by submission | Apr 10, 2011 | Story
Author : Steven Odhner
“I can already tell you aren’t interested in the admittedly confusing equations I’ve taken the time to write out, which is fine. So to give a quick and imprecise summary I will use the tired metaphor of Schrödinger’s Cat, where a cat is placed in a box with something toxic that will be released with a fifty-percent likelihood, triggered by radioactive decay of something else in the box.
“In the Many Worlds interpretation the universe splits, and in one the cat lives while in the other it dies. Obviously we only get to see one of the two, but both happen somewhere. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead until a measurement collapses the wavefunction to just one option at random. In the Stockholm interpretation, the cat falls in love with the scientist that locked it in the box.
“Nothing? Well, my wife thought it was funny. At any rate, while the Copenhagen interpretation is currently the most accepted there are problems with all of the theories and they are all devilishly hard to test. In large part this is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one, until we can get more data. Rather, until they can get more data. I already have it, and know the answer. I’m just not sharing it yet.
“Imagine, for a moment, that the Many Worlds interpretation is correct. That means that entire universes are unfolding constantly, an unimaginable number of them every moment. Some have speculated that we could find a way to travel between them, see the alternate versions of Earth that might have been. That’s a pretty thought, and something that might come to pass someday, but what I’ve discovered while working towards it is far more productive – and profitable.
“The device you see before you provides limitless free energy. This one prototype could power every device in the world at once if you could find a way to plug everything in. Every instant our reality is remade along with an infinitely expanding fractal cloud of others, and this device just… nips one in the bud. All the energy of the big bang, for free. All for just one lost option, one that will never be missed.
“Destroy the universe? Not this one. No, it’s quite safe. Technically speaking it destroys a universe every ten seconds or so, but they’re more like proto-universes. It’s not a big deal, really. It very nearly collapses them before they exist. Very nearly. Honestly, you don’t need to look so horrified. We’re talking about free energy here. This is the holy grail of science. It’s… excuse me?
“No, I told you it’s perfectly safe. It can’t break in a way that would do any more harm than a transformer exploding – You would have to deliberately turn it into a bomb if you wanted it to do anything serious. Well, yes, in theory. I’m not sure that’s a productive use of free energy, but I suppose with the right design you could release a minute fraction of the harvested energy as an explosion before the device obliterates itself. Call it one-one millionth of a percent, enough to level New York. No, no. The state.
“But we’ve gone off-topic. Back to the matter of free, clean energy for… Pardon me, but I’ll thank you to put away those guns.”
by submission | Apr 9, 2011 | Story
Author : Harris Tobias
It was adoption day at the facility. All those humans slated for euthanasia looking so bewildered, frightened and lost. How can anyone just leave them all to die? Thork and I rolled by the glass fronts of the cages stacked three rows high. So many of them. There must have been several hundred. They stared back at us hollow eyed and distrustful. Most had given up any hope of rescue. It was so sad.
Thork and I would take them all home if we could. As it was, we had already rescued six over the years. They make such wonderful pets. So grateful to have another year or two of life. Loyal, loving and kind, there’s nothing like a mature human to make a bleem a pronk. I look at their faces. I believe I can read a lot into their expressions. These are the unwanted refuse that clutters our streets. Picked up like vermin, breeding in dark corners, mongrels the lot of them. And yet, I believe, there is a dignity in even the lowest of them. Clean them up and feed them and they are the equal of any pure bred expensive variety.
I have had nothing but good experiences from my rescue pets. Oscar was beloved by all in the years he lived with me. It broke my org to flush him but he was so broken, he was not worth fixing. To this day I don’t know how he got under my roller. But I believe that every life is special and that there is something cute and worth saving in all of them. I roll by slowly and check out their faces. I nudge Thork with my appendage and point to a female in the third row. A mature female beyond child bearing years with a soft belly and sagging breasts. Water streams from her eyes like they do when they are sad. It touches my org. “She’s the one,” I tell Thork and he rolls off to get the attendant.
