by submission | Dec 9, 2010 | Story
Author : James C.G. Shirk
The automated countdown clock flashed: one hour, twenty-one minutes.
Commander Albright grimaced and adjusted the controls to retract the dome above. The astronomy observation skylight on lunar colony six, located at the southern edge of Mare Sarenitatis, slid noiselessly open. Earth, in its radiant magnificence, hung in the blackness of the overhead sky. “So, where is Goliath going to hit now?” he asked.
His cohort, Lieutenant Conrad, read the most recent data spewing from the telemetry console. “Almost right where originally thought — about six miles off the Newfoundland coast.”
Albright frowned. “Even after the intercept?”
“Yep. Missiles didn’t affect the flight path much — probably because it’s such a big honker.”
“I can’t frickin’ watch,” Albright said, punching the skylight closed.
“At least they let you bring up your wife in the last load of refugees,” Conrad said, trying his best to assuage Albright.
“Yeah, for what good it does my brother and sister…and my parents.”
Conrad winced; Albright was a glass half-empty kind of guy. “Where are they?” he asked.
“Mom and Dad live in St. Louis; brother’s got a farm in northern Indiana; and Sis is in Chicago.”
Shaking his head, Conrad said, “Almost makes me happy I’m an orphan,” and then added, “I guess that it’s good they don’t know what’s coming. It’ll be over in a flash. Thank goodness the government was successful keeping this under wraps.”
“I suppose,” Albright said morosely. “Thing is, the friggin’ idiots shouldn’t have put all our eggs in one basket in the first place.”
“You’re referring to the micro-hole?”
“Exactly. Focusing all our resources to create a miniature black hole in Goliath’s flight path, without developing a viable backup plan, was sheer stupidity,” he sneered. “Unless you call that pitiful attempt at blowing up the damn thing a backup plan.”
Conrad nodded. “Well, they were partially successful. They created the micro-hole okay. Unfortunately, the delivery system failed.”
“It wasn’t deployed early enough,” Albright went on, “and, of course, the damn thing disappeared enroute.”
Albright rose from his chair and walked to the event display screen. On it, the telescopic image of Goliath, a tumbling, black monstrosity, filled the screen — fifteen miles wide; it was a planet killer. Nothing would survive the impact. Nothing.
“You’re an ugly, remorseless bitch,” he murmured under his breath.
The countdown clock suddenly froze, and a staccato beeping blared from the telemetry console.
“What’s happening?” Albright shouted.
Conrad, eyes wide, poured over the incoming readouts. “Something’s changed,” he yelled. “Goliath is speeding up and tracking a half-degree off plotted course…and the variant is increasing.”
“Jesus,” Albright said. He jumped into his console seat and began analyzing the new data. As preliminary results flashed, he couldn’t believe his eyes. “If this continues, Goliath will miss earth by a couple hundred thousand miles. My God, can this be?”
“Check it again!” Conrad yelled.
Albright’s fingers hammered at the keyboard, and a second later, the revised trajectory flashed on the screen. Confirmed! Goliath was going to bypass Earth.
Conrad whooped, unbridled joy in his voice. “I’ll fire this off to Command. The gravitational pull from the micro-hole worked. It was just closer to Earth than anyone knew; it’s the only explanation. How lucky can we get?”
Albright looked up from his screen, face ashen. “Hold on. Final trajectory calculations just updated. It’s…it’s not all good news. Look.” Conrad hawked the screen, jaw grinding. Mare Sarenitatis was now in Goliath’s crosshairs.
The automated countdown clock buzzed and recalibrated: thirty-six minutes to impact.
zp8497586rq
by submission | Dec 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Daniel Euphrat
Beginning on August the twentieth, they received a series of twelve and only twelve transmissions, one a day from deep space probe Nocturnum. This was unusual because the probe had been expected to transmit far more reports, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, over the course of its voyage. It was also unusual because the probe hadn’t been launched yet.
Said one scientist of the event, “I believe it is safe to say that either some of our calculations were in error with regards to the transmission time, or we simply had an incomplete understanding of the phenomena at hand when designing the probe’s communication device.”
