura could do nothing other than shout words of encouragement.
“Mother!” she screamed. “Pull! Pull!”
Her mother gave one last almighty wrench. With a sound of slurping mud the calf tumbled out onto the straw. The cow gave out a low that shook the air, turned its giant head and began to lick its child clean.
Suddenly Ashura was back on the ship. A sharp pain in her arm, and the stench of the farm became the stench of stale air. She found she had thrust her hand back through the hole without even realising it. The driver glowed. With a final, infinite effort she waved it above the bolt and jammed it forward.
It slipped from her grasp and tumbled to the floor with a clank.
Weeping, she lay her head on the cold metal of the hull.
And it was seconds before she heard the hiss of the turning bolt; and then the womb-like interior of the escape pod lay before her, ripe with the promise of rebirth in the stars.
