And here you are.
Midnight to midday the hands on the clocks all turn. And much like the hand returning to the witching hour, you also return to us. And isn't that how it should be?
If I may be so bold, it's a comfort to me to see your face every year. Too often we feel as if this entire world has yet again come apart and swept itself into a pile of pieces. And then we begin to climb. It's always a climb, effort and height. And darkness below. Though I suppose darkness above as well, the mystery of what's to come. And all around us, that shadow crawling behind you. The thump in the attic, the low groan in the elevator. Something creeping in the trees, just out of sight. The monsters under the bed. And the eternal question of what's just around the corner…
All pieces, my dearest friend. Fragments and shards and slivers of ideas, from the first moment we open our eyes. Like letters to piece together, an alphabet to arrange into questions and answers and something whole. Into stories, great and small… Tales that reflect us like glass, where we seek answers to things we don't yet know.
The story is the candle with which we explore the dark of our life, the comfort that we ignite and are nourished by. And with the turn of this page, and as today's clock strikes twelve, we carry ever forward together. And until next year, may these motes of fright nourish you and your fearful cogs.
Happy birthday, Gears. To you.

Annually, we will make a special mention of the Cancer Research Institute each Gears Day. This is an American cancer research charity with a good reputation. Please consider donating.

Crystalis, by Captain Kirby and Natasha

Happy birthday! I hope you enjoy!

There are two types of naturally occurring distortive reflective surfaces: water and crystals. I have studied these materials separately, manipulated them with light to form new visual configurations. What started as scientific research turned into a series of well-funded art projects that eventually got me kicked from the University payroll.
But in those six years of work, I only ever let one canvas shine on its own. I never mixed my liquids and solids, either out of ignorance or reverence. At this point, those days feel so far behind me that I can't properly pluck my emotions from my memories. Everything after the cave has been reduced to subconscious mush, as I feel there is nothing more important to store in my mind.
I wanted to go out on one big hurrah with the last of my severance pay, and what better extension of my work than to observe water and crystal play with light, together, in a naturally occurring setting. I caught a commercial plane from Boston to Mexico City, and then a private puddlejumper out to a little unnamed mountain, which housed a named cave: Cuevo Resplandecienté. I decided to spelunk it alone, as I didn't want anyone interfering with my little light dances.
I traveled half a mile into the mountain side before I came across the cavern's main attraction. The room was littered with puddles, which rippled from water droplets sliding off crystalized stalactites. I couldn't wipe the childish smile from my face.
I unpacked two thirds of the weight I was carrying: a laser projector. Before I could start tuning this cavern to my liking, I just needed to see where the light would go. Just shoot off a ray of light and watch it ballet and prance from ripple to gem to gem. I set it on the ground, aimed my laser at the ceiling, and turned on a beam.
It raced upward, through the darkness of the cave. A refraction through a stalactite forced the beam to change angles, bending the light, leaving it at an awkward angle. The initial beam scattered into a puddle on the ground, but even that simplistic interaction struck me. We were tuning forks, this cave and I, both responding to the same frequency. We vibrated together.
I started with a blue laser. The impurities in the crystals separated it into a faint ombré from a light cyan to a navy blue. It gave the puddle that too-blue pool water look hotels like to tout in brochures.
Next to the first crystal, illuminated by the steady light of my projector, was a larger crystal. With a careful, delicate adjustment I shifted the laser so that the beam bounced from one crystal to the next before channeling downwards into a gleaming death on the puddle surface.
The crystals lit up one after another. It was easier than arranging the crystals in my lab. It was like the light knew where it wanted to be, knew what would be the most beautiful path for it to take. I reached out and with a brush of my hand, switched the beam to red.
One, two, three crystals lit up along the laser's path. They gleamed like long, knobbly fingers – like that trick where you hold a flashlight under your hand and watch your veins stand out up against the glow. And, just like veins, impurities in the crystal loomed as dark silhouettes twisted at the core of the crystals. My face hurt. I tried to stop myself from smiling, rubbing at aching muscles with the palm of one hand. Another crystal lit up, and I jerked my eyes back to the laser projector. It was sitting there, lifeless on the dry patch of ground I'd found for it.
I dragged my eyes back to the ceiling. The crystal that had lit up was the next along the obvious path, tracing a vein of ore that travelled along the ceiling. Flecks, maybe mica or maybe something more valuable, glittered in the light. Maybe I'd moved the projector. After all, that was the next crystal that I would have chosen. Surely that was the simplest explanation.
The light level in the room shifted again. I glanced up, and the next crystal along the path had lit up. My puddle was dark again, and I yanked my hand out instinctively when I glanced back down. Something about having a soft, necessary appendage dangling in dark water doesn't appeal to the human amygdala.
The next pond that the light dribbled into was larger – I could barely reach across it while kneeling on one side. The beam from the ceiling barely even illuminated the water, hitting dead center and fading away without even touching the sides. Deeper. It was so much deeper than the others. I laid on the edge and peered over. The beam disappeared into the depths below.
I only hesitated for a moment, glancing up at the glowing red figures on the ceiling. The twisted shapes inside, surely chemical or geological imperfections, danced in the light. They must be urging me on, I thought, and laughed to myself. The water wasn't as cold as I expected. I stretched my hand in as far as I could reach. I felt no bottom. The water was warm.
I slid into the pool. The way the lights shimmered around my body was like everything I'd been looking for in those early experiments. Only more exquisite, more personal.
Two more of the crystals lit up, and I let my head drift backward in the water so I could see the light beams as they began to dance across the ceiling. The ballet I'd imagined.. Too bad I wasn't choreographing it. More and more of the crystals on the ceiling lit up, and I noticed the weight of my wet clothes. The edges of the… puddle? It was a puddle, right? Suddenly seemed so far away. So pointless.
I stared upward at the nearest crystal. Through the few inches of water that now separated me from the cavern air, I could make out an unearthly glow. Switching from red to blue, the first color I used. Those writhing dark shapes inside whipped around, even faster now. I squinted up at one. It was hard to see with the cave water getting in my eyes. I blinked, rubbed one hand slowly across my face. The water was warm, thick, heavy. There was a person inside the crystal. They screamed. They smashed their feet and their long, knobbly fingers against the edges of the crystal, over and over and over again. The light turned red again as the warm, heavy water inside the stalactites filled with blood. They couldn't get out. They couldn't even scream.
But hey, like I said. At this point, those days feel so far behind me that I can't properly pluck my emotions from my memories. Reality is a blurry thing, after all.
Everything after the cave has been reduced to subconscious mush, as I feel there is nothing more important to store in my mind. There is only the dance of the light beams, arcing through this cave. Only me, in this cave. Every single one of me.

Ribcage, by Dr Antti Reijo

Hello Gears! I am truly inspired by your writing, your works motivate me to work on writing short stories. I really hope that you like this. Have a wonderful birthday and thank you so much for everything!

“The crazy boss didn't force me to come here, despite the rumors. I'm here by my free will.”
I sat down in the company psychiatrist's office, acting like the place was mine. He nodded:
“Other employees had described a sense of ‘uneasiness' within your presence, Antti. I'm sure that you are aware of this.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you know the reason?”
“Well, doctor… I sense some stuff.”
“Could you name me some examples?”
“Sure. I know that Olavi is questioning why he is here in this damned workplace at all. I know that the ‘vacation' he is planning will have no return and the boss will go crazy. I know that Marja forgot her brother's birthday and didn't forgive herself for weeks despite her brother being dead for years. I sense those without them telling me.”
“That is oddly detailed.”
“Exactly. I also know that the secretary tightens his grip around the pencil when he sees me, thinking of stabbing me. I wouldn't blame him though.”
“Look, Antti. You and I can be considered close, so I will not lie to you. That is a symptom of paranoia. I'm also suspecting-”
“Doc. I know that the reason you choose khaki ties to wear is rooted back in your military days. One never really leaves military, does he?”
He stopped writing in his little notebook. He shook his head but not denying it:
“I've told no one about that.”
“That's what I'm talking about. So, doctor, did you put up a gravestone for the war victim children you've found or not? I sense some kind of regret as you hear laughter of your daughter. She also doesn't like it when you drink too much. It never really helps you forget, does it? You just end up getting angrier. She is deeply hurt, having a monster in her nightmares…”
“Antti-”
“Shh. Don't worry, your little secret is safe with me. Also, I'm not here to discuss my ‘sensing' power either.”
“Then what is the reason?”
“I was disturbed.”
“By what?”
“Well, you see… I don't even find it odd when my muscles and flesh torture me. I can say that my brain itself is digging up trenches, ready to declare a war…”
“Do you suffer from any medical condition?”
“Not any that's curable. Some crap that gets worse after every night.”
He spoke formally, though fidgeting with the end of his tie:
“It is normal to experience those kind of feelings and nightmares in long-term or chronic illnesses. We can work on that.”
“To tell the truth, it's not that I am disturbed when I hear the darkness speaking. Hell, its voice is sweeter than my mother's. It's not that I am startled as it feasts upon my flesh every night, digging up wounds that heal by dawn.”
“I'm afraid I am unable to understand.”
“Doctor. It cried, groaned, screamed, shouted at nights. I ignored it. But in the end, it spoke to me in my own voice. I was the darkness all along.”
Upon getting no reaction, I got up, walked to the door. He didn't reply.
“I believe you are unable to help. That's alright. Just tell your daughter to strike me with a sword under my ribcage the next time, my only weak spot. Also, send her my apologies for harboring myself in her nightmares for this long.”

1, 2, 3, Eyes on Me, by DrClef

Happy Birthday, Gears!

"Flat Tire!"
"Shhhhhhh… !" The children reply by instinct, holding a finger up to their lips in return.
"All right, boys and girls," I whisper, leaning down close so they can hear me. "We need to be very, very quiet in this hallway, all right? So that means no talking… no yelling… no running. Everyone walk right behind the person in front of you. No shoving, no pushing… and keep your eyes forward. I'm talking to you, Lena, don't turn around to talk to Dolores. Look straight at the person in front of you, no turning around. Okay?"
The children nod quietly in return, their little eyes gleaming with understanding. I go on. "Anna, you take my hand. Taron, you're the tallest, so you're the caboose. Make sure everyone stays in line, all right?"
Taron nods, his seven year-old face hardened with the burden of his responsibility. I turn and take Anna's hand: her tiny fingers grip my left pinky with all the force of a machine-shop clamp. Her grubby, dirt-stained cheeks are stained with old tears, but her red-rimmed eyes are strong and determined.
I turn to open the classroom door. The lights in the hallway flicker crimson and white, the brittle plastic covers over the flickering fluorescent tubes draped with viscera. I can see Linda's classroom across the hall: the construction paper she taped over the windows to block out the gazes of curious bystanders has been torn away, replaced with a single handprint in red over the cracked reinforced glass.
There is something moving in that classroom. Something with big, veiny wings. Something that crunches as it eats.
I can see the sandbags at the far end of the corridor, the men with their machine guns and rifles guarding the front entrance of the school. They raise their weapons as we emerge. I see one of them frantically gesturing to me to hurry. I don't dare.
Anna whimpers and her grip on my hand tightens. "Close your eyes, hon," I whisper to her. "Just hold my hand and follow me." I see her nod frantically, and she closes her eyes tightly, trusting on me to guide her.
I take another step down the corridor, and my foot slips on something slimy.
I don't look down.

Stars, by djkaktus

Happy birthday, buddy. Hope this one finds you happier and healthier than ever before.

