by submission | May 4, 2016 | Story |
Author : Tino Didriksen
At the mid of the 21st century, we received the first signal, overriding the output of every speaker on and off the planet with a coherent but seemingly meaningless message. It wasn’t until the second and third signals blared forth with about a week between, that we figured out what it was: coordinates relative to the galactic center, less than two parsecs distant, but drifting ever so slowly away from us!
All diplomatic obstacles postponed or quickly smoothed over, as a year of worldwide dedicated research and engineering was mandated, in an effort to plan out the most ambitious space program ever devised. New and old long distance starship designs were perused, every outlandish propulsion gimmick re-examined, cryotech given a fresh look, and even worm holes got their hour in the spotlight.
From the fruits of humanity’s combined academic efforts, a grand spacecraft was commissioned. The pride of the planet, capable of getting its fifty occupants to their destination within a mere eleven years. We even figured out a limited form of faster than light communication, requiring the ship to drop off stationary relay buoys every half light year. The construction of it all took another half year, after which a great launch ceremony sent the voyage off into the unknown.
Then the long wait set in. The newsworthiness waned, the buried squabbles resurfaced, and the world mostly returned to its old self for a decade. Even the weekly confirmation of extrasolar life became more of a nuisance, and the mission updates were relegated to minor slots.
Finally, though, they were nearing their goal, and the world started caring again. Everyone back home was eagerly watching the feed as the ship came to a halt at the coordinates of the source, a few hours before the time it was calculated that a new ping would be sent out. Broad spectrum receivers were fanned out to ensure immediate triangulation of a precise location, all systems ready to begin bombarding the source with scans.
There! Global jubilation as the signal revealed a majestic alien craft, easily the size of a major metropolitan city. Our crew quickly began sending greetings and probes their way, in all languages and code. But then the echoes came in, and from them was gleaned the strip-mined husk of a once rich living planet and the burnt out remains of a star.
Immediately, radio silence was ordered, but it was too late. The alien vessel lit up slowly, turned lazily towards earth’s finest dinghy, then just sat there like a mute rock for several minutes, before casually accelerating to near light speed on a direct vector towards our little corner of the galaxy. We did not bother ordering pursuit.
As best we figured from the remains found out there, the aliens travel to inhabited systems, drain them for all resources and energy, before entering a hibernation state. They set up an automatic beacon to lure young races to them, and then wake up and follow the trail home.
We’ve since lost contact with the deep space mission, as the aliens destroy or disable each relay they pass, probably as a taunt to show they don’t care if we know when they’ll be here. And why should they? It’s not as if we can hope to put a dent in something capable of eating the sun. So yeah, we’re doomed. We’ve got half a year until they arrive, and we are preparing as best we can, but nobody really believes in it. We were too curious, too naive, and they got us good. Hook, line, and …
by Julian Miles | May 3, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The clouds are limned in blood. Carmichael said it was a trick of the light; I have to take it as a warning ignored.
We came to Acheron – actually Acheron IV, but as the rest were uninhabitable, we dropped the designator – to build a paradise. The planet was the right distance from the sun, had oceans, freshwater lakes, gloriously rich loam, and no creatures bigger than a sparrow. The bird-drop seed cycle was handled by a beautiful, green avian that fell perfectly between Swift and Hummingbird. It was also the fastest bird ever recorded, routinely achieving speeds in excess of 180kph as it shot through the night.
Acheron was to be the utopia that Homo sapiens deserved. The omen of seeking to build that fabled ‘no-place’, and the abysmal history of previous attempts, did not matter: we were the ones who would succeed.
Eight months and our cattle were breeding spectacularly. A second harvest was in. Our log haciendas had already been featured on lifestyle feeds. We had completed acclimatisation for all Terra-originated organics. The start of our ninth month would be marked by the atmo-dome being dissolved so we could finally experience our new home properly.
We were all outside, champagne in hand, when Teleon released the collapsers. High above, a tiny, bright circle appeared. It spread rapidly as the nano-nibblers consumed the dome, repurposing the ‘stem’ material into more nano-nibblers. The ring expanded until it dropped to the ground all round us and we cheered, raising our glasses in toast to our paradise home.
