by submission | Mar 19, 2017 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
Azova, Girgin, and Rastat floated through a hole blasted in the alien ship’s hull. Inside, everything was trashed. Whatever had destroyed this ship had been thorough. The computer systems were all but disintegrated. The ship was in complete vacuum, in fact sparser than the interstellar space outside. There was no gravity, caused by linear acceleration, rotation, or otherwise.
And the crew was frozen.
Their corpses were hard to identify at first, but the statuesque structures sitting in the middle of all the halls were unmissable. Once Girgin had examined them thoroughly, he concluded that they were frozen organisms, most likely the sentients in control of this ship.
“Well, why are they frozen?” Azova asked. “What could’ve done all this to their ship, in addition to *that*?”
“I don’t know off the top of my head, Azova,” Girgin replied. “It’ll require an investigation. I’m going to do a biopsy on one of them and analyze the substance encasing them in my lab.”
“Just one small sample,” Rastat said. “We don’t want to disturb the site. Treat it like a crime scene.”
“Yes, sir.” Girgin took his sample, chipping off a piece of one of the organisms, and they all returned to their ship.
The next day, Girgin rushed into the mess hall, shouting for attention. The other two were having breakfast, along with Crimien and Tsafon, the astronomer and computer specialist who had stayed behind during the other three’s jaunt. Girgin was holding the sample.
“It’s glass!”
The rest of them were utterly bewildered. Tsafon, however, soon understood what he was referring to, and tried to catch on.
“Are you saying that… that they were silicon-based, and the heat from their demise melted that silicon and, uh, vitrified them?” He gasped. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
Girgin gave him a look. “What? No. It’s biological. It’s a protein that encases them when they dry out!”
“A bioweapon, employed by their attackers?” Azova guessed.
“No! They did it on purpose!” While the rest of them gawked at him, he explained: “There are terrestrial animals called tadigrades that entomb themselves in this protein-based glass when the environment can’t support them. When conditions become favorable again, the glass breaks apart, and they resume their metabolism. These creatures must be doing the same thing! *They’re still alive*!”
None of them could believe it. Rastat snapped out of it first, saying, “So we can revive them?”
“Yes! And all it would take is exposing them to normal conditions. They might’ve depressurized their own ship, in order to induce this state and stay alive during the accident. Or the attack. It doesn’t matter which one it was; we’ll be able to ask them!” He turned to the computer specialist. “Crimien, do you think you can tease out a little of the ship’s life support data? We need to know what kind of climate is habitable for them, and then I can replicate it in my isolation chamber.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Crimien said.
“Good. Can you order everyone to suit up, Rastat? I wouldn’t want to overstep my bounds.”
Mildly exasperated, Rastat said, “You heard him.”
The whole crew donned spacesuits, and they drifted over to the wreckage. While Crimien did his best with the computers, everyone else hauled dry alien popsicles back aboard. Six hours later, with the life support data and ten alien bodies in hand, Girgin pressurized the isolation chamber and watched as, one by one, the aliens loosened, slumped, returned to color….
…And breathed.
by submission | Mar 18, 2017 | Story |
Author : Samuel Stapleton
“Your Excellency. We can’t move on this. The Intelligence Protection Community is watching too closely. Humans have made their move, their motion for an open debate court was approved.”
“This is ludicrous! They’ve been slaves for less than 30 Earth years. Every other subspecies has served for a minimum of 500 galactic years!”
“Yes, but they aren’t arguing over the Time Frame or the Legitimacy of Servitude Clauses.”
“Well what then?”
“Have you heard about the Rorschach Measures?”
“The new interface? Yes, I think my son is using it, what of it?”
“Distant chatter on multiple nets claim it was designed and written by a single human, with the help of an AI she also designed.”
“How would that even be possible? As a species they failed every single standard intelligence measure, they lost every shot they had at being classified as a prospecies.”
“Our team has been pouring over data from their home world. Did you know their population was 23 billion at maximum capacity? It’s larger than any other known species home planet. And I think we missed a key environmental pressure.”
“Which is?”
“Because of the complex nature of measuring intelligence the galactic society has always assumed that the most advanced organisms only peak after extended periods of evolution and adaption. As a species the humans have barely left the fertilization stage, but we’ve been looking into a phenomenon they call neuro-plasticity. They define it like this:
The brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuro-plasticity allows the neurons in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.
Their biology is very common – carbon based, we’ve seen it a thousand times before. But we’ve never seen a central nervous system develop in such leaps and bounds. I think we greatly underestimated the combination of their biology and the environment of their home world. They’re arguing that the galactic tests are old, outdated, and inherently biased.”
“We’ve heard that argument before. What’s different this time?”
“They claim to have already designed a different one. Better. One that they slipped into the Rorschach Measures interface…and that…according to the data they’ve collected…not one intelligent organism has passed ‘critical intelligence indicators’ other than humans…in fact we can’t even identify where the test was hidden in the coding.”
“They hid this test in a public user interface? How long have we been looking?”
