by submission | Nov 14, 2006 | Story |
Author : C. Hale
Shortly after the perfection of the gravity lens telescope, astronomers had tracked a celestial body twice the size of Earth and calculated its trajectory as intersecting Earth’s orbit. A full year of recalculations and simulations had all yielded the same results. Announcements were made. Debates were sparked. Cults rose, and fell, and governments toppled. Humanity had one hundred and three years to enjoy the planet, and two generations grew up knowing that they would be the last.
Dauk looked up at the sky towards the brilliant sunburst of another meteor entering the atmosphere.
“Is that the one, Mommy?” he asked, clutching at a tall, pale woman’s hand.
“No, sweetie. There are at least two days left. Go play with the other boys,” she said, brushing a tear away as Dauk ran off to romp. Inside, the broadcaster was making his final remarks.
“Reports say that the meteor cloud preceding Celestial Body 09-22-2011 will peak at approximately midnight tonight, leaving a nineteen hour window for the departure of the American arkship. Asia reports tentative success with its early-window launch and the European Bloc arkship has been reported as failed during separation. No word on whether auxiliaries are being prepared.”
Outside, Dauk watched another meteor streak by.
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by submission | Nov 13, 2006 | Story |
Author : David Zhou
“Have a good weekend, Mr. Lark,” he said, scooting his chair underneath his desk and shuffling his papers a bit.
“Don’t stay too late, y’hear?”
He laughed, and shook his head. Smiling faintly, he grabbed his bag and started for the door. He had a big couple of days ahead of him, and he wanted to be sure he was ready. His pace quickening, he called Susan.
The wildly swerving car barely slowed as it plowed into the man walking out of the office building, cell phone to his head, and quite suddenly, the world faded to gray and shifting black.
“Argh!” he shouted, throwing his visor and leaping out of the receptor. Grumbling to himself, he sat down at a neighboring console, and flipped through some screens. There it was.
Nathan Wilson. Twenty-four. Died of severe head truma.
“Figures,” he said. “What I get for choosing one of the younger ones.”
He sighed, and went back to the screen, switching away from group A, and into D. One of the profiles struck his interest.
William Lister, eighty-six. Died in his sleep. Peaceful enough.
He loaded.
Water. He needed to breathe, his head a pounding maelstrom of pressure and panic and he was sinking deeper, the light above dimmer and further and his vision, twisting and pulsating and that was it. The world faded to gray and shifting black.
He didn’t do anything at first. Just took big, heaping gulps of air. Once he properly made sure that he was not still drowning, he frowned and jotted down a note.
Categorization mistake. Group D element William Lister. Listed termination was not as experienced. Error corrected.
He leaned back in the receptor, looking around.
It wasn’t much, the Reentrant Room. Circular and ringed with consoles, the only thing that attacked the eye was the receptor in the middle.
The receptor. He grinned. It was the only thing that kept him at the job. Most people hated qualifying the reentrants. Something about the responsibility of mortality. But he didn’t mind.
He was the dam. He was the filter. He was the guard at the gate, turning away the filth from the grandeur that was the System.
Yes, it required him to possess a physical body, to be exiled and vomited from the System.
But he didn’t care. He may be all alone in the room, but in the end, he had ultimate control. He could dictate and manage which of these poor digital imprints of fragile souls would be allowed to reenter. Be reborn, and have another chance at the virtual life of a member of the System.
He smiled. It was worth it in the end. He flipped through another couple of profile screens. Hm. This one might be interesting.
Polenza Tipates. Fourty-five. Implosion.
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by submission | Nov 12, 2006 | Story |
Author : Jim Stitzel
The bag of chips was all but empty, just a few crumbs left in the bottom. He shook the bag, bouncing it in his hand, so that the niblets would fall together in the corner. There were so few left – and he wasn’t one to waste anything – so he tilted the bag to look inside to see just how much of his snack remained. The chips in the bottom reflected off the bag’s silver interior, and he was torn between the decision to pinch out what was left with his fingers or to simply tip the bag back and dump the crumbs straight into his mouth. A seemingly simple decision, yet he felt his mind stutter, then freeze up as solidly as two pieces of metal welded together.
And there he remained.
* * *
The two programmers observed their immobile subject on the monitor.
“Brilliant bit of programming there, Bud. How exactly did you induce that response?” Thom asked.
Bud chuckled. “It was pretty simple, actually. The silver lining in the chip bag contains several thousand lines of scrolling code – invisible to the naked eye, of course,” he said with a wink. “The program running inside the bag forced our subject into a state of indecision, then compounded the response, effectively throwing his brain into an infinite loop. The program essentially prevents him from action because the decision-making process never ends.” He glanced at the monitor again. “By now the program’s subroutines have copied over to his brain and should be running all on their own there.”
Thom nodded and asked the next logical question. “So. How do we get him unstuck?”
There was no response from Bud. Thom looked at him and saw that his face had paled and his eyes were wide with shock. Thom felt his gut clench in a combination of panic and fear as he looked at the monitor again. The horrible truth of what they had done came to him suddenly.
There was no way to end the program because the program had no ‘kill’ command – let alone a way to execute it – and no way to ‘reboot’ the subject. Neither of them had thought of that when they started alpha testing their project.
Thom said the only thing that he could.
“Oh.”
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by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 11, 2006 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Unsol remembered his twelfth birthday, remembered his fathers face alight with pride as he read aloud Unsol’s draft notice. ‘You’re going to be a pilot, Unsol.’ His father beamed ‘You’ll be the most valuable commodity in the Corps.’
