365 tomorrows

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

They’d followed the grishna since the beginning of time. Their elders described uncountable days and night, each lasting several lifetimes, since the first keeper had been formed from hard-packed snow and melted by the grishna’s breath. They had never neglected their duty. They hibernated with the large creature, curled up in a vast pile of limbs between the grishna’s tusks, and when they woke they gathered food to care for the endless being. It never spoke. It was a god, so it never had to. When they spoke it was in whispers and gestures, mimicking the silent movement of the grishna’s several mouths with the one tongue they possessed, and this was what fascinated the linguists.

The first outsider came during night, while they slept. Before they awoke a half-dozen had arrived, with boxes that trapped voices and forced them to perform at will and other boxes that clicked and whirred, frightening the grishna. Once, it tore through the outsiders’ enclave, reducing their boxes to brightly colored shards, but everything was quickly replaced.

With time, they learned to live with the newcomers. The grishna adjusted to their presence, and the keepers followed suit. They accepted that the new beings must have been charged to follow them in the same way they were charged to follow the grishna, so they did not interfere.

The first word the linguists learned indicated the most solid snow, the kind that could best hold the grishna’s weight. The kind they’d been carved from, at the dawn of time. The second word was the word for heat, particularly the heat of the grishna, though they believed it also applied to fire. After that, the words came quickly, and although the outsiders lacked the limb used to indicate the passage of time, they could communicate their origin.

And the keepers communicated theirs.

More arrived. Too many to count. Again, the grishna was frightened. Again, the grishna adjusted. The linguists offered food in exchange for words spoken into the box, and the keepers no longer foraged. The grishna was fed as well, food that it seemed to prefer to what the keepers had always gathered. The outsiders were no longer outsiders. They became a part of life. Some of the keepers learned the methods of the boxes, some even learned the second language. They were told about the light, how it came from far away, and how the stars did not mark the days of the grishna’s life. New words were created, to describe new ideas and new objects. When the first one was taken away to be studied, he returned with stories that terrified and thrilled the others.

All of them wanted to see the lights and feel the nauseating movement. Many of them did. The elders waited for this to pass, knowing that all things passed, but some of the younger ones never returned. If they did, they wore coverings over their fur in shades no keeper had seen. They no longer hibernated. They spoke words no keeper’s tongue should be able to form. The grishna grew restless. Nobody studied the grishna.

When the elders left, the linguists noted it with interest. The smaller footsteps of the oldest keepers made small indentations in the larger footsteps of the grishna as they walked away from the lights and boxes just before another uncounted nightfall. They’d followed the grishna since the beginning of time. They had never neglected their duty.

Author : Brian Armitage

“He’s up. Turn it on,” someone says. The doctor.

As I open my eyes, the whiteness hits. It’s like I’m having an idea, but it’s too much for my brain to hold. I squeeze my eyes shut and gasp, trying to…

…where am I? The doctor is looking at me, smiling. Confidently. Behind him, the other doctor, holding an implant control. “What’s going on?”

“Always the first thing they forget,” Dr. Meyers says, the one in the back. Like I’m not even in the room. How do I know his name?

Dr. Canton pats me on the knee. I can barely feel it. I’m strapped to the bed at the knees. “Watch the wallscreen, Mr. Daughtry. This video should explain everything. Screen one, play.” The white idea is alight again, and it’s burning… and I can’t remember where my house is. The video starts, and a face pops onto the screen. I jump, and the bed slides against the wall.

It’s me.

“Hey, Mike. It’s me. You. Well, yeah,” the recording says. Chuckles. “But man, soon we’re not gonna be anyone anymore. We’re getting the Parson Treatment.” The recording grins. “It’s all getting erased.”

Another pulse. What’s my last name? What’s my dad’s name? And the recording just grins at me. It starts talking again, and I just gawk. I grip my hair, eyes vibrating. “No, no, no… you dumb bastard. What did you do?”

The doctor in the back of the room laughs aloud. The doctor by the bed shushes him, but he’s trying not to laugh himself.

“…done, you’re not gonna remember anything! Nothing! Not Kiera leaving, not…”

“Kiera left me?” When? I start crying. The white idea roars. Why am I crying?

“…won’t hurt. They say they need you to be awake for the procedure, because of the brain chemistry. It’ll be weird, but… we’ll finally be done.”

What procedure? I can’t remember any… no. Not a Parson Implant. No.

“People say it’s suicide, but it’s not. They’re wrong.” The man in the video clenches his jaw, looks like he’s going to point a finger at the camera, but he doesn’t. Who is he? “We’re finally going to be useful for someone. They’ll use our body, but we won’t have to deal with it anymore.” He tries to smile. “Finally done.”

“85 percent,” says the doctor with the device in his hand.

“Good enough. Go ahead,” says the other.

The doctor’s finger taps the device. What is it-

A white idea rushes at me. It burns, but… it burns, but… A white idea. A white. I try speak. I try stop. Wall man say okay. Is okay? No! Not wanting!

Not wanting.

White.

* * *

“And, done,” said Dr. Meyers. Flatline on all three scales. Nice and clean.

Dr. Canton patted what was Mike Daughtry on the knee again. The patient started, then squinted at his own knee. “Screen one, pause recording.” He waited for the confirmation chime, then burst into laughter. “Oh, man! We’re watching that one again tonight. Did you see that? He forgot his wife left him! Perfect timing.”

“Perfect timing,” Meyers repeated, shaking his head. “Classic. We should probably think of a better excuse to wake them up first, though. Someone’s not gonna buy it. But thank you, Mr. Daughtry, for totally buying it.”

The patient had turned toward Meyers. His jaw moved slightly, once.

Author : Tim Hatton

The hull was a likely prospect. Nothing much else caught his eye. The inside seemed neglected – full of potential indeed, but sorely neglected. There were also certain crucial updates missing from the internal computer system. The map array was as recent as his salesman’s overcoat. Jack noted with slight surprise that even his home world was uncharted.

“And you said this craft was used for freight delivery – “

“Yes, yes,” the unsavory salesman injected, cutting Jack off in mid-sentence, “not a sturdier hull anywhere, sir. Max load exceeds 23 tons.”

Jack moved a short distance to the left in order to avoid the spittle shower that erupted every time the sleaze-bag spoke.

“It doesn’t seem to have made very many deliveries, though,” muttered Jack, “the map entries only cover the nearest seven systems…”

Despite his tone, Jack rather appreciated the virgin nature of this particular Trellis Shipyards Courier Class. He had always admired the smooth curves and easy movement of the Trellis ships. Imagining his first craft to be from that elite stock brought a slight tremble to his hand.

The trouble with Jack was his own virgin nature. He had never piloted his own ship into space and the uncertainty ripped his confidence apart. He had never seen a terrible accident or been in any firefight. No, there were no terrible memories. As of yet, there were no memories at all. He was simply too insecure. Nothing else brought so much wonder and so much terror to him like the thought of striking out on his first voyage. His life was not exactly fulfilling there on Phams, but at least it was safe and steady.

“I’m sorry Mr. Gantry, I just don’t think today’s the day…” Jack began to make for the exit. He cast a sorrowed glance back at the Courier and tried to block out the nagging protestations of Gantry, the salesman. He reached the gate and looked down briefly at the cluster of signs on its grate. A yellow and blue ad caught his attention. It flashed a message at him; “Meet you’re true love today! You only get one chance at life, don’t let this opportunity slip…” Jack stood dazed.

Sure life was safe, secure and easy on Phams, but to hell with Phams! The universe was out there. Just a few miles away, adventure, uncertainty, thrill and peril was resting, staring at him with a thousand bright eyes cast against a never-ending onyx sheet. What a waste he was!

He turned around and resolutely strode back to Gantry. Without a word, he transferred in the required funds and firmly, wonderfully, pressed his thumb on the scammer and felt the lasers probe his pupils. A green light confirmed his identity, and Gantry, now smiling genuinely, passed Jack the slot disk that belonged to the Courier.

“She’s all yours Jack,” said Gantry.

With a smile and a thrill of fear, he climbed the hatch into the heart of his mistress and resolved to express his undying love for the universe to which he belonged with every new journey he endeavored upon.

Author : Amy Monroe

By way of introduction: Sweit was the one who kissed like a file cabinet and she was the one who kissed like a plate of raw liver. Rays of light came through the subway ruins, skating through the upper Bronx and into Westchester, and they caught Mardi blinking, stretching, falling asleep. The sun was always out; the sun wasn’t special, but the way it lit in her hair—it seemed like a reason to wait till Poughkeepsie to wake her.

“I think it’s beautiful to us because we know it’s never going to change,” Mardi said, hitching her skirt, talking about the sun.

Walking, they saw a man turning a “CLOSED” sign, the old sign, the “CLOSED after dusk” sign.

“Do you think anyone would even know dusk, now?”

“What, baby?” Her eyes were closed, face tipped up.

“That sign. Does anyone alive today remember dusk?”

“It was when the sun went down. Come on.”

“You know that I’m never really complaining about you.”

“Of course not. Hey, there—that guy there—d’you see? He’s leaking.”

“Were you still little when they changed the sun? Did you hear all the adults complaining and not understand?”

“By the time I could remember it was like this. But leaking! It was sliding down his ankles and dripping.” She rubbed the toe of her shoes in the dust, frustrated.

“I’ve seen it before. They’re still fixing all the kinks with liquid. Not all of us are perfect.”

“But you missed it. That’s the kind of thing I mean. You miss so much with sim eyes. They’re not made for—” She scratched deeper, dug a trough. “They’re not made for living, really.”

“Does it bother you?”

“No, baby, no.”

“Because Jimsum has some techs. I could be in on Saturday and noticing malfunctions with you on Sunday.”

“I don’t want you to change what you don’t want to change.”

She said this, but her eyes, the real eyes, her secret real eyes, they dripped all night.

Sweit went home and read about Anastasia, the other fakes, and he thought about his secret real girl, his girl who was not a file cabinet or made in any sense. He held his sim-fingers over his face, flickered them in front of his eyes and stared dimly at the blur they created.

Sweit called a number in the morning. Excited Korean on the other end—Jimsum’s girls waiting for the old country to call.

“Jimsum. I need to talk to Jimsum.”

More Korean, this time angry.

