ONE THOUSAND CUTS

Molopod reached out delicately with one of her several hundred tentacles and carefully tucked the four bestial faces of her amalgamated childling into the soft folds of its sentient sheets.

“But mamma,” the fanged upper left hand face of her amalgamated child cried, “how do you expect us to sleep if we haven’t had a story!!?”

“A story,” Molopod sighed, “come now my pseudo childling, surely the combination of your disparately spliced genetic growth material places your internal body chemistry at a temporal development much beyond that of any lifeform that would require a story before bed.”

“But you promised,” growled the serpentine detachment in the lower part of the childling’s head, “you signed a contract.”

“You agreed to all terms and conditions,” continued the fanged upper part emphatically.

“And you signed it in blood,” came the high pitched squeal of the bat like face from the upper right hand part of the creature’s head.

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It stood before them, more than twice the size of Baudoin, the tallest of their group. The shape was that of a man in all the important ways, two arms, two legs, one head – but the face was like the shifting dunes they trod upon, constantly melting and reforming as they looked on. Only the hollow eyes were constant, staring at the five of them as they stared back at it…

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Once upon a time…

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Helena wished, not for the

First

Time that Timmy would wake

In the comfort of his coffin

And sigh in relief

At the still, dark dust and the

Solid pine walls

Of his small cemetery boat…

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I wear a wolf’s coat to keep me

Warm

Keep me

Safe

Keep the pack from smelling the sweet odour of my

Humanity

And tearing me into

Tiny

Red

Pieces

Of meat…

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The year is 2023 and ongoing developments in artificial intelligence continue to change the structure of human societies in varying ways. Already the faded border between reality and fiction has become challenging to read, but now creativity itself is being questioned as a province accessible for humans alone…

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Robert watched them slide by on the screen of his phone, talisman markers of a purer world. In Bloom. Man in the Box. Jesus Christ Pose. Breed. No Excuses. Black Hole Sun. But then something occurred to him as he looked for the perfect selection to block out the world and insulate him in his new gym adventure. Kurt Cobain had died in 1994. Layne Staley had died in 2002. Chris Cornell had died in 2017. He was filling his head with the voices of dead men. ‘Fuck,’ Robert thought, ‘when did I get so fucking old.’

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The alien ship hung in the air, glinting like an old chrome hub cab in the shafted light of the sun which arced above it like a vengeful phoenix. It was a round saucer shaped craft, with a large concave Plexiglas dome on the top. The words ‘unidentified flying object’ were painted upon the side of the craft, and inside they sat, the occupants, the aliens, like giant oozing balls of snot, they squelched inside their orbiting ship, consulting instruments with their many eyes as they curiously watched the strange little greeny-blue planet far below.

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“What if you could be the trigger, Robert. What if your rage, your anger, your frustration… what if the white hot power of your emotions is all that it needs to end… everything? What if all you had to do was sit in a chair, wire yourself in and activate a mechanism… to end it all forever. What if you could? And if you could… would you do it?”

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Like eager ants with bright shining eyes in the dark, the vehicles rush hither and thither on their night-time tasks, from who knows where to who knows what. On the hill in the cemetery they ignore such sounds, the noise of present day – they have come to listen for older voices, the whispers of the past.

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