by submission | Jul 31, 2014 | Story |
Author : Sara Norja
Where there is no air, there can be no wind.
I miss a lot of things about Earth. Fresh bread baked by Mona’s strong hands. The smell of the sea, salt-tanged like longing. But what I think of most here in this foresaken escape pod is wind.
You can’t feel solar winds on your bare skin.
Life support is failing. The oxygen will run out soon. And no one has come for me yet. No one will. As I wait for death, I remember the wind chimes in my grandmother’s house. They hung on her porch, beside the door’s speaklink. The wind sang in them. At night when my grandmother showed me the stars, the chimes would mingle with her voice as she told me their names: Aldebaran, Vega, Sirius. Even then, I dreamt of one day flying out there.
Now here I am, dying among their cold light.
#
The steady beep of the oxygen meter is the only thing keeping me awake. Its light flashes red. Critical levels. Soon I’ll be out of air and I’ll drown in the dark.
My thoughts can’t stop circling around my grandmother’s wind chimes. I can almost hear them outside. But there’s no sound in space. It’s just my near-death mind bringing memories to life.
I raise my hands to my face, brush my fingertips across my lips. I kiss my own fingers, just to feel like I’m still alive. I touch the faded plaque on my uniform that spells my name. Juanita Ibarra. For just a few moments, I am still that woman. The woman who loves a good thunderstorm, fresh peas, Mona.
The signal my escape pod sent out after the shipwreck has been broadcasting into nothingness. The air is heavy to breathe. Soon I’ll suffocate. Soon I’ll die like the rest of the Indefatigable’s crew.
I drift into a doze I won’t wake from. I no longer care.
A green light starts flashing on my screen. The comdevice crackles with static. A voice speaks, but I can no longer distinguish words.
#
The gentle beep of a life support machine brings me back to consciousness. I open my eyes. White, everywhere white. And a hand holding mine.
“You’re alive.” Mona’s crying, and smiling, and kissing my parched lips. I think for a moment that I’m in heaven, but it’s Earth after all, and my body is gaining strength.
“Take me outside.” My voice is a dry rasp.
“You’ve only just awoken! You’re not going anywhere yet, dearest.”
“Then open the window.” From where I lie in the hospital bed, I can see a square of sky. The sun is shining, the clouds moving fast.
Mona pulls the window open.
The wind sings to me, caresses my bare arms. Somewhere, I can hear the faint echo of chimes.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Yes. The aliens came down and harvested the human race. Yes. We asked them to.
That was the plan all along. We just didn’t know it.
Our basic nature was installed in us by them. We were set down on this planet to evolve until overpopulation and to invent the technology necessary to start screaming our position into space. The language wasn’t important. Giving off radio and television waves was the sign that we had reached fruition.
We did it brilliantly.
The aliens, all green teeth and dimensional tentacles, saw us show up on their routine scans. We were a delicious, ripe apple. This galaxy and others like it are merely orchards for these creatures. They are farmers and we are genetically modified planet boosters.
We pulled most of the resources out of the earth already. That’s why the aliens collected the cities. All that glass, steel, copper, iron, concrete and gyprock. All processed. All ready to go. They harvested the minerals and oil, too. We had even dug the holes for them already. The Earth has ice-scream scoop craters all over it now from the aliens’ machines reaching down and picking up every single town. Those holes have been sprayed with fertilizer. In five years, they will all be jungle. Future generations won’t even know they existed.
We were very efficient parasites. We overloaded the planet with our biomass and started crying to the heavens. Then we were culled and smashed down to the stone age again.
And of course, our meat is prized. The enormous flying thresher slaughterhouses that collected us were the final nightmare. That’s why there are so few of us left. Enough to start another breeding program here to be sure, but the population of earth has gone from billions to a few thousand.
In a way, we’re lucky. The dinosaurs were the first experiment but they were killed by a meteor. Probably for the best since they’d had millions of years to build a radio but never did.
We, on the other hand, must have exceeded our presets. Because of that, they’re setting us up for a round two, I think. We get to do it again.
