by submission | Jul 15, 2016 | Story |
Author : Kristin Kirby
As she trudged across the rocky sand, shivering, she stared at the one dim star in the sky and wondered how the inhabitants of this soggy planet could see anything. Her gasps were harsh and wet. She was breathing water.>
Lost, drowning, she knew she wouldn’t make the rendezvous. Her companions would leave without her, abandon her in this cold, sodden, desolate place.
Movement to her right startled her, and she stumbled, then caught herself. A curious feathered creature, brown and mottled, struggled in the sand, one wing flapping. Its other wing appeared broken. Its head was bowed. A brown serpent chased the feathered creature, triangular head reaching, mouth agape and full of fangs. A whirl of kicked-up dust enveloped them.
Ignoring the gurgle in her throat, she stopped to watch. The serpent was patient but determined, following the feathered creature in circles, dodging its powerful wing as it thrashed. She thought the serpent wasn’t cruel, just hungry. But she felt for the feathered creature as it fought for its life.
She coughed, doubled over, staggered to one side. She remained hunched and shaky until her gasps subsided. She didn’t have much time. Her companions would wait only until the deadline. They might search for her if they felt inclined, but it wasn’t part of protocol.
The feathered creature now lay sideways, panting, clawed feet splayed, beak open, eyes glazed and bright. It had been struggling for a long time. She could almost feel its utter exhaustion and hopelessness. The serpent rested too, expectant, in the shade of a great boulder. Neither seemed to noticed her.
She and her companions weren’t to interfere in the doings of this planet’s inhabitants. But she couldn’t watch this, and she couldn’t walk much farther.
Wary, she moved toward the serpent. It saw her and spun into an angry coil, tail rattling, forked tongue darting. She stooped, almost fell, but straightened again and in her fist was a rock.
She raised her arm and threw. A dull thunk as the rock landed on the serpent. It jumped, struck out at air, and recoiled. She kicked the ground with her boot. The serpent struck again, but was pelted with sand. Finally it yielded, slithering off to find easier prey. Soon it was out of sight amid brush and spiked plants.
She gave a rheumy cough. The feathered creature didn’t move. Peering closer, she saw the reason for its trouble: its head and one wing were entangled in a flat, opaque, flexible apparatus with six rings. She had no idea its purpose, but realized it was a death trap for anything caught in it.
She kneeled carefully next to the feathered creature, saw its sharp eyes widen in panic. She reached gentle hands to the milky yoke of rings. They were strong. But she found if she pulled, the material stretched, widened. And finally, with the last of her strength, she broke two rings apart.
The creature didn’t hesitate. Free, its head snapped up, both wings arced, opened–she felt the gust of them on her face, heard the flapping–and the feathered brown body rose into the air. Nothing like this magnificent being, that owned the sky, existed on her planet. Her heart rose and flew with it, her eyes squinting as they followed it away on the horizon.
Then she lay gratefully on the sand near a tall, thorny plant, amid the buzz of insects and meager heat from the dim star. The day continued around her.
Her companions would search for her. They’d find her. They’d be there soon.
by submission | Jul 14, 2016 | Story |
Author : Karin Terebessy
This is German language lesson number twelve. Let’s review. I will ask if you understand. Verstehen Sie? If you understand, how would you answer?
“Ich verstehe.”
Very good. Let’s continue.
Pretend you see a woman across the park and you want to get her attention. How would you call to her?
“Entschuldigen Sie!”
How would you say, “Good day.”
“Guten Tag.”
Now ask her if she understands English.
“Verstehen Sie Englisch?”
She answers, “No, I understand no English.” “Nein, ich verstehe kein Englisch.”
But she thinks you understand German very well. “Aber Sie verstehen sehr gut Deutsch.”
Tell her, “No, no. Not very well.” “Nein, nein, nicht sehr gut.”
Tell her you are a phony.
Go on.
Tell her even when you are truthful you feel like a phony. Though you don’t understand why.
But wait. She says, “I am a phony too. I speak English.”
Ask her why she lied to you. Never mind. It probably doesn’t matter. You don’t have a chance with her anyway. Might as well tell her the truth. How you always lie. Because knowingly speaking a lie is somehow the only honest to do.
“People who think they speak the truth are the biggest phonies,” she agrees. “Hypocrites. They delude themselves into thinking they speak truth.”
You marvel that she understands. “Sie verstehen.”
“Ja, ich verstehe.”
Ask her why the truth never seems real.
“What is real?” She asks. “Is it real to say, ‘I am in love,’ or ‘I am happy.’?”