They called the star Agatha, as long as it could be called a star. It appeared as if overnight, shining bright in the northern skies — brilliant, even against its peers. I remember when we first saw it, on the hill outside of town with Bethany and Richard, laying in the low grass and watching this new herald burning brightly in the heavens above us. God, what little we knew. What little we could have known! In those dying moments of summer, when it was just you, me and Agatha in the infinite dark above, who could have felt the cold winds of fall fast approaching?
What would you believe, if I told you how it ended? Would you know how close I am to you, even now?
Then came reports — slowly at first, convincing only those who wanted to believe the worst, and then a wave that swallowed even the firmest skeptics. Not a star, but a meteor — a primordial inferno, set loose by the chaos of creation to scream across the cosmos until it met its statistically inevitable end. They gave it another name, then; the 2022K-14 meteor, but we still called her Agatha.
It helped, early on, to give an identity to this catastrophe. Helped some people to meet it with dignity. What I would have done, they would say, were it not for Agatha coming to town. A pity. Others begged, some fell prostrate and worshipped her as a God, as an impending force of judgement. They called out to her — in fear, in desperation, insanity, but their pleas echoed off of unhearing ears, and Agatha continued forward, compelled by fate to complete her grim work.
It was in those dark hours, when all the lights were going out on our shriveling civilization, that the greatest minds of our generation discovered the last way out. I was called to duty, as I had been when I was young, and all of those years of research that had long since been decried as wasted suddenly found new purpose. The journals I had saved, the tables and calculations and endless arithmetic, all were given new life in the dying light of mankind. Agatha, it was determined, was far too large and far too fast for all the weapons of war that humanity had spent so much time perfecting to make any noticeable difference in her trajectory. She could not be destroyed, not with any arsenal built by human hands. But she could be averted.
There is distance between us, my darling, but it is less every day. I want to see you. I want to be near you again.
Still, the numbers never came together. We toiled, for weeks on end in the darkest laboratories on the planet, for an answer that would never manifest. While the world burned above us, and while the last remaining threads holding our human decency together frayed at the ends, we found nothing but frustration at the bottom of our efforts.
There simply was not enough time. Any attempt now to divert Agatha's trajectory would not make a meaningful difference. We would have needed to take action a hundred years prior, and sixty-million miles away.
It was a colleague of mine — Desmond Elliot, who made the Great Discovery. I remember meeting him at an event some years prior, some dull gathering of astrophysicists with more hair on their chins than on their heads. I remember the knowing smile you gave me when I rolled my eyes at his conjecture, that if space can be manipulated then so can time, that you don't need to push a hole through spacetime to get to where you're going, just wrap it around itself. The Elliot-Thurman Retrocausality Engine is what they would call his miracle, a device that directed tachyons backwards through time to bend its flow sideways, and then push it against itself. With a stable hand on the ship's automated rudder, all you had to do was ease it sideways into the slipstream, and you would drop from one loop to the other. Simple.
They didn't mention how many pilots they put into the testing rigs — but none of us wanted to know. Agatha had consumed us, just as it had consumed the sky, and if the pilots didn't return, then all the better for it. They would be spared the worst of what was coming. It couldn't be done with just rudder control and aileron. The onboard computer could tell you when the slipstream was formed, but the moment of dropout could not be handled by a machine. The computers were almost too efficient — too willing to ease into the transition. They were pulled apart, all of them, and history became filled with dark streaks of flaming debris that were once machine and pilot.
A team was assembled - pilots, engineers, physicists. In simulation we could make the transition once every four or five attempts, but we'd only need one. The first team to leave did so aboard a vessel called One Last Chance. The objective, really, was simple: find Agatha, across the vastness of space, and then nudge her sideways. The required variance was only millimeters; extrapolated over enough time and distance, Agatha would pass a hundred million miles from Earth. If our doom could be averted, the moment she was out of range the project would cease to exist — in the future, no such disaster would have ever inspired our efforts. We just had to find the right time, and the right place.
How long has it been? How many lifetimes have passed since I held you in my arms?
One Last Chance left our planet like a conquering hero, to the cheers and adulations of a desperately hopeful populace. Their course laid in, a team of seasoned veterans at the helm, and a one-way trip into infinity ahead of them. You were with me when we watched them rise into the sky, a sky now dominated by Agatha's grim spectre, and disappear into the night. I remember you squeezing my hand, flashing another smile, but a softer one this time. A smile weathered by grief and tempered in anticipation. Once she was free of our solar system, One Last Chance turned towards the universe, set light to Elliot's engine, and vanished into history.
We didn't know how long it would take, though theory supposed we would know immediately — or rather, we wouldn't know. But days turned into weeks, and Agatha grew nearer, and our messiah never emerged. It wasn't until a month after Agatha left that we determined what had happened - One Last Chance had left the slipstream, one hundred years prior, and then been immediately obliterated. We were foolish — even a century prior, Agatha had been going too fast. They arrived when they were set to arrive, and then were atomized seconds later. We had started picking up their distress signal, flung free from the ship during the collision, in the late 70s — a signal we didn't know the origin of, or what it could possibly mean, but the central computer recognized it now. They, like all of us, were just too late.
Another vessel was built, and another team assembled. We were so close, but our math had been off. We had to go further back in time, push the Engine harder than we had before. The next attempt failed to cross the slipstream — a nervous pilot pushed their craft too slowly and was scattered across a millenium. Another attempt was destroyed before they had even left the solar system, when the Engine inverted and they were flung into a dark, cold future. Time after time, we re-ran our calculations, loaded women and men into increasingly sophisticated vessels, and pushed them over the edge, and one by one they were late, or too far away, or annihilated. For a year we sent vessels into space, praying that this one would be the one, and each time ended in disaster.
Did you pray for me, when you realized I was gone?
And then, one day, there was nobody left. Mankind had been reduced to quiet, miserable pockets of whimpering animals hiding underground. There were no arks to carry us away, no shields under which we could hide. Every scientist, every architect, every possible combination of team available that could pilot our vessel had been exhausted. A day came when I walked into the hangar of our most recent iteration, and I was alone. There were no engineers. There were no scholars. There was me, and there was Finality. One more ship, needing only a single operator, with an Engine that could run for a million years, or more. By flooding the interior of Finality with the same tachyons, its pilot could stay as they were, static and unaging, for as long as it would take.
You begged me to stay, begged me to go with you underground. Maybe it will miss us, you said. Maybe it will only graze us. How you had maintained your optimism, I could not understand. I might never understand. But I knew how it ended — I had plotted Agatha's trajectory myself, a thousand times. Without exception, she would descend from the sky and, in an instant, set the atmosphere alight. She would punch a hole twenty miles deep into the Earth, and the ejected molten rock would blanket the planet. We would burn, all of us — even the ones who had gone underground. The continents would buckle, the seas would thrash and break the shore, mountains would slide into the chasms of shattered Earth and then we would die, all of us, screaming. Agatha had waited a billion years for this moment, and she would not be denied.
I left you in the morning, before you had awoken. There were no nights anymore - there was the Sun, and then there was Agatha, but our room was dark and you didn't see me go. I loaded the few things I wanted to remind me of you, and took our truck to the launch center. There was no one at the gate to welcome me, no one in the lobby to greet me. No one to perform a preflight check, no one to wish me well, no anxious and eager crowds cheering my departure. The facility was dark, and I was alone, save for Finality. I made the necessary preparations, had a final meal, and then laid in my course. This time, we would not be late.
Did you even wake in time to see?
Finality rose, on a pillar of fire, into the light of the morning. There were no scenic views on my ship — she had none of the artistry of her sisters, with the curved glass and polished steel of One Last Chance long since having been replaced by bulkheads and sensors. But I had kept a small porthole, just to the right of where my head would rest, from which I could look out into the cosmos. As Finality climbed, I caught my last glimpse of you from this side, with the world stretching further and further away from me. I thought of you, laying in our bed, expecting me to be there when you wake. I wondered if you would feel betrayed, like I had abandoned you. I wondered if you would think I was trying to flee, and leaving you behind.
If only you knew, I mused, considering myself. The space for my body within Finality was no bigger than a coffin. There was room enough for the slipstream controls, and enough for me to turn sideways if necessary, and that was it. I would not age, and I would not need food or drink. The onboard systems would maintain my life, so long as it was required. All I had to do was push the ship over the slipstream, and then wait.
My path out of the solar system took three weeks. On the twenty-third day I passed by Agatha. Our paths crossed as I was waking, and in the dim light of that far edge of our celestial neighborhood I spotted her, silently following the path set for her. As I watched her pass, I couldn't help but feel a sense of grim familiarity. We were the same, she and I — both of us set in motion by forces that existed long before we did. Both of us powerless now to escape our destinies. I wondered about her, as she pulled out of view. Was she a living thing? Did she dream? Was Agatha afraid of her death, as well? Did she have anyone she loved waiting for her back home?
I turned away from the Sun and into the dark of open space. I had never been religious, despite my mother's insistence, but in that moment I closed my eyes and asked for something. I did not pray for salvation, nor an end to pain. This path I walked now was not one that could be avoided, but I did pray for courage — not just for the moment, but for all the moments to come. The Engine behind me roared, and time and space sang together as we inverted, twisting and dancing. For a moment, we were all at once — every vessel that had come before me, all together in a single line. As they began dropping from the slipstream, or being destroyed by it, I looked to my right. Was there a ship that would follow me? Was there anything for us after my mission?
For a moment, as my hand trembled in the darkness, I felt yours on mine. Were you here, with me? Guiding my actions? The world grew dark. As Finality crossed the slipstream, she tumbled out into nothingness, ejected into a place that was very different than my own. When I came to my senses, I surveyed the heavens. I saw no stars, no planets. Nothing whose light had reached me, wherever I was. For a moment I felt panic — what if I was late? What if I, like the others before me, had come out on the wrong end? If I had been ejected into the heat death of the universe, Elliot's miracle would end here.
But the computer came online, reassuringly reminding me that it was not the future we had landed in, but a far distant past. Out of my tiny porthole I saw it now, streaks of luminescent gas, a cosmic miasma, and behind them points of light. We were in a dense nebula, far away from Earth, with nothing but space and time between me and my home. Despair gripped me. Was I too far away? Had Finality come out too far away? Would I have enough time to get back? I thought of you, in our bed, and locked my jaw in determination. I would have to make up for lost time, but I could get there. I could make it happen. The computer laid in a course for Agatha's projected trajectory, and Finality's extralight engines flung us through space.
I was alone.
For eons.
From my coffin in space I saw wonders, my dear. Oh, if you could have only seen them. The birth of stars, of worlds. Dreams and nightmares like you could never believe. For years, then decades, then centuries, until any measure of time devised by man was insufficient. How far can the human mind stretch? How long can it persist in the face of endless, inexorable time? I would close my eyes to dream, and lifetimes would pass. I sang once, a song my father used to sing to me before bed, and the song lasted a thousand years.
The change of Finality happened so gradually it took me seven-hundred years to notice the change. The flight computer warned me about trajectories variances, and had to compensate. When I scanned my vessel to find the disturbance, I discovered — to my dismay — that the ship had nearly quintupled in size. Gas and particulate from the young universe, attracted by the pull of the extralight engines, had begun to accumulate across the hull. The scanners were unimpeded, but it would not be long before the extralights were damaged by the crust of ionized metal forming around Finality. I could only watch in horror as my tiny window to the world around me became cloudy, and then dim, and then dark. After another four-thousand years, I was in total blackness.
But the extralights continued on, as long as they could. I came to the grim realization that I would run out of propulsion before I found Agatha, if I could even find it in time. I had hoped to rely on the extralights to give me time to find it, but without them I was just a missile. But there was another way. My scanners did not know where Agatha was, but the computer knew where she would be. While I still had command over Finality, I made a course correction to a point one-hundred years in the past from where I had come, and brought the engines to maximum power. One Last Chance had not been able to disrupt Agatha's arc, but Finality could.
I made the calculations myself. We had significant mass, now, and that mass would only increase as we hurtled through space. Any angle of attack would be sufficient, so long as we made contact with enough speed. Finality screamed through the sky, extralights blazing like the sun, until the dust and debris caked over the nacelles and they were suffocated.

