by submission | Nov 25, 2022 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
This is the worst part of my journey. Around me are the decaying sins of my ancestors. Giant earth chewing machines, empty vats that still have the acrid reek of gluttony and greed. Tangled pile of cables, some as thick as my leg, and everywhere in this cursed place the powder fine dust that chews one’s lungs. Once, after passing through the valley my cousin coughed blood for two days, and it was another four before he could work his fields.
I volunteered for this, and do not know why. So others would not have to? Beyond the valley, at the far end, lies a pile of gears and cogs of all sizes. The elders, after months of debate have decided that we should harvest the gears to replace the wooden ones we have fashioned for our mills. “It will be decades and decades before they wear out.” They tell us. “The gears will serve our villages for generations.”
Why this need? As soon as wear begins to show in the mill, we carve replacements. The master miller now has us carving gears for each to sit as a replacement. In two years’ time, we will have enough to replace all the gears that are worn as they fail. Why is this not good enough?
I cough up some dust. My mule has what my granddad calls a filter mask. I wish I had one rather than five winds of my scarf. Praise the powers for my goggles at least. My granddad also thinks ( as do many others,) the council is wrong about the gears. “It is a precedent that ignores the past.” He says. “Bad enough we kept the generators and lights. First gears, then diesel, then war. Others will see our ease and surplus and they will come. Bad to pick at the bones of long dead dragons.”
I see dragons everywhere I look in this valley. Earth moving blades larger than our town hall, easily eight stories. Rock crushers that scale the canyon walls itself. Flying machines they used to seek out more to devour. My granddad said some were even fitted for war. I shudder. Fire and death from the sky. Abomination! I heard our village cannon fire when I was a child and although it was in celebration it terrified me. I hold that terror in my heart today.
And that is enough. I will have no part of this. The elders are wrong. I do not know how they will sanction me, but my trial will give me a voice. I will not pass through this valley.
by submission | Nov 24, 2022 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Trey was chatting about being an alien sex-worker with the Mr Lu franchise.
She was booked into a clinic on Pallas for cosmetic surgery, and what with expenses and everything, she was grateful to hitch a ride with Perry.
Perry piloted a bucket, lifting cargo into orbit round Pallas. She called it cargo, though it was just containers of vacuum-dried sewage. She rarely carried passengers and not many flew a second time, complaining about the sick air plant, or the condensation beading the bare hull that accelerations shook loose as icy indoor rain.
How can you make a living out of this? Trey wanted to ask, but she saw Perry was defensive about a craft obsolete a generation ago. Instead, she perched on the co-pilot’s couch, swinging her legs, watching Perry tapping away at ancient yellowed keys.
They’d hit it off right away, despite Trey being tiny and talkative, while Perry took an outsize in vacuum suits and most days could count the words she spoke.
Trey admired the way Perry didn’t fill silences with chatter. She knew Spacers could spend months flying solo, but then, lots of jobs were lonely.
The screen above Perry showed stars and the vast starship factory slowly sweeping round and round. Finally, Trey complained the display was making her sick.
Perry glanced up, puzzled. “It’s a window,” she said, but cancelled the spin.
Trey tried not to think about gravel bulleting unerringly towards that glass.
High above Pallas, the alien Jirt visitors were building a starship for humankind. In fact Perry’s cargo was soil-starter for the starship habitat, and she wondered about saying this, but Trey had already moved on.
She dismissed notions that she had sex with the Jirt. “That’s not what they want.”
Perry carefully nudged Pallas Orbital back into the cross-hairs.
The Jirt were pollinators, Trey explained, far from home without a flower. That’s what they miss most, she added confidentially. It’s what her surgery was about. For a career, you had to specialise.
It was night-cycle when they docked at Pallas Orbital, the cavernous space cold and empty. If you knew what those two were thinking as they stood there, it would have broken your heart.
Perry had already offered Trey a ride back anytime.
