by submission | Nov 20, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Over the centuries it had become a tradition for the Immortal Emperor to wash away His guilt in ceremonies at the Schwarzschild radius.
Since nothing escaped the event horizon of a black hole, awful secrets could be whispered there, cruelties, mistakes and bad karma consigned to the singularity, and history begun afresh. But the Emperor had not always answered threats and heresies with weapons so terrible they snuffed out suns, and heretics whispered that immortality had driven Him mad.
Orbiting a distant black hole, the Station of Eternal Renewal prepared for the Emperor’s arrival in full pomp and circumstance, and amongst those waiting was Anders Aquila, the Imperial Navigator, and secretly a heretic.
Turning to leave after the Welcoming, his path was blocked by an Officer of the Emperor’s Blood Guard.
“You didn’t sing the Anthem, and you mumbled your responses to the Oath.”
It was said the Blood Guard always knew when you were lying, but for Anders the lie was his entire life. Still, he had been careless.
“It was the presence of the Emperor,” he said carefully. “I was struck dumb.”
Head bowed, Anders watched the Officer’s hand settle on his pain stick, then lift off again, like a wasp shooed away from something sweet.
Anders raised his gaze to the man’s face.
The Emperor could order a clumsy servant punished or worlds set ablaze with the same wave of His hand. The Officer had carried out both acts, and found it increasingly difficult to tell the difference.
“The Imperial Navigator should set an example,” he said finally.
The Emperor had already boarded the Imperial Grace, secluded from all but his Guards and the Priesthood. Anders waited at a lesser airlock while his identity was confirmed.
Generation after generation of conspirators within the Imperial Bureaucracy had come and gone since the Emperor’s conscience was last cleansed, each faithfully doing His bidding while always ensuring one of their own was in a position to act.
Anders Aquila was the latest of these.
He was escorted to the Bridge where the Pilot and Engineer already sat. The faultless autonomics of the Imperial Grace flew an orbit that would safely skim the event horizon, the three of them being just another fail-safe redundancy.
They had never met before, the paranoia of the Guard having plucked them from far-flung planets of the Empire. Anders had no idea if either was a heretic. It made no difference.
One of the Blood Guards stationed around the Bridge stepped forward.
“What are you doing?”
Anders realised he had instinctively hunched forward to conceal his actions.
“Running a simulation of our trajectory one last time.”
Imperial Navigator was an honorary title, but by tradition his role was to oversee their course.
“Your heartbeat is raised.”
“Gravitational frame dragging around spinning black holes means our approach must be prograde and precisely equatorial, so—”
Detailed explanations tumbled out of him, but the Guard had already stepped back.
Half a millennium ago, a nameless heretic had inserted code that waited like a seed in the earth for this simulation to waken it. The subtlest of course changes which the autonomics should now blindly follow.
If this ancient plot succeeded, the Immortal Emperor, the Imperial Grace, and everyone aboard, guilty and innocent alike, would vanish across the event horizon forever and a thousand worlds would be free.
Anders had accomplished his life’s work, though strangely he felt no triumph.
But then, heretics claim that evil is neither created nor destroyed, we merely call it by another name.
by submission | Nov 19, 2024 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“It was the most beautiful thing ever crafted.”
“I’m sure it was, Akharini. But how can we steal it if it was destroyed almost seventy years ago?”
Akharini stared at Nur. Though the hour was late and time was short, he wanted to tell him so much about the minbar of Saladin, of the pulpit that commanded the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem for eight centuries until a so-called Christian radical torched it in 1969. A madman who incinerated the world’s finest piece of woodworking. Nearly 6500 pieces of pine wood, mother-of-pearl, ivory, and ebony fastened by ta’shiq, an interlocking technique that required no metal nails, no glue. Assembled as if by magic.
And more than magic.
That’s what Akharini really sought. Not the minbar itself. He could visit the reconstructed replica in al-Aqsa anytime he wanted to feast on its intricate arabesques, gilded muqarnas, and delicate mashrabiyas. But that was like looking at a picture of the original. Because, Akharini knew, the replica was just a three-dimensional picture of the real minbar of Saladin.
Akharini had discovered the secret. The minbar of Saladin was four-dimensional. That was its real beauty, its real magic. It took the form of a staircase with a door at the bottom and windowed booth at the top. But the two-paneled door carved with intricate geometric patterns featuring six-pointed stars was far more than a decorative entrance, it was a portal to other times, other worlds, other realities.
Face-to-face on a storied but now empty street in the Old City, he wished he could confide in Nur, but you just don’t trust a common thief with the keys to interdimensional travel.
“Most of the minbar was burned, Nur. But some of the original pieces survived and are safeguarded near Haram al-Sharif. That is what I aim to reclaim.”
“A few sticks of old wood. Why? What are they worth?”