The attendant expertly wraps an appendage around our female and rolls her to the front. They are so small and delicate. The attendant examines her and gives her her shots with a big needle. She lets out a little yelp of pain and he puts her in the carrier we brought. We give the attendant credits and Thork carries the human to the transporter. We will keep her in the cage with the others. They seem to like their own kind. Outside the air is cool. The human whimpers and cowers in the corner of the carrier. I smeem to Thork, “Look, she shakes. That means she likes me doesn’t it?”
“Perhaps she is frightened or cold,” Thork knows nothing about humans.
“Perhaps,” I smeem back unconvinced. “I will call her Oscar like my other one. What do you think?”
Thork smeems assent. I stick my appendage into the carrier and stroke the creature. It shrieks. I can tell it likes me.
by submission | Apr 8, 2011 | Story
Author : Richard Chins
Sorry fragments of the dead man’s face reflected the white of the setting moon, lighting the ragged road side hump of molten metal and highway slag. His burning flesh cocktailed with a tart tarmac stench that bit at the lip.
I thought of burying him, but one handed, it would have taken time, which would put me in danger of being discovered – the danger triggered the mechanism again, fire bursting unexpectedly from the stumpy weapon port, where my arm had once been. I searched for his face again, in the unnatural light of my incineration, but found none. I retched, one hand yanking to my mouth, automatically: the other burning on.
If I returned to the desert now, he would have died for nothing. The bonfire of twisted humanity that had tried in all good faith to batter me unconscious with a rock and prise this thing off my arm, burnt on. It wouldn’t have worked, I can feel its roots shift inside my rib cage, consolidating its hold on me.
I turn to the dented road, extend my good arm, thumb raised, my skin cracking in bloodless seams around my mouth.
by submission | Apr 7, 2011 | Story
Author : John Xero
“BRRRRRRRMMMMMRRRRRRR”
“This is my dad’s tank.”
“B-B-B-BOOM, B-B-B-BOOM”
“It’s red and it has really, really big guns.”
“And it has scanners.”
“WJJJJJJJJJJJJ WJJJJJJJJJJJJJ”
“The scanners show him where the bad guys are and then he blows the bad guys up.”
“B-B-B-BOOM”
— —
In the kitchen Mary nurses her cup of tea and looks out of the window, into the sky. She listens to her son, George, in the other room with Doctor Ramsay. He’s having a good day today.
It will be George’s birthday soon and Jack will call them, like he does every year. The only time he ever calls them on a live feed. Jack will say happy birthday to his son, tell them he loves them both and hang up.
Afterwards she will tell herself all the awkwardness was down to the distance delay on the call.
— —
Some few hundred million kilometres away Jack is recalibrating the big guns.
Outside his tank the Martian wind howls. Red sand scrabbles for entry, trying every nook, every scar in the metal. The whole thing is due for an overhaul, but then what piece of equipment there isn’t. They will never leave this planet.
Jack sighs. He will have to call Mary soon, say happy birthday to George. Tell them there is no end in sight.
No one on Earth knows the truth yet. That what they fight is not a people but a planet. Victory is impossible. Every time they wipe out a nest the planet just extrudes more and they’re buried in little red men again. All they can do is keep things under control, prevent another attack on Earth like the one nineteen years ago.
Nineteen years ago; while Mary was pregnant with George; when the skies turned red and the clouds rained blood.
Jack looks at the photos pinned up in front of him; one of Mary and him on their honeymoon, and one of Mary and their son. It was the last time he saw George in the flesh, when he was three. The age George would always be, mentally. Mary had sent him newer photos, but he couldn’t bring himself to print them and put them up. This was George to him.
This was the George he spoke to once a year.
Jack didn’t know if he could ever go back.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Apr 6, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
The place never failed to depress me. You can’t polish a turd. The walls of the waiting area were painted off white and they had made an effort to buy a superior quality of cheap, shabby furniture. Around the corner it was different. The walls were an institutional green. The mortar was falling off the cinder block walls. The VA hospital had been built sometime in the last century and looked it. The patients looked it too.
