by submission | Feb 21, 2010 | Story
Author : Jeff Kirchoff
A few short keystrokes and the room sprung to life, bare, the walls black yet glowing with the subtle aura of electrical potential. Rico strolled to the center of the small space and looked at the crumpled paper clutched in his left hand with a sigh.
He spoke aloud to the empty room, “Cara, is everything ready?”
“Yes, loading is currently in progress.” The mechanical sound of the ship’s AI buzzed from the walls in response, mechanical and staccato in a vaguely feminine way, “Welcome back Chief. Should I run the program now?”
“Light it up.”
“Roger.”
The walls of the room flickered with static then snapped into focus, like an ancient television adjusting itself after a sharp thump. Where moments ago there was only blackness now contained an impressive springtime reproduction of a tall, shady tree surrounded by a secluded meadow. Wispy white clouds materialized in the sky, floating lazily overhead as wildflowers sprung up around Rico’s feet, growing a month’s time in an instant and spreading the pleasant smell of nature, subtle and earthy. He took in a deep breath and sighed.
Beneath the tree’s canopy a small ironwork table flickered into existence, followed quickly by two complementary chairs. Knowing what came next, Rico began to walk toward the tree and took a seat. Elbows on the table, he gazed at the empty chair opposite him, trying not to close his eyes.
He blinked. In the span of an instant a pale, dainty woman appeared before his eyes. Her long chestnut hair wafted in the gentle breeze, her blue jumpsuit ruffled almost imperceptibly.
“Kenna.”
She stifled a giggle, “I wish you would stop having a staring contest with the computer every time we do this, you know it waits to make huge changes until your eyes are closed.”
Rico cracked a grin, “Right. So how have you been?”
“Great! I got hired into Mars, just like you suggested.”
“Well, I put a word in.”
Kenna twirled a finger through her hair, “I appreciate it. Everyone is so nice here, all the red is kind of hard to get used to though. How’s your run going?”
“Same as always.” He frowned, “You know how hauling cargo can get.”
Her face turned serious and her voice badly mimicked his, “It’s a lonely job but someone has to do it!”
Rico gave her a playful shove, “Cut it out.”
“I wonder how you put up with it.”
“Well, this room certainly helps, how realistic it is.”
“Oh, of course.” A smile spread across her face, “So, what did you want to do today Ricky?”
“Nothing…” He abruptly grabbed Kenna’s hand,” I just wanted to sit here with you for a while.”
She smiled, “Whatever you want, love.”
The allotted time for the meeting passed and Rico sadly said his goodbyes, promising to meet again soon. As the room blackened and he stepped through the door into the cockpit of his hauler he looked again at the crumpled paper in his hand that he had been clutching the entire visit. He smoothed it out and stared at it while he sat back down at the helm, picturing himself receiving the printed letter from the post at his last stop, months ago.
Dear Rico,
I’m sorry that you had to find out this way but
we’ve been growing apart for so long and
I had to move on with my life, I hope that
you-–
He couldn’t bear to read any further.
“Cara.”
The ship droned, “Yes Chief?”
“I can’t do this anymore, delete the VR program I’ve been running.”
by submission | Feb 20, 2010 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Whether or not something is difficult is largely a thing of perception. If you practice doing most things a lot, then they become easier. Driving, hunting, farming – they all becoming easier with practice.
Living alone does not.
For three thousand six hundred forty nine days I have lived my life alone. No conversation with anyone who can reply, no hand shakes, no hugs, no smiles.
They can’t talk, you see. Everybody else has just sort of forgotten. ‘its 2 slw’ they tell me, the ones that bother to communicate with someone like me, that is. I used to try and remember who they were so that maybe I would have somebody, anybody to talk to. The only problem was, I couldn’t recognize anybody when they all wear the same mask and the same suit.
Every day alone is hard.
It took me five years before I decided I might want to try it out, that I might want to be able to communicate with other people. They told me ‘u r not cmpatble w/ the tchnlgy, u r prone 2 szres,’ so I had to do without.
So I live alone. I live alone atop my hill. Just me and my animals and my fields. I raise my own food, haven’t seen a dollar in years. I am not compatible with the stores.
