Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever

by Phoenix Sullivan

  Edited by Phoenix Sullivan

  Dare To Dream Press

  (In Conjunction With Steel Magnolia Press)

  Echoes of yesterday touch the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary ways in these provocative stories by some of the best up-and-coming authors of mainstream and speculative fiction around the world.

  Anthology copyright 2011 by Phoenix Sullivan.

  Except where noted, all stories originally copyrighted by their respective owners.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without the written permission of the editor and/or respective author(s), except where permitted by law.

  Table of Contents

  TODAY

  Echoes of yesterday touch the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary ways in these provocative mainstream stories

  Last Seen

  by Amanda le Bas de Plumetot

  Past Survivors

  by Sarah Adams

  Footprints on the Beach

  by Aleksandar Žiljak

  The Restoration Man

  by Simon John Cox

  A Dark Forest

  by Jen White

  My Own Secret Dinosaur

  by Jo Antareau

  The Language of Ice

  by David North-Martino

  TWEEN TIMES

  Mythic tales and near-future accounts that could have been and could easily still be

  Twilight Of The Claw

  by Adam Dunsby

  The Angel Genome

  by Chrystalla Thoma

  TOMORROW

  Speculative fiction that reminds us of our impending mortality and our immortal aspirations

  In Ring

  by Scott Thomas Smith

  Bones Of Mars

  by D Jason Cooper

  Hunting The Mantis

  by Adam Knight

  Connect

  by Kenneth Burstall

  Indigo’s Gambit

  by Adam Israel

  Blood Fruit

  by Shona Snowden

  TRANSCENDING

  Because humor lurks even in our darkest hours

  A Thorny Dilemma

  by Rory Steves

  Invoice H10901: 3 Wooly Mammoths

  by Robert J. Sullivan

  Distractions

  by Peter Dudley

  TODAY

  Echoes of yesterday touch the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary ways in these provocative mainstream stories

  Jase was her ghost in the machine — a shaded memory captured in synthesized pixels. The ghost of her past — near enough to see, too distant to touch. But could they still, somehow, connect?

  LAST SEEN

  by Amanda le Bas de Plumetot

  The last thylacine was seen on YouTube. You find her between film clips of ghosts and a movie you uploaded a couple of years ago. You and Jase that summer. He turns toward the camera and grins at you. The sun is on him and he is ripe fruit. Peach. Mango. Perfectly preserved.

  Half dog, half kangaroo, the last thylacine paws at the bars of her enclosure: playful, happy. Ears forward, she rushes along the side of her cage, chasing something the zookeeper is holding; she sits back on her haunches, her long hind feet flat on the ground.

  The camera bites pieces of light from the thylacine. Your computer processes it, your screen converts it. Pixels shade her through variations beyond black or white, on or off, there or not there; she’s been trapped by silver, caught in greyscale limbo.

  You read that the IBM computer, Roadrunner, can sustain a petaFLOP of calculations in a second. The words are meaningless, made up. Does FLOP stand for something special? It sounds to you like the way you feel most days.

  The nights are too long and empty. You google Jase and discover 387 hits. You’re not sure if that’s many for someone who wasn’t really anyone. You follow each link and find him tagged on Facebook, mentioned in blogs, standing on that beach with you. You and him, there on the screen for everyone in the world to see. You wish they would. You are wearing a bikini and smiling at the camera. He’s beside you, tall and golden, his hand reaching round behind you, resting, where you loved to feel it, on the back of your neck. He is smiling at you. You will always remember the way you could see forever in his face, in that gaze.

  When you look at those pictures now, you know the eternity of that moment is simply a construct of light and shadow.

  The last thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo. Locked in a cage, she stared out through the lattice of wire to the distant warmth of the keeper’s house. Alone all the long nights, she paced, fretful, the unfamiliar sound of her nails clicking on cement. She was surrounded by the stink of bears, the roar of lions, the shit-hurling culture of monkeys, the press and flow of humans. The last thylacine was imprisoned between concrete floor and iron bars without even a kennel’s shelter.

