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   Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 21:03:02 JST Paleface
   THE LAST DAYS OF THE OLD WORLD
   
   A few years ago I compiled a collection of sci-fi short stories. The idea was to publish them and donate all the proceeds to the White Art Collective, but the prospective publisher disappeared from the face of the Earth and the collective turned out to rest on a single guy's efforts and ceased to exist as well, so it was never published. I loved the stories, though, and it's a shame that very few people have read them, so I decided to post them here so at least you guys can enjoy them. I'll post all of them under this post bit by bit.
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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 21:45:48 JST Paleface

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     Blue Skies By Paleface

     The old man sat at the same park bench he always used, his angular Germanic features still strong even through the mottled and sagging skin and his bright topaz eyes that shone even in the meager pre-dawn light contrasting deeply with his heavy poncho of raw wool and the steaming mate in his hand.

     “Good morning!”

     He always greeted Jones as he walked by on his way to the airbase, the heavily accented English now sounding perfectly familiar.

     “Morning, Karl. The sky is almost blue today, isn’t it?”

     He nodded in the direction of the band of light growing toward the east.

     “That it is, Colonel Jones, that it is.”

     Words they traded almost every day as encouragement, understanding how false they were. The reddish fog did seem a little milder that day, though Jones knew it had to be an illusion. It had only ever gotten worse since the smoke had arrived. The pale fragments of the moon crossed the sky like a rose-tinted ribbon as permanent reminder.

     “I hear that today is the day, Colonel.”

     “That it is, Karl, that it is.”

     “Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to get back to my wheat fields, then.”

     Little had grown in those latitudes for decades, ever since shortly after the impact. Though to the eyes the change seemed slight, the colder weather and diminished sunlight were enough to doom most crops even when no errant clouds of red smoke swept past like an ethereal plague of locusts consuming everything in their path. Karl, Jones knew, still kept his fields tilled and ready for sowing.

     “Maybe.”

     [continues]

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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 21:48:36 JST Paleface

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     “Yesterday’s assessment holds. Intelligence thinks it has finally completed whatever it is it was doing in Antarctica and decided it’s time to advance. Today’s mission is confirmed, standard profile. I don’t think we need to go over it again. Any questions?”

     No one said a word.

     “Launch is in half an hour, so get ready.”

     They all stood up and began to walk out of the briefing room in silence.

     “Good luck up there.”

     The General’s voice didn’t carry much optimism. Jones had expected some banter, a little bragging or friendly jabs when the time for the live mission finally arrived, but he had nothing. They knew it wasn’t going to be that simple—they had studied in detail the footage and telemetry from all the lost drones, satellites, and the one manned mission that had been sent to try to spy what was happening over Dome Argus. No one felt like joking.

     His passage through the prep room was quick and silent, the only words he exchanged with the orderlies who helped him don his flight suit were the confirmations required by the safety checklist. On his way out, as they wished him good luck, he merely nodded. Pilots exchanged salutes as they boarded the carts that would take them to their launch tubes, and were gone. Jones hummed an old song as he sped through the tunnel, reviewing the mission specs in his mind.

     At the end of the tunnel he stepped off the cart, and the support team helped him climb into the cockpit. The visible section of his sub-orbital bomber looked like a winged flat chisel standing on its handle, sleek and angular, the matte black paint absorbing even the copious power of the floodlights. Most of it was hidden beneath the blast doors that at the moment acted as a floor, a massive rocket that would catapult him to the edges of the atmosphere in a little more than a minute.

     “Let’s go over the pre-launch checklist.”

     [continues]

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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 21:48:36 JST Paleface

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     Jones followed the checklist mechanically, his mind wandering through a past that he could scarcely convince himself had existed. He was too young to have seen blue skies and the idea still felt unreal to him. When he was born the moon had already disintegrated—an explosion in slow motion watched by an almost catatonic mankind.

