by submission | Mar 14, 2014 | Story |
Author : Rachelle Shepherd
The streetlamps sputtered on, spilling buttery fluorescence on Broadway Street litter. Sparrow opened the kitchen cabinets where chrome rows of Midnight Oil hissed in the shadow.
“Another night, Sparrow?” He didn’t answer. He never talked anymore, only scribbled in his journal and chewed his teeth crooked on pull-tabs.
Midnight Oil. 100% pure energy info-tech, all natural human animal hormone. Each tiny can was polished aluminum, reflective down to the print. Circuitry wrapped its wires around brand logo and rim and vanished down into the belly of the can. If you took a penlight and peered past the pull-tab, you could see through the translucent hormone to where the circuitry disappeared into the darker depths of oil.
Street rumor said that the circuitry never ended, not on any can. Constant loop.
With a magnifying glass the flawless circuitry became fine line English. Words all crammed in one gut-wrenching punch of symptoms and side effects. Gigabyte after gigabyte of consequence raced its message down those wires. Always changing.
Sparrow had classic addiction. Addiction and a writer’s muse, one of Midnight Oil’s bastard prodigies. Midnight Oil Poetry! Drinkers beware: metaphor in every can.
Sparrow plucked one off the shelf, chugged it, staggered, tossed the waste. When he turned back to me he had the pull-tab between his teeth.
*
Another night. I began to dread it just as much as my flat-mate, a man grown gaunt.
“You can’t live off metal shavings and steroids,” I said. He grinned a grin of broken teeth and ragged tongue. He’d been gnawing that pink skin at the edges.
The streetlamps hummed and spilled out sunscreen puddles over Broadway Street stray cats.
Midnight Oil. He said it stung the first dozen times. I saw the blisters myself, the pockets of pus clustered around his lips. There was a callous on the inside of his middle finger by the end of the week and crumpled stationary crackled underfoot with every step. Some of those pages were only words, some sentences, some dark night dead-end poems. All projects of a wired mind. Sparrow had gone viral.
He stopped talking, sleeping, eating, paying rent, paying attention. But he always burned the Midnight Oil.
I had my cigarettes, Surgeon General, and I lit one. Sparrow stood at the kitchen cabinet, his army of chrome soldiers full attention.
Another pop and hiss, guzzle and gag, gasp.
*
I woke up one morning to sunshine streetlamps fighting city smog. Some days, there was real Sun out there, the bona fide all natural firefly in the sky. You could see it on the news, too, if you were scared to go outside.
Sparrow dead on the kitchen floor, a pull-tab in his teeth. The linoleum was hormone slick.
I peered down at his open, vacant eyes. Circuitry bobbed across his iris.
I rushed for my magnifying glass. I was back before the words were swallowed by the black hole of his pupil and flushed down the cords of optic nerve.
Penlight? Check.
I put a beam on them, trapped that fine line English with my glass eye. They struggled with the congealed pool of sticky blue, strangers to 100% all natural human animal death throes.
They read: symptoms and side effects.
by Julian Miles | Mar 13, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Have you ever heard bagpipes played properly?
No, not some five-dee render job. I mean by half a dozen three-hundred pound ballbreakers wearing armoured skirts and gravtac boots under their blades and slugthrowers. It’s terrifying. Makes your blood rise and your soul sing, then you realise that they’re not calling you, they’re skirling your end. Because behind those six madmen are a hundred more with less clothing and more weapons. And blue tattoos. Some of the bigger ones light up. You can see the knotworks writhe on the berserker’s arms as he brings a shockhammer down, blowing your mates arms off by driving his head down into his hips with one hit.
Why am I here to tell the story? Because that shockhammer blow covered me in my mates blood and guts. So I fell over and pretended to be dead.
Why am I back at the front? Because those berserkers have rolled the lines back so far, so fast that where I ran too is now the front line. Yeah, I know that stinks, but it’s the truth.
What am I going to do? As soon as the pipes start, I’m going to walk forward and stand there. As the pipers come over the hill, I’m going to throw my weapons away and sit down.
You? You do what you want. I’m just telling you so you don’t follow me forward and make them think I’m doing some heroic last charge crap.