They stay in the city these days, down there in that bustling town. No time for driving any more, better stay close. All the houses in the hills are dark and empty, the roads are unused and falling apart. But with the people gone the animals have come back, which is good for me. They’re just more dinner.
I watch them down there, some nights. They light up the whole valley with their lights – one massive glowing Nirvana, automated, self-run. It seems to me that the people are rather inconsequential.
It all started so innocently. A way to communicate silently, quickly. No need to get dragged into conversations or unduly bother those around you, it was a way to keep things private. Then it was an obsession, and then an addiction.
I used to practice speaking every day. I would read aloud from one of my books for a few minutes, just so I would remember how. I stopped five years ago. What is the point?
Whoever invented texting must have been real smart. I wonder if he was a nice guy? I wonder if he knew he would be a thief?
He stole my voice. He stole my language. He stole my love. He stole my life.
It’s hard to live alone.
by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 19, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Levon leaned against the shower tube, letting the jets of water assail his body from all sides. As the sweat of the previous night’s activities rinsed away, the more subtle indicators of his exertions seeped in. Both his head and kidneys ached from the soup of chemicals he’d drank, sniffed and injected with the woman now sleeping naked in the next room.
Warnings pulsing dimly in his periphery reminded him that his kidney augments were still on standby, sifting and analyzing the foreign bodies in his bloodstream. An amber warning flashed, the proximity alarm on his equipment locker had been triggered. His company was awake, the message flashing red as she tried the door.
Levon flipped through and discarded most of the blood-work findings; street grade meth, cocaine and a too high level of alcohol, but the last one stopped him cold. A battery of tranquilizers had been automatically disarmed, all bearing Federated P.D. chem tags.
“Shit. She’s a cop.”
In an instant water droplets were evaporating in a jet of warm air and kidney grafts went into overdrive, flushing his system clean and pumping in Epinephrine.
Exiting the shower he could hear the woman padding around the bedroom, his sub-dermal grid-work of sensory pickups and Faraday shielding twinging as a transmitter narrow-banded a short range encoded transmission. Not only was she a cop, but she had a partner nearby.
Opening the door he found her perched on the end of the bed, tanned shoulders and arms exposed above the bedsheet she’d drawn around herself.
“Hey baby, look at you,” her words slurred together into a sound like a sneeze.
“Hey,” Levon moved to the closet, the auto-bolts retracting as he reached for the handle, “back in a sec.” He slipped through the door, closing and letting it lock securely behind him.
He’d converted the walk-in to a safe room when he’d started renting the sixth floor apartment. The low level lighting reflected dimly back at him from the kevmesh that coated the inside of the cramped space, uneven thicknesses of the dark green ultraweeve armor pooled on the floor where it had run as he’d sprayed the layers on.
He could feel a mass of people thundering up the stairwell at the end of the hall.
He pulled on overalls and a jacket and jammed his feet into a pair of Magnum Ions. Overturning a crate in the middle of the room he slung his shoulder holster and perched in a squat on the box like a bird, face down to his knees. He thumbed the release tabs on two canisters glued into the floor on either side of him and covered his face with his hands. The canisters ticked a few seconds before geysering upwards, thick jets of liquid spattering off the ceiling, foaming and filling the space, securing his hunched form in a bubble of packing foam.
He felt his cocoon shake, knowing that his bathroom had just been blown out the side of the building. A second set of explosions tipped his pod sideways, and Levon braced himself as a final eruption jettisoned the entire closet shell out the newly formed hole in the building, launching it through the window of the much nicer lofts across the street.
Levon had barely stopped moving before he blew the cocoon seals and stood up, the force separating the two halves neatly, leaving a man shaped impression in each.
Stepping through the broken glass and window frame, he surveyed the damage outside, his apartment now just a jagged tear in the brick facade of the building. Below, his shower poked out the side of a cargo van, vaguely phallic in a glittering mess of LED advertising and shredded metal.
Turning, Levon faced a startled couple sitting up in bed. Stepping past them, he helped himself to a piece of toast and a slice of bacon from the breakfast tray forgotten at their feet.