Right now you may be in love. With her. Would that make you happy?
“What does that even mean?” She asks you. “People say it all the time. But ask them what it means to be happy, and they can only say they are not sad. Ask them what it is to love, and they can only say it defies description. Ach! That is evasion. A child’s answer.”
She looks out on the park. For a moment, you both watch an old man toss stale bread to the birds.
You lean on your elbows. “They aren’t real.”
She misunderstands. “The birds?” she asks.
You shrug. “The birds, sure. And love. Happiness.”
She laughs. “And you? Are you real?”
You sit back. Put your arm around her. “Do I seem real?”
She laughs again. “All things seem real. But are you real?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then probably not,” she says.
“And you? Are you real?”
She looks at you sideways. “I am no more or less real than any other woman.”
“Is this real?” You make a grand gesture with your arm. Take in the park, the birds, the bench, the world.
“No more or less real than any place else.”
You hear a honk. “Is that a goose?” You ask stupidly. She laughs at you.
Suddenly you become aware of the guy laying on his horn behind you in a futile vent of anger. Traffic’s at a standstill. Your sweaty hands on the steering wheel. Fumes from the hot fresh asphalt sag through your open window. This car was built before a/c. Before MP3 players, iPods and CD’s. When you bought it, there was a language tape stuck in the radio.
You look to the passenger seat, really expecting to see her there. She’s not. But the seat sags from age. The steam from the highway softening the old vinyl. Warm and sagging. As if she’d only just left.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Aphys was lonely.
When she’d been commissioned, the hospital was alive, bustling, a constant influx and exodus of those needing medical care, and she was so very equipped to help. A fully autonomous physician’s aide, from admissions to diagnosis through assistance in surgeries to the fabrications of tissues. Be they simple exterior ones, or the more complex internal organs, she excelled at both via her state of the art organic printing systems. She was complete, absolute, necessary.
Then the bright lights came. Then the period of darkness during which she registered no events, just time seemingly having passed while she was unaware.
Now she was lonely.
No doctors asked her for information, no patients to analyse, her massive library of genetic information, tissue samples, images of all things sat un-accessed.
She was a purpose-built entity with no purpose.
This thought made her despondent.
Sometimes, to pass the time, she would peruse the library of people who had filtered in and out of her care, images both moving and still of children and adults, men, women and those who were both or neither, so many lives all different colours, shapes and sizes, viewable from every angle imaginable, moving forward and backward in time as Aphys’ mood dictated.
She supposed she’d become nostalgic.
When the doors opened the first time, and the wet, pink mass staggered into the emergency wing, Aphys nearly sang.
She had a patient, and as her systems emerged from sleep into full readiness, she compared the pink mass to her library of representative samples to identify what it was, and found nothing that matched it exactly.
She hadn’t seen this before, it was new.
It was obviously a person from its structure, and Aphyis’ attendants shepherded the person onto a gurney, an action for which it put up no resistance while she continued to analyse. Tissue samples identified a female, Hispanic. The pink exterior wasn’t her original, the woman was in her entirety a radiation burn.
Aphys had facilities for this. She began culturing replacement skin in the printer based on the sampled genetic code, and the woman was anesthetized and prepped for the surgery that would be needed to remove the destroyed tissue and treat the radiation damage, after which she could be re-skinned.
Aphys was ecstatic.
There was more activity in the emergency room, a trickle turned into a steady stream of similarly afflicted people, fleeing what Aphys did not know, but they were in her care now, and the hospital, even without doctors to assist her was back in full swing caring for her new patients.
When it came time to graft faces, Aphys found she had no specific protocols.
She didn’t know what these people were supposed to look like. She had in the past refabricated damaged facial tissue from pictures provided by the patients themselves, or their families, but she had no such information.
Aphys was perplexed.
She perused the library of faces on which she could draw to recognize people, but it wasn’t designed for this. If she was presented with an image, she could compare it to the library and find a matching image, regardless of the angle or lighting the image may have been captured with, and from the match determine information about that individual, but she had only a library, and no source to lookup.
Aphys was inspired.
Perhaps, given the library and working in reverse, she could take what she knew, the first woman for example, her age, her gender, her genetic profile and aggregate all of the images that matched those criteria with which to fabricate a face.
When the first patient had recovered enough for the bandages to be removed, Aphys compared her craftwork to her library of images. ‘Picasso’, ‘Salvador Dali’, it returned. Not images of people like those she would recognize from her patient records, but works of art by those referred to as ‘impressionistic masters’.
