by submission | Oct 26, 2008 | Story
Author : Phillip Gawlowski
The glitter of hyperspace was replaced with stars, as we crashed through the light barrier. Sensor input filled the screens, and the computer placed markers on the transparent steel.
“There.” Mike pointed at a small blip. “That looks promising.”
I nodded. “Yeah, we’ll start there, and then look at the two closest planets. The green first, the red one last. But first this blue ball.”
A strong storm tore at our ship’s wings as we made our way to the surface at a spot where we might find what we were looking for.
“Isn’t it strange, that the computer picked a place in the middle of ruins?”, said Mike.
“Yeah. But no matter what parameters we feed that thing, it always points us to that location. So, we’ll take a look.”
“Just to shut her up, eh?” Mike chuckled.
“Just to shut her up.” I grinned.
It must have been a city, once. A large one, too. There were towering ruins everywhere, making the approach more difficult than I liked. Especially with the wind, and now rain, too. Good thing that we could rely on the computer to guide us. I only needed to think about where I wanted to go, and the computer brought us there, correcting for atmospheric eddies.
I picked a nice, wide spot in the middle of the open place. “Larger than I thought,” I said.
“True. 850 acres, I guess. What do you think?”
“Give or take. C’mon, grab your suit. We are going out.”
Mike and I waited for the airlock’s cycle to complete. The atmosphere was breathable, but we hadn’t come this far to risk the mission on some fungus or bacterium in the air that’d kill us. And while the computers aboard the ship were sophisticated, they weren’t fully autonomous yet. I heard the hiss of the airlock through the membrane of my suit, and waited for the lock to open. A desolate, deserted spot vista greeted us, the ruins looming over us in all direction, like some memorial for a long forgotten people. I hesitated, and stepped outside, looking at the grey and brown soil. I doubted we’d find what we needed, but Mike carried the cryo-unit nonetheless.
We searched for an hour or two, until we found what we were looking for. With care we packed it into the cryo-unit, and watched until the unit’s diagnostic lights changed from red, to amber, to a comforting green. “Okay, let’s take off again.”
I nodded, and turned to follow Mike, until a sign caught my eyes. I could barely make out the script. It was old, and the alphabet was archaic. “Centr.l Park”, it read.
I looked back at the dying tree, whose leaves we were sent to gather, and hastened back to the ship.
by submission | Oct 25, 2008 | Story
Author : Mark Ingram
Seeeee? Timmy thought self-importantly, I told them he was real, and I was right.
His smile was ear-to-ear as he held the proof of the night’s happenings before his eyes. In his hands, he wielded an iron poker like a baseball bat; a viscous, black liquid—Timmy had never heard the term “ichor” before—now coated the metal shaft. He admired the oily shimmer of all the colors reflecting off the fluid from the lights on the tree—he pushed the girly word, “pretty,” out of his mind.
They told me he was just make-believe—they told me there wasn’t any monster. Timmy mentally rehearsed the story he was going to tell his parents: I knew he was going to look for me, so I hid behind the couch, he paused to cognitively pat himself on the back for being so smart, and then, when he wasn’t looking, I got the poker, and I hit him in the back of the leg, and then I hit him in the head, and then I poked him in the back, and then . . .
He stopped and realized he was beaming just like he was imagining he would be in the morning; this was, in his opinion, the most amazing story of courage and cunning he would ever divulge. His gaze returned to the crumpled mass near the chimney, and he knew the monster would plague him no more.
He has a stupid, fat face, Timmy mused, and stupid, red clothes, and a stupid, ugly beard. And he’s so fat and gross. He stared disdainfully at the corpse—too young to recognize that spitting on the body would accurately symbolize how he felt. For a moment longer, he watched the thick ooze seep out of the monster, turning the fuzzy ball on the tip of its conical hat—knocked to the floor in the scuffle—from white to black.
