Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan (bill gates book recommendations TXT) 📗

attack him and not the Mantis? She staggers and gasps as the Martian atmosphere leaks into her miniature Earth. She crawls into the closet and seals it. She has 96 hours, Stomper knows.

The Mantis crawls, too — out of the EnviroDome 4002. He cannot let it escape. As he raises his bloody blade, it catches the flickering recessed lighting and glitters. He climbs out of the house and sprints after the Mantis. His legs are bolts of lightning, his head a supernova, his heart a live wire. He is running to first base; he is pursuing the dragon; he is hunting the Mantis.

~~~

ADAM KNIGHT is a writer and an English teacher in northern New Jersey. His work has been accepted at Brain Soup, Halfway Down the Stairs, Golden Visions Magazine, and Hall Brothers’ Entertainment’s Villainy anthology. He can be reached at adamknightbooks@gmail.com.

Building bridges of meaning through symbols — such as flags, status, and nationality — is as much about alienating as connecting. But the Virtual Bridge Sri plans to build could reconnect the lost hopes of a dying civilization.

CONNECT

by Kenneth Burstall

By any reasonable measure we are dead.

Unity — slow, cold and broken — is leaving me behind. It’s a slowly boiling mass of speckled gray now. I’m walking away from it, building, understanding, memorizing as I go. And to do these things, to tie them together, I use my memories. Of being alive, of dying, of being dead.

~~~

The centre of the quadrangle was forbidden territory for displaced persons. Sometimes, though, the machine gun crew, drunk on loneliness or alcohol, would let some children in for a while. We would run and scream, ecstatic and terrified by the alien view the soldiers had of our people. A full 360 degrees of crowds on hard plastic seats and primitive bathrooms half-way down each thirty meter side.

We would play king-of-the-castle on the chunks of limestone there, a child on a rock pulled down and replaced by his or her peers.

One strange night the drunken soldiers let us into the central area. We rushed around, scaring each other with screams and unskilled kisses. We played king-of-the-castle, and it was a completely different game in the dark. When those trying to pull the king down were invisible, they were vicious and fast. The game moved at a startling pace, generating bruises and tears by the score.

For a brief moment I was king and the air on that rock seemed cold, thin and clear. The stars were brighter than I’d ever seen, pinholes in the fabric of the sky letting onto a blazing aurora. Then I was pulled down and the soldiers screamed us back to the edges at an officer’s approach.

I was eight years old.

~~~

Why my parents married, let alone adopted me, was a mystery.

“Fuck you! If it weren’t for my money, you’d still be living on EU food parcels.” A stream of obscene Russian followed Mother’s outburst. Father was touchy about his origins in Neutral Scotland.

“And if it weren’t for me, you’d be an uncultured parochial bitch. You may have made a little money but I was the one invested it, so excuse me while I go and spend some.” With that he stormed out, infuriating Mother even more by beating her to it.

We looked at each other, then at the beautifully inlaid door father had just slammed.

Weirdly, we started throwing numbers at each other, estimates of the effect that veneer would have on the aluminum honeycomb underneath.

I was ten years old.

~~~

The ship is perpetually cold. It slows irreversible processes and conserves energy. Still, with energy not being a problem here, there are other ways to solve the first issue. Our tokomaks have enough fuel to run at full capacity for the full 5000-year trip. We could run warm.

I believe the cold was imposed, unconsciously, as a penance for our deserting a doomed world. All but the fanatics claimed to wish us well, but I think that everyone really hated us.

We were leaving behind a biologically immortal population ten billion strong on top of an ecosystem crashing back to blue-green algae.

We got our last, anguished signal from them 513 years ago.

I am 3124 years old.

~~~

Kids with parents who were live and free were the elite. They got more and better food than the rest of us, live and free parents tending to stay that way by being bullies.

“So where’s your mum and dad today, Smeary?” Tall, blond and, hatefully to me, intelligent Smethills was my main persecutor. “Oh yes. Losing it in Wales!”

None of us knew what this stuff meant, of course. At eight years old, we simply latched on to whatever hurt the most. The Leary name was well-known, however, even among kids.

Mum and Dad were up in the mountains of the DMZ, shooting at and failing to kill US patrols. The numbers of their fellow insurgents were continually being reduced by packs of augmented dogs, the only weapon the US deigned to use.

Their disdain did not, however, prevent massively disproportionate reprisals against the camp populations for Mum and Dad’s activities.

I ran at Smethills, fists swinging, leaving him bleeding, crying, running for his mother.

That night his father and his goons visited. They beat my uncle so badly he pissed blood for a month.

~~~

Mother and Father made up, of course, with plenty of make-up sex. I could hear it through the very strong but very light door to their room.

To distract myself I laid my head on the brass grab-bar that ran all around the room. The distant bass of the big engines suddenly became clearer. More interesting to me was my distorted image in the rich glow of the polished metal: one eye huge, one small, mouth drawn out in a long snarl. I could sense these distortions somehow mapped back to the original me.

As I devised a mathematical framework to express the transformation, I felt a cold happiness at the conclusion. I map continuously back to myself.

~~~

Most crew engineer themselves to ignore the cold.

Some of us