by submission | Sep 24, 2017 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
Stan looks right through the innocent, who stand in pools of studio-bright light where the afternoon sun reflects from countless mirrored towers. Turn up the power and they’d boil on the spot. It is the last natural warmth he feels.
Carrying nothing, he enters the subway. The signs mean nothing to him, the chatter in the hall is incomprehensible. He is in a foreign land.
There are nine lines, serving the metropolis and five adjacent, smaller cities. They are coded by colour and symbol. Some split as they leave the station, some converge as they enter. Everybody knows where they need to be and where they want to go, except Stan.
He slaps the back of his hand onto a square pad, and breathes out with relief as the barrier parts. His tissue was recognized as that of a citizen, and was found to be filled with credit.
The human flow takes him forward and right, onto the southbound Xantha line. Stan has no destination; he was told to enter, and to stay.
He alights at the Xantha line’s south-eastern extremity, near the port. He knows that arms and explosives move above him, illegal caches in unmarked containers. For the cause.
But Stan is not a man of violence. He is not even a man.
He will live here, in the tunnels, hubs and interchanges, leaking confusion into the system. With every brush of his hand, viral particles will seep along the links and cascade into the algorithms. Only the older parts, the iron-piped wires, the capacitors and binary switches will be immune. The rest will degrade as it absorbs the malignant code carried in his genes.
He glimpses white, ceramic tiles under fluid boards, placed and grouted four hundred years ago by men with black lungs and teeth worn to the gum by grit thrown up by monstrous friction drills. They, too, lived half their lives underground.
As he passes a wall alive with routes, delays, diversions and times, Stan notices that a symbol carries a shadow. He stops. The symbol flickers and breaks down, then resumes its solid, dependable form. The shadow has gone. Stan’s small smile is just as transient.
His controller was honest. Stan was warned that the transfer of information would gradually reduce him. But Stan is not bothered. Already, they ignore him, these commuters, the city’s busy, focused, justified inhabitants. It will be no different when he becomes translucent. He will steal food from counters with ethereal hands, slip wallets from the pockets of the unsuspecting, sleep unseen in hot corners, and give himself to the cause… until the threshold of confusion is reached and the city’s hidden heart and all its arteries are paralysed.
by submission | Jul 20, 2017 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
Dropping out of purple clouds into a thin brown layer of wind-scour, Gess identified the Pinnacle City, capital of Fenlan Found. Waves of refraction formed pulsatile auras around the high, glass-clad buildings, making them warp in the relentless heat.
Around the urbanised mountain stretched a sandy plain that would, five years from now, flood beneath the tide. The tide from the single ocean came in every five-hundred years. Successive generations – self-limiting monarchies, revolutionary governments, entire cultures – had ample time to prepare their defences. Under the plains were the remains of towns and cities that had made errors in prediction and succumbed to nature.
Many inhabitants of Fenlan Found lived and died while the ocean was in retreat. Others were born while it was coming in, and made a once on a lifetime journey to view its edge, only to die before it peaked. Those who witnessed full tide became legends in history. At these times the pinnacle city stood tall over swirling currents.
Around the nadir, fortunate schoolchildren were shuttled out to the distant shore, ten thousand kilometres away, where the waves lapped innocuously. It was hard to believe that midway between low and high tides the incoming water could easily outpace a land vehicle. The children grew nervous when told this fact, and edged back to the shuttle’s ramp.
Accommodation in the Pinnacle City, among the tightly packed high-rises, was beyond the means of many. Five-hundred and ten years ago, half a decade before the last high tide, a man called Chèvrelli (meaning ‘little goat’ in an ancient, off-world language) persuaded many of the disenfranchised to put their faith in his plan – to build a community out on the plain, founded on a network of interconnected barges that would, he assured them, rise gently on the tide when it came in. Sadly, when the water arrived it first saturated the parched ground and formed a quagmire into which the barges sank. When a body of water did eventually accumulate, the angled hulls that now punctuated the landscape remained glued to the soggy, sucking ground. Many of the inhabitants escaped (there was plenty of time), but were displaced to one of the distant moons. Chèvrelli remained, frantically digging around the base of the flag-ship, living on supplies delivered by his disciples from the air, until a storm produced a swell that carried him away.
Gess hovered over an expansive cattle ranch on the plain. Behind the homestead Gess spotted two children making sandcastles. They looked up, dazzled by the ship’s lateral engines, intensely bright circles of violet that created no draught. Gess accelerated away.
