by submission | Sep 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
THE SENTINEL
They found it.
They found the edge of the universe.
And they found the sentinel there.
EARLIER
Harrison knew this was it. Beyond, there were no stars, just utter blackness.
“My God,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d ever find it.”
Ramsey looked at him. The lines on Harrison’s face were deep. They had met each other as much younger men, each of them searching for something that life was not giving them. They had become quick friends and, in time, inseparable. So, on the day Harrison came to him with his ideas for a quantum drive that could bend time and space, Ramsey had no other choice but to join him on his adventure.
It took twenty years and a billion credits to build the two-man quantum ship, but Harrison was good at acquiring funding for such things. He had an honest face, he joked, and businessmen were always quick to see the potential profit for themselves in his work. He wondered if those businessmen, all in their high-priced suits sipping their expensive wines, were shaking their fists in rage at him.
They had departed the orbital station in the middle of the night. Subterfuge had been the order of the moment, and neither of them had told a soul they were leaving. It was only when the quantum drive came online that anyone took notice of their flight….and, by then, it was too late.
Harrison had flicked the switch, and the ship disappeared.
It hadn’t really disappeared, of course. Harrison’s quantum drive merely slid the ship into an alternate dimension for a moment. The ship sped through that dimension, following a course that Ramsey had postulated would take them to the edge of the universe the quickest.
“But,” said Harrison, “isn’t there more than one ‘edge’?”
“Of course there is,” replied Ramsey. “There are trillions upon trillions of points.”
“Then why this course?” asked Harrison.
Ramsey took a second to reply. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “I….I’ve noticed something about this region of space we are traveling through. Something odd.”
“Oh?”
He drew a deep breath and let out a sigh. “It’s….it’s as if someone has laid out a trail of bread crumbs, in a way. The radiation coming from the stars in this direction—and in this direction only—is different than the radiation from other stars and solar systems in the known reaches of space.”
He went on to explain it, but Harrison did not fully comprehend. He was a theoretically engineer, a man who designed and thought up things no man had ever thought of before, and astrophysics was not his specialty.
In the end, he trusted Ramsey as much as Ramsey trusted him.
They traveled for months at speeds that were hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster than the speed of light.
Then, the day came that the sensors told them there was nothing ahead.
Harrison returned the ship to normal, sub-light speed.
They saw the void ahead.
And they saw the sentinel.
Both men gasped in awe at the sight. For the sentinel was neither machine, nor creature. It was something completely different. It sensed them the moment they arrived, and it started to flow toward them.
It wrapped itself around the quantum ship and Harrison, in a moment of fear, activated the drive.
Nothing happened.
“I don’t understand,” Harrison said, his voice shaky. “We should be parsecs away.”
But I do not wish it, a voice in his head replied. I have waited so long. He….he left me here….alone.
Harrison looked at Ramsey and, at that moment, both men understood. They had found the edge of the universe, and the sentinel was there to guard it. From what, they did not know.
A few seconds later, the quantum ship imploded and the sentinel, who could not help what it was, was alone….again.
by submission | Sep 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : Alicia Cole
“Watch out for that kid!”
Tanya swerves, kicking the drive gear into second. Our hover skimmer chugs left, close cropping a row of season’s end corn. She nudges the engine to a full stop and settles in the field.
Trash spills out of the can the kid was loading. He stands in his front yard, eyes wide, as the craft door opens and first I, then Tanya, emerge, removing our flight helmets. His camo pajamas are filthy, fraying at his ankles.
“Are you okay?!”
He continues to gape.
Tanya places her hand on my shoulder. “He ain’t bleeding, come on. We’ve got a deadline.”
Turning on his heel, he hits the porch at rocket speed, hollering, “Women from space!”
I run a hand through my long blonde hair and laugh.
*
“Y’all were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago, Delia,” Squib snarls, his men unloading the cargo from the rear of the skimmer.
“We ran into a kid in a field”, I shrug.
“After you stopped at a bar?” Squib fishes a sequined bra out of the front floor board.
“Didn’t have a drop,” Tanya grins.
“A drop of liquor at least.”
Squib hands me the bra which I hold up to my flat chest, wiggling my hips until he cracks a smile.
“Worth it, then?”
“Hey, boss!”
The cargo foreman waves Squib over, a pleased look on his face.
“These’ll sell like hot toasties!”
*
“Like this,” Tanya says, showing the Anolian child how to blow bubbles through the ribbed pink plastic wand. The soap bubbles swirl through the purple air.
