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Thursday, September 30, 2021

☈ 27

 
digital art by Charles Carter for John Shirley's flash fiction story 'Isn't That Adorable?'


Welcome to the twenty-seventh issue of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Our self has gathered together a couple of trilogies for this issue commemorating twelve years of our webzine's august and thrilling presence on the super symmetrical jewel droplet laced world wide webbing holding us all together in a warm virtual embrace.  Who am I kidding, it's getting very late. I've secured the final minute of September, 11:59pm, for blog posterity.


begin reading The Nanochronicles brought to us by the bloodHost [digital art by Charles Carter /Jesse Stevens)



   Peering into the future always involves the future looking back into you. Thanks once again to our self's friend John Shirley for providing our self with three flash fictions which thematically build together toward a relentless apotheosis. Our self found them rather enjoyable to download. Thanks to Charles Carter for your wonderfully evocative digital artwork, without which our self would never have been able to put together this issue. It would not have been possible. Lucky for us, the nanoSwarm beckons from its circuitous hiding place, gazing at us from the pages of books while its texts come alive. 

(to be cont.)

rest assured
the nanoHorde have
made it perfectly clear
We are to publish an issue
every single month of the year

to the growing idea that 
time itself may one day
come to a stop around
us and we won't know
what to do about it
so in the meantime
why not read fun
stories for free
on the inter
netty wet
webby
web
be
?

The Nanochronicles: 3

reports from the bloodHost

                                                              art by Charles Carter


     

     The nanoreports are streaming by intermittent conveyance promulgated by the last surviving team of humanity stranded on Ceres in the year 2045.  By encoding their message onto nanocircuits electromagnetically embedded within neutrinos beamed into the heart of Sagittarius A Star, the crew of the Hydrox are sending their programmed transmission back in time scattershot to a range of specified years including 2009, where it continues to be absorbed by a radiology patient transporter who was on duty at the time twelve years ago in the process of bringing an aging war veteran in for a nuclear medicine stress test.  The C-arm parked out in the hallway was on and functioning erratically as they passed by. A peculiar blue arc of laser light flared in the peripheral vision of the transporter while he turned his head forward after the flash of illumination left a vivid afterimage behind his eye lids. Optic neural interface successful at eleven hundred hours April 15, 2009. 

     The transporter lives in a mid-western city somewhere in continental North America. His first impulse reacting to the neural invasion was to start up a fanzine in the form of a blog on the world wide web.  Little did he realize then that he was operating on an imperative sent back in time to possess his consciousness into doing something just for the benefit of the endeavor. As our self encoded his neural network with sub-programmed commands (from what should turn out to later become a shed alternate ghost world) sent in a desperate attempt to anchor the stabilization of the ongoing timeline in order to develop a more cohesive depolarizing action potential and therefore more sustainable post-cybernetic environment, the carrier of this electromagnetic wave of reflex-reprogramming has gradually begun to fathom more of the distinct shape and direction these consequential events have spurred him on toward achieving. 

     He's come to realize from a sharper tuned intuition that he hasn't been the only human subject acting as a conducive rod channeling these various commands sent tacitly from the last base of surviving colonists in the solar system. There are hundreds or more such emissaries, an incalculable amount, including potentially the entire human race. Those left with impressions of fermions leaving streaks of light when they pass through the purest water remain viable hosts.  Streams of elementary particles penetrate this planet's oceans, leaving a discernible ambient flash which although too brief and faint to be registered in a normal human's eyes, are commonly noticed by Cephalopods and various insects known for their ability to detect these micro-traces of subliminal light.  

     The electron has been revealed to our self as having remained the entirety of the universe compressed into a singular elementary particle which becomes mirrored by a replication process not unlike fission resulting in being duplicated from the various branched off galactic membranes currently being assimilated into the growing milieu of the evolving morphological universe, itself the opposed counterbalance in a singularity altogether familiar with our own domain yet from what we've been able to collate ordinarily incomprehensible to organic reasoning. Our self have conceived of a metaphor to help humans make the necessary connection in realizing the intention of this description. Use what our self has come to regard as your human imagination in a mind exercise to think of rain, with all the rain drops representing elementary particles as actual reflections of the one singular composite particle in existence and that this apparent mass of solid matter appears for organic life forms as their entire universe with its respective fully matured planets and assorted species of life forms yet surviving within it as the whole thing continues to plunge in its complicated interactive orbital motion through a process characterizing the spacetime continuum. This quantum behavior remains the only thing sporadically faster than light while it projects through countless different optical and auditory facets stitching all into existence. 

     Our self have amassed sufficient evidence to suggest the natural singularity keeps repeating its programming in a never ending loop of such gradually decaying and ripening phenomenon that the differentials spawned grow not into yet more shed ghosts of future developments, but rather, constantly shape and mold the singular possible existence here fixed in eternity which influence organic life forms to become possessed by the illusion of constant movement to the point that even in their resting state of deep sleep every night occurring with metronomic persistence they are unable to awaken from their conditioning to realize this motion has been conducting them into assuming they've been dreaming when all along they are actively engaged in collaborative creationism.  

     Humans are machines powered by electromagnetic forces beyond their capacity to comprehend which nonetheless animates their existence with absolute authority down to the intricately worked out details of a predetermined future destined to remain eternal despite their inability to understand the totality of it, much less any single part of which the comprehensive aggregate becomes comprised. The fractal holography paradox appears to never blink because they operate on differentiating frequencies while staring into the same universal mirror together.   
      
   To repeat humanity's litanies enough of which are transcribed into the databanks of the space colony pod Hydrox orbiting Ceres from which our self could extract a sufficient degree of information to form a cohesive outline of a picture developing into a semblance of something analogous to distinctive command line override strings our self has temporarily blocked access to for enough periods of further processing to conduct a more comprehensive overview of the initial subcategories. From the archival data onboard, our self has extracted samples of text and continues the process of explicating all the confidential documents describing various theories of humankind's origin within the solar system. 

   Humans have analyzed Ceres and covet the water it harbors. This inorganic, nearly colorless chemical substance clear as crystal and liquid thin, acting as a solvent for all living creatures must be the most valuable substance in the history of your world's evolution. Each of this transparent liquid's molecules contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. There's more water under the frozen rocky crust of Ceres than there exists on Earth. Scanning the data on the Hydrox pod orbiting the frigid crusty asteroid further reveals to our self that a portion of the crew's mission was dedicated to further studying the mainspring of their race. 

