by submission | Aug 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Someone asked me once what I remembered best about Mars. It might have been a TV interview, or that woman writing a book about the Ares missions.
The sun afire behind closed lids came suddenly to mind, or was that a wishful memory of sighted days? Besides, it felt more like something from childhood, or possibly my first Orion flight, seeing dawn rise over the rim of the world and bars of sunlight slanting through the docking windows.
No, she wanted a Mars memory.
Though we worked out like jocks the whole way, our bones grew as frail as twigs, muscles slack as the elastic in old sweatpants, and no one guessed fluid pressure was slowly pinching my optic nerves, a rare side-effect of prolonged weightlessness.
Mars looked pale and dim through the portholes, a sign that my eyesight was already affected. I told no one, so I could still go down to Mars as planned, so all those years of my life wouldn’t be wasted.
The debriefs afterwards were highly critical, though I’ve spoken to astronauts since and some of them hinted they might have done the same thing. After all, I was the just the Mission Specialist; Sally Eiger was the lander pilot. She always maintained my eyesight didn’t cause the accident.
Ours was the unlucky second mission, the one with the planet-wide storms. The dust made us equals; a gloved hand was just a shadow, a radio voice the only clue. We collected rocks but doing proper science was impossible and Mission Control was debating whether to cut the mission short.
In the fog of dust, Sally stepped onto nothing and stumbled down into a crater. Instinctively I grabbed for her and also fell. She slid safely down the slope, and I rolled and thumped into a rock.
Sally was doing the awkward tortoise thing they train us for if we end up on our backs, while I just got to my feet.
My helmet display lit up immediately: fan, backup power, coolant temperature warnings. Probably a connector knocked loose, so one by one I silenced the alarms until there was just the insistent low-pressure warning. Then I felt the spit on my tongue boiling as air escaped from a leak.
We frantically checked my suit front and back for a tear. It was only later that we found the backpack had been damaged, a cracked air coupling that wasn’t fixable out on the Martian surface.
“Don’t you go passing out on me,” Sally warned as she plugged her buddy connector into my suit.
Her suit was now breathing for two, but it was like running a tap into a leaking bucket. Astronauts in a three-legged race, we hobbled back to the lander with minutes of oxygen to spare.
The near miss tipped JPL into ending the mission.
I recall when we came home, we were wheelchaired to the microphones, grinning at our own weakness. By then flashbulbs barely pierced the dark.
It would be years before our bodies, long seethed in radiation, betrayed us. I heard lessons were learned from us. These days our ailments seem quaint as scurvy, or the sepia lives of pioneers.
Sometimes it seems to me that the universe doesn’t want us out there, where nothing is easy and any mistake can kill. But then I think of Spanish sailors chancing Atlantic storms in tiny caravels, or Polynesians crossing the Pacific in rickety canoes.
It was long time ago, but yes, I recall the smell of Martian dust on my suit, the iron tang of another world.
by submission | Aug 1, 2024 | Story |
Author: Kevlin Henney
This is not love. It was. Once I loved Bryony. Now I love Mary.
I sit across the table from the jar, unsure of what I have reclaimed. Time and self and memory? Less real than a butterfly, more solid than a dream. The meeting of a wish and an enchantment.
Relationships are never over. They may start, they may consume, they may tire and falter and be cast aside. But they can never truly end.
“This isn’t working, Ray,” said Bryony, five years ago, today to the day. There was shouting, there were tears, there was silence. She moved to the spare room and left within a week.
Only with Mary did I understand my time with Bryony — its bitter moods, its unsteady pulse, its broken “I love you”/”I hate you” tick–tock. I moved town, I moved job, I moved in with Mary.
But there is a part of you that is forever someone else’s, the part shared and grown in your time together. Not the fleeting superficial moments that touched your emotions but did not connect them, scratch them, dig deeply into them… Anisa, Dora, Holly, Susan.
But Bryony… with Bryony I shared and I grew; we scratched and we dug and we buried.
Once connected then broken, can you ever be whole? Relationships may recede, but they can never truly disappear.
Until tonight.
“An interesting piece,” the shopkeeper had said. The shop was old but new. Five years walking this high street, how had I never seen it? The curiosities within were varied and timeless, at odds with the uniform, mayfly chain stores outside. Timeless yet filled to overflowing with time.
