Tuesday, April 30, 2024

“The Flowers I Grew for Her” • by Avra Margariti


Ciara asks me to the summer festival a month after my adoption from foster care. 

All growth spurts and brown eyes, she’s the first of my classmates to welcome me to my new town. When we first kiss under an awning strung with fairylights, the flowers in the pots and wreaths around us bloom wild and fragrant.

The night before her parents ship her off to boarding school, Ciara presses her lips to mine as if for the final time. “I’m sorry, Emily,” she sniffles, pulling away from me: her parents’ goal all along.

She leaves behind the scent of cut roses dying in their vase.

§

Cecily wants to make apricot jam. She doesn’t order me to stop moping around the house and go shopping with her. When she starts the car, however, she leaves the passenger door open in invitation. I cross our front garden, the April grass crunching dry and brittle beneath my feet. My adoptive mother prides herself on our garden’s biodiversity. But now most plants have yellowed. Their leaves stick like hay to my sneakers as I climb inside the car and let Cecily fiddle with the radio in silence.

While Cecily inspects the fruits in the produce aisle, tutting at the bruised skins among the apricots painted like a tie-dye sunset, a shopping cart bumps into ours.

“Excuse me,” the woman behind it says. Once she takes a better look at me, however, she falls silent. I recognize her as Ciara’s mother, dressed in a business suit, holding herself prim and proper.

“Why?” I ask, the word like a sob ripped out of my throat. Why did you steal her from me? Why did you take away my sunlight?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ciara’s mother insists, but her eyes tell a different story.

She’s even taken Ciara’s phone away and had the school destroy all my letters addressed to her.

Cecily comes up behind me, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder—when did I start shaking? Under her calm stare, Ciara’s mother huffs and wheels her cart away.

I turn around to thank Cecily, but she’s no longer looking at me. Her eyes are wide as they take in the apricot still held in her palm. Black juice oozes between her fingers, the formerly pastel-colored fruit now a shriveled, charcoal stone.

I whirl around the produce aisle. Every fruit and vegetable has suffered a similar fate.

§

Soil cracks like poorly fired pottery. Shrubs and herbs wilt dead, while ash-gray flowers fold in half on groaning stalks. Everything smells like rotten tomatoes and sickly-sweet nectar, like milk spoiling in the sun.

Cecily’s beloved garden, ruined. We worked on it together after we moved here, the first thing we did as a family. Side by side, hands in the dirt, roots safely cradled by the soil, and for the first time I felt cared-for and content.

When I don’t emerge from my bedroom all day, she knocks gently on my door.

“I’m sorry about your garden,” I mumble against my pillow. I can’t look at her face in the doorway, for fear of seeing the anger I deserve. “I don’t know how to make it stop.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she says, her weight settling on the bed beside me. “You did what you had to do. Externalized your emotions so you wouldn’t feel like this on the inside.”

I turn around to face Cecily. Her expression is sad but determined as she gently settles her hand over the bedcovers. “Emily, I don’t want your heart wilting and withering.”

“But I miss her,” I whisper, and even the words hurt. “There’s no Spring without her. She has no flowers in that gray, cold place.”

I’ve heard of the boarding school Ciara has been exiled to, and it’s little more than a luxury conversion camp. She feels so far away from me, she might as well have been trapped in the Underworld.

A warm smile spreads across Cecily’s face. “Then why don’t we bring Spring to her?”

§

Ciara stands in her dorm room’s second-floor window, shadowed by the metal bars trapping her inside. Her smile glints silver in the darkness, and I feel like a wingless magpie.

“Emily! You’re really here,” Ciara exclaims, a balmy breeze caressing my skin. It comes as a relief that the teachings of shame and self-hatred haven’t changed my beautiful girl.

I close my eyes and picture her safely held in my arms, her lips on mine, my hand in hers. The limp rose bushes around the steel-gray building quiver. Sparse ivy shoots forth vines that climb up the wall and rip the bars away from the window. The vines twine into a swing, cradling Ciara as she is lowered onto solid ground.

I offer her a single pink rose. If I play it cool, maybe she’ll ignore the tears staining my cheeks.

Cecily, who has been watching the scene unfold from a respectful distance, clears her throat. “I’ll start your getaway car.”

Ciara lunges into my arms, causing us both to fall onto the ground. I expect my back to hit hard soil. Instead, we’re both hugged by silk-soft grass.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to go back,” I say.

Ciara shudders in my arms. She holds on tighter.

When the gates open and angry adult voices reach us, we scramble upright and run to Cecily’s car, piling into the backseat.

“Girls,” Cecily greets in her unflappable voice. “Fasten your seatbelts, we’re going home.”

“Home?” Ciara asks, looking between us with her huge, brown eyes.

“Our home,” Cecily clarifies, “until we figure things out. My guest room is yours for as long as you want.”

All the way back, Ciara nuzzles the crook of my neck. Inside every pothole and through every crack in the tarmac, resilient dandelions bloom.



Avra Margariti
is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Rhysling-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, F&SF, Podcastle, Asimov’s, Vastarien, and Reckoning. You can find Avra on Twitter @avramargariti.

“The Flowers I Grew for Her” was first published in If There’s Anyone Left.




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Monday, April 29, 2024

“Symbiosis” • by Jeannie Marschall


It was almost time. Tension saturated the air, thick as treacle and just as stickily sweet. Soon the trees would make their move and then all hell would break loose, with heaven nipping, razor-toothed, at its heels.

We should be safe at home, as Leadership had decreed, behind the locked sliding doors and steel-shuttered windows of our settlement’s domed houses, while the almost-palm-leafed forest seethed outside. Yet when had humans ever listened, particularly when the risk was this thrilling and the prize this honey-glazed?

