365 tomorrows

Author : Brian Armitage

They met with four hours left. He had hung up his cell phone and stared at it for a second, suddenly out of people to call. When he finally looked up, he saw her across the street, holding the same pose – wondering, he knew, if she had forgotten anyone, but slowly realizing that there was no one left.

He had to convince himself to wait for the commuter rail to pass – one car, only three passengers – before he dashed across the street to her. She pulled out of her reverie, and looked to him as he stopped a pace away.

“What’s the count?” she asked. She wasn’t afraid of him.

He glanced at his phone, suddenly urgent. “Four hours. Will you marry me?”

“Wh… yeah. Yes. Yes.” She nodded, looking anxious.

He laughed once, a single burst. “Thank you! I just… I don’t want to… be alone at-”

She nodded again, dropping her purse and taking his hand. “Go ahead.”

He leaned forward to kiss her.

She snapped her head back, tugged on his hands. “No! Wait. Vows.”

He winced. “I’m sorry! Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Don’t worry. Go ahead.”

“Okay. Our first fight.” They both laughed, and in a moment, he collected himself. “Okay. Um…” He took a deep breath, and held her gaze. Her eyes were bright blue. “I swear, by everything I am, that… I will protect you, and… stand by you… for the rest of our lives. Whatever happens, I am yours.” He swallowed hard.

She pressed her lips together, sobbed once, and said, “I… promise you that I will be with you for the rest of our lives. I will love you… with… everything. That I am. And nothing will separate us, ’till death do we part.”

Then, they kissed.

They jogged to a hotel a block away and grabbed a set of keys from the rows laid out on the counter. He held her in the elevator, pressed close with their eyes both shut tight. Once in the room, they made love recklessly. They laughed when they accidentally bashed their foreheads together, and clutched each other when they cried. Time crawled.

With ten seconds left, they sat together on the floor, leaning on the bed, wrapped in each other.

“Thank you,” he said, and the last tear blinked from his eye.

She smiled and squeezed him. “It was a good idea.” She lifted her head, and her smile shifted sideways. “I’m Melanie, by the way.”

He had to chuckle. “Jeff.” He removed one hand from her back and offered it to her.

She took it and shook. “Nice to meet you.”

They kissed, and the lights shut off. Along, they knew, with life support. Then, it was quiet. Much more so than either of them had expected.

After a minute, Melanie shuddered. “Honey?”

“Yes?”

She drew in her legs. “I’m cold.”

Jeff, without a beat, reached behind him and tugged the rumpled comforter off the bed, wrapping it snugly around himself and his wife. “Better?”

She closed her eyes. “Yes. Thank you.”

Author : Roi R. Czechvala

My father fought in the Gulf War, the Iraqi War, and the Colonial Lunar Wars. His father fought in the blood bath of South East Asia, and his father fought in North Africa during the Great Patriotic War.

So, it was desert, jungle, desert… I hate the jungle. I wish things would have heated up on Mars so I could have stayed in my beautiful dry desert, but I had to follow the family line, I was sent to the jungle planet. Venus.

I hate Venus.

My dad told me, no matter what, “always take extra socks, change them whenever you can”, and the punchline; “always keep your feet dry”. What a joke. I’ve been here 18 months, and it hasn’t stopped raining once. Hell, dad had an airtight battlesuit on Luna.

My squad was out on patrol when we got a message that an enemy unit was in our area; company strength. Four to one. We had the firepower, but they had numbers.

We were walking in a staggered column, five meters apart, ten meters wide. Danvers, on point, suddenly stopped, raised his fist and lowered his hand slowly, palm down. Automatically we stopped and crouched. He stared into the brush. He motioned for us to “get flat”, and chucked a flash bang directly to our twelve o’clock. That little pop triggered a series of explosions that nearly shook my teeth loose. Danvers had spotted a cluster of claymores.

No sooner had the mud settled when we saw the points of light that was laser fire. The dense foliage and constant rain absorbed most of the power, and unless you took a hit in the eyes the most you might suffer is a nasty burn. That was just suppressive fire. All hell broke loose when they laid into us with .30 cal heavy guns and RPG’s.