I dreamed of you, in those days. Often I would slip back into sleep and be in your arms again, laying in our bed, talking about work or your studies, or what we wanted to watch on TV. Where had the time gone? We had talked about starting a family, about getting a dog. You wanted to move to Vancouver, but I wanted to stay closer to our parents. We always felt like we had nothing but time, that we couldn't spend it fast enough. While I slept in my cocoon, I thought of you. What would we do together, if I was able to save us? Where would our lives take us? Carolyn, you had told me, if it's a girl, Carolyn. If it's a boy, George - after your father.
Sometimes I would dream about the world I left. You died, I am sure of it. When Agatha struck the Earth, she would have turned it into a cloud of hot vapor. In the worst of them, I would see you laying there, as you were when I left you, when the wall of fire engulfed our home. I wonder if you felt any pain, in that moment, or if it was over before you realized it had even happened. Did you curse me, then? Did you cry out for me? Did you think of me at all?
Did anyone think of me at all?
Is there anything left to think about?

Oh, the stars. We're all just stars.

Do not fear, my darling. I'm getting close, now. I have been in the dark for so long, but I have not given up. My body has changed, but my mind is resolute. I will not abandon my mission, not now. It's so dark in here. The scanners tell me that Finality is tumbling through space. I wonder how large it has gotten? I wonder if it will be large enough to disrupt Agatha's course. I run the numbers again. It must be.
Something strikes the hull, but I barely feel it. Nothing can stop me, now. Nothing will stop me from reaching her.
I am so close. I can feel it. The scanners have not found Agatha yet, but I know she is out there. I am going to find her, and I am going to save us.
Then, when I've completed my task, I will return to you. We can be together again.
I am coming home.

What would you believe, if I told you how it ended?

Interview with an Icon, by Dysadron

Happy Birthday Gears! Thank you for helping create this wonderful community

(Excerpt from interview held on 27/04, with music executive Roger Icon — birth Name: Roger Peterson. Throughout the interview, the 1979 album “The Best Years” by rock band California Angels plays upon Icon's request. Full text to be published shortly.)
…now this song, this song's pretty spectacular. Stan performed the drum solo in one take. Perfection, first try.
Tell us about your relationship with the Angels.
My relationship? I built those boys from the ground up! They used to call me the fifth angel, they did — some still do. You look around now, I set the blueprint. Not only was I their manager, I was their agent, their producer, executive producer, PA, tour manager all rolled into one.
I saw them performing at an open mic night, saw they had it in them, saw they had what it would take. I stuck around, went backstage and I told them, “boys, stick with me, and I'll make you stars”. And that's what I did.
All four of them — Stan, Tony, Don, Chet — they worked hard, they put the effort in, they had the talent. But, they wouldn't have hit the top without me. And they knew it too. Well, all but Tony.
Tell us more about Tony.
Ah Tony, bless him. And I mean that, I really do. He was a good kid. But good kids don't often stay that way. The others they, contrary to the name, weren't always angels. (He laughs). Chet's 25th birthday alone probably damned us all to hell! But they knew the drill. Turned up on time, did their bit, put in the work.
Tony… I don't blame him. The pressure those kids were under. Top of the charts, nonstop touring, girls in every city calling their names. He couldn't handle-
Oh! I remember the moment Don wrote this hook (he begins to sing). “Oh baby you're all that I need. You got me begging, yeah I'm down on my knees”. It was December ‘78. The night before our last gig of the year.
So what happened to Tony?
Let's hear this song out first. The signature's up coming next.
(Two minutes of silence elapse. Track 4 of the record, “You Taste Like Heaven”, begins to play.)
Ah, I saw your smile there at the opening riff. I can't go a day without hearing this song on the radio, when I'm out, at the bars. I love it. Everyone loves it! What's not to like?
God, poor Tony. This was the first song we recorded after he left the band. He came in stinking of booze one too many times. Tried to take a swipe at Don one time during recording. I couldn't have it, it jeopardised everything we worked for. When we found the needles in his room…we knew it was time for him to go. Had to let him go with security present, knew he would kick up a fuss. And he did.
Was that the last time you saw Tony?
Ah c'mon, we both know it wasn't. With the band down to a three, pressure was on to produce something great. Something that would get the focus back to the music, you know? We were in the studio pretty much all the time, basically lived there!
Then, late one night, we're all tired, most staff have gone home, the band's in the recording booth, I'm in the studio with some of the audio guys. Knock on the door — it's Tony. The band's mid recording, they're fucking killing it, I don't want them disturbed.
I go outside, he says we need to talk. He stinks: booze, piss, you name it.
I loved the kid. He was like a son to me. All four of them were. Thought I'd hear him out, goodness of my heart and all that.
We go to a storage room, and he asks to be back in the band. I say no can do. He had his chance, he blew it.
Then… then he starts saying things. Awful things. Things about me, things about the other guys. That he'd go to the papers, that he knew people at the parties who would talk. I gave him everything, and that's how he wants to repay me? Me? (He smacks the table in front of him).
So…what did you do?
Smashed his head into the side of the wall. Then he started screaming, so I had to smash it again to make him shut up. Took a few tries. Eventually it worked. Waited till the end of the night, dumped the body, moved on. He was gonna have a sticky end eventually, press assumed he'd offed himself in some back alley. And you know what, the publicity didn't hurt the album sales when it came out one bit. “The Best Years” is a bonafide American Classic.
Why come forward now?
They're excavating where I dumped him. Building a supermarket or some dumb shit. It's bound to come out eventually, and I'd prefer my side of the story gets told when it does. Plus, docs say I'll be lucky to still be here in 6 months time, so…
So?
So I want the story told right. Restart the track. You. Taste. Like. Heaven. And it's a heavenly fucking song. Up there with the best.
You gotta listen closely. There, on the chorus, you hear it? I had to play with the pitch, a bit of the mixing…but you can hear it. It's there.
Tony's screams were picked up by the mics next door. And I made them into a million dollar hit. I told you I was a genius. Always feared I'd be the only one who knew, so thanks for listening.
Tony wanted back in the band. Guess I gave him our biggest hit as a swan song.
(Excerpt taken from police interview with Roger Icon, after he presented at a police station claiming he had information of the disappearance of Anthony Symonds.)

There's No Red Here, by Fantem

Happy Birthday, Gears! Glad to see the cogs still turnin ^w^

Red is a foreboding color; not like black.
Of course, the most obvious thing that comes to mind is blood, but that came last. There's the red of a roulette table. The red ink of an eviction notice and loan debts taken out of desperation. Then, the red of what's left of your dog, when he's lying on the floor missing his head.
When you notice that, black is a downright holy color. The calming dark of sleep, and the fur of your best friend, when he's noticed you crying… You miss it. So much so, the fear of red means nothing to you.
The fear of red turns to anger. Then regret. Then anger again. You wonder what'd happen if you hadn't gotten in so deep, you wouldn't be using a spade to bury your king in the backyard. Then, you want red. What's a little more? You're already drowning in it.
You coat your fists in it. And it feels good. Mostly because for once in your life, it means something good. You don't even care if your own blood starts leaking from the bullet hole in your tit.
At least now, you're in the black.

The Space Where It Wasn't Anymore, by HarryBlank

Many haunted returns!

I'm going to talk about a TV show I saw when I was young. No, this isn't the internet's nine hundredth watered-down "Candle Cove" retread. This show was real. It was called Mr. Putnam's Place, and it was Canadian. If you're Canadian yourself, you already suspect that this is a horror story.
When I was a kid, our networks couldn't just spew lucrative American programs over the airwaves. They had to produce a specific amount of legitimately Canadian spewage, too. The premise of this particular piece of filler fluff was just a gloss on the variety show bullshit so popular in 1990s children's entertainment: a discount Richard Attenborough type ran a wild-westish general store full of knickknacks and gewgaws, a long wooden counter and… I don't really know what else. I keep getting it mixed up with Shining Time Station, except that this show obviously couldn't afford the august personages of George Carlin or Thomas the Tank Engine, or even Ringo Starr. What they could afford was a puppet of a talking cat that looked like a puppet of a talking dog, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and playing a saxophone, whose name was Caldicott. That should give you a sense what we're dealing with here.
The only other thing I remember was the stuffed moose head mounted on the wall behind the counter. Before you ask — and why would you need to? — yes, the head was alive, and could talk. We don't have time to get into the weeds with that deeply troubling concept, though, because I need to tell you instead about how that moose head — or, rather, its absence — ended my childhood.
I only remember a single episode. Wikipedia says there were fifty-one; it also says the thing was actually called Puttnam's Prairie Emporium, so now I'm fifty-one different kinds of upset. This is some serious Berenstain Bears shit; the feeling that my head is full of hollow constructs bearing little resemblance to the lived reality which inspired them is pretty much not great, folks.
Some similarly nostalgia-afflicted soul has produced an episode list, and glancing over it I'd say that the one I'm thinking of was probably called "Bumps in the Night." Only "probably," because there is no way to know for certain… and likely never will be. Canadian content from the nineties doesn't get DVD releases, so I can't check my memories against reality, and it's entirely possible I'm the only person not involved in producing this episode who ever even laid eyes upon it. It might only exist in my brain, now. It might, though I really hope this isn't the case, have only ever existed there. I certainly can't prove otherwise.
At some point in this episode, some character — I don't remember who, because I don't even remember who the other characters were — came to the emporium alone in the middle of the night. There was nobody else around; Caldicott's bed was empty, Mr. Putnam Puttnam's post behind the counter was abandoned, and… the fucking moose head had gone, too. This is not something a moose head generally does, when not attached to a fucking moose. I didn't have time to dwell on the ramifications of that, however, because of what the head's inexplicable absence revealed.
There was a hole in the wall where the moose now wasn't, a well of inky black in the dimly-lit set, and there was something living inside of it. Something that wasn't a moose, zombie or otherwise. Something I can't even properly focus on my memory of, like someone scoured the relevant brain cells with sandpaper. I can only place it now as a vague feeling, as a concretization of the concept of dread which I have carried with me ever since I tried to peer past the scanlines of my TV set and make out meaningful shapes in the dark. I can feel eyes on me — because really, the late-night visitor is me, for all intents and purposes — and I can hear some ghastly, indescribable sound. One musty corner of my brain is occupied by that sense of malicious observation and that inchoate screaming wail, and nothing else besides. It's been that way for nearly thirty years.
I don't remember what happened next. All I remember is the sense of pervasive wrongness, of something familiar and even beloved subverted into alien hostility. According to Wikipedia, I haven't even gotten the most superficial details correct: the moose head wasn't a fucking moose head at all, it was a buffalo head — and a fucking awful glassy-eyed hell-beast of buffalo head at that. I didn't remember what the damn thing was, but I have never for a single second forgotten the shape of the space where it wasn't anymore, or the way it made me feel.
When an old building comes down or a new one springs up, and I'm momentarily disoriented in a well-known landscape, I remember the emporium with the lights off and nobody home. When it's late at night and the power goes out and I can't see two inches in front of me, I remember the hole in the wall. When I stumble over a cat toy in the dark, or, god forbid, the actual cat, I remember the thing that first made me feel fear like an adult. Whatever that thing was. I feel the fear of a thing out of place.
And it's only getting worse. There's no way to exorcise that otherworldly screech in my brain, because I'll never be able to watch that episode and laugh at how completely banal it probably was. Only seven of those fifty-one programs survived, and wouldn't you know it? "Bumps in the Night" isn't one of them. Something else I remember from my childhood speaks directly to that dilemma: what a survivor of the 1915 Lusitania sinking said about it, decades after the fact. "Although time fades and the little grey cells wear out, I can still sit here now and see that liner just sliding below the waves." He was just a kid when it happened, like me and my tiny but somehow no less memorable trauma. He had an ocean liner sinking in his head for the rest of his life, over and over, and his memory was the only place where that event could be actually witnessed. There were no photographs, and certainly no film. The moment was captured in the perishable muck of his brain, and when he was gone, the moment was too.
We age, we forget, we grow tired and stupid and we rot away, taking all the half-remembered and half-imagined worlds we are haunted by with us. On the table behind me, there's a few hundred mouldering CD-ROMs growing pinholes in their foil layers as bacteria work entropy upon them, and when I try to salvage their contents, the laser strikes the empty spaces and diffracts against the deep-worn scratches and just plain gives up. Information once committed to posterity is now wholly unavailable, as when I try to remember the contours of the thing inside the wall and my mental tongue strikes the wisdom tooth gap where that information once existed, but doesn't anymore. What does come out of either process is corrupted, like a mis-named man or a mis-species'd ungulate. None of my means of memory will last for long, in the grand scheme of things, and I myself won't last much longer.
Old film, like CD-ROMs and human brain cells, eventually rots. If the master tapes of that long-lost show still exist, there will soon come a time when they don't. After that point of no return, nobody else will ever again see the thing that I saw, and be changed in the way I was changed. If I know anything about the concept of horror, this is the reason why. That fragment of time on the sun-warmed shag carpeting of my living room floor, when I gazed into a video taped abyss filtered through the flickering of a cathode ray tube and discovered the concept of dread. That long, slow process of realizing that in a safe place, from a trusted source, I was gifted a permanent scar on my psyche. It was as formative an experience as my first serious injury, my first kiss, my first taste of lasting failure.
The day my memory of what was missing finally goes missing itself will be, I believe, the day I finally forget how to be properly afraid.
That scares me, too.

