Rejected!

What’s in the box:

An original short #sciencefiction apocalyptic #story by Jeff Arce.

A hopeful #writer whose only dream in life is to have one of his stories featured in his favorite literary magazine has received his final rejection letter just as the world ends…exactly how he predicted it would in his last story.

Word Count: 4404 words. (A 25 minute read)

Warning: this story contains despair.

Age limit: no restrictions, but made for readers 13 and up.

Story:

Ping! Ping!

            Was that my phone? I couldn’t believe it. 

            The isolated tunnel that I was presently being shoved through was narrow, dark, and oppressive. As was the hope for my future. Its steel-gray riveted walls arched high over us like a cresting wave of silver ice. It possessed a sterile, cold, military air that promised security at the cost of freedom. It gave me the willies. As the others clustered in around me, breathing hot, frightful air against the nape of my neck, clamoring for desperate refuge, yet wanting to run away all the same, I began to wonder how much salvation was truly worth. Urgent hands pressed at my back and shoulders. Grabbing, raking, pushing. Real Black Friday energy. Only the limited prize waiting for them at the end of the checkout line was survival. We inched ever closer to a line of glaring, steaming, lights that seemed to barb the vast river of jostling human heads that stretched out before me. The diffraction spikes appeared as great bright fiery swords, poised to dice the incoming hoard into pieces. Beyond that, I couldn’t see much. There seemed to be a watch tower standing over the crowd. They had spotlights pouring on us like hoses that were spraying blinding streams of golden rays over us. Someone was moving them this way and that. Someone, I presumed, might be armed with a very deadly long range tactical rifle. The cave that the steel tunnel deposited us into was massive. Swallowing us all in like the mouth of a world eating demon. And there we were—marching right down its yawning, eager throat. Into the belly of the great beast awaits our salvation.

            Yet, somehow, even down here in the depths of God-knows-where I got a message. Bewildered, I scrambled to get at my phone in my back pocket. I accidently elbowed a fellow lotto-winner in the process. He was leaning in high on his heels, trying to decipher what was waiting for them beyond the curtain of light at the end of the line. The woman—presumed to be his wife—was embracing him under the folds of his coddling arms. She looked scared. Her eyes were red and swollen from her irrepressible woe. She was startled by my presence as I bumped into her husband. They both jolted and looked at me as if stirred from a terrible dream. In their quest for refuge, they had forgotten that there were others surrounding them—all after the same thing—until I popped their bubble. 

            I frowned contritely at them. I truly was sorry. Never meant to cut into their harrowing epilogue on earth. I just wanted my phone. 

            When I found it, I brought it up to view more courteously, keeping my elbows in and out of their way. Our shared space was equivalent to being crushed in the moshpit at a rock concert. It was stifling, but I just had to know: how the hell did I get an email all the way down here? And who could it possibly be?

            I navigated the app interface to my inbox. When I opened it, I gasped.

Morbid Toybox Magazine.

            “You have got to be kidding me!” I muttered, bemused and irritated.

Dear Jeff,

            Robo rejections were always so cordial, addressing its recipients on a first name basis to remind them how unimportant they are.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your story, “Rejected!” Unfortunately, your story isn’t quite what we’re looking for right now.

            It was only the second most perplexing message I received that day, and it was the same old, same old. There must have been a system lag due to interference at the hands of a global communications failure. Once again, this unexpected message was significant to only one person on earth—me. Yet still it came through. Even now. Even here, standing in the last line I will ever have to endure from the world I grew up knowing my whole life. Like a final slap in the face, my science fiction/horror ironically titled “Rejected!” was rejected.

            Dismayed, I huffed, “Thanks for nothing.”

            I closed the screen lock and put the phone away. The incapsulating fear of an uncertain future suddenly abandoned me. It was replaced by my old, all-too-familiar friend—dejection. 

