by submission | Nov 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Cesium
It is only from one of the higher towers, the myriad smaller buildings laid out below and higher ones gleaming in the distance, that the City’s infinitude truly becomes intuitively and not merely intellectually apparent.
But even in the mist of a cool morning, when only the closer bridges and skyscrapers loom nebulously out of the featureless white, the City’s sheer vastness is never far from one’s mind. The City has no limits in the horizontal; it is bounded below and above only by what current technology can delve from the ground and claim from the sky. It is immeasurably old and constantly evolving. It contains buildings, and indeed whole districts, of every conceivable purpose and architectural style, and no sooner is a new one invented than some aging, decrepit building is torn down to make room for its first exemplar.
The City is everywhere inhabited; its populace moves about on its daily business via a network of streets, walkways, and rail lines, irregularly distributed, intersecting interminably with more of the same. The system is of course impossible to diagram in full, though local maps are readily available. Many people find employment and contentment within a few miles of their birthplace; some travel great distances to settle in different regions of the City; the remainder are restless wherever they go. I count myself among the latter few.
Once in my youth, driven by the impetuous urge to prove wisdom mistaken and the City finite, I leapt onto the back of an emptied supply truck as it departed the local produce market. If any activity went on beyond the limits of the City, I reasoned, it would surely be agriculture. But the truck arrived finally at a vast complex of greenhouses and hydroponic farms, surrounded by the familiar yet unfamiliar skyline of some other part of the City, and, seeing no obvious openings for further exploration, I was forced to make my way home.
In the decades since, I have traveled uncounted distances across the face of the City. A few years ago I began to hear rumors of the Tower of Jorge, which called it variously a tourist destination, an ancient relic, or a pilgrimage site; its fame seemed to grow the closer my journey took me. This very morning I arrived in the square where it stands, a tall straight spire pointing upward at the heavens, and climbed the winding stair to its top.
An inscription there defines the Tower to be the center of the City. The claim is absurd; the infinite has no center, or equivalently, every point is the center. But soon the chaotic sweep of the City all around me began to make a sort of sense; I seemed to perceive the avenues emanating from the square below, the districts arranged radially, disguised though they were by centuries of construction and demolition. In that instant I could believe that the City had started here. And if it had a beginning then perhaps it is not endless after all.
This is all I have discovered, for I have not managed to recapture that momentary revelation. I leave this note here in the hope that it will reach someone younger and better equipped than I to explore the mysteries of the City. I plan now to follow as far as I can the direction of one of the hidden avenues; perhaps I shall find its end in a location as distinguished as this one from the rest of the City. More likely I will die still unfulfilled. The City will continue, eternal and indifferent.
by Patricia Stewart | Nov 17, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
A torrent of sea water gushed from the six meter in diameter penstock into the Sirenum Ocean, Mars’ largest body of water. Twenty-eight minutes earlier, that sea water had been in the South Pacific Ocean, before beginning its long sub-space journey from the Atafu intake gate on Earth, to the Aonia discharge gate on Mars. This Mass Transfer Conduit (MTC) was one of twelve that had been offloading excess water from Earth in an effort to avert the coastal flooding caused by runaway global warming.
Mars’ four living Presidents stood together and watched the historic event on holovision. The announcer counted down in unison with the one hundred thousand spectators crowding around the Aonian observation deck, “Three, two, one, that’s it, twenty quintillion liters. Mars is now officially self-sustaining. With our oceans fully established, the ecosystem will be stable for the foreseeable future. Congratulations to President Tholus for making this day poss…”
Using the remote control, President Tholus turned off the holovision and raised his glass to his three predecessors. “No, that’s unwarranted praise, my friends. We all know that most of the credit belongs to President Pettit. Congratulations, Number Fourteen.”
“Thank you, Number Seventeen,” said Pettit, who also raised his glass. “And a special thanks to Al Gore, for laying the groundwork for the greatest con job in the history of humanity.” The four men toasted Al Gore, and enjoyed a hearty laugh. “It was almost too easy,” continued Fourteen. “When Emperor Yoo found those climate models published in the twenty-first century by Gore’s pseudo-scientists, he practically begged me to siphon off the top sixty meters of Earth’s oceans before the melting glaciers flooded his Summer Palace in Zhanjiang.”
