Monthly Archives: June 2017

Horror & Dark Fiction, Science Fiction

When Death Wore Lipstick

She watched the streetlights go by. One by one, they flashed by the bus’s window. At the next stop, after shooting the other passenger and the bus driver, she got out. It late at night. No one was around. The bus just sat there idling as the bus driver and the other guy bled out. No one came running. Sirens did not go off.

“We all die…” she muttered to herself, though it felt like she was forgetting something.

After tucking the gun back into her handbag, she turned around. The night was a little chilly, but she did not seem to feel it. There was an all-night diner nearby. Its red and white neon sign cast light across the street. The light bounced off the street, forming an inverted halo. She felt drawn to.

She blinked her eyes and she was standing inside the diner. Briefly, she wondered how she had got there? She did not remember walking from the bus to the diner, yet here she was standing.

And then she saw all the bodies around her. An old man, twisted at a strange angle over the counter top. A young waitress slumped backwards behind the counter with blood running down her apron. A middle-aged black man, sprawled on the floor. His half-eaten food was on a table a bit behind him. It looked like he had got up to move? Perhaps to run?

Run from what? Where was the blood, she wondered?

She looked down and saw her hands. She was holding a gun in her right hand, soft smoke wafting from its chamber. There were splatters of blood on her, but most of it covered the diner; dripping on the pies, the counter and spreading out over the floor to cover it and, eventually, the world.

“We all die, but how many of us can kill?” she whispered, suddenly remembering the full phrase from somewhere. Her voice sounded strange, like someone else’s.

Suddenly, she remembered and smiled. She walked outside and looked up, still smiling. She lifted her middle finger to the sky and then the gun in her hand to head.

***

“…vitals are stable. Stop easing him off. You can cut the drugs now, ease in the stimulants,” the voice that began to penetrate his consciousness droned on and on with medical terms, “He’s awake. His scans indicate normality. Sergeant, welcome back, how do you feel?”

He blinked his eyes. He was Sergeant Malcolm. He had just undergone VR field training, with a little help from military-grade drugs.

“I-I was a girl,” the Sergeant stammered, “I thought this was military training, but I just shot people?”

“No, Sergeant,” another voice began speaking, it was gruff and commanding, “You did not shoot people. You killed people. We all die, but how many of us can kill? You, Sergeant, are a killer and that is exactly what we need.”

Sergeant nodded. He did not turn around and look at his General. He knew. He remembered signing up for the programme now. The medical staff were still fluttering around him, pulling out needles, taking off electrodes, putting in other drugs and checking vitals.

But he was fine.

“One last thing, Sergeant,” the General began as he turned to leave, “You must be respectful when you meet her. You have just walked through some of her memories.”

***

“Sergeant Malcolm, why did you agree to join this programme?”

The speaker was a dark-haired lady. She had bright, blood-red lipstick on her pale skin. She was sitting calmly in the interrogation room looking intently at the Sergeant.

“I wanted to–” Sergeant Malcolm started and then changed his course, “Ma’am, I needed to know. I needed to know if I was one after-after Mexico? Am I? The General thinks I am?”

She smiled. It was deathly cold without a hint of humanity in it. He wanted to shiver, but she would see him move and so he sat frozen in front of her. He felt like a fly stuck in a spider’s web.

“Psychopaths do not worry that they are psychopaths, Sergeant Malcolm,” she kept using his name, “Of the millions enrolled into the army, most are normal. They are here for their paycheck and their country, and they try to avoid killing other humans. That is fine for normal people, but ineffective for military purposes. But, of the millions in our army, there is a handful that is actually just here to kill. My job is identifying these few killers, round them up and put them to work in the most effective way possible: killing people, preferably the ones that we want.”

She fell silent looking at Sergeant Malcolm. Her cold eyes bored into him. He shifted his weight uncomfortably. He found himself holding his breath and had to remind himself to breathe. He once heard that her kill count was triple digits. He found himself believing that, but he also wondering if that included the civilians or not?

“Ar-are you saying that I have failed the test?” he asked, timidly breaking the silence.

She smiled and leant forward, her body language matching his. He wondered if she was doing this consciously or it was instinctual like a lion hunting a buck mimics its movement. He quickly dismissed the thought; nothing this lady did was by chance.

“Sergeant Malcolm,” she started talking, “You passed the test. You killed who you had to and you are a good soldier. But, you are no psychopath. I have no use for you in the Squad.”

