by submission | Jan 4, 2015 | Story |
Author : David Botticello
We only discovered them by mistake.
Waiting out in space, watching, listening. Deliberating.
We had this exploration drone, for a comet. It was supposed to land, take samples, send back pictures and analysis—you know the deal. The physics of the thing was astounding; firing what was essentially a ballistic camera off into space with only small maneuvering thrusters, trying to hit a chunk of rock and ice hurtling through space. It was almost comical, when it bounced off. Hubris you might say, that we thought we could accomplish such a feat. Space Command had given it fifty-fifty odds.
Well, it bounced. All that money, time, effort, skipping off the surface, back into space. And so we figured, might as well leave the cameras running, right?
And then three and a half months later, while going over the images in some lab late at night, my buddy says, “huh, that’s odd.”
That was how we discovered the Vorinii. They had it all perfectly timed, tapped into even our most secure networks, moving their ship around so that none of our satellites would ever see them—if everything had gone according to plan, that is. Damned deliberating aliens. Just waiting there. Watching us. But they hadn’t expected us to fail. No, I don’t even think they understood failure in those days. They just didn’t get the concept. Everything they do is a resounding success. Some people say they’re just that much smarter than we are. Others say they are a particularly lucky species, or that we’re an unusually unlucky one. Or that they plan so much they just rule out all the bad options. This priest from my bowling league thinks they have some sort of cosmic authority that conforms the universe to their desires, makes everything they do come out well. I’ve half a mind to believe him. But whatever the situation, however it goes, for some reason the Vorinii just, kinda, succeed.
And that’s why they were so interested in us—a kind of morbid fascination, when you think about it. We fail. Sometimes dismally, but other times, there’s a bit of comedy, or even glory to it.
Well they landed, made contact, explored, flew away, came back. The whole deal. They even took news of this odd new race called Humans to the stars.
Twenty-five years in the planning. Ten years of travel. Hundreds of thousands of manpower-hours. Resources from across the world, some of them near-irreplaceable.
So that’s our first introduction to the universe, I guess. We fail spectacularly.
by submission | Jan 3, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
The first one I saw was at the auto repair. My neighbor, Al, recommended Hans, who fixed a problem even the dealer couldn’t find and did it in one afternoon for only fifty bucks.
“I hope the guy’s still in business,” Al said. “I told him he needs to charge more. Offered him a hundred, but he wouldn’t take it.”
“You’re a lousy bargainer,” I said. I’m a kidder, you know. “You’re supposed to offer less and then agree on something in between.”
“Nah, I was glad to find an honest mechanic who knows what he’s doing. Oh, I almost forgot about his dog. Wait’ll you see that cute little mutt. I asked him where to get one, but he said it just wandered into his shop.”
Apparently Hans was counting on volume to make up for his low prices, because his shop was full of cars. Only one mechanic darted from vehicle to vehicle. I flagged him down, explained the symptoms, and he said he could fix it in a couple of hours for fifty dollars.
Oh yeah, the dog. It was snuggled on his chest in one of those baby carriers. All I could see was its head, a ball of white fur with two black dots that looked up at him or towards me as we conversed.
Hans was busy, so I tagged along for a few minutes while he worked to ask some questions.
“Is that a German accent, Hans?”
“Ya, German.”
“Cute little mutt ya got there. What kind of dog is it?”
He said something that seemed to be all consonants, like “frbllxtmph.”
“That first part sounds a little like ‘fur ball.'”
“Ya, frbll.”
“Why do you keep it strapped to your chest?”
“We are, how do you say, inseparable.”
My wife arrived and tried to pet the dog, but Hans recoiled and the dog’s eyes retracted deep into its fur. As we left the shop, its eyeballs seemed to extend to follow us, almost as if they were on stalks.
When I returned to pick up the car, sure enough, it was fixed and he only charged me fifty dollars.
I didn’t haggle about the price, but I said, mischievously, “Merci, mon ami. You did say you’re from France, right?”
“Oui, France,” he said, handing me the keys.
Well that wasn’t the response I expected. The dog’s eyes narrowed as if it was glaring at me.
“And your little dog, did you say it’s a shit-zu?” I mispronounced it purposely.
“Oui, shit-zu.”
I couldn’t get a rise out of that guy.
A few days later, I saw Al taking out the garbage, and I noticed he had one of those baby carriers on his chest. “Is that one of your grandkids?” I shouted.
“Yeah, grandkids” he said.
I came closer and realized it was a frbll. “You can’t kid a kidder,” I said. You bought that from Hans, right?”
The thing glared at me with those beady little eyes and then looked up at Al.
“Yeah, Hans.”
But when I drove past the auto repair, I saw that Hans still had his frbll attached. In weeks to follow, they popped up on people all over town. Yesterday on the TV news from Des Moines the guy and gal both had frblls strapped to their chests.
Then the lightbulb went off in my head. I said to Marge, “Boy, whoever makes those baby carriers is raking in the dough, huh?”
by submission | Dec 31, 2014 | Story |
Author : Philip McNeill
Kris looked out the viewport into the void of space. She hated it here. She hated space, she hated the ship, but most of all she hated the engineers who still hadn’t got the gravity turned back on.
It was like a prison.
There was a small hiss as the door behind Kris slid open.
