by submission | Oct 13, 2013 | Story |
Author : Andrew Schnell
On the twentieth anniversary of their launch, the citizens of the Lincoln gathered along the main promenade for a celebration. Chief Engineer Leonid Zuyev was in the avionics bay, keeping an ear to the ship’s broadcast of the proceedings. He hated these types of gatherings, so it was almost good fortune that the radio array had gone down that morning.
There were speeches of course, from Captain Hodges and Medical Director Stuart. The Interior Minister spoke, reiterating many of the changes he promised in his recent re-election campaign. Then, recently downloaded videos of Earth dignitaries were shown. Each leader discussed the citizens’ dedication and desire to explore. None of them touched on what it was actually like to explore: the severe rationing and near starvation in the early days, diseases that spread faster aboard ship than on Earth, accidents and mechanical failures that had resulted in many more lost lives than the designers estimated. Fortunately though, the designers had also underestimated the citizens’ reproductive habits.
If things went according to plan, Leonid would speak last. The twentieth anniversary happened to fall on the exact moment when the first transmissions from their destination, the planet Nuwa, would be received by the radio array whose control systems were in pieces along the floor of the avionics bay. The signal was being sent by the first of many supply vehicles sent ahead of Lincoln. They were over a century old by now, but they contained long storage supplies, construction robots, and artificial intelligence programs that would survey Nuwa and begin constructing the first settlement.
As the Earth diplomats’ rhetoric droned on, Leonid stumbled on the source of the problem. A surge had burned out a power distribution unit. He ordered the AI to print and install a new unit, while he reassembled the rest of system. As the system rebooted, he used the spare seconds to hold out his cold fingers in front of the monitors to warm them.
Using pulsars as navigational beacons, the Lincoln’s AI pointed the arrays at Nuwa. The supply vehicle’s AI would point their transmitter at the Lincoln using the projected route programmed into the AI before launch. That route, Leonid was proud to say, had been followed to the letter. They were exactly where they needed to be. Hopefully, the supply vehicle would be, too.
Leonid tuned his slate to the century-old operations manual, to the section that would help him translate the first few 64-bit strings of data into a report on the overall health of the supply ship. The seconds clicked down on his slate’s timer. Leonid could hear the captain apologizing for his delay.
Then, the monitor flickered, and a blue “INCOMING MESSAGE” notification filled the screen. The 64-bit line came in underneath. Leonid interpreted the message as quickly as he could. Contact lights were green. Power generation levels were green. AI was green. Robots were green. Storage was green. Everything had safely landed on Nuwa.
Leonid gestured the information to his slate and ran towards the promenade. Holding the slate above his head, he apologized repeatedly while pushing through the crowd. Hodges saw the commotion and had the crowd make a path for his chief engineer. Leonid leapt onto the stage and his quick smile was all the crowd needed to break into cheers. The citizens of the Lincoln were heading to a planet they themselves would never see, that their children may never see, but now they knew that when the Lincoln arrived at Nuwa she wouldn’t be alone.
by submission | Oct 12, 2013 | Story |
Author : Aiza Mohd
Haan has found a cup of noodles from the future.
‘Mfg. 09 Jul 2036,’ reads the bottom of the cup. The year is 2013.
Haan is a penniless college student with an unbalanced diet, too much time, few friends and a cup of ramen from the future. All five of these are the reasons why he finds himself at the 7-Eleven where he gets his snacks.
But the cashier has no explanation. ‘Sorry, man,’ he says. ‘Barcode says you didn’t buy it here. It’s probably just a misprint, anyway; I wouldn’t worry about it.’
Haan has one foot out the door when the cashier exclaims. ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ he calls.
The cashier rushes over with something in his hands. ‘It’s not everyday I get a situation like this,’ he tells Haan. ‘Last week, a girl came in and gave this to me.’
It is a brown envelope.
‘To the boy asking about the ramen.’
In it is a destination.
Haan follows the directions in the letter until he reaches a house in the suburbs. The smooth white driveway is lined with daisies and the lawn is impeccable. It is the diamond to the rust of Haan’s small, wild balcony garden, ice cream tubs running amok with neglected life.
A girl opens the door when he knocks, holding a blue hardback in her hand. Haan’s shoulders tense as he takes in the bright eyes and the expectantly raised eyebrows.
He holds up the cup of noodles, but she just looks confused.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, feeling stupid. ‘I must have made a mistake.’
‘We already have noodles, thank you,’ she says. She is ever so polite.
‘I’m not selling,’ he answers, embarrassed. ‘It’s a funny story … you’d never believe it.’
She laughs. ‘I don’t know whether to close the door on you or to ask for this story.’
