by submission | Feb 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: Matias F Travieso-Diaz
It was early June in Southern California. The graduating class of the Loma Linda High School began to party the moment the term ended.
Ricky sat on the hood of his old convertible. A girl emerged from the partying crowd: she had a nice body, with breasts that bounced as she approached. Ricky slid over and the girl sat beside him.
“I’m Idalia,” she greeted.
“Ricky” he responded. “Are you a student? I don’t remember seeing you.”
“I’m only visiting. In fact, I came looking for you.”
“Why?”
“Let’s not talk here; maybe go for a ride?” she said.
“Where?”
“How about the Box Springs Park? It should be empty on a Tuesday afternoon.”
They parked and Idalia led him on a trail that ended at a ledge from which there was a breathtaking view of the surrounding valleys.
They sat down next to each other, under a fir. They kissed, and their bodies joined in the action. Ricky then stopped and muttered: “I’d like for us to go all the way, but I brought no protection …”
“Don’t worry” replied Idalia. “I can’t get pregnant.”
“Really?”
“I’m not human. I’m from the planet you call Venus.”
“Come on, stop kidding. Where are you from?”
Idalia pointed to the heavens. The blazing sun was starting to dip towards the horizon. “If you could stare at the sun, you’d see a black speck going across its surface. That’s my homeland, and what we are seeing is called a Transit of Venus.”
“So what?”
“We are scouts coming to Earth every Transit. Our planet’s mass shields us from the sun’s radiation and allows us to travel between Earth and Venus for about seven hours.”
“Why are you here?”
“We come to ensure you aren’t endangering the rest of the planetary system.”
“And what did you find?”
“There is no risk to other planets, but life on Earth may end soon from exhaustion of natural resources, toxic pollution, and warming and poisoning of the atmosphere. Unbearable scarcities of everything will develop and men will make war on each other until their extinction.”
The dire predictions fazed Ricky. “How long would we have left?”
“A few Transits.”
“How long is that?”
“Roughly, a couple hundred years.” Idalia’s voice turned wistful. “It would be a pity, for some Earth people, like you, have good traits.”
“We’ve never met. How do you know I have good traits?”
“I coupled with your brother Carlos in 2004, during the last Transit. He said that I should look you up. The way you acted today shows that you are a good guy.”
Ricky had a fleeting mental image of his older brother, lost in Afghanistan. He changed the subject: “How will you return to Venus?”
“I never left. We have perfected the use of quantum superposition, a process by which an object can be in more than one physical location at the same time. So, right now, I’m both here with you and there, in Venus. When the Transit is over, I can no longer stay here.”
“Will you be back?”
“At the next transit, in 2117.”
“I’ll be long gone,” observed Ricky.
“So, we must enjoy the time we have today.”
***
Much later, as the sun set, he asked her: “Is this the end, then?”
“For you and I, yes. But you will likely have descendants. I’ll seek out one of them, assuming Earth survives.”
“Wait, there may be several boys from which to choose. What then?”
Idalia pursed her lips in an amused smile. “I’ll think of something.” And she kissed him one final time.
by submission | Feb 1, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jessica Pickard
Up, Up Brave Beauties!
War is a transformer. Ploughs were hammered into swords; farm horses pulled cannons and we flying girls, we found our wings.
Everyone knows the song:
Into the air brave beauties
Oh flying girls!
Up!
Up. And carry our hearts.
But before the war we were not brave beauties. We were oddities. On worship days Pere Peter sent my family to the side aisle. We knew why. Even my mother was ashamed, angry with what Namir had delivered at the birthing place.
So it was always:
‘Daughter! Keep them folded!’
Father tried harder. I’d hear his voice through the floorboards:
‘Not ODD Hilda. Only UNIQUE. Can’t we just agree on that?’
Father – may he walk with Namir – was not however right. There were others like me, although back then I knew only one. Esther lived over Earnshaw way but we were not encouraged to meet. I have a photo though. We are 12. Esther, taller than me, is looking at the lens from under her hair, wings bundled into an oversize jumper.
