by submission | Sep 19, 2013 | Story |
Author : Glen Luke Flanagan
Pain tugged at the edge of my consciousness like a forgotten memory, bringing with it a collage of broken images and angry words. Without warning, sterile walls hemmed me in, and voices washed over me like a sea of panic, none of them intelligible.
“John.” One voice forced its way through the clamor, pulling me back to reality. “John, snap out of it.” I was daydreaming again.
Kaylee was looking at me intently, worry plain in her big brown eyes. “That’s the third time today,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I shook my head yes. “I’ve had these for a while. They come and go.” I couldn’t tell her I had only begun daydreaming since I met her, or that each time it happened I found it harder to focus and remember.
She hesitated, then smiled. “Okay, if you’re sure. Let’s get you home and out of the sun. I think I’ve had enough of the beach for one day.”
In the car, I watched as she carefully navigated the ins and outs of our little seaside town. I loved the way her brow furrowed slightly in concentration, the way her fingers lay languidly on the steering wheel. We had been dating for almost nine months now, but sometimes it seemed like I had just met her yesterday.
She caught my eye and blushed. “It ain’t polite to stare at a girl like that, Mr. Finnegan.”
I grinned and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Can’t help myself sometimes, little lady. I think it’s love at first sight every time I lay eyes on you.”
She laughed and punched my shoulder gently as we turned into the driveway. “Such a charmer. You say that to all the girls you take home?”
“Only you,” I promised, kissing her again. “Now, how about I throw our beach gear in the garage and we go to bed early?”
Cold metal bit into my side, and the panicked buzz of voices grew louder. A face hovered over mine, and gloved fingertips pried apart my eyelids, but there was no feeling. The face said words, and this time I understood a few.
“Hallucinogenic parasite.” The meaning evaded me, but I could make out the sounds. “Burrowed deep. Deadly if we can’t help him shake it off.” Then I was back in my own bathroom, sweating profusely and clutching the sink with a death grip for support. Kaylee’s voice came through the door, muffled but plainly worried.
“Baby, you alright in there?”
I sucked in a breath and looked in the mirror, wincing at my pallid, feverish reflection. “Yeah, I’m good,” I lied. “Be there in a sec.” Then the world went dark, and the walls closed around me once more.
“Not looking good,” the face murmured in a voice that sounded like angry bees. “Whatever it’s feeding him, he likes too much to let it go.” The words were starting to make sense now, and I fought against it. I didn’t like what I was hearing. Have to get back to Kaylee, I told myself. Focus on Kaylee.
The bathroom slowly came back into focus. I turned on the faucet, splashed my face. In the bedroom, she was waiting, reading. She glanced up and patted the spot beside her. I slipped under the sheet and pulled her close, looking into her eyes.
“Sometimes it feels like I just met you yesterday,” I whispered. “But I’m never going to leave you.”
by submission | Sep 18, 2013 | Story |
Author : Ian Muneshwar
Billy lost his grandmother to the portable DVD player five months after his grandfather died. It started when she discovered that, with Netflix, she had access to an almost infinite supply of B-rated romances. Before long, she started using the portable Sony so she could continue to watch them all over the house: she made it through “Gigli” while cooking a pot roast and finished “Breaking Dawn” in the bathtub.
About a week before it happened she had become obsessed with a hopelessly unoriginal vampire movie. There was one scene in particular—the final dialogue between the romantic leads—that she watched over and over, until both she and Billy had memorized every word, every caught breath, and every vapid declaration of undying love.
The night the movie took her Billy found the DVD player on the couch, looping the final scene. There was a shallow imprint on the cushion, so he knew she couldn’t have been gone for long.
“Grandma?” he called, sitting down. There was no response.
He set the Sony down in his lap and put the headphones in, one at a time.
*
“I don’t have much time,” the girl said when Billy reached the other side.
He recognized her immediately; she was Amanda, the white-blonde, quivering-lipped protagonist of the vampire movie. She was different on this side of the screen, though. There was a small but bright red pimple at the corner of her mouth that someone had unsuccessfully tried to cover with concealer and, standing this close to her, he could see the light brown roots in her hair.
“Bill, it’s your grandmother,” she said, blinking. “And I don’t think either of us has much time.”
“Time before what?” He tried to take a step forward, but instead his hand reached out and his long, unnaturally white fingers ran through the girl’s hair. “Wait, am I the vamp—”
“I tried to leave but I think we’re stuck,” she interrupted. “Stuck to acting out the last scene of this goddamn movie.”
She took his hand in her own. Billy looked down at her full lips and the poorly-concealed pimple.
“How did we get here?”
“Have you ever wanted something so badly, Billy, that you’d give everything you are just to have it?” She pulled him closer. “I couldn’t get this story out of my head. Eternal life seems so nice, you know?”
