by featured writer | May 4, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix, Featured Writer [ bio ]
Richard walks the dark streets of the worst part of town, a noir figure in a fedora and trench coat, his eyes casting about for shadows that move, his ears yearning to hear a cry for help. Nothing. He can’t remember his last assignment, his last rendezvous, his last secret password, his last foreign intrigue… no memory of claptrap from a bygone era, because memory was at a premium in the old days, and they’d only issued him 16K.
Even though he’s a walking relic, he feels young, as if he’d joined the Service just yesterday. His girl has a lot to do with that. The girl of his dreams come to life, she has Grable’s million dollar gams, and Russell’s voluptuous bazongas, and Bacall’s sultry pillow talk. What a dame. But deep down he knows he doesn’t deserve her. He hasn’t won her for sending the bad guys to jail, or to hell.
And worst of all, he’s a kept man. Yeah, it crushes his soul to depend on her for everything, for life itself — for vacuum tubes.
Back home, Constance sits by the window, looking onto the dimly lit street below, waiting for him to return from his midnight walk. She knows he aches to get into the fight, to right wrongs, to defend his country, to earn the devotion of a dame like her. It was designed into his circuits, and she loves him for it.
He is the man of her dreams. Literally one of a kind. The shining achievement of a top secret project to make a robot agent generations ahead of its time — able to outthink Enigma, to shed bullets, to overcome evil, to go 24 hours without recharging, and most important to her personally, to pleasure women. That last feature was added in hopes of turning foreign fems into spies for America. Connie gladly role-plays Axis Fraulein to stimulate Dick’s Allied Powers.
She had come across him at a government surplus auction, standing next to the crate that had preserved him for nearly 70 years. Others had thought he was a statue or a clothes mannequin and passed by without stopping. But she immediately saw something special about him. He was a hunk of a guy — healthy mop of brown hair, laughing green eyes, kissable lips, square jaw, and the body of an Olympic athlete. Lingering to examine him carefully from head to toe, she marveled at the attention to detail. Moles, scars, hairs in nose and ears. She found his power cord and wondered what it was for. Some sort of pre-Disney animatronics? Whatever. It didn’t matter. She had to have him. Didn’t bargain. Just paid the $100 cash and had him placed in the passenger seat of her Prius. Almost forgot his user manual!
To this day, three years later, she still wakes up in a panic from the recurring nightmare of forgetting to take the user manual. But it’s always right there on her bedside table, and he’s next to her, emitting the reassuring hum of his battery charger.
He stops. A muffled cry? Over there, in the alley behind the tavern. Two figures silhouetted, a man and a woman, struggling. He runs towards them, kicking a can, alerting the man.
“This is between me and her. And I got a gun.”
He’s just twenty feet away when the bullets ricochet off of him. He slams into the man, who collapses like a broken mannequin. The girl runs away.
He dusts off his coat, picks up his fedora, and heads for home. There will be no need for role-play tonight.
by submission | May 2, 2015 | Story |
Author : R Patrick Widner
The signal light above the airlock door glowed red. Tense seconds passed. The atmosphere in the chamber equalized. Finally the interior doors slid open and the rescue team hustled in carrying an improvised battle stretcher.
The soldier being carried writhed in pain, grabbing the sides of his head. The attendants futilely tried to calm his flailing. Chaos was exploding around them in the fire and smoke. Loud alarms were blaring. Frantic racing shadows darted down hallways.
A voice cut through the din.
“To the ER!” “Get him sedated and on the table! He’s got a live one!”
Misty air swirled and danced as he succumbed to the surgeons tools. There was only blank darkness until he awoke.
She was hovering over him and he didn’t recognize her.
“Hey, soldier,” she said. “You had us worried there for a while. They got it out, though. You’re the first one ever to survive. The doctors from Earth really know what they’re doing. You’re lucky, landing up at this base.”
His head was swimming. Somehow he knew that if he tried to talk, he wouldn’t be able to. He raised his eyes and saw gauze bandages surrounding his vision.
“You just relax there, soldier. You had some serious surgery done on your head. They took an intact egg out of your brain. That’s the first time they’ve been able to get one before it hatched. You’re the first one to survive.”
He closed his eyes and tried to remember, but couldn’t.
