by Patricia Stewart | Nov 11, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Lieutenant McDonald floated in his EVA suit and directed the external repair efforts. The maintbots were currently welding a splice-plate over a large breach in the hull. From his vantage point, McDonald could see a dozen similar holes along the length of the EFS Champion. It had been a fierce battle, he reflected, but the old girl prevailed. Ten thousand meters aft of the Champion, floated the lifeless remains of the Y’Kuscht. A direct hit to their reactor core had sent her crew to the Toreelian Promised Land. McDonald was glad he had helped them achieve their aspiration of dying in battle. “McDonald to the bridge. I estimate that it will take eight hours to complete the repairs to the hull.”
“Acknowledged,” responded the captain. “Try to shave a few hours off of that, Mr. McDonald. I don’t want to stay at this location any longer than we have too.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
******
Although the environmental system was operating at maximum capacity, the engine room was still thick with white smoke. The dead had been moved to a makeshift morgue in the cargo hold, and the injured had been taken to sickbay. Those that could still stand were grouped in a semi-circle around Chief Engineer Hopkins, waiting for direction. “Okay, men,” she said, “we’re in the middle of a war zone, and the propulsion system is off-line. We can’t count on being rescued. We need to get out of here on our own. As I see it, for the first time in the history of Earth Force, we’re going to have to repair a Niven Modulator outside of spacedock. I know it’s impossible, but we’re going to do it anyway. I want to hear ideas; I don’t care how dumb you think it might be.”
“Chief,” offered a young cadet, “we could access the modulator if we cut away the nacelle casing and jettisoned the injector coils. We have spare coils, but when we break the seals, they’ll leak trivalent boron. That stuff is extremely corrosive and toxic.”
“If we time it right,” suggested a senior engineer, “we can blow the nacelle casing and coil attachment fittings at the same time. The loss of pressure will suck the coils and trivalent boron into space. We’ll need to wear EVA suits during the repair, but I think the kid’s plan may work.”
“That’s the attitude,” boasted the Chief. “Jones, you go to the shuttle bay and grab a dozen EVA suits. Petters, go to the armory and sign out some C-6 explosive. Watkins, pull up the schematics on the viewer. Let’s get to work.”
*****
The captain paced the bridge trying to come up with contingency plans as the ship underwent repairs. He knew that there was no sense rehashing his battle decisions at this point; there’d be time for that once they reached safety. For now, he needed to get his crippled ship back to Earth controlled space. Since the Toreelians don’t take prisoners, this wasn’t a good place to be dead in the ether.
“Captain,” announced the tactical officer, “long range scanners are picking up three ships approaching at warp 5.”
“Friend or foe?”
“I can’t tell at this range. I’ll know for sure in about an hour.”
“For now, we’ll have to assume they’re bogies. Except for Chief Hopkins, have the command staff meet me in the main conference room in five minutes. If we can’t escape, then we’ll fight as best we can. And by God, if we can’t win, we’ll take as many of the slimy bastards with us as we can.”
by submission | Nov 10, 2010 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
I have brought the ship into orbit above Destiny. Forty-eight of my eighty-one years have been spent maintaining the systems and checking the life-pods of the passengers. Now we are here and I can rejoin my reborn body and be a part of a community again.
Destiny may even be a better home for humanity than Earth. My new home.
I awaken my body from it’s life-pod, and download back into it. I take a week to readjust to being in a meat suit, then move on to on site exploration.
I leave the ship AI in charge while I take the Lander down to find the perfect colony spot. I have chosen dozens of possible while in the System, and must now choose the best to land the ship at. Once landed the ship will never fly again.
I spend weeks locating the perfect spot. Finally I choose.
At the Y of a river valley in the subtropics, is a place with low rolling plains covered with a lush grass. The river is lined with palm-like trees, and the soil is a rich black that my test seeds sprout in nearly overnight. The cloud to my silver lining is a predator the size of a large cat. Small cloud. I decide it’s perfect and return to the ship.
