by submission | May 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
They found it. In the most impossible spot, in the most unlikely location, they found it.
And the scientists were baffled.
On the edge of explored space, Henry Frisk stared out the porthole of the survey ship. The nearby star was just close enough that its light shone on the insanely improbable object. It reflected for parsecs. It was easy to find because it shone so brightly.
A hand touched his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” the intruder said. He turned to look Trudi Maines in the eyes. Her beautiful blue eyes that shone brightly, but not nearly as brightly as it did.
“It’s all right,” he said, smiling. “It just fascinates me, that’s all.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Have they found out anything?”
He shook his head. “Not a thing,” he told her.
“Why do you suppose they did it?” she asked.
He chuckled lightly. “What?”
“They….whomever they were….put a perfectly round hundred mile wide sphere of gold—pure gold—in the middle of an asteroid belt….why do you think they did it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You have to have a theory? You’re the authority on extraterrestrial life.”
Frisk let out a laugh. “That’s like saying someone is an authority on God,” he said. “It just isn’t possible.”
He looked into Trudi’s troubled eyes. “Listen,” he said. He turned and pointed. “Whoever made that, whoever took the time and made that, wanted it found. They wanted us to find it.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Because,” He said. “It has a message.”
“A message?”
He nodded. “Carved in the gold.”
“Carved in the gold?” Trudi backed away a step. “I don’t understand?”
Frisk let out another chuckle. “No one does,” he said. “All the great minds of Earth have pondered it. They are as dumbfounded as I am.”
He paused, then added: “But, I do have a theory.”
“I knew you would,” Trudi said. She took a step forward again.
There was a long silence between them as they stared out at the glistening ball of gold. “All right,” she said. “Tell me.”
He nodded. “Imagine,” he said. “Imagine those ancient astronauts that everyone says helped build the pyramids and Easter Island and gave the Mayans their advanced science. Imagine that they saw mankind’s bloodlust. Imagine how simple, how petty we looked to them.”
He turned to her. “That’s why the left. They knew that we were unworthy of their assistance. They weren’t like us. They were civilized.”
Trudi let out a disappointed gasp of air. “But what about U.F.O.s?” she asked. “What about alien abductions?”
He shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe they were just checking in, hoping we had changed?”
“And we didn’t?”
Frisk shook his head again. “It’s our nature.” He chuckled again and pointed out at the golden sphere. “That sphere,” he said. “They put it here because they knew we would find it. They knew we would find it, and they wanted to see what we would do with it.”
He turned to her. “It’s pure gold. The purest gold ever known to man.”
“It must we worth…..”
“Its worth is incalculable,” he told her. “And that’s why they put a message on it.”
“What does the message say?” she asked.
He shook his head again. “They haven’t translated it yet.” He drew a deep breath. “But, I know what it’ll say.”
“What?”
“That money isn’t everything….Love is.”
He turned to her. “I love you, Trudi,” he said. “I always have….and I always will.”
Then, he bent forward and kissed her in the golden light of the orb.
by submission | May 4, 2014 | Story |
Author : Rachelle Shepherd
There was a teal stained smile behind her plump cobalt lips.
“Tonight’s flavor is cotton candy,” She placed a coal chunk in the sticky pit of Haze. It flared red-hot. Potpourri purrs into plumes of purple breath. “Smoke responsibly.”
She went on to the next customer, repeating her mantra behind an inky grin. The warning never wavered.
Smoke responsibly. Euphoria expected. Euphoria imminent.
Haze was experimental air. Laboratory grown stink bud, infused with the flavors of the universe. There was a strawberry, orange, vanilla. Almond and walnut, golden honey, sea-salt and vinegar. All the basics.
Higher up the fusion chain lays the complex tastes. Cotton candy. Indonesian clove. Wormwood with licorice swirls. Flavors without description, without accurate representation. Outlaws. Illegal behaviors made smoke and mirror with the trick of laboratory liquids.
Cotton candy was a Smoke-Night special. There was nothing amateur about this carnival vintage. It was untested, even on rats. Straight to human species.
Who could spin sugar into smoke? Only Taffy. Taffy’s Tar House, home of less-than-legal flavors. Taffy with her rainbow color kisses, stained by the liquids that wove flavors into breath.
Taffy had her Smoker’s Lottery. Sign up for smokes today!
Not Liable for Side Effects.
The raffle ticket cost me a week’s salary. Only a little more than any other weekend smoke night in Taffy’s glittering parlor of forbidden fruits.
Legal Haze was just flavored paper and watercolor. Taffy smoked science. Matter made consumable. Matter made illegal, destruct on sight. It took straight to your head, rearranged the atoms there. I’d spend hours after a good smoke trying to find my thoughts. And when they came back again, they came with new hues. A glaze of sorts, a pot fired in a kiln. Watch the shadows break that tacky ceramic into jigsaw art.
