by Patricia Stewart | Feb 11, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
It began as a simple misunderstanding. The Liturgians were a social-insectoid race. When they negotiated with a graduate student from Cal-Arts, they assumed that she spoke for the entire huwoman hive. The concept of individuality was unfathomable to them. So when the student agreed to allow the Liturgians to mine ice from the Whitney Glacier, in exchange for a joy ride in their spaceship, they assumed that the entire Earth collective had agreed to the terms. Therefore, they happily gave her a quick tour of the inner solar system, then headed off to the glacier.
Alerted by LAX, the California National Guard scrambled two F-16 Falcons from the 144th Fighter Wing to intercept the “UFO.” They spotted the flying saucer as it was approaching the Whitney Glacier. Since they were not authorized to open fire, they established a containment pattern 10,000 feet above the landing site and waited for reinforcements. Next to arrive at the glacier were four UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which hovered around the ship and illuminated it with searchlights. By the time the infantry units from the 40th Division arrived, the Liturgians had already excavated several tons of ice and were preparing to load it onto their spacecraft. When they noticed the solders approaching, they deployed their six phaser cannons and aimed them back toward their own ship, which was the universally accepted convention for receiving honored guest. However, the soldiers, not knowing the business end of a phaser cannon from the charging coil end, assumed that the aliens were preparing to attack. They preemptively opened fire, launching everything they had at the Liturgian ship. After the smoke cleared, the saucer was undamaged, and two of the four helicopters were flaming wrecks, having been shot down by friendly fire. The Liturgians were utterly confused by the turn of events, but decided not to respond until they better understood this bizarre behavior.
The following morning, the governor of California arrived at the landing site to take charge of the situation, since he had had personal experience with hostile extraterrestrials earlier in his career. He felt that this was clearly a misunderstanding that could be resolved with a non-confrontational face-to-face meeting. He approached the spacecraft alone, with his arms spread apart. Finally, the Liturgians concluded, a gesture that was unmistakable. The Queen of the Liturgians sauntered out of the spacecraft to feast on the obvious huwoman sacrifice. In Liturgians culture, after a battle, it was required that the leader of the losing hive offer her life in exchange for the lives of her offspring.
The governor smiled at the rhythmic clattering of the Queen’s six chitin legs on the hard surface of the ice. It reminded him of the banter between dueling tap dancers. When the Queen reached the governor she arched upward, perched on her four hind legs. From a height of over nine feet, her massive mandibles snapped downward and clipped off the governor’s head. In one fluid motion, her maxilla gathered in the severed head and guided it into her labium. The Queen bowed appropriately, and began to return to her ship. Almost instantly, the infantry opened fire again. The bullets ricocheted harmlessly off her personal force field. “What is it with these Earthlings?” she exclaimed after returning to the ship. “Can’t they make up their minds? They go from friendly, to aggressive, to surrender, to aggressive again. To hell with them. We’ll get the ice from one of the moons orbiting the largest gas giant. But before we leave this planet, we need to exterminate this hive. They cannot be permitted to swarm.”
by Duncan Shields | Feb 10, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Glass goes green when it gets to a certain thickness. The impurities gang up. It’s a great insulator. It’s why my entire suit of armour is made of it.
I have grill slits and air-holes drilled into the faceplate. The armour weighs close to seven tons because of its thickness but it’s light when I’m riding the storm.
I have a long, lightning-rod ponytail of white filaments flowing back from my topknot jack. It traces my motion behind me, luring electrons.
Ferroconduits in my giant glass boots keep me afloat on charged air. I skate the clouds. A Tesla Hammer is strapped to my back with miles of thin copper wire wrapped tightly around it to act as an energy sponge. The large crest of my royal station is bolted to the glass on my chest.
It’s electroplated with gold that had criss-crossed the rest of my armour over time, creeping like rust, gilding the stress fractures of my own magnetosphere.
I’m standing in a bruise of storm clouds over Arlington for this state’s latest coronation. There’s a bead in my ear telling me that in exactly eight minutes the clouds need to pulse, spread, break windows with the force of their thunder, and strike the palace’s rooftop lightning field sixteen hundred times. This will fill the standing royal prophecy.
The prophecy dictates that a State Monarch has to be ratified by the heavens when he or she ascends to the throne. Lightning must strike the rod-fields on top of that state capital’s royal house at the culmination of the acceptance speech.
It must be fulfilled in every coronation ceremony in every state. I have six more to do this year in other states. It’s my job to bring the lightning. It was my father’s job before me.
I hang in the clouds like a dangling string puppet. The clouds are amber and I’m a fly. In a minute I’ll speed-skate down and surf back up to shape this bank into a terrifying ridge that will remind the party below me of the safety of caves.
I’ll make the cloud bristle with whorls. I’ll bring the lightning heartbeat deep within her to a crescendo before lashing out at the building below.
