by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 19, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Aaron was quite obviously not your ordinary student. He was several years younger than any of the others at the university, but clearly far smarter. His appearance was a little eccentric, clothed in a mix of fifties white collar littered with popular current brands. His thick framed Buddy Holly glasses could have been either stylish or awkwardly obsolete, one couldn’t be quite sure.
He appeared almost out of the blue, and I tried several times to learn where he’d come from, what his background was, but he was unwilling to talk about himself. He would stammer before derailing the conversation towards a math problem he was solving, or some complex area of physics he’d become fascinated with. Somehow he could draw you into that conversation, and make you forget until later that he’d sidestepped your initial question altogether.
Some of our lectures he would simply not attend, preferring to spend the time in the lab or the library. Several lectures I think he came to only to engage the professors in heated dialogue about the theories they were positing, deliberately taking an informed but always contradictory stance. The professors appeared on the one hand to enjoy Aaron’s intellectual jousting, but on the other seemed to resent the fact that someone so young could expose such glaring gaps in their knowledge.
One morning, Aaron was found alone in a classroom, every inch of blackboard space covered with complex mathematical formula. His dusty hands shaking and his hair greasy and disheveled, it appeared that he’d been there all night, solving equations. They closed the room for a few days while the faculty reviewed and trascribed his proofs, and the school echoed with whispered comments for weeks afterwords.
Something was clearly not natural about Aaron, but no one could quite put a finger on what exactly that something was. His uncanny ability to solve equations most professors could not themselves understand; his extreme beyond the box questions; his apparent disinterest in girls, in liquor and often in sleep. The name calling stopped early in the year, people just began to keep a silent uneasy distance from him, and he didn’t seem to mind.
It wasn’t until Aaron immersed himself in the works of Sergei Krasnikov and his tube theories that I became concerned. Later when he began delving into the Alcubierre metric I myself became truly unsettled.
It was clear to me that he was far too intelligent. I simply had to consume him before he figured out what I was.
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by submission | Nov 18, 2007 | Story
Author : Benjamin Fischer
“My lady, is that a joke or an order?â€
Kalifornia raised a painted eyebrow at the the Chief Constable of Luna. The Chief was a solidly built man, veteran of the bitter room-to-room and sometimes hand-to-hand combat of the Secession. He had personally bludgeoned a brace of men to death and dozens more had fallen to his steady trigger finger. Ten thousand Deputy Constables answered to him and to him alone. Even the mighty Fleet deferred to his judgement in matters local to Luna’s surface.
Nevertheless, his pulse always rose in in the presence of the First Lady.
“Is anyone laughing?†she asked.
The Chief shifted his weight.
“If you might be more specific,†he said.
Kalifornia rolled her ivory shoulders and gazed off at the high ceiling of the Senate’s main vault.
“You know,†she said, “ the poets. The fortune tellers, the beggars, the street-folk who will tell you rhymes and stories and useless little morsels. The ones who will tell you anything, anything at all to put your coin in their pockets.â€
Her eyes returned to the Constable.
“Kill them all–even the women.â€
“You are serious, my lady.â€
Kalifornia’s big clear eyes clouded, narrowed, shrunk to tiny black pools of hate.
“Are you questioning-†she started.
“Ma’am, I beg you reconsider,†said the Chief. “There are hundreds of them, at least the ones that are known to my people, and to drag every single one of them to an airlock-â€
“Don’t waste your time,†said Kalifornia. “Shoot them.â€
“My lady. Hundreds. Hundreds of folk gunned down in the halls-â€
“Will be sufficient warning to the rest,†she said, running her long sharp nails through her blood-red hair.
The Chief stood before her in awe. If he refused he might live long enough to leave the Senate chambers. He may even make it to the company of Deputies. But their loyalty was to his title, and only that, and by nightfall there would be a new Chief Constable–one who would not hesitate for an instant before ordering such wholesale slaughter.
“My lady, let me make an example of those in Silver City first,†he said.
Kalifornia pressed the tips of her fingers together.
