by submission | Mar 3, 2009 | Story
Author : Eric L. Sofer
Humanitarian, Not Vegetarian
We were assembled for the yearly Meal of Thanks, and we had imported food, delicacies from Earth. Dad gets it through his job; he works for a corporation that does space exploration. About forty years back, they found this planet, Earth, and its inhabitants, Humans, and it turned out that we can eat Earth food. I don’t like it, but the rest of the family loves it – and it was what we having for the Meal.
I was helping my mom with appetizers, preparing Spanish peanuts and Brazil nuts. I was more than happy to be in the food prep chamber because Great-Uncle Goje joined us this year. Dad said Uncle Goje was actually born on Earth, but I don’t know if I believe that. Dad says a lot about Earth that must be fabrications. Example: he says Earth people live in square constructs called “buildings” instead of caverns. How could someone want to live in a fake cavern?
I brought out the snacks with a spon for each bowl. My stupid little brother was hanging on Uncle Goje’s every word. The old beast was going on about how he had been on Earth long before we ever landed there, and he wanted to live in peace, but there wasn’t anyone on Earth like him. Except for his old friend, “Mr. Cong” – “…and they treated him like a king, I tell you!” Uncle Goje sputtered.
I settled down to suffer when mother came out. “Hope everyone’s hungry! There’s plenty of Earth food Earth tonight!” My mother had worked overtime this year – to make my dad happy, I think. After the Observation of Silent Gratitude, Dad had to name every single thing, as if he personally had gone to Earth, caught everything, and prepared it.
“That’s Virginia ham, that’s Canadian bacon, those are French fries and Idaho potatoes, and these are called Brussels sprouts,” he said, pointing at each container. “English muffins, Belgian waffles, Hungarian goulash, and Elle, this is called Irish stew – I bet you’ll love it!” he said to me. I thought he’d probably lose that bet, but I showed respect – it [i]was[/i] the Meal of Thanks. My stupid brother, picked up something from a bowl – I think Dad called it Swiss cheese – and started to pop it into his mouth.
“Aarg!” my mother hissed at him. “You remove the stasis field from that or you’ll get sick as a spinner, and I’ll have to take you to the med center!” Aarg stuck one of his tongues out at her when she turned away and used his spon to remove the stasis field, and stuffed the wriggling bit of food into his maw.
As predicted, the family dined with gusto, while I just toyed with my food. At last, Uncle Goje leaned back in the special split back chair we have for him, to accommodate his back spines, and asked Mom, “’Thra, my dear, do you mind if I smoke?”
She sighed and nodded, and Uncle Goje puffed out three rings of smoke, and then ignited them with his breath, and I took my cue. “May I be excused to do homework, Dad?”
“Go ahead, Elle,” he answered. “And Aarg! Stop playing with your food!”
My little brother lifted a claw as a small piece – I think it was a German rye – screamed and struggled as Aarg grabbed it with his fangs and gnawed it to pieces. I ducked down the corridor into my chamber, and into my slime pit.
I don’t care what the rest of my family says. I hate Human food.
by Sam Clough | Mar 2, 2009 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
We stole the blinkpacks from the research facilities at Ceti Alpha. Stable displacement technology, suitable for individual use. We sealed the holes in our assault armour and slapped on the packs: suddenly we could step through walls and down corridors, infiltrating past sentries and guards and turrets with ease. You could even rig a spare pack to act as a bomb: find something big, displace it into something bigger. If you squint, an overlap detonation looks a lot like a nuke.
From there, we blinked around the perimeter worlds, looting, stealing, hoarding all the high technology and research material we could find: and what we found shocked and horrified us. The colonies were so far ahead of the core worlds that some of them had ceased to even resemble humans. Halfman recombinations with terran or alien stock, populations translated entirely into a digital form or living out in the open under a half-klick of liquid methane.
We blinked out as far as we could; we found terror. Machines. Of arguably human origin. Some even still bore ancient factional flags. There were hundreds of millions of them in every system we checked. Half our men didn’t return, and most of the rest never left again. We dug in the archives, and the libraries; we even unearthed a few buried data centres to find out who to blame.
These were clanking replicators, skewed by thousands of generations of isolation from intelligent guidance. They replicated out of control, torching systems and turning the rubble into more of themselves. One advance party discovered a strain that spent the resources of entire planets to extinguish stars in one shot.
We figured out a plan. It was our only hope of long-term survival. No-one could see any other way. We knew we’d be remembered as monsters, but in the grand balance, we thought that it would be better that someone was there to remember us at all.
We committed grand and unholy sabotage across the thousand worlds. Shocktroops equipped with blinkpacks teleported deep into power stations, factories and defense relays, breaking and fusing and detonating. Navies were brought down in port, armories reduced to useless scrap. We left a thousand worlds without a single communication array or functional ship.
