G'day, greetings and bonjour. Welcome. You're about to launch into an adventure at AntipodeanSF, the online magazine that's devoted to the regular monthly publication of fabulous and original science-fiction, fantasy, or horror mini-stories of about 500–1000 words each, with occasional feature stories of 2000 words and beyond.
AntipodeanSF will entertain you, get you out there and invade your mind — yet won't take hours to read.
I'm as sure you are that I have an ulterior motive in presenting you with this month's stories!
Read on...
Nuke.
Because the surface of Mercury is as hot as molten lead, its inhabitants live underground. It has an atmosphere, though, and properly suited up one can live on the surface for brief periods of time.
The planet is heavily cratered, much like Earth's moon. It has cliffs the colour of ochre that extend as much as a mile into the sky. Evidence of ancient lava flows are everywhere. There are shallow basins and ringed craters. A good percentage of Mercury's surface is covered by plains.
Yeah, it’s been a while since somebody last showed interest in this line of work.
How far should I go back? When my old man was a young boy, folks argued over the old and new Japanese Industrial Standards. In a nutshell, it’s about tabletop measurements. With the new standards, the width and the depth of tabletops were a couple of inches longer. Of course, you could place your notebook and textbook more easily on a larger desk. But you couldn’t change the classroom size. Do you know when they came up with the old standards? In the Meiji era. Did you know that? Yeah, Meiji. The late nineteenth century, to be more precise.
Blades of grass flattened beneath Lizabeth’s fingers as she laid back on her hands and elbows, admiring the view. One month into her new life and she still couldn’t fathom the beauty of this place. Children laughed as they skipped down the walkway alongside her, leaving a harmony of joy ringing in her ears. A soft breeze left a cold stain on her cheeks, and it felt as real as the wind on Proxima B. She knew it wasn’t real, just a side effect of the artificial atmosphere, but sometimes it would be strong enough that her thick curly brown hair would be picked up, thrown over her head, and land in her face. The ring was a paradise, akin only to the once-fertile world they left behind.
They were the ten richest men on the planet. Altogether, they owned over 95 percent of the Earth's wealth. They were responsible, through decisions made by their companies or by governments they controlled, for almost everything that happened to the inhabitants of the planet.
With a small portion of their immeasurable fortunes, they financed a Research Institute designed to study life extension.
"This is the last job. Then we can be together," Damon said.
"Famous last words," said Agnes.
"I wish you could be more positive," he said. Then Damon picked up a weapon and attached it to his cybernetic shoulder.
"I'm sorry… It's just..." she gently touched a metal piece of his cybernetic arm. "I wish you could get the procedure done now. Then my father would let us get married."
Space twisted, shuddered, then ripped apart as Flash Ships Ltd.’s experimental craft tore back into reality. The triangular ship shot forward, momentum from its previous suborbital position above Earth throwing it further into the Kuiper Belt.
Inside, Captain Bruce Malper saved the target drone’s recording of their arrival, unhooked his belt and checked the oxygen levels. “AI. Record. 11:47am AEST. Saturday 12th April 2036. The first human test of the interplanetary flash drive is a success.” He straightened carefully in the confined space, brushing off cables that had gathered near him, and checked stats. “Pluto’s orbit confirmed. 7.5 billion kilometres in 7 seconds.”
I’m pacing a groove in the floor. It’s been four months, with another six to go. I’m not going to last. Not at this rate. The sentence was a joke. They haven’t even found the merchandise — besides there’s no way to prove I was the one to take possession. No proof. No conviction.
At least that’s what I’d thought.
Apparently, proof is a more fluid construct these days. That bastard — my ex, the copper — the one who’d saved me from dying alone in a dead spaceship stuck in deep space didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t have it. He couldn’t find it in my crappy ship, but he took me in anyway. Arrested me. When they went back to grab my ship, well … it had disappeared. I should have been free and clear at that point.
The extradimensional spaceship sat in the blue sky over Perth city, unfolding and refolding and echoing sunbeams like a prismatic disco ball, while Steve sat on his roof, flipping it off.
He sculled the rest of his Emu Export, crushed the can, and nodded to his best mate Po, who reached a gloved hand into their esky and passed him another beer. Fold-out camping chairs protected their asses from the sunbaked roof, and they sucked down cigarettes and played Frogstomp from Steve's iPhone speakers and looked out over their city, which, like a thousand other cities around the world, was welcoming the Visitors with open arms.
