by submission | Oct 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Rachel Verkade
The killer told me he’d had a turtle in his head.
He seemed perfectly calm and reasonable about it. A turtle, living nestled in his brain. I asked him if the turtle was what had made him kill. He didn’t know. If it did, he didn’t hold any ill will towards it. He seemed to feel a good deal of affection for it, in fact, or at least as much affection as a man like him could feel.
I asked what had happened to it. Shrugging, he told me that when they’d caught him, they’d cut into his head. To see what had made him the way he is. He told them not to, he said, but they didn’t listen. He was mentally incompetent, after all, committed to a state hospital for treatment, and that gave them all the power over him that they needed. So the surgeons came, and they strapped him down, drugged him, cut him. They’d found the turtle, and they’d removed it.
I asked if that upset him. Not really, he replied. He’d been sorry when it died, of course, but he’d thought that might happen. How could an animal so used to the warmth and wetness of a man’s brain survive in the cold and the dryness of the air, after all? Anyway, they’d let him keep the body.
It was hanging outside his cell, just close enough for him to touch through the bars. A red-eared slider, male, a good size. The killer brushed it with his fingers, making the limp little head sway. I asked him how it could possibly have fit in his head and left room for his brain. He didn’t know. Not how it had gotten in there, nor how it had survived, nor how it kept getting out.
Getting out?
Oh, yes, he said with a smile. At least once a week it would go out, never for more than a couple of hours at a time. It always came back, so he didn’t mind. And anyway, he confided with a wink, it was because of the turtle’s little sojourns that he now had his secret. He gestured me closer, and I approached despite my better judgement.
Crawling around his feet, paddling through a little bowl of water on the stone floor…a clutch of tiny hatchlings. He didn’t know how big they’d have to get before they could enter his head, but he was willing to wait.
by Julian Miles | Oct 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The elegant décor did nothing to lift the atmosphere in the room as the small group of officers and dignitaries parted to let Inspector Carbeth through. He strode up to the sprawled body and rapped his cane on the parquet flooring to prompt his man’s report.
The detective spoke without looking up from his analyser: “His work, without question.”
“What was it this time?”
“A celery stick restructured to consist of tungsten-carbide.”
Carbeth scowled. The man was making a mockery of his department. Twenty-eight assassinations in nine weeks. The Council was gone. Only His Excellency remained. Drastic measures were required.
A polite cough from the entrance of the room caused all to bow as His Excellency sauntered in.
“My dear Carbeth. This is somewhat of a trial, is it not?”
“Excellency. The man known as the Alchemist is a coward. He slays and then disguises himself as a member of staff, uses his unique molecular manipulation techniques to shape a weapon from a household item, then kills his target without warning or mercy. We are now sure that he remains amongst the staff the following day and escapes in the evening.”
His Excellency looked perturbed: “You mean to say that the Alchemist is amongst the staff here, as we speak?”
Carbeth smiled as a notion became an idea: “Indeed, Excellency. And that is exactly where we want him.”
“Really? Do tell.”
“Please order the entire staff to assemble in the ballroom. I shall demonstrate.”
The ballroom was abuzz with muted conversation as His Excellency, Carbeth and twenty Pacifiers entered. Carbeth received confirmation from the seneschal that all were present.
He drew his flechette pistol and then nodded to the Pacifier Captain: “Kill them all.”
The spasmic grunts of unexpected death were drowned out by the crackle of twenty kazers. The silent aftermath was torn by the syncopated hiss of Carbeth’s flechette pistol as he shot the seneschal in the back.
“Good god, Carbeth! Are you out of your mind?”
“No, milord. I am killing the Alchemist. For the death of one such as him, the loss of eighty-five serving class is a bargain price.”
His Excellency gathered himself.
“Quite exemplary, Carbeth. You might give thought to a Council seat. I find myself in need of men of decisive mien.”
His Excellency was less sanguine later, missing his courtesans. Ah well, a couple of bottles of vintage red would tide the night over into the following day and the excitement of getting more staff. He always loved shopping.
Pleasurable anticipation was halted by the sight of a cracker lifting from his caviar, steaming and glowing as it was transformed from foodstuff to molybdenum. As the restructured wafer approached, a dulcet feminine voice spoke from the air to its left.
“It never ceases to amaze me that you are all so fascinated by the technology I use to make my weapons, yet never seek to question the simple ruses I perform to conceal my invisibility.”
by submission | Oct 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Thomas began remembering in the middle of the first week of May. There wasn’t a particular reason for it, no epiphany, no aching longing. It was just that Thomas had spent so long trying to forget that the only thing left to do was remember.
