by submission | Jul 24, 2013 | Story
Author : Bob Newbell
“T-minus two minutes.”
That's the mission control computer. That's how long I have to back out. One second after that is one second too late. But I'm not going to back out. I don't have any real ties to this era. My whole life I've felt I was born centuries later than I should have been. Temperamentally, I'm well-suited to time travel.
I've read some of the old time travel science fiction. Quaint ideas about time machines being compact little vehicles that magically drop you off to whatever calendar date you like. That's a much nicer narrative device than having to find the right kind of black hole orbiting the right kind of star and then build a machine around both of them.
“T-minus one minute, forty-five seconds.”
And in the old stories, you could travel into the future, too. In reality, you can only travel to the past. The closer to the present you want to travel to, the more power it takes. In terms of energy, it's far easier to travel 100 years into the past than it would be to travel ten seconds into the past. To travel even one nanosecond into the future would require infinite energy.
“T-minus one minute, thirty seconds.”
And once you're in the past, forget about preventing your grandparents from ever meeting each other or killing Hitler or any other causality violation-type tampering. Laws of physics won't allow it. Novikov self-consistency principle. Go back in time to kill your mom before she gives birth to you and on your way to commit matricide, you'll trip and break a leg. Or get killed yourself in a car accident. Something will prevent you from violating causality. Nature abhors a paradox.
“T-minus one minute.”
Did I mention it's a one-way trip? Like I said, you can't travel to the future. And when you arrive in the “past,” that becomes the “present.” The time you traveled back from is forever inaccessible. Once you're in the past, your job is to observe and document. And after you've recorded the history you were assigned to investigate, you take everything you've documented to the designated recovery location and let your recording machine dig itself into the ground. It'll burrow deep enough into the Earth's crust to remain undisturbed for centuries. They'll locate it and dig it up the same day you were sent back in time, centuries after you're dead.
“T-minus forty-five seconds.”
Speaking of death, you may not live very long after you've time traveled to the past. All matter that gets sent into the past including living tissue gets hit with ionizing radiation. You'll have at least two or three forms of cancer shortly after you arrive. That may not sound like a serious problem, but cancer used to be a debilitating and even deadly disease. Depending how far back in time you go, the medical science may not be advanced enough to treat it. Your cell repair machines may be able to fix the damage but all that nanotech in your cells gets hit with radiation, too. It may not function properly. Statistically, you've got a less than fifty percent chance of making it five years after your arrival.
“T-minus thirty seconds.”
Still, for all the problems, time travel is worth it. Data mining history is a calling, almost like a religion. We can't know who we are or what we can become if we don't know how we arrived here. Dying 700 years before you were born is a small price to pay.
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by submission | Jul 12, 2013 | Story
Author : Gabriel E. Zentner
I first saw the ocean many, many years ago – of that much I’m certain. Still, at my age, memory has a way of slipping away in the night, unbidden, to return again but never be the same. If I were younger, I’m sure I’d be able to recount every detail of that seminal day with vivid clarity. No matter, though; what is important is this.
I came to Titan with my parents when I was a child, back at a time when the outer Sol system was a chest of wonders to be unlocked by the most brilliant and intrepid minds humanity had to offer. I believe it was something called the Solar Command that really began the exploration of the Sol system in earnest, but those details really do tend to get away from me these days. Can you imagine? Humanity confined to a single system? It boggles the mind. How many systems has humanity colonized now, anyway?
Three hundred ninety-six? My word, how times have changed.
Where was I? Oh, yes, of course – Titan.
We hadn’t been on Titan long before I saw the ocean, I recall that much. I recall staring out a window, seeing the bruised, slushy landscape, perpetually wreathed in twilight, and thinking it was oddly beautiful. And then, I caught sight of it. The ocean.
It wasn’t like any ocean I’d ever seen before, having newly arrived from Earth, with its rich expanses of cool blues and greens, teeming with a mind-shattering array of life from the beautiful to the bizarre. This was… different. What other word can I use? I was transfixed.
I remember asking my mother if I could go for a swim. Apparently, I was too young at the time to understand that I would have died, had I attempted that.
