The Oort Cloud Turnaround

by Patricia Stewart | Feb 11, 2008 | Story

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

The colonization vessel SS Godspeed was the first super-sleeper ship to leave the solar system. The 1032 human passengers, and 4000 or so assorted farm animals, were destined for the Gagarin settlement on Rigil Kentaurus II. The Godspeed was currently halfway through its 16 year journey when the command computer aroused twelve of its crew from suspended animation. The ship was about to initiate its thrust reversal maneuver, so that it could begin the process of slowing down. The procedure was relatively simple: shut down the engines, detach the massive meteoroid shield at the bow, rotate the two mile long cigar shaped ship 180 degrees, reattach the shield to the aft end (now the new bow), and restart the engines. The four powerful engines were mounted on the sides of the ship, and would be located behind the shield during the four hours it took to turnaround the ship. However, “nonessential” areas of the ship, such as the cargo holds, and the hibernation bays, would be “exposed” to the meteoroid field of the Oort cloud for almost the entire four hours. Relative to the sun, Oort cloud objects are essentially stationary, but at the ship’s current velocity (over 300 million miles per hour), objects pass through the ship in nanoseconds. Two holes, an entrance and an exit site, simply appear instantaneously. The task of the twelve crewmen was to disperse throughout the exposed areas of the ship to patch the holes as quickly as possible, and repair any transit damage. The computer would handle the actual turnaround.

Shawn Houck velcroed himself to the wall so he could put on his boots. “Not bad for eight years without shaving” he said as he rubbed his stubby beard. “Hey, I guess you heard, six people died so far.”

Ben McNamara secured his helmet, and drifted toward the hatch. “They estimated nine to twenty for the whole trip. So I guess six isn’t too bad at the halfway point. Well, unless you’re one of the six. Okay, I’m ready. I’ll meet you in cargo bay three.”

The two men were floating next to the crated farm equipment when the alarm sounded. Shawn released a canister of blue gas. “I got one,” he yelled as he saw part of the gas cloud migrate toward a small hole in the exterior skin. He fired his control jets and drifted toward the escaping gas. Ben went in the opposite direction. Both holes were patched in a few minutes, and the men joined up again. “Looks like we lost the transmission on that tractor,” Shawn said as he pointed toward the tiny spheres of pinkish fluid drifting out of a hole in a crate.

“Well, it’s better than seeing blood balls,” replied Ben with a hint of anxiety in his voice.

“Oh great,” Shawn replied. “You’ve jinxed us for sure. We might as well paint bull’s-eyes on our chests. Ah hell,” he remarked as he did a quick estimate in his head, “we still have a trillion miles of to go before we’re behind the shield again.”

“Remember we’re traveling at half the speed of light,” said Ben with a smirk. “You need to take space-time dilation into account. Add another 250 billion miles.”

The alarm sounded a second time. “Oh Great,” said Shawn as he released another canister of blue gas.

Oedi's Opus

by submission | Jan 27, 2008 | Story

Author : Tim Hatton

The black is total.

Oedi’s life is devoid of light and endlessly deep.

Only stars prick the canvas. He stares at them, each in turn, for entire shifts. He finds it odd to realize that what he is looking at has moved from that spot eons before the light reaches his eyes.

Silence is the most common media.

Long stretches separate the use of his ears. Sound becomes painful.

His maintenance sentence was called “lenient” by the magistrate. He was dropped off on the station equipped with nothing but the clothes he was given and a thin instruction manual.

The only assurances he has of the functionality of his mind are the rare, random explosions that emanate from the Solar Span Gate. Exiting ships burst from it in a fanfare of sound. The pent up energy that held open the sub-space passage is unleashed as a fantastic show of swirling color. Reds shrouded in orange present a flame in the night, while yellow tickles the edge. Greens sprout healthy beside the warmth, soaking up the blues while they live. Surrounding it all indigo fades to violet, their soft transition back to space. No wavelength is neglected.

Every so often, one of these craft will dock with his prison and inject food and water. The rest fire up their electro-magnetic generators upon exit and gracefully glide away, propelled by their own polarized force field. The gift of their colorful arrival spent, they wander away from Oedi without acknowledgement.

His presence on this revolving maintenance deck is decidedly unnecessary. Computers regulate the day to day functioning of the Gate. Oedi is an overseer – a strange irony for a convict. In the rare event that the system is unable to repair its own malfunctions, Oedi does it. The rest of his life is spent idle. Nutrient paste is administered every eight hours. Water is available any time, but only four liters every twenty hours. The water is Oedi’s favorite. Sometimes he tries to cup it in his hands.

