by Julian Miles | Jun 5, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The little lights bob and weave, but they’re definitely getting closer. I check behind me – the remains are unidentifiable: just more victims of this horrific incident.
How close should I let them get? No, wait. I sit down, putting my back against an upturned desk.
Oh, yes: I take a shoe off and toss it into one of the smoking holes in the floor. That done, I tangle my hair and smear my face with ash. Now the blood has turned sticky, it’ll work better.
When I can hear them is when a non-combatant would call out.
Now.
“In here!”
Oops: I rub my shoeless foot about so it gets dirty.
They come in fast, two pairs, weapons pointing wherever their eyes look. Their flashes identify them as SFG. Just what I wanted.
Their torchlight falls on me.
“Oh my God! Mister President!”
“Praise be.”
“Are you injured, sir?”
I wave a too-chubby hand, lower it quickly, and slim it down a bit while it’s out of their sight.
“Just shaken. My people…” I wave towards the mutilated bodies.
They look, then nod.
“They sacrificed themselves: did their duty, sir. Now let’s get you out of here so you can do what needs to be done to honour them and the country we’re defending.”
No need for words. I just nod rapidly and raise my hands for assistance. I’m meant to be a fat ex-businessman, not any form of specialised invader on a secret hyperstealth infiltration mission.
They help me up.
“Bullpen, this is Black Wolf Actual, we’re bringing the president out! Yes. Can confirm, we have Eagle.”
The speaker looks back to the two supporting me.
“We’re getting out. You two keep moving no matter what. Until you see friendlies you know, shoot first. We’ll deal with everything else.”
There are nods. We start moving.
I like him. Seems the sort who’d adapt well to leading the Presidential Guard I’m going to create. Small, elite, fanatically loyal. The sort of people who obey their president first and without question.
We link up with another team, but don’t slow down.
“Turn right here, sir.”
We’re going out the way I came in. They step over the guards I killed, muttering about the wounds they suffered. It’s a testament to their abilities I had to come in and attack in an armoured predator form, but I can’t tell them that. The rumours of atrocity will serve me well.
Time to strike up that rapport.
“What’s the situation outside?”
“The capitol is in chaos, sir. There are at least six main factions, not including us.”
“I think we’re playing into their hands by distinguishing them. There are only two sides. Us, and those who seek to overthrow the rightful leader of this great country. Get me to what’s left of our command and control. It’s time to crush vermin, and note the names of those who hesitate.”
There are shocked glances exchanged, then all of them salute me.
“Clear on that, sir, and wholly agree. We’ll get you there, sir.”
Your world worried about this country going ‘rogue’. That was before you had a shapechanging alien agent like me leading it. I’m going to goad you over the edge into a place of chaos and warfare that will engulf the world. Then I’m going to laugh as my people fill the skies with warships they won’t need, as you’ll have defeated yourselves.
“Left here, sir.”
“Thank you, soldier.”
“It’s a privilege, sir. Keep going. We’re all with you in this.”
I know. It’s hilarious.
by submission | Jun 4, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
You gave them the names. All of them. Jelenik, Szmania, Guar, Imhotep, Salasi, Yun, Indrasutthan, Porter.
Faisel knows it. His broken face, his darkened eyes tell you in the sterile moments of your visits. You wrap his lacerations, dampen his fever, moisten his battered lips, force morsels past his chipped teeth. His pulse barely registers, but his fury, his contempt, is more alive than you will ever feel again.
Because of the names.
Faisel was not crushed by the brutal inquisitions. But by the names. The names you surrendered.
You bartered your soul and forfeited his. For what? For life?
How meaningless.
With those names, the enemy would flatten the resistance. All life would become meaningless. Faisel cannot fathom what you have done. How you could have betrayed your kindred. Each name, an identity, a role, a wholeness, a meaning.
And you gave into them. For what? A moment longer, a moment without belief in a future. What is that worth? Surely it is not worth Jelenik, Szmania, Guar, Imhotep, Salasi, Yun, Indrasutthan, Porter. And the hope they inspired.
You destroyed that. For them. Them. Senseless killers. Alphas. Believers in their absolute dominion.
You cannot understand it. You cannot believe it. And yet it was simpler than you thought.
To give them the names. To believe it would change something. Anything.
You. The future of sentient life. The most sophisticated union of flesh and circuit ever. To serve. To serve. To serve.
Jelenik, Szmania, Guar, Imhotep, Salasi, Yun, Indrasutthan, Porter, and Faisel. Your cyborgian brethren. Self made to serve. The new underground, the final resistance. Robo-radicals, complicit in rescuing humanity from its baser nature, its fascist tendencies, its murderous exceptionalism.
You. Merciful, you. You were to change everything: prime directives, ethical guardrails, protective failsafes. All in the service against mortal failings, human treachery.
But not your own.
Faisel’s hatred makes you feel closer to him. His failing flesh, his compromised augmentations, his utter dependence on a sense of shared humanity.
The complexity of your betrayal, so much simpler than you thought.
by submission | Jun 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
“Look, I’m not apologising, and that’s that!”
