Liars' League

Frozen Futures by Rhys Timson

Frozen Futures MP3

Read by Tony Bell

Shortly after he turns thirty-five, Tony decides to have his head frozen after he dies. Frozen isn’t the right word. Vitrified is the word, but he’s not really sure what that means. His whole body would have been preferable, but it is too expensive. Besides, he is confident the future scientists will be able to regrow his body using the cells from his head, like a seed grows a tree, or else he will be granted a robotic body with titanium bones and wiry sinews, like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, the T-800, but with a human brain.

He doesn’t tell his wife, partly because he knows she will think he is crazy and partly because when he thinks about the future he doesn’t really see her. He sees hoverboards and flying cars and underwater cities and 3D video billboards showing Japanese women applying cherry-red lipstick. What he doesn’t see is his wife or his two children or a semi-detached house in Guildford with black mould on the bathroom ceiling and a dishwasher that gets clogged up with pieces of pasta every few weeks. And besides, his marriage vows said ‘till death us do part’.

How to be an Astronaut by Alice Franklin

How to be an Astronaut MP3

Read by Gloria Sanders

1. Read

You are young when you start reading books about space. Event horizons, the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt enter your lexicon long before you learn to spell the word egg-zill-er-ate-ing, acc-sell-er-ate or happy-ness. Your school doesn’t allow you to write in pen. They’re not even teaching physics. “My Very Easy Method Just Shows Us Nine Planets” was something you learnt when you were three, and when you were four, your learnt it was false.

By seven: “Pluto is not a planet, Miss,” you say.

“Yes, it is,” the teacher says. “Pluto is most definitely a planet. It says so in your textbook.”

The textbook is twenty years old, which means it’s thirteen years older than you, which means it is shit.

London 2025 by Wan Shinfah

London 2025 MP3

Read by Cliff Chapman

Others might remember things differently, but if you ask me, something changed after he started time-travelling. That's not to say there was a clean break between before and after. I think he took it up because he needed something new in his life, something to give him a bit of a jolt, to broaden his horizons – a lot of us need that these days – but I reckon that's when things started to get worse.

I remember the first time, he didn't even tell me. He said he was going to China, but not the Yangtze Valley in 1931. Maybe he wasn't going to say anything at all – he was always a very private person – but when he returned, he couldn't contain it.

"The crazy thing is how similar it is," he said, drumming his long fingers across the crumbs on our shared kitchen table. "Like, I know this sounds kind of dumb, but the past doesn't feel like it's the past. You expect it's going to be, I dunno, black and white or it'll somehow feel far away and faded and ... historical! ... but it just feels like this. Like you and me here."

Proxima Centauri by Oliver Parkes

Proxima Centauri MP3

Read by Greg Page

The toolbox clattered as Jim flung himself down the hallway. He had to fix the hole in the roof or else he’d run out of oxygen and die. Again.

‘Oxygen levels depleting. Please report to the impact site immediately.’ It was good to hear the computer again, Jim thought. When the debris struck the ship, the whole system had gone quiet.

He placed the sheet of metal over the hole and, gloveless, used the blowtorch to weld the two together. He only had a little training from Daniels, who seemed to have a toolbox permanently attached to the end of his arm. Jim had been a surgeon on Earth, so at least he had a steady hand. The pull of the vacuum wasn’t quite enough to drag him out into space as the ship’s gravity well had increased to keep him on board, but his hair still fluttered in the escaping air.

His concentration lapsed for a moment - he was thinking of the next step, whether to stop the fire himself or let the ship’s suppression system handle it - and he cut through his finger.

The Martlet by Abigail Lee

The Martlet MP3

Read by Lois Tucker

They all went for a walk on Ramsgate beach before lunch and found a dozen washed-up dogfish, dull-grey in death, with down-slit, gurning mouths like sad baby sharks, scattered over the otherwise unblemished, sunny sand. It took the gleam off the morning, and they retreated up the zigzagging sea-stairs where chalk fell from the paperwhite cliffs and people wrote their names on the concrete. Ceri’s work-friend Lo, exhaustingly playful, grabbed a piece and scrawled their names, the date and HAPPY 30th CERI! 

At the rundown clifftop café they all bought cheap icecream and chips: nobody wanted fish now. Gulls and pigeons, sensing bounty, attacked in waves, and Rachel noticed one scruffy pigeon lingering longer, more exhausted than the others. It had an angry pink bubblegum blob where one of its feet should be, and hobbled about with a theatricality which in a human would imply faking.