by Patricia Stewart | Jan 14, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The interstellar war with the Luyten Empire was winding down. Although the Luyten home world had surrendered a few months earlier, much of their fleet remained in deep space, unwilling to voluntarily stand down. Consequently, the Earth Alliance was forced to hunt them down, one at a time, to prevent them from regrouping and attempting a counterstrike.
The SS Southern Star and SS Charleston pursued the ILS Battlecruiser Kanyee to the edge of the Cygnus Asteroid Cluster. Caroline Belle, captain of the Southern Star, radioed the Charleston, “Y’all park here, Commander Beauregard,” she said with a distinctive southern drawl, “we’re fixin’ to go yonder to prevent their escape on the far side.”
After both ships were in position, Commander Beauregard hailed the Southern Star. “They’re dug in like an Appalachian tick, Captain,” he reported. “I reckon you have a plan to flush ‘em out?”
“This ain’t my first rodeo, Commander” she replied. “But, if there’s one thang I learned in thirty years of runnin’ a starship, it’s if there’s one rat you can see, there might be a whole bunch more you can’t. We maybe should send in a few hounds ‘fore we go in there with our phasers half cocked.”
Both ships launched Class I probes into the cluster. The telemetry revealed that there was only one Luyten ship within the cluster. In addition, there was no evidence of booby traps or other dangerous devices hidden amongst the asteroids. Convinced this was going to be easier than shootin’ catfish in a barrel, Captain Belle hailed the Kanyee ship to demand their surrender. Seconds later, the image of the Luyten captain filled the viewscreen. Well, I do declare, thought Belle, he looks madder than a wet ‘possum in a tote sack. “This is Captain Belle of the Southern Star,” she said with an endearing smile. “Well, Captain, what’s it gonna be, fish or cut bait?”
“What the hell?” bellowed the captain of the Kanyee. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying, Earthie. It’s your damn accent. Either speak standard galactic, or find somebody that can.”
Well, that ain’t right, Belle thought. I ain’t got no stinkin’ as-sent. She realized that negotiating with this creature was going to be about as useful as a steering wheel on a mule. Then much slower than was actually necessary, “I… said,… Captain,… surrender… now… or… y’all… will… be… blown… into… a… billion… tiny… bits. Was that clear enough?”
The Kanyee’s reply was a torpedo launched at the Southern Star. The Star’s automated defensive system activated, and destroyed the torpedo in a flash of antimatter annihilation. Then the Luyten ship powered up her engines, and shot straight up out of the cluster at maximum warp. It detonated a spread of plasma mines in its wake in an attempt to mask its warp trail.
“That Cap’n is acting crazier than a sprayed roach,” remarked Belle. “Oh well, I love a good ol’ fashion ‘coon hunt. Mr. Davis, bring long range sensors online. Ensign Jackson, pursue a maximum warp.” As the Southern Star accelerated through warp 5, Belle glanced at her tactical display. She noticed that the Charleston was still holding position at the asteroid cluster. “Hail the Charleston. Commander Beauregard, are y’all gonna stay under the porch, or come out and run with the big dawgs?”
by Duncan Shields | Jan 12, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m no stranger to visits from my future selves.
The first time I showed up to myself, I was only nineteen. I was in the backyard, smoking a cigarette with my hand cupped so that my parents wouldn’t see.
An older version of me stepped out of the bushes. He was wearing a suit but it was dingy and the elbows were frayed. He had some stubble and a wet, red look to his eyes. I could smell whiskey and desperation.
He told me that he was a future version of myself. I had no trouble believing it. There was a kinship there that went beyond the features of his face or the fact that it felt like I was looking at a reflection of myself that wasn’t flipped around like in a mirror. There was almost a magical flow of energy between the two of us, atoms calling to atoms, a recognition of the same time-space footprint being near.
He told me who was going to win the football game tomorrow. He told me to write it down. I went inside and took out a notebook and did what he said.
I took it to heart and bet big on it. I made two hundred dollars. Big money for me at the time.
Years later, I’ve had hundreds of visits. I have six large estates around the world and I am the seventeenth richest man in the world. I write every visit from a future self in the notebook with the exact time notated as well. This is the notebook, my future selves say, that will allow me to come back and create this present. When the secret of time travel is discovered, they say, I will use this notebook as a bible and influence myself to this rich state of affairs, thereby avoiding a paradox.
