by submission | Apr 7, 2011 | Story
Author : John Xero
“BRRRRRRRMMMMMRRRRRRR”
“This is my dad’s tank.”
“B-B-B-BOOM, B-B-B-BOOM”
“It’s red and it has really, really big guns.”
“And it has scanners.”
“WJJJJJJJJJJJJ WJJJJJJJJJJJJJ”
“The scanners show him where the bad guys are and then he blows the bad guys up.”
“B-B-B-BOOM”
— —
In the kitchen Mary nurses her cup of tea and looks out of the window, into the sky. She listens to her son, George, in the other room with Doctor Ramsay. He’s having a good day today.
It will be George’s birthday soon and Jack will call them, like he does every year. The only time he ever calls them on a live feed. Jack will say happy birthday to his son, tell them he loves them both and hang up.
Afterwards she will tell herself all the awkwardness was down to the distance delay on the call.
— —
Some few hundred million kilometres away Jack is recalibrating the big guns.
Outside his tank the Martian wind howls. Red sand scrabbles for entry, trying every nook, every scar in the metal. The whole thing is due for an overhaul, but then what piece of equipment there isn’t. They will never leave this planet.
Jack sighs. He will have to call Mary soon, say happy birthday to George. Tell them there is no end in sight.
No one on Earth knows the truth yet. That what they fight is not a people but a planet. Victory is impossible. Every time they wipe out a nest the planet just extrudes more and they’re buried in little red men again. All they can do is keep things under control, prevent another attack on Earth like the one nineteen years ago.
Nineteen years ago; while Mary was pregnant with George; when the skies turned red and the clouds rained blood.
Jack looks at the photos pinned up in front of him; one of Mary and him on their honeymoon, and one of Mary and their son. It was the last time he saw George in the flesh, when he was three. The age George would always be, mentally. Mary had sent him newer photos, but he couldn’t bring himself to print them and put them up. This was George to him.
This was the George he spoke to once a year.
Jack didn’t know if he could ever go back.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Apr 6, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
The place never failed to depress me. You can’t polish a turd. The walls of the waiting area were painted off white and they had made an effort to buy a superior quality of cheap, shabby furniture. Around the corner it was different. The walls were an institutional green. The mortar was falling off the cinder block walls. The VA hospital had been built sometime in the last century and looked it. The patients looked it too.
My arm had been acting up again. It was probably older than I was. I often wondered about the guy who had it before me. It was an artificial black. I was a natural white. Not a good match, but what the hell do they care.
Most of the people waiting in the “lounge” as they called it were quiet. Some sleeping. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were homeless and had been awake somewhere all night and came here to sleep when the doors opened in the morning.
A quadriplegic sat down next to me. I could see the framework of his aluminium and carbon exoskeleton underneath his grimy nylon track suit. A lead from the suit snaked up from a collar around his neck and jacked into the port behind his right ear.
His limbs vibrated slightly as the skeleton tried to make sense of the random firings of the brain at rest. He’d been plazed. He raised a paper cone of coffee to his lips. I expected him to spill half of it over himself, but he handled it with great aplomb.
Normally I keep my mouth shut. I just want to get in and get out so I can head back to my shitty flat and get drunk. This time I didn’t. I wish I had.
“Luna,” I asked.
“Mars.”
“Corps?” Mars was fairly crawling with Marines since the insurrection.
“Army.”
“No shit. I was Army too. I got this beauty on Europa.” I tried to lift my mechanical negro arm. It whined noncommittally and failed to move. He turned his head to look me in the eye. His limbs shivered harder from the mixed signals it was receiving.
“You always talk this much?”
“No, I… um…,” I shut up.
“It’s okay. You felt like you had to talk to me, right?”
“Yeah, it’s weird because…,”
“Because, you just want to get your nigger arm adjusted, go back to your pathetic shit hole of an apartment and drink yourself to death.”
“Hey, who the fuck are you…”
“Relax, you know who I am.”
