by submission | Oct 2, 2007 | Story
Author : Grady Hendrix
The carriage stopped at the entrance to the NASA Space Propulsion Laboratories and the Grand Inquisitor of the State of Florida strode forth into the facility sending scientists scurrying like frightened chickens. They all knew why he was there: Dr. Stewart’s son.
“Take me to the boy,†the Inquisitor demanded, seizing a passing research assistant. At the security checkpoints the assistant whispered his Disarming Word to the locks and they opened, except for the one that didn’t. The Inquisitor tapped his foot while the assistant plucked a mouse from his Security Satchel, slit its throat and let its blood drip onto the keyhole. Satisfied, the electronic lock snapped open. The assistant babbled all the while.
“Only the fifth prodigy in forty years. It speaks to the orthodoxy of Propulsion Sciences,†he said through chattering teeth.
By now the Inquisitor could hear the boy’s voice: an obnoxious piping that made his ears itch.
“What makes our shuttles fly isn’t the goats we sacrifice before take-off, it’s internal combustion,†the brat was saying. “And we have the science for faster-than-light travel, I don’t know why everyone is so scared to develop it. Even I can work out the calculations.â€
“Blasphemy!†roared the Grand Inquisitor.
The room froze, the scientists listening to the boy’s words turned pale.
“I am no blasphemer,†the fifteen-year-old puppy said. “I keep faith with God.â€
The Inquisitor looked at the scientists, trying too hard not to study his face. He looked at the boy, too young to temper his knowledge with wisdom. He looked at himself reflected on a monitor screen, still excited to be playing the old game.
“People should know that the space shuttles fly not because our scientists accept Jesus Christ as their own personal savior but because of physics. Even a Hindoo could build a working space shuttle.â€
“If there were any Hindoos left,†the Inquisitor said, still circling the boy.
“I have committed no sin,†the boy said.
“Oh, you have. But not blasphemy,†the Inquisitor said. “Pride. Look at these wise men around you. They know much of what you are saying, but they keep their own counsel.â€
“Then why are they listening to me?†the boy asked. “Why have they let me preach science?â€
“Because, they want to see what happens to you,†the Inquisitor said. “They’re curious to know if the punishment for faithlessness in our faith-based space program has lessened in recent years. I’m here to answer their question. This isn’t about you, my boy. You are merely a piece of paper on which I shall write my reply.â€
Dr. Stewart’s wife had to stop attending the formal launch services for a while, at least until the remains of their only child, crucified on the chain link fence by the security gate, had decayed enough to be unrecognizable. But the following year, God blessed Dr. Lasseter with a son. In fifteen years, they would ask their question again. It was the scientific method. Hallelujah!
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by Kathy Kachelries | Sep 25, 2007 | Story
Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer
“You won’t like it there,” Rajani’s brother said. “People go crazy like that, so far from the sun. There’s science behind it. I saw it on the forums.”
Sam’s avatar hung on the screen throughout the call: himself at twenty-one, tanned and grinning as he reclined in a white plastic chair. His UV goggles had been shoved up into his dark hair, and she recognized the backdrop of the mainland relocation center behind him. The photograph was half a decade old, now. Samir was an account manager for a software company in Dhaka.
“I’m not going to go crazy, Sam,” she said with a tired but affectionate sigh. Rajani leaned back as far as her small control chair would permit her and folded her hands behind her neck. “I was a janitor on Mercury, remember? And a receptionist in the Hilton Luna.”
“But the sun was always there, Raj. You just had to travel a couple hours to see it. And an ice moon? The Eskimos used to go nuts, do you know that? Pibloqtok, they called it. You’re not cut out for a place like that, hon. Come back to Bangladesh.”
Rajani was used to her brother’s pleas, though they were less frequent and impassioned than her parents’. “The Sunderban’s underwater, Sam.”
“There are other places above sea level.”
“It isn’t the same.”