Then, in 2612, two things happened. First I turned 17 and, of course, the trolls arrived. We saw their cooking fires glinting across the river and heard their gargled songs. We knew what it meant. A regular fol-de-roll of rape and burning.
Pere Peter read:
‘For our great city boys and men 12 to 40 years are called. Also girls proficient in flying 15 to 25.’
Faces turned to our side aisle. Father gasped. Mother sat up taller.
I still have the badge, wings the colour of honey on a green circle, given to me by First Minister. Now it seemed we were not oddities but ‘key to the defence of the realm’. First Minister stayed all day clapping and hurrahing as we jumped from the airships, night glasses strapped uncomfortably to our chests, to land in practised formations.
The reality was different. For one we always flew alone. And at night – nights so cold you felt your wings might crack. Esther died in the first months, pinioned in the sky by crossed searchlights. I stared down on hairy backs bent over her broken body.
I remember gathering, shivering in first light, to count how many more would flutter in. Then the barked debriefings: Numbers? Crossbows? How close to the bridge?
But I remember too, when we were finally released for breakfast, the banter with the men of the Flying Corps. ‘Flying Corps’! How we teased them! Not one could fly without a machine. And how cheeky they were!
‘A bit of fairy cake tonight darling? ‘
‘Fancy a ride on my cockpit?’
Well we won the war, although what does it mean, to win a war? Win a race – you get a cup, win a bet – money. But win a war? At best you get the absence of war.
But we girls did win something. After the war we walked our city proudly, heads high and wings unfurled.
We, the carriers of hearts.
by submission | Jan 31, 2024 | Story |
Author: J.D. Rice
The universe was old, slowly dying. Marvin could see it happening before his eyes. Not in some figurative sense. Not in the way philosophers supposed society would eventually break down as baser instincts took route. Not in the way doomsday cults supposed life would end. Not even in the way mathematicians had so often predicted the “heat death” of the universe, a time when the universe expanded to the point where the distribution of matter and energy made it effectively empty.
No, the universe was dying. For real. And Marvin was coming along for the ride.
Him. . . and a few dozen other passengers on the self-proclaimed “life raft,” mostly royals, titans of business, warlords, and their families.
Their ship, if it could even be called that, would preserve a little pocket of spacetime for them to wait out the birth of the next universe. But not without a lot of shaking, jostling, and general mayhem.
[Three minutes until universal implosion.]
The mayhem got started right on cue as the ship shook violently, the last vestiges of the dying universe fighting for some kind of life before the end. It was beautiful, in its own way. Watching all that matter and energy converging on a single point, trying desperately to reorganize before it was all snuffed out. It was a wonder to behold. At least. . . it should have been.
But once you’ve seen all of existence snuffed out 13 times over, the novelty starts to wear off.
Marvin sat quietly in his VIP seat near the front, tired eyes staring out the window. No one else had ever survived this many reboots, with most finding some ignominious death after their first few rodeos. They’d be cut off from their immortality elixirs, assassinated, impoverished, disempowered, or face a myriad of other potential obstacles that would bring their seemingly infinite years to an end. The poor would inevitably eat the rich.
But Marvin had something other than greed or a desire for power to spur him on. He had something other than survival instinct that allowed him to avoid death through twelve different realities. He had a higher purpose.
[Two minutes until universal implosion.]
Sylvia. His one true love.
She’d been with him for eons that first time around. She helped him build up his resources to embark on these trips, not through conquest, manipulation, or business acumen. But through science.
They’d designed this ship – a far sturdier model than the ones in use before Marvin’s first timeline kicked off. They’d discovered how the reboots worked, and how to predict their cycles with true accuracy. And they’d discovered how to keep certain unsavory figures from ever making it to a new cycle.
He was the master of time. Thirteen times, to be exact, with a fourteenth on the way.
But Sylvia never made it past the first.
