by J.R. Blackwell | Jan 1, 2006 | Story
After a night of drinking, following the uncontrolled sleep of total blackness, there comes for humans a level of morning sobriety that is so clear it is painful. The white light of morning truth shines through to the black recesses of the human brain, and suddenly, the consequences of all those epic and sloppy actions of the night before pile like boulders, clear and terrible in the bitter morning.
In this cold, sharp daylight, Nima Atom was very aware of the two, no, three sets of alien legs that were entwined around him in the giant satin bed. Blue, green, and red bodies circled around his. Nima lay awake, listening to their soft breathing and piecing together his memories of the night before. As Nima gazed out the window in front of him, he became increasingly aware that the view he was seeing of the beautiful city, with its rounded golden domes, was a view that could have only been seen from the magnificent palace of the Shah-on-Shah, the ruler of the planet. Indeed, the lush fabrics and the little bubbling pools indicated wealth, and the slight and colorful figures that surrounded him wore jewels in their head skins that indicated them to be the royal wives of the palace.
Nima lay there, sober and aching, and imagined the night before. He had spent the night in a luxurious haze; beautiful alien women buying him drinks, escorting him from club to club, feeding him, encouraging him to sing, and kissing him with their long, leathery tongues. He blushed as he remembered being bathed in one of the pools by the giant window, where the curtain was now softly fluttering in the warm breeze.
His arms and legs pinned, he began to formulate an escape plan, a plan which first began with the artful extraction of his limbs from those of the women around him. His imagined plan stumbled in execution for when he flexed the muscle of his right arm the ruby woman resting her head there opened her purple eyes. She smiled at him, her sharpened teeth gleaming.
“Hungry?” she asked
“Listen,” whispered Nima “I don’t want to wake up the others, but I think I really need to go now, can you help me?”
“Why do you need to go?” asked a voice behind him. Nima looked up and into dark violet eyes and a green smile.
“Babe, I, uh, I’ve got a ship to catch.”
The blue woman stretched languidly, and snaked an arm over his stomach. “Stay. Eat with us.”
“Ladies.” Nima scrambled off the silk bed, wishing he could remember their names. “Ladies. The night was lovely, but I fear I have overstayed my welcome.”
“You really enjoyed the bath last night.” Said the green woman.
“”Oh, it was lovely, I’m sure.” Said Nima, trying to remember and forget at the same time. “It’s just that I’m sure that the Shah-on-Shah would not like me in here with his, er, wives.”
“We like you in here with us.” Said the nubile ruby beauty. “You lasted for two whole minutes with me last night. Our males only last for seconds.”
“Oh geez. Please don’t spread that around.” said Nima. “I usually last longer it’s just that I had a lot to drink and ““”
“You should show us how long you can go.” Said the green woman, her hands rubbing her naked legs.
“And I would love to stay.” Nima held out his hands defensively. “Really. I would. But I would also like to live. Living is an important value for humans.” He laughed nervously. “Um, yeah. So maybe, ladies, we could reschedule for another time, and you could tell me if there is anyway I could get out of here without the Shah-on-Shahs guards noticing.”
Ruby stood, her naked body glistening. “There is a way, if you follow me.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you!”
As they left through a door behind a pillar, Tiki leaned back and smiled at Ruma’sens green face.
“Poor human, he seemed so nervous. Perhaps we should have told him that the Shah-on-Shah encourages us to have relations outside of our own species.”
Ruma’sen patted Tikis blue shoulder. “No, third wife, trust me. It’s more fun for them this way.”
The two women smiled, bathed by morning light.
by B. York | Dec 30, 2005 | Story |
TURN THE SCOPE. Earth-124. Subject: Davis, Conner. Occupation: Car Salesman.
It was an ordinary day of waking up, drinking coffee, and making his way to the lot again but Conner was glad that every day had its predictability. New Fords meant New Mustangs with all their pretty little colors and displays, and he never ceased to enjoy selling them.
Conner was happily married, and enjoyed life with his son, Parker. He was a quiet man who lived a quiet life; a mediocre life that would leave him dead from heart disease at the age of 55.
Destiny: .01%
TURN THE SCOPE. Earth-273. Subject: Davis, Conner. Occupation: Assassin.
Gunshots were not his cup of tea, but ever since Conner had graduated from being an apprentice to actually doing the hits himself he hadn’t had much time for tea at all. This particular day, while he’s thinking about what it might be like to settle down with a wife while blood dripped from a gunshot wound to his side, he was on the brink of completing another mission.
