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.”
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?”