Despite the frequent cost of replacing her shuttle’s oxygen filter, Rajani fished a lighter from her pocket and lit a cigarette, exhaling towards Sam’s avatar with mild frustration. Her own avatar, displayed beside his, contained a preteen girl on a pale beach, bands of white surf curling around her ankles. Her father’s small fishing boat was tied up in the background.
“Have you ever seen ice, Sam?” she asked.
“Are you smoking in your shuttle?”
“I asked you a question.”
“Sure. I went to the ice park in Greenland a few years ago.”
“That’s not real ice.”
“It’s frozen water.”
“Not the same thing. They freeze it. I did a fly-by of Io once, a couple months ago. Nothing but black peaks and valleys, and the settlement’s lights reflecting over it.
“Sounds nice,” he said, though his tone was dubious.
“It looks like the ocean at night. The way our flashlights hit the waves when we were hunting for crabs.”
Sam was silent for several seconds. “You’re becoming an ice miner,” he finally said.
“There’s no global warming out there.”
Her brother sighed, but Rajani knew that she had won. “I can’t talk you out of it?”
“I’ll visit on the off-season,” she promised, and flipped the switch to disconnect. With a mechanical click, both avatars disappeared. Rajani angled the nose of her craft upwards, away from Earth, preparing to trade one orbit for the next.
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by submission | Sep 23, 2007 | Story
Author : Debbie Mac Rory
We have no choice, they said. We have to leave. We don’t know where we can go, or even if we can survive out there, but we can’t live here any longer. But there isn’t enough room here for all of us.
And then it became clear that the “we†and the “us†indicated in the news broadcasts, referred only to the healthy, the fertile, the educated among our peoples. Those who had been born without genetic abnormalities or physiological conditions which science should have long since cured.
The selection process was as short as the world government was able to make it, but it still stretched into months. Riots broke out worldwide, incited by those terrified of being left behind and those made bitter by tests results that rejected their chance of passage, even though they considered themselves healthy.
Paranoia took its place in the proceedings and only those who had a place ensured were allowed to prepare and load the ships. I suppose they believed that we, abandoned as we were, would yet try to poison the food, or infect their ventilation systems with some pathogenic substance. I know there were some that would have done so, and some that tried through the layers of security that surrounded the airbases. Most of them lost their lives on the lasers of the defensive grid.
When the ships had at last completed preparations, few were at full capacity. The medical AIs, calling on all the worlds collected knowledge, rejected all children under 12 in the belief that the exposure of such young bodies to the unshielded radiation outside the atmosphere would render them infertile, and useless as colony members. Even allowing for the families who opted to stay together on a now barren planet, or the parents who kissed their children goodbye, leaving them with crippled aunts or grandfathers too old to qualify, the numbers were far fewer than expected.
Most of the ships have left now, but the security grid around the airfields is still active. The children who were left come here most days to throw rocks against the fences, and watch the lasers turn them to dust. I still come to watch the last of the ships, assisting those others who try to hack into the abandoned bases so we can siphon the remaining power for ourselves.
The little girl with me clings tighter, burying her face in the cloth of my garments as the dust clouds raise from yet another launch. I adjust the gauze around my face with one hand so I can keep watching, while gently stroking the child’s hair with the other, to comfort her.
When finally the rockets flare has faded beyond what I could follow in the brightness of the noon-day sun I take the girls hand and turning, we walk together into the echoing streets.
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by submission | Aug 26, 2007 | Story
Author : Simon Petrie
There’d been big changes at Dave’s workplace.
Dave, 43, had been offered retirement, but he’d opted to stay employed in the burgeoning industry that he, as a roboticist, had helped initiate.
The society-wide introduction of working robots (more pedantically ICs, ‘intelligent constructs’) had been the past century’s dream, finally brought to fruition. And yet …
And yet. Midlife crisis, or something more? He didn’t know.
His reverie was interrupted by a tone in his earpiece.
“Completed on that level yet, Dave?” Hal’s clipped, precise tones, perfectly modulated.
“No, still stuck on the third unit. Shouldn’t be too much longer. Don’t think the rest pose any major problems.”
“Don’t forget those units on the next level. They need attention too.”
