by submission | Feb 3, 2013 | Story |
Author : Christine Rains
All they cared about was the color red.
When we landed on blue-gray gaseous Kepler 3, the squirrel-like beings greeted us peacefully. The Keps were primitive and living in small farming communities. They’d never even seen the full spectrum of colors, but they were intelligent and eager to learn. We brought them machinery to help with their fungi crops and technology to make their everyday lives easier. We even shared with them the secrets of space travel.
The first time some of their kind entered one of our ships on the surface out of the color filtering atmosphere of the planet, they cried out and some fell to their knees. Our galactic allied flag was brightly dyed, and the ship’s name was in red letters underneath on the wall. The Keps reached out their stubby hands, trembling as they traced each letter.
We were proud to have made new friends and allies. Not all beings we met in the galaxy were friendly. Yet we humans managed to make enough allies to help us flourish in the darkness of space.
The Keps worshiped us at first. And, not surprisingly, we liked it. Yet we didn’t stop to understand why. We assumed it was because we were strong and smart. They were small and comic in our eyes. We had brought them into a new age. We were gods.
We were blind to when it started to change.
They created a new flag for their world and wore uniforms. All red. We saw it as a tribute. They learned about weapons and strategy. They became great pilots and techs. Every farmer became a warrior. The Keps left their planet and made space their home.
When they helped us win wars, we gloated. When they conquered our most feared enemies, we congratulated them. We were the most powerful alliance in the galaxy.
Then they turned on us. We didn’t understand why. We had given them so much.
We lost several billion humans in the fighting. We feared we’d become extinct. When the Keps accepted our surrender, we thought they would kill off the rest of us. They were hungry for violence and glory.
They kept us clustered in camps on Mars. Earth was no longer habitable having been devastated by the war.
The Keps used us as entertainment, but mostly for livestock. They’d bleed us to stain their flags and uniforms. The red kept its intense color through ingenious fabric preservatives. Our blood was so different from the bluish-black ichor in their veins. Perhaps it was a statement to other aliens of their superiority, but in the end, we realized it was something more primal. Something that reached into their hearts and souls to bring out centuries of suppressed anger, passion, and hostility.
It was the color red they truly worshiped.
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by Duncan Shields | Jan 28, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
He was wearing the recording helmet when he died.
John DeMangus, out like a light, rest in peace. It was an embolism that took him out. He was by himself in the studio, and had the helmet recording.
He had noticed a background hiss in the first few tapes that the lab had made so far. It was like ambient noise on a badly made mix tape from before CDs. John didn’t know if it was the act of recording itself, the servos pulling the tape across the heads, that was causing the hiss or if it was possibly his own mind. Like maybe the background chatter was his subconscious whisperings. The prospect scared and fascinated him.
He had cleaned the heads on the giant machine and blasted air into the innards of it to remove all the dust. The interface to the machine took up a quarter of the lab’s wall space in the back corner. The machine itself was the size of an entire room. All the sensors and computational equipment were funneled down into two rainbow cables the thickness of a pair of arms. They snaked into the back of Dr. DeMangus’ chair. Wires from the chair led up to the helmet.
He pressed record.
He’d read about some meditational techniques that he was going to use to try to clear his head of anything that could cause any chatter on the tape. He needed a clean baseline to work from. It was not to be.
Fate struck the blow. John DeMangus died suddenly as the blood vessel in his brain took that moment to give up. It ripped open. John stiffened in his chair and then went slack. He wasn’t found until morning. The machine kept on recording for six minutes after his death.
The machine was built to record thoughts. We’d just started to tap the potential of the human mind.
The tape of John’s death was appropriated by the military, wrapped in red tape and yellow danger stickers, and stuck without ceremony in a sub-basement outside of Tuscon. It was a grave of sorts.
A shallow one, as it turns out. Colonel Magda Jefferies sniffed it out five years later and picked it up. She was looking for a way to interrogate prisoners.
Playback machines were smaller by that point. Laws were in place. What she was doing was so far beyond illegal that there wasn’t even a name for her crime yet.
She played the tape back on a few prisoners, bound and crying in their tiled cells. She placed the standard helmet on their heads and pressed play. The relived the experience of having an embolism. They died.
