by Patricia Stewart | Mar 25, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Laredo’s tugship was idling peacefully in geosynchronous orbit. Laredo was ten screens from the end of Asimov’s Second Foundation when the LSC alarm sounded, followed by a vocal transmission. “Code 13, Sector E180D500.”
In one fluid motion, Laredo brought the main engines online and activated the comm system. “This is Sam Laredo. Please verify that a cruise ship has lost stability control only 500,000 kilometers from Earth.”
“Roger that, Laredo. But it gets worse. Its course will intersect Earth in 68 minutes. If you can’t realign the magnetic plate in 25 minutes, the ship will have to be destroyed. It carries 423 passengers, and a crew of 192. Please assess the situation and report your findings ASAP.
Lerado headed toward Sector E180D450 at full throttle. The tugship utilized conventional reaction engines for propulsion and guidance. However, for the last hundred years or so, the larger sublight vessels, like the cruise ship, rely on MASIS for their primary propulsion. MASIS is the acronym for Magnetic Amplification by Synchronous Isolinear Solenoidazation. MASIS uses large ground-based transmitters to project extremely strong magnetic fields into space, similar to a search light. The magnetic field is precisely columnated, so it only loses 10% of its strength per trillion kilometers, rather than obeying the inverse square law typical of magnetic fields. By convention, these MASIS driven ships have a 3 mega-gauss “South Pole” electromagnet plate at their stern, and a similar “North Pole” in the bow. Therefore, the ships can be pulled, or pushed, by any of the numerous Pulse Magnet Stations on the Earth, Moon, Mars, Ceres, Ganymede, or Titan. Prior to MASIS, ships needed to carry more fuel than cargo. Now, they’re almost all cargo, except for the guidance jets. But whenever the guidance jets malfunction, the ship loses alignment, and the magnetic propulsion system can’t be used to stop them.
When Lerado reached the cruise ship just outside the moon’s orbit, it was tumbling stem over stern. “Control, this is Laredo. We have a tumbler, RPM 1.82.”
“Can you get it aligned in under 20 minutes?”
“Negative. It will take at least an hour to arrest the tumble.”
“Copy that, Laredo. Return to your post. I’ll notify Asteroid Defense.”
“Whoa. We can’t just give up that easily. They’re over 600 people on that ship.” Laredo racked his brain to come up with something. “Look,” he finally said, “I have an idea. Maybe I can push it sideways while it’s still tumbling, like a baton twirler tossing a baton. If she misses the Earth, I’ll stop the tumble on the sun side, and you can pull her back using MASIS.”
Not waiting for authorization, Laredo moved his tug to the center of the cruise ship’s axis of rotation. After synchronizing with the cruise ship’s cartwheel motion, he wedged the tug’s bow into the cruise ship’s bulkhead cargo hatch. He prayed that its force field would hold, and fired his aft thrusters at maximum. Asteroid Defense monitored his progress closely, and opted to let him proceed past the Minimum Close Approach Radius (MCAR). As the swelling Earth filled Lerado’s viewport, both ships began to skirt the upper edge of Earth’s exosphere. The two ships left a wake of thin ionized gas as friction heated up their hulls. It was the longest few minutes of Lerado’s life. Finally, Earth began to recede, and Lerado started to breathe again.
“Okay, Control, we’re clear,” he transmitted. “Give me an hour to align her mag-plate. Then you can haul her in.” But first, he thought, I need to change my flight suit.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 23, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s been said that if you give a room full of monkeys a room full of typewriters, they will eventually type up a Shakespeare play given enough time.
As a philosophical exercise, there is a point to the premise. However, there are a number of factors that make it impossible as a real-world application.
First and foremost, monkeys are mortal and will die after a few short decades.
Second of all, the typewriters themselves will often break under the surprisingly strong hands of the monkeys.
Thirdly, if the monkeys bash on the keys, they will hit the same group of keys over and over again with little variation, ignoring keys on the fringes such as shift, enter, and the space bar.
That’s where my MonkeyTron tm project comes in. I have created supercomputers whose job is to spew randomly generated letters, punctuation, and spaces. By running sixty of these computers concurrently, I have theoretically created this room of monkeys.
They’ve been running for a year.
So far, we have garnered half a poem by Robert Frost, nearly two full pages from the screenplay for The Shining, a full recipe for ‘glass brownies’, the entire lyrical songbook of Avril Lavigne’s career, two paragraphs from an engineering manual, and six nonsense limericks.
One page of Hamlet showed up, gentleman. I have faith that the future looks bright. Too bright.