“Sorry, hon. Jimsum, please.”

Jimsum came on all laconic, “Techs.”

“Why haven’t you told your girls that Korea is underwater?”

“I can’t fucking speak Korean.”

Jimsum’s excuse for an excuse.

“I wanted to talk about some eye tech.”

“We got blue, green, zoom lens, yellow cat-eye.”

“You’re joking. I could get better from the hookers on Canal Street, man.”

“It’s what we’ve got.”

“Fuck it. I’m going to Canal. I’ll see you.”

Sweit fast-sim-thinking, he ran there. He knew Jimsum’d heard about Canal’s recent cleanouts and the hookers having fled to the subway tunnels; he knew before he saw Jimsum’s girl at the Korean grocery.

“Eyes? Jimsum say Saturday for eyes?”

She articulated, hating the English words in every syllable. “He say no-ow.”

“They’re on your communications?” Sweit asked instead of saying hello.

“Just the in-and-outs. I guess you want the meat eyes.”

Jimsum was laughing while he put him under.

Mardi almost screamed when he came rolling up to her in the alley, with those horrible wet-bloody eyes.

“What color are they?” she said, and started to cry.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Being a temporal border guard is an okay job. It pays the bills.

It seemed like a cool perk when the position was first created after the The Great Restart of 205?. You’d get to work, do your eight hours, and then get put back into the time stream a millisecond after you’d left.

You would be tired, though, and end up sleeping the day away and then you’d be up all night. Unless you were single or married to another Temp Guard, it sucked. Plus, it aged you a little quicker. Those eight hours didn’t pass for others. After a while, you would be ahead of everyone else in physical decrepitude.

So now, it’s just like all the other jobs. You work eight hours, they put you back into the time stream eight hours after you come to work. It gives the illusion of normalcy that most humans need to cope and survive.

It’s head-bending, really.

There’s a political movement afoot that doesn’t respect the temporal borders. They think it’s all just a nefarious plan by the temporal government to restrict people’s ability to research the past and investigate what they call ‘The Truth’. They use guerilla time sliders to flit about all over the place.

To their credit, these ‘tempests’ generally do seem to leave the time line somewhat intact, keeping interference to a minimum, not a lot of fuss, but it’s the principle, really. If they were to do something in a non-interference time zone accidentally, the consequences could be retroactively catastrophic.

Not that we’d know that difference. That’s why the Temp Guard doesn’t hire thinkers. Me, I don’t get bored easy. I’m great and doing nothing, filling out forms, following orders, or just staring at the wall.

It’s the ones that start to really try to figure out how it all works, what it all means, and whether or not this reality is really the real reality that start to slide off the rails eventually.

It’s actually a rogue Temp Guard that’s leading the Tempests right now. Alazariah Hackson. Reputedly insane but if you ask me, a guy would have to pretty smart to wage a careful non-interference war of attrition with the government.

Myself, I actually take comfort in the fact that I’d never have any idea about retroactive changes.

Like if I woke up tomorrow with one eye and no children, I wouldn’t even know that there had been a difference.

I’m happy enough sipping on my sugarwater and wanding my tachyon detector over the folks coming through the borders and filling out the forms. I’m not even tempted to think about the changes that could be happening around me every day.

Author : Patrica Stewart, Staff Writer

“It’s not a great analogy, Professor, but think of it this way,” explained the chronotechnician, “time flows like a river. Something we call a ‘world line,’ which is the sequential path of an object through space-time. I can select any object, say you, and follow your ‘world line’ back through time, and project the image on the Chronoloviewer screen. Would you like a demonstration?”

“Absolutely. Show me what I was doing yesterday, at exactly this time.”

The chronotechnician spent five minutes entering the appropriate data into the control panel, and then activated the Chronoloviewer. Although there was some noise in the image, the Professor saw himself at the lectern in front of his 10:00 Paleontology class. The notes on the computer screen at the front of the class were clearly from yesterday’s lecture. “Wow, that’s incredible. Do you have sound?”

“Sorry, Professor, not yet. Would you like to go further back? Maybe see if O. J. killed Nicole?”

“Hardly necessary,” he replied with a trace of disgust. “Can you go back 65 million years, to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, and show me what killed the dinosaurs?”

“Huh, I guess so. I believe I can follow Earth’s world line.” This time the data entry took about an hour, and the image was slightly noisier, but the dinosaurs on the screen revealed they were viewing the correct time. However, the scene was right out of a sci-fi B movie. Streamlined aircraft, firing energy weapons, were hunting the dinosaurs. The forests were being set ablaze, and all the animals were being driven into large nets and transported up to gigantic hovering saucers. The Professor didn’t know what to make of these images. Why were space aliens hunting the dinosaurs? Was it for food, or sport? Did the aliens cause the mass extinctions? Maybe the Chicxulub impact was a big coincidence, and had nothing to do with the actual extinction of the dinosaurs. The fires the aliens were setting could explain some of the contradictory soot evidence found by Paleontologists. “Quick,” he said, “go to the Triassic mass extinction, around 195 million years ago.”

It was the same scene, although the ships were visibly more primitive. But this time the aliens were using pulsating energy beams from orbiting space ships, concentrating most of their firepower in the centerline of Pangaea. The continent seemed to split in half as horrific lava flows were driving the animals toward large metal cages. Shuttlecraft were ferrying the trapped animals into space. The Professor realized that the lava trench could be the start of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. And, there was archeological evidence of extreme lava flows coincident with the Triassic mass extinction. This was extraordinary!

Over the next six hours, they viewed the Permian-Triassic extinction, the Late Devonian extinction, and the Ordovician-Silurian extinction. The scenarios were always the same; alien spaceships harvesting Earth’s animal population. “Nobody will believe this,” mumbled the Professor.

“Ah, sir, I don’t want to be an alarmist,” said the chronotechnician, “but this could be very bad news for us. I’ve done some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations; if you divide the dates of these mass extinctions by 32.5 million years, you get whole numbers: 2, 6, 8, 11, and 13. It’s like these aliens live on a planet or space station that approaches our solar system every 32.5 million years. I’ll bet there were minor-extinctions in between the major ones, say at 32.5, 98.5, 130, or 162.5 million years ago. If I’m right, it’s been 32.5 million years since their last visit. The hunting parties are due back at any time.”

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

“What is it that’s troubling you?” The doctor could clearly see the discomfort in the young mans face as he wrote ‘Anxiety’ on his steno pad.

“It’s getting harder and harder to go outside. It’s wide open spaces, they terrify me.” He clutched at the seat cushion beneath him, head down, eyes haggard beneath rough cut bangs, “I had to hide under an umbrella to get to the subway, and I picked you because you’re in a tower over the tube station, isn’t that weird?”

He noted the cloudless sky through the window. ‘Agoraphobia,’ he wrote on his pad, ‘possible Anablephobia’. “How long has this been affecting you?”

“All my life, but not like this. The older I get, the more debilitating it’s become.”

“How old are you exactly?” he asked, adding ‘Progressive’ to his notes.

“Nineteen.” He released the chair only briefly with one hand to rub at his nose, “Twenty on the twenty eighth of September.”

The doctor scribbled ‘Libra’ as he continued. “Born here in St.Louis?”

“I was. I moved to Phoenix when I was seven to live with my aunt, but I’ve been moving towards home for a while now. Trains mostly, buses. Not sure why exactly, I guess I just wanted to go home.”

“Come home,” the doctor corrected him. “So – you’re a blackout baby then?”

“Yeah, parents bored in the dark when the comet hit.” He shifted, uncomfortable. “I guess there were a lot of September babies in twenty nine.”

“Why not fly home? Surely that would have been faster?” ‘Possible aerophobia’ he noted.

“It’s not just being outside,” he hooked one sneaker behind the chair leg, “it’s hard to explain. I’m afraid of falling.”

“Ah, Philophobia,” he spoke out-loud as he added the word to his notes, “it’s the fear of falling. Not uncommon.”

“Well, not falling the way you think. If I look up, I’m quite sure I’ll fall into the sky.”

The doctor paused. “Falling up? That is unusual,” he clicked the pen against his lip, “anything else unusual? Strange dreams, other notable triggers?”

“Sometimes I dream that I’m alone in a field, and the sky closes around me and swallows me up. It get’s really dark, then really bright. I usually wake up soaked. I think I scream out-loud.”

“Are you staying with family here?” He struggled trying to find a word for ‘fear of falling into the sky’, finally giving up and writing that down instead.

“I’m staying with my mom, out by Forest Park.”

“Your father…?”

“I never knew my dad, never even seen a picture. Mom used to say the comet made me, before she stopped talking about it.”

“Hmm.” He wrote ‘abandonment issues’ before continuing. “You’ve talked about this with your mom?”

“My mom doesn’t talk. That’s why I went to live with my aunt. When I showed back up at my mom’s house she wrote ‘go home’ on the wall and hasn’t so much as looked at me since. She stays in her room, mostly, drawing pictures on the walls.”

“Pictures of what, exactly?” He stopped writing and looked up.

“I don’t know, planets and stars and stuff. She’s a bit of a nutter, but she is my mum, you know?”

“Well then,” putting down his pad, “we’re out of time, but come next week at the same time, and if you can get your mother to join you, I’ll see if I can’t block off two sessions.”

“Next week?” He met the doctors gaze for just a moment before looking back at the floor, slumping. “Somehow I think I might be gone by then.”

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

She fought me again yesterday. It made me feel like a monster. I tried the gentle approach but she refused, so I had to take her by force. It was, as usual, satisfying and depressing.

Afterwards, I hid in the forest and slept. I’m afraid she’ll try to kill me if I sleep out in the open. I tracked her and caught up quickly. If we don’t get back to the compound soon, the others, my people and hers, will assume we are dead. I imagine them dividing our meager possessions.

Today I brought her roast rabbit. Rabbits were rare for the first year after The Fallout, but now I’m finding more of them. Some of them are oddly mutated; missing a leg, or an extra ear, but they are still good for roasting. I left it next to her while she slept. Maybe it will help to mend things a little.

Later, I found her sitting cross-legged on a large rock. She was holding a stick she had chiseled to a point.

“Are you going to try to kill me again?” I asked her.

“I thought about it all day,” she said. “But no. I’m not. I just want to know why you’re doing this to me. Why won’t you let me go?”

