Quality Time

by submission | May 27, 2008 | Story

Author : Peter Carenza

It was a special day; not merely because Bobby opened his eyes to an absolutely picture-perfect sunny surprise straight out of a travel brochure, but because he had been waiting for today for a long, long time. Rubbing the sleepy crust from his eyes, he swung his feet out of bed and ran nose first into a wall of sensory pleasure – the scent of still-sizzling bacon and eggs, browning toast, and Lord knows what else his parents might have conjured before dawn’s eruption.

Taking that as his cue, he jumped up, grabbed a clean shirt, and bounced out the bedroom door, practically fllinging himself down the stairs.

“Good morning, Bobby!” exclaimed Mom, always the first to spot things.

Dad looked up from his newspaper and grinned. Winking knowingly, he motioned to the hot food simmering on the stove, he said, “Help yourself, son. It’s your day! We’re gonna spend some quality time together!”

And of all days, this one was shaping up to be the most perfect.

It was planned for months, a chance for Bobby and his parents to bond, to spend some quality time together. For once, Bobby was asked what he would like to do, where he would like to go… it was as selfless a gift as he could have ever received, and though it happened only once every six months or so, it made him feel valuable, loved.

After a most scrumptious breakfast, one during which Bobby thoroughly stuffed himself, he scampered upstairs to get ready to go. He was pleasantly surprised, though it was typical of his Mom on special days like this, to find a brand new set of clothes beside his bed. Ecstatic, he slipped into his new clothes, stormed down the stairs just as his parents were ready to walk out the door — and so the day began.

This frame in Bobby’s scrapbook, this 24-hour spectacular, was better than any previous special days in his life. It was as if all the most pleasurable activities in a lifetime were crammed into a compressed capsule of time and space, and Bobby existed at its very center. Amusement parks… miniature golf… sumptuous meals…. Yet, like the persistent lap of the ocean waves against the glistening beach sand, all things in time and space ebbed and flowed. And like the deceptively sturdy-looking sand castle Bobby built that day at low tide, all things must soon pass. As the sun settled lower against the infinite horizon, the waves grew closer and closer to the shore and etched larger and larger pieces from the structure, until it finally collapsed.

Bobby heard his parents calling for him. He looked out at the ocean wistfully, silently sobbing under the gulls’ screeches, then turned and solemnly joined his mom on the way back to the car, his head resting against her hip, her hands stroking his sandy hair.

He was weeping uncontrollably by the time he was inside the car, his face red and swollen. He knew what was coming… the consolation, the pleading, before the syringe was pulled from the purse bearing the CDS logo… Cryogenic Disposition Services.

“Why? Why can’t you just find some other jobs or something?”

“Son, we’ve been through this before. We’re working to give you the life you never had, so that someday you and your kids won’t have to go through this.”

Tears blurring his vision, he helplessly watched as they pulled out the needle and injected him.

As he slowly faded into blackness, he wondered what special kind of life awaited him in return for this.

Quality time, indeed.

Vis Insita

by submission | May 17, 2008 | Story

Author : Asher Wismer

“I invented a time machine,” said Professor Rudnicki morosely. The whiskey in front of him glinted, a cylindrical crystal promising amnesia.

My hands moved on their own, needing no guidance, wiping a glass that would never be clean. I looked skeptical. “Isn’t time travel impossible, except to the extreme relative future?”

“That’s what they say.” Rudnicki gulped the shot and motioned for another. I poured it.

“Time is relative to our senses, space doubly so. What we perceive to be real is in fact the simple accumulation of expectation; we expect the glass to hold the whiskey, and we expect the whiskey to get us drunk, but only AFTER we drink it.”

“That’s deep, professor.” I hear stuff like this every day; hard not to, when you tend bar near MIT. You pick up the odd scientific fact, and one of the ones I knew about was that time-past was a fixed animal; nothing could penetrate that which has already passed.

“Oh, they want you to believe that, but it’s not true. All you need is to be able to see past Newton, past the expected… so I did. The human mind is the ultimate time travel machine; it sees into the past without leaving the present. All I had to do was replicate that function. And it worked! I never thought it would go so wrong.”

“What went wrong, professor?” The second shot sat untouched; he kept reaching for it, then pulling away.

