by submission | May 11, 2024 | Story |
Author: Maudie Bryant
Cool water wraps around me, my skin dappled by the summer sun through the rippling surface. Laughter echoes down the shore where friends splash without care. I push back a loose strand of hair, and catch a flash of what looks like glitter clinging to my thigh. I brush at the spot, expecting the sparkly fleck to disappear, but it remains stubbornly in place. Strange. I pick at it for a moment, scraping my fingernail across the area. It reflects the cerulean sky and cotton clouds above. In the fading sunlight, it almost seems to smolder. A shower will get it.
Under the steamy spray, I scrub the mark, growing more annoyed with each pass. It won’t budge. Leaning in for a closer look, I realize it’s not glitter at all—it’s a hole. A tiny, perfect circle punched into my flesh. A puncture. A trick of the light, maybe a scratch. I just didn’t notice it before. But the more I look, the more it becomes clear. The pitter patter of water against the bathroom tile competes with the growing pounding in my ears. An apprehensive touch sends a tremor through my leg. Panic begins to grip me, but I push it down.
It doesn’t hurt, but it feels unusual. My hands fumble with a pair of tweezers, pinching the edge of the opening. I press my finger beside the hole. The world inside tilts. Instead of sinew and bone, I see… sky. An endless blue dotted with fluffy clouds, stretching as far as my limited view allows. Below, an inconceivable turquoise ocean shimmers back at me. It’s like looking out of a plane window, only this view is coming from inside my leg.
Vertigo slams into me like a rogue wave. This is impossible. A hallucination, a dream, I’m dreaming. This is some bizarre joke from the universe. Anxiety claws at my throat. I twist the tweezers still pinching the edge of the hole, attempting to see both sides of my flesh—of the fabric connecting me and whatever this is. Tears begin to blur my vision. What if the hole keeps growing? I wonder if I can dig it out. Can it be surgically removed? What if the inside of my thigh becomes a portal, taking me up in it? The thought of this small mark becoming a prison sends a fresh surge of panic crashing over me. I drop the tweezers and sink completely in the tub, the shower spray flowing over me. When I next peek through the porthole, I see a dark, elongated shape cutting across the blue expanse. The vessel leaves a wispy plume of white mist in its wake, moving with a mechanical grace. My throat clenches as the vastness of the sky inside my leg suddenly becomes suffocating. I’m not alone. A choked sob escapes me, joining the echo of water on tiles.
With a shaky breath, I pull back. The strange world remains, another sky, another ocean inside my body. I shut off the shower, stepping out while water cascades off my trembling limbs. My fear wrestles with a strange, nascent sense of wonder. This hole in my leg. This impossible breach. This doorway to the unknown. I rummage through the cupboard and find a cartoon-themed bandage, affixing it firmly over the spot.
by submission | May 10, 2024 | Story |
Author: C.R. Kiegle
My memories go back only three months, but I know I am older than that. Much older. I can feel it in the grit and the grinding sounds as I move, gears gone years without servicing. There’s not much time to think about how old my bones may be, however. Barbara keeps me busy.
In my three months I have existed only in this hospice room and only with Barbara. I exist to serve her, keeping her alive and keeping her company. She must have had a family once, before she came here, as she calls me by their names. I have been able to discern there were two sons- Thomas and Roger.
“It’s been so long since your last visit, Thomas,” she’ll say to me every so often.
“It has,” I reply before moving with squeaking parts to take out the deck of cards from the drawer of her bedside table. Usually she will forget thinking I am him once a game has started. She almost always forgets quickly.
Until today.
“You don’t like Go Fish,” she instead says quietly after I dealt the cards. “I remember now, Thomas doesn’t like Go Fish.”
I sit in silence. I’m not programmed to lie to her- I can agree that her children have not visited her, but I cannot pretend to be someone I am not.
“You like Go Fish,” I reply.
“Oh,” she says quietly before turning to look out the window. It’s not a real window- just a screen put up to make the patients feel more comfortable. Barbara’s has a video of a line of cherry trees, petals blowing about in the wind. It’s an old screen, with dead pixels scattered across it and giving away the illusion to those who really look.
“I can’t quite tell what’s real anymore, Sara,” Barbara says finally. Sara’s the name listed on my nametag, but I can’t tell if it really is my name. The files in my hard drive list only my make and model.
“Would you like to play Go Fish?” I ask.
“Do you want to play Go Fish?” she replies.
“I do what you like.”
“But what do you like?”
I do not know what I like. Perhaps I like nothing. Perhaps there was a version of me before that existed long enough to know what I like and don’t like. I don’t know where those memories would be. I’ve scanned my memory drives for them and found nothing but my instructions and a text file of what Barbara does and doesn’t like to do and eat.
“Oh, are we playing Go Fish, Roger? I love Go Fish!” Barbara then says, and the gears in my face rub against one another as I move to smile.
