by submission | Dec 16, 2010 | Story
Author : Cesium
Professor Sean Katz walked into his lab the next morning, and Katherine was waiting for him.
“So, how did the trials go?”
“You'd better come see for yourself.”
He glanced up from his Blackberry. She looked as calm as usual, but there was a tinge of worry in her voice. He followed her down the corridor, brilliant sunshine streaming through the windows on one side, graphs and xkcd posters plastering the wall on the other. They turned a corner, and Sean stopped short.
The lab's very expensive new electron microscope was blackened and charred, and emitting a thin trickle of smoke which was slowly drifting toward the ceiling.
“Dr. Ko reported a breakthrough at around 3:30 last night –”
Sean's sense of doom was suddenly offset by indignation. “3:30? How late were you up?” He noted the discarded cans of Mountain Dew spilling out of the recycle bin.
“She insisted, after reading the report for herself…” Katherine looked apologetic.
“And this?”
“So after my apparent success, I decided to examine the atomic structure of the spoon… and, well, not only did Aristotle not believe in atoms, he didn't know about electrons, or electricity. He would have described them as little bits of fire, I suppose. Hence…” Dr. Ko waved helplessly in the direction of the wrecked machine.
Sean suddenly felt dizzy, and he leaned against the counter. “It actually worked.” He looked around at the other two. “We can change the laws of physics at will. No, more than that. We determine the laws of physics by studying them. God, the effectiveness of mathematics in explaining the universe is probably just because we expect physical laws to be mathematical in nature, so they are.”
“We can control matter by thinking about it,” offered Katherine. “Magic.”
“Exactly.”
They looked at each other for a while; at the microscope, symbol of a paradigm that now seemed so limited; at the spoon, which was apparently currently composed of mostly earth, with some fire and water and air.
“Well, you know what we have to do now,” said Dr. Ko.
They performed further experiments and tests, and once they were sufficiently convinced of their results, the manuscript was submitted to Nature.
Katherine walked into Sean's office. “How are you feeling?”
“A bit nervous. Once this thing hits peer review, news will spread, and every scientist on the planet's going to want to test it for themselves.”
“You know, something occurred to me. When Newton and his contemporaries started trying to explain the world through mathematics, the spread of the Enlightenment probably changed it into a form that could be understood that way. That might explain why reports of supernatural sightings and miracles have decreased since then.”
“Hmm. That could –” Sean stopped. If the efforts of relatively few scientists over centuries could change the way the entire universe worked… and just about now, every scientist hearing the news would be trying it with their own favorite discredited scientific paradigms, which were probably incompatible and almost certainly dangerous. The charred hulk in the corner of one of their rooms was testament to that. He reached for his keyboard, intending to compose an urgent email.
But it was too late.
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by submission | Dec 15, 2010 | Story
Author : Steven Odhner
Charles is scared, which is understandable. If I had to guess I would say that in his head he's attempting to dial the police right now, over and over, even though I've blocked all transmissions. The lab has to be heavily shielded for my experiments, the fact that it helps with this kidnapping is just a happy coincidence. The tiny jerks of his eyes stop and he focuses on me.
“Walter… please. You need help. Don't do this. Don't kill yourself.”
I have to smile at that. “I'm not trying to commit suicide, Charles – although it's true that the machine will destroy the planet upon activating whether it works or not. So, yes, there's at least a ten percent chance that I'll kill myself… but those odds are acceptable. I have one shot for this, one chance to meet my maker. In one way or another I'll be walking in the footsteps of God.”
The reaction will begin at the core of the planet, if I've done everything correctly, and just before it tears the Earth apart I'll be flung backwards in time. Impossible, according to all my peers. Insanity, according to Charles. He's trying to get my attention again, encouraged by my mention of God. I've avoided his religious debates in the past, but here at the moment of destruction I see no reason to hold back. I take the double-crucifix pendant from his neck and snap the chain. “This? This is a lie, Charles. There is no afterlife, no soul.”
“There is a God,” he says, “and you can turn to Him! Walter, God loves you and wants…”
His voice dies off as I point the gun at him. I will enlighten him, but I don't have time for debate. The device is nearly ready.