Quickly-assembled arrays folded space, and our navies appeared in colonial orbits. Purification-yield nuclear devices, biological warfare agents and cleansed the hundred worlds we needed. The engineers of the core worlds were flung to these hundred barren wastes, and were set to work. All the while, our fleets tore through the perimeter worlds, conducting a campaign of total annihilation: the might and fury of old humanity, rage driven by our history, our twenty-four thousand years of hatred, violence and war.
We didn’t understand the science, but we certainly understood the engineering. We turned those hundred worlds into the triggers for a giant chain reaction that would wipe out a reasonable portion of our cosmological back yard; isolating the core worlds with a rift of space washed clean of matter. This was our firebreak, our last best hope of survival. We doomed two hundred and fifteen billion people for the sake of thirty billion.
Was it worth it?
I don’t know.
by submission | Feb 28, 2009 | Story
Author : Dr. Alexanders
Hundreds of years of exploration, trillions of dollars into research on space travel, all culminating in the single most astounding and miraculous discovery in all of human history, and the only tangible result of that effort was the Unity Dome. Gerald shook his head as he walked through the padded corridor that cut across the barren surface of the moon, “Seems like a waste to me”.
His companion was noticeably more enthusiastic. “I can’t believe I was selected for the fifth viewing! I mean, you were there, the first to make contact but I almost had a heart attack when I got the hyperwave. It’s been such a rush. First class flight from Europa, a suite in the Tranquility Hilton! God above, I can’t believe I am this lucky!”
Gerald bristled at the unbridled enthusiasm, “Look, man, you don’t know what you are talking about. Like you said, I have done this before! It’s nothing to look forward to.”
Cameron seemed not to hear him, “A chance to watch an alien play, to see how they think and feel. An opportunity to view a mind so different than ours that communication is basically impossible! And it only happens once a year! Aren’t you excited?”
Gerald took a moment to remember how it had started. Humanity had been visiting alien worlds for almost a thousand years and discovered the galaxy to be a barren and boring place. Occasionally some rock would have pools of water on it and maybe some bacteria or some microscopic shrimp-like creatures, but nothing intelligent. The galaxy was nothing more than an empty space suitable for mining, dumping, and esoteric research. He had been hauling a load of toxic waste with a three man crew out into the middle of nowhere. Who would have thought that would have bought him a place in the history books? As the one manning the cockpit, he had seen it first, the smooth, black sphere hovering mere feet from their bow.
After that singular moment of elation, things had quickly gone downhill. Millions of minds had bent their efforts towards communication with the aliens but there were just too many differences. As far as anyone could tell, the aliens were just as confused and frustrated as they were. As beings of mostly light and energy, though they did have an organic core, they seemed to communicate through flashes of electromagnetic energy, in the visible through the microwave range of the spectrum, but no one could make any sense of it. At some point, Dr. Vandrashir had come up with the idea of the Unity Dome, and somehow had managed to communicate its purpose to the aliens, or at least we thought he had. And now, once a year, they came to the moon and met with humanity.
Cameron took Gerald’s long pause as an opportunity to ask another question, “Do you know what we are performing this time?”
Gerald was started out of his remembrance, “Oh… King Lear, I think. Who knows what they’ll make of that. Just remember that afterwards, when they take the stage, to put on your goggles. Otherwise the radiation they emit will blind you. Even with them on it’ll probably just be a confusing hour of flashing lights and low moaning, it just gives me a headache.”
Cameron didn’t seem to hear him, and as he stepped through the threshold at the end of the corridor into the darkness of the performing hall he said, “God, this is going to be the most exciting moment of my life.”
Gerald wished he could have shared his enthusiasm.
by Patricia Stewart | Feb 20, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
I was heading toward the Bridge along Deck 12 just aft of the Station 114 Bulkhead when I heard, sorry, felt, the explosion. The shock wave knocked me into the starboard hullplate, but I managed to remain standing. I felt a rush of air flowing toward the stern of the ship, followed by the breach alarm. I knew that I only had a few seconds until the vacuum pressure doors sealed off the compromised sections of the ship. I took three long strides and dove head-first past the bulkhead just as the automated safety doors slammed shut. Had I been a few feet further away I would be dying a horrible death as the vacuum of space ripped the air from my lungs. Of course, depending on the damage to the ship, I may still die, but I figured that I had a better chance than the 200 or so crewmen on the wrong side of that bulkhead.
I rushed to the Bridge. As I entered, the captain was coordinating the structural integrity assessment with the ship’s Chief Engineer. Commander Cox was coordinating the search and rescue operation. As First Lieutenant, my job was to assist the commander.
