by submission | Aug 4, 2013 | Story
Author : Alex Sivier
The large door at the bottom of the chrome craft opened with a faint hiss and white clouds billowed out into the cool Swiss air.
A creature slithered out and slapped dozens of wet tentacles against the plush red carpet to propel it towards the podium, where the president of the United Nations stood waiting.
On one side sat representatives from all nations, and on the other side, reporters from all the major news organisations peered out from behind a wall of cameras and microphones.
The president let out a nervous giggle, cleared her throat and slowly extended a shaky hand.
“On behalf all the citizens of planet Earth, I welcome you to Earth,” she said in a well-rehearsed, but slightly wobbly, voice.
The creature, dripping purple slime from its gelatinous body, raised its head on a serpentine neck and peered closely at her with seven, bulbous, unblinking eyes. It held up a small box and manipulated it in a series of quick twists, while tense security guards fingered their handguns.
Suddenly thousands of tiny dazzling lights burst outwards. The president flinched and jerked her hands in front of her face, but it was just a hologram of the galaxy, zooming into a region at the outer edge of a spiral arm. In the space directly between them, a single unmoving red star was the focal point of the zoom. Gradually, as the hologram grew closer to it, it did start to move, gradually picking up speed and increasing in size. The reason for its motion was because it was not at the centre of the zoom after all. The target was a small brown planet with three tiny moons.
The dark side of planet was covered in lights in intricate geometric swirls and lines, like the earth at night, except that the patterns were more regular and covered the whole of the unlit hemisphere.
Sounds began to fade in as the camera zoom slowed to a halt. Chirps, beeps and bubbling noises, mixed with static. It was like listening to the sounds of a forest on a radio with bad reception.
Suddenly a black cloud drifted into the frame, growing more opaque as it neared the centre. Tiny sparks exploded from the planet like welding embers, sweeping curved paths towards it. The cloud swallowed them and flashed from within, but did not stop or dissipate. Very soon it had engulfed the entire planet.
The sounds stopped abruptly.
The president gulped and a drop of sweat trickled down her temple. The whole world held its breath and stared, wide-eyed, at the writhing ball of smoke.
Finally it drifted away, leaving a charred, black planet, devoid of light and life.
With a flick of the box, the stars rushed in again, whizzed past in blurry streaks and then flung outwards once more as the hologram zoomed into a planet near a small yellow star, which was far more familiar. A patchwork of blues, greens and browns, capped with white, and partially hidden beneath swirling pale smears. Its single cratered moon swung around in a slow waltz.
More sounds faded in amid crackling static. A cacophony of words in a variety of human languages. Some accompanied by music, others with laughter, some were the sombre tones of newsreaders and a few were the passionate rants of dictators.
The creature moved its face very close to the president, who leaned back with a nervous frown. It pressed a long, slender tentacle against the larger of its two mouths and let out a single, soft, sustained sound.
“Shhhhh!”
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by submission | Jul 29, 2013 | Story
Author : Bob Newbell
Captain “Jet” Connors of the Planetary Alliance and his sidekick, Cadet Lackey, burst into the secret base of operations of their archenemy, Dr. Sinistral. The evil madman barked German-accented orders at the robots who flanked him. “Destroy them, my mechanical minions! Destroy Jet Connors and Lackey!”
The lumbering automatons' advance toward the trim, muscular heroes in their form-fitting spacesuits was cut short when Jet and Lackey leveled their atomic disintegrator pistols at the machine men and fired. The robots collapsed to the floor, the vacuum tubes visible through the transparent bubbles in their heads went dim. Dr. Sinistral was too stunned by the quick defeat of his guards to put up much of a fight. Jet felled him with a single punch.
“Lackey, contact Commander Gernsback and let him know we've secured Sinistral's base. I'm going to look around.”
After informing the Commander of the Rocket Patrol of the situation, Lackey joined Jet in Sinistral's lab. Along one wall were several recharging alcoves designed for the mad scientist's robots. Lackey thought it curious that there were no robots in any of the alcoves. He was struck by the enormity of the odd chamber at the center of the room. “Jumpin' Jupiter, Captain, what is that?”
“That, Lackey, is a time machine. I found the blueprints for it on that desk. And look at that chalkboard over in the corner of the room.”
Lackey walked over and examined the chalkboard. On it were parallel horizontal lines, the top line marked “Prime Timeline” and the bottom one “Altered Timeline”.
“Captain, what does it all mean?”
“Lackey, Sinistral's plan was to destroy the Planetary Alliance by changing the past.”
“Roarin' Rockets, Captain, how?”
