by submission | Mar 25, 2018 | Story |
Author: Roger Ley
‘So, what’s your star sign?’ Mary asked, and took a sip from her glass, she watched him closely over the rim. It was one of her stock questions on first dates. You could tell a lot about a man, depending on how he reacted. His actual star sign was irrelevant, she didn’t believe in astrology.
She liked to meet new prospects in the pub, on the way home from work. It was easy to make a hasty exit after one polite drink if the ‘Perfect Match’ was less than perfect. And, let’s face it, most of them were, it was just a matter of degree.
‘I’m not sure, I think you call it Antares.’
‘There isn’t a star sign called Antares,’ she said. She picked up her glass and appraised him as she took another sip.
He touched his ear and paused for a few seconds as if listening. ‘Oh, what star sign,’ he said, ‘a subgroup of a horoscope of twelve.’
‘Yes, which one are you?’ she asked again, trying not to show her irritation.
‘I’m a Monkey,’ he said. He tried his drink, tentatively, as if he’d never tasted beer before and was finding it difficult to acquire a taste for it.
‘A Monkey?’
He paused and touched his ear again, ‘Oh, sorry, wrong horoscope, I’m an Aquarian, born on the twenty-fourth of January.’ He looked around the pub and smiled as he scrutinizing the décor of old agricultural implements, tools and horse brasses hanging from the beams and walls.
‘Such an old technology,’ he said. ‘Hard to believe that you still use human and quadruped muscle to power your food production.’
‘We don’t, they’re antiques,’ she said. She thought he was rather gauche but he was pleasant enough looking, about her age (thirty), nicely slim and well presented. She even liked the smell of his aftershave, which she hadn’t yet identified, and she was something of an expert on men’s aftershaves. She came to a decision: he’d do, certainly for a night, after that, time would tell.
She put her drink back down on the table. ‘Would you like to come back to my place?’ she asked. ‘It’s quieter there and we could get to know each other better,’
‘Oh, yes, I’ve been looking forward to this,’ he said, ‘I’ve never been on a two-sex planet before.’
Oh no, she thought, a first timer, I’ll have to explain everything to him step by step and it’ll ruin the spontaneity.
‘Never mind,’ she said, downing her gin and tonic. ‘I think I’ll pass on this one.’ She stood, picked up her handbag and left.
I’m going to stick to Tinder Vanilla in future, she thought, as she walked to the car park. Tinder Galactica is just too unpredictable.
‘Open,’ she said and climbed into her car as the door sighed up. ‘Home,’ she said, it set off, almost soundlessly. There was no point being polite to software, particularly if it wasn’t even sentient.
Oh well, she thought, another night in with her rabbit, and maybe some screen time later. You can’t win ‘em all.
by submission | Mar 24, 2018 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
Two neutron stars, ten times the mass of the sun collided, unleashing a cataclysm—an explosive kilonova, whose massive gravitational waves undulated through the dark mantle of spacetime, forging in their course a planetary system composed of fifteen swirling planets.
Two hundred million light-years away, a team of astronomers on Orbital Observatory-9 detected the blast on their interferometers and monitored the emissions over seven days. As the astronomers triangulated the location of the collision, spectral signatures on their detectors indicated that the planets were formed almost entirely of the heavy element gold.
It was an astounding discovery. The twenty men and the twenty women gathered to discuss the theoretical implications of the golden planets. They dispatched a lengthy, detailed report to the Ministry of Space on their home planet. There, science officials forwarded an abridged version of the report to the Ministry of Resources; materials officials delivered a summarized version to the Ministry of Economics; and planning officials sent a simplified version to the Ministry of Politics. Serious, urgent communications ensued between the ministries.