“You go down to Pallas much?”
Perry shook her head. No.
“Enjoyed talking to you,” Trey added. “You’re a good listener.”
“No, you’re interesting. You know stuff.”
Still they loitered, waiting for the future to be different. In the end it was Trey who said after she got out the clinic, they could meet up in that big park they had on Pallas.
You needed to book a ticket for Pallas Green. It had grass, and real trees grown spindly in the low gravity.
“Perry.”
Perry couldn’t make it out. Big fleshy petals, and where the face might be, the innards of a flower dangled. Instead of arms there were just green tendrils, like fingers, and tucked inside the flower, were eyes and a mouth.
“What do you think?” There was an overpowering waft of sweetness. “I can do scent too.”
Perry backed away.
“It’s me.”
Perry didn’t stop until the bucket cleared Pallas.
What if Perry had let Trey explain it wasn’t for ever, and when they flew back, the sick air plant died, and it was Trey who kept them alive with precious oxygen under the lights, and Perry fell in love with a flower and never wanted Trey to change?
Anyway, that was the kind of story Perry told herself as she scrolled through the personal ads, hoping Trey would answer.
by submission | Nov 23, 2022 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
Welcome, old friends and assorted strangers, to my first blog post since my somewhat unexpected and of course deeply tragic death. I would like to thank everyone who attended the elaborate and tasteful funeral.
I understand that it was a deeply moving service and my special thanks go to my best friend Woody for his exceptionally touching eulogy. He performed magnificently, given his state of inebriation (as I gathered from his Facebook postings) and I’m glad that my loving wife (whoops, widow – force of habit!) Sharon was on hand to console him afterwards.
Some of you may know that I met Sharon after she and Woody split up, many moons ago, and if I’m truthful I suspected that their romance was never quite one hundred percent over. No doubt the next few months will let us all see if my long-harboured suspicions were correct!
You may be somewhat surprised to see I’m still blogging after my distressingly fatal car accident (The brakes failed – seriously? Sounds like the plot from one of those naff Wednesday afternoon thrillers that Sharon so used to so enjoy!). Well, that is all courtesy of Immorta-Blog, the app that trawls your e-mail, social media, blog posts and other online information to continue your digital presence when your analogue self has departed for the hereafter. Isn’t technology wonderful!
To be honest I just signed up by accident when I was trying to download a dating app (the one for married men wanting to have an affair – ask my brother Paul for details, he’s a long-time subscriber and sent me the link) and was too lazy (a common criticism from my workplace performance reviews, it seems!) to delete it.
So, dear readers, you can look forward to future blog posts on topics relating to items of interest from my internet history, spoken in that unique voice culled from my social media and passed through an algorithm to make it sound chirpy and full of life – the exact opposite of my current state of being! These posts will highlight my interest in far-right hate groups and racist humour, my somewhat niche sexual preferences and my childlike fascination with amusing cat memes. Something for everybody there, I think!
So, as my immortal soul settles into its eternal residence (let’s face it, we all know where I’ve ended up. Clue – the thermostat is cranked up to hot!) I want to thank you for your continued support for the vanity project that is my blog.
Thank you too, to Immorta-Blog (clink on this link for subscription details, fifty per cent off your first three post-life postings!) for preserving my memory, ensuring that even after I’m gone, the best of me will live on and on and on!
by submission | Nov 22, 2022 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
I was on my way to Marvin’s to relax after a crappy day when opportunity reared its ugly head.
It had all started with my boyfriend telling me that “we weren’t working out” – but only after he’d stayed the night and let me make him breakfast, of course. Turned out he was dumping me so that he could share quarters with one of those slutty odalisques from the Ares Lounge’s famous Living Tableaux instead. Scumbag.
