by submission | Feb 6, 2009 | Story
Author : George Galuschak
The end of the world: we expected mad cows, Y2K, global warming, asteroids, nukes, tidal waves, flu-stricken chickens and angels descending from Starship Christ. What we got was The Blue Weed. We don’t know the delivery method – meteor strike, abandoned spaceship, some geek from another dimension. All we know is that we’ll never know.
Picture this: a light blue flower with black speckles, droopy petals, creamy stamen. A hiker found them, tucked in a crater deep in the Smoky Mountains. She knew something was up right away: thumbing through her Wildflower Guide, finding nothing, working up the nerve to touch them.
A quarter-million sub-microscopic seeds went home with her, attached to every pore of her body. She woke up two days later, saw clumps of the flower growing all over her lawn. They spread from there, filling up parks and vacant lots and the cracks between sidewalks. Indestructible; dump lye on them and more came back the next day.
People shrugged their shoulders – big deal, a new weed – until the grass and trees started to die. Purple Haze: an alien virus, spreading, choking bark and branch in a blanket of fuzz. Purple Haze grew on everything, even human skin, and it was next to impossible to remove.
The alien bugs came: yellow, spiky caterpillar things; dragonflies the size of birds; beetles with weird glyphs on their shells. They rooted around in the Blue Weed, doing God knows what. Completely alien physiology – they had backbones, for starters, and secreted an oil. If you touched one with bare skin, boils, blisters, time for the hospital.
The word invasion became popular. People scratched their heads and wondered when the invaders would arrive, not realizing. Alien grays and little green men and penis-shaped rocket ships made sense, but a bunch of flowers? Gardeners aside, one doesn’t think of weeds as world conquerors.
The government swooped in with an arsenal of pesticides: defoliant, weed killer, DDT. They all worked; none of them worked. The Blue Weed died, and was reborn. The government tried other things: they quarantined people in plague zones, just like a bad horror movie. It didn’t work, because you can’t quarantine the wind.
The Blue Weed grew and grew. The flowers sucked in oxygen and emitted their own bitches’ brew into the atmosphere, changing it. The mass extinctions commenced: 99% of all living species, gone. The ants survived, along with the cockroaches. Humans died in droves: the old, the young and the sick went first. The survivors’ skin took on a tint just like the flowers.
Earth, today: nothing to see but a never-ending plain of The Blue Weed, waist high, swaying gently in the wind. The landscape: crystal jellyfish, drifting through the clouds; small, chattering monkeys with huge ears and wide, unblinking eyes; and the last human, cowering in the long grass, hiding from the carnivorous dragonflies, smothering in a world turned blue.
by Sam Clough | Feb 3, 2009 | Story
Author : S. Clough, Staff Writer
“Tash, stop right there.” Kal barked, raising his rifle, and aiming it squarely at his team-mate. Tash froze, and lifted her hands. She’d known this was coming, but it always caught her off-guard. The rest of the team had gone back to the lander to fetch some more equipment.
During Cat’s exploration of the outpost’s computers, they’d turned up a list of names: each one linked with a location deep inside one of the territories of the nearby polities. The files were touched with sakshan encryption methods: it didn’t take much to figure out that the research facility that they’d broken into was a sakshan outpost — and the list of names and places was a directory of intelligence operatives.
Kal, was the sharpshooter of the team, and was a pure-blood sakshan, with an impressive battery of combat-related headmetal. They’d found him broken and bleeding when they’d arrived to pick over the ruins of a particularly bloody border skirmish. They patched him up, discovered his skills with projectile weapons, and offered him a job. Once he realised command wasn’t coming back for him, he reluctantly took them up on their offer. In the years since, he’d loosened up noticeably, shaking off most of the comprehensive indoctrination that he’d been exposed to since birth.
His subconscious, though, still gave them some problems.
“Kal, don’t do this…”
“This list. Those men and women. If we sell their names, they’ll all die. Picked up and tortured and killed. They have families. This is stupid and futile and I won’t allow it.”
Tash bit her tongue. She knew that she couldn’t talk him out of it. He was visibly shaking: his rifle was rock steady.
“I won’t let you commit mass murder, Tash. I couldn’t live with myself if I did.”
“But you’d kill me?”
“If I had to. To protect my countrymen.”
“Kal, please. After everything we’ve done together — ”
“Just shut up, Tash.”
The silence held for forty seconds. Behind Kal, Frank (the medic-engineer of the team) was just sneaking around the corner, attempting to move silently. He was clutching a portable field generator that he’d modified for just such an occasion.
Tash took a step forward. Kal stiffened.
Frank stepped out of cover, and coughed. There was a clatter of bullets, and an ultrasonic whine as the field clicked on. Kal dropped to the floor, unconscious. Tash was clutching her arm, bent over andmuttering a steady stream of curses: blood was oozing between her fingers.
Grimly, they dragged Kal’s body back to the lander. A more subtle version of the field generator was hidden in the medical bay: the portable generator just induced a current in Kal’s implants, which quickly shut him down before he could sustain brain damage. With the generator in the med bay, Frank could purposefully manipulate Kal’s unconscious mind via the implants: he claimed it was like a first-person shooter, all exploration and twitch reflex. The point of it all was to reset their team-mate to an earlier state. Just long enough ago that he’d forget all about the mission, the list, and the betrayal. They needed him on top form.