After an unexplained communication blackout of six hours on Orbital Observatory-9, the team anxiously received an encrypted ministerial transmission. The message was dictated in a halting automated voice:
“Commissioned Astronomers of Orbital Observatory-9,—the Security Committee of the Ministry of Politics of Planet-State Earth,—on behalf of the Ministry of Space,—the Ministry of Resources,—and the Ministry of Economics,—expresses profound gratitude on your momentous,—historic discovery of the fifteen golden planets.—The team on Orbital Observatory-9 has admirably and honorably carried out its scientific commission in the area of outer-space detections.—As of this time,—your project is marked ‘classified’ in view of unprecedented space competition between interplanetary-state governments for commodities,—wealth,—prestige,—and systems of influence.—Rare,—naturally occurring gold in the cosmos is for us,—our allies,—and our rivals on the terraformed bodies—a significantly more valuable commodity than industrially replicated artificial gold.—Orbital Observatory-9 will now map ‘top-secret’ travel trajectories for unmanned surveyor-probes with hyperbolic propulsors to capture flyby images of the fifteen golden planets in order to determine if their magnetic fields,—gravitational pulls,—weather systems,—and physical terrains are favorable for execution of robot-rover expeditions for precious-metals extraction.—We anticipate at least several octillion tons of gold based on your report.—Per commission contracts,—all members of Orbital Observatory-9 will comply with ‘confidence protocols’ until this project is declassified.—Noncompliance shall be punished by imprisonment with work for life or for a definite term of not less than thirty years.—Again,—the Security Committee of the Ministry of Politics of Planet-State Earth commends you on your major discovery and thanks you for your service.”
The transmission ended, and the astronomers stood in stunned silence. They had never expected to hear from the politicians, much less from their security committee. The sudden demands, invocations, and presumptions after six uneasy hours shook and unsettled the team.
The men and women on Orbital Observatory-9 began to debate the significance of the transmission. They surmised that the communication blackout they had experienced was intentional. And they concluded that somewhere along the lines of inter-ministerial exchanges, a nonspecialist had omitted the detail that the golden planets could have been spheres of gas, dust, and cyclonic winds; or maybe, for the politicians, the detail was inconsequential insofar as elemental gold was available in one form or another.
The astronomers viewed their discovery under the shadow of an affliction. The neutron-star collision and their report of the golden planets ushered a perilous prospect before them—a revival of the epoch of wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions in the ancient human struggle for existence. The team continued to discuss. Distant comets outside the observatory window shot across the universe, indifferently.
by submission | Mar 23, 2018 | Story |
Author: Talon Abernathy
The disease passed quickly and no one was spared.
First, it neutered the men. Women became infertile. Men atrophied and women thickened. Hair sloughed off and torsos turned flat. The two sexes equalized and thus division was lost.
Next, hunger disappeared. People lost their taste for food. Then, the mouth disappeared. X-rays showed the stomach had folded back into the lining of the abdomen.
Clothes grew irksome. The skin itched and cracked under polyester, cotton, and wool. Nudity defeated ornamentation and vanity became impossible to please.
As all this occurred, it was revealed that the disease was the product of a design. Some young scientists in a city no one had heard of, located in a country seldom thought of, had pioneered the plague.
No complaints were raised.
The tall shrunk and the small grew. The pale grew darker and the dark grew paler. Soon there were 7 billion identical people and if you faced any two, the wrinkles, the smile lines, the freckles, and sun spots would line up as well as if it were one man facing a mirror.
War vanished. Rape disappeared. Murder, theft, and violence trickled to a stop. As minds aligned to a singular truth, lies starved for want of sustenance. Finding their homes destroyed, they dissipated and were no more.
And then one human- as grey, tall, and similar as the rest- realized that he could no longer love: not his wife who had become indistinguishable, nor his children, nor his parents, nor his friends.
Books, movies, and music were no longer created nor consumed. The craggy differences which had once generated so much creativity flattened and the black places that had nurtured the stories and expressions of man burned away in this new light.
Creativity and innovation died. Vanity was replaced by sloth; licentiousness and aggression were replaced by anomie.
All of the great cities of man emptied out. Their inhabitants walked into the wilderness and waited to die.
by submission | Mar 22, 2018 | Story |
Author: Logan Smith
In the beginning, humanity looked to the stars, and saw gods.
In their golden age, they went among the stars, as if they were gods.
In the end, when the stars started going out, they found gods.
***
You don’t see a lot of sunsets anymore.
If you do, you stop appreciating them. They stop being neat when you know in your bones what they always precede. A sunset means you happen to be in the right hemisphere of a staging world before the big show. When they eat stars, they usually eat more than one. That’s how we know where to meet them. Watch the night sky, wait for one of the lights to go out, and then shack up in a neighboring solar system.
