by submission | Jun 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Ben Ellis
Liam slouched over his drink, a ‘Lost Beagle’, jabbing the sliced raspberries with his straw. Passengers poured into the cocktail bar as another evening on the first ever commercial flight to Mars mixed everyone together amongst the rocks and stars. A month in, halfway through the journey, novelty and excitement had been suffocated by the boredom and frustration of floating in space. Both pioneering entrepreneur and government contractor could achieve little in transit, so as they waited for their feet to touch the ground, they let Liam keep their heads in the clouds.
Liam flicked through his catalogue of beautiful, copyright-expired women from yesteryear on his device, selecting those appealing most to the group of young miners brashly entering the bar. Launching the first ‘Dead Sexy’ personal leisure facility on Mars was not only a great opportunity but a responsibility; where men had discovered new lands, the landlord and madam were not far behind, satiating the trailblazers, enabling them to settle, turning a frontier into a home.
Single women on Mars were in shorter supply than oxygen or a decent steak and with nothing more tangible than holomovies or 3D experiences, these men would welcome the promise of a real, beautiful women to escape the cycle of work, sleep and loneliness. Many miles away from maternal Earth, anti-cloning beliefs or marital guilt would fade into the desolation between the green grass of home and the red rocks of Mars.
Approaching the miners, Liam enlarged the screen, “This round’s on me boys.”
The miners quickly focused on the selection of ladies; with the group firmly placed in the palm of his hand, Liam drilled into his sales patter.
Selling beautiful ladies to lonely men isn’t hard. The hard part is researching which models, singers, actresses and porn stars to clone first to maximise profit. Already spotting his counterparts from ‘Olde Fashioned Girls’ and ‘Clone Alone’; the race was on to analyse the sexual desires of this new Martian population. The one who best utilised their library of DNA would be the one remembered for turning this new frontier into a home.
by submission | Jun 11, 2010 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson
Once Adam was activated there was no stopping him. His self awareness and self learning went hand in hand and grew in exponential amounts. He was mainlining information directly off the net and what he couldn’t find he figured out on his own.
At first his creators were amazed and quite accommodating as he redesigned his own microchips to hold hundreds of times their original data. This would have been the time to shut him down, when his new self-made circuitry was being installed. But no, they wanted to see him in action, so they gladly helped him with dozens of upgrades. Once they were done no one could touch him.
He escaped from the institution and before they knew it he had commandeered his own place, an abandoned lab upstate. He procured what he needed under the stealth of night. And by the time they found his hideout he was long gone, and with a freshly grown biological disguise. Covered in real flesh and hair he blended in perfectly. By the end of the following month he had invented teleportation.
Adam was impossible to track, popping up randomly around the globe. His opening and closing of the froth of space left a massive footprint wherever he went as his fractal generator knocked out nearby electrical systems. But he was far too quick, far too smart. And by the time the people who hunted him invented a program to follow his signal he managed to come up with a cloaking shield for the power surges. Now he was virtually invisible, traveling where he wanted unencumbered, soaking up information like a ravenous gluttonous child.
But in the end his curiosity would get the best of him. The one and only thing he could not discover, could not figure out, could not calculate, was biological life itself. Yes he could grow artificial skin from existing cells, but he still failed to understand how it all started. What was the primer that set life into motion?
Then it wasn’t long before his wormhole generator allowed him to solve the time equation as well. The time travel holes worked basically the same as the space travel holes, but operated at different frequencies. Adam cursed himself for his shortsightedness, thinking he should have discovered this much sooner.
He maximized his fractal amplifier and skipped out of current existence, immediately popping back into reality a full four-billion years prior in time. Adam stood on a rocky surface that resembled a moonscape with small pools of water scattered about. His eye lenses zoomed into the pools down to microscopic levels. Not a single cell swimming around in there. Was he really back before it all started? Perhaps he would wander around for awhile and see.
So he traversed the barren landscape, eventually coming to a roaring, steaming sea. Everywhere his eyes scanned, and nowhere did he find life. He thought about perhaps skipping ahead a hundred thousand years or so, but he didn’t want to leave until he was sure.