            It was my favorite science fiction literary magazine at the time. Morbid Toybox has been with me longer than most of my friends and relationships. Since graduating from high school, I’ve always kept a copy within reach. I devoured the stories therein. I’ve studied them. Scrutinizing every line and punctuation with assiduous interest. I’ve watched the themes change. I’ve watched the rules evolve. Trends came and went, and I did everything in my creative power to adjust to the ever-shifting tides of what was popular in the literary world. But it always somehow felt like I came late to the party.  Like trying to catch a fly with a leaky net. No matter how hard I tried, I could never seem to predict which themesmight dominate the industry next. It was like dancing with a woman who knew all the moves, but I just kept on fumbling and stepping on her toes. I only wanted to write my stories, my way. They felt prophetic to me. Like an otherworldly being was whispering twisty concepts and plots into my ear as I slept. Even as I went on living my unremarkable life, prose was always on my mind, like a mistress that was never mine to claim. My truest, and only love. But their editors rebuffed my ideas. They wrote them off as deranged crack-pot conspiracy theories. 

            Their submission guidelines had become something more like a list of all the things that their editors didn’t want to read anymore. No vampires! No zombies! No witches! No ghosts! Every conceivable science fiction trope shut out by some derisive, purple-haired, critical-theory graduate who didn’t even like Science Fiction but couldn’t get their resume pulled up by anyone else. They were guarding the gates to a kingdom that they seemed to absolutely despise. Blocking me at every turn like an impassable goalie in a hockey game. At least that’s what I told myself to go to sleep at night. I never could admit that maybe I just suck at creative writing. Maybe I am wasting my whole life trying. Yet still, my dream never wavered. I never quit. Like an obdurate addict I carried on. Taking my licks over and over again. Because the only thing I ever really wanted in this world was to score a feature in Morbid Toybox Magazine. Even if it killed me.

            I scoffed, thinking mordantly to myself, well, at least that last part might come true.

            But then I remembered all the other things that came true and I frowned again. 

            There I was standing at the ends of the earth, carrying my last rejection letter in my back pocket, brooding like a petulant child with a bruised ego.

            The guy I bumped into suddenly wanted to talk. “We are the lucky ones!” he decided.

            “Really?” I groused. I wasn’t in the best mood for talking.

            The sorrowful brunette clinging to his chest like a beleaguered orphan looked up at me with her big, weeping red sores for eyes. Poignantly, she confessed, “my neighbor… I used to get so mad at him. He wouldn’t stop expanding his garden. It was encroaching our yard. He put up this fence that was such an ugly thing. Red, naked wood. It was incongruous. It didn’t match with anything that was happening between our two properties. I hated it. I complained about it every day. But it saved me. I was standing behind that ugly fence sulking about it when the city was attacked.”

            “It shielded us from the flash burn,” her husband added as he began stroking her back intimately, trying his best to soothe her. 

            The woman buried her sadness into his arm. She said, “God, I hope they made it out okay.”

            I sighed and said, “I’m not entirely sure if that would be better or worse at this point.”

            She lifted her chin from her husband’s embrace, looking horrified by my statement. 

            My last story Rejected! was a four-thousand-word science fiction tale that followed an unlikely world leader who was rejected vehemently both by his adversaries and his peers, yet still he prevailed. He was never truly fit for the job as he carried an unsuspecting world to its destruction. He was a man who struggled with a terrible species of malignant narcissism that lead him to believe that he was a profit sent by God to save the world from war and ruin. Blinded by his own arrogance, he rejected his critics, and the potential threats that loomed over his head. His bumbling reign is soon plagued by discord that which summons a civil war in his own country rendering them powerless against an invasion from an alien race. The vial extraterrestrials commandeered their technology as a weapon to torture and enslave humanity as a nuclear holocaust is unleashed to wipe out their infrastructure. An impenetrable axis of evil is formed between AI and Aliens, sending the survivors to seek their refuge behind a secret militarized bunker in the mountains. There, they would be subjected to a life plagued by oppression and great despair as the survivors try to figure out a way to fight back and reclaim their world. But no hope will come from their embattled leader as he is eliminated by his own guard in a surprise attack at a public conference.

            And it got rejected.

            I really hate being right, I mused scornfully.

            Clairvoyance wasn’t exactly a new thing in storytelling. The sinking of the Titanic, the creation of the atomic bomb, World War Two, and even the attacks on 9/11 were all presaged by fiction. All those stories were critically rejected by readers who were afraid of their own shadows to know what’s good for them.

            I shrugged absently. Guess you can add me to that list.

            “John Lucas!” the man who wanted to talk said, reaching over his quivering wife to shake my hand. I took it reluctantly. Then he divulged, “We just barely got out of the city when the crush came. The blasts…they were horrible. Wiped out most of Manhattan in minutes. Those Alien sons of bitches sure knew how to hit us.”

