by submission | May 20, 2010 | Story
Author : Elbie Kruger
I was born on the Calcarus colony settlement, a city floating 50,000 miles from planet Earth with a breathtaking view of the solar system. Having been born in space there were perks, however there were also drawbacks. You became used to cramped spaces and the lack of privacy, having known no other kind of life, but I, unlike many of the colony’s inhabitants, could not get used to people’s desire to someday live on Earth.
I must admit it was a surprise when Calcarus Regional Administration decided I should be one of only five space colonist to qualify for a month long surface trip. I was sanctioned to attend a major medical seminar on behalf of the colony.
As a high ranking Medical Officer on Calcarus I suppose I was a logical choice. The extra credits would lift my medical rank to level 7 and also meant I would qualify for my own room.
On the day of our departure I met my fellow travelers who were all extremely excited to say the least.
They kept on blabbering about how fantastic the trip was going to be. The one girl, I think her name was Menusa, went on and on about seeing real live animals. Personally I have never seen a real live animal and the only animals I have ever seen were from documentaries about Earth. On the colonies animals were strictly forbidden. This was mainly due to the fear of animal diseases, however I can honestly say after her non-stop whining about animals that I would happily die without ever wanting to see one.
We entered the atmosphere on the dark side of the planet, which meant there was not really much to see. At least the entry was quite a rush.
Upon our arrival at the spaceport we were quickly off loaded and huddled straight to our residence via hover tubes.
The rooms did not differ significantly from our rooms on Calcarus, obviously this was excluding the fact that they were about double the size. The bed was so huge that I actually had trouble getting comfortable.
I finally gave up trying to sleep around 5 am and being ever so slightly agitated and more than a little bored I decide to explore my surroundings. At the main entrance hall of our residence there was an exit to the outside gardens. We had no gardens on Calcarus, hydroponic food plantations sure, but the luxury of gardening for fun was never an option. I decided to take a stroll through the gardens, after all I was on Earth might as well enjoy it.
As I walked outside the sun started to rise over the horizon. Hues of red, yellow and purple streamed into the sky, a magnificent symphony of light and color. I had never witnessed something so spectacular or nearly as beautiful. When the sun finally emerged I felt my heart explode with emotion. Tears filled my eyes as the warm rays of the sun enveloped my face.
I don’t know exactly how to describe it, it felt like a complete sensory overload as my mind tried to process the absolute bombardment of beauty.
All around me I could see rolling hillsides covered by the most exotic blue sky. The smell of grass and fresh air filled my nostrils as I took the deepest breath I could. It felt like the first breath of my life.
As my mind regained control of my senses, I came to a complete realization.
I could never go back to the colonies.
by submission | May 6, 2010 | Story
Author : K Clarke
As if crashing on this stupid planet wasn’t enough. Pad paced the cell, glaring through the one transparent wall at the creatures on the other side. As if having to survive for three months on this stupid planet wasn’t enough. I just had to get myself caught by the Space Invaders from the Black Lagoon. They probably think I’m the local wildlife. A mechanical arm came out of one wall, scanned up and down his body, and retracted.
I’m not edible, I promise you. I’ve got sticky bones, you’ll choke. The two aliens poked at their banks of electronics, chittering over a film one of the machines spit out. One of them left the room, carrying the film.
Ok, test results. You better not be planning to eat me. Pad rested his forehead on the window that separated the rooms. You got here in spaceships. You’re ugly as sin, but clearly you’re intelligent. Well, I am too. How do I show you I am too? The remaining alien leaned on the other side, looking towards the door. A claw tapped a slow tempo against the glass. Pad thought he recognized a pattern, and, on impulse, tapped it back.
The alien froze, then turned to peer at him. It tapped a more complex rhythm and Pad repeated it.
Yes, Lobster-face, I’m copying you. I’m smart. Come on, please. After a few more tries Lobster-face lost interest.
Not enough. I’m just imitating, parrots can imitate. I’m smarter than a bird. Ok, you’ve got patterns, you must have numbers. He tapped once, waited. Twice. Come on. Three. Four. Lobster-face tapped five. Yes. Six. Give me seven… Seven. All right, back and forth. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Yep, we’re counting. How high do you want to go?
Lobster-face called something out the door. Hey, I’m more interesting than that! Really yell, get some people in here. Fifteen. Sixteen.
Still not enough. All right, math, don’t fail me now. Pad tapped three, five, seven. Lobster-face jumped in and tapped nine. No! Pad slammed a fist on the glass. Well, odd numbers, close. You get points for trying. But we’re going for something bigger here.
Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen. Seventeen. Please recognize primes. Please recognize primes. Lobster-face tapped a hesitant nineteen. Pad gave it twenty-three. It leapt to one of the masses of electronics and began squawking into it.
That’s right. You’re going to be famous, Lobster-face. You can write a book. How I Made First Contact with Humanity. A group of aliens rushed into the room, clicking at each other and pressing up to the glass to stare at Pad. And maybe you could do a sequel, How I Then Went on to Not Eat My First Contact with Humanity. I’d like that.
by submission | May 2, 2010 | Story
Author : C. Clayton Chandler
They came out of the sky like plumes of fire, these green-skinned sickos with their saucers and their death rays shearing the air, burning atmosphere, coasting smooth and cool out of the everlasting vacuum beyond the bounds of gravity, of reality, of everything we’ve ever known or truly believed.
Hundreds of them, thousands of them, a nation of interstellar marauders gunning for our territory, trailing those torrid banners of flame to herald their arrival.
We didn’t have a chance.
Me and Jane, we grabbed the kids and ran. Away from the chaos in the air. Through the chaos of the streets.
Everyone was running. Everyone was screaming. They weren’t screaming anything in particular, really. Weren’t running anywhere in particular, either. Just moving and making noise, flapping their hands and shielding their eyes and acting like I suppose you’d expect people to act in the face of an extraterrestrial invasion.
“Daddy, what’s happening?” Debbie, clutching the elephant doll we just bought her, what, ten minutes ago? Her hair flapping away from her shoulders and tears snaking down to her chin.
“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”
I knew. Debbie knew. Everyone knew what was happening: every cheesy sci-fi movie from the 1950s had just sprung to life. Low-budget nightmares from a hundred years ago were about to walk the streets.
But instead of taking the time to explain all this, I grabbed Debbie’s hand and dragged her back to the museum, where we could huddle and hide between the stuffed wolves and elephants and lions and all the other creatures that once walked the earth. Before there wasn’t any room for them.
We thudded, bounced, crashed off bodies as we careened up the steps. Jane kept pounding my back. Pushing my back. Urging me: Please please please. Willing me forward, but it wasn’t any use. Every earthling on the street was crowded against the doors, shrieking or shouting and shoving, smashing themselves against the bottleneck, desperate to get inside, as if the crumbling marble of a natural history museum could save us.
So I scooped Debbie into my arms. I grabbed Jane’s hand and we turned to watch strange spaceships knifing the smog.
One of them zipped down to skim the street, buzzing over cars and trucks that stood panting with their doors hanging open. It stopped to hover in front of the museum, kicking light off its spinning flanks, and I flinched as I waited for the ray guns to erupt.
Afterburners whooshed. Dust clouded up. The saucer crunched down on the flash-frozen traffic. A door hissed and yawned open and an alien spindled his legs down the ramp.
He stood looking up at us with eyes big as eight balls. His head was like a gourd turned upside down. An overbite showed rows of needle-pointed teeth.
He panned the shriveling crowd with those eight-ball eyes. Those black and emotionless orbs, they swept our gray eyes and knobby faces, our snowpowder wisps of hair. They searched the coal-burned clouds and bare dirt lawns surrounding the museum. And maybe he figured it out. Maybe he guessed that this planet wasn’t worth taking anymore. That the scout reports of green fields and luscious forests were outdated. That we’d squeezed our Earth of every last mineral, every drop of fresh water, every inch of space.
That he was fifty years or so too late.
His shoulders slumped. He turned and headed back to the ship.
Like this was a wasted invasion.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Apr 28, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Herbert Quigman was not a man. Well, not a man like you and I. Oh, he had all the parts. Bi-lateral symmetry of course, four major appendages, a head with a nose, mouth, ears and eyes in, more or less, the general configuration one would expect. But the ancient saltwater that comprised much of his blood came from a different ocean, not the one in which we evolved, on a planet that circled a distant star.
However, he did share much in common with men like us. Herbert was an accursed man, for you see, Herbert was married.
After a gruelling day as an insignificant junior partner at Veeblefetzer, Blorquesuong and Goldstein, Herbert liked nothing more than the thought of retiring to his basement workshop to tinker in peace.
No sooner had Herbert donned his safety goggles and fired up his torch to complete his latest invention, when, from the top of the cellar steps came, the VOICE.
“HerrrrrrBERT! What the hell are you doing down there?”
“Nothing Dear, just tinkering with a project.”
“Myeh, myeh, myeh, tinkering with a project,” she said in that mocking tone that made his flooglesang stand on end. “Why couldn’t you be like Edith Cohen’s husband Mort? He runs a successful accounting firm you know.”
