by submission | May 15, 2014 | Story |
Author : cchatfield
The child hovers in the doorway, reluctant to abandon the light of the hall.
“But it’s dark…” she whispers, “I don’t like the closet. Or the bed.”
Her father pats the pillow and proffers a gently humming comfort-bot. “Don’t worry. I promise there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“But what about the monsters?”
He cocks an eyebrow. “They wouldn’t dare. Would I ever lie to you?”
————
“It won’t hurt you.”
The girl is crouched on the couch, broomstick at the ready.
“It’s just a helper-bot,” says her father, “It’s here to clean and take orders. It won’t even come near you.”
Slowly, she lowers her plastic weapon. “Are you sure?”
————
Father and daughter stand in the docking zone, lugging suitcases fit to burst. The interplanetary ships loom overhead, buzzing with the activity of labor-bots, crews, and passengers.
“Dad, I’m not sure I want to do this.”
He pauses to rest a hand on her shoulder. “We don’t have a choice.”
“Will life be better there?”
He drops his baggage to wrap an arm around her.
“Life will be different, and we’ll have to work hard. But we’ll be happy and it’ll be worth it.”
“Promise?”
————
The alarm’s shrieks are replaced by a lone strobe-light flickering from the hallway. The man murmurs into a handheld screen: “Thanks, but no. We’ll stay here. We’d rather be alone.”
He signs off and sits beside his daughter on the bed.
His face is haggard, but his voice calm. “It’s the air systems. The bots destroyed the fuel reserves. They’ll breach this end of the ship soon.”
He opens his palm and the two pills glint in the light.
“If we’re unconscious, it won’t be bad at all. The air will stop and we won’t even know.”
The young woman’s voice quavers. “Will it hurt?”
His lips twitch and he shakes his head, “Just like going to sleep. Would I ever lie to you?”
by Clint Wilson | May 14, 2014 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
I am Charlie. I have been augmented with idog software. I can understand over 6000 words of English. I like food. I like warmth. I love my master.
He navigates the garbage-strewn alleyways with the expertise of someone born post invasion. I am only two years old. I follow him with undying loyalty. Together we study the open plain of an abandoned city square. A rabbit scurries sixty feet away yet I sit frozen. Not until my master gives the signal will I move a muscle.
Finally he lets me know it’s time to proceed. We slip along tight against the burned out buildings, hiding in the shadows as much as we can, avoiding the open space.
With a thunderous explosion the clouds part and a saucer drops from the sky like a weight, thudding hard onto the concrete of the square. My master reacts instantly, twisting and diving through a half-boarded up window into a long abandoned tenement. His familiar whistle pierces the air and I follow him through the opening.
Their humanoid detectors have located his form and they will not give up easily as they continue their relentless pursuit to abolish his kind.
My master sprints across a cluttered family room and bursts through a paper-thin door into a dingy hallway. I follow at his heels. Together we make our way toward the fire escape. Suddenly a lean muscular rottweiler jumps from an apartment doorway and lands in front of us, slobbering and growling like a hellhound. I skid to a halt on my four blonde paws, my master coming to a stop beside me. My father was a Pit-bull. My mother was a German Shepard. I remember them both dearly. I am a handsome dog who knows how to fight.
But my idog implant gives me other options. I quickly send the rottweiler an imessage. She receives it and I know that she too has idog. “Where is your master?” I type across the inside of her eyeball.
“He no longer moves.”
“So he is dead then?”
“I am not a doctor. I am not qualified to say.”
My own master has had enough of this and raises his weapon. I give him a familiar whine and a wink. He lowers his gun. “Hurry up then. We must move quickly!”
I turn my attention back to the rottweiler. “My master would have killed you had I not just intervened. Let us pass.” She looks up at him, then at me again, and bows back inside of her apartment doorway.
Together my master and I jump out onto the fire escape. Air drones buzz down and fire their lasers. My master dives into a dumpster and I follow. A blast from above explodes a cinderblock wall and knocks the dumpster over.
We scramble out and down the alley. Then another turn, and over a low cement wall and down an embankment. We are free. Soon we arrive in an old part of town, one we are familiar with. Yet, something has changed. The roof is missing from the Main Street Plaza. Suddenly a saucer drops from the sky. My master is blasted and instantly obliterated into a cloud of red droplets. I dive behind a pile of garbage, catching my breath.
I wait for hours, yet no one seeks me. My master is gone; I have witnessed this with my own eyes. After a time I realize that nobody is ever going to look for me. I slink from the rubble and make my way back toward the rottweiler’s apartment. Perhaps she has some ideas.
by Julian Miles | May 13, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
In a room devoid of décor, two chairs face each other across a table barely wide enough to be called a bench. Everything shows the khaki swirls of extruded Replast. In the left hand seat, a young man in filthy rags sits in a pose of tired resignation. Opposite, in many ways, sits a young woman in the uniform of a Major in the Ministry of Defence.
