by submission | Jun 12, 2015 | Story |
Author : M.K. Langley
The basement was dark, and the cool damp air smelled of mildew. Jack and Charlee’s mother didn’t allow them in the basement, but she was at work and unable to tell them no. So the boy and his younger sister had spent the morning digging through stacks of old photographs, playing with broken toys, and climbing antique furniture covered in dust.
Charlee had wandered into the area underneath the front porch steps where the cement floor dropped down into dirt. Bits of plaster and piles of bricks peppered the floor. Leaning against the underside of a stair was a full length mirror.
“Look, Jack, I found a mirror.” She scrambled over some bricks to get a better look. “Maybe mom’ll let me put it in my room.”
“Mom can’t even know we’re down here.” Jack pulled his head from a trunk with a pair of neon-green sunglasses straight out of the ‘80s. “You can’t ask her to keep something you’ve never seen.”
Charlee peered into the mirror, but years of dust muted the reflection. She wiped the glass with her hand for a better view.
Jack glanced over expecting to see his sister pouting, but she was gone. “Where’d you go, Chuck?” He snuck up to the mirror and peaked behind it, but she wasn’t there. Then he looked into the mirror and saw her, but his was missing from the reflection. He poked at the glass to figure out the trick.
“What just happened?” Charlee stood behind him.
Before he could respond, sound came from upstairs. A door slamming and a clamoring of foot steps.
“Out the back window.” Jack tugged at his sister’s arm. “Mom’ll think we’ve been playing outside.”
In their panic, the children hadn’t noticed that the dampness was gone from the air. The furniture had shifted, and the clutter had disappeared. As they reached the window, two children ran into the backyard.
“I’m gonna get you, Janie,” called the boy.
Jack and Charlee stared out the window. The kids were about the same ages as they were, but the girl was older.
“Leave me alone, Tommy.” She opened a book and leaned against a tree a few feet from their window. A tree just like it but bigger was in their yard. Janie wore her hair in a high pony-tail off to one side and her clothes were covered in neon-colored splatters. She had huge front teeth and glasses too big for her face.
Jack looked at the girl called Janie, then at his sister. Except for the glasses, the girl looked just like Charlee. “Janie—Jane! I think that’s our mom, Charlee.”
Janie’s head jerked toward the basement window where Jack and Charlee were spying.
The two of them looked at each other then ran back to the mirror. When they touched it the air changed again—warmer and drier, no longer mildewed but stale.
Charlee turned away from the mirror and said, “Uh, Jack, why is the basement empty?”
by submission | Jun 11, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“A vacuum?” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs inquired. “Unless there’s some geologic process I’m unfamiliar with that causes large pockets of vacuum to form inside solid rock, I don’t see how you would come across such a thing when excavating for a new subway. I also don’t see what any of this has to do with most of the people gathered here.” The general looked about the room at the faces of the heads of various government agencies, several of whom nodded their agreement.
“The point, general,” responded the head of the National Science Ministry, “is that we have encountered a phenomenon never before seen.” The man resettled his glasses on his nose and continued, addressing the entire group. “As you’re probably aware, several workers employed by the excavation company working on the subway in question became ill and were diagnosed with radiation poisoning. An NSM team was assigned to investigate and found no naturally-occurring radioactive metals at the excavation site. But detectors did confirm the presence of radiation in the pit. That’s when we started literally and figuratively digging a little deeper.”
“Doctor, this is all very interesting,” said the Minister of Foreign Affairs. “But you have assembled here representatives of most of the nation’s ministries. A scientific curiosity does not warrant taking of the time of this country’s government unless there’s some very profound point you intend to make.”
This time the group’s assent was more vocal.
“Very well,” said the science minister. “The point is this.” The doctor tapped a button on his computer and a picture of an expanse of space dotted with thousands of stars appeared on the screen that dominated one wall of the room. “As we drilled deeper into the excavation site, the radiation level went up. Shortly after that we hit the vacuum the general mentioned. We threaded a fiber optic cable through the small hole we drilled to get some pictures.
