Mars is only a reality TV show away... In a tale that crosses the border between fiction and an entertainment project that still might see the light of day, DJ Cockburn takes us on a journey into Deep Space. DJ Cockburn is an English writer whose most recent publications have been in the Year's Best Science Fiction of 2014, Qualia Nous, Apex and Interzone. In 2014 he also won the
James White Award. He blogs at Cockburn’s Eclcetics https://cockburndj.wordpress.com/


MARS ONE
by DJ Cockburn


​Punching Yegor on the nose wasn't the most tactful way of expressing my objection. I think 'expressing an objection' was the phrase they taught us in conflict management, but it was a while ago and I may have dozed off. A two hour lecture is hard to take in after a full day of decompression drill. Whatever they'd taught us didn't stop a mist the colour of our destination from filming my gaze when Yegor ate my toast.

Yegor shouldn't have needed conflict management to tell him to respect other peoples' toast. Zero gee doesn't make a simple, "is that your toast, Kirsten?" any more difficult than it would have been on earth.  

I'd turned my back for two minutes, checking the oxygen tanks that keep us all alive. Yegor wouldn't have thought about that. His optic nerve is wired directly to his stomach, bypassing whatever higher brain functions he hasn't euthanised with reruns of Australian soap operas.  At least, that's what he says he's watching when he pulls the curtain to his sleepspace.

A moment's thought would have told him that if someone left bread in the toaster, they would be looking forward to eating it when they came back.

You have to practice mindfulness out here. I think before I speak. I ask before I take any of the communal supplies. I've even developed a zero gravity version of yoga. I keep telling everyone we'd get on much better if I teach it to everyone, but no one ever takes me up on the offer.

Stoic as I am, Yegor pushed me one slice of toast beyond the limit of my forbearance.

So I punched him on the nose.
    
It was a good punch. Back home, that nose would have been broken. Out here, where the blue disk of home is so tiny I can straighten my arm and hide it behind the last joint of my thumb, it sent us both flying away from each other.

We can't even have a proper punch-up in here.

My tantrum will make good television. We've been in trans-Mars cruise for a year now, and our ratings are losing out to reality shows filmed closer to home. Mars got Talent would be a short and very dull series.
    
The signal would take a minute or two to reach earth. If Yegor's theft of my toast had struck the match, the thought of several billion people sniggering at my bleeped out obscenities poured the petrol. If I was going to lose it, I was going to lose it properly and rip Yegor's head off what passed for his neck.  
    
Everyone in the ship must have heard our shouting, but Guzman was the first to hurtle into the galley. As I kicked off a bulkhead toward Yegor, Guzman grabbed a rail with one hand and my ankle with the other. He was saying something like, "calm down, Kirsten", but I was well past listening. I flung abuse at Yegor and flailed my arms like a willow in a gale. Not that I'd ever see a willow or feel a gale again.
    
They'd told us the weeks of psychological evaluations were to choose a crew who were compatible with each other. I'd been naive enough to believe it. Halfway to Mars, it finally dawned on me that we'd been selected to make good television.
    
I was one of twelve people chosen to spend the rest of our lives hating each other.

When Eternity meets social media... what if Time is so bored that it amuses itself photobombing other people's selfies?

Today's contributor is Andrea Porter, a Cambridge (UK) based poet who says she has just begun dipping her toes into the short story/flash fiction waters.

​Her recent books include... House of the Deaf Man, a collaboration with the contemporary artist Tom de Freston about Goya's 'black paintings,' published in 2012 by Gatehouse Press This book ...is a remarkable thing. Andrea Porter's poems and Tom de Freston's images capture the spirit of Goya's Black Paintings without aping them: in other words, they are entirely their own thing, yet inspire in the reader/viewer the same sense of disquiet and dread and awe -because there is a beauty too. It's as if they have both breathed in his darkness and made it their own. ...Sir Anthony Sher (Actor, Director, Writer and Artist)    

Her collection A Season of Small Insanities was published by Salt Publishing the fascinating cut glass surfaces of her work, always tug against an undercurrent of darkness and violence ...Jo Shapcott


​Chronos
by Andrea Porter


One moment is… this, the next… that. Seems obvious but it takes my skill to use that fact. People waste time, they throw it away on just the necessary or mundane... breathing, rubbing at a scratch card, making a cup of tea, watching an upload on YouTube of a chimp wash a cat in a sink. 

