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Building New Atlantis

by Michael John Grist

The first stage in the construction of New Atlantis went quietly, and the world scarcely noticed. It looked enough like a new ship or oil drilling platform on the satellite photos that no other nation would pay it too much mind.

It was only after that first stage was completed, and the second stage begun right next to it, that the world sat up and took notice.

“Is this a new fleet then?” asked the United Nations.

“Whose property is this?” asked NATO.

“How did you finance this?” asked the WTO.

“What shipping rights have you declared?” asked UNESCO.

“What about all the little animals?” asked the WWF.

New Atlantis sidestepped the questions. Lawyers were sent to spill nothing answers over the courts and demands. “Wait,” they said. “Give us time. We’re building something amazing here.”

Image from here.

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The Nature of Man

by Michael John Grist

NB- This one is very graphic, and dark, and full of swearing.

He’s standing outside the building, waiting. He has been here for days. He doesn’t move much, he just stands, and waits, and he doesn’t care about the rain, or the sun on his face, tanning his right cheek to red, leaving the left sheltered and pale. People bustle by him like buffalo, following the herd. No-one asks him what he’s doing there.

He’s wearing the same clothes he was 2 days ago. He hasn’t moved. He only stands and stares up at the building sweeping majestic above him, 64 stories high and more than he can bear. He feels that at any minute the whole thing will fall down and burst him like a grape. That at any minute the things he thinks he remembers, fogged and bleary-eyed, will rush up through his body and choke him from inside.

Sometimes he spreads his arms because he thinks it will happen soon. He is only waiting for it. Pedestrians jostle with him and newsvendors hawk and spit in his path.

The police haven’t noticed him yet. It’s really a matter of time. Then it will be over, and he will have been judged. That’s all he’s waiting for.

Image from here.

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My Kids

“It happened 2 years ago,” he says.

“What did?”

Silence.

“You don’t remember?”

“Did I ever know?”

Silence. Reflection.

“I don’t think you ever did.”

“Then that’s good.”

“Yes. It is.”

Image from here.

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Freya 13

Delathon Rent, a 28 year old technician on the Freya 13 space station, sits slumped in the Outer rim command pod with a gas hatch sealed behind him, video-phone in his lap, waiting for it to ring. He’s been waiting for about 10 minutes now, after intermittently placing calls himself to the Freya Commune for the last hour. He has an awkward itch in the corner of his right eye. He wants to scratch it with the machined tip of his blue biro, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid to even touch his eyes.

Instead, he taps the pen against the video screen nervously. It makes a high clocking sound. He starts shuffling his feet over the dry friction floor to accompany it. For a minute, he considers whistling, then thinks better of it. Whistling is for happy people, and he is anything but happy. He can’t forget Boli’s face. The moment the first of them burst loose from his fingers. Poor Boli, smiling all black-eyed and blind when it happened. Talking to his parents, maybe, or an old girlfriend. They’d left him to die, and so he’d died.

Image from here.

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Hunting Ground

REN, TEKALUS, LORIE

They pick up the blip off the bait drop corner, burning bright green on the inner screen of their visors, flashing with a rapid-fire heartbeat, scouring afterglow trails into their eyes.
It’s the strongest they’ve ever seen.
Each blood beat swells across their visors like an explosion, waves spreading and lapping over the in-screen maps, washing out grey line buildings and buckled black roads beneath it.

“He’s a fat one, eh?” shouts Lorie happily, plumps out his black armoured arms before him like they’re resting on a vast belly.

Ren and Tekalus wince at the static burst in their helmets.

Image from here.

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Route 66

Black highway snaking through an empty desert, star-studded midnight sky overhead, reflecting on the polished blacktop. Constellations dot to dot across the shiny old road, here and there disturbed by the central glint of refracting cat’s eyes, forming new and curious imaginary beasts on the black surface, the earth’s alteration of the heavens’ map.

All around blocky sandstone buttes loom from the darkness, like giant gardeners tending to the strip of alien stone set through their territory. Somewhere, perhaps on the peaks of the gloomed out outcroppings, a wolf howls into the night.

Image from artbypavel.

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