by submission | Aug 27, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alfred C. Airone
“How many times do you think this sort of thing has happened?” Using gloved hands, Lady Maerlin, the current Director-Chief, turned the startling piece of discolored, shaped metal over and over in her hands.
“Who can say? Civilization has existed on Earth for several hundred thousand years, half a million years – some say a million. Perhaps a hundred advanced civilizations have risen and fallen. There are many periods which were chaotic, and there are almost no records from those times.” The Scientific Officer paused. “I think it’s likely this is not the first time such…an unanticipated discovery has been made.”
Lady Maerlin said nothing for a moment. I should know, she thought. I once studied history. Or tried to. Can anyone meaningfully interpret over five hundred thousand years of human endeavors, writings, casual scrawls, reports, records, legal documents, badly preserved images, art fragments, purchase receipts, the few audio records that remain… and knowing so much had been stored electronically and lost forever?
She set the metal object down, walked to the window that looked out over the acres of land of her official residence. With Earth’s population approaching the billion mark, she was reminded that such expanses might not always be made available for the use of a single person.
She turned back to the Science Officer and smiled for the first time since their meeting had begun. “How are you taking all this, Raj? It must have been a great shock to you. And, if I may presume, perhaps a great disappointment.”
Raj raised his eyebrows and looked to one side, then turned back to face Lady Maerlin. “It was a shock. We were convinced – I think everyone was convinced – that this was the first expedition of this type in all of human history. Surely a record of a previous such venture would have been remembered! The Expedition Leader reacted, I think, as anyone would when he made the discovery: long moments of profound silence, while our comm people kept asking him what he had found.” He grimaced. “If it weren’t for the telemetry we were receiving on his heart rate, blood-gases and brain activity, we would have been more frantic, wondering if he had met with an accident.“ He paused for just a second. “I’m not disappointed. We accomplished what we set out to do. The flight was flawless. The spacecraft functioned perfectly, the crew performed remarkably, just as predicted by all the training and testing we had done. I feel vindicated in the success of the project. It is still a tremendous, tremendous achievement.”
He stepped forward and carefully picked up the object he had brought. He looked at it again, for perhaps the twentieth time: a machined fragment, crossed by a bolted seam, showing clear signs of extreme aging that spoke of eons resting in the cold, sterile, and lifeless place in which it had been found. He remembered what the Expedition Leader had finally reported: harsh sunlight covering a vast field of gray dust, spotted here and there with debris that proved to be abandoned landing capsules, discarded components, launch platforms marking a successful return flight. Preserved from all but hundreds of millennia of relentless cosmic rays. Still recognizable markings in long-dead alphabets made their origin unmistakable.
Lady Maerlin smiled again, a smile she meant to be taken as supportive. “Yes, you’re right – landing humans on the Moon and bringing them back safely was, and is, a tremendous achievement. Something you have every right to be proud of. We just weren’t the first. That’s all.”
by submission | Aug 26, 2021 | Story |
Author: Tim Boiteau
The language of the tablet fought him every step of the way, full of shifting sands and pitfalls. It was a brief text, the only example of its kind. Three hundred characters, only three of which repeated themselves. The orthography seemed to be composed of ideograms, some tantalizingly close to pictographs. For example, one of the repeating symbols appeared to be a winking face, while another one might have been a tree or power lines or an arrow with its fletched end up.
“A missile?” read one of the lines of his notes.
He dreamed in the symbols, played with them, rearranged them, classified and reclassified them according to various methods—stroke count, sharpness or angle or curvature of the strokes.
After a year he had nothing to show the higher ups, and he was forced to admit defeat. Guards escorted him into a starkly furnished room to debrief the next linguist, a woman in her forties, who seemed to be winking at him at times. A twitch, perhaps.
And he gave his speech about shifting sands and pitfalls and dreams. “If only,” he concluded, “they hadn’t killed the messenger.” That is, the creature that had been carrying the tablet.
Then he was escorted to the memory-wipe chamber.
by submission | Aug 25, 2021 | Story |
Author: David Barber
1
Officer Chen woke just as they fell from the sky.
The woman sitting opposite cried out and braced herself for the crash. The engines screamed as the ground leapt upwards, then the dropship bounced and was still. They’d landed inside square kilometres of smart wire and autoguns.
“Was that really necessary?” The air was humid, with more oxygen. She swayed in the heat.
“Legion assumes all landings are hostile and trains for it,” shrugged Chen.
She was wearing Legion camo and a white helmet. And she, or some joker in orbit, had fastened her thorax armour on backwards.
There was a whirr of wings above them.
“Where’s Platt?” Chen called out.
The Legionary was already tracking the metre-long dragonfly with the barrel of a pump-action. The shot shredded its wings and it fluttered to the ground to be stomped on.
“Some like to lay eggs in you,” explained Platt.
2
Chen showed the reporter round Command. She loitered beneath the icy aircon, but there was no story in Legion techs hunched over screens.
“There were six rival Queendoms when we landed,” Chen explained. “Bugs had got as far as industrialised conflict. You should see their steamer tanks.”
She panned her camera round. “So we backed one Queen in return for exploiting… pardon, exporting uranium?”
Chen shrugged. “I was told you wanted to go a mission. Something more visual.”
She stared at him intently. It meant nothing, her camera was linked to her gaze.
