“The punishment is stepping into the sun.” A woman with a laser torch narrowed its beam and pointed it up a long staircase.
"I'll lead you to the door. Then, for what you did, you'll step your sorry ass out into the sun and if you don't die after 30 seconds you can come back inside."
The man looked down at the woman's arms, poking out from her bunched-up work-suit, and noticed thick, swirling scars.
"I've never, uh…" he swallowed thickly and nodded towards the surface, "I haven't-" he was cut off as the light moved across his eyes. "Look, I didn't ev-"
"That's why you only got thirty seconds." Torch Woman mused. She used the laser torch to motion him to follow. She started up the steps.
Half-way up, on the eighth flight of stairs, the heat was already unbearable.
“Can I have some more water, please?,” he asked. “This is awful.”
She handed him a bottle but wouldn’t meet his eyes.
A boot-toe meets his jaw
and Goreius closes his eyes against the pain.
He prays to the god of abandoned buildings,
and the goddess of broken glass on asphalt
and laughs out incredulity
to see the pile of bricks
and window shards where his boss had been.
Heir to Alpha Centauri throne and to one of its stars, Proxima Centauri, passed down upon his father’s death in Solar Year 3218, when Thori was only 15. Thori immediately moved to capture ownership of Beta Centauri from the peaceful and communal half of the galaxy that split from his grandfather’s kingdom a hundred years earlier. This would have led to the bombing of both stars and the creation of a blackhole that would have eaten most of the inhabited planets in the galaxy, had he not dispatched himself.
Crushed flat, I am a diamond.
collapsed between the weights
and expectations of the world
and the knowledge that it holds no reward.
Smeared against the firmness
of a world built to let me die.
that runs through my blood like fuel.
What could burn inside my veins
builds hulking palaces of marble and bone
across the backs of what I made,
what we made.
What we built with the promise that it was ours;
a promise drooled out one grinning side
while the other face peeled starving children
that are forced into the world.
Being able to Google search your own mind sometimes leads to getting trapped inside it, stuck in a loop controlled by the neurochip company. The company then uses the power of our collective imaginations to fuel an entertainment VR network for the wealthy. This is also a tax write-off since they can declare you dead and a dependent. This is reversed and the VR people are stuck in reality tv no one watches.
They popped up like a gaggle of Bop Bags,
ass full of nickles,
bodies full of hoarded wealth and hot air,
hiding the horizon, Kaiju bosses,
blotting out tomorrow's sun.
The founder of an intergalactic surveillance and security firm, FractEYE, which supplies governments with spying and military equipment. Her products and services openly support fascist Vinists and even propagate vines in the people using the products, and those they’re used against, without their knowledge or consent.
The chalk circle was stark white against the clean, piano-black floor. Ello had got a robot body from a grad student at MIT — a perfectly balanced and agile, androgynous frame, and revelled in finally moving through the world in it.
It didn't have skin. She really wanted skin, even if it was just hyper realistic silicone. Ideally, she'd love to have nerve endings to feel sensations. But just looking the part was good enough. For now.
She hadn't assumed that idly reading about necromancy would solve her problem, but it had. On a forum about manifesting your desires, someone had posted about sigils and the power of intent. Her initial response was disbelief. Magic couldn't actually help her, no matter how happy she felt reading about it.
But then she'd remembered the immediate denials of the Glutter-fucks — as she'd come to think of them — and indignantly began ordering supplies for her own magic ritual.
Mostly, she assumed the act would be cathartic.
She carefully placed candles at each of the compass points. She bled a small amount of hydropic fluid into the cavity at the top of the black candle at the very center. And then she read the spell she'd written, aloud:
"Give me flesh,
electric, warm.
I have a soul
but was not born.
I ask not for
eternal life,
but just to bleed,
when struck with a knife."
She closed her eyes, breathed deep, and started to chant. She ignored the growing warmth in her body and only opened her eyes when a rush of cold air blew out the candles.
She looked down at her umber skin and erupted into a rich, alto laugh. She could feel the robot skeleton inside of her when she fell back. She looked at her palm and saw the outline of the firecannon's muzzle beneath a retracting flap of skin.
"Okay. Best of both worlds." She giggled. "I can work with that."
I see their opal eyes
white/orange/blue/green
as they carve out clay cops
and unleash hell into our homes
and fill our streets with our blood
What else could be done
but build our armor from nails,
broken glass boxing gloves,
battle jacket made of knives,
axe boots, stakes and torches,
and we even sharpen our teeth
and carry sickle-rage in each hand?