Yeah, and he’s only one shaky step to suicide, Herbert thought.
“I should have married Chaim Rosenblatt like my father wanted. `Now there’s a real man,’ my father said, `nothing like that little worm Herbert’ he said, but did I listen? Nooo, I had….”
As her hateful, nasal, tirade bore on, wistful fantasies flickered through the amateur inventor’s anguished mind. Thoughts of the peace and tranquillity that slitting his throat might bring. Drowning is a peaceful way to die, Herbert had heard somewhere.
The verbal harangue continued as Herbert plodded on, intent on completing this, his greatest invention to date. “And another thing Chaim is rich, do you hear me, rich. When was the last time I had a decent dress, or went out to dinner? Why, I am ashamed to have my friends over to this dump…”
“Honeyblossom? Could you come down here for a minute,” he called over his shoulder as he finished up and replaced a spanner to its outlined space on the wall above his workbench.
He remembered when they were first married. She was so delightful and gay. He loved to take her dancing. She used to stand on his feet, like a little blork dancing with her daddy. Now as she hauled her ponderous bulk down the flight of stairs, stairs that didn’t creak so much as scream, he shuddered at the thought of her standing on his toes.
“What do you want? You know how I hate it down here. It’s so wet, and musty smelling. Did you fart? You’re a real prize you know that? Why if I…,”
“Just hold these a moment Dear,” he said as he placed a smooth metal rod in each of her hands.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with these? Shove them up your….”
“and place this on your head,” he continued, placing a gleaming metal cap atop her thinning hair.
“I went to the salon today….”
“Just a moment Snookums,” he said as he threw a switch and adjusted a dial. There was a sharp crack, and a stifled yelp from Mrs. Quigman. She glowed as if illuminated by the noonday sun. Suddenly, she was gone, leaving just the faintest scent of ozone and a fine ash as the two rods fell to the floor.
“Ahhh,” Herbert sighed, “That’s better.”
by submission | Apr 27, 2010 | Story
Author : Dale Anson
We captured her javelin just short of a light year out from Earth. Javelins are small ships, roughly 30 meters long and about 10 cm in diameter at the widest point. Eighteen javelins were launched from a rail gun on the moon six years ago. Each javelin contained a small amount of maneuvering fuel for use at its final destination, and housed the downloaded contents of the minds of 64 people.
I’d been shocked when Allison told me the news that she’d been selected for a spot on the javelin mission. Literally millions of people had applied, and the computer programs had run for several months to calculate the optimal crew. I figured I had a better than passing chance since I work as a loadmaster for Virgin, but Allison got selected, not me. Those selected would have their minds installed into a dense carbon nano-structure, capable of holding the petabytes of information that described their minds. I begged with her not to go. Allison put me off, saying this was the chance of a life time.
I took some vacation days to drive her from LA to New Mexico, where she’d catch the flight from the spaceport to Aldrin base. I worked at her, trying to convince her not to go. The computers had secondary lists, I told her, she didn’t have to go. I offered to marry her, but she was determined to go. I held her tight during our last night together.
I dropped her outside the west gate of Spaceport America, she leaned in the window and gave me a quick peck. “I love you,” she said, but I couldn’t see it in her eyes. It must have been the way the morning light cast a shadow across her face. The last I saw of her was when she stepped onto a shuttle bus headed toward the distant buildings.
Technology is funny. When the javelins were launched, it was thought that they were the only way humans would ever be able to reach another star. The javelins are small and light, and the kilometers long rail gun launched them at a good fraction of the speed of light. Nothing invented by humans had ever traveled faster, and technically, still haven’t. It turned out that there is no need to travel that fast after the scientists figured out how to do the brane-bending trick and apply it to a large space ship. I don’t claim to understand the physics, but basically, the ship generates a field that bends space so the starting point and the destination are in essentially the same place, then moves the tiniest amount to complete the trip. Snagging the javelins mid-flight was only a little trickier — bend to a location in front of the javelin, and bend back when the javelin was within the ship’s field, and repeat about a thousand times to reduce the kinetic energy that the javelin was carrying to a managable level.
It didn’t take much for me to wrangle a spot as loadmaster on the ship sent to capture Allison’s javelin. I wanted to be there, and be able to talk to her as soon as her javelin was connected to the ships computer. We’d still have to figure out our relationship, six years have gone since I last talked to her, and she doesn’t have a body anymore.
I caught my breath as the screen came to life. “Allison!” I gasped. “God, how I’ve missed you.”
Her eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. “Dammit. I thought I’d never see you again.”