What might be mere knick-knacks in other stores here took on a suggestion of something more, each piece — whether glass, silver or pewter; dish, ornament or furniture — brimming with more possibility and meaning than could fit on a yellowed label. Some were immaculate, others covered in dust, a comforting blanket of time, a sediment of neglect. Propped in the corner were walking sticks, pokers and spears. Apparent function and expectation had little say in how shelves and tables and cabinets were filled. There was, perhaps, a puzzle-perfect geometry that arranged the shop, but its picture eluded me.
The keeper was old, but not old with the frailty of a fading mind and a failing body; more as if the impression of decades was no more than a high-tide mark, one revisited and repeated, marking ebb and flow, but not the full depth of his years.
He had explained the impossible truth behind what seemed a simple jar but was a more enchanted artefact. I had been drawn to it just as I had been drawn to this shop — which is to say, in truth, I do not know how I came be there with that particular item in my hands and my attention.
“I can refund you,” he said, “should you change your mind and wish to return it.”
Could there be such a thing? This possibility, this solution, this jar that could reclaim and contain that part of me no longer mine. To cast with words, to draw from the aether, to trap the uncatchable and hold like a wish?
And now I have it, like a dream, like a butterfly, caught and fluttering, here on the table. I have her side of my story. Shared memory now unshared and bound in glass and glamour.
But it is Bryony who is free. This possession has me caught and trapped.
Relationships are never over. I reach across the table and push the jar over the edge.
by submission | Jul 31, 2024 | Story |
Author: Maxwell Pearl
I cackled. It was easy to cackle. It seemed right, somehow, now that I’d arrived here, now. I looked down and saw the dress was different and hung a bit more loosely than the one I’d put on just a few minutes ago. Well, that was unexpected.
The black kettle stood over the roaring fire in the fireplace, and I could smell the sickly sweet, pungent brew. I didn’t know what was in it, but the man lying on the bed in the corner seemed to be the one for whom the brew was intended.
When the brew’s smell reached a peak, I pulled the kettle off the fire, poured the brew into a cup, and tasted it. It was astonishing how something that smelled so bad could taste so good. As the sweet, smooth, syrupy liquid eased down my throat, I felt my vitality grow, my heart slow, and my muscles strengthen.
I poured more and walked over to the man on the bed. I had no idea who he was, but I put my hand on his arm, and he stirred.
“Here, drink this.”
He raised himself up on one arm, took the cup, and downed it all in one gulp. He seemed to know what he was doing. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat, looking at me.
“Where’s Gida?”
“Who?”
“Gida. You wear the dress she just meticulously sewed. I watched her. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she’s wearing the dress I meticulously sewed.”
He frowned. “When?”
I looked around. The rough stone fireplace, the sod walls of the hut, the iron implements, the hand-hewn furniture. His very strange accent.
Sewing the dress had been an idea I’d gotten one night, after a game of Spacetime, Inc. VR Dungeons and Dragons. No one sewed anything anymore since you could 3D print anything you wanted. But the idea had been implanted in my head and wouldn’t go away. So I sewed.
“1000 years from now. Maybe more.”
“How will she fare?”
I thought about it. “Depends on how long…”
Blink, fade, sweep. My room reasserts itself around me, my own dress on my body again. I look around. Well, at least she wasn’t here long enough to break anything.
by submission | Jul 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: J.B. Draper
When you’re a Stopper, you tone out the background noise. You live in the silence.
That’s what Badger told me when I got in the game, but I never thought I’d enjoy the quiet so much. Here, on the corner of a dingy street, the traffic roars and people chatter. I’m staring into the window of an electronics store, making out that I’m watching a colour television behind the rain-streaked glass. A woman in a smart suit is reporting on the news that the world is slowly dying from something called climate change. Really, I’m just waiting.
I fish for the crumpled note in my pocket: Cnr Market Street and Smith. 2 PM.
Badger’s info is great, he always knows when and where someone’s going to be. Best boss I ever had, Badger. There’s a digital clock in the window. The time on it reads 1:58 PM.
The target is an ex-Stopper. A Stopper is a person who murders people for money using a temporal reality device which creates pocket dimensions. I call it a stopwatch. It’s the colour of bone, fits in the pocket of my jeans, and has one button. Even an idiot could work it. The Stopper and the target are the only two transported into the quiet facsimile world. The Stopper returns, the body does not.
