by Patricia Stewart | Apr 11, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The mammoth multi-functional spaceship, the HMS Drebbel, descended slowly through the skies of Beta Bevatt and settled gracefully onto the undulating surface of the planet-wide ocean. For the next two hours the giant ship filled its ballast tanks and gradually submerged beneath the waves. Now a submarine, the vessel powered its way toward Meta DeStad, The City of the Fish.
Six months earlier, the first mission to Beta Bevatt detected the underwater city, built and populated, by fish. Of course, “fish” describe the Earth-base analog. Xenobiologist had a more accurate technical description of the streamline aquatic life on Beta Bevatt, but to the layman, they looked like fish, and swam like fish, so they called them fish. But that is where the similarity ended. These fish were sentient. They had a language, cared for their young, cultivated seaweed gardens, and even raised shrimp-like food in a pen built entirely from a reed that they meticulously weaved into a large sphere using finger-like appendages on the ends of their pectoral fins. The Fish were friendly and hospitable, not unlike the primitive American Indians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And the humans wanted to cultivate that relationship, so they kept the mothership hidden, and only interacted with the Fish using their quiet hydro-magnetically powered fish-like submersibles. Apparently, the ruse worked, because the Fish accepted the humans as distant, if not peculiar, cousins.
However, several months into the current mission, the Fish came to the humans requesting help. It seemed that the Fish had a great enemy. A pod of predators that swam in from the north and attacked their city around the same time every year, and that day was approaching. The prior year, the predators had killed 20 percent of the inhabitants of Meta DeStad. They were hoping that the human-fish could join them in battle.
***
“Captain,” pleaded the Science Officer, “we have to help. We’ve befriended these creatures. We can’t abandon them in their hour of need. Sir, we have over fifty manned submersibles, and they are all faster than anything in the sea, we can defend the Fish.”
“Tom, I understand your feelings, and I want to help too, but we can’t interfere in the natural selection process of Beta Bevatt. If the Fish were meant to survive, they’ll have to do it on their own. My hands are tied.”
“Please, sir, can we at least arm our submersibles? That way, if you change your mind, we’ll be ready to help.”
The captain studied his bridge officers. There was mutiny in their eyes. In his mind, he knew they would obey his orders, but in his heart, he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps he should buy some time. Maybe, the predators wouldn’t come this year. “Okay, Tom. But mark my words; no submersible may leave the ship without my direct order. Is that understood? Good. Now, go ahead and begin making the modifications.”
Two weeks later, the predators arrived. “Captain,” announced the sonar operator, “they’re coming. But sir, I’m picking up the sounds of screws churning in the water, and transmissions. Sir, I recognize the language. They’re Centari. It’s a hunting expedition. They’re hunting the Fish for sport.”
“What! Those bastards,” exclaimed the captain. “The Centari Treaty forbids them from entering this Sector. Okay, it’s no longer a natural selection dilemma. Launch all of the submersibles. Wait, belay that order. Launch all but one. Commander Eckland, you have the Conn. I’m joining to lead this fight.”
by submission | Apr 10, 2011 | Story
Author : Steven Odhner
“I can already tell you aren’t interested in the admittedly confusing equations I’ve taken the time to write out, which is fine. So to give a quick and imprecise summary I will use the tired metaphor of Schrödinger’s Cat, where a cat is placed in a box with something toxic that will be released with a fifty-percent likelihood, triggered by radioactive decay of something else in the box.
“In the Many Worlds interpretation the universe splits, and in one the cat lives while in the other it dies. Obviously we only get to see one of the two, but both happen somewhere. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead until a measurement collapses the wavefunction to just one option at random. In the Stockholm interpretation, the cat falls in love with the scientist that locked it in the box.
“Nothing? Well, my wife thought it was funny. At any rate, while the Copenhagen interpretation is currently the most accepted there are problems with all of the theories and they are all devilishly hard to test. In large part this is a philosophical question rather than a scientific one, until we can get more data. Rather, until they can get more data. I already have it, and know the answer. I’m just not sharing it yet.
“Imagine, for a moment, that the Many Worlds interpretation is correct. That means that entire universes are unfolding constantly, an unimaginable number of them every moment. Some have speculated that we could find a way to travel between them, see the alternate versions of Earth that might have been. That’s a pretty thought, and something that might come to pass someday, but what I’ve discovered while working towards it is far more productive – and profitable.
