by submission | Jun 7, 2015 | Story |
Author : Joey To
Lola sighed and glared at the chrome ring sitting on her desk. In the glowing hologram which hovered above it, her long brown hair glinted. Around her waist were his strong arms.
“Prick,” she muttered.
Indeed, her list of romantic failures were piling up. And his stupid big arms meant nothing now. The whole thing felt so clichéd and lame and she knew she would laugh her head off if this was something she saw in a film. As long as the film wasn’t about her, that is.
“Lola, is something wrong?” asked a gentle masculine voice.
She turned and there stood Tony in the doorway, his posture perfect. If his skin didn’t have that plastic shininess, he would pass as human. Lola didn’t answer and padded toward the bookshelf next to her bed and reached for her neuropsychology textbook. Damn exam.
Tony’s blue eyes tracked her. “Given your body temperature, the mild epidermal swelling under your eyes and facial expression, I conclude that you are in emotional distress. May I be of assistance?”
Lola glanced at her attendant, then nodded at the holographic projector. “Can you kill him?”
“Although I am to obey your orders, you know I cannot harm a human being.”
“Even if he harmed me first through infidelity?”
The android’s gaze narrowed. “I assess that you are probably not lying, but how do you know that is a fact?”
Lola waved her hand, sat down on her bed with her back to the door and the book in her lap. Damn his cold logic. “I wish I could just forget this…”
She swayed when the mattress sank as Tony sat next to her. “I was given the impression that shopping may brighten one’s spirits, figuratively speaking.”
“That’s so passé,” Lola answered. And pouted.
“And wishing you could forget isn’t?”
She glowered at Tony who was a few inches away, his back straight, totally unmoved. He was right, of course. He then nodded at the book in her lap. “Or you can study for your last exam. And chapter three on neurotransmission may be interesting for you.”
Lola looked down at the black textbook and rolled her eyes. “Okay, so not gonna study. But still, it would be nice to forget… just for a little while.”
As she was about to rise, Tony firmly held her head in his ten fingers while his glassy blue eyes bored into hers. They were soulless but it didn’t matter when she felt a gentle tingling, her vision blurred and her lips curled a little. Everything was gonna be fine after all.
by submission | Jun 6, 2015 | Story |
Author : Elijah Goering
It began with the invention of the tool. Perhaps that was our big mistake. We built a civilization. We survived the discovery of the power of the atom, and lived to develop a faster than light drive. Immediately, we raced to colonize dozens of systems, and began terraforming at least one planet in each system. Then we faltered, stopped expanding just long enough to populate our colonies. And then we created the weapon.
I will not describe the weapon in detail and help whomever might find this to destroy themselves. I will simply say that it had the power to scourge a planet of all life. The inventors meant to use it only once, and achieve a final victory over their enemies. The demonstration was effective, and soon the technology was bought, stolen, or copied by every planet, except those whose enemies got it first. But if we’re anything we’re vengeful. Homeless fleets of warships got their revenge.
No planets survived, but life continued among the asteroids. So did the war. Two of the most powerful nations banded together and destroyed the homes of every other fleet. I escaped before my home was destroyed, but I have not since seen any sign of my people. I roamed far from home through unexplored star systems and waited until I thought it was safe to return. I was right. The war was over. Nowhere that I searched was there any sign of life, only ruins of a lost civilization. Until I got to the home system.
Males were too rare in our society to risk in war, all were left safely at home, until our homes were destroyed. In orbit of a gas giant in our home system was a monument which said “Here was the final battle of the Oikosians. Whether by accident or design, this small moon was destroyed in the fury to combat, with the last of our males. Now our species goes to extinction”.
Perhaps some males survived, and a colony was formed in secret, far from the war. But if so, I have since roamed through hundreds, perhaps thousands of systems and have seen no sign of it. Some systems had life, but nowhere was there intelligence. I found only one planet truly bustling with life, orbiting a yellow star halfway through its life. I have placed my ship in the Oort cloud orbiting its sun. It is my hope that intelligence will evolve on the planet nearby, and develop a technological civilization. Before my escape I collected as much information as I could, and on board I have a library containing works of science, mathematics, and the history of the Oikosians up to the final war.. Perhaps they will find me, and with my working FTL drive I will be the key to the stars for some future civilization. To that end I will now disable life support to save energy so that my ship can send a message when another ship comes near. By the time the aliens get here they should be ready for the FTL drive. So ends the dominion of life from the planet Oikos, and so (I hope) begins a new era of life in the galaxy.
-The Last Historian
by submission | Jun 5, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“Captain Ree’Eer’Ak reporting as ordered,” said the alien who, from a human perspective, might have been described as some nightmarish character from a Picasso painting made flesh, as it seemingly just appeared in the room that lacked any visible means of ingress or egress.
“Be comfortable, Captain,” said the other equally surreal creature. Part of what might have been one of the thing’s arms appeared to be missing. The alien looked in the direction of where the remainder of the arm should have been. “Ree’Eer’Ak, your report is…”
“Difficult to believe,” the Captain finished for its superior. “I’m aware of that, Admiral. But as the old philosophers said, when evidence and belief are in conflict, belief must change.”
“Quite a bit will change,” the Admiral replied, settling back. The missing hand that held the Captain’s report abruptly snapped into existence as the back of the Admiral’s head disappeared like a poorly executed split-screen effect in an old movie. “In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that very few aspects of life will remain unaffected if your ship’s log entries are correct.”
“They are correct, Admiral.”
“Make no mistake, Ree’Eer’Ak. When this is made public, every biology textbook will have to be rewritten. And it’s an open question how the major religions will accommodate this discovery, if they can accommodate it at all.”
