by submission | Feb 4, 2011 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
“Twenty minutes to launch, Shortfall”
“Roger that, Command. Shortfall ready for launch.”
“Copy. Stand by.”
Lt. Commander Warren Sheffield looked over at his co-pilot, Major Emery West, who was busy with his own checklist. “Almost that time, Em. You ready?”
“Are you kidding me? Who in his right mind would be ready for this?”
“You volunteered, smart ass, same as me. Besides, they’ve been launching the satellites this way for a couple of years now. This is just the next step back into space. And the mice were ok.”
“Great! From mice to men. Whatever happened to chimp trials? Oh, yeah, the ASPCA and the ACLU. Never should have taught the little bastards to sign.”
Sheffield grinned over at the other man, who flipped him the bird. They both focused back on their pre-launch tasks and the minutes dragged by.
“…5…4…3…2…1…Activation.”
The bottom dropped out from under the two men, followed by an odd sliding motion as the crew module rotated one hundred eighty degrees. This at least gave them a slight pressure at their backs, and took the edge off the nausea.
West, as Science Officer, kept up a running commentary into the recorder. “Hundred miles. Two. Three-fifty. G-gradient steady. Glow from ports increasing. Auto-polarization effective. Heat negligible. Two-thousand miles. Three. Phase two imminent.”
Both men settled deeper into their seats and watched the dial wind down to zero.
An elephant dropped on their chests.
There was no more commentary. The sensors would record what they could, and later the men would fill in what they could from their tunnel vision, near black-out memories. For now the weight just went on and on. And on. And on.
Finally, after both were convinced it would never end, it did.
A circuit was tripped, communications was restored, and they were weight-less. Traveling faster than man had ever gone.
“Shortfall, this is Command. Shortfall, this is Command.”
“SON OF A BITCH! It worked! Command, it worked!”
“Roger that, Shortfall!” Sheffield could hear the cheers in mission control in the background. “We have reacquired your telemetry now. You both are showing elevated blood pressure and pulse.”
“Yeah, well, that was a definite E-ticket ride. We’re fine, aside from some bruising.”
“Good to hear. Tracking has you right in the groove. Get some rest boys. You’ve got to go on that ride again in just under eleven hours.”
“Roger, Command. Shortfall out.”
Eleven hours. Sheffield stared out the forward port at the moon. Not four days. Eleven hours.
Eleven hours until they slipped out of faze with the rest of the universe and plunged through the core of the moon to bleed off the momentum they had acquired from dropping through the Earth, and accelerating out the other side. Hopefully, to be left sitting at rest a bare hundred yards from the remains of Armstrong’s Lander.
He listened to West whispering into the science log.
“The mice made it!”
by Duncan Shields | Jan 19, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The control harness turned blue a second before I knew we were going to be hit. I pressed up against the back of the transport in a futile simian effort to get as far away from the pain as possible. The light outside the windows went nuclear. God’s donkey kicked us in the side of the head. In a lighting-flash world of white, I blacked out.
I woke up a few seconds later. We were a submarine in an ocean of fire. Our craft was in a flatspin in the top third of a mushroom cloud. We were a black dot in a great orange lake of fiery death. We were a tadpole in the heart of a manmade sun. The pilots were screaming. I looked across to my fellow dropouts. Their smiles echoed my own.
Everything was going according to plan.
I stood up and kept my balance. My men did as well. Our suits were too bulky for salutes but they stood still, waiting to follow my lead. The plane kept spinning. The eight of us stood there swaying a little like we were on the deck of a boat. The pilots had stopped screaming. They were probably dead.
I nodded and walked forward. My giant boots clunked on the grates like one-ton magnetic dragon feet. I put my gloved hand on the hot peeling paint of the door release handle. I counted to three loudly in my helmet. The men tensed.
I pulled the handle.
Hell was let into the cigar-tube body of the plane. It was too much stress for the vehicle. It flew apart. In pieces, its molecular integrity couldn’t take the heat and it turned to dust. The pilots were incinerated.
We dropped like rocks. We dropped like spiders. We freefell through thick plasmic radiated atomic hellfire. The displays on our face shields showed us where we were in relation to the others and the ground. The ground was coming up quick.
One of my men starting twitching. His face shield had a flaw in the monocrystal. It cracked. One second later, it was like he never existed.
We hit the ground feet first with no chutes like God’s hammers. Five thunderous beats. Five men in the middle of the worst that science had to offer. We were standing at the center of the crater. We were standing in the bottom of a bowl of red heat. We were standing at the eye of the hurricane. It was a vacuum here surrounded by billowing upward swinging curtains of smoke and flame like a Bedouin’s bedchamber. We stood in silence. We stood equidistant like the points of a pentagram in position around it.
The arrival. There was a fifteen-dimensional diamond floating in the center of our formation. It was aware of us.
