by submission | May 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Emily Stupar
“I know it’s not glamorous, baby. But someone’s got to fill out the paperwork, and you’ve got the best handwriting.”
Stephanie looks up at him from the couch, her face neutral. “I’ll do it, but you know what it’s gonna cost you.”
Gil nods. “Fine, fine, fine. I’ll feed the damn baby.”
He wanders into the kitchen and hits the switch for the flickering light. On top of the tiny refrigerator sits a tin overflowing with plastic clips, rubber bands, and empty lighters. Gil dumps the entire thing onto the counter top to find the patch he’s looking for.
A minute later he bounds back past Stephanie and down the apartment’s only hallway. He returns with an infant held triumphantly in the air. “How are you, baby boy? Ready for some lunch? You are!”
Through the feeding, cooing, playing, and eventual luring of the child to sleep, Stephanie remains impassive on the couch, dutifully completing the monthly Department of Emotional Services form.
Gil returns and collapses on the couch next to her, peeling the spent patch from his forearm. The color fades from his cheeks and the lopsided smile loses all its warmth, hanging dead and misplaced for a beat after the emotion dries up.
“Baby’s asleep.”
Stephanie responds with a grunt. Gil stares in silence at the wall until she plops the forms and pen down. “They’re done.”
“Great. What time did you say Rondo’s coming?”
“Half hour.”
An hour later there comes a knock on the door and Rondo lets himself in. He spreads his arms wide, practically bouncing around the room and speaking so fast his words blend together. “Hey GilSteph! SorrI’mlate I just had to, yaknow – Well I got somegoodstuff and I was droppinoff and then I remembered I promised! You gottatrythis, man!”
They sit still and pliable on the couch while he produces a pair of patches and slaps them onto their forearms. Stephanie vaults out of her seat.
“It’s cool, Rondo, don’t worry about it. Wow, I dunno the last time I had such good Happy stuff. Must be selling like crazy, huh?”
Gil wraps an arm around her waist. “Oh, of course, I bet it is. Wow, really great, we weren’t expecting anything good until after we get our papers in. Just let me know if you need me to take some off your hands.”
Rondo laughs and makes himself comfortable on the couch, running through a few non sequitur stories of clients and run-ins with the cops. The patches are just starting to wear off by the time he springs out the door: a miniature whirlwind leaving destruction and a terrifying silence in his wake.
Stephanie and Gil curl into each other on the couch as the replacement emotion drains slowly out of their systems. Tomorrow one of them will take the completed paperwork to the Department of Emotional Services and receive a new stockpile of the essentials: love, nurturing, anxiety, and, since the baby’s birthday is coming up, a bit of state-sanctioned excitement.
Drifting to sleep next to Stephanie, residual remnants of Gil’s fatherly instincts ghost through his veins. Outside the window, a cat yowls with a sound like a distressed infant and he fidgets but doesn’t wake.
by submission | May 28, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“I’m having to push the engines a lot harder than expected. The density and currents at this depth are both greater than we predicted,” said Dr. Ngozi Adeyemi as she piloted the Jules Verne over the ocean floor on Titan.
“Mohammed can reel you up if you get into trouble,” said the captain over the radio of the UAS Mandela in orbit around the Saturnian moon.
Ngozi tried cutting back on the submersible’s engines. She was afraid the turbulence they generated would scare away the elongated, tubular creatures that swam through the liquid methane sea that was the Kraken Mare.
“Are you going to try bring back a live specimen?” asked the captain.
“I’m going to try. But I’ll need to be very careful to–”
Her words were cut off by the screech of an alarm.
“Ngozi, what’s happened?” asked Mohammed over the radio from the landing craft. His hands tensed on the winch controls.
“Engines aren’t responding. I think the sub has drifted into a trench.”
Ngozi watched as the depth gauge indicated her small vehicle was dropping deeper into the hydrocarbon ocean. Simultaneously, the readout on the pressure gauge was going up. A low hum started to fill the submersible. It slowly rose in pitch. Structural fatigue.
“Pull her up, Mohammed!” ordered the captain.
“I’m trying, sir. Getting a lot of resistance.” He cursed in Arabic.
