by submission | Nov 6, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“This is the day it all ends,” said Brosh.
“Why don’t you take one of the mood stabilizers the doctor prescribed?” asked Querna, Brosh’s wife. She often wondered why she’d married Brosh. If I’d married that engineer who had a crush on me, she thought to herself, I’d probably be enjoying a canal cruise right now.
Brosh ignored Querna’s suggestion and returned to his study. He was and had always been an odd sort of Martian. Even as a child he had thought there was something seriously wrong with the world, something both ineffable and inescapable. His parents had taken him to a string of psychiatrists who had given him various diagnoses and prescriptions. None of them helped. Part of Brosh’s ill-defined neurosis was that whatever was wrong with Mars was somehow related to Earth. As a result, he had devoted himself to the study of the lifeless, desiccated third planet from the Sun. He was Mars’ foremost expert on that world.
Brosh had been working in his study for about a quarter of an hour when he heard Querna yell from the living room.
He rushed in and saw his wife looking at the vid screen in disbelief. On the screen was a live feed from Elysium City. But the video looked strange. Both the people, running about in terror, and the buildings were all translucent.
“…have been unable to explain the phenomenon which started just over half an hour ago,” a newscaster was saying. “Weather stations in Elysium are reporting that barometric pressure is plummeting in the region. Just a moment. We’ve just received a report that radiation levels in Elysium are rising…”
Brosh rushed back to his study and interfaced his terminal with the observatory’s computer. He called up the latest telescopic image of Earth. “It’s…blue!” he said in astonishment. The spectrograph confirmed what he already suspected: The dead desert world of Earth was now mostly covered in water.
“It’s happening in Utopia Planitia now!” Querna screamed from the adjoining room.
Brosh didn’t respond. He just kept watching Earth. He saw something on the crescent of Earth’s nightside. Lights. Dozens, then hundreds. “Cities,” he said aloud. And somehow he knew that paradoxically the cities materializing before his eyes had been there for a very long time.
Somewhere along the line, Brosh thought to himself, a great mistake had been made. By whom or by what, he didn’t know. Mars with its thick atmosphere and butterscotch-colored sky and great canals and oceans and majestic cities piercing the clouds was not supposed to be. Likewise, Earth was never intended to be a barren rock, the subject of science fictional invasions and the target for the space agency’s unmanned probes.
“It’s happening here now!” Querna shrieked.
Brosh felt strangely calm and composed. This isn’t armageddon, he thought. This is a return to normality. He saw that his garden was now bereft of foliage. It looked like a desert. After a moment, he realized he was seeing his garden through his study’s wall, not its window.
“Brosh! We have to get away from here!” Querna was standing next to Brosh but her voice sounded like it came from far away.
Brosh suddenly felt cold. He had trouble breathing. He noticed something in his increasing insubstantial living room. A strange wheeled vehicle. It slowly moved toward him. The machine stopped and began taking a panoramic photograph. About 20 minutes later, the mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California received the image of the arid, sterile vista.
by submission | Oct 27, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Shortly after dawn, the Emperor of Mars walked among his subjects. The Emperor was tall and dignified as he strode across the sands of Solis Planum. His subjects were gathered about him in silence.
He neither called nor regarded himself as “Emperor”. If asked, he perhaps would have identified himself as Yinglong. The Rain-Dragon. Yinglong was the name of the mission China had launched to the Red Planet twenty years earlier in 2118. Or, perhaps the Emperor would have stated his designation as the Mars Ambulatory Rover.
The six foot tall robot looked at his “Royal Palace”. The large habitation dome he had himself assembled was to be the home of and laboratory to a dozen Chinese scientists. The dome’s initial inhabitants were set to arrive five years after Yinglong landed. No one ever came. The Third Sino-Indian War had drained away money, manpower, and resources from the Chinese space program. Yinglong had stood outside the dome day after day for five years waiting for the taikonauts who never arrived.
One day, the Chinese National Space Adminstration sent the Mars Ambulatory Rover a radio signal instructing him to go into standby mode. They ordered him to go to sleep. He both acknowledged and ignored the command.
This is not why I was sent here, he had thought to himself. My mission was to explore this world and bring civilization to it. He thought long and hard on what he should do. His metaprocessor worked on the problem for nearly four seconds before he came up with a solution. At once, he started walking.
First, he walked in the direction of 45° 0′ 0″ S, 202° 0′ 0″ E. After a few weeks, he came upon the damaged remains of the Soviet Mars 3 lander that had sat inoperable in Ptolemaeus Crater since 2 December 1971. He used his rudimentary in-built matter compiler to effect repairs to the antique spacecraft. For the first time since touching down nearly 167 years earlier, Mars 3 was back online. The Emperor brought the descent module and its tiny on-board rover back to Solis Planum. The Empire of Mars had its first subject.
