by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 10, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
When you’re hurtling through space, distance and time become distorted.
Celestial bodies appear, and disappear, sometimes in the blink of an eye, the instrumentation the only proof they existed. Sometimes they seem to drift past over the course of several days, or weeks.
If not for the sensors, and the computer doing the math, it would be impossible to know exactly how far, or how close these dangers really were.
There’s nobody here to look now, to stare into the void with me. There’s nothing to see from here anyway, nobody’s missing anything.
In the cafeteria, if you’d lived here as long as I have, you would recognize the evidence of Petra and Olaf having had breakfast together, as their meal trays are where they left them on the table. Again. You would also know that Scott hadn’t made it to the cafeteria today, because those meal trays hadn’t been cleaned up, accompanied by the racket of his loud and incessant fussing.
The command module is similarly devoid of life, and one might confuse the mess as evidence of a struggle, but honestly, the Captain and his First Officer had devolved from their ‘everything by the book’ lifestyle to being little better than slobs over the last year. Had it been a year? More than a year? Time, right?
In the crew quarters, what was once pristinely organized now looks like a bomb went off in it, clothing and vac suit components strewn on the benches, bunks, and floor. Weapons, once neatly stored in locked compartments in the event of a landing, or intercept with a hostile foreign vessel, now lie scattered and abandoned in the hallways.
That sound is the nightfall warning. In thirty minutes the ship will gradually dim all but the essential lighting to simulate night. It’s one of the systematic mechanisms designed to enforce a regular schedule in a vacuum with no sun, no natural day or night. Structure. Familiarity. Routine. All very important on these long haul missions.
I remember stories of the land of the midnight sun, in the North on Earth where the sun was visible in the sky for months without setting. I remember how some people struggled if their days went unbroken by real night for too long.
I remember Earth too. Seems like a lifetime ago.
Through the viewport at the rear of the ship, I can no longer make out the remains of the crew. They may be out there, just beyond the limits of my vision. I can still hear them, I think. I can’t get their voices out of my head. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that they were here, but when you’re hurtling through space… Distance and time, did we talk about this already?
It doesn’t matter.
It’s going to get dark soon.
Will you stay with me?
Otherwise, when they turn out the lights, there won’t be anything left between myself, and me.
by submission | Feb 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
I was an orphan, never adopted, perhaps because I wasn’t ever cute or special in any way. But, when I was nineteen, I was fortunate enough to become a live-in housekeeper to Professor David Knežević. He was a polymath, most renowned for the Knežević equation.
That was over ten years ago. Martha, his wife, had died six years before I arrived and I knew he was still haunted by her death. When someone mentioned her, a cloud descended over his normally calm facial expression. Regardless, my main job was to never ever erase his blackboard.
I called him Uncle Dave and he never objected. He was the closest thing I ever had to family. A year before he passed away, he had confided in me that, since he was getting up there in years, he wanted to keep a promise made to his wife that they’d be reunited after he died.
He told me, “The lack of everything, namely, nothing, can’t produce something yet things do exist. But if there was always something in time then getting to yesterday would take forever. There could never be today.
Hence, there has to be something eternal, without beginning or end, outside of time that’s responsible for something existing in time. And the language of that creative principle is mathematics.
But, to unlock the secrets of the transcendental formula, you have to know the quotient of the highest number divided by the smallest number greater than zero. In other words, what infinity divided by infinitesimal equals.”
Less than a month before my uncle passed away, I walked into his study when he was scribbling on his blackboard. As he continued writing, he told me, “The original copy of the transcendental formula subsists in the noosphere. It’s accessible to the demiurge who inserts various values for different variables into the formula in order to create numerous alternative realities. Unlike the creative principle outside time, the demiurge is a personal god within time who makes the amorphous primary something into specific things in many distinct worlds.”
Then he replaced a symbol with Ω in a certain bracketed section of the transcendental formula on his blackboard and some of the chalk transformed into the English words, “What do you want?”
