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Please peruse all of this month's stories, and then you can listen to them again in audio a few months later on the AntiSF Radio Show...
...Nuke.
One step takes me into the portal. Pain rips the air from my lungs but I don’t have time to stress about the lack of oxygen. Every part of my body stretches and shrinks in continuous waves. I pop out the other side, sucking in great gulps of icy air and bend to put my head between my legs. I’m mostly successful in not vomiting and sit up, wiping a trembling hand over my sweat drenched face. I’ve done it before, travelled via portal, and every time I react the same way. They say you get used to it. I never have. I regularly defy expectations that way. Should’ve died ten times over by now. Very few portal jumpers are as old as me. I’ve got mileage. It means experience. They send me in when there is no one left to send and I get only the worst, most deadly missions.
Be here now. That was what was written over the door of the Zen Center. Where or what exactly “here” was was never explained, but that was the whole point of Zen. To be so in the moment you were the now. Alexander Morris understood the now to mean paying attention to the world outside himself. But, as a scientist, he was sceptical that the Zen ideal of being in the “now” was even possible. What exactly was the damn now anyway? It bothered him. The more he thought about it, the less “now” he became. Wasn’t that ironic? Purposeful thinking about something, even the now, took you further from its essence. He wondered how physics would explain the now, or was it merely a mental state?
In the light of the sunrise a little idea spawned, as I lay on my bed early one morning. One hour later as the warm sun came up — POP, out of my coffee came a bigger, better, greater idea. I started looking for a pen and began writing in my den.
I jumped up to my feet in a moment: I looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before me was the clock, and while the hour hand was still in sight, it was hurrying down towards closing time. There was not a moment to be lost — away I went like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as the hour turned a corner, “It is now five o’clock.”
We give this testimony in memoriam to an era long since succumbed to iridium dust. Mors immatura. Our geologic time was cut short, abruptly and mid-spiral, yet this oracle survives, through what becomes your history, perhaps your future. Do with it as you will.
To say that the Earth was paradise back then might mislead you. It was untouched, yes, unfettered even, but it was also dangerously unpredictable. We had no worries about greenhouse gases. Warm, peninsular breezes and plentiful, tropical rains kept us comfortably in our Goldilocks Zone. But the ground could split and shatter without warning, or heave molten rock in a moment’s desire. Despite this, Earth’s wrath stayed mostly contained and we thrived.
Broque’s earthly ensemble fit like a glove, so comfortable, in fact, that he decided to leave it on for the entirety of our rendezvous. I followed suit. Feeling green and anticipating my first report, I’d already begun peeling at the pale flesh covering my left index finger. I hoped he didn’t notice.
My eyes settled on cheaply painted black bedposts as he spoke, chosen in lieu of real wood.
Rosalie nipped my ear and I swatted her, just as Dad came in. He waved a vase of roses to thump me. Mum’s favourite vase. She screamed and he lost focus. The vase crashed, Rosalie Buzzed off and the parents turned on me.
“Leave your sister alone,” Dad said. “You have a special gift…”
The first call came while Stephen was halfway through giving Deanna his coffee order, which displeased him greatly. He tried to mouth large skim cappuccino at her while putting on his headset and flipping switches as his computer screen lit up.
‘Hello, you have reached the Hero’s Journey Hotline my name is Stephen how may I direct your call?’
It could be argued that what happened was the result of me being a cheapskate. It could also just have been an oversight. Either way, it was a disaster.
Packing a tesseract suitcase is not quite the same as packing a regular suitcase. For a start, the T-case's contents hang outside normal 3-space, via a wormhole throat, to an n-space rental warehouse. To put it in a nutshell — I can carry a LOT in a T-case.
Dear Editors of AntipodeanSF,
I need your help. I don’t know who else to turn to in order for me to get back to my own time.
Mainstream media outlets refuse to print my request, probably thinking it a hoax. As you’re an SF publication and my request has to do with time travel, I hope that you’ll be more sympathetic, and will recognise that this is no prank.
By William Kerr
The room was uncomfortably hot. Oppressive. The air itself seemed thicker and stank of an unspoken fear. Sweat beaded on her skin and dripped down her back. The Watchkeeper had been at her operations console for almost 48 hours straight. Others like her had their eyes glued to their own screens, lost in their own thoughts. Others unlike her seemed to wander around aimlessly — their discussions hushed but sharp. The displays flashed with ongoing status updates and live feed from the front. Things were not going well. The tension in the room was intense. Sickening. No one had slept properly in days… yet there was an overbearing feeling in the room that one way or another, it would all be over soon.
Out of nowhere he is engulfed by the stinging realisation that if he were a tree he would be a tight manicured ball of leaves atop a bare, slender trunk. He would not even have a proper trunk, really, just a perfect wooden stem no higher than a lady’s shoulder. Every second day he would require delicate pruning to ensure not a leaf fell out of place, not even in a strong breeze. At best he would evoke feelings of ambivalence from passers-by. At worst, someone would lop off his foliage - just for fun. He would simply be a naked stick then. Just one of many naked sticks all in a row lining an endless estate driveway.
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Coming In Issue 285
A Babbler from Door-toDoor
By Leon D Furze
A.I. — Ay, Aye!
By Col Hellmuth
Conception
By Jon Michael Emory
The Implausible Rise of Z-97R
By Ed Errington
In the Perpetual Dining Halls of Vallhalla
By Michael T. Schaper
Lady Killer
By Diana Grove
Summer Solstice
By Kevin J. Phyland
The Alarm
By Harris Tobias
The Return of the Drongo, Reborn
By William Kitcher
Two Sons
By Botond Teklesz
Speculative Fiction
Downside-Up
ISSN 1442-0686
Online Since Feb 1998
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There’s no real objection to escapism, in the right places… We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality… It’s a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can’t think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.