This latest mindfulness crap was what made me start to behave badly. Slow the clock in the library, the café, the market place, hold the instant in suspension and watch it all slow to the pace of a glacier. Use this fucking pause, I thought, to have a better day, beat pain or stress, feel connected to the universe.

I liked to think of myself as creating transient art installations, people trapped in a moment like flies in amber. I walked around them, examined their faces and wondered if behind those eyes there was a glimmer of recognition that they were between heart beats. I never stole their wallets, credit cards, watches, rings, that would be tacky. Nor did I humiliate those I didn’t like the look of; you know pull their trousers down, place a traffic cone on their heads. I treated each scene like a photograph, photoshopped it to make it more interesting; sometimes slightly surreal with a touch of the absurd.

However I have indulged myself and used their mobile phones to take a selfie with me beaming over their shoulder. I like to imagine their confusion when they see the image posted on their Facebook or Twitter feed and wonder just when they did that. I have become the stuff of urban legend the ubiquitous face in the photograph. 

It was an addiction I admit but it hurt no one and intrigued many, I liked that, making people speculate. I could have limited myself to the famous but it was the ordinariness of people that I really enjoyed; christenings, birthday parties, funerals, weddings, graduations all those markers they put in place to celebrate the passing of time. 

In the past getting into a portrait was impossible as both the painter and the painted were stilled. I would have liked to have appeared in The Last Supper. I did manage to appear in a number of early films, there was Eisenstein’s October, the camera ticking on whilst everyone just gawped in that frozen way they have as they remade history.

Of course film editors were much less scrupulous than they are today now I can be wiped from existence with one click of the mouse, what a great metaphor for how humanity is now with their weapons of mass destruction, drones and carpet bombing. Sometimes I hanker for the simplicity of the arrow, the spear and the sword... so small scale, so humane. 

Keeping time locked up can take its toll. Last night a car skidded on the ice, I held it just before it hit a woman pushing a buggy across the road. I could see fear in the driver’s eyes, the realization in the mother’s face that there was nothing she could do. The little girl in the buggy was fast asleep locked away from consequence.

There are rules as I said. No amount of mindfulness could stop what was about to happen or make those involved feel better about it after the event. It hurts me though, living in the moment can be a myriad of little deaths. For once I disobeyed and dragged her and the child a metre to the left and watched as the car just missed them. 

I sit at home now and wait, I can sense something unraveling or is it being wound in. Time will not allow me to forget meddling in even the smallest event, it has consequences. Those Fates were always bitches. I feel the ends of my fingers beginning to tingle, phase out of sync with this reality. When I am swallowed whole this reality will go with me. Was that woman and child worth a whole universe? Maybe, maybe not, but then I am bored of this reality; the next one will probably not contain selfies, cars, men and hopefully not fucking mindfulness.

Our latest contributor is I.Horsburgh, who  says "I used to be a long-term carer, and I now do casual work in libraries. I live in North-East England. I've had stories on SpaceSquid, Devilfish Review, InkBlink, the Drabble and The Casket."


Everyone got that?
by I.Horsburgh

​
This is Metro Control, with passenger information.
The train now approaching platform one does not stop at this station.
We are currently running a good service system-wide with no reported issues.
If your nose is runny, don’t use your sleeve, use tissues.
Will passengers please stand clear of the platform edge?
Your recommended daily nutritional intake should 
comprise least five different items of fruit or veg.
    
Do not attempt to enter the train after the warning tone sounds.
It is dangerous, and may result in a fine of up to one thousand pounds.
The service will be suspended between Jarrow and Wallsend on Sunday the sixth of March for refurbishment, but a replacement bus service will be running in the affected area.
Some lurchers are smooth-coated, while others are considerably hairier.

You are advised that the lift at Monument is currently undergoing repair, and passengers requiring wheelchair access should use Haymarket or Central Station.
Passengers are also advised that the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary is not a real animal, it is a figment of the Medieval imagination.
Bikes must always be folded if carried on the train.
Chris Clarke, currently waiting on platform two, your wife’s been cheating on you again.