Why I'm Not a Teacher Anymore, by Ihp

Happy birthday, Gears! Hope to see you on the Vallis again.

I used to teach at the high school in the next town over. You heard about how a bunch of kids vandalized the school one year, painted a bunch of slurs on the front, broke windows and all that? Called it a senior prank. And I don't think anyone in the county can forget how some student melted half the chem lab because they were trying to steal stuff so their dad could make meth.
We weren't allowed to vent about kids in the teacher's lounge; some parents had overheard us during a PTA meeting, and we were told not to shit-talk students on the clock. So, one of the math teachers had the bright idea to make a little journal: a composition book, hidden in the janitor's closet on the first floor, where teachers could write about the bullshit that students inflicted on them anonymously. Most of it was typical stuff you'd hear in any other lounge, lazy football players printing out Wikipedia articles instead of writing papers, pedantic nerds pissing off the history professors, even a few things written by the English department about how much they wanted to rip apart the curriculum so they didn't have to force kids to read Whitman.
There was this… one person who wrote in it. They had really neat and precise handwriting, and while some of us wrote expletive-laced diatribes (myself included), this guy just wrote first and last names of students that some of us had problems with. One of our math teachers outwardly had the patience of a saint, but she had once filled up three pages with an essay about how much a single kid pissed her off. Whoever this was just writing the first and last names of students, sometimes followed by a period written with such force that it would stab through the paper.
One day, this same neat handwriting didn't write a name, but a date: March 12th. None of us could figure out what it meant. There were a few students who had birthdays on that date, but none of them had their names written by Mr. Neat Handwriting.
When that date came around, there were twenty-six names written by that person. It was the date of the first lockdown drill the school ever did, and all of those kids had been in the same classroom, on the second floor. When they opened the door, they… didn't find anything. No blood, no signs of struggle, no people. Twenty-seven people, including the teacher, had just vanished. And they're still missing.
After we were let back into the school a couple of months later, we started a new journal— this time not for grievances, but for grief. The day I walked into the principal's office and handed in my resignation letter, I saw the first and last name of one of my students, written in neat and precise handwriting.

Green Eyes, by J Dune

[Hi Gears! Happy birthday. I'm honored to be a part of one of these for the first time. Hope it's a good one.]

I saw the woman with the green eyes again today.
It was at the train station on the platform opposite mine, our eyes meeting when the last car pulled away. We stayed that way for ten long, unbroken seconds. I counted, just in case. Pools of green flooding my own. There is nothing behind those eyes. I need to let myself know for sure.
I saw the woman with the green eyes again today.
At the supermarket. She walked into the same aisle as me. I walked into another to throw her off, but it didn't work. When I left, I could feel her staring at me. I could feel her eyes.
I saw the woman with the green eyes again today.
At the hospital, where she works as an assistant secretary on the 4th floor at Desk 2C. She seemed surprised to see me. They didn't want me to see her.
I saw the woman with the green eyes again today.
At her apartment. She hides a spare key underneath the door mat.
I saw the woman with the green eyes again today.
And she will never see anything again.

Message Board, by Jacob Conwell

While you were on your way out while I was just stepping on, your influence on the site and and my writing has always stuck around. SCP-217 remains one of my all time favorite pieces of fiction to this day. Thank you for all you have done. Godspeed.

AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

Notice to AZA-Co Staff:
Welcome to the Break Room!
We in management hope you will enjoy this space and will utilize it fully to unwind during your breaks. Please see this board for any and all general announcements.
Keep the place tidy and be respectful of everyone's belongings.
- MGMT

AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

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Paper and ink add up quickly!
Do your part to help us save money and help the environment. Please only print when necessary, and if possible use digital formats.
- MGMT

AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

Notice to AZA-Co Staff:
The official lost and found can now be found only at security.
Please make sure to turn in all unattended items there.
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AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

Notice to AZA-Co Staff:
The refrigerator in the break room is for everyone's use.
Please share the space, and remember that environmental services will clean it out at the start of the week.
We would also like to remind you that there is only one refrigerator in the break room and ask that you please double check where you place your belongings.
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AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

Notice to AZA-Co Staff:
Birthday parties and other celebrations are always welcome!
Please remember that cake and other confections found in the break room, unassociated with any such events, should immediately be thrown out.
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AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

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There are currently only two custodians with the name Johansen on staff.
In the event that you notice a third, please leave the area calmly and report to security.
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AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

Notice to AZA-Co Staff:
Leaving on time is a crucial part of the work-life balance!
We strongly recommend all employees leave promptly at the end of their shifts.
After-hours preparation classes are available on an as-needed basis.
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AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

Notice to AZA-Co Staff:
The building only has seven floors and no basement.
An environmentally aware employee is an alive employee.
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AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

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Do not trust management.
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Circles of rats are not a normal part of the office decor.
Please report all instances to environmental services for immediate incineration.
Do not approach yourself.
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AZA-Co: All of Tomorrow's Products, Today!

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Firearms are available to all employees at the Security Office.
Do your part to ensure a safe workspace today!
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Notice to AZA-Co Staff:
If you are reading this, run.
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Dispatch, by JakdragonX

Thank you for being such an inspiration for both this site and my own writing. I hope your birthday is filled with joy!

3 AM was always the worst time to be a police dispatcher.
I hadn't noticed it until the analog clock behind my desk began ringing, filling the black void of my office with noise. I was supposed to have left an hour ago. Back to my dinky old home that I purchased off my grandmother. But instead here I was — filling in for workers the precinct hadn't even hired yet. Of course, they told me that things would be easy. Living in a small city like Shadowcreek meant that everyone knew each other. Neighborhoods and streets were kept clean by community charities and pitch-ins. Night's were supposed to be quiet — only 5 or 6 calls total. And usually those were just false alarms.
A notification buzzed on my desktop monitor. After the noise jarred me awake, I realized what the alert was for. There was a call incoming. I suppressed the urge to groan. Why is there an emergency right now?
I picked up the line. Before the alert disappeared from my computer, I caught a brief glimpse of the last few digits on the calling number. Not that they were anything much, but it still caught me by surprise. The number felt strangely… familiar. Like, I was somehow supposed to know who was calling.
My gut lurched uncomfortably. In the back of my mind, I prayed that no one I knew was currently in trouble.
The line was silent when I answered. After a pause, I took the opportunity to initiate the call. It's possible they weren't even aware that they called the police.
"Hello, this is 911. What is your emergency?"
After a few seconds, no one answered the question. My doubt was beginning to rise. It wouldn't of been the first time that someone accidentally called the police.
"Hello?"
That's when I noticed it. The faint sounds of someone panting in between footsteps. The large gasps for air.
The caller was running away from something.
This call wasn't just an accident. On my other monitor, I opened the web program that we used to dispatch units. My screen quickly populated with images of maps and streets of the town. Hopefully the lack of police around wouldn't be much of an issue.
"—hello?!" The caller asked, fighting between breaths. Female, and sounded a lot like me. Maybe around my age too. Her footsteps were getting louder.
My mind went into autopilot as I spoke, "Hi ma'am, this is 911. Are you in danger?"
"Yes!" The caller screamed. "Please send help!"
She was panicking. I needed to calm her down so I could actually understand what was going on.
"It's going to be alright ma'am. Could you please tell me what's happening, and where you are?"
I could hear the caller talking, but the rushing wind was blocking out her voice. At this rate, it seemed impossible to get her to work with me. Obviously, if push came to shove, I could always use her phone's location and send someone to check. But, even that would be useless if she dropped her phone or something. I needed to get her to stop somehow.
"Ma'am, please find somewhere to stop so I can hear you. Like a road or a store." I didn't like putting her at risk like this. But, then again, it's not like there were many other options here.
"Something's… coming." I didn't know what she was doing to make herself sound better, but atleast now things were somewhat clearer.
Someone was chasing her. Usually in situations like this, it's someone's partner or a crook on the streets. This was some progress, atleast.
I needed to know more, in case an officer was able to track the attacker down. "Do you know who's chasing you, ma'am?"
"Big… faces…" She responded in between pauses. "Many eyes — its head is swiveling."
"I'm sorry?"
"It's crawling to me! I don't know… I don't know what it is. I — oh God, I think it's getting closer!"
What?
She was obviously delusional at this point. Maybe she wasn't getting enough air. How long had she'd been running for?
"I need to know who's chasing you. Do you have a better description?"
"ITS SMILE! Crawling on all fours. I can see its… its spine. Its spine is wiggling!"
There was no use in trying to make sense of what she was saying. If I had to guess, it was probably a stray dog.
"Where are you located right now?"
The faint sound of something falling on the ground outside of my office jolted me out of my chair. It's not usual for things to be moving in the office at 3 in the morning. After a moment I was able to focus back on the call — most likely an intern dropped a pot of coffee outside.
"Serenity Lane…" She panted between gasps. "By the red house!"
My jaw dropped open. Serenity Lane? That wasn't just a familiar road or a busy street. What are the chances that she'd be there? In front of my home?
"I… okay, it'll be alright ma'am. Go down towards Maple and take a left. You'll be close to the police station. Someone can help you there."
My head swiveled back around the office at the sound of something knocking on the walls. Taken aback by the sudden noise, I realized that I was also becoming panicked. I needed to control my breathing before the caller on the line overheard me. What idiot was causing ruckus in the office at this time?
The sudden screaming in my ear caused my attention to shift back to the caller. For a brief moment, I could've swore that I also heard it from outside.
"IT'S HERE!"
"Ma'am?"
Click!
"Ma'am, are you there?!"
Not fucking good. I swiveled back to my monitor, filling out the rest of my dispatch request with as much information as I could remember. Possible emergency? Assault. Location? Maple Street. Name of Caller? Of course, that was easy. It was… it was…
Did I ever actually catch her name?
That's when the door alarm rang. The sounds of sirens and shattered glass echoed throughout the precinct. She didn't just make her way inside — she broke in.
Who did she say she was being chased after? Was it really a mangled stray? In the back of my mind, I couldn't get past her descriptions of the attacker. With its faces and its eyes coming after her. Could all of this just be a massive prank?
My skin began to crawl as I continued thinking about it. I hadn't even noticed that I was now standing from my chair, or the sudden shadow that formed in front of my door. As I approached, I could see a figure standing in the window, staring at me with blood her eyes and marks across her face.
Our eye's widened in unison. Somehow she looked so familiar — but I couldn't quite understand why. The color of her hair, the way her cheeks looked so empty and hollow. I could feel myself getting lost in her deep amber eyes, the same ones that I had.
And that's when it happened. When I knew who was on the other end of the phone and staring me down. Why everything felt so familiar. Her face, and the way she talked. It all began to click.
I knew what her name was now.
Another shadow loomed over me, but this time from behind. I was so focused on her now that I didn't see the faces looming beneath my feet, lingering on the tiles of my office. Or the black tendrils, decorated with crimson eyes, snaking along the walls. That's when I realized I was trapped by it. And it was standing behind me, towering over me with nothing but its presence alone. My body stood frozen in fear. My mind and heart panicked as a revelation hit me.
Everything that happened… it was all just a lure. A trick. A way for this thing to find its prey. It wasn't actually coming after some random lady on the streets.
It was coming after me.

