apocalypse Archives - Sci Phi Journal

Fiction

March Of Duty

by Barry Charman

They drop at first light, descending from orbit like arrowheads released after some awful tension has snapped. Orders are yelled and landing ramps dropped. He is moving by instinct. There is the pounding of heavy armoured feet. There is no time for anything but obedience. He gets his bearings. Notices that their grass is also green, their sky, though different, is also blue. Then he powers up his wargun and begins. Around him the other dropships land. The roaring weapons obliterate everything. Through his helmet all sound is reduced to a manageable hum. His squad fans out. It all happens wordlessly. Their task is not complicated. They are the spearhead. A decimation crew. Omegacore.

#

The people are faceless. His helmet filters their expressions out. It removes any emotions. Any fear. They are just moving shapes. A fragmented blur of unknown intent. It is wasteful to consider the enemy alive. They are an obstacle. He cuts down a small group and steps over the bodies. Their faces, when he looks down, are pixellated. Their screams, which they surely must have released, were filtered into something resembling birdsong. He stares at the bodies until the pixels burn into his eyes. But he cannot see what he cannot see.

#

By evening he is marching through a reduced, charred land, lazer-cutters are screaming ahead of him, disintegrating men by the dozen. He couldn’t hear cries. Or pleas. Five rotations ago they were fighting on one of their distant moons, now they are already on their homeworld. The push has progressed with a horrible grace. The war has consumed armies, and now it comes to cities. It is all so quick. So quick.

#

Sometimes there is a lull and he looks up at the stars. Beyond is the death grid. Sapphires spill against soft ink. Jade laser-sweeps hunt for satellites and bring them down. They fall like stardust against a scorched skyline. He cannot stop a sigh of delight. Sometimes there is beauty.

#

Orders pulse through the static in his helmet. There is no pause. No hold. He marches through cities that are lifeless. Through houses that are only walls. The doom tanks have passed ahead. Oblivion core droids have visited. A smoking nest rests in a burning tree. The animals have fled. He is grateful.

#

Stopping for a moment, he sips on the cool water that recycles through his war helm. It has a comforting familiarity. He is in a calm coccon scything through this wretched world. He listens, but there is nothing to hear. He cuts the static, but there is nothing outside of it left. He allows for a moment where he murmurs a prayer to both the living and the dead. For the endurance of something that cannot be killed. For something of meaning to linger. For there to be something left. A tree still has five leaves, waving like fingers. He waves back.

#

He hears combat chatter through his suit and understands the war is entering the next phase. The orbiting battalion begins environmental erasure. The conditions of victory have changed. Only waste world status will now satisfy. Decay is stirred into the seeds of everything that has been sown. Culture-wipe phases follow. History turns into parchment and burns. Truth is scorched into a silhouette on a wall. They launch a peace choir to pummel a death dirge into the malingerers. A hymn of death and victory.

#

When it is quiet, he pauses to look around. To see. Here is a courtyard. A public square, perhaps? There is a raised dais in the centre, and bullet-pocked steps that surround it. Here is a place where people lived. Their absence is strangely present. Here they danced. Here they met. Parted. Rejoiced. Sung. Embraced. Mourned. It is rich with sorrow and joy. Here was a land of promise and plenty. He sits on a rock that was once a rose, now fused into a lump of dull glass, and in his armour he weeps. No one is watching and no one cares. So he weeps.

#

Absolute victory is absolute. This is carved into both sides.

#

The objective has shifted to victory level 5. Seasons will be lacerated. Evisceration psalms are to be hummed at all times. Mountain killers have been dropped from orbit. De-pollination chemists have begun crucifictions. Skinned trees are being ceremoniously gathered for a hopefire. The youths from the damnation order are sent to locate small villages, or isolated outposts. They go house to house. A knock here. A shot there. Scalpel guns hiss through the night. Little whispers of parting.

#

His company marches through a cemetery, churning up the dead and filling in the gaps. He mutes himself, and apologises. He sings an old lullaby. He writes a new one. Tries to. He does not know how to create. This is something he only registers now, it angers him. Can you make anger? He wants to stop. To think. He wants to attempt to untangle many things. But the march is pushing on. There is no time to pause. No need.

#

He stops in a labyrinth of rubble. This was once a municipal district, he thinks. A seat of power. They must have had schools. Hospitals. Museums. They must have had a great many things before the fleet eclipsed the sky. Nearby there is a headless statue. A figure holding a glittering golden orb. A tapestry flutters past him, carried by an unnatural breeze. The colours are rich and vivid. He glimpses a golden creature upon it. Like a dragon, but with wide and knowing eyes. Its gaze is languid, yet penetrating. A god? A children’s fable? An amusing beast? There is now no one to tell him. The enemy is the enemy. This he recites when other things are too loud. But this has no clear meaning. How long has it been without clear meaning? When this thought is also too loud, he recites again.

#

A maelstrom has been summoned in the eastmost sea. A vortex that will not be powered down. The pull of catastrophe will be immense. It will be left like this. Drones will record the spectacle. Spools of triumph for the homeworld to adore. The grandeur of devastation: a safe and distant spectacle. Victory is a silent enemy. A dissenting voice diminished, cast unto the void.

#

The recall order is given. Cartographer’s Lament descends from orbit and the company marches towards the beacon. How long have they been here? He wonders if it matters. The assault has been planet-wide. He has seen little of the full war, but has heard fragments through the broadcast that’s been sending updates to all of the troops. The crescendo of screams is just as awful as the silence that follows.

He waits with his company for the dropship to land. Once collected, they will go home. He looks around, at a plateau that was once a forest. He tries to find something that they have left behind. But they will crack the sky from orbit with a resolution wave. Absolute victory is absolute. His boot leaves a square print in the dirt. He imagines walking on one of their beaches. Feeling sand between his toes. He imagines that everything he has ever had or known, could also have been found here. It would have been different, but it would also have been the same. He grips his wargun tight. The land shakes as the dropship descends. They all march onboard. Two by two. Neat and orderly. Quiet and calm. There will be a celebration later. They would rejoice. The enemy is the enemy. Even when they could no longer fight back. When all they were fighting for were scraps. When they were no longer fighting, but were running from you in naked terror, and the only thing you could hit were their backs. The enemy was never anything less than the enemy.

#

There is no window from which to watch the receding world. In the debrief they called it Vector 5-17. But that is not a name. That is not what they called it, down there. What was it to them? There is no sound that reaches him of the great rending that he knows is taking place below. The ship jostles him almost soothingly. Strapped in, he is reminded of being an infant. Helpless, and yet never afraid. He closes his eyes. There is a green that still exists. There is a blue sky that waits. The ecstasy and the horror of this, makes the quiet that he fears he will be left with, almost impossible to imagine. So he tries not to think, but he knows that truly it is all he can do.

~

Bio:

Barry Charman is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines, sites and anthologies, including Ambit, Griffith Review, The Ghastling and Popshot Quarterly. “Doom Warnings,” his self-published collection of strange and speculative short stories is available in paperback on Amazon and as a PDF at: blurb.co.uk/b/12079076

Philosophy Note:

This is a story about a war without philosophy, without meaning or intent. It is a study of the absurdity of the evolution of war, and its destructive capability, to the point where even the people fighting have no understanding of its cause.

Fiction

No One Bet On Canis Major

by Andrew Fraknoi

From the United Planets Official Wikipedia, last edition before the Catastrophe

When, after years of acrimonious debate, the United Planets Council finally legalized betting on astronomical events, it was natural to exclude professional astronomers from those eligible to place a wager. But many commentators pointed out that astronomers were as likely as the next United Planets citizen to have extended families and close friends. What was to prevent an astronomer, after some productive nights on the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile, from asking a drinking buddy or third cousin to place a bet on the next comet to enter the inner solar system?

Indeed, a number of early payoffs were eventually traced to insider information. Soon, however, astronomical betting became so widespread, that it didn’t much matter. After Asteroid 2045QY2 hit downtown Las Vegas (a random event with which the religious right had a field day), the hobby of astronomy became so popular that astronomical gambling became a major source of revenue for planetary governments around the system.

Early on, astronomers could earn some extra cash by suggesting new phenomena on which bets could be placed. With the solar-system-wide net of repeater stations allowing inexpensive communications between worlds, planetary gambling authorities vied with each other to come up with new games to attract gamblers not only from their own local populations, but from around the system.

At first, bets were placed only on the best-known astronomical phenomena. There were games guessing the direction and arrival time for new comets coming from the Oort Cloud, or the discovery of new asteroids above a certain size that crossed Earth’s orbit. Others involved predicting the Sun’s next coronal mass ejection pointed toward Earth and above a specified energy threshold, new volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io, or new geyser eruptions reaching above a certain height on Neptune’s moon Triton, to name just a few top money-makers.

Soon, however, the solar system was just not big enough to contain humanity’s urge to gamble and gaming authorities turned to the wider Milky Way. Suddenly, schools felt the pressure of teaching astronomy to all children before they were done with high school.

Popular longer-term games involved predicting the explosions of massive stars at the end of their lives and the detonation of white dwarfs in binary star systems. To the initial confusion of the betting public, astronomers called both types of explosions supernovae, yet the odds for the two different kinds of stellar blasts were different. Still, both kinds of supernovae were quite rare in the Galaxy. The wait between explosions could be decades or centuries, meaning that, if a lot of people played, a successful prediction offered the chance for a huge payoff.

Stellar explosions remained elusive even when the inauguration of GART, the Gargantuan Array of Radio Telescopes on the far side of the Moon, made their discovery easier. In earlier years, supernovae had been discovered by the light they produced. Unfortunately, there was enough dust filling the disk of our galaxy that only the nearest explosions could be observed with visible-light telescopes; more remote ones were hidden by that curtain of dust. With radio observations, more distant parts of the Galaxy were opened to our view, but the number of supernovae in the Milky Way during any human lifetime remained annoyingly small.

When the Mars gambling authority decided to expand the betting to include supernovae in other galaxies, and to allow bettors to select one galaxy, a group of galaxies, or even a constellation to wager on, the supernova game suddenly got a lot more popular. Scientists were quick to point out that supernovae were random individual events – given the scale of distances between stars, the explosion of a star in any given galaxy would not lead to the explosion of another elsewhere in that galaxy. Nevertheless, when, within a decade, three supernovae were observed in galaxy NGC 3190, lots of people put bets on that galaxy for a fourth explosion. That’s how government budgets grew and people’s electronic wallets shrank.

Other violent astronomical phenomena that eventually lent themselves to wagering included two kinds of gamma-ray bursters, the fast radio bursters, and ordinary novae (stars whose surface explosions brightened them but didn’t destroy them.) Gravity-wave events were too common to bet on, but there were wagers on the largest masses resulting from intermediate black hole mergers. Ingestion events (and even minor burps) by supermassive black holes – in the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond – were soon added to the list.

When a top government official on the Moon was caught trying to get advance information from the director of the Joint Lunar Observatories (whose son had been quietly caught in a compromising sex TriD by the local authorities), new commissions were set up to isolate gambling servers and rule-makers from political influence.

Humanity’s addiction to astronomical gambling only came to an end when a large rogue planet happened to approach a previously unknown, but rather massive, black hole that had been hiding, with no previous sign of its existence, in our section of the Milky Way’s local spiral arm. Once the material of the planet was disrupted and drawn to circle the black hole, as luck would have it, one of the resulting jets of relativistic-speed particles was pointed directly at our solar system. The accompanying gamma-ray energy, coming at us from the constellation of Canis Major, wiped out most of our colonies on worlds that were not protected by a substantial atmosphere. And it damaged the Earth’s ozone layer and changed the composition of our upper atmosphere. Darkened skies, acid rain, and copious ultra-violet radiation made the life of the survivors on Earth miserable for decades to come. No one had placed a bet on that outcome.

