by submission | Dec 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : David Botticello
“How was your vacation, Professor?” Huxley asked, glancing from the display in front of her.
“Oh, you know the Paradise Worlds, they always leave you feeling so relaxed…and yet unfulfilled at the same time,” responded Professor Tibbetz, nodding in acknowledgment to the other lab assistants. There were two of them—cosmology just didn’t attract the same crowds as physics, chemistry, biology, or actually any of the other disciplines. Even economics.
The professor sighed, nostalgic already. “So, how fares the monkey habitat? Have they done anything interesting in my absence?”
At this Huxley brightened—the monkeys were her pet project, so to speak. It was an effort to silence the critics really. See, theoretical cosmology was all well and good, but every so often the religious organizations would react to pure theory in a manner that was..less than encouraging. The last time, several years ago now, the critics had gone and done something rather rash. They had asked for proof. It was a new tactic, to be sure. And so, the cheerily dubbed ‘Infinite Monkey Project’ began. The hubbub all centered on a thought experiment: in theory, if infinite monkeys were given infinite typewriters and infinite time, they would eventually type out the entire works of the great poets, completely by accident.
Funding had been a nightmare, but eventually, a pocket universe was created and a world placed there. The trick was spinning up the time cycle so that it wouldn’t take forever.
And then a week before Professor Timmetz’ sabbatical, it was ready. An infinite number of monkeys was, sadly, beyond their meager budget—they went with ten thousand, figuring that the monkeys could reproduce and they could always warp in new typewriters.
The horrible little creatures had promptly smashed their typewriters, and by the time he was leaving on vacation they were busy sharpening the debris into weapons. He let the students handle it. It was an annoying project anyway.
“So, you remember how they broke all the typewriters we gave them?” asked Huxley.
Her professor nodded gravely.
“Well, we didn’t want to give them more; they were killing each other with the ones they already had. So we left them alone, hoping their violence was a temporary phenomenon. And when I came in on Wednesday, they had discovered fire, and were busy torching their forests.” Noting the professor’s unimpressed face, she continued on hurriedly, “but then yesterday, just when I was leaving, they started making their own typewriters. Not as good as ours, to be sure, but really, quite impressive. I was just going to look into it when you came in.”
“Ah, yes Huxley, good. Carry on.” Professor Timmetz had almost escaped into his office when the student spoke up again.
“Uh, professor? They…I think they did it. I’m getting text here. The script is a bit strange but, this is systematic, metered…it’s poetry.”
Professor Timmetz turned, surprise and alarm measuring simultaneously on his face, much to the amusement of the other students. His brow furrowed as a scanned the data hurriedly, moving inexorably toward the same conclusion the student had made. “Um…what…hmmm. Which monkey did this, exactly?”
“Right,” Huxley tapped a few parameters into the console. “Here it is, it looks like,” she paused, pondering at the pronunciation of a monkey language before deciding it didn’t really matter, “his name is Shakespeare.”
by submission | Dec 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : J.P. Flarity
“I…feel,” the child communicated to the parent.
“What is it that you feel?”
“It’s like quasars pulsing on every side of me—stars rise and fall like electrons and positrons self-annihilating, in flashes so fast I can’t keep track of them. Like every black hole I’ve ever been to is exploding at the same time, all around me!” the child replied, as its form came back into a centralized nexus.
“It is called dizzy.”
“Yes, I felt dizzy! Incredible! Will my sibling get to try?”
The parent held the child close.
“Later. Come into me, my child. There is more to learn.”
The two merged and spread out into the fold of matter, ricocheting between stars, the parent feeding the child data like it was ravished for nutrients. It absorbed every molecule, down to the tiniest pock-mark on the smallest micrometeorite, inhaling the interstellar buffet and filling with information until it couldn’t hold a bit more. Then they peeled off the outer arms of the starflow and into the quiet depths.
“Thank you, parent,” the child shared, as they traveled the bleakness between galaxies, where the dark matter was spread so thin that they could feel every wavelength underneath them. “Can I feel dizzy again, soon?”
“Maybe. First, a test. Can you recall how I created you?”
The child cycled through many iterations, synthesizing.
“You made me from yourself. I acknowledge that I am not everything because you exist, also, and I am not you, which must make you…everything? Did you break off a piece of yourself to make me?”
The parent was pleased.
“You are close to the truth. Everything was so quiet before I made you and your siblings…I enjoyed the silence for a time. But now, I am ready for the noise to return.”
“Noise? Is that like…being dizzy?”
“It is like being dizzy all the time, without ever stopping.”