“By sending his robot henchmen back in time to destroy certain inventors and technologies so there'd be no solar system-wide Planetary Alliance. Look at that chalkboard again. Atomic rockets, flying cars, ray guns, space colonization. He was going to erase them all from history. He was even planning to have his robots self-destruct after they'd completed their missions in the past so no one could use their advanced technology to get history back on track.”
Lackey rested his hand on his semi-automatic pistol in its holster. “Good thing we stopped him,” he said. “Just imagine a world with no Moon base and no space stations.”
“Yep,” replied Connors. “If we'd gotten here just a minute or so later, Project Apollo would have been deleted from the history books.”
Connors and Lackey exchanged glances. “How did we get talking about the old space program?” asked Officer Lackey.
Connors looked around the room. Trash and drug paraphernalia were everywhere. The chatter from a mindless daytime talk show played loudly on the TV. The house smelled of pot and urine. Connors shook his head. “I don't know,” he said.
A siren screamed in the distance. Two police cars joined their own cruiser parked out in front of the house.
“Well,” said Connors, “let's get the paperwork knocked out on this.”
Lackey sighed. He looked at the three disheveled suspects sitting handcuffed on the floor. He looked at the squalid, filthy room. Another day, another meth bust, he thought. “Let's grab some lunch when we're done here,” said Lackey.
“Not fast food,” said Connors who looked down at his large belly. “Doc's been after me about my weight. Blood pressure and cholesterol are up, too. Sometimes I wish we just had food pills like in those old sci fi stories.”
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by submission | Jul 28, 2013 | Story
Author : Jim O'Loughlin
It’s like flying a kite, Sheila thought. In a way she was right. Just a thin strand of carbon nanotube stretched out of the launch pad, rising into the sky, and continuing out of sight. She accepted that the cord reached through and beyond the atmosphere, where it eventually attached to the space station in low orbit. But that had always seemed an abstract fact, like the knowledge that the earth revolved around the sun or that dinosaurs once ruled the earth.
Yet, now she was going to board the shuttle for a 100,000-kilometer trip up this flimsy looking strand, and there was nothing abstract about that. But it was important that she kept her cool, because her husband was starting to lose it. Palik stood next to her, his face flushed and his hands trembling, and they hadn’t even boarded the space elevator yet.
“Hold it together, bloke,” Sheila said.
“I’m not afraid of heights and I’m not afraid of small places,” Palik said. “But I’m not sure I can do the two together. What would that be, acroclaustrophobia?”
“I think I’m suffering from fear of bullshit. Does that have a name? Here, take this. It’s a special new anti-anxiety pill. Just don’t tell anyone I gave it to you.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“I know people.”
Palik swallowed the pill and looked relieved. It was only a sugar pill, but Sheila wouldn’t tell him that. She appreciated the power of suggestion more than most. It was one of the ways she had risen from rural Aussie schoolgirl to doctor in a semi-illegal clinic to Governor of this island. And it’s how she had been able to talk her way onto the space elevator for one of the first trips open to civilians.
She knew that despite his complaints, this trip meant everything to Palik. Of course, Sheila was excited to go into space, too. Who wouldn’t be? But for Palik, getting up the cord meant something more. She tried to fully appreciate what it had been like for him, growing up on the island where the economy, the culture and the schools all revolved around the cord, even though so few people ever got to go up to the space station. His whole life he had been staring at this sky-bound string, knowing it went somewhere he couldn’t go. It had left a core of bitterness in a man who was otherwise caring and decent.
Palik craned his head up the length of the cord.
“It’s a long way to go,” he said.
“About five days, they told me.”
“No, you and me. It’s a long way to go. I never thought we’d end up here.” Palik placed his arms around Sheila’s waist. “I’m ready to fly, and I can’t imagine what happens next.”
Sheila smiled. He was right. He couldn’t imagine what he was in for. She hadn’t told him the half of it yet.
“Enjoy the view. It’ll be a while before we see this again.”
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by submission | Jul 27, 2013 | Story
Author : Townsend Wright
When the mostly human crew of the starship Bastar VII found a derelict ion-powered eco-ship in the middle of deep space, they were surprised. When they found that the ship was heavy with life signs, they were shocked. When the ship contacted them in two distinctly odd accents of an ancient dialect of modern standard, they were stupefied. And when a visual contact was established and the crew saw the side-by-side faces of what appeared to be a very roughly humanoid cat and dog, you could have built a small cottage out of the bricks they all shat.
“Greeeeaaatingsssss, oolde oneesssssss,” said the cat-like-thing in a sing-songy, meowing voice. “Weeee haaveee beeen exssspecting your returrrrrrrrrrn.”
“Res,” added the dog in a concise syllable “We, wer be-ge-nin to won-da iff da stah-res wer tru.”