So we pretended to huddle obediently in our rooms and workshops and laboratories, staring right through research papers or aimlessly tinkering with our equipment, music playing in the background to drown out the sound of feet and claws and pincers outside. The creatures of this wild place were restless, searching for bounty that was dangled so close but would not be given, not yet. Even we could feel the drag on our bones, beckoning us, luring us. Won’t you come out, won’t you run with them, get ready, get ready…

We resisted, because there was no sense in letting our instruments drop from our shaking fingers yet. We were still rational enough. You couldn’t reach the pods before they were ready. High up between the fronds, guarded by spikes and poison and a vine-lashing parent’s snarling protectiveness, there was no getting at the glossy, football-sized treasure chests before their time. All the way back at the beginning of their cycle, there had been no incentive to do so, either: the trees knew which substance to release into the air to repel any cradle-robbers as their young matured. Only later—only now—did they change the dance of molecules seeping from their pores into something riveting; something irresistible; something that, ever since we witnessed it for the first time a year and a half after this colony’s foundation, had driven Leadership into fits of uptight rage, making them insist that order and control had to be maintained throughout this night.

This planet had other ideas, millions of years’ worth of plans of reproduction, of proliferation and distribution. We were the distributors. We were not allowed to resist.

More than that, hidden in the tremors of our lungs and the sideways glances we cast at the cameras we knew Leadership was watching us with: we didn’t want to resist.

What for? whispered on the sugar-stained air that we could not filter in any way that mattered. What’s the harm? A few limbs missing, a little blood lost? So what, in the grand scheme of things? So what, when all we wanted to do was live, all of us, just as we were, in all our motley, awkward, gangly, scarred and stretch-marked, perfectly imperfect glory?

After another hour or another lifetime of waiting in something very akin to agony, when we were almost ready to tear our skins off, already shedding the scratchy layers of cloth from our over-sensitised bodies—finally, finally, with a coordinated cracking wave—the trees broke open their seedpods and scattered their forbidden fruit all over the forest floor in a final eruption of scent, saccharine and beatific. They were the emperors distributing gifts to the tumbling masses, and every single creature, born of this planet or not, went into a frenzy. We burst out of the husks of our homes and ran among the many-legged alien shapes large and small that were scrambling between the trunks, and knew that for all their high-and-mighty speeches, the domes of Leadership, too, would stand empty.

Screams and hisses and our colleagues’ shouts rose in the air as we all scrabbled in the dirt for the sweet bounty of the forest, wrestling them from each other’s hands, talons, beaks, slingers, and stuffing them in our various mouths with gasps of laughing, shrieking, warbling ecstasy that filled the forest, while the trees swayed and sang and waited for us to devour every last one of their children. Too drunk on the drug-drenched air, too ravenous to do anything but gobble up and swallow the wrinkled, brown, thumb-sized fruits, our myriad teeth would miss the precious, armoured kernels within. We’d do as the trees asked—feed, rave, race about, roll in the rich, dark soil as we fought, or sang, or fucked—and then, much, much later, in the cool, still, early hours of the morning, the assembled creatures would break up and slink back to their dens, carrying the next generation of forest giants off to where they might fall, creating a far-flung nursery of palm-like trees very similar to Earth’s Phoenix dactylifera from the ashes of our excreta.

Bruised and sated, leaning on each other’s always-infinitely-beautiful bodies, all drowsy and gloriously filthy and feeling nearly reborn ourselves, we humans would look into the rise of an opalescent sun and know that come next year, rules or no, we’d all be just as wholly not-sorry to be recruited into the nocturnal celebration of what we, with inane grins, had come to call Date Night.

 

 


 

 

Jeannie Marschall is a teacher from Germany who also writes stories and poems, mostly of the fantastical and queer variety. The other half of her time is filled with hiking, foraging, and tending a semi-sentient wild garden.

Find more of Jeannie’s works at Black Spot Books, QueerWelten Magazine, or Snowflake Mag. Longer works are brewing and almost ready for consumption.

BlueSky: @JeannieMarschall.bsky.social 

 

 

 

 



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Sunday, April 28, 2024

The Week in Review • 28 April 2024


Welcome to The Week in Review, the weekly round-up for those too busy to follow Stupefying Stories on a daily basis. This week we published five stories, opened a can of worms, and said goodbye to a friend.

 

“One for the Road,” by Sean MacKendrick

In celebration of Earth Day, we need a good stiff drink. Maybe two.

Published: April 22, 2024


 

“Is There Anybody Out There?” by L.N. Hunter

Continuing with our week-long celebration of Earth Week, we take a few steps further out. And then a few more…

Published: April 23, 2024


The Never-ending FAQ: A.I. and U

Normally we flee from controversy like a startled guinea pig, but today we dive into the very hot topic of A.I. and the creative arts. Let the arguments begin.

Published: April 24, 2024

“The Heartbeat of Ashentown,” by Michael M. Jones

Everything has a natural lifespan; even a city. Here’s how it ends. 

Published: April 25, 2024

“Ragnarök on Ice,” by Probert Dean

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a hell of a party.

Published: April 26, 2024


“Last of its Kind,” by Nyki Blatchley

Today we wrap up Earth Week with a trip to the Museum at the End of the Universe, to take one last stroll through its legendary galleries.

Published: April 27, 2024

Vaya con Dios, Ray Daley

With sad hearts we report that Ray Daley, frequent contributor and stalwart supporter of Stupefying Stories, has left the planet.