“You’re pretty much a hero around here,” she said. “Your squad cleaned out an entire nest and you brought back the first intact specimen we’ve seen. It’s going to be a very valuable tool for the genetics lab. They’ll very likely be able to build a bio-weapon from it.”
He nodded slowly as he drifted away.
“One hundred percent eradication,” General Warren said. “We owe it all to you, soldier.”
The ceremony was starting and soon he would be live on TV in every country in the world that had survived.
“Without that specimen I don’t know what we would have done. Sorry about your fellow soldiers, that was a brutal way to go. The video we recovered shows the forward base being overrun in seconds. How you escaped is a miracle. The others, well, they were all injected almost immediately, and gestation lasts between two and twenty minutes.”
“C’mon, soldier; let’s go let them have a look at the hero.”
Looking out at the crowd he felt a swell of emotion. The President was about to speak and he would be mentioned by name and stand and give a nod to the audience . He would humbly accept his medals, even though he still didn’t quite understand the whole concept.
The opening speeches ended and then the main speech began. Shortly he heard his name mentioned and he nodded at the applause. The second time his name was mentioned, he stood.
Suddenly he felt a throbbing pulse of pain from his right eye. He grabbed his head and screamed. His eyeball popped from its socket and dangled on his cheek. Behind it a dull gray orb pushed out.
The pressure behind the egg burst it from its socket and it launched above the crowd. Still in mid-air, it erupted into a frenzy of claws and teeth.
It landed thrashing and slashing. Every human it killed, it grew a little. Soon it dominated the landscape and it wandered away destroying everything it encountered.
A single tear ran down the soldier’s cheek as he watched his baby go off into the world.
by submission | Apr 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Ron Riekki
“A Curious Knot God made”
–Edward Taylor
We got the call for a girl hit by a drone.
My partner drove.
He hates patients, so he prefers to be behind the console. He leaves me in back to treat the patients. Although there’s not really much we have to do nowadays. Just swap.
We arrived at the scene and the girl had two broken femurs. We scanned her I.D. and it showed she had medical insurance. Otherwise, the rule is that we treat you for the injuries, but there’s no swap. She was all clear. Her I.D. info even showed we didn’t need parental approval. So we loaded her into the time ambulance. We asked her how long ago she was hit. She said about ten minutes. We set it for twenty minutes before the accident.
The blood loss was about a liter. We just let it happen. We’d clean it up later. Her blue sweat pants were now magenta. It was simple color mixing. Jogging blue and arterial red make a perfect magenta. Our floor was white in spots, but now mostly red. They make the floors white so that you can easily find any blood. You don’t want to leave dried blood on a floor. Diseases in dried blood can last for weeks. We had violence janitors for that.
We arrived twenty minutes in the past and waited.
It was a good intersection. A Friday. The streets looked made for femoral breaks. Some roads, you can almost see the blood about to happen in the future.
We looked around at this world. A strange one. A human junkyard of sorts. This other universe is where we drop the bodies. We take what’s healthy. We leave what’s not. It’s a world of wheelchairs and limping, of scars and missing arms. Medicine hasn’t advanced much since the invention of the time ambulance. They say it’s a crutch, that we rely on it too much now.
The girl of her past jogged up. We grabbed her, flashing our badges, the onlookers having seen it before. Her bleeding self in the ambulance looked at the pristine body, how she was only moments before. We explained who were we, but she shouted for her mom. We said her mother was in the future, healthy and perfect. We picked the version of her with the broken bones and placed her on the side of the road. We locked the door before her healthy self could jump out and break an ankle, and we’d have to go back even further in time.
by submission | Apr 27, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
“Let’s fly to Oberon for fresh grub. Old Billy’s is good. That crusty Aborigine’s got odd ancient cuisine that’ll sharpen our palates. Maybe invite Ciers over. Missed him lately.”
Jensen Elbat corrected the freighter’s navigation towards Uranus, a sharp turn from their delivery path to the Kuiper Belt mining colonies.
“Shouldn’t take us too far off schedule. We can say we avoided hot magnetic zones that keep migrating near Neptune’s orbit. Forget Ciers, though; he died during hydrogen refueling near Titan last week.”
Jensen’s co-pilot, Crandall Shantz, raised the nuclear control rods as the freighter adjusted to new coordinates.
