by submission | Oct 15, 2016 | Story |
Author : Paul Alex Gray
“See everyone’s got a level,” says Cassie, swigging more than a mouthful of lager. “You can go way over. But you’ll pay. We paid! Remember? You’d always swear ‘never again!’”
She smiles broadly and nods at my glass. I take the hint and swallow down as much as I can. I’m already too drunk.
“Ahh, but before long, you level out. That yearning comes back. A tickle in the throat. You’ll be ready again.”
Outside it’s blowing a gale, the rain smashing against the pub windows. I haven’t seen her in years. Haven’t even been to London in a decade.
Then I’d had that dream. Or what had surely been a dream.
I’m jet lagged as all hell. My movements don’t even seem real. Twenty-eight hours on a plane. The disapproving stare from June’s mum still burned in my memory. Why do you have to go now? Is it really that important?
Her dad was furious I was leaving so soon after the funeral. I think he still held me accountable somehow, even though the cops had cleared me. I was in Melbourne when she disappeared, a thousand k’s away.
“You know,” says Cassie “I had a huge crush on you back when we flatted together.”
Classic Cassie. She’s smiling with that lopsided grin the same I remember, except with longer lines around the edges now. She still has that elfin hair, now flecked with grey, like me. Eyes bright like gold.
“I guess… I wasn’t so good at picking up on things back then.” I mumble.
There’s a loutish cheer. The crowd here is mean. Why did she take me to this place? A little while back some blokes got into a brawl. I’m ten years too old and ten thousand k’s too far removed from this life to be here.
“All good Mark,” she smiles. “We’ll get her back.”
I notice a bloke has come up, he’s glaring over us. Stares me up and down, then sneers at Cassie. He’s about to say something when she slams her glass down.
“The fuck’s your problem?” she spits.
“Bit lippy there luv,” he growls. “Have to drop that if you wanna get with me.”
His mates laugh and he leans in, moving his face up to kiss her.
There’s a flash of movement. Something hot and bright bursts from Cassie and hits the bloke sending him flying across the room. He cracks his head on the pool table edge with a sickening sound.
“What the fuck!” yells his mate.
I’m an idiot for calling Cassie. For coming here. And yet… that dream. Too real. Too clear. A dream of June, locked inside a tower above a field that I could draw with my eyes closed. And Cassie… holding a sword, beckoning me to come with her.
Cassie finishes her beer and slams the glass on the table. She waves her arm and a thin line of light seeps from her finger. Only it stays where she moves, cutting a shimmering oval before us.
The crowd is surging, angry and spoiling for a fight. I can barely register them for what I see through Cassie’s oval of light. A field of corn under a blood red sky. A dark tower on a hill in the distance.
“Come on Romeo,” says Cassie, a glowing beam of fire in her hands. “Time to get your girl back.”
by Olivia Black | Oct 14, 2016 | Story |
Author : Olivia Black, Staff Writer
Cold. For so long it has only know the frigid expanse of deep space, numb to the wonders, and horrors, of the galaxy. In this solitary existence, time has no meaning. It knows nothing, feels nothing as it hurtles ever forward, eon upon eon. There is only the cold.
And then heat, a burning so intense that it screams into awareness it barely comprehends. Something has entered its path. No, not entered, but drawn it onto a new course, one of resistance and fire. The thick cocoon of ice that has ever sheltered and protected it begins to melt away. The superheated vapour sizzles and snaps as the pressure shifts. Without the frozen shell, there is only the pitted core, forged at the centre of the universe. It becomes aware of a new sensation as the whistling air screams and pops on contact, roaring impossibly loudly as it careens downward in an uncontrollable descent.
The fall is interminable. Rock splits and peels away, disintegrating into dust and flaming away as gravity digs her greedy fingers ever deeper into the core. The centre cannot hold. It does not want this existence, struggling as painful fissures form that threaten to rend it into many pieces. Not even that will stop it from crashing into the immovable green orb. It longs to feel the cold again, and the silence.