As I approach the ship, I send a signal to the AI to begin awakening the passengers. If they are awake at landing, it was decided, offloading would proceed much faster. I want to be there to over-see the downloading of selves from the transport archive, of course.
I dock the transport, and head towards my quarters when the lights go out. All sounds have stopped, which means no air is flowing, and one thousand people are breathing what we have.
Within a minute, the light and air returns.
I ask the AI what has happened, but get no response.
I rush to the small control deck. Nothing software based is working. All hard-wired systems are on-line. EM pulse. I spend hours checking systems. All gone.
I hear screaming. The passengers! I forgot I awoke them.
I rush to the hold to find 999 adult infants awakening from anesthesia. All hungry as I was when I awoke. At least I knew why. They know nothing.
Fortunately, first meal is always mush in a bulb. I find the right storage and run around sticking nipples in mouths for two hours. Quiets them right down.
I return to what manual instruments I have and look for answers. And, find them.
Destiny’s star has a neutron star binary that EM flashes the planet every 396 local days.
I hear screaming. I rush onto the pod deck only to be assaulted by the most vile odor. I know my duty, and I begin checking. Most have soiled themselves, and I do the best I can.
* * *
A year has passed, mostly with-out sleep.
I transferred the passengers to the surface, ten at a time, in the Lander. I can still fly the Lander, but it must be on manual constantly.
Only fifty-seven have died, but I have felt each as if it were my own child. Of the rest, all are sitting up, and a few are taking their first steps.
My landing site is working out better than I thought. It rains once a day, in the afternoon, and it is as warm as bathwater. Which I use it for.
A few have even begun talking.
They are the ones that call me Dada.
by submission | Nov 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson
It was Professor Decker’s moment of triumph, what he had worked so hard for all these years. As the media looked on he manipulated the keys on his console. At first nothing happened, but then slowly the spherical device atop the garbage heap began to open like an egg. And although completely invisible to the gathered spectators, the microscopic androids descended onto the trash pile and became immediately busy doing two things; devouring the refuse as fast as they could suck the matter into their tiny nuclear furnace bellies, and duplicating themselves at an exponential rate.
Off to the right of the fuel site was a bare patch of earth -the build site- purposely cleared and leveled for the experiment. One of the reporters gasped and pointed. Suddenly they all saw it, a definite layout was appearing there in the dirt; lines of a foundation, plumbing, electrical, all appearing seemingly out of thin air. The microdroids were definitely on the move.
And while the refuse fuel was now visibly shrinking away before their eyes, on the build site steel stud framing grew from the just recently completed foundation while windows were progressing upward into fast appearing aluminum frames. Now a large red entrance door was materializing as if by magic.
And as the flat roof of the small two-story building nearly completed itself they could all see that the former garbage heap was now no more than a smoldering black patch of earth.
Ted left his console and motioned to them all, “Come inside everyone, it’s quite safe!” The gathered mob needed no coaxing. They followed Ted Decker like he was the Messiah.
Together they explored the brand new building with its gorgeous tile work and perfectly functioning plumbing; but it didn’t take long for one of the reporters to point out something quite startling on the second floor. “Say Decker, this building sure looks like it’s only two stories tall from the outside.”
“Well that’s all it is,” replied the professor.
“Then how do you explain this?” The reporter opened wide a closet door which gave way onto an upward spiraling stairway.
In unison they all climbed cautiously into the sunlight to find a completely unplanned and unexplained third floor growing out of the roof, which was surprisingly not made of tin or tarpaper but expensive looking hardwood flooring. Together the bewildered people gathered tentatively at a northward facing window as a new ceiling closed in over their heads.
They looked out of the unplanned third story window to the gaping hole in the earth which had now opened up under the former fuel site. And the healthy ground continued to seethe and writhe as the microdroids multiplied and took fresh matter into their tiny bodies
Ted Decker exclaimed, “Oh lord something’s happening, the program was supposed to end, they’re not stopping.”