“I’ll get there, Hal, don’t sweat. Job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.”
Don’t sweat. Hah. That was a good one. All the same, Dave did take perverse pleasure in the point: there remained some tasks beyond any IC’s abilities.
He finished up, reached the foyer. Several lifts awaited. Time was, Dave had ridden these lifts daily, twelve floors, to his office. These days, he only ever went one floor up. The lifts didn’t see much use any more.
They should have seen, ten years back, where automation led. The first domestic-grade ICs were already able to oust FIDE’s reigning chess champion while still not performing adequately on tasks such as the vacuuming of a shagpile rug. Their handling of basic household chores had improved in subsequent models. Nonetheless, it remained apparent the ICs’ real strengths lay elsewhere, in realms of symbolic logic, abstract concepts, and ordered environments: money; justice; administration; science, technology, mathematics; the factory floor; the shopping centre.
Chaos was their weakness. A disordered environment posed an insurmountable challenge to even the new top-of-the-line ICs with millimolar memory capacity and massively parallel quantum architecture. In some circumstances and for some applications — military, police, rescue, mining — there were ways around this, through the use of human-piloted semi-IC proxies for dangerous and difficult tasks. Many chaotic tasks remained, though, for which this was not cost-effective; perhaps the future would change that.
Funny, Dave thought. The very tasks people had always thought tailormade for robotic intervention were the ones at which ICs weren’t any good.
Hal called again, of course, as he did at precise fifteen-minute intervals whenever Dave was behind schedule. “Completed on that level yet, Dave?”
“Ground level? Yeah, sure, just starting on the first floor units.” He entered the first booth, got to work with bleach and disinfectant, and soon had the entire unit sparkling. The next cubicle was worse: it looked like the S-bend was blocked, he’d have to get his hands dirty to clear it.
Not too complicated a task, in reality; you’d think an IC could master it, if it chose.
But it was a paycheck, and wasn’t that still worth it?
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by submission | Aug 19, 2007 | Story
Author : Chris McCormick
When we finally made contact it wasn’t in the way that everyone expected. It wasn’t like Star Trek, or Sagan, or Alien.
It should have been kind of obvious, looking at an atlas of the universe that there were so many of us. Tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny points of life on planets, in star systems, in galaxies, in galactic clusters, in the cellular mess of the known and unknown universe of radiating globules.
It should have been kind of obvious, looking at the ubiquity and persistence of evolution in every system we examined. The genetic systems, the stock market systems, the social systems, the atomic physics systems – everywhere the same rule – “Things that persist, exist,” the corollary of which is that the more intelligent the system, and the more desirous it is of persistence, the better it is at persisting.
The universe gave us an escape valve against the frustration of physical isolation; the impossibility of transcending those colossal, unthinkable distances.
The particle itself had a longish lifetime. Long enough that we could create several of them, overlapping in time so that there was always at least one in the atomic soup for us to probe and watch. Collide, examine, die, collide, examine die. The first time we created the first one, we simply could not fathom the data. The energy signature from this one, weird, heavy particle, was completely strange. The data spewing from it hung around at the border between chaos and order. It was neither chaotic nor ordered. It was complex. Spectral analysis, fourier transforms, and various forms of signal processing yielded only more mess.
At last someone gave up and threw the data on the ‘net. Flushed it through the distributed computing networks, and eventually, subjected it to cryptographic analysis. Suddenly the data came into sharp relief; millions of tiny voices, babbling, saying hello.
The particle was a resonator which resonates at the same frequencies everywhere. A change in one place means the same change everywhere else on the same resonant channel. Like Einstein’s spooky action at a distance, like strange attractors, except that here the particle broke the known physical laws, and now information travels faster than light. So now, while the physicists scramble to accommodate the new phenomena, we’re talking, sharing, and discovering with all of them – Everyone, with a capital ‘E’. Our webs and nets connected to all of their millions of webs and nets. Our network is a tiny node in the largest network of all; the universal network, stretching across all known space, outside all known space.
We’re all working hard together, trying to find a way not to be alone.
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