Ngozi kept trying to restart the submersible’s engines. She wasn’t concerned about her own safety. Her fear was that if her vessel lost structural integrity, the atmosphere inside it, as well as her own body, might contaminate the Kraken Mare’s ecosystem.
Suddenly, the pressure gauge starting moving down. She checked the depth indicator. She was ascending. As she was about to radio her thanks to Mohammed, she noticed something outside the vessel. Through the porthole windows, she saw thousands of the tubular Titan eels surrounding the Jules Verne. The creatures were furiously beating the umbrella-like hoods they used for locomotion down toward the sea floor, pushing against the underside of the submarine. Their collective effort, in combination with the lander’s winch, soon had the craft breaking the methane sea’s surface. An hour later, Ngozi was inside the landing craft with Mohammed, drinking a cup of strong coffee.
“There were thin filaments wrapped around the ship’s propellers,” Ngozi was saying to the captain. “Some sort of Titanian seaweed. We’ll need to look the sub over really well, but I think she’ll be seaworthy in a day or two.”
“No one’s going back down until and unless we get clearance from mission control,” said the captain. I’ve sent a message to Khartoum informing them of the situation. Any idea how the alien creatures knew you were in trouble and why they helped?”
“They might have been exhibiting altruistic behavior. On Earth, dolphins have been saving drowning humans at least since the ancient Greeks. No one knows why. Of course, the Titan creatures may have been collectively repelling what they saw as an invader. We simply need to study them a lot more closely.”
“I’ll try to convince Khartoum to authorize another dive,” said the captain.
Ngozi looked out at the Kraken Mare through the lander’s windows. The surface of the sea of liquid alkane was so placid it could have been mistaken for solid ground. “Suit up, Mohammed,” she said at last. “Let’s get the Jules Verne ready for another dive.”
by submission | May 24, 2015 | Story |
Author : Ellie Snyder
We arrived at the edge of the universe yesterday.
I don’t know exactly what I expected to see but it wasn’t this. I guess I figured it would be blackness—that the last tendrils of matter that had worked their way here would dissipate into the void. Until the universe’s expansion pushed them further out and extended the boundary.
Hardy said he knew it was stupid but he always thought we would end up looking across a sort of boundary into the celestial realm. Off in the distance we would see where heaven started, and the black would fade into golden light and there would be this perfect city and God and everything. That was stupid but we were all pretty shaken up so no one laughed. Any theory seemed more plausible than the reality.
O’Connor said she didn’t think we’d ever reach a real end. She thought the galaxies and everything would thin out but never stop, that there would never actually be nothing. And if there ever was nothing she thought we would just keep going anyway to see if anything else started up.
Rees said he thought along the same lines as O’Connor, that it would never end, except he thought there would be infinite galaxies and stars and planets. He said he read about this theory where the universe is infinite so every possible scenario of anything that could ever happen would happen. There would be infinite Earths with infinite different people experiencing every possible scenario. He thought we might even meet up with a ship of other Us’s, also looking for the boundary of the universe. No one really knew what to say to that.
Thomson said he thought we would hit a wall. He thought there would be a boundary and one day we would just smack into it and rebound. He said he pictured it like The Truman Show, but instead of Truman’s boat hitting the edge of the dome it would be a spaceship hitting the inside of a sphere. He came the closest of all of us, I guess.
Here’s what the edge of the universe looks like. There is a solid boundary, or we think it’s solid, we haven’t tried touching it yet. It’s sort of glassy looking, but with bright waves of energy wavering all over it, and it stretches on forever on every side of us.
What’s on the other side is what’s really astounding. There are bubbles. They honestly look like giant bubbles with the same type of shells as ours. And they contain whole universes. It’s just like you would imagine, there are webs of galaxies inside, all miniscule, like ships in bottles. Some look more densely packed than others, and they all just float around out there and bounce into each other. When they bounce into ours the boundary lights up a little brighter and nudges in and then ripples away. It looks like the bubbles go on forever, or at least there’s no reason to believe they don’t.
Tomorrow we’ll try touching the boundary. I wonder if it’ll just obliterate us or if we’ll approach it all dramatic and slow and then just bump into it and make a little ripple like all the bubbles out there.
If we can we’re going through. No one wants to go back. For all we know there’s nothing to go back to. So through the edge of the universe it is and into a new one!
