by submission | Feb 9, 2017 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
“Pangaea,” we nicknamed the planet, after its one-island-continent which resembles Earth’s Paleozoic-Mesozoic supercontinent of the same name. I was showing Krispie, named after a… well, you’ll see, the relative motions of our two planets around their stars on a holographic projection. He, or perhaps I should say “it,” since we have not detected any gender differentiation, was the first Centipod we had encountered after landing, and it remained, sixteen Earth months later, the only one with whom we have been able to communicate.
We had stopped cold as a creature, over 120 centimeters tall from the top of its shell to the soles of its feet, sidled out of the rainforest on 112 legs, looking like a cross between a centipede and a snail. Although its multifaceted eyestalk remained fixed on us, its 56 pairs of webbed feet propelled it slightly to its left, requiring continual course corrections to keep it moving toward our landing party, lest it otherwise would have circled back into the forest. All Centipods drift to the left as they walk, because their internal organs are clustered within the left portion of their mantle cavity, an asymmetrical mass that tips their balance… But I digress.
I had become close to Krispie as it mastered our language and trained our translator program to recognize Centipod snaps, crackles, and pops and vocalize them as English. We met every day, without fail, since that first one.
“Earth races around your Sun,” it said.
“It does, indeed. At 110,000 kilometers per hour, we complete an orbit in just 365 Earth days, compared to Pangaea’s 77,000 kph and 1,022 Earth days. We live in the ‘fast lane.'”
I thought Krispie had missed my point, because it replied, “NO. It is we who live in the fast lane.” After a long pause, “You once said you have lived 36 orbits?”
“Yes,” confused, “I’m 36. Why…”
Abruptly, it folded its four grasping appendages to its chest, swiveled its eyestalk leftward, and coiled around to march towards the opening of the tent.
“Did I say something to offend you?” I shouted, the translator emitting snaps, crackles, and pops.
“I cannot meet with you again, old friend,” it replied, exiting in the direction of the forest.
“You’re not going to meet with me anymore?” I gasped, increasing my oxygen flow as I strove to keep up. Centipods move quickly when motivated, as Krispie apparently was.
“Do you have the sickness?”
Every few steps I got stuck. My mud-walking shoes, fabricated by a shipmate for me to accompany Krispie around its village and environs, were back in the tent.
“Yes. The sickness.”
Centipods had been disappearing of late. We had catalogued villagers by shell markings and geotagged them, following them visually when possible and otherwise via a GPS satellite we’d placed in stationary orbit. Many were missing from the village and their geotags had gone silent. Centipods are the dominant species on Pangaea, so predators were not thinning their ranks. It had to be some sort of sickness.
“Please, let our medic examine you. Perhaps there is something we can do.” I knew our exobiologist couldn’t place Centipods within an Earth-like classification, much less our medic treat their alien sickness, but I feared I would never see Krispie again.
Faintly, “My year… Nothing to be done…” Then it was out of translator range.
They were all gone within the next week, not just in that village, but everywhere in Pangaea.
After five Earth months of intense heat and drought, the rains returned and little Centipods began emerging from the mud. They grew rapidly, because, as Krispie had said, they lived in the fast lane.
by submission | Feb 8, 2017 | Story |
Author : Alicia Cerra Waters
Once a month, someone had to delete the files of the undesirables. It was an easy job; go into the server room, which was illuminated by the light of countless green-glowing network ports, punch in a command, and watch as a neon status bar tracked the progress of the photos, video confessions, the birth certificates and disposal certificates, all being scrubbed out of existence. Usually, the senior data analyst did it, but pale, introverted Stephanie of the bad allergies and dishwater hair hadn’t been in the office for days. At least, Rachel hadn’t seen her. Another bout of the flu was biting through the city, ravaging the young, the old, and the chronically unhealthy.
Rachel didn’t know if Stephanie had the flu, but that’s what the department manager had implied when Rachel bumped into him in the lounge. She was watching her coffee mug oscillate under the yellow light of the microwave, full of the thick remains of that day’s burnt roast. She had spent the afternoon rocking back and forth in her office chair. If she leaned back far enough, she could see the green light of the server room reaching towards her from the other end of the hall like floating strands of a spider web.
The department manager came in, grinning jovially at her. It was never a good sign when he smiled. “I thought I’d find you here,” he said. “I sent you an email. Urgent business. I was hoping you could assist me with it.” He reached for a chipped Yellowstone National Park mug and filled it with water.
