CONTENTS

  FLASH FICTION

  Glass Future by Deborah Walker

  Every moment he swims in the seas of his future.

  SHORT STORIES

  Enjoy The Silence by Paul L. Mathews

  And what’s this Instantaneous Communicating Machine supposed to do?

  Thawing Of Hope by Ram V

  The Seedman wanders, the Soilman stays. To the end of winters and the coming of days.

  Lion In The Wave by Priya Sridhar

  The beast thrashed inside it.

  DIGITAL ART

  Tais Teng

  FLASH FICTION

  Glass Future by Deborah Walker

  ~1000 Words

  The waitress seems reluctant to come over, pretending not to see us, even though I’d tried to catch her eye several times. We’d ordered our omelettes forty minutes ago. How long does it take to crack a few eggs into a hot pan?

  "Do you think she’s post-human?" I whisper to my husband. She looks too good to be real.

  Caleb glances over. "Maybe. She’s very pretty, but mods are so subtle, it’s difficult to see who’s human and who’s not."

  I wonder why such an attractive looking woman’s doing working in a low-rent place like this, a greasy-spoon cafe in a habitat on the edge of Rhea.

  We’d booked into the habitat’s motel last night. It reeked of overenthusiastic, grandiose plans for the future that would never come true. At dinner, I’d watched the motel’s guests. I knew them, their small time liaisons and their wild plans. They didn’t want much, just enough to be able to turn up on their home habitat and impress the ones who stayed behind, impress the ones who said they’d never amount to anything. They all ended up here, or someplace like it, scrabbling for success, trying to make a splash in an over-crowded system. This was a place for people who’d never escape the gravity well of their own failures.

  It was a sad place to end a marriage.

  "Is she ever going to come over?" I ask.

  Caleb’s says, "I see that we will get the omelettes. They’ll be . . . disappointing."

  I smile. Caleb has a sense of humour about his gift. Even now, when he knows what I’m about to do, he still keeps cracking jokes.

  I take a deep breath and say, "I want a divorce." I wait a moment to see if he’s going to make things easier on me. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t blame him. "I’m so sorry, Caleb."

  "So am I." He stares out of the window. "We’re on opposite sides of the reflection, Alice. You knew that when you married me."

  I look at his reflection in the metal glass window. Caleb was a designer baby. A person designed for space. The multiple copies of his genome in each cell protect him against ionization radiation. But modding is always erratic. There’s no way to predict how changes to the genome will affect the body--or the mind. Multiple genome people, like Caleb, developed unusual connections in their brains. Pre-cognition. They remember their future. And all of them are unable to pass the mirror test. They can see their reflections, but they can’t recognise themselves. Caleb hasn’t got the self-awareness that most human babies develop at eighteen months. That used to fascinate me, that lack of self. It seemed so strange, so exotic, now I find it sad. When love turns to pity, it’s time to end the relationship. Caleb didn’t deserve my pity.

  I look beyond Caleb’s reflection to the habitat’s garden. Gardens don’t thrive in space. The light collected from the solar foils and re-transmitted to the plants is wrong. Earth plants either wither and die, or they go wild. The habitat’s garden was over-grown and mutated. Swathes of honeysuckle blooms, with enormous monstrous blooms smothered everything. "It’s a pretty lousy garden."

  "All these mutants should be cut away," says Caleb. "I’m designing Zen gardens for the Oort habitats, swirls of pebbles, low maintenance." A heartbeat later, he says, "Why do you want a divorce, Alice?"

  He was going to make me say everything, "I’ve met somebody else, while you were working on the Oort Cloud project." Caleb’s an architect, very much in demand in the ongoing push of colonisation.

  "Did you?" The note of surprise in his voice is convincing. Caleb’s good at pretending to be something other than what he was. Every moment he swims in the seas of his future. Even when he met me, he must have known that one day we’d be here. Poor Caleb. No wonder most pre-cogs end up in hospital, overburdened by the nature of their gifts, or more specifically, overwhelmed by the fact that they’re unable to change anything they see. "And you love him?"

