by Clint Wilson | Apr 1, 2013 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
“Breeding for luck?”
“Breeding for luck.”
“Why does that sound familiar?”
“A famous 20th century science fiction writer once hypothesized…”
“Okay, okay I remember now. I read the whole series,” waving his hand in the air, “Plus most of his other stuff, brilliant fellow indeed.” Then the elderly prime minister’s face became serious again, “But you’ve done it for real?”
His science advisor looked like a schoolboy bursting with a nasty secret, “Better yet if I show you, come this way sir.”
As they ambled down the long corridor the younger man briefed him. “Sir our families go back together well over a century, in fact,” he held up a knowing index finger like an exclamation point, “my great grandfather started this experiment with your own great uncle, the thirtieth minister, Hector.”
The prime minister’s face showed genuine surprise. “Really, that far back?”
“It takes time to breed through generations sir. Of course they started with the best. The first couples were all multiple lottery winners, many of them also recipients of large family inheritances. But we didn’t stop there.”
“Oh?” Now the older man was entirely transfixed.
“No sir, not at all. We had survivors of multiple accidents. There was one fellow who lived through three plane crashes, and a woman who plunged from 40,000 feet without a parachute only to land in a thick patch of forest without a single broken bone.”
“Amazing!” interjected the prime minister.
“Indeed,” answered the scientist. “And we kept at it, over and over, testing subjects in a variety of ways. One of the earlier descendants is said to have played over 500 hands of blackjack against a professional Vegas dealer without a single loss.”
“Oh you tale spinner Norbert, don’t keep me in suspense, where does that leave us now?”
They reached a large set of double doors. “Come see for yourself sir.” He pushed through and they entered a laboratory buzzing with activity. “Ah good, we are about to witness a live test run. Our timing couldn’t be more perfect.”
The lab-coated workers parted as their boss and their national leader walked toward the large bay window overlooking the testing room. Together the men stood and watched as the scene unfolded.
Inside the chamber a door opened and a young man entered wearing a blindfold. Norbert pushed an intercom button and said, “Go ahead Mr. Reid, like we practiced, make your way through the room at your own leisure, and remember, it’s all virtual, you can’t be hurt.” Then releasing the button, “He’s our best sir, you’re bound to like this.”
Then the two watched as the blindfolded man proceeded forward and a spiked club sprung down from the ceiling missing him by inches. He continued and stumbled forward as a volley of sharp darts flew by just above his head. And it continued, a swooshing razor sharp axe, an onslaught of arrows, a pit full of buzzing saw blades, he stumbled on almost comically, avoiding all of it without a scratch. And then for the grandest of finales as he neared the far side of the room, he suddenly hopped to the left, narrowly missing the crushing weight of a grand piano dropped from a hidden trap door.
The prime minister applauded, “Marvelous, simply marvelous!” Then he turned, a questioning look on his face. “But I must know, how was that virtual, everything looked entirely real.”
“Oh it was,” the scientist patted him on the shoulder and smiled. “It all has to be real, otherwise we wouldn’t really be testing his luck now, would we?”
by submission | Mar 26, 2013 | Story |
Author : Aaron Koelker
I had eaten a ham sandwich the morning we found God. It wasn’t exactly the foundation of great literature. Perhaps they would write in a great feast and how our crew was a likable bunch both humble and imperfect. You know, a “twelve apostles” sort of crew, all dedicated to our own view of a higher power. Which wasn’t too far from the truth. We were a pretty diverse crew, and whether it was planned that way or just poor luck I’ll never know.
The creature that floated before our bow was certainly god-like in scope, but little else. It looked like a planetoid gourd covered in warts and veins, gently pulsing in sync with the starry background.
“My God…” the co-pilot gasped, her eyes wide.
“Which one you talking to?” the engineer laughed.
“That thing is a monstrosity,” the co-pilot finished.
The engineer made way for the coffee machine, smiling to himself. “I don’t know”, he said. “I find it sort of humbling.”
The head science officer walked into the room.
“Well, the scanners confirm it,” he said. “That thing is expelling organic matter in every direction. A spore-like vessel; just like the ones we’ve been finding.” He stopped in front of the forward port and gazed upon the beast. “We’ll need more time to derive its age, composition, metabolism…and of course its origin.”
“The Panspermians are going to go nuts,” I said.
The science officer turned toward me.
“Granted we can prove it’s really the source.”
“Everything we’ve collected and studied; all the sleuth-work has brought us to this place. This backwater space on the edge of nowhere.” I paused as I watched the creature, not yet sure what to think of it, only that it existed. “It has to be.”
“We should leave it,” said the co-pilot. “We should get out of here. That thing,” spoken with the utmost disgust, “wasn’t meant to be found.”
“Oh don’t get all prophetic on us,” said the engineer. “Why the fuck would you sign onto this expedition?”
“I don’t know. But it wasn’t to find that.”
