Monthly Archives: June 2018

General Fiction

Ursla’s Longing

He first heard it when he was a child. A rusty, old tune on his mother’s old radio in their one-bedroom apartment on the fringes of the colorful Latin Quarters in Paris.

He had been home alone a lot when he was very young. His mother worked in the nights. He had his old toys to play with but had gotten bored and clambered up to the shelf in their tiny lounge. Pushing away all the frayed fantasy books his mother kept up there–she had named him after her favorite American author–he had stretched and found the radio. His little fingers had run along its surface until they found the buttons and prodded each of them until it sprang to life.

The crackling, old radio started playing music. It was beautiful. He got back to the ground and then stood very still, hardly daring to breathe just in case it would break the ethereal melody filling the lonely apartment.

An angel was sorrowfully singing as a slow drumbeat and blues rhythm provided her texture. Her voice was both strong and quiet at the same but intensely loving with a sense of regret that gave him goosebumps on his arms. It was in some foreign language but he could feel what she was feeling as each weeping word caressed the air.

It reminded him of his mother and things that had not yet happened and he could not explain, and he had started to cry. He hoped that one of her clients did not hurt his mother tonight. He wished she did not have to work at night.

And then the song faded into its end as the DJ’s voice started.

“And that was the lovely ‘Longing’, now moving onto more recent and better-known hits–”

***

“I loved that last piece you played,” the pierced and tattooed guy leaned across and told him before walking out of the bar, “Really good stuff, man. Soulful.”

“Thanks,” he said, nodding as he began to pack his guitar away, “Wrote it for my late mother…” he started but the guy was already gone and the focus in the bar had now shifted away from the stage back to each patron’s own drink.

He sighed and stepped down from the shallow stage at the back of the small London pub.

“Hey, Ursla,” a gruff voice barked at him, “Go have your smoke break but be back by ten. You play another set then, cool?”

He nodded, swung his guitar over his back and stepped out into the night as he lit a cigarette. Just then, a London cab drove by with its window rolled halfway down and music emanating from its interior.

Ursla was transfixed. Tears came to the corners of his eye as he held his breath, forgotten cigarette in hand and frozen halfway from his mouth.

He suddenly remembered how his mom’s old apartment had smelt as crêpes, smoke and tourist bustle had wafted upwards from the Latin Quarter’s Parisian streets. He remembered his mom and holding her as she cried. She had asked him if he was alright while waiting at the hospital for her later that night. He remembered how frightened he was as a little boy and how the Minister had called his mom by her maiden name at the funeral. It had sounded so foreign and alien to him. He remembered how much more alone that had made him feel…

He stood there remembering so many things as the ethereal song floated through the air.

Instantly, he knew this was the same song that he had heard once all those years ago. The woman’s voice softly caressing her sorrows in what he now recognized as Spanish poetry while the drums kept her heart beating and the blues guitar gave her a stage to weep on…

Exquisite and heart-wrenching.

And then the London cab was gone, the damp English evening continued and the moment had passed. He remembered his cigarette and completed the motion to his mouth where he pulled a long, hard drag of it before sighing the smoke out.

One day, he swore, he would find that song and play until the end of time. He would show his children and his children’s children that song and explain what it meant to him. That was his song. If his life was a movie, that song would be the soundtrack.

***

“For those who were lucky enough to know my grandfather,” the young man said, his face taught as he struggled with emotions, “They would know that he did not have the luckiest childhood nor the easiest path through life to arrive here in California. But they would also know that he strove to make everyone else’s lives luckier and easier and better in every way imaginable. Music was his second love while Granny and my mother, my uncles and all of us were his first love. We are his family and he was ours. We are here because of you, Grandad, and we are better for you, but you will always, always be missed–”

The young man stepped away from the podium and wiped his eyes, his brave mask showing cracks as his eyes misted up. The small crowd into the church hardly noticed as some were openly crying while the rest were barely holding themselves together.

“Thank you, John,” the Minister said stepping up to the mic, “We will walk out to the cemetery for the burial before we come back for tea and coffee and to give our condolences to the family. Now, as we proceed, the three grandchildren–John, Ronald, and Reuel–have selected their Grandfather’s favorite song and we will play it. Everyone, please stand and let us proceed out the back of the hall.”

The church was suddenly filled with an angel’s sorrowful singing as a slow drumbeat and blues rhythm provided texture. Her voice was both strong and quiet at the same but intensely loving with a sense of regret that gave those hearing it goosebumps on their arms. It was an old Spanish poem and none gathered there could understand it, but they could all feel what she was feeling as each weeping word caressed the air and mixed with their sense of loss at Grandad Ursla’s passing.

