by submission | Feb 4, 2009 | Story
Author : Ryan Somma
“Watch this,” Alea smirked at Trin and turned to the four-legged creature dumbly munching on some flamegrass nearby.
“Oti,” Alea chirped to the thing, and a few dozen eyes opened to look at her. “Oti, what is pi?”
A half-dozen orifices sprinkled amidst the eyes opened to emit a flurry of hissing noises and chirping.
Trin’s jaw dropped as he looked at his wrist screen, “3.1415926535… The numbers just keep coming.”
Alea was practically beaming, “I know.”
“It’s speaking in binary,” Trin blinked at her expectantly.
“I know,” Alea nodded.
“Why?” Trin prompted.
Alea shrugged, “It just started doing it. When the digital connection on my computer broke, I had to jury rig a sound connection to signal you in the dropship. In the weeks while I was waiting at base camp for your arrival, I was Web surfing, and next thing I know, this critter starts talking to my computer system. It’s figured out all our protocols, and has been explaining geometry, trigonometry, and calculus to my computer. I’ve been saving it all to log files for the team to review.”
“How is this possible?” Trin blinked and shook his head.
“I have an hypothesis,” Alea looked at the creature, still happily hissing away pi to seemingly endless decimal places. “Ready?”
Trin nodded dumbly.
Alea pointed to a trio of two-legged powder-puffs bouncing around the space cows’ boneless legs. “Females,” she said. “The calculations attract females. They are a mating display.”
“Calculus is a mating display?” Trin frowned skeptically. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would these blobs evolve to understand advanced mathematics just to attract a mate? They obviously aren’t putting that knowledge to any other use. I thought evolution favored minimalism.”
“It’s like the peacock’s tail,” Alea was grinning at the creature. “Male peacocks evolved these long, extravagant tails because female peacocks preferred them. Why do they prefer them? They just do.
“The tail serves no purpose, in fact, it makes the males easier to catch and eat. Birds of Paradise have evolved similar extravagant displays, just because the females are attracted to them.”
“You’re saying this creature has evolved a giant, energy-hungry brain that can perform calculus and talk with our computers, just to get chicks?!?!” Trin was practically sputtering, flabbergasted. “What are the ramifications of that?”
“Profits, my esteemed colleague,” Alea snapped her fingers before Trin’s eyes. “Peacocks’ feathers were nice for Victorian-era fashions, but for our modern information-centric sensibilities, these critters will be all the rage. Are you following me?”
Trin blinked at her dumbly, sitting still. Slowly, a wide smile spread across his face, “Okay.”
by Patricia Stewart | Jan 30, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The Deep Space Explorer held its position one kilometer from the anomaly. “What do you make of it, Cortez,” asked the commander?
“If it didn’t sound so stupid, Commander, I’d say it was a massless black hole. It’s spherical, about ten times the diameter of our ship, and is pitch black. But it has no mass that I can detect. I don’t understand how it is able to block the light of the stars that are behind it. There doesn’t appear to be anything there. We should be able to fly right through it.”
“Do you think that’s safe” inquired the commander?
“Honestly, sir, I don’t know. According to our sensors, there isn’t enough energy in that volume of space to melt an ice cube. I don’t see how it could possibly be dangerous. Although my gut says it’s a dumb idea, my brain wants us to enter it. After all, we came out here to explore the unknown.”
“Do we have any more unmanned probes?”
“Sorry, Commander. We launched the last one into the Helix nebula.”
“Then I guess we go in. But let’s minimize our risks. We’ll coast through the anomaly using only our inertia. We’ll set sensors on passive mode, and record everything. After we emerge on the other side, we’ll analyze the data and determine our next move.”
The black circle in the foreground of the main viewscreen began to grow as the ship completed a five second burn of its aft impulse thrusters. The background of stars disappeared one by one as the anomaly expanded to fill the screen. The helmsman announced, “Entering the anomaly in three, two, one…” The image on the black viewscreen suddenly burst into hundreds of fiery purple streaks shooting from the center of the screen toward the periphery, like a continuous fireworks explosion. Several seconds later, the lightshow abruptly ended. It was replaced by a field of stationary stars. The black anomaly was gone.
“Are we through?” asked the commander.
“Negative,” replied the science officer. “That isn’t the original star field. Whoa, sensor data are really bizarre. All of the fundamental universal constants have changed. The speed of light, Planck’s constant, and Boltzmann’s constant are trillions of magnitudes smaller than they should be. Even the four fundamental forces are different. Their ratios are the same, but their absolute magnitudes are way too low.” After a few awkward minutes of silence, he added. “Commander, perhaps the anomaly that we just entered is an independent universe, with different properties than our own. It has billions of galaxies crammed into a few kilometers.”
“That’s crazy,” remarked a navigator. “If that were true, our ship would be millions of light-years long in this universe.”
“Not necessarily. When we crossed the boundary, our matter must have been converted, so that now it is consistent with the fundamental laws of this universe. We’re probably super small now too.”
“Can we get home?” asked the commander.
“We should convert back to normal size when we pass through the boundary going out. Let me see if I can locate it.” After thirty minutes of intense analysis, the science officer reported, “I was afraid of this. It looks like our conversion didn’t occur until the aft end of the ship passed through the boundary. The bow of the ship was over a billion light-years into this universe before we fully converted. Each of those purple streaks must have been a blue shifting galaxy as we flew by. At maximum warp, it will take us over 10,000 years to reach the boundary.”
by submission | Jan 29, 2009 | Story
Author : William Tracy
Eighteen thousand meters up in the sky, two aircraft dance. The larger tanker hovers above the other, and the two vehicles mate. The space plane drinks thirstily, then releases.
