by submission | Mar 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Daniel Fuhr
The haze of smoke lingered over the sharp nose and into aged eyes. Smoking on spacecraft was strictly forbidden according to regulations. Jascon owned this tugboat; he made his own rules and could give a damn about those regulations.
He squinted to try to see through the smoke covering his eyes.
A few months ago, when the space marines contacted Jascon about using his ship as a decoy and trap for the local space pirates, he scoffed at them. They explained about the local growing number of pirates, calling themselves “The Barate”, not quite pirates, not quite bandits. He rebuffed the space marines, declining to assist them.
He coughed into the smoke, the tightness in his chest making it harder to breathe.
Eventually the request turned into a demand and the space marines requisitioned Jascon’s ship, his annoyance became anger. Under the marines control his craft was turned into a by-the-book regulation ship. Then the problems came. “Not enough lifeboats”, “Unsecured instrument devices”, “Nonworking emergency backup”, “No Smoking”. That last one chapped his ass more than anything. The only way he was able to afford paying his crew the small pittance they deserved was by allowing smoking.
Struggling, he pulled in another breath, he wasn’t sure if it was his last one.
As suddenly as they came, the space marines transferred. They abandoned Jascon to a condemned ship. His craft wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough to run cargo runs anymore. It wasn’t even good enough to leave the dock the space marines placed it in. The government revoked his license and the ships registration.
So he stole it.
The foot on his chest put another ounce of pressure on his chest. The number of strangers on his bridge was uncomfortable. The knowledge that he could be killed was uncomfortable.
“So you want to become a Barate?” the rough voice came through the smoke.
by submission | Mar 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Sean Monaghan
Sid smiled as Alex handed him the separation results. One more test and they could announce. They’d known all along of course, since the first samples, but Mars Twelve operated on a government testing regime. No disclosure until verified. Too often the communities broadcast just to get the jump on other researchers, only to look like fools later.
But here was DNA, of a sort.
Spectroscopy, centrifuges, distillations. All the stuff he’d nearly forgotten in years of being administrator. Still, the results were clear. A microbe.
“Looks good, huh?” Alex said, grinning.
“Let’s wait for the second titration confirmation.”
“We’ll be opening that bottle of Taittinger you’ve been so precious with, huh?”
“Always so impatient. Did Jade and Mish come back from the site yet?”
“Nah. Something about digging a new line. They’ll miss the party. Imagine if NASA had sent rovers there fifty years back.”
Sid laughed. “Yeah, hindsight.”
Mish drew his multiprobe through the soil. “This is driving me nuts,” he said into his mike.
“Well, it’s not far to drive, is it?” Jade replied.
“Old joke, dull joke.”
He kept watching the readout on the probe. Nothing. Another line, still nothing. Well, it was better getting suit time than sitting in the bunker lab minding the centrifuge. He ran another two lines, then realised he hadn’t heard from Jade for a while. “Jade?”
Nothing.
Mish looked at the edge of the crater. “Jade? Come in.”
“Get over here, Mish.”
“What’s up?”
“Just get here.”
Sid grinned at the final results.
“Taittinger?” Alex said.
“Absolutely.” Sid clicked the press-release he’d composed weeks ago. He typed a quick couple of lines with the dates of the last tests and began the process of uploading to the server on Earth.
“Where is it anyway?” Alex said, hunting through a cupboard.
“What?” Alex’s finger hovered over the mouse key, the cursor on ‘send’.
“The bloody champagne. I can’t find anything up here.”
Mish came over the rugged crest and saw Jade crouching at a spaded hole. He bounced down the slope. “Whatcha got?” he said.
“Come look.”
Mish slowed and looked into the small pit. “Ventifact?” he said, looking at the twisted shape. But he knew it wasn’t. It looked more like a tree branch. That couldn’t be right.
He crouched and helped her scoop soil away. Excavating around the branch they exposed a joint. It was covered in a kind of lacquered felt, bonded into the main shell.
“Artificial,” Jade said.
“Well.” Mish pushed the end and the top flexed on the joint like an elbow. “From an old missing rover? Viking?”
“Moron, Viking wasn’t a rover.”
“But it had an arm.”
“Where’s your multiprobe? Let’s do a sounding.”
