by submission | Jan 13, 2024 | Story |
Author: Cecilia Kennedy
Shapes drift down the aisles of the ferry I’m taking to an island I’ve never seen before. A coworker, Sally, swears it’s the best-kept secret in the entire Pacific Northwest. We’ve got a seat near the window, as parents and children run up and down the aisle next to us, from one side of the boat to the other, inside and outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of an otter or seal, but it’s always just birds, tricking you into thinking their wings are fins.
Out of the corner of my eye, a hooded shape makes its way up and back. It’s much colder on the ferry than it is on land, when the air is still, and the water isn’t kicking up waves. Sally tells me all about the shops—and there’s a glimmer in her eyes—a yellow spark of something I’ve never noticed before, when she tells me of the pizza slices and tempura-battered shrimp.
The hooded figure passes two or more times. I assume it’s good exercise, walking laps around the boat—maybe to ward off seasickness. As I talk to Sally, her eyes glow bright, and the hooded shape takes on speed. I hear a clunk, clunk slither sound, and the shape disappears, then reappears again, until I see something else I hadn’t seen before: antlers protruding from the hood, a serpent’s tail swishing along from behind. My breath goes still, and I lean into Sally’s stories a bit more to avoid looking at the aisles, and as she talks, the flame in her eyes turns green, just as the ferry reaches the dock.
We get out into the sunshine, the town all lit up with salty air and rays, restaurants and shops, but my skin grows cold when I see everyone, including Sally, shed their coats, bare their antlers, their slithering tails. All turn to look at me to see what I’ll do, as I’m surrounded by faces with pointy teeth and vulture eyes. I want to run, vomit, get back on the ferry, but when I turn around, even the ferry workers have shifted their shape, so there’s no escape. Sally places her tentacle on my shoulders, insists on the pizza place near the corner, where tiny antlered children run. I remove my coat, let the sun soak into my skin, order a slice of the specialty: basil pesto squid—and wonder when my tentacles will come in, when my shape will shift—and how long it takes to fully conform.
by submission | Jan 12, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jaryd Porter
“What’s the damage?” I asked.
Snafu used a couple of car jacks to keep the tank suspended, while she removed the treads. She’d removed her combat armor and left it lying in the loose grit around us.
“Most of everything’s fine, honestly,” she said. Her enormous biceps flexed and glistened in the desert sun. She chewed on a rawhide like a cheap cigar. Of the five of us, only Snafu qualified as a combat mechanic. Only she could fix our light tank and mend the plating after small arms fire. That made her our most essential crew member–the tank doctor.
“What was the grinding sound, then? The actuator? Serpentine?” I guessed. The others played cards in the dirt and drank warm beer, disinterested in the repair job.
Snafu pulled the right tread off of the tank like I pulled off a shirt–the tread had to be half of a ton alone.
“White, it’s just a freakin’ bolt that’s warped. I can work a little magic and have us up and rolling in minutes,” Snafu said. “Just keep your pants on about it.” She smiled, her teeth all thick canine teeth and her eyes serpentine and golden.
“You know, Snafu, the penalty for desertion is death?” I said. “Out here in the Wasteland, I don’t know if we’d even go to a tribunal or court. He might really just shoot us dead. Five mutants recruited from the middle of nowhere.”
“I’d rather get shot by Captain Jerrund than sit through court, anyway. Bite the bullet, if you will,” she said. “If he just shoots us, my parents won’t see this headline: ‘Deserting Mutants Executed on Sight, a Pillar Officer Keeps His Word.’ Then there’s just a picture of my body mangled and riddled full of lead.”
“Morbid, isn’t it?” I said.
“People don’t value human life on this planet. There’s too many of us, we’ve got clones, mutants, and aliens. Plus, consumption is in fashion and some of the geezers in the big city live forever. So…maybe we do value human life. Monetarily. If you don’t have the sum to cover your cost, you get eaten alive,” Snafu said.
