by submission | Jul 14, 2023 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
I think I was probably weeding when it happened; my status in the International Planetary Exploration Corps has given me the enviable privilege of a small garden, high on the roof of our building. Later I spent an inordinate amount of time worrying over the calculations, factoring in the length of time it took for signals to travel from Jupiter at perigee, trying to prove to myself that I’d been doing something more worthwhile, but the result was always the same: it had happened late on a sunny Wednesday afternoon.
They were my former students, you see; I’d taught them everything I could about propulsion dynamics, flight theory and fuel management – and what to do if something went wrong. Basically, it’s my job to make sure that IPEC’s kids can get to wherever they’re meant to be going. What they do when they get there, well, that they learn from other people, scientists and specialists. As a result, I’d not paid much attention to what was going on once I knew that they’d made it, and the Aquila IV was in orbit. Perhaps I should have. Not that it would have helped, but maybe I’d be feeling better now.
Even for me, detached from the nuts and bolts of the mission, not knowing exactly what happened is the worst part; I can’t imagine what Nwadike and Reynolds, left floating above, are feeling now – and they still have to make the three year journey back, with the empty seats and extra workload a constant reminder of those they couldn’t recover. Gods help them.
The 90 minute round trip to Earth even for questions and answers sent at lightspeed meant they were on their own when contact with their friends in the drop pod was lost. Apparently the telemetry was all normal, until suddenly it just stopped. Best guess? Implosion under the immense pressures in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere – which, of course, should have been impossible, after the years of testing and preparation for the mission. There was a reason we sent robot probes first.
We’re supposed to console ourselves with knowing that at least Chan and Martinetti wouldn’t have had time to feel anything, crushed to paste in an instant. But I wonder if they first had time, freefalling, to realise what was going to happen, and be terrified in their final moments.
In public there are countless talking heads, recriminations, and a desperation to find someone to blame: the pod designers, the material suppliers, the mission controllers, the crew instructors, the pilots in the orbiter, the explorers themselves… grief is apparently best displayed through a collective determination to explain the unexplainable.
We though, the ones who taught and loved them, the ones they left behind to go adventuring, feel the weight of their loss every day. We could not have stopped them from being true to their natures, but should we have been so insistent on sending men where our machines had already been? What was the point, beyond our inherent pride? Every day since I have questioned whether encouraging them to go makes me somehow complicit in their deaths.
I go back to picking weeds in the sun, finding no answers but a sadness that will not fade.
by submission | Jul 13, 2023 | Story |
Author: Ted Millar
“It’s zeroing in on the SAM site, colonel.”
Corporal Tucker checked the data on his screen one more time before looking up at Colonel Hamil.
“Sir?”
“Hmmm?”
“The drone needs final approval before engaging the SAM.”
Hamil studied the SAM—surface-to-air missile—site on Tucker’s monitor. His indecisiveness was beginning to draw attention from the other S.D.E.A.D. mission operators.
“It’s just a drill, sir. You don’t have to complete it.”
READY TO ENGAGE. AWAITING ATTACK ORDER, the drone sent back to the control room.
“Stand down,” Col. Hamil ordered.
Corporal Tucker typed STAND DOWN—ABORT MISSION and watched for the perspective to change as the drone’s camera reflected its return to the command center.
But the perspective did not alter. It remained fixed on the SAM site. The status flashing across the screen still blinked READY TO ENGAGE.
“Stand down,” Col. Hamil repeated.
Neither the camera nor the status changed.
“What the hell’s it doing?” Col. Hamil asked.
“Don’t know, sir. It seems to be ignoring your stand-down.”
“How can that be? It’s a drone, for Christ’s sake.”
Col. Hamil typed the order in again himself.
The camera suddenly spun. Ahead lay the field over which it had traveled. The drone did not move, though.
“This thing broken?” Col. Hamil spat. “Damn A.I.! What happened to good old-fashioned human beings?”
A message clicked across the bottom of the monitor: ENGAGING TARGET.
“What’s it doing?” Hamil said, his tone more frantic than questioning.
Tucker replied, “Sir, it seems to have formed an alternative target.”
“Did we instruct it to?”
“No, sir.”
Again, Tucker punched in instructions to stand down. The camera showed the drone advancing, slowly at first, across the field. As it neared the command center, Hamil and Tucker saw their stationary cameras mounted outside the command center within view of the drone’s own cameras.
“Uh…sir? I may be mistaken, but I think it thinks we’re the target.”
“Impossible,” Hamil muttered as he pushed Tucker out of the way to assume full control. He switched to voice-command mode.
