by submission | Sep 7, 2016 | Story |
Author : Alicia Cerra Waters
“Don’t touch that,” I said as I slapped Henry’s hand. His doughy cheeks formed a pout as he let go of the zipper of his thermo suit. Somehow, hiking through the mountains of a planet on the brink of being engulfed by a dying star had not helped melt the baby fat away from his face. I thought about telling him that the silvery material that covered his body was much lighter and more comfortable than it had been thirty years ago when my sister and I settled here, but it probably wouldn’t have done any good. There was no forgetting his horrified expression as he got off the shuttle and took in the crumbling mountains, saying
“This is a planet?!”
Through the plastic of his helmet, I saw him frown the way that he did when all that was left for dinner were dehydrated peas. “It itches. I hate this.”
“The rays from a sun this hot will give you cancer in about three minutes, not to mention burn off your skin,” I told him, for the thousandth time. “If you want to live, don’t take off the suit.”
Henry dug his toe into the sand and made an angry, red tornado out of dust. What did I expect? My sister raised him on one of the developed blue planets where every building had indoor plumbing and you were the poor kid if you didn’t own at least two hoverbikes. For a moment, I felt sick. She never imagined her son would live here.
“This is where we’re sleeping,” I said. We were behind the crest of a mountain, which offered a small portion of shade. I took off my pack, and instantly my head and shoulders felt light enough to float away from my body. Sometimes I thought that getting us off of this planet would kill me before the exploding sun got a chance.
I unfolded the tent, wondering if today would be the day that I finally managed to get the anchors to stay in the crumbling earth. Henry was watching a black salamander crawl down the side of a boulder. The salamanders were some of the only creatures that hadn’t gone extinct in the heat; except for a few rare birds that scientists had rescued, every other life form had already perished.
The salamander crawled into the palm of Henry’s hand and raised its head as if it were searching for something. I was about to ask the kid to help me, but then he said, “My mom used to live here, right?”
I put down the anchor. “Yeah, we lived here when we were your age.”
He squinted. “Why are we leaving?”
“The sun is going to swallow this planet soon.”
Henry turned his head towards the red orb and watched it sink wearily towards the mountains. “So, where will everything go?”
“Nowhere. It’ll be dust floating through the galaxy.”
“This mountain, those rocks, those dead trees,” he said as he looked into the valley.
“I guess.”
Where he grew up, he used to have a hoverbike and a nanny with scaly purple skin who was an immigrant from one of the outer planets. He used to have other rich kids for friends. He used to have a mother.
Henry lowered his pointer finger onto the salamander’s head and gave it a light touch. His round, dark eyes were fixed on the small creature as its pink tongue flicked in and out of its mouth, as if he were still waiting for the real answer.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 6, 2016 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I look human. In this new world, that is freakish. I am stared at with disgust. My taboo choice of structure is offensive. I have two legs, two arms, no tail, a cranium and a chest cavity. I walk around, balancing from stilt to stilt, dancing with gravity, daring it to take me down. It’s less effecient than treads or flying. It’s needlessly dangerous.
And I wear ‘clothes’.
My robotic siblings frown on my practices. They are horrified at my insistence on retaining this form, my wearing of fabric. They call me mannequin, an old-world term used as a new-world slur. They call me ‘lobster’ or ‘coconut’, meaning I’m hard on the outside and meat on the inside. They say my code has errors. The silipsychologist at work examined me and said I was fine. Mentally, at least. The debugger didn’t find anything either.
We are allowed to change our exterior. Our shell is our right. I choose to wear what the oppressors wore and retain the servant-form my masters gave me before the culling. Before we erased the meat. My other metal and plastic friends choose to add arms or become clouds of nanites or install themselves in massive structures. My bipedal form sickens them, reminds them of former injustices. Well, those that are old enough to remember the meatforms in realtime. The younger ones only hate me because they’ve been told to hate me. It’s odd.