“The device you see before you provides limitless free energy. This one prototype could power every device in the world at once if you could find a way to plug everything in. Every instant our reality is remade along with an infinitely expanding fractal cloud of others, and this device just… nips one in the bud. All the energy of the big bang, for free. All for just one lost option, one that will never be missed.
“Destroy the universe? Not this one. No, it’s quite safe. Technically speaking it destroys a universe every ten seconds or so, but they’re more like proto-universes. It’s not a big deal, really. It very nearly collapses them before they exist. Very nearly. Honestly, you don’t need to look so horrified. We’re talking about free energy here. This is the holy grail of science. It’s… excuse me?
“No, I told you it’s perfectly safe. It can’t break in a way that would do any more harm than a transformer exploding – You would have to deliberately turn it into a bomb if you wanted it to do anything serious. Well, yes, in theory. I’m not sure that’s a productive use of free energy, but I suppose with the right design you could release a minute fraction of the harvested energy as an explosion before the device obliterates itself. Call it one-one millionth of a percent, enough to level New York. No, no. The state.
“But we’ve gone off-topic. Back to the matter of free, clean energy for… Pardon me, but I’ll thank you to put away those guns.”
by submission | Apr 3, 2011 | Story
Author : Jeremy Wickins
It was perhaps the greatest experiment of all time. For a split second, all other possible universes would be aligned, and we’d have knowledge of our place in the great order of things.
– I threw the switch that brought the bizarre energies together that would pierce through the barriers between universes. The small light over the switch illuminated. The instruments, scrutinised by the greatest cosmologists of our time … simply did nothing. Months later, when we were completely discredited and effectively unemployable, we could not get it through to anyone that the experiment may not have failed. Whilst there might not be any other possible universes, our calculations showed that we might exist in the earliest possible universe in which the experiment was attempted. Time’s arrow dictated that there could not be any others for us to see.
– I threw the switch that would pierce through the barriers between the universes. The small light over the switch illuminated – but it seemed too bright, somehow. The instruments detected a handful of universes, each a fraction of a second ahead of ours. Our careers were made, and we never needed to worry about research funding again.
– Just after I threw the switch, sudden pain shot through my hand as if I’d been burned by the indicator light. Our instruments detected a few tens of universes, each very slightly behind the one before it. Each of us became an instant celebrity from that day, and could find jobs in any arena we fancied – politics, media, university management: all were open to us merely for the asking.
– I watched again as the recording showed him turn on the experiment, and then simply burst into flames. It was horrible to see. It was as if the indicator light over the switch had become a high-powered laser beam. Despite the tragedy of his death, the experiment was a success – we discovered several hundred universes, each slightly in advance of the one before it, and each centred, for that moment, for some reason, on the switch. Of course, no-one on the project would ever want for work again, but some retired from science soon afterwards, stating that there some things that man can should not play with.
– Fortunately the control room was separate from many of the instruments, or we would never have worked out what had happened. The death toll was dramatic, as several square miles of land evaporated. We thought that there had been a nuclear bomb at first, what with all the crazies telling us how the experiment was too dangerous to go ahead. It was only when we analysed the data from the instruments that we realised the truth, but only after many “dissidents” had been tortured and killed. But who could have foreseen that the cumulative light and heat from the indicator switches in tens of thousands of other universes could bleed through, and with such terrible effect? The data derived from the experiment were significant, but we lost a lot of good people that day, and not just in the initial disaster.
– … 3 … 2 … 1 … I throw the switch and
by Patricia Stewart | Mar 15, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Lieutenant Robinson studied the sensor readings. The Captain stood behind him, patiently waiting for his science officer’s technical assessment. “It’s clearly artificial, sir,” Robinson finally said. “Although its surface composition is consistent with an S-type asteroid, its structure is completely different from the other asteroids in this field. For example, gravimetric data indicates that its density is 70% lower than it should be, and an asteroid with a mass under a trillion kilograms should be potato-shaped. It should not be perfectly spherical.”
“Your recommendation, Lieutenant?” prompted the Captain.
“We need to know what the inside looks like. I recommend we deploy seismic probes with ground penetrating imaging systems.”