Before he purchasing the memory machine he had never done anything notable with his life. He worked long, well-paid hours, and he never spent more money than he needed to. Friday nights consisted of lying in bed listening to music. He had no friends, and to be frank he didn’t want any.
He had loved a girl so much once that her absence still ached in his chest. Yet despite the tremendous longing he had for her he couldn’t remember her face. He spent long hours awake in bed trying to visualize her. He never could.
The night that Thomas finally began remembering was a sleepless night much like the many before he had dreamt of dreaming through. His mind desperately wanted to sleep, but his body refused. He spent hours fighting a battle in his head he knew he would lose. After three hours he stood up, walked back into his kitchen, and sat down in front of the helmet. He looked at it for a while. He listened to the sink drip – it had been broken for a while. The kitchen’s electronics hummed. The city buzzed with the motions of life just outside his window. He listened to these things. They were real things, things that he could hear in the darkness of night. He wondered what they would sound like if they weren’t real.
He put the helmet on.
Thomas didn’t show up to work the next day. Instead he went walking through snow up to his hips on surface of a lake, laboriously wading out letters fifteen feet tall. It took the better part of an hour to spell, “Happy Valentine’s Day.” Then he waited for her on top of a hill overlooking the lake, sitting in the snow and thinking. When she arrived he took her by her dinosaur-mittened hand and took her for a walk. He loved holding her hand. They went out for coffee after that, looking like snow-drenched rats in the clean store interior.
Thomas missed work again the next day. He was too busy for work and instead spent the day out on the trails behind her house. He rode a horse for the first time even though he was afraid of horses. She had wanted him to ride her Hoss, though. So he had, despite his fears. He had never seen her smile so much. He didn’t know it, but he fell in love again. He spent the evening warming up in front of a fire, happier than he had ever been.
The authorities showed up on the third day. They found Thomas on the kitchen floor, covered in his own waste and not moving, face vacant behind the helmet visor. They removed the helmet, but could solicit no response from him. There was swearing, an ambulance, a frenzy of activity.
Thomas died just before eleven in the morning from a severe brain aneurism. The last thing he ever remembered was the sight, sound, and smell of eggs, whipped cream, and waffles while she asked what she had done to deserve breakfast in bed.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The pulsing orb set down in my farmhouse’s back yard in the middle of the night. The corn swayed in the breeze, completely unaffected by the alien craft. It silently came to a stop on the grass just outside the cornfield, shifting in colour from red to green.
In the distance, a dog barked.
I stood on my back porch in my bathrobe carrying my shotgun.
I stared at the glowing, eerie ship. A door opened and a green creature came out, stepping down invisible stairs to the lawn. It stood fifteen feet in front of me. It had a disturbing amount of claws and teeth. It looked nervous and awkward.
“Hey there. Uh. You mutht be a hoomin.” it said, long tongue lisping through long teeth, “Thorry. Uh….human! Human. Yeah. Uh, take me to your leader? Is that how it goeth? Yeah. Take me to your leader.” Said the alien.
“Get off my property.” I growled.
“Uh, yeah. Uh. We come in….peath! Peath, yeah. That’s how it goeth, right? We come in peath. So, like, take uth, to, the…prethident. At the White Houthe.” Said the alien, shooting me a red-eyed questioning look.
“Look. If’n you don’t get offa my property, ahm a-gonna blast ya.” I sneered at the beast.
The alien looked at me. It appeared to be thinking.
“KORTH-QUAT!” boomed a huge voice from inside the ship, making both me and the alien jump. “QUIT PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD!”
Sheepishly, the alien looked back at me and shrugged. It leapt at me before I could even raise my gun. The last thing I saw was those teeth coming straight for my face.
by submission | Oct 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
“Greetings, friend and foe. I humbly thank you all for temporarily putting aside our differences and attending this unprecedented, historic peace conference.”
Twenty-three translators echo my words into twenty three different alien languages for the heterogeneous collection of delegates filling the cavernous convention chamber.
“My great-great-great-great-grandfather started this inter-planetary war – a war I hope to end today.”
A confusion of muttering, chirping, slurping and howls erupts from the congregation as my words are translated, absorbed and reacted to.
“He certainly didn’t intend to. Great-grandpappy4 George was a peaceful man, I’m told, who happened to be the leading specialist in laser technology when Earth’s astronomers detected a massive asteroid headed straight for us in the year 2035, Earth reckoning. He was asked to design and build an enormous laser on the moon capable of blasting it to smithereens – which he did, and in 2040, the asteroid was successfully destroyed.
“To us, he was a hero.
“However, in the brief, but hectic blasting frenzy, one shot missed. One fateful, three hundred gigajoule beam continued straight on through space for fifteen years until, despite all probability, it destroyed a space vessel belonging to the Thitherith.”