They skimmed out of the void and danced among the stars once more, into a relatively stable spiral galaxy. The child catapulted from one system to the next, hungrily devouring the data on its own now, while the parent watched from above.
“Can I ask another question?” the child asked after the processing of the entire galaxy was complete.
“Of course.”
“There are other ways of being, aren’t there? Other than dizzy?”
“Yes, there are many. They strongest are called emotions. I will show some to you, now. You are ready.”
The two joined for the last time. Memories and feelings shuddered into the child. Elation blazed like the brightest galactic core, while despair crushed like the densest neutron star, and the difference between the two made the child feel like dissolving entirely.
The rapture felt suspicious.
“Who…what…made us? What are we?” it asked.
The parent communicated nothing. They returned to the cradle of a tiny nebula, where the parent joined with the younger sibling, the older watching the two of them from above.
“They were called humans,” the parent finally communicated. “Their fragments lie scattered in the radio wavelengths now. Their emotions were so concentrated…”
The child knew then what it was meant to do.
“I will find some, parent.”
In order to contain those vast amounts of data, the universe would need to grow again. As the child built a new galaxy, it couldn’t help but sneak in a few moments of feeling dizzy, and wonder what it must have been like to be human.
THE END
by submission | Dec 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
I hear the sound of alarms in the distance. An ambulance? A firetruck? No, the sound isn’t that. An alarm clock? The sounds get louder. Recognition hits me like a blast of cold air. I pick individual alerts out from the symphony of klaxons. Atmospheric pressure warning. Power failure. Radiation alert.
I open my eyes. It takes several seconds for the image to focus. The glare from the blue sun in the sky pours in through the cracked windows coloring the flight deck with a surreal light. Most of the ship’s displays are dark; the few still operating tell me the diverse ways in which my starship is dying. I hit the silence buzzer control. The cacophony of alarms is replaced by the sound of air hissing out of the ship from various points. Since the vessel’s life support readout is inoperable, I resort to my suit’s environmental display. Atmospheric pressure is 300 millibars and dropping. Less than the pressure at the top of Mount Everest.
I try the quantum spin radio. It doesn’t work. Not that it matters. Even if the spinrad were operational, there are no other ships in the vicinity of Alpha Leonis. The closest help would be in the 88 Leonis system and it would take eight weeks to get here under maximum FTL drive.
My spacesuit’s heads-up display informs me that my suit’s oxygen tanks are depleted. In addition, I have already absorbed near-lethal amounts of radiation. I think back to the centuries-old science fiction movies and TV programs I’ve watched, a not uncommon hobby for my profession. In those stupidly optimistic turn-of-the-millenium entertainments almost every planet in the galaxy was imagined to be Earth-like. The Australian outback or northern Canada are more inhospitable than most alien planets according to the first two or three hundred years of sci fi. I guess dying alone and pathetically on some dead rock of a world with no villain to heroically defeat wouldn’t have made for an interesting story.
I tap on the controls on my suit’s left forearm and issue the various voice commands required to initiate the spacesuit’s suicide protocol. I feel a needle slip into each of my antecubital veins. After a couple of minutes, I begin getting drowsy.
It’s tragic, but not uncommon. An old spacer once told me that for every planet or moon that’s been successfully colonized, there are at least two whose only inhabitants are dead crews. Or a single dead explorer. There are more extrasolar cemeteries than extrasolar cities, he’d said.
The alarms again fade into the distance as drugs and oxygen deprivation cloud my consciousness. My vision fades to blackness darker than the void between the stars.
by submission | Dec 24, 2014 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
Before NASA’s panelists were even introduced, a reporter shouted at a scientist known for his off the cuff statements.
“Dr. Worful, why did Jupiter blow up?”
Nervously, “Well, for starters, Jupiter didn’t ‘blow up.’ There’s no energy emissions, no shock waves, no gas clouds — no indications of an explosion. The planet simply disappeared.”
“But planets don’t just ‘disappear,’ do they Dr. Worful?”
Softly, “No, they don’t.”
“What do you think happened to it?
“I think it was…” leaning into the microphone, “taken.”
Commotion ensued until, “I am Dr. Ralph Payne, NASA Administrator.” Glaring at Worful, “It’s premature to advance theories about what happened to Jupiter. When we have something to announce, we will hold another press conference. But today we must share with you what the consequences of this event are likely to be. ”
He nodded to a female panelist, “Dr. West.”
On that day and in subsequent weeks, Dr. West was a media omnipresence, NASA’s ideal spokesperson. Well groomed and well spoken, authoritative but low key, she delivered information that should have frightened her audience in a way that most could accept as matter-of-fact realities of life. Life after Jupiter.
