by submission | Sep 24, 2014 | Story |
Author : William Tham
I screamed.
Green spots of oxidation on silver-lined instruments. The porthole encased in fire, through which I vaguely saw the curvature of the earth, the Scandinavian peninsula hurtling below me, followed swiftly by the frozen wastes of the North Pole under spiralling clouds a hundred kilometres across, and then over the Pacific coasts, before the capsule turned and my directions were lost.
And then I fell again.
On the outer edges of the atmosphere, the boundary of air and space, where gravity ebbed weakly a hundred miles off the surface of the earth, my hands grappled with the controls and levers, struggling to tilt the capsule to keep it level. Useless! I was out of control.
Down below, Baikonur, Houston, all tracking my progress as I turned into a shooting star, a burning man falling from the sky.
A voice over the static. Someone spoke indistinctly, received by burning mechanisms as the air superheated into plasma while I was forced back into my seat, pinned down by acceleration and gravity, fighting to live.
“Lev….the Minister…he calls you a hero…please, reply…”
For an infinite fraction of time the capsule righted itself and I was staring into space. Outside, light from distant stars shone through the cosmos, undead and unblinking, a hundred million of them witnessing re-entry. For a moment, it was as if there was no movement, but the illusion shattered as another explosion shook the craft and I was spiralling away from constellations that I could no longer tell apart. The parachutes must have been burnt up, and the heat shield combusted.
“We don’t know…how…why…please, stay on…the Minister’s trying to call…”
*
A lifetime ago, out of love of the void, where we lived our insignificant lives amidst the vastness of the expanding universe, I had unbuckled and floated in near-weightlessness to the porthole to stare at the world down below. And I knew I could never go back to an ordinary life, ever since that day when I signed away my life to reach for the stars. The Minister, in his greatcoat, walked me amongst the desolate wastes of the launch site, where rockets like ballistic missiles would escape the earth. “The future,” the Minister said solemnly.
I knew that someday, death would not come from a pointless car crash or nuclear warfare, but it would find me in space. I accepted it then. But now I could not.
*
Now I just wanted to live.
I was speaking quickly, incoherently, hoping that all my words, every permutation and combination of the alphabet, scattered by static and background radiation, would fluctuate through the atmosphere and to the short-wave radio enthusiasts and foreign spies and the controllers with their radio telescopes and the Minister himself, praying and holding a receiver to his ear to catch the last moments of a dying man hurtling from orbit, leaving seared flesh and metal and quartz to ignite amongst the stars.
“It’s still beautiful here,” I managed to say.
by Julian Miles | Sep 22, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Why are we all the way out here? If we had taken the Rigel mission, I could have been home for mid-winter revel.”
Chapni sighed. That was the problem with the Urulaunk; they had this thing about partying. Preferably with as many like-minded multi-limbed beings as possible. For the rest of their year, they were fun people to be around. But come the two Great Revels, every Urulaunk not on Nicto Urula turned into a whinging child for a period equal to the time it would have taken them to get home for the festival.
With a flick of his vestigial groinwings, he brought himself back to being a tutor: “This is the Cradle. When you gaze upon the third planet from the recently subgiant sun, you are gazing at the world that gave us life. That is Earth, and although it is long dead, it is a worthy thing to meditate upon.”
“All the way out here? Only one planet? How, without the Perspicacity of Icto, did they manage to accomplish so much?”
“They were an emotive race. Driven by intense passion to achieve things we would deem impossible. Now, it is time.”
“What am I to learn?”
“You will tell me. Or you will fail this qualification sector.”
Chapni waited as they approached the system. He’d deliberately dropped them from Supra outside the system to give his student a better chance.
“Poshtor Chapni, the system has too many planets.”
“Quantify.”
“The archaeological treatises disagree on exact number, but the low bound is eight and the high bound is ten. There are forty here.”
“And how would you resolve this conflict of data?”
The Urulaunk brought its entire thirty-five digits to bear on the consoles and Chapni allowed a shudder to run up his dorsal ridge. An Urulaunk totally committed to something outside of inebriated joymaking. It was a first, and vindicated his faith in the race’s potential.
“Thirty-two of the planets maintain an atypical orbit, yet are equidistant upon the same track. Therefore, I deem them to be foreign bodies.”
“A fair initial postulation. Now granularise it.”
The fingers flew and the thumbs tapped and the rhythm was a frenetic, tribal thing. Chapni smiled. Even during data interrogation, an Urulaunk was primal.
