by submission | Mar 31, 2018 | Story |
Author: Neil Otte
Sean sighed as he leaned his head back against the tree. The good ones always left him with this amalgamation of thoughts and feelings, this clash of excitement and longing with the realization of routine and boredom.
He closed his eyes and listened to the water in the stream and rustle of the leaves. He felt the warmth on his bare feet where they encountered the light at the edge of the shade. This is why he came to the park to read. The solitary quiet made the transition back to reality somewhat more bearable.
It had been this way ever since he first realized the marks on the page conveyed meaning, created worlds that couldn’t be seen with his eyes. Thomas, Winnie and Piglet, Max; they took him with them. Taught him loyalty, goodness, and perseverance. Let him step into their worlds and wonder if he could ever be so daring, or humble, or wise. Then, as he grew, he rafted down the Mississippi with Tom and Huck, ate hotroot soup at Redwall Abbey, climbed Mount Doom with Frodo and Sam, and fought chaos with Pendragon and Lord Foul with Foamfollower and Bannor. Then he had discovered that heroes were not always make believe. He circumnavigated the earth, climbed Mount Everest and explored the South Pole with real people.
But he was born too late for that type of real-life adventure. Everything was charted and analyzed. Plus, he was stuck here in this remote corner of the universe where life dribbled by in a monotonous, mind-numbing rhythm. Digging minerals out of the ground day after day. Mom and Dad said they were a “tight knit community”. He longed for a new face, a new horizon. He had never seen an ocean or mountain with his own eyes. He had never been more than 110 km from this little nowhere where he was born. He wanted to go, he wanted to do and be! Adventure, excitement, heroic deeds were what he was made for. If only he could have been born 500, 200, or even 50 years ago. Then he would have lived a life worth living. Then he would not have to live with this constant ache and yearning.
He felt it first as a deep, bone resonating vibration that was far below the frequency his ears could discern. The vibration increased until the leaves were dancing on the limbs above him and he could hear the deep rumble as it climbed up the octaves. He glanced up just in time to see the stars beyond the park’s observation strips occluded by a blunt, massive object as it hurtled past. He glanced at his comp pad. Exactly what he had been thinking. Five ten on the dot and another 210 metric tons on its way in-system to the Goslar refinery station. The same thing three times a day, every day. His eyes strayed toward the brightest star, the Sun. Somewhere in that general direction was Earth, where it started, birthplace of the human race. Oh, to be free to walk under open sky, to have a whole world to discover.
The 5:10 meant that he only had half an hour to get home and cleaned up. He tucked his comp pad into his satchel as he loped over to the slidewalk. He was supposed to meet Chip and Zee and take the tube to Crystal Creek Cavern where they had just opened a soaring park over the thermal vents. He could do some browsing on the tube. He needed a new book.
by submission | Mar 30, 2018 | Story |
Author: Jatayu
It made headlines. It was the talk of social media for a week which is, like, forever.
“Someone came back!”
“Wait, what? When? Who?”
No one knew who and that was cause for amazement too; since World Citizenship came online there simply weren’t any unknowns left. It was crazy!
Okay, that’s enough exclamations. You get the picture. As the days went by the newsies sent out little tidbits of information about the man; he was a man, first of all, a survivor of the New York firestorm- that was last year, thus ancient history except to those of us who lost loved ones. My husband died there. They never identified his body, incinerated along with almost a million others. I missed him terribly…
This man, this survivor, was one of the lucky few to be sent to HEAVEN. No one had ever returned from there.
The consensus of opinion (in a world of anonymous news and photoshop facts are hard to come by) is that the Hospital of Emendation and Aceology Via Enthetic Neogenesis, located somewhere near Oslo was a Virtual Eden which only accepted members of the platinum class and above who had suffered catastrophic destruction, uploading their personalities into a perfect virtual world while trying to salvage whatever was left.
Less than 1% of these patients were saved and none of them had chosen to return to the flesh.
Of course the other 98% of humanity, like me and my poor Bill, could never afford such things. Since Automation, most of us could barely survive. We live our lives and die our deaths and try to find happiness in between. But sometimes we get lucky…
Today someone knocked on my door. Today I found out who had come back.
He was surrounded by bright lights, cameras, and reporters but I only had eyes for my dear, my beloved Bill. I fell into his arms crying. I asked him, holding tight,
“What happened?”
He answered in his quiet way,
“They picked up the wrong guy. When they realized the mistake, they said I could stay, said they had a ‘moral obligation ‘ but I couldn’t stay.”
