by featured writer | Sep 24, 2007 | Story
Author : Todd Keisling, featured writer
My brother used to tell me about the glory days, when the Government was less unified and there was more than a single state. Usually what he told me went along with what they taught us at the Academy in history class, but sometimes he’d add little details here and there. Things they didn’t include in their presentations.
This was after he’d joined the Military, served a couple of tours and came back. He was different when he returned. Told me and Mama that he’d seen his nightmares come to life during that time, that we just wouldn’t understand. Not long after is when he’d start telling me about the way things used to be. About how there used to be actual television broadcasts with fictional plots. He called them “sitcoms.”
We had this car. A real zoomer. Old rust-bucket from the 20th. He bought it before he was recruited, and before he left for duty I told him we’d fix it up when he came back. I didn’t expect him to return, but he did. Sometimes I think maybe it would’ve been best if he hadn’t.
One day, while we were both on our backs underneath the old GT, my brother told me that I should stop taking the supplements.
He said, “There’s more in them than just serotonin.”
I told him we had to by law, that we’d be in big trouble if we didn’t, but he just chuckled. He told me people used to read for enjoyment. The last book I actually saw was in an antique shop downtown.
“They didn’t have to outlaw books,” he said. “Back in the day, a lot of people wrote about futures where governments banned books. They were wrong. People just stopped giving a shit. Channel Zero took care of the rest.”
He took the ratchet from my hand and looked me in the eye.
He said, “This country was built on revolution. They want you to forget that. Don’t you ever forget that.”
Two days after he killed himself I was out working on the car to clear my head. Mama came to me, her eyes all puffy from crying, and gave me a letter. No name or return address. Just had my own name scrawled across the front. The letter simply said:
“Warehouse 27. Corner of Reed and Pine. Wednesday. 11 PM.”
And then, below that, it said:
“Your brother was a good friend.”
I was told my entire life not to break curfew. Two hours of Channel Zero were mandatory. We were always supposed to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior, and I’d heard about what happened to those who were caught in the streets after hours.
What my brother told me underneath the car that day stuck with me, and I wanted to know who sent this letter, so I managed to sneak out. I took to the alleys and the old routes I used to follow when I was a kid.
Warehouse 27 wasn’t empty. There were a lot of young men like me there. There was a lot of anti-Government propaganda tacked to the walls. After a few minutes, the doors were closed, and several soldiers and patrol officers filed into the room.
One man in a black uniform stepped forward and said, “You’re all under arrest for conspiring against the Government.”
Everyone murmured. We knew we’d been had.
“High treason is punishable by execution,” he said, “or by four years of Military service. The choice is yours.”
The soldiers cocked their rifles and took aim. I realized then what my brother was talking about, and why he enlisted in the first place.
The choice was obvious. I just wish I’d had time to say goodbye to Mama, and that I’d finished that damn rust-bucket car.
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by submission | Sep 23, 2007 | Story
Author : Debbie Mac Rory
We have no choice, they said. We have to leave. We don’t know where we can go, or even if we can survive out there, but we can’t live here any longer. But there isn’t enough room here for all of us.
And then it became clear that the “we†and the “us†indicated in the news broadcasts, referred only to the healthy, the fertile, the educated among our peoples. Those who had been born without genetic abnormalities or physiological conditions which science should have long since cured.
The selection process was as short as the world government was able to make it, but it still stretched into months. Riots broke out worldwide, incited by those terrified of being left behind and those made bitter by tests results that rejected their chance of passage, even though they considered themselves healthy.
Paranoia took its place in the proceedings and only those who had a place ensured were allowed to prepare and load the ships. I suppose they believed that we, abandoned as we were, would yet try to poison the food, or infect their ventilation systems with some pathogenic substance. I know there were some that would have done so, and some that tried through the layers of security that surrounded the airbases. Most of them lost their lives on the lasers of the defensive grid.
When the ships had at last completed preparations, few were at full capacity. The medical AIs, calling on all the worlds collected knowledge, rejected all children under 12 in the belief that the exposure of such young bodies to the unshielded radiation outside the atmosphere would render them infertile, and useless as colony members. Even allowing for the families who opted to stay together on a now barren planet, or the parents who kissed their children goodbye, leaving them with crippled aunts or grandfathers too old to qualify, the numbers were far fewer than expected.
