by submission | Nov 29, 2023 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
Driven out of Selene Station by the furious outbursts typical of the frustrated but truly powerless, Sheila and I went looking for space to reflect; we ended up making a mostly silent, three-hour crawler ride to one of the old prospector shelters three craters over. It would do for the night, and maybe for longer – as I’d expected, the power cube and life support were functional, and the clear geodesic dome over the living area was still intact.
The quiet here was a blessing. No-one was knocking on doors to discuss or debate or report the news and the dire predictions that were circulating, and we’d escaped the shrill voices and thinly-veiled hysterics in the corridors. Now we could actually relax, and think.
“I always thought that mutually assured destruction was an urban myth,” she said, eventually. “Something to scare us into trying to be better people.”
“No, the warheads were always there, even though we stopped talking about them.”
“But why now? What went wrong? Were we just blind, not to see this coming?”
“The wars in South America have been going on for a long time. But populists elsewhere started using them as an excuse to crack down on immigration, which oh-so-coincidentally raised tensions with their own neighbours. A few elections, sloganeering and pandering dog-whistles later, and someone felt backed into a corner. I guess they thought a short, victorious war would keep the voters onside. Except that their little expedition triggered another conflict, and that one another, until the whole world’s involved. And then some idiot loses patience and presses the button. Game over. Madness. Maybe we deserved this, for letting it happen.”
“What about us? What happens now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really?” she asked.
“Not beyond the obvious. No more supply runs, we’ll have to make do with what we can produce here. No luxuries for a while, certainly. It’ll be tough, lots of belt tightening. No more advice, either, no suggestions or ideas from Ground Control. And of course, knowing that there’s no going home: I don’t think people are ready for how hard that’s going to hit. More depression, and no meds to deal with it. So more suicides.”
“That’s… pretty bleak.”
I shrugged helplessly.
The Earth rose, and in the dark we could make out the pinprick marks of Armageddon marching across it.
“All we can do is carry on,” I said. “It’ll be a new and much smaller world for all us. Let’s hope we don’t screw this one up as well. We’ve got nowhere else to go.”
by submission | Nov 28, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Think thinly, my daughter,” the mother counseled as they approached the verge.
A few steps ahead, her daughter did not look back, did not break stride.
“The boundary may be abrupt,” the mother cautioned, then warned, “You don’t want to slip over.”
“We’re like bugs at a window. We’ll know when to stop.”
Bugs at a window. The mother’s heart shrank from her daughter’s conceit.
They continued in silence as the land jumbled and pulled away from itself. An active place, a thin place, where the borders between worlds remained uncertain.
Her daughter stopped at a line of house-sized boulders, dark gaps which reached back and drew forth. Her posture told the mother, “We’re here.”
Even the mother could feel it now. Threadbare. There was little to hang onto, little to leverage. Very thin. Very fragile. How could she not worry for her daughter? “Are you able to get a firm grasp?”
“I don’t need much. Not like you.”
The accusation stung. As if she were a hindrance, flawed, the reason her other daughter had disappeared. The mother, because she was a mother, held the hurt close until her heart smothered it.
Capable as they were, the mother knew, her daughters lacked cohesion. They were not tied to this reality as she was by joy and regret. It provided the mother a coherence, a unity of expectation, that her daughters’ youth resisted like a virus. Their identities were as changeable as the other worlds they sought, and into which her elder daughter had looked, then been lost.
In a way, her younger daughter’s vanity was hypnotic. Her surety enough to separate them forever, yet the mother would not let go. Especially in this thinnest of places, this most slippery of spaces. “Hold my hand,” she bid, and her daughter curiously obeyed.
“Where?” the mother asked.
Her daughter motioned with the hand holding her mother’s, so that, together, they were pointed towards the smallest of the gaps between the stone behemoths. “Cozy. That’s what my sister liked.” She led the mother to that verge, the veil pulled so thin she didn’t need her inner sight to mark the crossing. “Well, Mother, are we just bugs? Or do we break some windows and get my sister back?”
There was nothing wrong with being a bug, the mother had learned. Bugs respected boundaries, were hardwired for a certain order. Not her daughters. Not any child. Until they created their own world, they could not freely live in any.
Her other daughter had chosen rashly, passed through, and vanished. It is one thing to see beyond the veil and quite another to fight one’s way back.
The mother felt time and space thinning. She’d been here before. Membranes and passages stretched to breaking. Forced apart by another will, another belief, another reality ready to be birthed.
Her daughter released the mother’s hand, stepped to the verge, and swept aside the veil, the darkness of the passage. A welcoming radiance gleamed far forward. Her boldness blinding. “Light makes might. Let’s go, Mother.”
She disappeared doubt like a dictator, so what could the mother do, but follow and suffer another world for the lives she’d always bear.
The bugs on the other side took notice.
by Julian Miles | Nov 27, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It stands there, black branches against a steel-grey sky, lord of all it surveys from on top of the escarpment above where I’m digging what could be my own grave.