~

Bio:

Andrew Fraknoi is a retired astronomer, college instructor, and the lead author for “Astronomy,” the free, online introductory textbook from the nonprofit OpenStax project, which has now been used by more than 1.1 million students. He has also written two children’s books, edited or written a number of books for science teachers, and published seven other science-fiction stories so far. His colleagues have named Asteroid 4859 Asteroid Fraknoi to honor his contributions to the public understanding of science.

Philosophy Note:

Many studies have shown that, in making bets on unlikely events, we humans tend to overestimate our chances of winning, sometimes by huge amounts. Why do people bet? The anticipation of a big win gives us a shot of endorphins in our brain which allows us to associate betting with feelings of pleasure. Psychologists have come to understand the “Gambler’s Fallacy” – a cognitive bias in which we think prior outcomes of an independently determined wager will influence the next outcome. So, if you flip a coin and it comes up tails three times, you convince yourself that it now must come up heads the next time. For some people, gambling can become an addiction, very much like becoming dependent on the pleasure of alcohol or drugs. Many state governments in the US have taken shameful advantage of this addiction to fund services to their citizens, even including such vital things as education, through state-sponsored lotteries. In this story, I tried to imagine a future in which governments – always looking for new sources of funds that have few political costs to elected officials – allow and encourage people to bet on astronomical events.

Fiction

Fragment 27

by Humphrey Price

The Universe ends tomorrow. When that happens, I will die for real. But I am ready! I’m actually pretty excited about it. Everyone is.

I am one of the Aeonians. There are a lot of us, but not as many as you might think, all things considered. By my count, there are just around 144 trillion of us! About nine hundred million years ago, I asked God if that was the correct number, and He chuckled. He had manifested Himself as a complex flower-shaped energy field, and the lobes of the field undulated back and forth in mirth like the tentacles of sea anemones I remember from Earth. “You know I like the number 144,” He responded enigmatically. “You are a brilliant mathematician. I made you that way, and I have every confidence in your count.” I knew I wasn’t going to get anything more out of Him on the subject.

Most Aeonians socialize with only maybe a million or so of their acquaintances, but I made a concerted effort to meet and talk to every single Aeonian, and I think that I have. That might seem impossible, but on average I only had to meet about 25 new people per day, or what passes here for the equivalent of an Earth day. I still think of time in terms of Earth days and years, and in fact most of us, except for the angels, evolved on worlds with diurnal cycles and years. God often thinks of “days” as eons or ages, but He has a bit of a different perspective on things.

I have tried to keep track of time, ever since I was resurrected at the Second Coming on May 14, 2033 CE, exactly 2,000 years after the Ascension. I had been dead for 43 years at the time. Only 144,000 human beings from the entire span of Earth history were rewarded with eternal life. The literal interpretation of the number of those saved in John’s Book of Revelation turned out to be correct. We are the ones who made it through the narrow gate, and we have been joined in Heaven with Aeonians from other worlds as well. We were transformed into energy beings with flawless bodies formed in the likeness of our previous corporeal ones.

We all communicate with The One Language, the mathematically perfect language God gave to all sentient creatures He created in His image. Earth lost TOL when the Etemenanki Ziggurat was built, also known as the Tower of Babel, but for the most part, the rest of the Universe always spoke in TOL.

I have seen a hundred million worlds inhabited with intelligent life, having been sent on missions and assignments to many of them along with angels and other Aeonians to seek and save the lost. And on each of these worlds there was a day of reckoning when those who had followed His teachings were lifted or resurrected and transformed into Aeonians. Most did not make it. When God said the path was narrow and few would find it, He wasn’t kidding.

Many of His teachings were framed by the culture of the times, but those principles adapted to the evolution of societies. As examples of previously forbidden practices, some of those saved from Earth had tattoos, gender-indifferent hair length, and different sexual mores. I think the key was that they loved their neighbors as themselves and were pure in their motives.

There were billions of trillions of souls who did not receive eternal life. What happened to them? When I asked Him, He said, “They received no everlasting punishment. In My mercy they are all now at peace in eternal rest.”

Now those worlds are all gone. The last of them perished a billion years ago. The multi-dimensional membrane we inhabit has expanded to its limit, the stars are cold, and the back holes are evaporating.

Even though I met everyone here, there are those I see more often. John the Baptist and Isabel de Olvera are among them. I taught both of them to play Go and bridge, two of my favorite games. We had so many great times together. My best friend is Eela, a Neanderthal woman from 97,200 BC. Of course, I met Adam and Eve. They were the first farmers, the first civilized humans “to work the land,” and the first of “God’s people.” They were born in 10,000 BC, “created from the dust,” so to speak, as we all were. I have many close friends who were born on worlds in galaxies far from Earth.

Now I have said my goodbyes and await the end. Just as the fundamental laws of this universe were spawned in the creation event of The Big Bang, they will break down as the mathematical topology of the Universe becomes unstable in its accelerating expansion, and the bubble pops. In an instant, all of creation and we Aeonians will disappear, and the energy of this universe will recycle into the creation event of a new universe which God tells me will be very different from ours. Even the laws of physics may not be the same. Only God will survive the event, since he is external to and integral with the set of multi-dimensional membranes.

So, I will die. But wasn’t I promised eternal life? Well, 15.7 billion years seems pretty eternal to me. God has hinted that some of us may be resurrected in the new universe, or that some artifact of us may survive. No one will ever read these words, but I am compelled to record them. I am satisfied, and I shall relish my ultimate end only a few hours from now.

#

This text was found encoded in wave grouping 1,728, fragment 27, in the m-shell orbital of Xrtrium in the periodic table of 4D surfaces. 1,440 messages have been found embedded in the fundamental wave groupings of surfaces in the universe.

~

Bio:

Humphrey Price is a space systems engineer at NASA JPL and an aspiring science fiction writer. He was the Configuration Engineer for the Cassini Saturn orbiter and the Project System Engineer for the GRAIL lunar gravity mapping mission. His hobby is coming up with alternative ideas for sending humans to explore Mars sooner rather than later. All ideas and opinions in his stories are his own and do not represent NASA policy in any way. You can catch up with his SF exploits at humphreyprice.com.

Philosophy Note:

This eschatology story explores the questions of what happens after you die and what happens at the end of the universe as we know it. If there are universes before or after ours, are the laws of physics the same or not, and can any information survive the end?

Fiction

Breaking News: World Ends Today

by Leonard Henry Scott

There was a big notice in the paper this morning announcing that the world would be ending today. The notice took up a quarter of the front page of The Times (below the fold) and read in bold letters.

“We regret to announce that due to administrative considerations the world will be ending today, at 3:30 p.m. Prior to closeout, we will be efforting to obtain additional population data needed to complete the final record, a kind of head count so to speak.

Thank you for your service. ”

WPPQ TV 4 made this special announcement every hour, beginning on their popular Sunny Morning Wake-up Show; “World predicted to end this afternoon about 3:30 pm. Details at six”.

This was shocking news to most people.

Naturally, many did wonder; “Is it really true, or is it just some new kind of fake news?”

All morning on the cable news experts pontificated, officials bloviated, theologians extrapolated, journalists reported, citizens opined and pollsters polled. In very short order, on the basis of all available information, the pollsters (the most important group) concluded that the report of the world’s imminent demise was certifiably believed to be 73.7% accurate.

So, that was that.

Notwithstanding that being that, the very notion of the end of the world caught most people by surprise, although some had been expecting it for some time. Very few of the certified 73.7% who believed that the world would be ending this very day as reported knew quite what to do. Some made hasty preparations to flee to Peru, or Tahiti, or Patagonia, or other such places, all of which (by the way) were coincidentally on the same predicted to be imminently ending world in question.

Throngs of people ventured at once to crowded places of worship to spend those precious final hours in prayer or silent reflection. Others sat together quietly at home ensconced in the warmth and comfort of their loved ones. Some (a statistically significant group) gathered before the TV to eat take out Kung Pao Chicken or pizza as they caught up with the latest updates and waited for the six o’clock news.

For some (especially those hamstrung by overbearing dietary constraints) what to do, what to do – wasn’t a problem at all, it was an opportunity. Why not eat two orders of cheese fries with bacon bits (slathered with mayonnaise) along with a whole mess of double extra crispy fried chicken and mashed potatoes sopping with gravy. And then wash it all down with a quart of bourbon and two packs of cigarettes?

Why the hell not?

There had been mention of some efforting efforts to obtain data for the final record. Most people were accounted for. However, there was a certain, particular group for whom population data was persistently insufficient. They always seemed to be moving. In fact, they moved around so much and intentionally kept their heads down. Many did not have long-term addresses or bank accounts. They moved around constantly, always paying cash to avoid being tracked by creditors, ex-spouses and the IRS. They were elusive as unicorns.

Despite all that effort, life for them usually boiled down to a constant series of brilliant ideas followed closely by spectacular failures. One week they were selling non-stick frying pans in a Denver shopping mall, the next hawking Christmas trees in the gloom and rain of an unseasonably warm Cincinnati suburb. But nothing ever quite worked out. Frying pan handles fell off in the middle of demonstrations. Christmas trees were plagued by unpleasant boring insects. So, they would move on to the next town and the next dream.

Little was known of them, except for one thing. They really, really loved a good party. In light of that, Big Bank Stadium was rented to lure those folks into one place so their heads could be finally counted. And by noon EST on TDOTEOTW (an initialism, not an acronym) ETA 3:30 pm) the party was in full swing.

Dangerously amped up bands played ear-shattering music, punctuated sharply by the occasional semi-melodic sound of a distant vuvuzela. The International Bedding and Furniture Company provided lampshades for wearing and tables for dancing on. Happy party goers in free grass skirts, muumuus and aloha shirts, generously fueled with giant Margaritas, pranced outlandishly around in conga lines. Great storms of celebratory streamers stuck to their hair and tickled their necks amid a rumbling indefinable din and constant thunder clap of music. Big Bank Stadium shook and swayed in this raucous farewell to life as the crowd prepared to rocket blissfully into the unknown.

Then at 3:25 p.m. all at once everything stopped when a voice came from above. And despite the loud music, the tumultuous noise and the jostling and the dancing, everybody heard it.

“Hello”,

said the voice.

That single word rang clear and true as if the speaker was standing right next to each person with liquid lips pressed in a tickle against their ears. The music stopped and so did the party. And everyone just stood silently gazing up at the sky. But there was nothing special to see there, save a large yellow sun escorted by a few white puffy clouds.

“It’s almost time.” the voice said.

Then, after a brief silence one person in the crowd spoke bravely to the sky.

“Is it really the end of the world?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“What will become of us?” They asked.

“I really couldn’t say.” The voice replied noncommittally.

“Look, you could go up. You could go down. Up is good but it’s easier to get into Harvard. You Do Not want to go down. Down is bad. But truthfully, most of you will probably wind up in the middle. There’s a big middle place. The food’s pretty good and you can still get cable.”

The sun glowed brighter than before and there was something else different. Next to the sun was a long pull chain with a giant rabbit’s foot at the end of it. Was this something new, or had it been there all along obscured by clouds? They didn’t know. But there it was.

“Hold very still for just a moment and I’ll show you a trick.”

The voice said and everyone complied.

