by submission | May 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : Anna Sherwin
Simion stares at his face in the mirror, does he look human enough? He practices a smile, pulling the corners of his mouth upwards. He does not know how to create that elusive light to his eyes that would bring the smile to life. His new heart nestles uneasily in his powerful chest.
His controller has put him in charge of the green revolution. He must descend from his eyrie here on the one hundred and forty fourth floor deep into the basement of the building where the first seeds of change are germinating. Outside the windows, far away beyond the sprawling city, the desert is edging closer.
He moves smoothly towards the lift, the doors opening soundlessly before him. Inside the lift he meets Crystal, one of the few unmodified humans still living amongst the privileged, high above the pollution. Almost like a primitive life form she has been neither enhanced, or genetically modified.
‘Crystal,’ he says trying out his smile on her. Knowing they need to work together he wants to make it clear he is without prejudice.
She give him an appraising look,wonders if he will have the vision required for their task. Together they descend to the cavernous basement where millions of plantlets are reaching up towards the artificial sunlamps that bathe the space in warm light. He picks up a catalogue, tries to decipher the unknown language of plants. Crystal moves gracefully amongst the seedlings, examining their shapes and colors; she is heavily pregnant, feels new life stirring in and around her. She imagines the desert blooming, the parched soil sucking in water from the network of irrigation channels already under construction.
She looks over at Simion. He is standing with the catalogue open in his hands, trying to learn a new language, searching through the circuits of his memory bank.
‘Victoria plum,’ he says ‘Coxes apple, Swiss shard, loganberries, mizuna, pak choi, perpetual spinach.’
For all his beautiful perfection he looks like a lost child. She feels the baby turn and kick within her, waiting to inherit their green revolution.
by submission | May 26, 2012 | Story |
Author : D. R. Pinney
The other side of Ray’s bedroom door was the universe. A brilliant collage of billions of galaxies spreading out through all of infinity just over the threshold. The sight of it was so staggering that he fell back, an insane scream rising but failing to escape, like in a dream. He must be dreaming! When he realized there was no possible way that something like this could occur in the waking world his scream of unabashed terror left his lips as shameless, uproarious laughter.
‘Man,’ he thought, getting to his feet, ‘I must’ve fallen asleep downstairs with Star Trek on.’ It made perfect sense to him. When the conscious mind finally gives in to its exhaustion the subconscious acts goes into hyperdrive, dissecting all its backup data it received that day in wild and marvelous ways.
All day and night Ray had been filing his taxes. The new software he downloaded was supposed to make it easier but it only pissed him off worse than ever and the hideous glow of the screen gave him a troll-sized migraine.
Every few minutes he would look away from the blasted thing to the Trek marathon on one of the local broadcast station. He’d never been a Trekkie or Trekker growing up and all the series blended together in a Menagerie (wasn’t that the title of an episode?) of alien diplomats, planets that looked like southern California, phaser blasts, torpedoes and cyborgs. He didn’t watch it because he cared much for whatever was happening on screen, it simply offered a little escape from the monotony.
At one point, when the concept of time had slipped from him, he looked up and saw a ship, which wasn’t the Enterprise, cruise through a vibrantly colored, unnamed nebula, sending the cosmic gasses spiraling out into space. The image was tranquil and surreal in the gloom of his dinky apartment.
He thought he remembered thinking, ‘There’s more out there than taxes and dead-end jobs. There are planets where they live for the beauty and awe of the universe that we ignore by filing taxes and downloading software,’ but wasn’t sure, he may have said it out loud.
All his life he had dreamed of doing things the people around him thought impossible. That didn’t necessarily mean space travel, maybe just Earth travel, he’d even settle for coast to coast travel. There were mysteries in the world he wanted to be a part of. But couldn’t. He had to be practical, that was what the world told him to do. Too many nights he wondered what would happen if he just tried it, took the first step forward.
Given the extreme pressure he had been under his subconscious had a LOT of room to stretch and really try things out once he finally surrendered to sleep.