Forty years later, I still wanted to swim in that ocean, that frigid, hydrocarbon ocean.
The geneticists, the bioengineers said it couldn’t be done. There were limits to human physiology that couldn’t be overcome, no matter how far our science had come.
I’d like to think that I’ve matured enough not to gloat, but damn if I wouldn’t love to say I told them so. Thing is, they’re probably all millennia dead by now.
That’s all right.
I am one with Titan.
I am one with the ocean.
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by featured writer | Jun 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell, Featured Writer
The man wearing Victorian garb with what appeared to be brass welding goggles pushed up on his forehead walked into the bar. The look of confusion on his face had little to do with the bizarre menagerie that comprised the establishment’s clientele. The bartender smiled and nodded at him and gestured to a barstool.
“What’s your pleasure, sir?” asked the portly barkeep.
“Uh, brandy, I suppose,” the man said.
The bartender produced the drink for his customer.
“I say,” said the man, “this will probably sound a bit odd, but–”
“You have no idea who you are or how you got here.”
Astounded, the man replied, “That’s right!”
The bartender looked the man up and down. “You’re a steampunk,” he said at last.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Airships and Babbage analytical engines and lots of gears and London in the late 1800s. Sound familiar?”
The man gulped down his brandy and said, “Yes! That’s it exactly! That’s where I’m from. But how did you know? And why can’t I recall who I am?”
The bartender leaned on the counter and said, “You’re nobody. Nobody in particular, that is.” He poured the man another drink. “You’re what I call an ‘archetype’. They’re all archetypes here.”
“I don’t understand,” the man said.
“Take that fellow sitting in the corner, for instance. The guy in the form-fitting spacesuit with the raygun in his holster. Back in the ’30s and ’40s he’d drop by for a drink on a rare occasion. By the early ’60s he was coming in all the time. Now, he’s a fixture. Almost never leaves. He had his time in the media and the pop culture and the collective consciousness. But that time passed. So now he’s here.”
The man was about to speak when a fellow clad entirely in black leather and wearing mirrored sunglasses walked into the bar. The newcomer’s left arm was a robotic prosthesis. He silently walked up to the bar, was handed a beer, and then went to a table and sat down alone.
“Cyberpunk,” the bartender said. “Close relative of yours. Since the 1990s, he’s become pretty much a fixture here, too.”
“Who are you and what the devil is this place?” the steampunk asked loudly.
“Those are very difficult questions to answer. This bar doesn’t exist in any material sense. Neither do you. Think of this establishment as a sort of resting place for the paradigms of speculative fiction. An idea is created in science fiction or fantasy. Maybe that idea flourishes. It ascends through the subculture, perhaps breaks through into the mainstream culture. But then its popularity wanes. People become uninterested and start to forget about it. It never vanishes entirely, of course. There will almost always be some minuscule following. Even if there isn’t, the themes and tropes still exist, entombed in a faded pulp or hibernating in an old VHS tape. And it may even become popular again someday. But until such a day comes, these specimens of speculation get reduced and distilled down to prime examples, to archetypes, and they inevitably end up here.”
The steampunk stood up and backed away from the bar. “You’re barmy! I’m not some archetype! I’m a person!” He turned and ran out of the bar.
The bartender wiped the counter down with a rag. “They all say that when their time is almost up and the culture is ready to move on to something else,” he said to no one in particular. He looked at the steampunk’s half-finished second brandy. He sighed. “Yep, he’ll be a fixture soon, too.”
by Desmond Hussey | Jun 13, 2013 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer
“… Mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.” – St. Augustine
Numerals flow in random digital pulses around a wide black band high in the perilous chapel’s white marble walls. Each numeric chain makes a full rotation before disappearing into its own beginning point, like a snake devouring its own tail.
A cabal of twelve ebon-clad Mystics, their robes finely detailed with glimmering stars and moons, are aligned like sentinels around the circular perimeter of an intricate tile mosaic occupying the center of the main gallery. The mosaic’s design is a mesmerizing mathematical fusion, depicting colored rays, radii, circumference ratios, triangles within squares within circles. Imaginary numbers. A thin line of red tile carves an elegant spiral path through the entire motif.