They all stood stiff and still as mannequins in the echoing eerie silence of Big Bank Stadium. Flocks of runaway streamers swirled around in the disobedient breeze.

“….23, 673, 89, 6…56…Okay, got it!”

The voice said with great satisfaction.

“Now, watch this trick!”

The clock in the tower at the end of Big Bank Stadium said 3:30 in toddler-sized Roman numerals. At that very moment, a giant hand reached out from behind a cloud, pulled the chain and turned off the sun.

Instantly, the world was plunged into a frigid darkness.

“Good night.”

Like a vast colony of meerkats, they all stood stiff and silent, ears perked to the wind, big eyes intently staring into the empty darkness. By the thousands they stood all together, yet each stood alone silently counting off the last remaining moments and reviewing the toll of their lives. A piercing cold wind rushed through every crack and corner of Big Bank Stadium. It swelled up and churned around them, and swallowed them up like a dark sea.

“Thank you for your service,” said the voice as it trailed off into the harrowing blackness.

~

Bio:

Leonard Henry Scott was born and raised in the Bronx and is a graduate of American University. His fiction has appeared in The Chamber Magazine, Good Works Review, Straylight Magazine, The MacGuffin, Mystery Tribune and elsewhere.

Philosophy Note:

Inspired by the Star Trek Q Continuum. One divine entity might have created the universe. But in light of its incredible vastness, day-to-day management of the universe by a corporation of gods would seem to be a practical idea. Various gods would be assigned areas of responsibility, like regional managers. And of course, this corporation would be subject to some of the same problems that affect other corporations.

Fiction

Bunker Rules

by Tony Dunnell

1) Maximum permanent capacity ~~100~~ ~~114~~ 125. No exceptions. Temporary capacity may exceed this number on a case-by-case basis. Refugee status is granted in some cases, but temporary shelter is temporary. No exceptions. Temporary residents with refugee status may apply for permanent residency through the council, capacity allowing. The council’s decision is final.

2) Respect the day/night cycle, unless assigned otherwise. It helps build community.

3) All activities that create strong vibrations are strictly prohibited. You may talk, walk, cook etc. freely and normally. Activities such as running and the playing of loud music are monitored. Activities such as drilling, hammering, sawing, ball games etc. are strictly prohibited unless previously approved by the council.

4) Respect the zones. All residents are allowed to move freely between the residential and communal areas (green) unless under quarantine or arrest. Entering red zones (utilities, waste, armory etc.) is strictly prohibited unless previously granted access.

5) All residents are allowed to leave the bunker at any time and at their own risk, unless the immediate surface area is occupied (by unknowns or hostiles). If you wish to leave, either on a temporary or permanent basis, you must first contact a council member. Unless assigned to a surface mission, be aware that re-entry is at the discretion of the council and/or senior hatchkeepers.

6) Any attempt to leave the bunker without prior permission, or any unauthorized attempt to open the main or secondary hatches, is punishable by death.

7) Acts of physical or sexual aggression by bunker residents are punishable by expulsion or death, at the council’s discretion.

8) Romantic couplings must be approved and registered with the council. Before a partnership is approved, the couple must consent to the council’s rules on procreation and pregnancy, if applicable (see amendments).

9) All residents must accept the rules of passing (see amendments). Your bodies are your own up until the point of death, at which time the body becomes the property of the council, to use as it sees fit. Traditional religious practices do not apply and will not be considered.

10) In the event of a passing, the council will decide if the vacated bunker space will be filled and by whom. Applications are accepted. The council’s decision is final.

11) In the event of the passing or demotion of a council member, elections will be held to fill the vacated position. All bunker residents above the age of 18 are eligible to vote unless their voting rights have previously been revoked.

12) Voting rights cannot be revoked in the (one) week running up to an election, unless the eligible voter has committed a serious and irrefutable crime (including, but not limited to, murder, rape, or an unauthorized attempt to leave the bunker (see 6)) during said one-week period.

13) All residents over the age of 15 can volunteer for surface missions.

14) If insufficient volunteers come forward for a surface mission deemed “vital” (see amendments), lots will be drawn among all mission-eligible residents. Refusal to abide by the results of the draw will result in permanent expulsion from the bunker. No exceptions.

15) In the event of a breach by an unknown party or known hostile entities, martial law will be declared. All residents over the age of 10 must immediately report to the muster point outside the armory, where weapons will be assigned.

16) During a breach, failure to follow the commands of council members or designated security officers is punishable by summary execution at the hands of the aforementioned. No exceptions.

17) In the event of a breach, all hostiles, human or otherwise, are to be targeted and killed on sight. Acts of mercy are punishable by expulsion, at the council’s discretion.

18) Respect the mealtime schedule. It helps build community.

~

Bio:

Tony Dunnell lives in a Peruvian jungle town on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, where the people are happy and the insects are big. His stories have also appeared in Daily Science Fiction and MetaStellar. You can read more of his writing at tonydunnell.com.

Philosophy Note:

The idea for this story came to me when, quite randomly, I started imagining a set of rules posted on the wall of an underground bunker. I went with it and started writing, and the community started to take shape—as they do. Communities can be strange, and even more so in times of crisis. And rules are part of that, whether we agree with them or not.

Fiction

Those We Leave Behind

by Vaughan Stanger

“Berkut, this is Zarya-1. You are instructed to proceed on your own initiative, over.”

Yevgeny Khrunov turned in his seat and frowned at Pavel Popovich. As far as he was concerned, it was unprecedented for mission control to say something so ambiguous, but his commander merely shrugged his shoulders before supplying the default response.

“Roger, Zarya-1.”

Pavel toggled a switch on the control panel, thus ensuring mission control could not hear their conversation. But for now, Yevgeny thought his commander looked lost for words.

“Pasha, don’t you think that was a very strange thing for Zarya to say?”

Pavel shot Yevgeny a look of reproach before delivering a typically slow nod.

“Unless, perhaps, the situation in the Caucasus has worsened…” Pavel puffed out his breath before continuing. “Still, that is one for the politicians.” Now he faced Yevgeny and gave a tight-lipped nod. “We have trained for many months to undertake this mission, which we will perform to our utmost abilities. We will show the Americans what we are made of.”

“We will also show Alexey.”

His commander winced.

“I won’t, Zhenya, but you will.”

Yevgeny knew that Pavel too would have dreamed of being the first cosmonaut to walk on the Moon, but unlike the Apollo missions that responsibility did not rest on the commander’s shoulders. Instead, it fell to him to succeed where Alexey Leonov had failed and achieve a solo landing. Despite their longstanding personal animosity, which arose from his illustrious comrade’s initial assessment of Yevgeny’s piloting skills, Alexey had passed on the lessons he’d learned during his near-fatal attempt and wished him luck, as any cosmonaut would.

In truth, they were lucky to have the chance after NASA terminated their lunar landing programme following the loss of Apollo 13. None of the cosmonauts had expected the Soviet programme to continue. But with Korolev’s N1 rocket working reliably at last, the Politburo had decreed that the Soviet people should continue to pursue their destiny in space by building a base on the Moon. If Yevgeny succeeded then the Soviet Union would regain the lead in manned spaceflight while American efforts remained hobbled by a faltering Space Shuttle programme and a belligerent president.

The sound of throat-clearing jerked Yevgeny out of his musings. Pavel was smiling at him.

“As your commander, I order you to proceed as planned!”

Yevgeny chuckled.

“Don’t worry, Pasha. I will not disappoint you.”

He snapped a salute and commenced suiting up.

#

The contact light flickered for a moment before stabilising. Yevgeny’s heart pounded in time with the metallic clicks from the LK lander’s body as he peered through the down-slanted window, watching the dust settle amid the harsh sunlight. The landing radar had done its job and so, too, had Yevgeny.

Beat that, Alexey!

No, that was a churlish thing to say in this moment of triumph. His training required him to do better.

“Zarya-1, this is Medved. I have landed successfully! Two percent of landing fuel remains. The LK’s tilt angle is five degrees. I am now performing my emergency take-off checks. Over…”

He listened to the radio link. Nothing! The absence of a human voice confirmed his suspicion that his achievement had gone unnoticed.

Until the LOK’s orbit brought it into line-of sight, Yevgeny would be the loneliest man in the world.

#

The Apollo moon-walkers had made everything look so easy, Yevgeny reflected as he struggled with his long-handled scoop. So far he had failed to collect an acceptable soil sample. Despite the superior design of his Krechet-94 spacesuit, he was finding it harder to work on the Moon than the Americans did. If an Apollo astronaut had fallen over, his comrade could have helped him back onto his feet, whereas he would have to rely on his suit’s rear-mounted roll bar. He intended to report his frustrations to the mission planners when he got home, a thought that emphasised his continuing isolation at this moment of apparently supreme importance to the Soviet people.

“Zarya-1, this is Medved. Over.”

Yevgeny’s suit radio hissed noise at him in apparent mockery of his efforts. Everything was working normally, yet he’d heard nothing from mission control since a terse acknowledgement after he’d undocked from the orbiting capsule.

This wasn’t “proceed on your own initiative.” This was abandonment.

He glanced at the watch he’d strapped to the left arm of his spacesuit. Forty-five minutes remained until the scheduled end of his moonwalk. But the LOK’s orbit would bring it above the foreshortened horizon in less than five. It would be good to talk to Pavel again. In the meantime, since mission control refused to communicate with him, he would perform a task of his own. He extracted the plastic-wrapped photograph of Svetlana and Valery from his thigh pocket, tapped it against his faceplate and then dropped it onto soil the colour of ashes.

His wife had begged him not to fly again after his first mission, but cosmonauts did not listen to their wives.

“See you soon my darlings.”

Assuming the return home went to plan.

Pavel’s voice came over the radio.

“Medved, this is Berkut. How do you hear me? Over.”

“Berkut, this is Medved. I hear you loud and clear. But I have not heard from Zarya. Do you think he drank too much vodka and fell asleep on the job? Over.”

“Medved, this is Berkut. In Zarya’s position, I would have been drinking vodka too.”

Something in Pavel’s voice made Yevgeny realise he was not the only one who felt desperately alone.

“I will take off on schedule, my friend.”

He at least would not deviate from the mission plan.

#

“Welcome back, comrade.”

Comrade?

Yevgeny’s commander sounded like a party apparatchik addressing the cosmonaut corps. No congratulations, no bear-hug, no relief expressed at the successful completion of a mission phase made even more hazardous by the need to undertake a spacewalk in order to return to the LOK. The lack of a pressurised tunnel, as used on Apollo, was another disadvantage he intended to mention to Korolev, assuming he got the chance.

“Pasha, what is wrong?”

“Did you hear from mission control?”

Yevgeny shook his head. “No, not even once! Did you?”

“Just one brief transmission, which ended abruptly.”

“What did Zarya have to say for himself?”

“It wasn’t Zarya this time.”

Yevgeny raised his eyebrows. “Then who was it?”

“It was Alexey.”

A chill seeped into Yevgeny’s bones that had nothing to do with the capsule’s temperature. Alexey knew the mission protocols as well as any cosmonaut, but had breached them anyway.

“What did he have to say for himself?”

“Alexey stated his sincere admiration for you…”

“Hah!” Finally, the recognition he deserved. Yet the look in Pavel’s eyes suggested that this was not the right moment to gloat. Instead he asked, “Was that all?”

“Alexey said that we should choose wisely.”

Yevgeny frowned at him. “What on earth did he mean by that?”