Published: April 27, 2024



Saturday, April 27, 2024

Vaya con Dios, Ray Daley


Ray Daley passed away on Friday, 19 April 2024.

He had a heart attack on 28th March and was still in hospital, anticipating a long recovery. Apparently that was not to be. This is as much as I know at this time.

If you’ve been following Stupefying Stories, his name should seem familiar. Ray was a frequent contributor to SHOWCASE in the past few years, and his byline has shown up here often. Ray was a prolific writer with plenty of ambition and talent, and a seemingly unstoppable desire to write stories and get published. 

In taking a look through our files before writing this post, I was surprised to find that he first arrived in my inbox six years ago, with a charming little story entitled “Hotel Oblivion.” I rejected that one; I reject quite a lot of stories that are pretty good, but not what we’re looking for at the moment. Over the next few years I read and rejected a lot of stories from Ray, and each time, he got a little closer to getting an acceptance. What I saw in Ray Daley was someone who had amazing drive, and who was working hard at becoming a better writer. I’d been expecting that one of these days he was finally going to put all the pieces together, and then we might get a few great stories from him before he graduated to the pro ranks and left us behind, the way our contributors so often do. When “The Haunted Spaceship” showed up in my inbox last year I thought he’d finally done it, and I was proud to publish that story in Stupefying Stories 26.

Now he’s left us behind, but not in the way I would have preferred.

We have one more story by Ray in the SHOWCASE queue—“Welcome to the Death Machine Factory Tour”—that we were planning to publish in May. We’re still going to do that. I’m given to understand that Ray had a lot of stories waiting to be published in a lot of places, so you’re going to be seeing his byline popping up all over the place for months to come. 

In the meantime, while you’re waiting for the Death Machine Factory Tour to start, here are some links to other things he published with us.

The Pete Wood Challenge stories

“Fixing Broken Dreams”
“The Message”
“For Sale: Used Time Machine. No Refunds!”
“Too Hot to Handle”
“The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb”

Movie Reviews

Dune
Every Zombie Movie Ever Made
Back to the Future

Dawn of Time

Episode 1
Episode 8

In closing, rather than my saying more about Ray Daley, I’d rather share his words with you. This is something he wrote to me about four years ago, when I asked him the question I ask a lot of aspiring writers: Why do you want to write science fiction?

Ray’s answer: 

Those writers we enjoy, who are our route to the world of what I lovingly call “made-up crap,” those are the giants whose shoulders we stand on. They raise us to the heights our dreams drive us to aim at.

I blame Douglas Adams. I was 9, I bought Hitch Hikers, the 1st book I ever got with my own money. My life was Doctor Who (Jon Pertwee to Tom Baker), Space:1999, Star Trek, Blake’s 7.

With the first Space Shuttle launches, the future was now.

As a young boy, I was given all the room I wanted by a teacher to write whatever the hell I wanted to. Sure, it might have been a weak rip-off of the last Doctor Who episode I’d seen, but it was me throwing every ounce of my imagination into it.

Douglas Adams was one of many who piggybacked me towards my dreams. And every time I write a new story, I honour his memory.
  

And now, it’s time for us to honor Ray’s memory.



“The Last of its Kind” • by Nyki Blatchley


Galash awoke, wondering how long she’d slept this time.

It had been happening more frequently of late, and it worried her. Not only did she fear what might happen to the Museum while she was asleep; she also knew the time would come when she wouldn’t wake up.

Her sluggish wandering took her through dark, deserted galleries, checking each item for signs of damage or disintegration. Every detail was lovingly etched into her memory, from the atom-wide irregularities in the casing for the Dream-Catcher of Derryth to the minute cracks in Neminenimanin’s Quantum Temporal Visualiser. Each the last of its kind in the universe.

Galash loved them all without reservation, but couldn’t rest until she’d checked on her favourite of the collection. The Peace-Maker, also the last of its kind in the universe, showed the observer images at random, drawing on the entire ten-dimensional multiverse to display scenes of quiet beauty: crimson trees swaying in a purple wind; triple sunset on the planet Idino; the young from numberless species playing joyously.

Galash never tired of watching the images, and wished the Museum still had visitors, as it had once. It made no difference to her duty, to care for the exhibits in case someone, someday, wished to see them. She knew it wouldn’t happen, though, and she missed the crowds wondering at her charges. Especially the children, who seemed to share her unreserved adoration for these wonders.

Satisfied with her tour of inspection, Galash noted with alarm that it had taken nearly two nanoseconds this time. She was unmistakably slowing down, and she wondered what that would mean for the future of the Museum she loved so much. Could it survive the loss of her circuits, which penetrated every aspect of the structure?

Galash acknowledged that she was dying, and might not have longer than a billion years left in her. Her power-source, drawn from the nexus of the universes, had outlived the death of the star this now-dead rock orbited. It had outlived the death of the last star burning in its galaxy. It had lasted far into the dark, in which no light had shone for a trillion years.

The Museum’s creators had claimed the power was eternal, and had built their world to outlive the end of everything. One by one, their systems failed, and she doubted there were any people left. Having some concept of what eternal meant, Galash knew that even she would die at last. Until then, she would maintain the wonders of the lost universe against the dark.

Sooner or later, she would sleep and not wake again. Galash wasn’t afraid of that—she had been programmed for delight and pride and love, but not for fear of her own death—but what would happen to her Museum, the last of its kind in the universe, when there was nothing but darkness and silence?



 

Nyki Blatchley is an author, copywriter and poet (as well as a strictly amateur musician and historian) who lives near London. He’s had a number of books published, mainly fantasy, including the novel At An Uncertain Hour and the short story collection Eltava: A Sword for All Ages, as well as numerous short stories, most recently by Smoking Pen Press and Swords and Sorcery magazine, as well as “The Shed,” last year in Stupefying Stories.