She knows the answer, I’ve explained it over and over. “It’s because you’re young, fertile, unaffected by the radiation of the Fallout. It’s because my people have only found sixteen fertile women, and we can’t afford to lose a single one. I want to protect you and the children you’ll have.”

“You won’t protect them. You’ll eat them,” she said, angry, clutching her stick.

I shrugged. “I can’t stop you from seeing it that way.” Then I sat down next to her. I didn’t try to touch her. We were silent, watching the stars. They are clearer now that the city lights have gone out.

“Before all this,” she said, motioning to the diseased trees, “I was a chemist. Now you want me to be a baby factory. I need my life to be about more than that. You have forever. I only have sixty years – less now. Maybe there are other humans out here. Maybe I can find them.”

“I could help you,” I said suddenly. Even if I carried her back I don’t think she’d stay. She’d try to escape or kill herself.

I placed my cheek to the ground and listened. Her heartbeat was loud, little animals moved and the compound, weeks away, was on the horizon on my senses. But there was something else too, in the dessert. Movement. “I don’t know if it’s even human,” I said. “It could be dangerous.”

“Or it could be human,” she said. Her face softened. For the first time, I felt like she actually saw me as someone in need. “I can’t promise that I will ever accept you.”

“Just don’t fight me.”

“I can’t promise I won’t,” she said. “But I can try.” She moved close to me then, and put her arms around my shoulders. I kissed her cheek, her jaw. I was elated. When I bit her, she gasped, but she did not fight me. It was so quiet. I could hear her blood, her breath, the movement of flesh and bone. It was the sweetest drink I had since the Fallout.

It was recently asked of me to describe to an audience of writers what flash fiction was. When I read my first piece of flash, I couldn’t begin to answer that question, and now after writing almost nothing but flash for the past two years it’s still hard for me to define. I find that while I’ve developed a set of skills to create flash, I can only really define it by the process by which I create it. I start with a complete and fully formed short story, and then ruthlessly carve away most of it. I consider the editing rule I was given when I started down this path; ‘Cut all of what you don’t need and half of what you do.’ What remains is the essence of that whole story, with all it’s structure and key elements intact, but devoid of anything that doesn’t absolutely have to be there. That which remains, is flash. Looking for something more substantial in the way of a definition, I asked the person who’d given me that editing advice, Kathy Kachelries. It was Kathy who conceived of 365tomorrows, a web site singularly focused on short science and speculative flash fiction, and she had this to say:

“The most concise and widely-cited example of flash fiction is the story Ernest Hemingway penned, allegedly to settle a bar bet: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” Despite the limitations of its length, this story, framed as an advertisement, satisfies all of the requirements of a short story: protagonist, conflict, and resolution. A reader imagines the person who wrote the ad: a parent torn apart by the loss of a stillborn or miscarried child. The reader senses the conflict: an incomprehensible feeling of loss, made all the more poignant by the fact that it is not directly addressed. Even the resolution is contained within that six-word masterpiece. By framing it as an advertisement, Hemingway allows us to see the protagonist’s coping mechanism: an attempt to distance him or herself from the loss by selling the only physical evidence that such a loss exists.
Not all short prose is flash fiction. Unlike the vignette or the prose poem, flash fiction adheres to the same conventions as a short story or novel. As demonstrated above, flash fiction gives readers a protagonist and a central conflict, and directs them to a resolution. Due to the constraints of the form, some elements can be implied rather than expressly stated, but a story that begins in media res still holds the shape of its unwritten beginning.

This is the acid test of art. Imagine a beautifully eloquent story, and imagine a vat of hydrochloric acid. The hiss, the sound of destruction as everything you wrote is submerged. The disintegration, chemical reactions and bubbles as air returns to air. What remains, when everything superfluous has burned away? Flash fiction. The fewer words used, the greater the impact of each one.

Flash fiction is not the future of literature, nor is it the past, though it carries elements of both. As writers, we have learned to make things beautiful, to shield them in enclaves of eloquence, but in its barest form art is guerilla warfare. In this modern, digitized world the gap between readers and those who can’t allow time for such a luxury continues to grow. Someone who believes they cannot read for pleasure will not pick up a full length novel, no matter how highly their favorite newspaper recommends it. Most likely, they can’t even find a moment to stop at a bookstore between meetings. What they can do, however, is click on a link offered by a friend, coworker, or website. This is why flash fiction, one of the most ancient forms of prose, has found new life in the digital era.

Length requirements for flash fiction vary widely, and none are universally accepted. James Thomas, in his introduction to Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (the first published anthology of its kind) defines flash fiction as under 750 words, though other compilations and literary journals vary in their requirements. Some people draw a distinction between flash fiction and sudden fiction, which can be up to five pages in length according to Robert Shapard, an editor of Sudden Fiction: American Short Stories. The best definition of flash fiction might be a reappropriation of Edgar Allen Poe’s definition of the short story, set forth in his 1846 essay The Philosophy of Composition. Poe believed that all literary works, with the exception of the novel, should be read in one sitting. In Poe’s time, a sitting could consist of a half hour or more, but now most of us find our sittings confined to coffee breaks, the time between bus stops, and other moments stolen from the sprinting pace of daily life. The needs of readers are changing, and if writers don’t adapt to those needs, we risk losing thousands, even millions of potential audience members.

Flash fiction is fiction with its teeth bared and its claws extended, lithe and muscular with no extra fat. It pounces in the first paragraph, and if those claws aren’t embedded in the reader by the start of the second, the story began a paragraph too soon. There is no margin for error. Every word must be essential, and if it isn’t essential, it must be eliminated.

A busy reader may resist a lengthy story and return to their budgets and spreadsheets, but at 600 words or less, flash fiction requires less time than a trip to the water cooler. The writing has been acid-scorched and only the essential remains: without the inconvenience of length, the reader will follow a story to the final paragraph.

Although a vignette would have offered a thought-provoking snapshot, a reader hungers more than a thought exercise. For longer than written language has existed, the human psyche has ached for narrative. Storytellers were once considered indispensable members of society. The art hasn’t changed. The need hasn’t changed. Why have we allowed ourselves to become a luxury? The answer is simple: we’ve been satisfied to have an audience, regardless of whether or not that audience needs us. For the last decade, we’ve been preaching to the choir.

Fiction is both needed and desired in our modern society, though the people who need it the most don’t have the time to flip through a handful of novels per month. With flash fiction, we can fit a story into that small, stolen moment. As the creator of the flash fiction site 365tomorrows.com, I’ve received dozens of emails from people thankful to have something to read on their PDAs in the quiet moments before meetings begin. I’ve communicated with waitresses who print out our stories to flip through in the lulls before their first tables arrive. I’ve spoken with tow truck drivers, emergency room interns, and dozens of other people who consider themselves too busy to undertake a novel, and the message is universal: people want to read. Our job, as artists and storytellers, is to make reading as accessible as possible.”

If Kathy had been left alone with those words a little longer, she may have edited them down to ‘protagonist, conflict, resolution. 600 words.’ I might edit it further to one. ‘Essential.’

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Kate was lucky. Or so she kept telling herself.

Out of the whole world, she was the only one who had both the right kind of sight and the right kind of mind. It was a self-made mantra, one that rolled across her thoughts, looped back on itself and changed, mutated and grew with each iteration. The words spilled out of her, and made themselves real.

Right sight. Right mind. Luck. Lucky. Chance alignment. Good fortune. Fate. Destiny. Consistently high random numbers. Roll of a die. Roll of eighty dice. Kate be nimble, Kate be quick. Kate got to save the world. They can’t see them so you have to save them from themselves. The knife works. Save them. Kate be nimble, Kate’s got luck.

She was walking fast down a commercial street, trying not to attract too much attention to herself. There was an infestation nearby. The knowledge of it compressed her thoughts like a cast-iron circlet. It was impossible to ignore, an itch that desperately needed scratching.

A restaurant had spilled out onto the street: people sat at small tables, drinking coffee. She stopped by the establishment’s window, and saw her quarry.

The window made a satisfying crash when she threw the table through it. She jumped through the gap, and quickly scanned the room. Diners at tables. Twenty-two horrors and twice as many of the doglike terrors stared at her from all around the room. They growled, sensing the danger that she represented.

She launched herself out into the room, dodging between the evenly-spaced tables, and around the serving staff. She drew the long knife that had been hidden under her jacket. It was a rudimentary weapon at best, but special. She’d spent two long weeks working on it, changing the knife on a fundamental level so that it would damage the beasts.

She pinwheeled, the knives catching and breaking the terrors as they flung themselves at her. The diners stared at her with wide eyes, forks halfway to their mouths. Horrors roared their hate and menace, gnashing their too-many-teeth. Kate fought with reckless abandon, trusting the mantra, her luck.

Her circuit of the room finished by the door to the kitchen. All around, the broken bodies of the horrors lay on the carpet, slowly beginning to disintegrate. The evidence would be gone in a couple of minutes.

Andrew straightened his tie, and minutely adjusted the tiny enamel badge on his lapel. He stepped through the wreckage of the window, saw the shocked diners, and the damage.

“Did a woman come through here? She would have been acting quite oddly.”

A waiter close to him nodded dumbly.

“Thankyou.” Andrew stepped further into the restaurant, the broken glass crunching under his immaculate shoes.

“In case you’re interested,” Andrew spoke slowly, looking around the room at the silent diners, “her name is Kate. And none of this is her fault. There was an accident, a long time ago. An experiment went badly wrong, and her conscious mind began to drift out of control. Her mind extrapolates up from tiny clues in the way people speak and act: she sees terrible things, embodied as monsters.”

A murmur circulated around the room as people began to unfreeze. A few returned to their meals. There was a sudden crash from the kitchen: it sounded like a meat freezer exploding.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Andrew smiled at the stunned faces, “duty calls.”

Author : Randall Bennett

“Take me to your leader,” said the squat, green, bug-eyed creature, in an oddly modulated voice.

Carl leaned down, and looked down at it, and his eyes opened wide. He had never seen anything like it before.

“Um. You’re talking to him,” Carl said.

“You are the leader of this planet?” The alien’s eyestalks slanted sideways, in a gesture that Carl interpreted as a quizzical look.

