by submission | Dec 10, 2008 | Story
Author : Jim Brown
Jaller scrambled across the engine’s surface, checking for microfractures and loose connections. The recon ship had taken a direct hit to its hull which both shut down the engine and sent them spinning off course. They had gotten so close.
As he worked, he listened to the details of the battle as they were announced over the speakers. Technologically speaking, this new race was a bit ahead, but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with.
Due to the unknowns of dealing with aliens, transmissions over air other than sound were banned. This meant Jaller flew around the engine with a large amount of wires connecting him to the main repair system. Along with the repair work at hand, he had to also continually reach back and unhook the wires from various snags.
The captain came over his headset.
“How far are you, Jaller?”
“Half way done, sir. Lots of microfractures. Nothing broken so far though, so just this patch work and we’ll be good to go.”
“Thanks.”
He loved fixing microfractures. Nothing made his day like knowing that he had taken proper care of the engine, especially things about it few others knew about. He knew this love was encoded in him and most of his personality traits had been chosen before he was born, but it didn’t matter. As with everyone, he was made for a purpose.
Then came that odd moment of pity he felt when he thought of all the worlds they had encountered where life was random and finding one’s purpose was a flailing in the dark. It had taken some doing but every race they had come in contact with had been given the joy of predetermination. No one had to wonder if they were in the right place. No one had to get up in the morning and dread the day ahead of them. He couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to hang on to such a miserable existence.
With that thought, his work was done. All fractures were repaired and the engine was ready to go.
“Done! Fire it up!” he shouted into his headset.
The engine came to life in a controlled explosion of energy and centrifugal motion. He laughed aloud as waves of joy washed over him.
They reached their goal a moment later, positioning themselves between their home and the star they were sent to investigate. He heard the lifepods ejecting and the subsequent evidence of their destruction. They weren’t making it very far at all. Though there was no sound in space, there was sound when debris from a destroyed pod hit the hull.
Jaller set the necessary traps and laid out various tools to give the targets a false sense of the tech they faced. Anyone analyzing the upcoming debris of the ship would assume their level of advancement was fairly low.
Heading to an escape pod, he paused briefly at a terminal to absorb more information that had been collected about this new race, focusing on propulsion and power sources. It became apparent that it would be a short fight and in the end, this race that called itself ‘humanity’ would be cured of the horrible disease ‘free will’.
As the pod shot out into space, he faced the star ahead and threw out his arms. He felt the pod tear apart and the burning heat of the explosion as it tore through his skin. Like his shipmates, Jaller concentrated on the facts of their targets, smiled deeply, and died, his essence and knowledge being caught in a stellar wind and carried along towards home.
by submission | Dec 7, 2008 | Story
Author : Tom Mazanec
Everybody needs a hobby. I am a collector.
I just made it to slide implant technology. I was in my nineties when nanojuve came out, over 100 when I got my Slide implant. What I do is, I buy a small piece of jewelry. Then I walk around downtown Cleveland, using the View option to study a random timeline as far up the 300 year Masterson asymptote as I can get (usually at least a quarter millennium). I look for an empty alley so no one will see me Slide. Of course if I just see charred rubble or something, I View a different timeline. When I get there, I hunt out a pawnshop and pawn the jewelry. Then I look for a bookstore. They are getting tough to find, with readers replacing books in most timelines within reach (and my reader is non-compatible), there are enough bibliophiles in a big city like Cleveland to make one or two flourish. Then I buy a reference almanac or other “guide to modern history” with the money from the pawnshop. Some timelines are using biometric money, but I can usually still do cash, even if it gets me funny looks. I then slide back home with the book and change. I put the change in the coin and currency folders in my closet and the book in my bookshelf.
