by Duncan Shields | Aug 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“During the mission, your memories are yours. After the mission, they belong to the military.”
The sergeant had droned on at the beginning of this op. It was a standard briefing. I remember seven similar briefings followed by months of blank space in my head. Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a soldier.
We were on a stealth run in Tehran. The radioactive crucible that used to be Qom was a warning shot but they hadn’t listened. Or rather, they hadn’t aimed their warheads away from the east coast of the states.
Our non-reflective gear made us into shadows on the night floor, oil on the city streets while the scared civilians stayed locked inside their houses, praying. We made our way to what our intel told us was the squawk box. It was our job to slit the throats of the button-pushers in the underground missile lobby quietly.
It was real wet work. Proper analogue. None of this remote-control warfare. I was happy to be a part of it.
Because of the memory wipes, none of us knew if we’d worked with anyone on the team before. I knew some of the other players from enjoying each other’s company here and there on R&R and from declassified training but for all I knew, we’d either never been on a mission together before or we’d saved each other’s lives a bunch of times in past missions. It took a special kind of mind to roll with that.
The speakers above us blared the prayer. That meant it was 4:28 in the morning. There was rustling from all of the shuttered apartments around us as people woke, knelt and prayed. I felt powerful, knowing that I was an instrument of what they were afraid of.
We edged up near the fence of our target building. It was a broadcast station set up to look like a corner store. Using the prayer as cover, the six of us slid bonelessly up the wall and through the windows. A ganked keycard allowed us to bypass the keypad into the stairwell and ghost down the stairs to the sub basement.
The sweating, nervous men were looking at the radar screens for any form of airspace incursion. The feeling of tension in the room made me smile.
I looked left and right at our team and nodded.
Thirty seconds later, we were the only living things in the room and no alarm had been raised.
The army had been kind to me. It had augmented my entire body and gave me special abilities. I’d seen parts of the world I’d always wanted to see in between missions. And the memory wipes meant I never had any lasting psychological damage from the horrors I inflicted on people or war crimes I witnessed. It was a pretty sweet deal. Plus no interrogation could work on what I couldn’t remember.
We put the looper into the computer system and the encrypted signal seamlessly slotted in, continuing to let our target know that everything was okay on this end. All intel correct. All systems green.
I pushed the squirt on my arm to tell beta team that we were a go. Then everything went black.
…
I wake up in the barracks. It’s a beautiful day outside. I check the calendar. I’m missing six days. I hope the operation went well. The news is saying that the nuclear standoff is over. I hope I had something to do with it.
by submission | Aug 12, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
Dr. Chow Ming Fu and his cat Schrödinger are the only inhabitants of the titanic supercollider surrounding Canis Majoris like a ring. With a diameter of over 4.5 billion kilometers, the supercollider harnesses the gravity of the massive sun, spinning quantum particles to velocities approaching 99.999% light speed. It’s here that Dr. Fu hopes to unlock the secrets of faster than light travel.
Tinkering with a hypercoil, Dr. Fu hums thoughtfully to himself, while Schrödinger, a tiger stripped, orange tomcat lounges on a nearby consol. A small, diode bejeweled collar adorns his neck.
Making routine passes of the labratory is a Robo-Vac. Contained within its super dense Diurelium casing is a miniature Black Hole, devouring dust, bits of discarded waste and cat hair, dutifully maintaining hermetic cleanliness within the station.
“Pass me the laser coupler, please.” The doctor asks, head buried in condenser wires.
“Certainly, Doktor.” Schrödinger replies. The collar’s microphone translates the feline’s vocal purrs with a faint Austrian accent. With a twitch of an eye, the coupler lifts out of the tool box, levitates gently through the air and rests lightly in the palm of Dr. Fu’s outstretched hand.
“Are you certain that flooding the Boson Stabilizer with Tachyons will work, Doktor?” The cat begins casually cleaning its paw.
“I’ve no idea what’ll happen, to be honest, Schrödinger. No idea at all. There. That should do it.” Dr. Fu extracts his oversized head from the mass of cables. Multi-optics goggles bulge absurdly over his eyes. “We’ve been unable to stabilize enough Bosons to do anything productive for over five hundred years. They are so short lived and difficult to preserve. My theory is that the Tachyons, which are moving backwards through space/time, will –“
“- will extend the life of the Bosons by slowing the temporal flow within the stabilizer.”
“Exactly!”
“Are you worried that a build up of Bosons might neutralize the Higgs Field Matrix, Doktor?”
“Nonsense!”
“Right then. What are we waiting for?”
Dr. Fu launches into a complicated sequence of calculations and calibrations, activating the supercollider and accelerating quantum particles along their sixteen quintillion kilometer journey around the sun to truly astronomical speeds. Schrödinger carefully monitors the flow of Tachyons while eating a tin of Nep-tuna (TM).
The Robo-Vac vibrates discreetly in the corner.
“It’s working!” Dr. Fu chortles happily. “The reservoir is filling with captured Bosons. They aren’t decaying at all!”