“Please speak clearly. This interview is being recorded and witnessed.” She smiles after she speaks; an encouragement.
“I must have given my statement a dozen times over the last week.” The tramp seems unimpressed, but his shoulders straighten.
“This will be the last time. Full and formal record.”
“Okay. How would you like it presented?”
“Tell the version you gave to the Draft Evasion Board.”
He leans back and stares at the ceiling. His voice betrays an education at odds with his appearance.
“It was ten years ago, just after the first conscription draft intake. We were in the same barracks. As you know, that draft was split into units after the first three months. I ended up in the scutwork battalion. He got into the new army cadre. I never figured it out, just got on with it. UNE profiling gave us the jobs we could do best, so I did my bit.”
She leaned forward: “Then came the Advent City Incident.”
“We all watched the news. The firestorm, the ship coming down, the recruits getting massacred trying to protect the townsfolk. Then the camera picked up a lone figure at extreme range, hanging off the old mine workings on a firing sling with a Trapenor Missile Launcher. Firing that monster was suicide; he’d bring the hillside down on himself for sure. But at that range, the missile would penetrate the Khomin’s shields and hull. We cheered like everyone else when he gave his life to save so many. We were so damn proud. A conscript had become the first hero of the Human-Khomin War. Everyone was fired up.”
“Until the hero was named.” She sat back and crossed her legs.
He grimaced: “It took them a week to recover his body. I was just out of the showers when someone slapped me on the back and told me I was a hero. When I heard the news, I went to our battalion office and made some enquiries. They told me my name was Gustav and that I should stop messing about. I got really angry. So they sedated me. I woke up in an ‘Unsuitable for Service’ workhouse.”
“Which you escaped from and disappeared. Until eight days ago.”
His grin was infectious: “Wouldn’t you? All of a sudden, I was a lunatic and my mum had a dead hero for a son.”
“So why did you come back?”
“Mum died two weeks ago. She’d had the support of a grateful Earth in her waning years, something far better than I could have given her. But now she’s gone, and the war is two years past. It’s time for the truth to be revealed. There is no way that a five-month recruit could have rigged an ad-hoc sniper harness on those mine ruins, let alone overcome the safety limiters and proximity locks on a Trapenor.”
“Say it clearly, please.”
There is a silence as he gathers himself. It reminds her of an animal shaking off the concealment it has risen from.
“My name is Leon Sprake. The man you have named streets, warships and memorials after was an identity thief, and I think we all need to know who he really was.”
by submission | May 12, 2014 | Story |
Author : Kirstie Olley
My name is Leila and I used to be the queen bee at school. If I curled my hair, all the girls curled their hair. If I cut one side short and left the other long, everyone did. If I shaved the Queen of Hearts into the short side of my hair, my class became a deck of cards.
Then Dad got promoted. The generous pay rise was off-set by a massive move. We relocated, and I changed schools.
I thought I’d just swan in, gorgeous as always and charm everyone, but they all stared at me like I was a freak.
At first I thought it was the Queen of Hearts still shaved into the side of my head, so I let my hair grow out, but they didn’t stop avoiding me.
I noticed everyone at school was bald. So hair must be out here, I’d heard of the trend before, so I shaved my head, waxed off every hair I could find. They stopped staring but no one talked to me.
Everyone was pale too, so my Californian tan stuck out. I begged Dad non-stop for a week, total ‘are we there yet?’ style torture until he agreed to pay for a procedure that bleaches the tan out of your skin.
He was still nervous when he took me to the cosmetic surgeon.
“This procedure isn’t unusual, particularly out here. People just want to fit in, not just teenagers, but children and adults too,” the nurse assured dad, her eyes on his ever-jiggling leg as he sat beside me. “And it’s not permanent either.”
Dad’s lips twitched in a way that said he knew that was more a plus for the surgeons than for the patients.
The next day at school I swanned in with my lovely new pale skin, my scalp freshly shaved, but still, no one talked with me.
I don’t think you really get it. This is agony for me. Sure it can’t be easy being the outsider all the time, but imagine if you’d had a taste of being not just in, but being the trend setter.
I spent the next week in my room. I didn’t go to school. I couldn’t.
Then the internet gave me the solution. There were other procedures.
It took longer to convince Dad of these ones. These ones were permanent. He thinks I don’t know, but he looked into getting transferred back to California, but his bosses refused. I even heard him discuss with Susan quitting and finding another job, but in this economy, with unemployment rates so high, they agreed it was too risky.