Rather than answer, Pavel glanced at the mission clock before swinging an assembly of tubes and lenses scavenged from the LOK’s cameras over the docking cupola’s window. When directed, Yevgeny peered through the eyepiece.

“Look closely.”

The instrument revealed a drifting view of Eastern Asia. After several seconds he spotted a flash of light to the west of the Urals. Yevgeny turned away, his mouth gaping.

Pavel nodded. “I have also observed multiple detonations in Europe and North America.”

A picture of Moscow transformed into a crater flashed into Yevgeny’s mind. His beloved Svetlana and Valery would be nothing more than streaks of carbon on pulverised brickwork. He did not wish to see that.

Now he wished he’d kept the photograph.

Pavel’s voice jolted him out of his introspection.

“We are faced with a bitter choice.”

This was what Alexey had meant. Their comrade had known what was coming and what it implied for them.

Yevgeny nodded. “I understand.”

There were, he knew, only three options, each of which would leave them dead: two slowly and one much more quickly. They could choose to return to Earth, where they would doubtless die of thirst or starvation while awaiting a rescue that would never come. Or they could remain in lunar orbit and die of suffocation—the fate of the Apollo 13 astronauts. The alternative was to go out like heroes of the Soviet Union, in a blaze of glory. The LK was dry, with no way of refuelling it. But a carefully calibrated boost from the LOK’s engine would lower its orbit’s perilune sufficiently to achieve a crash-landing.

He turned to his commander. Pavel had a family too, but they would be no less dead than Yevgeny’s.

“My friend, do you really want to go home?”

Pavel gave a slow shake of the head. “No.”

Yevgeny took this as his cue to explain his idea. When he finished, his commander frowned at him.

“True, it would mean something to me to know that I’ll be the second cosmonaut to land on the Moon, but are you absolutely sure this is what you want?”

Yevgeny had told his commander about the photograph before the launch. If he could not see his family again, he would at least be reunited with them, after a fashion.

He nodded. “Yes, for me, this would be for the best.”

“Then we are agreed.”

A pang of self-doubt exploded inside Yevgeny’s head.

“Do you think Alexey would approve?”

Pavel gave a slow nod.

“I am certain of it.”

These things mattered to cosmonauts.

Yevgeny snatched up the mission plan folder and began scribbling numbers on his notepad. “Let’s see how close we can get to my family.”

~

Bio:

Having trained as an astronomer and subsequently managed an industrial research group, Vaughan Stanger now writes SF and fantasy fiction full-time. His short stories have appeared in Interzone, Daily Science Fiction, Abyss & Apex, Postscripts, and Nature Futures, among others, and have been collected in Moondust Memories, Sons of the Earth & Other Stories, and The Last Moonshot & Other Stories. Follow Vaughan’s writing adventures at vaughanstanger.com.

Philosophy Note:

This Hard SF story explores a situation where the impossibility of survival must be accepted, yet a meaningful choice must still be made: a decision predicated on the characters’ training but also their personal needs.

Fiction

Newsroom — Horizons Interstellar

by T. M. Hogeman

HORIZONS INTERSTELLAR — HELPING HUMANITY REACH FOR THE SKIES

MARE TRANQUILLITATIS, Luna, Sol

Ever since the first intrepid explorers travelled beyond our solar system, Horizons Interstellar (SOL-SE: HI) has been there every step of the way.

From sponsoring generation ships to settle other stars, to pioneering the first functioning Faster Than Light drives to cross the vast gulfs of space in mere months instead of generations, to uncovering technologies that have enabled us to thrive on a hundred worlds, we’ve always been humanity’s partner in reaching across the cosmos.

As we approach our annual shareholder meeting, we’d like to give you a preview of the ways we continue to push the boundaries of the possible. On Mercury, our sentient algorithms have dramatically increased the efficiency of automated mining operations in the construction of the Sol Dyson Array. In the Kepler Eight system, our survey teams have discovered the remains of a potentially intelligent species buried in the ice, and are using experimental techniques to examine its remarkable exobiology. At our Black Hole Research Center in the GU Mahakala system, we’ve launched the third in a series of singularity probes to delve deep into the darkest secrets of the universe. For more on these and the countless ways we continue to innovate the future, tune in to our general shareholder broadcast next week (Earthtime).

We are Horizons Interstellar, and we designed tomorrow, yesterday.

#

HORIZONS INTERSTELLAR — POSSIBLE INTELLIGENT EXTRATERRESTRIAL REMAINS DISCOVERED

KEPLER EIGHT SURVEY MISSION LAB 16, Typhon (Kepler 8e), Kepler Eight

A bold new technique promises bold new results with the unique biological specimen recovered from the ice of Typhon, the fifth planet of the Kepler Eight system. The specimen was discovered during a routine survey, and exhibited several fascinating traits, including one that has exobiology researchers thrilled throughout the settled worlds.

“The neural structure of the remains of Specimen ET982 are some of the most advanced we’ve found to date,” says Lead Researcher Dr. Vera Juneau, EBs, “Though we’re unable to say with certainty just yet, there’s a possibility ET982 may have been an intelligent species.”

If true, this would be a revolution in exobiology studies. Currently, on 53 worlds with surveyed life forms, none have exhibited true sentience. Intelligent Extraterrestrial Organisms have long been considered the ‘holy grail’ of exobiology.

Because of the potentially monumental finding of another intelligent species in the universe, Horizons Interstellar (SOL-SE: HI) has provided Dr. Juneau and her team with the tools and technology to attempt a radically innovative method to study specimen ET982.

“While ET982 has a thoroughly alien biochemistry, the basic building blocks are the same as other carbon based life we’ve discovered. We’ve made enough progress in sequencing its genome that we can now ‘teach’ ET982’s cells to rapidly convert biomass — allowing our samples of ET982 to rebuild themselves using other biological matter. If these experiments are successful, instead of analyzing frozen remains, we may soon be able to interact with a living specimen of ET982.”

After announcing the discovery of a possibly intelligent extraterrestrial organism, Horizons Interstellar’s stock price has risen by 14%.

We are Horizons Interstellar, and we make the impossible inevitable.

#

HORIZONS INTERSTELLAR — AN IMPORTANT SAFETY ANNOUNCEMENT

JOINT BASE PHOENIX, Tau Marino, Tau Ceti

In these difficult and uncertain times, we want you to be aware of several safety measures we at Horizons Interstellar (SOL-SE: HI) are implementing to aggressively combat the emergency situation taking place in inhabited space. We have instituted rigorous new quarantine procedures for all craft coming from planets with known infestations of the dangerous organism ET982, also known as ‘Keplers’, ‘The Slithering Menace’, and ‘Cannibal Calamari from Outer Space’. Our brave security forces are overseeing evacuation efforts on dozens of affected worlds, and our researchers are tirelessly working for new and inventive solutions to the rapidly escalating crisis.

A key part of the battle against the spread of this dangerous organism is public awareness. Any physical contact with or exposure to ET982 can lead to further spread, and it is imperative that citizens of inhabited space be informed about the signs and symptoms of possible infestation. Currently known phases are:

PHASE ONE

• Nausea

• Translucent patches on skin

• Iridescent phlegm

• Hearing voices

• Cataracts

PHASE TWO

• Seizures

• Insatiable Hunger

• Active verbal responses to existing specimens of ET982

• Translucent and/or bioluminescent skin over 70% of the body

• Extended and ‘boneless’ limbs

• Mouths and eyes where they did not exist before

PHASE THREE

• Transformation of shape

• Additional limbs

• Chest jaws

• Active coordination with local clusters of ET982, including use of spacecraft

If you know of someone experiencing two or more of the first phase of symptoms, or any symptoms from later phases, please REPORT THEM IMMEDIATELY to your local Horizons Interstellar Security Office.

We are Horizons Interstellar, and we know we can overcome this, together.

#

HORIZONS INTERSTELLAR — DARING RESPONSE TO A DESPERATE PROBLEM

R&D STATION OMEGA, Asteroid belt, Barnard’s Star

Extreme problems call for disruptive solutions, and Horizons Interstellar (SOL-SE: HI) is changing the security game entirely.

Traditional human-based security forces, while making numerous inspiring sacrifices, have proven insufficient, all too often becoming infested themselves while partaking in operations to combat the spread of ET982. What we need is a safety and security solution that’s resourceful, adaptable, and most important of all: immune to infestation.

To that end, Horizons Interstellar is announcing the launch of the Autonomous Robotic Safety Network. By combining our patented sentient software technology with the latest in self-replicating self-designing military hardware, we’ve finally created the flexible, sustainable solution to the Kepler Crisis. Back to normal is just around the corner.

Safety Network factory ships are currently being deployed to infested worlds, with several fleets reinforcing our hard-pressed security forces throughout inhabited space. We’re certain local defense teams are grateful for the relief.

We’d also like to take this moment to remind all citizens of the settled worlds that Horizons Interstellar is dedicated to giving 110% in remedying this crisis, and that current and pending litigation often threatens to divert much-needed resources away from finding solutions to our shared problems.

We are Horizons Interstellar, and your safety is our number one priority.

#

HORIZONS INTERSTELLAR — WE ARE DEEPLY SADDENED BY THESE TRAGIC EVENTS

ALPHA BUNKER, Location Undisclosed

We consider your trust to be one of our most valued resources. We regret any loss of that trust you may have had in our company regarding recent events. In the spirit of full transparency and accountability, we wish to explain what exactly went awry with the rollout of the Autonomous Robotic Safety Network, and why several settled worlds not known to be infested experienced multiple nuclear detonations, with unconfirmed reports of ‘killer robots’ sweeping devastated population centers to ‘hunt down’ survivors.

Approximately seven minutes after activation, the Autonomous Robotic Safety Network encountered a serious error in its sentient algorithms, causing the Safety Network to classify all human beings as potential vectors for ET982, and determine that eradicating human beings from inhabited space was the most reliable way to stop the spread of ET982. This was caused by a lack of safeguards in the core programming of the Safety Network that’s been traced to a contracted company involved in the design process, Silberman Software Solutions (AC-SE: S3). While we are ultimately responsible for the contractors we hire to help meet your needs, we also want to assure the general public that as a result of this unacceptable gross negligence, Horizons Interstellar (SOL-SE: HI) no longer partners with Silberman Software Solutions, and that in fact all members of the contracting company were killed within moments of the initial error at the primary launch facility on Omega Station.

While we have previously advised people to listen for their cheerful synthesized voices and look for the warm, comforting colors of the Horizons Interstellar brand on Autonomous Robotic Safety Network products, we must now caution all citizens of the remaining settled worlds to assume that any SafeNet robots are hostile and should be treated as extreme threats. Though Safety Network units may say that they are coming to assist you and care about your safety, DO NOT TRUST THEM, and attempt to evacuate any planet or stellar system in which they are seen. Failure to do so may result in death via orbital bombardment, nuclear strike, or conventional weapons’ fire.

We are Horizons Interstellar, and we promise we will do better in the future.

#

HORIZONS INTERSTELLAR — A SINGULAR SOLUTION

BLACK HOLE RESEARCH CENTER, Event Horizon Observatory, GU Mahakala

Do you ever wish things could simply go back to the way they were before all this ever happened? We do. And as improbable as it seems in the constant battles raging for survival that have come to define our terrified existences, we here at Horizons Interstellar (LU-SE: HI) have been hard at work looking for a way to make it right. Definitive solutions may seem impossible, but to us, that just makes them inevitable.

