by submission | Jul 25, 2009 | Story
Author : Steven Odhner
I can’t stop staring at the massive crater, watching the clouds of dust that blow out past its rim before curling down into the bowl and dissipating. For the hundredth time I wonder why the crater hasn’t filled up with water; maybe it just doesn’t rain anymore. I always forget to ask. A lack of rain would explain the dust that tints the sky red, that covers the ruins of the city and transforms them from twisted buildings into indistinct burial mounds. I had decided that some virus or pollutant had killed the plants and that, in turn, had allowed the soil to blow freely… but maybe it was just a simple lack of rain.
The robot glides noiselessly through the doorway with my lunch.
“Greetings! I have the meal you requested!” They always sound excited. I take the tray and place it on the table by the window.
The spindly metal creature does its equivalent of standing at attention and asks the same thing as always – “Is there any other service I can provide?” I tell it I have some questions and it waits eagerly. I’ve already tried asking about the crater, asking for the location of any other humans, asking to travel. I try asking about the rain this time.
“I’m sorry, weather information is not currently available!”
Of course not. Always the same answer, with the automated systems trying to access networks that no longer exist. I allow the robot to leave, and go back to staring out the window.
The landscape is hard to read with the buildings knocked over and covered in dust, but the more I think about it the more I’m sure my old apartment should be in the crater – if it even still existed by the time whatever it was happened. I leave the bland recycled food and wander downstairs, past floor after floor of empty offices and idle robots. I stop on the ground level for a moment to once again look at the electronic notice on the main doors – “Until further notice the government has implemented a mandatory lockdown for public safety reasons…” before heading to the basement where the hum of the building’s independent power plant vibrates up through the soles of my shoes. Once more I pace down the long hallway with the countless cryogenic chambers, the time capsules filled with what could be the only other humans on Earth.
I want to smash all of the electronics so that the robots are forced to revive everyone, but I know that most of them were frozen when they were already dead or about to be. I asked if others had been healthy and had set a specific date for decanting like myself, but the robot excitedly informed me that it couldn’t give out privileged client information. If I forced the robots to open them all up, thaw them all out, wouldn’t it be worth it if even one person survived? I know I won’t do it. I can’t stand the thought of killing any of them even though I know that they’ll never wake up, that someday the power will fail and they will seamlessly transition from sleep to death. Some of it is selfish too; I’m not sure how many people the robots can provide for. Better to play it safe, lonely though I am. Heading back to the stairs, I take one last look back along the endless vault of frozen humanity. Maybe tomorrow. For now, I head back upstairs to watch the sun set over the crater.
by submission | Jul 23, 2009 | Story
Author : Lliir
Mary Ellen Gratcke had never contemplated murder before. She’d never felt so betrayed, helpless, and naked before, either. A mere thought, a flip of a switch, and the killing began. The fluid levels in the special bath that protected her betrayer from the dangers of hyperspace flight ebbed, then began plunging.
98%
94%
She reflected long and bitterly on the deception that had rendered her nothing more than a brain in nourishing liquid, navigating a ship. So much for the Fountain of Youth. So much for saving her grandson, Frank.
“C’mon, Grandma! Faster!” Perpetual energy is amply manifest in small children, and though she’d put up a good fight, failing knees and lungs never let her keep up with the four year old whenever he came to visit. When she’d collapse into her chair, Frank would clamber onto her lap, nestle his head under her chin, and gently stroke her face.
“It’s okay, Grandma,” he’d say. “I have to take naps sometimes, too.”
54%
“Grandma,” Frank had said, as he lie in that hospital bed, “I hope I live to be as old as you.”
Mary Ellen just chuckled, though her daughter and son-in-law had blanched.
“I hope you live to be even older, Sweetheart,” and she had clutched his tiny, shriveling hand. In her dying heart she whispered, “I hope you live to see next year.”
Doctor Lawton had given Frank seven months unless he could get Tranenamine, a rare medication that Lawton hadn’t been able to find anywhere within eighty parsecs–at least a year’s journey by the fastest ships Mary Ellen knew of.
37%
“Mrs. Gratcke?” that calm voice of wickedness had said.
“Yes?”
“How would you like to cheat death? You and your grandson?”
Too good to be true, but… “I’m listening.”
23%
“I’ll try it first,” she’d told the liar. “To see if it’s safe for him.”
15%
She hadn’t had the chance to see Frank a final time before the procedure. And now, she had no eyes to behold him anyway.
“Grandma,” he had whispered, half-coughing, the day before the liar came.
