by Patricia Stewart | Apr 26, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“This is Captain Thomas Rider of the Starship Dunkirk. What’s the nature of the emergency?”
“This is Governor Wingfield of the Constant. We had a core breach, and had to jettison the reactor. We’re operating on minimum life support. Not sure how long we can hang on. We have over 2000 colonists aboard.”
“Understood Governor. Can I speak to the captain?”
“The captain was in Engineering during the explosion. He was killed. I’ve taken command.”
“That’s not the protocol Governor. Command cedes to the next ranking Bridge Officer.”
“I chartered this ship, Captain. I’m in command.”
No sense debating this now, thought Rider. I’ll sort it out when we get there. “Here’s the situation,” he said, “The Dunkirk is only a scout ship with a crew of 15. In an emergency, we can carry an additional 30 adults, or 70-some children. We’ll be arriving at your position in eight hours. Have the evacuees ready for transfer. More ships are on the way, but won’t arrive for at least a week. Can the colonist survive until then?”
“It’ll be close, Captain. We’ll have your passengers ready when you arrive.”
Eight hours later, the Dunkirk docked to the primary cargo hold of the Constant. When Captain Rider walked through the docking hatch, he spotted 18 adults, 10 children, and six large crates. “What’s going on here?”
A large man walked up to the captain and handed him a list. “I’m Wingfield,” he said. “These are the evacuees. They were chosen by lottery.”
The captain studied the list. “How fortunate, Governor. It appears that you and your staff hit the lottery. What’s in the crates?”
“Our valuables. We won’t leave without them.”
“Well, you got that much right, Governor. Ensign Stahler, bring a security team out here and escort the Governor’s administration to the far side of the hangar. If any of them approaches the hatch, shoot them. Lieutenant Hathaway, find the ranking bridge officer.”
***
Captain Rider was studying the passenger manifest when the Constant’s First Officer was escorted into his Ready Room. “I don’t want to play god,” stated Rider without preamble, “but I’m going to.” This is a list of the children by weight. Starting with the lightest, gather the children until you reach 2000 kilograms. If the parents want to keep the family together and hope for the next rescue ship, fine. Skip them. Understood?”
Several hours later, 83 children were being escorted onto the cargo hold. The first officer explained, “It could have been 85 children, but I needed to keep two here so I could send enough baby formula to feed the ten infants. But Captain, I need to ask you a favor. Can you leave us a few weapons, in case the governor decides to be more resourceful next time?”
Ensign Stahler, who had been eavesdropping, spoke up. “That won’t be necessary, Captain. Lanyi and I would like to volunteer and stay behind and maintain order until the other ships get here. Beside, it’ll give you room to take another four or five children.”
“Ensign, you understand that the next ship might not arrive in time?”
“Aye, sir. We’ll take our chances.”
The captain nodded, and the first officer headed off to the passenger section.
An hour later, Captain Rider returned to the bridge of the Dunkirk. Children were huddled in the nooks and crannies. Some were crying, some were whimpering, all of them were scared. The captain forced a reassuring smile. “Mr. Cunard, maximum warp. Let’s see if we can make the round trip in record time.”
by submission | Apr 25, 2011 | Story
Author : Jordan Whicker
Henry Goodman sank readily into the welcoming embrace of his favorite recliner; the whoosh of air escaping these cushions and the groan of its leather was the only ‘Welcome home, honey!’ he’d ever known. He sat in silence for a few moments, his eyes closed, his mind working to quell the tempest of thoughts that had roared unabated for years. He wasn’t having much luck.
He opened his eyes after some time and stared at the TV across the room. A large part of him wanted to leave the TV off, as if doing so might preserve his anonymous existence here in his comfortable chair. He knew it was impossible; whether he watched or not millions of others around the world would be glued to their sets at this very moment, seeing his face and speaking his name, committing them both to memory. Henry Goodman, the father of the Second Computer Revolution. The Singularity. No, nothing would ever be the same. Not for him. Not for the world.
He grabbed the remote and turned on the TV.