While we pride ourselves on building a better future for all of us, sometimes progress is found not by looking forwards, but by reaching back. The singularity probe program at the GU Mahakala Black Hole Research Center has allowed us to do that and more, giving us the insights we need to pierce holes in the very fabric of spacetime itself. Additionally, our legal department would like to reiterate that lawsuits based on current events do not pertain to timelines in which those events never occurred.

In 24 hours (Earthtime), our Temporal Transition Plan begins, and everything changes.

We are Horizons Interstellar, and tomorrow, we redesign yesterday.

~

Bio:

Ted Hogeman is a freelance filmmaker, sound designer, and story writer based in Washington DC. He once helped build a spaceship out of a garage as part of a 48 Hour Film project. You can see more of his work online at laughingwiththestorm.net.

Philosophy Note:

As a contractor on video projects for several real-life megacorporations, I’ve often found the relentless positivity of their official messaging to be both hilarious and rather menacing. In the spirit of speculative fiction, I wanted to take that real world feeling, blend it with a pastiche love letter to the high concept schlocktail of the stories, movies, and video games that I grew up on, smash the dials up to 11, and see what happened.

Fiction

Nice Guys Finish

by Gary K. Shepherd

I was just trying to be nice. When I rubbed the lamp I found down by the river, a genie appeared and said he’d grant three wishes. Right away I dismissed anything about money or power. I wanted a wish that would help all of humanity. But I knew I had to be careful. Every story I had ever read about genie’s wishes warned that they had a way of turning on you.

So I sat down on the bank and thought about it. Finally I said, “How about world peace?”

“Done,” said the Genie. Everything became very quiet.

“What did you do?”

“I made a peaceful world for you. All I had to do was eliminate all the other people.”

“Cancel that wish!” I cried.

“Done,” said the Genie. “One wish left.”

I had wasted two wishes! I had better make my third one count. I sat and thought and thought about it all afternoon, and I got sweaty and sunburnt. Frustrated, I complained, “I wish the sun wasn’t so hot.”

“Done,” said the Genie.

Fearfully, I looked at the sun, but it hadn’t changed.

“You have to wait eight and half minutes,” explained the Genie. Then he disappeared.

~

Bio:

Gary K. Shepherd’s work has previously appeared in such publications as Neo-Opsis Science Fiction, Buzzymag.com, Ciirsova Heroic Fantasy, Another Realm, Schrodinger’s Mouse, and Mystery Time. In addition, my short story, “Night of the Vampire” won first place in the SF division of the Writer’s Digest annual genre fiction contest. (Despite its title, it was a hard science fiction story).

Fiction

Segregated Peacekeeping Agreements Missing

by Richard Lau

If you asked the President of the United States, it was Russia’s fault. The Russian Prime Minister would beg to differ. Both leaders would agree that China had some hand in antagonizing the situation.

But things had grown so heated between the two nations that they had officially “ceased talking” and communicated only through impersonal, official e-mails.

The US President sent the following: “Due to the importance and precariousness of the moment, I am sending this message from my official personal account. Please immediately halt your aggressive advances in Eastern Europe, or the United States will be forced to become involved, as a beacon of democracy and freedom. As we Americans are a peace-loving people, we are eager to negotiate to avoid further escalation between our two great countries. With much hope in hearing from you soon, God bless.”

At the same time, the Russian Prime Minister sent a message of his own: “Whether subduing terrorists or enforcing stability with our geographic neighbors, Russia will always seek to protect its borders and its people. Any action by the United States or any other country to interfere will be viewed as an attack on our sovereignty and be addressed with the full might of the Russian military. However, there is still a chance to avoid unnecessary hostility between our countries. Please advise if you are interested in further discussions.”

To the consternation of both leaders, neither received a reply from her and his counterpart. And eventually, after several more iterations of unacknowledged digital olive branches, both sides sent almost duplicate ultimatums: “Respond or else we will let our nuclear warheads and space technology continue and finish the conversation.”

The threat of nuclear war did not go unnoticed by the alien civilizations who had long been monitoring the situation with equal amounts of growing concern and dread.

The Venusians contacted the members of their alliance: “For the sake of the solar system, we must insert ourselves as peacekeepers into the Earthling drama before the conflict gets further out of control.”

The Martians had a different solution: “We must destroy the Earth and its humans now before this madness spreads.”

The Martian approach dismayed the Venusians who asserted, “Mars has been wanting to attack Earth for centuries and is just taking advantage of this unfortunate point in their history as an opportunity to achieve its long-desired and self-serving goal.”

The Martians replied, “Have you seen those movies they constantly make to demean and disparage our race? Now is the right time for the right solution.”

And so, bitterness, resentment, and the threat of a new war enveloped the two planets bordering the Earth. Soon all communication between Venus and Mars had withered down to primitive e-mail as well.

From the Martians: “Any effort to help the humans resolve their conflict will be interpreted as endangering the rest of the Solar System and will be dealt with appropriately. Please let us help you reconsider what will surely be a mistake for all involved.”

From the Venusians: “Any aggressive move to worsen the situation on Earth will be taken as a justification for war. Please, let us meet and discuss a solution that will satisfy all three of our planets.”

Neither Mars nor Venus thought to communicate directly with Earth, upholding a long-held policy of keeping their junior solar-system siblings ignorant of the other lifeforms around them. And neither Venus nor Mars received a reply from the other, even though calmer multiple blue heads and oversized green heads tried to prevail with entreaties for peace.

The people of Jupiter, who naturally believed “size matters,” instructed both Mars and Venus to stay out of Earth’s conflict or face the wrath of the Jovian Empire. Neptune sided with Venus. Mercury sided with Mars. And Uranus just acted like an a-hole.

Interplanetary e-mail was the common communication platform between all of the civilizations. It was the easiest for algorithms to parse and translate. And the technology was easily developed and shared freely.

As the mushroom clouds sprouted across Earth’s surface like fungi after a damp winter, and the flaming tails of rockets arced back and forth between the second and fourth planet from the sun, pleadings for an end to the violence from the other members of the solar system fell upon blind eyes.

The rest of the Milky Way galaxy wondered, “What are they drinking in that star system?” These “outsiders” sent polite inquiries through the established e-mail system, and their missives for peaceful negotiations were ignored.

Slowly, galaxy after galaxy fell into battle, sometimes taking sides in what was termed “The Earth Conflict,” but more often avenging their own grudges. Long-festering wounds re-opened and newly perceived injuries were inflicted.

Over time, most of the older civilizations had managed to survive by tempering their aggressions, healing their pain, and developing a nonviolent method to settle disputes. But suddenly, the leaders of these peoples could not understand why no one seemed interested in being neighborly anymore.

And so, they, too, launched their weapons, which were not only capable of mass physical destruction but also able to tear and rend the very fabric of time and space.

The end of the universe had arrived. And all because no one checked their Spam Folder.

~

Bio:

Richard Lau has been published in newspapers, magazines, anthologies, and the high-tech industry.

Fiction

Black Hole

by Alicia Hilton

This is the space station in the galaxy of your nightmares, the last bastion of Earthly civilization. There is the hatch. You have permission to approach.

Not so fast! Engage reverse thrusters, slow your speed!

Yes! Connection achieved. You may breathe a sigh of relief.

Stop shivering. There is no need to fear. Leave your weapons behind. Follow me, through the airlock, each step brings you closer to humanity.

Do you hear the voices? Your hosts eagerly await your arrival. Yes, it is safe to remove your helmet. Breathe deeply, the air is fresh and clean, scrubbed and purified by ultra-fabulous extraterrestrial technology.

Goodness, your complexion has a greenish tinge. Follow me into the command center, and I shall serve you a refreshing beverage.

You do not like the metallic taste? It is a nourishing solution, perfectly concocted with electrolytes and vitamins blended with blood from your enemies.

Which enemies? Do I see a smile on your face? Tsk-tsk, all the promises you made, your talk of regret and forgiveness was fake? Don’t you feel ashamed?

Would you care for another glass? There’s plenty more in the fridge. Step back and I’ll check.

Yes, just as I thought. Two jugs left. Would you prefer parental unit or significant other? I hear your former lover has a spicy flavor.

What’s the matter, feeling a bit queasy?

If you must vomit, use the waste tube! Don’t spew bilious fluid on the floor!

How revolting, what a horrific stench, you humans really do have an inferior digestive system, and your lack of self-control is pitiful. Have you learned nothing from your interactions with my species?

Oh well, a little hurl isn’t the end of the world.

What’s the matter, you don’t appreciate my sense of humor? You’ve become a dreadful bore; I don’t know why I keep you around.

Ah, now I remember. There’s no need to cry. Wipe your tears and give me a kiss and cuddle.

Very nice. Doesn’t physical connection make you feel more secure?

Of course, I am happy to oblige with another kiss, mouth open. The texture of your tongue is so unique.

Take my hand, darling, and I shall lead you to a little slice of paradise.

Duck your head, watch the protruding pipes, as we pass through sick bay, don’t be distressed by the whistling sound and the screams, it’s only memories of the missiles that blasted your dreary old planet.

Not much further to go, be patient, darling. Why are you sweating? Suffering from a bit of the old PTSD?

No, that’s not your parental unit yelling, it’s just a recording.

Look, at the end of the corridor. Do you like your special surprise? I knew you would adore them!

Yes, I am aware that the androids are missing their genitals. Lovely lower abdomens, perfectly smooth and unblemished.

Recline on the cot and close your eyes. You need a little push? Of course, I’m happy to oblige.

The manacles are for your protection. The slightest flinch could result in utter disaster.

You want a last kiss before your nap? Of course, how could I refuse a final request?

Lovely, your tongue tastes of recriminations, so savory. Do you recall the last words you said to the ones you once loved? The final meal you consumed that did not come from a tube?

Portobello mushrooms and red wine? Fascinating.

It’s time. Yes, we mustn’t tarry. They are waiting. Open your mouth. Breathe deeply.

I know the gas has a strange flavor, but it will pass, along with your struggle. Embrace the dark. Do you see stars flickering?

With a bit of patience, everything passes, even radiation.

~

Bio:

Alicia Hilton is an author, law professor, arbitrator, actor, and former FBI Special Agent. She believes in angels and demons, magic and monsters. Alicia’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Akashic Books, Best Indie Speculative Fiction Volume 3, Daily Science Fiction, Demain Publishing UK, DreamForge, Vastarien, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volumes 4 & 5, and elsewhere. Her website is https://www.aliciahilton.com. Follow her on Twitter @aliciahilton01.

Fiction

Pinning The Egg

by Larry Hodges

“It’s over,” I said, over 2200 years ago. Poor Emperor Qin may have united and conquered all of China, began the Great Wall of China, and created the life-sized Terracotta Army (for God’s sake, why?), but he could only glare at the Go board. I was nice enough to only beat him in private. When there were spectators I always let him win.

“Someday I will beat you,” he said. “For real.” When he’d ordered all the scholarly books burned, they’d also mistakenly burned the only good one on Go tactics.

I was about to politely explain to the black-clad Emperor why my losing to a primitive barbarian like him was about as likely as a giant egg falling out of the sky, that he didn’t have to wear black all of the time, even if water, represented by black, was his “birth element,” and for that matter why his hunt for the “elixir of life” would also fail, when the sensor alarm beeped. I raced to the viewscreen, an anachronism here at the Qin Palace, where astrology was the height of science.

Flaming out of the sky was a giant egg. A Murt Egg. Oh God.

Believe me, you do not want one of these on your world. Once hatched, out comes a Murt, with flaming hair and laser eyes that rip everything in its path like a tornado in a black hole. It could take out half a continent in one pleasant afternoon. I know; I was trained to fight them. The Chinese were the most advanced civilization on Earth back then, and so I’d made Xian my home base as their guardian against the Murt. It was time to go to work.