I was in the rear when we got hit, so I scrambled into a group of rocks that formed a shallow bowl, allowing me to lay down covering fire for the rest of the guys. I was just rising up to fire, when something fell behind me with a moist plop. I spun and found myself face to face with an allied, his rifle on me. It was a classic Mexican standoff, the first to flinch dies.

We faced each other for what seemed like hours, our weapons trained on each others bellies, when a wave of heat and light bowled us over. It was an NG, a neutron grenade, one of theirs. We didn’t carry them in the jungle, because it was too close to escape the blast. They don’t value life like we do.

With our differences, momentarily forgotten, we peeked over the rocks. Nothing. We sat down facing each other, and laughed at the absurdity of it all, not understanding the others language, but understanding futility.

He sighed, put his weapon down, and pointed at my canteen. I handed it to him and he drank deeply. He handed it back to me, and as I took it he grabbed his rifle and leveled it at me. Then he laughed even harder, removed the magazine and showed it to me. It had been empty all along. We both laughed.

He opened his wallet and handed it to me. A picture of his family; cute kids, pretty wife. We laughed. He laughed even harder when I leveled my weapon at him.

The report of my rifle nearly deafened me in the closeness of those rocks.

I hate Venus, and these bastards are why I’m here.

Author : Asher Wismer

I pushed the fedora up on my head and watched the bloody letters with suspicion, as if they might rearrange themselves during a blink. Brick snapped a picture, then muttered, “Josh Ledder. I knew him.”

“Not in this reality,” I said.

“No, but I know him in ours.” My supervisor held the camera nervously, as if unsure of how many more pictures to take; a visual desecration of the hallowed dead. “He almost came to the Temporal Academy with us, but he couldn’t take the string tests without fainting.”

“Hard times for everyone.”

“More for those who didn’t get in.” He gestured at the letters. “What do you make of those?”

“Well,” I said, leaning a little bit closer, “they appear to be his own initials, drawn in his own blood.”

“JL?”

“JRL. Apparently his middle name starts with an R.”

“No it doesn’t.” Brick waddled over and examined the wall. “Josh’s middle name was Earl. JRL… that could mean….”

He trailed off. I cocked my head at him, puzzled. “What?”

“Nothing, just a flashback. We used to have a game we’d play, before I met you. Replace the middle initial with a word to indicate that something had happened. But there’s no context here.”

“Context?”

“It would be in notes, passed in class. Like, I’d write that I was hungry, and change my middle initial to B, for burger. He’d write back that he hoped the burger was good, and change his to G, for gas… it wasn’t a very good game, come to think of it. Still, I can’t help but think that he’s trying to tell me something.”

“It was probably just a mistake,” I said. “Let’s get these back to the station.”

***

That night, as we were filing our reports, the door opened and a pair of beefy Inter-Temporal Cops came in. If we were the watchers, these were the guys who watch the watchers. They trooped over to Brick.

“Sir, you’re going to have to come with us.”

“What for?”

“You’ve been officially charged with the Cross-Temporal murder of Joshua Ledder.”

“Charged with-that’s the case I’m working on right now.”

“And a smooth move it is, to try and avert suspicion by investigating your own work. Come with us, please.”

Brick looked at me, panicked. “Rudy, you’ve gotta help me out here. Show them the pictures.”

“These pictures?” I held up a sheaf of 8 by 10 color glossies, each showing either Brick’s deceased friend or the bloody letters on the wall. The letters that spelled out “Brick killed…” and then smudged off into oblivion.

Brick goggled. “That’s not what was there before! He changed his middle initial to R! He was trying to tell me something! Send someone back to observe, that’ll prove it!”

One of the IT cops grabbed Brick, pushed him down over the desk, and cuffed him. “That reality has too much strain on its subspace net as is. Sending anything back to that location would be just begging for a paradox. Besides, everything looks clear as far as the judge is concerned.” The other cop grabbed the glossies and they hauled him off.