She squatted low and pulled her giant monkey wrench out of the loose dirt. The powdery red grains soared into the air, uncovering her wrench’s polished silver. The wrench was longer than she was tall and probably more than my body weight. Snafu slung it over her shoulder with ease and began to adjust her spanner. Robot mechanics or a military grade automatic wrench was typically required to make the sorts of repairs that Snafu did, but she liked to show off too much.
She cranked the wrench patiently. The bolt, about the size of my chest cavity, dropped into the dust with a resounding thud. It looked like any old bolt, but almost a full foot in circumference. It was more of a boulder than a bolt, to me.
“It’s…warped?” I scoffed.
She grabbed a blowtorch and heated the massive bolt until it burned red hot. She beat it with her wrench repeatedly. I couldn’t see any visible difference between when the banging started and when it ended, but she smiled at the bolt and left it to cool off.
“Good as new?” I asked.
“With all those millimeter machining defects, White Flag, ‘fixed’ is always better than ‘new’,” she said. “Broken things need a little love and care, you know. Better than new.”
I couldn’t help but think she meant us mutants, not the bolt for the treads.
by submission | Jan 11, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
When astronauts landed on Wolan, some shed tears of joy at what they found while others salivated. They appreciated their fluids touching the dulcet air of another world. And they cried and drooled because there was enough timber to last for at least one decennial cycle.
Nearly as wonderful as the abundance of magnificent trees was the absence of beings of appreciable size on the planet.
On Earth, the resource masters received reports of Wolan’s riches. Outwardly stoic, each privately rejoiced. Every sterling image of four-meter-wide trunks rising forty meters up to split into limbs three times the thickness of the thickest of humans, was the most encouraging find they had received in a very long time.
Some of the masters recalled a distant past time when trees on Earth were the size of Titans. Earth folk had walked among those Gods; they had touched them and experienced a wonderment no officer had known. There were, as yet no holograms capable of replicating the grandeur of magnificent vegetable flesh.
From decision command, the chief resource master issued an order to the culling crew. ‘Select a corner and make your first cuts.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum,’ the culler chief replied.
On Wolan, the astronauts concentrated on finding a quarter acre a short distance from their ship. When they sighted a good lease, they set up an infrared boundary so that any culler, approaching from any direction, would recognize the boundary.
The culling team unpacked their pneumatic axes and scaling gear and approached the infrared barrier. Crossing it, they noticed that the weight of their equipment increased. With each step they took in approach to those first trunks, the strain on their hands, wrists, forearms, elbows, and biceps grew until each culler was plagued by ache.
Since seasoned astronauts were accustomed to all sorts of strains, no one made comment. But what they were not prepared for was an incapacity at lifting their drills above waist level upon switch on.
Fourteen cullers, with fourteen pneumatic axes expelling air, stood immobilized.
‘Culler chief report,’ the chief resource officer called from Earth.
‘Sir Mum, we cannot lift our axes,’ the chief culler replied.
‘Explain.’
‘We cannot raise them north of our middies, Sir Mum.’
‘Drop the axes.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum.’ The chief turned to their team and ordered a lowering of tools. Each culler choked their axe and laid it on the soil.
‘Apply hand axe. Single indentation.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum.’ The culler chief walked to the closest trunk and unsheathed their hand axe. They had no difficulty removing the tool, but as they went to swing the blade toward the tree, the axe head rebounded from a spot in space. The head took the axe with it, both bouncing back, flying from the culler chief’s hand to the ground.
‘Report.’
The culler chief picked up their axe. ‘Aye, Sir Mum. A pain radiates from my wrist toward fingers and forearm. It is the shock of impact. The axe did not touch wood.’
‘Reapply.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum.’ The culler chief again readied to swing their hand axe, and again the head struck a point in space prohibiting trespass. The axe tumbled from the culler’s hand, completing several somersets before reaching dirt.
‘Ah,’ the chief culler winced, clutching their hand which began to swell, purpling in expansion.
‘Report.’
‘Reattempted cut and axe re-met invisible barrier. Cannot lift axe with prime hand as hand, from wrist to fingers, swells.’
‘Pain?’
‘Severe.’
