by submission | Sep 18, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
Black slime and brown muck sucked cracked leather on his unkempt boots. He inhaled riverbank patent odors by Cairo woodlands, where the Mississippi and Ohio converge in a sordid affair of upstream debris and human waste. Maps fluttered in his head from Horace Bixby’s wisdom notes bludgeoned the Cub Pilot serving the Paul Jones steamboat. Slapping waves, two seconds apart, brought surges over the bulrushes, exposing a yet unseen steamer rounding the bend, with no billowing plume from her growling belly rising above galleried forest of cottonwoods. He chomped on his spit-soaked cigar, wondering who had nerve enough to bear tight to shore during flood season.
Sizzles rose as the cigar fell harshly into turgid waters. A silver craft rose from the river depths to hover over him. Coherent blue light vacuumed his body from the cloying banks, leaving boots standing empty. The spacecraft flashed skyward, away from detection.
“Can you understand us, Samuel?” The blonde woman’s gentle voice awakened him. Her speech was not American; he was sure, but akin to the wealthy British passengers.
“Where the blazes am I?” Sam remained frozen in a high-backed chair of an unrecognized material, metallic yet soft.
“As a courtesy to a pilot, we brought you aboard our ship.” The voice had a slow, masculine resonance, almost mechanical, from a blonde man, similar to his guest mistress. Both wore long, flowing robes with bejeweled gold headpieces across their foreheads. “Look out of our pilot house, as you call it, to see our view as we travel.”
A shudder rolled through the captive as one wall of the room revealed the Earth beyond them, and the moon, half full, rising behind the Earth’s horizon. “Have I died? Is this heaven? Are you angels?”
“Hardly, Sam, as there is no heaven as you know it, no angels and no God watching over you. This you may write about someday.” A slight smile arose on his captors faces.
“Write? I only wrote a few things. I haven’t the time for more. I’ve have a profession, but I must be dead. None of this is real. I need a damn cigar.” He rummaged through his shirt and pants but could find nothing, not even a match.
“You’ll find no such things here. We don’t allow them…especially fire. We hope that after our short talk you might give up this habit, and your dalliance with women of low morals. Both will take their toll if you do not change.”
“If this is heaven, I’d prefer hell. Now get me out of this contraption! I swear…!” He struggled with no progress.
“We can only keep you for a short time here, but you must know, Sam, we have watched over you before birth. You will influence many. There is a terrible war coming. You should avoid it. Your destiny is that of a wheel, to keep ever moving on the road. Steer straight, true and tell others of your ventures…but do not become like the dark souls you will meet. Rise above them for you have seen the heavens, but stay away from Pennsylvania.”
He faded into darkness again, waking far inland, wondering how he had gotten out of the woods and back near the docks by the Paul Jones with his boots on the wrong feet. His hands scrambled about seeking out his smokes. There were none. His mind rebelled against that loss while a sinking feeling haunted him to avoid Philadelphia.
by submission | Sep 15, 2015 | Story |
Author : Kate Runnels
Torque gazed down at the clouds scudding past below in a breeze she couldn’t feel. She sat at the edge of a rusting support beam. The beam, one of many that needed repairs, helped hold up the roof of her father’s Mechanic shop.
The constant thrum of the engines kept the city of New Perth in the sky, droned on in the background as she fiddled with her mechanical right arm. The tiny gears and joints sometimes clogged with dust and she liked to keep it clean; running smoothly. The small screwdriver tightened one last bolt and she slipped it into a side pocket as she flexed her right arm, watching the interplay of gears, pulleys and the fluid that represented blood pass through tubes.
Her chores finished, she stayed out of sight of her mother and the bastard of a new man she called husband, Malcolm. A drunk, pretending to run the shop: her father’s shop; her shop!
The same accident that had taken her arm had taken her father, and half the populace of New Perth.
The steel vibrated under her. Sark, Malcolm’s oldest son, two years older. He grinned at her. “Torque the dork. What are you doing? I’m sure father will love to know your shirking work.”
“If Malcolm’s not too sloshed.”
“What was that?” he demanded, stepping one foot out onto the beam. Scared, he kept hold of the hull wall, as there was only the starboard engine housing and the clouds.
She had been sitting, but a pitch in the background rumble caused her to stand, easily balanced on the 10 inch wide beam.
“What-”
She cocked her head slightly to one side to bring one ear upward. He opened his mouth then stopped, he’d heard it too. Another airship!
