Ninety-second Issue! Ghost Code
August hangs suspended between seasons. The height of summer hums around us, but the nights begin to draw in, shadows linger a little longer, and familiar places feel just unfamiliar enough to make you look twice. It's the perfect time to listen for signals hiding beneath the static.
Welcome to the ninety-second edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter.
This month, we return to science fiction with our theme, Ghost Code. These are stories of abandoned systems, haunted machines, forgotten AIs and digital echoes that refuse to disappear. Expect impossible transmissions, corrupted memories, technological afterlives and secrets buried deep within the code.
Thank you to everyone who submitted this month. Your stories glitched, whispered and reached out from the dark between the data. Proceed carefully... something in the network knows you’re there.
Congratulations to both winners of the August theme: Zach Shephard and Angus McIntyre!
We Haunt by Zach Shephard – When the inventor of a technology designed to capture ghosts awakens inside his own creation, he discovers its purpose has become something far darker...
Airgap by Angus McIntyre – A technician repairing a deep-space probe in complete digital isolation encounters something that shouldn't exist on an offline system...
This month's newsletter features:
- LIVE & SPOOKY Open Submission Call
- NEW Flame Tree Press titles!
- Myth & Fiction Podcast
- Original Sci-Fi Fiction #1: We Haunt by Zach Shephard
- Original Sci-Fi Fiction #2: Airgap by Angus McIntyre
- EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
- Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme
FLAME TREE PRESS | August Titles
Slow Burn by Amal Singh
When Rishi Tripathi, a failed actor, falls through a mirror in an inverted Mumbai, he invites fame like he has never seen before. In this inverted city, he’s a superstar and a critically acclaimed darling. But he soon realizes that success bears a heavy cost. The cruel actions of his doppelganger catch up to him, and he’s forced to find an entity called the Maker of Mirrors to return to his actual city.
But fame is also a drug, and Rishi has become an addict.
Is he truly ready to return and embrace failure?
OUT 18th AUGUST!
Ghosts of Chanterlands by Catherine Cavendish
“You don’t belong here. None of you do. None but us….”
1940. Pamela Courtney is evacuated to Chanterlands – the home of her aunts: Jilly, the eccentric one, who dreams of her days as a star of the silver screen, and Bunny, the pragmatic one.
But Chanterlands is home to more than just the living. There’s the spectral lonely boy whose room Pamela sleeps in and, in the long-neglected attic, she discovers a sinister secret of this once-great house. But greater danger awaits Pamela during that summer long ago when war raged all over Europe and the safety her mother had wished for her took a dark and fatal turn.
OUT 18th AUGUST!
Original Sci-Fi Story #1
We Haunt
Zach Shephard
My technology was never meant to imprison the living. I don’t know how they modified the ghost vault to capture my consciousness like this. What has the company done with my body? Somewhere on the outside is a human being, comatose, probably labeled like a scientific specimen. “Male, 44 y/o.” This is how they keep me silent. This is how they move forward with the project I never agreed to.
I stand on a short metal cliff in a world of sharp angles. Neon teal cracks cut through the black plain below like circuitry; a spectrum of diagonal pinkish bars makes up the sky. In the distance, past a forest of square-edged pillars, stands a massive door like a drawbridge without a castle. Its chrome surface reflects the sky’s pinks. Black shapes flitter around it like flies.
This is not what I expected the vault’s interior to look like.
I lower myself off the cliff. My foot hits one of the teal cracks on the ground. It flares, the pulse of light shooting into the pillar forest. I lose sight of it.
A roar splits the air. The call rises in pitch like the growl of a fast-approaching vehicle.
Something emerges over the pillars: a metal minotaur, soaring on an eagle’s wings. It carries a chrome staff whose ends glow electric yellow.
The minotaur lands forcefully. Without a word, it attacks, its steel wings extended for balance.
“Stop!” I say, frantically dodging the staff. “I’m not supposed to be here!”
As I backpedal, my heel catches in one of the teal cracks. I trip.
The minotaur towers over me, staff raised in both hands. I cover my face and brace for impact.
A loud crash sounds, but there’s no pain. I look.
The minotaur lies at my feet, spitting sparks from the holes in its head. Standing over the metal corpse is a woman holding a spiked flail, her eyes pale white.
“Are you a ghost?” I ask.
“We all are here."
“Not me.”
“Yeah? And what makes you so special?”
“I built this place.”
“Oh. So we have you to thank for our prison.”
Another minotaur call splits the air, approaching.
