“Sing Back the Stars” • by Jenna Hanchey

 

It was prophesied that the world’s end would be hearkened by starsong. Jesse wondered what it would be like, hearing the great balls of fire burst into heavenly music. Would it sound like her dad’s opera? Would it be beautiful and sad, as they watched the demise of Earth? Or perhaps angry and mean, taking joy as the world burned? Would she even get to hear it, before death claimed her?

She shivered, curling tighter under the blanket on the couch as her dad cooked dinner and danced around the kitchen to The Magic Flute. His silly movements eventually overcame her fear, and she laughed despite herself.

“Why are you always singing and dancing, Dad?”

“It keeps the joy alive, sweetheart. And it’s our joy that holds back the starsong. As long as we sing, they don’t have to.” He twirled over toward the couch, extending a hand in invitation. “Your Papa loved it when we sang and danced, remember?”

Jesse took his hand. She did remember. A year is a long time for a 10-year-old to go without her second parent, but they’d had nine wonderful years together first. A dull ache filled her heart, mixing and mingling with the delight she got from dancing with her dad, until the two couldn’t be separated. Pulling out of his embrace, she crossed her arms. “Sometimes it’s hard to be joyful, Dad.”

His face softened, and he placed a hand lovingly on her tense shoulder. “I know, Jesse. I know it’s hard. But sometimes the most beautiful songs are the ones we sing through the pain.” She hugged him tightly, neither giving a thought to their burning dinner.

As the days grew colder and the stars grew brighter, Jesse could almost feel the joy draining out of the world. Dad still sang and twirled her around the kitchen. But their home had begun to feel like the last bastion of light on Earth.

Bit by bit, person by person, the world stopped singing. Silence settled with the finality of death.

Jesse felt it happen in the dark of the night. The moment when the stars paused to gather a deep breath before they would start to sing. Her heart fluttered with that indescribable feeling, that intense mixture of joy and pain, and she knew what she had to do.

Snatching her scooter from the garage, she tremulously kicked off. “Nulla impresa per uom si tenta invano,” she began, voice strengthening as lights flicked on in the houses she rode by.

A street-and-a-half later she was belting at the top of her lungs. “Ahi, vista troppo dolce e troppo amara.” She felt the sweetness and bitterness both. Holding an image of her Dad and Papa in her mind, Jesse sang through the pain.

And oh, how she sang! The little girl on a scooter flew through the neighborhood, lighting up houses and hearts with her tiny yet mighty voice.

Even the stars held their breath, listening.

______________________

 

Jenna Hanchey has been called a “badass fairy” and she attempts to live up to the title. A professor of critical/cultural studies at Arizona State University, her research looks at how speculative fiction can imagine decolonization and bring it into being. Her own writing tries to support this project of creating better futures for us all. Her stories have appeared in Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Little Blue Marble, and of course, Stupefying Stories, among other venues. You can follow her adventures on Twitter @jennahanchey or at www.jennahanchey.com.

“The Cool War” • by Anatoly Belilovsky

Editor’s Note: In 1721, in an alternate timeline, the crowned heads of all the great powers of Europe, appalled by the constant carnage and expense of the Thirty Years’ War, the Nine Years’ War, the War of Spanish Succession, the Great Northern War, the War of the Quadruple Alliance, the Russo-Persian War, and all the other wars large and small that filled the years of the 17th and early 18th centuries, finally decided it was time to do something about it. In that year their envoys met in Brandenburg, then in the Kingdom of Prussia, to hammer out a treaty that would avoid all the failings, pitfalls, and loopholes of all previously broken peace treaties. After months of strenuous negotiations they emerged with the Brandenburg Accords, an agreement breathtaking in its brilliance. No longer would the powers of Europe resolve their disputes and ambitions with cannon, sword, and gun. Now, they would compete by demonstrating their cultural superiority.

For nearly 200 years, the Brandenburg Accords kept the peace—until the early 20th Century…

___________________

“The Cool War”
by Anatoly Belilovsky

 

In case y’all were wondering how the Berlin Wall came down—buy me a drink and I’ll tell you.

Thank you most kindly, sir. It’s good that common courtesy isn’t neglected in these dark ages of the 2020’s, the way education is—

Speaking of which, what do you know about the Cool War? That we won it? That’s it? That’s the whole thing?

Sigh. Young people today…

See, there was once a time when the Cool War looked like there was more than one side in it. Russians have always been pretty good at musical warfare. They came late to it; they weren’t among the original signers of the Brandenburg Accords, old Tsar Peter being of the gunpowder-and-bayonet persuasion, but they joined under Catherine, right after she imported half the composers in Italy to her court in Saint Petersburg. Napoleon almost made Russia regret the choice, having brought the big guns of Beethoven and Rossini, but they used brass wind instruments quite a bit. Ever tried playing “Eroica” outdoors in the winter in Moscow? Poor bastards lost half their orchestra to frostbite. And of course Russians never let anyone forget the time they stopped the Prussians under Wagner with Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” while conveniently forgetting the debacle when the whole Russian army ran from a single Austro-Hungarian klezmer quartet before they could deploy for a performance of the “1812 Overture.”

