by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Shadow coloured stones crush and scatter under boot heels. Their passage unheard, two figures have slipped silently across the rooftop expanse to its eastern face. Lumbering mechanicals presenting themselves at intervals, drinking heat from the spaces below to exhale in great humid sighs. These are the only sounds to disturb the pre morning air. There are no bird songs, no passing vehicles, no murmuring undercurrent of peripheral lives. It will be hours before the first ships climb to the stars.
This is the silence before the break of day.
Two figures sit, silent, legs dangling into space from the parapet, the last of the previous night’s beer in hand, each absently slaking the thirst neither of them feels anymore.
It’s not the night’s antics that make this moment memorable, indeed those memories are lost now. Not even the rise of the sun itself, though I’m sure as always it was worth the wait. The rising of this particular sun on this particular day was merely an ending, it had no significance beyond that.
The memory, rather, is of two accidental friends sharing the last moment they’d know together, in silence, waiting for the sun to rise and give them permission to leave one another, to leave home.
It is these few moments, this shared time of solitude so exquisitely inscribed upon which I now reflect. A time remarkable in its clarity, plucked from a sea of murky memories, of happenings that have long since faded from view. Brought forth by the thought of a sunrise I can’t remember watching, and will never see again.
by submission | May 31, 2014 | Story |
Author : David Barber
“You might have seen my paper in Thaumaturgy,” the sorcerer was saying. He’d introduced himself, but the name hadn’t stuck. Maxine complained that Jeff just didn’t try.
“So you’re Maxine’s husband? Maxine’s father and I met in England.”
Jeff was sitting in his office, disappointed by the lack of magic paraphernalia.
“Boyfriend.”
“Of course, popular notions of magic are completely wrong.”
Jeff had shared a narrow office at Fermilab and knew all about clutter, but this room was shabby with neglect, a dusty chlorophytum was dying on an antique PC. Jeff began to rehearse his excuses. He’d need to be careful because it would get back to Maxine.
“People think magic is like wishing, that you can just wish for gold.”
Jeff wore his jacket, jeans and an I Survived the Great Vowel Shift t-shirt. He’d promised Maxine he would give it a shot, but that didn’t mean he was selling out.
“You can only get something from nothing at the energies you work at. Ha. Ha.”
Jeff smiled wanly. He didn’t know much about start-up, except somebody had a useful skill and somebody else had finance. This Brit was mistaken if he thought Jeff was the one bringing money to the table.
“If Alchemy taught us anything, it’s that magic can’t transmute lead into gold. But it can change something into something similar.”
Jeff’s last interview had been with the IRS. There’d been a PhD biochemist, a geology graduate, and him, all going for the same job. They were overqualified and underemployed; Jeff was only there to keep Maxine happy. Hire those other two guys, he’d joked. They could get blood from a stone.
The old guy stared hard at an unlit match.
“Fire is exothermic. Magic just changes the probabilities…”
Outside, occasional traffic hissed down wet roads. Finally, the match ignited.
Jeff cleared his throat. “You know, I’m wondering if…”
“Theoretically, the simplest way to get gold is to steal it. Portal magic, from the jeweller’s window to your pocket. Depends on gravitational potentials, conservation of energy and so forth. Magic still obeys rules. Shot a necklace straight through a window with that spell. Awkward moment.”
Don’t go chattering, Maxine had warned. Let him do the talking, see what he has to offer.
“Or gambling. But a die or a roulette ball are slippery beggars. Horses were the best bet once, of course. Trouble is, blocking magics are always easier than transforming magics. Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that.”
He sighed. “Everything is magic-proofed these days.”
They stared at one another.
“So, Jeff, you worked at Fermilab?”
“Two years, yes. They’re shutting the accelerator down. Hard to get a grant now. Maxine said something about a start-up…”
“Same in magic. A lifetime of study and I drive a Toyota Yaris.”
“Look…”
“I’m looking for someone familiar with…” He consulted his notes. “Quantum states, Hamiltonians and er… eigenvalues.”
Jeff shrugged. “Sure.”
“Ever since I was at Oxford, I’ve nursed this idea about influencing individual electrons with magic.”
“That’s a quantum calculation. From what I know of magic.” What he had gleaned from Wiki, Jeff meant. “It’s doable, I just don’t see why.”
“To flip selected bits in a computer memory.”
“In computer memory?”
“To add zeroes to the end of a bank balance.” He nudged his papers parallel with the edge of the desk. “For example.”
After a while, Jeff said: “There’d need to be some tests.”
“Yes.”
Maxine would be pleased.
“Then it might be more… prudent, to go into business selling blocking magics.”