Timmy had been a good boy this year.
by Sam Clough | Oct 24, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
Out of the inhabitants of the world, Conrad was the trend-setter. He’d sparked off the craze for playing as gods when he’d discovered a cache of ancient texts. He’d painstakingly recovered audio platters from the less senile databanks in the cities. The six cities provided everyone with the power to create and destroy, to reshape the land according to their whims. No-one understood them, and most were rightly afraid at hastening their slow decay. Conrad, however, enjoyed prospecting for information.
Conrad casually adjusted his eyes to see into the infra-red. He was in one of the vaults underneath the southwest segment of the city of Suberesk. This segment had been dead for years: vault after vault of quiet, inscrutable machinery. Some seemed pristine, whilst others appeared to have started decomposing. Conrad had even found one vault full of natural florae growing quietly underneath an artificial light source.
In the next room, something caught his eye. A old-style holographic display was flickering in one corner, displaying the same fraction-of-a-second of animation over and over again. The projection was an abstracted human head, spasmodically twitching in a sort of half-nod. Conrad took the first action that seemed natural – he kicked the projection unit.
The animation sputtered through a few more frames, then began to play smoothly.
“Integrator online. On the next tone, it will be beat six hundred and six, subinterval twelve of interval sixty-two thousand. There are two messages waiting, marked for the attention of any and all citizens. Would you like to view them?”
“Yes, of course.”
“The first message was received forty-eight thousand, six hundred and twelve intervals ago. It has been altered for language, tone and content.”
The abstract head shrank into one corner of the display, and a second head appeared. Reptilian in appearence, it spoke in a series of choking hisses. The integrator spoke over it in a smooth voice.
“We have grown impatient, city-dwellers. Your cities have stalled our solarsystem and many others. You waste energy in a ridiculous and profligate manner. Your actions threaten the stars themselves. If you do not halt your activities, we will be forced to destroy you, even if it means destroying ourselves in the process.”
The reptilian head faded, and the integrator once more occupied the whole display.
“The second message was broadcast forty-eight thousand, six hundred and eleven intervals ago by Doctor Aki Munroe at Ichioresk. It is presented verbatim, but carries a strong/disturbing content warning. Do you wish to view it?”
“Of course!” Conrad almost shouted, captivated by the artefact.
Again, the integrator’s head shrank to one corner of the display. A young woman’s face appeared. She looked worried, and she stumbled over some of the words, as if choking on them.
“After long contemplation, the unified response to the coalition’s threats is relocation. This shift will take place at the beginning of interval one-three-three-eight-ten. We’re going to attempt to use the cities to project a frameshift field around the world. This’ll isolate us from the universe at large. Existence effectively ‘out of time’ will allow the city grids to tap any major source of energy in this universe or any other. From any point of time. If this project succeeds, we’ll have guaranteed our survival. Possibly at the cost of our culture, since and isolated world is doomed to stagnate. But we must try this. The alternatives are too horrific to contemplate.”
by Patricia Stewart | Oct 23, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“Meteorologists, you can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t vaporize ‘em. That’s what I always say,” bellowed Jose Vargas, Prime Minister of The United Countries of Earth. The large dark skinned Brazilian reached across his antique mahogany desk and grabbed a Cuban Cohiba from a hand carved cherry-wood humidor. He stuck one end imperceptibly into the desktop disintegrator then offered it to his guest, who waved a polite no thanks. “First of all,” he continued as he put the ‘guillotined’ end of the cigar into his mouth and lit the other end with a plasma lighter, “you guys figured out how to control upper level wind shear, and you eliminated all of the Atlantic and Gulf hurricanes. Without the hurricanes to draw out the excess heat from the tropical waters, the Gulf of Mexico heated up to over 130 degrees. That killed all the plankton and fish. Not to mention devastating the resort areas along the gulf coast.”