Impact. Sudden, screeching halt. The ground quakes and quivers, as a tidal wave of dirt and rock rises up in every direction, moved by the sheer force of its collision with the surface. And then the upheaval stops. For the first time in its long existence, it is not in motion. There is quiet again. Not the silence of the dead void of space, but merely of the absence of life. The air sizzles around it as what remains of its core begins to cool. The fissures deepen and spread over its surface, creating a rich topography. Though it is greatly diminished from what it once was, this new existence is tolerable. The green orb is neither cold nor hot.
As equilibrium is achieved, there is a shift. The fissures widen and crack, expanding from the centre. The pitted metal falls away in chunks. It wants to wail, but has no voice. It wants to hide, but finds no shelter. The light from the orbiting star filters through the atmosphere, blinding it. It has never known anything other than darkness. There is no return to what was.
Now, it feels the weight of time passing as it adjusts. Four spindly legs emerge from the centre, finding purchase on the scorched ground with pad and claw. Spurs and spines adorn the joints of each leg as it tests the strength of these appendages. They appear adequate. It raises its body up out of the shell of the meteor, blinking its two sets of eyes. The air tastes… sweet, unspoiled. Its oily black carapace glints in the sunlight. The climb out of the crater will be a long one, but the wonders of the green orb away it. At last, it is alive.
by submission | Oct 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : Riley Meachem
The stars in our sky are run on electrical wires. Shaped like logos and dyed the color of neon and glass. They come on the fronts and backs of cars, on huge billboards. There’s a sort of beauty to it, I suppose, knowing that your mountains were drawn by architects and city planners, that your grassy fields were purchased for sporting events. No, not beauty. A beauty off-shoot, a less popular cousin, some generic brand-name aestheticism. But it’s the only beauty I know.
I’ve lived here, as long as I can remember. When it was just five square miles set adrift out on the sea. When the skies weren’t always ablaze and children could run out on the streets, while shopkeepers and fishermen and workers of every kind went about their business. Where everyone knew each other. When we were just an odd social experiment– a city built on pontoons and set to move around the seas like a ship. Then, of course, things changed—as they always do.
People are wont to tell you change is always a good thing. Well it’s not. But it’s not a bad thing, either. Change is just change. It doesn’t care who or what it affects, what happens when it comes. Doesn’t bother moralizing or deciding whether or not to be good or evil. No, it’s just change. And it comes rambling forward without stopping.
I was too young to remember what it was really all about. Just that the first bomb fell in Pakistan, the next in some place called India. Then others joined in, fiery ICBM’s annihilating whole civilizations, their buildings and their memories. I cannot even remember most of the world before the bombs started to fall. All that’s left of them are the dust clouds that still linger in the skies.
Fallout swept over the land, killing crops and animals in places that had never so much as seen a missile silo. But our city in the sea grew. Morphed, perhaps, is a better word. People flocked here from all over, any survivors crawling, floating, swimming from the wastelands to this lone oasis. And we welcomed them. They brought business, built houses.
Then winter set in, but we just kept moving southward and southward. And then the fish started to die. Night set in as the sun was blocked out by the dust. And more people kept coming and we kept floating along, desperate to survive for some unknown reason. Living on where it’s always night, the air is always cold, and the water is always warm.
One by one the stars have started to go out, as fuel dwindles. The divers have had to go deeper and deeper to find food. We’ve started making farms with solar lamps. It’s really quite ingenious what this species can do when it isn’t busy killing itself. Plants that grow towards fake suns and stars that don’t exist.
And the funniest thing is, our impending doom doesn’t even bother me at all. It just seems so unimportant now.
I wonder why we bother going on in a world like this. I wonder what my role is in this puzzle that seems to be black and devoid of any image. And I cry, as I always do, as I stare out at the inkwell ocean meeting the jet stone sky, wondering when the blackness will overflow and wash all this away.
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by submission | Oct 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
I entered the war room, the data all pulled up on my reader. The e-whiteboard at the front told me that one of the colonels was trying to sell the idea of a space ark to the Admiral, telling him to devote materials to escaping the Solar System and trying to hide. The Admiral had a look of frustrated acceptance on the issue when I came to a stop and saluted.
