by submission | Jun 20, 2017 | Story |
Author : Charles Paul Wallace
Ashura contorted her body, thrust her arm through the jagged rip in the ship’s inner hull and aimed the flash-driver at the stuck bolt.
Which, as ever, refused to turn.
She slumped back down to the shrapnel-strewn floor and considered her possibilities.
One: give up; wait for the remaining air to seep into space; die.
Two: Leave the escape pod compartment without, somehow, suffocating in the vacuum of the rest of the ship, and locate any surviving tools that might help solve her predicament.
Three: keep trying.
One was not an option. The Pan-African Space Agency was on shaky enough footing already without adding cowardice to the catalogue of errors. If corners hadn’t been cut on the ship’s construction, if Commander Musonda hadn’t panicked when the alarm flashed into life…She was determined the last remaining survivor of the mission would show no weakness.
Option two seemed an impossibility. The asteroid-net had scythed through the outer hull, obliterating the rest of the crew in one fell swoop. Musonda’s death had followed swiftly once he made the mistake of severing the command capsule from the power module. The resultant blast of nuclear material had billowed through the vessel’s interior in seconds. Ashura had heard it all from where she had taken shelter by the escape pods. She had only survived the blowback by pure luck. Now, her one chance of survival lay with…
Option three: keep on trying and hope for the best.
Small hope though it was.
She stretched her arm through the tear in the bulkhead once more. Centimetres away, the bolt sat beside the pod’s release mechanism, unconcerned and indifferent to her attempts to turn it. She switched on the screwdriver for the briefest second. How absurd, that her survival should rest on the waning charge of this tool. How narrow the divide between success and failure. She grimaced; the same could be said for the entire mission.
The bolt, naturally, didn’t move.
She withdrew her arm and tried to think. The dwindling oxygen supply was making such an exercise near-impossible; she tried pinching herself, slapping herself, anything to clear her thoughts. The fuzz inside her head ballooned, a clouding, impenetrable miasma…
A memory came to her: her mother, on her hands and knees in their barn. The farm where Ashura had spent her childhood seemed to manifest itself around her, out here in the void. Her mother, arm extended inside the only cow they could afford, was desperately trying to pull its calf out before the beast expired from the effort. Sweat drenched her forehead. Ashura could do nothing other than shout words of encouragement.
“Mother!” she screamed. “Pull! Pull!”
Her mother gave one last almighty wrench. With a sound of slurping mud the calf tumbled out onto the straw. The cow gave out a low that shook the air, turned its giant head and began to lick its child clean.
Suddenly Ashura was back on the ship. A sharp pain in her arm, and the stench of the farm became the stench of stale air. She found she had thrust her hand back through the hole without even realising it. The driver glowed. With a final, infinite effort she waved it above the bolt and jammed it forward.
It slipped from her grasp and tumbled to the floor with a clank.
Weeping, she lay her head on the cold metal of the hull.
And it was seconds before she heard the hiss of the turning bolt; and then the womb-like interior of the escape pod lay before her, ripe with the promise of rebirth in the stars.
by submission | Feb 5, 2017 | Story |
Author : Garrisonjames
They used to joke that the world would eventually be taken over by cockroaches or rats. Both are pretty much extinct these days. We’ve all been done-in by the ants. Tiny, insignificant little creatures we used to crush under our thumbs, poison with impunity. In the end they were too smart for us. Too smart and too numerous.
By the time anyone noticed the super-colonies in Africa or Asia or wherever, it was too late. We were too used to seeing things from the perspective of mammals with centralized brains in our bodies. Ants don’t work like that. Maybe they did, once upon a time. At some point the ants developed into a form of networked intelligence. We used to worry about AI and robots rising up to destroy us, and in a way we are being exterminated by biological robots driven by a massively multiplexed networked consciousness that might as well be the Singularity for all we know or can prove.
Not only did the ants out-number us by trillions upon trillions; all those connections, all those linked synapses allowed them to outclass our own monkey-brains and computers. Insidiously clever things, the ants quickly, quietly, carefully infiltrated every one of our cities and settlements. They formed deeply embedded nests where their queens dreamed in pheromones and conspired through chemical signals among one another to take over the world.
Sinkholes ruined roads and collapsed neighborhoods. Cave-ins and avalanches and mud-slides struck without warning. Cables were severed. Sewers were blocked. Hordes of every kind of ant swarmed through the chaos and destruction.