            I frowned, doubtfully at this. I thought, the Artificial Intelligence that we created to protect us knew how to hit us.

            “I was an engineer. Worked for the city for decades. Served twenty years in the United States Navy. We got the yellow card. As soon as the message reached our phones, we were already surrounded by chaos. But we got out. We made it.” He hugged his wife again, thankful.

            I didn’t roll my eyes until he wasn’t looking at me anymore. Then I said, “I’m a recluse writer. I live in the woods with a camper and a beat-up Ford pickup truck.”

            “A writer?” John Lucas seemed genuinely perplexed by this. I couldn’t blame him. The lottery was made to preserve only the most valuable contributors to the human race. I was just a scrub. My name should have never made the cut.

            I shrugged and said, “Yeah, but I can parallel park my RV pretty damn good.”

            Now, his wife was giving me a look of curious scrutiny.

            “If you don’t mind me asking,” John started asking before I could have time to mind, “what color did you get.”

            Insouciantly, I replied, “I don’t know. Blue, I think.”

            “Blue!” John Lucus stirred, becoming uncharacteristically hostile. They suddenly turned from friendly to sour in an instant, as though I just stole something of high value from them.

            “What?” I asked.

            Before they could answer, a surge in the crowd shoved us forward. We had reached the checkpoint gate. Rugged soldiers, clad in black and gray striped armor, with heavy helmets, and carrying deadly rifles were shouting orders at us. They were grabbing terrified men and women callously by their arms, yanking them this way and that. They demanded to see their tickets. John Lucus waved his phone in one soldier’s face. The yellow card from the lottery was glowing from the screen. The soldier scanned the QR Code illuminating from his phone with a small handheld device. Then he pushed him through. He was savagely torn from his wife’s arms before they were bustled into separate corridors. The wife screamed. John Lucus resisted. He was beat down by several soldiers swinging clubs at him until he went still on the ground. They carried his broken body into the next chamber. The long concrete tunnels looked like ashen guts splayed out before them, eviscerated from its earthen womb. The one they had disappeared in with John Lucas clawed under a massive rocky wall bristling with crystalized stalagmites like diamond scales. 

            Then, it was my turn. 

            One of the soldiers slipped behind me. They shoved me, hard. My hesitant heels felt as though they were digging into the ground without my permission. My impulse to flee from this chthonic nightmare was starting to override all my primal functions. But I couldn’t. I was surrounded. The irate soldier standing in front of me stood about six feet tall, with wide, intimidating shoulders, and more muscles in his neck than I had in my entire body. I gulped as I brought up my phone in a trembling hand. I showed him my government assigned QR code. The barcode was glowing with a bright blue backdrop. The officer’s eyes widened with unexpected amusement at the sight of it.

            He raised the scanner in his gloved hand. The thing resembled a gun, drawing a startled gasp from my lips. Reflexively, I turned around to flee. The beast standing directly behind me caught me in his big, powerful arms. He restrained me and turned me all the way back around with one hand.

            Then, the officer with the daunting, gun-shaped scanner demanded, “Are you military? Marines? Special Forces?”

            “N-no!” I stammered.

            He did a double take, looking at the bright blue barcode glaring from my phone’s illuminated screen, then again back at me. “What is your occupation, Sir?”

            I was sweating. Panting. My heart was doing backflips in my chest. I didn’t know what they wanted from me. So, I just answered the question. “I write stories… I s-sell my work at flea markets and comic cons!”

            He and the officer holding me up shared a glance. It looked doubtful. It looked confused. 

            He scanned the code on my screen. The device beeped. I had no idea what that meant. But it didn’t come off as the typical, callous sound of rejection. So, I relaxed my shoulders and released my angst. 

            The soldier with the scanner appeared dumbfounded as he reviewed the data streaming on the LCD screen attached to the side of his device. Then he blinked his unbelieving eyes up at the big man behind me and said, “He’s clear. Take him directly to the Council!”

            Without hesitation, the soldier seized me by the back of my neck and coerced me straight for one of the tunnels up ahead.

            “Wait a minute!” I protested. “What’s going on? Where are you taking me?”

            He didn’t answer. 