  There was thunder the night she died, and rain. A springtime cold snap that followed days of merciless heat. Above the thylacine’s cage was a deciduous tree, still bare of leaves. She called through the night, her high-pitched yip yip yip torn away by the wind. You’ve heard that hypothermia causes the victim to feel paradoxically warm and you wonder if that’s what the thylacine felt as she died. You hope so. You hope she had a dying dream of forest and treefern, of other thylacines. Because the last thylacine’s final vision was strobe-lit by lightning: black and white. Vertical bars. Alone.

  At least you were there with Jase at the end. You held his hand and tried not to cry. It was wrong, the way you could feel his bones. He’d faded to shadows, black, grey, silver. He had no density, no weight. Even as you gripped his hand and tried to keep him with you, you could feel him fading. Black, grey, silver, gone.

  Ghosts stare out from mirrors all over the Internet.

  You read about thylacines on a cryptozoology website. A link leads you on to a website about the magical properties of silver. It takes a silver bullet to kill a werewolf; a silver crucifix will burn a vampire. Mirrors capture souls, trap them between glass and silver. You’ve heard there are cultures where they believe the camera steals their souls. Light carries the image, focuses it through glass and lens to be captured on a plate of silver nitrates. A moment of soul. You wonder if digital cameras have the same power, and then you learn that the circuits in them are made from silver.

  Every website is a combination of picture, opinion and fact. The trouble is, you can’t figure out which is which.

  Ghosts are the spirits of the deceased.

  Ghosts are an expression of psychic energy created by intense emotions.

  Ghosts are beings from another plane of existence.

  Ghosts are the symptom of a mental disorder.

  Ghosts are old myths designed to scare children.

  Ghosts are a means by which unethical predators can extract a living from gullible individuals.

  Calculation speeds increase exponentially. ExaFLOP computers arrive: reconstruct the human genome; broker peace in Africa, the Middle East, between India and Pakistan; solve the energy crisis. You make tea in your kitchen and wonder about the use of this. Wouldn’t it have been better if those wars had never started in the first place? Your personal set of genes remains unconsidered.

  You believe that the theories and explanations for the causes of cancer are as authentic as ghost pictures. Somewhere in the world there’s a doctor whose theory of cancer is the right one, but nobody knows whose. This means that somewhere on the Internet there’s a ghost video that’s real; you just can’t tell which one
it is. Maybe it’s the photo where the faces of dead sailors are caught in the wake of their ship; perhaps it’s orbs that can only be seen by cameras, caught as they float beside children and dogs and gravestones; or it could be those mysterious images staring from the windows of empty houses.

  Cancer is caused by poor diet.

  It’s the result of living in a polluted environment, an accumulation of toxins.

  It’s a lack of antioxidants, too much sun, the body’s inability to cope with stress.

  It all comes down to an unwise choice of genes before birth.

  Cancer is a condition of age; everyone who lives long enough is going to get it.

  In a second and a half of blurred, unsteady camerawork, an animal moves across a tiny YouTube insert. The caption is Mystery Creature — Thylacine?? and you wonder if this could be the one. If this could be the one image of a ghost — a real film of a live thylacine in colour –- or if it’s yet another theory of cancer. Meditation, a high-fibre diet, sun-screen before leaving the house.

  Comments on the YouTube page claim the animal is a lioness, a zebra dog, a wolf — a fake.

  Comments on the YouTube page say of course it's a thylacine: they were cloned years ago so the animal wouldn't go totally extinct.

  The Internet is a maze but you follow the clues, turning left at every junction. In 1866, a thylacine joey was preserved in a bottle. There’s a close-up photo of it, and it makes you think of a newborn puppy, so innocent. Paws tucked under its chin, soft fur around its muzzle and its nose just millimetres from air. Preserved in alcohol instead of formaldehyde, the joey still contains intact DNA and, for a little while, back just before the turn of the century, it did seem possible that it might be cloned. That every home could have its own newly un-extinct pet running around the backyard.