Our noisy cheer masked Teleon’s death. His wife found the pockmarked slab of bloody ruin that he had been. She screamed loudly, then even louder after a cloud dropped on her. Most of us stood about in confusion: that deadly moment of hesitation. But those who acted were the first to fall. Clouds rained down and the dying began.
I got to watch from the single greenhouse as my friends were consumed by nebulous entities that looked like clouds, pounced like leopards and fed like frenzied sharks. The scientist side of me noted a pack order in feeding, with some ‘clouds’ circling slowly while the killer fed. After the killer rose, multiple ‘lesser’ pack members would swarm the remains. They were all messy, wasteful eaters.
I knew my mind was using clinical observation to distance itself from the horror, but could not stop. My heart raced as my brain sought survival options, whilst I calmly observed that these were obviously the apex predators of this planet’s trophic hierarchy. They were why the Emerald Proto-Swifts were small, nocturnal, and ridiculously fast. Why there were no large fauna. It seemed like paradise was guarded by monsters of suitably legendary nastiness.
A cloud has squeezed through the skylight into the greenhouse. It’s a small one, probably last in line for the feast hogged by its bigger kin. Did it’s finding of me indicate an improved hunting ability, or was it a common trait?
I smile. Ever the scientist. As the cloud slowly approaches, I lift a ground sensor and ram the half-metre spike through my heart. Sweat runs from my forehead. I bite my lips to stop myself screaming: I suspect a scream will make the monster lunge. To die quickly, I need to pull the impaling spike out. The sensor beeps, determining my temperature and mineral content.
The scientist inside howls as the observer yanks the spike from between my ribs.
That hurts even more. I look up.
The clouds are limned in blood.
by submission | May 2, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
“Oh my God! I found life!”
Kenrin was kneeling on the ground, peering at something in the dust. As Ederford, Roana, Viccison and I walked over to him, he shifted position, suggesting that whatever he was looking at moved, and rapidly. He had found an animal!
The four of us skidded to a stop around him, and huddled together to try and get a glimpse. It took me a second, because both the creature and the regolith were a very dull brown, basically grey, but it was there. Life.
Life was a precious thing in the universe, as it only occurred on approximately one planet for every fifty star systems, and interstellar travel wasn’t easy. Sixteen times the speed of light may sound pretty fast, but light isn’t all that fast in the first place when talking about galaxies. To get from Gerfysa to here, Manklenon, took four years.
The little beast was around five centimeters long, with a body that looked like a pine cone and… fourteen legs. Each one was very thin, and had something that looked like a hook at the end. Despite my fascination with exobiology, I couldn’t help but admit that it did seem a bit too “buggy” for my liking.
That should have told me that we never should have filed the report.
Kenrin deftly clapped the animal into a specimen jar, and handed it to Viccison. “Get that back to the lab,” he said, “and do what you gotta do. I’m gonna try and find more organisms. You three, spread out and help me look.”
Over the course of our adventure, we found a few more life forms, all equally buggy in nature. When we all returned to the hab, we ran a few tests on the bugs, figured out what they were made of and what they could do, and sent our report back to Gerfysa at a slightly improved 20c. We never imagined the consequences.
Twenty Six Years Later
Achpersson Drives have improved in the past few decades, allowing more people to get to Manklenon that would have ever been possible when my team found its biosphere. Being a living planet, it attracted a lot of tourist attention, and civilian tours began eight years after I first arrived. That’s how everything died.
No one could stand the little “Manklenites,” as they were called. Anyone with any kind of arachnophobia went berserk on them. The creatures, unfortunately, had a knack for creeping into normally sealed spaces, ending up in people’s hotel rooms and luggage. But, despite the disgust, the attraction of alien life made people keep coming. Keep killing. Now, with a more complex ecosystem than previously considered riddled with holes, Manklenon’s biosphere could no longer support itself. It has become the lifeless stone we thought it was on approach. Now here I stand, on Ganorpeña, in front of an alien that is the spitting image of a centipede.
I think I’ll hold off on that report.
by submission | May 1, 2016 | Story |
Author : Indiana Fairhurst
Confused, I open my eyes, it’s blurry. I slowly become aware. The sound of the ocean becomes louder and louder.
“I’m alone. Where am I? Who am I?”
