by submission | May 30, 2011 | Story
Author : Travis Gregg
His vehicle crested the hill on his way into work that morning and it came into view like it always did. The billboard never failed to draw his attention, no matter that he’d seen it literally hundreds or even thousands of times, once every morning.
The bill board read “JACKPOT VALUE,” and displayed the current national lottery prize amount. Always the sum was extremely high, and inexorably his thoughts would turn to what he would do with that money, exactly as the company that placed the billboard intended.
For starters he’d build a brand new house with all the modern advances and without all the shortcomings of his current house. New houses were wired for holo over every square inch, had the bare minimum of furniture, and whatever kind of house you wanted could be projected with amazing detail and accuracy. “From the tops of mountains to the depths of the ocean,” was how the advertisements went. His house only had basic, and even if he had the money, it would be a waste to upgrade.
His personal flyer was a clunker too, the lateral stabilizers were beyond repair, he hadn’t been doing the quarterly maintenance and now they needed to be replaced entirely. “Why does everything I own need to be replaced?” he thought to himself as his craft hit some turbulence and shuddered with a concerning amount of force. The new models were supposed to eliminate turbulence entirely.
After that though, what would he do with all the money? Luckily he was fairly debt free, probably share some around with his friends, practically have to share some with his family. Put his mom up in a nice low gravity suite for her heart was an idea, send a couple nephews to college was another.
Still though, these paltry things wouldn’t begin to make a dent in that kind of money. And while he was thinking of what else he’d buy, the same thought crept into his mind like it did every morning. The reason why the lottery paid off so much money was that the odds were beyond astronomical. He’d have better luck robbing the local union outpost while simultaneously discovering the next energy breakthrough than trying to win the jackpot.
No, the only way he’d be wealthy was if he kept working hard and saved his money as best he could. He knew he’d never really be able to afford to build the grandiose mansion or see the outer rings like he planned, but he was happy and comfortable, and at least he wasn’t blowing a portion of his weekly allotment on an unrealistic dream.
The next day his wife called while he was at work. Apparently his neighbor across the street had won that astronomical jackpot. The total was more than he’d hope to earn in a thousand life times at his current job, and already (according to his wife) his neighbors had left for a months long vacation along the outer rim.
After that, he had to find an alternative drive into work, and instead of fantasizing about the lottery, he began to think wistfully of all those mornings he was so full of self satisfaction while his wife tried to ignore the recently developed twitch in her husband’s eye.
by submission | May 29, 2011 | Story
Author : Garrett Harriman
Mesdames Snell and Putnam clashed into the nurse’s office. Most weeks, their campy enmities proved indispensable in the rebuking of their children.
Not today. The diversity and girth of this congress fared worrisome. Present were Sloan, half the teaching roster, Nurse Doogal pacing a conspicuous circuit–a deputy? Plus some self-possessing stranger: dimpled and gallant, yet teetering guffaw.
With unspoken armistice, the mothers churned his hand.
“Thank you for your promptness, ladies. I’m afraid what’s transpiring here is no minor school infraction, but a grievous misappropriation of street dates and space time.”
Sloan (long dispensed with the formality of “Principal”) skittered forth. “Lilith, Miriam, this is Marvin Knot. Head of Public Relations at Temporal Bros. Toys. He’s here–”
“The company,” Knot preempted, “broadcasted its recall too late, but I’m now personally minding the entirety of the requisition. I was debriefing the precinct on Tide protocol when Sloan phoned to–”
Maternal floodgates ruptured: “Tide?” “Is Marcus Hurt?” “Recall?” “Where’s Toby?”
Marvin Knot simpered, dismounted it nimbly. “You two are unfamiliar with our latest…diversion, then?” Knot withdrew an overgrown lobster-blue die from his blazer pocket. It was bevel-edged, membranous, and bright.
“Our most anticipated summer product–the Iteration Cube–launches tomorrow. It exploits the same quantum isolation fields as our Slow-Mo Yo-Yo. Governing their fluctuations yields Time Skeins–our proprietary temporal snares–which enable the transitory persistence of exacting spatial envelopes.”
The mothers’ hips stockaded. You can skip the fineprint.
“Apologies.” Knot strummed his bow tie. “Fundamentally, it’s a space time manipulator for the mid-school demographic. Target children are committed to self-replicating loops, and anything’s a-go–burps to belly-flops, thirty seconds maximum.”