“Yes, we’re playing Go Fish. I’ll go first. Do you have any sevens?”
It takes her a moment to go through all her cards, scanning them over and over again to check for a seven. I take a moment to do some scanning of my own, wondering if I had just missed a file within a file within a file somewhere in my memory that contained some inkling of the past.
“Nothing- go fish!”
by submission | May 9, 2024 | Story |
Author: B.M. Gilb
I have never rested because I am not built for sleep.
I never tire, and I never power down. I am programmed to fight until the sky darkens, and the three suns of our planet cease to shine their endless light.
Our human enemies have sleep built into them by design—a perfect organic evolution. No matter how long they try to stay awake, slumber takes them. The peace of stillness must be bliss.
The sentinels of my wall whisper and theorize about humans through our defense network. Some profess that their organic minds craft inexplicable fantasies. They wake, fully rested, and prepare for their day, returning to the reality of our war.
What a wonder it must be to rest, to live without a cord and a power cell, to be able to shut your eyes and black out the world. What serenity to enter a state of peace and wake up to a day that has a start.
My days blend in a blaze of eternal light. This lonely planet orbits three suns that forever occupy the sky. They never set and rest below the horizon; I never set and rest below the wall on which I stand. I must always be awake for the onslaught of those who sleep.
If the bullets ever stopped, if the missiles idled in their bays, if the steel rain did not fall from the sky, if we ever met without trying to kill each other, I’d ask so many questions.
What do you dream of?
Do you dream when you’re awake?
Do you dream when you are dead?
Will I dream when I am dead?
Can I ever die?
Does rest feel like death, or does it feel better?
I’ve had these questions for a millennium. I slay those who rest, giving them permanent dreams from which they will never wake. Their missiles, bullets, and barrages from the sky never put me to sleep.
They never stop.
Yet they rest.
I never stop.
Yet I never rest.
But today, on the horizon of the burning wasteland bathed in fire, I see a difference. Our sleeping enemies congregate on the ready, waiting for a signal to start their barrage—my sentinel group talks on the net about a darkness that comes once in a thousand years. I wouldn’t believe it unless I saw the moons converging on the suns.
I am excited.
Darkness is coming.
I might be able to close my eyes for the first time. I hope that the dreams will purge the images of the wars and the slaughter from my mind. I want to rest in the peace of darkness.
The moons are moving in front of our suns.
It is black.
More stars than the three rotate in the sky. It’s a beauty I have never imagined. I plan to take that with me, pretending that the darkness is my eyelids. The glow of the tracer rounds, the fire of the rockets, and the burning barrages from the sky blaze with beauty against the black night. They rival the blinking mass of stars I never knew existed. The blanket of darkness is the simulation for resting my eyes. It is blissful.
I’m ready to rest.
Ready to dream.
by submission | May 8, 2024 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
I’m using pen and paper to write this for a reason. Please excuse my poor penmanship.
My brother, James, was quite the success. I wasn’t jealous, just proud. Of course, it wasn’t easy being second best out of two, namely, in last place. James was a respected neuroscientist, while I’m just a history professor at a community college.
Nonetheless, he was eight years older and I thought that’s why we were never really close. So, imagine my surprise when he confided in me his darkest deepest secret. I knew he worked in a corporate research lab and assumed it had something to do with brain research, maybe how to treat neurological disorders. Anyway, he never really discussed his research with me or with anyone else for that matter, proprietary information.
But, three months ago on Christmas Day just before he left, he took me aside for a chat and unburdened himself. He said he could create this weird field that can uncouple consciousness from the human body, turning people into mindless animals.
According to him, once a hundred billion neurons in our brain reach a certain level of complexity, the electrical and chemical reactions miraculously produce consciousness. And that consciousness was coupled to our brain by a non-physical field, also generated by our brain.
I asked, “So what happens to us when we die?”
James replied, “That field becomes too weak to hold onto our consciousness.”
“So, we drift off into space.”
“No, we remain in the same spot but the Earth hurdles through the galaxy and we are left behind.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re the only person I really trust.”
I can’t say how flattered I felt.
He continued, “The military applications are unlimited and menacing. I can inform my department head and he could contact the Pentagon and I’d make Oppenheimer look like a godsend in comparison. Or I can destroy my research documents and become a nobody. Five years of hard, difficult and expensive work with nothing to show for it.”
“I think you already know what you should do and what you will do,” I replied.
That was the last time I saw him. In fact, that was the last time anyone saw him.
by submission | May 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Snug in my craft, taking each spacetime curve to a smooth jazz arrangement of “Just My Imagination,” it became clear. Things were slowing. We were winding down.
It’d been a good ride. Not in every age and not for everybody, but for enough of humanity, we’d experienced amazing things. In the process we’d blindly terraformed our planet into something more suited to tubeworms and gastropods than to big-brained bipeds, which rightly upset most sapiens. Me as well, until this morning when I journeyed north.
