by submission | Mar 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Daniel Fuhr
The haze of smoke lingered over the sharp nose and into aged eyes. Smoking on spacecraft was strictly forbidden according to regulations. Jascon owned this tugboat; he made his own rules and could give a damn about those regulations.
He squinted to try to see through the smoke covering his eyes.
A few months ago, when the space marines contacted Jascon about using his ship as a decoy and trap for the local space pirates, he scoffed at them. They explained about the local growing number of pirates, calling themselves “The Barate”, not quite pirates, not quite bandits. He rebuffed the space marines, declining to assist them.
He coughed into the smoke, the tightness in his chest making it harder to breathe.
Eventually the request turned into a demand and the space marines requisitioned Jascon’s ship, his annoyance became anger. Under the marines control his craft was turned into a by-the-book regulation ship. Then the problems came. “Not enough lifeboats”, “Unsecured instrument devices”, “Nonworking emergency backup”, “No Smoking”. That last one chapped his ass more than anything. The only way he was able to afford paying his crew the small pittance they deserved was by allowing smoking.
Struggling, he pulled in another breath, he wasn’t sure if it was his last one.
As suddenly as they came, the space marines transferred. They abandoned Jascon to a condemned ship. His craft wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough to run cargo runs anymore. It wasn’t even good enough to leave the dock the space marines placed it in. The government revoked his license and the ships registration.
So he stole it.
The foot on his chest put another ounce of pressure on his chest. The number of strangers on his bridge was uncomfortable. The knowledge that he could be killed was uncomfortable.
“So you want to become a Barate?” the rough voice came through the smoke.
by submission | Mar 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Patrick Kennedy
“Mom, there’s something in the front yard!”
“What is it, Billy?”
“A robot, Mom! What’s a robot doing in our yard?”
“I don’t know, Billy. It must have gotten past the fence somehow.”
“But I thought the fence was supposed to keep them out!”
“It is, Billy. So let’s go see what it’s doing here.”
Janice looked at the robot through the peephole in the front door. It was an old one, rusted and breaking down. It must have wandered straight through the spam-filter without even registering. She sighed and opened the door.
“Hello!” said the robot. “Your house looks like it hasn’t had a weatherproofing in some time! Without a regular application of our patented and trademarked Weather-Stop product, your home is exposed to the elements, which can cause damage and reduce its value. I’m here today to tell you how we can do a demonstration application which will be good for thirty days at no cost!”
Janice pointed her shotgun at the robot and said, “you’re in violation of the neighborhood’s no solicitation policy, and you’ve bypassed our household spam filter. You will give me your employer’s contact information and then leave immediately.”
“My apologies. I just wanted to share with you this incredible opportunity. May I just offer you this brochure?” As it spoke, the robot’s third arm came around from behind its back, a small pistol in its hand. “I think you’ll find this offer quite compelling.”
Janice fired first. The shotgun took the arm off at the shoulder and damaged the robot’s head. It fell to the ground in shock. Janice planted a small thermite burner on it’s chest and went back inside as the robot melted.
Damned sales-bots. Getting pushier every day. Time to get a new spam filter and upgrade the fence again.
by submission | Mar 5, 2010 | Story
Author : V.L.Ilian
“Hogwash! There was a mathematical proof the sound barrier could not be broken even tough they were breaking it with cannons in Newton’s time!
There was a mathematical proof the light barrier could not be broken even tough they were breaking it in Einstein’s time!”
“Yes… but that’s different.”
The senior researcher was continuing to pull levers and instructing computers to start sequences while his colleague stood there helpless with a stack of tablets full of mathematical proofs.
“Nonsense! The proofs of the time were based on an incomplete understanding of the universe.”
“True… but those inventions were not this high risk”
A robot opened a large safe an pulled out a liquid-filled cylinder holding a suspended seed of blue light.
“Poppycocks! When trains were invented everyone feared the human body could not survive such accelerations. Endless tests were conducted to see if passengers would lose consciousness.
When the teleporter was invented everyone cried the soul was being lost. We all know how that turned out don’t we?”
The robot inserted the cylinder in a complex assembly. Immediately the seed of light was sucked into the multifaceted sphere in the center of the machine.
Light appeared to reverse itself and the sphere went completely dark.
“Doctor! This won’t work!”
“Absurd! No more buts!”
The senior researcher put on his favorite goggles and hovered over a big red button.
“Let’s make history… literally.”
by submission | Mar 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Sean Monaghan
Sid smiled as Alex handed him the separation results. One more test and they could announce. They’d known all along of course, since the first samples, but Mars Twelve operated on a government testing regime. No disclosure until verified. Too often the communities broadcast just to get the jump on other researchers, only to look like fools later.
But here was DNA, of a sort.
Spectroscopy, centrifuges, distillations. All the stuff he’d nearly forgotten in years of being administrator. Still, the results were clear. A microbe.
“Looks good, huh?” Alex said, grinning.
“Let’s wait for the second titration confirmation.”
“We’ll be opening that bottle of Taittinger you’ve been so precious with, huh?”
“Always so impatient. Did Jade and Mish come back from the site yet?”
“Nah. Something about digging a new line. They’ll miss the party. Imagine if NASA had sent rovers there fifty years back.”
