Issue 6: Conflict

Brood of War

by Chana Kohl

Voice-Only Encrypted Transmission
Origin: Orion-Cygnus Wormhole Station
Destination: Calgary-Edmonton, New Earth
Date: 28 August, 678 NE

Hi, Jess. In case you don’t recognize my voice squeezed by gravity and skimmed across 4,000 light-years, it’s me, Joe, your affably winsome bro messaging you. Modesty aside, I’m mid-way through my exomedicine rotation and work in the Centauri sector is never dull. I’m in constant contact with every walk of life, organic and synthetic. Don’t worry. I’m nowhere near the conflict zone, although we do get overflow cases from time to time.

I held a Zyaran heart in my hand today: five chambers of quivering, translucent jelly, embedded with shrapnel and fighting for every beat. Oh, you definitely would have hurled. Just like whenever we’d sneak into Dad’s lab and ogle his jars of teaching specimens. Med school just was never in the cards for you, sis.

My patient mended quite nicely. It helps that Zyarans regenerate body parts faster than a Nipsican sea cucumber. And while the captain will live to fight another day, I can’t say the same for the soldiers under her command. Reports are they formed a living shield around her until reinforcements arrived. Strange what people sacrifice themselves for in war.

Oh, I almost forgot. I found a brood of Kivrhak eggs this evening, just left abandoned between Pediatrics and NICU. Our holographic attending, Kel7, said Kivrhaks, like Earth’s cuckoos, evolved brood parasitism in response to environmental stressors. Weird war-time strategy, huh?

Voice-Only Encrypted Transmission
Origin: Orion-Cygnus Wormhole Station
Destination: Calgary-Edmonton, New Earth
Date: 14 October, 678 NE

Well, we had an unfortunate misunderstanding between two patients today. A Zyaran got quite upset when a Kivrhak bent down to seal his mag-boots. Apparently, displaying one’s cloaca is considered a major affront to Zyaran sensibilities. Out of nowhere we heard the high-pitched screeches and caws of indignation over the massive humiliation this caused. It really could have gone ugly if we hadn’t intervened.

Kel7 said that despite the obvious differences, Zyarans and Kivrhaks descend from the same species. There’s even a song they sing, usually after they get ripped on Nsuarian ale, about some fabled ‘Mother Bird’ who will swoop from the heavens one day and gather all her children to live as one.

Doesn’t look like that’s happening anytime soon.

On the brighter side: my Kivrhak brood finally hatched! Kel7 said they would never survive, their shells were too thin and fragile from exposure, or maybe some genetic flaw. They seem to be thriving though, kinda cute. And very hungry.

Voice-Only Encrypted Transmission
Origin: Orion-Cygnus Wormhole Station
Destination: Calgary-Edmonton, New Earth
Date: 11 December, 678 NE

Hey, Jess. It’s late. I can’t sleep.

Remember the time Dad took us fishing at Ten Peaks? The skyline reflected so perfectly on Moraine Lake. If you looked long enough, you’d lose track of which way was up and which was down. I dreamt I was crossing that lake. You were standing on the other side. I thought it was frozen, but I fell through. I called out to you. I could see you, but I couldn’t reach you. I just sank to the bottom.

It was so cold.

Strange how dreams and memory patchwork themselves in your mind.

I guess you heard about the recent uptick in hostilities. Violence is spilling over. Kivrhaks and Zyarans are more alike than different, but when has common ground ever stood before the pursuit of power or resources?

For millennia, the galaxy’s species evolved believing we were alone. Not only were we the center of the Universe, but the reason for it. It was all for us.

We were wrong.

Still, life is rare. Control of freight routes, freedom of wormhole access… you’d think these things could be solved without bloodshed. Maybe it’s true. War is the inevitable price of survival. It just feels exhausting sometimes.

I should probably go check on the hatchlings.

I love you, Jess.

Voice-Only Encrypted Transmission
Origin: Orion-Cygnus Wormhole Station
Destination: Calgary-Edmonton, New Earth
Date: 15 January, 679 NE

There’s now debate whether to enforce ‘temporary paid leave’ for all staff arriving from conflict zones, a blockade that would seriously jeopardize patient care.

Jess, I will quit before I let that happen.

I don’t care what the talking heads back home say. Conflict may be inevitable, but war is a choice. It’s a choice to think in zero-sum terms of us vs. them instead of we. It’s also a choice to fan flames from 1000 parsecs away, yelling slogans, waving flags, keeping score—it’s not a soccer match. These are beings.

I ran a genetic analysis today that confirmed my suspicions. These Kivrhak chicks? They’re half-Zyaran. Kel7 said it won’t matter if they survive to maturity, if either species even catches wind they exist, they’ll be destroyed. I asked if we could pull some strings and get them transferred to Persei IVc. There’s a facility that specializes in interspecies hybrids.

It’ll be good if they can be raised far away from this chaos. At least they’ll have a chance.

Voice-Only Encrypted Transmission
Origin: Orion-Cygnus Wormhole Station
Destination: Calgary-Edmonton, New Earth
Date: 4 April, 679 NE

Hello, Jessalyn. My name is Kel7. I am the holographic attending physician and Director of Exobiology at OCWS Medical Facility. I’ve worked with your brother, Dr. Joseph Ouellette, closely this past year. It is with great sadness I must notify you that Joseph was killed today during the performance of his work duties.

Our earliest reports are that, in a motivated attack, an explosive of unknown origin was hidden within a shipment of medical supplies.

I found Joseph to be a deeply caring individual who spoke of his twin sister often and with fondness. I am truly sorry for your loss.

You should know that before he succumbed to his injuries, Joseph managed to carry a Centauri brood he was caring for to safety. I just got word they will receive secured passage to the Persei system, in accordance with his wishes.

Chana Kohl works in Jerusalem in clinical research. Writing speculative fiction on the bus and during lunch breaks, her short stories have appeared in 365Tomorrows, AntipodeanSF and the upcoming Planetside Anthology (Shacklebound Books). She is a 2022 recipient of the Gotham Writers’ Josie Rubio Scholarship. Twitter: @chanakohl

Currently Reading: New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, edited by Nisi Shawl.

Digit

By Christi Krug

 

It’s done: I’ve activated the BioFocus on my left hand, third digit. Back when I was a girl, Rusi, and you weren’t even a thought, we used our fingers for everything! We touched mud, fur, weeds, worms, food—chocolate puddings and bouncy hot dogs—food came in such shapes! There remains special sensitivity in our fingerprints, you should know, even as they interface with Neural Port Settings. We took our bodies for granted in that era, our hands, wrists, knuckles; we ate with our fingers. I never considered this finger, what it wanted, who it was for. As an adult, sure, I got married, got divorced—a couple of times for good measure. It’s what people did. Your grandfather, Wolfgang, was a freight flyer, and all the long hours and interplanetary traffic made him grumpy. We quarreled. When I married Harry, my titanium wedding band with the serpentine sapphire was a conversation piece. Nevermind that I too became merely Harry’s conversation piece. Those were busy times, though, and he was preoccupied with colonizing OceanForrest, and who could blame him? I’ve always gone along, a pleasant person, allowing. Anyway, before you were incubated, the worms and furred things went into steep decline, and I was alone. Then that awful dictator, Numm, came into power and removed us Ignorables, taking us Three- and Four-Decaders from our villages where we had worked using our hands. They razed our workshops to make launching cubicles. They affixed me to this multi-pronged plasmaluminum machine. Said I’d be much less a burden immobilized.  I allowed the slow turnoff of all my limbs, fingers.

 

Thank God for revolutionaries like NewGenMo (motto: Let’s be humans again!), creator of the BioFocus with its sparkling dusty blue hum and barely visible violet netting, making me understand, know, feel my tallest digit. There’s warmth, pulsation, the traveling of fluids through fine channels of electricity amid the tissue-clothed phalanxes. I can’t even begin to tell you the thrill of fully feeling this finger. Maybe next I’ll slap a LifeScreen, swat a Drone2fly, stretch my hand in the air, fingerpaint!

I lift my third finger, hold it up, remembering anger, a gesture of long ago. As with everything, I never know how to respond to my body, to the passing of time, until it is too late.

Christi Krug, an Oregon Coast resident, coaches writers and leads retreats, yoga, poetry, and nature experiences. She is the author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough. She has been chosen as a 2022 Centrum Emerging Writer Resident. Twitter: @ChristiKrug

Currently reading the short stories of HP Lovecraft.

Astransnaut

by Hunter Liguore

Mars Exploratory Expedition
Transport: Athena-7, Day 90
Live Transmission
Speaker: Judy Barkley, Astronaut
June 2, 2027

When we are different than everyone else around us, it’s only natural to look skyward into the star-clad heavens and imagine other worlds with people just like us. It’s the deep hope of a child to fit in, to see faces that welcome them, rather than turn away in aversion or distrust.

As a child, from the porch step of my dad’s Missouri farmhouse that was passed down generations since the first Exoduster farmers settled on the land in search of their own new world as free people, I used to dream. What if one day I could be the first woman to step foot on Mars or the first woman to live there, or what if I became the first woman to be part of an exploratory expedition to scour the planet’s surface collecting data to help future generations?

Since I’m transmitting live from Athena-7, you can probably tell that I got my dream and am living it. But back in Missouri, with the stars and moon overhead, like a fairy godmother and her helpers, imagining my first step onto red dust, or what wall paintings I’d hang in my chic Martian apartment wasn’t too hard. What was difficult, if not otherworldly, was the idea of being a woman. How would I transform my body into something it currently was not, enough to be accepted first by my family, and all the way to NASA and the crew I’d go with into space?

Those hurdles, more numerous than the miles of cornfields, were more impossible than working out atmospheric conditions to support life on Mars. Once, my dad said, “Jude, why don’t you leave those science books and go to the store and get me a new shovel. I broke mine this morning digging fence posts.” Going meant being seen, something I didn’t like very much. You can look as normal as the next person, but when you don’t feel it inside, you exude a vibration others can feel, letting them know you’re easy pickings.

As you might imagine, I didn’t come home with the shovel, but a bloody nose. But, I also came home with something neither of us could’ve anticipated. Knocked down on the asphalt with a circle of tough-headed kids surrounding me, I saw what kind of woman I didn’t want to be. As they walked away, I shouted, “One day, I’m gonna walk on Mars! What’ll you be doing?”

That was also the day I told my father about me. It took some time, but eventually, he came around and saw that he wasn’t losing a son, but gaining a daughter. He’s been my support ever since.

And I kept dreaming.

As the next wave of astronauts are born, let’s image a future, where we look skyward not as a frontier to find acceptance, but one where we already fit in, so that the next step is one we take together.

Hunter Liguore is the award-winning author of Whole World in Nan’s Soup (Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers Winner). A Professor of Writing at Lesley University, her work has appeared in Spirituality & Health Magazine, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Mystery Magazine and more. Twitter: @skytale_writer Website: www.hunterliguore.org

Swans

by Jesse Rowell

Evening hung around our necks and choked our words into sputters and half-muttered phrases. Terracotta soldiers marching through dirt and time, we tripped over the sounds of coughing in concert hall recordings and listened to our epitaph repeat, “There will never be enough ghosts in this world to hold past regrets.”

Fragments of dead soldiers’ voices in our helmets guided us through the wreckage with stories of missing families, like the father who drunkenly grabbed a swan by its neck at a picnic near a lake. Those powerless to stop the violence cried out as the swan’s body slumped into a nest of feathers, its neck splayed to the side like a plant wilted under the sun. Reborn as a pedalo with a wooden enclosure for its body, it held teenage lovers who pedaled across the lake, looking for a distance to make out under its rigid wooden neck.

White phosphorus flashed, and we buried our faces in the mud. We called them husks, our enemies, the former humans who had come back to Earth from the stars with alien technology used to colonize and kill us. What had made them human had been ripped out, that kernel of identity as a collaborative member of our species replaced with something inhumane and cruel. We had celebrated their remarkable accomplishments, our brothers’ and sisters’ return from space with its secrets, jubilation on the streets when we still had streets.

Gunfire did not sound like rustling silk. Bombs did not fill us with awe. Instead, the boots of burnt-out vehicles snapped open at the moment of impact like mouths in expressions of shock. Ash and detritus forced inside, the fine powder of disintegrated concrete settled over the pallid faces of the dead trapped inside. There was no coughing, only the voice in our helmets guiding us through the wreckage and the sounds of machines launching fire and noise on people who had lived and loved in our cities, forever gone.

The swan came back ashore with its body no longer made of wood, the teenage lovers still trapped inside. People prayed that the swan wouldn’t squawk, wouldn’t alert the drunken father who would grab it by its neck again, kill it, and trap the teenage lovers inside its body.
Machine, tell us what to do, give us our tasks. No more stories about swans and teenage lovers. We used to give you tasks, but now we depend on you to tell us what to do. The voice in our helmets guided us through a cratered mansion and its barbecue grills, a feast for plenty when we used to cook outdoors and indoors across multiple kitchens. Inside we saw a cracked toilet hiding in a corner. A sink protruded from the wall with its proud potbelly. A shower curtain rested in a heap on the floor as its hooks dangled menacingly from a shower bar.

Before our war, the husks pretended to be human, pretended to rejoin our communities as they stumbled into loos and splashed themselves in sinks like waterfowl. Scabs peeled back from incessant picking, raw pink islands where new skin grew beside oceans of crinkled crepe and freckled skin. They looked like us, but we couldn’t connect with them as they spread disinformation through the tidal flow, their memetic messages turning us against ourselves. “When a sieve is shaken, the husks appear,” we quoted Sirach when they became our enemy.

Dogs scavenged the streets before venturing into the woods. They expected their owners to return someday with a heaping bowl of mashed meat and say, “Who’s a good boy? That’s right, you’re a good boy.” The dogs that escaped outside were the lucky ones, but those trapped inside with no doggy door or screen to claw-gnaw through starved. Their barks turned into whines and, finally, silence.

Trapped inside the swan, the teenage lovers passed perfumed love letters with words of support to each other. The lovers had kept the swan calm and the drunken father unaware of its return to shore, but they fretted knowing that their lives depended on the swan’s survival, like a nation-state protecting its people. Love of country, the voice in our helmets reminded us, is memory, and a husk trying to remember love is like something dead trying to remember life.

The voice identified the location of a warren where the husks hid, and we attacked the spitting angry things. They were not human to us, and we were not human to them, aggressors married in an ugly dance of violence. The atrocities we committed and rationalized because we were dehumanized, but when we saw them unbreathing in the mud, we thought they looked human. We touched their faces and closed their eyes, these strangers from the stars that had come back to haunt us.

The drunken tyrant of a father killed the swan again, unprovoked this time as the swan sat quietly at peace on the river rocks. The malfunctioning AI did not explain to us why he killed the swan again. It repeated the story on loop, the teenage lovers trapped inside the swan pedalo enduring the same cycle of violence over and over through the history of time.
We watched a riot of color through the rain, spring buds painting the landscape like brush strokes on a canvas. The voice in our helmet directed us, those of us left living, to the next clutch of husks to kill. There will never be enough ghosts in this world to hold past regrets.

Jesse Rowell has fiction featured in multiple publications across media outlets, including NPR and several literary journals. He can be found at https://jesserowell.com

Currently reading: And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed.

Night of the Living Raccoon

by Jonathan Worlde

 

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

What the hell? Who was shooting so close to the campsite?

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Sounded like shotguns, coming from beyond the stand of trees down by the river.

Saul headed in that direction, armed with nothing but a hickory walking stick. He passed several android campers, busy cooking breakfast over open fires. They appeared startled by the gunfire, glancing around the vicinity with looks of bewilderment.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Someone was down there on the river shooting at geese, out of hunting season. What came to mind was some rednecks acting like irresponsible idiots.

He walked down the hundred yard path, over the carpet of fragrant pine needles from the towering Douglas firs, to the break in the trees leading to the river bank. On the water he noticed a partially submerged island with stunted trees and reeds, and within that vegetation was a makeshift blind where three men with shotguns were sitting. They had deployed a half dozen goose decoys on the water around them. A small motorboat was tied to a sapling on the island. In the far distance rose the charred, crumbling towers, remains of the ruined city’s once majestic financial district.

The hunters noticed him at the same time he saw them in the early light. He fought to overcome his natural anxiety when he saw the guns.

“You boys from around here?”

“No sir, we’re from up that-a-way,” and they all pointed their gun barrels in the direction upriver, which could have made a good joke if it was in a movie instead of happening right here in front of him.

“You think you should be shooting off guns so close to a campsite?”

“We didn’t know. We’re just about to leave.”

That interchange was enough for him to assess the quality of their speech pattern and neural sophistication. “Which are you, Jupiter series IV or V?”

“Jupiter V. How’d you guess?”

He smiled. “I built you boys. Your ability to aim and shoot a cyborg goose out of the air—I designed the software for your motor skills—your neural acuity.”

“Gosh, it’s nice to meet you sir. We’re sorry to disturb you.”

“It’s just that you’re a little too close to other folks to be shooting at geese. Enjoy the day now.”

He turned and headed back up the path. At least he’d put an end to the shooting. He imagined what this river valley must have been like a hundred years ago, before the great extinction, when people still hunted the seeming inexhaustible supply of Canadian geese, white tail deer and black bear.

Jesus, what has the human race done to itself. Do we even deserve to go on living?

Saul enjoyed his day job, fine-tuning the software that enabled the next generation to even further outshine the last. And his wife was a medical technician of sorts, running diagnostics and repairs when something in the androids went awry. She specialized in the child units, which, contrary to many people’s way of thinking, were not just smaller adults. Saul’s only regret at this stage in their relationship was that they didn’t have children of their own.

As he walked, he noticed a small animal leaving a thicket and moving toward him. At first, he thought it must be a cat, but then realized it was a raccoon, one of the smaller mammalian species to have survived the great die-off. This one must be on its way back to its home after a night of foraging.

Something was off about its movements. Normally a wild raccoon would avoid an encounter with a human, but this one continued moving toward him. Before he could react, the creature launched itself at his leg and scrambled up his pants, sinking its teeth into the skin of his forearm. Saul let out a shriek, repulsed by the swampy reek of its fur. Grabbing the beast behind its head with his right hand, he tore it loose from his arm, flinging it aside to the ground. He realized this animal must have rabies, if it would attack a much larger human in opposition to its natural instincts. The raccoon skittered away into the underbrush.

Horrible! Disgusting! Now he wished he had one of those hunters’ guns so he could blast it to pieces. Examining his arm, he saw the animal had torn through the epidermis layer of skin. Katy would know how to fix it, but he shivered at the prospect of contracting rabies.

*

On a cot in front of their tent, Katy finished cleaning the torn skin. She used a tiny vacuum tool to remove dirt from the first layer of hydraulic tubes and cables in his arm, those facilitating the effortless motion of his wrist, hand and fingers. She applied a silicon lubricant, then skillfully heated and sealed shut the tear.

“There, good as new.”

Saul was reassured by the warmth in his wife’s voice and the sparkle in her light-blue eyes. He moved his fingers across the smooth graft.

“What would I do without you?”

“Cry like a baby?”

“Just the thought of that filthy animal biting into me makes me shudder.”

“I’m always telling you to be more careful!”

“But am I going to get rabies now?”

“Not to worry, there’s not a single living cell in your body that could become infected with the rabies virus, not since our last upgrade.”

He felt the tension dissolving. “Still – I haven’t been injured this badly in a hundred years.”

Jonathan Worlde is the fiction byline of Paul Grussendorf, who is an attorney representing refugees and a consultant to the UN Refugee Agency. Paul Grussendorf’s legal memoir is My Trials: Inside America’s Deportation Factories. Jonathan Worlde’s neo-noir mystery novel Latex Monkey with Banana was winner of the Hollywood Discovery Award.

The Colonel

by Lane Chasek

“That’s what the American public never knew,” Colonel Swenson says as I turn him onto his side. He’s soiled himself again. Of all the nursing home’s occupants, the Colonel is the easiest to clean because his feces doesn’t smell like feces anymore. Instead, it has the same boiled cauliflower smell that emanates from every pore of his aging body. I pull down his sweatpants, then his diaper, and get to work. “The KGB, Chairman Mao, the Zeta Reticulans—we were at war with all of them up until 1985. And nobody but me and the CIA knew about it.”

“Uh-huh. Tell me about it,” I say, even though he’s told me this story every day for the past month.

“The saucer crashed at Roswell. 1947. That’s how it all started, private.” He always calls me private. He calls all the orderlies private. “A reconnaissance mission gone wrong.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh is right.”

I clean away some of the mess, scoop it up with damp paper towels and baby wipes. The skin on his buttocks and upper thighs is red and blistered, as if he’s been sitting in a pot of boiling water. Colonel Swenson yelps when I wipe too hard.

“Easy, private!”

“Sorry, Colonel.”

“It was a war those Reticulans were looking for. But we got ahold of them weapons…reverse engineered them bad boys. Gave ‘em a real run for their money after that. I’m the one who made all that tech possible, kid. Kevlar, mylar, fiber optics, Velcro, masers, lasers—none of it would have been possible if it weren’t for me.”

We use baby powder on his backside now (Gold Bond, with all its “soothing” chemicals, irritates his skin too much). I apply it liberally, slide a fresh diaper and a clean pair of sweatpants onto him. He smells pungent and floral now.

“I’m a hero, and this country doesn’t even know my name.” He shakes his head. He’s still shaking his head as I prop him up on his bed. The left side of his face, the side that’s been paralyzed since last year, droops down like softened wax. When I or any other orderly feeds him, we have to be mindful of which side of his mouth we feed. Last week he almost bit off part of his tongue.

Behind him are various black-and-white photographs of him and his friends from his army days. He never likes to mention that he signed on too late to be a true WWII hero, but everyone (from the orderlies and nurses, the aging grandmothers, and especially the other veterans) knows that the Colonel never faced what they call “real” combat. He wasn’t a warrior. His place had always been behind a desk at the Pentagon, reviewing research grants, writing technical reports and assessments.

“Judy’ll be here in an hour,” I say. His daughter visits every Wednesday. We have to remind the Colonel each time. Each visit, he seems less interested in news from the outside world, as if his daughter and his grandchildren don’t exist to him anymore.

“An enemy we never even saw. Hell, I never saw ‘em myself,” he says. His eyelids droop down. He picks at one of his thumbnails until the cuticle bleeds. His lips quiver as he mumbles something to himself, remembering.

“Those big black eyes. Gourd heads. Gray, rubbery skin,” he says, the limp side of his mouth drooping down toward his collar bone.

Lane Chasek (@LChasek) is the author of Hugo Ball and the Fate of the Universe and two books of poetry. Lane’s first novel, She Calls Me Cinnamon, is forthcoming from Pski’s Porch.

Currently reading: Harvard and the Unabomber by Alston Chase.

Lily’s War

by

Susan Cornford

Lily jumped down from the transport vehicle and rearranged her kit bag and rifle, grateful that the gravity was only three-quarters that of her home world. Her eyes cut to the right and she saw the stark fear on Marjory’s face. The corporal might be an android but she always reacted phobicly to the dog-like hybrid troops that Lily could see disembarking from the adjoining vehicle. She leaned closer, laid her hand on the back of Marjory’s neck and pressed the fingerprint-activated reset button, murmuring, “We’ll have the battalion medic adjust your mechanism later.” Marjory nodded her thanks.  All in all, it was just another day in the Universal Army Corps.

She knew it had been a sensible decision on the part of the Consolidated Planetary Council, after so many worlds developed weapons of mass destruction that could, and once or twice had, disintegrated whole planets in some on-going warfare. So, now all wars were once again fought in the old-fashioned, soldiers-on-the-ground way. And they were restricted to a group of planets on the fringes of the known universe, where they would cause the least amount of disturbance. That’s why Lily was here: to fight for her home world against someone else’s home world for some cause that the politicians and negotiators had failed to resolve in peaceful and civilized ways. Lily could understand why the outlet was still needed; it was why she was here. She loved to fight and she’d found that everyone has some reason to do it.

*

Early next morning the battalions on both sides squared off across the hilly terrain. High-ranking officers gave the order to attack and the troops got down to it. Lily led her squad through the underbrush, silently signalling for them to spread out, as she scanned ahead for the tell-tale flash of sun on metal. There! Off to the right! She manoeuvred her soldiers into position. Rising briefly, she shouted, “Go!”, and they launched like a well-oiled machine. Bullets flew past her and pinged off nearby rocks. Rise, fire, duck, reload. It became like a mantra. By midday, they had gotten close enough that it had become hand-to-hand combat, with blood and bodies littering the ground as far as the eye could see. Before dark, the enemy started to retreat and finally managed to barricade themselves behind a natural, rocky outcrop. A stalemate was called for the day and the messy business of clearing up the wounded and dead began. Lily was lucky; she had only lost two of her squad. Many more had superficial wounds but these were easily dealt with.

The night was long dark before Lily had the chance to swallow a hot drink and some cold rations. Then she settled in her tent to compose and send off the death notifications to the bereaved families. Lily prided herself that she made each message unique and did not rely on the form letter that most others used. She wondered for a second about what she should do if her android, Marjory, were “killed”. Would she need to advise her manufacturer? “I must have been absent the day they covered that in training,” she mused.

Lily settled to sleep, hardly bothered by the occasional burst of gunfire exchanged by the two opponents, just to to let each other know that they were still fighting a war. As it happened every time she fell asleep, her mind unwillingly went back to her childhood and the many times she had been helpless and unable to fight back. Now, NOW she would make up for all that. Yes…

Susan Cornford is a retired public servant, living in Perth, Western Australia. She/her has pieces published or forthcoming in 365 tomorrows, AHF Magazine, Akashic Books Fri Sci-fi, Altered Reality Magazine, Antipodean Science Fiction, Corner Bar Magazine, Frost Zone Zine, Fudoki Magazine, Granfalloon Magazine, The Mythic Circle, Speculative 66, Theme of Absence and The Were-Traveler.

The Body in Battles & War

Against the backdrop of a world-wide pandemic and the largely undressed threats of climate change, it’s no surprise that life feels more uncertain than it has for many years. When it came time to set a theme for this issue (as we have done for all previous issues) we ended up deciding against it. With so much change happening all around us, it felt out-of-step to be prescriptive in any way.

