by submission | Jan 23, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
“Space is… so vast, so empty, so cold… anyone who has experienced it must desire confinement, fullness, warmth…”
The Greatest Lover of Space (TGLoS) speaks but the words, filtered through the protective arrays of my specially constructed spacesuit, become little more than a series of data points.
“Early on, I became a starship captain. Some fiction I had enjoyed as a child convinced me, incorrectly as it turned out, that this was the quickest route to love in space. A captain’s life, alas, is not a lover’s life. The responsibility of command proved oppressive (pressing concerns are the enemy of love). There were also the difficulties of managing an entire crew in love with their single captain (chronic in-fighting, zero esprit-de-corps). I gave it all up, I had to. I became more of… a drifter.”
My suit, I realize, does not offer complete protection from the allure of romanticized narrative. Mere content seems unlikely to overpower me, however. I press on. Boldly, I ask TGLoS about one of the more inevitable consequences of love in space: offspring.
“Oh, there have been some, perhaps many. The first that come to mind were the Albuntians. Those I birthed myself, not realizing that the rather invasive love of their species would leave me with a crop of youngsters growing just below the skin of my forearms. While the birthing was an incredibly painful process, it endeared me to the little ones all the more. The Albuntians love only in season and my little ones were born out of season. They left on the first cargo ship out of port. They don’t write but I often wish they would. There are rumors of other children which I cannot be completely sure of, owing to the distortions of space/time. If they do exist, it is likely that one of them will one day take my place as The Greatest Lover of Space.”
Noting these facts, alongside reminders to follow up on some of the rumors mentioned, I ask about any specific experiences, events, or happenings that stand out in the mind of TGLoS.
“Once, for what I was later told was a period of three months (time did not pass for me) I was taken into the living body of an Ilgesian firque. By turns I was partially digested and then rejuvenated. There was something mythical about it all. I imagine that I would still be there had a scruffy group of space poachers not intervened. I didn’t hold their interruption against them and even managed to love two of them before hot-blooded in-fighting claimed them both. I rode back to civilization with their robotic accompaniment, a poacher-bot all but immune to love. Our eventual parting was so poignant that the poor droid’s circuits were entirely blown. It stands at our place of parting even now, a somewhat eternal monument to love.
Having enough data to file my report (and a rapidly depleting suit battery), I thank TGLoS and rise to leave. In doing so, my suit catches on the rough corner of my chair, tearing a small hole. TGLoS is at my side immediately, asking me if I am injured (I had let out a bit of a squeal as the tearing was taking place). I make assurances that I am fine but somehow a lone finger finds its way into the tear, probing gently. My suit compromised, my head already swimming, I cannot help but be loved by The Greatest Lover of Space.
by submission | Jan 16, 2011 | Story
Author : J.D. Rice
Discovering how to travel forward in time had been easy. Scientists had been experimenting with the accelerator for decades, perfecting safety limits, performing animal testing, making it ideal for human use. Set a dial, flip a switch, and a human being will be frozen in time until a set date. They even worked it out so you would continue to move along with the Earth through space.
The real trick, we knew, would be traveling backwards through time. Accelerating someone to the point of time freeze was simple enough. It followed the standard rules for relativity. The faster you move, the slower time passes. All we had to figure out was how to remain stationary and safe. But traveling backwards? That was a whole different can of worms. It raised questions about string theory and temporal paradoxes.
They told me it couldn’t be done, not in a thousand lifetimes. So I decided I’d just skip ahead to when it could be done and prove them all wrong.
The process was simple enough. The accelerators were getting ready for commercial use, to freeze people with serious illnesses until a cure could be found, so it was easy enough to procure a testing unit. I took it home, set the dial forward by a thousand years, and hit the switch. Protocol said that when they discovered my body in the accelerator they had to put it in storage until the thousand years were complete. The capsule’s outer shell would protect me from major wars. The external censors would delay my unfreezing if the atmospheric conditions around me were unsafe. Only the destruction of the Earth itself could keep me from waking up.
And so it was that I found myself on this strange new world. I woke up, feeling fresh and excited, and took my first breath of that oxygen-heavy air. The sky was dark, lit only by two pale moons and cluster of unfamiliar stars. The ground had a dusty, copper tint. The only vegetation were twisting, tangling blue vines.
Checking my chronometer, I found that I had been in temporal acceleration for over ten billion years. The Earth must be long gone. Destroyed by our dying Sun. Maybe even destroyed by humanity itself, a thousand years in my future, ten billion years in your past.