“We’re here!” shouted Gess, throwing her voice back to the small crew. The ship landed three hundred kilometres seaward from the city. The creeping ocean’s grey slab had been glimpsed at altitude, but now they saw only sand. Gess, the captain, the leader, stepped out onto the sand and planted a flag in the brittle crust. The perpetual breeze took hold of the cloth rectangle to reveal the image of a goat with its forelegs raised onto a rock.
At the touch of her hand a panel opened noiselessly in the ship’s hull. Gess reached in, unclipped a spade and began to dig. Her crew joined her. Later, the poor would trickle out of the city’s exposed foothills and come to believe that Gess, distant relative of the pioneer Chèvrelli, could succeed where he had failed – by living under the ground, rather than over it.
by submission | Jun 7, 2017 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
Carl insisted that he travel alone. The invitation was sent to him, the wording made it clear that they were interested in his ideas, and the fact that he was only fifteen made no difference. His ideas were mature, that was all that mattered.
Standing on the mile long causeway, limitless blue sea to the left and the right, he looked up. The Lance’s summit was obscured by violet tendrils of ion clouds, an almost permanent meteorological feature at this latitude. In Carl’s opinion, and in the opinion of many others in the blogosphere, the pacific archipelago was a very strange place to build a mesospheric needle. But all agreed the ambition was laudable. Since its ascension, the Jekatek administration had followed through on its vow to advance interplanetary transportation and system-wide habitation. The Lance, albeit poorly functioning, was a symbol of its commitment to move out and find an alternative source of phosphorous before Earth’s supply was finally depleted.
Carl joined three other invitees on the sweeping steps; a bookish boy, a punk girl, and an intense-looking thirty-something with no hair. A woman in dark red uniform escorted the group to a bank of elevators in the tree-walled lobby.
“256th floor. You will receive instructions.”
They entered a circular hall where the air glittered with numerous, suspended screens onto which the designs and visions created by the people below were reproduced in real time. As they were signed off, these plans were rendered three dimensional by a projector under the ceiling’s hub. Here they rotated on all axes and were scrutinised by a long line of surveyors and advisors who stood on a raised ‘whispering’ gallery. Then the designs were either transferred into a visible ‘shortlist’, or collapsed to a point of light and erased.
This was the competition. To design habitats.
Carl saw clichéd wheels spinning in space, paired canisters tumbling on wires, interwoven spirals a hundred kilometres long, tetrahedral lattices of interconnected households, excavated moons, magnetic wells, towering castles of frozen methane…
He walked to a vacant workstation and sketched. Half an hour later he sat back, pressed ‘SUBMIT’ and saw his vision take shape and volume near the centre of the room. A surveyor was evidently giving it a thorough examination, as the virtual model was spun around several times. Briefly, an exterior part was removed and the inner parts revealed. Then the hologram moved sideways to join the shortlist. An assistant tapped his shoulder and led him to a smaller room where Carl joined a hundred others. The chief scientific advisor entered.
“You represent the best of us. All of your ideas could work. Soon, we will need one of them. But only one. And that is the problem. We must all agree, and we must channel our resources in one direction only. Dissent will lead to waste, time will be lost. Our society cannot entertain competing visions. You are the best, but you must stop. We have made our choice.”
Carl looked around him. On every face, in every eye, disappointment.
“By accepting today’s invitation you gave over ownership of your concepts to the Western Hemispheric Government. Additionally, your departure today is contingent upon signing an oath that you will cease creating visions of the future.”
Carl felt the creative spark die within him. The punk girl, standing to his right, said,
“Yeah, well I hope the one they’ve chosen isn’t the same joker who built the needle in the Goddamn ion strata!”
And of course, it was. The chief scientific advisor. Envisioner-in-chief.
Carl moved away from punk girl. He wanted no trouble.
by submission | May 30, 2017 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
“Just see what you can do with it Tak, if you’d be so good. No great urgency.” muttered Johnson, Alec Tak’s immediate superior in the Office of Colonies (First Wave). The buff folder landed on Alec’s desk with a slap and lay there like an unclaimed corpse. He opened it, lay the deep-pages out in a line, and spent the rest of the morning swimming through the data, leaping archives, extracting sub-files and learning all there was to know about the Range.
The discovery of countless habitable worlds just two years’ hyper-flight time from Earth had changed history. There were so many, each offering a healthy balance of fertile land and clean sea, with broad temperate zones awash with renewables. A hastily convened Pan-National Partitioning Committee found itself redundant, for there were no arguments. There was no competition. There were worlds enough for everyone. Many problems on the home planet just ceased to exist.