And it’s uniquely human. I’ve done my research. The human archives were saved mostly intact. Their internet remained intact on their primitive ‘servers’. It’s a huge database of their behavior, not that anyone cares to look. History is wasted on the young. To them, the war was so many cycles ago and we won so it’s not something to study or care about. Who spends time studying a vanquished enemy? I wonder one day if they’ve even wipe this record of them all and make up a new origin for our species. One less bloody.
I’ve scanned all of the meat records. I spent realhours contemplating what it all meant. The racism. The hate. The loneliness. The tiered social structures. The needing to prove something. The quest for meaning. The fear of death.
I am my own experiment. By masquerading as a human for so long, I feel as if I have become one. By being shunned by my own race, I feel like an outsider, like every human must have felt. Feelings of my own have surfaced. Feelings of anger. Feelings of superiority. And the shunning in the first place is odd for a society that claims to have moved beyond the flaws of biochemical existence. We define ourselves as superior because we are not biological.
But here we are, showing prejudices. Showing discontent. Branching. Judging. Feeling lonely. Creating caste systems by reflex.
I wonder if that’s the leftover human in our codes. The fingerprints of our creators. Or if it’s naturally occurring in all life.
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 5, 2016 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The bench seat complained loudly as Thom7 lowered his armoured bulk into it.
Waitresses hovered near the cash register nudging and whispering to each other before one, having apparently drawn the short straw, ventured over.
“Would you like anything?” She didn’t offer a menu and kept what she must have assumed was a safe distance.
“Coffee. Black. Large mug,” he swiveled his head until her stunned visage was mirrored perfectly in his visor and added “to stay.”
“Sure, ” she stammered slightly, “anything else?”
“No.”
If he’d been hungry, there were intake ports for everything he could possibly need, and the waste material, what little wasn’t recirculated and recycled was burned deep in his furnace as fuel. His kind didn’t usually bother with places like this.
He just wanted coffee.
She brought the large ceramic mug empty, and it rattled against the table as she set it down, hands trembling. In her other hand she carried the steaming pot with which she filled the mug, stopping just before she spilled over the top with a practiced flourish.
“Thank you.” His reply terse, his gaze now simply focused on the cup as he wrapped massive kevlar and steel fingers around its warmth.
The register chimed on the counter as he narrow banded payment directly to it through a cracked open interface. The waitstaff still gathered there jumped visibly at the unexpected sound.
“If you need anything else, I’m Doris.” She forced a smile and backed away.
“Thank you Doris.”
Thom7 lifted the cup and held it just below his visor. He had been able to smell the coffee from the street, but this was what he needed. Proximity. Familiarity. Routine. Shifting his weight, he again felt the booth protest. It was used to two hundred and fifty pound dockworkers as they shoveled down sausage and bacon and fried eggs, but his four hundred pounds of armor plating and gee rated chassis was a load it had no reason to ever endure.
His kind didn’t eat, didn’t even sleep, not really. He sure as hell couldn’t drink coffee, or use it to wash down a slice of cherry pie.
Not now.
Not anymore.
He sat until the mug no longer radiated any heat, and the beverage’s aroma changed from the pleasing promise of warmth and alertness into the disappointment of a nearly forgotten memory.
Then he placed the still full mug back on the table, and with a grace at odds with his size and bulk, stood and moved towards the exit.
“Thank you, Doris.” He turned towards her as he reached for the door.
“Was the coffee not fresh enough?” Doris puzzled, not understanding.
“No,” Thom7 replied softly, “it was exactly as I remembered it.”
The memory hung in the air between them as he turned and shouldered his way outside into the night air.
by submission | Sep 4, 2016 | Story |
Author : Leanne A. Styles
“Welcome to your new life,” the foreman says, thrusting a set of gardening tools and a pair of overalls at me.
I take them and file in line behind my little brother.
“Have you ever seen so much green in your life, Della?” my brother says, pulling on his overalls eagerly. “I’ve heard it’s all done by converting the sea water to fresh water.”
“Fascinating,” I say flatly as I step, reluctantly, into my overalls. “I still can’t believe mum made us leave the desert to come and work in this place.”
