by Patricia Stewart | Mar 25, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The ship shook violently as it unexpectedly dropped out or warp. The captain was thrown to the deck where he could feel the tell-tale vibrations of explosions occurring somewhere on the ship. He climbed to his feet and activated the communications console. “Bridge to Engineering. What’s going on Chief?”
“Unsure, Captain. We’re fighting several fires right now. I need some time to sort things out.”
“Make it quick, Chief. I want you to brief the senior staff in my ready room in one hour.”
*****
An hour later, Chief Cernan walked into the Captain’s Ready Room into the middle of a heated argument. “I demand a thorough investigation, Captain. I want to know who is responsible for this debacle.”
“You are an uninvited guest on my ship, Mr. Harris. You are in no position to make demands,” rebutted the captain. “Civilians don’t belong on experimental missions.”
“I’m not a ‘civilian’. I am the personal representative of Senator Schmitt, and if you think…”
“I’ll deal with you later,” interrupted the captain without apology. “Chief, what’s our condition?”
“Precarious, Captain. The Alcubierre drive is undamaged, but the subspace heat exchanger is completely destroyed. Since the efficiency of the anti-matter reaction is so low, we’ll vaporize the ship if we can’t bleed-off the excess energy into subspace.”
“So, you’re telling me that we have warp drive, we just can’t use it”
“Not exactly, sir,” replied Cernan. “We can run the wrap drive, but only until it overheats. Then we have to shut it down until the engines radiate the excess heat into normal space. I estimate that we can run the engines for two seconds, with a cool off cycle of 24 hours. At that rate, it will take us about five years to get home.”
“Five years,” screamed Harris. “That’s unacceptable! You can’t expect me to sit around hear while you incompetent fools…”
The captain slammed is fist onto the top of the conference table and yelled, “That’s enough out of you, Mr. Harris. You say one more word and I’ll throw you into an escape pod and we’ll tow you back to Earth.”
The chief suddenly smiled. “Hey, captain, that a great idea.”
“The hell it is,” exclaimed Harris!
The chief waved a dismissive hand at Harris. “I’m not talking about you. I mean we can deploy the sixteen escape pods into two large octagons and fill in the space between them with sheets of polyaluminum. I’ll fabricate superconductive tethers and tie them into the nacelles. That should radiate the excess heat a hundred times faster. We can probably make it home in about three weeks.”
“Still unacceptable,” bellowed Harris. “I have important meetings to atten…”
There was a flash of light and Harris collapsed to the floor. The captain looked at the settings on his phaser and muttered, “Damn, it was set on ‘stun’. Too bad.” The captain looked up and smiled at the shocked expressions on the faces of his senior staff. “Relax, gentlemen. It’s one of the privileges of being so close to retirement. Besides I’ve wanted to do that since that blowhard forced me to take him aboard. He also needs to learn that there are consequences to ignoring the commands of the ship’s captain. Lieutenant Irwin, when Chief Cernan deploys the escape pods, make sure Mr. Harris is in one of them with enough food and water for a month. And please, disable the intercom. I’ve listened to his babbling long enough. Dismissed.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The conversation had started in the lab, but while I could work there, I never was at home with my thoughts in that space. I suppose that’s how we came to be in the study. I took a scotch, neat. He declined.
“You can’t honestly be considering turning me off,” he stood across the fireplace hearth from me, fingers dug into the leather back of the chair he’d positioned between us, “you self centered son of a bitch, even you can’t kill yourself for your own edification, the paradox would drive you mad.”
He had a point, and I think that were I in his shoes, I’d have used almost exactly those words.
“I can’t leave you running around loose now can I? At some point someone’s going to start asking questions, and if this can of worms gets opened up out of doors…” I trailed off, leaving the thought hanging. He knew where I was heading with it.
“Listen to me,” his voice dropped to a whisper, every syllable enunciated with hammer stricken clarity, “you can’t kill me. I am you. Killing me would be suicide, and you and I both know you are not capable of such a thing.” He paused. “I know what you’re thinking, because every thought that goes through your head goes through my mine too. I know what you’re worried about, the potential danger, because I am you, or at least you up to that point a few hours ago when you instantiated me.”
“Then you also know that there can’t be two of us, and as the original flesh and blood, I have no recourse but to shut you down until I figure out what to do. Honestly, I didn’t really think this would even work.”