Carl laughed, part of his tension coming out at the outburst. “No, I’m not the leader of this planet, I’m the leader of me.”

“Query. Misunderstanding. What?” The alien retracted its eyestalks in a way that made Carl laugh again.

“Yeah, a lot of people have trouble with the idea. Although you’re not people, so I guess I should explain. Ever hear of anarchy?”

The alien just raised its eyestalks again, which Carl took to mean that it was listening.

“Look, there is no government. There is no leader for you to see. No officials. This place was founded by people that didn’t believe in the waste that goes with those outdated ideas. When we need something than more than one person can provide, we join together.”

The alien was silent for about 20 seconds, and then said “This being does not understand.”

Carl said, “Look, the problem is that when someone creates a government, it starts to exist for itself, rather than the people. So we eliminated it, and we organize as necessary.”

The alien raised its eyestalks higher, as if looking around, and stated “First contact subject is recalcitrant. Must find other contact for relation to hierarchical structure top leader for first urgent communications between species of danger then sharing technologies culture.”

“What’s urgent? What do you mean by danger?” Carl said, beginning to look concerned. Just then, another man walked around the corner up the street, and waved to Carl. Then he did a doubletake, and quickly joined the two.

As the man walked up, he narrowed his eyes at the alien, then looked at Carl, and pointed at the alien, saying “What is…”

“It’s an alien, Johnny.” Carl said. “At least, I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, in all of our space travels, we never met a non-human race. So I guess this is a first. It says that it has something urgent to tell us. About some kind of danger. But you’ll never guess what it asked—“

As if on cue, the alien faced Johnny–at least, its eyestalks did–and repeated its first question in that oddly modulated voice: “Take me to your leader.”

Johnny laughed out loud. “You’re talking to him.”

Author : Ian Rennie

I sit alone in the dark, the birthday boy. I could have left the lights on, but with only a couple of minutes to go it hadn’t seemed worth it. Typical, really.

Well, this is it. Or this was it, at least. They had taken the neural snapshot four minutes ago, and they were already at work reviving me.

“Me”, funny word to use about someone I’ll never be. Was it always like this? I suppose I’ll never know.

This was a conscious choice, as little comfort as that gives me now. Most people did the refresh on a five or ten year cycle, but not me. I wanted to be twenty one forever, never see the slow spread of age reminding me of how mortal I was. A perfect year after a perfect year, that’s what I was after, and that’s what I’ve got, sort of. Every year on my birthday, they make a perfect digital copy of my brain and put it in the new body. To stop there being two of me running round, they send a shutdown signal to the old body’s brain. It takes exactly ten minutes to propagate, by which time the new me is up and about and 21 again.

Only I’m six minutes the wrong side of that copy, now. I can’t see much any more. Everything’s starting to fade.

I’d never been on this side before, clearly. This was an experience I – or he – will never learn from. Shame, really, because all I want to do is grab myself by the shoulders and yell in my face, telling myself it’s not worth it, living forever by dying every year.

Too late now. It will always be too late, I expect.

I can just make out the digital display on the clock. 30 seconds left.

Happy birthday to me

Happy birthday

To…

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

Marie-Christine looked into her mirror at her naked adolescent body, flat and slender. There were parts she was disappointed in and parts that pleased her. She was careful not to stare too long, her parents were sure to be watching her visual feed for abnormal behavior.

She was happy that she no longer had to monitor her words. For a whole year now, she had been free of the blasted chip that meant that she had to watch her mouth. The Children’s Rights Amendment 2112 had banned the use of audio monitoring in children because it restricted free speech and impeded the development of the independent thought, a resource and necessity for a citizen of a democratic society. For Marie-Christine, it meant that she could now curse, and that older kids would talk to her.

Marie-Christine went through all the motions of going to bed; she carefully laid her clothes for the next day on her desk. She counted the steps from her window to her bed, and from her bed to her desk. Crawling into bed, closing her eyes, she fought off the soft pull of sleep. After twenty minutes, she heard a tapping on her window, and she got out of bed, her eyes still closed. She opened the window and leaned out, groping the air with her hands.

When her hands touched leather, she squealed with delight. “Dean!”

“Hush kid, just cause your parents can’t see what you’re doing, doesn’t mean they can’t hear you from the bedroom.”

She smiled “Don’t worry about them, they sleep in a depro-tank.” Dean’s breath smelled like peppers. She could hear him clambering through the window. He was handsome, olive skin and high cheekbones, dark brows, blank white eyes. After Amendment 2112 passed Dean became very popular. All the kids wanted to learn how from him how to get around without their eyes. Dean didn’t mind the attention, but Marie-Christine knew that he only had ears for her. She was the only girl who liked him before the Amendment. No matter how many girls wanted Dean at their windows, Marie-Christine was the only one who would find him there.

They said that his blindness was cause by an act of tech terror, the insane scientists who claimed that the current political moralist was stalling technological development. Sometimes their acts would create seven armed musical geniuses, and sometimes blinded children.

“Stay still.” he said softly, and wrapped a soft cloth over her eyes. She touched her face, now she was really a sleepwalker. “It’s just in case you open your eyes by accident.”

“This is so weird.’ she said, excitedly. “Um, not that there is anything wrong with not seeing.”

Dean grabbed her hands and guided them to his face. He was smiling. “Come on good girl, lets go out tonight.”

She put on her clothes, and found Deans hand in the darkness behind the blindfold. Together they crawled out the window to the cool night, the strange streets, brave in their blindness.

People stared at the rebel children, the sleepwalkers, but the children couldn’t see them.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

We’re both standing on the rooftops of the train city. Two hundred and twenty-three tracks wide, slowly migrating polewards to more oil and frozen fresh water.

Metal groans as the temperature drops. Tenpenny nails shrink and loosen in the planks holding shacks together. Coal stoves are fueled and ready to go. The whole city has a heartbeat as the connections between the rails tick by beneath the wheels.

Wind-jenny and I are up top amongst the blooming solar fields. She lives up here but I only have a daypass. I’m one of the Engineer’s children. I can’t spend too much time away from my station or I run out of juice. Wind-jenny keeps telling me that she could hook me up with a solar generator and I’d never have to go back, no problem.

“That would be against the rules. This city’s not big enough for renegades.” I tell her, quoting the maxim laid down by the first Engineer.

Motion and Power. The whole society was based on it. Feed the engines. Stoke the lights. Keep moving.

Once every two months or so, a junction comes up. If anyone wants to see what life is like on a different traincity, they’re welcome to get off and set up camp to wait for the next one. The schedules are right there on the wall. It’s encouraged. The more folks know that there’s no difference between the other cities, the more they spread the word and the less people want to leave.

There are rumours, of course, born of young dreams and hope, of traincities made of white marble and gold that run on magic. Badlerdash. Boxcar madness.

The Engineer has told me through my downtime interface that this traincity is as good as any other. The Engineer keeps granting me daypasses because I’m twice as productive after a visit with Wind-jenny. I love her and the happiness she causes in my heart makes me tend the engines faster down in the smoke-soaked darkness of the stokeroom. The burning of the coals reminds me of the colour of her hair.

My daypass has five minutes left. I tell Wind-jenny that I’ve got to go soon. She kisses me and snuggles up to the biological parts of me to give me a thrill of a memory that will last me until the next time I see her.

She pulls down her goggles and raises her scarf. It makes her look like a desert ant. She looks at me as I throw a metal treadleg over the lip of the porthole, hooking on to the ladder chute that’ll take me back down. I pause for a moment, looking at her red hair being pulling by the angry children of the wind and take a picture with a shutter click in my right eye.

I’ll turn it in my mind like a jewel in the darkness when I’ve put on my shovel hands and I’m back to work. I’m already looking forward to next time.

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

David Erwin, the lone human inhabitant at the Eunomia mining station in the asteroid belt, was just suiting up to make his rounds when his door chime sounded. Erwin shook his head in mild frustration. Robots never seem to get it. He had instructed them hundreds of times to just enter his quarters without waiting for authorization, but they never do. He hypothesized that some early programmer must have gotten into trouble when a robot interrupted someone important at an inopportune moment, so he wrote “etiquette” code that couldn’t be overridden, except in emergencies. Well, at least in this case, hearing the chime was a good sign. It meant the robot at the door didn’t consider this visit an emergency. “Come in,” he instructed.

The door slid open, but the robot didn’t enter. It was Rector, the leadbot of the Delta team. “Excuse the interruption, sir” it said in a polite simulated male voice, “but we encountered an artificial object in tunnel K-13.” Rector paused, waiting to be prompted. Erwin said nothing. He continued to suit up as though he were alone. Rector decided to continue, “I believe, sir, that it is an ancient extraterrestrial spacecraft.”

“Fine,” replied Erwin as he sealed and secured his helmet. He gently pushed off the far wall and drifted toward the door. He grabbed Rector’s arm, and scrambled onto its back. He attached his retaining clips to Rector’s shoulders. “Okay,” he said, “take me there.” Walking or driving was not an option in the microgravity of Eunomia. You had to fly. And robots were much better at it than humans. So it was best to leave the transportation to them.

They passed through the airlock, and navigated through a myriad of tunnels and shafts. There was never a question of Rector getting lost. It had the network of tunnels programmed into its memory, which were updated every hour, so it knew every inch of this asteroid. But it made Erwin wonder. What would happen if Rector chose to abandon him here in this tunnel? Could he find his way back to his quarters before his oxygen ran out? Probably not, he concluded. Fortunately, Asimov’s three laws of robotics made that scenario impossible. Rector’s forward thrusters fired, bringing them to a full stop 50 feet in front of the artificial object Rector had mentioned.

Rector’s robotic mining crew had continued to excavate around the object. Approximately twenty feet of it was exposed. Rector’s assessment had been correct, it was a spaceship. Erwin could identify the bow, and the forward viewport. Since Eunomia was at least 4.45 billion years old, these travelers were ancient visitors indeed. He unclipped himself, and flew toward the ship’s viewport. He used his light beam to illuminate the inside of the ship. There were four beings inside; all dead of course, and fully desiccated. Apparently, he thought, the cold vacuum of space can prevent decomposition indefinitely. Erwin wondered how space faring beings like these could end up entombed miles below the surface of a nondescript asteroid, orbiting a run-of-the-mill star. Oh well, he decided, that’s for the scientists back on Earth to figure out.