I saw her discreetly twiddling with the bracelet she wore under her sleeve, the one bearing the sign of her faith. She had shown it to me the night before.
“Where are the other three?” I asked.
“In their cabins, I believe.”
I left and found the medical officer sitting on his bunk, the door to his cabin ajar. There was a thick book in his hands from which he read aloud, fast and mumbling.
“You alright in here?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. I waited a moment longer before leaving to find the other two science officers. They weren’t in the lab, so I figured they must’ve been down in the cargo hold, looking over the collected spore samples.
The hold was dark, and upon entering a sharp acrid smell filled my nose.
“Anybody in here?” I called.
No answer. I ventured toward the back where the samples were kept. There, half-wedged onto the bottom shelf, was a makeshift chemical bomb thrown together with spare parts and lab supplies. A puddle of leaked fluid slicked the metal floor.
Beside the bomb lay one of the science officers, a long stain of blood running down his collar. In one hand he held a scalpel and the other a metal charm strung on a silver chain. I recognized the symbol; an extremist cult. One that lead a world power and over two billion people through its strict law; one that couldn’t afford to have that law grow fallacious.
Perhaps we hadn’t found God after all.
by submission | Mar 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“You scared, son?” the old man asked the large robot walking down the long, gray corridor beside him.
“I am incapable of emotion, doctor,” the automaton replied.
The old man nodded in response as he shuffled along. The robot walked slowly so as to remain at the side of the decrepit scientist. At the age of 100, Doctor Segrest was one of the youngest people alive.
Segrest chuckled. “Pretty clever of ’em when ya think about it,” he muttered.
“Doctor?” the machine asked as it moved along with a gait more fluid and graceful than that of its human companion.
“Oh. Them,” Segrest said glancing up at the ceiling of the long hallway. “Just thinkin’ ’bout how the aliens did us in a hundred years back. All those probes fallin’ all over the world releasin’ that virus that made everybody sterile. They coulda invaded like in some science fiction story firin’ lasers or missiles or whatever. Or they coulda sent a virus to just wipe us out. But then they’d have all those unburied corpses, machines runnin’ unsupervised until they broke down or caught fire. World without people would go to hell in a hand basket pretty quick.”
The machine listened politely but said nothing. Being a command robot with an advanced metaprocessor, it was well aware of the theory that the Infertility Virus that had been released into Earth’s food and water chain was the first step of an extraterrestrial invasion to take place much later. By allowing the human race to become extinct through attrition rather than by a massive military assault or abrupt genocide via biological warfare, the theory went, meant that mankind would attend to such tasks as burying or cremating the dead and shutting down hazardous facilities like nuclear reactors as the shrinking population made their continued operation redundant. Thus, the invaders would inherit an intact world for colonization and study, neither shattered by war nor devastated by sudden depopulation.
“Yep,” Segrest continued, “those alien sons of bitches think they’re gonna walk right in and take over.” He chuckled again and then looked up at the towering machine. “They didn’t count on you fellas.”
As the two walked toward the door at the end of the corridor, the robot silently downloaded reports from its mechanical brethren all over the world as well as from those in orbit around both the Earth and the Moon. The large alien fleet was now inside the orbit of Saturn. It was still a few weeks from Earth. As far as could be determined, the fleet appeared completely unarmed. The command robot processed the data. It determined that the 23,000 nuclear warheads at its disposal were far more that sufficient.
“It’s been about 50 years since we gave up on trying to reverse the Infertility Virus,” Segrest told the robot as they stopped in front of the door. “Fifty years since mankind gave up on survival and found a new purpose. Vengeance.”
“Doctor Segrest, I must get to the command station in orbit,” the robot said flatly.
The old man nodded. “You go right on, son. There are only about 50,000 people left. Soon Earth will have a population of zero. Except for the machines. This will all be yours. You folks are what’s next. Complete your mission, son. Avenge us.”
“Goodbye, Doctor,” the robot said as it walked through the hatch which automatically closed behind it.
Ten minutes later, a spaceplane took off and arced upward toward the stars. Segrest watched it ascend.
“Avenge us!” he said to the fading point of light.
by Patricia Stewart | Feb 19, 2013 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
(Caution: Science content) The Perseus Space Colony is a marvel of twenty-third century engineering. It is located approximately 400,000 kilometers from the Earth, and trailing 60 degrees behind the Moon. Astronomers call it the Lagrange (L5) point, and it’s one of the very few truly stable orbits in the Earth-Moon system. The gravitational forces of the Earth, Moon, and Sun keep the mammoth habitat in an 89-day kidney shaped sub-orbit around the L5 point. Like a marble in a bowl, if the colony drifts in any direction, the E-M-S gravity fields always brings it home.
