by submission | Jul 31, 2015 | Story |
Author : David Botticello
When the Nezzan ambassador abruptly walked out of a Council session, nobody really thought much of it. It was a time-honored method showing political irritation. Not that the Nezzan had ever used it before. They were a quiet species—fundamentally reasonable we thought—but quiet. Ideal citizens, really.
The Nezzan introduced themselves into galactic society in the usual way. First encountered by a long-distance cargo hauler that had wandered off course, they were eager to meet new races and participate in our burgeoning community. They joined the League of Free Worlds. They traded interesting variations on the most current technologies. They became active members of our polity, spoke at our councils, and joined even our most idealistic causes.
Usually, it’s the little cultural quirks that cause friction. One race worships the color red. Another hoards natural fabrics “because they’re fuzzy.” Every so often an ambassador gets offended, often as a political ploy, and then there’s an apology, some commiseration over Illyrian wine, and an economic concession. The affairs of state go on.
The Nezzan fleet attacked exactly as their ambassador’s shuttle debarked. We checked. The offensive was cold, strategic, and planned in alarming detail. But the Nezzan were never the most powerful of races; with only moderate technology and a below average birth rate, their ability to wage war was nothing special. To be sure, they caused serious damage to a few worlds—the attacks were particularly unpredictable, and therefore, effective—but the Nezzan never had any real chance against our Coalition Fleet.
We sent messages. What grave offense had set the Nezzan on their murderous course? The Nezzan gave no response. We sent envoys, but they were turned away at the edge of Nezzan space. So we turned inward to our own resources, but our great scholars and xenologists just shook their heads and shrugged. The Council voted to send Senior Mediator Drelax to search for answers and seek out peace. He made it past the border by virtue of his venerable reputation, but then sat daily in a conference room, in the finest government building of the largest city on the Nezzan homeworld, alone. It was not until the last day of his visit that Drelax was joined by the Nezzan’s most esteemed ambassador, Nax Nioryl. He, too, said nothing. Nioryl perched on the edge of the table and smiled pleasantly, implacable as a neutron star. After an hour of Drelax’s entreaties—begging for peace, or armistice, or at least some measure of explanation, the defeated senior mediator rose to leave, turning to Nioryl for one final question: simply, “Why?”
The Nezzan ambassador stared back wordlessly.
Still, we finally got an answer, of sorts. Two days ago a Nezzan heavy cruiser parked in low orbit over a primordial world deep inside the League’s territory. It deployed a plasma cannon of alarming scale and magnitude, carving intricate lines of ancient Nezzan calligraphy into the crust of Colmar Prime. As we gaped at the images coming in, great glowing scars in the planet’s the now-boiling surface, we realized this was Ambassador Nioryl’s response. Loosely translated it reads:
“Why? . . . Because life grows. Because gravity pulls. Because the stars burn.”
by submission | Jul 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : William Ovide Richardson
On a clear day, the tower was a perfect filament of white, stretching from its mile-wide root before you to its faded terminus directly over your head.
The human mind is not accustomed to seeing straight lines at such massive scales. It interprets them as curves, and since the tower was 35,000 kilometers long and perfectly rigid and straight, it seemed to hang overhead, as though before it was lost to sight in the haze of the atmosphere it bent at the end like a light standard. To a conventional mind, unaccustomed to such counterintuitive sights, it could be as jarring as the view from the inner surface of one of the larger Stanford Tori, which seemed like an arch over a curved strip of solid ground, punctuated at the noon position by a luminous suspended cylinder that seemed to float weightless, and which the mind would simply not allow to be as massive as it actually was. The brain was trained and evolutionarily predisposed to understand ‘up’ as a place where incalculably huge things simply didn’t hang like that.
If you stood in front of the tower, that bizarre and disorienting apparent curve would confront you, and several thoughts would come to your mind unbidden. The first you might dismiss as hackneyed and obvious: this was the tower of Babel. It was a monument to human arrogance and hubris and God or nature or chaos or whatever would make us pay for it. Those who laboured for the consortium at all strata, from executives to lawyers to engineers to migrant labourers, would tell you that whatever your beliefs, that thought was perfectly normal. Some of them even believed it.
The second was sheer awe at the scale of human potential. We fight. We forget our lessons every generation, and most of us never learn them at all. We succumb to superstition, incompetence, and the endless blights of stupidity and mean-spiritedness. Nonetheless, this. Somehow we can achieve Olympus, Pedestal, Canaan, Luna, and the utterly mindblowing Tower and the masterstroke of political organization of the Consortium.
Once those thoughts crossed your mind, you would turn, because knowing what was there, you’d have to turn to look after your mind processed the second thought. The idea that the Tower Consortium was a miracle would necessitate it. You’d turn to see the airbase, operating military aircraft around the clock. Beyond that, warships passed, and in the seaport, the derricks of the shipyard turned and swung where the massive landing craft, fully equipped for long-duration seabasing, underwent construction and refits.
The scale of the operation was staggering, of an order to impoverish superlatives, and so was its opposition. Newton’s laws are, of course, immutable. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If some optimistic segment of humanity decided to buck the dark-age warnings of the fearful and build a tower to the stars, then those who thought any of a thousand contrary things–either that we should be satisfied with our God-given dominion, or that we were testing God’s (apparently finite) patience, or that we ought to simply read the stories bronze-age nomads wrote, or whatever else– would come together to tear it down, bound by the basic laws that govern the motion of everything from events to baseballs to force their own prophecies to come true.