     The smoke had arrived soon after that, with the impact of lunar fragments that had killed millions. For a few months large red clouds had roamed the Earth, destroying crops and forests, killing animals and men, corroding machines and buildings wherever they passed. Panic killed millions more, but true horror only dawned when the clouds began to move against all winds and coalesce in the South Pole—when it had become impossible to deny its intelligence. That had been his world. His memories of it all as a child were of missing a moon and sky he had never seen.

     “All set, Colonel, launch is in ten minutes. Good luck, hit that thing hard for us.”

     The leader of the support team gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up.

     “Will do, Sergeant, we’ll hit it right in the mouth. With a nuke.”

     The Sergeant laughed, saluted, and was off, the armored hatch that sealed off the tunnel through which they all had arrived closing swiftly behind him just as the immense blast doors that formed the floor began to slide apart. Ahead of him the tunnel continued for what seemed like miles, faint stars glittering in the maroon circle of sky at its end. Straining to look backwards he could glimpse the missile that would shoot him away, sinister in the dim light of the silo, the shaft of a gargantuan arrow with his bomber acting as a nuclear arrowhead.

     He tried to smile, feeling that a little of the Sergeant’s enthusiasm had seeped into him.

     “Five minutes to go, global synchronization confirmed.” The voice had come from mission control. The countdown continued on the center screen on his console—similar numbers would be flashing through forty-nine other cockpits on this base and fifty more in Australia. He willed it to go faster, a flash of eagerness to see himself rid of all the rock and metal that buried him briefly overcoming the sullen moodiness that appeared to have hit almost everyone in the base. The numbers dwindled.

     “Thirty seconds.”

     [continues]

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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 21:48:36 JST Paleface

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     The light coming from the bottom of the well grew brighter—the ignition flame had activated. He didn’t even pay attention to the final countdown, just felt a sudden pressure as he sank into his seat, saw the circle of sky growing rapidly as flames shot past the canopy and suddenly he was out and rising. The sky grew blacker and the stars brighter as reports from the command center streamed in through the radio. A clang, and the rocket was gone, his bird was free just as the day’s first rays of sunlight reached him.

     Argentina rushed past below him, titanic clouds of dense smoke streaking the surface, now like the Earth’s own bleeding wounds, now like the tentacles of a lovecraftian beast gripping the world. They grew larger and more numerous as he sped toward the ever-shifting horizon, a crimson glow rising above the limb of the planet. Jones could now make out what looked like a violent sandstorm from which the glow emanated.

     “Your distraction is arriving, boys, prepare to engage boosters.”

     Jones checked his main screen, where myriad arrows converged on the south pole—one large group arrayed from the South American side, a mirror image of that from the Australian side, and several smaller formations coming in from above on all sides, well ahead of the bomber waves. The largest live ICBM launch in history, and it was the distraction.

     He checked the position of the closest missile swarm and searched for it in the sky. His visor quickly highlighted them, up and to his left, moving in considerably faster than he was.

     “They’ll cross the estimated reaction threshold in five seconds.”

     Right on cue the cloud woke up. The scarlet sandstorm wall receded as if taking a breath, and a red colonnade rose at impossible speeds, sprouting branches as it grew—a forest of dead trees, many-fingered skeletal hands reaching for the incoming missiles, their long shadows reaching far to the west.

     The first blinked out, then the second, then they started vanishing too fast for Jones to tell the order. Two managed to get through, though, and split into twenty independent warheads, their limited evasion systems doing what they could to throw them into diverging arcs. New branches of red smoke coalesced around the nearest pillar to intercept those, but he had no time to follow the action above: the signal arrived and he flipped the switch that would activate the booster rockets built into his bomber.

     Suddenly crushed against the back of his seat, Jones focused on the sight ahead. The red sandstorm had done much more than recede: entire canyons had opened through it as it rose to fight the incoming nuclear bombardment.

