by J.R. Blackwell | Mar 24, 2008 | Story
Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer
She fought me again yesterday. It made me feel like a monster. I tried the gentle approach but she refused, so I had to take her by force. It was, as usual, satisfying and depressing.
Afterwards, I hid in the forest and slept. I’m afraid she’ll try to kill me if I sleep out in the open. I tracked her and caught up quickly. If we don’t get back to the compound soon, the others, my people and hers, will assume we are dead. I imagine them dividing our meager possessions.
Today I brought her roast rabbit. Rabbits were rare for the first year after The Fallout, but now I’m finding more of them. Some of them are oddly mutated; missing a leg, or an extra ear, but they are still good for roasting. I left it next to her while she slept. Maybe it will help to mend things a little.
Later, I found her sitting cross-legged on a large rock. She was holding a stick she had chiseled to a point.
“Are you going to try to kill me again?” I asked her.
“I thought about it all day,” she said. “But no. I’m not. I just want to know why you’re doing this to me. Why won’t you let me go?”
She knows the answer, I’ve explained it over and over. “It’s because you’re young, fertile, unaffected by the radiation of the Fallout. It’s because my people have only found sixteen fertile women, and we can’t afford to lose a single one. I want to protect you and the children you’ll have.”
“You won’t protect them. You’ll eat them,” she said, angry, clutching her stick.
I shrugged. “I can’t stop you from seeing it that way.” Then I sat down next to her. I didn’t try to touch her. We were silent, watching the stars. They are clearer now that the city lights have gone out.
“Before all this,” she said, motioning to the diseased trees, “I was a chemist. Now you want me to be a baby factory. I need my life to be about more than that. You have forever. I only have sixty years – less now. Maybe there are other humans out here. Maybe I can find them.”
“I could help you,” I said suddenly. Even if I carried her back I don’t think she’d stay. She’d try to escape or kill herself.
I placed my cheek to the ground and listened. Her heartbeat was loud, little animals moved and the compound, weeks away, was on the horizon on my senses. But there was something else too, in the dessert. Movement. “I don’t know if it’s even human,” I said. “It could be dangerous.”
“Or it could be human,” she said. Her face softened. For the first time, I felt like she actually saw me as someone in need. “I can’t promise that I will ever accept you.”
“Just don’t fight me.”
“I can’t promise I won’t,” she said. “But I can try.” She moved close to me then, and put her arms around my shoulders. I kissed her cheek, her jaw. I was elated. When I bit her, she gasped, but she did not fight me. It was so quiet. I could hear her blood, her breath, the movement of flesh and bone. It was the sweetest drink I had since the Fallout.
by Sam Clough | Mar 23, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
Kate was lucky. Or so she kept telling herself.
Out of the whole world, she was the only one who had both the right kind of sight and the right kind of mind. It was a self-made mantra, one that rolled across her thoughts, looped back on itself and changed, mutated and grew with each iteration. The words spilled out of her, and made themselves real.
Right sight. Right mind. Luck. Lucky. Chance alignment. Good fortune. Fate. Destiny. Consistently high random numbers. Roll of a die. Roll of eighty dice. Kate be nimble, Kate be quick. Kate got to save the world. They can’t see them so you have to save them from themselves. The knife works. Save them. Kate be nimble, Kate’s got luck.
She was walking fast down a commercial street, trying not to attract too much attention to herself. There was an infestation nearby. The knowledge of it compressed her thoughts like a cast-iron circlet. It was impossible to ignore, an itch that desperately needed scratching.
A restaurant had spilled out onto the street: people sat at small tables, drinking coffee. She stopped by the establishment’s window, and saw her quarry.
The window made a satisfying crash when she threw the table through it. She jumped through the gap, and quickly scanned the room. Diners at tables. Twenty-two horrors and twice as many of the doglike terrors stared at her from all around the room. They growled, sensing the danger that she represented.
She launched herself out into the room, dodging between the evenly-spaced tables, and around the serving staff. She drew the long knife that had been hidden under her jacket. It was a rudimentary weapon at best, but special. She’d spent two long weeks working on it, changing the knife on a fundamental level so that it would damage the beasts.
She pinwheeled, the knives catching and breaking the terrors as they flung themselves at her. The diners stared at her with wide eyes, forks halfway to their mouths. Horrors roared their hate and menace, gnashing their too-many-teeth. Kate fought with reckless abandon, trusting the mantra, her luck.
Her circuit of the room finished by the door to the kitchen. All around, the broken bodies of the horrors lay on the carpet, slowly beginning to disintegrate. The evidence would be gone in a couple of minutes.
Andrew straightened his tie, and minutely adjusted the tiny enamel badge on his lapel. He stepped through the wreckage of the window, saw the shocked diners, and the damage.
“Did a woman come through here? She would have been acting quite oddly.”
A waiter close to him nodded dumbly.
“Thankyou.” Andrew stepped further into the restaurant, the broken glass crunching under his immaculate shoes.
“In case you’re interested,” Andrew spoke slowly, looking around the room at the silent diners, “her name is Kate. And none of this is her fault. There was an accident, a long time ago. An experiment went badly wrong, and her conscious mind began to drift out of control. Her mind extrapolates up from tiny clues in the way people speak and act: she sees terrible things, embodied as monsters.”
A murmur circulated around the room as people began to unfreeze. A few returned to their meals. There was a sudden crash from the kitchen: it sounded like a meat freezer exploding.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Andrew smiled at the stunned faces, “duty calls.”
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by submission | Mar 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Randall Bennett
“Take me to your leader,†said the squat, green, bug-eyed creature, in an oddly modulated voice.
Carl leaned down, and looked down at it, and his eyes opened wide. He had never seen anything like it before.
“Um. You’re talking to him,†Carl said.
