by submission | Dec 15, 2010 | Story
Author : Steven Odhner
Charles is scared, which is understandable. If I had to guess I would say that in his head he's attempting to dial the police right now, over and over, even though I've blocked all transmissions. The lab has to be heavily shielded for my experiments, the fact that it helps with this kidnapping is just a happy coincidence. The tiny jerks of his eyes stop and he focuses on me.
“Walter… please. You need help. Don't do this. Don't kill yourself.”
I have to smile at that. “I'm not trying to commit suicide, Charles – although it's true that the machine will destroy the planet upon activating whether it works or not. So, yes, there's at least a ten percent chance that I'll kill myself… but those odds are acceptable. I have one shot for this, one chance to meet my maker. In one way or another I'll be walking in the footsteps of God.”
The reaction will begin at the core of the planet, if I've done everything correctly, and just before it tears the Earth apart I'll be flung backwards in time. Impossible, according to all my peers. Insanity, according to Charles. He's trying to get my attention again, encouraged by my mention of God. I've avoided his religious debates in the past, but here at the moment of destruction I see no reason to hold back. I take the double-crucifix pendant from his neck and snap the chain. “This? This is a lie, Charles. There is no afterlife, no soul.”
“There is a God,” he says, “and you can turn to Him! Walter, God loves you and wants…”
His voice dies off as I point the gun at him. I will enlighten him, but I don't have time for debate. The device is nearly ready.
“Before the big bang, there was only God. God was without limits and without time, and was one with Himself. God knew that nothing could exist while He did, because God was all and all would be God. And so He chose to die, to explode and cast His body into the universe we know. Time and Space are the corpse of our dead creator, and we are maggots crawling within. You say there is a God. I tell you there is not, and the proof is all around you. Look upon His scattered remains and weep in mourning and in joy. You foolishly ask me to enter into a relationship with Him, but the truth is that God is a mother who died in childbirth – He never met us, never knew our thoughts or wrote books to guide us. All we can do to know Him is to look at what is left behind, the laws of physics that he used to commit suicide.”
I step into the chamber. The reaction is already building, the Earth eating itself from the inside. The readings are excellent. Charles is screaming something, but I can't hear him over the machines. They all told me it was impossible. But they never thought large enough. They need to go to a time without time, a point where no physics yet exist to say what can and can't be done. I'm going to meet God, right now.
—
For a timeless instant God is aware of an arrival. He notes the relevant information: Elapsed time, 13.82 billion years. Complex DNA present. Method of termination? Pre-event time travel. And God saw that it was good. God ponders Himself, and resolves to try a 0.005% higher matter/antimatter ratio for attempt number 497.
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by submission | Dec 12, 2010 | Story
Author : Nathaniel Lee
“Good morning, Tibbs,” Rasa said. She said it every morning, even when there wasn’t a morning. If she hadn’t stopped when Tibbs left, why stop when there wasn’t a sun to rise? Rasa rolled out of the bed, sinking too deeply into the foam and the overlarge depression in it. Tibbs liked it soft. After a quick rinse, Rasa squeezed through the corridors to the bridge, where the dispenser gave her hard-boiled eggs and sausages. Rasa only ate the eggs. Sausages were something Tibbs liked.
Rasa lived on a haunted spaceship. She didn’t have to. She could have told the computers to fix it, to clean it up, to erase it, but she didn’t. Rasa let the spaceship stay haunted. The computers didn’t care. That was why Rasa liked them.
In the too-large chair at the navigation center, Rasa did her best to keep things on course. She’d just done the jump yesterday, so it was another six days of deceleration before she’d reach Pendergast and deliver yet another cargo. Mostly data, these days. Shipping wasn’t profitable unless you had a far larger ship than she and Tibbs could have afforded, and the money for a license and a scanner and certification. People were nervous about contamination. And so Rasa was sitting behind an enormous jet of heated particles, watching the blueshift fade, riding on what amounted to a giant metal mail bag. A haunted mailbag.
Rasa squirmed in the space meant for Tibbs and called up a view of the stars ahead. She wondered how many of them were burned out already, light from dead stars. “I’m using you up,” she told them. “Too fast now.”
