by submission | Dec 29, 2006 | Story |
Author : David Zhou
It started, as many such things start, with a plum.
The fruitseller first noticed the plum eater when he came by the same stall not once, not twice, not thrice, but fifteen times in the same cycle. He would always pick the juiciest plums; freshly cloned from the best Terran stock, hundred credits for a bunch.
The fruitseller didn’t know what to make of it. No one likes plums that much. Fifteen in a cycle!
And so he talked.
It was here that the groundskeeper of the Skylaunch heard from his friend the gardener of the Genetic Granaries who heard from his uncle the proprietor of Smithee’s Singular Singularities that the fruiterseller down the corridor, over in in the Eastern Dome, had a customer who ate fifteen plums in a cycle.
Fifteen!
The groundskeeper told his wife who told her friend who told her husband who told his son who told his friends and pretty soon, the entire colony was in a buzz about the man who ate the plums. They peeked from behind auto-dimming transparencies. They followed him in secret, watching him eat.
And always at the same place.
The goundskeeper of the Skylaunch viewed it as his personal luck that the renowned plum eater would choose his grounds to eat his plums. Everyday, at precisely the midstrike of the demi-cycle, the plum eater would bring his plums, sit down on the grass knoll facing South, look towards the heavens and eat his plum.
“It must be a woman!” cried the goundskeeper’s wife. “Only a woman could make a man eat so many plums, and stare so forlornly into the sky!”
“How the hell would you make a man eat plums,” muttered the goundskeeper. “And he didn’t look so sad to me. He looked like he was pondering.”
And so they told each of their friends the story. The wife told the other wives that the plum eater was eating plums for his long lost love, who left him in the colony when she journeyed to the stars. The husband thought that was silly and childish.
“He’s doing some deep thinking,” the groundskeeper told his friends. “Earth is that way, you know, our home so long ago. And he must be thinking of Earth, and eating plums.”
The stories spread. Wives quarreled with husbands. Husbands quarreled with daughters. Daughters quarreled with boyfriends. And boyfriends glared sullenly back.
One day, it all came to a head.
By this time, the plum eater had gained a grand procession on his cyclical trips to the Skylaunch. The fruitseller made a fortune, as all sought to imitate the plum eater, and bought plums by the tens and dozens. Some even bought fifteen. In a cycle!
And so the procession followed him, to the Skylaunch. And the procession watched, as he sat down on the grassy knoll, plum in hand, eyes upwards.
Behind him, the crowed argued.
“It’s his love he’s looking at, in the stars!”
“No, it’s Earth, that pale blue dot in the lavender sky!”
But, quietly, without notice, a small child walked up to the plum eater.
“Mister,” the child said. “Mister, why are you eating plums?”
“Because I like them,” said the plum eater.
“But why are you sitting here?”
“Because it’s cool, with a fresh breeze from the Southern Ventilator. The grass comforts my back, and the heavens calm my mind.”
“Are you thinking about a girl?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
The wives sighed in unison behind him.
“Are you thinking about Earth?” said the child.
“No, I don’t think I ever thought about the Earth.”
The husbands behind him cursed under their breaths.
“Then what are you doing?” asked the child.
“I like eating plums. And I like looking at the sky. The grass is soft. The air is fresh. And the sky is so open and wide. The universe is a marvelous thing, don’t you think?”
And so, the crowd left the plum eater to his ways. They went back to their lives, caring for the cloned cattle, cleaning the atmosphere ventilators.
They learned a lesson that day, one not quickly forgotten. For when you see a man walking down a corridor, and he has plum in hand, it doesn’t mean he’s thinking about love, nor that he’s thinking about Earth. It doesn’t mean anything.
He was just a man who ate his plums while being fascinated with the universe. And there’s nothing wrong with eating plums.
Even fifteen!