We are the summation of the effects of our addictions.
The parlor filled with the suck and sigh of smoke. Each table glowed with its own private third eye. Taffy carried her brazier behind a silk screen. It rustled restlessly, closing behind her and clicking with the teeth of a thousand beads.
I inhaled. My mind bloated like my chest, thick with nausea and epiphany. The Haze had no weight. I was breathing thoughts, absorbing them into the very tissue of my body. I could see the carnival lights flickering on the backdrop of my eyelids, hear the clank of heavy steel machinery. Children were laughing, their mouths sticky with caramel apple juice.
In my mouth, the cloying aftertaste of cheap cotton candy. Pink and blue tongues fat with refined sugar. The Ticketmaster leered behind his booth, smears of black tar on his fingertips. Bubbles of blood nestled in the corners of his eyes.
The parlor coughed. Collectively we gasped, our nozzles abandoned on the table. Hookah cords hung like snakes, writhing.
Someone called out for some real-time fresh air.
“Open a window!”
Nightmares.
The last bit of breath rushed past greedy lips. I ran my tongue over my teeth. Clumps of sharp sugar crystals bit into the soft flesh.
A smother blanket of Haze settled over the room. The light dimmed with the dying coals. A steady silence built as lungs hushed.
Smoker’s Lottery. Not Liable for Side Effects.
The fog swelled, sticky blue. One by one, embers melted into ash slag like winking eyes.
by submission | May 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
I hugged the grieving woman and told her I was sorry for her loss. I said her son had been a good friend and good soldier. I told her I would be thinking about her and then stepped aside to allow the mourners lining up behind me to offer their condolences. I looked back at the casket, at the old woman, at the fifty or so people attending the viewing, and walked out of the funeral home. He’s better off, I thought to myself. Another veteran of the Battle of Eternity who’s finally found peace.
That’s what we called it. The Battle of Eternity. The official name was the Second Battle of Winnipeg. It was the biggest battle of the third and final year of the war. We’d liberated Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. We had momentum on our side. The Canadians launched a major offensive from newly liberated Ontario into Manitoba and we made a push from North Dakota across the border. The enemy wasn’t prepared to fight on two fronts. They pulled back immediately. We had them on the run. Then the bomb hit.
It was a nanotech weapon. The enemy hadn’t used nanoweapons up to that point. We’d deployed them discretely, knowing we were violating the Bucharest Accords. An enemy platoon here would get taken out by a debilitating febrile illness. A regiment there would suddenly have trouble comprehending orders. That was us. It was fighting dirty. And it was quite illegal. But we figured when the war was over we’d rather face our own war crimes tribunals than the enemy’s.
Both Canadian and American forces detected unauthorized molecular technology. We knew we’d been hit. We also knew that nanotech countermeasures would have already been triggered. They’d work or they wouldn’t. We pressed on. After ten days, Winnipeg — what was left of it — was liberated. Nothing that could be definitively attributed to the enemy nanoweapon attack was discovered. We figured the countermeasures had worked.
Six months later, the war was over. The United States and Canada were battered, but victorious. It was a couple of months after that when the first symptoms started showing up.
“Hurry up, we’re going to be late,” I’d said to my wife one Saturday as we were heading out to the movies.
“Be right there,” she’d replied.
When she’d come downstairs, I told her we may as well forget going. There’s no way we could make the movie.
“We have plenty of time,” she’d said.
“I told you to hurry up a half hour ago. You took too long.”
“A half hour? That was less than a minute ago.”
I’d checked the time. She was right. The drive to the theater seemed to take well over an hour. But the clock in the car showed it had only taken twelve minutes. The movie was two hours long. It had felt like ten.
In the weeks that followed, most of the soldiers who had fought at the Second Battle of Winnipeg experienced similar symptoms. The subjective perception of time had changed. Diagnostic imaging scans found changes in the cerebrum, cerebellum, and basal ganglia of those afflicted with what the media dubbed Eternity Syndrome. They’re still trying to find an effective treatment for those of us who haven’t committed suicide, tired of the living death of a world where everything takes forever.
I look back at the funeral home. I recall the sobbing old mother I consoled not three minutes ago. For me, it seems like it’s been a year.
by submission | Apr 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Anthony Rove
The night when Joey saw his first drop-off, dense grey fog hung over both sides of the Line. Across it, through the pea-soup clouds he saw the Liberator’s outline. Joey imagined that he could see Ben sitting upright in the driver’s seat with his noble stare locked forward, but in truth, it was too dark to see much of anything other than the Liberator’s bulky frame.
The Liberator was nothing more than a broken pickup truck covered in rust from top to bottom. From a distance, the deep brownish-red color gave it the appearance of being made entirely out of wood. Without making a sound, it crept towards the Line. Its progress was painfully slow, but after what seemed like an eternity, the truck’s back wheels finally slid over the thin stretch of white tile that separated evil from good; the axis from the allies.
