by submission | Jun 8, 2014 | Story |
Author : Becky Kendall
The biggest disappointment for the public around the mid-21st century was when physicists conclusively disproved time travel. Scientists were taken completely by surprise when they realised how many people had believed time travel would be possible at some point in the near future, so they were unprepared for the backlash.
What they hadn’t taken into account was that for most of us – the non-scientists and non-mathematicians – belief in science was just that, a faith, something you accepted because it seemed to be a respected and popular view, but had no way of personally proving. The untrained everyman was as able to understand the theory behind most accepted physics hypotheses as she was able to walk on water. Sure, we accepted that gravity was what stopped us falling off the Earth into the sky, but observing most people try to explain why, or what gravity was, would be enough to make a physicist cry.
What they failed to understand was that science was viewed as no different to magic by most. This was despite it increasing in popularity throughout the first half of the 21st century, or maybe because of it. We accepted levitating frogs and space travel, images beamed from satellites, mobile technology and computer chips able to process information faster then the human brain. But we didn’t really know how they worked, we just believed that they did. Bits of data that travel through the air from my computer to yours on the other side of the world. OK, if you say so.
As science and technology breakthroughs became every day news, we saw image mapping of the brain become much more common. The detail of the images was breathtaking, beautiful, magical. So that’s what my brain looks like when I think of playing tennis, tell a lie, fall in love? Wow.
When this technology became affordable to large organisations, it breathed life into the failing advertising industry. Once it became mobile, it really took off, and suddenly the dream of an open and honest society looked achievable. You can’t lie to me if I know what you’re thinking. By this time, almost everyone on the planet had long given up conventional ideas of privacy, so they shared their brain mapped data with the world at large.
It was just like being psychic.
Scientists had become popular, mainstream, and public funding for scientific experiments had massively increased. The public was fully behind these far-reaching dreams of a future enhanced by all kinds of exotic improvements they couldn’t even imagine, but couldn’t live without. Scientists mistakenly believed that this meant people understood what it was that they did. They didn’t.
The PR agent used by most of the public-facing physicists hastily tried to put together a series of public events that would highlight achievements over the past 100 years, and there were many of them. But it was too late. Our mystical gurus had let us down. What do you mean, time travel isn’t just around the corner?
Faith wained, physicist became a dirty word. Their image was tarnished beyond repair. Sure, they still had hardcore disciples who would preach to you about E=mc2, but no one listened.
Some physicists dabbled with ecology, with genetic engineering and DNA research. Eager to please a sceptical public, some moved into the social sciences.
But the herd had moved on, restless and overfed. Impatiently waiting for the next miracle.
by submission | Jun 5, 2014 | Story |
Author : Aaron Koelker
Most said I was crazy, some wished me luck and only one said, “I love you”.
Though I was strapped to a flaming arrow that the archer had no intention of ever retrieving, I had yet to question my own sanity. In fact, I thought I was the sanest person on the planet, and it was about to lose him.
Thousands volunteered for the opportunity and thousands backed out; hundreds were declared unsuitable and dozens were thanked for their commitment but ultimately turned away. Now there was just me, soon to be the first man to stand on that little red rock in the sky.
A psych test wheedled out the majority of applicants and declared that I was in undeniably perfect mental health. It didn’t take a subtle mind to see the overwhelming irony in that, but I believed it, and I was impressed with whomever had designed the test to actually deign me sane. Perhaps they, too, understood things like I did.
I wasn’t scared as the rocket locked into its ignition procedures and I didn’t think I would need the luck people had thrust upon me over the last few weeks. You can’t be the sanest man in the world and believe in a thing like luck, but it was interesting how much I learned about fear from those concerned folk. Sometimes you saw it in their eyes or in the way they asked, but you could always tell. While they surmised little from me, I took a lot away from them.
“Won’t you get lonely?” one asked me. I then knew they were terrified of solitude.
“Won’t you get bored?” asked another. I knew they cherished material goods and struggled with restlessness.