Mr. Davis was an enigma in the eyes of all systems, and right now his one redeeming quality was shooting the fuck out of the newly-elected President of Unified Territories and the change that would ensue would be as important to him as the huge pay-off. Unfortunately, Conner would die of that wound before he could report his near-success.
Destiny: 9.05%
TURN THE SCOPE. Earth-5890. Subject: Davis, Conner. Occupation: Chemist.
Early days were no stranger to Doctor Conner Davis, who labored heavily over limitless lines of formula and code to decipher what the cure would be. Humanity was fading fast from the plague spreading through each and every citizen and time was running short for the underground lab he kept in Bismarck.
Dr. Davis had lost everything in his study for a cure including any hope of a relationship. He’d lost care of personal gain and took sight of what really mattered. Life mattered. His eyes saw the necessary means to create a cure and he might be able to save more than just his sanity by finding one soon. Doctor Conner Davis died of an aneurysm at 98.
Destiny: 45.39%
TURN THE SCOPE. Earth-1. Subject: Davis, Conner. Occupation: Unknown.
Conner Davis lived every day as if it were his last. He took everything as it came to him and never took any of it for granted. He never wrote a book, never saved a nation, never killed a villain or moved a mountain. Mr. Davis was going to Sydney and he was getting married to the love of his life.
Mr. Davis never knew happiness outside of how he felt for other people. Material possessions never occurred to Conner to mean anything. He lived, and he loved with the best of his ability and compromised nothing. Conner Davis dies tomorrow.
Destiny: 100%
TURN THE SCOPE.
by Kathy Kachelries | Dec 28, 2005 | Story |
The feeds are not for the news. The feeds are the distraction, the feeds are the facade. The news is contained within them, invisible to the naked eye, downloading itself as cookies, slipped into meta tags. Sometimes, Anna wondered who controlled the news, who encoded it so carefully before covertly disseminating it to a throbbing public that would never be able to read it.
“Six civilians reported dead after recent bombing,” the scrolling headline told her as she slapped a post-it above the monitor.
It is a crime to open up your computer. Computers come fully assembled: white cubes with no seams, glowing power button and white cord.
You had to buy a saw, the kind used for cutting pipes. It was a tedious process. When Anna was thirteen, it took her five hours to get through the half-inch of white plastic and the quarter-inch of metal beneath it.
She was disappointed at the interior, which consisted of shiny green boards pricked with bits of copper. It was too mundane to be forbidden, she thought. She resented the laws for tricking her into wasting her time.
The newsfarms were self-contained as well. The boy who lived down the street told her that the buildings were empty, operated by machines. Machines made the feedsites, and machines maintained them. That was why they had no doors.
“How do we know they’re telling the truth?” she asked, squinting at the windowless building.
“Machines can’t lie. They don’t even know what lies are.”
In the cafe, Anna inserted a small black cartridge and cut off the auditory alarm with a few keystrokes. The computer could recognize “malicious code.”
She glanced up to the innocent-looking post-it note attached to the top of the monitor. The usercamera was the first line of offense, and it was the first one to be neutralized. Now, it was busy converting the image of the yellow paper to digits, which were stored and immediately printed by the DHS for deployment. Their enemy is the color of dandilions, she thought, smirking at their waste of yellow ink. The front of the square said 10.12.01.
Judith had been a few years older than Anna, and lived in the apartment beside her. Judith’s apartment was sealed like a newsfarm, and, though there was a door, Anna had never seen it open. Eerie blue light flickered from the inch between wood and tile.
The first and last time she saw Judith was a week before she graduated from high school. Anna answered the door at three am, mostly because her mother told her not to answer the door at three am, and Judith shoved a box into Anna’s arms. “This is for you,” she whispered breathlessly before turning and running down the hallway in a mess of curly hair and toffee-colored skin. The police arrived three minutes later.
Confident that the computer’s safeguards had been bypassed, Anna opened the program on the disk and stared at the black window for a second before filling it with white letters and numbers. Another window opened, and the guts of the feedsite spilled out into black and white as numbers and letters. Anna hit print, then eject, then yanked the cord out of the wall and replugged it. Pocketing the disk, she looked at the startup screen. “Shit!” she said, loudly enough for the clerk to hear. He glanced up. “It turned itself off,” she explained.
“Do you need-” he started, then the phone rang, exactly on schedule. “One second,” he said, and picked up the receiver.
Anna grabbed the stack of seventeen freshly-printed pages and exited while his back was turned.
Sitting in the diner, drinking her fourth cup of coffee, Anna worked over the pages with a ballpoint pen. Eighty three people had died, not six. Their names were half-assembled as letters trapped in little blue circles of ink.
