Final Effect

Author : Desmond Hussey

Dr. Chow Ming Fu and his cat Schrödinger are the only inhabitants of the titanic supercollider surrounding Canis Majoris like a ring. With a diameter of over 4.5 billion kilometers, the supercollider harnesses the gravity of the massive sun, spinning quantum particles to velocities approaching 99.999% light speed. It’s here that Dr. Fu hopes to unlock the secrets of faster than light travel.

Tinkering with a hypercoil, Dr. Fu hums thoughtfully to himself, while Schrödinger, a tiger stripped, orange tomcat lounges on a nearby consol. A small, diode bejeweled collar adorns his neck.

Making routine passes of the labratory is a Robo-Vac. Contained within its super dense Diurelium casing is a miniature Black Hole, devouring dust, bits of discarded waste and cat hair, dutifully maintaining hermetic cleanliness within the station.

“Pass me the laser coupler, please.” The doctor asks, head buried in condenser wires.

“Certainly, Doktor.” Schrödinger replies. The collar’s microphone translates the feline’s vocal purrs with a faint Austrian accent. With a twitch of an eye, the coupler lifts out of the tool box, levitates gently through the air and rests lightly in the palm of Dr. Fu’s outstretched hand.

“Are you certain that flooding the Boson Stabilizer with Tachyons will work, Doktor?” The cat begins casually cleaning its paw.

“I’ve no idea what’ll happen, to be honest, Schrödinger. No idea at all. There. That should do it.” Dr. Fu extracts his oversized head from the mass of cables. Multi-optics goggles bulge absurdly over his eyes. “We’ve been unable to stabilize enough Bosons to do anything productive for over five hundred years. They are so short lived and difficult to preserve. My theory is that the Tachyons, which are moving backwards through space/time, will –“

“- will extend the life of the Bosons by slowing the temporal flow within the stabilizer.”

“Exactly!”

“Are you worried that a build up of Bosons might neutralize the Higgs Field Matrix, Doktor?”

“Nonsense!”

“Right then. What are we waiting for?”

Dr. Fu launches into a complicated sequence of calculations and calibrations, activating the supercollider and accelerating quantum particles along their sixteen quintillion kilometer journey around the sun to truly astronomical speeds. Schrödinger carefully monitors the flow of Tachyons while eating a tin of Nep-tuna (TM).

The Robo-Vac vibrates discreetly in the corner.

“It’s working!” Dr. Fu chortles happily. “The reservoir is filling with captured Bosons. They aren’t decaying at all!”

“Doktor, The Higgs Field Matrix is in chaotic flux. Perhaps we should stop.”

“Nonsense!”

There is a hollow thunk behind them as the Robo-Vac and it’s Black Hole “falls” into the Boson Reservoir, beginning an instantaneous and irreversible chain reaction. Cat and man simultaneously rotate their heads, peering awestruck into the new gaping hole in the wall. A red light begins blinking on the consol. Schrödinger is the first to react.

“I’m getting strange readings from Big Dog. It’s rapidly losing mass.”

“Did you say, ‘losing mass’?”

“Yes, Doktor.”

They look at each other, gobsmaked, as claxons scream. They feel the sudden absence of gravity.

“Doktor?”

“Yes?”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Yes.”

“Ooop –“

Underlying the entire Universe like an intricate rug is the Higgs Boson Field, providing mass for particles, without which there would be no particle interactions, no matter, no life, just pure, impotent energy. As the microscopic Black Hole collapses into the unnatural accumulation of Bosons trapped in their temporal prison, the proverbial rug is pulled. Faster than the speed of light, the Higgs Boson Field collapses, removing mass from all of creation, instantly disintegrating the entirety of material existence.

Luckily, nature abhors a vacuum.

 

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Skyhook Waypoint

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Terry abandoned the powerbike at the bridge a few hundred meters before the checkpoint, running it off the road, down the embankment and parking tight against the understructure before he waded into the river.

He swam across, letting the current take him downstream towards the woods where he exited the icy water, discarded his neoprene coverall and closed the distance to the fence on foot.

Beyond the chainlink the thin tether of the skyhook was barely visible against the moonless sky, just a tear in the blackness of his peripheral vision.

The fence, wired as it was, posed only a momentary barrier. Terry lit a monofibre blade and divided one post neatly in two to the ground before spreading the post halves, fencing still intact and live, into a large enough V for him to step through.