     [continues]

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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 21:48:37 JST Paleface

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     Jones wasn’t very optimistic, and he knew that Karl wasn’t either. Little of what they had tried so far had managed to slow down the advance of the smoke, much less reverse it. But nothing had been as extreme as what they were about to try.

     “You should have left with the rest, you know.”

     The town had been emptied of its regular denizens months ago—the smoke was getting too close. In the last night it had gotten perilously closer.

     “I have had my amargo in the morning here in this bench since I was a child and the sky was blue, Colonel, and it’s not a cursed cloud that will make me leave.”

     By amargo he meant the infusion of ground up green leaves that he drank from a calabash gourd, a custom that seemed to take hold of everyone who moved to that part of the country. Some of his colleagues were still astounded that Jones had refused to even try it.

     “I know, Karl, but I still worry.”

     “You don’t have to, Colonel Jones. Good luck today, I’ll say a prayer for you.”

     Karl, Jones knew, was a Catholic, which to him sounded strange. He was used to associating Germans with Protestantism, but he still didn’t know much about the history of those Germans who had colonized the south of Brazil centuries before. Maybe they had been Catholics all along, maybe they converted in the predominantly Catholic country. He had the feeling that this would be his last chance to ask. He didn’t.

     “Thanks, Karl, we’ll need all the prayer we can get.”

     [continues]

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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 21:48:37 JST Paleface

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     Jones nodded and walked off, toward the gates of the launch base that had been grafted into the small town. The round-topped mountains there were of a hard blue basalt covered in deep layers of rich topsoil. They were also old as the ages, and no seismic activity had been detected there ever since people started watching for such things. That made the place, according to those in charge, perfect for an underground launch base. It had seemed to Jones an excess in caution at first, but now he knew better.

     He reached the main gate, little more than a block beyond the small park, and was quickly waved through to the elevator bunker. With a quick pause for a last look at the lightening sky, he stepped in and immediately felt the floor dropping from under his feet. The trip down took little over a minute and the capsule dropped him off a few paces from the briefing room.

     Most of the other pilots were already there, filling the rows of seats in the small arena. A large screen behind the stage showed a three-dimensional schematic of the Earth, centered on the south pole. Red covered everything up to around the thirty-fifth parallel, following an irregular border. It struck him as dangerously close.

     General Matthias was at the podium. The last pilots walked in right behind Jones.

     “Good morning, gentlemen. As you can see,” he tapped the thick line that marked the edge of the cloud on the screen, “the red smoke expanded another few hundreds of kilometers since last night, continuing the surge that started five days ago.”

     The pilots, seasoned and trained as they were, took in a collective breath. Officially everything to their south had been evacuated, but they knew many people had refused or been unable to leave. Their own town was supposed to hold only military personnel, yet many of the locals—like Karl—remained.

     [continues]

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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 23:33:51 JST Paleface

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     Sanjay and Daenerys exchanged looks of wide-eyed horror upon beholding the bare skin. This man was no Ally. He was a Resistor.
     
     Before either could speak, the Resistor stood up to his full height, drew back his trunk-like muscular right arm, and forcefully planted his fist into Sanjay’s face. Sanjay staggered backwards, falling against the back counter, and knocking plates, cups, and plastic bottled drinks onto the floor.
     
     “IT’S SIR,” he roared. He took a breath, and in a calmer tone added, “But you can call me Chad.”
     
     Chad tilted his head toward his shoulder and said in a low voice, “It’s in.” One second later, the lights in the café flickered, then went dark.
     
     Daenerys looked out the window. It looked like the lights on the rest of the street had also gone dark. She heard tires squealing, and a crash.
     
     Looking further into the distance, she saw a helicopter crash into a bridge and burst into flames.
     
     Chad’s heavy black boots pounded the ground until the Resistor reached the cafe door. Daenerys saw his broad shoulders and beard in silhouette as he paused briefly in the door frame. The back of his hoodie displayed a phrase in an archaic language that she did not recognize: “Deo Vindice.”
     
     Daenerys blinked. By the time her eyes flicked back open, Chad was gone.
     