Jeff grinned wolfishly. “I’ve got a great name for our new company.”
by submission | May 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : JD Kennedy
It is interesting how seemingly unrelated technologies become connected together to create new and unexpected capabilities.
First, there was the successful development of cryogenic ‘sleep’ systems. The goal was to freeze someone who had a terminal illness until a way of treating that illness was discovered. Unfortunately, the researchers found that you could keep a body frozen for only six months or so before irreparable tissue damage occurred (effectively, freezer burn).
While this was a failure for terminal patients, it turned out to be a boon for deep space travelers. A frozen person does not need the life support that an awake person does. You can transport dozens of frozen people on a much smaller spaceship than would be needed for an awake crew. You can also get them there faster since rapid acceleration and braking is not a problem. This allowed the creation of large research stations on Mars and even a small outpost on Titan.
Later, a practical matter teleporter was developed that could de-materialize an object on one end and re-construct it on the other. There were several significant limitations with it, though. It only worked with inanimate objects – living creatures always died in the transmission. The teleport range was also very short and limited to wired connections as it was very sensitive to errors induced by noise. It also required a fixed receiving station – you couldn’t just teleport anywhere like they did in SF stories. As such, it hasn’t seen wide-spread use.
The first breakthrough came when someone realized that you can store the ‘image’ of an object being teleported and later re-create a perfect copy of it from the stored image. This allowed more equipment to be sent to the Mars stations than ever before. It was teleported a short distance on Earth, where its pattern was stored. The object was then recreated on Mars from storage devices that were shipped with the frozen crew, further reducing the cost of deep space exploration.
The next came when someone realized that a frozen body was an inanimate object while it was frozen. Tests proved that you could freeze an animal, teleport it, and then revive it with no damage to the animal. Soon trials were successfully made on human volunteers (usually terminally ill patients). It didn’t take long before a researcher realized that you could store the pattern of a frozen person and make as many copies of it that you liked! It was much easier than cloning – you didn’t have to grow and train anything! This discovery resulted in some very sticky legal and ethical considerations. Thus, it was quickly and universally outlawed.
But like any law, there developed one very unusual exception.
A visionary realized that we could now ‘package’ an entire off-world colony, including hundreds of colonists, in a very small volume. Travel time to a planet in another solar system was no longer a limitation. A special team of ‘colonists’ was extensively trained on how to survive in any habitable condition. Specialized equipment was developed for the new colonies that not only would help with the initial deployment of the colony, but could be replicated as needed once the colony was established. When everything was ready, the ‘colonists’ were frozen, teleported, recorded, and revived. All of the equipment was also teleported and recorded.
Then one great day, hundreds of identical copies of the colony were launched to every habitable exoplanet then known. The seeds of humanity will finally reach beyond confines of its home system, even if the ‘original’ colonists never leave the planet.
by submission | May 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Stephen S. Power
Despite the miners’ diligence, a fleck of intellimetal again drifts away during transfer from the supply ship to the adit. Wherever it lands on the trojan an accidental tower will grow, and any tower is soon full of squatters, so the mine promptly deploys Diga.
Trudging from Tower 1 to 4 she receives coordinates where the fleck will probably alight. Her visual sensors, though, note the tower already corkscrewing above a small rise, its shape inspired by the trojan’s tumbling instead of a tunnel’s freshly-bored walls. Diga heads for the newly designated Tower 6.
She flares her scrubbers as she travels. Detritus wafts away. 1 was almost entirely consumed by squatters before the mine realized there even was a Tower 1, but at least the squatters’ resulting reproduction and mass migration demonstrated what a threat they could be to the adit’s integrity. Thus, Diga.
Not that Diga knows this. She wouldn’t know if the miners were suffocated as the mine’s atmosphere geysered from a compromised adit. She just wouldn’t receive any new transmissions. And to her silence means all is well.
The silvery corkscrew looms overhead, uncountable flecks of native rock reconfigured by the initial fleck of intellimetal into new intellimetal. Her biotic sensors pinpoint two squatters already, one near the base, one around the first curve. She climbs.
When she reaches the first, a beating red point in her targeting program, it jumps. This is unprecedented. The squatters move by letting go of the trojan so it spins beneath them until they’re grabbed by an outcrop with, hopefully, a patch of tasty ore. They don’t, however, let go of intellimetal. Diga notes the movement in her behavior log, then reacquires the squatter, flares her scrubbers and burns the tower clean.
She climbs to the second squatter and finds a third beside it. It’s unlikely another migrant would’ve landed that close. Could the second have replicated so quickly? No matter. Newborns are just as unwelcome as adults. Diga flares her scrubbers.
The third squatter jumps away. Diga reacquires. It jumps again and again and disappears around a curve. Her primary sensor bulb swivels to watch it go. Her programming lacks the code for an exclamation point.
