The Long and Short of It

Author : JD Kennedy

The bridge of Earth’s first colony ship, Columbia, was a beehive of activity. The newly awakened ship’s officers were carefully reviewing the system readings at each of their stations. Captain James Branson sat in his chair admiring the efficiency of his crew. They were all relying on their training while they worked through the fog from a century of cold sleep. It seemed like just yesterday when they left lunar orbit. The ship’s automated systems had taken them to within a week of mankind’s first direct encounter with a planet around a distant star.

Aboard the ship was a very precious cargo – 250 carefully selected men and women that would establish the first human colony on an extra-solar world. Other than the ship’s bridge crew, they were still in cold sleep. Once the ship entered orbit around New Terra, they would be awakened in a preset order based on their role in establishing the new colony. Awaking them all at once aboard the cramped ship would put a strain on the ship’s resources since a landing site has to be prepared before the big ship could safely land to unload the considerable supplies they brought with them.

As the crew settled into their routines and the fog slowly began to diminish, excitement began to grow. The historical significance of what they would soon do was not lost on a single crewman. They would be immortalized by all of humanity as the ones who started Man’s expansion in the universe.

All of those thoughts were suddenly interrupted by an unexpected voice hailing them on the radio channel intended for communications between Columbia and her landing craft. The comms officer, Lt. Keller, had been running through her system checks and had the circuit patched to the bridge speaker instead of her headset when the call came in.

“Columbia, this is New Terra. Please respond.”

All activity stopped as each crewman stared in disbelief at the speaker above the viewscreen.

Several minutes passed before the hail was repeated. This time Captain Branson nodded to Lt. Keller. She hesitated a moment before responding.

“This is Columbia. Um, please identify yourself.”

“This is New Terra. Is Captain Branson there?”

“This is Captain Branson. Am I to understand that you are hailing us from New Terra? Please explain.”

“Yes, sir. We are an advance team on New Terra. You see, 40 years after you left, we discovered the secret to faster-than-light travel. It took many more years to build a manned ship capable of safely reaching here. Sir, it took us just over a year to make the same journey that took you a hundred years to make. A dozen of us have been here for several months preparing for your arrival, but FTL ships cannot yet carry the amount of material you could. I think you will be pleased with our preparations. You will be able to land Columbia just a few days after you achieve orbit.”

Captain Branson sat in silence for a few moments before responding.

“Very well. Needless to say, this is a bit of a shock for us. By the way, what is your name?”

“I’m Captain James Branson. The fourth. Sir, I am your great grandson. I am looking forward to meeting you when you land.”

 

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Runner

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

We tried everything but the kid was just too fast. We were hoping to break speed records when we bred him. A snip of a molecule here, a tweak of an atom there. We only wanted to cheat and win some gold medals for our country.

We were too good. The kid could move himself around the room with a muscle twitch. The snap of each muscle fiber contraction set off miniature sonic booms. We had him contained but he’d run into the walls just by taking a step. He’d rocket around in his room like a pinball every time he had a nightmare until we strapped him down. The concussions were killing him.

We had to let him out. We had theories about how to slow him down so that he could function in society and we tried them out. Speed retardant. Friction enhancers. We injected negative velocity serums into his bloodstream. We coated him with time suspension gel. We even dialed his quantum universe placement signature to always be ten feet behind where he actually was.

Nothing worked.

Early in the morning, we carefully put him into a wheelchair and told him to stay still. We took him out into the field above the secret sub-basement where he’s spent his entire life. He was immediately agoraphobic when he saw the blue sky and clouds so far above. His eyes were wide.

“No walls.” He said. He was six. Those were the last words we heard him say.

He twitched his head to the left and my glasses broke from the shockwave. He stood up, immediately displacing the air into flames around him for a second with the friction. Anything standing in front of him would have been vaporized from the small blast wave.

He looked into the distance and cocked his head.

And disappeared. The trail of churned earth and scorched grass that flew up like a roostertail fell back to earth lazily, reclaimed by gravity. His tracks ended twenty feet away. At first, we’d though that he had vaporized.

Then I looked up and saw the hole in the clouds. Taking a minute of drift into account, it looked like it would have been about parallel with the end of his tracks.

We got the defcon warning two minutes later that there had been an unauthorized missile launch from our co-ordinates. We invoked our black book top-secret status and that went away. Defcon stood back down to previous levels.

I want to believe that our child broke the light barrier. I want to believe that he has landed exhausted and happy on another planet.

I want to believe that he hasn’t run into the heart of a star or that he hasn’t died in the cold vacuum of space.