“You realize that Armando isn’t alive, right Grandma? He’s undead.”
“Dead, undead. He can spend the rest of time with Amanda. They could be happy together literally forever. That would have been nice to have.” She paused, brushing hair out of her eyes. “I’d give the world to have had that with Grandpa, undead or otherwise.”
“But that’s not how it works, Grandma. This isn’t real.”
“Who are you to say what’s real, Armando?”
“I’m not Armando—” Billy began to say, but the girl drew him in for a deep kiss.
“I loved you from the moment we met. I want to be with you, like this, forever.” She blinked coyly.
“Grandma?”
But Billy could feel it, too. His own words were being blown to the far corners of his mind. The script began to bleed into him; his language, like his actions, were no longer his own.
“We can be together, Amanda,” he said. He stared deeply into the girl’s eyes, where he saw his own terror reflected. “There’s a way.”
“Take me, Armando.” She uttered the movie’s closing line in an exaggeratedly breathy whisper.
Billy pulled his grandmother’s head back and, tenderly, plunged his teeth into her chest.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Ringmining attracted a certain kind of personality.
Not exactly hermits but beings okay with long terms of isolation. Pairs or groups of people rarely worked the rings.
Lena should have known better.
Each ringminer scoopship was like a baleen whale. They had wide mouths to collect all the crystals and sift through them for valuable minerals. It was tedious work but the rewards were there. It tended to turn the rings grey after a century of mining but didn’t damage them other than that. The ecolegal fights had been fought and ringminers were a profession for now.
The rings themselves played hell with transmissions when a ship was in them so when a ringminer was mining, they were on their own. The particles bounced radio waves around, sometimes for years. It wasn’t uncommon to hear garbled SOS beacons from years ago. The rings were creepy. It was best to keep the coms off entirely.
Lena piloted the ship Harling’s Spur, named for Lena’s grandfather. It had been her grandfather’s ship and was her inheritance when her own father passed. So many parts had been replaced on it that she doubted it could even be called the same ship. She was a third-generation ringminer.
She’d met Jordy on a supply run to K-78, the largest general store asteroid near these parts. It had been a stop to bury her father. She’d been blinded by grief, perhaps. Jordy was handsome, long-haired and strong jawed, but she’d forgotten that appearances can be deceiving. After three nights of passion, she’d signed him on with visions of bouts of lovemaking in between bouts of mining.
The dreams of a teenager.
Jordy was new to the business and Lena was starting to think he wasn’t cut out for it.
He started complaining about boredom almost as soon as they hit the rings. “Nothing to do, nothing to do, nothing to do” had become his mantra. His constant sighs and huffs were contributing to the rising tension. Lena had tried to teach meditation, exposed him to the ship’s library and games system, even tried to teach him tantra but it didn’t work.
He was a social animal. Perhaps he’d been blinded by lust as well.
Either way, this wasn’t going to work out and the hold wasn’t nearly full enough to justify a return trip. Lena knew that Jordy, soon enough, would demand to be returned home no matter what the expense. He wouldn’t wait six months and he was stronger than her. Things would get ugly.
She decided to nip it in the bud.
Another reason she’d picked Jordy was that he was a drifter of no importance. He didn’t have rich parents or a large family that would miss him. She thought that marked him out as the right kind of loner for the job. She was wrong about that but the upside was that making the problem go away wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.
While he was sleeping, Lena brought the largest hammer they had down on Jordy’s head enough times to make sure he’d never wake up.
She jettisoned his body into the rings. The surplus of supplies with his absence meant that she’d be able to stay here for a year. Operating the ship by herself would be no problem. There’d be a big payday when she docked again and a year of peace and quiet to figure out a plausible story before that.
She sat smiling in the darkness, listening to the rasp of the ringdust against the hull.
Ringmining attracted a certain kind of personality.
by submission | Sep 16, 2013 | Story |
Author : Aiza Mohd
There’s a funeral being held in the junkyard today.
Its mourners come in a neat little line of twelve, proceeding in that beautiful precision of steps that only them bots ever have. When I was young, I learned to tell for myself whenever the girl at the ticket counter, the man falling asleep behind the bar, the bored kid mopping up the aisles, was nothing but cogs and gears. Wasn’t the flawless face. Wasn’t no lack of expression, either. Was the way they walked. No human ever walks the exact way the human body was designed to walk. But bots do.
The pallbearers arrive, lowering a dark coffin onto a clearing in the heap. Eddy and I had made that clearing ourselves just a couple hours ago, though we hadn’t a clue what it was for then. Just following orders.
Eddy’s staring, too, his forearms crossed and resting on the handle of his spade. ‘Don’t cha think them wooden ones turned out kinda nice?’ he says.