  "I do. I’m going to move in with him. I’m sorry, Caleb."

  "I know."

  The waitress comes over. She places two plates of greasy omelettes on the table. She looks at Caleb, her violet eyes widening in recognition. Caleb’s famous. There aren’t too many functioning pre-cogs in the system. Every now and again, someone will put out a documentary about him, usually spurious, about how he’s refusing to use his precognition to help people. It doesn’t work like that. The future’s set. No amount of foreknowledge will change anything.

  "Thank you," I say, trying to dismiss her. Just because I don’t want him, doesn’t mean that I want anybody else to have him.

  The waitress lingers at a nearby table, straightening the place settings, wondering how she can attract him, thinking that knowledge of her future might bring her an advantage-- just like I did when I met Caleb. She’s looking for her future, wanting to use Caleb, not realising that they only thing we, on this side on the mirror, will ever have are reflections.

  "We’ll keep in touch, Caleb," I say.

  "No, we won’t. Goodbye, Alice." He leaves the table, walks over to the waitress. He says something that makes her laugh.

  I walk out of the cafe, into the unseen future, without him, stepping into my future, my unseen and unknowable future, without him.

  ______________________________________________________________________________

  Author Bio: Deborah grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London where she now lives with her partner and two young children.

  SHORT STORIES

  Enjoy The Silence by Paul L. Mathews

  ~ 3800 words

  Shelf--much to my chagrin--had always been an ugly town with ugly houses which flanked ugly streets walked by ugly people who wore ugly hats and smiled ugly smiles. Its townsfolk were those damnable souls that were just Loud. Plump and curvy to a man, woman and child, they called to one another with cheery waves and noisy salutations, banged pots as they cooked and slammed doors as they went about their business, living loudly by night and snoring monstrously by day.

  Little wonder that I eschewed the company of such insufferable neighbours. Overlooking this raucous place from my house on the hill, I, Albrecht Lazell Esquire, lived a life of quiet solitude to focus on my experiments and studies. And how they filled my every waking hour!

  Of these multitudinous inventions ... Nay, obsessions! ... three were the source of my greatest pride. The first (being a large rocket ship which virtually filled the entirety of my back garden) had barely reached completion before the events that I am about to relate to you; the second (a wondrously complex clockwork head and brain of brass, cogs and springs) I had used to replace my real head at the end of my tender teens; and the third (the chief source of this narrative) I would still describe as my greatest invention; The Instantaneous Communicating Machine.

  Some might claim the Communicating Machine to be the instrument of my destruction, but, looking back, I now see my cat--Glimpse--to be the true architect of my downfall.

  The countdown to disaster began on one of the few days I allowed the traitorous beast into my basement workshop. Being of a curious nature, the cat usually had to be locked out, possessed as it was with an infuriating tendency to knock things over upon the rare occasions I allowed him inside (so much so that I had my first suspicions that the animal felt a deliberate need to wreck the machines). Upon being shown the Instantaneous Communicating Machine, however, Glimpse had merely looked uninterested in that utterly dismissive way that only cats can. The creature had ever been difficult to impress, and my machine--with its beautiful wooden casing and such delicate and precisely engineered mechanisms--seemed to have a typically underwhelming impact upon the cat.

  "And what’s this Instantaneous Communicating Machine supposed to do?" he inquired as he licked his paw and proceeded to wash behind his ears.

  "Well, in terms you might understand," said I, "it communicates across limitless distances instantly by virtue of the agitation of reality; an agitation which, if controlled properly, can be received by an identical machine and deciphered into messages."

  "You mean this wooden box transmits pulses through the membranes in M space to communicate with receivers elsewhere in eleventh-dimensional space?" Asked Glimpse. His eyes widened, and he stopped washing as he stared at the machine, suddenly transfixed.

  "Um. Yes." I will admit his interpretation made little sense to me, and I suspected him of some facetious tomfoolery. Regardless I continued. "Rather like a telegraph machine would send Morse code down a telegraph line, except here the messages are conducted by the fabric of our existence."