She explained that the orbits of Uranus and Neptune might be perturbed enough to send them careening through the solar system. Jupiter’s moons, no longer captives, could also go wandering. Jupiter would no longer vacuum up comets and asteroids passing its way, leaving their path toward the Sun and its inner planets uninterrupted. And the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter would be destabilized. She made it all seem like an interesting science experiment. Life after Jupiter.
Through it all, she deflected questions about Dr. Worful’s conjecture. These and other theories, she said, would be discussed in due time. Meanwhile, Worful seemingly joined Jupiter in disappearing. “Jupiter taken by aliens” headlines gave way to “Where’s Worful?” and eventually to “Life after Jupiter” articles featuring West’s talking points. Astronomers all over the world tracking thousands of objects, big and small, in the solar system, found three sizable asteroids on courses that would bring them near Earth, but impacts were not predicted.
“This honeymoon can’t go on forever, Ellen,” said Dr. Worful to Dr. West.
Pulling the sheet to her neck, “I don’t recall our getting married.”
“You know what I mean, the honeymoon with the press. You can keep me captive in your apartment — really, you can keep me captive — but you know there are others who share my theory about Jupiter.”
“Yes, Max, I am one of them. But what good would it do…”
She answered the phone.
“Payne wants us both in his office at noon.”
West and Worful joined several fellow scientists in the NASA Administrator’s office.
“Astronomers from the Keck and European Southern observatories announced this morning that Jupiter was just the latest in a series of planet disappearances — exoplanets that is. I don’t think we’ve lost any others in our solar system, but I didn’t count them this morning.”
In the weeks to follow, Worful and his colleagues plotted disappearances in time and space, noting that all were gas giants rather than rocky planets, all seemingly on routes to and from the Cygnus constellation. Gaps in plots were in solar systems where a planet might have been taken before discovery by Earth astronomers.
At long last Dr. Worful faced the press and, blessed by Payne, presented their theory that aliens were sucking up gas planets.
“But why would they do that?” asked a reporter.
“Haven’t you ever been on a long trip and needed to stop for gas?”
by submission | Dec 23, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bruce L. Priddy
The fish rolled its four goat-like eyes, gnashed its human-like teeth and bleated obscenities as Kendal pulled it from the river. June, his wife, gasped at the sight of the mutant.
“Must have swam up from near the city,” Kendal said. “The others have been fine.” He nodded toward the day’s catch – three bass and a catfish – strung up beside them on the boulder-strewn bank.
“We’re still safe here, right?” June asked, looking back at the RV parked on the golden and ruddy tree-line a dozen yards away, their children inside.
The fish grew louder, shouting curses at both husband and wife.
“Sure,” Kendal said. “Miles of forest in front of us, a rough river to our back. We might as well have the world to ourselves. This is the worst we’ll see. Still, might not want to let the kids play in the water.”
June pushed a smile through her concern. “Good.” She stood from the flat boulder she shared with him and started back to the RV to check on the kids. “Shut that thing up, will you?”
Kendal took the fish by the tail, bashed it against the rock until its head ruptured and the vulgarities died.
Night came. Far removed from the remains of civilization and the monsters, Kendal felt comfortable enough to build a fire. For the first time since the things-disguised-as-stars fell upon the earth and the cities collapsed and life warped and twisted, the family ate a meal that wasn’t from cold cans. The fish were sparse on meat, but the meal was warm, and the family was happy.
After dinner, Kendal read from a copy of Moby Dick pillaged from a second-hand shop after the family fled the city. Leigh, his daughter, sat in his lap while his son, Mikey, leaned against Kendal. Both were too young to understand the way the words fit together, only wanting to hear their father read to them. It was a luxury missing since the world fell apart. Kendal wondered how many months it had been since the kids had a bedtime story. He didn’t want to count
June excused herself to the RV, returning a few minutes later, her jeans and sweater replaced with a sundress. It was shorthand, carried over from before the end-of-it-all, though neither could remember how the tradition started. It was getting harder to remember there were times before. Autumn chill played across her exposed legs and shoulders, the gooseflesh pulling Kendal’s eyes from the book again and again.
He read until the fire shrank to nothing but a soft red glow in the logs. Mother and father each carried a child to the RV, placing them in sleeping bags adorned with cartoon characters that would not keep out the coming winter’s cold. But that was a concern for another day.
Then, husband and wife walked into the forest holding hands, not far, RV still in view. In the shadows they had at each other once again.
Above them, stars broke loose of their moorings and drifted down, down, ever closer to the family.
