by Julian Miles | Jun 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Chandra Fourteen is an archaeological mystery. Not regarding its lost civilisation, nor the history of that civilisation. What everyone who encounters it becomes desperate to answer is why they did what they did.
Imagine a society at a pinnacle only dreamt of by man. Disease all-but banished, global peace established, a society turning itself toward furtherance of the physical, philosophical and spiritual sciences. A bright, beautiful world, geologically stabilised by a marvellous series of vents and pressor systems – that we still don’t understand – around their equivalents of the ‘Ring of Fire’.
That society has over ten thousand years of recorded history, showing parellels with humanity that cease when they nearly destroyed themselves in a global biowarfare holocaust. From that point it was as if they had gained something from the event that man has yet to realise. If the records found are complete, they never made war after that near-apocalypse.
Take time to mentally voyage across a world resembling the finest of climes that Earth has to offer, from sub tropical to frozen poles. See the artificial volcanoes that stabilise the world and allow a measure of weather control.
Now turn your gaze eastward, looking out across a gigantic ocean, seeing the peaks of the volcanoes like fenceposts stretching for hundreds of miles, then pause as you see that one of the ‘fenceposts’ has grown.
Impossibly tall, the vent installation at the centre of their greatest ocean stretches into orbit, a feat of engineering that has human engineers scanning it with a mix of glee, awe and despair.
How long it took to accomplish that feat is unknown. What followed took a lot longer, was far more difficult and infinitely more puzzling. This enlightened, advanced civilisation channelled it’s energies into putting the magma from the planet’s core into orbit.
It is insane to see this hollow sphere of barely ten-kilometre thick pumice, wrapped about a framework of a ceramic/metallic alloy that is still deemed impossible by our science. That sphere encases a dead planet, dead in a way never before encountered. They shut out the sun and, as far as can be ascertained, waited for one of the various lingering deaths to claim them. A monstrous, planetary suicide.
Professors Eppes and Rhodensteen have only one tenuous explanation, which is causing an uproar that looks to increase before it settles. It is based upon the one inscription on the atmosphere-piercing spire. At the top, plainly etched after the insane pyrospire ceased belching magma, is and inscription that translates as ‘We have become polluted/unclean’. From that, the learned Professors have drawn a conclusion: the society fell foul of mass delusion prompted by religious dogma.
When everyone has stopped screaming at each other, maybe we can return to looking for the truth – be it heretofore unexpected reason, or sad proof.
by submission | May 31, 2015 | Story |
Author : Page Turner
The plastic cover Nadia had snapped onto the mattress earlier crinkled as she sat down. Lazily, she stretched out on her bed and picked up the remote. Click. Car racing, sit com, cable cooking show. Informercial, infomercial, informercial. Golf. Infomercial. Nice little exercise machine though. It was a shame she was so in shape.
She watched as a young woman with outdated spangly earrings tried to sell her a white blouse she called “simply marvelous.” Give me a break, Nadia thought. Who says marvelous anymore? Turning off the TV, she picked up the phone, a big heavy relic she kept around because she loved the weight of the receiver in her hand.
“Hello.” She had to hand it to him. Not everyone could get it on the first ring every time.
“Hello, Isaac.” She let her voice sit for a moment, knowing he would recognize it.
“Geez, Nadia, it’s freezing over here… what the hell did you do?”
She smiled. “Oh, just a little something. Don’t you worry about that… I have more important things I’d like to talk about.”
“No,” he said. “You listen to me! I want the heat back on soon or I’ll –”
“What’s that, honey?” she said, raising her voice .”I’ll have to turn down the furnace so I can hear you.” She dropped the phone onto the handset.
Three seconds later, the phone started to ring. Nadia looked back at it. Sighing, she pointed at the phone with her finger. Closing her eyes, she imagined the explosion. When she opened them again, the phone burst into flames. With the level-headed stare she gave it, the fire went right out, leaving the phone completely unscathed.
There, she thought to herself. He won’t be calling again. Human males are such pests.
by submission | May 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Emily Stupar
“I know it’s not glamorous, baby. But someone’s got to fill out the paperwork, and you’ve got the best handwriting.”
Stephanie looks up at him from the couch, her face neutral. “I’ll do it, but you know what it’s gonna cost you.”
Gil nods. “Fine, fine, fine. I’ll feed the damn baby.”
He wanders into the kitchen and hits the switch for the flickering light. On top of the tiny refrigerator sits a tin overflowing with plastic clips, rubber bands, and empty lighters. Gil dumps the entire thing onto the counter top to find the patch he’s looking for.
