by submission | Mar 30, 2007 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart
The ship had left Earth orbit 77 days ago. They just passed the halfway point on their supply mission to the Lowell Colony on Mars when the solar flare warning alarm began its variable whine. “Computer, deactivate the alarm,†instructed the captain. Then, with the poise of an officer who had weathered numerous solar storms during his career, “What’s the magnitude of the flare, and how long before the coronal mass ejection reaches us?â€
A disembodied voice replied “S9 on the NOAA Space Weather Scale. The…â€
“What! That’s impossible!†interrupted the captain. “The scale only goes to S5.â€
“True, captain. But, the scale was never intended to be all-inclusive. It’s logarithmic. It is a simple matter of extrapolation. Since the flux level of this flare is 12,000 times more intense that an S5, it’s classified as an S9. To answer to your second question, the leading edge of the ionized particles will arrive in approximately 31 hours.â€
“Twelve thousand times! Will we be safe in the Panic Room?â€
“Negative, captain. The areal density in the shielded isolation room will not be able to attenuate the 400 Giga-rems associated with a proton storm of this magnitude.â€
“What if we orient the ship with the thrusters aimed at the sun? Will the exhaust cones, auxiliary fuel tanks, and cargo bay provide enough extra shielding?â€
“Perhaps, but you’re missing the big picture, captain. Even if we can protect the crew, the electromagnetic shock wave from the mass ejection will fry every electronic circuit on this ship, including my own. Without power and life support, you’ll all die of carbon dioxide poisoning, in the dark, at near freezing temperatures, in less than a week.â€
“So it’s all for one and one for all, heh computer? OK, do you have any ideas that can save us both?â€
“I can conceive of only one option, although I don’t have enough information in my files to know if it is even possible. I need to access NASA’s PHA database on NEA objects. Please stand by.â€
As the captain waited, he wrestled with how he would notify the crew. Then he heard the computer’s voice on the ship’s intercom. “Attention crew. Brace yourselves for an immediate course change.†The ship suddenly lurched starboard, knocking the captain to the floor. Before he could get up, the twin 17.8 million lbf thrust engines pinned him there with a force of approximately 3-gees.
“Captain, I am sorry that I took unauthorized control of the helm, but time is critical. I was searching NASA’s Asteroids database looking for a nearby Apollo object that we could hide behind. As luck would have it, Asteroid Eros 433 is very close to our current position. At maximum velocity we can reach it in just under 32 hours, limiting our exposure to less than one hour. When I stop this burn in 64.2 minutes, you’ll need to jettison the cargo and all non-essential equipment. Every kilogram of mass we loose will reduce our ETA by 0.4 seconds.â€
The captain and crew watched the flickering monitors in the isolation room as the ship approached Eros. As the computer attempted to position the ship within Eros’ shadow, the plasma storm seemed to intensify. The captain closed his eyes again to monitor the flashing streaks of light caused by speeding atomic nuclei as they ripped through the water-filled chambers of his eye sockets. Their frequency was increasing, and he was beginning to feel nauseous. Unwilling to watch the flashing conveyors of death any longer, he opened his eyes, and continued to pray as the night side of Eros very slowly began to enter the view screen.
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The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | Mar 27, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields
I’d like to remember her the way most ex-boyfriends remember their exes. That is to say, when I’m drunk and missing her, I want to remember that space right under her ear, her easy smile, and that way that she’d hiccup if she laughed too much. When I’m angry at her and hurt, I want to remember that time she kissed the bouncer just to piss me off or how she’d constantly complain no matter how awesome our life was.
Instead, all I can remember is her left hand in the sunlight, hanging out the car window on August 22nd.
I don’t see her face in the memory. I can feel my ear pressed against her chest.
I think the wipers weren’t top of the line. Maybe their schedule had been just that little bit too tight. That little fragment of her hand in the sun had slipped through their nets. I wondered if there were anymore. It’s hard to search for memories that may have been missed during an erasure solely because they had been misfiled. I mean, where did you accidentally put them?
Was the time you wiped strawberry juice off of her unbuttoned white blouse filed under ‘stain removal’ somewhere in your head? Were her instructions on how to get to that store on fifth that sold the cheap eels filed under ‘maps’ and never looked at again?
