by Julian Miles | Dec 19, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The lights reflect from the gleaming chrome and glossy Union Jacks on the lines of matt black all-terrain cars. Typical over-indulgence: four-wheel drive is hardly necessary to drive down a thirty-mile, two-lane strip of tarmac.
They sent me down ten days before it all went to hell, not because they thought I was worth saving, but because I was the mechanic. They wanted their fleet of getaway vehicles ready to go.
I had just finished servicing the one-hundred and twentieth car, making sure it’s batteries were charged from the reactor far below, its petrol engine was functioning and its heated leather seats were perfectly aligned. The onboard computer was fully up and running too. I was doing my last check by lying in the fully reclined rear seat and playing solitaire on screen when I felt a tremor. Then eight more.
I jogged down the line of vehicles to the master board. As I hit the ‘prepare’ button, I saw the lights flash on the platform of the evacuation line. Minutes later, as I covered the other duties that a team of eight should have been here to do, a single four-unit train whistled in and came to a standstill. The doors remained closed, each with the hackle-raising red glow of a contamination light above it.
After five minutes, I dared to go up onto the carpet of the platform and investigate. Inside the first carriage the floor was covered in sludge. It soaked the thousand-pound suits and lapped against the briefcases locked to skeletal wrists. The government and their favourites were chunky soup.
The vomiting fit passed and I went along the carriages, looking for any signs of life. I couldn’t have got in, even if I wanted to. The override codes for the doors were above my clearance.
In the last carriage, a single man sat by the window, dried blood under his nose, ears and mouth. He looked at me and shouted, blood flecking the glass.
“Can you get me out?”
I shook my head.
He smiled. “Can’t or won’t?”
I shouted back. “I don’t have the codes.”
He nodded. “Anyone else make it?”
I shook my head again.
“Guess you’re it, then. What section are you with?”
“Secure vehicles, engineering unit four.”
He laughed; more blood on the window. “Typical. A mechanic is the only one we save.”
With one hand, he wrote a sequence of numbers and letters on the glass.
“That’s the access code. Select ‘untrained’ from the menu and the system will run in idiot mode.”
With that, he coughed hard and most of his face came off. I backed away quickly and sprinted to the main board. The code got me a lot of functions that the ‘idiot mode’ helped me with. I sent the train back out into the tunnel, then retracted the rail and closed the steel and cement iris doors. Straight away I fired up a car and headed for the sanctuary.
After six miles the downward slope of the road ended in a tunnel-shaped lake of still, dark water. So I drove back.
I’ve got a hundred and twenty cars, each stocked to keep six people alive for a month. I have access to thousands of books, films, games and music tracks, but it is a closed system with no access to the outside – that was available from the sanctuary; this was just a stopover.
Once a week I play thrash metal really loud for as long as I can stand it. Hopefully someone will hear before I die of old age or go insane.
by submission | Dec 18, 2013 | Story |
Author : Aaron Koelker
The first note, neatly folded into squares, appeared a short ways off the park path where I enjoyed my evening walks. Had I not spotted the strange rippling effect, like a vertical pane of crystal clear water broken by a gentle leaf cast down from the tree of time, I would’ve never seen it. I wouldn’t have hunched my shoulders against the autumn chill and left the path; have never known she would exist. I picked it from the grass and unfolded it with cold fingers, frosted breath screening the neat handwriting.
To anyone who finds this, kindly write your name and the date in the space below. Then return this message to the EXACT spot you found it, or as best you can. It is very important to us, and will be much appreciated.
I thought it a joke at first, or some student’s social experiment. Did they assume I’d have a pen? I did, though. I had written out a check to my psychiatrist earlier that night.
Walter Kinsley. 11/29/2013.
I folded the note back into the same little squares in which I’d found it and lay it back on the grass, more or less where it had been. Then I returned to the path and waited a moment, wondering if whoever had put it there would run to retrieve it.
Instead the ripple returned, though now directly before me and leaving little doubt as to its existence, and the note vanished. I was bewildered, suddenly exhausted, and decided I would need to see my psychiatrist again sooner rather than later.
The next evening, while walking the same route at roughly the same time, I found the second note much like the first. I snatched it up and found the same handwriting; the same message. Below that was an addition.
