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    Metaphorosis December 2016
    Metaphorosis December 2016
    Metaphorosis December 2016
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    Metaphorosis December 2016

    By Aatif Rashid, Sandi Leibowitz, Simon Kewin and

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Beautifully written speculative fiction from Metaphorosis.

    All the stories from the month, plus author biographies, interviews, and story origins.

    Table of Contents
    • The World’s Secret Heartbeat – Aatif Rashid
    • The Nature of Glass – Sandi Leibowitz
    • The Stars are Tiny Lights on a Perfect Black Dome – Simon Kewin
    • The Doctor’s Mask – Taylor Hornig
    • Never Miss: Moses Abebe is a Machine – J. T. Gill
    Cover art by Ben Bronstein.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMetaphorosis Publishing
    Release dateFeb 6, 2018
    ISBN9781640760714
    Metaphorosis December 2016

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      Book preview

      Metaphorosis December 2016 - Aatif Rashid

      Metaphorosis

      December 2016

      edited by
      B. Morris Allen
      ISSN: 2573-136X
      ISBN: 978-1-64076-071-4 (e-book)
      Metaphorosis
      Neskowin

      Table of Contents

      Metaphorosis

      December 2016

      The World’s Secret Heartbeat

      It came from Aatif Rashid

      A question for Aatif Rashid

      About Aatif Rashid

      The Nature of Glass

      A question for Sandi Leibowitz

      About Sandi Leibowitz

      The Stars are Tiny Lights on a Perfect Black Dome

      It came from Simon Kewin

      A question for Simon Kewin

      About Simon Kewin

      The Doctor’s Mask

      It came from Taylor Hornig

      A question for Taylor Hornig

      About Taylor Hornig

      Never Miss: Moses Abebe is a Machine

      It came from J. T. Gill

      A question for J. T. Gill

      About J. T. Gill

      Metaphorosis Publishing

      Copyright

      December 2016

      The World's Secret Heartbeat — Aatif Rashid

      The Nature of Glass — Sandi Leibowitz

      The Stars are Tiny Lights on a Perfect Black Dome — Simon Kewin

      The Doctor's Mask — Taylor Hornig

      Never Miss: Moses Abebe is a Machine — J. T. Gill

      The World’s Secret Heartbeat

      Aatif Rashid

      Blake tried once again to start his car, a mustard-yellow vintage two-door from back when companies still made gasoline cars — but the engine only sputtered and groaned. It sounded to Khalid like a dying person, coughing and wheezing through its final moments of life with a few last and naive gasps of ill-conceived hope.

      I told you we should have taken the electric, Khalid said.

      Don’t worry! Blake called from the driver’s seat. It’ll work!

      Blake tried the car again, and Khalid sighed and turned to look across the bay. From here, he could see the full extent of the sprawling, ruined city where they were set to rendezvous with the Movement’s two local contacts. Cold glass towers rose into the dark sky, and in the distance lay the broken bridge, its red frame collapsed into the gray water. White, cubed houses were scattered like dice across the surrounding hills, and the setting sun reflected off their hollow, uncurtained windows. Meanwhile, the ash-strewn road where Khalid stood wound its way around the bay, through the dusty fields, and up into the city, cutting through the warm haze that hung around it all like a shroud.

      I think we’re out of gasoline, Celine said.

      The meter says it’s still half full, Blake said.

      Half empty, Khalid corrected. And maybe the meter’s broken.

      Blake ignored him and tried the car again. Celine leaned in through the driver’s door and put her hand delicately on Blake’s shoulder, though Blake as always remained unresponsive. Khalid wanted to tell Celine to give it a rest. Blake obviously didn’t go in for that sort of thing, at least not with her. She should have known this by now, having worked with him in the lab for almost six years. But as the Movement’s only historian, Khalid noticed certain human subtleties that scientists like Blake and Celine did not. It was possible that Celine understood the truth of Blake’s feelings and was attracted only to the tragic romanticism of it all, of being emotionally invested in something that could never work out. But Khalid felt a part of her probably still held out hope. Humans were after all so easily deluded into optimism.

      The car sputtered and groaned once more, but still didn’t start. Blake stopped for a moment and then tried it again, with the same predictable result.

      Khalid found it ironic that they might have run out of gas on this particular mission, to track down that rumored old source of sustainable energy, the world’s secret heartbeat as it was referred to in the records of the board meeting at Gold Man Investments. It might just be a rumor, he had cautioned Blake, when Blake brought them in front of Erin to propose the mission. These old corporate documents are filled with false starts, projects that never got the funding or that never panned out.

      But Blake had argued his case effectively and convinced Erin to authorize the mission. It’s worth chasing even a rumor, he’d said. We all know that shale and oil won’t last forever, a few hundred years more at most, and as long as the Domes are profiting year to year, they’re not going to be the ones to look for a long term solution. It’s up to us. And, I mean, think of how everything will change when we have long term, sustainable energy. We can finally break the Dome Corporations’ monopolies and end the long years of economic stagnation. And then we can rebuild everything, our cities, our farms, our whole society. We can make the world like it used to be.

      More convincing than his actual words had been the way he’d said them, purposeful, confident, his voice rising at the end with passion. This had always been what drew Khalid to Blake, this depth of feeling, this soul-stirring resonance that only he could create. It was how he’d convinced Khalid to join the Movement during University and it was why for the past eight years Khalid had never quit, despite his growing pessimism about their cause. Blake was like a source of energy all by himself, charging everyone around him with his own optimism, making them believe in the utopian future he envisioned for humanity, which to his physicist’s mind was a simple equation, one that by necessity had a solution that would bring the world into mathematical balance. Khalid envied the world view that allowed Blake to believe in such a thing, and perhaps that was why he always found himself following Blake, no matter how outlandish his goals. Deep down he really wanted to see the world that Blake saw.

      Overhead, the sun beat down from the cloudless sky, and Khalid felt sweat building up on the back of his neck (they had plenty of sunscreen, but even so, he’d read enough stories about the long term effects of direct sun exposure outside a Dome to be worried). Blake stepped out of the car and went around the front to pop open the hood, as if the answer lay there. He took with him the battery pack, a small device he’d brought that could jumpstart electronic devices, though even a non-scientist like Khalid could tell the car’s issue was more than just a simple electronic malfunction. The battery pack had a limited charge, and Khalid didn’t want Blake to waste any of it, as he assumed it might be necessary somewhere on their mission, in the ruined city still filled with old electronic infrastructure with residual power. But Blake’s eyes gleamed with characteristic hope as he looked under the hood and across the car’s vast and complex inner workings. Celine leaned next to him, placing her hand a few inches from his, her eyes moving wherever his did. Khalid turned away to scan the horizon.

      Where they’d come from was just a grimy haze, miles and miles of flat earth, the road just a thin black strip crumbling to ash under the harsh climate conditions. As it wound its way across the parched land, it passed the occasional gas station or road sign or other remnant of the old world — all now a kind of museum, or mausoleum, of the history of mankind’s folly.

      As Khalid stared at the brown land around him and then back at the haze-shrouded glass and metal city across the bay behind him, he remembered what he’d read in the histories at University, about how all this had once been beautiful, green fields and rolling hills that turned gold in the summer. Things had grown here, a quarter of the world’s food — strawberries, garlic, avocados, foods that now existed only in literature and fading collective memory. He’d tasted a strawberry only once, back at the University, when a rich friend’s parents had purchased a frozen crate of them (for the price of a nice house in one

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