by Patricia Stewart | Oct 12, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
A year before the New Horizons spacecraft was schedule to fly by the dwarf planet Pluto in July 2015, NASA awakened it from its scheduled hibernation for equipment checkout and trajectory tracking. During the systems check of the LORRI long-range visible-spectrum camera, the scientists received a hint of something very strange. There appeared to be a faint object between Pluto and Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. At first, scientist speculated that it must be an optical illusion created by one of Pluto’s other three known moons, Nix, Hydra, or the recently discovered S/2011. But those moons were all accounted for. One of the specialists from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory suggested that the object was a fifth moon trapped in Pluto’s L-1 Lagrangian point. Later, an imaging specialist from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center suggested that a geyser-like volcano had erupted on the face of Charon that was facing Pluto, and that the ice particle fountain was responsible for the faint object. The debate came to an abrupt end when all communications with the New Horizons spacecraft was inexplicably lost.
By and large, scientists working for NASA expect to encounter occasional ‘glitches’ in lengthy space missions, so there was no immediate panic. The mission commander simply pulled out the Troubleshooting Manual and began a meticulous process of fault tree analysis. However, it quickly became clear that this was no ordinary glitch. The New Horizons spacecraft was equipped with dual redundant transmitters and receivers. In addition to the high-gain antenna, the spacecraft had two low-gain antennas and a medium-gain dish. It was inconceivable that there could be simultaneous failures in all of the communication systems. Suspicion was subsequently directed at the ships two flight computers. Again, built-in redundancy provided for independent Command and Data Handling systems. Eventually, extensive testing of identical earth-based flight computers eliminated any design and programming anomalies. Finally, as the months passed, it was becoming increasing probable that the New Horizons spacecraft had been impacted by a rogue Kuiper Belt object.
Just as all hope was being lost, communication was reestablished through the aft low-gain antenna, which had only been used during near earth phases of the mission. With only a month to flyby, the team began an exhaustive effort of rebooting and reprogramming the spacecraft. Progress was slow due to the nine hour round trip latency, but two days out, the spacecraft returned from the dead.
When the cameras were once again focused on Pluto, it was suddenly apparent that Pluto was not an ice cover rock. It was artificial, and apparently teaming with life. Thousands of small artifacts buzzed around Pluto like a halo of giant space-bees surrounding a hive. The faint object between Pluto and Charon turned out to be a 17,500 kilometer long tether, locking the two objects together as they swung around their common center of gravity every 6.4 days, presumably in an effort to create artificial gravity. The PERSI near-infrared imaging spectrometer revealed that Charon was significantly hotter than Pluto, suggesting that it was a power plant supplying Pluto’s inhabitants with life sustaining energy. Nix and Hydra were donut shaped satellites with diameters larger than 100 kilometers. “I guess Dr. Tyson was right after all,” remarked an analyst. “Pluto isn’t a planet.”
As the New horizon neared closest approach, the tiny ‘moon’ S/2011 left orbit and flew toward the spacecraft. As it neared, it became obvious that S/2011 was a large spacecraft. When it was approximately ten kilometers away, a bright light flashed in one of its three nacelles, and the New Horizon spacecraft went dark for a second time.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 4, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was ecstatic that I could create this kind of complexity in a chain-reactive static chemical crane array. The underchains made a little room between the different string permutations when the time came. It was the moment I’d been waiting for. The oven timer went off with a ding.
Seconds before the oven mitt caught fire, I let the retractors go and turned the electron ginny to six. With a little wiggle and a snap down to the quantum level, the lattice formed. It was perfect.
I’d made a fourteen-molecule high exact replica of my living room. It was there. I’d routed my electron microscope through the projector so that I could see it. The image of tiny green-tinted chairs and a coffee table was projected there in monochrome perfection on the pulled-down screen. I even managed to recreate the broken lampshade with a salt bonder, revised electrolyte silver off of a fork of my mother’s, and just a little monomole.
Light even streamed in through the basement windows. It was perfect.
I sat back to watch the show.
I had made her from pure electricity and wound her cored skeleton up from polymer attractors. The barest sheen of flattened oak protons and a hexideximilliliter of her own blood coloured her hair. She walked into the room, a little unsteady on her feet, and looked around in confusion.
I could actually see her hesitancy. The resolution wasn’t high enough in the scope’s view but it if was, I’m sure I would have been able to see a scurry of electrons form a sparking furrowed brow. She knew this room but she seemed to suspect something. She held her hands up in front of her. If she noticed that they were made of kaleidoscoping cohesive energy waves, she didn’t show it.
Barrelled underwards and hidden side-by-side on a level of predictable uncertainty in between this universe and the possibilities of our nearly identical neighbours, I’d stored the entirety of her mind in a recording.