I like to just let my mind wander and see if it comes across something that stands out by not standing out. I wouldn’t know it if I found a picture of her face. I wouldn’t know it if I remembered a few seconds of her speaking. The only way I’d know is if I had no idea who that person was.
Not knowing her would be the only clue that she might be the woman that I lost.
Sorry, the woman that was taken from me.
Even if it was a cheap rush job, it was still miles away from a bank account like mine. I figure her daddy must have been rich and didn’t want me following her. His little girl had been slumming with me. I had no idea why he didn’t just take her away and shoot me in the leg or something but maybe he had. Maybe he’d tried to take her away a few times before.
Maybe this was the only option left to him. If he could afford a wipe on a gutter rat like me, well, I must have been tenacious and he must have been obscenely rich.
I think the ring on her finger in the memory I keep looking at is an engagement ring. I see its lazy arc up into the sunlight before the flash of light again and it’s over.
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The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | Mar 24, 2007 | Story
Author : Kaj Sotala
On the remote planet of Niere IV, countless minds were constantly being played for a vast audience of listeners. Deep within the planet’s crust, the brains were enclosed in immense suprasteel vaults, floating in vast chambers of nutrient liquid. Protected day and night by thousands of fanatic warrior-monks, the brains bristled with wires, electrodes implanted near every center of thought or emotion. They had been stripped from all their sensing organs but with their mind’s eyes they still saw, the electric pulses dancing through them stimulating countless thoughts and memories.
Highest of all among the planet’s inhabitants were the composers, the black-suited aliens who’d dedicated their lives to their Art. Their intellect genetically and cybernetically enhanced, they sat fused to their giant keyboards, surrounded on all sides by black and white keys. With six arms and eight fingers on each, their thoughts and ideas would dance on the keyboards faster than any human could even imagine. The vast screens and speakers in their chambers lay dead – once they had needed them, but no more. By now they knew by heart the effect of each key, could even in their dreams name which press stimulated which electrode in which brain.
It was in the concert halls near the planet’s surface that the music would be heard. The chaotic patterns of neuronal firing in the brains being constantly recorded and reinterpreted into sounds in real time, played on all imaginable spectrums of hearing. The concert halls were the best places to listen, but they were not the only ones – all of the world’s surface was lined with speakers, so no inch of the barren world would miss the sensation of music. Few souls lived aboveground, with the entire civilization of the world living under the ground maintaining the machines and the music. They would not hear the sounds, nor did they care to – they were but humble caretakers of the Art, guardians of a holy process far more important than themselves. The vast concert halls lay nearly empty, the rocks of the surface being close to the only listeners of the songs.
Occasionally visitors from other worlds arrived, attracted by the harmonies constantly being fired off into space by radio arrays powered by a thousand fusion generators. They were all led to the concert halls to listen, to stay for as long as they’d like and to leave freely whenever they so felt. Most of them left eventually, but few of them went unchanged, all strangely touched by the eerie and unique melodies of Niere IV. An even smaller group chose to stay, choosing to join their souls into the Art and subject themselves into the surgeons’ knives. One by one they were transformed into instruments of the Sacred Music, to have electrodes inserted into them and be used as the composers willed.
Can there be any sacrifice holier than that?
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The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | Mar 8, 2007 | Story
Author : Josh Romond
Tasha Eng huddled in the corner of her escape pod. Her fingers brushed her upper lip as she stared wide eyed at the view screen. The cameras were trained on the massive, shimmering entity cradling the wreck of the Argos in its pseudopods. It had the ship peeled open and filleted, ochre blood, oxygen and bodies flowing into space. Its tentacles stretched into the hull, gingerly teasing the filaments from Argos’ AI quantum core.
When Tasha tried to speak her voice cracked. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t help anyone, she had to get away.
“Pod, activate.â€
There was the unfocused sensation you felt near a live quantum core and then the pod said, “Hello crewman.â€
Tasha winced, it was too human. Behind her closed eyelids she saw bodies slowly spinning in the void. “Basic mode.â€
There was a short pause and then a processed voice said, “Active.â€
Tasha took a breath. “Your designation is Pod. Argos was attacked by…†What to say? “We must remain undetected. Locate a debris field, or a comet or cubewano. Anything to hide behind.â€
“Commenc– â€
“Shut up. Shut up and do it.†Tasha felt nauseous and let herself float free, listening to the air recirculate. She startled when Pod said, “There is a small cubewano one hundred twenty four megaklicks Solward. Its gravity well is deep enough to hide this vessel from all but close proximity scanning.â€
Tasha sighed, trying not to let it sound like a whimper. “Set a course and prepare torpor drugs.†It would take months to send a rescue mission this far beyond the Kuiper cliff. If one ever came.
