by submission | Oct 13, 2022 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
“Hello, my name is Fragog”.
The voice was the deepest I’d ever heard. I’d been playing in the garden with some action figures, as you do at age seven and looked around to see who’d spoken.
“Oh, I’m not there on Earth,” Fragog explained, somehow sensing my bewilderment, “I’m on the planet Saturn. My people are telepathic and I’m contacting you with our telepathy telescope. I’m speaking in your mind.”
Even at that young age, the popular culture of the time helped me to understand.
“Just like Professor X!” I replied. “Am I going to be an X-Man?”
Fragog laughed, a deep bass sound that I felt all the way through my body, down to my feet.
“No, Kevin, you’re going to be my test subject! You’re going to help me learn more about your world.”
And that’s what happened. When I woke up every morning, I would feel Fragog’s presence behind my eyes, watching as I went about my daily routine. Sometimes he would ask questions and I would do my best to answer. My parents caught me speaking to him a couple of times.
“A bit old for imaginary friends, aren’t you?” asked my Dad.
I just shrugged. I knew Fragog was real, but I also knew, somehow, that there was no way I could persuade my parents of this. So I didn’t try.
After a while, Fragog stopped asking questions and started asking me to do things instead.
“Observation is part of the scientific method, but so is experiment,” he explained.
At first, most of these experiments seemed boring and pointless to my younger self. Then one day he told me to get one of my sister’s hamsters from her room. Despite my trepidation, Fragog whispered words of encouragement to me and I went into Sally’s bedroom and lifted Hokey out from his cage.
“Good,” said Fragog, “Now I want you to bash its head in.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. I knew that it was wrong. I liked Hokey!
“But you have to,” said Fragog, “It’s for science!”
“No”, I shouted, “I’m not going to!”
“Then I’ll make you,” Fragog replied.
Suddenly, I felt as if I was looking down a long tunnel at my hands as they held Hokey. I watched those small fingers take the hamster and smash it repeatedly against the bedroom door.
“There,” said Fragog, “that wasn’t too hard, was it?”
Then I rushed down the tunnel and was back inside my body, holding Hokey’s bloody corpse. I dropped it on the carpet and ran out of the bedroom, tears flowing down my cheeks. My mother eventually found me hiding under my bed. I told her everything, about Fragog and how he’d made me hurt Hokey. She went through to Sally’s room and I heard her gasp then shout for my dad. I can still remember the panic in her voice.
Afterwards, the doctors taught me that Fragog wasn’t real and eventually I was prescribed anti-psychotics which seemed to block his voice out completely. I’ve been on them ever since. It took me a long while to feel well again, but I’ve had some good years since then and have built a life for myself that I’m quite proud of.
Until yesterday, when, despite my meds, I once again felt Fragog’s calculating presence watching from behind my eyes.
Yesterday and that final item on the news: ‘Objects erupting from the atmosphere of Saturn, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists are baffled.’
Yesterday and that single sonorous sentence ringing through my mind.
“See you soon, Kevin!”
by submission | Oct 12, 2022 | Story |
Author: James Callan
Picking up the pieces is useless, a failed enterprise, like eating bisque with a fork. The bits that were my lover are like autumn leaves late in the season, too many to count, frayed, half-liquefied, one with the mud. I hold what may have been her brains, the organ of her sharp intellect, as memory cells containing our lives spill through my trembling fingers to join the detritus of a war-torn urban ruin. Satellites dot the sky, daytime stars, raining death and doom, laser beams and radiation. Tallies of hot hues, angry, searing tears, streak vertical to mar the tender, baby blue above, now blemished with deep bruises of billowing black smoke. The stones beside my bent legs vibrate; in a dead world, the inanimate come alive. My gaze falls to the earth, the rubble before me, the sullied puddles of groundwater coming up from the big blast. Among the charred fragments of obliterated landscape, the molten corners of toppled buildings, fallen giants, I recognize the anklet she wore, blackened and broken, the vague outline of her delicate foot. I take the trinket for a keepsake, a memento of our love, and cough among the scattered ash, the cloud of black that is her ankle turned to dust, airborne, like an angel off to a far better place.
by submission | Oct 11, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Location. Location. Location. That’s what I always preach. You have to really think about where you’re going to live. Really consider what a place is going to mean to you and your family over the long haul.
That’s why the greenbelt is perfect.
Space. Privacy. Prey.
You have to go where the food is. Where you can feed a growing family of mutants. Hungry, hungry young mutants.
See, humans are discovering greenbelts, too. Building more and more homes right up against steeply wooded hills, deeply sluicing ravines, densely fecund wetlands. Their backyards butting right against my front yard.
