by submission | Mar 5, 2010 | Story
Author : V.L.Ilian
“Hogwash! There was a mathematical proof the sound barrier could not be broken even tough they were breaking it with cannons in Newton’s time!
There was a mathematical proof the light barrier could not be broken even tough they were breaking it in Einstein’s time!”
“Yes… but that’s different.”
The senior researcher was continuing to pull levers and instructing computers to start sequences while his colleague stood there helpless with a stack of tablets full of mathematical proofs.
“Nonsense! The proofs of the time were based on an incomplete understanding of the universe.”
“True… but those inventions were not this high risk”
A robot opened a large safe an pulled out a liquid-filled cylinder holding a suspended seed of blue light.
“Poppycocks! When trains were invented everyone feared the human body could not survive such accelerations. Endless tests were conducted to see if passengers would lose consciousness.
When the teleporter was invented everyone cried the soul was being lost. We all know how that turned out don’t we?”
The robot inserted the cylinder in a complex assembly. Immediately the seed of light was sucked into the multifaceted sphere in the center of the machine.
Light appeared to reverse itself and the sphere went completely dark.
“Doctor! This won’t work!”
“Absurd! No more buts!”
The senior researcher put on his favorite goggles and hovered over a big red button.
“Let’s make history… literally.”
by submission | Mar 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Sean Monaghan
Sid smiled as Alex handed him the separation results. One more test and they could announce. They’d known all along of course, since the first samples, but Mars Twelve operated on a government testing regime. No disclosure until verified. Too often the communities broadcast just to get the jump on other researchers, only to look like fools later.
But here was DNA, of a sort.
Spectroscopy, centrifuges, distillations. All the stuff he’d nearly forgotten in years of being administrator. Still, the results were clear. A microbe.
“Looks good, huh?” Alex said, grinning.
“Let’s wait for the second titration confirmation.”
“We’ll be opening that bottle of Taittinger you’ve been so precious with, huh?”
“Always so impatient. Did Jade and Mish come back from the site yet?”
“Nah. Something about digging a new line. They’ll miss the party. Imagine if NASA had sent rovers there fifty years back.”
Sid laughed. “Yeah, hindsight.”
Mish drew his multiprobe through the soil. “This is driving me nuts,” he said into his mike.
“Well, it’s not far to drive, is it?” Jade replied.
“Old joke, dull joke.”
He kept watching the readout on the probe. Nothing. Another line, still nothing. Well, it was better getting suit time than sitting in the bunker lab minding the centrifuge. He ran another two lines, then realised he hadn’t heard from Jade for a while. “Jade?”
Nothing.
Mish looked at the edge of the crater. “Jade? Come in.”
“Get over here, Mish.”
“What’s up?”
“Just get here.”
Sid grinned at the final results.
“Taittinger?” Alex said.
“Absolutely.” Sid clicked the press-release he’d composed weeks ago. He typed a quick couple of lines with the dates of the last tests and began the process of uploading to the server on Earth.
“Where is it anyway?” Alex said, hunting through a cupboard.
“What?” Alex’s finger hovered over the mouse key, the cursor on ‘send’.
“The bloody champagne. I can’t find anything up here.”
Mish came over the rugged crest and saw Jade crouching at a spaded hole. He bounced down the slope. “Whatcha got?” he said.
“Come look.”
Mish slowed and looked into the small pit. “Ventifact?” he said, looking at the twisted shape. But he knew it wasn’t. It looked more like a tree branch. That couldn’t be right.
He crouched and helped her scoop soil away. Excavating around the branch they exposed a joint. It was covered in a kind of lacquered felt, bonded into the main shell.
“Artificial,” Jade said.
“Well.” Mish pushed the end and the top flexed on the joint like an elbow. “From an old missing rover? Viking?”
“Moron, Viking wasn’t a rover.”
“But it had an arm.”
“Where’s your multiprobe? Let’s do a sounding.”
“You think there’s more?” He passed the probe over.
Jade shoved the tip into the soil and pinged it. She rolled out the screen and examined the grainy image.
“Jeepers,” Mish said.
There was a buried oblong shape, with wings and wheels and tracks and long and short arms. Bigger and more complex than anything NASA had ever sent up. Different too, odd shapes having nothing to do with practicality or keeping weight down. Strange.
“Alien,” Jade said. “An alien rover.”
Mish sat back on the orange soil. “You know what this means, don’t you?” He touched his wrist to make the call back to the bunker.
“A bigger discovery? Wow. Way bigger than just a microbe.”
“Except that it means that ours may not be not a Martian microbe.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jade looked at the rover’s arm. “Extrasolar.”
“Let’s hope they haven’t announced yet.”
by submission | Mar 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Liz Lafferty
“Tell me the story again, Grandpa. Did we really have automatic lights? And could you really talk to someone on the other side of the planet?”