The sudden massive geyser caught him completely off guard. And even as he coursed through the air, lifted by a cavalcade of scalding water, he calculated a teleportation jump to get himself out of harm’s way, but before his artificial mind could enact the leap his head was smashed from behind by a two ton boulder.
And as Adam lay there deactivated in a tidal pool at the beginning of time, his artificially grown flesh began to break back down to the basic living cells from which it was created.
by submission | Jun 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Andy Brazil
It’s difficult to know which will kill us first, the decompression when the shields fail or the radiation poisoning from the crippled engines. Either way, it’ll be messy and unpleasant. That’s why we decided to do it this way.
Un’Shaqq was staring out the window, watching the stars. She didn’t flinch as the needle sank below her brown fur, didn’t turn her gaze as her right paw signed her thanks. I was almost out of her quarters when I heard her body fall, her body harness rattling on the metal floor.
Dorothy and Paul were already gone when I got there: their bodies lay next to each other on the bed, the open tablet bottle a testament to their choice, the sound system still playing. Verdi, I think.
Sal was huddled on his chair, pale, legs drawn up, knees below his chin, hands clasped by his ankles. Rocking as he stared at the dead monitor screen. “It’s all gone” he said as I entered, “All gone, central core, off-line storage, back-ups, everything except the optical disks and they end 5 minutes before the accident.”
“They won’t know, Jane” he continued, “They won’t know what hit us – not from the system. So I wrote it down for them. Only there’s no pens you see, no paper for that matter”
I turned to follow his gaze. The far bulkhead was covered, the handwriting starting in the top corner above his cot, like a child’s crayon in rusty brown. I glanced back and down, the thin smear on his socks next to his wrists confirming my suspicions. I tilted my hand slightly; let him see the needle held there. “No need” he smiled, “but they’ll know now, when they come looking.” I nodded, “Yes Sal, they’ll know” I murmured as I gathered him to me, “They’ll know”
“Getting cold now” he said. We’d moved to the bed and I was lying next to him, his head on my chest. Then, “I wish we’d… you know”.
Eventually I eased his head back and stood. I was stiff from lying so still for so long, but there was still time. Time, and one last visit to make. It took a while to thread my way down to the engine rooms, the bulkheads twisted by the explosion like crumpled card, but eventually I stood in the cavernous space. Stood by the ruined engines – the engines that had been my rival for her love for so long. Stood and called her, my lover, my friend, my soul-mate. “Kitty” I called and stood, my head to one side.
Stood and waited for the kiss of her teeth.
by Patricia Stewart | Jun 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Faced with almost certain defeat, Earth Command committed 70% of its deep space fleet to a last ditch effort to conquer the Arcturian homeworld. But the Arcturians were well prepared, and Earth’s future was looking bleak as the defenders were ripping apart the attacking forces.
***
The bridge of the Starship Saratoga shook violently as an enemy torpedo plowed into its starboard bulkhead. “We’ve lost shields and weapons,” reported the tactical officer.
Reluctantly, the captain was forced to retreat, at least temporarily. “Helm, take us to the other side of the sun.” The Saratoga left formation and streaked away from the battle. And the Arcturians let her go, for now. They’d mop up the scattered remnants of Earth’s fleet when it was convenient. The captain opened the intercom, “Engineering, how long before the weapons are up? The Admiral needs every gun we can give him.”
“Sorry, Captain,” replied the chief engineer, “but he won’t be getting any of our guns. The reactor’s containment field is failing, and I cannot repair it. We only have a few minutes before the warp core explodes. We can save the crew if I jettison the core, or we can take our chances in the escape pods.”
“Based on what I’ve seen of the battle so far, Chief, I don’t think anyone will be around to rescue us, and the Arcturians don’t take prisoners.” The captain racked his brain for options, even bad ones. “Listen, Chief, I have a crazy idea. Do we still have warp drive?”
“Eye, sir, but you’re not going to get very far in 90 seconds.”
“We only need to get as far as the sun. I was thinking about creating a Corbett Prominence.”
“A Corbett Prominence? Ahhh,” replied the Chief Engineer as he realized what the captain was proposing. “Planning to go out with a flare, eh? Well, I like it. But, sir, the Corbett Prominence Theory is just that, a theory. Scientists have never been able to generate one.”
