Veteran of the [CLASSIFIED] Wars

Author : Joshua Reynolds

VETERAN OF THE [CLASSIFIED] WARS

I/We are/am the last survivor. Hodge-podge helter-skelter jigsaw man/men/woman/women. I/We am/are not sure there’s anything left of me/us. I/We sit in this red, red room, alone with my/our thoughts. All of them. Swirling, stirring, whirling, whirring hummingbird thoughts of a thousand colors sparking and splashing. I/We are a brain in a bag of meat and bone, burned and battered, frail and dead. Wounds are all I’m/we’re made of. Machines keep me/us breathing. You want me/us alive. I/We am/are the last you see. The last of the atom babies.

I/We made sure of that.

I/We had to. It was the only way to win the War.

Eagle fights Bear. Hammer and Sickle fights Stars and Stripes. These and a thousand other implements ranged against each other in the mushroom’s shadow. Minds expand and unfold, blossoming like nuclear flowers and then they are clipped and caged, uprooted and replanted. The atom bomb gathers dust. The atom babies go to war. I/We fought for God/Queen/Country/Fatherland/the State/Uncle Sam…brains blazing like comets, neurons straining against neurons, minds clashing in the emptiness between seconds. Every minute a battlefield, every hour a campaign. Hooked into barracks like cattle, I/we fought without seeing, without hearing. I/We fought in our heads. Again and again and again. Cattle straining against cattle in the dark car, pushing but not moving.

The world rolled on but I/we was/were unaware. Little wars started and ended and I/we still fought. Because you commanded us to. Never ending. Minds were nearly snuffed as atom baby bodies-always weak, always sick-failed, but those white-hot corona minds could swim into others, making them stronger. Bigger. Better. And you saw and you smiled and you thought the stalemate was ended as they killed bodies and forced scattered minds to go, to funnel into one meat sack. A big, bad ballistic atom baby mind.

But the others did the same. And others after them.Until only a few were left, a few blazing brains where before there had been thousands. You consented to sublimate your atom babies to others, for the Big Push. Thousands to hundreds, hundreds to dozens, dozens to several, several became…

Two.

Only two. Two minds pushing and pulling. Two minds that cracked the sky and boiled the oceans, two minds full of thousands. Two minds. One failed.

I/We were the last. Wasn’t/Weren’t I/we? Or was/were I/we the first? Was this meat I/we wear the first or the last? Alpha or omega?

I/We can’t remember, really.

There’s only me/us now.

You want to know where I/we all went. Where the rest went…after. That’s why you keep us alive, now that the War is done. But I/we/us are all in here. Together again for the first/last time.

I/We are all on the same side now.

And it’s not yours.

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Subtle Influences

Author : Aaron Springer

“Of course we are not the first!”

These words were unspoken, and were in other ways communicated. No human alive would even understand the rough approximation. Sound waves were non-existent, and no mess of soft tissue and bone could begin to detect the subtle fluctuations in the quanta making up the exchange. This exchange is simplified down several orders of magnitude and has sacrificed the complexity and elegance actually portrayed.

“I have been studying their culture, and it is pockmarked with other such actions.”

The first being, who had no real name as such, gave what, to its race, would have been a disgusted snort. It did not filter through the nasal cavity, as the beings did not have noses. In fact, it had no face to carry a nose, no head to carry the face, nor body upon which to have a head.

“And how does this affect what we are doing?” said the first.

“No effect that cannot be corrected.”

The student was learning, thought the first being.

“Anything we do to this universe changes all manner of things. It is the nature of this reality. It adds flavor.”

The second being gave a deferential nod, although even the most advanced equipment on Earth would have barely registered the respectful neutrinos.

“Tell me of the previous influences.”

“Well, one was about sixty thousand of their ‘years’ after they first began to ripen to sentience. It appears that someone isolated two of them, male and female, and convinced them that they were special.”

Again, the first being snorted using gravity waves.

“Amateurs! Direct contact? Absurd! And what was the result?”

“Apparently, the being set out some simple rules, and someone else appeared and convinced them to break the rules. Elements of the resulting faith exist even now. They have been alternately victimized or become victimizers for close to six thousand of their years.”

“You see?” the first being waggled a finger equivalent at the first, “Such direct influence does nothing but damage. When dealing with an infant race, you must operate with the utmost delicacy. Direct influence is too blunt, too forceful.”

“In another incident, a female was made to bear a modified young. The youth, when it matured, led a small group of others around the country they lived in, performing acts of healing.”

“And, again, the results?”

“A ritual sacrifice, followed by two thousand years of warfare. Another sect, created by an intervention about five hundred of their years after the first, was led to believe the other was evil, and the two have been fighting since then.”