  At this juncture, even Glimpse--usually so parsimonious with his praise--had to profess his admiration, saying as he did, "That is pretty bloody clever. Wotcha gonna use it for?"

  Gripping my lapels, I allowed my chest to swell with pride as I replied, "I shall use it to communicate my findings when I land my rocket on the Sun."

&n bsp; Glimpse looked at me, and, with an attitude I could only describe as one of incredulity, his eyes widened still further. "Land? Rocket? Sun?"

  "Indeed. The last great unexplored frontier."

  And the cat merely shook his head as though lost for words.

  #

  To call any home on this Earth a house is something of a non sequitur, and mine was exception. With only one of its three floors above ground level, and that one floor more akin to an armoured bunker than a place of residence, it lacked any exterior charm or decoration. Whilst most buildings were clad in mirrors to reflect heat, the walls of my home were furnished with black tiles and my father’s ingenious heat-exchange system that fed the complex batteries which powered my utilities. Such was the reality of life in the face of our fierce and unforgiving sun.

  Regardless, my father (God rest his soul) had determined that the house be at least well-furnished and comfortable. The drawing room bore the most lavish testimony to this as witnessed by its profusion of books, leather chairs and mahogany furniture. Lavishly illustrated maps and blueprints filled the walls, but all were dominated by a portrait of the great man himself.

  The following night I sat in that drawing room with one of my father’s collections of essays resting on my knee. To my shame I will admit I neglected the book that evening. Instead, I spent much of the time regarding Glimpse critically as the cat sat upon the window sill and, heat-resistant shutters on the windows thrown back, watched the town below. As I observed him, I dwelt upon the conundrum this animal presented. Quite why Glimpse had decided to move into the house had always confounded me. All I know is I walked into my kitchen one night and found the scrounger helping himself to a plate of cold meats (my supper, no less!). The blasted stray had stayed ever since. When asked from whence he came, he would offer only a cryptic "Elsewhere", and that he had chosen to live here because "the house is warm, and it’s riddled with mice." Only once did I manage to partially hypnotize him with a woollen mouse stuffed with cat-nip, but I could only elicit--before the animal realised my plan and ran away--the claim he had travelled here "from the future", and had slid into the past "because it gets real grim once The Nil come..."

  As much as these scant clues--and the mentioned of these mysterious ‘The Nil’--fascinated me, I had since been unable to extract further information from the cat. Only now do I realise how much harder I should have tried...

  But I digress. Going back to that night in the drawing room, I had just turned my attention back to father’s book when Glimpse ceased his washing and proclaimed, "A-ha! Lunch!"

  I looked to the window to see something land on the sill outside. A pigeon, it peered at Glimpse through the glass and hopped nervously from one foot to the other.

  "Right," said Glimpse as the eyed the pigeon, "come here, you!"

  "Oh no, you don’t!" said I, rising from my armchair. "I’m expecting this chap. He’s part of my experiment with the Instantaneous Communicating Machine."

  "How can he help? He’s a pigeon!"

  "A messenger pigeon, to be exact," said I. "His owner has a receiver for my Machine set up in the city.

  "What news?" I proceeded to inquire of the pigeon, which, in turn, continued to eye Glimpse somewhat nervously.

  "’Ere," said the pigeon, "is ‘e safe? One of his kind ‘ad my Uncle Albert, y’know."

  "He’s perfectly safe," said I, impatience manifest in my tone. "Now, what news?"

  The pigeon continued to shift from one foot to the other in unease, but answered nonetheless. "Well, Doctor Tidy says the receiver is workin’ perfectly," said he, "but he’s confused by your communication this mornin’."

  This perplexed me. "This morning? I sent no communication this morning."

  "Well, he says he received a burst of information just before breakfast. And lots of it."

  "Information? What kind of ‘information’?"

  "That’s what he’s unsure of. He says it wasn’t gibberish--it was too structured--but he also says it’s no language he’s ever ‘eard."

  "Good lord," I murmured. "How strange."

  "He’s asked Professor Klepper to ‘ave a look, see if ‘e can make anythin’ of it."