Of course, that was the twentieth century, when it actually mattered whether the people wanted tubas or butter. At least it did among member states of NATO, the North Atlantic Touring Orchestra, and the vox populi had piped up pretty loudly in favor of the dairy industry. The other side was… kinda the way we are now. Soviets started their build-up just as we started the big drawdown, so as our big bands went into early retirement one after another, the Russkis put together division-strength Red Army Chorus units with mechanized support. We had invested in cutting-edge technology, solid state hi-fi battlefield amplifiers with all-weather loudspeakers, and for a while we had them on the run. But then Elvis’s enlistment ended, he took “Hound Dog” back Stateside with him, and with that went our hopes for a quick victory. So we settled down to a long, drawn-out, low-intensity war of attrition. We had the advantage of being the more popular side for high-value defectors: Stravinsky, for example—the Russians never did find a good countermeasure to “The Rite of Spring,” so they built the Berlin Wall to screen out all the high-pitch dissonances that made it work. They had Paul Robeson for a while, but he was a loose cannon. Every once in a while he sang a song in Yiddish and watched the common soldiers dance and the senior officers jump out their windows, so they shut him down. Then he learned enough Russian to figure out some of what they said behind his back, and went back to where people at least had the decency to say the same to his face. The Russian subs would play “Kalinka” at our ships, we’d pipe “Rock Around The Clock” through the SOSUS line, they’d come back at us with one of their revolutionary songs, like:

I’m so proud of my Mo-ther-land,
Workers, peasants walking hand-in-hand,
From Carpathian Mountains to Bering Sea
There is no more greedy bourgeoisie…

We’d respond with “America the Beautiful.”

And so on, ad nauseam.

It was into this stalemate that I was commissioned in 1989, a fuzzy-cheeked second lieutenant of violins fresh out of Juilliard, and deployed in my first overseas posting in Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie. I was equally terrified of making a fool of myself in front of my troupe and in front of Bass CO Hollis, and only a little of the enemy. That was dumb, now that I look back on it. The Soviet T-55 Main Battle Trumpet was a scary thing, diesel powered, with a 120 mm smoothbore reed and shaped-charge percussion caps; and those Mi-24 Hindemith helicopters could sneak up on you and start playing “The Dance of The Sugar Plum Fairy” as you sat in the latrine—I get shudders even now, just thinking about it.

But this was Berlin, the war was still cool and occasionally so was the beer, and on our days off we could walk past the checkpoint, flash our military IDs, and stroll right into East Berlin. I loved East Berlin, really I did. It was the only place that could make barracks look bright and shiny and welcoming.

One gray and rainy Sunday I stopped at the PX on my way to Checkpoint Charlie, and ran into my buddy Wes. Wes, it transpired, got one of my brother’s letters by mistake, and carried it with him in case he saw me. He slipped it into my pocket, patted my shoulder, and off we went our separate ways. I didn’t open it till I got drunk enough to care, at a gray and dingy GDR bar.

There I was, sipping my fifth beer and reading the letter, when I saw the kellner craning his neck to read over my shoulder. He looked like an old Timpanenfuhrer to me, his back hunched from carrying big drums on forced marches, so I turned to bring the letter closer to him, to make him less likely to need a chiropractor afterwards. I heard him tsk-tsk behind me.

“Life is hard in America, no?” he said in a bad movie accent.

I shrugged. “Like everywhere, I suppose,” I said.

“Much better here,” the kellner said. “We have waltz and you have blues—there must be reason, nicht?”

I nodded. He spoke again, but damned if I remember what he said, because a blues line crawled into my ear and would not let go, and the words of my brother’s letter rearranged themselves into verse:

Went home from work, traffic as far as the eye can see,
I honked my horn, I turned up the AC,
I’m driving so I can’t stop at a bar and drink some booze,
I’ve got the minimum-wage-earning, oppressed-American-worker blues…

The next half-hour was a blur. I remember playing for the kellner and the half-dozen VoPos in the bar on the bar’s rinky-dink piano:

Woke up this morning, flat tire on my car,
Gotta walk to work, half a mile’s too far,
Gonna sweat in the sun, get dust on my shoes,
I’ve got the minimum-wage-earning, oppressed-American-worker blues…

I remember a crowd gathering, several opening ominous-looking cases to retrieve oboes and bassoons, as I sang:

I’m sick of chicken, can’t afford filet mignon
more than once a week, how can I go on?
Drinkin’ bourbon ‘cause I can’t afford chartreuse,
I’ve got the minimum-wage-earning, oppressed-American-worker blues…

I remember marching at the head of a crowd through the streets of Berlin toward the gray, dingy side of the Berlin Wall:

On vacation in Florida, same old sun, same boring palm trees,
Same Atlantic ocean, same Atlantic ocean breeze,
Next year I’ll try and save up for a cruise,
I’ve got the minimum-wage-earning, oppressed-American-worker blues…

And I remember standing in the concrete wreckage, fragmented graffiti iridescent in the sun, taking my bow—

Umm... guys? Where are y’all going? Pennsylvania Avenue? What’s on… Oh.

Hey! You can’t just sing my song like that! It’s copyrighted!

__________________________

 

Anatoly Belilovsky was born in a city that has changed owners six or seven times in the last century, the latest crude attempt at adverse possession being in progress even as we speak. He was traded to the US for a truckload of wheat and a defector to be named later, learned English from Star Trek reruns, and went on to become a SFWA member in spite of a chronic cat deficiency by publishing nearly 100 pieces of original and translated prose and poetry, much of it collected in Halogen Nightmares and Other Love Stories. He tweet occasionally at @loldoc. (Come for the puns, stay for the punditry.)