Torque glanced up in time to see a sleek fast moving airship streak out from above the bulk of the city and then it was past and diving down into the clouds.
It was followed by a ship that made the last look like a rusted old tug boat. As it fully emerged did the colors and the sigil penetrate into her astonished mind.
“A Royalty Air Cruiser.” She’d only seen the medical boat after the Blast.
It continued, following the other down into the clouds to vanish into the white.
What was it doing here? They chased pirates and brought order among all the floating cities.
The beam shook slightly and she glanced back to see him as Sark pulled back a meaty fist for a punch with a wicked gleam in his eyes.
She stepped back off the end of the beam. Torque dropped, her right arm catching the lip of the beam and she smiled as Sark, off balance, wind milled to keep himself from falling. Torque only used the beam to slow herself and change trajectory, swinging in toward the hull she released her grip.
Torque landed lightly on another beam that was part of the floor. She gripped a rusting hole in the hull, and metal on metal screeched in her grip. She didn’t stay long, but ran the length. Torque leaped off to fall into the gaping hole, a legacy of the Blast. Barely any light penetrated the shattered part of engineering. A moment of free fall then she landed, rolled to shed momentum and stopped with a bang as her right arm hit the inner wall.
She smiled at the memory of the look of his face as she leaped off. Let him try and follow her now.
by submission | Sep 14, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
The infinitesimal point that had been the universe bounded out and stars and galaxies returned to their proper places in the cosmos as I defolded back into normal space. I steered toward the small world orbiting the red giant star. From a distance, the planet appeared to have a ring system. I knew it didn’t. The “rings” were hundreds of thousands of vessels and beings and those for whom there was no distinction between the two.
The word had gone out long ago that we would meet here at this time. Some, like myself, had traversed the galaxy in the span between two adjacent moments. Many had had to cover the intervening space between here and wherever they came from at many times the speed of light, still painfully slow given the gulfs between the stars. Others had made the journey at subluminal speeds, a good many at so leisurely a pace that they had had to resort to multigenerational vessels or suspended animation ships, the civilizations that sent them now unrecognizable or extinct by virtue of the passage of centuries or millennia.
Several of the gathered races had never before had any contact. A few represented species currently at war with each other orbiting the planet together under various states of truce and ceasefire. There were oxygen-breathers and chlorine-breathers and those who didn’t breathe at all. There were biological races and machine races and races that incorporated elements of both. They had all come to this world for the same purpose: To say goodbye.
The quintillions of species that walked and crawled and swam and slithered and floated on millions of natural and artificial worlds throughout the Milky Way all traced their origin back to this small, dying planet. Its sun had been a yellow dwarf star billions of years ago. The aging star had become red and bloated and had already engulfed two worlds. Now it encroached on a third.
The mourners at this cosmic funeral paid their respects in diverse ways. A group of ten-legged crustaceans from some world near the galactic core played a mournful dirge. A collection of mammalian bipeds from a nearby system sang and got drunk. An aquatic species laughed riotously while a reptilian race wept and wailed. One robotic civilization bowed their heads in respectful silence while another society of mechanicals recited impromptu poetry.
Some of us tarried for days and others remained for months or even years as the planet’s surface blacked under the relentless heat. In time, I departed. As I slid into the interstices between dimensions, I thought that the galaxy, for all its endless diversity of life and civilization, seemed somehow lonely now for the loss of that tiny rock in the hinterlands that gave birth to us all.
by submission | Sep 12, 2015 | Story |
Author : Hannah Hunter
Darkness. Eyes open, still dark.
Why?
Why is your arm burning?
Where is your phone? What time is it? Why is there no light? I always have my phone on the bed when I go to sleep.
Pain.
Sharp burning, pain. Just my arm. Why only your arm? So intense I can’t think straight.
This isn’t my bed.
Where is your phone? It will give me much needed light and tell me who I am.
Who are you?
Name.
Name?
It’s gone. How do you lose your name?
Not lost. Taken.
Taken?
Who would take your name?
This definitely isn’t my bed, so it’s not my room. How do you know it’s not your room? You don’t even know your own name. The pain. It’s distracting. It’s doesn’t feel like mine. The flesh is tight, raised and warm to the touch. The pain is not going away. How do you know it’s not your room?
Think.
There is no bedside lamp. You had one. You’re in single bed and you had a double. You know this. Some memories are here. My eyes fall shut as I try to locate further memories. My eyes are heavy and my brain fogs over. My sleep had not been natural?
