by submission | Nov 6, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
Prosperina Station’s marketing slogan, “No sun means more fun!”, didn’t do it justice: circling the wandering gas giant PSO J318.5-22, better known as Dis, it was the ultimate in literally non-stop nightlife, seasoned with a flexible approach to Terran laws. Newly graduated robot designer Max Wayne knew she was a decade or so away from a salary that would justify going, but NearlyHuman Inc. had gifted her the trip as a signing bonus; granted, her grades had set a new record and made her ‘one to watch’, and she’d told them about that offer from NeoBodies, but it still made her vaguely uncomfortable. It was terribly close to bribery, something she’d normally shrink from.
Her unease hadn’t been improved by the complimentary ticket to the famously expensive *Cirque de géante gazeuse* waiting in her suite. The card had been disquieting: “We’re hearing some strange rumours. See if anything strikes you. Andy will want to know. John in HR”. His new boss wanted her to sniff around? She was no corporate spy, but maybe that was the point. And the show was reputedly one of the great experiences for spacefarers; getting dressed up and taking it in would be better than spending years regretting a missed opportunity, after all.
So she went, pleased to find herself in a good (but not the best) row, close to the circular stage as she goggled at the high plastiglass dome above, framing the extraordinary backdrop of the rogue planet’s luminous bands. The show was as incredible as billed – jetpack acrobats, highwire clowns, fabulous dance routines, low-gee jugglers, levitating contortionists and more.
The evening’s featured soloist, however, the trapeze artist Billy Flyer, was exceptional. Powered by a discreet partner, he was a spotlit star in the glowing, colour-tinged darkness. Disdaining safety nets, strong throws launched him ever higher, and Max gasped as he spun, rolled and jackknifed through the recirculating air. When disaster came, it was completely unexpected: coming down from a mighty leap, his partner mistimed the catch, and he plummeted 30 metres to the ground. Max groaned as others in the audience screamed in shock. A stage hand rushed to where the crumpled body lay, but before she could reach him, the acrobat stood, laughed, bowed and ran off out of the lights. Half the crowd were stunned, and the other half went wild.
“That’s impossible,” the woman next to Max yelled over the noise. “No,” she shouted back, “it’s inhuman. He’s an android. Or maybe a heavy cyborg. Must be. Never seen one that limber or real-looking though!” And that was the rub: someone off-Earth was already making machines that could pass as, and almost outperform, the most athletic of human beings. But who? And more importantly, why were they so shy about their achievements? What were they planning? The implications were huge. Suddenly, her career and a lot else looked far less certain. She’d have to find his maker, and not just for her employer’s sake: it wasn’t just her own future riding on it.
by submission | Nov 5, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Her fingers stinging, Salda felt the chill and vastness of the late spring runoff as she sat upon a large stone in the middle of the river. High above her in the mountains, that same frigid water was a torrent muscling rock and soil relentlessly to carve deep channels. Channels that converged, then split, re-converged and re-split.
Where she sat upon the stone, the May sun showering her brightly, the river was wide and shallow. Almost placid.
She’d picked her way among the tumbled stones and stolid boulders to dip her hands in the water, collect the weight and momentum of winter’s melted malice–and scoffed. “I survived you. You had me in your conceited, icy grip. Squeezed me within an inch of death. But you couldn’t finish me, you haughty bitch.”
She reached out and swatted the river. The spray sparkled in the sunlight, falling away without an answer. “You thought you could do me, just like you did Aphyr. Two sides of the same coin, you thought. Mother fucking nature.”
Salda stood up and turned upriver. A hundred miles east, Aphyr was frozen in a lake. A white out had consumed them as they’d tried to make their escape from the Edge.
The Edge. That’s what Aphyr had called the collider facility, housing an almost infinitely fine fission blade, at which puny humans could hurl even punier Bose-Einstein condensates to split elemental particles.
Liberation is what their team leader, Roj, called the process. Bifurcate to liberate, he’d preached. Splitting open the multiverse. Co-creating a new cosmos. Roj had all the pretty phrases. Problem was, he’d believed them.
Within a few months of working at the isolated Edge, Aphyr had grown skeptical of Roj and their work to slice mother nature ever finer in the hope of eventually carving their way to the infinite bounty of branestring energy.
Day in and day out in the middle of a mountain in the middle of winter, Salda and Aphyr had labored with the rest of the team, until Aphyr had convinced her that their work was a form of seppuku. Ritual suicide. There was no free lunch. No free energy. There would be a price—a blood price—and it would be their humanity.
The morning that they detected and confirmed the first wave of branestring energy from the Edge, Roj became ecstatic, praising the heavens and humankind’s ingenuity. He told them this day would be a new beginning, a split from the past, an opening of a new future. A new way forward. The path less traveled.
That night, in the monstrous white out that would cover their tracks, Salda and Aphyr fled. But not before they bifurcated Roj.
