by submission | Jun 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
“This is a rare photograph of Christ, taken before time tourism was banned,” said the Director of the Temporal Institute.
The Senator stopped to examine it, and his entourage jostled and bumped awkwardly behind him.
A picture-lined corridor led to the gallery overlooking the wormhole, and though each picture was an actual snapshot of some historical event, the Director knew the Senator’s particular interests.
In the distance, the Sea of Galilee gleams like a sun-struck windshield, as sightseers stream down from the Sermon on the Mount. Slightly out of focus, they all wear tunics and sandals, making it difficult to tell if any of them are locals.
“The vote in the Senate to ban it was close. You must have been under a lot of pressure, but you stood by your principles and helped make the difference.”
The Director paused to see the effect of this blatant flattery.
The Senator nodded absently. He was studying the photograph. It had been enlarged to the limits of resolution and, unaccountably, was in black and white.
He pointed. “So, that is…”
The burly man slapping Christ on the back like a trainer congratulating his boy on a good fight, or a miracle well done, is Peter.
“Difficult to believe time tourism was permitted for so long,” the Director continued. He found it distasteful being a salesman, an actual unpleasant taste in his mouth.
“Opponents of the Bill maintained that since anachronisms like the camera taking this picture weren’t a problem, the ban wasn’t necessary.”
The features of Christ are hidden by the raised arm of someone striding into shot just as the shutter clicks. Only Judas, his mouth a perfect O of alarm, has seen the blade.
“But the ban was to stop rogue time travellers interfering with pivotal moments in history. Manpower and resources are poured into that.”
“Though the Institute doesn’t benefit,” he added.
One of the Senator’s aids murmured to the Director about their tight schedule.
“If we could move along to the viewing gallery now,” said the Director smoothly.
The demonstration was near the limit of current wormhole technology. Hopefully, the Senator would be impressed by men costumed in bronze armour and plumed helmets returning with film of the skirmishing round Troy.
Hopefully. The energy costs were punitive, but it would all be worthwhile if the Senator’s oversight committee approved next year’s budget.
The Senator seemed reluctant to move on.
“Assassinations,” he said. “I hear you call them celebricides.”
“Well, informally, yes. Trying to assassinate an important historical figure was usually how lone actors attempted to change the present.”
“I recall a best seller about a time tourist who planned to foil the assassination of Julius Caesar in the Forum.”
Like many patricians, the Senator claimed to be a descendant of Caesar.
“The world would be a very different place if he’d succeeded,” he mused. “Though of course, we’d never know.”
The Senator had been a military commander and still wore his authority like a uniform. The Director found himself being lectured to by an amateur.
“Well, foiling that assassination could certainly change the time-line,” he acknowledged. “In fact, Christ was a frequent target for religious cults attempting to rewrite history.”
He ushered the Senator into the gallery and let the eerie glow of Cherenkov radiation from the wormhole speak for itself.
“Though none of them ever managed to prevent his assassination,” the Director added. “For which we owe eternal thanks to Jove, and of course the Roman Temporal Guard.”
by submission | Jun 29, 2024 | Story |
Author: Andrew N. McCue
I was 15 when I left home. Replacing schoolbooks from my pack with clothes and food, I steal my mother’s favorite can opener, some flatware and a small stash of cash.
I walk mostly or hitch. Standing on the side of a road I read stapled, tacked and nailed sheets of paper on a power pole; lost cats, yard sales, a suicide prevention lifeline flyer with a few tear-off phone numbers missing and an advert for a free palm reading.
My food supply dwindling, I hope the palm reader offers snacks.
It takes me two days to work my way to the palm reader’s address. Not a horse drawn wagon
or a purple stucco house but a high-rise office building. I go up an elevator and am greeted at a door. Not by big hoop earrings or a gold tooth but by a sharp looking business dressed woman. Maybe she’s my mother’s age.
She shows me to a room with a table. We sit on either side, and she guides my palm-side-up hands under a scope thing. She peers into a pair of eye pieces and makes small noises as she adjusts knobs. The light on my palms brightens.
She looks up from the scope thing. “You have an unusually long lifeline,” she says. She says some other things but I’m mostly wondering where the snacks are.
“We’ll be in touch,” she says as she walks me from the room to an elevator.
“I don’t have a phone or an address,” I say.
“We’ll find you,” she says.
At a mission, I get a hot meal, a shower and a place to sleep. In the morning an army type in a suit and two uniformed army types are standing over me.
“Will you come with us, please,” the suited one says.
“No thank you,” I say and roll over.
The two uniformed army types manhandle me off my cot. In handcuffs, they escort me from the mission. I’m hoping they will offer me snacks.