At first Cleveland had various names (once it was called “Smithburg”), then soon it was called “Cleaveland”, after Moses Cleveland (I go to a Point of Divergence before we changed our name). Lately people have started noticing that I am a Slider…my accent is off, or some point of ignorance in conversation. They ask if I am a “Jumper” or some other such word for sideways in time traveler (never “Slider”…they are lucky enough never to have had that TV show). I know Masterson was a prodigy, but when it is time for telephones, you get telephones (Elisha Gray submitted his patent the same day Alexander Graham Bell did). Before they just thought I was a foreigner.
I have learned a huge amount of history. For example, I have yet to find a timeline where nuclear weapons were never used in anger, or one where a man landed on the moon before we did (and usually well after). My first book was from a timeline with a French Louisiana bisecting the United States, my newest is from a timeline where a Mormon nation called Deseret fills the Great Basin.
It’s been fun. Everyone needs a hobby. I am a collector.
by submission | Dec 6, 2008 | Story
Author : Renee Leyburn
I dream things before they happen to me. I dreamed the day I will die. From what I hear tell, the foresight is a side effect of the genetic selection and enhancement process that was used when my parents decided to have a child. I don’t know all the delicate ins and outs, all I know is that I’m not allowed in casinos, that I have to wear a special armband everywhere I go so that I can be identified, and that I’m viciously aware of how I will meet my demise.
So much for luck. So much for “you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.”
Some people call this thing a gift. I call it a disease. When I was a boy I thought that I was normal. I thought that everybody was like me. When I hit puberty and the dreams started coming more often, began to be more far-reaching, people started to treat me differently. The future is inescapable and people don’t want to hear about the bad things that are going to happen to them. They want to go on with their lives, dumbly unaware, pretending like they are happy.
There aren’t that many more like me, but there are enough that lately there’s been quite a lot of talk about the need to fix the “flaw” in the genetic enhancement process that created us. They don’t want types like me to get too common. Never mind that the exact same process created them and it’s just a fluke that their futures assault me in my sleep instead of the other way around. Never mind that I never asked for this. Never mind that their future is already what it is, whether they hear about it from someone or not.
Never mind that most of the things I see are not even supposed to be about anybody else. They’re just about me. It’s all about me. It’s all about how my life will go, no matter what I do. It’s all about how this is out of my hands. Last night it was all about how in a moment five hooded men are going to break down the door to my apartment and purge the world of whatever influence they think I have. So much for luck. So much for the gift.
So much for the good of humanity.
by submission | Dec 5, 2008 | Story
Author : Rob Burton
Pour. Spit. Ram. Withdraw. Prime. Cock.
I had really hoped people were better than this.
Aim. Fire.
It’s just a game.
I heard somewhere once that the military used to recruit gamers to be snipers. They’d voluntarily honed their skills since childhood, and could be calm and dispassionate under fire. I can believe that. My hands move fluidly now, too quick to worry about the heat as the drill marches through my head. The words are voiced by some archetypal sergeant. I can almost see the moustache.
Aim. Fire.
The man falls down, an entry wound in his hip like a juicy red apple.
I was a human rights lawyer. I knew the terrible things people were capable of. I just didn’t think it was our natural state. I didn’t want Hobbes to be right. Yet here I am, at a castle gate, making everyone’s life nasty, brutish and short.
Aim. Fire.
When it all switched off we were bemused. Then there was looting, rioting, arson, rape. Blood like the pavements had just rusted. The guns showed themselves for a few days, before the ammunition ran out. I think that killed nearly as many as the knives.
Aim. Fire. His arm still grips the ladder when it falls.
I quickly realised, hiding with the weeping weak, that the simple provision of high walls was enough to keep us alive whilst the world went mad. It’s always the young men. Even before the collapse, as a man you were more likely to die between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five than any other ten-year period of your life.
Aim. Fire. Missed.
So, for all our advances, and all the many places in this great city, we ended up here. The terrible truth is that medieval stuff just works. Forty of us here, access to the river, a safe place to store food, fuel and medicine. Also enough to make us a target. A young man tells me that he thinks the earth’s magnetic field flipped. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it was a computer virus, or nanobots. It doesn’t matter.
Aim. Fire.