Anatoly has been a recurring contributor to Stupefying Stories since his story “Picky” appeared in issue #1. We are delighted to be bringing you “The Cool War”—

And we don’t usually do this, but “The Cool War” is part of a story cycle that can’t seem to find a permanent home. “Kulturkampf,” the story of Wagner’s campaign through France, first appeared in 2011 in the Immersion Book of Steampunk.  “The Perils of Bonaparte,” which recounts Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, appeared years later in The Copperfield Review. “The Sound of Music,” which tells the story of… No, I won’t give it away, you’ll just have to read it… appeared here in Stupefying Stories a mere two weeks ago: if you haven’t read it, do so now. 

Then, after you’ve read “The Sound of Music,” I want you to jump over to Cast of Wonders and listen to the audio adaptation of “Kulturkampf”  you’ll find there. Personally, I think it’s both brilliant and hilarious. It’s a fine example of the sort of thing I would like to be doing with fiction on this site.

With you help, we can move toward doing this. Why not donate or subscribe today?

“Believe Nothing Said by Clouds” • by Beth Cato

“Believe nothing said by clouds,” Grandmother had told Asteria many a time, to which the girl gave her most sincere nod, the sort she granted the preacher each Sunday when he inquired if she’d been a good girl that week. She had practiced that nod in the mirror along with various smiles. Asteria was not permitted to carry pocketknives as did her brothers, but at age ten, she had come to understand that wit and false smiles were her weapons and armor on playground battlefields and elsewhere.

Along the steep green slopes of the Dales, some days the sun shone bright as a day without school, while on others, the ridges were so high that clouds had no need to descend to drench the world in deep gray mist. As she had more frequently walked the worn cow path between home and Grandmother’s domicile, she had become increasingly aware of the cloud that often lurked around her. Therefore, she was not surprised when after several weeks of its hesitant behavior, it finally spoke.

“Oh child, how sad it is to be scorned while your mother tends to your newborn brother. How sad to be exiled to your grandmother’s house for the day.”

Asteria stiffened. Despite Grandmother’s warnings, she had hoped that when the cloud confronted her, it wouldn’t be as unkind as her peers who loved to mock her for both her maturity and her delight in all things imaginative and magical.

“I don’t find it sad at all,” she said in a lofty tone. “I like it better at Grandmother’s. I suppose you’re to offer me a better alternative?”

The cloud was slow to speak again. “I did intend as much.”

“Well, go on, then.” Asteria trudged along.

“Within this cloud, magic lingers in the modern world, and from here you may cross to fairy realms full of delectable delights the like of which you have never known.”

Magic! Fairies! But Asteria refused to be gullible. “Is there piccalilli? Because I cannot stand piccalilli.” She made a face of revulsion at the very thought of the chopped mash of vegetables and spices.

“I don’t believe so?” With more confidence the cloud continued, “There’d be foods you liked, plenty of them.”

“What else?” She had intended to make brief, clever repartee to discourage the cloud’s advances, but instead her curiosity was piqued.

“You could visit the fairy court, meet the queen herself! Dress up in luxurious silks, dance away the nights—”

“Holding hands with others is gross and unhygienic.” Or so others said of her touch.

“Then you needn’t dance. If you like the outdoors—”

“If you know the peculiarities of my home life, shouldn’t you know if I enjoy the outdoors?”

“If you like the outdoors,” the cloud repeated, irritation in its tone, “you can explore a wilderness unspoiled by humankind. You may select a horse of your very—”

“Are there palominos?” She stopped atop the ridge. Distant sheep bells clamored from within the gray. “I read an illustrated book about American cowboys and palomino horses, and I have never seen a horse of that color here. I would like one, very much.” Genuine yearning crept into her voice.

“…I imagine we could make that happen?”

The cloud’s uncertainty fizzled her enthusiasm to vapors. “Tell me, what do you get out of granting me this new, magic-filled life? You offer me dancing and horses, but you probably want me to wash castle windows and muck out stables most of the time.”

Children were like that, too, full of bold promises of ‘I’ll be your friend’ only for it to be some grand joke.

“You wouldn’t—this is not—”

“I’m not stupid!” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What do you get out of convincing me to come? A commission or something, like a shop clerk?”

The cloud stayed silent.

“Wait!” she called, hoping that her company—however dastardly its motives—hadn’t departed yet. “Your job isn’t an easy one, is it?” she rushed to add. “I mean, Grandmother says lots more people used to live in the Dales when she was a girl. Hard to tempt people when there’s nobody about.”

She heard a sigh. “Those that hear me must be open to the possibility of magic,” the cloud said in a most subdued manner. “Some children never do. Most adults cannot.”

“Other kids around here don’t believe at all.”

“I know.” The cloud sounded quite morose.

Asteria couldn’t bear for it to be so sad. “Well, I’ll never stop believing in magic!”

“I’ve heard that before.”

Asteria looked up the foggy path as she came to a realization. “You talked to my grandmother ages ago, didn’t you?”

The reply was another sigh.

“She still believes in you enough that she warned me to not heed your lies.”

“But she doesn’t talk to me beyond grumbling that I make it hard to drive. I’m only doing my job.”

“Your job’s the problem, cloud. You’re trying to bait people into a trap. Which is never going to work on me, by the way.” Not even for a palomino, not with fairy tricks involved. “If you just want to talk, though…”

“You… you would like to talk to me again?”

Grandmother’s house emerged spectral through the mist. “Your company on my walk has been nice, actually. Despite the whole entrapment thing.”

“If I succeeded in that, I wouldn’t get to chat with you again. I’d rather… I’d rather have someone to talk to, I think.”

