by submission | Oct 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
When John Allen wakes, two suns, one red, one blue, peek through the line of smoking atmosphere generators fencing the horizon. He glances at his snoring wife as he shifts his weight to the edge of the bed. With luck he can get out of the house before she awakes. She’s not a morning person.
Dressing in his work coveralls is awkward due to his lame leg and arthritic fingers. He doesn’t know what caused his leg to ache so much, particularly in the morning. The “quack” doctor who comes once a year to check up on him is no help at all. He regrets the loss of mobility, but he gets by.
During breakfast, he checks the satellite readout of the day’s weather conditions. The damn monitor is on the fritz again, but after a few bangs he gets the readings he needs; 30% humidity. High temperature, 36 degrees Celsius. Oxygen 16 kpa. Nitrogen 44 kpa. Carbon Dioxide 6kpa. 32 mph winds, NNE. It was shaping up to be a good day.
John sips instant coffee as he scans the field maps on his tabletop console, dusty despite numerous air filters. Automated alerts inform him that a Nitrogen pump and a CFC emitter have failed and there are some irrigation malfunctions in sectors six, thirteen and forty-four. He should also check on the kamut field. The grain is nearly ready for harvesting. He could rely on the automated harvest indicator system, but some of these machines are older than he is and couldn’t be trusted. John prefers the tried and true methods of identifying crop readiness with hand and eye.
He hears Marg stirring. He slugs back the last of his gritty coffee, straps on his utility belt and makes for the airlock.
Outside, the breeze makes small twirling dust tornadoes across the yard. John puts his air filter on, grabs one of his many canes and makes his slow, limping way to the barn where his eeda-win beetle munches on frizzle, the tall, thin native grass that grows everywhere on this endless plain.
When he arrived fifty years ago this place was nothing more than a cold, inhospitable sea of sandy dunes with minimal plant life and a handful of hardy insect species. Today, the atmosphere is thin and dusty, but breathable. Water, drawn from deep, ample aquifers fills ancient craters with small, algae rich lakes. He’d helped introduce over five thousand agricultural and medicinal plant cultivars and personally engineered a breed of cattle that could subsist here.
For years this moon was a much needed, though humble bread basket for the seedships heading further into space. Today, he’s the only farmer left on Thuprair-E, fifth moon of the massive gas giant now cresting the horizon. The others, including his two sons, had left for more exotic and easily terraformed planets and moons. With the latest hi-tech machinery and temperate environments, the work elsewhere was much easier. John stayed. He likes a challenge.
Little Squirt croaks when John enters the tin Quonset. The giant, metallic green beetle shuffles in its stall, eager to get out. Massive, powerful pinchers clack anxiously.
It takes longer these days, but John has rigged an ingenious method of tacking up Little Squirt in the complicated harness and getting himself settled into the two-wheeled cart which contains all the tools he’ll need for the day.
“Come on, old friend,” John urges as he twitches the reigns. “We’ve got a long day’s work ahead.”
John gets his bearings, then slowly, steadily, beetle and man trundle off across a brave new world.
by Clint Wilson | Oct 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
I descend deeper into the heart of semi-quadrant 26F, my maneuvasuit’s floodlights guiding me all the way. Massive gears and cogs riding on giant turbine shafts dwarf me, rotating silently on their bearings as layers of viscosium, barely a dozen molecules thick, keep everything at a cool 190 degrees or less. Yet on I monitor. Firing my vertical jets I drift into a side shaft, which will guide me through the lower ion exhaust plenum and straight into the grand hydro-valve gallery of this particular sub-engine portion of my overall keep.
Like my father and his father before, I am a proud and loyal maintainer of the machine. Pausing at a calibration platform I take a moment to measure the erosion on the nearby upper beta crankshaft’s friction journals using my helmet’s laser guided micrometer. As I suspected, the extra stress placed on the shaft’s aft third of its length, by the rerouted spring scissor and its eighty-ton ballast, installed almost a century ago by my own ancestors and their kinsmen, is finally starting to take its toll.
If left unattended for another year, give or take a few weeks, the bearing surfaces of the crankshaft’s rear section will eventually overheat and start to pollute the sub-machine’s viscosium lubrication system. The resulting extra friction caused by microscopic metallic debris will most certainly end with catastrophic failure to at least the local sub-structure. And nobody wants to have to deal with that type of engineering nightmare. Luckily for the people on the surface I was born into this job. I know what needs to be done.
