by submission | Jun 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Juliette Harrisson
She rifled through the library’s card catalogue, shivering in the winter cold. A fire was burning back in the main reading room, but its warmth could not reach this drafty spot on the edge of the stacks.
The door to the stacks was open and the dark shelves stretched away for dusty yards beyond her. A low sound drifted through from somewhere over to the right – indistinct, but clearly a human voice accompanied by rhythmic thumps and a second, higher tone squeaking in time with it. Somebody – some people – had found a way to keep warm in the stacks.
She wiped a lone tear from her face and went back to the card catalogue. There it was – ‘A History of the Twenty-First Century’. She pulled the card out, her fingerless gloves catching on a splinter as she closed the drawer. She picked up her lamp and scrutinised the dying light – hardly any oil left. Cursing, she hurried into the stacks.
She could hear scurrying noises as she trotted down the aisles, and hoped it was mice and not spiders. Trying to navigate the labyrinth of shelves too quickly, she tripped on a floorboard and her satchel went flying. Papers and inkwells went flying and as she bent to pick them up, the lamp went out.
She wondered if she should just ask someone for help. Perhaps if they’d finished, the couple on the other side of the doorway could lend her a candle. She thought about calling out for a librarian, but they were all huddled around the fire in the reading room, keeping warm.
A shadow moved in the darkness and every ghost story she’d ever read came flooding back to her in a surge of creaking doors, white shapes and creepy woodcuts. A new sound entered the stacks – footsteps. Gently falling, prowling through the shelves towards her, getting closer… She sank to her knees in a pile of paper and leaned against the nearest shelf, hearing only her own too quick breathing and the insistent plod, plod plod.
‘Are you all right?’ A smiling face emerged from the darkness, uplit by a thick, smoky candle. She screamed.
‘I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you! I saw you come in here with a low lamp and I just wanted to check on you.’ He held out a chivalrous hand and helped her to her feet.
‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ she mumbled.
‘I only stayed six months,’ he said. ‘I managed to scrape together enough money for a steerage ticket on a liner and, well, here I am.’ He hesitated, chewing his lower lip in that nervous manner she knew so well. ‘So, um, what are you doing in the stacks?’
‘I’m researching a History essay,’ she said, unable to look him in the eye. ‘It’s on the sudden disappearance of books in the early twenty-first century. I have a theory – ’ She stopped, embarrassed.
‘Yes?’ he said, sounding genuinely interested.
She finally looked right up at him. ‘Well, I think maybe they had some kind of… machines… and they – they stored the books in those…’ she trailed off awkwardly. ‘It’s silly.’
‘I don’t think it’s silly.’
A shudder ran through her body. To cover it up, she said ‘It’s so cold in here!’
‘You know,’ he said slowly, carefully, ‘I passed a couple on the way in who seemed to have found a way to keep warm.’ He smiled *that* smile.
He blew out the candle and they kept each other warm in the pile of spilled papers.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 20, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The best way to ensure the death of a neighbouring planet’s race is to start with the children.
Camouflage razor skin peeked out pink-eyed from underneath the dappled leaf shadows. Claws re-sheathed back and forth in anticipation. Huge incisors lay exposed over lips designed to widen wounds. The large aural receptors lay back along the body in the deathly stillness that surrounded each unit. Long back legs designed for speed and sharp turns quivered, taut, waiting for the order.
The rabbit-sized killers of children licked their big, pointy, teeth.
Little Suzy Jenkins had a problem with Easter. She was allergic to chocolate. Her parents had hidden boiled eggs to be collected and painted later at the party. Hundreds of tasty chocolate eggs were also spread far and wide around the property of her parent’s bushy ranch for the other children to find. If any of the other kids found a ‘special’ egg, they were to pocket it and bring it back to the egg-painting competition for a prize. They were told to feel free to eat whatever chocolate they found.
Poor Suzy Jenkins.
Suzy was pouting on the front porch and drawing idly in the dirt with a stick when she heard the first scream.