I spread my arms.
by submission | Feb 9, 2009 | Story
Author : Terri Monture
The funeral cortege rolled smoothly down the boulevard, the faces of the witnessing crowd somber and drawn in the grey light. It had stopped raining but was damp and cold. Amanda shivered and pulled Sylvia and Clarice closer into her body. “Mama, what is that?” asked Sylvia, her shrill little girl’s voice querulous as she pointed at the immense funeral bier, the sleek black coffin strewn with white flowers.
Amanda swallowed, licking her dry lips. “That’s your father,” she answered.
Sylvia, her youngest, looked up at her mother, uncomprehending. “What’s a father?” she asked, her huge blue eyes solemn.
Amanda looked at the massive coffin as it rolled on past. Women of all ages, all bearing the same stamp in their faces – the thin aquiline nose, the full lip, the elfin chin and black hair – all vaguely the same, all hunching their shoulders against the cold in the same fashion. Jacob Lastman – not so ironically named, as it turned out – had fathered them all. He had been the last fertile male left on the planet, his precious sperm the last viable option for the human race. And now he was dead.
There were only females left on the planet now, and their numbers were dwindling.
Amanda had born seven of his daughters in the age-old way, the lucky meeting of sperm to fertile egg, and provided countless ovum to the frantic attempts to preserve humanity. She was also probably one of the last women on the planet to have actually lain with a man, to know his weight upon her and feel the shuddering spasm that fathered her two eldest daughters until it was realized that he was becoming too old — and his heart too fragile — to withstand the rigours of normal fertilization. And after his final heart attack, all of their advanced technology unable to correct the last defects — they had wrung out every last precious drop of him and were even now impregnating the women who would carry the end of their species.
Amanda hugged her smallest child. “Do you remember the lesson yesterday, we watched the clips about how people are born.”
Sylvia looked confused but Clarice glanced up at her mother, her bright blue eyes narrowed in concentration. Amanda knew that glance — she had seen it in Jacob, seen it replicated a thousand, a hundred thousand times in the last twenty years. All that was left. “Oh yeah”, she chirped up. “I remember. It said that boys are extinct. Something about the fragile Y chromosome.”
Amanda nodded. “That’s right. Turns out the environment became too polluted for the Y chromosome to survive. The only male left could father children, but just girls.”
She glanced around the crowd, all of them related, all sisters. She remembered her own father only vaguely, and had never known any brothers. Her grandmother had told her stories of the old days, about inequality and domestic violence and something horrible called rape. All of that was over.
Women had decisively won the gender wars. But it was very lonely.
by submission | Feb 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Waldo van der Waal
The sound of an old-fashioned bugle in his aural signaled the start of the hunt. On cue, the chem depositors in his spine fired a burst of adrenaline. His face flushed from the drug and a mad grin spread across his features. He glanced across at the other skimmers lined up on the barren plain, then he smashed both throttle levers to the full-forward position. With the landscape blurring around his craft, he turned his attention to the sky. God, hunting Omnivians was fun!
He timed his first run perfectly. The giant avians’ massive shadows raced over the ground, and he used them to pace his charge. Then, just as it seemed as if he was racing too far ahead of the shadows, he leant back on the controls in a way that one really shouldn’t do in a craft designed to stay near the surface. The frame groaned as the skimmer bulleted into the sky, rapidly gaining altitude, shedding speed in the process. At the zenith, he let go of the controls completely, turned around smoothly and hoisted the gun to his shoulder. In that single, weightless moment, he aimed down the barrel, a mature Omnivian filling the sights. The sheer size of it stunned him for a heartbeat; but then he squeezed the trigger. Things seemed to slow down for a moment, and thinking back, he was sure he could see the projectile leaving the gun, flying true and hitting the bird in the middle of its flat forehead.
The leviathan’s scream jarred him back into action. He turned away from the mortally wounded beast and wrestled with the controls – the skimmer was in a dangerous tail-stall, and death was approaching at an alarming rate. But he might still survive. The Omnivian would never filter-feed through the skies again, nor would it give birth to live young while on the wing. Its constant migration would finally come to an end, and its shadow would no longer race over the barren plains and dunes below. Man had come to its world.
With the ground rushing in, he hauled backwards on the stick, and somehow managed to bring the skimmer under control just before impact. The other hunters had seen his shot, and made their way to the body of the beast. As his open craft settled, he stepped onto the dusty grey ground, and looked at the graceful, gentle giant he had slain.
Evolution had taken its legs, and what might’ve been a beak eons ago was now a gossamer web designed to catch insects in flight. The eyes looked forward, instead of to the sides, and the wings… The wings were truly astounding, not only for their shear size, but also for their vibrant colours. Omnivians never had anything to fear, since their natural habitat put them well out of harm’s way. That is, until the settlers arrived from the blue-and-green marble they called Earth.
He looked down at what remained of the animal. Then he glanced at the faces of the other hunters that had gathered around, and for a moment he saw in their eyes a mixture of shame and regret. No man can kill without regret. Then someone cheered, and they all raced back to their skimmers for the next run.