The captain promptly made a signal for one of the AIs to cut the transmission. As the screen went dark she asked her co-captain “What the Hell was that?!”
“That was a cat and a dog, sir,” he replied.
“I get that much, but why were we just talking to them in old English?!”
“Well, sir, one of the AIs has identified the craft as the first ship to leave the Sol system heading for the Inocci system, or Alpha Centauri as it was known at the time. It left the Sol system in approximately 46 B1C. It was lost shortly after.”
“Early Technological Earth, fits the language. But are we supposed to believe that in just 44,000 revolutions the people on that ship evolved into cats and dogs?”
“No, sir, the people on that ship died. Ten years into the thirty-year journey, one of the crew went mad and murdered every human there. The ship went off course and no one has heard from it until now.”
“Then who were they?!”
“Cats and Dogs, sir.”
“We’ve been over this, sir.”
“No, sir, they are in fact the descendants of the cats and dogs that the people brought onto the ship.”
“That much evolution in just 44,000 years is impossible.”
“Not necessarily, sir. With all humans gone, domestic animals, which relied heavily on humans, would be forced to rapidly adapt. Those with the intelligence and the dexterity to access the food and help humans would have given them would be more likely to survive. The ship was designed with an ecosystem and technology meant to last a long time without maintenance. Eventually the two species developed the anatomy to work the human devices, the intelligence to understand them, and the lingual skills needed to interact with the ship’s primitive AI, which is where they learned English.”
“So…What do we do now?”
“Official policy is to contact any and all intelligent life forms and introduce them into galactic society. This should be fairly simple in this case, given these races’ close similarities to an already established race.”
“Alright, but first, Mr. Fjoyk,” the Captain turned to the scanner technician, a trilaterally symmetrical reptilian. “I don’t know if you can detect this from here, but…They can pick up their own shit by now can they not?”
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by submission | Jul 26, 2013 | Story
Author : C.T. Jackman
The late-evening wind wasn’t the only thing that threatened to pull Derek from the building’s roof. A car screamed through the air in front of him, forcing the bounty hunter to stagger his stance for balance and spin his arms, even almost dropping his sub-machine gun as he tried to maintain his position on the roof’s raised edge. He wasn’t in any serious danger; if he had fallen, he would’ve been able to activate his jump-pack and prevent any serious injury, but doing so would blow his cover wide open.
“There’s lanes for a reason!” he shouted at the departing vehicle, but it paid him no heed. It continued to fly in the space between its counterparts in the air and those lesser machines confined the ground, eventually disappearing out of sight as it recklessly turned a corner.
“That was smooth,” his robot companion commented below him. Benny’s voice was the perfect imitation of a human’s, but Derek could still tell the difference between a voice-box and vocal cords.
“Can it, bucket-brain.”
“So we’re resorting to slurs now, are we? Professional. I hope your wild display of ineptitude didn’t draw the attention of our target.”
Derek ignored the comment and pushed a button on the side of his helmet to zoom in on the man they were after. The marauding arms dealer was still dining at a table outside the restaurant with his two alien clients, and they gave no indication that any of them had witnessed a hover-craft almost tearing Derek from his perch.
The contract stated that their target was to be taken dead or alive, and anything else was secondary. The Inter-Galactic Justice Commission put Mr. Bradford’s warrant out three months ago, and Derek and Benny quickly jumped at the opportunity.
The bounty hunter dropped back below the edge of the roof and raised his face mask so Benny could look him in the eyes. He knew the robot appreciated being able to analyze his facial micro expressions and compare them to the audible fluctuations in his voice. Benny claimed that it was good practice for when they had to determine the truth in a target’s words.
“I still say we should have brought a rifle so we could pick him off from here,” Derek said.
“I already told you. I calculated that the likelihood of them utilizing personal energy shields is roughly 70.28%.”
“And such shields are designed to deflect a shot made from this distance, I know, I know. That’s why we have these,” the bounty hunter said, and raised his sub-machine gun.
“Correct. We’ve tracked him across three different star systems; I think you can handle making the leap across a street.”
“Maybe. Why don’t we find out? I’m tired of waiting; let’s go take this bastard out before he completes the deal and hands over the weapons.”
A chuckle emitted from Benny’s voice box. “Derek, after all these years, are you beginning to fancy yourself a hero?” it asked. The robot barely registered the gleam in the corner of the human’s eye before the helmet’s face mask slid down and Benny was looking at its own reflection.
“I consider it more of a civic duty,” Derek said, double checking the scope on his gun one last time. “I am licensed, after all.”
“Would that really affect whether or not you would continue to pursue this line of work?”
Derek thought for a moment, then powered up his jump-pack. “No,” he said, his smile hidden. “It’s too much fun.”
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