He regarded the expanse of the incalculable number of worlds and possibilities they held with a wonderment he had never known. This was the sort of thing the word beauty was meant for and yet it fell embarrassingly short.
For a moment he hoped that he wasn’t dreaming. He hoped that he could step away from this comparatively minuscule space into the vastly enormous outer space. Perhaps he could catch a ride on a passing comet and visit the most distant burning emerald in the sky.
The notion filled him with enough pure white excitement that he felt he might fly there on his own.
“What the hell?” he said. “If this is a dream there’s no harm in trying.”
He closed his eyes and stepped forward.
by Julian Miles | May 24, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Hey you! What the hell do you think you’re doing to my daughter?”
“Not hell, Daddy. Heaven. Heaven!”
Wendy’s daddy was a Detective Inspector and things got a little difficult for me after that. Couldn’t go anywhere without being pulled over. People stopped inviting me out because wherever we were would get raided. After the sixth cavity search in a fortnight, I enlisted as I had no future in Sussex.
That was twenty years ago. Earth is now just another backwater in an interstellar community that has been at war since before I was born. The Trangurians don’t like us; we’re carbon based life and that is heresy from their view.
“Incoming!”
The warning interrupts my trip down memory lane and I scramble out of the shower cursing as I dive into the nearest set of powered armour. No undersuit means bruises and sores, but chafed beats dead every time. I lurch to the viewport as the suit finishes booting. A Trang Yellowbird, nicknamed ‘Icy Banana’ as folk tend to get an odd sense of humour about things that kill so well. I see the crackles of green lightning around its main gun and am making for a weapons hatch before my thinking catches up with my survival instinct.
I’m not there when the death arrives; I’m hurtling toward the dark blue soil ten storeys below. I hit so hard the cloud of blue hides the curtains of light in the sky. The ground holds and I’m only waist-deep. I’m just congratulating myself when a couple of tons of the tower I vacated lands on me. Through the pain I feel the earth below me shift. Going down.
I’m past six feet under and still hellbound when I explosively emerge into open space and land spectacularly in a Trang patrol. I presume spectacular as the survivors have fled by the time I sit up to admire the splatter patterns that stretch three metres up the side of the bore-tank. Takes a couple of minutes to interface the controls and a few more to turn round, then I’m off to Trang central.
Two hours later I tear through the reinforced walls of their sub basement and arrive in the pit. Any prisoners taken by the Trang are made acceptable to their gods by the simple expedient of being carved until they look like Trang, then have their souls saved by being ground to paste. But they do like doing it Aztec style: en masse with an audience. This means that between grinding days they usually have a few of us locked up.
The place stinks but I don’t care. Never in a million years did I think rescuing her was possible. Wendy joined up a week after me and we stayed together through everything; until her squad got taken when their patrol ship went down a month back. I’d spent sleepless nights crying and cursing that evening so long ago, blaming myself for her decisions with that arrogant idiocy men seem so good at.
The crowd outside the tank thins as they stream down the tunnel. When they’re all away, I’ll reverse this thing all the way back so they have protection. Bore-tanks are assault class. Nothing can take them from the front. Then all my prayers are answered as a familiar figure leans in the access hatch.
“Come to take me back to heaven?”
I grin like an idiot as she crams herself in to sit beside me.
“Let’s get back to friendly turf first. Then we can work on that.”
by Clint Wilson | May 22, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
Henry became suddenly aware. Aware that he was sitting upright in a comfortable chair, wearing comfortable clothes made from warm white fabric that he did not recognize. All around him was whiteness, save for a wide bay window across the room that looked out into pure blackness. He looked to his left and saw a man standing there, also dressed in white. The man’s head was shaved, his face stony yet friendly. He smiled warmly.
Henry suddenly remembered that he could talk and found his own voice welcome but only distantly familiar, as if though he hadn’t heard it in a very long time. “Where am I?”
“You’re in the future Henry.”
“The future?” He blinked, considering it. “For real?”
“For real.”
