by submission | Jul 18, 2019 | Story |
Author: Luke Shors
“The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef formed over millions of years”. Raj heard the divemaster say through his earbuds. It had been a decade since his last dive but a refresher in the pool had revived some rudimentary skill. Not neutrally buoyant like he should be but good enough to relax and enjoy the experience at 30 feet down. He flashed his dive buddy ‘A-Ok’ which she mirrored before pointing to a giant cuttlefish rippling color patterns on the sandy bottom. The cuttlefish held his gaze, both interested and unconcerned by the human interlopers.
“Coral are not plants but animals making their skeletons out of calcium carbonate. The colors you see are of the zooxanthellae inside.”
Raj watched four yellow and blue parrotfish swaying back and forth with the currents against a backdrop of vibrant red brain coral. Ahead he saw the rest of the dive group slowly following the master towards two sea turtles. Raj started to follow then gazed back where the cuttlefish had been. The cuttlefish was gone, but something else decloaked from the rock. Out of context, it didn’t register until it finally did: Humanlike, androgynous, barnacled and ancient, its expression powerfully sad.
“I thought this was a science tour,” Raj said over the microphone pivoting to the group.
“It is” replied the divemaster
“Well, then why did I see a mermaid?”
“Weird. Pretty certain that’s not in the program. Some cephalopods can create amazing disguises – might have been it” the divemaster replied. “If you follow me I want to show you how dolphins can direct schools of fish towards their friends’ mouths”.
Raj swam on feeling the fins pinch his feet as they propelled him onward. Just then the display screen on his scuba mask went down. The augmented reality view which had spatially anchored the holograms onto the coral frames vanished leaving the bleached coral reef stretching like the spine of some ancient planetary entity. Immediately there was channel cross-talk. Raj looked back to where the mer creature was only to find an endless expanse of sand and dead coral.
“Sorry, we seem to be having a technical problem everyone,” the divemaster said. “I’m sorry about that. Good news is that there’s a full refund if we can’t fix it.”
The guide paused before continuing “Since this is a science tour I’ll say that you can see what’s left of the reef. Unfortunately, coral is very sensitive to temperature and salinity, so the reef was lost in the first half of the 21st century with the pH changes due to C02.”
Raj started breathing deeply. Nothing to be frightened of he told himself. Just the remnants of the reef and the sand and blue water. If that was what his mind was saying his irregular breathing was telling him differently. It was death. Planetary death of the oceans and the remnants of an ecosystem that would never return. His buddy flashed the ‘ok’ sign. ‘Not ok’ he signed back.
“I’m going up the line,” he said over the channel to the group. He directed air into his BCD, ascending without looking back, skin-crawling to get topside.
by submission | Jul 17, 2019 | Story |
Author: Angus Miles
Bang. Bang.
Qean jams the knife into the man’s heart. He gurgles and crumples to the rust stained floor. Blood runs up the walls and across the ceiling like paint thrown from its bucket. The dead man’s half-flayed. Through the ship, the echoes hit her.
Bang. Bang.
She needs to get to the hangar. Captain Powell has a way out. Qean rips the knife from the flesh and turns down the hall. She drags a foot behind her, the limb a puppet with one string left. She scrunches her face up with every step. Haggin told her to amputate it, said she’d be better off without the pain. She groans from somewhere deep in her chest and grins with red-rimmed teeth. Haggin is dead now, and the pain keeps her alive.
Bang. Bang.
It’s closer. The vibrations thrum along her bones. The world was once illuminated by the speckled canvas of space. Milkdrops splattered against the onyx blanket they all slept under. Now, the bulkheads are down, and there is only the blood. Her arms swing in tired arcs with every step. She hasn’t slept for days.
Qean giggles. When she turned ten her dad bought her an overflowing bowl of red and blue jello. “Still not as sweet as you,” she says, and steps over MacMillan. His legs are gone.
Bang. Bang.
The flickering sign above her reads ‘HANGAR’. The captain has a way out. Kleo laid in bed with her, tangled in the sheets past midday. Breakfast in bed, but the best birthday gift was being with her. Qean doesn’t want to find Kleo.