After I sit down? I’m going to stay there until some blood- and tattoo- covered berserker offers me a smoke, a whisky and a chance to spend the rest of the war as a rock crusher on some planet where there isn’t enough atmosphere for bagpipes to make my soul cry.
by submission | Mar 12, 2014 | Story |
Author : chesterchatfield
I woke up one morning and found a small robot living on my leg. By the time I stumbled up to the bathroom, I could feel the little parasite burrowing, trying to get at my mind. After an hour, I’d become a passenger in my own body, watching this little creep run me around like a puppet.
It walked me down to a local mall and we bought a wristwatch, no one seeming to notice an alien presence behind my eyes. We hopped a bus, walked a bit more, and then buried the watch in a hole filled with tons of other trinkets, tools, and sheets of metal. I have no idea where we went because it avoided looking at any signs or landmarks the whole way. That treasure trove could be practically anywhere.
As the day wore on I felt the presence weaken, like it’s batteries were running down. By the time we returned to my apartment, I wrestled control back and the robot dropped off my leg, lying limply on the ground. It was about six inches long, metal plated like a cylindrical leech. I doubted it would be able to travel very far without a host.
Reaching over to gingerly poke it, I finally noticed a small notebook that had been tied around the thickest part, like a dog collar.
Inside were accounts from what I guess are all the other people it’s latched onto. The first dozen are in foreign languages I can’t read, but towards the end they’re English. Each person wrote their name, the date, and what the creature had them do. The list varied from cutting down trees to robbing a jewelry store. The most recent was dated twenty-five years earlier. Judging from the jumble of letters, numbers, and codes in one, I think some kind of research facility had it at one point. I guess they weren’t careful enough.
There was also a note that the thing had so far proved indestructible, but that it wasn’t a danger after it fell off. The woman who had it before me, Linda, had speculated for a page or two that it was building something. That it had been on earth for hundreds of years. She planned to leave it locked in a trunk in the attic space of her apartment building.
I dropped it off the pier, locked in a safe. It’ll escape eventually, but not for a while. And it won’t land on anyone while they sleep.
The creature tapped its bright pincers, interacting with a shipboard computer while its companion observed apathetically. On a trip of this length, watching the other often became their only entertainment.
“Wait,” the watcher suddenly clicked. “Go back.”
The other flipped back through the sensory images, landing on a cold metallic orb, full of energy.
“Reminds me of that build-helper I made. Remember? I was gonna teach it to repair the shuttle’s temporal navigator so I could spend time trading chem with that gorgeous piece of shell down at Carnite IV.”
They spent a moment in fond recollection. “Didn’t work out though. Hadn’t even attached limbs yet, gave it a list of parts and the damn thing just hopped ship to go find a new mineral base for the reactor.”
“What happened to it?”
“Either floatin’ around space or landed somewhere, I guess. Ha! Maybe it’ll find the materials to actually make a new reactor.” The creature dissolved into clacking laughter. “I never got around to teaching it the containment procedures! That thing was persistent. Probably end up blowin’ a small planet!”
by featured writer | Mar 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jay Knioum, Featured Writer
Is this Waterloo? This is Waterloo, isn’t it?
That was the question that sealed it for me. That bright day in Hyde Park, with the pigeons. It wasn’t a great feat to hide the Professor’s keys from him after that. The Apparatus, however, was another matter. Very hard to find good movers, especially in 1924. Bubble-wrap was a long time coming.
He came with me to the station, watched me watch the mules haul the crate aboard a flatcar. I’d catch up with it in Vienna, but not before a side trip.
I poured his tea as we steamed across the Channel, and often again on the train to Zurich. The Professor seemed lucid now and again, but he always came back to Waterloo. It was the horses. In his youth, his horse had been shot out from under him during the thick of the fighting. How he survived to get the Keys to the Apparatus, I still didn’t know. He didn’t like to talk about it.
He wouldn’t talk about it even now, after the centuries he had crisscrossed, the things he’d seen. I would ask him, when he was at peace, clear-minded, usually just before sleep and after a belt of brandy.