“The thirty-two identified are orbital, but my predictions state they are on the cusp of escaping. They are artificial, being dense mass without variance for mantle, core or similar. There are no artefacts. I do not understand.”
“Persevere.”
The rhythm resumed.
“Poshtor Chapni. The worlds comprise synthetic organic polymers of varying exact composition. From what I have gleaned from the history and legendry, I would state that they are composed entirely of detritus. I postulate that humans resorted to this drastic measure when planetary storage threatened to overwhelm thier biosphere.”
Chapni allowed his horns to flush scarlet in approval: “Urulaunk Takton, I deem you to have passed this sector’s requirements. Now, for extra credit, why do you think we are here?”
Takton reflectively scratched his armpits, an unconscious movement of joint-popping speed and complexity.
“The thirty-two will soon become free-space objects. By the time the first one becomes a nuisance, the rest may be scattered across the universe. Dealing with them here and now is the best remedial action.”
Chapni’s horns almost glowed: “Correct.”
“Poshtor Chapni, a further deduction?”
“Proceed.”
“Nicto Urula is dependent on similar polymers. You are endeavouring to lay a warning upon me.”
Chapni let his proboscis dance across the control console: “Now that the lesson is installed, let us set about destroying the Polystars of Sol.”
by submission | Sep 5, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
The thing inside Tabitha Sandor twitched. She tried to move, make herself more comfortable, and it did not approve.
Stop. The word danced in her head. She wondered for a second if she had even heard the thought, but she knew she had. Since the scientists had discovered the alien DNA was compatible with human DNA, and inseminated her with it against her will, she knew.
It knows, too, she thought.
She looked around the 6-foot cubicle that they had placed her in for observation. The walls were glistening stainless steel. Only the camera in the corner interrupted their smooth surface. The scientists were watching her.
She ran her hand along her stomach. Two weeks ago, her belly had been flat and muscular. But, then they came in the middle of her sleep shift and hauled her off to a lab. They drugged her. She awoke to find them between her legs, syringe in hand, injecting her with an alien’s seed.
“It’s for the greater good,” one of the scientists told her. “We need to know what this alien race knew.”
Her personal freedoms were secondary to them.
To them, she was disposable.
She stood and walked to the wall. For the millionth time, she ran her hand along the smooth contour, hoping to find the exit.
There, it thought.
She paused, dumbfounded. Over the past couple of days, she had come to realize that the thing growing within her was not only alien, it held all the knowledge of its race. It somehow retained the knowledge of a long dead alien race; the abilities of that race were in her stomach. It was showing her, in brief glimpses, the majestic world, now turned to ash, below. There was a war that had wiped out its people. They had used weapons that made nuclear fusion look like a cap gun. They incinerated their entire planet. It was that planet from which they had extracted the alien’s DNA and impregnated her.
They are coming, It thought.
Tabitha backed away from the wall and, a second later, two white-coated men stepped inside.
One of them stepped toward her.
Tabitha felt a strange sensation and then her mind went blank. When she regained control, the scientists were laying on the floor, both of their necks broken.
She gasped.
“You killed them,” she said.
It was necessary, It thought. They were going to stop the experiment.
It flashed a thought through her mind. It belonged to one of the scientists. In the thought, she understood that they had come to the realization the alien was communicating with her. They understood that some form of muscle memory or genetic memory was telling her things. They also knew that the seed they planted inside her belonged to one of the scientists who helped destroy the alien world. They had managed to decipher some of the alien language.
They feared the alien’s power…and they wanted to kill it, lest they unleash the dragon again.
We must escape, It thought.
Tabitha wanted to protest, but a sharp, agonizing pain shot through her.
Do it!
Then, it took control again, and everything went black.
##
When she returned, she was in an escape pod. Through the window, she could see the massive ship above. It was burning silently in space.
As she watched, the ship exploded.
She gasped in horror.
It had to be, It thought. They wanted to stop us. I could not allow that.
She wanted to fight, but knew fighting was futile.
It was in control.
She fell back into the cushiony seat and watched as they dropped to the scorched world below.
by submission | Sep 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jedd Cole
This kind of epilogue ends with a beginning, just as Homo sapiens began with an ending in the dark garden of forevers past. They believe it is AD 2476. They march through empty space with their idols under their arms. Earth burns behind them along with the little unnamed ones–the poor and the needy. Being unnamed, they are soon forgotten. The small unsponsored flotilla presses on towards the people’s recourse: a cold red rock, the shell of an empty colony, and other idols.