I thought of the long odds that had brought my heart back to me. I thought of miracles and sobbed,
“You were in Heaven my darling. Why did you leave?”
He looked at me with a love deep as oceans and smiled.
“Because you weren’t there.”
by submission | Mar 29, 2018 | Story |
Author: Mina
Dr Carlson looked up wearily as the last patient of the day came in. She was a new patient, Emily Mitte-Kunagi. He noticed that her body language and her clothes were aimed at not drawing attention to herself. It worked until she sat down, removed her darkly tinted wrap-around glasses and looked him in the eyes. Her eyes were a deep indigo, with flecks of silver. That simply wasn’t possible; he had read that they were now extinct. Yet here she sat, living proof that at least one Vaata remained.
She cocked her head at him, intrigued:
– I sense no fear in you. That is unusual.
– Are you always met with fear?
– Yes, with fear, terror even, hatred, anger, revulsion… not usually with simple curiosity.
– Well, psychologists are ultimately just curious observers.
She closed her eyes for a moment:
– Oh! You are ill and… dying. I thought the Kalevi Empire had eradicated all disease?
– Well, all apart from the Super Bugs we created by living in such sterile environments. Even then, we can usually be vaccinated against them. I was the one in a million for whom the vaccine did not work. Haigus B is untreatable. I may be almost symptom-free for a year or two, but then it will begin to affect all major organs. Death will be slow and not kind… But what brings you here today?
– Loneliness. It is also a slow and unkind death.
For the next hour, she talked of what it felt like to be the last one left, to always be running and hiding, to have no one and nothing to rely on. She had searched through several galaxies but had found no other survivors of the Tapma Cleansings, as they were now called. In times of war, Vaata oracles had been greatly valued. They had allied themselves with humanity during the Vooras Invasion. But in times of peace, humans had turned against the Vaata, afraid of their “sight”. Emily explained that the popular misconception that the Vaata could read all your thoughts had led to their annihilation.
– You cannot read thoughts?
– No, it is more like sense impressions of your future. As some are of only a few minutes ahead, it can feel as if we are mind readers.
She paused.
– I had planned to kill you at the end of our appointment and then myself. I did not want to die as I have been living for the past few decades: helpless, hunted and completely alone.
Dr. Carlson, feeling oddly calm and detached, remained silent. Emily continued:
– I am considering an alternative. I could take you to the edges of the known universe and show you wonders you cannot imagine. In exchange for your companionship, I can promise you a kinder death when the time comes. And I can promise you that I will be with you on that final journey.
Dr. Carlson laughed, feeling almost euphoric:
– Why not? But if we are to be traveling companions for a while, we need to introduce ourselves properly.
Holding out his hand, he said as he shook her hand:
– Hello Emily. My name is Ivan.
– Hello Ivan. My name is actually Saar Valge.
– Perhaps we could record all your memories on our travels, Saar, so that something remains of the Vaata?
– Perhaps.
Ivan stood and offered Saar his arm. As they left the room, his voice commands erased all recordings of the last hour and turned off the lights.
by submission | Mar 28, 2018 | Story |
Author: Dylan Otto Krider
Rick saw the Universe in folds. He coded a program that could make anything in origami. You put in, say, a rhino, and it would make the plan, complete with lines for the folds, and when you were finished, it looked exactly like that rhino. Exactly. A biplane? Exactly like it.
“That’s… that’s amazing,” I said when he demonstrated. “It almost as if the entire third dimension could be made from a second-dimension piece of paper.” No one had stumped Rick yet.
Rick looked at me, completely serious. “The third-dimension is the second, folded.”
#
He invited me for the weekend, and we sat up all night talking in front of the fireplace.
We had met in college. Rick dropped out to start his software company, while I stayed and finished. He, of course, is a billionaire while I am persistently underemployed. He had offered me a fifty percent cut the company if I dropped out. It is an unspoken rule to never remind me of that, and he never has.
He has since sold the company and lived on his investments as he pursued his inclinations. He started a band for a while, and then a puppet theater. Now it’s origami.
Rick compared himself to Kepler, a mathematician, and astrologer who saw the Universe in perfect geometrical shapes. He spent years of his life trying to get data of the planet’s orbits to fit his idealized version of perfect geometry. Finally, he had to give up his religion to see the orbits were not perfect circles, but ellipses, and Kepler’s laws were born.