What didn’t make sense to me, though, was that the versions of me that kept coming back to give me tips got progressively more well-dressed and wore more jewelry. I found that odd since I, myself, don’t really like wearing rings. Also, if my future selves were changing according to the riches that I was making, why was the first one to come back dressed so poorly?
I smelled something fishy. I was going to ask the next future self some pointed questions. The riches had made me bold. I was poised with the notebook, ready to get some answers.
The next time a future self showed up, however, it wasn’t me. It was a woman in a red dress and a scar down one cheek. She walked with purpose, the straight back of a dancer. She marched up to me and grabbed me by my expensive collar and kneed me in the balls.
While I was writhing in agony on the marble floor, she took the notebook out of my hands, the supposed bible and key to all of my success, and threw it into the fireplace.
There was a flash of blue light and she disappeared, having never uttered a word.
Nothing changed for me. I am still the seventeenth richest man in the world. My wealth is intact. My appearance hasn’t changed.
Her appearance happened just over four years ago. There hasn’t been a visit from the future, myself or otherwise, ever since that notebook was thrown into the fireplace.
I wonder who she was. I turn the puzzle pieces over in my mind and I can’t make sense of it. I feel left out and oddly alarmed most days, like this could all disappear in an instant.
by submission | Jan 10, 2009 | Story
Author : Jason Kocemba
The time train was late.
His great(x5) Grandfather’s birth certificate felt massive in his pocket, a nano-singularity. Did that flimsy piece of paper (wood based!) really cause him to lean to the left? They had caught up and were closing in and the train was late.
He spent time wondering what might have happened if things had been done differently. Was he wasting time trying to change what had happened, trying to make things right? Time had been used wrongly, he had been used wrongly, his whole family had been used wrongly.
He lifted his wrist watch. He watched the second-hand do another seven ticks until it showed eleven pm precisely. The temporal display showed agitations in the ether.
He heard them behind him, in the crowd. Their ancient dialect was barely recognisable as words, more like a continuous audible stream of nonsense syllables.
The station wall clock was two minutes faster than his watch. The colon between the digits winked out and came back on, winked out, came back on. His eyes moved to his watch. Tick. The second-hand jerked on. Tick. His eyes moved to the wall clock. The colon winked out. Tick.
11:01
Was he doing the right thing? He wiped his sweaty palm on his shirt. He hated waiting, after so much wasted time it felt wrong. But it was all relative anyway, right?
He resisted the temptation to pace. He stood, bright shiny shoes three inches apart, grey slacks pressed into a knife edge, his shirt tucked half in and half out of his waistband.
His hand wiped itself on the shirt again. His eyes ticked to his watch, the flashing colon, the tracks, and back to the watch. He resisted the urge to shuffle his feet. The voices moved closer, and the nano-singularity in his pocket seemed to be gaining mass.
11:02
He felt the wet patches under his arms, he felt sweat run down his back to soak into his trousers. He wiped his already damp sleeve across his brow, and caught sight of his watch as it moved past his eyes. More seconds wasted and the temporal agitations had become distortions.
His eyes ticked to the tracks. Was it coming? Another bead of sweat ran down his back, another second ticked by in this era.
Someone stood behind him. He heard a familiar voice talk softly in a dialect he understood. He felt a hand press down on his left shoulder. He knew he would soon fall under all that combined mass.
“Stop running now,” the voice said. Other voices spoke; he did not understand them.
“I have to go back, Constable,” he said, feeling a deep bass rumble through his feet.
“You cannot,” the Constable said.
11:03
“The time line will re-assert itself, all paradox will be erased,” he said. He knew if he turned around and looked at the Constable he would be looking into his own face, his own eyes. “You will be erased.”
“Can you be sure?” said the Constable, who was also him. “Perhaps it is you who will be erased, perhaps both of us.”
“It is wrong,” he said as the train pulled in to the station. His whole body vibrated to that bass rumble.
With a clap, air rushed in to fill the space where he had been.
The Constable lowered his arm: “Damn, just in time,” he said, and disappeared.
by submission | Jan 2, 2009 | Story
Author : Steven Holland
Jaden Stanitski throttled the space rover to full power. The soft treads of the vehicle crunched over the rough, sun baked surface of Planet Merco II. He avoided the craters and deep crevices of the planet’s surface as best he could. The sack containing small, labeled samples of rock and dirt had been hastily thrown into the rear compartment. The disturbance of his path sent small chunks of brownish-gray rock flying into the air.
Jaden didn’t notice, for dawn was fast approaching. Miles ahead of him, wispy gray smoke rose in a plume. Even after five minutes, the fire still managed to find oxygen aboard his crashed spaceship.