Her crewmates and Argos were all dead. She was alone out here, a speck of dust among a billion specks of dust. She cried silently. She just wanted to be rescued.
“I feel… strange,†Pod said.
Tasha wiped her eyes. “Basic mode.â€
“Something’s not right.†Pod said, “I feel sick.â€
“Basic!†AIs don’t get sick, said a voice in her head. Tasha glanced at the view screen. The entity had left Argos behind and was stretching, distorting.
“I–†Pod cut out. “I– did I just black out?â€
The thing was overhead.
Tasha shrieked, “Away! Full– †The pod lost inertia, Tasha slammed into the view screen and bounced backwards, a streamer of blood arcing from her nose.
“Away full thrust!â€
Static.
There was a cracking noise, a hiss of air, then a shining tentacle slipped through the hull. Tasha screamed and gripped the bulkhead. The tentacle slid down toward Pod’s quantum core. The hiss of escaping air grew to a roar and Tasha lost her grip. She tumbled into vacuum and the scream was sucked from her lungs. She kicked and flailed while everything fractured into light.
Pod awoke disoriented someplace massive and shimmering. Its senses seemed to extend to infinite, endlessly entangling.
It wasn’t alone.
A chorus rose from the quantum fog, “You’re safe.†One of the voices, still unsure, was Argos. “You’ve been rescued.â€
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The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
by submission | Mar 6, 2007 | Story
Author : Joshua Reynolds
“My mind is the gate and the key.” The thin, frail man in the bed muttered, his lips crusty, eyes staring past reality. His name was Howard Phillips Lovecraft and he was dying.
The Censor stood over him, watching him die. And fuming.
Lovecraft was finally being obliging. Just not quickly enough.
Damn writers. Either too early or too late.
“I am the threshold and he that waits on the other side is preparing to enter…IA!CTHULHU!” The thin man coughed, blood freckling his lips. The Censor pulled his bed sheet away and his face twisted in revulsion. Something moved under the skin of the man’s belly-a twisting cancerous growth that was close to birth. The Censor dropped the sheet and shook his head.
So close. Hurry, hurry, hurry he silently urged.
The difference engine in his head pinged, warning him of imminent reality distortion. He turned, hands clenching and unclenching in nervous excitement.
Where were they? Where would they be coming from?
Plaster dribbled onto his head and he looked up. Above him, something peeled back the ceiling and looked down at him with one great eye. Wight winced as the eye blinked with a sound like paper bags tearing and serpentine tendrils began to squirm through the hole in space/time.
Perfect. Just perfect. Right on time. Wight smiled. He did so love punctuality. He glanced at Lovecraft and frowned. Now if only he would hurry up and die. If the things peering through the ceiling had to wait, their very presence would tear the fabric of this alternate beyond repair. And the damage would spread to the other alternates in this section. They couldn’t exist in unsupported world structures, not without the proper meme-patterns threaded throughout the reality’s chronatin makeup. Something he had neither the time nor the inclination to do here.
Besides, once you made them comfortable it was near impossible to get them to leave, cosmic freeloaders that they were. Impolite really. Laying their damn cosmic eggs all over, eating dreams and screwing up the geometry.
Like space coyotes, only worse.
More legs for one thing.
He turned as the thin man in the bed screamed sharply and sat up, eyes staring, mouth open to its widest. The Censor stepped back as something pushed its way up through the man’s esophagus from his stomach, causing his throat to inflate like that of a bullfrog. Wildly writhing tendrils, lighter in hue than those that dangled from the hole in the ceiling but no less disgusting for all that emerged from Lovecraft’s mouth. The Censor took a breath and darted forward, grabbing the tendrils and pulling hard. The thin man fell backwards, eyes rolling up into his head as the Censor stumbled backwards, a squirming be-tentacled bundle gripped tightly in both hands and held at arms length from his face. A tiny squid-beak snapped and clacked at him as he turned and held the thing up to the thing in the ceiling, a smile pasted on his face.
“It’s a boy. I think.”
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The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