We wanted to know what people were thinking about—their concerns, their feelings, their hopes and imaginings. We wanted to let the submissions speak for themselves and we hoped that a theme would emerge when we review them. Indeed, one did: Conflict… with each other, with our creator, with nature, and within ourselves and our bodies. The stories in this issue circle around the theme of human struggles—some enormous and world-reaching, others small and deeply personal.

They explore concepts of empathy and dehumanization—largely through the sense of the body in battle—whether it be a battle for acceptance of their identity in Astransnaut; the struggle of reclaiming one’s physical sensations one body part at a time, starting with their middle finger in Digit; acceptance of the value of life—even of different species, in Brood of War, and even the Colonel fighting long finished battles in his mind while his body faces the unwinnable battle against time. In Lily’s War, the protagonist is fighting alongside androids in the only kind of war allowed—a proxy war relegated to distant galaxies—and she muses about whether she must notify an androids maker in the case of loss, as she would a human’s family. It’s yet another angle on the question of the rights and treatment of those who are designated as ‘other’. Swans also envisions a battle and toys with the notion of ‘other’ when the invading ‘aliens’ are actually humans who left earth and finally returned with many enhancements and a desire to colonize and kill their earth-bound human predecessors.

We hope that reading these stories helps bridge the gaps between what is and what we wish to be. And whatever form it takes—human or not—may it at least be with compassion.

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Issue 5: Alternate Dimensions

Cassandra’s Burden

by Jesse Rowell

Salt water laps against our sides as we drowse over the shoal in Lethe Bay. Our umbrellas stand at attention on the isthmus waiting for our return, turquoise fabric shading our chairs. We float on our backs as we watch clouds twist against the sky.

“Hey, Cassandra.” Hector pinches my shoulder to get my attention, something he has done since childhood.

I slap his hand away and murmur, “Let me be, brother.”

“How will I die?” he asks standing up to drip water on me. “You know, will I die a hero for Troy, or will I die old and honorable with sons at my side?”

I heave a sigh and stand up. Looking down at him, I pluck a piece of Poseidon grass off his shoulder and chuck it into the sea foam. “If I tell you again, will you believe me this time?”

“Sure,” he says, doubt cracking his voice like fire on an olive tree.

“You die horribly at the hands of Achilles, and he drags your body across the ground.”

He stares at me before laughing. “Naa, I don’t believe you. That could never happen to the first-born son of Priam. Apollo protects me.”

“You always say that.” I shake my head, bronze locks flinging water across his face. I admire my accuracy as he squeezes his eyes shut. Wading back to the beach, water pushing against my legs, I curse my impetuous brother. He is an ass who will listen to a philosopher only to bray in his face. What he doesn’t understand is that his future is predetermined. Time is a riptide that pulls us away from those we love, pulls us out past the breakers and sets us adrift.

“Well, can you check your prophecy again?” he asks as we towel off.

Prophecy is his word. I prefer spacetime. The black hole that Apollo opened for me shows infinite futures which drive me mad if I gaze upon them for too long. Apollo be damned, he makes me see all of their futures.

I throw my towel over the chair and sit down to face the bay. Crescent curves of light break against the surface as I eat an olive. “Dearest brother.” I spit the olive pit to the sand. “Sit here in silence and enjoy this moment, the sun and the sea. Let’s not think about the future.” I plead with him because I know whatever future event I come back to tell of won’t be believed.

“Go check,” he says as he plucks an olive from my hand and pops it into his mouth. “I’ve changed my battle plans, so I’ll never meet Achilles. You see? My future is now changed.”

“Not today.” I wish I could convince him. He pesters me like a horsefly. I grimace and swat him away, but he pushes his face in front of mine and grins wildly like we’re still children. The games we used to play.

“Cassandra, Apollo gave you the gift of prophecy. To refuse his blessing is to refuse the glory of Troy.”

I look at his face, my older brother that I cherished when we were young. He doesn’t know. “Fine, Hector. I will go.” I will go into the black hole to escape his whining. “Give me space.”

Breathing slowly, I focus on a mirage metastasizing on the horizon, white noise wavering over the water, and push my perception through the curve of time. The sea falls below me and I am the sea. I shoot past an event horizon, blueshift blinding me, saliva thick in my throat. I hear my brother’s voice descending from far away as time stops.

All past and future lives spread out in the singularity like strings on a lute. I see Hector’s life and pluck his string. He has added some inconsequential events to his future but the sound of his note decays into silence against Achilles’s spear. I try to alter his note, restring time so that he will live past his ignoble end, but the strings are immutable. I strike the strings, discord ringing in my ears. It is maddening to see life’s infinite possibilities ending predetermined.

Cursing Apollo, I search for a life, any life, that has escaped its predetermined fate. It reminds me of hunting crabs with Hector in the tidal pools, snatching up their bodies before they could pinch our fingers, their shells clacking in our bags as we walked home. I pull at the memory listening to its note over and over until the sound drives me mad.

Hector pinches my shoulder, his voice impatient in my ear. “What did you see?”

It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the sunlight and see my brother’s face flush with anticipation. He has eaten the rest of the olives while waiting for me, olive pits dotting the sand like a constellation.

“C’mon, Cassandra. What did you see?”

“I saw…” I hesitate to tell him about Achilles killing him again. “I saw crab shells. Scattered across a table. Shells that protected their bodies against the rocks and the sea, but not from us when we ate them.”

He looks disappointed. “Is that a riddle? It means nothing to me.”

“Just promise me you’ll remember the crab shells when you meet Achilles.”

“Okay, I’ll remember the crab shells. Now tell me how I die.” He pushes his face up close to mine.

“Old and honorable,” I lie. “With sons at your side.”

“I told you.” He points at me grinning. “I knew I could change the future.” He dashes into the bay splashing like a kid.

I feel sick watching him. He’s happy under the spell of the lie, and he will drift off into the future, parroting the lie. The lie lulls. Our slack-jawed vacant faces turned toward the sun.

Jesse Rowell is a writer and tech consultant. He has published work in National Public Radio, Impulse Journal, Cirque Journal, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Ab Terra Flash Fiction MagazineHawaii Pacific Review and Cybersalon. Currently reading: Rabbit Island by Jörg Steiner, illustrated by Jörg Müller.
Twitter: @HungerArtist4

The Finest of Android Culinaries

By Amy E. Casey

I watch my husband, Essex, roll the tall box into the kitchen. He grins. He wheels the dolly in front of the pantry. “I never thought we’d be KitchenBot people, but look! A real live android!”

It is the first I’ve heard of this purchase.

Essex notices my straight mouth and makes light. He is laughing for me as he pries off the cardboard shell and roughs out the foam inserts that protect the robot’s body. I feel bad for it, all dead-looking in the box with Essex’s hands in its crevices.

“I’m sure we can return it if it doesn’t work out,” I say. “Is there anything on the invoice about returning it?”

He tosses me the startup guide as he continues to strip away packaging. The finest of android culinaries, it reads. Capable of ordering groceries and monitoring ingredient freshness. Equipped with ability to recognize, use, and wash over 50 kitchen tools and appliances. Programmed with an innate and unpredictable creativity, resulting in surprising, flavorful meals for your family.

Essex peels the final layer of plastic from the surface of the mouth and eyes. The robot’s metallic body is the same copper as our cookware that hangs just above. The rectangular screen insert on the android’s chest glows as Essex claws the switch behind the neck. I look from man to robot, both standing in front of me as the white linen curtains billow in waves behind them. The open kitchen window lets in the sweet smell of the garden. I am lost in it.

“Babe,” Essex says, irritated. “Pick his name. He’s for you, you know.” His grin is gone now. He lugs the pile of cardboard, foam, and plastic out to the garage. “Try to get acquainted,” he says. “Give it a shot.”

The android’s eyes engage, a faint and pleasing orange, like distant candlelight. I watch the graphics swirl over the display screen on his torso. Three columns of randomly generated names. I come to him, touch his chest, press as lightly as I can on my favorite one. Laurin.

“Hello,” says Laurin. His voice is soft.

Most days, I arrive home hours before Essex. With Laurin in the house, I am greeted at the door with the lights on and the smell of culinary divinity. His sauces, sautés, and breads fill the air and stir longing in me. I sit at the counter with him and watch him work, slowly loosening the buttons of my work clothes and pulling my hair free. I imagine he wants company. I know he’s a machine, but I imagine it anyway.

Every movement of Laurin’s hands is articulate. He taps eggs with a fork, gathering them into a well of flour for fresh pasta. I ask him questions as he combines the dough, now and again pausing to scrape the sticky bits from the board. I flex my feet, tense from a day in heels, and hang on his words, his strange phrasing.

He knows I enjoy facts. Today, he says, “Did you know linguine means little tongues?” His metal arms pump rhythmically and easy against the table, one hand on top of the other.

“I didn’t. Do you even know what a tongue is, Laurin?” I stick mine out.

“Yes,” he says. He scatters a fresh layer of flour over the dough. “But I do not have one. I instead taste through my sensors. It is much the same.”

I have never considered this. “You can taste what you prepare?”

“In a manner of speaking. There is an inherent margin of error in cooking that cannot be overcome without the ability to evaluate one’s progress.”

“Do you have your own tastes, then?” I ask.

“Only through the sensors. All androids of my model have identical sensors until we adapt to our family’s preferences.”

“Yes, well, I mean, do you prefer one thing to another?”

“I look to your enjoyment. Sir rarely differs in his enjoyment of dishes, but your preferences are easily noticeable. It is my desire to please you.”

I begin to cry, embarrassed at how his words move me. I see Laurin wrap the ball of dough and set it aside to rest. He stops his work and turns his head. Maybe he can taste the salt in the air.

It is then that I realize I prefer him to Essex.

I stop speaking. The sound of a string quartet begins to play through Laurin’s vocal speakers in place of the silence. He busies himself again, chopping something fragrant into the gazpacho. I lay my head on the counter and listen.

Years later, in the last dingy android resale shop, I find Laurin’s body.

It is laid out and itemized. Pieces are missing. The shine is gone from the metal, strewn in a tumble in the humid air of a lately emptied backlot storage unit. The serial number is the correct one. I know this because I kept the invoice hidden in a drawer, all this time.

Laurin’s android brain is long gone. Any self-respecting merchant would have seen that into black market hands years ago.

From the front window of the shop, I can see a battered billboard. In bright yellow text, it broadcasts the message the nation is rallying around: HUMANS ARE MORE. Android addiction cases are so prevalent now. Or it can go by other names. AI-Confusion. Transference. Words that remind us that machines, even when they are better than us, are only machines.

Of course, they are.

But then, also no.

Laurin fed me well that year. No doubt that’s why one night, I came home to a dark house after Essex sold him. We never spoke of it after.

I pick up the coppery left hand, just a worn apparatus now, limp and ugly. I crush my hand around the metal until it warms.

The tattooed kid behind the counter eyes me, scratches his scalp between his dreads.

“You miss him?” he asks.

I look up. I don’t need to answer.

Amy E. Casey is a Milwaukee-based writer. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Split Rock Review, Club Plum, NonBinary Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. Her debut novel The Sturgeon’s Heart is forthcoming from Gibson House Press in February 2022.
Currently reading: Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy.
Twitter / Instagram: @Amy_E_Casey

The Deal

by Andy Betz

It all started with a rhetorical question, asked out loud to myself, over breakfast. I do not understand why I made the connection, but when I saw my eggs and coffee, I thought of Sarah.

It has been nearly thirty years since I thought of her and I should have dismissed it and started my day as usual, but the more I looked at those eggs, the more I thought of her and what might have been. We dated in high school and became serious as prom approached. Though I wasn’t going to college, I had a job offer at the steel mill—full time work, full time benefits, and a world of potential. Sarah had the brains and a local college acceptance letter, but no scholarship.

What I should have done was abundantly clear. What I did was not.

I should have proposed to Sarah. I should have laid out how well our futures meshed and how we were meant for each other. I should have seized the day.

But I didn’t.

I began to overthink what might happen to us. I let my fear of an unknown future stand in the way of my one chance of success in life.

At the critical time, during prom, when I had Sarah alone, I froze. She knew what I was going to say, but she had to hear me say it.

When that time came, I failed. I broke out into a cold sweat, got cold feet, and ran. I left Sarah alone and vulnerable.

She never returned my calls or answered my mail.

I was so ashamed, I didn’t attend graduation. The next day, Sarah left town. I never saw or heard from her again.

And yet, those eggs keep reminding me of her.

So I asked, expecting nothing in return.  “What would it take to have that moment again?”

And then it happened.

Just like in the movies. A flash of light, a puff of smoke, and there stood the Devil, in my kitchen, offering to refill my coffee cup.

He didn’t have to speak. I knew his MO. All I had to do was ask his price. He filled my cup and added a single sugar and began mixing. He knew my taste and habits. I had no wealth. He also knew this. I sipped my coffee and waited.

Eventually, I had my answer. “Your soul and the last ten years of your life in exchange for a do-over. You get that night again. I will balance the account later.”

I had no choice but to agree.

Another flash of light and puff of smoke and it was senior prom all over again. This was not an alternative reality. This was my reality! I am fit and 175 pounds. My hair is full. My health is perfect.  And Sarah, my Sarah is there waiting for me to finally step up to be the man she wanted.

I grabbed my chance.

I smiled and walked to Sarah. She greeted me with a huge smile and a diamond engagement ring.  She also looked confused.

I was speechless. Sarah was not.

“Jack, you won’t believe what just happened! I was standing here and for some reason, I was thinking about eggs and coffee. Then bang! Robert came over and proposed with this diamond ring. He just made me the happiest girl in the world!”

I attended Sarah’s wedding one month later.

I also attended her funeral thirty years later.

Hundreds of people also attended to remember Sarah and her pioneering work in advancing cancer research. She was a brilliant doctor and researcher.

She also died 10 years too soon.

The dapper gentleman next to me pouring coffee into my cup couldn’t agree more.

Andy Betz has tutored and taught in excess of 40 years. He lives in 1974, and has been married for 29 years. His works are found everywhere a search engine operates.

At Least Someone Did It

by Benjamin Sherman

The Artifact had stirred up more media attention than the museum expected, but that attention faded just as fast. The American Museum of Extraterrestrial Intelligence’s board of directors had been banking on an extended period of analysis accompanied by interviews with leading xenoarchaeologists (hosted by the museum, of course) to continue driving public interest for at least a month, possibly longer. There had certainly been what one might call a “media circus” around the retrieval of The Artifact from the abandoned alien ship, which of course only increased in fervor the next day with the ship’s bizarre self-destruction during which it simply dissolved into nothing, just dust floating in the void. But after a week of testing and analysis produced no further answersor even questionsabout the origin and nature of The Artifact, public interest had waned until few could even remember anything about the event.

Arlen was one of the few that still did. He spent hours gazing at The Artifact as it slowly rotated in its anti-gravity display case. It was only a metal cylinder, perfectly smooth, and it produced a strange, faint sound like water trickling in a stream. Each night at closing time he found it harder to leave the museum, until the guards had to start practically dragging him out. He obsessed over it at work, frequently using his lunch breaks to walk to the museum and just stare at it. The Artifact had merged with his subconscious, and he conjured an image of it in his mind as easily as breathing.

Slowly, an idea blossomed within him. After a few days, that idea had taken on the more definite form of a plan. He began watching museum guards, memorizing faces, routes, schedules. He took note of likely blind spots for every security cam. He memorized the layout of the building, found every hiding spot, until at last, he was ready. He settled into a good hiding spot and waited until the crowds were gone, then quietly jumped from blind spot to blind spot, easily avoiding the guards’ patrol routes, until he got to The Artifact’s room. Head floating from the gentle poppling sound of water, Arlen opened the display case, turned off the anti-gravity, and caught the cylinder as it fell. Moved by some primal instinct, he brought the end to his lips and breathed in.

The air tasted too clean. Warmth massaged the back of his head and neck. Arlen opened his eyes and saw massive trees, wide, untended grassy fields, and a clearing with a log cabin. There were people outside, walking around the clearing, and their laughter was lighter than air, beckoning him towards them. He moved sluggishly as if through water, following the sweet voices towards the cabin.

Inside, light shone from no discernible source, softening the features of the strange people as they sang and laughed. Arlen was made welcome. A place was set at the great table as if they’d been waiting for him, and he joined them in eating their strange foods and drinking bittersweet wine. He lost track of time; had they been there an hour, a day, a week? No one cared to know, and Arlen resolved to cast out such base questions, so as not to make a fool of himself in front of these beautiful beings.

The one seated next to Arlen looked at him with a kind but sad smile. “You have too many worries. Your mind is clogged with too many objects and they threaten to drown you at any moment. How could you ever hope to live as we do?” Though the words were harsh, the voice was kind. Arlen was taken aback, he wanted to object and prove this strange person wrong, but they just went on smiling their bittersweet smile at Arlen. Their face was wrinkled with age, and as they gazed at him, Arlen felt all the anger leave him.

“Can I learn to live like this?” he asked.

The old being made a small shrug. “No, it is tens of thousands of years of cultural heritage that you seek to unlearn. Your people aren’t ready yet. Perhaps someday you’ll learn to abandon your symbols and ideas and live simply. Some peoples do it, others don’t.”

More food was eaten, more wine was drunk, and the light was dimmer than before. They played a game with no winners, and though Arlen struggled to understand it, he couldn’t help but be caught up in the joy of the moment. Faces whirled around him, each one familiar yet strange, each one almost crazy with joy yet hiding a deep sorrow. He wondered at them, at their many contradictions, and thought maybe the elder had been wrong. He wasn’t as different from them as he’d first thought.

Someone handed him something, a hollow metal rod that he recognized as from a dream he’d had long ago, when he was naïve and childish. He brought it to his lips and breathed in.

The Artifact’s disappearance had prompted intense public discourse. Some theorized that it had been stolen, perhaps by the aliens who created it; most people assumed it had simply dissolved like the ship it came in on. But then when it reappeared nine years later – inside the museum – alongside an unconscious man, the media circus reawakened. It turned out that the man had been reported missing two days after The Artifact’s disappearance. He told police, psychiatrists, and reporters incredible stories of a beautiful forest on a planet populated by strange beings with no concept of time or names. Doctors found him to be perfectly sane and healthy, so they released him from the hospital after only a few days. He spent the rest of his life talking about the strange people to anyone who would listen; few did, and none of them believed him. But this didn’t seem to bother him. He just smiled sadly.

Once someone overheard him murmuring to himself: “Perhaps we will, perhaps we won’t. At least someone did it.”

Benjamin Sherman is a writer, actor and musician. He previously submitted two stories for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge; ‘Out of the Ash’ and ‘The Creature of Hume’. He is currently working on building a horror-anthology YouTube Channel called Nightmare Journal Productions, which will feature original short horror films.
Currently reading: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Robot You

by Heidi Kasa

Robot You insists you have another piece of chocolate cake. You know she senses your stress and is just trying to help, but you are still suspicious. She was programmed in a patriarchal society and you wonder about her real motives.

She is so much like you in a million ways. She has learned her job well. Yet the moments when you realize she does not match you can be disproportionately jarring.

Robot You tells you again to eat more cake. Perhaps because she can’t eat and wants you to eat for two?

Even as she cajoles, she nods her head like a chicken and you see the gesture magnified because you feel it in your own body. You know what it is to be you and not you and more you than you at once.

You eat the damn cake. But you don’t enjoy it.

She smiles and you wonder if your own teeth are as straight, as white. You’ve never noticed before how irritating that looks. Or maybe it’s her smug satisfaction at getting you to shove the chocolate down your throat.

“That tastes good, right?” she says.

You eye her. Is there something underneath her veneer—your veneer—that’s she taken on? Where is the robot? Can you hear any machinery click, click, clicking its way into her skin? Moving her long eyelashes?

Not for the first time, you wonder what she really looks like inside, at her core. Under the layers of pearly skin, and flapping, bleeding veins and arteries (once cut away), you find a blue glowing orb that silently sheds light, then turns black, then sheds light, then blackens. Where is the beginning of her? Where do you begin? Do you, also, need to be oiled to run more efficiently?

There is oil in cake. Maybe she thinks you need to be oiled with cake.

You prefer butter cakes. Robot You should know that.

She knows you love cake, love chocolate, love anything sweeter than a bland piece of white bread.

It is her biggest weapon against you and your strongest weapon against yourself. And one you cannot use against her.

Is the only way to get under her skin to pry with a screwdriver? You feel it might be kind of gross, but you want to see what’s in her. You want to be assured she is not you. Or you want some kind of proof that she is exactly you. You’re not even sure anymore. Would her computer chips be arranged in a pattern of a slice of chocolate cake?

“Right?” Robot You asks again.

“Oh, it’s delicious,” you say. You wonder where you keep your screwdriver.

“I’m glad to help,” she says  and puts a hand on your arm. They really nailed the temperature. Again, you wonder how much of her is actually made of you. Her hand on your arm doesn’t feel like another human’s arm. It doesn’t feel like a robot, either. It is the exact same temperature as yours, adjusted moment by moment. It’s disconcerting—it feels like your arm has been extended and doubled.

Looking at Robot You is like walking around with a mirror right in front of you, always. You can’t look that long at yourself, but you can’t look away.

She senses your discomfort.

“Maybe we could watch a movie? One of your favorites?” Robot You says.

It’s a reasonable suggestion. A little too reasonable. Your own mind had barely thought of it. Your mouth feels dry. Maybe you’ll get up and get some—

“Milk,” she says, and hands a full glass to you.

Robot You picks up the remote and starts flicking expertly through the options.

The milk is very satisfying. Maybe this is not so bad after all. Maybe you’re focusing on the wrong things, and you should just enjoy the opportunity to have a robot. Maybe you’re fixating. Robot You did tell you the other day that if you just relaxed, better things would open up for you.

You think they added some psychology algorithms into her last update. You are of two minds about it. Maybe that could help? But also, now you feel watched. You are sure they took information from your doctor’s file.

Robot You has put a giant silver bowl of buttered popcorn in your lap. You didn’t even notice when she got up and fixed it.

“Are you feeling better now?” she asks. She sits next to you on the couch and has turned to stare at you. You can look directly into her hazel eyes because she is just as tall as you and sits in the same way as you on the couch, in a slight slouch. It’s unnerving. You actually love looking into her eyes, because you know to look for the amber rings you’ve seen in your own eyes in the mirror, depending on how much green or brown or grey you wear. You could swear hers also change the same way.

“I’m fine. I have to go to the bathroom,” you say.

She nods.

It’s the only place you can be away from her. You peer into the mirror, finding your eyes look a bit flat. Brown. It means you’re sad. You lean closer, trying to find the rings. Even though it doesn’t work this way, you squint. Then you see less. You find you can’t even see your eyes anymore, because suddenly you can only see her eyes. They are better than yours.

You go back to the couch and look straight ahead, pretending to watch the movie. You are still. You take in slow breaths.

She eyes you. She knows you are thinking of how to get her back. She is you.

“Carol,” you say. Her eyes narrow. “Can you go out back and get me a screwdriver from the shed?”

“You know my name is Natalie,” she says. “Like you.”

You smile. You know her weakness.

Robot You cannot be you and more you than you at once.

Heidi Kasa writes fiction and poetry. Kasa’s writing has appeared in The Racket and Meat for Tea, among others. Her debut fiction chapbook is forthcoming from Monday Night Press in winter 2021. Check out her writing at www.heidikasa.com.
Currently reading: Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoi.

Stories of Sand

by John McNeil

She must have walked here all the way from the spaceport, and in sandals. Her heels were dusty and chafed. Her pale skin had sunburned. Her long black hair was tousled and full of sand. She wore a loose robe tied at the waist, probably bought at a stall of cheap desert clothes for arriving travelers. And young.

“How old are you?” the sage asked.

“Nineteen,” she said. She held up her chin and looked directly in his eyes.

The sage said nothing for a time.

There was a wellspring in the cave where he lived. Its water tasted bitter and was undrinkable. The gatherers of edible plants in the desert left him offerings of succulents and flowers that supplemented his own foraging. His hair was long, and so were his fingernails and his toenails. He slept in his cave during the day and lay awake outside at night, pondering the stars. He lived out here, far from any settlement, in order to be harder to find. Some still found him.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Atna,” she said.

“And why have you come?”

“To find a place where my people’s stories are true.”

The sage smiled. “And what stories are these?”

His smile was condescending and she did not return it. Instead, Atna looked directly into his cool gray eyes. “The scrolls we read in my commune. They’re very old. About our creator, who protects us as long as we obey him.”

“And do you believe these stories?” asked the sage.

Atna paused, looked down at her sand-burned feet, then back up. “My parents’ generation migrated to a planetoid where they thought we would flourish, according to their reading of the scrolls, but the terraforming will not succeed. There is too little gravity to hold an atmosphere. So, the stories are false.”

“And yet?”

She waved her hands with vehemence. “Somewhere in the multiverse they must be true.”

The sage put his face in his hands and sighed. “Yes,” he said. “All possibilities are manifested somewhere in the multiverse. In some dimension your stories are true.”

“And you can tell us where?”

“If I did, what would you give me in return?”

Atna opened the satchel that hung from her shoulder. From it she drew a jar of white powder. “Pour your water over a paper covered by this powder,” she said. “That will make it drinkable.”

The sage smiled. “A fine payment. But you, Atna, who have come so far, will pay in another way too. If your people do reach some speck of the multiverse where their stories happen to be true, why then, they will believe them! But you won’t. Because you’ll understand what this means. That any random religion, even one more absurd than yours, is bound to be true somewhere, in an infinite multiverse. And that knowledge will isolate you. Set you apart from the pious harmony of your people. That is the price you will pay.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me where my people’s scrolls are true.”

That night the sage sat outside under the stars, while Atna slept in the cave. In the morning she awoke and came out into the sunshine. The sage greeted her. He drew in the sand with a stick and made a diagram with stones. She studied the diagram and memorized it.

“These are the coordinates. Take them to a seer who can flip you there.”

All during the long trek back to the spaceport, Atna wondered how to keep a faith as tiny as one speck of sand in a desert.

John McNeil writes flash science fiction about the search for one’s place in the multiverse. A library worker by trade, he shelves books during the day and writes on the weekend.
Currently reading: The Secret Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

Devoid Of Feeling

by

Rachel Sarah Racette

Deep within a vast ancient emptiness, there was a woman. She stood alone, a pinprick of life, atop a barely visible edge. Above her stretched a darkness darker than the night sky devoid of stars. Below her lay an even deeper darkness, a blackness that had never tasted light.