She was almost pure theory based on a shrunken cascade of concatenated decision processes mapped out at the moment of transition as she fell asleep. She’d fallen asleep because I had drugged her hot chocolate before I let the nanotech do its work and transfer her consciousness to her tiny doppleganger.
Her macro-world body lay unconscious on the work bench behind me. Her breathing was steady. She’d be fine. I’m no monster. She’d have no memory of the last hour, though. I wanted no trouble.
Soon she’d wake up on my mom’s couch upstairs and assume that she’d had a little nap. I’d be there in her groggy state to back up that assumption and make it fact that would be seamlessly woven into reality by tomorrow. She’d have no idea about the copy of her that the boy in the basement next door had stolen.
I couldn’t wait to make the adjustments tonight and put a copy of me in there as well.
Time to see if she meant what she said would happen if we were the last two people on earth.
I believe in science. I believe in love. I believe in controlled conditions.
by submission | Sep 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
I should have just slept with her, in retrospect. She had been attractive and suggestive, but there had been something about her that smelled like trouble, and sure enough, she had come back to the hotel bar with her arm wrapped around six feet of good old-fashioned trouble. Maybe I was supposed to be revenge on him for something he had done, but now she was going to use him to punish my rejection.
She pointed me out to him and he started striding towards me with blood in his eye. I stood up and stepped away from the bar. I should have just left, but I was at that stage of drunk where I wasn’t thinking straight but thought that I was. Besides, I was a little pissed at myself for turning down an easy score and at her for her betrayal.
As Trouble got near, the world started to slow down. The implant sensed my fight-or-flight response and responded by pumping me full of chemicals that made adrenaline feel like roofies. The artificial nerves switched from the setting that let me talk to people to the setting that let me count the beats of a hummingbird’s wing. No normal man could possibly defeat me.
Unfortunately, Trouble had that look too. Rather than rushing in like the angry fool he had seemed, he had slowed his approach and come into a fighting stance. He was an augment like me. Damn.
Science had not yet found a reliable way to replace muscles or change the speed with which they contracted, and that made a fight between augments a curious thing to watch. Fast thoughts, slow muscles. Make a wrong move and your opponent will see it, find the right counter, and launch his own attack, all faster than Bruce Lee at his finest.
I saw Trouble tense for a left jab, so I started to bring my arms up for a parry and cross. His left relaxed and his right dropped for a body blow, I began to bring my parrying hand up for a strike at his face, forcing him to pull ever so slightly back. Two attacks, two responses, and to those watching we might as well have been statues.
It went on like that for what seemed like hours, punches, kicks, shoves, slaps, all scarcely started before they were abandoned as futile. In the minutes we actually fought neither of us made a move more dramatic than a step, more obviously aggressive than a shrug.
Thankfully, I don’t stay in fancy hotels where the bars have nice clean floors, and the eternity it would have taken for him to look where he was stepping would have given me ample time to drop him. He didn’t see the wet spot until he started to slip, and an instant later the fight was effectively over. My left hand started to reach out, to help push him down while my right hand cocked slightly for a knockout punch on the floor. He had no way to counter, and it showed in his eyes. Along with a reflection of her face.
Bitch hit me with a barstool.
Despite our modifications, he couldn’t watch the floor and I couldn’t watch my back. They got in a few good kicks, then ran for it. I woke up a few minutes later, bruised but okay, and waited for the police. No one saw anything, not even the bartender, and the cameras were out so nothing came of it. I guess it helps to be a local. Fucking Pittsburgh.
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Doctor Spake slipped the needle into the fatty flesh of the rat and depressed the plunger, then withdrew and watched.
“This rat is almost three years old,” the Doctor addressed the Senator standing opposite him, “virtually at the end of its lifespan as you can see by its appearance.
The Senator regarded the withered rat with distaste. The benefits of this science appealed to him, but the specifics and the dirty work was for others; he had no interest and little patience.
In the cage, the rat began to become noticeably more agitated, its sparse and flat fur visibly thickening, taking on a healthy looking sheen.
This the Senator took interest in.
“What’s happening to the rat? It looks like it’s getting…”
“Younger.” Spake cut him off. “The injected nano-tech has reverted the rat to roughly a third of its expired life.”
Senator Thrush looked back and forth between Spake and the rat, which was now feeding aggressively.
“You’re sure about this? Sure that this will work? I know what you said, but this…” Thrush regarded the Doctor as though seeing him for the first time. “Why haven’t you used this on yourself? You still look to be…” he paused, “sixty?”