3
They hurtled over feathertrees at Mach 1 with utter faith in terrain-hugging radar.
“Not really necessary,” Chen shouted over the engine noise. “Bugs have no air defences, but it’s what the pilots do.”
“What’s with all these devils painted on your men’s gear?”
“What the bugs call us. I turn a blind eye.”
He explained a local nest was to be seeded with a cocktail of pheromones. A covert attempt to weaken the grip of the Red Queen.
“Wait. I thought the Red Queen was our ally.”
“She seems to have forgotten that.”
Nests were underground. There wasn’t much to see, just tall smoking chimneys and roads that radiated away through jungle. The dropships settled after the same stomach-wrenching plummet.
Legionaries were outside before she could unbuckle herself.
“Stay with me, yes?”
She followed him into a dark mouth in the earth, legionaries fanning out ahead. Suddenly there was gunfire, deafening in the tunnels. She shone her camera light on bugs chewed up by bullets. They were more like centipedes the size of large dogs.
“What’s happening? Aren’t these on our side?”
Chen shaded his eyes as she pointed her camera at him. “My report will show this was an unprovoked attack.”
Legionaries came running back, pausing to fire long growling bursts.
“Here they come, sir.”
She turned to look and Chen shoved her. She stumbled, arms outstretched, into the frenzied bugs and they tore into her.
After a while Chen ordered his men to fire.
“Collect the body, sergeant. And the camera.”
4
Officer Chen reported to his superiors on a secure channel.
It went to plan?
“Yes sir. As a bonus her camera caught the bugs attacking her.”
An unarmed reporter. It would justify nuking the Red Queen alright.
Any problems to report?
“No sir.”
You obeyed orders, which is what you demand of your men. But you murdered a civilian and turned on allies, without any qualms. There is a place for men like you, but not in the Legion.
“Wait, what?”
This sim is ending now.
by submission | Aug 24, 2021 | Story |
Author: Mina
Hell, Gon-Zuu was in hell.
The body shell they had inhabited was overcome, again, by a wave of disgusting nausea. Gon-Zuu would have to lie down soon, preferably on the floor. They fumbled in the pocket of the alien clothing for a tablet that they swallowed dry. The only thing that helped with the constant nausea and prevented vomiting, a fate worse than death, was a medication designed for impregnated human females.
Nothing had prepared them for being trapped at the pinnacle of a soft mound of flesh, or for the sickening see-saw movement that displacement involved. Gon-Zuu’s home world had much stronger gravity than this primitive planet and their species had evolved accordingly, hugging the ground when displacing themselves.
Despite three months of attempting to become accustomed to the body shell and its method of displacement – “walking” the humans called it for Gon-Zuu had most definitely not managed “running” – they still struggled with constant feelings of vertigo and what humans called seasickness. Gon-Zuu constantly felt like they were going to fall off a precipice and smash screaming onto the unforgiving ground. The motion jostled and jarred them and that ground never stopped rolling.
Gon-Zuu had begged to be allowed to discard the body shell and leave the planet. But their superiors had insisted that they had to wait three months to see if they could become accustomed to the swaying motion while trapped so high above the planet’s surface in a flubbering jelly vessel. Only then would their commandant accept a full report.
Gon-Zuu was already certain of the message their report would contain:
Abort mission!
Human body shells are not suitable receptacles for the Cretoid.
Strongly advise seeking alternative planet for colonisation.
by submission | Aug 22, 2021 | Story |
Author: Riley Meachem
After years of research, Delkor Bionics completed “the door of perception.” Not a literal door, but a maze of computers, electrodes, goggles, and wires attached to a chair, it allowed whoever sat in it to examine any choice they’d made in the past, make a different one, and follow it to its logical conclusion, viewing years of existence in mere moments. The product’s release was heavily hyped up by marketing and was already world news before the first issues cropped up.
Several testers came back with severe trauma after only a few seconds in the machine, as their hypothetical choices subjected them to agonies beyond measure, and loss and grief which was yanked from them as suddenly as it was foisted on them. Even those who did not witness their own agonizing death and disfigurement, or the deaths of their loved ones, were sometimes neurotic wrecks after emerging, refusing to make any choices at all for fear of upsetting the balance of the universe. In extreme cases, these subjects refused even to eat or drink or move, and wasted away and died or froze solid. Subjects would live eternities in these myriad new lives, only to be dragged back to their young body, with the experiences of a thousand men in one young brain. Many merely went insane from eternities in other people’s lives, ones which bore such an uncanny relation to their own. Despite this, investors did not lose their investment or undercut public confidence in the brand. The Door of Perception was released.
How that went depends on who you asked. If you can indeed ask anyone and are not just trapped in the door of perception. Would you remember entering it? Could you tell the difference between a real person and a mental projection from our own mind? Most of us only talk to ourselves and an idea of another person when we have conversations anyway.
Many theorize that humans have entered the door many times, and that we are in a perception of a perception of a perception, using the door over and over. That is, as I said, if any of us is real.
I have forgotten my name, and which of my lives is real. I have forgotten how to exit, and how to choose. I wonder if there is anyone sane enough on the other side of the door to pull me back through, or if there ever was. I wonder if the door has closed upon me forever. In the meantime, I push ever further in these potential lives which never were, until in one of them, I once again stumble upon the door.