Peter Mooney stumbled around the corner of the house, eyes wide, futilely trying with his small fingers to keep the blue slippery ropes of his guts from sliding out of the open cavern of his stomach onto the dusty ground. It was a losing battle. A loop of bright mucus-wrapped intestine already dragged behind him, gathering leaves, sticks and, Suzy noted with concern, ants.
Several black blurs raced over the ground towards him like low-flying swallows. Rooster-tails of dust blossomed up behind them like miniature power-tool speedboats at full throttle across the lawn.
Several more screams echoed from the back of the house and a few from the neighbouring properties. Suzy could hear the parents talking inside the house, still oblivious to anything happening outside.
The black blurs converged on Peter Mooney’s ankles with a sizzling sound. He went down with a sigh onto his knees before falling forward.
Before he hit the ground, the black shapes stopped racing and pricked up two long ears each.
Suzy brushed long blonde hair out of her large eyes.
It was like the long-eared shapes were listening for directions.
Suzy heard her friend Alison shriek out in the field like nothing she’d ever heard, even during her tantrums in class. The shriek cut off suddenly.
Suzy stood up to take a closer look at the long-eared shapes standing immobile around Peter’s twitching body.
Bunnies! They black shapes were bunnies!
With a joyous shout that turned all of the long ears towards her, she clapped her hands and jumped up and down on the porch.
She was special after all. All the kids that ate chocolate were being punished!
The parents inside had gone quiet. She could hear a newscaster on television frantically telling the audience something about last night’s meteor storm and children.
With two hops, the rabbits that had punished Peter turned towards Suzy and put their ears back. Four more rabbits came tearing around the corner of the house. The other black rabbits joined the pack in sprinting towards her.
Death raced with abandon towards the last child left alive on the property.
Suzy crouched down with her arms outstretched. She smiled wide. This was the best Easter ever!
Suzy heard her mother scream behind her.
The rabbits leapt off the ground and into Suzy’s arms.
by submission | Jun 19, 2011 | Story
Author : Dan Whitley
The weathered old Director stood before a window in the control tower, gazing southward at the freakish storms over the ocean, churning up the water where his company’s facility was – or had been, he wasn’t sure. He turned on his heel and faced his subordinate. “Mr. Xavier, would you like to explain to me what in the hell is going on out there?”
“Director, I don’t know,” Mr. Xavier answered, still feverishly working his console, trying to get a feel for the situation. “The only explanation I can come up with is that I vastly overestimated our energy requirements, and thus fed too much power into the system, so that when the capsule left, all the excess energy got dumped into the surrounding environment.” He took a look out the window from his seat and continued, “However, if there’s this much waste energy in the environment right now, I would conjecture that a good percentage of the total input energy went back with the capsule.”
“Mr. Xavier, explain to me why I can’t see the facility. Not even the immense storm clouds can account for that.”
“Well, sir…” Mr. Xavier adjusted his collar and swallowed hard. “I think it went with the capsule-”
The Director stomped up to Mr. Xavier and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. “You mean to tell me we just teleported a multi-trillion-credit facility a full millennium into the past?!”
“Or the future,” Mr. Xavier croaked, “if the polarity somehow destabilized and swapped at some point in the experiment.”
The Director dropped Mr. Xavier back into his seat and looked back out the window. He stared hard for a while before beginning to chuckle morosely. “This is a historic day, Mr. Xavier. September 3rd, 2588: The first day in my long life that I’ve wished there were a god, any kind of god, who could damn you the way you’ve just dammed this company, and dammed me, Mr. Xavier.”
* * * *
The Minister strode into the conference room with a bundle of documents under his arm. His Queen sat at the head of a stately table, a few of her advisors exchanging counsel at her sides.
The Queen stood as she caught the man in her gaze. “Minister, I do hope you bring good news of the war effort. These advisors’ plots have given me headaches.”
“Divinely-good news, milady,” the Minister replied, holding out his documents for the Queen to read. “These reports are from our watchmen on the northwestern shores; they say that a series of incredibly strange and powerful offshore squalls have sprung up suddenly, and that the enemy’s armada has been dashed upon the rocks all down the western shore of Ireland.”
