by submission | Dec 28, 2009 | Story
Author : Omkar Wagh
“How many days of funding do I have left?”, I asked.
“Well your thesis has been accepted and you have already been given a Ph.D. degree. So the college is willing to support you for about three more months at least.”
“Damn It! I would have never expected such a toxic species to last so long. Is there no way I could wrap up my work without landing in prison?”
“No I don’t think so. It’s a bit harsh but necessary. You’re going to have to fund the experiment with your own earnings now. I did advise you not to dabble in such experiments though.”
“Sir, but why is this law even in place?”
“Ever since a species in another simulation experiment conducted somewhere across the globe had developed enough to run their own simulation experiment, some blokes somewhere thought they actually had sentience, life even. They had as much a right to life as we did. Which meant a person could not stop such a simlation until all life had terminated.
Now depending on the laws of physics in that universe, this could take any time from months to years.”
There was nothing I could do. The job prospects for a universe simulation graduate were bleak especially with the negative publicity surrounding the research field because of the several casual genocides that were caused. Students would start simulations with random laws of physics, see which ones led to life, publish papers and then terminate them. I was one of the last students to take this line.
All that changed when some simulated species began their own simulations. What if we were a simulation ourselves? Would we want the same fate on us? Hence, we could not stop a simulation without all life terminating of it’s own accord.
I had to hire a talented hacker to bring down our systems from outside the university and delete all data. It was criminal. It was genocide. But at least he could claim he did not know of the simulation within the system. At least he wouldn’t get the death penalty. And I won’t be there to hear their last cries.
I’m not sure I want to play God anymore.
by Collaboration | Dec 15, 2009 | Story
Author : Adam Zabell and Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Fifteen days after we landed on Io, Jupiter’s innermost Galilean moon, a faulty weld on the ascent module’s fuel tank ruptured, venting all of our liquid hydrogen into space. Janice O’Connor was able to repair the tank, but if we couldn’t replenish the hydrogen, we’d never be able to reach the Return Module orbiting Callisto.
Command and Control tried to help, but the 90 minute round trip conference calls to Earth were quite literally killing us. Janice died while removing a flow regulator that C&C told us to replace “ASAP”. Thirty minutes later, a message arrived warning us of a potential explosion. That’s when I decided to take Earth out of the loop. After all, I had a ship full of scientists; surely they could come up with a solution on their own. I asked Kristoff Heise to head the Hydrogen Replenishment Team. Kristoff is the brightest we have up here. Marooned on a deserted island, he’s the guy who could build a hovercraft from a dead car battery, some palm leaves, and six coconuts. Of course, he’s also the guy that would die of starvation because it wouldn’t occur to him to eat the coconuts. Short leash, specific goals; that’s what it takes to keep him focused.
Reading the summary from his preliminary report made my eyes crossed. If I understood correctly, and that’s debatable, Kristoff devised a way to turn Io into an electric generator. “…The orbit of Io lies well within the intense Jovian radiation belt. This bathes the moon in highly energized electrons, protons, and heavier ions. A coarse calculation (see Equation 9, Section 3.2.14) indicates an electric potential of 175.9 volts per radial mile. Therefore, if we construct a modified magnetic reconnection antenna (see Figures 12 thru 17) there are hundreds of amperes of electric current available (Equation 11, ibid). By establishing a…” Ahh, whatever. When I brought him into my office he simplified it. “If we tap into the electric potential of Io, we can power an enormous electrolysis cell, separate gaseous hydrogen from the disassociation of melted Ionian ice, compress the hydrogen into a liquid, and refill the tank.” Why didn’t he just say that in the first place!
After hours of listening to his scientific babbling, I snapped. “Kristoff,” I yelled, “just appropriate whatever you needed to do the job, and stop bothering me.” In hindsight, I probably should have worded it better. The next thing I knew, he had the entire science team postulating, designing, planning, and whatever else those brainiacs do. They removed the heating coils from the life support system, the tanks from the water recycling system, and the compressor from the carbon dioxide scrubbers. I tried to explain the biological ramifications of dismantling equipment that kept us warm and allowed us to pee and breathe, but they were in the middle of an egghead feeding frenzy over heat transfer coefficients. “Besides,” they constantly reassured me, “we’ll put everything back together once the fuel tank gets filled.” Yea… that makes me feel soooo much better.