Thirteen years they had invested in him, teaching him, leading him, shaping him. Days turned into years racing war craft through fields of stars and cavernous landscapes of dust and stone, sometimes hunting, sometimes the hunted as they prepared him for his future.
At twenty five he pledged his allegiance to the Corps. ‘I will gladly sacrifice my life to protect our Earth, I pledge my life to the Corps.’ The next day he pledged his love and honour to his new wife. The words ‘Semper Fi’ etched themselves upon the man. These were the happiest days in his memory.
Hot wired into the cockpit of his Slipstream, his every thought, every twitch of his wrist, each flick of a fingertip was translated into immediate motion; pitch, yaw, roll. He merely willed the craft to move, and kept his eye on his prey. A more perfect union of man and machine was simply beyond his comprehension. Pushing through the dust cloud above the surface to hug the craterous landscape, his squadron chased their elusive quarry through canyons and across wide open plains to the mountains. They could taste victory, but they had been careless, arrogant. Unsol’s last memory was of tearing metal, the rush of atmosphere and the smell of burning flesh.
It took twelve months to rebuild him, but after spending thirteen years creating him, reconstruction was an economic viability.
His wife had attended his funeral. There were Corpsmen firing rifles into the sky, and a squadron flew the missing man formation over the graveyard for each as their friends and families paid their last respects. The pilots watched the proceedings from their hospital beds. Each wife fathered a child, some right away, some not for months after. The Corps knew how rare pilot DNA was, so they helped facilitate the in-vitro as part of the bereavement benefit package. Unsol would never be seen by his wife, or his child. He was dead to them both, though he would still fly to protect them.
Security allowed him into the nursery wing after his son was born. Unsol stood in the hall, staring through the glass at a sea of tiny hands none of them would ever get to hold, smiling faces that would never smile for them. Unsol reached with phantom arms and felt new polymer hands connect with the glass, pickups extending reflexively from his palms, skittering on the smooth surface as they searched for an access point to interface with. He shuffled inside his legs, and felt the bulk of thighs and boots not entirely his own move him closer. The lights dimmed in the nursery, and the glass suddenly reflected back the white dome where his face should have been, fogging below the chin line where his air exchanger vented moist air forward. He could feel a tugging in his chest where his own heart once had been, and pain where he knew tears could no longer flow.
When Unsol agreed to sacrifice his life for the Corps, he had only meant that he was willing to die.
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by submission | Nov 10, 2006 | Story |
Author : Patrica Stewart
The finals of the twenty-fourth biannual solar wind races were in their thirty-ninth day. The race course was a 15,000,000,000 mile Z-shaped trek within the Alpha Centuri system. The Alpha Centuri system was considered ideal for solar wind racing because it contained three stars. The light from each star provides the primary propulsion for one leg of the race. The ships start near Alpha Centuri A, the brightest star, and accelerate toward Alpha Centuri B, 23 AU away. At a distance of 2 AU from B, the ships leave the A-B plain, and maintain a constant distance from the red dwarf, Alpha Centauri C (aka, Proxima). After an additional 51 AU, the ships turn from their tangential course to “radial-away,†and sail for the finish line. Although the inertia re-vector compensators allows each ship to retain most of the speed they developed during previous legs, the winner of the race was usually the ship that could best collect the feeble light of Proxima (19,000 times fainter than Earth’s Sun).
Over the past fifteen months, the 64 one person ships had been reduced to two, the SS Asimov, and the SS Weinbaum. The Asimov, piloted by Horatio Clarke, was currently in first place as the two ships were within a 600 million miles of the finish line. The Weinbaum, piloted by Lee Midier, was attempting to block the Asimov’s light. ‘Blocking light’ was a standard racing maneuver for the trailing ship. Place your 532 square mile sail (over 50% larger than the city of New York) between the light source and the sail of the leading ship, and you get all the photons. You accelerate, they only coast. If you’re really good, or lucky, you could pass them before the finish line.
Both ships were currently ‘running with the photons,’ so the optimum sail shape was parabolic, like the mirror in a reflecting telescope. In an effort to keep free of Weinbaum’s shadow, Clarke initiated a variable corkscrew maneuver by reversing the polarity of a one square mile portion of his sail, at the 6:00 position, along the periphery. He then advanced the polarized area, sometimes clockwise, sometimes counter-clockwise, to keep his sail in full Proxima-light. Captain Clarke watched with pure enjoyment as the Weinbaum floundered repeatedly in its effort the match his variable course. Clarke activated the ship-to-ship comm unit. “Give up, Lee. I’m no midshipman. Try something else, like jettisoning some dead weight. I recommend you start with the Captain.â€
Because the Weinbaum was 30,000,000 miles behind the Asimov, Clarke had to wait over five minutes to hear Lee’s radio reply. “We’re still two days out, Horatio. You have to sleep sometime.â€
But neither man slept. The two ships continued their light duel for the next two days, but the Weinbaum was never able to overtake the Asimov. The Asimov won by a distance equal to the Earth-Mars close approach.
At the celebration banquet, Captain Clarke accepted the trophy for the seventh consecutive time, and announced his retirement from racing. A few hours later, as Clarke was preparing to leave the reception, Lee Midier confronted him. “You can’t retire, you old bastard. I almost beat you this time. You have to give me one more chance. If you go, who shall I race, what shall I do?â€
With a half smirk on his face, Clarke stepped onto the transporter pad and said “Frankly, Midier, I don’t give a damn.†Then he dissolved away.
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