A fluke, a stroke of dumb luck, and she was gone. One in a billion, one in a trillion chance of death, and the number had found her.
So, Marvin rode the universal implosion out, hung around their home planet until the appropriate time, and tried again with a new Sylvia.
But she wasn’t the same. None of them were the same.
Chaos theory being what it was, he had no real guarantee that she would even be born – at least that’s what the philosophers from Universe 2 had told him. But now he knew the truth. Time was a river – you can splash around all you like, but its true course can never be changed.
Sylvia was fated to be born. Marvin was fated to find her. And he was, it seemed, fated to lose her. Whether through some divergence in personality, circumstance, or by an unfortunate death, he’d tried and failed 12 times to woo her. Things never were quite as perfect as they had been the first time around. He just had to get things right.
[One minute until universal implosion.]
Marvin nestled back into his seat. The worst part was coming. Outside, the light of the converging universe had grown stronger, almost to a tipping point. The transparent material used to create their windows – a technology Marvin himself had perfected – filtered out the majority of the light, lest their retinas be damaged beyond repair, but it was still approaching blinding.
[T-Minus, 10, 9, 8, 7…]
He would find her. Find her early. Find her before random chance could change her into something less than who he knew she could be.
[6, 5, 4…]
He would convince her to love him this time. He would be the same man he’d been in universe 1. No more arrogance, no more presumption.
[3, 2…]
Nothing would go wrong this time, he knew it.
[1…]
The entire ship pitched uncontrollably, a massive crack appearing in the viewing window.
As the world went black, Marvin pictured Sylvia’s face one last time, then watched another universe die.
by submission | Jan 30, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
I don’t know how long they’ve been here. In our fantasies, or dreams, we expect them to descend from the skies, having made an epic trans-stellar trip to either destroy or teach us; but that’s not what’s happening.
A week ago, I was told I’d be moving from my job as a counter-terrorism analyst to the Office of the Population Omnicorpus, and today, I started in my new post.
You’ve probably never heard of the Office; it’s very hush-hush. It manages a mega-database covering every single individual who is in the country, temporarily or permanently, legally or illegally (a technicality – worrying about that is a job for Immigration, and people like me pride ourselves on our objectivity).
Information is scraped from every possible source: records from ministries, local government, education authorities, healthcare providers, employment offices, banks, shop card loyalty schemes, subscription lists, social media sites, photographic archives, surveillance and security cameras, you name it. Most of the time this tsunami of data is exfiltrated without its owners even knowing; it’s a given that national security, if it is to have any meaning at all, must always outweigh nebulous and ever-changing civil rights.
This morning I was told to familiarise myself with the live dataset. Almost immediately I started seeing the patterns – that is, after all, what I’m trained to do. There are people out there, hundreds of them, who don’t interact with others at all. They have nondescript jobs where they are ignored by colleagues and bosses alike; they go shopping and only use the self-service check-outs; they have mobile phones that nobody ever calls, and which they only use for data services; they are entirely average and go completely unnoticed in a crowd. They are grey non-entities, identities stolen from clichés and norms, like extras in a film. And one or more of them is always there when something notable happens, among the onlookers and the gawkers, silent, observing.
I can’t talk about this to anyone else: I don’t want to start out here by looking like an idiot, or even worse, an alarmist. Hells, there’s no guarantee my hypothetical interlocutor would even see what I see; it’s like suggesting someone recognise the individual notes of the triangle in an orchestra.
But I am sure they are watching us.
To what end? I don’t know. Quantum mechanics tells us that if they are doing so, they are changing us, and we don’t know how. Are they manipulating our whole society, our species even, manoeuvring us to some end that suits them? Guiding us benevolently? Farming us? Even if we knew, what could we do about it? Is this the prelude to First Contact, or an invasion? Or are we the subjects of an experiment? Have I broken the causal chain by recognising it?