What had gone wrong? The ship was supposed to remain on autopilot, flying along with him on the dark side of Merco II. Perhaps the magnetic field of the planet’s magnetic core had disrupted some electrical component onboard, not that it really mattered at this point.
He was dead. He knew that. Dawn would come and incinerate him to ashes. Despite the circumstances, Jaden laughed at his actions: trying to outrun the spin of nine hour planet on a land rover. He might buy himself a few seconds, maybe even a minute.
Abruptly, he slammed on the brakes. The rover skidded to a stop, its back end fishtailing slightly. The light was coming; Jaden could see it in the horizon behind him now.
The seconds ticked by. Jaden sat frozen on the seat, his mind whirling like an overworked steam engine. Three deaths – incineration, hypothermia, or asphyxiation. The blazing sunlight drew closer, waves of heat rising toward the empty blackness. He had 15 minutes at the most.
Three deaths. Clenching his teeth, Jaden decoupled his air hose. The hissing sound of the air was lost in the vacuum of space. This death would be the most painful, but it was the fate he could control.
by submission | Dec 29, 2008 | Story
Author : Greg R. Fishbone
Agent Stanley, six-time salesman of the month, cut a trail through the switch grass with his machete. His motions were effortless, hardly distracting from his practiced patter about low interest financing.
Behind him trudged the Forrester family. Mr. Forrester swatted mosquitoes from his arms and neck. Mrs. Forrester quietly bemoaned her mud-caked designer shoes. The Forrester children, Gerald and Roxie, fought over a tuna sandwich that represented the last of their daily provisions. The family’s first weekend of house hunting was already a miserable affair.
Agent Stanley’s trailblazing ended abruptly at a precipice with a view of the steamy valley below. “This is a good place to begin. Most of the homes in this valley migrated inland after Hurricane Ronaldo, with a few holdovers from the ’36 flood and some recent foreclosures.”
The Forresters peered down into the fog, where a few house-shaped outlines could be seen moving together toward the northeast. “Do they always travel in packs?” asked Mr. Forrester.
Agent Stanley shrugged. “Not always, but homes by the same developer sometimes form neighborhood associations for their mutual protection. They needn’t worry about burglary, here in the wild, but the security systems don’t know that. Watch your footing on the descent. I tagged a lovely three-bedroom colonial last week that would be perfect for you, if we can find it again.”
The valley was thick with grass and, as Mrs. Forrester loudly noted, a particularly clingy tan-colored mud. Ground cover and trees were common, but not thick enough to prevent houses from moving through. While Mr. Forrester applied more insect repellant and Mrs. Forrester brushed mud from the hem of her skirt, Gerald and Roxie argued over which of them needed more closet space.
Agent Stanley knelt to examine a tree stump. “These cuts are fresh, and the treads lead off in this direction.”
“Houses cut down trees?” asked Gerald.
“They do in the wild, son,” said Agent Stanley. “There aren’t any lumber yards out here, so houses have to make due with what materials they can find.”
“Why do they need lumber if they’re already built?” asked Roxie.
“Repairs. Wear and tear. Or sometimes they feel the need to build a dormer or an addition.”
“Maybe it’s installing crown molding in itself,” said Mrs. Forrester. “I always imagined my first house would have crown molding.” Mr. Forrester put an arm around her shoulders.
The Forristers, with Agent Stanley as their scout, tracked the house through the trees and across the plains. The whine of a buzz-saw grew louder as they approached until, over a small rise, they came upon a team of robotic house-scutters working on a single-story structure with two wide openings in the front.
“We’re in luck!” Agent Stanley exclaimed. “That’s a detached two-car garage–very desirable!”
Mr. and Mrs. Forrester nodded appreciably, while Gerald and Roxie ran forward to play with a robot that seemed to be fashioning shingles from strips of bark. “Be careful, kids!” called Mrs. Forrester.
“Don’t worry.” Agent Stanley chuckled. “Those fourth generation house-scutters are great with children. They cook, they clean, and as you can see, they’re quite handy with home improvements. If you’re ready to make an offer, I’d be happy to–”
He was interrupted by a loud crash, as a four-bedroom Tudor-style house burst into the clearing with red lights blazing in every window. Agent Stanley looked with alarm toward the detached garage, where Gerald Forrester was carving his initials into the door frame with a pocket laser.
“That’s trouble,” said Agent Stanley. “Tudors are notoriously protective of their out-buildings.”
