by submission | Nov 14, 2010 | Story
Author : Hugh Downs
Royce Millison requested cremation. He had got the idea in 1908, early in his long life. He was neat and efficient and said he didn’t want his remains ‘to take up space’.
In 1991 he restated his desire, being a person who tends to repeat himself and believing he was near the end of the line. But then the Wackman Breakthrough increased his life span by thirty percent, and he lived to be one hundred and twenty-two. At a still vigorous one-hundred and twenty-one, he stated yet again his desire to be cremated. He had had a dream that he would be cremated three times, that his ashes would be scattered the second time and regathered the third. When he spoke about this, friends thought he had become senile. But he hadn’t; his dream was a prophecy.
One year later, the front wheel of his motorcycle dug into soft sand and he did an endo [this is a wheelie with your back wheel off the ground] from which he never recovered. He was cremated at 1115 [I wrote this in bold] degrees Fahrenheit. His ashes were deposited in an appropriate urn.
Five billion years later the sun had swollen to a radius of one astronomical unit, swallowing Mercury, Venus and Earth, and vaporising Mars. Along with everything else in the world, Millison’s ashes were recremated at 4,800 degrees Kelvin. This time they were scattered through the solar interior, gradually rising in temperature to one hundred million degrees Kelvin.
Sixty-two billion years after this, a universe, as neat and efficient as Royce Millison was, regathered his ashes in the Great Implosion and compacted them to negligible size. Then, at a temperature above one trillion degrees, it cremated them a third time.
He was not prepared for what happened afterward (if afterward is the right word for a time as distorted as that in the transition from one universe to another). Conditions inside the cosmic egg, in bending some fundamental physical laws out of shape, did the same crazy thing to entropy that allows a black hole to eject a television set. And here he was again (if here is the correct word for a place occupied by a new universe).
Although his memory of a previous life was hazy and at times haunting, Royce Millison was not surprised to find himself back in business, and not much changed – except for having a neurotic aversion to motorcycles.
by submission | Nov 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Jacqueline Rochow
Jones surveyed the carnage. Under the blood splatters lacing the bed and carpet, the young woman’s limbs were splayed at unnatural angles, her head twisted nearly backwards and her throat crushed. Bites had been taken out of her collarbone, and the bruising suggested that one of her breasts had been crushed rather severely while she was still alive. Her ribs were caved in on one side.
“The victim?” Jones asked.
“In the bathroom.”
Jones skirted around the supervising officer with a quick flash of his badge and found the boy crouches on the floor, eyes red, deep scratches up his arms. Whether the girl or he himself had made them, Jones wasn’t sure. He looked about nineteen.
“Peter?” Jones said softly. “I’m Tim Jones.”
“Are you here to arrest me?”
“No.” Jones crouched on the floor next to him. “I’m here to talk to you. What happened?”
“I met her at a party. Amy. We were drinking and having fun, and…” he started to sob.
“It’s ok, Peter. Was this party last night?”
The boy nodded. Jones handed him some toilet paper to blow his nose.
“Then what happened?”
“I walked her home. We got back here, and… and she invited me into her room, but… but I changed my mind.”
“And then?”
“And then I don’t know what happened.” Peter’s sobs became louder and turned into wails. Jones put an arm around his shoulders and waited patiently for him to calm down again.
“It’s ok if you don’t remember the details. Just tell me everything she did, ok? You came in the front door. Did she lead, or did you?”
“Sh… she did.”
“And then?”
“She asked if I wanted a cup of coffee. I said yes. She put the kettle on.”
“Good… what next?”
“She took my hands and led me into her room. Started taking her shirt off. We kissed a bit.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “She put her hand down my pants, and then I said I wanted to slow down. She took her bra off, and then she put some perfume on.”
“Perfume?”
“Yeah. And then…” Peter swallowed and shook his head. Subconsciously, Jones brushed the deep scars on his own arm where the leather restraints had bitten into his flesh all those years ago. Becoming a counsellor for Pherax victims required being exposed to it. He’d never forget that hunger and desperation as he fought to cross the room to the female officer on the other side… health, his own arms, the fact that she would shoot him in the head if he actually succeeded in breaking free and running for her, had all been irrelevant at that moment.
“Where did she put the bottle of perfume?”
“Uh… her dresser. Second drawer, I think.”
