by submission | Mar 15, 2025 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
I was going catching with my Grampie. He weren’t really my Grampie but that’s how I’d always referred to him. He was old, had a bushy white moustache, a scratchy beard and a big belly. And he was good to me, not like my Pa which tanned me all the time, even when I wasn’t messing up. Pa didn’t understand me like Grampie.
He never talked, my Grampie. Something happened to him in the war, not rightly sure what it was. But he could talk just fine with his eyes, and his smile. I always knew what he was thinking by reading his face. Sometimes he’d use his hands, like this morning when he made a little reeling motion with his wrist. I knew what he wanted to do. Most people called it fishing but we always called it catching.
I was carrying a small metal bucket with a bunch of crawlers mixed in with some wet dirt to use for bait. He carried a sack with some cheese sandwiches and a couple mini hydration canisters. We both had poles.
We followed the ancient tram tracks that were rusted and growed over with weeds. It would lead us right to the best catching spot where we’d always go. We walked for a ways and it was getting warm along towards full sunrise, the sky a real pleasing orangey-yellow. The tracks ended at a broke bridge halfway across the river. We went right to the edge, sat our butts down, hooked up a couple crawlers and lowered the lines into the water to wait for a nibble.
I looked over to my Grampie and he gave me a smile that said it was real nice to be here together on a beautiful day doing something that made us both happy. Like I said, he could say a lot with just his face. I nodded my agreement. There was only the call of birds and frogs and crickets.
Then a sound came from behind us. We both turned around and there were two silvery guys right there, or maybe they were wearing radiation suits, I couldn’t tell. My Grampie stood up real fast and stepped between them and me. They spoke with some weird voices and pointed a blue metal rod at him. Before I knew what was happening some beam shot out of the rod and hit my Grampie in the chest and he buckled for a second, but didn’t go down. With one hand he knocked the weapon out of the guy’s grip and with his other he shoved me back. I tried to catch my balance, but the push was hard and I went over the edge of the bridge. Just before I fell, I saw my Grampie lighting into them guys for all he was worth.
I fell for two seconds before I splashed into the water. I popped up right away and looked up to the bridge. I couldn’t see much through the slats and the snapped beams but I could hear quite a tussle going on. I swam to the shore as fast as I could but it took me a minute or two, then I scrambled up the bank to the tracks and got to the bridge. I saw my Grampie and the two silvery guys all laying down, not moving. I ran over to my Grampie.
His belly was huffing up and down and there was lots of blood leaking through his clothes. I held his hand and he managed one last smile. Then he died.
I looked at the other guys and they was dead too. Then my Grampie moved. His head tilted back and his mouth opened. A black shinning ball that glowed like a tiny sun, rose out and hovered in the air for a few seconds. It floated over in front of my face and stopped there. I opened my mouth, cause it seemed like that’s what I was suppose to do, and it went into me. I gasped as it caught in my throat, burned going down, and I got dizzy for what seemed like a half minute, then it all passed. I blinked.
I was not quite sure how I was going to explain this debacle to my father, but I had a confident suspicion that I would have to accomplish that task with only my facial expressions because I would not be speaking anytime in the future. I also doubt he will be disciplining me anymore. Events in my domain have changed dramatically.
by submission | Mar 14, 2025 | Story |
Author: Jo Peace
We always learn things too late.
I remember the pine smell, the urgent fear as I hurried to assemble the close-in defense unit before the drones reached our position.
A young voice snaps me back to the present. “Dad, why do you live alone in the mountains? Is it because people tease you about the serious?” That was part of it, for sure – people can get surprisingly mean about things they don’t understand, and surprisingly controlling about things that hurt no one. But also, I needed to stay close to the last functioning “serious”, as they called them. I just got tired of explaining they were much more than just a pile of spare parts. “Dad?” -“Sorry, I got lost in thought.” I take her in a big hug, like when she was little and we all lived in the village. “I missed you so much!”
“It’s very nice of you to visit your dad, Libby. I don’t think I could survive here if you and your mom didn’t visit now and then. What brings you to the area anyways?” -“Oh daddy, house power broke and hubby said his pals found a functioning unit! Since we were close I thought I’d come by.”
Just on cue, her friend Jack comes by. “Hello mister Humpfrey!” His clothes are dirty and oily. I wave, then go in the tent to prepare some tea.
