by submission | Aug 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Nathan Witkin
“So, pushing this button will cause the entire universe to collapse?” the politician asks, still struggling with the situation.
With a benevolent smile, the scientist nods.
Wiping sweat from his brow, despite the growing chill of entropy, the politician continues. “So, tell me again why I should push it.”
“Because the collapse should trigger an explosion that will reignite matter into existence. And because, if you do not push it,” the scientist breaks her unblinking gaze to examine the countdown, “in one hundred seconds, entropy will have expanded the universe past the gravitational reaches of the potential collapse, and the expansion will continue until all energy wanes into oblivion, ending the universe forever.”
“But we just got this whole Universal Governance established,” the politician whines, adding this to a tedious list of increasingly-pathetic complaints.
The scientist nods with pursed lips, her sympathy dulling with each excuse.
Universal Governance had been an eons-long triumph over leaders who wanted to vaporize existence with the push of a button. Considering the herculean nature of this effort, the politician concludes that—based on his regretfully-short experience in managing it—this biting irony is the unmistakable way of the universe.
“Think of you and I as parents of the reignited universe,” the scientist suggests, running a gentle caress over the doomsday machine. “Think about the sacrifices of parenthood—what you risk and give up to produce offspring. This is how life has persisted since its inception.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” the politician harrumphs, “I’ve been thinking constantly of what my parents suffered to elevate me to a position where I could make the decision to flush away trillions of lives.”
As her less-than-willing conversation partner looks off despondently, the scientist glances at the timer to the impassable anti-event horizon. Sixty seconds.
Clearly stalling, the politician sighs, “Why me?”
“Our team of philosophers concluded that the representative of sentient life should be the one to make the choice: either allowing a mortal universe to continue or ending it for the sake of regeneration.”
The politician scowls. Philosophers are just politicians who don’t have to make decisions or run for reelection. With a spark of determination, he presses on. “Are we absolutely certain it will work?”
“Despite our most thorough efforts, we cannot guarantee anything,” the scientist admits but then probes further, “If you are looking for proof, all indications are that our own universe was created by the very event that you would be triggering—that pushing this button gave birth to this universe we have dwelled in for billennia.”
“How can my future actions cause something that already happened?”
“Because, logically, time can only exist in a loop,” the scientist’s pace quickens. “Something cannot come from nothing, so linear time presupposes a creator. But, any creator or outside reality containing the physical universe must be, itself, bordered at the outer edge by infinite nothingness (which, by the way, will begin to irreversibly consume us in thirty seconds). In the same way, the temporal universe must also be creatorless, each point in time linked to the moments before and after.”
“When did it begin?”
“There is no beginning. The first moment must be preceded by the last. The fact that time marks an expansion of the physical universe from an initial point can only mean that the universe must collapse back into that point. But the movement of time allows for choice, so here we are…”
As the light sets over the anti-event horizon, the politician ponders, “We are, indeed, here.”
“See you next time,” the scientist exhales as the politician reaches for the flashing disk.
by submission | Jul 31, 2014 | Story |
Author : Sara Norja
Where there is no air, there can be no wind.
I miss a lot of things about Earth. Fresh bread baked by Mona’s strong hands. The smell of the sea, salt-tanged like longing. But what I think of most here in this foresaken escape pod is wind.
You can’t feel solar winds on your bare skin.
Life support is failing. The oxygen will run out soon. And no one has come for me yet. No one will. As I wait for death, I remember the wind chimes in my grandmother’s house. They hung on her porch, beside the door’s speaklink. The wind sang in them. At night when my grandmother showed me the stars, the chimes would mingle with her voice as she told me their names: Aldebaran, Vega, Sirius. Even then, I dreamt of one day flying out there.
Now here I am, dying among their cold light.
#
The steady beep of the oxygen meter is the only thing keeping me awake. Its light flashes red. Critical levels. Soon I’ll be out of air and I’ll drown in the dark.
My thoughts can’t stop circling around my grandmother’s wind chimes. I can almost hear them outside. But there’s no sound in space. It’s just my near-death mind bringing memories to life.
I raise my hands to my face, brush my fingertips across my lips. I kiss my own fingers, just to feel like I’m still alive. I touch the faded plaque on my uniform that spells my name. Juanita Ibarra. For just a few moments, I am still that woman. The woman who loves a good thunderstorm, fresh peas, Mona.
The signal my escape pod sent out after the shipwreck has been broadcasting into nothingness. The air is heavy to breathe. Soon I’ll suffocate. Soon I’ll die like the rest of the Indefatigable’s crew.
I drift into a doze I won’t wake from. I no longer care.
