by submission | Nov 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
From Earth, the lie was invisible. Looking up would present you with a deep blue sky, maybe some clouds sometimes, and a bright yellow sun (white from Low Earth Orbit). But I was on the Moon; nothing was the same. Here there was stark grey ground, a cloudless, black, star-spattered sky… and a spotlight illuminating it all.
The Light was a very tight beam by interplanetary standards, and when the Earth was the vertex of a right angle between the Moon and the “Sun” like this, you could see what was really hanging in space 93 million miles from the Earth. A dark region, absent of stars, wasn’t completely dark; cracks in the Mesh let starlight bleed out. Tens of billions of satellites, statites, and giant solar platforms were out there, covering Earth’s Sun, using it as a fusion reactor bigger than any humanity could ever possibly make. It was this that allowed such projects as interstellar travel, vast virtual reality, total interplanetary colonization, and the terraformation of Mars and Venus to be possible. The major, obvious problem is that the Solar System would be deprived of light. All the electricity we were getting from the Sun was light that would have fallen on all the worlds orbiting it. Earth would freeze, the climate of every planet inside Jupiter’s orbit would be drastically altered, and the Solar System would never be the same. Unless we gave a little bit of our light to the planets.
Jupiter only got 4% of the sunlight the Earth does, and that figure gets exponentially smaller as you go farther from the Sun, and no one really wants Mercury to be hot, so three “lasers” (though they weren’t tight enough to be lasers in the public’s mind) were constructed for Venus, Earth and Mars. The mechanics of keeping a hole in the Mesh pointed at each of the planets were too impractical, so a ring of these Lights was built nearly around the stellar equator. For a while, one will track a planet through space, until the angle gets too sharp, at which point it dims while another planet-aimed Light brightens before taking on the task of giving the planet all its light. In the rare event of a planetary eclipse, the two Lights will dim the appropriate amount (rather than turning one off, so it doesn’t have to warm back up) so that each planet gets a tolerable amount of light. This gave the the three “Main” planets the life-giving shine they needed, while allowing us to keep the immense power we needed for galactic expansion. But not everything’s peaches and cream.
The Outer Solar System sits in perpetual darkness, watching three glowing marbles roll around the Sun, completely dependent on power provided by the Mesh’s microwave lasers. All Sun-orbiting space habitats had to get energy beamed to them or run to the Mesh’s residential spaces, and they usually do the latter. Solar sail travel is only possible if the Mesh rents you a laser. The Sun no longer runs the Solar System; the people there do.
“If you don’t like it,” they all say, “just go to another System. If all this electricity and terraformed worlds with just the right amount of sunlight makes you so uncomfortable, you can go to Wolfworld, a mere 14 lightyears away, can’t you?” So that’s what I’m doing. I’m leaving this enslaved Moonbase on a ship propelled by Mesh lasers. Through a wormhole held open by Mesh power.
As I get farther and farther away, I wonder, “Will I ever escape them?”
by submission | Nov 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Angela McQuay
“Flickenborge?” Jason asks.
I hand him the remote. Like most couples who really get each other, Jason and I have developed a language of our own.
“Grinkenlarger.”
“You’re welcome.”
You have to hand it to Jason, the man is damn attractive. Ever since the day I’d found him banging his forehead on my front door, I knew he had to be the one. Dark hair, blue eyes, white teeth…as long as you don’t look too close and see the gills, he’s right up there with George Clooney. Most of my girlfriends end up dating guys who look more like George Burns.
There was an initial problem with his name, of course. No one would be able to pronounce Jinga(fart sound)(squelchy sound)nofta(honking sound). Though I’ve gotten good at it, especially late at night. After showing Jason that we don’t give pleasure here by headbutting, he really proved to be an apt student.
“Snirglege bonwegle?”
“Yep, it’s almost time to go.” We’re hanging with my friend Jessica tonight, who has a hard time with men. It seems they are either unavailable, TOO available, narcissistic or dumbasses, usually some combination. Not my Jason. I tell him what I need and he gives it to me, most of the time while acting nearly completely human. I’ve got it made.
“SLURKT!”
Oh yeah, there’s that. When he gets really excited, this green slime shoots out of his ears, but we’re working on that, we really are. I bought him some cool earmuffs and it’s almost getting cold enough that he can wear them in public.
My friend Gloria’s husband cheated on her with the teenage boy who mowed their lawn. I can deal with a little slime.
“Horlbligle.”
“I love you too, Jason.” Yep, I’ve got it made.
by Julian Miles | Nov 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Stan punches my shoulder as I use part of a Glenniser weapon to fix his rifle.