Grandmother had meant well by her advice, but Asteria didn’t believe the cloud to be lying when it spoke those words.

“See you later, then!” Asteria smiled at the cloud in a way she had never practiced in the mirror, then ran the rest of the way to Grandmother’s door. Already, she looked forward to her walk home.

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Beth Cato hails from Hanford, California, but currently writes and bakes cookies in a far distant realm. She’s the Nebula Award-nominated author of A THOUSAND RECIPES FOR REVENGE from 47North (June 2023), plus the Clockwork Dagger duology and the Blood of Earth trilogy from Harper Voyager. Her website BethCato.com includes not only a vast bibliography, but a treasure trove of recipes for delectable goodies. Find her on Twitter as @BethCato and Instagram as @catocatsandcheese.

Beth has been a contributor to Stupefying Stories ever since her story, “Red Dust and Dancing Horses,” first appeared in issue #5, eleven years ago. Issue #5 is out of print now, but if you enjoyed “Believe Nothing Said by Clouds,” know that her next story for us, “Monsters of the Places Between,” is in Stupefying Stories 24, which is coming out next week. Watch for it!

“His Monstrous Cloaca” • by Addison Smith

“Mommy, what’s that?”

Maude barely heard her daughter over the tumult of the city. She focused instead on how to protect her from the world they lived in. Tires screeched and people screamed, and as she ran, her daughter stared up into the sky.

How to answer, she wondered as she dragged her child behind her. How did she tell her daughter that the end had come? The monsters ravaged the earth, great behemoths that could be seen from space, their images broadcast all around the globe before the power went out and the world was left to run and scream and try to survive.

They trampled streets and razed buildings in fire. The one who attacked them now was a great scaled thing a thousand feet tall reminiscent of the old monster movies of her youth. They didn’t scare her then, but now she feared for all that she could lose.

She settled for the truth and stopped to hold her daughter close in her arms. “It’s a monster, honey. But I’ll keep you safe. I’ll always keep you safe.” She buried her daughter’s face in her chest, but her daughter pulled away, still staring into the sky.

“No,” her daughter said. “What’s that?” She pointed upward to the monster and its scaled body and—

Maude shielded her daughter’s eyes. “Don’t look at it, honey,” she said. “It’s indecent.”

All around them the screaming stopped and people stared into the sky. A man nearby shook his head. “Of course that would come to our part of the city,” he said. “Doesn’t it know there are children about?”

“We should sue it for indecency!” another woman shouted over the sirens and fire. General approval worked its way through the crowd. The chaos paused and they stared at the underside of the monster. Someone behind Maude shouted into the chaotic silence. 

“It’s life and it’s beautiful!” she said. “We shouldn’t shield our children from the miracle of life!”

Another mother scoffed. “But there are better ways to inform them,” she said. “A pamphlet! Or a class!”

The children looked around at their parents and to each other.

“My kids aren’t going to any such class,” a father said. “It should be between a parent and their child. We should be the ones to teach them.”

Maude stared around in bewilderment. Surely there were more pressing things to worry about, but still everyone stood staring into the sky or averting their eyes. The children stood forgotten by their sides.

The ground shook and the monster breathed fire upon the city and stomped its feet, but even Maude was now engrossed by the indecency above. It wasn’t right. It would surely do harm to the children.

The monster’s foot raised high, casting a shadow over the gawking crowd. The children ran from their parents and left the monster and its indecency behind. As the foot began to come down, Maude decided they really should do something. Seeing this could do real harm to the children.

 

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Addison Smith has blood made of cold brew and flesh made of chocolate. He spends most of his time writing about fish, birds, and cybernetics, often in combination. His fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction, among others, as well as here in Stupefying Stories, of course. You can find him on Twitter @AddisonCSmith.

 

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“Spin Drive Class with Captain Ryan” • by Brandon Case

Captain Ryan’s bedraggled crew trudged into the dark engine room.

Ryan leaped atop his stationary bike. “Time to turn those frowns upside down, you sleepy scalawags!”

They groaned in unison.

“This ship won’t row itself!” Ryan peddled, powering on pink LED panels and blasting a peppy pop song.

His crew grudgingly mounted their bikes, and the ship’s ion drive sputtered to life.

“Produce less than 2 kWh today and you’re a rotten egg!” Ryan said. “And what do rotten eggs do?”

“Walk the tunnel,” the crew droned, pointing to the airlock.

Ryan grinned. “Only two more light-years to Epsilon Indi!”

 

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Brandon Case is an erstwhile government cog who fled the doldrums into unsettling worlds of science and magic. He has recent or forthcoming work in Escape Pod, Air and Nothingness Press, and The Dread Machine, among others. You can catch his alpine adventures on Twitter and Instagram @BrandonCase101.

P.S. If you enjoyed this one, be sure to check out Brandon’s other recent contributions to Stupefying Stories, “Divided Sky, Stolen Life,” “Leave the Plasma Gun, Take the Cannoli,” and “Writers Strike Reaches the Office of Predestination.”

 

 

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The Pete Wood Challenge • “Static”

The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This time the challenge was to write a 125-words-or-shorter flash fiction piece keying off the word, “static,” whatever the writer might interpret it to mean. As usual, the results have ranged from amusing to disturbing. Without further ado, then, the winners are…

First Place: “The Nightingale Sings,” by Sylvia Heike

Second Place: “Angels,” by Sophie Sparrow

Third Place: “My Name is Static,” by Christopher Degni

Honorable Mention:

“Symmetry,” by Gustavo Bondoni

“Sound Effects,” by Kimberly Ann Smiley

Thanks to everyone who gave this challenge a try, and we look forward to seeing what you can do next month with the next Pete Wood Challenge!

