by Sam Clough | Jun 3, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
“Name?”
“Oreska Oleg.”
“Neurotype?”
“Atypical four.”
“Specialisation?”
“Mathematics.”
Oreska saw the world in numbers. He saw, below the fabric of existence, the harsh grid of mathematics with which everything could be described. He had shown an aptitude for manipulating numbers at an early age, so it had been decided that his atypical neurotype should be encouraged. Through an intensive training regime, Oreska’s facility for numbers was turned into an obsession, and from there, into an neurological imperative.
He found it a strain, sometimes, to deal with typicals. Like the nobody in the suit sitting across the table from him. The interviewer was your standard corporate drone. Average in all respects, and a neurotype so bland it could send you to sleep.
“I think we here at the Exchange will have a place for you, Savant Oleg. We are slipping behind our competitors in the physical sciences. We have the research facilities, but insufficient minds to analyse the data.”
“What areas are you researching?” Oreska feigned interest. That always seemed to get you further with the drones.
“I’m authorised to inform you that we’re conducting research into strangelets and microblackholes, as well as certain more tangible areas, such as drive theory. Naturally our research interests are far wider than this, but I’m not permitted to disclose anything more”
“Naturally. What percentage of your current staff are atypes?”
“In physics, we have a ratio of approximately one to twenty, atypes to typicals.”
“And my inclusion would make it?”
“Exactly one to twenty. Would you come this way? I’m told the second part of the interview is ready for you.”
The interviewer led Oreska through the complex, down two flights and stairs and through one airlock. Silently, he ushered him through a door marked with the two-dimensional shadow of a hypercube.
The room Oreska found himself in was relatively small. The walls were smooth and white, with a plastic sheen to them. They were covered in text; numbers, letters, and mathematical operators. The equations surrounded him. Involuntarily, Oreska slipped into mathspace.
The transition was as smooth as ever. The walls slipped away, along with his sense of self. The equations glowed hot and bright. Slowly, Oreska began to shift them, conducting a few exploratory transforms. And it clicked — he found the error buried in the numbers. The variables stretched, shifted, and settled into place. The modifications practically radiated ‘rightness’. Oreska stepped backwards, shaking off the arithmetic hallucinations.
A pen was thrust into his hand. Rapidly, Oreska made the required alterations.
“How long was I out?” He asked. The splinter skill originally knocked him out for hours. Self-discipline helped, but he still sometimes lapsed into a math-thrall.
“Twenty seconds, Savant.” The interviewer had gone, replaced by a taller man. Oreska’s face recognition was sketchy at best, but this man he knew. Professor Lantar, head of the Exchange.”Interesting solution. Please report to the reception for your identification and lab assignment.”
by submission | Jun 2, 2008 | Story
Author : Benjamin Fischer
“You’re a hard man to find.”
Victor’s eyes were hazed with blood. His own blood–the cop had put a baton across his forehead. His ears still rang.
“Nothing to say, huh?” said the black coat. His cudgel flashed.
Victor doubled over and fell to his hands and knees.
“Not so tough now,” said the constable, pacing around him. He kicked aside a spray of books, knocked loose from ransacked shelves. “Skinny little guy like you an assasin? My ass. You’re definitely a garden-variety code cracker.”
The cop’s heavy boot heel ground Victor’s hand like a cigarette butt.
Victor screamed.
“You know how long I’ve been waiting for this?” the constable asked. “Damn near four months, two hundred thousand man hours, seventy million in expenses. Somebody up top wants you bad. There ain’t a rock on Luna we didn’t look under.”
Victor sobbed.
The baton came down on his back, knocking him flat.
“You’re a hard man to find, Mister Constant,” the black coated cop repeated. “I’ll be damned if I don’t take my time before I turn you in.”
“In the phone book,” Victor rasped.
“What?”
“I’m in the phone book,” Victor said. “It isn’t hard.”
The cop frowned, stepped back.
“Funny man,” the black coat said. “We searched all the directories. You ain’t there.”
“The first one,” said Victor, gesturing with a mangled hand at the shattered bookshelves.
“What’s he mean?” the cop’s companion asked.
“I dunno. Take a look,” said the black coat.
“It’s down by the dictionaries,” said Victor.
“Take a look,” said the cop, planting his boot on the back of Victor’s neck. He pressed Victor’s face into the threadbare carpet of the tiny apartment. He could hear the other policeman step through the debris, knocking aside the broken reading lamp, sifting through the avalanche that had been his reference shelf.
“Holy shit, here it is,” said the second cop. He had found the heavy black leather volume.
“Damn,” said the black coat.
“This has got to be an antique,” said his partner. “I didn’t know they made these.”
“When Copernicus first incorporated-” Victor started, but then his captor pressed down, choking the words out of his thoat.
