by Kathy Kachelries | Nov 2, 2005 | Story
“They’ll find you,” the chronomancer told me. “They always do. One day you’ll be sitting around sipping tea, playing Mah-Jongg, and BAM!” He slammed his fist on the rickety card table, nearly upsetting his coffee and definitely upsetting Sib. She moaned loudly and ran for the corner, then rocked back and forth and pounded her palms against her head as if the sudden sound had come from within. If he noticed her, he hid it well. People like Sib are easy to overlook.
“Time’s a big place,” I said.
“Not as big as you’d expect. You think you’re the first one to come up with this idea?”
I didn’t respond. The chronomancer exhaled a long, low note and pushed his fingers through his mop of wild white hair before taking off his glasses and polishing them on the edge of his greasy shirt. “All I’m saying,” he continued, “is that you’re not just going to vanish. Wherever you go you’ll stick out like a black cat in a snowstorm. You’ll get myths and legends built up around you. At worst, you’ll show up in history books, and they study that stuff. Anachronists, they call you guys. It would be hard enough if it was just you, but…” the chronomancer’s voice drifted as his eyes focused on the girl in the corner, “you’ll never be able to get away with that.”
His tone lowered at the final syllable, like mentioning Sib was a breach of etiquette. “You have something on your chin,” he might have said. “Your fly is down.” I stood up and stepped over the piles of paper and gears that littered his workshop to gather the small girl into my arms. “She has a name,” I told him.
The chronomancer pushed his glasses back onto his face and squinted at me in the dim light. “They’ll find you,” he repeated.
“We’ll take that risk.”
Sib’s small fingers grabbed at the collar of my shirt and she buried her face into the point where my head met my neck. She smelled like hospital, and she was still wearing the blue robe they’d given her when they tested her for genetic abnormality. The chronomancer watched her squirm into position.
“Do you have kids?” I asked him. He shook his head slowly.
“I applied, once, a long time ago,” he said. “I’m not made of the right stuff.”
“Neither’s she,” I said as I brushed my fingers against the space between her shoulderblades.
Again, he sighed that same note, though this time he slid open a metal filing cabinet under his table. The chronomancer withdrew a manila envelope and flipped through the papers with a grimy thumb. “Do you speak Greek?” he asked.
“I can learn.”
“We’ll find a place for you,” he said slowly, running his fingers over the page. “I’m sure we can find a place.”
by B. York | Nov 1, 2005 | Story |
“Diggs! C’mon man, we gotta keep this moving or we won’t find squat for real dirt by the end of the day!”
‘That had to be Brennan yelling over the drill tube. He’d been at work
on that machine, trying to suck up the dry mud and debris, hoping for a
better chance at the pure stuff.
Diggs wiped his brow, tugging the tube up out of the dirt to stop production. “Eh! Boss says we got to crank this up a notch, people, let’s strip this land and move on.â€
Brennan shifted his ball cap over his head as the the light of the sun beat down on the dying meadow. “Say, Diggs, I know you gots your kids birthday today. How’s abouts you go home early?â€
“What? And miss a shot at gettin’ some real prime planet core? Bren, you gotta be outta that thick skull of yours. The fuzz ain’t makin’ you nervous are they? You know we’re miles from the cops. Besides, we’re busy. We got two more areas to suck up after this one and-“
“Look†Brennan started up, swinging his clipboard back around in a wide dramatic gesture, “I ain’t tryin’ to steal goods from ya, just thought I’d suggest. She’s a real primer, this one. Just, be careful.â€
“Aw, Bren, I’m gonna get all misty. You ain’t still worried about what happened to the McClennan boys are you?†Diggs had taken the time to make mocking smirks at his boss and life-long friend.
“It just… it ain’t right. Like, the ground or somethin’ just ate’em up. They left the tools and ate the people, Diggs. I ain’t wanna see the same happen to you.â€
Brennan’s friend just shook his head and turned back on the A34 Soil Remover. The buzz turned to a low hum and soil started to pour through out onto the ground next to him. After Brennan left, Diggs remembered the reports. First, things had gotten real quiet, they read. A few of the soil-miners freaked and the rest were never heard from again. The activists got all up in arms, saying that it was punishment from God or maybe nature fighting back. Hell, it was already illegal to poach earth, but they did it anyways. That was all crud according to Remy Diggs.
“Damn, just got three good ones! Haha!†The soil-miner kept it up, feeding the suction into the ground to have the particles sopped up through the tube and analyzed.
This little machine was amazing, Diggs thought. It could sort out the moisture content in every grain of soil and then, when all was said and done, the same scientists who opposed the “raping of the land” had to bow down to the pure energy brought by a single unidentified element formed in one of three billion grains of soil. Sucker could power Vegas for ten years on just a handful of juiced grains. Ah, and the money sure did roll in.
Diggs was paying so much attention to his device, he didn’t even notice that things had gone real quiet, real fast.
by Jared Axelrod | Oct 31, 2005 | Story
With each stroke of the knife, I knew he loved me.
It started with my nipples, him telling me how much he loved me and how sexy I would look without them. He touched my face as he did it, cooing and kissing my forehead and telling me how much he loved me. He kissed away every one of my tears and held me within his powerful arms as I bled.
