by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 22, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Consciousness seeped back slowly; recognizable sounds gradually replacing static; blackness giving way to a dull aching in his head. He resisted the urge to open his eyes.
“How are you feeling?” The voice reminded him of someone, a woman he knew? He couldn’t quite put a finger on it.
“What happened? Where…” Memory of the moment started leaking back in, vaporously thin and with apparent gaps. “My experiment, my lab… did something go wrong?” He risked a look, blinking back against the light.
“No Rick, everything went pretty much the way I’m sure you envisioned it would.” Blue eyes smiled at him from beneath blond bangs, she looked not unlike like his assistant, and yet subtly different. “This will just take some adjusting.” She studied his face for a moment, thrusting her hands deep in her lab coat pockets before turning away.
The walls seemed to vibrate with light, crisp luminescent tile covering the room floor to ceiling. “Is this the past?” He half whispered to himself. “Or is this some other part of the complex? I don’t know this place.” From the corner of his eye, he could swear her hair was darkening, shortening, but when he looked at her, it was the same shoulder length mahogany cut as before. Was it brown before?.
“No, you haven’t been to this place, and this isn’t the past, not yet.” She turned to face him, her voice almost reproving. “You can’t simply wander backwards in time Richard, I’m afraid your concepts and equations are interesting, but flawed.” He found himself captivated by her eyes, chestnut flecked with amber. “Time is all about absolutes Richard. Moving forward. Displacement equations were what you should have been looking for, but I think they’re a little beyond your comprehension. No matter though, ideas like yours are precisely why we’re here.”
“I don’t understand.” The room seemed to be fading in and out of focus, he could barely make out the books on his bookcases. “Here? In my study? Why are you here?”
“You’ll make a fine teacher Richard, you’ve got so much of the future in you, I’m sure you’ll do wonderful things.” Her glasses glimmered in the pale firelight, hands stuffed into the pockets of her cardigan.
Richard stared down at the tome open upon his desk, following the same lines of text over and over several times without reading it.
“Santayana?” A woman’s voice. He met the gaze of his teaching assistant, wrapped in her cardigan in the corner chair on the other side of his desk.
“What was that?” Had he said something just then? He felt a sense of unease, as though something was about to happen, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what.
“You said ‘Those who do not learn from history’…” She began to repeat the phrase.
“Are doomed to repeat it.” He finished it reflexively, then paused, the words familiar on his tongue, but with no idea where the thought had come from.
“Santayana isn’t it?” She regarded him quizzically. “Are you ok? You look a little lost.”
“No, I’m fine, I think I’m fine. Santayana, yes, yes you’re right.” He pushed back in his chair, rubbing tired eyes and feeling suddenly so very old. “We should pack up for the night though, I’m tired, and I’ve got a class to teach tomorrow.” Class to teach. Why did that seem so foreign a concept? He must be tired, he would sleep, and everything would be better tomorrow, he was somehow sure of that.
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by featured writer | Jun 21, 2007 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, featured writer
“How’s this thing work?†asked Dean O’Banion, the man Alan Mitchell had reluctantly asked to come to Seattle to bankroll his invention that could provide the world with unlimited, cheap, green energy. Although O’Banion was not the most reputable businessman on the planet, he was the only one that didn’t laugh in Mitchell’s face after reading his abstract on the Potential Benefits of Crumpled Space.
“Well, Mister O’Banion, it’s simple really. With nonscientists, I usually demonstrate the principle with piece of paper and a 2-D analogy. I’ll draw circles on this paper representing the galaxies in our local group. This circle represents the Milky Way, this one Andromeda, and Triangulum, both Magellanic Clouds, and so on…OK, that should be enough. Now, as you can see, there are about two inches between each galaxy. But, if I crumble the paper into a tight ball, some of the galaxies actually touch each other. My theory predicts that space is actually crumbled this way in the fifth dimension, although we can’t see it. Now, if we create a wormhole in this fifth dimension, between our galaxy and the one that is practically touching us, we can travel there in a few years, rather than millions. Unfortunately, there are two limiting factors: I cannot change the shape of crumpled-space, so we can only travel to the galaxy that happens to be folded over us; and creating a wormhole that large requires more energy than our entire galaxy emits.
