by submission | Aug 31, 2010 | Story
Author : Andrew Hawkins
The meeting was in a small stale office of the Pentagon, the two crisp suits shifted in their seats as I came in. I was tall clean shaved in a comfortable cream jacket, silk shirt, tie and custom leather shoes worth more than minimum wage makes in a year. They looked at me with uncertainty, no doubt I defied their expectations.
I opened with confidence, catching my interviewers on the back foot “Good afternoon, I am Mr Ross, you would be Agent Adrian Cole and Agent Maria Fernandez, shall we begin?”.
Adrian was hesitant but to her credit Maria took me in her stride, she must have been a few years older than her partner, clearly the more experienced of the two.
“Of course Mr Ross, now I just want to make certain you know what’s involved here. Your duties will include…” I cut her off with a wave of my hand, damn I love freaking out these Yale types.
“Agent Fernandez, I am perfectly aware of what is involved, the documents on the project were quite comprehensive. You are already aware of my previous employers, so let me cut to the chase. Finding highly trained government agents with high level access is easy. You can throw a brick in DC and hit a dozen. I have Graceful level clearance, two grades above your own. I am certified to know national secrets that would start wars if they got into the wrong hands and I have 20 years with a flawless record for my tact not to mention intensive torture resistance training with the US Marines and the British SBS, I am a rare commodity.”
I slid a crisp white sheet of paper across the table with a 6 digit number on it and relished the looks on their faces.
“Finding janitorial staff with the same clearance is significantly harder, hence my fee. Trust me Ma’am none of those suits will be willing to clean up alien substances off the laboratory floor or unclog the toilet that the Head of Project 12 was using yesterday and your average cleaning staff won’t be able to keep sufficiently quiet about the work involved or be able to spot a class 1 bio-hazard leak. I think you will find my services and record for discretion are well worth my fee.”
Agent Cole scowled in silence, but Fernandez simply nodded.
After a long pause staring at the number she met my gaze “Your fee will not be a problem, It will be a pleasure to work with you Mr Ross.”
by Duncan Shields | Aug 30, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Newton left us a gift. Tesla wrapped it up and Hawking put a bow on top. It was the brilliance of Dr. Panaura that opened it for the whole human race.
Dr. Panaura had found a way to trap energy and shape it. Using accelerator kilns, she’d bind the light with the electricity. By using a series of ceramics and mirrors, she’d weave the energy into a tight overlapping grid. The waves would move in a pattern that generated their own power through recursive timestreams.
Physical relationships warp at higher velocities. Anything with appreciable mass cannot be accelerated to lightspeeds.
In effect, she’d made plates of invisible energy that borrowed energy from past versions of themselves. She knitted light into primitive jointed garments.
The armour tapped into the missing seventeen per cent of the universe. It was a marriage of Newtonian physics and the unified field fueled by funneled electricity.
It worked on a universal scale. It stole kinetic energy but weighed nothing. It was bulletproof in the same way that a planet was. Any force applied to it was absorbed.
It could be worn as an invisible suit of armour that nothing could penetrate.
She would be hailed as a savior later. Any industry that needed a hard surface would benefit immediately. Impossible architectural masterpieces would blossom. The military would gain invincibility. Hard materials would become possible with no natural matter being used.
She never lived to see any of it.
That first suit of armour that she tried out on herself didn’t have any airholes and the generator pack was on her belt, trapped inside the form-fitting field with her. The fields surrounding her hands couldn’t penetrate the shield around her waist to press the deactivate button.
No one knows what she was thinking trying it out on herself like that. It’s hard to believe what a simple, stupid mistake that was considering her brilliance. Conspiracy theories abound that the military complex got to her and killed her so that she wouldn’t stand in the way of her invention being used as weaponry. No one knows. She suffocated there. Her assistants found her in the morning.
Since the energy supplies are theoretically infinite, she is still encased in that field, resting peacefully in her coffin.
by submission | Aug 29, 2010 | Story
Author : Fred Coppersmith
He calls her beautiful but he doesn’t mean it. He is in love with someone else.
He feels his hand stroke his wife’s back, hears himself whisper I love you, you know that, go back to sleep. He rolls over on his side towards the window. Through the half-opened blinds he can see the moon, full and round and orange, in the night sky.
He thinks of her, the woman in his dreams, waiting at the station, eyeing the watch he gave her as a birthday present. He imagines her there, waiting for the shuttle that will take her to Tranquility. She will be going on holiday to visit her mother. She has talked of almost nothing else for several weeks. The gray lunar mountains are just visible through the opaque shielding behind her, and the Earth, if she can see it at all, will hardly register: just another gray speck in the sky. No one lives there anymore where she comes from.
He feels himself fall asleep then, and when he wakes he does not tell his wife about the dreams. He does not tell her about the Earth, dead for centuries, or about the woman he is meeting at the station on the surface of the moon. He does not tell his wife how beautiful this other woman is, or how this world has become more and more like a dream. She would laugh, and then he would have to smile and say, you’re right, of course, I was only joking, what’s for breakfast? He would have to say, you know you’re the only one. He would have to say he loves her.
