by submission | Oct 19, 2013 | Story |
Author : J. Louis
The day Hell broke through the surface of the Earth was etched in his brain.
Sirens blared, signaling the air raid had begun. Shadows of zeppelins blotted out the sunlight, their engines roaring through the endless expanse of the sky. He looked at her, the woman he had always loved, but could never have, at her dark hair and blazing green eyes, wide with shock. The war had begun, all because they let the contagion of the century escape their clutches; a genetically engineered, air-born variant of the Black Death, under development for use in biological warfare.
That was six years ago. He was hoping that the rumors were true, that her hometown would be untouched by the plague. There is no known cure. It is uncontrollable, unstoppable.
When they arrive, her parents are already dead, and have been for some time. She runs into the deserted land, overcome by her loss. He feels it’s best to leave her be for the time being. Even in a harsh world such as this, there must be time to mourn. He reasons that she is a grown woman and can take care of herself.
The sound of rats flitting in and out of the decrepit wall wakes him up from his reverie. Outside the broken window of her home is a harsh landscape ravaged by nuclear war. The sun’s heat is amplified from the cloud coverage, resulting in a sweltering hot February day – easily 110 degrees. Such weather is normally considered mild for central New York after the war. A searing wind blows across the landscape, ripping bark off of the skeletal remains of trees.
The haze looks real nice today, he thinks.
He pulls a flower, a desert dandelion he found growing outside her house, out of his satchel. It wasn’t anything special, but it was her birthday, and he wanted to surprise her with something.
The half-light from the sky dissipates. A murder of crows flies by on fell wings. The sandstorm picks up.
Something catches his eye; a figure stumbling across the cracked soil, dark hair whipping in the wind.
Her.
Skeletons of rodents and their predators crunch under his heel. A blast of hot air sears his face as he opens the door. Huddling in his ragged clothing, he trudges through the blood-red sands, moving toward his target as quickly as possible.
He reaches her only to recoil in horror. Half of her face, her beautiful, sun-scorched face, is black with necrosis, and thick, bulbous sores coat her body.
He checks the pistol, noticing his already blackening fingers. One bullet remains.
He places the dandelion in the palm of her hand, then holds the .45 to her head. She opens her eyes – no longer the striking shade of green, but a sickening red. He lodges a bullet in her forehead, blowing bits of brain, flesh, and bone across the unforgiving sands.
by submission | Oct 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : David K Scholes
Deep Space
The Far Future
The entity slowed down to take in the grandeur of it all.
It had seen much of wonder during what it considered its comparatively short existence. Black holes, neutron stars, binary star systems, magnetic pulse stars, wormholes, dimensional rifts and swirling galaxies seen from the great voids between galactic systems. It had witnessed the birth and death of planets and whole planetary systems.
It had seen all manner of alien civilizations. From great star fleets of empire to humble probes that had traveled much further than their creators had ever imagined. From worlds teeming with untold billions to so many, many lifeless worlds each of these still containing their own kind of beauty.
The entity never ceased to tire of this. Even now it had much to learn and the secrets of the Universe continued to unfold for it.
Of course it wasn’t all tourism. The entity and those of its ilk had been tasked by their creator to save lives, even civilizations, where possible. It might be the life of a single space farer or a whole civilization whose sun was about to go nova. It might be a single star ship approaching the event horizon of a black hole, or an entire star fleet threatened by a cosmic storm.
The entity had not been this way before and now before it was the Multiverse’s only interdimensional black hole. That is to say a black hole existing in every dimension at the same time. The entity saw that it was not as massive as what the corporeals called the super massive black holes that it had seen at the core of many Galaxies but it was far more magnificent.
Yet even at this most magnificent moment, since it had acquired its current near omnipotent form, the entity felt something gnawing at it. As if despite all the grandeur surrounding it there was something absent, something missing from its existence.
Then it detected a telepathic communication. Not from across the void but actually quite close. From one of its own kind. Often it forgot that it was not unique. Its creator had discouraged fraternization indeed even communication among its kind. Also the Universe, let alone the Multiverse was a rather large place.
The communication was faint at first – tentatively probing.
“A place of magnificence,” it telepathed “do you detect the vast numbers of dimensional rifts leading to so many other dimensions? Can you sense still the energy signatures of starships even star fleets that fell into the singularity. The life essences of all those that perished here?”
“It is like a vast intertemporal archive,” the entity telepathed back.
Then there was telepathic silence. A rather long silence. Followed by an entirely different communication.
“Fred, is that you? I recognize your small residual corporeal life force signature. We all still have them you know.”
“Bill, Bill Norris from Lyndhurst in the New Forest,” the entity responded. “What would be the odds against our meeting in our current forms and in this place?”