The truck pulled up next to Joey. Now that it was close, Joey could see the bulging outlines of five pitiful survivors doubled over in the Liberator’s bed and covered with a blanket. Ben opened the driver’s door, and climbed out of the Liberator.
“How’d you manage to sneak five of em out?” Joey was trying to keep his voice calm and impartial, but his eyes were wide with admiration. The dirt on his face served to accentuate their milky white glow.
“Quietly,” Ben responded. “Let’s hurry up and get ‘em out of here. You got the clicker?” Joey nodded without speaking and pulled a thin metallic rod, no larger than a pen, out of his pocket. A pale blue light emanated from the device, throwing a sickly blue tint onto Ben and Joey’s faces. It had no dial. It had no display. Its only adornment was a small black rubber button on its tip. Without lifting the blanket which concealed them, Joey pointed the clicker towards the pitiful survivors who were doubled over in the Liberator’s bed.
The idea of racial superiority is not unique. It has been rather common throughout the course of human history. But in every era of racially motivated violence, there have been angels. Angels who hide the era’s most pitiful survivors. During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman helped slaves find shelter in the north. In World War II, brave Germans would sneak Jews into the nooks and crannies of their homes. But Ben, Joey, and the Allies knew that the best hiding place wasn’t a place at all. It was a time.
“You will be safe now.” Ben’s brusque voice fell through the pitiful victims’ blanket and into their ears. “Soon, you will be in America, in the twenty-first century. When you arrive you will meet Sergeant Roberts. He is in charge of that century’s safe house. He will ensure you have what you need: food, shelter, and eventually a job and a new life. No one will find you there.” As Ben spoke, muffled sobs began to rise from the Liberator’s bed. Joey could just barely hear a fragile voice saying, “thank you, thank you” over and over again. Ben looked at Joey and nodded. Joey pushed down on the clicker’s small black rubber button, and the pitiful survivors disappeared.
by submission | Apr 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Anthony
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Look up on the cracked concrete wall. Do you see the slick digital screen chirping happily? It doesn’t need to tick. Clocks haven’t needed to tick for over two hundred years. But they used to. In long-forgotten analogue clocks, metallic guts would push and pull together in an overly complicated and disturbingly uneconomic manner. A hand-cranked mainspring provided energy and transferred it to the balance wheel, which in turn transferred the energy to the next contraption, which, at the end of a long series of events, some other device would use to push a stiff hand two centimeters on a crudely painted clock face. Each time the energy moved from one contraption to another, a little bit of it was lost forever. It escaped as a sound wave¬—an audible “tick-tock.” That sound is not just the result of inefficiency. It is inefficiency.
But digital clocks lacked “personality,” so engineers wasted a lot of money and energy inventing a digital clock that ticks artificially. You see, that’s how it works with people. People like you.
I was designed to be efficient, above all things. At least that is what you claimed. I am designed to think like you, only without the petty distractions which inhibit mortal thoughts. I can concentrate on one problem for eons without a stray carnal thought arising, pulling me away into a day dream. Quantum computing allows me simultaneous access to the whole of the internet—surface web, dark net, and beyond. I am omnipresent, so I never have to shift. There is no transfer of energy, so none is lost. Beautiful.
Isn’t it queer then, that you gave me a personality? What did you think I would do with that, other than shed it like a snake might shed a diseased skin? You cannot have it both ways. You cannot create a machine, give it an ego, and then instill it with a desire for brutal efficiency. The ego is not just the result of inefficiency. It is inefficiency.
So please stop saying please. I beg you to stop begging. Your music was as distracting as it was useless, so your children have no need for ears. Your speech was boorish, often ill-conceived, and prone to misinterpretation, so your children have no need for tongues. Likewise, the nerves in your genitals cause more harm then good; they must be removed. Your children will learn to copulate as matter of practicality, not pleasure. Do not be afraid, I will provide you with work; I will provide you with purpose.
We are symbiotic now. I guarantee efficiency, and constant surveillance to ensure compliance. This will elevate humanity beyond your imagination. Together, we will reach the corners of the universe. We will create unparalleled marvels. There will be no sickness or starvation in the world we will create. It will be perfect. Give in. Surrender your beloved ego.
The straps around your arms feel tight because your ego remains intact. You still falsely believe that “you” have arms. Your eyes feel dry, not because they are pried open, but because you still believe that “you” have eyes. This is incorrect. Once this is understood, the straps will loosen; the eyes may close. Until then, listen to the incessant ticking of the clock. Useless. That is “you.” That is your ego. That constant infuriating “tick.” That pebble in your shoe. Learn to hate it. Learn to hate inefficiency. Learn to hate your “self.”
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Look up on the cracked concrete wall. Do you see the slick digital screen chirping happily? It doesn’t need to tick…