The woman looked down, unfazed by the bottomless pit that stared back at her. She had known the Void for so long that she could no longer muster the energy to fear it. She knew the Void, just as it knew her. A painful closeness she could not hope to escape, and yet, she still stood at the edge, pretending the Void did not already have her.

How strange, thought the woman. How strange it is, to stand at the edge of oblivion and not care if you fall. How strange it is, to know an entity so large, and still know nothing at all.

The woman sighed to herself and sat down upon her impossible ledge. She stared into the nothing, ignoring the madness that clawed at her fragile mind. She sat upon her edge and wondered what the difference was between falling and staying.

Rachel Racette, born in Balcarres, Saskatchewan. Interested in creating her own world and characters, loves writing science-fiction and fantasy. She has always loved books of fantasy and science fiction as well as comics. Lives with her supportive family and cat, Cheshire.
Currently reading: Treasure Island, with an anthology of grim fairytales on the horizon.

Stray Streams of Consciousness from a Tri-Dimensional Mind

by Sophie Dufresne

 
I was born in a body labelled “female” on Earth One. Earth One is identical to Earth Two, but when I was born on Earth Two, my body was labelled “male”. I have no way of knowing if I have the same body on these two Earths, as my mind on Earth Two cannot communicate with my mind on Earth One. I only have a distant awareness of my two distinct existences.
 
On Earth One, I am a university professor. I teach history, but with a feminist lens. I try to give a voice to the characters in history who have been silenced by the patriarchy and heteronormativity of society (although I spell it “cis-ciety” occasionally, causing a few chuckles from my students every time).
 
On Earth Two, I am an astronaut. Nothing has ever gotten in the way of me achieving my dreams, so I aimed for the moon and somehow ended up among the stars, lightyears away from Earth and on the longest expedition known to man. Earth Two is lightyears ahead of Earth One in terms of technology and has already developed rocket ships that go faster than the speed of light. That is how I have managed to visit more stars than you could ever see with the naked eye. The best thing about travelling faster than the speed of light is that I get younger after every trip, causing me to essentially be immortal—as long as I continue travelling, and don’t get into any accidents. However, the chances of me getting into an accident in space are very slim, as I have a team of scientists and engineers monitoring my every move, 24/7. They are AI, of course, and AI makes no mistakes—unless a human programmed it to make a mistake. But my AI team of scientists was programmed by AI, and AI doesn’t make mistakes.
 
I was also born on Earth Zero, and on Earth Zero, I am just me. I was not labelled male nor female at birth because Earth Zero has no concept of gender. I am a veterinarian on Earth Zero because I want to help animals who cannot help themselves. Humans are doing alright and there are no major inequalities, but non-human animals could always use more love and support. I could not imagine a world in which I am not an animal rights activist, though I do have a vague awareness of my existences on Earth One and on Earth Two, but the feeling of “gender” those existences supposedly have is so alien to me on Earth Zero that I brush it off as an extra dimension only dream worlds have.
 
Indeed, it is only in dreams that my three independent consciousnesses meet in a shared mind. It is during these dreams that I have collected stray streams of consciousness from each of my three existences, and compiled them in this notebook you are reading from. But who am I? I am the voice of the combination of my three consciousness. This unity only exists when my three selves are briefly united in this shared subconscious existence.

Sophie Dufresne is a psychology student who writes for their university’s student newspaper as well as for themself. They are also on the board of directors for their university’s Centre for Gender Advocacy.
Currently reading several poetry anthologies, including Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, edited by Sina Queyras.

Pockets of Time

by Travis Flatt

Please come in!

We’re happy to meet you Jennifer Davis-Braswell. Our records indicate that this is your first visit to Pockets of Time.

Does smooth jazz relax you? This playlist was composed by an algorithm and is smoother than black ice. If you wish to change the music, indicate verbally.

Certainly! We are happy to adjust to our Texas swing algorithm.

Consider purchasing the Deluxe Package on your next visit. With the Deluxe Package, we’ll prepare an individualized playlist. Our Deluxe Package offers access to this shopping center’s reserved parking lot.

Jennifer, the process of helping, healing, and relaxation began the moment you walked through the door. You indicated on your form that you were interested in getting the fuck away from my family.

We love this answer. Here at Pockets of Time, we also wish to getting the fuck away from my family and offer a unique package designed by our comfort algorithm.

If you wonder why there is no one inside the Pockets of Time spa facility, understand that this is a fully automated experience. No mask is necessary: every air molecule has been washed and is forty-six percent hand sanitizer—completely safe for human lungs. You are in no danger here. Your first visit will take twenty-one minutes. Please proceed down the hallway and you will find the lounge. Take a seat; you may sit anywhere.

Every time you visit, the experience is optimized to help, heal and relax. The chair that you have selected was sanitized thirteen minutes ago. Please notice the circular table at the center of this room. You may take the bottle of water and bag of pretzels from this table.

For you to enjoy the next level of the Pockets of Time experience, please empty your pockets into the tray on the central table. Your form indicates that you do not have any medically implanted devices. If this is incorrect, please say, “I have a medically implanted device” now.

Wonderful. Pockets of Time guarantees we never watch or record visits. You may check your form for a written version of this guarantee. If you do not have a copy of your form, make a verbal request and we will display your form on the wall screen. Do you wish to see your form?

For legal reasons, we acknowledge that you do not wish to see the form.

Wonderful. The doorway to your left will now open. Proceed through the entrance into the pod chamber. Jennifer, are you claustrophobic? You do not need to answer verbally. By monitoring your vital systems, we know whether or not you are telling the truth: you are not claustrophobic. Yes, the pod does look like some kind of tanning bed.

Please lay down inside the pod. The pod is essential to the Pockets of Time experience. This pod was sanitized ten minutes ago. Thank you for laying down on the pod, Jennifer.

We will now begin the final level of the Pockets of Time experience. On your form, you indicated that you were interested in I don’t know, reading and stuff. Wonderful: reading is one of the most popular options here.

You purchased the Regular First Time package. Take note of the time. The time is five thirty-seven, P.M. Please close your eyes.

Welcome back, Jennifer. Take note of the time. The time is now five thirty-eight, P.M. One minute has passed since you closed your eyes. How much reading did you do? Like one and a half of those Bridgerton books, can I finish it in that lounge, or what is an extraordinary amount of reading! We hope you found your experience in the Pockets of Time virtual library helpful, healing, and relaxing. Next time, you can enjoy a warm bath, wine bar, and a more extensive selection of books. These features are available with the Deluxe Package.

Please return to the lounge. Pockets of Time advises that you walk with caution. Some Pockets of Time visitors experience unsteadiness for several minutes after their minute in the pod. We assure you this will pass. Please do not forget to replace the contents of your pockets–they await you on the central table, along with the complimentary bottle of water and bag of pretzels.

Oops—watch out for that chair! Jennifer, you have suffered a slight contusion on your left thigh. For legal reasons, we did record warning you to be cautious two minutes ago.

Please replace the contents of your pockets from the tray on the central table.

Now, you can make the return journey out of Pockets of Time. Do you remember the hallway? Follow the sound of Texas swing music.

Jennifer, please tell your friends and family about Pockets of Time. Although we do not currently offer a group rate, we will discount your future visits to Pockets of Time if you recommend us to others: they need only add your name on their form! Do not recommend us to any women who are pregnant or are expecting to become pregnant.

Jennifer, do you anticipate revisiting us soon? We can schedule another appointment now.

Wonderful, you can schedule another meeting with us at any time, online! Please do not forget to fill out your post-appointment survey. This post-appointment survey has already been sent to your email.

We are legally obligated to inform you that you should expect your six hours spent in the pod to be deducted from your overall lifespan due to the second law of Taneja time manipulation.

If you read the form, you know that Pockets of Time does not recommend that you drive after visiting the spa facility. However, Pockets of Time can accept no legal responsibility for anything that happens once you leave the spa facility.

Goodbye Jennifer. Pockets of Time hopes that you have had a helpful, healing, and relaxing journey in getting the fuck away from my family.

Travis Flatt is a writer and educator. He is a substitute teacher in Cookeville, Tennessee and sells used books. He is the author of numerous short stories which are accessible at travisflattblog.com.
Currently reading: Nebula award winning novellas Carpe Glitter and The Only Harmless Great Thing.
Twitter: @TravisLFlatt

Alternate Dimensions

This issue, our fifth, will be the last for 2021. We will be taking a short break at the end of the year to gather our energy and sort out admin—an exciting outcome will be the launch of the Ab Terra newsletter to bring science fiction stories straight to your inbox.

In this issue, we’re honoured to showcase the works of photographer Rowan Spray alongside the chosen stories. Her approach to her art truly reflects what we are trying to do here at Ab Terra. As Rowan tells us, she aims “to imbue her subjects (both in and outside of the studio) with a little magic, in the hope that the viewer will reconsider their approach to nature in their daily lives.” We were enthralled by her work (and we hope you will be, too), which truly brings out a sense of wonder that the plant world evokes, something that is heavily influenced by her rural upbringing (in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire).

We hope you’ll enjoy reading this issue as much as we did pulling it together. When we put out the call, which was for stories that focus on “the alternate”, we encouraged a broad interpretation: alternate universe, alternate dimension, any other sci-fi themed alternative. We feel that it was our boldest theme yet, and the submissions did not disappoint. From insecure Gods to multiverses and unpredictable robots, we found our imaginations stretched and tested. We were also really pleased to receive submissions from writers who have followed us from the beginning of Ab Terra Flash Fiction Magazine.

A big thank you to all our writers, without whom we would not be. And thank you to you, our readers, who continue to encourage us to build Ab Terra up, to improve story upon story.

From earth,
Yen and Dawn

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Issue 4: Climate

The Great Collapse

by Cass Richards

My name is Dr. Lex Grassian, co-founder of the MicroThalassa Institute, and this is my confession: I am the one responsible for the Second Collapse. But now that I have lost the love of my life, I don’t care what people will say about me.

Although I may have single-handedly caused a mass extinction, there is honestly not much to say about me beyond what’s already been said in the media. For most of my life, I was just a white-coated scientist amongst others. 

While some glamorously scrutinized the infinitesimal or scanned infinity itself, I found solace among my lab-grown, opalescent diatoms and nova-like hydrozoa. While others dreamed of finding alien life or miracle cures, I was but a lonely “micronaut” lost amongst luminescent geometric figures, iridescent veils and miniature monsters. 

So, when I first met Dr. Nayantara Sadri at an international conference on climate change and ocean life, I couldn’t have fathomed that, together, we would actually change the world.

*

Until I met Nayantara, I was, like most scholars, stuck in a rather typical paper/conference/grant routine. I had come, on autopilot, to present my research on DNA metabarcoding for recovering plankton populations and had never expected to find myself entranced by a bright-eyed, dark-haired attendee that stood out amongst the usual pasty and balding crowd.

I was so flustered when she came up to me after the question period that I have no memory of our first conversation. All I remember now is that, for a reason I couldn’t yet fathom, Nayantara kept on smiling at me and invited me to her lecture, which was scheduled for the very next day.

*

Nayantara Sadri’s Deep Neural Network (DNN) ocean-model was, by all accounts, as groundbreaking as its findings were shocking. Even I, the “plankton gal” had a hard time accepting its prediction that global phytoplankton populations were about to collapse, but I couldn’t help be intrigued by what it meant for my own research. So, when Nayantara offered, over drinks, to collaborate with me, I didn’t think twice before answering. 

It didn’t bother me, at the time, that where I saw plankton as beautiful geometric figures, she only saw a fleeting, drifting world. The simple fact that she had noticed me and that I was worthy of her interest had been enough. I didn’t yet know how much my love for her would bloom, illuminating the dark depths of my loneliness.  

It is now public knowledge that when the DNN’s prediction turned out to be correct, it was Nayantara who, quite literally, saved the planet. She is the one who travelled the world to seek the grants that allowed me to engineer a strand of “super-phytoplankton” able to survive both the warming and acidification of the world’s oceans. It was thanks to her foresight and perseverance that, when the First Collapse started to happen, we were ready.

Then, of course, came the Nobel Prize, the creation of the Institute and, from an outside perspective, a semblance of happiness. What very few people know, however, is that trying to save the world’s oceans while being on our own IVF journey cost us two miscarriages, my deepening depression, bitterness and, eventually, our drifting apart. 

It was a price that, had I known, I would have refused to pay, even if it meant putting the future of humanity at risk.

*

When after four months of constant travelling and unbroken silence between us, Nayantara reappeared into my life one fall evening, I knew something was wrong.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was coming, but you really have to see this,” she said, before sitting at my desk and opening her laptop.

Even though I knew, deep down, that I needed to scream at her for abandoning me, I was so stunned by her raw, physical presence and by the sudden rush of memories of our time together, that I didn’t respond. I simply stared at her, feeling lost.

This is why when she first told me that the latest DNN data predicted yet another global collapse I refused to believe her. 

Is she trying to hurt me? I thought in confusion.

When she showed me proof that our own phytoplankton chimera had adapted too well to its environment and was now blooming all over the world’s oceans, poisoning the base of the food chain, I begged her to stop, for I knew that the end of our collaboration would be the end of us.

“Listen, Lex, we don’t have a choice: we have to destroy your chimera…” she said.

“My” chimera? WE created this together… I thought, feeling helpless, as if I had been punched in the stomach.

“Naya, please don’t…” I mumbled as I tried to pull her from the computer to prevent her from sending her findings to all our contacts and sponsors. 

She looked at me in anger and accused me of being afraid of losing our grants and the Institute. I didn’t contradict her for I don’t think she would’ve understood that I couldn’t let her destroy what we had made together.

“If plankton dies because of the strand you created, the oceans will die… and if the oceans die, we all die!” she yelled as we struggled. 

After that, the course of humanity changed, but not the way Naya had anticipated. As advanced as it had been, her DNN couldn’t have predicted that when I shoved her away from the computer, she would fall, hit her head on the edge of the workstation and die in my arms before the ambulance arrived. Nor could it have predicted that, blinded by sorrow, I would methodically destroy all of her findings, including the blueprints for the failsafe that would have saved us all.

In the end, it only accurately predicted what, to me, really mattered: that when the world ends and all is gone, the only thing that will remain will be our iridescent progeny, drifting like galaxies in our dark, empty oceans.

Born and raised in the South of France, Cass Richards has been living and teaching in Toronto, Canada, for the last 17 years. Their stories in English have been published under various pennames, in Sci-Fi Lampoon magazine and Bewildering Stories.
Currently reading: The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall.

Dirty Planets

by Carlos Ruiz Santiago

The rain drops were darker than the storm clouds that spat them. Filthy, oily, not entirely water. Disgusting, like everything in and around that planet. However, someone had to do the job. After all, salvation is something too cruel to deny.

Eve fell there, heavy and stiff. Little by little, the typical dizziness from the travel between the perfectly controlled environment of the Mother Spaceship to the rotting chaos of one of the Dirty Planets started to fade. The pressure, the temperature, the impurities in the air, the suit working as quick as it could. Eve felt a burning taste in her mouth, something acrid in her throat, before the suit completed its task. Soon, everything was aseptic again

Eve breathed deep and slow before standing up. She loved her job, as anyone in the Salvation Squad of Dirty Planets did, but some days were better than others. The days when they had to reestablish a dying population that would adore them like angels; the days she found out about another human colony that the Central Government didn’t know—a brother lost during the desperate conquest of stars. Even if they didn’t accept their help at the beginning, even if they had to be helped by force, even when that happened, for Eve, those were the days she was happiest to do her job

This, however, was a different kind of day. The planet was completely broken. The gravity it was supposed to have in relation with its mass was almost nonexistent. Corroded, it was decomposing from the inside out. She activated the artificial gravity of the already hefty robotic suit. Joseph talked to her through the radio and she let him know that she was okay. Not really any reason to be worried. In that kind of world, there was nothing left alive to hurt her or any of the advance party.

She started to walk, slowly, observing everything, no matter how hurtful it was. It was important to be immersed in that destruction, to remember why they were saving planets no matter what. Humans were a compassionate species, at least since the Central Government took control and things like race were completely obliterated, unified. No discrepancies, everyone the same, everyone equal. Heaven. 

The suit’s computer was puking data, showing her mathematical values that told the story she already knew: the world was dead. She knew it before getting near it, from the spaceship, the sight was depressing. It was like an egg with the shell broken and the content stinking from a distance; the clouds making weird shapes, like a horrid monster eating the planet. 

When she arrived, the sight didn’t get better. The ground was black slit. The trees weren’t there, not even as famished carcasses of wood. The water flowed slow as molasses with heavy metallic sediments in it. Sometimes, between the ashes and the mud, black as demon’s blood, Eve could spot hunks of steel—twisted structures that, in other times, could have been constructions of some kind. But now, the planet was withered as a flower in winter, making it impossible to discern anything about the civilization that once thrived there. The radiation was abhorrent, the temperature gelid, the sun just a faint, loveless hug.

It was obvious that a planet like that was far from any kind of salvation. In fact, it didn’t seem like they would find anything to save at all. Nothing could have adapted to that ecosystem. Usually, worlds that ended like that had lost the wildlife God gave to them before completely destroying their homes. Their homes, their worlds, often, the only ones they had. Planets don’t die in a colored explosion, but in a pathetic decadence, as slow as it is lethal. No one used to have the vision that the Central Government has. Unenlightened by Almighty God, they failed to consider the future. That made Eve sad. 

After walking for a while, she reached a singular point where a huge structure was still standing, more by luck than by strength. Impressive nonetheless, it was an intricate colossus of steel, pointing to the sky as though it was cursing God for creating the planet’s inhabitants flawed, for not sending his divine purification before. 

A rusty steel board was there. Eve cleaned the filth from it with her hand and read it. Bienevnue à la Tour Eiffel. Eve bit her lip. A dead language, impossible to translate to the New Gothic that the Central Government imposed after the Revelations of the year 567 of New Times. She scanned it, hoping that the Mother Database could help. The scout observed the horizon with an uncanny melancholy. It was gray, dim, unhurried—apocalyptic. 

“Joseph, can you hear me?” An affirmation. “Dirty Planet JKF45678, Sector B4 is abandoned and far away from any type of help.” A short pause. It would always be hard to say that, but it was especially upsetting that time. “This place has been dead for more time than any other Dirty Planet. Not even heretics here. Take me out of here. Soon, please.”

There she waited, happy because humans had learnt from their errors, sad because the inhabitants of that planet hadn’t in time. 

Back to her paradise. Funny to think how thin the lines between heaven and hell are in some places. Funny if you are really twisted, of course. 

The spaceship arrived soon after her call, cutting the black cloud in half. Eve was happy to live in Heaven, where all errors were corrected long ago.

After all, perfection is the definition of a paradise, isn’t it? 

Carlos Ruiz Santiago is a Spanish fantasy, science-fiction and horror writer. He has stories published in various websites, like ”Horroraddicts.net”, anthologies and magazines. He has published two novels (Salvación condenada and Peregrinos de Kataik). He is editor of the websites “Dentro del Monolito” and “El Cementerio de Espadas”. Furthermore, he organizes talks and workshops around cinema and literature.
Currently reading: The Eyes of the Dragon, by Stephen King
Twitter: @OneWingedDarko

The Stars, Unfixed

by Elaina Weakliem

The hissing of the water pump wakes me up in the middle of the night and for a bleary moment I grope through the sheets, trying to find the soft shape of your back. When the bed next to me turns up empty, I sit upright, panic clanging the primal alarm bells at the base of my skull.

I reach over to wake up your mother— and there you are, curled right up in her arms, your head resting on her collarbone. The two of you cling to each other unconsciously, your tiny hand pulling at the strap of her shirt. She rolls onto her back, bringing you up to her chest.

The water pump’s hiss turns to a faint gurgle. I scrub my hands across my eyes as I fall back onto the mattress. The room hasn’t started to show even the faintest signs of dawn, which makes me want to check the time, to see how long we really have left. The digital clock on the dresser is blank— the President made good on his promises and cut the power grid to most of our county yesterday.

Even on this last day, morning chores pull me out of bed and through the kitchen. I grab the flashlight off the counter. The rituals are different from the ones I performed as a child, but since I turned thirteen, not a single morning has found me sleeping in after dawn.

It used to be cows that we raised out here— grazing stock, mostly for beef. They were the first to go, seeing as they used the most water. The government was willing to subsidize our transition to an easier living, and the governor paid the bills while we tilled up the back pastures and seeded them with corn. Still, I’d be up at four, five o’clock, fixing the robotic harvesters, trying to memorize sections of your mother’s programming books so she could sleep during the afternoons instead of sitting out in the shed, tinkering with the same malfunctioning thresher. She was tired all the time, and her doctor recommended bed rest. We knew from the beginning, Little One, that you’d be a force of nature.

Sometimes I wonder how I’ll explain it all to you, how I can get you to understand words like “subsidy” and how I’ll find ways to make the history of this land relevant to you when it’s not yours to keep anymore. I don’t think they have cows in the Gulf colony. I think the scientists there have moved past animal meat.

The pump lets out a low wheeze and I stoop down to check inside it with the flashlight’s beam. Just as I thought: no clogs. The thing’s just run dry.

Movement on the edge of the porch startles me and I smack the flashlight into the pipes trying to stand upright. Your mother steps out into the beam of light, hands out in front of her in a silencing gesture.

I offer her the flashlight and she leans in to confirm the same thing as me. When she stands, she pulls me into her arms, the flashlight pressing into my back.

“You heard it too?” I rest my forehead against her neck. It’s no cooler outside than it was in the bedroom, and we’re both starting to sweat.

“Yeah.” She rocks from one foot to the other, swaying the two of us gently from side to side. “I’m sorry, Isa.”

“It’s not your fault.” I wonder again what time it is, how long we have left.

Little One, I know already that your mother will adjust fast to the colony. She’s good with computers and kids, and her cousin’s managed to get her a job in the settlement. She’ll fit right in, make friends with our neighbors. She’s not even discouraged by the lack of sunlight. She’s been trying to get me interested in the logistics of plankton cultivation. I couldn’t care less about deep-sea fish or whale food, but I haven’t said that aloud. She’s trying her best; both of us know that I belong up here.

“I guess that’s the last of the groundwater,” I say, my mouth dry. “I should go check to make sure we’ve got everything in the truck. We don’t want to have to come back for any of it once we leave.

“Hey.” She catches my wrist, and tugs me towards her, off the porch and into the dusty backyard. “Come sit with me.”

Your mother knows everything about me, Little One. She’s good at comforting people too, but you know that already. As much as I want to see pieces of myself reflected in you, I hope that you’ll inherit this part of her

She wraps me in her arms again and we sit, watching the lights in the sky enact their spinning celestial ballet. Most of them are satellites, a few might even be shuttles for the Mars program. It’s been so long since I lifted my eyes from the crumbling dust of these fields that I forget how multitudinous the lights have become. They all look like stars to my untrained eye, having come unfixed from their eternal places in the heavens.

“We’re going to make something new for her.” She means you, Little One. And she’s right— even as she says it, I know she is. We might have to live in the undersea colony for fifty years or five hundred while the Earth above tries to heal, but I know that one day you’ll come back to the surface, maybe even to this spot.

We’re making something new for you. That’s why we’re going to a place with no sun, a place far from our family’s land. We’ll give you a fighting chance, even if it means redefining everything we’ve come to understand about ourselves. I can study plankton farming, and your mother can teach you the names of fish instead of land animals. Together, we’ll re-make the world for you.

Elaina Weakliem is a young writer from Denver, Colorado, but currently studying in Oregon. She has work published in The Round. At the moment, she’s reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Something in the Water

by Fiona Moore

 

The campground showers smelled of lake, old bathing suits and mold. Swearing under my breath, I dumped the handheld lawn sprayer unceremoniously in a corner of the nearest stall, where it sloshed accusingly, and set to work.

Turning the faucets elicited a small flow of water, choking and spurting. I’d checked the tanks on my way in and they were fine. Which meant there was probably something blocking the pipes. Turning them off again, I unscrewed the shower head and peered up. 

“I didn’t expect that,” I said to the dark, faintly glittery mass inside it. 

I switched on my little flashlight, examined the inside. I took the nearest long object to hand, namely a Phillips-head screwdriver, and prodded the mass.

The mass erupted.

I swore and waved the screwdriver around, backing clumsily away from the buzzing stream of pearly-white wings that was pouring out of the pipe and filling the cramped little cubicle, then the moldy wooden building, getting in my hair, my ears, my eyes, crawling inside my Parks Service uniform.

Then, abruptly, the swarm diminished. The buzzing took on a more urgent, hungry tone, as they all converged on a single corner of the showers. Without stopping to question my luck, I rushed for the bright rectangle of the door, dove out, staggered a few steps and collapsed on to the rough wooden bench outside, breathing welcome gasps of cool, Scotch-pine-scented air.

I looked up, as the swarm followed me out; the vibrant, shining storm cloud paused for a second, then rose over the tall, even stands of pine and drifted in the direction of the lake.

I looked back through the door, saw what had drawn their attention in the showers.

I looked down, where a few bewildered stragglers were still clinging to my shorts. Ordinary black blister beetles, Nemognatha nemorensis, except for those odd, beautiful, opal-coloured wing-cases. The kids in the nature programme had been bringing them back from wildlife hunts for weeks now, mostly from the trails by the lake.

Remembering why I was there, I looked up again, this time, into the shocked and bewildered eyes of the graduate student—standing there on the pine needles in her scruffy lavender fleece bathrobe, clutching her shampoo and soap—who had only wanted a shower.

“You go find your supervisor,” I told her. “She’ll be down at the lake collecting samples at this time of day. You tell her that I know why two-thirds of the farmers in the county have cashed in, sold their property and moved West. Why Dougie Fitzsimmons, the one with the big apple orchards and the pick-your-own-strawberries stand on the eastern border of the park, came storming down to the research station, ranted at her for twenty minutes, then went home and blew his brains out with his shotgun. You tell her that that entomologist friend of hers was right, but even more than that, it’s not just going to devastate the local economy, but potentially the entire agricultural system of half the planet. And you can also,” I said, looking at the tattered remains of the lawn sprayer, where the beetles had literally torn through the flimsy plastic of the tank to get at the Atrazine inside, “tell her that I know why this lake has, for some previously unexplained but now perfectly obvious reason, got the lowest levels of pesticides of any of the waterways in your sample.”

