by submission | Dec 26, 2011 | Story |
Author : Chris Daly
The dust was unbearable. Dry, grey, clinging powder draped over every surface, clogging the machinery, grinding against gears and wheels. Water refused to wash away the dirt, forming only a cloying mud that was just as abrasive. His hands bled, crisp and chafed. He had no gloves, no protection from the work that consumed his effort.
‘Clean-up’, they called it. He installed the engines that probed the ground, searching for deep, buried water, enough to wash all this filth away. The dust was all that remained of a civilisation that once dwelled here, cities and towns incinerated away. First came the embers, smoke and ash, later the rubble broke down into that dust, surrounding and coating everything. He worked tirelessly, checking gauges, replacing worn cogs, lubricating the gearboxes, as the machine drilled deeper, through asphalt, dirt and bedrock.
He looked up at the brown sky, past the great towers and twisted metal girders, watching the light straining against the permanent cloud cover. One day, he knew, his work could clear that sky. He would clear away the grey blanket smothering his world. Each passing year, fewer and fewer of his kind searched for that dream. Occasionally, a small pocket of moisture would be found, enough to keep some of them going, but so much was trapped in those clouds, refusing to fall, and the rest entombed in aquifers deep under the old lakes, rivers and mountains. Almost every week now one of them fell, sharing their water with the rest. The algae and fungus in the waste pits kept them alive, but it was bare sustenance, not the abundance that the ancestors had enjoyed.
Even with that abundance, they destroyed each other. Now their offspring fought like pack animals, scavengers over what was left around them. He could never understand why the old ones did it; the others told him not to try. ‘Keep drilling’, they said, ‘One day you’ll bring back what once was.’
The machine let out a whine, cable and wire straining, snapping over bare metal. An acrid cloud rose up, the smoke from a burning motor. He coughed, then sat back and sighed, face in his cracked hands. A tear crept into his eye, traced its line down his face, darkening the grey dust he constantly wore. He sat up again, wiped his nose with his tough sleeve. Useless to cry, he told himself, it just wastes the water. He lifted a rusted tool from the floor, set down his rifle, and returned to work.
One day, he thought. One day soon.
by submission | Dec 25, 2011 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
“Jack! Come in here a minute!”
“All right Mary, what is it?”
“Check this out. I was running down that noise on the comms channel, but it wasn’t noise. Listen.”
Mary touched one of the controls in front of her, and a crackling voice erupted from the starboard communications station.
“…the best friend I ever had, closer than my actual brothers, far better to me than I ever was to him. I spent a hundred nights…”
She turned it off.
“It’s an old radio signal from Sol! It must have mixed with one of the local oscillators and gotten upconverted into our comms band! It has to be a thousand years old!”
“If it was original and that old, we would never have gotten it at all. You have the whole message?”
“Sure, it cycled at least twenty times, that’s why it’s so clear – I was able to stack the repeats and drive the signal above the background. Want a hardcopy?”
“No, just copy it to a thumb, but… there’s a tradition. After you copy it, re-record the message in your own voice. Loop it a hundred times or so, then transmit it on the directionals. Send it back to Earth, and maybe twenty of your other favorite directions. Pick places people might catch it, other than that it doesn’t matter.”
“Okay, what frequency?”
“Same as the original signal – if you send it on the comms channels we’ll get flagged, but no one cares what goes out at radio frequency. Besides, as strange as it may sound, that mixing wasn’t accidental – it’s not in the specs, but these rigs are designed to catch signals like this one.”
“Why?”
“I told you – tradition. Get to it.”
“Jack, why my voice, why not the original?”
“It will be clearer than the one you received. Besides, the voice doesn’t matter, just the message. Meet me in the wardroom when you’re done.”
The wardroom was filled to capacity when Mary finally reached it. The entire comms staff was there, along with most of the older crew and a few others. Jack took the portable drive from her hand and replaced it with a glass of brandy before playing the recording to the crowd. For several minutes, the room was silent save for one scratchy voice, telling of a friend, a brother, a son. When it finally fell into static, Jack raised his glass and cleared his throat.