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by submission | Dec 28, 2006 | Story |
Author : J. R. Salling
A large ripe melon rests on an operating table. Members of the surgical team stand in the wings, preparing long serrated knives. Spotlights illuminate chunks of crushed ice that slip down the sides of the patient. My mouth becomes moist in sympathy. I take another step forward when the nurse’s hateful expression stops me. I have trespassed.
She points to the sign threatening unauthorized personnel. “Can’t you read?”
In answer to her question I retreat to the waiting area, sit down again, and pick up my book. When she fails to notice I rattle the pages. This releases a faint odor of formaldehyde, which makes me think of Kate.
Kate would have loved this book. It has such an interesting typography. Sometimes I piece letters together and make a word, but not often. There’s no need. The important thing, I tell myself, is to forget the other room.
The man sitting beside me suffers from an insatiable curiosity. I have already told him the title of the book. “Honestly,” he says, “when do you find the time?”
I shrug.
He fills the void himself. “I used to have plenty, then lost it all. Every last minute. There’s not a cure, you know.”
This information angers me. “I’m not sick,” I insist.
“Exactly,” he says and smiles, revealing black teeth. From the pocket of his sweatpants he retrieves a partially consumed strand of licorice and wrestles off another bite. The blackness oozes from his open lips as he chews.
One of the surgeons emerges and delivers hurried instructions to the nurse. There must be trouble, I decide. The nurse pops up and disappears into a long empty corridor. When the squeaking of her shoes becomes faint I make my move into the restricted area.
It appears that I am too late. The procedure has begun, the rib cage of the melon spread open to reveal its inner secrets. Wondering where the operating team has gone, I push on into the theatre.
For a brief moment I see Kate lying there in a contented if somewhat waxen pose. My head swims. I fight it off and inch closer, blocking the light, so that I can no longer tell who or what is being operated upon.
When my lips make contact, just brushing the exposed tissue, the melon reappears. Angry electronic noises rake my ears. I stagger backwards, my eyes shut.
The blindness is somehow comforting, but does not last.
“There’s no cure!” I hear the man from the waiting room scream. “There’s no cure.”
“I’m not sick!” I want to shout, but I know that it is a lie.
A curtain slides back and the nurse reappears. She picks up a bowl of moist, pink, fleshy chunks and creeps toward me, baring her teeth like a mad dog.
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The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | Dec 27, 2006 | Story |
Author : J. S. Kachelries
I am very, very sorry. What else can I say? If it means anything, at least I will die before you. I probably only have a few hours left…just enough time to tell you what happened, and to ask for your forgiveness.
I am (actually, was) a graduate student of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Cambridge. My Ph.D. thesis involved achieving absolute zero in the laboratory. Others scientists have gotten close. My colleges at the Helsinki University of Technology got down to 0.000000001 K. But my technique was a quantum leap beyond theirs. I could suspend all atomic motion. The electrons, protons, and neutrons would be instantly locked into place. No motion, no temperature. I had already prepared my Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
I was completely certain that my technique would work. What I wasn’t sure about was what would become of my my 1 gram target of osmium. My gut told me nothing would happen. I’d just have 1 gram of very cold metal. But, like any great scientist, I had to consider all possibilities. There was a slim chance that the electrons could collapse into the protons, giving me 1 gram of neutronium, i.e., a mini-neutron star. Since a neutron has more mass than one proton plus one electron, I’d have to supply additional energy. You know, the e=mc2 stuff. Then, when I ended my experiment, the neutronium (being unstable), would revert back to protons and electrons, and I’d have to dissipate the energy. Nothing I couldn’t handle. So, this morning, I performed the experiment.