“It amazes me,” commented Sixteen, “that Earth politicians put soooo much faith in ‘scientific’ studies where the grant money was contingent on giving the government agencies, or the ‘Independent Foundations’, the answers that they wanted, even if they had to use tricks to manipulate the data. But, let’s not forget, that if Fifteen didn’t act when he did, they might have caught on to us.”
“Yes, that was a close one,” reflected Fifteen. “When Earth’s global sea levels started dropping, some of the ‘deniers’ started making noise again. I quickly lifted the Antarctic gate from the Weddell Sea for ‘maintenance’. I linked it with the Gate we had left on Venus, back when we were terriforming Mars. We pumped so much carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere that we actually started causing the glaciers to melt. After three months, we put the Gate back into the water, and no one suspected a thing. And let’s not forget Sixteen. Setting up those mini-gates on Titan was visionary. It’s what truly gave us independence from Earth. With Titan’s hydrocarbons pouring into our refineries, our industrial revolution took off exponentially.”
“Yes, my friends,” said Seventeen, “We’ve achieved a lot in the last few decades. A stable ecosystem, unlimited energy, and prosperity and independence as far as the eye can see.” President Tholus walked over to his desk and picked a small wooden humidor. “Have a cigar, men. I just got a shipment in from Acidalia Planitia.” They all lit up and took long drags. Tholus blew a smoke ring and added, “Damn, it’s a great day to be a Martian.”
by Duncan Shields | Nov 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Introdus happened in late 2021.
Seven hundred thousand time travelers showed up around the world.
They showed up on fire.
They showed up in clumps in the larger cities and by the singles and pairs in rural areas. Most of them were burnt beyond recognition.
Only sixty-eight of them were saved and of those, only sixteen were able to maintain consciousness. Of those sixteen, ten of them were only able to scream and scream and scream. They were sedated into comas. The six that were left were able to talk.
It was hard to get intelligible stories out of them.
There was a lot of confusion at first. The fact that these people appeared out of the air was hard to make the public believe. It was thought that a worldwide firebomb campaign had begun until the corpses and survivors were examined and not a single one of them could be identified. They simply weren’t on our books.
Scientists measured closer and verified that on a quantum level, the bodies were not from ‘here’. No one could confirm that they were from the future but that was the story those survivors told in slivers, gasps, and broken metaphor. Through shattered teeth and pain medication, though burnt faces and time-jumbled brains, through hand signals and languages evolved further from our own, they told us when the universe would end.
The invention of time travel triggers an event, they said. Once a switch on a time machine was thrown, the universe took notice. Some of them said that it was God, the Devil, Shiva or a giant mouth of fire descending through the clouds. The images they provided were delusional ravings. Entire continents becoming open sores, tentacles reaching down from the stars, the air shattering impossibly like glass, and dimensions bifurcating like paper being crumpled into a ball. No two of them were alike save for the fire at the end and a horrible universe-wide sentience saying “NO”. A combustion not just of the body but of the entire existence of a dimension.
Each of the six survivors claimed to be from a different time and each one claimed to have invented time travel on their own with no help. If that was true for all seven hundred thousand of the travelers, then they all came from different Earths. The odds of them all discovering time travel independently on the same planet were too high.
They all had tried to escape the cataclysm that had suddenly appeared by using their invention. Some of them had fled to the dinosaur times, some had gone back two or three years to warn themselves, and some of them had set their dials to the far future.
But they’d all ended up here, burning and screaming, at September 18th, 2021 at 9:18 PM Pacific Standard Time.
The theory being introduced by the Pope is that the travelers have been sent as messengers. That whatever force destroyed them and sent them here in suffering did so in order to tell us that time travel must never be invented.
For once, the church and most scientists seem to be in total agreement.
By papal decree, UN Security Council ban, and unilateral G20 accord, research into time travel is prohibited and strictly enforced.
by Julian Miles | Nov 15, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He stepped over the bodies of the last two assault teams and walked swiftly to just below the camera blister on the ceiling. Waving a hand, he spoke calmly.
