by submission | Sep 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Cruz Andronico Fernandez
People were getting sick everyday. Scott could care less. It was just something talked about on the television. So when he fell off his bike and tore up his arm he was only thinking about when he could get back on and ride again.
The day after the accident Scott’s arm hurt most of the day. His bones felt like they were grinding together. He thought he could hear them making little snapping sounds. It was weird he thought. The swelling was going down by the minute. The color was returning to normal. But it hurt! The pain reached a crescendo and he heard a pop. It wasn’t in his mind. He heard his bone pop.
It was the sound of it popping back into place. His arm was better. He could move it again. Scott didn’t know what they had given him at the hospital but it sure as hell worked. His arm had healed itself within a day of his accident.
Scott threw himself on the floor and did ten push ups. No pain. He did twenty. He did another thirty. His arm was better. Better than before. Then the pain in his head began.
It happened fast. Sharp pain shot from his eyes to the base of his skull. He threw up cold pizza. Sweat poured from his body. His muscles felt like they were being ripped from his bones.
911 was experiencing a high volume of calls. It didn’t matter. He crawled into bed. The light hurt his eyes so he left the lights off. If his television had been on he would have seen that this was happening all over the world. He would have known that people were dying. He would have known what happened after they died.
Scott closed his eyes and dreamt. His dreams were wild. He was in a wasteland. Cities buried in sand. He became a bird and flew to a half buried power line. Then he melted into the power line and was pure energy. He coursed through the line into the wasted city. He found himself in dead appliances. He emerged onto television screens and computer monitors. His eyes became street cameras. His ears became discarded and dead cell phones. His voice radios and mp3 players. He screamed for someone to answer him. No one did. He was alone.
For a time he waited silently. Breathing in the desert air. He was a ruined city. He was a world without people. He was the last thought of a dead civilization. Rain began to fall and each drop was his tear. Then he got angry and he was lightning. Then he was still and nothing.
Scott’s heart stopped at nine o’clock at night. His apartment was dark. It was still. In the streets fires were burning. Around the world people were dying just like Scott. There was panic. There was fear. Eventually there would be nothing left.
At ten o’clock that night the lights in Scott’s apartment came on. His television turned on. His mp3 player started playing. His blender came to life. Every electronic device became active. At ten o’ one Scott’s eyes opened.
by submission | Sep 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
The crowd is fast on the heels of the gate guards. Evacuation sirens are blaring, deafening. Over everything the massive ship looms, engines warming up. Everybody is running, but from what, or why, nobody can say. They’ve been trained to for years. That’s all they know.
In front of them a guard turns and fires a single round.
A man looks down at his gut. He’s been shot, he realizes. He could live with enough time and the right care, but there is no time and right now nobody cares.
‘Daddy,’ the little girl says, ‘you’re bleeding.’
‘I know.’ He looks at the young guard, still holding the pistol in shaking hands, unsure of what he has done. On either side the crowd surges forward. There are two more gunshots, a shout. It’s over quickly.
The man picks his little girl from between the legs of the adults, trying not to scream from the effort and the pain. ‘Come on, honey,’ he tells her. ‘Close your eyes.’
The people surge over the body of the guard and the man who killed him, trampling their bones and blood and flesh back into the dust.
The man staggers forward, every step measured in blood and shortness of breath.
Around him the people scream and scream and scream. They’re about to be left behind and they know it. Everybody is climbing over one another in a bid to get forward even a little bit. Many are crushed beneath dirty feet. They leave the man alone, however. He is large, a steel worker covered in scars and plates, augmented and able to easily crush any one of them.
But he’s dying. He looks down again. His pants and shirt are soaked in blood, more blood than it should be possible to lose. He looks forward, looks up. The boarding ramp is only fifty feet away, cordoned off by strong men with large guns, fighting for their lives against the mob. The soldiers begin backing up. Time has run out.
So the man moves. One arm holds his child while the other pushes bodies away. To him they’re nothing. He moves onward, inexorable.
He’s forty feet away.
Thirty.
The crowd begins to run: Ignition is coming. One of the soldiers notices him, raises his gun, fires.
Twenty.
Ten.
His chest burns, the body he is shielding his daughter with is sputtering blood, bone, and oil. The ramp begins to rise.
The man collapses half on it, his little Sarah spilling from his arms onto the metal. Everybody is gone away now, and the soldiers are simply watching.
‘Daddy,’ she is crying. ‘Daddy. Get up. Please. You have to get up. Please get up.’
The soldiers look anywhere but before them.