“Mister Mitchell, I don’t see how any of this is going to make me rich, as you said, beyond the dreams of avarice.â€
“Yes, unlimited energy. OK, on the grand scale, let’s assume the entire universe is crumpled as I’ve suggested. Now, we can take my analogy one step further, into the realm of micro-crumpling, so to speak. On this much smaller sub-scale, Earth-space is crumpled within itself. And it takes much less energy to create a wormhole between two places on Earth. As it turns out, just a few meters from this lab, in the fifth dimension, is the bottom of the Marianas Trench. With this device,†he pointed to a contraption sitting on the floor, “I can open a wormhole between the Marianas Trench and here. As water rushes through the wormhole at 15,000 psi, that’s 1,000 times atmospheric pressure, it can turn a turbine with 100 times the power of Niagara Falls. I’ll demonstrate the concept with a real pinhole size wormhole.†Mitchell adjusted the controls of his wormhole generator, aimed the focus straight up, and activated the instrument. It shot a thin column of super-high-pressure water through the ceiling and upward into the sky for several miles.
“Well, I’m impressed, Mister Mitchell. How easy is it to control?â€
“Child’s play. I have all the instructions written in this manual.â€
“Fantastic.†O’Banion promptly pulled a gun from his coat pocket and shot Mitchell between the eyes. Then, he nonchalantly packed up Mitchell’s equipment and returned to his home outside Chicago.
Two days later, the lead story in the Chicago Sun-Times read: “Dean O’Banion, a prominent Chicago businessman, was mysteriously killed last night when a volcano erupted on his estate, creating a 2000 foot lava dome. Scientist cannot explain the eruption, since there are no known magma chambers in the Chicago area. Scientists are also baffled by the fact that this particular type of basaltic lava is only known to exist in Iceland. The damage was so extensive…â€
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by submission | Jun 20, 2007 | Story
Author : Mark Lindquist
“I’d like to order an arm, please. Left, if you have them. I’ve always liked left arms.”
“Certainly, sir. Have a seat while — oh, my apologies, that was quite rude of me.”
“Think nothing of it. It’s by choice, not by circumstance; sitting has always been highly overrated.”
“So I’ve heard, so I’ve heard. I wouldn’t wish to do without it myself, you understand, but I can see how … ah, here we are. Did you need it coloured to match?”
“I don’t suppose you have green…”
“No, sir, only the natural colours. There’s a dyist some of our patrons use that we can highly recommend, if you’re interested.”
“No matter, I have my own. Did my ears.”
“Remarkable work. Modified?”
“Not much. Standard frequencies and AM/FM radio. Decent quality, but I pick up a bit of static when I get too near a microwave.”
“Common problem, or so I’ve heard. Now, if you’ll take a look at the monitor, you can see what we have in stock.”
“The, ah, black one…”
“An excellent specimen. Professional ball player, or so I’m told. A pitcher.”
“The cost seems low in that case.”
“Well, he was right handed. But it’s still a very high quality arm. Do you play?”
“I must say — never quite got the game. I mean, I understand it … but why?”
“Quite, sir. I was never very good at it myself. Would you like to see another, then?”
“Ah… one moment. Hm. 3X23.”
“I am compelled to tell you, sir, that that is in fact a female arm. We certainly don’t oppose such things, but we’ve had some complaints from customers who weren’t aware when ordering.”
“What’s the motor control like?”
“Rated at 73%, sir. Very good for a left hand.”
“Not a primary hand, then?”
“We get very few of those, I’m afraid. Not for lefts.”
“Understandable. I’ll take it. Put it on my account.”
“Certainly, sir. Will you need that installed here or delivered?”
“Neither, thank you. I’ll eat it here.”
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by submission | Jun 19, 2007 | Story
Author : Grady Hendrix
When new Aunt Sally arrived, David had just one question burning in his brain. He managed to make it all the way through her visit before it came out.
“What happened to old Aunt Sally?†he asked.
“She’s gone on to a wonderful place where it’s always summer vacation,†his mother said. “She’s much happier there.â€
Being a normal eight-year-old boy, David knew that this meant that she was dead.
