by submission | May 4, 2014 | Story |
Author : Rachelle Shepherd
There was a teal stained smile behind her plump cobalt lips.
“Tonight’s flavor is cotton candy,” She placed a coal chunk in the sticky pit of Haze. It flared red-hot. Potpourri purrs into plumes of purple breath. “Smoke responsibly.”
She went on to the next customer, repeating her mantra behind an inky grin. The warning never wavered.
Smoke responsibly. Euphoria expected. Euphoria imminent.
Haze was experimental air. Laboratory grown stink bud, infused with the flavors of the universe. There was a strawberry, orange, vanilla. Almond and walnut, golden honey, sea-salt and vinegar. All the basics.
Higher up the fusion chain lays the complex tastes. Cotton candy. Indonesian clove. Wormwood with licorice swirls. Flavors without description, without accurate representation. Outlaws. Illegal behaviors made smoke and mirror with the trick of laboratory liquids.
Cotton candy was a Smoke-Night special. There was nothing amateur about this carnival vintage. It was untested, even on rats. Straight to human species.
Who could spin sugar into smoke? Only Taffy. Taffy’s Tar House, home of less-than-legal flavors. Taffy with her rainbow color kisses, stained by the liquids that wove flavors into breath.
Taffy had her Smoker’s Lottery. Sign up for smokes today!
Not Liable for Side Effects.
The raffle ticket cost me a week’s salary. Only a little more than any other weekend smoke night in Taffy’s glittering parlor of forbidden fruits.
Legal Haze was just flavored paper and watercolor. Taffy smoked science. Matter made consumable. Matter made illegal, destruct on sight. It took straight to your head, rearranged the atoms there. I’d spend hours after a good smoke trying to find my thoughts. And when they came back again, they came with new hues. A glaze of sorts, a pot fired in a kiln. Watch the shadows break that tacky ceramic into jigsaw art.
We are the summation of the effects of our addictions.
The parlor filled with the suck and sigh of smoke. Each table glowed with its own private third eye. Taffy carried her brazier behind a silk screen. It rustled restlessly, closing behind her and clicking with the teeth of a thousand beads.
I inhaled. My mind bloated like my chest, thick with nausea and epiphany. The Haze had no weight. I was breathing thoughts, absorbing them into the very tissue of my body. I could see the carnival lights flickering on the backdrop of my eyelids, hear the clank of heavy steel machinery. Children were laughing, their mouths sticky with caramel apple juice.
In my mouth, the cloying aftertaste of cheap cotton candy. Pink and blue tongues fat with refined sugar. The Ticketmaster leered behind his booth, smears of black tar on his fingertips. Bubbles of blood nestled in the corners of his eyes.
The parlor coughed. Collectively we gasped, our nozzles abandoned on the table. Hookah cords hung like snakes, writhing.
Someone called out for some real-time fresh air.
“Open a window!”
Nightmares.
The last bit of breath rushed past greedy lips. I ran my tongue over my teeth. Clumps of sharp sugar crystals bit into the soft flesh.
A smother blanket of Haze settled over the room. The light dimmed with the dying coals. A steady silence built as lungs hushed.
Smoker’s Lottery. Not Liable for Side Effects.
The fog swelled, sticky blue. One by one, embers melted into ash slag like winking eyes.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tomas entered the sushi bar ten minutes before noon, ten minutes before his assignment would arrive. The restaurant was busy, not packed, and there were a few vacant tables along one side. His assignment would take the one closest to the kitchen, as he always did. Tomas left his jacket on the chair back of his own table, where the maitre’d had left him with a disinterested wave, and walked back towards the kitchen, pausing only long enough to lay a new QR code sticker over the one on his assignment’s table before continuing on into the bathroom.
He rinsed his hands, waited a few minutes and then returned to his seat to wait.
At noon his assignment walked through the door, an imposing man in an electric blue suit, double chins cleanly shaven, hair perfect.
The maitre’d showed much more interest in this man, and ushered him excitedly to his usual seat.
The man produced his phone and scanned the QR code on the table to begin his order.
Tomas heard an annoyed grunt. The menu app that would normally have launched immediately was now asking him to download an upgrade. Hungry and annoyed, he typed his passcode with fat well manicured fingers to remove this obstacle to his gluttony.
Moments later Blue Suit was ordering, and before long food was arriving. Tomas sat with his back to the man, listening to him wolf down plate after plate of sushi, sashimi and all sorts of dim sum. The sound made him nauseous, and any interest he had in eating faded quickly away, his own meal now abandoned before him.