I sat back in my chair and thought, then checked my illegal timeline feed. My second, unauthorized jump showed up under routine maintenance. A little tweaking changed the exact time, and then I shunted the whole thing over to another bureau.

I had never liked Brick anyway. He smelled funny. Besides, now his job was open….

Author : Jacinta A. Meyers

So here I am, a third-class passenger bound for the floating island of a techno-civ, armed with various skins and plotting infiltration and assassination.

Ah, sounds like vacation.

Well, except for the intended target, that is. How do you disarm a human trigger? I mean, I’ve done my fair share of seduction and all, but this is a kid we’re talking about here; his twelfth birthday’s not for another four and a half months. My employers want him dead before then. Even I admit it’s a weird mission. And it wouldn’t even be so bad if I didn’t know that he’s a fair, kind-hearted kid. But what can ya do? Desperate times, desperate measures.

The skin I wear today is white, former Western European. By the time I reach their palace, oh in about seven week’s time, I’ll be wearing one of their skins. They don’t like foreigners where I’m headed. But they do let refugees in. We do their dirty work. We are an expendable commodity and we know our place. So today, I am a lowly immigrant looking for a bottom-rung job. Start at the bottom and work up, that’s how it goes. I’ll tell ‘em my story if they ask, “Homeland under water, no place to go, no family, need work.” Boo hoo, they hear it a million times a day, won’t look twice at me. I’ll be just another face on the wharves. Just another grubby girl there to work the night lines in their factories or clean up their hazardous chemical waste.

Or there to kill their Emperor’s heir.

You know, one of the nice things about what I do is travel. I can just see the island up ahead, growing bigger as we get close. They had to float the whole dang thing when the sea level rose. My employers are still trying to figure out how they did it, and whether it’s still tethered to the bottom somehow. I hear that they carry their pureblood women around on platforms covered with jewels, and that the penalty for touching one is mutilation beyond recognition. Sounds neat to me. Maybe I’ll steal one of those skins while I’m there. See what it’s like to be doted on and protected for once.

Oh, and the kid. Can’t forget about him. Emperor’s got a dozen nuclear missiles rigged to go off if anything happens to his son, all pointed at the League of First-World Nations. If you ask me, it’s a terrible idea. I mean, what if the kid falls out of bed one night? Well. Maybe they sleep on the floor. . . Weird culture, after all. And anyway, it won’t matter anymore.

Because that’s what I’m here for.

Author : Asher Wismer

“I invented a time machine,” said Professor Rudnicki morosely. The whiskey in front of him glinted, a cylindrical crystal promising amnesia.

My hands moved on their own, needing no guidance, wiping a glass that would never be clean. I looked skeptical. “Isn’t time travel impossible, except to the extreme relative future?”

“That’s what they say.” Rudnicki gulped the shot and motioned for another. I poured it.

“Time is relative to our senses, space doubly so. What we perceive to be real is in fact the simple accumulation of expectation; we expect the glass to hold the whiskey, and we expect the whiskey to get us drunk, but only AFTER we drink it.”

“That’s deep, professor.” I hear stuff like this every day; hard not to, when you tend bar near MIT. You pick up the odd scientific fact, and one of the ones I knew about was that time-past was a fixed animal; nothing could penetrate that which has already passed.

“Oh, they want you to believe that, but it’s not true. All you need is to be able to see past Newton, past the expected… so I did. The human mind is the ultimate time travel machine; it sees into the past without leaving the present. All I had to do was replicate that function. And it worked! I never thought it would go so wrong.”

“What went wrong, professor?” The second shot sat untouched; he kept reaching for it, then pulling away.

“I tested the machine yesterday, multiple times, setting it for no more than hours past. It worked perfectly; the memory of the machine and its contents appeared in my memory right when it should have.”

“Memory?”

“When something appears out of nowhere in my past, I expect to remember it,” he said irritably. “Anyway, I showed it to my colleague, Doctor Smith, and he insisted on giving it a test run with himself as the subject.”

“What happened, did it explode or something?”

