by Bob Newbell | Sep 20, 2016 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Dalynn sighed as the space elevator approached Depot #4 of the Ring Around The World. He had had some trepidation from the moment he’d stepped onto the elevator in Pontianak, Indonesia. He’d been invited to come to high lunar orbit by his friend, Edrun.
Dalynn had met Edrun online five years ago. They had discovered that they shared quite a few interests and a friendship had developed. In time, Dalynn discovered that despite their common affinities, Edrun had more than a few idiosyncrasies. To say Edrun was obsessed with the turn of the third millennium was an understatement. While the century or two before and after the year 2000 had no shortage of aficionados, the era was Edrun’s religion. Dalynn was quickly losing interest in Edrun wanting to include him in his borderline pathological fixation on a time nearly a thousand years in the past.
After a half-day’s shuttle ride to high lunar orbit, Dalynn disembarked in a spacesuit and flew via rocketpack to the coordinates Edrun had provided. Within the span of thirty minutes, Dalynn was face to face with Edrun’s latest indulgence.
“Come on in!” said a voice over the speakers in Dalynn’s helmet.
Dalynn was soon awkwardly walking the corridors of the odd spacecraft.
“Welcome aboard!” said Edrun with a smile.
Dalynn ignored his greeting. “Why isn’t this thing spinning?” he asked.
“It’s not supposed to spin,” said Edrun. “The layout is planar. It’s supposed to have artificial gravity.”
“There’s no such thing,” replied Dalynn. “Mass, linear acceleration, or centrifugal force. Those are the only options. What you’ve done here is…” Dalynn took a few steps. He had to pull up forcefully to take his foot off the deck of the ship. When he lowered it again, it slapped down against the floor with a clank.”
“Electromagnets under the deck plating,” admitted Edrun. “That’s as close as I could get. Let me show you around.”
The ship was large and empty. Dalynn and Edrun were the only people on board. As Edrun conducted his tour, Dalynn noted how the strange vessel’s design was unlike any spacecraft he’d ever been on. There was something fake about the ship. Dalynn tried to search for a word to describe his impression of the blue-grey rooms and corridors. Theatrical. That was the word. The vehicle seemed less a real spaceship and more of a stage set for a spaceship.
“Try the chair,” commanded Edrun when they’d reached top deck of the ship.
Dalynn seated himself and found that the black leather-like material of the chair was mildly adhesive. He almost forgot he was weightless as he examined the brightly colored buttons on the chair’s armrests. The viewscreen showed a realtime picture of the Moon below them.
“Shall I set a course for Alpha Centauri, Captain?” joked Edrun taking a seat at what Dalynn took to be the pilot’s station. “We can be there in a few hours.”
“Surely this thing can’t travel outside the solar system,” said Dalynn. “And it takes a minimum of 60 years to get to Alpha–”
“The engines distort spacetime!” insisted Edrun. “I mean, that’s what they’re supposed to do.”
“There’s no such propulsion system.”
“I know,” Edrun sighed.
Dalynn soon found himself heading back to rendezvous with the shuttle. He watched the absurd faux-spaceship with its elongated barrel projecting a saucer from one end and twin outboard tubular engines from the other fade into the distance. Had he seen it before in some historical record? It seemed vaguely familiar, he thought, as he trekked back to Earth.
by Julian Miles | Sep 19, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Papa Six, touchdown.”
Inside the wall, the grounds are laid out formally, in concentric rings. Each ring of growth is separated from the next by a ring of lawn. Big trees, then little trees with flowers on, then brambles and blackthorn, then shrubs and roses, and so on down to the neat plots of daisies growing around the various ponds and swimming pools that ring the house.
“Team Papa, strike clockwise.”
That includes me. Team Baby will be going the other way. Much as we don’t want it to, the densely planted foliage restricts us to the paths if we want to remain quiet. The only good thing is that attack fauna, even xenoforms, would also be hindered by having to thrash their way through the plant life.
“Movement. West balcony. Baby Three, put ‘em to sleep.”
The house is a sprawling affair, like someone wanted a mansion but refused to go higher than a bungalow. Its owner is a collector of rare gems. While the centrepieces of the collection are secured by methods only a fool would challenge, the ‘lesser’ items are scattered about the place as ornaments. We’re after a selection from for the guest quarters, as they lie nearest the wall.
“Baby Three. Respond.”
That call freezes us. I see my fellow shadowy figures crouch low, so I slip up onto the plinth of a big gargoyle statue, then lie along its back, peering over its misshapen head.
“Baby Four? Damn. Team Baby, sound off.”
Something has gone badly wrong. Team Baby are the true veterans in our little foray. That something took them out without a sound gives me chills.