  There are all sorts of theories about thylacines. Four thousand sightings since that last one died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936. They were brought to the mainland, you read. A colony of them established in Gippsland. There are parts of the mainland where they never became extinct. A pocket of them in South Australia, still surviving.

  You wonder how people can believe such a thing in this day and age. There is no physical evidence of thylacines. No footprints or scat mark their passing; there are no middens of wallaby bones decorated in the scrimshaw of thylacine toothmarks. Nobody has found the remains of a thylacine deceased in the wild, or taken a potshot at one raiding the chookhouse. When every bushwalker, hiker, tourist and adventurer has a digital camera with a zoom lens and a mobile phone with at least a 2-mega-pixel camera, bluetooth and 3G roaming, and a personal page on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, the thylacine’s existence remains a grey area.

  ZettaFLOP computers construct themselves, reveal the secrets of the human brain, solve global warming. Their processors are cool and silent. Keyboards have been replaced by a thought-activated interface, the screen has been superseded by the self-actualising unit: 3D visuals, surround sound, haptic response. One of these days you’ll upgrade. Your enthusiasm for technology faded when it failed Jase.

  You photographed him all the time after the diagnosis. Moments of hope as he endured the treatment. The transience of normality: eating breakfast, resting on the sofa, playing with the dog. You took care to frame each shot, avoiding the bruises on his arms, hiding his new bald patches from view, adjusting light against the pale of his face. You were not stealing his soul, you were preserving it on a 4GB flashcard. It’s still inside the camera. You never uploaded those last images.

  Videos of ghosts collect in odd corners of the Internet. Orbs drift on unfelt winds, tiny white lights buzz in spirals like the sparkle in his eyes on that summer day. A door opens, a chair moves, a dog watches as curtains are slowly drawn. There is no apparent reason for the behaviour of ghosts. Cold spots and compass deviations have no connection. Ectoplasm has gone out of fashion; there is no residue of ghosts. You sometimes think there is a sensible, natural explanation for hauntings: odd sounds that are really rats in the walls, the ringing doorbell that just needs its battery replaced, faces that are random patterns resolved into lost loved ones by the yearning mind of the survivor. Haunted houses retain memories of past inhabitants only because the present inhabitants hold them there.

  You wish Jase would haunt you. You just want the evidence, to know that something has lasted beyond those final days of morphine nightmare. You know that he would come if he could. You wonder how much of his soul fills the nodes and connections of Internet computers. Thoughts of him pass between you and your new computer and he gazes at you from that summer. You wonder how many ghosts drift in and out of the self-actualising fields in empty rooms. It isn’t fair and you know it’s stupid, but you are angry at Jase for getting sick. You feel betrayed by his death. Why didn’t he stay? You wanted him to stay.

  Do thylacines run like dogs or leap with their kangaroo legs? Does the yip yip yip of their call echo through quiet cities uncommented on, not because it isn’t heard, but because no one actually remembers what a thylacine sounds like?

  Awkward, hand-held ghosts inhabit the dark corners of offices, trap themselves in spider webs, knock against the walls. Ambiguous images in light and shade fade from the windows of empty buildings, “Like” stuff on Facebook, place themselves in news updates.

  YottaFLOP computers appear spontaneously on every desktop in the world. You look up to find the new machine staring back at you.

  Constructed of light and silver, supported by a platform of belief in the fantastic, the thylacine turns from her cellulose railway and steps through the self-actualising field into your room, ears forward and yip yip yipping in excitement.

  There’s a collection of stationery that hasn’t been touched for months. The thylacine’s foot brushes it as she steps over and out the window. You watch in open-mouthed amazement as her black and taupe stripes blend with the light and shadow of life. There’s a stationery avalanche. Unopened letters and bills slide away to reveal your camera, battery now flat, memory card of Jase still there inside it.

