Harold Sampson was a hundred and one years old when his draft notice arrived in the form of two uniformed young men. They rang the doorbell on Sampson’s apartment at Cosy Acres Retirement Home on an ordinary Thursday morning. Myrtle Fitzhugh, Harold’s eighty-two year old girlfriend, answered the door. The young men introduced themselves as private Howard Wilson and Staff Sergeant Wilmer Sax, US Army.
“We’d like to speak to Mr. Sampson, is he in?”
“Whoever I choose, I’ll have one triumphant delegation praising my judgement and forty-nine accusing me of prejudice against their kind,” Gillis complained.
DeMaus, his friend, fellow trader and second-in-command agreed. “The bastards set you up!”
Once, the geologists told us, the planet had likely been temperate enough to have polar ice-caps, but these had long since dissipated. Now its slow-dwindling seas simmered, driving huge quantities of water vapour into a thick atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide and nitrogen and blanketed by permanent cloud.
Once, the palaeontologists surmised, life may have been abundant here: varied, complex, ubiquitous. Life still endured in a unicellular form, the simple metabolic processes of which were perfectly adapted to a steam-hot aqueous environment; but if there had at one point been indications of the diversity of former life on this world, those traces had not endured.
Yesterday I zoomed back to ancient Egypt at the time of the Pharaoh Ramon Topek the Fifth. Hang on, first I need to tell you about my time machine, don’t I? Time machines are as common these days as mobile phones were back in the twenty-first century, and mine is a state-of-the-art model. It’s no bigger than a fingernail and it’s made of black onyx with a rim of gold that moves and shivers whenever I look at it. Yes, creepy. But it works a treat.
Once upon a time, deep down in the sea there lived a mechanical doll named Mai-hime. When she was still human, she lived in a small fishing village by the sea. While collecting seafood on the beach, she was captured and brought to Ryūgū Castle at the bottom of the ocean. Like other prisoners held captive by the tyrannical king Ryūoh, she was turned into an automaton, deprived of the freedom to move her body at will. Still, thanks to Ryūoh’s whim, she was allowed to keep her consciousness.
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Coming In Issue 269
Aberrant Orbitlusa Channellings
By Sultana Raza
Candy Town
By Amy Logan
Curiosity Coil
By Myna Chang
Emergency
By Bruce McNair
Morning Garden
By Umiyuri Katsuyama
Translated by Toshiya Kamei
Night Music
By Connor Orrico
On Demand
By Kevin J. Phyland
Space Train
By Laurie Bell
State of the Art
By Carl Walmsley
The Broken City
By Michael Casey
The Demise of Major Strom
By Timothy Dwyer
The First Artifact to Reach the End of the Universe
By Haneko Takayama
Translated by Toshiya Kamei
The Polishing of a Knob
By Kerrie Noor
Turn the Tables
By Ashley Noel
Woman Apart
By Keech Ballard
Speculative Fiction
Downside-Up
ISSN 1442-0686
Online Since Feb 1998
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