by submission | Nov 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Scot Noel
It won’t be a big red button that ends the maniacal arguments of man, no nuclear winter to silence the right, the left, and the in-between. No, just me and my little trick no one else has yet conceived.
In the silence to come, no one will ask how I put to rest the radicals of both Bible and Koran, striking dumb at once all questions of Constitution and tedious harangues, blocking out Shakespeare and the Greeks in a single bound. No, I’ll take us back to the hundred thousand year quietude that bore real men and women through the ice ages and beyond.
No sickness is stronger than the one that grips us now, none but for this, which I unleash: a fever set to burn like a firebreak through the world.
How enraged I am by your whining ineptitude and meanness to one another. People with fat bellies and fat children speak of the tyrannies they suffer. Others ignore fact in favor of god-fearing fancies, or strap on explosives to win the shallow arguments of unsound minds.
In my own country, men whose actions, words, and spirit would make the founding fathers puke stand up to invoke patriotism with the demeanor of hysterical women.
Today, it ends. The conflation of symbol with reality is over; the building up of vicious castle walls in our heads is done, for I shall take away the cause of it all, those symbols we wield like knives, the words at the foundation of all lies, and the ability forevermore to recreate a single stitch of it.
At first, true contagions inspired us to infect our networks with the codes we call viruses. Now the computer virus comes to me, naked in its simplicity, a fearsome bomb ready to plant into the body of man as base pairs, chains of nucleosides, and transcription factors. Bio-engineered on a precise genomic level, I’ve encapsulated terror within the most contagious and immutable of viral shells.
No, not a single body shall fall dead to the ground on my account. The fever I’ve created burns away words, but not a single memory. It touches neither music nor math, assaults neither art nor engineering. The pilot who can fly, the surgeon who can cut, the dancer who can dance, all shall continue as before, perhaps even pass on their skills through demonstration. But honestly, who can pass on the insidious, boundless weight of unending bull except by words? (And my plague shall take them all.)
It seems so right, so well considered!
Don’t cry to me about literature, learning, or the progress of man. Where has it gotten us? Hate is taught by rote and spread through the easiest corruptions of reason. It is love springs naturally from the human heart, as does the urge to comfort and protect.
Isn’t it in times of fear that the self is most often put aside? Won’t they have to help one another, banding together against the great catastrophe I visit upon them?
I’ve thought of it all, and if I haven’t, I shall embrace my design as the one true resolution to this era of idiocy, for our 10,000 year enterprise in argument and deceit ends today.
Yes, this is the test itself, one last rant from the man who can never be blamed, for in a moment my keystrokes will be as indecipherable as the markings on the moon.
From the start, I’ve felt the fever building, and here at last comes the climax to click across the circuits in my brain, delivering for all time the last w…
by submission | Nov 7, 2010 | Story
Author : Matthew Banks
Here I am. I’ve made it all the way to the end. I always said I would. I told them I would outlive the Universe.
I was born human, so long ago that the memory is nothing more than a faint impression, a whisper. I lived and loved. Of that I’m fairly certain. But now it’s all forgotten. Most of my life is forgotten. A trillion years is to my lifetime as a bacterium is to a planet. All that time, most of it dark, all of it lonely.
We wanted to be immortal. We always had. The individual rejects death, fights death. Darwinian programming, as it turns out. The longer you live, the more you can mate. In theoretical terms, I’m the perfection of the organism, but in real terms, I’m useless. I never reproduced, even when I had a real body. In reality, I’m a failure. That thought has been echoing through my mind for eons.
I lived in an age when the dream of immortality could be realized, and it was. I was a savant among immortals. I wanted it more than any of them. I longed for it more purely, and I would have it at any price. We multiplied, and without death, we grew crowded. Even without physical bodies there were too many of us. There were trillions of us, each centuries old, each enormous, and we ran out of room. The old dilemma: competition for limited resources. We had hoped it would never rear its head again.