“Admiral,” I said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but the Intelligence Division has urgent information from spy telescopes on the Jidehri reinforcements.”
He sighed, “Go ahead.”
“We’ve taken time to look at the star on the other side of the wormhole,” I began, my voice shaking a little, “as well as its immediate surroundings. We’ve managed to identify several planets on the other side. The hole isn’t aligned correctly to show us Mercury or Mars, but Venus, Earth and Jupiter have been resolved after we ran the images through some pattern-recognition software–”
“Hold on,” he said, holding up a hand. “You’ve lost me. It sounds like you’re saying you saw our Solar system through one of their wormholes.”
“That, uh, that is correct, sir,” I managed to utter. “The Intelligence Division has come to the conclusion that what we saw through these wormholes were our planets in other universes. We think that the Jidehri open them when the war in one universe doesn’t go their way, and then pass through to another universe where we, the enemy, are having worse luck. This essentially gives them control over probability, and allows them to devote less resources to lost causes while making their successes even greater.”
“So there have been countless universes where the Jidehri have just up and left. No resistance, no warning.”
“Right. And countless times, universes like ours have received more forces of conquest, leaving us with even less of a chance, prompting even more versions of the Jidehri fleet to come here and fight. It’s a positive feedback loop, and the way things are going now, it’s going to put this universe’s humanity in the ground.”
The war room was silent after my dramatic ending. The officers in the room looked with pale faces at the Admiral and I, partly in fear of the Jidehri, partly in fear of the Admiral’s reaction. Which happened to be a brightening of his eyes and a smile creeping across his face.
“My God! This, ladies and gentlemen, is the turning of the tables! If we put up enough resistance in the coming battle, the Jidehri will leave overnight! Send out a broadcast– I want to notify all of human space about this development.”
“But sir,” I returned, “we’re in a losing universe that, for just that reason, is going to keep on losing! I think we need to take Colonel Rinyan’s proposal of a last-ditch ark seriously. It may be our last option.”
The Admiral actually laughed at me. “Nonsense! If we make it just a little difficult for these damn things, they’ll scrap this war and move on. I wish I could help the next universe over, but the only thing we’re capable of doing is saving ourselves. And that sounds a lot more plausible all of a sudden. Rinyan, I’m afraid we’ll be using the resources you want for the ark on something a little more… militarily oriented. Get the Engineering Division to design some new battleships. This war ends in a fortnight, one way or the other.”
by featured writer | Oct 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : Priya Chand, Featured Writer
Sam looked at the tickets and crumpled paper, already softening under the onslaught of summer heat and Mei’s palms. “I never been to some classics concert before,” he said, holding his fists tight against his sides.
“You never sat in the nootropic section, either.”
They’d been to two other concerts—inside the walls, anyway—in their seventeen years. Sam licked grit off his upper lip and said, “How you get those tickets, anyway?”
“Same way you got cake for my birthday. See, the waiver.” Mei waggled the crumpled paper in his face. “I already signed, but your ticket not gonna activate until you do, too.”
Sam smoothed out the waiver and nodded when he saw the Tuskegee Convention seal in the corner. Certified ethical. “Fine.” When he pressed his finger down, the nanofibers winked and both of Mei’s tickets turned pink. “When is it, anyway?”
“Six hours, but it’s in Shivnagar.”
“Shit.” Sam tugged his shirt off with the deliberation of someone who owned two outfits, both threadbare.
“Yeah, I got a dress this morning at Hydracity. All they wanted was skin.” Mei raised her thumb, which barely looked raw. She’d once scraped her palm sneaking into a kitchen. Sam could see the scar from the infection.
“Coulda warned me,” Sam muttered, but by then Mei was halfway down the street, sandals slapping around the oily puddles that littered the road. Awnings flapped in her wake, droplets scattered. Sam hoped the acid wouldn’t wreck his clothes. Scoring goods was harder for boys than girls—after centuries of gender imbalance, there wasn’t a huge demand for male data.