She scrubs the second squatter, then follows the third. As she comes around the tower her targeting program lights up with points, eight now, no, ten, which is impossible. Squatters double in sync. Her infestation protocol kicks in, and before she logs she scrubs.
And scrubs. The points don’t vanish. More appear. Fifteen. Twenty-seven. Diga runs a diagnostic on her scrubbers. No deficiencies. Same with her sensors. Fifty-four. Ninety. They’re popping up all around her. Either the squatters are undergoing a mass migration and landing here or they’re emerging from the tower itself. She lacks the code to frame the latter possibility.
Squatters jump on Diga, but, made of plastic, she’s immune. She reports to the mine. Her bulbs swivel involuntarily, smoothly at first, then jerkily, before focusing on the third squatter. It beats brighter, as if staring back.
Diga receives a command: Immolate. She climbs on a carpet of points to maximize the sphere of flame. The tower expands. Diga arches her chassis and spreads her pads. She dumps her logs into the mine computer. She undoes her safeties. The tower throbs.
The point of the corkscrew, now as much squatter as intellimetal, reaches down, curls around Diga and catapults her away. The tower’s great sproing shivers her bulbs and rattles her pads. The trojan tumbles below. Diga, undaunted, flares her scrubbers. The adit appears beneath her.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Sergeant Gains got the call at four am; lone white male out on the Golden Gate Bridge about mid-span. He spent the twenty minutes on the Harley with the throttle pinned, the lights up and the siren silent wondering what he’d find when he got there and hoping he wouldn’t be too late.
The man was still pacing when Gains rolled up, but as Gains powered down the bike, killed the lights and slung his helmet on the handlebars, the man climbed out onto the cord. They regarded each other with mutual apparent uncertainty as the officer closed the gap between them on foot.
Gains stopped a few metres away and hitched his thumbs into his belt.
“Be careful, it gets slick out there this time of night.”
The man, still wearing the previous day’s office attire, collar undone, tie pulled aside, squatted and looked around before speaking.
“Doesn’t matter. Don’t waste your time. I’ll be gone in a minute.”
The Sergeant scrambled to remember his training, to remember the dozen or more men and women he’d been called down here before to talk out of ending their life. He always felt unprepared, like each was the first time.
“If you wanted to jump, you would be gone already, I think you really just want someone to listen to what you’re feeling.” Gains moved slowly to the edge and looked over the side into the darkness below. “What’s your name son?”
“David,” their eyes met for a minute before the young man looked away, “David Parker.”
“Well David, what brings you down here tonight?”
David sat for a minute before looking up, catching and holding Gains’ gaze.
“You have no idea what it’s like to never fit in. To be smart, but treated like a freak, to be funny but treated like a joke. To only be able to make friends with the other freakish jokes that are just like you, and to know everyone is talking about you behind your back all the time.” He spoke in a steady tone, barely pausing for breath. “I meet girls who like me until someone tells them about me, and then they stop returning my calls. Do you know what it’s like to know you’re always going to be alone? Truly, completely alone? Even in a world packed so tight with people that you can’t even breathe, to know you’ll always be alone?”
Gains started to move forward but paused as David tensed up.
“I know what it’s like being on the outside looking in. You don’t do what I do as long as I’ve done it without becoming a little detached from everyone around you,” he read David’s expression and changed his tone, “but no, I don’t know what you’re feeling exactly. But there are people that are going to miss you if you go.”
David looked at the dim steel of the chord for a while before answering.
“No. Nobody will. Sorry you wasted a trip.”
With that he leaned sideways and was gone.
The second David did, he knew he’d made a mistake. He thought of Becky Six in statistics, of her sad eyes each time he declined her invitation to join their group for lunch. He thought of the last glimpse of resigned horror on the policeman’s face, a horror he knew would wake the man up for countless nights in a cold sweat.
By the time his back and shoulders impacted the water a few seconds later, his body was travelling at nearly one hundred kilometers an hour. The water brought him to a very sudden, very painful stop, shattering his spine and ribs, puncturing organs and caving in the back of his skull. His arms and legs cut a graceful arc away from his body, snapping as they too impacted the water’s surface.
He realized he could no longer blink or close his eyes.
Secondary systems powered up to try and maintain his consciousness and preserve his memory for a rescue he knew would never come. Pain recepters amped up and closed down spasmodically, sending shockwaves of pain through him. Sea water slowly seeped into his control systems, shorting out and shutting down his fine motor controls so even the feeble twitching of his shattered limbs stopped. He slipped beneath the surface and the lighting bolts of pain dulled into a steady ache.
He watched the moon until the depth took even that ray of hope away.
It would be hours before his batteries would flood out completely and grant him final peace, his pain transferred to those who loved him.
