by Duncan Shields | Aug 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’ve stabbed deep into the envelope around the white dwarf sun at the center of this solar system. My gravity repellers are maxed. I’ve skimmed the perihelion right in the onionskin. I came in at .75c and the slingshot here has nudged me just past full light. This experimental craft is performing perfectly. A silver arrow of flexible diamond called The Needle. The seventeen thrusters that have burst-accelerated me across a fifth of the Milky Way to end up here have all been discarded behind me like Fibonacci-spaced buoys. I was by all accounts the fastest human-constructed artifact in the universe.
I am seven miles away from the surface of the dwarf and here I will stay.
I can look up from my cockpit and see the whorls and radiation of the star like a static, unchanging borealis. My ship’s cabin protects me from the effects as does my hubris.
I have found out what happens when a ship with mass goes faster than the speed of light. Caught by surprise, physics found a mutually agreeable solution that I have not found agreeable.
The moment I hit 1.0000001.c, all of my control panels stopped. They didn’t turn off. They just stopped. Anything that oscillated froze in mid strobe. My shuddering, screaming, deafening ship became silent. Oddly, I am free to move about. I can touch everything in my cockpit but I cannot move it. It’s like I am immersed in a three-dimensional photograph.
I am a fly trapped in an amber bulb of time. Why my consciousness has been permitted to remain alert is a mystery. Perhaps something to do with Schrodinger and perception. Even though there will be no outcome, there needs to be an observer.
The folks back home are waiting for telemetry from my ship. By my viewpoint, they will always be waiting.
I have been here for six days so far. My ship has not moved forward and I have not run out of air and I’m felt no hunger or thirst. I seem to be destined to remain here. In a few years, I suppose I’ll find out if I’m even aging at all.
If I’m caught in a loop, it’s a loop too small for me to detect. I won’t go forward. I won’t go back. I have been put ‘oh hold’ by the universe’s laws.
I wonder how many alien astronauts dot the border of light with me, strung out across the galaxy like doomed fireflies in jars.
Perhaps when the universe ends and physical laws break down we will all be set free to complete our parabolas.
Until then, my orbit is not done. My orbit will never be done.
by Clint Wilson | Aug 20, 2013 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The team signaled goodbye to the assembled early humans. The tribe of twenty-three men, woman and children stood there in their animal skins. Many of them held the new tools. All of them now held the knowledge that had been passed on to them in the past four months.
Professor Smith would miss his subjects dearly. He had grown not only to care for them greatly but had come to think of them as family. It was the same with the other six researchers. There had been one more traveler when they arrived in the spring but a saber-toothed tiger had seen to her demise.
There was a flash of white light and then the early humans stood once more alone in the vast unscathed world.
Inside the machine the researchers all stood looking at one another. They remained silent during the twenty-minute time transfusion. They all knew well enough what they had done. The results of this experiment would be permanent as they all hoped to greatly advance the technology of the human race within their own lifetimes. The real mystery was what they would find when they got back home.
They would land less than a nanosecond after their initial departure; to witness the alternate future they had now created by introducing so many technological advances to the once uninformed bipedal creatures.
The humming of the wormhole engines wound down to a halt and the blackness outside the windows lightened once again to reveal the year 2013. And what a year they encountered!
All the roads seemed to be covered in a hard cement-like substance. Strange sleek horseless carriages raced by, traveling at least thirty or forty miles an hour. And the buildings, some of them reached ten or fifteen stories high!
The travelers huddled together behind their tinted glass. Never before had they witnessed such marvels. All of them, including Professor Smith, silently wished for their old slow world and simple architecture, with structures that rarely reached higher than two stories, and hand painted signs that didn’t light up. This was going to take some getting used to.
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by Julian Miles | Aug 19, 2013 | Story
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They say that a man who seeks revenge should dig two graves, one for his target and one for himself. I dug two hundred and seventy-nine.
Into two hundred and thirty-seven of them I put all that remained of the inhabitants of my home town, Padgest. I had to guess which bits belonged to whom toward the end. The two hundred and thirty-eighth is Karen’s.