People being people blamed one another and took up arms against their usual enemies even as city after city fell to the ants. Some took to the oceans, others took to the skies; there was a renaissance for airships after all. Of course ants can grow wings and swarms wrecked all but the highest-flying dirigibles, and it was only a matter of time before raft-like masses of ants stripped barges and oil-rigs, ocean-liners and other sea-going vessels of all life.
There aren’t many of us left these days. A few survivors wandering about what’s left of the old deserts that are slowly greening due to the ants’ efforts at making the world over in their image. There are some isolated island communities that the rafts haven’t reached yet. Some of us hide as far up in the atmosphere as our airships can reach. But we’re too few and too scattered to be any sort of threat to the ants.
by submission | Dec 22, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Culturally, they are the descendants of the hepcats and beats and hippies and hipsters and the other various subsequent nonconformists of the past half-millennium who organically came together to form distinct subcultures. But there the parallels end. Even the most unorthodox of those earlier bohemians could not have imagined the Plasmatics.
As a Special Activities Bureau investigator for the Sino-American Commonwealth, my job can take me anywhere in the system, but the magnetosphere of Jupiter is pretty far afield even for someone like me. It’s equally unusual for an agent like myself to enlist help from outside the Bureau. We typically pride ourselves on our discretion. But when an unmanned recon ship gets trapped in orbit around Jupiter carrying intel that could mean trade sanctions from the African Coalition and perhaps war with the Lunar Free State if said intel goes public, discretion is adjourned. That’s where the Plasmatics come in.
My ship settles into an enormously wide orbit around the gas giant to avoid the electromagnetic maelstrom that rings the planet, the same maelstrom that the Plasmatics call home. I beam a radio signal and wait. Within half an hour, I get a response.
“The ship’s computers are probably already fried,” I tell the locals. “But we were hoping you could make sure they are.”
In a few minutes, a modulation in the normal Jovian background radio emissions is received and processed by my ship’s computer: “Jiddy sups a boost. Not charming a glint.”
That is the closest literal translation my computer can manage. The Plasmatics have a slang all their own. The fact that they are a community of gigantic spider web-like entities flying through the Jovian magnetosphere does nothing to bridge the cultural gap. Of course, the people who gave up their humanity over the past century to become Plasmatics didn’t do so because they wanted to fit in. The connotative meaning of the message is something like “The human would like us to do him a favor but he isn’t offering us any reward in exchange.”
“What could the Commonwealth do for you?” I reply, having no idea what nearly immaterial meshwork creatures who live in a plasma sheet might want.
“Pum the Spot with Basu-Lovvorn 3.”
Basu-Lovvorn 3 is a long-period comet. It will pass through the orbit of Jupiter in about 10 years. They want the Commonwealth to deflect it to strike the immense anticyclonic storm system on Jupiter’s surface that is more than twice the diameter of Earth called the Great Red Spot. I radio back to my superiors. They agree to the terms. The Commonwealth Space Authority will undertake the project with research into Jupiter’s atmosphere as the cover story.
“The Commonwealth will do as you ask. Just for my own curiosity, may I ask why you want a comet diverted into the Great Red Spot?”
My computer struggles with the Plasmatic response. The only word it can clearly render is “Renovate”. I have no idea if it’s more Plasmatic slang for something or if, in some context I can’t imagine, it means what it says.
My sensors show repeated bursts of electrical discharges in the area of the derelict Commonwealth spacecraft. Presumably, they have fulfilled their part of the bargain. “The Sino-American Commonwealth thanks you for your assistance,” I transmit as I move to break orbit.
“Cohesive, Jiddy! Real cohesive!” comes the response a minute later as I begin my fall back to the inner system.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 20, 2015 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The cure for the plague that killed half of the planet’s population forced mankind’s biology to outgrow what was previously defined as human.
We skipped ahead six chapters in our evolution, overachieving little tryhards that we are. Those scientists were savants without the idiot. The vaccines were rushed to the city centers. Riots followed. Governments were reinstated. It was a long ten years. Giant ‘dead pits’ burned at the centers of most cities for years.
Half of the planet was suddenly vacant. Room for everyone now. It was a new dawn.
Korgath Bigbones looked at the black stripes and zigzags on his thick, pale hand. He stopped thinking about the past and starting thinking about the present.
Coal tattoos. That’s what it was called when coal dust got into a miner’s wound. The cut darkened and it became a permanent black line.
He ate his sandwiches daintily, pinching one corner between each thumb and forefinger, the rest of his black-encrusted fingers raised far away from the sandwich. The dark poisons on his fingertips stained the small corner he was pinching. The ground was littered with tiny black triangles of bread after lunch.