It was insanity fighting insanity. And mother nature took sides. Aphyr fell through the lake ice. Salda wandered for a month in the frozen drainage of the sawtoothed peaks, becoming as bitter as the cold trying to kill her. Finally she struck upon the main branch of the river. It brought her here. Sunshine. Warmth. Liberation.
The sky bifurcated.
Salda shielded her eyes from the blinding light as a second sun rose from the east. The instantaneous heat puckered her skin and she plunged into the river seeking its cold relief.
The roar as the Edge birthed a branestring sun deafened her hearing, but not her thoughts. She knew this was payback. Her temporary escape had only one small reward: a final moment of recognition.
“Yeah, you’re a haughty bitch,” Salda mused half submerged behind the boulder. “But, I guess, you don’t become a planet and spawn life if you’re completely dumb. You played us well. Got us to supply you with infinite energy. Worked your way up the cosmic food chain.”
Salda might have mock saluted the quantum sun if her flash burnt arms would have obeyed her. Liberation. Bifurcation. “I guess we’re parting ways.”
The thunder of the detonation was soon replaced with the grinding growl of water. A wall of water, splitting, channeling, co-opting paths of least resistance, spreading exponentially wider to fill the basin where Salda stood her ground. And where Aphyr, poor Aphyr, would soon join her as they flowed to the sea.
The infinite and surprising sea where we began.
by submission | Nov 3, 2024 | Story |
Author: Beck Dacus
One half of the sky brimmed with stars, the Sun at one light-week’s distance barely outshining the rest. The other half was utterly dark, as if the universe ended at a sheer cliff. As I approached the blackness, detail started to emerge, my headlamp casting shadows on icy gravel the color of moonlit fog. I slowed my approach with the cold gas thrusters of my suit and reached my hand out to touch the surface, feeling regolith with the consistency of laundry lint.
“Contact,” I radioed.
“Congrats,” Stan replied. “You are the first person to ever touch OCO-2141-Oph12.”
“My resume will never be the same.”
Oph12 was an Oort cloud object, one of trillions out here. This was where the comets that graced Earth’s sky came from, including comet 614N Canskel, which would be swinging by Earth in a week’s time. Trouble was we’d never found a cloud like it around another star. Some cold comet belts, but not a swarm of *trillions* in a shell around the star. We’d looked with telescopes, we’d even sent unmanned probes to the stars, and they didn’t find a single alien Oort cloud.
So are all those other stars the weird ones, or is ours?
“Okay Siggy, everything looks nominal from here.” Stan knows I prefer “Sig.” “Go ahead and proceed to the crevasse, about 15 meters to your right.”
“Copy.” I pushed right with my thrusters, gliding over the surface in the measly gravity. The edge of the crevasse was a gradual slope; I could only distinguish it from the comet’s horizon by the fact that the darkness around me deepened, the starlight receding into a narrow sliver at my back. Up ahead the wall seemed to end; I let myself get excited by the possibility of a hollow void in the comet’s interior. Instead, I *ran into* the dark— the smooth surface caught the light of my headlamp as I turned to face it. “You seeing this? Or… not seeing? Volcanic glass maybe, except where the hell is a comet going to get lava….” I reached out, felt my palm press against the void, smooth and cold.
My hand was outlined in light. I felt nothing, but I yanked it back like I’d touched a hot stove. Then a circle made of assorted glowing rectangles and triangles formed on the surface, an iris burning bright orange— *Jesus Christ, it’s a screen!*
“Talk to me, Sig! Your vitals are spiking!”
“Look at my feed, Stan! It’s… I don’t know, but it’s sure as hell not a comet!” I maxed out my reverse thrust. “Warm up the engines, we’re—“
My radio started screaming. A second later my helmet computer filtered the signal out to spare my hearing. “Stan, what the hell was that!?”
“Transmission from Oph12,” he replied. “Broadband. There’s a match in the language database, it’s… Sumerian?”
“What the… well, what’s it saying?”
“Three words, on repeat. ‘They have returned.’”
*‘They.’ It means us. But no one’s ever been here before….* I drifted into the airlock and started pressurizing. “I’m back in! Gun it!”
“Jesus… Sig, it’s not just Oph12. The two nearest comets to us just started sending the same message. It’s too early to be sure but… I think the message is *spreading.*”
“Spreading,” I repeated. “Spreading to every comet in the Oort cloud….”
*But why stop there?*
“Oh God!” Stan breathed. “Sig, it’ll reach comet Canskel right when it passes Earth! What the hell do we do?”
I breathed deeply. “Nothing changes. Set course for Earth.
“Whatever they’re planning, we’ll be there to meet them.”
by submission | Nov 2, 2024 | Story |
Author: J. Scott King
“Can he continue?” A familiar voice, distant, urgent.
And nearer, “The Seconds are conferring, Captain.” Then, more urgently, “Come no closer, sir! Resseaux, control your man!”
