by submission | Jun 18, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Not long after a distant star suddenly brightened a thousand-fold and gamma rays gobsmacked life on earth, a prairie dog emerged from its burrow in a deep narrow canyon in what was once southern Utah.
Ever wary of predators, it fed quickly and returned to its burrow unable to remark on the extreme quiet and supreme stillness of its surroundings. After many days of this, the prairie dog began to range farther and farther from its burrow. It skirted many carcasses, some limbless, some with wings, some with four legs and some with two.
It fed well and became less wary of predators. More and more often at the height of day, it hunched on a high ridge and watched the horizon for hours. It was still unable to remark on the extreme quiet and supreme stillness of its surroundings, but the prairie dog returned less and less to its burrow deep in the narrow canyon.
A day came when the prairie dog set out. Sudden storms interrupted the extreme quiet and supreme stillness of its days and nights, but forage was plentiful, predators were absent, and the prairie dog was compelled by a something. A something new.
On the very periphery of awareness probing to find a foothold in the prairie dog’s nature, it could almost be called a question. The prairie dog felt it as a restless push enticing it across what was once southern Utah to what was once southern Nevada.
At a place that was flat and hard with many unfamiliar things and many dusty carcasses, the prairie dog sensed what might be an answer to the extreme quiet and supreme stillness.
A something. A something new.
A call. And now a response.
Deep below, a gamma ray gobsmacked sleeper had awakened and was ready for all takers. As in every cosmos, life in its rarest and most lasting forms is patient.
Next to what was once a signpost that read Homey Airport, the prairie dog began to dig for its answer. Something anew.
by submission | Jun 17, 2022 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“I’m thrilled to share our Mars challenge solution.” A bespectacled 30-year-old twittered before the tech wizard’s Spartan Texas office.
“Sure…thrilled…sit. Skip the small talk. Make your elevator pitch—five minutes.” The ruffled-haired billionaire entrepreneur seemed agitated at the Millennials’ amateurish prattle.
“You know oxygen is critical for Mars projects. My team developed an elegant innovation, although somewhat costly to implement.” Michael Partridge cleared his throat while adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses.
“Always are—these phantom ideas,” the CEO replied. “Forget potentials. Does it work? Where’s your proof of operation?”
“Pilot tests were concluded during Death Valley summers and winters in the Rockies. During daylight, our system continuously converted carbon dioxide into oxygen, which was then compressed and stored through our exclusive design.”
“Who was the testing oversight authority with knowhow? Stanford or JPL?
“NIST in Colorado monitored the Rockies. Caltech evaluated the Mojave. Here are our results.” He opened his leather satchel, removing a thick prospectus.
“No, I don’t need to see that. Williams recommended you already for this meeting, but I’ve heard schemes before. What makes yours better than dozens I’ve nixed? Shame you didn’t have Stanford involved.”
Partridge pulled back his folder. “Our investor collaboration included the Naval Research Laboratory and NASA. That’s where Williams discovered us. We initially worked on the Moon base plan, but it proved implausible. However, with Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere, we now have a winner…but at a price.”
“Williams said you used unusual material applications and techniques. Summarize.”
The CEO stared across the desk, making Partridge hesitate.
“I have restrictions, as COO, to discuss specific proprietary information. However, I can say our dome construction involves Fresnel heating lenses activating microscopic gold filaments that stay suspended in carbon dioxide gas. We use a charged ceramic membrane to separate molecular oxygen into our patented collecting system.”
“Maybe, but you know the temperature gradients on Mars. What materials are going to keep your dome resistant and still operational?”
“We have a new application using Nitinol nanofibers combined with graphene in dome construction elements and extraction support equipment.”
“And the carbon waste dust?”
“We’ve designed collection systems capturing pure carbon residues for use later as part of water treatment for crew enclosures.”
“It’s still a waste product.”
“Not exactly. Based on the chemicals the carbon filters from recycled liquids, including Mars brine water, we discovered that mixing the final carbon sludge with biowaste enhanced plant growth. We ran initial tests at Texas A&M. Potatoes flourished with that mixture. It’s a win-win for survivability.”
“What’s the power source for separation?”
“As long as the sun shines on Mars, the domes make oxygen. The upper half of a dome holds Fresnel lenses for activating microscopic gold foil which then reacts with carbon dioxide, leaving behind oxygen and carbon, but not melting or overheating the Nitinol and graphene materials.”