‘Love,’ he whispers. He needs to say more, but his time is up. One broken hand gives Sarah’s arm a squeeze. Then the ramp has risen too far and his legs are too weak. He falls to the ground like a bag of cement mix.
Sarah is looking over the edge now, down at him. ‘Daddy,’ she screams. ‘Daddy. Get up!’ She is about to jump down to help him when rough, calloused hands grab her and pull her back.
The soldier holds her to his chest while she cries, one gentle hand on her head. He says nothing. As the ramp seals he squeezes her tight, but he may as well be a ghost to her.
Little Sarah turned six today. The dress her daddy got her is dirty and torn.
A roar – the ship begins to rise.
Everybody is leaving something behind.
by submission | Sep 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
We’re cutting it damn close. The three Gyth gliders are closing quickly as we jink in and out of the towering rock spires attempting to stay out of their line of fire. We’re gaining altitude quickly enough, but Kharla’s running low on water to convert to hydrogen for lift. She isn’t used to this pace. If we don’t make it to the event horizon we were done for.
I turn to my helmsman. “How’s she doing?”
K’li’ilk swivels two eye stalks toward me while the other two keep close watch on the jagged wall of rock, foliage and jutting stone terraces flashing past our portside. He answers rapidly in his clicking insectoid language. He’s morbidly pessimistic, as usual.
“I was afraid you’d say that”, I reply. “Just keep her going up.”
Another barrage of angry clicks.
“I don’t know! Tell her she can have all the water and sunshine she wants when she gets us to the other side.”
K’li’ilk scowls with his eyes, then closes them all as he concentrates on making empathic contact with Kharla, our ship.
Kharla’s a Palori, a pseudo-sentient plant. She uses photosynthesis to convert water into hydrogen for mobility through the vast airspace of this uncanny, improbable hollow planet. The H2 is stored in the one-hundred-forty thousand cubic foot, translucent gas membrane looming eighty feet above our gondola. Below the two crew decks, her four enormous, leathery leaves are currently making critical course changes, acting like rudders and/or sails when necessary. Dangling forty feet lower, her water sac and other organs are contained within a smaller, thicker, venous membrane. Trailing nearly a thousand feet, her many hollow, prehensile roots whip about in the gusting winds. She is a thing of beauty.
Jarku, my centipaur engineer, scuttles over on eighty spindly legs. “Ballistas are loaded. CO2, H2, O2 tanks fully charged, sir.”
“Let’s hope we don’t need them.”
We clear the highest spire and make a mad dash for the Event Horizon, a spectacular band thirty miles thick of low to nil gravity which divides the upper and lower hemispheres. Vague, amorphous shapes float within, likely large water bubbles filled with the strange algae that grows up here. If we’re lucky, that’s all they are.
Kharla’s gas membrane has become significantly smaller. We’re losing momentum fast and air pressure has decreased significantly, further slowing our assent.
The leather winged Gyth open fire, raining stone bullets across the hull, tearing chunks out of my ship. The twins, Torrah and Neb return fire with CO2 ballistas, but the fast moving, acrobatic Gyth are difficult to hit.
“Three thousand feet to EH.” Jarku reports. Too damned far.
K’li’ilk informs me that Kharla is nearly out of water.
Time for evasive action. My girl needs help.
“Jarku, fire up the thrusters. K’li’ilk, let Kharla know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Click, click.”
Kharla’s gas membrane begins deflating, shriveling into a tight, organic ball above us. My stomach lurches as our upward momentum ceases and we begin to plummet.
One Gyth gets too close. Kharla lashes out with her roots snaring the bird-beast in their sinewy grip. She rips off a wing then drops the howling Gyth tumbling to the ocean one hundred miles below. One down.
“Jarku. Now! Make it count.”
Another Gyth swoops up from below as Jarku ignites the short-range pulse-jets mounted below the gondola, catching the avian in its searing blue flame and rocketing us straight up. The remaining Gyth retreats.
We’re going to make it, but our troubles aren’t over yet. We still have to cross the Event Horizon. I hope our cargo is worth it.
by submission | Sep 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : Sean A. Murphy
“I would first like to thank you all for your time and consideration, but I have to open this session with an apology.
I do not have any easy solutions to offer you, nor even any that may ask you all for some tremendous investment. I know many of you expected and were fully prepared to put the considerable resources of your peoples to work. In fact I expect that if I asked this gathering, expenditure greater than the full sum of all prior human accomplishment could be attained. Unfortunately a proposal is not what I come to you with. Rather what I have is a prospect, an idea which I feel it is now our duty to explore.