“Well, is he in there?” the black coat asked.
“I’m looking, I’m looking.”
The black coat tapped his collapsible baton on Victor’s head.
“Well?”
“Yeah, here he is.”
“What’s the address?”
“It’s six six six-” the second cop began.
Victor was already moving, rolling out from under the black coat’s boot and slamming his mass into the cop’s other leg. His not so broken right hand grabbed the police baton. In the low lunar gravity, he easily pitched the cop into the near wall.
Victor rose, weapon in hand.
“Now you’ve done it,” said the black coat, pulling himself up. “Jerry, shoot him.”
His partner was mute.
“Jerry?” said the black coat.
Bug eyed, stiff–thin tendrils of smoke crept from under his partner’s cuffs and collar.
The black coat went for his gun. Victor slashed at him. The cop yelped, his right arm broken. Victor brought the jagged, broken nightstick up and ran it through the man’s larynx. He caught him as he fell.
Victor hefted the choking cop over to his partner, whose armpits and chest were charring. Visible flames licked at his adam’s apple and wrists. A few of the heaped books’ pages began to curl. The black coat’s eyes met Victor’s as he set him down in the nascent pyre.
Victor pulled the black tome from the clawlike grip of the dead man.
“Now you’ll be hard to find too,” he said.
by submission | Jun 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Luke Chmelik
The Eldest coughs, hoarse and frail from the vagaries of stasis. Dull orange light from the isotope heater gives a glow of health to a man who has cheated death for many, many lifetimes. He has awakened for the first time in centuries, and the young ones gather close. He looks out the viewport at the pin-prick stars wheeling against the void, bright and steady and changeless. He is the only one who has seen the way an atmosphere makes them sparkle. There are a great many things that only he has seen.
The Eldest is much older than he seems. He was first put into stasis in low orbit at the age of twenty, young and strong and fit. His physiology took well to the procedure, and he was selected as an Elder, a cultural time capsule for the tens of thousands of colonists aboard the unnamed worldship. Awakened once every generation, to tell them the stories of the past, he has been sheltered from the passage of time for so long that he can no longer be considered the same as the people he was to guide. They are made now of bio-alloys and neural networks, linked together in a mesh of infinite complexity, and he can not take part in it. They see him as an antique prototype, an outdated custom model never meant for mass production. He has been alone for a very long time.
There is a quiet rustling as he stands, a breathless chatter like leaves in the wind. He sighs, yielding to a wave of nostalgia. The young ones have never seen leaves, never felt the wind, and it saddens him that many of them never will. He moves slowly to the dusty command console, disused joints groaning in protest, and turns on the power. The young ones watch him in curious wonder, eyes bright and cold and silver. They do not understand why he needs to use his hands. In the dull glow of the screen, his brow furrows. Without thinking, he recalibrates the system, accounts for the blazar on the edge of detection, filters out the microwave background. The young ones watch as he does in minutes what they do instantly.
When the Eldest moves to the communications array, the young ones do not follow. They have not used the communications array in millenia. The ancient screen flickers to life, showing only an oscilloscope wave and frequency information. Undaunted, the Eldest manipulates the controls, and the low hiss of the void turns into something constructed, not random. His face changes, and he makes a choking sound deep in his throat. Some of the young ones appear, curious about the sound, but he ignores them. He adjusts the controls, receiver crystals slowly tuning in to the signal. When the oscilloscope vanishes, it is replaced by a moving image and a voice.
“…own vessel, do you read? This is Station Charon’s Rest, do you read?”
The Eldest does not know how there are humans here, light years from home. He does not care. She looks like the Eldest but her face is young, soft and smooth where his is hard, and her eyes are as blue as the sky that only he has seen. He has been alone for so long. The young ones do not understand why the salty water comes from his eyes.
by submission | May 31, 2008 | Story
Author : Viktor Kuprin
Jump drive, hyper drive, quantum drive, there were many names for the exotic-vacuum engine that propelled our ships to the stars. In the CIS Space Force, we called it the Super-Space Drive, the S-Drive.
Thirty of us lined up outside the training ship’s control-simulator bay, everyone wearing light suits, helmets clipped to our belts. Only a few in our squad had experienced a jump. The rest of us were simultaneously excited and terrified. A jump can affect people in different ways, not all of them pleasant. Anyone who couldn’t take it would be immediately washed out of the astrogator program and reassigned to a non-flying career track.
Someone tugged at my suit’s collar ring. It was Sturms, the cocky, muscle-bound creep who always harassed me when I pulled dorm-guard duty.
“Hey, Kreminov, loan me 500 rubles,” he demanded.
“Nichevo. Forget it, Sturms. You got paid last week just like me.”
