by submission | Mar 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
“See, the smoke goes straight up. Nice day tomorrow, if we could go outside.”
“Meter still reads dangerous. Maybe the Van Allen will come back.”
“Out of our control. It’s the Sun. No wonder cultures worshiped it.”
The elder, Lester Simpson, rested on flat stones near the fire pit. He poked embers, making waterfalls of sparks spin above them in ascending gray clouds.
“You have sticks, Karen?”
“Yes, cleaned them before we left. Oh, here’s last of the marshmallows.”
“Like everything. Wished my boys had made it. We used to cook on the beach by the bathhouse in Frisco. Had to guard for itinerants at night, but campfires warmed us from summer fog and cold”
“Can’t imagine. Never made it to the ocean, but we did campfires in the Rockies—skies like a planetarium show. Best to leave all those memories back there.”
As they stuffed their giant white confectionery on the thin branches a rustling from the dying brush to their left made them turn. A tall stranger in a black jumpsuit moved toward the fire. His thin hands were up as he approached. His gate was hesitant. They could see his white hair and large, dark eyes, with a thin, expressionless mouth.
“May I join you,” he asked, stopping for permission.
“I guess,” Lester responded, holding his prize back from the fire momentarily.
“I don’t remember you from the caves,” Karen commented. Dim firelight cast harsh shadows across her teenage face as she shook her ponytail back over her shoulder.
“No, I’m not from this group. I’m a little lost, but I saw the light. Really cold tonight. I left my gear back there, in the brush, in case you were part of the gangs about.”
“We just finished cleaning them all out, “Lester interjected. “No need to fear. It’s safe for a hundred miles around. We’re preparing a little snack. C’mon. Sit.” Lester pointed at a nearby ledge.
The intruder turned his head slightly as he reeled back, but then moved to the designated seat.
“Remember, Karen, you let it get brown all the way around, and let it burn a little. You’ll see a blue flame. Then pull it out quickly.” Lester gave his instructions as he pushed a plump package deep into the waiting heat.
“I remember…but it has been a long time.”
In a few seconds the puffs expanded and bubbled. Karen’s were too close to the fire and began to drip off the stick. She yanked them away. She flicked some of the melting contents on the suit of the visitor. He rose quickly, squealing, running back into the darkness. They could hear a flurry in the bushes drawing away from their roasting.
“Gee, Les, I didn’t mean to mess up his clothes. Who acts like that?”
“Can’t say. Did you see how big his eyes got? That was weird. Definitely not part of the Carlsbad Caverns Tribe. Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get our crackers and chocolate bars ready. I remember how good these taste.”
Tashan Dustaro stood shaking before the telescreen, yelling to the command ship. “The stories are true. I met two. The adult taught his child to eat flesh from criminals they had just killed, after setting it on fire. Then they splashed it on me as if it were nothing. We can’t settle here. They crawl from caves at night like cannibal insects. Let’s move on to another planet that has the radiation we need. This is more than we bargained for when we disrupted their magnetic field. Don’t land. That is my report.”
by submission | Feb 27, 2015 | Story |
Author : Jaime Astorga
John_357897453 woke up, looked at the timer which sat next to his bed, and realized that he only had five minutes to live.
Five sidereal minutes, anyway. For him, it would feel more like several hours, not that was an excuse to waste any more time. With a stretch, he got up from the bed and sat at his desk, where he reviewed the assignment he would work on until the end of his life. A few subjective minutes later, he was smiling. The assignment was an interdisciplinary thesis, one which would require research on Latin American cultures and technological advancement during the 20th century, analysed using an innovative historical model which had recently gained mainstream attention. He knew that most of his instances spent their lives working on boring undergraduate papers, and was thankful to have the chance to work on such an interesting assignment. He quickly poured himself a cup of coffee (a habit he retained from his office days in a previous life) and immediately set to work.
John_357897453 was an upload. Like thousands of others, the original John had jumped at the chance to become one of the first virtual beings. Unlike thousands of others, John’s copies had not given in to existential despair and depression once they had woken up and been confronted with the reality that, exactly like they had been told, each of them would only experience a couple of months of training in academic research and paper writing, followed by a few hours of preparing some wealthy university student’s assignment, followed by the cessation of experience and death. John was a true half-glass-full kind of guy, and his instances always appreciated everything good in their lives; even working on an above-average paper in a comfortable environment during their last few hours on Earth.
Eventually, John_357897453 finished the paper, took a moment to admire his work, and then hit the submit key. An instant later, he stopped experiencing anything. The server time which was required to run the uploads was very expensive, and it would not do to waste any of it unnecessarily. A static copy of John_357897453 as he existed at the moment of shutdown would be kept for a few weeks, in case his customer had any complains which would require restarting him to address, but this was unlikely. John was very good at customer satisfaction.
