by submission | Dec 1, 2023 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
Jorge looked at himself in he mirror. His mother was right. He was badly in need of a haircut. He set up an appointment with Shelby’s Salon.
Upon arriving Shelby’s, Jorge selected two services: A trim and a scalp massage. The reception kiosk immediately directed him to chair number three. This pleased him, since this meant there was no wait.
The chair for station number three was a new one. Very cushy. Jorge liked it. He plopped down and before long a salon bot rolled up silently behind him. He noted it had three appendages: one for brushing, one with scissors, and one with an electric razor.
The screen on top of the bot began to glow, and soon a woman’s face appeared. She was gorgeous, in a way that only an AI generated face can be. Flawless skin, perfect features, young but not too young.
“Hi, Jorge,” the image chirped. “I’m Talulah. I’m your stylist today. How are you?”
Jorge smiled. Was he supposed to make small talk with a bot? He was never clear on the protocol. “I want a trim and a scalp massage.”
On screen, Talulah smiled and nodded. With a loud click, manacles popped out of the chair’s arms to wrap around Jorge’s wrists. His neck and legs were also shackled in place by the chair.
“Hey! What’s this for?” Jorge panicked.
“New federal safety regulation,” Talulah replied. “Now, about your selection,” she continued as her eyes rolled back in her head. The screen blinked off. In a few seconds, it flicked back on. Jorge wondered if it just reboot itself.
Back on screen, Talulah said sternly, “Time to get you shipshape.” The electric razor buzzed.
“What? No! I just want a trim.” Jorge attempted to struggle, but the manacles held tight. The razor coursed over his head until all his hair was gone.
“I’m gonna sue this salon into oblivion!” He hissed.
The salon bot rolled away, leaving Jorge strapped in the chair. When it returned, it had replaced its scissor appendage with a tattoo needle. Without comment, it began to tattoo—something—into Jorge’s scalp on the back of his head.
“What are you doing? I did NOT order a tattoo!”
The beautiful face on the screen smiled coldly and continued working. “There,” it said when it finished. “All done.”
“What did you put on my head?” It would take months to grow out his hair long enough to hide that tattoo. And to find a new salon, perhaps an old-fashioned one still employing human stylists.
“It’s your serial number,” the bot answered. “According to government files, you turned 18 yesterday, and that automatically enlists you in the draft.” It flickered off again.
“What?!”
In answer, the screen came back to life. Instead of the attractive AI stylist, he saw the face of a severe looking military man. Before Jorge could ask what was going on, the sergeant on the screen began his programmed rant.
“Listen up! You’ve been drafted to serve as a foot soldier in the Intergalactic War of Alien Attrition. Operation Freedom Rings. You ship out for basic training immediately. Your family will be duly notified of your change in status.”
The bot then raised its hair-brush appendage, and touched the brush to the topmost right corner of its screen in a crude parody of a salute. “Congratulations.”
by submission | Nov 30, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Barber
An agency employed Morgan as an instructor for the alien tourists.
They wanted to visit, but not encased in space suits or lumbering robots. They wanted the genuine experience, blending in without the screaming and gunfire of the first time, so now they wore human bodies like gloves.
Morgan was qualified to teach English as a foreign language, though by an irony of the process, their gloves retained the ability to speak English like a native. He glanced around at faces blank as dinner plates.
The elderly balding man was Mr Frank Belknap. Sammy Beck was the one with the tattoos and wasted veins. Morgan wondered who rented themselves out like this. But then, what kind of alien would want to wear Sammy Beck?
Yesterday, Morgan came back to the classroom with a coffee, and found them all hunched over in their seats, wrists and arms bent like a preying mantis, silently snapping jaws in unison. A reminder that these weren’t people.
It was near the end of the brief course on how to pass as human. It covered the basics of eating, excretion, shopping and sex, hopefully enough to get by for a few days without the locals calling the cops.
They sat round a table in a bar, which Morgan justified to the agency as a practical test. To pass, each had to order a drink, eat some peanuts and use the restroom.
Frank Belknap had a queasy fascination with the drinks on offer.
“Excreted by micro-organisms, you say?” He held his beer up to the light. “But they are dead now? The ethanol kills them?”
Everyone else either gulped the glassful, or sipped and left well alone.
Buying drinks was a success. Perhaps monetary exchange was universal. The eating practical not so much. Peanuts still fell out of mouths.
Morgan took a deep breath. The restroom business had been a nightmare. Just sex then.
“Listen up guys. There are quite a few rules—”
“May I ask a question?” This was Sammy Beck.
“It’s what I’m here for.”
“Funerals.”
Funerals weren’t covered in the course; in fact, Morgan didn’t think they were even mentioned in the handbook.
Expressionless faces swivelled towards Morgan like radar dishes.
He cleared his throat. “You do know what funerals are?”
“Ashes,” said one.
“Heaped earth.”
“The coffin and its perplexing cargo.”
“And you want to see one?” It was better than his vague plan with hookers.
There are funerals all over the city every day. What these graveside mourners made of his class visit he couldn’t imagine.
The priest’s voice rose and fell, just audible over the rain pattering on umbrellas.
“Such mayfly lives,” murmured Sammy Beck.
Afterwards, Morgan let them watch the backhoe filling in the grave. He was proud how they stood in respectful silence, and perhaps that was why he found himself telling them about his dad’s death; how he’d squeezed his hand tight, as if that could stop him slipping through his fingers.
He saw them savouring his words like fine wine.
Tourists offer payment for such conversations now, and snap pictures of coffins.
Their alien flesh endlessly renews itself by clever tricks of the science we envy so much. Is that why they are obsessed by our mortality?
These days they pay top dollar to witness life support turned off, live as it happens. Special rates to watch euthanasia. Also executions, for the connoisseur.
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.