She wondered what it would be like to not stop. To turn off the decel and fire up the Keppler Tank over and over and over until she ran out of fissionable material and the nanobots stopped rebuilding, just fly out into the dark spaces in between, read other people’s mail until she knew their stories better than her own. She could grow old out there, in the places between the stars, the gaps and holes left behind. She could jump back and back and back to the place where the star’s light was still new and fresh.
But she’d seen that light before. She had the tan and the scars to prove it. It wouldn’t be the same light, anyway; it would be older, light that had been around the block and seen a few things since it bounced off her skin, since it reflected in her eyes and his eyes, inches apart, in the warm dark flying through the cold dark.
The computers whirred to life. They’d hit the laser-comms from Pendergast, information beamed out five or six days ago, traveling at the pokey speed of mere light. This was new light, shaped light, light serving other people’s needs. News. Information. Connections.
Rasa watched the computer screens flicker for a long while before she reached to type in the commands.
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by submission | Dec 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Daniel Euphrat
Beginning on August the twentieth, they received a series of twelve and only twelve transmissions, one a day from deep space probe Nocturnum. This was unusual because the probe had been expected to transmit far more reports, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, over the course of its voyage. It was also unusual because the probe hadn’t been launched yet.
Said one scientist of the event, “I believe it is safe to say that either some of our calculations were in error with regards to the transmission time, or we simply had an incomplete understanding of the phenomena at hand when designing the probe’s communication device.”
Said another scientist, off the record, “See, this is the kind of thing that happens when you fuck with faster-than-light speeds.”
For astronaut George Felix, the strangest part was hearing the voice of his future self.
“I somehow thought I’d sound more distinguished after maturing a few thousand years,” he said with a bemused half-grin.
“Yeah, don’t believe what they say, George, people aren’t really like fine wine.” Edward Templeton sat next to Felix in front of a waveform projection on computer monitor, clicking back to the beginning to play the clip yet again.
“Please, for Christ’s sake, would you quit it with that thing? You’re giving me a headache.” Felix stood up and began to pace back and forth behind his chair in the tiny foam-padded sound room.
“Most old people I know aged like warm milk. Particularly my relatives. I’m sorry, is the scientific revelation of the century getting on your nerves, princess?” said Templeton, tossing a pen in Felix’s general direction without looking up from the screen.
“Oh please. We knew from the start that the tachyons were going to go back in time, we just guessed wrong on how far. The only revelation is that those dimwits at the ISA can’t make a half-decent Feynman diagram.”
“Right, right and getting a fucking message from the future is just kind of an arbitrary side-effect.”
Felix chuckled, interlacing his fingers and tapping his thumbs together. The room was quiet now except for the hum of the computer and Templeton’s mouse clicks.
“I’m still going to do it, you know,” said Felix.
Templeton did look back at him now, an eyebrow raised. “Alright, buddy, it’s your funeral.”
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by Patricia Stewart | Dec 7, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
As the comet approached the sun, trillions of trillions of Fultons withdrew from their hibernated state and joined the collective. Individually, the microscopic Fultons had no power of reasoning, merely instinctive drives to survive and reproduce. However, on these cyclic sojourns around their luminary, the group consciousness “remembered” the purpose of their existence. They were the seeds of a great space fairing race that colonized the dusty arms of this massive spiral galaxy. But they couldn’t do it alone. They needed the help of other species. But not any species fit the bill. They required a species that had the technology to reach the stars. With the help of their hosts, the Fultons could expand outward against the solar winds of other stars and plant more seeds. That was the way of the Fultons. It was why their ancestors selected comets to deliver their seeds. Comets would return to the habitable zone of a star thousands of times during its existence. Each time releasing a small percentage of their seeds, in the hope that the life on the planet was ready. If not, then maybe on the next pass. Satisfied that the time was right, the seeds nearest the surface of the comet allowed themselves to be blown into the void by the vaporizing ice. Isolated and adrift in the cosmos, they lost consciousness.