“Eighty two, actually. Thank you. I installed an earlier version of the nano myself before I’d perfected the regression capabilities, and I’m afraid my installed version is incompatible with this one. It does have its benefits, for example I’m better at developing connections, if you know what I mean.” Spake smiled, a practiced, reassuring smile.
It took forty five more minutes to convince the Senator, and by morning Thrush left feeling and looking like a man half his age.
Months later Senator Thrush had achieved all but the most lofty of his personal goals, taking his party’s nomination from the incumbent in a landslide, his sights set firmly on The White House.
As he sat in his office late one evening, a warm summer breeze stirring the leaves of the tree outside, a fifteen year old bottle of Macallan disappearing one glass at a time, he found himself thinking of the Doctor. There had been messages that he’d been too busy to return, and he wondered if he should contract someone to keep an eye on the good Doctor, lest he forget his place.
Thrush suddenly felt ill, the room swimming around him. He pushed his glass away on the desk, trying without success to steady himself against the dark heavy expanse of mahogany.
“Senator Thrush. You’ve been negligent in fulfilling your end of our agreement.”
Thrush vomited on his desk, the voice coming from everywhere and nowhere, his head pounding.
“I told you my nano advantage was dependent on connections? Do you remember that Senator?”
Blood dripped from Thrush’s sinus, spattering on the desk.
“Specifically those connections are what you may know as quantum entanglements. They tie two distinct and different things together, like atoms, at a quantum level.”
Thrush felt his legs go numb, heavy and no longer under his control. Pins and needles itching his fingertips, crawling up his arms to his shoulders.
“While the good Doctor will have died of an apparent heart failure this evening in his lab, it wouldn’t be fair for a politician to never grow old, to benefit from the Doctor’s life work without having ever contributed anything himself. Would it?”
Thrush blinked, for a moment he could swear there were steel benches surrounding him, cool white tile against his cheek. Then blackness overtook him.
Spake flexed his limbs, massaging the numbness from his forearms and fingers.
Then he sat, removed a tissue from a box on the desktop and wiped absently at the blood on his upper lip.
“Senator ‘Spake’ Thrush, PhD.” The Doctor formed the words with his new mouth. As he poured himself another glass of Scotch he added “I rather like the sound of that.”
by submission | Sep 15, 2011 | Story |
Author : N.R.Messer
I’ve been going at it for months now. Searching, weeping, trying to find her — my Angelica. But, in my haste to undo the past, my desire to forge my own fate has quite possibly damned me from the start of this journey.
Although married for four years, Angelica and I were still very young-and very much in love. I, a physics major and she, a student of veterinary medicine, lived in very different worlds. But our lives collided and swirled together beautifully from the start. On a crisp, white, December night, in a pub drunk on spirits and holiday cheer, our life together began. So it’s not without theatrical spin and romantic fate that she would bring me to that very pub-years after our vows-to tell me she was dying.
Malignant Intracranial Neoplasm-brain tumor.
I felt as if I were in a mid-day nightmare, it couldn’t possibly be true. But; after months of treatment and referral, I accepted the inevitable. I was soon to lose my best friend, my lover, my companion.
There were options though-there were always options. Options however, that didn’t come without risk. Brain damaged, comatose, or the already inevitable deatd — but found much earlier. Regardless of my pleas, she accepted her fate.
Not long after her funeral, in a drunken stupor-made light by not even the lowest of self pity-I realized I had not in fact accepted what she so calmly had, that fateful evening on Bewer Street.
In a move of pure desperation, I sold every worthwhile item in my possession, and invested in blind hope and heartfelt raging passion. With all my financial and mental prowess, I designed, engineered, constructed, and executed a machine with the intent of crossing over to a parallel world. A world in which my love was still alive. But when I found only a gravestone and suicidal doppleganger, I plunged myself towards the next prospective universe. World after world, grave after grave.
I began to find comfort in the idea of suicide myself, as I strayed further and stranger away from my home world.
A renewal of faith came to me in the form of a double-edged sword after I crackled through the quantum walls of one particular world, when I found only browning grass at the increasingly familiar cemetery plot. She was still alive. The second sword’s edge struck me however, when I discovered a terminally ill Angelica waiting for death’s cold hand, in the same hospital we spent so many late nights in before. Those blessed-but brief-last weeks were, for me, a message from God himself. Press onward.
But now I question from which god the message came. Months I’ve traveled now, and at every crossing, the worlds become stranger, more…alien. I wonder how long, if in no time at all, until I find myself in a world in which Angelica was never even conceived. But onward I continue. Barreling through on a single straight path. Knocking through unseen barriers like sheets of rice paper. I must decide soon: continue on blind? Or discover a way to turn around. Before it’s too late for even myself.