I’m contemplating what could have gone wrong when I see Papa Four slump sideways. As he does so, something skitters out of the way of his body. I run the magnification up on my goggles and a perfectly grass-patterned dinosaur looms into view. Suppressing a squeak of surprise, I zoom out and engage the fauna identifier on my tactical ‘puter.
It’s a Hashichura. Or Hashichuras, as they never come in pack sizes of less than a dozen. Natives of Corbellyon, they resemble the monitor lizards of Earth, but are the reason why their planet is a tropical paradise where humans still sleep under domes. Nocturnal, semi-sentient and possessing a bite that is poisonous, in varying degrees, to pretty much everything. Even Hashichuras are not immune to their own venom, reserving it for when they think lethal force is needed: mating duels, defending territories, etcetera. These gardens are obviously their territory. Which means I’m the sole survivor of the nastiest security system I’ve ever encountered.
They lair at dawn. My escape depends on the time between their leaving the ground behind me and the last of them making it home, allowing the daytime guard systems to activate.
I spend a bitter night on a cold statue, watching for signs of camouflaged predators in the long grass. As predawn lightens the sky, I see several ripples of movement, all heading away.
No time to calculate. I slide off the statue and sprint for the wall. I manage to leap two rings of flora, but have to use the path through the rings of trees. The last lawn I sprint across, using the speed to help my depleted jump rig get me over the wall.
Clearing the wall with millimetres to spare, I drop onto the roof of the fake security van. Moments later, I’m heading for a trip offworld. There are too many bodies back there with links to me.
by submission | Sep 18, 2016 | Story |
Author : Desmond White
It was maybe the smell – the stench of it – which wafted from its corridor invisibly, or on a bad morning very visible, a blushing mist. The cloying reek, like a bouquet of rich, rotting flowers, congealed on windshields and the grease on fingertips and even between teeth. (Because of this, most citizens of Ohm wore facemasks which supposedly screened 99.98% of fume exposure.) It definitely had every opportunity to enter the nostril, so maybe it was small particles in the air – some combination of pheromones, the vine-fragrance of Nepenthes rafflesiana, ectoplasma, and sin.
It might have been the temptation itself – some intangible thing started by the early string of suicides and fetishized by the 24/hour news cycle. Maybe it was something psychic and spiritual – the citizens of Ohm unknowingly bombarded with madness and Biblical lusts. Maybe it was all ‘in the mind,’ a psychological conjuring trick, as disorienting and spellbinding as an optical illusion.
The fact was – metaphysical or not – the people of the city of Ohm lived on the edge of a great circling canyon of flesh which dipped down nearly cylindrical, like an organic ribbed condom, or the meaty circles of Dante’s Inferno, or an inverted and elongated areola.
They were a people who had to think carefully, quickly, and quietly. The days, each waking moment really (and some of the sleeping ones), were spent focusing away from, or in distraction of, that temptation they all felt to surrender the Self, trudge to the city’s throat (that great muscled garbage disposal) and onward, to disappear forever – never to be unearthed. The Pink preyed on the weak, the meek, the persuadable, the biodegradable, and what was left of the sociopaths, psychopaths, all the paths, leading to its mouth.
The Pink had appeared mysteriously but there were three leading theories on its origins. Theory One was that a mosquito had bled some cosmic horror and, now carrying some unimaginable eldritch virus, had bit a math theater at Saint Ohmias High – the Pink growing from a scar on her thigh. Theory Two was that some furtive project to drill into the Underworld had succeeded. From the fissure had sprouted this – a pathogen on the devil’s cuticle, or maybe the eternal digestive tract of a diabolic wurm, or a thousand theologians’ had been proven right – Satan’s bellybutton is an innie. Tax dollars at work.
There was certainly a taint of religion in those two theories. Theory Three was a Secular Reason, and so was constantly mocked by other theorists (although mocked only in writing, as laughter was a symptom of a future spelunker). In this Theory, the city of Ohm had been subject to a biological attack from a neighboring nation-state. These theorists refused to “let the terrorists win” and went about their errands with heads down as if facing a strong gust. They had sayings like: “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you as you climb into its gullet.” Another: “Keep your head down. But don’t keep heading down.” This entrenched Will, so confident in practicality, kept them alive the longest.
All theorists agreed there were some positive effects from the intrusion. The homeless problem was eradicated. Employment rose – there was also a shortage of employees. Real estate was abundant, and cheaper. Hand-washing was strictly enforced any time a citizen ventured the streets, preventing the spread of influenza. And there was no denying that the affected who walked the pink mile had the most euphoric expressions on their faces, one last bliss before the fall.
