by submission | Sep 24, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
TRANSCRIPT OF THE FIRST OFFICIAL MEETING BETWEEN UNITED NATIONS SPACE AMBASSADOR JEFFREY CHATMAN AND AMBASSADOR VELDRIK-ORAN OF THE IMPERIUM OF ZETA RETICULI.
UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK, 15 JANUARY 2086
CHATMAN: On behalf of the peoples of Earth, it is an honor and a pleasure to meet you.
TRANSLATION ROBOT: Your greeting cannot be literally translated into your counterpart’s language. But I will try to convey the basic sentiment.
[ROBOT speaks to VELDRIK-ORAN in an alien language. The Zeta Reticuli ambassador responds.]
TRANSLATION ROBOT: Today, the people of Zeta Reticuli and the people of Earth are like prisoners in the same detention camp.
CHATMAN: What?
TRANSLATION ROBOT: That’s the closest translation possible in English. The connotation is that your people and the ambassador’s share a strong bond of friendship.
CHATMAN: Oh. I am confident that both our worlds will benefit from the foundation we build here today.
[TRANSLATION ROBOT and VELDRIK-ORAN converse.]
TRANSLATION ROBOT: Our feet are all stuck in cement.
CHATMAN: I beg your pardon?
TRANSLATION ROBOT: The ambassador shares your hopes.
CHATMAN: Oh. Humanity looks forward to learning about your people and their culture and history.
TRANSLATION ROBOT: My bank account is overdrawn.
CHATMAN: Huh?
TRANSLATION ROBOT: By this he means he lacks the means to express how hopeful he is of a cultural interchange.
CHATMAN: Ah. Would you be willing to join me in a press conference later and allow our journalists to ask you a few questions?
TRANSLATION ROBOT: The service at this restaurant is horrid.
CHATMAN: What?!
TRANSLATION ROBOT: The ambassador will attend your press conference. His expression implies that if one wants something done, one must do it for one’s self. In other words, he is willing to do this.
CHATMAN: Are you sure our conversation is being properly translated?
TRANSLATION ROBOT: Sir, both you and the Zeta Reticuli ambassador have radically different biologies, cultures, and histories. Translation under such circumstances is an art, not a science. I am trying to balance communicating what each of you is literally saying with rendering the translation linguistically and culturally comprehensible. Just a moment…
The ambassador says you must have gotten your clothes at a fire sale.
CHATMAN: I beg your pardon! This suit was a gift from my wife.
TRANSLATION ROBOT: Human beings are like a rash the doctor cannot treat.
CHATMAN: This is ridiculous. We need a different translator.
TRANSLATION ROBOT: I assure you, Mr. Ambassador, the conversation is being rendered as precisely as possible within the cultural and linguistic limits.
CHATMAN: Alright. Ask the ambassador if his people have encountered other intelligent life in the cosmos.
TRANSLATION ROBOT: Ambassador Chatman, I couldn’t ask that! Ambassador Veldrik-Oran would almost certainly interpret such a question as a lewd double entendre.
CHATMAN: That’s it! I’ve had it! I can’t do my job under these circumstances. Tell Veldrik-Oran he can take his diplomatic mission and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
[TRANSLATION ROBOT and VELDRIK-ORAN converse. VELDRIK-ORAN gets out of chair, walks over to CHATMAN and gives him a warm embrace.]
TRANSLATION ROBOT: That was very well received, Ambassador Chatman. Just a moment…
Ambassador Veldrik-Oran says…the light’s been green for ten seconds, for the love of God hit the gas pedal!
CHATMAN: What the hell does that mean?
TRANSLATION ROBOT: He wants to establish a warp gate in orbit around your world so the people of Earth and the people of Zeta Reticuli can visit each more easily. Congratulations, Ambassador Chatman! Your diplomatic mission is a complete success.
END TRANSCRIPT
by Julian Miles | Sep 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The spiders are watching me. Just like the flies, but cleverer. A fly can never be stealthy – except hoverflies, but they’re too difficult to control.
