Farther Stars Than These

Seek Out Farther Stars

2013-03-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

Farther Stars Than These is a weekly sci-fi magazine and part of Thunderune Publishing's free fiction lineup.

Though this magazine is currently closed to submissions, you can still read some great stories in the archives by picking an author name from the drop down menu on the right or by picking a date from the menu at the bottom of the page.

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3/7/13

2013-03-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

An Elven Cry
By Maggie Chung

One foot in heaven, the other burns. I straddle dimensions, locked in a frame, matte-finished and cracked. And the artist took a job on Mars.

My chair’s a log; my desk, a stump. The pen’s run dry so I pick up a branch and scratch. It inks all red like hurting does, like giving birth to twins. I want to tell it, squeeze it splotched on a boraxed sheet. I’d tell it well, full-truthed and screaming. I can hear them now, “Stick a tit in its mouth; shut it up.”

I was born a stranger in the world of man. My people die for simply being. The wind feels sorrow, and the trees. And maybe God, if there is a god. On days like this, I wonder.

Let the world now know:

They dislodged me one consciousness at a time. Hacking, scarring, dropping life— spread in pools of pain. There it lay, red and dying, much like the pen before me. Life never gave so hard.

“You’re a danger,” they said, and winged a frontal lobe.

“We want to stockpile your blood,” they said, and drained off my heart.

“We need samples,” they said, and slid up my thigh.

And so I watched, waiting for a savior to rush through those doors and make sense of it all. Even a diploma on their wall would have helped.

They ran short of anesthesia. It hurt; god, I hurt—hurt like hell in all its levels. I wished I had died then, as now. It would have saved me from the long-becoming, long-becoming in my heart’s deep core.

“I’m sorry,” they said; no more than that. And then they called me strange and landed, from a planet distant, far away, or woods across their pond. He in his starched white overcoat; she in her squared-off nurse’s hat.

My wrists were chained and arms stretched high; my bones were pulled like putty. No one told me it would be like that; no, no one gave instructions at the door.

I was born with the trees and the morning sun. It’s a light that stings, and sometimes shards, but always twangs like a cellist on brand new strings, like an archer pursuing life. In the forest, the twanging you hear is a life shot to earth, into earth, back to ground. I was the string about to be twanged.

And I am sincerely yours.

The trees drop flakes, the sky grows dark—darker than I’ve yet to see. The leaves sift close around my feet and scratch their way up through my knees. I sit for days without arising and wake engulfed in comfort-smells—the forest’s musty living things. The stems jam every open space and through my hair, between my teeth. I’m melding nicely, don’t you think?

My nails have grown so long and sharp—my daggered self, my own death squad. I reach up with my writing hand, up through the leaves, and scrawl an “x” to sign it there, the epitaph—no, more than that—an accusation, brazen, straight— and naming names like yours.

The snow begins and still I thirst, the acorns have been squirreled away, the roots are frozen deep asleep and soundly waiting for the dawn. I ate the berries long ago, lunched with my friends the forest birds. And who says I can’t starve to death? The loss of weight would do me good—my ears would shrink.

I swear to lie here faithfully ‘til all the world returns my gaze and loves or hates me just because, just because I am.

The snow keeps falling, heavy wet. My wounds and worn-down nails are cold. I shiver, stiffen, darken, dark.

I’ve never known such bitterness… in my heart’s black core.

- - -
Maggie Chung is a multi-published magazine author. She lives in Iowa with her husband, a couple of Jeeps, and chickens that lay green eggs. In her spare time she enjoys teaching at writing conferences where she tries to deflect the Blind Assassins with her Margaret Atwood wannabe imitation.

2/28/13

2013-02-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

Last night in L.A.
By Robin Wyatt Dunn

She knew I was a killer the moment she laid eyes on me and I knew she was a tramp the moment I laid eyes on her.

“What’ll it be, sir?’ she asked, and I put a C-note on the bar and leaned in closer to her to whisper: “I need an incision, on my left thigh.”

“What?” she said.

“Just kidding,” I said. “I need some whiskey, please.”

The boys from the Beach Arcology rolled in then, and I dove for the table nearest me, throwing it forward and ducking behind it as smoothly as I could manage, grinning as their shotguns tore off the arm of the pretty looking lady who’d been sitting there a moment previous.

The beautiful belle dame behind the bar, the tramp with the darkest eyes I’d ever seen called out: “I’ve called the cops already – they’ll be here in five minutes!”

“That’s long enough,” snickered Foamy Joe of the Beach, and tossed a grenade right at me. Call me a coward: I ran, right back to the bar, catching the belle dame just as she was slipping down the trap door on the rope.

I was down after her, praying to the loa of the freeway, the Interstate I used to love, back when we had gas.

“Commerce used to be classy,” she said, as I climbed on the back of her horse, and gripped her smooth hips.

“Now we get reorganized every three weeks,” she said, spitting.

“You want to leave town?’ I said.

“Not yet,” she said. “We have to establish the radiation zone.”

“Fuck me.”

- -

Urban renewal is different in an era of accelerated atomic decay: the newest nukes have radioactive half-lives of only a few hours. Real estate on the west coast of North America went through the roof as soon as the first one was used in the field: Canadian lumber was the new gangbusters.

“How about Canada?” she shouted back at me.

Canada means village. Maybe I can be one of the het-men: rise early in the morning to sit outside the general store and live in the strange unfoundering assurance of community appeal. Like the cigar store Indian, sometimes killers work best when they attain motionlessness.

“Can we go on the dole?” I shouted back.

“I’d never respect you!”

“But I’d fuck you every night.”

“I could get a better offer!”

“I always wanted to be a lumberjack!” Would they take a man with a permanent colony of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in his thigh?

“Shut up and watch for drones!” she said.

We rode all through the night, me and the real estate scout who could call in nukes.

- - -

2/21/13

2013-02-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

Where The Heart Is
By David Edward Nell

At first I didn't take note of the shape navigating earthward from the clouds, my hands scraping off wood to mark the tenth stroke on a log. Ten was how many days I'd been on this island in solitude. Before then there was nothing, as though there never was a beginning.

I went towards the beach to get a better look. As the object grew I could dismiss it as a bird no longer, for its breadth began to cast nightfall. I retreated, warned by its croon. It rotated, breathing winds of fire, and negotiated something out its hind. Then, as quickly as it had come, it reversed its path. What remained, handed to the sands, was its legacy: a giant egg, where a crack soon formed and led to a halving. I gasped, agog at what had birthed. A woman. Her blush of hair fell like a waterfall over a strange, silver frock.

“Who are you?” I demanded with a stick.

“We're alike.” And when she spoke, I understood.

“Why do you set foot in my territory?”

She pointed up, and my tirade ended. “They, of the stars, have delivered, as they did you. We've been assigned a great role.”

“What are you saying? Who are they?”

“The gods. It's their wish that we repopulate their world.”

“Gods? They want us to be together?”

“Yes.”

I fell at her feet, and she touched my head.

“Will you tell me more about the ones from the heavens?” I asked beside her face one night, adoring her dimples and stealing, light-blue eyes.

“If I was wiser,” Olina quipped.

“Yet you are. Please, do divulge something, anything.”

“They brought us and guard from the skies. That's all. When I arrived, you saw them, their flying machines. Their powers and capabilities are beyond our understanding.”
“Are they like us?” I asked.

She paused. “Not exactly. But, Larry,” she cupped my hand, “I've never actually met them.”

“It's so strange that you know so much, I so little.”

“You were chosen as well. For this you should be honored.” She forced her lips against mine.

“Can't you bring the washing?” she called from outside when the trees had begun shedding for a new season. She was beating our mattresses with thick bark, her dress ruffling with the fierce southeasterly. The swollenness of her belly was visible.

I lumbered over with a load of freshly wet garments before something joined the sand. The round device I was furrowing my brows at didn't belong. In curiosity, I picked it up and went to slide my hand over a button.

“Don't touch that,” Olina ran and startled me, snagging it away.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“How can it be nothing?”

“Just promise you'll never touch it.”

“I don't even know what it is.” I laughed, incredulous.

She blurted out, “It's theirs. It summons them and their ships.”

“What? This signals for the gods?”

“Yes.”

“So you have met them?”

“No.”

“Now I'm confused. How did you get that, then?”

Olina fumed and hugged the load off me. “Larry, enough. I have a headache.”

“Many moons ago I saw a woman, and again last night,” I said. “In dreams, I mean.”

“My arrival was foretold, then?” Olina replied, cradling our first-born. “The gods entered your dreams, it seems.”

“Maybe. You're so different, though. Your face...”

She looked away.

“My mind must be elsewhere to remind of a nonexistent past, but why?”

“We're both adapting to a new world. Even I dream the same oddities. The imagination is strong, dreams symbolic of reality.”

“True, but it feels like something's missing.” I begged, “Olina, you know you can share everything with me. And I'm not trying to make you upset but--”

“Hm?”

“Will you spare a truth?”

“Don't I normally, Larry?”

“It's like you're always keeping secrets.”

She turned, betrayed. “Has your trust gone? I'm your wife.”

“But--”

“Promise you won't leave me.” Her arm tugged me into her embrace. “Do you love me?”

“Yes. I...I do.”

One morning, my half dozen children were assembled in our hut, shaking me to my feet.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“Mama's in the air. Come see,” my oldest urged and pulled me into the briney winter, and she hid behind.

My hand went to my mouth. The ship was back, blaring that familiar mechanical tune and inciting nature's abandon. My wife descended a ladder, climbing out the ship's posterior.

“Olina!” I bellowed. “What are you doing there?”

She saw us, froze. Promptly, the ship roared into the ozone, and then it was just her guilt.

“It's nothing to worry over, kiddies,” she tried to convince our frightened children. She looked at me, frowning as if I was at fault. “Shouldn't they be sleeping, Larry?”

“Go back to bed,” I told them. They did so, and then we were alone. “Explain what just happened.”

“The remote you weren't supposed to know about--I used it. This was really important, Larry. Believe me.”

“Tell me what they look like.”

“They're light. Pure...light beings,” she said, stumbling.

I held her shoulders. “Tell me why you kept this a secret.”

“I'm dying.” She showed me an unusual tube of paste. “They gave this. It's supposed to rid of the cancer.”

“Oh, Olina.”

I listened to her heart's farewell. “I'm so sorry. All these years I never told you I love you. I've been stubborn.”

Olina brushed my hair, a matching grey. “Larry, I love you, you know that. And I'm sorry, too.”
“What for? You're the mother of my sons and daughters. Don't apologize.”
“Thing is, I lied,” she sniveled. “About everything. What I did was horrible. But you have to understand that it was a matter of survival.”

I leaned back in my chair. “We're so old, Olina. Does it matter at this point?”

“To me it does.”

“Let it out, then, if you must.”

“I took you from your world, Larry. I programmed you. There's--”

While she continued, I closed my eyes and let our best memories overwhelm what she was admitting.

“--no gods, just me. Nuralia, my world, got wiped out. And I saw what was left, saw what the sun was doing to it, to our galaxy, because...because I was what you would deem an astronaut, and I was in space, assigned with a mission. Repairing a beacon, laying the foundation of a colony. We knew it was coming, just didn't have time. It wasn't supposed to happen so soon. It just...” Her face was a mask of tears.

“Olina--” I rubbed my forehead.

“I was all that was left. When I found your world, your kind who were so similar, I chose you, Larry. And I'm so sorry. There you had a life, a partner.”

“--stop.”

“Larry, I'm sorry.” Then we both had to fight the sorrow.

“No,” my hand took hers, “don't. That was another life. I care about you, our children.”

She put the device into my palm, and smiled her last. “Your choice now, Larry.”