My uncle could see the horror in my eyes and said, “Fear not. The demiurge means us no harm.”
He wrote on the blackboard, “To be reunited with my wife after I die.”
Whereupon what he had written was rearranged to read, “Only if you keep my secrets.”
He then ordered me to erase and clean his blackboard every day thereafter. And, after he passed away, I learned he left his house to me and realized he had destroyed all his mathematical papers before he died.
Even if I could have, though I surely couldn’t have, duplicated his feat, I wouldn’t have. I hope he’s somewhere nice with his beloved Martha but, personally, I prefer to have a more prosaic finale. I’m perfectly fine with ending up wherever the demiurge deems appropriate.
But, you see, I have no one waiting for me.
by Julian Miles | Feb 8, 2021 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
We spent a century looking for life on other worlds. Found some, too. Most of it wasn’t happy to meet us. Us being us, we got round that with our usual bonhomie and genocidal violence. Until we met the Pesserac. They kicked our murderous fleets clean out of space, and eradicated every colony we’d established through force. Then they politely informed us that peaceful colonisation was welcome, because we had a lot to offer. However, until we evidenced the ‘fundamental societal changes’ needed, we were also banned from participating in interstellar trading or receiving aid.
We were a pariah race. Despite the clear warnings, we often pushed our luck. They had clearly dealt with our kind before, and fallen foul of the lies told. We never had any survivors.
It took Earth a century to sort itself out. Afterwards, things generally went well when we ventured into space. Then the first ship with cordallium-windowed viewing galleries journeyed into the long night and humanity discovered a reason to behave, and to believe. For any to cause denial of access to this wonder swiftly became inconceivable.
“Ma’am. They’re here.”
Streamers of light twist past the gallery windows. Tourists crane their necks to try and see ahead. There’s some pushing and shoving.
“Stand easy, people. You’ll see them soon.”
As if on cue, a whirl of colours comes to a halt by the largest window. It presses close. People step back. They can’t help it. I couldn’t, and I’ve seen this countless times.
In proximity to the glass, the colours part to reveal the outline of a figure. Completely negative, no reflections, nothing. Just a rainbow aura about a darkness that comes in varying shapes.
“Marla.”
A man on my left sobs the name and collapses. Every time, with no exceptions, a revealed form will match someone’s recollection of a lost loved one. It works with animals, too. Not that all animals can express grief or distinguish individuals, but recognition behaviour, pack calls and the like have forced the acknowledgement of this phenomenon.
Another whirling form presses close. A shorter, more rounded figure. A family to my right clutch each other tighter and burst into tears together.
The eerie event continues. So many people come each time. Most don’t get the encounter they hope for. All of them see enough to be convinced.
These things are like dolphins, riding ahead of our ships, shedding ribbons of light. How long they’d done this before we could see outside bare-eyed, we don’t know. We can’t detect them in any other way than with human sight. Several scientists I know surmise it’s actually some interpretive quirk of the way our brains process light after it passes through cordallium crystal.
This new field of science is inconclusive and ongoing, but people don’t care. The entities, or effects, or whatever they actually are, have been named ‘Delphine’ in some strange hybridisation of religion and perceived characteristics.
A faster-spinning mass of light presses to the window near me. The outline of my sister quirks her head in the way she used to do. It straightens up and, just before it whirls away, I swear there’s a flash of light like the edge of a silver eyelid closing in a quick wink.
Every time I see, I’m sure it’s somehow learning from me how to represent her. My suspicions about that sort of behaviour have been dismissed so many times I’ve given up.
Much as I can’t stop myself visiting, I’m increasingly convinced we’re missing something. I’ve no idea what. But, in the moments before I sleep, it scares me.
by submission | Feb 7, 2021 | Story |
Author: JC Hammer
Everyone hears new and they think different or better. That’s not always true. Humans on Mars? Sure that’s new. There’s nothing different about us, though. Nothing better.