And so, war. No more justification required. No more explanation needed for the now constant air, sea, and space battle being waged mere hundreds of miles away from where you now stood. The Consortium’s superiority was incontestable, but it was limited in manpower, while its enemies were legion. It was only a matter of time until this stroke of human genius came tumbling back to Earth, incomplete. Something had to change. Humanity had to improve; we needed to be objectively better.
That was a project much larger and far more daunting even than the Tower, and it was already underway.
by submission | Jul 29, 2015 | Story |
Author : Dominic Constable
Jacob stood in his garden. The sky was clear and the sun cast it’s early morning, summer rays across the long strip of grass where the clover had taken hold, it’s white flowers, scattered across the green vista. He could hear the hum of the bees and see the glowing green of the leaves.
Jacob had not slept well and felt tired. He had worked into the early morning. A few turbulent hours of sleep later he stood waiting for the rays, like the trees. Now the warm finger tips massaged his naked torso, the heat welcoming and alluring. He carefully ran his forefinger along the inside of his left wrist, triggering the implants.
Like a mass of dominos collapsing simultaneously, small, square scales erupted across his back, that he turned to the sun. The wave of solar panels, each one revealed as the skin above them became translucent, flickered orange and then blue in the sunlight as the multifaceted metal caught the solar rays. Jacob twisted his back and the solar cells moved with the stretching, flexing with the muscle, echoing the shape of his back, an integral part of his body.
The energy surged through Jacob’s form and the late night fell away. He could feel the tiredness in his aching limbs evaporate, the fuzziness in his mind clearing. He let the warmth surge through his body and couldn’t stop, the solar energy was addictive, but just when he felt like he could stand there all day the inbuilt failsafe triggered and his skin returned to normal. He signed and turned to walk back to his office. The company had paid a lot of money for him to worked extended hours.
by submission | Jul 28, 2015 | Story |
Author : Cheryl Wood Ruggiero
You’re right. I really should not have touched it.
I certainly know better. My mother always told me not to touch odd things I found in the woods. I told my own children the same, and my grandchildren.
But it was so shiny. And so smooth. And when I touched the green fallen leaf it lay on, it quivered like a quarter-sized pool of mercury. I had to touch it. I just had to.
And of course, it spread itself up my finger, which only looked silver plated for about half a minute.
I don’t feel any different. Haven’t I always had the smooth complexion of a young girl? Very smooth. Almost luminous. Haven’t I always been able to pour myself under leaf litter, around the fruiting stalks of fungi and rise up again into my beautiful body a mile away? Haven’t I always absorbed the dead detritus of the earth and dead skin cells of my fellow humans as I touch them? Haven’t I always been a vital part of the food chain?
You think I’ve changed? You’d rather I didn’t touch you? Oh.
by submission | Jul 27, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
Late afternoon in Drake Park. In the red-orange light of the setting sun, he walks down the path towards the footbridge and pauses. Should he cross the river or turn and walk along the… A bicycle blur brushes by him and swoops onto the footbridge, barely missing a woman and toddler. Instinctively, before the man is out of range, he pulls a pistol from beneath his jacket and fires two quick shots. The rider careens onto the railing and falls into the river, sinking out of sight.
There had been no warning, no bell, no “coming by on your left.” What if he had turned and collided with the bike. And, and the sign said “Please walk bicycles across bridge.” And the mother and child. He had to do it. It was a righteous act, he thought to himself.
Aware of people screaming and running away and a police woman shouting, “Put the gun down or I’ll shoot,” and aware that he is more responsible than the cyclist for upsetting the perfect calm and beauty of Drake Park, he presses the button on the strap of his backpack.
An explosion of bright white light and wrenching metallic sound give way to another quiet afternoon in Drake Park. The cyclist continues across the footbridge, scattering a few more pedestrians before darting onto a side street. As the mom and toddler pass by, the child extends a lollipop in her sticky hand to offer him a lick. He smiles. It doesn’t bother him that in this reality the cyclist went unpunished, because in another he paid, he paid for…
No longer distracted, he decides to turn away from the bridge and circumnavigate the park. But something is different. There is no artillery piece. Whoever had it installed in other realities had not done so in this one. Every reality differed from the one years ago when he first tried out his invention. He leans against his favorite pine tree and remembers when there were houses on this spot, or ashes up to his armpits from a volcanic eruption, or the vacuum of space where the park and Earth should have been. He had gasped for air and pressed the button and thrown up blood. A man on a bicycle had stopped to give aid and a police woman called for EMTs.
Lost in thought, he and the park have been overtaken by evening. From his dark vantage under the tree he sees a man and woman struggling. She screams, the man wrestles her to the ground, another man intervenes, the two men grapple. He pulls his gun but can’t shoot without risking… Then, an open shot, the muzzle flashes twice. One man runs away, the other staggers.
He staggers, dropping his gun. His chest is on fire. He and the other man fall to the ground. He knows instantly what has happened. In this reality he had not invented the machine. He had seen a woman in trouble and had… the overwhelming pain pushes all other thoughts aside. He feels the warm blood gushing out, covering him, washing away his…
The other him, surrounded by people, the police woman pressing her hand on his chest to stop the bleeding, the sirens coming ever closer. The two men expire and fade away, leaving only pools of still warm blood as evidence that they ever existed on this fine summer evening in Drake Park.
