by submission | Mar 16, 2013 | Story |
Author : Holly Jennings
“January 18th, 2311. Patient is Makayla Jenson. Session one.” Dr. Rhan sets the recorder down on the table between us and clears her throat. “John tells me you’re having trouble with your dreams?”
I glance down at John’s ring on my finger. I try to wear it as much as I can when I’m not working.
I like when I’m working.
“Yes.” I nod. “They’ve taken over my sleep.”
“I’d say so. The whole crew has heard you screaming to wake.”
She squints over her glasses at me. The blue-speckled frames cut through the center of her eyes as if she’s half blind to the world. Everything else about her is so plain that she blends into the ship’s stark grey walls behind her. I let my vision blur. She disappears. Only the frames remain behind like the grin of a Cheshire cat.
Screaming to wake, I repeat to myself and chuckle inwardly. Screaming to go back.
“What do you dream about?” she asks.
Sunlight. Warmth on my face. Dry air percolating in my lungs. I never thought a desert could be so refreshing, especially when I rouse to John’s touch, icy as the galaxy around us.
I could have chosen a bigger ship. No, had to take John’s vessel so we’d be together all the time.
All the time. No escape. No way out.
After some piddle-paddle about the latest research on nightmares and how common it is for space dwellers to dream of being elsewhere, the doctor says our time is done and I’m to come back tomorrow. When I turn to leave, she deposits a little white pill in my hand.
“Put it under your tongue before bed,” she says.
More like down the sink.
I nod to satisfy her and leave the room.
I return to my quarters. The far wall is a sheet of clear aluminum silicate, like a floor-to-ceiling window. It catches glimpses of my reflection as I move about the room though none of my dark features show: my raven hair, brown eyes or tanned skin. Just a shadow of myself.
I walk up to the window, press my forehead against it, and look out the cold, empty vastness that doesn’t seem nearly as deep as the one inside. Against the backdrop of a foreign world and its lifeless moons, I can still see the faintest image of a girl I once knew trapped in the tiny space between the ship and the universe.
There’s no smile on her face.
I wave at my reflection with the tips of my fingers. The phantom image waves back from within her prison.
Something tiny nudges my palm and I looked down at my other hand. My fingers uncurl and I study the sedative resting in the cavity of my palm. I put the pill where it belongs. It spirals around the sink until it disappears into darkness of the drain. Then I crawl into bed to escape into my dreams, the one place where I’m free.
The one place where John can’t find me.
I look back at the window. The ghost girl appears again and the heaviness in her face tells me she’s tired too. I watch her drift to sleep. Though still trapped within the glass, I notice something’s different just before she closes her eyes.
She’s smiling.
by Patricia Stewart | Mar 15, 2013 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“Welcome aboard, Mrs. Dieter.”
“Why, thank you, Captain Dieter,” Lana replied with a giggle, and followed it up with a long, hard kiss. Afterwards, she embraced him firmly and said, “I can’t believe I married a 200 year old man.”
“I’m thirty-five,” he corrected. “I just happened to have been born 200 years ago. It’s one of the consequences of choosing a career piloting interstellar cargo ships at near light speed.”
“I can’t imagine how hard it had to be for you to leave your family and friends for so long, knowing that they would grow old, while you stayed young.”
“I won’t lie to you, darling, it ruined my first marriage. Unlike you, Demetra was afraid of space, and wouldn’t leave Earth. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the beginning. After all, the Alpha Centauri run has the least relativistic effects. However, I’d age only a year, as Demetra and the kids aged eight. However, the money was good, so we thought we could deal with it, but after the fourth run it became untenable. Relative to me, in four years, Demetra was older than my mother. I couldn’t handle it. I asked for a divorce. I willingly gave her all my money, and signed up for the Denebolian run. She died during the 73 year voyage, and I haven’t been back to Earth since.”
“Was she pretty?”
Concluding that he had already said too much on the subject, he tried to divert her attention. “Not compared to the prettiest girl in the universe,” he said as he framed her face in the palms of his hands. “Well, that is, until Halona decides to join us,” he added has he padded her slightly protruding tummy. “Now, if I don’t get this ship out of the dock, Phobos Control will give someone else our launch slot, and we won’t get to Regulus before the cargo spoils.” He kissed her forehead lightly, and headed toward the flight deck, truly believing the topic was behind them.
Several months later, however, after initiating the Regulus breaking sequence, Wendell Dieter entered their bedroom to find Lana sitting on the edge of the bed in tears. Fearing a problem with the pregnancy, he rushed to her side. “What’s the matter, honey? Is the baby okay?”
She pointed to the desk monitor with a trembling finger, “Is that your Demetra?” she asked through stifled sobs.
