by submission | Aug 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
The twin, muscled eunuchs shove the girl to the feet of Tar Marrella, Crèche mother. The remaining forty-seven crèche citizens stand in a rough circle surrounding them. All but the girl wear pale, toga-like robes and watch impassively, dull eyed and slack jawed. The girl’s dirt smeared clothes are obviously Old World relics; black pants, a stained, white t-shirt and a filthy denim jacket, the likes of which haven’t been seen for over eight hundred years. A wild mass of auburn hair coils about her head.
“We found this one in the Restricted Zone,” says one of the eunuchs. “Near the old city,” finishes the other.
Tar Marrella, tsks disapprovingly. She lifts the girl’s freckled chin with her finger carefully, as if the feral girl might suddenly bite.
“Who are you?”
The girl’s emerald eyes blaze with rebellion.
“What Crèche are you from, child?”
No response.
“What were you doing in the Restricted Zone? Collecting these?” Marrella gestures dismissively at the girl’s clothes. “Every child knows it’s against the Law to enter the Forbidden Zone, or to possess artifacts from the Age of Death. Why awaken memories we have all tried so hard to forget?”
The girl remains obstinate.
“Stubborn, are we? Very well. There are other means of getting the answers I seek.” Tar Marrella speaks without anger, or malice. “But first, let us remove that defiled clothing. Even after all these years, Death clings to it. The smell offends me.”
Susurrations of agreement come from the crowd as the two eunuchs, despite her ineffectual struggling, strip her bare and thrust her into the center of the ring of watchers.
The gathering grows deathly quite. All stare in disbelief.
The girl stands naked and defiant, tangled hair cascading over her freckled shoulders to drape over the gentle mound of her breasts. Ribs push against her taught, pale skin. Her strong, lean legs brace for action. Her hands clench into fists.
It’s not her nakedness that has stilled the masses. All gawk at her navel, the tight little whirlpool of skin just above her tangle of ruddy pubic hair.
A woman’s horrified scream breaks the silence and the crowd erupts into frightened banter.
“Freeborn!” someone yells.
Tar Marrella circles the profane girl as if she was a poisonous viper and raises her voice above the panic.
“It’s Blasphemy to be born of the flesh, a Sin to live in the shadow of our ancestors, whose greed and lust nearly destroyed the world so long ago. We, the Children of the Crèche have lived harmoniously for a thousand years! Born in the Crèche! Dieing in the Crèche! Reborn again! This has been our way. Five hundred thousand of the purest were chosen. Only five hundred thousand can there be. This is the Law! Our wise forefathers knew the only escape from sin was through Clone Resurrection. There can be no Freeborn to taint our perfection. Death to the Lawbreakers!”
The murderous horde echoes the verdict and closes in, tightening like a sphincter.
The girl’s green eyes flash. She inhales deeply, a furrow of concentration creasing her brow. She waits patiently for the oppressive mass to condense, for the first tentative probing fingers of her dull witted attackers.
When all are within range, she retaliates.
Her short ranged, but powerful psychic assault reduces the entire mob into a quivering, spastic mass. Their weak minds, too old and frail, their intellect spread too thinly over a thousand years of revolving resurrections are easily dominated by her own.
The naked girl looms over the epileptic form of Tar Marrella.
“Evolve or die, bitch.”
by Julian Miles | Aug 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
My father always told me that there was a thin line between bravery and stupidity. Just like genius and insanity, it frequently comes down to time, place, outcome and who’s doing the judging.
Right now, I don’t need to check with any judges. This is stupid and insane. I am hanging, angled head down, from a kilometre length line woven from graphene, carbon nanotubes and synthetic spider silk. I’m naked under the sightbender bodysuit and the anchor points at my waist, knees and shoulders have been carefully needle-pointed through the suit and superglued to my skin, which has Kevlar weave bandages reinforcing those bits. Did I mention the stealth gel between skin and suit? I don’t sweat or anything right now and will die in about forty minutes if I’m not hosed down.
All the high-end sneakery is to place me above the target without being detected by some very thorough and murderous security. This piece of lunacy was suggested by yours truly in a moment of drunken insight a week ago. Well, what I actually said was: “We need a flying chimp with a spear to pop that dome.”
All I have to do now is use the carbon fibre composite bow to shoot the molecular-point diamond-tipped arrow through the forty metre diameter dome a hundred and twenty metres below gently swaying me.
The Thodmuk come from a deep subterranean culture and are methane breathers. After their initial assault, they adapted the Purbright mine complex as it has the right composition and depth to contain a pressurised methane atmosphere. This one arrow could change the course of history.
Ignoring the pains and the view, I nock and draw smoothly to my cheek in one movement as my father taught me. Relax, sway, aim, breathe in, breathe out, sway, breathe in, breathe half out, hold, sway, release –
*
I wake up a month later after they transfer me from the immersive healing vat to the silken hammock. All I remember is being a comet, hurtling through the sky, leaving a trail of incandescent me.
They tell me that’s not delirium. When I shot the dome, it ruptured savagely, and ripped some power conduits. Sparks and high pressure combustible gas resulted in a plume of fire jetting a kilometre into the sky.
I was a hundred and twenty metres up, remember? The plume blew me away. To the limits of my line, anyway. Which snapped. Fortunately I was glued to it, so the western winch anchor defined the radius of my arc, which terminated in a lake just under half a kilometre away. The hard water effect should have killed me, except I was completely relaxed: unconscious from the seventy percent burns inflicted by the flammable stealth gel under my only slightly flame retardant suit. I’m going to be in agony for weeks, but if the line had held I’d be a crispy speck dangling over the smoking crater where the Thodmuk used to live.
I’m going to be decorated for bravery when I have skin all over. The bloke who came up with the plan is being hailed as a genius.
