by submission | Oct 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Christopher Stewart
Everything was powered up, the switch thrown, and she stepped through, crossing the threshold out of nowhere. I remember everything about her so clearly. Not that she was remarkable, other than appearing out of nowhere, but shooting the instrument panels of the machine demanded attention, y’know?
She said, “You will not know my name. You will not know my era. You’ll never make sense of today and I’m sorry about that. You just can’t do this and we have to be certain you don’t.” As she spoke, the gun turned towards me. The rest of the room reacted like it was pointed at them, but no, she was looking right down the barrel at me.
I don’t know guns, but it looked like a normal gun to me. I was looking really hard, you see. And it worked pretty well apparently. She stared at me, just for a moment, then frowned and addressed the gathering of scientists and reporters. The gun stayed on me.
“You opened your door to strangers!” She looked at the project lead. “You! You were grinning like an idiot! You have no idea who I am!” He tried to remind her she hadn’t given a name, but she cut him off, “SHUT UP!”
“You were so keen to be first; you never wondered how many came later, did you, Let alone who controls them, when, and for how long. But what’s done is done. All we can do is contain the mess you have started until as late as possible. This door must be closed. I am not arguing with you, that’s pointless, I am just telling you because you need to understand today isn’t aggression, but desperation.”
Her eyes turned back to me, and with a small, sad smile said, “Being a science writer is not for you. You should write a book. I really love your book.”
I woke up a week later in a hospital bed on the other side of the ocean, three bullet holes in my chest, and a lot of people wanting me to tell you the story I just told you. She had shot me and I was whisked away. I was lucky they said. I thought about that a bit, got into a loop, and passed out. I don’t think about it anymore. Not sober anyhow.
After I had left the building, the machine was repaired relatively quickly and the demonstration was set to continue later that day. This we know because those in attendance said as much in phone calls, texts, so on.
No idea what happened to my fan after she shot me. She never left the facility by all accounts. The second time the machine was turned on, they sent a nuke instead of a person through the door, so one way or another she disappeared in a ball of physics along with a big chunk of France.
As far as I know, nobody has built a machine since then.
by submission | Oct 18, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jay Haytch
Did they teach you in school why the Soviet Union broke up? The story everyone ‘knew’ was of internal strife and bureaucratic inefficiency, but really it was Space Science.
In 1986 we discovered a… ‘thing,’ which stellar parallax put about 107 light-years away. It seemed to perfectly mirror the spectrum of wherever it was observed from. In realtime.
Yes, the Inexplicable Reflector. I like that name better in English than Russian. My colleague came up with it.
Anyway, we studied it for a couple of years until the director-general of the whole program poked his nose in and decreed we should ‘ping’ it. We would send a burst signal, as powerful as we could make, and see what happened. Would it take 214 years to see the result? Who knew?
Well, we started receiving a reply before our apparatus had even finished transmitting. And it was a reply, not just a static reflection – there was clearly information encoded into the complex waveforms.
Eventually – this was 1988; our computers were slow – we processed the signal and dumped the output – 27 pages of coded nonsense – to the printers. We made many copies, which was fortunate because one of the machines caught fire and subsequently destroyed my lab.
This would have been the greatest discovery ever, had it happened anywhere else, but our bosses demanded secrecy so we kept the outside world in the dark while we studied its contents. Eventually the Soviet system fell, and our top-secret research program evaporated with it. We all went on to careers elsewhere, having reached no satisfactory conclusions about the Inexplicable Reflector.
We never ‘decoded’ the message, never translated it into Russian or English or any other human language, but I know what it was. Simply reading it was enough.
We’d been sent a virus, a great instrument of information warfare that ran on human minds as if we were networked computers. I don’t know how it spread or how many became ‘infected’, but there’s no mistaking the signs. Party loyalists became self-serving agitators, protests, riots, and eventually the Soviet Union – the organization that sent the ‘ping’ – was torn apart.
