by submission | Aug 30, 2011 | Story |
Author: Dan Fuhr
Years spent as a shuttle engineer and now I’m facing the unemployment line for another week. Of course, after this week, someone will be calling me up.
A bachelors and masters in Electrical Engineering, MBA, Professional Engineering license, the whole nine yards in education, and I can’t even get a callback from a company. Of course, I’ll get a callback next week from someone, maybe the European Space Agency.
All the parts used I bought off the shelf from hardware stores in America. Then I drove them in a trailer to Mexico, where my family owns vacation property in a secluded area with plenty of land. A few weeks down there “on vacation” and I was ready to go. Sure, the natives called me “científico loco”, the mad scientist, and the officials came knocking a few times, but a few greased palms and dinner parties put me in the clear. Overall, it was cheaper than I paid for my last car than it was to build the rocket, bribe officials and launch it. American ingenuity produces amazing work, or is that a will and a way? Either way I’ll impress the Russian Federal Space Agency.
Every night I checked, the rocket was on course. I’m an engineer, I don’t care about landing in the history books; I just want a job that uses my abilities. When I first started the project, I thought about landing on the moon, but really, whom would that impress? Everyone can see the moon and point to it. Hitting that would be like hitting the broad side of a barn. Therefore, I chose a smaller target.
2010 TK7, the first Earth Trojan asteroid to be discovered, 300m in dimension, hard to see, hard to find, easy to miss. And I landed an old Dell on the thing. The clock is ticking; soon it’s going to start sending a simple radio transmission, a short form of my resume.
I picked up my last unemployment check and started talking with the nice lady who handed it over. She was very giddy.
“Have you heard the big news? Some unemployed NASA engineer just landed a living dog on the moon, AND he’s bringing him back alive!”
I smiled as I resigned to seeing her again next week.
by submission | Aug 20, 2011 | Story |
Author : Garrett Harriman
Marigolds blossomed in the Evermore courtyard, tiny manes preening in the light.
Alongside them, Halley proofed her math. She knew it took eight minutes–ninety-two million miles–for sunlight to blanket the void of space and peck their tender flames. She knew the distance to Gliese 581d was forty light-years roundtrip. She knew her kid’s fears, her husband’s favorite teacher. And she still recalled how Russell Wood’d smelled on the hot April night he’d been drafted.
All of it factored the same: zero. Over two hundred and thirty-four trillion miles preparing what to say…and nothing, nothing, had surfaced.
To the contrary, she scrutinized her hands. They’d grown blanched and baggy. Shadowed with inclinations of liver spots. She lamented how short a jaunt even one AU had proven to be. How light played tricks at seventeen.
Halley stroked her sun hat lower, watching the ember blooms gorge more time.
Massive sound gained precedence. Soon a USF transport hovered over the lawn, graciously coming aground. Its door unfurled, freeing pilots, wingmen, gunners–triumphant young veterans of the Glieseian Uprising.
Halley’s breast tripped down a stairwell. Her promise rushed back, rushing here, to Evermore, mere hours after his fleet breached the HZ. She’d pledged to him and sacrificed for an instantaneous future, one with minor age discrepancies, friends and family long deceased. Those misty cryonic snakes redoubled her cold feet. A trepidating toe braved the Bite before the realization pelted her sensible:
It’s a crush. An infatuation. I am not in love.
Now, second-to-last out the pod, Russell O. Wood returned to the deep freeze, his miles of sunshine culminated. He’d served his planet well–time dilation, him. The United Space Force’d suppressed the Glieseian factions in six Earthen years. Discounting travel, he clocked in at twenty-five sharp. Shaven, impermeable, his decorated flack bottled bountiful joys.
Behind him the shuttle spat pneumatics and wafted gaily over the street. Russell smiled. Followed his brothers. When he passed the old lady on the bench he tipped his starchy hat.
Recognition didn’t shoulder him. It fled the other way.
Halley sulked after him, remembering: He’s not here for Halley Cross, girl. He’s here for Halley Wood.
Sure as Sunday, Russell joined the defrost cue. Just like he’d always sworn.
Halley watched nakedly. A dozen war heroes flashed receipts–puppy love–or recited cryo-chamber numbers by heart–true love.
It went.
Wood’s turn. Halley bunched up, praying she wasn’t the only service fiancée to ever burn the Bridge of Time or deny being some spaceman’s icebox leftover. Maybe he’d forgotten that she was all he’d left behind.
True love. Russell Wood rattled off her lost chamber number.
The name’s wrong, sir. Confusion. Dismissal. Well check again. Miss Wood isn’t enrolled with us. Bullshit–she’s waiting. God bless you, sir. Now listen here! I’m so sorry, Captain.