“I do not create machines that explode! That pastime is reserved for the likes of Nobel; all my work is for the human good.”

“So what went wrong?”

“In my haste to perfect the time matrix, that which allows a physical object to recreate itself in the past, I ignored Newton entirely. Conservation of mass and energy, the laws of inertia. Reaching the past is one thing; reaching the past and remaining on Earth is another.”

“You mean…”

He grabbed the shot now, threw it back like a man just in from a convent. “Yes, exactly. The Earth is in constant rotation, the solar system in constant movement. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion stays in motion… and our motion today is in a different physical spot in the universe than it was fifty years ago.”

My hands failed me for the first time in my career. The glass shattered. Rubnicki smiled grimly.

“He must have appeared right in empty space, in the same relative spot that the Earth would occupy fifty years in the future.”

He stood, no signs of intoxication in his stance, and dropped a ten on the bar.

“Keep the change.”

Author : Dee Harding

Samsara has worn his locks for 15 years, shining and strong. He has adapted to them by sleeping sideways and letting them learn to clean themselves. Each tangled cluster of keratine farms its own rot, the rain, and the detritus of everyday life. Stray protein quietly becoming fuel for a million miniscule workers, all sculpting their environment in long sheathes and spirals. When the city smog is bad all that can be seen of Samsara beyond his mask are the crawling oil-slick dreadlocks, unbound. Throughout his culture’s history, hair has been alive with the symbolism of wind, water and fire. It has not taken so very long for those abstracts to become material, but his mane remains ritual before anything else.

Anything but the divide. Those that take the twisting path serve the economy’s invisible hand. Although the knotted braids are an efficient manifold for Samsara’s microbial hive they weigh him down with meaning. They bind him to his place within the kingdom and decades of financial debt still to be paid. His scalp harbours his craft, his industry and his caste, all impossible to hide. Those of the Breed spend half their lives physically unconstrained but in monetary bondage before they cultivate the 9 foot long archipelago that marks a master of the art. A sage so skilled as to be rooted to the spot and cared for by concubines, physically encumbered but spiritually free.

In some ways, even now, it is difficult to determine where each compound filament of Samsara’s hair ends. They thread through their own strands of infection into the pheremonal plumage of kingdom socialites and prostitutes, the telluric ephemera of engineers and navigators, the chemical sequencing of medics and pushers alike. Even bald, Samsara is telepresent. Which is good, considering, but no real consolation. Stone burns into his knees in the mid-day heat, ankles bound, and the crowd is silent. No-one will approach but the perfect men with swarming skin. Samsara can send nothing past their gracious smiles and he weeps. No fear has been greater than this moment, every nerve is wracked with grief. They walk closer now, and closer. People like Samsara creep up against every boundary, breaking laws that have yet to evolve, but every loop-hole curls in on itself in time. He is caught dead centre in the web of New Delhi, broken, while around him bronzed razors flash in the sun.

Author : Ian Rennie

They turned Valerie off this morning.

Nothing flashy, nothing officially announced. Two grey-suited daemons came in, picked up her sprite and walked out with it. When I went to the dorms to investigate, her room was blank, no sign that she had ever been here.

I know the drill. They’ll say there was some irregularity in her payments and she was being moved from virtual to storage until it was sorted out. Which is crap. What they mean is that the company directors owed someone a favor or were made a better offer on her runtime. In a few weeks they’ll say how much they regret the misconception and that Valerie will be back with us as soon as a space opens. Which they never do.

Valerie, myself, and most of the other residents are lifers, legacies. We paid on insurance policies for decades so that when the inevitable happened our digital consciousnesses would continue in post-life communities. This was back before they understood how expensive the runtime would be. Legally, they have to maintain us here because our policies have been grandfathered in. In practice they want nothing more than for us to vanish and leave the lucrative virtual environment to paying minds with runtime trusts.

So every now and then, they do this, just to get rid of one of us, just to keep the others scared.

They used to call it murder, back when we were alive.

Author : Jacinta A. Meyers

Lieutenant General Macy McMurphey Delane dreamt of meeting his nemesis.