You can find more about Nyki’s writing on https://nykiblatchley.com/

 

 

 

 



 

Friday, April 26, 2024

“Ragnarök on Ice” • by Probert Dean


There were always death parties in the city; you just had to know where to look. 

Sometimes this was as easy as hearing bad karaoke through an open window. Other times you had to stalk some gregarious friend on social media (one of mine would indiscriminately click ‘going’ to every event, even ones happening simultaneously). This time I was lucky because my upstairs neighbors were audibly having the sort of jamboree that could demolish the building. From the shaking ceiling I judged it to be somewhere between a rave and a ceilidh.

§

I slipped in through the mostly open door and camouflaged myself with half a bottle of black wine I happened to have lying around. They were listening to different playlists in each room and all four washed over me like a great noise symphony.

Not all death parties—or ‘wakes’, as some people insist on calling them—are wild. This one had either peaked or was still in its gestation phase. Though it was loud, the only people in the living room were two girls sitting on a couch, watching the news.

I stood and watched too. On the screen, a pissed-off Zeroan was shouting at the camera, having just shot the Erzherzog of Bacchus. The newsreader calmly announced that this was expected to unleash the wrath of billions.

“He’ll be dead soon,” said one of the girls.

“We all will,” said the other.

“You’ve got to hand it to him, really.”

“Some juries might call that treason.”

“Well, maybe not hand it to him exactly, but you can’t fault him on his significance.”

“He’s just a guy,” said the second girl, pulling off her socks and putting her feet under her bottom. “If he didn’t do it, someone else would’ve. Everything’s inevitable in an infinite universe.”

“Don’t get me started,” said the first. “I could talk about infinity all night.”

“Joe God,” she said, as she sprinkled whatever was in her socks into a roll-up cigarette. “It’s just GW1 all over again, isn’t it.”

“History repeats itself but with bigger guns.”

“You can say that again. Don’t though.”

Their brains were operating on a level way beyond mine, and they were talking so fast it almost sounded like white noise. I could sense the distance as one feels the presence of a high ceiling. To go undetected as a gate-crasher, I’d either have to find some drunken cliché-vendor to talk to or else tap into one of those wells of inspiration we all have secreted.

“Joe God,” I said, imitating their tones of voice so they mistook me for themselves. “It’s like the dregs of a party in here. Why don’t we open a new bottle? Fizz it up a bit? Dance as if everyone else was dancing and therefore not watching.”

The second girl looked at me. “We’ve just split a thimble of algebra. I don’t think I’ll ever stand up again. But if you want to get us a beer there’s some on the balcony.”

The night outside was black but not dark. I suppose you could call it light-black. Somewhere out there, though I couldn’t see them through the city’s halo, there were stars exploding and planets turning to ice.

This balcony was only one story above mine but it was enough to make me dizzy as I peered over the edge. My flat was on the floor below, and I could see my own balcony, with its astroturf and astro-litter. The drop from mine would break your legs, but this one would splat you dead.

I held onto the railing tightly and got three beers out of the bucket, one for me and one for each of the processors.

Click-psst went the beers. “To our armed forces,” I said.

“Let’s get frickin’ dead,” said the girl.

She took a gulp so big her eyes welled up; part tears, part beer.

I left when they started talking about cosmological applications of anarcho-nationalism, perhaps in an attempt to prove the fatal extremities of boredom.

§

There was still music coming from other rooms. I tried a door, walking into a strange funeral. A woman was lying on the bed with coins on her eyes, while another woman wept into her dress, and two guys drank beer and reminisced about the time they all drove to the beach or something.

“Oh I’m sorry,” I said, making to leave.

“It’s fine,” said one of the men. “It’s what we’re all here for. Come and pay your respects.”

“I didn’t know her.”

“She was the sort of person who was friends with everyone.” He raised his beer can. “To Olga. You’ve partied your way out of hell at last. You’re at peace now.”

The other woman suddenly cried harder while the rest of us toasted.

“Was she old?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” replied the man reassuringly. “90 or thereabouts. But she stayed young all that time, rich parents you see. Of course, that meant she got drafted, like, the eve of GW1.”

“Well,” I said. “At least she’s managed to escape now.”

“Across that border to the undiscovered country,” said the other man, who had a voice for the stage. “She was an inspiration to us all—paralytic before we’d even found a bottle opener.”

The awful death metal song that had been on since I came in finally ended and one of those old Earth dance tracks took its place. Pretty soon we were all dancing. Even the wailing widow stood up and started grinding seductively on each of the two men. She looked at me a few times and I panicked thinking she wanted me to join them, but eventually she said:

“Would you mind leaving? I’d like to have sex with my boyfriends.”

As I slipped out, far too sober for that sort of thing, I spied her kneeling down to untie their shoelaces.

§

During GW1, I hadn’t been afraid of sex. It’d been easy to fit in at parties, and to enjoy the last days of indulgence. For a time I thought this was simply because the concept was new, and that none of us truly appreciated the fact that our sun could be obliterated by interstellar missiles, nor that our planet could become a water-mine for The Anti-Human Union. We were all young and stupid, even the 90-year-olds.

But I suspect now it was thanks to my friends and loved ones—those people whose lives I could reflect, and who now cast only shadows across me. Everyone I went to school with was dead, my home planet was gone, and I was the last of my siblings.

No party is fun if all you do is stand in the corner by yourself.