As I am arranging cups on a tray, I hear a commotion outside. “Fireworks!” I rush out and I see tracers glowing in the evening sky, then a ball of fire. I can make out two more drones passing through, towards us. I haven’t seen them so aggressive since…
-“Wait, Libby, where did he find that power source exactly? Not in a CIWZ… right?” There was nothing for miles, family after family had dismantled everything they could find. Except for the one I had been maintaining all this time, our last functioning defense. “Not in a shallow dig by an old pine tree?”
Libby’s face grew red. Jack shrugged. “So what? Those old machines never do anything. They’ve been broken for decades.”
“Yes son, unless someone cares enough to maintain them”, I think. My blood turns cold at the realization of what they have done. That was the last CIWZ, the one I dedicated myself to carefully maintain for decades, sacrificing time with my family. It also meant I couldn’t continue trying to educate the tribe in maintenance and the invisible dangers. I had given it my all, but they were more concerned with their immediate survival needs.
“More fireworks!” Another ball of fire as a second wave breaks through the coastal defenses, ten kilometers east. Nothing remains to block their way, and I’m the only one left who understands what that means. My wife is out in the village, exposed. Libby’s husband is there too, and almost everyone I’ve known in the past decade.
I could run. I could hide. But I realize that even if I survive despite the long odds, my life would be pointless with the rest of the village dead (or the livestock we rely on). They didn’t know they needed me, and I didn’t know I needed them. We always learn things too late. Libby needs her husband, and I need my wife. At least she won’t experience the dread of knowing certain death is flying towards her.
The tray is still in my hands, the drones are maybe two minutes away now, the kids still unaware. Tears blurring my vision I turn to the three kids. “Who wants tea?”
by submission | Mar 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: Soramimi Hanarejima
On my way home, I stop by the drugstore for a quick errand. But in the nootropics aisle, I’m thwarted by vacant shelf space. When I ask a clerk what happened to all the memorysyn, he tells me there’s been a recall. Some production issue has made recent lots more potent than normal, resulting in memories that are too vivid with all the minutiae of daily life. For now, we’ll have to make memories the old fashioned way.
After dinner, I cozy up on the sofa and go through what happened today, picking out events that hold the promise of meaning. Then it’s time to determine that meaning, which is easy when the meaning is straightforward but frustrating when it’s ambiguous.
And it’s especially ambiguous for the most notable thing today: the world seeming forlorn without my colors. What does that mean? Hoping to puzzle out the answer, I go over and over my in-progress memory of this colorless day.
Before work, I took my colors to the vision shop for an overdue tune-up. The chromatician told me that all my colors needed recalibration and I’d have to leave them for various specialists to service.
“The whole spectrum is out of whack. Especially the tertiaries,” she said.
“So do you have loaner colors I can use in the meantime?” I asked.
“Not an entire spectrum. We just have basic colors, and you’re better off seeing the world in shades of gray instead of getting pops of red, purple and yellow.”
So I resigned myself to total grayness and headed to the office, the city like the milieu of an old movie—until an unsettling emptiness began to loom over downtown. That emptiness only intensified, and at work, I struggled to focus. By lunchtime, it was as though a vast void lay beneath the floor and behind the walls. I had to take the afternoon off.
My usual route home was a dismal trek through a desolate husk of urban life—buildings, traffic and people all hollowed of substance. My apartment was just as vacuous, sapped of its usual homeyness, like a three-dimensional shadow of the place I’d left this morning. Not sure what else to do, I took a nap and slept soundly, until I was woken by a call telling me that my colors were ready.
After a bus ride through the ashen shell of the city’s former self, I got my recalibrated colors reinstalled, and instantly the world was more lively than ever.
It’s all straightforward enough. So what’s the significance? Colors make the world feel substantive? Is it that simple? Or does the absence of color make an emotion I don’t ordinarily feel—like loneliness—part of the world around me?
More than ever now I crave the automatic narrative cohesion granted by memorysyn—the seamless way this neuroceutical instantaneously makes a whole memory complete with an inscrutable logic that locks events into meaningful place. But I should save what few pills I have in case it’s a while before the manufacturing issue gets resolved.
So I settle for the facile interpretation that seemingly simple fixtures in life shouldn’t be taken for granted. It’s a trite truism, but I can try again later. Or ask for your take on my day without colors. You have a knack for seeing the events of my life in a certain way, and that might just be the key to unlocking the significance I can’t. Then this memory would be really made the old fashioned way, something socially constructed. Maybe with the old-timey pleasure of understanding life together.
by submission | Mar 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: Lewis Richards
Two Shuttles slashed through the sheeting rain, trailed by twin comet tails of super heated plasma vaporising any raindrops unfortunate enough to meet them on their spiralling descent toward the fluctuating lights of the colony they raced toward.