“Yes, Sweetheart?”
“They told me in church today that I’d go to Heaven. Will you come play with me when you get to Heaven?”
She could only turn away and hide the tears.
7%
She wanted to smile at the victory she’d win for justice by ridding the universe of an awful man.
2%
“Grandma?”
“Yes, Sweetheart,” she’d choked.
“They told me in church today ‘Thou shalt not kill.'”
In the now, Mary Ellen’s conscious gasped. The switch was reset. Her captor lived.
********
Three days later, Robert Choisse congratulated himself on his fastest delivery run ever–six months round trip for that toure– grateful for the cerebral navigation system that sped his flight. He regretted that the system had gone haywire, but pull a plug, problem solved.
“Thanks for your business, Mrs. Homan,” he said as a lady tearfully signed for the shipment of Tranenamine, “Give my regards to the little guy.”
by submission | Jul 21, 2009 | Story
Author : Adam Zabell
Commander Deborah Sagmeiser began the ‘big reveal’ of Project Beta. This briefing used to be a formality which celebrated the human race. She looked across the table at a bespectacled middle-aged man, brought into the fold against her better judgement, and wondered how much room for celebration was left.
“Time and space travel,” she explained, “use identical but polarized technology. Like those elementary school cartoons showing self-propagating, transverse oscillating waves of electric and magnetic fields, the physical laws of interstellar travel are twinned with intrachronological transfer.” First Physicist Nikolayev’s eyes grew wide as his scientific intuition processed the implications. His previous assignment had been Project Coeus, whose hyperspatial engineering had drilled Chang’s Five Theorems into his soul.
Commander Sagmeiser tapped a display screen to reveal the Sixth Theorem. “Outside of Project Beta, FP Nikolayev, this collection of variables and constants are an expensive and ruthlessly guarded secret. Within, the past several centuries have seen it used to great effect.”
“It is a reasonable approximation to say there are two timelines measuring the existence of humanity. They branched five hundred years ago, subjective, because Project Beta achieved what nature could not. For two dozen generations, a fleet of C5T ships explored a sterile universe. Discovering rocky planets in every astronomical ecosphere, none of which could manage more than a kind of proto-life. Collections of nucleic and amino and betain acids, barely self-replicating, a light broth in salty water. Psychosocial analysis showed our species on an inevitable descent to suicide because of cosmic loneliness.”
“Within that context,” the Commander continued, “Project Beta developed the C6T technology. Eighty objective-years ago, we finished our prototype ship and went back some four billion years to fertilize the most promising worlds. We returned at intervals to cultivate a spectrum of cultures a bit slower and poorer than ours in preparation for when the C5T survey ships were scheduled to arrive. Five hundred sub-years ago, that was the Fluvuluvians. Twenty years ago, the G’trn.”
Commander Sagmeiser paused, savoring the last moments of Nikolayev’s innocence. “There was much debate within our Sociological Unit about how we should balance exobio aggression; in the end we settled for enmity from every fourth species. The inevitable wars would cost millions of lives and billions of dollars, but our racial ennui had stopped before it started.”
“Having created in our own image, we made certain none of those races would independently develop time travel. Usually a simple matter of giving some desperate alien physicist the first Five Theorems, we short-circuited any natural discovery on every foreign world. Let one of those seedlings peek behind the curtain of history, and the consequences would be disastrous. It’s why Project Beta is always and forever exclusively human, why joining our family is always a one-way trip.”
“We’ve successfully managed time, our most precious resource, for millennia with only modest intrusion. That all changed last week; the C5T ship Yoolis Night has discovered a race we never seeded.”
by submission | Jul 19, 2009 | Story
Author : Jamison B. Medcalf
Technical officer Jones had had his first job at 12 during the 2127 crash following the Antarctic War. Those were simpler times when perma-jacks that fed the Internet into your brain were less common.
Nowadays only those aboard colony ships got sleep. Deep frozen sleep for years in the void of space while people on Earth had their brains awake 24-7 thanks to the new drug, Ap. Ten years off your life for only having to sleep once a week.
Colony ships like the Rosetta were needed to set up the seeds of a new city on some far off world so that great Transport vessels could come next with its thousands of comatose passengers. Earth couldn’t hold any more people and was low on breathable oxygen. The crew of a colony ship will sleep for years and awaken a few months away form the eventual destination to begin preparations for arrival. Timing was everything. Time meant money and lives with every second being worth more than the last.