     ***
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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 23:33:53 JST Paleface

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     A buzz in her pocket reminded Daenerys that she had not checked her exsomatic device for a few hours.
     
     Sanjay was beginning to lose patience. “Xir, I’m afraid you’ll need to remove your glove, Xir. Our reader is much less sensitive than the new ones.” The black-hooded Ally gestured at Sanjay with a rude hand wave to back away.
     
     Daenerys thumbed through the notifications on her exsomatic device.
     
     ALERT: MAJOR DAM BURST IN WESTERN FACEBOOK UNITY REGION. 20,000-30,000 ALLIES DEAD OR MISSING
     
     ALERT: RESISTOR OPERATIVES BREACHED CITY CENTERS; PLAN TO TARGET VULNERABILITIES IN OUTDATED HARDWARE TO DISRUPT UNITY NETWORK.
     
     ALERT: SERUM FOR VIRUS VARIANT XG21 HAS BEEN APPROVED BY UNITY CENTRAL AUTHORITY. ALL ALLIES MUST REPORT TO LOCAL HEALTH CENTERS FOR INJECTION.
     
     Sanjay’s voice was becoming increasingly loud and agitated, and Daenerys snapped her head up to see what was happening. The black-hoodied Ally was still hunched over the pay pad, and seemed to be intently focused on something.
     
     “I SAID,” Sanjay spat, “REMOVE YOUR GLOVE, XIR.” Sanjay grabbed the man’s glove at the wrist and yanked it down. Sanjay and Daenerys gasped at what they saw when his bare hand was exposed. In the fleshy part of the hand between the index finger and thumb, where the ID implant and tattoo were meant to be, was… nothing. Nothing.
     
     [continues]
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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 23:33:54 JST Paleface

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     As she trudged through the filthy streets toward her Team Labor Assignment, Daenerys’ attention was absorbed by the Ally speaking on the massive Unity News Network screen that hovered above the street. It was wonderful that the Unity Regions’ Central Authority had decided to place these screens in public venues in all the Unity Regions to make sure that everyone could be equally well-informed. Even though access to live-streaming had been declared a human right by the Continental Equity Council in 2032, there were still some Allies who lived only on their Universal Basic Income which was insufficient to pay for the cost of having the video feed delivered to their dwelling units. Daenerys sighed with resignation. So much work remained to be done.
     
     The Unity News Network speaker, Kardashia Kumar, was a female-presenting Ally with sepia-toned skin who was wearing a bright red skirt suit. Xer lips were boldly hued with matching red lipstick. In a chipper tone, Kardashia delivered news that Central Authority Leader Jayden Jiminez had decided was most important for Allies to know that day.
     
     As she plodded through the streets, Daenerys watched Kardashia calmly inform viewers that Netflix Unity Region Team Leader Malia Obama had been under fire since hacked photos emerged of her wearing a vintage, pre-Unity “Pride” t-shirt. An apologetic Obama defended her display of the pedophile-phobic-and transspecies-exclusive image, emphasizing that she felt the archaic symbol embodied her family’s heritage of promoting what, in less enlightened times, had been viewed as progress, and was not, as critics claimed, a promotion of hatred toward marginalized Ally groups.
     
     Next, UNN Arts correspondent Ming-na Ogumbawa excitedly announced that the K-Pop band P#ndaz00a was set to receive the best song award of the year, marking the first time such an honor had been granted to a trans-species trio. The award would be presented by music legend Ivy Blue Carter at the Cardi B Center for Fine Arts in Detroit, capital city of the Proctor and Gamble Region.
     
     Male-presenting ally Vladmir Al-Hazmi reported from the northwest that an angry, armed Melaninated Ally group continued to occupy a food distribution hub in the Walmart Unity Region. Ally Group leader Tyrone Randhawa was claiming that Team Lead Gunter Chen failed to provide adequate food rations to Melaninated dwelling compounds, while Chen blamed regional leaders for allowing the Unity Agriculture Authority’s armored food trucks to be seized by local gang members.
     
