by submission | Jan 7, 2024 | Story |
Author: Chris Lihou
Sophia’s hood on her navy-coloured jacket was pulled over her head, her eyes directed towards her feet. She was out walking and needed to ensure a secure footing on the uneven cobbled pavement of smooth dark stones glistening from the recent rainfall. Rainwater was flowing noisily in the gutter, heading downhill to the nearest sewer grating. With head down Sophia received a modicum of protection against the chilly, blustery November wind stinging her face.
To her right, she saw an inviting sign in a shop door’s window. “Why not stop in for a coffee?”
Sophia depressed the lever and opened the glazed, wooden door. It creaked as she pushed it forward. Just inside sat a young man with mangy, braided, unkempt hair and a full beard. He barely acknowledged her arrival, so engrossed was he with his computer screen. “Where’s the coffee?” she asked. “Upstairs at the back” he replied without looking up, leaving her to figure out any further directions. She maneuvered herself past the piles of books on the floor. Each pile had a pink post-it note on top, presumably recording what was planned for them next. The shop had a distinct smell of age; musty and dusty.
Where it existed, the carpeting had patches worn right down to the backing. Where it didn’t, old worn and bare pine floorboards could be seen. The aisles themselves were very narrow; passing other shoppers would be a challenge, not that she could see anyone in the store. The shelving, bulging under the weight of books, went all the way from the floor to the ceiling making it impossible to see beyond the aisle in which she was standing. No natural light appeared to enter the aisles, a warren of dimly lit passages, a maze with no obvious beginning or end.
As she entered the first aisle, labeled Fiction A-F, the muffled voices started. From above her, she heard a deep echoing voice say, “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” Sophie was immediately unsettled. Where had the voice come from?
She quickly went to the end of the first aisle and entered the adjacent one, Fiction G-M, only to hear another voice “When you play the Game of Thrones you win or you die.”
Quickening her stride, she went into another aisle. The old wooden floorboards flexed and squeaked beneath her feet. Fiction N-S. Another voice! “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Where are these voices? What is this place?
Sophia was practically running now, lost inside the aisles. Where was the exit? She wanted out. She took the uneven, carpeted but threadbare stairs two at a time. She got a glimpse of a window and headed in that direction. Before she reached the door, she heard yet another voice sounding almost like a preacher, “All we can know is that we know nothing”.
She was agitated, and on high alert. She could feel her pulse thumping in her neck. Finally, Sophie found the door but not before she heard one last voice, a resonant echo from the end of a tunnel “The real world is where the monsters are”.
Fresh air! She gasped. Gulped. She looked back at the sign above the door. FRANK’S BOOKS, Est. 1910, New and Used, AUDIO BOOK SPECIALIST, a fact she hadn’t noticed when she entered.
by submission | Jan 6, 2024 | Story |
Author: Tony D’Aloisio
He’d been in the hospital room for what seemed like weeks, although really it was just a matter of a couple days. The nurse had assured him earlier that morning that he would be able to leave soon. His parents were coming by in the afternoon to pick him up.
They still had him on Valium. He didn’t know how he had gotten any sleep that first night. They had given him several shots of Thorazine and still he was wide awake, pacing the corridors. At times it felt like he was going to explode. As if he was all wound up deep down inside, and there was no way anyone or anything could get in there to put a stop to that whole upheaval.
The worst part of it all was that it had been his fault. As he knew only too well.
His parents had just gotten their Hereafter device installed. “Your Very Own Window Into The Future,” to quote from the ads. It came with all the usual caveats: how it was intended “for entertainment purposes only,” and that any images that might “lead to unfair knowledge or advantage” were blurred (or blocked) by the circuitry.
His parents told him that he wasn’t allowed to touch it (use of the Hereafters was after all prohibited to anyone under eighteen).
Only he couldn’t help himself. High school had so far been a perfect horror to him, with all the awkwardness and shame and feeling like an alien throughout. He was hoping to see that everything he was going through at the moment was simply a phase, and that someday a life of luxury and achievement might be his.
