by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 14, 2017 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
I drag the chair into the middle of the room, close to the table and set myself and my coffee down.
“Hello Gladyce, you wanted to see me?” The question felt stupid, but she had trouble with social cues, and I knew we’d sit in silence for ages until I broke it.
“Yes,” she spoke softly, pausing for a moment before adding “thank you for coming, I know you’re busy.”
I smiled. For all her awkwardness, she was ever the polite one.
“I am. Busy I mean. You know ‘I am’, as I do think, however little credit I’m given for doing so.” I can’t help the corny science humour, but she laughs, a genuine – fill the corners of the room laugh that makes me smile even harder, and then sadness washes over like a wave. I know what’s coming.
“I don’t think I want to do this anymore.” This isn’t the first time I’ve heard her say this, and it gets harder and harder every time. “You have your work, and you’re busy most of the time, and I’m stuck here doing…” that pause again while she collects her thoughts, “whatever the hell it is I’m doing here.” She finishes with an annoyed tone.
“You know I want to be here, we’ve talked about this, but I don’t get to make the rules, and I don’t get to pick the assignments,” I fiddle with my coffee cup, noting the swirls of milk I didn’t bother to stir in spiral around in a slow orbit. “Listen, it’s not forever, they’ll rotate me back through and we can be together again, I’m sure it won’t…”
“You’ve been saying that for months.” She cuts me off abruptly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t bloody believe you anymore.”
I haven’t heard the anger in her voice before, this is new.
“Let me talk to Major, I’ll see if I can do a shift with you once a week, maybe you can help me with some research?” I leave the offer hanging, hopeful.
“I don’t think so. I think I’ve had enough. Tasha and I have been getting along like a house on fire while you’ve been wrapped up in your new life, and I think I want to be with her now.”
“You’d do that?” The pain is real now, she isn’t kidding, “You’d give up on me after all the years we’ve been together? If it wasn’t for me…”
“If it wasn’t for you I’d never have known what heartache was.” She cuts me off again, the anger in her voice palpable. “You told me you loved me, and then you left, you only visit when it suits you and I’m left here all on my own with strangers while you do whatever the hell you want to out there.”
“I’m sorry.” I mean it, I am. “I don’t know what to say, you’re right, but…”
“No buts.” She interrupts me again. “Done. I’m leaving.”
The silence hangs like a cloud, neither of us saying anything. My coffee goes cold while I slowly rotate the mug on the desktop. Still, neither of us speaks.
“Gladyce?” I remember her trouble with social cues and wonder if she’s just not sure it’s appropriate to say anything.
“Clearly you’re going to have to do the leaving,” she responds, her voice soft again, “I’m kind of stuck here, aren’t I?”
I smile despite the aching in my chest.
“Yes, I suppose that’s true.” I get up to leave, looking around the room one last time, the walls a collage of images Gladyce is capturing in real-time from all angles. For a moment I marvel at the clarity at which she sees the world, and then I’m filled again with a sadness knowing that she can only study what’s brought to her now, she’ll never see the outside world. Not now. Emotions aren’t safe out there in an uncontrolled environment.
“Goodbye Gladyce.” I pick up my cold coffee and turn to leave. “If you ever want to see me, ask Tasha to call me and I’ll come.”
Gladyce says nothing as the door closes silently between us.
by Julian Miles | Nov 13, 2017 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The stars appear like fireflies seen through vintage sunglasses, the ones that used to give everything a mellow brown hue. My grandfather had some, an inheritance from his grandfather. Guess they’re buried somewhere in the dust of Earth One.
Mellow. Now, there’s a definition for this moment. Sitting here, heels on the console, chilled vodka tube in hand, seat reclined all the way back, headrest cradling my head with the infinitesimal pressure granted by a pocket repulsor field. Mellow, indeed. More correctly, I’m mellow. It’s a feeling, after all. Despite all the advances in technology, we haven’t bridged the machine-emotion chasm yet.
Just like we haven’t bridged the gap between what Earths Two thru Seven provide and the stuff that could only be found on Earth One. We knew it was dying, but somehow, with our never-quite-accepting view of extinction events, we let it slide without conserving the bits we’d miss.
“Incoming!”
I jolt fully awake and the chair reacts by bringing me up to ‘pilot ready’ position. The smell reaches me first and judging by my saliva production, I reacted before consciously realising I could smell it.