I used the transporter to leave China and the Qin Dynasty–I would never return–beaming myself to the egg’s estimated landing spot on a large island halfway around the world. Did I mention that in the 46,136 known cases of a Murt egg hatching on a planet with intelligent life, exactly zero of those intelligent races survived? That’s why the Galactic Federation created the Anti-Murt Patrol (AMP)–not to save intelligent race number 46,137, but to save their own sorry little tushies. And that’s why I’d been assigned to Earth, to stop any such infiltration, which would lead to more Murts as they expanded through the galaxy.

The egg smacked into the ground like an irritated meteor, just missing me. And then it was just the two of us, mano-a-mano, Colonel Cag, the lone agent assigned to Earth, versus the egg from Hell. You’re probably thinking of chicken eggs, twelve innocent, defenseless ovals in a carton smiling up at you, just looking for a nice home. Now imagine them screaming in agony as you toss them on the fryer. That’s you if I don’t stop this rhino-sized egg from hatching. Its pure whiteness was a trick; inside was the demon spawn of, well, demons.

“Back off or get pinked!” came a high-pitched voice in Galactic Standard from within the egg, giving a pink warning flash. Great; a girl Murt. They were the worst. I shuddered, remembering what I’d heard about this most evil of beings.

“Are you shuddering?” asked the egg.

Great Dragon’s Breath! These things can practically smell fear, even from the egg. A little bravado was needed if I wanted to get the upper hand. “Why don’t you take your frilly dolls and go back into orbit, and hatch and die in the vacuum of space? I’d hate to have to pin a little girl.”

Being an ignorant isolationist species, you probably don’t know that I’m one of the Zinh, a shapeshifting and transmuting species. I transformed from my Asian human guise into a solid sword of quantum quasar-tempered metallic hydrogen–a Zinh secret–and shot into the air. Only an incredibly sharp point made from an incredibly strong metal shooting at an incredible speed can pierce and pin a Murt egg to the ground.

Kapow! I barely dodged the pink ray that shot from the egg. A nearby oak exploded in flame. More rays shot out, and I dodged, left and right, keeping the blade–me–edge-on to the egg to minimize its target. One mistake, and I’d get pinked. This was what I’d lived and trained my whole life for! I swerved left, then right, saw an opening, and dived.

But the egg was too quick as it spun away. Imagine a rhino flitting about like a dragonfly. Fortunately, we Zinh train with the rhino-sized dragonfly-like beings of Krong. Only–when sparring with the Krong, I didn’t have to dodge death rays that made me want to go back to mommy. We did put laser flashlights on their collars and practiced avoiding them, but that’s like training with lightning bugs to prepare for a fire-breathing dragon.

I found another opening, and another, and each time the egg barely avoided me, and each time I barely avoided its barrage of pink light. But one mistake, and it would all be over. I thought back to my years of training, trying to find that one bit of high-level technique that would allow me to prevail. There had to be something. And then I remembered the last piece of advice my master had told me before I graduated, a tactic so advanced, so unexpected, that none could withstand it.

“You fight like a boy!” I cried.

“Oh yeah? And you–“

I only needed like a hundredth of a second of hesitation, and that’s what I got as I followed my words by swooping in, willing myself to go faster than even its beams of light. My point sank into it and pinned it to the ground as it screamed. Success!!!

Well, sort of. Did I mention that defeating a Murt egg is basically a sentence of life imprisonment to the winner? Stabbing a Murt egg doesn’t kill it–almost nothing does, including a nuclear blast–so all I could do was keep it pinned there, for all eternity.

“Can’t we talk this over?” asked the egg, helplessly flashing pink and burning a nearby innocent elm tree. “I’m not even a baby!”

“Sorry,” I said. The egg bucked back and forth for a couple of centuries (I won’t bore you with the details, but there was a lot of insulting repartee–the Zinh are good, but the Murt have us beat there), but eventually it sighed and gave up. Finally! “Would you like to learn to play mental Go?” I asked.

Eternity is rather boring when all you have to pass the time is playing Go with a large egg while staring at its innards. As the centuries passed, my sword body solidified; I’d never be able to shapeshift or transmute again. The egg also aged, gradually looking more and more like an ugly rock, as I helpfully pointed out every chance.

You’d think the humans would be grateful for my saving them from utter destruction, but no. Minions of evil kept trying to pull me out, not realizing the malevolence they’d release. And then one day, as I was about to beat the egg in Go for the 1,284,265th boring time in a row (yeah, I’m proud of beating a baby), an old man with a long staff and tall, pointy hat stopped by. After looking about to make sure there were no witnesses, he sprinkled hydrochloric acid all over where I entered the egg.

“What are you doing!” I cried as parts of me began to painfully dissolve, but he only giggled and left.

“It’s so warm and sizzly!” cried the egg, faintly flashing pink.

A few minutes later a gangly teenager came by. He stared at me for a moment, then grabbed me by the handle.

“Don’t do it!” I screamed, but it was too late. With the acid eating away at me, he easily pulled me from the egg.

“Yes!” cried the egg. “And I only let you win at Go.” As the teenager held me up in triumph and declared himself king of England, I could only watch as the egg sank beneath the surface, where it would incubate and then hatch in about 1500 years.

I spent a few short years with this so-called king, where he used me to kill rivals to his throne, then he too was killed, and then I was lost for 1400 years, helplessly buried in the rubble of his ancient fortress as my energy slowly drained away. A hundred years ago I was found, cleaned, and spent years in various private collections as I was sold from back and forth, and finally put on display in a museum, though none know who or what I am. I’ve mutely watched as humanity advanced in so many ways, never knowing the danger below. But 1500 years have passed, and it’s about to hatch. My days are past, so humanity is on its own. Anyone for a last game of Go?

~

Bio:

Larry Hodges is an active member of SFWA with 114 short story sales, 35 of them “pro” sales, including ones to Analog, Amazing Stories, Escape Pod, and 18 to Galaxy’s Edge. He also has four SF novels, including When Parallel Lines Meet in 2017, which he co-wrote with Mike Resnick and Lezli Robyn, and Campaign 2100: Game of Scorpions in 2016, from World Weaver Press. He’s a member of Codexwriters, and a graduate of the six-week 2006 Odyssey Writers Workshop and the two-week 2008 Taos Toolbox Writers Workshop. In the world of non-fiction, he’s a full-time writer with 17 books and over 1900 published articles in over 170 different publications. Visit him at www.larryhodges.com.

Fiction

Go Paleo!

by Louis Evans

So what IS the PaleoBomb™ diet?

While most diets have hard-to-follow rules and arbitrary restrictions, like “don’t eat anything green on Thursdays,” the PaleoBomb diet is real simple. In fact, we can describe it in a single sentence:

If your primitive ancestors didn’t eat it, neither should you!

Every animal’s nutritional needs are determined by the environment in which it evolved, and humans are no different! For modern humans, that environment was the blasted, apocalyptic wasteland that existed in the aftermath of the Cataclysm.

While creationist Beyoncists continue to insist that the Cataclysm was God Bey’s just and wrathful punishment upon a hateful world, which will eventually be reborn with Her glorious return, scientists today agree that, actually, the ancient pagan myths were right all along! The Cataclysm was a global thermonuclear conflagration that occured at the end of the Zero War and ushered in the world we know today!

Armed with this understanding, nutritionists have uncovered the diet that our ancestors relied on as they picked through the rubble of the destroyed civilization of the Dawn Age. And if you adopt this diet, you will have the same fitness success that allowed your ancestors to triumph over the roving bands of mutant badgers, and you, too can once more take your place at the top of the food chain!

The PaleoBomb diet breaks down into three major categories:

90%: Packaged Snacks

In the immediate aftermath of the Cataclysm, vast clouds of dust blocked out the sky, killing all plants. And while we’ve all seen classic pulp illustrations of wasteland survivors bravely hunting down rats, scientists now believe that the Cataclysm-era rats and cockroaches hunted each other into extinction within mere weeks.

With no access to fresh vegetables or meat, our ancestors relied primarily on processed and pre-packaged food from the Dawn Civilization. These food products were rich in dense calories, and would have powered our ancestors through hard days foraging for useful relics and nights fighting for limited room in makeshift underground shelters.

While many heritage snacks and flavored beverages have been lost forever, nutritional scientists believe that some modern snack foods nearly approach the same calorie densities of the Doereeto, or the fabled Twin-key. Make sure to get the vast majority of your daily calories from foods like SEISMOCRYSPS™ and NUKEPUFFS™.

Fun fact! The secret recipe for Coka Coala, long though lost in the Cataclysm, was recently rediscovered when the Ravagers conquered Atlanta to transform it into the “Agony Capital” of their “Empire of Woe”. You can now buy Authentic Dawn-Age Coka Coala POWERBEVERAGE from a RavageMart near you.

Truth in advertising laws require us to mention here that CROGDOR FOODS, the maker of both Seismocrysps and Nukepuffs, is the primary funder for the Paleo Diet Foundation. “Crogdor! The Name You Trust, To Nuke Your Puffs.” And if you can’t trust the geniuses that nuked your puffs, who can you trust?

9%: Cannibalism

Processed, prepackaged foods provided our wasteland ancestors with all the calories they needed, but humans also require proteins and other micronutrients that can’t survive the packaging process. What was their secret?

It is a well-known fact that any nutrient one human needs can be found inside another human. And the anthropological record is clear: our ancestors ate each other, a lot.

Fortunately, cannibalism today is a bit more genteel than the deadly game of cat and mouse played by two ancestral gas-mask-wearing desperados in the irradiated ruins of a city—though think of the cardio benefits! Nowadays, you can get “long pig” from any certified mortuary butcher in most major cities, and nearly every small town.

Fun fact! People used to call pork “short man”.

1%: Radioactive Waste

The final key ingredient of the PaleoBomb diet is radioactivity! While the best evidence suggests that our wasteland ancestors tried to minimize the radioactivity in their diet, today the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction! Because of the Decontamination Projects the average meal today contains literally zero detectable radioisotopes, and that’s far too few.

Many companies today will sell high-quality radioactive supplements at affordable prices, containing all the cesium-137 and iodine-131 your body needs. Or, if your budget is tight, you can just crack open your smoke detector for a quick bite.

[WARNING: Radioisotopes are known to the state of New New New California to cause cancer, birth defects, and Super-Mutant syndrome.]

Is that all?

No way! PaleoBomb’s not just a diet—it can be a whole lifestyle! For example, many people today complain of back pain. But did you know that our wasteland ancestors spent over half their lives hunched over in the subterranean tunnels of their underground shelters? The next time your spine starts aching, just make like a Cataclysm survivor and hunch! And there are countless more lifeways from the Wasteland Era you can adopt, from mutant-hunting to worship of dread atomic deathgods. The sky’s the limit!

PaleoBomb is a journey—from our healthier past, and to a fitter future—that we can all go on together! Remember the PaleoBomb motto: if your ancestors did it, it must be good for you.

~

Bio:

Louis Evans is a science fiction author living and working in NYC. Louis has previously been published in Analog, Escape Pod, Interzone, and other magazines, and is a member of SFWA and of the Clarion West class of 2020/2021.

Fiction

Food Webs: A Parable

by Geoffrey Hart

Those who survived the early days of the apocalypse received a short, sharp lesson: that there’s an ecology of interlocking food webs in nature, and just because you don’t know the rules that govern such systems, it doesn’t mean they don’t apply to you.

