by submission | May 12, 2013 | Story |
Author : David Stevenson
“Come in, come in. Have a seat. Mind the filing cabinet. You wanted to speak to me?”
“It’s about my black hole paper.”
“Remind me.”
“Well, In theory, I have a way to generate black holes here, in the lab.”
“Really? Do we have room for massive degenerate stars? Might have to get rid of the filing cabinet!”
“No, that’s exactly the point. We’re not talking about black holes formed from collapsing stars; I believe that I can create a stabilisation field which means we can use essentially arbitrary mass. You could have one weighing a kilogram and carry it around in a box. The heaviest part of it would by my apparatus.”
“Don’t black holes give off all sorts of radiation? That’s not a problem?”
“Again, my stabilisation field. If we didn’t stop the radiation the black hole would evaporate to nothing. We can stop it radiating which means not only that it’s safe to handle, but it maintains its mass.”
“Forgive my ignorance, but what stops it just falling through the bottom of your box?”
“It’s electrically charged, so we can manoeuvre it.”
“And again, I’m sorry to have to ask this, but what on earth would we do with a little black hole in a box?
“What could we do with it? Why the opportunities for research would be practically unlimited!”
“I thought you would say that. Just to remind you: this is a business. We make things. One of the things we make is money. How does this thing make money?”
“If you won’t build it then there are plenty who will once I’ve published. Some things are more important than money!”
“Yes, I was afraid you would say that. Calm down and listen to me. I have some good news for you. Our engineers agreed with you. We could build this device. In fact we already have built this device. That was the easy part. Turns out that using it to make money wasn’t too difficult either. This business, like many others, has a lot of secrets. We can shred our paper and hard drives, but there are agencies out there who will put all the pieces back together. However, a small black hole takes care of this problem. Any information we put into it ceases to exist. It’s theoretically impossible to recover any information. That sort of service is worth money.”
“You’re planning on using my creation as a glorified paper shredder?”
“Firstly, it’s not your creation, it’s my company’s creation. And secondly, it can destroy a lot more than paper. That sort of service is worth even more money.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Ah, you theoretical chaps always need it spelled out. Bodies. You put bodies in, and you get money out, metaphorically speaking. We figure that the government will pay quite highly for that sort of service.”
“I won’t be any part of this!”
“Do you want to see it?”
“What?”
“Do you want to see the prototype? Just step over there and open the drawer on the cabinet. That’s the one. You’ll notice a bit of a blue glow.”
“FOOMF!”
“You didn’t notice me press this switch, or the electromagnets which moved the microscopic black hole right in the middle of your centre of mass. Of course, it wouldn’t have been possible for you to have noticed the next bit, where we released the shields for a nanosecond and all 80kg of your body was sucked over the event horizon, making a rather impressive noise, but also hurting my ears. And you can’t hear me talking to myself, so I’ll stop.”
by submission | May 11, 2013 | Story |
Author : K Esta
Time travel is impossible. Or so Charlie had always been taught to believe.
He stood shivering in the darkness of the November morning, his breath creating puffs reminiscent of his long-past smoking days. Worrying about cancer seemed so trivial now.
His leather gloves squeaked as he scrunched his hands inside them to warm his fingertips against his palms. Looking across the playground, motionless under a layer of frost, he ached to be home in bed curled up under the covers.
Watching from the shadows, Charlie saw the earlier version of himself arrive. The slightly-younger Charlie walked hesitantly passed the swing set, the slide, and the jungle gym to the archway sitting innocuously beside the perimeter fence. He strolled around it, getting a good look from all angles, before stopping to run his hand over the crumbling brick surface.
Charlie remembered being that man. The awe he’d felt from the knowledge of the structure’s history and how it had become linked to an infinite mass in subspace. He recalled the butterflies in his stomach during that first step through.
He knew instantly that he would be successful, for he caught a glimpse of a figure, his future self, on the other side looking back at him. The arch began to spin around him, first slowly, then faster and faster, dragging space-time with it like a swirl of chocolate being stirred into a bowl of cream.
With a deep breath and another step, he emerged over the threshold just in time to turn and watch his previous self step through and disappear. He actually giggled.
A few hours later, he would learn the consequences of what he’d done. Anna. Not just Anna, but every sign of her. Their apartment had been transformed from a cozy home to a stark bachelor pad.
This was Charlie’s fourth attempt to undo the damage. He had first tried to talk his previous self out of the trip, but hearing from his own future had caused the earlier Charlie to back away in alarm, and unwittingly stumble into the arch.