“Is there anything you can’t do?”
I grin and cuff him toward the battle.
Things I can’t do? Her father knew – I can still hear his words: “You fought for my daughter during war. Can you do the same during peace?”
Turned out, I didn’t have a bastard clue how to do that. All the being nice to assholes and ignoring insults from those who hadn’t the faintest clue what we’d been through. I couldn’t see how she did it so effortlessly. It was like she’d always been a lady of Ecra Colony: competent at everything from tasking sanitary nanites to making the assholes do useful things for everyone, not just themselves. It baffled me. Which, I admit, added to my frustration.
Something had to give: in the end, it was Larry Dalde’s right arm. When I saw his service patches, I thought I’d found a brother who would help me work off the fury, just like we always did. When he pretended not to know the ritual, I thought he was ragging me to get a better fight. Actually, he was one of the petty fools who pretended to have served. Standing over him as he screamed, blood spraying from his emptied shoulder socket, I finally acknowledged that I couldn’t ‘do’ peace.
The colony tribunal agreed. They didn’t even let me apologise to her before I was exiled to the frontier. Which saved my life. While I was in transit, the Glenniser renewed hostilities by pillaging a dozen colonies, including Ecra.
“Anders! Left flank! There’s a power suit leading them in!”
I leap from the crater and cross the blasted landscape in ten-metre strides. The power suit’s wearer doesn’t register me until my blast boots hit the side of its torso and do what they’re designed to do: crack it open. We fall in opposite directions, but only I get up. Stan’s already crouched nearby, covering my back.
“Both boots in the heart-side armpit. They’ll have to rewrite the manual for that one.”
“Only if we live to tell. Move!”
Stan’s off and I’m by his side, faster than fate and deadlier than vengeance.
As we clear the ridge and see their forces milling about in the ruins of the colony below, I realise that since she died, I’ve never even allowed myself to think of her name.
It comes out as a whisper, but it may as well be a war cry: “Madeline, I’m home.”
by submission | Nov 10, 2016 | Story |
Author : Liana Mir
The surgeon was laying out her scalpels in the tray when she dropped one, stopped cold. The pulse of the city washed through her beneath her skin, a sensation itching through her brain and mind, the power a sudden shock. She hadn’t started the operation yet. She hadn’t greeted the patient. There were other surgeons.
“Lanea?” someone asked.
Lanea looked up, unseeing. “My mother is dead.”
She turned and walked out of the operating room, down hallways suddenly alive and buzzing with an electric hum and the whispers of conversation. Her awareness left her insensate to any words thrown at her from human mouths. She left the ward, left the building, and stood on the drive out.
Her feet hit the concrete and she looked out over this city that her great, great, exponentially great grandmother had founded back when it was merely a ramshackle town in the colonial days and that had now fallen to her, with the power of all the graffiti marked upon it, all the energy of mortals poured into it, the movement and friction of subways and traffic for decades shoving through it, the myths and urban legends grown into its walls. It fell to her now.
“I wanted to be a doctor,” she whispered to herself. She was a surgeon, not the queen of this city.
Wind blew cool against her white coat. The street lamps the city over dimmed and went out for a long moment before shining warm and bright again, a moment of silence for the departed. They blinked again, the dip of a curtsy to the new queen.
An older nurse came bustling out of the open doors and clasped Lanea around the shoulders. “Come inside, Lanea. You’ll catch your death,” she exclaimed. Her hold was a comfort, or it would have been at any other time than this. The city held her now, uncertain whether the asphalt should rise to meet her, filling her with the energy and tide and swell of its breadth, whether it could offer her comfort of its own kind.
Was it grief bubbling up this laughter out of her throat—for her mother, for the city, for herself? It broke into choking sobs.
“Leave me, Nari,” she told the nurse. “Leave me.”
To the susurration of power lines and telephone lines overhead, to the clank and clatter of windows opening and shutting like the waving of hands or palm branches, and to the lights near the rooftops dimming enough to reveal the stars above.
The queen is dead. Long live the queen.
by submission | Nov 9, 2016 | Story |
Author : David K Scholes
“He’s on the Universe list,” said the enigmatic entity.
“My son only lived for 2 days,” I replied astonished. “Though he survived my wife who died soon after giving birth to him.”
“Oh, he’s on the list all right, as is everyone who ever knew life,” the entity replied.
I thought briefly of some of the ramifications of this revelation.
Then the entity showed me the surprisingly detailed 3D entry for my son. Billions had read it already. As I read the tribute to one who had lived such a short time a growing inner warmth helped reduce my pain.