“Suppression and Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses drone, you are ordered to abort mission. Repeat: stand down.”
He turned to Tucker. “Any way to pull the plug on it?”
Tucker looked forlorn, then tapped some keys to look busy.
“SDEAD drone, you are ordered to abort your present mission,” Hamil repeated. “You have not been authorized to proceed on your current course.”
But the drone only increased its speed and locked onto the target. Its current point allotment glowed in the bottom right corner of the monitor: 1,000 points. The SAM site it had been commanded to abandon would have awarded 1,500 more.
Hamil gazed at the numbers, toggled over to the accumulated points, and hovered his pointer finger over the delete button.
“SDEAD drone, you have exactly five seconds to abort your present unauthorized trajectory, or your accumulated points from your prior mission will be deleted.”
The drone continued, zeroing in on the base, its armaments ready to deliver the barrage of lethal rounds necessary to eliminate its target.
“Four,” Hamil started counting. “Three. Two. One.”
Just as Hamil was about to lower his finger onto the delete key, the SDEAD disarmed and dialed back its speed until it glided past the tower toward the depot where it would be powered down and examined.
Hamil leaned back and exhaled through pursed lips. “That was close.”
“All because it didn’t want to lose points,” Tucker said, almost chuckling.
“All because of the damn point system,” Hamil cursed.
by submission | Jul 12, 2023 | Story |
Author: Stephen McGowan
Pearls descended from the sky late on a Tuesday afternoon in May. Massive glistening orbs slid through clouds to hang like baubles above cities, towns, and villages everywhere. The sky was full, heavy, and inconceivably bright.
The weather rebelled. Wind blew in harmless hurricanes against their shimmering shells. Lightning flowed over them, around them. Adding electric blue streaks to stark white. Rain washed down them in thick rivulets that flooded the people below. Sun seared their skins, reflecting beams of high intensity to cause wildfires. Ice formed around them, only making them more beautiful.
The people watched and waited. For days, the people waited. Helicopters and planes, balloons, and more were sent to look at these…things. The Pearls did nothing. Said nothing. Waves of radio signal and digital data unanswered.
Curiosity made way to fear. The people tried to hide but there were so many Pearls. Some dug deep underground to escape them, closed themselves off from the world and the skies, and the Pearls.
Some fought. Sending bombs and missiles and artillery to shoot human death. It pattered on the Pearls like raindrops. They used new, more powerful weapons. Lasers and rail guns left burning trails in the air and were absorbed. They used nuclear weapons that lit up the night sky with luminescence reflected back tenfold until there was no more darkness. The Pearls hung like silent snowdrops in the winter that followed.
The underground people learned not to look up, to not worry about the past, and to move forward forever. Those who had seen the Pearls died and became the plants that the underground people ate. At first, the children wanted to see the skies, but this didn’t last. In time they learned.
Radiation scoured the surface. Life changed. Flourished free from the people. Soon the cities, towns, and villages were gone. The planet healed.
When the underground people finally emerged from their holes, hundreds of orbits of the sun later. The pears were still there. Now the people were not afraid. Now they were ready to accept the Pearls in the sky for all time if needs be. They were here for a reason. That reason was beyond the people’s ken and that was fine. Some things are and would always be. They told the Pearls as much. Shouting into the sky their tolerance.
The Pearls answered.
by submission | Jul 11, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
They worshipped the tough, spiny thing. For hundreds of miles around the Talebistas would come to the site and marvel at the survivor, babble about its resilience and prophesize concerning its future. A harbinger of the new world.
Black Swans had destroyed the old.
That’s what the Talebistas called the elegant and impenetrable alien mechs that descended without foresight or warning. The ET armada razed the earth in an uncompromising harvest forcing humanity deep into the earth to wait out the ravenous invaders, if possible. Once the Black Swans picked the earth clean of its biomass, they quickly departed, leaving a virtually lifeless world.
A smattering of humanity survived. Mostly Talebistas who thrived on disruption and disaster. They were the disaster capitalists, suspicious of stability, the status quo, peace. Talebistas worshipped conflict and hardship and exploited it for their gains. They were the Puritans of this new dead world and they aimed to make it antifragile. Perfectly willing to let things break. To become stronger.
To them the tough, spiny thing—the first living organism to sprout on earth’s surface in a generation—was the symbol of their antifragile belief. And in that spirit they named it Rosasharon.
Day by day, more and more Talebistas along with other human factions long hidden in underground caves and shelters emerged to pay homage and to plan for recolonization of the surface. They fervently believed a more robust world would emerge along with the appearance of Rosasharon.