Ladies and gentlemen of the council, this page of Hamlet that showed up seemed to be ‘corrected’. There were only seven minor changes from the original, but it made the language seem to flow better. This is very worrying.
Worrying because it’s only been a year.
What’s even more alarming is that computer 18 has stopped including words and seems to be focusing entirely on math. It’s spouted out, amongst the gibberish, several of Newton’s laws and half of a Hawking precept.
The gibberish is disappearing, gentlemen. The computers are finding their own areas of expertise and they seem to be closing in on our own level of intelligence.
The fear is that they will start to create original pieces of written art that rivals our own. The chilling implication is that maybe our own pieces of art that echo down through the centuries are not original at all and were merely randomly generated from our own minds.
With the math robot, we’re worried that it may start to come forth with mathematical theories and physical concepts that supersede our own. What happens then? How do we publish these discoveries and who do we credit?
I am coming to you, supreme council, for a decision on whether or not to proceed.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Mar 17, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala: Staff Writer
The Crimson Dawn hung in geosynch above the besieged planet. Far out of reach of the meager defenses the primitive populous threw at them.
“Skipper, another salvo is being launched.”
Captain Dimitri Sardukar gave a bored sigh; “Viewer.” The bridge of the ship dissolved and the captain and crew seemed to hang in empty space. Even after years as a staff officer, the sudden switch to VR still unnerved him.
He watched as a seven missile volley rose from the planets surface. He watched as the stages of the chemical rockets fell away. He watched as the impotent atomic warheads spent their energy fruitlessly against the ships absorbing Tesla Field.
“Enough is enough. Ensign contact fleet. We are dropping. These savages need to know with whom they are dealing with.”
Klaxons blared throughout the ship. Armoured marines scrambled for the lifter ships. The captain himself took personal command of a lifter, and was the first to ground on the surface of the planet they had dubbed Circe.
The assault ships formed a perimeter around a massive stone complex. A walled palace. Stunned guards at the gates watched in awe as the huge marines emerged. The awe soon resolved itself into anger. They opened fire as the marines approached…
Dimitri joined his retinue of eleven men in raucous laughter as bullets impacted armour and fell to the ground as harmless lumps of jacketed lead.
“Open fire,” Dimitri ordered, growing tired of the futile display.
The detachment of guards was reduced to shapeless mounds of burned flesh under the searing blast of plasma fire. The men stormed unopposed into the massive building, followed by their swaggering commander.
The interior was one massive chamber carved from a single piece of a marble like stone. The walls shimmered with iridescent colours. In the centre of the hall upon a raised dais a huge throne stood. It was occupied by a diminutive figure, almost human in a vaguely elfin way. At the base of the platform a contingent of similar creatures stood unarmed.
“There will be no need for your crude weapons.” The diminutive being waved a careless hand and the marines were quickly disarmed by his personal guard. “Nor your armour,” just as quickly the men were denuded. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Viceroy Creed. Welcome to…,” he smiled disarmingly, “Circe.”
Stunned to immobility the men stood in rigid fear.
Outraged, Captain Dimitri Ulyov Sardukar turned on his minute tormentor, his face flushed with rage. “I command…”
“You command nothing,” the alien leader snapped viciously.
“I have ten ships…three thousand marines, trained killers ready….”
“There are no ships, there are no marines. Not for much longer anyway…,” he quietly informed the captain.
With a dismissive wave of his hand, Creed turned to his coterie. “Amusing aren’t they? Their worlds will make a unique addition to the Empire.”
“Make them comfortable for the time being. Tell the kitchen there will be twelve for dinner.”
He turned and faced the deflated Fleet Captain. “Remind the chef, I like mine rare.” He graced the men with a quick winsome smile. Rows of pointed teeth flashed wickedly in the waning light. The Viceroy turned and walked lightly from the room.
by Collaboration | Mar 11, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer and J. S. Kachelries
“Command and Control says that we will not be permitted to land,” stated Taylor O’Leary, the pilot of the return module.
Despite knowing that O’Leary wasn’t responsible for the decision, Jonathan Hartwell argued, “They can’t do that. The alien spores are dead. They can only live on Mercury.”
“Look Jon, maybe you’re right, but it’s not going to change their minds. After what those spores did to our base, they can’t risk letting us contaminate the Earth. There are over eight billion people down there, versus just two of us. Face it, we’re expendable.”
“The spores didn’t kill us. They don’t kill people.”
“It’s the universal acid they secrete. It destroys everything.”