You found me disoriented and confused, barely surviving on the bitter fruit growing from those blue vines. Mad with loneliness, I welcomed your assistance with open arms. I’ve subjected myself to your tests. I’ve told you all I know about how I got on your planet. I’ve answered every question you have thought to ask me these last fifteen years. Now please, answer one of mine.
How do I go back in time? How do I get home?
by submission | Jan 14, 2011 | Story
Author : Thomas Keene
“So,” the diplomat said, “is our offer acceptable to the people of Earth?”
I held my face in my hands and said nothing. The young lieutenant on my right, sat back down with another cup of coffee. The soldier standing on my left shifted his stance uneasily.
“This is a lot to… Can I ask you a few questions again?”
The diplomat twitched a tail, but said nothing.
“You’ve been surveying Earth for decades? That’s how you speak English?”
“Affirmative.”
“And right now some alien space-pirates, or the equivalent, are hurtling towards Earth faster than light, and they’re due in a couple of hours?”
“We estimate they will take action in one hundred and fifty-five minutes. If they commence with hostilities, you can expect enslavement and…”
“Right, right. And you’re offering to help… With only half a dozen of you and one small ship… You’ll help by broadcasting a distress call to the Galactic Something-Or-Other, and the space pirates will run away before a peacekeeping force shows up to arrest them for exploitation.”
“Yes. Our asking price is five percent of your country’s yearly gross product for the next century, with the stipulation that no more than twenty-five percent of any good be demanded. You understand the time-sensitive nature of this predicament. We would have contacted a more appropriate leader from your country’s executive branch, but our atmospheric engines are very slow.”
A soldier passed me a memo. I crumpled it up before my eyes had finished it. Still no word from command. Phones, radio, Internet, all dead or jammed everywhere. Space pirates go for communications first, apparently.
“If it will persuade you of our goodwill, we will let you know that we are risking our own lives. The liquid assets and sophonts on our ship exceed the value of your solar system and civilization by two orders of magnitude. We are a tempting target for criminals, and we must either hide or run regardless of your decision.” The diplomat blinked for the second… No, the third time since we’d started the discussion.
“Right… And as a local authority, by your laws, I’m a representative of my country. And if I agree, it’s like everyone in the government approved it unanimously.”
“Correct.” The diplomat blinked again.
I leaned forward. “So what happens if I say, ‘yes,’ and you help, but then Congress doesn’t ratify it?” The lieutenant next to me half stood up as if she was going to protest, but then thought better of it and went to get another coffee.
“Well… For breach of commercial agreement, standard precedent is to exact one hundredfold as the injured party sees fit.”
I nodded. I hate politics. I hate meetings. I hate being up at three in the morning.
“I’m sorry, but I’m unable to decide due to my low rank. Please help us, we will be very appreciative and try to recompense you with trade agreements or mining rights or something, but I can’t promise anything. I’m sure you understand.”
The diplomat nodded, lowered itself to the ground, and gracefully padded out of the conference room. My eyes hurt just walking it walk on five legs.
The lieutenant turned to me. “Do you think they’re lying, sir? Trying to set us up?”
“Lying or not, they’re only offering to send a message to some authorities, but not actually promising to help out in any way. No way I’m paying that much for a collect call!”
by submission | Jan 13, 2011 | Story
Author : Carter Lee
What happened to your future? We’re it. We, men from the future, have kidnapped you the day before you were going to make your ground-breaking new invention known to the world. We’ve taken the invention itself, and every scrap of paper and every shred of information about your process, and we’re gonna keep it. All of it. And, this is the good part, we’re going to remove not just all memory of your invention from your brain, but make it impossible for you to ever stumble down the mental path you’d need to follow to recreate it.
It makes us sound like Republic serial villains, doesn’t it?
Of course, the Ape with the Brain of a Robot, our leader, knows the repercussions of your little machine would have led to an unacceptable level of upheaval and collapse, along with all the death and suffering such things entail.
Food for thought.
That’s where the future you wanted went. The jetpack, the ones that maimed and killed thousands in the future, we made it disappear. We dropped agents into every year of this century, and they built up automobiles and air transport, along with the infrastructure to support them. And jetpacks faded into dream, only remembered by lovers of musty science fiction.
