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 18, 2011 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
If I hadn’t made the tran-atomics strike, we couldn’t have afforded the cottage in Coventry. If we couldn’t afford the cottage, we wouldn’t have been docked during the strike. If we hadn’t been docked during the strike, we would have waited to start our family. If we had waited, we would have been destroyed with the rest of Earth Force. So the birth of my daughter saved the rest of my family.
We watched the feeds as the invaders swept aside the efforts of the belters. Our friends and neighbors died two for every one they destroyed, and there was nothing we could do. Time and again, I caught myself about to leave for my singleship to help. Then I would remember that I had rented it to a friend, and I had no way to defend us.
We watched as the invaders came within range of Earth’s primary defenses, and for once were glad that they had been so paranoid of us belters. And we cried when we saw that it wasn’t enough.
The invaders died by the thousands, yet again, but they had enough left to bombard the home planet. Even our simple scopes here in the belt could see the flashes of death on her surface. And still they fought. Missiles left from an unsought war a hundred years ago lifted slowly and locked on to anything in Near Earth Orbit. By then the only things left in that orbit were invaders, and as slow as the missiles were, more invaders died.
I supposed they knew they couldn’t win.
The few hundred invaders that were left turned to flee the system. As they flowed outward along the path of destruction they had wrought, they seemed to have forgotten the rest of the belters on the far side of the system. Weeks had passed and every ship capable waited for them. No invader left the Solar System.
That was a decade ago. Ten years at near light speeds. I know that we learned how to reach these speeds by studying the wreckage of the invaders, but it doesn’t matter. They came for us out of the black, and that is how we will come for them.
Ten years for me, nineteen for you. Daughter, this is why your father had to leave. You saved us once, and now it’s my turn.
by Patricia Stewart | Jan 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“We know that you released the Vigilante Spheres, Dr. Vehmic. So, you might as well confess,” argued the investigator.
Dr. Vehmic leaned back in his chair and smiled. Yes, he did release the spheres, but they couldn’t prove it. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” he replied.
“Quit playing games, Doctor. We have a copy of your thesis from ’16. We know that you theorized building autonomous devices with unlimited range that can fly, hover, and kill.”
Dr. Vehmic waved his hand dismissively. “That was mere speculation on the part of an ambitious young graduate student looking for employment in the defense industry. Nothing ever came of it.”
“That’s not what Dr. Curtis told us.”
Oh crap, thought Vehmic, but he kept his composure. “Who’s he?”
The investigator picked up a folder and opened it. “Dr. Timothy Curtis, a famous neuroscientist. I’m surprised that you haven’t heard of him, since we have video of the two of you together. It seems that he has developed the technology to decipher the syntax and the semantics of neural language. He can read minds, in other words. And he incorporated that technology into your automatons.”
“To what end,” demanded Vehmic?
“Here’s what I think,” began the investigator. “Ever since your wife and son were killed by Islamic terrorists, you’ve been plotting revenge. But deep down, you’re a decent man, unable to kill just any Muslim. You’re only after the really bad ones. So, you created these ‘Vigilante Spheres’ as they’ve come to be known, and released thousands of them in the Arabian Peninsula. They’re programmed to scan the brains of random individuals. If they detect that the individual is a terrorist, or fundamental Islamic extremist, it exposes them to a lethal dose of hard radiation. They get sick, and die a horrible death. Your devices have killed thousands already, and they are spreading to other parts of the world. Unfortunately, Dr. Vehmic, whatever your ‘execution criterion’ was, it wasn’t specific enough. Your devices are killing more than just Islamic terrorists. It appears that they’re killing anybody that meets your definition of ‘evil.’ In the last month, that list includes mercenaries, drug dealers, military commanders, world leaders, even some murderers who were already safely locked away in prison. Don’t get me wrong, Doctor, they were all bad actors, to be sure, but the U.S. Government can’t have its citizens killing foreign dignitaries, even if they are murderers. Now, Dr. Vehmic, you to tell us how to deactivate these devises.”
Still defiant, Vehmic replied. “Sorry Inspector, you’ve got the wrong man.”
“We’ll see,” said the inspector as he lifted a metal box onto the table. “I have a theory, Doctor. I don’t believe that your programming differentiates between individuals that kill for ideological reasons, from those that kill simply because they are “evil”. So, has your quest for revenge blackened your soul? Has blind hatred turned you into an evil person?”
The inspector began unlatching the metal clamps securing the lid of the box. “Now, I estimate that in the last year, you are personally responsible for killing at least ten thousand people with your spheres. Oh, by the way,” he added, “we captured one of them, and I happen to have it right here.” He patted the top of the box. “So, Dr. Vehmic, will you tell us how to deactivate the spheres, or should I let this one out of the box? I’d really like to know if my theory is correct. What do you think, Doctor? Will one of your spheres consider you an ‘evil’ person?”
by submission | Jan 16, 2011 | Story
Author : J.D. Rice
Discovering how to travel forward in time had been easy. Scientists had been experimenting with the accelerator for decades, perfecting safety limits, performing animal testing, making it ideal for human use. Set a dial, flip a switch, and a human being will be frozen in time until a set date. They even worked it out so you would continue to move along with the Earth through space.