I thought for a moment. “No. No. Oh God, No!”
“Good for you. Give the boy a cigar. It’s time for reveille. Wakey wakey, eggs and baky…”
I awoke just in time to feel the nurse yank the lead from the port behind my right ear. Doctor Mayerson stood at my side. “I’m sorry Sergeant. The nerve attenuation from the plasma blast is incompatible with the fractal rate of the exoskeleton available to you. I’m sorry; we can do nothing for you now. Perhaps, if you have civilian insurance… No? Too bad you weren’t an officer.”
I looked down to where my arms and legs had been and screamed.
by Duncan Shields | Apr 5, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m on a steamboat at night. It’s hot out. I’m standing at the railing throwing earthling dimes into the dark water in the Mississippi night. I’m wearing a white linen suit. I feel like a dandy but wool would be suicidal in this heat.
Well, to someone that grew up in a cold place, anyway. Like me. I’m not from here.
I take another sip of my White Russian and look out in the near-jungle of rainforest that edges away into the darkness. We’re still too close to the city for stars but I can see the yellow-dot constellations of alligator’s eyes in the river picking up the shine from the moon and lights from the ship. The reptiles float by like dead things.
Steam. Fledgling electricity. Telephones. No connected computer network yet. Nothing that could detect the alien organs lurking under my disguise.
Behind my back, the steamboat is still alive with the sound of carousing but it’s dying down. Tourists are betting the last of their money, making their endgame strategies with new objects of affection, or stumbling back alone to their cabins.
We are an oasis of light and sound in the silent swamp. We’re invasive and we don’t belong here. All of the noise is coming from the deep, almost panicked need to be entertained. Humanity’s place in the world is clear at moments like this.
We. I thought the word ‘we’. Have to watch that. I’m thinking like them again. I’ve spent too long with these obnoxious experiments fouling their own cradle.
I pour the white drink into the river. It skates on the rainbow surface of the oily water, snaking back into the wash from the noisy paddlewheel at the rear of the ship.
Just another ten of the human’s years and my time here will be finished. The ruse will be up and I can go home to my own planet. I’m looking forward to it. Other contacts have reported forming an attachment to this place, to some of the humans. I envy them. That affection must make the time pass quicker.
For now, however, I feel more kinship with the alligators on the far shore with their unblinking flashlight eyes.
by submission | Apr 4, 2011 | Story
Author : Patrick Condon
Do you remember what it was like before?
No.
I don’t think so.
Do you?
We knew our civilization had peaked. The few world leaders left concluded that Communal Thought was the only solution. It is the one thing preventing our demise.
I go through life hearing thoughts that are not my own. Everyone does. I hear the non-contextual ramblings of those around me every hour of the day.
…coffee…
…twenty-two…
…May 13, 2117…
I came from the facility with a new spark in my eyes. I could feel the emotions of millions at any one moment: an infant’s cry, a lover’s kiss, the striking epiphanies of modern philosophers. Our link to the world is unimaginable.
…power can be…
…population is stable…
…substitution for…
Grand ideas and solutions came forth from seemingly unfit minds. We are in a new age of boundless progression. Communal Thought has been the greatest independent advancement for mankind in hundreds of years.
William is…
Fourteen dollars and…
I don’t care for…
Maybe it’s not right.
…truth in the—
What’s not right?
Our thoughts were once our own. Should we allow the Commune full input and output on what we do?
Hm?
I don’t understand.
What do you mean?
We weren’t always like this. We used to live in a world of life and freedom. Communal Thought was established to bring us into the Golden Age, where we would thrive as the Commune of Humanity. The Human Being.
We are progressing.
We are thriving.
We are surviving.
We used to be free.
I concentrated on the word. Free.
Free.
Do you understand? In our effort to move forward, Humanity has lost it’s… humanity. We are being monitored by familiar overseers; the entire world is an audience to everything we do. We aren’t free.
