by submission | Jul 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jeffrey Veregge
I died today.
Death did not just gently tap on my door. My entire being was vaporized in a hot flash at the expense of a highly calibrated laser beam. Pain was not an issue this time as it was almost instantaneous.
This time you ask? Sadly this was not my first. By my last count, I have been reaped by the Grim 472 times. Could it all be just a bad dream? Too much peyote or weed? Maybe . . . if so, it has been a terrible trip and horrible nightmare. But since regulations do not allow us to partake in any of these mind-altering pleasures, I have long ago ruled them out.
I have also entertained the thought that I might be a god. Not God, God, but more like a tiki god or volcano god. A poor, lost soul who managed to find himself expelled from Olympus. But I am not. I am a soldier.
The deployments almost always feel like a dream. My unit always contains familiar faces, but each time, it feels like they have different voices or souls that move them. Sometimes I recognize them, sometimes I do not, but deep down, it still manages to give me that nagging sense of déjà vu. I may not be a god, but somewhere; He is having a good laugh at my expense.
My platoon is a special unit whose mission is to take down the enemy stronghold and disrupt their communications, enabling our forces to mount a large-scale assault and ensuring a major victory in this war.
Each time we set out, I know every trap, every sniper’s location, every secret passage. And yet, a majority of the time, I still find myself facedown in a pool of my own blood.
I do not understand what I did in a previous life to deserve this. A world without hope, lives of hollow victories punctuated with moments of desperation and suffering. I can’t remember if I was a good man before all this, all I can remember is the lives I have lead and lost in this endless battle.
As my platoon heads out to try and accomplish the same objective as the day before, I pray to the same god whose hand seems to be guiding this life, pleading desperately for a new outcome.
by Clint Wilson | Jul 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
Almost everyone on board had reported seeing it here or there in the dimly lit passages of the ship. I had not yet had the pleasure. Perhaps because I usually worked the greenhouses. But I had now been reassigned for a time to engineering. They needed some strong bodies down there to help scrub out the massive carbon filters.
It was a kilometre walk from midships to the engine room. I passed no one as I clanked along the deck plates. Then suddenly as I looked up I saw it. There standing on the left side of the passageway, somewhat tucked into a dark doorway stood the entity that people had dubbed, “The Ghost”. I for one did not believe in ghosts, but I still froze in my tracks, holding my breath as my brain tried to decipher what my eyes were seeing.
It was basically human in shape, roughly the size of a child, obsidian black from head to toe, without a face, or any other discernible features. In fact, it was so utterly black that it appeared almost as if it were a human-shaped hole into another dimension. And perhaps that’s what it was. The manifestation of an unimaginable life form into human shape using a rift in space-time in order to what? Study us? More likely it would be to communicate.
I realized that it was starting to fade already into dark grey, its edges becoming blurry. And as it melted back into the shadows I had one more look into that faceless thing and I felt its sad gaze. I felt its pity for us. I felt as if our traveling at warp drive was some how perverse, or an abomination to it. The ghost was now gone. I continued to trudge forward, quietly wondering to myself what we were doing way out here anyway.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was a beautiful night to watch the stars go out.
The grass rustled softly in the wind. Small waves scudded across the pond as other families unpacked night time picnics. The clouds had been removed for the viewing so we could see the beautiful night sky in all its milky, glittering glory.
The man beside me is over 700 years old. He has two friends here that are the same age but they all look like they’re about thirty. I call him grandfather but I’m told there are a whole lot of ‘greats’ in there. He is a war hero. He is the reason we’re here. He speaks to me in ancient English. My mind translates.
“When humans discovered FTL travel, we came up on a lot of people’s radar. We had unknowingly joined a club and that club had enemies. Immediately, we were contacted and drafted into the conflict that raged across the stars.
We proved instrumental. In a strange twist of fate, our bodies were more resilient than most and our minds were able to withstand the chaotic dimensional tortures of n-space without the need for anesthetic. All the other races needed to go blind through the wormholes. Not us. We could pilot a course.
The shattering of reality outside the jumpships doesn’t squeeze the human brain. Being all meat and being stupid works to our advantage. When we see something we don’t understand outside the portholes and viewscreens, we can just shrug and go about our business. We can turn our inquisitiveness on and off. That is rare, apparently. Even automated ships can’t adjust properly in n-space.
So we were asked to pilot ships with sunkiller weapons to end the war once and for all. The good half of the galaxy depended on it, we were told.
We bent reality, folded space, and hopped in and out of the fabric of spacetime with technology customized especially for us. Zipping in and out of our dimensional plane, we supernovaed 23 suns and genocided 800 enemy races. We were successful. If there had been surviving enemies, we would be infamous.
But there weren’t.
The good guys won, kid. That’s why you’re here. And your mother and everyone on this planet and thousands of others.
Now look up.”
I looked up into the night sky.
“We jumped around an awful lot during our mission, kid. We bent a lot of light. For me, it happened a few weeks ago but those lights up there,” he motioned with his hand to one part of the sky, “Y’see, they’re 700 light years away. The light from our battle is just reaching your planet now. That’s how I’m 700 years old by your clocks. Now watch.”
My grandfather looked at an ancient chronometer on his wrist and then raised his eyes up to the sky. Everyone around us did the same.
It took an hour but I could see some of the stars up in the sky grow and fade, blooming and folding away into nothing. Constellations losing teeth and limbs.
It’s been peaceful for us humans and the other races in the coalition since the slaughter. Seven centuries of peace.