We primed our weapons. We were going to nip this in the bud.
by submission | Jan 13, 2011 | Story
Author : Carter Lee
What happened to your future? We’re it. We, men from the future, have kidnapped you the day before you were going to make your ground-breaking new invention known to the world. We’ve taken the invention itself, and every scrap of paper and every shred of information about your process, and we’re gonna keep it. All of it. And, this is the good part, we’re going to remove not just all memory of your invention from your brain, but make it impossible for you to ever stumble down the mental path you’d need to follow to recreate it.
It makes us sound like Republic serial villains, doesn’t it?
Of course, the Ape with the Brain of a Robot, our leader, knows the repercussions of your little machine would have led to an unacceptable level of upheaval and collapse, along with all the death and suffering such things entail.
Food for thought.
That’s where the future you wanted went. The jetpack, the ones that maimed and killed thousands in the future, we made it disappear. We dropped agents into every year of this century, and they built up automobiles and air transport, along with the infrastructure to support them. And jetpacks faded into dream, only remembered by lovers of musty science fiction.
Weather control. Personal laser guns. All those crazy airplane designs. Dirigibles. We took them all away. The easy way, like this. We stop you, and whatever like-minded inventors might follow a train of thought similar to yours, from following through. We come here, remove your life’s work, everything connected with it, including your memory and some of your ability to reason, and then we go forward and look in the history books to see if any of them still mention you. Your singular contraption will be displayed in the Museum of Unreal Inventions.
The first removal I took part in, we saved the entire world. All by this, what I’m doing to you, happening to another genius with no common sense. I’m going to make the modern house as clean as clean can be, this clever fellow thought, and came up with a living floor covering. A live rug, that would digest any dust or dirt that settled in it for too long. Its excretions? A scent of your choice.
Do you have any idea how many dead skin cells are in household dust?
By the time it occurred to someone that walking on something that was subsisting on your very flesh was not the best of ideas, we’d already lost. The rug-things had discovered they liked the taste of human. One of them found that they could produce a scent that was a soporific for us. Made us just want to lie down, spread ourselves out, and feel good. It was the most merciful way of killing a person I’ve ever heard of.
The cities were overgrown in days, but the things, although it might have been just one big thing by that time, well, they hit their stride when they got to open country. Places to root, soil to drink from, animals to lull and consume, they just spread and spread and spread. A huge, crazy-quilt blotch spread over the Bavarian countryside, growing visibly even when viewed from space.
The uninfected areas of the world were arguing their way towards doing something when Pakistan went silent. Cambodia dropped away. Kenya vanished, followed by New Zealand, all of Southern Africa, Taiwan, Peru, the Pacific Rim, the North American Union. Separate outbreaks. Projections indicated that the death of the last human would run neck and neck with the death of the entire ecosystem.
So we dropped back to the proper year, and made it all go away. We don’t solve the problem, we make sure the problem never needs to be solved. Not removing the mistake from existence, but removing it from ever having existed.
For what it’s worth, I’m sorry we have to do this. Your breakthrough would have made you a name for the history books, in many different ways. But, for the sake of 120 Billion people forward of us, I’m more than willing to cast you into an uncertain future. You’ll still be a genius, after all.
You won’t remember any of this, just like all the other times we’ve met and I’ve done this to you. You just can’t seem to stop with the world-shattering inventions. Three more of these and we give you a neat tattoo you’ll never know how you got.
Well, time to get to it. This is gonna hurt like hell.
by submission | Jan 12, 2011 | Story
Author : Steven Holland
“Mr. Coleman, I already know everything you will teach; therefore, I’m going to ignore you and read about time travel and reincarnation.”
Jamie Faulkner was 17, beautiful, and knew it – but didn’t seem to care. She possessed a lean, athletic body, blonde hair, and intensely blue eyes.
Gordon Coleman gave her a bemused smile, his way of granting permission. Everyone knew about Jamie Faulkner. She read professional scientific papers and graduate level textbooks – items demanded and granted from her bewildered parents. Jamie could have been at college with a full scholarship, but she had steadfastly refused to skip any grade.
She had no friends and wanted none. Last year she sent Jimmy Forsythe to the hospital with three broken fingers and a cracked collarbone; he had tried a little too hard to play the dominating seducer with her in the hallway. The year before that, she and Beth Bailey exchanged unpleasant words. Beth was found two hours later in the girl’s locker room, sobbing hysterically. Later, rumors circulated that Mrs. Bailey was taking her to a psychiatrist in Biloxi.
As the months progressed, Jamie read unobtrusively in the back of the classroom. Occasionally, she would close her current book, slump over in apparent defeat, and rest her chin on thin, folded arms. On those days she watched Mr. Coleman, her eyes moving over his body whenever he paced, centering on his face when he stopped. Gordon chose not to notice. Young Jamie Faulkner unnerved him; her eyes were too knowing for someone her age.