Oedi’s face is a gauze of pigment-deprived wax. His eyes are consumed by pupils, and in their black voids, his existence is mirrored. Life on the deck is permanent, but this situation has taken something from Oedi that he did not mind relinquishing. Oedi will die here, and that reality, coupled with the doldrums of his experience, has erased all fear of death. In his dreams, his mind melts with the blackness of space and his body fuels the light reactions that dance magnificently from the Gate.

For now, he resumes his examination of the stars – always staring at those things that are no longer there.

After Dark

by Stephen R. Smith | Jan 26, 2008 | Story

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Kyle shifted in the metal chair, suspiciously regarding the toaster sitting on the table in front of him.

“So, it’s a toaster,” Kyle finally spoke, not taking his eyes off the appliance, “what’s so special about that?”

Niles cleared space on a desk in the corner, waking up his laptop and tapping impatiently as it warmed up. “I’m going to make it fly, and I want to see what you think when I do.”

“Flying toasters?” Kyle looked over one shoulder, eyebrows raised. “You’re shitting me, right?”

Niles left the laptop to finish initializing, and plucking a package from his pocket crossed the room to stand beside Kyle. “It’s going to fly, trust me, you’ll see.” He slipped a stubby antennae out of its wrapping, and held it up for Kyle to see.  “I’m going to pop this sensor on you so I can monitor and graph what you’re feeling while you’re watching, ok?” Kyle nodded, turning his attention back to the chrome box in front of him. Niles peeled away the wax paper backing to expose the adhesive pad on the device, and carefully stuck it sideways across the back of his friends neck.

Satisfied that it wasn’t going to slip off he returned to the laptop, apparently now in an operational state, keyed up a console window and stood poised with a finger over the ‘Enter’ key. “Ready?” “Ready,” came the response. Niles depressed the key and watched, dividing his attention between the screen and his friend, and periodically glancing at the toaster on the table.

Kyle stared at his reflection in the polished side of the toaster. Two slice. Very boring. For a moment, he could have sworn the cord had moved, but that wasn’t possible. No, it was moving, and he watched, mouth slowly sagging open as the cord withdrew from the clutter on the table to slide up the toaster and into the air. The wire flattened as it coiled into what was almost a propellor before beginning to swing in circles. As it gained speed, the room filled with the ‘whip-whip-whip’ sound of a small helicopter. As he stared, mouth agape, the chromed metal sides of the appliance seemed to peel away, unfolding outwards into wide wings. The toaster appeared as if to stretch once, then began flapping. Kyle moaned as the toaster slowly rose, clattering from the table to hover a few feet above it in the air. As he tore his gaze away to find Niles, he heard the toaster clatter back to the table, and as his head snapped back around he found himself staring again at a lifeless appliance, wings folded invisibly away, cord limp on the table top.

“Holy shit!” Kyle’s mouth moved, words started and stopped several times before he spat out “Holy shit” for a second time.

Niles stepped forward and retrieved the antennae from his friends neck before returning to his laptop and closing the lid.

“That’s incredible,” Kyle started again, still staring wide eyed at the now lifeless appliance in front of him, as though as any second it may leap back into the air. “Incredible.” He stared and then suddenly struck by a thought, turned to face Niles. “That is incredible Niles, and don’t get me wrong, but what the hell use is a flying toaster?”

Niles peeled the spent adhesive away from the stubby antennae before returning it gently to his jacket pocket. “Oh, don’t worry, I can think of plenty of ways to use this.”

Off Key

by submission | Jan 16, 2008 | Story

Author : Andy Bolt

It started when a song got stuck in Jola Ndenga’s head. She had just gotten the new aMix mp12 player, the one that could store a theoretically infinite number of sub-quantum sound files and injected just under your cochlea. They had just become available at Charon Station, and she had been amped to get her hands on one. Even though C1 was supposed to be the blistering edge in scientific research, the United Inner Rim’s top priority, she had spent most of her time out here watching space-faring rocks and trying to resist the urge to stick her head in the neutron remuter. Truth was, there was not much use for a xenobiologist on Charon. Someone from the initial survey team had reported a possible site for microbial bacteria, but that had amounted to nothing. At least now, she had maniacally decided, her suicide-inducing levels of boredom could be set to a pleasing soundtrack.

She had been aural-loading the new Virulent Photons album – thirty-four tracks of twelve second bursts of intergalactic noise mixed over a calypso backbeat – when her transmitter began playing the song. She had never heard it before. Indeed, she had never heard anything quite like it before. When the newsites would come asking later, she would describe it as a combination of meringue, plasmatronica, and a third type of music that she was unable to fully identify.

At the time, however, she simply became very nervous. The aMix was still a relatively new technology, and there was a post-urban legend flying around about a beta tester for the Grape corporation. Supposedly, she was still in cryogenic suspension after an early model had become inextricably integrated with her central nervous system and driven her psychotic with round the clock renditions of Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb.”