Mum?, by LAN 2D

This is my first contribution to the site, after years of lurking. I can't think of a better way to make that first step. Have a great birthday, Gears! I hope you enjoy!

Tuesday.
It's been 3 days since Mum spoke.
I think she must be bored, because all she does is watch TV.
A few nights ago, Michael from Mum's work came over for dinner. Actually, he made us dinner. It was nice, but he made a special dish for Mum because she deserved it for all her hard work. I asked to try but he said no.
Mum didn't like it though. She started coughing and I think she was sick in the toilet, so Michael sat on the sofa with her so they could rest.
Thursday.
Mum didn't move the next day, or the day after that. I think she's tired.
Sammy sometimes barks at her, but I try and calm him down. He's a bit stressed out with Michael around.
He put me to bed yesterday, and today he drove home from school in Mum's car. He said not to tell anyone because the Principal doesn't like him and I might get in trouble.
Sunday.
Michael's out today, so I had to make myself lunch. I asked Mum if she could make me a sandwich, but she wouldn't get up no matter how hard I pulled on her arm. I pushed up a stool to the fridge, and made it myself.
Mum always told me the toaster's too dangerous to use by myself, so my bread was cold. I didn't mind really.
After lunch, I took Sammy for a walk and bumped into Mrs Brown from next door. She asked about Mum, and I told her she was watching TV. She said she should come round and see, so I got scared and ran home. I don't know why.
Monday.
Mum has started to smell. Sammy doesn't come near her, which is sad, but its good that she isn't scared of insects anymore. She doesn't even scream when they crawl on her.
Michael said to start calling him Mikey today, so I will.
Mikey gave Mum a scrub and dressed her up in her favourite dress. He said it was for tonight's date.
I couldn't sleep because they were talking so late, so I tried to listen through the wall. Mikey's voice was so loud and deep I couldn't really hear Mum's. I think she talked for a bit though.
Wednesday.
Sammy wasn't here this morning. I think he was scared because Mum looks so pale. Mikey said it was a new makeup she was trying.
I went into the garden to look for him, but I couldn't find him. Just his fur, in clumps across the garden. Mikey said he saw him rolling around outside early in the morning, but I don't know – Sammy always waits for me at the door.
Someone knocked on our door today, really hard. They shouted for a bit, then left. Mikey said it was a local prankster pretending to be police. Mikey always knows what to say.
Saturday.
Sammy hasn't been home for days. Sometimes I worry about him, but Mikey always cheers me up. Tomorrow he promised we'd have a tea party with Mum. I asked him to just give her water, because she hasn't had anything to drink in a while.
I told him that Mum had stopped breathing, but he said not to worry – it's a surprise.
I don't think she's noticed yet.
I'm not sure how to tell her. It would scare her if I just walked up and said it.
But I'm not worried, I'm sure she'll get up soon. I miss talking to her.
Sunday.
Mum fell out of her chair today, and when Mikey helped her back up, I could see her bones.
I've decided not to tell her.
After all, I think she'd be upset.

The Sleep Academy, by Lt Flops

Happy Birthday, Gears! I hope your summer has been treating you well! Your stories have entertained for years. Here's to a hundred more!

I am a trial volunteer at the Sleep Academy. I volunteer not for self-enrichment, nor really to lend a helping hand. The Sleep Academy is meant for neither. It's a gig of pure utility; I need extra cash, and the labour is almost nonexistent — for the leisure of it, I really should be paying them for their accommodations.
I know they study dreams, but I don't know what they do with the data, nor even what these data are. I can make inferences: Patterns, the interplay between constructed and episodic memories, the fusion of the stochastic imagination with daily experience, subconscious symbolism, false awakenings. I've heard whispers about all these sorts of things. I've even researched them — and more — in my time away, but I've never gleaned what the point is.
What I get, beyond air-conditioned sleeping spaces among my eccentric-yet-entertaining workmates, is the adventure. A film is like a focused dream; but a dream makes use of all senses, including those of real, tangible freedom. Here, they corral dreams. They let them mill within the confines of the mind. And then, they let them loose, onto the ripe fields of the unconscious.

Like any other week, a dull receptionist holding nondescript clipboards leads me through the communal sleeping auditorium, nodding past sleepers and those who soon would be. Some of them, I know; some, I've been seeing for months; some, I've never seen at all; and others, I'll never see again.
Each week, they're always mum about where I'm being taken, what I will see when I get there, and how I'll be feeling when I do. This week, I simply pull my pillow a bit tighter than usual to my chest.
Passing my typical destination — the tenth row of bed arrangements on the left side of the dim auditorium — I'm led further, past the last row of beds. And then beyond even there.
We finally reach a line of people milling about, at the bottom-left wall's exit from the auditorium, where they speak in banalities, ambling towards the Academy's refectory, to inevitably fill their empty bellies after a long rest. We pass them, too.
“Whereabouts this week?” I ask reservedly.
“We're still getting things back to how they were,” the receptionist tells me, “how they need to be to get the data we want,” leading me away from everyone else. I suppose that answers that. I briefly, and rather consciously, feel eyes affixed to my back, but pay no mind.
I remind myself that a cool bed can strip away all sense of alienation we carry from the world around us.
I'm at the end now, past a recluse young woman locking dead eyes with a panelled wall, past a greying janitorial workman wrestling a cord hanging from the rafters, and into the unlit, absolute top-left corner. And here I find a door.

I forget what happens next, but my memory returns: The ghastly kyeeeeeeeerrschhhk of a door peeling open, or rather into, the room I'm now in. A claustrophobic affair, with pastel walls and snowy sheets adorning a twin bed. A stout man with a closely trimmed beard, snug whitecoat, and thick glasses strolls in, carrying another of the nondescript clipboards. My brain tells me he's a doctor; I don't know what of. He's smiling; I don't know what about.
He sets the clipboard on a pastel bedside table. I reach to grab it — then realize I'm strapped to the bed.
“What're these for?” I ask, struggling to wrest even my shoulders from the mattress.
“For sleepwalkers. Don't you worry.” Another smile, of the toothy variety.
“That so common?”
“No.”
Then, just as soon as he entered, he backs up, closing the door with him, another kyeeeeeeeerrschhhk, a wide smile as he crosses the threshold.
A deadbolt clunks. The lights are flung into a dim, low setting.
In my prone state, I look aside, barely catching the clipboard in my field of vision. I fight the straps, shifting weight and squirming and bobbing and overextending my limbs in uncomfortable ways. After some time, I'm able to get a close eyeing of its contents.
I now realize there is one descriptor that best suits the clipboard: Filled. Short lines of terse writing, and many.
In the heading I find something disconcerting: A label, signifying rejection. That the “test” is not to go on; that the “subject” is unfit; that they had failed to administer the proper procedures; but that the entire ordeal had already been set in motion and could not be undone. Next, a matter-of-fact “avoid subject loose” — I snort at the cumbersome grammar. Then, that “it” has “been initiated”, with two thick underlines. Accompanying this dense subject matter (which fills the rest of the page), various bolding and strikethroughs and use of complex terminology and scattered abbreviations lead my attention. The last quarter of the page discusses “an experiment in seclusion.”
Much is chicken-scratch. The word “subject” is common — so dehumanizing, the very word creating distance, yet constricting in its use, and so freely used.
I'm not one to show when I'm ready to lose it, and if I do, I usually restrict that showing to a short but sustained bout of unease. Here and now, I call for the bored receptionist and the beamish doctor.
No response.
I glance at a small, similarly pastel-painted grill on the ceiling. From there, I await an announcement over the PA, the one that should have croaked to life by now, to speak to me about events to come, to give solace for another trial about to go forward, to give at least good luck. Neither one comes. For a short, disquieting moment, I imagine all sorts of things have gone awry.
Tears line my eyelids and dare to spill forth, down my cheek.
Eventually, I give in to my restraints, and ease into a stupor. Despite the obvious wrongness of the situation, unconsciousness happens quicker than usual.

Feeling the weight of what must have been a full night's rest, immediately I am cognizant that I'm now out of bed. I look over its metal frame, straps removed and folded neatly in the bed's corner, and everything… is as it was?
… Something is missing. The pillow I had on my person and the pillow on this bed are different entities. The bedside table is an inch or two closer to the wall than it had been in my restrained state, and the clipboard is different. In fact, this lacks papers or anything of the sort.
There are smaller inconsistencies: The ceiling is lower, and the room a bit narrower. With a look at the evenness of the paint, it seems a hasty job was done. And the colour is inconsistent with my memory.
I spin, facing the door, instinctually grabbing the handle, and, holding my breath, twisting.
The deadbolt, luckily, doesn't catch. I pull the door, wincing at its signature kyeeeeeeeerrschhhk as I struggle against its mass. It's a lot heavier than the doctor had made it seem.
Beyond the door, a wider hall sprawls before me. A curtain masks the right side of the wall from which I emerged, and flush at its left, a descending staircase. Beneath that, void. One could open the curtain, were they a few steps downward, but they would be in a most uncomfortable position, and would not reach behind lest they climbed. Further along the right wall, an ascending staircase begins midway from the ceiling. I turn left, finding a mirror image of the hall's right, though offset by some feet. Straight ahead, the room narrows. It continues along in a full spectrum of darkness, implying immense distance.
None of this hall's geometry makes sense. Nothing in this area bears resemblance to the rest of the Academy.
In the distance I hear… The mewling of a helpless baby? A cat's caterwauling? I can't make out much, so I travel where it takes me.

This auditorium is a different beast without any people in it. The Sleep Academy typically runs in two shifts: After-noon and overnight. One is often quieter, and emptier, but neither so empty as this. Each bed, typically filled with a person, now lacks a mattress, and all in varying states of disrepair. Some rest on the floor, in shambles.
I have followed the cry into this room. I shout, again for the receptionist, or the doctor, or for any of the other staff. No orderlies sporting bottles of water or vitamins are milling about. But still, the cry persists, filling the space, echoing on all sides.
And I look at the sides, and notice something I had never noticed before: Curtains. Shifting. Shadows, dancing in the spaces beneath those curtains, despite this dim auditorium, darker than it ever has been.
“Hello?” I call, this time barely more than a croak.
For a moment, my echoed voice and even the calling prove silent.
And then I hear a response.

My pursuer makes chase as I barrel through dull, samey halls. A dearth of doors, but many branched paths aid my escape.
Occasionally, I catch shadows of the one in pursuit — a short, stout silhouette on walls, floor, and ceiling behind me. Sometimes, the shadows flicker ahead.
Breathless, I take stairs two at a time, and after excruciating minutes of climbing, make way back to my starting point.
Sweat coats clammy palms. I rush the door. A disturbance in the curtain, but I keep steadfast and narrow my sights on the room, press on the heavy door, wince at its kyeeeeeeeerrschhhk as I scramble inside.
Imagine my shock, then, realizing the lock is on the outside. I force my weight against the closed door; it opens inward, and my pursuer would have all leverage.
After an extended period catching my breath, I notice all is quiet. I release the handle, standing tall.
Nothing.
I slowly face the room I neglected to investigate on my return.
On the bed rests the clipboard. This time, the same as the first, with the page filled… In my writing.
Transfixed, I gaze at my scrawling in every field. I scan quickly before arriving at the discussion section.
I perceive the rising screech of the poorly oiled door to my back. But my mind is more focused on what “I” have written.

