by submission | Jun 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
The assessor is attractive in a button-down kind of way. Blonde hair, pink jumpsuit, digital makeup set to minimal. Her face is a sculpt, something from one of the mid-level catalogues. Attractive, but not too attractive. The same face you see on a thousand other people. Only her eyes, brown and liquid, are original.
“You failed your empathy test, Mr. Clawford.”
Her tone is carefully modulated. No condemnation there, none at all. Just carefully presented curiosity.
“I know.”
“You haven’t been taking your dose.”
It isn’t a question. I shrug.
“No.”
“Why?”
The assessor leans forward. Her pink uni-suit tightens slightly, emphasizing the shape of her breasts. It’s a cheap trick, meant to distract one, make your interviewer more susceptible to the subharmonic pulses they use in these interview rooms, to make one more compliant.
“Compassion fatigue,” I say.
The assessor arches her brows. “Honestly?”
“Honestly. I’m tired of being chemically forced to care for my fellow man.”
“Are you experiencing nausea? Fatigue? Some people develop a sensitivity to the pills over time.”
“No, nothing like that. I just decided not to take my dose.”
Her carefully modulated expression becomes one of concern.
“You are aware that refusing to take your dose is illegal?”
“It’s a class two offense. I know.”
“Will you take your dose now?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I sort of like feeling like a bastard. Does that make me a bad person?”
“It makes you . . . atypical,” says the assessor. She shifts in the chair. “This is the second time you’ve failed an empathy test, Mr. Clawford.”
“I know.”
“There are three options at this stage,” says the assessor. “You can take your dose and agree to daily monitoring for the next three months.”
“No. I won’t take the dose any more.”
She nods. “Fine. The second option is isolation. You’d be placed under house arrest and not allowed to leave your residence until you resume taking your dose.”
I shake my head. “No, I don’t think so. I think, miss, I’ll go for option three.”
She frowns. “Exile to the Cold Isles?”
“Yes.”
“You are aware that if you choose exile, Mr. Clawford, it’s a one way trip?”
“I know.”
“And that is what you want to do? To go and live among the callous and the unfeeling?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d rather be an authentic bastard than a fake nice guy.”
Her grin surprises me. She stands and her suit tightens, turns matt black.
“Good answer. Come with me. We can be in Christchurch within the hour.”
I’m confused. “We?”
She laughs. “What? You didn’t think the fuzzies would trust one of their own to do these assessments, did you?”
“You’re one of the cold?”
“No, Mr. Clawford.” She gives me a look that I’ll get from lots of people over the next few weeks, part condescension, part genuine sympathy. “I’m one of the free.”
by submission | Jun 16, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bronwyn Seward
Franny,
I know this letter will be nonsense, beyond your wisdom and understanding. But I need to write it. You need to read it. I dated it so that years after you have shoved it into an old shoe box or tucked it away in your hope chest, you can look back on February 5th, 2013 and evoke my memory.
I can picture you reading this. Oculars scanning the lines, dots, and swooshes that compose this English language. Your brain seeking to process the information set before you. Some of this data will be impossible for your primary visual cortex to distinguish and associate with any meanings you are currently aware of. That is because my explanations for departure will be otherworldly, alien to you, but necessary.
Four years ago, I “moved” into town appearing to you in my burly human shell, as a farmer from Bovill, Idaho. Instead of the four day walk I claimed it to be, I traveled a century through the inky space you call sky to arrive here. Of course with all that time I was a wonderfully well-thought out character with a backstory, quirks, pictures of my ma and pa. A ruse. A trickery. A character in a game. And I was well studied, well prepared.
This appearance on earth was my last step toward sprubeity. I had to observe human interactions in order to become an ambassador for our eventual full scale return to this planet. My break from the Perknite, my home, was agonizing, we don’t feel pain as you do but independence is a foreign concept. Your entirely unnatural composition, with abstract ideas such as happiness, joy, fear, and death is what spawned my journey to your planet.
Franny you were a closely studied individual from the beginning. Fear pervades your planet, but you escape it. Earthlings fear spiders, snakes, heights, public speaking, and close spaces. There is cynophobia, astraphobia, trypanophobia, mysophobia, and hundreds more. Mankind is marked by its fears. But Franny you never seemed afraid. Because I couldn’t seem to overcome your spirit with wild ideas, I had to try to influence you in another way.
On Perknite, every Prectiss is a puppet, our motives are determined by our energy source, some, like myself, are expelled in order for possible future conquest. Forced explorers. Our flexibility allows us to mold ourselves into whatever the prime specimen of a race should value, treasure, or act for. We can only think apart from Perknite when on a different planet, under different rules. On earth, men are ruled by their fears, and by an emotion called love. This is what I employed to weaken you, Franny.