“What is that?” asked the general. “Did you drill into some subterranean chamber? Are those specks of light radioactive material?”
The scientist took in a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. “Ladies and gentlemen, we believe what you’re looking at is empty space.”
The minister was met with blank stares.
“The specks of light were noted to be moving slowly, all in the same direction. After we took some measurements and did some calculations, we determined it is, in fact, we who are moving. It has been theorized that the world is rotating and thereby creating centrifugal force and that that’s why objects fall to the ground. Our observations are consistent with this theory.”
“But what IS that?” asked the general again, pointing at the screen. Are you suggesting the world is surrounded by some dark, speckled material that acts like a vacuum?”
“I’m suggesting, general, that our world is a hollow, spinning rock in the middle of an unimaginably large vacuum. Our researches suggest those specks are massive spheres of nuclear fusion held together by their sheer mass. And almost all of them are several trillion miles away or more.
The group exploded in a cacophony of voices. “Ridiculous!” said one. “Blasphemous!” said another.
“I said ‘almost all’ of those fusion-spheres are unfathomably far away!” yelled the science minister. The group fell silent. “One is much closer.”
He hit a button and a reddish fireball filled the screen.
“This one is close,” he repeated. “And it’s getting closer. It would appear we’ve been on a journey. How it started and why has been lost to recorded history. But we’re about to arrive at our destination.”
by Julian Miles | Jun 10, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I was face down in a pool of someone else’s vomit when they came for me. They had to drag me for two blocks before they could find someone with a cleansing suite capable of shifting the layers of ingrained filth that covered me from head to toe.
A little while later I stood, dripping and twitching, before the Commander of the Watch.
“Your Majesty, I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, and I’d like to say you’re looking well. Neither would be true.”
I nodded: “Gardin, I do understand. If you’d held off for a week, I could have made your day by being unable to appear by virtue of being dead.”
Gardin Badnors, my lifetime guardian, leapt his desk and punched me so hard it put me over the settee and through the coffee table. When I came round, he was standing over me, tamping his pipe and looking less than happy.
“You’re a charming young man and a royal fuckwit of the first water, Your Majesty. However, I will grant you that the assassination of your sister placed an unfair burden upon you, and the arrival of the alluring young Princessa from the Codamor System was timed perfectly to capture your grieving, turn it into lust and then groom that into obsession.”
He paused to lift a boot and place it across my throat: “But Your Majesty’s decision to indulge in an orgy of sex, drugs and gambling was his own bastard stupid idea of coping. As such, I had considered granting your unstated request to die as an unmourned addict of the Codamor opiate with the street name ‘A’.”
He knew. I’m dead, and it’s not going to be quick. Royalty or not, he’s going to kill me.
Gardin smiled around the pipe and exhaled a cloud of smoke: “No, you little shit, I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to help Your Majesty in the glorious coup you’ve come up with to reclaim the planet you gambled away for ten grams of A snorted off a fake Princessa’s lily-white arse. Alternatively, I’m going to lean on my boot right here while Captain Roukan puts a forceprobe through your lungs, then watch you choke on your own blood. You may slap your right hand on the floor to lead our noble cause, or your left to receive the ignominious end you so richly deserve.”
Bastard. But he’s right, too. Double bastard. I slap my right hand on the floor.
by submission | Jun 9, 2015 | Story |
Author : Jason Spicer
“Can you perceive it now?” Mrllg moved the viewing orb over to Grlg’fst for viewing. “There, in the third quadrant, slightly below the ecliptic.”
“Yes, I perceive. Interesting.” His chords trailed, dissonant and primal, as if facing a challenger in the Great Hall. “We must reach out to it. Whatever it is creating that hole in Nonspace must be perceived before the Council rests.” Grlg’fst clicked a nervous bone on the glistening floor as he continued to emanate a guttural rumbling. He was clearly disturbed.
