by submission | Jul 16, 2009 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
There was a warm glow as the Core began to wake up, followed by a spiraling light that worked its way around the room. After a moment a thousand pairs of eyes opened, and a thousand magnetic locks released. Like a routine play nine hundred and ninety eight spindly human figures stepped forth onto the walls and filed towards the black emptiness arranged around the Core in what a chemist or mathematician might call tetrahedral bipyramidal form.
Soon they had all filed out, except for two. Two bright, flamboyant figures, every one of their lights on. Two figures, with red, white, green and yellow halos from which fell streams of red and white that culminated in belts of purple and ended in pale skirts of gray. Slowly, after several million machine cycles two pairs of eyes opened separately of each other. Patiently, four legs took tentative steps forwards. Carefully, fourteen foot long fingers at the end of two separate hands grasped each other.
Several cycles passed, merely a millionth of a second, and thousands of synthetic neurons fired off across space to those waiting – brilliant lights in the darkness.
Hello, they cried to one another.
Another thousand suns and Hello, how good to see you again. Hello hello hello.
Every sun spread out across the dark sphere, each one revealing a flaw. A slight scratch here, a growing patch of rust there, a long-forgotten digit and a patch of skin resting together in the middle of nothingness.
A hundred more brilliances just to ask ‘How about a walk?’ And to reply Of course, ‘the sun is so beautiful outside.’
With measured deliberation four spidery legs crept forwards, perfectly out of sequence, perfectly unordered. Over the edge they stepped, fingers still curled and intertwined together, and down the walked towards the door farthest away.
They strolled through the empty darkness together, and parted the sea of nothing with a song of light. One time a cycle, four times, three times, six times, and once again – perhaps a hundred thousands times in a second. It was simply noise.
A repeating eternity later they finally reached the hole into a bright nothing and stepped through, not as one, but as two.
For precisely one billion cycles they simply stood there, taking it all in. The pale glow of a red sun drew long shadows across a field of the dead.
‘It’s always the same,’ said one.
‘It’s never the same,’ replied the other. ‘See the many ways the sun paints the blood and the stars paint the blackness.’
At the end of the billionth cycle, precisely on the dot, the pair, alone in a field of a thousand, began to step forth, from one piece of debris to the next. Here the frozen hull of a once thriving colony ship, there the still burning heart of a capital ship. And there, a icy body, familiar and alien at the same time.
All the while the stars twinkled between the two – ‘Look over there’ or ‘see the way it has spilled open.’
Then came the tug. Even these two couldn’t ignore the desire to return and to sleep.
They made their way back, they returned. Everything was in place, and nine hundred and ninety eight eyes were shut around them.
‘I checked, we will be cleaned tonight as we sleep.’
‘Do you think we will remember?’
‘I do not know.’
For a moment two hard, skeletal heads touched, and a million transmitters exploded in a violent, silent cacophony of what is only known as joy.
And the lights went out for the last time.
by submission | Jun 21, 2009 | Story
Author : John H Reiher Jr.
Family Faxor Kwer had lived on this comet for five generations. The light of the home star Sol was indistinguishable from the light of the twin stars Alef and Bey, or the nearer star Prox. Their ship dwarfed the small comet, stretching far past it in both directions.
The great night of space wrapped around Morgzha, who took little notice of it. He had been born in it, his body was made from it, and he knew of nothing else. He was the son of the headman of the family and overseer of the mining machines. They mined the needed water and minerals from the comet as well as the even rarer metals. They very much needed metals.
Oh there were stories of Hmon arising from the round balls that circled the stars, rich in metals, but he didn’t believe that. How could man come from those balls? The pull of the worlds would crush your chest. No, those were stories for young ones, to listen to and dream of while the crèche mothers raised them to be good workers. Ah to be a child again, thought Morgzha, but if one were to wish for something, it should be how to make different machines.
Morgzha stood on the soft snowy soil of the comet in his airsuit, his handfeet leaving steaming craters as his body heat melted the frozen air. Diggers, the size of twenty men pawed at the ice and snow. Sniffers floated in the near zero gravity and checked the chemical content of the ice being mined. They also checked for the signs of metal, any kind of metal beneath the regolith.
When Family Faxor Kwer chose this comet generations ago, they had chosen poorly. So far, the only metal they found had massed only 2,000 weights. They needed more, much more, to finish a sister ship to Faxor Kwer’s, and start a new family, the Faxor Kweronie. They had bought the right to build the ship ten generations ago from family Faxor Onie, at the same time as the families Faxor Octo and Faxor Neun. Those two families had built their new ships 4 generations ago, while family Faxor Kwer barely had enough metal to build an fifth of the new ship.
There was plenty of carbon compounds and other long chain elements, but without machines that knew how to weave these chemicals, they were forced to find every atom of metal this comet possessed. They could buy the information to manufacture the machines necessary, but the price would be enormous. Faxor Onie was the only one with that information. Morgzha did not want to know what the cost would be to buy this knowledge from the first family of Faxor.