They were well away from the outpost by the time Frank finished. Tash met him in the medical bay.
“Think you’ll be able to forgive him?” Frank glanced up at her.
“We always do, don’t we?” She stroked Kal’s hair, and sighed. “Every time.”
by submission | Feb 2, 2009 | Story
Author : Hilary B. Bisenieks
The last time I saw the surface of the moon, it was pristine save for a few sets of footprints. I had been struck dumb at the majesty of the black—an eternity of stars from horizon to horizon—while the others filled my ears with the chatter of their radios.
We were the first on that little patch of dust and rock, far from the Sea of Tranquility which had been designated as protected, along with the handful of other pre-commercial landing sites, long before our voyage had even been viable. There was no flag there, just as there was no wind to make it flap. When we left, nobody took note of our names. We were just a load of rich passengers to everyone on Earth. We were only remembered by trivia buffs preparing to compete for billions of dollars on quiz shows.
There were people who cared: the scientists whose work had made our vacation possible, the pilots who hoped that ours would be the first of many such trips for them, the CEOs whose companies could turn a profit marketing increasingly down-market lunar trips. They cared about the advances, the experiences, the possibilities, but not the moon itself. While we leaped across the lunar surface, they planned to develop it.
When our time was up, we returned to our module to make the long trip back to Earth. I wept in the safety of my suit as we took off. While there was still gravity, my tears slid across my face before being reclaimed by my suit. My grief and my joy were purified and offered back to me as nothing more than water.
by submission | Jan 27, 2009 | Story
Author : James C. Clar
“Shit,” Corporal Sean Collins thought out loud. “I’ve got to calm down. My oxygen will be gone in twenty minutes if I don’t. I need to stay low. If I raise my head above the dunes to take a shot, that Martian bastard will vaporize me.”
Collins had gotten separated from his patrol during a violent sandstorm … a storm that, although abating at ground level, was still disrupting communications. Attempting to make his way back to base he became disoriented and wound up alone and with his back against a sheer rock wall. Thank God for the undulating sand dunes that partially protected his position to the front. He fell in love with them, in fact, as soon as the shooting started. A lone ‘Marty – probably separated from his men as well – spotted him an hour ago and began firing. “Son of a bitch,” Collins swore. “My tour’s up in three weeks. I just want to make it home to see Rachel and my baby daughter sometime before she’s ready to go to college! If I’m just patient and wait out the storm, Command will send a flier out to look for me.” Hunkered down and shivering on an inimical, alien landscape, Sean weighed his options.
****
Meanwhile, Zadok crouched behind some boulders and checked the charge on his pulse rifle; enough left for two, maybe three, bursts. His elevated position gave him a huge advantage over his enemy. The human had nowhere to run and the moment he raised his head above the dunes that sheltered him, Zadok could pick him off with ease. Even now, the Martian soldier saw a flash as sunlight reflected off the helmet or visor of the trapped earthling. It was just a matter of time. Although eager to return to base for the communal meal, Zadok … like most of his ancient race … had learned patience over the long, silent eons. He was more than willing to wait.
****
In Topeka, Kansas Rachael Collins walked out into her backyard. Her young daughter was in her arms. One of her friends had shown her how to find Mars in the evening sky. She gazed up at the distant planet and thought of her husband. Someone else had tried to explain that the light from Mars took nearly fifteen minutes to reach Earth. Rachael only barely understood what they had been talking about and, to be honest, she didn’t really care. All she knew was that her husband was up there somewhere on that distant, dusty world. When she stood in her yard and looked up at the faint orange glow in the darkening sky, she felt a connection with Sean. His tour was nearly up but it would a year or so before he made it home. It didn’t matter. Unlike her impetuous husband and his crazy Irish relatives, Rachael was infinitely patient. She was more than willing to wait.
by submission | Jan 26, 2009 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
People sometimes look at me weirdly when they first see me, and after all this time I can’t really blame them that much. I’m disabled. They see me with the goggles and the earpieces and they wonder what’s going on. Then they check the nets to see what it could be, and their faces get the same uniform look of pity and contempt. How tragic it must be, they think, not to have infoplants; way worse than being blind or deaf, because missing senses can be replaced by impants. How wretched not to have lucid dreaming or radiotelepathy.
My parents didn’t find out about it until I was four, when they took me to get the usual edutainment wetware. My body rejected the spinal grafts, rejected them with such savagery that it nearly killed me. The doctors refused to try again, saying that another rejection would kill me.
To my parents’ credit, they never made me feel different. They got me as unobtrusive a headset as they could, got me gloves so I could take part in sensationals with them. My elder brother, Troy, once beat up a kid at school for calling me a “limp”. I’ve never minded the names, though. They can call me a limp or a flatline or a blackout. They can even pity me for my disability, and I con’t care, because there’s one thing I can do that they can’t.
I can turn it off.
I can take off the sensation gloves, the goggles, and the earphones. I can unclip the belt pack and leave my computer in my room. I can be alone if I want to be. I look at people my own age and I know they’ve never had a night’s sleep where their dreams weren’t sponsored by Toyota or Burger King. They’ve never wanted to know something and had to work at finding it out. They’ve never laid out in an empty field under an infinite sky, alone but for their thoughts, knowing that no popups or instant messages will ever spoil the view.
They look at me and they feel pity.
I look at them, and I feel lucky.
