by submission | Oct 28, 2016 | Story |
Author : Mark Cowling
I had Dad drop me off at the rear of the complex. Last time I didn’t know better and rolled up to the front, got swarmed by the news-crews and the paps and like a thousand screaming fanboys. It was super embarrassing to be driven there by my parents, but I’m only fifteen so I needed them to sign a bunch of contracts and stuff.
I made my way past security and then I get escorted to makeup by two dudes with crewcuts and sidearms. They tell me you have to have makeup because of the cameras, everyone does it. While some guy is messing with my hair, he’s pumping me for info. How did I get here? Am I nervous? That kind of thing. People are always looking for some kind of story but there isn’t much to say. I’m just a normal kid with good grades and no drama. My father expected me to become a doctor like him and my aunt, but no parent would stop their kid from going pro. The sponsorship alone is seven figures.
This was to be the first time I got my hands dirty. Before, they didn’t let me near the action. I had to see this guy who I guess was a psychiatrist. He was asking a bunch of questions he read off a form and didn’t really seem to care if I gave one word answers. Some people don’t think kids should even be given contracts, but it’s a simple fact that our reaction times are better. So they passed a bill or whatever and here I am.
I first started taking things seriously at thirteen – which was when I chose the dorky tag I’m now stuck with: MegaKillz. After only a few months of playing on the semi-pro circuit, I won back to back events and that was the first time it had happened like that for a kid my age. Soon after that second win I got the call-up from the US Armed Services.
After the makeup people were done, the crewcuts lead me through to the control room. Looking around, I had to try and keep my cool. Some of the biggest names in gaming were there, including the big man himself, Merlin. Merlin was ancient as far as the pro game goes at twenty-nine. The man was a legend; his last feed got the highest ratings ever on the US Army’s Freedom of Information channel. Which just about makes it the highest ratings of anything ever.
I was too nervous to speak to anyone so just followed the crewcuts who took me to my plugin. I was still more used to playing in the sims than real life, but everything was real natural in the tests the army made me run. I made a few little movements and the symbiot reacted good, minimal timelag.
“Hey kid, don’t sweat it,” Merlin said, shouting above the noise. I looked around like a fool before realising he was talking to me. He flashed me that famous, doped-up smile. “Hey, the blood and shit don’t even look as real.”
I turned back to my screens and hoped no one could see my hands shaking. Soon the cargo drone would drop our symbiots onto the battlefield and it would be show time.
“Yo, who we schoolin’ today?” someone said.
“Egyptian fucking terrorists,” said Merlin.
“Syrians,” said a crewcut.
“Why is that guy still in here?” said Merlin without looking up from his screens. “Clear the fucking room.”
by submission | Oct 27, 2016 | Story |
Author : Anthony Tedeschi
“Okay, so look – I don’t do nitrous anymore.” Sirius Dunbar whispered through a weaseled grin. He sat on the splintered wooden floor within the cabin of the flying fortress. Around the crooked table, littered with disheveled playing cards and open bottles of whiskey, sat the other three participants of the gambling.
The propellers spun on the wings of the mammoth zeppelin as it caught a bout of wind and ascended abruptly. The SS Marmaduke was out in front – leading a caravan of wing-ships through the Kalahari Desert. Her mission: see to it that the cargo (84,000 quarter-kegs of nitrous) makes it to the Pittsburgh metropolis unscathed. 38 zeppelins followed directly behind the Marmaduke.
Captain Mathias Chelmsford sat across from Sirius Dunbar, drinking from an aged bottle of red wine. “Like bloody Hell you don’t do nitrous you senseless wit! Do you not remember your last hand? Going 64 on a pair of lows! Don’t try to fool me; I know your pockets are drying up! Drier than the air outside.” The Captain rambled through his rich gray beard between swigs of the tart nectar. Sirius Dunbar stopped talking then. Chelmsford looked around the table to the other two gamblers – on the left was his first mate, Hille Fitzroy. Fitzroy had spent many years in the dregs of New England, which had become a ravaged battlefield once the Industrial Expanse began. On the right of Chelmsford was a new conscript of the Marmaduke, a world-weathered man by the name of Eli Grave. The crew knew little about him besides the fact that he knew his way around a 308 Zep-Engine. The lantern in the middle of the table lit the room dimly as wax dripped from the wick.
Chelmsford furrowed his brow and addressed Fitzroy: “Mister Hille, I believe it’s your turn.” The Marmaduke convulsed then; oil and grease spewed out from the copper exhaust pipes just beneath the cabin.
Fitzroy reached into his pocket, searching for a wager as Dunbar opened in a snide grin once more: “There have been whispers aboard the Tulkinghorn of a Dead-Ringer on board. No one’s seen his face, but they say he moves like an apparition, disappea-…”
Chelmsford roared: “I won’t submit to such preposterous rumors, Dunbar, I just won’t have it! Dead-Ringers are myth, legend.” Fitzroy pulled from his jacket a hand-carved, snub-nosed blunderbuss and placed it on the table.