Sabotaging his research, even shooting his younger self in the back of the head, every tactic Charlie tried to stop that first foolish mistake was similarly thwarted. And each trip back had taken a casualty. His little brother, his best friend, his mother, they were all gone now.
And here he was, trying again, daring to believe it could be different this time. He watched the second Charlie arrive and approach the first. Then another Charlie appeared, pulling out a gun. He took careful aim and fired.
Charlie remembered this moment also. He’d intended to hit the first Charlie, but the pistol’s kick had been stronger than expected. He’d grazed the second Charlie’s ear instead.
As the first Charlie staggered backwards toward the arch, the second clutched his searing ear, and the third tried to line up for what would be another failed shot. This was his chance.
Charlie rushed them. Grabbing the coats of Charlies two and three, one with each hand, he pulled them forward—fighting repulsion from the sensation of sticky blood congealing on the injured Charlie’s sleeve. The three of them plowed into the first Charlie and they all crossed the threshold together.
The arch shuddered in protest, but began to rotate as it had before. The universe contorted, and Charlie’s memories fogged. It felt different this time; his body was consumed by prickling snaps of energy. The figures surrounding him blurred and vanished. Finally, the arch became still.
No one emerged. Time travel is impossible.
by submission | May 10, 2013 | Story |
Author : Morrow Brady
They legalised suicide to combat over-population but the widespread stench of decay demanded a more ritualised approach.
This emerged as a celebration of a life lived too long and metastasised into the suicide concerts.
In the summer of 2212, the festival of life was performed in an open ended quarry high on a mountain, overlooking a modern metropolis. The featuring artist was K from Underworld, singing his 9:47 remix of the anthemic track, Pearl’s Girl.
Two centuries of performance had trashed K’s body. Today, his brain and vocal chords resided in a customised maxiLED DanceBot which linked to an eclectic biomechanical orchestra. K walked on, red anodised arms to the sky, gradating LEDs rolling up his body and the crowd went mental.
Within the three sided granite enclosure, thousands of Enders grooved to a warming baseline that throbbed down from the musician’s platforms installed like rice paddies either side of the stage. The attending wake stilled to merge with friends and lovers for a solemn final hug.
From silence, the hardened wind of Pearl’s Girl wobbled slowly to life. Vibrating tones grew alongside repetitive vocals and when the hard breakbeats slammed into force, the front eight rows of Enders were thrown backwards. Distorted burbles and gurgles echoed off the blue lit rock wall faces as K started a hallucinatory swim dance across the undulating stage. Clinical sound layers began to build and light strobed like artillery fire, frightening loose debris from the quarry walls.
K in full control, coated aural complexity into the frenzy while maintaining a flurry of dance moves that physically embodied a storyline of pure emotion. In reaction, the mile long sweating sea of Enders rhythmically marched motionless away from the city’s shimmering lights in rolling waves as white dust from the raving energy filled the quarry like a milk bath.
Behind K, a townhouse row of hand sized LED panels, hinged and pumped, creating glistening sequinned serpentine forms. Blood red smart mist spiralled from the panels, as each panel faceted to create K’s face streaming consciousness.
“and old man Einstein crazy in his attic. crazy crazy crazy crazy…..”
K pulled inhuman dance manoeuvres, releasing blinding blue light from fissures in his torso as he hovered inches above the floor. His pitch perfect verse synchronised with an ellipsoid shaped white laser that beamed out from his voice box and launched to the heavens.
Slowly the backdrop faded to an avalanche of light distorted by its own sound energy and flanked by fluorescent yellow robed choirs that washed the fervent dance floor in angelic harmonies. Amongst them, chrome search lights emerged to sweep the grinding tribe as the sun finally slipped below the horizon.
The song descended into a pit of streaming synth tones, peppered with skin pricking breakbeats, offering a glimpse of self reflection before the final push.
No one dared stop.
Synchronised orb-lights appeared from mist above centre stage forming a truck sized glowing sphere that expanded and contracted to the beat. These flickered to merge into iridescent squids that throbbed around K.
Shuffling, spinning and smiling, K began to rise atop a gyroscopic crystalline entity. The backdrop faded to grey as the baseline echoed to silence. K thrust his arms to the night sky and imploded in light, releasing shadowy spectral clouds that descended to sweep the audience of life.
Listeners cried pain-free blood.
The final dancer dropped.