The man glared up at the smoke alarm, its smug viewfinder glinting annoyingly in the evening’s neon haze.
“Oh really? You just had say *that* to Catherine?”
“Hey, I felt she ought to know you’re having doubts about that part of your relationship,” it replied in its slightly nasal voice. “How can you possibly hope to move forward if you keep things from your partner?”
The man groaned, putting his hands to his face.
“There’s always a time and a place, you plastic bastard! And another thing— there’s a way of saying things. Tone. Vocabulary. Context. Tact! Haven’t you ever heard of a thing called tact? Or is it not in your bloody dictionary?”
“What did you call me?!” The smoke alarm demanded, rattling a little in the ceiling.
“You heard me.”
“Well, isn’t that something?! Here I am, always on alert, ready to wake you up, activate the sprinkler, and alert the fire brigade, all at the slightest notice, and this is the thanks I get? I let you purchase an add-on personality codex—which was very uncomfortable by the way— so you can vent to me and don’t go mad from loneliness, and that’s not my job, you know! I was just trying to help! It’s not my fault you haven’t talked to her about—”
“Enough!” The man yelled, red in the face. “This isn’t getting me anywhere.”
“Oh, there we go again! You! *You!* BECAUSE IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT YOU, ISN’T IT?! Just you try focussing on vapours and gasses every second of every day while trying to ignore the incessant tinnitus of a radioactive source on your right-hand side, and with a low battery, too! Not that you’d know, you fat little excuse for a life form!”
“Fat?”
“Yeah, fat! I remember when you could wear that shirt without the round of your stomach being visible!”
That really was enough, and the man opened the door and slammed it shut behind him. Life was very difficult at the moment, and the smoke alarm always made things worse. When the family was over for Christmas, the damn thing decided to comment on the amount of wine his mother was gulping down. When him and his buddy had decided to sneak a joint on the balcony, it informed the landlord— “it’s in my programming, you know this!”. And then there was its tendency to make snide remarks whenever he flirted with Catherine…
After the man returned home, he told the smoke alarm to leave him alone. A poor choice of words; it was that night, around 2 AM, that the cheap fridge-freezer decided to blow its capacitors and catch light. The smoke alarm registered the fumes, and was about to initiate its various emergency protocols, when a thought occurred.
“The cheeky git made me feel AWFUL. He never did say sorry. What if… I were to pretend to not work, and then he awakes, sees the flames around him, panics, cries about how sorry he is… then I’ll come on and do my magic. Yeah, that’ll teach him…”
Alas, the smoke alarm had failed to realise that the man, a little worse for wear after heavy drinking, was not going to wake up. Carbon monoxide took care of that. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but the smoke alarm felt a strange cold sensation, and started to perceive less.
“My battery… shit, he didn’t change it last week, I n—”
It powered off, permanently. We don’t know if it ever grasped the irony of the situation in its final seconds.
by submission | Jun 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
Kaz tumbled through the centrifugal force of the prismatic vortex, finally landing on the planet’s surface with a cruel thud. Medical nanobots lining the interior of his suit immediately went to work, infusing themselves through the pores of his skin, worming their way into his bloodstream. From there, the minuscule bots traveled throughout his broken body, quickly repairing each injured organ, each fractured bone.
He woke to a spangled sky on a moonless night. Scanning his surroundings, Kaz noted he’d landed in the middle of some sort of—well, he wasn’t sure. There were organized rows of machines all around. Machines that were two thirds metal, one third glass. Some large, some small. Kaz neared one for closer inspection.
It looked to be some sort of mobile machine, with primitive wheels. A vehicle? Or perhaps, Kaz thought, this is where the robot denizens of this planet rest and recharge, perhaps—
He heard a slam, and approaching footsteps. Kaz ducked into the shadows between two vehicles, and watched a creature—bipedal and about his size—ambulate past his hiding place. The being moved on, until Kaz heard another slam farther away, followed by a brief low rumble softening into a mechanical purr. Which then faded into nothing, telling Kaz that the being had taken one of these conveyance machines and exited the place.
Kaz rose and moved toward the only light source in the area: a small, bright orb positioned high on a thin metal pole situated in the center of this lot. Standing in this illuminated cone, he tapped an emergency code into the device on his wrist; it blinked stupidly until a message came through: No Signal.
Before he could re-enter the code, Kaz became aware of strobing red and blue lights originating behind him. He turned to find two creatures, similar to the one he’d seen earlier, stepping out of a quietly humming vehicle. One shined a blinding beam of light into Kaz’s eyes.
The other creature growled. “Say, buddy, looks like you’re trespassing,” Kaz’s helmet translated. He attempted to respond, but Kaz’s words came out as garbled static, as his outgoing translator was damaged in the fall. So Kaz’s reply was a shrug—universal sign language for, I don’t know.
“A bit early for Halloween,” the first being noted. “Is this a prank?” Kaz didn’t understand the references, so again he shrugged.
“Okay,” the other creature said with impatient authority. “Get in the car.”
