The Future Is Short Read online

  “This is insubordination. I command you to fire. You are deceived if you think you can defy me. We will leave nothing but a burning desert for the little Meek bastards.”

  “It is not we who are deceived. Chekov, show Mister Read to his quarters. As from this morning, General Dare is in command. We simply preferred you to condemn yourself before we acted. It is General Dare’s personal wish that you be slung into Mount Etna, right down into the fires of hell. A bastard that would see his own troops murdered to deceive mankind into unleashing a holocaust on other peace-loving sentient beings deserves no less a funeral pyre."

  [Story inspired by the original Eagle comic, 1950–1969, UK]

  Richard Bunning is an author of speculative fiction. He has also published reworked neoclassical plays, a totally daft gift book, and short stories in a mix of genres. His best-known book to date is Another Space in Time. His website, geared towards the support of independent authors across many genres, is http://richardbunningbooksandreviews.weebly.com. [email protected]

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  29.

  The Horde

  Tom Tinney

  It was five hundred years ago, when the Horde had arrived. It was an early spring, before the crops had even sprouted. That is how the story goes.

  They were here twenty seasons. That is all the time they needed to strip the Earth bare, lay waste to the great cities and scatter the survivors.

  They came from the heavens.

  They did not speak or announce their intent to the people, nor ask their permission; they just began mining.

  They did not attack the nations or announce a conquest; instead, they took no notice of the humans, as if they did not even exist.

  The Horde’s machines landed all over the Earth to begin digging and extracting every ounce of metal from the planet. Giant constructs came from the heavens and latched onto the earth like the leeches that lived in the swamps that now covered any low-lying land. They sucked up raw ore, man-made tools, power generators, wire, and vehicles. They found anything that contained metal and took it.

  The shamans of the day surmised that they were waging a galactic war and needed more raw materials. The Horde did not interact with the people in any way, treating them as pests that inhabited their latest claim. They processed the metals, precious and basic, out of all previously made products in their orbital smelters and dumped the nonmetal waste materials across the sky, raining down on the Earth for the next five hundred years.

  The great chiefs of the day sent messages and demands, then pleas for the Horde to stop. No answers came. Men sent their powerful armies against the Horde, but they were ignored, except when their metal weapons were taken away, with no regard for the men using them.

  The cities fell, forcing the tribes to become nomads and scavengers, living on the strips of arable land during the last ten years of the mining and for the subsequent half millennia.

  Gunty was riding his juka beast through the canyons. The canyons crisscrossed the entire world, formed when the Horde had stripped away the land to mine deep into the Earth. Juka beasts had been winged passengers on the Horde machines; they had leaped off to scavenge. They resembled ancient reptile-like birds and could carry a small man.

  Gunty was excited. At fifteen years old, he was one of the youngest to take to the air, and he had just pulled off his first raid. While the others focused on grabbing food and medicine, he had gone to the Harlum tribal chief’s dwelling and found his prize.

  The S’eak S’ell.

  The S’eak S’ell was technology. It was powerful and known to help predict important events when used by a powerful shaman. The Horde had consumed most technology, but some items had survived. His own village shaman had ten artifacts from the past, and an eleventh would bring Gunty more standing in the tanasi.

  Gunty had been smart during the raid; he had also found a sun-power plate with two wires. The wires themselves would bring the price of a small herd of livestock or two young juka beasts. The sun-power plate was priceless. When held toward the sky, it could bring technology to life, as long as the wires were good. Now the S’eak S’ell would work for his tribal shaman.

  Gunty flew below the canyon rims so the others would not see him and try to take his prize. He returned to the cliffs; there, the flat land on top was reserved for crops and livestock, with the houses, workshops and other dwellings built into the canyon walls below. Gunty landed on a communal platform and ran to the shaman.

  The shaman smiled as he took the prize, holding it aloft for all to see. He placed the panel, connected the wires, spoke an incantation. He touched the S’eak S’ell.

  “Play,” said the S’eak S’ell .

  The people gasped. The shaman held up his hand for silence and touched the artifact.

  “Now spell Water.”

  The shaman touched the S’eak S’ell numerous times and the S’eak S’ell said, “Correct; now spell blood.”

  The village cheered. They would have rain this year, but it would require a sacrifice.

  Tom Tinney is a biker nerd and USAF vet with experience in radar systems, aerospace, and instrumentation industries. When not at work, he spends time motorcycling and writing for biker magazines, as well as conservative blogs. He now writes science fiction novels, his favorite genre to read (and watch). Ride safe. Ride often.

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  30.

  The Earth Is Dying

  Jot Russell

  “The Earth is dying,” said Luke.

  “What do you mean, dying?” asked the President.

  “According to our best estimates, the desert’s growth is accelerating by an additional fifty thousand acres a year. At that rate, it will span the planet and overcome even our most fertile land within a hundred years.”

  “How do we reverse it?”

  Luke looked down. “We can’t, sir.”