[#]
Heléna bends over with arms outstretched, holding her little daughter far away from herself in a corner of the compartment where the mob has been herded and penned. The child empties her bladder onto the hard metal floor. The stream makes unpleasant smacking sounds and splashes onto Heléna’s shoes. Twenty feet away, people pretend not to watch with their faces.
Heléna thinks about what happens when the royal are made refugees. She remembers with unidentified feelings the flat she and her daughter fled in such a hurry, leaving everything behind to save their lives so they could pee in the corner of a starship compartment. Cargo ship. It has never tasted human flesh before, nor does it wish to. Two months ago it was full of tiger nuts out of Valencia. No one will be interested in tiger nuts anymore. All the little wrinkled tubers were left behind.
Heléna’s husband used to eat them plain. He was also left behind.
There is a preacher in the midst a while later, speaking soft and confident words to the people. He meets Heléna’s stare. They talk about the disaster and where they used to live and what it is to be lonely among so many people. It turns out the preacher had owned a house just a few kilometers from Heléna’s flat. He tilts his head towards her and asks if she has been saved. She looks around and says yes with some confidence.
Heléna loses sight of her daughter among the thousand people in the compartment and never sees her again. She thinks about Baal and Moloch and passing children through the fire. She and the preacher are making plans for their future together when she gives birth to a new child three days before the ship reaches Mars. They name him Esperanto, speaking strange things to him.
Their new home will become ancient.
Heléna writes a story about the flight from the old place, and how everyone was saved, especially from the large countries. She writes from the carefully airtight hovel. Esperanto plays in the hydroponic garden. The preacher works in the chapel made of red dirt. He dies several years later of complications from AIDS.
[#]
Esperanto keeps Heléna with him in his pocket. She’s been dead for twenty years. She dwells in the paper, the story about the old place, the earth that perished. He contributes to the making of a new old world here. Planeta rojo.
Heléna had written of the burden of the removed generation.
Esperanto speaks strange things to his daughter, whose mother he does not know. There’s a former preacher’s son who lives in the hovels a block away and with whom Esperanto’s daughter plays for eternal segments of time.
Forever comes and goes. Esperanto thinks about what happens when refugees are made royalty. He turns it into a thesis, and the thesis will burn some people alive, including, eventually, himself.
Before that happens, he becomes their leader in the dark. Renovations are made. Rages aimed. Governors deposed, but not for good. The seeds of change wrinkle in the sun atop fallow Martian soil, where new men have proclaimed old things, and triumphed over the mere words of scribes.
[#]
Esperanto has died, his daughter has been lost, and new ones have been born in the interim to continue the unspoken religion. The epilogue remains an unwavering line that begins with Heléna’s manuscript and shoots into space along the route of the ancient fleeing ships. The fresh, sprouting heads write their own stories. The people proclaim themselves Genesis, the beginning of creation, and they cover the red planet with origins and fables. By inertia, the descendants of Heléna, Esperanto, and their daughters become the writers, builders, priests of the new old, of Baals, of Molochs, of fires. Children passing through them, most unnamed.
by submission | Aug 31, 2014 | Story |
Author : Sarah Vernetti
“Am I comfortable? No, Amelia, not particularly. I feel like I’ve washed out to sea. Maybe I’ll return. Or maybe I’ll end up in some far off land fifty years from now, only to be discovered by a child and be featured on the evening news. So, no, I’m not comfortable.”
He struggled to catch his breath. His hands gripped the arm rests with such force that his knuckles looked like they might burst through his skin.
I sighed. How was I supposed to respond? I never did understand his brand of metaphorical nonsense. If only that website hadn’t insisted that we meet.
Things went well at first, but there were always additional demands, more requests, further attempts at forming some kind of bond. But I needed my space.
“Goodbye, Pete. See you on Mars,” I said as I closed the door to the space vessel. I leaned over the control panel, ignoring his muffled voice. I entered the launch code, sending him into oblivion with only my newest invention and his own histrionics to keep him company.
The capsule shot upwards with such force that I was thrown back against the guardrail, peeling paint finding its way into the palms of my hands. Right through the fate line. Pete would have appreciated that detail.
Once the rumbling stopped and the smoke cleared from the room, I grabbed my phone. Under relationship status, I toggled over to “single.” It was all too easy.