The snow is piled deep here. With a last effort, I hope to make a capsule where the low temperatures can help my life support pack keep me from dying. It’s been doing a fine job for the last week, but the injuries from the battle, plus those from the crash, plus those from trekking through this charmingly picturesque frozen hell have it down to reserve power.
Which is not quite as bad as it sounds. There’s emergency power under that, but it means I have to choose between the life support and the rescue beacon. It’s a hell of a choice: hope to live long enough to be found by luck, or settle for being certain they’ll retrieve my corpse.
Right now, I’ll just be glad to get the improvised splints off my leg. They may have let me hobble, but the edges of the metal cut me as I went. As a bonus, I think at least one of those cuts is infected.
I wonder if we won?
There’s a thought. If we haven’t or didn’t, I can pretty much choose the ‘find my body’ option, because the locals might rescue me, but they’ll cheerfully finish the job their poxy, insane pilots started with their delta-winged toys.
Toys. They lie down to pilot them, with drives above and below, fuel to the left, and weapons to the right. Silver triangles barely four metres long, piloted by people who have nothing to lose. They shoot us down, ram us down, and keep punching holes in anything they can’t bring down in one until it finally falls from the sky.
We fail when up against them, because we want to live. They want their people to live, and accept they will probably have to die to achieve that goal. It doesn’t mean they’re suicidal, but it does mean they have no limits, and that’s where we fall down… Literally.
I was in a dogfight with six of them. Got two, two peeled off to chase my partner, then I got the fifth and shouted in triumph. A shout which ended when the sixth went out in a blaze of glory, taking my starboard wing with them.
The flat spin that sent me into took some inspired use of the remaining angled thrusters to cancel. Then I overcooked it, flipped over and went into a dive I knew the end of.
Inverted ejector capsule use is red-letter not recommended in the manual. I slammed everything into a braking/lift thrust, then hit the eject button as things started breaking about me. So, technically, I wasn’t completely upside-down.
Didn’t stop me landing at overspeed. The capsule fragmented, absorbing the impact, but the snowbank it hit at the end is what saved me.
Save me. Nice idea.
Time to crawl inside and take the gamble we all hope to avoid. It’ll be a change to just lie still and listen to my heartbeat for a while. Wait. That’s an idea. I can work on it until I pass out.
Here goes. Watch over me, winter tree.
.
.
.
“It’s been three days since last signal. We have to accep-”
“Captain! Captain!”
“Yes, Comms?”
“We’ve got a signal, sir. Right zone, low-power, steady. Sounds like they switched the beacon to broadcast their life monitor pulse, conserving power.”
“Clever. Best go rescue them, then.”
“Yessir.”
by submission | Nov 26, 2023 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
Standing on the deck of the ship, he watched the dead planet hanging in the void in front of him. It’s lustre had gone, its greens and blues replaced by a uniform dull brown. The automated systems confirmed it. There was no life on the world in front of him, not even microbes. The Earth was completely dead.
He felt sad that his home had gone. Not surprised though. He even felt a little bit of hope, which didn’t quite make sense…
*
The two imposing security personnel led Peter to a small room, plonked him unceremoniously down on a chair and left him there, blinking across a table at the stranger seated opposite.
He still felt groggy, which was no surprise. He’d been in hyper-sleep for a week whilst the vessel underwent its trans-light journey to Argus, the fourth planet in the Ross 128 system. Here he’d planned to start his new job, a twenty-year contract that would set him up nicely for retirement back on Earth. Yet, no sooner had his sleep pod wakened him, than security had grabbed him and taken him here, to this quiet annex of the ship.
“Hello Peter, I’m Rob. I know that you’re still recovering from hyper-sleep, but it’s important that you listen to what I have to say.”
Peter mumbled an acknowledgement.
“So, Peter, your pod monitors your brain during hyper-sleep. Pods are designed for the period of unconsciousness during trans-lightspeed travel to be dreamless. However, your pod indicates that you entered REM sleep. I want you to tell me about your dreams.”
The dream was still strong in Peter’s mind. He recounted all that he could remember, describing arriving at a dead planet Earth.
Rob nodded, made a few notes on his pad and continued.
“There’s a lot about trans-lightspeed travel we don’t understand. Humans cannot sustain such travel while conscious, hence the sleep pods and automated flight systems. Don’t ask me to explain, I’m no physicist, but travelling faster than the speed of light has implications for our ideas of time. It’s a well-kept secret that interstellar travel allows the possibility of information leakage from the future. If a person crosses their own timeline, through a mechanism currently unclear to us, they get glimpses of their future. You’re not the first person to have such dreams. There’s a whole division dedicated to collating these premonitions, this information leakage. We’ve only a partial picture, of course, but it’s clear your return to Earth will be at a time when all life on the planet has been extinguished.”
“So I was dreaming about the future. About my future!” Peter exclaimed, trying to grasp the implications.
“Yes,” Rob responded, “You have to understand, that, in a very real way we cannot prevent, you’ve already returned to a dead Earth. We cannot stop this from occurring, but perhaps we can delay it.”