“You think there’s more?” He passed the probe over.
Jade shoved the tip into the soil and pinged it. She rolled out the screen and examined the grainy image.
“Jeepers,” Mish said.
There was a buried oblong shape, with wings and wheels and tracks and long and short arms. Bigger and more complex than anything NASA had ever sent up. Different too, odd shapes having nothing to do with practicality or keeping weight down. Strange.
“Alien,” Jade said. “An alien rover.”
Mish sat back on the orange soil. “You know what this means, don’t you?” He touched his wrist to make the call back to the bunker.
“A bigger discovery? Wow. Way bigger than just a microbe.”
“Except that it means that ours may not be not a Martian microbe.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jade looked at the rover’s arm. “Extrasolar.”
“Let’s hope they haven’t announced yet.”
by submission | Mar 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Liz Lafferty
“Tell me the story again, Grandpa. Did we really have automatic lights? And could you really talk to someone on the other side of the planet?”
I laughed. We huddled by the fires every night, the children always wanting to hear one of my fantastic stories of the old days.
I had a hard time believing my own version of events. It had all started simple enough. Technology that had exploded from building-size computers down to palm-sized mega-devices. Our homes were loaded with scanners that heard our voices, obeyed our commands. We were too confident in our intelligence. We’d forgotten that nature had a way of humbling us.
“All true, Jack. I had a communication device that let me talk to people in Paris, France.”
“Where’s that?”
I didn’t even know if France still existed. My world, my family’s world, centered around a cave in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We went out on raids to gather our food.
“A long way away. I was eight years old then.”
“That’s how old I am!”
“Yep. We had everything, Jack. Food, safety, warmth. It was gone in an instant.” It was gone in twelve minutes, if you wanted to set your clock by it. That’s how long it had taken the solar flare to reach Earth.
The government might have known; scientists surely had to suspect… still, all that followed had wreaked havoc everywhere on the planet.
Print publishers, newspapers, magazines had gone out of business due to more advanced online capabilities; store front banks closed up, their asset information in securitized web farms; universities and schools no longer had buildings — all learning, scoring, testing was completed via webcasts. Friends and families existed in high-def.
Everything except farming and food could be bought, traded, read, transacted online.
It had all started with global warming. We were saving Earth’s resources with our more advanced capabilities and humanitarian efforts. It seemed to be working. Politicians and scientists hailed the reports about lower carbon dioxide emissions and fewer hurricane warnings and less polar ice caps melting.
Then again, it might have all been a huge plot to pull the wool over our eyes.
“Did the sun really make it all go away?”
“Indeed it did. It was a solar flare.” I spread my arms wide as I demonstrated, wiggling my fingers in front of my grandkid’s face. “The flare shot of the surface of the sun. Its flaming fingers searching, reaching out across time and space until those hot licks touched our planet. The orbiting satellites tumbled from the sky, blazing a trail to earth like fireflies. Power grids all over the world collapsed. Radio and television and computers all sizzled and ground to a halt.”
“What happened next?”
“Without communication, without money, without contacts — governments collapsed, chaos ensued, people died.” Even I didn’t know the full extent of the catastrophe. Only a few Hamm operators got information through to us. They called it a coronal mass ejection, a proton storm. The worst ever recorded.
We never recovered; so much of our technology was lost. We were back to scavenging old paperback books for our entertainment.
I threw a stick in the fire. We watched the night sky. Aurora borealis was still spectacular, eighty years later.
by Patricia Stewart | Mar 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Vladislava Demidov and Pierre Rousseau were Space Traffic Controllers for the Alpha Centauri Tri-System. They were half way through their shift when their long range sensors picked up an unidentified ship approaching from the direction of Earth.
“We’re being hailed,” reported Rousseau. “The ship is called the CS Cornucopia. They are asking to communicate with someone called the ‘Advanced Scout’.”
Demidov entered the Cornucopia into the Starship Registration Database. “Wow,” she said, “that ship left Earth over 230 years ago. It’s a sub-light robotic terriforming ship. I guess after the warp drive was developed, we totally forgot about them. They’re a century too late. We’ve already terriformed all the habitable planets in this system.”
“What are we supposed to do with them?” asked Rousseau. “Do you think their supplies have any value?”