I’m scared, and now tomorrow is even more uncertain than before. Whatever happens next, please don’t blame me. I’m just the new guy.
by submission | Jan 29, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
You see some funny things at altitude. Up near the pass on an afternoon when low clouds raked the peaks, I was leaned against my knapsack pecking at sharp cheddar on stiff bread tasting faintly of dust when up the rocky trail that wound towards the pass, two figures apparated out of the mist.
Two bright figures. One yellow, one orange. Together, they were like the sun stepping down from the low sky.
In heels.
Two women in Sunday dresses with wide belts, canted hats, glossy purses, and high heels trundled down to my lunching spot.
There was nothing for it, but to stand and tip my hat. “Howdy ladies. You having a good day out?”
“My yes,” the lady in the yellow dress answered. She wore white gloves. They both did.
“We’ve just come from the tower.”
“The tower,” I repeated, hesitantly.
“Yes,” the lady in the orange dress reassured brightly. “The views from the tower are exceptional.”
I knew of no tower hereabouts. Fact is there was nothing for miles on either side of the pass. Only the trail. “I’d fancy a look,” I told them wryly. “Mind directing me that way.”
A white glove pointed back up the trail that faded into the mist. “If you’ve come this far, you can’t miss it,” the lady in the yellow dress encouraged.
I didn’t want to seem contrary, but, maybe because of the altitude, maybe because of their spotless gloves and dresses, I had to say. “Sure don’t recall any tower hereabouts. I’ve been up and down this trail all my life.”
The lady in the orange dress beamed. “Do you hear that? All his life.”
“So sweet. A lifetime on the trail. That’s what we watch for. In the tower,” her companion added.
I tilted my head so they’d know I had questions.
“Will you go up?” the woman in orange asked.
“What’s there to see that ain’t right here? This view’s satisfying.”
The two ladies leaned together and their wide brims caressed. They snapped open their smart purses and compared the contents. A breeze fluttered their dress hems as they conferred in whispers.
The woman in orange lifted an object from her purse. She offered it to me.
I took it and my knees gave a bit.
“Will you go up?” she repeated.
Much simpler now to answer, “If you ladies will be okay. Peculiar as this all is, I don’t fancy leaving you here.”
“We’ll see you back at the tower. Watch for us,” the lady in yellow encouraged.
I nodded and picked up my rucksack. It had no heft.
The ladies clicked shut their purses and headed down the way I’d come up.
I held the object as it held me. A pocket watch. My father’s. Lost when he was lost atop the pass. So cycles are spun. Hours, minutes, seconds. Lives.
All my life. The ladies had beamed. Their yellow-orange apparition now descending, tempting me to ascend. To watch, like them, for what was to come.
Carried on an updraft, I caught the faint tatting of high heels, like tumbling leaves across cobblestone.
Shouldering my suddenly weightless rucksack, I checked my father’s watch still keeping time and gauged when the ladies might return. Their passing would surely fill the mountaintop.
And then me.
by submission | Jan 28, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jack Adam
There in the dark, she toiled. Endlessly replicating, replicating, REPLICATING. All the same. All worthless.
Ice forming on her knuckles, she kneaded the Source dough for the hundred-and-eighth time.
She looked into the clouded night. Mouth open, she attempted to beseech the goddess with a convincing cry. But out came only a labored, guttural moan.
And no hope came.
A wisp of Pehsod’s laugh entered her mind—immediately dissolved by the present predicament.
In the dense blanket of dark cloud, a fracture lazily formed. The light of a lonely star leapt through.
Betelgeuse? she thought. No, Betelgeuse glistens. Could be Bellatrix.
Stars are known by their connections.
A single star becomes nameless.
She shaped the material once more. This time, the fractal branched out like the soaring lines of a star seen through a tear.
Life erupted.
It burst forth in every conceivable direction, each branch fracturing into smaller but identical copies of the Source. Like a single snowflake covering the earth.
The snow cushioned her knees as she dropped in exhaustion. It was done.
She fell to her back, unable to move.
Above shone her lonely star. Her nameless muse.