Professor Ichabod Palmitter, a slim, balding, middle-aged man squirmed in his oversized chair, which incidentally, had legs that were three inches shorter than Vargas’s chair, “Uh, with all due respect, Mr. Prime Minister, that’s not an accurate representation…”
Vargas cut him off in mid-sentence. “And then you created that mid-west weather grid in North America to disperse all of the supercell thunderstorms, so there wouldn’t be any more tornadoes. That idea was a winner. Lightning discharges decreased by 80 percent. Without lightning to convert gaseous nitrogen into nitrates, the soil became sterile. I’ll bet over a million people died of starvation because of that little brain fart.” He drew in a lungful of aromatic smoke and blew several smoke rings toward his office skylight. “And let’s not forget that ‘global warming’ fix you guys came up with. You took so much carbon dioxide and methane out of the atmosphere that you triggered a freakin’ ice age. New York City is still buried under a thousand foot thick glacier. So, Doc, tell me, what hair brained idea did you come up with this time?”
Palmitter nervously cleared his throat. “Uh, well, sir…ah…we think the best way to end the ice age is to release 50 million tons of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. They will destroy those pesky ozone molecules that block the sun’s ultraviolet light. The more energy we get to reach the Earth’s surface, the quicker we’ll begin to warm up.” He folded his hands in his lap, and grinned proudly.
Using his tongue and teeth, Vargas rolled the end of the cigar around in his mouth. The lit end emitted a corkscrew of smoke as it circled in the air. Vargas plucked the cigar out of his mouth using his thumb and middle finger. Then, he pointed his plump index finger directly toward Palmitter’s chest. His lips pulled back to produce an exaggerated, toothy smile. “Why… you… dirty… DAWG,” he roared. “I can’t believe it. Man, I guess I owe you guys an apology. That idea is absolutely brilliant.” Vargas glanced over at the organization chart on the far wall of his office and focused his eyes on the name of Alexander Roge, the Secretary of Global Environment. Hidden sensors interpreted his desire and opened a comm link. “Hey, Al,” he said as he lifted his large feet onto the corner of his desk, and crossed his legs at the ankles, “Get in here pronto. And bring your check padd.”
by submission | Oct 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Mark Ingram
He toyed with the hunting knife as he daydreamed; it gave his hands something to do. He was not much of a thinker, but tonight, he allowed his eyes to shift out of focus and his mind to wander . . .
What would we do if aliens came to Earth? Would they come in peace or war; would they already know all that we could teach them; would they want to help us advance our technology; would they get us off this mediocre, blue-green rock . . . ? Start at the beginning: war or peace? The result of war is obvious. We have barely set foot on the moon; they have traveled a gagillion miles to get here. Their technology is far superior to ours.
We would be crushed.
Depressing thought.
He lit another cigarette. He was on his third pack since sitting down, and his five-o’clock-shadow had turned into a three-in-the-morning-overcast. He scratched it and went back to his musings.
Suppose they come in peace? That would be astounding—and very un-humanlike of them. Let’s assume that—after all the formal greetings between the human and alien nations—no one side offended the other. Highly unlikely, but that too would be a breath of fresh air. If they did insult each other (which would be almost a certainty due to both parties’ ignorance of the other’s probably radically different culture), there would be bad blood. Bad blood leads to distrust, leads to prejudice, leads to discrimination, leads to bloodshed . . .
We would be crushed.
Right, anyway, so if they came in peace and we didn’t piss them off, there might be talks . . . or something akin. The world would know of them. Some people would welcome our allies, some would stay at a cautious distance, some would be afraid; it’s inevitable. But there would never be uniformity of opinions among humans. Some groups would always fear the aliens. Even among humans, hatred has lasted between nations so long that they fight each other because they always have. Palestinians versus Israelis. Chinese versus Japanese versus Koreans. Northern Irish versus Britons. No matter how tolerant a culture claims to be, someone—some nation, some state, some planet—will hold prejudice against what’s different. And some subset of that will act on it. Whether the reason is that they don’t like the way the newcomers look or dress, are upset by the visitors’ ignorant disrespect of a specific human culture, feel threatened by them, or have their own way of thinking—perhaps even their own theology—challenged by the aliens’ presence, some people will act out. It might be minutes or days or years after contact. Hard to pacify the entire world’s concerns forever. Violence will ensue. And violence leads to bad blood . . . leads to bloodshed . . .
We would be crushed.
May they never know.
And with that, he thrust his knife deep into the writhing mass on the table in front of him until it went limp.