Colonel Magda took the physical feeds out of the tape and played it back on a few more prisoners. It was the beginning.
The prisoners experienced Dr. John DeMangus’ death without the physical symptoms. They experienced his soul slipping loose.
The souls of these prisoners were ripped from their bodies and flung to whatever other side there was.
The human-shaped construct of meat and bone that was left was open to suggestion, non-verbal, and remorseless.
She created an army from POWs after that.
Magda’s zombies, they were called. Or merely Doctors, as a throwback to DeMangus. Her crime was called soul-stripping. The official name for it became Murder in the Fifth Degree.
Many of the troops in today’s army are stripped. It makes them more pliable and obedient while they still retain the motor control and reflexes of a normal human.
by submission | Jan 24, 2013 | Story |
Author : Michael T Schaper
Tanya looked out across the room. The party was in full swing and, because both of her sisters now had children of their own, any chance at conversation was being drowned out by a multitude of little voices. She swooped down, picked up one of her young nephews, and spun him around in her arms.
“How does that feel, honey?”
“Whee!” was the only answer she got. The three year old’s face was lit up with sheer pleasure.
Kids, Tanya thought. So full of life and love.
Tanya glanced across the room at her husband Peter. His attention was clearly elsewhere, in an animated conversation with her brother-in-law, both of them ignoring the good-natured chaos around them.
“Hey,” she shouted over the noise, “want to join us?”, but Pete just shook his head and turned away.
Tanya sighed. We can fly through the depths of space, use nanotechnology to extend our lives, climb Everest and even build perfect robots, she told herself. But we still can’t work out why some males warm to children and others don’t.
“All good, Tan?” Her youngest sister materialized alongside, extra wineglass in hand.
Tanya took a deep gulp and shrugged. “Five years,” she said, taking another long draught. “I’m five years older than you. Yet here you are, with a family of your own. What have I got?”
The cherished hope of a child of her own seemed to be slipping further away every year.
Ever since she’d first met Peter, Tanya had known that a natural conception wasn’t possible. But even all the many other treatments hadn’t bought her any closer to having her own family.
“If you still want to try, then you have to do something about it,” her sister said. “Have you ever thought of adoption? If Peter agrees, that is.”
And that was precisely the problem. “We could apply you know,” she explained to Peter after they’d left the party, “and get a response fairly quickly. But the adoption agency has to know that we’re both keen to do this. I can’t be the only parent in this relationship.”
Peter stopped and looked into her eyes. He was thinking, really thinking it through, Tanya realized. She could almost hear all the gears in his brain ticking over. Then he shook his head. “I’m sorry, really. But it’s not something that interests me. Hasn’t in the past, doesn’t now. It’s just not the way I am.”
Weren’t guys designed to get better at dealing with kids the more time spent around them? It didn’t seem to be working for Peter.
They drove home without saying another word. Tanya would have felt her heart was breaking, if she hadn’t already expected this answer.
*****
She woke the next morning with a still heavy heart. Peter was standing in the doorway, as he did every Sunday morning, her breakfast on a tray. He was good like that, Tanya realized. Good on the predictable. And kids weren’t like that. They were messy, confronting, hard to understand or control.
He placed the tray on the bed beside her and giving her a long kiss. “I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want. I guess I’m just not wired that way, am I?” he said with a wistful smile.
She looked at him closely for a minute, this beautiful husband of hers. Peter was right: he wasn’t built that way.
And her sister was also right. If Tanya wasn’t happy with that, then she had to do something about it.
She leant over, kissed Peter softly, and ran her hands through his hair until she found the spot. It took just a few seconds to switch data chips, then wait for the reset function to work. She smiled at him once more, then decided they could go looking for nursery decorations this afternoon. There. Now he was wired that way.
by submission | Jan 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Will Strouse
If Casey wasn’t so hard to understand, she would be perfect; we kissed for the first time at work… The next day, we still got along… at work.
Kind of weird that she can never hang out after work…
She says she lives alone downtown but I don’t know where…
At the end of the day she gets anxious; acts like I don’t exist.
Next day everything’s cool again, except she won’t acknowledge that us just being intimate at work is weird.
One day I followed her home…
Figured she must be married(unhappily)…
Found out she wasn’t…
She acted like everything was normal…We had dinner… I stayed over… Things felt okay… for a bit.