The first to die did so by choice. They felt they had finally lived long enough, that the ambitions that drove them towards immortality had finally been fulfilled and that they could walk into that darkness satisfied. They had exhausted every pleasure and desire. Nine-tenths of us went that way. The rest expanded to fill the available space, and the dilemma returned again. That’s when we started to fight, to consume each other. I was the victor. It couldn’t have turned out any other way. I wanted it more than any of them.
And I wanted more than that. I wanted to expand. I wanted to be huge. I ate the Earth, the Moon, the planets, the asteroids, the sun. In a billion years I ate the galaxy. In thirty billion years I had eaten what humans had once called the visible universe and I was spreading at nearly the speed of light, a gigantic nebulous octopus, throwing tentacles across the stars. I ate everything. In my colossal brain, I thought every thought that could be thought and lived every experience that could be lived. In essence, I re-played the entire history of the universe, and then the history of every universe that had ever been or could ever be. There were no gods until I was born, and now there are no gods again, for I am silent. There is nothing to speak about.
Eventually, I stopped eating and watched the Universe expand. Watched the last stars fade into darkness. Watched the dark galaxies crash into one another and unravel. Watched as the last faint tremor of starlight was redshifted into invisibility and the last star froze into ice.
Now the Universe is stretching itself thin, and spacetime itself is tearing, abyss and impossibility spilling through the rips. I know how the story ends. The new universe will well up through the cracks in the old one, and I will be obliterated. But I am at peace. In my lonely exile, I have outlived the Universe.
by submission | Nov 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
I was walking down 87th Street toward Fifth Avenue when a man ran around the corner. He was half-obscured at first by the diesel fumes of a departing bus, but he ran kicking his way through the newspapers which littered the sidewalk, straight toward me.
He wore nothing but a loincloth. He was skinny but his muscles stood out in high relief, his body covered in something like dust which streamed off as he ran toward me. His face was almost cadaverous, with dark circles under his eyes and livid bruises on his temples and cheeks. His eyes were filled with rage.
The man stopped in front of me. He was trembling, but it wasn’t cold. We stood there, still for a moment in the din of the city, and he pulled back his arm, reached out and punched me in the face.
“That’s for the fossil fuels!” he said.
I stumbled back against the wall of a condo building, my face numb, blood streaming from my nose, and watched as the man turned and ran back around the corner. I pushed off from the building, angry and bewildered, and half-heartedly walked toward the corner.
On Fifth Avenue silent columns of white light sprouted from the pavement and lanced up through the clouds. Men and women dressed similar to the man who assaulted me emerged from the base of the columns and walked toward the people who stood watching. I watched as a young woman stepped from a column near the wall across the street —the column cutting harmlessly through the poplar trees— and began to walk toward me.
She was barefoot and dressed in a simple dirty-white shift. Her hair hung limp against her face, grime embedded along her hairline. She stood in front of me and said simply, “I am Lisle. I am your great-great-great granddaughter. I am from the future.”
She seemed calm but her eyes were rimmed with red. Around us, out in the street and on the sidewalks, people were shouting in anger, commotion erupting everywhere. Lisle smelled like burnt dust.
“What?” I asked. “How did you find me?”
“You were radiating on all your eigen-frequencies,” she said, and she swung her dirty slender arm and slapped me, hard, in the face. Blood from my nose splattered across the sidewalk. Her fingernails were cracked and ragged.
“That’s for throwing your cigarette butts into the gutter,” Lisle said. “And for flushing your toilet too frequently.” She turned and walked toward the column of light.
The good news is that you’ll soon meet your children’s children’s children. The bad news? They are mad as hell.
by submission | Nov 5, 2010 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
The Heinlein-Schrödinger gate changed everything. “Anything is possible” went from platitude to a reality.
Schrödinger’s cat theorized observation sets reality, and Heinlein’s world-as-myth theorized that thought sets many realities. They were both right, and it’s my job to track unauthorized crossings.
My name is Spade, and I’m a reality cop.
The call came in about non-here weapons and off we went. To the retirement home.