One day three months into the school year, Jamie closed her book, The Physics of the Impossible, and slid it off the desk. Jamie laid her head flat on the desk. When the dismissal bell rang, she remained, motionless. Several minutes after everyone else had left, Gordon tentatively approached her.
“Miss Faulkner, are you all right?”
Jamie raised her head. Her eyes contained the deepest despair Gordon had ever seen.
“What’s the purpose of being the most popular girl in school… or curing cancer… or winning the Women’s State Basketball Championship?”
Gordon pursed his lips, uncertain of the direction of this conversation. “Fulfillment maybe?”
“What’s the purpose of an etch-a-sketch that shakes itself every 10 seconds? What if I want to die and stay dead?”
“You… seem to feel that life is meaningless.” he answered slowly, in a worried tone.
“I want out.” she stated with a dead flatness. “Maybe the science is broken; maybe the religion is broken. Maybe I have to build a machine that can destroy time. Nothing else works – not even becoming president and initiating a global nuclear holocaust.”
“What!?”
“I don’t think life on Earth was meant to be lived more than once. At least, not the same life. I’m going to build that machine Gordon. No more pleasure lives. No more passive learning lives. It’s time to get serious.”
“Miss Faulkner…”
“Stop. Tell me something meaningful.”
Gordon had been slowing backing away, but Jamie’s pleading look of despair stopped him. She looked old and tired.
“Miss… Jamie… I don’t know if success for you is a good thing, but sometimes the craziest hope is better than none.”
She let out a small sigh. “Thanks. You’ve never phrased it like that before.” She rose and walked listlessly to the door. Pausing, she turned. “I love you Gordon.”
The next day Jamie missed class. By lunchtime, the entire school had heard. Jamie Faulkner had committed suicide. Gordon Coleman sat in his office, staring numbly at the wall, trying to create sense from senselessness.
by submission | Jan 9, 2011 | Story
Author : James C.G. Shirk
CANINE STUDIES INSTITUTE HQ
(Abr. Final Project Report)
Status: One survivor Breed: Retriever (mixed)
Name: Pita Sex: Male
Age: 5 Weeks Pathology: Infected w/CCDV
Prognosis: Terminal within two weeks.
End of Report
Submitted by: Dr. Anthony Tolson, Director CSI, Mars Colony proper. Date: 10/22/2145
“What do we do now?” Dr. Hillary Kurtz asked. Her gloved hands, sticking through the enclosure’s side port access, trembled as the puppy suckled the bottle of enriched milk.
“There’s nothing left to do,” I replied. Anger clawed at my gut, begging for release. “Damn it! We did everything to protect them from the virus. We spent years in research; we formulated every conceivable anti-viral; we put them in controlled enclosures to prevent disease-carrying contact, and when all that didn’t work, we moved the last surviving dogs here to be clear of any earthly pathogens…and for what! The whole attempt has been an abject failure. My failure.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Kurtz said, putting aside the bottle and wiping mucus from Pita’s eyes. “Species have gone extinct before, hundreds of thousands of them. Viruses adapt, sometimes beyond our ability to contain them. The virulent ones can get buried in the species DNA. There’s nothing we can do about that.”
I nodded. “But nothing like that has ever happened to a creature so close to man,” I said, “and to have failed–. It’s just too much.”
“Sometimes God’s plan is unfathomable,” Kurtz said hopefully. She was a devout believer; I, not so much.
“If so, He must be mad at man,” I replied, perhaps a little too curtly.
She turned her attention back to feeding the puppy. “Why do you say that?” she asked.
“Religion and science don’t mix well,” I said. “Perhaps all our technical achievements displeased your God, and it was his hand that took the one thing from man that is irreplaceable in order to teach us a lesson.”
“You’re an idiot,” she grumbled.
Pita stopped nursing at the bottle and burped contentedly. The recorders surrounding him gathered data, analyzing everything, including the presence of the virus in his system.
Not that it mattered now.
I pushed back the enclosure’s protective covering and reached inside with my bare hands; no need for precautions any more. I petted his head and scratched his milk-filled, pink belly. His blue puppy-eyes glazed over at my touch, and he licked appreciatively at my fingers. “Mankind will be less without them,” I moaned.
An alarm went off behind me. I rushed to the monitoring console to examine the readouts. Something had happened to Pita, something extraordinary.
“What is it?” Kurtz yelled over the din.
I slammed the monitor button, killing the noise. “I don’t believe it! The virus is dying. At this rate, it will be completely out of his system in minutes.”
“How can that be?” Kurtz said.
I shook my head, wondering. Why so late? Why did this happen when there was just one animal left? And then it struck me.
Viruses mutate.
God’s hand? Man’s hand? My hand? Pita just received the first unprotected contact from a human in years. Some insignificant thing on my fingers found its way into Pita’s system when he licked me. That had to be it! Irony upon irony. The disease had only endured, because we denied dogs the one thing they ever wanted from us. Human contact.
“What now?” Kurtz asked for the second time today.
I smiled. “We clone.”