Silence.
Russell Wood withered to a bench. The last of the pilots embraced him. He promised different words, then jogged through the booth to reclaim his Bitten sweetheart.
Wood sat alone. Unaged beyond hope, he cried into his hat.
Halley didn’t interject for eleven point five million miles. She thought back sixty-three years. On her family. Marrying Albert Cross. New friends and a life lived outside of frost and waiting.
Reawakening today, dated seventeen, would it have been fair pretending to love Russell back?
Answers didn’t come. Just rays, memories.
Standing to leave, Halley stooped and plucked a gilded flower. She approached and pressed it to his lapel.
Russell jerked at her gesture, then softened. “Ma’am?”
“Wear it, soldier,” Halley soothed, straightening florets. “With a sun like this she’ll find you.”
by submission | Aug 19, 2011 | Story |
Author : Jason Frank
He was losing the crowd. Maybe they were already gone.
“Look, this is a new approach. We can’t keep attacking them directly; we always lose. We need to try unconventional approaches. We can win if we make them fight the battles they don’t want to fight.” The bright lights were a mistake; a man could melt.
“So wait…” this guy didn’t raise his hand and hadn’t been recognized, “… how come we have to steal their socks and what… mix them up with other socks? I don’t get it.” Why does freedom from thought so often accompany freedom of speech?
“We talked about this. They don’t wear socks. The lower appendage components of their regulation suits, however, are finely calibrated and so are prone to disruption. Mismatched components weaken the suits and weaken their wearers.” One idiot was no cause for alarm in an open forum.
“I dunno, I really don’t like feet.” Wasn’t there a sporting event on somewhere?
“They don’t have feet. Do I have to remind everyone that we’re talking about aliens? They don’t even stand on their lower appendages on their homeworld. I don’t see how this is relevant to_”
“I heard their feet were their sex parts and I ain’t touching anything that touches anything if you know what I mean.” This guy won gold at last year’s Olympics of disapproval.
“Moving on… we can ignore this blatant weakness and still come out on top. I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the zrunchez, the main staple of our oppressors’ diet. We’ve found substances that, when poured into their tanks, gradually remove all the nutritive value of these creatures. This process would seriously weaken our alien overlords until the point where_”
“We can’t hurt those little ones; they’re innocents. My son found one and nursed it back to health. They’re kinda slimy but they’re so smart. We trained ours to play checkers. When it’s not eating the pieces it’s pretty good.” It’s always nice to see women equally represented in a popular movement.
“Right… so… there are plenty of other targets of opportunity we can take advantage of. Addressing all of these in tandem would be more effective but that isn’t important right now. Right now we need to focus on what we ca_”
“Are we only considering death and destruction scenarios? What about an equality thing, you know, with buses and marches and stuff?” Seriously, what is the half life of a hippie?
“Yeah, so… let’s just forget about it. Why bother? They cured herpes, right?. What more could we want? We should be grateful they took over. I’m sorry I wasted your time. On the plus side, the new episode of “Dancing with Our Masters” hasn’t started yet.
The crowd filed out gradually, disrespectfully. He got off the soap box when they were gone.
Quququial stood up and stretched.
“You see resistance like this liberating your people?” he asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that. How did you manage before the invasion?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anyway, you’re cool. Come with us. We’re freeing as much of the galaxy as we can. It’s hard work but the rewards include space model girlfriends and unlimited space-tinis. I can’t see what you’d be missing out on here…”
The Earth loomed large out his window until it didn’t. When it was gone, he cried a little. Then he had four elaborate space cocktails and made out with a super hot Yllumean. It wasn’t too long before he forgot all about the backwater planet of his birth.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was a shock to learn how short their life spans were but not surprising considering how much naked energy they threw off. We do not know how long we live because none of us have ever died, only changed form.
They called themselves Humans. They are beings of fire. They burn so hot. They seemed to be made of pure radiant heat. They seemed impossible. They had special suits to survive in our environment. Those suits protected us, encasing their boiling energy. They called our environment a ‘vacuum’ and spoke of an ‘atmosphere’ where they lived.
An atmosphere that dimmed the stars on their planet (during a period called ‘night’) and made their transport vessels work tremendously hard when taking off and burn with friction when landing. They also had more gravity on their world. Such fragile, determined creatures. It was inspiring.
We have no ‘atmosphere’. Our planet has low gravity. We achieved space travel by jumping hard into the air and returned by waiting. After a time, we came back down.
The humans had names for our parts. They said we were crystalline. Our blood, when we decided to make it liquid, is thick and able to stay flowing in what the humans see as extreme cold. They called it ferrofluid. Our intelligence is encapsulated in each of our particles. They called that nanotechnology. Each tiny particle of us is a switch, able to align or crook tangent to the other, forming solids and liquids. They say that makes our entire race one living ‘computer’.