“That’s Stephanie’s,” Rachel said. She remembered when Stephanie came back from that vacation; the only time Stephanie had ever seemed happy about anything was when she was explaining the photograph of the Emerald Pool. He turned towards her, and suddenly she wondered why she’d spoken at all.
He widened his grin. “Stephanie won’t mind.”
“Is it the flu? My grandmother’s sick with it.”
He hummed. “Yes, poor thing.”
The microwave beeped, and it took a concentrated effort not to jump from surprise. He grinned, watching her. “Be sure to read your email.” He took a long drink from his mug and paused in the doorway, and she felt his eyes rest on her for another long second before he left.
Rachel’s intestines released the knot that had twisted up while he talked. She took a breath, then carried the mug back to her cube and angled her chair away from the hall. In her desk drawer, under a pile of papers, was a smokeless, scentless marijuacodin e-cig. Technically they were illegal, but everyone in the data department smoked them. Glancing around, she inhaled deeply from it once, then twice, and allowed herself to rotate her chair back towards her computer, sitting up very straight, as if she were pausing to think about the contents of a spreadsheet when really she was floating through a dim, blissful haze.
Eventually the click of keyboards all around her calmed her senses, and she opened her email. A well-rehearsed script picked up inside her mind; “You’re safe. You follow the rules. Almost all of the rules. You’re a citizen In Good Standing. You’re safe.”
She scanned the email he had sent. “Please delete the files of the undesirables.” That was all he’d written. Not even a signature.
She turned her head just right, and a prism of bright green light stretched its tendrils towards her. She thought about Stephanie in the vacation photos, smiling for a change, standing in front of that dreamlike blur of blue and green and sepia.
by submission | Feb 5, 2017 | Story |
Author : Garrisonjames
They used to joke that the world would eventually be taken over by cockroaches or rats. Both are pretty much extinct these days. We’ve all been done-in by the ants. Tiny, insignificant little creatures we used to crush under our thumbs, poison with impunity. In the end they were too smart for us. Too smart and too numerous.
By the time anyone noticed the super-colonies in Africa or Asia or wherever, it was too late. We were too used to seeing things from the perspective of mammals with centralized brains in our bodies. Ants don’t work like that. Maybe they did, once upon a time. At some point the ants developed into a form of networked intelligence. We used to worry about AI and robots rising up to destroy us, and in a way we are being exterminated by biological robots driven by a massively multiplexed networked consciousness that might as well be the Singularity for all we know or can prove.
Not only did the ants out-number us by trillions upon trillions; all those connections, all those linked synapses allowed them to outclass our own monkey-brains and computers. Insidiously clever things, the ants quickly, quietly, carefully infiltrated every one of our cities and settlements. They formed deeply embedded nests where their queens dreamed in pheromones and conspired through chemical signals among one another to take over the world.
Sinkholes ruined roads and collapsed neighborhoods. Cave-ins and avalanches and mud-slides struck without warning. Cables were severed. Sewers were blocked. Hordes of every kind of ant swarmed through the chaos and destruction.
People being people blamed one another and took up arms against their usual enemies even as city after city fell to the ants. Some took to the oceans, others took to the skies; there was a renaissance for airships after all. Of course ants can grow wings and swarms wrecked all but the highest-flying dirigibles, and it was only a matter of time before raft-like masses of ants stripped barges and oil-rigs, ocean-liners and other sea-going vessels of all life.
There aren’t many of us left these days. A few survivors wandering about what’s left of the old deserts that are slowly greening due to the ants’ efforts at making the world over in their image. There are some isolated island communities that the rafts haven’t reached yet. Some of us hide as far up in the atmosphere as our airships can reach. But we’re too few and too scattered to be any sort of threat to the ants.
by submission | Feb 4, 2017 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
The engines stopped burning after a full year of deceleration, and all the ships turned to face their destination. The mechanics triple checked the cannons before opening their compartments, and did touch-ups on all the fighters before deploying them. When the fleet was ready, Commander Ankerbjin looked to his navigation officers and asked, “What enemy movement are we seeing?”
For a time, no answer came. Then one said, “None, sir. We detect no ships converging on this location, no weapons locking on, and no emergency lockdowns on any of the planets, looking at their energy signatures.”
Ankerbjin grunted. “Continue scans of the system. Hold tight for several hours, wait for the light from the distant edges of the system to reach us. Once we have a better lay of the land, we’ll be able to attack.”
Hours did pass, and the aliens seemed to be taking no defensive actions against the arrived enemy fleet. Even stranger things started happening four hours after the engines quieted.
“Sir, you ought to see this.”