He would just smile. He’d touch my face, and ask about the horses.
We made Zurich. It broke my heart to hand him over to the nuns. One of them reminded him of his mother, and he spoke to her as such. God bless her, she took his weathered hand in hers and answered in kind.
Time catches up with us all, he used to say, no matter when it finds us. The first time he said that, we were moving ghostly pieces across a virtual chessboard some miles above the Earth, while a friendly automaton served us synthetic liqueur in crystal printed that very morning. He said it again in the light of a campfire, as the smell of sage filled our noses and the cattle stirred sleepily in the Texas twilight.
He’d always loved Texas. I left his spurs with the Sisters, in case he might remember them.
It breaks my heart that I couldn’t leave him in Orleans, but his great grandnephew would take the wrong side in the war to come.
We all meet our Waterloo.
by Desmond Hussey | Mar 10, 2014 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
It’s oily, amber light which finally penetrates the hazy atmosphere as the first forays of dawn dimly paint the coastal shoreline. Ook-Pak emerges from his dome-like tent and stretches his many limbs, shaking off sleep’s lethargic blanket. His four nostrils flare eagerly, inhaling a deep breath of fresh, methane-rich air.
With two primary appendages he straps on a utility belt adorned with various brushes, hammers, chisels and trowels, while secondary, chittinous arms perform morning ablutions to his slick, hairless body. The camp awakens slowly around him, but excitement about the work ahead is quite palpable, displayed by the camp’s lively banter and the quick-shifting hues of the large, wispy membranes fringing their necks.
“G’morn, Ook-Pak,” a sleepy-eyed novice croaks. “Fine solar period for a dig, no?”
Ook-Pak tips his short antennae in greeting as his neck-fringe flashes agreement. “May Utta be with us, Lik.”
“Is truth? We may find Those-Who-Came-Before?” Lik chitters eagerly.
“Pray it is so.”
Ook-Pak ignores his stomach’s demands and goes directly to the dig site a hundred grulls from the camp and, crouching at the bottom of the excavated pit, he studies the mysterious metal cap covering the entrance to the catacombs created by some long-extinct race.
It takes many hours for the crew to maneuver the chambered air-lock over the site and the rest of the solar period to chisel away the millennia-old growth of minerals and rust welding the portal closed. It isn’t until the silvery lunar disk is cresting the horizon with its missing chunk, like a bite out of a fresh harlack bulb, that Ook-Pak’s team is finally ready to crack the age-old seal to an era no eyes have looked upon for eons.
The crew is feverish with anticipation, so rather than wait until the next solar period, Ook-Pak orders the team to break out the bio-lamps and remove the cover.
The air-lock maintains the subterranean pressure near perfectly. As the heavy lid slides off with a grating clang, only a brief, sucking hiss emits from the depths below, as if a great lung inhales a long-awaited breath.
A rusted, far-reaching ladder, designed for a slightly larger being, vanishes after several grulls into gloomy darkness.
Accompanied by hovering bio-lamps and armed only with his belt of tools, Ook-Pak begins the long climb into the bowels of the underworld. Alone in the reverent silence, he prays to Utta that he may find the proof he is looking for buried beneath the ancient sands.
His entire career has led to this moment. If he could find evidence of the elusive race, Those-Who-Came-Before, lords who mastered the sciences long before his own species walked beneath the light of Utta, he could satisfy an age-old argument about the foundation of their own culture.
Ook-Pak’s studies have proven that the ancient world was very different. The atmosphere was once choked with oxygen and nitrogen, toxic to his kind, yet capable of sustaining an environment for a vast diversity of plant and animal life that fossil records demonstrate populated nearly every continent and ocean. But some global, mass extinction event, possibly a result of misused technology – as Ook-Pak suspects, changed the atmospheric chemistry of the planet, and paved the way for Utta’s People to rise to dominance.
Was it deliberate? Did this ancient culture commit some form of racial suicide? Did it happen over night, or was it a slow, agonizing death? Were they aware or ignorant? These questions echoed through Ook-Pak’s mind as he descended ever deeper into the dark mysteries of the past. If there were answers down there, he was determined to find them.