Maybe we’ll pass someone else on their way out, exchange addresses.
by submission | May 23, 2015 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
Earth is largely habitable. There are some places that are especially hot, cold, dry, irradiated, and toxic. And, sometimes, the entire Earth is subjected to extreme conditions; mass extinctions, periods of volcanic activity, Ice Ages, snowball Earths, and so on. But this does not happen often. To be direct, the chance of one of these things happening to an exoplanet just when humanity wants to colonize it is extremely low.
But it happened anyway. Not only had Kepler-438b been recently hit by a magnetic pole shift, it was also in the middle of a snowball planet phase. As I looked out at the cold, irradiated surface of this goddamned, supposed-to-be-beautiful planet, these were the infuriating thoughts that raced through my mind.
Over the radio, I’m pretty sure everyone else could hear my labored breathing. They definitely saw my clenched fists and the shaking of my legs, as i was about ready to fall to my knees and start screaming.
“This had 100 times less of a chance of happening than winning the lottery,” Arida said from behind me.
“What are we going to tell Earth?” Vonan asked.
“We almost did it,” Shalla added.
“We won’t be able to live here for thousands of years,” Irnen.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to pound on the ice until one of us broke. I wanted to slaughter everyone around me.
I wanted to die.
But I knew none of those would solve the problem. Nothing would. So, against all my natural instincts, my nature, and my pride, I turned back to the ship… and set us on a course home. Wounded. Defeated. Deprived.
Lost.
by submission | May 18, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“We’re almost ready,” said Olav to his companion, Isak. “Are the others out of range?”
“Yes, all the ships are gone,” replied Isak. “It’s just us now.”
The two of them watched UY Scuti waver on their ship’s display like a reflection in water distorted by ripples. But UY Scuti was no reflection. It was a red supergiant star with five billion times the volume of Sol. The great artificial rings that surrounded the enormous sun were far too small to be visible. But they were there, spinning around the great star faster and faster, distorting the fabric of spacetime. If UY Scuti replaced Sol, the former’s photosphere would extend beyond the orbit of Jupiter. In a few moments, the star would be compressed to the dimensions of a proton.
“Think we’ll survive?” asked Isak.
“We both made backup copies of our minds,” responded Olav matter-of-factly.
“I know. But I mean…us.”
“There’s a good chance we won’t,” said Olav. “No one’s ever tried to punch a hole out of our D-brane and into another dimension.”
“Assuming our universe is a very large D-brane extended over three spatial dimensions,” remarked Isak. “If that’s the case and all material objects are just open strings bound to this D-brane and gravity is the result of closed strings exerting their force from ‘outside’ our universe…”
“We’ll know either way soon enough,” said Olav.
The ship’s computer started moving the vessel closer to the imploding star.
“I hope opening a hyperspace tunnel out of our brane-space doesn’t do any harm,” said Isak.
“The government approved this. Even if it did cause something catastrophic, in the long run the race would benefit from it,” said Olav.
“Well, that’s taking optimism a bit far,” replied Isak.
“But it’s true. Look at history. Back in 2758, when Eta Carinae went supernova, the gamma ray burst destroyed Earth’s ozone layer. Muon radiation killed almost everything and ultraviolet radiation killed what was left. But the humans in underground colonies on Earth’s Moon and Mars and inside hollowed-out asteroids survived. The survivors were a select population: Intelligent, highly motivated, physically and emotionally tough. It was from this adventurous stock that the human population was restored.”
Isak looked at his companion in disbelief. “It was the worst mass extinction event in history!”
“Oh, certainly it was a horrific nightmare. But without it, mankind would have remained confined to one solar system.”
“Next you’ll be telling me the Plague of Tau Ceti IV was a great leap forward.”
“It was. After the plague, legislation blocking experiments in transhumanism was relaxed and later repealed. The transhuman meta-race wouldn’t exist across the Milky Way if the Tau Ceti plague hadn’t happened. I know it seems grotesque that that’s how progress is made, but–”
Olav was interrupted by the sound of alarms. UY Scuti seemed to suddenly iris down like the image on an ancient television set that had been switched off. The ship lurched forward at high speed toward the narrow tunnel that was opening.
“I sincerely hope this doesn’t turn out to be one of your great moments in the history of progress,” said Isak as the small ship disappeared into higher dimensions.”