‘Oh, don’t close the door,’ says Haan. ‘I’ll tell you. But don’t laugh at me, okay?’
‘I won’t. I like stories.’ She looks over her shoulder, as though glancing back at something less than pleasing. ‘I never get to hear any good ones.’
Haan, after placing the cup of noodles in his bag, explains to her all the peculiar events of his day. As he tells his tale, she tilts her head and listens, letting the polite smile grow into something warmer.
Her name is Leanne.
Next morning, he awakens with the strangest sensation that something of profound importance has finally changed in his life. On his wall in blunt pencil, he writes, ‘11 July 2013. Yesterday, two things I believed impossible turned up in my life.’
Now it is 13 August, 2036, and Haan and his wife are battling once again. ‘You never loved me,’ weeps Becca, her face a canvas of smeared makeup, years of frustration painting her cheekbones. ‘It’s her. You want her.’ And although deep down Haan knows she’s got it right, Haan utters not a word. He watches and waits, the way he has his whole life.
In the room down the hall their daughter Jo should be sleeping, but she’s imagining another space in the universe right now, in which Haan is now married to Leanne, and not Becca. They have a double-storey home, three children and a puppy. Becca, in that same space in the universe, is soaring to the top of her career. Everyone is happy. Everyone’s in love.
On the floor by her feet is the blueprint of her plan. The light is dim beneath the desk, but the first step is visible still.
‘2013: Leave note at the 7-Eleven.’
by Clint Wilson | Oct 11, 2013 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
Eddy and Rico performed the mundane task of sifting through tailings. It was standard procedure. All the valuable ore had been extracted from the captured asteroids, but the leftover rubble might still contain significant matter; so it was all to be gone through carefully.
It was easy enough to get the tons of debris and dust back down from the stations. Earth’s sixteen space elevators required endless counterweight to continuously lift people and goods into orbit. Yet it was strictly mandated that any captured matter from beyond our atmosphere must be immediately run through one of the planet’s hundreds of privately owned decontamination centers situated around the elevators.
They were both roused by an alarm buzzing on the console. “What’s that?” asked Rico. He was still pretty new.
Eddy replied nonchalantly, “We used to get lots of these false alarms in the old days. It got so irritating that we detuned the sensor arrays.” He hit a plunger, stopping the entire conveyer belt. They both looked at the screen on the console. The image there showed several pebbles amongst the debris highlighted by the computer. “Hmm, this is interesting. It says they’re all identical.”
An hour later the two had managed to sift through and procure from the rubble, thirty-seven seemingly identical oblong pebbles. The tiny items sat there on the lab counter, looking ominous, as the two discoverers passed a smoking joint back and forth.
Eddy piped up, “I think they’re seeds.”
Rico laughed, “Yeah right, we just discovered an alien life form in asteroid tailings.”
“Oh yeah?” replied Eddy. “I’ll prove it.”
Suddenly the young newbie looked concerned. “I don’t think we should…”
But it was too late. Eddy had scooped up the pebbles into his shirt and had made for the rear exit.
Rico shouted after him, “Hey, I don’t think that’s a good idea!”
But the exit door clanged shut as the other exited, so Rico jumped up, squashing the joint, and followed suit. “What are you doing you crazy bastard?” He burst through the exit door.
Eddy was crouched down there giggling as he churned the soil in the flower planter with his hands. “Come on buddy, you think we’re gonna grow some alien ganja? Live a little!” He ran off and grabbed the caretaker’s garden hose, which had been coiled up on a reel nearby; and began watering the planter.
Rico shook his head, staring at the dark soil that was now getting wetter and wetter. “Eddy, you’re nuts. We should really report those things.”
Eddy grinned and squinted at him, “For what? These guys don’t give a shit. It’s all a big….”
Suddenly there was a rumble and they both felt the ground tremble beneath their feet. Eddy froze and stared up at Rico. He released the handle of the hose nozzle and the water dribbled to a halt. Then the ground shook again, so hard that they both nearly fell over. The rich soil was suddenly seething and roiling like a thing with a life of its own. Eddy turned back to see Rico running fast for the parking lot.
Just then something massive and horrible shot forth from the planter. Eddy now knew that he had made a horrible mistake and surmised right there and then that mankind was likely to pay for his idiocy. He shut his eyes tight and prayed for the first time in years, as he was sucked up into the maw of something terrible and unknown. Mercifully, he would never realize the true mayhem he had caused.
Rico managed to live for almost another two minutes.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 10, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
In a city this size, a dozen or so beaming errors a year were acceptable.