“Yes, you mentioned all that already, but you have my attention. Nitinol and graphene aren’t cheap, but I suspect gold is the price point.”
“To supply a one-hundred-person team the project requires a metric ton of microscopic gold particles. That’s within the maximum payload range of your transport designs; however, acquiring that much gold is a difficult issue beyond the technology, by both cost and politics.”
“My original homeland’s government is corrupt. They’re sitting on all the gold we’ll need. I can get it…so let’s first test this fairy dust invention here on Texas soil with limited resource impacts, in case it fails.”
“Terrific—Operation Tinker Bell.”
“Don’t ever do that. I get to name stuff.”
“Sure…sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“You’ve done enough thinking. I’ll do the rest.”
by submission | Jun 16, 2022 | Story |
Author: Samuel Edney
He’d wandered too far. He’d wasn’t paying attention and had wandered too far and now it was darkening as the storm had descended upon them. Mother was going to shout at him. She was going to be so angry.
‘Darling, where are you?’
If he turned back now, maybe she wouldn’t be so mad but he couldn’t see the way back anymore, blotted out like the sun on the horizon. He called out but immediately clasped his mouth shut as the storm howled all around him and filled is mouth with sand. He tried to turn, to follow his footsteps back to Mother, but any trace of his journey to where he stood was erased now. His legs felt warm even through the fibres of his suit. He looked down to see his legs encased in the sand. She was going to be so disappointed in him. In his weakness.
‘Come back! Playtime is over now’
Shielding his eyes, he swore he saw the dunes move. Undulate. Melt.
Toward him.
He didn’t like it. It was too loud, the sand hurt his face as it cut his cheeks and now he didn’t care what Mother would say or what she would think of him. He called out to her but the noise! It was too much and the darkness closed in, the faint orange glow of the sun bouncing off of the sand’s surface shrinking away under the assault.
Something brushed past his feet.
‘If you don’t come back now I am leaving without you!’
He howled as a sharp pain struck up his leg. He heaved it free, blood pouring freely from two deep bite marks, ripped deep through the synthetic fabric of the trouser leg. Spittle dripped through his gritted teeth as he planted the leg back in the sand, then freed the other, hands hooked under the knee, dragging it forward.
A spit of orange fire in the storm as Mother fired up her engines.
‘Fine! Have it your way!’
One step. Two. Over and over. His head throbbed, his ears boomed, his legs screamed in pain and spewed blood from so, so many punctures and he lost his balance in the pitch blackness, fell forward, arms lost to the sand, dragged under by whatever it was under there that was tearing through his suit and feeding on his flesh in the midnight.
The puncture of dripping orange just beyond the rolling dunes popped to a blue. The roar of Mother’s engines punched through the rushing wind as she lifted up, up, further and further into the darkness and away.
Sand filled his throat as he screamed and screamed for her to come back and then his throat was nothing but sand and all he could think about was how much he let Mother down as he was shredded into a thousand pieces and pulled down into suffocating oblivion.
by submission | Jun 15, 2022 | Story |
Author: D. I. Dean
Room 2248 was quiet, save for the distant hum of the starship engines. She held Sarai’s good fingers in her hand, unsure if he even knew that she was there, but this was the least she could do; take up space next to him, watching the stuttering rise and fall of his chest.
She found the fingers of her free hand running along the warm glass of the bedside table. The sensation was a welcomed distraction. It was almost soothing, the way that the tips of her fingers prickled and cooled as she pulled – because it felt like she was pulling – frost to the glass beneath her palms. It traced where her fingers went along the surface, leaving intricate crystalline patterns behind.
She hadn’t told anyone about it yet. She wanted to know more about what this was before that, though she knew The Sodality would find out eventually. Their sigil branded everything in the room; the light-barrier entrance, the viewport window, the slowing heart rate monitor…
She cooled the glass again. It was cold where she had touched it, sure, but she didn’t feel cold. Her fingers felt frosty but not frost-bitten. Not like Sarai’s. She held the frost longer. She held it until her hand cramped and ached, and her fingers burned. No matter what she felt, her skin never turned purple. If she took her focus from the frost, then she knew her hand would feel normal again too.
She didn’t want this. She would give it up in a heartbeat if it meant saving Sarai. Maybe there was time. She could go to the Ministry of Science. They could study it, figure out something, and then- and then what? The heat of the room sent sweat rolling down her back and did nothing to stop the purple blisters creeping over Sarai’s chest. If she went to The Ministry’s marble chambers, part of her knew that she would never leave. And Sarai would still be dead by morning.
