by submission | May 28, 2012 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
Jake loved this part of the day. No more phone calls, no more meetings, no more acting humble, just a Cognac, a cigar, and a few minutes of quiet egotism. He didn’t think of himself as particularly egotistic, but the thrill he got sitting in front of his wall of awards, the thrill of having them on display even in a private office, it always made him feel a little guilty. He had certainly earned them all, as impossible as that always seemed, and if you really are the smartest and most important and best person in the world, is recognizing it really ego? Heck, four of his meetings today had been people imploring him to run for President, clutching poll numbers that were …
“Jake Alderman.”
He froze. That was definitely the sound of a hammer cocking, he had fired too many guns to mistake it, but how could anyone get in here? The mansion was always cleared at night, security at the perimeter was tighter than the White House, and getting into this room required three different passcodes! He hadn’t been shot – yet – and the voice seemed familiar. A joke perhaps? Careful to keep his hands visible, he pivoted in his chair and stopped aghast at what he saw.
“Unbelievable.”
One word, one voice, two speakers. The man standing before him could easily have been his twin if not for the poor muscle tone, bad complexion, terrible hygiene, and gun. The man dropped a book on the desk, a copy of his latest biography.
“Jake Alderman. Enlisted Navy SEAL. Medal of Honor. Army Aviation officer. Medal of Honor again. Olympic decathlete with 3 golds. Doctorate from MIT, doctorate and law degree from Harvard. Fields Medal, Nobel Peace Prize, probably a few more Nobels down the road. You start a garage band, you get Grammys. You make some movies, you rake in Oscars. You start a company, it makes you the richest man in the world. You’re married to the most beautiful woman in the world, and I can’t get a date to save my life, and we’re the SAME DAMN PERSON!!”
“I don’t understand – who are you? What do you mean? And want?”
He had triggered the silent alarm, what was taking so long?
“I’m you. A different you. A you from another universe. A week ago another one of us dropped in on me. He was a physicist, figured out that there were infinite universes and how to travel between them.”
The man leaned suddenly forward.
“Do you remember in high school, all the things you thought about studying? You went engineering and military, I went into philosophy and dishwashing. I think that’s why I see it when the physicist didn’t.”
“See what?”
Christ, he should have kept a gun in the desk, kids be damned!
“Infinite universes, man. Really, truly infinite. Every possibility. Don’t you see?”
He shook his head. What did this lunatic want, how could he get away without getting shot?
“All this, all your success and awards, it’s all just a point on a probability curve. There’s no merit to what you are, no honor – in infinite universes you had to happen at least once. You’re just lucky. You’re just the us who guessed right every time, who had everything go just right, who got everything he ever wanted. And me? I’m just the us who got past your security.“
The man grinned at the confusion in Jake’s eyes.
“It’s okay – there’re infinitely more of us out there. But I’m lucky. I’m the us who gets to do this.”
Bang. Bang.
by submission | May 27, 2012 | Story |
Author : David Hartley
We’ve longed for this, the end of all times, echoed the rampant philosophers, baying for the choicest sound-byte to sing the species out. I flick the radio off, return us to silence. Better that than cloying intellectual redemption. I look to you, to your belly where propagation lies, wondering again what flush of nonsense brought about that defiance, wondering again if that is a baby pushing against your rags or a statement. You smile, as if that alone could reverse things, however much I wished it could.
Outside, the liquid creak makes itself apparent and your smile dies; closer now.
‘Shall we?’ I say. You are already rising, one hand cradling the bump of ambiguous potential, the other limp by your side, grasping for nothing. No weapons now, no point. No more bows and arrows, no lightning.
Together we lift away the rug-door and bow out to the balcony. There are two of them in the courtyard below, inspecting every brick, every wire and lump. Each touch is cautious; when something crumbles they whine and try to push the bits back together again.
Your hand slips into mine, grips. I purse my lips, whistle.
Creak, squeak, chatter, snap, they wheel on us and we stand firm; representatives of a fragile race at the weary end of its tether. It is almost immediate now; flails retracted, whip-limbs recoiled. Armed only with inspection fibres, softly, slowly, they creep, scuttle, and scramble up, over, and all around us. Their eyes, such as they are, have faded from scanner red to sky blue, an imitation of the expanse above perhaps.
