by Julian Miles | Oct 12, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Section three. All clear.”
That’s Christov. Which is clever, because according to the heartbeat monitor I have, Christov’s heart stopped beating ninety-four seconds ago.
My claw comes down on the ‘Section Three Purge’ button as people about me register my movement and open their mouths to shout. Far to our west, an outlying section of the metropolis dies under neutron charge detonations and layered EMP.
“Section three was compromised one hundred seconds ago. The dead man talking confirmed it.”
Shock registers, then sorrow, gratitude, and finally: renewed resolve.
Nanowar is a tainted thing, a combination of chess, sociopathy and gambling. As the enemy can work through things so small, a certain paranoia has to be practised, and it is hard keeping the equivalent of Level Three Disease control everywhere that could be threatened. Errors occur. People die before they are even aware of being killed – or even invaded.
I am a Telemeter, the latest edge for my side. A totally sealed armoured unit, impervious to anything below macro-scale invasive attack. I look like a giant beetle and move with a silence that makes anyone who has a fear of multi-legged things incapable of working with me.
My purpose is to monitor everyone else, to make tactical decisions and enact suppression routines that are simply too hard for humans to make in the correct timeframe. They lose precious seconds in emotional quandaries, seconds that cannot be lost if we are to counter the insurgencies.
“Section four. All clear.”
That’s Michaela. She’s clever, and has a heartbeat too.
I do not move.
There are sighs of relief.
by submission | Oct 11, 2015 | Story |
Author : C. James Darrow
There was a time when man set his eyes on the stars beyond our own. Yet as the centuries passed man still found himself stuck on the world upon which he began. Through our own advancements we eventually found ourselves setting foot onto the Moon and Mars. But it was our satellites which reached far beyond those boundaries, to which no living man ever would.
A time dawned when man’s chaotic history culminated to a single point which became our tragic end. Not from our own self-destruction, but rather obliteration from the one thing which had given us life—the Sun. The dying star became a spectacle of light as it engulfed our home and the other inner planets we had come to know so well. However it was this fate which we recognized long before its occurrence. In one last attempt to survive the eons, and to preserve a history we so cherished, we erected one last monument to ourselves.
The vault was constructed from solid gold, a magnificent cube the size of a small home. It was sent to, and placed on Europa with a hope that any future travelers may find the last remnants of our forgotten empires. Inside it we placed thousands of books and millions of photos; a collection of documented life throughout the evolution of man and his home.
It was there it sat, for millennia to come, resting atop the frozen moon; shimmering in the light of the colossal red Sun. Though it was that light, however weak, that allowed the world to slowly warm. The melt itself took thousands of years alone and the layers of ice began pooling together, creating vast oceans. Soon the vault’s weight became too much and it broke through the thinning ice, sinking far below the surface, and so vanished every last trace of us.
Though it was something else that soon found its way to the surface. Black eel-like fish, for the first time ever had been granted a view beyond their once encapsulated icy realm. It was when they first reached the surface that they stared into the heavens with uncomprehending eyes. Soon they began to lunge from the icy waters, propelling themselves into the thin atmosphere that had slowly been forming above. The red Sun, though providing only a fraction of the heat it once had, was more than enough for the emerging species. It was here they continued to jump into the air, over and over for countless years to come, striving to reach the stars for themselves.
by submission | Oct 10, 2015 | Story |
Author : John K. Webb
This was not South Carolinian white sand beach. He’d instructed Jacobson—the spherical little Dispensation Drone with its twitching antennae and the prying, bulging crystalline eye—to direct them to a nearby exoplanet with a white sand beach. Corporal Weyer had nicknamed Jacobson “Jacobson” one day prior because he’d found it amusing; apparently, this minor betrayal was the drone’s version of a comeback.
“You are not satisfied with Exoplanet-Arlington-XC57C? My scanners indicate that your blood pressure has risen to one-twenty-seven over eighty-two, which while being within normal parameters—“
“I’m sure you find this funny,” said Corporal Weyer, folding the pre-deployed polycarbonate surfboard under his armpit.