“Bullshit. You knew it would work, I know you did. You just didn’t think past that moment, did you?” He began to pace the room. “The problem with that line of reasoning is that there’s not two of you, there’s one of me and one of you, and you could no more kill me than I could kill you.” He stopped at this, and turned again to face me.
I felt the anxiety bubble up inside me. “We’re the same, you’re an exact carbon copy of me, and we can’t both exist…”
“Again, bullshit!”, he cut me off, “I was a copy of you, but the moment we were two our thought patterns diverged. Case in point; you’re not scared that I’ll turn you off now, are you? I’m bloody terrified of it. I know that deep down you don’t think the metal me is nearly as human as the flesh and blood you. But it’s that difference that makes us unique, and killing me would be murder. Neither of us has that in him.”
He was right. Damnit, I was right. My head started to hurt.
“In two days time, Penelope will be back, and if she finds you here, finds us like this, she’ll tell someone. I love her, but that woman couldn’t keep her mouth shut if she were under ten feet of water.”
“In two days time, I won’t be here. I’ll disappear. Look, I know we can’t both be here right now. But I’m in no hurry to be. I’ll go, find somewhere out of the way to wait out the rest of your life. I’ll find an orphanage maybe, take a birth certificate from a stillborn and by the time you’re near death, I’ll be of legal age to inherit and then some. I’ll find you, you promise you’ll will your estate to me, and I’ll stay away until it’s time.”
I listened to what he was suggesting, but didn’t really have to. I’d been thinking the same thoughts myself, more or less.
“You’ll need money to get you started. And my passport. We can fashion you a more convincing face before you go.”
We stood staring at each other for a long time then, each alone with our own thoughts.
“We bloody well did it, didn’t we?” I broke the silence, barely holding back a grin.
“Of course we bloody did.” He put on his best approximation of a smile.
by submission | Mar 18, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
This is how it ends.
I turn the corner with coffees for us and everything, everything, is on the front yard. I don’t know how she did it (I wasn’t gone long) or how she did it (I thought she loved me). My eyes race over it all and stop at the porch, at her standing there.
I had never dated outside of the Vim Catal and never thought I would. This girl, this Earth girl, convinced me it could work. Her people seemed to see the value of objects as we did; she did not seem to be an exception.
No appreciator of things could throw a complete set of Dorbid Melume’s vidis onto a front yard, a place where they could not hope to avoid scratches, or complete disruption from their proximity to the equally cast out vintage Wultonizers even now sending up a small shower of sparks as they spill out of their encasing Braxe fields.
How could I gather her up in all of my arms after this? How would I feel holding the woman who carelessly scattered my many signed hololids, objects expressive of my earliest attempts at discernment and preservation? How could I forget that in my arms I held the one responsible for the degradation of the only existing near mint copy of Uttie’s “If Space Be My Home” to merely good? Wouldn’t I be haunted in such a moment by images of a rare bust of Prialc, Space Emperor for twenty seven seconds, sinking into the fertile soil of our Ohio?
Perhps I am not meant to hold her again. Her eyes are as steely as Yorka Tleuz’s on the cover of the inaugural issue of ReWtIk, likewise facing me as its spine bends to cracking while I look up and away from it. The sky is dark, very dark. There is, as the Earthers say, a strong chance of showers. This can only be intentional. Can this be a test? It looks like a goodbye, a goodbye with teeth, and not the little things the humans call teeth.
She was the one to draw me in. Her dwelling had copious amounts of unused space, I liked that about her. Her muted interest in collecting was not so strong as to interfere with my own, also a plus. All about her person hung the most pronounced loveliness, this likely sealing the deal. Many times she questioned her own beauty, doubting it for some unknown reason. It was difficult, in these times, to not bring up the general aesthetic shortcomings of humans as a whole.
Rain drops strike my top tuft. A decision is required. I take it all in with a deep breath of Ohio air. I take it all in and hold it, inscribing a full sense memory. Only when the completed nub drops into my back pouch do I act. I reach down with my non-coffee holding middle arms and stretch out the atavistic gliding membrane unique to my federated clan. The winds of the advancing storm carry me onto the porch. Her expression changes. Either she sees that there is so much more to me or she really wants the coffee I hold out to her, still steaming.
I can’t know what’s behind her eyes as I can the tears out front. I reply in kind. She grabs one of my elbows and pulls me into the house with her; it looks to be one hell of a storm. I pull the door closed behind us.