She laughs, her facial feelers scenting the air.
“Fizzy,” she squeaks.
Her parental polyp buys three bottles.
“I can’t believe they were such a good price,” I say, my skirt twirling as I dance through the slowly exploding incandescent spheres.
“They’re just not that popular Terra-side anymore.”
*
As I watch from the cover of trees, the hover skimmer hid, the kid in the camo pajamas picks up my gift.
“I thought aliens left better presents,” he comments idly, pulling out a yellow wand.
It hangs in his hand idly, a few bubbles dribbling through the lighter gravity. When he cracks a smile, I smile in return.
Some things are universal.
by submission | Sep 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
It’s rotating. It doesn’t look like it, but instruments show that it is. Right now it takes around 24 hours to complete one rotation. Since it’s just over two miles in diameter at its center, the amount of centrifugal “gravity” being generated right now is negligible. That’ll change. The drivers will keep slowly increasing the spin until it’s rotating once every two minutes. That will make the pseudo-gravity 0.45 g. It’ll take most of a year to get it spinning that fast. No matter. I’m in no hurry.
Even now, with the thing less than complete, it’s a work of art. Nearly ten miles long and perfectly rounded at both ends, it’s hard to believe it used to be three gigantic asteroids.
I make way stations. And while there’s an unfathomable amount of engineering that goes into them, anyone who says it isn’t art is a liar or a fool. You can’t totally rely on the equations to tell you what the proper land-to-water ratio should be. The hull specs that will block hard radiation while still greedily gathering up ordinary light to illuminate the interior? Your AI will get you pretty close, but there’s always a small gap between theory and practice. And it takes instinct to bridge that gap.
It’s surprising how many people think we’ve always used way stations in interstellar travel. We haven’t. During the first hundred and fifty years of extrasolar travel, various methods were attempted to get across the gulf between the stars. Suspended animation. Multi-generation ships. Near-light speed schemes. Not one explorer made it to his destination alive.
What can go wrong on a space mission within Earth’s solar system? A technical failure. Psychiatric issues. Medical emergencies. Radiation contamination of food or water or living space. Now extend that mission from tens of millions or a billion miles to one that has to cover multiple trillions of miles. The law of averages wins. Something going catastrophically wrong becomes all but certain.
The first way station halfway between Earth’s system and the Alpha Centauri system was small and fairly unimpressive by modern standards. The crew on the first attempt to reach Proxima Centauri after the station came online barely made it. They spent four months there effecting repairs to their ship and relaxing in an environment that at least approximated being outdoors on Earth. Now there are six stations equidistant between Sol and Proxima. It takes most of 10 years to make the trip, but you have a month or two every 18 months of the journey at one of the stations. You’re not trapped in the same spaceship for a decade. You’re never more than 18 months away from a giant O’Neill cylinder with forests and lakes and deserts.
Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Epsilon Eridani: They all have a string of way stations reaching back to Sol. And no two way stations are alike. You might explore a jungle on one station and participate in a snowball fight on the next one.
I’ve been working on this station for most of 20 years. A siliceous asteroid, a carbonaceous asteroid, and a metallic asteroid. Bolt them together and fling them out of the asteroid belt and command nanotech machines like a conductor directing a symphony as you travel out between the stars. Twenty years and now the first way station between Sol and Procyon is almost ready. I’ve modeled the beach and sea on Destin, Florida. White sand and emerald water. And an artificial sun illuminated by concentrated starlight. You need that on an 88 trillion mile journey.
by submission | Sep 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : Glenn Leung
He was the Hero of time, that was all we knew. For millenia, long before he was born and long after he had died, he had been saving the world. An alien invasion two hundred years in the future, a genocidal plague three hundred years in the past, had all been averted by him. He had never once revealed his identity, even though people have seen his face. I even own a plastic figure of him, have pictures of him from eyewitnesses, and am always on the lookout for him in real life. Yet, I have not met this man, nor has anyone else in this time.
“He sounds very much like that alien with two hearts,” laughed my brother. “Does he travel in a blue box?”
I giggled, I did not realize how similar those stories had been.
“So you think it’s all just mass delusion?” I asked.
“Quite likely so, although I’m very surprised in this age of logic and reason, such things can still happen.”
Indeed, it was unthinkable that mass delusions could occur in this age of science. However, it was just as unthinkable how stories of his exploits in the future could arrive with us. Some people say that this is evidence time travel exists, citing photos that were allegedly taken with him against a futuristic background.