The real trick, we knew, would be traveling backwards through time. Accelerating someone to the point of time freeze was simple enough. It followed the standard rules for relativity. The faster you move, the slower time passes. All we had to figure out was how to remain stationary and safe. But traveling backwards? That was a whole different can of worms. It raised questions about string theory and temporal paradoxes.
They told me it couldn’t be done, not in a thousand lifetimes. So I decided I’d just skip ahead to when it could be done and prove them all wrong.
The process was simple enough. The accelerators were getting ready for commercial use, to freeze people with serious illnesses until a cure could be found, so it was easy enough to procure a testing unit. I took it home, set the dial forward by a thousand years, and hit the switch. Protocol said that when they discovered my body in the accelerator they had to put it in storage until the thousand years were complete. The capsule’s outer shell would protect me from major wars. The external censors would delay my unfreezing if the atmospheric conditions around me were unsafe. Only the destruction of the Earth itself could keep me from waking up.
And so it was that I found myself on this strange new world. I woke up, feeling fresh and excited, and took my first breath of that oxygen-heavy air. The sky was dark, lit only by two pale moons and cluster of unfamiliar stars. The ground had a dusty, copper tint. The only vegetation were twisting, tangling blue vines.
Checking my chronometer, I found that I had been in temporal acceleration for over ten billion years. The Earth must be long gone. Destroyed by our dying Sun. Maybe even destroyed by humanity itself, a thousand years in my future, ten billion years in your past.
You found me disoriented and confused, barely surviving on the bitter fruit growing from those blue vines. Mad with loneliness, I welcomed your assistance with open arms. I’ve subjected myself to your tests. I’ve told you all I know about how I got on your planet. I’ve answered every question you have thought to ask me these last fifteen years. Now please, answer one of mine.
How do I go back in time? How do I get home?
by submission | Jan 15, 2011 | Story
Author : Thomas Keene
“But, your honor! I didn’t commit that crime.”
The judge rubbed his forehead with both hands. “Your vehicle was double-parked, on a curb, and had struck a mailbox. We have two store surveillance tapes showing you parking it and driving it away. But you claim innocence?”
“Simple!” Eisenhower raised a fat finger to his forehead. “I was braincast to Earth from oh-five hundred to oh-three thousand. The man who committed that crime was not me!”
The judge just blinked.
Braincasting was relatively new, but several big executives used it to commute to the Jovian moons to keep an eye on their businesses. The process is simple. Pack a quick-growing clone of yourself into a cargo ship headed out to Jupiter, and wait five months. When the clone gets there, you scan your brain on Earth, then beam the scan over the Web and dump it into the brain of your clone. Wake up on Jupiter, do some business at the office for eight hours, then scan your brain again and send it back to Earth in time for dinner with the family. It’s like teleporting, but you only teleport your brain patterns.
Most people who did this would have their “inactive” self sedated, to avoid the messy legal and social complications of being in two places at once. This defendant, however…
“Mister Eisenhower, do you or do you not have your inactive self sedated during a braincast?”
“I do not, your honor. He goes out for drinks with friends from work, attends parties, goes to the gym…”
The judge laughed.
“I don’t know what he was thinking! It won’t happen again!”
“Fine, then, Mister Eisenhower. We shall play it your way.” The judge leaned forward over the bench. “Murder, or traffic violations?”
“What? Murder?” Eisenhower blinked, and smacked his fat lips together.
“I can charge you with murder of your non-braincast self. By your own admission, of course.” He gestured to the metal recording box to the right of the stand. “You overwrote the mind of the man you claim committed this crime. By Jovian law, that is technically murder. And the case ought to take a minimum of three months to work its way through the courts. You will not be allowed to braincast back to Earth because you’re definitely a flight risk. I’m not sure how that will affect your job…”
The fat man’s face turned red, and he stood to object.
“OR, Mister Eisenhower…” He hesitated, then sat back down. “…or you can plead guilty to your traffic violations, pay a nine hundred credit fine, and take a five point penalty on your license. Your pick.”
Eisenhower looked like he was about to explode. He fidgeted, puffed, and finally gasped, “you win, I’ll take the fine.”
“Good.” The judge raised his gavel, but then paused and frowned. “Are you familiar with our license termination policy, Mister Eisenhower?”
“Er, no, your Honor.”
“You now have twenty-nine points on your license. One more traffic violation, and your Jovian driver’s license will be revoked permanently.”
“WHAT!?”
“I checked our records this morning. Every time you have been in court has been during a weekend or holiday on Earth. You would be unable to recall any of those crimes because you had braincast back to Earth before each was committed and processed. Did Mister, ah, ‘Not-Eisenhower’ not tell you?”
“N-no! No, your Honor, this is the first time I’ve been in this court! I don’t remember-”
The judge banged his gavel. “Very well, then. It wouldn’t be any help to YOU if I tell you to be more careful. Case dismissed.”