“Well, when will they stop?” asked a young wild eyed reporter as a light switch panel materialized on the freshly erected wall behind her.
Decker paused, as if grasping for words, and then finally, as the fuel hole widened and deepened even further, and as they all watched an unplanned western wing of rooms begin to stretch away from the main building, he replied with a question, “When they run out of fuel?”
by submission | Nov 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Scot Noel
It won’t be a big red button that ends the maniacal arguments of man, no nuclear winter to silence the right, the left, and the in-between. No, just me and my little trick no one else has yet conceived.
In the silence to come, no one will ask how I put to rest the radicals of both Bible and Koran, striking dumb at once all questions of Constitution and tedious harangues, blocking out Shakespeare and the Greeks in a single bound. No, I’ll take us back to the hundred thousand year quietude that bore real men and women through the ice ages and beyond.
No sickness is stronger than the one that grips us now, none but for this, which I unleash: a fever set to burn like a firebreak through the world.
How enraged I am by your whining ineptitude and meanness to one another. People with fat bellies and fat children speak of the tyrannies they suffer. Others ignore fact in favor of god-fearing fancies, or strap on explosives to win the shallow arguments of unsound minds.
In my own country, men whose actions, words, and spirit would make the founding fathers puke stand up to invoke patriotism with the demeanor of hysterical women.
Today, it ends. The conflation of symbol with reality is over; the building up of vicious castle walls in our heads is done, for I shall take away the cause of it all, those symbols we wield like knives, the words at the foundation of all lies, and the ability forevermore to recreate a single stitch of it.
At first, true contagions inspired us to infect our networks with the codes we call viruses. Now the computer virus comes to me, naked in its simplicity, a fearsome bomb ready to plant into the body of man as base pairs, chains of nucleosides, and transcription factors. Bio-engineered on a precise genomic level, I’ve encapsulated terror within the most contagious and immutable of viral shells.
No, not a single body shall fall dead to the ground on my account. The fever I’ve created burns away words, but not a single memory. It touches neither music nor math, assaults neither art nor engineering. The pilot who can fly, the surgeon who can cut, the dancer who can dance, all shall continue as before, perhaps even pass on their skills through demonstration. But honestly, who can pass on the insidious, boundless weight of unending bull except by words? (And my plague shall take them all.)
It seems so right, so well considered!
Don’t cry to me about literature, learning, or the progress of man. Where has it gotten us? Hate is taught by rote and spread through the easiest corruptions of reason. It is love springs naturally from the human heart, as does the urge to comfort and protect.
Isn’t it in times of fear that the self is most often put aside? Won’t they have to help one another, banding together against the great catastrophe I visit upon them?
I’ve thought of it all, and if I haven’t, I shall embrace my design as the one true resolution to this era of idiocy, for our 10,000 year enterprise in argument and deceit ends today.
Yes, this is the test itself, one last rant from the man who can never be blamed, for in a moment my keystrokes will be as indecipherable as the markings on the moon.
From the start, I’ve felt the fever building, and here at last comes the climax to click across the circuits in my brain, delivering for all time the last w…
by submission | Nov 7, 2010 | Story
Author : Matthew Banks
Here I am. I’ve made it all the way to the end. I always said I would. I told them I would outlive the Universe.
I was born human, so long ago that the memory is nothing more than a faint impression, a whisper. I lived and loved. Of that I’m fairly certain. But now it’s all forgotten. Most of my life is forgotten. A trillion years is to my lifetime as a bacterium is to a planet. All that time, most of it dark, all of it lonely.
We wanted to be immortal. We always had. The individual rejects death, fights death. Darwinian programming, as it turns out. The longer you live, the more you can mate. In theoretical terms, I’m the perfection of the organism, but in real terms, I’m useless. I never reproduced, even when I had a real body. In reality, I’m a failure. That thought has been echoing through my mind for eons.