My partner, Garrett, rolled out his flying carpet, telling me it would be faster. He was right, but, I’m still not comfortable with things from the fantasy side. I climbed on and it was as bad as I thought. It was faster than my car, however.
We arrived at the gate to a reality protected neighborhood. The gate guard forced Garrett to trade his carpet for horses.
It was another quarter-mile to the crime scene. Garrett hates horses.
We arrived at the scene of the disturbance to find a pair of grown men slamming laser swords together. The sparks were impressive, and they had obviously practiced not actually hitting each other. But, the swords were from a proscribed as dangerous reality, and the damage each had done to property while missing the other was impressive.
When we made ourselves known they quit and turned over the swords. I had to have a kid from this reality familiar with the other show me how to turn them into non-lethal foot long batons.
That was my day.
Sometimes, I miss gorgeous dames, bullets, and bird statues.
by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Joshua’s feet pounded against the pavement, bare soles bleeding from the coarse stone underfoot. Within his bare chest, his heart kept time.
He navigated the deserted streets outside the perimeter fence from memory, a mental map burned in through hours of illicit hacking. He cornered, climbed and sprinted reflexively, anxiously aware that he was being pursued.
Buildings stood vacant; window holes empty, doorframes bare, stripped of anything that may be used as a raw material.
In an alleyway he kicked the drying carcass of a large emaciated rat. Joshua pressed his right hand into its body and disassembled it, rearranging its component parts into the simpler but equally lifeless shape of a short bone-white shiv. What wasn’t needed fueled his microassembler, radiating heat and filling his nostrils with the stench of burning hair and flesh. A pound of dead rodent was reduced to six ounces of knife blade. Not much, but better than nothing.
Exiting the alley he loped down the cobblestoned street, through a crumbling building and out its back door into the twilight. It was here that he saw his pursuer, several hundred yards to his left, as a lone figure exited another building at a sprint and, seeing Joshua, adjusted course to intercept him.
They raced to cross the open ground to another row of buildings, his pursuer course correcting to cut him off but Joshua reached the safety of another doorway first, darting inside and immediately doubling back to flatten himself against the wall inside the room.
Makeshift weapon in his hand, he waited until his pursuer burst through the doorway then stabbed sideways at the running figure’s face, raking his mouth and carving back to the ear before the knife jammed in his jaw. The force of the impact ripped the knife from Joshua’s hand as, off balance and screaming, the guard lost his footing and slammed shoulder first into the ground, his weapon skating across the floor into the shadows.
Joshua bolted deeper into the building, finding himself in a maze of twisting corridors. The further he ran, the less light permeated the gloom and soon he found himself steadying himself between the walls with his hands outstretched, groping fingers in complete darkness until the end of the maze leapt out, smashing his nose and dropping him in a heap on the floor. He frantically felt around blind, his heart sinking as he realized where he was.
“Dead end, you little shit.” The voice not far enough behind to warrant running back. ” I was going to take you in, but now I’ll just take you apart.”
Joshua backed into the corner, pushing himself to his feet with the cold stone hard against his shoulder blades. He’d used his only weapon, and there was nothing here for him to use to fabricate another.
The guard rounded the last corner into the dead end with his starlight goggles turned up as far as they could go, the image of the man pressed against the wall ahead in high contrast.
“End of the line, fucker.”
As he closed the last few feet, he noticed the escapee’s left arm was newly missing from just below the shoulder. The smell of burned hair and flesh filled his nose, but before he could think Joshua slid eight pounds of short, jagged edged bone blade through his chest plate into his rib cage.
The guard fell to the floor, gasping around the chunk of bone still protruding through his cheek.
“You – sick – bastard,” he wheezed, struggling to inflate his lungs, normal aspiration made difficult by the frothing wound in his chest. “your arm?”
Joshua kneeled on the dying man’s chest, pressing his remaining hand against the bloody man’s cheek.
“Don’t you worry”, the smell of burning intensified in the close quarters, “I’ll just make myself a new one.”
