by Desmond Hussey | Nov 18, 2013 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
“Hello, Mum.”
She stands in the doorway, arms crossed, deciding whether she has the guts to enter. The intervening silence is broken by the repetitive hiss-thunk of my artificial lungs and the various beeps and clicks of the life support equipment esthetically cluttering my immaculate bedroom. She makes up her mind and tentatively takes a step closer. I knew she would. This is, after all, her last chance to say her piece.
“I’m glad… you came…” I whisper through heart-breaking gasps for breath. I must look so weak, all shriveled up in this disgusting, aged, dying body. I give her my sweetest smile. I chose these dentures just for her.
“Shut up, Mum. I’m not here to reminisce or pretend like we’ve any love between us.” Indignant rage festers behind her eyes. I’m so glad she has my eyes!
“For that… I’m… truly… sorry.“ My face is a mask of remorse.
“And I’m certainly not here to forgive you.”
So much for pleasantries. I drop the sweetness and labored breath and speak bluntly, “Then why ARE you here, dear? Surely it’s not to wish your dying mother a fond farewell as she slips quietly into the Everafter.”
She doesn’t respond. The gears are turning. Anger and loathing battle for first strike. She scans my room, frowning at the very expensive medical equipment keeping my organs functioning, eyes my priceless collection of art on the wall. What’s this? Was that a covetousness twinkle in her eye? Don’t worry dear; you’ll get everything… in a manner of speaking.
“Was it worth it?” She asks at the end of a dramatic pause. The question drips with contempt.
“It?” I riposte with mock naiveté.
“Your life,” she sighs, “This.” Her gesture takes in my lavish room. “All this wealth. Was it worth dying alone for?”
“But, I’m not alone, dear.” My smile is cold. “You’re here to keep me company. My loving daughter.”
“Stop. Stop it. I am not your daughter. Not any more.”
Oh, but you are. My very special child.
“Money was more important to you than us, wasn’t it, Mum? Money and your conceit for youth and beauty. You drove us away, Dad and me. You drove us away and for what? Another fat million in your bank account? You had the best of everything, food, liquor, clothes, entertainment, art, cars, medicine, a face lift every five years. But here you are, kept alive, barely, by the miraculous machines you bought with all your god-damned money. You thought you could buy anything, didn’t you? But you can’t buy immortality and you can’t buy love.”
I begin to laugh. I hate that it sounds more like a cackle.
“Goodbye you covetous old bitch. I hope you rot in hell.” She turns to leave, but Dr. Swanson looms above her, needle already sliding into the meat of her shoulder. Her look of indignant shock is trumped quickly by the sedatives. Swanson lowers her into a chair as her consciousness ebbs.
When I wake later I feel forty years younger, but a phantom voice screams from the dark recesses of my mind. Shreds of her id still fight me, but Dr. Swanson assures me these will fade over time.
Dr. Swanson holds up a mirror for me.
“Oh, my dear,” I speak to smiling image of my daughter’s face in the mirror, my face, “you could not have been more wrong. I CAN buy immortality. You were my retirement plan, grown for a single purpose. As for love… who needs it when you’re richer than god?”
I’m so glad she has my eyes.
by submission | Nov 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Robbie Kowalski
“Hey Marv, have you ever wondered where all the shit goes once you flush the toilet?”
“I don’t know Joe.” Marv said unenthusiastically as he tried to figure out a crossword puzzle.
“Man all that added weight to ship definitely adds up over a period of time. Couple of thousand people per ship. One shit per day. Tons of extra baggage.”
Marv scratched his head and muttered, “Nine down starts with I ends with-”
“Hey Marv are you listening? I think we have a real crisis on our hands. Tons of shit could be barreling down on us at any second. One system failure and boosh. Death by brown tsunami.”
“Inspector? No. Ingenuity? No.”
“Marvin!” Joe yelled from his work console.
“What!?” Marvin yelled back startled.
“We got a real situation here. The walls are closing in man. I can feel it. One solar flare and pop goes the weasel. I ain’t dying in this death trap of a septic tank.”
“Imbecilic.” Marvin growled. “No.”
“Huh?” Joe replied as he turned side to side looking at the walls nervously.
“Look lugnuts. We are on a spaceship that goes faster than light and can reach the end of the galaxy in a blink of an eye. You’re telling me that the engineers who designed such a vessel are going to short change the pride of the human fleet in the waste management area?”
“Well you never know Marv. There was that thing on the Chernobyl.”
“Comparing a core meltdown on a dilapidated ship to a crap tank explosion on this ship is beyond-” Marvin looked at Joe and decided not to deride him any further. He was his best friend on the ship, after all.
“Oh never mind.” And he went back to his crossword.