Humans love the thought of wilderness out their back door. A refuge from their urban and suburban dependency. Best of all, a place for their kids to grow up around nature. On their own privileged terms: tamed but untamed.
I get that. I’m fairly sophisticated for a mutant. I owe that understanding to not having to spend as much energy searching for prey. Our meals come happily, curiously, to me.
Everyday, kids and parents set out to play and hike in the greenbelt, not really questioning who made the network of trails snaking the trees and undergrowth. Thinking maybe the narrow paths were made by deer or other wildlife.
Never imagining me.
Me, with the razor teeth and claws of a wolf, the hulking muscles of a great ape, the feral cunning of an adapter.
That’s me. An adaptation. An unnatural selection catalyzed by exotic toxins released for generations at an old lab site in the high hills–from which all the local greenbelts spread.
I suppose I should be more curious about my origins, but I’m an accepting sort. And so are my spawn. We live like kings in the greenbelt, feasting on the bounty of suburban sprawl.
It’s a lovely life.
And we feel lucky. Grateful for all humans who love the wild and want a taste of it every day. We sure love the taste of them.
Location. Location. Location. That’s what I preach. Mutation. Mutation. Mutation. That’s what I praise.
by Julian Miles | Oct 10, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s always warning. No matter how sneaky they are, they can’t help themselves. The urge to see our reaction means they telegraph every strike. If our side managed to spot that more often, it’d be hilarious.
“Four o’clock low.”
I flick a glance that way. That twinkling is lenses aligning. I slap the alert panel.
“Up and attem, kids. We have incoming!”
I call Jonas back: “Top spotting, that being.”
“Saw a puff of manoeuvring thruster, Arby.”
“Clumsy of them. Do a sweep the opposite way, would you? They’re not usually that careless.”
“Trish is winging a bat out there now.”
“Please tell me she’s using a REMship.”
A cheerful voice cuts in.
“Arby, you do care!”
Jonas chuckles and exits the chat.
“Trish, the stealth bat you’re piloting is worth more than a year’s budget, whereas REMship versions only cost ten grand apiece.”
“I’m flying with a rolling screen of ten REMships, Arby. We know the new Blemenase detectors can tell the difference. With me in the middle, the swarm will be considered a threat they have to respond to.”
Dammit, she’s right.
“Give you that. So, what’s it looking like?”
Her tone changes from bantering to serious: “Oh, shee-it!”
My screens flash red. Detector data starts scrolling very fast. Hold on. These scale-of-attack numbers can’t be right!
“Nothing launches, people! Trish, hightail it back here. I have three full flights of Barracudas backing a Mantis. Five o’clock low.”
A flight of Barracuda-class harassers we can take. Two flights, maybe. With a Mantis-class warbird on top? Survivable – if we’re very lucky. Add a third flight? We’re done for.
“Arby, they’re a feint.”
“You what?”
“There’s a pair of cloaked Wolverine-class, nine o’clock high. They’re coming in on residual momentum.”
Furled their sails and engaged cloaking without firing up their drives. No energy trails for us to detect. The Wolverine is what’s laughably defined as a mini-dreadnought. We couldn’t take one down, even if we rammed a drive core. Their shields are strong enough to damp a range-zero core detonation.
“Trish. Flit off towards one o’clock high like you’re still looking for threats. Be ready to abandon your REMships for a passing pickup.”
“Net me, Arby. You’ll be able to salvage a few REMships from the mess, and you won’t need to slow down for docking.”
“Okay. Shock gel yourself when we swing in, because we’re not going to be hanging about.”
A spaceship is never still, even when supposedly stationary. In our case, we’re slowly revolving. I launch chaff from the lower dispensers only. Our nose lifts.
“All hands, brace for high-speed evasion.”
I prepare all four sling nets, because I don’t know which side Trish will come up on. I tell the snatch system it’s looking to scoop stealth bats in passing. It does the impact calculations, then prepares damper fields so we won’t crush the catch.
The nose is pointing the right way.
“Three, two, one… Drive!”
Even acceleration dampers struggle with full thrust. The slight deformation of eyeballs and internal organs is brief, agonising, and the main reason we avoid using it whenever possible: beings still occasionally die.
Somewhere amidst the pain and acceleration, I feel the impact of a sling net deploying.
Moments later we hit freespace and transition to FTL.
Trish chuckles.
“Arby, did you know REMships have a long internal spar?”
“No?”
Always thought they were flexible spheres full of hologram projectors and drives.
“Scramble a repair team, would you? I can’t get out. There’s a spar through my external lock control panel.”
“Will do.”