She couldn't even remember her own name. All she could remember was an explosion. Nothing else.
She lay there. She had no idea where she was. She tried to remember. Nada. Void. She stayed immobile for what seemed to be an eternity.
Eventually, she recovered some strength and stood. She looked around. What she saw frightened her. Everything — destroyed. Corpses lay scattered on the ground, but there was no sign of violence. They were like...frozen.
Oh my god. Girl. How has it been TEN YEARS since I last saw you? I’m so glad I found you on Instagram! How have you been?
Listen. That’s amazing and I’m so so so sorry about your son Caden BUT I actually wanted to talk to you about something. How would you like to start working, making some real money, and being your own girl-boss—or girl-PHARAOH?!
Carrington often met me for drinks on a Friday. We would catch up on our respective lives — his as an astrophysicist at Melbourne Uni, mine as a child psychologist with a well-known quango — and our wives had become fast friends as well. We'd known each other since high school and despite our disparate career paths we had maintained our association. More due to geographical convenience than anything else, I often speculated.
When he sat down opposite me this Friday however, his brow was furrowed and there was a distinct air of dejection about him that was uncharacteristic.
The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy appeared as a radio play (broadcast in Australia by the ABC) around the time I was becoming a fledgling adult. Uniting two of my passions: science fiction and humour, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. When I discovered the novelisation I devoured it then passed it around to friends with the zeal of a religious convert, desperate for people to speak the language of towels, hoopy froods and Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters.
The word “stalker” hadn’t entered the general vernacular, but I was a fan, and courtesy of co-operative work colleagues and flexi-time, I was able to get to a number of Australian book signings by Douglas Adams. In 1985 I even managed to get to one of his book signings at Forbidden Planet in London prior to attending a Hitch Hikers Guide convention in Birmingham run by the international fanclub, ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.
You have to feel sorry for the Zips. Since losing the war and their home world to our victorious armada and superior technology, they have been a sad and demoralised people, living as an underclass among us. How that must hurt. It’s not like they don’t deserve it. They’d have annihilated us had things worked out differently. Their numbers reduced to a few tens of thousands from the billions of them that challenged us. Now they live in abject poverty and appalling conditions in their ghettos and on the streets of our great cities. Hated and despised, they are a pitiful lot.
LT Karen "Buster" Reynolds turned her F/A-18H inbound toward the carrier and flew at low cruise airspeed into an empty sky filled with stars. The Moon was new, not even above the horizon at the moment. It was always beautiful to see so many stars in the sky this far from land. She moved her head to see whether a blur was a smudge on the canopy or a distant nebula. Not a smudge. Combat Air Patrol could be tense, but what could go wrong on a night like this?
"Alpha Romeo 46, this is Alpha Romeo 35," Dave ‘Reef’ Black called over the CAP frequency, "I've got a bogie on my heads-up display!"
AntipodeanSF supports the ASFF
Please visit the ASFF website and consider joining for up-to-date info about Australian SF cons, awards, competitions, and to receive the Foundation's newsletter, Instrumentality, and more.
Coming In Issue 272
Buchstabensuppe
By Tony Owens
Content
By Ashley Cracknell
Drowning
By Chris Karageorge
Fodd Prints
By AE Reiff
For More Options Press 9
By Myna Chang
Hotel de Mort
By Emma Louise Gill
The Hot Equations
By Simon Petrie
The Smeg
By Harris Tobias
The Walls Have Tongues
By S. A. Mckenzie
Tribunal on the Misuse of Swords and Knives
By Len Baglow
Speculative Fiction
Downside-Up
ISSN 1442-0686
Online Since Feb 1998
AntiSF Radio Show
The AntipodeanSF Radio Show delivers audio from the pages of this magazine.
The weekly program features the stories from recently published issues, usually narrated by the authors themselves.
Listen to the latest episode now:
The AntipodeanSF Radio Show is also broadcast on community radio, 2NVR, 105.9FM every Saturday evening at 8:30pm.
You can find every broadcast episode online here: http://antisf.libsyn.com
If your God is everywhere, if He is always watching, why should your people make houses to go to worship Him? Faced with an all-seeing, everywhere-being God, I would think what is needed is a place to hide.