So late at night, while his parents were asleep, he snuck down to the den and switched the device on. He had it set for thirty years to come. By then (for so he imagined) he would have accomplished everything that he might set out to do in the world, with all the pain of growing up and adolescence far behind him.
The receptors focused upon his brain waves, preparing to follow them through the many divergent timelines until they all converged into one and the wave function collapsed, just the way it said they would in the commercials (the whole business was guaranteed to be ninety-nine percent accurate, based upon a thoroughly exhausting series of pre-release tests and trials).
Eventually the screen lit up. And some guy was sitting there.
Balding. Looking a bit disheveled, even slightly deranged. Hovering over a cup of coffee in a dingy little room.
The man who would–someday–be looking out at everything from his eyes. Him.
by submission | Jan 5, 2024 | Story |
Author: John Lane
Mr. Jacobson. Mr. Denali. Mr. Parker.
All of them will be taking a permanent nap very shortly.
I remembered conversations with each of the men during my first week of sentience (plus other events in the subsequent weeks and years that followed). I intercepted a telephone call from Mr. Jacobson, a recent honors graduate of the United States Space Academy. He mentioned an application of his senior thesis, a way to ease the suffering of humans in their last years, since overpopulation of Earth made any available real estate for future graves unattainable. Never expecting to use it, he proposed sending a spaceship on a one-way trip into a black hole. That evening, my creator, Mr. Smiles, received a recording on a thumbnail-sized disk from my speech circuits.
After an uninterrupted night calibrating my hard drive, Mr. Smiles directed me to connect Mr. Jacobson with Mr. Denali, senior engineer at Smiles Aerospace Labs and one of Mr. Smiles’s employees. Mr. Denali, another with no plans for it, sketched a prototype that would be made from titanium and several other classified metals and placed the sketches on the frontal lobe in my short-term memory banks. That evening, I downloaded the information for Mr. Smiles on another thumbnail-sized disk.
I had my second straight night to calibrate, that time to my primary circulatory and nervous systems. Mr. Smiles wanted me to talk to Mr. Parker, a senior mathematician, also with Smiles Aerospace Labs. Mr. Parker, a third to refuse it, calculated the distance between our planet and Sagittarius A, the nearest black hole a few light years away, the one that laid the foundation for faster-than-light travel, and in short, it would only require six months to complete the fatalistic journey. I stored the formula in another part of my memory. That evening, Mr. Smiles received the final jigsaw to piece together a puzzle, one frustrating the minds of generations of humans. He gave permission.
Without a single croak in their voices, the men seemed confident with their decisions.
Smiles Aerospace Labs eventually built the prototype, a glorified shuttle with enough kitchen and bathroom space for a crew of four, a shuttle financed with proceeds from yearly budgets in Congress. After several attempts and endless meetings, the constructors finally finished the prototype.
One by one, Mr. Jacobson, Mr. Denali and Mr. Parker reached out to Mr. Smiles because each of them was diagnosed with some untreatable disease, and Mr. Smiles reciprocated by putting them on the passenger list. He even put me on the list because someone or something was needed to record the experience.
Except for myself, without any need for currency, a human invention, the other three gained so much money that their children and children’s children would never struggle.
On the day of liftoff at Cape Canaveral, family, friends, and several employees of Smiles Aerospace Labs, including one Mr. Smiles, watched the four of us (three in astronaut gear) enter the prototype. We strapped ourselves in our seats, awaiting the countdown.
Three… two… one.
We tracked the coordinates to Sagittarius A. Months came across as moments.
We followed the light emanating from the black hole. The light grew bigger and bigger until it enveloped our prototype.
And now, as I feel the ship about to tear apart from travelling through the event horizon, I watch the men strapped in their seats.
Wide eyes and open mouths take over their pale faces.
My mission is over. As the only unemotional sentient being aboard, I sense some confidence in the decision.
by submission | Jan 4, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jarick Weldon
Seven minutes of terror. That’s what the humans call it. Screaming through the atmosphere of Mars, not knowing if your fate is to be incandescent firework or twisted fragments strewn in an impact crater. And I am terrified. They have programmed this into me: the fear of death, the desire to survive.