***

            After a very long, very uncomfortable walk through a dimly lit titanium corridor, passing various claustrophobia-inducing chambers that looked too-much like prison cells for comfort, I soon found myself seated in a squared room sealed off from the rest of the sprawling, subterranean facility. There was a long black table stretching out before me. At the end of it sat three brooding strangers. They each had a folder open in front of them with paperwork full of various data. My picture was paperclipped on top of it all. It was my profile picture from my private account on Facebook. I recognized it immediately. A case file…on me. I swallowed the growing lump in my throat just then. The matching scrutiny I found on each of their smoldering faces suggested that I was either in a whole lot of trouble, or they knew something that I did not. Either way, it didn’t bode well for me. I started going over all the things I might have said on social media before the apocalypse began. Dread inundated my heart. I suddenly felt naked and humiliated—exposed by our modern form of Sigillum Sacramentale.

            The woman with the sharp suit and austere red hair unthreaded her fingers to pick up the file. They were all dressed in suits that were expensive and pristine. Not a speck of dust or soot polluted their threads, as if the world wasn’t fighting its last war at all. I couldn’t help but to wonder how they managed to get gear so clean in all this chaos. I stole a moment to look down at my own scuffed up sweatpants and disheveled t-shirt. An iconic image from James Cameron’sscience fiction classic Aliens was emblazoned on the front of it. I remember throwing it on before powering up my MacBook to get started on my story before everything had gone awry. There were streaks of black grease slashed across my gray sweats. That had come from a dripping, overturned car I came by before arriving there. I was forced to get down on my belly to shimmy into the wreckage so I could rescue a crying dog from her carrier. She was trapped in it. Her owner was long gone, crushed under a twisted heap that came of the driver side compartment upon impact with the sturdy trees that shielded my camp. He must have swerved off the road when the blast in the city ignited the sky. 

            It scared the hell out of me. Even inside my trailer, lost in my own world, it took me. There was no sound. Not at first, anyway. There was only an intense light. It turned the night into day. It seemed to even wrap around the mountain I had parked my camper under to get away from the world. Like a thief in the night, it invaded my home. I thought I was on fire. I could see the bones through my hands like an Xray. I’ll never forget that. Then, I felt the explosion in every molecule in my body. My bones rattled behind my flesh. I was under my desk screaming, but there was still no sound that I could hear—only violent vibrations. I had clenched my teeth so hard I thought I might break them. It was bad. The driver must have seen the worst of it before he crashed. I could only imagine.

            “Jeffrey Morrowe,” the woman in the perfect suit with the red hair stated sternly. It snapped me immediately back into the dark room. “That is your name, yes?”

            Sweaty hands set firmly over my jittery knees, I nodded.

            “Answer!” the bald man next to her with the dense eyebrows and smoldering scowl demanded.

            “Y-yes.” I answered.

            She looked down at the file that was now open in her hands through her oversized wireframed glasses. They were aligned perfectly across her face, also unmolested by damage. I wondered how such a fragile thing could survive when all the skyscrapers across the planet were now presumably flattened. 

            “And you go by the pseudonym, Jay Morrow?” she pressed.

            Reluctantly I replied, “I do.”

            She plucked a page out from my file. Presenting it in the air, folded between two fingers like an unwanted parking ticket, she asked, “Do you know what this is?”

            I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m guessing, stuff about me.”

            “Wrong!” she said curtly. “This is a piece of paper with stuff about you.”

            “Oookay…”

            She set it down. Her frown deepened. Her glower darkened. “Do you understand why we have been forced to resort to this more analogue approach to collecting data?”

            I had an idea, but I didn’t want to say it. So, I said nothing. 

            She sighed. “We understand that you recently submitted a story to a literary magazine, seeking publication. Can you tell us what it was about.”

            My heart skipped a beat. But I couldn’t find words to hold on my tongue.

            “Speak!” the third character in the room demanded brusquely. He was long, and lithe, with a regal face, and a silver goatee. He wore a crew cut. Brown hair. Full hair line. He had several folds in his forehead. They undulated vigorously as he spoke. It’s silly, but these are the obscure details I had to focus my attention on to keep from having a full-blown panic attack.

            Finally, I said, “A hostile alien race invades our satellites to highjack our tech. More specifically, they force open a door to gain access to our juvenile Artificial Intelligence systems.”

            “Why?” the woman demanded.