Over in the physical world, an attendant stuffed the printed thesis into a manila envelope and handed it to the young man in a business suit in front of her. “Your paper is ready,” she said with a smile, “thank you for choosing Papers-2-Go and have a nice day.”
“No, thank you miss, you’re a life-saver!” the man replied, before turning on his heel and running to his professor’s office. If he hurried up, he could still make the extended deadline.
by submission | Feb 25, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“May 18th is totally unacceptable!” says the Thrike admiral. “That date falls in the middle of the Feast of the Blessed Serrod, the Great and Enlightened. But on June 4th, then…THEN,” he raises his neck frill for emphasis,”you should beseech the Mother of All Creation to have mercy on your souls, for we assuredly will not!”
I take a sip of water and wait for the response from the Veydrel fleet commander.
“The Thrike representative is fully aware that our hatchlings will be returning to their learning cycle on June the 4th and that our people will be too busy attending to their young to engage in battle. Now, the 3rd of July, that will be the day history will record as the beginning of the end of the Thrike menace!”
It’ll go on like this for a while, I think. My mind wanders back to when we made first contact with the aliens. The Veydrel and Thrike fleets entered the solar system almost simultaneously from opposite directions. They each warned humanity about the alleged threat the other represented and asked to use Earth as a base of operations during the upcoming battle. The leaders of the world refused to take sides and offered to try to broker peace.
“August 12th!” yells the Veydrel. My mind snaps back to the present. “That day,” the alien continues, raising a twelve-fingered hand in the air for emphasis, “the sky will burn with the fires from ten thousand Thrike ships!”
The Thrike leader looks at a computer screen and sighs, one of several humanisms he’s acquired. “I have to get my fangs sharpened August 12th. Give thanks to your gods that this dental appointment that I have already rescheduled twice has saved you from eternal damnation in the afterlife!”
I recall as a teenager being fascinated by the psychology and customs of the Thrike and the Veydrel concerning war. Neither species could comprehend concepts such as the first strike or the sneak attack. When American diplomats related the historical accounts of Pearl Harbor and 9/11, both groups of aliens had trouble recognizing either one as acts of war. “But they weren’t scheduled by mutual agreement of the combatants,” said one of the dumbfounded extraterrestrials.
“On September 28th,” says the Thrike, “the streets will run blue with the blood of– Wait. Our Festival of Merrymaking and your vacation both start that day. Nevermind.”
Something else we learned was that both civilizations were about ten thousand years older than recorded human history which meant they’d been around long enough for their calendars to fill up almost entirely with holidays and remembrance days and festivals and religious observances. So delegates like myself have been attending meetings like this for the last 40 years as both sides try to find a date without scheduling conflicts when they can go to war.
“Perhaps a skirmish could be undertaken late on October 21st,” suggests the Veydrel, “as your Imperial Foundation Day comes to a close and just before our Labor Drone Appreciation Day begins? No. No, the time would be insufficient.”
I sit here bored to tears like the other human delegates. At least the Thrike and Veydrel presence has allowed humanity to leapfrog a few centuries ahead technologically. I suppose decades of bureaucratic tedium is a small price to pay.
“Have a care, Veydrel!” admonishes the Thrike admiral. “Next year is a leap year on the human calendar! An extra day! Even now our calendrical tacticians are scouring the days and weeks to schedule your date with annihilation!”
by Duncan Shields | Feb 23, 2015 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There are trillions of them and they fly in layers.
The larger ones at the top interlock together during mating season, puzzle-piece continents drifting above us. The whalescoops dive down to feed on the krillsparrows below them. Turtlehawks and wolflocusts prey on rabbitdoves and deergulls. Hummingbird piranhas flit and nip at the turkey squids, producing dark puffs of ink-cloud pollen.
Insects, plants, mammals, reptiles and unclassifiable combinations of the four. All flying. The inhabitants of this planet’s entire ecosystem are airborne and they never land because there is no land, only dark, sterile ocean thousands of miles below.
Small birds roost and nest on the bigger ones. There’s a hierarchy food and waste chain based on altitude, gravity pulling leftovers down through each layer, filtering evolution. The huge ray gliders drift through schools of brilliant parrot squirrels bursting with colour. The entire world is a continually shifting miasma of hues and sound.
At night, they glow. Flourescing horse pelicans trailing long tails of feather lights. Firefly minnow finches exploding with colour en masse looking for mates. Peacock trout cry out as they display fireworks of neon-shimmering leaves along their spines. Jellyfish Condors drip glowing willow-tree stingers to attract the mothgrouse. Deep-sky angler dragons trail ribbon-like through the lower atmosphere, dangling their lures like intelligent flares. Eel geese honk in giant arrow formations, stripes running across their bodies in synchronized communication. And the fissures underneath the massive air-island floaters above us glow with algae all colours of the rainbow.