“Doktor, The Higgs Field Matrix is in chaotic flux. Perhaps we should stop.”
“Nonsense!”
There is a hollow thunk behind them as the Robo-Vac and it’s Black Hole “falls” into the Boson Reservoir, beginning an instantaneous and irreversible chain reaction. Cat and man simultaneously rotate their heads, peering awestruck into the new gaping hole in the wall. A red light begins blinking on the consol. Schrödinger is the first to react.
“I’m getting strange readings from Big Dog. It’s rapidly losing mass.”
“Did you say, ‘losing mass’?”
“Yes, Doktor.”
They look at each other, gobsmaked, as claxons scream. They feel the sudden absence of gravity.
“Doktor?”
“Yes?”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Yes.”
“Ooop –“
Underlying the entire Universe like an intricate rug is the Higgs Boson Field, providing mass for particles, without which there would be no particle interactions, no matter, no life, just pure, impotent energy. As the microscopic Black Hole collapses into the unnatural accumulation of Bosons trapped in their temporal prison, the proverbial rug is pulled. Faster than the speed of light, the Higgs Boson Field collapses, removing mass from all of creation, instantly disintegrating the entirety of material existence.
Luckily, nature abhors a vacuum.
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Terry abandoned the powerbike at the bridge a few hundred meters before the checkpoint, running it off the road, down the embankment and parking tight against the understructure before he waded into the river.
He swam across, letting the current take him downstream towards the woods where he exited the icy water, discarded his neoprene coverall and closed the distance to the fence on foot.
Beyond the chainlink the thin tether of the skyhook was barely visible against the moonless sky, just a tear in the blackness of his peripheral vision.
The fence, wired as it was, posed only a momentary barrier. Terry lit a monofibre blade and divided one post neatly in two to the ground before spreading the post halves, fencing still intact and live, into a large enough V for him to step through.
He had just enough time to reach the outer wall of the storage facility before he heard the sirens, saw bright blue and red light strobing against the darkness up the road. He watched for a moment, working back the distance in his head as he palmed a phone from his front pocket and dialed. There was a chirp which he answered with a time in seconds, and an acknowledgement chirp. He pocketed the phone again and sliced a set of door hinges off to slip inside the facility.
Terry moved quickly in the near darkness from memory, the storage facility was mostly empty now as the cargo had been moved into the skyhook car itself. Outside, as the first cars hit the bridge the timer on the powerbike expired, igniting several kilos of explosive and tearing the bridge off at its expansion joint, twisting steel and shattering concrete and asphalt. The lead vehicle skidded onto the bridge engulfed in flames, another hit the endwall driving blind into the flash while a third left the road and plunged into the river.
Terry felt the impact from inside and stepped up his pace.
He wound through the layers of structure until he could see the elevator car in the courtyard idling, its maglev engaged and floating it centimeters above its launch pad. The car would be fully loaded and locked up tight. There was no chance of him getting inside, and in a matter of minutes it would leave and there’d be no way out.
He ran, knowing there was little time and sure that by now his pursuers would have crossed the bridge to hunt with amplified vigor.
To his right was the maintenance trailer, and inside he tore through lockers and cabinets until he found the pressure suits required to operate on the skyhook car outside Earth’s atmosphere.
He pulled on a suit, sealed the helmet and shouldered a jet pack before locking on the gloves. Once back outside the scene took on an eerie silence. Behind him he knew were thundering feet, and ahead the rumbling readiness of several tonnes of cargo ready to be slung up the tether beyond geosynchronous orbit to the station above. Terry could only hear his breathing, and the pounding of his heart.
He jogged as quickly as the suit would allow towards the car, lumbered up the gantry and jumped the short distance to the capsule top where he climbed up to its gentle sloping dome and draped himself across it, spread eagled to wait.
The lift started slowly at first, then built to a speed at which Terry felt his bones would crush. He hovered near unconsciousness until mercifully the force of the Earth began to recede, and the capsule slowed for the last half of its journey to Skyhook Station above.
On the ground his pursuers were already alerting the sentries in orbit. They had him, they were sure.
As the capsule slowed, Terry forced himself to his feet and turned his face towards the star flecked blackness above.
Above the station, in a higher orbit was a comforting black silhouette, and it was to this Terry aimed as he fired the jetpack and accelerated away from the skyhook and Earth towards freedom.
by Patricia Stewart | Aug 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart
The patrol ship SS Rakki was approaching Moonbase Delta when the science officer announced, “Captain, I’m picking up an emergency distress signal from the Ultragravity Research Station orbiting Jupiter.”
“Are they requesting assistance?” asked the captain. “Surely they know that there are much closer ships patrolling the outer solar system.”
“Negative, sir. It’s a system wide broadcast. They are reporting a runaway cascade failure in their graviton stress–energy tensor experiment. They are warning everybody in the solar system that if they can’t contain the breach, it may initiate a graviton tsunami.”