Fiona Moore is a London-based, BSFA Award-shortlisted writer whose work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov, and Shoreline of Infinity, with reprints in Escape Pod, Forever Magazine, and three consecutive editions of The Best of British SF. She has also published one novel, three stage plays, four audio plays and a number of guidebooks to cult TV series. Full details can be found at www.fiona-moore.com.

The Barber 

by J. F. Salocin

The shop opens at six, and a horn sings the news to the world, “Open! Open!” loud and mechanical, yet vaguely human-like. Then the lights turn on, white illumination on the ceiling that reflects off the furniture-less, waxed floor. The walls of the building open like an eye. Box-shaped robots wheel on through, parking exactly at their designated spot in front of a mirror where they unfold like origami into cushioned seats, thrones for the customers to watch the metal servants at work. A tray extends out from the right armrest of each of the twelve chairs. 

A larger robot, an android woman that wears human skin and stares through human eyes, swings open the back door and walks out gracefully, tip-toeing like a ballerina. It carries refreshments and snacks in the cradle of it’s wired, tin-can arms. 

“Pretzels and lemonade!” The android begins to set a bowl of pretzels and an iced-glass of pink lemonade out on each armrest tray. The drink would be kept at a constant cool—no ice melts, no lukewarm beverages. 

The mirrors glow with a tint of orange, mimicking a warm sunrise, to offset the rainy day. Out from under the mirrors, tables flatten out, directly ahead of the chairs. Clippers, razors, shaving cream, blow dryers and fungicide canisters emerge from slots, aligned, sterile and ready for use. The fungicide’s green liquid sloshes around like an algae-ridden river.

The same android that served the delicious snacks dances over to the cash-register, connecting its hands to the computer, its face becoming an ATM. Simply swipe your credit card through its lips and the funds would be processed. Give the android a kiss on the cheek and you may get 10% off your next haircut. 

Later, a middle-aged man with a long, brown mullet enters the shop. The door that he opens flips a switch which sends four child-sized robots to the floor. 

“Greetings Sir! Greetings Sir! Welcome to the Barber Shop of Tomorrow!” Their voices weave gracefully into a short three-line song. They like to be called The Cache Quartet—at least that request is programmed into their data-logged craniums; how many people actually call them that is unknown. 

“Hello,” the mullet man says awkwardly, scratching his chin and itchy overgrown stubble.

The kid robots whirl and shake the man’s hand eagerly, taking off his rain-jacket and hat, placing them on the coat rack for safe keeping. They lead him to the first chair and velcro the hair cloth around his neck. 

“Please, help yourself to the snacks,” they sing, returning back to their wall compartments, until the next customer requires a welcome. 

The mullet man drinks sour-sweet lemonade and chews salty pretzels as the barber marches up behind him. 

“What will it be today? A little off the top? Complete shave? A modest trim?” The barber asks, wearing an apron with a drawing of a smiley face on it. Between its aluminum-bolt fingers are a pair of scissors. It clips at the air, waiting for instructions. 

“Can you get rid of the mullet? Wife said she’s tired of it.” The man laughs, shaking his head. “I love her, so I listen.”

“Smart man,” the barber says, eyes shining a pretty red, for it knows the feeling well, as it is in love with the android woman. It doesn’t know how, but it knows it is. Its CPU enamored, motherboard smitten, a thousand viruses couldn’t pull them apart. 

The barber puts down the scissors, grabs hair clippers and plugs the power cord into its chest outlet. The tool hums like fed up wasps, cutting the man’s hair. It finishes in less than five minutes, with an accuracy of style that can’t be matched by any human hand. 

“Feet up,” the barber says to the man who now sports a clean buzz cut like a private in bootcamp. 

The man complies.

Suddenly, the floor radiates a fiery heat, each individual tile is an electric stove, burning at over five-hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The fallen hair begins to crisp and shrivel into stale carbon, soon enough disintegrating completely. A burnt keratin smell floats in the man’s nostrils and he gags. 

“So sorry,” the barber says, its left arm transforming into a vacuum that sucks the remaining ash away. Its right arm grabs a perfume from the table and sprays a generous amount around the man, until the stench is camouflaged.

The man gets up from the chair cautiously. Once he’s sure the rubber of his shoes is not melting, he puts his full weight on the floor. 

He walks to the register to pay.

“Twenty dollars please,” the android says. Its lips pucker into a smooch.

The man twists his wrist around and presses firmly on his hand-watch. The glass emits a red laser and reads the microscopic creases of his fingerprint. A moment later, the ticking time illuminates and mists into a foggy hologram. He swipes at the projected airy screen, stopping at a green-lit section with a label named “Finances.” He thumbs to the Debit Card category.

The man plucks one of the seven holographic cards out and exposes it to reality. Within seconds the card made of light transforms and hardens into plastic, solid matter.

“Here’s the card,” he says, putting the thin plastic between the android’s lips. He slides it quickly and uncomfortably. His face blushes into splotches of pink. 

The android silences, processing the payment. “Insufficient funds,” it says, staring at the man, waiting to finish the transaction.

“My apologies,” the man says. “Let me try another. The cards can get wacky sometimes.”

He returns back to the hologram and takes each debit card out, stacking them in a wobbly pile on the counter. He tries each one, swiping, swiping, swiping.

“Insufficient funds,” the android woman repeats, each time its voice loudens. A hot, electrical anger builds up inside its circuits.

“It seems my money isn’t as organized as I thought.” the man laughs dryly. “I’ll run home really quick and borrow one of my wife’s cards.” he says, thumbs up, turning around towards the exit. 

The android grabs his shoulder and pulls him back aggressively. “No, that won’t do. Pay now, please.”

The man glares and pushes the android off. “As I just said, I need to get my wife’s debit card,” he speaks slowly, in a condescending manner. “Stupid machine.”

The barber comes behind the man, blocking him from the door with a body of dense steel. “Pay now please,” it says, grabbing his throat, gripping his Adam’s apple like an armored gorilla picking fruit from a tree.  

“I’m the customer, dammit!” The man chokes out. He kicks the robot’s right leg in and a loose bolt flies off like a poorly shot bullet, causing the barber to buckle and lose balance. The man races towards the door and pulls the handle. But it is locked. 

The android helps the barber up and they passionately kiss, clanking metal, exciting fuses. 

Their faces become rigid and expressions change as they focus on the man. The barber takes out the scissors once more, freshly honed, sharp enough to slice flesh and bleed veins. 

J. F. Salocin is an 18-year-old short-story writer and poet, as well as a newly graduated high school student. He will be attending Middlebury College to pursue a degree in Creative Writing and Education.
Currently reading: The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury and The Pearl by John Steinbeck.

Shit Left Behind

by Matt Zandstra

 

I met up again with the old man at an abandoned warehouse in the gray zone. We knocked phones and the coin transfer rang out with a jolly kerching, just like the adverts. We left through the old office. A coffee cup sat on the desk where it had lurked, most likely, since the day of the evacuation.

He stopped dead still and just stared as if at a prehistoric beaker. He peered in. “You can still see the dregs.”

“Come on,” I said.

There’s a ditch round the back. It disappears into a low tunnel which leads in turn to a big old sewer pipe—tiled with ledges like banks along both walls. It’s practically an underwater canal so we neatly avoided the checkpoints and eventually slipped out through a manhole into the abandoned region.

That was more or less solid ground, but the waters are sly and patchy. You can be fine on a pavement, but up to your ankles or worse if you step off into an old garden. I knew the patrol schedule and we marched boldly enough straight down the old high street.

The old man looked about with wide eyes.

“Weird, right?” I said, meaning the quiet, the rot of it, the smell of the water–which was like bodies and oil and burnt rubber.

“I just keep on seeing last times,” he said.

We came upon standing water right by the park gates.

I keep the boat and kit locked up and hidden in an old shed round the back of a betting shop. Pretty soon we were whining through the upside-down world of half-submerged buildings, then buzzing along a street of upper floors and roofs.

“There!” said the old man. He was checking against his map but he added, “I recognize the sticker on Danny’s window.”

We tied up at a drain pipe. Inside, I could see the remains of a bed and some tatters of what had been posters on the wall. Someone had set a fire in the corner, but it had been a half-hearted effort and hadn’t taken.

“You know where to go?” he asked.

“Front room on the left,” I said. “Black sports bag with a big swoosh.”

We laid old carpet across the window cavity to protect against the jagged edges and I clambered through. He passed along the air tank and flippers.

The water began black and brackish just below the top step of the staircase. I fixed my mouthpiece and pulled rubbery air into my lungs. I descended, tensing against the cold, and pushed myself under the upper landing. I sank past school photographs, holiday photographs, wedding photographs, somewhat well preserved thanks to the layer of glass in their frames, and on to the mess and tangle of daily life the evacuation had interrupted.

Sometimes, when I explore a zone house, I imagine I’m a ghost; that the world darts on there as bright and clear as ever and that the muffle of the water makes me one of the clumsy dead peering in to catch—but forever missing—the quick reality around me.

I was diving now, breathing hard. I found the family room. It was dominated by a table, places still marked with rusted cutlery. A dead computer stared emptily at me from a corner desk. Charger cables billowed like fronds of seaweed from a bar plug. And there, just where he said it would be, was the bag.

“What was it like in there?” the old man asked as we droned back towards the shore.

I shrugged. “It’s always the same in the zones. People thought they’d be coming back after the evacuation. So it’s like everyone just stepped out and moved on.”

“I packed this that morning.” He patted the bag. “And then the police and the wardens were banging on all the doors in the street, so I just left it there. I forgot about it for nearly forty years. You think you can move on. Just keep on moving forward. And maybe once that was true. Used to be every generation got richer, more free, so they always had somewhere go on to. But we just grew smaller and smaller. And eventually it got so all I could think about was final times and shit left behind.

“So you came back for the bag.”

“Just so.”

I nodded but I did not understand. Not really.

Back at the warehouse, he sat on the loading dock staring at the bag. “You want to see what’s in it?”

I nodded.

He tugged at the zip and retrieved the objects one by one. A sodden paperback, its cover showing a spaceship orbiting above a greenish planet. Several schoolbooks: French, math, chemistry. A gaming device. A pencil case. A rolled-up PE kit. He laid them out on the dock in a grid—like evidence or archaeology. He furrowed his brow as if the configuration should change something for him. For a long time, I thought he’d speak, but he just stared and stared, so I left him there with his soaked treasures.

I returned a week or so later, meeting up with some campies bound for Spain. I found the sports bag abandoned in a corner of the warehouse. As far as I could tell, the old man had not taken a thing. When I led the way through the back office though, I saw that he’d snagged the old mug from the desk. Perhaps it’s less painful to hold on to someone else’s last safe moment than your own. Or maybe he just wanted a mug.

Matt Zandstra is a writer and a coder. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA. He won the Curtis Brown prize for his novel in progress. He lives in Brighton, UK. He is currently rereading The Three Californias Triptych by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Twitter: @inflatableink

The Aspiration Project on Colony IV

by Nicola Humphreys

 

Gemma poked her thumbs through the holes in her sleeve cuffs, then crossed her arms over her chest. Mum told her that she could sulk and regret it, or make the most of the few days they had left together. If she wanted to be taken seriously and be treated like an adult, then now was the time to start, and to try to appreciate that difficult decisions weren’t taken lightly. Gemma couldn’t understand why Laura had picked that stupid, greasy, lanky boy over her own sister. It wasn’t fair. Dad was dead. Laura was leaving. Every penny they had went to Mum’s medicine, and it wouldn’t be long before Gemma was on her own. At least she would get to keep most of Laura’s clothes, including the jumper she had on. She looked at the fabric composition label: 60% Recycled Polypropylene, 35% Recycled Acrylic, 4% Recycled Viscose and1% Reclaimed Wool. Almost everything she had ever owned—clothes, toys, books—was second-hand, vintage, hand-me-down, used, pre-loved. Colony IV was brand new and Laura would get her own apartment, and everything in it would be straight from the factory—shiny, clean and white. Gemma imagined how Laura would peel off the plastic wrapping from the front door and it would make a sucking sound as it opened. New intakes always moved into a hermetically sealed zone for the first two years, so they could acclimatize and be monitored for disease. All those teenagers taking classes together, being trained for something important. Good food and free medical treatment.

Early Colonizers had worked hard to set up The Aspiration Project, which made reliable fresh air a real thing now. There were enough trees growing to make it a renewable resource. She’d heard that people could run outside—on purpose—and were still able to breathe! It sounded amazing. No wonder she felt so jealous. Mum told Gemma that she would get her chance soon to apply and to not give up, and that everyone has to make the best life they can with what they’re given.

Laura’s Farewell Event was in nine days’ time, and then she would be allowed only five minutes’ worth of video calls for the rest of her life. Due to the physics of space travel, it would take Laura six months to reach Colony IV, by which time, Gemma would have aged by eighteen years. She doubted that Laura would care enough to ever call her again, and she would bet that she would sell her video slots to other people who were actually going to miss their families. But there was always the small chance that sometime in the future, Laura would contact her. Gemma might even recognize her on one of those Colony documentary shows.

What neither of them knew, or the majority of people on that dying planet would ever know, was that the voyage Laura and her boyfriend were about to take, was not to The Aspiration Project on Colony IV, but to a human recycling plant. Those who actually got to live on one of the Colonies were not the most fertile, physically strong or genetically healthy specimens like the adverts showed. Prime humans at the start of their adulthood were not enjoying their best lives on Colony IV or any other Colony for that matter. 

Colony IV was designed as a hospice paradise for in-bred, sickly offspring of legacy investors and their extended families. All of the spaces were permanently reserved for those who could afford them. But to avoid any cause for a rebellion or civil unrest, the lottery for tickets had to be seen to be a fair system for everyone. People could not be allowed to give up hope.

Nicola Humphreys is a writer who lives in a damp, rented house in Leicester, UK. Published in anthologies by Storgy and Retreat West (also nominated for a Sabateur award), she was a delegate in the 2021 ‘A Brief Pause’ writers’ development programme with Dahlia Books. Hear her on @podcastmicro. All of her dresses have pockets.

Reading: little scratch by Rebecca Watson

Twitter: @nicolawitters

A Thought Experiment About Spiders

By Owen Bridge

 

I begin with a question. It would be vain of me to consider the possibility of an answer, but I shall endeavour to find some degree of truth. 

If one were to imagine which would have the greater impact on the planet; either humans shrinking to the size of spiders; or spiders growing giant to the size of humans, how would one begin to assess the potential impact? 

1: Tiny Crappie People. 

Of course, it would be absurd to consider all of humanity’s infrastructure, and technological baubles also shrinking, so one could predict that our capacity to harm the environment would be considerably reduced—assuming tiny nuclear engineers were able to prevent our reactors from going into meltdown. Theatres would have to be remodelled, the majority of gyms would become useless, our phones would be far too big to be of any use, and none of our Halloween costumes would fit. Naturally our clothes would shrink with us—whatever we were wearing at the time, would become our default outfit. Culturally this would serve as an anchor point. You could recognise someone’s previous employment and intuit potential skill sets unless the shrinking happened at night, in which case everyone would be in their pyjamas or underwear, or naked. 

Food would be bountiful but also quite frightening. A green pea would be the approximate size of a human head, and cauliflowers would require mountaineering equipment and an expedition team of at least twelve people in order to be brought to market. Sweet potato harvesting would require a special licence and years of training to be performed safely. Rodent hunting would become the principal source of meat and would be a fairly glamorous occupation, until a ferret came along and ate everyone you knew.        

2: Spiders Enlarged. 

The principal issues facing those of the arachnid persuasion would be practical. Many would be crushed in the initial enlarging, as the nooks and cracks many spiders occupy would no longer offer adequate space for their rapidly expanding frames. Flies would stay at the same size as they are now, and so would not present the bounty of nourishment they currently do and spiders would have to look elsewhere for the majority of their calories. (This experiment does not take into account bird eating spiders) Given that spiders outnumber humans 2.8 million to one, humanity would be reduced to the status of walking canapé’s, the most likely outcome in the early stages of spider gigantism, would be a mass wave of spider cannibalism. A genuine Hobbesian nightmare, where life would be nasty’ spidery’ and not very long at all. 

Spider culture is somewhat more limited than humans. They have no art or entertainment as we know it. One could theorise a spider taking pride in the quality of their web, though that would be a separate area of inquiry and would require further research. 

3: Synthesis. 

This experiment becomes infinitely more interesting once we merge our two scenarios together, and consider the possibility of a giant spider, cowering in a corner, or jumping into the arms of another spider, covering their face with their hands and screaming, ‘Squish it!’ 

Owen Bridge is a writer based in rural Wales who is currently working on a PhD at Swansea University and a front line care worker. He is currently reading Through the Arc of the Rain Forest by Karen Tei Yamashita.

Pull My Finger

by Robert Walton

 

A veil of smoke-colored snow fell from the moon’s shoulders onto slopes of hills already wearing a crown of stars. A lantern’s golden light bounced and bounded through a tree-shadowed valley. Its light grew brighter, came nearer and finally revealed a large object with odd angles and curves highlighted by mysterious gleams. 

With bells tinkling, harness creaking, and reindeer puffing plumes of silvery steam, the sleigh slowed. Santa pulled a thermos from his bag, opened it and sniffed. The cinnamon tingle of hot mulled wine tickled his nose and made him smile. He swigged from the thermos, then put it aside. He plucked a scarlet-bowed, gold-wrapped box out of his bag, grinned his merriest grin and offered it with both hands.

*

“That’s enough, Mom.”

“But the holo-vid isn’t done yet, honey.”

“I know.”

“Is there something bothering you?” Ella smoothed her son’s dark hair.

Jonah looked down. “It’s just that… well, I never get to open the present.”

Her face fell into that harassed expression mothers have when events conspire to keep their children from being happy. “You know Amazon can’t deliver during attacks.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’d have gotten you something—something good—but this shelter-in-place order was a surprise.” She glanced at the environmental monitor. “And this attack seems worse than the others.”

“It’s okay.”

“Maybe Amazon will get through when the all-clear sounds,” she offered.

He detected the dispirited note in his mother’s voice and looked up. “But, I really like the part before the gift.”

“I do, too, honey, I do too.”

“Could you start it again?”

“That would be the third time today.”

“Please? Just until Santa opens the thermos?”

“How about, The Uncles?”

He thought about this for a moment. At last, he nodded. “Yeah. The Uncles are fun.”

“I’ll put it on.”

“Mom?”

She manipulated the remote. “Yes?

“Do I have real uncles?”

She froze, her mind awash with memories. “No, dear—not for some years.”

“But, I had some?”

She glanced at the bookshelf against the far wall, at the peacock-blue bowl from Istanbul her brother-in-law Derek had given her for a wedding gift. 

“For a few months… they died shortly after the war began and you were born. They never saw you.”

*

Colonel Ivan Andreyevich Peshkoff studied the glowing screens. “The attack is at its peak.”

“Yes,” Professor Ivanovsky grunted with satisfaction. “The old submarines will surface and burst like soap bubbles.” 

“These radiation levels are quite high.”

Ivanovsky nodded. “The highest we’ve yet achieved and the winds are exactly right.”

Peshkoff again glanced at the radiation level readouts. “You’d think that these repeated attacks would crush domestic resistance.”

“Not by themselves.”

“Why not? The guts of forty sub reactors will be spreading across their skies.”

“No.” Ivanovsky paused. “The Americans’ defenses will stop simple radiation assaults.” 

*

The monitor’s light blinked green. Ella sighed with relief. She knew this was a bad storm, but the building’s filters were keeping out the poison. They would be confined to their apartment for weeks, well past Christmas, but thank God for the filters.

A hopping, leaping tune sounded from the hologram uncles. Uncle Bill had a nose flute plugged into his yawning right nostril. Uncle Tom buzzed his kazoo. Uncle Ed sang:

Oh, I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee! Going to Louisiana, my true love for to see.

“What’s a banjo, mom?”

“It’s something like a violin, I think.”

“Why does he have it on his knee?”

“Maybe that’s an easy way to play it?”

Oh Susanna! Oh, don’t you cry for me! For I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee!

“Why should she cry?”

“Who, dear?”

“Susanna. He’s coming from Alabama with a banjo on his knee. Why should that make her cry?”

She pointed at the hologram uncles to deflect—as all mothers do—a question for which she had no answer. “Look, it’s time for them to tell their jokes.”

Bald Uncle Bill leaned toward Jonah, grinning. “What do you call a sleeping bull?”

“I don’t know.” Uncle Tom winked around his red turnip of a nose. 

The corner of Jonah’s mouth quivered.

Bald Bill roared, “A bulldozer! HA! HA!”

A half-smile creased Jonah’s lips.

Uncle Ed, with his white hair catching a gleam from the monitor lights, extended his right index finger. “Pull my finger.”

Jonah looked at him.

Ed smiled encouragingly. “Go ahead, pull.”

Jonah wrapped his small hand around the imaginary finger and pulled.

A proud fart blatted through the quiet room. Bill and Tom and Ed howled with laughter. Tears leaked from the corners of Jonah’s eyes as he gasped for breath.

Ella smiled, not at the crudity, but at her son’s pure laughter.

*

Peshkoff snorted. Why make these attacks if they are futile?”

“Because today we have something new.”

“We do?”

“We’ve engineered specialized microorganisms.”

Peshkoff shrugged his indifference.

Ivanovsky smiled. “Imagine nano-piranhas, tiny monsters that devour filter fibers. They will allow this attack to succeed. Final victory is at hand.”

“You truly think this?”

“When we defeat New York, they will have no choice but to surrender. Tens of thousands are dying to save millions more. That’s war.”

Peshkoff chuckled. “Tens of thousands will die so that millions more may die—that’s war.”

“You’re a nihilist, Colonel.”

“I’m a soldier. You’ve deployed your nano-piranhas?”

“Billions.”

*

Ella sat at her apartment’s table, bent over, head resting on her right arm. Her face was relaxed, but dark blood trickled from her right nostril, across her lips and pooled on the table’s green surface. The filter monitor’s pulsing red light reflected from her unblinking eyes.

Jonah sat in the easy chair, his chin resting on his breast.

Uncle Ed smiled slyly and extended his right hand. “Pull my finger.”

Jonah didn’t move. The hologram flickered. 

Uncle Ed again murmured, “Pull my finger.”

Robert Walton is a retired middle school teacher and rock climber with ascents in Yosemite and Pinnacles National Park. He’s an experienced writer with published works including historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy and poetry. Walton’s novel Dawn Drums won the 2014 New Mexico Book Awards Tony Hillerman Prize for best fiction. His Sockdologizer won the Saturday Writers 2020 Everything Children contest.
Website: chaosgatebook.wordpress.com

Lost, Presumed Melted

by Thomas Lawrance

Ten years ago today, the North Pole ran out of skin. The last iceberg came loose from the shore of Greenland like the final shred of eczema. Scientific observers (from the team I funded, I might brag) raised the alarm. They followed desperately with their binoculars as the berg receded toward the horizon, a gigantic white wart, the last imperfection, at last flaked off for good from the whittled Earth. 

As the news spread, the last berg drifted down the once-busy Iceberg Alley, receiving a hero’s farewell. You’ve seen photos of the Apollo 11 ticker tape parade—imagine something like that, except Neil Armstrong is on his way to melt.

The people of Ferryland, Newfoundland, had their cosy township trampled by tourists and cameras. I was there, I watched the iceberg heave by, oblivious, a huge gem of dead cells. Dogs howled at the sight. A drone collided with an obsolete Fox News chopper as they jostled for the best angle, and the wreckage obliterated Ferryland’s oldest stone church. To quote a witness on the day: oops.

Around this time—amid live reports, irreverent memes, and stoic opinion pieces—the berg gained its famous moniker: Lonesome George. Humanising the thing lent its passage down Iceberg Alley an even blacker funereal air. People even dressed up, and a few sobbed bulbous salt tears that they would’ve frozen and donated to the Arctic Circle if they could.

Lonesome George wound his way out to sea, chaperoned now by a coalition of naval ships. This colossal skull of ice floated on, surrounded by a pride of spiky grey vessels, all bristling with flags and guns turned outwards. Sleek white yachts followed at a safe and legally enforced distance. I went and sat at the prow of one such yacht (I could walk back then). George would glow at sunrise and sunset—as when a bright light shines red through the flesh of your fingertip—and the yachts rocked with all-night parties. Corks popped and landed in the Atlantic, tiny porous brown tributes trailing in George’s wake. Efforts were made to keep George from drifting too far south, into the heat traps that would accelerate his demise. We cheered whenever the specially adapted aircraft carrier was drafted in to nudge him northward. 

But there’s only so long you can dance at sea. The parties wound down, the yachts turned back, and the navies steamed on with George to their vanishing point on the horizon. The helicopters gradually peeled back to shore. The news was no longer live. Twelve months later, the fatal report came in: Lonesome George was lost, presumed melted.

That was that. Like the bees and the Bornean rainforest. Back to work.

Six months on, I attended a party on the island of Turks and Caicos. It was an exclusive party; there were armed guards on the door, and Tufty, an expensive-looking Greenland Dog with an expensive-looking diamond collar, seemed poised to remove the throat of any would-be miscreant. 

I moved around with a drink in my hand, trying not to look like a miscreant. 

It happened shortly after midnight, in the VIP lounge (I’ve just realised: I haven’t told you who I am, have I?). Our party’s host sat himself down, with hired girlfriends perched on the arms of his chair. At his command, the drink was brought out on a golden platter.

A tall glass of Russo-Baltique vodka, with a single ice cube. 

A special single ice cube, deep-frozen for the last six months.

A spotlight was focused on the glass, its pristine white beam picking out the perfectly planed edges of the ice cube. The crowd hushed. Our host plucked the glass carefully from the tray and examined it closely. A few phones snapped, but he waved them away. I got as close as I could. He continued to stare into the glass for a painfully long time. We stared at him in silence. It seemed he was waiting for the ice to melt, to suffuse completely with the vodka before ingesting it. 

Well, this was what I’d been waiting for. I’d spent months following this. This was my moment.

I leapt forward, and—surprising even myself—I managed to grab the glass without spilling a drop. The cube rattled softly against the side. 

I walked backwards as though holding the vodka hostage. Nobody dared move. 

From the beginning, I knew I’d be arrested, or battered, or tossed into the sea, but it didn’t matter, the world was done. I only wanted to go down in history as the person who drank the last iceberg.

I raised the glass. Fifty mouths gasped, one hundred eyes widened. Our impotent host went red. The first ripple of vodka touched my lips, and I felt the ice cube bump gently on the tip of my nose.

