by submission | Jan 26, 2016 | Story |
Author : Justin Permenter
The Earth was silent upon the Last Day.
The Great Mother, once resplendent in the verdure of youth, now wretched and barren in Her twilight, shuddered and trembled as tectonic forces slowly rent Her to pieces from within. She had outlived Her children by eons, the last of whom abandoned their matriarch more than seven billion years before Her demise. These wayward sons and daughters of Earth were destined to inhabit more than a hundred worlds across dozens of systems, expanding ever outward until, at last, they perished, the summation of all their dreams and fears and ambitions consigned to a mere footnote in the incalculable history of the cosmos.
And yet for a time, the Earth remained, keeping Her stoic vigil over ancient battlefields and forgotten graves. Entombed within the heat-scorched shell of their former dominion, the conquerors and vassals, executioners and martyrs of bygone epochs found in death the kinship which had so tragically eluded them in life. Inside this ossuary the bones of mankind now mingled with the dust of empires and oceans boiled away into nothingness beneath the relentless expansion of the Red Giant.
So it was upon the Last Day when, for the first time since the age of the pre-solar nebula, the Earth and Her patron star, the former progenitor and sustainer of all life upon the planet’s ruined surface, were drawn together once more into fatal contact by the adamantine power of gravity. A searing burst of light heralded their violent reunion. Geysers of white flame washed across the glassy exterior of the planet, a tidal wave of heat so intense that even ghosts fled before its mighty and terrible fury. The brittle crust, withered and decimated by millennia of crushing temperatures, dissolved almost at once, exposing the viscous mantle beneath.
From this moment onward the Earth would be forever conjoined with the dying star which had already devoured two of Her sister worlds. Almost two hundred more years, a measure of terrestrial time whose meaning had long since been lost, would pass before the last molten elements of the planet’s core yielded to the weight of Her own mortal destiny. Then, having expended every last measure of resistance, She succumbed to the inferno with the groan of a great wounded beast, resigning the orphaned spirits of Her progeny to wander the vast and pitiless emptiness of space until the coming of the Cataclysm which would bring an end to all things.
Thus was another verse added to the elegy of the ages, the ghostsong which echoes throughout the chasm of the universe, the lamentation of races and civilizations displaced by the ravages of celestial time, and of the worlds which they once called Home.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jan 25, 2016 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Consciousness came back slowly, from the extremities in. First pins and needles in the fingertips and toes, then the crawling burn of some painful memory winding its way along the arms, up the legs, gathering speed until it exploded in a relentless fireball in the brain.
Taxx. A moment ago I was being killed by –
“And here we are back again, Lieutenant.” The voice was everywhere and nowhere, I wasn’t hearing it so much as –
“See how much more clearly you can listen without the limits of your ears, Lieutenant?”
There was a white flash, then an image began to stabilize. I hadn’t opened my eyes, and yet I was seeing, something, a mirror? Something wasn’t right, how—
“And see how much better the view without your eyes, Lieutenant. Now I can show you what I see, at least what I want you to see.” The voice grated. “I must say you’re far more rugged than the rest of your team.”
A sickening spiral, the sudden motion bringing on nausea in waves before a rapid flash of images. Uniforms, men. No, parts of uniforms, parts of men. A floor littered with augments and attached flesh, weapons, body armor, body parts, men. My men.
Somewhere someone was screaming. It was some time before the realization that the screaming was me set in, mic’d and fed back into my brain directly in the absence of the ears I no longer possessed.
The view changed, a no-longer familiar body, face flayed, cables crawling through the lacerated flesh into the muscles, the brain. The body twitched and recoiled from some unseen horror.
Me.
The body was me. The twitching was mine.
“You fascinate me, your quest for machinehood, your replacement of your organic components with the more advanced elements akin to my own. You expand and extend your fragile human platform.” The screaming had stopped, a throat screamed raw, lungs no longer able to sustain the sound.
“You never find us trying to replace our more advanced elements with your organics. I suppose it’s natural for you to want to ascend.”
“What I do want to know, however, is what it feels like to be you. To be fragile, fallible, weak. I can measure every variable, every aspect of your existence, your temperatures, pressures, electrical impulses, chemical compositions. I can take you to the point of death and bring you back, again and again, but –” The voice stopped, the image of me presented as if through my own eyes, lidless and unable to be averted turned back on myself, burning like a hot-wire through my brain.
“How do you feel Lieutenant? I need to know.”
by submission | Jan 24, 2016 | Story |
Author : Lars H. Hoffmann
“And for the love of humanity, please come save me.” Concluded the video. Andie’s voice very nearly broke towards the end of the sentence, making the plea sounding as heartfelt as possible. There was a moment of silence before anybody spoke. Jason looked around the boardroom at the thirteen seated men. This moment was pivotal. Jason was convinced that each and every one of the board members were making up their mind right in front of his eyes. Had it worked?
“Thank you very much for this… this…” The chairman paused searching for words “…fascinating and moving presentation. We will of course need some time before we give you any sort of reply.”
“Of course.” Answered Jason. “We understand that a thirty billion dollars investment over ten years is not something to be taken lightly.”
“One final question: How certain are you that Andie is actually alive?” Asked the Chairman.
This was good, he was using Andie’s name anthropomorphizing the space rover.