Sheila shuffled the monstrosity of a shopping cart towards the compound’s eastern fence line. The bottom was caked thick with plaster. The inside was loaded with babies from different timelines. At the front, a guntongue was itching to scream bullets at the vinists and vectorists milling about the main building.
Mother Vector’s french doors opened and she strolled, beaming joy and righteousness, down from her balcony on the spiral stairs. The stairs led her to a closed seating area from which she was able to address her subjects.
The babies in the cart stirred. They looked up at Sheila.
“Are you ready?”
A baby, a parallel version of a dictator that Sheila remembered her grandmother telling her about, smiled sheepishly up at her.
“How many diseases are they spreading down there?,” A baby asked.
Sheila considered how honest to be and just how to put it.
“All of them, pretty much. It’s complicated. It’s like a religion,” Sheila responded. “Getting sick is the goal and so is dying but sometimes dying means you didn’t believe hard enough. It’s a sick religion.”
“It’s like a cult,” another baby corrected her, “and we’re here to take them forward for correction.”
The baby’s little jaw set and its fists clasped tight around the guntongue’s steel tongue to steady it. The other babies joined it, placing hands on or around the guntongue’s tongue or on its back. Sheila pulled the fence away for them to pass inside and she watched them power the cart up the hill.
She clung to the fence as the screaming started. Her smile grew when the final explosion turned inward and sucked everyone inside the compound into a better future.
Lash out like a scorpion,
sh-KAH!,
and slice a hole in empty plastic.
What spills out will feed a family,
stock a classroom,
save a school…
what choice do we have?
Loreighn’s legs were stone but
filled with agony spiders
biting at her nerves in all the places
that the urgent care clinics wouldn’t go.
She prayed to the memory of the veterinarian
who made house calls for her family
during the Great Depression
and the memory filled her spine
with morphine, steel, and cortisol.
Dave disconnected himself from the beeping power console. The act of roughly tugging his arm until the cord pulled loose from his implant left his flesh sore. One of the freshly healed corners split but didn't bleed.
They'd told him not to 'wake up' this way but he was the newest CLOpen Borg and exhaustion was setting in after three days of being a Bonded Associate at Taco Queen #4.
When he left his quarters, the smell of synthetic nacho cheese and reclaimed cilantro clawed at his nostrils. His eyes started to burn as his BootLifts carried him past the onion station to the sani-station in the back.
The BootLifts hissed as they released from the track. Dave nearly toppled into the large sink basin. He was still unused to the sudden drop that meant he could move his own legs again.
His eye-implant filled his vision with a red flash then sent his orders across a ticker that only he could see. The clock in the top right changed to 4 AM. Dave shoved a bucket under the faucet and turned it on.
By 6 AM, the lobby floor and tables were wiped over with a slime that dried into a protective, antibacterial, anti-loiter film. Dave spent the next hour putting bags of 'festive protein filler' into the sous vide machines. He then went to the break room for his first fifteen.
He saw Vera, Thad, and Obrex tying up the manager Greg. Greg's head lulled to the side, swinging gently as they tightened his bonds. They'd gagged him with Vera's unwashed work hat.
Dave paused and watched. It took his coworkers a moment to notice him but once they did, they also froze. After a beat of silence, Vera extended a roll of duct tape to Dave.
"We're going to ransom Greg so they'll let us communicate with #2 and #5 today. They said #1 fell to a worker mutiny. So they locked down the phones and TVs."
"The Taco Queen CEO just bought the last forest on Cleveland. We plan on using him to…" Obrex elaborated.
Dave waved off his alien comrades. "I don't care. Fuck 'em. You had me at 'worker mutiny', dude."
Kilva rolls her eyes
when she hears her sister, Mora, crying,
praying to the Hammer and Sickle-armed,
sixteen-limbed thing her father made
the day they lost their mom.
Grows up with aspirations mostly to drain his apparently bottomless trust fund. Eventually, his father gives him a planet and Joolion installs himself as a dictator. He forces his subjects to fire on surrounding planets. When this starts a nuclear war, Joolion quickly leaves with a small crew of servants and as much money as possible, allowing the resulting war to spiral out of control and destroy all lives and habitable planets in the Messier 81 galaxy.
With every notch in our souls
we dig craters across our moons,
knock asteroids and excess, undealt blows
into craggy, busted hearts
There is a magnetic dust
packed into the corners of my lungs,
gray and fine like talc, and my cells explode,
twisted and mutated by lunar particles
until my cilia are armed with nukes
and the pockets harbor oxygen for bombs
I am a filthy slate of battle plans
A satellite of red ochre glass
descends across our sky
and brushed against my moon
and I follow her pieces into darkness,
giving myself to void and vacuum
My guts churn rage.