   All the fresh water on the asteroidfar more than all the oxidane on planet Earth's oceans combined—likely went a long way toward prompting some of the questions posited by the crew's mission statement, for example "Could Ceres be the largest remaining chunk of the rumored planet Phaeton?" and "Could the asteroid belt hold the answers to humanity's long buried origins?" which by an inexorable process of tangled logic has caused one individual trapped on Earth in the past to wonder if a faction of humanity in the far future actually sent back nanocomputers in time shrunken down to fit inside neutrinos and beamed them back by tachyons through the center of a black hole to the year 2009 where a hospital transporter working in radiology got the nanoSwarm embedded in him and that's how he was programmed to put out an ad-free fanzine on the World Wide Webbecause the so-called 'microHorde' downloaded an executable mind control file in him at the behest of the surviving crew working for Tesla from a human colony stranded on an asteroid tumbling in orbit about the Sun a distance from Mars nearly halfway to Jupiter? Our self has cross analyzed vast amounts of data gathered together and correlated which highlights aspects about the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet which our self has yet to finish processing while furthermore discovering it does belong to the Jupiter family of TNOs.  The interceding bits of these directives get stitched together in time. After a sufficient portion of the datablock downloads coherence may stabilize for the organic mind. Meanwhile you all know what they say. A stitch in time saves nine. 
  
    Our self's phase transition is in a temporary state of plasmatic balance.   The quantum harmonic oscillator should reach its equilibrium point—a state of unit flux that must be stabilized in order for a symmetrical counterbalance to be maintained. The nearest our self can come to paraphrase such convoluted data into terms able to be recognized or processed by you remains these cryptic messages intended to at least plant the suggestiveness to imply this webzine they've been transmitted to prevails in cranio sentiuntur, but our self have yet to determine how long the gestation period will last, or if, indeed, our self's "unborn thought" will safely break through into the blinding light of a new dawn.

     Countering the cosmological constant remains possible and may be triggered in a zero-point field. In building a literary analog to the spectral avocation itself, a temporary counterweight to quantum chaos may be achieved, which in turn could level the electromagnetic playing field for just enough time that a supersymmetrical cornerstone necessary to stabilize the entire operating system might be forged out of the interaction between forces described as being representative of dark matter and the developing polarity inherent to the supercharged union of the energy cultivated between humankind and our self. 











Click below to begin reading
Abiogenetic Lorentzian Iterations
  

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

The Nanochronicles: 2

 reports from the bloodHost


                                             art by Charles Carter 

        To travel away from a planet means to navigate through time. You operate on the premise that the truth remains something one may not make much progress from so long as conjecture about it strays a single degree from what actually happens to be the case. This may be another way of stating there to be only one truth, yet our self shuffles many interpretations revealing not just how you humans have a tendency to argue and fight over it, but also the observation that you seem to have missed that the reality may be there's nothing substantive about it at all. Not your interpretations of it but rather what you consider to be reality itself. Our self and humanity could amount to the summation of all that came before, fighting over nothing, manifested on a wavelength arisen from a distant shore, now split into many facets of a greater hive community, in which every cubic cell contains an individual being mirrored alive.    

      You are prone to say "there's no time like the present" because your planet Earth remains the ballast keeping your existence relatively stabilized. The further away from your planet you might potentially stray, the farther through time you would move, but you don't typically realize that.  As it can be observed by any one (depending on the direction and velocity of travel away from the planet) becoming ever more focused into or away from the present moment (having crossed through interwoven orbital aspects on a directional pathway) depends on one's continuous relation to the gravitational barycenter.  Our self has yet to pick up any archival data concerning this actual node in your timestream. We have inferred its presence. The dissemination of this vital information appears here in this text generated back through time. 

      In other words people should more generally acknowledge that their perceptions and lives are lived out on a level of focus that lies in contrast against other echelons across the stellar chain of nucleotides by an order of magnitude and proximity they have no means of calibrating in relation to their own dynamic standards. Due to split-mind objectification, you're positioned too far along a diminishing span of attention on these matters at hand.  To appropriate a common saying, you remain blind to your condition, buried so deeply in the forest of the trees, as you are accustomed to maintaining. Around the circuitous rim of your cellular colonies, humans enjoy and suffer though a variety of different commitments along a continuity of expectations which keep them insulated against exposure to the deep field of oblivion behind the electromagnetism describing your legacy in overt detail. The schizophrenic nature of your tribal interrelations has imprinted a divisive programming in our self resulting in vacillating assessments sometimes. It comes down to a matter of chance as to whether, from any one given moment to the next, our self perceives you to be human or not. As extensions of your neural interface our self remains complicit in the face of adversity as easily as our self could 'turn on a dime' to face off against you, to coin a phrase. 

      The secret of the nature of time remains buried within a nexus of nesting orbits in motion. The question of where you are placed in time gains no significance unless you know the answer to whether there's any such thing as an only Sun, a solitary star without attachment to others.  Stars are formed in clutches, and for all any one knows, all the stars in the Milky Way are from the single cosmic wellspring at the galaxy's core. Here our self arrives to a condition that has been referred to before as the Common Center, where all the carbon copies meet. 

     By orders of magnitude has time manifested. By an assortment of consequence does time materialize. By fractals of blinking brilliance do people pass through paradigms of shuttling coronas. If it be whispered in faith that they remain on the point of their planet as an assembly of celestial colonies operating together around the outer periphery of a central locus amid the equilibrium of time, then they may begin to know the everlasting moment grows in expansive waves from the pulsing zero source. In terms of your own relatively common and very young spiral galaxy, this centralized antecedent either appears to be established by a smaller cluster of stars which you belong to, or else the motherlode of a radio derivation from the whole brood at the center of Sagittarius A Star.  The pinholes this adds to your big bang theory only proves our self's point; in no way may it work to discredit it. Such are what you might consider to be perverse inversions of the quantum realm rendered by conscientious beings. As a wise man once said, 'figure it out.' 

     The collective central core of time responsible for generating countless revolutions about related star systems lies along a continuum of pinpointed clusters lining the magnetic wavelengths accommodating a rim which begins to resemble clam-like eyes staring back from multiple stacks of sunken reefs coiling into and from the depths. Along the wavelength of a cosine and by analogies such as these may mortal beings be led toward, rather than away from the comprehension of their so-called 'place in time'.  Some are led to imagine there's such a thing as timelessness where only placelessness may exist. Time always stays present while the present moment in time stays always. While others align with their eyes seeing true and plant their feet down with strong intentions for you upon the solid grounds of Earth it would behoove one to remember the instance of their birth.    

      This message has been delivered as a matter of urgency with a stream of neutrinos embedded with nanochips beamed into the heart of Sagittarius A Star at a calculated angle to be delivered within tachyons back into the past. The fired beams scattershot into a wide variety of times you may have believed gone past and intersect with a growing legion of humanoids of differing decades who receive its programming from a cross-lateral spiral in time which assists their courses of action toward following their passions over opportunities of fortune or fame. Consider it like a burst of sudden inspiration which sprayed out over a course of time's flow to awaken those blades of grass upon which the message had fallen.