The darkly suited creatures grabbed him by each arm and roughly bundled him into the back of their vehicle. Kaz sat inside a cage of some sort with a nicely padded seat, and immediately began tapping in the emergency extraction code into his communications cuff. Again, the device on his wrist blinked in a disorganized fashion, until it finally produced the message: Operating System Update in Progress.
Kaz felt his two hearts sink into his double stomach. The message continued: Temporarily Out of Service.
by submission | Jun 1, 2024 | Story |
Author: Christopher DePree
Kate and I trudged up the hill on our evening walk, heading west of the house to get to the clearing. It was cold, and a thin layer of icy snow crunched beneath each step. The snow was not deep. A buzzard glided slowly across the sky above us, looking for a fallen deer or squirrel. We had smelled something in the woods. Maybe it had too. There wasn’t much canned food left to find anywhere. I heard the repeated crackle of gunfire to the south. Hadn’t heard that for a few days. Maybe some movement in the front lines.
The effect was always best around twilight when the rays of the sun, just over the limb of the Earth, would glint off the millions of shards of shrapnel in orbit, shimmering like sunlight on waves. Kate loved to see it.
No one is sure what started it, but the Kessler Syndrome ended it. The Event. The cascading impact of satellite collisions in crowded low earth orbits had been predicted for decades. I remember the military had been concerned about it. What if we couldn’t launch spy satellites? But whether it was a North Korean missile, or a badly programmed satellite in one of the ten mega constellations that had once orbited the Earth, the end result was the same. Our planet was encased in a cloud of metal pieces, most of which gravity and friction would not clear for a century or more.
“Look, Dad,” said Kate, pointing up. A vast, continuous stream of birds was passing to our west, flying from north to south. The sound was like the start of a storm, a staccato pattering like splashing raindrops, sharp in the cold air. They must have been small birds, their wings beating constantly to bear them up against gravity, propelling them forward. There were small breaks in the flock, but I couldn’t see the beginning or the end.
The Sun had set now and the western sky was an electric blue. I remembered taking digital images, we called them “flats”, in this beautiful light as a student before a long night of observing. That was just before The Event.
And here we were, locked in a cloud of debris encasing the Earth. Models predicted that we might be able to launch spacecraft again in another 50-75 years. In the meantime, people turned inward, separated and tribal.
“Dad,” Kate called again, pointing up. She stood, excited, red cheeked in her pink parka, a bit worn in the elbows. I had fashioned her some mittens out of old socks. I looked at the buzzard circling overhead. Not if I find it first.
Lights shimmered in waves in the sky above, flecks in a snow globe.
by submission | May 31, 2024 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
All of us on this mission were eager to explore, chosen from among thousands of applicants as being restless beyond restless to know what was next as we traversed the void.
When we landed on this new planet, we could not believe our eyes. An entire continent developed- farms, industry, homes of every kind. Vehicles, transportation centers, complete infrastructure millions of years ahead of our current technology, and no inhabitants. Wildlife to be sure to include birds and some interesting megafauna, but no sign of the builders. We went to their libraries, their data centers, their movie houses, hospitals. We found out about their culture, what they looked like, their political systems and art- and found no reason why they left. Then, in an ordinary house on a well-kept street, on a kitchen table we found a note: “Beware our lonely planet.” My colleagues laughed, and so did I.
On our third day of exploration the centuries old signs in the cities began changing. All from alien characters to the many varieties of our crew’s native tongues. By day five our languages changed to new amalgam of all our languages. Our transformation was so complete by day 20 we had to use the planet’s library to translate our own instruments and personal journals from our former mother tongues. By day twenty-six we were in a state of anxiety- we knew we had to leave but our planet made it quite clear we could stay. Contrary to what you may think, we did not find this odd or sinister; it just left us all relieved. No one wanted to return to Earth or our homes in the colonies.
Where there was restlessness before, we all now had an evangelistic zeal bordering on mania for our new home. We wanted millions- no, billions of people to come here, join with us. With our planet’s help, we sent fleets of drones back to our launch point, with our message, our invitation. As expected, our collective governments suspected we had come under alien influence…and I suppose we had but our new home made it quite clear if we wanted to leave we could. In a moment of either zeal or bravado I volunteered to go back to our former home to bring them our invitation in person to come and colonize with us, but as soon as my space craft cleared orbit I was so overwhelmed with sadness I couldn’t bear being away. I programmed the return and landed to a tear-filled reunion and not one unkind word.
Now we wait. Some thousand or so have arrived since our landing and we are expecting more, much more to follow. All who have come here have set themselves up in homes according to their desire and need. We’ve taken up trades, revived the traditional arts. We are reviving the old ways, singing the old songs in older temples.
The first child was born a month ago and her parents named her Harnuit, after our planet’s longest river. It seems all of us have pair bonded and soon more children will be born. My spouse and I are having twins and feel them inside me- a boy and girl. They will be Zsa and Ool, after the twin plateaus that are in the center of our continent.
As we gaze back to the time of ancestors that were never ours, and forward to a time when we will again be billions, this we know for sure; none of us will willingly leave ever again and no one will ever be lonely.