“James, come out. We know you’re in there.”
Of course they know. The spiders showed them. Eight furtive little legs with eight beady eyes on top, backed by a microscopic implant broadcasting on tightbeam back to a tiny receiver that runs the spider’s chaotic vision through a complex program that reduces it to something human eyes can comprehend.
“James, be reasonable.”
I started this. While all the other bio-augmentation projects worked on mammals, I went downscale. Insects are fascinating and many have a curious affinity for augmentation. Fair enough, the fleas were a step to small. But I learned a lot. So much that I had to start triple-layer, quadruple-key encrypting my notes. I had stuff they would sell their souls for, if they hadn’t mortgaged them already. Stuff so deadly I cannot even leave a hint of it.
“James, you need help.”
Help? Their kind of help will be torture and slow death. I’ll stay right here in my armoured underground lab. While I’m in here, my erasure programme continues. Woodlice with magnetic carapaces wandering through datastores; it’s good to know the harm I have invented will never escape.
“James, can we talk about your little friends?”
No, we can’t. I’m not stopping them. You will never know how to grow carapaces of depleted uranium or make weevils that can disable electronics. The secrets of the hornet grenade and the wasp that produces poison-arrow frog venom for its sting; ant reconnaissance swarms and beetles that spin monofilament lines guided by pheromones, all this will be lost.
A flicker of movement catches my eye, but it’s only a death-mantis taking out one of their watchspiders. The formula to the mantis’ lethal secretion is the first secret I destroyed. The only ones in existence are in here, keeping their spies out.
“Do you need food, James?”
They really think that I am engaged in some protest siege in the hope that the world will rush to my aid. The world knows nothing of me, never will, and will be far better off for that. My legacy shall be tales of a mad scientist and his multi-legged frankensteins muttered in the quiet moments at every hidden research centre worldwide. I cannot be taken, alive or dead. Imaging of my brain could give them enough to know where to start.
I am sitting on the finest improvised explosive device ever made. Three stage: biological, electrical and fission. I will die quickly, then my brain will be purged by an ampage not seen since Tesla suffered a lighting strike that boosted a test of his distribution field so much that even the ground glowed. Finally, a small but incredibly dirty nuke will make sure that whatever remains in here is unavailable to forensics for ten millennia.
I lift the mug from the watchspider I have let survive. It turns slowly until it’s pointing straight at the device, centred in the beam of the small spotlight I rigged up. Details can be hard to discern unless the subject is brightly lit and I’d hate for them to think I am bluffing.
“Captain Miller. I suggest that you start running. Three miles should be sufficient, unless you have implants, in which case I recommend five and a certain alacrity in getting there.”
by Duncan Shields | Sep 22, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Timecasting is a strange way to travel to the future. It ‘throws’ a person forward. In this case, me. I’ll be the world’s first temponaut soon. The scientists keep playfully calling me a ‘temp’ and they think it’s hilarious. If all goes well, I’ll be the first person to see the future.
By using a ‘time anchor’, they can nail a temponaut to one single here and now. It’s like putting your back against the elastic of a slingshot and walking backwards until it stretches tight. The further backward you walk, the further forward you’ll go when you relax.
The flow of time dams behind the person like putting a clamp on a hose and having the water build up behind it. After a few seconds, the time anchor turns off and the temponaut re-enters the timestream. The backed-up time behind them shoots the person forward. The longer the pause, the further into the future he or she goes.
You could also say it’s like dropping a huge weight on one side of a seesaw. Whoever’s on the other side of the seesaw will go flying upwards into the air but the seesaw itself stays where it is. The fulcrum of the seesaw is our present moment, and the temponaut is what gets catapulted.
Everything that goes up must come down, to use the seesaw metaphor further, and so the person will slow, pause and then reverse course back to our lab.
At that perihelion, that tip of the parabola in the future, the person can stay still long enough to take a picture and have a quick peek.