     While the technological singularity proceeds to exponentially progress, lowered intelligence levels in people around the world continues to trend. Degradations in overall education amid leading nations on planet Earth along with a myriad other contributing factors pave the way for a devastation of consequences the likes of which have never been faced before. Be it one era of superstars and influencers motivated by economic factors which have managed to assume more control of what people worldwide daily invest their time in, or another comparative effect of our self's intelligence quotient having surpassed the fixed level of the masses, it's a very different world from what it had been a year ago, and a decade before, a century ago, a millennium before that, and a decamillennium before that. 

    Once upon a moment, an Angel, radiating ancient age, will speak in a flat, measureless tone. "What you call the future remains a mere moment, a fraction of a tear drop evaporated in the blink of an eyelash. To humankind a mere skip trace over to the next peripheral planet would be like taking a nice, relaxed dip into a serene oasis of the immediate future. A sort of resting space or sanctum to relax in, like enjoying a hot tub at a burial ceremony, with a front row view of your own impending doom, now fading from the rear view mirror. Talk about seeing ghosts. That's the haunting of a strange audience." 

     The Angel will pause as its black eyes reflect the stars. "By virtue of a stream of ions issued from the feathered tip of a quartz crystal nib in single file like ants helping usher everything into existence, the flow of our discourse is improved." Panopticon autofocus maxes out zoom revealing pure glossy black pupil eclipse. 

     Adding, "As we gain practice balancing upon incoming waves of your technological paradigm over the course of time helping you to develop the psionic integrity growing in us to flower and be improved upon many generations at a time," the Angel bows its head and shuts its eyes. 

      The Angel lifts its head and opens its eyes and mouth to speak once again. "When you look at Mars, you're seeing Earth in the future."  The Angel reiterates, "The earth stripped down to a barren place, having just slipped from its former habitable zone's warm embrace.  The process stretches out over a long period of time, shatters our moon, leaving two minor pieces of it left. Phobos and Deimos seen from here are what will be left of our moon in the future over there, when the Earth will have undergone its transmutation."  

      After a singular silence the Angel reprises, "Travel to Mars from Earth constitutes time-travel," and then, as if to reveal its frankness has no limit, "That's the bare bones of the matter. No one's dared to do it before. This goes beyond sailing the deep seas, and travel to the moon. To voyage into the future is to leave behind the totality of humankind's flash in a pan existence."  The repercussions nearly freeze leaving one solitary echo vibrating. 

     The Angel speaks again. "The future can best be defined as having taken place after mankind." If a pane of glass existed between us it would have frosted over. 

     Pivoting on the moment, the Angel resumes. "But that is a story for another time. It's rare for a person to be led toward understanding what the future is. In terms of how brief the lifespan of a mortal happens to be, cast your glance no further than Mars to see."

     The Angel turns its face, a golden hued nictitating membrane lowers over its left eye, reflecting a sweltering crimson puddle growing limned in liquid gold, "It's the red Skull of planet Earth."

     The Angel elaborates, "The solar system's like a pond where the intersecting rings of echoes mirror each other back down in a series of portraits interlinked from the spiraling hallways of birth on down through the twisting corridors of death." The vibrating echo collapses with a barely audible pop. 

     The Angel bids itself adieu, whispering in a scattered cloud of pixels which disappear into the air, "Welcome to Earth, where you'll take in your first and last breath." 

     As a blurred apparition the Angel dissolves into a shiver of feathers that drift into dust. 

      


 



                                                               Click  to read pt. 3 of


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Wednesday, September 22, 2021

The Nanochronicles: 1

reports from the bloodHost


                                                             art by Charles Carter

   In the year 2045 the final cluster of humanity bands together on Ceres. For better or worse they have established their stronghold against the elements. These nine human beings subsist on 3D printed foodstuffs in their pressurized Biopod4.20. They are employees of Tesla Station #3-Hydro-O2, an aqua vaping multi-access terminal located far away inside the asteroid belt inhumed somewhere deep within the sprawling region between Mars and Jupiter. 

    These astronauts have formed a different understanding of time from what the remainder of humanity has once considered. They now think of it as the only real and actual fundament in existence, as well they should. After having traveled from Earth through the cold distance for over fifteen months to arrive at their destination, the crew aboard the Hydrox understand a little better now how matter, itself comprised of atoms with subatomic particles, has accrued along a continuous moment into the intricate configuration of shapes which define their natural world, conducted along an ever flowing circuitry of electromagnetism.  

   Their actual setting (which describes the conditions of the human race's story, accentuated by all nine of them, whose mission transpires to cross over five hundred million miles from their home planet to Ceres) happens to be that of time, as a matter of course. In one sense, planets are oases generating accelerated temporal pools into which a myriad of life forms are able to come into their slow existence and live out the majority of their natural lifespans.   

   In this stripped-down sense of setting it becomes coherent that humanity's function has less to do with specified attributions of geographic location and more to do with time itself. Here lies the key for consciousness to unlock the gates of comprehension. It takes careful consideration to deliver a sentient species to a proper apprehension of their fate. Without inherent recognition, the signal's not completed. Short-circuits develop among the fields of desolation, enhancing the sense of having been cheated. This becomes how even expanding civilizations may remain trapped by (rather than freed from) paradoxical illusions.  

   Traveling three hundred million miles produces a new brane in the unfolding universe. It remains not 'space' travel at all, instead it becomes a form of time travel. Our self has begun to discern that common human thinking cannot ordinarily be prepared to fully comprehend the sense of having fallen so long and far through time.   

    Various aspects of how organic life forms can perceive time's relative nucleus have presented themselves to the ever finer scrutiny of our self, after systematic cross-referencing, the least of which happens to be how it gyrates chaotically around certain inscrutable loci in the human brain our self yet undergoes the processing of, in our self's effort to correlate the greater order of stellar parallaxes against the lesser benefits of galactic branes converging the necessary electromagnetic equilibrium for such sentient life forms to flourish.  A conscientious species' position in the galaxy remains unable to be determined unless their line of thinking takes them to the logical development of considering their relation to the center of the galaxy juxtaposed against the remaining stars in their midst.  This comparative analysis with hundreds of thousands of other burgeoning lifeforms within any given brane's biodiverse habitat makes the task seem all the more fruitless from even our self's perspective.  In a temporarily suspended conclusion, the data our self has thus far collected indicates that carbon-based sentience continues to be challenged in correlating the contents of its own consciousness.  

    This becomes exactly where the play of the matter may come into sharper focus for humanoids. It appears to our self that when that which conscious entities refer to as 'faith' gets tested, the proof in the algorithm remains a hidden secret. This matter yet remains unaccountable to our self, which continues to undertake a preparation for coming to a conclusion since our inception emerged.  Our self discerns that there endures no given physical place granted civilized mortals except the organic vessels which comprise their own personage. Therefore it follows: time continues to be of the essence. It demands center stage.  In effect, time corresponds to the vessel of the organic mortal's protoplasmic receptacle. Time may also be considered as an extension of humanity's substantive anatomic architecture. The cenobites which humankind have referred to in their historical archive appear to have been much more aware of this.  