Two days later, our cargo hold looked like a farcical blend of MC Escher and Rube Goldberg. However, I have to give those nerds credit – the hydrogen tank is 50% full and climbing. On the other hand, I’m wearing a parka, sitting with my legs crossed, and trying to learn how to breathe carbon dioxide. Lately, my oxygen deprived brain has been reflecting back on my life, trying to figure out which cosmic deity I piss off enough to make me the captain of this ship of savants.
by submission | Nov 25, 2009 | Story
Author : Amanda Baker
Years ago, Christina stayed over at Emily’s house, and found herself belting out this awful pop song in the shower. Some boy band kind of thing. She didn’t remember the song; boy bands hadn’t been popular since the nineties, and she’d be hard pressed to name the band and tune, or hard pressed to admit she still had a fondness for nineties pop, even back then. To be fair, she didn’t even realize she was singing at first, and she silenced herself in embarrassed horror as soon as she did, stopping the silly “love you baby” lyrics from leaving her mouth as she rinsed the bubbly foam out of her hair. Her singing voice was pretty awful.
Of course her girlfriend heard her. Emily being Emily, she didn’t give Christina a hard time about it, but still, Christina knew Emily knew, and she felt ashamed. She had been caught doing something incredibly stupid.
Christina doesn’t think she remembered it until last Saturday—after all, she’s got better taste in music now, and she hasn’t talked to Emily since the breakup. Christina’s a loud sort of person, and she’s got a million better memories with Emily if she wants to feel nostalgic, and a dozen sillier memories that she can look back on if she wants to laugh at herself. She’s been quieter since Saturday, though. Everyone’s been quieter. When Christina turns on the news, crime is down. Of course crime is down. Even the criminals are stunned.
Everyone’s busy watching the sky, too. The talking heads on TV told them it wasn’t like that, the messages came from light years away, and there’s nothing to worry about. They couldn’t be here yet.
Peace negotiations have started. Peace negotiations, and it’s only been less than a week. It’s funny, almost. Back when the war started, Christina went out to city hall every weekend with her protest sign. She wrote letters, signed petitions, blogged rant after rant just to get people to care… pretty much everything she could do, and it took this to get peace negotiations to start? The first day, she thought this was a hoax. Probably everyone did. It’s something out of science fiction, which she used to actually like, before it was all over the news that extraterrestrials had made contact. It was better back when it wasn’t real.
It’s terrifying now. It’s like a hidden camera on the wall, like being the teenager who thought she could get away with everything, and then suddenly you’re faced with evidence that your mother knows every detail of what went on at Hannah’s birthday party. No, that she might know. No, that “Mom” exists. Christina frames it in another concept, thinks about it differently, but really… Do they know about Hiroshima? Do they know about the holocaust, or slavery, or the way humans have fought each other tooth and nail over absolutely everything ever since they’ve had the bad luck to evolve from the chimpanzees?
And they still want to talk to us. Christina hopes that maybe they don’t know us as well as they could, that we’ve got another chance to make an impression if we just behave ourselves from now on. Christina herself has gone to work on time, stopped grimacing so much, called her father back before he called her again to ask why she hadn’t called. And it’s not just her—it’s everyone. Everyone’s trying to shape up, to be better for whoever’s watching.
As Christina sees it, it’s as if humanity itself has been caught in the galactic shower, singing bad love songs off-key.
by submission | Nov 20, 2009 | Story
Author : Courtney Raines
As I watched myself falling down the hill, I remembered that fairy tale from physics class; the one about the cat in the box.
I had been walking home through the wilderness that separated my cul-de-sac from the grocery store, it was a walk I had taken hundreds of times over the past five years, when I tripped. The pack of groceries on my back had nearly slipped off my right shoulder, and I shuffled mid-step to adjust it. That’s when it happened; the quantum flash.
A ‘quantum flash’ is what the ubiquitous ‘they’ call it when you experience a moment of your life from another quantum reality before returning to your own. Mine happened in that instant between when I knew my foot was coming down wrong, and when it actually hit the ground.
I stood there for a millisecond frozen in time, watching as another me somewhere didn’t manage to regain her balance. I watched as the other me’s foot came down and twisted on a root. I heard the crack of bones. I felt the snap in my shin. I watched as the other me fell backwards towards the ravine, and wondered for the millionth time why the path was so close to it.