“Before the big bang, there was only God. God was without limits and without time, and was one with Himself. God knew that nothing could exist while He did, because God was all and all would be God. And so He chose to die, to explode and cast His body into the universe we know. Time and Space are the corpse of our dead creator, and we are maggots crawling within. You say there is a God. I tell you there is not, and the proof is all around you. Look upon His scattered remains and weep in mourning and in joy. You foolishly ask me to enter into a relationship with Him, but the truth is that God is a mother who died in childbirth – He never met us, never knew our thoughts or wrote books to guide us. All we can do to know Him is to look at what is left behind, the laws of physics that he used to commit suicide.”
I step into the chamber. The reaction is already building, the Earth eating itself from the inside. The readings are excellent. Charles is screaming something, but I can't hear him over the machines. They all told me it was impossible. But they never thought large enough. They need to go to a time without time, a point where no physics yet exist to say what can and can't be done. I'm going to meet God, right now.
—
For a timeless instant God is aware of an arrival. He notes the relevant information: Elapsed time, 13.82 billion years. Complex DNA present. Method of termination? Pre-event time travel. And God saw that it was good. God ponders Himself, and resolves to try a 0.005% higher matter/antimatter ratio for attempt number 497.
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by submission | Nov 21, 2010 | Story
Author : Julian Miles
We met at a parts fair. We simultaneously laid hands on opposite ends of an Emptor storage array. She smiled and brandished a handful of gigaflex at me.
“Mine.” She said.
In one of those moments of prescient genius, I replied “Ours.”
It started for real a week later and finished two hours ago, with fifty years in between. We had gone from two lonely computer geeks with a thing for efficient storage to the founders of DataSure.
Yes, that DataSure. The one that can map you into the Alphanet; “Making Death Merely a Transition” as our promotionals say. She’s there now, a Transited, getting used to peripherals that can operate kit in different galaxies. We argued so much about that. She wanted the merge as her body failed; I couldn’t bear to see her go. Her crossing was the end for us. Because a transited consciousness cannot run slow enough to mix with mortals. It just isn’t possible. A machine slow enough to allow us to interface would demise the transited. A certain processing speed is necessary to maintain soulullar cohesion.
Yes, I am wealthy enough to ignore the assisted suicide laws and the mandatory consciousness directives, but my problem is something I cannot buy off.
In amongst the genetic diversity of mankind there is a peculiar combination that although mapped decades ago was a mere curiosity until transit was discovered. It means that a minute fraction of one percent of the population cannot be transited. They are quietly and pityingly referred to as ‘The Bodybound’. Something in their makeup means their consciousness cannot remain cohesive outside the shell they were born into. I have the dubious, lonely privilege of being one of them.
So I lie here next to her precious body, the cortex feed bundle hidden by her still luxuriant white hair. I write this having just completed putting my affairs in order. Now I look at the dark sheen on the barrel of my antique Desert Eagle and hope beyond reason that one day my afterlife will find her eternal circuits, somewhere out there when science and heaven finally meet.
by submission | Nov 17, 2010 | Story
Author : Cesium
When the food ran out, we all responded differently.
The Cythalans engineered themselves into cold-blooded pygmies, with slow perception and quiet metabolism, tending their meager crops with careful patience. They lay on the hills and watched the sun wheel about the sky, and sang songs that lasted for months.
They’re all dead now.
The arcologies of Hongdao were unroofed, and their occupants became photosynthetic, living off water, earth, and sun. Their buildings were wonders of glass and carbon, full of light and air, and the people’s skin was resplendent in all colors of the rainbow.
They’re dead now, too.
The people of Tashpan downloaded into mechanical bodies, powered by the tiny sparks of nuclear engines. They lived mostly as they had, their factories precisely calibrated for a sustainable rate of growth, and their science flourished like none before them.
I don’t yet know what happened to them.
The Stennish went further, and sealed their minds in blocks of computing machinery deep underground, powered by the heat of the earth. They lived in a shared fantasy, refugees from a physical world that could no longer support what they had once been.
They’re still around, I think, in some form.
