by submission | Mar 12, 2014 | Story |
Author : chesterchatfield
I woke up one morning and found a small robot living on my leg. By the time I stumbled up to the bathroom, I could feel the little parasite burrowing, trying to get at my mind. After an hour, I’d become a passenger in my own body, watching this little creep run me around like a puppet.
It walked me down to a local mall and we bought a wristwatch, no one seeming to notice an alien presence behind my eyes. We hopped a bus, walked a bit more, and then buried the watch in a hole filled with tons of other trinkets, tools, and sheets of metal. I have no idea where we went because it avoided looking at any signs or landmarks the whole way. That treasure trove could be practically anywhere.
As the day wore on I felt the presence weaken, like it’s batteries were running down. By the time we returned to my apartment, I wrestled control back and the robot dropped off my leg, lying limply on the ground. It was about six inches long, metal plated like a cylindrical leech. I doubted it would be able to travel very far without a host.
Reaching over to gingerly poke it, I finally noticed a small notebook that had been tied around the thickest part, like a dog collar.
Inside were accounts from what I guess are all the other people it’s latched onto. The first dozen are in foreign languages I can’t read, but towards the end they’re English. Each person wrote their name, the date, and what the creature had them do. The list varied from cutting down trees to robbing a jewelry store. The most recent was dated twenty-five years earlier. Judging from the jumble of letters, numbers, and codes in one, I think some kind of research facility had it at one point. I guess they weren’t careful enough.
There was also a note that the thing had so far proved indestructible, but that it wasn’t a danger after it fell off. The woman who had it before me, Linda, had speculated for a page or two that it was building something. That it had been on earth for hundreds of years. She planned to leave it locked in a trunk in the attic space of her apartment building.
I dropped it off the pier, locked in a safe. It’ll escape eventually, but not for a while. And it won’t land on anyone while they sleep.
The creature tapped its bright pincers, interacting with a shipboard computer while its companion observed apathetically. On a trip of this length, watching the other often became their only entertainment.
“Wait,” the watcher suddenly clicked. “Go back.”
The other flipped back through the sensory images, landing on a cold metallic orb, full of energy.
“Reminds me of that build-helper I made. Remember? I was gonna teach it to repair the shuttle’s temporal navigator so I could spend time trading chem with that gorgeous piece of shell down at Carnite IV.”
They spent a moment in fond recollection. “Didn’t work out though. Hadn’t even attached limbs yet, gave it a list of parts and the damn thing just hopped ship to go find a new mineral base for the reactor.”
“What happened to it?”
“Either floatin’ around space or landed somewhere, I guess. Ha! Maybe it’ll find the materials to actually make a new reactor.” The creature dissolved into clacking laughter. “I never got around to teaching it the containment procedures! That thing was persistent. Probably end up blowin’ a small planet!”
by featured writer | Mar 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jay Knioum, Featured Writer
Is this Waterloo? This is Waterloo, isn’t it?
That was the question that sealed it for me. That bright day in Hyde Park, with the pigeons. It wasn’t a great feat to hide the Professor’s keys from him after that. The Apparatus, however, was another matter. Very hard to find good movers, especially in 1924. Bubble-wrap was a long time coming.
He came with me to the station, watched me watch the mules haul the crate aboard a flatcar. I’d catch up with it in Vienna, but not before a side trip.
I poured his tea as we steamed across the Channel, and often again on the train to Zurich. The Professor seemed lucid now and again, but he always came back to Waterloo. It was the horses. In his youth, his horse had been shot out from under him during the thick of the fighting. How he survived to get the Keys to the Apparatus, I still didn’t know. He didn’t like to talk about it.
He wouldn’t talk about it even now, after the centuries he had crisscrossed, the things he’d seen. I would ask him, when he was at peace, clear-minded, usually just before sleep and after a belt of brandy.
He would just smile. He’d touch my face, and ask about the horses.
We made Zurich. It broke my heart to hand him over to the nuns. One of them reminded him of his mother, and he spoke to her as such. God bless her, she took his weathered hand in hers and answered in kind.
Time catches up with us all, he used to say, no matter when it finds us. The first time he said that, we were moving ghostly pieces across a virtual chessboard some miles above the Earth, while a friendly automaton served us synthetic liqueur in crystal printed that very morning. He said it again in the light of a campfire, as the smell of sage filled our noses and the cattle stirred sleepily in the Texas twilight.