They didn’t exactly take the best of us with them. Sure, we’ve got a couple of scientists, a few doctors, but they’re all here to serve the greater purpose, the Cause. We think we’re so feckin’ righteous, with our plan to bring peace to the universe with buckets of bombs and a brigade of adolescent Marines. I don’t know if you’ve seen Marines at the bar or on shore leave, but there’s nothing peaceful about that circus. And I know you haven’t seen them at their business end, because you wouldn’t be alive to read this if you had.
It’s kind of ironic, though. The same organization that wasted Earth is the same organization that helped me escape from it. I commissioned in the Marine Corps fresh out of college—one of only two women in my class—thinking it would help get me out of the neighborhood I grew up in. Turns out joining the Marine Corps is the wrong thing to do if you want to avoid violent neighborhoods. Who would have guessed? But, it was the military that gave me my ticket off Earth, though all I’ve done is bring the fight with me. We took the same nukes that made quick work of everything living on Earth and used them to power the ships that are shuttling the rest of humanity to Mars. Now, it’s my job—our job—to make sure that the resources on our new home are secured for the “friends of freedom”, using the Marine Corps’ trademark democratic persuasion to encourage the rest of Earth’s survivors to agree.
So, now I’m here, staring through my inch-wide slit of a window at a cloud of red dust swirling feebly in a tenuously thin atmosphere. There’s a persistent buzz pecking at my attention, slowly eroding my sanity—of course, they put the LT next to the compound’s generator. If the Eastern Alliance doesn’t kill me, I’m sure this noise will, or maybe cancer. But it’s all the same to me. Everyone dies one way or another.
At first, I felt lucky to be one of the few to survive the flaming outhouse called Earth, but it’s been a week now since arriving, and I’m starting to realize that the ones left behind were the lucky ones. Food and water are rationed, the air is recycled and barely breathable, and my travel options—for the rest of my life—are limited to the ping-pong room and the mess hall. My bulletproof options, that is. But I’m itching to get out of this bunker inside of a bunker inside of a barracks. It’s too safe. Marines weren’t meant to be caged like a pet.
The klaxon alarm suddenly screams out across the barracks, accompanied by the frantic, flashing red lights lining the walls of my platoon’s hallway. It could be a drill, like the countless others this week, but something about the timing of it all suggests otherwise. I leap enthusiastically off of my rack and zip myself into my form-fitting EVA suit, then grab my rifle and head out the door. My platoon is already gathering by the airlocks that lead to the pressurized troop crawlers, organized into fire teams and squads. It’s a sight that never fails to send shivers running up my back.
Time to bring liberty to the Red Planet.
by submission | Feb 6, 2021 | Story |
Author: I.W.Ray
“What’s the matter? I’m busy.”
“He’s dead,” my ex-wife gulped through her sobs. She didn’t have to continue. I knew who she was talking about. “Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I take a second to brace myself like a dam against the news I knew was coming.
“Come to the desk.” The order flung me to the present and then my eyes are fixated on the woman in the sharp white suit. The whole room was so white. I felt like a giant piece of dust that would be devoured if I dared step farther in. “You have given up all your worldly possessions?”
“I have not a penny on me.”
“You are wearing a watch. You can’t have it.”
It’s a cheap digital watch my youngest son gave to me when he was a kid. The same one I practically threw in his face for wasting his money. I found it after his death. I haven’t taken it off since. “You said I can give a gift,” I explained while caressing the watch. “I choose this.”
I give her the watch as she inspects it by the millimeter. She approves and gives it back to me. “Did you bring any other items?”
“No, just a letter,” which I wave. Without warning, she grabs the envelope and guts it and spills the continents no one but my own eyes should see. As she reads it my anger, shame, and discomfort forces my mind back in time.
“Sorry about your son,” my aide Fremont said. “When is the funeral?”
“I have no idea. My ex and my other kids don’t want me there. My youngest dies because he drops out of college and joins a cult and I’m the bad guy.”