We lived to fight another day. Marvellous.
by submission | Oct 9, 2022 | Story |
Author: Tim Goldstone
I first met you at that stage where I couldn’t sleep because I needed to stretch and stretch and stretch but it’s never ever enough all night long, every night, and I know the only certain way to achieve relief is to stretch so far so violently that my bones burst out of the ends of each and every one of my fingers and toes and only then the calm I yearn for will come and at last I will be able to sleep, in peace, in bliss, a lovely little temporary death and when I come out of it I won’t ever need anything so desperately again. But it doesn’t come. It never comes.
You were wearing perfume someone had hastily sprayed on you to hide the smell of the bile you’d retched up until there was nothing left inside you.
The town’s allocated rehab center was a room in a hostel, one room: standard construction, peeling walls, a flickering strip light, a crackling radio, a shorting kettle.
We would learn later why after each meeting every one of us felt so drained. Back then though, we could see just you – the solitary female, just under five feet tall, discarded, dumped there by court order, final chance, losing weight as we watched, on your hard seat, your head falling in gulps towards the dark green lino. The state you were in made us all feel better about ourselves.
All of us in that semi-circle noticed only your classic addict’s thinness, none of us suspecting the energy humming deep within you – that you’d soldered together from the few functioning pieces you still had left, draining power from the room to aid your own recovery.
And on the day you finally strode out, heroically leaving the rest of us behind, the weary well-meaning volunteer tried desperately to explain to our demoralized group, the ferocious force behind your tiny home-made waste-dump dynamo. And he told us how he wished from the depths of his human heart that the addiction chip had never been invented. We knew humans ridiculously attributed emotions to their blood-pump. But we knew also that it was too late – that their obsessive ambition to give us human characteristics had gone too far. Much too far.
by submission | Oct 8, 2022 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
Hi Ted, let me tell you my story. Some of it you’ll know, but some will be new. I fervently hope that it’ll become your story too.
In 2006 the New Horizons probe was launched from Earth. Its goal was a flyby of Pluto, which it achieved on July 14th, 2015, after travelling a distance of 3 billion miles. It took over a year to transmit all the data from the fly-by and a decade passed before it was all analysed.
The world of 2026 was very different from that of 2006. Peak-oil had been passed, supply-chains were broken and social order was crumbling. Industrial civilisation was on the brink of collapse because the cheap, easily available fossil fuel energy had all but been used up. Solar panels and wind turbines simply couldn’t sustain a 21st century technological civilisation.
Then a scientist, still crunching through the New Horizons data, noticed something remarkable. The probe’s mass spectrometer had detected sizeable deposits of a stable isotope of element 130, also known as Untrinilium. Untrinilium, created in the lab for fractions of a second just the year before, was believed to have the potential of being a wonder fuel. We couldn’t synthesize it, we just didn’t have the technology. Yet here it was, just sitting on Pluto.
In 2026 Man had still to return to the Moon. By 2029, thirty astronauts landed on Pluto. It was a remarkable achievement, borne out of desperation. We were desperate to avoid resource wars, desperate to continue living the only way we knew how. Once on Pluto we were able to mine enough Untrinilium to power our civilisation for the next century.
This was a new element though, one that humans had never been exposed to before. We took precautions, but truth be told, the mission was too important to fail because of health and safety concerns. So we were exposed to Untrinilium, innocently unaware of the consequences, just like those people in the early twentieth century who used toothpaste laced with thorium, or drank radium infused water.
That exposure killed two-thirds of the astronauts over the course of our return voyage. Those of us that survived were altered in a glorious way. Our minds were fused together in what I suppose you could call a hive mind, a mentality of one singular purpose.
We share each other’s thoughts and feelings and I have to tell you that it’s an ecstatic experience. We all have an overwhelming urge, a missionary zeal, to share this experience with as many people as possible. That’s why we never reported any of the side-effects of Untrinilium. Since we landed here at Cape Canaveral we’ve been exposing as many people as possible to our wonder element. It doesn’t take much, just a minuscule amount, to initiate the change. Already I can sense our ranks swelling as my brothers and sisters spread out through the complex.
Not everybody survives contact with Untrinilium, of course, but Paradise was always for the few, not the many. We’ll head out into the wider world, covertly at first, but once our numbers increase sufficiently, we’ll be able to be more open about things. It really is a blessed state of existence.
Ah, Ted, I see by your glazed look, your unhealthy pallor, that you unfortunately won’t be joining the ranks of the chosen. Take comfort from your imminent death though, because you are stepping aside so that a new and better form of life will inherit the Earth. We will, with gratitude, build the citadels of our grand utopia upon the ashes of your fallen world.