“Rank novices!”

The first being looked down on the small blue sphere. Or, more accurately, it observed instantaneously in almost every way possible.

All at once, several of the inhabitants looked up with flashes of pure insight.

Unlike previous interactions, this appeared as a group of ideas.

“You see,” said the first, lecturing to the second, “these subtle ideas will be mulled over in their biological brains. Some of the ideas will survive, and resonate within them. Over time, they will add their own flavor to the ideas.”

Again, the second gave a courteous spray of neutrinos.

“To what purpose?” it asked respectfully.

“The ideas will lead to their expansion beyond their own world, into the greater universe. Interaction with several thousand other races will flavor and mature them, make them full and round with wisdom.”

“And then?”

“Eventually they will rise to meet us, and then we dine.”

The second being wiped what could be called hands on what could be called an apron.

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Raindrops Keep Falling On The Dead

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Peter’s office was on the fifteenth floor of Landfall Tower. He spent a lot of time staring out of the floor-to-ceiling window, at the neat, ordered rows of caskets on the field around the tower. They were still a shocking white, even after a year of rain. His eyes drifted to the twenty-two caskets which were open. They were all full of rainwater. Peter’s eyes came to rest on his casket. He stood there for a second, then turned away from the window.

Scoutships had found five habitable planets. Five names were etched on the walls of Near-Earth. Five colonies had been founded, and had succeeded. Five vivid dreams.

The sixth colony was going to be even better. They were calling it Paradise.

It was going to be perfect.

Peter had been one of the one and a half thousand people tasked with setting up the bridgehead: constructing a city, mass driver, and orbital.

He had woken up in the rain, the graceful shape of Landfall Tower lost in a wall of fog. Stumbling, slipping in the mud, half-blind and frozen to the bone, he eventually made it to the sanctuary of the tower. The tower was the guts of the landing craft that had touched down on the planet, bearing the colonists with it. Once it touched ground, it had fallen apart gracefully, leaving one and a half thousand caskets arranged neatly on what was supposed to have been a sundrenched field.

In total, twenty-one other colonists met Peter in the base of the tower. A spattering of technicians of various disciplines, a single medic, a couple of agricultural engineers, a few soldiers, and Peter, a single bureaucrat. Among them was a young stasis technician. He spent the next six days out in the torrential rain, amongst the caskets which contained the other colonists.

On the seventh day, the tech killed himself. Before he did it, he scrawled a message across the Tower atrium.

‘They’re all dead.’

In the days after that, two more followed suit. A month later, the lone wirehead killed himself after the rain shorted the last of the robots.

The colony — they still laughingly called it that — survived. Food, clothes and materials for one and a half thousand could keep them alive and comfortable almost indefinitely. They didn’t move away from the Tower out of a sense of duty to the drowned field and the dead of their colony.

After ten years in Landfall Tower, with only seventeen people, and the constant rain for company, the survivors had all become quite settled in their ways. Some made tours of the caskets out on the drowning field, paying respects to each individual. Some started projects. Peter’s life was subsumed with keeping their little community together.

On the first morning of the eleventh year after landfall, three black ships punched through the clouds. They circled Landfall Tower like scavenger birds. Armed men and paper-thin androids leapt from the ships to the top of the tower. They swept downwards, through passages and hidden ways, moving soundlessly.

They found Peter in his office.

Three heavily stealthed androids seemed to fold out of thin air. One grabbed each of his arms, and another dropped to the floor, locking itself around Peter’s legs. He struggled against them, but got nowhere.

A uniformed man approached him.

“Peter Vyse, you are under arrest under the Colony Protectorate Act, for conspiracy to murder one thousand, four hundred and seventy eight members of the Paradise Colonisation Expedition. You will come with us.”

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The Oort Cloud Turnaround

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

The colonization vessel SS Godspeed was the first super-sleeper ship to leave the solar system. The 1032 human passengers, and 4000 or so assorted farm animals, were destined for the Gagarin settlement on Rigil Kentaurus II. The Godspeed was currently halfway through its 16 year journey when the command computer aroused twelve of its crew from suspended animation. The ship was about to initiate its thrust reversal maneuver, so that it could begin the process of slowing down. The procedure was relatively simple: shut down the engines, detach the massive meteoroid shield at the bow, rotate the two mile long cigar shaped ship 180 degrees, reattach the shield to the aft end (now the new bow), and restart the engines. The four powerful engines were mounted on the sides of the ship, and would be located behind the shield during the four hours it took to turnaround the ship. However, “nonessential” areas of the ship, such as the cargo holds, and the hibernation bays, would be “exposed” to the meteoroid field of the Oort cloud for almost the entire four hours. Relative to the sun, Oort cloud objects are essentially stationary, but at the ship’s current velocity (over 300 million miles per hour), objects pass through the ship in nanoseconds. Two holes, an entrance and an exit site, simply appear instantaneously. The task of the twelve crewmen was to disperse throughout the exposed areas of the ship to patch the holes as quickly as possible, and repair any transit damage. The computer would handle the actual turnaround.

