by submission | Nov 17, 2010 | Story
Author : Cesium
When the food ran out, we all responded differently.
The Cythalans engineered themselves into cold-blooded pygmies, with slow perception and quiet metabolism, tending their meager crops with careful patience. They lay on the hills and watched the sun wheel about the sky, and sang songs that lasted for months.
They’re all dead now.
The arcologies of Hongdao were unroofed, and their occupants became photosynthetic, living off water, earth, and sun. Their buildings were wonders of glass and carbon, full of light and air, and the people’s skin was resplendent in all colors of the rainbow.
They’re dead now, too.
The people of Tashpan downloaded into mechanical bodies, powered by the tiny sparks of nuclear engines. They lived mostly as they had, their factories precisely calibrated for a sustainable rate of growth, and their science flourished like none before them.
I don’t yet know what happened to them.
The Stennish went further, and sealed their minds in blocks of computing machinery deep underground, powered by the heat of the earth. They lived in a shared fantasy, refugees from a physical world that could no longer support what they had once been.
They’re still around, I think, in some form.
I, the groupmind of Emnisi, I chose a different path. My 46,228,901 constituent humans boarded a ship, and in the outermost reaches of the system I created a tiny black hole. Safeguards were in place; it could do no harm to anyone else, but it was perfect for my needs. My ship was to slingshot around the singularity, approaching close enough for the time dilation to become enormous, and then drawing away. Two hundred years would have passed in a day, enough that the crisis would have been averted.
But there was a miscalculation.
I’ve spent a long time pondering where exactly the error was. It could have been human error, or a gap in my understanding of physical law. I hope it was the former, but I don’t have enough data to tell for sure.
When I escaped the pull of the black hole, I found the orbiting instruments and monitors long since ground to dust by micrometeoroid impacts. I had come forward in time not two hundred years but two billion, to a sun too hot and bright, and no sign of human life. The ship began its return journey down the star’s gravity well, but I found nothing to assuage my worst fears. I sought the children of Staenn and Tashpan and Ishiko, but I fear they have forgotten those ancestral names (and, indeed, the communications protocols).
After several minutes of shared thought, a shipwide referendum was held. By a 46% majority vote of my members, with 19% abstaining, I have decided to alter the ship’s trajectory and take it directly into the black hole. In a short while, we too will be gone.
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?”