A minute later he bounds back past Stephanie and down the apartment’s only hallway. He returns with an infant held triumphantly in the air. “How are you, baby boy? Ready for some lunch? You are!”
Through the feeding, cooing, playing, and eventual luring of the child to sleep, Stephanie remains impassive on the couch, dutifully completing the monthly Department of Emotional Services form.
Gil returns and collapses on the couch next to her, peeling the spent patch from his forearm. The color fades from his cheeks and the lopsided smile loses all its warmth, hanging dead and misplaced for a beat after the emotion dries up.
“Baby’s asleep.”
Stephanie responds with a grunt. Gil stares in silence at the wall until she plops the forms and pen down. “They’re done.”
“Great. What time did you say Rondo’s coming?”
“Half hour.”
An hour later there comes a knock on the door and Rondo lets himself in. He spreads his arms wide, practically bouncing around the room and speaking so fast his words blend together. “Hey GilSteph! SorrI’mlate I just had to, yaknow – Well I got somegoodstuff and I was droppinoff and then I remembered I promised! You gottatrythis, man!”
They sit still and pliable on the couch while he produces a pair of patches and slaps them onto their forearms. Stephanie vaults out of her seat.
“It’s cool, Rondo, don’t worry about it. Wow, I dunno the last time I had such good Happy stuff. Must be selling like crazy, huh?”
Gil wraps an arm around her waist. “Oh, of course, I bet it is. Wow, really great, we weren’t expecting anything good until after we get our papers in. Just let me know if you need me to take some off your hands.”
Rondo laughs and makes himself comfortable on the couch, running through a few non sequitur stories of clients and run-ins with the cops. The patches are just starting to wear off by the time he springs out the door: a miniature whirlwind leaving destruction and a terrifying silence in his wake.
Stephanie and Gil curl into each other on the couch as the replacement emotion drains slowly out of their systems. Tomorrow one of them will take the completed paperwork to the Department of Emotional Services and receive a new stockpile of the essentials: love, nurturing, anxiety, and, since the baby’s birthday is coming up, a bit of state-sanctioned excitement.
Drifting to sleep next to Stephanie, residual remnants of Gil’s fatherly instincts ghost through his veins. Outside the window, a cat yowls with a sound like a distressed infant and he fidgets but doesn’t wake.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 29, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tamis woke under the heat of the mid morning sun, the ocean reaching tentative tendrils up the smooth sand to lick at his feet. The last evening was a grey cloud, but he’d evidently passed out on the beach again. Levering up on one elbow, he followed the beach-line unbroken to the horizon, then pushed up into a sitting position and turning, scanned to the horizon on his other side. Nothing to see, apparently nobody up yet.
Last night…
A fragment of a song flitted through his mind, and he latched onto it, pushing at its edges to try and expose the entire tune. There was something familiar, but without context…
The girl breezed by in the periphery of his mind’s eye, but as he reached for the memory it dissolved, like a chalk drawing in the rain.
On the sand he’d absently scratched the crude outline of a heart, and the letter ‘T’.
She must be here somewhere.
Climbing to his feet he began to walk along the shoreline, the waves still reaching for him and he staying just beyond their touch, taunting the massive body of water. ‘You can want me, but you can’t have me.’
The beach gave way on one side to a thick expanse of jungle, trees reaching skyward choked at their bases by vines and bushes peppered with brightly coloured flowers. Birds chattered to each other unseen, and occasionally something big would breach out in the open water. Close to the shore schools of needlefish darted towards the shore and back again, a glittering mass of light-ribbons moving as one just beneath the surface.
He passed an almost familiar Victorian mansion set back in the greenery and covered with plant-life, it’s architect long forgotten and the jungle slowly reclaiming it. The structure filled him with a nagging unease that he could neither shake nor coax out in to the light over the next hour of walking.
From the corner of his eye he saw her again, tanned skin wrapped in red tropical printed silk, but as he turned to look she had disappeared into the green. A fist closed on his heart and his stomach lurched, he had to find her, had to have her again… Again?
In the sand at his feet was the crude outline of a heart, the letter ‘T’ scratched inside.
Had he been walking that long? Was the island that small? He looked again, slowly turning, following the beach to the horizon in both directions.
Not an island. A loop. A construct.
His mind raced as he started walking again, consciously willing his heart-rate to remain neutral, his pace natural. If he was jacked in someone would be monitoring his vitals and he needed to exploit the relative freedom the unpopulated beach afforded him while it lasted.