Filling the next forty has taken me six years. Six years to track down every member of the Twenty-Third Special Operations Commando, who turned my home into an abattoir during the dying days of the ‘Endless’ Empire. They went their separate ways after the war, slipping anonymously back into the newly-freed populations as their training had taught them to do.
The first squad ran an adventure holiday company on Eridanus. My quest for vengeance nearly ended there. Eight-to-one odds, only offset by the fact that they had all gone to seed quickly, partying hard with their customers. I shipped their bodies home in a freight container.
The second squad was ruling the planet of Haberdesh. I had to start a rebellion to get them and only salvaged a suitcase full of remains to bring back.
The third squad had become bounty hunters. I realised that my need to look them in the eyes as they died would get me killed, thus personal vengeance ceded to practicality and I sabotaged their ship. I brought their frozen bodies home strapped to the outside of my hull like sculptures.
The fourth squad came after me. It was inevitable that they would keep in contact with their former comrades and work out that someone had declared open season on them all. I spent eight months in hospital after the month-long running battle with them, wading through the stinking swamps and blighted mires of Kelsige, relying on a native crossbow as the planet’s corrosive atmosphere destroyed their kit and removed their advantages.
The command squad split up while I was in hospital and went to brutal lengths to conceal their tracks, forgetting one thing: a trail of bodies is easier to follow than a trail of transactions.
I found them all and dealt with them one at a time. As I didn’t have their training, I had to improvise: hiring a truck to crush a coffee shop, dropping a skip on a stationary car, using a tourist submersible to sink a yacht, using home-made bombs to cause an avalanche, a rockslide and a bridge collapse.
The former leader of the 23rd SOC retreated to a hunting lodge in the mountains of Tarkerut. He used all his skills to make the place lethally inaccessible. So I used mortar bombs filled with Charo musk to paint the walls and roof. Charo are voracious and look like the furry bastard spawn of lampreys and cockroaches. He tried to stop the infestation I attracted and died very badly, if the screams were anything to go by. I had to wait two months to retrieve his remains.
Today I filled his grave and walked across the blue grass meadow to where Karen’s mound lies next to the only empty grave. I sit on the edge of the open grave and tell her about the last death while I finish my champagne and cyanide. Then I check the deadfall holding the earth back from the grave.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
Next to my girl, forever to keep
Come judgment day or ending times
The guilty have paid for their crimes.”
The darkness washes in as I feel myself topple into my grave.
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by submission | Aug 18, 2013 | Story
Author : Bob Newbell
The crew of the starship looked at the strange yellow star on the viewscreen. The interstellar vessel's enormous magsail was slowly decelerating the vehicle against the star's solar wind. Soon there would be a series of aerobraking maneuvers carried out around some of the system's outer planets to further slow the vessel so it could ultimately insert itself into a stable orbit around the third planet, a world called by the indigenous population “Earth”.
The captain turned away from the viewscreen and looked back at a squat transparent cylinder at the back of the deck. Inside the cylinder, suspended in clear fluid, was a crab-like creature with a translucent red exoskeleton. The captain looked down at his hands. Five digits, one of which was opposable. Ossified endoskeleton. Skin. “I'll never get used to this,” he said.
His first officer, who appeared every bit as human as the captain, walked up and stood in front of the adjacent cylinder that contained a similar crustacean, his own original body. “It can be reversed,” he said. “Won't take as long to get our brains back into our original bodies as it took to grow these alien ones.”
A sound of disgust came from the other side of the deck. The pair turned to see the third member of the crew holding a receptacle of water. His chin was wet.
“Still haven't mastered drinking fluids?” asked the captain.
“I can do it, but…”
“But?”
“It's quite disgusting,” said the navigator. “Pouring liquids into an orifice. And I won't mention the further exigencies of this body's metabolism. I really question if the First Contact Committee made a mistake in not simply allowing us to contact the humans in our native form.”