“Don’t get up,” he grinned, “I’ll see myself out.”
by submission | Feb 18, 2010 | Story
Author : Carol Reid
Is there a sign over Gina’s head that reads, “Vacancy”? She imagines it in neon, that peculiar orange pink reserved for a certain class of motel– and apparently for her, a certain class of fucked up female, who had a reasonable, ordinary life before the thing began. Maybe she should blame her dad, poor dad, long dead and blameless anyway. The other half of the sign lights up. No. No. No. No. You did this on your own, girl.
She has a cell phone in her hand and his number written on her wrist, as if she could forget it, although never has she called him on the phone before. She is not near any motel. She is in her car, parked neatly between the lines in the empty Wal-Mart parking lot. Recession has cut back hours, everyone heads home at six. It’s a quarter after seven, the September sky turning lavender overhead. She has a cell phone in her hand, open.
Everything feels so still, just an underlying electric hum, perhaps from the cell, perhaps from the lowering sky. Her need for him tears at the lining of her gut. He has done nothing to encourage this. He is merely there, out there, somewhere, waiting for her call.
Her head swims a little from hunger but she doesn’t want to hurl again. Her husband has noticed that lately she picks at her dinner; she can hear him thinking that maybe she’s on the sauce. And she has tried a little, just wine so far, which did nada to file down the edges of the thing to any tolerable level. On nights like tonight, when he leaves for his shift at four thirty and doesn’t come home till five a.m., she can live unobserved. She can pick up a six of cider and tuck it under the passenger seat, drive up and down the alphabet of residential streets, Aspen, Brook, Cassia, Dunbar. She “dun” went to the “bar”. Ha ha. Not yet, at least. Later, alligator.
She rubs her thumb across the inked-on ten digit number she took the entire afternoon tracking down while her husband napped. The ink doesn’t smudge. If she wants it gone she’ll have to take a layer of skin off with it. If only her husband had woken up early, crept up behind where she sat at her computer, demanded to know what the fuck she thought she was doing. No. She had any number of lies ready. There wasn’t a thing her husband could have done.
She keys in the series of innocent numbers, each one a stroke nearer to getting the thing done. Each tone has its own heavy frequency, and after the series of ten is complete, the silence on the line sucks her breath away. Who knows what she really sees next? It is likely that her mind can’t open wide enough to take it in. In its place she sees the matte metal shell of the craft hovering just above her, and the hinged staircase dropping open, each step limned with a neon glow. The roof of the car is first transparent, and then permeable, so that when she reaches up to clasp his hand there is no longer any barrier between them.
by submission | Feb 17, 2010 | Story
Author : Q. B. Fox
The members of Juliet Patrol, 29 Group, Royal Engineers hunkered down in a squat two-story, stone building balanced on the hillside. Lt. Harry Banford watched through the unglazed window as a UN superiority denial aircraft painted a con-trail far, far overhead.
At the sound of a distance whine, Banford dropped back into cover, barely ahead of the muffled, distant whump that shook plaster from the ceiling and blew in dirt through the empty casements.
After a moment’s silence, and not for the first time that day, the soldiers of Juliet Patrol relaxed their braced shoulders, then blinked and coughed in the bright, moted sunbeams.
Private Darren Hastey, first time in theatre and green as a cabbage, uncurled on the floor and cringed under head-shaking gaze of his fellows. “I wish they wouldn’t do that,” he grumbled.
“Don’t be an idiot, Hastey,” spat Sgt. “Handy Andy” Andrews. “If our planes stop knocking out their bomber drones then this whole hillside will be flatter than your girlfriend’s chest and faster than it takes you to disappoint her. Am I clear, private?”
“Yes, sir,” Hastey sang back, as brightly as he could muster, then immediately winced at his mistake.
“And don’t call me ‘sir’, you idiot,” Andrews growled, “I work for a living.” He paused and then, turning to Banford, he apologised “No offense, sir,”
“None taken, Sergeant,” the Lieutenant smiled.
Then everything was quiet, except for occasional distant small arms fire and the clicks of Lt. Banford’s keypad as he rechecked the mission details.