  The President jumped up, stormed around his desk and stared Luke in the eyes. “‘Can’t’ is not in your job description. You were hired to solve this problem, and that’s what you’re going to do!”

  The President walked past, poured a glass of water from the bar, and stared back at Luke from the wall mirror. He turned, bringing the glass with him. “You see this? This is all we need! All you have to do is extract it from the sea or from subterranean supplies.”

  “Our conservative estimates include our best efforts to desalinate water from the sea.”

  “Then we have to double our efforts,” demanded the President.

  “There’s more, sir.”

  “This better be the good news.”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  “You tell me the Earth is dying, and then you say that’s not all the bad news you have to tell me?”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Stop kissing ass and tell me what it is!”

  “We’re dying.” Luke spoke with the words painfully escaping his lips.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The epidemic that’s spanning the planet—it’s not viral, it’s something else.”

  The President let go of his anger and gave Luke a somber look. “If it’s not a disease, what is it?”

  “Its start coincided with the initial expansion of the deserts. At first, we didn’t think the two could be related.”

  “You’re saying the same thing that is killing the planet, is killing us?”

  “It seems so, sir. The question to us was how? About twenty years ago, our navigational sensors stopped pointing north.”

  “I remember. What does that have to do with this?”

  “We understand now why the compasses no longer work. Something in the Earth herself has stopped. Something that does more than direct our boats. Something called magnetism.”

  “I’ve heard about these magic rocks. Continue.”

  “We were able to reproduce the effect in an experiment. By spinning a large ball of iron, we were able to control the
compasses. What’s more, when we blew metallic dust at the ball, its course was partly diverted.”

  The President shook his head. “So, what does that mean?”

  “We believe there is a massive metal ball in the center of the Earth. That, somehow, it was able to spin faster than the rest of the planet. And by doing so, it created a magnetic force-field around the planet that protected us from something. Something from space.”

  The President let out a deep breath. “Did you verify any of these results?”

  “Yes, sir, in several ways.”

  “So what do we do? We can’t just sit around and hope for some type of miracle.”

  “I don’t think there is anything we can do, except to plant a seed.”

  “Plant a seed? You tell me we’re dying, that our world is dying, and you want to plant a seed? What good would that do, when anything we plant here is just going to die anyway.”

  “Not here, sir. We’ve been experimenting with rockets. We think we might be able to send microbes or even small animal life to the third planet, Ocean. If we evolved from this life, perhaps we will again.”

  Jot Russell: An engineer is a designer of work to fill a purpose. Whether that be to build a tower that stretches into the sky, to create a soft parade of logic to command artificial life, or to find a way to arrange random words into the dramatic, those who seek design fulfill their own purpose. I'm an engineer.

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  31.

  Arrival

  Karl J. Morgan

  It turned out that the skeptics were right to question the motives of the alien fleet that appeared in orbit that late October day. I was sitting in my San Diego backyard, sipping a cold beer, when one of the ships blocked out the sun. Sirens sounded and the military went on alert, but what could a single man or all of us together do against their superior technology? I am one of the lucky ones, surviving in this cave far from the city and the invasion forces, watching the perpetual fires in relative safety. I am not a prepper, but I have friends who are and was lucky enough to join them when they bugged out.

  At first, we were terrified the aliens would find us, but after two weeks, it seemed they had enough slave labor to carry out their mission to extract all natural resources for shipment to their home world. The media had gone silent, the Internet was permanently offline, and the cities not burned to the ground were dark, saving energy for the mines and factories.

  I was certain Kyle had lost it when he said we needed to strike back. Somehow, he managed to form alliances with others groups and planned a series of assaults on the invaders. I knew it was a suicide mission, but could not allow them to destroy our planet while I cowered in the caves. It was no honor to inherit a dead planet. Better to die now and give those bastards something to remember.

  Early on that fateful day, we began receiving encouraging reports from other groups. Casualties were high, but several alien installations had been overrun. It was just before dawn when we encountered the first alien patrols. The odds were heavily in our favor and the aliens were dispatched almost instantly. Now we had their weapons too. Kyle turned out to be a military genius and as lethal as a team of Navy Seals. By 10:00 a.m., we were at the gates of the alien compound, having left a trail of dead aliens and pools of green blood behind us. A thirty-minute mortar barrage and a hail of machine-gun fire later, we captured the compound. The surviving aliens were chained together and Kyle looked them over. I knew our victory would be short-lived, but these aliens would think twice before invading another planet.

  “What is your name, Commandant?” Kyle asked.

  “Balook Nizfaz,” the tall, green alien spat, his black eyes blinking in the bright sunlight. “You know that reinforcements will come soon and you will all die, right?”

  “Let me kill that bastard,” I shouted.

  “Calm down, Sid,” Kyle laughed. “You’re done killing for today.” He glared at the alien commander and stated, “And there will be no reinforcements, Balook! Watch your friends abandon you.” Kyle pointed skyward just as the massive alien starship shot upward and disappeared.

