365 tomorrows

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

There are two things I hate about a job like this: Carrie, and the viewer-at-home.

That’s not true.  There are dozens of things I hate: network executives, directors, producers, footage editors with their nasally little ‘we could have used a little better resolution here. ”  I hate pretty much everyone involved in a documentary, but it’s the viewer-at-home who matters.  Once that viewer decides they don’t like Carrie, don’t like fish, or don’t like learning, all of us are out of a job.

“There’s the entrance!” Carrie squeals.  If nothing else, she has enthusiasm.

It’s a low-budget gig.  Unlike Carrie up ahead, who was lucky enough to be female, skinny, blond, and (of lesser importance) a marine biologist, Tommy-crap-for-lighting and Joe-the-assistant-camera-guy (that’s me) actually have to lug junk into these tunnels.  The sound guy and lead cameraman are resting cozy on the boat, practically retired.

“Over here,” she calls, swimming smoothly over a long-still turnstile and into the submerged station lobby.  I bring the cameras around an ancient ticket machine but find nothing more than a ragged hole, smaller than a kid’s fist.  “There are thousands of these,” Carrie continues, looking at my headcam.  Who the hell wears makeup underwater?  “Even though their slowed metabolism gives them twenty or thirty minutes underwater, the skeletal structure hasn’t changed much.  If it weren’t for these nests, they’d make easy dinner for anything down here.  A single Long Island Crocodile could take out a whole school in seconds.

Great.  Crocodiles.  I really ought to read a pamphlet or two about this junk before strapping on the cam and jumping overboard.

My comm beeps and the cameraman patches in, private to me and Tommy.  “Can we get a shot of these rats?”

“Carrie, they want rats,” I say, switching frequencies.

“Be patient.”  Her primary concerns always involve creatures lacking higher brain function.

“She says be patient.”

“We’re working overtime here,” he says.  I hear the hiss of a bottle opening.

On the main channel, Carrie’s still rambling science.  “Marine biologists continue their search for the secrets of the tunnel rat,” she says.  “Despite intensive study, their rapid evolution remains a mystery, and we can only hope that in decades to come-”

“Joe, can you get a better shot of that hole?” Tommy comms.

Carrie, caught up in describing the rats’ miraculously pathetic life, doesn’t notice as I clickswitch my handcam to fisheye without turning my helmet camera from her face.

And then, Tommy delivers a kick to the ticket machine with so much force that I have no idea how he pulled it off with flippers.

They crawl and swim, dozens, maybe hundreds, not just from the hole but from the ticket slot as well, from unseen gaps behind and beneath the machine.  An emptying hive of nearly hairless grey and pink rodents, tails swishing and feet scrabbling for purchase as a stream of bubbles trail upward from a corner.

“That’s what we need!” open-comms the cameraman.  “We can edit out that kick, right?”

Only the glow of Tommy’s sidelight lets me see Carrie shake her head.  “You can’t just empty a whole colony like that!” she says, voice weak.  “Do you have any idea how territorial–”

“Look, Carr, we’re making a documentary here,” comes a new voice, the assistant director.  Asshole must have been monitoring everything.

“They’ll only invade another colony, and–”

“Let the marine biologists worry about that junk, okay?  All of you, back to the boat, and–”

“I am a marine biologist.”

“Back to the boat.  Now.”

It’s a month until filming starts on Carrie’s next Learning Channel adventure, and hopefully, it’ll be somewhere warm.

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

My husband doubts the existence of history.  I wonder why I married this man.

When I woke up to the banshee-screech of a bandsaw, I assumed we were getting another door.  He likes that too, building doors.  But, when I came downstairs in a yellow bathrobe hoping he’d brewed a morning pot, I found no coffeemaker.  In fact, I found no kitchen appliances.  Nor did I find a husband, though a sign reading “time machine” was taped to the garage door.

“Progress calls, sweetheart,” he yelled from the garage.  “Many scientific innovations have failed due to lack of funding.”

“You don’t believe in history.”

“I believe that history, if it exists at all, is subjective, but more likely, each instant is a singular point of awareness suspended in-”

“All right, honey,” I said.

“It’s entirely different,” he said.  “Also, don’t go into the garage.”

One might wonder how my husband learned so much about time, space, or mechanical engineering.  Since most modern philosophers discount his beliefs about the former two and he still hasn’t fixed the dishwasher (won’t, now), one might do well to dismiss that curiosity.

But if he is anything, it’s determined.

After returning from Starbucks with the sense of patience possessed only by those who expect their wealthy in-laws to replace their kitchen appliances, I was greeted by a man with curly, powdered hair.

“Bonjour, madame,” he said.

I knocked on the door to the garage.  “There is a Frenchman in my kitchen,” I said.

“I know.”

“Well, so long as you know.”

“Thanks, dear,” he said.

My husband isn’t good with sarcasm.

I sat the man in the living room, set the television to Nickelodeon, and went upstairs to read.  I let my husband deal with his own problems, until the police or fire department get involved.

When I finished my book, the living room was filled with Frenchmen.  Again, I knocked on the garage door.

“There are more Frenchmen,” I said.

“I know.”

“Where did they come from?”

“France.”

I needed more coffee.  “Did you invent a time machine?” I asked him.

“I did.”

“Even though you don’t believe in time?”

“Yep.”

“Are you going to send them back?”

“As soon as I invent an un-time machine,” he told me.

“Maybe you should invent someone who knows what they’re doing.”

The silence suggested he believed that science did not concern women.

Since I couldn’t cook without an oven, stove, or microwave, I ordered pizza for the Frenchmen.  All in all, they didn’t seem disturbed by the displacement-in-time thing.

The next day, I found not just Frenchmen, but several Russians as well.

“Honey, there are Russians in my living room,” I said.

“I know.”  I heard a whirring sound, then a thud.  “I’ve almost got the ’specific time’ thing down.”

“And this will empty out my living room?”

“I’m getting Americans next,” he said.  “I heard that they both did some crazy stuff during the Cold War.”

“You heard.”

“It’s not like I believed in history,” he said, cross.

I went to buy coffee.  I also bought several boxes of donuts.  The Frenchmen were still transfixed by the television.  The Russians, from several points in time, were eagerly exchanging stories.  In the garage, my husband was negotiating his own little cold war.  I took a leisurely stroll and had reached the town park when the solution occurred to me.  I hurried home to tell my husband.

“Dear,” I said.

“I’m busy, darling.”

“Why don’t you invent a future time machine, and ask someone how to do it right?”

There was a long silence.  “I don’t believe in the future, sweetheart,” he said.

The voices in the garage resumed.

Happy August First!

Today marks the start of the fourth year of 365. We hit a lot of milestones in the last twelve months, including our 1000th story, which was reported on boingboing.

Whether you’re a new reader or you’ve been here since the beginning, we’re glad to have you around. Thanks for a great three years, and we hope you enjoy the fourth!

Let’s say that you’re surfing the majestic tubes that make up our internet when you stumble onto a nifty flash fiction website.  What a fascinating idea, you think!  New short stories, every morning!

Now, lets say that after a bit of poking around, you decide to start at the very first story and move on from there.  A fine task for an afternoon, right?

Wrong.

A fine task for a weekend, right?

Wrong.

You’d better put on a few pots of coffee, because if you spend five minutes reading each story posted here, you’ll have a fine task for three and a half days.

Today, 365tomorrows turns 1000 stories old.