Moments ago, Henry Goodman, a Senior Researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, committed a cyber attack against the United States of America. His unprovoked attacks crippled the nation’s internet, cellular, and telephony capabilities, plunging the nation into a communications deadzone. As Goodman has effectively deafened the nation’s police and counter-terrorism forces, a $10 million bounty has been placed on Henry Goodman, effective immediately. Authorities warn that Goodman is extremely dangerous, likely armed, and liable to intensify his cyber attacks against the United States of America at any moment. President Ibson has authorized the use of lethal force to neutralize the domestic terrorist Henry Goodman. May God bless the United States of America at this dark hour.
The message looped, then, the female voice speaking over security camera footage of Henry working in his lab.
“No,” Henry croaked. “No no no no no no no.” He cycled through the channels on his television. They all broadcast the same message, the same voice intoning his death sentence.
How can this be happening? Henry thought. We put controls in place and –
His thoughts were cut off by three staccato bangs on the door.
“You in there, Good Man?” The muffled voice added stress to the second syllable of Henry’s last name where there typically was none. “I don’t really need to ask. I seen you come home and I ain’t seen you leave so unless you already offed your own fool self I reckon you still in there.”
Henry’s eyes darted around the room; he cursed the sudden uselessness of all his possessions. He grasped the lamp that stood next to his recliner, yanking it away from the wall and plunging the room into darkness.
“Well then. Guess there’s my answer. Make this easy on me Henry, it’s gonna happen eventually.”
A clipped blast freed the deadbolt and set the door swinging wildly on its hinges. The man stepped in, shotgun pressed to his shoulder as he scanned the room.
“It’s too late,” Henry stated from his hiding place behind the recliner.
“I know it is, and I’m almost sorry Good Man.”
“No, you don’t get it. I’m the only one who knows how to stop it. And it realized that.”
The man stepped around the recliner and leveled the weapon at Henry. “Good for it. Any last words?”
“All hail the computer overlord,” Henry said. His voice was even; a grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. He had done it.
by submission | Apr 24, 2011 | Story
Author : Ian Eller
People said that the house was haunted. It sat alone along the broken asphalt road surrounded by parched fields feebly overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. It was a small house: one story, with a covered porch and attached one car garage. The house would have seemed perfectly at home in one of the subdivisions, just another dilapidated and empty structure on a sun-burnt, grassless lot, with broken windows and a collapsed roof inviting the elements inside.
But this house was not dilapidated. Its roof remained strong and its windows were unbroken. Nor was it on a dry, weeded patch like the others, but a vibrant green swatch, exactly square. A narrow concrete walk, unbroken by time, ran from the porch to the street. On one side of the walk was a mailbox atop a post, and on the other was a large square sign that, despite exposure, remained unfaded. The words on it were unknowable, but the image of the house and a smiling family were visceral.
Either the strange location or the unmolested state of repair of the house would have been enough to fuel suspicions and rumors about the place, but there was more. At night, when the world was dark save for campfires and the rare battery powered lamp, the house was aglow. Some swore they could sometimes see a shadow move behind the drawn shades.
Across the street from the house was a deep drainage ditch, bone dry and carpetted with long dead reeds. Within, pressed against the dirt wall, Wallace and Adrian glowered at one another.
“Well, go on then, if you’re so smart,” snarled Wallace. He was big for ten, with a meaty head and hands, but covered in dirt and pallid from malnourishment.
Adrian, who was smaller than Wallace and no cleaner nor better fed, snarled right back. “I will, I will! Get off!”
The sun was lowering in the west behind the mountains. Dusk stretched across the land and when it touched the house, there was a brief flickering from within, then a soft, cold glow.
Adrian swallowed hard.
“You’re chicken,” Wallace said quietly.
“I’m not chicken!” hissed Adrian. With a courage fueled by boyish pride that even war, death, famine and pestilence combined could not extinguish, Adrian pulled himself over the berm and onto the cracked asphalt.
Wallace opened his mouth to heckle Adrian again, but found his mouth too dry and his chest too tight. A wheezing, “Go!” was all he managed.
Adrian moved uncertainly across the street, one step then two and three. When he reached the center of the road, where the dashed yellow line was just barely visible, a light above the porch blinked into existence. Behind him, Wallace squealed and dove into the ditch. Adrian steeled himself and crossed the street.
Finally Adrian stood before the walkway. Slowly, his eyes never leaving the from door, he reached out and opened the mail box. Bright lights on either side of the front door came to life and a voice, tinny and distant, spoke from within the mail box.