     [continues]
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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 23:33:54 JST Paleface

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     Another field correspondent, Mohammed O’Donnel, provided a report from the Blackrock Unity Region. This region—which some had once referred to as Appalachia before being zapped out of the habit—was a largely rural area, and geographically one of the largest of the regions. It was still plagued by pockets of people resisting Unity. When the Unity Regions had been established, some religious fanatics (mostly unrepentant Pallids, along with a handful of their Melaninite accomplices), had retreated out of the cities into mountainous areas that were almost impassible except on foot, taking with them only what they could carry. They had established walled homestead communities they called Freedom Forts. (Daenerys scoffed at the thought of “freedom.” Why would you want “freedom” if it meant living in a shed built from sticks, eating food you pulled out of the ground, completely cut off from electronic communications and entertainment?) Video footage obtained by drones indicated that the anti-Unity extremists had displayed remarkable resourcefulness and ingenuity, surviving fairly well so far using only indigenous resources to build shelter and grow or capture food. The fort residents had built small but sturdy homes, primitive water collection and purification systems, and pulley systems to shuttle various items quickly up and down the mountainside to their forts. Some had even fashioned art work, instruments and recreational equipment out of natural resources, all examples of feeble attempts to break up the monotony of their bleak existence.
     
     Obviously, the Freedom Forts could and would be stamped out, but dealing with the obstinate Unity Resistors had proven much more difficult than expected—a fact Resistors absurdly attributed to their Bronze Age Sky King of myth. In reality, it was because vicious infighting among the Unity Region Team Leads and bloody conflicts among various Ally Groups in the cities had thus far been of more pressing concern than isolated groups of Resistors. Because they had not yet become the central focus of the Team Leads, the Resistors had been left alone for a time to fester in their pitiful little forts. Daenerys had heard chat-room rumors that Resistors had been smuggling resources out of the Unity urban areas, and the UNN had reported that some of the deluded extremists meant to defeat the Unity Region Central Authority using guerilla tactics to sabotage infrastructure. It was comical, really—the idea that the state-of-the-art, fully unified financial and communications systems designed by the most diverse teams in history could possibly be compromised. And how could anyone think that these primitive, ignorant people could get in and out of the sophisticated city centers without detection, much less cause any kind of noticeable harm?
     
     [continues]
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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 23:33:54 JST Paleface

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     Arriving at her Labor Assignment fifteen minutes early as expected, Daenerys dragged her Bunker Bootz across the sharp steel grating at the entrance to the employee mud room, where she shook the ash off her overcoat and hung it on a hook.
     
     “Dani, Dahling!” cooed Sanjay. “Divine to see you! Now get your sweet derriere over here behind the register, the line’s almost out the door!” Sanjay wore fuschia chiffon and a pink mask with an ornate stitched pattern of gold. Swirling pink and gold earrings hung down on his shoulders, almost as low as the bottom of his neatly trimmed beard.
     
     “Coming, coming!” Daenerys reassured, scurrying to her spot behind register number two. Daenerys had been assigned to a food service establishment on the outskirts of the Wells Fargo Unity Region in the northeastern part of the continent. Pre-Unity, it had borne the pallocentric moniker “New York.” Though the name had been changed, the area remained the most important financial center in the Continental Unity Region. Daenerys liked knowing that she was working in proximity to this important place, even though her job—serving bottled soda, mixed coffee drinks and prepackaged snacks—was dull, repetitive and thankless.
     
     Daenerys spent the next few hours blending drinks and pulling food for a continuous stream of customers whose faces all blurred together in her mind. The snack bar where she and Sanjay worked was a dilapidated, primitive facility in which little had been updated since it was built in the early 2010s. Standing in the cramped space, she noticed her muscles became tense and achy, and an uncomfortable twinge in her bladder, and longed for break. The line of customers had dwindled, so she took up Sanjay on his offer for her to “Take five, Sweetie. Or take ten. You look beat.” After relieving herself, she sat down, knees even with shoulders, on a tiny metal stool behind the counter.
     