“So you think they jettison it out an airlock or something? Sounds ecologically unsound. Shit just floating around the galaxy. What if it hits a ship? Could be a real catastrophe. I can see the headlines now, Poop Hits Ship:Kills All Aboard.”
“Sounds like a real constipated issue.” Marvin smirked.
“I’m serious Marv. What if it did hit a ship?”
“If it is shot out of an airlock which I think it isn’t, it’s probably burned up in our warp wake. Nothing can survive going out into the warp stream. You know that.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“But if they don’t shoot it out an airlock then where do they keep it?”
“Probably recycle it somehow. They recycle everything else around here. Wouldn’t surprise me if they use it to make something else.” Marvin said while he agonized over his crossword puzzle.
“Recycle it?” Joe pondered. “You mean I might be wearing shit laced uniforms or sitting on shit cushioned seats?”
“Maybe even faeces lined computer board switches for that extra fiber strength.” Marvin grinned.
“Ha ha, not funny.” Joe said as he inspected his console and uniform.“Well they definitely do something with it. I just can’t think of what.”
Suddenly, a hologram of a chef from the kitchen staff projected into the room.
“Hey guys, Ron from kitchen speaking, just wanted to tell you about our special for today, Hash Brown Casserole. It came out spectacularly. So, anybody hungry?”
“Ignorance. Ignorance is bliss.”
by submission | Nov 16, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
I remember the day things started disappearing. I was driving into work listening to the news on the satellite radio. Astronomers had observed that a galaxy called MACS0647-JD could no longer be detected. It was one of the most distant objects known, over 13 billion light-years away. A cloud of dust or some such thing, it was speculated, had become interposed between Earth and MACS0647-JD. It made sense. Thirteen billion light-years is plenty of space for something to eclipse a galaxy. But that turned out to be only the beginning.
Over the following week, more astronomical objects started disappearing. There was no consistent pattern of location or distance that could be detected. A quasar billions of light-years from Earth vanished the same day two of Jupiter’s moons went missing.
“They’re gone! They’re gone!” my wife had screamed over my cell phone. I had the news pulled up on my computer at work. The “they” my wife was referring to were Portugal, France, and Spain. That area of southwestern Europe and everything and everyone in it had ceased to exist. There was no trace of the missing countries under the ocean and no signs of destruction. The sea and land now formed a coastline with the territory where France had bordered Europe as if that had always been the normal geography of the continent.
Science could provide no explanation let alone a remedy. The Andromeda galaxy winked out of existence. The planet Venus was there one moment and gone the next. A large section of the Midwest disappeared leaving the United States truncated. People were terrified, but civilization held together. Indeed, wars and disputes between nations came to a grinding halt in the face of the catastrophe as governments worked together as never before to find some way to deal with the existential nightmare.
Then, the Moon disappeared. That’s when civilization collapsed. Rioting broke out across what remained of an oddly abbreviated Earth with countries, mountain ranges, deserts, and seas missing, the expected gaps obliterated by the apposing sides of the wounds inexplicably abutting each other instantaneously. Somehow, even the disappearance of Earth’s own territory didn’t seem to affect what remained of the human race like the vanishing of the reassuring light in the night sky.
My wife and I have barricaded ourselves in our house. I have to fire a warning shot every few hours when someone tries to break in. We’ve had no electricity or running water for days. Too much of the power and water infrastructure gone for them to remain operable, I assume. We’ve broken apart our furniture and burned it in the fireplace to keep warm since the Sun vanished three days ago. She sits by the fire night and day — if those terms even mean anything in a sunless world — praying. And crying.
As for me, I find myself looking up through the skylight in the attic. I don’t know why. The stars and planets and galaxies are all gone. The skylight could be painted black and the view would be no different. But I keep going up there and looking out and wondering what we did to deserve this.
**********
“Ready for lunch?” asked the alien of his companion.
“Yeah. Just powering down my computer.”
“Weren’t you running some big sim application on that?”
“Yeah. Haven’t done anything with it for a really long time. Just left it up running. I really need to get a new computer. This one takes forever to close programs and power down.”
by Duncan Shields | Nov 15, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was a beautiful day for a ship launch.
These are the things I remember:
I remember the sun shining down out of a blue sky that arced from horizon to horizon over the beach with only a scattering of clouds above the water.
I was perched on the small hill about a mile away from the launch site with my mother. Her bright red hair was still full and lustrous but shot through with grey. She’d say to me that every grey hair was from a time I fell and hurt myself. That’s how much she loved me.
I remember her bringing her hand above her eyes in a salute to shield them from the sun. She was perched sidesaddle on her hip in a red dress. She’d tucked her heels up underneath her and was leaning on her other arm, her hair was teased by the wind. When I remember her, this is the image that comes up the most, her leaning into the breeze. As an adult, I can look at this memory objectively and see her not only as my mother, but as a woman. I can see how attractive she must have been.