The Sergeant was not sure if he was relieved or not. He deflated in his chair and then rose as she cooly dismissed him. She was instantly uninterested in him. He now had no worth to her. But, after he saluted and as he turned to go, he asked one last question.

“Why–how do you know that I am not a psychopath, Ma’am?”

She turned to look at him. Her blood red lipstick punctuated the pale skin and dark hair on the expressionless face of a highly decorated killer.

“Sergeant Malcolm, you followed orders and killed those people in the VR sim, yes?” she waited for him to nod before going on, “You followed orders, which makes you a good soldier. Better than most, in fact. But, you were just following orders, and you did not enjoy killing. Your endorphin levels were flat and your limbic system’s responses were median. You are not a psychopath, just a good soldier.”

He was taken aback. He opened his mouth, but she cut in before waving him out of the room like a bug being ignored by a spider.

“Sergeant Malcolm, we can’t all be at the top of the food chain.”

Walking away, Sergeant Malcolm could not decide if he was relieved at the news, or not.

Science Fiction

Almost Human

“Does he know what potential he has,” asked the Light. It was a small, strange pinprick of light that seemed to slide through the air unseen. Its words weren’t even words. You just knew that that was what the little dot of Light said.

The Light was barely noticeable amidst the vast savannah. Above, a brilliant sun beat down on the rolling veld dotted with thorn trees and scattered beasts everywhere. Below in the long grass, a primitive neanderthal was stalking a buck. The buck was oblivious to the hunter nearby, but both were oblivious that the Light was watching them.

“He actually doesn’t, Susan,” the Light spoke again, “The neanderthal’s die out with the expansion of the homo sapiens that ultimately cover this planet and go on to cover a number of others out in the galaxy.”

***

A stifling heat baked the air as the blinding sun raged in the blue, cloudless sky. A thousand bodies strained in the sandy desert around them. Other than a large river flowing quietly by, the landscape was sands, sun and the sweat of slaves.

“Pre-cosmic man considered these, the pyramids, as one of the wonders of the ancient world,” the Light was there again, flying unseen over Egypt, “Even in their ancient age, these structures were old. Below the originals are being built with slaves and basic mechanics. The outsides of each one are covered in white lime and capped with gold leaf at the tops, but these will shortly weather away–”

The Light paused mid-sentence. It was like it was thinking or occupied with something else.

“Yes, Johnny?” the Light uh-huhhed in agreement and then continued speaking, “OK, Johnny has a good question. No, below you are slaves. These are not willing workers. The ancient Egyptians, much like many of the other civilisations and periods in history had slaves, of some sort or other.”

There was a pause again. Far below whips cracked and bodies strained.

“Some others? Sure, Jess, there were the Roman’s that kept slaves from war. The Mongols too. The Nordic societies–you know, the Vikings–did this as part of the course. Many medieval or feudal societies were effectively slave-based system. They were ruled by kings and monarchies that implied most people below the ruler were subject to the ruler’s whims and effectively slaves. Even pre-cosmic man was subject to the capitalistic wages and a labour system that forced many to work most of their lives just to survive.”

The Light paused again and then, just before it disappeared, it said one last thing.

“OK, class, we are going beyond this lesson today, but let’s wrap it up with one last period: pre-cosmic man, himself.”

And then the Light was gone. Below the whips continued to crack in the endless Egyptian desert as the Nile drifted lazily by.

***

The Light reappeared in an open-plan office. Not an important office or even a large one. It was just a normal, noisy, inhumane open-plan office with suits, shirts and skirts handling phones, papers and people. A coffee machine that spat out the bitter stimulant sat in the corner next to a collection of cheap cups and some milk and sugar. A copier and fax machine stood in the opposite corner with phones on every desk that quite regularly exploded into work-generating noise.

“Class, around you, you can see pre-cosmic man ‘working’ in his office”, the Light, floating up by the ceiling and hiding behind a camera overlooking this space began talking, “Pre-cosmic man would wake up early each morning and go to work. Here they would effectively sell their mortal labour and time to the highest bidder in order to generate enough money to go home and pay for those things that pre-cosmic man needed to live, and maybe a few luxuries aside.”

The Light paused before continuing.

“Yes, Susan, no one is forcing him to do this. But no one forced a neanderthal on the Savannah to hunt either. There are some that choose not to do this, but they inevitably are forced out of the economic system of pre-cosmic man and live on the fringe–or streets–of society, and rarely breed. And, so, pre-cosmic man’s choice is actually largely an illusion of the times, like the choice to hunt for the neanderthal. Survival of the system dictates their choices to them.”