Was the pain spreading? I clutch my left arm again as a new wave of pain hits. It’s certainly getting worse. Infection perhaps?
How old am I? My skin does not feel young. I don’t remember any of my birthdays but I know such a thing exists. I know people have birthdays. I know I had birthdays. I’m sure they sucked.
A light.
Where is it coming from? There’s a door.
There’s a room beyond.
Can you move?
My body is heavy and aches but I can move. I swing my heavy legs over the side of the bed.
Can you get up?
I don’t have a choice. I must get to the door. It has answers. I will myself to leave the bed. I’m standing. Facing the door.
It has answers.
I need answers.
I shuffle forward. Slowly.
Shouldn’t I be cold? I can feel the air conditioning blasting onto my skin but I am numb to its temperature. Goosebumps appear on my skin, making the flesh on my arm hurt all the more.
Small movements.
Big effort.
Are you in a medical gown?
I can feel the recycled air tickle my bare back.
Is the pain from surgery? Is that were your memory has gone?
Push forward.
The answers are in the light.
Did I choose this? It hurts. Who would choose this?
Perhaps it was an accident that got me here?
The floor.
My legs are unforgiving of the snail’s pace in which I was travelling.
The floor was no kinder.
My face feels warm. And wet.
Is that blood?
Only the light can tell you that.
Get up.
Get up now.
Ignore the pain. The pain is not going away. My legs are definitely old. The skin feels loose and dry as I pull myself up. I don’t remember being old.
Smaller steps
Bigger effort.
The door is heavy. Or is it that you have no strength?
Push
Push, push, push.
Light.
Soft light.
A bathroom. Not mine.
A mirror. Not mine.
A reflection. Not mine. The eyes, the hair, the broken and bloody nose are not just unfamiliar. They are not belonging to me.
My stomach and heart lurch as I read the note that is on the mirror. The note that was definitely left for me:
“You said you did not want to be you anymore.”
by Julian Miles | Sep 11, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Hawking proposed that information was not consumed by black holes, just held in super-translation holograms at the event horizon. I proposed that stored information is always accessible. Discounting the chaotic infoforms emitted as Hawking radiation, I was sure that there had to be a way to interrogate the universe’s archives.
Like the rest of humanity, I had witnessed the global schisms instigated by the Transit phenomena, although I was only a child. To me, the ability to switch from physical body to virtual was a magical thing. By the time the Hawking proposals were reaching tenuous confirmation, I had been Transited for over a century. With the fortune made by my own work multiplied nearly a hundredfold by speculators eager to reap the rewards of the biggest big data to ever exist, I spent the next century working with the most brilliant minds I could find. Many of them so brilliant that science regarded them as crazy.
Being Transited, I needed no life support of other bulky luxuries. The huge, freespace-built drive unit to carry the superdense, solid-state device I had transferred my consciousness to was fired up on what would have been my two-hundred and fiftieth birthday. Within minutes of launch I had attained ludicrous speeds, heading towards V404 Cygni faster than anything man had ever built. From that pinnacle, my ship dived into subspace and I left what is termed as reality for a while.
When I returned from the place where machines misbehave unless sentience is within to keep them anchored, I beheld V404 – and experienced helpless terror.
I remained in the throes of that terror until ejected by my vessel, whereupon I entered a state that I can only describe by theoretical allegory. If one was being eaten alive, I suspect the experience may share some with what I felt. The flashes of pain, the reduction of sensation, the frantic thrashing of phantom limbs. That last one finished me. I had never missed my body, until then – the moment where my consciousness was dying.
The blackness took me in chunks, something wholly alien to my digitised perceptions of self. When the dark consumed me, I was puzzled by my continuance, before resolving to at least fade away with some vestige of grace.
Then the community reached me and night turned to day.
And that is where I remain, dwelling in a proof of Hawking’s contestation that goes so far beyond it as to almost make it erroneous.
Everything is here. The information of a universe consumed. The sentiences of all those consumed, too. Not all survive intact, but those that do not are purposed with whatever they can achieve. Our reality is a toroid of super-translated data holograms architected by the sentiences that survived the transition into it.
This place grows as the hungry infostar we encircle draws in and translates everything without into dataforms within.
Of all the wonders I have encountered, it is the fact that I am content that staggers me most. This place is, I believe, the nearest a scientist can get to heaven.