Most of the ships have left now, but the security grid around the airfields is still active. The children who were left come here most days to throw rocks against the fences, and watch the lasers turn them to dust. I still come to watch the last of the ships, assisting those others who try to hack into the abandoned bases so we can siphon the remaining power for ourselves.
The little girl with me clings tighter, burying her face in the cloth of my garments as the dust clouds raise from yet another launch. I adjust the gauze around my face with one hand so I can keep watching, while gently stroking the child’s hair with the other, to comfort her.
When finally the rockets flare has faded beyond what I could follow in the brightness of the noon-day sun I take the girls hand and turning, we walk together into the echoing streets.
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by submission | Sep 22, 2007 | Story
Author : TJMoore
The path to the discovery of intelligent non-human life was, for me, a life’s journey. SETI had invested billions in high tech telescopes and antenna arrays, thousands of personnel hours and miles of red tape, without a single positive result. I had done it at the cost of just over five hundred thousand dollars, twenty five years of my own life, my own sweat and tears, my family, my friends, my reputation and my respect. The last two or possibly three items I have since recovered, depending on your definition of “friends”.
It all started with the artifact. I had found an artifact that I believed to be part of a larger artifact that was lost or discarded by prehistoric visitors from another world and time. It ended with my excavation of a site that I had purchased with the proceeds from the sale of my house, my land, my entire estate and personal wealth. The excavation resulted in the discovery of a mechanical devise of unknown origin, composition or purpose. Scientists have analyzed the metal like material and have determined that nothing like it exists in the world as we know it and the material has yet to be reproduced by any known process.
The discovery site was the southern edge of a quarry where decorative marble was occasionally mined for its unusual color, transparency and high concentration of fossils. The fossils were so numerous that the strength of the stone was unacceptable for most building materials so the quarry had been dormant for many years. I had little trouble purchasing it.
I had great trouble finding it. It took years of searching through paper invoices and inventories, work schedules, logs and shipping documents. The final link was actually an artist who had ordered some slab marble for a pedestal he was commissioned to build at a museum. He had personally scouted out the stone to be cut from the quarry, deliberately choosing the brittle stone for its interesting fossils. Unfortunately, the museum changed the color scheme of the atrium and the stone was sold to a tile company to be cut into floor tiles. The tiles sat in a warehouse for several years until it was sold at auction to a wholesaler who shipped it to another warehouse where it sat for another few years. When the wholesaler went out of business, it was sold, again at auction, to a distributor who sold it to a contractor whose business was building and remodeling for small businesses. The contractor had used the tile in the restrooms of a new office building.
So we arrive at the beginning of the journey where I, sitting on the bathroom throne, caught a glimpse of something unnatural beneath the polished surface of the floor tile beneath me. It was a tiny spring with a tiny fossil passing through the coils. A spring deposited in the ancient muck when the now fossilized shellfish was still alive. A spring made millions of years before man.
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by submission | Sep 21, 2007 | Story
Author : Viktor Kuprin
Any starship could request a flyby. Popik received them all the time from the Customs Patrols and the Space Force when they needed to eyeball our ship. If they wanted a bribe that day, they’d come aboard Popik’s old Mod One. He would shake hands with the thug-in-charge and discretely pass some rubles or gold kopeks he’d gotten from here and there.
That’s what you had to do if you were a free trader like Popik, especially if you occasionally hauled illicit cargoes on the side like bootleg vodka or tobacco. The Americans treated tobacco like it was some kind of fission-grade plutonium. But the colonists on the Fringe Worlds gladly paid for it sight unseen.
Maybe Popik was curious to see the ship or, I suspect, he just wanted to give me a surprise. He keyed up the code for a flyby request, transmitted it, and to his surprise the reply came back giving the okay. Back then, before the wars with the Helgrammites and the others, there weren’t so many alien starships in human space. Not like now.
When he called me over the comm, I was playing with dolls in my cabin. I raced to the cramped control center, dragging my favorite teddy bear behind.
“Sit down, Vika, and watch the big televisor,” Popik said. “We’re going to see something special.”
“Is it Poppa or Momma calling? Are they coming?” I asked.
“Not this time, my heart,” Popik replied. “We’re going to see a Tsoor ship, an alien ship. We’ll fly past it in a few seconds. Watch.”