For six weeks there was no mention of knives. My heart leapt every time he looked at me, a joy and longing in his eyes. The six weeks after I gave up my nipples were quite possibly the happiest of my entire life.
But the seventh and eighth and ninth passed, and he grew distant, moody. He would spend nights away from the house and return drunken and grumbling. One night, I asked what was wrong, and what I could do to help him.
And so the knives came out again.
He shaved my head, including my eyebrows that night. Soon after, all of my hair from my body was removed through his amateur electrolysis. He took off my nose with one clean slice and, using a device I didn’t recognize, sealed up the wound and made it smooth to the touch, as if nothing had ever been there. I could only breathe through my mouth, and told him so, panicking. He just smiled, kissed the smoothness in the center of my face, and told me I was beautiful.
My toes and fingers took nearly two months, one joint at a time. He took similar relish with each of my teeth. He said he was sad when he went for my crotch, but I saw how happy his eyes were and how his hands shook with arousal as he smoothed out my groin.
He used that same device to seal off my sockets after he cut out my eyes. He also used it to fuse my ass cheeks, and later, my mouth leaving only a small hole in each case. I heard him laugh and tell me how sexy I looked. He kissed me all over, and made jokes about how easy it would now be to confuse my two ends. He sounded so happy.
One night—or what I assumed was night, at the very least—he drew a heart on my smooth chest with his finger. He told me it meant “I love you.” Then he cut off my ears.
Between long stretches of nothing, I would suck vitamin-enriched water from a straw he would press against lips and feel his strong fingers all over what was left of my naked body. I was too weak to react physically, but I reveled in his touch and the way traced that heart on my chest over and over. My life was spent this way, waiting for these moments.
It is difficult to love a being from another planet, but there are sacrifices to be made in every relationship. And now my alien lover will never leave me.
by Kathy Kachelries | Oct 30, 2005 | Story
Peter did not remember the first time he used the displacement generator. That was how it should be, of course. When used properly, the generator always erased the traces of itself. If it didn’t, a person could get tangled up in time, strangled by tethers of conflicting memory. So when he woke up in the white room, surrounded by lights and wires and the generator’s dull whirr, it used to take Peter several minutes to get his spatial and temporal bearings. Not anymore, though. Now, he had a few shortcuts.
When he came to, the first thing his eyes settled upon was the sheet of paper taped to a wire over his bed. He snatched it, squinting at the broad, circular letters. Your name is Peter Graham. You are a displacement technician. You are thirty seven years old.
The statements continued, and gradually, Peter’s memory spilled into the places that were blank when he first woke up. He had two sisters. He lived with his girlfriend and their daughter Sarah. He played tennis. By lunchtime, he’d overcome most of the amnesia of temporal shock.
“What’s it today, mate?” asked the portly, graying man across the table at the complex’s cafeteria.
“What?”
“I’m Will.”
Peter didn’t remember anything about Will, but he unfolded the paper to double check. Nope. Nothing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’ll come back in a few hours.”
Will nodded and peeled the plastic wrap from around his sandwich before taking a large bite of synthetic tuna. He chewed this thoughtfully, then put the sandwich back on the table and snatched the paper from Peter’s fingers. “Peter Graham,” he read. “Nice. You’ve got a kid.”
Peter nodded. Odd man. Years of doing this made some people go a little strange.
“You working this afternoon?” Will asked. “Check the schedule.” He pointed to a large display on an adjacent wall, and Peter stood up to find his name. It was nothing but numbers.
“I don’t remember it being like this before,” Peter said. Will chuckled.
“Check your arm,” he said. Peter did. At the base of his wrist, a seven digit number showed in crisp black ink. “They can’t do that kind of thing by names, for obvious reasons.”
Peter found his number and followed it across the glowing chart. “I’m working the French Revolution,” he said.
“Fun.”
He continued examining the schedule, picking out what he’d be doing for the next few days. “Hey,” he noticed, “Why do I have a dormitory number?”
“Huh?”
“They have here that I’m supposed to sleep in section 17-F.”
“Well, then you sleep in 17-F.”
“What about my girlfriend and kid?” Peter said. He dimly remembered promising her that he’d take her out for dinner tonight. Was it their anniversary? Her birthday, maybe. Will laughed.
“See you at dinner,” he said as he pushed away from the table. “Maybe you’ll be Pierre by then.”
by J.R. Blackwell | Oct 29, 2005 | Story |
Outside the dome, the earth was sealed with cement; the towers of processed plastic, retrieved from the treasure chests of ancient dumps, grew, broke and branched like mad metal trees. The glimmering city sang in a constant low thrum, tiny machines building additions, remodeling for the new and the better, ever evolving, unfinished. The man made cold swept over the hard city, sending citizens running for manufactured warmth and longing for a past that never was.
Inside the dome, the wild Villia embraced herself under thousands of watching eyes who longed for her natural paradise. The constructed environment bore her food and cradled her in eternal summer. Villia thrilled before her invisible admirers, stretched herself in the gaze of the gods of her wide Eden. On neon screens she, natural goddess, worshipped by the clicking of tiny insecticide cameras, smiled at a field of tiny yellow flowers, imagining them as her followers, faces rising, bright and delicate.