Shawn Houck velcroed himself to the wall so he could put on his boots. “Not bad for eight years without shaving” he said as he rubbed his stubby beard. “Hey, I guess you heard, six people died so far.”

Ben McNamara secured his helmet, and drifted toward the hatch. “They estimated nine to twenty for the whole trip. So I guess six isn’t too bad at the halfway point. Well, unless you’re one of the six. Okay, I’m ready. I’ll meet you in cargo bay three.”

The two men were floating next to the crated farm equipment when the alarm sounded. Shawn released a canister of blue gas. “I got one,” he yelled as he saw part of the gas cloud migrate toward a small hole in the exterior skin. He fired his control jets and drifted toward the escaping gas. Ben went in the opposite direction. Both holes were patched in a few minutes, and the men joined up again. “Looks like we lost the transmission on that tractor,” Shawn said as he pointed toward the tiny spheres of pinkish fluid drifting out of a hole in a crate.

“Well, it’s better than seeing blood balls,” replied Ben with a hint of anxiety in his voice.

“Oh great,” Shawn replied. “You’ve jinxed us for sure. We might as well paint bull’s-eyes on our chests. Ah hell,” he remarked as he did a quick estimate in his head, “we still have a trillion miles of to go before we’re behind the shield again.”

“Remember we’re traveling at half the speed of light,” said Ben with a smirk. “You need to take space-time dilation into account. Add another 250 billion miles.”

The alarm sounded a second time. “Oh Great,” said Shawn as he released another canister of blue gas.

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Trust Your Doctor

Author : Timothy T. Murphy

Hurley sat on the examination table, naked to the waist, and sneezed for the umpteenth time. He reached for yet another tissue, his eyes watering, as he watched Dr. Mills flipping through charts and scribbled notes and rather pointedly ignored him. Shivering in the cold of the exam room, he finally broke the long silence, “Can I put my shirt on?”

“No, you may not.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m going to want to listen to your lungs again in a few minutes and because I’m extremely angry with you.”

“Hey look, just because you didn’t think they were ready for testing…”

“Clearly, it doesn’t matter what I think, does it?”

“All the tests showed that they were ready.”

“The tests were flawed, as I tried to point out.”

He sneezed again, blowing his nose loudly. “Okay, so I have a cold after the injection, proving that they don’t work, so why don’t you just say ‘I told you so’ and get on with the prescription, okay?”

A smug smile crept across her face as she tossed her clipboard on the desk. “Well, you see, that’s my point. They’re working perfectly.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your beautifully engineered medical molecular robots are doing their job just fine.”

She just stood there smiling at him with that infuriatingly superior manner of hers and waited for the inevitable question.

“Then how did I get a cold after I was injected?”

“You had the cold when you were injected, you simply weren’t feeling it yet. Had you been subjected to a physical before the injection, I could have warned someone.”

“Okay, but that still doesn’t explain why I still have it.”

“They were programmed to imprint on the first D.N.A. code they encountered upon injection. They were injected into your bloodstream.”

Again, she stopped and smiled like that would explain it all. He thought about it for a moment and it hit him. “Oh, crap.”

“Oh crap, indeed.”

“Are you telling me…”

“You are infected with a computer-enhanced virus.”

“So, no NyQuil?”

“Well, NyQuil hasn’t been tested or approved for use against the cyber-cold, but that certainly won’t stop you, now will it?”

“Can it kill me?”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, mind you, I’ve never encountered Robocold before, so I can’t be sure, but there is a possibility of rapid production of mucus membranes and other fluids interfering with the functions of your lungs.”

“Look, could we have this conversation in English?”

“You could drown on your own snot.”

“Okay, ew. What do I do?”

She handed him a dosage cup with two pills. “You take this. It’ll help.”

He downed the pills quickly as she picked up her phone. “What are you doing?”

“Calling the C.D.C.. You need to be quarantined.”

“What? No chance. I have to get to work on fixing this.” He stood and pulled on his shirt.

“I can’t let you out into the public. If your brand-new supervirus gets out into the general populous, it could kill billions.”

He strode over to her, towering over her and staring her down, despite the dizzy, unfocused feeling in his head. “I can’t let you do that, doctor.”

She held his gaze steadily. “I know. That’s why I gave you the tranquilizers.”

He started to ask what she meant, but the room spun, his knees gave out, and the room went dark just as his head hit the floor.

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