The Future Is Short Read Free Page A

are born and die an echo.
    Without warning, Con’s there, mirroring my frozen, dull-eyed shock. We’re both blank. Hollow; with no hearts left to break. Where my tears track, his follow. He bears his own grief and mine, by lifting me and carrying me effortlessly into my own cube. He lies there beside me, and says—to no-one at all—in a voice with no tone at all: “Penultimate Earthling Ended.”
    ***
    There was a woman here once, named Morwen. Named Amma, Mother. Mamm. She danced tales of Anansi. Rip Van Winkle. Of Isis, Allah, Vodun, the Khrishna-Christ. Of Twains, Austens, and Andersens. She sang of Ethiop’s fables; of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Of humans.
    She’s gone now. Yet Kawgh an Jowl y’th vin Conran, the Devil’s shit-mouthed deceiver remains. Like Jan Tregeagle, labouring on endless tasks all across Bodmin Moor, Con and the New Gods still feed me the knowledge of an entire planet. But I’m all full up. Now, I’m ready to burn.
    Hic sunt dracones.
    They’re manipulating my XYs with Morwen’s stored DNA. If they do make a woman, I’m taking her with me. We’ll run even faster than the Gingerbread Man. For now, I do the only thing I can to stop my dragonfire.
    I dance. I sing.
     
    J.J. Alleson is a London-based freelance editor, multi-genre writer, and poet. She writes across the spectrum of romance, science fiction, murder mystery, and the paranormal. Her anthology of science fiction short stories, A Step in Time, will be available on Amazon, Smashwords, and other online platforms from December 2014. [email protected]   http://www.jjalleson.com
     
     
     
     

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    4.
    There Is a Silent Secret in the Woods of Ar-Cortiex
    Paula Friedman
     
    What I ’member about Granmer was she loved the silence, and she showin’ me, out on the high forest hillside, what people usedta call “birds.” See, this was out on Ar-Cortiex III, back when I was a kidsie and Daddy worked as gobernor of the whole Ar-Cortiex System. “See birdie,” Granmer’d tell me, n’ she’d point, say “birdie-birdie” and how big “in our thin air” them wings. And tell me, “Sylvie, know the forest sings a secret, but you gotta go discover it you’self.” I’d laugh and listen, and hear silence. Them were the days.
    Back on Earth-Crowd’dr, though, two decades later, after Dad’s death and my Marvin’s, sick on that thick air, we got forced to join the lined-up folk, awaiting export (“exile,” Oaksing calls it—she’s my treesie, brought from Cortiex, skinny-light like me ’n Granmer, and all leaf-silk fur). It was ’cause-of Granmer, mostly; she’d got old. And can’t take Earth-loud noise.
    Hey hell, she never could—that’s Granmer. Kinda-like me and Marv, y’know? Grew upsie on Ar-Cortiex.
    So, hearing now her screamsies here, crunched in that bed, tubeses and stuff, I hear them birdies, silence, forest back on Cortiex III; ’member how my little Granmer took me out for treats, and now she’s sayin’ “Help me, end me, Sylvie, no more this”; I know she means the noise. Kinda all around in Hospi-Crowds like here. I say, “I’ll try.” I can’t, though—not Earth noise.
    All started with that tooth, see. Infected—’fore then, back on Cortiex where “air’s so thi n /  ya wanna spin,” Granmer was full-on perky. But here, and with them twenty-eleven days’ wait per an appointment, wow that tooth got bad, them microbes “climbed her bones , /  got up so hig h /  they sought the sky,” as Oaksing told me, and docs stuck her right into a Hospi-Crowd. So Granmer—oh they kept her life up, kept her ears on, all that, but—she’s never been the same. And so every day she’s here, my Granmer, locked in Hospi-Crowd, where all the televisies and “gamesies play , /  all night and day” and every other moment, too—bzzz-thump-bzzz-zhppp, no stop to it.
    ’n they drug her up, too, ’cause she shouts “Stop the noise! Let me sleep!” which