Once again I let the word fill my mind.
Free.
I felt the world fall out of motion. A wave spread from person to person, town to town, country to country. Thoughts felt more and more distant and foreign as the regions of the world gained my individual awareness. The world was my audience.
Silence.
Free.
Free.
by submission | Apr 3, 2011 | Story
Author : Jeremy Wickins
It was perhaps the greatest experiment of all time. For a split second, all other possible universes would be aligned, and we’d have knowledge of our place in the great order of things.
– I threw the switch that brought the bizarre energies together that would pierce through the barriers between universes. The small light over the switch illuminated. The instruments, scrutinised by the greatest cosmologists of our time … simply did nothing. Months later, when we were completely discredited and effectively unemployable, we could not get it through to anyone that the experiment may not have failed. Whilst there might not be any other possible universes, our calculations showed that we might exist in the earliest possible universe in which the experiment was attempted. Time’s arrow dictated that there could not be any others for us to see.
– I threw the switch that would pierce through the barriers between the universes. The small light over the switch illuminated – but it seemed too bright, somehow. The instruments detected a handful of universes, each a fraction of a second ahead of ours. Our careers were made, and we never needed to worry about research funding again.
– Just after I threw the switch, sudden pain shot through my hand as if I’d been burned by the indicator light. Our instruments detected a few tens of universes, each very slightly behind the one before it. Each of us became an instant celebrity from that day, and could find jobs in any arena we fancied – politics, media, university management: all were open to us merely for the asking.
– I watched again as the recording showed him turn on the experiment, and then simply burst into flames. It was horrible to see. It was as if the indicator light over the switch had become a high-powered laser beam. Despite the tragedy of his death, the experiment was a success – we discovered several hundred universes, each slightly in advance of the one before it, and each centred, for that moment, for some reason, on the switch. Of course, no-one on the project would ever want for work again, but some retired from science soon afterwards, stating that there some things that man can should not play with.
– Fortunately the control room was separate from many of the instruments, or we would never have worked out what had happened. The death toll was dramatic, as several square miles of land evaporated. We thought that there had been a nuclear bomb at first, what with all the crazies telling us how the experiment was too dangerous to go ahead. It was only when we analysed the data from the instruments that we realised the truth, but only after many “dissidents” had been tortured and killed. But who could have foreseen that the cumulative light and heat from the indicator switches in tens of thousands of other universes could bleed through, and with such terrible effect? The data derived from the experiment were significant, but we lost a lot of good people that day, and not just in the initial disaster.
– … 3 … 2 … 1 … I throw the switch and
by submission | Apr 2, 2011 | Story
Author : Richard Chins
Blue Squadron stood swiftly to attention. Milk dipped eyes stared blankly back at me.
Unfeeling? Indifferent?
I feel a cloud pulse behind its eye, catch a fleck of black spinning uncontrollably in its peripheral vision.
Truth and love. A dark, well trod vision slides into view. I push a smaller child and take his bike. My Mum calls my Dad an offworlder. A dog screams, my girlfriend goes to war and doesn’t come back: I see her laughing in a bunker restaurant in old burnt out London. I find a pebble with a staircase carved perfectly into it. There is blood in my cough.
I am sweating. I squirm, the beads taste thick and curdled.
My mind slips always toward the dark. Awful secrets howl their names. To turn and fight, it draws me in; I feel it tighten as I focus. But to ignore it… Terror! Thick waters drag too fast, too strong; a man insults me from across the bar; I hide it from her; I laugh as he takes my beating.
The eye is sweating, but it does not reach its cheek; it does not fall like a tear. I am a bad man.
Still standing to attention, somehow I claw my eye from its gaze. I hear my hand flap and tear at my side. The truth is ripping me apart.
It blinks, reaches for its holster, I taste blood. The gun points over my shoulder, a man’s head explodes. Six people to the left of me are sick. Someone is covered in one of the traitors, someone is screaming for mercy.