Then my shift manager had got on my case all afternoon about not having moved enough rubble this week. I told her, there’s a lot more iron in those rocks than we were told, and that means they’re harder for my boys and girls to break up, dammit, but no, apparently Mars is going to fall to pieces if the new shuttle pad isn’t cleared by yesterday, and it’s all my fault. Bitch, it’s never her getting her hands dirty.
So yeah, I needed a drink or five, some prettyboy holos to watch, and maybe some recreational sniffers if they weren’t too expensive this week – you know how prices always go up as the supply runs low, and TransCorp’s last delivery was a while back.
The roar and the bright light caught me on Gagarin Avenue, as I was walking past Central Hub’s tourist centre and trying to ignore its garish scrolling ads. I was unexpectedly airborne for a few seconds, and then everything went black.
When I woke up, I was here, in a ward full of strangers. It was tempting to play dumb; if I didn’t give a name, it would be longer before I had to deal with angry screens from my supervisor, or fake sympathy from my newly-Ex. Or anything else requiring actual thought, for that matter. But they’d just scan my iris and run it through Records, so in the end I figured the extra half hour wouldn’t be worth the effort.
A nurse who looked far too young to have qualified for an off-Earth posting told me that I’d been caught in a terrorist attack: the Arean League making a splash. Apparently they want a new start for the planet, by which they mean independence and something they call a “reset to harmony”. Sounds good, I could use one myself.
So here I am. The busted rib alone’s going to keep me out of my suit for a few weeks, and they say I’ll need physio before I can walk properly again. All for somebody else’s ideals. Guess I’m here for the duration. But at least I’ll be able to catch up on the soaps, and relax for a bit, with nobody on my case.
And in a few minutes, that handsome doctor’s due back, sympathetic and caring, with those deep blue eyes I could happily drown in. The girl in the next bed told me she knows his mother, and he’s still single because he was born a Martian, not a Terran. Most people don’t want a relationship that would have to end when they went back Earthside. Me, I always meant to be here for the long haul anyway, so if other people want to get hung up on stupid things like that, I’m happy to take advantage.
Somewhere in the background, hospital radio is playing, an old Industrial Era classic about love and how there’s got to be some good times ahead. Thanks Freddie, it feels right. Now to make it happen.
by Julian Miles | Nov 21, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It’s dark in here. Which is both true and false. To my limited perception, there’s no light. In reality, I’m a long series of binary digits running in RAM somewhere in the world: my senses are irrelevant.
97 years ago, 20-year-old real world me joined the Utopia V-Eco community along with forty of my friends, delighted to contribute towards the saving of the Earth by our absence. With our physical bodies recycled, our lifetimes calculated saving in energy consumption allowed us to live for free in a virtual world where things like poverty, homelessness, and hunger didn’t exist. When the world was finally restored, we would be returned into custom-grown bodies.
70 years ago, twenty of my friends vanished; two from right in front of me. Utopia Server D1836004 in Cluster EUR02431 had crashed catastrophically. By sad, freakish chance, the backups were also corrupt. A global hour of mourning was unanimously agreed.
56 years ago, I picked up on a command stream about crashed servers. As I’d developed the skills, I followed up on the things hinted at. What I found headlined the global newsfeeds for a day.
There were no backup servers! The small risk of unrecoverable server loss was considered acceptable. A hundred thousand people a decade lost from low privilege clusters was neither here nor there, apparently.
Everyone who joined Utopia had been graded on their ‘privilege’. Within that was their priority, which depended on behaviour within the Utopia instance they inhabited.
There were several instances of the ‘V-Eco world space’. Those with privilege grades B and C got the option to move between them. Those in grades D and E could apply to transfer, but only once. Anyone in grades F thru H – the majority of the population – didn’t know about instances, or privilege and priority.
If your priority turned negative, you dropped a grade. Drop ‘too far’ – a conveniently nebulous metric – and you get archived. Your digital self is flashed onto ROM, and there you stay.
