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 Julian Miles | Sep 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The metro swishes past while I tap my fingers in frustration on the dashboard. I may have priority, but nothing out-prioritises fifty tons of autotram.
“Where are you, Lime?”
“Watching the metro. The collision avoidance system in my car decided that playing chicken was a losing game.”
“They’ve brought down the SWAT drones. No jokes.”
“I had no intention of mentioning swatting.”
There were collective groans over the airwave. Tony had company.
“What’s the book say?”
“What book?” Tony’s voice radiated innocence.
“You know, the one where the audience around you bets on how long it takes the thuglifes to realise that they’ve left toytown.”
“Oh, that one. Current favourite is two minutes and one magazine.”
“From sidearm or main?”
“Main.”
“Oh, ye of little faith. Oop! Metro’s gone, taking emergency measures. Route me a waiver.”
“Chief says to keep the damage under six figures.”
He would. They need me to catch these bad guys, so I need to do something they won’t – manual driving at excessive speeds. As a getaway car is only a vampire conversion on a standard grid runner, they can’t do what I’m about to. I hang a left through an advertising display and cut across the rough ground behind, collecting bruises as the suspension they upgraded for me proves to be as crappy as the last set they did. Next time, I’m doing it. My granddad taught me how to fettle cars. Time for me to revive another redundant art.
Exploding through a vending kiosk – showering seven people with Instablend gel as a side effect – I reach the on-ramp for the interstate. Slewing the car sideways, I exit and retrieve Gertrude from the rear seat.
“Lime, that’s not a service piece.”
“No, Tony. It’s something a bit older and a lot more effective.” A hybrid of Anzio 20 and 20/50, to be precise.
“I’ll get another waiver en route.”
“Cheers, buddy.”
Down the road comes my target, feeling smug now that they’ve EMP’d all the drones for six blocks, crashed the city grid, all local CCTV and jammed the air-op frequencies. Unless their pursers are using off-grid vehicles and personally present to drive, they’re clear. Which is why I am tolerated in a police force my granddad would have ridiculed.
My first shot would have won me a shooting competition a century ago. It enters the front of their vehicle, taking out their frontal interference unit. After passing through the central power core of the car, it enters the passenger compartment through the centre-console display, spraying hot LED shards everywhere as it disappears through suspect number four and comes to rest in the trading system core they dropped into the boot after their raid.
The car comes to a smoking, sparking halt and all four doors open. Suspects one, two, three and five throw themselves face down.
Across the road, an old man pauses his exo and shouts: “Ya gottem’ Sheriff! Good goin’!”
I wave and grin. At least the older folk appreciate what I do. Everyone else seems intent on suing me for contraventions of noise, weapons, vehicle, and ‘humanitarian rehabilitation of criminals’ statutes.
The four I didn’t shoot are rehabilitating just fine. I can hear them from here.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Pears.
I wish to never seen one again in my life.
The colony on Arcadia had soil that would let us grow trees from Earth. We sowed an orchard outside of our newly printed house. The fibrous growths that sprouted fat and tall from the ground there looked nothing like Earth trees. Round spheres of black wood with short branches dotting it, looking more like spikes on a mine that branches on a tree.
But each branch sprouted pears and the pears were delicious.
Our strange orchard was going to let us prosper here.
But as with all frontiers, there were opportunists looking for ways out of hard work, looking for the dark delights a lawless society can give a cruel disposition.
They rode up one beautiful day. Humans. That’s important. Humans, like us. Not Arcadians.
The dragged my mother out into the yard with me and my sisters. My father they shot in the house.
As their men harvested the pears and set the nanites to dismantling our house, they had sport with us.
We were given pears. Our father’s body was crucified against the nearest pear tree on those nasty spikes. We were told to throw the pears at our father’s body. Every time we managed to hit him, we were given a prize:
We were allowed to live.
It took half an hour for them to harvest everything in our pathetically tiny first harvest. During that time, my mother missed my father’s body with a pear. So did my sister.
At the end, I was the only one still throwing pears.
The leader of the marauders, a man with kind eyes and a trustworthy face, told the men to load up the pack animals and prepare to ride off. Then he looked at me. They all looked at me.
There were twelve of them. Now, under ordinary circumstance, twelve divided by three is four. But my mother and sister were dead so there was just me.
It was a long afternoon.
It was dark before they left.
The left me facedown in the bruised and crushed pears, emptied of tears and empty of feeling. I eventually walked again with the help of the local physiotherapists after one month.
For a while I toyed with the idea of rebuilding the orchard by myself, finding a man, and starting a family. But every time I met a man with kind eyes and a trustworthy face, I couldn’t bring myself to talk.
I will make my way back to Earth and I will get a job in a factory.
And I never want to see another pear again in my life.
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.
