by submission | Jan 28, 2016 | Story |
Author : Janet Shell Anderson
All our executions are political. Of course, that makes them right, and no one rich or well-connected dies.
The poor man’s on his knees in his orange jumpsuit, with the red waves of the pitiful surf of this prison world, Kepler 435b/Gilgamesh, behind him, a red pseudo-gull that doesn’t know what’s going on overhead, and the tall masked figure in black with the knife, sword, whatever, beside him. I don’t look. It’s live, popular on homeWorld. Millions watch.
Here, not so much.
Back in the cells, Joker watches and laughs, although next dawn, out in the red desert, he dies. Joker’s a politico, hard to like.
Being a woman, I have to be a guard here (unless I’m a prisoner which would be unthinkable). Or at least I don’t want to think it.
Gilgamesh’s the best prison planet, has big-time criminals like Joker and nobodies like Freddie Graywhale. Our trials are fair; our executions quick. Now, though, this new information about time, what it is, how it works, makes the death penalty problematic. My cousin has proved time is circular. So if someone is executed, what’s the point? Do they come back? Can they sue?
The new physics had to come from Kepler 435b/Gilgamesh of course, not the homeWorld, because my cousin George Poorbear’s here. Why is he here? That’s another story. I’m here because I’m his cousin; it’s an honor. Doesn’t feel like an honor.
George shows all the worlds that time is not as linear as we think. Past. Present. Future. Lined up? No. George replaces Albert Einstein. Knowing George like I do, this is hard to believe.
We’ve got problems on this clean, well-packaged, well-presented, low-populated prison planet Kepler 435b/Gilgamesh, with its red star dunes, a thousand years old, and its sitcom lizards, who can talk but never say anything worthwhile.
We’ve got believers and unbelievers.
We avoid them. Some believe time is circular; some don’t.
I’d like to deal with George face to face, but having created both the believers and unbelievers, George is holed up in some fortress on the edge of the Anvil of the Heavens, a wasteland no one wants to travel. The believers and the unbelievers are getting ready to have a war, George thinks.
My prisoners cry, beg, offer money, every kind of sex, diamonds which will melt in your hand, pizza. You can’t imagine. Some of the other jailers get so tired of it they hang the prisoners before their due dates.
I won’t watch another death. I’m disgusted by it. My Somalian cat, who can talk but won’t, helps me patrol this afternoon. The sky’s red and dim, and the desert’s bitterly cold.
I’d like to have a universe that makes sense.
I go among the prisoners to one cell.
“Hey, Freddie. I’m going to let you out. Your wife sent the money.” I push the button, and my deeptime keyless lock pops the door open. One click. It’s important not to do more than one click. George was very specific about that. More than one click does something else.
Freddie Graywhale grabs me around the neck, kisses me. I walk him to the exit toward the transport.
The desert’s serene in the slanted light. The cat and I patrol; puffs of red dust rise. Somebody killed a man I loved in these low red hills. I don’t know who killed him. Somali knows. Maybe someday she’ll tell me. Probably not. Our somedays are running out. We need a change.
I’ve got the deeptime keyless lock. George talks about Calabi Yau Manifolds, pieces of space so small you can’t imagine them, where time goes backwards, sideways, upside down, for all I know. George’s always talking about things like that, and when I ask him about my lover, it’s more Manifolds. No answers.
I walk with Somali out in the red desert. Maybe George’s right. Maybe not.
I’m letting all the prisoners free. I may even talk to the cat Somali. The deeptime locks open everything, change everything. Will anyone remember the past? Will anyone find the future? Do they even exist?
At the very least the deeptime locks will open up the Calabi Yau Manifolds. It’ll be fun.
by submission | Jan 27, 2016 | Story |
Author : Tristan Krahn
It was a miracle of science, a triumph of the Human mind over nature that allowed them the chance to be gods, but it was careless hubris that destroyed them.
The Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator on Planet Earth: ten billion dollars worth of high energy hardware; the world’s most expensive science project. It was here that the most cutting edge physical breakthroughs in Human history became realities.
It was here, one hundred meters below the Earth’s surface, in a twenty-seven kilometer circular tunnel, that Humanity’s brightest minds verified a generation-old prophecy. First described by the luminary of particle physics, Peter Higgs, the discovery of his namesake field was a crowning achievement, not only for particle physicists, but Humanity as well.
The Higgs Field: the field underlying the entire standard model of physics; the field that gives particles mass by interacting with and slowing down these particles each to a point where their wave function no longer vibrates at the same frequency as light and other mass-less particles, allowing them to interact with each other and form the basic elements. This field, finally discovered by a machine that smashes particles together so hard that the resultant debris actually mimics, for a brief nanosecond, the conditions present just after the Big Bang.