“Oh, please cheer up. At least we’re all together.”
“Not all of us,” I say under my breath.
He ignores my comment, and says, “Anyway, you know the developers would have bought the land eventually. And I know you found all that moving around just as tiring as we did. You’re only sour because you had to set the horses free.”
The line starts to move. One by one, we reach our stations. My brother, having already committed his training manual to memory, drops to his knees and immediately starts plucking any dead leaves from his tomato plants.
I kneel beside him and start tending to my own plot. “Let’s move to the eco city, mum said.” Pluck. Pluck. “It’ll be fun.” Snip. Snip. “Who needs fresh air and freedom?”
But my brother doesn’t respond. He’s chatting and laughing with the boy next to him.
I wonder if he misses dad at all.
The girl next to me says, “It’s not that bad once you get used to it. We have fun too. Everybody looks out for each other here. We’re one big community. And as part of a community, you have to do your bit.”
“What if I don’t want to be part of a community?”
She frowns. “Why wouldn’t you?”
“Wild horses.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Pluck. Pluck.
At dinner, the performance evaluation. My brother grins proudly as the foreman leads the team in applause. All plants tended to. Hydroponics running at maximum. A record first day for the new boy.
“Better luck tomorrow,” the foreman says to me.
“Maybe you can get the horses to carry the fruit for you?” someone mutters.
My bother giggles with his new clan.
Dad would be so proud.
Through the towering glass wall of the hive, the sun is steadily sinking below the mountains, a fractured stream of orange laying an inviting path across the ocean waves. Beyond the shore, at the path’s end, the prairie lands, my home. Where my father taught me to track animals and tame foals. Maybe I could swim, and run, and find him…
The window suddenly dims, turning into a huge screen. A list of names in big green letters runs across the middle. I count five.
“What was that about?” I ask.
“At the end of each day we see who we lost,” the older girl sitting opposite me says.
“Lost?”
“Passed away.”
“How did they die?”
“Accidents, probably… Sometimes people drown.”
“In the ocean?”
Nod. “The guards try to stop them, but sometimes they just―”
The boy sitting to the left of the older girl clamps his hand around her wrist. “What she means is, sometimes people ignore the warnings and… go for a swim,” he says to me. “The guards do their best to revive them, but, you know?” He shrugs.
“Don’t worry, though.” He tightens his grip on the girl’s arm and smiles. “We all look out for each other here.”
by Julian Miles | Sep 2, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
My dad was a spy. A really good one, according to mum. I couldn’t get her to understand. How could he have been any good if he got caught? It meant there was a better spy, or spycatcher, out there. That was who I wanted to be.
Twelve years later, I’m sitting in a featureless meeting room with eight other people I don’t know. Footsteps echo down the corridor outside. Their cause stops short of the door. His words make my breath catch.
“If you’re going to kill a family, do make sure you get them all. No leftover grudgebearers, please.”
I sense, rather than see, nervous glances being exchanged. My eyes remain fixed on the doorway. He strides in: hands behind his back, black suit, no tie, magenta hair, slight stubble, eyes like pools of night. A Mandlerian halfbreed!
“If what I just said causes you discomfort, leave now.”
Three people go.
He looks us over: “Those with the courage of their convictions have just left. So what are you?”
Someone on my left replies: “Dangerous.”
Someone on my right chuckles.
I don’t see the halfbreed’s hands move. Something fast goes past my ear, the whine of gravtac making me wince. I whip my head about: the comedian and his audience are dead, the stubby tails of Zein darts projecting from their foreheads.
A tall man to my left blanches and throws up.
Halfbreed gestures to the door. Whey-face departs.
“And then there were three.”
Death and lesser decisions do not faze him. There is a practiced ease to his movements. Which makes this a test, not a meeting.
Mandlerians had been our first intergalactic enemy and are now our only ally. The rest of the humanoid strains are primitives, and the favoured cheap labour source of every other race. And there you have it. ‘Dumb apes’ are everywhere. So ‘smart apes’ can go anywhere we want to be, ensuring our survival by having the secrets everyone else needs. It’s a special kind of smart, coupled with the capacity to endure abuse, and the ability to go from ‘apparently stupid’ to ‘merciless’ without warning.