And he is growing tired of the lie.
by submission | Aug 28, 2010 | Story
Author : Jake Christie
While they made love, the world ended. Bombs dropped. The earth shook and split open. Tornadoes flung nations to pieces, and then tsunamis swept the land clean. By the time they were finished, everyone else was dead.
They lay there for a while without saying anything. She rested her head on his chest. He picked pieces of plaster out of her hair. The apocalypse had opened a small hole in the roof. Clouds of black smoke rolled by, occasionally revealing a patch of deep red sky.
She turned to look at him, her chin fast to his ribcage. “What do you want to do now?” she asked.
“Just lay here with you,” he said.
Somewhere in the distance something rumbled. Thunder, maybe, or more bombs. It was all the same now. She put her ear to his chest and listened to the smaller, more comforting rhythms of his heart. The earth shook once more and she dozed off as it rocked her to sleep.
She dreamed that the world hadn’t ended. She dreamed of plants growing in time-lapse, seasons changing. Children being born. The people of the world laughed and held hands and sang. She saw her family standing in a field, waving to her. The sun rose and set and everything was green and beautiful and alive.
She skipped through this world with the sun warm on her face, looking for him. But she could not find him. She stopped skipping and began to run. She ran through the green fields, over the cold rivers, faster and faster, always searching. Her feet left the ground and she flew through the clean blue sky, over the people, over the families, and she screamed his name but he did not answer. She could not find him. He wasn’t there.
She woke to the sensation of rain on her cheek. He pulled them aside wiped the water from her face with his thumb. It was gray from the smoke and the ash.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. She pressed her body closer to his, out of the rain. “I was just having a nightmare.”
by Patricia Stewart | Aug 27, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“Captain’s log, 6022.55. We’ve separated from the Command Ship and are descending toward the surface of Piscis Austrini C. The weather over the primary landing site is clear, so we’ll set up the blind as planned on an old lava field, approximately 1000 meters from the migration bottleneck. Per the mission objectives, we’ll observe the mandria herd for two days as they return from the birthing plains. Reconnaissance data from the drones indicate that this herd contains at least one million bison size creatures. We plan to capture a few live specimens to obtain statistical and biological data, including blood and DNA samples, assuming they have them. With a little luck, we should collect enough data on this trip to keep Earth’s Xenobiologists busy for decades.”
“Approaching the landing site,” announced the helmsman. “Touchdown in ten seconds.”
Three massive landing pads extended from the underbelly of the shuttle and locked into position. As they touched the surface, the ship skidded sideways before jarring to an abrupt stop.
“Captain, the penetrometer indicates that we landed on mud, not lava-rock. We’re at Zee minus one meter.”
“Move us to hardpan, Mr. Shikoku,” ordered the captain. “We don’t want to be mucking around in waist deep mud for the next two days.”
After several aborted liftoffs, the helmsman reported, “Sorry, Captain, she won’t budge.”
The captain unbuckled his harness. “Okay,” he said, “let’s pop the hatch and have a look.”
Crewmen Alpeton climbed down the ladder and prodded the ground with his foot. “It’s solid, sir,” he announced as he jumped onto the rocky surface. As he walked around the stub-wing toward the nose of the ship, he suddenly sank into the mud up to his knees. The mud instantly turned solid, trapping his legs. “What the hell! What is this stuff, some kink of cosmic fly paper?”
The ground began to tremble. In the distance, a nearby hill began to undulate. It started to move perceptibly closer. “A spider web would be a more accurate analogy” remarked the science officer. “If I’m interpreting the circumstances correctly, that approaching hill is the silicon-based equivalent of a gigantic Earth-spider. It must be capable of controlling the viscosity of this mud-like substance to trap prey. I estimate that it will reach our position in approximately two minutes.”
“Options?” demanded the captain.
“Our phasers will be ineffective against rock,” replied the science officer. “I recommend that we free the ship by melting through the aluminum landing gear struts. Unfortunately, we’ll have to amputate Mr. Alpeton’s legs above the knees.”
“Unacceptable,” snapped the captain. He quickly set his phaser to self-destruct and threw it as far as he could toward the approaching mound. The moving hill shifted its path and engulfed the whining phaser. Moments later, the size of the mound tripled as the antimatter power-pack detonated. The expanding hill then burst like a water-balloon, showering the area with fist size clumps of mud. The ship shifted slightly as the rock encapsulating the landing gear suddenly returned to the consistency of mud. Freed, Alpeton scrambled up the ladder and through the hatch.
“Preparing to return to the Command Ship,” announced the helmsman as he began manipulating the controls.
“Belay that,” ordered the captain. “We didn’t come to the cosmos to run and hide every time an alien creature says ‘boo.’ In fact, this planet has piqued my curiosity. After we complete this mission, we can spend a few extra days studying this amazing new predator.”