That was 19 years ago. Standing watch on the starship’s bridge at one-twentieth of the speed of light we still have at least 70 more years before we reach Rigil Kentaurus.
But that’s okay. I’ll still be around. I have an unusually long lifeline.
by submission | Jun 28, 2024 | Story |
Author: Janaya Young
In space, hyper lanes operate like traffic lanes but with one important difference: you aren’t entirely in one place or another while traveling through them. Most people can’t tell. Maybe you feel a slight shudder of the ship, or for a moment you look down and your hand is not where you thought it was. But then it’s back and you think you must have just blinked or imagined things or had too much of the ship-generated food. With so many ships moving that quickly it becomes impossible to calculate, to avoid collisions. When you’re going that fast everything becomes fuzzy and soft, like it’s forgotten it used to be solid and that it liked being solid and everything decides to have a go at being intangible. But then your ship slows, and your body, right down to the teeth, remembers that it liked being solid and snaps back to what it was.
Sister and I like watching the ships pass in the hyper lanes. You can’t see it with just your eye, of course. You have to look through the special windows they have at the station. You can adjust the settings and slowly, slowly the hyper lane comes into focus. Blurs of blue and red. And then blurry outlines of things that just might be ships but all strung out and see through. Sometimes we’ll take a picture, and we’ll zoom in on that moment of frozen time and we’ll try to find the funniest thing we can see. Sister always thinks it’s funny to find people in the shower, with water going through them instead of running over them. Or when they’re in bed and just a mess of limbs and flesh and funny faces.
Though I like best when people are working, when there’s no line between what a person is and what they are doing. Today I saw an engineer with blinking lights on his arms, binary code in his eyes and wires coming out of his fingers. I saw a botanist’s leg become the root of a Ficus and for a moment if she could be aware of it, I wondered if she could self-reproduce just like a plant could. But then it all went back to normal, and the ship skipped away, and mother came in and started screaming about what’s appropriate for little girls to do. I know I will never see those exact people again, but I wonder if they know, if part of their atoms remember that they aren’t as solid or as separate as they think they are.
by submission | Jun 26, 2024 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Darren had come to dread having to decompress. He wasn’t alone and yet no-one was talking about it, even the media were quiet on the subject but then hardly anyone now was exempt. The evidence was everywhere and decompressing people had become a commonplace sight across the city. Old people, old bodies, slumped in cars and on public transport, sprawled across park benches and on the pavements. The only way to distinguish them from the city’s homeless was by their fine clothes. Shrunken and shriveled bodies adorned in the latest designer labels. It was, Darren had decided, grotesque and he was terrified at the prospect that eventually he would be reduced to this.
When Darren first started wearing the chip almost thirty years ago (although he now hated that phrase: ‘to wear’, the chip wasn’t something one wore like an item of clothing or an accessory). No, it was something one used and relied upon. In the beginning decompressing had not been an issue. The moments when he chose to remove it, and it had literally been just that, moments, it was no more invasive than brushing his teeth.
He remembered how he would often remove it whilst waiting for the morning train or even crammed in to the crowded carriage as it rattled its way into the city. But now, if he needed to remove it on the station platform, he would have to ensure he was seated, sitting slumped for at least half an hour, barely conscious, hardly able to move, the precious chip safely stowed in his pocket. Managing this only if after pulling it from its port in the small of his back he was strong enough to move that far. No, the days of the quick and easy fix were definitely behind him.
The chip has been widely available for almost fifty years now and the oldest users are well into their eighties and possibly above. And these are the people decompressing out on the city streets in plain sight. They are degrading and broken, not just the chips but also the users who are unable to stop trying.
At sixty-one, Darren is still relatively young and he hasn’t yet needed to cower and hide away in a toilet cubicle or lock himself in one of the supply cupboards at the office. But the tension when it comes is a bit more intense and the discomfort, the pain, lasts a little longer each time. So far, he has always managed to make his way home where, closing the bedroom door and pulling down the blinds, he huddles beneath the duvet.
When at last Darren emerges, he doesn’t immediately re-insert the chip. Pushing himself up from the bed, he crosses to the mirror on the wall and studies himself. And standing there, as he pushes the chip back into its port, he watches the not so subtle transformation.
by submission | Jun 25, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“You’re a peasant, a cyber peasant in the fiefdom of Facebook, of Meta. You’re a digital sharecropper for Google and Amazon and Apple, and you don’t even know it!”
The hooded man stood on the polished marble steps and shouted as a small crowd gathered. Alternately, the man turned and slapped bright yellow sticky notes on the tall sleek glass doors of the gleaming office tower in the heart of Wired Street.
“You’re being played. You’re being scammed. You’re being enslaved!