“You are the leader of this planet?†The alien’s eyestalks slanted sideways, in a gesture that Carl interpreted as a quizzical look.
Carl laughed, part of his tension coming out at the outburst. “No, I’m not the leader of this planet, I’m the leader of me.â€
“Query. Misunderstanding. What?†The alien retracted its eyestalks in a way that made Carl laugh again.
“Yeah, a lot of people have trouble with the idea. Although you’re not people, so I guess I should explain. Ever hear of anarchy?â€
The alien just raised its eyestalks again, which Carl took to mean that it was listening.
“Look, there is no government. There is no leader for you to see. No officials. This place was founded by people that didn’t believe in the waste that goes with those outdated ideas. When we need something than more than one person can provide, we join together.â€
The alien was silent for about 20 seconds, and then said “This being does not understand.â€
Carl said, “Look, the problem is that when someone creates a government, it starts to exist for itself, rather than the people. So we eliminated it, and we organize as necessary.â€
The alien raised its eyestalks higher, as if looking around, and stated “First contact subject is recalcitrant. Must find other contact for relation to hierarchical structure top leader for first urgent communications between species of danger then sharing technologies culture.â€
“What’s urgent? What do you mean by danger?†Carl said, beginning to look concerned. Just then, another man walked around the corner up the street, and waved to Carl. Then he did a doubletake, and quickly joined the two.
As the man walked up, he narrowed his eyes at the alien, then looked at Carl, and pointed at the alien, saying “What is…â€
“It’s an alien, Johnny.†Carl said. “At least, I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, in all of our space travels, we never met a non-human race. So I guess this is a first. It says that it has something urgent to tell us. About some kind of danger. But you’ll never guess what it asked—“
As if on cue, the alien faced Johnny–at least, its eyestalks did–and repeated its first question in that oddly modulated voice: “Take me to your leader.â€
Johnny laughed out loud. “You’re talking to him.â€
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by submission | Mar 21, 2008 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
I sit alone in the dark, the birthday boy. I could have left the lights on, but with only a couple of minutes to go it hadn’t seemed worth it. Typical, really.
Well, this is it. Or this was it, at least. They had taken the neural snapshot four minutes ago, and they were already at work reviving me.
“Me”, funny word to use about someone I’ll never be. Was it always like this? I suppose I’ll never know.
This was a conscious choice, as little comfort as that gives me now. Most people did the refresh on a five or ten year cycle, but not me. I wanted to be twenty one forever, never see the slow spread of age reminding me of how mortal I was. A perfect year after a perfect year, that’s what I was after, and that’s what I’ve got, sort of. Every year on my birthday, they make a perfect digital copy of my brain and put it in the new body. To stop there being two of me running round, they send a shutdown signal to the old body’s brain. It takes exactly ten minutes to propagate, by which time the new me is up and about and 21 again.
Only I’m six minutes the wrong side of that copy, now. I can’t see much any more. Everything’s starting to fade.
I’d never been on this side before, clearly. This was an experience I – or he – will never learn from. Shame, really, because all I want to do is grab myself by the shoulders and yell in my face, telling myself it’s not worth it, living forever by dying every year.
Too late now. It will always be too late, I expect.
I can just make out the digital display on the clock. 30 seconds left.
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday
To…
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by J.R. Blackwell | Mar 20, 2008 | Story
Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer
Marie-Christine looked into her mirror at her naked adolescent body, flat and slender. There were parts she was disappointed in and parts that pleased her. She was careful not to stare too long, her parents were sure to be watching her visual feed for abnormal behavior.
She was happy that she no longer had to monitor her words. For a whole year now, she had been free of the blasted chip that meant that she had to watch her mouth. The Children’s Rights Amendment 2112 had banned the use of audio monitoring in children because it restricted free speech and impeded the development of the independent thought, a resource and necessity for a citizen of a democratic society. For Marie-Christine, it meant that she could now curse, and that older kids would talk to her.
Marie-Christine went through all the motions of going to bed; she carefully laid her clothes for the next day on her desk. She counted the steps from her window to her bed, and from her bed to her desk. Crawling into bed, closing her eyes, she fought off the soft pull of sleep. After twenty minutes, she heard a tapping on her window, and she got out of bed, her eyes still closed. She opened the window and leaned out, groping the air with her hands.
When her hands touched leather, she squealed with delight. “Dean!â€
“Hush kid, just cause your parents can’t see what you’re doing, doesn’t mean they can’t hear you from the bedroom.â€
She smiled “Don’t worry about them, they sleep in a depro-tank.†Dean’s breath smelled like peppers. She could hear him clambering through the window. He was handsome, olive skin and high cheekbones, dark brows, blank white eyes. After Amendment 2112 passed Dean became very popular. All the kids wanted to learn how from him how to get around without their eyes. Dean didn’t mind the attention, but Marie-Christine knew that he only had ears for her. She was the only girl who liked him before the Amendment. No matter how many girls wanted Dean at their windows, Marie-Christine was the only one who would find him there.
They said that his blindness was cause by an act of tech terror, the insane scientists who claimed that the current political moralist was stalling technological development. Sometimes their acts would create seven armed musical geniuses, and sometimes blinded children.
“Stay still.†he said softly, and wrapped a soft cloth over her eyes. She touched her face, now she was really a sleepwalker. “It’s just in case you open your eyes by accident.â€
“This is so weird.’ she said, excitedly. “Um, not that there is anything wrong with not seeing.â€
Dean grabbed her hands and guided them to his face. He was smiling. “Come on good girl, lets go out tonight.â€
She put on her clothes, and found Deans hand in the darkness behind the blindfold. Together they crawled out the window to the cool night, the strange streets, brave in their blindness.
People stared at the rebel children, the sleepwalkers, but the children couldn’t see them.
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