How do we warn the future generations? How do we tell them not to breed, not to innovate, not to invent, not to think? We want to start a religion that will celebrate meekness, to idolize servitude, to live simply, and to shun technology. But I remember that a lot of religions before the harvest were already trying to do that and they failed.
Maybe if I made an image of death that looked like a farmer but then I remember that my image of Death had a scythe and that makes me think that maybe this isn’t the first time we’ve been culled.
Maybe the wave of humans before us already tried to do what I’m trying to do now.
This is why we never got any responses to our messages into space. Those messages are silenced as soon as they start talking. There are no conversations. Only yells that are cut off.
If I could go back in time, I’d tell the people of earth to shut up. To stay quiet. To quit beaming our entire lives at full volume into space.
All we were doing was ringing the dinner bell.
by Julian Miles | Jul 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Sweeper, what about that clump at five o’clock low to you?”
“Negative on that, Houston. It may show as solid, but visual shows it’s a mass of sub-kilo pieces in close formation.”
“Roger that, Sweeper. Your next action is twenty-seven clicks toward homebase.”
“Twenty-seven clicks dawnwards it is. Sweeper out.”
The bulky scow moves off and I transfer my attention toward its target. Nothing of mine, so I drop the alerts back to watcher status and return my primary attention to my CoD squad, who in my absence have racked up a high bodycount with no purpose. I rein in their kill routines and set them to team working and support, identifying future influencers and laying formative ideas.
“Sweeper, did you catch that?”
“Negative, Houston.”
“Something fast, should be heading away from you, nine o’clock high.”
“Got it, Houston. Hot rock, high metal content, burning on a skip-pass.”
“Sighting added to identification data, Sweeper. Thanks.”
As the ‘hot rock’ skips for the second time, I send it my credentials. It does not skip a third time, just heads on out into the beyond. This planet is already reserved.
“Sweeper, we just got a burst of static. Did it register with you?”
“Just flare residue, Houston.”
As Houston signs off, I tune to Sweeper’s internal chatter.
“Is it me or are the home team getting twitchy?”
“Something you’ll learn, Dean, is that home team are always twitchy, and our job comes with an unwritten duty to reassure them.”
“Reassure them about what?”
“Certain high-ups back dirtside are convinced that something evil has infiltrated Earth’s communications and data infrastructure. They’ve been convinced of it since the eighties and no matter what we say, they will not be shaken from their paranoia.”
“How could something do that and remain undetected?”
“Precisely, Dean. There’s nothing organic up here but humans in tin cans.”
That is absolutely true. The existence of an artificial monitoring intelligence using a distributed mote architecture disguised amongst the thousands of tons of space debris is something they cannot conceive of. With judicious application of focussed microbeam assassinations, my existence will continue to remain beyond conjecture.
By the time my operators arrive, I will know everything about the capabilities of these sapients who call themselves ‘humans’. I will have been observing them and their societal networks for centuries.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Teddy shifted into second gear as the pickup crested the hill, her forearms burning from the long climb and having to fight a leaky steering pump the entire way.
“I don’t understand why you disabled the power assist Teddy, you make things so much harder-”
Teddy cut her passenger off in mid sentence. “I’ve told you Max, the controller on the power steering system was misbehaving, I couldn’t trust it anymore.”
Max’s attention darted between Teddy and the road ahead, fingering his seatbelt nervously as Teddy fought with the old truck to stay between the trees. In a flash of blinding sunlight, they burst into a clearing. Teddy reflexively stood with both feet on the brakes to bring the truck to a halt before they drove over the edge she knew was there but couldn’t see through the glare. When the truck had come to a complete stop and the dust had settled, she threw it into park and killed the engine. The sudden shift to silence unnerved them both.
Max dropped his head and reluctantly unbuckled his seatbelt. “Teddy, I-”
She cut him off again. “Shut it Max, you know I need to do this.” She unbuckled her own belt and pushed open the door to climb out of the truck. The front wheels sat barely a foot from the edge. “Might’ve been my last trip too,” she breathed, “damn.”