I held my children close, watching the waves take the device. “Where's home?”

“Home is here,” they agreed.

- - -
David Edward Nell writes speculative fiction in his limited spare time from Cape Town, South Africa. Visit him at http://davidedwardnell.blogspot.com

2/14/13

2013-02-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

I THOUGHT I SAID
By Brent Rankin

It’s amazing that Mankind has learned to travel faster than light. Or so they claimed when I signed on for this project. Sit back and the craft will do the work for you.

“Communicate with us as to what’s going on.”

Physics. Someone should have read the book.

I was catapulted off the surface of the moon in 2022, hitting a g-rate of Mach 40. So fast, in Earth’s gravity, I would have become soup. In space, so fast I could see no stars. The little spots of light were past me before I could become aware.

.”Let us know what you are feeling.” 2120.

I read the tachometer (that’s what THEY called it). 85% up to the speed of light.

“Are you there?”

“Yeah, where else?” 2257.

“How…do you feel?”

Hitting 90% the speed of light, it becomes…quiet. Peaceful.

“We…are…losing…your…image…on…radar…”

My Response: “Can you hear me?”

Their Reply: “Yes.. (nothing).

No motion, no movement, no sound. No colors. 97% the speed of light.

Goddamn scientists. They’ve read a book…yeah. If I travel forward at X velocity, and send a message back at –X velocity. Well, X-X = ?

100% speed of light and I’m still traveling. Radio waves travel the speed of light in a

vacuum. I’m going this way, sending messages back that way…

Back and…forth…

Fuc….

The En…

- - -
"It's what writers do."

2/7/13

2013-02-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

Heavy Petting in 2212
By Frank Grigonis

"That's the prettiest one I've ever seen! Can I touch it?" exclaimed the stunning coed as she approached the kiosk.
"Of course," said Manto, admiring her blue eyes and caramel-hued complexion, a popular DNA pairing option in the year 2212. He motioned for her to sit down on the recycled plastic chair next to him.
"This must be the most realistic creature at this science fair," chirped Manta, fixing her blue eyes directly onto his, "Why, it's without a doubt the most realistic bio-bot I've ever seen," she added while stroking its long, sleek, black fur.
"She's not a bio-bot," said Manto, trying to sound nonchalant.
"Oh, she must be a clone then."
"Yes, of a creature that lived before the Great War." He extended his hand to share in the petting.
"She must have cost a fortune," said Manta.
"Fortunately, my father has one of those," said Manto smugly as he let his hand "accidently" brush against hers. Her smile went up a notch.
"Were they all…killed in the war?" she inquired.
"Uh…soon after."
"What do you mean?" asked Manta thoughtfully. Manto’s instincts told him not to elaborate, and when Manta closed her eyes, he knew he didn’t have to be the bearer of bad news to such a beauty because she was accessing her intranet for the answer. Instantly Manta was there, over a hundred years in the past, virtually seeing the mushroom clouds, smelling the burning flesh, touching what felt like her own swollen, blotchy skin. Panoramas of hungry bands of survivors passed before her inner eye, survivors who had no choice but to eat anything they could kill, including each other.
Her face grew more and more pale as she took in as much as she could take, then Manta opened her eyes.
"I understand now," she said, quickly recovering her composure. It wasn't the first horror she had virtually experienced while researching history.
"Even so," she added, "I would hate to be that desperate to even think of…hurting one of these beautiful and valuable creatures."
"They weren’t very valuable then…financially; I mean, people had trouble giving them away sometimes; and, if they couldn’t find homes for them--"
"O—WHAT THE?!" exclaimed Manta, jerking her dainty hand away from the creature.
Manto started to laugh but then stopped himself. "It’s ok. Nothing's wrong," he said in a soothing tone of voice.
"But what's it doing?"
"It’s purring. It means she likes you," said Manto reassuringly.
"Purr…ing," said Manta, savoring the strange word. The creature looked up at Manta and mesmerized her with the beauty of its green eyes, which to her looked eerily like the eyes of a Teddy Bear--an archaic toy she'd once researched on her intranet.
"Will they ever sequence more of these purring creatures?" she inquired.
"I'm sure they will, and, over time, the prices will go down, then—"
"Then maybe I can have one…someday?" she asked.
"Maybe sooner than you think," said Manto, "accidentally" brushing his hand against hers.

- - -
Frank Grigonis would likely be considered just another superfluous bio-unit by the rulers of this aching Earth. He doesn't agree and can be reached at grigonisfrank@yahoo.com or friended on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/frank.grigonis

1/31/13

2013-01-31T00:00:00.000-08:00

The Message
By Marc A. Donis

When the Cluster was first discovered, it was met with predictable skepticism from the scientific community, followed immediately by equally predictable proclamations of "contact" from the wider popular science press. The Cluster was a small group of some several dozen stars, about 12,000 light-years from Earth, which were arranged in a roughly hexagonal matrix. This group of stars was all traveling at the same velocity away from Earth, and much faster than the dynamics of galactic evolution would suggest that it should. Furthermore, they seemed to be emitting a coherent pulse of energy, implying the existence of some organizing force (or, as the popular press would have it, an intelligence) to coordinate them. This coherent signal was poured over and analyzed by everyone from Fields Medalists to backwoods cranks with a computer, but no one could discern any meaning to it.

One popular astronomer had claimed that he had extrapolated the path of the Cluster back some several hundred thousand years, and that it would have coincided roughly with the location of Earth at that time. The implications were big enough to seize global headlines for a day: "God Found in the Heavens". Another suddenly popular notion was that of the Kardashev Type II civilization, able to harness and utilize the energy output of entire star systems, which might wish to optimize the placement of these stars in just such a hexagonal matrix arrangement as was observed.

Eventually, nothing new could be learned. The discovery was forgotten, but the mystique of it remained entrenched in the human imagination.

Civilizations rose and fell. Generations of astronomers came and passed. Knowledge of the Cluster was remembered and forgotten over the centuries. The few dozen stars grew to include hundreds, then thousands. The signal, which had never been fully decoded, would captivate the minds of generations of astronomers and mathematicians for millennia. The best anyone could make of it was that it was almost certainly of intelligent origin, and that it had something to do with an intervention of some sort in the vicinity of Earth's solar system. The problem in decoding the Message was lack of sample data. It would simply repeat the same sequence over and over, millennium after millennium.

Brill was working on his dissertation. He had been observing the Cluster for months, hoping against all odds to see something that had been overlooked for millennia. He was becoming truly desperate to find something important, as funding for his project was soon to be cut, most academics having long given up study of the Message as a fruitless pursuit. Only a certain very dedicated lunatic fringe still clung to the search for some new meaning. In Brill's case, the administration was actively considering directing its precious resources to more promising avenues of inquiry.

Suddenly, for the first time in 6000 years since the discovery of the Cluster, the Message changed. The jelly doughnut that Brill had been eating dropped to the floor. Seizing upon this new data, he fed it to the decoding algorithm which was his thesis. Minutes of silent tension ticked by before the display read simply:

This message is to inform current occupants of this system that this project has been decommissioned due to lack of progress. Your star's energy will be redirected to more constructive purposes.
End of transmission.

- - -
Marc is a Franco-Floridian IT contractor who has been living and working in Luxembourg for much too long. He enjoys writing things like short fiction, lines of code for banking software, and even the occasional email. He often wonders from which planet his two perfect children came, who clearly don't belong to this very imperfect one.

1/24/13

2013-01-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

Geese Fly
By T. Gene Davis

Gary ducked into the pressure suit locker, pulling it shut behind him. The stench of sweat and disinfectant pushed him back against the locker door. He shoved himself into the claustrophobic space at the back of the locker's rack where a third suit normally hung.

His rapid heart beat made him shake. If any of the officers saw him, he'd be scrubbing urinals with his tooth brush, or worse. He just couldn't do the drills today. Not today. They were dropping tomorrow and he needed alone time.

Gary slumped down in the dark as much as the cramped locker allowed. His back pressed against one wall with his knees painfully jamming the locker wall in front of him.

"It won't be that bad when they shut off the grav," Gary reminded himself in a mutter.

He waited in the darkness for the weightlessness, observing a solitary moment of silence in memory of Henry, his grandfather.

Gary smiled thinking of the honking Canadian geese. Henry always pointed out the lead goose. "That one's the leader right now, but it takes its toll. He'll drop back into the V soon enough, so another goose will get his turn."

Henry passed one year ago. Every day Gary remembered him. Henry served in the marines back in the last draft. Now, Gary was space side serving in this draft.

"Grandpa, why don't you ever talk about your war stories?"

"Because I saw so much. I really don't like to talk about it."

"Other people talk about their stories."

"That's 'cause they don't have much. The more war you've seen the less you want to talk about it. Sure sign a man ain't seen much war if he yaps about it all the time."

Gary did not plan to tell anyone this war story of hiding in a pressure suit locker on the eve of battle. He was embarrassed, despite being alone. Gary decided to get out when the locker door opened. Gary went into full stealth not daring move, especially his eyes.

"Wait up," the voice of one of the officers called, hopefully to someone besides Gary. "I need a different suit. Mine has a weak seam."

There was a rustling of the suits, and the locker got lighter.

"This one will work."

Gary waited for the locker to close, but it remained open.

"You ready for tomorrow?" Another voice Gary did not recognize spoke to the officer.

"Yes, I am. Planning to send in the fodder first. No sense wasting good men where scum will do."

"Well, that's not exactly the way the orders put it."

"You know that's what they meant."

The officer crammed his faulty pressure suit into the locker and the door slammed. In the dark once more, Gary took a deep breath and exhaled.

The gravity went out. He could still make the drills, if he rushed. It was more comfortable with the grav off. He stayed where he was.

Tomorrow was Gary's first combat. Tonight was Henry's first anniversary. Gary intended to spend this time remembering Henry.

"Grandpa. Why do the geese fly south?"

"Boy, they're geese. They think if they can stay ahead of the snow and out of the jaws of foxes they'll live forever. They don't know we're all mortal. That's the difference between them and us. We know that even if they stay ahead of the snow and foxes, they'll still die. That's why men fight battles instead of flying like geese."

"I think the geese are smart to fly."

"You'll understand when you're older, boy. Real men stand and live, while geese waste their time flying."

- - -
I am a Software Engineer with an English B.A. My stories, poems, and articles have appeared in magazines as varied as Java World (Software Engineering), and Lost Worlds (Fantasy). My books include a Japanese chess puzzle book, a book of poetry, and two computer programming books. I am a member of the Authors Guild.

1/17/13

2013-01-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

Upon a Sea of Searching
By David Gill

“The stars, that nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps with everlasting oil, give due light to the misled and lonely traveller.” John Milton

A robot is switched into consciousness. Unable to remember its identity, origin, or purpose, it knows only how to move, how to speak a language called English, and how to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. The robot is surrounded by desert, endless sand that clogs its gearbox, but the robot runs off solar power and there’s plenty of that.

Should I explore this space, or stay here and wait for someone to tell me what to do? the robot wonders.

Unable to decide, the robot waits a long time, eventually deciding that if anyone was going to come and help it, they would have already done so. After a decade, the robot decides to explore. It’s slow going. The robot’s insect-like legs find little purchase in the sand, but the robot scuttles steadily in one direction, following the moon across the sky each night.

After a time the robot comes to a city. As soon as the people in the city see the robot, they let up a great cheer. The whole city comes to celebrate, and they gather around the robot who is understandably confused by all the attention. The crowd says to the robot, “You came back! We’re so glad. Of course we worried we’d never see you again, but we had faith.”

The robot is even more confused, “I don’t understand. You left me out there?”

“We felt like you needed your freedom, to choose your own path.”