“Friends, tonight we heard a voice in the dark. The speaker is forgotten, but the message goes on, and we honor it. Raise a glass tonight to Jeremy Coonradt. He is not dead while his name is still spoken. To Jeremy, and to those he left behind.”
by submission | Dec 23, 2011 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson
The intelligence level of the Xzeckqi people was growing at an exponential rate. Just a few centuries prior they had been cooking over open fires and using stones to sharpen animal bones into spears. Now they were hunting with exploding projectiles and using electric ovens to prepare meals. And in the populous Jagxso region, a wide flattish land running nearly half the circumference of the tiny green world’s equator, there were wheeled carts moving by means of autonomous engines. All in all the Xzeckqi were proving to be quite inquisitive and inventive.
Their curiosity and thirst for learning had recently caused them to take up great interest in their planet’s geology. Prehistoric Xzeckqi had taken for granted the random and varying intricate formations of their world’s topography. Geometrically perfect shapes and angles littered the globe, all covered by the vibrant green of the thick ever-nourishing moss that grew from pole to pole. But the people knew that when digging down through the life-giving organism one found many different colors and strange materials. The moss was thought to feed directly on some of this mysterious layer that occupied the space between the biocrust and the ‘dock’ or dirt-and-rock layer whose great depth had yet to be determined.
Their curiosity of the middle layer went all the way back to the early development of tool making which was based on the study of some of the strange giant ‘stones’ found there. Early Xzeckqi people had studied the threaded lines on house-sized spiral formations and by copying them had developed one of the earliest simple machines — the screw. Of course the wheel had already been long invented by now, as giant wheels seemed to occur naturally nearly everywhere in their world, along with other wheel-based phenomena such as cogs, gears and pulleys, plus axles, levers, hinges, and countless other devices, waiting to be studied and then duplicated down to a manageable scale. Almost all modern technology now owed its existence to the excavation and copying of various formations found in the layer.
But the people wondered — how could natural formations be so perfect, with parts that looked as though they could still move with the precision of any modern machine or device. On they poured, searching for answers.
***
Meanwhile aboard the star freighter Constantine.
“Sergeant, why haven’t we stopped to dump our garbage? I want to get into warp before lunch!” The Captain rubbed his weary eyes and sipped his coffee. He could view the navscreen from where he stood well enough to see that the bright green dump planet, Tilpot IV, was below but falling away, yet the yellow lights on the custodial array glowed bright, showing the ship’s waste containers still quite full.
“Sorry Cap,” the young sergeant replied. “Collective orders. No more dumping on Tilpot IV until ecological survey performed. Don’t worry though. Jack’s Port, the big moon of Tilpot VII has been designated temporary dumping site until the survey is completed.”
The captain didn’t look impressed. “All the way out to the seventh planet at fuel-speed? I’d rather we drop back and do a little illegal dumping that aint gonna hurt a soul.”
Knowing fully that he could exercise his legal right at any time and place his superior under arrest based on Environmental Absolute 1.9 he decided to let his captain finish his coffee. “Like I said, don’t worry sir. I can get us up to .002 by fusing some of ‘hotter’ waste we have in container three. We’ll be there in no time. And besides…” He said sternly. “There might be something intelligent down there.”
by submission | Dec 20, 2011 | Story |
Author : Martin Berka
‘Ebra drifted down the hallway, the candle hanging by a string from her wrist. It gave no warmth, a blessing: even in the far-ship’s state of efficiency, ambient heat was plentiful. It barely gave light either, which was fine by the bearer, but since this was fading to nothing, she would have to get more, or be blind. By its weakening glow, she checked the last stasis pod in the corridor, and via the hub, moved to the sun-room. In ‘Ebra’s shaded mind, dull revulsion sparred with a rare excitement.
She pulled herself along through a sharply-angled, ever-narrowing maze of bulkheads and emergency shutoffs. The candle had served well, but it died now, leaving the watchkeeper in darkness. Fortunately, she now saw the light of the sun-room. Creeping along the wall, she turned on every filter in her goggles and made sure her block was holding up. Half-gripping, half-sliding along the wall, careful not to damage the ubiquitous solar collectors, she approached the single heavily filtered window to the outside world.