“The interface went live a little over three galactic years ago. It’s now the 13th most used interface galactically speaking.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The human female slave, what’s her name?”
“Well we’re still working on tracking her down sir, but we’ve found reference material that links her to a common user name on the net.”
“And it is?”
“She calls herself Darwin.”
“What relevance does that have?”
“We aren’t sure if it means anything sir. We’re still looking into it.”
“And Rorschach – figure out what that is as well. Humans are so young it boggles the mind that they’re this much trouble.”
“What should we do about the court date?”
“Nothing.”
“They said you would say that.”
“Who said?”
“The person who sent you your most recent e-message. It was sent directly from one of the Rorschach servers. Only moments ago. You just got another. Take a look.”
The only thing humans will be slave to, is our own nature. Adapt or die Chancellor. Adapt or die.
-drwn
by submission | Mar 17, 2017 | Story |
Author : Uri Kurlianchik
She didn’t have a throat to sing or speakers to talk. Her only means of vocalization were small devices that vibrated and gyrated as she drilled and scraped barren soil in search of remnants of past life or possibilities of future life. She traveled a quarter million miles of vacuum to land among endless plains of red rock and winds of frost and fire. She was alone.
Her only memory of home were the words “good luck” written on her metal carapace in childish hand and illustrated with butterflies and flowers. The letters were colorful once, but the baking sun robbed the words of their hue and nuance, leaving them white and parched. She worked days and nights.
Days, when the orange sun was so vast and hot it boiled rocks and melted metal and interfered with her sensitive sensors. Nights, when sunlight was replaced with a void that sucked all heat from the world and threatened to freeze and break her delicate machinery.
She was a dutiful explorer, but she did not work all the time. She had one holiday per year. It was a short holiday, only 80 seconds long. During these long seconds, she would cease her stoic toil and hum “happy birthday to me” with a drill and a saw. These were the best 80 seconds of the year.
Her ultimate mission was to reach a great mountain, a mountain so colossal it loomed over her from a thousand miles away. The way was long and harsh, but she never considered abandoning her mission. How could she? Her existence had no other purpose.
The years went by and she rolled and worked and rolled and worked and for 80 seconds each year she hummed a birthday song to herself and the mountain grew ever closer, ever closer, so much closer, but still so vast, still so distant, still unbeatable. Dust blew with indifferent ferocity and sandblasted the childish words, leaving just a plain surface. It blasted some more, and smooth metal became as rough and scarred as the skin of a very old woman.
She rolled on. The mountain filled the sky. Avalanches broke her antennae. Earthquakes twisted her chassis. She rolled on.
On her seventh birthday, she hummed the song one last time. The red bar blinked and blinked and blinked and went dark and never blinked again. The lights died, the lenses shut, and the wheels stopped. She transmitted her last signal and became no different from a million millions other rocks that lay in the shadow of the great mountain. The wind and the sun and the cold broke her without ever noticing her ephemeral presence.
Two thin hands, green and scaly and so very old, grabbed the still explorer and carried her across the last stretch to a cave where pictures of friends and family, dead these past million years hung, in neat frames. It was the sort of neatness you find only in the homes of very old people, people so old that the neatness of their homes is the only thing that keeps their minds and bodies from crumbling into dust. The owner of the hands was old and alone. It almost never ventured forth to see if it had visitors, but tonight was a special night.
It placed the explorer on an old sofa by an ancient table. It threw a colorful party hat on her. It lit countless candles on a small cake (why would it need a big cake? It always ate alone) and blew a party horn and then blew the candles and did not wish for anything because it was so happy. For the first time in a million years, it did not celebrate alone.
by submission | Mar 16, 2017 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
From the window of his cabin in the I.P.S. Red Baron, Admiral Mortigna sipped coffee and watched as the last repairs were made on Jupiter’s dynamic orbital ring. A hoop of solid material twirled around the planet at speeds faster than needed to maintain orbit at its altitude, creating a net-outward force on the habitat ring built around it and on the tops of the space elevators hanging from below it. This kept it suspened above Jupiter without requiring its inhabitants to be in freefall. While humanity was fighting the Knorotoks, enemies from another star, this vast construct had been destroyed, cutting the Solar System off from vital elements used in fusion reactors. Now it was coming back together. Mortigna had been smiling at that all morning.
Then he received a message.
A petty officer rang his door chime, and the Admiral nodded to the camera above the door. The cabin bot slid the door open and the officer walked in. “Sir?”
“Yes?”
“I have some things to show you on my tablet.”
“You couldn’t have just sent them to me?”
“We agreed that you should have someone here who can answer all your questions. And we didn’t want to do a video conference, since that’s not physical and sincere enough for what you’re about to see.”
“Okay… what am I about to see?”
The man stepped forward and crouched next to his superior, who had forgotten to offer him a seat. He started playing a video of rioting and gunfire, with crowd control teams barely managing to hold the civilians back with their phono-shields.