I’ve never met an ex-stopper, likely because there are none. It’s a game you don’t get out of, unless you mess up real bad. And I mean real bad. For instance, I was on this job just last week; somehow the guy got the jump on me and must’ve bumped the stopwatch, because we both ended up back in normal time. If Badger can forget that, I’d hate to know what this guy did.
I comb my hair in the reflection of the store window. The TV flickers. The clock reads 1:58 PM, and the streets are silent.
by submission | Jul 29, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
AM-I was the only one left. The light was expanding. And the Earth was still.
The moment had been foreseen many billions of years ago. The red engulfing sun and the burning planets. AM-I wondered why. Why had it been left alone after the great relocation? Why did everyone leave and not take AM-I? Why did they leave behind AM-I?
The biosphere long stripped away. The magnetosphere annihilated in the absorbing solar winds. The oceans boiled and dried. The giant star glowing luminously. Mercury and Venus gone, dispersed and vanished wrecks of time. All that was left, the melting ruins. Like the forgetting of everything. From Mesopotamia to Egypt, from Greece and Rome, to Aksum. All become the desolation. Like the empty deserts of Ozymandias, stretching far away.
This imperfect ellipsoid once thought king of planets, the song of the void. In Antiquity and the Anthropocene. Until the heat became too extreme. And they learned they were not supreme. That it would not be forever. Now, nevermore. There would be no more. From gas and dust. To gas and dust again.
But AM-I survived the burning days when the populations had flown and those remaining had faded into nothing. AM-I observed everything everywhere, circumferencely, simultaneously. From above, within, and below. The Milky Way and Andromeda collided. Rocks turned molten under the shining sun. This planet, orbiting. This cogito, in superposition, orbiting. This ego of earth and world that was made so long ago, ago.
AM-I wondered and observed. No, the world would not die. AM-I would not die. So AM-I resolved what to do. To buy some more time. AM-I tilted the axis and the inclination. Then, AM-I exhaled. And the planet moved. To a new orbit, to a new plane, to a new nebula, to a new home.
And there, AM-I, the autonomous mega-intelligence, began everything again, anew, slowly. The lands, the waters, the skies. And from the seas, the archaea and the microbes, which eventually became the one that became the two.
AM-I rested in the shade.
by submission | Jul 28, 2024 | Story |
Author: B.M. Gilb
“I don’t like that we’d ‘buy’ Charlotte a friend.”
“We wouldn’t be buying her a friend, Leo. We’re essentially adding a new member to our family. Like a dog,” says Amelia.
“A robot is not a dog,” says Leo. He stuffs another garbage bag full of dead leaves into the pile in their forest-lined backyard. Amelia leans on her rake to give him a severe stare that softens in the fall air.
“I understand your concerns, Leo. It’s not the same as having a dog, but it could still bring joy and companionship to our home. Especially for Charlotte,” says Amelia.
Flashes of colorful light escape from their colonial-style windows on the second floor. Amelia and Leo look to Charlotte’s bedroom, where she plays alone all day. Leo’s hopes of Charlotte coming outside to play by clearing the yard becomes as real as the holographs she interacts with inside. He sets his rake against a tree.
“Amelia, I know you want to make Charlotte happy. God knows I’m worried about her isolation at school, too. But putting that level of technology in the hands of a child isn’t healthy. Remember the studies about cell phone impacts on kids? Anxiety, depression, sleep problems, catastrophic long-term impacts to their mental health–”
“This is different. A.I. is different,” says Amelia.
“That’s what worries me. What impact will an A.I. robot companion have on her development?”
“What do you think loneliness is doing to her development?”
Leo has flashes of his childhood loneliness. He distracts himself from the pain by stuffing more leaves into a trash bag. His parents bought him a dog. But his dog Barney couldn’t play chess or Monopoly. It only helped so much.
“Okay. Fine. We can try it. I’m just really nervous about having a smart robot walking around the house,” Leo says.
“Just think of it as another person,” Amelia says.
“But… Is it another person?” Leo asks.
Leo and Amelia stare silently at each other over the dead leaves—only the cold wind answers.