  Your fingernail digs out the flashcard and flicks it onto the flat of your palm. You offer it to the computer.

  ~~~

  Amanda le Bas de Plumetot is an award-winning writer of poetry and short stories, and also a performance poet. She has been published in books, trains, websites, zines, school readers, collections, magazines and TV commercials. She is a graduate/survivor of Clarion South 2009 and is awestruck by the wonderful people she met there. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her kids have moved out, so she and her beloved hubby share the place with lots of pets. She likes cats, robots, movies, camembert and frankie magazine. She gets paid to sell movie tickets. She would like to be more organised when she grows up.

  Website: http://amandale.net

  Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/featherfour

  Michael didn’t understand her loss. Even she didn’t realize how deep it ran, until a saber-tooth cat helped to heal the past and point her toward a future she didn’t know she needed most.

  PAST SURVIVORS

  by Sarah Adams

  It’s odd to think LA might be one of the sacred places of the world. But here, in the dreaming hills that hem in the vast puddle of concrete that is the city, there is no clear past or future, only an eternal present. Pockets of time — past, present and future — overlap and spill into one another in the breathing silence that fills the canyons and valleys.

  It was the silence that drew me into the hills. I had hiked miles up a deer run, letting the rhythm of my feet wipe away everything else. Now, I sat in the shade of a sage bush, on a sunset-facing slope, asking the silence to hold me together. I held myself still — still enough almost to stop the blood in my veins. I trained my eyes on the sun, holding down the thought of my own blood trickling into the dusty earth, becoming part of the hills. The mountains breathed all around me. A lizard flashed across my foot. Knees drawn up to my chest, I tried to breathe with the hills, to be still like them.
<
br />   But a mule deer, flanks lathered in sweat, crashed across the ridge behind me. It landed on the trail, stumbled, and went to its knees. Its eyes rolled white in its head. Froth bubbled at its mouth. As the deer flailed to its feet, a massive cat, too big for a mountain lion, sailed straight over my head. It landed on the deer’s back, mouth already clamped on the animal’s neck, even as its weight sent them both crashing to the ground. They landed in a heap of flailing hooves and a sickening thump. The deer jerked, blood bubbling from its nostrils, but the cat’s impossibly long canines were buried in the deer’s jugular. The cat squeezed, holding shut the windpipe until the deer’s head hung limp.

  Our eyes met across the carcass.

  I, still as a sage bush, crouched on the ground with my knees up with my chin, arms wrapped around my shins. The cat, bloody-muzzled, panting, stood with one paw still on the deer’s windpipe. Later I would wonder why I felt no fear, not even a dim, intellectual awareness that I should have been afraid. But I felt only the quiet of the hills pressing down around the sharp beat of my own heart.

  Massive, angular shoulders tapered back to narrow hips. Dusty brown ripples ran over deeper golden shades, almost a broken tabby pattern, darker over the head and shoulders, shading into the pale beige of fallen leaves on its hindquarters. Fangs like ivory daggers curved back toward its body.

  My hand crept over my heart, not to still the pounding, but to feel it, to know that my heart could still beat aloud. At the motion, the saber-tooth stretched its jaw wide, wove its head back and forth as if brandishing its weapons. Blood drops flew from the fangs, spattered the dusty ground. Its absurd stump of bobtail lashed at me.

  I blinked and the cat was still there.

  Eyes still fixed on mine, it lowered its head and seized the deer’s limp neck, dragging the carcass with it as it backed away from me below the lip of the hill. I waited, immobile until the little sounds in the brush resumed: the terrrrrrr-whit! of a quail, the rustle of lizards at the roots of the scrub. Vultures dipped over the canyon, stooping toward the carcass. I got to my feet, quietly, as though I were in a cathedral, and hiked back to my car.