“You shouldn’t do puzzles in pen,” The waiter said, refilling her coffee. “What if you want to erase something?”
“I don’t like erasing things,” she responded without looking up. He walked back behind the counter and she circled another letter, frowning.
by B. York | Dec 25, 2005 | Story |
No one is sure where it came from. The old books with paper pages will tell you that it came from Cologne Cathedral, but I’m not so sure anymore. I imagine it comes out of the woodwork when trouble starts and times are dark. It’s time for the holidays again, but all we hear are the bombs of the war crashing down on our walls, shaking our souls and the ground beneath us.
The Archons of the city have gathered us children in the basements and the shelters as everyone awaits an end. They tell us stories and in each of these stories I listen for a crooked stick of candy.
Think back to the battle to defend Earth. In the chaos of the Narxar attacks, the holidays happened and the fighting stopped. The invaders didn’t have to put down their guns, but when they saw smiles and heard singing, they almost had a reverence about it. Somewhere in that story, a child was handed one of these curved confections and life was made better for it. Rumors have it that when peace was made with the Narxar, one of the canes was given as tribute.
Who could forget the civil war of the Mars colonies? A whole thirteen years filled with blood and sacrifice. The usually dry desert of the red planet was soaked with the blood of those who had given their lives for the right to make laws. It was then that the sky softened and revealed to them that man controlled nothing but himself. Snow broke the battle. It coated the red, if only for a day, and it cleared the minds of those who were riddled with anger. I like to imagine that someone handed someone else this length of peppermint and all was made right with the stars and the heavens.
In darker times, when we invaded Delfia II for its plentiful resources, for its air and plants and endless reserves of fuel, we expected to skip the holidays until we were victorious. Still, the Delfian climate was so warm and peaceful that when the time for celebration and goodwill came about, the soldiers lost their wills to fight. The war had become unimportant. Sometimes, I dream about a soldier holding up one of those perfect shiny red and whites and handing it to a Delfian child no older than myself. That child would know that everything would be all right.
Yet, here we are now. The ground trembles and my friends are huddled together as if our proximity could protect us from the bombs. Our Archons have left to defend us from the soldiers who would enter and kill us. I pray that no one wins. I pray that the sky opens up and that snowflakes fall down. I pray that somewhere, anywhere, someone will remember why we breathe, why we live, and why we created the word “peace.â€
Then, the walls stop shaking. A deafening silence fills the air around me. My friend Sarah reaches over to me and takes my hand, pressing something into my palm. I look down and see a transmitter antennae, bent and shaped like a cane. Like a candy cane. Smiling, I take her hand and close my eyes. Somehow, everything is going to be alright.
by J. Loseth | Dec 24, 2005 | Story
Me? Oh, I’ve always known. I mean, not that I knew what it meant, but I’ve felt this way since I was a child. It wasn’t something that came out of nowhere, you know? But yes. When I went to high school, that was when I really had problems. I remember hiding in the girls’ bathroom and mewing for hours, just crying out because nobody could understand me—and I mean, how could they? I didn’t even understand myself back then.
I was an only child, you see? So there was no one to compare myself to. I didn’t realize that it was weird to sleep on the floor with the cats, or to feel more natural on all fours than on two legs. I didn’t understand these feelings inside of me. Kids in school used to make fun of me, so I tended to spend a lot of time on the Internet. That’s where I met other people like me. It was like stepping into a new world.
My parents… well, of course they don’t approve. They blamed themselves. I’m told most do. But you know, it’s not anything they could have prevented, right? I mean, this is what I’ve always felt inside of me. Even when I didn’t know what an anthro was, I had leanings. We all do.
The ears were first, yeah. It’s a good place to test and see how the genetic manipulation will work with the implants. The eyes were pure surgery, actually. We don’t even need feline DNA to mimic the slits. Later on I might get the gene manipulation to help with night vision, but it’s expensive, you know?
The tail is my next priority. It’s a big operation and it’ll take a lot of time to recover, but it’s something you can really feel. With that new nerve technology they’ve got now, I’ll actually be able to manipulate it, if I follow doctors’ orders after the surgery. I’ll need gene therapy on and off for the rest of my life, but just imagine the feeling.
Just imagine, for a second, that you’ve felt wrong your entire life—that your own body betrays you. Picture yourself as a pretty girl who has boys asking her out but cries herself to sleep every night because she can’t understand why she wants to lick herself clean. Pretend you’ve been told your entire life that what you are, what you feel, is wrong. Then imagine the freedom of finally being able to express yourself.
I know what I call that. I call it a miracle.