“The experts say the photos are genuine,” I often hear such protests against claims of photoshop. Yet, everyone knows that nowadays, experts are often wrong about many things.
“Maybe he’s a concept,” my friend Jody had once mentioned. “You know, a concept personified. Just like comic book superheroes were during the second world war. They were supposed to represent the people’s wish for a good person of immense power which brought an end to suffering.”
“But he’s not a fictional character,” I had replied. “The things he did, or will do, are supposed to be real.”
Jody sighed in disagreement.
“Who knows, a thousand years from now, people may think superheroes actually existed.”
Was it all just an issue of legends made real then? I told others I remained open-minded, but secretly, I wanted to believe. I wanted the Hero to be real, and I wanted him to be my Hero, a brave man detached from his time, traveling around to make things right. I wanted to follow him, be his sidekick, and get to know him better.
“Hey Johnny! Come take a look at this!”
It was my brother, slouched on the couch, as he has been doing every day at nine. It was the news, and some security footage was showing. It was a shot at the entrance of an old castle. No one had been in the castle at that time of night, yet at precisely 2 in the morning, someone was shown leaving it.
I could barely believe my eyes. I recognized that face, that hair, that outfit practically anywhere! It was him!
“Yet another sighting,” sighed my brother. “I bet it’s just another extremely elaborate hoax.”
No…I thought. He was here, in this time, for something. Something is about to happen, and soon, the people of this time would know how real he is. I was excited, my Hero was coming to life! So elated was I that I did not realize that the lights in the city were starting to go out…
by submission | Sep 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“Please be careful getting up, Mr. Turner,” says the tinny, sing-song voice of the robotic surgeon. “Some dizziness and disorientation are to be expected.”
Other medical automata extend thin mechanical arms to help me to my feet. I still can’t believe I went through with it. I keep expecting to wake up and laugh it all off as a dream. But this is no dream. A year ago an enormous alien spaceship really did enter the solar system traveling at close to the speed of light. It really did enter Earth orbit and the Omrad really did make contact with us.
“Take it slowly. One leg at a time.”
The Omrad arrived in a ship so big it was clearly visible with the naked eye from the Earth’s surface. They immediately started transmitting a series of radio pulses denoting prime numbers and slowly worked up to more complicated mathematical functions and crude video images of the atoms in the periodic table starting with hydrogen. Within three weeks the beginnings of real-time translation was achieved and a dialog begun.
“Don’t try to walk, Mr. Turner. Let’s just stand for a minute and get our bearings.”
Tripedal robots from the Omrad ship were sent to the International Space Station. The Omrad, via their machine emissaries, were eager to have firsthand contact with human beings. The six person crew of the ISS became humanity’s ambassadors. Immediately thereafter, the Omrad broke off contact and recalled their robots.
“Would you like to try taking a step? We’re right here. We won’t let you fall.”
A few days after the ISS affair, the Omrad re-established contact. They requested permission to send a single robot to the surface to meet with a small group of diplomats. As the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, I was in that group.
“That’s fine. Let’s try another step.”
The alien machine explained that humans and the Omrad shared something in common. Both species tended, rightly or not, to judge by appearances. The Omrad possessed this attribute to a much greater extent than mankind. “The Omrad,” the robot diplomat had remarked, “are impressed that the human race has a gift for looking beyond the superficial. Regrettably, the Omrad psyche and culture do not share this talent. This will be an obstacle to direct contact between the two species without the need for machine intermediaries like myself.”
“Steady, Mr. Turner. It’s okay. A stumble is not unexpected. Let’s rest a moment and then try another step.”
There had been a collective gasp in the room when the Omrad robot had suggested that it would be necessary for a human to be biologically re-engineered to qualify as an ambassador. Even then I knew I would volunteer.
“Shall we try another step?”
What offended the Omrad about humanity’s physical appearance is that externally humans are bilaterally symmetrical. Almost all life on the Omrad homeworld is trilaterally symmetrical, as are the Omrad themselves.
“You’re doing fine, Mr. Turner,” the robot doctor says with an inflection of reassurance.
I see my reflection in the chrome-like housing of one of the Omrad medical machines. My face is thinner and I have two more of them located circumferentially around my head. My brain has trouble processing the disorienting panoramic view. I shuffle awkwardly on three legs not sure how best to move my three arms with each step. I start to say something. I stop as my three mouths all speak in unison.
“You were about say?” drone the machine physician’s three voice synthesizers all at once.
