by submission | Apr 19, 2024 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
The coronal mass eruption went unnoticed by a good many sentient creatures on the fourth planet from the sun. Engineers, though, noted communications equipment and most industrial machines continued to run without benefit of terrestrial power sources. Moreover, they witnessed those same devices spark—with some even catching fire. The engineers suspected the sun. The clergy blamed the cohort of trickster gods who bedeviled their society from time to time.
A great public debate raged between the two factions, until old Maz slammed his staff down on the polished floor of the Senate.
“It wasn’t the work of trickster lords, nor a random burst from our life-giving star,” Maz declared. “It’s the depletion of our population’s auras! Our halos aren’t as strong they once were—too much easy living, too much decadence. Not enough courage, self-reliance, and patriotic pride.”
A great murmuring rose in the audience. Had they brought this upon themselves? Did this signal the end of their empire?
“Both sides—science and religion—are important to society.” Maz continued, “We need a healthy balance; we can’t function properly without it.”
The audience buzzed. Sure, sometimes one faction held sway over the other, but the pendulum inevitably swung back. Though currently, one faction cast an opaque superstitious shadow over their lives—
Again Maz’s staff slammed down on the floor.
“My nephew Ewton,” Maz crowed, “is brilliant. An engineer! He’s built a device to scan the aura of every citizen. A device to gauge not just the strength and length of individual auras, but also the color.”
Now the audience roared—aura colors were private! They contained personal information only shared with intimates. One’s aura colors were none of the Senate’s business! But some argued, if corrupted auras did cause this strange event—then Senators had to be informed, so they could craft laws to save the empire!
Though fights broke out and blood was shed, the Senate voted to use Ewton’s machine. A law passed compelling every citizen to submit to testing. Trust in the Senate fell into two camps: total suspicion, versus total blind faith. Some citizens packed up their families and in the dark of night fled to the mountains, never to be seen again. Others, thinking obedience was the highest form of patriotism, waited in line for days to be scanned. Society splintered; some cracks would never be repaired.
* * *
Ewton oversaw the test results himself. The Senate gave him an official uniform.
Standing at his console, Ewton twisted knobs, pressed buttons, flipped switches. One by one, citizens passed through the polished arch of the Aura Scanner 3000. The arch beeped and flashed.
“Your aura,” he said pleasantly to one bright-eyed young citizen named Cara, “is pale blue with overlapping shades of pink. So healthy, it’s positively iridescent!” Before the end of the test, Ewton asked Cara out for dinner.
To numerous other citizens he was more somber. “Yours is a sickly dark green. You’ll have to be recycled and repurposed into someone more useful to society.”
Ewton’s work lasted a year, until every known citizen was scanned. He amassed a personal fortune.
Maz was scanned last. When he passed through the arch, there was no beep, no flash.
“Hmmm,” Ewton began, worried Maz would be repurposed. According to the machine, Maz possessed no aura. Impossible! Ewton fretted: Was Maz so old his aura had dissipated? How—
A coronal mass ejection, this one magnitudes larger than the last, slammed into their planet knocking their empire back into the dark ages; a strong-armed blow from which they would never recover.
by submission | Apr 18, 2024 | Story |
Author: Thomas Godfrey
I should have just pleaded guilty. I should have just gone off to some decrepit moon somewhere and put in my ten years of hard labour or whatever it was they were going to have me doing. Breaking my back in the mines of Tormen IV, or being drafted into the Imperial Army and sent off to die in some random frontier war. But no, I’d pleaded not guilty.
Fuck me.
Did I do it? Yeah, of course I did. And I’d do it again. Better to rob some pensioner blind than starve, right? The police didn’t see it that way though, and now, here I am, in the Draxas arena running for my life from HK units programmed with some ridiculous gimmick or another. Apparently, this was a spectator sport in the Elysium sectors of the universe. Rich people bet on how long us cons would last. Kids collected trading cards of the various HKs. What did we get in the slums? Wrestling and raves.
So, forgive me for not knowing exactly what the Draxas arena would look like. I’d been given a crash course. This was my trial. A trial by combat.
They’d dropped me in this arena. Some blown-out old frontier town that got glassed to the Stone Age by Xarens hundreds of years ago. The place was loaded with cameras, and I and about a dozen other lowlife criminals had been dropped in. Last man standing went free.
It was all televised.
Hopefully, someone out there was betting on me. If I got out, I’d make some snobbish police commissioner a wad of credits. Maybe I’d get a trading card or a collectible action figure. Johnny Paxton, the guy who survived Draxas.
I was currently hiding under the ruins of a hovercar.
There wasn’t any food in here. Well, there was. If you could find some other dead guy after an HK had got him. There was also a bit of water here and there. Xaren radiation bombs killed bacteria so the water was fairly drinkable. But I was running out. I’d lasted almost a week.