You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? 31 years later, researchers in Japan discovered the same object and, again, tried to send a message. And some old Russian men such as myself started coming forward…
We all remember the chaos that followed – apparently the response was much stronger – but I do believe the world is better off since. Every government dissolved, their armies abandoned, bloated corporations shut down out of apathy. But look at what we’ve achieved since then, freed from ages-old bureaucracy! Manned spaceflight, interstellar travel, in just a decade…
Everyone has a theory about the Reflector now. My favourite is that it is an open network port into another universe, and we triggered serious anti-malware defenses from its firewall. But I’m a computer scientist, after all.
Which is why we’re here, just 1.5 AU from the Inexplicable Reflector, on the opposite side from Earth and Sol, in this starship I commissioned. We have no ties to any wider organization – I ensured that. My crew are all men and women like me – scientists; obsessed – driven – with the need to understand this thing.
Proximity didn’t yield any answers. So tomorrow we will tight-beam the most powerful broadcast in human history – the entire energy output of this starship’s drive – right into the maw of the featureless black sphere a planet’s orbit away.
I’m pushing the button. I have to know.
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Time. I joked once with her that it was simply the thing that stopped everything from happening at once. When she asked me for space I laughed, and said “Of course you can have space, if you didn’t, everything would be happening right here.”
That’s not what she meant. She wasn’t amused.
There’s that long awkward period of mourning you go through when you stop being part of someone’s life, when they stop being part of yours. You do things to help you cope, maybe workout too much, run too far, move to a different city and start drinking all the time. Coping mechanisms. I tried them all, and in the end, I dried up, slowed down and poured myself back into my work. It’s ironic that the thing that killed us wound up being the thing I turned to in order to save myself.
My liver has always been shit.
She never believed me when I told her what I wanted to build, and when I tried to explain it she’d wave her hands and talk over me “Too much science, tell your nerd friends, I don’t care”, and then she’d go watch the gardening channel or the food network or something.
It also seems a little ironic that on the night, in fact in the moment I actually made it work, she pulled out to pass and kissed a semi in the dark. She was my first call, she never picked up. Peterbilt would be her last kiss. I’m still kind of jealous.
So what does this have to do with anything, you ask? Everything, actually.
That thing I made work, notice I didn’t say ‘perfected’, we’ll come back to that. The thing I made work with all my nerd-science was a means to take a specific moment in time and space, focus it and revert it to an earlier instance of that point. Kind of reverting to a space-time save-point in real life, like you would in a video game, but without having to have thought to save first.
The equipment is setup in my van just a few weeks from now, parked on the shoulder where the flowers are still piled up for a particular southern belle who’s going to have a mishap with a tractor trailer just a few moments further along this timeline.
That’s where it’s going to stay. Up the road she’s in her car, not quite fed up yet with how slow the car ahead of her is driving, and in the distance there’s a tractor trailer coming, its driver oblivious to how the night will never end for us.
I’m in the middle, stuck in a moment I can’t get out of. I expect I’ll stay forever, in this bubble of time just big enough for my mind to race.
Eventually I’m going to go completely insane.
In the end, the thing that killed us, and that saved me from self destructing has now ultimately enacted a fate much worse than death upon me.
Irony has always been shit too.
by submission | Sep 26, 2014 | Story |
Author : Glenn Leung
He was the Hero of time, that was all we knew. For millenia, long before he was born and long after he had died, he had been saving the world. An alien invasion two hundred years in the future, a genocidal plague three hundred years in the past, had all been averted by him. He had never once revealed his identity, even though people have seen his face. I even own a plastic figure of him, have pictures of him from eyewitnesses, and am always on the lookout for him in real life. Yet, I have not met this man, nor has anyone else in this time.
“He sounds very much like that alien with two hearts,” laughed my brother. “Does he travel in a blue box?”
I giggled, I did not realize how similar those stories had been.
“So you think it’s all just mass delusion?” I asked.
“Quite likely so, although I’m very surprised in this age of logic and reason, such things can still happen.”
Indeed, it was unthinkable that mass delusions could occur in this age of science. However, it was just as unthinkable how stories of his exploits in the future could arrive with us. Some people say that this is evidence time travel exists, citing photos that were allegedly taken with him against a futuristic background.
