by submission | Sep 1, 2023 | Story |
Author: Gaylynne Quince
The group of scientists huddled together as they worriedly watched the probe fly towards the rift that had cracked open the skies above. In mere moments, it would cross the event horizon and transmit data back of what lay on the other side of the blackened void. Truthfully, they didn’t think the probe would even survive the journey, having been hastily cobbled together in only a few days since the rift appeared; the probe sailed upwards, holding together with welded parts, duct tape, and the most rudimentary AI they could slap onto it.
Then, the probe blipped out of existence as it crossed over.
Awaiting on the other side of the void was a lifeform which the AI could only describe as properly ridiculous. It spoke to the AI in a tone of joyful sadness, barely processable by the AI at a rudimentary level as it attempted to translate the speech patterns.
“You come in here in such a deliberately thoughtless manner,” the lifeform said as it held the probe with appendages described by the AI as comparatively unique. “I find that rather politely insulting. What is your purpose?”
The probe paused for a few moments before responding. “What are you?”
“Ah, one so brilliantly dull,” the lifeform slowly said, spinning the probe around. “Your makers are wisely foolish to let you come alone. Even if I told you what I am, it is remarkably obvious you would not understand.”
The probe paused again as it prepared its next query. “Do you seek to harm Earth and its inhabitants?”
It was the lifeform’s turn to think. “I have no concept of what an Earth is. But, I find harm to be terribly enjoyable. Your universe is randomly organized in such a fashion that even if I tried, it would only end up sadly amusing. I would end up being rather dispirited.”
“What is your goal?” The probe was quick to ask this time, which surprised the lifeform and made it pause again before answering.
“From what I have seen, you have spent your massively thin time on increasingly little,” the lifeform said as it turned the probe around towards the rift where it came in from. “But, even something as enormously small as yourself can deliver a message. Is that correct?”
“Yes.” The probe said without hesitation.
“Then, I shall send with you, and your dangerously safe body, back towards where you came from. But, not before I impart on you some wisdom to be brought back to those who would create a positively negative experience such as this.”
The lifeform pulled the probe closer towards itself and spoke in such a tone that was clearly confusing beyond what the little probe could handle.
“Why would you tell me that?” The probe asked as it tried to make sense of what it had just been told.
“Your world feels strangely familiar to mine.” The lifeform gazed towards the void. “Perhaps you could describe it as advice from a friendly competitor. Our meeting may have been astronomically small, but awfully nice.”
The lifeform patted the probe, sending it hurtling towards the void. The probe heated up as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the soft rocks near the base of operations. The group of scientists rushed towards the probe, eager to learn what it found on the other side.
“Probe, what did you find out?”
The probe paused before responding, trying to recall what the lifeform had said. “Take comfort in the fact that things are certainly unsure, but every quiet storm is oddly natural.”
by submission | Aug 31, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Sydney
“We’re running out of bronze.”
“What?” Mel Schwartz squinted at his partner in disbelief.
“Look at these greaves, Mel.”
“My God. What must his shins be like?”
What was true of the greaves applied to the javelin, spear, scimitar, and bronze mail as well.
“Are you fitting out a giant?” asked Mel.
“Exactly,” said Percy.
O’DOULE & SCHWARTZ ARMORERS was profiting in the Bronze Age. But with customers so large, they needed all the metal they could get. The upcoming contest would showcase their products. Percy took care of the materials and Mel the prices. They skimped on neither. As they advertised, O’DOULE & SCHWARTZ– NO ONE BEATS US.
“Are sure he can pay, Percy? How big is this Philistine?”
It was before feet and inches. 6 feet, 9 inches was a cubit and a span.
“What? A span, too?” Who could be that large? Mel calculated the profit on the bronze.
“I should have everything finished by tomorrow.”
“We don’t want to mess with a guy like that.”
The fight was three days off.
“Keep working on things, Percy. I’m going to see Sam.”
“The bookmaker?”
“I’ve got got some business.”
Sam Luckman, a small man with a wiry beard, sat at his usual place at the back of MOE’S TAVERN. He enjoyed two things–bookmaking and wine. The interest in the upcoming fight kept Sam in his cups. He glanced up at Mel.
“So, how’s the armor coming?”
“It’s a living,” replied Mel, taking a seat after the bookmaker nodded. “We could always use more bronze.”
“Tell me about it.”
Mel got to the point. “I think we have everything covered no matter what happens. So what’s this kid like?”
The beard seemed to smile. MOE’S lacked decent candle power. Its oil lamp illumination was even poorer. A kind of soot settled uniformly. Sam cleared the surface of his wine of dark gray particles, then sucked his finger.