“Welcome to the House of Tomorrow! Please come in and see what the future brings!”
He heard Wallace yelp and then bolt down the ditch.
Again, the tinny voice said, “Welcome to the House of Tomorrow! Please come in and see what the future brings!”
Adrian thought of Wallace, running for their burrow, digging for grubs to eat, crying late into the night.
He stepped forward onto the walk. The door of the house opened with a whisper.
Adrian went in, to see what the future would bring.
by submission | Apr 23, 2011 | Story
Author : Robert Sooter
The captain watched from around the corner as his small crew nudged the sleeping form with their brooms, utility poles, and various other implements as gently as they could. As captain he certainly couldn’t openly condone such behavior, especially towards a new crew member, but that didn’t make it any less funny. The trip was long and there were stretches with not much to do. Picking on the noobs before they really got their legs under them was—well, it was fun.
Assuring himself that he hadn’t been noticed, the captain quietly drifted away from the scene, chuckling to himself.
Satisfied with their work, the crew quietly whispered across the room at each other debating how to wake their sleeping victim. The debate settled down, and the first mate quietly counted down, “3, 2, 1.”
“Alien attack!!!” the crew screamed all together and the sleeping figure floating in the center of the room came instantly awake, flailing and twisting as his muscle memory tried to use the gravitational field he wasn’t in to spring from his bed.
After a few seconds of this awkward zero-gee ballet the young midshipmen calmed down a bit, and looked around. His flapping had imparted a slight momentum and he spun slowly in place. A quick look around reveled his full predicament, zero-gee, nothing within reach, and, thanks to the careful efforts of his shipmates, zero relative velocity. He was stuck.
“Aw, come on guys! This isn’t funny. How the hell am I supposed to get out of here?”
“Oh, come now, midshipman. It’s not that hard to figure out,” the first mate intoned solemnly. “We’ll be back in a few hours to check on your progress.”
Laughing and kidding one another, the crew drifted off to their various neglected duties leaving the poor man drifting alone. Sullenly, he floated there, his small spin leaving him with a constantly changing view of the same scenery. It reminded him of a road trip he’d taken with his family, driving through the endlessly repeating fields of Nebraska. A few moments thought had lead him to the conclusion that he would be able to claw his way to a wall by “swimming” through the air for a few hours. And he knew that’s what they thought he would do so they could come back every once in a while and laugh at his nearly futile flailing.
This would not do. So he floated and he thought, noting the occasional disappointed crew mate sneaking a peek. Eventually, he started to smile to himself. He floated, still and calm, exhaling in one direction, turning his head and inhaling in the other, imparting a tiny change to his relative velocity with each breath.
by submission | Apr 22, 2011 | Story
Author : Wasco Shafter
“Thirty minutes until heart failure” chirps a voice in Mark’s head. He flips through the internal photographs on his heads-up display, but there’s nothing new there. His heart is a confused, rotting lump of electrified meat rattling his ribcage. Five minutes has not done much to change this.
Beyond his display, surgeons twiddle their scalpels. Mark can see one chain-smoking on the observation deck. The surgeon closest to him waves a breathing mask in his face. Mark shakes his head, then returns to the medical feed on his earpiece:
vaccine for brain flu … cure for cushing’s disease … bionic arm … Ping!
“TOKYO: NEW PROSTHETIC HEART OPERATES AT 10X EFFICIENCY”
He drags the figures around in his mind. Three minutes for the 3D printer to assemble one, twelve minutes to do the surgery, fifteen minutes to play with.
“I can wait.”
The surgeons throw up their hands and sub-vocalize queries into their own earpieces. The pieces obediently sift through the sum total of human knowledge, aggregate relevant data into feeds, whisper the results into their ears. They listen to baseball scores, celebrity gossip, the whereabouts of their spouses. Mark listens to the steady march of biomedical research:
cure for anorexia … vaccine for hopelessness … bionic eye… Ping!
“Twenty minutes until heart failure.” The surgeon in the observation deck puts out his cigarette. He moves his lips, and his earpiece’s sensor reads them. Mark hears,
“Ready?”
“I can wait,” he replies.