It was. Wendell couldn’t understand why his new wife was so fixated on a woman that’s has been dead for centuries. “Honey, what’s this about? I explained to you a dozen times…”
“No, no, no, it’s not that. It’s a Genealogy site. I was constructing Halona’s family tree. Demetra’s daughter was my grandmother. You’re my great grandfather.”
by Julian Miles | Mar 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
After Grandma died, Grandpa settled into being the selfish octogenarian teenager he had always been under the veneer of wisdom and mischief. When his body started to fail, he didn’t notice for a while as he played so much. Eventually we had to intervene to save him from himself. Today, he’s viewing his new home, one fully approved by Decade Eight and thankfully affordable.
“But they don’t even have a megabit network interface!”
Give me strength, Grandma. How did you not throttle him with the power lead from his vintage PS4?
“Look; the room doesn’t have a vari-pos screen and the armchair is unpowered.”
At this point, a bright and distractingly bouncy nurse in a blue-green skinjob under her transparent nurse’s suit enters the room. Grandpa’s eyes go saucer-wide, like the first time he’d seen Ellen without the modesty panels in her daysuit.
“Challene Deathblade?” He sputtered.
With a megawatt smile she crouches by him and Ellen, my wife, has to look away from the intimate view provided as Grandpa leans forward to get a better look.
The nurse in cosplay bodypaint has a dazzling smile and her cleavage is seemingly bottomless. “You’re a fan? Oh great. I’m outnumbered by the Empire players.”
Grandpa looks ready to cry. “I used to be a mercenary guild Reptiliad, but I’m useless without enhanced play.”
I know that Grandpa, you spent our inheritance on neural accelerators to compensate for your slowing reflexes. The painted but fundamentally nude nurse leans close and stage-whispers: “Why do you think this place looks so ordinary? We put all of our investment into wireless care. Everything you need is available from dropdown menus, we monitor your body state all the time and prevent more than we have to fix. Plus it gives us a multi-hundred gig bandwidth to parallel you with a fully persona’d neural assistant.”
The look of stubborn non-cooperation on Grandpa’s face vanishes like a switch has been thrown. Ellen doesn’t see because the male counterpart of bouncy nurse has entered the room. Her eyes nearly suck this red-skinned Adonis with brown tattoos clean out of his suit. I need to get her out of here before comparisons with my blatantly ungym rounded padding are made.
“When can I move in, ‘John Carter’?” Grandpa’s voice is querulous and Ellen catches my eye. The advice from the Octogenarian Gamer network had been spot on.
“I see you’re persona non-abode due to mandated residential care, so you don’t actually have to leave, sir. You can scan your flat from here and eyetag everything you want brought over. I’m Doctor Evander Morgan. It’ll be a pleasure and honour to host a veteran gamer like yourself.”
Doctor Morgan’s voice is businesslike, but his pecs flex slowly and I see Ellen’s eyes widen.
Grandpa smiles for the first time in forever. “Do it. Adam, Ellen, you can leave me here.”
Morgan looks at Ellen and smiles. I see the flush spread down the back of her neck.
“We’ll need one of your family to drop in a couple of times to finalise the details. Challene; sorry, Nurse Burton will see to getting ‘Grandpa’ bedded in and implanted.”
Ellen steps forward. “My husband’s very busy right now, but I have no problem coming in when you need me to.”
She smiles straight at Morgan’s chest and I decide that work be damned, whenever she comes to ‘see Grandpa’, I’m coming too.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 13, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s a time traveler thing.
I’m always walking up to people that I haven’t met yet and saying ‘hello’. I jump around so often that I can’t keep it straight. Then I have to go back and stop myself from doing it. It can get confusing but as long as I keep all the distortions to my own timestream, things are okay. A lot of people think I have a twin who occasionally appears, angry, and gets my attention.
It’s cool. I’m my own guardian angel, I guess.
I like seeing these people who I’m not going to meet for years by their reckoning. Some of them will be recruits, some of them will be lovers, some of them will just be pals with no idea of who I truly am.
I do enjoy a good ruse. I’m also quite the practical joker. I like to go around and leave little traps for myself. I’ve had people come up to me in public places and slap me silly because of what I did ‘last night’. I know my future self is laying down more shenanigans for me to find out about. It’s a gas.
What has me worried this time, though, is this woman in front of me. She’s crying in a way that suggests that she’s witnessing some sort of miracle.
“David?” she’s saying through her tears, hope warring with disbelief on her beautiful face. “Is it you?”
And then she says the words that chill me.
“I thought you were dead. I saw you die.”
Now, my name’s not David. I use a lot of aliases. But this woman seems pretty sincere. We talk for a while. She tells me that I died in her arms four years ago after a car accident. After her tears dry, she admits that I do look younger than her late husband but that the resemblance is still uncanny.
I died? Four years ago? I was married? How could I even begin to screw the timestream that much? That goes against everything I’ve been trained for. She has no idea I’m a time traveler, though, so I guess I at least kept that secret from her.
I’m very unsettled now. I hope all will be revealed. In time.
by submission | Mar 12, 2013 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
“Mac?”
“Yeah?”
“Um. I sort of want to eat your face.”
Raj said this in a sheepish tone.
“No, you don’t.”
“I know, I just. . . .”
I jerked a thumb over my shoulder, at the back of the car.