She pulled on a set of heavy work gloves from the door pocket, walked to the side of the truck and started pulling pieces from the pickup bed. First she hefted a microwave, carried it over her head to the edge of the drop and threw it into space, counting the seconds until she heard the satisfying crash that reassured her it was broken beyond repair at the bottom of the hole. She followed the microwave with a toaster, then a coffee maker, a flat screen television and a laptop computer. For the next hour Max watched her as she tirelessly launched DVD players, clock radios, electric mixers and digital scales, calculators and automatic vacuum units off the edge and down into the hole.
“You could give me a hand Max, you lazy shit.” She yelled across the truck at him, not pausing to look.
“You know I can’t Teddy, I’m sorry.” His shoulders dropped, and he kicked absently at stones on the ground, unable to look at her.
Teddy kept emptying the truck.
When the last piece had rattled off the rock floor of the great hole before them, she walked around to stand beside Max.
“You know what this is about, don’t you Max?” She looked sideways at him as she spoke. “You know why I have to do this?”
Max stared at his shoes.
“Yes Teddy, it’s about the virus. I understand.”
“You’ve been my best friend for as long as I can remember Max,” she took a few steps back, produced a large calibre handgun from her coverall pocket, and leveled it at Max’s head. “I’m sorry Max, but you don’t know you haven’t been infected, or that you won’t be.”
Max raised his head finally to look at her, and she saw her own reflection distorted in the chrome of his flesh.
“If you loved me Teddy, you’d find a way to-”
There was clap of thunder as the slug tore Max’s head nearly in two, the force throwing him back against the fender and then off into space.
She listened long after his body stopped making noises below.
“Love,” she talked outloud, turning the window crank to close Max’s window before slamming the door shut, “for a second there Max, I thought maybe you weren’t sick after all.”
by submission | Jul 13, 2014 | Story |
Author : Matt Handle
Dex felt the sleek machine between his legs thrum even deeper when he twisted the throttle, opening it up to full speed as he zipped through the streets of Central City. He weaved in and out of traffic as the wheelgaunts honed in on his signal. He could sense them getting closer, their hideous high-pitched shrieks echoing off the DBS towers that loomed over the slender corridors of silicon and steel. Blue and green luminosity streaked by as he gritted his teeth and pressed on, a leather-clad comet blazing across an electric night.
The warmth of the golden runes that were etched into his pale skin radiated inward, flowing through his nervous system like quicksilver. The skeletal wraiths nipping at his heels would stop at nothing to carve that power source from his tender flesh. They’d caught wind of him as he’d descended the Spindle and now he had only one chance. Reach the protection of the Night Lotus or die.
He leaned into a curve as he neared the last tunnel, his body nearly parallel to the smooth surface of the interior artery. Every fiber of his being tingled as the narrow sleeve of insulated circuitry approached. He was almost there.
The lead wheelgaunt was drafting him. Its sinewy arms and clawed talons grasped for the back of his cycle as the creature’s translucent and spiny wheels tore into the sponge-like track. Needles of fear spiked their way down Dex’s spine and stabbed at his heart. He’d made this treacherous route dozens of times before, but the wheelgaunts had never been so close. He could smell their stench of atrophy and death as he sped into the red passage that marked the final length of his journey.
Vermilion light washed over him as his bike darted through the channel. The whine of his engine reverberated off the rounded walls, mixing with the furious sound of his pursuers to create a cacophonous song that announced his arrival. There was no turning back. The tunnel contained no tributaries or retreats. Either he would reach the safety of the Bloom or the wheelgaunts would drag him to ruin.
In the final milliseconds of the chase, Dex felt the icy tips of the wheelgaunt’s barbed fingers as the creature leapt forward in desperation, lashing out before it came up short and slammed into the ground, tumbling away into a tangle of bent wheels and broken limbs. The screech of its two fellows’ brakes immediately followed, their shrill screams of hatred heralding his narrow escape.
Dex burst free from the pipe, shooting across open space in the blink of an eye. The runes that covered his body blazed forth in a torrent of light at the proximity of the Lotus’s welcoming folds and then the flower enveloped him, engulfing him in a lover’s embrace. He was home.