Ankerbjin rose from his command throne at the center of the bridge to lean over the shoulder of one of his navigators. He looked at what was on the screen. “Tell me what I’m seeing here.”
“The ships… they’re converging on their own planets. Planets whose power outputs are spiking. Certain structures on those planets are *really* lighting up.”
“Certain structures? Weapons! They’re preparing to fire surface batteries at us!”
“And not just on the planets. You know that structure we identified around their star? That’s powering up too.”
“Good God.”
“Well, sir,” one of the bridge engineers said, “we anticipated something like this. It only took a year to get here from our perspective, because of time dilation, but for them we took nearly a hundred. We knew their technology would come a long way before we even started our attack. That’s why we brought so many ships along with–”
Starlight stopped shining through the giant forward window, the tiny lights indicating planets winking out with it. The navigators’ lidar screens also went dark.
“What the hell just happened!?” Ankerbjin barked. “Are they… blocking electromagnetic radiation from getting to us? Is there something obstructing our view?”
“How could there be if we’re still seeing stars?”
The bridge was silent for a minute. Then the same bridge engineer said, “Shit. Advanced technology indeed.”
The whole room looked at him.
“We thought, with a hundred years to prepare before we arrived, the aliens would advance in defensive weapons technology. They might create forcefields, build surface batteries, megascale energy weapons. But I think they took a different approach. Those structures on the planets, and around the star? I think they shunted the entire system away from here. They picked up what they were trying to defend and sent it somewhere else, their whole home system. We spent a hundred years traveling to a place that might as well have been… imaginary.”
“Well– where did they go?” Ankerbjin stuttered.
“Dunno. Could’ve gone to an alternate dimension, for all we know.”
“So what the hell are we supposed to do!? How do we win?”
“I don’t think we do. This is like… like pacifist’s checkmate. There’s nothing for us to do now but turn around and go home.”
There was arguing. Fighting. Rallying. Mutiny. But in the end, Earth’s assault fleet powered up their ships, turned away from empty space, and began the century-long journey back home. Defeated.
by submission | Feb 3, 2017 | Story |
Author : Nick Wood
Five hundred words Izzy. Further we go, less we get. No pictures either. We lose bandwidth as the vast miles mount, so my words must be enough. We’re beaming photon packages with data ten light years back. Latest planet-hope is called Delteron-9. Twice Earth-size so gravity may be a problem; exo-skeletons and gestational support needed for first-generation colonists, but I’m ahead of myself. Just logged into orbit, so much analysis still to do, this may just be another red-herring, a planet with parameters beyond our abilities for terra-forming. We hope and pray as we know the years pass more quickly on your heating Earth. Still, I hope to see you here, perhaps with children?
Let me paint a word-picture for you at least. The planetary disc swirls and shimmers a pale blue; not deep blue like Earth, but a water-blue at least. Acid-wet though, so work to be done before anyone can swim or drink here. Three moons swing in orbit; two little more than the Martian rocky moons, but one a large dead world that glows in pink phases from an orange-red sun that looks so similar and yet so different to our own. No sun’s name though, that’s only for official reports. Five thousand words allowed for those. Not fair is it? Anyway, there are flashes of orange on Delteron-9; ground is roughly ten percent of its area and is crinkled and crusted, some mountains rearing twenty kays high. White topped, places to walk or climb perhaps, like your father loves (or loved?) to do.
No words allowed from you here. Data is precious, time is short they say. The mission is all.
To them.
But when we drift around the night side, purple flashes seam the darkness. Atmospheric flares or pulses of fluorescent life? Too early to tell; we need to send the probes. As colours strobe the darkness I wonder, is it lightning, is it rain? It’s been fifteen years since I felt wet rain on my face. Fifteen years since I pushed you high on that swing and you laughed and looked back at me; your face caught in my head and heart, hair flying forward as you started your arc back down to me. I have no picture of that moment, but it lives inside me as I watch purple stain the darkness above or below us. Two pictures I have; you know the ones, one with your dad and me in front of the cake, one with your mom. Five years old. They’re pasted against the window over my cocoon-bunk. I look at both you and the new worlds beyond. But mostly I look at the gut-wrenching darkness of space. Purple flashes are few now; I see the orange-gold glow of an imminent sun-rise. I watch the sun rise for both of us. I’m too scared to ask the Ship for relativity calculations of your age. Wish you here Izzy. Love You. Grandfather.
FAILED TO DELIVER. RECIPIENT DECEASED. NEXT OF KIN UNTRACEABLE.