“I’m Mia,” the woman says.
“I’m—”
“—Following me. Don’t step on any cracks.”
Mia pulls me to my feet. We dash into the pillar forest.
#
We meet with a dozen other ghosts like Mia, milky-eyed and weary-faced. I tell my story as everyone sits in a circle atop broken pillar chunks, staring into a campfire that isn’t there.
“Things went south when the company started adapting my technology to imprison living minds,” I say. “I threatened to blow the whistle if they didn’t stop.”
“And?” Mia asks.
I gesture at myself, a living mind in the vault’s ghostscape. “Apparently they didn’t stop.”
A ghost curls his lip in disgust. “It’s this bastard’s fault we’re here. I say we feed him to the sentries. See how he likes being torn apart and reborn again.”
I look to Mia for an explanation.
“We can’t be killed here,” she says. “But the sentries can reset us. Worst pain you’ll ever experience.”
“You still feel pain?”
“It’s our whole world.”
I appraise the ghosts, looking like weary soldiers in an endless war. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be. I built the vault because ghosts were haunting the living—I had no idea their minds remained intact after capture.
“You may have created this hell,” Mia says, “but you can still redeem yourself. That door, beyond the forest? We think it’s the way out. We just don’t know the code.”
“Code?”
“There’s a keypad. We’ve fought our way to it a few times and made some guesses. Nothing’s worked. But if you built this place, you might be able to figure it out.”
The epiphany strikes me like a bullet.
“I programmed a purge command into the machine in case it ever needed to be emptied. That keypad must be how it manifested here. I know the code.”
Mia stands. “Well then—what are we waiting for?”
#
Our soldiers burst from the forest, trampling the teal cracks to draw the sentries’ attention. Winged minotaurs turn in the sky, fixing on the charging intruders. They growl like engines and dive.
Mia escorts me away from the action. We sneak behind metal cubes like boulders, advancing toward the door. Battle-sounds erupt, but I don’t look that way. I’ve got a different job.
I reach the keypad and enter the code. The door opens, revealing a liquid-chrome portal. In it is a wavy image of a room—the place where the vault sits within company HQ.
“After you,” Mia says.
I compose myself. I step through.
And there I am, on the floor, in a puddle of blood still seeping from the bullet wound in my head. I kneel next to my body, trying to understand. Mia steps beside me.
“They didn’t trap my mind,” I say. “They killed me.”
She crouches with me. “Yep. Same here. The company didn’t like the ethical questions I raised about your project.”
“You worked here?”
She nods.
“Did you know I was dead this whole time?”
Another nod. “It’s in your eyes. It’s in all our eyes.”
I look around. There are dozens of vaults, like a server room. I remember wandering down here and discovering them after thinking my original was the only one. Someone from the company appeared, disappointed that I’d been so nosy . . .
I turn to Mia. “What now?”
“Now, we enter your code into these other vaults and release their prisoners. I’ll show you how to interact with the physical world. After that,” she says, standing, “we do what ghosts do best.” Her face drips away like melting wax, long strips of it dangling from the bones of her exposed skull. “We haunt.”
Footsteps approach outside. Someone’s coming to clean up my body. Mia and I rush to work, entering the code into the machines. Tortured ghosts start pouring out. The footsteps are near, but they’re too late.
We haunt.
Zach Shephard lives in Enumclaw, Washington, where he writes stories that are sometimes dark and sometimes humorous, and sometimes so maddeningly vague not even he understands them. His fiction has appeared in places like Fantasy & Science Fiction, the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology series, and several of Flame Tree Publishing’s Gothic Fantasy anthologies. He’s a huge fan of Roger Zelazny, and would probably never have started writing if not for the battered copy of Nine Princes in Amber on his bookshelf. For more of Zach’s stories, check out www.zachshephard.com.
Original Sci-Fi Story #2
Airgap
Angus McIntyre
The suit is heavy, made of single-use bioplastics, with pleated accordion folds at knees and elbows. When Badr puts it on, it feels clammy against his skin.
“Listen up. Your suit does not have a radio. Once you seal your helmet, you’re on your own. If anything goes wrong and you don’t remember your hand signals, you will die.” The commissar has one foot hooked under a grab bar, swaying slightly in the microgravity. “Your suit does not have environmental control. If you do not monitor your air and heat, you will die. Understand?”
There is a murmur of assent. Most of the men are veterans. It’s not their first time using a dumbsuit.
The transfer vehicle is almost as dumb as the suits. It’s a stubby cylinder with space for a twelve-man crew and six sleds of supplies. The rockets fire automatically on a clockwork timer.