It had been three days since the Ark-ship above lost contact with the colonists below and just over an hour since their distress call fired up the gravity well calling for an Evac before communication was lost again.
“Arrival in T-Minus three minutes. Over” The voice of the ships captain crackled.
“Confirmed” came matching responses from the shuttle pilots.
The shuttles levelled out, main engines cutting out as speed reducing thrusters flared.
“Hold position five hundred metres above the LZ. Over.”
“Captain?” The pilot of Shuttle Alpha asked
“Hold position.”
“But Sir with all due respect we don’t know how desperate the situ-“
“Precisely Daniels.” The Captain interjected. “ I am not inclined to allow an unknown pathogen, life form or rogue element risk the lives of everybody aboard this ship. We need more information and until then we treat this as a full quarantine lockdown. Am I understood?”
“Yes Sir” Two voices chimed
“Good. Now hold Position”
“Confirmed”
The shuttles hung in the air, buffeted by howling wind. Below the colony spread outward from a central landing pad, prefabricated units dropped from orbit giving way to a vast alien prairie. Lights flicked in a few windows, a ring of perimeter lights blinked in and out.
“Switching to spotlights.” Pilot Beta announced.
“High-beams on, confirmed” Daniels replied.
Two coronas of white blue light pierced through the night.
“What the- Sir are you seeing this? We have colonists on the landing pad.”
The pilots stared down at the landing pad and the mass of bodies staring back at them. Colonists covered every inch of space, packed tightly as more crammed up the access ramps and metal staircases.
“That must be every colonist down here” Beta whispered.
“They’re going to have to scram if they want a ride” Daniels answered “Sir shall I start my approach?”
“Negative Daniels. Hold while we assess.”
“Sir do you have access to my forward camera feed? You should see this.” Beta spoke. Panic in his voice.
Daniels bought the image up on his own screen, Beta was zoomed in on the colonists below, they were stood perfectly still. Too still, their eyes fixed unblinking on the glare of the shuttles above them, every muscle locked, mouths gaped in silent screams. Even from here he could see the whites of their eyes, he zoomed further, every colonists eyes were milky, laced with black.
“What’s wrong with them?” Daniels asked.
Nobody answered.
“Shuttles are to return to the ship immediately. You will perform a 7G burn from your main thrusters back into orbit and proceed directly back to the ship. Am I understood?” The Captains voice boomed with every ounce of her authority.
“Sir, the plasm-“ Daniels began.
“Exactly.” Beta whispered.
“Oh shit.” Daniels muttered, fingers flying over his console.
The shuttles flipped in near unison, thrusters flaring as they pointed their noses straight up.
“Acceleration in 3-2-“ the captain counted down.
“Confirmed” two voices spoke from the shuttles.
The main engines of the shuttles burst to life, propelling them back up through the atmosphere as twin comet tail exhausts of superheated plasma bathed the horror below, vaporising any colonists fortunate enough to be in their path.
by submission | Mar 11, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Some seven thousand years ago a micrometeorite winged a pine cone, clipped the ear of a very surprised marmot, skewered a large oyster mushroom, and buried itself in the thick duff of a mountainous forest in the north Cascades. Stan Clutterdam knew none of that when he unceremoniously peed on the ancient impact site.
Only a trace amount of his pee seeped to the buried micrometeorite. Enough, though, that remnants of Stan’s DNA triggered a reaction bio-coded in the thing which had travelled from the deeper cosmos so long ago. The reaction was somewhat clouded by the reluctant artifacts of the pine cone, marmot, and mushroom, but the embedded bio-code was nothing if not adaptable, and the process in the buried thing began.
About six hours later, tired but satisfied with the day’s rugged hike, Stan Clutterdam was looking forward to an elk burger and garlic fries at Zeke’s back in town. He wasn’t counting on the creature blocking his descent. Stan was used to back country critters, but he wasn’t prepared for a pine-marmot-mushroom doppelganger sitting in the trail. He had a whistle and bear spray, but neither seemed sufficient when confronting the furry, spongy thing that kinda looked like him and smelled like a car air freshener.
As if customary, Stan’s doppelganger stood and launched into song. “Do you see what I see? Way up in the sky. Do you see what I see? A star, a star, dancing in the night. With a tail as big as a kite.”
For some preternatural reason, Stan sung back, “Do you hear what I hear? Ringing through the sky. Do you hear what I hear? A song, a song, high above the trees. With a voice as big as the sea.”