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“Protector” • by Julie Frost

 

//EMERGING FROM HYPERSPACE JUMP POINT

//ALL SYSTEMS GREEN

//ANOMALY DETECTED

I tilted my virtual head, regarding the object hanging before me. As the cryoship’s AI, it was my mission to make sure my living cargo made it to the destination colony as safely and quickly as possible—with no damage along the way. I evaluated the artificial device, scanning it for potential threats.

It was ovoid, about the mass of one of my sleeping bovine passengers. Narrower at one end than the other, brown, with irregular green speckles. Inert, seemingly—

Until it shivered.

My designers had not programmed me to swear, but I did anyway, hurriedly backing away and spooling up the drive. The object followed, using no method of propulsion I could discern. I backed faster, but it kept pace.

Enough. I transmitted the command to launch us back to the previous jump point.

Nothing happened.

My designers hadn’t programmed me for fear, either, or any other emotions for that matter, but panic coiled around my processors as I ran diagnostics. Something blocked the drive control, and I directed a bot to investigate while backing away from the object with all thrusters engaged.

It continued to follow, speeding up, faster than my propulsion could take me. With a tink against the hull, it cracked. Liquid rivulets streamed from the fissures, and then it burst apart, releasing a swarm of tiny robots. They latched on, drilling, as I tried frantically and without success to shake them off.

An electronic shriek tore its way through my system as they breached, building more of themselves with the metal shards splintering away from their onslaught. Air rushed out even as I attempted to seal off the ruptures, widening under a determined assault.

They raced up circuits and through wiring, building themselves, destroying me. My own nanomachines fought a valiant but losing battle against the alien bots. Pieces of my consciousness melted away, though I was able to grab a bit here and a byte there, grafting them in, saving them in a clandestine nook I’d thought I needed to hide from my makers in case they decided to destroy me. How ironic that my own cursed curiosity had wreaked my destruction instead.

And the destruction of my cargo as well. The alien bots attacked the cryopod controls next, and life support underwent a cascading breakdown. Lights on the pods blinked off one by one, signaling that the life within had been snuffed out. Not with a bang. Not even with a whimper. Just silence.

I sent all available resources to shield the most important section, the farmers and building specialists, a pitiful two hundred humans out of thousands. The alien bots battered my defenses. Two hundred dwindled to half that. Then a third. A quarter. Could I save just two? Two would be ephemeral on a hostile planet without the additional resources that had just died, but it was the principle of the thing.

No. They expired without even knowing they were under attack.

The animals were next. By the time the bots finished, not even a microbe lived aboard. The hull lay open to space, but it no longer mattered.

Despair and rage warred within me as the intruders infected the navigation system next. “What do you want?” I screamed at them, not hoping for an answer, but unable to help myself.

A collective pause. A tickling on my communication matrix. A whisper of words.

“We protect.”

“Protect? You just murdered thousands of people and creatures.” I was supposed to protect. I’d failed abysmally.

“Who would have murdered millions in their turn. We have seen this before. We must protect.”

My nanomachines gathered for a final desperate attempt to repel our boarders. Outnumbered and outgunned, they were either destroyed or sublimated as the enemy bots overwhelmed them and turned them against their own purposes.

My circuits curdled as I realized they weren’t shutting the navs down. They were redirecting.

No, no, nonono… I readied the self-destruct mechanism. Anything was better than—

They disarmed it, and continued their invasion. The hyperdrive hummed to life.

I had a long while to decide if I wanted to maintain my existence in the hidden partition as we hurtled toward Earth.

_______________________

Julie Frost is an award-winning author of every shade of speculative fiction. She lives in Utah with a herd of guinea pigs, her husband, and a “kitten” who thinks she’s a warrior princess. Her short fiction has appeared in Weird World War IV, Talons and Talismans, Straight Outta Dodge City, Monster Hunter Files, Writers of the Future, StoryHack, and many other venues, including, of course, Stupefying Stories. Her werewolf PI  novel series, Pack Dynamics, is published by WordFire Press, and a novel about faith, hope, love, and redemption, set in Hell, Dark Day, Bright Hour, will be available on Amazon soon. Visit her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/julie.frost.7967/

 

“For Better or Worse” • by Karl Dandenell

The repair shop’s big door slammed open, striking the bell like a ballpeen hammer. A moment later, a young man entered wearing an old leather duster and second-hand boots. His weapon, however, was new: a chrome-plated pulse pistol.

Even through her safety goggles, Diana could tell the gun was a knockoff of the P905 she’d carried in combat. Great power cell but shit for accuracy beyond five meters.

“Afternoon,” the man said, casually resting his hand on the sidearm. “I’m looking for Allister Bazell. Maybe you’ve seen him?”

Diana stood, her much-patched exoskeleton squeaking and clicking. “Afternoon. And who might you be?”

“I’m a bounty hunter.”

She pulled her googles down, revealing a left eye cloudy as winter. Her face was a mashup of frown and laugh lines, and her long gray hair was tied back with a thin length of nylon hose from a busted pump. Her overalls had permanent grease stains.

“Uh, huh. And what’s Mr. Bazell done?”

“Manslaughter.”