That person is me.
I settle in the timechair and give the thumbs up to the technician.
Time cannot stand anything going against its flow. The resistance increases exponentially. The most they’ll be able to hold me back for is five seconds. That’ll be enough power to shoot me one year into the future.
The scientist in the body condom hazmat suit off to my right throws the switch. My timechair immediately goes cold. The lab around me throws into reverse as I am held back. My vision develops a blue tint. I have the horrible sensation that my hair is reverse-growing back into my head and I hope it’s just psychosomatic. Every slows to a quivering standstill five seconds in the past and then…
SNAP I’m flying forward in time. The lab smears around me in streaks of light and pops of blinding, saturated colour like I’m watching every single frame of a year-long movie all at once. An orchestra of rattling and ambient noise builds to a rattling, banging crescendo. Just when I think I’m about to suffer from a full sensory overload…
It stops.
I’m hanging in a dark cavern. My nails, beard, and hair are a year longer. The lab has disappeared. There is a strong stench of ammonia. Stalactites dot the entrance to the cave and there is a low subterranean humming. Something glows in front of me.
It’s a tongue. The perspective flips and I can see that I’m inside a giant mouth. The glowing tongue darts out and touches my ankle. The whole interior of the mouth lights up like the ribs of a deep sea angler and I scream.
We’re not timecasting. We’re fly fishing and I’m bait. There must be giant creatures in the time stream that eat time travelers and I’m on the end of Earth’s first fishing line.
My last thought is that I hope the timechair acts as a hook and brings this beast back to the lab.
by submission | Sep 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“The Path Not Taken”
Author: Quintus Caecilius Cordus
Rigel Kentaurus Press, MMDCCLXVI AUC
Reviewed by Domitius Felix Andronicus
Mars Literary Review, Amazonis Planitia
Quintus Caecilius Cordus’ latest book may raise an eyebrow with readers expecting the grand old historian of Rigel Kent to gratify us with another “The Punic Wars Re-Examined” or “The Discovery of New Europa”. In “The Path Not Taken,” Cordus reimagines rather than relates the history of the Empire and thence extrapolates an odd and unfamiliar world both fascinating and frightening.
Cordus begins in the year when Vetus and Nerullinus were consuls (modern calendar: DCCCIII AUC) with the advent of the aeolipile steam engine by Hero of Alexandria. But in the historian’s alternate past, the Greek engineer and mathematician becomes not the father of the Industrial Revolution, but merely a comparatively obscure inventor, both the man and his machine relegated to historical footnotes. It is here that Cordus imagines history diverging into a bizarre parallel world where steam power would remain an undeveloped art for nearly MM years.
The chapters that follow this introduction reveal a strangely static world in which technology advances with agonizing slowness. The Germanic Wars, to take a single example, continue unabated for centuries, leading ultimately to the Empire’s collapse. With frequently poetic prose, Cordus describes a nightmarish world of war without end fought with weapons unchanged from the pre-industrial era. No steam tanks roll across Thrace during the Battle of Philippopolis to defeat the Goths. No airships drop bombs to end the Siege of Mainz. And, needless to say, there is no atom bombing of Germania resulting in the surrender of the Germani and their assimilation into the Empire.
Cordus envisions a millennium-long dark age in Europa after the Empire’s fall with the center of civilization shifting to the south and east. He speculates about a great monotheistic empire originating in the Arabian Peninsula holding sway over much of Asia and extending in Europa as well. But at last, the author postulates Europa waking from her thousand year intellectual slumber as various polities rediscover the heritage of Classical Antiquity. It is this hodgepodge of nation-states, not a unified Roman Empire, that discover and then conquer New Europa.
Somewhat amusingly, Cordus pictures Britannia ultimately rising to Great Power status and even has the island creating a globe-girdling empire of its own as Hero’s steam engine is finally reinvented after MDCC years. This is one of a number of flights of fancy in the book that will undoubtedly prove controversial. This hypothetical Britannic Empire itself is eventually superseded by a New Europan successor state.