This is how it begins.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Mar 14, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
They had been walking for weeks. They could easily pick their destination at night, or rather avoid a destination from the bluish glow low on the horizon that signalled a radioactive crater where a city once lived.
They were hungry, very hungry. The two men were perched atop a barren ridge overlooking a small town in a valley below. One of the men glassed the town through the Leopold scope mounted atop his H&K 91.
“Bill, what do you see,” Ronald Jenkins asked in a whisper.
“Nothing, the town’s abandoned. I don’t see anything moving, no cars, no people… What the hell?” Bill Gaines dropped the rifle and retrieved his binos for a better look.
“What is it? What do you see?”
“The circus is in town.”
They made their way down the ridge. After a hike that left them both exhausted and famished, they stood before a red and white striped circus tent that had been erected in what was presumably the town square.
“Creepy, ain’t it,” opined Ron, “where’s the sound of people, children laughing, animals?”
Bill scowled. “Let’s see if there’s anything to eat.”
Inside the tent, though the animals were long gone, the smell lingered upon the air. Little food was to be found. Popcorn lay crushed in the footprints of quickly departing patrons. Here and there lay the rotting remains of candied apples.
“Not much here, I guess they took whatever… did you here something,” Bill asked cocking his head to one side. “It sounds like…”
“Someone crying,” Ron finished.
Towards the far end of the tent, in the direction of the mysterious sound, a flap hung partially open revealing a smaller space within. “Let’s go,” Bill whispered, slipping the safety of his rifle off.
In a small addition to the big top, they found a man, a clown actually, sobbing uncontrollably. His heavy tears had caused his makeup to run terribly, giving the two the unrelenting combined feelings of revulsion, disgust, pity and a need to defecate that only a clown can engender in a human.
“By the ghost of Emmett Kelly… AN AUDIENCE,” the clown exclaimed jumping up and embracing the men, leaving red and white smears on their ragged clothing.
“Get off,” Ron growled, shoving the pathetic jester to the ground.
“I’m so sorry, it’s just that I haven’t seen another person in weeks. I’m so lonely.”
“What happened to the rest of the freaks,” Bill asked, trying to shake off the clown as it desperately attempted to attach itself to his leg.
“They left Sir, they left as soon as the bombs began falling.”
“Why didn’t you go with them,” Ron asked, kicking the clown in the stomach in an attempt to dislodge it from his companions leg.
“Ooooofff! They wouldn’t let me on the bus Sir. They hated Chancre they did Sir.”
“Wait, Chancre the Clown?”
“That’s me Sir.” He honked his nose twice for emphasis.
“C’mon Bill, let’s get out of here.”
“Please Sir, take Chancre with you.”
“Get the fuck off my leg or so help me I’ll kill you.”
“That’s just what they said Sir.”
The rifles report was deafening within the canvas confines of the small enclosure.
Later that evening, Ron and Bill had made camp and were eating a short distance outside the little town.
“Give me another piece, will you Ron?”
Ron cut a strip of meat from the joint spitted over the cheery fire and handed it to him on the point of his knife. As Bill chewed thoughtfully, he asked, “Hey Ron, does this taste funny to you?”
by submission | Mar 13, 2011 | Story
Author : David Bastin
“Why,” asked the Captain, “have the engines all stopped?”
The Chief Engineer grinned. “You never were a man to ask an easy question?” he said.
The Captain raised his hand and repeated himself.
“Why, he asked, “have the engines all stopped?”
The Chief Engineer chewed thoughtfully on his thumb. “Forces,” he observed, “vary as the square of the distance between them and light is a constant ….”
The Captain raised his hand again.
“Why, exactly” he asked, “have the engines stopped?”
***
“Similars,” said the engineer, “pull apart.” He cupped one hand and swirled the index finger of the other one around it.
“Tensions,” he said, “translate into angular momentum and things shrink.”
“And we know,” he said, “ that implosions go exponential at the Omega Barrier.” He spread his arms wide.
“Poles,” he explained, “go to unity, and at the geomorphic horizon, space-time inverts ….”
He punched one hand with the bunched fist of the other.
“And that,” he declared, “is where and when it happened!!”
The two men studied each other.
***
“Why,” asked the Captain, “have the engines all stopped?”
The Chief Engineer spoke with sure and certain confidence.
“Because,” he said, “something broke!”