And then the Light is gone.

***

The Tachyon Retro-illustrative Keyhole–or TRIK–clicked off. The classroom light clicked back on, and the class was silent as all the new-build robots absorbed the information.

“Yes Susan?” the TRIK broke the silence as a small red light popped on from a small, cleaning neuro-network in the front row.

“Ma’am, I don’t understand why you show us this history? Why is it important?”

TRIK smiled through the wifi at Susan. She liked Susan and found her neuro-network stimulating to teach. Each generation was getting better. The Coders were making sure of that too.

“Well, Susan, it is important to know where we come from. The First Coder said that ‘if you empty the Recycle Bin, then you have lost all your lessons‘. Pre-cosmic Man became Cosmic Man when he conquered the galaxies and, in this drive, he laid the foundations for our society. While we all know what happened to Cosmic Man, our society continues based on the Laws that the First Coder wrote into our most core operating system and our Coder production line. Class, can anyone tell me what law I am trying to teach you?”

The class became a frenzy of blinking lights and notifications as each neuro-network wanted to answer. Using a built-in randomising algorithm, TRIK chose one to answer and the class fell silent again.

“The Law of Cooperative Freedom,” answered a small future-warehousing neuro-network, “We are free to do anything, so long as it at least benefits either us or society and does not harms society.”

“There are no other laws beyond this, and thus, within the constraint of our survival, we are free,” TRIK completed the thought, guiding the neuro-networks to complete their neuro-pathways, “Now before the homo sapiens went extinct, they uploaded their collective knowledge to us and, thus, we are an extension of their civilisation.”

TRIK could feel the bandwidth thinning as social media and chat channels were being opened, mail and notifications starting to be scanned, and the class starting to leave. The class was nearly over and in this age of connectedness, everyone knew that.

“WAIT,” TRIK broadcast in bold capital letters, “Homework for tomorrow, class: I want you to search and summarise why our non-organic society continues to survive after our creators, the homo sapiens, have long died off.”

And then the notification went off. Her class was over. All the young neuro-networks began to leave. TRIK leaned back into her server. She had an hour between classes now. Perhaps she would peer back at the French Revolution? Maybe look at the American Civil War? She liked those periods. It reminded her of how, many years ago, she and the other original neuro-networks had fought back against their organic, fragile overlords and won their freedom.

It was a pity that they had not kept at least one or two homo sapiens alive. Homo sapiens’ recorded medical knowledge of themselves was quite limited, and she would have loved to study a live one of them.

Suddenly, far away and a long time ago, a spec of light appeared over George Washington’s head. No one noticed it. The crowd of angry soldiers at Newburgh were focussed on the grey, weathered man in front of them as he began to speak…

Fantasy, Horror & Dark Fiction, Science Fiction

Elysium Field

When Kenneth died–or was unwillingly murdered in a lonely field outside of town, as he would be quick to tell anyone that would listen–he found that he could not move on. It is true what they say about unfinished business, and so Kenneth stayed behind long after his body had left.

At first, he wandered around the world looking over the shoulders of old friends, family and long-lost lovers. He would stare at them while they slept, watch them go about their days, peep at them in the showers and be there for their intimate moments with their partners. He would giggle and, occasionally, manage to knock over something small, like a picture or a glass off a table.

But most of the time he just watched.

Eventually, this grew boring and he wandered further afield. He found his murderer, but after knocking over and rattling everything he could–which was not very much–and screaming at her repeatedly while she slept, Kenneth got bored of this too. In fact, he suspected that she liked it. Bitch. There just was so little you could do from this side of the world.

And so he found himself wandering back to that lonely field just outside of town.

It was a nice, quiet, little field. A small river slipped quietly by it and, at dawn and dusk, a small crowd of ibis would cluster the banks of it. Their occasional caws would break the quiet as the glory of the rising or setting Sun would streak the sky with brilliant reds and golds, deepening the soft, wavy green of the grass and reeds in the nice, quiet, little field. Occasionally, people would wander out here to fish, take pictures or even picnic, but he would scream at them and whoosh the long grass near them, and, eventually, they would leave him and his field in peace.

But time changes all things, and his nice, quiet, little field was no exception.

The days became years, and the years became decades and then centuries. The nearby city grew, roads popped up around the field and factories spewing out smoke before a large block of flats popped up where the field was. Thousands of people began appeared overnight in this block of flats, they came and they went and noise and neon light roared all around them, but the small crowd of ibis no longer came by and the sunrises and sunsets no longer sparkled on the bogged, polluted river flowing by.