He snarled and grabbed my collar ring, pulling me face-to-face to him. “You lousy lickspittle! I’ll be looking for you later!”
Squad leader Medvedkov shoved Sturms away from me. “Belay that or you’ll answer to me!”
He knew better than to cross Medvedkov, but Sturms had to get the last word: “I can’t wait to see you two during jump. You’ll be pissing in your light suits. You’ll scrape paint off junk ships while I’m flying starcruisers!”
Chimes sounded, and the training bay hatch opened. We marched to our stations, each console fitted with a dark-turquoise astrogator-control simulator that we would use to mimic the jump’s setup and execution. I read the destination preset: Epsilon Eridani; Distance: 10.5 light years. I plugged my suit into the flight seat, sealed my helmet, and started my pre-jump checklist. The vacuum alarm blared as the bay’s atmosphere started venting away. No military ship maneuvers when pressurized. Neither did our training ship.
In nine minutes I had my plot. I entered the solution and keyed my console. A green-light reply returned from the instructor. Yes! I was one of the first to finish.
I could feel the ship’s rumbling vibrations as we accelerated. The initial energy that triggers a jump comes from the conventional engines running up at full power, and the greater the acceleration, the less veer during transition.
Then I felt the giddy exhilaration I’d heard about. I inhaled deeply and the walls of the training bay contracted and expanded with my breath!
I began to see the electro-photonic glow around my body, around the other cadets. Next to me, Medvedkov held out his hand. I saw Kirlian sparks leap between our fingertips when I touched him. We laughed hysterically.
On the bay’s huge televisor, the stars began turning blue. Then came the long, terrifying shot-out-of-a-cannon rush of final transition. The screen showed a black void dotted with slowly tumbling colored orbs.
I felt something slam into the deck behind me. It was Sturms, curled up like a hedgehog, his eyes wide, crazy with terror.
Medvedkov keyed his helmet-mike: “Welcome to S-Space.”
by Stephen R. Smith | May 30, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
David closed the door and slid the deadbolt, tossing his keys on the hall stand. He crossed the small parlor to the sideboard, and as he reached for a tumbler and the bottle of Jamesons, he was startled by a voice from the corner.
“I’d prefer you didn’t do that,” a deep, tired sound from the direction of his overstuffed armchair.
David’s hand shook, gripping the glass tightly as he turned to where the man sat hidden in the shadows. “Who the bloody hell are you, and what are you doing in my flat?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t have let me in if I’d asked.” The figure produced a cigarette from a jacket pocket, and tearing the ignitor open drew deeply before exhaling slowly into the room. “I’m in collections David, and I’m afraid you’re in possession of something that’s no longer yours to keep.”
“Jesus, are you here about the television? I’m only a few days past, and if your lot kept better shop hours, I’d have been able to pay it last week when I was in the city. Here, you can take the cheque and shove off.” He started back towards the hall, but stopped when it was apparent the figure wasn’t moving.
“This isn’t about the television, it’s that body you’re wearing, I’ve come to take it back.”
David stood still, not sure he’d just heard correctly. “You’ve come for what?”
“Do you remember the company you owned, the money you made, before the accident, before…” he paused, waving around the now smokey room, “before this place? Do you remember when you acquired that body?”
Far more words formed in Davids head than made it to his lips. He could only stammer “accident? company?”
“You were quite a powerful man in your day I understand, but you had that thing for experimental aircraft, so your company had you heavily insured,” the cigarette glowed brightly as he inhaled, “and that insurance policy bought you out, reconstituted you in that body you’re wearing now.”
David looked down reflexively, noticed that he still held the glass, and in a daze set it down on the sideboard.
“Of course the condition of the insurance was that you be disassociated with your past, which is how you wound up here. I suppose the insurance company covered the rent.”
“I don’t understand, what do you mean by ‘that body you’re wearing'”
“You see, the insurance company put your policy claim out to tender, and the winning bidder scraped up what was left from your cockpit and installed you into the body you’ve been wandering round in these last few years. The problem is that company’s gone bankrupt, and as they purchased the rights to that body from my employer, and as they never paid for it, my employer’s sent me ’round to pick it up.”
David fingered the glass, and shakily uncapped the bottle of whisky. “My employer, my insurance, won’t they cover what’s owed?” He didn’t believe what was happening, but it was beginning to seem unnervingly familiar.
“We started there, unfortunately the insurance is nearly tapped, and I’m afraid your previous employer doesn’t seem to like you that much.”
“How long have I got, and what then?”
“In a few minutes, when you’re ready, I’ll release you to the ether, and return that body to my employer. It’s not like you weren’t living on borrowed time anyways now, is it?”
David poured a healthy measure from the bottle into his glass. “I think I’ll have that drink if it’s all the same to you, at least the whisky I’m sure I’ve paid for.”