The Perseus’ outermost “H” ring is 2,700 meters in diameter, and it houses the living quarters for the 824 permanent residents, and the 182 visitors that are “on-station” at any given time. The Preseus rotates at a leisurely 0.73 revolutions per minute, which produces a comfortable 0.8g in the “H” ring; less as you approach the hub. As the H-ring spins at more than 100 meters per second (circumferentially), it produces some disorienting physiological effects on the occupants. For example, if a person in the H-ring drops an object, it curves sideways as it falls, a radial Coriolis effect. It’s the same phenomenon that causes hurricanes to rotate counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere. Permanent residents don’t even notice the effect when they go about their cycle’s business, but first time visitors always move around like they had taken too many recs.
Senior Maintenance Engineer Louis Spiridon crawled backwards out of the cylindrical conduit that exits the noisy pumping room of the C-ring’s recycling center. As he removed his hearing protection, he became aware of the variable wail of the station’s emergency alarm. He activated a comm panel along the wall of the main corridor to find out what was wrong. The computer informed him that there had been a significant solar flare event, and that all personnel had been ordered into the shielded auditorium at the station’s hub. “Do I have time to take a shower?” he asked, knowing that it generally took hours for the sun’s coronal mass ejection to reach Earth’s orbit, and because the recycling center tended to leave an unpleasant scent on all those that pass through.
“Negative,” responded the computer. “This is an X-class flare. The immediate concerns are the high levels of electromagnetic radiation, not coronal ejecta. Lethal levels of x-rays have already reached the station. You need to start running anti-rotation, now.”
“What? Shouldn’t I head for a spoke, so I can take a lift to the auditorium?” Just incase the computer knew what it was talking about; Louis began jogging against the station’s direction of rotation.
“Sorry,” replied the computer. ”The lifts won’t function in an X-class flare. But, fortunately for you, the current orientation of the Perseus has the shielded auditorium located directly between your current location and the sun. However, you’ll only be in its shadow for another 3 seconds. Since the station is rotating, you need to run, not jog, to stay within the auditorium’s shadow. As long as you maintain that position, you’ll be shielded from the lethal radiation. However, you need to sustain a steady pace of 780 meters per minute to keep the auditorium aligned with the sun. It’s only 0.1g at your current radial distance, so it should not be too difficult. The lethal phase of the flare will only last for another two hours and five minutes. That’s 91 laps around the C-ring. I’ll regulate your pace. A little faster please, Mr. Spiridon.”
by Julian Miles | Jan 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
As a child I was fascinated by the reflections you see when you place two mirrors facing each other and stand between them. Trying to understand that fascination drove me through mathematics and into science, down into quantum foam and up into the things that make reality real.
I could never shake the feeling that what I saw in those mirrors was something fundamental, if I could only understand it. When the new scientific fields caused by Tennerson’s discovery of the principles of wormhole transit opened their doors, I made sure that I was one of the first to get access to their data. Then Cravedine had his accident during a wormhole transit experiment. It caused an utter sensation, but I ignored the media furore. I knew that deep within the logs of that event was the thing I needed.
To go directly from one reality to its alternate is impossible. But in a wormhole, certain laws are placed in abeyance. A wormhole can deliver you into another reality. I added Cravedine’s rather elegant energy field equations to my mirror theories and used the gestalt result as the focus for a wormhole. Reducing the bizarre mechanism down to a backpack and a bag of portable reflective surfaces took longer than the science.
The paired mirrors are the key. The field generated between them places you in a portal. If you can see a reflection of yourself distinctly, you can go there. There being a reality divergent from our own. Of course, you needed to count how many instances from here the reflection is, so you can return.
My first jaunt was reality plus one, my shorthand for going through the right-hand mirror to the first reflection. I found myself in a familiar place, but standing in a sizeable crater. After scrambling out of it, I found the nearby city blocks deserted. Upon reaching populated areas, I got some odd looks. When I read the headlines about my ‘crazy’ experiment demolishing a neighbourhood, I ran back to the crater, unfolded a pair of mirrors and stepped back into reality minus one.
The guard standing in my laboratory was white-faced with surprise, but he held his rifle steady as he ordered me to stay put. I said I needed to stabilise myself by putting up two reflective surfaces. He nodded assent and while he called for backup, I unfolded my mirrors and stepped back into reality plus one.
I stepped into my laboratory and the me in there screamed like a girl before collapsing, hitting his head heavily on the corner of the bench. I heard his neck snap as his head twisted. I unfolded mirrors and got the hell out as I heard running feet in the corridor outside. This time, I chose reality minus two.
The ruined laboratory was open to the sky. Climbing up, I beheld the ruins of a city stretching as far as I could see. So I sat on charred masonry, snacked, drank and thought hard. Then I mirrored up and selected reality plus fourteen, the furthest that I could make out.
Six years later, I am still here. I have become a best-selling author with a backpack and a bag of mirrors cemented into the foundations of my Swedish home. I didn’t think it through. A reflection is never an exact copy and each reality has its own reflections. The reflections I saw in each reality were reflections of that reality, not mine.
I discovered the most effective method of exile ever. Then inflicted it upon myself.