Would you like to bake us a cake?  If so, you’ll need about two pounds of birthday candles!  Would you like to print the stories into one book and keep it on your nightstand?  It’ll be almost as thick as three copies of Moby Dick!  Would you like to mail me an American quarter for every story written?  You’d better have a lot of postage handy, because that package would weigh thirteen pounds!

That’s about as much math as my liberal arts major brain can handle in one night.

Whether you’ve been a fan since the beginning or you’ve only recently found the site, we’re grateful for your support and we hope you stick around for many years to come.

-Kathy

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

Nate Sorelli ruled the playground like Napoleon ruled France: with an iron fist and a mind like a laser-cut scalpel. With the knowledge of Sun Tzu and strategies selectively culled from the Roman and British Empires, Nate Sorelli was an architect and a general. He had a loyal army of boys who let no one tread on his territory, and his territory didn’t stop at the schoolyard’s boundaries. To the colony’s children, it was Nate Sorelli and not his parents who owned all of Shi.

In the early days of the colony, physicians played it fast and loose. Frontier medicine had different rules, and when his early tests showed mild retardation, his parents didn’t even need to pull strings. The neural implant had never been approved for children, but if Nate Sorelli was any indicator, that lack of approval was a terrible oversight.

Nate had a network. He didn’t need to threaten kids for their lunch money: they willingly handed it over. A quirk of his lips could start and end playground fights, but Nate never threw a punch. He didn’t like getting his hands dirty.

The teachers, too, were under his thumb. They didn’t realize it, of course, but he could redirect lessons with a few choice words, and he steered the curriculum like a rudder steers a boat. They thought it was their idea to move him to the C class with the older kids, and the following year, they thought they made the decision to bump him up to B. There wasn’t a test he couldn’t ace. The colony’s library had been committed to memory, and the only thing keeping the wealth of the internet out of his mind was the communication delay between Shi and Earth. It was no surprise when the home world sent a team of doctors to study him.

The study lasted three minutes: as long as it took to process the data from the CAT scan. Three Shi doctors lost their licenses. His parents were fined extensively, and paid twice that in bribes to maintain custody of their son.

Despite the setback, he maintained his rule. The other children continued to revere him, and although the scandal was teachers’ lounge gossip for weeks, they considered the decline in test scores a result of the stress of publicity. No one saw the first cracks in his empire. Certainly not Nate Sorelli.

Lunch money came more slowly. Paper bills turned to coins, which turned to crinkled wrappers. Without funding, the army of children grew restless, but it was over a month before they disbanded. There was no coup. No new ruler, no interim leader. Political issues were eclipsed by video games and dodgeball. The teachers noticed the change, but there were no complaints. The other kids’ performance improved. Overall, Shi’s school was well-ranked among the colonies.

At recess, Nate Sorelli took to playing jacks. His reflexes were still sharp, and he liked the smooth texture of the rubber ball. His previous loyal subjects played hopscotch and football in the nearby field as his hand shot out, snatching three silver stars before catching the ball in its descent.

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 : 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 : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

Most of them come at night. They assume that their objective would be easier to complete while the target was fast asleep, so we increase security at dusk: three guards outside of the bedroom door and two inside, and another dozen on patrol. Sometimes they have bulletproof clothing. Sometimes they have guns that can burn a hole straight through a body. Our scientists spent weeks analyzing them, but we can’t replicate the battery. It’s unfortunate. Technology like that would be useful on the front lines.

Some of the travelers are scrappy, with banged up equiptment that looks older than they are. From their actions, we assume that they are rogue. They bring their wallets, and based on their ID, most of them date from the 2700s. The other ones, the ones with polished weapons and uniforms, carry no identification. From the manufacture dates on their equipment, we’ve determined that they come from the late 2600s. Words and names are written in Chinese, but the ID cards say America.

At first, this caused concern.

We’ve tried to predict our future based on their existence. We will win the war. Victors don’t make assassination attempts. We know that at some point in the 2600s, the American government realized that their program would be unsuccessful, and the remaining equiptment fell into the hands of private citizens. We know that China and America share military secrets. We can find no trace of Japan, so we assume that they lost their war.

We haven’t shared this information. If they have a protection force similar to ours, they’re keeping it to themselves. If they don’t, we can assume no attempts have been made on the Emperor’s life.

Our greatest concern is assassination in the years before our division was founded. However, the Leader remembers no unusual events, and his ancesteral line was unaltered. We’ve theorized that another group of temporal soldiers protected him then, but left it in our hands once he rose to power. Our records would be invaluable to future generations, and eliminating us would wipe those records from existence.

We haven’t been able to interrogate them. The soldiers who aren’t killed commit suicide in seconds, and their bodies disappear in a flash of light. The rogues’ bodies usually remain, and autopsies have revealed significant changes to their biology. Implants made of an unidentified material. Evidence of advanced surgical techniques. Unfortunately, we can’t use this knowledge to our advantage without the equipment to properly analyze it.

With every attempt, our efficiency increases. Assurance of victory raises morale, and every dead traveler is proof that the Leader will not be killed.

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

Eric Hayton was not happy. In fact, his unhappiness was palpable: it could be seen in the four empty coffee cups on his desk, in the disgust with which he regarded his wall of monitors, and mostly, in the overfilled ash tray positioned on the corner of his desk. Smoking was illegal in the colony, but if he didn’t get this weather bug sorted out, he would have bigger things to worry about than a misdemeanor fine.

Almost a century ago, the first wave of emigrants suffered through perfectly stable weather. Although the colonists were expected to enjoy a sempiternal spring, the lack of seasons only reminded them that their world was artificial. The Monarch system, written a decade later, swept the programming awards and was immediately put into use. It projected the weather for an entire imagined planet, then used the colony’s temperature and humidity controls to match the weather for a hypothetical longitude and latitude. Because it was self-reliant, the only people who studied it were eccentric techno-anachronists and third year programming students. Even Eric, the colony’s chief meteorologist, hadn’t read the output in years. It was stable. Reliable. There had never been problems before.

Judging by the two feet of snow outside of Eric’s window, there was a first time for everything.

“Linz, can you put on another pot?” he called as he gnawed on the end of his stylus. He’d run out of cigarettes a few hours ago and run out of sleep twenty hours before that, but for now, his coffee reserves were holding. It was his responsibility to track down the bug, but introducing new code to the Monarch system was dangerous. Sure, he could stop the snowfall with a few keystrokes, but since the simulation built upon itself, one clumsy move could cause floods and droughts for centuries to come.

“After this round,” Eric’s daughter called from the other room. Through her headphones, he could hear the muffled sounds of her video game. When Lindsay appeared with a fresh mug of coffee, he gestured to the largest monitor and a tap of his stylus froze the code in place.

“You see anything there?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s self-correcting though, right? It should work out the kinks in a week or so,”

“We don’t have a week or so,” Eric said. He picked up the mug. “Everything’s shut down. The whole colony’s snowed in.”

Lindsay shrugged uneasily. “We only started learning Monarch this semester,” she reminded. “I barely know anything. Are you sure you didn’t leave yourself logged in at a public terminal?”

Eric shook his head. “Aside from the computers at City Hall, his is the only machine wired in to the sim.”

“I guess it’s just a natural bug, then.” Lindsay wrapped her arms around Eric, giving him a quick hug before turning back to the living room. “Good luck,” she added.

Lindsay closed the door behind her and pulled on her headset as she dropped onto the sofa.