Around the corner, four are plastered on the ground.
Galway.
Xi.
Jennings.
Ivetsky.
Beyond them, the stars and the culprit.
Bang. Bang.
The captain has a way out.
Her feet slide through little red puddles. The one window’s bulkhead hasn’t come down. The man continues.
Bang. Bang.
Against the cosmic backdrop he’s a shadow.
Bang. Bang.
Her knife drips, drips, drips in her hand. She’ll do him a favour. She wrenches him around, knife rising high.
“Powell?”
The captain stares at her. A river of wine runs down his face from the basin in his forehead.
“Did you like the wine I got you?” Qean says.
Like a crane he moves back to the window.
Bang. Bang.
The hangar’s door is clasped shut.
She drops the knife. A hairline crack runs across the window. The captain has a way out.
Qean longs for the milkdrops.
Bang. Bang.
Bang. Bang.
by submission | Jul 13, 2019 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
From my corner table at the café, I saw the tourist read the plaque. The same plaque adorns every public space on our planets, but this is the first. I know the words by heart. I was made to memorize it as a child. It is not the most elegant tome written by our people, but it does have the simplicity and brevity associated with the utilitarianism of project management, which it should, as it was written by an engineer, not a poet.
“You have to understand; our universe was going to die. We were in a panic. We knew that even with all the best technology we had, we couldn’t fix it. The planets we terraformed, the space stations we had around them, the billions raised to the billions that we became, all of that would be over in one brilliant burst of radiation from our dying sun. And we didn’t know when it would happen other than “relatively soon.”
So we sent out our fleets of autonomous terraforming ships. The idea was they would terraform the worlds in advance of our arrival, we would arrive at our new home, and then as one world filled up, the rest of us from the diaspora would follow the fleet of terraforming ships and we would all eventually be settled on newly transformed pristine worlds able to support us.
But, in our panic, our haste, we did not see the errors in our language… the “vaguery” in our programming. The parameters were too wide, too all-encompassing, the AIs we sent to manage them too powerful, too… parochial. We had no idea you were out here until it was too late. For that, we are truly sorry.
You will be honored. Our politicians, social scientists, and philosophers desire to make amends. One day, when the time is right, we will bring you back and seed you on a world where you can begin again.
As for now, we have recalled the last of the terraforming ships and their millions of self-replicants and rest assured we are fairly certain this will not happen again.”
The tourist bows his head in an acceptable moment of silence and moves on.
What has been done, has been done. The guilt of my ancestors weighs little on my conscience. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the air is sweet, the flora and fauna of our ancestral home have taken over and this planet is indistinguishable from our mother world. As it is with the rest of this system, and the next, and the one after, and the one after that, and the one after that one, and so on, and so on, and so on.
by submission | Jul 12, 2019 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
I was the only person who ever saw the castle in the air.
It appeared one morning, a visitor from nowhere suspended high up in the cobalt blue of a December morning. Hovering thousands of feet over emptiness, that castle could have been a hallucination, some projection of my childish id. But since I knew nothing of psychology, I simply accepted what I saw which hung in my firmament for months.
As a boy, I never remained some chrysalis-bound pupa. My parents made certain I went out and skinned my knees, or dirtied my nails in the cold mud. I scarred my head on a brick, even broke my foot running over stones in the creek. When I’d see them at meals, they knew I was alive and that was good enough. While I had plenty of friends, I was often alone. I never had my time with them scheduled; we would school and disperse like a pod of pond minnows.
Winter was my favorite season because I was an inveterate sky watcher. Without the summer dome of humid light that plagued my star gazing, I could take out the telescope and puncture the clear dark in search of Saturn and Jupiter. I was better skilled at making sightings without gloves, so I learned how to work through numb fingers.
Each day that I saw the castle I was sure would be the last. Something so unique and singular could not pass for long. But there it was, every day. It ranked with the most improbable things I had seen, a nautilus of the deep. Friends would see me standing around looking straight up, forced to ask what the hell it was that I was staring at. I never answered directly, I just said I had a kink in my neck I was working out.