The vaccine let humans be groomed for their jobs. If a job was dangerous, the body could be adapted to endure and even thrive in hazardous environments. No longer did we have to destroy the environment around us to suit our needs. We could, when the occasion called for it, become different to suit where we were.
The coal miners were a pale breed. Their lungs were changed to gain nutrients from the coal dust as well as the oxygen and gasses miles down beneath the earth. Their nostrils were very wide. They had small, greenish white, night-vision eyes that glinted in the darkness like sharks in an ocean at evening.
Korgath realized that there were no mirrors down here except in the tattoo/cutter’s caves.
These were bodies that could take punishment. Bodies with solid fat on them coating muscles borne of pure endurance.
The ones that had been there the longest had the most detailed coal tattoos on their broad backs and huge arms. The workers looked like pot-bellied, hairless, albino, subterranean gorillas wrapped in the black-ridged whorls, initials, and high-contrast designs of their tattoos. Memorials for those crushed in cave-ins, crude portraits of departed friend’s faces, and cultural swirls from the ancient Celts, Maoris, Africa and the Orient.
It took seventeen elevators and nearly a day to get down this low.
They didn’t need many lights to work in the depths and they didn’t need to come for fresh air. The cooling flanges on their back dissipated the constant heat. They’d do six-month stretches down there. They don’t call it the bowels of the earth for nothing. They’d come up stinking.
Korgath was six days away from the end of this contract. The end of half a decade in blackness.
He’d need respirators filled with coal dust and special sunglasses when he was above ground for six months until the vaccines returned him to what was considered normal baseline human. Even tropical temperatures would feel chilly to him until he acclimatized.
Some miners kept their appearance. That level of intensity was hard to shake off no matter what the topside mirrors said.
Korgath was considering keeping the tattoos. But he still wasn’t sure.
The lunch bell rang and he went back to work. Six more days.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 12, 2015 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We are on a planet whose proper name is unpronounceable by us according to the aliens who left us here. We call the planet Here, Prison, Earth2, Re-earth, Zooplanet and many others names. We haven’t been here long enough for one single name to stick.
It looks kind of like what I remember Africa looking like when I saw it on television back on Earth. Lots of arid land with occasional fields of tall grass and little tiny lakes scattered around, lots of sun.
We’ve got three suns and sixteen moons. The suns are weaker so we don’t cook. They add up to a constant summer. The moons make for a much brighter night. Both days and nights are twice as long here but we’ve adjusted.
We sleep half the day and then half the night. The protective atmosphere here is not flawed. We tan here with no burning and no skin cancer.
Over a year ago, the aliens came down to Earth and left a puzzle for us floating in the middle of the Pacific; a giant geodesic dome bobbing in international waters. They made a lot of noise leaving it there. Our weapons had no effect. We watched the ship leave and turned our attention to the artifact.
One by one, the countries sailed out, surrounded it and stared. For once, the UN came in handy and volunteered to be first to go into it.
Inside the dome were a series of simple puzzles that became progressively harder. The puzzles were relayed back. The world got busy.
The first six were completed in days. Prime number sequences, geometric and logic proofs, a couple of theoretical physics equations. Then they got hard.
We made it up to question twenty. Hawking died trying to figure it out.
After no more puzzles had been solved for sixteen months and a few of them had been answered incorrectly, the aliens came back.
Twenty-three million of us were collected at random. We simply woke up in the cargo hold of the arkship floating around our former home, a mathematically fair cross-section of ages, races, nationalities and gender. Family ties were not taken into consideration.
As the Earth grew smaller, we saw it flash a number of colours.
We were told later that the Earth had been sterilized and cleaned for its new tenants. That meant that every human not on board the ship was dead.
I missed my parents. We all still had nightmares. Some of the women have given birth, though, and a new generation has been born here.
There was initial fury, insanity and sadness after we left the arkship. Factions developed, readying themselves to attack the aliens if they returned and trying to rally others. The aliens have not come back and those factions are being listened to less and less.
There are still some that see us as victims rounded up and put on some sort of a reservation. Their numbers are dwindling. The grief-stricken are starting to rejoin conversations and laugh sometimes.
The silent surroundings and lack of predators are calming. You can’t die from exposure to the elements here. It’s always good weather. The plants and food and game animals are plentiful and none of it seems to be poisonous.
There’s no money here. The unemployment rate is 100%. The air is clean and so far, the weather’s been a flat and uneventful paradise compared to the growing superstorms on Earth.
The fact is that most of us have taken to thinking that technically, we’ve been rescued.