“Such little space!” said the claustrophobic one.
The solid boosters lit beneath me, yet they seemed far away and unimportant. I was picturing the day’s headlines sprawled out above a black and white of my hideous mug. “MAN’S ONE WAY TRIP OPENS FUTURE!” it might say. Think of all the petty, uninspired jokes there would be when people saw the face of the man who chose to run away from all of humanity. They couldn’t understand, just like the people who feared for me didn’t understand and the people who thought me crazy didn’t understand. If they did, they might be strapped into this rocket with me.
Only one person came close to that claim, and while I wouldn’t necessarily miss her, I regretted not knowing her better. My mother walked out on my father, who died when I was fifteen shortly after remarrying. My stepmother and I, between which there was little animosity, had never spent much time together. But she knew she was the only flake of a family I had left, and that must have compelled her to say, “I love you,” when I told her I was leaving for good. No comment or fuss, no attempt to understand why or dissuade me. Just, “I love you.” She couldn’t understand why, but I was glad to know she at least understood me.
As I soared into a black heaven dotted with starlight, I knew I completely understood all those people with their faces titled up to the sky imagining themselves in my position, terrified at the idea. They could only wonder and guess why a man would willingly condemn himself to my fate. My problem was that I knew them all too well. I read them like an open book while to them I was some alien hieroglyph etched on a dirty wall.
I didn’t condemn myself; I condemned humanity.
by submission | Jun 4, 2014 | Story |
Author : S. Tyrel Murray
Its cold all the time. I don’t mean cold, as in frozen. More like uncomfortable, chilly. Its still cold enough to die from hypothermia.
I was one of the first volunteers selected. They said we would travel. See the sights. They lied. They had us in cold sleep for the trip, so we didn’t get to see any of it. Even warping space and travelling at 27 times the speed of light, it took us more than 18 years to reach here.
There were sixteen of us when we left. We lost the first two a half million klicks from Earth. A secondary reactor in the aft storage module started leaking coolant. Johnson and Valasques went to shunt the coolant line so we could salvage some supplies, and dump the module. They were boiled alive. It wasn’t pretty.
You may be wondering, “Where is here?” “Here” is Kepler-186f. We found the planet orbiting an M class dwarf, a red sun, back in early 2014. It’s habitable, but barely. The air is breathable, the water is potable, the vegetation is edible. We haven’t seen any native fauna, but I’m no zoologist. That was Valasques’ job.
When we landed, and I use that term loosely, the wind was too strong for us to set up our survival equipment. We had to weather the storm in the crew module. It passed after almost a week, then we set about building our domed houses. Azzimi, a structural engineer, made sure our houses could withstand the high winds.
He was the first to disappear. We don’t know when it happened. There were no screams, and no bootprints or tracks to follow, thanks to the constant winds. Over the next four months, nine more men disappeared under the same mysterious circumstances. The rest of us were petrified to leave each other’s sight.
There are only four of us left, and we always have one person on watch. We’re all very tired, bored, afraid, and resentful. We haven’t been apart from each other in more than six months. We have begun to hate and fear each other. Suspicion runs high, but we still need one person watching at all times. It’s my turn for watch, so that’s what I’m doing.
They say familiarity breeds contempt, and I agree. I hate those guys so much. I think I’ll go for a walk.
by Julian Miles | Jun 2, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
We were getting pasted in a dogfight off Agnos IV when Team Havoc dropped out of subspace and chewed up the Havna interceptors that had been giving us grief. The thirty-two of us left were damn happy to see the cavalry.
“Marduk Leader to Havoc Leader. Cheers for the assist.”
“No problemo, Marduk. Happy to help.”
At that moment, the jaws of the Havna trap closed and seventy-two Crusis Class interceptors appeared in four ‘eighteen wheels’ formations.
“Marduk Leader to all Marduk units. Looks like we get to celebrate on the run. Havoc, you got flank?”
“Hell no. I got the latest version of Combat Assessor online. Predicts over eighty percent losses. Havoc Flight, reset to start of zone in three,-”
“Reset what?”