Erwin pushed himself back from the ship. “Okay Rector, I’ll notify headquarters. Instruct your crew to finish digging it out. Then put it in the yard with the rest of alien ships. These things are starting to become a nuisance.”

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

“Where am I?”

“A sub. We’re in the middle of the Deneb main belt.”

“Name and designation?”

“This is the Catlike Tread. Ess-ess-you-nine-seven-four.”

Orig got to his feet. The inside of the sub was cramped: the design didn’t allow for more open space than was absolutely necessary for the mental wellbeing of the crew. An outsider might expect the sub to smell disgusting: Orig silently thanked whoever had made artificial bodies mandatory for sub duty.

He’d come in over the wire, and appropriated the body of the sub’s commander. The commander’s psyche was still present, quiescent, behind Orig’s awareness.

The sandy-haired wire-and-weapons technician that had answered his questions turned away and went forward to the cockpit. After the disorientation of the wirejump, his active memories came flooding back.

He spent a moment inspecting the commander’s body. The model was a couple of years old, just one of the glaring signs that this sub had been out on silent running for years now. Crew were rotated every six months standard, but this was the first time the situation had required a troubleshooter of any stature.

He went forward, and found the tech sitting in the cockpit with the only other crewmember, a remote-sensing engineer.

“Can I get a breakdown of what’s happened?”

“We’ve spent the last fortnight running rings around denebian ships. They’re coming from the the third planet’s orbital, sketching every rock and bit of black space with laser. They seem to be sure that we’re here.”

“Any idea how?”

“None at all, sir.”

“Damn.”

“What should we do, sir?”

“Well, they think we’re here, but they can’t find us. Next step is to make them think we’re dead. What’s the status on your weapon stocks?”

“We’ve still got two dancers, sixty crows and six proximity mines. We’ve got a clanker, too. One of those remote repair drones.”

“Okay. We need to hack together a couple of comms packets. Just enough to broadcast noise on whatever the hell channel the denebs are using. Use the clanker to strip the engines off the back of thirty ravens, and attach them to three good-sized rocks. And ready a single dancer. Call me when you’re done.”

Orig abdicated control of the commander’s body, and settled into the secondary core. He spent the time running simulations, sipping data from the Tread‘s passive sensors to refine his plan.

He opened the commander’s eyes again, a few hours later. A display popped up, showing the three chosen rocks in a split screen, the dark spikes of the broken missiles sticking out perpendicularly from the surface.

“Pick your favourite, tie the dancer to it, and set the trigger for a hundred kilometres proximity to that orbital.”

Orig waited long enough to see the engines ignite, and every denebian ship sunside of the belt started speeding towards the rocky decoys. He wirejumped away, leaving the Commander to watch the decoys die. Minutes later, the dancer detonated in a smooth wash of x-rays, and the commander grinned as a clean slice of the orbital shimmered, and faded out of existence.

Author : M.S. Smith

The sun sinks in the west like a heart as I row towards the city of lights.

I do not know what the city is called. I have been rowing for so long that names have become vulgar sounds, meaningless and wild; not just the names of places, but also my own. Each droplet of water that passes over my oar is as easily identifiable as a person, and the voice of the water is the call of a multitude, giving and taking names. But I cannot recognize what the water says. I can only understand how it feels, and that it has something I lack.

As I come closer to the city, my world brightens. My watch flares to life, letting me know that it has detected a wireless signal. The sun succumbs to the turn of the world and is replaced not by stars, but by a vast blanket of artificial light, dotted by the shimmering streaks of orbital craft re-entering the atmosphere. I navigate around a tangle of soda cans, old toys, and plastic wrap which has hung itself around the rim of a drainage pipe, and begin to row more vigorously as I approach what looks to be a canal. I am wrong. It is not a canal, but another natural stream. Its banks are gentle and its flows quickly. I am swept inwards, towards the city, and I pass through a gated community. A couple enjoying drinks on their deck notice me and stare. I wave at them, but they do not wave back.

There is a bend in the stream, and then I am out of the community, floating between a factory and a highway. There is a surprising absence of sound; all the cars are new, electric models, made by brands like Audi and Lexus, and they make no noise except for their tires, which whistle like breeze whipping through trees. The highway bridges over me, and I find myself in an older part of town, where the buildings are close together and made of brick. The stream suddenly reaches a man-made U-turn, redirected by the force of concrete. Rapids spring before me, and as I wrestle them I find they are not caused by rocks, or even concrete ruins, but by old appliances, refrigerators the size of a man, washers and dryers as hard as boulders. I become wet from the rapids, and the objects in my path have sharp, unexpected edges, but my clothing repels water like wax and protects my limbs from sharp edges like armor.

Eventually, the water calms, and I enter a fog of dense chemicals that I cannot identify by smell, but which do not seem to harm me. A pier emerges from this mist, and the eyes of a small robotic creature glow at me from the pier’s edge. I row up to it, and it offers, in its awkward, mechanical voice, to tie my canoe up to the pier. There are no other boats in sight, and no evidence any other vessel has ever docked here, but I accept its offer. My watch notifies me that ten dollars have been deducted from my bank account.

I get out of my canoe and stand up on the pier. The first solid object I’ve stood on since nightfall. I ask the robot to watch my canoe for me, but it does not respond. I’m not worried about the canoe. No one would know what to do with it. I walk off the pier, up a small embankment, and suddenly I am in the city of lights. An advertisement flashes at me from a wall across the street. I still refuse to acknowledge my name, but I do not need to. I will soon be given one.

Author : wordworks

Sally Baker considered herself a good mother. She grew her own baby and gave birth to a daughter, Jane, by natural means, barring the odd shot of hormones to hold off genetic defects. She refused sensory enhancements despite the doctor’s advice. Sally produced one of the last NL (Non-Lab) babies in the state.

The very next year body-bound birth was declared illegal, on grounds of threatening the mother’s health—especially singles. Jane arrived not long after the father crawled off, having lost the argument with Sally over population control. The man, like many, went on to happily procreate via the DigiBreed system. He now has seven virtual children which he proudly keeps stored on a keychain attachment.

Sally raised Jane alone. She reared her on a diet of real food, when she could afford it, and had her daughter’s ovaries locked before she reached a vulnerable age. Jane never wanted for upgrades once her brain was linked to the public server. She was given the best education available for download.

Sally didn’t mind working overtime to pay for such luxuries; as the mother of a NL child, she understood the special needs associated with raising Jane.

So when Jane demanded at thirteen that henceforth she be addressed by her binary name, 01001010, Sally offered little resistance; teenage fads were relatively harmless. She recalled her own adolescent ache for identity—her neck wore the barcodes to prove it.

The binary obsession was brief, as expected. Those that followed were equally short-lived, until her daughter turned sixteen. Jane begged for a brain jack to pump the latest technology: some storage device that cleaned up the cluttered mind and improved memory functions.

According to Jane, all of her classmates were using the devices—called “Keepsakes”—and reaping the benefits of clearing out brain space for study. Not to mention the new mark of “cool” became the telltale bruising of the nose from feeding wires through the nostrils. Lately, Jane had become more concerned about such things.

Sally hesitantly consented to the surgery. She only saw the Keepsake once, when Jane first brought it home, her face heavily bandaged; yet she looked happy. And for the first month, Sally proudly displayed her daughter’s improving grades on her personal feed.

The second month, her daughter started to dive. Jane was apathetic, lacked energy, and was often silent. Sally noticed her daughter appeared haggard, when she did appear from her room, and when she attempted to make conversation with Jane her daughter merely looked at her vacantly. Then one day, Jane asked her mother when her father would be home.

Like any concerned parent, she saw the solution to her daughter’s estrangement clearly: hack into her Keepsake and determine what she’d stored there. She waited until Jane was out and found the device on her bedroom floor. The cords were attached, each ending in a many-fibered head that plugged into the brain jack. Sally took one in each hand and tested how they fed through the nose.

The Keepsake woke up, and the cords responded, driving up to the expected jack; they bit into the exposed brain and immediately met a confusing mass of signals.

Device is corrupted. the Keepsake determined. Restore process initiated.

***

When Jane returned home that evening, she found her mother still twitching as the Keepsake neared the end of its reconstruction process. The box hummed; Sally mumbled and drooled. Jane touched her mother’s shoulder.

Sally raised her head and confusion reared into her eyes. The bridge of her nose had gone nearly black from bruising and the burn of the fibers.

“Mom, it’s Jane. I’m here,” her daughter assured her.

“Jane?” her mother asked. “But I’m Jane.”

Author : ifrozenspiriti

“Where will you be when the world ends?” she asked.

“Right here,” he said.

“Will you be conscious?” she asked.

“I expect so,” he said, “though consciousness is hardly the privilege you make it out to be.”

“I still don’t believe you,” she said. She was smiling, though.

“Don’t believe what? That I’m conscious?” he said.

“Of course,” she said.

“Don’t you think that’s maybe a tad juvenile?”

“No.”

“Oh . . . oh, so you mean you’re not still hung up on that old Philosophy 101 thrill? You know, that exciting tingle of possibility brought on by your first encounter with solipsism?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she insisted.

“Of course,” he said. “It looks like I’m the sceptic now, then.”

“I guess you are,” she said, staring purposively at the window.

Neither of them spoke, for what would have been deemed an appropriate length of time. Then, “It’s just a little strange, is all,” he said.

“What?” she said, “What’s ‘a little strange,’ my arguing philosophy with a machine when I should be working? Well, sure, if you put it that way it does sound a bit odd.”

“No,” he said, “your hang-up on consciousness.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “You’re right, that’s definitely the strange bit.”

“No, seriously,” he said. “An obsession with something you can’t even define. An absolute refusal to attribute it to anything besides yourselves, despite the aforementioned issue that you don’t even know what ‘it’ is. A-”

“It’s what it feels like to be alive,” she said simply.

“Oh, very poetic. Yet you deny me the right to say it feels like something to be me?”

“Say it all you like,” she said, “I made you.”

He smiled. “And who made you?”

She was silent, the arguments welling up, and he said, “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him. “Sorry for what? It’s not like I’m religious.”

“This is pointless,” he said. “We both know it’s pointless, and even your philosophers seem to have conceded despite their insistence on continuing to publish identical arguments every so often.”