“How?” Peter asked, with a sense of foreboding.
“We’re going to send you on another trip,” Rob replied. “A longer one. Your final destination will be Earth, but you’ll be going via the Andromeda Galaxy. For you, asleep, the trip will last a hundred years at trans-light speeds. For us, outside your accelerated space-time bubble, a million years will pass. Time enough for us to move humanity away from Earth, perhaps even to scour all signs of life from its surface. Causality is happy, humanity survives. It’s win-win.”
“What about me? How do I win?”
Rob smiled.
“We’d like to thank you for your sacrifice.”
And with that, Peter began his journey back home. The long way round.
by submission | Nov 25, 2023 | Story |
Author: Richard Loudermilk
My child, never worry about how you would endure a catastrophe. You will find it amazing what a person can do when there is no alternative.
Look to the graves in our backyard, and yes, you are old enough to hear this. I took no pride in providing their occupants, but neither did I feel shame. The thieves would have left us to starve.
When I first saw the Man in the Sky, I was hardly older than you. He saved a town in Oregon from a mudslide, and I was fascinated. After he went away, I could listen to your grandparents tell stories about him for hours.
Years later, he came back. When the celebrations ended, some people asked why he left in the first place. I was too excited to care.
The Man in the Sky wasn’t talking, but he stayed busy. Sitting atop Mount Rushmore. Circling the Eiffel Tower. Lifting a train car above his head, perched on one of the pyramids.
Then I saw the interview, if you can call it that. Just him and the camera, answering unspoken questions. As unnerved as I was to see him in street clothes—no costume—his words were worse.
“I will no longer save you, because it never ends.”
He said he waited until everyone he knew was dead, which explained his absence.
“Soon,” he said, “I will begin giving commands. They will be enforced, no matter the consequences.”
When we saw the first command, nobody doubted it was from him.
He wrote it on the moon.
Just the date, followed by five words.
One year: no more whaling.
I had no idea anyone still did that, so maybe we were worried for nothing. By the time a year had passed, most everyone had forgotten, including me.
He hadn’t. The Man in the Sky began sinking whaling ships, and the footage was horrifying. Like a missile, he struck each vessel just below the waterline.
Some put their families on board, thinking that would make a difference. It didn’t, and that’s when I knew we were lost. This being, with unmatched powers, no longer felt obliged to use those abilities to prevent harm to humans. On the contrary, causing harm was not a problem.
The planet was outraged, and the old name no longer fit. Now he was the Fist in the Sky. I won’t tell you what I call him.
The world’s militaries rose to stop him. They couldn’t even slow him down.
The next command?
One year: no plastics and no gasoline.
Our old lives were gone. This was a loss, and we grieved poorly. Work stopped, schools closed, businesses went dark. Riots erupted within a week, everywhere. Our economy—along with all the others—cratered. For two months I kept the practice going, but a dentist can only do so much without electricity.
One of the eastern European nations had an offer. Providing no details, they assured all that their deal would be irresistible, that the Fist would agree and cease his hostilities.
Their prime minister declared he would present the offer in person, on the roof of his luxury apartment, where awaited the former hero.
To my surprise, he showed up.
As soon as he landed, a nuclear device was triggered, obliterating the prime minister, the city, and most of its residents. Horrendous, but this demonstrated just how few options we had left.
The Fist was overhead again that afternoon.
He gave the latest command yesterday, and I expect this is the final one.
One year: no new babies.
by submission | Nov 24, 2023 | Story |
Author: Brynn Herndon
The man next to me on the bench wears a crisp suit, creased where it should be, and smooth where it’s meant. My shorts have long ridden up. A splinter digs into my thigh.
The world ended yesterday, and the bus is late.
You might assume that’d be something that rendered the commute unnecessary. Surely it would have at least provided an icebreaker for bus stop small talk between strangers, but the man didn’t look at me. He stared at his briefcase. I wanted to go to the Dollar General, but the thick orange haze and the way the sidewalk buckled made the walk intimidating. The air tasted sour, and grass had hardened into spikes that pierced the soles of my shoes and my flesh like barbed wire, sending shocks of its anger through me. It was June, and the trees were bare. The remains of their leaves lay beneath them in a melted, sludgy black pile.
It all happened at once, too, the same way it might have in a movie.
“You know,” I said to the man, over the shrill buzz in the air—it reminded me of cicadas, back when they were a thing, “I guess they kept saying this was gonna happen.”
“Hm.”
He was right. I approached the end of the world with a “hm” as well. I wasn’t one of the people denying its arrival. I thought it seemed to make sense.
“It ain’t comin’.” He said after a while. The orange air felt like it was coating me now, the skin on my shoulders burned in a way that made the splinter ignorable.
“What?”
“The bus,” he told me, but he didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at anything. “It ain’t ever comin’.”
“Then why are you waiting?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, finally looking at something—his watch, deformed on his wrist like a Dali painting, melting away. “What else is there to do?”