At the critical moment in the experiment, something catastrophic happened. I had overlooked the obvious. I had not considered the effect my experiment would have on the elementary particles (quarks and leptons) and I had assumed neutrons were the ultimate termination point. When absolute zero was achieved, my osmium collapsed past neutronium into a singularity. With nothing to contain the singularity, gravity caused it to drop toward the center of the Earth. In the second it took to descended through the lab bench and the floor, sucking in everything in its path, it exposed me to a lethal dose of X-rays and gamma rays. In freefall, with nothing of consequence to slow it down, the singularity will reach the core in a few minutes. It will shoot past, stop somewhere near the upper end of the southern mantle, and return through the core again, continuing the cycle for hours. Eventually, it will settle down at the precise center of the Earth. Then, over the next few days, it will devour the core, the mantle, the crust, and the atmosphere. The Earth will shrink from its current 8,000 mile diameter to an infinitesimal speck. The astronauts in the space station may live to see it, but you won’t. The earthquakes, the tsunamis, the volcanoes, and the radiation will end your innocent lives long before the conclusion of this tragedy.
But, as I said, I am very, very sorry.
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by submission | Dec 26, 2006 | Story |
Author : LaTosha Hall
The three children stared at the table top.
“How’s it doin’ that?” the fair haired boy whispered, reaching two fingers out towards the dull metal object floating above the center of the cracked table. The only girl of the group, tall and gangly, squatted down, peering under the table.
“It’s got to be some sort of trick… you know, like magic tricks on TV,” she muttered, touching the wood of the table top from underneath. The darkhaired boy, runt of the litter, took a step back. Visibly nervous, he shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Told you we wasn’t supposed to be here,” he said, his voice cracking into splintered tones.
A distant hum became faintly louder as the three stared at it. The fair haired boy’s fingers lightly brushed the edge of the metal, and it bobbed slightly. The hum began to sound like audible chanting, voices from far away. The children couldn’t quite make out what it said, but the dark haired boy had had enough. He bolted through the empty rotting rooms, out into the cool evening air where only the wind was heard. About 30 feet from the broken door of the abandoned house, he turned, expecting his friends behind him. Only the gaping windows followed him. He sat down in the dirt path, waiting.
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by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 25, 2006 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Zero hour is struck on an instrument of time beyond the grasp of mortal men. Above the sky over the northern pole of the earth, a great creature slowly shakes off the remnants of a rather lengthy slumber.
Eight bristling legs unfold and stretch, then hoist aloft its swollen belly after having lain dormant for three hundred and sixty four revolutions of its ward below. Plucking silken web strings like a harp, the guardian navigates a path along the lines of longitude, effortlessly traversing the vast distances around the globe, from one pole to the other and back again, pausing only to check the latitudinal lines for damage or intruders.
The reflected moonlight shimmers and dances across eyes of a billion facets or more. In each of these facets, were you to get close enough to look, one would see a life reflected from the planet beneath. Through the sleeping months, the spindly spider sated itself on the love and loathing of the broken beings of the earth below, growing fat on the endless feast of emotions, and now, its web once again secured, she begins to weep. A single tear falls for each human being, tears cascading in sheets as she traverses the planet once more with meticulous care. Billions of droplets plummet to the earth as she covers every square mile of the globe, traversing the latitudes slowly so as to stay always in the hour of darkest night. As the slow moving blanket of astral droplets fall, each passes from the ethereal to the real, trailing behind a spiral of silken fiber, coiled and shimmering through the sky. Upon finally reaching the earth, each unfolds and on eight tiny legs of its own delivers its own self by following a signature trail of emotion to the place where the life of its origin sleeps. The tiny creatures negotiate a passage in through letterboxes, open windows or down cold chimneys to arrive at their predetermined destinations.
It is here that, were anyone present to see, one might question whether one was really awake, or simply in a state of childlike dreams. In each house, the tiny creature shakes rhythmically, drinking deeply of the wants and desires of their chosen one, fattening themselves on raw emotions before transforming themselves into some meaningful token to leave in their place, first spinning themselves into a cocoon of coloured silk and then metamorphasizing into some little trinket of deep personal meaning.
Having traversed the whole world again, and with her work now done, the guardian lumbers to the top of the northern pole once more, emotionally and physically spent, to slumber again, until another year has passed, and the time should come for her to awaken and restore the balance of wakeful dreaming once more.
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