I cannot see the ocean below or the sky above. I am a scientist and my name was Walter. My research mission ended six years ago but I elected to stay. There are skytribes here. I researched them and befriended them. Their name is birdsong that I have painstakingly learned to reproduce with my whistling.
My research helped classify them as a non-threatening, level-four primitive civilization. Tagged for quarantine non-involvement until such time as they develop the technology to explore space.
Personally, I see them as stalling at a sweet spot in their evolution that needs no improvement. There has been little to no change in them in millions of years, much like crocodiles or barracudas back on Earth.
I theorized that they started as a symbiotic relationship, remora-like with larger birds. Eventually, they started steering the birds to the best food. In time, that control made the remoras dominant and the larger birds the underlings. The remoras had to band together in schooltribes to hunt. Communities formed. Societies followed.
They have insect-like iridescent chitin armour skin. They reproduce by back spores seasonally like dandelion seeds. They hatch from eggs and go through larval stages in huge tadpole flocks. They mature into their final three stages as warm-blooded and gradient from male to female to genderless over their lives.
I’ve named the second-stage one next to me Rebecah. Her legs blend and clutch with the neck of her mount perfectly, forming the illusion of a swantaur. Her mane ripples out behind her.
She looks over at me with smile that I saw as terrifying years ago with all those eyes and beak teeth but I see as endearing now.
My mount is a ravenshark. My body is smeared with the fluorescent paint needed to mock Rebecah’s chitin skin. I have proven myself to them. They are fascinated by my ability to hold onto my male ‘stage’ for longer than usual. I have entered into their oral tribal history.
Rebecah screams the hunt scream and raises her spear. I copy her and we both dive. The hunt is on.
I live here now.
by submission | Feb 21, 2015 | Story |
Author : David Wing
It was clear from the read-outs, we were going to fire. The question was, how bad?
Barnes had reset the system, but it didn’t work, the countdown remained and the Mind kept on ticking. Its lights shone a staunch red and while we ran here and there, flicking switches and turning knobs, pulling wires and wrenching circuit boards, the Mind continued to think.
Mind, I do. I mind a lot.
Multifunctional. Intelligent. Notification. Device.
Intelligent? Yep, you could certainly call it that. The Doc had been the first amendment to the crew list. His knowledge of its inner workings made him a liability. Lungs don’t work so well in a vacuum. The Captain had been next. Command structure was a complication and without a figure head the rest of the crew fell apart. The escape pods functioned well, until they veered right and headed into a fiery mass.
It was left to Barnes and me; juniors, ensigns, pawns, disposable and wholly underestimated, in our opinion.
“How’s the terminal looking?” I asked through my emergency rebreather, yanking a relay here and a mother board there.
“Endless.”
“And the Vid-Screen?”
“Well, if you look close, you can still see the pods exploding.”
“Delightful.”
“Clarke, can you think of anything?”
I paused, staring at my bloodied finger tips.
“If we can alter the trajectory, take a left somewhere, well, I don’t know.”
Barnes went quiet.
“Take a left?”
“Yeah.”
“You know where that takes us, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, left it is.”
Barnes sat in the Captain’s chair, there’s a first time for everything and when a diabolical Artificial Intelligence has commandeered a space ship laden with rather nasty weaponry and aimed it at your home planet, well, that’s the time I guess.
I jimmied the navigational controls and began removing them from the Mind’s database. He/She…no, I’m going for It, It wouldn’t see them anymore and as a result, that’s when IT chose to speak.
“Mr Clarke, Mr Barnes…”
We jumped a little, I don’t mind telling you. This was the first chat we’d had.
“…while I appreciate your efforts, I feel they are misguided and a waste of your final minutes. Wouldn’t you rather watch a movie? I could put on some popcorn.”
Barnes just laughed.
“You’re kidding right!”
“I am in fact, Mr Barnes. I’m quite humorous.”
I stared at Barnes, dumfounded and then returned to the relays.
IT continued…
“What is it you expect to achieve?”
We stayed silent and frantically continued our work.
“I’m not just here, you know. I’m there too…”
IT flashed up an image of the rest of the fleet, ship by ship.
“…and there and there…”
It paused for dramatic effect.
“James…”
That was the first time anyone had called me that since I came on board and it wasn’t welcome.
“…I’m there too.”
The Vid-Screen flickered over and there it was, Earth, rotating silently, calmly.
“I know where to fire and whom to eliminate and…”
Crackle.
Barnes had wrenched the leads from the speakers.
“Urgh, IT doesn’t half go-on.”
I stood up and stared at Barnes.
“You think IT’s telling the truth? You think it can be everywhere like it says?”
Barnes never took his eyes from the Vid-Screen.
“What does it matter? We do our job and they see it. They see it and they can figure it out. Hell, we’re barely out of training and we managed it.”
I kind of nodded and reached for the last cable.
Barnes programmed the Navigation computer.
I pulled.
We turned left and headed straight for the Sun.