So Jola greeted her own malfunction with some alarm, half-prepared to gouge out her own eardrum with a pinpoint cooking laser. She approached Ryx Marcomb, the station’s biotech engineer, and Willix Frog, the knowledge-specific medical clone, with great haste.

“Alien music is burrowing through my skull,” she told them. “Help.”

Willix offered to operate instantly and found that the magnetic scalpel did its job cleanly. Within twenty minutes of the problem’s first discovery, Willix, Ryx, and Jola were staring at a slightly bloody, centimeter square aMix chip under a broad-beam microlight. Ryx had jury-rigged a nanophone and a bag of Willix’s emergency transplant tissue to play back the still repeating song at an audible level.

“You know this song?” Ryx asked, flipping his gaze between the chip and Jola.

“No one knows this song,” Willix answered, offering his colleagues a look at his handheld sonic spectrometer. “˜It doesn’t conform to any extant musical style. Half of these lower tones are infrasonic and wouldn’t even be audible to the human ear. And this,” he continued, gesturing at a garbled looking wavelength, “isn’t even a sound in the conventional sense of the word. It’s a permutation of a sound wave that the computer can’t even begin to analyze.”

Ryx raised an eyebrow. “New life communication signal?”

Jola glanced at the pad. “Don’t think so.” She took it from an obliging Willix. Within a moment, she had overlayed the spectranalysis and one of Willix’s medical files.

She displayed it to her colleagues. Onscreen was a translation of the sound waves into a rough approximation of a DNA sequence, and the helix seemed to hum.

“The song IS the life.”

And inside the aMix, the alien song breathed its musical breath.

Heroes

by Patricia Stewart | Jan 15, 2008 | Story

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer

Circa 2086, the war with the Epsilon Eridani System was currently on hold, as leaders from both worlds were attempting to negotiate a truce. However, most of Earth’s military advisors were against a truce, because the Earth Alliance was clearly winning the war. Our technology was far superior to theirs. It was best, they said, to destroy the Eridani’s ability to wage war while we had the advantage, rather than give them the opportunity to regroup and strengthen. What the Eridani lacked in technology, they made up for in aggressiveness. They would be back if they were not destroyed. But soldiers only fight the wars; politicians start and end them.

While the negotiations ebbed on, the Earth Alliance continued to patrol the solar system. The stealth scout ship Casper was assigned the volume of space between Earth and Venus from zero degrees to minus thirty degrees. Normally, a pretty quiet sector. The Eridani almost always attacked Earth from above the ecliptic, most likely because their star was located in the northern hemisphere. They were considered aggressive, but not very imaginative. While the two-man crew of the Casper patrolled their sector, their proximity alarm sounded. “Hey, Commander, look. It’s an Eridani ship. What’s it doing in here?”

“Good question Lieutenant. Let’s follow it and find out. Keep the cloak engaged.” They tailed the Eridani ship to a small asteroid. The Eridani had constructed several large ion drive impulse engines in one quadrant of the asteroid. “What data do we have on this rock, Lieutenant?”

After consulting the ship’s computer, “It’s called 2340 Hathor. It’s an Aten Type asteroid. It’s approximately 5.3 kilometers in diameters, a mass of 200 trillion kilograms, and average orbital velocity of 30.7 kilometers per second. Oh, damn. It’s scheduled to make a close approach to Earth on October 21, 2086. That’s in two months. Do you think those bastards are going to attempt to change its orbit so that it hits Earth, even while they negotiate a peace treaty?”

“Apparently, Lieutenant. Notify Earth and request instructions.”

Two hours later, Earth responded. The celestial mechanics concluded that based to the photographs of the ion engines, a burn of 18 hours was required to produce an intersect orbit. If the full burn was completed, Earth would not have time to alter the new orbit before impact. A battlecruiser was being dispatched, but wouldn’t reach their coordinates for three days. Their orders were to continue monitoring the asteroid, but if the Eridani ignited the engines before the battlecruiser arrived, they were to attempt sabotage, at whatever cost.

The engines ignited the following day. “Well, lieutenant, our moment of truth has arrived. I’ve been thinking of options. Unfortunately, the only sure fire way to stop them is to park next to their fuel tanks and overload our reactor. What do you say?”

“Well, sir, I have three kids on Earth. I’d prefer to have them die of old age, rather than by a comet impact. I say, let’s do it.”

On Earth, Steven Patterson was walking his dog just before sunrise. As he looked into the western sky, he saw a bright star appear near the horizon. It was nearly ten times brighter than Venus, but faded quickly. “What the hell was that?” he wondered aloud.