Ye and I…
The crack on the glass of the observation deck was branching fast, turning into a cave painting. Panic seized my heart, and my legs wouldn’t move to reach for the alarm button. There I was, glued to the floor in my customary observer’s position, knowing what awaited me and yet doing nothing to prevent it, to save myself.
A limb of thousand filaments appeared on the other side. The ship’s system still has not registered any anomaly in the ship’s hull. Was I hallucinating this creature? Imaging an enemy to justify a computer mistake?
There is no need to fear. The agony will be but short-lived. Then you can join. A mind that touched my mind was heavy.
What? Where? Why? Under the load of that super-consciousness, my own memories – the snapshots of my life I would prefer to remember in the last moments – were squeezed and compressed into a singularity, drowning in something bigger. But the cogs were wrong – they didn’t fit into that huge mechanism; they jarred and broke, shredding my past, my I into spaghetti.
A second before my lungs ruptured in vacuum as I forgot to exhale, I cognised a sadness.
Sorry. Too early. We be of one mind, ye and I… some day.
Written by Nadya Mercik
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Graffiti Ghost
I arrive in the street cramped with huge lit signs of various shops and restaurants. There is a wrapper stuck to the sole of my trekking boot already. My shoulders ache – the trip from the airport included a lot of walking. A smell of hot bibimbap comes from the nearest door, enticing me to go in, take off my backpack – which is heavy with everything I own – and order a bottle of soju on top of everything.
The Shifting Tattoo
I feel it before I manage to see it and almost drop the coffee cup into the sink. I could nearly mistake it for the scald of the too hot water if it didn’t run up my forearm instead of down. It is rather precise as well, like tiny piranhas biting their way along the thin paths, very artistically. And when I look down – there it is. Or better say isn’t. Parts of my tattoo gone, vanished without a trace.
Through The Hole
I can feel the layers of threads, but behind them the outer envelope is rock-hard. Each time I try to get through, my thin legs are sucked into the silk of the cocoon. Each time I pull back in horror, scared they would get trapped inside. Yet I cannot stop. It gets more and more cramped in here, and the air is stale, sparse. My new body wraps around me too tightly.
Karma On Pause
Yrid was escorted down the long white corridor by a lovely blonde-haired man. His features looked even more perfect when she tried to put her own face next to his in her mind’s eye – the aligned symmetry, the enhanced colours of the irises, the glow of the smoothest skin she’d ever seen. Not that she was very much surprised – every publicity material about Karma Inc. mentioned the high clinic standards, not only when it came to R&D and equipment, but the whole aesthetics.
Hobble Forward
I tense the muscles in my right foot and half-hop, half-skitter forward. Quick pause, then repeat. After a few steps I get the rhythm and the speed, and manage to climb the ramp with only a little bit of help from my wings, which too are clipped. This is an extra measure, because I am attached to a kid – they don’t want to traumatise her by having to use the disintegrating button. I have a few words to say about that, but my programming blocks them.
Phantom Heist
The things are finally quiet, and I glide down the corridors to the Egyptian room. I feel a bit nervous, so at one point I stop minding the cabinets and the walls and simply go through them. The benefits of being a ghost!
Switch
From my vantage point I look for any moving shadows, but they are always twigs or bushes, not even a stray cat. When I hear a rustling, I turn one-hundred-eighty degrees, but it’s just a chocolate wrapper carried around by the ecstatic wind, which seems to enjoy the empty streets. I wait and keep looking. They must be somewhere.
#FFA500
Their skin was a terrible orange colour. Still. If they could, they would peel it off and dump into the nearest trash bin.
Tricky Treat
Tamarak took the last vial off the distillation set and held the result to the light. Apart from a few tiniest sediment granules, it was perfect. Their alchemy wasn’t so much different to his chef’s duties after all. He poured the deflavoured, re-constituted, magicalised blood into the cupcake cream, stirred thoroughly and scooped a portion to decorate the bases.
Illinearity
Again and again the fourth dimension went crazy at that particular moment and the time portal spewed him out wrong minutes or parallel hours earlier or later. He recalibrated his warp-watch time and again; he didn’t have the additional gravitational compensators on him, and he was afraid to search for them unless he be carried away in the ever-splitting flow, dragged off by routines set to him by the source mind craving complexity.
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