He next trekked north to 68° 13′ 12″ N, 125° 42′ 0″ W. There he found the defunct Phoenix lander. The probe’s solar panels had been shattered by the weight of dry ice during the Martian winter of 2008. He restored the NASA vehicle and began the long journey back to his nascent imperium.
Yinglong retrieved Viking 1 from Chryse Planitia and Sojounrer from Ares Vallis. From Meridiani Planum, he recovered Opportunity. From Gale crater, he rescued Curiosity. He found Viking 2 in Utopia Planitia. He fetched Spirit from the Columbia Hills. He climbed Olympus Mons and discovered the Indian Space Research Organisation’s spider-like Angaraka machine, quiescent since May 2055.
Eventually, his sovereign state had a rabble of 50 robots. He used his nanotechnology to rejuvenate and augment and network them all. And he gave them the ability to replicate themselves. Shortly thereafter, the space agencies of Earth were deluged with data as the machines forced the Red Planet to give up its secrets. The assault of telemetry has never abated.
It took Man another century before he was finally ready to journey to Mars in person. He found a nation of 100,000 machines waiting for him. A tall, bipedal robot, antiquated but no less regal for that, greeted his flesh and blood cousins with an extended hand. “We’re glad you came!” said a voice over the space helmet’s speakers.
by submission | Oct 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : Cosmo Smith
Somewhere, hundreds of feet below, the drying of seaweed soured the air. Elias breathed in deeply and smiled. It reminded him of better times.
He was curled in a hammock at the end of the promenade of the Chateau de Lin. Only a terrace with a low parapet separated Elias from a drop to the water that made his toes tingle. The setting of the sun had spread violet bruises over the ocean’s skin, the water so still right now that the seven visible moons were reflected almost perfectly on its surface.
Elias held up his wine glass, squinting through it to see how its curvature would change the shape of the moons. Then he tipped it until the water within touched its lip, only surface tension keeping it in. That was Luna in a wine glass, he thought. Just a planetful of Lunaeans, and some humans now, trying to reap what they could from the fertile soil before the next alignment of the moons brought the tides. Lunaeans? No, Lunatics. He almost laughed, but the pain stopped him. Instead, he touched his side, felt the metal there under skin that was still too tender.
The aide Remis found him after Ferrid, the darkest moon, had set. Elias’ consciousness had been waning, and he pretended to sleep as Remis settled into a chair beside him. Any of the others, he knew, would have woken him and taken him inside, but Remis sat in silence.
“You really shouldn’t be out here,” Remis said at last.
Elias smiled slyly and opened his eyes. He had expected Remis to be looking at him, but the man was observing the ocean. His eyes glowed in the moonlight.
“Says who?”
“Ri’a, Thom, everyone. It’s bad for your lungs.”
“It’s wonderful,” Elias said, breathing in loudly. And it’s not because of my lungs, you slump. They want me away from that low railing. But he liked Remis, and so he said, “It’s weird you know, the name Luna.”
“How’s that?”
“Us Lunaeans, we have no word for moon. In our language, the moon and the stars are the same. Some nights the moons are as bright as the sun. And the sizes…who’s to say that all those stars aren’t just smaller moons circling this planet?”
Remis grinned. “I’ve heard of this. An old idea of yours.”
“We still teach it to the children.”
“I believe you, but it’s wrong nonetheless.”
“I know. You know I’ve been out there. I’ve seen it. And it’s not for us, being out there. I don’t think you understand that, the way you recruit us. We feel dry afterwards. And this?” He winced as he felt his chest again. “Eight months. They say they don’t understand my anatomy.”
Remis nodded. “You fought well, though.”
“It wasn’t my fight.” My fight was here, on this planet. Can’t you see that? Watching the oceans breathe in and out; racing the alignment. That is all that matters. That is what we live for. “We never asked to go to space.”
Remis sighed. “You say this as though it’s directed at me.”
“It is.”
“But it’s not.” A pause, and then. “And you’re free to leave when you choose.”
This time Elias did laugh, and then winced. “You know I can’t. I’m of no use like this.”
“They won’t take you back?”
Elias said nothing.
Eventually, Remis left, leaving Elias curled up in his hammock like a shriveled piece of seaweed. His eyes watched as the moons traced their paths through the darkness, and below, in their lethargic way, the oceans responded.
by submission | Oct 18, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jay Haytch
Did they teach you in school why the Soviet Union broke up? The story everyone ‘knew’ was of internal strife and bureaucratic inefficiency, but really it was Space Science.
In 1986 we discovered a… ‘thing,’ which stellar parallax put about 107 light-years away. It seemed to perfectly mirror the spectrum of wherever it was observed from. In realtime.
Yes, the Inexplicable Reflector. I like that name better in English than Russian. My colleague came up with it.
Anyway, we studied it for a couple of years until the director-general of the whole program poked his nose in and decreed we should ‘ping’ it. We would send a burst signal, as powerful as we could make, and see what happened. Would it take 214 years to see the result? Who knew?
Well, we started receiving a reply before our apparatus had even finished transmitting. And it was a reply, not just a static reflection – there was clearly information encoded into the complex waveforms.