Said another scientist, off the record, “See, this is the kind of thing that happens when you fuck with faster-than-light speeds.”
For astronaut George Felix, the strangest part was hearing the voice of his future self.
“I somehow thought I’d sound more distinguished after maturing a few thousand years,” he said with a bemused half-grin.
“Yeah, don’t believe what they say, George, people aren’t really like fine wine.” Edward Templeton sat next to Felix in front of a waveform projection on computer monitor, clicking back to the beginning to play the clip yet again.
“Please, for Christ’s sake, would you quit it with that thing? You’re giving me a headache.” Felix stood up and began to pace back and forth behind his chair in the tiny foam-padded sound room.
“Most old people I know aged like warm milk. Particularly my relatives. I’m sorry, is the scientific revelation of the century getting on your nerves, princess?” said Templeton, tossing a pen in Felix’s general direction without looking up from the screen.
“Oh please. We knew from the start that the tachyons were going to go back in time, we just guessed wrong on how far. The only revelation is that those dimwits at the ISA can’t make a half-decent Feynman diagram.”
“Right, right and getting a fucking message from the future is just kind of an arbitrary side-effect.”
Felix chuckled, interlacing his fingers and tapping his thumbs together. The room was quiet now except for the hum of the computer and Templeton’s mouse clicks.
“I’m still going to do it, you know,” said Felix.
Templeton did look back at him now, an eyebrow raised. “Alright, buddy, it’s your funeral.”
zp8497586rq
by submission | Dec 5, 2010 | Story
Author : David Perry
He had figured it out at the all-too-young age of 26. At the time it was just a theory, a crazy idea – he wouldn’t even test it until 38. That day he put a loaded revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger six times. He took his discovery to the greatest minds the world had to offer and over the next fifty years he came to learn what it meant, how it worked. He wouldn’t find out what it meant for much, much longer.
“Everything is probability waves, right?” He began his lecture as usual. “There are an infinite number of possible dimensions with an infinite number of possible outcomes for every event. There are universes where all of our atoms spontaneously disassemble, where the Earth is made of tofu, and infinitely many universes in which none of us exist.” His heart raced, the demo approached. “The thing is, though, that we can’t perceive universes in which we don’t exist and, like most energy, we tend to take the path of least resistance. In other words, we tend to see the most likely set of events in the set.” He walked to the podium and retrieved his revolver. “This is a very real gun and it contains very real bullets. I invited a number of people from the audience to a nearby shooting range earlier to verify that it works.” Suddenly he placed the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. He felt nothing, but he knew that the universe had just shattered. The revolver made its usual satisfying “click” and much of the audience audibly gasped. “Welcome to a new universe. There are now countless universes in which I just killed myself in front of all of you, but you’re not in those universes – at least not the copies of you that I perceive. My consciousness, your consciousness, every consciousness cannot perceive a universe in which it does not exist, so when I kill myself in one universe I have no choice but to branch off into a less likely one. The gun always jams, the bullets are duds – something always goes wrong. This is my six hundred and twenty-third ‘suicide attempt.’ I’m telling you that you are all immortal.”
It was his 96th birthday and time was starting to catch up with him. His skin hung loosely over brittle bones and he began to wonder how far his theory stretched. He knew that eventually his chances of survival had to reach zero and there would be nowhere left for his consciousness to go. What then?
He was over seven hundred years old, though he long ago lost count. He could ask the computer if he really cared, but age had long ceased to be a factor in any meaningful way. There were side effects to this, things he hadn’t expected. He had watched his wife and friends wither and die, seen dozens of wars and so much death. “We tend to take the path of least resistance.” The words echoed in his mind, he had to find a way out. The “path of least resistance,” as it turns out, meant that everyone kept dying as usual, everyone kept fighting as usual and the world kept going to shit as usual.
For the first time in ages he felt genuinely nervous. He had to find a way out of this universe and into another one. One that still had people, civilization, a reason to live. He put the quantum superimposed revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger…
by submission | Dec 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
“It’s worse than that,” I said. “Everyone coming out of sleep at the same time, my staff is overtaxed, and you tell me half the ship is missing?”