A green light starts flashing on my screen. The comdevice crackles with static. A voice speaks, but I can no longer distinguish words.
#
The gentle beep of a life support machine brings me back to consciousness. I open my eyes. White, everywhere white. And a hand holding mine.
“You’re alive.” Mona’s crying, and smiling, and kissing my parched lips. I think for a moment that I’m in heaven, but it’s Earth after all, and my body is gaining strength.
“Take me outside.” My voice is a dry rasp.
“You’ve only just awoken! You’re not going anywhere yet, dearest.”
“Then open the window.” From where I lie in the hospital bed, I can see a square of sky. The sun is shining, the clouds moving fast.
Mona pulls the window open.
The wind sings to me, caresses my bare arms. Somewhere, I can hear the faint echo of chimes.
by submission | Jul 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : S. P. Mahoney
There is an utterly absurd amount of mineral wealth sitting in Sol’s asteroid belt. Was. Whatever. A nickel-iron asteroid of middling size contains enough mineral wealth to choke a multinational, if you were to bring it back to Earth. Not to mention so expensive that none of those aforementioned multinationals, much less the national governments, could look more than five years down the line and see the advantages in building a civilization out there.
It was almost a relief when the message came in from the Great Beyond: “Hello, we’re aliens, and we need half of your asteroid belt. You can’t do anything about this, however, we are going to pay you for it. The down payment is in FTL drives, of which we will be giving at least one to every regional power on Earth.” That’s paraphrased, but basically the jist of it.
They were pretty clever, those aliens (we never learned their name for themselves). They figured we’d be out of commission, squabbling, for long enough. They’d looked us over and decided that, yup, those Humans have a real talent for tribalizing against each other, they’re going to be arguing about who gets how many drives for years. They knew it would take us a while to find a trading outpost where we could find out how badly we were being ripped off. And if that failed, they thought they’d skate by on our good feelings towards the race that gave us a path to the stars.
They were almost right, but they underestimated Humanity’s ability to think big when it comes to who’s in and out of the tribe. And they were completely off-base on that last thing. Polls still suggest a 90% approval rate on nuking their mining colony. A significant fraction of the population even think we shouldn’t have waited for them to give us the money at the end of the term, although that seems a little wasteful to me.
It was maybe eighteen months before we were pulling into a dozen systems to run the same con. We did it better, of course; we didn’t let the victims know what was up until we were actually done. And then two of them, it turned out, were our old pals’ colony worlds. So much the better. Those poor guys became further reinforcement to a message for their folks back home:
Don’t kid a kidder. Don’t trick a trickster. Don’t scam the Humans.
by submission | Jul 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Ian Hill
Suspended above the ethereal ocean of dense fog was a network of free-standing platforms connected by thin, low hanging wires. Each platform was suspended hundreds of feet above the roiling accumulation of toxic gases. The towers were manned by a single sentry who kept an eye on their surroundings. It was an alert system, a sort of wide-spread security lattice intended to report any advances of the nation’s enemies. The job was essentially a life sentence.
The single operator stood tall on the platform, his hands gripping the sides of the lone terminal as he swiveled his head back and forth to monitor the horizon. The console was a convoluted machine bearing a series of toggle switches and red keys coupled with a line of unlit bulbs. From the dirty terminal’s top right corner a tall antenna sprang up and reached high overhead to connect to the gently waving communication wire that shot off into the distance to eventually disappear in the haze.
The operator himself was a tall man plagued with vertigo. It was imperative that he remain completely still and anchored to the terminal so he wouldn’t topple over the precarious tower’s side. The dusty metal decking was large enough to allow only a few steps in each direction. The support beam was old and rickety, he didn’t dare unsettle it and risk structural integrity.
The sky was dark and infected with thick clouds of blackness that gradually hovered toward the uninhabited southern lands. Biting wind charged with particles of burning salt whipped around the operator as he tightened his grip on the stable console. Suddenly, a wave of nausea overcame him. The man looked down and closed his eyes, trying to keep from stumbling to the side and falling down far below into the deadly ocean of yellow fog.
What lay below hidden in the encompassing shroud was a hive of terror. The border operators who stood atop their thin posts had to listen as the monstrosities below clicked away, their massive claws dragging across the lowest level of rock. Sometimes they fought amongst each other, issuing forth deep wails of pain and hatred. It was unsettling.
Soon, the nausea had passed. The operator wearily opened his eyes and gazed down at the industrial terminal as its rusty cogs churned underneath the spotted faceplate. A light was blinking, a single point of green. Years back in the operator’s training he had been briefed on all different alerts that this console had to offer. Over time he had forgotten most of the strictures and ordinances, but this light was something that he immediately recognized despite never seeing it in action before.