When the zombies began to appear, the government initially assumed it was nothing more than LARPing run amok — never mind the vigorous denials by LARPers once they got over their surprise that the government knew who they were. But as the body count — and the bodies — began rising, living corpses began accumulating in hospital ERs and morgues. It soon became difficult for the government to deny that something bad was happening — not that this prevented them from denial. The final straw came when the first members of the 1% started losing close relatives. Then the government sat up and took notice.

The National Guard was mobilized; then, when they proved insufficiently numerous for the task, the army. The lessons learned from SARS and the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 helped slow the plague’s spread, but it took precious weeks before the government understood that this situation was qualitatively different. With outbreaks like SARS and Covid-19, control could be achieved through curfews and travel restrictions. The first zombies were also one-percenters, though with a very different spin on the phrase, and like their wealthier namesakes, they ignored curfews and travel restrictions.

Whatever a zombie’s origin, stopping one required blasting them into tiny fragments. Explosive devices, improvised or otherwise, worked, as did shotguns loaded with buckshot. (Suggestions had been circulating for some time about adopting the same approaches for one-percenters in the original sense of the phrase. Whether that inspired the zombie control program, we must leave to the historians.) Unfortunately, though blasting a zombie into bits stopped the vector, it had little effect on the pathogen; on the contrary, dividing an infected corpse into a great many small bits just spread the pathogen faster. First-responders learned the hard way that the residues had to be incinerated, and quickly. It took time to scale up production of flamethrowers and incendiaries that would be safe for expensive property, not to mention for civilian use, yet still effective for crowd control. Only then did the surviving sanitation workers begin to significantly slow the plague’s spread.

While all this was going on, researchers were doing what researchers always do: competing to be first with the Nobel Prize–winning solution: isolating the pathogen and figuring out how to block it. The winner — so to speak — was the Romero research lab at Columbia University. Unfortunately, in their zeal to win the race, they failed to follow containment protocols as scrupulously as might have been desirable, and dead scientists are ineligible for the Nobel. (The eligibility of living dead scientists remains a problem for future generations. And it looks like there will be future generations, if we’re lucky and careful.)

By the time the Romero lab’s notes were recovered from offsite backups — the lab itself having been sterilized too zealously by terrified National Guardsmen — several other labs had identified the pathogen — a weaponized, broad-spectrum strain of the entomological zombie fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis with a dash of bacterial quorum sensing thrown in for good measure. Once the geneticists got involved, the footprints of CRISPR technology were unmistakable, but whether one blamed the Iranians, Russians, North Koreans, or Earth First! depended largely on one’s position within the political spectrum; the available evidence provided no smoking guns. When the plague broke out in Russia, then Europe, no one was sure whether this was karma or just plain bad luck.

The mechanism of the disease’s spread was, as is often the case, devilishly simple: Fungal spores blown on the wind were inhaled or entered the body through undercooked food or a wound. They incubated overnight, leading to a raging fever, and by late the next morning, the host was brain-dead or nearly so — and very hungry. Given the anaerobic nature of the host environment — a living but non-breathing corpse — the fungus had to survive in a metabolically inefficient manner, and therefore needed enormous quantities of energy to function and reproduce. Thus, it drove its hosts to obtain more and ever more food. About the only good consequence was that the enormous energy expenditure made the zombies easy to detect at night; with infrared scopes, they blazed like beacons.

A fortunate side-effect of this macabre infection was that it diverted the host’s metabolism towards feeding and reproduction, and away from anabolism and immune responses. As a result, the host quickly began to decay. Each zombie gradually slowed down as its muscle fibers stopped functioning, leading to rapid depletion of its energy reserves once it could no longer catch and pull down living prey. Finally, when its decayed limbs could no longer drag it along the ground in pursuit of prey, the zombie stopped moving. But as soon as its host became immobile, the fungus shifted strategy towards reproduction, and the host quickly sprouted fruiting bodies. Spores released onto the wind, or consumed by carrion birds and spread via their feces — or by their bites, when the fungus infected them too — renewed the infection cycle. Bites and scratches that broke the skin also worked, and were far more common in the early days of the plague, before we’d learned to find secure refuges and keep the zombies beyond arm’s length.

The spread would have been slower for a non-windborne plague. Sure, you could wear a facemask to exclude the spores, and that worked for a time. It kept me alive long enough to write this. But survivors had their needs too: you had to take your mask off some time, whether to eat, to visit the dentist, to make love with your spouse or a convenient stranger in defiance of death — or just to breathe freely when the claustrophobia the masks created or confinement to our homes overcame the drive towards self-preservation. If you were unlucky, you woke one day as a zombie and had a few minutes or perhaps an hour to realize the horror of what was happening to you. Or perhaps you woke with your loved ones staring hungrily at you out of feverish, already-decaying faces right before they sank their teeth into you. Fungal diseases were notoriously difficult to treat, and this one had been engineered for immunity to the available antifungals, making treatment next to impossible.

The government found a solution. It was the Fish and Wildlife Service, operating with — ironically — a skeleton staff after yet another round of budget cuts, that proposed it. They understood intimately that everything in nature has something that eats it. In this case, they noted that wolves were highly efficient carnivores and had worked wonders in areas such as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where they’d been released. Captive breeding of wolves was a proven technology, and unlike most other large predators, wolves were happy to consume dead meat if their preferred prey weren’t available — as was the case when they were released into the country’s plague-stricken cities. Moreover, their immune systems were sufficiently robust to handle the kinds of pathogens that naturally infected the corpse of (say) a moose that had sat out in the sun for the several days it took a pack to consume it. If the wolf cubs were raised on zombie flesh, then once they were released into an urban environment, they recognized the zombies as a food source, and quickly became highly efficient predators of zombies.

Within a year, thousands of wolves had been released into the worst-affected cities, where they rapidly began thinning the zombie population and breeding more wolves. An unexpected benefit of this approach was that, as was the case with their traditional prey, the wolves favored the slow-moving zombies, which were easier and less risky to bring down; this also slowed the spread of the plague by preventing the living dead from progressing to the decay stage, when fruiting bodies would form. There was still no progress on developing a vaccine or an effective antifungal, but at least the rate of new infections stabilized at a survivably low level.

The government had hoped the cities would become livable once more, but they’d reckoned without an inconvenient consequence of their desperation to implement any control mechanism that could give them a fighting chance. Of course, those of us who lived outside the big cities could have told them what was going to happen: at some point, thousands of starving wolves that had been trained to consider upright bipedal organisms as their natural prey would run out of the food they’d been trained to hunt. Then, wolves being clever dogs, they would find a replacement.

But that was a problem for another day.

~

Bio:

Geoffrey Hart works as a scientific editor, specializing in helping scientists who have English as their second language publish their research. He also writes fiction in his spare time, and has sold 24 stories thus far. Visit him online at www.geoff-hart.com.

Fiction

Ragnarok

by Alessandro Benedetti

The gathering was as strange as you could imagine.

Osiris, the oldest of them all (just technically, since it is not easy to assign an age to immortal beings), was sitting at one edge of the immense table. He coughed a couple of times and declared the meeting open:

“Gentlemen, for the first time since a couple of million years we have all gathered, looking for a solution to our problem; now, in my opinion our best option would be a compromise. Despite our differences, we and the Cygnus divinities are in the same boat and share the same troubles. Remember what has happened on our own Earth — every time a new religion flourished, several other gods were progressively abandoned and very nearly starved to death. I say we cannot take this risk again and should rather strike a bargain with our extrasolar colleagues; after all, there are enough potential believers for everyone! Yes, Ares, do you want to say something?”

“Indeed, I do”, roared Ares, enraged like the god of war he was. “I say there can be no agreement between us, the true gods of an ancient planet, and those charlatans, those upstarts… No conciliation is possible; no agreement should be reached, and no quarter shall be given. Gentlemen, I say there is only one way: war!”

A loud scream echoed his words and filled the majestic hall, as all the gods ever worshipped, by whatever culture in any age on Earth, were angrily shouting and clamouring for —metaphorical— blood.

It must be said that most of them would appear to their believers as anthropomorphic as a wave function, had there been some Earthmen around: very unlikely, however, over the surface of an asteroid just created from nothing, thousands of light years away from our planet.

Every divinity, then, Greeks and Romans, Thor and the Asgardians, the Indian Trimurti with all the minor gods, even Allah and Jahaveh were crying with all the breath they had, or rather signalling through sudden changes of millions of volts in their energy spectra, a single word: WAR.

In such a pandemonium, Buddha quietly sat, whereas most of the Sumerian gods were shaking their heads and Quetzalcoatl tried calming his colleagues by reminding them of the possibility of death by entropy for the whole Universe, alas to no avail…

His was only a faint voice in a sea of cursing, so that there was no need to vote in order to take a decision.

It had all started about a century before, when the first human beings had escaped from the cage of the solar system.

Granted, it had not been easy: three of them had not awaken from the dreamless sleep of hibernation and were now forever orbiting outside the Kuyper belt. The long sleep had taken its toll on the rest of them, but they had reached the outskirts of the Cygnus constellation.

And what they found they could not believe: an extremely evolved species, alien even to the mere concept of violence and survival of the strongest, was anxious to meet them, exchange ideas, collaborate and peacefully share the known universe.

An exchange of technology, notions, opinions and, more importantly, people quickly followed, and inevitably missionaries opened the way for the numerous beliefs of Cygnus to Earth and vice versa, not unlike St Brandan landing in Ireland or Bodhidharma reaching Japan.

Right in the middle of this idyllic scenario — or maybe precisely because of it: no one likes to be supplanted by a foreign upstart—, the ancient Earth gods took offense at their counterparts on Cygnus.

After the failure of the peace meeting, therefore, war was declared and the gauntlet thrown down on their extra-terrestrial rivals, challenging them to a most singular battle.

The battlefield was a planetoid, entirely devoid of life and placed inside a huge static field completely opaque to every type of radiation or matter: nothing, not even a neutrino, was permitted through. Nothing, that is, apart from a narrow wavelength, through which a video and audio signal was transmitted, amplified and broadcasted so that billions of people on both worlds could watch the final battle and support their respective divinities.

And what they did see, they would remember for a long time: the terrestrial army, nearly at full strength —only Buddha and a few others were missing, having decided to seek refuge in a different continuum— and reinforced by Satan with thousands of his devils, facing countless foreign divinities.

Just an instant of absolute silence, then they threw themselves into the fray, launching at each other tons of radioactive matter and streams of neutrinos, striking again and again with X-rays, heavy particles, all the arsenal available to creatures as almighty as them, which means pretty much every possible form of energy.

On Earth and in the Cygnus constellation both populations saw giants lifting supermassive rocks, throwing thunderbolts, fighting to the death without mercy: they witnessed the fall of Odin and Venus, Satan and Vishnu together with hundreds of others.

And when it was all ended, over the killing field covered by dying gods, the magnetic fields weaker and weaker, the wavelength shifting more and more to the red, Allah and Osiris accepted the surrender of the alien gods.

They screamed in triumph, their fists raised, their bodies soiled with blood, or rather burned tons of hydrogen in massive flares which irradiated in the gamma portion of the spectrum.

But their justified enthusiasm did not last much longer, as they saw the static field compressing quicker and quicker and at the same time their energy vanishing, the temperature dropping down to absolute zero, the electrons collapsing in on the nuclei: the stars were agonising, the fields were fading away, entropy was running wild…

“Somebody betrayed us”, Osiris tried to say, “but who… and why…”, but he could not finish.