Science Fiction

The Cost of Immortality

It was the colorful 2050’s when they discovered the Pill and the world embraced it. Contexin Phosphorexia Dichloride Isotype IV or, as it was commonly known, “the Pill” cured everything. Well, it did not actually cure anything, but it did prevent everything. It blocked all viruses known to man, it stopped cancer from forming and, yes, it even prevented natural death.

The Pill did all this by freezing you at a cellular level and locking each cell into place forever.

The chemical was a rare and rather accidental by-product of research into cryogenic stasis sleeper cells. While quite useless for what it had been designed for, the chemical in small amounts froze living cells and left it in a kind of waking-stasis that made the body immune to all non-violent threats. You could still die from car crashes, being shot or stabbed, or other such violent ends, but cancer, viruses and old age would never get you. You would stay exactly the same as the day that you took the Pill.

It was the 2050’s and old North Korea and war was forgotten. Technologies that had long since thought to be beyond the reach of man were appearing daily across the world. Cold fusion was being commercially refined into a nearly infinite source of power for the planet, the genome was being tuned like a common guitar string–though full human cloning remained strangely elusive–and even strides in inorganic teleportation and brain-internet interfacing were happening in leaps and bounds.

In this euphoria, the Pill was readily embraced by enthusiastic masses, despite its one, single, permanent side-effect: infertility. Once the cells were trapped in eternal stasis, no procreation could take hold within the now solid-state biology of the individual.

While a small number rallied against this side-effect, the vast majority considered infertility a minor price to pay for a chance to be immortal. Some even applauded this side-effect as a solution for global over-population. Whatever their reasons, justification, and rationalizations, men and women everywhere were taking the Pill.

Mankind would never be the same.

***

The death count was higher than the world had seen for many decades, but the ironically named Living terrorists were successfully contained and their remnants exterminated or incarcerated. At the time, this was for the betterment of the majority, but in the end, this was actually the beginning of the end.

By now the vast majority of the global population had taken the Pill–or their children or their children’s children had taken it–and their immortality had brought unfounded wealth accumulation over their long lives. Death was expensive as knowledge and experience were lost and taxes triggered while empires were taken over by inferior heirs.

The Pill had solved all of this as even the lowliest person now could accumulate wealth and even minor savings would compound into great fortunes over enough time.

This was a good thing for the majority of the global population that had taken the Pill, but the opposite was true for the small percentage that had decided not to take the Pill and retain their fertility.

Growing immortal wealth had driven inflation while the normal frictional costs of life, death and children ate into the so-called Livings’ savings and saw them increasingly marginalized in a fast-changing global economy.

Humanity had two classes: the immortals were both the majority and the have’s while those that had chosen to be mortal were the minority and the have-not’s.

What happened is what always happens when the well-resourced majority have a conflict with the poorly-resourced minority: laws were passed and events smoothed over to favor the majority and the minority was more and more marginalized over time.

And then the bombings started.

The majority of the world may have been immortal from natural causes, but they could still die. They still feared their ultimate end and, when the bombings started, the panic was palpable.

It all ended up in the military and police rounding up the Living around the world and either killing them or placing them into prison for life sentences with no parole. There were questions about the guilt of all the Living picked up but many of these were smoothed over by fearful courts and the majority consensus.

Then, after a hundred years had passed, the end result was the same: no one in the world was fertile anymore. Not one single human being could bear or produce a child.

***

No matter how small the probability of a fatal accident, a violent end or suicide, if a human life is given enough time these same odds rise to a near certainty. Eventually, something will happen somehow and somewhere, and the person will die.

In the thousand-odd years that passed after the final Living had passed in prison and mankind had become infertile, the eight billion immortals on Earth were whittled down to a handful of survivors.

Leading up to this, over the millennia, some immortals died in car accidents, some were mugged or murdered, some died in freak accidents while a good number just eventually committed suicide. Finally, there were even a number of small skirmishes that killed a number but that was the exception.

The vast majority just died in statistically probable accidents or suicide. Mankind’s end came slowly and with great attrition that saw the species slip slowly into oblivion.

The great cities of the world were all self-sufficient with cold fusion power grids and autonomous AI and robots running everything. No new skills or knowledge were introduced into civilization and, slowly, those who knew how died and their knowledge left the world.

Eventually, no one knew how anything worked. They only knew that it did. And the cities and, indeed, entire countries and then continents ran themselves.

The few surviving men were but ghosts in the great machine that they had constructed and the chill winds of hollow movement scattered them like Autumn leaves before the Winter.