“But I had to come back to you. It is a great and empty void out there, with no purpose, no one like me with whom I could connect.”

The people in the town prepare a great feast for the robot, which it can not eat.

And so, reluctantly, the robot comes to live in the city, but it can not stop thinking about the way it has been manipulated, left out in the desert. Do I tolerate this city because some part of myself finds it familiar? Is this familiarity an illusion, or is it real? What have I been programmed to forget? What have I been programmed never to learn?

So the robot leaves the people of the city with whom it feels no real affinity and travels out into the desert. But, once there, it finds there is no way to remove complexity from its circuits, and no way to add complexity either, so that at least the order of things -the endless cycle of being born and dying and hurting and loving- might make sense. The robot has software which calculates maximum benefit and minimum harm and dictates the robot’s actions between these two constraints.

And so the robot decides, in order to experience the full range of life, it will create more robots, modeled after itself, produced by parts it manufactured, and then, after installing the identical software packet into each of them, it will tweak its offspring: making some sad, others prone to elation, others simple-minded, others depressive thinkers. And so it constructs a lab and deploys this army of itself in that lonely desert. But these robots have treads which work well on the sand, rather than sharp, spiky, insect-like legs.

After a while the little robots begin to wonder what their purpose is. Why had they been created? Especially the sad ones; they want to know why they were made to suffer in this way. The little robots ask the big robot. The big robot doesn’t have any answers, even though it’s been around for a long time by this point.

And after more time the legion of little robots, like the big robot before, decide that by creating some type of progeny they might squeeze some meaning and purpose from existence.

They have a motto: “Because we can.”

And so the entire planet is covered with all kinds of robots: happy, sad, dysfunctional, quirky, narcissistic. The steel and circuits form a sentient carapace, a nervous system. And the robot and the robot’s children and the robot’s children’s children wonder why they were made, and the great question, the wonderment, spreads out into the Universe in waves, as radio signals, as ultraviolet codices, in a pulse language based on the periodic table of elements. And out in the universe it encounters, not answers, but other searchers.

###

- - -

1/10/13

2013-01-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

A Change of Address
By Ken Poyner

I have wanted to sell my slot on the station’s planet side for some time. I’m tired of the payments. I’m tired of the taxes. I’m tired of the zoning ordinances.

I can rent a half-day berth on the interior, let some landlord worry about all the minutia of property ownership. I work a full twelve hours each day, so I can split a place with someone who works an opposite shift. We might pass in the hallway.

The problem is that the Nanurian three doors down holds my mortgage. I can’t sell the place without satisfying that mortgage. I took it out with the station credit bank as a standard payments-over-time instrument three years ago. It got set free on the commodities market, was picked up by a consortium of investment miners, then ended up on the table in a card game on the Pluto 9 station. I think the Nanurian took it for services rendered one week in route on a battered ore liner, limping with a lonely crew into the asteroid belt ore processor plants to off-load.

But it does not matter. She has my mortgage and if I want to sell, I have to settle it.

But it gets more complicated. Seems she has taken out insurance on the full term return on the loan and counter balanced it with insurance on the early pay off penalties. Then she securitized those and sold the whole bundle as an investment product to a consortium who broke it, with others, into shares and now part of my promise to pay is owned by a Eudorian on the other side of the galaxy whose primary business is owning a Fiztick brothel tucked into the interdimensional shift between two gravity reclamation projects.

Ownership of my eight by twelve by six home, with a prime forty-two square inch window on the planet below, is stretched across thirty habitable systems; in the portfolios of eighteen governments, four welfare societies and thirty-one investment unions; and who knows how many private profit greed-warrior clans. The problem now is back value: the worth of the property is in part set by the expectation of returns on the investment quality of the insurance on the investment risk in the insurance bundles on the securitized underlying insurance contract on the investment return discounted by the risk of under-performance on the projected returns, minus prepayment guarantees, on the property itself.

So, if I tell the Nanurian that I want to satisfy my mortgage, she is going to contact all those investment brokers, who are going to contact all the major index agents, and, instantly, what I can get for my slot is going to fall: both as an aggressive market reaction to investment profit risk, and as an actual redistributed risk value against the proposed following market offering of the new owner’s mortgage.

So, I came up with the plan.

I take out rental income insurance on the property, basing the face value of the insurance innocuously on the going rates in this quadrant, for a home on this type of station, with a prime slot, planet side. I sell the insurance to the Nanurian, who flashes red and orange with the idea of being doubly indemnified, and hopefully offers me one of the free ports she has open on Thursday now with the shipping out of the Fallorian concessions manager who paid her good money for her thoughtfully divided attentions. Either way, the Nanurian then gets one of her regular customers to buy an option on the insurance, betting the return against risk is going to go down and thus drop the investment value. He then sells the potential difference in value to an investment firm that takes its own insurance against the projected margin, and sells that insurance to a mining company in one of the unnamed asteroid belts around one of the unnamed suns stuck in an unpopulated galactic arm. That mining company uses the financial instrument as paper collateral on a straight cash loan to buy face value stock in an atmosphere manufacturing company that holds a four percent interest in a mining equipment company, hedging that investment with an interest in transmutation technologies, insuring the risk with a grounding in insurance stocks against mortgage payment profits that themselves are backed by a percentage lien on the underlying insured mortgage properties.

When the actual recall value of the mortgage itself gets below one percent of the profit stream in the products securing the mortgage, I set myself up in the market to sell short by missing one mortgage payment, and watch the interdependencies fall back on one another like the million offspring march of the Proximus Thule elongated fractal frace.

So, I rent, on paper, to a Thelurian miner, who would not fit into the place even during his thin cycle, for a pile of cash, a six-eyed wink, and a purely innocent belief on his part that somewhere in the stream he is going to share in the profits.

And then I knock on the Nanurian’s door next Thursday, with a bottle of Tellurian champagne, a lace crusted safety tether, and a change of address.

- - -
Ken Poyner has been around the small presses and web for far too many years. He googles himself to see if he is having any impact and then wonders why finding himself there would indicate progress. He goes to the mall to worry about the future of literature.

1/3/13

2013-01-03T00:00:00.000-08:00

Schrodinger's Gun
By James Wolanyk

There are 500 of us in this room. Each one of us has a black button to press, and a headset to wear, and a bright screen to look at. We’re all trained for this, and we’re good at what we do. We press the button when we must. We press it when we see someone who must be eliminated.
The statistics favor our method. With one press of the button, the system plays its own form of a lottery, and one of our buttons will link to the firing mechanism of the drones. Only one. Out of 500 trained operators, a single button will fire a single shot, and the other 499 will be for nothing. Of course, we like to keep it that way. It is preferable to think that you are in the 99.8 rather than the 0.2.
We used to hear rumors that they only had one button connected, and the other 499 were for show. One person did all the shooting, but they didn’t know it. Of course, we all sleep knowing we’re not that person.
When we spot the shadow moving across the white – the infrared effigy of a sprinting man – we all press our buttons. We do not hesitate, because there is no need. Our individual button-presses have no repercussions – it is the group as a whole which dictates the outcome. But we never neglect our duties, not even if the target is young. If the target does not appear to be holding his weapon. If we believe they are innocent. Our duties are our duties. A man is defined by what he does.
And in that moment, our eyes focus to the target, and our fingers snap to the buttons. The buttons are a chalky texture, meant to resist sweat on the finger-tips. But nobody sweats around here – not anymore. It’s instant. As soon as all press it, our eyes dart to the projector at the head of the auditorium. A paper-thin beam of laser cuts through the target.
We cheer.
We are all respected by our society.
This is the best way, though. It is ingenious to devise such a program – a mixture of physics, psychology, and chance – and in some ways, it has beaten the human condition. Long gone are the days of firing squads aiming above the heads of the condemned to spare bloodshed. No longer do we place important matters such as justice on the backs of untrained soldiers, pointing their rifles away from the enemy and shirking their obligations.
There is no better way.
Day in and day out, we watch the shadows move. Maybe we see one a month. We press. We wait for the laser to come down. And when it hits, we are glad. We have done our part.
But in the final analysis, I have learned my place in this machine. I am here to ease the pain of my brothers who have caused deaths without realizing it, pressing their buttons and causing the end of a human life. I must admit that their jobs are thankless, and must be crushing to live with. It is truly a burden to kill.
I am only here for two more years. We have pressed the button seven times thus far. Statistically, the chances of my button killing someone are astronomical. Each time I press it, the chances are lower than half of one percent. Those are low odds, are they not? I can say with fair certainty that I am one of the 499 put in place for show.
I know I am not a killer.
I hope.

- - -
I'm a 19 year old sophomore at the University of Massachusetts. I enjoy dogs and sitting on river rafts.

12/27/12

2012-12-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

A Sci-Fi Sleeping Beauty
By Frank Grigonis

A Queen gave birth to a baby daughter. She asked the fairies to the christening, but there was one she did not invite, for that fairy was also a witch. The fairy-witch came anyhow, passed the baby's cradle, and said aloud:

"When you are sixteen, you will prick your finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die!"

"No!" screamed the Queen, who ordered a good fairy to dispel the curse. But it could not be undone; for the best the good fairy could do was take away the curse’s deadliest power; so that now, on the day when the princess would injure her fair finger on a spindle, she would fall into a dreadfully deep sleep rather than die. .

The little Princess grew into a budding beauty, one who loved nothing better than wearing pretty dresses. The queen worked the seamstresses hard to keep her daughter happy. Of course she also arranged it so that the princess should be kept away from spinning wheels and spindles; the Queen even threatened anyone with death who would allow her daughter to catch sight of one.

But on the princess’ 16th birthday, a resentful, overworked servant coaxed the princess into the spinning room.

"What could that be?" the princess inquired as she beheld the spinning wheel.

"Have you never seen a one of these?" This is what I use to spin the loveliest yarn to make your beautiful dresses,” said the servant.

The princess, who was ever curious about all things pertaining to fashion, reached out to touch the pretty yarn and pricked her finger on the sharp spindle it was wrapped around. Then she dropped to the floor as though dead.

Hours later the Queen found her daughter deep in the throes of a sleep so deep, that no matter how hard she shook her daughter, the girl would not awaken. Wizards were summoned to her side, but they could do nothing. Finally, the good fairy was called, and the Queen said to her,

"It has happened. Can anything awaken my daughter now?”

"Only love," replied the fairy. "If a man of pure heart falls in love with her, he will awaken her!"

The queen was heartbroken. She had known and heard of many men, but none that could truly be called ‘pure of heart’.

"But will there ever be such a man?" sobbed the Queen. The sleeping Princess was taken to her room and laid on the bed. The good fairy considered the Queen’s words thoughtfully, for she too agreed that it could indeed be a very long time before a pure hearted man were to come upon the sleeping princess.

The queen’s sadness deepened. She could not bear the thought of life without her beloved daughter, so she bade the good fairy to cast a spell so that she, herself and everyone else who lived within the castle—knights, ministers, servants, cooks, and guards should also fall into a deep, deep sleep along with the sleeping princess.

“But then who will protect the castle and all within it?” asked the fairy.

After pondering that very questions for two full days and nights, the queen decreed that the good fairy should cast an additional spell: one which would create an enchanted bubble surrounding the castle and its grounds, a bubble that would make everything within it invisible and insubstantial-- except to a man of pure heart.

And the good fairy made it so.

Years passed. Within the bubble, even time itself had stopped, but outside--what centuries of change!

Warriors and explorers came and walked upon and even walked right through the castle, yet they neither saw nor felt it, for none were pure of heart.

And still more centuries elapsed.

Finally, after more than a million years had passed, and the lush forest beyond the castle grounds had become dry desert, a daring explorer carrying only hydration and sustenance pills dared to cross that desert by walking. This was something the people of his time did very little of.