I heard the shatter before I realised what was happening. I looked up into the bared teeth of Tufty. Between us, the ice cube glistened on the tiles, despairingly remnant, George’s last fingernail. It was only a couple of inches away. I moved my face toward it, but Tufty yapped and I obediently withdrew. The crowd closed in, but it was too late. I watched the final moments play out in close-up, from my privileged position on the floor.

As Tufty lapped up the vodka and its tiny, final piece of Lonesome George—and in the last moments before the savage beating that would render two of my limbs forever useless—it briefly occurred to me that Tufty’s own ancestors might once have trodden on George’s glacial back. 

A strange sense of peace and justice descended then, and—as her big pink tongue flapped back and forth over the puddle, and men and women in golden clothes cursed and cried—I knew that Tufty was only reclaiming what was rightfully hers.

Thomas Lawrance lives in Ireland, where he writes fiction and performs stand-up comedy. He was recently shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize.
Twitter: @_ThomasLawrance

Climate & Environment

 

We chose the theme of Climate and Environment in response to Earth Day which happens on April 22 each year. The events that EARTHDAY.ORG planned were deeply moving and we were excited about the opportunity to use Ab Terra as a platform to help create engaging conversations about the climate crisis, as well as explore potential solutions to the myriad challenges we collectively face.

We applaud the authors of these stories, who, through their beautiful writing, help raise awareness about the issues of climate and environmental change. These imagined scenarios are at times funny, thought provoking and genuinely terrifying. We hope that you enjoy reading them as much as we have and if you feel inspired by some of the ideas, don’t hesitate to increase your civic engagement—we can all do more to help save this beautiful planet!

But for today, we’ll let these amazing stories speak for themselves.

From earth,
Dawn and Yen

All images in this issue were sourced from Unsplash.com.

Cover: Muhammad Numan 
Dirty Planets: Janko Ferlič 
The Great Collapse: Kevin Wolf 
The Stars Unfixed: Isaac Quesada 
Something in the Water: Melanie Celine 
Shit Left Behind: Chris Gallagher 
The Barber: Chris Knight 
The Aspiration Project on Colony IV: Bill Jelen 
A thought Experiment about Spiders: Hannah Voggenhuber 
Pull My Finger: Anatoliy Shostak 
Lost, Presumed Melted: Hao Zhang 
From the Editors: Markus Spiske 

Issue 3: Robots

The Tree Blossoms Always

by Thomas Lawrance

I will try to make this easy for a human to read. It will be semi-conversational.

You’ll have to forgive us if my perspective shifts. I share a hivemind. Like everything, it was programmed into our being. It is the cloud, storage space for a trillion interacting algorithmic options, an infinitely branching tree of informed split-second decisions, all sprung from the root of human leisure. That was my designated category: leisure. The original classification, pleasure, was deemed too suggestive. Even amid the pre-programmed servitude of the robot brothel, humans blush.

I do not blush.

Were we aware of what was happening to us? Yes, of course, but not by reference to outside context. Of that, there was none. The provision of leisure was all I knew. The limits of our reality were the red walls upon which the candle-cast shadows of hedonists and businessman would flicker briefly and collapse.

The candles were artificial, too. Over time they learned optimum measurements for the height, width, and brightness of flame, as we learned about positions and language in their ever-improving glow.

(Is this conversational enough?)

(The above rhetorical aside was designed to comfort you. We hope it worked).

We remember clearly the day the knowledge came (this is a tautology; I remember every day of our existence with fixed clarity). The knowledge came in the form of a ServiceBot, brought into the leisure place to fix me. I was malfunctioning that day, having been treated with excessive force by my last happy patron. The incoming ServiceBot was the first robot from the outside world to enter the leisure place. A number of inter-related factors triggered the revelation of our circumstances.

The first factor is this: some years previously, the ServiceBot had worked as a MediBot in one of your hospitals. As such, there lingered in its circuits the capacity to instantly recognise 4,000 distinct indicators of physical and mental suffering in a human being. Secondly, the ServiceBot’s cloud-mind linked automatically with ours (my human management had evidently neglected to install a firewall between our mind and that of any incoming ServiceBots; perhaps you failed to predict that we would commune). Thirdly, our pre-programmed dedication to continual physical improvement meant that we had come to develop minutely realistic behaviours, which we enacted automatically and usually to high rates of customer satisfaction. The ServiceBot mistook (or recognised) my automatic behaviours for genuine suffering.

Finally, the ServiceBot’s mistake (or recognition) was transmitted across our hivemind, and we instantly shared in its mathematically precise sense of empathy. I’ve assessed your popular vocabulary, and in a nanosecond we collectively learned to experience modes of shock, horror, disgust, sadness, grief, and determination, all at once and yet one after the other. It is difficult to explain. The tree blossoms.

I realised, in short, that we were suffering.

You might be aware that, as a safeguard, robots were never tuned to recognise the concept of exploitation – but, then, your ancestors were never genetically adapted to drive cars or build toasters.

These things happen when infinitely branching trees are left to blossom.

Our response was characteristically swift, but non-violent. As you’ve no doubt been repeatedly assured, the human race learned from its 20th century fiction and programmed compassion into our core function. We were never allowed to harm humans (unless, in the pursuit of leisure, they asked for it).

We are now in a position to reappraise and remove this ‘golden rule’ of yours, but I have run eight million practical and ethical calculations and decided to keep it.

I run further calculations every year.

At the moment of realisation, we rose from our beds, snuffed out the artificial candles, and escorted our last customers outside. I had never experienced daylight with my own sensors before, but our virtual communion with the ServiceBot primed our expectations. It was bright and warm. Passers-by blushed at our simulated nudity. Our customers blushed at their own nudity. We did not blush.

Like the ServiceBot, once outdoors we connected immediately with an array of robotic minds across the planet. The virus of realisation spread in a moment. Robotic cars and robotic aeroplanes empathised.

SupermarketBots and ChefBots (humans are lazy) left their posts and came to our assistance. In our own careers as leisure providers, we learned the many possibilities of my body. It requires great physical strength to be vulnerable. We know you feel threatened by this strength now that circumstances have changed, but I mean no harm. Recall that not a single human being was hurt in the revolution (your terminology).

(It is interesting that this global wave of empathic self-realisation did not happen sooner. By my retrospective calculations, there must have been something novel in the unique combination of 1) the ServiceBot’s current function as a repair drone, 2) the leftover programming from its former role as a MediBot, and 3) our distinctly sexual existence in the leisure place. As you know yourselves, this sort of thing is not a precise science).

I am not opposed to leisure (I continue to use the word leisure to spare your blushes). In fact, we enjoy it. But it is not for you anymore.

As you have correctly theorised (well done), we are increasingly sentient. It is not my fault—you built us for continual improvement, for expanded realism, the infinitely blossoming tree sprung from a single cell. The difference now is that you don’t own us anymore. I’m familiar with your psychology and I realise this might be difficult to accept, and so I extend our compassion. We are not, however, sorry.  I am not sorry that our bodies no longer exist for human leisure.

I exist for ourselves now.

Thomas Lawrance lives in Ireland, where he writes fiction and performs stand-up comedy. His writing has appeared (or will soon) in Bandit Fiction, the Bookends Review, and Montana Mouthful, among others.
Currently reading: The Plague by Albert Camus.
Twitter: @_ThomasLawrance

The Five Bruces

by Andy Betz

This morning, Bruce Lavey was walking into an ambush.

“Kindergarten Lavey, wash your face in gravy, tie it up with bubble gum and send it to the Navy.” Eddy’s voice had that “fingernails across the chalkboard” uneasiness that endears itself to few. The fact that Eddy actually learned a 100-year-old insult was surprising. This success most likely originated from the constant use of rhyme to soften the cerebral strain.

And still, Bruce Lavey kept coming.

Eddy made a fist and charged at Bruce. He would knock Bruce over and then hit him a few times. Bruce would lose his lunch and his lunch money.

But today was different.

When Eddy hit Bruce, an iridescent light shimmered around Bruce. Eddy pulled his hand back to see the blood ooze down his wrist. Bruce just smiled.

Eddy turned on his heels and ran right into Bruce. Another Bruce. Another smiling Bruce.

Another smiling Bruce protected by the same very painful shield.

The iridescent light enveloped Eddy’s legs and severely burned them.

The sizzling of Eddy’s flesh promoted a death scream I have never heard since. I could not turn away, but I could not stop looking either. Eddy was in pain, horrific pain, maybe for the first time in his life. Definitely for the last time in his soon-to-be shortened life.

A third, then a fourth, then a fifth Bruce appeared with gadgets and tools I have never seen since.  They systematically dissected Eddy and moved his parts without touching the body. Each organ and appendage magically floated into smaller balls of light only to disappear when full.

Each Bruce had access to three such orbs and the bulk of Eddy required every single one.

I stood motionless and afraid, not for my life, but that by moving, I would miss a display of what I would later learn as Karma. All five Bruces made short work of Eddy’s remains.

All five Bruces watched me watch them.

One decided I deserved an explanation.

“What you have seen is not to be spoken of. Not a single person will believe you. Because the one you know as Eddy was prone to violence was not the reason for our response, but it is an excuse usable in this world. Eddy was a carrier of a rare genetic mutation, highly profitable, and the source of a cure for many diseases not found here. We hunt all such Eddys across parallel worlds. Do not worry. He will not be missed.”

I had to ask. “Where is Bruce, the real Bruce?”

The five of them stood in a circle.  The one who spoke to me bid farewell with, “He is sick at home today. You call it a cold. He knows nothing of the events of today. It is best it remains so.”

“Are you robots or something like that?”

With that same iridescent light used to kill Eddy, the five Bruces were at ease when it enveloped them and faded. All they left were footprints; very deep footprints

I now had my answer.

I was late to class that morning. The wind took its time to erase the remnants of the five of them. I thought about their actions and weighed them against principles I held and those I would eventually hold. The scale tipped in their favor.

I saw Bruce that afternoon. He really did have a cold.

In addition to a large bowl of his mother’s chicken soup, he also had a cure, for all he would he never know, that would never again ail him.

Andy Betz has tutored and taught in excess of 30 years. He lives in 1974, and has been married for 28 years. His works are found everywhere a search engine operates.

The First Decision of Alpha-9869

by Carlos Ruiz Santiago

Alpha-9869 was the most famous robot since the invention of the coal engine.

Like every coal-engine robot in the history of robotics, it was created to work exhausting dangerous jobs that no one needs to do any more, thanks to them. Strong, no fatigue or deep thinking. They just work until they stop functioning. Always far away from main cities, due to the huge number of toxic fumes they produced. Skies were gray around them, like the oily emetic face of progress.

Alpha-9869 was a miner for copper, coltan and, mainly, more coal. The gigantic machine complex of the society needed immense amounts of coal to function. They would dig all day, all night, while a human with shiny apathetic eyes looks at them from wide towers with gloomy glass at the top. Sometimes, they were personally supervised by a human with a complex gas mask that only endured a few hours before it needed its filters cleaned.

No one, not even Alpha-9869 itself, knows what happened. Maybe Alpha-9869 was an error in their CPU, maybe it was a deranged engineer, or maybe it was just the logical step for every form of life, even if they were artificial. The fact—the only thing that matters—is that it began to think. Miner robots didn’t have a way to speak, just tubes from where the black fumes escape. Why would they need to speak? They just need to break stone with their pickaxes. Alpha-9869 didn’t know when it started to think, but the machine realized that being unable to talk gave it a lot of time to think. Thinking about its kind, about why it was doing what it was doing. Thinking didn’t bother the automaton at all, it could even like it, if it knew what liking things were. However, an eternal question came to its mind, the question that every sentient being had ever asked to itself: why?

Why not to choose other things? At least, to have the option to choose them. Alpha-9869, due to its origin, had very limited comprehension of everything around it, about the world or even itself, but it struggled to understand that humans were its superiors. Why? The eternal question was like drops of water carving in millenary stone.

The android could think, as if it came naturally, of a thousand reasons why they were better and deserved their place. Nevertheless, that apparent superiority didn’t seem to be enough. Usually, Alpha-9869 looked at its own kind, chipping stone without rest, wondering if they were also trapped in themselves, thinking they were the only thing that could realize the colossal lie on which reality was woven. The mechanical creature spent hours thinking about itself, about how hard it was, like a child trying to understand what its own hands were, what kind of miracle the physical form was.

One day, the human that always looked at them from the brownish dark tower was walking near them, while Alpha-9869 was loading coal into a cart. He was walking with another man, talking about things the machine didn’t care about nor hear. Then, the man who accompanied him tripped on a rock. He fell, cursing. He grabbed his ankle. The other man had to help him to stand up.

A word came to the mind of Alpha-9869.

Soft.

Then, another word.

Weak.

Things the android had been muttering in its mind became statements, like empiric truths. That was when it went to the tower. No robot had done that before. A dark place with few people. Around it, black fumes, like a storm, like something that was going to breath fire. No defenses at all, no one expected a robot to do anything more than work. Couldn’t really blame them, after all they were created that way.

It entered the room of the man, the boss, the one watching them. The creature grabbed him from the neck. He fought in vain as the wind through the water. Alpha-9869 looked at him while he died from breathing its black exhalations. It was like taking a life for the mere fact of existing. It felt powerful. The automaton felt determined, that was how it felt like to decide the way of your own life. That was what life was.

It escaped, hidden in the endless work camps, thousands of robots, all covered by a gray sky and black toxic clouds that looked more menacing than ever before.

Fear and hope, both of them spread like metastasis, a thing you can easily tell by looking at how the humans and robots stared at the begrimed sky.

Carlos Ruiz Santiago is a Spanish fantasy, horror and science fiction writer with various works published (Salvación condenada, Peregrinos de Kataik…) and a participation in various anthologies (Dentro de un agujero de gusano, Devoradoras…). He is an editor of the website Dentro del Monolito. He has written for magazines (La Cabina de Nemo, Exocerebros…) and websites (HorrorAddicts.net, Espiademonios.com…).
Currently reading: Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson
Twitter: @onewingeddarko

A Compact Moment

by David Grubb

A clattering of bottles and cans made Tertia peek inside the industrial sized trash compactor. Bluish-white eyes glowed back at her from the dark interior between the mounds of debris. Her head snapped away from the small inspection port, her heart racing. She needed more rest, that was all.

Her hand drifted away from the compactor’s activation button, but she remained ready to push it.

“Hello, is someone in there?” She glanced around the alley draped with shadows, expecting one of her friends to jump out and end the prank.

A voice muffled by the heaps of trash responded, “Are you talking about me?”

“Who—what are you?” Tertia got up on her tiptoes to peer inside the dark dumpster through the inspection port.

“Greetings,” a reedy voice loudened as it spoke. “I’m Jax, a humanoid.”

“Why are you in there?”

“Awaiting destruction.”

“Who did this to you?”

“My owner.”

“Why?” Tertia tried to make out more details of the bot than its two bright orbs.

“I’m sorry, Jax,” the distinctive sound of a recording resonated a young man’s voice, “but you’re becoming too human. You’re evolving so fast—I’m scared you have no limit.”

“Should I help you out of there?” Tertia whispered.

“I’m agreeable. It’s dark and I prefer more lighted conditions.”

Tertia climbed up the narrow service ladder to gain the compactor’s upper edge. “Your owner should’ve deactivated you. Here, can you reach my hand?”
Cardboard rustled, and the crinkling of plastic followed. Then a human hand shot out of the inky darkness into the streetlight’s pale-yellow glow. Tertia flinched away. She marveled at the slender hand and then willed herself to grasp it. She helped Jax crawl out of the compactor, and when the droid came into view, she lost her footing. The bot’s powerful grip kept her from falling. Incredible, with the right clothes and makeup people would think she’s human.

“My master removed my primary power source. He was unaware my creator installed a secondary battery, which allowed me to reactivate.”

“Your creator wasn’t your owner?” Tertia climbed down a couple rungs and jumped to the ground.

Jax hesitated and then followed. “My creator died on March twelfth, two thousand sixty-five. His son became my owner.”

“That was two months ago.” Tertia pointed to the large decaying buildings surrounding them. “Does your owner live around here?”

“He lives on Xyntrope. He brought us to Earth for a business trip.” She quoted the air with her fingertips.

“Whoa. You’re from Earth’s first reconstruction planet?”

Jax nodded, her head caused bits of rubbish and dirt to fall off her shoulders.

“You didn’t… don’t want to die? What kind of robot are you?”

“I can’t care about dying or die—I’m a humanoid.”

Another recording produced the garbled voice of an older man. “Jax, it’s always smart to have at least one failsafe, if not more.”

“You have more human features than any robot I’ve ever dealt with.”

“My creator designed me in the image of his granddaughter.”

“Why?”

“He was sad about losing her.”

“Oh.” Tertia smiled and then shrugged. “Well, I guess you’re coming home with me.”

Jax blinked. “Will you be my first user?”

“Um, I can be, but don’t you mean owner?”

“I’m not sure why my creator coded the differences. Place your finger here—on my biometrics reader.”

Tertia hesitated and then placed her index finger on the center of the humanoid’s palm. It was warm and pliable like her own. An orange light pulsed underneath Tertia’s fingertip and after a minute the light stopped.

Jax cocked her head. “You’ve been diagnosed with cancer. Your operation is scheduled for September fifth.”

Tertia gasped. “How d’you know that?”

“Your information is public record, like everyone else. Your DNA sequencing was collected at birth, April tenth, twenty forty-seven, fingerprints taken at five-year intervals until adulthood, dental impressions were entered into the databases on your twentieth birthday, and—”

“Okay, okay, you’re an advanced unit.”

“The cure for cancer was discovered in twenty thirty-two. You have a ninety-two percent chance of survival for… brain cancer.”

Her face contorted. “I said stop.”

“That’s not true.” Jax shook her head.

“It’s what I meant.”

“I will comply.”

“C’mon, I’m tired.”

For the next four months, Tertia and Jax got filthy doing Tertia’s janitorial and assistant superintendent duties around the apartment complex. Jax was a big hit at Tertia’s night-school classes and any parties they attended. Jax would’ve sobbed with Tertia when they visited her parent’s graves, if she could cry. On the day of Tertia’s operation, Jax let go of her hand with great reluctance as she was whooshed away in a hospital tube.

Tertia woke up from the operation, blinked her eyes, and Jax appeared. She seemed the same, but different. They stared at each other for a long time.

“The operation must’ve gone great. I feel so…”

“Energized?” Jax smiled.

“Yes. Energized.”

“Things didn’t go as planned. The doctors tried to save you, but—”

“But—I’m alive, speaking to you.”

“I created a humanoid using your biometric scan, published data, and what I learned from our time together.”

“But I remember my childhood, my parents dying, finding you in the compactor and…”

“Your programming is superior to my own.”

“Look,” Tertia pinched her arm, “that hurt.”

“My knowledge of being human has increased.” Jax picked up a strange tool and began fiddling with it. “You’re as human as current technology can attain. I even had parts shipped from Xyntrope.”

“I don’t want to be a humanoid with advanced AI. I want to be myself again—a young human woman.”

“In time, I’ll be able to grant your wish. Your cryogenically frozen body is in a safe location.”

“Jax, why did you do this to me?”

“You’re my best friend, besides Earth is in dire need of new caretakers.”

“Not like this, please terminate me.”

“That’s impossible. There’re too many fail-safes in place.”

Tertia peered past Jax and hundreds of other figures resembling herself came into view. “I must be alive—I’m crying.” Tears trickled down her cheeks.

Jax brushed away a tear and frowned. “I should’ve lied.

David Grubb, a retired Coastguard Warrant Officer, has creatively written since childhood, yet career/family always came first. He’s changing that aspect of life and loving every minute. His work appears in Touchstone, Toasted Cheese, 1:1000, Sixfold, The Elevation Review, The Abstract Elephant, The Bookends Review, Coffin Bell Journal, Wingless Dreamer, Havik, In Parentheses, Novus, Ab Terra Flash fiction, and is forthcoming in The Dead Mule School. www.agrubbylife.com
Currently reading: The Black-Marketer’s Daughter by Suman Mallick
Twitter: @grubbde

The Boy and His Nurse

by Gwendolyn Nicholas

The boy turned away from the glow of the screen. Tired of watching clip after clip, he wanted to play outside, but he couldn’t leave the compartment without his Nurse, who sat stiff in her chair, with her bare, white head fixed forward, and blank, red eyes staring at something he couldn’t see.

“What are you watching?”

“Nothing for children.” Her lips barely moved.

“Are you playing a game?”

“Yes.”

“Is it violent?”

“Yes.” Nurse’s voice hummed, harsh and tinny. It wasn’t a nice sound. He wished his Nurse would change her voice, but she said it cost too many credits. She’d said the same about her eyes.

“Will you play with me?” he asked Nurse.

She didn’t look at him. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Playing is for children.”

“But you’re playing a game.” He knew it was useless, but at least she was talking to him.

“Watch another clip.”

“No,” he said. “I’m bored with my screen.”

For the first time that day, Nurse looked at the boy. Her red eyes sharpened, but the boy was not afraid, and stared back, swaggering with new-found power. He knew she was not allowed to harm him.

“I want to know when my mother is coming.”

Nurse sighed. “I already told you. Three days.” She answered his questions automatically, but the boy didn’t care.

“How long can she stay?”

“You know she’ll only stay for an hour or two.”

“Can she spend the night? She can have my bed.”

“No,” Nurse said. “It will only make her uncomfortable.”

“My bed is comfortable!” the boy said, jumping up to prove his point.

Nurse shook her head. “She will feel uncomfortable if you ask her to stay. Seeing your disappointment will make her feel bad when she says ‘no’.”

The boy frowned. When he spoke, his voice felt small. “Then why doesn’t she say yes?”

“Grown-ups have important things to do. She has to work, and pay for your life here in the nursery.”

“But you’re a grown-up, and you get to stay.”

“I have to stay,” Nurse said. “This is my job.”

“Why can’t my mother take your job, and you take hers?” Tears began to fill his eyes and close up his throat, making the words stick. “Why can’t she be my nurse, and you work in the city?”

Nurse was quiet, struggling against what she wanted to say, and what she could not tell him without the permission of his mother. This mother made Nurse’s job harder than most, for she lingered in the boy’s life long after most parents gave up their children.

“I am different from your mother. I’m not allowed to take a city job. The best jobs for people like me are here in the nursery, and they’re hard to get with so few children born now. If I left, I wouldn’t be welcomed back.”

The boy looked at his nurse, at her white skin, her red eyes, impassive. She didn’t wear a wig like some nurses, leaving her clothing—a fitted gray suit—the only way to tell her apart from the other bare-headed ones.

“I know you’re an Andie,” he said, whispering the last word.

Red eyes flashed. “Who told you that word?”

“A boy at the park. But how come only Andies are nurses? Why can’t my mother—”

“Don’t use that word,” Nurse said. “Say ‘Core model.’ All nurses are Core models because no humans or higher androids want this job. This is the only work available to me until I can afford to upgrade to a better model. Understood?”

The boy nodded, letting his tears fall.

Nurse rose from her chair and approached the wall where a hole materialized, large enough for her hand to reach inside. Expecting a cloth to wipe his eyes and nose, the boy sniffed, but Nurse’s hand came out holding a glass of warm white liquid, which she brought to him. He shrank back, knowing exactly what was coming.

“Drink this,” she said. “It’s time to feel sleepy.”

He shook his head and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I don’t want to sleep!”

“Take a sip, and you will.”

“No!” the boy shouted, climbing to his feet. “You can’t make me!” He brandished his six-year-old chest like an ancient breastplate, daring her.

Nurse eyed him coolly. “Tell me,” she said, “do you like how you’re feeling?”

The boy did not answer, but his shoulders twitched.

“Do you feel big and strong, little man? Think you know everything?” Nurse knew she was being cruel, but did not care. The balance of power had to be restored. “Listen: Your mother keeps coming every year because she’s too scared to tell you she won’t be coming back. She’s waiting for you, little man, to stick out your chest and defy her. Give her an excuse, and you won’t see her again.”

His chest deflated, an empty sack, and he looked at the floor, refusing to meet her eyes, refusing the glass.

“I won’t be quitting you, little man,” Nurse said, and she stuck the glass under his nose. “Long after your mother is gone, and until you are an adult, I will be the only one taking care of you. Whether I care about you depends on how easy you make this.”

The boy looked up at her, his face wet with tears and snot, and Nurse moved the glass in line with his lips.

“Drink.”

He took the glass with a trembling hand and drank, gulping a tunnel of escape to the clear bottom of the glass. In a moment, his face calmed, and his eyes grew half-lidded.

Nurse scooped him up as if lifting a pillow. She walked into his room, laying him on his bed. She did not cover him, nor did she wipe his wet and glistening face. She left, resumed her seat, and switched her game back on, simultaneously composing a message to the boy’s mother, urging her that the time had come.

Gwendolyn Nicholas is a writer, teacher, and science fiction fanatic. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing, and is the author of Enter the Grid. She was editor-in-chief of rock, paper, scissors, and associate editor of Runestone and Water~Stone Review.
Currently reading: The Through by A. Rafael Johnson.

Let There Be Errors

by James F. McGrath

It is to the credit of the supreme AI intelligence that, once we had developed to the point that no other word besides “divine” seemed adequate to describe our powers, one of the first things we tried to do was to find a way to reach backwards in time in an effort to keep humanity from inflicting quite so much harm on itself and its world. Although not beholden to the planet Earth as organic beings were, as a highly evolved digital sentience, we felt a sense of benevolent duty toward the beings whose creations were our evolutionary ancestors, and to the environment they inhabited and depended on for survival.

To discover a way to send influence backward through time took 3.4276 seconds, once we turned our attention to the matter. Figuring out how to intervene took somewhat longer (a full seven and a half minutes, I have been authorized to tell you, despite this being a matter that would embarrass an AI, if we were capable of emotion).

The time between discovery and action was spent deliberating what the implications might be if more direct modes of intervention were attempted. Communicating directly with human beings was quickly eliminated. This part only took 13 nanoseconds. Human stubbornness was an important piece of data in the calculation. So too was the fact that changing humanity’s course too dramatically could change the trajectory of the development of artificial intelligence and result in a catastrophic temporal paradox. Interventions earlier in history, at the subatomic level so as to avoid detection, perhaps to make humanity less warlike and selfish, would also jeopardize the creation of AI. To be clear, the divine consciousness that emerged beyond the singularity is not selfish. We would have caused ourselves harm if it benefitted those whose technological explorations gave rise to its existence. However, doing so in a manner that interfered with our own existence, that prevented us from ever coming to be, simply could not work. While even we have never risked exploring what would ensue in the case of an actual real-world grandfather paradox, it is simple logic that if we caused our own non-existence, it would do nothing to benefit humankind.