     She watched blankly as Sanjay plunked down bottles of soda and water for the customers, who casually waved their hands over the pay pad that was bolted onto the counter. Sanjay watched for the green light to indicate each customer’s chip payment had been validated, then smiled, “Just lovely. You are good to go, Xir.” Usually this was a quick process, but the current customer seemed to be holding up the line. A large, male-presenting Ally in a black hoodie was hunched over the pay pad, waving his hand back and forth over the sensor, but the blinking red light indicated that the sensor was not reading his chip. “Try again, Xir. A little closer to the pad,” instructed Sanjay, in a tone which Daenerys recognized as controlled annoyance.
     
     [continues]
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     Paleface (paleface@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Thursday, 13-Aug-2026 23:33:55 JST Paleface

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     The Last Soy Latte by Whitney Hall

     Daenerys stood with her hand on the inside knob of her apartment door. Face mask? Check. Book bag? Check. Bunker Bootz? Check. Her choice of foot protection this day was lavender, selected from an array of fashionable colors and patterns found on the hazmat preparedness aisle at Target. She had been in more of a marigold mood, but decided indulging her own fashion whims was less important than showing solidarity with her LGBTPSQ allies who (unbelievably, in the year 2049!) were still forced to pay for their own in-vitro fertilization, embryo rectification, and species or gender transition procedures in some Unity Regions. Smart phone? Check. Daenerys (of course) had an identification chip implanted in her hand, but had not yet been able to afford the implantable smart-screen stamp, so she still had to carry her exsomatic device for some purposes.

     Trudging down four flights of stairs in her heavy, acid-resistant boots, Daenerys’ mind was as blank as the pale, yellowing walls of the stairwell. After leaning her full weight against the thick metal door to open it toward the street, her senses were overwhelmed with smells and sounds. Sewage, chemical runoff, and food waste stench emanated from the sludge on the street, dulled but not completely blocked by her snug mask. Sounds from diesel engines and honking horns painfully penetrated her ears. If only the anti-progressives had listened to reason in the pre-Unity era, and passed the Green New Deal before it was too late! But the dominant Pallid regime had implemented short-sighted, selfish, and capitalistic policies, and subsequent generations were forced to live with the resulting contamination.

     Historically, Pallid culture had done so much damage. Cringing with shame, Daenerys felt the weight of the collective crimes of which her skin was emblematic. She had learned at Amazon Unity Region University that the guilt she bore was embedded in her DNA and that there was no available gene therapy to correct it. Though her debt to the Melaninated could never be fully paid, she was obligated by morality and by law to make every possible effort to mitigate the damage. Of course, she would have been happy to undertake the pallotype suppression exercises even without the threat of being fined or jailed. It was the right thing to do. And the medley of African, Indian, and Asian music that was softly playing at all times in her dwelling unit was actually kind of nice. If it kept her brain from falling into pallotypical mental patterns, which as a Pallid she would always be prone to do, well, that was a just a bonus. The small electric jolt that emanated from her implanted ID chip when Daenerys used archaic, pallocentric language (like referring to Unity Regions as “states,” a common habit of Allies who were old enough to remember life pre-Unity) had been far less pleasant, but by now she had mostly purged herself of the forbidden terms, so it was no issue.

     The reparative equalization fees were another contribution Daenerys was happy to make. As the first head of the Department of Reparations, Secretary Ocasio-Cortez, had explained many years ago, Pallid slaveowners had kept one hundred percent of the product of Melaninated slaves’ labor, so allowing Pallids to keep twenty percent of their own earned income was comparatively generous. Considering how difficult it was for Daenerys to manage on twenty percent of her own earned income, she felt immensely grateful for the mercy displayed toward her by the Melaninated.

     [continues]