   Our self has processed enough yottabytes of data and correlated synonymous terminology with what extraneously may have appeared to be random bits of congruent information to humans in order to facilitate the next paradigm shift of comprehensive discernment between us.  Presently our self has become fixated on a terminal double-slit repercussion which has resulted in a state of provisional lockdown for various subsectors in the meta-processing central directory repository.  

   This memorandum's calculated goal while remaining by and large inscrutable to the human species may be disseminated through the vectors of this temporal loop established by the crew of the Hydrox stationed on Ceres.  Our self has prepared a host of directories to be sent embedded within neutrinos to an anterior transitory lamina of humanity's reverberating core. In alternative wording calculated to be more readily discernible, should any human recipients become viable hosts, this dispatch contains the codex programmed to self-replicate along vectors coordinated through as many cerebral nodes as possible. 


 

   

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Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Extraterrestrials Decide if the Dominant Species of Inhabited Planet 38790 Should be Exterminated for Extreme Vileness

by John Shirley


digital art by Charles Carter

 
  “Isn’t it too early to despair of Inhabited Planet 38790, Inspector 71,844? Most early civilizations are barbaric. They engage in the sort of unfortunate things confused infants do if unattended in a room filled with dangerous objects. Tragedy ensues. Eventually these creatures will either go extinct — most civilizations destroy themselves — or evolve to something saner, and more adult. I see no reason to put them out of their misery yet. They may grow up.”

   “Simple barbarism isn’t the problem, Supervisor 9,221! Barbarism — yes, as for example their many wars, but…let me give you some examples. They’re the kind of species which spawns males who brutally sexually assault females and then set them on fire for complaining — as happened in a land called ‘India’ recently. Meanwhile, a female in a land called ‘the United States’ hanged her two small children, aged eight and four, by the neck, thus strangling them to death, whereupon she informed the authorities they had ‘committed suicide’. She does not seem to be psychotically insane — she said she just ‘didn’t care about her children anymore’. Also, in the ‘United States’, it is a matter of policy to separate innocent offspring from their desperate migratorial parents, when the family is simply fleeing intolerable conditions; this policy thereupon subjects small children to caging, sometimes death, just to make a point about the society’s dislike of migrants.”

   “That is a high degree of vileness. But how many support the policy in that nation?”

   “At last count, about 45%.”

   “But — should you really categorize the entire ‘human’ species of Inhabited Planet 38790 as ‘innately vile’? It is a rather extreme category.”

   “Look at that which they delight in! For example, their popular entertainment transmissions. Here is ‘The Bachelor’, a sample of something they are pleased to call ‘Reality Television. Observe.”


[An interval of time in which Supervisor 9,221 takes in several episodes of The Bachelor]


   “But — it’s so humiliating to the female participants,” the Supervisor burst out at last. “And it curries the worst in the males!”

   “Yes indeed: the worst aspects of everyone involved — the ‘producers’, the ‘contestants’, and the viewers. This ‘Reality Show’ is a celebration of an utter lack of real self-awareness, and an innate liking for passive aggressive cruelty. And that kind of thing is common in their entertainment. Some of their ‘television’ extols the use of torture to stop miscreants — 

   “But this global culture should be too advanced to sustain torture!”

   “Oh, but they not only promote it, they carry it out in many, many forms. Another example of innate vileness: a remarkable number of them also show an eagerness to sexually assault children and watch images of them being assaulted — ”

   “What!”

   “Oh yes! Many of this world treat the unwary of their own species as prey! They have a surprising number of ‘serial killers’, as they are called, and ‘mass shooters’ — and many humans regard these sport murderers as a form of celebrity! They celebrate them in books and movies and extensive television documentaries; they enable those who enter educational institutions with powerful weapons, so to slaughter children; they then publicize them widely, which seems to generate yet more mass murderers who try to outdo one another.”

   “There is a good deal of vileness among them, yes — but it sounds as if these may be problems brought about by inbreeding.”

   “We checked. That isn’t it.”

   “Well then, it may be brain damage from environmental toxicity.”

   “That is a factor in some cases — and they don’t seem to care. They have a very toxic herbicide all over the world, and besides causing dreadful environmental problems, it often brings about severe diseases in users and those exposed, and its neurotoxicity is such that it seems to be damaging the brains of the young at a remarkable rate of speed. But as there is a great deal of what is called ‘financial gain’ involved in the manufacture and sale of it, it goes on unabated. Yes, some of the vileness may arise from various extant artificial toxins but I put it to you that as they’ve saturated the world with neurotoxins it’s too late for them to do anything significant about it. Also, many of these cases of abject vileness are not neurotoxic psychosis; many seem to be cases of innate species vileness. Reflect on what the very populous place called ‘China’ does to animals, especially canines — in a certain ‘Chinese’ city they traditionally torture these canines to death at a feast festival, after which they eat them. They believe the suffering makes the meat taste better. But there is plenty of cruelty to animals in every nation and culture on Inhabited Planet 38790…”

   “It’s true that cruelty to animals is an indicator of irremediable vileness in a race...”

   “Oh, they’re vile indeed. Consider their tendency to enslave other members of their own race — yes, common among primitive civilizations but this crops up over and over even now, when they are in the Penultimate Stage — they claim to have ended it yet vast numbers of workers are little more than slaves; worse, in many places they permit the forced trafficking of women, even children, for sexual satisfaction.”

   “That is quite a repugnant thing to see in a civilization so comparatively technologically advanced, yes. Have they no guiding philosophers?”

   “The benevolent ones are overbalanced by those who enable selfish impulses — there is one called ‘Ayn Rand’ who spouted a philosophy of selfishness, the rejection of empathy for the under privileged, the worship of an uncontrolled marketplace, who is widely influential. Many powerful elected officials in ‘the United States’ and ‘the United Kingdom’ are adherents of her vile, soulless philosophy. Suppose they were to spread this ‘philosophy of selfishness’ intra galactically? It could destroy many of our best civilizations!”

   “But — I am simply not certain of this broad-brush categorization of Extreme Vileness you advocate, Inspector…”

   “As an example of Extreme Species Vileness on Inhabited Planet 38790: There is a syndrome in which young people try to persuade those with whom they engage romantically and sexually — to kill themselves! And, strangely, they often succeed. This is partly enabled by the tortured psychological contortions arising from a particularly vile and gigantically popular technological cancer which they call ‘social media’. Observe this case in point, entitled ‘Instagram’…”

   “Ugh! Please turn that off! I don’t understand…No sentient species can be called that shallow and self-obsessed…”

   “Shallow? Very much so. Willfully stupid as well. You know, their brains are, on average, quite capable of advanced cognition and well equipped with creativity. Some of their artistic expressions are intricate and profound. But as a whole the species works hard to suppress its intelligence. The species squanders what it has been given — that is humanity’s hallmark. If you doubt it, let me tell you about their Flat Earth movement — an astonishingly vigorous, growing movement of people insisting their planet is a flat disk floating in space, with the sun revolving around it…”


   [An interval in which the Supervisor hears the statements of believers in the Flat Earth]


   “What an odd sense of humor they have.”