I look at him. ‘Wooden?’
‘Sure. Where d’you think the junk timber went? They wanna make ‘em outta waste now. Green robots.’
‘And these ones are wooden?’ Some of the mourners are weeping. One of them has white flowers in her hand.
‘So Jackie tells me.’ Eddy’s ex-wife. She works here too. They make small talk when they happen upon each other, as though the 32 years together had never taken place.
‘Well, I bet they ain’t the important bots. Important bots probably made outta gold.’
‘It’d surprise you,’ he says in return. ‘Plenty of them VIP bots is made outta cheap material come outta landfills like this one. Singaporean President? Made of e-waste.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Parts of him used to belong to Acer. Ha, ha ha!’
I look back at the funeral proceedings. The bot holding the flowers lays her bouquet coffin-side. The others bow their heads a little as she does this. Stood up like that in the middle of all that junk, with their slender black silhouettes leaning against the sunset to the west, they remind me of a scene from a movie that I’d seen as a boy.
Pretty soon, them bots start leaving the ‘yard single file, and it’s time for me and Eddy to get to work. The bots don’t dig any grave of their own – that’s what me and Eddy are here for.
As we approach the coffin, the late afternoon light glances off a silver plaque on the coffin-lid. Eddy pauses, then scuttles over to it like the sparkle-loving magpie that he is.
‘What’s it say?’ I ask him.
He’s crouched down by the thing, without a shred of respect for the dead. ‘Isaac Benjamin Crocker,’ he murmurs, callused fingers running wonderingly over the silver plaque. ‘I heard that name before. Ain’t he one of them Silicon Valley fellas?’ He pauses in a moment of conscience. Then he heaves and pries open the damn coffin-lid with his own bare hands.
‘Eddy, what in the name of Teddy Roosevelt –’ and there I stop, because I’m staring, not at the disassembled anatomy of a machine in the box, but a person. A human man.
He’s been perfectly embalmed, Isaac B. Crocker, probably by mechanical hands, but a small card been tucked under his crossed hands. My own hands trembling – very much alive over his – I pick it up and read it aloud to Eddy’s questioning face.
‘Glory be our father.’
Ain’t it peculiar how interchangeable trash and treasure are?
by submission | Sep 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Adam Levey
The pilot, Simon, surveyed the scene of utter devastation all around him. Spent ordinance drifted in the space between thousands of shredded warships, many the size of mountains, with gaping wounds as big as apartment buildings. Ammunition spilled from storage rooms, detonating as it collided with the debris of human achievement. The mighty fleets had been last-ditch efforts by the great powers to end the war decisively. The fact that each side had decided that their secret weapon would simply be larger versions of things that weren’t working as it was really did say it all.
Scraps of hastily retrofitted merchant ships mingled with the purpose-built destroyers and frigates. Old ships recovered from scrapyards, new ones right out of construction bays. Cutting-edge lasers, missiles, rail guns and projectile weapons as old as the idea of interstellar travel itself all blurred together into a mélange of destruction. Many of the gutted wrecks that haphazardly floated past weren’t even equipped with jump drives, they’d needed to be ‘towed’ by the larger vessels. Towing was an unreliable science; ships had up to a 20% chance of being ripped apart by the strain. Still, jump drives were expensive. The comm-channels were dead, Simon had checked. Not even static. Then again, maybe it was his own equipment that was damaged.
Before this battle, there had been many others. Hundreds, certainly, maybe thousands. Ten times as many skirmishes, acts of sabotage and terrorism. Every weapon in humanity’s arsenal had been utilised, from chemical agents to propaganda. There had been plenty of time, after all; a war that lasts centuries leaves plenty of time for experimentation. Resources had run dry, colonies had been bombed into dust, economies and industry were taxed to breaking point. Technology stagnated, except when it came to military hardware. It provided little benefit though, considering how quickly spies were able to get their hands on new discoveries and prototypes, and by the end industry was so deteriorated that advanced technology was impossible to manufacture.
Simon considered the wreckage all around him. So many civilian ships had been pressed into service…perhaps all of them. Most of the original crews had opted to stay with their beloved vessels. The military’s relief was almost palpable, since it wasn’t like they’d have any chance of providing crews; after a war lasts a century (or two, or three), volunteers become difficult to find.
It was hard to be certain, but it seemed like every fleet had fought to the last. There certainly couldn’t be many survivors. The war was probably going to have to be put on hold for a while. It was likely for the best, everyone could do with a breather. Simon smiled sardonically at this thought. Light flared as damaged reactors went critical, and capital ships were ripped apart, blast doors and engines and shield generators pin-wheeling. There was no sound, except the hiss of air escaping through the cracks in his cockpit canopy.