Perhaps the oddest speculation in which Cordus indulges is the rise of an obscure messianic sect of Judaism eclipsing the gods of the traditional pantheon with a distinct monotheistic faith. He takes this conjecture to rather ridiculous lengths, going so far as to develop an alternative calendrical system based on the birth of the Jewish Savior. More curious still, he renders these alternative dates parenthetically next to the conventional years using Arabic numerals. Thus, Christophorus Columbus lands in New Europa (rather than, as he actually did, on the surface of Mars) in MMCCXLV AUC (1492). The current year is written equally incomprehensibly as “2013”.
This book will doubtless divide Cordus’ readership with some applauding the historian’s fertile imagination while others long for an examination of the Caesars or a treatise on the Empire’s early interstellar expansion. “The Path Not Taken” is available for quantum entanglement download throughout the Empire via the Imperial Hypernet.
Mars Literary Review. Copyright MMDCCLXVI AUC.
by Julian Miles | Sep 20, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It’s really disappointing. All the science fiction stuff about energy weapons and faster than light travel turned out to be impractical or impossible. Even nanotechnology proved to be only useful rather than miraculous.
“He’s coming round.”
“Batteries four and six, come to bear. Batteries three and five, cover his escape vectors.”
“Aye aye captain.”
The great exploration of space has come to a grinding halt. The Solar System is it for us. A few colony ships have gone out, filled with fanatics or undesirables, but their chance of becoming anything but footnotes of unrealised horror is slim.
In-system, it’s been lively for a couple of decades now. Earth considers itself the ruler of the system and the various established colonies object strongly. Independence wars have been flaring up so often it’s pretty much sequential.
I grab a stanchion as Brutus fires all eight guns in the four turret-mounted batteries and the ship rings like a gong. It’s wasteful but metal is plentiful now we’ve got the asteroid belt to strip mine. Two batteries aimed at where our opponent is going to be, two batteries aimed at where he could be if he dodges. There’s no point firing after he dodges.
“He’s fired everything!”
The Raumhorst is Federal Europe’s most powerful space battleship and deservedly so. His targeting gear is famous and his crew veterans. Brutus is the one thing they fear.
The United Kingdom colonised Pluto back when we still had royalty. Nobody contested our claim and we just got on with subzero mining and other stuff. I wonder if the spies and the analysts who didn’t work out why we were shipping lumber out there have been fired yet.
Geoffrey Pyke had the idea a couple of centuries ago but it was deemed impractical. Around Pluto, however, extreme cold and water are in plentiful supply. Just add fourteen percent wood pulp and you have space armour to defy most projectiles. The Brutus is basically a pair of Vanguard class super-dreadnoughts mounted keel to keel, or where the keels would be. Everything is a lot smoother than their naval equivalents because after the ninety-six thousand tons of ‘double-barrelled battleship’ as my uncle called it is constructed, all the exterior gets a ten-foot layer of pykrete. Frozen water is great for turrets because the friction allows them to turn without having to taper the armour layer – we just have to mount the turrets on risers to allow ten feet of pykrete between them and the deck. The double-up configuration allows eight turrets, four top and four bottom. Two main guns per turret, sixteen inch smoothbores that throw two-thousand pound ‘bullets’.
I hug the stanchion as the Raumhorst’s broadside slams into us. The sound of things falling is all that occurs, the dreaded whine of escaping air non-existent.
“Three hits! Took the two we sent to port in her superstructure and portmost one of the main barrage in her stern. She’s yawing! It’s a kill!”
I still don’t understand why everyone else builds space battleships like sea battleships with the bridge sticking up like a target. But I’m not going to argue. We’ve just become the primary force in the system. Pluto Colony is on its way to independence and being able to honour the orders from Mars we have for pykrete, even if the commercial slabs will be a little weaker than our own.