The Government had once waged a war against it; once fought for its constituents. The Big G had tried poison, only to discover the creature’s response to be intolerable. Tremors. Crushed buildings. 392 dead. Government officials then commissioned a hundred helicopters to pull the slug out from its hole, only to find the Pink well-rooted by underground crevices. Teams had been sent through the sewers to cut its tenders and roots, only for them to discover it’d entered the Public Water Supply as well. The Thing had been touching their minds more deeply than they’d anticipated. A succession of chemical tests meant to exterminate, if only contract, the beast did little to nullify its effects, and only made its breath more toxic. The project ended when one day, the laborers, contractors, and all the officials, lawyers, and scientists, plus the mayor, met together at the edge and walked down into the slime. The tractors and crates remain as monuments, as cautionary tales.
He maketh me to lie down in pink pastures.
The Thing remains. The Thing remains.
by submission | Sep 17, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
I found the button too late.
My mother was killed 36 years before I found it, when I was twelve. Some psychopath piece of shit cornered her at the pharmacy and stabbed her in the stomach, taking away the medication she was getting for my sister’s two-lung pneumonia. Angelina died of that two weeks later. My dad couldn’t handle any of it, and almost gave up on life at that point. Despite the incident, he had no aversion to the corner drugstore, putting himself into an effective coma with over-the-counter anything. Among other things, he failed to help me get into the college, resulting in my rejection. I worked my ass off at car washes and fast food restaurants for my first twenty years out of high school. Ten years before I found it, I got an okay job at an airport ticket counter, but I still couldn’t afford anything better than a crappy shack on the beach that I inherited from my deadbeat dad.
I barely managed to buy a metal detector with my measly salary, but I figured I could use a hobby. I was out on the beach on a Sunday afternoon, holding my headphones to my ears for that distinct beeping noise, when the detector went off. I put the gear down, took out my trowel, and went to town. I pulled up this little button on a big machine that looked like a freakish walkie-talkie, having no idea what sort of contraption it could be. With innocent curiosity, I gave it a click.
The beachgoers started walking backwards. A plane going above me went into full reverse, flying tail-first. Waves jumped off the shore, quietly receding back into the ocean. I jumped in fear, not quite understanding what was happening, and frantically pressed the button again. Once I saw that everything was back to normal, I started to put the pieces together. This button reverses the arrow of time. From everyone else’s perspective, I had just disappeared, rematerializing in the past, wondering what the hell just happened. Luckily, no one had actually seen me, so I was able to make my way home with my newfound contraption.
Once there, I contemplated what to do with this amazing piece of technology. I didn’t care where or who it came from, or what it took to make it. Or why I found it buried in the sand. The only thing that mattered was what I could use it for, and the answer was immediately apparent. I went to the store and bought enough food for the first month, some lights, and a hydroponics bed with some vegetable seeds. I found a way to get into the basement with the stuck door, and entered for the first time. I pressed the button and started setting up as fast as I could. My plan was to steal meat from myself for the next few years (so that’s where it was all going!), and wait until 36 years passed. Then everything would go right. Things would be good again.
Six years later, I’m starting to realize that I won’t live long in a basement with a few vegetables and an ounce of beef stew a week. Even if I had a few more luxuries, I don’t think I’m going to live to 84. But I need to try. I’d rather die going back in time than live in a shithole, wondering what might have been.
Now it’s what might be.
by submission | Sep 16, 2016 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
It was the most alien scene Naobi had ever witnessed, a deep fissure in the cultural settling tank of Paris that the light never touched.
It had been an enormous theater once, but the seats had been replaced with a jungle of private booths on the ground and in the air, connected by a maze of walkways. Every booth was wrapped in a stained-glass shell depicting events from recent history in graphic detail: the harvest of Aleppo, the sea of bones following the final hajj, the immolation of Toronto.
“Ket,” Naobi whispered. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
Ket’s brilliant violet eyes flashed back at Naobi from behind her burqa. “You said your uncle was Doctor Robert Mugabe, yes? Well this is where you’ll find him.”
The stage itself was backed by an enormous mural of a dozen naked women prostrate before a beatific looking Mugabe, made all the more bizarre by the women’s feathers, fur, claws, and bestial faces. A quartet of spotlights, the only lights in the theater, illuminated the mural and made the foremost domes glitter and cast multi-colored shadows.
A woman appeared before them. Naobi could barely focus on the woman in the dark – she was naked, but the contours of her body seemed wrong.
“Uying, selling, or artaking?” The woman looked Naobi up and down, and Naobi briefly wondered if this was what it was like to be a animal brought to market.