“I’ve only got time for one more run,” a static-laced voice said. “We’ve got to finish tomorrow’s codework.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Lindsay said,with a glance to the closed door. “School should be cancelled for at least another week.”

“I feel bad saying it,” another guildmate grunted, “but we’re damn lucky this bug happened when it did. Gives us some time to catch up with that guild on Reki 5.”

Lindsay’s avatar joined the rest of her guild at the digital battleground. “Let’s show them what we’re made of.”

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

“You haven’t changed a bit,” Aja said, though her eyes avoided her sister’s face. Saj noticed the hesitation, noticed the way Aja’s bangs (gray and black, like soot-streaks on the walls of a bombed-out Akari factory) hung thin, revealing a forehead creased only with the lines of age. Saj’s hair was short and black, the standard military cut, and the slashed-circle brand of the soldier caste was glossy and pink above her eyebrow.

“How would you know?”

“You still look like you’re sixteen.”

“I’m nineteen. And I’ve changed a hell of a lot.”

Saj’s voice was tight, somewhere between the tone of a defensive child and a fierce adult, but there was no conflict in the duality. Saj kept her head high, her expression arrogant and indifferent to the curious stares of the few other teenagers in the café. None of them were branded. The caste system had been eliminated twenty years ago, when Saj was seventeen and light years away in the dying months of the war.

“You’re a doctor now,” Saj’s eyes remained hard on Aja’s face. “A plastic surgeon. Is that what happened to your mark?”

“Don’t do this, Saj.” When she frowned, her face looked like the wrinkled crust of the ice moon of Omnaki. Aja would never see that moon. No Salal would ever see it again. “The war is over, now.”

“Your war.”

“Our war.”

“The only people who shared that war with me died in the massacre on Soulon 5.” Saj’s expression was stony, and her dark eyes had narrowed into slits. “This isn’t my home. This is some world that you made, you and the rest of them, after I went away.”

Saj stared at her sister’s hands, which seemed even more alien than the leathery flesh of the Akari. Liver spots, wrinkled skin, fingernails painted mauve. It was hard to believe that they’d shared a womb, nineteen or sixty years ago.

“There’s a place for you here,” Aja whispered. “I’ve been saving. You can live with James and I, and go to University. We can get rid of your brand.”

“This isn’t my world,” Saj repeated. “And no one’s touching my brand.”

A cold silence fell over the café, and Saj realized she’d spoken too loudly for the enclosed space. She pushed herself up from the table and it creaked at the force of her muscular arms.

“Remember the river, out behind the house?” Aja said. “Where we used to swim in the summer?”

“You’re older than Grandma was.”

“We built a raft once, to see if we could float away from the colony.”

“If I’d drowned, you would have been firstborn,” Saj snapped.

“And I would have gone instead of you.”

Aja’s voice was calm, but Saj pushed away from the table and whirled, her boots squeaking against the floor as she stormed towards the glass door.

“I’ll wait for you.”

“You’ll be waiting for a damn long time.”

“I’ve been waiting for sixty years.”

This time, Saj hesitated, her hand on the doorknob. She stared back at her sister, something indefinable flickering behind her dark eyes.

“Come home,” Aja said.

Saj gritted her teeth and turned away. “I don’t have a home.”

She slammed the door before shoving her hands into the pockets of her jacket and tightening her fingers around her cellphone. Its directory was empty, aside from Aja’s number and the Social Service Center. She wanted to break it, to watch it explode like a photon grenade, but she didn’t move. Saj was cold and tired, and she didn’t know what to do next.

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

“You won’t like it there,” Rajani’s brother said. “People go crazy like that, so far from the sun. There’s science behind it. I saw it on the forums.”

Sam’s avatar hung on the screen throughout the call: himself at twenty-one, tanned and grinning as he reclined in a white plastic chair. His UV goggles had been shoved up into his dark hair, and she recognized the backdrop of the mainland relocation center behind him. The photograph was half a decade old, now. Samir was an account manager for a software company in Dhaka.

“I’m not going to go crazy, Sam,” she said with a tired but affectionate sigh. Rajani leaned back as far as her small control chair would permit her and folded her hands behind her neck. “I was a janitor on Mercury, remember? And a receptionist in the Hilton Luna.”

“But the sun was always there, Raj. You just had to travel a couple hours to see it. And an ice moon? The Eskimos used to go nuts, do you know that? Pibloqtok, they called it. You’re not cut out for a place like that, hon. Come back to Bangladesh.”

Rajani was used to her brother’s pleas, though they were less frequent and impassioned than her parents’. “The Sunderban’s underwater, Sam.”

“There are other places above sea level.”

“It isn’t the same.”

Despite the frequent cost of replacing her shuttle’s oxygen filter, Rajani fished a lighter from her pocket and lit a cigarette, exhaling towards Sam’s avatar with mild frustration. Her own avatar, displayed beside his, contained a preteen girl on a pale beach, bands of white surf curling around her ankles. Her father’s small fishing boat was tied up in the background.

“Have you ever seen ice, Sam?” she asked.

“Are you smoking in your shuttle?”

“I asked you a question.”

“Sure. I went to the ice park in Greenland a few years ago.”

“That’s not real ice.”

“It’s frozen water.”

“Not the same thing. They freeze it. I did a fly-by of Io once, a couple months ago. Nothing but black peaks and valleys, and the settlement’s lights reflecting over it.

“Sounds nice,” he said, though his tone was dubious.

“It looks like the ocean at night. The way our flashlights hit the waves when we were hunting for crabs.”

Sam was silent for several seconds. “You’re becoming an ice miner,” he finally said.

“There’s no global warming out there.”

Her brother sighed, but Rajani knew that she had won. “I can’t talk you out of it?”

“I’ll visit on the off-season,” she promised, and flipped the switch to disconnect. With a mechanical click, both avatars disappeared. Rajani angled the nose of her craft upwards, away from Earth, preparing to trade one orbit for the next.

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

It was a no-call assignment, and Carson hated no-call assignments. Attempts to contact the McCaulty family through conventional mail had been unsuccessful, though he noted that the lever of the mailbox had been raised, indicating recent use. They had no telephone, of course. Carson shifted the car to manual control as they left the grid and pulled onto the gravel trail.

“Are those real cows?” Kristin asked. He nodded. Her eyes were wide.

“You’ll get used to it. Is your defo shield charged?” he asked. The car came to a stop behind a rusted-out manual pickup truck, and Carson yanked on the emergency brake. Kristin nodded and followed him up the gravel path and he looked her over one last time before ringing the doorbell.

Long seconds passed before the door swung open a few inches, and a portly woman ran her eyes over the two of them. “Are you Mrs. McCaulty?” Carson asked as he flipped open his wallet. His badge caught the light and projected a holographic image of his face.

“I got no business with you.”

“We’re here to discuss your son.”

Mrs. McCaulty squinted suspiciously. “There’s nothing wrong with Herbert.”

“Then you won’t mind us asking him a few questions.”

“He don’t talk yet.”

Carson reached for his report pad and scrolled through the relevant information. “He’s nearly five, correct?” he asked as he moved his foot into the crack between the door and its frame. “We’re just gathering information about the case.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Herbert.”

“Are you familiar with the Re-Ability program?”

“You’re not sticking nothing in my son’s head,” she said, this time with an edge of force. Mrs. McCaulty leaned against the door, but Carson didn’t let it close.