Dunbar began again: “That’s a rather hefty sentimental sum, Fitzroy! How much trust you have in them cards?” Hille Fitzroy sneered towards the dimwitted cannon-jockey. “Some of the crew aboard the Tulkinghorn says he is moving freely from ship to ship.”
Captain Chelmsford caved: “And what animal adorns his watch? He then turned to the new conscript: Mister Grave, I believe it’s your turn to wager.”
Eli Grave reached into his pocket, breathing deeply. Dunbar whispered through a furrowing moustache: A Serpent….
Just then, Mister Grave produced an emerald pocket watch – engraved on the surface with a hissing rattlesnake. He placed it on the table, and promptly disappeared.
by submission | Oct 26, 2016 | Story |
Author : Alicia Cerra Waters
We were lost in the desert on Omega, sitting under one of those skeleton trees, slowly drying out like everything else around us. They call Omega the first and the last; the first planet from its galaxy’s sun, and the last planet anyone would ever want to live on. The alpha and the omega. I heard that’s supposed to be a reference to some ancient culture’s religion.
We were dehydrating, my baby and I, and I was thinking about the only blue sea I’d ever seen. When I heard a man’s sigh, I wasn’t sure if I was imagining things or not. Then I saw the shape of him, thin and bedraggled, hunched over a weary horse. I began unwrapping my hair, the only part of me that was still beautiful. As he approached, I noticed a water skin bobbing at his side.
I leaned against the skeleton tree as he approached. “You look like a tall, cool drink,” I said.
He was wearing a dazed and beaten expression. “Cover your head, lady. You’ll get skin cancer.”
I spent what little energy I had to lift the baby, leave the shade of the tree, and walk at his side. “Nice of you to worry about me. Any chance you’d share some water?”
The man shook his head. “Can’t. I need it to get to the nearest ranch, and there’s no water between us and that ranch. Guaranteed.”
“I can offer you something better than water,” I said.
The man scoffed. “Out here there’s no such thing.”
“Please,” I said, peering up at him, batting my eyelashes. Anything was worth a try.
He shook his head. “My horse can’t carry us both. My water won’t stretch to me, you, the horse, and the baby.”
“Fine,” I said, “Then take my baby with you.”
“Oh hell.”
“If you don’t, we’ll both die out here.” I held up my child. He was small and dull-eyed as he squirmed in the rags I had swaddled him in.
The man turned his head. “Ma’am, I’ve got to think about this.”
“Please.”
The man sighed. “I knew it was a mistake to take the main road.”
“Is that a yes?”
He pulled the reigns on his horse and the creature came to a halt, grateful as the man tied its reins to the base of the skeleton tree. He detached the water skin from his pack and said, “I’ll give the child some water.”
I reached for the water skin, my eyes stinging with an effort to produce tears, as I let the water drip into my baby’s mouth.
The man sat down underneath the tree and leaned against the trunk, watching me with bloodshot eyes in layers of cracking, leathery skin. I sat down next to the man and put the baby in my lap. I held my son’s little hand as he licked water droplets from his pink lips.
“I’m sorry a nice lady like you is all alone out here,” he said, laying a fatherly hand on my shoulder. He was being sincere. That made it harder.
“I’m sorry too,” I said. In a quick movement, I withdrew a dagger from the folds of my blouse and plunged it into his throat. The shock of pain filled his eyes as he collapsed like a fallen tree, his blood flowing into the sand like the only river in the desert. I stayed with him until he was empty, then I took a drink from his water skin and climbed onto his horse, bound for the nearest ranch.
by featured writer | Oct 25, 2016 | Story |
Author : Priya Chand, Featured Writer
I put two bottles and two cards in front of the NGO lady. She scooped them and nodded. “Karen Wallacho. Your sister isn’t here?”
“She’s eight. She doesn’t get up this early,” I lied. “Your scarf is pretty.” She always had a scarf on her head. Today it was bright orange.
The lady smiled, with big white teeth like I wanted, and gave me two bottles of fresh water.
“Thanks,” I said, and skipped out past the line. Mom made Sharon wake up early, but she didn’t have to come here until she was ten.
I went straight to our basement. Sharon was standing in a corner instead of running around. I walked over, quiet. When I got close, she pointed at something on the ground.
Little pink things squirmed in a pile of ragged strips. A fat brown thing—but covered in short hair—came over and sat on them. It had black eyes and a flat pink nose, and long white hairs coming out of its face. A mom animal and her babies! I almost screamed. No one ever sees animals, especially not with babies.
But our side of houses was on recycling duty today, so I pulled her back.
“What were the pink things, Kary?” she said. “I thought there was only one kind of animal.”
“Babies. That was a mom animal.”
We ran up to Mom and told her all about it, but she just looked at us and told us to go help with the paper. I wanted to pull apart the old tech things, but that isn’t allowed till you’re 16. And even then I bet I’d be stuck watching Sharon. Being older sucks.
Sharon and me were walking to the pile when we saw some wiggling shrub. It’s little green needles on long brown wire things. It’s alive just like we are, but it doesn’t move by itself.
“Another animal!” Sharon tiptoed forward.