Two hours later, they were looking at an intricate 3-D holographic image of the subsurface structure of the anomaly. There were 720 geometrically identically subsurface chambers that were uniformly distributed just below the exterior of the asteroid. Each chamber contained an irregularly shaped object of silicaceous material with a mass of approximately three metric tons each. Beneath the 720 outer chambers, there were additional, larger subchambers, but there was insufficient resolution in the data to determine the contents, or nature, of those chambers.
“Captain,” said the ensign manning the science station, “I’m detecting an increase in seismic activity within the asteroid. There are hundreds of low magnitude earthquakes, I mean asteroidquakes. It appears that the surface of the asteroid is crumbling.”
“Put it on the main viewer, magnification fifty,” ordered the captain. As he studied the viewscreen, the surface of the asteroid blasted away and a coma of dust expanded outward in slow motion. Then hundreds of shuttlecraft-sized rocks flew from the asteroid in random, erratic, corkscrewing trajectories. Eventually, they all settled down, and began traveling in straight lines. A few seconds later, they increased speed, and flew off into the asteroid field with apparent purpose. A dozen of the flying “rocks,” which happened to be heading in the general direction of the ship, paused at a distance of approximately one hundred meters. They hovered like bees for a few minutes and then one by one, they detoured around the ship and headed off toward remote regions of the asteroid field.
by submission | Feb 19, 2011 | Story
Author : Ron Wingrove
Discovery of the Omniflower should have been one of the greatest of the 23rd century. It happened on a distant planet, to a ragged crew from an equally-shabby exploration ship. Anybody who could cobble together an FTL drive went into exploration. Most never made it back.
The landing was hard with the heavy gravity, but the ship got down safely. The captain had one important question to ask his science officer.
“There air outside?”
“Yes sir, but…”
“It’ll do… MAC!” A dirty face appeared round the hatch to Engineering.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Make sure nothing broke after that bump. We’re going for a walk.”
The crew was met just outside a settlement by an alien. Yellow skin, vaguely human. The captain was a more casual than the movies liked.
“Kwishath ack narothdack?”
“Sure, man. We come in peace, and leave in pieces, and stuff. Yeah.”
“Astana retoothka? Squirly a chondack?”
“Yep, that too… What the hell is that?”
“That” was a short plant that appeared by the alien’s feet. It grew from a seedling to a small bush, put out some blue leaves and one fruit, then died back to nothing in the space of a few seconds. Totally calm, the alien bent down to pick the blue fruit. He broke it open, removed something from inside, and handed it to the stunned captain.
“So, what’s this? ‘English-Narothdack phrasebook?’ You gotta be kidding me!”
Flicking through the pages, the captain looked for one specific phrase, and found it in a chapter marked Social Colloquialisms for Informal Occasions.
“What in God’s name is going on? Kveesta unacktra ban de plositch?”
Plositch was the closest the language could come to God.
It meant “Small blue plant that provides us with all we need.”
With the phrasebook, the alien explained to the spacefarers. It was called the Plositch, and popped up wherever something was needed. Dinnertime? One would open with your favourite food. Nighttime? A larger one, with a bedroll. Predator attack? A long one would open containing a spear. All you had to do was imagine a flower opening nearby, and what it would contain. The captain named them Omniflowers.
A week later, and it was time to go. Efforts to make the omniflower grow anywhere other than the surface failed, but there were no limits to what it could make. When Mac dropped his ancient pocket watch in a stream and wished for a new one, it was discovered that the plant could produce complex mechanisms, and the captain figured out a way of making some serious money. The ship’s library had pictures of collectables, and the omniflowers produced crates of small “antiques.” A moment of whimsy produced a large gold watch. It fitted nicely into a pocket of the captain’s jumpsuit, just right for timing the lift-off.
“5… 4… 3, first stage ignition… 2… 1… Lift-off, we have lift-off, retracting landing gear…” A pause. “Altitude 35,000 meters, standby for second stage ignition…”
“Hey, that’s not right!” The captain’s shout made everyone turn and stare. Instead of a watch, his hand held a pile of greenish slime. A second later, it had dried to dust.
“Oh, bad luck, captain. The things made by the plants can’t leave the surface either. That means those crates are gone, too.”
“Second stage ignition in 5… 4… 3… 2, first stage shutdown complete… 1…” An ominous silence. “Second stage ignition failure! Mac, what’s up with your engines?”
Mac went deathly pale.
“Boss? The second stage fuel pump! Needed replacement, but we didn’t have one…”
“Yes?”
“I replaced it with one from a plant.”