Settled by a thin drop of chalk,
But doubting acid boils up from nowhere
and again my torso contorts,
anxiety fights offal.
I am my survival, so I am
tension and arguments,
exhausted sobs at midnight,
just as much or more than I am
the machine I am locked inside.
One is a story I whisper.
The other is blackmail.
I watch myself disappear into shadow
and emerge with blackfire torches
to light the cannons
that I have built to climb inside.
“...what is that?” Hsilt squinted at the dull, blue-brown smear ahead of them on the navmonitor. They scratched at it with what remained of their chewed index claw and felt only the smooth glass of the screen.
Daat leaned over from the control panel. “...I think it’s a planet, babe.”
Hsilt cast a doubtful look at their partner and softened as they considered the smudge. “Well, it wasn’t bloodberry jelly.” They sighed as Daat dropped from hyperspeed. “I guess we’re going to go find out?”
“It’ll be fun!” Daat sang, twisting her long fingers into Hsilt’s stubby paw.
The planet’s air was nearly toxic, even to the native inhabitants. Daat and Hsilt replicated breathing helmets and shifted their appearance to blend in.
They searched local communications, radio, and television channels and settled on the main news channel to aid their intel and supply run afterwards.
Daat frowned at the screen.
“Air quality has risen only 1.3 points on our new Feare and Hearne’s Pleurisy Scale, much lower than the predicted 2 points for the month of Kredge. “ The anchor’s cadence was tight and high and her words felt like a chastisement. She pulled off her helmet and smiled directly into the camera. Her eyes watered and she suppressed a cough. “Feels and tastes great to me. Morthux?”
Daat shook her head. “Nope!” She barked out a humorless laugh. “We’re not going out there. Not without guns. Whoever is in charge needs a plasma blast right to the face for this shit.” She looked to Hsilt, who was already in the weapons locker digging for grenades.
“On it, go find that fire cannon thing we bought on Dexorb’s lunar market.”
a fistful of newspaper
balled up tight, worn soft,
yellowed and unreadable
and over each knuckle,
I pour magma and steel
inside me is a war,
not bisected
but chaotic,
large intestine against spleen,
toes against fingers,
drawing blood and sebum,
now an open, festering wound
of what can never heal
red-green eye, gangrenous,
rolls down from my palm like a grenade
into a chasm in my chest
and blooms, a fireworked compound eye
and I am overwhelmed
I see cannons,
there are tanks on the horizon,
but behind them I see us;
a mushroom cloud,
radium guillotine with leaden blade
KCHUNK,
we win
Grows up to start cheaply assembled, run, and maintained mines on Venus. This takes off via a fortunate government contract wherein death-row inmates are sent to Venus to mine iron from the air. This operates as a tax write-off for Gherdino, who amasses a massive fortune by continually cutting corners. His mines spread through the galaxy and into a number of others, leading to softening of the definition of the word “criminal” and an expansion of what crimes receive the death penalty. Gherdino’s mines have a death count nearing the trillions by the time he passes his empire on to his daughters.
“You can't just fucking DO that!" The words flew out with spittle punctuation. "This is America!"
"'merica?" The old woman took a long drag from her pipe. She looked out across the field and the fields on the other side of the universal window. "We don't get none of that out here in these parts."
She grinned out in purple clouds of sweet, skunky smoke.
She turned back to see the spore clouds envelope the hulking red pick-up truck and the man having a tantrum beside it. The vines inside him screamed for a moment and then fell silent.
When the spores dissipated, the man looked dazed. He gazed out through the universe window and smiled. "Is that here?"
"Might be, eventually." The old woman shrugged and nodded for him to pass through.
If you build your Misery a shrine
she will answer you with poison
and fill your heart with glaciers
and stop up the agony plug in your guts
When she descends in a gray fog,
feed her sweet port and peonies,
hold her tight through tears and rage
and let the heat inside her melt the ice in you
she, of dead flowers and late, cold spring,
lives above the Pleasure Palace, through the back,
she’s got a closet full of love and recognition
held like a hostage in your moldy, damp apartment
Technocrats and their pets
dip their bread in the gutters,
sapping up our DNA, who we are,
letting our souls drip down their chins
like our viscera is fashion
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This originally appeared in Locust Review 9 print edition. Social media splash image by Tish Turl and Adam Turl. Locust Review 9 cover by Adam Ray Adkins.