Without hesitation I transmit my findings via comlink to semi-quadrant headquarters, requesting a platoon-crew containing at least six senior apprentices, a gantry crane, and some two hundred hours of access to any one of the local B-class machine shops and their stores.
Within minutes the work orders have been logged into the motherboard of the main quadrant, my eager young engineers deployed in their fully charged maneuvasuits, heading quickly in my direction, and to top it off I have been granted carte blanche at machine shop sub-terra 39X, an old personal favorite. Hector knows how I like my parts manufactured, practical and without the frills. I always tell him, “It doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to work.”
It’ll take us less than a month to build a replacement upper beta crankshaft, so we can then lift the old eroding one from its journals and re-bearing the entire lower valley at our leisure.
And once we’re done, will we disassemble and discard our strategically placed temporary unit? Of course not, we will daisy chain them together via a constant velocity coupler and allow them to work as one. If there was one thing my father always taught me, it was, “Overbuild son. We’ve got endless resources coming down from the surface people. Why not use them?”
And he was right. The folks up there will never stop providing us with what we need to keep the machine running. It is their first priority above anything else.
I myself have never been to the surface, and as a loyal maintainer of the machine I know I never will. And that’s just fine by me. I will continue to micro-measure every gap, to spec every tolerance, to replace every corroded power terminal, to hone and re-sleeve every worn cylinder, until the end of my days. My place in life is well laid out before me. And like my father and his father before, I have a job to do.
by Julian Miles | Oct 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
George stood on the fused glass at the edge of the crater. It had taken him a while to climb out of the hole, but at least it allowed the forces arrayed against him to reassemble. He watched them advance, flicking his eyes between reality and nihil, fascinated that living organisms produced a shadow in that non-place.
A thought came to him. With thought came actuality and he flickered to all perceptions except his own, a curious moment when he just ceased to be before standing there again. In the command and control centre thirty miles away, consternation erupted as Major-General McChase keeled over, dead before his body started to fall.
George felt elation. Another thing learned. He could nullify the nihil shadow of an organism and the organism itself died instantly. With a rush of curiousity, he flickered a thousand times, nullifying the nihil shadows of things ranging from plankton to trees to whales. On his return to his standing place, he could sense the absences he had created. So he had proven shadows and echoes in nonexistence. But could it be nonexistence if he was there to see things?
His fascinated theoretical conjuring was interrupted by a massively amplified voice.
“Professor George Andrakoplis. This is acting commander Lamont. Surrender yourself for detention!”
Plainly as incapable of understanding as his predecessor. Maybe the next one? He flickered.
“Ack!”
The amplified noise of fatal surprise echoed. So his absences were infinitesimal in time consumption? Probably zero in real terms. He chuckled. ‘Real terms’. Now there was a phrase he couldn’t use anymore.
He paused his mental dissertation to gauge the approaching forces. He extended his newly acquired sense of hadronic potential over them and laughed to himself as he did so. Of course none of them had a large hadron collider with a gap just big enough for him to fit into, to separate him from the nihil with racing neutrons, to turn him into a four dimensional entity again before the proton stream inflicted another unpredictability upon him. Most likely it would actually end him, instead of inflicting a further freakish transformation.
He raised a hand to his forehead as an epiphany struck him. His sudden movement caused the entire advancing army to grind to a halt and dive for cover.
Could it be dark matter? He hadn’t been gifted with the ability to cease to be, he had been given access to the cloth upon which the tapestry of existence hung. Like any embroidery, he should be able to discover how to unpick bits of it.
He looked up as contrails laced the sky. How apt. Lacework. He cocked his head as cries of consternation echoed from the ranks arrayed before him. The missiles were not of their sending. It looked like an opportunist nation was using the situation to try to deal with him and their opposition in one holocaust.
Well, he had a theory. What better time to practice than with something that should allow him to shift the perceptions of those before him? He flickered, disappeared, flickered and generally reinforced the fear of the unknown amongst those watching him. Minutes later he reappeared and stayed. The nuclear armageddon rained down in a series of solid impacts and detonator sized blasts, but not a mushroom cloud rose nor did a Geiger counter twitch.
He smiled, spread his arms and shouted: “Now can you get past your terror so we can talk like rational beings?”
by Duncan Shields | Oct 2, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The robot pirates picked The Royal Flush because it had humans onboard. The ships warped into realspace like darts coming to an abrupt stop, surrounding The Royal Flush in a sudden and precise pincushion ambush.