From far above came the cries from the rest of the flock. Their melancholy songs reverberated through the skies, but the echoes were growing dim. Soon they would become legend. Nothing more than memories. Memories in the minds of men who hunted, because it was fun.
by submission | Feb 7, 2009 | Story
Author : Adam Zabell
In the darkness of my private soul, I still can’t believe I get away with it. In the light of my studio, I focus on titles.
Honestly, the title is usually the hard part. “SunderS” was brutal and well-received, but too abstract for my personal tastes. “Urinationalization” had the right measure of self-loathing, but never captured the self. They nearly revoked my license for “Waterbored.”
“Decimating” is six years old and remains my favorite. That year, I took a fraction of the grant money and broke it into a month’s wages for a hundred people. Volunteers were pathetically easy to come by. All they had to do was live their life for thirty days; one in ten got a late night visit with benefits, caught on ocular lens as unedited broadcast. The grandmother was anti-climactic, but the construction worker made up for it.
For almost two decades, I’ve pushed buttons and morals and boundaries, safely distancing myself from prosecution under the license that Our Greatest Society gives to their appointed moral compass. They needed me since the war effort made so many other things so justifiable. It’s why they took out the worthless parts of my brain to install the camera and antenna and video compression algorithms, why they raised me to be a forward observer. And maybe why they were so willing to give me the chance to turn my hobby into my passion. I don’t dwell on it much, I’m just glad for the opportunity to work with my hands.
Staying on the leading edge of the Shockwave (it’s what the art critics call my movement – to compartmentalize, trivialize, genericize me) used to be easy. Nobody had the stomach to match my vision, and nobody had my aegis. But now there’s this agrofarm kid who just hit the scene. They say his old man died in a thresher, and the kid couldn’t cope. Sold the farm to pay for his own camera, he’s making his way along the underground circuit. I only found out about him when I hacked my hospital’s records to research “Licensed, Therapist” last season. Slummed my way into his gallery. Clearly derivative, but it’s plain that he’s thrown the gauntlet. That would have been nice, but he’s cheating. All his pieces are “Untitled.” No work, no ingenuity, no soul.
This year, I’m running live for the whole season. Most of the time I’ll be tending a garden, building tension. I’m calling my work “Stalking.”
by submission | Feb 6, 2009 | Story
Author : George Galuschak
The end of the world: we expected mad cows, Y2K, global warming, asteroids, nukes, tidal waves, flu-stricken chickens and angels descending from Starship Christ. What we got was The Blue Weed. We don’t know the delivery method – meteor strike, abandoned spaceship, some geek from another dimension. All we know is that we’ll never know.
Picture this: a light blue flower with black speckles, droopy petals, creamy stamen. A hiker found them, tucked in a crater deep in the Smoky Mountains. She knew something was up right away: thumbing through her Wildflower Guide, finding nothing, working up the nerve to touch them.
A quarter-million sub-microscopic seeds went home with her, attached to every pore of her body. She woke up two days later, saw clumps of the flower growing all over her lawn. They spread from there, filling up parks and vacant lots and the cracks between sidewalks. Indestructible; dump lye on them and more came back the next day.
People shrugged their shoulders – big deal, a new weed – until the grass and trees started to die. Purple Haze: an alien virus, spreading, choking bark and branch in a blanket of fuzz. Purple Haze grew on everything, even human skin, and it was next to impossible to remove.
The alien bugs came: yellow, spiky caterpillar things; dragonflies the size of birds; beetles with weird glyphs on their shells. They rooted around in the Blue Weed, doing God knows what. Completely alien physiology – they had backbones, for starters, and secreted an oil. If you touched one with bare skin, boils, blisters, time for the hospital.
The word invasion became popular. People scratched their heads and wondered when the invaders would arrive, not realizing. Alien grays and little green men and penis-shaped rocket ships made sense, but a bunch of flowers? Gardeners aside, one doesn’t think of weeds as world conquerors.
The government swooped in with an arsenal of pesticides: defoliant, weed killer, DDT. They all worked; none of them worked. The Blue Weed died, and was reborn. The government tried other things: they quarantined people in plague zones, just like a bad horror movie. It didn’t work, because you can’t quarantine the wind.
The Blue Weed grew and grew. The flowers sucked in oxygen and emitted their own bitches’ brew into the atmosphere, changing it. The mass extinctions commenced: 99% of all living species, gone. The ants survived, along with the cockroaches. Humans died in droves: the old, the young and the sick went first. The survivors’ skin took on a tint just like the flowers.
Earth, today: nothing to see but a never-ending plain of The Blue Weed, waist high, swaying gently in the wind. The landscape: crystal jellyfish, drifting through the clouds; small, chattering monkeys with huge ears and wide, unblinking eyes; and the last human, cowering in the long grass, hiding from the carnivorous dragonflies, smothering in a world turned blue.