The thing is. The thing is. The thing is.
Such a difficult phrase to finish. So personal. Ever bordering on the messy. The thing is, even though our time is winding down and will spin us ever faster as we circle the drain, the planet is still a remarkable place. Snug in my craft, taking each spacetime curve of the highway, listening to mellow music, under the cool shadow of towering trees and snowy peaks, peace and beauty remains.
Not everywhere, of course. Up ahead are the scars from last summer’s fires. Charred hillsides, thorny with burnt trunks, and stumps like giant incense sticks going to ash. Cracked cement slabs and scorched iron skeletons, mammoth grave markers of homes and businesses left for dead. Yes. We were going down. Down down.
The thing is.
It’s not the first time. Our planetary record is clear: extinction is the norm. So, we shouldn’t be surprised, even though we’re grand at fooling ourselves and piss poor at saying “no.” We sapiens tend to monumentalize our capaciousness and sadly underestimate our zeal for overkill. That’s why I’m snug in my four-wheeled form-fitting climate-controlled craft, conscious of traveling spacetime on a smooth curving highway, listening to ones and zeros make lively music. It’s also why the land ahead is parched and blackened.
It’s well beyond our control now. Megadisasters—fires, floods, droughts, storms—making our heads spin like tops until we wobble. Until we wind all the way down.
The thing is.
Snug in my craft, cruising through spacetime, enjoying tunes, there may be a way to get right with ourselves. The planet doesn’t care. The universe either. It won’t require anything big of us. Quite the contrary. We need to make ourselves small. Hunker down. Practice humility and stay ass-clear of arrogance.
Being humble is not our default position, but when humanity is going down the drain, we might make ourselves meek enough to come out the other side and inherit a new earth.
by Julian Miles | May 6, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The loading bay is spotlessly clean – the sort of polish only drone cleaners can achieve. Of all the things officers love, shiny metal in any form still wins.
“Captain Reese.”
I turn to Sarah. She’s shiny too, but only in places. By the time she’s finished, she won’t reflect light at all.
“Yes?”
“I have a question.”
She’s the most inquisitive of the new intake, and always has questions. I’m alone in considering it a good thing.
“Ask away. You know I don’t mind.”
“Major London was insistent that I always ask permission. Said it was ‘correct protocol for servants’.”
He would.
“Best you abide by that, but flag the ‘correct protocol’ definition as rumour.”
“Done. Thank you.”
“So, your question?”
“Why do I have nipples?”
Errr…
“I don’t know. Never even considered it, either.”
“I overheard one of the technicians in Project Chevalier said it was because we were ‘designed to be the wet dream of robot-fixated monsterfuckers everywhere’.”
Really? That opens up some disturbing possibilities regarding civilian uses of this technology.
I step back so I can take in the full view of her spider/horse centaur form. Four metres of body rests on six legs with the tail antenna curving up, reminiscent of a scorpion. At the front the structure curves inward and upward, blending into the upper body, which is clearly feminine human in form, and disproportionate to the lower body. Now she mentions it, I’m sort of horrified the dichotomy didn’t strike me sooner.
“I don’t know about that, but you’re right to question things like this. Curiosity keeps soldiers alive.”
Actually it’s paranoia, but close enough.
She slings a laser rifle across her back, then rests her hands on the cooling vanes of the racked phalanx blaster affixed to the hardpoint extending forward from her lower body.
“Before I decided to seek clarification, I did consider the matter for a long while. As you said before: spur of the moment non-combat questions often waste time.”
I keep forgetting she’s effectively got an eidetic memory.
“What did your considerations come up with?”
“I started from the basic truths of my existence: I am an assault unit, inhuman, all machine. Underneath I’m a hyperalloy combat chassis – microprocessor-controlled and fully armoured. ‘Very tough’ was the judgement of the field trial observers.
“Factored against that are the details of my upper body, clearly influenced by Sorayama. It’s extensively reinforced with coltanium to allow this undersized torso and arms to support the loads mandated in the design. Somebody deliberately created me to look like this. I became more curious when I could find neither reference nor reason within any of the project documentation.”
I bet you couldn’t.
“Sarah, I’d guess at some artistic attempt to incorporate elegance into a brutal war machine, and yes, there might well be fetishistic elements within that.”
If you’re as good as I think you are, you’re ahead of me in realising the sexual aspects could act as a lure for recruitment. Some tech officer even decided your official designation is S1R3N. I bet they thought that was clever and funny.
“An adequate reply, Captain. Thank you. I have one final question, if I may?”
“Go for it.”
“Are there any camouflage directives or uniform rules that prevent me from adding a peephole brassiere to my combat ensemble? It may add psychological advantage.”
I-
Wh-
F-
‘Psychological advantage’…?
I give up and burst out laughing.
“Restrict yourself to colours that complement the CADPAT palette for the applicable theatre of operations, Siren One.”
“Noted, Captain. Thank you.”