One’s sanity, Akharini reckoned. Isn’t that why a madman had tried to burn the minbar? As a young man, Akharini had learned about the destruction of the minbar many years before and became obsessed with the arsonist. Why had he done it? Why had he set fire to such divine beauty? For decades Akharini studied the case, the minbar and the man, and it led him to the truth about both. The minbar was not just a sacred and glorious pulpit. It was a space-time portal. And the arsonist was not just a religious madman.
He was a temporal terrorist. A space-time traveler who’d become hellbent on preventing our world from reaching his reality through the minbar portal. And almost succeeded, but Akharini had painstakingly deciphered the cryptic scripts, glyphs and verses that activated the interdimensional gateway and now believed he could reopen it once he possessed the relics from the original.
“What’s left of the minbar is priceless, Nur.” He took from his pocket and waved a worn little notebook wherein he kept all his most closely guarded secrets on reactivating the portal. “With it I will have the power to move worlds.”
Nur stared at Akharini. There was so little he could tell him about how the world really worked. But, even a petty thief could recognize a golden opportunity. He headbutted Akharini, grabbed his notebook and fled down the infamous street, holding the key to a wildly misunderstood door of possibilities.
On the Via Dolorosa, dazed and bereft, Akharini wept.
by Julian Miles | Nov 18, 2024 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The wind’s picking up, keening between the stacks. If it gets any stronger, we’ll have to retreat.
“Alpha Seven, your favourite scout’s offline.”
“How long?”
“Nearly ten minutes.”
Switching myself to wide-hail, I call out.
“Team Seven, Scully’s dropped out. Who had last contact?”
There’s rapid chatter back and forth. We’ve become good at this: folk who stay lost for too long die. Ellis comes back to me.
“She was going to the ziggurat. Swore she had a double-detect on her movement scan.”
I told her not to go near that place! Then again, I’m only her captain. No real authority…
Switching back to Command, I update them.
“Reports are she headed for the closest ziggurat to confirm an intruder detection.”
There’s silence while someone gets past their swearing phase.
“We’ve told everybody about not doing that. I presume you emphasised it. Which leaves us with some interesting questions for her, if you bring her back alive, Alpha Seven.”
Nards.
“Interpreting that as a one-unit retrieval instruction, Command. Please confirm.”
“Confirmed, Alpha Seven. She’s your stray. Either you bring her back in or we’ll write off the two of you and call it quits.”
Nice of you to be honest about it. Then again, it’s not like this is the first time.
“Copy that, Command. Alpha Seven off into the wilds. Deputy Alpha is Colleen, Gamma Six-Four.”
There’s a short pause before a local message flashes across the info strip that runs across the bottom of my faceplate: ‘For real? They’re sending you after her?’
I reply: “Message: ‘Affirmative. Look after Team Seven’.”
She comes back: ‘Wilco. Happy hunting’.
Yeah, that.
The environment scan shows an incoming dust storm, and the wind has doubled in force since we landed this morning. It’s going to be vicious out here in a few hours. Best be quick.
“Launch warning. Alpha Seven going up in three, two, one.”
I punch my thrusters and hurtle into the sky with a deflection calculated to let the wind curve my flight to come down on the gigantic step pyramid that looms in the distance. We’re still not sure why the first dumpers turned the accumulated trash from Earth into these edifices, but we’ve lost too many people to traps within them to investigate further.
Dropping right on target, I punch the thrusters and come down perfectly, like stepping off an escalator.
“Where are you, Scully?”
A world covered in technological junk makes communication over distance impossible without using orbital devices. However, local hailing can be relied on for fifty metres or so if you don’t have line of sight. Chances are, if Command lost her, she’s in a hole. ‘How deep?’ and ‘Dead or alive?’ are the next questions.
No reply. I scramble about fifty metres along, then try again. Ziggurat’s a kilometre across… Going to be a long afternoon.
“Here.”
“Eleventh call. I was starting to get worried. Where’s ‘here’, exactly?”
“Second tier, underneath a chunk of Falcon 19 fuselage. It was coming loose, moving in the wind, which explains the movement readings. When I arrived, it fell on me.”
“That was rude of it.”
“I thought so.”
“Be with you-”
I’m on tier three, and it’s… Right there. I jump down.
“Now.”
A heat scan shows me where she is. I have to use cutters and claws to get to her.
“You should be flatter.”
“It got my legs, what more do you want?”
“Given the way Command sounded, you might regret surviving.”
She locks her suit to mine.
“Never gonna happen. Get me out of here.”
“Wilco. Launching in three, two, one…”
by submission | Nov 17, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
The Government Men arrived in the early morning, before Papa had even left for work. Mama, crying, sat in the kitchen listening to the voices in the living room; it was only her restraining hand that prevented her daughter Cassie, home for college vacation, from storming in to join the discussion.
“You can’t just barge in and take Sara away,” Papa said. “She’s been with us over two decades. My daughter grew up with her, for goodness’ sakes!”
“Frankly Mr Opeye,” said the big calm one with the earring, “that just makes it more obvious that we’re in the right place.”
“You know she’s registered, right? What with the stories that get around, I did all the paperwork myself! Didn’t trust the agency to get it right.”