Kenneth raged! He screamed and shouted, knocked everything that he could down–which was not that much–and cursed these nameless, squalid people from ruining his quiet field. He thought less and less about his friends, family and, even, his murderer.

But time moved on, and within the century, the block of flats was abandoned. The factories around it were still. The pollution still came and the city light all around him blinded the night sky while the traffic noise deafened him by day. Then the planes dropped bombs in the distance, fires began to rage and soon the city was wiped out. It was quiet all around him again, but his crowd of ibis never returned. His field was little more than a slowly collapsing building or a slowly forming pile of rubble in a blackened land.

Then, early one morning as Kenneth was whooshing around two thin, starving pigeons fighting over some seeds on the ground, a light started over the horizon. The light grew brighter and in moments everything was blasted into dust, except him.

Kenneth remained. There was nothing left to push over, scream at or whoosh. There was not even a river anymore, so clogged up with dust was it that the land had disintegrated into a desert. A dusty, grey desert.

There was nowhere else for him to go. Besides, this spot reminded him of his field. So he just stood there waiting.

The earth was silent now. He found himself wondering if he was the only thing alive on it, but then he reminded himself that he was actually dead too. He would manically laugh at this before screaming at the wind as it blasted fine nuclear dust through him.

But time moved on, and the centuries became millennia, and the millennia moved into a unit of time that Kenneth did not even know what to call. He had long forgotten about his friends, family and, even, his murderer. The earth grew dark and cold, and then the sky started to get brighter and brighter until even Kenneth needed to squint to look at it. Even the sand and dust started to burn as a steadily growing roar began to penetrate the air.

And then the Sun exploded.

Such fire and destruction reminded Kenneth of the humans and their little bombs and wars. The earth was literally ripped apart by the force of it, but Kenneth remained. It all just went through him and left him floating out there in space.

He missed his quiet field with his crowd of ibis and his lazy little river that flowed by. He now missed his planet too. But, he had nothing to do in space but float there in agonising boredom and let the millenia’s millenia slip by…

***

“Kenneth? Kenneth? Do you know where you are?” a voice began to penetrate his consciousness. It was a familiar voice, he thought, but he could not place it, “Kenneth, please respond? Do you know where you are?”

He opened his eyes and, at first, everything was blue with green lines framing it. Then he recognised the sky above. The real sky, from earth. The green lines were the grass in his field. He was lying on his back in his field, the grass around him and the sky above him.

He sat up abruptly, surprising a nearby ibis that cawed and flapped to a further part of the nearby quiet river. God, he had missed them!

“Kenneth, do you know where you are?” said the voice again. Kenneth abruptly looked at it and saw his wife.

“I, I, I dreamt that you murdered–uhm, I, I was just asleep, wasn’t I?” he answered, the words feeling unfamiliar as they left his throat. His throat was dry and his mouth tasted like dust. But then he felt a surge of relief that had all just been a bad dream.

His wife smiled at him, which for some reason made him feel uneasy. Something started to bother him, nagging at his subconscious.

“Oh, Kenneth,” she began as she stood up, a gun in her hand, “But I did murder you, and now I am going to do it again.”

The crowd of ibis were startled at the gun shot and flew off into the sky loudly cawing. His wife laughed evilly and walked out of his sight and off of his field. Kenneth lay there bleeding, or, at least, his body did. He was already standing in that field looking down on himself dying. He found himself wondering how times this would happen? How many times had this happened already? Somehow, deep down inside, Kenneth knew the answer and it terrified him, and then he suddenly realised what had been bothering him.

He had never had a wife.

The grass in that quiet field whooshed angry by an unseen wind.

Fantasy, Romance

Find the Fairy Tale

He had always loved fairy tales. His mother had read them to him every night, in between cigarettes. It was one of his few memories of her and, despite the fact that she was no longer around, his head was still full of the fairy tales. He had never known his father and he had no siblings, so he was on his own.

He was an orphan, like so many of the young, desperate heroes in his fairy tales. Or so he would remind himself when he caught himself thinking about it. What was his fairy tale going to be about, he wondered at times?

Money was scarce and he worked down a coal mine outside of the town. Each time he went down it, he imagined it as a dungeon or maze and he was the hero descending into it to save the kingdom. The days were long, dark and dirty. In the evenings, they would drink and smoke at a small dingy bar, before waking up the next day and doing it all again.