It’s a weird sensation going under general anaesthetic, the creeping in vagueness, the world misting away.
My recovery took months, but now the bruising is gone and the scarring is hidden.
I look perfect: silvery pale, hairless, my features elongated, my big dark eyes, my nose so small and flat it’s barely there.
Finally I’ll fit in with everyone else on this planet.
END
by submission | May 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Tyler Hawkins
I only just missed you this time. Five millennia in the timescale of the cosmos is a needle in a haystack and then some. I was only 5 thousand years away from you but it seemed like it very well could have been any of the other times I arrived before the Milky Way collides with Andromeda. We were long gone, I was surprised to find. The stars looked identical to when I left, it was so reassuring. But the Earth didn’t. Pity, I had higher hopes for humanity.
Not really any of my concern though, the Earth will be there for us. I have the tools to reach you, just not the luck. Time travel was so new for us, but it was agony waiting for every minor breakthrough we had perfecting it. I needed more accuracy, but by the time we could have hit that small window where you lived your life, I would have been long gone so I had to risk it. I’ve been traveling for 2 years now, with each jump I use more energy. With each unsuccessful jump I age that much more, my machines wear that much more and I become that much more desperate.
Even if I deplete the stars, even if I destroy these machines and my body, I will reach you. 20 years now, so many parts have failed, machine and body alike. Each jump now uses more than a whole star, but lucky for me the universe has billions and we only need one. I think back to the closest I’ve ever been to you, and realize it was before all this started. When I was born, it was only 150 years since you had died. I met you through your writing, I loved you through your photographs and I will find you across the universe.
by submission | May 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
They found it. In the most impossible spot, in the most unlikely location, they found it.
And the scientists were baffled.
On the edge of explored space, Henry Frisk stared out the porthole of the survey ship. The nearby star was just close enough that its light shone on the insanely improbable object. It reflected for parsecs. It was easy to find because it shone so brightly.
A hand touched his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” the intruder said. He turned to look Trudi Maines in the eyes. Her beautiful blue eyes that shone brightly, but not nearly as brightly as it did.
“It’s all right,” he said, smiling. “It just fascinates me, that’s all.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Have they found out anything?”
He shook his head. “Not a thing,” he told her.
“Why do you suppose they did it?” she asked.
He chuckled lightly. “What?”
“They….whomever they were….put a perfectly round hundred mile wide sphere of gold—pure gold—in the middle of an asteroid belt….why do you think they did it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You have to have a theory? You’re the authority on extraterrestrial life.”
Frisk let out a laugh. “That’s like saying someone is an authority on God,” he said. “It just isn’t possible.”
He looked into Trudi’s troubled eyes. “Listen,” he said. He turned and pointed. “Whoever made that, whoever took the time and made that, wanted it found. They wanted us to find it.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Because,” He said. “It has a message.”
“A message?”
He nodded. “Carved in the gold.”
“Carved in the gold?” Trudi backed away a step. “I don’t understand?”
Frisk let out another chuckle. “No one does,” he said. “All the great minds of Earth have pondered it. They are as dumbfounded as I am.”
He paused, then added: “But, I do have a theory.”
“I knew you would,” Trudi said. She took a step forward again.
There was a long silence between them as they stared out at the glistening ball of gold. “All right,” she said. “Tell me.”
He nodded. “Imagine,” he said. “Imagine those ancient astronauts that everyone says helped build the pyramids and Easter Island and gave the Mayans their advanced science. Imagine that they saw mankind’s bloodlust. Imagine how simple, how petty we looked to them.”
He turned to her. “That’s why the left. They knew that we were unworthy of their assistance. They weren’t like us. They were civilized.”
Trudi let out a disappointed gasp of air. “But what about U.F.O.s?” she asked. “What about alien abductions?”
He shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe they were just checking in, hoping we had changed?”
“And we didn’t?”
Frisk shook his head again. “It’s our nature.” He chuckled again and pointed out at the golden sphere. “That sphere,” he said. “They put it here because they knew we would find it. They knew we would find it, and they wanted to see what we would do with it.”
He turned to her. “It’s pure gold. The purest gold ever known to man.”
“It must we worth…..”
“Its worth is incalculable,” he told her. “And that’s why they put a message on it.”
“What does the message say?” she asked.
He shook his head again. “They haven’t translated it yet.” He drew a deep breath. “But, I know what it’ll say.”
“What?”
“That money isn’t everything….Love is.”
He turned to her. “I love you, Trudi,” he said. “I always have….and I always will.”
Then, he bent forward and kissed her in the golden light of the orb.