Jones was currently going mad from boredom and loneliness and knowledge of his fate. His sleeping bath had malfunctioned and now he was going to die. He was mostly through his own food rations already and if he ate the other crewmembers then they would all starve in the last few months off the journey once everyone awoke. So instead he worked. He plotted courses and wrote notes and calibrated terraforming machines. He tried to fix the sleeping bath but it was no use, the thing was shot and no spare parts existed save those on his crewmates baths.
Two months into his awake period he gave up trying to ration food. He wasn’t working anymore. Instead he wrote. He wrote all of his goodbyes and an explanation of what had happened and what command could do in the future to make sure it never happened again.
He wrote out his memories and hopes and things he wished he had done. He felt like he had all the time in the world. In fact, he hadn’t been this bored for a long time, which was why he was going crazy.
Jones mapped the ship in his mind and walked it with his eyes closed just to pass the time. He made delicate zero-gee sculptures by lifting small objects into space and then he took digital images of them for his crewmates to see when they awoke.
When they awoke, he realized, he would be long dead. It was the third month and he was almost out of his food when he simply stopped. He sat and stared into the blackness of space out a window and wondered what they would say, what they would do, when they found his body. He hadn’t been so still for so long before in his life to his knowledge. Eventually he got out his personal computer and wrote one more thing before swallowing a handful of pills and strapping himself into the command chair to stair out the window into space.
Dear Earth and Whom It May Concern-
I think if we all took some time away from the Net and the Vehicles and the Noise we could all learn a thing or two about what it means to be alive.
Looking out the window he decided the stars, the same stars he saw every day and every night for hours on end, weren’t so boring as he had thought. In fact, they didn’t seem very far away either. All it took was time, and he had all the time in the world.
by submission | Jul 18, 2009 | Story
Author : Q. B. Fox
At night, when everything’s finally fallen quiet, the terraces sing; or maybe moan, I’m not sure which. The water where it laps over the first floor windowsills seems calm, except when a boat stirs it up. But deep underwater, by the front steps and in the old basement flats, Gary says there are currents that tug at the foundations. The old brickwork complains at the weight above; a choir of fallen, drowning angels.
I try not to listen. I just try to sleep.
It’s still dark when the Big Girl in the Red Dress comes up the stairs from the floor below, heading off across the rooftops. She seems fearless over the loose slates, crossing the most precarious wires between the buildings. But she won’t take a boat.
Gary says that she’s seen what’s in the water. I don’t know.
When the water’s low you can almost make out the front door or the shadows of long abandoned cars, but I’ve never seen the big, moving shapes people say they can see.
I think the Big Girl in the Red Dress is ill; she’s always red-faced these days, feverish maybe; and she never speaks to us anymore either. Gary says she drinks too much. He says he’d drink too much if he’d seen what she’s seen.
It’s still early, barely light, when we take the boat up the Earl’s Court Road. The Hustler’s are already there, trading out of skiffs and rafts. These days they are all big, burly men; sour faced and sombre, eyes darting nervously downward, or to the high ground in the north. I hear one say that when the water’s low you can almost walk on dry land at Nottinghill or Speakers Corner. I smile; even I know there’s nothing that way until you reach Camden.
We look, but there’s no food for sale; everything’s for sale except food and that’s all anyone wants to buy. There are millions of people left in the city and the flat-roof gardens aren’t enough. “Never mind,” says Gary, “maybe tomorrow.”
We head back down towards Redcliffe Gardens, keeping the spire of St. Luke’s on our right. There are currents that pull you out over Brompton Cemetery if you go too far. Boats go missing there; just below the surface are statues and mausoleums; and the colonnades. Some people say there are other things too.
We step out onto the pontoon at Coleherne Court. The men keep their distance; teenagers really, some no older than me. Mostly they wear long leather dusters, despite the heat. It’s sweaty and steamy already and they’re shirtless under their open coats. They’re so skinny, they eat no better than us.
Finally one comes closer. He has monkey on his shoulder. No one smiles, except the monkey who bears its teeth. No one, not even the monkey, looks up; they all keep their eyes on the gaps in the pontoon.
When we get home again, the Post has left a letter for us. It’s from Mum. I don’t know how the post is still running, but it is. Our letter has been sent over the wire from Cumbria, but at one point it must have been typed out again by hand, because it’s full of mistakes. Mum doesn’t make mistakes.
“Christ,” spits Gary, “I’ve told her not bother. I’ve told her we’re alright in the city, that we high above the ground.” He still looks nervously at the water. “We’re not leaving.” We both know that there’s no way to leave anyway and nowhere to go.
“We’re just hanging around,” I grin.