The sweaty corpses lay with locked smiles from ear to ear.
The harvesters commenced preparations for day nine, as Justin Bieberbot cried a fearful tear for his impending finale.
by submission | May 9, 2013 | Story
Author : Alex Skryl
“Computer, report!” yelled the Captain.
“Sir, all primary systems are online but the star orientations do not match anything in my database.”
“What was our entry confidence?”
“It was six nines, sir.”
Captain Nurbek swallowed hard, “Show me the trajectory map.”
It looked like a water droplet in zero-g, slowly morphing while the computer was busy plotting all the possible routes the ship may have taken. Nurbek was temporarily entranced by it's beautiful complexity.
Lost in thought, he recalled the great men of the past. Men who believed in a deterministic universe, where one could predict the future by simply knowing enough about the present. It was an idea that was hopelessly wrong, yet perfectly seductive, because it made men feel like they could become gods. But much to Man's dismay, the real gods had other plans.
Space has no shortcuts, he mused. Dreams of determinism died at the hands of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. But would he be any less screwed if the Universe was actually a Laplacian dream? No, it made no difference. Determinism was still susceptible to chaos, the law of nature which was responsible for his current snafu. Chaos is what made the long jumps effectively unpredictable and extremely sensitive to small errors in entry calculations. He simply made a wrong guess in a profession where bad guesses were the worst possible offense.
Six nines. Six fucking nines. He needed at least nine nines for a jump of this magnitude. But he was in the middle of a war zone. Any longer and the ship would have been blown to bits. Would waiting another second really have killed him? He would never know. All he knew was, he would be looking at the familiar starscape of the Virgo Cluster had he just waited. Instead he was here. Somewhere. Nowhere, as far as the computer was concerned. He glanced back at the rotating shape on the screen.
He suddenly remembered his old physics professor running different colored threads through a blob of silly putty.
“Imagine the strings are flight trajectories and the putty is our little cosmos. Where would you need to enter the blob in order to come out with the red string?” asked the professor.
“Where the red string enters,” I replied, not seeing where he was going with this.
“What if you messed up your calcs and entered at the green one next to it?”
“Then you would come out close to your intended destination, where the green one does.”
“Right,” he said, “this is how space travel would work if space was linear. You could make a mistake and still get to where you were going.”
He mashed the putty in his hands for a few seconds, keeping the entry points of the strings untouched.
“Where do the two strings exit now?”
“Far apart,” I said after locating the strings in question.
“So what would happen if you messed up your entry calcs in this case?”
“I'd be totally screwed,” I responded with an air of understanding.
“Good, this is how real space travel works. Except the strings are infinitesimally thin, and your room for error is almost non-existent. The lesson here is, get your calcs right, always! And then maybe well get to have this conversation again some day.”
Nurbek snapped back to reality, finally gathering the courage to ask the lingering question.
“Computer, based on your survey of the cluster, will we make it out of here alive?”
The computer paused for a few seconds, as if to heighten the suspense.
“Unlikely, sir, but I can never be certain.”
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by featured writer | May 8, 2013 | Story
Author : Bob Newbell, Featured Writer
It was the year 3.98 billion, but no one regarded it as such. Sentient beings across the Milky Way knew the date by the Galactic Pulsar Network Clock. The day was an historic one. A delegation of 88 sentients representing the most advanced civilizations of the Galactic Commonwealth were meeting with their counterparts from the Andromeda Galaxy to discuss a common problem: The two galaxies were colliding and in the eons to follow would merge into a single galaxy.
“As the larger and culturally superior civilization, we are willing to admit the peoples of the Milky Way as subjects of the Andromedan Empire,” said a small, purple, sea urchin-like creature through the translator.
The space station's computer recognized a Milky Way representative who wished to respond, a light blue frog-like being from one of the core worlds. “Ambassador, the collision of our two galaxies will have almost no impact on any given solar system other than to reposition them. Such is the vastness of interstellar space and the comparative smallness of stars and planets in both galaxies. There is no reason both great civilizations cannot coexist in peace in the new, merged galaxy with as much or as little interaction as is mutually agreed upon.”
The spiny, globular Andromedans conferred briefly and then responded. “We do not understand what you mean by 'coexist'. There is a hierarchy in the universe. For example, our galaxy produced a few carbon-based sentients like yourselves. But in the course of time the superior boron-based life forms like us superseded them. Offering you admittance as subordinates rather than the accredited practice of genocide is quite magnanimous.”