Tenebra peeked out at the world below, visible as the barest curve of the here-sun’s light, fleshed out by occasional flickers on the surface. Up close, those flickers would hold one’s attention for the rest of a short life: the here-planet was fierce, wild, as far as such living adjectives could apply to a body of nearly-molten rock, and made Venus seem tame, as far as such a domestic word could apply to the home-sun’s renowned probe-killer.
Yet from orbit, the here-planet’s dull, red inner glow was overshadowed by its horizon, so bright that ‘Ebra had already turned away, covering her eyes with one arm and using the other to propel herself backward, out of the sun-room. Despite her precautions, the after-image of the here-sun’s rays, searing light along a dark arc, filled her vision for a few dozen rapid heartbeats.
No one had told Tenebra exactly what went wrong with the far-flight; her darkness was the solitary sort that never sought attention, that never bothered brighter sparks. The far-ship was suddenly in need of fuel and repairs, using a twilight orbit around a death-planet to draw maximum energy from a bright-star, while avoiding radiation. The batteries were charging, the robots were on the here-planet, somehow staying ahead of attrition, and the far-seekers could be on their way in a few years, if enough energy could be harnessed. Almost boring, until they ran out of spare stasis pods.
Tenebra returned to deeper parts, the candle at its brightest in weeks. A few seconds of the here-sun’s light, even so greatly reduced, were always enough.
She thought back: she could have done the job without looking, without the sheer brightness. Even the home-star’s light had burned her too-bright skin, driving her to the dark of space. But she had risked the pain, now and every time before. Ideas were defined by their opposites, and darkness needed light to know itself. Now, back to the solitude of minimum power and light, sufficiency, watching over a ghost-ship. As others rested unconscious, to pass time, Tenebra also rested, having the time of her life, in darkness.
by submission | Dec 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Max Cohen
A wind swept over the flat grey plain that night carrying with it a smell of nothingness. The wind continued whipping ever faster until as the sun rose it blew over a low stone wall and onto a field of deep green grass. It flowed over a man and a boy just waking from their nightly slumber before continuing on their way.
The boy shivered and pulled his threadbare blanket closer around himself trying to return to his sleep. But his father stood and brushed himself off before nudging the boy with his foot, “Come on Jonathan. We need to get this over with, then we go home.”
The boy, Jon to his friends, groaned but stood up next to his father.
“Now listen boy. You’re nearly a man grown now and you need to know about the outside world,” he gestured at the gray featureless plain, “That right there is because of us. We near destroyed ourselves and the world and nothing is going to bring it back. This right here,” he gestured to the deep green grass they stood on, “is the only safe place left. You step out there you die.”
Jon looked doubtfully out at the plain, “There’s nothing there dad. It doesn’t look dangerous at all,” he scoffed he was fifteen now and clearly his father and the rest of the adults were addled. Nothing can’t kill you.
“Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean the danger isn’t there,” he walked back to their bags and pulled out a small cage. Inside was a mouse. “Watch.”
The man walked over to the stone wall and stood staring out into the waste, seeing something that Jon couldn’t. With a shake of his head, he reached his arm out and gently set the cage as far from the wall as possible, pulling his hand quickly away as if afraid to be burnt.
Jon watched with an amused expression. This was pointless, nothing was going to happen to the mouse after all. For a few seconds the cage simply sat upon the ground but as Jon watched the cage started to come apart, to melt. The mouse leapt from the cage as is it broke apart turning grey even as it slid silently into the ground. The mouse began to run towards the wall but it quickly fell shaking to the ground, and Jon watched horrified as its skin began to run off. Its skin and then its muscles, blood, bones, and organs flowed together turning grey.
Perhaps a minute had passed but nothing remained except the vast plain.
“That’s why you can’t go out there son. Anything that touches that grey land just melts away,” he put a hand on Jon’s shoulder to reassure him.
“But… what happened?” Jon asked still staring at the spot where the mouse disappeared.
“A long time ago our ancestors tried to change the world. They made tiny people to help them. But the tiny people kept growing and multiplying. A grey wave washed over the world and changed it into this. But your great-great grandfather built this place for all the people, animals, and plants that survived. As long as this stone wall stands the grey goo can’t get us,” he pulled at Jonathan, “Now come on we’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”
As they walked away the wind blew on with nothing to stop it. Over the one tiny spec of green in an ocean of grey.