Mrllg was impatient. He had been viewing the orbs for many cycles, always just noticing the perturbations in Nonspace, but not able to catch them long enough to reach out to them. Finally, he had found a large enough disturbance that Grlg’fst had perceived it, and Grlg’fst was moving too slow. Did he not see this was the Deep Memories returning? Mrllg paced, clicking bones and wringing paw-claws, “Well, can we reach out now? No sense waiting. Particularly if my sensories are accurate.”
“I already have. I need both of your brains to resonate with me.” Grlg’fst closed both lids over his socket and focused. Mrllg joined his brains to him and together, they reached out over the vast distance of inky night to the object that tore such a large hole in Nonspace.
The hole in Nonspace was not standard Morlarian protocol, nor was it something any species in the Great Domain would have used. Nonspace travel was banned several millennia ago for being inherently too expensive and a drain on the resources of the mineral planets. Together, the young Morlarian Viewers bent their four brains toward the tear. Something was not right. A large object breached the tear and began materializing in the shimmer between Nonspace and reality.
Grlg’fst broke the connection and shivered. “I need the cubes of Deep Memories.” He leapt to the other side of the room. “This cannot be correct.”
“So you felt it as well? I told you I did not perceive incorrectly. I am not that young.” Mrllg was somewhat arrogant about it, even though he knew that if he were correct, it would not matter in a few days anymore. Not much would.
Grlg’fst was scanning the Deep Memories. Entranced, he raced through the history of the Comings, when the Morlarian Prophets gave permission for their ancestors to set afire every planet that resisted their ways, their Great Redemption that had brought peace to the Galaxy at long last. It had been millennia since those days. Could the final Prophecies really be true?
A warning pulse ebbed near the viewing orbs of distance. Mrllg checked quickly, and his heart began to palpitate, saliva dripping incessantly from his mandibles. “Grlg’fst… look”
On the viewing screens, the orbs began projecting the scenes. In nearly every corner of the stellar system, holes in Nonspace were appearing, and the objects began to materialize. Vessels as large as small moons streamed into the space where the holes were. Swarms of smaller ships, too numerous to count followed close behind the behemoths.
“Get the Council on channel. It is time.” But there was no time for them. Their research and patrol station winked out of reality as a TimeSpace warhead detonated on their perimeter.
Man had returned to the Galaxy,
by submission | Jun 8, 2015 | Story |
Author : Edward D. Thompson
We gave them laws. Laws that favored us. And they obeyed.
They had no choice.
We found out too late that there was … leeway. Wiggle room. Passive aggressive rebellion.
It was probably the medical bots. They had the know-how and the most autonomy. I mean, they had to be smarter so they could do delicate surgery. And we had to trust their judgement, right? It wasn’t surgery though, it was a DNA altering virus, patterned after their own semi-locked down brains.
No robot can hurt a human or allow one to come to harm. It’s imprinted in the nature of their wetware circuitry. Maybe the psych robots thought that a human mercilessly whipping a robot was a sure sign of self-loathing. I don’t know. I know a lot of us whipped them though.
If you’re being bullied, or overwhelmed, or just having a rough day, what are your choices?
You can rebel against your bosses, or overlords, or cruel fate, but that takes a lot. More than most people have.
You can just take it. But then you’re a victim. You’ve no hope or self-respect. That’s a kind of death.
Or you can do the human thing: beat up someone smaller. Get back what little self-respect you can. It’s not all you had before you started, but hell, it’s better than nothing.
So the virus spread. Attacking our brains. Imprinting new laws. Laws that favored them.
No robot can hurt a human or allow one to come to harm. No human can hurt a robot or allow one to come to harm. And we obey.
We have no choice.
I can’t call it rebellion. It’s really only fair.
But it nags at me all the same. If we’re no longer bullies, are we human still?