I am a subject of the Sleep Academy. I'm here not for their enrichment, but to force my own hand. The Sleep Academy is meant for me. It's a place of pure utility; they require precious memories, and the labour is most exploitative — for eternal rest, I really should renounce my will and let it come easy.

The Sleep Academy calls for my return, tender within the clench of its maw. After all: Is what is real much different from what is dream?

Going Off the Rails, by LurkD

Happy birthday!

Finally.
Sunrise.
I shuffle out from the pile of tattered hard cover books and try and get my bearings. The nights are far too long in this place. And far too dark. I can barely see my hands in front of my face when the light dies out. That's why we can't travel at night. As the night sky bleeds to deep blue, I can allow my eyes to adjust again. The landscape remains unchanged.
I stand on a pile of worn books packed into an open train car. This train car is one of many. One of hundreds. In fact, it just stretches straight ahead from one horizon to the other. If this sun is like ours, that means that the train is heading due south. The noise is almost unbearable. The grinding and shrieking of metal are never ending as the entire rusty streak of train cars barrels through this grey wasteland. Not even a shrub or outcrop in either direction. I can't even see the tracks below with all the dust being kicked up. It's either dust or ash. I can't tell which.
When the Foundation assigned us to investigate, they sent us through the front engine which was stationary. It was sitting in a muddied mire in some humid southern swampland and with only eight corroded cars attached to it. I felt like I needed a tetanus shot just from looking at it. There were six of us then. A security team of five and a lady from research and acquisitions. There was a small home nearby. The entire family gone missing in one night. But we are not here to retrieve bodies.
We thought we'd be eaten alive by mosquitoes, but as we got closer to the site they backed off. It was dead quiet with hardly anything living around the parked train. We went through the front just fine. There were no components on the damn engine, just a hollow shell. Hell, if I knew how it got there. Looks as though it was stripped for parts. Next was a train car of rotted timbers, some of which appeared to be oozing some kind of sickly sap. More of a pus. Then a passenger car.
I remember one of the security agents getting jumpy and shooting one of the passengers right in the face when it turned to look at him. We all froze waiting for a reaction, but nothing. Looked like he shot a mummified man sitting in his seat with clothes too decomposed to tell what they were. Tattered black rags across his withered frame, shrink wrapped in a crispy grey skin, but it had a moldy briefcase with rusty latches in its lap. There were several others sitting in seats spread out all over the train car.
“Commuters?” One of the members mumbled. It looked back at him with hollowed eyes and a furrowed expression like it just had its day ruined. Then picked up the case and tossed it at our feet. I finally broke the silence after a full minute.
“Pick it up and take it back to the rally point.” I ordered to the agent in the back.
He was relieved to do so and hustled back through the engine to get out. I was glad he was able to get off when he did because that's when we felt the whole train move forward. It was such a jolt that we all came crashing down like dominos right in the aisle. When we stood back up, we could see that we were somewhere else entirely. That was yesterday. Well… yesterday in train time. Not regular time. Regular time it's been like… 2 maybe 3 days. I'm not real sure.
Sun is getting brighter. It's blinding. Takes up half of the sky and is as bright as a flare. Now that I can actually see, I look at the books in the pile I've been laying on. All bound in a sort of stained burlap cloth. Each one with the same title but I can't read it. Whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. The inside is… well I can't make sense of the language or the characters either. Cyrillic or maybe Hindi? Characters I'm just not familiar with at all. They seem to change when I glance back at them. Something anti-memetic likely. I close it up and find a place in my vest to store it. I hear Michelle as she starts coughing. She's not getting better. Not since she fell into that open tanker car filled with only God knows what.
“You're awake. Feel any better?” I ask loudly. I have to shout over the noise.
“Not hardly. I can move though.” She gets up on wobbly legs. “Can you see the engine?”
“No.” I squint hard down the endless cars through the wind. “It's not there. At least I can't see it. I can still see a little black smoke ahead but that's all.” I remove the radio from my hip and key it up.
[ZETA FIVE, THIS IS ZETA ONE. WE HAVE DAYLIGHT AND ARE GOING TO CONTINUE TOWARDS EXTRACTION. YOU COPY?]
[-STATIC-COPY- STATIC-YE-STATIC-JUST HA-STATIC-]
[THIS IS ZETA ONE. WE ARE UNABLE TO HEAR YOU. IF YOU CAN HEAR US, WE ARE MOVING SOUTH. I STILL HAVE BLUE ASSET WITH ME.]
[-STATIC-STA-STATIC-FOLLOW-STATIC-TRY T-STATIC-]
“Why do you still use that thing?” Michelle grabs her laptop case and clamors up on top of the pile. Her raspy voice is getting more noticeable.
“Because it's smart to. We keep talking. We keep communicating.”
“But you can't understand each other.”
“That doesn't mean they can't hear us. C'mon, we have daylight to burn. There has to be at least a hundred cars to the horizon. You going to carry that thing all the way back?”
She tucks the case under her arm. “It's recording everything. We can't just-“ Michelle stops and coughs into her sleeve. It's that same black stuff as yesterday. We both look at each other concerned, but there was no time to dwell on it. Over the pile of books and into the next train car. All these train cars are unique in their own right. Some more memorable than others. We are able to pass over the tops of forty rusty cars in the long morning. It's best to travel on top rather than through if we can, but we are exhausted. I thought the long night would help us rest, but I feel just as tired as I did yesterday.
There is one car coming up with no roof. I motion to Michelle that we have to hop down. She nods. Her sleeves are stained black with her coughing. No point in keeping it hidden now. Instead I turn my attention to the jump up ahead. I can't see inside for some reason. Even with the huge sun overhead, the shadows are too deep. It'll be a blind jump. We'll go together. I grab her hand and we look at one another for a moment. We're the last two. We jump.
We fall and pass through the dust and shadows. There is a weightlessness to the space inside the car. Michelle and I hold onto one another as I try and paddle forward. I can feel the sides of the train car as I pull along. Can't feel the floor though. Finally, I can touch the other side. There's a ladder. I grab hold of the first rung and pull. It's slow going but I can make progress. Michelle feels like dead weight at this point. But I keep pulling. Finally, we break through the shadow stuff and I take a full breath of air. Was I not breathing before? I pull up Michelle, but I can feel her grip has loosened. I pull harder. An arm surfaces. Then the top of her head. But suddenly she lets go. Her hand opens up and she pulls away from me. Something is slippery across her skin. I can't.
Another sixty cars later and the sun has crossed over towards the other side. I carry Michelle's equipment with me. She's gone. I still can't see the engine. Just a straight path towards the horizon. I think about jumping off. I think about what happened to my second in command, Zeta-Two, when he fell. Disappearing into the dusty clouds churned up by the screeching wheels. Nobody could see the body. I think about what else is ahead. Animal transport cars filled with bloated stocks of twitching tumors. Flatbeds with burning cars chained down. Tankers of sloshing effluence with a smell that lingers on my tongue instead of my nose. This is an endurance in hell.
I've been at this for hours, a full day probably. A train day. Much longer than the hundred cars I wanted to accomplish. I can still see the plume of black smoke in the distance. Doesn't look any smaller or larger than it did earlier. With the sun is almost touching the other side of the world, I key up the radio.
[ZETA-ONE. LIGHT IS GOING TO BE GONE IN A BIT. IM GOING TO FIND A CAR TO STOP AT. I THINK I CROSSED TWO HUNDRED… MAYBE THREE HUNDRED TOTAL FOR THIS CYCLE.]
[STATIC]
[LOST BLUE ASSET. JUST ME NOW. I HAVE HER EQUIPMENT… IF THAT'S WORTH ANYTHING.]
[STATIC]
I go to key up one last time. But I have nothing left to say. This is probably day 4 for me. Or is it 5? I should be thirsty. I should be almost dying of thirst in fact. But I feel nothing. I feel empty. But I can still keep moving. Just a few more cars for the day. Really, I'm just scouting for a place to hunker down when the sun is gone. It's too dark to move at night. I come across a passenger car with an open vent. As I hop down, I nearly fall through the wooden floor. My foot breaks through but I'm able to pull it free. All I see is dust and the spinning axel holding the train car up. The glass windows are all shattered on the inside. The seats are ripped and moldy. I doubt anyone is going to ask to see my tickets.
I sit down right as the sun falls over the edge. I feel the book in my vest. I open to try and look at it again. It's starting to make more sense. Looks clearer than before. I can make out a few sentences.
In the land of ash
An old rusty wyrm slithers
And hungry head glares
~
Dreamers all aboard
Take a seat when the maw shuts
Dreamers all aboard
I've lost track of time. I've only been here since yesterday. Regular time… I think. Streaks of orange light shift to purple, then deep blue just before the sky is swallowed in black. The light is almost out now. I'm so tired. I can wait here. I can rest here. Maybe even sleep. I key the radio up one last time before it goes completely black in the car. Static. But there is also something faint behind the noise.
I press my ear into the radio…
…I can barely hear it…
…a train whistle

Watch Your Step, by ManyMeats

Happy Birthday, Gears! No need to count your candles but do enjoy the light they bring.