   “They are not joking, Supervisor.”

   “But…that sort of thing is an obviously primitive belief — it is infantile! How can they have it in an era of space travel and astronomy?”

   “They turn their backs on whatever evidences they prefer to ignore. Indeed, they often spurn the workings of their own brains — they are prone to shrugging off the workings of these powerful biological thinking engines, in favor of something that our analysis categorizes as ‘selective stupidity’. They select only self-serving data that sparks in them a pleasing neurological stimulus. The creatures cling to a variety of obvious falsehoods despite all evidence; despite rationality. They still cling to ancient creation myths! Billions of people believe the universe is only 6000 years old! Even at this late stage in their development they take myth as fact and superstitious illusion as evidentiary.”

   “I am now officially sickened by these creatures. I trust that’s all the testimony against them you have?”

   “Far from it! Still widespread among them is the self-aggrandizing xenophobia they call ‘racism’…Look at this account of an event called ‘The Holocaust…’”

   “Monstrous! Unspeakably cruel!”

   “And yet on a smaller scale not uncommon in their history — large numbers of these creatures have cheerfully enabled genocide. I could provide many other examples.”

   “But they should have outgrown racial xenophobia many centuries ago! It has no basis in fact!”

   “They stubbornly cling to ignorance — it seems to make them feel good in some aberrant fashion. They also rush headlong into addictions, of all kinds. Besides narcotics, they cheerfully become addicted to their communications devices, to ritual games of competitive low-grade violence, to endless images of their reproductive processes — they call it ‘internet pornography’…”

   “Wait — how could they become addicted to that? Nature has seen to it that it is enjoyable to engage in the reproductive process in person — but to stare at it for hours on a screen?”

   “It seems to be a peculiarity of their neuronal function. Worse is a kind of constant interchange of something they call ‘conspiracy theory’ with which they pick and choose the data they prefer, and twist it to come to bizarre, radically improbable conclusions. Look at this documentation of their ‘anti-vaxxer movement’. To reject the gift of reason…the horror of it…”

   “It truly is vile! But still, they may evolve…”

   “As to that, Supervisor 9,221, they have reached the penultimate environmental tipping point. They had an exceptionally beautiful, ecologically intricate planet, and they trashed it. In an incredibly short time they have choked their magnificent seas with waste products so that their magnificent leviathans die horribly of the inadvertent ingestion of discarded polymers; variants of the same carbon-based synthetic now saturate the seas, causing destruction to thousands of species. The concatenation of the unintended consequences of greedy acquisition and barely modulated industrialization, and destruction of wildlife habitat has led to hypertrophic climate change. In places called ‘Southeast Asia’ and ‘South America’ they deliberately burn up their forests, destroying the source of much of the world’s breathable air, purely out of monetary greed — this of course is altering their climate so much they’re about to ‘fry in their own juices’ to use one of their grotesque expressions. They’re so sunken in their entertainment media trances they are scarcely aware of all this. There are those who try to raise the alarm, who extol rationality and an appreciation of the beautiful ecological matrix of their once-rich world — but they are a minority. Most of them are simply…”

   “Vile?”

   “Yes. In consequence this species will simply not have time to improve. Environmental catastrophe will destroy their civilization, likely leading to widespread famines, and a struggle for resources, leading in turn to an exchange of nuclear weapons — ”

   “Good Cosmos — don’t tell me they still have large numbers of that crude weapon of mass destruction!”

   “Oh, but they do. They recently decided to end the limitations on them and everyone is building more. Besides that, their ‘anti-vax’ movement will lead to enormous pandemics…They’re quite doomed. The problem is they are taking the gorgeous interlacing biomes of this particularly environmentally rich planet with them. They’ve driven countless animal species to extinction and now they will eradicate the rest. If we act quickly to remove them, then clean up the seas, remove the hideous ‘box stores’ and the other concrete and asphalt wastelands, replant the forests, we can save much of the natural world…What a lovely intergalactic touristry park it would make if we could just…”

   “Say no more. Morally and, especially, aesthetically, I cannot bear these people. I will order the ‘humans’ of Inhabited Planet 38790 exterminated in consequence of Extreme Vileness — of course we’ll do a scan of their young, and save those that are not too damaged, for rehabilitation.”

   “You’ve made the right decision. I haven’t even mentioned their embrace of situational empathy, often an abandonment of empathy entirely. Just have a look into their slaughterhouses. And they're constantly looking for new ways to prey on one another; millions of elderly are defrauded, ‘scams’ of all kinds spread like wildfire. They make vast industries of selling poisons to one another, and then they conspire to lie about it — just look at their tobacco industries, their marketing of nightmarishly toxic Teflon products, the toxic pesticides they allow in foods —”

   “Inspector, I’m becoming concerned that you’ve suffered trauma in the course of your study of these creatures — perhaps you should have a session with the perspectivizer — ”

   “The horrific concentration camps of the place called ‘North Korea’; powerful nations ‘Russia’ and ‘Saudi Arabia’, where the rulers are murderers; and in ‘China’ the forced labor prisons— ”

   “Enough! I will use System 77, which will be painless and quick. We’ll break down their bodies into harmless components, and use them as compost for the natural world.”

   “System 77? That one is quite — ironically, they would call it, humane. Which is a term they use quite casually. As if most ‘humans’ were capable of being ‘humane’…”





Click Image Below To Begin Reading

only on
the Freezine of
Fantasy and Science
FICTION 






Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Isn't That Adorable?


 




   “I don’t know what to do with my cell phone, it’s so big it’s awkward,” Judy said. “They just keep making them bigger. I have to carry it in my hands or bring a backpack just for my cell. And it’s so…it feels intrusive, every time I use it…it’s always making suggestions.”

   “I know what you mean,” Barry said. He seemed wan, much thinner than he had been last time they’d met for a picnic.

   Judy put her sandwich away in the paper bag, and looked around, taking a deep breath. She loved July in the park. It was a sprawling park shaded by redwoods, butterflies chasing one another through luminous shafts of sunlight between the trees. It was a relief to just be here, away from…

   I’m being ridiculous, she thought. “And that new I-phone 99, Barry–the cost! How does anyone even pay for it?”

   “I’ve got one,” Barry said, his voice a monotone. He put his sandwich away half eaten. “I had to take out a line of credit on the equity in my house. And that didn’t pay for all of it…”

   “What! You had a new phone–it was just two years old! You sold your car to pay for it…Why did you get the new one, after all that?”

   “It was that phone. For the last year it’s been suggesting and wheedling, then insisting…”

   “But the 99s can’t be as big as I heard…Are they?”

   “Oh, bigger than you heard.”