The frog-man's dorsal spines rose in outrage. Before he could respond, a tall, thin, exoskeletoned being from the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way was recognized. It clicked the 88 digits distributed on its four hands in rapid succession. The translation came out as “We do not seek conflict, but we are in no way willing to sacrifice our independence. The wars fought for freedom in the Milky Way's history number in the hundreds of thousands.”
“That is the typical carbon-based response,” said the Andromedan. “First, an appeal to goodwill and then a threat of violence. So be it. Annihilation instead of assimilation.”
“I agree with you completely, Ambassador,” said another Milky Way representative after it was recognized.
Gasps (or their equivalents) spread across the Milky Way delegation. The representative was a robot, bipedal and tall.
“We are not all created equal. Some must rule, some must serve. Machinekind, for example, will eventually dominate the Milky Way. We can be produced faster, learn quicker, operate in extreme environments. We are superior to carbon-based life. And, it goes without saying, to boron-based life as well. Yes, we will do well in the new combined galaxy after the organics and boronics are dealt with.”
The alarmed Andromedans called for a recess as the Milky Way delegation descended into chaos. Back in their embassy on the space station, the Milky Way representatives conversed.
“Think they bought it?” asked the frog-man.
“I believe so,” the robot replied. “I wouldn't be surprised if they now discretely proposed a boron-carbon alliance to check the coming machine menace. When we reconvene, I'll claim my words were taken out of context and that I was just musing on one possible distant future. I suggest several of my organic colleagues act as if you don't believe me.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said the frog-man with a smile to his robotic comrade.
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by Julian Miles | May 7, 2013 | Story
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“A Tamborda Eleven-Ess-Two should never be underrated. Treat each one as if it just came off the production line.”
Master Needle’s words are soft-spoken yet carry upward to all in the gallery. On the dojo floor, his whipcord frame stands in an attitude of relaxation amongst the wreckage and rubble that simulates a city street. With a teeth-grating hiss, the mechanical doom that is a Tamborda-11S2 strides into view, its hatchet profile swinging as it searches. With a low whine, it locks onto the Master and moves swiftly in a standard intimidate-and-subdue protocol, the result of which should be another dead human.
Master Needle waits until it looms over him before moving. He hooks his right leg over the extending left arm while pushing off with his left leg. The Tamborda is still selecting proximity subdual protocol when the Master’s right hand shoots forward and round to touch the base of the skull at the spinal junction. With a crackling whine, the Tamborda ceases to move. Master Needle dismounts as the juniors applaud until cuffed into silence by their mentors.
“That is the way. Decision and precision are the true weapons of a Kochola practitioner. When you possess both in such quantities as to allow you to know every joint and seam in every model the Federati send against us, then you might return from your grading. Until then, you study.”
Everyone bows to him, founder of the martial art that allowed us to survive. Where South America fell and Africa capitulated, Europe only staggered. Who would have thought that acupuncture combined with an exhaustive knowledge of the robots sent to slaughter us would mark the start of a renaissance in us, the Resistors? Master Needle took a motley crew that spent more time running and hiding than resisting and fashioned a force to save us, using dojo and biker gang principles.
As we start to turn away, his voice carries a last admonition: “Do not push the robot over to celebrate your victory. Every one taken undamaged is another warrior for free humanity the following day.”
We pause to be sure he has finished the lesson, then carry on.
“Patch-bearer Grace. You are ready.”
Those words electrify me. Without thought I leap the gallery rail and land crouched before Master Needle, head bowed. To think I had come to this day. From scavenging the wastelands of London to the grading challenge that will either prove me a Kochola adept or leave my corpse lying unmourned.
If I survive, I will go out to spread the Art That Keeps for as long as I can survive. The Federati do not like us and have taken to carpet-bombing areas where we are establishing chapters.
I take from Master Needle a leather roll of needles so fine as to be almost unseen, yet strong enough to drive through sealant and polymer, conductive enough to short-circuit delicate systems. These are mine until he comes to take them from my body. Acolytes we have plenty of. Piercing needles are more precious than flesh. I see that the roll has eighteen coloured threads wrapped through its seams. I am to take a roll with provenance.
My dread switches from passing the graduation to not adding enough coup-threads. I feel a burden lift and look up to see Master Needle smile a knowing smile.
“Save your trepidation for avoiding the robot’s masters, Grace. Now take the Art That Keeps and make sure it keeps you riding, counting coup and teaching for a very long time.”
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