“Oh man, you’re realtime? That sucks. Havoc out in two, one… Seeya.”
Team Havoc vanished into subspace and the dying began.
The merging of flight simulators, multiplayer combat games and drone technology started back in the mid twenty-first century. When man went into space via the discovery that subspace could carry more than communications, ‘simdrones’ became the new frontier. Billions of young gamers could reconnoitre actual new planets, all from the comfort of their recliners and gameshelms.
When negotiations broke down with the Havna, we nearly won. A million simdrones piloted by teenagers from across the world had the Havna outnumbered and out-insanitied – there are no limits to what you’ll attempt when you can’t die.
Havna technology advanced and subspace feedback missiles gave the simdrone community their first casualties: 196,547 in two days, to be precise. Cocky became cowardly. So much so that ‘training missions’, supposedly in virtual environments on Earth, were actually live missions, pulled off without the knowledge of the all-too-aware-of-their-mortality little darlings safe at home.
Occasionally, clusterfucks like the one that killed all bar three of Team Marduk happened. Apparently, Team Havoc received a ‘stern’ reprimand.
We hear the chime within the house. It’s a fine day and people are sunning themselves by their pools. Stacey and I, we look summer-ish. Get too close and you’ll see angular outlines under our jellabiya.
The door opens and a woman who could be anything between fifty and ninety smiles at us, revealing teeth to match her million-credit bodywork.
“Can I help you?” Her tone indicates mild curiosity.
“We’re from SD Monitoring, Madam. Can we speak to the resident SD Warrior?”
She sighs: “Warrior? Pain the neck is what he is. CECIL! People from the base to see you!” With that, she leaves us standing there and saunters off, calling for the maid.
A few moments later, a well-built teenager in a silk dishdasha ambles out: “You two my new handlers?” He focuses on Stacey: “Oh man, they sent a babe.”
I rest the foot-long suppressor that fronts my Morgan .60 cal on the tip of his nose: “Marduk Leader to Havoc Leader. Karma time.”
The kick shocks my wrist, elbow and shoulder. Cecil’s head sprays across four metres of parquet and stucco. I look at Marduk Seven – Stacey. She nods.
“Next?”
She checks the datapad on her wrist: “Two houses down on the other side.”
“Law enforcement window?”
“Nine minutes.”
Three minute walk, one minute knock and wait, one minute kill.
“Send subspace co-ordinates for the road outside the next house to Marduk Twenty-Three. Evac in seven.”
Jimi’s that good. Put him in a captured Crusis Class and we become oni: unstoppable demons of vengeance. By the time questions are asked about surveillance suppression and the like, we’ll be back in our quarters on ISS Twelve having left no traces of our little field trip.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Shadow coloured stones crush and scatter under boot heels. Their passage unheard, two figures have slipped silently across the rooftop expanse to its eastern face. Lumbering mechanicals presenting themselves at intervals, drinking heat from the spaces below to exhale in great humid sighs. These are the only sounds to disturb the pre morning air. There are no bird songs, no passing vehicles, no murmuring undercurrent of peripheral lives. It will be hours before the first ships climb to the stars.
This is the silence before the break of day.
Two figures sit, silent, legs dangling into space from the parapet, the last of the previous night’s beer in hand, each absently slaking the thirst neither of them feels anymore.
It’s not the night’s antics that make this moment memorable, indeed those memories are lost now. Not even the rise of the sun itself, though I’m sure as always it was worth the wait. The rising of this particular sun on this particular day was merely an ending, it had no significance beyond that.
The memory, rather, is of two accidental friends sharing the last moment they’d know together, in silence, waiting for the sun to rise and give them permission to leave one another, to leave home.
It is these few moments, this shared time of solitude so exquisitely inscribed upon which I now reflect. A time remarkable in its clarity, plucked from a sea of murky memories, of happenings that have long since faded from view. Brought forth by the thought of a sunrise I can’t remember watching, and will never see again.