There was telepathic silence again – an even longer silence.
The entity once known as Bill Norris of Lyndhurst, near Southampton, England, Earth finally responded. “I miss those days Fred. Having a pint of ale in the pub. A walk in the New Forest. And other things.
Then there was telepathic silence for a very long time as the galactic entity recalled every single detail of his former life as the corporeal entity Fred Nerk originally of Basingstoke, England, Earth.
by submission | Oct 15, 2013 | Story |
Author : Aiza Mohd
Today is our last day on Earth.
This morning, I beheld the sun rising over the Arctic. From all the way down in our dwelling, it felt like it was worlds away.
Behind me I saw Naamin. She’d discovered her brother, who’d died in the night, while I pretended to sleep.
There in our kingdom of water and silence, we buried our dead as the sun came up. There was just enough light to paint our surroundings. The muted horror of awakening to gone relatives. The urgency of hiding them, from the far-reaching expeditions of human science.
That nemesis drove us from every home in the past age, exacerbating every attempt to prolong our existence until we were constrained to planet Earth’s most undiscovered world: the oceans.
We weren’t made for such suffocating life. Water such as this was rare back on Marikh; we had avoided the oceans for as long as we could until Earthland was no longer an option.
Closing my eyes to Naamin’s grief, I spoke. ‘Fola led his faction away, while you slept. There are two vessels left. And fewer supplies.’
‘Then let’s leave. Please.’
She was scrabbling in the earth. The dead lay all around us. Nearby, I saw someone leaning over a lost love.
‘Where did Fola go?’
I recalled what a dead friend had told me once, about human knowledge of the universe. His faction had sampled a human, a well-read one who spoke of white holes and lenticular galaxies. We used to do this sometimes, to assess just how far humanity had travelled.
‘He means to reach a faraway planet long dismissed as dead,’ I answered. ‘I don’t believe his craft will even get halfway.’
‘There never was one as resigned as yourself,’ she spat with sudden venom. ‘You’ll doom us all to your deadened dreams.’
‘This planet is at its peak,’ I said. ‘Do you remember what it was like up there?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I remember. I remember that up there was beautiful and full of life. There were things to see, dangers to run from. And I remember brightness.’ She stood, abandoning the task of digging her brother’s grave. ‘I remember something to live for.’
I said nothing. Overhead, a dark creature swims rapidly away.
‘You see?’ she said softly. ‘Even if we stay, the ocean floor is no longer ours. Earth was never ours — each time, the universe created a new inhabitant for whatever place we’d dare to try to steal. Our time is up.
‘You’ve seen our civilisation rise and fall– you’ve suffered, grandfather. But there’s nothing for us here.’
Emotion, a phenomenon from the distant past, swelled up and soared through me. It bent my heart double and smashed it.
‘I’ve chased our entire existence into a corner.’
‘No, Premier,’ spoke gently the mourner I had seen earlier. ‘You’ve done only what you’ve had to do. But I agree with Naamin.’ The woman was approaching us. ‘Though what lies beyond is uncertain, I would go to my end seeking a better grave. Continuity for the sake of continuity is for nothing, when all we do is bury our dead. We have defied the universe for far too long.’
I was silent, defeated. A tired old man. Naamin led me by the hand to a vessel as some others followed suit. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘humans will be faced with this choice too.’
Now we are leaving, abandoning this dark and rippling realm, leaving everything we ever were behind us. I am holding my breath, I am waiting … anticipating that dazzling burst of sunlight.
by submission | Oct 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Mordecai J Banda
Michael had come back from his daily walk. He had eaten his breakfast and attended to various things to keep himself healthy. Now it was gaming time.
This past month the Future Warfare 3 had had a special event that called on worldwide cooperative multiplayer event. Michael personally didn’t like this but the reward was amazing: 100 dollars per kill.
His parents sent him enough money, but in the past week he had gained a small fortune in this event and he didn’t intend to stop.
It was no lie to say that at that moment he was the number one gamer on the planet.
And the military loved him for this.
“He’s a pretty knowledgeable kid… Are you sure he won’t figure out what’s happening? This could be a big scandal.” The Head Technician spoke to The Director of Future War’s company, Octagon. They were in a decommissioned space station control room.
“Michael Black will not know for at least some weeks, and by then the third world war would have been won.”
“Really? One boy?”
“Are you seeing what he’s doing on the field? The soldiers are even starting pray to their bots ‘for his soul to descend.'”
“Amazing.” The technician shook his head in surprise. He was both commenting on what The Director had said and on a particularly skillful headshot that Michael had executed.