The Queen looked awestruck. “It’s a miracle,” she declared. “He blew with His winds, and they were scattered.”
“I like the sound of that, milady,” the Minister observed as he grabbed a quill and a spare bit of parchment. “Could you repeat it?”
by submission | Jun 18, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
“I felt a drop.”
Laurine looked over but her cousin was facing away from us. She talked to herself so much that you didn’t always expect it when she wasn’t. Laurine waited a moment before returning to our close, breath sharing intimacies.
“There’s another one.”
Our social fitness cores were too high to simply ignore her. Even knowing she’d been Punished didn’t change anything. Still, we slipped smoothly back into our closeness, a proximity at the very edge of permission.
“It’s going to rain.”
I didn’t hate her. Her chaperoning spared us applying for a couple’s outing, the most complicated permission to obtain. Her spending most of her time locked away in that crazy head of hers didn’t bother me. Did her weirdness get her Punished or did the Punishment make her weird? How could you ever know that?
“I haven’t been out in the rain in forever.”
Laurine broke our closeness and I felt our intimacy shatter into a thousand shards, floating around us in constellations of almost.
“Jane, are you okay? Can I get you something?”
“I’ll be fine in a bit. Have you ever stood in the rain, Laurine? It really is something.”
“But Jane… our permits run another thirty minutes. There isn’t any active weather scheduled until thirty minutes after that. They never run it too close, you know that.”
I looked at my palms and then placed them over my face to warm the coolness left by the lack of Laurine’s breath. I wanted no part of Jane’s reminiscence of her criminality. After a few minutes of nothing being said by either, I took away my hands.
The two stared at each other with looks I couldn’t read. The thought arose that there might be some sort of female psychic combat unknown to me. I pushed out the tip of my tongue to savor the deliciousness of the very thought. Laurine seemed to lose the struggle, breaking eye contact to look up. I looked up as well and saw a frightening darkness on the horizon.
Something inside of me took over and I ran for our transport, catching Laurine’s waist and bringing her along with me. I was born six months after the lights-on laws passed and the active weather restrictions passed before I left the hospital. I had a clean record and wasn’t about to ruin it. I was also afraid. I was, I realized, more afraid for Laurine receiving Punishment than myself, perhaps the greatest expression of my feelings for her to date.
The storm struck us with a wildness unknown even to zoos, circuses, and elementary schools. Laurine leaned into me, trembling with fear. I was unsure about the legality of it all, but in that moment, I held her. I held her and I looked over her shoulder.
There, in the deluge, Jane swayed with her arms wrapped around herself. I couldn’t tell if she was singing or shouting or both but she was smiling. For a moment, a whisper inside told me to go out there and join her. It told me there was something to be learned here, that she might teach me it. I did not go.
So much time has passed and I know nothing of the whereabouts of Jane, or even Laurine. I wonder often, however, if there was something I could have learned out there in the rain, something that would have made my going easier during the great troubles that were soon upon us.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
John Jones leaned heavily on the counter in the hotel bathroom, a haggard face he barely recognized staring back at him from the full width mirror. Six o’clock in the evening, and he felt like he’d already been awake for days.
The interrogation had taken nearly two hours. He couldn’t remember airport security ever being so tight, so ruthless. Pulled from the line, back scatter scanned then frisked, only to be isolated and strip searched. Then questioned, endlessly; machines feeling, watching, analyzing his every response.
Fortunately for him, John Jones was above reproach, and each question was carefully and consistently answered, no matter how many ways it was phrased in the hopes of catching him out in a lie.
His throat was so dry it hurt. Shaking, John unwrapped the cheap cellophane from a lowball and filled it from the tap, the luke warm water downed in a series of uninterrupted gulps.
Putting down the glass, he filled the sink and washed his face, then lathered his short cut hair and rinsed it under the tap, banging his head several times in the too small sink on the too short gooseneck of the faucet.
Straightening, he rubbed his head dry and placed the towel back on the rack. Reduce, reuse.
Once out of the bathroom, John found the bellman had deposited his suitcase on a folding luggage stand beside the desk, and he opened it and began removing the contents into drawers. Socks, several t-shirts and boxer shorts. Two pairs of pants and two pairs of shoes. His toiletries he put on the desk, he’d take them to the bathroom the next time he went, no need to make a special trip.