My dry throat causes my voice to come out raspy and harsh. I struggle to stand up. It’s apparent I’ve been here for a while. But where is here? There’s sand on either side of me going miles farther than I can see the end of, and behind me, trees, grass, mountains, all such a lush green, all so beautiful. But I wonder, how did I get on this island? I spend all my time searching for answers, any sign of other humans, but nothing.
I go further, I’m deep in the island now, searching. Suddenly, I fall down a steep hill only to find a home, made from logs and branches covered by giant leaves. I walk to the door cautiously but anxiously. But when I walk in, I don’t see any people, but instead, boards covered in complex equations, walls covered in sketches, notes, and calculations.
“I remember.”
Not everything comes back, but enough to know why I’m on this island. I remember the virus, how it killed so many people. I remember my plans, my research, my mother. My sweet mother who died so young from the thing I had come to this island to cure. I tested it on myself, and that’s what caused the memory lapse. I did it to myself.
As the percentage of deaths grew, I realized that my research couldn’t wait any longer. That’s why I came to this island, I needed this specific environment for research.
I see my journals, I remember how some were for research, and others personal. I remember logging my thoughts to keep myself sane. The more I read the more my tears stain the pages. It wasn’t what I expected, I was always alone, always isolated from the world around me. My eyes scour the room when what looks to be the remains of a dog catches my focus.
“Darwin,” I cry out as I remember what it was that helped me finalize the cure. Something was missing, I needed bone marrow, more than I could take from myself without taking my own life as well. Battling my thoughts I fall to my knees short of breath and in shock of all the information that just came flooding back into my memory. I did it to save humanity, it was what finalized the cure that will save the lives of millions. But in the process I ruined myself. I killed the only friend I had since childhood. How could I have done this? How could I kill the only friend I had ever had? I scream until my face turns blue.
“I’m a monster.”
I’ve done nothing for days, despising the person I’ve become. As I take a bite of the most beautiful fruit I have ever seen, I remember what on the island is nutritional, and what’s fatal. My breath runs short, my throat tingles and my vision goes blurry. I fall on my back only to see a helicopter, the same I had arrived in, and the same that was scheduled to pick me up this day. I try to scream, I try to beg for help, but all that comes out is a whimper, a desperate last attempt to justify all that I’ve done to get here. But I know… I know the last chance of humanity surviving will die with me, and I know it was all for nothing.
by submission | Apr 29, 2016 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“You’re gone, aren’t you, Pete?” I ask my beloved dog who now stares up at me without recognition. His breathing is fast and deep. There are flecks of blood around his mouth. I’ve been coughing up blood, too. So has every surviving member of the human race, I imagine. I caress Pete and tell him I love him.
I return to the rare and antiquated pen and paper. Computers no longer function reliably. It’s questionable whether my record will physically survive. And in the unlikely event it does, who will remain to read it? I resume writing nonetheless:
I wonder if Joseph Weishan is still alive. If he is, what could we do to him? Imprisonment? Torture? Execution? What punishment could balance the scales of justice in retribution for the ultimate crime? If there were still judges and juries and courts, what penalty would they impose for the first, last, and only case of cosmicide, the killing of the universe?
It was on January 18, 2271 that Joseph Weishan murdered his parents nearly two years before he was born. He’d used the equipment at the Temporal Studies Institute in Indianapolis to travel back and commit his crime, reappearing in the present a moment later before leaving the Institute and eluding the authorities.
Initially, the effects from this flagrant violation of causality were more curious than alarming. Joseph Weishan’s parents were found in their home very much alive and well. But fifteen miles away, the graves of the Weishans complete with headstones documenting the date of their demise were discovered in a local cemetery. The bodies were exhumed and subjected to forensic analysis including DNA testing. The cadavers were the younger deceased bodies of the very same man and woman who were still alive.
The Weishans themselves reported confusing memories, recalling the lethal attack by the man who their son came to resemble as he aged, but inexplicably also remembering their lives continuing uneventfully despite their having been “killed”.
In the weeks that followed, as the world’s scientists puzzled over the effects of the temporal paradox, astronomers and astrophysicists witnessed the stellar spectra change. Every observable star including the Sun showed an inexplicable and unprecedented shift in their absorption line characteristics. At the same time, a global pandemic developed. All living organisms on Earth from humans down to bacteria began to show cellular deterioration. Medical science had neither an explanation nor a cure.