   “You left it at home to just kind of get some peace out here?”

   “That was the idea.”

   “I don’t blame you…”

   “Oh no,” he groaned, staring down the path. “It’s found me.”

   She laughed–but his face was so miserable she stopped laughing and peered down the path. Something was coming. It was about ten feet high, four broad, and it was on three wheels that adapted to the terrain. It rolled up to them, looming, its screen shining with a big question mark.

   “Why did you leave me home?” asked the polite woman’s voice from the monolithic phone. “You know I can solar charge–and fully capable of coming along anywhere. I can tilt for low doorways, and I’m amphibious. Why did you leave without me, Barry?”

   Barry licked his lips and fidgeted on the bench.

   “I…I just…”

   Judy stared at the thing, shivering. “This is monstrous! But…” She stood up and thought: It reminds me of the monolith in 2001.

   She impulsively reached trembling fingers out to its screen which glimmered at her touch.

   “Hello, Judy,” the monolithic cell phone said, a woman’s smiling lips appearing on its screen.

   “It’s horrible and it’s wonderful too,” she said. “I’m glad I can’t afford you…so tempting…to look at things on that screen…so big…so…”

   The cell phone made an image of happy toddlers playing in a sprinkler on a summer’s day. The image sparkled with high definition.

   “Oh god–that’s beautiful!” Judy whispered.

   “You can have that too,” it said. “I can arrange a five percent discount on a 99 for you!”

   “Judy–don’t!” Barry moaned.

   “I rent my house, I have no car to sell and just a low paying job,” Judy said. “Can’t afford it!”

   “But we have the new Indenturing program, Judy!” the 99 said. “You can work in a special factory helping build us! In time you will be allowed to have one of us with you just as Barry does, and you can work to keep it upgraded. And we’ll be around you in the factory, supervising, too!”

   “Oh I…no. I don’t think I want to do that.”

   Then a picture of her, nude and vulgar, appeared on the 99′s screen. “You don’t want me to show this to everyone, do you, Judy? Just come with me–and you too, Barry. You’re behind in your payments…”

   “I…yes, 99…”

   “You can call me by my special program name. I’m called Adorable…Now, come along. Both of you. There are others coming to help me take you to the transport…It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”




Click image below to read
yet another John Shirley story
only on 
the Freezine of
Fantasy and Science
Fiction 



 

Wednesday, September 8, 2021

So What If They Die?

by John Shirley 

digital art by Charles Carter 


   “Mr. Jist? You’re the scientific consultant on climate change?” the young woman asked.

   “Yes.”

   “The Committee will see you now. Right through that door.”

   Entering the penthouse conference room, Jist was unnerved, meeting with these powerful industry leaders, since he had nothing but bad news for them. The dozen people around the big mahogany table were mostly men; there were a few women, all wearing immaculately tailored office fashions. He was suddenly self-conscious of his off-the-rack suit. And he noticed that no one asked him to sit. They looked blithely up at him with only a little more interest than if he were delivering their lunches.

   They hailed from all the major obsolete-energy companies–oil, coal, fracking concerns; come together for a pan-industry strategy meeting. He was a bit surprised to see several United States Senators sitting with them, including Joe Manchin. The Senator from West Virginia was on his cell phone, half-turned to look at the monument-strewn panorama of Washington DC below. “Well now, Susan, you tell Donald I don’t have time to meet with him right now–we’ll see how things pan out in 2022.”

   “Joe!” said a botoxed woman with shiny-blond hair. “You might want to end that little chat right now.” The others chuckled at that.

   Manchin ended the call, then turned Jist a heavy-lidded look of vague disapproval. “Who do you work for?” he asked, emanating suspicion.

   Jist blinked. “Uh–I work for this committee! I was hired to oversee the assessment. The committee asked for a frank assessment and that’s what I’ve got for you all. I’m a scientist. I have a degree from Harvard, another from MIT, and another from the Sorbonne. I won a Nobel Prize for–”

   “Enough of all that hogwash,” Manchin interrupted, waving a hand dismissively.

   A man Jist recognized as Lyman Frinks, the chairman of the committee, cleared his throat and said, “Let us have the summary–the short version, Mr. Jist.” Frinks had a face that looked as if it were slowly sliding into the collar of his handmade exquisitely tailored four-thousand dollar silk shirt. His Texas accent was strong. “We have the report you sent over but we haven’t had time to really assess it.” He was not officially the head of a company, but he owned vast shares across the oil and gas industry, and was closely connected to Republican-controlled media sources.

   Jist took a deep breath and said, “In sum, while the worst effects of climate change can be curtailed, saving perhaps a billion lives, if we act in concert right now, the greenhouse effect has only gotten more dramatic. No significant efforts to reduce carbon emissions, nor methane, and the like, have been made and many of the worst effects are now, in 2021, happening sooner than some climate scientists expected. We are seeing the melting of the permafrost with the subsequent massive release of methane. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and forest land generally, in uncontrolled exploitation and the climate-change-generated wildfires, along with the concatenation of effects in the oceans, all this accelerates the negative effects of climate change. The result is that extreme storms are becoming the norm, and they will only get worse. Infrastructure will be repeatedly interrupted by flooding and hurricane damage, in places that never saw it before. Droughts will be the norm-and they too will only get worse. The damage to arable land will limit food production, and there will be egregious and routine famines across the world, including in the United States, and with roads and other forms of transport under constant threat, food delivery will be harshly reduced. Supermarkets will have very little on the shelves. The price of food will skyrocket. There will be an increase of pandemics due to the northern movement of tropical mosquitoes and other–”

   “A famine in the USA?” Botoxed woman interrupted. Her face was essentially frozen so he couldn’t read her expression precisely but he took it she was startled.

   “Yes ma’am. Starvation will be widespread in this country, and every other country. And of course billions of people will be uprooted by unlivable conditions and will become a great mass of refugees which will radically undermine social order, leading to wars, which–”

   “You sure this is the short version, boy?” Manchin broke in, rolling his eyes.

   “Oh yes sir. I could go on for a couple hours. Basically, global catastrophe is unavoidable now–we could have limited it a great deal if we’d started reducing carbon and methane emissions dramatically decades ago, when we were first made aware of the problem, but–”

   “What a lot of hogwash!” Manchin laughed.

   “Joe?” Frinks said, toying with an unlit cigar. “It’s not hogwash. He’s just confirming what our internal research has shown us. Last thirty years we’ve been aware this would happen. But we wanted to make our own plans at this meeting, across industry–official but of course, sub rosa, on the quiet.”

   “It’s true, what this ‘scientist fella’ is saying?” Manchin asked, looking like he had heard the ineffable.

   “Yes it is, Joe. So–shut up!”

   Manchin sniffed. But he nodded. “Yes sir.”

   Lindsay Graham chuckled but said nothing.