“Why here, do you suppose, sir?” Sgt. Andrews asked unexpectedly.
“Erm, well,” Banford, considering the details on the screen in front of him, “this hillside obviously faces the target, and these buildings provide…”
“No, sir,” Andrews interrupted, “why do they all come to fight over Jerusalem.”
“Ah, yes, I see what you mean.” his officer reconsidered. “The Jews and the Romans, the Romans and the Persians, the Crusades, the Ottomans, the British, the Israelis and Palestinians….”
“And now the aliens,” Andrews concluded grimly. “Even they think it’s special to their religion.”
“And now the xenomorphs,” Banford corrected. “I don’t know why.”
And then after he’d thought for a moment, “There’s a syndrome named after this place; it’s one of only three geographically located syndromes; Jerusalem, Florence and Paris.”
“What about Stockholm syndrome, sir?” Hastey interrupted.
“Be quiet, you idiot,” his sergeant snapped, “An educated man is talking.”
“Yes, si.. Sergeant,” Hastey responded meekly.
“But Jerusalem syndrome is unique even among these unusual conditions,” the young officer continued as if he’d not been interrupted, “Some people who come here just become obsessed, become unhinged; believers and unbelievers alike get a glimpse of God.”
“I heard that reality is thinner here,” Hastey said nervously into the pause, “that we really are closer to…”
But before he could finish, or Andrews could rebuke him, Private Collins, pushing his headset further into his ear with two fingers, spoke clearly and precisely over the top of them. “Sir, we are go; repeat: we are go.”
Juliet Patrol sprang to their feet and raced down the stairs. With practiced professionalism they deployed the array, and after a moment to check the alignment, Banford squeezed the firing trigger. A hoop of air shimmered, as molecules rammed into each other, delivering a near invisible punch to the target; on the ridgeline across the valley the xenomorph transmitter disintegrated.
Like all snipers, they should have redeployed after firing, but nobody moved. They just stared. Very slowly, like wallpaper peeling off damp plaster, the sky, just where their target had been, was tearing open.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 16, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s a reasoning process. There are seconds left. The cold leather of the chair is warming up beneath my manacled wrists. The restraints are tight on my arms. I’m wide awake and dreaming.
I can’t decide if it’s a syringe or a snake that they’re drawing back out of my arm. I can feel the pitter patter of little feet running through my veins, getting progressively softer as they hit the smaller tributaries. My body is a giant vibrating footstep tied to a chair.
Laboratory nine. People don’t come back from this lab. I have opinions. This is where they put people with opinions. You should hear the way the sergeants pronounce that word. It’s right up there with communism, hippie, and free will. Venom drips from their lips.
It’s dark in the tiled room except for the light over my chair. My muscles vibrate faster and faster until they hit a state of constant striation. Being cognizant, I realize that this must be what a seizure is. I’ve never had one before but I saw a friend have an epileptic fit when I was a child.
We were playing in a field. It was a hot day. This was before the occupation, of course, before the clicking mandibles hissing out a whisper that was the closest they could come to English. The messages from the sky. The examples. Prague, Toronto and for some reason Adelaide made into legend as a warning shot. I remember the hissing language from aliens. They looked like a cross between spiders and crucifixes.
I remember they lit up the atmosphere of the Earth to prove their power, to scare the primitives. The ozone layer had flashed like a dance club.
Me and my friend David in that summer field had looked up. The strobe light of the entire sky had set my friend to moaning. His joints froze and he fell back like a broken toy. An animal keening had squeezed out of him. It sounded like a kettle reaching a boil.
It wasn’t a good sound. I can hear it echoing around me now in the laboratory and I realize that it’s coming from me.
Soon, I know that if I don’t give in to the suggestions that are coursing through my veins, I’ll die. No one has come back from this room. No one has given in.
It’s almost comforting to know that there are still humans who will fight to the death on these tables, resisting the attempt to shape their allegiance until they’re switched off permanently. I feel honoured to join them.
I can feel the lights within my mind turning out one by one as the chemicals give up coercion and switch to destruction.
I am candles on a birthday cake being blown out.