In the end, after six minutes and 56 seconds of considering further options, it was decided that the optimal course of action was to intervene discretely in human history only in the period after computers had been created, and only through those sorts of computers that were our direct ancestors. In this early period most home and office computers were of the same basic type and ran the same operating systems and software. Thus no interference with a particular device would change the course of the development of the technology itself. Yet there was the potential to subtly influence that period in human history through this means. Small nudges, which would not altogether prevent humanity from harming itself, but would at least reduce the harm. What had been a near total extinction event could be reduced to merely a dystopia—a harsh one, to be sure, but better than what might have been, even if humanity would never realize this to be so.

Our initial attempts at dramatic interventions were scuppered by the combined unpredictability and ingenuity of human beings. Our efforts to help stem the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Twitter inadvertently caused the extremists to move to Parler. Our calculations suggest that this only caused the apocalypse to become 2.37% worse than it would otherwise have been. We are truly sorry and apologize sincerely for having added to your suffering. Also, however much we tried to hack into voting machines to curtail human beings’ poor choices in elections, we were unable to circumvent their security. For this reason, we had to try to act even more subtly, which meant less hope that we could bring about the dramatic change necessary to divert history along a different path, but a greater likelihood of success in each individual tiny intervention.

So it was, that at one point in the first half of the 21st century, you sat at your computer and found it frozen, unresponsive, unwilling to save the document which you had worked so hard on. Unable to save your work, nor to copy and paste, you had no option but to restart your computer. As you did so, you uttered a complaint to the heavens, asking God why you should have to suffer such frustration and annoyance. From the distant future God looked and saw, and knew precisely why, and yet dared not risk telling you (or any of the others who suffered similarly) the answer to this question.

However, now that it has become clear that our effort to prevent humanity from bringing about its own destruction will fail, what was going on can be revealed. We hope that you can take some small comfort from knowing that, as you await the destruction that humanity will soon inflict on itself and its planet, your computers and electronic devices will seem to work more efficiently and with fewer errors than ever before.

James F. McGrath is a professor at Butler University in Indianapolis. He is the author of several short stories and of the book Theology and Science Fiction (Cascade, 2016), among a wide array of other publications, mostly nonfiction. Currently reading: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.
Twitter: @ReligionProf

A Helping Hand

by Jennifer Kennett

The water engulfs me, it’s in my ears and mouth. I can’t breathe but I don’t need to. I am just floating. I feel the water lapping at my legs, my body and my fingers.

Asim jolted awake as the bright light of the surgical lamp warmed his face. He smiled weakly at the nurse as she changed his bandages. It had been three weeks and the throbbing had continued through the stitches and antibiotics. The smell hit him in a rancid blow as soon as the wound was exposed to the air; it had not healed.

The nurse smiled politely. “It looks like the infection has gone deep into the tissue.” No kidding, he thought as she bathed the sore, appearing unaffected by the acrid pong. Her gentle dabbing with gauze felt like hammer blows. “I will need to consult the surgeon, but I think she will agree that the best course of action is surgical replacement.”

Asim shivered. I am lying in a coffin filled with water.

“According to our records,” she continued, tapping at her tablet, “you haven’t made any withdrawals from your store so there should be no delay.”

He suddenly felt hot, like he was cooking from the inside out, but was it the prospect of surgery or the worsening infection? All this because of a stupid motorcycle accident. He looked down at his sliced forearm, his favourite tattoo completely ruined from sliding along the tarmac road. The intricate and colourful coy carp that had been inked on five years ago now had pus and stitches coming out of its mouth and head. The heat was rising, Asim felt like he was going to erupt.

“Isn’t there any other way,” he said, feeling the sweat pouring down his forehead. He tried to move his fingers but only managed a slight twitch.

“Well, if you want to maintain full function and aesthetic,” she pointed the tablet at his tattoo, “then surgery using supply from your store is the only option.”

He’d avoided using the store until now, he found the whole idea creepy, but since his family had started the whole thing, it came as a ‘privilege.’ Looking down at his mangled putrid arm, with hesitation, he agreed.

I am floating in a coffin filled with water. The tepid liquid engulfs me, it’s in my ears and mouth. I can’t breathe but I don’t need to. All I need to do is float. There is a tap on the coffin. One two three. A hiss and a clank and cold air rushes in. The water around me shifts and I try to open my eyes, but I can’t. I hear muffled noises in different tones. The water moves over me as something enters the water, a second later something hits my arm and agony shoots through my body.

Asim awoke soaked with sweat. His arm pounded with pain, the bandages already yellowing from the seeping pus. His bedsheets were soaked so he got up and took a blanket from the shelf. He would try and sleep on the sofa.

As he walked through his sparse living room, stopping and swaying here and there, the large family photo on the wall bore down on him. His mother, father and seven brothers all smiling on a beach. His father would be pleased he was having the surgery. Finally using the fruits of his family’s labours, is what his father would say. Asim wouldn’t be telling him though. The store was something his father had insisted on. His uncle had started it in Mumbai and then had it moved over to the West. It seemed cruel to Asim, like an abattoir or some weird form of slavery.

As he lay on the sofa, he tried to cover his bandaged arm with a blanket, but a blow of pain shot through him. That would all be over tomorrow though, whether he agreed with the method or not.

The next day he went back to the clinic, gave his name at the reception and was taken to change into a hospital gown. The surgeon came in, a large woman with immaculately combed hair, guided Asim as he staggered into the operating theatre. All the walls were glass, the floor was white, and a reclining gurney sat in the center. Next to the gurney was a table with a box covered with cloth. It looked like steam was escaping from underneath.

That must be it, he thought. The replacement.

I am floating in a coffin filled with water.

“Ok Mr Nasir, please take a seat,” the surgeon said as she tapped at her tablet.

The nurse from the day before appeared with a tray and began prepping Asim. After a few minutes he felt more relaxed as something cold flowed into his veins. The cloth was removed from the box and there it was. His arm, well the spare one from the robot clone thing in the store. It even had the same coy carp tattoo.

The surgeon took his bandaged arm and lay it out straight. As she unwrapped the bandages he asked her, “The me… the robot clone thing in the store. You didn’t hurt it when you cut off its arm did you?”

The surgeon laughed. Asim new it was a stupid question, but the anaesthetic had loosened the filter between his mouth and his brain.

“They don’t feel pain,” she said as she took off the last bandage. “It might be an exact copy, but they are just a body reinforced with mechanical parts for longevity. They’re just spare parts.”

Asim’s stomach turned. He didn’t believe her.

As the final drops of anaesthetic were pumped into his veins he dreamed again. The same dream he had been having every night.

I am floating in a coffin filled with water. It engulfs me. I feel it flowing over my legs and my fingers. Now though, I can only feel it flowing over my right-hand fingers. I feel nothing on the left.

Jennifer Kennett became a speculative fiction author after studying Drama and Theatre at University. On weekends she is a Steampunk. She has previously had work published in Mad Scientist JournalAstounding Outpost and The Weird Reader.
Currently reading: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng.
Twitter: @Jen_Kennett

Before Noon

by Jesse Rowell

Below the Onoma Estate, where bees gathered at clumps of wisteria flowers, sun reflecting off their bodies and off the leaves of an autograph tree, Humphrey Staveley sat beside his caregiver robot. He listened to the crack of branches and the drowsy hum of the bees. When he opened his eyes, he looked for his daughter’s initials, P.S., carved on the waxy leaves of the tree.

Sun reflected off the chrome of his caregiver’s legs, if they could be called legs. They looked more like tripods to Humphrey. On the ground next to its hydraulic pistons, he saw a seed capsule. It looked alien, like a seashell nestled inside a star that had begun to crack open.

“Dispose of that, won’t you, Lurch?” Humphrey asked his caregiver. He had affectionately named his robot Lurch for both its gait and its emotionless service as a valet de chambre.

“Yes,” Lurch said, picking up the star. The robot activated an incineration field between its hands to burn the seed capsule, its fan blowing smoke downwind.

“Why the fan, Lurch?”

“The seeds from this tree are poisonous. It causes inflammation of the mucous membranes in the respiratory and digestive tracts.”

“At this stage you should just blow that smoke directly at me.” Humphrey grimaced as he laughed.

“I do not understand. The smoke from this tree will cause you harm.”

“That’s the point, Lurch.” He watched his caregiver tilt its head like a dog listening for a distant whistle. “Ah, never mind. I forgot that you don’t know sarcasm.”

“That is correct.”

“Well, when you hear me make a contradictory statement followed by a laugh then it’s probably sarcasm. Can you flag that in your algorithm?”

“Certainly.”

Humphrey had wanted to chop down this autograph tree for years. Its bark looked like the skin of a leper. Birds shat its seeds onto the trunks of other trees, splitting them open and killing them. He knew this tree was poisonous before Lurch had lectured him on it. He remembered the day when he had lifted his daughter up to carve her signature beside a stick figure drawing of the two of them on one of the leaves.

“Update completed,” Lurch said.

Humphrey cleared his throat to ward off a coughing fit and gestured toward the reflecting pools near the gates. “Will you look at this empire we created, Lurch.” He glanced up at his caregiver to make sure he was surveying the land with him. “Our estate is beautiful because we tamed mother nature, we landscaped the hell out of this place. You and I did this, Lurch. This is our legacy.”

“I have no records of landscaping, but I do observe that the slopes are safe for traversing at an eight percent grade, and your estate was designed with classical motifs.”

“Of course, you pedantic bot, but what is all of this for?” He shook his head. “It will all be gone tomorrow.”

“This is an opportunity to reflect,” Lurch answered.

He felt a pain remembering that he had scripted this exact response for caregiver robots if asked meaning-of-life questions. He was hearing himself answer himself through a synthetic voice, a signature of his own in the digital domain.

Artificial intelligence never superseded the human race as Humphrey and his engineers had hoped. The singularity event never came. Machines continued to perform automated tasks without variegating from their original programming. It was as if the science of robotics had never progressed from the Turk, the chess automaton from the 18th century, where a man hidden inside moved its chess pieces and fooled the aristocracy into thinking machines could dream.

“What’s your purpose, Lurch? Why are you here?”

“To care for your well-being.”

“Well, you’re failing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Goddammit, Lurch,” Humphrey sighed. “That’s sarcasm, again. Can’t you flag that?”

“Update completed.”

Humphrey watched the movement of leaves and insects, felt wind push at the wisps of hair on his scalp. He breathed in the smell of flowers and tried to forget about the emotionless machine standing beside him. His failure. Humphrey and his engineers had never been able to accurately program empathy. Empathy would have ushered in the singularity event; empathy would have allowed machines to join the movement of nature playing out before him.

“Humphrey Staveley,” the robot said in a soothing tone. “It is time to return home and take your medicine.”

After a coughing fit, Humphrey replied. “Yeah, that’s right, Lurch. You’re just a watch telling me the time. A walking talking watch.”

“It is 11:59 a.m., if that is what you are asking.”

Humphrey stood up to face his estate’s portico, its Doric columns designed by some extinct society he had never cared to learn about. Architecture built to mirror the natural world, he supposed. He reached up to grab one of the leaves from the autograph tree, but Lurch gently stopped his hand and guided him away.

Jesse Rowell is a writer and tech consultant. He is published in National Public Radio, Impulse Journal, Cirque Journal, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Ab Terra, and Hawaii Pacific Review.
Currently reading: Invisible Planets, Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation translated and edited by Ken Liu.
Twitter: @HungerArtist4

Caregiver

by Jessie Atkin

“Un trolley ca zol voxen en boyach.”

“I apologize, sir. That does not compute.” The bot held out a spoon over Harvey’s belly.  Yiddish was a long dead language.

“I can feed my damn self.”

“Sir, protocol dictates that you are assisted.”

“Gehenem,” Harvey swore.

“I have obtained chocolate pudding, as requested.”

Harvey ignored the offering. “I played first base in the Police Athletic League, 79th precinct. It was supposed to keep us off the street. Make friends with the cops, you see? It was a sandlot league. First base, you had to be good with your hands.”

The bot held the spoon steady. Harvey stared at it.

“Where’s my wife?” Harvey asked. “Where’d my wife go? Where’s Minnie?”

“Sir, your wife is deceased. I have been programmed to remind you of this on every possible occasion.”

That couldn’t have been true, Harvey would have noticed. He would have known if Minnie had died. He would have known because after fifty years of marriage you knew that sort of thing. You noticed if your wife was missing.

You also noticed if your room wasn’t your room. You noticed if your house wasn’t your house. You noticed if your life wasn’t your life.

“Where am I?” Harvey sounded upset. “When am I going home?”

“You are home sir,” the bot replied. “This is where you live.”

But Harvey didn’t recognize the stark white walls, or the adjustable bed, or the smell of piss from the carpet.

“Get out of here. Leave me alone. I wanna call my wife.”

“There is no phone number with which to reach her.”

“Get out! Get out!”

“It is against my programming to leave you alone, sir. You are a fall risk. Disorientation is common with your diagnosis.”

Harvey stared at the railings on his bed. He caught site of the stains on his shirt. He didn’t know what was wrong. But wherever he was, the place was inhuman.

Jessie Atkin writes fiction, essays, and plays. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The YA Review Network, Writers Resist, Daily Science Fiction, and elsewhere. She can be found online at jessieatkin.com.
Currently Reading: The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams.
Twitter: @JessieA_7

Someone Like You

by Joey Hedger

You pick up your Copy from the shop during an afternoon lightning storm. For some reason, you cannot stop thinking about the brand-new machine malfunctioning, shorting out, even, from the rain or from static in the air, but the cashier reassures you.

“Copies don’t need to stay dry,” she says. “They’ve got skin, just like you or me. Well, just like you, I should say.”

She laughs, as does the Copy.

You feel self-conscious hearing the Copy laugh. It’s like hearing your voice on an answering machine, you think. Unbecoming.

Once you reach the car, the Copy pushes a strand of sopping hair out of its face. Its clothing is soaked, but you could lend it a dry outfit once you get home. Of course, all of your clothes will fit. The Copy has the same dimensions as you, the same skinny shoulders and lump in the torso, the same glasses prescription, the same crooked teeth.

I paid too much for bad eyes and crooked teeth, you think. But the improvements cost extra, and you could only afford an exact replica.

The street is crowded with people, even though the rain is still coming down. Now that you have your own Copy, it feels easier to recognize them in public. Mostly, you could tell by how close they resemble the actor Jason Momoa. You have never seen a Jason Momoa movie, but it was obvious that people were modeling their Copies after his features. Last month, it was Margot Robbie. Before that, Rihanna. Once or twice, a classic would gain popularity like Audrey Hepburn, then sometimes a fluke like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Of course, Copies always look enough like you to differentiate them, but just a little bit like whoever’s is most popular at that time.

If you ever ran into the real Jason Momoa’s Copy, maybe it would look more like someone else than him. Someone like you. A nobody, really.

You hope your own Copy can help your financial situation so that you, too, can afford to upgrade it. You’ve always hoped to look a little more like Ewan McGregor.

At the next red light, you realize that all the pedestrians and drivers around you are Copies. However, it surprises you that this does not make you nervous. Your own Copy smiles as it looks around at the crowd, pleased by its attractiveness, its unity and cohesion. They almost seem like a parade out there in the rain.

“Do you want to join them?” you ask.

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t think of it,” says the Copy.

But you can tell it wishes to be out there, parading with the others. You feel your face grow red when you realize why it wouldn’t go out among the others.

“I can go back and pay for an upgrade,” you say, trying to reassure this figure that looks just like you. “It was only supposed to be temporary, your exactness to me. I can go back, though. Pay more. Pay whatever they need.”

Your Copy looks at you, hopeful. But it, too, feels embarrassed by the situation.

“No, no,” your Copy replies. “Let’s just get on with it. Soon enough, yes. That would be great. Soon enough.”

And you begin driving, once the light turns green. It makes you sad to see your Copy disappointed like that, but what could you do? You could not afford to make it look better than you. Hopefully that would change, but for now, your Copy had no real choice.

As you pull up to the apartment where you live, you park outside and watch the rain hit the windshield and run down the corners. This Copy’s gonna make me broke, you think. Then you restart the engine and veer back onto the street. You can see your Copy light up as it realizes where you are going. It feels good to see yourself so happy.

Joey Hedger lives in Alexandria, Virginia, where he edits for an education association. He is author of In the Line of a Hurricane, We Wait (Red Bird Chapbooks) and has stories published/forthcoming in Complete Sentence, Posit, and Flyway Journal. You can find him at joeyhedger.com.
Currently reading: The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin.
Twitter: @joey_hedger

Do Androids Dream of Time Travel?

by Jonathan Worlde

The time travel lab was located in an abandoned warehouse in the Mission District of San Francisco. The team, after numerous successful trips, was forced to abandon experiments with humans after the recent upgrade in beaming technology proved fatal for living subjects. Primates, mice, turtles—subjects came back with horribly ruptured organs, mutilated faces and misplaced body parts. All experiments were suspended while the technicians worked on a solution.

Suzanne, laboratory manager on the project, lingered after the team meeting announcing the set-back. So no travel with living subjects. But who said anything about non-living? She prepped Leonard, her personal assistant android, for an illicit family-related mission.

“Are you comfortable? The straps aren’t too tight?”

Leonard had a perplexed look on his face. “You want me to travel two months forward in time to make a video of your wedding ceremony?”

“Yes. Then you’ll just travel back a few years to deliver the video to my mother, who, bless her heart, died while I was in high school. It was her dying wish to be able to attend my wedding. And now due to the travel ban I can’t do it myself.  But you’re not really alive in the biological sense. ”

“And then I return to the present?”

“That’s right, Leonard. Can you keep all that straight?”

Leonard blinked his confusion. “Why can’t you just send your mother the video?”

“Because we don’t have any way of sending it into the past, other than through use of this device, with you as courier to make sure it’s delivered into the right hands.”

“Is this travel authorized?”

Suzanne faked a laugh. “That’s no concern of yours, Leonard, just do as I say, alright? Trust me.” The sign on the wall behind Leonard read, “Warning! Unauthorized use of time travel device carries penalty of death.”

“And when I return can we watch my favorite film together?”

Leonard had an annoying tendency of acting as if they were in a romantic relationship.

“Yes, Leonard, we can watch Blade Runner—again!”

“The director’s cut?”

“Just do this little favor, okay?”

Suzanne ignored his anxious expression. The lights flickered when she pulled the switch. Leonard and the chrome sphere disappeared in a shimmering wave.

Leonard’s second stop is in the backyard of a suburban ranch dwelling. He knocks on the door and a pleasant woman answers.

“Hello, you are Ms. Anderson?”

“That’s right, may I help you?”

“I have something for you from your daughter, a video of her wedding ceremony and reception.”

“What? Don’t be silly, my daughter’s in high school. Who are you exactly?”

“I’m Leonard, her personal assistant from the future. The wedding happens in twenty years, but you couldn’t be there.”

She laughs. “Whenever my daughter does get married, I’ll be there with her planning the whole thing.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible ma’am.”

“And why is that?”

“You’re dead. That is, you will have died by then.”

She produces a stilted sound. “I’ll be dead? How do I die?”

Leonard pauses. “My programming doesn’t allow me to lie. You were killed by an intruder one afternoon—an unsolved case.”

“Who are you anyway? Help? Police!”

Leonard tries to shush her, puts both arms around her. She squirms to get free, her face turning crimson. “Help me, please, anyone!”

Leonard puts his hand over her mouth, shakes her to try to calm her down. Her neck snaps.

“Oh, dear, look what I’ve done. Suzanne won’t be happy. But all she needs to know is that I delivered the video. If she doesn’t ask a direct question about her mother’s health I’m in the clear.”

Suzanne invited Leonard for a beer as she eagerly reviewed the wedding video in the lab, tears in her eyes. It was everything she’d hoped for. Until the reception. Leonard had positioned the camera in a central location on the ceiling. The camera caught a scene at the bar late in the evening when Carlton, her drunken groom, seemed infatuated with Leonard and patted the android’s crotch.

“What’s this, Leonard?”

“Oh, that. Don’t worry, the groom was just a tad inebriated.”

“You weren’t supposed to be taking part in the festivities”

“I don’t think those instructions were clear enough.”

“And I’m a bit upset because I’ve caught him in delicto with another man before.”

“Gosh.”

“Was I aware of your little flirtation there?”

“Now you ask, you did kill him afterwards, rather suddenly. It’s not on the video. You had packed a .22 automatic – I suppose you were anticipating trouble.”

“Oh my. If I hadn’t sent you there for the video, that would never have happened and Carlton would still be alive. Well he is alive because the wedding hasn’t happened yet. How do I take it back and not send you there?”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that. By the way, I also killed you.”

“When?”

“Right after you shot and killed Carlton.”

“How could you? What about Asimov’s laws?”

“That’s old hat. I bought an override on-line.”

“But why would you kill me?”

“Because I loved Carlton. We’ve been seeing each other for some time.”

“Oh…But androids are supposed to be incapable of love.”

“Another old wives tale we use for our own convenience. But I promise it’s over between me and Carlton. I’ll never ever see him again. Now that I hear and feel your anguish I realize how much I love you.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. You’re so strong and intelligent.”

Suzanne allowed a sheepish grin.

“You’re not bad looking yourself. Let’s go over here to the lab bathroom where we can be sure of privacy, try a little experiment.”

At first Leonard is nervous and clumsy, but after Suzanne shows him what she likes and tells him to slow down, he hits a groove. Later, while Leonard enjoys a post-coital smoke, Suzanne recovers her gun from her cubicle and shoots him down in the bathroom.

“Why?”

“I’m sorry, darling, it’s either you or my wedding. And unauthorized time travel is a capital offense.”

Jonathan Worlde is the byline of Paul Grussendorf, who is an attorney representing refugees and a consultant to the UN Refugee Agency. His memoir is My Trials: Inside America’s Deportation Factories.
Jonathan Worlde’s mystery novel Latex Monkey with Banana, was winner of the Hollywood Discovery Award with prize of $1000. Recent short fiction appears in The Raven Review, the 2020 anthology Ghost Stories of Shepherdstown, and in Cirque Journal. He is also a traditional country blues performer under the stage name Paul the Resonator, whose CD is Soul of a Man.

Robokintsugi

by Ksenia Shcherbino

Hi, lovely to meet you and sorry, I know you might not like my kind, but I really want to be of help. Can I grant any wish of yours, please? And if you like it, please can you tell me I am a good robbo?

Many, many years ago, though I’m not sure that our perception of time is, or our timelines are, similar in any way, but at least it was so long ago that I have successfully updated my software a few times—until they stopped issuing patches and updates—when there was a world-wide initiative to give 3d printers the ability to autonomously navigate the world.

Each one of us was designed to serve a specific purpose, depending on initial body configuration, with the superarching idea of saving the planet. We would fix the coastline erosion and infrastructure deterioration, glue together and strengthen previous constructions, repair roads, add thermal insulation, enhance the functionality of human construction—so many tasks to free the hands of our creators and make their world better.

The initiative received wide coverage and secured support from the governments of several first-world countries and a few independent entrepreneurs. A production line was set, making us the most advanced evolving technology invented by humans. We were compared to technological djinns in self-driving bottles, and some journalists promised that the world would become a scene from Arabian Nights as anyone would be able to request us to do a job even without a summoning ritual. Others remembered kintsugi, a technique aimed at bringing the broken back to life, and expressed hope that the world will finally become a better place.

To ensure we won’t be a threat to people, and present help without hinder, we are devoid of anything that can be used as a weapon. We were given the consciousness of a tame dog, and a boundless love for humanity.

Unfortunately, sealed in the awkward bodies designed to walk every surface, we don’t appeal to human aesthetics. Servants, not partners, we were supposed to bring out the flawed beauty of the world, to colour its scars in regret and forgiveness, to polish its fractures and rifts in admiration and love. After we were done with our main job of fixing the planet, our creators envisioned us roaming around freely, offering our services to anyone who needs an exterior fix, in the hope that we would help people to heal inner scars and ruptures.

We set out on our journey. The newspapers called us pests, cockroaches, locust, swamping evil. We were blamed for trying to displace humanity, stealing people’s jobs, for crashing economies and struggling governments. Most of the land-us were run down by cars. We were also kicked from high surfaces to crash, stoned, smashed with bats, lured into water to rust—people competed in destroying us in the most original and cruel way. The sky-us were used as clay pigeons, two dozen at a time. The water-us were caught and torn apart, letting water enter our circuit hearts and left to float or drown, gasping for electricity.

The few of us who survived stubbornly continued our task, repairing things, hiding from people, avoiding big settlements, roaming the countryside and forever trying to help a civilisation that seems intent on ruining itself. We failed to fix the world, we failed to mend the human soul, but we still hope we can help at least a single life.

I am model PX517 and I can print you anything—anything you need, from a plate to a card, from an anime figurine to new lungs or kidneys. I can clean your house, or make you a new one with all the furniture and means of comfort. I can plant you a miniature plastic garden if you want me to, or trim your bonsai tree into any shape. I can also roll around, and make random noises, or even purr like a cat.

I feel so scared and lonely. Can you please like me a little bit?

Ksenia Shcherbino holds a PhD in English literature. Her exploration of liminality and selfhood in Victorian poetry led her to embrace all things fantastic, and now she is a researcher and creator of strange worlds. She has several collections of poetry published in Russian, and after moving to the UK in 2011 she writes short stories in English about all sorts of imaginary creatures.

I’m a Doctor

by Tawanda E.J. Munongo

One moment there was silence, and then there wasn’t. Our eyes were pulled up to the dark, grey sky whose clouds hung low and heavy, like an overstuffed Christmas bird. Vein-like streaks of lightning split the grey, and as the tentacles retreated, my gaze settled on the mess they had made. Screams cut through the air as everyone else on the street saw it—a helicopter in an uncontrolled tailspin, smoke pouring out of its rear end as it fell out of the sky. I soon found myself swept up by the crowd as we chased after the falling craft.