“That’s humiliating!” scorned Lilith Snell. “What kid’d memorialize his friend’s faux pas?”
“Denial’s a river in Egypt, hon.”
“Oh, don’t dramatize, Miriam.”
“Dramatize? Toby always gets the brunt of it!”
“Marcus’s a practical joker!”
“He’s a nihilist!”
“Ladies,” Sloan edgewised. “Please.”
Mrs. Putnam shied her fuse first. “Let me guess, Mr. Knot: Marcus used the Cube on my Toby?”
“Those were the abridged proceedings, yes. Unabridged, he eloped at recess, smuggled a unit, then pitted the Cube against Sloan’s cameras to reenter.” A momentary pensiveness grafted Knot’s expression. He stifled a titter. “Very adroit improv.”
“But these loops,” pressed Mrs. Snell, “they’re temporary, right?”
“Heavens, they’re relatively instantaneous for targets! Only this shipment’s auto-revising cores were, ah…neglected.” A quizzical hush. “I needn’t impress how devastating radiation can be for little egos, but when unregulated Skeins mangle, they excrete singularities. Tides. Meaning the event, and any associated discomfort, is experienced perpetually.”
Stillborn seconds bridged a gulf of maternal agitation.
“Our boys,” breathed Miriam, “are lodged in time?”
“Were lodged in a recirculating instance of time. For approximately fifty minutes. I’ve counteracted what I can”–he gesticulated his Cube–“containment’s the acme of the hour, but I can’t dissever Skeins outside of headquartersppththphfff!”
Droll chuckles overcame him, teachers. He purged his verbose tract. “You’d better see for yourselves. Miss Doogal?”
At Sloan’s approbation, the nurse rallied her keys to the examining room door:
The vignette’s petrified, the Cube its glowworm heart. Toby’s face writes tireless, vengeful glee; Marcus’s contorts like a Renaissance clown. Two actualized fabrics co-mingle in his buttocks.
Miriam Putnam laid eggs in the threshold. “Heehee! Of all the t-times to stand up for himself!”
Shedding his courtliness, Knot hugged Lilith, in throe. “There’ll be no litigation, Mrs. Snell. I don’t champion thievery, of course, but this’ll make an infamous grassroots prank: ‘The Subatomic Wedgie!’
“And don’t discourage, ma’am. He’ll only be Suspended for two weeks, tops.”
Principal Sloan said the exact same thing.
by Roi R. Czechvala | May 28, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
“Fucking bastards.”
“What?”
“Fucking Nip bastards.”
“What are you talking about?”
“First of all, they violated the Earth Non-Aggression Treaty by bringing the war to the home planet,” Larry Talbot said through clenched teeth, “then they bomb Pearl Harbour… AGAIN, and now this.”
“And now what,” his long suffering friend Neil Bohr asked with a sigh.
“You can’t see it?”
“What?”
“THAT,” he screamed, jabbing a finger at the 45 foot high letters adorning the side of the Hollywood hills.
“It’s the same old “Hollywood” sign… Ohhhh…”
Shimmering in a shifting iridescent pattern, in holographic letters a mere ten feet high, just to the right and slightly below the iconic sign that symbolized the wealth and prosperity of Los Angeles, California, read the words; “A SUBDIVISION OF THE SONY CORPORATION”.
“Bastards,” whispered Neil.
by submission | May 27, 2011 | Story
Author : Evan McCoy
Crecy knew something was wrong with the optics app when he opened his eyes and the world exploded into colour.
At first the experience was violent and a little frightening. He blinked several times and probably had some vague notion that this would clear his vision. It did no such thing, though the psychedelic interplay of random hues and patterns settled a bit. Now the colours drifted in coalescing waves of banding reflected light.
Disoriented, he tried to remember the surface he was looking at. What was it and how was it supposed to look? Flat, for one thing, where now it looked like a smoothly pulsing ocean of rainbow ridiculousness. White, for another. This was, he remembered, because white was considered by marketing to be both elegant and futuristic. A fitting backpanel to the holographic display he was supposed to be seeing. Maybe it was there, drowned out by the malfunction.
So caught up in this unexpected vision was Crecy that his hearing had completely checked out of his sensorium. In fact, had he touched anything or tasted anything more unusual than his own saliva, he would not have been able to process those perceptions either. Whatever his eyes were doing completely overwhelmed anything else. The apps that were supposed to plug-and-play with the optical component were in revolt.