Every Sunday, the Concorde would pass over our house en route to Paris. It was an afternoon flight always on time, steady as a metronome. My dad told me that the pilot was required to wait until the jet passed the twelve-mile limit before breaking the sound barrier. This was done to protect human ears. I wondered to myself what a Man-of-War or cresting dolphins felt in those Chuck Yeager moments.
It had not occurred to me that the castle might fall directly in the Concorde’s path, but that is precisely what happened. I clutched my binoculars with damp hands, certain castle and jet were set to die. So it was that I watched the Concorde pass through the castle, molesting neither pennant, passenger, or barbican.
One week later, I watched the Challenger disaster in my class at school. For the first time, a non-astronaut, a teacher, slipped Earth’s surly bonds. When the shuttle exploded, many of the girls in my class spontaneously sobbed. My teacher had to turn her head away. After a few minutes one boy, normally very quiet, started to laugh. He was immediately sent to see the principal.
At home that evening, my parents tuned in to listen to the president. He eulogized the dead in a flight of rhetoric that seemed to soothe my folks. I don’t recall whether they cried, only that someone sighed and we had a short conversation about what I had witnessed. That night in bed, I didn’t see the Challenger, instead, I replayed the path of the Concorde.
The next morning, when I went outside, the castle was gone.
by submission | Jul 11, 2019 | Story |
Author: Moebius
Twins focused better together.
Navigating the universe in a faster than light vessel required a higher level of brain power than a single person could manage individually. In the late 23rd century, Dr. Sabine Korgev created a revolutionary device that stabilized synergetic neural connections. Countless studies backed up the science and decades in space were a testament to the technology. Embedded synth-sents managed most of the data processing, but critical analysis, and then selecting the final plots were best managed by people.
Still, it wasn’t enough to prepare for the unexpected. Damage control systems had sealed off sections torn up by the rogue meteor shower and stabilized life support on what was left of the SEV Copernicus. Engines were at forty percent and improving. Slowly. Thanks to the small army of repair drones. Six total casualties, four confirmed fatalities, from a crew of only ten.
Bahati was one of those wounded when a shower of fragments ripped through the galley. She gingerly lowered herself into the pod beside her twin. Her breathing was slow and shallow, but she smiled reassuringly at her sister. Amani masked concern with procedure and initiated the dive into the navigational construct that allowed the twins to perceive their location in five dimensional space.
Perception in the construct was like having a double-sided mirror along the line of your nose, swinging from left to right, while constantly swirling about in a thick viscous oil of complex data points. Fragmentary and confusing. This is why it requires a second, merged consciousness as validation for self-perception. The synthetic sentient engine of the ship distilled the critical data and created navigational links which the twins investigated.
“So, ladies, where are we?” A third consciousness entered the nav-con. It was the first officer, Krit. Geoff was in stasis down in the medical bay. He was now technically captain of the Copernicus. Krit was off shift and in his berth when the meteor shower knocked them off course.
“We’ve identified Aldebaran, Matar, and Zibal. Confirming distances now,” replied Amani. “We need at least two more stars to get an accurate URH.” She didn’t really need to vocalize her responses since all three of them were tapped in to the nav-con. Her sister confirmed a fourth star and plugged it into the data set.
“How long before we can get a plot back on course?”
“At least another hour, Krit,” Amani said. Her sister disagreed and argued that only ten minutes more was all they needed. She could not see the course projections without the fifth point for the URH location. Bahati showed her the first pass of a thousand navigation threads and then plotted in the final point. “Thank you, sister.”
Perhaps it was the urgency brought on by tragic circumstance, but the link with Bahati was more intense and even more coordinated than usual. They were analyzing complex data threads almost as fast as the synth-sents could generate them. Amani smiled and felt the warm glowing presence of her sister grow inside her own consciousness.
“We have a solution.” Bahati prompted her sister to add, “Captain”. Amani felt a realization that Geoff was no longer with them.
“Thank you, Amani.” Krit replied slowly. “I don’t know how you can manage, but I will leave you to it.” His presence disengaged from the navigation construct. He helped another crew member remove the lifeless body of her twin from the adjacent pod.