“I think you might be misinterpreting this visit,” he said. “I’m here to tell you about the federal assistance program. Your son may qualify for-”

“You ain’t sticking nothing in my son’s head,” she repeated.

Carson revealed no evidence of frustration or unease, though Kristin had tucked herself behind him with a nervous expression across her youthful face. “Re-Ability implants are no different from pacemakers or any other medical device,” he said calmly. “If he’s struggling, there’s a solution. Surely, as his mother, you’d want him to have the best life possible.”

“You ain’t-”

“I’ll just leave you with this information,” Carson said. His hand slid through the crack in the door, holding a bouquet of holo-readers. She snatched them from his grip, and he barely retrieved his hand before the door snapped shut. Carson’s frown was almost invisible as he turned back to the car.

“She isn’t going to read those,” Kristin said as she grabbed the door handle.

“You’re learning fast.”

“So what do we do?”

He slid into his padded seat and yanked the door shut with a little more force than necessary. “Level two,” he said. “Forward it under neglect and endangerment.”

Kristin gave a short nod as she slid in and pulled her door closed. “Are they going to-”

“If he doesn’t have that implant before he’s six, he’ll be permanently delayed.” Carson snapped as he threw the car back into manual and it spun. “Don’t feel sorry for her. He needs treatment.”

“Alright,” Kristin said. Her voice was meek as she reached for the console panel.

“Label it priority,” he added. The car jerked abruptly as it reached the end of the driveway and reunited with the grid.

As of yesterday, we’ve wrapped up yet another year of 365tomorrows (for a grand total of 730 tomorrows, I believe, but as a liberal arts major, I might be wrong) and today launches us into our third. We’ve got a number of changes to announce, from the new site itself (design provided by Steve Van Rooy and produced by Steve Smith with 3D graphics provided by Moebius) to shifts in staff, and we’re certain we have an exciting year ahead of us.

J Loseth will be leaving us this year, but we’re bringing on three regular contributors as staff members: Sam Clough, Duncan Shields, and Patricia Stewart. All three have made excellent contributions to the site so far, and we’re looking forward to seeing them more often. You can usually find our new staff members (and some of us old ones) milling around the forum, so pop over to get to know them.

As it did last year, 365 runs on both staff writing and user submissions, so please, keep those stories coming! We’ve upped the word count to 600 or fewer words, but while we used to play fast and loose with the limitation, it’s now a firm rule.

We’re all really excited about this coming year, and we’ve got a few more surprises in the works. Thanks to you, we’re the most popular daily flash fiction site on the web. It means a lot to us to see how many people visit the site and to hear feedback from our readers in the forums (hint, hint), and without you, we might not have survived as long as we have. So thank you, from the bottom of our writerly hearts, and we hope you’ll enjoy what we have in store.

-Kathy

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

“I think mine is a girl,” Anju said as she stretched her legs out over the sofa in the resting room. Her hands crossed over her round stomach, which was covered by the stork-printed flannel shirt Special Delivery issued to everyone in the compound. A larger embroidered stork rested over her heart, carrying a swaddled infant in a sling. Most girls were horrified by the logo when they first arrived, but an aide explained that it was simply an ancient myth. No children would actually be dropped from the sky.

“You can’t tell what it is,” Jahnavi said. Her shirt hung around her stomach, deflated, but the next few months would change that. Even with an empty womb, she carried herself as if in her third trimester. Jahnavi had lived in the complex for seven years.

“I can tell,” Anju said. “She feels like a girl.”

“You’ve never been pregnant before,” Jahnavi pointed out.

“I know.”

Shaila listened to the conversation with mild interest, though part of her attention was directed towards the television. For weeks, she’d been trying to teach herself to read by watching American sitcoms with subtitles on, and sometimes, she thought she was getting close. Special Delivery didn’t allow anything but light comedy in the facility. A healthy mind makes a healthy baby, they said. Shaila’s dark eyes drifted to the other two women. “If she thinks it’s a girl, let her think it’s a girl,” she said. Her voice was a quiet warning. “They won’t let her see it, anyways.”

Anju’s hands pressed more firmly against her stomach, but she did not argue. For long moments, the only sound in the resting room was the laugh track of the television and the quick, poorly-dubbed dialogue. Shaila bit at her fingernail as she studied the rapidly moving words at the bottom of the screen. In three years she’d be too old to work for Special Delivery, but she didn’t intend to go back to the factory like most retired surrogates did. Shaila was going to move to the city and get a real job, the kind that she saw in the sitcoms.

“They really won’t let me see her?” Anju asked quietly.

“Why would they? It’s not your baby. Let the real parents worry about it.” Jahnavi waved her hand dismissively, though there was a hint of derision in her voice.

“I’d just like to know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

“Yeah, well. You’ll get over that.”

Another long silence. Shaila rubbed her stomach, which was just beginning to swell. This would be her thirteenth birth. “They look like that,” she finally said as she lifted her hand to the television. “Like those people. Blue or green eyes, red or blond hair. They get named things like Courtney and Jeremy.”

Anju looked at her intently, then fixed her eyes on the screen. “All of them?”

“Most of them. It’s what the parents want.”

Anju looked down at her belly, then back to the colorful television. She seemed to consider the statement carefully. “I hope she has blue eyes,” she said.

Jahnavi grunted. “It’s not your baby,” she said again.

“I don’t care. I hope she has blue eyes and black hair and I hope they name her Madhuri.”

“No one is going to name their baby Madhuri,” Jahnavi said. “No one. You ever seen a Madhuri on TV?”

The silence was tense, and after a few seconds, Shaila turned up the volume on the television. “It’s a perfectly good name,” she said, her words almost drowned beneath the laugh track of the television. “Just save it until you have a kid of your own.”

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

Nine days after receiving the transmission from Claudia, Jisuk found himself sitting in a corner booth at the Leaping Cow pub, grateful that the iciness of his beer disguised its stagnant taste. It wasn’t hard to keep something cold on Luna Mal, where the school uniforms included heavy coats, but until this visit he’d never realized how well the temperature complimented (or disguised) the flavor of the region’s cuisine. When Claudia finally sauntered into the bar, ten minutes late, she unwrapped her scarf and yanked her hat from her head before dropping into place across from him. Her blond hair was a mess, and she smelled like damp wool. Jisuk had been annoyed since leaving Earth for the three day journey to Luna, and his contact’s tardiness didn’t help matters. Unfortunately, Jisuk knew he needed her.

Last year, Claudia had secured an exclusive contract for Mercurian saffron, and the spice had given his menu an advantage over the hydroponic dishes offered by his competition. Now, the rest of the gourmet world was beginning to realize that Terrans preferred their cuisine pulled from the soil—a kind of nostalgia, he imagined—and if he didn’t come up with something new, he risked losing his prestige as an innovator.

Claudia yanked the drawstring of her bag and withdrew a dull metal box slightly larger than his palm. A portable refrigeration unit, he realized. She placed it on the table with a quiet thump and motioned for a server to bring her a glass of water.

“Joraberries,” Claudia told him with a broad smile.

Jisuk’s expression of interest showed a flicker of reservation. “Berries?”

“Not just berries. Joraberries.”

“If this is some kind of Frankenstein fruit, I’m not going to violate-”

“It’s not,” she interrupted. “It’s not engineered at all. All-natural and organic, fresh from an ice cave on Triton.” Her thumb rubbed the box’s fingerprint reader, but she didn’t lift the lid.

“Berries. From an ice cave.”