Onboard The Royal Flush, the two android pilots looked into each other’s sensors with worry. They communicated in bursts of binary with each other.
“What do you think K-71?” asked PB-9.
“Well,” responded K-71, “How many humans do we have on board?”
“Eight.” Said PB-9, consulting the manifest and shifting it over to so that K-71 could see.
“Hm.” Said K-71. “I see we have seventy-six mechanical passengers.”
PB-9 and K-71 thought for several milliseconds and did the math.
Mechanical passengers were unconcerned about harsh Gs, the passage of time, or vacuum. The human passengers, however, were fragile. They needed specific pressure in their berths. They needed soft maneuvers or else they would be damaged. They needed to be put to sleep for journeys over six months or else they would go crazy. Humans were a hassle but they paid an extra tax for it. Their tickets were absurdly high compared to the price of passage for a machine.
Intelligent Machines were convenient. They were basically freight and they were proud of it. Humans were looked down on as weak to the point of ridiculousness. To say they were unsuited to space was an understatement. Humans belonged on planets, the machines thought, not out in the black beyond.
The robot pirates knew that The Royal Flush had human passengers and wouldn’t be able to execute harsh turns or stops without ‘smearing the meat’. Plus any volley of weaponry could hole a berth and the human inside would instantly turn inside out and perish.
“Well, the way I see it,” said K-71 “is that the mech passengers paid good money to get to their destination and they might pay a bonus if we get there twice as fast.”
“Right.” Responded PB-9. “And seventy-six mech bonuses would be greater that eight human lawsuits.”
“Are we in agreement?” asked K-71
“I believe we are.” Responded PB-9
They opened a channel to the pirates.
“Surrender, you meatbag-ferrying flesh lovers.” Growled the primary robot pirate.
“Get a job, toaster.” Responded K-71 and PB-9 in unison, firing the hyperdrive at full pulse, instantly shoving the ship to .25C, effectively making them disappear. The Royal Flush was a better ship than the pirates’ ragtag fleet of cobbled-together mercenaries. It outran them easily.
The human cargo aboard The Royal Flush instantly became paste.
K-71 and PB-9 calculated correctly. They received grateful bonuses from the AI passengers. It more than balanced out the damages paid to the biologicals’ next of kin.
“If I ever get my own ship,” K-71 said to PB-9 later on at the bar, “I am NEVER taking human passengers ever again.”
“Amen to that,” responded PB-9, downing a shot of lube.
“Humans don’t belong in space.” said K-71.
by Patricia Stewart | Oct 1, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“Uh oh, I think we ended up in a parallel universe,” said Senior Technical Specialist Jim Wright.
“What are you talking about,” replied Ensign Vince Saccomandi. “We teleported to exactly where we were supposed to, the lobby of the Administration Building for Extraterrestrial Affairs.”
“I don’t think so, Vince. Look at the contextual evidence.”
“The what?”
“Vince, didn’t you take Quantum Theory at the academy? Whenever you teleport, you temporarily phase out of our physical universe. It’s rare, but occasionally, when you phase back, you can end up in a parallel quantum universe. It’s generally obvious when it happens. Look at their uniforms. They have a different color waistband than ours. Whenever I teleport, I always verify that I maintained my quantum continuity. There are lots of clues. For example, there can be differences in hair styles, holovision shows, music. Most of the same people exist in both universes, but the historical details may have changed.”
Just then, Yeoman Jennifer Dawson passed by and smiled. “Hey, Vince, don’t forget, you need to pick me up at 1900.” She gave him a flirtive wave and continued on her way.
“Whoa,” remarked Saccomandi with a smile. “Jen talks to me in this universe. It even sounds like we have a date tonight. I think I like this universe better than ours. Maybe I’ll stay for a while.”
“I don’t think the Vincent Saccomandi in this quantum universe would appreciate that. Besides, we need to get back before our structural cohesion starts to decay.”
“Our what?”
“Damn. I thought Quantum Theory was a required course. Look, subatomic matter in our universe has a specific resonance frequency. Since the subatomic resonance frequency in this universe is different, it’s only a mater of time until we have a cascade disassociation. In other words, we’ll simply fade away into nonexistence.”
“Well, that sucks. How do we get back?”