They caress for hours and we resist squirming under the tickles. They spend a long time poking and measuring your bump, returning to it each time the rebellious unborn kicks or fidgets. I watch each grope from the edge of my sight, hands running cold with sweat. They inspect that too; catching drips, drinking it maybe. But we hold on tight, force of will, and not one touch hurts or discomforts.
Invader guilt, they have called it. A sudden cease of destruction replaced by this unease. No victorious mothership, no enslavements, just a mute confusion, a hasty sheathing of tendrils. We had been war-torn before they arrived, waging our own myriad paths of destruction across the globe, bending hell to cause devastation for obscure reasons. Perhaps, after all, they were just trying to join in. Trying to make a good first impression.
Our friends cease their inspection and we retreat. Throughout the night they build and build and build. By morning, a new Starbucks stands in the courtyard and they are gone.
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 submission | May 23, 2012 | Story |
Author : Alex Bauer
The light on the wall is green. The machine beside her is on and receiving. The walls bleed nuclear colors like a pool of oil before shifting to uniform white. First session in years, motivated by some desperate nostalgia. The machine hums, squat and blinking, next to her. Now he comes in, sits at the end of a long steel table, sighing.
“Why did you wake me?” He says. His voice is jerkier than she remembers, more pained. Expectant. That, more than anything about present circumstances, chills her to the bone.
“Can’t we talk? I want to just talk.” She says, unsure with his attitude. “It’s been a while.” The room is stark white; the only smudge to its banality is she and he. He practically glows here. The only place he ever has, she thinks. The thought too bitter to stamp out. His face is vague as if he were a stone in a river. Worn by too much time, too much self-correction. Brown eyes that were once blue cup her in the palm of his gaze.
She looks away, looks to the doctor watching from somewhere behind the one-way mirror taking up the right side wall.
“Mm,” he burbles. “Suppose it has. You’re the one who wanted to see me every morning. So, here we are. Though I think a lot more mornings have passed between this one and the last, you know.”
She flinches. He drums his fingers on the table, looking at a point between his hands. Considers it. Always considers it. Something hot catches in her throat, finding herself unable to speak for some time. The strange aeroshape of a gun sits between his hands like she’s always imagined. The coroner’s report hasn’t faded like his face. Single exit wound out the back of the head. His front teeth knocked out by the cycling of the receiver.
The machine hums, squat and blinking, next to her. A strange tickling sensation at the base of her skull. Digital blood pours out his mouth. He laughs, looks down at his now stained clothes, the chipped front teeth on the table.
“Just let me go.” The fading memory says. “Please. You came in here for nothing. This isn’t some weird absolution.” He looks at her again, his eyes reflecting all the pain she felt. Too long since she’s been here, too long since she’d let this memory out. “Do you even remember my name? Do you?” Panic writhed its way down to her very pith.
He favors her with a bloody smile. “Of course not.”
“Turn the machine off,” a voice intones over the speakers. She looks at the mirror, sees only her own panicked rictus.
“You’re just talking to yourself again.” He says, shrugging. “Makes no nevermind. Too much guilt, too much booze. You tried to drink me away and got weepy eyed and came back to this looney bin to see what you could remember.” The gun solidifies on the table. He picks it up.
“Turn the machine off, ma’am.” The doctor says again. She very calmly reaches over to switch the machine off when he points the gun at her. Simple light and digital outlays set in the walls make it look real, but all the same, she jerks back.
“You remember this because it was yours. You remember the details more than you remember me. So, you feel guilty. It’s normal. Maybe not for as long as you have, but normal enough.” He leans back, running a wavering hand through blood-shiny hair. With a sudden jerk, he’s leaning forward, wavering and warping as if the world can’t contain him. Her mind can’t contain him. “Wanna see how I did it? It’s there. You think about it. That’s why you do this. You don’t even wanna know why, just how. You think about doin–.” She lunges, flips the switch, and he bursts apart in a fountain of light motes.
Silence. “Are you all right, ma’am?” Says the man on the speaker.
“Ye-yes. I…shouldn’t have come.” She says.
“Quite alright. This form of interactive therapy is only good for the short-term. It’s been too long. But…seeing what was said, would you care to step into my office? I think we need to have a talk. And not about your son this time.”
She nods, not trusting her mouth, stares at the machine as if it were something alive. Very gingerly, she peels the diodes from the base of her skull, winces at the few strands of hair plucked out with it. The walls bloom psychedelic before returning to their neutral state. She places them back on the table and looks at them there between her hands. Considers them.
Finally, “I think I’d like that.”