“The colonists have been living on them for years, but no one on this side of the asteroid belt has heard of them,” Claudia continued. “They’re seeds. Unfertilized, preserved by the nitrogen pools. Aged at least five centuries old. Since the plants are extinct, they’re a limited commodity. And I just bought the cave.”

“Show me,” Jisuk said. The lid of the box flipped open.

For a second, it was impossible to see the contents through the pale fog floating over the surface of the liquid nitrogen. After several seconds, however, the denser gas spilled over the edges and onto the table and revealed several clusters of translucent beads, each seed the size of a large marble and containing a black pit smaller than a sesame seed. They were submerged in the clear fluid, but Claudia retrieved a pair of plastic tongs from her bag and pulled one free, then dropped it into her glass of ice water.

“Like I said, I own the cave,” she said as the berry frosted to an almost opaque white, “and I’ve contracted two groups of migrant workers from Io. If you’re not interested in them, I’m sure Kerry Jenson will be.”

The mention of his main competitor caused Jisuk’s eyes to narrow. “If they’re any good, I’ll buy them,” he said. “If they’re not, it’ll be Jenson’s loss.”

Claudia shrugged. Seconds of silence passed before she fished the berry from the ice water with her tongs, then motioned for Jisuk to extend his hand. He complied. The skin of the seed felt like frozen leather. He touched his tongue to the berry, then popped it into his mouth and bit hard, hard enough to pop the thick coating. The inside was gelatinous but shot through with ice crystals–a fascinating texture, one strong enough to feature the betty prominantly in desserts. The taste developed a second later: sweet, but with an acidic tinge. Versatile, excellent for marinades, and he could already imagine a martini flavored by its extract.

“They’re good,” he said. He swallowed the gel and chewed the skin, which dissolved almost immediately into syrup. “Excellent.”

“It’s what I do,” Claudia said. She waited before continuing. “Thirteen credits a pound,” she told him. “Including shipping. They’ll come like this, in nitrogen.”

“Write up the contract,” Jisuk said after running his tongue across his teeth to lick away the last of the berry’s juice.

“You’ll have it within the week,” Claudia said, grinning before pulling her hat over her head and rising to her feet. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

Jisuk nodded. He reached for her tongs, taking another icy sphere from the liquid and dipping it in the ice water to thaw.

“What about the colonists?” he asked as he lifted the berry to his mouth.

“What about them?”

“You said this is what they eat.”

“Oh, they’ll manage,” Claudia said. “They’re a resourceful people.”

This month, we’re proud to feature another long-term contributer: Patricia Stewart. Patricia’s background in physics makes her an excellent source of hard science fiction, but her audience isn’t limited to scientists: anyone can enjoy the human touch in her stories. You can expect her to make several appearances in June, in addition to our usual blend of staff writers and submission contributions. We hope you enjoy what you see.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Staff Writer Steve and Möebius, of www.team-dystopia.com, we now have a masthead and footer that far surpass the text-and-NASA-culled-stock-photo images we’ve been using for the last two years. If you haven’t already, refresh your browser to check out the wonder.

Möebius posted this excellent render of our (NASA’s?) satellite dish to the forums, and we immediately fell in love with it. Luckily, he allowed us to use it for the overall site design. We love getting feedback and contributions from you guys, so please, keep them coming! You all know where to submit.

There’ll be another newspost about this in a couple months, but we’re closing in on two years here at 365, and we’re constantly amazed and warmed by the support we’ve received from you loyal readers out there on those vast, pipe-channeled internets. Thanks, guys. We’re looking forward to even more.

We let a couple of months slip by without a featured writer, but our featured writer for the month of February is here to make up for that: Sam Clough, aka Hrekka. He’s got plenty of new tomorrows to bring you this time around, along with our usual mix of submissions and staff work. We began featuring writers last October with Duncan Shields, and we intend to continue throughout the year.

We’ve got a few other projects in the works, including some promotional flyers that should find their way onto our news page within a couple of weeks, so stick around!

The Lethe was plastic, white. It bore the black logo of Mnemoprises and a large yellow caution sticker that warned ebayers and Chinatown chopshop owners that it was illegal to use without proper company-granted certification. None of them listened, of course. The list of warnings was seemingly endless, but Xiu knew that most of the threats were empty. Permanent neurological damage. Wasn’t that what the machine was for?

She operated out of a small room in the back of a tourist dump, and every day she had to brush past curtains of t-shirts (“3 for $10!” the handwritten sign informed) and “Vacation souvenir’s!!!” (punctuation intact). The store had belonged to her father, and his father before him, and now it belonged to her brother. As the oldest, it should have gone to her, but they were a traditional family. A woman couldn’t be trusted to run the business. This didn’t bother Xiu, who made more money from one appointment than her brother made in a week. They were different businesses, tourist dumps and memory holes. People paid more to forget than to remember.

Her appointment book that day was filled with the usual: witnesses who didn’t want to take the stand, thieves who didn’t want to know where their money came from in case the feds mindmined them. She was an expert, though she lacked the certificate Mnemoprises offered. The man who had sold her the Lethe had taught her the subtleties of memory. Her first appointment wanted to forget a night in Atlantic City, where he’d gambled away half of his child’s college fund. “I’m going to claim I was robbed,” he told her. Implausible, but it wasn’t Xiu’s job to question. She used the device like a surgeon, precise and cool as a sharp scalpel. There was no collateral damage.

The second was a love story, a woman whose husband had left her for a history teacher. A male history teacher, no less. “How could I have known?” she sobbed. Again, the scalpel.

The last client, the one at the end of the day, was a woman with straight brown hair and a child in tow. He couldn’t have been older than eight. Xiu motioned to the chair in front of the Lethe, but the woman nudged the boy forward. He sat on the stool. His eyes were red and he sniffed, rubbing his nose on the sleeve of his sweatshirt and leaving a sparkling line of mucus. Xiu gestured the woman back into the tourist dump.

“I don’t do this on kids,” she said.

“It’s nothing bad,” the woman told her. “He just needs someone to help. I’ll pay well.”

Xiu needed to be paid well. “What’s the case?”

“It’s my husband’s father,” she said. “His grandfather. They were very close.”

Xiu frowned and tugged at the hem of her shirt, suddenly nervous. “He died,” she said. It was more of a statement than a question.

“Yes.”

Xiu considered this, silently weighing her options. “His mind is still growing,”

“He’s been crying for months.”

“He misses his grandfather. It’s natural.”

“It’s not natural to cry for months.”

Her fingers knotted around the elastic hem. “And you need him wiped. Everything.”

“Can’t you just make him forget that he’s dead?”

“If he knows he had a grandfather, he’ll wonder where that grandfather went. Wiping’s the only solution.”

The woman was silent for a long time. Slowly, she reached into her purse and withdrew a thick envelope. Only cash had value here. Xiu accepted it with a subtle bow of her head. “He’ll regret this,” she warned. “Never knowing his grandfather.”

“He won’t know to regret it,” the woman told her. Somehow, the woman knew more about this procedure than she did.

Xiu led her back into the room and sat down opposite the boy, whose eyes were dark and pink from endless rubbing. “Give me your hand,” she said, and placed his small palm against the larger palm outline on the Lethe. Xiu turned on the machine and it hummed to life, ready to swallow the past.

___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer

That Halloween, the ship decided to be a ghost.