“Don't forget that our primary mission isn't so much contact as reconnaissance. We've learned quite a bit about the humans from their audiovisual transmissions. But the Committee wants much more detailed information before we are authorized to formerly contact the Earth people's leaders. In our original bodies we wouldn't survive long on the surface of their world, let alone be able to surreptitiously assess whether formal diplomatic relations would be advisable.”
The navigator nodded, itself an odd gesture, he thought. “What about the personas we will be adopting? One would think if we walked among the humans as leaders of commerce or high practitioners of science or of religion we would be able to more efficiently complete our mission.”
“Hundreds of thousands of hours of the audiovisual signals from Earth were analyzed,” said the captain. “It was only after much discussion and debate that the First Contact Committee made its decision. We must have confidence in both the Committee and ourselves if we are to be successful. Our species and humanity may well be the only two intelligent races in the galaxy. We cannot afford for an instant to forget the importance and seriousness of our mission.”
Bolstered by the captain's speech, the navigator immediately placed himself in the mindset of the human character the Committee had chosen for him, a role he had studied and practiced so he could pass unnoticed among the people of Earth.
“I was a victim of soicumstance!” the obese navigator, his head shaved down to stubble, said pleadingly to captain who immediately slapped him across the face.
“Hey, let 'im alone!” interjected the first officer whose hairline receded back to a shock of hair.
“Oh, a wise guy, eh?” said the captain, his brow furrowing under his dark bangs as he poked the first officer in the eyes with his fingers.
“Nyuk nyuk nyuk!” said the navigator.
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by submission | Aug 17, 2013 | Story
Author : Joshua Ginsberg
Jeff sat at a circular table in the cafeteria, going through some of his data captures and interviews. It was an annual assignment – covering the oldest high school tactical combat drone rivalry in the country. Both schools had fallen to a Tier II ranking over the past decades, which meant carving some activities and programs out of the curriculum, but the drone teams were a major alumni draw and kept the corporate sponsorships coming in, which meant that Jeff could count on at least one story each year for a long time to come.
He saw the drone Capitan, Kit and his second come out of the lipid line with the left sleeves of their white shirts rolled up to expose the holotats on their biceps – streaming alphanumeric text alternating between forming the shape of a missile and the shape of the school’s initials.
Kit and his second stopped beside another, much smaller student and looked down at his open-toed shoes. Kit suddenly recoiled in disgust, pushed the smaller student’s tray down with a clatter, spat at his feet and then glared down into his gray eyes.
“Get outta here, you quad freak.” He hissed.
The other student stopped, contemplated collecting his lunch before decided better of it and headed towards the bathroom to wash his light grey shirt which had become stained with some sort of juice plasma.
Jeff tried to keep writing but he suddenly became aware of a burning itch on the toes of both feet that he couldn’t ignore. He put away his notes and followed the student into the rest room. Through the sliding doors, he heard muffled sobs coming from one of the stalls and gave it a quick rap. The sniffles subsided.”
“Hey, you ok in there?”
Jeff, pushed the door open a crack.
“It’s not my fault,” a pathetically small voice said.
“I know. And I’m going to tell you something. I do a lot of research and it turns out that for the past ten years more than 50% of new births are quadriphilanges.”
“So…?”
“So you’re not the freak. The quints are. They’re the evolutionary knuckle-dragging anomalies and you’re the future, kid.”
“Great, so maybe in another generation the odds will even out…” He stopped to blow his nose.
“It won’t take that long… But in the meantime…” Jeff took off his shoes and bent down, clasping each of his pinkie toes for a five count until the adaptive cybernetics detached from his feet leaving just the small lump where a fifth toe never grew. “…you’ve got these.” He put the false toes in his palm and extended it through the slight opening in the stall. The detached digits continued to flex and writhe in his hand like fleshy caterpillars.
The kid opened the door all the way, his green eyes wide in disbelief. “No way! But, wait. I thought they were banned?”
“Yeah, well sometimes we even the odds ahead of evolution. Here, I’ll show you how to put them on.”
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