 

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Rupert

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer

Rupert’s father blubbered uncontrollably as he took his son’s hand and led him away from the car and into the forest. Son? Was he really? Maybe if he kept thinking that way this might become somehow easier. Yes, he just needed to keep reminding himself. The boy may have sprung forth from his beloved Mary’s womb, but he wasn’t natural. No sir, not in the least.

Bob cried aloud as the revolver fell from his waistband to the wet leaves. Dropping to his knees his body was wracked with sobs as he stuffed the gun back into his pants, all the while Rupert stood expressionless, waiting for him to get up and continue leading the way.

“I’m s-s-sorry son. There’s nothing else to do now.” He wiped snot on his sleeve and composing himself momentarily he grabbed Rupert firmly by the hand again and said, “Come on.”

And further into the woods they went. Rupert always silent, allowing himself to be led, as per usual, wherever his parents took him, just like he had allowed them to lead him to school for the first time. But it wasn’t long before the Williams girl had turned up dead on the playground. No one could explain it. One moment she had been apparently talking to Rupert, and the next she was lying there with blood pouring from her ears and eyes.

Then there was the old man at the park. Rupert’s parents had only turned their backs for a minute, but when they had suddenly discovered that their son was missing, it didn’t take much frantic searching before they located him in some nearby bushes, standing quietly over the elderly fellow’s corpse, again complete with all too familiar bloody orifices.

And so they had moved to another town, to get away from all the pointing fingers and accusations. But it wasn’t long before their new neighbor’s dog was felled by a mysterious ailment that had caused it to bleed from its ears and eyes as well.

And Bob had endured it all, but there was now this, the final straw. He had come home that afternoon to find his worst nightmare realized, his beloved Mary on the floor, blood surrounding her. Why it had happened was just as much a mystery as any of them, but it was the last time it would ever happen. And the hell-spawned demon would now pay for taking her from him.

They came to a small clearing and Bob let go of his son’s hand. He took two steps away and turned to face him. “It was that lab your mother used to work at, wasn’t it? They did things there… things that she was sworn to never discuss, not even with her own damn husband!”

Rupert stood as wordless as ever, his blank stare giving no hint of thought or emotion.

His father yelled at him. “They exposed her to something! They did… something! And you’re the bastard result!”

Rupert’s expression never once changed, but deep inside the center of his chemically enhanced mind he calculated. And he remembered everything. They all had it coming. From the bullying, pinching girl, to the disgusting pervert who had made ready to take his sex organ out, to the stupid biting beast, and worst of all, his pillow-smothering bitch of a mother.

And now here stood his blithering idiot of a father, making ready to dispatch him with that crude weapon.

Suddenly Bob’s sniffling and crying stopped abruptly, and as the revolver tumbled uselessly from his fingers he began to bleed steadily from his eyes and ears.

 

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Concerning Dark Matters

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

“Damn, there’s nothing there. I don’t like this one bit,” said NASA’s Jim Mason to his fellow astronomer. “Based on the perturbations to the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, the computer says the damn thing has 45% of the mass of the sun.”

“That’s impossible,” replied Jed Simpson. “We’d be able to see a star that big. Even a dwarf star that died ten billion years ago would still be omitting in the infrared. And, if it were a black hole, Chandra would have picked up x-rays as it gobbled up Kuiper belt objects. Let’s face it Jim; it’s some kind of dark mass.”

“Dark mass? You mean Baryonic? Are you nuts?”

“No, no, not dark matter, dark mass. I mean some kind of super-Jupiter that didn’t go nuclear.”

“Well, that’s just stupid,” snapped Mason. “All of a sudden, the four fundamental forces don’t apply to your super-Jupiter. Are we supposed to ignore a hundred years of proven science? What’s next, the Earth is really flat? Let’s stay focused Jeb. There has to be a good reason that we can’t see anything.”

“Okay,” replied Jeb, raising the ante. “Maybe it’s stealth technology. Some alien race is attacking us using some gigantic invisible spaceship. How about that?”

Missing the sarcasm, Mason latched onto the idea. “Hmmm. Okay, let’s follow that path. But, it doesn’t have to be an invasion. Maybe it’s just a natural progression of an alien technology. For example, could it be a Dyson Sphere? Maybe they didn’t intend for it to be invisible. They just made it so efficient that energy doesn’t escape. We can calculate its coordinates from the effects on the gas giants. All we have to do is aim the Hubble II at it and see what’s there.”

A few days later, the Hubble II revealed that the anomaly was a Dyson Sphere, approximately forty million kilometers in diameter, which was probably surrounding an M2V red dwarf.