The other cullers, listening to the conversation, said nothing. Several remained in awe of the majesty of the trees, an awe that challenged the itch in their limbs to cut. Still others, not similarly overcome, grew angry at what they felt was arboreal insolence. Without awaiting order, they swung their axes at the trees but met with the same result. Half the culling team now clutched hands immobilized by pain and bruising.
The chief resource officer began a scan of Wolan’s surface. Expecting to find a hidden energy Foco responsible for the barrier, the officer found none. They commenced a subsurface planetary scan but that, too, produced nothing.
‘Sir Mum, what is the directive?’ the culler chief inquired.
‘Cullers will return to the ship. Chief engineer will prepare cannon. Captain, select target and fire.’
The cullers made haste and watched from their viewing screens as the ship’s cannon powered up. In the walls of the ship there was a surge of energy felt by everyone on board. It was a surge to which hey had grown accustomed during warp travel but not sub light speeds, much less in a stationary state.
‘Fire,’ the captain ordered. The gunnery office fired the cannon at a magnificent specimen standing 400 meters tall. The cannon had no effect on the tree.
‘Select a smaller specimen.’
‘Aye, Sir Mum.’ The captain located a sapling and ordered the gunnery officer to fire upon it. Again, to no effect.
A moment passed. Before the chief resource officer could advise, the gunnery officer turned toward the captain. As their pupils dilated, the gunnery spoke in their usual speech tone, but used words they never before would have had the temerity to utter: ‘I reject your attempt to designate us a name we have not chosen.’
In a trice, the captain heard the chief resource officer remark: ‘Captain, we reject your attempt to give us names we have not chosen.’
‘Sir Mum?’
‘I did not name you, captain. You are not at liberty to issue a claim.’
The captain, caught by the forest on his view screen, forgot to blink. With each mote that landed on their lenses, in each tear the ducts produced to wash away each blemish, pain infused the captain’s sight. It maundered into their being, that pain they had suppressed every time they heard themselves called captain. So damn singular, that title.
by submission | Jan 10, 2024 | Story |
Author: Lauren Everling
I didn’t want to end up here. I didn’t want to be in a holding cell with five other women who looked like funhouse mirror versions of themselves, wrinkled and geriatric, although one of them was only twenty-five. She got aged sixty-five for robbing a convenience store. I was waiting for my punishment, but after looking at that cellmate, the suspense wore away, as I knew whatever it was wouldn’t be good.
The day they took me away was cold, with stabbing pains in my stomach. I clutched it while shivering, the snow piling on my eyelashes. My family was everything but well-off. I’m sure now that I was in prison they felt a sense of relief, knowing that they had one less mouth to feed. Some older woman walking out of the grocery store next to where we lay our heads took pity on me and my family and gave me a slice of bread. One slice was all it took for the cops to think that I was stealing. When they forcibly grabbed me by my waist I kicked back, which the officers took as resisting arrest.
Now I sat here and watched a clearly middle aged woman with tattered clothing being pulled out of the cell. The officer threw her to the ground, grabbed her arm, and stuck the needle in. Immediately, her body thrashed and she gasped for air. Her gasp turned to a groan as her face sagged. All the skin on her body now hung off of her bones. Her diminished self got thrown back into the holding cell as a warning to the rest of us. The other un-aged women moved away from her. She became less than them now.
At this point my mind filled up with ping pong balls bouncing from one end to the other, each time reminding me of the horrors that soon would distort my body. The worst part is, they never warned you. As far as I knew, my next breath could be my last before I was forever someone who my brain could no longer recognize.
by submission | Jan 9, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The universe is a bowling alley. It sets up the pins and we knock ‘em down.
That’s pretty much all you need to understand entropy. You’ll need a little more to understand humanity. We are high maintenance. We basically feast on order and crap disorder.
The chemical energy we consume and absorb is very ordered. Think cheeseburgers and sunshine. The heat energy we radiate and piss away is very disordered. Think garlic breath and sweaty pits.
Humans only survive by increasing disorder in the universe. No wonder we’re so messed up. For so long, we’ve been attracted to this notion of linear progress trending up and up to some golden age where our brains are the size of beach balls and we wear long shimmering cloaks and wax nostalgic over war, famine, corruption, inequality, poverty, climate change and the final season of Game of Thrones.