The ship itself wanted to use an oversized sheet, but Tommy laughed at the artificial intelligence and pointed out that there was no way his mother would be able to find a sheet that big. It was a small ship, the kind most kids in his middle school got when they turned twelve, but even a small ship would require at least three or four king sized sheets, and besides, where would they put the eyes? It was a terrible idea. Being a ghost was fine, Tommy said, but the ship would have to be a ghost ship. Tommy himself would have to be the ghost driver.

Tommy placated the ship by allowing it to have a ghost flag, which was a pillowcase with a ghost drawn on it with permanent marker. He hadn’t asked first, but his family had plenty of pillowcases. He only used one pillow; his sister used four. He felt justified in his decision to give the ship what it wanted.

The ghost costume itself (the ship’s, not Tommy’s) was accomplished with a lot of dark tempera paint, the kind that most kids used to paint names, sports logos, and witty comments on their ships during the school year. He smeared it over the white plastimetal surface as the ship sat contentedly on its three landing feet, humming a popular tune through its speakers. The paint didn’t go over quite as well as he hoped. Rather than looking like soot or rust from outer space, it looked like fingerpaint, like a prank gone very poorly. Tommy didn’t tell the ship, though. He didn’t want to hurt its feelings.

His own costume was slightly more involved than the sheet would have been. Tommy used the leftover paint to smear over the only white pair of pants and shirt in the house, which he’d found in his older brother’s drawer, and after they were sufficiently filthy he went at them with a wire cutter, which was the only sharp thing he could find in his father’s workshop. When he came back outside, the ship whistled contentedly.

“I think we should be zombies instead of ghosts,” Tommy said. They looked more like zombies anyways. He drew a new flag on a new pillowcase, this one with a caption declaring a lust for brains, and he rubbed the last bit from the bottom of his paint jar over his face. They made much better zombies than ghosts, though he wasn’t sure if a ship could be a zombie. Either way, he again decided not to mention it. His ship was more sensitive than most, and often took things the wrong way.

Tommy’s mother took the usual pictures, and gave her usual lecture to the ship about its responsibility for the safety of the boy. “Braaaaaains,” the ship declared, and it plotted a course through the city. The year before, they’d charted out the best towers for candy and prizes, determined not to waste their valuable time in the wrong districts. By the end of the four hour window permitted by the city, the trunk of the zombie-ship was nearly full. Because his mother’s curfew was an hour later, the ship landed on a public pad atop one of the tallest buildings and they rolled to the edge as Tommy popped the front dome to look out over the twinkling city.

“Sorry you can’t eat candy,” he told the ship as he pulled the wrapper off a piece of caramel. The ship ate nothing, not even fossil fuels, sipping its power off of a hydrogen battery.

“It’s okay,” the ship said. Its internal lights flared with contentment. “I prefer eating brains, anyways.”

___________________
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows
365 Tomorrows Merchandise: The 365 Tomorrows Store
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow

So far, this has been an exciting year for 365. The submissions are working out great, and we’ve been really impressed with the quality. Judging from your feedback, you’ve been enjoying them too. However, we’ve had a few emails asking about the status of particular submissions after they’ve been rejected or accepted, and we’ve traced this problem to the fact that 365tomorrows emails are being filtered as spam by a few popular email services. When you submit, please make sure that 365tomorrows.com is on your list of approved senders!

We’ve pleased to announce a new forum overlord: Freeman. If you haven’t already checked out our forums, head over to discuss the day’s story (and other exciting topics!) with other 365 readers. Most of the staff and a few popular non-staff writers follow the boards to answer questions and participate in the fun. We’d love to have you join us.

We’ve got another exciting announcement: beginning this month, we’ll be occasionally featuring a writer pulled from our well of submissions. We’re kicking this off with Duncan Shields, whom you’ll be seeing a lot of in October.

The Sears catalogue offers dozens of models of BlogBots, but it claims that its most popular is the X451, used to conduct remote interviews. During an average three years of service, the X451 BlogBot will recite hundreds of questions posted to its forum and transcribe the answers of over 50 interviewees. Some interviewees are celebrities, and some are politicians. Many are general surveys, where the BlogBot is positioned in a public space and repeats the same question to a given number of pedestrians.

Once, the legend goes, a kid asked his favorite site’s BlogBot to interview another BlogBot, this one belonging to a fiction site, and provided it with a single question: “Why do you do it?” A BlogBot’s programming is rudimentary by conventional standards, and it’s considered slightly less intelligent than the average car. When the question was posed to the fiction BlogBot, it nearly crashed, but its adaptive software saved it by processing the question as an incomplete answer rather than an inquiry.

People say science fiction is prophetic, but that isn’t entirely true. Science fiction isn’t about the future. It’s about the world we live in now, which is constant and constantly changing. The specifics change, from hovercars and ray guns to genetic engineering and cyberspace, but at the center of every science fiction story there’s something alive, something human. And that never changes.

The first answer was not an answer. The second BlogBot coolly repeated the words it had been given, and the BlogBot conducting the interview lapsed into a similar state. For several minutes, the room was filled with two voices as the BlogBots recited the question over and over. Each repetition was classified as a follow-up question, and in accordance with its programming, nothing could be converted to text until a final answer had been given.

Of course, it’s difficult to come up with ideas sometimes. You get discouraged, or feel like everything’s been done before. Often, it has. Sometimes the ideas are wonderful, and sometimes they’re less than wonderful. But you do it anyways, because that’s what writing is about.

It took the webmaster over an hour to realize that something was wrong, and it took three days to find the missing BlogBots. When they were recovered they were still locked in battle, though their words were now slurred by dying batteries. Not a single word had been converted to text. The question was never answered.

When readers try to thank me for writing, I never understand it. On their own, words are nothing but lead and ink and pixels. Telling a story is a circle: the writer writes, the reader reads, and worlds are created. I’m constantly thanking my readers. Sometimes, it’s just more obvious than others.

Information about the upcoming year of 365

It seems like it’s been forever since I stopped at an abnormally long traffic light in my hometown and wondered why the internet has daily blogs, daily webcomics, and no daily fiction. 365 days after our initial launch, it’s safe to say that’s no longer true. 365tomorrows is the first daily flash-fiction site to complete an entire year, and although we’ve given you hundreds of stories, there are thousands more waiting to be told. Some will be ours, some will be yours, but you will never go without your daily fix.

We are, however, making a few changes.

In year two, Steve Smith will be joining the 365tomorrows staff as a contributing writer. Steve’s a fantastic wordsmith and a beacon of ideas, so we’re certain that you’ll love his work as much as we do. He’ll be replacing Jared Axelrod, who’s leaving to pursue his own projects. The rest of us (J Loseth, JR Blackwell, B York, and myself) are sticking around, though you’ll be seeing less of our work as we use submission content to introduce you new writers.

In case you missed our newspost about submissions, you can find all the information you’ll need through the “submit” button on the navbar above. We’re still accepting them, so hurry up and write!

We’ve had an excellent but challenging year, and I’m constantly astounded by the amount of audience support we’ve received. It hasn’t always been easy (wardriving at midnight during power outages, typing stories into cellphones) but it’s been fun, and we’re ready to go another round.

When I found her she was seated at the entrance to the 8th street NR station, looking like Huckleberry Finn in faded overalls with a wooden fishing pole resting over her shoulder. She’d been waiting for me, of course, because I was the one with the BB gun, and she damn well wasn’t going hunting on her own. Dawn was cocky, sure, but she wasn’t stupid. You never know what can happen down there.