“Exoplanet-Arlington-XC57C is the closest approximation to what you described, sir.”
“The sand is black andesite, you can barely call it sand—“
“Blood pressure has increased to one-thirty-five over eighty-six—“
“—and you think it’s funny, don’t you?”
The drone fluttered in circles around his head, humming a tuneless song in its tinny voice that served as response, and with that they began walking down shore, Weyer’s footsteps disappearing almost instantaneously in the hot, rubbery black “sand.” Then, looking on the horizon, he noticed something.
“I haven’t seen one wave, Jacobson.”
It was true: the planet’s ocean, large enough to swallow all of Earth’s landmass, stretched as an infinite sea of mint colored glass, the light green color owing to sprawling colonies of undisturbed deep-sea algae that’d originally been confused with methane gas emissions, from the orbital imaging.
“The planet’s wave articulation—“
“My only day off and you take me to a planet with no waves?”
“—occurs once every three hours. The next wave is due in fifteen minutes.”
“Care to tell me my blood pressure?” Said Corporal Weyer, stepping into the water. It felt like a river bottom, layered moss-slick stones that if not for his boots would have been quite painful to walk on.
“Blood pressure is—“
“Shut up, I was joking.”
“May I remind you that the re-appropriation of TEDI material for the purposes of constructing a surfboard is a gross misuse of company material?”
“You just did.”
They went about a hundred yards out before Weyer activated his surfboard, the object no larger than a briefcase unfolding into a twelve foot long solid piece of polyurethane. The Corporal lay flat on his belly, the board unmoving atop the featureless expanse of alien ocean. Like antarctic whiteout: a shimmering flat Nothing. Jacobson hovered overhead, providing a measure of shade, scanning with that great, bulging eye.
“No lifeforms detected,” it said helpfully.
Weyer grunted.
Charleston was his home—at least, it had been, before he’d entered the Deep Sleep and drifted several million miles away. For the first time in his career he allowed himself to wonder if the city still even physically existed, or like every other memory simply lived on in collation and correlation: water is water, beach is beach, whatever the chemical components. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless.
“You know what paradise is, Jacobson?”
“An existential conceptualization—“
“This is it, this is paradise. Nothing but ocean and beach, oldest thing there is.”
A bump appeared on the horizon, what the orbital images showed as a solid wall of water rising hundreds of feet high, straddling the planet, the result of unstable tectonic activity. The wave was finally coming.
“I take it all back. This is perfect. Jacobson, thank you.”
The drone hummed merrily, “I wouldn’t trick you.”
by submission | Oct 9, 2015 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
“Major, Allen’s alive. He got through Iraq. He didn’t disappear in a Nevada training mission.” Reed Winston leaned over the small table in a cramped conference room filled with file boxes, copy machines and a coffee mess. Burned coffee aromas perforated Reed’s attention as the thin, pasty Major Cordoni stared back with penetrating dark eyes and a quizzical expression.
“What a wild-ass concoction. Why don’t you take your cockamamie ideas to the media? I don’t have time.” A smirk rolled across the Major’s face as he leaned back, sneering at the haggard intruder, now handcuffed, and waiting for Oakland police.
“He disappeared in a Sierra cloud bank, but no plane was recovered? How can you believe that? I was a Marine pilot for eight years. You don’t…”
“Don’t what? Lose planes in the Sierras? It took a year to find Fossett. A year! So why are you sure about Colonel Winston?”
“We’re twins. We sometimes see through each other’s eyes. I know Allen’s still flying, but it’s somewhere he hates and the things he’s facing are…well…not on Earth.” Reed hesitated as the Major broke into deep laughter, slamming a manila file folder onto the table.
“Nice fantasy, but I’ve got stuff to do here today. I read your sleeve. You were topnotch with the Harriers for the Marines… even got a DSC. I’ll humor you out of respect, Captain, but there’s no basis to alien abductions. Martians didn’t eat your brother.”