The Large Hadron Collider had, in short, succeeded in creating tiny short-lived universes, thus bestowing godhood on the Human race. For, with each collision that resulted in a momentary Higgs Field, a new universe was born and lived out its natural progression in the fraction of an eye’s blink. To the physicists, it was no more than a few nanoseconds to live and die; to the tiny universe, it took tens of billions of years.
This marvel of science should have bred humility in the physicists that represented the Human race but instead it bred a god complex. Now that Humans could create whole universes, they wanted to see if they could manipulate the conditions just enough that they could create a tiny fleeting version of their own universe. Not only were they playing god, they were trying to be their own creators.
What would they do when they succeeded? Would they build a shrink ray and draw straws to determine which egghead would play diminutive ambassador to a synthetic analogue universe? They would have to act fast, in the space of a few picoseconds, if they wanted to interact with the analogue’s Humans. Perhaps they could beam the universe into space using quantum teleportation and somehow expand the universe so that humans seeking a holiday in an artificial analogue universe could simply go into deep space, cross a barrier and be within a smaller but virtually identical universe to their own.
It was a miracle of science, a triumph of the Human mind over nature, but in the end their hubris did destroy them. For, as they had hoped, the physicists truly did create their own universe. Due to the infinite nature of probability, it was by mere chance that they created the exact universe they existed in. Before they even had a chance to examine themselves, the tiny universe annihilated, taking the entire human race with it, casualties of their own god complex.
by submission | Jan 26, 2016 | Story |
Author : Justin Permenter
The Earth was silent upon the Last Day.
The Great Mother, once resplendent in the verdure of youth, now wretched and barren in Her twilight, shuddered and trembled as tectonic forces slowly rent Her to pieces from within. She had outlived Her children by eons, the last of whom abandoned their matriarch more than seven billion years before Her demise. These wayward sons and daughters of Earth were destined to inhabit more than a hundred worlds across dozens of systems, expanding ever outward until, at last, they perished, the summation of all their dreams and fears and ambitions consigned to a mere footnote in the incalculable history of the cosmos.
And yet for a time, the Earth remained, keeping Her stoic vigil over ancient battlefields and forgotten graves. Entombed within the heat-scorched shell of their former dominion, the conquerors and vassals, executioners and martyrs of bygone epochs found in death the kinship which had so tragically eluded them in life. Inside this ossuary the bones of mankind now mingled with the dust of empires and oceans boiled away into nothingness beneath the relentless expansion of the Red Giant.
So it was upon the Last Day when, for the first time since the age of the pre-solar nebula, the Earth and Her patron star, the former progenitor and sustainer of all life upon the planet’s ruined surface, were drawn together once more into fatal contact by the adamantine power of gravity. A searing burst of light heralded their violent reunion. Geysers of white flame washed across the glassy exterior of the planet, a tidal wave of heat so intense that even ghosts fled before its mighty and terrible fury. The brittle crust, withered and decimated by millennia of crushing temperatures, dissolved almost at once, exposing the viscous mantle beneath.
From this moment onward the Earth would be forever conjoined with the dying star which had already devoured two of Her sister worlds. Almost two hundred more years, a measure of terrestrial time whose meaning had long since been lost, would pass before the last molten elements of the planet’s core yielded to the weight of Her own mortal destiny. Then, having expended every last measure of resistance, She succumbed to the inferno with the groan of a great wounded beast, resigning the orphaned spirits of Her progeny to wander the vast and pitiless emptiness of space until the coming of the Cataclysm which would bring an end to all things.
Thus was another verse added to the elegy of the ages, the ghostsong which echoes throughout the chasm of the universe, the lamentation of races and civilizations displaced by the ravages of celestial time, and of the worlds which they once called Home.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jan 25, 2016 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Consciousness came back slowly, from the extremities in. First pins and needles in the fingertips and toes, then the crawling burn of some painful memory winding its way along the arms, up the legs, gathering speed until it exploded in a relentless fireball in the brain.
Taxx. A moment ago I was being killed by –
“And here we are back again, Lieutenant.” The voice was everywhere and nowhere, I wasn’t hearing it so much as –
“See how much more clearly you can listen without the limits of your ears, Lieutenant?”
There was a white flash, then an image began to stabilize. I hadn’t opened my eyes, and yet I was seeing, something, a mirror? Something wasn’t right, how—
“And see how much better the view without your eyes, Lieutenant. Now I can show you what I see, at least what I want you to see.” The voice grated. “I must say you’re far more rugged than the rest of your team.”