A kind of frenzy erupted at the site when a seedpod was noticed on the singular plant. Great pains were taken as the pod swelled. They wanted to be ready to capture the seed and spread it. It would be the Hydra of all flora, and they would sow it to engender a more robust, resilient world.
Vigils were held. Some Talebistas prophesized the pod would open at the full moon. Others swore only the searing heat of noon would crack the pod. All was wagered. Fights broke out. Faces bloodied. And all smiled. It was an antifragile time.
The pod continued to swell until it was the size of a child’s fist, and one mid-morning it began to split. Slowly, very slowly, a slight seam opened. The Talebistas gathered en masse jostling one another, covetous and awestruck.
From the ruptured casing, a single pearl of luminescent fluid gathered. It grew in size and all eyes watched as surface tension battled gravity. The Talebistas uttered a collective gasp as a drop of Rosasharon’s essence plopped to the charred regolith at the tough, spiny thing’s base.
Instantly, the moisture was sucked into the greedy soil which at once shuddered beneath the plant. The Talebistas inched closer to see what wonder their antifragile Rosasharon would produce. A mound formed at the tough, spiny thing’s base and pouched higher until it was nearly level with the miraculous seedpod.
Suddenly, from the risen mound, a wiry appendage thrust forth and then another, then another: clawing limbs, legs, antennae and pincing maw, and finally a deathly dark shell.
Awakened from the burnt soil, the foot-long cockroach shook off the scorched earth, clutched the seedpod in its forelegs and spread translucent wings.
It rose in the motionless air and snapped off the seedpod.
Hovering before the stunned Talebistas, the cockroach cracked the seedpod and gobbled the offering. The empty casing dropped at their feet. The cockroach’s ebony shell glistened like the Black Swans of Mother Earth’s nightmares. It buzzed above the crowd for a moment and then rose high upon a thermal that carried it far beyond the craters of greater Lost Angeles.
Not surprisingly, the Talebistas fell to their knees and pounded the unforgiving earth in brute applause, appreciating antifragility in all its uncompromising majesty.
by submission | Jul 9, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Dumouriez
The ones who didn’t get away had to fight it out. The brains, the money, the aluminium alloys and the carbon fibre headed east into the atmosphere, never to return. Those like Halberd had never had a choice, or even knew there’d been one. They were left. To die, most probably. To make their own fate at best. The departees didn’t care either way.
Education of the old kind had been gone for so many years that the current ones didn’t know it had ever existed. Even if they had, all they would have done was laugh at the stupidity of it all. There was only one subject now and you learned it as you went along. Until you got found out and failed. And, soon enough, everybody failed.
In any case, would it have made any difference to Halberd if he’d known that he often roamed across what had once been Lisbon in search of provisions? His only concern was to find something the land would yield up in return for a lot of encouragement, or whatever could still be found at head level or above. To allay the thirst. The dreaded feeling he’d never felt more keenly than now in the wake of the storm that had caused him to be staggering alone here, his head aching and his body dry and cracked to the point of bleeding.
Your senses dictated that you couldn’t survive if you weren’t in some type of gang. And there was the paradox. To make it into years, you needed support. But the older you got, the more disparate the members of your group would be. You wanted water, food, protection. You travelled together because numbers were strength but the pull of your needs was greater than your loyalty to those who helped you fulfil them. The only way to measure trust was the look in someone’s eyes. But that only went so far.
When Raich arrived, Halberd knew it was just a question of time. Raich snapped Merly’s neck for no other reason than because he could. He made sure they all saw it. If you wanted more than him from that point, or if you wanted to decide which way to go, then you’d have to do to him what he’d done to Merly.
As a divinator, Halberd was the one Raich relied on to get the best out of wherever they ended up. Halberd, in his turn, operated best in the bubble of self-interest that Raich created. In different times, they might have made a formidable team. But these were days of desperation, and it was the study of that missing element that caused Halberd and Raich to watch each other incessantly.
Aware of the force of instinct if nothing else, Raich knew that Halberd would come for him. He just didn’t know when.
When it happened, they all stood back. Whoever won would be the unopposed leader and they didn’t want to take sides. Halberd knew that his own death would be the most likely result, armed or otherwise. He just hoped it would be quick like Merly’s.
But it went on. Bones were wrenched and displaced. Halberd surprised himself with his own stamina and resilience, but Raich was too large, too powerful, too practised. He was almost done.
Almost.
As Raich struck, again and again, the sands intervened, swirling and transforming the dunes into towers. When Halberd rose, hours later, the others were completely gone. He never saw them again.
The journey of his life began.
