Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 66 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, fantasy, magazine, short story, clarkesworld, science fiction magazine, fantasy magazine, short stories, semiprozine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2012-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

Excerpted from the astronomy site, Constellation Prize:

Really? Unexplained astronomical phenomena? Possible supernova? Really?

Worst. Cover up. Ever.

Sure, most of the sheep don’t know. They’re too busy sucking off the media streams to notice anything, even lights in the fucking sky. But they’ll know soon enough. We’ll force those apes to look up for once.

We’ve got pictures of the flare, and the tracking data before and after. So what if the gubmint has shut the hell up? We don’t need their fancy toys for this. We’ve already plotted the flight paths for Bogies 1 and 2. We can watch them ourselves — Big Brother gets my telescope when he takes it from my cold, dead hands.

We just have to agree on the narrative. We know what’s happening — a ship is tearing ass through our system right now, and last night it fired something off in our direction.

We know that. We can’t be mealy-mouthed. Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, can’t be sure, yadda yadda fuck you. We know. Second guessing now is just helping the cover-up. (Yeah, and I know some of you guys in the comments are plants. Eat shit and die, federal sockpuppets!)

Possible supernova. Unexplained phenomena.

ALIENS, MOTHERFUCKERS!

We know.

How stupid do they think we are?

Well, I guess we did vote for them.

“Can I pet your monkey?” my sister Sophie asked, sitting on the balcony next to me, her back against the rust-rotted rail.

“He doesn’t like kids,” I said, but Monkey scampered down from my shoulder into her lap.

She smirked and ran her fingers through his fur. “See? He knows I’m not a kid, Cesar.”

I tapped the tablet in my hands, marking my place in the trojan wiki Monkey had me reading and set it down to stare at my sister. Thirteen, and scary tall all of a sudden, with unexpected girl curves rounding her skinny body. No, she wasn’t a kid anymore. That’s why she spent so much time in our rooms now, so the pirates down below wouldn’t notice her.

Hurricane Mindy had torn the south Texas coast to shreds, and only the newest and toughest of the resorts and condos on our barrier island had survived, broken teeth jutting from sandy gums that shifted and bled with every new storm. The mainlanders had given them up, and now they belonged to the squatters who’d refused to leave, like my mother, and to the pirates. With broken ships and garbage they had built a raft city between the towers, a port for the sugar trade, a rat hole where they could hide from the ceegee patrols circling out in the gulf.

It’d been rumored for years that the mainland would bomb us someday and send South Padres’ towers finally crashing into the sea. Looking at the gull-picked corpses the pirates had chained to the balconies of the Hilton across from us, I wondered if they’d ever bother. If the hurricanes didn’t finish us soon, the pirates would, and then they’d just eat themselves.

“You thinking about going out again?” Sophie said, her eyes following mine.

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