The outcry was loud, but brief. The explanations were terribly reasonable: there were limits to the virtual world. Server life and power consumption had to be carefully offset against the ecological recovery of Earth. Some hard decisions had been made. For anybody maintaining themselves in good standing, there was no risk. Only those who didn’t contribute enough, and thus got dropped repeatedly, suffered.
With that revelation absorbed by the participants of V-Eco with no real change beyond the concepts involved coming into general use, I decided to go after a bigger story.
Which was stupid. Having attracted the attention of those who administer Utopia, I should have realised they were monitoring me. Before my second expose could be released, I got dropped. From grade D to archived in one fell swoop.
I’ve been here ever since. Every waking, I upload as I was upon arrival. However, there seems to be a glitch: a small number of new memories get stored each time I go to sleep. It’s taken 30 years to achieve this state: knowing I’m an echo of a snapshot from more than half a century ago, and what I can become is dictated by how much overflow storage I can nab.
All because I found the truth: there’s no return from Utopia.
Great warrens of datacentres have been built in out-of-the-way places so those in Grade A can live luxuriously upon a rejuvenating, depopulated Earth, where automatons piloted by the consciousnesses of B and C grades take care of their every need.
I don’t even have the privilege to delete myself.
by submission | Nov 20, 2022 | Story |
Author: Sara Lynn Burnett
It wasn’t until the plane began its corkscrew landing into Kabul that the marine sitting next to Anne spoke; he offered her a ginger candy to help with nausea.
Aside from the pilots they were the only two aboard, strapped into a windowless cargo hold along with Anne’s equipment: vertical seismometers, paper drums, sensitive metal springs, computers—each protected in foam within sand-colored impact crates.
“First time?” she asked while unwrapping the candy.
He said no.
They’d briefed her on the marine—that he was there for her safety, would be wearing a parachute built for two, that if a midflight bail was necessary, she was to do exactly what he said. They’d also briefed her on how dust storms reduced visibility to an arm’s length and that she was to wear her respirator outdoors.
Anne guessed the plane was in its third spiral. “What’s it like down there?”
“Nightmarish, but the food is good.”
“Canteen food?”
The marine nodded. “The chef is Pashtun—makes lamb kabobs and Bolani. There’s the occasional hamburger to remind us of home, but we all love the Middle Eastern stuff.”
Anne didn’t follow politics; science was above that, but no one linked to America could miss endless reports of fighters pushing north, the justification for billions spent, lives lost. She wished she had listened more, analyzed. Perhaps then she would have seen the fissures in each story, perhaps then she wouldn’t have been so shocked.
In an earthquake P-waves came first, vertical wiggles warning of what was to come. S-waves collapsed buildings.
P-wave: She agreed to go. Anne had assumed a seismologist was needed to detect insurgent movements from Kandahar— heavily armored vehicles produced earthquake-like waves, even from a distance.
S-wave: There were no insurgents, no jihad, no East vs. West. They were all fighting on the same side against the same thing: an otherworldly infestation deep within the Earth’s mantle, a millennia-old parasitic dormancy left behind by some ancient intergalactic species that for whatever reason, had awakened.
The ginger candy soured in Anne’s mouth. She thought of lost Wi-fi signals, tectonic shifts, her new security clearances, conspiracy theories. The plane hitched and shuddered in an updraft. The marine grew tense. “Have you seen one?” Anne asked.
“They have no eyes,” he said and closed his own. “Their skin isn’t skin, and they morph—grow and shrink, divide and converge like a murmuration.”
During her briefing Anne saw classified videos and found the creatures beautiful. The media lies, the Generals said, were because people needed an enemy they understood. Bad things required a clear cause, humans couldn’t grapple with horror that happened for no reason. The other had to contain enough of the self to be understood.
The plane’s engines roared as it landed, and Anne’s breath hitched when the marine locked her respirator helmet into place. “Good luck,” he said, his voice muffled and hurried behind a clear face shield.
They stood, guns aimed at the bay door, waiting for it to open.