A sickening spiral, the sudden motion bringing on nausea in waves before a rapid flash of images. Uniforms, men. No, parts of uniforms, parts of men. A floor littered with augments and attached flesh, weapons, body armor, body parts, men. My men.
Somewhere someone was screaming. It was some time before the realization that the screaming was me set in, mic’d and fed back into my brain directly in the absence of the ears I no longer possessed.
The view changed, a no-longer familiar body, face flayed, cables crawling through the lacerated flesh into the muscles, the brain. The body twitched and recoiled from some unseen horror.
Me.
The body was me. The twitching was mine.
“You fascinate me, your quest for machinehood, your replacement of your organic components with the more advanced elements akin to my own. You expand and extend your fragile human platform.” The screaming had stopped, a throat screamed raw, lungs no longer able to sustain the sound.
“You never find us trying to replace our more advanced elements with your organics. I suppose it’s natural for you to want to ascend.”
“What I do want to know, however, is what it feels like to be you. To be fragile, fallible, weak. I can measure every variable, every aspect of your existence, your temperatures, pressures, electrical impulses, chemical compositions. I can take you to the point of death and bring you back, again and again, but –” The voice stopped, the image of me presented as if through my own eyes, lidless and unable to be averted turned back on myself, burning like a hot-wire through my brain.
“How do you feel Lieutenant? I need to know.”
by submission | Jan 24, 2016 | Story |
Author : Lars H. Hoffmann
“And for the love of humanity, please come save me.” Concluded the video. Andie’s voice very nearly broke towards the end of the sentence, making the plea sounding as heartfelt as possible. There was a moment of silence before anybody spoke. Jason looked around the boardroom at the thirteen seated men. This moment was pivotal. Jason was convinced that each and every one of the board members were making up their mind right in front of his eyes. Had it worked?
“Thank you very much for this… this…” The chairman paused searching for words “…fascinating and moving presentation. We will of course need some time before we give you any sort of reply.”
“Of course.” Answered Jason. “We understand that a thirty billion dollars investment over ten years is not something to be taken lightly.”
“One final question: How certain are you that Andie is actually alive?” Asked the Chairman.
This was good, he was using Andie’s name anthropomorphizing the space rover.
“One hundred percent.” Said Jason without a moment’s hesitation. “The signal time to Titan is about an hour and a half from earth so she had to be autonomous. Her basic programming focused on learning from experience much like a child and at some point while driving around on Saturn’s moon she learned enough to become self-aware.”
He smiled his most charming salesman-smile and started collecting the materials he had used for the presentation. He stood up, thanked the board for their time and walked out.
Outside the building Carmen was waiting for him with an unlit cigarette in her left hand. When she saw him come out of the door she hurried over to him.
“How did it go?” She asked.
“I think they are going for it, they might actually fund the rescue mission and we can get her back home.” He said smilingly.
“Her?” Said Carmen disapprovingly. “It might have developed sentience and actual intelligence, but Andie is not man or woman.”
“Yes. Sure. I know.” Said Jason. “But the only reason why this meeting is different from the fourteen previous ones we’ve had with space operating companies is that I refer to Andie as a female and her voice was changed in the video.”
“Do you really think that is enough?”
“I don’t think the men in that boardroom will be able to ignore a damsel in distress.”
by submission | Jan 23, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rob Francis
Hyenas owned the dry, dead city.
They watched as Abal guided the rover down the empty roads, rolling around and over the scattered debris of civilization. His home was gone now, forever. It seemed absurd. Ridiculous. Perhaps that was why he couldn’t stop laughing.
Static crackled over the speakers, and a wavery voice filled the vehicle.
“Rover 12, Rover 12. You there, Abal? Reached A.A. yet?”
H.Q. He slowed to a stop and pressed the comms switch on the rover’s control panel.
“Not a soul to save, brothers.” No sign of the living. No sign of the dead.
From the roadsides hundreds of black eyes mocked him. Mouths gaped, slick wet tongues dangling. An entire metropolis of scavengers.
That would explain the lack of bodies. Possibly the lack of survivors as well.
Abal bared his teeth right back at them. They grinned together.
As he completed his circuit of the city, Abal tapped the comms switch again. “Sweep confirmed. No clean up needed here. No evidence of survivors, diseased or otherwise. Returning to cordon.”
He turned the rover back towards the broken highway and the long drive to safety. From the rearview camera, he saw that a large cackle had gathered in his wake. Hundreds of the vermin, drawn together by his tour of the deserted streets. Abal put his foot down.
As the engine rattled and died, he found himself laughing harder than ever, tears hot on his dusty face.
He did not laugh alone.
END