“Da, Popik.” I should have known it wasn’t my parents. Poppa was on duty aboard a warship somewhere in deep space. Momma was away, too, always working in some company office on Getamech. So, when I wasn’t in school, I got to travel with Popik and live in his asteroid domik between our trips to the stars.
A strangely-shaped orb appeared on the televisor screen and began to grow in size. Popik grinned and fired the retros, slowing our approach.
“It’s a Class-4 Tsoor starship. They call it a ‘Porpita,'” he explained.
“That’s a funny name, Popik!” I bounced and giggled, hugging my teddy bear.
The Tsoor ship was a cluster of four huge connected spheres glowing bluish green. Bars of brilliant violet light circled the globes’ equators and vertical axes. I saw no portholes, no windows, no one looking back at us. To me it looked like some giant, magical New Year’s tree ornament.
“Can we flash our lights for them, Popik?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We probably shouldn’t, my heart. The aliens might not know what to make of it.”
Then the beautiful Tsoor starship receded into the distance and was gone.
I watched and re-watched the video Popik had made of the flyby. And all these many years later, I still have that recording. Just a few seconds long, but it takes me back to those happiest of times, back to my dear grandfather.
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by featured writer | Sep 20, 2007 | Story
Author : Todd Keisling, featured writer
Mr. Serling entered the cafe and took a seat at the bar. He ordered the lunch special which, for that day, was a bowl of vegetable soup, carrot sticks and a peanut butter sandwich.
His arrival did not go unnoticed. Rob watched from his booth table while his girlfriend, Mary, nursed her coffee.
“Rod Serling is an alien.”
Rob chewed his lip as he made his confession. Mary set down her cup of coffee, glanced around the cafe and lit a cigarette. She blinked.
“Your neighbor is an alien?”
“Yes, I’m telling you, he’s a damned alien and he’s right there.”
Mary took a drag and exhaled a plume of smoke. She regarded poor old Mr. Serling’s aged back and smiled.
“You’ve been smoking too much, man. Not the ciggies, either.”
“No, Mary, I’m serious. Here–”
Rob produced a brass pocket watch. Mary smirked.
“It’s a watch, Rob.”
“No, it’s not just any watch. I found this in his front yard.”
“You were snooping in that poor old man’s front yard?”
“No. Well, maybe. Yeah, anyway, look–this watch stops time. Just like in that old Twilight Zone episode.”
From his seat at the bar, Mr. Serling uttered a low belch and opened up a copy of the morning newspaper.
“Rob, you’ve been doing more than smoking. Did you drop that acid last night after I left?”
“I’m serious, Mary. Look.”
“Rob, it’s a damn watch. Now, I want you to go over there and return that man’s property. Tell him you found it and think it belongs to him.”
“But Mary, he’s an alien!”
This last outburst attracted the attention of several cafe patrons. Mr. Serling was too absorbed in his newspaper to notice.
Mary put out her cigarette in the ashtray and placed her hand on Rob’s.
“Honey. I love you, but I swear to God Almighty, if you don’t stop watching those reruns on TV, I’m going to kick you in the ass. The real Rod Serling died in the 70s. You know that. That guy–”
She pointed at old man Serling.
“–just happens to have the same name. That guy’s not even related. You know that. I know that. Now go return his watch before I smack you.”
“Mary, you’ve seen the shit that goes on next door some nights. You’ve seen things float into the sky and hover and the flashing lights and–”
“Rob, I’ve been stoned out of my mind and seen elephants eclipse the sun. He is not an alien. You’re just paranoid and weird. Now go return the damn watch.”
Rob snatched the watch from the table and rose. He marched over to the bar where his neighbor Mr. Serling sat chewing a peanut butter sandwich.
“M-Mr. Serling?”
The old man swiveled in his seat and faced Rob.
“Yes?”
“I, uh, well, see, I was walking along and I found this–”
Rob held up the watch. Mr. Serling’s eyes brightened.
“Oh, thank goodness. I thought I’d lost it forever. Thank you, young man.”
Mr. Serling took the pocket watch. He opened the cover, stared with gentle amusement at its ticking face, and then pressed the stop button.
Everything froze.
He rose from his seat, left a couple of dollars on the bar and left the cafe in its frozen state. Above, birds hovered still in the air, while cars and people stood in place.
Rod Serling surveyed the street corner, smiled and nodded. His work here was done. He pulled back his sleeve, tapped his wristwatch, and promptly vanished into another dimension..
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