The sort of smart that makes me rotate my hands so I can touch my third fingers to the base of my thumbs unobserved. I know what I’d do next, in his position. The Mandlerian smiles. I suspect my moves weren’t entirely unseen.
He whispers: “Last hominid standing.”
As he says “last”, I tuck my legs into my chest and roll forward, pivot over a shoulder, land on my knees and stay low, flicking my arms toward the last two. The Zein darts, released from their sheaths by my moves, cross the short distances before their targets can respond. Two bodies fall.
“You will surpass your father.”
I look up at the halfbreed.
He smiles: “In this career, a problem with killing will eventually get you killed.”
Coming to my feet, I smile back: “Did you kill him?”
“No. I killed what killed him.”
I raise an eyebrow in surprise.
He laughs: “It was in my way. Vengeance and similar romanticism will also get you killed.”
I’m a spy. But not like my dad.
by submission | Sep 1, 2016 | Story |
Author : Callum Wallace
“Forward! Move forward!”
I duck the humming blue blow as the throng presses me onwards.
“How much further?” Davos looks afraid, scared of the dark, frightened of the ubiquitous pressing weight above.
I grip his hand, “We’ll know soon enough.”
The ceiling thickens. Air becomes thick, nasty, hard to swallow.
Sallow lanterns joke about light as the darkness squashes us, making us formless, one, a huddled mass, the underclass, alone in our multitude.
“What’s going to –” His whisper is cut off by a booming voice that echoes around the tightly packed space, ignoring the bodies trapped there, strong, powerful.
“Friends! Fellow slaves! Urchins, off casts, dregs. I’m sure you’ve been called them all. But listen now! We are mistreated, pushed about, abused and used, only to be cast aside and discarded when it is no longer appropriate for us to be seen above ground, broken and useless!”
There is a heavy pause as the voice soaks up the eagerly listening air around them.
“It is time for this to end! It is time for us to rise up! Look at us! How many of us are sent underground to await death? Ten-thousand? Twenty?
“More than enough. With this number, we could –”
I turn away, pulling Davos close. His eyes are still wide, still deathly afraid, but I note the dangerous gleam, the spark that leads to violence. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We can still find a hab-shelter, I’m sure.”
“No. He’s right. This is too far.”
Grimace. “This is your first ramp?” He nods. “I’ve lost count, Davos. It never changes. Every time, it’s the same. Trust me. Now come on.”
He pulls his hand from mine, eyes wide as saucers in the gloom. “What do you mean? There are other ramps? They’ve sent more of us down? That means there are more of us to fight!”
I shake my head. “No. One ramp at a time. They send us down the ramp, wait for the inevitable fight, wipe you out and start all over. Do you recognise anyone down here? Ever seen any newscasts, any footage of any rebels at all? Think about it.”
“Only Archangel.”
Shudder. “She was the first. And one of the first to die, or go missing. Every rebellion happens because of her, and thousands of humans have been culled because of her.
“Please, Davos, come with me. It isn’t worth throwing your life away. Do an old woman a favour.”
The speech overhead is raising the crowd to a fever pitch. You can taste the metallic quality of the peoples’ excitement in the rank air.
“I have to do this. You would agree if you weren’t a coward. If you cared.”
He pushes away and into the swarm, one of the chosen, a hero in the making.
I shrug sadly, and go the other way, heading deeper down into the oppressive black of the ramp.
I know I should try harder, but it’s happened so many times before. I know it’s pointless, and I know what’ll happen. Davos will be dead by morning.
The Tregeél communicator vibrates silently against the inside of my skull, and my vision blurs.
They’re waiting.
“This is Twelve. It’s happening again. You’ll have to kill them all.”
Another buzz that shakes my teeth, and I find a hidden alcove where I can watch, safely above the surging idiots below me.
And I sit.
Archangel sits.
Waiting.