The heads up display was as Michael saw it from his rig. The techs on this side were the ones who saw the important stuff: Core temperature, power supply and so on.
There were three teams. One of them overlooked the particular bot that Michael was using, the other two divided labor into running basic diagnostics on the other bots that had lower level players using them.
The Director was pleased with himself. Rarely did plans ever go so perfectly. Disregarding the actual commanders of the field, his side had gone swimmingly.
As an alternative to nukes robots were visited as an option to mass destruction on a manageable scale. World War Three, though not widely known, had begun. The robots were miraculously finished, but the biggest obstacle was Artificial Intelligence. It was beyond the minds, abilities and funding of this generation. However, there was a wealthy resource that they could tap into if they wanted killer machines: the online gaming world.
It was crazy but they tried it out. Soon enough they had the gamers fighting for their country and they didn’t even know it.
Future War 3 was chosen as the bearer of this project. It was far from the ideal where all the soldiers on the field were robots, but it was good enough for now.
The Director smiled sympathetically as Michael was shot and ‘killed’. On the console it showed an apparently random countdown that in actuality was showing the download time for Michael to access another bot. This time it took two minutes and Michael was back at it again. He approached the camp that had exterminated him, vaulting over a trench and raining death upon the soldiers with godly skill.
It was a pity, but Michael was killing real humans. The Director had lied to the technician. If the boy found out it would be bad. It only depended on whether he would accept it or not.
But The Director trusted Michael was someone who looked to the future, who looked forward to advancement. He had ascended from gamer to patriot after all.
“It’s Michael! It’s Michael!” Some relieved rookie soldiers cheered with awe.
The Director smiled. More like a guardian angel.
by submission | Oct 13, 2013 | Story |
Author : Andrew Schnell
On the twentieth anniversary of their launch, the citizens of the Lincoln gathered along the main promenade for a celebration. Chief Engineer Leonid Zuyev was in the avionics bay, keeping an ear to the ship’s broadcast of the proceedings. He hated these types of gatherings, so it was almost good fortune that the radio array had gone down that morning.
There were speeches of course, from Captain Hodges and Medical Director Stuart. The Interior Minister spoke, reiterating many of the changes he promised in his recent re-election campaign. Then, recently downloaded videos of Earth dignitaries were shown. Each leader discussed the citizens’ dedication and desire to explore. None of them touched on what it was actually like to explore: the severe rationing and near starvation in the early days, diseases that spread faster aboard ship than on Earth, accidents and mechanical failures that had resulted in many more lost lives than the designers estimated. Fortunately though, the designers had also underestimated the citizens’ reproductive habits.
If things went according to plan, Leonid would speak last. The twentieth anniversary happened to fall on the exact moment when the first transmissions from their destination, the planet Nuwa, would be received by the radio array whose control systems were in pieces along the floor of the avionics bay. The signal was being sent by the first of many supply vehicles sent ahead of Lincoln. They were over a century old by now, but they contained long storage supplies, construction robots, and artificial intelligence programs that would survey Nuwa and begin constructing the first settlement.
As the Earth diplomats’ rhetoric droned on, Leonid stumbled on the source of the problem. A surge had burned out a power distribution unit. He ordered the AI to print and install a new unit, while he reassembled the rest of system. As the system rebooted, he used the spare seconds to hold out his cold fingers in front of the monitors to warm them.
Using pulsars as navigational beacons, the Lincoln’s AI pointed the arrays at Nuwa. The supply vehicle’s AI would point their transmitter at the Lincoln using the projected route programmed into the AI before launch. That route, Leonid was proud to say, had been followed to the letter. They were exactly where they needed to be. Hopefully, the supply vehicle would be, too.
Leonid tuned his slate to the century-old operations manual, to the section that would help him translate the first few 64-bit strings of data into a report on the overall health of the supply ship. The seconds clicked down on his slate’s timer. Leonid could hear the captain apologizing for his delay.
Then, the monitor flickered, and a blue “INCOMING MESSAGE” notification filled the screen. The 64-bit line came in underneath. Leonid interpreted the message as quickly as he could. Contact lights were green. Power generation levels were green. AI was green. Robots were green. Storage was green. Everything had safely landed on Nuwa.
Leonid gestured the information to his slate and ran towards the promenade. Holding the slate above his head, he apologized repeatedly while pushing through the crowd. Hodges saw the commotion and had the crowd make a path for his chief engineer. Leonid leapt onto the stage and his quick smile was all the crowd needed to break into cheers. The citizens of the Lincoln were heading to a planet they themselves would never see, that their children may never see, but now they knew that when the Lincoln arrived at Nuwa she wouldn’t be alone.