He had just enough time to reach the outer wall of the storage facility before he heard the sirens, saw bright blue and red light strobing against the darkness up the road. He watched for a moment, working back the distance in his head as he palmed a phone from his front pocket and dialed. There was a chirp which he answered with a time in seconds, and an acknowledgement chirp. He pocketed the phone again and sliced a set of door hinges off to slip inside the facility.

Terry moved quickly in the near darkness from memory, the storage facility was mostly empty now as the cargo had been moved into the skyhook car itself. Outside, as the first cars hit the bridge the timer on the powerbike expired, igniting several kilos of explosive and tearing the bridge off at its expansion joint, twisting steel and shattering concrete and asphalt. The lead vehicle skidded onto the bridge engulfed in flames, another hit the endwall driving blind into the flash while a third left the road and plunged into the river.

Terry felt the impact from inside and stepped up his pace.

He wound through the layers of structure until he could see the elevator car in the courtyard idling, its maglev engaged and floating it centimeters above its launch pad. The car would be fully loaded and locked up tight. There was no chance of him getting inside, and in a matter of minutes it would leave and there’d be no way out.

He ran, knowing there was little time and sure that by now his pursuers would have crossed the bridge to hunt with amplified vigor.

To his right was the maintenance trailer, and inside he tore through lockers and cabinets until he found the pressure suits required to operate on the skyhook car outside Earth’s atmosphere.

He pulled on a suit, sealed the helmet and shouldered a jet pack before locking on the gloves. Once back outside the scene took on an eerie silence. Behind him he knew were thundering feet, and ahead the rumbling readiness of several tonnes of cargo ready to be slung up the tether beyond geosynchronous orbit to the station above. Terry could only hear his breathing, and the pounding of his heart.

He jogged as quickly as the suit would allow towards the car, lumbered up the gantry and jumped the short distance to the capsule top where he climbed up to its gentle sloping dome and draped himself across it, spread eagled to wait.

The lift started slowly at first, then built to a speed at which Terry felt his bones would crush. He hovered near unconsciousness until mercifully the force of the Earth began to recede, and the capsule slowed for the last half of its journey to Skyhook Station above.

On the ground his pursuers were already alerting the sentries in orbit. They had him, they were sure.

As the capsule slowed, Terry forced himself to his feet and turned his face towards the star flecked blackness above.

Above the station, in a higher orbit was a comforting black silhouette, and it was to this Terry aimed as he fired the jetpack and accelerated away from the skyhook and Earth towards freedom.

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Graviton Tsunami

Author : Patricia Stewart

The patrol ship SS Rakki was approaching Moonbase Delta when the science officer announced, “Captain, I’m picking up an emergency distress signal from the Ultragravity Research Station orbiting Jupiter.”
“Are they requesting assistance?” asked the captain. “Surely they know that there are much closer ships patrolling the outer solar system.”
“Negative, sir. It’s a system wide broadcast. They are reporting a runaway cascade failure in their graviton stress–energy tensor experiment. They are warning everybody in the solar system that if they can’t contain the breach, it may initiate a graviton tsunami.”
“A graviton tsunami?”
“Yes, sir. Concentric ripples in the curvature of spacetime. Somewhat analogous to the waves created by dropping a stone into a pond. Only, much, much larger, and they spread outward at the speed of light.”
“If that occurs, Commander, what can we expect?”
“That depends, sir. For example…” Just then, overwhelming nausea caused the bridge crew to double over, a few collapsed into unconsciousness.
Fighting to regain his composure, the captain crawled back into his command chair. “Report,” he ordered.
“I suspect that was the graviton tsunami, sir,” replied the science officer. “Evidently, the breach occurred shortly after they transmitted their warning.”
“That was milder than I expected,” remarked the captain. “Shouldn’t there have been more damage?”
“As I was about to explain, Captain, the effect is proportional to mass. The mass of our ship is only eight million kilograms. The tsunami passed around us like an earth-based tidal wave would pass around a fish in mid-ocean. But the gravity well of a large mass would magnify the effect like a funnel shaped harbor. Ensign Baker, put Jupiter on the main viewer.”
When Jupiter appeared on the screen, it was more than a thousand times brighter than Sirius. The gravity wave had apparently initiated hydrogen fusion in its core. “Oh my God,” exclaimed the captain, “Put the Earth on the main viewer.” Seconds later, the night side of Earth was awash in the glow of the nuclear Jupiter, but no artificial lights dotted its surface. Fearing the worst, the captain turned to his communications officer, “Lieutenant Albright, see if you can raise Central Command. Tell them we are prepared to assist, and ask for instructions.” Turning back to his science officer “How bad do you think it is Commander? Do you think there are survivors down there?”
Commander Roberts had turned ashen gray, his eyes filled with hopelessness. “Perhaps, sir, but only for another fifteen minutes, or so.”
“Explain,” snapped the captain after the cryptic reply.
“The graviton wave is traveling at the speed of light, sir. Although we just saw Jupiter become a protostar, it actually happened more than forty minutes ago. We didn’t know about it until its light finally reached us.”
“Your point, Commander?”
“Eight point three minutes after the wave hit Earth, it will reach the sun, the largest gravity well in the solar system. I suspect, sir, that eight point three minutes after that, we’ll see the sun go nova.”