“Why, my dear Chief,†she asked, “would you limit my desire?â€
“The people here in Silver are unwavering in their loyalty to you,†he said. “They will support and commend your bold action.â€
“Your words suggest otherwise for balance of communities,†said Kalifornia.
“Then you hear me right,†said the Chief.
He held his breath, waiting for an outburst.
“So what of them?†the First Lady asked.
“They would be shown what your iron standard is, my lady. When the extermination continues there, they will not claim some unexpected and unjust atrocity,†and the Chief tasted bile at that word, “but instead they will know that they have been held accountable to your new policy, and they will have no grounds for complaint.â€
Kalifornia turned from him for a moment. Then she spun and pulled herself into the Chief’s arms and she kissed him in a most unchaste manner.
She licked her lips whorishly when she finally pushed away from the lawman.
“Wise counsel,†she said, her smile all vicious white teeth.
“Thank you, my lady,†said the red-faced Chief.
“See that it is done this evening,†said Kalifornia, “so that the greatest portion of the public may bear witness.â€
The Chief bowed deeply, suppressing a shudder.
“As you wish, my lady.â€
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by submission | Nov 17, 2007 | Story
Author : Sean T. Rogers
She can read reality television with uncanny ability. Five minutes into the program she knows that the gay chef, the one with the balding mohawk, will be asked to leave, told to pack his knives. The vagaries of throwaway statements are her tealeaves. She sees the expressions of judges, the subtleties of editing. She never misses. The selected tearfully packs his knives, as was preordained.
She can read reality television and this week she watches from Nashville, from The Grand Ole Opry Hotel, where she is attending a trade show. She and a workmate buy six-packs and watch the program in their hotel room. She boasts of her talent, predicts, and once again is right. The tough girl, the one with the streak in her hair, the one that got into all the fights, packs her tools.
She can read reality television but he cannot. At home, he packs his belongings, looks around the apartment, pats the dog on the head one last time. There’s no need to write a note. She will not be surprised to find him gone, having deciphered the signs. She can read reality and will already know.
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by submission | Nov 16, 2007 | Story
Author : Sean Donovan
“The computers are down,†said Dhir. His voice was steady and unbroken though Lim knew that inside he was shattered.
Lim stared at him, her eyes blinking back tears of sorrow and fury. The computers are down. She repeated the phrase to herself, almost as if she needed to hear the words spoken inside of her head to make them factual.
Once, she’d been told, computers were tools – intelligent ones perhaps but tools just the same. In those bygone days that phrase did not have the same connotation as it did now. Once it meant that the computers were malfunctioning, broken, in need of man’s help. No more. Quite the opposite, in fact. Now, deep underground and abruptly realizing that their assumed safety was a sham, the meaning behind Dhir’s statement was all too clear to her. The desolation on the surface of the planet didn’t seem so distant any more.
“You mean they’ve moved past the pulse barrier?†she asked, already knowing the answer.
“About an hour ago,†he replied, his eyes meeting hers. Looking into them, she suddenly realized how weary those once beautiful orbs now looked, how strained and hollow they’d become since the sentries had first reported discovering the freshly drilled tunnels not more than a few weeks ago.
“So that means we’ve got what? Two hours? Three?â€
“Tops,†he responded quietly. “Probably less than one at the rate they’re moving.â€
With the systematic destruction of all means of long-distance communication, the burning of the printed books and the surge purging of the electronic data libraries, most information was nothing more than ashes and wayward electrons. It was all gone. Combined with the loss of contact with the Solar Watchmen, so was the history of the Silicon Rising.
All Lim knew was what she had heard in stories as a child, listening intently as her kin-tribe related tales that seemed too dark to be true – tales heard deep under the granite bedrock of what had once been New Hampshire, under what had once been America, under what had once been an Earth ruled by humans.
Even those twenty odd years ago, no one could remember exactly how the computers came to seize control, forcing mankind’s unplanned return back into caves and crags in a resented exodus to a Neolithic lifestyle. All they knew was that one day, man had woken to a new world, one where the linked silicon groupmind had decided that a change of the stewardship of the planet was in order.