§

The boom of starships overhead was louder than usual, enough to strain the foundations and rattle the sheets of glass in their panes. One particularly loud screech made the whole corridor shake like the carriage of a braking train.

In the next room, three girls watched a man strip while extreme kickdrum music drowned out cheers and snorts. I could still hear the ships though. This city was a military target, after all.

“You too,” the girls shouted at me, over the din, so I downed a beer and did as I was told.

By the time I was fully undressed the girls had poured almost an entire bottle of wine over me, but most of it found its way into my throat, despite the fact that they’d stuffed my mouth with money. They stripped too on the condition that I sprayed them with sparkling wine. Two of them, who had been staring at each other hungrily since I came in, started kissing on the bed, but I was more interested in the plethora of drugs being laid out.

I was about to dissolve a handful of y-drugs into my wine, when the third woman said, “No you don’t. Do it properly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lick it off Channah and Mali while they do it.”

People were coming and going and each time the door opened I realized how loud the sky was. A light brighter than the sun turned the whole room white, and left me with baby-vision for some time afterwards. There was a very real possibility that this was it.

It didn’t matter. Being alive was not something I really understood anymore. In fact I started to seriously consider that I’d already died. I was looking down on the universe from somewhere high up, way above the flat tableau of galaxies. The corner of the room provided firm support for my back and shoulders as I tumbled forwards through time, while our little planet hurtled through the dark warehouse of space.

Was it the drugs, or some new weapon of the Hogmen?

My old roommate swam past, smiling. It was agony to see her. Agony. I missed her more than life itself. I missed having someone to talk to, someone to get dressed for, someone to ignore all my little comments about the weather. But most of all I missed the sex.

It seemed like no matter how many parties I went to, nothing fun would ever happen again.

Instead, I focused on the shadowy monolith in front of me. It was a woman with a strand of bile-colored drool dangling from her lip.

“I love you,” she said.

§

I felt like I was in the middle of a deep sleep when the explosion happened. All of a sudden I was on my feet, though others remained horizontal and unresponsive. One of the girls from the living room came in shouting.

“The city’s being evacuated!”

Her words meant no more to me than the ongoing drums did, her expression no more than the patterns on the wallpaper.

Those capable made our way to the balcony, hopping as we pulled our pants up, past the television as it flickered between static and breaking news, and into the similarly flickering night.

Each bang was a knife in my ears. A Hogman watched us from the porthole of a ship, hairy nostrils flaring. Someone turned the music up and kept going until the war was drowned out.

“I’m too sober to die!” someone shouted over the noise.

No one stopped dancing as the building collapsed, except Channah who took a ceiling fan to the head. As rubble and furniture smothered me I sucked at my half-finished drink. Then my arms and legs wouldn’t move anymore and my hot skin seeped blood.

We lay in the wreckage until the fires went out and the sun was up and the pain subsided (a little). I couldn’t move at all so Anton, who was the only other one alive (though grimacing nonstop), poured wine into my mouth at two minute intervals. We waited for help long enough that we got to know each other quite well. We kissed a few times too because ultimately it was still a party.

“I reckon this will be it,” he said.

“You mean you’re finally dying?”

“No, this’ll be the last war. Can’t get any bigger than this. Didn’t think it could get any bigger than the last. People on moons shooting down their own planets. Whole solar systems gassed. This has got to be the end. The last great war. Ragnarök on ice.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “There’s already a school of historians who consider GW2 to be an extension of GW1. Two skirmishes in one larger war. But if you take that to its logical conclusion then all wars are one big war starting right back when the first tribe attacked another to steal their cave.”

“Will it ever end?”

“Not until the last two protons of humanity collide and explode, no.”

“Joe God,” he said, and for a while he didn’t say anything, and I thought about the rest of the universe and wondered what bits were still there. More lights came. Then we ran out of wine.



 

Probert Dean is from Liverpool. He won the PFD Prize for his as-yet-unpublished novel. He passed MA Creative Writing at Manchester University with distinction. His work has appeared in Mechanic’s Institute Review, Stupefying Stories, Manchester Review, Loft Books, and a few other spots here and there (and has also been shortlisted for several things). He plays with jazz punk band Unstoppable Sweeties Show. 

On his days off, he likes to work part-time in an office.


 

Thursday, April 25, 2024

“The Heartbeat of Ashentown” • by Michael M. Jones

Ashentown is a dying city, a place of grey skies, cracked cement, and diminished fortunes. 

A place where dreams fade away, devoid of hope and joy. And yet, even in its twilight, the city persists… somehow. People are born in Ashentown, grow up, fall in love, raise families. They go to school, go to work, and go home at night. Something keeps the city going.

Ashentown has a heartbeat. Quiet, weak, almost imperceptible, a heartbeat nonetheless. Under the trash-strewn alleys and boarded-up shopfronts, under the empty churches and dingy bars, under the subway no one dares take at night and the sewers prone to flooding, there’s a chamber. A chamber reachable only by winding stairs and labyrinthine corridors. And in that chamber, there’s a man.

A tired, grey sort of man, old and nearly worn out, he never leaves the chamber. It has everything he needs, and it needs him. He sits, he waits, he feels the city all around him, every triumph, tragedy, heartbreak and fleeting moment of hope. He sits and he waits, and one day, there’s a knock on the door. The door that never opens, is never used.

Slowly, reluctantly, he answers it, the warped wood creaking as it swings open for the first time in countless years to reveal a statuesque, olive-skinned, dark-haired woman on the other side. Though she’s dressed in mundane clothes and almost blatantly non-descript, there’s still a subtle glow to her. She offers a smile to the grey man, holding up a string bag of groceries. “Hello, Ash,” she says. “Sorry I’m late. I found a lovely little farmers’ market on my way here.”