The surgeon digs around for a lighter. “You’re really letting this go down to the wire, guy.”
“The wire keeps moving. Got a ping just now tells me a new type of heart takes half the time to install.”
“Great,” Says the surgeon, “Get it. We’ll have you out of here in nine minutes.”
On the operating table, Mark shakes his head. “I don’t want that heart. I want the time its existence gives me. Can’t afford to get surgery, just to have a better heart come out fifteen minutes later.“
Mark sets his earpiece to ignore the surgeon and focuses again on the medical feeds:
cure for addiction … vaccine against starvation … bionic breasts … Ping!
“Fifteen minutes until heart failure.” Six minutes left to find a better heart. Information pours into Mark’s skull through his ears, his eyes. He mutes his death-clock, places it in the corner of his display instead. Eleven minutes, twenty seconds. Scripts comb the torrent, highlighting breakthroughs of tangential interest:
cure for heartlessness … vaccine for heartworm … bionic blood … Ping!
“3-D PRINTER SOFTWARE UPGRADE. PRINTING TIME REDUCED TO THIRTY SECONDS.”
He teaches a widget to calculate the time until his point of no return, places that countdown directly beneath the death clock. Two minutes, forty seconds.
He sees the mirrored image of his death-clock on the surgeons’ displays.
cure for common cold … vaccine for impure thoughts … bionic hair …
Nothing.
Thirty seconds. The surgeon with the breathing mask moves in. Mark flails his arms. He can’t speak, but his earpiece reads his lips:
“NO! NOT YET!”
Ten seconds until point of no return. One. Negative five. Mark doubles the breadth of his searches, combs four datastreams at once. The surgeons solemnly disconnect from his feed one by one, and file out of the room. The surgeon on the observation deck crushes out his cigarette, and then he too leaves.
And four minutes later, when Mark finds a new prosthetic heart in Beijing that operates at 100x normal efficiency, and can be easily installed in the time he has left, there is no one to do the surgery.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Apr 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
The skiff shot swiftly across the calm waters of the harbour as if pushed by a giant hand. A young woman, her thick red hair flying wildly in the wind, sat in the stern manning the tiller. Around the little craft, pacific striped dolphins danced. Blissfully lost in the enveloping sweep of the moment, she was shocked back to the present by the subtle buzzing of her iPlant.
She subvoked the ‘plants menu which appeared to her eyes to flutter against the saffron sail. The call was priority from Confed command. “Shit,” she muttered, “not even one fucking hour of peace.” Reaching up to her right ear she pulled away a lock of crimson hair… and as she pulled the lead of the Sony DreamMan from behind her right ear, the dismal reality of her berth congealed around her.
“Murphy here. What is it?”
Only appearing in her brain, but to her perception, materializing before her was a tall broad shouldered man with close cropped hair wearing the uniform of a Marine brigadier general. “IT, is your DIVISIONAL COMMANDER, Captain Murphy.”
Instantly she snapped to. “Sir, sorry Sir, I just thought, I had no idea Sir, I…”
“Never mind. Our base on Pearl was bombed. It’s gone. O’ahu is gone for that matter.”
“Sir I don’t understand. What is going on?”
“The Asiatics. They violated the Earth Non-Aggression Treaty. They brought the fight to Earth.”
“Sir, I am afraid I still don’t understand.”
“You have the captured yacht of Hikachi Muromoto in tow, correct?”
“Yes sir. I am to escort the defence minister, his staff, and the yacht’s crew to the detention centre on Ganymede for interrogation.”
“Captain, destroy that ship.”
“But Sir, they are just unarmed civilians.”
“CAPTAIN! DESTROY THAT SHIP AT ONCE!”
“Aye aye, Sir.”
Captain Adelaide Murphy muted the neural connect. “Bridge,” she called, opening a secondary connect, “Cut the yacht free. When she reaches 300 kilometres fire one salvo singularity torpedoes. Maximum spread.”
“Yes Sir.”
She pulled up her main feed. “Sir, I…”
“I heard Captain, I just hope that…”
At that moment, the reaction drive motors of the Asiatic Alliance yacht, Divine Wind, went critical. Her hull breached and washed the Confederate battle cruiser NCS Juarez, and her crew of six hundred in the warming glow of white thermonuclear fire.