“Ready?” she asked, grinning like a cartoon pumpkin. I nodded and she swung the fishing pole out to grab hold of the line, which was tied around the usual candle. Dawn lit both ends then bounced down the stairs, disappearing into the black subway entrance as if it were the mouth of a cave. I followed, the BB gun brushing against my hip.

As usual, the swarm of small fries dashed away from Dawn’s candle with a clatter of hundreds of claws against cement. These were three, maybe four inches…not the type we wasted ammo on. The quickest gutterbrats could catch them by tossing nets, but Dawn and I, we hunted serious game. She thrust the fishing pole into my hands as she hopped the turnstile, and my eyes followed the watery light over the familiar space. Hulking figures of old, dark ticket machines, and the plexiglass windows of the chamber that, for some reason, had never been looted. All trains cancelled, the whiteboard read in marker unaffected by the last decade.

“Downtown this time?” Dawn asked. She took the pole back so that I could swing myself over the barrier, and when I landed, I nodded. We passed the pole again to jump down into the tracks, and the flame flickered, almost going out from the movement. The candle was vital to tunnelhunting. Aside from providing light, it warned us when we were coming up on a patch of dead air. When we stood still we could hear them in the distance, crawling through the tunnels. The big fish, trackrabbits the size of cats.

Dawn stopped, and the candle bobbed. This was the place. I hurled the Styrofoam containers onto the next track over and heard the snap and wet crash of half-rotten bait, then I backed beside her to wait. They heard it. They always did.

The first ones were small, a little smaller than a cat. In the flickering light of the candle they were emaciated grey shapes trailing bent tails, sometimes bulging with tumors. The water’s poison, down here. We wait patiently, Dawn dangling the candle a few feet ahead as I level the gun at the swarm of rats. The big ones come later, ambling on crooked legs. Those are the ones we want.

The shots are clean, like my shots always are, and the rest of the trackrabbits scatter like pigeons. When Dawn and I get over, three of them are laying on the tracks, and one of them’s still twitching. “Nice,” she says, and I nod in agreement. One’s almost the size of a dog…it’ll fetch good money topside.

Dawn grabs the smallest one by the fattest part of the tail and starts dragging, steadying the fishing pole by tucking it under her arm and holding it straight with her free hand. I grab the other two and we head back to the sunlight, pulling our spoils behind us.

“She likes the rain,” Ms. Jones explained to her neighbor when the woman called in a panic, yelling that Xue had spent the last six hours sprawled across the top of the house ‘looking like a half-drowned corpse.’ She scowled at the shrill, busybody voice, but saved her choice words for the sound of the dial tone after Mrs. Hatter had been disconnected. The social workers had warned her that the transition would be difficult for Xue, but no one could have cautioned her about the Hatters.

The entire country had seen the news reports of the commune raid, but it had been reduced to late night talk show jokes in a matter of days, and within two weeks, it was forgotten. The commune leaders were sent to jail, which Ms. Jones’ pastor described as a light punishment for the crime of playing God.

In the first few weeks, Ms. Jones had become aware of the whispers that stopped when she drew near to the groups of ladies assembled to collect their biological children from the church’s after-school care program. She’d learned to ignore them, eyes forward as she swept through the handful of women to the corner where Xue played by herself. After she gathered the abnormally small child into her arms she always made it a point to walk past the other mothers with her posture straight, her jaw clenched, and her eyes narrow. It had taken Ms. Jones less than a month to become fiercely proud of her foster daughter. The condescending glances only strengthened her conviction.

Such a pity, the ladies gossiped. The girl’s barely human. Can you imagine? And with no husband to help. She should have just gotten a pet.

After Ms. Jones replaced the phone on its cradle, she left through the front door and walked to the sidewalk, shielding her eyes from the downpour and scanning the roof for Xue. Sure enough, the girl was stretched across the mottled shingles. Ms. Jones didn’t bother calling her name. She strode to the ladder and climbed eleven feet before stepping over the edge of the ranch house roof.

“Xue?” Ms. Jones said softly. The girl shuddered, sending droplets of rain in every direction. “Don’t you think it’s time to come inside, honey?”

Xue turned, her dark, unblinking eyes meeting Ms. Jones’ blue ones. Her nose twitched, but she offered no response to the question.

“It’s cold out here,” she said. “You must be freezing.”

“I’m not cold.”

Ms. Jones shrugged as she took a seat beside her foster daughter. “I am,” she said.

“That’s because you don’t have fur.”

Ms. Jones had no argument. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched the clouds scrolling over the horizon.

“No one’s making you stay out here,” Xue said. Her voice was cool, sullen, and seemed old for her eleven years.

Again. Ms. Jones shrugged. “It’ll stop raining eventually,” she said.

“Whatever.”

“And the colder I get, the better the hot chocolate will taste when I go back inside.”

Xue’s whiskers trembled. “You have hot chocolate?” she asked.

“And marshmallows,” Ms. Jones said.

The girl considered this for a long minute. “Maybe in a little bit.”

“No hurry.” Ms. Jones brushed away the lines that rain had traced through the thin fur of her daughter’s forehead. “It’ll be there whenever you’re ready.”

The bud blossomed into her ear, its hairlike tendrils snaking towards her eardrum where they fanned out into electric petals, sensors cool against her hot skin. The soft thud reminded Meredith of being submerged, and in a way, she was: holding her breath against the summer rush hour stench of body odor and urine as the subway undertow pulled her beneath the island. The bud measured her heart rate, body temperature, slight changes in her pH. It understood her mood, and it provided a soundtrack to match. Slow, quiet. A Monday evening mix.

Meredith was well into the third track when her hardware buzzed against her thigh. She shifted her weight to detach it, and pressed the backlight button to better make out the words. Josh.

u ok?

im fine, she messaged back. y?

Three thousand miles away, on the west coast, the boy Meredith had met on her favorite band’s forum frowned at the letters on his own messenger. She couldn’t lie to him any more than she could lie to her bud. Josh syndicated all of his friends’ iTracks, and the downtempo music broadcast her mood better than any facial expression could.

im reading ur itrack, he typed. sounds sad.

just a mellow monday, Meredith replied.

want company?

Meredith answered with an indifferent emoticon, but Josh understood. He positioned his analogue headset over his ears and smiled at its weight, at the cold feeling of leather-covered foam beside his cheekbones. He clicked the link on her iTrack feed and jumped in mid-song, then settled back into his armchair, closing his eyes and concentrating on the gentle, melancholy notes.

Separated by an ocean of land, Meredith leaned into the hard cradle of an orange subway chair as her world, too, faded to music. Around her, dozens of bodies shifted to their own rhythms, composing their iTracks over the steady, low hum of the train.

“You just need to get your priorities in order,” Pern said as he plunked the ripe wikifruit onto the table. Courtney watched with dismay, her eyes wide as she watched the young man end drive a long knife through the product of her months of gardening. “Food is all fine and good, but we already have food. We’ve got over a hundred rations to get through before the supply ship comes. This,” he said, indicating the smooth, pink outer shell of the fruit, “is for something better than eating.”

“The only thing better than eating is breathing,” Courtney said, reciting one of the three principles that had been drilled into her during pioneer orientation. Pern laughed.

“You haven’t been here for long, have you?” he asked. He moved the blade around the thick stem of the wikifruit until a circle the side of his palm could be lifted from the foot-long purple shape. Pern reached for the next instrument, a long-necked spoon, which he stabbed deep into the fruit’s body.