At first, the few survivors each had an entire city to themselves, but, eventually, it was an entire continent.

And then, eventually, even they disappeared. One killed the other and was then, in turn, killed by the next. One crashed their car while drunk, another blew their brains out while the next one overdosed on narcotics.

Eventually, the last one climbed up the greatest of mankind’s towers. From the top, you could see the electric wilderness of man stretching out before you like some empty, blinking machine that had long since lost its purpose. And, to the dripping crimsons of mankind’s last sunset, he leapt.

Medical bots scampered forth and emergency lights blinked, but mankind was no more. The funeral bots took the body, labeled it and buried while admin bots updated the official records.

And then the City–as all the rest of the cities in the world–carried on running itself on sustainable energy with AI and robots scurrying around its corners.

But there were no people anywhere anymore. Mankind was no more. It had paid the price of immortality.

General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Ghost Car

He got out of the car. It softly chimed at him, reminding him to close the door behind him.

He did so and barely noticed the empty, self-driving vehicle roll away into the vast city night.

“Welcome, welcome,” the man at the front door gushed, a hint of red wine on his lips, “Come inside. The drinks are in the fridge and on bar, help yourself to anything. Gimme a shout if you need anything, otherwise, most people are chilling in the lounge and around the pool outside…”

He nodded and shook the host’s hand, thanking him for the invite. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and became part of the nightly noise of society.

***

“No way!” the tipsy lady exclaimed, clutching her mobile phone in one hand and her glass of wine in the other, “But I heard a better one. You guys ever heard of the Ghost Car?”

Murmurs rippled through the throng of people in various states of intoxication. There were some confused looks and plenty of shaking heads with a chuckle or a giggle or two.

“So, my girlfriend works in a call center and she says that her boss told her that one of their clients does the big data for one of these tech businesses. She says that one day they picked up an anomaly and they’ve been tracking it ever since. It’s the–” she paused just a little bit for effect, “Ghost Car!”

She unconsciously checked her phone while taking a sip of the wine in her hand. A couple more heads had turned her way now and everyone was waiting for her to continue.

She swallowed her sip and giggled before going on.

“So you guys remember when the ride-hailing apps all went autonomous and driverless, right? Must be like ten or fifteen years ago now. Well, in between the asset recalls, upgrades and switches of models and software, one of the fleet’s cars disappeared. Or fell through the cracks. Or something. It was a full self-driving, solar-powered electric car and even self-repairing using those autonomous auto-shops. No one can find this thing anymore, yet the data keeps streaming in some corrupted form or something, so they know that it’s out there.”

She paused again, scanning the crowd while sipping her wine again.

“They say that it still drives around out there, its neuro-network learning and its GPS still navigating, but no one has been able to hail it or find it or, even, say inside it in like almost two decades! Or, at least, no one who has ever come back…!”

She chuckled and added, “How random and scary is that?” before taking another sip of her now-empty wine.

There was scattered laughter at this while others looked perturbed. The girl giggled and checked her phone again before stumbling back off to the kitchen.

***

“Thanks for coming,” the host gushed again, decidedly more red wine on his lips that when he had first opened the door, “Was so, so lovely seeing you. You really come over again. This was fun. Anyway, hey, get home safe now.”

He smiled and shook the host’s hand. He was also feeling quite tipsy now.

“Absolutely awesome night! Don’t worry about me, my rides coming now. I won’t be driving, in fact, no one will!”

They both laughed at this, though the joke had gotten old about a decade ago.

“Whoa, shit,” the host exclaimed, pointing behind him, “Your rides already here. I didn’t see it coming! That was so fast. And silent. Really silent…”

“Yeah, these damn electric engines are so quiet,” he muttered, glancing at the app on his phone, “That’s strange. Says my ride isn’t here yet. Anyway, I may as well jump in.”

He stepped out around the car and pulled the door open. It was strangely heavy and stiff. Perhaps this was an older model car? Though, he hardly noticed, waving his goodbyes at the host for one final good impression.

It was only when he was inside and the car was rolling off that he noticed the dust. Everything was caked in layers of thick dust and even the air had a strange, musty smell. Was that a scratch in the inside door panel? Had someone tried to claw their way out?

His head was spinning and his heart started pounding. It was at this moment that he reached for the door and found that it had been locked.

In fact, all the doors had been locked.

By now the car was on the highway and going too fast to do anything else but sit back and wait. Almost like the car sensed this and its old-school radio clicked on. He did not recognize the song, but some old rock ballade was being sung about a guy who could not get any satisfaction.