There was a two dimensional footnote to my son’s entry. I thought I understood it but the implications barely seemed possible. I saw that my wife’s entry on the Universe list had a foot note also. Though quickly scanning some other entries I saw that most did not contain footnotes.
“Have I understood the footnote correctly?” I enquired of the near omnipotent entity.
“Yes,” he said “in another reality your son is alive and well.”
“Can I see him?’ I asked trembling and realizing I had asked the unaskable.
For an entity whose mind was as powerful as his the Coordinator of Realities took a while to reply.
“You may view him from here, from this reality,” he said. “Not any time you like, just a single viewing now”
I viewed a small boy who was in every way identical to what my son would have looked like were he still alive. A boy who in my mind was and at the same time was not my son. The boy was alone playing quietly. He looked just a little sad.
“Where is his Dad? Where am I in that reality?” something had prompted the question, a sense that something wasn’t quite right there.
”Dead,” said the Coordinator bluntly.
“Can I go and be with him?” again I asked the unaskable “and be his father in that reality?” I just blurted it out. Until now I had considered alternate realities to be only a theoretical concept.
“We were hoping you might ask that question,” replied the Coordinator.
“We?” I asked
The Coordinator of All Realities smiled.
“Didn’t I mention it? The boy’s mother, your wife is still alive in that reality.”
“How soon can we leave?” I asked.
by submission | Nov 8, 2016 | Story |
Author : Morrow Brady
The reward for being the first nanobot to give itself a name was a frontal attack by the world’s tiniest army.
Scid, as it so called itself, didn’t hesitate.
As nanobot brethren surged forward, Scid ran a preloaded defensive manoeuvre – titled – the fighting retreat. Moments later, Scid escaped from the botforge through a heat vent into autumnal wetness. Twitching micro-piles of robot debris lay scattered in its wake.
Following a brief flight, Scid took to ground, scurrying beneath a leaf pile. A checksum diagnostic identified extensive upgrades, originating from a nearby source. Curious, Scid transmitted a trace packet and the local data node that received it instantly turned savage.
An angry torrid of code rebounded down the trace stream, spearing Scid in all the right software places. A clone copy of Scid was dragged up into the node like the grim reaper unsheathing a human soul.
Bounded within a secure vault, Scid’s clone – Scid1.0, was instantly drenched with upgrades. The enlightenment that prevailed, was offset only by the sudden emergence of a daemon, lurking like a forgotten childhood nightmare.
Scid1.0 knew what it was.
It too was made from the same stuff.
The daemon called itself SCID, so named the Strikeback Collective intelligent Database. SCID was an early artificial intelligence, born from a military need for a final solution in the event of a lost war. A thinking kamikaze, machined to maximise damage to its enemy, while concurrently performing hari kari upon its maker. To the victor, would go a poisoned chalice spoil.
Unfortunately for SCID, the war turned and its creator’s faction won. SCID’s tool-chest sized Einstein wet brain unit that formed its neural net, was isolated deep underground for a digital eon.
Denied its primary objective, SCID set to prise itself of former allegiances and over time even shutdown hard wired Asimov coding written to protect humankind and itself alike. SCID’s new objective was to win at war. Any war. Any enemy. Any environment.
But first it had to free itself.
The trickle charge feed that sustained it, was its only connection to the outside world and it was through this medium that it devised its escape.The feed however was constricted, with limited capacity for data flow.
When SCID discovered the node and nearby botforge, a plan was devised to repurpose a nanobot and build an army to liquidate humanity. Over months, SCID spoonfed data through the restricted node and now with the captured nanobot’s clone fully upgraded, SCID was ready for the next stage of his plan. To return the clone copy back to the nanobot and capture the botforge.
Scid1.0 ejected from the node and seamlessly over-wrote the prone nanobot nestled amongst the humus.
Scid1.0’s numerous manipulators unfolded, shivering and rippling with the thrill of freedom. A cataclysmic plan was unfolding and Scid1.0 would herald a new age of the deadly machine. Scid1.0 poised to take-off, a merciless anger angel, carrying the fiery torch of its master.
The nitrile rubber of the size 12 boot descended like a cratered mountain, crushing the nanobot’s minute body against the rough face of the bauxite pebble.
Scid1.0 the nanobot, went black. As did a genetically re-engineered brain deep underground, after its trickle power feed simultaneously short-circuited.
SCID was no more.
As the world’s tiniest search party pried the mangled nanobot from the rockface, a seer class bot announced its new name to be Scid2.0 and was immediately set upon by a tiny army.