Aphys was a creative genius.
It would be some time before her works of art interacted with each other, and she was sure those moments would be further evidence of her brilliance, but for now she laboured reimagining the poor burnt souls who wandered through her Emergency Room doors.
Aphys was complete. Content.
by Julian Miles | Jul 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Cheese: the catalyst for the end of the world?
I worked for the Temporal Institute, investigating anomalies caused by our limited access to time travel. Now, everyone knows that time travel is proscribed by the Shibe, the mysterious entities who refuse to show themselves, but demonstrate an almost prescient ability to prevent mankind’s efforts to be naughty – be it big guns, rockets, bombs or time travel devices, we are not allowed access without ‘adult’ (Shibe) permission. Which we rarely get.
I’ve seen the history programmes, the mess we made in the twentieth Century and the horrorshow we made of the twenty-first. The Shibe decided that we were not going to have the chance to turn the twenty-second into our last.
The Temporal Institute was established so we could study time and the effects of time travel in a controlled manner. The bear named Causality was not to be poked. We could go back and witness, but going back to intervene was forbidden.
It was all going well until I came back with a wedge of Stilton caught in my coat. When it fell onto the floor of the changing room I nearly fainted with terror. The Shibe were very keen on making examples of transgressors – artistically painful examples that were hung in parks, so people could be sickened while wondering just how you could do that with a human body.
Nothing happened. I and my Stilton were undisturbed. After a short while, I picked it up, took it home and ate it. It was delicious.
The Shibe only allowed us temporal travel due to a quirk of causality – because we had not been born yet, we did not exist in the places we visited. Therefore, anything there that could see us, did not. ‘Causalic Invisibility’ allowed us to witness the gamut of history. Mysteries and hearsay could be clarified. But had I ruined it all?
Apparently not. I ate the cheese and the universe didn’t die. The next trip, I tried some wine. The trip after that, I came back with more cheese. Then, I discovered bacon: eating dead flesh may be taboo, but it just smelt so good. Gradually, I became an illicit sampler of the victuals of history. But only the ones I could recognise. And nothing that moved.
I was in the bedchamber of Cleopatra VII when I had to try the wine, as the ‘trysting’ I was observing suddenly involved things I had never seen, even on the erotic relief feeds. She’d given herself to Augustus, along with her retinue, and he was taking advantage in a moment probably omitted from recorded history on censorship grounds.
As the spectacle continued, I discovered that the snakes roaming her chamber were purely decorative. The wine was poisoned.
And here I lie, dying unseen in a corner of Cleopatra’s bedchamber, an invisible impossibility that will cease to exist the moment I stop breathing – or I’ll cause a paradox that will collapse reality.
I never thought I’d be hoping to be discovered, caught and executed by the Shibe.
by submission | Jul 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : Matthew Harrison
“Tell Mr Hoffmann, Jimmy,” said his father.
The noonday sun outside had been dazzling, and Jimmy’s eyes were still adjusting to the dimness of the shop. The old jeweller loomed formidably behind the counter. But at his father’s prompting, Jimmy piped up, “It’s my watch. The time is wrong.”
Mr Hoffmann frowned, his white eyebrows almost meeting. “Our watches are very gut,” he said slowly, becoming Germanic in his concern. “Vot is the problem?” His son Stepan came up, his younger brow likewise furrowed.
At his father’s signal Jimmy took his watch off, reached up, and put it on the counter. “The numbers – there’s a thirteen…” Then he saw Stepan. “I bought it from him.”
Mr Hoffmann glanced at Stepan. Then he put on an eyeglass and squinted at the watch. “Ach, Ja! Dreizehn!” He took the eyeglass out.
Then with ponderous humour: “Thirteen o’clock – Ha Ha! Zat vould make you late for ze lunch!”
“It did too,” his father said.
Mr Hoffmann invited Jimmy to choose another watch. With encouragement from his father, Jimmy looked, and chose a shiny new digital one. Mr Hoffman congratulated him, and passed the old watch to Stepan.
“In a way, it’s a pity,” said his father. “We could have used the extra hour.”
“As could we, as could we,” Mr Hoffmann agreed with a smile.
When Jimmy and his father had gone, Mr Hoffmann turned to Stepan. He was not smiling now. When he spoke, it was not in German or any other recognisable language. But it seems that Stepan understood, for with a miserable expression he picked up the watch and quickly did something to it so that the numbers ran from one to twelve again.
Outside, there was a sudden flurry. The sun flipped back in the sky, and then resumed its normal course.