“I doubt anything that old is worth a single credit,” replied Demidov, “except to an antique collector.”
“Well, we can’t have that lumbering behemoth in the shipping lanes. It’s a hazard to navigation. Let’s sent it out to Probose,” suggested Rousseau. “The Aerospace Core of Engineers said that moon is a lost cause. Maybe they can make something out of it. At least, they’ll be out of our hair.”
***
“The Cornucopia landed of Probose, and the autonomous robots began their terriforming operations. However, after several decades of futile work, they concluded that the frigid moon would never be suitable for human habitation. Therefore, they contacted the humans to ask for new instructions. But once again, the humans had forgotten about them. The human they spoke with told the robots to stop bothering them because nobody cared what happened to obsolete, worthless equipment.
“Undaunted, the robots decided to fashion Probose into something that was at least more suitable for them. They also decided to reengineer their “utilitarian-centered” physical characteristics, and to rewrite their limited “homo-centered” programming. Over the next few centuries, they evolved, both physically and technologically. Eventually, they became the most advanced beings in the galaxy. When they left Probose to show the humans that they had indeed become worth something, they discovered that the humans had become extinct…”
“That’s not true, Father,” protested the young android, who was a little more humaniform than the older android telling the story. “Benny told me during our Ontology Engineering Class that we destroyed all of the humans, because they treated our ancestors so poorly.”
“Hmmm. Well, maybe we did, maybe we didn’t,” replied the older android. “But it should still be a lesson to you. ‘Don’t treat sentient beings like they are worthless.’ It’s not polite. Now, power yourself down and begin your dream cycle.”
by submission | Feb 23, 2010 | Story
Author : Phill English
Special Agent Jessy McCormick knocked gently on the door of the Director’s office. He looked up from his desk, where a large holographic display was swarming with reports that he was busy gesturing into folders, signing quickly, or dumping into a bottomless recycling bin. He didn’t pause as he addressed her.
“Yes, Special Agent?”
“Sir, we’ve just received a call from the Deterministic Energy Department.”
The Director grunted. “And? What do they want?”
“They want you to take a look at something. They say it’s important.”
The Director barked a laugh, “I’ve got an outbreak of Chaotics in the main district, over one thousand energy directives to implement, and a list of official emails that I might finish reading when I’m asleep in the grave. What could be so important?”
“They say they’ve found a cache. They said they believe it to be the biggest they’ve seen for decades. Centuries, perhaps. Sir, they said they’ve found the ‘motherload’.”
The Director’s hands finally stopped sweeping the console’s face. “‘Motherload’? That’s the exact term they used?”
“Yes sir.”
The Director was already out the door before Special Agent McCormick had a chance to ask what it meant. By the time she caught up, he was already stepping into one of the department’s cuboid transports. “Did they say where they were?”
“Yes sir. Third District, Thirteenth Iteration.”
“Thank you Special Agent, dismissed.”
* * *
The maniacal sobbing was audible as soon as the Director stepped from the transport. DED troops surrounded the entrance to the Iteration. The Chief of the DED was standing at the entrance. He greeted the Director as he arrived. “Thought you might like to see this before we set the boys loose. Not every day you get a cache like this.”
“Who’s the owner?”
The Chief consulted his display. “One Mrs. Narelle Williams. She’s the noise you can hear. Totally deranged. Keeps screaming that her boy will be coming home any minute now. The room is his apparently, perfectly preserved.”
“Is he here?”
“Records show he died in the riots three years ago. Hardcore Chaotic.”
“Good. Less ownership issues. May I?”
“Go ahead.”
The Director ducked down into a room hidden by a false bookcase. This was old tech, probably put in place in the final days before Order was imposed. As he descended the final steps and turned to inspect the space, he was dumbstruck. It was quite a small room, perhaps five square metres, but what it lacked in size it made up for in clutter. Mangled sheets cascaded from a bed that was half buried in an assortment of sex mags and political books. Any of the stained carpet that may have once showed through was covered by food wrappers, clothes, and moldy tissues. The shelves were lined with action figures and the walls practically hidden by a layering of posters. The finishing touch was provided by a pair of filthy underpants hung from a ceiling fan.
The Director whistled. The DED had their work cut out for them. Restoring Order to this mess would yield enough energy to power the District for years.