He’d always loved Texas. I left his spurs with the Sisters, in case he might remember them.
It breaks my heart that I couldn’t leave him in Orleans, but his great grandnephew would take the wrong side in the war to come.
We all meet our Waterloo.
by Desmond Hussey | Mar 10, 2014 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
It’s oily, amber light which finally penetrates the hazy atmosphere as the first forays of dawn dimly paint the coastal shoreline. Ook-Pak emerges from his dome-like tent and stretches his many limbs, shaking off sleep’s lethargic blanket. His four nostrils flare eagerly, inhaling a deep breath of fresh, methane-rich air.
With two primary appendages he straps on a utility belt adorned with various brushes, hammers, chisels and trowels, while secondary, chittinous arms perform morning ablutions to his slick, hairless body. The camp awakens slowly around him, but excitement about the work ahead is quite palpable, displayed by the camp’s lively banter and the quick-shifting hues of the large, wispy membranes fringing their necks.
“G’morn, Ook-Pak,” a sleepy-eyed novice croaks. “Fine solar period for a dig, no?”
Ook-Pak tips his short antennae in greeting as his neck-fringe flashes agreement. “May Utta be with us, Lik.”
“Is truth? We may find Those-Who-Came-Before?” Lik chitters eagerly.
“Pray it is so.”
Ook-Pak ignores his stomach’s demands and goes directly to the dig site a hundred grulls from the camp and, crouching at the bottom of the excavated pit, he studies the mysterious metal cap covering the entrance to the catacombs created by some long-extinct race.
It takes many hours for the crew to maneuver the chambered air-lock over the site and the rest of the solar period to chisel away the millennia-old growth of minerals and rust welding the portal closed. It isn’t until the silvery lunar disk is cresting the horizon with its missing chunk, like a bite out of a fresh harlack bulb, that Ook-Pak’s team is finally ready to crack the age-old seal to an era no eyes have looked upon for eons.
The crew is feverish with anticipation, so rather than wait until the next solar period, Ook-Pak orders the team to break out the bio-lamps and remove the cover.
The air-lock maintains the subterranean pressure near perfectly. As the heavy lid slides off with a grating clang, only a brief, sucking hiss emits from the depths below, as if a great lung inhales a long-awaited breath.
A rusted, far-reaching ladder, designed for a slightly larger being, vanishes after several grulls into gloomy darkness.
Accompanied by hovering bio-lamps and armed only with his belt of tools, Ook-Pak begins the long climb into the bowels of the underworld. Alone in the reverent silence, he prays to Utta that he may find the proof he is looking for buried beneath the ancient sands.
His entire career has led to this moment. If he could find evidence of the elusive race, Those-Who-Came-Before, lords who mastered the sciences long before his own species walked beneath the light of Utta, he could satisfy an age-old argument about the foundation of their own culture.
Ook-Pak’s studies have proven that the ancient world was very different. The atmosphere was once choked with oxygen and nitrogen, toxic to his kind, yet capable of sustaining an environment for a vast diversity of plant and animal life that fossil records demonstrate populated nearly every continent and ocean. But some global, mass extinction event, possibly a result of misused technology – as Ook-Pak suspects, changed the atmospheric chemistry of the planet, and paved the way for Utta’s People to rise to dominance.
Was it deliberate? Did this ancient culture commit some form of racial suicide? Did it happen over night, or was it a slow, agonizing death? Were they aware or ignorant? These questions echoed through Ook-Pak’s mind as he descended ever deeper into the dark mysteries of the past. If there were answers down there, he was determined to find them.
by submission | Mar 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
“No, no, no!” he said. It just won’t do.” He looked at the workers and shook his head. “Do you call those hands?” He motioned toward the thing lying on the slab in front of him. “And feet? Those look more like claws!” He shook his head again. “It just won’t do….and we’ve got a time line to keep!”
The workers cowered away from him. In a way, they feared him. But, they also respected him. He was, after all, the head cheese, the Big Guy, the Big Kahuna, the one who ran the show.
Not a one of them spoke.