  "Ahhh ... Klepper." That could only be good news. As a linguist of some renown, even my father had spoken highly of this man. "And when will the Professor be next visiting Doctor Tidy?"

  "Tomorrow night, I believe."

  "Then you must return and give me any news, there’s a good chap."

  The pigeon still regarded Glimpse with some suspicion. The cat didn’t help matters by grinning at the bird whilst displaying his claws.

  "Will ‘e be ‘ere?"

  "Of course. He lives here."

  "Well, ‘e’s a bad un, like all ‘is kind," the pigeon muttered. "You mark my words."

  #

  The following night I impatiently awaited the return of the pigeon.

  Night time in Shelf, like any other town or city on our accursed Earth, is not just a time of Noisy People, but also of Even Noisier Vehicles. Only during the nocturnal hours could flat-beds and wagons bring their fresh goods from the various hydroponic silos used for fresh fruit and vegetables; or the high-sided and vans bring fresh meat and dairy produce from multitudinous battery farms and underground abattoirs that lurk in the ground, hidden from the ravages of the sun. Not only were these dreadful, ill-engineered machines equipped with noisy, grumbling diesel engines and squeaking suspension; but they were cacophonous also, ejaculating malodorous plumes of smoke and pools of sullied oil in their wake. And, as though to add insult to injury, the drivers seemed even more clangorous than Shelf’s damnably rambunctious shopkeepers as they traded their goods for cash and friendly smiles! How insufferable I found it!

  But I had no choice but to witness this racket from the window in my drawing room, eager as I was to hear the latest message from Tidy’s lab. By three o’clock in the morning, however, there was no sign of his messenger pigeon, and I gradually accepted there wouldn't be any communication that night. I found this to be a matter of eminent agitation. For all my annoyance, however, I knew waiting would serve no purpose, and thus retired to my workshop.

  Once there, I took a moment to dwell on my fourth greatest invention. And what a magnificent sight it was! A mechanical body with which I intended to replace my flesh and blood prison before I journeyed to the sun, its dormant pistons and internal batteries lay exposed as it lay strapped to a bench tilted at some fifty-five degrees from the floor. The body gleamed in the lamplight, tall, broad and indomitable. The day I swapped my mortal shell for this eternal simulacrum could not come soon enough.

  All the while, as I dwelt on this fantasy, the Instantaneous Communicating Machine whirred and ticked, sending its scheduled messages to Doctor Tidy’s lab.

  I remember tutting at the mere thought of Tidy. How the man vexed me. Why this delay in communication? Had he not spoken to Klepper? Had they, or had they not, decoded these mysterious transmissions?

  Aware no answers would present themselves that night, I pushed the matter aside, and went to work upon my new body

  #

  As dawn approached, I confess to abandoning my task, so distracted had I become by my annoyance at the tardy Tidy. A mistake at such a delicate juncture, I knew, could ruin the body’s mechanisms. Thus, I decided to err on the side of caution and elected to take supper and watch what I could of the sunrise.

  #

  Dawn broke, and I stood at my front door for as long as I dared, wary of the impending sunrise. To be caught in the sunlight meant certain death. So strong were the sun’s rays since the Expansion that they burnt and stripped flesh from bone in seconds. Old Widow Rose, who lived at the bottom of the hill, made a prime example. Drunk on sherry, she’d fallen asleep on her porch in the dead of the night and slept soundly until sunrise. The first creeping rays of the morning had stripped her legs clean, and she’d barely escaped with her life, awoken by the agony and managing to drag herself indoors.

  As the horizon lightened, I looked upon the town. As ever, this was the only point in the day when all was quiet. In that moment of suspense between night and day, as the townsfolk retired to their beds and animals fled to their sanctuaries, there breathed a split second of silence; a split second I adored with as much passion as I detested the noise and bustle of the town’s nightly life and the guttural snores of the day. Even now I vividly remember closing my eyes as I dwelt on how I longed to take flight in my rocket and escape to the sky ... and the fiery solitude of the sun.

 

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