“They haven’t damaged the module. It’s taken us three months to get back to Earth. Those damn things are everywhere. There are probably billions of then in our clothes. They’re harmless. If they were still dangerous, we’d be dead.”
“Jon, you’re a scientist. Use your head. Maybe they’re just dormant. If it turns out that they can live on Earth…” O’Leary was interrupted by an emergency alarm. He drifted over to the master panel and punched up the codes. “Damn. The reactor is overheating. Maybe those bastards are still alive. We need to move the ship away from Earth before she blows.” As the primary thrusters fired, the reactor’s coolant line ruptured and the ship began to spin out of control. Despite their best efforts, the ship tumbled toward the Earth. Moments later, it exploded.
Most of the debris burned up during reentry, but much of it, including trillions of spores, slowly drifted through the upper atmosphere and eventually into the troposphere. NASA was able to collect a few hundred of the microscopic spores using a Lockheed ER-5 high-altitude research aircraft. Testing at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta concluded that the spores had the ability to reproduce, but they were not active. After months of experiments, the scientists could not get the spores to feed, reproduce, or secrete acid. Apparently, Earth had dodged a bullet. However, the United Nations passed numerous resolutions prohibiting exploration of any extraterrestrial body until adequate safeguards were established. Eventually, the fervor died down, and most people forgot about the incident and went on with their lives.
But the spores continued to drift around the globe hoping to settle in environments that were suitable for them. No one at the CDC thought that the key factor keeping the spores dormant was the low flux density of neutrinos on Earth. On Mercury, because of its proximity to the sun, they were bathed to ten times the number of neutrinos, and they could grow and multiply. On Earth, however, there were only a few sources where the flux density of neutrinos was high enough to revive them. And, eventually, the spores found them all, one by one. They thrived in their new environments, and their populations grew exponentially. Of course, they also began secreting their corrosive fluids. At first, it was assumed that terrorists somehow managed to destroy the Aircraft Carrier CVN 76 Ronald Reagan. No one thought it was the spores, even as nuclear power plants around the world began exploding one after another.
by submission | Mar 10, 2010 | Story
Author : Bryant Pocock
“Dammit,” grunted Sam as the wrench slipped and he lost his grip, drifting slowly away from the mining craft. “Now I’m really in deep shit.” Mentally running through his options, the panicked miner came up with nothing.
The battered and stinking p-suit never came with a long-distance radio, so that was right out. Similarly absent was the fuel for his maneuvering jets or the (theoretically) Company-mandated safety tether. These he had pawned at the Company Store to pay his fare on the freighter to this lonely outpost. That left the small but efficient solar collector on his back to power the oxygen scrubbers, electric heater, and water distiller to keep him alive, floating through this asteroid field until he starved to death. Or there was always the grisly possibility that a microscopic spec of space dust, traveling faster than any bullet, would pierce a pinhole through kevlar and flesh, spewing a miniature fountain of bubbling blood and precious atmosphere at entry and exit. One way or another he would die here, floating and turning slowly, meters away from his modest habitation capsule.
Considering this possibility, he preferred suicide. Sam pondered this solemnly for several minutes, said a quiet prayer, and tugged hard at his helmet seals. Nothing. It seemed that the only pieces of safety equipment still functioning in this man-shaped composite crapcan were the vacuum-activated safety locks.
This left the pistol strapped to his side. The only non-vital piece of kit that Sam had held onto all these years, he had been wearing it since before he sold the hydro farm back on Earth and set out for the asteroids to try his luck extracting ore. “Second Amendment and all, can’t be too careful,” mumbled Sam to himself. Not that any government’s constitution held real sway in this corner of space, but Sam had lost count of how many times the old-fashioned revolver had saved him from unpleasant confrontations. Now it was once again helping him forge his own destiny.
As he drew the gun and said his prayer again, Sam suddenly remembered with surprising clarity the voice of his high school physics teacher, droning in his driest monotone, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” A smile crept over the old miner’s face. Turning the gun away from his helmet, Sam took careful aim and fired all six rounds, slowly and deliberately.
It took nearly two days, but eventually the impulse of those few ounces of lead moving at the speed of sound was enough to send Sam gliding slowly to within an arm’s reach of the thruster pod he had been repairing. He was even able to grab the dropped wrench before making his way back inside the small metal can he called home.
“Damn the Company and damn this cloud of rocks,” thought Sam out loud, banging a fist on the bulkhead. “Soon as I can, I’m getting back to God’s Green Earth. But first things first, I’m getting my hands on some more bullets.”