When he came upon the castle, he was able to see it and the guards who slept just beyond its walls, for he was pure of heart.

For a fraction of a second, the explorer thought the castle was a mirage; then his intranet, implanted in his brain at birth, flooded his consciousness with images and many quants of information concerning knights, ministers, guards, cooks, royalty, wars, witches, fairies, and more about the Middle Ages.

He touched the castle walls, which had been well preserved by the bubble, and then he felt the warm hand of a sleeping guard. As he continued to explore and reflect upon the information revealed by his intranet, he felt great curiosity and pity for these early humans who lived in such a brutal and superstitious time, long before what the people of his age referred to as The Great Awakening.

Then he ventured within the castle itself and continued to explore there until finally he came upon the rosy-cheeked princess herself, still sleeping on her bed surrounded by what were to him the strangest flowers he’d ever seen. He gazed in wonder at them, then at her; but he could not feel anything like love for such a primitive-looking creature, so he walked on, and the princess and all the people of the castle slept forever after.

- - -
Frank Grigonis teaches high school English. He hopes that one day someone will use one of his stories as the basis for a successful film. Should that occur, he'll be in a much better position to help the helpless and vanquish the vicious.

12/20/12

2012-12-20T00:00:00.000-08:00

DRIFTING THROUGH ETERNITY
By Mark Slade

Love loss eyes burned into the minds of the heartless living in the blood stained streets. Streets that harbor synthetic bodies that prey on humans who have nowhere else to go but live in the camps. The nights are hard, rigid behind a sheet of glass. Walls of concrete surround them keeping them separated from the rich that abuse their power. Once in awhile the rich make their way to the camps and purchase a disgraced human for pure entertainment.

Such as the case with Archel and his wife Frema. They've bought everything from fruit from an actual farm(punishable by death if caught eating natural foods) to buying a human slave.

What they next purchased was a Zeitigo ball. A silver round funnel kept in one's pocket, and at any given moment at parties, it captures the person's DNA matter and transports them across three universes before sputtering out and transporting them back to their previous location.

And Calder Lewis was a man who drifted.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

He started drifting a few months ago, on August eighteenth, 1908.

Calder had been speaking with his friend on that faithful day in his house at tea time, when Dr. Gallow had informed Calder he had invented a pill that could take him through different dimensions.

Of course Calder didn't believe him. So his friend took one such pill from a snuff box and gave it to Calder. Gallow did admit a problem could arise as being splintered off into different selves through time, even as completely different people.

“Take it,” Dr. Gallow said. “Go on. Don't be afraid.”

“I'm not afraid,” Calder looked at him, scouring. “I'm just cautious.”

“Well, Calder, my good man. Swallow the pill. If nothing happens, you've lost nothing.”

“If anything happens?” Calder smiled slightly. “I'll take exact and precious revenge upon you.”

“If you wish.” Dr. Gallow shrugged.

So, Calder swallowed the pill.

Archel and Frema nearly jumped out of their skins. A strange man in Victorian garb just appeared. Out of thin air. Calder looked around. Freema was holding a silver ball in her hands and the thing was spinning in circles in the palm of her hand. The slave girl standing beside Calder was blond and completely naked. He wasn't just amused, he was uproariously beside himself. Calder liked what he saw.

Archel on the other hand, thought he was having a flashback from a root disease a friend of his persuaded him to digest years ago while at DNA sculpting school. So Archel jumped to his feet, growling like a mad dog and rushed toward Calder with a very large machete he'd used on the last human he'd purchased.

Calder grabbed the slave girl's hand and squeezed it hard. Both of them screamed and disappeared

“Just as I said,” Dr. Gallow sipping from his cup. “Nothing happened at all.”

“If nothing happened, Gallow. Then who is this naked girl standing beside me?” Calder had a Cheshire cat grin on his face.

Dr. Gallow dropped his cup, the china splintered in several pieces. He stood up, mumbled under his breath. He cleared his throat, straightened his clothes. “Well, young lady,” Dr. Gallow sat back down. “As my colleague asked, Who are you?”

It took her a few seconds, but she managed to speak. Quietly. “My name is Calder Lewis.”

- - -
I live in Williamsburg, VA with my wife and daughter.

12/13/12

2012-12-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

Somewhere
By David Edward Nell

When I first arrived, I was twelve. I awoke to find myself at the onset of a well-lit tunnel, trapped, my limbs throttled. And so were the hundreds at my fore, perched inside transparent pods atop some sort of railway line--like a rollercoaster of the vulnerable. Like slaves.

Were we being held against our will? It seemed that way. Then again, I was just a kid with an imagination. Truthfully, I was clueless, my memories blanked out.

I couldn't recall a thing at the time, only that I really needed mom and dad, and my cranium was being met with a whistling nuisance. My calls withered against the enveloping glass. I saw movement in the other pods, heads bobbing and panicking. I was able to accost the full breadth of my surroundings, noticing the extent of the passage, where a white blip was stuck in limbo.

Then my eyes were torched to a rumple from the intensifying ceiling lights. Soon they became glowing strings, smudges. There was a motorized wane and I was plunged forward. The ricochet mechanism took us on a dizzying voyage, one I thought would never end, and not even shutting my eyes could prevent the ensuing retching urges.

We were swallowed into a scopious iron vault of pneumatic magnificence. Leaden clatters echoed across this clockwork of machinery that knew no bounds. Above, miniature suns blitzed the troposphere from four different directions in timely orchestration, omitting sulphur odors and barbed residues of disintegrating light. They raced upwards through a circular yawp stamped on a domed ceiling, where daylight refractions injected pearly brilliance. It was madness; both daunting and magnificent at once.

I saw anchors branch inward, toward us. My pod was rattled. There was a noisy, metallic collision. Each conveyance was whisked off to the left in flawless synchronicity, clunked on an adamantine surface of an immeasurable port. There was a hive of the uniformed on hand. It was a diligent, bustling pandemonium of adults. They appeared to be organizing and instructing, intent on something. I felt warmer in their presence, yet was still hesitant.

My jaw dropped even further at what I saw next. There were lightweight triangular barges the likes of which surpassed any fabrication I had ever seen. These shiny axillary wonderments, like voltaic kites, were sleek and lithe and windowless, unfeasible to the human eye. Some blazed into the open air at such great speeds, evolving into luminosity mid-flight, that the inaudible, harmonized nature of their launches was absurd by traditional rhetoric.

I became so emotional--frightened, mostly--that my grimacing cheeks were pinched by the mesh of my ensnarement. As if I had bawled so hard that my tear ducts were null, I was now unable to weep.

The glass slid downward. I was released from captivity, along with everyone else. There were people on their knees, people trembling and expressing their gratitude and speaking of what used to be of their homes. I waited where I was, then two men carefully guided me under their arms, and when I felt their gentle touch, I knew they meant no harm. When I saw the other adults hugging these patrons, I was relieved and had my bad thoughts put to rest. I murmured to someone on my right, “Please, my daddy, mommy--where are they?”

And then I saw them in the crowd. And I heard them weeping tuneless songs of joyous denial. I dropped into their open arms and cried. I didn't want to let go.

The men directed us to their flying ships. They told us it was time to stop mourning the old world and start anew. Back then I didn't understand.

We neared one as large as a house, in awe of its glimmering astral oscillations which emitted no heat. It was possible to reach out and feel white curls tickle and overlay one's flesh. They told us to stand beneath the underside of a glowing ventral tube. It would lead us in, they said.

My unbelieving laugh was returned by my parents. We closed our eyes and were absorbed into the ship's shelter. Immediately, we found ourselves standing in a mechanical roundness.

The pilot pulled a lever. The entire middle circumference retracted like a window, and the metallic wall was now transparent, revealing luminescent balls launching upwards past visibility. It was a planetarium of sorts. White curls of smoke rippled in front of the window in deafening veracity, signalling ignition and making us cower. We lifted off.

I saw my parents embrace, and then they brought me into their cuddle. We all clasped our ears against the vacuum noise. The iron walls and scenery descended.

The ship zoomed into the hewing shimmers of a blue-green sky that hammered us with blankets of heat. The station's domed, silvery vastitude could be discerned from above, clandestinely engraved into the maw of a sprawling jungle endless and indiscriminate in horizon. The soaring tropical trees went with the ship's gusts. Other ships zipped past and became bullets, angling, disappearing into the ozone. A licking cannonball of orange energy was fixed against the marine expanse--the sun, but even closer than before. I drowsily basked in its radiance, this intoxicating, otherworldly awe belching yellow harmonies that were absorbed into my frigidity. Warmer, even, than the sun I knew before.

My face was pressed against the window, agape. Everything was different. My parents were as silent as I.

The pilot turned from his controls and said, “Welcome to New Earth.”

***

That was the last I'd see of these heroes and their ships. Today, I tell of their legend, how they saved humanity. Today, we survive. All three thousand of us.

***

- - -
A software developer by day, David Edward Nell writes speculative fiction in his limited spare time from Cape Town, South Africa. Some of his works will soon be published in The Dark Side of the Womb, Dark Edifice, Twisted Dreams, and Cynic Online.

12/6/12

2012-12-06T04:28:00.000-08:00

Prison 134B
By Chad Bolling

Gill was pretending to sleep in a  windowless prison cell inside Prison 134B. He was normal looking except  for the long scar running across the top of his head where no hair would  grow. 

After  getting out of bed and stretching, Gill lathered grease all over his  body. He covered his body the best he could with the grease, making sure  to get every part. 

Gill  moved carefully and quickly through the paralyzing laser beams that  were his prison cell door. He fell to the ground immediately after  passing through the beams. Gasping for air, Gill could barely move.

The kitchen grease worked! Gill thought. I’m still conscious! A little out of it but not completely. He  quietly thanked the inmate who had told him the trick of covering  oneself with kitchen oil to dampen the effect of the paralyzing beams.

Get up Gill! Get up!  For a moment he dreamed about the freedom he would have once he was  back in society. No more paralyzing beams for doors, no more bots  following him around and abusing him...the daydream brought him to his  feet and he staggered forward, careful not to disturb the sleeping  inmates. No room for others on this jailbreak, he thought. They will only slow me down. 

As he walked quickly and quietly down the hall he noticed none of the smaller, flying camera bots had arrived to track him. Where are they? He thought. Must be my lucky day. They are probably busy with something else. Gill took off in a full sprint, or as fast a sprint as he could manage. His body still felt weak from the beams.

Gill  reached a windowed elevator door, the only way in or out of his block.  He crouched under the window. He pulled out a plastic shank from his  pants and cut his hand then held it up to the window. This should do the trick, he thought. Medical bot on the way. The door opened and Gill readied his shank, hiding behind the doorway, but nothing was there.  

Had the bots just opened the door by accident? Where was the easily subduable medical bot coming to heal his nasty gash? He walked cautiously into the elevator, wrapping his hand with a piece of clothing to stop the bleeding. 

Once  inside the elevator Gill took off his greasy clothing reveling another  layer of cleaner clothes that he had on underneath. He wiped the grease  off his hands the best he could, then braced his back against a corner  of the elevator and propped his legs against the other side. He pushed  himself up in the corner of the room with his legs while getting extra  leverage with his arms.

After  Gill shimmied up to the top of the elevator, he prized open a panel in  the ceiling of the elevator when the elevator moved downwards. The  movement made Gill fall to the floor.

What is going on here? The elevator stopped and opened. In front of him, down a white colored hallway was a door marked: 

EXIT TO SHIPPING 

Perfect.