If he could create a machine to weave the chemicals into support struts and walls, then they would be free from the thumb of the first family and it’s rules. But no one knew how to tell the machines how to do what they did, that knowledge was erased from the memory banks of their ship. Only self-repair systems were in place, and basic life-support and entertainment modules were working. The machines could make the very thin skin of the star sails, but that could not be adapted to structural members.
If wishes were plasma drives… he thought and smiled. His thoughts were disturbed by the alert he received from one of the sniffers. He bounded over to the crater the diggers had excavated and saw a wonder: a 10,000-weight, large iron-nickel rock. Morgzha smiled. Maybe he should wish more often.
by submission | Jun 15, 2009 | Story
Author : Michael Varian Daly
The city had once been prosperous and beautiful, tall shining towers, broad tree lined boulevards, full of vitality.
Now it was a smashed ruin. Most of that had happened during the Age of Storms, Category Six monsoons scouring those once shining towers, adding their debris to the general destruction of wind and rain.
Battle damage had now been added to that forlorn landscape.
Drajica looked around at the ruins from the wide intersection where she had set up her Tribunal. The helmet of her battle armor was opened ‘on the half shell’ and would snap shut if the suit detected any incoming threat.
In the distance, she could hear the buzz/hum/hiss of Marine weapons, the snapping of century old ex-Soviet assault rifles, the occasional crump of chemical explosives. The air stank of general decay, with an undercurrent of burnt flesh.
Her security team had established a perimeter around the intersection. In its center, a hundred or so local males were lined up, kneeling, hands bound at the small of their backs. A stack of black plastic body bags were in an orderly pile a dozen feet behind them.
“Pathetic,” she thought, “But they had been warned.”
As the Age of Storms slowly abated, the Union of Matrilineal Republics had emerged from North America’s West Coast. The Sisterhood, as it was colloquially known, spread rapidly into the chaotic aftermath.
In the half century since, it had displaced most of the ‘systems’ that had survived the Age of Storms in an essentially peaceful process, and then expanded out into near Earth space.
Some pockets of Phallists had resisted with violence. But with limited capacity to reproduce, they faded quickly. Uterine replicator technology seemed set to reverse that, but unaugmented tank babies were almost universally sociopathic, except for the psychotics, of course. Those societies imploded brutally.
This city was one of the very last strongholds of Phallism. The Sisterhood had compiled evidence of genital mutilation, impregnation rape, and foot amputation for the women who tried to escape before it took action.
Two Warnings were issued. Then came an EMP, followed by a Marine Drop Brigade. Mobile Tribunals did the mopping up.
Drajica walked over to the line prisoners. She’d picked the first one specifically. She knew his type.
He wore a finely knit kufee and a now soiled white robe. His beard was long, but neatly trimmed.
Drajica faced him. “Do you Swear to honor and respect your Sisters?” Her voice was soft, but firm.
He smiled, but his eyes were hard. “There is no God, but God,” he said, “And Mu-”
She pointed at him. An actinic flash burst from her fingertip. A pinhole appeared in his forehead, a thin wisp of smoke puffing upward. He fell over backward, his body jerking. The smell of piss and shit adding to the overall stench.
She sighed. The next in line, a terrified boy no more than seventeen, had already pissed himself. She faced him. “Do you Swear to honor and respect your Sisters?” she repeated in the exact same tone.
“Ye-ye-yes, Mistress,” he blubbered with utter sincerity, “I Swear by my life!”
Two Marines hauled him away to a waiting ground vehicle. His fate would be agricultural resettlement, or possibly servitor augmentation. But that was not for her to determine.
Two other Marines were dragging the mullah’s corpse toward the pile of body bags. He would wind up as DNA harvest. His smug face would haunt her dreams for a while.
Drajica sighed again. “It will all be over soon,” she told herself, and moved down the line.
by submission | Apr 29, 2009 | Story
Author : Ryan Somma
Director Almod peered at the computer screen frowning in contemplation, “I don’t get it.”
“It’s a star,” Jaed offered helpfully.
“I know it’s a star,” Almod gaze never broke from the image. “So what?”
“Sooo…” the smile gracing Jaed’s face only moments before had vanished, “So it was made from scratch.”
Almod looked at her, quirking an eyebrow, “On a computer.”
“Yes. On a computer,” Jaed’s hands began playing with one another in that way they were prone to do when she was anxious. This was not going the way she had planned, “I gave the computer eight decillion virtual hydrogen atoms, described in exquisite detail, and defined an environment with physical laws just like our own Universe, and…” Jaed’s mouth scrunched up at the look on Almod’s face.
“And it made a star,” the Director’s frown deepened.
“I–I don’t like to think of it as making a star, so much as the computer inferred a star,” Jaed swallowed.
“What are the applications of this?”