I’d only seen about four HKS. They all had names like ‘The Butcher’ or ‘The Pope’. There was one called ‘Dominatrix’, who had these spiked chains and tortured you to death. She only aired on the after-dark channels. Best not to traumatize the kiddos.
The fan favorite was ‘Barry’, at least as far as I could tell. His gimmick was that he’d slide-tackle you like an honest Sunday league football player then stamp you to death with bladed cleats.
Fuck me. Should have pleaded guilty.
All was quiet, for now. Then, my stomach growled. I knew in the next street over The Pope had just incinerated some pedophile. The Pope was a great one to follow. His meat came pre-cooked.
So off I went.
I rounded the corner. There it was, a smoldering corpse. I greedily ran towards it. I didn’t care about the cameras. Sure, cannibalism was illegal, but who cared at this point? If they nabbed me again, I’d happily go off to Tormen IV and mine silicon or whatever.
I reach the corpse and start to pluck off flakes of meat. The nonce is still juicy. Yum.
Then something whistled through the air and I felt a sharp pain in my right hand. I screamed as a hooked chain punctured my palm. Then, another chain punctured my left hand, and I was pulled to my feet, screaming in agony.
Fuck me, I’d been found by ‘Dominatrix’.
This was going to be a rough death.
by submission | Apr 17, 2024 | Story |
Author: Thomas Desrochers
It is one of the great mysteries of the late 21st century that the land of Alaska remains as nearly untrammeled as it was a hundred years before. Though its harsh climate was well-preserved by the collapse of the Atlantic Gyre, the exodus from Europe caused by that same calamity created a great many refugees who ought to have seen it as a much less crowded version of the lands they fled. Despite this it remains home to hardly more than a million individuals, its grand vistas largely untouched, the aforementioned preferring off-world vistas.
I came to Alaska in 2087 fresh from the Geological Institute of Colorado on orders from AmMex International, my job to monitor the 40 autonomous nuclear boring probes that restlessly hunted the crust for pockets of mineral wealth. The system was automated and I was a glorified wrench-monkey, a wrench being the best tool to beat the data relays with when they iced up.
To anyone who has lived in this land it should come as no surprise that my romantic visions of life in the far North were quickly replaced by the reality: A body in confusion from nights that swung from perpetual to fleeting, a mind numbed by the seclusion and boredom of life on a lode of quartz ideally located to receive rock-relayed data streams, 47 kilometers from the nearest road. It was no wonder none of my predecessors had lasted more than a year!
The crisis came in the spring of 2088, physical health following my mental health into the depths plumbed by the very probes I monitored. I struck out to my nearest neighbor, a man I had been briefed on but never met who lived a mere 3 kilometers away. Joe was a holdover from a life two centuries past, living in a spruce-log cabin he had built himself and earning his keep trapping the native fur-bearers.
He did not seem much surprised to see me that spring afternoon, perhaps only that I had not come to call sooner. He was an amiable man for one who chooses such seclusion, and for a while we simply traded banalities and drank the tea he had made us from the dried fruit of the local roses. The conversation lapsed to silence, and then my rumination simply spilled out. “Joe,” I asked, “How can a man stand to live in a place like this? It feels as if the land itself is draining the life from me, and I fear that if I stay here much longer I will meet my end.”
Joe smiled at me, thought for a moment, and then said, “In all my years here I haven’t met a foreigner who didn’t feel that way. A man comes up and, sure enough, he’ll meet a crisis of health, of faith, of spirit, within the year. Makes no difference if he’s in the sticks or the city. I did too, some forty years ago.”
For a moment I was shocked from my own misery, the statistical improbability glaring out at me. It was then that Joe told me something I could never forget: “Might be there’s an astronomical explanation, weak magnetic fields or circadian disruption. I don’t think so. Near as I can figure the land itself wants them gone, won’t accept its own taming. A man learns to play by its rules and he’s usually fine.”
This seemingly prosaic wisdom burrowed into my psyche and bore fruit not long after, showing its truth and altering the course of my life. For that I will always be grateful.
-Samuel Goode
by submission | Apr 16, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
We’ve all heard about light pollution and how the glow from cities and towns obscures the night sky, making it difficult to view stars and planets. Maybe we’ve even learned how our luminescent nightlife affects nocturnal animals, migrating birds, and all manner of insects, confusing them and contributing to their alarming decline.
But from space, oh from space, what a show! What a shiny bauble Earth is! Celestial bling of the highest order! Often, I wonder if the stunning view of our glittering globe is the real reason I’ve stayed on Titania all these years. It’s certainly not the amenities.
The self-indulgent whim of the world’s first trillionaire, Titania is the only orbital hotel ever completed. First marketed as a stellar cruise ship for the high-end adventurer, it’s devolved over my tenure into a kind of sketchy skid row hostel for failed opportunists and escapists like me.
Not exactly the class of folks you’d want as our planet’s last best chance for survival.
Because that’s what we became when the lights went out on Earth. Our bright, gleaming world went dark. Like moths to the flame, they came. From Titania’s lido deck, it looked like an impossibly large swarm of insects engulfing the planet. Communication earthside went helter skelter. Then ceased.