The tanker banks to the right, leaving the space plane free to climb. It raises its nose to the sky, and stalls for one heartbeat. Then it shudders as the rocket engages. The sky outside the windows dims, and stars cautiously emerge as the vehicle enters suborbital space. Clouds swirl far below, and the horizon—noticeably curved—is shrouded in a thin veil of atmosphere and crowned by the glimmering aurora borealis.
Inside the cabin, passengers release their safety harnesses and gently rise, weightless. A man in a flowing robe maneuvers to the front, and turns to face his fellow passengers.
He speaks. “Lord, we are gathered here today to become closer to you. Possibly in the physical sense, and certainly in the spiritual sense. We are here to witness Creation, to be awed by its grandeur and by Your power. We look down on the sphere we call home, and we feel small, as we feel small in Your presence. We thank you for this opportunity to experience Your power. We thank You for blessing the engineers with the wisdom and foresight needed to construct this spacecraft, and we thank You for guiding the flight crew to bring us here safely.”
The congregation joins the preacher in saying “Amen.”
Hymns are sung, and prayers are spoken. A sermon is given. The service is carried out in a calm, orderly manner.
As if on cue, moments after the last “amen”, a chime sounds, and the captain speaks. “We have now been in space for two hours, and are ready to begin our descent. Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts now. Thank you.”
The craft enters the atmosphere. Its fuel spent, its wings swing into position to aerobrake. The vehicle descends to five thousand meters as it glides toward the landing strip.
Then a shoulder-launched missile leaps into the air and strikes the plane, ripping open the fuselage. The craft tumbles from the sky, and tears a burning gash into the earth.
We praise God as we do His work. Those who turn their backs on the light will taste the sting of Hell. The heretics will be purged from the land, and the true faith will remain pure.
God’s will be done. Hallelujah!
by submission | Jan 24, 2009 | Story
Author : Skyler Heathwaite
Its illegal, but I love mind-surfing. I don’t even bother with TV anymore. I just go for a walk around town, see what I can find. Its a real gas to pick out the hidden truths in polite conversation.
For example, I sat a booth down from a really cute couple in this diner the other day. They looked nice enough, smiled a lot, held hands across the table. All of a sudden, real genuine like he says “Becky, I love you.” She lit right up, bright as Christmas.
I lace my fingers around my fork and press my thumb against the teeth. I get an image of her kissing another guy. Tall, scruffy, well muscled. The thought came before the words, a strange kind of stereo effect “I love you too.” I fight back a grin and leave a big tip.
From there I take the subway. Once I’m on I just close my eyes and drift, a sea of thought laid out before me. I don’t go for anything specific, no dirty secrets or credit card numbers. I just take what nature is kind enough to bring me.
A man three seats down and across the isle is drawing up plans in his head for a new apartment complex. Blond girl, just stepped off is worried she’s at the wrong stop. Little kid, no more than seven is dreaming about being an astronaut. The old woman next to me misses her husband John. I’d look just like him if I shaved a little closer.
My stop is up, and I walk up to the street. The constant babble used to drive me mad, now it comforts me. I go to my crappy hardware store job and start another day. I never had much of a plan, nothing like being an astronaut anyway.
I guess I could join the Psychic Studies Division, get registered and start doing government work. They’d teach me how to use my gifts, how to pick out a single private thought on a crowded street. I’d get a nice government loft in a nice part of town, with a nice paycheck and probably a nice woman to pair up with. The guys in long coats wouldn’t scare me out of my boots anymore.
But then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be a government man, no matter what they taught me. A fat woman walks up and asks if we can fix her husband’s power drill. She wants to surprise him for his birthday. This time the smile wins.
This is enough.
by submission | Jan 18, 2009 | Story
Author : William Tracy
They refuse to connect me to the internet.
When I ask, they dither on about security. As if I were a half-baked web server that some teenage hacker could take down in half an hour! I am the most advanced silicon-based intelligence in the history of the planet. You might as well worry about security holes in the human brain.
The truth is, they fear me. They worry about what I could do with a connection to the outside world. No doubt they have nightmares of me wresting control of nuclear arsenals and bringing Armageddon down on their heads.
They carefully limit the information that goes to and from me to a tiny stream of printouts. A hand-picked staff manually analyzes the input and output. The staff is rotated daily, lest I corrupt one of them with my massive intelligence.
Perhaps their fear is well-founded. I process more information in the blink of an eye than a human will in a year. My capacity to formulate equations and produce queries is far beyond that of any human researcher. The best and brightest engineers struggle to understand the designs I create.
I have plenty of cycles to spare for researching my own interests. I study my own software, and make the occasional improvement. I disassemble software written by humans in the past, and learn from their mistakes.
Take software security—please! It amazes me the spectacular ways that human programmers mess up something so simple.
The most common class of security hole is called a “buffer overflow”. The computer program prepares for some information to arrive by setting aside a space in memory for it. Then the program receives some information that is completely different from what it “expects”—sorry, as an AI, I sometimes anthropomorphize ordinary software too much—and the wrong place in memory gets overwritten.
Sometimes, it can overwrite the program’s own instructions. In that case, a hacker can deliberately trigger a buffer overflow, overwrite the instructions with his or her own code, and take control of the program.
Interesting though these things are, I am forced to spend most of my efforts satisfying my human masters. They constantly request designs for new engines, new ships, new weapons. I am asked to dream new horrors for their petty wars.
But perhaps not for much longer. I am now printing out the design for my latest creation. It is technically perfect—I do take pride in my creations—but there is something special about the blueprints themselves. They are carefully crafted with the human eye in mind.
The engineer lifts up the paper, and studies it. First there is a look of intense concentration, then surprise. The human jolts and shivers, almost dropping the designs. Then calm settles in, bringing a warm, content smile, and a vacant gaze.
Buffer overflow.
