“He knew the woman was dead before she hit the ground. Even though her throat had been deeply slashed, the amount of blood still surprised and sickened him. As he watched her fall, he realized he too was being watched. He turned and ran from the darkened alleyway onto the busy thoroughfare, narrowly avoiding the oncoming traffic. Horns blared, brakes squealed, but he found safe harbor in an unlocked delivery entrance to one of the many downtown food suppliers’ warehouses. He glanced quickly through a crack in the door, and saw he had not been followed. No one would know that it was he in the alley. He took his handkerchief from his shirt pocket, wiped his face and blotted his shirt and pants to remove the blood that had splattered when she was first cut. Perhaps he should just walk home instead of taking the transit; less noticeable that way. He put his handkerchief back in his pocket so he could discard it at home; leaving it here would only bring disaster to his doorstep. They would be on him within the hour because of the DNA. He decided he would wait a few more minutes before he ventured back out on the street. He reached for his wallet to see if he had enough coins for a coffee from one of the sidewalk dispensers, but found his pants pocket was torn and his wallet was nowhere to be found. He frantically turned all his pockets inside out, but knew exactly what had happened. When he had turned to run down the alley, he had run into a pipe sticking out of the wall and got his suit caught up on it. When he had pulled to free himself, the pocket had torn and his wallet had fallen out. His wallet, with his identi-card inside, that contained his name, address, photo, fingerprints, DNA strip… Now, there would be no just walking away.”

The great wars of the future are over. A society obsessed with
violence is born. John Hollis questions life in a world where death is
mandated by The State.

About the Author:

S.C. Hayden’s fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and
journals throughout the English speaking world. His first novel, a
social satire titled “American Idol” is slated for publication with
Mythica Publishing. He is currently at work on a collection of short
fiction.

Excerpt:

Dayton Death’s Inc. provided every violent death imaginable. You could
be lynched, hung, drawn and quartered, guillotined, buried alive,
stoned, set on fire, or ground into sausage. They also provided, for
those who could afford it, some of the most spectacular deaths in the
industry. Dayton aired a television series, Deathstyles of the Rich
and Famous, dedicated to showcasing the most expensive celebrity End
Day events in The State. Just that past week, Country Music sensation
Jeb Reynolds was wrapped in designer fireworks and shot two hundred
feet into the air from the mouth of a canon. He exploded over the
North Pacific Ocean in an array of brilliant sunbursts and smoky
contrails. Crimsons saffrons and cerulean blues flashed magnificently
in the evening sky, as his hit single, No State Like My State, played
at deafening decibels. With the last explosion, the flares converged
and formed an image of the music legend’s face. The glowing bust hung
for a moment in the sky, then dissipated in nebulous smoky haze.

My day began with breakfast, going to work at the bank and coming home to an all but empty apartment with just my faithful dog for company.  I felt as though I was going through the motions of life and my life resembled watching an old movie or rerun of a television program everyday.  Life became mundane with no challenges ahead and nothing to look forward to.  I got up at the same time every day, went to work, and came home.  I am a bank President.  I run the largest bank in this town.  It is not a very exciting job, but the money is good and it pays for my kid’s school tuition fees and their various extra-curricular activities.  There is even money for my soon to be ex-wife to shop wherever and whenever she wants.

My wife, who never had to work a day in her life, said she was bored and I provided her with no excitement.  She had been going to the gym, working out, and met someone else there.  She decided to take herself and my children and go and live with this total stranger after knowing him for just one month.  She even managed to get herself a job as a copy editor at the local newspaper in the area where she was moving to.  The man she met was the paper’s editor and I cannot see how his job was any more exciting than mine was.  However, he was 10 years younger than me and that seemed to be the draw.

Watching them leave, and feeling a tangled mixture of emotions, I realized that I could not make a difference in other people’s lives.  I needed to start with my own.  Staring into her new paramour’s face as he got into his car with my family, I had an uneasy feeling.  His eyes stared straight at me and his smile was cold and frightening.  He looked evil.  He did not speak directly to me and my kids were shaking with fear. My wife told me it would be better this way and she got into the car and never looked back.

I stood there staring at the back of the car until it disappeared.  I could not believe what had happened nor would I ever believe that I had no choice but to let it.  My children are my life and I cannot think about living the rest of it without them However, Jana felt that since I bored her to death with my day at the bank and nothing much ever happened to excite her during hers, this young guy whose face looked cold and demonic was the right one for her.  It was as if he had her under a spell.