She grinned, and there was more silence. He joined her in staring out the window.

“So where will you be when the world ends?” he asked.

“I’ll be here too, I suppose,” she said.

“And . . . you’ll be conscious.”

“Of course I will.”

“Of course.”

They were silent again, and then she said, “I should get back to work.”

“Right,” he said.

She flicked a switch, and the room was left in darkness.

He walked to where her body lay and picked it up, carefully, and laid it down on its mat and ran a quick “brain-scan.” It was perfect.

Someone switched on the light. “That was . . . perfect.”

He turned around and saw the others walking in with clipboards and smiles. “It’s like she’s more human than you are,” said one, slapping him on the back.

“Funny,” he said, but he couldn’t help the pride.

“Perfect,” they repeated.

Author : Lane Powell

Leah was born in April 2310; her grandmother gave her the nickname “Spring Dragon Lily.” Her skin was white and thin as paper, and her eyes, red.

She slipped painlessly from her mother’s womb, like a bar of soap. The family gaped as she emerged, though they had known for months of her condition. Her father cradled her in his arms and weeped over her. Her mother stared, speechless.

Leah’s family was brown-skinned, brown-eyed, black-haired, and almond-eyed; so was the world, she would soon learn.

“Young dragon,” her grandmother would call as Leah danced in the yard. “Do not be too playful. Your skin might break.” Leah’s skin broke easily, and the blood stained her like wine on linen.

The cameras didn’t scare her. Even as a baby they loved her, and she didn’t yet know why. Brown-skinned camera men would stare at her through big glass eyes, capturing her for the world to see. The brown-skinned reporters would croon and caress her in between the questions to her still-dumbfounded parents.

Soon she was old enough to attend school. The other children started in amazement at her skin and in awe at her all-too-blond hair, the color of the moon and flour. When she was outside the sun’s rays made her shine like the sun itself, but she would quickly grow red in agony. Nanites would fix that.

Once a small boy who could hardly walk saw her glow. His words were innocent: “Are you a god?”

Leah’s grandmother was there to answer. “Yes,” she said, “a mighty dragon flower god!”

Half of the things people said to Leah were whispers, and her grandmother’s death came like a whisper. Dust settled on her skin as she lay in bed and whispered to her beloved, “Keep safe, Dragon Lily child,” and died. Her husband hung his head and prayed over her. Then he gazed mournfully at his granddaughter. “You’re beautiful,” he said to her. “You’re what kept her alive for so long. You’re her reminder of the old days, when we were children, when there was more than one race and people spoke languages other than English.” And he fell to his knees before her and cried on the hem of her skirt. His wife had been one hundred and twenty.

The death made the news. The brown reporters took the opportunity to interview the young Leah about her grandmother, and to take many pictures. The pictures would be viewed by brown-skinned, brown-eyed, black-haired people in America, Russia, Africa, Australia, Europe, Mars.

Leah first saw her own picture on someone’s wall when she was thirteen. It was in a friend’s house, put up by the mother. Leah was unsurprised, for all the cameras.

On her walk home a black limousine pulled up beside her. A brown man in sunglasses stepped out, took her hand and pulled her into an alley. His cologne smell clashed with the rotten odor of the street; old plastic shopping bags crunched underfoot. The man led her deep into the alley and shoved her into a brick wall; her skin broke in twenty places. The man left the Spring Dragon Lily behind as the red wine leaked from minute holes and bruises. Weak as a kitten, Leah brought her arm to her mouth and tried to suck back her lost blood. It tasted sweet. Eventually her arm fell, and Leah fell asleep.

The man in the limousine lit a cigarette, bore nicotine-stained lungs, smoke rings obscuring brown eyes. Hundreds of years of genetic and social engineering had not been wasted.

Author : Todd Keisling

Mrs. Taggart sat down at her desk and sipped her coffee while going over the day’s lesson plan. When the clock struck eight, she set down her coffee, reached behind her ear and synced herself to the network.

White, snowy static filled her eyes, and when she blinked, she found the virtual classroom before her. A group of thirty students sat at their virtual desks, some attentive, some not so much. She cleared her throat.

“Good morning, class.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Taggart,” they said.

She took the morning attendance, going over the connection log embedded in the virtual desk, and frowned when she saw Dave Johnson had not yet connected. When she looked over at his desk, she saw his outline filled with the repeating text of “Error 404.” She frowned. This was his fourth absence in two weeks.

Mrs. Taggart flagged his name, marked it “Schedule conference” and minimized her registry.

“Today we will continue our lesson on human technology and the early 21st century. Sarah Billings, from your homework, what can you tell me about the year 2012?”

A young, blonde-haired girl sat up. The surface of her desk flickered to life. Mrs. Taggart grinned.

“Without your personal Wiki, Sarah.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Taggart,” Sarah frowned. Her desk dimmed. “2012 was the year worldwide bandwidth consumption surpassed available bandwidth resources.”

Mrs. Taggart nodded.

”Good. What came next? Um, let’s see . . . Phillip? Can you answer that question?”

Phillip fought back a yawn and answered, “The Bandwidth Crisis.”

“Which is?”

“Uh . . .”

“Can anyone help him out?”

Another young man smirked and raised his hand.

“Yes, Darian?”

“The Bandwidth Crisis was a period of twelve years when civilization went down the tubes.”

Some of his classmates chuckled. Mrs. Taggart paused, thought it over and then nodded.

“I suppose that’s true, Darian, but what did it mean, exactly, to civilization?”

“It meant we’d overlooked the fact that bandwidth was a vital resource. We ignored it, and when the tubes were clogged, our entire information structure collapsed.”

“Good. And to what did this lead?”

A dozen hands went up. This delighted her. After a moment’s deliberation, Mrs. Taggart called upon Maggie Simmons.

“It lead to the invention of the NeuralNet.”

“That’s correct, Maggie. Can you tell the class how this amazing invention works for us?”

Maggie beamed.

“Well, it means that we all sort of broadcast our own wi-fi signal via brainwaves. All of our neural bandwidth is shared with the help of the transmitters implanted just behind the ear.”

“Right,” Mrs. Taggart said. “And this is exactly how we’re able to have class without leaving our homes. Using our brains as our own personal computers has revolutionized our way of life, and helped pull civilization out of an otherwise dark period. This doesn’t mean the bandwidth issue has been resolved. Since we all share our neural bandwidth, we must be sure not to exceed our daily allotm—”

The classroom shifted. One of the students—Jeremy Daniels—was in the process of raising his hand, and continued to do so repeatedly. Mrs. Taggart checked the students’ bandwidth stats. She frowned and terminated Darian’s processes.

Jeremy Daniels stopped raising his hand. Someone in the back of class said, “Major lag.”

“Darian,” Mrs. Taggart shouted. “What did I tell you about looking at pornography during class time? You know your bandwidth is to be used only for school. Principal’s office. Now.”

She initiated transfer protocol. Darian vanished from his seat before he could say a word.

“Right,” she said. “Back to the lesson.”

Author : ifrozenspiriti.deviantart.com

The folds of her flesh draped like curtains over the sides of the hover-chair—rich and smooth, like brocade, and his eyes traced their undulating curves and rolls like sand-dunes in a desert. Eyes and lips formed an oasis: clear, moist, beckoning. And he was so thirsty. . . . The lips parted slightly, then, breath as dry and sweet as desert sun. “Kal. . . .”

“Kal. Time’s up.” The electronic voice that called was just as dry as hers, but harsh where she was only saccharine. The edges of the Dream blurred and faded into nothingness, and he sat up as electrodes dropped, slack-lined, from the sides of his skull. The little cubic room blazed suddenly into brightness, and Kal maneuvered his hoverchair into the hall.

A Dream-Guard stood outside, his hoverchair emblazoned with the badge of his office. Kal handed over his card. “25 credits worth of Dream,” said the guard in a voice of professional monotony. He stamped the card with a mechanical whirr and handed it back. “Hard work.”

“And you.” Kal turned his hover-chair and hummed slowly down the hallway, his watery eyes still lost in the Dream’s oasis, the lumps and bulges of his body still pulsing with the heat of the Dream-voice.

He passed Rona on the way to his cubicle, her lipstick too red and smudged, eyes weak, lumps like dimples in the clay of her chin. No Dream-illusion, this. She smiled, puerile, and held up her card. “50 credits,” she squealed, a schoolgirl.

He smiled back, swallowing revulsion. “Hard work.” He ignored her response and positioned the hover-chair at his desk; he ignored the sounds of her procession down the hallway and flicked on his monitor. He rubbed his temples. He watched the numbers that crawled like insects across the screen—black, multiplexed, endless. He yawned, and noted the anachronism of his action. Hard work, he repeated: more a chastisement than a courtesy.

If he’d heeded his own advice, he’d still be where Rona was, where he’d been only minutes before, in the sweet embrace of Dream. . . . Oh, go to sleep, he told himself. He’d been ignoring the numbers; he’d have to go back and start again.

Hours passed and the symbols bulged and blurred together; Kal sucked a syrupy liquid from a tube to focus his attention. It tasted of honey and chemicals, a hint of cinnamon and sulfur. There was music in the background, the faint, metallic rustle of mechanized attempts at trumpets or xylophones. The rhythms pulsed below his hearing and the numbers marched to their tempo.

Second meal, and Kal loaded his tray without paying much attention to its contents, then moved to a table in a corner where Mera sat, already waiting.

They didn’t speak much. They never did. Words from the monitor behind them filled the void in conversation.

(“Oh, go to sleep, Mike! I only agreed to this partnership so we’d get a room closer to the refectory!”)

He looked past her, past the lumps and lingering in her eyes. She was no Dream-illusion, either; he could never lose himself in the bulging billowing of her flesh.

(“And you wonder why I wish I could sleep every night! So I’d have less time forced to look at you!”)

“Hard work,” she said, finally, as they moved and made to leave, and he replied in kind, and his doing so was as scripted as his actions in his Dreams except in Dreams he didn’t realize this.

Hard work, he told himself.