The Captain leaned forward. Its body seemed to break in two, its proximal half sliding forward on its distal half. “Every word of every log entry is true, Admiral. What I and my crew documented is an accurate description of life on Earth. And we have brought back biological samples for study.”
“And ‘Earth’ is the name by which the inhabitants of Dellor 3 call their world?”
“Yes, Admiral.”
“And the…” The Admiral referenced the report. “The ‘humans’ as well as all life on that world are…”
“Three dimensional,” said the Captain.
The Admiral leaned back further. Its head now seemed to vanish entirely. “It’s long been theorized that simple microscopic life might exist in three dimensions. But complex, higher life forms? That was always thought impossible. And you claim these humans are intelligent?”
“They are, Admiral. Their science is somewhat confused because their sensory organs can’t detect a fourth spatial dimension. For example, they imagined some strange and undetectable material called ‘dark matter’ existed to try to reconcile their 3-D perception of what is a 4-D spatial universe.”
“How do they appear?”
“They’re bipeds. They’re…it’s difficult to describe. They’re ‘flatter’ than we are.”
“And how do we appear to them?”
“Very unnerving. Parts of our ship and the crew are not visible to them. And the parts that are or are not visible change as we move. And their architecture is likewise limited to three dimensions meaning we can enter or exit what to them is a totally enclosed structure by simply walking around the walls. I’m glad we were able to make first contact without incident. To them, we must be terrifying.”
“And yet you conclude your log entry with the suggestion that we establish full diplomatic relations?”
“Yes, Admiral. As you noted, this will change who we are and how we perceive ourselves. And it will have the same effect on the human race. Isn’t that the ultimate goal of exploration? I believe we should extend the hand of friendship even if our new acquaintances can’t see it all at once.”
by submission | Jun 4, 2015 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
Dear Mr. Hawking,
I regret to inform you that I will not be attending your reception, scheduled for 12:00 UT, 28 June 2009.
Or perhaps I should say that I apologize for not having attended your reception, given that this letter will not be delivered until after the event has concluded. You of all people must understand the complexities of communicating in a manner such as this, but alas, we are limited by the temporality of our existences.
It would, perhaps, be prudent to inform you that a number of my colleagues discouraged me from sending this letter. In fact, they expressly forbade me from attempting any communication with you at all.
Their prejudice is not, as you might imagine, any concern over temporal paradoxes or alternate timelines or any such nonsense. Nor have they discouraged me from contacting you based on the concrete evidence that no one did, in fact, attend your reception. No, such historical truths can often be misrepresented, and I certainly trust that, if asked, you could have taken such a secret to your grave. A man of your intelligence could at least be trusted for that small a task.
No, the true reason my colleagues have urged not to contact you is simple: They do not like you.
And I’m afraid to say, Mr. Hawking, that I cannot much blame them.
Why, the very nature of your invitation is reason enough to scorn you. You may suppose that young and upstart time travelers may have a keen interest in making your acquaintance, regardless of the consequences. But you would be incorrect. Most young men in our business find your invitation so insulting, not only to our profession, but to the march of scientific advancement itself, that they would rather you die in ignorance than know the truth. What kind of arrogant man, they say, would claim to know more than men a thousand years more advanced than he?
But alas, Mr. Hawking, despite my hearty agreement with my colleagues on the latter point, I simply could not let the former pass. A man of your intelligence does deserve to know the truth before he dies, and thus I have crafted this letter to be delivered on your deathbed, mere seconds before you eyes close for the last time. Yes, you are going to die, and if my timing is correct (as it often must be) this will be the last thing you read.
And so I say again, Mr. Hawking, I am very sorry to have missed your party. Perhaps in the next life (if there is such a thing) you will look upon the natural world with a bit more humility.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Time Traveler
by submission | Jun 3, 2015 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
June 7, 2105: Today, we switched on the communications array and confirmed what Dr. Keller’s team had previously detected. The signals we are detecting follow recognizable mathematical patterns, resembling the transmission encoding commonly used on Earth. We have yet to verify whether or not these signals are coming from some other government on our planet, but the sheer bulk of transmissions seems to support Dr. Keller’s hasty conclusion: We’ve stumbled upon an alien communication frequency. It may only be a matter of time before we can make contact.
December 14, 2105: Ongoing efforts to decode the alien signals have gone nowhere. We’ve brought in encryption experts from across the world to analyze the transmissions, but we are no closer to unlocking their secrets. Some on the encryption team believe the level of mathematics at work to be beyond our understanding. Others believe potential linguistic differences will make it impossible to understand the messages, even after we have decrypted them. Only time will tell.
May 3, 2106: Congress has voted to continue funding our project, despite ongoing dissatisfaction with our results. We are exploring the possibility of designing new decryption software to break down individual messages.
August 22, 2106: The communications array has fallen silent. All messages have stopped.
September 10, 2106: No new messages have been detected by the array.
November 17, 2106: We have decided to transmit a message out into the void. We will send the message in all Earth languages and pair them with mathematical sequences to demonstrate our intelligence. Perhaps we will get an answer.
January 11, 2107: Array still silent.
March 1, 2107: Long-range telescopes have detected thousands of large, metallic objects nearing our solar system. They are too far out to estimate their shape.
March 7, 2107: The metallic objects draw nearer.
March 10, 2107: The objects detected by our telescopes will not enter the Sol system, instead passing us by en route to some location farther out into the Milky Way.
March 12, 2107: The objects are passing as close as they will come. Images from our high aperture telescopes verify our suspicions: Alien spacecraft are about to pass Earth. Who are these travelers? And why will they not communicate?
March 14, 2107: The last of the alien ships passed our system today, drawing close to the orbit of Pluto. As it passed, we received a single message through the communications array, transmitted in all Earth languages.
“They are coming. Run.”