I laughed. We huddled by the fires every night, the children always wanting to hear one of my fantastic stories of the old days.
I had a hard time believing my own version of events. It had all started simple enough. Technology that had exploded from building-size computers down to palm-sized mega-devices. Our homes were loaded with scanners that heard our voices, obeyed our commands. We were too confident in our intelligence. We’d forgotten that nature had a way of humbling us.
“All true, Jack. I had a communication device that let me talk to people in Paris, France.”
“Where’s that?”
I didn’t even know if France still existed. My world, my family’s world, centered around a cave in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We went out on raids to gather our food.
“A long way away. I was eight years old then.”
“That’s how old I am!”
“Yep. We had everything, Jack. Food, safety, warmth. It was gone in an instant.” It was gone in twelve minutes, if you wanted to set your clock by it. That’s how long it had taken the solar flare to reach Earth.
The government might have known; scientists surely had to suspect… still, all that followed had wreaked havoc everywhere on the planet.
Print publishers, newspapers, magazines had gone out of business due to more advanced online capabilities; store front banks closed up, their asset information in securitized web farms; universities and schools no longer had buildings — all learning, scoring, testing was completed via webcasts. Friends and families existed in high-def.
Everything except farming and food could be bought, traded, read, transacted online.
It had all started with global warming. We were saving Earth’s resources with our more advanced capabilities and humanitarian efforts. It seemed to be working. Politicians and scientists hailed the reports about lower carbon dioxide emissions and fewer hurricane warnings and less polar ice caps melting.
Then again, it might have all been a huge plot to pull the wool over our eyes.
“Did the sun really make it all go away?”
“Indeed it did. It was a solar flare.” I spread my arms wide as I demonstrated, wiggling my fingers in front of my grandkid’s face. “The flare shot of the surface of the sun. Its flaming fingers searching, reaching out across time and space until those hot licks touched our planet. The orbiting satellites tumbled from the sky, blazing a trail to earth like fireflies. Power grids all over the world collapsed. Radio and television and computers all sizzled and ground to a halt.”
“What happened next?”
“Without communication, without money, without contacts — governments collapsed, chaos ensued, people died.” Even I didn’t know the full extent of the catastrophe. Only a few Hamm operators got information through to us. They called it a coronal mass ejection, a proton storm. The worst ever recorded.
We never recovered; so much of our technology was lost. We were back to scavenging old paperback books for our entertainment.
I threw a stick in the fire. We watched the night sky. Aurora borealis was still spectacular, eighty years later.
by submission | Mar 2, 2010 | Story
Author : Paul Starkey
The athlete sat before me took a while to speak. At first he just sobbed. It’s a common enough reaction; I see it in many of those referred to me. A combination of fear and guilt, with a spoonful of self loathing mixed in. As was often the case he started explaining with little preamble.
‘I used to be fast, you know?’ he said, wide eyed, on the verge of hysteria. ‘Won my first medal when I was just ten. I won gold at the under fourteens, under fifteens…won silver in the Commonwealth Games when I was nineteen. Everyone said I was going to win gold at the Olympics next time around.’
I said nothing, just sat behind my desk, nodding empathetically. I didn’t ask him what’d gone wrong. In all honesty I didn’t care. Maybe he hadn’t trained hard enough, maybe it was drugs. Probably it was just fate. He simply wasn’t quick enough anymore.
‘The final Olympic trials are in six months.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m not going to get through; I’ve barely scraped through the preliminaries. All I ever wanted was to win gold, but if I don’t make it to Miami this time…I’m not getting any younger, this is my…my…’ He started crying again, burying his face in his hands.
I gave him time. Eventually he wiped his tears away and looked up with a new found determination in his eyes. Now we could get down to business.
‘Gary said you could help me, Doc. That you could get me to Miami.’
‘I can,’ I said. ‘But you understand the risks, yes?’ he nodded. ‘You also understand that you might not make it to Miami. You might have to wait four years, until Tripoli. Is that acceptable?’
He nodded. ‘I realise there’ll be adaptations I need to make, to my running style and all.’
Before we did anything else we discussed money. He’d brought the full amount, in cash. I counted it, twice—someone who’ll cheat in sport won’t hesitate to try and cheat a crooked doctor. Satisfied that the amount was correct I walked over to the medicine cabinet, twisting my body slightly so he couldn’t see the combination I punched into the lock.
I placed a bottle of pills on the table in front of him. ‘You need to start taking these now; they’ll strengthen your immune system, just a precaution. Now then, as to the nature of your adaptation, I think a car accident is always best…’ His eyes widened. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said as reassuringly as I could. ‘My team are experts, the risks are very small and there will be no way of determining that it wasn’t an accident.’
‘Ok.’ He nodded. His lust for gold overrode all other concerns.