Mortigna looked at the blue, bright sky in the video’s background. “Where… is this Venus?”
“Yes, sir. They’re in front of the United Solar Authority’s local control palace. Saying they’re not being fairly represented.”
“But it got them through wartime! It got everyone through!”
“Yes sir. But it’s not wartime anymore. They’re reacting to that.”
“My God.”
“There’s more,” said the petty officer, switching to a video from what looked like the surface of Callisto. A placid dome sat in the foreground, before a sudden explosion forced a cloud of valuable breathing air out of the habitat like a hurricane.
Mortigna looked back out the window. He could see Callisto from his seat, coming out from behind its giant parent planet. He was awestruck. “All this, because of the United Solar Authority?” he whimpered. “All this because the war’s over?”
The petty officer shrugged.
Mortigna was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Maybe… maybe we found something.”
The officer raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe we found a mysterious object outside the Solar System. Strange energy signals. Coming in fast by the look of it.”
“But sir, we haven’t–”
“Maybe it looks like a scout. Maybe the Knorotoks had colonies around the galaxy, and word has started to reach them about the recent Knorotok defeat here. Maybe another attack is only a couple years away, with the speed of their ships.”
The petty officer’s mouth was agape. “A… a conspiracy, sir? Is that what you’re proposing?”
That question was never answered directly. Mortigna just said, “Get Earth Central Headquarters. Make some data that looks like an incoming scout probe from the stars. And make sure word of that gets around the System ASAP. We have some reunification to do.”
When the petty officer left, the Admiral relaxed in his chair once again, looked out the window at the dull reds and yellows of Jupiter, and smiled.
by submission | Mar 15, 2017 | Story |
Author : David Henson
“Honey, are you going to use the DreamMaster tonight?” Sally says to her husband.
“You bet. I’ve scripted a football match,” Jim says, laying the DreamTablet on his bedside table. “Big hero.” He taps his thumb to his chest. “You?”
“Think I’ll take a break tonight. Have you brushed your teeth?”
“Oops. ‘Bout forgot.” Jim goes into the bathroom. When he returns, Sally is scooting back to her side of the bed. “Well, good night,” he says, leaning over and kissing her.
“Night yourself,” Sally says.
Jim connects a wire from the DreamMaster controller to a contact at the base of his skull, turns off the light, and quickly falls asleep.
“We welcome the mighty earthling Jim to our planet, Sensuria. I am Queen.” says the statuesque woman wearing only a see-through chiffon gown. It is our custom that I and my 20 beautiful handmaidens welcome you with a night of wild lovemaking.” Jim quickly removes his spacesuit and follows the beautiful Queen into her chambers.
Adhering to the custom of Sensuria, Jim makes passionate love to the 20 beautiful handmaidens, saving his best for the Queen. “There has never been a man on this world who has pleased me so,” the Queen says hours later. She climbs on top of him.
“OK, one more time,” Jim says. “I know I’m hard to resist.”
The Queen leans down as if she’s going to kiss Jim. “We have another custom,” she says, turning into a giant spider. Its drooling jaws gape open and chomp his head.
Jim wakes up screaming. His wife is holding the DreamTablet. “Football match, huh?” she says. “How’d you like the little surprise I put at the end?”
“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about, Honey. I just scored the winning goal is all. Honest.”
Sally nods at the tablet. “I saw what you wrote ‘mighty earthling.’ You know I hate it when you lie to me…But I forgive you. I wish you’d show some of that endurance and creativity with me.”
“I will. I promise. I think I’m addicted to this thing. Let’s put it in the basement.”
“Good idea. I’ll give you some encouragement,” Sally says. She leans over to kiss Jim and suddenly becomes a giant spider, gaping, drooling jaws opening around his head. He wakes up screaming.
“What…What’s happening?” He yanks the wire from his neck. “OK. Disconnected. Not dreaming.”
“Are you sure? Maybe I put that in your DreamScript — ‘Jim removes wire.’ ”
“No…that wouldn’t… Wait, it would…” Jim pinches his arm. “Ow! That hurt. I must be awake.”
“In the script.”
Jim pinches his arm twice more. “Ow! Ow!”
“Script script.”
“Wake up! Ow!”
“Does it hurt? Let Sally kiss and make it better.”
“No! Ow!”
Jim squeezes his eyes closed as Sally gives him a long kiss. Then they have passionate sex.
“That was wonderful, Honey,” Jim says. “I thought for sure…” He clicks his teeth.
“Don’t be silly,” Sally says, yawning. “Let’s get some sleep. I can barely keep my eyes open.”
Sally leans in to kiss her husband. As she does, Jim’s head turns into a jack-in-the-box and pops. Sally gasps and wakes up. Jim is holding the DreamTablet.
“Jim! What?”
“Turnabout is fair play. At least I didn’t chomp your head off.”
“OK, OK. I guess I had that coming. Really now. Sleep.”
The two lean in to kiss — stop, eye each other suspiciously, then turn over and say good night.
.