At twenty minutes past the hour he heard the phone ring behind him, and for the next hour and forty minutes between gulps of green tea and around mouthfuls of raw fish, Blue Suit talked to nearly every politician in the city, most of the construction union leaders and several members of the local organized crime rings.
While they talked, Tomas’ modified menu app whispered from a list of NSA hot codes into the line, burying phrases under the conversations, painting targets under the noses of a very specifically targeted group of men.
Shortly after two Tomas had checked off all the names on his mental list from the conversations he had overheard. He left several bills on the table to cover his food and an allow for an unremarkable tip, and then slipped quietly out of the restaurant without a backwards glance.
On his way to the subway Tomas made one call.
“It’s done,” there would be no response he knew, “they’re all as good as dead.”
by Julian Miles | May 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Bloody hell but it’s a long way down.
It always gets to me at least once each shift. Burlaria has a vast atmosphere envelope. The result of it becoming the capital of the Nineteen Worlds was a huge increase in population. As the planet prided itself on the beauty of its natural countryside, something had to be done.
An architect called Gingky came up with the idea of ‘Skyspires’. Vast tower blocks, supported by the latest in deep space technology and each independently powered by the gravitic core housed at the apex of the tower. Which allowed the core to be jettisoned into orbit with ease in the event of an emergency.
The idea swept all before it and within the constraints imposed by the physics involved, each Skyspire was permitted to be individual in appearance and style. Kilnrock looks like a classic evil wizard’s tower from old fantasy tales. Orbitville is the preferred habitat for spacers. There are six hundred Skyspires and they themselves have become a tourist destination: airships full of sightseers take tours around them, snapping movies and stills of the light shows, inlaid designs and, my personal favourites: the gargoyles.
The gargoyle had been a mountain dwelling winged predator in danger of extinction. Burlaria had tried so many times to halt the decline of these long-lived, magnificently ugly, stony-skinned pre-sentients. They were unique in the experience of the NWFPC – Nineteen Worlds Fauna Protection Council – but that uniqueness doomed them. There were no applicable behavioural or environmental models to adapt.
Then the Skyspire I’m on today, Lifespear, was completed. Within a month, there were sightings of gargoyles in the uppermost zones. Investigation showed gargeries in numbers never before seen.
The height was the thing. When Burlaria had been discovered, it had gigantic polyps drifting in the high sky. They were part edible, part refinable and part weavable. The rest was top-grade fertiliser. Extinction occurred before controls could be introduced.
It seems that the gargoyles needed the polyps to lair and reproduce, high above the highest-flying competing raptor species.
Skyspires gave them back their havens and their population has recovered, with divergent species and variants still being catalogued, eight decades later.
Something small, fluorescent and purple hurtles past me, a vicious rattle emanating from its throat sacs.
“Leave me be, you ugly son of a gull!”
I patch my video feed directly to ‘Gargoyle Central’, as we call the NWFPC watch station here.
“Gail, darling. What’s glowing purple and wants to eat my eyes?”
“Casey, that’s a broodmother of the Lesser Mauve Tyrant subspecies. Very, very rare. If she’s threatening you, you must be near a newly-established gargery. So stop what you’re doing.”
A gargery? Made from excreted resin and scavenged rubbish in whatever aperture appealed.
“Gail. Is this species a hot laying or cold laying one?”
“Hot. Why?”
“I’ll come back in, but you have to call Lifespear Maintenance and tell them exactly why their expensive contracted external works engineer will not be clearing the heat exchanger on level seventeen-hundred, but will still be charging them his premium callout rate.”
She’s laughing as she replies: “Done.”
by submission | May 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
I hugged the grieving woman and told her I was sorry for her loss. I said her son had been a good friend and good soldier. I told her I would be thinking about her and then stepped aside to allow the mourners lining up behind me to offer their condolences. I looked back at the casket, at the old woman, at the fifty or so people attending the viewing, and walked out of the funeral home. He’s better off, I thought to myself. Another veteran of the Battle of Eternity who’s finally found peace.
That’s what we called it. The Battle of Eternity. The official name was the Second Battle of Winnipeg. It was the biggest battle of the third and final year of the war. We’d liberated Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. We had momentum on our side. The Canadians launched a major offensive from newly liberated Ontario into Manitoba and we made a push from North Dakota across the border. The enemy wasn’t prepared to fight on two fronts. They pulled back immediately. We had them on the run. Then the bomb hit.