 

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Hard Time

Author : Bob Newbell

“We beat it!” Those were the words my lawyer had said to me right after sentencing. “It” was the death penalty. “Son, you shouldn’t have done this in Texas,” he’d said to me the first time we met. “This” referred to killing a man.

It happened in the middle of July. It was one of the hottest summers on record. There had been a power failure at the office. Power wouldn’t be restored until the following day. Nobody was too broken up about going home early, least of all me. It was about half past one when I pulled into my subdivision. There was a car in my driveway. I immediately recognized it as belonging to Jimmy. Jimmy and I had been best friends since elementary school.

I’d felt that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as soon as I saw the car, but I tried to ignore it. Jimmy had come by to see me, I told myself. Probably been here all of two minutes. Wait another minute and he’ll come right back out that front door. Of course, I knew what I would find when I went in the house.

This is where it starts to get blurry. It was a really long time ago, after all. I remember catching Jimmy and my wife in the act. I remember a lot of yelling. I remember the gunshot. I remember the cops cuffing me. The blood on the bed. My wife shaking uncontrollably.

The prosecutor had tried to get the death penalty. Maybe I deserved it. But I had a good lawyer. Maybe too good. He got me life without the possibility of parole. I was 45 years old when I was convicted. I had high blood pressure and high cholesterol and I’d smoked a pack-and-a-half of cigarettes a day since I was 17. My dad had died of a heart attack at 51. A life sentence didn’t seem all that bad.

I’d been in prison for about ten years when the Nanotech Revolution happened. Everything started advancing really quick. Robots, spaceships, all that science fiction stuff the movies and comic books predicted that never happened all became commonplace in just a few years. And everything became really cheap. “Self-replicating molecular assemblers,” they called ’em. Like tiny little robots that could build almost anything from dirt, water, and sunshine. Medicine got real advanced, too.

First they cured diabetes. Didn’t just come up with a better way to treat it, they really cured it. Heart disease, colon cancer, Alzheimer disease. One by one, nanotech cured all man’s ailments. Eventually, they announced they’d found a cure for aging itself. “Cell repair nanobots” and “telomeres” and a bunch of other stuff I never understood. And because all this nanotech medicine was so cheap, everybody was able to get it.

Including prisoners.

I’ve tried to commit suicide four times. They monitor me ’round the clock now. “They” being the machine guards, of course. Guarding prisoners is one of those jobs humans (and transhumans) won’t do.

Nations have risen and fallen around the prison. The Greater American Federated States is the name of the country that Texas belongs to at the moment.

I’ve been locked up for 485 years. They keep saying they’re gonna pass legislation to free us. Or to let us die. They’ve been saying that for almost 300 years. I wish to God that prosecutor had done his job right and got me the death penalty.

 

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Marooned

Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer

It’s been ten years since the Humanis Confederacy swept the Roekuld from the Spiral Arm in a rebellion that no-one thought mankind capable of. In six months we undid the defeats and treacheries of fifty years. Victory was absolute and mercy forgotten.

We. Sadly. My blood is tinged with green and I can read thoughts within eight metres. I am a Rho-Ka-Mismeja, elite of the Absalon Rage, premiere commando of the Roekuld. I trained for five years to join humanity. Underwent six months of irreversible surgery, losing a half metre in height and a digit from each appendage. But the ‘man’ who joined the harvest labourers in Barron, a small town on the frontier world of Fettya, had the rugged features and hefty build that marked the nomads of the mountain ranges. My willingness to work and drink got me accepted, and after the winter I moved to Dellaban, the capital city. Command knew there was something major being planned. I had barely been accepted into the resistance when that something became the end of my race.

I spent a year as a homeless drunk, risking the minimal chance of detection. Only a small group of humans pursued the ‘shadow company’. The rest thought that we only existed in wartime myth. A year later I had become a vagrant when my remaining comrades commandeered an armoured freighter to strike at the heart of the Confederacy. I saw their final broadcast, all vengeful fury and bared teeth. They were blasted to dust and humanity celebrated the end of the Roekuld. I was alone, yet never regretted being too drunk to answer the final call to join them.