“Free apps, games, software. It sounds so good. So simple. So convenient. Like with easy credit and pay day loans, they get you hooked. They lavish you with eye candy and then suck, suck, suck you dry of your data, your identity.
“To Big Tech you’re not a citizen, you’re a datazen. Like in China, they’re tracking everyone online and in the streets with facial recognition software. Authoritarian regimes love the web, love the dependence of datazens on digital exchanges. You are so much easier to monitor, influence and control. If all your currency is digital, they can cut you off, squeeze you.”
He plastered more stickies, each a bullet point of heavy black text, on the door, and continued his harangue as the crowd grew.
“Understand what you are giving away. All your decisions, all your movements, all your interests. You’re letting Big Tech have it all. And for what? An indulgence? A promise of access? Of interconnectedness? Of celebrity?
“It’s criminal. You are being robbed. And yet you are the one being put in the debtor’s prison from which you can never work your way out—as long as Almighty Tech holds the keys. Even as we spread to new worlds looking for freedom and opportunity, you can’t escape it. Don’t worship and sacrifice yourself on the altar of Almighty Tech!”
The man pressed the last of his 95 sticky notes onto the doors just as building security came out. Many in the crowd were already posting pictures of the scene to their social feeds.
The man threw back his hoodie and bowed toward the crowd.
Some in the gathering throng gasped.
Others smiled.
On his broad bald red head, the man had a large QR code tattooed. More phones came out. In a flash, the scene was viral on the feeds.
As building security moved in, he shouted, “You can’t touch me. I’m interplanetary. I’m a Red. You don’t want to mess with Big Red.”
Building security messed with him anyhow.
Voices in the crowd shouted, “Who are you?”
Struggling as he was led away, the otherworld man called confidently out to the crowd, “Martian Luther.”
by Julian Miles | Jun 24, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The corridor is just far enough off-true that it messes with your vision and balance if you’re not careful. Or if part of you relies on an exoskeleton to function.
“You okay there, Zeno?”
I flick a glance and grin towards Leroy.
“I’m seventy-one, godammit. Been doing this war shit for nearly fifty years, and it still sucks.”
He chuckles under his breath.
“I hear that, and I’m only eighteen behind you. When did the old guard get so old?”
Susan comes back to us at a fast lope, exoskeleton humming as she jumps the hole in the floor in front of me.
She lands. The floor gives way. The exoskeleton whips my arm out in time to catch her flailing hand. It pulls her up, over, and past me before both exoskeletons release our bruised limbs from automated rescue responses.
I slowly stretch my abused shoulder. A couple of degrees more and the damn rescue would have dislocated my arm. Then again, if it’s that or lose another of us, it would be a cheap price to pay.
Leroy helps her sit up. She grins at me.
“Your shoulder objecting to moving as fast as you used to?”
I grin right back.
“Like yours isn’t.”
There’s a shrug, then she brings a finger to her lips and points to our right. Leroy and I crouch down, bringing weapons round with care. Sure enough, her uncanny hearing has saved us from a sneak attack.
Without another word, we kill our sensor packs and move with aching slowness to take up positions either side of the two places Susan indicates. She does a finger countdown from four.
Three. Two. She closes her fist: pause.
Her eyes widen. She points to the section by Leroy with one hand, making the sign for him to drop with the other. He obeys.
The mandibles of a Scortan come through the wall either side of where he’d been but a moment before. He reaches up and grabs their outer edges, using the ridges to keep a grip as he slams his boots against the wall to trap it.
I step back, then lunge through the door. Rotted wood explodes outward as I correct my aim and shoot the grey horror in it’s armoured head.
Partially deafened by the noise of my antique 8-gauge in a confined space, I turn a slow circle with the hammer back on the other barrel. When a second centipede/scorpion hybrid doesn’t charge in, I allow myself to relax.
Susan peers round the door.
“You blew that up good. The mandibles came off in Leroy’s hands.”
“Handy. I’ve wanted a Scortan machete for a while.”
Leroy steps into view, curved mandible in each hand.
“Machete nothing. You seen these? I’m thinking scimitars.”
Susan moves down the room, cuts the stinger from the armoured tail, then brandishes it at us.
“Scortan tail stabby thing for me.”
“That a technical term?”
“The technical term is khanjar, but I didn’t want to confuse you with long words.” She points to the mandibles. “Scimitars are definitely what you’ll get from those.”
Leroy looks down at the Scortan.
“Real shame the only way to stop them is to destroy the bit we need to defeat them.”
I lean over and look at the torn wires and unidentifiable components amidst the bloody ruins of the head.
“We’ll get one. Burying it under rocks is the current plan. Until then, we need to stay lucky.”
Susan chuckles.
“Absolutely. I want to have a long, violent talk with whoever infested the Earth with these.”
She’s not alone in that.