My arm had been acting up again. It was probably older than I was. I often wondered about the guy who had it before me. It was an artificial black. I was a natural white. Not a good match, but what the hell do they care.
Most of the people waiting in the “lounge” as they called it were quiet. Some sleeping. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were homeless and had been awake somewhere all night and came here to sleep when the doors opened in the morning.
A quadriplegic sat down next to me. I could see the framework of his aluminium and carbon exoskeleton underneath his grimy nylon track suit. A lead from the suit snaked up from a collar around his neck and jacked into the port behind his right ear.
His limbs vibrated slightly as the skeleton tried to make sense of the random firings of the brain at rest. He’d been plazed. He raised a paper cone of coffee to his lips. I expected him to spill half of it over himself, but he handled it with great aplomb.
Normally I keep my mouth shut. I just want to get in and get out so I can head back to my shitty flat and get drunk. This time I didn’t. I wish I had.
“Luna,” I asked.
“Mars.”
“Corps?” Mars was fairly crawling with Marines since the insurrection.
“Army.”
“No shit. I was Army too. I got this beauty on Europa.” I tried to lift my mechanical negro arm. It whined noncommittally and failed to move. He turned his head to look me in the eye. His limbs shivered harder from the mixed signals it was receiving.
“You always talk this much?”
“No, I… um…,” I shut up.
“It’s okay. You felt like you had to talk to me, right?”
“Yeah, it’s weird because…,”
“Because, you just want to get your nigger arm adjusted, go back to your pathetic shit hole of an apartment and drink yourself to death.”
“Hey, who the fuck are you…”
“Relax, you know who I am.”
I thought for a moment. “No. No. Oh God, No!”
“Good for you. Give the boy a cigar. It’s time for reveille. Wakey wakey, eggs and baky…”
I awoke just in time to feel the nurse yank the lead from the port behind my right ear. Doctor Mayerson stood at my side. “I’m sorry Sergeant. The nerve attenuation from the plasma blast is incompatible with the fractal rate of the exoskeleton available to you. I’m sorry; we can do nothing for you now. Perhaps, if you have civilian insurance… No? Too bad you weren’t an officer.”
I looked down to where my arms and legs had been and screamed.
by Duncan Shields | Apr 5, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m on a steamboat at night. It’s hot out. I’m standing at the railing throwing earthling dimes into the dark water in the Mississippi night. I’m wearing a white linen suit. I feel like a dandy but wool would be suicidal in this heat.
Well, to someone that grew up in a cold place, anyway. Like me. I’m not from here.
I take another sip of my White Russian and look out in the near-jungle of rainforest that edges away into the darkness. We’re still too close to the city for stars but I can see the yellow-dot constellations of alligator’s eyes in the river picking up the shine from the moon and lights from the ship. The reptiles float by like dead things.
Steam. Fledgling electricity. Telephones. No connected computer network yet. Nothing that could detect the alien organs lurking under my disguise.
Behind my back, the steamboat is still alive with the sound of carousing but it’s dying down. Tourists are betting the last of their money, making their endgame strategies with new objects of affection, or stumbling back alone to their cabins.
We are an oasis of light and sound in the silent swamp. We’re invasive and we don’t belong here. All of the noise is coming from the deep, almost panicked need to be entertained. Humanity’s place in the world is clear at moments like this.
We. I thought the word ‘we’. Have to watch that. I’m thinking like them again. I’ve spent too long with these obnoxious experiments fouling their own cradle.
I pour the white drink into the river. It skates on the rainbow surface of the oily water, snaking back into the wash from the noisy paddlewheel at the rear of the ship.
Just another ten of the human’s years and my time here will be finished. The ruse will be up and I can go home to my own planet. I’m looking forward to it. Other contacts have reported forming an attachment to this place, to some of the humans. I envy them. That affection must make the time pass quicker.
For now, however, I feel more kinship with the alligators on the far shore with their unblinking flashlight eyes.