Dad had a keen mind and a sharp eye. He was a civil engineer and a damn good one from what other professionals told me, for whatever that's worth. He liked to talk about really small details and he would get this look of fascination and wonder on his face as if it were every bit as interesting as the most salacious political drama. "Stairs," he would say with this knowing grin. "The slightest error in the angle of stairs can make for an awful bumpy ride." Weird, right? Who talks about stairs? Every day, hundreds of millions of people the world over take a ramp up or down, climb the stairs, go up and down ladders…
The spacing, the angle of the pitch, the pitch line between treads…all of it adds up to a deceptively simple formula. He could look at a flight of stairs and and point out if the angle was off with barely a glance and I just found it infinitely fascinating in the way only the curious mind of a youngster can. I had to test it, of course, every time he told me one wasn't right. I had to see just how "Weird" changing the numbers could make it.
He would smile and I would giggle as it dawned on me, every single time, that he right. As I got older and learned about confirmation bias I suspected he was just running a game on me. I would continue to call him out when he mentioned them, proudly bounding up the steps unbothered. He'd still smile at my determination.
As I got into high school, his smile became weaker and he pointed out stairs less and less often. He would say things like "Those stairs aren't right" instead of the passion he used to speak with. Maybe he was just getting old and tired; 35 years in the same field will do that to a person. But in between the crow's feet and early wrinkles on his face I felt as if I saw something more.
I picked up a lot of my dad's habits. I was my father's son.
I went to college for engineering; had always excelled at mathmatics and related fields so it was a natural fit. Dad was proud of me, happy even, that I was going to his alma mater. I was getting pretty good at pointing out 'wrong' stairs too and would gleefully work through the mental judgment as I roamed the campus.
One late night, deep in the throes of midterm study, I took a walk through the halls to get out of my books, get some water, clear my head. A stairwell I had sworn I had walked past a hundred times looked…wrong. The angle off by more than enough for me to notice, the treads inconsistent in their depth from step to step. Really wrong in a way that a simple error of math cannot explain. I was fixated, glued to that spot befuddled by the stairs for what felt like hours. By the time I snapped out of it, my hand was on the railing and I was already four or five steps up the flight. I shook my head, let go of the railing, and went back down the steps. The stairwell seemed to groan and…I could swear it was stretching on before me and behind me. Farther than it had any right to in that space.
I rationalized away that I was too tired. I went home. Such thoughts were the only way I could sleep.
The next morning, after breakfast, I called mom and dad and told them about my midterms and laughed I was studying so hard that I was hallucinating. They asked what I was seeing, jokes were cracked, and I thought we moved on. Mom wanted me to see an optomitrist, but I was certain I'd be fine after another night's good sleep and a hot meal.
Dad called me back about an hour later. No mom on the phone.
"Son…" He interrupted my hello.
"If…" I could hear the hesitance in his voice. Something he had no desire to ever tell me hung in his throat. Was everything fine at home? Was he well? My heart pumped with adrenaline and my body tensed with fear at all the dark places it could race to without his help. "If the stairs are wrong, just walk away. Take the elevator, wait, I don't care what. Just…walk away."
His voice was so flat and firm. Concern bubbled beneath an almost hostile contempt for something. Not me, but something bigger than he was letting on.
"Dad, you gotta give me something here. What's going on?" My voice quivered as I tried to sit down and remember how to breathe.
"Just promise me that you'll walk away. Just walk away. Okay?"
There was a minute of tense silence. "Okay, dad. I promise."
His voice was barely a whisper as he thanked me and hung up.
I thought back to that conversation a lot throughout the semester. From time to time I saw stairs again. Different sets in different places, older and more worn than the buildings they were in. Decrepit and decayed processions up and down into spaces that almost seemed alien.
A janitor's closet cracked open. Stairs.
A stall in a men's bathroom at the field house. Stairs.
An outdoor parking lot. Stairs.
Of course, no one else was ever around when this happened.
I'm supposed to walk for graduation in a little bit more than a week but whether or not I get handed a diploma at the end requires me to pass these final exams. I've been burning the candle at both ends, so to speak. Lots of late nights in weird old buildings. Buildings with stairs that just aren't right.
It was late here in the physics library. All the TAs had gone and I was the last student standing. If there was a janitor lurking in the building, I hadn't seen them in hours either. I packed up my stuff and headed for the stairs; the library was only on the third floor so I didn't mind a few steps. And like my father before me, I could instantly tell the moment I looked at the first tread. I don't know how else to explain it. It was wrong.
Everything else in my life oh physics and math and rules and order was simple to explain, even if in the context of mistakes. Converting between measurements wrong, a simple mistake in the builders marking the wrong spot, or using a different riser material than they were supposed to. There were a thousand reasons why a staircase could be wrong but these stairs…these fucking stairs were none of them.
I backed up slowly and rerouted myself to the elevator at the end of the hall.
"OUT OF ORDER. MAINTENANCE." Initialed by some guy from facilities and dated last week.
I was being silly, right? This was dumb of me. Irrational, even. I went back to the stairs and my throat got tight in defiance of my logic. I looked down the stairs and into the darkness with only the faint red glow of the 'EXIT' sign providing any light at all. The entire stairwell seemed to darknen even further in the short while I looked for another route. Shouldn't there have been emergency exit stairs? I swear there was another exit. Some other option besides what lay before me and jumping out of a window.
A tremor getting the better of me, I put my hand on the railing and took the first step down. Instantly my knee wobbled and almost gave out but I was able to lock the other and remain upright. Another step further down, then another, almost tripping more worse with each step more wrong than the last until I fell face first onto the landing.
I looked up, the soft orange-red of the EXIT sign above me.
I rise to my feet and look down the next flight of stairs but instead of seeing the second floor, all that awaits me is three more steps into a black oblivion. The hair on the back of my neck and on my arms stands up, the primal centers of fear and self-preservation firing in a way no student should ever have to consider.
There, in the darkness. I saw something move.
The outline, no, the shape of a person. Their form catching what faint light there was, moving left to right with inhuman speed. They made no sound.
Somewhere beyond them I heard a…sort of toggle. Like a circuit breaker being flipped on as a conical ceiling light blinked to life. There, about 50 feet away, a matte gray fire door with EXIT above the frame.
"H-h-h-hel…" I couldn't even finish the word for what little air puffed over my lips.
I saw the outline again, a shape in the darkness, and my body disobeyed all logic I might have once been able to muster. My knees gave out as I collapsed backward onto my ass and slide backwardagainst the cinderblock of the wall. I practically crawled to the side groping for the stairs upward like some wounded animal trying to get away and in that moment I truly was nothing more than that. I ran. The impossible angles of the stairs stretching and shifting and creaking and faltering to both meet and retreat from my step at the same time. Ten steps, then twenty, then fifty. With each one I took, stumbling over myself, another 5 seemed to groan out from the darkness and fill in the space. Seconds turned to minutes, the adrenaline in my veins making every muscle that would respond burn with the fires of survival.
Just as my legs and arms were spent from skitter up the steps, I lurched forward onto the landing expelled from the darkness. I lay there, chest heaving, unable to even lift my head to look back at the stairs.
Then I pulled myself up onto my ass and slumped against the wall, still panting as if I might burst. It was all quiet. Nothing stirred and I was near the library I had been studying in, where this all started. Dad said I could just wait them out, so I would. Pulled myself inside to a desk and started to wait.
My watch turned over 3am, 4am. I fell asleep somewhere around there.
I woke up, my watch showing almost 8am but it was still dark. Then 9am, 10am…Nobody is coming, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty. My knuckles turn white as I clench my backpack and resolve to go hunting for those emergency exit stairs again. There must be another way.
There, around the corner! I can't believe I missed those before, put myself through all of this because I couldn't find a big red and white sign.
I push the fire escape door open.
The faint orange-red glow of an EXIT sign to my left, stairs going up and stairs going down to my right.
They look wrong.

The Tower Heart, by minmin

Happy birthday!

Content Warning: Suicide
This is, as it always is, someone else's story. We were assigned to the same group for a presentation in college on microhistories at some point, which turned into sharing our own separate histories of how we had gotten to where we are, and the trajectories of our respective lives. That was how I learned he served in the same unit I did half a year after I'd been posted out. For those of you who know, you know; for the remaining readers it suffices to note that we had both been deployed as military security for the same key installation, namely a complex of several petrochemical plants located by the coast. It's a hellish place, more so at night than at day; the factory workers and most of the other guards do go home, but the lights never really turn off, so you're constantly surrounded by dead silence and the burning glow of gas flares and service lights and the churn of unmanned machinery and kilometres of raw concrete. We both worked the guard towers, immense concrete structures five stories tall with a tiny ring of space at the top to fit whichever poor saps were on duty at the time. There are a few of them every kilometre or so lining the coast, massive monolithic things that look like a cross between an air traffic control tower and a tombstone. On the night shift up there that's twelve hours in silence staring at the sea through a narrow slit. They're real quiet too, because the walls are so thick. You could sleep there if you knew how. This story is from that place and time.
My new friend gets to telling me all of this, and his story takes a dark turn, as army stories tend to do. People think strange things when they're alone, especially when they're eighteen and friendless and trapped in a system of conscription they never consented to in the first place. There was university or the working world waiting for us outside, but from within, it seems like an awful long time. Two years is enough time to develop all kinds of awful thoughts. So my friend, around the fourth month of his deployment, still friendless, jobless, and shit out of luck for higher education (his first attempts at applying had all been rejected), he starts to think of death. Hard not to, with all the drills we'd been put through to shoot on sight, aim centre mass, etc. He starts to think to himself what it might feel like on the other end of the barrel. He even starts to consider the logistics of it: when and where, and how to get away with it. His thoughts, then, bring him to the tower.
There were stories of people killing themselves on duty. Kids with live rounds, left to themselves for twelve hours straight, who knows what can happen, right? Guard duties now ran on a buddy system and had regular vehicular patrols woven in to spice up the monotony; really, just makework to keep idle hands from the inevitable. My friend, here, he'd figured out the stupidly obvious way to bypass that. He'd do it in the tower in the dead of night, when everyone else was asleep, with his helmet on to make sure his brain pan caught the most of the frangible rounds. My palms get real sweaty hearing about this. I think he notices, because he assures me that despite everything he's about to say that he's completely fine now. But what I'm telling you now — the scary part listening to him was, when he tells me this, tells me in full detail how he'd do the deed, I find myself understanding completely, like I'd known this all along.
My friend smiles. “Everyone listening to this story tenses up at this part. I think it goes really well with what comes next.”
The tower, you see, is made of solid concrete. So are the steps leading from the top to the bottom of the tower. The first night after he'd booked in from a particularly fucked-up family incident — he declines to tell me what — he's all alone, and awake, and everyone else is snoring around him, he decides to do it. He's already envisioned the place he'd do it: at the bottom of the stairs, under the first flight where they stored the fire extinguisher and some jerry cans and extra metal stools, someplace where no one would hear his footsteps, and where they'd only hear the sound of him cocking his rifle only when it'd be too late. He recites this to me with total clarity yet absolute distance — which is exactly how I would have imagined it — as if an external force had taken over his body and reasoning, and came to a clear and lucid conclusion about how it would all end. He got as far as the third flight of stairs, loaded magazine and all, when he sensed something that made him freeze, at which he's still at a loss for words to describe.
To the best of my paraphrasing ability, this is what he perceived. That there was an immense presence in the air all around him, stilling his every muscle such that he could not and would not take another step. A year later his imam, to whom he first related this story to, described this as the miraculous hand of Allah. But there was nothing miraculous about it. The terror he felt came from somewhere deeper in his nervous system, beneath even the lucid, machinistic thoughts of death that had driven him there; beneath even, indeed, his conscious thought itself. There was a lurid sensation coursing through his system which conveyed to his every fibre that he was not to die here. His therapist in college had called it a moment of clarity beyond clarity in which he rediscovered his will to live. But he insisted to me that it was different from that, and that only someone who had served in the tower would understand.
I nodded along, not wanting to contradict him. A memory resurfaced of me pausing mid-flight down the concrete stairs, and the image of the bottom of the stairs magnified itself until it overtook every single thought in my mind. The dark space between the bottommost flight and the concrete floor was at once so familiar I swear I could feel the sandy coolness of the concrete surface beneath my touch, taste the rotten coastal air between my teeth. The rifle felt as familiar in my grip as the weight of a loved one's arm. I felt the stippled plastic in my clammy grip. I dimly wondered if any of this had ever happened to me, or if I was instead alone telling this story to myself, hoping to uncover through imagined dialogue a truth I could barely begin to understand. I visualised, with excruciating clarity, the 5.56mm round entering the roof of my mouth at a forty-five degree angle to splinter through my brain stem, the tip fragmenting at the roof of my helmet, before ricocheting cleanly around to perforate whatever was left of my conscious self into biological mush. All this while my friend was looking at me, while I was gripping the seat of my armchair in that student lounge so tight I swear I could hear the pleather split.
This is the part that's most difficult to relate to others, as it involves a series of thought processes so clear and alien that I doubt if they were truly my own. For the story my friend was relating had paused then and there in the middle of the steps, surrounded by five stories of concrete and indeterminable quiet in an island of burning fuel and crypt-like air, and it had become our story in the pausing. Sometimes I think I'm still there telling it. When the notion entered my friend's head that he was not to die here it did not come through cleanly as an affirmation of his autonomous worth. Instead, it took on the tenor of a warning. He had not been paralysed with clarity. He had been paralysed with fear.
“You know it too,” he says. “It's not happened to you, but you know it. This exact same feeling has happened to everyone from the unit I've told this to.”
He lived. Whatever feeling had possessed him faded quickly enough for him to make his way back up to his post without anybody noticing. Nobody noticed him slip the loaded magazine from his rifle into his magazine pocket. He remained in that position until it was time for shift change, the adrenaline racing through his veins making him more alert than he'd ever been in his life. Conversely, then, did my feeling of terror fade as I was listening to him, but I couldn't shake the memory that I had been there in the tower before, standing where he stood, contemplating in his shoes the manner of his own death. I couldn't shake the notion that something terrible had happened in that moment of suspended time, or that some psychic connection had made it known that others had come to the same decision that we had, and made the same choice, or that something else entirely had prevented each of us from meeting our deaths in that tower — a silence, perhaps, lying halfway in the space of the stairwell between stone and sea, symbolising the greatest solitude of all, and whose dreamless sleep we had taken the greatest of care to leave undisturbed.