“Entirely gone,” Captain Stefan said. “Almost the bottom third of the ship. Sleep pods, living quarters, hydroponics, two singularities; all gone, like something came by and sliced it off with a laser torch.”
“Have to be a big torch.”
“And the problems with waking–”
“I know about those,” I said. “Remember my medical degree.”
“But it’s all too much, they never trained us for this.”
“They trained as best as they could,” I said. “Now hold still.”
I injected two CCs of epinephrin in the Captain’s neck, just above the esophagus. “You should start feeling better in ten minutes. Now, I really have to check on–”
“But what could have done it?” he said, plaintively. “All those people, gone, dead….”
I sighed. “If I think about it for five minutes, will you go and let me tend to the others?”
He nodded. I checked his readout, saved it to my files, and sat.
After about three minutes, Captain Stefan took a deep breath.
“Better?”
“Much.”
I clicked a cabinet open and took out three foil-wrapped tablets. “Take one of these before bed for the next three nights. Let me know if you have more trouble after that. Magnets.”
He took the packet and blinked at me. “Magnets?”
“Children often swallow small things, and small toys often have magnets inside. They stick together, you see, and if they are in different loops of intestine they can stick, pulling the intestines out of place, causing blockage and pain. You might check our telemetry, see if we passed by something very large, something with a lot of gravity. The singularities in the lower section could have attracted–”
“–and although our speed was too high to pull the ship off course,” he said, “they would have enough attraction to push against the magnetic couplings. We built the ship for containment but I bet they never considered something attracting from outside.”
“Send someone EVA,” I said. “Check the rivets. Probably the ship parted on seams, and everything just fell off.”
He was already standing. “I’ll call you,” he said.
“Please don’t,” I said. “I have responsibilities.”
The door hissed shut. I turned to my screens and tabbed through a crew list. Almost six hundred people, simply gone.
Who knew if my solution was right. The point was, with fewer people to get sick, I would have much more time away from the clinic in the years ahead.
There’s a silver lining.
by submission | Dec 2, 2010 | Story
Author : Sean Austin Murphy
I was 19 when I first heard them. I thought I was crazy. They assured me I was not. I told my family. My family agreed I was crazy. I went to the doctors. The doctors gave me pills. The pills don’t work.
They said they were from the future. They said I was the only one they could contact. They said I was a mutation. I believed them. They said the sun was dying. They said I was the only hope.
They told me to build it. The device. I was given clear instructions. I gathered the materials and I began construction. Every piece fit. Everything was perfect. But then the others came.
The others tried to stop me. The others said not to trust them. The others said they were evil. I was shown images. Horrid tortured by visions of the future. The others said they were responsible. The others said they were invaders. The others said they came from nowhere and attacked for no reason. I almost believed it. But the others made a mistake.
I don’t think they could hear the others, but still they knew. They knew when I stopped working. I was almost done, one more piece was all. But the others had given me pause. They guessed what was happening. They told me who the others really were. They told me the others were people. They explained that as the sun faded humanity went mad. They said the few still coherent were zealots. Survivors believed this was gods wrath. They said the others believed to interfere with god was wrong. They said they were only here to save what humanity had once been. They showed me images.
It’s a powerful feeling, to decide the fate of your world. I almost believed the others. Then the others showed me an image. It was of the others counter attacking the invader’s ships, to drive them from our world. But I had already seen this image. They had showed it to me. They had showed me how the madmen had destroyed their outpost, murdered the families inside.
As I finished the device the others begged me to stop. When I asked the others didn’t even know what it would do. The madmen even tried to claim it was a bomb.
When the final piece was in place the voices stopped. No more images, no more arguing, just quiet.
The others still don’t know what it is. I tried to tell them, the others that is, but they think I’m crazy. All they know is that the invaders are talking to someone in the past, planning something, and that they have to stop it.
They’re in the other room now, the others. They are all I have left, the only few survivors still fighting the good fight. They have their theories as to where the invaders came from, but they don’t really know. I do.
It’s not a bomb the invaders are building in the past, it’s a beacon.