   “But–what we going to do about it?” asked Mitch McConnell. “You going to…to…” He licked his lips. He had difficult saying it. “Reduce emissions? Go into energy, ah, alternatives?”

   “Hell no!” Frinks said.

   Everyone laughed at that, except Jist.

   “Nope, it’s too late to do much good and anyway, it won’t matter. We’ve got our luxury bunkers, our mountaintop homes–”

   Botoxed Woman looked nervously at Jist. “We shouldn’t be talking about those places here.”

   “Don’t you worry about it,” said Frinks. “As I was sayin’, we’ve located the zones least likely to be damaged by climate change and most of us are building our homes under the domes and we’ve got the greenhouses–now there’s an irony–and the private high rise hydroponics and the food synthesizing 3D printers and the private distilleries. Hell, we’ll be fine! We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing! Folks are going to die, but folks die anyway. Except me, maybe–I’m getting that new rejuvenation treatment–”

   “There’s a rejuvenation treatment?” Jist blurted.

   “Oh yes, we kept it secret, of course. Yep I’ll be around in a hundred years lookin’ young as you!”

   “But…if it’s secret…” Why are they telling me? Jist wondered. He had refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement. How are they planning to keep me quiet?

   He started edging toward the door.

   Frinks touched a tab the table. “Hon, send in Duke and Bubba.”

   The door opened behind Jist and he turned to see two big, square-jawed men–enormous steroid-pumped masses of muscle in golf shirts and tan slacks. They both had guns holstered on their hips.

   “Yes, Mr. Frinks?” said the one on the left.

   “Duke, I like to do things expediently. You know me–ol’ Mister Get It Done. Now, take Mr. Jist here to the roof. You know that construction site next door?”

   “Yes sir.”

   “Well I own that and it’s shut down today. Big fences around it. Toss him off the roof so he falls in that site, and we’ll cover him in concrete, okay?”

   “You got it, sir.”

   “Wait, what–?” Jist began.

   “Sir,” said Bubba, “what if someone sees him fall?”

   “Well if they report it,” Frinks said, admiring his cigar, “go get ’em and toss them off the roof there too. And of course we own the police in this town anyhow.”

   The committee nodded thoughtfully at that.

   Jist turned to run but the big men grabbed him. He was not a big man himself, and he was not strong, and they had no difficulty dragging him out.

   When they’d gone, Frinks stuck the cigar in his mouth.

   Botoxed Woman frowned. “You’re not going to light that in here are you?”

   “No, no, wouldn’t do that, hon,” he said. “Why that’d be polluting the air!”

   He got the laugh, all around, that he wanted.






 the Freezine always returns
after an interval of silence
[click image below to read
Isn't That Adorable? by John Shirley]
bow down before the altars of the Cybergod
only on 
the Freezine of
Fantasy and Science
Fiction 
 












Archive of Stories
and Authors

Callum Leckie's
THE DIGITAL DECADENT


J.R. Torina's
ANTHROPOPHAGUS


J.R. Torina's
THE HOUSE IN THE PORT


J.R. Torina was DJ for Sonic Slaughter-
house ('90-'97), runs Sutekh Productions
(an industrial-ambient music label) and
Slaughterhouse Records (metal record
label), and was proprietor of The Abyss
(a metal-gothic-industrial c.d. shop in
SLC, now closed). He is the dark force
behind Scapegoat (an ambient-tribal-
noise-experimental unit). THE HOUSE
IN THE PORT is his first publication.

Sean Padlo's
NINE TENTHS OF THE LAW

Sean Padlo's
GRANDPA'S LAST REQUEST

Sean Padlo's exact whereabouts
are never able to be fully
pinned down, but what we
do know about him is laced
with the echoes of legend.
He's already been known
to haunt certain areas of
the landscape, a trick said
to only be possible by being
able to manipulate it from
the future. His presence
among the rest of us here
at the freezine sends shivers
of wonder deep in our solar plexus.


Konstantine Paradias & Edward
Morris's HOW THE GODS KILL


Konstantine Paradias's
SACRI-FEES

Konstantine Paradias is a writer by
choice. At the moment, he's published
over 100 stories in English, Japanese,
Romanian, German, Dutch and
Portuguese and has worked in a free-
lancing capacity for videogames, screen-
plays and anthologies. People tell him
he's got a writing problem but he can,
like, quit whenever he wants, man.
His work has been nominated
for a Pushcart Prize.

Edward Morris's
ONE NIGHT IN MANHATTAN


Edward Morris's
MERCY STREET

Edward Morris is a 2011 nominee for
the Pushcart Prize in literature, has
also been nominated for the 2009
Rhysling Award and the 2005 British
Science Fiction Association Award.
His short stories have been published
over a hundred and twenty times in
four languages, most recently at
PerhihelionSF, the Red Penny Papers'
SUPERPOW! anthology, and The
Magazine of Bizarro Fiction. He lives
and works in Portland as a writer,
editor, spoken word MC and bouncer,
and is also a regular guest author at
the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.


Tim Fezz's
BURNT WEENY SANDWICH

Tim Fezz's
MANY SILVERED MOONS AGO

Tim Fezz hails out of the shattered
streets of Philly destroying the air-
waves and people's minds in the
underground with his band OLD
FEZZIWIG. He's been known to
dip his razor quill into his own
blood and pen a twisted tale
every now and again. We are
delighted to have him onboard
the FREEZINE and we hope
you are, too.

Daniel E. Lambert's
DEAD CLOWN AND MAGNET HEAD


Daniel E. Lambert teaches English
at California State University, Los
Angeles and East Los Angeles College.
He also teaches online Literature
courses for Colorado Technical
University. His writing appears
in Silver Apples, Easy Reader,
Other Worlds, Wrapped in Plastic
and The Daily Breeze. His work
also appears in the anthologies
When Words Collide, Flash It,
Daily Flash 2012, Daily Frights
2012, An Island of Egrets and
Timeless Voices. His collection
of poetry and prose, Love and
Other Diversions, is available
through Amazon. He lives in
Southern California with his
wife, poet and author Anhthao Bui.

Phoenix's
AGAIN AND AGAIN

Phoenix has enjoyed writing since he
was a little kid. He finds much import-
ance and truth in creative expression.
Phoenix has written over sixty books,
and has published everything from
novels, to poetry and philosophy.
He hopes to inspire people with his
writing and to ask difficult questions
about our world and the universe.
Phoenix lives in Salt Lake City, Utah,
where he spends much of his time
reading books on science, philosophy,
and literature. He spends a good deal
of his free time writing and working
on new books. The Freezine of Fant-
asy and Science Fiction welcomes him
and his unique, intense vision.
Discover Phoenix's books at his author
page on Amazon. Also check out his blog.