When the giant sphere crossed Jupiter’s orbit, it launched thousands of massive spaceships, which swarmed through the asteroid belt like angry hornets. As the weeks progressed, the sphere continued on its way past the sun and out of the solar system, but the spaceships stayed behind. Then, one by one, the spaceships left the asteroid belt and flew toward the sun; stopping just outside the orbit of Mercury. They would only stay a day or so, and then return to the asteroid belt is steady fashion.

The two NASA astronomers, along with seven billion concerned Earthmen, watched the extraterrestrial caravan for months. “Why don’t they answer our transmissions?” asked Mason. “Surely they know we are here. What do you think they are doing?”

“It’s obvious. They’re constructing another Dyson Sphere. They are probably autonomous construction ships. There’s no one there to answer us.”

“But if they are building a Dyson Sphere near Mercury’s orbit, won’t that block out the sun. The Earth will freeze.”

“Oh, we won’t have to worry about that,” replied a somber Simpson. “The asteroid belt only had 4% of the mass of our moon. There isn’t enough material there to construct a Dyson sphere. It’s just easier to get to. Eventually, they’ll need more raw materials. They will have to dismantle all four inner planets, including the Earth to get it. I estimate we only have a couple of years to figure out how to stop the invasion.”

 

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Double Blind

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Dr. Darius from the Psychology lab walked along the line of students to Dr. Thorne’s adjacent Bio lab, reaching the door just as it opened to emit a thin wiry girl with a pale face and electric blue irises. She paused only a second before stepping around him, offering a shy ‘Excuse me sir’, under her breath.

“Next.” Thorne’s voice was unmistakable from within the lab.

“Just a second,” Darius held back the next student in line, evoking an irritated but acquiescent huff from the towering young man, “won’t be a minute,” Darius added as he entered the lab and closed the door.

“Release signed?” Thorne spoke without looking up. “Payment in order?”

“What on earth are you playing at?” Darius startled Thorne with the question, causing him to look up from the notepad on which he was busy typing notes.

“Playing? I’m not playing, I’m researching.”

Darius closed the distance between them, admiring the majesty of the contraption that filled the desk beside the gray haired engineer. “I hear they’re not going to renew your funding next semester, what’s to become of the genome jammer?”

Thorne winced at the term, “Gene Code Reprogrammer, and once I’ve secured a corporate sponsor, or a less impotent government one then its future won’t be in jeopardy.

Darius stopped in front of the Doctor and his machine, noting the snapshots of the girl who’d just left on its display, a brown eyed before and the striking electric blue after shot, along with long strands of double helixed code in constant motion. “So you’re going to sell this to a cosmetics firm then? Or a circus? Changing eye colours really isn’t going to fund the kind of research you need to be doing to keep this dream alive, you do know that?” The doctor chided his old friend. “You’re going to have to show something really remarkable.”

Thorne thumbed his notepad, the security camera outside the office photographed the next waiting student and called up his file.

“Johann Yonnes,” he recited, “second string linebacker on the football team, two hundred five pounds, six foot four. He has dormant muscle mass code that we can reactivate, fast twitch in his legs for speed, slow twitch in his upper body for strength. We can put him on the first string next season.”

Darius shook his head. “Teams can always find better athletes, that’s not going to be enough.”

Thorne grinned. “I know, that’s just the carrot.” He pointed to the machine’s display and the streaming strands of colour coded DNA, mostly made up of vivid colour pairs, but some sections were clouded and grey. “These sections here,” Thorne jabbed his fingers at the screen, stopping a coil from turning and then rotating it back and zooming in by planting one hand on the glass, fingers together then spreading them outward. “Here,” he tapped a single grey pair in a sea of colour, “here is a possible payoff. I give them the carrot, then flip a combination of these mystery switches and see what we get. They come back every few weeks for follow up tests, and we figure out what we’ve accomplished. I’m expediting my trials a little.”

Darius stood for a moment, mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Finally he stammered “These are students, children, you’re messing with the lives of children…”

Thorne waved him off. “I load their DNA here,” he waved at an arm cuff and bank of needles at one end of the machine, “I recode their genes and replace them, then reboot their sequence, wait and test. If they last five minutes they’ll last a week, and anything harmful I undo the same way.” He gestured to his datapad, “I keep notes.”

Outside Johann checked his watch impatiently.

In the stairwell of Hawkfel Residence, a brilliantly blue eyed girl curled shaking on the landing, wing stalks forcing their way violently out from between her shoulder blades.

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