The ship’s two-seat shuttle craft left the freighter orbiting over the pock-marked moon. Jensen set down in the icy landing field outside a flashing, orange sign advertising Old Billy’s restaurant. They were the only visitors. Merchant travel crumbled in the outer zones after renewal of conflicts between Earth and Mars.
Once beyond the pressurized hatches of the eatery, Elbat and Shantz removed their spacesuit helmets. Shantz noticed drifting piles of gray moon dust near the entry left by previous guests. Inside were sterile blue walls of harshly back-lighted acrylic perforated with insets of orange cubbyholes constructed of soft plastic and rubbery compounds. Feeding tubes and electrical lines draped to these narrow chambers through the acrylic ceiling from where foods were artificially manufactured above them. Across from the alcoves was a massive sign reading, “If the food’s too tough…grow a pair.”
Billy appeared as a holographic display in front of his customers. The Aborigine was traditionally dressed with white face markings and a loin cloth, with a boomerang draped from his throat on a bright-red bandana. “Mr. Elbat, so glad to have you back. Long time. And your companion?”
“Co-pilot Shantz. New here. Surprise us. I know you can.”
“So glad to,” Billy replied, coming in and out of focus in the flickering display. “Especially with a new war on. You be sure to tell others I’m still open.”
“Always will,” Elbat returned. “So what’s today’s special?”
“We got roast iguana with kangaroo sauce, sautéed carrot juice and a dessert of baked dagoba seeds wrapped in albino koala skin.”
Elbat whistled. “Make that two. He can take it, and don’t hold back on the hot sauce. We’re on a long run to the Belt. We’ll need all the heat we can get.”
“Coming up. You go ahead and get connected and it’ll be out in a few.”
Shantz pointed up at the display. “This place is weird. Never heard of carrots. And what’s the sign all about?”
“Old Earth joke,” Elbat replied. “When humans still had teeth. Couldn’t chew? Then grow a new set of dentures. Nobody has had any teeth in a thousand years, or hair, since all the exposure to heavy metals and deep space radiation. Let’s move into the food bays. This is a pleasure you won’t forget. Wished Ciers could have joined us.”
The men wriggled into the slick walls of the waiting cavities. The materials vibrated, fitting tight to them as flavor probes connected to their thalamus inlet sockets on the back of their necks, inputting programmed odors and tastes for Old Billy’s menu choices. Feeding tubes hooked to valve stems on their throat stomas, allowing direct esophageal deposits. They closed their eyes in ecstasy as the gray gooey goop slid into them. They chomped open mouthed with pink, empty gums as saliva dribbled over the outside of their suits. Old Billy sang a sacred walkabout chant from a forgotten homeland to aid their digestion.
by submission | Apr 26, 2015 | Story |
Author : Piotr Swietlik
‘I told you we shouldn’t have…’ says Hun-Hunapu as the executioner slowly approaches.
‘Oh don’t be a wuss. You’ve seen the time progression’ replies Vucub Hunapu narrowing yellow eyes, identical to his twin brother’s. ‘We’ll get reincarnated and it will be us beheading them soon enough.’
He tries to point with a chin to the group of fantastically shaped individuals who just cheated them in the traditional ball game, but the guard twists his arms further, limiting his movements completely. There is no source of light here, yet the executioner’s blade still manages to flash ominously.
‘Not that soon. And besides‘ ads Hun-Hunapu with a clear disappointment in his voice ‘the time progression shows you’ll be using my head as a ball!’
‘We can swap during the death-phase’ offers his brother.
‘Yeah… Still, it’s not your head that will be buried under the play field. You always get the better incarnations.’
‘Not so.’
‘No? And who did get to be Kain? And that time in the north, when you insisted I would be better incarnation of Balder?’
‘But…’
‘I can’t even think of eating venison or sausage after that unfortunate thing with Prometheus and don’t even get me started on our venture into Egypt. I still have nightmares of being dismembered.’
‘At least you got to spend a night with Isis, while I had to make do with Horus.’
Hun-Hunapu’s reply is highly unequivocal and completely non-verbal.
‘Look’ says Vucub Hunapu conciliatory ‘we both lose our heads this time and I promise you, we’ll swap places on the next one.’
‘Fine, just remember I…’ Hun-Hunapu never finishes as his head falls, lifeless, to the dark dust of the lowermost layer of Xibalba.
‘Cross my heart…’ mutters Vucub just before his head follows.