New Aunt Sally was exactly the same as old Aunt Sally. She brought the same presents, she said the same things, she embarrassed him the same way. The only difference was that she didn’t seem to upset his father as much. He and old Aunt Sally were always shouting at each other, but new Aunt Sally and his dad got along just fine. It was like she was the same, only better. Better for his dad, at least.
“Why did new Aunt Sally come?†he asked his mother.
“Because we asked her to,†said his mother.
“But why? What was wrong with old Aunt Sally?â€
“Nothing was wrong with her, but new Aunt Sally is so good, don’t you think? Now go do your homework and stop asking so many silly questions. It’s nothing you need to worry about.â€
But he did worry about it. He worried about it all the time. Old Aunt Sally had just been plain Aunt Sally, but suddenly one day she became old Aunt Sally and new Aunt Sally took her place. What if one day he was suddenly old David Lighter? Come to think of it, he was already old David Lighter, just nobody had called him that yet.
He lay in bed all night, staring at the ceiling and promising God that from now on he would be very, very good. He would be very, very, very good. He dug his nails into his sweaty palms until they bled and he bit his lip until it tore and he swore that he would be so good that his parents would always want the old him. Always.
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by featured writer | Jun 18, 2007 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, featured writer
The USS Jovian Explorer skimmed above the turbulent cloud tops of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. The large clamshell doors on its underbelly slowly opened and locked into position. Moments later, the restraining clamps released the Simon, a two-man research “submersible.†The nearly spherical vessel plummeted downward and disappeared into the yellow-orange mist. After safety deploying her charge, the mother ship activated her antigrav engines and lifted into a higher orbit to temporarily escape Jupiter’s lethal radiation belt.
When the submersible descended to 60,000 km above Jupiter’s core, the pilot, Jonah Grumby activated the antigrav thrusters and gradually slowed their decent, eventually leveling off at 50,000 km. Although the craft had the ability to maneuver, they elected to ride the winds to reduce buffeting. “OK, Hector, you can begin collecting data.â€
“Roger that. Wow, this atmosphere is pretty soupy. Besides hydrogen and helium, sensors show: methane, ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, condensed water vapor, and a bunch of other hydrocarbons. I’m also picking up the larger molecules too. At least ten amino acids: arginine, glycine, lysine, valine… Well, this is interesting. There are polypeptides, and some pretty complex proteins too. Hey, I think we have all of the ingredients for life here. Let’s drop down another 10,000 klicks. If the atmosphere thickens much more it might behave like a liquid. Maybe we can find some single celled organisms.
“Z minus 10,000 it is. In fact, let’s have a look outside.†As the ship descended, he opened the iris covering the one-meter in diameter observation port, and activated the floodlights. It looked like an upward flowing snowstorm. When they leveled off, the streaking “snowflakes†resolved into small randomly moving specks. Under the magnifying effect of the observation port, however, the “snowflakes†appeared to be little jellyfish-like creatures with four flapping wings. As they prepared to collect specimens to take back to the mother ship, a “flying fish†about the size of a large dog flew past the observation port. It had a huge gaping mouth almost as large as its body. “I guess it’s a filter feeder,†Hector suggested. “I don’t see any eyes. I wonder how it knows where it’s going?â€
“It probably doesn’t need eyes. There’s no natural light this deep. I’m going to go further down. Their food chain must be based on Chemosynthesis. Jupiter produces three times more energy than it receives from the sun. There must be something akin to hydrothermal vents, or maybe an entire hydrothermal ocean that’s driving the whole ecosystem.†At 28,000 km, they plunged into a liquid ocean. The ship rocked and creaked, but the force field maintained the hull’s integrity. A three meter long streamlined creature, about half the size of the Simon, approached the submersible. It also had a large mouth, including an impressive arsenal of teeth. “Well, well, I guess this menacing looking fella must be the top of the food chain.â€
As they watched the hypnotic movements of the new creature as it investigated the submersible’s lights, a distant shadow began to grow larger, and larger, and larger. By the time it reached the illumination field, all that was visible were two rows of teeth, as one row passed above, and the other below, the Simon. “No, Jonah,†said Hector, “I believe this guy is the top of the food chain.â€
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