I smiled. ‘Excellent. Now we just need to decide; right leg or left?’
* * *
We discussed matters for another hour, then he left and I settled down with a scotch to check my fee for a third time.
I’m still amazed the authorities don’t crack down on me and my ilk, but I guess self interest keeps them from making a big issue of it, and whenever the media try to stir up a storm all manner of government officials quickly debunk the story.
With each passing Olympics the medal haul becomes more and more important, national pride is at stake and the Paralympics is almost as important and, more importantly, easier to influence. Maiming an able bodied athlete is a lot easier than prescribing performance enhancing drugs. After all, none of my patients ever failed a disability test…
by Patricia Stewart | Mar 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Vladislava Demidov and Pierre Rousseau were Space Traffic Controllers for the Alpha Centauri Tri-System. They were half way through their shift when their long range sensors picked up an unidentified ship approaching from the direction of Earth.
“We’re being hailed,” reported Rousseau. “The ship is called the CS Cornucopia. They are asking to communicate with someone called the ‘Advanced Scout’.”
Demidov entered the Cornucopia into the Starship Registration Database. “Wow,” she said, “that ship left Earth over 230 years ago. It’s a sub-light robotic terriforming ship. I guess after the warp drive was developed, we totally forgot about them. They’re a century too late. We’ve already terriformed all the habitable planets in this system.”
“What are we supposed to do with them?” asked Rousseau. “Do you think their supplies have any value?”
“I doubt anything that old is worth a single credit,” replied Demidov, “except to an antique collector.”
“Well, we can’t have that lumbering behemoth in the shipping lanes. It’s a hazard to navigation. Let’s sent it out to Probose,” suggested Rousseau. “The Aerospace Core of Engineers said that moon is a lost cause. Maybe they can make something out of it. At least, they’ll be out of our hair.”
***
“The Cornucopia landed of Probose, and the autonomous robots began their terriforming operations. However, after several decades of futile work, they concluded that the frigid moon would never be suitable for human habitation. Therefore, they contacted the humans to ask for new instructions. But once again, the humans had forgotten about them. The human they spoke with told the robots to stop bothering them because nobody cared what happened to obsolete, worthless equipment.
“Undaunted, the robots decided to fashion Probose into something that was at least more suitable for them. They also decided to reengineer their “utilitarian-centered” physical characteristics, and to rewrite their limited “homo-centered” programming. Over the next few centuries, they evolved, both physically and technologically. Eventually, they became the most advanced beings in the galaxy. When they left Probose to show the humans that they had indeed become worth something, they discovered that the humans had become extinct…”
“That’s not true, Father,” protested the young android, who was a little more humaniform than the older android telling the story. “Benny told me during our Ontology Engineering Class that we destroyed all of the humans, because they treated our ancestors so poorly.”
“Hmmm. Well, maybe we did, maybe we didn’t,” replied the older android. “But it should still be a lesson to you. ‘Don’t treat sentient beings like they are worthless.’ It’s not polite. Now, power yourself down and begin your dream cycle.”
by submission | Feb 28, 2010 | Story
Author : Tony Healey
When my heart decided to start failing on me around my seventy-fifth, the doctors offered me a bio-mechanical one. They called it ‘the ox;’ so called because it apparently never wore out. I remember sitting in the consultants office, surrounded by plastic models of replacement limbs and artificial eyeballs. Dr Fenwick sat at ease in front of me with his hands folded on his desk.
I asked him what the procedure involved. He described the removal of my damaged heart and the attachment of a device to keep the blood circulating in my body in its absence. It was then a simple case of reattaching the old arteries to the new ones in the mecha heart. I had enough of a nest egg put away that I could afford the procedure, so I agreed to it. Dr Fenwick stood and we shook on it. He regarded my prosthetic hand; the result of a traffic accident in my thirties.
“You know, we have replacements for these now,” he said.
“Do you?” I asked.
“Yes. We could replace it with one that looks almost life-like. You’d regain most of the dexterity in your fingers as well,” he said.
“Well I could…” I stammered, my mind reeling. I’d gotten used to not having the use of the fingers on my left hand, and now the thought of having it all back made me nauseous.
“Do you wear those all the time?” he asked, nodding at my glasses.
My head span. Hearts, Hands… Eyes… What else could they replace? I asked him.
He simply shrugged. “Everything,” Dr Fenwick said. “And we do insurance…”
I was still in that office hours later, booking up more enhancements. I allowed Dr Fenwick to convince me into putting the last of my money toward an extensive insurance policy. It wasn’t until later that I realized they would just keep on replacing things, even the new parts when they wore out or malfunctioned. I should have felt full of energy, knowing that I’d significantly extended my life span beyond what it was meant to be, but I didn’t. I felt tired.
I wondered how tired I would become…