“Ah, here you are.”
“Commander,” Kris gave a salute.
“Hah, at ease. And quit acting like I’m the Captain. I work for a living,” Calvin said.
Kris said nothing, and stared back out the viewport.
“Hmm, you’re pissy. Let me guess, Bolaski and Grangerson stole your clothes while you were showering again?”
Kris turned and glared at Calvin.
“I, um, guess not. Sorry for bringing that up.”
“Is there something you need, Calvin?” Kris said.
Calvin floated back a little, getting out of Kris’s striking range. “Right, um, we’ve got a sortie in an hour. Just came here to remind you. You know, just doing my job.”
“That’d be a first,” Kris said turning back to the viewport.
“Ok, not going to lie. That one stung a little, Kris.” Calvin crossed his arms. “It was supposed to sting, wasn’t it?”
“Figure that out all by yourself, did you?”
“Oh come on, what did I do?”
Kris’s eyes flared. “Goddamn everything!” She slammed her fist into the metal wall of the ship. A resounding thump that echoed through the room.
“I hate this ship, this pointless mission, everything. There’s no goddamn point of us being here, but everyone acts like there is. There’s nothing in this sector: no planets, stations, or even asteroids. What the hell are we guarding? And why the hell haven’t they fixed the fucking gravity?” She slammed her fist into the wall again.
“Stop doing that.” Calvin held his hands up in panic. “Please, don’t rupture the bulkhead. The engineers would be very upset – and we would both be very dead.”
There was a long silence. Kris brought the hand she had struck the wall with to her chest. The side of her hand was already beginning to turn black and blue.
“You really didn’t want to go on sortie today, did you?” Calvin joked. He floated over to Kris to examine her injury. “Looks fractured. See why you don’t punch things, especially a metal wall in zero gravity?”
Kris looked away. “I’m sorry, sir. That was completely unprofessional of me.”
“I was going to say scary, but I guess unprofessional works,” Calvin said. “So, about everything you said. Did you mean it?”
“I – don’t know,” Kris said. “I guess I did. I was angry, still am. Don’t you ever get frustrated being stuck here?”
“Oh yeah, all the time. It absolutely sucks out here.”
“But you’re always so – so bubbly.”
“Bubbly?” Calvin said. “Well, now my confidence is just going through the roof. Look Kris, all us have our ways of dealing with being on this ship. We just need to find you a way that doesn’t involve – breaking it.”
Kris chuckled.
“See, you’re already starting to feel better. Guess my bubbly personality is just what you needed. Now, how about we get you to the med-bay to get your hand looked at?”
by submission | Dec 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Ian Hill
The two men stood shifting their weight uneasily, peering into the depths of the passageway’s stone entrance. Leaves of autumn crunched underfoot as they nervously glanced back over their shoulders down the length of the bright forest corridor. Looming tree palisades stood on either side of the lowered grass path like waiting sentries.
“So uh… what do you think is in there?” the first man asked, nodding toward the dark opening.
The other man shrugged. “Never been this far down the corridor before.”
Silence returned as they crept ever closer to the archway that was set into the steep hillside. Around the door the trees didn’t part, there was a single direction to go and that was down into the void.
“Hold up.” the second man said, grabbing his comrade’s shoulder haltingly.
“What is it?” he hissed, glancing at the man.
“Why don’t we head on back?” he continued, voice tinged with obvious trepidation. “Back down the ridge. We can find another path.”
“We can’t go back now.”
The man sighed and eased his grip. “Why not into the forest?”
“Ha.” the first man cackled incredulously, turning back to face his friend. He motioned vaguely toward the sheer walls of birch that covered their flanks. “You can’t see past three feet in there. It’s dark. Darker than whatever’s down there. Maybe even darker than where we came from.”
“Listen to me.” the second man stressed. “For our whole lives we’ve seen the explorers head down bright ridge corridor and the other paths. No one reaches the end and comes back to tell the tale.”
“There are exactly four ways out and three of them are blocked.” his comrade replied angrily. “Five if you count going into the forest, but that’s pure suicide. We can’t go back now. What’s waiting for us beyond the ridge… I’m not willing to face that. What I am willing to do is gaze into the abyss.” he reached into the messenger bag at his side and retrieved a sturdy gas lamp.
The second man frowned as his comrade lit the internal wick with a match. He held the lantern up to the archway and squinted into the haze. The passage took a sharp decline, the flight blurring the definition between ladders and stairs.
“Whoever made this place had to get in and out somehow. For all we know this is how they did it.” the man with the lantern said, edging closer to the stone slope. He glanced back down the corridor past his comrade, observing the natural beauty one last time.
“They told us to never go this far…” the second man murmured uncomfortably.
“So be it.” the first man replied, turning back to face the opening. After briefly bracing himself he took the plunge and began the silent descent.
The second man stood alone, listening to the wind as it whistled through the dense field of tree branches. Red and brown leaves swept up from the corridor’s dirt ground and softly floated through the air. He was torn between two equally grim but contrasted paths. The chanting words of the elders rang through his head like a bell, warning him of the corridor and what lay at its end.
The distant mechanical voice from beyond the ridge echoed through the air to reach the man’s ears. It was searching for them. He sighed and shook his head in frustration. Slowly, he shuffled toward the stone entrance.
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.”