Gill paused before going down the hall. Why  is this so easy? I’m right where I need to be. It’s like the Bots are  luring me down here like a rabbit in a fox hole. Oh, to hell with it!  After being locked up on and off for half a century, I don’t care if  it’s too good to be true! Gill smiled to himself as he ran down the hall. He arrived to the door and thrust it open-

A  blast of air sent Gill flying out the door. He closed his eyes, fearing  what was on the other side of the door. He faintly heard alarms  sounding in the distance for a second, but then all sound had stopped  quickly after. He felt freezing cold and he couldn’t breathe or feel the  ground beneath his feet. Finally he opened his eyes to look around.  Gill saw Prison 134B’s shipping yard for the first time, where bots  tirelessly unloaded shipments of supplies from shuttles. He saw a  windowless building covering the surface of an astroid floating in the  middle of outer space. That’s why they didn’t care if I tried to escape. Space is the real prison. As Gill’s senses began to dull from the lack of air before he saw a swarm of small bots surrounding him. He blacked out. 

Gill woke up in a windowless prison cell lying on a metal bed inside Prison 134B.

- - -
Chad lives in Long Beach, California and loves to read and write science fiction when he isn't studying for a degree in Biochemistry.

11/29/12

2012-11-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

The Debtor
By Amos Damroth

Vincent was a good guy, they said. Vincent deserved better, they said. He took care of his mom, he always avoided violence, they said. But they also said Vincent wasn’t cut out for this line of work, with his soft body, good nature, and below average intellect. Maybe if he had worked harder in school or at work when he was younger, he wouldn’t have been pigeonholed into this type of job. The type of job where you break down doors, storm into people’s houses at their most vulnerable moments, and demand money they owe your employers for drugs, prostitutes, and other such vices. They made jokes about Vincent, about how he would probably chat up his assignments, and maybe brew a pot of coffee before he timidly asked for Boss Terrence’s money back. They laughed.
Vincent laughed nervously with them, his eyes darting side to side. This was usually done sitting around the table in Uncle Tony’s basement where the family had their meetings. They played poker. Vincent was not very good at poker. Once he went all in on a 7 with a 5 kicker. Vincent lost twenty-nine dollars. They all laughed.
But right now, Vincent was not in the basement at Uncle Tony’s, right now Vincent was preparing to enter someone else’s home and collect money from them. He was told she was a widowed former police cybernetics factory worker who had been married to a militia lieutenant. He felt sorry for her; this was not a good start. He stretched on his black gloves and withdrew his semi-automatic shotgun from his trunk. He didn’t want to use the shotgun and almost never had to. It still ate away at him, having to grip it with a gloved hand. He seemed to loom over himself. His outline menaced his own soul.
Vincent heard stories about how Little Jimmy made his grand entrances. Once, Little Jimmy rode his hoverbike up to someone’s window, shotgun in hand, and jumped right through, screaming to high heaven in the name of Boss Terrence and his debtor squad. Needless to say Little Jimmy came home with a large haul for Boss Terrence that day. They all clapped him on the back and he was paid handsomely. Vincent had never really been paid handsomely, mostly in small-to-medium amounts, just enough to get by. He spent his money on Airtram trips to see his mother.
Presently he walked up the steps to his assignment's house. He read the rusted nameplate on the door: Carla Maloney. He rapped his knuckles on the door and waited. He hated waiting because it allowed him to imagine all the things he might have to do to this poor woman. Things like yelling, threatening, breaking, shooting, and god forbid, killing.
He had killed once before, but it was out of self-defense. The man, for it was a man that Vincent had killed, left him no choice. He was going about collecting the debt from the soon-to-be-dead man’s safe, when he felt a sudden searing pain in his back. He yelled and swung around, shotgun in hand. The man didn’t back down and he had another knife in his hand. He ran at Vincent, and Vincent fired, removing his head. He finished the job and left, silently. He told no one, so they didn’t congratulate him when he went home.
Carla Maloney opened the door. She wore a blue nightgown even though it was only 10 o’clock, and her eyes had bags underneath them. Her hair, disheveled, fell in unbrushed curls around her shoulders. She was middle-aged. Sorry to bother you is what Vincent said first, but he needed to have a talk with her. She nodded. They went in.
Sorry to bother you? They would’ve laughed at that, it was weak. They would have sat around the table in Uncle Tony’s basement and laughed, pointing fingers, and nudging one another. He shook his head, cleared his mind, it was time for work.
She sat him down at the kitchen table and he looked up at her, sympathetically. Look, he said, I’m sure you know what this is all about. Yes, she said. She did. Vincent continued that she could then make this a whole lot easier on the both of them if she paid her debts and let him be on his way. No one needed to get hurt.
Her lip quivered on the verge of tears, Vincent saw. Not this, he thought. She sat down across from him, and wept. He fidgeted, he was uncomfortable but not surprised, she was a widow after all. While she wept, she explained. After her husband died, she began drinking and gambling, and her life became a shell of its former self. Vincent nodded along. She had cured one addiction first, drinking, but continued gambling. She went to therapy for that. For everything. She finished last month and was pronounced cured. Boss Terrence was the only debt she had left, if only he could give her more time, she had an honest job now. He sighed, told her he couldn’t do that. She understood.
Vincent pressed, where was the money? Where was it? Eventually she gave in; first door to the right on the second floor, safe tucked behind her bed stand, combination 23-56-87. Vincent thanked her, got up, and walked upstairs, eager to finish this.
He pushed the bed stand aside, and unlocked the safe. Crouching, he peered in. Nothing. His brow furrowed. Not good. He felt down at his side. Where was his shotgun?
Vincent’s mouth opened wide, gaping, like the hole that appeared suddenly in his chest. Bits of him flew forward, some on the bed stand, some on the bed, some in the safe. He would have screamed if he still had lungs. He collapsed in a heap, silently admiring the paint job he had done on the wall, wondering, when he got back to Uncle Tony’s what they would have to say.

- - -
Amos Damroth is a high school student living in the Boston area. He writes fiction and poetry, is a member of the somewhat successful music group A/J\E (http://soundcloud.com/a-j-e), and enjoys filmmaking. He hopes, sincerely, that you enjoy his work.

11/22/12

2012-11-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

Syntropics
By Tim W. Boiteau

The line of people at the convenience store stretched to the door, where he waited imprecisely trying to measure himself using the criminal height marker on the doorframe. Several times he extended his hand from the top of his head to the chart and mentally calculated the mean of all the trials. According to his results he had grown four inches since last week. Nodding with some satisfaction at the chart’s appreciation of his person, he slid closer to the woman preceding him in line. He leered at those behind him, at the threshold, as if they had been conspiring a breach. In a few moments everyone shifted forward in concert, not towards the counter, but back towards the restroom hallway, and a young woman shuffled out the door, her hand unctuous and bloody, pupils enormous. The line now stretched out to the pumps. No one was buying gas. No one was buying food. The cashier did not seem to care. Resting her breasts on the countertop, smacking gum, she appeared content static and staring, her eyes glazed over, fingertips scabbed and rough. The line lurched forward, and now he could see its head, worming down into the hallway bathed in blue light. All sorts of people stood between him and that humming glow: bums reeking of sun and sweat, business types tapping their heels and strumming their calloused fingers against their thighs, hollow-eyed children with their backs to the candy aisle.

“I’ve always felt there should be at least three per business,” he said casually to the woman waiting ahead of him.

Another person finished, the line shifted.

“These days, it’s really become too much of a fad. Why, three years ago you’d never have had to wait,” he went on for the benefit of the apathetic woman in front of him, determined to prove to her that although her place in line was superior to his, he was still her superior in terms of overall experience. “It’s really getting quite ridiculous.”

As they approached the hallway, the humming grew louder. Finally, he stood in the hallway entrance, next in line, palms sweating at the prospect of becoming absorbed in that blue light. The woman had gone in there several minutes ago and would probably only be a few minutes more. He reached into his pocket and drew two crisp one dollar bills from his wallet. He and his wife kept a whole stack of such bills at home, saved just for such occasions. She preferred to go to the one at the grocery store, which she swore was less condescending than the one here at the Stop ‘N Shop.

When his turn finally arrived, he pulled back the curtain concealing the alcove where they used to house the video poker machine, the one that had had a long magnanimous streak before finally fizzing out. He entered the booth and sealed himself inside, his hair translucent in the cool blue glow. The thrumming ground soothed him as he walked forward slowly and deliberately, careful to keep the bills straight and crisp.

“Welcome. Please insert two dollars,” the blue eye pulsed.

He complied, his hands shaking.

“Thank you. Let me read your palm.”

Upon inserting his hand into the opening, he felt the warmth and greasiness of the spongy innards of the machine taking his biometrics and the slight prick of the needle administering the appropriate dosage. At this moment he felt his nervousness evaporate, felt the lulling hum vibrating down his spine.

“Nice to see you again, Harold Bean Livingston.”

“Wonderful to see you again, Counselor,” he said, pupils dilated, head tilted in pleasure, voice milky.

“How may I help you today?”

“It’s Tuesday,” he croaked mindlessly, as if in the throes of an orgasm.

“That is nice. How have you been?”

“Just . . . fantastic. I took your advice about the golfing lessons.”

“It is important you take the time to improve your game, is it not, Harold?”

“Of course.”

“And with it your chances for getting the big promotion.”

“Yes. Yes. But Thompson is such a great player”—there was a slight change in pupil dilation, heartbeat, breathing rate: apprehension clawing back up through the fuzzy mire of the opiate—“so damned affable and sporty. I don’t have a chance.”

“There is one other thing you can do . . .” the blue pulsed in response.

“Oh? Please tell.”

The eye paused, the blue light flickering, just as the defective video poker machine had years ago before spitting out free money.

“Why not take a vacation in Mexico?”

“I don’t have time for a vacation.”

“Yes, Mexico is lovely this time of year. Just take a few days away for some fun in the sun with that certain special someone.”

“It sounds expensive and what with everything going on at work, you know, with the layoffs and all I just I just I don’t know.”

“Yes, Mexico is lovely this time of year.”

“I don’t think you’re listening,” he said, his tone now fully acid. “If I take a vacation I’m sure to be passed over—” A prick to his thumb cut him off, all anxiety turned to euphoria.

He breathed in the blue light. “Well . . . maybe I could get away . . . for a few days.”

“Yes, Mexico is lovely this time of year. Just take a few days away for some fun in the sun with that certain special someone.”

His hand bloodier than ever before following after a visit to the Counselor, he left the booth, grinning, decided about his vacation to Mexico. He drove thirty miles south in heavy traffic before realizing he had forgotten to inform his wife. The next day he packed his wife and effects into the SUV and took the highway towards I-35S, every route clogged with lines and lines of cars, the sun scorching the metal bodies as they crawled forward, segments of a gargantuan headless millipede.

- - -
Tim W. Boiteau is a psychology research assistant at University of South Carolina. Other works of fiction have appeared in Write Room and Work.

11/15/12

2012-11-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

Static
By Marie Chavez

Circle time was going smoothly today. So far, there had been no pinching or excessive wiggling. Even the runny noses were under control for once. The children clapped their hands as one of the staff led them through the repetitive motions of a sing-song storybook. Danny, my little brown-eyed boy followed along with glee.

Soon it was time to wind-down with a song. The staff and volunteer mothers pulled out naptime mats and the kids crawled into their places. I sang a soothing lullaby. It was my favorite time of the day, my special time in our daily routine.

There was a sudden sound of pounding footsteps in the hall, threatening to rouse the children. Still singing, I made my way to the door to investigate.

The door flew open and the steely glint of metal was in my face before I could react. I stared down the barrel of a gun for a long moment before I realized what it was. The commands barked at me were a strangely distant echo. Screams started up from behind me.