#
There was a whole line of teenagers outside the stadium. Most of them had decent clothes and shining hair, but when Sam looked at their feet, he saw mud and ragged toenails. There were other lines of people in heat-wick salwars or jeans—the kind of people you’d expect at a classics concert. He bet none of them had ever sold data, or if they had, it was the kind used to make new cures or enhancements. Sam had a friend who’d gotten out of the slums that way.
The ticketwalla didn’t make eye contact with Sam, just slapped a patch on his hand and shooed him through. “Come on,” Mei said, dragging him past the signs to their section.
The seats were disappointing. Plastic, small, same as the movie theater in their own neighborhood. At least the setup below looked fancy. Backup dancers were going through their paces as techs guided speakers and screens into place. “How long?”
Before Mei could answer, they were blasted with noise.
Sam couldn’t figure out what was going on—the crowd roared along to lyrics in some near-dead language, one he’d missed in nine years of school—and then the patch activated.
Bliss, he was riding a dolphin leaping through a sea of sound, tears of joy. The strings slipped into mourning, and a moment later he was sobbing like he hadn’t known he could sob. Sam caught Mei’s face out the side of his eyes and saw it glistening. She hadn’t cried when she first showed up, a six-year-old from the hydroponics, but it was lit in neon tonight.
After it was over, Sam and Mei agreed that the classics were pretty good. When the under-thirties job market reopened and they got placed in a factory, maybe they’d put a little aside and learn Telugu.
Mei traded her fingerprints for train tickets, and as the silver bullet dove under the swamps, terabytes of data streamed through the skyscrapers floating above.
by Julian Miles | Oct 10, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The room is a stock F-Class residential dwelling. With three people and a forensics robot within, it’s one small child short of standing room only.
A young man in a lurid red suit, cut in the fashionable retro-zoot style, turns to his bearded boss with a look of mystification: “What’s a ‘buk’?”
Detective Dru looks up: “It’s an intermediary form of collated hardcopy, printed on sheets of pressed wood pulp.”
“It’s made of wood? No wonder they called it pay-per!”
“You’re not wrong. Now, back to the matter at hand: why does Miss Priscilla Townsend, a twenty-year-old student, living on the poverty line, have a shelf full of them?”
The third member of the team, a woman possessing eyes seemingly too large for her narrow face, waves a hand toward the shelf: “Initial assessment has their value at mid or high six figures, depending on content.”
Dru nods: “Tomas, get someone from Antiquities to catalogue and bag everything on that shelf, then get me the last five years of our victim’s life. Loanna, find me something on the family. We’ll meet at the office in two hours.” With that, he turns and carefully makes his way out of the cramped domicile.
Their office was a converted B-Class residence, salvaged from the last flood before the Thames Levee went up. On the flat roof, where Dru was, you could see the broken line of low islands that marked where the Thames Barrier had been.
“She was the great-granddaughter of Elliot Parson, boss.”
Dru knew that name, but the details eluded him. He sighed: “Go on, then. Remind me.”
Tomas grinned: “Headmem, boss. You really should get some before your mental archives of London criminality and how to catch them are lost to us.”
“I meant remind me about Mister Parsons.”
Loanna joined them: “He knows that, but couldn’t resist it.”
Dru pointed at Tomas: “Tell.”
“Elliot Parson, last curator of the British Library, disappeared fifty-three years ago, just after the library system was abandoned. During the transfer of assets to the British Museum, it was found that he had stolen a huge selection of collectables from the deposit archives in Bolton over the preceding decade. Most of those items are still missing, and all of the items on the young lady’s shelf are part of that haul. She died of malaria because she wouldn’t sell stolen goods to pay for treatment.”
Loanna nodded: “We’ve actioned a death mandate for her data presence, and her private blog details exactly that. It also seems that Elliot may not be as dead as everyone thinks. He, or someone purporting to be him, sent those books to her three years ago when she started university.”
Dru stared out across the Thames Delta: “Send the actionable data to Interpol, arrange for her ecofuneral, and hand the books over to the British Museum.”
As Tomas and Loanna reached the door to the stairs, Dru’s raised voice reached them: “Don’t forget to get an itemised physical receipt as well as an electronic one. There are far too many academics in that place for there not to be an indebted hacker or two.”