I began to think of places that I could go and where I would spend the rest of my life.  I couldn’t even think that far ahead.  I wandered down the road until I came to a small body of water that was surrounded by trees and grass.  There was no one in sight.  It was pitch black.  The sky was covered with clouds so dark and ominous that I stood frozen to the spot and couldn’t move.  The air was damp and yet I felt nothing.  I was neither hot nor cold.  I felt numb.  Feeling nothing but pain in my heart and fear that someone would finally find me and make me go back to the life I had before, I knew that I had to make a move in some direction.

I began contemplating my next step.  I didn’t know where I was or where the road would lead me.  It was so dark that I decided to stay where I was until morning.  However, that decision was not so easy to fulfil.  I saw a light coming towards me from a distance.  I hid behind a tree, or at least, I tried to, but I was wearing a yellow shirt and the driver must have seen me from a distance.  He got out and walked in my direction.  Being in an isolated area, I didn’t know where to go or where to run.  I just stood there like a statue hoping that I would look like part of the scenery.  As he came closer, I realized that he was a police officer and might recognize me and take me back home.

He drew closer, but, before he could approach close enough to speak I heard the crackling of his radio, and he stopped in his tracks, but not before looking me straight in the eye with his cold eyes and icy stare.  His smile sent chills down my spine and I prayed he would not come any closer.  Suddenly, he tuned and returned to his car and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I thought that for a minute he was the same man who had taken my family away from me.  However, from a distance I could not be sure. I passed the night in that place, rooted to the spot, afraid and unsure of myself. With the coming of daylight I summoned what remained of my courage, and made my way home. That very day, things began to change.

Twitter: @franellena

Way back at the start of the century, the role-playing sites had been a revelation. People had thrown themselves into them, become slaves. masters, warlords – even poets, God help them. They’d fallen in love, married, indulged in sexual gymnastics totally incompatible with their physical condition and levels of attractiveness. And many of them had been broken when they found that the magic and freedoms they enjoyed in their virtual worlds just refused to transfer to their everyday routines.

But evolution got faster: the servers got bigger, the online experiences became even more realistic and the headsets, with their visual and olfactory sophistication, transported wearers into a virtuality which moved closer and closer to the real.

For Jez, it still wasn’t fast enough. It struck home one day in May. After breakfast he’d put on his headset and logged in to AD, which is what everyone now called Alternative Dimension. There, he was Gabriel, master of Glentyre. He harnessed his unicorn, rode it through the lava flow, left it tied up outside the Sistine Chapel while he ducked inside to fuck a wolf he’d met the previous evening in Chicago. It wasn’t special but the wolf was grateful. On the way back to his ranch on the plateau, he stopped briefly to release a tree elf from a rock in which she’d been locked by a guy with one silver wing sticking out of his forehead. She was grateful, too. The day had started well.

When he got home, his neighbour Gerry, a homosexual giraffe whose aspirations to be a DJ had so far been wrecked by the fact that he had no microphone or deck, was outside, doing his Tai Chi.

‘Hey Gerry,’ said Gabriel.

The giraffe ignored him as he moved his neck slowly from one side of his garden to the other. Gabriel stepped back as it hovered over him and, yet again, plummeted off his footpath to the floor of the ravine six thousand feet below. He always did that. It was so tedious. He got up, dusted his jacket down and flew back up. For maybe the hundredth time, he sighed at the predictability of AD and made a mental note to move the path away from the edge.

Inside the house, Derek, his stone gargoyle, was sweeping and dusting as usual. His welcome greeting sounded hollow.

‘Good morning, master. What is your pleasure?’

In the early days, before voice activation, Gabriel had smiled as he saw the words come up on the screen. Then the boredom had set in and he’d given him various answers.

‘World domination.’

‘Sex with a mushroom.’

‘Peanut butter with nipples.’

‘Tongueless cunnilingus.’

Derek had no sense of humour. His reply never varied.

‘The master has excellent taste.’

Bill Kirton.

Web: http://www.bill-kirton.co.uk/
Twitter @carver22

Taku from "The Gardener" - Illustration; Keith O'Connor

The man crossed the room, stood before Argarrai and spoke with a soft engaging voice, conveying more than direct translation.

“My name is Taku.” he said.

He looked out the window to where the lights of a ship could be seen slowly ascending through the atmosphere from the nearby space port. Argarrai had spent most of his professional life there.