She squinted, bringing a half-smile to her face.
In my memory, she looks out across towards the massive ship.
The ship was white with scooped shapes. It didn’t look aerodynamic but my mom told me that it wasn’t that kind of ship. It was a ‘long-range’ ship which meant that the science was different. It didn’t need to worry about drag and other wind-tunnel qualifications. It would ‘slip’ up and out from this plane of existence and then come back to this dimension at its destination. It wouldn’t take as long as the other way, she said. He’d be back soon.
When I asked her when daddy would be back, she just looked away from me, back up at the ship. I could see love there, but also a little resentment. My father, the astronaut, was going on this trip against my mother’s wishes. I’d heard them fighting at night when they thought I was asleep.
We sat there on our red-checkered blanket having a picnic at the launch. We were there with hundreds of other people. Red-necked sightseers, teenage couples, scientists, keen students, and the families of the other astronauts, all of us on blankets with picnics, ready to see the launch take place.
Ten. Nine. The numbers rang out from the loudspeakers in the distance. Our little radios shouted out the numbers as well, a half second before the sound from the launch pad got to us. It made an echo of the numbers. I remember feeling like I was in a dream.
My mother’s hand tightened on mine. I leaned up against her. I was eleven, old enough to be embarrassed by affectionate gestures from my parents but not old enough to do without them. I held onto her and we both watched the ship that held my father.
There was a clap of thunder and a ripple of imploding wind and the ship was gone.
That was sixty years ago. Their calculations were off. The ship came back this morning.
To everyone on the ship, they’d been gone for two months.
They were being briefed. My father was being told that my mother had died twenty years ago, ten years before my own wife. He was being told that I was in a wheelchair and that I had six grandkids.
I was about to meet my father. He was still thirty-six. I was looking forward to it.
by submission | Nov 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Trent Isaac
The man wrestled a pile of rods, plates, wires, lights, and fingers through the door and let it crash in a heap.
“Or there’s this one,” the man said as he swabbed his bald head with a towel.
Brennan scratched his arm through the frayed hole in his sweater as he compared the two robots. One was nearly seven feet tall. Its white plastic helmet and gloves gleamed, and its black body reflected bits and pieces of the robots on display around it. The second robot looked like a skeleton marionette that had been buried by an avalanche and left to rust and petrify. The man wrapped the second robot’s boney, copper arms around the waist of the nearby security robot to stand it up.
Brennan read the patch on the man’s uniform. “Johnny?”
Johnny looked up.
“Is he supposed to only have one leg?”
“Uh… no.” Johnny chuckled. “For the missing leg, I’ll drop this little guy’s price to 5,000 dollars.”
He patted the robot on the back and the metal man’s right eye popped out and shattered on the floor.
“Or if you want to leave here with absolutely no worries, you can take this specimen for just 3,000!” He motioned to the black and white giant. With a shrug of his shoulders, he added, “We overstocked.”
Brennan eyes rested on the limp marionette. The ding at the corner of the android’s mouth gave the bot a crooked grin. Brennan gripped the multi-tool in his pocket.
“Okay, I’ll take him.”
The man nodded and punched some numbers into the giant’s back. The robot whirred and its eyes flickered on.
“No, the one-legged one!”
###
“Brennan?” called a feeble voice.
“Yes, Grandma, look what I found!” he said as he rounded the corner into her bedroom. The robot followed, rolling on his modified foot. Brennan hoped his grandmother would think he had found the robot by the side of the road. His grandmother might not approve of him spending money this way, but she wouldn’t throw away something that still had use in it.
“Oh, Brennan, I don’t need that thing,” said his grandmother. She straightened her shoulders and looked at him from her chair. Lifting her arm, she pointed at him with her bone-like finger.
“Listen here,” she said. But a cough stopped her. To him, the cough sounded like a car backfiring. She swallowed, opened her mouth, and coughed again, and could not stop until she had drunken a glass of water.
“I’m going to be gone most of the day, now that I’m moving rubble for Mr. Fleischman’s company,” Brennan said quietly. “It’s a nice robot, Grandma.”
His grandmother looked the mechanical man over.
The metal stick figure tilted his head at her. Then the robot zipped across the floor and reached out his boney hand. His fingers clicked in their sockets as he stroked her shoulder. The android’s other hand took the glass she was holding and returned it to the stand. He lifted the pitcher of water and refilled the glass in slow, jerky motions.
The wrinkles on her face relaxed and she said, “Yes, I see that now.”
She closed her eyes and crossed her feet, her real foot sliding over the prosthetic one.