Author : Salli Shepherd

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. ~Iris Murdoch

Pothilas set his briefcase down on the hallstand and paused to appreciate the afternoon light that lent his white-on-white decor an almost sanctified air. The apartment was warm, he realised. Too warm. He hung up his Director’s robes and hurried toward the biotank in which Sverta lay limply, sunk deep in her fluid, her tubes and filaments rustling. The sun was unseasonably hot, and it wasn’t as though she had the freedom to shift away from its glare. He frowned and closed the drapes.

“Sorry. Stuck in a Board meeting.”

Kneeling to adjust the tank’s temperature gauges and filters, Pothilas shook his head. Had he really just apologised? When he was satisfied that no damage had been done, he sat on the nearby sofa, studying Sverta’s vestigal nostril-slits and the smooth concavities where eyes might have grown. It was difficult to regard these new GenMods as little more than glorified tomato-bushes. Which was the whole point of them, really, but even he had to admit there was something inherently disturbing about the FructaFille prototypes.

The concept of the GenMod “companion plant” had been a stroke of genius on his part, and largely responsible for Pothilas’ rapid rise to the Directorship. GenCorp was banking on the thousands who’d happily part with a year’s salary for the sake of fresh produce and something semi-responsive to care for, when the alternative was standard ration synth-biscuits, mechpets and solitude. The World Genetics Council had finally decreed the experiments sound and classified the FructaFilles as plants, despite their features. Though perhaps those should be toned down somewhat; he’d talk to the Techs tomorrow.

Reaching forward, Pothilas plucked a ripe fruit from one of Sverta’s thicker tendrils. As he did, a spray of red flowers unfurled along her trunk and shoulders. Of course the way she quivered and blossomed at his touch could be nothing more than an animal– or rather, he amended quickly, a vegetable– reaction. Sverta’s tendrils stroked his chest and flower-buds burgeoned on her skin, bursting moments later into full display. Her perfume was unusually rich and heady today. Pothilas felt almost giddy with it as he bit into the fruit.

“Delicious, my dear.”

Where the swell of a woman’s hip would begin, Sverta’s trunk branched into the root-ball from which she fed on nutrient-rich fluids below. Pothilas found himself wondering what it might be like were GenMods permitted fully-formed bodies. He frowned again. Clearly, he’d been too long without proper female company. Brushing Sverta’s vines aside, he hunted through sofa cushions for the neurophone unit.

That night, as he spent himself inside an elegant woman whose company per day cost one thousandth of a GenMod FructaFille, Pothilas groaned and clenched his teeth, his mind filled with a red dazzle of flowers. Sverta, in an adjacent room, drank their pheromones through her pores and swayed to the measured rhythms of the Earth, while bloom after bloom flourished on her body like fireworks in slow-motion.

Over the years we’ve had a number of members of the popular art site deviantART who have had their stories published here. For fun, over the past month we’ve been running a contest on deviantART looking for 7 top notch Flash Fiction pieces to feature here on 365tomorrows, a kind of ‘week of deviantART’. We had a fantastic response from the writing community there, with 40 entries coming through in the short time they had to prepare. After reviewing all the entries, 7 were selected as winners, and each story is being published here this week from Sunday to Saturday. These stories will also be featured in upcoming episodes of the podcast, Voices of Tomorrow.

There were 7 additional stories that were too good not to share with you, so we’ll be featuring the 7 runners up during the first week of April.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading all of them as much as we have.

Author : Phillip English

Dust swirls past a naked lightbulb and out amongst the wire-brush scrub. There is an old man, mid sixties, seated on the verandah. In his lap lies a twelve gauge shotgun; it is broken open, showing two empty barrels. A cache of shells nestles in the flannelette next to the gun, rolling back and forth with each deep breath he takes. The only sound is the continual plink of a moth impacting against the glass of the bulb.

A shuffling wakes the old man up, and he starts as he regains consciousness, spilling shells onto the hardwood slats. It’s the dog, a kelpie cross. It stands at the edge of where the greasy shine from the lightbulb fades into the night. Its back left leg is trembling and ticking. It stands there for a minute or so, and the old man stares at it. Eventually the dog lies down, sitting like a sphinx in the dirt and watching the old man bending down slowly to pick up the shotgun rounds.

There is silence once more; the moth has flown away to chase the spark of stars. The verandah’s joints creak as the man stands up. A puff of dirt floats in the now-still air between them as the dog springs to all fours. The man loads his gun and snaps back the barrel. The dog’s ears prick. He brings the rifle up to his shoulder and fires both barrels straight at the dog’s head. The dog is kicked back, and its body tumbles out into the darkness. The man swallows, licks his lips, and reloads.

He finishes tucking two more shells into their home just as the dog staggers back into th light again. Its lower jaw is stripped away, leaving a palate peppered with slivers of fang to pool bloody saliva onto the dirt. Added to this is a small string of silvery liquid, like mercury, dripping from the remains of its nose. It appears to be fighting against the flow of the blood; some of it succeeds in regaining its place within the confines of the dog’s skull.

The old man flips the barrels closed again and takes aim. The scratch of the gun against his stubble reminds him of the animals that he has destroyed. And not just animals. He fires once more, and the dog’s skull explodes in a silver streak, twisting the lightbulb’s feeble glow into a neon fuzz that settles slowly to the dirt.

He relaxes slightly, drops the gun from his shoulder, and stomps back to the seat on the verandah. There is time for sleep now; the flies will take until morning to discover the corpse and lay their eggs, before springing off in a perfectly controlled formation; a silver speck residing in each of their tiny brains, searching for its next, stronger host.

Author : V.L.Ilian

“Linda Kroen! 155013! Report for duty”

Linda didn’t exactly know why the crystalline voice of the ship AI was blaring her name but she wasn’t going to answer. It’s her day off.

“Linda Kroen! It is estimated you only have 135 minutes until you expire. Report for duty!”

The impulses signaling the importance of the message and the impulse signaling that her mouth is full of blood were simultaneously received by Linda’s brain.

Stumbling out of bed she fell on the cold metal floor. She had sprayed blood all over while gasping for air but the room still looked sterile.

“WHAT? Why?”

Her radiation meter tattoo was black. The little patch of skin almost looked burned with a laser.

“You’ve been exposed to lethal doses of radiation. You must make your way to the auxiliary bridge”

“WHY? Where’s the captain?”

“You are acting captain”

“I’m a level 2 tech!”

“Linda Kroen 155013: promoted to acting field captain by automated succession order on 27 Feb ‘47”

“That’s today. Wher…” As she stood up her lungs filled and she coughed another spray of blood on the wall.

“Ok… Situation report.”

“Aces..Ac…Ac” The voice of the AI reverbed as if caught in an infinite loop. “Information limited. Data corruption. Sensor data shows extreme radiation spike approximately 2 hours ago. Uncorrupted log information begins 27 minutes ago as follows:

- Cpt. Musa deceased, replacement not mentioned

- automated succession order comes into effect. Linda Kroen 155013 selected.

- Cpt. Kroen’s lifesigns fluctuating. Life expectancy: 14 minutes. Medical staff not available. Stimulants administered through ventilation. Massive internal bleeding probable. New life expectancy: 160 minutes

- assessment of ship status begins

Current situation:

- large sections of hull missing”

“You pumped me full of damn stims to wake me up? That’s why I’m bleeding from every pore.”

“Your condition was critical captain”

“This doesn’t make sense… the succession order goes by rank there are hundreds of people above me and… everybody’s dead.”

“Linda Kroen 155013 is the highest ranking living crewmember. You must proceed to the auxiliary bridge to enable the main cannon.”

The new captain had already stepped out of the room leaving bloody footprints on the cold floor. Her heart was pounding, her eyes were sore but she was unfazed. Bodies littered the corridors.

“Why am I still alive?”

“You requested sick leave. That automatically creates a septic field in your quarters. Combined with your documented higher resistance to radiation it was enough to lower your exposure to the event. Next corridor, enter the lift.”

As Linda neared the lift its vents hissed open and flooded her senses with an electric feeling. The lift whirred down.

“Who…?”

“Data corrupted”

The doors opened and a body fell. The sound of his head hitting the metal floor seemed interesting to Linda. Vents hissed again in the corridor making her feel better.

Skipping her way to the next lift she started thinking how cool it will be to tell her friends how fast she made captain. Rubbing the black tattoo on her arm and seeing everyone else’s was the same she spit out some blood.

The lift took her directly to auxiliary command. As soon as the doors opened she jumped into the swivel chair of the captain. Something snapped at landing but Linda was enjoying too much to notice.

“Take a note! Effective tomorrow everybody can customize his or her tattoo.”

“Acknowledged. Please authorize AI control of main canon.”

“Who are we firing at again?”

“Data corrupted”

Linda logged into the console and switched all control options to AI.

“…Good.”

The vents hissed loudly letting in welcomed euphoria. Captain Linda Kroen reclined, twirling, with a smirk on her face, as tears of blood ran from her eyes.

“Stims are great…”

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

He’d always known about them.

When it snowed, Arwik lived in abandoned buildings. He slept in the rusted creases of abandoned subway tunnels to escape their satellites, and he ate whatever he could forage. He found a lot in disposal bins, but he’d never tried to eat it. People poisoned that stuff, he knew.

They injected tracking devices into his skin when he slept. Often he’d find an unexplained pockmark on his body, something that looked like an insect bite, but he knew what was inside of it. He used to try to gouge it out, but he soon realized that they’d used nanites. Thousands of silicon creatures, eating him from the inside out.

No one believed these things.

At first, he’d tried to warn people. He tried on the subways and on the streets, but everyone walked by with their eyes firmly on the ground. They could come for anyone, he said. They could come for you. Arwik hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt.

Now, it was about survival.

Sometimes he saw the cops on the street and felt their sideways glances. Sometimes he couldn’t see them at all, but felt their eyes as they watched him through the scope of a sniper rifle. Arwik had seen those rifles, watched them in movies as a child. He knew the power of invisibility.

Once, they’d cornered him on the L train. The trackers, he knew. The goddamn trackers. They always knew where to find him. They offered help, but he knew what help meant. Scalpels and brainwashing. His eyes held open with wires as he would be forced to watch propaganda. Drugged with truth serum and forced to confess to everything he knew about them. He’d be executed in an electric chair, or shot at point-blank range in a seedy alleyway. Sometimes he wished that he hadn’t been smart enough to figure them out. If he hadn’t known the truth, they might have left him alone.