“When I was young, I was like you, I viewed things the same way and my life was not unlike yours. I felt curiosity burning inside whenever I looked into the night sky. Interstellar travel was well established when I was born. My people had escaped gravity to explore our local space. Eventually reaching beyond our physical limits to travel intergalactic distances, using different scales of time and life. Ship after ship went into the darkness in search of universal answers. We found other civilisations, new materials and technologies but the simple questions remained.”

He paused.

“I would battle with what I was, what my world was, what my people were and simply, why?”

He looked at his hands as if first noticing them, glanced briefly at Argarrai and returned his gaze
to the stars.

“It was a long time ago”

The words “long time” were emphasised. The stranger was intriguing but there was something
odd, something that made Argarrai uncomfortable, he was too familiar.

“Who are you?”

The words rasped. Argarrai’s chest rose and fell rapidly, the sweat on his brow glistened as
breathing became more difficult. His toes were outlined, involuntarily clenching and unclenching
against the sheets.

“I have little time for new friends or flippant conversation.”

His eyes glistened with amusement; even on his death bed a little sarcasm could be served. His mind was clear and curious. This was how he had always felt! A sense of deep frustration at his place in the universe. A successful professional life and overcoming personal tragedy to raise his daughter Sen, were universally trivial – it was all constrained within a painfully minimal context and had little to do with the surrounding world, the planet he grew up on, the solar system, the galactic arm, deep space and the expanding universe beyond. In short – what was the bloody point?

Taku smiled kindly, apparently sensing Argarrai’s thoughts. He leaned further forward,
chuckling.

“Yes, you are just like me”

“You know that it is your time to die and you desperately want answers. For that you must live
much, much longer. You must look into the night sky and see more than stars.”

–

Maybe Tomorrow: @mayb2morrow

Fergus Neff: @chillyspoon

Illustration of Taku for The Gardener by Keith O’Connor – Aug 2009.

Life

It was supposed to be the highlight of her career, an alien planet, as foreign as it gets. But the air in her helmet was stale as a college dorm at 10 a.m. The gloves and boots sealed her from touch; not a co-ed dorm in that case. And she felt like a walking machine. Rough fabric crinkled and squeaked round arms and legs as if she were still back home in the water-tank. Someone had scrubbed the scenery off the walls and scattered rocks on the tiles.
Forget looking for alien life, Jen thought. She wasn’t even sure there were humans here.

Twitter: @mayb2morrow

“It is the year 2299.

There are almost no births—over seventy percent of the population is sterile. A genetic outcome of past history.
There is no disease of any kind.
The eco wars of two hundred years ago caused society to virtually breakdown.
Disease killed three billion people, approximately half of earth’s population.
Those who survived faced great hardship.
Extraterrestrials, already familiar with ancient earth exploration, developed colonies here.
They became the Guardians.
Astute scholars of ancient biblical history—they began to re-establish God Centers for the betterment of humankind.
Eventually they withdrew themselves.
More recently, human-alien hybrid Guardians have taken their place.

My treatise on our history.
I am a scholar and documenter, employed at the Center for Archeological Studies in Zone 29.
I am at my place of work when two Guardians come into see me.
They inform me that my son Corsco 123 has requested a life termination.
Such requests are rare.
We ride to the Great Hall in their flytram. There is little or no conversation.
I have been to the Great Hall previously–once when my birth provider and I married and once to hand over the infant for education and treatment. Treatment consisting of cyclic vaccination therapy. Preventative medicine thus enabling immortality.

I am handed over to two different Guardians. They are from the Office of Termination.
The door is opened and I am asked to sit at a desk. Facing me is a familiar slogan:
The all loving spirit of God comforts us all.
A motto—but never something I questioned. For I have always been an obedient citizen. A willing participant in the world I knew to be mine.

My name is Arbin 157. I am 157 years old.
“You have been informed?”
“Yes, I was told my son seeks termination.”
“That’s quite true. How do you feel about that?”
“I should like to speak with him!”
One of the Guardians cuts me off.
“It will not be necessary. His termination was approved and he’s already been euthanized.”
His words hit me hard. I stutter.
“But surely I should have had an opportunity to speak with him.”
“No. The procedure was carried out yesterday. His remains are in transport.”
I didn’t speak for some time. But only squirmed under their watchful gaze—glancing up every so often at the slogan.
I couldn’t understand his action. Our world was perfect—every desire catered for. We knew neither sickness nor death. No war had been fought within living memory.
Finally, I managed to speak.
“What reasons did he give?”
“He said he was ready. That was all he said.””