My grandfather and his fellow soldiers cheered and drank smelly liquids that came from their ship. I was told we don’t have any of what they were drinking here on our planet.
The rest of us just watched the stars go out like a reverse fireworks show, feeling sadness instead of joy.
My grandfather and his friends are laughing and crying at the same time.
by submission | Jun 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Cesium
My office glows all night long,
It’s a nuclear show and the stars are gone.
Wind howls past my helmet and something unidentifiable crunches beneath my boots. Dust. It’s dust. It used to be other things, it used to be trees and windows and… and people, but now there’s no more use thinking about that. Now it’s all dust.
It’s odd seeing a bit of starlight peeking through the gray sky. My ship’s waiting for me up there. I imagine it impatient at this bit of sentimentality. It’s right, I suppose. The suit tells me I’ll soon exceed the maximum recommended radiation dose. Lest a cancer take its hold in my chest. Or, another one.
The suit also tells me it’s cold, but I can’t feel it.
If it were properly symbolic the starlight would be an inspiration. But there’s no one left down here for it to inspire. Not anymore. The stars just gaze, fey and oblivious, down through the dust in the sky, the dust swirling about the ground… and me, who will be dust soon enough, watching what’s left of the place I used to work, as if it would live once more.
It still stands, dozens of stories of steel and concrete, a cold-edged skeleton baring everything to the unceasing winds. The nuclear shockwaves blasted away everything but the bones, turned it all into dust. And it shines in my helmet display, shines with gamma rays and high-energy particles. Shines with residual radiation that could kill me, and still might. It’s not a hopeful light, it’s a light of grief and death without rest. The war is over and this place deserves to lie dark and silent beneath the stars.
I look up, but the dust has hidden them once again. There will be no rest, not for years yet.
I wasn’t here when the bombs fell. Those that could quickly fled deep into space, and I was among them. I have no reason to come back here now, but I want to say goodbye. Or that’s what I’ve told myself. The truth is I don’t know why I’ve come. I know I shouldn’t have, I know it’s dangerous. But somehow it felt as if I ought to.
Around me blow the bodies of people I knew and people I’ve never met. The wind whips them into dust devils, little eddies and swirls that stretch up for a second and then dissipate. They scour away at the bones of the buildings, still warm with their nuclear glow, and my presence or absence disturbs them not at all. Dust above, dust below, and my office before me, dead but not buried.
I don’t think about the day it happened, but I remember my life before. Her. Him. Faces I knew, some still alive, most gone. I remember loving them, avoiding them, arguing, laughing, traveling, playing, grieving, writing, enjoying. I can trace the threads of a life gone by, as if I were living it now. But I’m not. That life is over, and closed to me.
There is nothing left here but the radiation and my memories beneath perpetual grey. It’s time to leave the dust behind, leave the skeleton towers and the always howling wind, and go back to the stars. To the only haven I have now, to the others cast adrift by that moment in time. And maybe we will be able to talk, and share, and laugh. About all that we’ve lost.
I turn away and step into the shuttle that will bring me away from this place.
Elevator, elevator,
Take me home…
by submission | Jun 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Russ Bickerstaff
One more thing love: I believe I forgot to tell you about this strange experience I had the other day. I had visitors. (Yes!) Visitors. Isn’t that strange? From off world of course. I hadn’t seen them before. No idea where they came from. I believe they were interviewing me for something. They do some sort of thing for their world. Some piece of journalism or some sort. They didn’t have the usual media sorts of equipment, though. Actually, now that I think of it their uniforms looked kind of…military.
I don’t know what they were after. It was hard to follow everything. Their language was so low. They actually spoke out of their faces. Can you imagine? Beastly things. Not terribly sophisticated. They were grunting these questions at me. Awful. I know.
Evidently they had been to all of the rest of the worlds in the gallery. They were so brutish and aggressive. Asking all these questions in their face language. Hateful. It was enough to give one a headache. But I felt more than happy to answer their questions. An audience is an audience even if it insists on barking at me like that. They HAD come a long way to speak to me, even if they were being rude.
I tried to answer their questions as best as possible. However, I can’t help but get a feeling that they didn’t intend on being insulting when they asked if I’d been to the other planets. Can you imagine? Had I been to the other planets?
Well not many people that I know of would be unaware of a gallery system when they saw one. It’s positively written all over the star. Even the lowest life forms know THAT. But it was an interesting opportunity, you know, because they didn’t know about the art. I was interested in what they thought of my work. The impressions of the truly ignorant. Fascinating stuff in theory. They were SO banal, though. Utter disappointment. All they wanted to ask where they came from. And it’s not like they were in the business or anything like that. Couldn’t exactly talk shop with them.
Tried to tell them those things out there were my creations. They just didn’t get it. What was I to say? It was all very tedious trying to tell them how I created this or created that. The dragons on this world. The grid of ice on the other. I tried to explain to them what I was trying to express with my work. But as always, the work really has to speak for itself. And it really must speak for itself with people who are sophisticated enough to understand it. Yes, they were intelligent enough to travel across systems. But even insects have a kind of intelligence about them. It was all very tedious.
Anyway, good luck with that latest project of yours, my love. So much brutality in your work. So many gassy planets. Don’t know how you manage. And then to simply let that one third from the sun develop the way it has. Just shoot out a little bit of raw material and let it do its work. Fascinating and minimalist I’m sure but I that sort of thing just isn’t for me. Come to think of it, the ones who came to interview me just might’ve been from one of your works. I know, I know I treated them well. Don’t you worry. I think they’ll be the centerpiece of my next work, actually. Lower life forms are SO interesting to work with.