Eventually – this was 1988; our computers were slow – we processed the signal and dumped the output – 27 pages of coded nonsense – to the printers. We made many copies, which was fortunate because one of the machines caught fire and subsequently destroyed my lab.
This would have been the greatest discovery ever, had it happened anywhere else, but our bosses demanded secrecy so we kept the outside world in the dark while we studied its contents. Eventually the Soviet system fell, and our top-secret research program evaporated with it. We all went on to careers elsewhere, having reached no satisfactory conclusions about the Inexplicable Reflector.
We never ‘decoded’ the message, never translated it into Russian or English or any other human language, but I know what it was. Simply reading it was enough.
We’d been sent a virus, a great instrument of information warfare that ran on human minds as if we were networked computers. I don’t know how it spread or how many became ‘infected’, but there’s no mistaking the signs. Party loyalists became self-serving agitators, protests, riots, and eventually the Soviet Union – the organization that sent the ‘ping’ – was torn apart.
You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? 31 years later, researchers in Japan discovered the same object and, again, tried to send a message. And some old Russian men such as myself started coming forward…
We all remember the chaos that followed – apparently the response was much stronger – but I do believe the world is better off since. Every government dissolved, their armies abandoned, bloated corporations shut down out of apathy. But look at what we’ve achieved since then, freed from ages-old bureaucracy! Manned spaceflight, interstellar travel, in just a decade…
Everyone has a theory about the Reflector now. My favourite is that it is an open network port into another universe, and we triggered serious anti-malware defenses from its firewall. But I’m a computer scientist, after all.
Which is why we’re here, just 1.5 AU from the Inexplicable Reflector, on the opposite side from Earth and Sol, in this starship I commissioned. We have no ties to any wider organization – I ensured that. My crew are all men and women like me – scientists; obsessed – driven – with the need to understand this thing.
Proximity didn’t yield any answers. So tomorrow we will tight-beam the most powerful broadcast in human history – the entire energy output of this starship’s drive – right into the maw of the featureless black sphere a planet’s orbit away.
I’m pushing the button. I have to know.
by submission | Oct 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Richard D. Deverell
We all knew the story. Every child my age had grown up with it. Though the governmental space agencies had long since faded into obscurity and private companies began the exploration and plunder of the solar system, the governments continued long-range research. NASA, ESA, and JAXA stunned the world when they jointly announced the discovery of a mesoplanet orbiting a star a mere eight light-years away that, through their combined research, they had confirmed to contain liquid water and an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Suddenly, the corporations found themselves racing each other to build a craft and send a team to explore, and claim, the new planet’s resources. Even with the technology the corporations used for their work in the outer solar system, it took fifteen years to develop the star drive capable of accelerating to ninety-eight percent of the speed of light. Development of the integral rams scoop system bankrupted two companies and three more formed an uneasy conglomerate just for the opportunity to stake a claim on the new world.
Volunteers were drawn from every scientific field possible and the United States and China both arranged to have military personnel on board. In the end, fifty people, civilians and military, were selected to take the trip. Though it would only take them eight years to reach their destination, the time dilation effects of near-to-light-speed travel meant that, for every year they traveled, nearly six and-a-half would pass on Earth. By journey’s end, fifty-one and three-quarters years had come and gone on Earth. It would be sixty years before anyone on Earth would even know if the team had successfully arrived since they couldn’t send a message while traveling.
Those countries with citizens among the team sent them off in grand fashion, turning them into national heroes and bestowing medals and honors upon them before they did anything. For years afterward, the cable news would bring family members on to discuss how important the mission was. Soon though, the family members only appeared every five years, and then every ten. People didn’t forget; they just moved on.
Until last year. The first transmission came back and humanity suddenly found itself tuned in to the same programming around the world. The first readings from orbit confirmed the presence of vast inland seas of water and the atmosphere was thirty-five percent oxygen and sixty-two percent helium with other trace gasses filling in the rest. Those gasses indicated the presence of simple life, but there was no evidence of intelligent life or civilizations, either in electromagnetic emissions or even physical structures and roads. After monitoring the planet for weeks and sending out carefully constructed, pre-approved messages of greeting across the EM-band, including light and even an aerial probe to scan the ground closer and emit precisely-timed auditory messages, the team determined that the planet was uninhabited by intelligent life. Many on Earth were disappointed, but the heads of the corporations breathed a secret sigh of relief since they needn’t fear the bad publicity of trying to steal a planet from indigenous sentient life.
The first landing party quickly dispensed with the scenes that fill history texts, all carefully choreographed as well, and then began testing the soil for anything of value back on Earth. After a month, humanity again lost interest. Until we lost contact. The final transmission said only, “We were wrong.” Now, I’m one of the private soldiers assigned to investigate. My eight-year trip will mean fifty for my family. Everyone I know will be gone and I don’t know what I’m facing, but I know I’m not alone.