“The experts say the photos are genuine,” I often hear such protests against claims of photoshop. Yet, everyone knows that nowadays, experts are often wrong about many things.
“Maybe he’s a concept,” my friend Jody had once mentioned. “You know, a concept personified. Just like comic book superheroes were during the second world war. They were supposed to represent the people’s wish for a good person of immense power which brought an end to suffering.”
“But he’s not a fictional character,” I had replied. “The things he did, or will do, are supposed to be real.”
Jody sighed in disagreement.
“Who knows, a thousand years from now, people may think superheroes actually existed.”
Was it all just an issue of legends made real then? I told others I remained open-minded, but secretly, I wanted to believe. I wanted the Hero to be real, and I wanted him to be my Hero, a brave man detached from his time, traveling around to make things right. I wanted to follow him, be his sidekick, and get to know him better.
“Hey Johnny! Come take a look at this!”
It was my brother, slouched on the couch, as he has been doing every day at nine. It was the news, and some security footage was showing. It was a shot at the entrance of an old castle. No one had been in the castle at that time of night, yet at precisely 2 in the morning, someone was shown leaving it.
I could barely believe my eyes. I recognized that face, that hair, that outfit practically anywhere! It was him!
“Yet another sighting,” sighed my brother. “I bet it’s just another extremely elaborate hoax.”
No…I thought. He was here, in this time, for something. Something is about to happen, and soon, the people of this time would know how real he is. I was excited, my Hero was coming to life! So elated was I that I did not realize that the lights in the city were starting to go out…
by submission | Sep 20, 2014 | Story |
Author : Gary Will Kreie
“Hi, Dusty.”
“Howdy, Richard.”
“How’s the cattle business, Dusty?”
“Business is good, Richard.”
“Have you been riding the fences?”
“We don’t use fences anymore, Richard. Open range now.”
“How do you keep your cows from wandering off, Dusty?”
“Moogle glass.”
“What?”
“The cows wear glasses.”
“Really, Dusty?”
“Really, Richard.”
“You mean, like, sunglasses? And big floppy beach hats, Dusty?”
“Funny. We use special goggles strapped to my cows’ heads with built-in image control, navigation, and communication, Richard.”
“Interesting. Let me guess. You program the latitudes and longitudes of your old fence lines right into the glasses. Is that right Dusty?”
“Right, Richard. We control everything they see. Normally, the glasses are clear, but when my cows get close to the old fence line, the glasses show ’em a simulated cliff edge.”
“So at the old fence line, your cows think they are standing on the edge of a cliff. You use the cows’ own fear of heights to keep them from crossing that line. Is that how it works, Dusty?”
“Yep. We trick ’em into thinkin’ they live on top of a large mesa with high vertical cliffs all the way around.”
“That is funny. Cows are stupid. Keep it up, Dusty, because my humans really like eating your beef.”
“So how you doin’ with your humans, anyway, Richard?”
“They can be a handful.”
“How do you keep your humans from wanderin’ off? Fences?”
“No.”
“Glasses?”
“No.”
“I give up. What?”
“My humans get all their information online. We own online access, Dusty. We control everything they see.”
“OK.”
“Sometimes we tinker with, uh, conventional wisdom, Dusty. History. Facts.”
“So?”
“So we rewrote some ancient science history and old science books that are now all online.”
“So?”
“We changed them all to say that the ground is round.”
“You mean, like a ball, Richard?”
“Right, Dusty.”
“Well, Richard, aren’t your humans smart enough to figure out that they would fall off of a ball?”
“We took care of that by pretending some guy found an invisible force a long time ago that pulls everyone toward the ball center. That’s what the internet and all the scanned and reprinted books say now.”
“So, you’ve tricked your humans into thinkin’ they live on the surface of this giant ball. Right, Richard?”
“Yes.”
“So they won’t try to leave.”
“Yes.”
“You’re jokin’. Right, Richard?”
Richard looked back at Dusty with a serious expression and swiveled his head left and right slightly.
And Dusty just could not stop laughing.