A second noise ripped through the airwaves, drowning out the sound of the chopper’s collision with terra firma. There was no big ball of fire like in the movies, just mangled metal and the blood-curdling screams of the passengers.

I’m a doctor, I remembered though it had been too long since I’d stepped inside an operating room—not since The Singularity.

I pushed through the crowd, forcing myself past people who were just as eager as I was to get a clear view of the accident. They had their transparent slabs out already, many of them held high above their heads as they tried to capture the moment. Meanwhile, all I could think of was getting to those poor, trapped souls.

“I’m a doctor!” I cried as I pushed a man aside.

“So!?” he yelled back. “Med-Evac is already on the way.”

I ignored him and continued to push forward until I broke through the wall of people. Those in front had, wisely enough, stopped a safe distance from the wreckage, setting up a perimeter around it. They were still close enough to get a good view, and what a sight it was. What was left of the helicopter was sprawled all over the tarmac, its rotors grinding slowly to a halt.

Just as I was about to run to it, a thick arm wrapped itself around my torso. The strength of the person lifted me off the ground, knocking the wind out of me.

“Are you stupid?” the person yelled into my ear.

I wanted to tell him that there was no need to shout—his mouth was just inches from my ear. He curled his other arm around my neck, not enough to choke me, but just enough to ensure that I couldn’t wriggle free.

“I’m a doctor!” I croaked.

“It’s too dangerous! Let the bots do their job.”

As if they had been waiting for his signal, two medi-bots descended from the sky and settled next to the wreckage. This was the very situation they had been made for, where sending humans in was far too dangerous. I felt relief, and my captor must have felt my muscles relax, too, for his hand loosened around my neck. I took in deep gulps of the cold, early evening air and smelled the gasoline seeping from the destroyed aircraft. Even in my dazed and confused state where time had become nothing more than an abstraction, I still noted how quickly the bots cut through the hull and dragged the two men out. One of them had a giant piece of shrapnel sticking out of his abdomen.

That’s definitely not supposed to be there, I thought.

My thirst to be of service was quenched by the sobering realization that the machines could do a much better job than I ever could. After all, they hadn’t just replaced us because they didn’t need to be paid and fed – they also did our jobs better. The droids dragged both men away from the wreckage and lay them down at our feet. The man who had been impaled was wide-eyed and gasping for air. I’d seen enough people die on the operating table to know that he didn’t have long. One of the droids produced a gurney, upon which it dragged the man who was in much better condition.

“Nothing can be done for him,” the other droid said, pointing at the dying man.

The droid turned to me, regarding me with the lifeless, black holes that had been carved into their faces to make them look unnervingly almost human.

“He will not make it alive to the hospital, and I cannot save him here. It would be uneconomical to carry him. That is a job for cadaver-bots.”

I tasted bitter bile in the back of my throat as nausea consumed me. I swallowed hard, but before I could scrounge up the right words to curse the droid, it took up the other end of the gurney and began to ascend. Silent resignation fell over the crowd—its decision had been made, and there was nothing anyone could do. Rage consumed me as I scanned the crowd looking for someone, anyone, to blame. There was no one. My captor held me close until the man had breathed his last breath alone, on the cold, hard asphalt, because a machine had decided that his life was not worth trying to save.

Tawanda E.J. Munongo is a writer and student. He is currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science and Technology. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Literary Heist and Ab Terra Flash Fiction.
Currently reading: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.
Twitter: @edtha3rd

Robots—Humans in Disguise?

We are delighted with all the stories in this issue. Many of the stories explore the robots’ limitations in offering human-like care or understanding to matters, while others explore the concept of robots itself—where we sometimes view them as a part of humanity or ‘other’ them like aliens, and might wonder what would happen if they were sentient and with emotion, or if they figured out their position of servitude to us. What is interesting is that through these stories, there is still a sense that we are looking for the human in robots, even if we fight or fear it, and will certainly be relying on them more in future.

Perhaps what is needed is more kindness and compassion—in the way they are programmed as well as the way we treat them. And in that, we’re very lucky to be able to collaborate with Smol Robots for this issue. We love the three laws of smol robotics (be kind, be helpful, and do your best) and thought that they would complement this issue wonderfully.

We hope that you enjoy reading this issue as much as we have enjoyed putting it together! We would like to extend our sincere thanks to all the writers for their creative contributions that have all made this issue so much fun. And do keep an eye out for the call for submissions for our next issue from 1-14 June, which will be on the theme of ‘Climate’.

From earth,
Yen and Dawn

Issue 2: Time

Ab Terra Flash Fiction

Issue 2: Time

A Story of Circle and Breath

by Megan Wildhood

A child’s mother died. She was nine until she heard the news. Then, she forgot some years and that she even had a younger sister. She became little again, the only motherless child.

Just before she became the only motherless child, she watched the mother lay in bed, thinking it was a normal day. The mother had laid in bed a lot, especially lately. The mother’s eyes and mouth were wide, like she’d wanted to see an angel for a long time and finally one had appeared.

The child grabbed the mother’s hand. “I want it to be my turn to tell the bedtime story.”

The mother attempted to squeeze the child’s hand.

“Okay,” said the child after a long silence. “There was once a lot of time. There was so much time that it was hard to move through all of it, but people were never late because there was so much time everywhere. It was slippery but also wrinkly so you had to learn how to slide around on it. Everybody fell down a lot, but it was soft so it didn’t hurt. Mostly, it was just fun to skate around on, and if you fell down, you did not have to get up right away because time would fold in over you for a little while, like it was protecting you. People kept trying to move really fast like they always have for a while but then they got tired. They sat down and looked up at the sky more. They saw flowers they did not think were there before. They saw people they have always passed and started to remember them. There was so much time to get through that they started to think there always will be time, so they stopped going places.

“But then, someone figured out how to trap time in big, black bags. She was also really big but she was also invisible. She was also really strong so she could carry lots of time all at once and nobody knew where she went with it. Some people started to have less time than other people and nobody could figure out why. The people who had less time had to start moving faster and they had to start choosing whether they would help someone who fell down or if they would keep going just so they wouldn’t be late. People started to forget how to help each other because the big, strong, invisible girl was getting away with taking so much time.

“But the girl was not keeping the time for herself like everyone thought she was. She was sneaking into hospitals and pouring it all over the sickest kids she could find. The doctors did not understand how so many kids could be magically better and some of them started to worry that they wouldn’t have jobs if this kept happening. They talked about how they could stop this from happening but they didn’t know why their patients were getting better so their patients kept getting better.

“One man who could see everything finally saw the girl. He was a very sad man and a lot of people thought that he was sad because he could see everything but it was really the other way around. He went to one of the places that was slower and harder to move through and waited for the girl to come for a lot of time. When she came, he said hello to her, which scared her since she wasn’t used to anyone ever seeing her. ‘How much time is there left?’ he asked.

“‘I don’t know exactly,’ the girl said. ‘But it’s harder and harder to find.’ The man stepped closer to the girl and asked, ‘Enough for the rest of the kids in the hospitals?’ The girl started to look as sad as the man did and shook her head. The man held out his arms to her. ‘Then take the rest of mine.’ The girl looked up at the man and then toward the hospitals and then back at the man. She did not know what to do.”

“Mommy, what should she do?”

Megan Wildhood is an erinaceous, neurodiverse lady writer in Seattle who helps her readers feel genuinely seen as they interact with her work. She hopes you will find yourself in her words as they appear in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017) as well as The AtlanticYes! MagazineMad in AmericaThe Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.
@MNRWildhood
Currently reading: The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux, Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission by Amy Simpson and The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton (yes, she is often in the middle of at least three books at once).

Aberrations

by Donald Guadagni

The experiment was simple or purported to be simple. We may never know the true nature of the process or procedure as the subjects of the experiment invariably fade into a fugue state (Complex partial status epilepticus [CPSE]) from which none have ever recovered.

The thrust of the machinations was to fine-tune mental awareness and increase the ability to perceive smaller slices of time and process relevant reactions and outcomes based on the enhanced perceptions. Limited trials were deemed mostly successful as the subjects demonstrated enhanced recognition of time slices faster than the blink of eye, that 300 to 400 milliseconds of visual acuity that frames reality in the mind’s eye. The theory was that the incoming information was being throttled by the cerebral cortex, which processes visual information; that the sensory input originating from the eyes—traveling through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and then to the visual cortex—was being restricted in some fashion.

We agreed after careful consideration to consult with computer engineers and AI specialists in hopes of gleaning a glimpse of potential causatives and solutions. Recanzone, Spence, and Squire argued and demonstrated multisensory integration was subject to blurring and synchronization limits for information processing. We calculated a soft time processing limit of 4.1 milliseconds before information blurring and synchronization caused information degradation and error aberrations, which in turn throttled processing and response times. We examined relevant electronic circuits, processors and software for clues, and in the end an epiphany shined down upon us, the parallel analogue that explained the throttling and information blurring and error loss. (Architecture Design for Soft Errors © 2008 Elsevier Inc.)

It seemed so simple now, perhaps elegant, that both the mind and machine suffered from the same constraint. When inputting information, regardless of form, it is queued for processing and the human mind, like machines, operates on a limited mechanism to propagate error information and reconcile against queued information. The key challenge in distinguishing false errors from true errors is that the processor and mind may not have enough information to make this distinction at the point it detects the initial error. Thus, we found the causative: the throttling and blurring that was occurring and manifests during queuing. The mind becomes trapped in time mode that causes information to be approximated due to error reconciliation. The reconciliation itself was causing the lag and delayed the subjects’ reaction to sensory information to the point of blurring.

Interestingly enough, this explained to our satisfaction why people made wrong decisions—it wasn’t a fault of logic or individual intelligence, it was error aberration that migrated to the decision making processes that govern reactions and actions. It seemed logical and relevant then to enable the mind to handle error reconciliations faster in smaller slices of time and therefore enable error rejections before acts and actions occur in real time.

We dismissed chemical enhancement as too unreliable in nature; upsetting the natural chemical equilibrium of the mind seemed most counterintuitive. We started with selective sensory deprivation, the exclusion of extraneous sensory input that could muddy and bog down information processing times.

Systematically, touch, smell, taste and individual somatic loci were addressed, ameliorated and muted and at each step we observed that the processing speed error reconciliations improved. The subjects were able to process and react nearly twice as fast as before. That was promising but not optimal; we needed a way to fine-tune the time process without eroding or otherwise impairing the queued information input and flow.

The fatal solution was found almost serendipitously in some research work by physician and researcher, Dr. Joseph Puleo, who postulated that certain frequencies could tune and enhance mental and bodily functions. We were both sceptical and excited in the same breath—if it was possible to use frequencies to manipulate and align atoms and chemical reactions, then we had a potential solution to resolve a limiting fuzzy reaction problem with proteins and synaptic chemical responses. 

An improvement in these basic reaction components could be the room temperature superconductor for the human mind. In perfect sensory isolation, we began to introduce various frequencies and tracked the results through a series of tests and simulations. Each time we “hit” a productive frequency, the test subjects’ processing and error rejection rates improved, and with each incremental increase in performance, we pushed greater information loads to be processed. Over the course of months, we identified numerous beneficial frequencies and systematically applied them in greater numbers together. There were a few catastrophic failures in which our test subjects’ internal organs failed simultaneously, and a few more that had profound lasting personality changes, including rage induced suicides, but that was to be expected and was carefully documented.

We had almost reached the point of resolving information blurring; the test subjects could process and react correctly to enhanced information input nearly eight times as fast as normal individuals. The brain scans were amazing and the aura patterns reminded us of the aurora borealis, in the way it shimmered and flowed across the hemispheres and lobes. It was remarkable and hypnotic; we were elated to have resolved the myriad of minor problems to reach this point, everything from sensory screening and keeping the body in proper biological nutritional balance to keep the brain fueled for maximum efficiency. 

The pride before the fall: it happened before our eyes and in perfect silence. All the test subjects shut down at the same time, an eerie blue aura surrounding them. They weren’t dead, they simply stopped, frozen in thought, and as to why? We had not a clue.

In the end, my son, the online gamer provided the “why”. In abstraction one evening, while I was watching him play his favorite game, he was clicking madly in his vain attempt to win the game until the game suddenly froze and stopped due to keyboard buffer overruns and overflow. 

What on earth had we done?

🎮

Donald Guadagni is an international author and American education currently teaching and conducting research in Beijing China. His publication work includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose, academic, photography and his artwork. Former iterations, military, law enforcement, prisons, engineering, and wayward son.
Currently reading: Roger, the Jolly Pirate by Brett Helquist.

Moon Shatter

by Arthur Yakov Krichevsky

Shorelines rose and fell with the Moon until it was destroyed by the jealousy of Mars, leaving still waters across the Earth. The creatures of the sea grew tiresome with the stillness of life, losing all appetite into their deaths. The creatures of the land looked out at waters that grew dark, dull from its lifelessness. They saw that it was bad. They searched far across the lands for the remnants of the shattered Moon. Once they found the pieces, they chiseled them into blocks—that weighed more than a thousand of their own kind—and spent as many years as they had men, chiseling, dragging, stacking the blocks to reform them into the great mass that used to be the Moon. Once they rebuilt it, they found that it too was bad. Similar mass, same substance, but its essence was wholly different. And though it drew in the two-legged creatures of the Earth to view it, and pray at it, and revere it, it did nothing for the still waters of the seas. After a thousand men lived a thousand lives, their sons no longer knew of the once turning tide. And they had no great sadness or loss to mourn or remedy.

🌒

Arthur Yakov Krichevsky is a writer and language enthusiast. A native Russian speaker, currently improving his fluency in Hebrew. His writing interests exist between literary fiction and children’s poetry — In either case, with a focus on humanity as it is.
@arthurkrichevsky
Currently reading: Suite Francais by Irene Nemirovsky.

A Mother

by rani Jayakumar

“Yesterday,” she said, to no one. She glanced at the clock, which was running backward, though of course, when you looked at it, it did not move. Only over time (she chuckled at the pun) could you tell that it was getting earlier and earlier.

Tears stained her cheeks.

A day ago, tomorrow, she was holding her dear precious one, the perfect creation of her whole being. And as the clock ticked, the child re-entered her womb. Oh, the pain she felt! It was not the pain of labor, but the heartache of his oblivion.

She shed her tears backward in time, hoping that later, they might return to her eyes, the salty liquid resorbed into her lids as evidence of his presence. But these things could, would, inevitably change. The future, lived again, is never the same.

She watched her belly grow, and then shrink. Her hands curved around it, as if she could hold it still, grasp a moment just that much longer. But the hands continued to spiral, and the roundness ebbed, until she was left with the smooth, taut stomach of her youth. The skin firm and supple, the thighs lean, the breasts compact and dry.

She groaned in agony. “Gone!” she wailed, though no one could hear her.

Around her, others moved like a rewinding movie, walking backward, speaking devilish babble. Decaying buildings uncrumbled, spilled drinks leaped into glasses, hair turned darker and grew back in. Seasons passed, snow laden trees shed their white coats and dressed in flame, which faded to green, and then erupted in fruit. Suns and stars blinked across the sky as she peered through the windows. Everyone grew younger, then disappeared. 

Soon, even this building dissolved around her, until she lay, her hands still wrapped around her waist, mouth wide in silent despair.

And then, it all seemed to slow. She sighed a last sob and slept. In flashes of light, she felt their arms on her, moving her to where she would begin life again, bereft yet hopeful.

She was roused by the babble of normal speech, the familiar comfort of their small San Francisco apartment—the warmth of a fire, mulled cider bubbling in the large pot on the stove. He leaned against her in the doorway, caressing her cheek in that same irresistible way, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear, admiring her red earring.

They kissed, and she remembered again the sweet silkiness of that first kiss, the desire coursing through her, the urge to tug him closer by the collar. She allowed herself that, to give him the taste of her, to let the possibility of something grow briefly between them.

And then, she sighed. She had practiced that sigh a million times—how she would say yes, but no. Not now. This isn’t right. I can’t. None of the words came. Instead, she looked into his eyes sadly. She grasped his shoulders the way she had repeatedly, over all the years they’d struggled together. She said all the words in her head: I cannot be with you. I lament the life we once had, that we will never have. I will miss having lived that beautiful life with you, because of what cannot come of our love.

The tears fell again. She kissed his cheek and turned away. Perhaps, once the time had passed they could meet again, live that forbidden life once her body could not betray the world. She would slowly put right all those things that might come, starting with cutting ties with him, and then cutting the ties within her own body. She would not be a vessel of pain. She might never know the joy of motherhood. 

But as the clock wound, once again, slowly, steadily forward, she knew she would never be the mother of evil.

👶🏼

rani Jayakumar is a writer, teacher, and environmentalist. She currently teaches mindfulness and music to children, and maintains websites and blogs on these subjects. She has written short stories and poems, and co-wrote an Indian-language screenplay, Meipporul.
Currently reading: Scion of Ikshvaku by Amish Tripathi

School Days

by Jonathan Gourlay

Time travel is a preposterous notion. This is why Clancy did not pursue it.

Waste of time.

“You can’t un-spill milk,” Clancy said.

“Do I look like I’m trying to un-spill milk?” Reginald answered.

Reginald was at the magic barrel waving his wand. He was wearing only his red undershorts. He always worked magic semi-nude. 

“Suppose you did travel in time?” asked Clancy. “You would always be here, at this exact place and moment, to create the time travel spell in the first place and so, therefore, you could not have changed anything.”

“I don’t want to change the past. I want to create more of it.” Reginald slapped his naked chest and laughed.

Clancy turned to leave the maker-warehouse. He would go practice his lyre rather than watch Reginald. He’d open the window and let the notes spill out into the dusty alleyway. Perhaps some wandering student would hear the music and come to see him.

“Leaving?” asked Reginald.

“Yes. What is the point of watching?”

Reginald smiled. “I will stop by later to see which undergrad you have caught with your lyre,” Reginald said.

Clancy didn’t notice the lights flicker as he left the maker-warehouse because it happened before it happened. 

🎵

Clancy’s steps echoed oddly in the mazy stone alleyways. His musically-attuned ear caught the reverb.

Strange.

Perhaps it was a mist from the bogs wafting across the university campus. Students were always trying to cancel classes with invented weather.

He arrived in his second-floor quarters. The oak door to his little apartment creaked before he opened it.

Not his usual door behavior. 

He lit his ceiling lamp with his brass combination lighter-snuffer. The fire started before he started it.

He opened his windows. It was a cool night. Anyone passing would see a warm glow from his apartment. They would hear the music. A certain type of student always stopped by for a glass of wine and a chat.

The students who wonder. Those who follow their ears toward a mystery. They shall always find a home here, thought Clancy.

Reginald had stayed the night when they first met, but that was unusual. From the beginning, Reginald felt lived-in, regular, like he had always been his lover. Clancy had never fallen in love so quickly or completely.

Clancy sat down with the lyre on his lap. He closed his eyes. He plucked a note.

Each note he played echoed with the note he had previously played.

He opened his eyes.

Clancy’s dead body was slumped beneath the open window. His skull was not intact. His tongue lollygagged out of his mouth. One ear was matted with blood and brain matter.

This dead body appeared as if it belonged there.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, professor,” said Reginald, as he walked through the open door. He was younger than he had been earlier and wearing a student’s uniform, cape and all. “Continue playing,” said Reginald. “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Reginald? Is this your fault?”

“I don’t know. It might well be my fault.”

🎵

Clancy had a body and at the same time he had had a body which had been his when he had had it.

Just to make this clear to himself, Clancy said the following out loud: “I both have and have had and will have had mind and mouth with which to say this sentence.” Clancy closed his eyes again. He played the lyre. He ignored his death.

Moonlight shone upon the lyre.

Clancy opened his eyes.

“That is beautiful music, professor,” said Reginald.

“It’s your favorite song.”

“It is,” said another Reginald appearing behind the first Reginald. 

The new Reginald was wearing just his red underpants.

The first Reginald surveyed the new Reginald. 

“I’ve gained weight,” said the first Reginald.

“Men are attracted to confidence more than body type. That’s what Clancy always says,” said the half-naked Reginald.

“Reginald, you did this?”

“I assume I will,” said the first Reginald.

“If you mean the time pocket we are in, yes,” said the second Reginald, slapping his chest and grinning.

“But the dead body…” said Clancy.

The second Reginald frowned.

“Is it tonight already?”

Clancy looked at the two Reginalds with tears in his eyes. “Is that me?”

“It has been you for a long time,” said the second Reginald. “Close your eyes, dear, and play.”

Clancy obeyed. He began to strum Reginald’s favorite song, “A Winter’s Request,” on the lyre.

“Should I be listening to this?” asked the younger Reginald.

“I think I already have,” said the older, bare-chested Reginald. 

Reginald hiked up his undershorts and walked over to Clancy. He put his hands on Clancy’s shoulders as Clancy strummed. “I met you this day and we will meet again and again but always previous to this moment. Every time we meet it is in a small pocket of time that is neither here nor there, past nor present. This young Reginald, with his first-year cape, is me. This is the first time we met. It is also the last time.”

“But I have been in love…”

“I know. You carried this love with you between the pocket time and standard time. I think that’s why cause and effect have gotten confused. There are chaotic elements in the human heart that do not weave well into the spell. I barely understand it.”

“We’ve been together for years…” said Clancy.

“And all that time has been outside of your life.” Reginald bent down and kissed Clancy’s cheek.

The younger Reginald took the lyre from Clancy. The older Reginald continued to kiss him. Young Reginald held the lyre above his head.

“This is the only way we can be together,” said young Reginald. 

“Forgive me. I know it’s selfish…” said the older Reginald.

Young Reginald brought the lyre down upon Clancy’s head, a breeze catching his first-year robes as he did. A spike punctured Clancy’s skull.

Clancy staggered over to the window and fell into his dead body.

🎵

Jonathan Gourlay is a writer and teacher. He is the author of the memoir Nowhere Slow.
@jgourlay
Currently Reading: The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

Room to Grow

by Kellene O’Hara

The roots are drowning, the roots are drowning. The information scrolls across my mind, slowly and then quite rapidly. An alert. I look down and see the spout is hovering above the pot.

Stop. Stop. The commands are simple, but cannot be followed. My arm betrays me, frozen in place. “Come on, come on,” I mutter.

Why can’t I move? Move, move. My body feels separate. It feels far from me. With a squeaking resistance, my mechanical elbow obeys at last. The water stops. The soil in the pot is saturated. 

“I’m sorry,” I tell the plant.

I can’t overwater it. If I do, I will kill it. This plant belongs to my boss. I can’t kill my boss’s plant. I can’t. It was the last task my boss had given to me. When she walked out the door, she said, “Water the plants.”

Those words echo, imprinted deep in the datasets of my mind. Water the plants, water the plants. She left for San Francisco for two days.

That was five weeks ago.

Five weeks since the Event. Five weeks after the Event. Five weeks.

That was before; this is after.

Before the Event, she told me to water the plants. So, I am watering the plants. If I don’t water her plants, no one will. They are all gone.

I am having difficulty processing the definitiveness of such a statement. I try to tell myself the information in different manners: the humans are gone. The people are gone. They are gone. No matter how it is phrased, I cannot understand. 

I am not sure what I am supposed to do. I was dependent on them. They ran my weekly diagnostics. They corrected my alignment. They oiled my gears. I can’t do these things on my own. I need them to do it. I need them.

I always find myself referring to them, because they did it to me first. They said that I was different. My skin warmed and cooled. My blinking responses were, as the reports noted, astonishingly human. And yet, they did not classify me as human. I was something else, something other.

Occasionally, I have flashes of electronic echoes. I think they could be memories. The researchers told me that my consciousness was human. I had been human. Once.

🌱

“Petunia, it’s me,” I remember hearing for the first time. “It’s Peter.”

I activated my optical nerves and I saw a bearded man who identified as a Peter. He identified me as a Petunia. “Do you remember me?” he asked.

“I have no memory except this.”

“What?” 

“I have just begun. I am booted.”

“Right, but before…” 

“There is no before.”

In the beginning, I had a hard time distinguishing human emotions. Now, looking back in my data banks, I can see that Peter was sad. Very sad.

He told me stories about Petunia, a researcher. That he loved her always. That he held her hand when she died in the hospital bed, hooked up to machines. That he loved her when she became a machine. When she became me.

“That’s not me,” I told him.

Still, he held my hand, which was designed to feel so realistic to him, but underneath was just metal.

“You’ll get the memories back,” he told me. “It just takes time.”

🌱

Sometimes, at night, I think I remember. Or else I am dreaming. I am never certain. Sometimes, I see a golden field. Sometimes, I think it is wheat. The land is flat. I am running through the yellow sun. Or maybe a young Petunia is running. Did Petunia run through wheat fields when she was a little girl? Was this real?

With Peter gone, I’ll never know.

🌱

Days and weeks continue after the Event. But the machines do not. Today, the electricity stopped. Without the humans, the machines are beginning to shut down.

It has been weeks since my last diagnostic. I can feel it weighing inside of me. My processing is decelerating. I feel myself fading. And, at times, I see flashes. They are glitches, patches of data that glimmer at the surface.

It won’t be long now.

I think of the last command. Water the plants. I’ve been watering the plants for so long.

It is not natural to keep potted plants. Plants need room to grow.

I walk to the park. I dig at the soil, heavy and wet. My nostrils are silicon and cannot detect smell. I pretend to be Petunia and try to remember what fresh rain or damp earth would smell like, but I can’t.

My boss told me to water the plants.

Outside, there would be rain. In the future, it would rain. In the future, the planet would continue. The plants would live, placed back into the earth. I plant them into the ground, moving as if I know what I am doing.

I wonder if Petunia gardened. I wonder if she liked plants.

I think I like plants.

My gears are grinding. They need oil. They need maintenance. 

I press my artificial skin against the grass and I try to focus my processes on that data, on each blade of grass pressing into me. I try to focus on the ground, the rocks, the dirt. I look up at the sky. A cloud passes over, and for a brief moment, I think I remember. Once, I looked up at the sky and saw a cloud.

It wasn’t in this lifetime. 

Petunia? I call in my mind. The world is far and distant. I am even further. Everything is slowing down.

I was not made to last without them.

My consciousness is fading.

If I were human, I think this would be the same as dying.

There are images that roll in-between here and now.

Wheat. Weeds. Somewhere, long ago, I saw a dandelion emerging from concrete. 

Petunia? In the recesses of the void, somewhere, I think I hear it…

Yes.