He looked at the lot of them and took a deep sigh. This was important. This was BIG. It was the biggest project he would ever undertake, and they didn’t get it. Maybe he was unclear? He had provided them with blue prints, schematics, DNA samples, but no go. They didn’t understand. They were set in their ways, and he was being original. He wanted to create something new….something fresh….and they just weren’t getting it. How hard was it to follow his instructions? He wondered. The blue prints were cut and dried. They were simple to comprehend. All they had to do was follow it. Create what he wanted from what he showed them.
But, they just weren’t getting it.
“You,” He said, pointing at one of the main workers. “Come here.”
The worker came forward. There was fear in his expression. The creature was shivering. He could see that and, being the kind soul he was, He felt bad for yelling at them.
By the time the worker reached him, his anger and frustration had changed to something more constructive. “I’m sorry,” He said, “but I’ve got a time line. It can’t be broken, do you understand?”
The worker nodded.
He looked at all the other workers. There were so many of them. He had never worked with so much help before. He wondered why he had taken on this insane task. Wouldn’t it just be easier to leave things as they were? Why break the status quo?
Because I can do better, He thought. I can correct all the things I did wrong the last time and make things better.
He patted the worker on the back. “Go back to your friends there,” He said, smiling kindly. “And don’t be afraid…there’s still time. I don’t need this”—He pointed at the thing lying on the slab—“for another six days.”
He turned to the congregation. “I’ll be back on the sixth day,” He said, “and I want a new prototype—this one to the specifications I gave you.” He held up his hands. “Like these,” He said. “Their hands need to be like these.” He kicked off his sandals. “And the feet….they need to look like mine. Understand?”
The workers all nodded their heads.
He drew in a deep sigh and turned away. He knew when He started that it would be an almost impossible mission to complete, but He had already set things in motion, and He wasn’t about to stop things now. But, on the seventh day, he was damn sure going to take a break. He was exhausted.
“All right then,” He said. “Get to work. Time’s a wasting, but tomorrow will be a new day…and I’ve got a universe to create.”
“Yes sir,” they replied in unison.
Good, He thought. Now to go figure out this night and day thing.
He reached out his hands and began.
by submission | Mar 8, 2014 | Story |
Author : Rocky Hutson
“They’re incompatible: He has no income and she has no patability.”
The middle aged couple entered the reception hall. Invited guests of the groom’s family, they were eager to give their condolences to the happy couple, Herkus and Midge, get back to the spaceport and leave Andromeda-five colony far behind them.
An adolescent boy neared them and the man stepped up. “Son, have seen Midge yet? She could have married any man she pleased, it’s just that she never pleased any.”
“Someone once told Herkus to be himself: They couldn’t have given him worse advice.” Said the lady.
“You could seduce her even if you played your cards wrong.”
“Oh, Mikal.” The woman rolled her eyes at her companion. “He has a face you don’t want to remember and can’t forget.”
“Yes, Raxine, but she looks like a professional blind date.”
The young man edged away as gracefully as possible. “Well Mikal, He is dark and handsome: When it’s dark, he’s handsome.”
“Right. And no one can say she’s two faced. If she had two, why would she be wearing that one?”
“Hey Mikal, there’s the happy couple, lets wander over. His mother-in-law calls him son, but she never finishes the sentence.”
“Someone ought to rent her out to a near-sighted knife thrower.”
Two young women friends of the bride stepped in front of Mikal and Raxine, as if to cut them off.
“Life is what you make it until he comes around and makes it worse.”
“Now Raxine, when she enters a room, mice jump on chairs.”
“And he has a fine personality, just not for a human being”
“Yeah and she’s a vision, a real sight.”
The two women backed off, opening a path to the newlyweds.
“Someday he’s going to go far, Mikal. Everyone hopes he’ll stay there.”
“She loves nature, in spite of what it did to her.”
“They’re inseparable. It takes several people to pull them apart.”
Midge squeezed Herkus’ arm. “I’ve never been so insulted, so humiliated in my life. Deal with them honey.”
Herkus walked over to the insulting couple. He extended his hand, gave Mikal a handshake and slipped one-hundred credits into his palm. The emcee pattered loudly. “Everyone give Mikal and Raxine a hand. They are the best insulters in this galaxy. You all know that if The Fates think a marriage starts too smoothly, they’ll mess it up later. Here’s to a long and happy marriage for Herkus and Midge.”
