SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Larger than theirs, and the Dragons reported that its planetary rotation was backwards! That the solar cycle lasted a mere 24 hours, splitting the period between darkness and light into a tiny fraction of time. There was evening, and there was morning. There were nameless animals creeping over the surface of the planet. Plants that would yield unfamiliar fruits. Flowers with unknown scents waited.

The people on the ship, still reeling from the experience of leaving their home and seeing it destroyed, found hope in their hearts.

The people, who would take to calling themselves the Tribes in Exile, watched as the ships landed in the driest area, similar to the plains on their home planet. The Sola was just rising in the Eastern skyline and there were a few small groups of the proto-humanoids that lived on this planet gathering to watch the Ships land. The Dragons would go first.

They were always first.

It was the end of everything.

It was a beginning.

~Safkhet, Star Date 21*520*205500

January 15, 20—

Ancient Rosetta-Stone Like Text Uncovered! Scientists Stunned!

The International Scientific community is reeling with the publication of a new translation of an ancient text. Readers may remember the story of a strange sphere being discovered years ago. Many thought it was a hoax, but this new discovery has changed that speculation.

This week, news that the ancient story of an extra-terrestrial race of beings had come to the Earth was uncovered by a graduate student. When her computer was taken over by a virus, Sonya Lake found the initial installment of an amazing story. Publishers are fighting over the rights to release the rest of what might prove to be a historic text that will change the way we view our own evolution, as well as this planet’s history, and that of the entire solar system. Computer scientists say that what has been done to her computer is impossible. Top history and archeological scientists have given no comment at this time, but an anonymous insider says the story is huge.

The first of several stories have appeared, and are supposedly written by an ancient scribe named Safkhet. Stay tuned here to the World News Time-Gazette for more information as the story unfolds!

For Wide Release.

For more information, contact K. Zimmer

@ Time-Gazette.com .

Originally published by Terraform

Some particular trick of the moon, the weather, and the Earth’s closeness to the sun had pulled the tide all the way to 5th Avenue, a good half-block further uphill than usual. The city had put out an alert, so Jordyn knew to clear out the basement ahead of time. Their landlord had been smart enough to have the foundation sealed years ago—that would be fine—but there wasn’t much to be done for cardboard boxes and old futons. Those had to be kept above the tide line, or they were garbage.

Her girlfriend, Mia, had paused on the first floor landing to breathe, a disintegrating tomb of Jordyn’s family albums clutched in her hands. Its weight eased for a moment as she rested an edge on the railing. "We should toss these," Mia had said. "You digitized them years ago."

"Oh, but it’s not the same," Jordyn had said, and it wasn’t.

Now she sat cross-legged on their bed while Mia showered, a stack of albums on the duvet beside her and another open in her lap. She peered at the careful handwriting under each photograph, names and dates and in-jokes, most of them incomprehensible. The photos had been taken with cell phones and carefully printed out, an anachronism even then. Her grandmother had pressed hard when she wrote, and as Jordyn ran her fingertips over the pages she could feel indentations beneath the ink. The album smelled of dust and old glue and a worrying hint of mildew.

Jordyn had copied one—taken a photo of a photo, found a place up in Bushwick that still did small print jobs, bought a silver frame secondhand at the Brooklyn Bazaar—and set it on the wooden dresser beside their bed. Her grandmother had taken it decades ago, when her mother was a little girl and the Gowanus canal only rarely ventured out onto the streets.

In the photo, a small, smiling version of her mother sat on the stoop of her grandparents' house. She was an almost-copy of Jordyn herself: curly black hair, brown skin, freckles on her cheeks and bare shoulders. The house was yellow brick, with white-washed iron bars over the windows and a little flower garden tucked between the concrete stoop and the stairs down to the cellar. Her grandparents had bought it in the 1970s for very little money, and, at the time the photograph was taken, were rightly smug about their foresight. When the photo was taken, they could have sold it for a million dollars to developers who’d have cheerfully replaced it with a narrow stack of condos.

They’d stopped using the cellar after Hurricane Oscar. Hurricane Andrea had ruined the curtains and the carpets on the first floor. In the end, they’d been forced to sell the house for little more than it cost to buy a new car.

Jordyn lived just up the hill, now. The yellow house in her picture wasn’t large—two stories and a basement—but on most days, its top story rose out of the lagoon. She liked to look at it from her roof in the late afternoon, when the warm golden sunshine made it look buttery and romantic. Like it had sounded in her mother’s stories, back when she was still alive to tell them.

The pipes thumped as Mia turned off the water. She walked out the bathroom in a cloud of steam, her stout brown body naked and dripping as she toweled off her hair. "Moon’s out," she said.

Jordyn closed the album in her lap and set it on top of the others. The bed creaked as she slid to the edge, tucked her feet into her slippers, stood up; she stretched her arms above her head and her muscles resettled. "It’s a King Tide," she said. "Highest this year. By a lot ."

Mia pulled her head through a cotton tee shirt. "We should drink a couple beers on the roof."

"Hah! In winter?”

Mia shrugged.

Jordyn opened the door to their apartment, then turned the lock so that the deadbolt would catch on the frame and keep the door ajar. Theirs was the top floor; they climbed one flight of steep marble stairway to the roof. Two bottles clinked together in Mia’s hand, held by their necks between her fingers.

The winter had been mild, but little mounds of rotten snow hid in the shadows, and Jordyn rubbed her arms through her sweatshirt as she walked across the tarpaper. Through the steam of her breath, she looked out over a city of brick and stone and water. Behind her swelled the high-rent higher ground of Park Slope, dry townhouses marching up the hill to Prospect Park, Flatbush, Windsor Terrace, Crown Heights. Neighborhoods that emptied this time of year, when everyone escaped to their condos in Georgia.

Before her, an archipelago.

Real estate agents had started calling it "Gowanus Beach," which Jordyn thought was pretty misleading, even by real estate standards. At least when people said Red Hook was "The Venice of Kings County" that evoked a useful image: water-stained townhouses and floating wooden walkways, plastic kayaks tied up in front of corner bodegas, tanned women in sundresses puttering around in little zodiacs with outboard motors, the East River lapping at second story windowsills. "Gowanus Beach" implied sand, maybe sea-smooth stones, even the muddy shore of a lake. Nothing about "beach" said crumbling asphalt, or concrete gnawed away by the tides, or exposed rebar skeletons dissolving into rust, or the bloated carcasses of cheap student furniture bobbing up from drowned garden apartments.