“It’s not you. It’s her.”
I hit the switch, activating the shock-collar the perp was wearing. She twitched on the backseat like an epileptic having a grand mal seizure.
“Better?” I asked Raj.
He nodded, rubbed his head. “Yeah.”
“You have to learn to keep ‘em out of your head, kid.”
“How do you do it?”
I shrugged and we drove along for a while in silence. Outside the car, the concrete highway glowed in the moonlight. Ahead, a neon sign flashed, advertising a truck stop.
As we drew near it, Raj sighed and drew his gun, pressed it against my head.
“Pull over, Mac.”
I looked at him. The ‘path was out cold, in the back seat. “You’re a sympathizer, Raj?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet bounced off my skull and shattered the front windshield. I jabbed two fingers into Raj’s throat, hard. He bent double, choking and I relieved him of his gun, slammed it into the side of his head. Raj slumped, unconscious.
I checked myself in the rear-view mirror. The bullet had torn through the synthetic flesh covering the side of my head, exposing the metal beneath it. Repairing the damage wouldn’t take much, but until that happened I would be walking around, looking like an escapee from a bad sci-fi movie.
“What . . . ?”
Turning, I saw the ‘path staring at me, blearily, through the perp-glass. On general principles I switched on the shock-collar again, a full jolt. There was an unpleasant stink of burning hair and urine.
Typical.
Damned telepaths.
Bad enough the war with them turned me into a cyborg, now this one had to piss all over the backseat.
I stopped and radioed headquarters, letting them know what had happened. They gave me the green light to sanction the ‘path, but wanted Raj alive. Living sympathists were rare. The spooks wanted to interrogate Raj before they sanctioned him.
I felt sorry for the kid, until I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window.
Bastard.
The interrogators were welcome to him.
I pulled the telepath out of the car and put a bullet in her mutant brain. By the time the spooks arrived for Raj, I was sitting on the car’s hood, sucking on a cigarette, watching the sunrise and feeling almost human.
by Desmond Hussey | Mar 11, 2013 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
At 12:01pm Greenwich Time every vid-screen worldwide is interrupted by a mysterious broadcast. Every program on every channel airs the same ominous figure shrouded in thick shadow. “Greeting citizens of Earth,” speaks the mystery man after a brief, enigmatic silence. World leaders are called away from meetings or roused from sleep to watch the pirated broadcast, unable to stop it. Eyes and ears all over the globe are fixed on their media outputs.
“For two hundred years my identity and purpose has been carefully hidden from you.” The speakers queer voice modulates with a frog-like intonation. “But the time has come to reveal myself and my intentions. As of yesterday, by your own terrestrial laws, I have legally purchased all property, water and mineral rights, corporations, manufacturing and processing plants, patents, law firms and banks. I presently own 95% of the planet and its resources. I am,” an alien face looms into the light, flat and featureless, “your new landlord.” A thin crimson slash cracks the smooth, ebony salamander skin – a twisted smile. Twin, black pearl-like eyes gleam with inscrutable intelligence. The world holds its breath.
“My name is B’nar Khaffri Sul-nikat. I am what you earth people would call an extra-terrestraial, though I’ve lived on this planet far longer than any of you. I am an explorer from a solar system far beyond your current ability to locate. Even from a thousand light years away I was attracted to the wondrous beauty of your home; it’s variety of life and plant species so unlike most worlds in the cosmos. If you only knew how truly rare this oasis of life was, you would not have become so careless in your treatment of it.
“For reasons uncountable I have come to love this planet as much as my own, which is why, after a thorough examination of your backward economics and outlandish international and corporate laws, it became clear that I could simply buy it from you.” The being laughs, a sound much like a wooden bat being dragged across metal bars.
“It is ironic how much your species values so-called ”precious” minerals and metals, how much importance you place on ownership and legal rights, how much faith you have in an economic system so easily corruptible and flawed. I say ironic because the gold, diamonds and petroleum you deem so ‘rare’ and cherish so highly are, in fact, as abundant as the stars. I have seen entire planets made of diamond, oceans of crude oil, moons with rivers of gold. Yet on these common, base elements you would hang your happiness at the tragic expence of the unique and glorious diversity of life your planet offers; a treasure far beyond monetary quantification. Your backward obsession with shiny things, however, made it simple for me to amass wealth sufficient enough to purchase, over time and with utmost discretion, those industries and resources which represent your present civilization.
“It is time to protect my investment before your destructive tendencies reach their inevitable, tragic end. As of this moment, all mining and manufacturing will cease, all borders are dissolved, all banks are closed. I will grant humanity one year to vacate the premises before my new tenants arrive.”
B’nar Khaffri Sul-nikat fades back into murky shadow.
“Please, do not attempt to resist. You’ll find the effort most unrewarding.”
The television screen goes blank. The radio broadcasts only static. Seven billion newly homeless humans stare unblinking into thin air, like a gambler who has lost everything on a single bet, unwilling to believe the outcome; beaten at their own game.