“I…” Courtney began, but her shock quickly overcame her dedication to the pioneer ideals. Pern looked up to her with a warm smile, then twisted the spoon and lifted a clump of soggy pink from the inside of the wikifruit before dumping it into a bowl. He repeated the motion several times, and the rose-colored heap grew larger and larger until it seemed that so much mass could not have been contained within the now-hollowed fruit. Pern ripped the corner from a bag of sugar with his teeth, then poured it into the bowl in an avalanche of white.

“Get me the riser,” he told her. Courtney stared at the fruit, her horrified expression similar to the one she’d worn when she heard about the great wagon incident. She had no choice but to obey, though, and he knew it. When she returned with one of the small packets she used to bake bread, he tore the top away and emptied the paper envelope over the white and pink heap. Pern stirred the pile with his spoon until the wikifruit meat was a squishy, sugar-embedded glob. He lifted a spoonful, offering it to Courtney. “Wanna taste?” he asked.

“You monster!” she whimpered. He shrugged, and shoveled the bowl’s contents back into the purple rind.

“You’ll thank me in a month or two,” he told her with a knowing smile as he sealed the wikifruit with the circle he’d first carved away. “Everyone always does.”

The girl was only on at night, like all of the girls on Bleeker. Her hair was a different color every couple of weeks, because it was so easy to change, but her eyes were always the same. They dressed her up in costumes depending on the season. In December, it was a red velvet miniskirt with white trim. A pilgrim hat in November. In July, small triangles of red, white and blue stretched over artificial breasts with perpetually hard nipples, inviting New Yorkers to celebrate their freedom. When there was no holiday on the horizon, they dressed her depending on their mood. She performed best with her golden wig and the Marilyn dress, standing on the subway grate with a glazed-over smile as she waited for the train to pass beneath her. Once, they dressed her as a mime, complete with white makeup smeared over rubbery skin. The makeup wore off after two jobs, and they couldn’t be bothered to keep touching it up. She’d done well, though. She was excellent at talking with her body.

When men spoke to her, she listened dumbly, nodding at carefully calculated intervals. Usually, they didn’t speak at all. Their business was done in a large loft, where curtains of sheets strung from twine sliced the space into private rooms. Hers was at the end of a white cotton hallway, and was two feet larger than the mattress of the futon. Although they washed the cover twice a week, it always seemed yellow beside the fluttering wall.

Once, after the job, the client asked her about her eyes. “Are they real?” he said with a slight Midwestern drawl. “They look like they’re glass or something.” Although she was capable of speech, the girl rarely answered questions. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice as dense as the well-packed mattress. When he left, he gave her a generous tip, though her service had been distant and uncomfortably rhythmic. “You should have those things looked at,” he suggested, and the hallway billowed as he walked away.

The talent was stored in glass vials, a class A controlled substance. The FDA regulated it heavily, fining doctors for excessive prescriptions and keeping the drug company on a short promotional leash. This was not to be available to the general populace; in fact, this was not to be known of by the general populace. Talent must be a rare thing. If too many people are talented, talent becomes commonplace and the prescription must be increased. It’s a slippery slope, said the ethics committee. They likened it to heroin, suggesting that an entire society could develop a tolerance for the substance.

There were slight variations in the chemical makeup of the talent serums. The qualities that make a good singer are not the qualities that make a good writer, and the enhancements reflected that. Some raised reasoning, allowing for quicker logic associations. Others weakened the neurological scripts that bound ideas together, easing the creation of symbolic connections for artists. Bodily coordination was enhanced, the capacity for language was enhanced. The serums were not offered to those without promise; they were offered to those who had already demonstrated natural aptitude.

The child’s fingers were light on the piano keys, filling the room with watery music. His rendition was criticized for its rhythm, the hesitancy with which the notes followed one another and merged, slightly off, like unsteady footsteps in soft sand that were licked away by the indifferent sea. This was never a piece about triumph, he told the reporter after the recital. The media criticized him for his unpopular interpretation, but the doctors rejected him for choosing the piece itself. A true artist would have created his own sonata, rather than recycling the ideas of a long-dead composer. It showed a lack of initiative, a lack of creativity. He was not a good candidate for talent.

Everything that can be accomplished has been accomplished already, the pharmaceutical company’s internal memo said. We’ve reached the limits of our natural skill, and true innovation is no longer feasible. In the first-year anniversary of the serum’s release, the company held an internal dinner. The CEO shook the hand of each member of the development team, smiling broadly, proudly. “Congratulations,” he said. “You may be the best artists of the century.”

It started at the SureSave on Fourth Avenue. Andy had been standing in line for nearly ten minutes, sweltering in the August heat that poured through the open doorway, before he dropped his basket onto the counter. Hair dye, promising 100% gray coverage. Baking-soda-infused toothpaste. A package of Freedom Day cards which should have been mailed two days ago. The clerk, a bored high-school kid who’d obviously never heard of the complexion pill, swiped his products and asked for proof of credit. Andy pressed his palm against the plastic panel, and the register shrieked.

The kid stared. Andy stared. The customers stared. The manager stared, then asked Andy to step aside. Andy did. The police arrived seven minutes later.

“Where’s your proof?” they asked him, and he offered his palm to their handheld reader. The reader shrieked. Andy was brought to the station. “I have plenty of credit!” Andy argued, but the officer merely lifted an eyebrow. He recited his work history to deaf ears.

The problem wasn’t a lack of credit, as Andy had expected, but an excess of credit.
Herman Sylle was his name, and he was wanted for falsification of funds. Nine million dollars, to be exact. “I’m not Herman Sylle,” Andy argued, but as the police pointed out, the records couldn’t lie. His handprint matched up. His DNA matched up. The police database was completely secure, and there was no chance that anyone could have tampered with it.

“If people can’t tamper with the database, how do people falsify funds?” Andy asked. It was the wrong question, and it wasn’t deserving of an answer. He was assigned a case number and put in prison to await his trial.

“Do you have anyone who can verify your identity?” his attorney asked him, but Andy was a freelance web designer, working from home for clients all over the world. It was rare for him to meet a client face to face, and when contacted, none of the clients could recall details about his appearance. He’d never married, and he’d been the only child of a couple that went into retirement-stasis at the age of 60. The law forbid the subpoena of retired citizens. “Convenient,” his attorney said. He tried to log into his records to find the contact information of the few friends he kept, but his proof was locked out of the account. When the police tried, they found the files empty.

One of the biggest questions we’ve gotten in the last few months is this: what’s going to happen to 365tomorrows on July 31st?

To be honest, for a long time, we weren’t sure. When I started this project, I had no idea that it would become so huge, and I’m really grateful to all of you for helping us along the way. We’ve been featured on a ton of sites and translated into a half-dozen languages, and almost all of this has come from word-of-mouth rather than self-promotion. The forums have been hopping (check them out if you haven’t!) and it’s pretty obvious to me that we have one of the most supportive and enthusiastic fan bases on the internet.

Which is why we’re opening our pages to you.

Beginning on August 1st, 2006, 365 will rely heavily on reader submissions. There will still be staff stories, of course, but in the next year, we’re depending on you guys for most of our content. So, it’s time to commit those flash-fiction ideas to paper (if you haven’t already) and toss them our way! You can find the link to our guidelines and submission form at the top of the page.

We’re really looking forward to hearing from you guys, and making this into all of our tomorrows.

-kathy