“Hello Justin, I’m Agent Dessall. I’ve come to chat about what we can do to end this stand-off without any further loss of life.”
I smiled at that.
“I think we both know how that can happen.”
He shook his head.
“Jared says he will not give in to your cowardly threats.”
“Cowardly? He took my fiancée and eight others prisoner to force the release of his brother and two other fanatics when he knew the international stand over no negotiation with hostage takers.”
He looked uncomfortable. I knew the conversation was being relayed to his section chief.
“I know that Justin, but this really is not helping our efforts to get Pamela and her colleagues freed.”
I laughed.
“As you stand there, six sniper teams have switched from rifles to rocket-propelled grenades in the hope that you can lure me out. If I appear, you are collateral damage.”
He paled as his section chief assured him that no such thing was happening. On another channel, instructions were issued to switch to another frequency and change encryption.
“I don’t believe that, Justin. We’re so close to negotiating the release of the hostages. Don’t ruin five months work.”
“Agent Dessall, even you cannot be that naïve. I have taken control of an office block in the country that harboured and trained Jared. This is an international incident and embarrassment to my home country. I have caused the death of thirty troops that I note carry weapons supplied by your country despite the embargo. In addition, amongst the people in the building are three members of Jared’s family.”
He turned momentarily as distant automotive mayhem became audible.
“I’ve shut down the local traffic control grid. Way too many suspicious vehicles heading this way.”
He looked up at the camera.
“Justin, how can you justify this?”
Ah, now we came to it.
“I cannot. Nations stand by as people die because no-one will take responsibility or try to challenge the causes. So when Pamela was taken, I put into place something she and I had discussed when the CityOS projects first started. Every city that deployed the infrastructure is vulnerable and I have them all. Where governments will not, I will. This is merely the first example. As such, it has to show what can be achieved. So, for your hard of hearing companions, I have uplinked this situation worldwide and I do hope that Jared is watching.”
Agent Dessall paused and then ran flat out for the doors. I let him go. The attack helicopters were coming. The inhabitants of the building were deemed expendable in the face of the threat I now posed.
In minutes, the building was burning rubble. As the dust clouds dispersed, I kept the uplink going, then patched into their tactical net and coughed politely.
“I do hope that was edifying for you all. Did you really think I was in the building? Jared, I would like my fiancée released immediately or your capital city will suffer a complete infrastructure failure. If it moves, it will have no brakes. If it supplies, it will be contaminated. The death toll will be huge. I do not negotiate. Obey or be punished.”
Governments across the world activated contingency plans for their CityOS to find that they only existed in the manuals they were reading from.
“You wanted terrorism? You have it. I will be in contact. Overlord out.”
by featured writer | Nov 14, 2011 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, featured writer
“I wrestle with it every minute of every day. However please let the record show that every precaution was considered when it came to keeping it humane. No one ever knew for even an instant what hit them. One second we were a planet overrun by thirteen billion parasitic beings, all of whom were in immediate danger of mass extinction via overcrowding and disease. And then the next second they all went peacefully away, and we were suddenly a very healthy and robust selection of the top five hundred million people considered essential enough to keep around.”
“This court has already recognized the previous global crisis and is thankful to be among the surviving carriers of our specie’s precious DNA. But what we really want to hear from you is, how was it actually done?”
“Ah, that is the genius of it… it was the Captain Trips antivirus that carried the doom bringers in the first place. The world was so scared of the super flu that they clambered over top of one another violently to get to the abundantly distributed free bottles of Red Five.”
“Yes, yes, and the Red Five contained microscopic machines… nanobots you call them?”
“Yes your honor. They still exist in all our bodies, everyone who drank the antiviral medicine, which was pretty much everybody on the face of the planet. But don’t worry, the machines are now in permanent sleep mode, their command program destroyed, they are nothing but electro-microscopic bits of gold and silicone floating amongst your blood cells.”