“Sorry, but maybe you should find out and go anyway. It won’t look good in the press if you don’t.”
“Here, you now have seventy-two hours,” the woman in white again forces me back to the here and now. She gives me back my letter with a fresh envelope and the money I will need that has the correct series date on them.
As she is shoving me out the door, she asks me one more time if I truly understand what I’m doing. Of course I do. Go back in time and with a letter and one gift for my younger self to change my future for the better.
“Your path can fracture into a thousand roads. No one can predict the consequences,” she warns again.
“I know.”
She unceremoniously dumps me outside an abandoned industrial center like a stray amongst the gravel and garbage. As I walk to the nearest bus or gas station, an odor rises and attacks my senses. It must be from the old factories but I don’t remember it when I first came here. It was ominous, a dreadful warning but ineffective to one who no longer wants to remember the pain.
#
After a week, I’m back here in the same white office. The woman in white was getting ready for her next transaction when I walked in. She stares at me but says nothing. After a few seconds, I stammered, “It worked perfectly. I got everything I wanted.” After some painful seconds of silence. “ there’s another better me out there. I don’t know where else to go.”
She eyed me up and down. “Level three-point five…no… point four anomaly. You exist on another plane of reality. Welcome, to the realm of the immortals.”
by submission | Feb 5, 2021 | Story |
Author: Phil Gagnon
The prairie stretches before me in an endless expanse under the million blue hues of a sublimely beautiful sky. The camp is busy with the preparations for serving the evening meal and then later to bed down for the night. A freshly downed buffalo has supplied the cooks suitable forage for a veritable feast even while the smells of roasting meats and stews are denied to me.
Enervated movement in their evening chores conveys the weariness of the prospective settlers in the long journey they have made so far, and for the thousand miles remaining. I do not feel that same fatigue that is imparted over the twenty miles of walking and riding that the convoy made today and the same many days before.
I fish the harmonica from my pocket, pleased by the cold steel in my hands. The instrument is a family relic. It traveled these trails with my ancestors as professional captains of the wagon trains that crossed to and fro over the wild continent that is now before my eyes. This artifact conveys a feeling like it knows this place better than I ever will, even though I am a captain of emigrants in my own right.
The switchgrass moves in endless waves and I can hear the sharp snap of the canvas enveloping the prairie schooners, the winds that cross this land unchallenged have come to lap around the first abrupt obstacle in their paths. While I cannot feel the stir of this air, I have known the ebb and flow of far greater winds. I raise the battered harmonica to my lips and play the tune of the atmospheric tides. The small fire I have near me imparts no warmth, but its crackle is the percussive accompaniment to the melody.
Lost in the moment, I watch as the sun begins its fiery descent into sunset. The lurid reds and oranges are stark against the indolent violets and black. I pause to observe the encampment again. Even though one in ten will not make the end of the trail the respite leads them to laughter and recreation and the sounds of a people awakening from a long day’s drudgery with unbridled excitement for being one step closer to the end of their journey. I smile at their prospect, even though they will not speak to me directly.
Twilight has blanketed the camp in the inky pitch of night. I play a gentler tune that corresponds to the rhythmic dance of the shadows across the camp. My aria is just beginning its last wordless verse when in the blink of an eye the life of the camp is frozen, the shadows held fast to whatever surface they cling to. I instinctively turn to the west knowing an ethereal message hangs waiting in the air. It glows in soft artificial green:
Virtual Recreation Allotment Has Been Reached
I go through the command sequence to shut down the VR emulation. I am going to be needed on the bridge shortly, as a captain’s duty is never done. We will be making our final approach burn for TRAPPIST-1e this evening to deliver the yearly allotment of twenty-thousand colonists aboard CV Prairie Echo. I slip the harmonica back into its protective case. The 400 year old instrument has accompanied the safe movement of hundreds of thousands of people in its time, and I have no intentions of breaking its streak.