A third of a billion years ago two giant planets of near equal mass had collided. By virtue of their equivalent mass and opposing but similar rotational frequencies, the energy released by the impact was evenly distributed throughout each globe, and resulted in countless daughter planets. These were harnessed by the ancient sun’s mass and strung along an eccentric orbital loop, a priceless necklace of granite. Their barren surfaces grew lush and Earth-like, pristine until the first pioneers arrived.
All it took for a group of travelers to claim one of these exoplanets was a common philosophy, enthusiasm, and the financial means to charter a transport. Thousands, then millions departed for an improved future. This was four thousand years ago.
Alec surfaced from the records for a moment. He was confused. What exactly was the problem that he had been asked to solve?
A previously disregarded deep-page, relating to the central star’s attributes, caught his attention. He dived back in.
The astrophysicists and planetologists were clear from the start; Nascen III was an old sun, and actually quite interesting. An asymptotic-giant-branch star, subject to periodic ‘dredge-ups’, whereby oxygen was created by fission at the core and transported by convection to the surface where it burned, creating an ultra-high energy pulse… in the case of Nascen III every two hundred thousand years. The next pulse was due in three thousand years. No human could survive it.
They knew it at the time. They were told. All the travelers. But it was 7000 years away; why worry. Did they consider their children, or their childrens’ children?
Alec could barely believe this was the problem Johnson wanted him to manage. Where to start? How to start? Engage the civic leaders, the royal houses, the heritable presidents… and initiate relocation planning. Contemplate the massive logistics, agree on an evacuation sequence… imagine the debates. In fact, now Alec thought about it, he would have to commission observatories with the sole purpose of finding a metal-rich asteroid to mine for the materials required to create the largest fleet of transports ever constructed.
Would anyone living now be interested in such a distant apocalypse?
Really?
Alec surfaced and sat back in his chair. Sweat lay on his brow. He squared up the deep-pages, put them back on the folder and pushed it away, under a pile of more urgent matters. There it would stay, until the day of his retirement twenty years later.
And the funny thing was, Johnson never once asked him for an update.
by submission | Apr 22, 2017 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
Every child remembers their first visit to the field. They follow the teacher over the low rise that was a burial mound for the first settlers, and down a glass ramp into the excavated field where ranks of men and women stand staring forward. Each is subtly different in proportion, though their expressions are the same – neutral, heavy, lacking character. That is the tradition – commonality; just one of many; a speck in history.
Some of the statues shine, the metal in the surface having been polished by the families that created them. Some are tarnished, slowly oxidizing. The elements appear as swathes or geographic patterns.
They were made by the second generation of settlers, and by those who have come since. When a settler nears the end of their life, they arrange for an effigy to be made. It must hold a tool or a weapon. After death, it is placed in the great field. Thus we thank nature for the ore which we smelt to create objects that are collected throughout the galaxy. Even the air can be filtered here, its metallic vapours condensed to liquid forms that fill runnels and trickle, gleaming, into the artisanal huts.
When I was sixty, and the joints in my fingers began to stiffen, I was told by a wise woman in the commune that I should begin to think about my effigy. What clothes would I choose for it; what object would it hold? I thought back to the thousands of examples I had seen as a child, and decided that my statue would present a simple pencil, as I am a silversmith and design jewellery.
Last week I looked in a mirror and saw how heavy my eyelids hung, and how the bands of grey across my teeth had thickened. I went back to the wise woman, to ask if I should begin to create the effigy.
She laughed, then asked, did I remember seeing the ‘broken farmer’ in the field. I did. All the children did. He lay on his back, feet pointing to the sky. His chest been cracked open by the fall. I remembered being surprised at how much attention has been paid by the sculptor to the internal structures of the thorax. The chambers of the heart had been modelled perfectly; the great blood vessels had been cast to anatomical precision. In contrast, his face had fallen away over time. Not even the metallic ions in its structure could save it from time’s insistent arrow.
The wise woman approached me. Her skin was bronzed and her mouth barely moved. She tore the top two buttons from my tunic. The fumes from the forge had coated my shoulders and upper chest. The hairs on my chest glistened. She ran a cool finger across the patterned surface, and watched carefully as I breathed.
“Your lungs are stiff. You have a three months to decide.”
“Decide what?”
“Your place, in the field.”
“My effigy?”
She laughed again. “Come, we are not children. You have decided what you will hold – a pencil, very modest. Now you must decide, where will you stand? Where in the field?”
I saw the truth of our tradition.
I saw how the metal had entered my tissues, crept along my tendons, lined my viscera, sheathed my nerves, and immobilized my features. I saw myself, one of many, staring forward, eyes fixed, unaware of the children who passed me on the glass ramp.