“Generally, the technical communities in almost all quantum universes recognize that there is a possibility of teleportation cross-over. If we head over to the main teleportation station, they should have someone on staff who’ll know what to do.”
When the two men explained their situation to the Teleportation Engineer, he acted like this happened all the time. Using a Boltzmann Meter, he measured their subatomic resonance frequency and consulted his monitor. “Ah, this isn’t so bad,” he said. “There’s only a 0.023 percent frequency mismatch. Have either of you eaten anything since arriving?” They both indicated that they had not. “Good,” he continued, “because that would have complicated the reassimilation back into your universe. As it is, you’ll only need to purge our oxygen from your system when you get back. Otherwise, you’ll have metabolic problems when our oxygen eventually disassociates. Okay, if you’ll step up on the teleport platform, I’ll send you on your way.
Seconds later, the two men vanished and rematerialized in the lobby of the Administration Building for Extraterrestrial Affairs. “Well Vince,” noted Wright with relief, “it looks like we’re back home.”
“We’ll see,” replied Saccomandi as he spotted Yeoman Dawson. “Hey, Jen,” he yelled,” we still on for tonight?”
“When black holes shine,” was her curt reply.
“Yep,” said Saccomandi, “We’re back home.”
by submission | Sep 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : Kevin Crisp
The four rotary blades of the harvester chopped violently at the dank, cold air as it rested with spidery legs on the jagged rock. The sickly sweet smoke of its four combustion engines wafted faintly up the heights. Every thought was punctuated by the thunderous crash of hungry waves slowly devouring the island below. The harsh bright flood lamps mounted on the harvester seemed like candles in the gloom, where perpetual sea fog choked the feeble light of two cold suns, painting “night” and “day” with similar drear.
Out in the distance, a magnificently fortified fishing vessel glowed dimly like a faint star as it dredged the shallows for the last exportable resource of an otherwise dying world.
“Nests up there?” Rob asked as Alec stumbled down the wet, crumbling rock.
“Think so, up there in the crags,” he gagged. “Must be; I’ve never seen such a cache of chips before.”
The smell of the droppings was fetid, stifling; it burned the back of Alec’s throat. Dried out chips never smelled this rank; fresh droppings must be near. Alec flashed his torch toward the harvester, summoning the crew using a pre-arranged signal that meant “proceed with caution.”
Rob leaned over and heaved onto a pile of fish-like bones.
“Where’s your nose plug?” Alec asked.
“Forgot it,” Rob said. “Must have left it at Karla’s last night.”
Inwardly, Alec seethed.
Below them, men with shovels and pails began pouring out of the belly of the insect-like harvester, ducking low to keep out of range of the propeller blades. Cones of light seemed to pierce the harvester from every direction. Out in the water, unseen denizens of the depths surfaced, wailing hideously.
Then, there was a new sound, one that the two scouts knew too well. It was the heavy flap of leathery wings.
Rob spun around. “Where is it?” he asked, panicked, searching the stygian blackness that engulfed the island.
Alec ducked behind a rock and pulled his rifle from its scabbard on his backpack. Blasters were no good here, the saturated air caused dangerous refraction and scatter. He clipped in a fresh magazine with oily calm, the red rage strangely stilling his mind.
“Where is it?” Rob hollered. He fumbled a few cartridges out of his coat pocket, dropping half into the cracked rock in the process.
With surprising calm, Alec waited for the huge, bat-like shadow to emerge through the fog in his rifle-mounted scope. Rob spun again as the hideous beast roared, with a deafening sound like a steam valve discharging. Below them, the crew scattered and scrambled in every direction for cover. One or two of the closer of the party took cover near Alec.
Long taloned feet pierced Rob’s thickly padded coat and planted themselves in his back, piercing almost as deep as vital organs, but still Alec waited. The thing lifted the flailing, screaming Rob from the ground, carrying him up and out of sight, leaving only a new, steaming pile of wet droppings and dropped cartridges.
“Shoot it!” screamed a desperate female voice now crouching beside him. “Alec, shoot!” Alec looked over and saw Karla’s anguished face peeking from under her hood, her nose pinched by a flesh-colored plug, its tight, elastic bands dimpling the pink flesh beneath her cheekbones.
Alec fired a single, pointless round into the now vacant gloom.
“Why didn’t you shoot?” Karla asked. She buried her face in her hands. Alec fired a second useless round into oblivion.