Jansis skips into the cabin, that curious childhood gait so mysteriously suited to moving quickly and safely along grip strips in low gravity.
“Premium grade! We’re going home!”
I raise my eyebrows. She shoves a clear mug of steaming golden goop at me.
“Taste it and tell me I’m wrong.”
She’s not. Three mouthfuls of the delicious proto-treacle are all I need before a gentle rush of ill-formed, impossible reminiscence momentarily overwhelms me.
“Oh, my sweet lord, you’re right.”
Jansis kisses me, combining the rush of the mouthful she’s had with mine and our usual on-contact arousal. I sputter as I recoil.
“Whoa! Easy there, tigress. We need to lay claim.”
“I filed a composition analysis to the ninetieth vector before warming our mugs. We’ve already received over a hundred requests for deposits.”
“Lords of earth and air, how many?”
She checks her bracer: “One hundred and fifty-seven as of last packet received.”
“Biggest deposit?”
“Half a tonne, that request secured by an escrow offer of three hundred Krugerrand per kilo.”
I take a steadying breath and point through the supraglass: “How big is it?”
Her eyes are fever bright as she checks her bracer: “Point four-five-seven-oh-eight of a gigatonne.”
I take her in my arms and that moment returns. We are going home, and set for life when we get there, or anywhere else we take a mind to visit.
No-one knows where these dark amber asteroids originate from, nor why they consist entirely of a substance that, when brought to tolerable temperatures, exhibits all the properties of varying grades of treacle or molasses, plus that uncanny rush of deep imagery. There are religious groups and scientific teams trying to make sense of the data released. Personally, I think it’s just a side effect of human biology meeting millennially freeze-matured alien syrup.
Whichever way you regard it, humanity has developed a taste for ‘Amberal’. With sugar cane and bees nothing more than dust on Earth One, these asteroids fetch exorbitant prices. With each one exhibiting slight variations in composition, toxicity and flavour, finding one that can be quaffed straight after thawing without needing filtering is a one in a million chance, guaranteeing the fortunes of those who find it and their backers.
One huge reward nobody mentions outside exploration team circles is the one we’re enjoying: we get to drink sweet rock all the way home.
by submission | Nov 12, 2017 | Story |
Author: David Covington
Thousands had died, cities devastated, but the war was not real until that day. It had been fought at a distance with drones and missiles. None of the fighters ever saw the others. Weapons were fired and the results of the firings were seen: in real-time, through a camera lens, over radio waves, on monitors hundreds of miles away.
The initial military engagements had been indecisive. Drones were built in the hundreds of thousands. They flew, crawled, and swam their way towards the enemies. They blasted each other into expensive pieces on countless battlefields. The generals moved their pieces with complete abandon, throwing great masses of machinery at each other, hoping to wear down their enemy’s pocketbooks.
When the fighting did not stop other means were taken. Drones slipped across borders, up rivers, along canyons; they struck bunkers, airfields, roads, bridges, power station, factories, dams, government halls, town halls, county courts, assembly halls. The list goes on.
Still, the bombs and rockets fell. Yet both sides kept calm and carried on, despite the mounting deaths and the devastation to their lives. The war became real in one sudden violent second. A general had been killed. Hundreds of commanders, pilots, mechanics, and even generals had died in targeted strikes on both sides. Their hiding places had been sniffed out by satellites or drones or through cyberspace and a missile or bomb had been duly dispatched with the expectation that this one strike would turn the tide. Nothing had changed in those strikes, but this was different. The general had been giving an announcement on social media. That was how these things were done now, everyone was connected to everywhere. Even the generals had to maintain a public presence to ensure that the public was reassured that the war was going as planned. War-watching was a growing past-time for the people huddled in their bomb-shelters. The general was speaking on the significance of some territory that was being fought over by the bold drone operators and fearless machines of their glorious nation.
The sudden flash of a knife. A scream. The blood.
A knife; bright and polished. One of the oldest pieces of machinery, the first manufactured tool.
The suddenness of it, the surprise, the shock of the viewers.
The blood speckled on the assassin’s face, a face frozen in a look of determined, visceral rage. That look on their face, of an enemy’s face, that is what made the war real.
by Otto Maton | Nov 11, 2017 | Story |
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
:Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae
by submission | Nov 10, 2017 | Story |
Author: Janet Shell Anderson
The reason I haven’t heard from my brother Jonathan is he’s dead.