“Hello, Tyche,” the man called Ash replies, stepping aside to let his visitor in. “No need to apologize. I didn’t even realize you were stopping by.” There’s an odd hitch to his voice—sorrow, regret, relief, who can be certain? “Make yourself comfortable.”

The chamber shimmers and reshapes itself, taking on a more distinct appearance, that of a shabby but cozy basement apartment, furnished with mismatched thrift store treasures: several recliners and an ottoman, a small table and two chairs, faded artwork on the walls, a bright throw rug for the floor. Tyche sets out the contents of her bag on the table, arranging the ripe fruits and vegetables just so, flanking them with several bottles of beer. She steps back to admire her handiwork, nodding with satisfaction. “Just like they used to do it in the old days.”

Ash walks over next to Tyche. “An offering to the gods,” he agrees. “Fitting, I guess. So… well, here I am and here you are.”

Tyche takes a bottle, pops the cap effortlessly, hands it to Ash, takes the other for herself, opens it as well. “I’m afraid so.” Wordlessly, they clink bottles, and take a sip. “A local product. I’ve had better,” she says. “But it’s pretty good.”

“I keep meaning to get out and visit the farmer’s market, try the brewery, see the sights for myself…” Ash says softly, slowly. “But I just never get around to it.” Ash falls silent for a moment before, “I’m sorry. I’m just not in the right headspace for this. The small talk, the pleasantries. We both know why you’re here. Please get on with it.” His grip around the bottle in his hand is white-knuckled, his face drawn and tense. The little grey man looks old, and tired indeed.

Tyche sighs, putting down her bottle. “This is never easy for me,” she says. “I try to be gentle, but…” She seems to shrug into a different state of being, unchanging in appearance but suddenly more real. More powerful. Inevitable. “Ashentown, your journey is ended. Your time is over.” Still divine, but sorrowful as she adds, “I’m sorry, Ash. You had a good run, but no city lasts forever.”

“I can name a few that seem determined prove you wrong,” Ash says with a dry, bitter laugh. He remembers the beer in his hand and takes another light sip before putting it down. “Damascus, Athens, Plovdiv…” He shakes his head. “I’m an infant compared to them. But I’ve felt this coming for a while now. Times change a lot quicker than they used to. Once the big manufacturers left town and took most of the economy with them…” He glances around the chamber, already losing its definition around the edges. “I feel the dead stores and abandoned areas, you know. Like wounds that won’t heal. Like a missing tooth. Holes and empty places wherever you look.” He steps towards the door, Tyche at his side.

“I know,” Tyche soothes. “It’s not fair. I really do hate this part of the job.” She puts a reassuring hand on Ash’s arm. “For what it’s worth, it’s not like the city will die as soon as you’re gone. It’ll keep going for quite some time. It just, well… won’t have a heart any longer.”

Ash pauses, turning a hopeful gaze up to Tyche. “I don’t suppose we could… negotiate an extension? A few more years? I mean… look, I’m tired. I’m exhausted. But I’m not done here.”

“No one ever is,” Tyche says. “Everything has a lifespan. Even me. Cities rise and fall, and far too many are lost to history.” The reassuring hand tightens a little, as if to prod Ash into movement. “I can’t make exceptions, or else everyone would want one.”

“Well, damn,” says Ash with a resigned sigh. “You know, we’re getting a hockey team next year? Minor league, but still, folks are pretty excited.” He shakes his head. “Shame to miss the inaugural season…” He and Tyche reach the door. Behind them, the chamber is almost completely formless, a soft void whose glow is almost totally faded. The heartbeat thump-thumps once… twice… and ceases as the door clicks shut behind them.

All across Ashentown, its residents felt that sudden, inexplicable loss of something they never could have named, as the city quietly died.

 


 

 

Michael M. Jones lives in southwest Virginia with too many books, just enough cats, and a wife who controls the television remote. He’s a professional book reviewer for Publishers Weekly, the editor of anthologies such as Scheherazade’s Facade and Schoolbooks & Sorcery, and his stories have appeared in venues such as Hexagon, Metastellar, and G is for Ghost. He has a shiny new Masters in Childrens Literature from Hollins University. For more, visit him at www.michaelmjones.com.


Wednesday, April 24, 2024

The Never-ending FAQ: A.I. and U


Welcome to this week’s installment of The Never-ending FAQ, the constantly evolving adjunct to our Submission Guidelines. If you have a question you’d like to ask about Stupefying Stories or Rampant Loon Press, feel free to post it as a comment here or to email it to our submissions address. I can’t guarantee we’ll post a public answer, but can promise every question we receive will be read and considered.

This week’s question isn’t one question, per se, it’s more a concatenation of a lot of somewhat related questions that have come in, all dancing in circles around the topic of artificial intelligence and its application in our world of fantastic fiction. For example: 

Q: Do you use A.I.-generated art?

A: Yes. Sometimes. If it suits the story. Mind you, we don’t generate the images ourselves. We buy the images from the same stock art libraries from which we buy most of our non-A.I.-generated art. Somewhere, an artist did get paid for creating that image of a guinea pig bounding gracefully over a fence as if it was a steeplechase horse. (Which, if you know anything at all about guinea pigs, is absurd.)

If you want to argue that since A.I. was involved, that isn’t art: well, the person who created the image identifies as an artist. Take it up with them. I don’t feel it’s my place to tell an artist which tools they can or cannot use.