The chief justice tugged at his collar uncomfortably at this, as if though imagining the countless microscopic intruders coursing through his body, the same ones that had instantly severed billions of brain stems with their deadly lasers, and then had oh so quickly dissolved their victims gruesomely albeit efficiently into morbid puddles meant to evaporate or wash away in the rain. Not losing his scowl he said, “And you just gave the order then? The command or whatever? To kill most of the human race?”
“If I hadn’t none of us would be having this discussion right now, or any discussion for that matter. You see your honor we were at a critical level, in fact we would have already gone ahead with the plan over a year earlier but we still lacked the computing power.”
“The computing power to kill?”
“Actually the computing power to segregate who was and who wasn’t to be deleted. Once we had the comprehensive genome map in our system we could divide those to be sacrificed from those of us like you and I, the ones who were meant to carry on.”
He leaned back in his chair, contemplating, tapping his fingers together. Then finally, “Might I ask why it was you who personally? pushed-the-button so to speak?”
My answer was simple and direct. “Because it was my idea in the first place.”
In another half hour I walked out of the building flanked by my own armed guards, I sidestepped a spot where the courthouse steps were discolored a pinkish hue, a one meter circle with a wispy bit of hair at its center. I was free to go wherever I wanted, the man who euthanized over a dozen billion people with a single keystroke. But I prefer to think of myself as the man who saved the world.
by submission | Nov 13, 2011 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
“Five minutes, General.”
“Thank you, Gunner.”
Anywhere else in the fleet she would be an impossible escort. Her dull-black skinsuit was topped with a spiked leather jacket, her hair gelled into liberty spikes, her face painted like a skull. She still showed her rank and rate, but the only name was the one tattooed on her forehead. Her child perhaps, a lover, a sibling. All that mattered was that anyone she killed would be able to see why she was doing it.
He followed her down to the assault bay, to the raised platform at the edge of the deck. His command was waiting for him, ten thousand variations of the Gunner, uniformity thrown aside in favor of anything that would scare the enemy, or give voice and strength to the rage they all held inside. All had names tattooed on their forehead and elsewhere, even him — ten years of war, a hundred names, a hundred strikes to his soul etched in his skin. These were his brothers. Time to get them ready.
“You know why we’re here. PUD’s, all of us — Psychologically Unfit for Duty. Pulled from the line because we could not follow the rules of command, of war. Because none of us could see past our need to immediately kill as many of the fuckers as we possibly could. We didn’t want to leave — they made us. Today we’re back. Today is our day.”
“HOO!” The sound rang through the chamber.
“A few minutes ago, you all felt a bang, felt the ship veer onto a new heading. That bang was simulating a malfunction, and since we have not taken any fire it appears the bastards think we are out of control and falling into atmosphere to burn up. In another minute or so a big chunk will do just that, but this lander, this big stealthy armored rock, will drop right down in the middle of their field command. While the main strike force sets the beachhead in Switzerland, we will occupy and destroy as much of their command as possible. We will today kill as many of the fuckers as we possibly can.”
“HOO!”
“We’re coming in hard, no jets until absolutely necessary, so even with the dampers this is going to be a hard ride. We hit hard, the shocks raise the ship, and this deck is left on the ground. The gunners take out the hard targets from above…”
He paused to nod at his escort.
“…while we go after the soft targets below. We have no meaningful intel on their actual deployment. There is no plan, other than mayhem, destruction, and death. Give it to them.”
“HOO!”
“They are not like us. They are clinical. Detached. To them, this is a business, our oppression their right. They can handle the Fleet, the Army. They can’t handle us.”
“HOO!”
“Our own people called us flawed, called us broken. When we planned this mission, they called us ‘The Legion of the Dead’. They knew us better than they thought. We are dead. And we are legion.”
“HOO!”
“We will kill a hundred of them for each name we bear, and we will break their spirits so that the Living can break their backs!”
“HOO!”
“No mercy. No surrender. Only RAGE! From each of us, they have taken something. From them, we take EVERYTHING!”
“HOO! HOO! HOO!”
The General stepped down, walked to the number ‘1’ blazoned at the edge of the deck. Ten thousand knelt down as one, grasped the handholds, and waited.
It was going to be a good day.