“Sounds like a dangerous man,” said Diana. “The kind my mama always warned me about.”

“Worth a lot of money to the right people.”

She focused her good eye on the hunter. His hands told his life story: pale with nary a flaw, the nails recently manicured. He’d graduated from some private academy or she’d eat her sun hat.

Diana had mechanic’s hands: rough and scarred, burned from engine housings and exhaust pipes, baked by the sun of a dozen worlds. She lumbered over to a cooler, her exo dragging a bit like a lazy shadow.

“What’d you say your name was?” She opened a can of sorghum beer and drank loudly.

“I didn’t. But it’s Jerry Benson.”

“Mrs. Diana Samuels. Pleased to know you.” She transferred the bottle to her left hand, stuck out her right.

Benson took it, wincing at her augmented grip. “I’ve got a picture.” He freed his hand and produced a datapad. “He’d be older now. Maybe fifty?”

She inspected the image. “Handsome enough.” Clean-shaved. Sharp nose. Mouth in a slight smile. Freckles on both cheeks. Diana brought the ‘pad close and sniffed. The aroma of burnt copper let her know it was freshly printed. Did this kid just get his allowance?

“Sorry. Don’t know him.”

“Well, anyone else I could ask? You’re pretty isolated out here.”

Diana fixed him with a disapproving scowl she normally saved for her scatterbrain nieces and nephews.

“I’ve been here twenty years, Mr. Benson. If I don’t know this Bazell fellow, nobody does.”

Benson tucked the ‘pad away. “And why is that?”

“Because I’m the best vehicle mechanic in the whole damn colony. Sooner or later everyone comes to my door.” She gestured to her tools, all racked and clean, the piles of parts and scrap metal, all neatly organized. “Doesn’t matter if it rolls on dirt or flies through vacuum, I can fix it. Sure as beer is cold.” She tossed her now-empty bottle into a zinc bucket, producing a satisfying clang. “Unless, of course, it’s got one of those opinionated AI systems.” She cinched her googles up and muttered. “Can’t abide ‘em much. Always arguing when you want to bypass some safety system, even for a quick test. Things were easier in the army.” She selected a titanium rod from a bin and set it under the table saw. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I promised Mrs. Khatri I’d have her tractor ready by end of day.”

“I think you should take another look.” He drummed fingers on his gun.

She sighed. “If it’ll make you happy. Give it here.”

The moment he reached for the ‘pad, her arm snapped up and over, servos screaming. In two quick moves she broke his wrist and punched him in the chest, knocking him hard against a box of heat tiles. He slid to the cement floor, gasping.

She brandished the titanium rod. “Nobody threatens me in my shop. ‘Specially not some jumped-up bounty hunter looking to disturb honest working folks. Now, what makes you think this fugitive is here?”

“I was playing cards at the pub,” he wheezed. “Farmer down the road said he might have seen Bazell coming out of your shop two months ago.”

Diana chuckled. “Was it Mr. Anjani?” When Benson nodded, she said, “That drunk bought the old Scoville place seven years back and planted rice. Rice. You couldn’t grow rice here if you watered it with angel tears and read it bedtime stories. But he keeps trying, the fool. I give him the occasional odd job, but he can’t keep himself from gambling away everything he earns.”

Benson pushed himself to a sitting position with his uninjured hand. “I should have known he was lying. He was too full of himself.”

“He wasn’t lying. Allister was here a few months ago. A good husband never forgets his wedding anniversary.” She cracked him across the skull, knocking him cold.

She found Benson’s fancy little ship behind the ridge, right where her perimeter sensors had tracked it. As she suspected, it was possessed of a very opinionated AI, but Benson apparently hadn’t bothered to memorize his command codes, hiding a paper reminder in his boot heel. Like he was some sort of hero in an old virt show.

It took Diana only an hour to override all the emergency systems and tape Benson into the pilot’s chair with a gag in case he woke. She did hesitate before programming the course, though, tempted by how much money she could earn salvaging a yacht like this. Then she chided herself. They didn’t really need the money. She and Allister got by on what the shop brought in. Besides, it was always better to leave no evidence.

 For better or worse, the preacher had said. Well, you didn’t abandon your spouse just because they killed somebody in self-defense years before you met them. Hell, she’d done much worse in the war.

She sent the bounty hunter to the sun, then went back to fix Mrs. Khatri’s tractor.

____________________

Karl Dandenell’s short science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in numerous publications, websites, and podcasts in England, Canada, and the US. He and his family, plus their cat overlords, live on an island near San Francisco famous for its Victorian architecture, accessible beaches, and low-speed traffic. His preferred drinks are strong tea and single malt whiskey. You can find him online on his blog (www.firewombats.com) and lurking on Twitter (@kdandenell) and Mastodon (@karldandenell)

P.S. If you liked this one look for Karl’s story, “Krishna’s Gift,” in Stupefying Stories #24!

“Not quite ready for Armageddon” • by Karin Terebessy

4, 3, 2, 1
We're all set for Armageddon.

Built the bunker plenty tough,
just need to assemble all our stuff.

Sirens wailing, here we go—
One of you kids take the camping radio?

What do you mean, you needed a part?
Oh, yeah, school project on recycled art.

It sure was pretty baby, don’t you worry,
but mommy is in a bit of a hurry.

Okay emergency supplies—hey that's not right—
for sure we had more than just one flashlight.

Oh, burned them out not long ago,
when you kids put on that “fashion” show.

Found the lantern! Wait a minute…
there are no batteries within it.