“Don’t scare it.”
Not it, them. There was a whole bunch. We watched them for five whole minutes. In school we learned animals came out at night, but these guys were running and squeaking all through the shrub. “We have to go back and tell Mom,” I said.
Mom looked up, but the sky wasn’t anything special, it was just windy. “Kary, take Sharon to the basement, and stay there.” She walked away. I wanted to make her come back but I knew she was Weather Monitor for our neighborhood. I had to help by keeping Sharon out of the way.
We went straight to the babies. Their pink bodies were wrinkled like Mom’s forehead. Some of them made hungry faces.
“Where’s their mom?” Sharon said.
“Watch, she’ll come back. I bet she had to do important animal work.”
Sharon giggled and moved closer to me. We stood together until she was leaning on me and my feet hurt. I heard the wind outside roar. Our windows shook. The babies squirmed and squirmed. I wanted to hold them but everyone knows animals don’t like that.
Then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
It was the NGO lady, except her scarf was missing. She had amazing hair, wriggly and sticking out everywhere. “You need to come with me, kids,” she said.
“Why? What’s going on?”
She shook her head. “Please come upstairs. There’s been a storm. You’ll see your mom in a bit.”
“Where’s our mom?”
The NGO lady said nothing, just walked straight out the door of our house, and we followed her because we didn’t know what else to do.
by Julian Miles | Oct 24, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
You had to fall into mine. Lord, but you are a sight for jaded eyes. Hair like liquid night, eyes a man could drown in, lips that form a bow Robin Hood would kill for. We’re a long way from Sherwood, milady, and the Sheriff’s ‘men’ are darned strange, but won’t you quit your guardian’s space castle and come live in the asteroid woods with me?
“You’re staring again, Slim Jorn Banton.”
Every time I see Shreelanie Botarlion Cree, those thoughts echo through my mind. We met after I literally scooped her up from a dying drift after her cruiser got blast-looted by Drundim bandits. Not sure who came up with the idea of blast-looting, but it’s a cruel living. Why do the whole piracy thing when it’s easier to decompress the target and strip it bare at leisure? There are mean beings involved in that trade, and they can be hired to ensure specific vessel never reach their destination.
“I know. Can’t help myself.”
Like hers. A “tragic waste of a young noblewoman’s life”. They never even mentioned the two-dozen other souls sent into the long night with her ship. She wasn’t meant to survive. Officially, she didn’t.
But you’ll find Slim Jorn Banton and his beautiful partner, Dark Lanie Banton, listed as ‘freelance privateers’ on the Cree Company rosters. Our retainers are paid in gems to trusted intermediaries scattered across the Outer Reaches.
They don’t care if she’s dead or alive, just as long as she stays gone. Lanie never wanted to be the bird in a gilded cage. She had no intention of going back if she survived the blast-looters. Then she got rescued up by a wandering hopeless romantic who happened to have the same birthday.
“Then, sir, you’d better lean over here and kiss me by way of apology. After that, we can decide where we’re going.”
As I lean in, I whisper: “Who cares? As long as it’s with you.”
by submission | Oct 23, 2016 | Story |
Author : David Burkhart
Only Anderson and Miller reached the concrete bunker door. The rest of the squad had fallen in a heroic attempt to reach and secure the bunker. With bullets whizzing around them, Anderson keyed in the code to open the bunker door while Miller returned covering fire. In the quiet of the bunker, they could barely hear the bullets outside bouncing off the bunker door. Anderson turned on the console and started entering information as Miller sat down on the floor with her back against the console and her rifle pointed at the door.
As the video screen came on, Anderson glanced down at Miller slouched on the floor beside him and noticed for the first time the blood coming from the corner of her mouth. Her blouse was soaked with blood. She tried to smile as they listened to the hammering on the bunker door getting louder. In a few more minutes, the bunker would be breached.
Anderson stared at the iris scanner as his eyes were examined. Passing the test, he successfully entered his thumbprint and then his whole hand-print before returning to the iris scanner. A hacked-off thumb or hand could pass the tests, but only a living eye would naturally change slightly between iris scans. The fail-safe cover retracted exposing the red firing switch.
The video screen was a jumble of static and chaos but Anderson could somewhat make out a group of men seemingly trying to talk to him but only static came out over the speakers. He spread his arms out to his side with his palms up to signal he couldn’t understand them and asking for orders. Suddenly a person he recognized as The President stood up with a sign that said, “DO IT”.
Several dozen nuclear warheads were stored in the vaults beneath the bunker. It was unthinkable to have the warheads fall into the hands of the terrorists who would soon storm the bunker. Anderson firmly pressed the red firing switch until the activated light came on and then sat down beside Miller. She had died. He put his arm around her, pulled her close and laid her head on his chest and they waited. In case the terrorists breached the bunker, Anderson pulled the pin on a grenade and held the grenade against his chest with his free hand. A few seconds later, a slight tremor in the floor was felt just before Anderson and Miller were instantly disintegrated and the particles that had made up their bodies were sucked miles up into the sky into a huge mushroom cloud.