“It’s not folds, but spheres,” he said, to himself more than anyone. “When ancient man looked at the earth, they debated whether land went on forever, or eventually dropped off a cliff. Both were impossible. Finally, they reconciled them when they found out it was a sphere. So, both were right: the earth is finite, but if you keep flying, you can keep going around the globe to infinity.
“When we looked at the universe, we debated whether it was finite or infinite. Either one was impossible, but we found out space is turned on itself, so if you go in a straight line, eventually you end up where you started,” Rick said, getting more aminated. “It was a sphere, again. Whenever you are debating whether something is finite, or infinite, the sphere is the answer. Can you think of something where it can’t be finite, or infinite, but it has to be one or the other?”
I thought about it. “Time,” I said.
“Exactly,” Rick said. “I have sunk my entire fortune into building a spaceship that will accelerate for years, approaching light speed. Due to relativity, the time for the universe will speed up, allowing me to reach the end of time within my lifetime.”
“What happens then?” I asked.
“Head north long enough, and you start heading south.”
“A time machine?”
“A time machine,” Rick said. “I am going to go tonight.”
#
I tried to talk him out of it, but he couldn’t be deterred.
“This is goodbye, I am afraid. Once I pass the south pole, and time starts moving forward, the future is no longer set.” He started ascending the staircase to his ship.
I knew why he was doing this: to prove the universe is one piece of origami. His religion. “Remember Kepler,” I warned. “You might find out there is no perfect geometry. It’s all ellipses.”
Rick smiled. “Ellipses are perfect geometry.”
by submission | Mar 27, 2018 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
“How’d did your last trip go Vincent?”
(Sigh) “Not good Director. We keep hitting the same walls. No matter what we do, nothing has an effect.”
“Nothing?”
“You heard it right chief, nothing.”
“Maybe we should go for a larger effect.”
“Like killing Hitler? Sorry to disappoint you but when our fifth attempt to alter the timeline did not work, Anderson went off the deep end. His targets were Hitler, Mao, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, and Jesus. Oh, and his uncle Phil.”
“Phil?”
“Maternal uncle. Apparently a real douche bag.”
“When you say nothing, what exactly do you mean?”
“Just that boss, nothing. And when I mean nothing the big nothing. Anderson dialed into the 1925 rally at Nuremberg and not only did the weapon malfunction, he was ejected from history.”
“What!”
“Furthermore, each time he dialed in to do the deed as soon as the attempt failed, he just materialized right back to our point of origin. We even repeated his ‘experiment’ and even less happened. ”
“Time index. What was his time index for each event?”
“His and our taskers took eight hours subjective and zero time actual.”
“Wait: Zero time actual? That’s not possible. There should have been some indication of time spent if only the time it took to dial the controls.”
“Roger that sir, but according to the logs we spent zero time, time traveling. Oh, and it gets better still. Now we can’t travel at all.”
“Machine malfunction?”
“Nope. The techs tell us everything is in perfect working order. Circuits fine, no shorts in the systems, controls, all in perfect order. And before you ask, I scrambled the beta site teams and the gamma and the delta. Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any speculations?”
“Yes, sir. We assembled the team and during the debrief we all came to the same conclusion.”
“And?”
“That the universe is a lot more involved in us than we thought and it doesn’t want us to time travel.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes sir.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Cease operations immediately and disassemble the project as if it never existed within the next 24 hours. Oh, you’ll find all our resignations along with our final report.”
“A bit draconian don’t you think? Seeing as you actually did travel in time don’t you think it warrants another attempt?”
“No, sir. It’s clear to us that the universe does not want us to continue.”
“Really? As men and women of Science don’t you think you’re anthropomorphized this a just a tad?”
“Well, normally I would agree with you but as you know to check our time index we look at before and after shots of seven constellations of known configurations. Their movement gives us a reference point for time. ”
“I fail to see-“
Vincent spread a folder of time-indexed photos on the table in before the Director. His eyes became as wide as saucers. “How is this possible? This has got to be a trick.”
Vincent shook his head. “Checked and rechecked. Had security run a level 10 diagnostic sweep to see if we have been hacked. I have done all the due diligence and then some. The results, however bizarre, speak for themselves.”
Vincent tapped the time-indexed photos of the constellations. The Director closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “For the record, tell me what you see in the photos of the constellations please.”
Vincent took a deep breath. “That of the seven known constellations we use for time travel authentication and verification, all seven have realigned to spell the word ‘NO.’”