A gruff, mumbled reply I can’t make out.
“I’ll have him done!” That first fellow again… Captain Eddings. Right. Yes, that’s the one. Never liked the man.
My eyes open to falling snow, grand white flakes drifting down in the cold, still early morning air.
Two people, a man I recognize but can’t quite place and a woman I recall meeting briefly but a short while ago, huddle alongside me. The woman, a physician, I think… yes, a healer, has unbuttoned my vest and is cutting away my shirt with a palm knife.
I crane my head forward. Is that my blood?
The shirt falls away, and… goodness, shot! Near-center chest, just below the sternum. Red-black blood oozes from a single hole, steaming in the morning chill.
I raise my right arm from the ground. A flintlock wavers unsteadily in my hand, a wisp of smoke curling from the barrel like the Captain’s wife at play. I let it fall to the snow. My arm follows and my head drops back to the ground.
Damn.
Dawn cannon fire erupts in the distance. A long way off but I can feel the play of it in the earth. The dead fall by the thousands every day, but still they come.
“Did I… hit him?” I ask, breathless.
“You did not, sir,” says the vaguely familiar man. “Be still, and let Helene see to your wound.”
I close my eyes, take a deep, painless breath. The air is alive with gunpowder and bergamot, with the memory of desultory words said in jest over polite tea.
A barrage of angry footfalls concusses through the snow, halting abruptly at my side.
“Get him up! I demand satisfaction!”
Eddings again. I don’t have the strength to face him.
“He’s finished, Captain,” that familiar voice again, admonishing. Lieutenant… Bertrand. That’s it. Claude. A good man.
“We best have his head before he turns,” Bertand says in a hushed tone. “It won’t be long now.”
Ah, yes… That. I suppose it wouldn’t do to switch sides.
“Leave him in the snow to rot!” Eddings barks. “I’ll put another ball in the fool when next our paths cross.”
Lieutenant Bertrand sighs. “As you say, Captain.”
As my killer marches off, arrogance in every step he takes, I manage a blood and bile grin and whisper my last breath.
“Not if I find you first…”
by submission | Nov 1, 2024 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
The cheap hotel room was draughty, the shadows ink in the recesses. Each sheet of green William Morris wallpaper was peeling in at least three places. For all the dinginess, though, it was a room, and I needed one. By a feeble light I’d tried to work, but the sound of the storm outside kept distracting me. I decided to poke around the place and see if any previous guests had left anything unusual— a pack of playing cards, some cigarillos, and so on. Nothing like that came from my searches, but I did notice, tucked away under the bed, a mariner’s chest. I hauled it out— it was sparingly light, but it made a noise as if it were full of something crushingly heavy. No one knocked at my door to complain, though, so I looked it over, and then opened it. What can I tell you, I’m the curious sort.
It smelled of something faintly metallic and damp air, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It was, however, so dark I couldn’t see the bottom, and it wasn’t because of the weak candlelight. Attached to the inner lid was a crudely-written note:
“DON’T—! Leave it be. Not worth it.”
If the person who wrote such a thing truly wanted to keep me away from what was inside, they ought to have said “dreadfully boring” or “contains dead wasps”. Instead, they’d lit a fire under my curiosity, so I stuck my head in. Some terrible force seemed to tilt my chair, and I fell face-first into the chest, but— well, I didn’t, because I fell into my desk chair, in the same hotel room, the chest open on the floor where I’d left it. This was shocking, but not so much as the astonishing view of the moon and stars out of my window. They were large, like diamonds in the sky, and the moon so close I felt like I could jump towards it if I was outside. The town seemed different, too, the buildings of a fairytale height, though still the same mess of rough houses I’d last seen. I scrambled over to the chest, seeing a new note, in the same hand:
“Be satisfied, stop.”
Hardly that! I couldn’t wait to see the next… place? World? Alternative? Wherever it was, that was where I was bound. I dove into the chest, and appeared in my room, but the ceiling taller, as was my window, and the night much brighter out. I could see Mars, an umber coal in the sky, and the houses were like the crooked towers of a Medieval city. I also noticed the walls were closer than they’d been before, my once-ample room now rather small. Strange, but intriguing, and I examined the chest again.
“Do you see? Stop! Wait for morning, Hawk-Keppler in the library.”
Again, the writer of the note had failed to judge my character. Whoever this Hawk-Keppler was, I’d find out tomorrow *after* I tried to get to the bottom of this myself. I reasoned that either there was an end to the chest-worlds, or someone was trying to keep me out of the secret. I leapt in again.
“ONLY DESTRUCTION AWAITS—!”
I saw the ceiling stretch, and the edge of the universe halt. I looked into a void, and there was Nothing. I screamed as my skull pressed-up against the walls, and I looked into the firmament crammed into the atmosphere, incinerating and then exploding into a collapse as the universe finally stopped and compressed.
The cheap hotel room was draughty, the shadows ink in the recesses.