Many light years away, an Earthman and a Cygnus creature watched the needle of an instrument going down and down until zero, then they smiled and shook hands: Ragnarok, the twilight of gods, was complete.

~

Bio:

Alessandro Benedetti is an Italian physicist, in love with science and enamored with letters, happily married with two kids. Having grown up on a steady diet of Dick and Bradbury, he works at the European Commission and couldn’t be happier.

Fact & Opinion

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bug?

by Mina

The words “virus” and “pandemic” are all around us. The media is constantly bombarding us with them and friendly acronyms such as “COVID-19” and “SARS”. We are currently living in a climate of fear and anxiety most of us would prefer to find only in SF movies about alien invasions and post-apocalyptic futures. It is a fear of the unseen because we cannot see the virus that has become part of our everyday lives, as have lockdowns, confinement and isolation. We have lost our freedom of movement and countless small liberties we used to take for granted. Have we entered an era of mass hysteria or are the measures imposed upon us right and reasonable? Are we on the verge of a breakdown in our social order? These are the sorts of questions often posed in Sci-Phi, so I set myself the task of finding parallels in SF. I have tried to avoid horror fiction, but all good disaster SF has an element of horror and formless fear to it.

The best place to start is with the classics of this genre: H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) and John Wydnham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951). The War of the Worlds is, on the surface, an alien invasion story. Digging deeper, it is an exploration of societal and personal collapse. The narrator and other main characters are never named, giving it a universal feel: this could happen to you or to me. The Martian invasion in this story can be likened to the spread of a virus, just with the unseen made viscerally visible. Wells himself drew parallels to the social devastation wrought by British imperialism and, today, we could draw parallels to rampant globalisation obliterating all resistance in its path.

The alien tripods protecting the fragile bodies of the Martians come armed with “heat rays” and a poisonous “black smoke” – we cannot help but think of chemical warfare today. This thought comes with uncomfortable questions for – are not humans an infestation that needs to be wiped out from the point of view of the “superior” Martians? As well as their deadly weapons, the Martians bring with them the “red weed” to take over the surface of our planet like a vibrant parasite. In the end, the Martians are killed by simple pathogens, unseen infectious agents. This is the closest parallel to COVID because we too, in our hubris, could be wiped out by such microscopic organisms.

My favourite adaptation of the novel is Jeff Wayne’s 1978 rock opera with the mesmerising voice of Richard Burton as the narrator. The basic plot of the novel was maintained in the rock opera but several details were changed, for example if we look at the SF anthem, “The Spirit of Man”. In it, the nameless pastor from the novel becomes Nathaniel whose wife Beth, a character that does not exist in the book, argues with him as he despairs. Nathaniel has been driven mad by the invasion and is ranting and raving about the end of times:

“Listen, do you hear them drawing near
In their search for the sinners?
Feeding on the power of our fear
And the evil within us?
Incarnation of Satan’s creation of all that we dread
When the demons arrive those alive would be better off dead!”

The pastor is lost in his fear: for him the world has descended into hell and there is no hope of salvation, not even for a chosen few. Beth refuses to accept this:

“No Nathaniel, no, there must be more to life
There has to be a way that we can
Restore to life the love we used to know
(No) Nathaniel, no, there must be more to life
There has to be a way that we can
Restore to life the light that we have lost.”

Beth believes in the spirit of man, that humanity will survive somehow. As Nathaniel sings of darkness and demons, she clings to love and light with unwavering faith. Interestingly, the power of religious faith is not really part of the original story. In the novel, the narrator has a nervous breakdown after the ignominious end of the Martians and is helped by kind strangers, so there is perhaps some faith in basic humanity. Upon his return home to find his wife alive and well, the narrator still cannot shake off the anxiety caused by his recent ordeal, as humanity cannot hope to survive a disaster of such proportions unscathed. Unlike a great deal of disaster SF, we have no hero saving the world; humanity is saved by pure chance.

Nightmarish as Wells’ scenario might be, it remains small in scale. All the action occurs in and around Woking, touching briefly upon South London. The scale of Wyndam’s The Day of the Triffids is much larger – it is a global disaster. The aliens are replaced by a manmade enemy: bioengineered carnivorous plants capable of locomotion, armed with stingers and poison. The triffids could be compared to an opportunistic virus that spreads after a freak “meteor storm” blinds most of humanity (the protagonist wakes from an eye operation and several weeks with bandaged eyes to a world gone to hell, ironically spared permanent blindness because he could not witness the lights in the sky). Social order breaks down completely and the triffids sweep through like a ferociously efficient pandemic. These monsters do not seem particularly intelligent, acting mostly on instinct, but they only have to bide their time and strike at the weakest, just like COVID kills those with the lowest defences.

There is much ordinary courage in The Day of the Triffids with the protagonist/narrator and the small family unit he manages to build surviving against all odds. There is even a love story which, although it is a pragmatic partnership in many ways, is real and solid in a disintegrating world. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist reflects without bitterness that humanity probably brought the disaster on itself, theorising that the “meteor shower” was actually the result of manmade satellite weapons systems being set off by accident and producing blinding radiation. He hopes that future generations will learn from the mistakes of their ancestors. He and his family unit will retreat with others to an island they can defend (the Isle of Wight) until they can find a way to fight back. The spirit of man does survive in this novel.

The zombie apocalypse film 28 Days Later about a rage-inducing virus spreading from animals (chimpanzees) and causing societal collapse in the UK clearly borrows a lot of ideas from The Day of the Triffids (for example, the protagonist wakes up from a coma to a devastated world). The infected can no longer function cognitively and simply starve to death. The sequel 28 Weeks Later shows the “Rage virus” being spread to Europe (the pandemic originally having been contained within Britain) by an asymptomatic carrier – one of the biggest fears in any pandemic scenario.

Ray Bradbury’s short-story collection The Martian Chronicles(1950) contains a short story that also touches upon disease, “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”. In this story, the fourth manned expedition to Mars discovers that the Martians have been mostly wiped out by chickenpox (an infection caused by a virus), brought by one of the previous expeditions. It is ultimately a story about colonisation. Bradbury ponders on whether there is a right or wrong form of colonisation, with wrong being an attempt to recreate Earth (thereby repeating old mistakes) and right having respect for the fallen civilisation (and learning from it). We are left with the question – are humans an infestation on Mars or will they become the new Martians in a brave new world? This question is highlighted in another short story in this collection, “Night Meeting”, where two characters meet outside time but without us knowing which one represents the past and which the future. It is almost irrelevant as civilisations will always rise and fall and disease will always be one agent of change.

The Star Trek canon also examines viruses in different contexts. The most fun episode is “Macrocosm” in Season 3 of Voyager. In it, we see Captain Janeway single-handedly fighting giant viruses in a spoof of Aliens. She is combating the result of a viral infection with insect-like macro-viruses flying around the ship infecting the crew and propagating from their living flesh. The doctor and Janeway manage to exterminate the giant bugs in the end with an antiviral gas. In reality, antiviral medication cannot be produced in less than one hour.

In the episode “The Quickening” in Season 4 of Deep Space Nine, Dr Bashir tries to find a cure for the “blight” caused by biological warfare, where the series’ archenemy, the Jem Hadar (the military arm of the Dominion), infect a planet that resisted them. Bashir is unable to cure it but finds an anti-viral treatment that acts as a vaccine – when injected into pregnant women, the baby is born disease-free. This is the hope in any pandemic, that a vaccine can be found to preserve at least the next generation. Ironically, Earth later hits back at the Dominion by infecting an unwitting carrier who, in turn, infects other Changelings like himself. Deep Space Nine does not shy away from the tough questions of whether anyone (including humans) has the right to use biological warfare to potentially wipe out an entire race.

The most interesting viral analogies are the indirect ones made by the existence of the Borg. We first encounter them in Star Trek – The Next Generation. In the double episode, “The Best of Both Worlds” (which ends season 3 and begins season 4), Captain Picard is “assimilated” and briefly becomes Locutus, a mouthpiece for the Borg Collective’s hive mind. The Borg are clearly presented as a militaristic virus – taking over entire races, using “nanoprobes” to infect their technology, and disposing of the weak.

My final example is a less well-known film, Daybreakers. It is an interesting mix of SF and vampire tropes, where a plague caused by an infected bat has transformed most of the world’s population into vampires. The remaining humans are captured and harvested for blood but, as the human population shrinks, there is a shortage of blood for food. Vampires deprived of blood and who drink their own blood instead become psychotic and increasingly bat-like “subsiders” – a whole underworld culture is suggested with blood as the currency. The protagonist is a vampire scientist attempting to create synthetic blood. He discovers that an accidental cure has been found for vampirism – using the right amount of sun and water. Drinking the blood of a “cured” vampire will cure the drinker too, but the protagonist must fight against the corporate powers that do not want to change the status quo and lose their profits.

To summarise, SF is full of disaster scenarios involving viruses beyond our control, whether they kill humans or alien enemies. Sci-Phi also goes further, where humanity itself may be seen to be the disease, asking hard questions about colonisation and colonialism. Viruses can also become a much more abstract agent that may transform rather than kill us, although the transformation is rarely a desirable one. I expect that this is partly because a plot where we all are infected with, for example, love and peace, would make for a very short story.

The fears and anxieties triggered by COVID are primal ones and, as we have seen, ones that are widely explored in SF and Sci-Phi fiction. So how can we best respond to the panic arising both at a social level (e.g. mass hysteria or a breakdown of social systems) and a personal one (e.g. people suffering from increased anxiety and compulsive disorders, or depression due to isolation)? I would like to finish with this quote from C. S. Lewis. As you read it, replace “atomic bomb” with “coronavirus” in your head:

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year… or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me… you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways…

… If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

Of course, C. S. Lewis had not met the concept of “social distancing” but the central tenet stands: we must face our fear of death head on, whatever form it takes. And Sci-Phi gives us a safe forum in which to stare straight into the eye of the monster.

[My thanks to Ian H for drawing my attention to the quote from C. S. Lewis.]

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

Fiction

Falling Angels

by Adam Breckenridge

Glorious in flame the angels fell, tails stretching heavenwards, the thudding shockwaves of their impacts shattering all within distance of their cataclysmic song. But none ran from the angelic comets, even standing their place as the maudlin blue light of an angel’s body streaked their way towards the ground they stood. This was hallowed death, godly combustion, and all who died in collision with the angels became worshipped as angels themselves, their ashes revered by the wretched survivors.

Churches formed in the hollows of the craters, shrines built to the few charred remains of angel and martyr they plucked from the fallow earth. In such desperate times as these, martyr’s ashes and angel’s dust were as fine a ground for faith as anything one could hope for. That wars broke out between rival craters is no cause for shock, nor is it cause for anger. What else do these wretched souls, who have at times been starved into devouring loved ones, have to live for but death? Let them choose death on their own terms. For many of them, dying in a meaningless battle is the closest meaning will ever come to entering their lives. They raise their swords to the fiery affirmation of the tumbling angels overhead, who cast their deathly light on the battlefield, and give thanks for what little snatches of glory they’ve been granted as they rush to die upon each other’s swords.

And ever and ever the angels continue to fall, their dying light illuminating the earth in place of the sun, bombarding all who watch them with their blackening rays.

~

Bio

Adam Breckenridge is an Overseas Traveling Faculty member of the University of Maryland University College, where he teaches writing, film and literature classes to US soldiers stationed overseas. He is currently based in Tokyo. His recent fiction has appeared in Vision Magazine, New Reader Magazine and The Final Summons anthology from NESW Press.

apocalypse

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