Eventually, scientists recognized what was happening: The physical constants of the universe had subtly changed. The speed of light is now very slightly faster than it had been prior to Joseph Weishan’s parricide. The weak nuclear force has become infinitesimally stronger. Chemistry — including biochemistry — doesn’t work quite the way it did. Reality itself has been broken.
I suddenly find myself on the floor. My muscles ache and I have apparently urinated on myself. Tonic-clonic seizure. Late stage of the disease. The human central nervous system wasn’t designed for this revised universe. Pete lies next to me, dead.
A final thought occurs to me: Fermi’s paradox. Why are there no signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life in the universe? Where is everybody? Could it be that when a civilization becomes advanced enough for time travel, someone causes a temporal paradox and makes the universe hostile to that type of life? Are we perhaps just the latest species to paradox itself out of existence? Darkness and silence are the only answers I receive.
by Julian Miles | Apr 28, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Detective Narda looked about the scene in horror. Some of the colours of blood on the walls and ceiling he didn’t have a name for. A couple weren’t even in his visible spectrum – his forensic scanner added them to his augmented vision as blue dots or green stripes. The whole place smelled like month-old dairy products sprayed over a charnel burn.
He turned to Detective Cummins: “How often are people killed around here?”
Cummins looked up from his magnifier: “Usually takes a couple of dozen times, unless you’re thorough.”
Narda sighed. High-tech supercultures were a nightmare. Give him a backwater planet with neo-cowboys and proto-cows any month of the calendar. He looked about again. Actually, right now, he’d even settle for a mining world with shovel-handed Blinktrolls and their daily dishonour duels.
“Okay, Cummins, what are the variants?”
“We start with the original core person, born of uterine female from an egg fertilised by something accredited as eighty percent or better human analogue. That person, upon achieving notoriety, will take steps to ensure their continuance, over and above any steps their doting parental units may have. To that end, we have babyclones, kidclones, teenclones, and – rarely – adultclones. Then we can add at least half a dozen virtual images, especially if the original is a tycoon of some kind. Now, if the virtuals have been dimensioned, they are full entities in their own right. Then we have back-projection, where virtual images are flashed onto mindless organclones, or holoclones, where a dimensioned virtual has had a body grown from original stem cells.”
“That’s a lot of persons.”
“I’m not finished. Many wealthy folk like to travel, and to get the full sensation, they have bodies for each environment, so they can experience each one in-the-skin. Of course, skinjobs are meant to be extinguished at the end of a cruise, after the person has flashed back to their core body. But some get out, through malice or negligence. Then we can add the clones from stolen DNA for celebrity sex-dens – which is narcissistic in the extreme or straight-up too-far-gone in the fandom stakes.”
“Paying to have sex with a copy of your favourite star?”
“Or paying to have sex with yourself, a transgendered version of yourself, or just being there to let your fans have at you without them knowing they’re getting the real deal. It’s a whole sick snark and I, for one, will never sleep properly again.”
Narda visibly shuddered: “Definitely too far over the edge. Was that what happened here?”
Cummins shrugged: “There may have been some escaped sexclones, but what we have here is, as far as we can detect, every person of Clutha Moreno.”
“The gang boss?”
“The tentacle-eared overlord of the Cozria Nila himselves.”
“How many?”
“Best guess: seventy-two.”
“Paranoid, wasn’t he?”
“A bit. But a lot of these were not ‘official’ persons. Rival gangs, pretenders, vengeful ex-partners, the list is long and ultimately irrelevant. It would seem that Clutha’s DNA included obsessive-compulsive greed. So when it came out that he was coming here to transfer his core image to a new person, every one of the would-be usurpers turned up to take his place.”
“What was waiting?”
“Magtoran Eradicator.”
“The DNA sniffing assassins exist?”
“Actually, one does. He’s a licensed killer and a good friend of law agencies in these parts.”
“Does he have a contact point?”
“Known only to Planetary Governors. It’s safer, what with his thousand-year lifespan.”
“Safer?”
Cummins gestured to the carnage: “With the enemies he’s accrued, he doesn’t do unexpected. He will kill first and apologise to your relatives if appropriate.”