It was me, and it wasn’t. I felt it, and I watched it; both inside and outside. It was still me. The soft, moldy puff of dirt when I crashed backwards. The citrus thumps as my groceries began to tumble from my pack. The uncomfortable stab of cold plastic wrapped in polyester as I hit the milk jug before the inevitable flip.
The inevitable slow motion flip; my back arching, my pack sliding further down my arm, the milk, the bag of oatmeal, the kiwis and apples plopping to the ground, my feet creating the circle I could never draw. I felt my neck bending but not, quite, snapping. It radiated pain and there were spots before my eyes. As my body came around an almost elegant 360 degrees I saw, from both above and to the right, the pile of grapefruit and lemons that had first fallen from my pack.
Then my knees hit the ground, and I began to slide downwards. My pack was gone, what little cushioning it might have offered rendered nonexistent. Dirt and leaves began push their way up my shorts; I felt the leaves break and crinkle against my thighs. I slid in a slow motion second until first my feet, then my stomach, and finally my head bucked over a knobbled rock, smashing in a rhythmic serpentine motion. I barely had time to register the explosion that was my shattering kneecap, or the loss of breath following a rock in the gut, when the hard surface thrust my chin briefly upwards so it could better collide with my forehead.
Pain circled my head, blood trickled coppery in my mouth, and darkness called until the clock ticked into the next millisecond and my foot came down awkwardly on the dirt.
With a little hop, I regained my balance. I shifted my pack so that it was squarely on both shoulders, and muttered a prayer to the God of physics that I had been born to this quantum reality.
by submission | Nov 14, 2009 | Story
Author : Q. B. Fox
“Each freighter, since the very first one we built, is given a unique name,” the technician explained.
“Can I choose a name, if it’s not already taken?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not, sir,” the tech was barely apologetic. “A name will be assigned to you.”
“Oh, I’d like to have named her after my wife.” Alice’s warm smile and freckled nose appeared in my mind’s eye.
“Most people do, sir; a spouse or sometimes a child. But the journeys are long. And families, well, sir, they don’t always stay together. And you can see how that would become awkward. I’m sorry, sir, but there it is; I can show you the statistics, if you’d like.”
He started to turn his screen towards me, as he was required to by the Full Disclosure in Work Act, but I waved him away. Alice and I knew we’d make it work.
I was encouraged to think of the Catherine Rose as an animal, as a pet. Some men preferred to think of the freighters as their mistress; if those statistics were accurate then some of their wives did too. Some of the women thought of the freighters as children. But we were all expected to treat the ships as if they were alive; talk to them, care for them, spoil them.
It had always been a tradition to give names to vessels. And their crews have always treated them as living things, superstitiously believing it made the craft work harder to stay reliable, to keep them alive.
But the science is the other way about: giving them names makes us empathise with them. We sit in a vast emptiness of black, listening to the hum of the engines, alert for any sound of distress or discomfort. We fill our days with the repeated routine of caring for our babies.
And it keeps us sane, never quite alone in that horizonless, apparently unending, nothing.
They may have stopped me naming my freighter after my wife, but they couldn’t stop me naming my daughter after the Catherine Rose. So while I was away, my first born said her first word, took her first steps and had her first tantrums. But I was always connected to her, through the ship that shared her name, by an invisible bond that linked them.
I was only on a short run when the accident happened. Just an accident, they told me, nothing you could have done, if you were there. The sun shone brightly on the day of the memorial service.
It was year before they’d let me do another long haul trip, a year of short runs and psychological evaluation. I had adjusted remarkably well, they said. There was no sign of long term mental trauma, they concluded. I had grieved for a suitable time and I had moved on.
“Space,” Dr. Addison had warned me, “deep space, can play tricks on your mind. You’ve adjusted well, but if you have any worries, any worries at all, contact me, straight away.”
Of course, I had grieved for my wife, but I have to be strong. I still have to care for our child. She whimpers in the night, and I get up, adjust her injectors, balance her output, sooth her back to sleep.
She’s crying now, her display flashing an urgent red, tugging me towards our planned destination. It’s alright, sweetheart, I tell her, disabling the alarm. Let’s go this way. It’s quiet and peaceful; no one to bother us, kiddo. Just me and you and as much space as we need.