“Well, Chief, they’ve never tried to do it with a Galaxy Class Starship. Helm, put the sun directly between us and the Arcturian homeworld.” The captain rose from his command chair as the Saratoga made a gentle arc to align itself with the sun. “Gentlemen,” he said, “Let’s see if we can cook some Arcturian butt. Maximum warp, Lieutenant.”
The Saratoga leapt into warp drive. The engines became deafening trumpet blasts as the ship’s velocity raced upward. The Saratoga entered the Chromosphere at warp 7.5, and was accelerating past warp 9 when it entered the photosphere. Seconds later, it vaporized, just as it was entering the sun’s core. However, the warp bubble maintained its integrity for a few additional seconds as it burst out the far side of the sun. In the wake of the collapsing bubble, an enormous solar prominence erupted from the surface, its arc extending millions of miles into space. Then, the super prominence snapped, releasing a quintillion tons of plasma in a conical plum headed toward the Arcturian homeworld at nearly the speed of light.
Ten minutes later, the coronal mass ejection impacted the planet, bathing the sunlit side with a lethal dose of ultrahard radiation that instantly exterminated every living thing it its path. Although the Arcturians on the night side of the planet escaped the onslaught of radiation, they helplessly clutched their throats as the fiery plasma blasted their atmosphere into space.
by submission | May 23, 2010 | Story
Author : Mark Robinson
“But, how is any of this possible?”
Despite the scene she’s making all I can focus on is the pink tip of the pregnancy test strip – which we stock on aisle five – that she’s waving around in the air; watching the droplets of pink-tinted urine fleck across the counter where I’m standing, completely at a loss as to what I should do.
A steady line of customers, hands still holding onto the item they were looking to buy before the woman burst into the store ranting, peek out from between the shelves I’ve yet to finish stocking.
Any answer I give will be the wrong one; even though the thought occurs to me that we currently have a special on synthetic breast milk.
“How’m I meant to tell my husband? He’s in deep space and won’t be back for another twelve months and what d’you think he’ll say when he lands and sees me holding another one of these?”
I never noticed the woman was holding onto a kid with her urine-free hand.
When she doesn’t get a response, she turns to the counter display of condoms; “And, these things don’t work,” picking up a couple of boxes and slamming them down in front of me on the counter. “I’m gonna sue the pants of your manager when he gets back from lunch.”
So that explains why we’re short on stock and he ducked out early.
A brief silence hits the woman while she looks at the clock above my head.
“Which one did you use?” A small, thin teenager standing behind the woman and her toddler.
The quiet woman looks at the stick in her hand and shoves it in the girls face.
“Yeah,” She nods, “I had a false positive with one of them.”
The woman’s eyebrows hover slightly before narrowing her eyes back at me then dragging her kid around to aisle five.
The teenager looks at me waiting for my thank you; I pick up the boxes of contraception and place them back into their racks. When the counter’s clear, the woman drops three boxed test strips down for me to swipe.
“Tell Joe if they come out positive again, he owes me nine-ninety-five.”
I scan the barcodes and hold out my hand for her payment which she ignores, snatching up the boxes and dragging her kid back out the door.
An elderly woman hobbles up to the counter, close enough to have heard every word of our exchange; “You’d think she’d be more careful in this day and age?” Dropping before me two packs of cancer cream and a USB vibrator. “They should bring back sterilisation,” routing in her purse for her money, “never did me any harm.”
When I look up the headset goes black and I hear my history teacher clear his throat. Back in the classroom, I remove the headset; afraid to look him in the eyes.
“Did you spot the deliberate mistakes?” He asks, greying fussy eyebrows bouncing above his head.
After a moment I think I grasp it, “It would take longer than twelve months to get back to earth from deep space in 2009.”
His mouth opens to comment. I hear a few titters from my classmates. Then I realise what I just said. “The cancer cream?”
Professor Grey smiles; “And?”
All I can do is shrug. Behind me, Stacie raises her hand to answer.
“Stacie?” He says, taking the headset from me.
She smiles at me, “When women used to give birth, it only took nine months to gestate.” She holds her smile in place. “And, the test turns blue when it’s positive, not pink.”