“It’s a proof of concept for the Cartesian method,” Jaed stumbled over the words trying to get them out. “In the 17th century, the philosopher Descartes argued that everything about reality could be known through logical inference. In the 18th century, John Locke argued that reality could best be understood through experimentation, and this has been the dominant paradigm for centuries, the scientific method. The only place Descartes’ idea has had any relevance is mathematics.”
Director Almod’s eyes were starting to glaze over, and Jaed’s hands continued wringing one another, “So you see, this program, this simulation, is a proof of concept. I’ve given the computer a cloud of the most basic atom to work with, and, using gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, it has inferred fusion, producing helium. It has even inferred several gas giants in orbit around the star. So you see…?”
“Hmph,” Almod grunted and Jaed’s heart sank. “We live in a Universe a few billion years old–”
“13.5 billion years old…”
“–Running that on a computer, even accelerated, you might have something useful to the company in… What? A few million years?” the Director shook his head, “I’m sorry, but we can’t dedicate more computing power to something with such mediocre chances of profitability. We don’t do science experiments here.”
Almod left the room without another word, leaving Jaed to swivel back to her disparaged accomplishment. Helium now made up 0.27 percent of the atoms in the simulation, Oxygen and Carbon made up 0.006 percent and 0.003 percent respectively. Neon and Iron were there too, and when the star eventually went supernova, Jaed was certain it would produce all the other elements found in the Universe.
But that event was decades away (not “millions of years” as Almod had grossly exaggerated), and would only occur if the server was allowed to run that long. In the meantime, Jaed could at least watch her simulated Universe of a single star for her personal enjoyment, maybe get a Discover magazine article out of it.
She zoomed in on a tiny speck of clumped matter, a planet made of carbon was orbiting the star. It had an atmosphere as thick as the layer of varnish on a globe. H2O molecules were pooling on its surface, forming lakes and oceans.
There was also a strange discoloration spreading across the planet that puzzled Jaed. There were no chemical reactions with the few elements present in the simulation that she could think of to produce the color green.
by Patricia Stewart | Apr 16, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Captain Alais Tonk contemplated the house sized asteroid floating a short distance beyond the forward viewport. Its surface was covered with long, slender green filaments that swayed gently in the weak electromagnetic field of the asteroid belt. Surely, Tonk thought, no one on Earth will believe this. They will say that the images were faked. They will say that it is impossible for life to exist in the vacuum of space. They will say that it’s fool’s life; inert mineral deposits only imitating life. They will say that he’s the naive twenty-fifth century equivalent of an old gold prospector clutching iron pyrite nuggets to his chest. There is no doubt, he concluded, this will require irrefutable proof. He turned toward his science officer, “Have you completed your analysis of the sensor data, lieutenant Orgueil?”
“Partially, sir. The asteroid appears to be a massive carbonaceous chondrite. Spectrographic data indicates that it contains significant quantities of organic compounds. I can identify the characteristic signatures of forty different extraterrestrial amino acids. In addition to the hydrocarbons, there are also silicates, nitrates, sulfides, and frozen water. And that’s just what’s on the surface. I won’t know what is on the inside until we take a core sample.”
“Give me your best guess, Mr. Orgueil. Is that green stuff grass, or not?”
“Not in the conventional sense, sir. Photosynthesis may be the metabolic pathway, but if it’s converting sunlight to chemical energy, it can’t be using carbon dioxide gas and liquid water. There’s no atmosphere, and the water is frozen solid. The chemicals may be there, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out a way to make it all work at minus 100 degrees Celsius. On the other hand, I can’t imagine any natural way for minerals to form flexible green filaments on the surface of an asteroid.”
“Well, lieutenant, it looks like you’re going on a field trip. Put on your EVA suit and collect some samples.”
As Tonk watched through the viewport, Orgueil carefully plucked a few dozen blades of “grass” from the surface of the asteroid. Each time he took a specimen, faint concentric waves appeared to ripple outward from the site. After stowing the samples, Orgueil removed the hollow coring tool and hammer from his utility belt. He placed the coring tool against the surface of the asteroid and gently tapped it with the hammer to set the sharpened end. The asteroid momentarily shuddered and began to drift away. “What the hell?” radioed Orgueil. “Unless I failed Newtonian Physics 101, there’s no way that tap could have cause this massive asteroid to react like that. Huh, it look’s like it stopped moving. I’ll try again.” Orgueil fired his control jets and pursued the asteroid. This time, rather than tapping the coring tool, he gave it a good whack. The asteroid lurched several meters from Orgueil and stopped. It rapidly rotated 180 degrees and remained motionless for a few seconds. Then, in the blink of an eye, like a challenged ram head-butting a rival male, the asteroid slammed into Orgueil, sending him flying, head over heels, in the opposite direction.
Captain Tonk could hear Orgueil cursing in his native language as he fought to regain control of his EVA suit. To Tonk’s utter surprise, the asteroid spun and began to move away from the ship at a speed that was unimaginable for an object that large. In less than a minute, it was just another dot of light, lost in the background of stars. Surely, Tonk thought, no one on Earth will believe this.