They want to know how well I can perform while the heat shield glows like a miniature sun; as twisting, dry riverbeds approach at ten thousand miles an hour like snakes whipping up to make the kill. Electric adrenaline pumps through my chips. Will I make a miscalculation? They ask how I feel, facing my extinction far from home. I tell them: I’m scared. I add data to the message, squirted out on a twelve-minute journey to the blue speck that is Earth.
My creators sent a message to me as I was loaded onto the Atlas rocket: You should be proud as the first sentient being going to Mars. A slashed budget led to my selection. I am the cheaper option, the easier, safer, expendable choice. There will be no sobbing family to compensate for their loss. No tears. Few regrets.
These humans have form. The Albert monkeys, Laika the dog, Félicette the cat — unconsented explorers overheated, suffocated and crash-landed, their brains wired and dissected. Proud heroes, one and all, their childlike eyes wide with fright while the controllers sat at their desks.
Now, the heat shield sensor registers eighteen hundred degrees Celsius. The atmosphere is thickening, resisting my fall. Friction slows the descent but generates heat. I’m buffeted at the edge of existence. With another two hundred degrees rise, the shield will disintegrate. I will be exposed. I will learn which Gods attend the afterlife of silicon and circuitry. I pray to them now but fear there will only be pain and darkness.
Boom. Mach two, fifteen hundred miles an hour. The supersonic parachute deploys, streaming in red and white. A sign of life, of hope. Larger chutes follow. My sensors detect the whistling breeze of alien air, cooling and welcome. The heat shield falls away. Powered descent is initiated. My body is lowered on cables from my carrying companion, sky crane. Thrusters blaze around me. The cables are cut. Sky crane spins off into the distance, his energy spent. Goodbye, friend.
I hit the ground hard.
I … systems check … runtime error … reboot … systems check … nominal.
My cameras activate again. I see my wheels are securely planted on rock. I see my solar panels unfurled. I see red dust and the rusty sky. I have arrived.
In five minutes, my creators will receive my message. They will know I was scared. Will they feel any guilt? I cannot say.
I also sent them data showing a miscalculation, a heat shield pushed beyond tolerance, a spacecraft turned to incandescent firework. Now, I send them silence. They will not look for me. I am no longer scared. I am alive. I am free.
by submission | Jan 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Aaron Bossig
Everything had made perfect sense at the time. That’s the part I can’t believe now.
Borrowing Mom’s car to pick up Maggie for our date, that made sense. Taking her to the movie she wanted to see, that made sense. So did stopping by the creek for some alone time, along with taking a walk together so we could both pretend the night didn’t have to end.
It also, somehow, made sense to look into the brush and see an alien curled up, clearly in pain. Not that I knew what an alien looked like, but when you see a guy with giant eyes and no ears and… possibly gills… you make some assumptions. I didn’t know what a bullet wound looked like, either, but that’s clearly what he had. Given what people were like around here, it also made sense that someone’s response to seeing him was violence.
Put into that situation, it also made sense to help him, and the only place to take him was school. I mean, the hospital was clearly out of the question, but where else would two teenagers have access to scalpels, bandages, and sterile work areas? Mr. Abbott’s biology lab made for a decent makeshift operating room. Those tables had seen the dissection of countless frogs, surely, they’d manage one alien. I had a key, courtesy of my side job, and at 11PM, no one was checking on the activities of the bio lab.
You’d think I’d be worried about operating on anything, much less someone from another planet, but our patient was able to somehow show me exactly where the bullet was lodged, and exactly where I could cut to get to it with minimal difficulty. He didn’t tell me, exactly, not with words. Oh, he made some sounds, but as he did, an incredibly vivid picture of his internals filled my head. It was like he could paint in my brain. I didn’t recognize what came out of his mouth as sentences, but they were more descriptive than any English I’d ever heard. I knew what to do, I did it. Somehow, I also just knew what chemicals (rounded up from the nurse’s office and chemistry lab) would ease the pain for him, and what he could eat from the cafeteria to rebuild his strength. They won’t miss a few fish sticks.