Love is merely a chemical reaction in the brain. In this shell I could feel its effects, its clouding in my judgment, the focus I could not keep. The human body I had played this act through infected my individuality as a Prectis, and I started feeling. Feeling emotions, feeling pride, feeling a joy in my independence, enjoying friendship by choice, instead of that I am forced into. Last night, you told me you loved me and I replied in the acceptable manner. But I do not love you. I cannot love you. I fell into my own trick. My own lie. My own character. I am starting to desire things I can never experience apart from this planet. Impossible things. I want to feel fear, I want to be an individual, I want to experience love. I want to stay.
And that is why I must go.
Forever yours as Peter Clark Young,
Alespapewanes
by submission | Jun 15, 2013 | Story |
Author : James McGrath
The knife blade gleams in the half-light, sliding through its target.
The tape then gives and the box lid opens. This must be box five-hundred, I think as I pack the circuit boards onto the conveyor belt. But what do I know? All time has moulded into a lump; one solid, inescapable moment.
Think of Earth, think of terraformed Mars. They wouldn’t allow these conditions there, but nobody as poor as us could hope to live on planets like those. Diode Ltd, the owners of this Planet (or is it just a factory? How would any of us even know?) run a completely different kind of world.
We awaken at five each morning, eat our bowl of porridge and go downstairs.
Straight to work, no messing about.
Work ends at midnight and if you’re sensible you have your evening meal and go straight to sleep. If you’re too tired in the morning, you could work too slowly and those that are fired are “thrown to the wastes”.
The others seem to enjoy their sleep. Each of them breathing peacefully when I awaken, confused and disorientated.
You see, even in my dreams I work.
It must be my brain, I tell myself. It has known nothing else since I finished the “Earth Education for Colonials”. The course lasts until age ten and I think I’m forty-two.
I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to do anything but pack these boxes now, but the vague and clouded memory of childhood makes it worse. It taunts and teases me from afar.
Time makes no difference to me; at 5.15 each day I pack boxes, and in the dreamscape of night I pack boxes. My knife always looks the same and the drab backdrop of the factory never changes.
It’s maddening.
I try to fight it. Pinching myself whenever I can, but I say “Ouch!” in my dreams too.
When you’re asleep, how do you distinguish between what hurts and what is perceived to?
I draw a cross on the back of my hand, hoping it won’t appear in my dreams. It enters my subconscious after two days of working with it and it follows me into the night.
I try changing the symbol every day, to trick my brain. Now, when I’m checking if I’m asleep I’m no longer sure of what to look out for.
Did I change it today? Did my head change it for me?
I look at the snake drawn on the back of my hand. The guy in the bunk underneath mine dealt with the checklists and is now wandering the wastes for losing his biro.
But I couldn’t feel sorry for him when I wasn’t sure I was even feeling pain myself.
Inspiration struck.
I needed something new.
It would only work once, but that was enough.
The knife misses the tape this time.
The back of my wrist feels beautiful.
The back of my hand feels.
IT FEELS.
This is new. It has to be!
It’s overpowering. Intense. Raw.
I scream manically and no one looks up from their stations, but as I go down I see a foreman rushing over to me.
I couldn’t dream this. I’ve never felt this before.
Something warm and sticky caresses my cheek and I hear the foreman swear loudly.
“Shit! Not another one of these today.”
by featured writer | Jun 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell, Featured Writer
The man wearing Victorian garb with what appeared to be brass welding goggles pushed up on his forehead walked into the bar. The look of confusion on his face had little to do with the bizarre menagerie that comprised the establishment’s clientele. The bartender smiled and nodded at him and gestured to a barstool.
“What’s your pleasure, sir?” asked the portly barkeep.
“Uh, brandy, I suppose,” the man said.
The bartender produced the drink for his customer.
“I say,” said the man, “this will probably sound a bit odd, but–”
“You have no idea who you are or how you got here.”
Astounded, the man replied, “That’s right!”
The bartender looked the man up and down. “You’re a steampunk,” he said at last.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Airships and Babbage analytical engines and lots of gears and London in the late 1800s. Sound familiar?”
The man gulped down his brandy and said, “Yes! That’s it exactly! That’s where I’m from. But how did you know? And why can’t I recall who I am?”
The bartender leaned on the counter and said, “You’re nobody. Nobody in particular, that is.” He poured the man another drink. “You’re what I call an ‘archetype’. They’re all archetypes here.”
“I don’t understand,” the man said.
“Take that fellow sitting in the corner, for instance. The guy in the form-fitting spacesuit with the raygun in his holster. Back in the ’30s and ’40s he’d drop by for a drink on a rare occasion. By the early ’60s he was coming in all the time. Now, he’s a fixture. Almost never leaves. He had his time in the media and the pop culture and the collective consciousness. But that time passed. So now he’s here.”