Like I said. Results and judging. Because my opinion of him and the Thodmuk opinion of me are a lot less complimentary.
by Clint Wilson | Aug 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
“Well let’s see now Mr. Williams, you have your battery charged for over 100,000 hours of usage, plus the suit’s solar absorbers are in good order. Your spots will provide ample light should you land somewhere where it’s night. Of course on your right forearm is your matter analysis spectrometer so you can tell what things will be poisonous or edible. Your medi-pack is fully stocked and of course functional.”
“And my suicide pill?”
The little man in the white lab suit patted the prisoner’s breast pocket. “Don’t you worry young man, we wouldn’t let you go without that. Just because you’re a mass murderer, we’re not inhumane!”
“I told you I’m innocent.”
“Sure Mr. Williams, of course you are.” With a nod toward the two huge guards the test subject was escorted toward and then shoved roughly into the chamber. There was a hiss of steam as the heavy door bolts slid into place.
Suddenly Williams was terrified. “Wait, don’t do it yet… I’ve changed my mind!”
The little man laughed, as did the giant guards. “Changed your mind? You want lethal injection instead of becoming a hero to your race? Please Mr. Williams. The contract is signed, so it doesn’t matter anyway.”
Williams’s shoulders slumped in resignation. “So, how long will I be able to talk to you?”
“After you land the wormhole starts to close almost immediately. We probably have less than a minute, so I need you to describe everything to me as quickly as possible.”
“Then that’ll be it? I’m on my own after that?”
“Yes Mr. Williams. You’ll be free to live your life however you must, wherever in the universe you are.”
Inside the chamber the prisoner was breathing hard and sweating bullets.
The little man typed in a command at his console and there was a hum as the fractal probe began to pick through the trillions of miniscule holes in the froth of the space-time continuum. The program was quick, finding hundreds of distant planets every second, casting aside rejected discoveries as it went.
Too hot, too cold, too much gravity, no magnetic field, inadequate atmosphere, and on it went. Suddenly there was a soft chime. The analysis came up on the display. “Ah it looks like we have our winner; quite nice indeed. Goodbye and good luck Mr. Williams.” He typed in the launch code.
Williams realized that his eyes had been closed. Suddenly he felt a cool breeze on his face and so he hazarded a small glance. In a second his eyes were wide open and his mouth was hanging agape.
“Mr. Williams!” The voice was crackling in his earpiece. “What do you see?”
He answered dreamily. “Tell me again why you can’t find this place a second time?”
“We don’t have time for that. Please, tell me what you see!”
“Not until you tell me why no one else will ever come here.”
“Oh for god sake… because wormholes are countless and always on the move. Trying to find you after this would be like trying to find a microscopic needle in a cosmic haystack. Now tell me what you see!”
Again he answered dreamily. “I’m glad nobody else will ever come here… we’d just ruin this place.”
“Mr. Williams… we’re almost out of time!”
“Wrong. I’ve got all the time in this world.”
He tore out the earpiece and began to walk toward the greenest mountains he’d ever seen. He wanted to drink from the azure pools beneath those mile high waterfalls. Above him a pink and red ringed planet hung between two warm yellow suns.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“During the mission, your memories are yours. After the mission, they belong to the military.”
The sergeant had droned on at the beginning of this op. It was a standard briefing. I remember seven similar briefings followed by months of blank space in my head. Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a soldier.
We were on a stealth run in Tehran. The radioactive crucible that used to be Qom was a warning shot but they hadn’t listened. Or rather, they hadn’t aimed their warheads away from the east coast of the states.
Our non-reflective gear made us into shadows on the night floor, oil on the city streets while the scared civilians stayed locked inside their houses, praying. We made our way to what our intel told us was the squawk box. It was our job to slit the throats of the button-pushers in the underground missile lobby quietly.
It was real wet work. Proper analogue. None of this remote-control warfare. I was happy to be a part of it.
Because of the memory wipes, none of us knew if we’d worked with anyone on the team before. I knew some of the other players from enjoying each other’s company here and there on R&R and from declassified training but for all I knew, we’d either never been on a mission together before or we’d saved each other’s lives a bunch of times in past missions. It took a special kind of mind to roll with that.
The speakers above us blared the prayer. That meant it was 4:28 in the morning. There was rustling from all of the shuttered apartments around us as people woke, knelt and prayed. I felt powerful, knowing that I was an instrument of what they were afraid of.
We edged up near the fence of our target building. It was a broadcast station set up to look like a corner store. Using the prayer as cover, the six of us slid bonelessly up the wall and through the windows. A ganked keycard allowed us to bypass the keypad into the stairwell and ghost down the stairs to the sub basement.
The sweating, nervous men were looking at the radar screens for any form of airspace incursion. The feeling of tension in the room made me smile.
I looked left and right at our team and nodded.
Thirty seconds later, we were the only living things in the room and no alarm had been raised.
The army had been kind to me. It had augmented my entire body and gave me special abilities. I’d seen parts of the world I’d always wanted to see in between missions. And the memory wipes meant I never had any lasting psychological damage from the horrors I inflicted on people or war crimes I witnessed. It was a pretty sweet deal. Plus no interrogation could work on what I couldn’t remember.
We put the looper into the computer system and the encrypted signal seamlessly slotted in, continuing to let our target know that everything was okay on this end. All intel correct. All systems green.
I pushed the squirt on my arm to tell beta team that we were a go. Then everything went black.
…
I wake up in the barracks. It’s a beautiful day outside. I check the calendar. I’m missing six days. I hope the operation went well. The news is saying that the nuclear standoff is over. I hope I had something to do with it.
by submission | Aug 12, 2012 | Story |
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.
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 11, 2012 | Story |
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.