A moment of silent communion passed and then Stan and his doppelganger harmonized, “Do you know what I know? Do you know what I know?”
And in that instant, they did. Stan Clutterdam experienced every warp and weft woven into the fabric of this ancient alien’s being. Stan’s deep space doppelganger got decidedly less material from Stan’s twenty-eight years of earthly existence, but the mind-meld did reveal a penchant for online poker and crypto trading.
Rocky but acceptable soil for a cosmic entrepreneur’s seed money.
Such was a galactic empire born. Not immaculately, nor drama-free, but over many decades, Stan with his clandestine doppelganger’s help amassed a great fortune that ultimately funded unimagined (unless you’d experienced alien mind-melding) technological breakthroughs leading to the rapid colonization of Earth’s planetary neighbors. And soon thereafter onto scads of favorable exo-systems.
On Stan’s deathbed at the age of 173, the truth came home to roost. Alone but for his demure doppelganger and sensing his last moments, Stan gave into a very cliche question, “Why me?”
Imbued with equal parts pine, marmot, mushroom, and Stan, his doppelganger shrugged. “Who knows. The seeds of tomorrow go where the solar winds blow.”
“Not very reaffirming, but at least you gave it a poetic spin,” Stan wheezed. “What happens from here?”
“Entropy.”
With that, Stan joined the Clutterdam family of little more than man. His doppelganger stood there for a few moments before the overwhelming compulsion came to venture deeper into the cosmos again via a very secret seed-ship. Enough time, though, to imagine a vague sense of agency, maybe even free will.
And for the very first time, Stan’s doppelganger really needed to pee.
by Julian Miles | Mar 10, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They’re running about again, but at least they’re looking happy about it. When I – we – got here, there was running, but only grim faces.
Has it only been six days?
Can’t have been.
Wait. Go through it.
Day one would have been after I heard the crash during the night. Sounded closer than all the others, but another aircraft falling from alien-controlled skies wasn’t unusual. I dug myself deeper under the stack of bedding and went back to sleep.
Come morning I crawled out. Seeing it had rained, I went out water hunting with funnel, syphon, and five-litre carrier in my backpack. Then I saw the size of the tailplane sticking up above the houses across the road. After making sure no-one was about, I went to see. The overnight scavengers would have picked it clean, but water might have collected in the wreckage.
I was right. Got nearly two litres before I saw the hand. Unlike all the other bodies, this one was waving!
A shockingly short time later, I had Jemima and Bruce sitting in my improvised den, eagerly wolfing down protein bar crumbs. I’d found the box squashed under a toppled cupboard in a looted shop, but after eating the contents of the ruptured wrappers, enough remained to keep me going. Until that day.
They told me about the fix their mother had entrusted them with delivering. Something in their cybergear had the secret to fighting the aliens. I didn’t understand. Apart from the urgency, and them being stranded.
Day two started early. I’d seen a crashed 4×4 on the other side of the supermarket. An old one. Bruce said his dad had been a mechanic. Said he could get it going, especially as I had a charge box I’d been keeping topped up with hours of cranking the hand charger I’d had since my grandfather gave it to me decades ago. The old bastard would have been in his element in this chaos, unlike me.
By lunchtime Bruce had got the 4×4 going, and Jemima had shot Looter Dan. He’d been my only local competition. Being nearly twice my width and surly with it, ‘competition’ mainly involved me retreating. This time a girl half my size blew his head off.
Day three: that had been fun. I’ve always loved driving. The 4×4 had nearly a full tank, airless tyres, and a hybrid cruising drive. With Jemima riding shotgun and Bruce navigating, we covered nearly three hundred miles, had two shoot-outs, and only lost the rear windscreen.
We arrived here later that day. I nearly got arrested, got thanked, then got ignored. That last one becoming a state of existence… Yeah, it’s been six days.
“Tony.”
I look up from my daydream. It’s Jemima.
“Uncle Ben says you can take the repaired 4×4 and a full load of supplies if you want.”
Oh yeah. I’d asked for that. ‘Uncle Ben’ wears a uniform with insignia that makes people salute and get out of his way. I was feeling unwanted when he asked. Since then, I’ve compared living in a ruined furniture warehouse to living here. I think I made a mistake.
She looks down at the floor, then back up to me.
“He also said you could keep the 4×4 and become our driver. Bruce said you were really good.”
“What about aliens and stuff?”
“They’re not gone, but the scientists say what my mum made is better than she predicted. We’ll have peace before winter.”
“I’m only driving if you bring that enormous gun of yours.”
She beams at me.
“Deal!”