“It’s not food they want. They want soldiers…the best, now. They keep us at war constantly to develop improved fighters for their extraterrestrial wars and invasions. Military disappearances occur continuously. A Persian army of fifty thousand disappeared in a sandstorm in 525 B.C. The armadas from Spain to England, and China to Japan, disappeared with tens of thousands in horrific storms. 1915 in Gallipoli, an entire regiment of Brits walked into a mist on the battlefield and vanished. We’ve lost planes and ships in the Devil’s Triangle clouds. Aliens manipulate the weather to hide thefts. We’ve got thousands of MIAs still unaccounted for since World War II, on every battlefield. You can’t deny those facts!”
Major Cordoni waggled his head, sighing deeply, as Staff Sergeant Prentiss entered, interrupting to whisper to his superior, “I checked with HQ. They put a restraining order on him for all the bases but they forgot about recruitment centers. All we can do is have Oakland hold him for questioning. We need you at the front, too, for a minute, sir.”
“Captain, I have to attend to something else momentarily. I’ll get back with you in a few.” Cordoni followed the overweight sergeant to the center’s glass doors facing west toward San Francisco. The skyline was gone under rolling fog.
“That’s the problem, Major,” Prentiss said, pointing outside. “It came up sudden over Ballena Bay and Crab Cove. You can’t even see the cars on Central Avenue.”
“Shut it down, Sergeant, and lock the doors. We’re closed.”
“Yes, sir, Major, but what about the team that flew in from Las Cruces last night? We’ve got ten top drone pilots from Holloman waiting to brief hundreds of prospective engineering students from Berkeley, Stanford and Cal Poly. TAAC will raise hell if we put these USOVF nerds on ice here.”
“Not to worry. Close it up. I’ve got my quota to meet. Looks like it will be eleven instead of ten.”
by submission | Oct 8, 2015 | Story |
Author : Sevanaka
It is an unnatural sensation. A man is meant to act; meant to take measured, deliberate steps after rational thought. Oh, for the keen, decisive edge of ideology, or the white-hot flurry of passion to drive thought from mind to hands. Instead there is only the unknown – the great, big, Outside – beckoning to him with the pirouetting lights of the tangled slipstream of subspace.
He had imagined it would have been silent: dark, cold, and uninviting, like some of the older films suggested. Yet here, in the slip, there was something he could only relate to a kind of music. An orchestra; a synesthetic orgasm that tore at his mind in a way that the holosims back home never could. A wild, pulsating and writhing symphony; a polyphonic ensemble of greater proportion than what might have been gleaned from the tutorials, or the guides, or the training. Here, this journey out of known space – just shy of six months out – was rapidly coming to a middle.
There had been little left of the excitement of exploration – of adventure! – left in the eyes of the crew. Their glazed-over expressions seemed to reveal a strange mixture of fascination and dull acceptance. Already, the constellations he grew up with were gone, or at least that’s what the navigation console would have told him. Already, the light from home would be a microscopic speck, or so the spectrometer might have read. But for right now he, like the others, was lost in the swirl.
It reminded him of dancing. Despite two left feet, and an absolute lack of rhythm, his mind wandered to the melody that had once carried his body across the floor. He thought of the tinkering laughter that made the waltz seem simplistic, natural. He lingered on the distinctly tactile memory of twisting limbs and searching lips, as the night wore onward towards morning. He recalled the joyous whispers, the rustle of silk, the profession of love. But his eyes were dazzled by the whirling lights; alas, he could not seem to picture the smile from the wrinkled image that faded, forgotten, at arm’s length.
To him, it felt surreal. There was nothing left of the wit and will of the crew around him; each standing dumbfounded and drooling. Slowly… slowly, the man tore himself away from the mesmerizing spectacle and glanced instead at the instruments. Alarming lights, harsh even against the cacophony of the stars, demanded attention and he gaped at the incoming reports.
The ship was screaming, the reports told him. Posts: abandoned, by men wholly lost to the blankness of space. Airlocks: left gaping, by crew wanting nothing but to swim in the stream of colors just outside. He considered it, briefly, but out of the corner of his eye, her face beamed up at him, chiding him with blissful ignorance.
And in that moment, he knew with a certainty that drowned even the starlight: he must act.
He must return.