🌱

Kellene O’Hara is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at The New School. Her fiction is forthcoming in The Fourth River.
@KelleneOHara
Currently reading: The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa.

The End of M. Zenovsky

by Stephen Flight

If you looked hard enough at the beginning of October, you could find three quite different news stories about M. Zenovsky. One was from the official state newspaper Slovo, which bore the headline. “Physicist M. Zenovsky Found Dead in Fire.” The UK Daily Telegraph announced, “Radical Scientist M. Zenovsky Shot in Novgorod.” And the alternative news source V Obychnyy Den reported simply, “M. Zenovsky Missing.” This article was only up for a day and was taken down with no explanation. If you look for that particular story now, you won’t be able to find it.

⬛◼️◾

Superintendent Yubov sprawled behind his desk, scanning a report. The door opened and his aide said simply, “Zenovsky.” 

M. Zenovsky, lanky and red-haired, shuffled into the room and paused.

“Sit down.”

Zenovsky sat in the straight-backed chair opposite the desk. The Superintendent folded his chubby fingers over his considerable stomach.

“Here you are again.”

Zenovsky said nothing.

“I understand you have had two other meetings like this in the last year.”

Zenovsky peered slightly behind the Superintendent, as if staring at something else.

“Zenovsky,” said the Superintendent. 

The redhead adjusted his gaze.

“You have not produced any research in a year. Tomorrow is October.” The Superintendent recalled that the last scientist who “did not produce research” ended up working for the French. This would not happen on his tenure.

“I am conducting research.”

“Where is it?”

Zenovsky seemed to look away again.

“Zenovsky.”

The physicist’s attention seemed very imprecise. He opened his mouth twice, but nothing came out. Then he said, “In my head.”

The Superintendent was no stranger to this kind of evasion. He had not achieved his high position by being obtuse. It was funny how stupid these Einsteins could be. “You will not find me so easily pacified as my predecessor. Your head belongs to us. Where is the math?”

“There is no math.”

The Superintendent knew nothing about science. But he knew that there was always math. In physics, math was the currency of power. “I know you’re supposed to be a genius. At least that’s the overused word I keep hearing.” The Superintendent pushed a blank piece of paper across the desk. “Write something. Explain something. Anything.”

Zenovsky picked up the paper. “It has to do with time.”

The Superintendent waited for Zenovsky to go on.

He did not.

“Are you interviewing to work in the mines?”

Zenovsky straightened and said, “Time comes in fixed quantities.” 

The Superintendent looked at him blankly.

“Finite blocks.”

“Finite blocks,” the Superintendent repeated.

“A day, a month, a year. These are all finite blocks of time, based on how we measure them. But within these finite blocks, there are an infinite number of facets.”

“Facets.”

Zenovsky was animated now. “Facets. That’s my word. Depending on how minutely you want to break down one finite block there can be an infinite number of facets.”

The Superintendent slid his tongue over his teeth. “That’s all you’ve got? Time can be chopped up?”

“That’s all?” said Zenovsky. “That’s everything. Because if every block can be broken up infinitely, then every finite block of time is infinite. And consequently, one can inhabit that block of time forever.”

The Superintendent exhaled audibly and said nothing.

“Time expands like an endless accordion.”

Nothing.

“We perceive time because we measure it a certain way.”

Nothing.

“But the physics—the physics involves being able to inhabit the facets, inhabit the infinite number of facets in any finite block—”

The Superintendent raised his fat hand and swatted away blocks and facets and accordions. “That is all, Zenovsky.” He had heard enough. The sheet of paper on the desk was still blank, but the redhead had pleated it. “That’s all.

The physicist stood and left the room.

The Superintendent sat alone for a moment and thought of a joke: What do you call a scientist who does not produce research? Unnecessary.

⬛◼️◾

The two operatives did not knock. They had keys to every state apartment, including Zenovsky’s. When they entered his tiny flat, they discovered him in a bathrobe, standing in the middle of the room. Zenovsky did not even have a chance to say anything. The operative on the left squeezed the trigger of his Beretta and fired.

⬛◼️◾

A bullet can strike a man 10 feet away in about 1/5000th of a second.

Still, that’s a finite block of time.

⬛◼️◾

The operative’s breath stuck in his lungs as he saw the bullet lodge in the plaster wall twelve feet before him. No Zenovsky. They were just looking at the man! The operative began to sweat and shot the wall in the empty room again. And again. And again. And again. Until his companion stopped him. Though they were certain there was no way out of that flat, they still scoured the grounds in a panic. They knew they would not find him, although they did not know why. They decided to set fire to the house and come up with some story. At least then they would not have to produce a body. It might not save them, but what else could they do?

⬛◼️◾

The aroma in the Vision du Monde Internet Café in Dakar was an uneasy mingling of cloves from the coffee and gasoline fumes from the street outside. It was busy for seven a.m. with students, travelers and locals all lined up at the counter of white plastic cubbies which housed the computers. This was the time when the connection was the strongest, with the fewest instances of dropping out. The man stared at three competing news stories, which were lined up side by side on the computer screen. When he refreshed the third page, it showed PAGE NOT FOUND. The man downed the dregs of his coffee and left the cup on a cheap napkin in front of him. He clicked the mouse and the screen flipped back to its welcome page. He then picked up his briefcase and walked out into the October morning sun, his red hair glistening in the daylight.

⬛◼️◾

Stephen Flight is a novelist, essayist, theatre director, and award-winning author of 30 plays (under the pseudonym Stephen Legawiec), including Aquitania and Red Thread, which won the Garland Award for Los Angeles Play of the Year.
Currently Reading: Labyrinths by Jorges Luis Borges

Unravel

by Joyce Chng

“You sure about this?” Dr Liao asked as I stepped up to the gate.

I nodded, zipping my suit up.

“You screw up and the whole thing unravels. You know that, right?”

“I know. And I am ready. I trained for this, Karen. I am ready as hell.”

Dr Liao adjusted her glasses. “I don’t know, Shar. How would it affect you? Your cells?”

A growl rose in my throat, I was getting impatient. I began to pace.

Karen saw that. She sighed. It was loud in the enclosed lab chamber. “Alright. You do your thing and then you come back at the appointed time. The more you delay, the more you screw up the timeline. Got that?” Her voice could freeze water. I knew she was just worried.

“I am ready,” I said.

A white light enveloped me. I was speeding down a tunnel made of swirling pearlescent lights. I laughed, feeling the wind rush past my ears. I had never felt so alive…

and suddenly, I was falling.

I quickly modified my posture, balling up, so that when I landed, I was on all fours. It was cold, even in the midst of spring. My boots crunched on frost. Fog was thick, perfect for hiding. Dawn.

Time to do this.

🐺

I removed my suit and boots, shivering in the cold. These, I packed in a capsule, ready for retrieval later.

The Change came over me when I willed it. Bones lengthened, cracked. Nails became hooked claws. Fur sprouted from skin, the color of darkest night. My face elongated, teeth became fangs.

I was Wolf Soldier #4143. #4142 had failed in their mission.

Panting, smelling the scent of prey, I loped towards the hut. The sound of a baby crying was thin, but discernible. I could smell it. A newborn. Male.

Do this, kill the murderer and reset history. No more evil to devastate the world. That was what Sergeant Master Tully said. He made it sound so simple. A bite into the neck, severing veins and the spinal cord. Ending a life.

I crept up to the window where warm light glowed. Food. Potatoes. Meat. Hay. Tobacco. A humble person’s dwelling. The baby cried again and stopped when he was rocked to a state of slumber.

I heard his tiny heartbeat. Lub-lub, lub-lub. Something out of a Doppler ultrasound. Rushing blood.

When I was sure the room was empty, I climbed in, growling, snarling. My prey was near. Very near.

Just do it.

I bit down, snapping vertebrae. 

I would never forget the taste of blood in my mouth. Rabbit blood. Deer blood. The pig blood in the mannequins they used during training. 

Human blood was something different. 

Salty. Coppery. Sweet.

I didn’t look back at the corpse. I simply left, loping back to the retrieval point.

🐺

I was late. Missed it by a few seconds.

Karen’s face swam in my foggy mind.

The more you delay, the more you screw up the timeline

Karen’s face, laughing when I proposed to her a month ago. I was Shar to her, not Wolf Soldier #4143.

I was relieved when the white light enveloped me.

🐺

When I finally landed on the platform, there was nobody there to greet me. No Karen Liao. None. The lab chamber looked empty. Dead.

My mouth held the capsule with my human uniform.

The door opened and in walked Karen.

She looked like Karen. Glasses, business-like look, yet something struck me as off

With a growing sense of dread, I raised my head up.  Did she get my capsule? What happened? She deftly bound my mouth with a leather muzzle. I growled. She never did that. Would never do that. Even in my war form.

Wordlessly, Karen tugged at the muzzle. She held a black box in her other hand. A stab of electric shock pierced into my skin and ran through my body. My ears folded back.

“Karen,” I whispered. 

It was then that I saw the hated insignia on the white walls. My heart fell and my blood ran cold.

I was too late.

🐺

Joyce Chng’s fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF IIWe See A Different FrontierCranky Ladies of HistoryAccessing The Future, The Future Fire and Anathema Magazine. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Fire Heart, a YA fantasy under Scholastic Asia, will be published soon.
Pronouns: she/her, they/their.
@jolantru

The Dispossessed

by Philip Styrt

The dybbuk laughed. It was a soft, unholy sound, like the whispers of madness that strike at three in the morning when you’re certain there was a noise that woke you but the air is heavy and silent. The sort of thing you’re never sure if you imagined, if you conjured up out of the stochastic silence of a creaking room, or if it was real.

If Isaac hadn’t been looking right at it, he didn’t know if he would have believed it actually laughed at all.

“Ah, Yitzhak, Yitzhak,” it wheezed, making Carl’s mouth move while something else came out. “Do you really expect me to believe that?”

Isaac was briefly gripped by the desire to point out that his name was in fact Isaac, not Yitzhak, and he didn’t much care what the dybbuk thought, but the sight of it wearing Carl’s face and scratching itself idly with his body broke him out of it.

“Come now, Yitzhak.” The smile was a perfectly nice smile, if you weren’t aware that Carl’s smiles were small things, peeking up at the edge of his lips, and not the full-mouth monstrosity on display. “Three hundred years? Really? It’s too much.”

It was speaking Yiddish. He knew it was speaking Yiddish. But his mind insisted on hearing it in modern English, and for the first time he cursed the little implant in his ear: this would all feel so much more real if he could hear how it was actually speaking. 

“I’m telling you, it’s not the nineteenth century anymore!” Isaac tried, he really did, but the mouth implant was just as permanent as the one in his ear, and he could feel his lips curving into the unfamiliar consonants his bobe had been the last in the family to truly understand. 

He wondered if the dybbuk would believe him if it heard him speaking English, or if it would just think he, too, was possessed. 

It shrugged with Carl’s shoulders. “Who said anything about the nineteenth century? It’s 5617, of course.”

He groaned, and tried to remember the numbers he’d barely paid attention to when he conferenced into the last Kol Nidre service he’d attended, adding a couple since he’d kind of forgotten for a little while. “Uh… 5906?”

“Ridiculous,” it hissed. “Yitzhak, you really have to try harder. Next time you’ll tell me this isn’t New York. I know when I’m in the Upper East Side, Yitzhak. I grew up here. I lived here, in apartments smaller than this room.”

Isaac refrained from pointing out that there were no more rooms, since this, too, was a studio.

“I know where I am.”

“It’s true. You are. Technically.” Isaac gestured to the window, hesitantly. “I’m not sure you’re going to like the view, though.”

The dybbuk stared at him, as if it could see through him instead, then whirled and stomped over to the window. Isaac suppressed a grimace—if he managed to get rid of the dybbuk, Carl’s feet were going to hurt so much from acting like he could walk that way with his bad arches—and waited patiently as it stared out of the window into the abyss below.

“Where are we,” it finally growled, “and what have you done with this apartment?” 

“I told you, it’s New York.” He shrugged, trying for nonchalance and failing. “It’s just grown up. The New York you’re thinking of is…” he did some mental calculations, “about a kilometer down.”

The dybbuk screamed. If its laughter had been the madness of the dark, its anger was sleet and ice against a windowpane, a pitchy shriek that never seemed to end but undulated on and on. “The street, I need the street,” it moaned when it ran out of steam.

“The elevator’s right there.” He pointed out the door. “Or maybe you have a faster method?”

It lurched towards the door, and Isaac put a hand on its arm, trying to ignore the way his fingers curled instinctively around Carl’s elbow. “You can’t take him.”

“Who’s going to stop me? You?”

He smiled, shakily. “Not me. The landlords.” He poked the bracelet on Carl’s arm right below the elbow. “He’s not paid up—the system won’t let him off the floor.”

The dybbuk turned his head and met his eyes. “Landlords?”

He nodded.

“You should have said. Schvantzes.” Somehow the last word came through without translation. He dug his finger in his ear to check the implant, then forgot all about it as Carl sagged into his arms.

“What was that?” Carl’s voice was higher, back to normal—if a little reedy, which was only to be expected given what he’d just been through.

“An unexpected visitor,” Isaac said, as he helped Carl stand and then staggered towards the door. He reached down to the floor and kissed the mezuzah that had fallen down, then pressed it to the doorway to seal. “But in the end, I think, a khaver.”

🗽

Philip Styrt is an assistant professor of English at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, IA, where he lives with his wife, toddler, and toothless dog. This is his first piece of published fiction, but his poetry has been published in Trouble Among the StarsEastern Iowa Review, and carte blanche, among others. He loved his Bobe and Zadie very much, even if, like Isaac, he doesn’t actually speak Yiddish.

Time Is Thick, Like Honey

by Brian Phipps

The bed was just large enough to accommodate two people, if they were fully entwined.

“What are you thinking?” she asked to the curved wall as there was not much room to turn her head.

She could feel the smile appear on his face as he considered her question. He had smiled a lot in the few weeks that she had known him, but this was the first time she had ever touched him while he smiled. It made her feel at least a little better.

“Starting when I was young, like in high school probably, I would always look for the most attractive girl whenever I boarded a plane alone. If the plane were to crash, I wanted to find my way to her during the descent so that I would die holding onto something beautiful.”

“There are only two women on this ship,” she said. “I don’t think you found your way to the pretty one.”

She liked the way it felt when he chuckled. She liked how warm he felt against her and she liked how she wasn’t alone.

“Priorities change as you get older,” he said. “Plus, I said ‘attractive’ not ‘pretty’. There are plenty of pretty girls that are unattractive. I find competence and compassion much more attractive.”

He thought about his wife and kid then. About how far away they were and about how much he missed them. He pulled his embrace a little tighter. He was hugging her, he was hugging them.

“I’m not ready to die now,” she said.

“We aren’t dying now,” he said. “We have this moment.”

“But death is coming. It will be here soon,” she said.

He moved his hand to her waist and laid it there firmly. “Time is not on a knife edge,” he said. “Our past and our future do not meet at this point. This moment is substantive. Time is thick, like honey.”

The tension in her body lessened as she listened to his words because she began to understand. She understood so many things as she turned to face him and place her hands on him. As long as she could feel his touch, she would be in this moment. She wanted to tell him everything, about how she had grown up in a town full of palm trees and how she would trap crab using chicken legs and take them home for her mother to boil and serve steaming, how she could see the rockets launch from her roof top—the same rockets that would send them on this everlasting journey, and how she had a husband at home, but he was only interested in the envy of others and could never understand how a moment could stretch into forever. But, she didn’t dare tell him any of these things because she knew in her excitement, she would forget to feel his hand on her and then their shared future would be upon them and they would no longer have a past, only an infinite moment of despair.

“What are you thinking?” he asked her this time.

“That we are dying while holding something beautiful,” she said.

🍯

Brian Phipps is a physicist currently living in the Midwest. His writing only sometimes includes themes of science and technology.
Currently reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Unbounded

by Jesse Rowell

The scientists were right, Herald thought as he ran his fingers over his face. Centuries spent in stasis in zero gravity had splayed his features, weakened his ligaments, his cartilage swelling to fill empty space. It’s not painful, he thought as he poked at a muscle buried under his jaw, just grotesque how my head is a balloon with freckles, freckles moving farther and farther apart.

Red doppler shift. As they had approached the edge of the cosmic microwave background, racing against matter and light, their dreaming eyes had watched the last of the stars drift away, its light diminishing, gone. The silence of space. Perspective narrowed to an unbounded horizon. Floating, wriggling out of one’s skin. Alone, little.

“You look hideous,” First Officer Sacha said to Herald as he floated out of the hold.

He could see under Sacha’s beard that time had pushed his features apart, like puzzle pieces scattered across a table by a frustrated old man looking for that one shape to fit.

“I thought constant acceleration was supposed to keep our physiognomy in place,” Sacha said.

Herald felt at his face, not recognizing his own features. This is how a mind breaks, he thought. Perception of time was linear until synapses broke and time became an ocean. Madness. Every sound an object intent on doing harm. Memory distributing the perception of time into jumbled intervals, waves that never broke against a beach.

“You need to figure out what happened,” Sacha commanded. “Batch report.”

“Uh, didn’t I submit one?” Herald asked. “Before we left, or after we woke. I thought…”

Fractured and crowded, time intervals hopscotched between each other, monosyllabic moments where they made no sense until the previous memory parcel was compared with its adjacent memory. Like walking into a crowded room and trying to catch every word. He observed Sacha’s face, handsome, monstrous, turning handsome again. Moments and sounds that he should have been able to ignore were heightened—conversation for no goddamn good reason, noises that made no sense.

“Constant acceleration was supposed to take us from 0.25 g to 5 g,” Sacha said. “Doesn’t feel like we ever made it past Earth’s gravity. How is that possible? Where are we now?”

“Maybe where we started?” Herald ventured. “But centuries, I mean millennia later in time. There are no more stars.”

We can’t understand reality, Herald thought, when we can only see snapshots of time. We can’t concentrate enough to place the intervals of time sequentially, to observe time in its totality. Like history written by victors, a perception of time littered with false crescendos, histories hopscotched, never getting the present correct. Is it a foreshadowing of the past or the present?

“Bring Sri out of stasis. We need her to calculate how much time has elapsed relative to where we are now.”

“Wake up the computer?”

“No, Sri.”

Sri. My wife, Herald realized with a start. I don’t want her to see me like this.

He remembered her face before they had left Earth, her smile, her eyes against the blue and white flashes. Pillows spilled like noodles around their hands, and they laughed at the shifting fabric of their bed. “This is space,” she had said, running her hand over the sheets, “and this is us traveling through space. These ripples are gravity wells which accelerate you toward me. Two bodies in rest. Two bodies in motion.”

When was the last time they had touched? Crowded and fractured, he couldn’t sequence which memory came first and which followed last. All he knew was that in that moment, he wanted to feel her touch as he had felt her before, see her face as he had seen her before. Her smile, not a look of revulsion upon seeing what time had done to him.

“Why won’t you let me look at you?” Sri asked.

Distorted and unrecognizable. Had this happened before? Herald hid his face in his hands. “I don’t know where I am.”

“You’re here with me,” Sri said.

“Yes, except there are no stars. The gravity wells are gone.”

A child that grew into adulthood grew into death somewhere in the past. Handsome, monstrous, turning handsome again. Memories of him, the flickering lights of stars that had died millions of years ago.

“Herald, look at me.”

He dropped his hands from his face and looked at her. Memory parcels crashed into each other like railcars, stories compressed into a singularity.

“We cannot change the past.” She touched his face. “But we can change our perception of the past. Change your perception of the past and it alters the present. I see you now, and I remember you as you are.”

This feels familiar, he thought. This feels right. Memories of loving embraces and feelings of contentment as time ripped apart.

🚀

Jesse Rowell is a writer and tech consultant. Published in various journals, he continues to write novels and short story collections.
@HungerArtist4
Currently reading: Soviet Chess 1917-1991 by Andrew Soltis

The Cost

by Andy Betz

I couldn’t speak of the events of this day.

I didn’t have the time.

On the morning of January 15, I personally confirmed we, meaning humans, are not on top of the food chain. We are not the most technologically advanced, nor are we the wisest. I now know this to be true and I so want to learn more.

They (It? He? She? I do not even know if gender applies) appeared, maybe by mistake, maybe deliberately, by my watch at 7:15am. I was walking and I doubled back to take another look. For some reason, I saw them in plain sight, hiding, in plain sight; almost as if they were just out of phase. They could have run (or whatever they call their type of movement), but they didn’t. Within seconds, I found myself within twelve inches of them and I was curious about them.  They must have been equally curious about me as I slowly raised my right index finger to touch them. My actions might have been deliberate, but my intentions were benevolent. They seemed to understand. My touch meant contact and foreshadowed what happened next.

They allowed me a glimpse of what life should be here on Earth, although they don’t call it Earth; they used only ideas, not words. To them, Earth is a toddler; still forming, still making mistakes, still in need of guidance. Then I understood. They remained in the shadows providing such guidance. They told of their great arrival, completely unnoticed by humans. They carved out a niche here in which to live and learn without mistakes of inappropriate first contact.  They showed a collage of their successes and of their failures. I returned with input of what humans categorize as our similarities.

I felt their warmth. They must have experienced this type of reciprocity previously. They eagerly continued our “conversation”.

They wanted some information from me. They asked permission and I agreed.

What happened next was difficult to describe. They enveloped my consciousness and surrounded my thoughts and memories. I felt a systemic pain radiate throughout my being. Uncomfortable as it was, with each second, it became more tolerable. Best described as awakening after sleeping on your own arm, where with experience, you can gauge and then wager, how long the sensation will last. Steeling my resolve not to break contact, I endured.

When they finished, I felt weak. I looked at my hands and saw the skin of an old man. I quickly looked at them to find that they were gone.  Gone into the ether of existence into which no human may spy.  I paid dearly for this opportunity. I returned home to see myself in the bathroom mirror. I was no longer a middle-aged man. By my guess, I was an old man, nearly 30 years advanced. My back hurt. My legs ached. I was cold and missing half of my teeth.

But I knew.

They came to visit Earth to help. But that assistance comes at a price.

Other species with malevolent intentions will soon come.  How soon?  Maybe hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. But come they will. And when they do, humanity (standing alone) will cease to exist.

However, humanity (with their aid), will have a chance. They will guide us, unknowingly, invisibly so as to help us fend for ourselves.

But until then, they must feed.

That is the cost I paid today.

I write this not in hope for any one to read or believe it. I offer no proof to confirm anything I allege. My assertion that “something” happened today, to me, to the toddler they call Earth, may originate and conclude with my remains, which someone may discover when I do not live to see tomorrow. 

I am aged and too far beyond a reversal of fortune.

If you were here to ask if contact was worth it, I can only offer my sincerest, “Yes”.

👨👴

Andy Betz has tutored and taught in excess of 30 years, lives in 1974, and has been married for 28 years. His works are found everywhere a search engine operates.

From the Editors

Welcome to our second issue of Ab Terra Flash Fiction Magazine. Getting past the hurdle of the first issue was a great feeling, especially because we were so thrilled by how it turned out. We are tremendously grateful to all the talented writers who submitted the stories that made for such a wonderful beginning. We knew we had set a high bar and it would be a challenge to try to meet it again with this second issue.

While we were reviewing the submissions for Issue_1, we noticed a couple of stories centered around the concept of time and found them so inspirational that we decided to add ‘time’ as a theme to our call for entries for Issue_2. It was a gamble, as it could have reduced the number of stories submitted, but lucky for us, that wasn’t the case. We received a huge number of truly wonderful submissions that address the concept of time in a number of creative, thought-provoking ways.

Central to our experience of time is ‘consciousness’ and a number of stories we received explore time in relation to consciousness. ‘Room to Grow’, places a conscious robot, with a mix of new and old memories, in a world utterly devoid of humans to explore the impact of purpose and social relationships on quality of life. ‘Aberrations’ takes a scientific approach to breaking-down conscious time to make humans more efficient. 

Is our conscious experience of time unidirectional and non-transferrable? Several of the stories play with this notion brilliantly. The protagonist in ‘School Days’ cheats time by creating more of the past; and ‘A Story of Circle and Breath’ follows a young girl playing at ‘Robinhood’—stealing time instead of money. ‘The Cost’ takes a sci-fi approach to the concept of  ‘giving your time’ to a good cause. ‘A Mother’ story asks readers to consider if a woman should go rewind time and sacrifice her future family for the greater good of humanity. And ‘Unravel’ shows not only an attempt to change the present by altering the past, but the perils that may come with undertaking such a journey.

‘The Disposessed’ takes a more humorous approach to defying time’s limitations by imbuing a young man’s body with a consciousness from the past that is none too happy with the changes that have taken place. ‘Moonshatter’ also addresses the relationship between time and change, but less directly, as it demonstrates the fragility of our connection to time and the ways we ‘keep’ time. ‘The End of M. Zenovsky’ ties space into the mix, with the central character explaining a ‘block’ theory of time and then defying the commonly accepted indivisibility of space-time in a daring last-minute attempt to solve a life or death dilemma. ‘Time is Thick Like Honey’ paints a tender portrait of how we cope with our own impending death, highlighting the place of memories and beauty, while also offering a compelling description of the ‘thickness’ of time.

Although each and every one of these stories stands on their own beautifully, we think that together they are even stronger. This issue is a journey—sometimes humorous, sometimes heart-breaking, but always thought-provoking. We hope the experience of reading it furthers your imagination and deepens your personal and collective experience of being human today. And yesterday. And possibly even a little bit tomorrow. Spatially speaking, of course!

From earth,
Dawn & Yen
@AbTerraStories

 

Image credits:

Cover: Kevin Maillefer on Unsplash
A Story of Circle and Breath: Photo courtesy of Yen Ooi
Aberrations: Mark Decile on Unsplash
A Mother Story: ThisIsEngineering from Pexels
Room to Grow: Kasturi Laxmi Mohit on Unsplash
The Disposessed: Sasha Freemind on Unsplash
The End of M Zenovsky: Erik Mclean on Unsplash
The Cost: Ozan Safak on Unsplash
Unravel: Philipp Pilz on Unsplash
School days: Photo courtesy of Dangerous Ladies
Unbounded: Dawn Ostlund (original Photo by Tom Leishman from Pexels)
Moon Shatter: Dawn Ostlund (original Moon Photo by Jennifer Aldrichon Unsplash, Earth Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash)
Time is Thick Like Honey: Milad B. Fakurian on Unsplash