It was a nanotech weapon. The enemy hadn’t used nanoweapons up to that point. We’d deployed them discretely, knowing we were violating the Bucharest Accords. An enemy platoon here would get taken out by a debilitating febrile illness. A regiment there would suddenly have trouble comprehending orders. That was us. It was fighting dirty. And it was quite illegal. But we figured when the war was over we’d rather face our own war crimes tribunals than the enemy’s.
Both Canadian and American forces detected unauthorized molecular technology. We knew we’d been hit. We also knew that nanotech countermeasures would have already been triggered. They’d work or they wouldn’t. We pressed on. After ten days, Winnipeg — what was left of it — was liberated. Nothing that could be definitively attributed to the enemy nanoweapon attack was discovered. We figured the countermeasures had worked.
Six months later, the war was over. The United States and Canada were battered, but victorious. It was a couple of months after that when the first symptoms started showing up.
“Hurry up, we’re going to be late,” I’d said to my wife one Saturday as we were heading out to the movies.
“Be right there,” she’d replied.
When she’d come downstairs, I told her we may as well forget going. There’s no way we could make the movie.
“We have plenty of time,” she’d said.
“I told you to hurry up a half hour ago. You took too long.”
“A half hour? That was less than a minute ago.”
I’d checked the time. She was right. The drive to the theater seemed to take well over an hour. But the clock in the car showed it had only taken twelve minutes. The movie was two hours long. It had felt like ten.
In the weeks that followed, most of the soldiers who had fought at the Second Battle of Winnipeg experienced similar symptoms. The subjective perception of time had changed. Diagnostic imaging scans found changes in the cerebrum, cerebellum, and basal ganglia of those afflicted with what the media dubbed Eternity Syndrome. They’re still trying to find an effective treatment for those of us who haven’t committed suicide, tired of the living death of a world where everything takes forever.
I look back at the funeral home. I recall the sobbing old mother I consoled not three minutes ago. For me, it seems like it’s been a year.
by submission | Apr 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Ian Hill
The dense battalion of grey-clothed workers strode through the militant capital, their stiff legs rising and falling in finely tuned unison. Their perfectly timed footsteps echoed around the dark square like gunshots, deafeningly loud compared to the enveloping layers of oppressive silence that hung like a pall over the rest of the city.
A taskforce of bright-faced officers marched at the head of the contingent, proudly holding red flags that displayed the royal standard of their glorious nation. Crows watched from dirty rooftops as the tight ranks marched toward the central meeting point.
The crowd spanned throughout most of the city, its fringes filling alleyways and distant streets. Everyone stood on the tips of their toes, trying to catch a glimpse of the raised metal stage. A man clad in a black uniform waited expectantly behind the monolithic podium, his sharp blue eyes gazing out at the blank-faced people before him.
Eventually, the battalions converged and blended into the crowd. Biting wind passed through shattered windows and shook loose power lines. The man on the stage stood backlit by the imposing capital building. Red banners torn at the bottom hung from the stone façade, billowing slightly. All was silent as the marching ceased.
The man smiled and leaned forward, placing his gloved hands on the podium’s edges. He brought his quivering mouth closer to the cylindrical microphone and spoke. “Amongst you is a dissenter.”
The words boomed throughout the city, echoing ominously and stirring birds from their perches. His voice was deep and rich, revealing a hint of sarcasm intermingled with patronizing spite. The peoples’ glassy eyes twitched slightly as they digested the foreign information. Their ears rang with omnipresent tinnitus as silence returned.
“In your pockets you will find the key to weeding out this pest.” the man continued as he glanced around at the numerous pale people. A brief flash of worrying consciousness flicked across a few of their faces.
After a brief period of hesitation there was a soft shuffling as everyone reached into the pocket of their working pants to retrieve a yellow capsule. They gazed down at the small pill in their hands, head cocked to the side curiously.
“Think about the greater good.” the man said sweetly, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
As a single unit the mass of selfsame people placed their palms to their mouths and swallowed the pill. Their eyes dimmed further as they all collapsed to the ground, their limbs splaying outwards and becoming intertwined with others. It was as if a virulent plague was sweeping through the populace, poisoning and killing the people in one fell swoop.
The man at the podium squinted and glanced all around the fallen crowd, searching for the standing dissenter. He frowned and straightened his back. After a few more moments of half-hearted search he shrugged inwardly. “Better safe than sorry.”