“I tested the machine yesterday, multiple times, setting it for no more than hours past. It worked perfectly; the memory of the machine and its contents appeared in my memory right when it should have.”

“Memory?”

“When something appears out of nowhere in my past, I expect to remember it,” he said irritably. “Anyway, I showed it to my colleague, Doctor Smith, and he insisted on giving it a test run with himself as the subject.”

“What happened, did it explode or something?”

“I do not create machines that explode! That pastime is reserved for the likes of Nobel; all my work is for the human good.”

“So what went wrong?”

“In my haste to perfect the time matrix, that which allows a physical object to recreate itself in the past, I ignored Newton entirely. Conservation of mass and energy, the laws of inertia. Reaching the past is one thing; reaching the past and remaining on Earth is another.”

“You mean…”

He grabbed the shot now, threw it back like a man just in from a convent. “Yes, exactly. The Earth is in constant rotation, the solar system in constant movement. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion stays in motion… and our motion today is in a different physical spot in the universe than it was fifty years ago.”

My hands failed me for the first time in my career. The glass shattered. Rubnicki smiled grimly.

“He must have appeared right in empty space, in the same relative spot that the Earth would occupy fifty years in the future.”

He stood, no signs of intoxication in his stance, and dropped a ten on the bar.

“Keep the change.”

Only Time Will Tell

by Patricia Stewart | May 15, 2008 | Story

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

The ship’s computer revived me from stasis. It took hours for my body to fully awaken, and for my muscles to respond to my wishes. But what could you expect from a woman that was 345 years old? We had volunteered for this one-way ambassador mission in the year 2136, shortly after the space probe Tycho Brahe passed through the Alpha Centauri system. The probe had sent back images of an Earth-size planet orbiting in “The Goldilocks Zone,” approximately 1.1 AU from Alpha Centauri A. But the most amazing images came from the planet’s night side. It was lit up like a Christmas tree. The planet (called Telles, after the Roman goddess of the earth) was supporting an industrialized civilization, estimated to have a technology slightly behind Earth’s. This assessment was based on the observation that there were no artificial satellites orbiting the planet. Earth’s central command wanted to send a manned vehicle for first contact, and we were eager to volunteer. The Tycho Brahe made the original trip in 53 years; but it was a flyby mission. Our ship needed to accelerate, turn around, de-accelerate, and achieve orbit. It also had to carry life support and enough food to last six people for two years (in case we couldn’t digest Tellean food). We also took seeds to grow food, if necessary. Anyway, it took our ship 312 years to make the trip. Now, it was time to meet the neighbors.

One of the first things I did (after peeing for five minutes) was check the ship’s logs. I didn’t understand what it meant, but our ship hadn’t received a transmission from Earth in 167 years. Then Jack reported that he couldn’t see lights on the night side of Telles. Elizabeth had the only encouraging news, the telescope revealed metallic structures in orbit. At least Telles had made it to the “space age” during our long journey.

After the computer successfully put our ship into orbit, we were able to confirm what we’d been dreading. Telles was lifeless. Electromagnetic imaging revealed that there had been life, and a bustling civilization, but everything is dead now. The cities were destroyed, and the atmosphere was contaminated with lethal amounts of radiation. It appeared that Telles had had a thermonuclear world war. Stupid bastards.

We didn’t have a lot of options. We didn’t have enough fuel to get back to Earth, and we couldn’t land on Telles for at least ten thousand years. So we decided to crawl back into stasis. Our only real hope was to be rescued one day, because it was unlikely that we could survive an additional ten thousand years in stasis. Before entering my stasis chamber, I sent a full report to Earth. It would be eight and a half years before a message made the round trip. I instructed the computer to wake me in nine. Why rush?

As the Stasisosane gas filled my chamber, I began to think of Earth. Why did they stop transmitting 167 years ago? Did they forget about us, or did they destroy themselves too? Is self-destruction an inevitable consequence of intelligent life? I hoped not. We may well be the last six humans alive. If true, we’d have to land on Telles one day, and attempt to repopulate it, assuming we survived one hundred centuries in suspended animation. However, if by some miracle we did, I prayed that our descendants would not be as foolish as their ancestors, or the previous inhabitants of their new world. Only time will tell. I closed my eyes and drifted into oblivion.