If this is Walter, then hello again! And thanks for your help!
I replied.
Who are you?
The next night I found a third note, though this time I waited an hour for it, alone and shivering.
My name is Claire…
She told me she was from the future, at a time when dozens of private parties raced to produce reliable time travel, the goal being to send a human there and back in one piece. She told me that the notes really helped the project; eliminated bugs, honed the data, perfected the art.
And thus began our strange relationship, with hundreds of messages to follow, growing progressively longer until it was several papers folded together appearing each night. I went along, all the while surprised at how calmly I handled it. Quite unlike me.
When we ran out of professional topics, we shared our interests. I said I liked 90’s rock. She liked the Oldies. Turned out they were the same. We shared our lives, our hopes, our dreams. At first for the sake of science, of course, but I couldn’t help falling for her. Hard. I figured she liked me too, since the notes continued even after she told me that phase of the project had ended.
She finally wrote.
Talk about long distance, huh?
The longest distance.
Of course, my psychiatrist thinks I’m completely bonkers. He’s changed my meds a dozen times, though I know I’m fine. I don’t even feel like I need them anymore. The anxiety, the depression; both gone.
She wants to volunteer as the first human through the ripple, and I’ll be waiting. Waiting for her to make that long distance through time and space feel so incredibly small.
by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Lucas Three sat in the coffee shop long after she left, long after the people that had watched the scene play out had moved on. He sat for hours after she’d calmly, mercilessly ended their three year relationship with a calculated precision of language that even he couldn’t have delivered more succinctly.
“This has been fun, really, it’s been fantastic, but you knew this was never going to last.” She didn’t touch her latte, which was never a good sign.
“You’re never going to get old, and I’m going to age out and die. At some point you’re going to leave me for someone younger, and by then I’ll be too old to find anyone to love me and I’ll simply die alone.” Her hands flew about the space in front of her as she spoke. He often wondered if she were forced to keep her hands in her pockets, would she be able to speak at all? He smiled at that thought, and the smiling caused him pain.
“Already my friends find you ‘quaint’, and your friends look upon me as some kind of lesser thing. Janson Four called me a relic. A relic? I’m twenty nine years old, I’m not a god damned relic.” She raised her cup and put it back down without drinking. “What are they going to be saying about me at fifty nine? Seventy nine? Am I to be a sideshow freak at your social events? I’m sorry. I’m not going to put myself in that position. You knew this day was going to come, and it has. I’ve had my things moved out of the apartment this morning, you can have access revoked at your convenience, I won’t be coming back.”
She’d risen at that point, and suddenly aware that her unintentionally raised voice had turned heads and sparked a series of whispered conversations, she softened visibly, shoulders dropping, eyes losing their searing glare of purpose to tear up at the edges in a haze of uncertainty.
“Listen Lucas, I’m sorry. I really am. I’ve loved you, I still do love you,” her voice broke, “but I can’t go on loving you, I have to go.”
She made it to the door before she turned again.
“Goodbye” was all she said, and then she was gone.
When the coffee shop proprietor none to subtly turned off the lights and motioned to the closed sign by the door, Lucas stepped out in the nighttime air. She had been the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, a bright light in a sea of grey, and she was gone. Were he to have a heart, it would have been breaking, and as much as he knew he wasn’t built to feel what he was feeling, the thoughts and emotional response racing through his head were too much for him to take. If he didn’t do something, he feared he would break completely.
On the pier, listening to the waves shushing the shoreline, he overrode the safeties and did a search of his memories, collecting every single moment they’d shared together into an array, and without a second thought iterated through the batch and deleted them all.
When the process completed, he felt a strange sense of emptiness, but the anxiety had dissipated.
As he turned, he saw her, perhaps the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. They walked towards each other, and he could see that she’d been crying, her face streaked and makeup spoiled. “How quaint” he thought out loud, and she stopped, her eyes searching his.
“Lucas,” she spoke as he passed, “Lucas,” her voice almost pleading, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to live without you.”
As he reached the end of the pier, the strange and beautiful woman’s voice trailed off behind him, and he wondered who her words were for.