A thirteenth figure, a woman, naked and bound, every inch of her pale skin tattooed with alien cartography, hangs suspended inches above the locus of the circle by a rope which vanishes into the overhead shadows. Her blue eyes glisten with terror.
Silently, each Mystic produces a heavy, linen sack from within their robes and proceeds to dust the mosaic in a thin, chaotic layer of salt.
Then they begin their chant.
Quietly at first, nearly inaudibly, the heinous invocation multiplies and rolls over itself like an approaching thunder clap until the vast chamber is filled with a reverberating chorus of harmonized frequencies. Subliminal numeric equations weave themselves together within the esoteric warp and weft of dark tonalities, evoking foul attention from the Realms-Between-The-Spaces.
Awakened by the hypnotic din, the salt begins to dance, moved by invisible forces until it has gathered into a vibrating pattern of circular and curvilinear lines on the floor, and when the chanting shifts octaves suddenly, the pattern of salt changes. Circles bud like dividing cells into smaller, twin circles forming a more complex pattern.
Darkness gathers like a noisome cloud above as, once more, the surreal chant shifts octaves. Again the trembling salt sketches out a more compound geometry, levitating from the ground and twisting into a three dimensional spiral which rotates around it’s anchor point, the woman. Her long, auburn hair floats freely from her body now as if underwater, stirred by eldritch currents. She struggles weakly against her restraints.
In a bone-shuddering climax, a sudden bass tone resonates throughout the chamber scattering the salt into a loose dome above the mosaic and silencing all other sound. The darkness beyond the dome is complete, shrouding the miscreant wizards behind a protective saline field.
All that remains visible is the woman hanging within a malevolent emptiness by a spidery thread. She has ceased moving. Her eyes, only a moments ago staring in wide-eyed horror, are now drained of color, becoming slick, shifting voids, like twin pits filled with oily, black serpents.
With the deliberate, agonizing pace of an emerging butterfly, the skin around her eyes, mouth, nose, navel, vagina and anus begins to fold over itself, her body inverting and contorting into a shapeless mass of pulsing muscle and viscera. One by one, each bone is excreted and drops to a gruesome pile on floor.
Numerous mismatched eyes and prehensile, snake-like appendages emerge at random points from the hideous, crimson flesh-beast. Still suspended from the rope, the mass splits across its middle, forming two massive, bloody lips which begin a gross mockery of speech.
“A go-go lap dancer, a pip, was able to peel in a zip, but she read science-fiction and died of constriction, attempting a Mobius strip.”
The confused Mystics stand in muted bewilderment.
“Sheesh, Tough crowd.”
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by submission | Jun 9, 2013 | Story |
Author : John Kinney
When I was twenty years old, advancements in medical science and our understanding of DNA coding finally climaxed. I invested half of my money in a company called Stockholm and Siegfried, who specialized in genetic manipulation and, most importantly, cloning. They didn’t normally clone humans, despite how easily they could, because most considered it to be an ethical dilemma, but my frequent donations eventually changed their minds. When I was thirty, I had my parents’ graves dug up for samples of DNA. I told the research team that the whole project would be our little secret.
On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, the DNA was replicated and, in the morning, two embryos floated in a vat in the basement of the lab.
My parents are twelve now, the tender age that I had lost them in the crash, so many, many years ago. My father’s blue eyes stared into my own and in a small voice he told me that he loved me. He used to look me in the eyes and smile and tell me so when I was his age. I had to choke back tears when my mother smiled and told me to buy her more finger paint because of how much she loved painting. I hung her stick figure picture of my father and I next to one of her college portfolio paintings of a beautiful mountain landscape. I always loved that painting. She had told me that it was of a mountain that she had hiked during her trip to Germany. I made sure to get her more finger paint from the store when her and dad were sleeping in their beds.
I call them mom and dad, and I taught them to call me son.
They will be married when they’re old enough. It will be just like it was, so long ago, but I won’t let them leave me this time. Technically, they can never leave me.
When I die of old age, their son will grow up to be just like me.