“A graviton tsunami?”
“Yes, sir. Concentric ripples in the curvature of spacetime. Somewhat analogous to the waves created by dropping a stone into a pond. Only, much, much larger, and they spread outward at the speed of light.”
“If that occurs, Commander, what can we expect?”
“That depends, sir. For example…” Just then, overwhelming nausea caused the bridge crew to double over, a few collapsed into unconsciousness.
Fighting to regain his composure, the captain crawled back into his command chair. “Report,” he ordered.
“I suspect that was the graviton tsunami, sir,” replied the science officer. “Evidently, the breach occurred shortly after they transmitted their warning.”
“That was milder than I expected,” remarked the captain. “Shouldn’t there have been more damage?”
“As I was about to explain, Captain, the effect is proportional to mass. The mass of our ship is only eight million kilograms. The tsunami passed around us like an earth-based tidal wave would pass around a fish in mid-ocean. But the gravity well of a large mass would magnify the effect like a funnel shaped harbor. Ensign Baker, put Jupiter on the main viewer.”
When Jupiter appeared on the screen, it was more than a thousand times brighter than Sirius. The gravity wave had apparently initiated hydrogen fusion in its core. “Oh my God,” exclaimed the captain, “Put the Earth on the main viewer.” Seconds later, the night side of Earth was awash in the glow of the nuclear Jupiter, but no artificial lights dotted its surface. Fearing the worst, the captain turned to his communications officer, “Lieutenant Albright, see if you can raise Central Command. Tell them we are prepared to assist, and ask for instructions.” Turning back to his science officer “How bad do you think it is Commander? Do you think there are survivors down there?”
Commander Roberts had turned ashen gray, his eyes filled with hopelessness. “Perhaps, sir, but only for another fifteen minutes, or so.”
“Explain,” snapped the captain after the cryptic reply.
“The graviton wave is traveling at the speed of light, sir. Although we just saw Jupiter become a protostar, it actually happened more than forty minutes ago. We didn’t know about it until its light finally reached us.”
“Your point, Commander?”
“Eight point three minutes after the wave hit Earth, it will reach the sun, the largest gravity well in the solar system. I suspect, sir, that eight point three minutes after that, we’ll see the sun go nova.”
by submission | Aug 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“We beat it!” Those were the words my lawyer had said to me right after sentencing. “It” was the death penalty. “Son, you shouldn’t have done this in Texas,” he’d said to me the first time we met. “This” referred to killing a man.
It happened in the middle of July. It was one of the hottest summers on record. There had been a power failure at the office. Power wouldn’t be restored until the following day. Nobody was too broken up about going home early, least of all me. It was about half past one when I pulled into my subdivision. There was a car in my driveway. I immediately recognized it as belonging to Jimmy. Jimmy and I had been best friends since elementary school.
I’d felt that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as soon as I saw the car, but I tried to ignore it. Jimmy had come by to see me, I told myself. Probably been here all of two minutes. Wait another minute and he’ll come right back out that front door. Of course, I knew what I would find when I went in the house.
This is where it starts to get blurry. It was a really long time ago, after all. I remember catching Jimmy and my wife in the act. I remember a lot of yelling. I remember the gunshot. I remember the cops cuffing me. The blood on the bed. My wife shaking uncontrollably.
The prosecutor had tried to get the death penalty. Maybe I deserved it. But I had a good lawyer. Maybe too good. He got me life without the possibility of parole. I was 45 years old when I was convicted. I had high blood pressure and high cholesterol and I’d smoked a pack-and-a-half of cigarettes a day since I was 17. My dad had died of a heart attack at 51. A life sentence didn’t seem all that bad.
I’d been in prison for about ten years when the Nanotech Revolution happened. Everything started advancing really quick. Robots, spaceships, all that science fiction stuff the movies and comic books predicted that never happened all became commonplace in just a few years. And everything became really cheap. “Self-replicating molecular assemblers,” they called ’em. Like tiny little robots that could build almost anything from dirt, water, and sunshine. Medicine got real advanced, too.
First they cured diabetes. Didn’t just come up with a better way to treat it, they really cured it. Heart disease, colon cancer, Alzheimer disease. One by one, nanotech cured all man’s ailments. Eventually, they announced they’d found a cure for aging itself. “Cell repair nanobots” and “telomeres” and a bunch of other stuff I never understood. And because all this nanotech medicine was so cheap, everybody was able to get it.
Including prisoners.
I’ve tried to commit suicide four times. They monitor me ’round the clock now. “They” being the machine guards, of course. Guarding prisoners is one of those jobs humans (and transhumans) won’t do.
Nations have risen and fallen around the prison. The Greater American Federated States is the name of the country that Texas belongs to at the moment.
I’ve been locked up for 485 years. They keep saying they’re gonna pass legislation to free us. Or to let us die. They’ve been saying that for almost 300 years. I wish to God that prosecutor had done his job right and got me the death penalty.