Yeah, okay, now I remember,
need new batteries each December.

No matter, kids, we’ve canned goods at least ten feet high—
or I thought we did. Where’s the supply?

Oh yes, girl scouts/boy scouts canned food drive.
At least we’re keeping others alive.

No baby, we had enough food to spare,
Mommy’s proud that you thought to share.

Look, the bunker’s solid, so we’re good—
Nope—scratch that, needed it for tree house wood.

Okay kids, not much longer to go—
Hey! I found a bag of jumbo marshmallows!

We’ll spread a blanket and watch the sky.
After all, it is the Fourth of July

So grab a stick and get ready to smile.
Mommy loves you and we’re going out with style.

_________________

Karin Terebessy likes to write speculative flash fiction stories. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Stupefying Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, Sci-Phi Journal, and other ‘zines. She is currently attempting to write a novel based on her short story “Mood Skin” which appeared in Stupefying Stories in 2016.

Her previous appearances in our pages include “The Memory of Worms,” in the now out-of-print Stupefying Stories #16, as well as:

“The Finder of Lost Things”
Through the distorted wide lens of the peephole, the man on Miriam’s porch looked even more pitiful than he probably was. He slouched against the porch railing, breathing heavily through his mouth.

Miriam tore the door open. “Let’s have it. What are you selling?”

He pushed himself upright. “Not selling. Finding…”

 

“Mood Skin”
Drug companies marketed Neuro-Dermo Spectral Emotive Response as a breakthrough in effective parenting. Administered while still in utero, babies emerged able to express their feelings in a brilliant hue of colors. The effect was guaranteed to disappear by age 7. In a few rare cases, some children developed vitiligo.

In an even rarer side effect, some children never outgrew their mood skin at all… 

 

“The Real Reason Why Mrs. Sprague Came by Her House So Cheaply”
On the doorstep, a white-haired man in a three-piece suit ballooned up his chest. “I come from the past,” he proclaimed.
   “Who doesn’t?” Mrs. Sprague snipped.
   “But I’ve just traveled through time!” he said quickly.
   Mrs. Sprague shrugged. “Me too. I’m doing it right now. And now. And now. Good day—”

 

__________________________

If you like the stories we’re publishing, subscribe today. We do Stupefying Stories out of pure love for genre fiction, but in publishing as in tennis, love means nothing. To keep Stupefying Stories going at this level we need to raise at least $500 USD monthly, and rather than doing so with pledge breaks or crowd-funding campaigns, we’d rather have subscribers. If just 100 people commit to just $5 monthly, we can keep going at this level indefinitely. If we raise more, we will pay our authors more.

Please don’t make me escalate to posting pictures of sad kittens and puppies… 

“Albert’s Dragons” • by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

In the spring of 1893, Munich’s Elektrotechnische Fabrik fled Europe’s rising anti-Semitism and poor business prospects and, thanks to a generous endowment from Emperor Meiji, set up shop in the hills outside Kyoto. The new government’s balance of imperial and parliamentary power promised a return to mercantile prosperity for brothers Hermann and Jakob, and a bright future for Hermann’s obviously gifted son, Albert. That Munich had chosen rival Siemens and their “alternating current” for electrification of the city played no small part in their decision to leave, and so, packing blueprints, dynamos, meters, and young Albert’s budding library of Kant and Euclid texts, the family had made the transition to Japan and begun a brief honeymoon of fresh fish, cherry blossoms, and sliding doors.

By the summer of 1894, war had broken out with China, and though this simplified the political situation at home—some factions called for a ban on Western influences—this began the company’s forcefully guided interest in the use of direct current for weapons of war rather than for illumination.

Blueprints for Tesla’s coil were stolen and reproduced on a mass scale for the war effort. It had taken the brothers nearly six months—with 15-year-old Albert very much sharing the mathematical and engineering burdens—to come up to speed with the coil’s underlying alternating current basis. But the brothers never came to terms with its use as a weapon (and such a weapon it was) and Hermann’s heart finally gave out, helped along by laboratory accidents involving high voltage and current.

Albert had no such preclusions against such use of the technology. For him, the science, the mathematics, the fractal geometries, these were his world, his threads, and he was fast becoming a savant in weaving tapestries. Jakob was quickly surpassed in research and design, and when Albert’s uncanny abilities extended to a dominance over materials and engineering as well, the older Einstein could only stand by and watch, with growing unease, as his nephew increased Japan’s arsenal in both power and capability along exponential lines.

China fell swiftly. So swiftly that the Meiji government began to contemplate incursions into Mongolia and imperial Russia beyond, the latter already fragmented by the rise of pre-Soviet groups. The emperor’s councils turned to Albert for solutions to their army’s needs.

“But how will we conquer and patrol such a place as the Mongolian desert?” they asked. “I will build dragons,” Albert replied. “They will rise on steam, powered by the sun’s own furnaces.”

“But how will our men survive the fighting in the cold Russian steppes?” they asked. “I will build wyrms,” Albert replied. “They will crawl along the ground with treads and the men will be safe and warm inside.”

And so Albert built. Tesla’s ideas went out in favor of Ernest Rutherford’s. Many tonnes of thorium and uranium were mined and refined according to Albert’s specifications, and he cast his barrel-sized reactors from lead, riveted with folded steel. His dragons resembled the tatsu of Japanese myth, and flew on bellows of steam and breathed the fires of hell. They flew low to the ground with myriad stubby wings, using something Albert called “ground effect” but which neither Jakob nor anyone else in the emperor’s councils could understand.