The reptilian delegation collectively hisses.
“The Thitherith, mistaking our errant laser as an act of war, assaulted Earth in a massive invasion in 2096. They brought lots of lasers of their own. With the aid of our fledgling space fleet and Great-grandpappy4 George’s laser, we managed to push the Thitherith out of our solar system.
“But not for long.
“For thirty years the attacks persisted. For thirty years the solar system and surrounding regions of space were ablaze with lasers, explosions and death. Then things got really heated.
“You see, with all those ultra-powerful lasers zipping around it was just a matter of time before another spacefarer got hit by a stray. Before we knew it, three other local races were up in arms over perceived, but unintentional hostilities. Of course, they all brought lasers.
“By 2140 we had regular laser battles from Cygnus to Sagittarius and five more indignant races had joined the fray. By 2190 lasers were bigger and more destructive, four home planets were asteroid clouds, seven were uninhabitable and multi-colored lasers criss-crossed the heavens hourly. On top of all this, reports of armed armadas bearing down on this sector seeking justice were coming from every quadrant.
“It’s now 2227. Twenty-three races are currently at war. Existing laser-beams will pollute the galaxy for fifty more years before they are too weak to do any harm.
“It is time to do something
“I’ve dedicated my life to stopping this escalating catastrophe. It has occurred to me; in the one hundred and eighty-seven years of galactic mud-slinging since Great-grandpappy4 George fired the first accidental shot, no one has addressed the fact that it was a simple faulty assumption that got us into this imbroglio. We have collectively believed that space beyond our local sphere was so inconceivably vast that our actions could not possibly adversely affect anything or anyone else. We know, now, this was foolishly naïve. We know, now, it’s a small galaxy afterall.
“I hope to convince this honoured assembly that our horrendous conflicts have been the result of a tragic misunderstanding – one that we can end. Today, by ratifying the Neodymium Accord, we can put aside our endless hostilities, stop polluting space with violent energy and ban the use of destructive laser technology. Today, we can choose to work together toward the first United Coalition of Planets and an age of peace.”
The room fell silent. I wait with baited breath.
by submission | Oct 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Antonio pitched forward onto the ice, the exit wound in his left upper back clearly visible. He was dead. I finished reloading my rifle and took cover behind what remained of the wall of the dome. It was almost entirely a ground war now. Between our anti-aircraft lasers and the aerospace support from the Lunies, it was hard for an enemy drone or fighter plane to get through. In the distance, I could see several vehicles approaching. Hovercraft tanks, most likely. I doubted I had anything left that could hit something that heavily armored and do much damage.
My hands and feet were getting numb. It wasn’t that cold out, only -20°C according to the readout in my helmet’s display. Something was wrong with my battlesuit’s heaters. I did a sensor sweep and could still only see the heat signatures from the hovercraft. If there had been individual soldiers on foot, I might have tried to pick one or two off.
I looked back at the fragmented dome. Inside the area of the dome about a quarter of a kilometer in the distance I could make out a few hectares of hydroponic crops, long since frozen and shattered. Off to the left were rows of much smaller geodesic domes: individual houses, some of them remarkably intact given the pounding the giant habitation dome had taken. I wondered what the cities in the Americas and Russia and Asia looked like? The Lunar Free State and Lagrange-5 had been bombarding the enemy for close to eight months. That had to be taking quite a toll.
As I looked around, my eye fell on a small, dark object a few meters away. It was a grenade. My battlesuit’s system interrogated it and the grenade’s computer confirmed it was functional. I ran over, picked it up, ran back to the edge of the wall, and looked around the corner. The hovertanks were getting closer. I could see their skirts had tessellated armor, probably a ceramic-matrix nanocomposite that might withstand a grenade blast. The ice between my position and the tanks had several small craters. If I could manage to get the grenade in one of them just before the tank passed over it, I thought as the vehicles closed in on my position.
I picked a crater and estimated how long I should wait before I made a run for it. I’d almost certainly be gunned down before I could make it back behind the wall. But I figured I was as good as dead anyway. May as well take a half-dozen temps with me to hell. I got ready to sprint for the crater when the tanks all suddenly stopped.
“Wěi! Wěi, can you hear me?” I reflexively jumped when I heard the voice in my helmet’s speakers.
“John? Is that you?,” I replied.
“Yeah, it’s me. Wěi, the war’s over! They’ve had enough of the Lunies and Laggies pummeling their countries. The temperate zone powers just agreed to a ceasefire and they’re ready to recognize us as a sovereign state!”
I gently put the grenade on the ice and then sat down with my back against the inner wall of the shattered dome. My hands were shaking and it had nothing to do with the cold. We’d done it. We’d won our independence. Antarctica was free!