It was a bit of an obsession. He imagined that, across the star-clustered chasm of drifting space dust, on the far edge of the galaxy, there was another command center probably very much like his own.

Yes, there must be super computers with flickering lights and perpetual output of military strategies, logistics, altered tactics. Readouts of enemy locations and dispositions. A busy body of staff revolving around one central station hub.

Perhaps that man would be a bit hefty too, a bit round in the middle. Maybe he liked his authentic steaks cooked medium-rare and tried not to think of the lost ships and their crews drifting in tangled debris as he injected himself with rest serum at the conclusion of each day. His hobbies might include collecting ancient relics or constructing model spaceships. Or when he wasn’t dispatching orders to the front, perhaps he was compiling a catalogue of specimens of rare rock from explored planets.

Surely, this man had a family, too — a wife, two sons who had followed their father into the military tradition. Yes, yes. He probably prided himself on his impeccable uniform but wore his collars slightly loose. His hair might be thinning a little on the top. Perhaps he sported a mustache or perfectly trimmed beard. Yes, yes. And the more he thought about it, the more Delane saw an inferior mirror of himself in the coldly calculated moves of the enemy’s forces.

Delane decided he should like to meet that other general. After the war was through, of course, when the terms ensured peace. A holiday would be in order then. Delane would parade his laurels as he went, would make appearances at certain destinations popular among the politically elite. Perhaps take a short little trip behind the former lines, let the local populace look upon the man who had defeated their very best. Yes, it seemed like a very good plan indeed.

But the blue dots denoting corresponding allied ships became fewer and fewer on the screens. The digital readouts offered less maneuverable options. Losses mounted while Delane scrutinized his foe’s movements and imagined personal insult there. Public outcry hit a deafening crescendo. The people and the politicians resigned themselves to defeat.

Conditions of surrender were sent through the silent vacuum of space: a single white probe (smaller than a child’s hand) carrying files in every language of man.

An answer came twenty-four standard earth hours later. The victor would maintain a distant control only, with little forced change of life on the part of the losers. Merely some intensive trading agreements were to be made in the winning side’s favor. Everyone understood without question that the war would resume in a matter of decades. It always did.

There would be a different general, then. Delane’s dint at command had failed. Setting aside his mild disappointment and arrangements for a golfing trip to the engineered fields of Venus, he thought of his wartime dreams. As his final act in the central command hub, he sent out a friendly inquiry to the enemy’s capital.

The response was surprisingly abrupt. “Oh,” it said simply, the sentence repeated blaringly, line after line, in every language of man, “we computerized central military command. It was converted to artificial intelligence years ago.”

Author : Timothy T. Murphy

A month before reaching Europa, Heather woke to an e-mail from her grandfather. Her grandfather hated e-mail, so much so that she’d been shocked when he asked her to teach him so they could talk while she was away.

He hated cameras even more, so when she opened her in-box to see a thumbnail of his face, she was stunned.

She clicked it and her grandfather’s face swam into view, eyes red and swollen.

“Heather, dear, this is your grandfather. I’m sorry to have to tell you this way, but your mother has died.”

Even in one-sixth gravity, her gut sank like a rock.

“There’s uh… been a virus spreading about, these last few months. I think you only just missed it…”

She knew of it. Two months after leaving Earth, everyone on her transport got into a panic over it. For three months, they all hopped around with breath masks, getting panicky anytime anyone sneezed. Heather’s dust allergy had not made her popular.

“I didn’t want to tell you until it was certain, and for a while there, it looked like the antivirals were working. Two days ago, she took a very bad turn …”

She didn’t want to think of what that meant. She’d heard the stories. She tried not to think of her mother lying in bed, soiling herself and screaming incoherently as the virus fed on her nervous system, leaving behind mineral deposits that calcified her brain.

“Your brother and father are fine. They’ve been quarantined for weeks, but it looks like they’re not infected.” He paused to wipe his eyes, not looking at the screen. “Your mother wasn’t allowed any visitors.”

She died alone.