Venturing closer to the water, he let the cool ocean wash over his feet as he walked, the schools of needlefish parting and swimming past him seemingly unconcerned by his presence, but not oblivious to it.
Stopping, he dropped to his hands and knees in the sand and dug a hole half a meter across, forming a berm with the wet sand around its edges. The hole filled from the water beneath, and once it was complete he busied himself coaxing the slender fish towards him then flipping them out of the ocean and into the pool. Having trapped enough, he sorted the construct’s predictably sized simulacra, small, medium and large, and returned all but three of the largest and half a dozen of the smallest back into the ocean. The remaining fish he pinned gently to the bottom of the pool with one finger, watching his print burn into their scaly skin. He could affect the programming of insignificant things, he’d spent enough time in virtual and coding constructs to do that, but he would need to be very careful. He sequenced them, the short ones one through three, and seven through nine, and the long ones four through six, then busied himself for a while digging a trench from the pool back out to the open water.
When the fish had all escaped, he struck off towards the jungle and the red dressed woman he knew he was expected to find, but must be careful not to. Whatever she was, whatever piece of knowledge she represented, it must remain out of his reach, and thus the reach of his interrogators until his message arrived and a trace negotiated back to him.
The song fragment raised itself again, and he pushed it aside, humming instead a Gaelic tune he’d practiced for such an eventuality.
It was a song he could lose himself in for days.
by submission | May 28, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“I’m having to push the engines a lot harder than expected. The density and currents at this depth are both greater than we predicted,” said Dr. Ngozi Adeyemi as she piloted the Jules Verne over the ocean floor on Titan.
“Mohammed can reel you up if you get into trouble,” said the captain over the radio of the UAS Mandela in orbit around the Saturnian moon.
Ngozi tried cutting back on the submersible’s engines. She was afraid the turbulence they generated would scare away the elongated, tubular creatures that swam through the liquid methane sea that was the Kraken Mare.
“Are you going to try bring back a live specimen?” asked the captain.
“I’m going to try. But I’ll need to be very careful to–”
Her words were cut off by the screech of an alarm.
“Ngozi, what’s happened?” asked Mohammed over the radio from the landing craft. His hands tensed on the winch controls.
“Engines aren’t responding. I think the sub has drifted into a trench.”
Ngozi watched as the depth gauge indicated her small vehicle was dropping deeper into the hydrocarbon ocean. Simultaneously, the readout on the pressure gauge was going up. A low hum started to fill the submersible. It slowly rose in pitch. Structural fatigue.
“Pull her up, Mohammed!” ordered the captain.
“I’m trying, sir. Getting a lot of resistance.” He cursed in Arabic.
Ngozi kept trying to restart the submersible’s engines. She wasn’t concerned about her own safety. Her fear was that if her vessel lost structural integrity, the atmosphere inside it, as well as her own body, might contaminate the Kraken Mare’s ecosystem.
Suddenly, the pressure gauge starting moving down. She checked the depth indicator. She was ascending. As she was about to radio her thanks to Mohammed, she noticed something outside the vessel. Through the porthole windows, she saw thousands of the tubular Titan eels surrounding the Jules Verne. The creatures were furiously beating the umbrella-like hoods they used for locomotion down toward the sea floor, pushing against the underside of the submarine. Their collective effort, in combination with the lander’s winch, soon had the craft breaking the methane sea’s surface. An hour later, Ngozi was inside the landing craft with Mohammed, drinking a cup of strong coffee.
“There were thin filaments wrapped around the ship’s propellers,” Ngozi was saying to the captain. “Some sort of Titanian seaweed. We’ll need to look the sub over really well, but I think she’ll be seaworthy in a day or two.”
“No one’s going back down until and unless we get clearance from mission control,” said the captain. I’ve sent a message to Khartoum informing them of the situation. Any idea how the alien creatures knew you were in trouble and why they helped?”
“They might have been exhibiting altruistic behavior. On Earth, dolphins have been saving drowning humans at least since the ancient Greeks. No one knows why. Of course, the Titan creatures may have been collectively repelling what they saw as an invader. We simply need to study them a lot more closely.”
“I’ll try to convince Khartoum to authorize another dive,” said the captain.
Ngozi looked out at the Kraken Mare through the lander’s windows. The surface of the sea of liquid alkane was so placid it could have been mistaken for solid ground. “Suit up, Mohammed,” she said at last. “Let’s get the Jules Verne ready for another dive.”