Sid laughed. “Yeah, hindsight.”
Mish drew his multiprobe through the soil. “This is driving me nuts,” he said into his mike.
“Well, it’s not far to drive, is it?” Jade replied.
“Old joke, dull joke.”
He kept watching the readout on the probe. Nothing. Another line, still nothing. Well, it was better getting suit time than sitting in the bunker lab minding the centrifuge. He ran another two lines, then realised he hadn’t heard from Jade for a while. “Jade?”
Nothing.
Mish looked at the edge of the crater. “Jade? Come in.”
“Get over here, Mish.”
“What’s up?”
“Just get here.”
Sid grinned at the final results.
“Taittinger?” Alex said.
“Absolutely.” Sid clicked the press-release he’d composed weeks ago. He typed a quick couple of lines with the dates of the last tests and began the process of uploading to the server on Earth.
“Where is it anyway?” Alex said, hunting through a cupboard.
“What?” Alex’s finger hovered over the mouse key, the cursor on ‘send’.
“The bloody champagne. I can’t find anything up here.”
Mish came over the rugged crest and saw Jade crouching at a spaded hole. He bounced down the slope. “Whatcha got?” he said.
“Come look.”
Mish slowed and looked into the small pit. “Ventifact?” he said, looking at the twisted shape. But he knew it wasn’t. It looked more like a tree branch. That couldn’t be right.
He crouched and helped her scoop soil away. Excavating around the branch they exposed a joint. It was covered in a kind of lacquered felt, bonded into the main shell.
“Artificial,” Jade said.
“Well.” Mish pushed the end and the top flexed on the joint like an elbow. “From an old missing rover? Viking?”
“Moron, Viking wasn’t a rover.”
“But it had an arm.”
“Where’s your multiprobe? Let’s do a sounding.”
“You think there’s more?” He passed the probe over.
Jade shoved the tip into the soil and pinged it. She rolled out the screen and examined the grainy image.
“Jeepers,” Mish said.
There was a buried oblong shape, with wings and wheels and tracks and long and short arms. Bigger and more complex than anything NASA had ever sent up. Different too, odd shapes having nothing to do with practicality or keeping weight down. Strange.
“Alien,” Jade said. “An alien rover.”
Mish sat back on the orange soil. “You know what this means, don’t you?” He touched his wrist to make the call back to the bunker.
“A bigger discovery? Wow. Way bigger than just a microbe.”
“Except that it means that ours may not be not a Martian microbe.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jade looked at the rover’s arm. “Extrasolar.”
“Let’s hope they haven’t announced yet.”
by submission | Mar 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Liz Lafferty
“Tell me the story again, Grandpa. Did we really have automatic lights? And could you really talk to someone on the other side of the planet?”
I laughed. We huddled by the fires every night, the children always wanting to hear one of my fantastic stories of the old days.
I had a hard time believing my own version of events. It had all started simple enough. Technology that had exploded from building-size computers down to palm-sized mega-devices. Our homes were loaded with scanners that heard our voices, obeyed our commands. We were too confident in our intelligence. We’d forgotten that nature had a way of humbling us.
“All true, Jack. I had a communication device that let me talk to people in Paris, France.”
“Where’s that?”
I didn’t even know if France still existed. My world, my family’s world, centered around a cave in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We went out on raids to gather our food.
“A long way away. I was eight years old then.”
“That’s how old I am!”
“Yep. We had everything, Jack. Food, safety, warmth. It was gone in an instant.” It was gone in twelve minutes, if you wanted to set your clock by it. That’s how long it had taken the solar flare to reach Earth.
The government might have known; scientists surely had to suspect… still, all that followed had wreaked havoc everywhere on the planet.
Print publishers, newspapers, magazines had gone out of business due to more advanced online capabilities; store front banks closed up, their asset information in securitized web farms; universities and schools no longer had buildings — all learning, scoring, testing was completed via webcasts. Friends and families existed in high-def.
Everything except farming and food could be bought, traded, read, transacted online.
It had all started with global warming. We were saving Earth’s resources with our more advanced capabilities and humanitarian efforts. It seemed to be working. Politicians and scientists hailed the reports about lower carbon dioxide emissions and fewer hurricane warnings and less polar ice caps melting.
Then again, it might have all been a huge plot to pull the wool over our eyes.
“Did the sun really make it all go away?”
“Indeed it did. It was a solar flare.” I spread my arms wide as I demonstrated, wiggling my fingers in front of my grandkid’s face. “The flare shot of the surface of the sun. Its flaming fingers searching, reaching out across time and space until those hot licks touched our planet. The orbiting satellites tumbled from the sky, blazing a trail to earth like fireflies. Power grids all over the world collapsed. Radio and television and computers all sizzled and ground to a halt.”
“What happened next?”
“Without communication, without money, without contacts — governments collapsed, chaos ensued, people died.” Even I didn’t know the full extent of the catastrophe. Only a few Hamm operators got information through to us. They called it a coronal mass ejection, a proton storm. The worst ever recorded.
We never recovered; so much of our technology was lost. We were back to scavenging old paperback books for our entertainment.
I threw a stick in the fire. We watched the night sky. Aurora borealis was still spectacular, eighty years later.