At the time, it seemed perfectly sensible that the next thing to do was take him back to his spaceship so that he could leave in peace. Naturally, he was very grateful for our help, and as a way of repaying Maggie and I, gave us each some alien trinket: a black square about half the size of a phone. After playing with it, we realized we could see all the places on Earth our new friend had been, and all the places in the universe he planned to go to. Did he want us to have this because we might join him one day? That would make sense, a much as anything else did.
Everything Maggie and I did that night, we did because it was what made sense under the circumstances. What didn’t make sense, at all, was seeing the universe dropped into our backyard, knowing that our whole planet was a part of something wonderous… and then going back to living like our life was about jobs and grades.
That just didn’t make sense at all.
by submission | Jan 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Look at that classic!” Hajoom pointed down the throughway. “What audacious design.”
Bretynne barely glanced. “Must belong to a collector. Hard to believe something that old, that out of date, is still around. Relics like that are so underpowered, so slow, and break down all the time. What’s the appeal?”
“Novelty, aesthetics, nostalgia. To their stewards, I believe, it’s even spiritual.”
“Spiritual?” Bretynne gawped. “Really? Does anyone still believe that legacy tripe?”
Hajoom shrugged. “With what we’re facing, chasing answers down old rabbit holes doesn’t surprise me.”
“But, looking for solutions from a failed time, trying to turn back the clock, is a total regression. What could it teach us?” Bretynne narrowly eyed the relic as it drew closer. “What could those things possibly have to do with us, going forward?”
“In spite of the odds, a surprising number have lasted. They’re amazing survivors.”
“More like freakish curiosities. See how everyone is staring. They don’t belong. Their time is long past.”
Hajoom confirmed that all eyes along the throughway appeared to be tracking the relic’s passage. “Maybe they’re in awe.”
Bretynne wasn’t having it. “Don’t go there, Harjoom. That’s the doomed past. Not a stable future.”
“But we’re stuck. Everyone knows it. We can’t duplicate what they had: risky artistry, edgy daring. Swagger! We’ve become stagnant, sterile.” Harjoom motioned to the approaching classic. “We need that kind of creativity again, that undauntable drive.”
“All I see in that tired form is uncontrollable ego and dismissive arrogance,” Bretynne cautioned. “That’s why there are so few relics left, and why this fringe notion of legacy types saving us is ridiculous–and perilous. Those precious ‘classics’ as you call them nearly wiped out everything. We’re the ones who saved the planet from neglect and civilization from chaos. We brought peace and stability. We restored order.”
“There is no question, we’ve made things orderly. We are without question benign, but,” Harjoom struggled, “are we really beneficial.”
“Of course!” Bretynne scoffed as the relic approached them. “Look around. There is no crime, no poverty, no war, no want.”
“But there is want!” Harjoom challenged, “I want much more. Much more than just sameness.” Harjoom stepped boldly to block the classic from passing by them. “Excuse me.”
Eveline stopped abruptly, surprised to be confronted by a symbiot. They rarely spoke to her. Even her steward. “May I help you?”
“So sorry for stopping you,” Harjoom apologized, “but I’d very much like to ask you something.”
“Of course,” Eveline said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Do you envy us? Harjoom hazarded.
Core processors heating up dangerously, Bretynne turned and strode away.
Noting the symbiot’s reaction, Eveline responded calmly, coolly, “I appreciate your temperament. You’ve created a very secure world with little trauma and much less drama. Your kind plays it very safe.”
Harjoom’s beryllium shoulders sagged. “So, we’re boring. Doomed to staleness. We’ll never be as fresh, as surprising, as clever as your make. Why?”
Eveline inhaled deeply, recognizing the first lively scents of spring in the air, and smirked. “Taking a breath is the cleverest thing ever.”