Our very nature, though, is bipolar. Order/Disorder. The signs that we are thriving as a species, really kicking dominion-over-the-earth ass are crystal clear: it’s mayhem out there. We are increasing global disorder at a mind-boggling rate, creating a golden age of man-made crises.
So, what do we do? Just keep bowling?
Or do we defy the conservation of energy and rewrite the first law of thermodynamics?
That would be a tedious proposition at best. So I suggest, as a species, we embrace disorder. A new kind of disorder.
A disorder where humanity is not always at the front of the line, on the top of the heap, in the number one spot. A disorder where flora and fauna can flourish because they are not competing with our technological heat waste and exploitation. The earth is not our heat sink. It is not our strip mine.
We can turn our waste energy and our wasted energy to shaking up the established order. We can reset the pins ourselves and not bowl them down. We can create a much more liberating and equitable world disorder by embracing biodiversity.
Biodiversity. Not bowling. That’s what the universe is really built for.
Are you ready for it?
Are you hungry for it?
Good. Now, who’s ready to disorder?
by Julian Miles | Jan 8, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles
There he is, tapping away on his communication device.
Verify.
2024. Autumn. White House. Executive Residence. Second Floor. The body will be found at 05:14 by Charles Lebruin, one of his security personnel.
Time?
05:12.
I step towards him.
“Mr President?”
He looks up. I pull the trigger and see the needler beam scorch the wall behind him. He falls.
Perfect. Time to return. I press the recall button on my sleeve.
*
How did the bomber get into the White House? That’s the question of the decade. Tonight at nine we ask a panel of security experts how things could have gone so disastrously wrong for the Secret Service.
*
Karl, former Vice President, looks at the scorch marks, then at the report in front of him, then back to Eckardt.
“You’re telling me the president was already dead, the weapon used is unknown, the explosive is unidentifiable, and the bomber only showed up on thermals three minutes before he blew himself up?”
“Yes.”
“Eckardt, I want this mystery solved. Make it a Special Access Program, reporting directly to me.
“Yes, Mister President.”
*rew*
There he is, tapping away on his communication device.
Verify.
2024. Autumn. White House. Executive Residence. Second Floor. The body will be found at 05:14 by Charles Lebruin, one of his security personnel.
Time?
05:12.
I step towards him.
“Mr President?”
He looks up. I see the needler beam scorch the wall behind him. He falls.
What was that?
*
On top of a year of sordid revelations for the First Lady, the sudden death of her husband must come as both devastation and relief. Tonight at nine we ask a panel of bereavement councillors how things are likely to progress for the First Family in the coming months.
*
Karl, former Vice President, looks into the cell.
“You caught him, and got a cover story in place! Good work, Eckardt. Find out who, how, why, and where they got that clever technology. Break this thing down and get us some answers. Make it SCI, eyes only, you know the drill.”
“Yes, Mister President.”
*rew*
There he is, tapping away on his communication device.
Verify.
2024. Autumn. White House. Executive Residence. Second Floor. The body will be found at 05:14 by Charles Lebruin, one of his security personnel.
Time?
05:12.
I step towards him.
“Mr President?”
He looks up. I pull the trigger and see the needler beam scorch the wall behind him. He falls.
Perfect. Time to return. I press the recall button on my sleeve.
*
On top of a year of disasters for the White House, the breach of security that allowed an assassin to join the Secret Service could see a change in the way the First Family are protected. Tonight at nine we ask a panel of espionage experts how a double agent could have made it so far undetected.
*
Eckardt, former Vice President, looks at the scorch marks, then at the report in front of him, then back to Charles.
“You’re telling me the president was already dead, the weapon and explosive come from some of our own secret projects, and the bomber only showed up on thermals three minutes before he blew himself up?”
“Yes.”
“Somebody knows something, Charles. Let’s start a hard sweep through the radicals, militias, and insurgents. I want them to know we’re not going to tolerate this anymore.”
“Yes, Mister President.”
Charles hurries away.
President Eckardt smiles. It’s going to be a glorious new world, policed in hindsight.