“When you’re refitting a probe,” Badr remembers his instructor saying, “you’re in a hostile environment, informationally speaking. That thing’s been out there in the dark, exposed to Marx knows only what. Every single cybernetic component is potentially compromised. Any controller, any block of memory, might contain a virus that could kill us all. When we send you out there, we send you out naked. No cybernetics, nothing that could let any enemy mindware jump the gap and hitch a ride home.”
There are no screens in the transfer vehicle. Thick glass windows at the bow end let the pilot judge their approach. Peering over the pilot’s shoulder, Badr watches the probe grow from a faint star to a recognizable shape. The distant sun lights up the fat blisters of the fuel tanks, the solar panels, and the long trellis of the spine with its payload of antennas and dishes. It grows steadily until it fills the entire viewport. Badr sees steel panels scarred by micro-meteorites and the black mouth of a thruster larger than their shuttle. Then the braking rockets fire, and everything vanishes in a cloud of exhaust.
Badr has done EVAs before, but it’s different without a robotic exoskeleton. The clumsy suit drags at his arms and legs as he pulls himself hand-over-hand across the probe’s hull. There’s no helmet display to show him his body temperature or respiration rate, but he can feel his sweat starting to soak the suit liner. He takes deep breaths to calm himself.
Something touches his shoulder, and he turns his head to see another bubble-headed spacesuit next to his own. The other man puts his gauntleted fists together, the hand signal for “Let’s talk.” Badr puts his helmet against the other’s.
“Can you hear me?” The voice through the plastic is faint and buzzy but audible.
“Yes.” He reads the name stenciled on the other’s suit: Berg.
“Chen says we can trust you,” says Berg.
It occurs to him that this might be the first conversation he’s ever had that wasn’t monitored. Out here, without radios, they might almost be beyond the reach of the committee.
Despite that, he hesitates for a moment before replying. It could still be a loyalty test. In the end, Chen’s name tips the balance. “Sure,” he says.
“Here’s the deal. Whenever we replace a component, we’re supposed to burn the old one before we bring it in.”
Badr knows the procedure. One of the tools clipped to his waist will deliver a lethal blast of electricity that will fry even hardened circuitry. No hitchhiking virus will get aboard the station on a salvaged part.
“If you have to pull something, don’t zap it. Just drop it in your pail,” Berg tells him.
He’d suspected it was something like this. No doubt Berg has a contact who’ll buy the recovered components. But there’s an obvious flaw in the plan. “Doesn’t the commissar inspect everything?”
“He gets a cut to look the other way.”
It’s what he had expected. Everyone has some kind of scheme to make their rations go further or their life a little more comfortable. In the end, he says "yes" just to get Berg to shut up and go away.
His assignment is to check the components in one of the sensor bays near the forward end of the probe. They’ve given him a hand console, solid-state with no volatile memory that could be corrupted. His job is to plug the console into the diagnostics port of each component in turn and replace any that show signs of damage. It’s mindless work that might almost be pleasant if he weren’t sweating in a primitive spacesuit on the hull of a space probe two light-hours from the sun.
The console flags two processor modules for replacement, but it looks like simple radiation damage, bits flipped by stray cosmic rays during the probe’s long journey to the inner system. He zaps one, reducing its complex innards to slag, hesitates for a moment, and then drops the other one intact into his pail. He needs to give Berg something, and the module has too little memory to host anything very nasty.
It’s when he’s checking a third, larger unit that it happens. One moment the console’s showing standard diagnostics. Then it flickers and goes blank. When it comes back, the screen shows a single word.
Hello.
Badr waits.
Anyone there? the console says.
He’d never entirely believed the stories. Of banshees and infojackers and counterrevolutionaries, all floating around in the void, trying to compromise passing spacecraft. Much of the time, he thinks they’re all alone in the solar system. But something’s in the module, and it’s talking to him.
He taps the screen once.
One for yes, two for no. OK?
He taps it again.
The ghost in the module thinks for a while.
I can tell you things; it prints at last. About what’s really out there. Do you want to know?
Badr looks at the zapper clipped to his belt. It’s his duty to use it. This is why he’s here.
He reaches out and taps the screen again.
Angus McIntyre is the author of the space-opera novella The Warrior Within published by Tor.com in 2018. His short fiction has appeared in
a number of magazines and anthologies. He lives in New York. For more
information, see his website at https://angus.pw/.
|
|
|
Sign up for our fiction newsletter 