Three years later I returned to Barron, welcomed back like a prodigal son. Two years after that I had become the town smithy, with a profitable sideline in unusual jewellery: unusual because it used designs from my disintegrated homeland.

Early one dawning I was staggering home when a thought hit me: “You smell like a hebegraf.”

I spun round too fast and fell in a heap, opening my eyes to see a pair of grey eyes framed in a mass of tawny hair. She raised a hand so I could see one of my bracelets on her wrist.

“Your work made me cry. To see Lethdargil scrollwork again was something I never expected to do.”

I lay there as shock chased the hangover away. The smell emanating from me became all too clear. I smiled. “I remember hebegraf smelling better. Apologies, I thought myself alone.”

“I am Atanel of Palameen.”

Images of that vast, lush tropical delta spotted with small communities came to mind.

“Bushlarl of Lethdargil.”

She smiled. “The mountains bred another metalworker?”

“Family trade. Here I am Bush.”

“Atane.”

While I washed, she made breakfast and we spun to each other, the affinity of thought sharing healing us in places we had thought unreachable.

“I was wallowing when the last call came. I was the only one to refuse and had to waste half a year out of my mind so they could not find me. Then I wandered until I saw your bracelet. That was a year ago.”

She appeared in the doorway, mugs of steaming broth in hand and a faint smile on her face. “Shall I be your sister or first love?”

“First love, please. The drinking was only partly to forget. It also kept Barron’s marriageable women at bay.”

She laughed. I knew then that we could share, finding a refuge in each other’s mind while Barron became a comfortable place to slip unnoticed into extinction.

 

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Reading

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

They stood on level sixteen of the meat building, waiting for their order of sharkbeef.

This vat boutique specialized in hybrid delicacies and Kay was hosting a birthday dinner party tonight. The invites and accepts scrolled across her vision as she looked down at her son. The store prided itself on having curious antique items for the customers to handle while they waited. He was engrossed in something.

“What are these?” posted Adam. He was six years old today. “They look ancient. What were they used for? They look heavy enough to be weapons.” He turned it over in his hands while his pupils irised wide, scanning through several spectra and mags to see if there was something deceptively complex under the surface.

There wasn’t. He was looking at a book. He’d never seen one before. He had yottabytes of information in his cranial cavity just like everyone else but like his parents always said “It’s about asking, not having.” He had perfectly decent search engines installed but like most children, he just wasn’t that curious about the past.

“It’s a book.” Kay said. “It’s how humans used to record information when we stored it externally. Sort of like a baby internet. You remember that from your history downloads?”

“Yes.” Adam lied. He never paid attention to his school feeds. There were so many other cool things happening with his friend’s challenges in the socials. Pretty Renee from crosstag was finally paying attention to his scores.

“I know you haven’t.” she said with a sigh. She remembered being so curious at his age and wondered why he wasn’t. She took the book and opened it. The title had rubbed off but she recorded the first few lines into her eyes. The results fluttered through. No exact matches. Must have been a small publishing run with little to no success. Looked like a collection of poetry. She scanned it in to the general knowledge Linksys, tagging ownership and viewing rights to see if there were any challenges. There weren’t. It must have been quite obscure.

“It was a painfully laborious process and in real-world costs, entire forests were given over to these methods. Businesses made money off of them. Government sponsored storage facilities kept entire buildings full of them.” She searched. “Ah. Libraries, they were called. Like our file systems.”

Adam was already bored. He hated shopping with his mother.

She went on. “It’s a form of meditation in some of the enclaves to read them. Taking in information that slowly is like eating a great meal over the course of days. Flashing a book in seconds still gives you the same comprehension but it’s not the same. Actually reading, using your meat mind, well, some of them say they feel connected to our ancestors by reading this way.”

She had to admit to herself that it sounded boring. But she’d never tried it. She turned it over in her hands like a curious animal inspecting a possible trap.

The shopkeeper came over with the sharkbeef. “Here you go, Miss. Creds received. Ah, I see you’ve found something interesting.” He said, friendly eyebrows waggling at the book.

“Thank you Jake. How much for this, uh, book?” she asked.

“Take it.” Jake replied. “Bring it back if you don’t like it.”

Adam sighed theatrically. Kay tucked the book into her bag.

“Okay, let’s go, kiddo. Your birthday dinner awaits. Thanks, Jake!” she said.

Tonight she would read in the bath like her grandmothers did. She was looking forward to it.

 

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