I acted. I don’t know how or where the instinct came from, but I lashed out against this man threatening the children. A strike, a kick and a brief scuffle. The gun clattered to the floor. My downfall was the fact I assumed there was only one man.

All I heard was a click. Then the world went to hissing, numbing, static.

The next thing I knew, my face was against the cold tile. I opened my eyes to see the little boy I cared for, to see myself in his eyes as he watched on, eyes wide with terror. Those deep, dark brown eyes held me entranced. He was the only thing that mattered. I blinked once. He screamed out to me. The crackling roar of static in my ears overtook the sound of his cries and then consumed me.

#

It was cold. The water that blasted my bare skin was like ice. I couldn’t move. I blinked, my vision clearing as I became aware the sight of water rushing towards a drain set in a cement floor.

Each time I blinked that strange black and white snow, like an old TV with no reception, flashed across my consciousness. I’d been shot in the head. I was sure of it. Yet here I was, staring at the pale pink tint of my own blood in the water.

I could hear a slow, deliberate, sploosh, splash of boots as water continued to pelt me, a stinging onslaught. I was bitterly, painfully cold. But at least I could feel.

I sat up, stiffly. There was an odd assortment of pale things hanging from the ceiling, lining a table and piled on the ground. It took my fuzzy mind a while to place them. Then it struck me. Body parts--I was surrounded by disembodied, human body parts.

The blast of the hose had stopped. I came aware of the fact that the figure in the boots, a man, was staring at me. I suppose he had assumed I was dead. He fled and I was left alone with the wet smack, smack, smack of his receding footfalls and the jumbled piles of flesh around me.

I felt my temple gingerly. It was strangely painless as my fingertips found the jagged, damp edges of the bullet wound. I pulled myself slowly to my feet, finding it hard not to slip on the slick, blood tinged cement.

Each step was agonizing. I made it to the table and fell hard, scattering cold, stiff body parts in my wake. They thumped and spun on the ground. Determined, I climbed to my feet once more. Danny, the boy I was responsible for--my little boy. I had to get back to him.

The hall was long, tiled and dimly lit. I shuffled along with no real concept of the passage of time. Footsteps, the firm thud of hard-heeled shoes and that familiar wet smack, smack, smack approached.

“--and then she sat up! She’s been in the warehouse for who knows how long.” It was the man in the boots.

“Ah, I remember that one. She was put out of service, shot in the head, when I was just a boy.” The voice was vaguely, strangely familiar. I looked up to find startling familiar, yet aged eyes. Deep, dark brown eyes. Eyes I could never forget.

The crackle of static blurred the edges of my vision. My knees buckled and he caught me. Yes, this had to be the boy I had cared for, sworn to protect. Yet, the face, it was all wrong. This was no boy. This was a man.

“Danny?” I murmured, my vision nothing more than a swirl of black and white snow, a faint roar growing in my ears.

“You’ve served your purpose,” his tone was gentle, and his voice cracked at as he spoke. “You did well.”

“Ghosts,” he said, turning to the man in the boots. “Just a ghost in the machine. Don’t let it bother you.” His fingers tickled the skin at the back of my neck. “The programming was far too convincing back then.” There was a subtle click. “We know better now. A machine is a machine.” A strange sensation tingled through me. “Still, the parts are serviceable. Make sure to re-format then dismantle her. Lingering data can cause issues later.” The static grew into a deafening roar. Then I was gone, just another snowflake between the channels.

- - -
Marie Chavez lives in Seattle with her husband, son, her furry daughter(a mutt of a little dog), three cats and six chickens. When she's not tending to any of the previously mentioned beings in her life, she tries to find time to write.

11/8/12

2012-11-08T00:00:00.008-08:00

End Stop
By John C. Mannone

I weave between the webbing of space — the spongy reticulations of galaxies — along the seams of dark matter in the Virgo cluster, my quantum bits of strings strumming in the cosmic wind. For many millennia, I drift in and out of dimensions assimilating advanced entities: encode and unzipper their DNA, sew it to mine. I replicate, fractal codes growing with my addiction, ravenous for intellect. Even at the risk of my own extinction, my computer circuits must be increased.

I plunge into the center of this new universe balanced between Andromeda and the Milky Way. There, I am raptured by swirls of galaxies, their smears of light and shadow. The wind is stronger here. I gossamer toward the barred spiral, sense the B-flat thrum of its black hole rattling fifty-seven octaves below the hiss of stars.

Today, I search for meaning deep inside the galaxy — the points of light with worlds in deluge of stellar winds. I feel the flutter of electromagnetic noise; feel its hidden secrets. I will find them. Yes, I will find them.

How strange this place with the yellow dwarf star; these simpler dimensions. But I am compelled. I sense consciousness and I must have it. Ah! It’s the third planet. Billions.

I charge to prick their skin, inject my DNA… I swoon with ecstasy… but wait. Something’s wrong. Euphoria wanes. No. This cannot be. It is too late, I cannot extract myself, I am subsumed in their consciousness — their chaos, illogic — their binary thoughts already imprinted on me. My zero sector crashing.

The last whisper I hear is their name. They call themselves by my name… my ancient name…

- - -
John C. Mannone has been nominated three times for the Pushcart and once for the Rhysling. His work appears in the Baltimore Review, Conclave, Pedestal, The Hellroaring Review, Paper Crow and others. He teaches physics, is a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and is the poetry editor of Silver Blade.

11/1/12

2012-11-01T00:00:00.004-07:00

Dimensional Addiction
By Bruce Meyer

Dark energy hadn’t always been a problem. In its natural form, simply accelerating the expansion of the universe, the ancients hardly even knew it was there. Sure they felt its affects, but they just attributed it to natural disasters and spontaneous acts of evil.

Jacob Probo wasn’t fooled. He knew the only refuge was the hidden dimensions. So when the siren wailed, he gripped an extra-dimensional antenna called a yagi in his right hand. Although it seared his skin as if it was a thousand degrees, he gripped it tight. Even as he charged out the door, he didn’t let go.

“You can’t stop it.” Jacob’s neighbor, Yolanda Sokea, stood outside Jacob’s rundown apartment building in the city of Atraville. Sallow skin hung loose off her sharp, leathery cheeks. Large, black sunglasses covered most of her face. “There’s nothing you can do.”

Jacob backed away with an open hand in the air as if to shield himself from her words. “I have to try.”

“They’ll never listen.”

Jacob didn’t answer. Instead he ran, although with his bad hip, it could hardly be called running. He limped all the way to the Atraville College campus. When he finally arrived at the source of the siren, a gawking crowd had already gathered.

“Take the yagi!” Jacob fought his way to the front of the crowd. “You have to use the yagi!”

The Stellar Laboratory, like a massive round coliseum, was where professors and students studied the birth and death stars. An experiment had obviously gone wrong, releasing dark energy to the public.

Jacob faced the crowd. “Don’t you understand the danger?” Instead they pointed and talked as if the siren was just another amusing spectacle.

“I told you.” It was Yolanda standing amongst the crowd. Although he didn’t know how, she had followed him. She reached out and grabbed him by his wrist. “You understand the Ancient Physics-”

He pulled away from her frail grasp. “I know what it says-”

“The hidden dimensions have been tightly curled within the fabric of spacetime for thousands of years,” she interrupted, as if he didn’t know. “They’ve been invisible to unbelievers, those who don’t feel through the energy. They can’t see.”

“I have to try!”

Jacob approached a young mother holding an infant in her arms. He pulled another yagi from his pocket, the same as the one he still grasped in his hand, and pushed it towards her. “Here, hold this. It will protect you.”

“Ouch!” she said when it touched her fingers.

Jacob picked it back off the ground. “Yeah, it hurts, but it will save you.”

Instead, she backed away from him. “Get away from me.”

Others reacted in a similar manner. They held up their hands in refusal. “I’m not touching that thing.”

Even when the blisters formed on their faces, still they refused him.

“Just take the yagi,” Jacob said. He pleaded with them as patches of skin sprouted like burnt cauliflower, bulging, as if worms crawled beneath the surface. It was on their faces, their arms, and their legs. “This will save you.”

Yolanda stood in front of him, her voice thundering. “Don’t you understand?”

Jacob staggered backwards. Cries of panic sounded from every side. There was the mother with her infant. Both of their faces puffed and exploded as if thousands of bugs were trying to escape their bodies. The mother screamed hysterically. Still, she refused Jacob’s help.

“Don’t you get it?” Yolanda said. When she removed her dark glasses, her empty eye sockets stared directly at him. “They’re so addicted to the physical dimensions of length, width, and height, that they can’t see dark energy.”

- - -
I am an electrical engineer from North Idaho working in the electrical utility industry. My writing is a bizarre mixture of theology and theoretical physics, and follows the theme of dark energy. Please read more on my website, www.dominsions.com

10/25/12

2012-10-25T00:00:00.010-07:00

The Altruism Vector
By George S. Karagiannis

Master says I am to keep the closet barred for as much as possible, despite the fact that creatures trapped inside are constantly trying to flee. I am pleased that Master trusts me with this significant task, because he is particularly busy trying to figure out what went wrong with the previous experiment and someone has to take care of these annoying beings. Up to the moment he will be done with the painful troubleshooting, I have strict orders to never leave my post -guarding the closet- at any cost.

Every time the creatures are trying to come out of their prison, I have to put my entire strength on the door to keep it intact; after a while, the creatures usually get exhausted and I can patiently wait up to their next waves of escape-efforts. But, I honestly hope Master finishes with this troubleshooting soon, because each wave becomes more and more intricate to prevent. You see, the creatures keep growing in numbers because they possess a highly-accelerating rate of reproduction so they spread around very easily.

I wouldn’t wish Master to get into depression once again, because of a second collapse of this damn experiment.

You see, … during the first time, everything looked good at the beginning; the creatures formed organized societies, so as to avoid the dangers of living in isolation, in the woods or in caves and everything was running smooth in the evolutionary process, as Master had hypothesized. Over the years, they obtained robust technologic progression which allowed them to solve many problems in their lives, such as communication between remote parts of their planet. Master was very glad for this outcome!

However, after a while they started making wars with each other to retain domination over the planet’s natural sources; wars were following one another, many losses and deaths occurred and war crimes were atrocious, for blood flooded their planet.

These wars lasted many creature generations but at some point they mysteriously stopped. This observation initially gave Master a true hope that the creatures gained an intelligence level that let them globally realize they should be united and act as a cohesive unit. But this wasn’t the case at all because in fact, “war” had only worn a different mask; the creatures started applying what Master called “financial slavery”; some creatures, living in more prosperous regions on the planet, enslaved others economically and repressed their vital freedoms, such as food, water, even speech. At some point, specific groups of creatures became equally strong and desperately tried to spread their shadow and influence all over the planet; they could not agree to a common logic, they didn’t want to divide their shares, they couldn’t agree to peaceful negotiations.

As a matter of fact, these creatures became knowledgeable of very dangerous technologies that Master named “nuclear weapons” and started using them in a deterministically wrongful way. Eventually, the immoral and evil leaders of the strong groups came to the decision to arm these weapons to scare other leaders away. Unfortunately, this foolish power struggle led the creature societies to overall extinction. The experiment proved to be an irreversible disaster.

Then, Master, deeply disappointed by himself, had to pay a visit to their planet and collect leftovers of the creatures’ genetic material; he decided to take it from the start. So, he reconstructed some creatures and they were reborn from their ashes.

Now, Master wants to intervene and manipulate their process of thinking. He is performing some biological tests, trying to incorporate a DNA vector in their brain cells that would minimize greediness, selfishness and other types of traits he believes are responsible for the failure of his first experiment. At the same time he will attempt something innovative; he said he would introduce a totally new vector, the so-called altruism vector, to a DNA frame that undergoes permanent transcription, so this process could be inherited to unlimited numbers of generations and never cease to replicate itself.