Of course, it was a museum, full of things we’d thought we were done with. One of the old men from the home was a chemist. I don’t know how he made this powder, but it was worth every moment of those terrifying midnight scavenging runs. I was nervous when we first fired the musket, shocked when I found out I was the best shot. It turns out that shooting grouse with my grandfather and playing countless hours of ‘longshot’ wasn’t such a waste of time after all.
Aim. Fire. A head pops. It’s just a game.
Except that it isn’t. Maybe it’ll calm down, after some time. Maybe it’s fatty food and television deprivation, or the closing of the world down from global feeds to your field of vision, or worse, some horrible echo of expected behaviour, reinforced by countless films and stories, the same cultural hangover that helps me do this. The longer this lasts, though, this daily grind, the more I doubt it. The more this seems like our natural state.
Pour. Spit. Ram. Prime. Cock. Aim. Fire.
And there goes the ramrod. It didn’t even hit anyone.
So now we die.
A young mother dashes up to me. She’s brandishing a spare ramrod, a prize from another exhibit. With sudden clarity, I wish that she hadn’t found it. Will it be the same tomorrow, as it was yesterday? Can I face it?
Pour. Spit. Ram. Withdraw. Prime. Cock. Aim. Fire.
by submission | Dec 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
He became part of the Grand Flyby Mission midway through the third decade of his life, as a junior designer on the Flight Data Subsystem team.
He found himself at the leading edge of spacecraft design, and worked with the members of his team to build a robust device capable of data-handling functions for a long-term project.
He went to the Cape for the liftoff, was amazed to see the spacecraft climb on a column of flame. He met a girl on a Florida beach, and a year later married her.
The next years were heady times, as the spacecraft arrowed its way to the outer planets: Jupiter and her moons were imaged, and Saturn and her rings fell to the instruments aboard the spacecraft. He lived as fast as the data coming in, speeding the crowding freeways of LA in his sports car and drinking more than usual. He had an affair, which his wife did not discover.
The spacecraft’s mission was extended, and he found himself no longer a junior engineer but in charge of a team. The FDS was his baby, he the hands-down expert. The spacecraft was the first to perform a flyby of Uranus, and the first to photograph Neptune.
In the fifth decade of his life, he found himself settling down. His fast car had long ago been traded for a family-style sedan. He spent hours at work designing methods for upgrading the spacecraft, and when he and his team succeeded the job of the spacecraft changed again, to a long-duration interstellar mission. His wife learned of his dalliance a decade earlier and, bored and facing an empty nest, divorced him.
Some of the instruments on the spacecraft —those with no use in the sparser stretches of the solar system— were shut down, and though the incoming data never ceased it did slow. He found his staff reduced, which was expected. He found his life had settled into a slow rhythm —collecting data from the far-off spacecraft, sending updates across the expanse, sleeping and eating.
One year after the spacecraft crossed the termination shock —the inexorable slowing of the solar wind— he suffered a heart attack. He took time off but kept charge of his small team. With doctors orders he was back on the job, but charged with shutting down two more of the spacecraft’s systems. Three years later he retired.
He kept a firm hand on the spacecraft’s systems as a part-time consultant. With only two instruments still collecting data, the mission had collapsed to a terminal phase. They held a party when the spacecraft entered heliopause, and it reminded him of the good old days, when the spacecraft was running fast through the outer planets and the data stream held discovery after discovery. Now past the edge of the solar system, the spacecraft would coast quietly forever.
It became apparent to him that he and the spacecraft had led parallel lives, from a fast and fiery launch to a slow cold end.
Late in his eighth decade he found that his time in the sun had created a defect in his skin which, in the darkness and solitude of his late age, would probably end his life. So, too, the spacecraft: its time in the sun had ended, the reactors that powered it all but discharged. But it sped on, and so might he.
The rapid telemetry of his heart would slow, the data stream of his brain would trickle to a stop —but he knew, somehow, that he and the spacecraft would ride together, into the light of lesser suns.