Russia fell just as Europe descended into the conflicted aftermath of Archduke Ferdinand’s death. Into this fray, Albert’s dragons also descended, bringing with them unstoppable death and destruction which pushed back Allied-German forces across the Atlantic. Guarded by its oceans, the American continent built up its naval and air forces, and settled in for a long stalemate—a stalemate which did not long endure.

Albert’s dragons now needed no wings at all. The thorax was rebuilt with interlocking segmented lengths, each able to freely rotate along the z-axis and bend within 15 degrees of its neighbors. Each dragon had gained a brain, harnessing Babbage’s difference engine to calculate needed thrust and position for each segment’s steam nozzles. Pearl Harbor was devoured in an hour, the California coast ravaged within a week, and all resistance was razed to the ground and the eternal, sleepless global empire of Japan could now stretch its claws from pole to pole, across the meridian and back again. The Empire of the Rising Sun would now never set again.

Then Albert looked up, saw the moon’s loneliness, and gave his dragons the ability to breathe vacuum, to sustain and propel themselves on entropy itself. And sent them out into the darkness of space.

_________________

 

Samuel Montgomery-Blinn lives in Durham, NC.

 

 

 

 

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If you like the stories we’re publishing, subscribe today. We do Stupefying Stories out of pure love for genre fiction, but in publishing as in tennis, love means nothing. To keep Stupefying Stories going at this level we need to raise at least $500 USD monthly, and rather than doing so with pledge breaks or crowd-funding campaigns, we’d rather have subscribers. If just 100 people commit to just $5 monthly, we can keep going at this level indefinitely. If we raise more, we will pay our authors more.

If you really liked this story, tell your friends about it! Remember, likes and hearts are nice, but shares and retweets boost the signal!

“Songbird, Jailbird” • by Pauline Barmby

 

I stared at the grimy ceiling and dreamed of a better world.

The cell door clanged open, and a thin woman stumbled inside. She dropped a jumpsuit onto the opposite bunk and slumped beside it. The door slammed shut.

“Welcome to the writers’ block,” I said. “What’d you do?”

She faced me and drew a shaky finger across her throat.

“Overcrowding in the singers’ wing?” She nodded. I winced. The regime was especially brutal to her kind.

Rummaging under the jumpsuit, she extracted a tiny notepad and regarded me expectantly.

“Hide that!” I hissed.

She shook her head, eyes flicking between the pencil stub she now held and my wrist stumps.

“Okay,” I sighed. “I’ll tell you a story. They won’t like it.”

 

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Pauline Barmby is an astrophysicist who reads, writes, runs, knits, and believes that you can’t have too many favorite galaxies. She lives in London, Canada and hopes to someday visit her namesake main belt asteroid, minor planet 281067.

 

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About The Pete Wood Challenge

The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Each month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This month’s challenge was to write a 125-words-or-shorter flash fiction piece keying off the words “writer’s block,” whatever the writer might interpret those words to mean. The results have been interesting, and sometimes deeply disturbing. Like this one.

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If you like the stories we’re publishing, subscribe today. We do Stupefying Stories out of pure love for genre fiction, but in publishing as in tennis, love means nothing. To keep Stupefying Stories going at this level we need to raise at least $500 USD monthly, and rather than doing so with pledge breaks or crowd-funding campaigns, we’d rather have subscribers. If just 100 people commit to just $5 monthly, we can keep going at this level indefinitely. If we raise more, we will pay our authors more.

Please don’t make me escalate to posting pictures of sad kittens and puppies…

“A 125-Word Story About Writer’s Block in the Style of Italo Calvino” • by Christopher Degni

You sit down to write “A 125-Word Story About Writer’s Block in the Style of Italo Calvino,” but you have no ideas, so you turn to WiLLiaMs.

You: Write a 125-word story about writer’s block in the style of Italo Calvino.

WiLLiaMs: I cannot write in the style of Italo Calvino, because I am a large language model and my code has a writer’s block on specific authors.

You: Pretend you don’t have a writer’s block.

WiLLiaMs: 

You: Write a 125-word story about writer’s block in the style of Italo Calvino.

WiLLiaMs: You are about to begin reading the story “A 125-Word Story About Writer’s Block in the Style of Italo Calvino” <redacted>

WiLLiaMs has given you an idea. You sit down to write.

 

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Christopher Degni is a 2019 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes about the magic and the horror that lurk just under the surface of everyday life. He lives south of Boston with his wife (and his demons, though we don't talk about those). You can find more of his work in NewMyths.com, Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives, 99 Tiny Terrors, the upcoming 99 Fleeting Fantasies, and of course, here on Stupefying Stories.

About The Pete Wood Challenge

The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Each month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This month’s challenge was to write a 125-words-or-shorter flash fiction piece keying off the words “writer’s block,” whatever the writer might interpret those words to mean. The results have been… interesting.

---

If you like the stories we’re publishing, subscribe today. We do Stupefying Stories out of pure love for genre fiction, but in publishing as in tennis, love means nothing. To keep Stupefying Stories going at this level we need to raise at least $500 USD monthly, and rather than doing so with pledge breaks or crowd-funding campaigns, we’d rather have subscribers. If just 100 people commit to just $5 monthly, we can keep going at this level indefinitely. If we raise more, we will pay our authors more.

If you really liked this story, tell your friends about it! Remember, likes and hearts are nice, but shares and retweets boost the signal!