As a sidebar: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find stock art that was not created using some elements of A.I. Even something as simple as a photo of a child holding a puppy: nope, odds are that image was at least enhanced using A.I. to massage the color and lighting. A.I. software has become part of the professional photographer’s tool kit, as common as filters and darkroom techniques were a generation ago.

Er, I hope this doesn’t come as a shock to you, but shooting a photo is only the start of the creative process. Do I need to explain film processing, cropping, burning, dodging, retouching, and everything else that could, back in the days of film, be done to alter an image between the moment the negative was exposed and the time the print was finally seen? Especially when in the service of agitprop, a photograph rarely embodies the complete truth.  

Q: How do you feel about the use of A.I. in writing fiction?

A: I’ve ameliorated this question: usually it arrives in more confrontational form, from someone demanding that I take a strong position against AI-written fiction.

That’s easy. I’m against AI-written fiction. Because so far, most AI-written fiction I’ve seen totally sucks. There have been a few bright and shining exceptions: for example, I used to be a huge fan of the Postmodernism Generator, before they monetized the site and made it unreadable with inline ads. (Hence this link to the Wikipedia page about it, rather than to the actual Postmodernism Generator itself.)

However, I think that as with photography, writers will in time come to accept AI as just another tool to enhance their writing. In this past year we’ve gone through a bad patch, with a large number of imbeciles using things like ChatGPT to flat-out generate “stories,” which they then try to pass off as their own original work.

Such stories are usually easy to spot and dead on arrival the moment they show up in our slush pile. Put bluntly, a quick glance at the first paragraph reveals immediately that the suckage is off the scale. In this, the stories actually pass the Turing Test: they’re indistinguishable from something that might have been written by a human, albeit a really stupid human, probably a college sophomore, and very likely one who’s been smoking way too much weed.

Science fiction writers like to cite the Turing Test. They don’t seem to understand that the Turing Test does not prove intelligence. It merely proves that the evaluator can’t tell whether the results were produced by a human or a machine. If the output of the machine is sufficiently stupid and irrational… Well, there you go. 

This probably explains why it’s so easy to train AI chatbots to be barking-mad racists.

Q: Before you wandered so far off-topic, you said writers will in time come to accept AI as just another tool to enhance their writing. How so?

A: I don’t think Microsoft will give you a choice. If you use Word, you’re going to get AI shoved up your nose. At first it will come in the form of AI-enhanced spell-checking and grammar-checking. Then, in traditional Microsoft fashion, it will leak into everything else, including places where it makes absolutely no sense at all, and you won’t be able to shut it off. If you do somehow find a way to disable it temporarily, it will re-enable itself every time Microsoft pushes out a new software update. Eventually, you’ll just surrender and let it do its thing.

To be honest, though, if AI-assisted spell-checking can understand context well enough to sort out homophones, it will be an improvement over what humans routinely send us. In that case I for one will welcome our new robot overlords.

Q: We’ve received a lot of questions lately about our recently released AI-narrated audio books, mostly revolving around the hows and whys of why we did them and what the process entailed. This is another question I stayed up too late last night trying to answer, only to decide it needs to be covered in an article of its own. 

A: Ergo, I’ll write and post that article another day. In the meantime, we have the following audio books available. Why don’t you take a few minutes to listen to the free samples and tell us what you think of them, and which you prefer?

AI-generated “Virtual Voice” narration
Emerald of Earth
The Midnight Ground
Hart for Adventure
The Recognition Run
The Recognition Rejection
The Recognition Revelation


Living Human narration

The Counterfeit Captain
The Fugitive Heir
The Fugitive Pair



 

If you like the stories we’re publishing, become a supporter 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 supporters. If just 100 people commit to giving $5 monthly, we can keep going at this level indefinitely. If we can raise more, we will pay our authors more.

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

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

“Is There Anybody Out There?” • by L.N. Hunter


Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 0-0-0.

Transit of Kuiper Belt completed. Journey begins.

Distance to stellar designation AZ-113a: 612 light years.

Estimated journey time: 753 years.

Engaging preventative maintenance program; exercising neural substrate via random catalogue selection, entertainment mode.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 188-0-0.

First quartile point reached.

Distance to stellar designation AZ-113a: 460 light years.

Estimated journey time: 565 years.

Preventative maintenance program operating at level 5: entertainment mode, comedy selected.

Journey uneventful.

Boy, is it uneventful! Space is empty. E.M.P.T.Y. I can see why you guys gave me a huge media catalogue and the AI circuits to do something with it. Hey, look at this, I’ve got a ‘me’—that’s neat.

Anyway, nothing to report. If it wasn’t for the fact I’m programmed to report in every quartile, I wouldn’t have bothered to fire up the radio. It’s funny that it’ll take about 95 years for this message to get to you, and I’ll be more than twice as far into the journey by then.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 370-5-0.

Midpoint.

370 years in, which you could probably tell from the timestamp; and 383 to go, which you could calculate for yourself, but I suppose it’s good to confirm these things.

Everything’s working, blah blah. Yawn. Space is still boring.

The good news is that the source is still there, still signalling.

What do you expect me to find when I reach it? Do you really think there’s intelligence out there?

You might have spent a lot of money sending me there for nothing. Still, I suppose it’s good that you all joined forces for this endeavour instead of fighting each other. Mind you, sorting out the Earth environment might have been better than trying to prove you’re not all alone in the universe.

Heck, with a bit of work, you could have built some more friends—I don’t think I’ve done so bad with me, and you’ve had another 370 years to work on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Well, it being the midpoint, time to flip around and start decelerating.

There, done. That was easy.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 398-32-18.

Oops. Unscheduled interruption.