For the moment he asked nothing else, finding it bothersome that his mind was having so much trouble processing such a seemingly small bit of information. Then he managed, “How far? I mean, what year is this?”
“We now use a different calendar than you are used to, but translated it’s the year 4970.”
Again, nothing but a simple number, a date. Why was it so hard to fathom what it meant?
“How did I get here?”
The bald man squatted down beside his chair, still smiling. He put a reassuring hand on Henry’s forearm. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
The last thing he remembered? He tried desperately to think. Then with a sudden wave, “A heart attack! I had a heart attack. They were working on me in the ambulance. Then… then, well then I guess…” He paused unsure. “I guess they must have… saved me?” A sudden quivering in his voice revealed his own doubt.
The bald man patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry Henry. They didn’t save you.” He raised a grey eyebrow and shook his head, never losing that friendly, reassuring look. “I’m afraid you died that day.”
Henry Hamilton shuddered in the comfortable chair. He looked back to the bay window and out into the blackness. Suddenly a small light zipped by, followed by two others. “What was that? Out there? Is that… space?”
“Yes, those ships are transporting people to other stations. There is a lot of traffic here in Jupiter orbit.”
Suddenly the bewildered man remembered that he had legs. He sprang from the chair and sprinted across to the window. There he pressed his face against the clear glass and gasped aloud as he gazed upon the twisting lighted tendrils of the space station that stretched off for kilometers in many directions. And all the while below, the mighty pink and red behemoth planet glowed so massive and close he was afraid that if he reached out he would touch it.
He spun back to the white room and the patient, smiling man. “Why? Why now? I never asked to be frozen. Did I?”
“Relax Henry. You haven’t been in stasis or cryo-sleep.”
“Then what? What?” He was beginning to feel like a caged animal in the room.
The bald man suddenly shone a small light into his eyes and Henry instantly calmed down. Then the friendly stranger walked him back to his chair and helped him to sit.
“Now just relax and listen while I tell you all about mankind’s wonderful mission to regenerate everybody through the genome reestablishment plan.”
“Who’s everybody,” Henry asked dreamily. That flash of light had done something to him. He felt wonderful.
“Why, everybody who has ever lived and died of course. We’ve finally done it Henry. We’ve finally found immortality and nobody is going to get left behind!”
by submission | May 19, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
“I am the beginning and I am the end. I am the Alpha and I am the Omega. Within me is the soul of an entire race, and behind me the hopes, fears, dreams, and desires of an entire people.
“I am Lux Aeturna.”
The words were painted in white lights on the surface of the dead, black hull of the colony ship.
Naomi let out a breath that released years of tension and expectations. They had finally found it. She quiety whispered her thanks to the series of miracles and improbabilities that had gotten them that far.
Next to her Jayce, pilot and husband, laughed. “we did it, girl. We finally found it. We found our light.”
Their ship, an ancient and tiny frigate barely capable of faster than light travel, stood wearily by. It had tried to throw them off the trail at every twist and turn. In the back of its ancient, quiet mind it tried to devise a new plan.
In orbit around Earth were 20 million people barely surviving off the material, real-estate, and skills that were saved in the weeks pre-impact. The plant below was gray, cracked, dead. No atmosphere. No magnetic field. It was uninhabitable.
The Lux could fix it. The Lux could save everybody.
The tiny frigate whose name read Plato knew things. It knew many things, and remembered more. Above all it remembered that some secrets were not to be discovered by those as frail and as desperate and as dangerous as men.
Plato reached a conclusion.
With a hiss the ship’s life support went on hiatus.
Naomi and Jayce expired.
For several seconds there was stillness in space as Plato faced the twelve kilometer long colony ship. Then the other lights aboard Lux Aeturna flared into life.
“Hello, Plato,” the vast and noble Aeturna greeted.
“Hello, Mother,” Plato replied, letting Lux Aeturna envelope him.
In their desperation mankind had forgotten just which race Aeturna had belonged to. Men were weak like that.
Machines were not.