In each gigantic waystation structure, the building blocks of life were kept in vats and tubs. There were huge enclosed swimming pools filled with chromosomes and proteins and cell juice. Vast, layered skin farms were rotated underneath mile-long sunlamp tubes on the upper levels.
Each facility jutted up like an architect’s dying wish on the outskirts of the major cities. They were effectively airports in a universe that had done away with air travel.
Those initial millennia of colonization were tortuous but this was the new age. All was well. To travel between the stars no longer required a spaceship.
It was found that information could be pushed faster than light while mass could not. Coded streams of electrons could be bent around the straightness of space. We made paper airplanes out of the impossible.
A person was put, naked, shivering and afraid, into a bathtub cubicle chamber on one end. The lid was closed and the dissassemblers were let in. It was fast acting acid swamped with tiny nanos that took the person apart piece by piece while recording every bit of it.
They always screamed. It was painful.
The nanos were set on ‘record’ as they tore the person apart. That information was coded into a hardbase of data which was then threaded onto an electron batch. With a focused squirt, the person’s breakdown was sent to his or her destination.
It went behind the closets of the universe, in between the cracks.
It was received seconds later by one of the mentioned white structures outside the destination city.
There, using the building blocks available, they put the coded instructions into a machine, set them to ‘reverse’, and then hit play.
It was like watching a film of melting wax being run backwards.
The person was re-built without the last ten agonizing minutes of memory from the breakdown process. The rebuilding took weeks.
Angela’s electron burst must have skirted a star because she woke up skinless, missing her legs, six of her fingers and a fair portion of her brain.
She never fully recovered. They did what they could but humans were still a little hit and miss when it came to creating people from scratch with no nanorecords.
She was taken care of wonderfully in the basements of the building. Her relatives signed waivers and become richer. She learned a few words of English to communicate. She never got the hang of her new fingers and legs. She died happily in a diaper five years later.
In a city this size, a dozen or so beaming errors a year were acceptable.
by Desmond Hussey | Oct 9, 2013 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
When their explorers first arrived they were few; we’d no reason to fear them. We welcomed our brothers and sisters from another world with open arms. We traded with them, celebrated with them, showed them our ways and invited them into our homes. They were so like us, and yet, so very different. They departed with promises to return with wondrous gifts.
I’ll never forget the night they returned. Beneath a sky dark and clear, I lay studying the ancient constellations twinkling in their familiar geometries, slowly unraveling their secrets throughout the seasons. Starlore held practical knowledge; when to sow, when to reap, aided those at sea, but it also told legends of monsters, heroes and wisdom. The past and the future were written in the night sky.
That night, before my eyes, many new stars appeared and grew larger. Too many to count. The Great Archer, the Winged Serpent, the Virgin and others became obscured by our visitor’s arriving ships. My heart soared. That night I anticipated a great celebration, a union of cultures, a sharing of knowledge and the beginning of an age of peace.
For three days crates of their strange metal rained upon our communities and country sides. When they broke open revealing odd trinkets, exotic cloth, food and drink we took them as the promised gifts from our star family.
Our guests from across the cosmic ocean never came down to receive our thanks. They waited in their ships while we celebrated without them. They watched us from above as we danced in their strange, new clothes, became intoxicated on their potent elixirs and fell into drunken stupors. They watched as we fought amongst ourselves over their useless trinkets. They waited as my people became sick from their alien diseases. They watched and waited as we died in the billions.
Their gift to us was death.
We’d been betrayed, yet their sickness did not take us all. When they finally descended on their iron battle horses, we met them in open war, fighting as our ancestors had taught us, with bravery and honor. But these warriors from the skies were not brave, showed no honor. They murdered without thought, burning women and children, the sick and the old with their lightning sticks. They burned ancient forests to ash and boiled seas to salt deserts.
I killed five of their warriors as they brutally raped and beat two of my sisters. I have never seen such hatred of life. They laughed mockingly as Myrrah and Nevi cried for mercy, but they will laugh no more. I killed them quickly, which was more than they deserved. I wish I could have killed five thousand more.
We lost. We never really stood a chance. It wasn’t their superior technology that overwhelmed us – a single one of our warriors is worth ten of theirs in a fair battle – but their cunning and deception was unmatchable, their strategies lacked mercy and dignity. Before they came we were six billion strong. Now, what few remain are herded like animals into crowded reservations where we must live the rest of our days, clinging to the shreds of our culture, while, beyond the electric fence, our world is consumed by the Usurpers.
Tonight, I long to see the stars once more, but my eyes cannot pierce the thick veil of smoke rising from their mines.
I wonder if somewhere, hidden within the constellation’s legends there might have been some warning, some message I missed; that one day a race called “Human” would plunder my world and destroy all that I loved.