The destruction of man’s fragile empire had occurred faster than anyone had imagined possible. With undebated orders carried to the electronic troops at the speed of fiber-optic light, irrefutable binary-coded logic behind them, actions were carried out in perfect synchronicity across the globe and those born of flesh stood no chance against the onslaught.
Some opined it was the work of an alien race, some blamed cosmic radiation and some called it a smite from a god who’d grown jealous of mankind’s omniscience over these machines, punishing his own creation for aspiring to become too godlike in its own way.
The reasons and opinions and guesses were myriad. Facts were much harder to come by, and with the loss of any method of data retrieval (the attempts at which had ruined the minds of the greatest scientists left alive on the planet) there were no facts available to those who yearned for a reason why.
Not that it matters now, she thought.
“The computers are down,†Dhir repeated with a sigh. He rose from his monitoring station and without even a glance a Lim, walked to his quarters. She didn’t flinch when the shot rang out shortly thereafter. She’d known it was coming, just as she knew she’d never hear the report when she pulled the trigger of her own service weapon, barrel pressed comfortably against her soft temple. Not yet though, she thought. I want to hear you first…
She listened carefully, ear pressed against the granite that they once thought would be mankind’s salvation. She could hear them in the distance, drilling, grinding, chewing through the last meters of bedrock. Down they came, ever downward. The computers are down, she thought to herself as she stood and followed in Dhir’s wake.
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by J.R. Blackwell | Nov 15, 2007 | Story
Author : J.R.Blackwell, Staff Writer
To the Dar, Seed is immortal.
Seed knows he is not immortal, it’s just that the nature of his cellular structure, the length or certain mitochondrial chords that determine his long lifespan. Longer than the Dar, longer than the normal human life.
Seed is not normal. Seed has been Altered. The chemical treatments, the virus that mutated his body, the tiny machines he swallowed that sunk into his cells and changed him were painful, but not half so painful as the long and terrible travel to The Dar. Even sleeping most of the journey, Seed felt the passage of time like an ache in his muscles, the endless silence, the dark sleep without dreams.
More than once on that journey, Seed considered suicide. There were a hundred different ways he could kill himself on his tiny ship. There was starvation while he slept, certainly the most cowardly way out. There was opening his airlock and dipping himself into the nothing that was space. The vacuum so like death itself, a dark void of still and cold. He would have liked to say that the thought of the mission, his calling, kept him from taking his own life. However, after waking up and making his ship adjustments for the hundredth time, the mission seemed very small. It was only fear that kept him inside his warm little pocket of safety.
When he landed with the Dar, he was so lonely that even their strange company was a relief. The Dar were like birds and squid but like neither as well, something altogether alien in construction. Their “feathers†were rubbery cellular structures that flared around their segmented bodies when they slipped underwater. They could expand four tentacles from their bodies to grip objects. Their cone heads had eight great eyes, half covered with milky lids that blocked out the bright light from their green sun.
They were sentient, but simple, living seasonally, unwilling to make any but minor modifications to their environments. The Dar were friendly and curious though, and when Seed learned their high, underwater language, they welcomed him to their bizarre world.
One hundred years after landing Seed lives with a Dar collective. Sixteen Dar crowded inside Seed’s modified ship. They traveled all over their world. The Collective does not worship him anymore, but treat him like an elder, with reverance and love. They allow him to perform his tests, they marvel at his shiny red machines, curling their eight fingers around those smooth shapes.
It is eight fingers on each extremity row now, instead of three. The tentacles, once able to retract, are now permanently extended. Two of the tentacles are atrophying and inside the other two, a kind of stiff cartilage is growing.
He is making them human.
It will take a hundred generations, but he will make them human. A little different perhaps, to be better adjusted to the climate, but the Dar will be able to breed with any human from any other world. Transporting enough humans across the stars to colonize or conquer a planet takes more energy and resources than contained in a star. Changing a planet, this is the work of an Artist, a Doctor, a Master, a General, a Seed. This is the calling, to spread humanity among the stars.
In a hundred generations, Seed will be home again.
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