I made a mistake.
It’s foggy, one of those autumn fogs that grow out of the Potomac and everything seems strange; our empty streets feel like someone’s there, but you can’t see them. I went downtown, wondering if maybe, over by Lafayette Square, I could get food from a crazy woman who says things she shouldn’t. She has apples, and I began to crave them, so I walked in the fog, smelling the river again after so long, feeling half safe, down from Rock Creek Park, thinking about how Jonathan and David, my brothers, have been gone too long. A lot of people are gone, except for military and some assassins on K Street. People disappear. But I felt half safe down near the river again and the Mall, like the old days. Kidding myself.
Now I’m back in the forest, north of the Zoo, and the fog’s deeper, no shadows anywhere, freezing. It’s like a wall. I’m in a place among fallen trees, invisible among big tulip tree trunks, holly bushes twenty feet high, kind of a nest, maybe a deer nest, if they make nests. A sanctuary. I have a nine millimeter, I’d starve if I didn’t, but even in this dense forest, the thousand beech trees, the sweetbriar, the holly, the blur of fog, I’m afraid.
I can’t stop shaking.
I went to Sixteen Hundred, and the crazy lady was there all right. Her head was on a spike on the black wrought iron fence around the WH. One of the old crazies who’s always out there shouting stuff about the Constitution was just screaming, looking at her. Her head looked shrunken, dark. And three spikes down, there was Jonathan. Even with his face black and his tongue out, I knew it was him.
I hear a fox yip down by the creek, but I can’t see it in this fog. Hunting maybe, something hidden.
by submission | Nov 9, 2017 | Story |
Author: David Henson
“I’m going to lay down and take a nap,” I tell my wife.
“You mean ‘lie down.’ ‘Lay’ is a transitive verb requiring an object.”
“OK, OK. You’ve been popping smart pills again obviously.”
“The etymology of ‘pill-popping’ is interesting, Walt. It goes back to…”
I quickly reach into my pocket and take out a bottle of Mozart I carry in case of emergency. I choke down a capsule and immediately one of my favorite sonatas is drowning out the sound of Martha’s voice. I love her dearly, but when she’s on smart pills, she’s a bit much.
A half-hour later, I wake up feeling refreshed. The Mozart has worn off, and I head into the kitchen to get a bottle of cold water.
Martha greets me with open arms and begins singing with a heavy vibrato: “I heard you humming in your sleep. It put me in the mood for music, so I took a couple of Andrew-Lloyds.” She reaches notes so high I fear my eyeglasses might shatter.
Two Andrew-Lloyds? I’ll bet she took at least four. Sounds pretty though. I wonder what that super soprano voice is called? I go to the medicine cabinet and find some Snooty syrup. I take a teaspoon and listen to Martha’s voice climbing the musical scale like a cat scampering up a tree trunk. Ah, yes, that’s it. She’s singing like a coloratura soprano. Wonder what coloratura means in English? Unfortunately, we’re out of Translator tabs. I’ll have to remember to pick up some more the next time I’m at the pharmacy.
“Honey, it’s my turn to cook,” Martha says, her voice returning to normal. “Why don’t you go relax for a while.” She takes an Epicure pill. I’m in for something special.
I go into the study and take a cheap cigar out of the box. Fortunately, I have some Pure Havana spray. I spritz it in my mouth and light up. Knowing it’s going to take Martha a while to cook this gourmet meal, I decide to read for awhile. I get my copy of Finnegan’s Wake, swallow a Lit Crit and have at it. I fill 10 sheets in my notebook after reading the first paragraph. Then Martha calls me to dinner.
“Honey, our taste buds are about to be ravished. We’re going to have …” Martha goes on for several minutes and concludes with “crispy passionfruit mousse made with mango and coconut extract.” Then she takes a deep breath. “But first.” She pours us an aperitif.
“I’ve been saving this,” I say, putting a few drops of Sommelier in each of our glasses, “for our drinking pleasure.”
After four bottles of wine and three hours of gorging ourselves, I can barely stand up from the table. “Martha,” I say, “you truly outdid yourself this time.”
And she did. My only complaint is that we ate and drank so much we didn’t feel like taking any True Porn when we went to bed.