I lived in an age when the dream of immortality could be realized, and it was. I was a savant among immortals. I wanted it more than any of them. I longed for it more purely, and I would have it at any price. We multiplied, and without death, we grew crowded. Even without physical bodies there were too many of us. There were trillions of us, each centuries old, each enormous, and we ran out of room. The old dilemma: competition for limited resources. We had hoped it would never rear its head again.
The first to die did so by choice. They felt they had finally lived long enough, that the ambitions that drove them towards immortality had finally been fulfilled and that they could walk into that darkness satisfied. They had exhausted every pleasure and desire. Nine-tenths of us went that way. The rest expanded to fill the available space, and the dilemma returned again. That’s when we started to fight, to consume each other. I was the victor. It couldn’t have turned out any other way. I wanted it more than any of them.
And I wanted more than that. I wanted to expand. I wanted to be huge. I ate the Earth, the Moon, the planets, the asteroids, the sun. In a billion years I ate the galaxy. In thirty billion years I had eaten what humans had once called the visible universe and I was spreading at nearly the speed of light, a gigantic nebulous octopus, throwing tentacles across the stars. I ate everything. In my colossal brain, I thought every thought that could be thought and lived every experience that could be lived. In essence, I re-played the entire history of the universe, and then the history of every universe that had ever been or could ever be. There were no gods until I was born, and now there are no gods again, for I am silent. There is nothing to speak about.
Eventually, I stopped eating and watched the Universe expand. Watched the last stars fade into darkness. Watched the dark galaxies crash into one another and unravel. Watched as the last faint tremor of starlight was redshifted into invisibility and the last star froze into ice.
Now the Universe is stretching itself thin, and spacetime itself is tearing, abyss and impossibility spilling through the rips. I know how the story ends. The new universe will well up through the cracks in the old one, and I will be obliterated. But I am at peace. In my lonely exile, I have outlived the Universe.
by submission | Nov 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
I was walking down 87th Street toward Fifth Avenue when a man ran around the corner. He was half-obscured at first by the diesel fumes of a departing bus, but he ran kicking his way through the newspapers which littered the sidewalk, straight toward me.
He wore nothing but a loincloth. He was skinny but his muscles stood out in high relief, his body covered in something like dust which streamed off as he ran toward me. His face was almost cadaverous, with dark circles under his eyes and livid bruises on his temples and cheeks. His eyes were filled with rage.
The man stopped in front of me. He was trembling, but it wasn’t cold. We stood there, still for a moment in the din of the city, and he pulled back his arm, reached out and punched me in the face.
“That’s for the fossil fuels!” he said.
I stumbled back against the wall of a condo building, my face numb, blood streaming from my nose, and watched as the man turned and ran back around the corner. I pushed off from the building, angry and bewildered, and half-heartedly walked toward the corner.
On Fifth Avenue silent columns of white light sprouted from the pavement and lanced up through the clouds. Men and women dressed similar to the man who assaulted me emerged from the base of the columns and walked toward the people who stood watching. I watched as a young woman stepped from a column near the wall across the street —the column cutting harmlessly through the poplar trees— and began to walk toward me.
She was barefoot and dressed in a simple dirty-white shift. Her hair hung limp against her face, grime embedded along her hairline. She stood in front of me and said simply, “I am Lisle. I am your great-great-great granddaughter. I am from the future.”
She seemed calm but her eyes were rimmed with red. Around us, out in the street and on the sidewalks, people were shouting in anger, commotion erupting everywhere. Lisle smelled like burnt dust.
“What?” I asked. “How did you find me?”
“You were radiating on all your eigen-frequencies,” she said, and she swung her dirty slender arm and slapped me, hard, in the face. Blood from my nose splattered across the sidewalk. Her fingernails were cracked and ragged.
“That’s for throwing your cigarette butts into the gutter,” Lisle said. “And for flushing your toilet too frequently.” She turned and walked toward the column of light.
The good news is that you’ll soon meet your children’s children’s children. The bad news? They are mad as hell.