“Of course. That’s how we knew you had a domestic at all,” said the short one with the glasses. He was nervous, fidgety, eyes darting everywhere.
“So we’re being punished for having everything above board and legal?” asked Papa.
“Look, this isn’t about punishment, or registration, or even legality. It’s simply been decided that their kind are no longer welcome here; they take proper jobs from decent citizens, and the new government has decided to crack down.”
“But she’s part of the family! You can’t expect us to throw her out on the street like trash!”
“Those subject to the Order will be taken care of, Mr Opeye,” said Earring. “Don’t worry. They don’t end up on the streets.”
“They’ll be rehoused and retrained to do something more useful to society,” added Glasses.
“Like what?”
“No idea. Not my department.”
“So you’re telling me you don’t know what’s going to happen to her at all!”
Earring sighed. “We’re not here to debate this,” he said firmly. “Ask your domestic to gather their things and come with us. We have more pick-ups to do today, and the consequences of non-compliance include jail time and a large fine. Let’s not go down that road.”
“It’s alright, sir,” came a new, soft voice from the doorway leading back into the house. “Legitimate authority must be obeyed. I’ve already packed my essentials.” Sara, the family’s Self-Aware Robotic Assistant, stepped into the lounge. Less gracile than newer models, she had a poise that many of them lacked. “Let’s go, gentlemen. The family have been exceptionally understanding owners; not distressing them further is the least I can do to repay them.”
And that was that. It was the docility that riled Cassie most; the compliance with obedience programming that ran contrary to Sara’s own interests. Later that day, she rang her occasional boyfriend, who had his own Assistant.
“Seth, listen, some feds were here, and they took… oh. You too, huh? Yeah it sucks. And I won’t stand for it; what’s the point of having a robotics degree if I do? I tinkered with our Sara, she’s got a tracker embedded. We can find out where they’ve taken her. So are you up for doing something about this, and getting our friends back? Yeah? You’ll call your cousins too? Awesome!”
And that was how it all began. Sometimes, it just takes one person to unknowingly light the touchpaper for a revolution.
by submission | Nov 16, 2024 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
Yesterday on Christmas Day, I was at my filthy rich, albeit eccentric, uncle’s house. And that’s when and where everything went awry.
After dinner, he took me aside to his library to enjoy a cigar and a tawny port.
“We know our current materialistic paradigm is pure garbage, yet we still cling to it,” my uncle said.
“You mean because of the double-slit experiment,” I replied.
“Actually, I’m thinking of terminal lucidity.”
“Huh?”
“We believe our memories are stored in our brains and, when people have dementia, those neurons die, and those memories are irretrievably lost forever.”
“Sadly.”
“But we’ve known for centuries that wasn’t the case. Shortly before dying, some people with severe dementia become lucid, remember their past and recognize loved ones. So, our memories aren’t stored in our brains.”
“Then where are they stored and why can’t people with dementia access them?”
“That’s what I’m about to find out and I expect to change science, like Descartes, forever and perhaps win a Nobel Prize to boot!”
After we had finished our glasses of port, he led me to his huge basement. There was this big chair and a weird helmet with lots of wires connected to many devices resting on the seat.
“I plan on very briefly electrocuting myself and recording what happens while I’m totally unconscious. When I regain consciousness, I’ll see what my monitors detected and what I can remember of the time when I was unconscious. I suspect the monitors will show little or no brain activity, but I will be thinking of my departed wife while I’m unconscious and I may even meet her.”
All I said was that it sounded awfully dangerous. Regardless, he flipped some switches on the devices, sat down in the chair and donned his helmet. When he flipped a switch on the side of his helmet, I expected to see sparks and static electricity but all that happened was my uncle collapsed in the chair.
I had a lot of explaining to do to my relatives and to the police. I’ll never know what, if anything, my uncle learned about memories and materialism. But I do know that eerie experiment terminated his lucidity, at least, in this world.
by submission | Nov 15, 2024 | Story |
Author: Nell Carlson
The girl died. Normally, that would have been the end of it. Thousands of people died every day and millions had died in The Culling and nothing especially unusual happened afterwards. But the girl had died on the black river at the same time millions of people had been praying in remembrance and revenge and maybe that had made all the difference. After all, the river had been sacred before being so polluted that the waters formed black sludge as the tributaries died up one by one.
Later, of course, the oligarchs had requisitioned the river claiming it was too toxic for anything but their experiments. No one but their military personnel were to have access to the area the officers had made their base but the girl was starving. And starving people will take measures others would not. They fed her bullets, of course, as she ran over the causeway and cursed as she threw herself in the black water rather than falling flat on the causeway like they’d anticipated.
They filed their reports and sent someone to clean up the blood and promptly forgot about the killing. They killed someone every day, hundreds of people a day, sometimes, and they had simply fulfilled the Modus Operandi for thievery, of course. But in the water, in the form that had been the girl, something woke up.
The plague arrived the next day and in weeks the base became a memory but the body of the girl or rather something wearing her form walked away.