Amazingly, Titania’s derelict denizens didn’t panic. We woke up, shook off our malaise, our ennui, our entirely French-forward weariness, and got down to the business of what was happening. Was it an alien invasion or bizarre planetary infestation? Was it organic or robotic?
Was it planned or opportunistic? Were we next?
We shuttered Titania, powered down to standby systems and waited. And, though there was literally nothing to see of the shrouded Earth, we watched as our sensors registered a mysterious spectrum of energy waves, ionizing the atmosphere. Though the lights were out planetside, the air was humming with electricity. Low-level radiation coursed the darkened skies below.
Was life on Earth being zapped out of existence? Was the planet being sterilized for new tenants? Were we just low-hanging fruit for some kind of interstellar harvest by sentient locust?
No one had an answer, though I had an idea: hormesis.
It’s the adaptive response of cells and organisms to low doses of what otherwise might be harmful to them, such as allergens, toxins, and even radiation. I’d had experience with that kind of therapy. It’s why I fled to Titania. Suffice it to say that even a snake oil salesman like me had to quickly part ways with a rogue foreign space agency because I didn’t like the kind irradiation dosing I was directed to give their astronauts to bolster their exposure immunity for a secretive Mars mission.
Still, the concept of hormesis was sound, and the more I saw of the atmospheric telemetry readings, the very systemic increase in ionization, the more convinced I became that our mysterious interlopers were not trying to terraform our planet, but terraform us.
After seven months, just as quickly as the interlopers had come, they (whatever they were) left. The shroud lifted and Earth once again gleamed majestically below us. We cheered on Titania. But Earth remained eerily quiet.
Once we re-established contact, my suspicions were confirmed. Life on earth had been changed. We were not what we once were. We were better. Healthier. Less hostile. More unified. We’d been imbued with a sense of common purpose. As well as an enhanced biological resistance to solar radiation.
From Titania’s vantage, I came to see that our interstellar interlopers hadn’t been attracted by Earth’s gaudy city lights. Instead, they’d been drawn to something more luminous, something more strangely dazzling in humanity.
They hadn’t come to invade or infest. They’d come to invite.
To coax us from our darker shadows, redirect our light, help us ride it to the stars, and fan the flames of self and selfless discovery ever brighter.
by submission | Apr 14, 2024 | Story |
Author: Guy Lingham
My job as a chaos machinist is simple: I inject failure. I’m unleashed upon a system to disrupt its dependencies and tease out its vulnerabilities. It’s all about building resiliency. Chaos exists everywhere, in everything, so better to break and fix things now, before they’re broken for you.
The practice used to involve killing a few clusters or upping the latency to test how well you’ve built your servers. These days, since the advent of global hyper-simulations, my job has become far more interesting. We’re no longer restricted to scaling tests and database failovers for creating chaos; now, the world is our sandbox.
The company paid me well to do my job, as they should have—I’m very good at it. Simulations emulate reality near-perfectly; this is by design, as there’s little point in testing anything that doesn’t. Though this makes a job like mine all the more challenging, it’s allowed me to develop a unique set of skills. If, for example, I was tasked with testing the security of a restricted zone—a contract I received all too often—I couldn’t just drop in, kitted to the teeth with fancy gadgets, and call it a day. That’s only testing the final layer, which, frankly, would be useless. What we need to test is the full journey.
Once plugged in, I would wake up in a random location with nothing but the clothes on my back and a pocketful of cash. The first step of any experiment—that’s what we call testing in the biz—is to gather resources. I’ve been doing this long enough that I know where to buy gear and weaponry that’s cheap and untraceable. Give me a week and I can get you anything. Tranq darts? Easy. EMPs? Done. Antimatter bombs? I happen to have a stockpile already, but I’m saving those for something special.
Next, I’d need to reach my destination unseen. I rarely have to think about this part anymore, it’s practically second nature. Nasty in-and-out facial surgery is scarily easy to come by these days. A quick trip to some backstreet clinic and a visit to the forgers next door would yield me an identity that would last long enough. Finally, it’s simply a matter of sneaking in, placing the charges (if applicable), and getting out. Then, I unplug, wait a month for them to implement fixes, and try again.
The company sent me on countless experiments, even choosing me as the machinist to test their own premises, entrusting me to breach their defences and topple their towers. Like I said, I’m good at my job. I could have done such great things for the company, if only they weren’t so shortsighted. See, they weren’t ambitious enough. As good as the simulations are, a test is never truly worthwhile until it’s executed in prod—the live environment.
They didn’t trust me. They called me mad, mad for wanting to build their resilience, mad for wanting to do my job. Do they not realise that chaos is in everything? In everyone? They’re lucky I’m so forgiving. Even if they won’t take their security seriously, I will.
Soon, they’ll be sorry they got rid of me. Soon, they’ll realise just how good at my job I really am.