The man was about to speak when a fellow clad entirely in black leather and wearing mirrored sunglasses walked into the bar. The newcomer’s left arm was a robotic prosthesis. He silently walked up to the bar, was handed a beer, and then went to a table and sat down alone.
“Cyberpunk,” the bartender said. “Close relative of yours. Since the 1990s, he’s become pretty much a fixture here, too.”
“Who are you and what the devil is this place?” the steampunk asked loudly.
“Those are very difficult questions to answer. This bar doesn’t exist in any material sense. Neither do you. Think of this establishment as a sort of resting place for the paradigms of speculative fiction. An idea is created in science fiction or fantasy. Maybe that idea flourishes. It ascends through the subculture, perhaps breaks through into the mainstream culture. But then its popularity wanes. People become uninterested and start to forget about it. It never vanishes entirely, of course. There will almost always be some minuscule following. Even if there isn’t, the themes and tropes still exist, entombed in a faded pulp or hibernating in an old VHS tape. And it may even become popular again someday. But until such a day comes, these specimens of speculation get reduced and distilled down to prime examples, to archetypes, and they inevitably end up here.”
The steampunk stood up and backed away from the bar. “You’re barmy! I’m not some archetype! I’m a person!” He turned and ran out of the bar.
The bartender wiped the counter down with a rag. “They all say that when their time is almost up and the culture is ready to move on to something else,” he said to no one in particular. He looked at the steampunk’s half-finished second brandy. He sighed. “Yep, he’ll be a fixture soon, too.”
by Desmond Hussey | Jun 13, 2013 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
“… Mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.” – St. Augustine
Numerals flow in random digital pulses around a wide black band high in the perilous chapel’s white marble walls. Each numeric chain makes a full rotation before disappearing into its own beginning point, like a snake devouring its own tail.
A cabal of twelve ebon-clad Mystics, their robes finely detailed with glimmering stars and moons, are aligned like sentinels around the circular perimeter of an intricate tile mosaic occupying the center of the main gallery. The mosaic’s design is a mesmerizing mathematical fusion, depicting colored rays, radii, circumference ratios, triangles within squares within circles. Imaginary numbers. A thin line of red tile carves an elegant spiral path through the entire motif.
A thirteenth figure, a woman, naked and bound, every inch of her pale skin tattooed with alien cartography, hangs suspended inches above the locus of the circle by a rope which vanishes into the overhead shadows. Her blue eyes glisten with terror.
Silently, each Mystic produces a heavy, linen sack from within their robes and proceeds to dust the mosaic in a thin, chaotic layer of salt.
Then they begin their chant.
Quietly at first, nearly inaudibly, the heinous invocation multiplies and rolls over itself like an approaching thunder clap until the vast chamber is filled with a reverberating chorus of harmonized frequencies. Subliminal numeric equations weave themselves together within the esoteric warp and weft of dark tonalities, evoking foul attention from the Realms-Between-The-Spaces.
Awakened by the hypnotic din, the salt begins to dance, moved by invisible forces until it has gathered into a vibrating pattern of circular and curvilinear lines on the floor, and when the chanting shifts octaves suddenly, the pattern of salt changes. Circles bud like dividing cells into smaller, twin circles forming a more complex pattern.
Darkness gathers like a noisome cloud above as, once more, the surreal chant shifts octaves. Again the trembling salt sketches out a more compound geometry, levitating from the ground and twisting into a three dimensional spiral which rotates around it’s anchor point, the woman. Her long, auburn hair floats freely from her body now as if underwater, stirred by eldritch currents. She struggles weakly against her restraints.
In a bone-shuddering climax, a sudden bass tone resonates throughout the chamber scattering the salt into a loose dome above the mosaic and silencing all other sound. The darkness beyond the dome is complete, shrouding the miscreant wizards behind a protective saline field.
All that remains visible is the woman hanging within a malevolent emptiness by a spidery thread. She has ceased moving. Her eyes, only a moments ago staring in wide-eyed horror, are now drained of color, becoming slick, shifting voids, like twin pits filled with oily, black serpents.
With the deliberate, agonizing pace of an emerging butterfly, the skin around her eyes, mouth, nose, navel, vagina and anus begins to fold over itself, her body inverting and contorting into a shapeless mass of pulsing muscle and viscera. One by one, each bone is excreted and drops to a gruesome pile on floor.
Numerous mismatched eyes and prehensile, snake-like appendages emerge at random points from the hideous, crimson flesh-beast. Still suspended from the rope, the mass splits across its middle, forming two massive, bloody lips which begin a gross mockery of speech.
“A go-go lap dancer, a pip, was able to peel in a zip, but she read science-fiction and died of constriction, attempting a Mobius strip.”
The confused Mystics stand in muted bewilderment.
“Sheesh, Tough crowd.”
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