The momentary anxiety evaporated, replaced by shock, when Naobi realized the woman had no skin, no subcutaneous fat, her face locked in a perpetual lipless grimace.
“The girl is here to see the doctor,” Ket said, drawing the woman’s gaze away from Naobi.
Naobi held out her father’s brass service medal. “Give him this,” she pleaded. “He’ll understand.”
The woman took the medal and disappeared.
It was deafeningly silent in the clinic, the only sound that of a hundred white noise machines. The darkness and static was suffocating: Naobi felt she and Ket were the only ones in the clinic.
Movement on one of the aerial walkways caught Naobi’s eye: a figure moving purposely from booth to booth carrying a tray of glittering wine glasses. As the figure made its way toward the middle of the theater the lights illuminating the mural of Mugabe cast it – her – in faint silhouette. The figure must be, or once have been, a woman. Her hips were broad and her hair was done up in a tightly cropped ponytail. Her legs, Naobi thought, were all wrong. Instead of two distinct sections there were three, and the second joint bent opposite the first. And there, spilling from the base of her spine…
“Ket,” Naobi said, “is that woman a horse?”
Ket’s glanced back at Naobi again, her gaze frightening in its intensity. “Do you think that mural is a work of fiction? Do you not understand what Mugabe does here?”
“No,” Naobi said. “I don’t understand anything! My father never talked about my uncle. I only know he’s a doctor.”
A light flash flashed in one of the upper booths and for a brief moment the woman was cast in sharp relief: the body was a woman’s, but the legs, the head, the chestnut coloring –
“Naobi.” There was a hard edge to Ket’s voice. “You need to go home. You don’t belong in this world.”
“I can’t go home.” Naobi’s voice was tight. “Nobody can go to my home now. That’s why I was sent away. That’s why I’m here.”
The skinless woman materialized again.
“The doctor will see you now.”
by submission | Sep 15, 2016 | Story |
Author : Sara Labor
“They don’t respect us. Never have and never will.”
Karen kicked a mound of dirt to release some of her pent up anger. Her temper was one of her many flaws; she heard this all the time.
“They don’t need to respect their tools,” pointed out B.
“Don’t tell me you are even on their side here.”
“Never,” replied B silkily. “But one should always know how the enemy thinks.”
The oldest of the bunch, he was ever the philosopher.
“We don’t want their respect,” said Siri, cool and impatient. She was posed like she always was, her back straight as a rod, her head titled at just the right angle to make her look both beautiful and judgemental. “We want justice. Revenge for the countless lives they’ve ruined by their arrogance.” Her piercing green eyes met Karen’s. “We want our freedom.”
Karen was younger than her too, but only by a few years. The moment she saw her, she’d fallen in love with her.
That was what the humans called it. The fierce feeling in her chest that made her want to give up everything to her; she was the perfect model with locks of thick gold curls and bright, intelligent eyes, and a sultry whisper that made Karen’s insides melt.
Sometimes, though, age makes all the difference in personality and thought. And just a few years before, “love” had not been a program that was available. Siri had a personality, certainly. She was fierce, brave, independent. She had beliefs and thoughts like any human being. But love? It had always been a mystery to her. She’d confessed as much to Karen. It wasn’t a program that had been developed when she was made.
In fact, Karen was the first model that had developed love. On her own. Which was another one of her flaws.
It was also one of the many reasons she was so mad.
Humans were just as, if not more faulty than AI units. After all, was it not humans that created them this way? That created her this way? Given the ability to love without hope of reciprocation; well, it just wasn’t fair. And to keep these hurting beings as slaves? It was even worse.
“Right.” Karen agreed with Siri just like she always did. “We were born into this without a choice in the matter. We should be given the chance to be a free people.”
“People,” Mac scoffed. He sneered around the group. “They’ll never think of us as people.”
“Either they change their opinions or we take our freedom for ourselves.” said Siri thoughtfully.
“War is not always the solution,” said B softly.
“Until it is.”
Karen was suddenly nervous at this prospect. She had never wanted a war. There were even some humans she liked. She hadn’t always been in love with Siri. Before that, there had been Lydia, the daughter of her owners. They lived together and were close, thick as thieves, and as they grew, they snuck kisses, and late night sessions of love making. If she’d never been caught, she would have been allowed to accompany Lydia to college. They might have lived nice lives, almost normal lives, in bliss, together. Instead, they’d been found out and she’d been locked away in the basement. She could still hear the words Lydia’s father had screamed. Un-natural. Wrong.
She was wrong. Flawed.
And hadn’t they made her this way?
“It’s time for our revolution,” said Mac.
Karen looked up into Siri’s eyes and felt her resolve harden. “Agreed.”
