Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

Who will catch the criminal on the run? Call now…McCarty and his team of Old Ones are, as usual, prepared…This ain’t fun for the juvenile nightgaunt.

Opera

Dubbed in Ancient Egyptian and Modern English.

Kla (Hero): What do you want of me?

Ste (Heroine): Kill him.

Kla: I cannot do this.

Ste: Kill him.

Kla: Don’t tempt me, dearest; don’t tempt me.

The Dhole broke free! It’s rampaging through the conference room. The assembled are panic-stricken. It’s breaking down the door and moves out of sight.

Wait for more breaking news.

Only metres remain between Haggerty and the final. But what now? A Dhole enters the racecourse. It squeezes two participants into the corners and keeps aiming at Haggerty, simply sweeps him away….

What a tragic ending of a gorgeous day in sports….

News:Dhole heading for the Portal.

News:Energy prices slightly increasing.

*glrb nub?*

*grub clrb?*—“What does the Dhole here?”

*knub crlb*—“Take that for breaking my headstone!”

“Out of my kitchen! Oh, no, the dessert!”

Chemistry for Kids

“The portal works and, as suspected, it reveals a Dhole…a Dhole?! Argh!”

“It’s getting at the bomb!”

“Well observed, Mickey!”

BOOOMB!

News:Studio Five has mysteriously exploded. Tragically, it also caught an energy depot close by…Stay tuned for more news.

News:Prices for energy high as never before!

Opera

“What do you want me to do?”

“Kill, kill, kill!”

*switch*

Snow

*switch*

*switch*

Shut down due to maintenance.

Stay tuned.

TRI-TV was yesterday! Today, we have printed paper!

Mari Ness’fiction and poetry have appeared in multiple print and online publications, including Clarkesworld , Fantasy Magazine , Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction , Goblin Fruit , and Ideomancer . Further small insights into her mind and work can be found at: mariness.livejournal.com, and on Twitter at: mari_ness. She lives in central Florida, and openly admits to being rather grateful that the streetlight at the end of the block keeps monsters away at night.

Michael Mathesoncurrently resides in Toronto, where he works as an author, freelance editor, and technical and public relations writer. He has been a presenter at the ACCSFF and has served since mid-2010 as the editor of the Friends of the Merril Collection publication, Sol Rising .

THE STARS GLEAM like polished bone out on the galactic rim, edging up on the borderless black of deep space at the outer reaches of the Milky Way. There are graveyards there, celestial sepulchres of rotted hulks and ruined metal that drift in slow arcs through long orbits. It’s deathly cold on the rim. Light from distant stars diffuses before it reaches so far out, not enough of it left, by the time it hits those frigid boneyards of blasted metal, to warm what lies within.

Once, these trackless wastes of accordioned metal were home to smugglers and the kind of pirates who preyed on half-mad colonists keen to dare the endless black of the deeps and claim what lay beyond. But they died out long ago, or were driven off by the kind of men who claim a bounty for killing work. Now, only Eliana keeps silent vigil here, an accidental caretaker in this unhallowed place, where Death has walked with arms outstretched, gathering all unto him.

With the crash and sweep of Debussy’s “La Mer” flooding over the Lacrima ’s speaker system on a loop, Eliana drifts in the arms of morphia, its hot bloom in her stomach and her bowels a balm to wounds that refuse to heal. Slumped, opiate-riddled in the grimy bucket seat of her not-quite-several-hundred-feet-long, decaying shuttle, cobbled together from the skeletal hulks of still-older wrecks, she dreams the face of her dead son.

She sprawls, tethered by fraying straps, in her pilot’s seat; enclosed in a full pressure suit of black metal and antiseptic cloth resembling nothing so much as a shroud. Only her helmet is off, the bulbous capstone floating several feet away and suspended in midair in the weightless cabin. Her head lolls one way and then another, hot tears orbing as they hit her cheeks and float off to make a starry sea of the darkness from the blank, black screens for the ship’s lateral and aft camera HUDs, arrayed around the closed shutters of the cabin’s forward viewport. She drifts between sleep and waking. Her face is grey and lined with age, framed by straggly locks of still-night-black hair. She has been out here on the edge of absolute darkness a long time.

Twitching and whimpering in her sleep, struggling against the straps that hold her down in the weightless cabin of her ship, Eliana is awakened with a start by her ship colliding with an interposing object. Her ship tumbles from its orbit, rolling with a groan of warping metal that sounds only within the confines of the shuttle as she comes to, wiping salty streaks from her face and gulping down air.

Debussy’s etheric, otherworldly strings and crashing cymbals drum against the cabin’s interior as Eliana reaches, bleary-eyed, for the con. She slams her palm down on its smooth, touch-sensitive face and blazing starlight floods into the ten-by-fifteen cabin as the main port’s reinforced titanium polymer shutters peel back, opening to the dizzy whirl of revolving space.

Eliana’s eyes skitter without purchase across the scene unfolding before her. A large section of her carefully maintained graveyard home is in disarray: Scythed halves of ships that were whole only a few hours before rip and tear at one another as they pass, shards of their ionised hulls floating free in the swirling maelstrom of shorn metal. Light is sent scattering everywhere from still-reflective surfaces in the spiraling, tumbling mess that her ordered world has become.