“One hundred percent.” Said Jason without a moment’s hesitation. “The signal time to Titan is about an hour and a half from earth so she had to be autonomous. Her basic programming focused on learning from experience much like a child and at some point while driving around on Saturn’s moon she learned enough to become self-aware.”
He smiled his most charming salesman-smile and started collecting the materials he had used for the presentation. He stood up, thanked the board for their time and walked out.
Outside the building Carmen was waiting for him with an unlit cigarette in her left hand. When she saw him come out of the door she hurried over to him.
“How did it go?” She asked.
“I think they are going for it, they might actually fund the rescue mission and we can get her back home.” He said smilingly.
“Her?” Said Carmen disapprovingly. “It might have developed sentience and actual intelligence, but Andie is not man or woman.”
“Yes. Sure. I know.” Said Jason. “But the only reason why this meeting is different from the fourteen previous ones we’ve had with space operating companies is that I refer to Andie as a female and her voice was changed in the video.”
“Do you really think that is enough?”
“I don’t think the men in that boardroom will be able to ignore a damsel in distress.”
by submission | Jan 23, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rob Francis
Hyenas owned the dry, dead city.
They watched as Abal guided the rover down the empty roads, rolling around and over the scattered debris of civilization. His home was gone now, forever. It seemed absurd. Ridiculous. Perhaps that was why he couldn’t stop laughing.
Static crackled over the speakers, and a wavery voice filled the vehicle.
“Rover 12, Rover 12. You there, Abal? Reached A.A. yet?”
H.Q. He slowed to a stop and pressed the comms switch on the rover’s control panel.
“Not a soul to save, brothers.” No sign of the living. No sign of the dead.
From the roadsides hundreds of black eyes mocked him. Mouths gaped, slick wet tongues dangling. An entire metropolis of scavengers.
That would explain the lack of bodies. Possibly the lack of survivors as well.
Abal bared his teeth right back at them. They grinned together.
As he completed his circuit of the city, Abal tapped the comms switch again. “Sweep confirmed. No clean up needed here. No evidence of survivors, diseased or otherwise. Returning to cordon.”
He turned the rover back towards the broken highway and the long drive to safety. From the rearview camera, he saw that a large cackle had gathered in his wake. Hundreds of the vermin, drawn together by his tour of the deserted streets. Abal put his foot down.
As the engine rattled and died, he found himself laughing harder than ever, tears hot on his dusty face.
He did not laugh alone.
END
by submission | Jan 22, 2016 | Story
Author : Beck Dacus
My team and I came to the exomoon Talursa expecting to find extraordinary things. Every new world was an exciting adventure for science– life, evolving completely isolated from the rest of the galaxy, making completely new life forms. It was expected to change exobiology forever, but no more than any other world had.
Instead it changed everything.
We came to this moon and found an abundance of plants, ones that photosynthesize and some that eat other plants. The ecosystem was so intricate and balanced, that we worried our mere presence may cause an extinction. But as we looked further, none of us were worried. Our impact was minimal.
For the first two weeks, it was your standard exobio mission. We all walked around and examined the plants up close. One thing we noticed was the ubiquity of asexuality; none of the organisms on the planet copulated to make offspring. Reproduction was restricted to cloning moonwide. And any organisms that randomly mutated were swiftly wiped out by the members of their own species.
This alone was spooky. We all wondered why such a tyrannical system would evolve among a whole biosphere. All our questions were answered at the beginning of the third week, when Tamara brought in the results of her genome sequencing.
“I found a message,” she said.
“Hmm?” Rick grunted unsuspectingly
“I did the genome sequencing on five of this moon’s species. Each one is a different message.”
“What!?” Perkins demanded. “Whaddaya mean?”
“I scanned the genome of five species, and each one had a unique binary pattern. I–”
“Computer code? There’s computer code in their DNA?” I tried to clarify.
“Yup. I plugged it in, and only got useful data out of two of them.”
“Slow down!” Dana said. “You’re saying something intelligent made all life on Talursa, encoding a different message into each species?”
“Yes. Their way of storing LOTS of information for a long time. Terabytes for eons. I looked over five, like I said, and only two registered in the computer. One was a video, and the other was a recording.”
“Well, what did they say?”
“I don’t know. The video was just a bunch of wavy colors, and the audio was garbled noise. But I saw patterns in them. They had information. We just need to send this to Earth cryptographers to decipher.
“Do we know why the other three didn’t work?”
“Not for sure, but I’m betting it’s because our computers can’t display smells.”
“Huh?”
“Or taste, or a tactile interface, or an electromagnetic field. The aliens that found this world could have had any type or combination of senses– they had to try everything. The two I could use probably had wavelengths of light and sound beyond a human’s range of hearing or vision.”
“So… we’re standing on a time capsule?”
“Carrying what?”
“Everything. All the information about, and ever collected by, some advanced race.”
“So, what do we do? Go back to Earth?”
“Right after we sequence the rest of the genomes on this planet, yes.”
“But that will take ages!”
“That is why you will all stop what you’re doing and help me.”
“What!?”
“Starting right now. There is no time to lose.”
“Hey, I’m mission command–”
“This is larger than us! This is humanity. Now everyone, to my lab. Lots of work to be done.”