Weather control. Personal laser guns. All those crazy airplane designs. Dirigibles. We took them all away. The easy way, like this. We stop you, and whatever like-minded inventors might follow a train of thought similar to yours, from following through. We come here, remove your life’s work, everything connected with it, including your memory and some of your ability to reason, and then we go forward and look in the history books to see if any of them still mention you. Your singular contraption will be displayed in the Museum of Unreal Inventions.
The first removal I took part in, we saved the entire world. All by this, what I’m doing to you, happening to another genius with no common sense. I’m going to make the modern house as clean as clean can be, this clever fellow thought, and came up with a living floor covering. A live rug, that would digest any dust or dirt that settled in it for too long. Its excretions? A scent of your choice.
Do you have any idea how many dead skin cells are in household dust?
By the time it occurred to someone that walking on something that was subsisting on your very flesh was not the best of ideas, we’d already lost. The rug-things had discovered they liked the taste of human. One of them found that they could produce a scent that was a soporific for us. Made us just want to lie down, spread ourselves out, and feel good. It was the most merciful way of killing a person I’ve ever heard of.
The cities were overgrown in days, but the things, although it might have been just one big thing by that time, well, they hit their stride when they got to open country. Places to root, soil to drink from, animals to lull and consume, they just spread and spread and spread. A huge, crazy-quilt blotch spread over the Bavarian countryside, growing visibly even when viewed from space.
The uninfected areas of the world were arguing their way towards doing something when Pakistan went silent. Cambodia dropped away. Kenya vanished, followed by New Zealand, all of Southern Africa, Taiwan, Peru, the Pacific Rim, the North American Union. Separate outbreaks. Projections indicated that the death of the last human would run neck and neck with the death of the entire ecosystem.
So we dropped back to the proper year, and made it all go away. We don’t solve the problem, we make sure the problem never needs to be solved. Not removing the mistake from existence, but removing it from ever having existed.
For what it’s worth, I’m sorry we have to do this. Your breakthrough would have made you a name for the history books, in many different ways. But, for the sake of 120 Billion people forward of us, I’m more than willing to cast you into an uncertain future. You’ll still be a genius, after all.
You won’t remember any of this, just like all the other times we’ve met and I’ve done this to you. You just can’t seem to stop with the world-shattering inventions. Three more of these and we give you a neat tattoo you’ll never know how you got.
Well, time to get to it. This is gonna hurt like hell.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Jan 10, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Battles in space aren’t the cool atmosphere bound dogfights of the twentieth century that are still depicted in movies. Battles in space are a matter of orbital mechanics, patience and stealth. Real fighters aren’t streamlined, sexy, sleek affairs. The are ugly little craft bristling with pointy things and energy damping Tesla generators to counter detection as well as retaliation. More than anything else, a fighter looks like a pissed off porcupine.
My last kill was simple enough. Her presence had been betrayed not by my sophisticated detection system, but by a glint of sunlight reflected to these low tek eye bulbs of mine. I dove straight towards the Allied fighter. As she turned to engage, I kicked over in a somersault, and let loose with a quick flash of laser fire to her cockpit, followed by a swift plasma burst to her engines.
Just like that, she was dead. If her atmosphere hadn’t already escaped, she was still adrift.
Dead either way.
“White One Bravo, this is White One Victor, Over.”
“Bravo here, Vic. What’s up?”
“Allied scout just off the northern shore. Threat eliminated. Sending grids now.”
“Keep your eyes open. I don’t have to tell you, if you see one…,”
“…there are a hundred you don’t see. Right. I’ll scout around. See you soon.”
Most of the pointy bits on a fighter are reaction thrusters. To make yourself a harder target to hit, you engage the thrusters in a random pattern. The effect is not unlike a stoned cat in room filled with parakeets.
Just as my craft began lurching like a Philipino prostitute when a ship’s in port, I heard something. Or rather sensed something.
“Shit.”
It’s impossible to feel motion inside a T shield, but I knew I was dead in space. My engines were cut. Why? Then I saw her. A new ship. One I’d never seen before, though I recognized it for what it was. A lethal matte black craft boldly flying the Allied insignia. She spun like a top as she sidled over to me. She looked me over before winking out.
“White One Bravo, This is White One Victor.” No answer. My comm was knocked out. I punched the comm over to record.
“To anyone who retrieves this message. They can counter our evasive pattern by duplicating it and apparently firing while shielded. Sort of like a flechette grenade. Watch out guys.” I switch off the comm.
Well, she missed my cockpit so I still have air, but she holed my engines and whacked my comms. I am adrift.
Dead either way.