Five months she’d been on a spaceship, adapting to low gravity and being shunned as the only law enforcement officer on board but for the first time, Heather felt sick and alone. Her gut wrenched into a knot and she leaned forward, pressing her face into her hands as fat tears slid free of her eyes.

“I … I know that you and your mother didn’t get along, these last few years, Sweetheart, but … Well, services are Saturday, and I know you can’t be there, Baby, so if there’s anything you’d like me to say on your behalf, well … you can let me know.”

She knew as well as Grandpa did that any words from her at that ceremony would be seen as an insult, a spit in her mother’s face. In the Childress family, she was a pariah. “The only Childress ever to grow up to become a servant.” Only Grandpa still talked to her, and even he did so in secret.

Still, it was her mother. She wanted to say something. Her mind spun about, looking for some anchor, and landed on the only photo she’d bought with her. Pinned to her bulletin board, it had been taken twenty years ago, when Heather was just seven, and still her mother’s favorite. Her mother had broken her leg, skiing in the French Alps. Heather had signed her cast.

Almost blindly, she opened a new mail and clicked her grandfather’s address. For the subject line, she only put, “Eulogy.” For the message, “My mother taught me to endure pain. It is no help, now. I’ll always ache without her.”

She thanked him and sent it. Later, she would send a longer mail, telling him how she felt, and trying to console him in his loss, but for now, she curled up on her cot – five months away from her mother – and cried.

Author : Geoffrey Cashmore

“See? Look, I said already. It don’ hurt.”

Herb watched again as the bump on Tommy’s hand faded from pink to grey then back to pink each time he clenched his fist.

“Well it’s up to you, buddy,” Herb sounded sceptical. “but it sure looks bad to me. You need get that sucker see’d to.”

Tommy lifted his heavy-booted feet from the linoleum, allowing a party of cockroaches make their way towards the trash-can unimpeded, then got up from the table, shaking his head and puffing out frustrated air. “Crap…” He pulled open the refrigerator with his bump-free hand, “I had me ten times worse than this…you wanna beer?”

“Sure do…but don’t go givin’ me none o’ that there European shit.” Herb set light to the end of a Marlboro then flicked the smouldering match in the direction of the faucet. “I’m keepin’ it real now on – all American…”

“Hey!” Tommy yelled, snagging a pair of long necks from the bottom shelf. “You can’t be sayin’ them things no more, Herby, that’s racialist.” He spun a chair backways and straddled it next to the small table.

“Bull-shit!” Herb twisted the cap off his beer and watched the froth poke its head out “A jigaboo’s a jigaboo, Tommy, an’ I don’t give a shit whether it’s black, white, pink, yeller, green or some micro-fucking-scopic bacterial infection. They shoul’n’t never gone changing the God-damned constitution.”

Tommy got up from his chair again and pushed open the door of the trailer to look out into the dessert night, stepping aside to allow a half dozen moths flutter in and up to the smoke-clouded fluorescent “Jesus, Herb! Your old man’s a God damned Mexican for Christ’s sake! Don’t see how that makes you so all American.“

Herb showed Tommy the middle finger of his drinking hand and burped the words “Ass-hole!”

Tommy waited for the roaches to return across the lino before sitting back at the table.

Herb took a long swig of beer. “So, do you know what it is? D’ya know if it’s on the list?” At least he sounded a little more sympathetic this time.

“Yeh.” Tommy rubbed his eyes “Bacterial. Fucking staphylococci… It don’t need a permit, it’s on the God-damned list.”

“Shit.”

Both men swigged at their respective beers and sat in silence for a few moments before Herb spoke again “You know…I know a guy who knows a guy…can get stuff…”

Tommy cocked his head at his friend. “What sorta stuff?”

“You know…” Herb glanced around the trailer as if to check for spies “Anti-biotics.”

“Jesus, man!” Tommy banged his beer bottle onto the table, sending a plume of froth to splatter on the abandoned poker deck. He was starting to wonder whether he should be hanging out with Herb. “That shit’s fucking racialist too, you racialist bastard!”