            I shifted my eyes from the third man in front of me back to her. Stalling. I wasn’t entirely sure why. I just felt stupid explaining my idea to these people. They didn’t quite look like my kind of audience. “To seduce them,” I said. “You can’t really hack a species of Artificial General Intelligence… Well, in my story you can’t. You must persuade it to see things your way. That’s what they did. And with it, the alien hostiles usurp all control over our cyber infrastructure. This allows them to achieve a crippling Bolt From the Blue attack against all their most formidable adversaries before emerging from the abyss.”

            “The abyss?” the woman asked.

            I nodded. “Yes. They don’t come in from above. They have always been here…under the ocean. Waiting. Plotting. Learning.”

            “And then what, Mr. Morrowe?”

            I lifted my hands, presenting the environment around us. “This… We hide in caves…back in the primordial holes where our species began.”

            The third man with the silver goatee then asked, “How did you come by this plot?”

            “Lots of coffee and whiskey.” I honestly did not know how else to answer the question. So, I told him the truth. “Maybe some shrooms.”

            The three strangers then exchanged curious looks. The one in the middle leaned to the one with the silver goatee and whispered something in his ear. The woman with the red hair, however, only kept staring at me. It was as if she meant to see through my skull to peer into the secrets I might be safeguarding there behind my head. She would find nothing too surprising. Every idea I’ve ever brewed up in there I put on paper and tried to submit… Well, not exactly on paper.

            “That’s why you’re using paper.” I realized out loud. “Can’t use a computer in a world threatened by computers.” I chortled. My hosts did not seem to share in my amusement though. But I just couldn’t help myself. I said, “So, what? Are you gonna use morse code now to tell everyone how to take them out?”

            “How do we take them out, Mr. Morrowe?” she pressed, as stoic as ever.

            My mirth instantly left me. “Why are you asking me?”

            The bald man between them leaned in and said with accusation on his tone, “Everything you wrote in your story has happened.”

            “The president is dead,” the man with the silver goatee put in. “Assassinated by a radical posing as a secret serviceman. Exactly how you set it in your story.”

            “The world is under attack by a foreign entity that is armed with technology we have never encountered before,” the woman added.

            I scoffed, doubtfully at that. “Never?” 

            It was their turn to be circumspect. They only continued to stare at me with hard eyes.

            Then the one with the goatee said, “Even if we had, this does not negate the fact that we are very much unprepared for such a foe.”

            “And as you presaged in your little tale,” the woman put in derisively, “they have allied themselves with a quantum computer in China that has thus far shown to be quite impenetrable.”

            “How many nukes did they launch?”

            This question troubled all three of them. 

            The man with the silver goatee offered gravely, “thousands.”

            Everyone I’ve ever known on this earth were likely gone. The gravity of it all only hit me in that very moment. I shuddered.

            “It’s bad,” the woman admitted, showing the first sign of human emotion since they started.

            “So, what do you want with me.”

            Again, the three of them shared curious glances. It was as if they could hardly believe what they were about to propose. Finally, the woman with the red hair explained, “This is not the first time you have written a story that has come to fruition.”

            This was true. I’ve written several tales that have been rejected in their literary form, before appearing on the news several months after as a real, cataclysmic event. But I kept those inconvenient revelations to myself. I learned a long time ago that going around claiming to be a psychic was the fastest way to the loony bin. Though, I did live in an RV on the side of a mountain. So, I guess social excommunication was an inevitable fate for me either way.

            “We have reason to believe that you might have a gift, Mr. Morrowe,” the woman said.

            “A gift?”

            “Precognition,” Silver Goatee said. “We at the CIA have elected to preserve you as a crucial asset to the salvation of humanity. We believe that your prognostic foresight can aid us in our fight.”

            “What?” I was flabbergasted. 

             “Simply put, we want you to help us write the future of our survival,” the woman with the red hair said.

            “You have got to be kidding me!”

            Now I understood why all those crazy stories of mine got rejected. Some ideas are just too big to take responsibility for. It’s easier to just say no than to try and save a world that was a structural and philosophical mess.

            “Nah, I’m good.” I decided.

            Red head gasped. “Excuse me.”

            “I’ll pass.”

            “You’ll pass?” Silver goatee was furious.

            Curious, the woman with the perfectly shaped red hair then asked, “Why?”

            I simpered. “Saving the world is just not the type of story I’m looking for right now.”

            I waited my whole life to say that to someone. It felt good.