That’s the irony of it all. You can pack as many paracausal weapons into a warsuit as you like but weaponized mathematics, caedometric suites, and AI don’t mean shit if you don’t have a skin-and-bones human to run it all. Some cruel fucking joke of the universe means the numbers don’t work otherwise. The universal constant. In every observable timeline, it has to be us, which makes just as much sense as the rest of this shit.
We’re an infinite army. It seems that way at least. We’re fighting a billion trillion battles across the observable universe against an enemy from the unobservable. Each and every one of them is a set of paradoxes and quantum violations given form: an unthing that cannot exist and does. They’re an infection from all the universes we aren’t supposed to think about and we’re the antibodies dutifully rushing to the defense.
I don’t see a lot of sunsets anymore. I’m trying to appreciate it, but it’s getting harder. A bunch of us are going to die, some more than once if they get caught in a bad loop. We’re going transatmospheric to fight for a main sequence star hosting an indigenous subluminal civilization. Soon, I’m going to take a backseat to the suite of psychedelics, quantum neural interfaces, and tactical intelligences that does the heavy lifting.
We’re gonna try to kill a god.
by submission | Mar 21, 2018 | Story |
Author: Shari S Levine
Miriam opened the door of the caravan-turned-time machine. Dry, hot air blew in. She shaded her eyes against the brightness. They had landed where they had planned: at the base of a range of hills, nothing around them but arid land that matched the red sun.
A scream pierced the air. Miriam rushed out to find a young woman shouting.
“Yeshua, oh, Yeshua!” the woman cried out in Aramaic, her hands flung in the air, going to her mouth, going back to the air again.
Miriam turned around to see sandaled feet sticking out from beneath the time machine. No, they couldn’t have.
Suddenly, she heard a thud and spun around to see her husband and lab partner Josh with a club in his raised hand, the woman now lying on the ground.
“What on Earth have you done?” Miriam kneeled beside the woman and checked her vitals. She wasn’t dead, thank God.
“She was hysterical! She would have totally blown our cover.” Josh’s throat bobbed. “Did you hear what she was shouting?”
“Yeshua.” Miriam shook her head. “This isn’t good.”
“We killed Jesus.”
“We didn’t kill Jesus.”
“We killed a guy named Jesus, then.”
Miriam closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. Their trip wasn’t supposed to go like this. Everything she had planned depended on them *not* killing Jesus.
“What do we do?” He sounded like a child.
“We need to think.”
* * *
Miriam and Josh sat against the caravan-turned-time machine. She passed the now half-empty bottle of wine back to Josh. They were supposed to be saving that for the journey home. She wondered what lasting effects on the timeline their little adventure would cause.
“That’s it!” she exclaimed. “We need to impersonate Jesus.”
“What on Earth are you talking about?”
“We can’t just go back in time and kill Jesus without having lasting repercussions on the timeline.”
“And how are we going to do that?” He hiccuped. “You don’t think everyone is going to recognize Jesus has changed?”
He was pale, blond, and had blue eyes. “Alright, so we’ll put some makeup on you.”
“Oh, for the love of God.”
“Precisely!”
“You can’t be serious. We can’t impersonate Jesus fucking Christ!”
“Can’t we?” Miriam raised her eyebrows. “We kill the man who is supposed to be the Son of God, and you’re telling me that we need to go back and hope for the best?”
“There are going to be lasting effects, no matter what!”
“Maybe not. Maybe this is originally what happened. Maybe those miracles were just some time travelers trying not to mess things up.”
“I want you to hear what you’re saying. You’re asking me to impersonate Jesus on the off chance this fixes everything.”
Miriam frowned. “Not everything, Josh. Just the timeline.”
Josh stared at her. His cheeks were flushed. Was it from the wine or anger?
“You still don’t forgive me.”
“No.” Miriam looked away. “I’m sorry.”
“I apologized a million times.”
“I know. But fixing the timeline or not won’t change the fact that you cheated on me.”
Josh squeezed his eyes shut. Miriam was worried he would only help if she promised to forgive him. She would lie if she had to, but she didn’t want to.
Josh sighed and shook his head. He looked young. She yearned to reach out to him, to forget everything and go on as if nothing had happened. But that would have been as useless as ignoring the fact that they had just killed Jesus.
“Alright,” Josh said. He reached for the club. “Let’s fix this, then.”