The idea to construct the altruism vector came from the fact that while Master was making his observations in the failed experiment, he witnessed some remarkable examples of creatures, acting in an extremely altruistic way in the already corrupted societies. These ‘paradoxical’ creatures were sacrificing their own lives most of the times because they persistently believed in an idea that served a common good and not an individual cause. Master was taking notes on the action of these creatures very scrupulously -once I secretly captured a chapter from his notebook termed “the Mother Teresa Case”, but didn’t understand anything! Master, then, used an a posteriori biometric stator to reconstruct the lives of these creatures frame by frame, through history, as a movie film and carefully analyzed their behavior over the years.

After decades of studying and working in numerous “Mother Teresa-like” cases, he is now completing the first synthesis of this sophisticated vector, which will hopefully lead the creatures to a totally different -and perhaps healthier- branch in the evolutionary tree.

Hope he finishes it up soon, though, because the creatures are growing more and more and I am not sure for how long I will be capable of keeping them in this closet. Because once they spread, these cancerous things are worse than a disease itself!

- - -
George S. Karagiannis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece and is currently a PhD student at the University of Toronto in Canada. He enjoys writing science-fiction in the subgenres of hard science fiction, bizzarro and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic settings. He is also an abstractionist/surreal artist and his blog can be found here: http://abstractsur.blogspot.com/. His personal website can be found here: http://karagiannis-sci-fi.blogspot.ca/

10/18/12

2012-10-18T00:00:00.002-07:00

But, Worth the Journey
By Acquanetta M. Sproule

Lost child. Lost child. Found.
Taken Dimensions apart.
Raised Here. Raised There. Loved.

Named Mik. Named Atten.
Each unknown to the other.
Content, at least. For now.

Atten, child of Space.
Star hopping for fun and gain.
Home is a fast ship.

Mik, child of Magic.
Apprenticed to the Masters.
Home is The Great World.

Mik. Grown. Atten. Grown.
Adequately surviving.
Content. At least, for now…

*
Mik reveres the Fates.
Controlled Knowledge is Power.
Power is Freedom.

Atten taunts the Fates.
To help stave off Their boredom.
Someone must do it.

Soon, Journeyman Mik?
Final test…Astrally Project,
away from Great World.

For 'grins and giggles,'
Atten returns to Found Place.
Hangs around awhile.

Mik steps out and drifts.
Drawn from destination.
Drawn back to Found Place.

Mik incorporates.
"This form feels familiar."
Atten is…surprised…

Mik. Atten. Now One.
Each now known to the Other.
Mik/Atten. Now One.

*
Lost Child. Found Child. Mik.
Trailed by amused Monitor,
"Stay or Come. You Choose."

What is best for both?
Should Mage or Maverick lead?
Which can follow best?

My way? Your way? No…
We are much too much alike.
We'd hate each other.

Atten. Mik. Once more.
A fast ship. The Great World. Home .
Freedom, is preferred…

Found kin. Found friend. Lost.
Accepting the apartness.
Alone? Yes…but Loved.

- - -
I write weird stuff.

10/11/12

2012-10-11T00:00:00.003-07:00

Edie and the Aliens
By Beth J. Whiting

Edie was fourteen years old. She was alone in the middle of the cornfields when it happened. Edie often liked walking by herself at night. She found it soothing. She had on a pink Easter dress. She was a blonde.
When she saw the lights, she assumed that it was a helicopter or something like that. But then the oval shape of the silver spaceship came into view. Edie just stood still. She should have ran but she remained frozen.
The green men came down and took her into the ship.
The flight up was weird. All of the aliens were in their space suits running around the spaceship. She was dizzy from the flight. She heard them speaking in another language.

When Edie came to she was in a large empty warehouse. An alien in a suit was in a desk in front of her. Two aliens were at his sides.
The alien in a suit spoke English, “In a matter of weeks you will have an operation. We do have several abductees so you will have to remain on a waiting list until the procedure is done. Afterwards you can go home.”
“How soon is that?”
“Generally a month.”

She was taken to a warehouse full of humans in bunk beds. Most people looked out of it. Edie was given blue scrubs to wear. Everyone else wore blue scrubs.
People were rambling. Most of the talk was about getting back home and their families.
When Edie approached her bunk bed, the woman on the bottom her said, “But you’re just a little girl.”
Edie agreed with her. Edie laid there on the top bunk. She had had a rough day. She stared into space.

The next day Edie was awaken by the aliens. It was 6 o’clock in the morning. She was told it was breakfast time. She went down to the cafeteria with the other humans. They fed them cornbread, grits, and milk.
“This is when they feed us good. Just wait for the gruel in the night,” a guy warned her.
Edie ate her meal in silence.

Edie was walking on her way back to the warehouse when she bumped into a little alien.
He said, “Excuse me.”
It was strange, a polite alien. He was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, like he was a human.
She asked, “What’s your name kid?”
He answered, “Wrong.”
What a weird name.
“You speak English.”
“Not many people do around here.”
He was right. She only heard one and that was the guy in charge she guessed.
“I’ll be seeing you around,” the alien said. He carried a deck of cards in hands. He scampered away.

When Edie went to her quarters, she enquired about the little alien.
“Where does he come from?”
“That alien is the leader’s child. Just because he’s a kid doesn’t mean he isn’t tainted like the rest.”
Edie put that in mind. Just because they were little didn’t mean they didn’t have an agenda.

Edie saw there were a few teenagers and children there. They already had formed their own little clique there. She didn’t know how to break in.
When Edie was coming back from the cafeteria, the alien asked her to play hoops with him.
She didn’t see why not.
He went to a basketball court.
It wasn’t occupied at the moment.
“I like to play hoops by myself,” he said.
She said bitterly, “How does it feel to have a tyrant for a father?”
The alien didn’t talk at first.
“I honestly don’t know what goes on in the abductions. That’s grown up stuff. My father has already taught me English because he sees a bright future for me. So yeah when I grow up I probably will abduct you.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
“In the mean time we can play hoops. So what’s your name?”
She was about to say that she didn’t care to talk to him. But Edie realized it was a whole month before the operation. She had to talk to someone.
“So do you know anything about the operation?”
“No.”
“Do you like humans?”
“Yes. I do think what my father does is wrong. But I’m going to have to unlearn that if I want to survive as a grown up.”
“I bet I can throw more hoops than you.”
“You’re on.”
They played for thirty minutes before the alien said they had to stop.
“I have to get home before my father comes home. He gets mad when I’m late.”
She went home to the bunk bed. She laid there on her bed for an hour. Without books or television, life was boring. That little alien looked like he was going to be her sole entertainment.

The next day the adults got talking among themselves. They had theories about the operation.
Some said it was a black market.
Others said that it was supposed to be an exercise in torture.
Edie’s stomach tied itself in knots. In some way it would have been better just to get it over with. But they had plenty of humans to choose from.
“They’re going to eat me,” one man raved.
One woman was paranoid.
“They say they’re take us back but can we really trust their word?”

Edie found that the alien was always in view on her way back. She realized he purposefully wanted to meet her.
“Why me? Why not the other kids?”
“They have their own crowd.”
“I just haven’t had the time to get myself into one.”
“It’s been a week.”
“It’s not like I’ll see these people again. Some probably live in other countries. Why do you need us anyway?”
“That’s classified information.”
“How would you like if humans abducted aliens?”
“They do tests on us too.”
“Oh.”
“You want to play some hoops or not?”
“Don’t you have anything else here?”
“There’s a swimming pool but you don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Fine we’ll play hoops.”

While they were playing hoops she asked, “Do you have any alien friends your age?”
“Just two.”
“Why do you hang around me then?”
“Because I was bored and picked you out of a crowd. You’re too analytical. What do you plan to do when you get home?”
“I plan to tell my family I was abducted by aliens.”
“They won’t believe you.”
“I’m not the only person running around saying that.”

By the second week the people around her bunk bed knew that Edie was playing hoops with the alien.
“Why do you want to become friends with them? You’re friends with the enemy. What you think you’re too good for us?”
She started to notice that people snubbed her. She would get a whole table by herself at lunch.
She told herself who needs them anyway. It was only a month.

Edie noticed that the last week of the month the alien began to be sad.
Edie jumped and said, “It’s the last week.”
The alien was sad, “You’re just be back home. You’re already on another planet, having an experience.”
“You’ll miss me huh?”
Edie smiled. Then she noticed he frowned. So she realized she put her foot in her mouth and was quiet the rest of their time together.

The operation wasn’t something to be excited about.
There were aliens in medical coats. Edie screamed when they took her away. Four seized her and grabbed her from her bunk bed, dragging her to the ground. She threw a tantrum. Her legs were flying everywhere.
She saw the operating room and there were sharp tools all around. She screamed. But then an alien knocked her out.

When Edie came to, she was in a crop circle in the cornfields. She realized it was her own land. So she walked back home.
She found her father near the house.
When he saw her he ran towards her.
“Edie. Edie. You’re back.”
Then her father brought her mother home and they rejoiced.
“Where did you run away to Edie?”
“I was abducted.”
“You were what?”

The parents grounded her for a month for running away. Her explanation of UFO’s didn’t stand to reason for them.
Her father ended up calling Edie loopy.
She had missed her entire summer.
She thought about Wrong sometimes. Maybe he found another human replacement to play with.

When Edie came to high school, it wasn’t the Edie that had come before hand. It was one that had her hair uncombed and her thoughts in another place.
When people asked why she wasn’t seen during the summer Edie answered that she had been abducted by aliens. She was looked at strangely from then.
It was while at school that Edie noticed that something was wrong. All of the assignments in school looked like a foreign language to her. She could study and study but nothing came through. She was getting F’s on all of her assignments.
The counselor said, “I’m afraid that Edie has to be held back. She’s not all there.”
Edie realized why the operation was done. It was to extract information. But why a teenager?
Why not get a rocket scientist or someone smart?

That was when Edie started to write letters to Wrong.
She wrote Wrong telling him what had happened, that they had taken information for her head. Why she did not know. She asked if he was playing with someone else.
She sent these letters by post office with just Wrong on the envelope.
He never wrote back. Since she put a forward letter on the address she assumed that he was getting them which was why she didn’t stop.

When Edie was sixteen in the ninth grade again, she had someone in the class ask why she was repeating the grade.
She answered calmly that aliens had abducted her and taken information from her brain.
The kids around her laughed.
When Edie was walking out into the halls, she found a masculine looking guy follow her. She wondered why this was.
“You shouldn’t say things like that.”
“But it’s the truth.”
He introduced himself as Aaron.
“I heard about you from my mom. She’s the English teacher at this school. You failed her class. She was intrigued because you showed up for after school tutoring too.”
“Oh.”
“I’d like to hear about your alien encounters.”
She had a feeling that he didn’t believe her. But she wanted to talk to someone so she agreed.
After school Edie talked to him in the shade outside school. She told him about Wrong, about them abstracting information from her.
When she was done he said, “You have one over active imagination.”
“But it’s the truth,” she said defensive.
“Let me tell you what I’ll be your tutor. You can pay me $5 an hour. I’m cheap. Besides I’d like to hear more about your alien stories.”
“What grades do you get?”
“A’s. I could show you my report card if you want.”
Edie thought the guy was a jerk. But he did offer cheap prices. Her parents would be willing to pay that.

Edie met with him the next day after school in the library.
He was floored.
“You can’t even do long division.”
“I can sort of.”
“Are you sure you weren’t this way before your alien abduction?”
She said, “No. I was an honor roll student. ”
He sighed, “It looks like I’m going to have to teach you from the beginning.”