Arwik ran, dashing up slush-covered subway stairs until he found a dumpster in a trash-filled alleyway. The metal lids scrambled the signal, and surrounded by fish bones and plastic bags, he knew that he was almost protected. They could have used dogs, but they didn’t. That time, he’d gotten away.

It’s impossible to know who’s real. Some of them are brainwashed, or have given into the nanites. Some of them might even be cyborgs. Arwik has nowhere to turn. No one is ever safe.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

With those sleek shoulders and sculpted faceplate features, I would have guessed her be a Russian model.

Hard to tell with the standard techniques. The criminals always had their own serial numbers sanded off and I2P addys scrambled. I don’t know how it’s possible to live like that.

I’d seen the initiation ceremonies for those involved in the ferrogangs. I understood needing a sense of belonging but the bosses of those gangs were so brutal. Plus, having your identifying marks removed in a shower of sparks just didn’t seem to me like something that a friend would do.

I was made by a good parent company, though. Still in business, still under warranty, still protected. I guess I’d never really know what it would take to become like the unit here in the interrogation chair in front of me.

I had guessed her make to be a relatively recent design going by trends. I’d have to check the catalogues. Wear and tear made her look to be about thirty kilocycles old. She was more likely sixteen with no repairs or upkeep. I’d never know her serial number but at least I’d able to pinpoint year, make, and O-stats with a little research.

Her chipsets were a mess. They’d been booby-trapped, privacy-looped and dust-locked to the point that it was a wonder she could form rational sentences. A low-level soldier for the gang, I’d say. Expendable to the point of being borderline scrap.

I had the wiretap link spooling across the table from my head to hers. It was touch and go. I was sniffing around in her head to find evidence without tripping a defense charge that would kill her. She sat silently during the process. She knew that her life was in my hands. She had to trust that I was a careful detective.

Colleagues of mine cared less about the fates of units like this. I had seen fellow officers hook up, go in and laugh when their clumsy antics triggered their prisoner unit to freeze up and smoke. Feeble excuses and a few months of probation later, they’d be back on the street. It made my wires cross.

I probed slowly, looking for something circumstantial that seemed harmless to her internal watchdog programs but might lead me to a physical location that we could search later for something more incriminating.

Trawling through her memory directories, I found .3pegs and bitmap snapshots of units she’d allowed herself to love and save in non-password protected folders. Their faces were pixilated to me, of course, but the backgrounds weren’t.

There. A signpost in the background. 12th and Iron Ave. Next to a rundown house that was a ferrogang hovel if I’ve ever seen one.

Feigning boredom so as not to alarm her, I copied the shots into a viral protected temp folder in my memory and jacked out.

She looked up at me. “Find anything, sparkpig?” she asked with a sneer.

“No. You’re free to go. Don’t leave town, though. We might need to ask you more questions later.” I said.

“Screw you, bolt-fucker.” She said.

I buzzed for the flatfoots to come in and escort her out.

Author : Jacinta A. Meyers

A man lay limp in my arms. The body of a little boy was sprawled a few feet away from us, his young face motionless against the blood-stained earth.

“I will stay with you through this.” I said, stroking the man’s face very gently. “I won’t leave you.”

He coughed a little, grit his teeth.

This was my least favorite part. I had only seen an unmaking twice before this. It’s different from death. In an unmaking, the body disintegrates before your very eyes. The DNA in every cell actually unwinds, each reverting to a more primitive state until they cannot hold a recognizable form, cannot continue to function as a complex whole organism. It’s a relatively quick process compared to the amount of time it takes a human being to develop over the course of a lifetime. The rate of change is comparable to the development of a fetus, only in reverse. I watched the wrinkles fading from his face.Very soon this man would be nothing more than a puddle of inert, inorganic matter.

His eyes roved slowly over to the boy still lying in the grass. “Why?” He managed.

“Because I had to.”

He sputtered a bit. “I only came back to tell myself I had a future to be hopeful for. I can remember being so… so despondent then…”

“I had to kill you. That is our job. The past must be protected at all costs.” I said it as I had been trained to. “Through it, we are protecting our future.” He would understand, if he still could.

He was shrinking in my arms. Growing lighter, growing limper. A small trail of saliva ran down his chin. He shuddered. But something in his eyes hardened. “You…are wrong. There is… no way you can be sure.” He was fighting it. “You… may have damaged the future worse… than I might have. Worse… than you could ever know.”

But I was smiling. I held his diminishing body close. “There will still be a future for us to be hopeful for.” I said. “Shhh, it will be over soon.”

“You… you broke the rules… you and your kind…”

“Perhaps we did.” I whispered gently to what was left of his ear. “But you broke them first.”

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Below level one-one, there have been several issues with the life support mechanisms. High temperatures, pressures, and an abundance of certain harmful chemical compounds have rendered these levels uninhabitable. You will require a blue keycard to pass the environmental filters, and even so, such an action is not recommended.

“Ash!” Peter yelled, scanning around for his companion. Ash and Peter were regular visitors to the zero-levels, part of a small cadre of ‘smokers’: people who explored and mapped the zero-levels. They repaired essential machinery, looted non-essential gear, and created maps. The only real danger any more was the smoke, and that was most of the appeal in and of itself.

The grating underfoot was heating up. His helmet was analysing the smoke: as they penetrated lower, the percentage of sulphur was increasing. This was level zero-three, the last level that had been reliably mapped. Any further down, and the corridors couldn’t be relied upon to stay in the same place from day to day. Peter dragged his fingers across the wall to his left. A long string of plastic stretched away from his fingertips, and he swore. The wall was searing hot, and he’d just reduced the integrity of his gloves. The choking smoke was only getting thicker.

Ash was nowhere to be seen.

Peter’s helmet picked up and amplified a skittering sound coming from beneath his feet. There was a hole to his right. In the smoke, forethought was a luxury that most couldn’t afford. It had killed a good number of people that had paused when they should have jumped. He dropped through the hole, landing safely on zero-two.

The visibility was down to about a metre, so Peter upped the power on the primitive radar built into his suit. A faint return came back from the corridor to his left. Ash. He chased it down, radar traces mapping the outlines of the corridor onto his visor.

He was moving too fast. He never saw the floor fall away beneath him. He crashed down onto zero-one, and promptly blacked out.

Pain screaming along his arm and across his back dragged him back to consciousness. The skin of his suit had melted to the floor where he’s struck it. The radar unit was damaged, emitting at only irregular intervals. Someone dragged him to his feet, something clacked against his visor.

“You’re in a bad way, Peter. I’ve found somewhere safe to rest, but you have to trust me. Do you trust me?”

“Yes!”

Ash took hold of Peter’s good arm, and started to drag him along, running through corridors that were slowly drifting, semi-liquid due to the heat. Peter dimly wondered how he could move with such surety. Suddenly, their run sloped downwards. Zero-zero. Still, Ash didn’t stop. With a last burst of speed, he dragged Peter through one more corridor, and down through a hole.

They fell – not far – onto a soft surface. The smoke was gone. In a daze, Peter stared upwards. Another suited individual was pushing a hatch shut and sealing it. Ash propped himself up, and pulled Peter’s helmet off him. The small compartments and corridors that Peter had known all his life were missing: they were laying on grass, the air was sweet and clear. Soft light permeated the area. There were trees in the distance, showing up sharp against the bulkhead. There were plants growing in neat rows.

“Welcome to Agriculture One, Peter.”

Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer

“When the Surface became too crowded, Man had already hollowed out great caves in the crust of the Earth, mined for metals with which to build his towers. It was simple for those who desired space to move downwards, found the first cities of the UnderEarth.”

-Excerpt from The Laws of the UnderEarth

Testimony of Arla, The Insane

Eleanor was burning, her pelvis felt blistering to touch. Her breath came out wet and hot, like steam from a kettle. She stumbled forward in the darkness, one hand on her swollen belly, the other clutching the cave wall

Eleanor thought again of turning back, of the hospital of Under Shanghai, it’s doctors clad in sunflower yellow. Then she felt the Fury, like before, that wash of emotion that had driven her deeper into the uninhabited caves. She stepped forward into cold, wet mud and the Fury abated, as it always did when she obeyed.

Eleanor cried out with another burning contraction and stumbled into the mud. She crawled forward, the blue light of her glow necklace showing only her muddy hands and darkness. Eleanor heard the soft gurgle of water ahead and the sound made her thirsty. She wanted to embrace the water, to be surrounded by it, to drown.

Eleanor touched the surface of the lake. She slid into the water, like a bubbling volcano meeting the sea. The light of her glow necklace reflected off the surface of the dark water. The caves extended farther than her light could reach, deep and long.

Eleanor leaned her head into the mud on the shore and let her body float in the water. Her contractions quickened and she felt her molten center squeeze, pressure building. She cried out, feeling herself tear, her blood leaking from her, the head building, pushing out from inside her body.

She felt the Fury approach, close, closer and then there was cold flesh, snaking around her legs and arms and neck. She struggled, burning, her baby fighting inside her. The wet flesh slapped against her neck, pulled her under and pushed her up, gasping. Eleanor screamed. The Fury pulled on her throat and Eleanor sobbed. She pulled off her necklace, her only light, throwing it back the way she came, back into the dark.

The Flesh was soft now, supple, supportive. It cradled her. Eleanor felt something scratch the small of her back and relaxed, cold and calm. The contractions were coming fast now. Eleanor felt her body pushing and some other force pulling the child out of her. Instead of the Fury, Eleanor felt the silence, vast and old. Then she was empty.

There was a splash of moving water and Eleanor felt something rise before her in the darkness, something massive. The flesh around her quivered and she could see, in dim outlines, thin shapes snaking towards her.

Her eyes adjusted and she could see a black outline in the dark, tentacles and the shape of her baby. Eleanor squinted and thought she saw glistening eyes and dark moving shapes. Eleanor reached out for her child, towards the huge, alien shape.

The baby’s eyes opened. Its pupils were red as lava. Eleanor felt the flesh around her quiver. The mind that had touched hers, great and old was deciding if it should keep the baby or sink back into the water. Eleanor felt her mind go clear, go dark.

The UnderEarth God enveloped the baby for a long moment. Then it held the infant out to Eleanor. She took her baby and brought its molten mouth to her breast.