It was years before they were swept up by the gravity well of a passing planet. Over time, the isolated seeds dispersed around the troposphere, drifting aimlessly until they landed on a suitable host.
Feeding and dividing. Feeding and dividing. As the mother and its offspring continued to multiply within its host, they acquired more and more neural connections. Eventually, they became sentient again, ready to fulfill their destiny. If the host were ready, they thought, they would communicate their presence, share their collective knowledge, and transform themselves from a parasite to a symbiot. Together, the Fultons and the new host would become more than the sum of their parts. They would become partners in the great expansion. If all went well, their new hosts would move outward toward the stars, and the Fulton and her children would go with them. And in their wake, seeded comets, carrying the next generation of Fultons, would be set adrift to start the cycle anew. But, first things first, thought the Fultons. They needed to extend their tendrils into their host; Learn its language, talk to it, and reveal the great future that awaits it/them. And so they started. Fleeting images became concepts; concepts became words, and words became thoughts. But the thoughts were all wrong. Rather than embrace the Fultons, the host used vile words to describe them. “Cancer, tumor, malignant.” It followed these words with words of impending murder, “chemo, radiation, and surgery.” Why was the host resisting them? Didn’t it understand? The Fultons would share great knowledge. Why wasn’t this host listening? The Fulton’s children began to collectively scream as millions twisted and died. As their numbers dwindled, the mother cried as she slowly lost consciousness.
by submission | Dec 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Matt Matlo
Jeremy Davenport awoke in an apple orchard outside Somerville, Massachusetts, sometime in June, 12,459 A.D.. Back in the 2200’s, some genius invented the temportation machine. They used it to see into the future, and then, before anyone asked if they should, people were jumping into the machine, making that Great Leap Ahead, a million years ahead, maybe five million. A few hundred in a bank account would turn into billions upon arrival in the capital planet-city of the great galactic empire, full of humans, or trans-humans, even some semi- and post-humans. The future was their oyster.
Space travel opened up thirty thousand years from now with FTL technology. Sixty thousand later, we meet the first sentient aliens. Another hundred thousand, humans were part alien themselves and spread out across the galaxy. A million years ahead, and the cities of earth unmoored themselves and floated in the skies, just as people rewrote their DNA to grow wings, and took to the skies themselves. These images tempted us all to Leap Ahead.
Jeremy was all alone, no friends or family. Nothing but a few hundred in a bank account. Pick it up a few thousand years from now, bloated to millions of future-dollars, and he could live like a king in that super-tech wonderland.
“Look,” he said to the professor who finally interviewed him, “I just need a new start. Maybe just ten thousand years ahead?”
“Colonization of the solar system, cities on Mars, Europa, Ganymede! The asteroid belt lit up like a toroidal Christmas tree. We’ve seen it, and you’re going to love it. Just sign here, and do hurry. We’re ever-so busy this time of year.”
Busy didn’t come close. Every minute of every day, they lined up, sometimes carrying a suitcase, sometimes with only the clothes on their backs, to step through that iridescent portal.
“Why doesn’t anyone come back, you know, to visit or something?” Jeremy asked.
“Oh, good question,” the scientist answered, “We’ve seen through the time-window that backwards time-travel is invented three point five million years from now, but all the futures we observe are such that this is in fact the least interesting era in human history. Why come here when you can grow gills to see the undersea city of New Lemuria, just a million and half years from now?”
He cursed the scientist, wishing he remembered his name as he toured the ruins of Boston. The North End skyscrapers still stood, but empty, their solar windows gathering power for no one but him. He ate fruit off the trees growing in Government Center, in the hottest days wearing nothing but shoes. Finally he went back to the temportation center. With a little percussive encouragement, the machine started up and showed him the Earth flashing through a million years of future, none of it human. When they looked ahead for him, Earth still had nine billion people, but now, as he cranked the dial as far to zero as he could, it showed him no one else alive on the planet. They wanted the future so badly, no one stayed behind to build it.
He decided to stay, not that there was anywhere else to go. Maybe someone else would take the trip to 12,459 A.D., hopefully a woman, but anyone would do. This broken and empty world was no prize, but at the very least he wouldn’t be alone anymore.