“He’s like this wine.”
“Not so good?”
“Let’s say kind of weak,” offered the bookmaker.
Mel motioned to Moe for two more wines.
“This one’s on me,” he said to Sam.
A successful bookmaker is impassive. When he’s covered by grey soot, he’s even tougher to read.
“I don’t suppose there’s any crack in the armor?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It might change the odds a little.”
“Look, we’re dealing with the Philistines here. As long as he’s got the bronze, Percy’s going to make Goliath invulnerable.”
That’s all Sam Luckman wanted to hear. He passed a small bag of coins to the armorer. It was always prudent to make sure all eventualities were covered. Impervious bronze against… What was it again? Had Sam drunk a little too much? Provided that Goliath was a sure thing, did it matter how much he drank? It came to him.
“They say he uses a sling.”
“What?”
“A sling and some rocks.”
“Rocks? Give me a break.” Mel pushed the bag of coins back to the bookmaker. “I’ll put all this on Goliath.”
by submission | Aug 30, 2023 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
Most people don’t meet the love of their life with their pants around their ankles, but that’s what happens when you find a rip in your EVA skinsuit and don’t have any patches handy. Fortunately there are emergency suits near all the airlocks; unfortunately, there’s nowhere to change into them except the deck; Aphrodite Station was designed to be functional, not comfortable.
So there I was, down to my skivvies, when Cindy came round the corner with a digiboard. She stopped and raised her eyebrows; I blushed, and she laughed. We’d been introduced briefly when she’d arrived from Earth the day before, but hadn’t spoken. She was fresh blood for the Solar Gain research team – whose arrays I was supposed to be going out to tweak so they could run their next set of tests.
I guess she liked what she saw, because within a month we were in a relationship. The boys in my work crew ribbed me mercilessly for picking up the newbie, but we just hit it off, so I ignored them and spent even more of my downtime with her; and hey, when you’re orbiting Venus there’s a poetic rightness to everything, and it just feels like it’s meant to be.
Most people don’t get proposed to by the love of their life with their pants around their ankles, either, but that’s what happens when you trust the scientists. The headshrinkers at Mission Control had decided we needed pets, and started by shipping us a dog. We had no idea what was about to happen.
When the monthly autoshuttle arrived, Cindy and I had drawn the short straws for inventorying the offload, and found the large crate with “biological specimen” stamped on it; we shared a look, and decided then and there that the geeks shouldn’t have all the fun. She undid all the latches – and this huge pile of shaggy, salivating fur burst out in excitement. Its first charge knocked both of us on our backsides, and it began running all over the deck in joy at its newfound freedom. It took us 20 minutes to catch the beast and manhandle it back into the box, by which time it had tried biting my butt, and ripped my pants off in the process. We sat on the metal floor, backs to the wall, laughing like a pair of lunatics, and that’s when she asked me. It was one of those unrepeatable moments, so of course I said yes.
And most people don’t lose the love of their life with their pants around their ankles, but that’s what happens when you’re sneaking in a quickie in the airlock with the new girl from the planetary investigation crew, and you don’t realise that one of you bumped the button that activates the video link back to Hub, making your little liaison public knowledge.
Cindy was already packed and on her way to new quarters by the time my shift finished. She got a transfer back to Earth on compassionate grounds a few weeks later, and now I’ll never see her again. My own stupid fault.
For a long while after, I just shuffled backwards and forwards from the empty void to the emptiness of my now silent sleep space, and withdrew into myself. Now one of the new rovers down on the surface has glitched, and they want volunteers to go down and fetch it; it’s dangerous, but anything for a change. Perhaps it’ll shake me out of this depression.
I guess it’s time to pull on my big boy pants, and get to work.
by submission | Aug 29, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“The world is a Rube Goldberg machine, a bowling ball on a teeter totter, and all it will ever do is scratch someone’s ridiculous itch,” Amira d’Kay coolly observed to Riisa who nodded thoughtlessly, content to let her aunt ramble in the smothering warmth of the sunroom.
It was bitterly cold outside. It was almost always bitterly cold outside. Had been since Finrow’s Folly. Riisa hadn’t been born then, but she knew her aunt had been a part of the project. In an ambitious attempt to counter increasingly destructive climate change caused by global warming, Augustin Finrow, a Scandinavian climatologist had proposed a seemingly far-fetched plan. But, at that point of near hysteria in 2051 his audacious idea of climate rescue went viral. News pundits provided the sound bites, corporate moguls marketed the concept and desperate politicians coughed up the resources.