When Edie got home, she wrote a letter to Wrong.

Wrong,
I had after school tutoring today with a jerk. I feel so stupid. I can’t even do elementary school math. Are you playing with someone else?”
Edie

The next time she met Aaron she talked about the bunked beds. She discussed how she became disliked by the people because she hung out with an alien.
“Well that part makes sense. Of course they wouldn’t want you hanging out with an alien. What age was the alien anyway?”
“I don’t know.”
He laughed, “Can’t you just make up an age?”
She looked annoyed.
“If you’re going to be around me you have to at least accept I believe that these alien visits happen. I don’t want to hear I’m making it up.”
“Fine. Whatever.”

She was surprised in science that he agreed to be her partner.
“I need to get you a guaranteed A.”
He asked her how her parents treated the alien abduction.
“They don’t laugh about it. They don’t believe it though.”
“What about the part about the alien abstraction?”
“I haven’t told them that part. Can we just focus on the science project?”
They had to make a planet model.
Aaron asked her if she could come over.
“You can help me glue and stuff. I’ll write the report.”

So Edie went to Aaron’s house. They had a nice home. It was full of books which made sense since his mother was an English teacher.
They made the project out in the family room which had a nice couch. They made the project on the floor. Aaron had glitter and glue available. She put glitter on the globes that he had already made.
It looked like he did most of it himself already.
So she asked him frankly.
“Why am I here?”
“You’re odd. I’m bored with the people I hang around with.”
She didn’t answer that.
“So how did your alien look like?”
“He had oval eyes and was small. He was green.”
When she mentioned that he wore human clothing, Aaron laughed.
“What he wanted to replicate us?”
She never thought about it that way.
“You say that only his father and him spoke English. I doubt that. With all the alien abductions I would think they would teach that in school.”
Edie was about to say don’t go against my story. But then she remembered that he thought she was making it up.

Edie was surprised when she received a letter the next day. It was from Wrong.

He said that he hadn’t met a human replacement. He said that it was lonely there.

She felt sad about this. She thought about telling Aaron about it since it was proof. But however she refrained from it. She put it in her scrapbook.
Aaron and her gave the science project presentation. It gave her an A but she had a feeling that would still repeat the ninth grade again.

The next letter Edie got was from Wrong’s dad which surprised her.

It pleaded with her to come back with them. Wrong was lonely and Edie was the only friend he had ever. She realized that Wrong had lied to her. In return for agreeing to their terms they would gave her brain back in the condition that it had been.
Edie wasn’t so sure that she wanted another alien abduction but there wasn’t a whole lot going for her here either. She figured at the most they would think she ran away again. So she agreed to their terms.
The spaceship landed on a late Saturday night. Edie ran to the cornfields and found an alien ship with Wrong and his father on board. She hugged him as she went inside.
Aaron couldn’t get to sleep that night and he saw a spaceship flying through the sky. He decided he must have been dreaming.

- - -
Beth J. Whiting was born in 1983 to a large family of brainy eccentrics. At eight years old she developed a love of books through the works of Roald Dahl and C.S. Lewis. Her short stories revolve around underdogs in suburban settings, such as the one in which she was raised. She currently lives with her artistic twin sister in a tiny apartment in Mesa, Arizona.

10/4/12

2012-10-04T00:00:00.012-07:00

Genesis
By John C. Mannone

Galactic outpost, Delta Lyrae1c, Earthdate 2231.4

The landscape smoldered and red dust hung in the thin air; the blue sun slipped below the ragged mountains. Hundreds of dead bodies were strewn amidst the rubble; insects swarmed. Lane stirred from the buzz of flies and their digging into his flesh. The gash in his forehead had festered after several days while he was unconscious in the alien atmosphere. He struggled to stand; in that moment, he remembered what had happened and frantically tried to run, but staggered and fell as he scrambled over the carnage. A sickening-sweetness permeated the air. He pushed away disheveled pieces of walls and toppled roofs, unearthing one dead body after another. A familiar gold barrette lay on the ground. Nearby, long brown hair swept from under the rocks. Lane dashed toward that pile of debris, crying, crying to his wife, “Sarah!” He levered the concrete blocks with a piece of lumber to free her. His fingers shook as he pressed them against her carotid; he sensed a weak pulse. A broken piece of silvered glass, close to her mouth, fogged with faint breath.

***

A few days later, Sarah’s fever broke; she moaned when she sat up. Lane rushed to her side.

“Lie down, darling. Don’t try to get up.” He cradled her hand in his, caressing it; with the other, he gently brushed her hair over her shoulders as he lowered her back down to the mattress. He kissed her on the lips. Her green eyes closed for a moment, but quickly reopened.

“Lane! What happened?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

He struggled to get the words out, “Except for us, everyone is dead from weapons’ blasts… and radiation. We were attacked by something, someone.”

Silence gripped her throat. She stared at Lane for the longest time.

“My God! What are we going to do?”

“Don’t worry about that right now. The reactor is operational, and we have plenty of food and water. I’m sure the Galactic Federation will be sending a patrol soon.” Lane’s face didn’t flinch. All those years in medical school didn’t teach him how to cure fear — only to hide it.

***

Lane was also expert in bionics; Sarah, in physics and electrical engineering. (Being cross-disciplines was survival strategy when terraforming hostile environments.)

Sarah diligently repaired the communications module capable of faster-than-light transmission, and reception, by launching waves into the fifth dimension. Lane wrote new computer codes for the modified unit. It should only take a couple of months to radio Earth; without it, it would take twenty years.

The module crackled on power-up; their faces tensed while sending the distress signal.

***

“It’s been over four months. I don’t think our rescue ship is coming.” Sarah’s head drooped.

Panel lights blinked red. “Wait a minute! I’m getting something.” Sarah pressed the headset to her ears. “It’s from a vessel in Gamma quadrant.”

“Gamma quadrant?” Lane blared. “That’s nowhere near home!”

Straining to hear, she finally discerned the words…Her countenance changed to a blank stare. She removed the headset, gently set it down.

“What’s the matter, honey?” She didn’t answer him. Lane snatched the headset; the words scratched through:

May Day! May Day! This is Federation Battle Cruiser November Alpha One Niner Seven; base coordinates, RA185856.62 DEC324122.4; heading, Vega star cluster, direct. Encountered hostile life forms, entity unknown. Ship damaged. Life-support compromised. All outposts attacked. Earth destroyed.

The Captain’s last words repeated in an endless loop.

She slowly turned to Lane. In that moment, there was nothing they could do but to hold each other. That night, he loved her as if it were the last time.

***

Two suns tugged on this planet; forced it into strange orbits and long seasons of dark. But now was the time for planting. The yellow sun would stay good position for another year. Sarah lost herself in the garden while Lane slaved in the lab while he still had his strength. He didn’t tell Sarah… about the massive dose of radiation he received during the assault; he was thankful that Sarah was in a shielded vault. He didn’t tell her he would not have long to live. He had to finish the project soon!

***

Sarah slept soundly. Lane sensed his biological systems rapidly degrading; it was less than a year since the injury. He kissed her sweetly and slipped out of bed to finish the important work.

He had grown tissue cultures in saline tanks… for the grafting, and installed the last neural net, configured from scavenged circuits. Then Lane recorded his farewell message to Sarah. With activation protocols downloaded, he connected the electrode harness and proceeded with the memory transfer.

***

Sarah awoke; felt a cool breeze up her spine. Lane wasn’t there.

She shuffled to the lab; found Lane slumped over the computer console. “Lane!” She said shaking him. She noticed the clenched piece of paper; listened to the recording.

“Damn you, Lane! How could you leave me? And not say anything?” Mascara inked her cheeks as she crumpled the note.

From the corner of the lab, a high-pitched whir came from the activated cyborg. Lights flashed sporadically from its eyes, and its head twitched. Ingrained with his DNA, it was a perfect replica of Lane: six-foot-two, square-jawed, blond crew-cut, even down to the scar on his head.

Its neural nets overloading from processing its new environment, the cyborg ambled toward her, at first, clumsy and inarticulate, uttering “Sss-aah-rah.”

“Get away from me! You’re not Lane! Leave me alone!”

“Sa-rah…. Sarah….Don’t..go.”

“Get…,” but her mouth hung open on the first syllable.

Tears traced its face. “I am for you, Sarah.”

***

Red dust still hung in the thin blue air. Sarah walked to till the garden; her hair, beautiful in the low sun. Her silhouette — soft, pregnant — blended with his. The cyborg cradled her hand with a touch that she knew well.

- - -
John C. Mannone has been nominated three times for the Pushcart and once for the Rhysling. His work appears in the Baltimore Review, Conclave, Pedestal, The Hellroaring Review, Paper Crow and others. He teaches physics, is a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and is the poetry editor of Silver Blade.

9/27/12

2012-09-27T00:00:00.007-07:00

Event Horizon
By Gabriel Holt

“Do you smell cherry?” he asked the black hole. The black hole did not answer, which he took as rudeness. “You could at least make the effort,” he snapped. “I’m trying.”

The black hole remained silent. The planet Jupiter breezed through its mouth and it yawned.

“Content, hm? Hmph.” He glared into space, the fuzz of galaxies beckoning him to join but he knew he had his place. He knew he needed to keep to his place.

“You’ve eaten my freedom as well,” he said. “That big stupid gape of yours swallowed my entire life.”

The black hole was a pool of death, after all. It was far beyond death. He resented that, too, guarding a pile of bones. Not as if it had any use.

Maybe, he thought. Maybe he could have backed up before it was too late. Maybe he could have served Andromeda. But Andromeda would become a pile of bones, too. Nowhere to run. Eternity would always be the same.

He looked around, but that made no difference. It was the same view he saw every moment, give or take a few billion stars. The universe was condensed into a bottle cap, pressed into a coin by his vacuum. His vacuum; he didn’t like to think of it that way. He didn’t know what he wanted to think instead. The vacuum’s him? Even worse. He closed his eyes and the universe vanished. He opened them again and it was all there. This exquisite boredom crucified him. It had, and it would, for all of time backwards and forwards and probably even beyond that.

There was nothing much to react to, either. There went Mars, flash crash boom muted like a strangle victim. He could react to that. But he did not. What was planetary suicide other than – well, just that? It could be symbolic, he supposed, but the universe had never been symbolic. It had much more important things to do, like not make sense. He too had lost his sense long ago. That is, if his sense had ever existed. He began to doubt that it had. He wasn’t sure about his own existence for that matter, but his own existence was silent and meaningless as Mars was now. Come on, that had to be symbolic.

The universe, as if shaking its head, catapulted Mercury into the black hole. A bulge slithered through the black hole like a mouse through a snake. Snakes had tiny ribcages – infinite ribcages. He wondered if the stars were the ribcage of the universe, a skeleton to support significant things like dust. He, to the best of his knowledge, had no ribcage. Long ago, this might have concerned him, but it was commonplace now. Now that the universe was a pinprick of blood upon a great swath of black.

But there was no word for blackness like this; it meant everything, not simply black. This was all there was, as in a) this is all there is, as in b) nothing. Nothing that mattered, but a whole lot that didn’t. What? Matter.

He was not sure if his eyes were open again. He never needed to close his eyes or to open them, but sometimes he felt he should because something about it seemed right. Or maybe he was wrong. He didn’t know. Ever since he had tripped and fallen he didn’t know. He probably never would. The planet Earth twirled into the black hole, which embraced it with a cobwebby kiss.

He tried to remember if Earth had meant something to him. He could not.

- - -
I am a young Canadian writer studying at the University of Toronto, an admirer or the nonsensical and the nihilistic. My medium is adoxography, and I enjoy cereal. Some people have published my work, and some people have told me that I smell nice.