Despite the machines around them, the room remained eerily quiet. She looked at the monitors just to make sure they were still working. Lines and numbers that she didn’t understand still appeared on the screen, however useless they might be. Not just the machines, no, she was useless too. If such a strange ability were to show up in her life now, then why couldn’t it be useful? Healing?
Why couldn’t whatever was taking Sarai take her too? Maybe it would. After cold blisters started forming along the first doctor’s arms, the rest of them refused to even step foot in the room. It had spread quickly, but they took oaths of discovery, didn’t they? How could they cower floors away when Sarai needed them here?
Nothing covered her arms, save for cracks from the dry heat. Maybe there was a delay for her. Maybe that would be for the better. Her throat tightened. He wouldn’t want this for her. She doubted that he would wish it on anyone. She played with the frost on the tabletop again/ She could be here with Sarai when everyone else feared trying. She wanted him back, moons she wanted him back, but if that wasn’t possible then she was going to be here beside him. She would pretend to know how he felt.
by Hari Navarro | Jun 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The porcelain pilot hovers just beneath the artificial swell of the valley lip. Once long ago a dam though now, after the water has long since fled, it is but a hill covered in lush deep grass and bluish grey flowers with petals that purr at the sun.
“It’s time…”
The days light has folded neatly beneath the horizon and the pilot can all but smell the rich stews being ladled onto famished plates and see the smiles as armour-plated bread struggles and then gives way between cracked dirt riven thumbs.
They’ll be tired. Their guards will be sagging. These whom turn soil that is not their own. They’ll be drinking. The grapes will be massaging the insides of muscle, and eyes will be shining and lids drooping.
Beneath thatched roofs long, tables accommodate ever-multiplying issue. Grubby urchins that will one day too rise to further dilute and molest my sacred home.
The village projects as a simple schematic onto a visor already fogging with the pilot’s ramping breath.
“Home…”
The settlement has but one road and it curves in from the left before cleaving down through the homesteads and then abruptly wearing off to the right. Targeted structures are represented with blue squares and names overlay each to designate ownership.
Bielawski
Bielawska
PIERZECKI
Bielawski — Barn
PIERZECKA
PIERZECKI
PIERZECKI — Barn
RABOWICZ
BORON
BULLFINCH
BULLFINCH
CHALY
“… ownership.”
The pilot’s teeth grit and ever so slightly chip and she runs ever-long porcelain fingers that are just as delicate as they sound across the under-glaze that covers her body entire. Dipped as a child into a holy greyish-blue tint of her grandmother’s making until all that remained of her pearlescent self was the round of her face.
She traces the bright red rose that blooms between her breasts and the thorn stems that connect to the white petals that adorn her shoulders and arms.
‘North designated division proceed and cleanse at will. South designation seal and eliminate any and all of the detritus rats that shear from this most glorious action.’
Amassing dots surge onto her monitors and she manages a smile as her creations relay the very first screams of the attack. She imagines the re-purposed sickles and pitchforks and hammers that extend from their wrists suckling on blood and spent bone.
“Cut down by the same tools you use to foul my land… war can be such perfect poetry.”
Tools to rip and gouge and the liquid flames that bubble and drip from lips to bawl fury upon the hacked and render all of their hovels to cinder.
Blinking surnames stratify into sub-branches that show each and every family member. As eliminated the names transition to red. Her intelligence has been oh, so precisely thorough.
“Interesting! Appears they’re destroying the children first. Why? I never programmed for this. Kill the children and the adults will remain and fight? Kill the adults and the children scatter as vermin. Such clever weapons you are… I have to see. Must bear witness”, she whispers pulling back on the controls and rising above the crest and at once marvelling at the pulsing beauty of the orange swath below.
The porcelain pilot moves her craft ever closer until she is directly above a very particular barn. She leans across the console and gazes down as her creations close in and herd a manically scampering form inside and out of her view.
“Bastards… I was watching that!”
The form’s blood-clotted screams relay and fill the cockpit and both it and the reflecting flames conspire to fill the pilot with another kind of heat. She shifts and adjusts the harness that rolls gripping at her thighs.
She thinks she may be more than a little sad as she remembers. Long wasted afternoons laying upon the straw-strewn floor now cooking beneath her. Days with nothing but her anxiety and the beautiful flowers beneath her lacquered skin for company and… another.