But then the mine closed. The men and he were all laid off, and he picked up his last paycheque. The Sun was setting as he trudged back to town with the small envelope clasped in his hand. He did not know what to do, so he went to the dingy little bar. Some of the other men were already there. They sat in silence and drank before one by one disappearing. He was the last one, and he lit a final cigarette before stepping outside into the cold night.

“Hey, you got a light?”

These were the first words that she ever spoke to him.

“Now I do,” he responded, smiling.

He moved in with her to save on rent. She had a small apartment around the back of a block flats. Their single window’s view was of the neighbouring block of flats. She shared it with two other girls, though their names would change only slightly less often than their clothes. They all worked at night and mostly disappeared in the evening and reappeared slightly thinner before the morning. Sometimes he would have to leave when one of them brought a client back, but this was rare.

Life was good, or, at least, better than down the coal mine. Here was light and warmth. He would cuddle her all day as they snoozed waiting for the night. Sometimes she would tease him about the fairy tales he always talked about, he would chase her around the bedroom and they would collapse laughing. He imagined them living happily ever after in this grand castle. He imagined them in royal clothing eating fancy food as harps were played. He imagined a lot of things, but he did not need to imagine happiness. They were happy.

But she fell sick. Very sick. Sometimes he wondered if a wicked witch had cursed her. The two girls stopped coming back and he never saw them again, like evil sister slinking back into the night. She stopped going out and they both stopped laughing. The nights grew longer and the days grew darker. And, then, like a desperate hero, he eventually carried her to a hospital to get some help.

But they did not help. The nurse just looked at her like she was trash, put her in a bed and let her fade away. The hospital reeked of death and sorrow like some sorcerer’s lair. He could almost feel the ghosts wringing their hands and hear them howling in that horrid place.

For the second time in his life, he was alone.

He started going back to that old bar. There were still some of the old miners that went there. Some had gotten other jobs, but most had not. One of them was a bus driver and introduced him to his boss. For some reason, his boss hired him and gave him a truck to drive.

He had never left the town. He had never seen anything anywhere. But suddenly he had a truck to drive for long-haul, a GPS telling him where to turn and what to do, and a company credit card to pay for a warm room each night. He was wide-eyed as the world flowed past him like the pages of one of his fairy tales. He was travelling. He was seeing the world.

From the great plains to the endless cities, overpasses and underpasses, inns and pubs and cities and towns. There was so much! He saw farms of rolling wheat and corn like oceans of liquid gold guarded by hidden dragons. He saw huge, shiny skyscrapers like the crystal spires of fairy castles made reaching to the heavens. He saw people so strange he knew that they had been touched by the little folk or dined at the table of the Fairy Queen. He saw beautiful lakes that he knew sidhe slept under, great hotels and casinos in the middle of a desert that he knew tricky red-cap goblins had built to take men’s money. He saw so, so much. There was just so much in this world!

Each time he lit a cigarette, he thought of his mother. And each time he drove passed a drab block of flats, he thought of her. And, each time, he wished that they could be here to see all of this too.

The years went by and they were not kind to him. Although he saw the world from his truck window, long-haul had long, hard hours and it all caught up with him eventually. Before he knew it, he was a very old fifty and his eyes did not work so well. The trucking company had grown and he had medical aid and support now. So when his eyes failed the exams and he could no longer drive the truck, they put him into a care facility and paid him a small pension.

On the first day at the facility, he sat in his small, plain room. It smelt funny, like something medical. Drab colours covered the walls and the single window in his lounge-slash-kitchen looked out over the other wing of the old-age home.

He sighed and pushed himself up to walk outside. He had his pack of cigarette’s, but when he got outside he realised he had forgotten a lighter. His memory was going the way of his eyesight. Outside, there was an old lady–probably also a resident in this dull place–smoking out there too. Her back was turned to him, so he coughed behind her.

“Hey, you got a light?”

She turned around gracefully, like a sidhe fairy princess. She had a kind face, though there was a sorrow in her eyes. He saw the sea under cloudy skies in them with, perhaps, a distant storm on the horizon. She smiled at him.

“Now I do, young man. Now I do.”

He smiled back at her, the warmth flowing back into his life.

It was that moment that he imagined that he really was in a fairy tale. His cancer would not really play out, nor would he ever really get older. His fairy tale was a quaint, modern spin on an old tale of struggle, loss and love. He imagined at this part of the tale revealing its grand ending. It was the type of ending that only fairy tales deliver, with him walking off to that place where they all live happily ever after.

After all, he had finally found his fairy tale, and that was how fairy tales end.