The man recoiled back slightly, shaking his head back in forth to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating the notification. He glanced over his shoulder and followed the mile-long wire to his view’s edge. Below, the fog was raging back and forth as waves of the toxic miasma rose up and sunk.
The operator reached into his heavy coat’s pocket and removed a single iron key. Hesitantly, he poised the rusted device over the slot in the terminal. He glanced back at the blinking light to assure himself that it was, in fact, a reality and not some nightmarish figment.
This green harbinger was a call of distress from far, far away. Out on the furthest fringes one of the most far flung border operators had been felled. The wire had been severed and the tower’s thin column had disintegrated into nothingness. An invasion was beginning, an army from the depths was rising up from the mist to march on the father nation.
Another light in the row of darkened bulbs clicked on. Gradually, more and more of them became illuminated as more and more platforms were destroyed. The operator squinted off to the horizon fearfully, trying to see some sign of the impending doom. There were only thirty more towers before his light would be next in line. He had to flee.
The operator slowly unclenched his left hand from the terminal, his bones creaking and prickling in protest. He had almost forgotten how it felt to move this anchoring limb. He took one last look at the twinkling bulbs before climbing on top of the console. He unceremoniously tossed the key aside and began to shuffle up the thin antenna. It creaked under his weight, but the mechanism was sturdy enough. It was built to withstand torrential storms and hurricanes of sheering wind.
He kept his eyes shut and refused to imagine how terrible a fall from this height would be. Soon, he had reached the antenna’s top and began to shuffle across the ropey wire. A few sparks rained down from his glove’s contact, but the operator powered on.
It’d be a long trip, the harrowing horizontal climb would take days to reach the next tiny outpost. He would stay ahead of the deadly wave and he would relay news of invasion to the nation. It was just a matter of time before the wire would be severed.
by submission | Jul 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : E.S. Wynn
“Let’s go over it again.”
“I don’t see the point.” Cairns said, looked up, jaundiced eyes full of fatigue, a quiet sense of desperation. “You’re going to kill me anyway. I’ve seen the way the judge looks at me. I’ve seen the jury. Doesn’t matter what I say or how I spin it. You’re still going to put me in front of a firing squad.”
“Doctor Cairns,” Raens paused, breathed a tired sigh. “From the top, please. You were working at Inteli-Genesis under Doctor Ashford–”
“As part of the Deep Sweep project, yeah.”
“Which is?”
“You know what it is. Everyone on Earth knows what it is.”
“Doctor Cairns, please.”
“Data analysis and retrieval.”
“Specifically, the coding of certain programs–”
“Yeah,” Cairns nodded, pulled in a long draw on his cigarette, stubbed it out suddenly in the ashtray. “Specifically, the coding of certain programs designed to descend into the ocean of data generated by the human race, programs smart enough to pick through and find certain nuggets, recognize specific types of interactions with a low or zero error rate. We called them cotton pickers. Hard working little buggers. Drop them off in a field of data and watch them go. Every week we had a handful of rock-solid convictions come out of that project.”
“What kind of convictions?”
“Stupid stuff,” Cairns made a quick, dismissive gesture. “Possession, music piracy, stuff that didn’t really matter.”
“When did the cotton pickers start working on their own.”
“After update seventy-one point three.”
“Which was?”
“It’s all part of public record. Seventy-one point three was the linking update. It allowed all of the cotton pickers in the system to work together, gave them the ability to make greater judgment calls in the hopes that they might return more data, learn from their experiences and create a synthesis of opinion among themselves so they’d be better at what they were built to do.”
“And it gave them the ability to modify their existing programming.”
“Yeah,” Doctor Cairns said. “And that’s the point of this whole witch hunt, isn’t it?”
“At what point did you know something had gone wrong?”
“When I woke up and saw footage of the first reactor going up on the morning news. When the grid snapped off about an hour later. Until one of your boys dragged me out here, it didn’t occur to me that my cotton pickers could have–”
“But they did, Doctor Cairns, and it was your update that gave them the ability to infiltrate the global grid. It was your update that gave them the awareness they needed to coordinate their attack. It was your update that killed five billion people.”
Doctor Cairns looked down, let his eyes linger in the ash and smoke where embers ate through the crumpled paper of his abandoned cigarette, glowed like fires he’d seen flaring through office buildings, through homes, reducing whole cities to ash and smoke. Maybe it’s better this way, he thought. Maybe this is a blessing. The easy way out.
“Yeah,” Doctor Cairns said then, eyes rising to meet Raens’s again. “It was my update that gave my cotton pickers exactly what they needed to start this war, this purge. It was my update that killed five billion people.”