“Home… where I had a friend that looked just like me.”
Save the barn? No. Nothing good ever came from looking back. Cleanse and rebuild.
The porcelain pilot will never know why she fell. Why her perfect craft suddenly dropped without warning and crashed through and into the blazing barn of her youth. Maybe a long saved and carefully aimed bullet or maybe the gathering thick smoke choked her engines. Whatever the case, as she sits in the wreckage and as the heat enters the gaping jag hole where her shoulder once was, she screams.
A grotesque lost thing grins from the same straw-strewn floor upon which she would lose herself.
She is perhaps the exact same age. Severed clean in half with the soft furl of her tattooed belly rolled back to beneath her bare breasts as if perfectly laid back sheets.
She is smiling though she is not. It is but the fire’s glint on her teeth as now she is without any lips.
“Why did they leave you naked? Why did they defile us in such a way? I never programmed this. Such soul-less little weapons they are… But best that I die knowing full well who I am. To die old and broken and forgotten having only seen my deeds from the sky is such a hollow pointless pantomime. I regret nothing and I will use that lie as a balm as I blister and break and fall into the ash and my flowers bleach to nothing ”, said the porcelain pilot as she cracked and splintered in two.
by Julian Miles | Jun 13, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The planet Naduskar is a technological wonderland without visible natural surface, be it land or water. At some time in the distant past, an advanced race converted or covered every last piece of open ground.
There’s the mystery: is it nothing but a huge machine sitting upon the remains of the planet, or is it somehow a vast preserve, eternally maintaining an ideal environment for whatever dwells there?
I’m of the opinion they simply didn’t want anything interfering with their grand plan, and engineered accordingly.
“Go for entry.”
That’s Cheimo, over in Golden Hinde IV. He’s the instigator and leader of this venture, and to him the glory of taking the armoured bulk of his brainchild down to make planetfall.
His crew are so enthusiastic, verging on a devotion that makes my teeth ache. If they weren’t so nice, they’d be insufferable.
I reach out and touch Baylia on the shoulder.
“Follow them in as planned, but slow our descent to give them a thousand-kilometre lead.”
Hands flit across the control board, implementing my wishes.
It’s been a long trip from Earth 9. Two ships on a single mission, but of very different purpose. The Golden Hinde IV is designed to bludgeon through the debris rings about Naduskar, and whatever effect causes them. The Challenger XIX will be witness, following in its wake. Eventually it’ll act as space-side support, with the ultimate goal of becoming an orbital base.
My theories about Naduskar led to me being ridiculed, even after I accepted Cheimo’s open dare to join his expedition. Today, I’ll be eyewitness to being proven wrong, or I’ll be vindicated – and a hundred people will die.
“Hestor! You recording?”
“With everything we have, Cheimo. Whatever happens, it’ll be for posterity.”
“Still with the doubts, eh? Look at it! Those rings of debris are from a hitherto unencountered weaponization of Roche limits, I’m sure of it. The dynamic gravity field protecting this ship will obviate it.”
A concept so bizarre I still have trouble believing he won any support. That you can vary the gravitational effect of a celestial body so the tidal forces of that body will tear a chosen target apart isn’t theoretical, it’s fictional. Don’t even get me started on his ‘DGPF – dynamic gravity protection field’.
My postulation is that the creators of Naduskar equipped their world with something we need to observe before we seek to work round it. I said we should send a large, automated vessel instead. Nobody listened.
The Golden Hinde IV enters the outermost ring, impacts from debris sparking across its hull.
Ambu calls out: “Something’s happening. Multiple effects, multiple spectrums.”
I look across: “Their DGPF firing up?”
He shakes his head, then points to the monitor, eyes going wide. I spin to look.
The Golden Hinde IV is gone!
As I think it, debris spurts forth from a single point. Before our very eyes, Naduskar sprouts a new ring.
The replay is astonishing. The Golden Hinde IV collapses in upon itself until only a metre-wide black disc can be seen. That disc flashes white, debris shoots forth, then the disc vanishes.
The AI in our quantum computer considers the event for several minutes – a very long while in QAI subjective time – before advancing an initial hypothesis: a null-point wormhole. Both ends are mapped to the exact same place and moment. It collapses before anything can traverse the internal region: the debris being rejected, syncretised content.
My apologies, Cheimo. Compared to this, manipulating the Roche limits wasn’t such an outré idea, after all.