  “What did you do?” the commandant demanded.

  Kyle walked up to the alien and shoved him backward, knocking him to the ground. The other aliens formed a tight, protective circle around their fallen leader. At that, the ground around them cracked, and a massive flood of termites crawled out and surged over them They screamed in pain as their flesh and sinew was consumed by millions of ravenous insects. I could not believe my eyes, and moved back. Kyle was laughing out loud. Within a minute, only the skeletons of the aliens remained.

  “What just happened here?” I gasped.

  Kyle patted me on the shoulder. “Sid, there is only room on this planet for one invasive species. We’ve been here millions of years, which makes Earth as much our planet as yours. The last thing we will allow is some other planet coming to take what belongs to us, and that includes you, Sid.” As I watched, Kyle’s skin cracked and thousands of termites emerged and crawled down and back into the ground, leaving only the pseudo-skin of my former friend.

  Karl J. Morgan is the author of the Dave Brewster series of science fiction novels and the Heartstone series of fantasy novels. The Hive was awarded an honorable mention at the 2013 Southern California Book Festival. He lives and writes in Southern California. http://www.karljmorgan.com

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  32.

  So, There

  Allen Quintana

  “Look at the sky.”

  They came in out of the southern galactic plane, a cloud of spacecraft, their beams slicing anything they lanced. Lines of white-hot fire cut through stone as easily as it did people.

  Teardrop-shaped craft hummed in like waves of locusts, devastating all they came near. Buildings, trees, cars, avenues, and lives were turned into ash as the alien armada stormed the planet from horizon to horizon, leaving in its wake a fiery wasteland of slag and despair.

  “We shouldn’t have.”

  Forests raged aflame, as animals of all types fled in fear from the heat. Many more succumbed to the conflagration encompassing them, dying in the worst way, as did many campers caught in their midst. Bridges of stone charred and shattered, then collapsed. Arches of steel puddled, then melted and poured into lakes and rivers, the latter exploding into mushroom clouds of steam roiling into a once placid sky.

  “Perhaps . . .”

  Oceans boiled from the polar caps to the equator as heat beams raked latitudes. Sea life bobbed lifeless as columns of concentrated sun speared the waters into a cauldron from the depths to the wavetops. Vessels on the surface became pyres, before joining ruptured submarines below. Many islands fell to volcanism as heat rays skewered their once-extinct mounts. Continents were cut up like cakes; hundreds of miles of their coastlines sheared off and spilled into the waters before the seas burst into searing clouds.

  “Talk to them?”

  Homes exploded like soap bubbles, as if from a child’s toy, as beams of fire furrowed cities, scorched towns, and torched neighborhoods. Larger buildings popped like balloons as needle-like bolts shredded streets and schools and shops. Mountains became mesas, then hillocks, and then craters as spacecraft weapons gouged the land in geometric destruction. Communications lines and wires were cut to ribbons. Surprise was complete.

  “Maybe we should have.”

  People ran in panic. Many screamed as they never had, seeing strangers and friends and loved ones cut down by falling masonry or flashed away at the slightest touch of a white-hot shaft, right before their own ends. Above, teardrops hummed and rained destruction as teardrops of another kind slid from the dying below.

  Nothing—and no one—was spared from the merciless invaders from the stars.

  “Too late.”

  Then—there was silence.

  What remained was a burning, smoking, pitted, lifeless world that once had thrived and flourished and harbored countless forms to be seen, heard, admired,
held, loved. Now all was gone with the swath of an alien scythe from beyond that had cut the world to the bone and left a bleached skeleton of a planet dead in the cold of space, never to rise up and look at its stars again.

  The humming from the teardrops stopped, as did the fiery lances, which had finished their toil. Thousands of spacecraft hung above the dead world for a moment, then all but one left, back the way they had come. All but one.

  It descended to a spot, burned to glass, now cooled enough for landing. The teardrop alighted and all was silent there, save the burning breeze that carried the smell of smoke of the city, of flora, and flesh.

  The teardrop sat there, then opened like a glistening flower, misleading to its destructive nature. Then two space-suited figures came out. Both aliens turned about and surveyed the work.

  “You know, Mike,” said one, “I really didn’t want it to come to this.”

  “Yeah,” said the other. “We didn’t have any choice, Joe.”

  “I know,” Joe said. He thought for a moment. “What was it that you called it?”

  “Gimme a sec.” The one called Mike wiped his visor of the wind-blown soot that dusted the landscape to the horizon. “Oh, yes.”

  He scanned a column of black smoke, its pall turning the sun a hellish red.

  “An eye for an eye.”

  Allen Quintana is a California native. He doesn’t need a “feminine side” since he’s sided from all points of the compass by five daughters and his lovely wife of 24 years and counting, which inspires his muse with plenty of drama and humor and then some.

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  SECRETS

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  33.