Jones stuck his head around the bathroom door and attracted the attention of a police officer. “Pherax, second drawer of the dresser. Get a hazmat team on it. Don’t let anyone else touch it or we risk having a violent orgy on our hands.” He went back to Peter. “Peter, listen to me. This isn’t your fault. That perfume is a special chemical, it changes the way you think. It makes men want to have sex with her, and for some men, it makes them violent. What happened… that wasn’t you. That wasn’t something you could control.”
Peter nodded, but Jones could see the memories of violently tearing apart and raping a woman reflected in the boy’s eyes, and he knew that Peter didn’t believe him for a moment.
by submission | Nov 10, 2010 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
I have brought the ship into orbit above Destiny. Forty-eight of my eighty-one years have been spent maintaining the systems and checking the life-pods of the passengers. Now we are here and I can rejoin my reborn body and be a part of a community again.
Destiny may even be a better home for humanity than Earth. My new home.
I awaken my body from it’s life-pod, and download back into it. I take a week to readjust to being in a meat suit, then move on to on site exploration.
I leave the ship AI in charge while I take the Lander down to find the perfect colony spot. I have chosen dozens of possible while in the System, and must now choose the best to land the ship at. Once landed the ship will never fly again.
I spend weeks locating the perfect spot. Finally I choose.
At the Y of a river valley in the subtropics, is a place with low rolling plains covered with a lush grass. The river is lined with palm-like trees, and the soil is a rich black that my test seeds sprout in nearly overnight. The cloud to my silver lining is a predator the size of a large cat. Small cloud. I decide it’s perfect and return to the ship.
As I approach the ship, I send a signal to the AI to begin awakening the passengers. If they are awake at landing, it was decided, offloading would proceed much faster. I want to be there to over-see the downloading of selves from the transport archive, of course.
I dock the transport, and head towards my quarters when the lights go out. All sounds have stopped, which means no air is flowing, and one thousand people are breathing what we have.
Within a minute, the light and air returns.
I ask the AI what has happened, but get no response.
I rush to the small control deck. Nothing software based is working. All hard-wired systems are on-line. EM pulse. I spend hours checking systems. All gone.
I hear screaming. The passengers! I forgot I awoke them.
I rush to the hold to find 999 adult infants awakening from anesthesia. All hungry as I was when I awoke. At least I knew why. They know nothing.
Fortunately, first meal is always mush in a bulb. I find the right storage and run around sticking nipples in mouths for two hours. Quiets them right down.
I return to what manual instruments I have and look for answers. And, find them.
Destiny’s star has a neutron star binary that EM flashes the planet every 396 local days.
I hear screaming. I rush onto the pod deck only to be assaulted by the most vile odor. I know my duty, and I begin checking. Most have soiled themselves, and I do the best I can.
* * *
A year has passed, mostly with-out sleep.
I transferred the passengers to the surface, ten at a time, in the Lander. I can still fly the Lander, but it must be on manual constantly.
Only fifty-seven have died, but I have felt each as if it were my own child. Of the rest, all are sitting up, and a few are taking their first steps.
My landing site is working out better than I thought. It rains once a day, in the afternoon, and it is as warm as bathwater. Which I use it for.
A few have even begun talking.
They are the ones that call me Dada.
by submission | Nov 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson
It was Professor Decker’s moment of triumph, what he had worked so hard for all these years. As the media looked on he manipulated the keys on his console. At first nothing happened, but then slowly the spherical device atop the garbage heap began to open like an egg. And although completely invisible to the gathered spectators, the microscopic androids descended onto the trash pile and became immediately busy doing two things; devouring the refuse as fast as they could suck the matter into their tiny nuclear furnace bellies, and duplicating themselves at an exponential rate.
Off to the right of the fuel site was a bare patch of earth -the build site- purposely cleared and leveled for the experiment. One of the reporters gasped and pointed. Suddenly they all saw it, a definite layout was appearing there in the dirt; lines of a foundation, plumbing, electrical, all appearing seemingly out of thin air. The microdroids were definitely on the move.
And while the refuse fuel was now visibly shrinking away before their eyes, on the build site steel stud framing grew from the just recently completed foundation while windows were progressing upward into fast appearing aluminum frames. Now a large red entrance door was materializing as if by magic.