He turned the corner past the coffee shop he haunted daily, and stumbled, mind racing, mental and emotional processes run amok for no discernable reason. He’d have sworn, if he’d had a heart and ever allowed someone inside it, this is what it would feel like were it to be broken.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 16, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Yes, the aliens were invasive. Savagely invasive. But how could we blame them? We were a treasure trove to them.
The aliens had no name of their own, you see. As a warrior race, they let the planets they invaded name them. As they took planet after planet and civilization after civilization, they collected names. They were up to one hundred and sixty four.
Unpronounceable names screaming forth from terrified beaks, mental picture collages from psychic races, bursts of scent from pheromone speakers, they were all collected in their databank.
If a planet had no sentience, the aliens moved on. Slaughtering animals that could not name them held no interest.
And this is why Earth was like a rainbow of temptation to them.
With over 6900 languages on Earth, the aliens could increase their name count (and thereby their reputation) by factors of ten. And that didn’t even include slang or scientific definitions.
They took their time, making sure to take at least one speaker of each language to record their names for posterity while they laid waste to us.
It was fascinating for us to find out that the way we split and diverged our languages was unique. Most alien civilizations leaned towards a common language but we didn’t. What a strange thing to find out on the eve of our doom.
They didn’t destroy the forests or the oceans. They only targeted the cities and the towns.
As a reward for our staggering bounty of names, they left enough of us to start another stable gene base with the promise that they would be back in another ten thousand years to do it all over again after we’d evolved and split and developed new languages.
There are a hundred thousand of us now. They picked us all up and dropped us in Indonesia where it’s hot most of the time. We’ve started having as many babies as possible and doing our utmost to survive and keep each other safe.
Earth is reclaiming the ruined cities. The stink of human death is dissipating on the wind. In time the animals will multiply faster than we can eat them and the oceans will fill back up with fish.
Although this is the worst chapter of human history, or maybe even the end of it as we have no way to record our findings now other than scratching on bark or painting on cave walls, it sometimes feels as if we are in a new Eden.
I am thirty-two years old. I am on a beach in this hot country. The sun is going down. I can smell the boar our party killed cooking on the dinner fire. Sixty-three women are having babies in the next few months. We are by necessity polygamous to increase diversity for strength. We have no shame at nudity and we must not tolerate jealousy.
We’ve painted pictures of the aliens on any available surface as a warning to future generations. We are struggling to maintain one language among us but we are from all over the world. It’s hard. But we’re trying harder than humanity has ever tried to speak one language to each other so we can all understand. We are one tribe now.
I cannot bring myself to thank the aliens. My own family and all of my friends were killed. I am the only person from my city left alive.
But sometimes in moments like this sunset, I feel something like gratitude in my chest and it makes me feel conflicted inside.
I turn away from the sunset and go to eat.
by submission | Dec 15, 2013 | Story |
Author : Andrew Hollis
The manual had been totally inadequate. For a start the Chinglish translation was hopelessly out of date, there were archaic digiverbs in it that must have been superseded at least three authorisations ago.
Of course flight inexperience would be no excuse, especially when explaining how a Mastodon runner had ended up fur-balled across the front skid!
But if he stopped at a detox point on his way back to the Arc he could hose off the mess and concoct some story about pranging a floater. Tell the dispatcher it was a false trace, no runner found. Then on the return trip his ship had smacked into a discarded fuel pod. He pulled some hair from the twisted skid; shit, with floaters scattered all over the place it’s a believable excuse.
The Waxer buzzed in his ear, “three zero, snoozed the Masto yet?”
He winced at the static fuzzing across his eardrum, “Nope, it was a false trace, nothing there but prefabs and blowflies”.
“The trace looked strong, did you ask around?”
Sure he’d spoken to the settlers, they were happy to carve up the carcass and share it out, no questions asked. It made a change from blowing nosebags of disgusting Nutrinow.
‘Yeh I spoke to the land agent, they’ve seen nothing. I’ll checkout the bat farms in the valley. Maybe it’s there hoovering up fruit.”
The fuzz tickled again, “Ok but keep it slow through there, don’t want your air shock flipping trays.” Yeh the last thing I need on top everything else is a dozen hanging baskets of splattered fruit wrapped around the fins.
He flicked on the Grav-it and dropped gently to the red earth. The holoplay was scuffed but had survived his frustrations; he dusted it off and re-launched a how-to of the ship’s dashboard.