Human history is riddled with tales of beings of intelligence beyond the familiar. From the titans and gods of old to the Hollywood movies and popular culture of today, our collective culture is fraught with tales of life beyond our own. These ideas may have a myriad of inspirations and most if not all are undoubtedly mere imaginings, but the current of belief since the dawn of man has maintained that, however distant, we are not alone in the universe. I ask you now, esteemed representatives, if you are prepared, if we are prepared, to be right.
I have found a structure in the silence of the stars. My experiments and the issue of the day have led me to look into space as no other has before me and I tell you I have found something. The data is here. It has been poured over and confirmed by the greatest minds of our generation. It is indisputable. The conclusions I draw from it may offend you but this is not something we can afford to ignore.
This design presented now behind me, gentlemen, is a system of interconnected and communicating nodes, as I have so far mapped them out. As yet I cannot offer you a translation of what they say but I assure you all the foremost data and linguistics analysts have showed beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are both nonrandom, and not naturally occurring. Not only that, but in my detecting of them they have also detected me. Even as we speak several of these nodes have turned, from as best I can tell, a listening ear to our lonely planet.
I can understand your outrage gentlemen but I assure you I have not taken any unilateral action on this planets behalf, they became aware of me the moment I began my experiments, as you yourselves obliged me to. I realize these are not the results you were hoping for, but this may be our only option, indeed our only salvation.
Said as plainly as possible I put this statement before the General Assembly. There is nothing we can do about our sun; we simply do not have the technology. But they might.”
-Excerpt from Dr. Wilkos Bradshaw’s address to The General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20th 2047
by Julian Miles | Sep 7, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m not in the moment. I am the moment, locked in by law-enforcement combat conditioning. Beyond my fixed perceptions, there is nothing. The instructors told us to take in the whole enhanced experience at these times, letting the moment become us instead of becoming our madness.
There’s a nanopede traversing the barrel of my gun, its tentacular manipulators working devotedly to provide gecko-like traction in the sheen of tarnish-repellent gloss upon the burnished alloy. The legs move in waves, reflecting little coruscating showers of light as it makes its way about its incomprehensible business.
“One.”
The stock of my gun is jammed tight into my shoulder, so tight my clavicle aches, but I can’t diminish my grip. The sights are aligned to the probable target vectors and the filament to my combat eye swings rhythmically in time with my heartbeat. My peripheral vision shows my team and headman distributed for optimum coverage.
“Two.”
The warehouse is silent. Our stealth gear means we are invisible even to a Tabino, the plastic addicted rodents famed for denuding citizens in moments. Thankfully the only citizens nearby are in the passing air traffic that illumines the darkness fitfully with bright beams through the torn roof. They strobe by like the strides of giants made of light.
“Three!”
The darkness is hurled back by the phased pulse of six demolition charges that turn air into energy with an efficiency that can suffocate the unprepared. Which is what we all hope our targets are. As the expanding rings of blue fire flash along exposed conductive materials, the bass thrum of a grazer amped from it’s workcycle of plasma cutting up to illegal death dealing autopulse reveals some of our targets were very prepared.
My legs are a separate entity, hurling me forward on an irregular course. My sights show no targets yet the autopulses increase from one to eight, stretching out towards us like ribbons of purple light. They must be cycling the grazers without regard for cooling.
“I’m hit!”
One of the ribbons intersected with my headman and his right thigh has been blasted to superheated mist. Now I understand why they’re running the grazers so hot – they can chop us down. I desperately try to find them, overriding the sights to fire at the originating end of the nearest lethal ribbon of light.
“Bastard!”
The scream over open comms coincides with the ribbon I was using to orientate my fire winking out. I’m just fighting my single-minded kill directive to rediscover speech, so I can pass the sight-override manoeuvre on, when two of the ribbons slash sideways and bisect in my chest, vapourising my forearms and detonating my gun. I watch in macro-awe as the nanopede executes a flawless pike off the gun barrel and drops from view behind the expanding pink and silver ball composed of gun shards, denaturing chest armour and limb fragments. Then the physics happens and I am dropped off the impaling spears of energy, falling behind a thankfully solid stanchion.
The medical unit on my belt exhausts its entire repertoire in under five seconds. I am going to live, my arms and weapon having reduced the death dealing beams to merely searing.
Released from combat mode, I open our tactical channel and tell my remaining team-mates about overriding their sights. Wordless growls of thanks make me smile.
The moment stretches and snaps, normal time and senses are resumed and I manage to race the pain into the welcoming embrace of sedative oblivion.