“Ah, Lieutenant Oliver,” said the commander, “We thought we had lost you. Glad you’re still with us. Listen, the only vessel we have forward of the sealed off sections of the ship is the captain’s yacht. I need you to fly six shuttle pilots and medical teams back to the aft launch bay and transfer them to the shuttlecraft. They’ll dock to the exterior hatches in the damaged sections and look for survivors. You start docking with any personal escape pods that managed to eject. You don’t have much time. We’ll have to jettison the engine compartment before the warp core explodes. You have less than two hours.”
As the yacht passed along the hull of the Indomitable, I could see a gaping hole where the propulsion section used to be. It was venting plasma. I blasted open the flight bay doors to gain access to the shuttlecraft. I transferred the pilots and medics and we began rescuing the survivors. After 90 minutes, the commander ordered us away. “We’re losing the containment field, gentlemen. We need to sever the ship at the 128 Bulkhead before the core blows. All rescue craft back off 5000 klicks.
As we pulled away, the white-hot flash of the amputation charge arced around the circumference of the ship, separating the aft third. The maneuvering thrusters of the main portion of the Indomitable fired, and it began to move forward. That’s when I spotted a drifting escape pod. “Commander, permission to retrieve another pod,” I requested.
“Negative, Mister Oliver. There’s not enough time to dock.”
“I don’t need to dock, sir. I can use the grapple,” I pleaded. “I can make it.”
The Commander hesitated a few seconds, and then said, “Okay Lieutenant, you have one shot. Hit or miss, you pull out at maximum speed. And, so there won’t be any misunderstanding, that’s an order!”
“Understood, sir.” Fortunately, all those training exercises paid off. I managed to snag the pod cleanly and towed it toward the escaping forward end of the Indomitable. At 5200 klicks, the Indomitable’s warp core exploded into a fireball that was so bright the yacht’s emergency shutters polarized the viewports. Ten seconds later, they depolarized to reveal the debris field silently expanding. I watched as thousands of molecular fragments impacted the yacht’s shields and harmlessly dissipated as tiny flashes of light.
by submission | Feb 18, 2009 | Story
Author : Rob Burton
There’s that tapping again.
I’ve been listening to peeling bass music, as loud as my ears can stand it, but it doesn’t shut out that quiet, metallic tap. Perhaps this capsule is resonating, magnifying the tapping. Perhaps it’s just my mind, feeding the slow rhythm into everything else I hear. Each time my eyes flick up to the window, unbidden.
Under normal circumstances, Gemmah Merchant only sends one void mechanic at a time, and only then when several robots fail. The madness that accompanies solitary months in the void can usually be kept at bay with communication – an invisible electronic umbilicus feeding us nutritional family contact and friendship. But delays and solar interference preclude that this far out, and simulations can only do so much. They sent two of us so that we wouldn’t go insane.
Often, despite the value of the mined resources, if they go astray they have to be abandoned. The sun can spit a particle that’ll corrupt a computer now and again no matter how heavily it’s shielded – even sitting the piloting ‘bots control computer behind the load doesn’t guarantee anything. Sometimes they just stop working – the ion drives stay on, or it just goes dead and it drifts. This time it started to decelerate the load too early, crawling round to the far side and starting the long breaking process before it’d barely covered a quarter of the journey to Earth. Gemmah determined that it was worth attempting retrieval, and sent out a ‘bot. It failed, reason unknown. Such was the limit upon time and the value of the cargo, they chose to send us. It sat there, as dead as my companion is now, waiting in its own private, ponderous solar orbit.
Gemmah Merchant exists to make money, not spend it. In space, mass costs money. Just enough filtering and air – never mind the smell. Not enough food, and appetite suppressing drugs (pills are light). Hardly enough room to turn around, only the barest chance of limping home alive if we failed to fix the ‘bot. One window. One suit. He’s still wearing it.
It’s easy to forget that you are always travelling fast. How fast only depends on where you’re standing. We’d been decelerating for a week, varying the deceleration as much as our bodies could stand it. He’d been eager to get the job done, boredom being a wonderful motivator. I was willing to let him take the first EVA, being of the opinion that it would probably take more than one to fix the ‘bot. It could be me out there. He certainly seems to think it should be.
These lanes are vast and almost empty. Almost. Some tiny thing smashed through the suit at his shoulder. Wrapped his remaining arm around a handle on the capsule, all he was ebbed out to ice before me. I had to switch off the comm. I couldn’t stand to hear him screaming.
The ion drive pushes slowly and inexorably. The acceleration is constant. I tell myself it’s just some strange coincidence, some function of the acceleration and the elastic properties of the suit around that missing shoulder. The glove strikes the window once more, the fingers curl, and it slowly rebounds, beckoning me. He wants me to join him. I’ve tried switching off the engine. It just starts again as soon as I switch it back on. If I try and drift home, I’ll starve to death. And every time I hear the tap I look up. I’m trying not to.
But there’s nothing else to look at.