Then something happened, I couldn’t explain..
She fell asleep… I got up and went into her kitchen & when I came back to bed she was gone… I searched her entire house, but there was no sign of her…. yet her front door was locked…
The next morning she reappeared… When I asked her where she had been, she acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about…
I realized we had to break up…
We stopped talking for a week…
She started flirting with Nat Gander… I hate that guy.
I missed her.
One day after work we got coffee and talked honestly for the first time… She said she was afraid of the dark as a kid… and that’s why she’d gotten all weird at the end of the day… Wasn’t sure that explained anything…. but it was progress…
I stayed over at her place again… This time I watched her for awhile… then I left the room… By the time I got back she had vanished… I looked everywhere for her… Called out her name…
Then I saw something in her hallway that took my breath away…
The next morning I told her about the man that showed up after she disappeared… Said he was her father…
She laughed in disbelief.
I told her she’s either a shape shifter – her power nourished by her compulsive denial… or her dreams come to life.
I got a video camera and stuck around…
I watched her all night, made sure she didn’t disappear… Then I’d test it out… let her go… & dream… most of the time there was nothing around but empty space… I got lucky a few times though and wrote down what I saw… & pretty soon I got to know some of the characters from her dreams…
my favorite was Andre, a unicorn missing it’s horn…. there was a crocodile that lived in her tub that scared me… scared her parents too… her best friend from college told me to leave… but someone had to write her dream book…
I stopped going to work so I could sleep during the day…
And then one night, I met something that had taken on my exact resemblance, claiming to be me… It left and let me see through its eyes… the outside world… less and less frequently…
Pretty soon I lost my reflection…
When I woke up I saw her reflection… she was sitting on the ground writing in my dream book…
I never saw myself again.
Instead, I closed my eyes and dreamt of blackness and falling purple stars.
by submission | Jan 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Meg Everingham
In the night Tom rolled over and opened his eyes. Through the dark like a ghost floated the low sound of his mother crying.
She had arrived home earlier, from the airport; she had stared past him like a blind person and disappeared into her bedroom.
Tom followed a light down the hallway. He found her bent into a chair in her office, lovely dark head in her hands, all sharp edges of grief. He stood in the doorway and whispered to her. She looked up and held her arms out to him, red eyes terrible. Tom moved to her obediently, in awe of her sadness.
She settled him on her knee and turned him, so they both faced her desk where she spent so much time working when she was home, away from the ocean. Lying on it was a photograph.
‘Look, Tom,’ his mother whispered, and she traced a finger along the blue lines of the image.
Tom recognized the picture of the humpback whale. He looked up to the empty space on the wall, where it usually hung alongside other luminous images of the deep.
‘The very last one died today,’ his mother said. ‘In a sanctuary up north, where I work.’
‘Why?’ Tom said. Her arms around his waist were hard, cold.
‘He was always going to,’ she replied, speaking into his hair. ‘But it was mainly because of people.’
She stopped working. She spent a lot of time curled on the floor of her study, hemmed in by the walls of photographs. She was silent and lost to the world. Deep underwater.
One morning, some men in suits knocked on the door, and asked Tom politely if they could see his mother. He showed them to her office, where they disappeared inside. Tom sat near the door, his cheek resting on the cold steel. There was the low murmur of questions and answers. They were there for several hours.
Soon after there came an afternoon when Tom got home from school, and his mother was gone. He searched the house, calling softly. He was hungry.
Something had happened in the office. Papers were littered across the room. Framed images from the walls lay crushed on the floor, fragments of afternoon sunlight caught in the splinters of glass. The chair was upside down.
Tom tried to ignore the cold feeling in his chest. He shut the office door and wandered around the house for a while before turning on the television.
She was on it.
Out the front of an important-looking building, the strange men in suits were holding her by the arms as she struggled like an animal. They were restraining her from a nearby knot of angry people, who were throwing objects at her and shrieking. They used the words monster, heartless, murderer.
Tom kept his stare on his mother’s face. Her hair was in her eyes. The camera zoomed drunkenly in on her as she said, over and over again, ‘He was lonely, he was lonely.’
Later that evening, Tom’s grandmother came and helped him pack his things into bags and boxes, and he went to stay with her.