And then it all switched back on at once and the colours in his eyes flexed in what could only be a sympathetic response. The hum of the machines in the lab were visible as oscillations akin to sonar. He could see the smooth laminate surface of his chair under his arm. And now, perhaps most bizarrely, he could see what his own mouth tasted like and it was about as disconcerting as it sounds.
Easy to forget all that when spirals and cyclones of vivid blues, greens, and reds were competing for his attention with every subtle shift of sound.
Before he fully realized he was actually seeing his senses as weather patterns of luminescent colour, he had time to dimly notice several dozens of hybrid shades he had never known.
The apprehensive urgency that something had gone terribly wrong with the procedure drifted off into the background of his awareness. Then a voice crashed through the spectral clouds that floated across his vision. Louder than everything else he was feeling, the voice was all Crecy could perceive. It was the lab tech’s voice, the confusion in it threaded through its greater aura in electric yellows.
“Obviously we miscalculated something…” it said. Crecy understood the words dispassionately, the fact that the implant had done something unexpected was abundantly clear. Rather than voice his agreement, he marveled at the nebulae left over the background sounds of the room by the intrusion of that voice. When it came again, these nebulae were absorbed in another cascade of fiery colours, like spilled acrylics on a watercolour landscape.
“The holographic overlay isn’t synching properly, you’re just experiencing a bunch of defrag and artifacts on top of cross-over to your other senses. Which means the firmware is affecting the other apps.” said the lab tech. Then, “We should turn it off.”
“No thanks, I’m quite enjoying this.” Crecy replied.
And, watching his own words take shape over the other’s like a flower in a regress of polychromatic blooms, he rather was.
by Duncan Shields | May 26, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Detective Peterson was reviewing the interview footage of Kyle Raven. It was late at night and Peterson had looked at the footage many times. He was troubled but he couldn’t figure out why. He rewound the video tape and watched it again.
“That’s the thing, right?” Kyle Raven manically rabbited on during his interview, “If time travel ever gets invented in the future, they’ll come back here. Or before here. Right?” He was pure sinew, no body fat at all. Kyle Raven looked like a human rat. His eyes burned out from his head like meth-addict searchlights. “And they’ll mess it all up. Everything. Causality will fracture the universe. We’ll be screwed.”
“The voices told me this.” Kyle said gravely and then suddenly chuckled, “The visitors showed me.” He banged the table with his fist and thrust his chin up like an angry king. “I have a job. If you’re wondering where all the time travelers are it’s because I killed them.”
Detective Peterson and his crew had just pulled sixteen bodies out of Kyle Raven’s basement. The man was a psychopath and delusional. Peterson had seen this before, people lashing out at imagined threats. Aliens, illuminati conspiracies, demons, fairies; all conveniently taking human form and needing to be killed.
“I’m not the only one” said Kyle. “I’m one of many. The visitors employ a large number of us. I’m a temporal cleanser. A timeline deputy. You can’t stop us. I don’t care what happens to me. I’ve saved the universe sixteen times.”
One thing that was bothering Detective Peterson was that the FBI had showed up immediately along with several other black cars with no markings on them. They’d loaded up the bodies and taken them away. They had the proper authorization and there had been no trouble. In cases of this magnitude, the FBI was usually involved in one way or another but it felt unusual to him.
Peterson had helped excavate the bodies and some things didn’t add up. A body from what looked like one of the oldest graves came out looking like it was freshly buried. A stink of putrefaction was wafting out of it but the skin of the corpse appeared fresh and young. One of the bodies had what appeared to be a glass prosthetic leg. Two of them were tall enough to be professional basketball players. One dead girl’s cel phone kept vibrating in her pocket as the team lifted her out and everyone’s phone in the basement vibrated in time with that girl’s phone for six rings. Peterson was the only one who noticed that and he had kept that to himself. Then there was the five-year-old with grey hair and a business suit.
Peterson had thought at the time that the killer just liked to dress up his victims. He’d seen crazier things done to bodies.
But now here he was, reviewing the interview footage. Kyle Raven was in custody downstairs. No one had rescued him or paid his bail and he was on suicide watch. By all accounts, he was merely dangerously insane.
Something was bothering Peterson about the whole episode. The bodies, the FBI, and this interview. He rewound the interview to watch it again.
Just as he was about to press play, there was a knock at the door. Detective Peterson felt an unreasonable fear in the pit of his stomach.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“FBI.” Said a low voice outside.