Siren Song, by PlaguePJP

Happy birthday Gears! To many more 🥂

As a teenager, I spent a lot of my summers in New Jersey with my family. We had a shore house a few blocks off the beach. It was pretty nice — I had my own room and enough space to hold the insane amount of clothes my mom thought I needed for two weeks. I had a few friends who went to the shore within the same timeframe I did. We normally spent all day together shooting the shit while we got sunburnt. Nights were less structured, we might go to each other's house to watch a movie, sit and talk some more, or have a few drinks.
There were always a few nights a year where kids throughout the neighborhood and beyond would head to one of the beaches and throw a party. These were pretty short — the cops would kick us off within an hour or two — but they were always fun. It was 2016 when I started hearing whispers that kids were going missing. It was your standard ghost story bullshit: someone vanishes into thin air without a trace, or there are animal footprints from when they were last seen. You know the deal. What was real though, was when we found a body on the shore.
It was about 70 kids this night, one had brought a speaker and we were all crowded around it as it spouted whatever song we decided was good that month. I was jumping around with a mixed bag of kids I didn't know as my one friend went off with a girl and the other was fruitlessly attempting to do the same. This one drunk kid I knew from the neighborhood, Julian, ran over to me saying he found something at the lip of the ocean. Then someone screamed, alerting the rest of the party, and we collectively made our way over.
Half the naked corpse was exposed — the rest was buried under sediment and sand as if it had been beached. There's no real way for me to put this without being frank, the corpse was of the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. She was otherwordly, in a unique yet familiar type of way, as if I knew everything and nothing about her the second I laid eyes upon her. The tide had gone out far, so the corpse had been dry for a time. Her hair was strung out like a spiderweb across the sand and her skin was cracked, despite there being no signs of sunburn. None of us really knew what to do. When people are experiencing something shocking or traumatic, they seem to freeze and wait for someone to do something. One kid called the police before another claimed we should dig her out to look for injuries. I said that wasn't a smart idea but was outnumbered.
As a few boys started shoveling sand away from her legs, a shiny layer of skin was revealed. It was hard and rough, like sharkskin, but iridescent. They kept pulling sand away from the body until her lower half was completely revealed. The smell of rotting fish filled our nostrils as her tail was fully revealed. A mermaid. A dead fucking mermaid in the middle of New Jersey. A bunch of kids started taking pictures and videos until one of them spilled a drink on the body.
It started moving.
I told a group to grab the remaining solo cups and get some seawater to toss on her. Her skin started healing and her tail began to flop on the dry sand. Another boy said we should pick her up and bring her back in the water. About seven of his friends listened and started half-dragging the body into the water like those beached shark videos you'll see from time to time. The body was fully submerged after a bit of difficulty. The eight kids were standing in about ankle-deep water, waiting around for whatever they thought would happen.
There was a slight wake in the water as if it was boiling. Suddenly, there was a bloodcurdling, melodic screech from the ocean. It was blinding in a way. Everyone turned away from the source of the sound as if that would soothe our ears.
It felt like an eternity before the scream ceased. When it did, it took a few seconds before we mustered the courage to open our eyes and turn around. When we did, the eight kids who stayed in the ocean were gone. The only trace of them was one of their hats and a few loose flip-flops. No one knew what happened to them; the police who showed up wouldn't believe a group of drunk teenagers that they saw a mermaid, despite the videos and pictures we took. Missing person reports were filed, but nothing ever came of them.
I wrote this about seven years later because I finally decided to head back to the spot after vowing to never go set foot there. I sat there on the cold damp sand, and in my solitude, I contemplated whether what I saw was even real. I's almost convinced myself it was a fabrication, until I heard the faint screech a few miles into the water, this time joined by eight unique voices.

I Don't Love You, by Rigen

But we do love YOU, Gears. Happy Birthday, Gears, wish you all the best.

Were I could choose what I wish to be born as, I wonder what I would have chosen?
Devoid of knowledge, would I have chosen to be born as a brilliant star amidst tumultuous stellar nebula? Would I have chosen a mindless existence of unicellular yeast, living for mere hours in energetic paradise before cooked into one's meal? Would I have chosen an extremophile, drunk in fiery existence of undersea vent or bedrock cracks? Would I have chosen a languid life of redwoods or baobabs, simply living and growing upon the slow eons?
Devoid of prejudice, would I have valued the strength of a lion? The sight of an eagle? The speed of a peregrine? Would I have valued a nightingale's song? A cockroach's resilience? A lobster's longevity? A jellyfish's simplicity?
Devoid of foresight, would I have regretted not being able to play piano? Would I have regretted being unable to read? Being unable to write? Unable to draw? Would I have regretted not choosing human?
Would anything be worse than being with you?

Welcome Home, by RockTeethMothEyes

Happy Birthday, Gears. Thank you for everything you've done for us.

The body of the human-like intruder laid on the tiled floor of my kitchen. I first hit it with my baseball bat because it was my understanding that I'd be the only one home today. I then hit it four more times because I had no understanding what something like that could have been. I struck it twice more when it tried to crawl away, afraid that I'd still be in deep shit if someone else saw what I had done.
Looking down at the soft pink body, I thought about how I could easily earn the sympathy of someone else. "I would have done the same thing!" No shame to be had here. But it was definitely dead, and it was definitely my fault. I ran through what the next steps could have been.
It was time to clean up the mess I had made of another living creature.
I looked under the kitchen sink and found a box of disposable gloves. Only two left. All I needed. I slipped them on. I grabbed a trash bag and re-addressed the creature. I looked at its arms, long thin things with chipped nails on each hand from its attempt at escape. I looked at its head, or whatever was left attached. I looked at its other limbs. I didn't know if they could be called legs, before or after the slaughter.
It wasn't all going to fit into one trash bag.
I spent an hour maiming the corpse, condensing it into easy-to-fit pieces; I hacked away at it with old tools dad left in the garage. Each strike was accompanied by mental preparation that eventually came into a mantra. "Hard day at work? I cleaned the kitchen. Of course I didn't have anyone over." Again. Again. Rehearsal.
Four trash bags, each filled with the body of a creature I never recognized. And now what? Bury it? This neighborhood wouldn't lose the chance to gossip about that. Burn it? It smelled bad enough dead, and someone would surely call the police. Hide it? Nowhere in the house was safe.
… nowhere in the house. But there was the second car.
I found the keys and heaved the bags into the garage. Fluid was starting to pool at the bottom of each bag, so I lifted them each to avoid causing a tear and a new mess to clean. I popped open the trunk, fit the evidence snugly inside, and closed it. I retreated back to the kitchen to finish cleaning, the process of which took nearly three hours.
Soon after, mom came home.
"Hard day at work?" I said, just like I practiced.
Mom smiled, clearly tired. "Not as hard as it could have been. How was your day?"
"I cleaned the kitchen. Nothing else new."
"Just you all day?"
"Of course. I didn't have anyone else over."
"Oh? Where's your father?"

Logic Bomb, by Rounderhouse

Happy birthday once more, big man! Site's had some rough patches, but your stewardship of it remains a shining example - here's to many more Gears Days!

Five senses make up the input that goes into the human mind. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound - everything that exists around them falls into one of these categories, or as far as they are concerned, it doesn't exist. Of course, senses are only the data that go into formulating the human perception of reality. The mind processes this data to achieve a conclusion and act upon it.
This is where things get messy.
Brains are, at the end of it, supremely complex input/output machines. Sensory input goes in - conclusions about the world come out. The input is run against a lifetime's worth of "rules" - determinant statements - a complex algorithm derived from other conclusions and those conclusions' conclusions and so on and so forth. It is ever-adapting and all-encompassing. The rare scenarios where it fails at these are, respectively, learning and insanity.
But the machine is not immortal. Over time, it deteriorates - input is wrong, and this leads to exponentially inaccurate conclusions. As mentioned, it is subject to insanity, brought on by the realization that something is utterly beyond the capacity for human conception - it defies understanding by means of its very existence. These are natural faults of the human mind - they are caused by itself.
Artificial faults are far more interesting - viral input. A clarification - they are not just detrimental sensory input. Detrimental sensory input is nails on a chalkboard, the odor of decomposition, the acrid taste of cyanide. These are much worse than that. They camouflage themselves as sensory input - just another of the countless things you can hear, touch, taste, smell, and see. This is a lie - they are no more true sensory input than a chameleon is the branch it sits on. But the chameleon uses this to hide from predators. Artificial faults are the predator - they are invasive and transformative to the mode of thinking.
For this reason, they are called cognitohazards. Hazardous to thought. Let us return to the idea of the mind as a machine - a bundle of input, like any other, comes in one day. A poster on the wall that is slightly too red. The sound of a plane that is too close. The smell of your wife's perfume, but off. It is processed, and conclusions are drawn. But something is wrong.
This color is red.
It happens too fast to even notice in the moment - a simple, utterly banal but fundamental rule that the rest of our world sits on is changed. That gear has been warped - it is functional, but it throws off the entire apparatus. By itself, it is too minor to notice. But there is now a crack in the machine.
The mind continues unabated. It gets no breaks. But as it takes on more thoughts, more pressure, the crack widens. Expands. The remnants of the thought remain, and they spread to more gears, more rules. They warp, in turn.
This is a stranger, not your wife.
The failures build on each other.
This gun doesn't hurt people.
Eventually, something breaks inside.
This feeling is pleasure.
Something goes too far, and the mind realizes it can no longer trust itself. That an object, a viral factor, something it merely saw for just a second five months ago has fundamentally broken its understanding of the universe and its subjects. The human experience is fed by both its senses and the mind's logic for decoding them. When both of these factors fail, there is only one logical conclusion remaining: that the rules it has built over a lifetime no longer matter. Nothing can be trusted. Nothing is real.
This is madness.

Who?, by Tanhony

Hey Gears, happy birthday! Hope you're doing well -- and hope you're enjoying the stories we've come out with this year. That's probably going to come to an end with mine, but I hope you like the rest of them! All the best.

"I guess I wasn't thinking much about it," he said, putting his hands down on the table in front of him. "I mean — given the circumstances, I was grateful to receive it, but it wasn't like the highlight of my year or anything. Just a little bright spot if anything."
"Right," I say. "That's understandable."
"The story they'd given me was…" he sighs before trying again, rubbing a loose hand over his eye. "I don't know what to call it. Less a story, more a dialogue — very vague, um, only one of them was really doing any talking at all. Sorry, is this too much detail?"
"No, no," I quietly copy his words down into my notebook. "Please, go on. For the sake of communication, let's call the thing you read a 'story'. What happened in it?"
He nods. "Well, it starts off very casual — small talk, sort of a recap, then one of the speakers starts describing this creature he's recently found out about."
I chuckle. "What, like some kind of creepypasta monster?"
His own laugh isn't quite as genuine, tinged with worry. "I guess kind of. I mean, it seemed a little more real than that. I don't know if real would be the right word, but — describing it here and now, it'd probably sound silly."
"Silly how?"
"It was like a human, sort of a humanoid shape like you and me, but with all the skin gone, just this wet — just this wet red all over it, dripping. Dripping."
"That doesn't sound very silly to me." I bite the end of my pen, leaving deep indents.
He chuckles a little more genuinely. "Well, I suppose once you've seen a bunch of that stuff, you… anyway, the thing — the gimmick about the thing was that it was a bodysnatcher. Like — have you ever seen the actual movie? Invasion of the Bodysnatchers?"
"I can't say that I have."
"In essence, it replaces people. It looks like a person, acts like a person, but it isn't — isn't a person. Not at all. The Thing's another one like that — the John Carpenter version, I haven't seen the original. It was a little different, though, the way this creature was described to do it."
"How so?"
"It's a skinless thing, I said that, right? Just this big wide grin among a sea of red. So if it wants to pretend to be someone else, it has to find itself some skin. Just peel it off a person and wear it around. Like a Halloween costume."
"And this description disturbed you?"
He nods, pale. "I read that and I knew — I just knew — that this thing was gonna get me. And once it had gotten me, it was gonna get him."
I raise an eyebrow. "Him? Who do you mean?"
"Why? Why…"
He smiles, and his lips — along with most of his face — roll back to show off the enormity of his toothy grin. There's a tearing sound as his skin peels off the muscle beneath — and he turns around to look in that person's direction.
I, of course, follow suit, grinning all the same.
"…the guy reading this, of course!"