And as the flat roof of the small two-story building nearly completed itself they could all see that the former garbage heap was now no more than a smoldering black patch of earth.
Ted left his console and motioned to them all, “Come inside everyone, it’s quite safe!” The gathered mob needed no coaxing. They followed Ted Decker like he was the Messiah.
Together they explored the brand new building with its gorgeous tile work and perfectly functioning plumbing; but it didn’t take long for one of the reporters to point out something quite startling on the second floor. “Say Decker, this building sure looks like it’s only two stories tall from the outside.”
“Well that’s all it is,” replied the professor.
“Then how do you explain this?” The reporter opened wide a closet door which gave way onto an upward spiraling stairway.
In unison they all climbed cautiously into the sunlight to find a completely unplanned and unexplained third floor growing out of the roof, which was surprisingly not made of tin or tarpaper but expensive looking hardwood flooring. Together the bewildered people gathered tentatively at a northward facing window as a new ceiling closed in over their heads.
They looked out of the unplanned third story window to the gaping hole in the earth which had now opened up under the former fuel site. And the healthy ground continued to seethe and writhe as the microdroids multiplied and took fresh matter into their tiny bodies
Ted Decker exclaimed, “Oh lord something’s happening, the program was supposed to end, they’re not stopping.”
“Well, when will they stop?” asked a young wild eyed reporter as a light switch panel materialized on the freshly erected wall behind her.
Decker paused, as if grasping for words, and then finally, as the fuel hole widened and deepened even further, and as they all watched an unplanned western wing of rooms begin to stretch away from the main building, he replied with a question, “When they run out of fuel?”
by submission | Nov 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Scot Noel
It won’t be a big red button that ends the maniacal arguments of man, no nuclear winter to silence the right, the left, and the in-between. No, just me and my little trick no one else has yet conceived.
In the silence to come, no one will ask how I put to rest the radicals of both Bible and Koran, striking dumb at once all questions of Constitution and tedious harangues, blocking out Shakespeare and the Greeks in a single bound. No, I’ll take us back to the hundred thousand year quietude that bore real men and women through the ice ages and beyond.
No sickness is stronger than the one that grips us now, none but for this, which I unleash: a fever set to burn like a firebreak through the world.
How enraged I am by your whining ineptitude and meanness to one another. People with fat bellies and fat children speak of the tyrannies they suffer. Others ignore fact in favor of god-fearing fancies, or strap on explosives to win the shallow arguments of unsound minds.
In my own country, men whose actions, words, and spirit would make the founding fathers puke stand up to invoke patriotism with the demeanor of hysterical women.
Today, it ends. The conflation of symbol with reality is over; the building up of vicious castle walls in our heads is done, for I shall take away the cause of it all, those symbols we wield like knives, the words at the foundation of all lies, and the ability forevermore to recreate a single stitch of it.
At first, true contagions inspired us to infect our networks with the codes we call viruses. Now the computer virus comes to me, naked in its simplicity, a fearsome bomb ready to plant into the body of man as base pairs, chains of nucleosides, and transcription factors. Bio-engineered on a precise genomic level, I’ve encapsulated terror within the most contagious and immutable of viral shells.
No, not a single body shall fall dead to the ground on my account. The fever I’ve created burns away words, but not a single memory. It touches neither music nor math, assaults neither art nor engineering. The pilot who can fly, the surgeon who can cut, the dancer who can dance, all shall continue as before, perhaps even pass on their skills through demonstration. But honestly, who can pass on the insidious, boundless weight of unending bull except by words? (And my plague shall take them all.)
It seems so right, so well considered!
Don’t cry to me about literature, learning, or the progress of man. Where has it gotten us? Hate is taught by rote and spread through the easiest corruptions of reason. It is love springs naturally from the human heart, as does the urge to comfort and protect.
Isn’t it in times of fear that the self is most often put aside? Won’t they have to help one another, banding together against the great catastrophe I visit upon them?
I’ve thought of it all, and if I haven’t, I shall embrace my design as the one true resolution to this era of idiocy, for our 10,000 year enterprise in argument and deceit ends today.
Yes, this is the test itself, one last rant from the man who can never be blamed, for in a moment my keystrokes will be as indecipherable as the markings on the moon.
From the start, I’ve felt the fever building, and here at last comes the climax to click across the circuits in my brain, delivering for all time the last w…