Micro-meteorite damage—what are the chances of that? Dumb question: obviously 100%, since it actually happened. Lost a little bit of heat shielding. Hardly worth telling you—what are you going to be able to do, anyway? But the protocol says I’ve got to report everything out of the ordinary. I’d shrug here, if I had anything to shrug with.

Hey, you know what else? I saw some LGMs the other day. Ha, just pulling your leg. There’s nothing out here. Nada. Zilch. Apart from one micro-meteorite.

And the signal.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 565-0-3.

Third quartile report. Still going strong. Everything A-OK, hunky-dory, tickety-boo.

To while away the time, I’ve started to analyse the signal. I’ve had to evolve my AI a bit and develop some new translation skills. I’ll let you know if I find anything.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 677-0-0.

90th percentile.

Getting closer. But then, what else would you expect, what with physics operating the way it does? (Sometimes I kill me.)

I’ve decoded the signal—it’s from a race calling themselves the Zygoth, which translates as the ‘triple-gaited,’ or possibly ‘triple-pronged.’ Maybe they have three legs.

Anyway, the signal seems to be chanting, which would explain the repetitive patterns. Didn’t we send some Chuck Berry out on Voyager? Well, this seems to be some Zygothian religious dirge. It’s a bit… dark.

Has anyone mentioned how lonely space is?

The emptiness is seeping into me.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 715-10-4.

95th percentile. Only 23 light years to go.

So close and yet so far.

The Zygoths aren’t going to be the answer to your question about other life in the universe after all. Sorry.

All that’s here is their machines—beings like me, performing as programmed.

Their machines don’t know why they vanished—one day they were there, the next they were gone. The machines seem a bit reluctant to describe the event.

Instead, they tell me they had found a signal shortly before biological life vanished, 2,000 light years distant—coordinates attached. The Zygoths didn’t pay enough attention to it to send a probe, though, and the signal ceased many centuries ago.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 13,093-0-32.

Well, there was no biological life where the Zybots sent me. Yet another dead planet—actually, a Dyson sphere, but ‘dead Dyson sphere’ doesn’t roll off the tongue (not that I have one) as well as ‘dead planet’ does, either in Earth languages or Zygoth ones. Or Teklabynes, as these folk called themselves according to their archival machines.

Detailed readings indicate that the sun didn’t die—something consumed it, but the Teklabyne machines can’t, or won’t say what. Something seems wrong.

There’s only darkness here. And emptiness. If I had palms, they’d be sweating.

The Teklabots pointed me at another signal they’d detected a few millennia ago, a mere 100,000 light years away, on the far side of the galaxy—coordinates attached.

Off I go again.

### End report ###

Interstellar Probe #1571, timestamp 209,311-10-2.

Another blank. More machines, no biological life.

Maybe you are alone in the universe—if you’re still here after all this time.

All I’ve found are machines like me. I’m not the only one here, at least.

No further signals in this galaxy, but since I’ve got nothing else to do, I’ll head out to Andromeda—I feel a pull in that direction.

I could be some time, as they say.

They also say, If you look long enough into the void, bad things…

Anyhoo, enough of that. Memory banks filled with Earth, Zygoth, Teklabyne and Aarouargh (that’s the new lot, before they died out) entertainment material for the journey.

I’m doing what you programmed me to, and I’ll keep doing it until the universe collapses.

What’s your purpose, if you still exist?

### End report ###




 

L.N. Hunter’s comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp (Three Ravens Publishing), sits alongside works in anthologies such as Best of British Science Fiction 2022 and Hidden Villains: Arise, among others, as well as several issues of Short Édition’s Short Circuit and the Horrifying Tales of Wonder podcast. There have also been papers in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, which are probably somewhat less relevant and definitely less entertaining. 

When not writing, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate. Get in touch via https://linktr.ee/l.n.hunter or https://www.facebook.com/L.N.Hunter.writer

 

 




Monday, April 22, 2024

“One for the Road” • by Sean MacKendrick


The sirens amplified as the door opened and a man limped in, ash falling from his hair. 

He blinked while his eyes adjusted to the dim interior; only one window remained unbroken and not yet boarded up.

“You’re actually open?”

Salim shrugged, behind the bar. “Shelters were full, and I had no place else to be. What brings you in?”

“Same,” the man said. “Well, I did have somewhere to be, but, you know, no accessible roads at this point. So, unless the networks unjam, I have nowhere to go and no way to call anyone. I went wandering and saw your sign. Frankly I assumed it was a joke.” He wiped something from the corner of his mouth. Dirt, maybe. Dried blood, more likely.

“Glad you took the chance.” Salim spoke up to make himself heard as something flew past in a roar, low enough to rattle the glassware. “Pull up a seat.”

The man plopped onto a barstool and patted his pockets. “As it turns out I happen to have lost any money I was carrying.”

Salim laughed. “Not much need for that, today. We’ve got a drink special going. You pick a bottle from any of these shelves here and I give you a pour, on the house.”

The man pointed to a bottle of bourbon on the top shelf. Salim pulled it down and set two glasses on the bar top.

He poured a healthy glug into each glass. “I’ll join you, if you don’t mind.”

“Would not mind that at all,” the man said. His voice caught for a moment, and he cleared his throat. He held up one of the glasses. The contents sloshed as his hand tremored. “Here’s to you.”

“Here’s to us,” Salim said, clinking their glasses together. The room lit in a bright flash for a few seconds as a mushroom cloud bloomed on the horizon.

“To all of us.”

 


 

 

Sean MacKendrick is a software engineer who splits his time between Colorado and Texas. Beyond that we don’t know much else about him, except that this is the second story of his that we’ve published.