They said we were -420 degrees Celsius but that’s only because that was the lower limit of their temperature gauges. Down at our temperature, gases become stable liquids and deep inside us, even colder, some solids do, too. Like iron. “Sloshed around like silver paint in a test tube, like molten lead, all granular like a black and white picture of Jupiter with some sparkles thrown in.” one of the humans said.
We took their form at first so as not to alarm them. We were much taller than them and blue but it helped. Though we can take any shape, we haven’t tried many.
The humans have imagination. They showed us their engineering and architecture data. The math of load-bearing weights and geometry was something we knew instinctually, much like a human catching a ball wouldn’t consciously figure out the parabola and the necessary arc needed to intersect and catch it. We are angles, from our tiniest particle to our largest forms. They showed us flimsy carbon strings they called ‘diamond’.
We extrapolated. We improved.
We can make fusion reactors the size of what they call a fingernail. And then we make more. And then we attach many of them together. We do not have to use ‘tools’. We are the tools. We are the systems.
They have told us how to get farther. They didn’t know how to build those machines. They only had theories. They showed us.
We extrapolated. We improved.
We have the ability to create stable holes in space now that help us slide further when we ‘jump’. They have star maps that tell us where to go.
We let them travel inside us in special chambers to go far, to go where they wanted to go, to explore and record together, each experience filling up the cels of our cathedral spaceship bodies.
It’s only fair.
by Patricia Stewart | Aug 15, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The dilapidated sign above the front door read, “Doctor Hawking’s Tackle and Bait Shop”.
“I don’t know, Anthony,” stated Lamar Gregory of the University of Georgia’s Temporal Physics Department. “Do you really think that’s ‘The’ Stephen Hawking?”
Anthony Toole scratched his head as he studied the Tpadd’s readouts. “According to this, we are at the correct place and time. But personally, I don’t know what to believe anymore. Ever since the library’s records were corrupted by the Metis virus, everything is screwed up. That’s why the government gave us the two trillion dollar grant, so we could travel back in time and get hard copies of the monumental technical papers, and rebuild the database from the ground up, similar to what the Greeks did for the Ancient Library of Alexandria.”
Despite their misgivings, they decided to walk in and introduce themselves. However, when they entered the store, they were practically bowled over by the stench. Fighting the urge to hightail it back to the twenty-third century, they pinched their noses and soldiered on. “Excuse me, sir, are you Doctor Hawking?”
“That’s me,” replied the portly man with a broad smile, minus his left front tooth. “Doctor Hawk King, at your service. What kin I do for you gentlemen?”
Toole consulted his Tpadd and began reading, “We’d like to get copies of your papers on black hole thermodynamics, dark energy, condensed matter physics…”
“Whoa, son. If you’re one of them ‘green people’ collecting paper to save the planet, then say no more. I keep a whole pile in the back for wrappin’ fish. Wait here and I’ll fetch you a box.” King walked into the back room and came out carrying an oil stained cardboard box. The lid, which had the word “papers” written in crayon across the top, was tied tight with crisscrossing twine. He handed the box to Gregory, who nearly collapsed from the weight. King watched Gregory tote the box outside, presumably to throw it into the back of his pickup truck.
That was easy thought Toole, remembering how tough it had been to get Patricia Stewart to hand over copies of her celebrated papers on early space exploration. “No way,” she had said, “unless you also take my collection of flash-fiction stories. They’re way better than those dumb old papers.” Toole read a few, and had his doubts. But after three hours of arguing, he ended up taking both.
“Well, thanks for all your help Doctor Hawking,” said Toole, as his fingers queried the Tpadd for their next destination. “Damn, piece of crap,” he lamented as he repeatedly pounded the reset button. “Excuse me, Doctor Hawking,” he said as they both walked outside, “but my Tpadd appears to be malfunctioning. Is there any chance you know where we might find William Robert Duke, the Nobel Laureate in quantum fluid dynamics?”
King thought about the question a moment, trying to figure out what a Nobel whatchamacallit was. Most likely a high-falutin city word for “moonshine”. Aaaaah, he suddenly realized, these fellas weren’t green people, they’re just lookin’ for hooch. Good ‘ol boys, in other words. “Sure do,” he finally said. “You’ll find him up the road a piece. See that smoke risin’ over yonder. Just head toward that.”
The strangers climbed into their fancy floatin’ car, and silently glided away. Uh oh, thought King. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Don’t sneak up on him, boys, or you’ll be pickin’ buckshot out of your hide. And don’t call him William Robert, he goes by Billy-Bob.”