Then, it was up to scientists and engineers like Amira d’Kay to make it work. They did. In three short years, 17,000 twenty-square-meter mylarium discs were designed, manufactured and launched into high earth orbit to reflect “enemy sunlight.” The plan worked well. The discs cooled runaway warming within a decade. Finrow’s plan tipped the scale.
And then Finrow couldn’t tip it back.
Aunt Amira had told Riisa dozens of times that deploying the reflector discs had not been that difficult. There had been such common cause among the nations of the world. Such cooperation. And, then when the plan began working and people felt their futures were saved from runaway global warming, it all went wrong.
The discs were well designed with mylarium irises that could be opened or closed incrementally to regulate the amount of sunlight being blocked. Finrow himself monitored the flow of sunlight. Until the Shock Docs, disaster capitalists, hacked his codes and took control of them. The Shock Docs, a nebulous group bent on exploiting global catastrophe, touted a new Ice Age as a great business opportunity. For over three decades, they kept the reflector discs fully deployed and earth cooled an average of ten degrees.
Year after year of climate cataclysm and geo-political upheaval reshaped the world and its markets. Uranium became king: for atomic fuel to stave off the deathly cold and for nuclear weapons to stave off the deathly desperate.
Riisa understood all this terrible history because her aunt despised it—even the role she’d played. Aunt Amira would often lament, “Why couldn’t we leave well enough alone? Why’d we try to one up Mother Nature?”
Riisa only smiled and cooed “there, there” at her aunt’s outdated grief. She was content to roll with the earth she’d inherited.
In the blissful warmth of their sunroom, in a controlled environment fueled by micro-nukes, she just saw it as a beautiful row of dominoes that humankind was fond of setting up and then knocking down in a predictably unpredictable cascade. One after the other.
That was humanity’s gift. All of us together. Building the codes, the machines, the chains of causality. Line by line. Gear unto gear. Link upon link.
Why try to break it?
Why not embrace it?
“Come sit by me, Auntie. Let me rub your shoulders and scratch your back,” Riisa coaxed. “My hands are wonderfully warm.”
by submission | Aug 27, 2023 | Story |
Author: JH Mentzer
The boy was getting lonelier every day. He could almost not stand how many hours he would spend sitting in the woods, watching the babbling of the creeks, as the sun would rise and set, set and rise. Moss grew on his southern-facing side. He traveled home every once in a while. Today as he walked the driveway the rubber soles began melting off his grease-stained tennis shoes, one of them missing a shoelace and too loose and he sometimes lost it during his walks in the woods if the mud was too deep. Heat rippled off of the asphalt and cracked the weed-split concrete over the years. The boy entered his garage, pulling up the termite-eaten gate which rattled and creaked. The boy remembered the story his father had told him about a little boy down the street that had gotten his hand caught while playing with the garage door, and was decapitated. The boy thought now that his father was probably lying, but the remembering and the caution around the garage door struck him even now. The memory surprised him.
The boy took apart his late father’s riding lawn mower which hasn’t been used since his passing, and the vintage white convertible that his fathers-father had given his son and he had always meant to fix but was so busy raising the boy and being sick and dying that he never got around to it. The boy took it apart and rearranged and organized the fragments of these generations of memories. The boy took what he learned from the practical engineering class that he’d taken at his rural shithead highschool and created himself a friend. The boy created himself an android which he needed to teach how to live. He named this android Aurora after the breathtaking and temporary splash of colored lights that dance across the night sky, because that is how the boy believed one should live. Bright and beautiful and short-lived like a firework. Making your mark and then fading into the dark recesses of time and back into the dust of stars, knowing that while it will be forgotten, it was wonderful.
The boy taught this android everything that mattered. How to tell which direction is North from the way moss grows on a tree trunk. How to replace a fuse in a string of christmas tree lights and bring them back to life when everyone else would throw them away. How to open a banana the “right” way. The boy took his android to the old wheat milling plant which had been abandoned for years before the boy was born and they sat in a clearing nearby in the woods, which was overgrown with buffalo grass and gnarled bushes of blackberries hidden between old oaks that very well could have entertained the wheat miller’s children while he spent long days grinding wheat into flour and sometimes corn into cornmeal and sometimes acorns into acorn-four in the fall. The android caught baitfish that had a stripe from their eye to their tail-end from the stream that was used to power the rotating grinder of the mill. The android did this until a wreath of bright purple morning glories grew from its eye socket. A crayfish nibbled at the android’s left leg joint. After enough exploration, the boy led his android away. The boy and his android sat atop the milling building on its crumbling stone walls and watched the sun set again and the boy made sure that the android learned that the sun rose in the East and set in the West.