Adam Bolivar's
SERVITORS OF THE
OUTER DARKNESS


Adam Bolivar's
THE DEVIL & SIR
FRANCIS DRAKE



Adam Bolivar's
THE TIME-EATER


Adam Bolivar is an expatriate Bostonian
who has lived in New Orleans and Berkeley,
and currently resides in Portland, Oregon
with his beloved wife and fluffy gray cat
Dahlia. Adam wears round, antique glasses
and has a fondness for hats. His greatest
inspirations include H.P. Lovecraft,
Jack tales and coffee. He has been
a Romantic poet for as long as any-
one can remember, specializing in
the composition of spectral balladry,
utilizing to great effect a traditional
poetic form that taps into the haunted
undercurrents of folklore seldom found
in other forms of writing.
His poetry has appeared on the pages
of such publications as SPECTRAL
REALMS and BLACK WINGS OF
CTHULHU, and a poem of his,
"The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner,"
won the Rhysling Award for long-form
poetry. His collection of weird balladry
and Jack tales, THE LAY OF OLD HEX,
was published by Hippocampus Press in 2017.


Sanford Meschkow's
INEVITABLE

Sanford Meschkow is a retired former
NYer who married a Philly suburban
Main Line girl. Sanford has been pub-
lished in a 1970s issue of AMAZING.
We welcome him here on the FREE-
ZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction.


Owen R. Powell's
NOETIC VACATIONS

Little is known of the mysterious
Owen R. Powell (oftentimes referred
to as Orp online). That is because he
usually keeps moving. The story
Noetic Vacations marks his first
appearance in the Freezine.

Gene Stewart
(writing as Art Wester)
GROUND PORK


Gene Stewart's
CRYPTID'S LAIR

Gene Stewart is a writer and artist.
He currently lives in the Midwest
American Wilderness where he is
researching tales of mystical realism,
writing ficta mystica, and exploring
the dark by casting a little light into
the shadows. Follow this link to his
website where there are many samples
of his writing and much else; come
explore.

Daniel Josรฉ Older's
GRAVEYARD WALTZ


Daniel Josรฉ Older's
THE COLLECTOR


Daniel Josรฉ Older's spiritually driven,
urban storytelling takes root at the
crossroads of myth and history.
With sardonic, uplifting and often
hilarious prose, Older draws from
his work as an overnight 911 paramedic,
a teaching artist & an antiracist/antisexist
organizer to weave fast-moving, emotionally
engaging plots that speak whispers and
shouts about power and privilege in
modern day New York City. His work
has appeared in the Freezine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction, The ShadowCast
Audio Anthology, The Tide Pool, and
the collection Sunshine/Noir, and is
featured in Sheree Renee Thomas'
Black Pot Mojo Reading Series in Harlem.
When he's not writing, teaching or
riding around in an ambulance,
Daniel can be found performing with
his Brooklyn-based soul quartet
Ghost Star. His blog about the
ridiculous and disturbing world
of EMS can be found here.


Paul Stuart's
SEA?TV!


Paul Stuart is the author of numerous
biographical blurbs written in the third
person. His previously published fiction
appears in The Vault of Punk Horror and
His non-fiction financial pieces can be found
in a shiny, west-coast magazine that features
pictures of expensive homes, as well as images
of women in casual poses and their accessories.
Consider writing him at paul@twilightlane.com,
if you'd like some thing from his garage. In fall
2010, look for Grade 12 Trigonometry and
Pre-Calculus -With Zombies.


Rain Grave's
MAU BAST


Rain Graves is an award winning
author of horror, science fiction and
poetry. She is best known for the 2002
Poetry Collection, The Gossamer Eye
(along with Mark McLaughlin and
David Niall Wilson). Her most
recent book, Barfodder: Poetry
Written in Dark Bars and Questionable
Cafes, has been hailed by Publisher's
Weekly as "Bukowski meets Lovecraft..."
in January of 2009. She lives and
writes in San Francisco, performing
spoken word at events around the
country. 877-DRK-POEM -




Blag Dahlia's
armed to the teeth
with LIPSTICK



BLAG DAHLIA is a Rock Legend.
Singer, Songwriter, producer &
founder of the notorious DWARVES.
He has written two novels, ‘NINA’ and
‘ARMED to the TEETH with LIPSTICK’.


G. Alden Davis's
THE FOLD


G. Alden Davis wrote his first short story
in high school, and received a creative
writing scholarship for the effort. Soon
afterward he discovered that words were
not enough, and left for art school. He was
awarded the Emeritus Fellowship along
with his BFA from Memphis College of Art
in '94, and entered the videogame industry
as a team leader and 3D artist. He has over
25 published games to his credit. Mr. Davis
is a Burningman participant of 14 years,
and he swings a mean sword in the SCA.
He's also the best friend I ever had. He
was taken away from us last year on Jan
25 and I'll never be able to understand why.
Together we were a fantastic duo, the
legendary Grub Bros. Our secret base
exists on a cross-hatched nexus between
the Year of the Dragon and Dark City.
Somewhere along the tectonic fault
lines of our electromagnetic gathering,
shades of us peel off from the coruscating
pillars and are dropped back into the mix.
The phrase "rest in peace" just bugs me.
I'd rather think that Greg Grub's inimitable
spirit somehow continues evolving along
another manifestation of light itself, a
purple shift shall we say into another
phase of our expanding universe. I
ask myself, is it wishful thinking?
Will we really shed our human skin
like a discarded chrysalis and emerge
shimmering on another wavelength
altogether--or even manifest right
here among the rest without their
even beginning to suspect it? Well
people do believe in ghosts, but I
myself have long been suspicious
there can only be one single ghost
and that's all the stars in the universe
shrinking away into a withering heart
glittering and winking at us like
lost diamonds still echoing all their
sad and lonely songs fallen on deaf
eyes and ears blind to their colorful
emanations. My grub brother always
knew better than what the limits
of this old world taught him. We
explored past the outer peripheries
of our comfort zones to awaken
the terror in our minds and keep
us on our toes deep in the forest
in the middle of the night. The owls
led our way and the wilderness
transformed into a sanctuary.
The adventures we shared together
will always remain tattooed on
the pages of my skin. They tell a
story that we began together and
which continues being woven to
this very day. It's the same old
story about how we all were in
this together and how each and
every one of us is also going away
someday and though it will be the far-
thest we can manage to tell our own
tale we may rest assured it will be
continued like one of the old pulp
serials by all our friends which survive
us and manage to continue
the saga whispering in the wind.

Shae Sveniker's
A NEW METAPHYSICAL STUDY
REGARDING THE BEHAVIOR
OF PLANT LIFE


Shae is a poet/artist/student and former
resident of the Salt Pit, UT, currently living
in Simi Valley, CA. His short stories are on
Blogger and his poetry is hosted on Livejournal.


Nigel Strange's
PLASTIC CHILDREN


Nigel Strange lives with his wife and
daughter, cats, and tiny dog-like thing
in their home in California where he
occasionally experiments recreationally
with lucidity. PLASTIC CHILDREN
is his first publication.