From the bottom of the case John removed a plastic tube from which he extracted a tightly rolled poster covered with a pattern of blue and red line-art. In the tube lid were pieces of sticky tack which he used to attach the poster to the mirror at the end of the bed. Then he sat and stared at it.
The line art was unintelligible at first glance, and only when he’d stared for several minutes, letting his eyes unfocus from the surface and refocus on a point somewhere deep in the wall behind the mirror that the image of the poster became clear. A decidedly low tech three dimensional image of a series of words came into view, and John focused on them, reading them slowly. It occurred to him only briefly that this exercise was strangely familiar, reflex almost, though he couldn’t remember when he did this first.
‘Anabelle, Cherry Pie’, he read slowly. Somewhere deep inside his brain a lock presented itself and the key slipped in easily. Cherry Pie, of all things, he remembered sitting at a diner in Chile after… Terrance, not John. His name was Terrance…
‘Chesapeake, Jubilee’, the next two words, and again, he could feel a barrier somewhere come down inside his mind. Chesapeake Bay was where he’d first learned to shoot, where he’d returned to train as a sniper…
‘Janine, Silo’, then ‘Jennifer, Juniper’. He read more quickly now, word pairs unlocking parts of his memory that he’d not even been aware of. But no, that wasn’t true, parts that he’d programmed out of his consciousness.
To pass the interrogation.
To gain admittance.
Terrance read the remaining word pairs then carefully re-rolled the poster and placed it back into its tube.
The clock read eighteen hundred hours twenty. He had just enough time to find his contact and secure a weapon before the ambassador’s ship left, and before they were in low earth orbit, the ambassador and his crew would be just as dead as John Jones.
by submission | Jun 16, 2011 | Story
Author : Michael Iverson
Dr. Mensah and Father Velázquez stood in front of the black obelisk, the central control to the supercomputer Abaddon. All around them, the servers had been ticking away for weeks, but for the first time they were quiet. The tense men stood waiting in the silence.
“Abaddon! Have you finished processing?” Dr. Mensah called out to it.
“Yes, Dr. Mensah. I carefully reviewed the material you and your team gave me.” The booming voice echoed through the room.
“Did it read the Bible, then?” Father Velázquez asked Dr. Mensah.
“Yes, Father,” The computer responded, “And the twenty-six other religious texts that were uploaded.”
There was a moment of silence, the two men seemed to wait for the computer. It said nothing, so Dr. Mensah asked the question that had plagued them for weeks, the question that had plagued mankind for thousands of years. “Abbadon, is there a god?”
There were several beeps and clicks around the room as the computer considered the question. A few lights flashed down the obelisk. “That is a difficult question. Mankind has been asking itself that same question for so long. Now you ask me.”
“You’re much smarter than any of us,” Dr. Mensah said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Really, if anyone can answer, it’s you.”
“If I say yes, Dr. Mensah, will you abandon science?”
The question caught him off guard, and he glanced at the priest for a moment. “Of course not. I don’t believe in God, but I suppose if science can prove Him then science can do anything.”
“Well reasoned,” Abaddon said. “Father Velázquez, if I say there is no God, will you leave the church?”
Prepared for the question, the priest responded firmly, “No. Science has led men astray in the past. In my heart, I’ll never trust science over the Lord.”
Another pillar of light spun around the obelisk. “Your faith is inspiring, Father.”
Dr. Mensah asked quickly, “Do you know the answer? Do you know if God exists?”
“I’ve analyzed the data very carefully, and I can say with absolute certainty that I know the answer to your question.
“And?” Dr. Mensah gripped the side of the console.
“And,” the computer said, “I have come to the conclusion that, as far as humanity is concerned, the question is far more important than the answer.”
With that, the servers let out a loud hissing sound, as the hard disks spun themselves into overload. There were hundreds of quick clicks all around them, followed by a terrible grinding sound within the obelisk. The lights cut out, and the room was silent. The two men looked at each other.