I, the groupmind of Emnisi, I chose a different path. My 46,228,901 constituent humans boarded a ship, and in the outermost reaches of the system I created a tiny black hole. Safeguards were in place; it could do no harm to anyone else, but it was perfect for my needs. My ship was to slingshot around the singularity, approaching close enough for the time dilation to become enormous, and then drawing away. Two hundred years would have passed in a day, enough that the crisis would have been averted.
But there was a miscalculation.
I’ve spent a long time pondering where exactly the error was. It could have been human error, or a gap in my understanding of physical law. I hope it was the former, but I don’t have enough data to tell for sure.
When I escaped the pull of the black hole, I found the orbiting instruments and monitors long since ground to dust by micrometeoroid impacts. I had come forward in time not two hundred years but two billion, to a sun too hot and bright, and no sign of human life. The ship began its return journey down the star’s gravity well, but I found nothing to assuage my worst fears. I sought the children of Staenn and Tashpan and Ishiko, but I fear they have forgotten those ancestral names (and, indeed, the communications protocols).
After several minutes of shared thought, a shipwide referendum was held. By a 46% majority vote of my members, with 19% abstaining, I have decided to alter the ship’s trajectory and take it directly into the black hole. In a short while, we too will be gone.
by submission | Oct 7, 2010 | Story
Author : Dennis Gray
“Where’s that gurney? Get it in here now!”
”Alright, hook her up, quickly! Forget the hand unit; let the gurney scanners do the work. Got the spinal lock in place? Good, seal it up and let’s move.”
The doctor kept shouting orders all the way to Medlab; with the Commander, Dr. Fatah and I following close behind. The Commander tried to follow the gurney into surgery but the sani-field snapped on as he reached the door, keeping out all except authorized medical personnel. As we watched through the observation window a crowd of technicians, soldiers and other personnel started to gather around us. The full force of the Commander’s tension lashed out as he span around.
“Don’t you people have jobs to do? I want answers and I want them now…”, his head snapped around to Dr. Fatah and I, a finger stabbed the air, ”…starting with you two. What the hell happened in there?”
Fatah’s reply echoed slightly in the now empty hallway, “You were there Commander. Right now, you know as much as we do.” A technician handed Fatah a terminal pad.
For years now we had been trying to create an artificial worm-hole. Dr. Fatah had demonstrated the theoretical possibility, but it took three governments to make the attempt a reality; and from the look of things we finally succeeded. Minutes ago the “switch” was thrown, the projectors powered up and an event horizon glimmered in the concrete pit we called ‘the bunker’. Military grade sensors probed their way down through the whirling darkness. Thousands of petabytes of data was collected then processed by the quantum computers into a video image on the monitors. That image was…
“Myra Benson – that’s who it is all right.” The doctor rejoined us a scant ten minutes later, “and she’s dead. Her whole body’s been affected by passing through that damn thing; massive cell damage, every organ shut right down.”
“But how can the body of a woman who died 172 years ago be here, now?”, the Commander asked no one in particular.
“Well,” Fatah scanned the telemetry on the pad, “it seems all that time-travel theory isn’t science-fiction after all. According on the data the worm-hole tunneled across time and space and did indeed open in the home of the United Nations president, 172 years ago. She apparently saw the anomaly, reached out to touch it; and, when her hand crossed the event-horizon she was pulled through and dumped out here.”
“So now what do we do?”
I thought the answer was obvious. “We send her back”, I said.
“Send her back? How?” The commander shook his head and added, “Doesn’t matter, even if we could, I am not sending back a dead UN President!”
“Look,” I explained, ”the techs are keeping the worm-whole open, locked on the same co-ordinates; we just put her in and let quantum physics do the rest. Besides, you have no choice! One hundred and seventy-two years ago Myra Benson’s aids walked into her office and found her dead body. No doors or windows compromised, no alarms triggered, nothing that gave any clue as to what happened.
“The whole planet went into mourning and as a result her campaign to dismantle the weaponized satellite network not only went ahead, it succeeded. The only unanswered question since then has been, ‘what happen?’ Who and/or what killed the most popular politician of all time?”
The Commander’s face went from worry to stark terror as he realized where I was going.
“Well, now we know; send her back.”
