by Patricia Stewart | Mar 15, 2013 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“Welcome aboard, Mrs. Dieter.”
“Why, thank you, Captain Dieter,” Lana replied with a giggle, and followed it up with a long, hard kiss. Afterwards, she embraced him firmly and said, “I can’t believe I married a 200 year old man.”
“I’m thirty-five,” he corrected. “I just happened to have been born 200 years ago. It’s one of the consequences of choosing a career piloting interstellar cargo ships at near light speed.”
“I can’t imagine how hard it had to be for you to leave your family and friends for so long, knowing that they would grow old, while you stayed young.”
“I won’t lie to you, darling, it ruined my first marriage. Unlike you, Demetra was afraid of space, and wouldn’t leave Earth. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the beginning. After all, the Alpha Centauri run has the least relativistic effects. However, I’d age only a year, as Demetra and the kids aged eight. However, the money was good, so we thought we could deal with it, but after the fourth run it became untenable. Relative to me, in four years, Demetra was older than my mother. I couldn’t handle it. I asked for a divorce. I willingly gave her all my money, and signed up for the Denebolian run. She died during the 73 year voyage, and I haven’t been back to Earth since.”
“Was she pretty?”
Concluding that he had already said too much on the subject, he tried to divert her attention. “Not compared to the prettiest girl in the universe,” he said as he framed her face in the palms of his hands. “Well, that is, until Halona decides to join us,” he added has he padded her slightly protruding tummy. “Now, if I don’t get this ship out of the dock, Phobos Control will give someone else our launch slot, and we won’t get to Regulus before the cargo spoils.” He kissed her forehead lightly, and headed toward the flight deck, truly believing the topic was behind them.
Several months later, however, after initiating the Regulus breaking sequence, Wendell Dieter entered their bedroom to find Lana sitting on the edge of the bed in tears. Fearing a problem with the pregnancy, he rushed to her side. “What’s the matter, honey? Is the baby okay?”
She pointed to the desk monitor with a trembling finger, “Is that your Demetra?” she asked through stifled sobs.
It was. Wendell couldn’t understand why his new wife was so fixated on a woman that’s has been dead for centuries. “Honey, what’s this about? I explained to you a dozen times…”
“No, no, no, it’s not that. It’s a Genealogy site. I was constructing Halona’s family tree. Demetra’s daughter was my grandmother. You’re my great grandfather.”
by submission | Mar 9, 2013 | Story |
Author : James Zahardis
Glxxo-Rgm looks up from her console at the colossal androids. Above their heads is a transparent dome that separates the Denshari flagship’s methane-enriched atmosphere from space. Glxxo-Rgm’s foremost right leg extends and the Loom materializes. She centers herself in the matrix of spires, pulls a polypeptide strand from her spinneret, and the web forms.
The colossus with pinkish skin and blue eyes stares down. “You propose we’re going to this planet hastily and without an appropriate treaty?”
Glxxo-Rgm cross-links a strand to her web.
The second colossus, similar to the first, except for his baseball cap, sneers at Glxxo-Rgm, faces the other android and says, “Please, Admiral Ooghrt–”
“–Ooghrt-Lxi, the Ravager, cryosleeps. I am now Thaddeus. Do you understand, Nahum?”
“Yes, Thaddeus. Why do you listen to this old fool, sir?! She cost us victory on Denzbxx! We lost the–”
“–Silence! Be satisfied that you are now Chief Ambassador. She’ll never make planetfall again!”
A young, leggy Denshari strides toward the Loom, and bows to Glxxo-Rgm.
“Weave, larva!” booms Thaddeus’s voice.
As the Denshari weaves, Glxxo-Rgm’s pedipalps curl down. She remembers Ooghrt-Lxi webcasting her demotion and promoting his nephew to her post. He doesn’t know his air-sacs from his spinneret, she thinks.
Thaddeus reads the web, “Transport–momentarily.”
#
Andrea “A-Day” Dadelomis sees two customers in the car lot. Look like Escalade types–probably some of Jayhawk’s wannabe friends, she thinks.
“Welcome to Deal Master’s–you want it, we’ve got it!”
“We’ve come to make terms with your world’s leader,” Nahum replies.
“Oh, you mean Jason, my soon to be husband,” A-Day says. “You guys bill collectors?”
Nahum’s colloquial/slang app activates. “We ain’t bill collectors. Need to confab with Big Man–set things proper between our peoples.”
Holy crap!–Jayhawk’s mixed-up with gangbangers! A-Day thinks. “Follow me.”
Synth-blood rushes into Nahum’s cheeks as he passes under the banner that reads: DEAL MASTER’S–BEST DEALS in DELAND and the ENTIRE WORLD!!!
Jason “Jayhawk” Hawkingston tries to rap along with a YouTube video. He sees the men, their thick gold chains. Damn, big money playas! he thinks. He turns off the video and sniffs his underarms.
“What’s crackalackin, fellas?”
“You the Deal Master? best deals on the planet?” Nahum responds.
“That’s what the commercial says, right? What can I interest y’all in?”
“Everything.”
“Got Escalades, some–”
“Yes. Everything.”
Jayhawk turns to A-Day. “Excuse me, gonna show them the lot.”
Jayhawk escorts the men outside. “OK, what y’all really want? No disrespect–are you… Mafioso?”
“We want to establish a base on your world.”
“You want the whole place?”
“Yes.”
Thaddeus nudges Nahum. “I offer the following gifts for your world: a slap-chopper, an auto-tune microphone, a pair of–”
“–Hold up, big baller, I busted my ass flipping foreclosures to get money for this place!–I don’t care if you’re Sopranos–y’all don’t–”
“–Silence!” interjects Thaddeus. “We’ll also give you ten million freshly minted US dollars!”
“Serious?”
Thaddeus and Nahum escort Jayhawk to the Hummer parked across the street. Soon Jayhawk hightails back to the dealership with two duffel bags, and ten minutes later he and A-Day are driving home to pack for Acapulco.
#
Two weeks pass. A.J. Nelwood, an Apopka sod farmer, is inspecting damage to his turf incurred during a sudden hailstorm. He nearly trips over several stones lying on the grass. If thunderstorms can bring fish’n’frogs reckon hailstorms can bring stones, he thinks. As he walks away he fails to notice the spiders striding away from the stones or their tiny flag embedded in the grass.
END
by submission | Mar 8, 2013 | Story |
Author : Xauri’EL Zwaan
Evelyn offers me a bouquet of white lilies. I know immediately that she’s hiding something, but I indulge her little game. I take them and breathe deeply; she knows how I love complex smells. These have a spice that matches nothing in my chemical pattern bank. Genemod flowers; that’s unlike her.
“Happy anniversary, Darling.” She’s not happy, but trying desperately to sound it.
“What’s wrong?”
She flashes with anger. “Nothing.” I know she’s lying, but I also know that forcing the issue will just mean another fight. I’m not eager for a week of verbal silence and kinesic screaming, so I drop it.
I’ve put every ounce of the love I still feel for her into dinner. She picks at it in silence.
She asks me about my day. Surprising; she never wants to hear about work anymore. I tell her about charting trajectories for blinkships in Reimann space. She’s becoming angry, hostile; my words trail off.
“Your enhanced genetics must help you a lot with that.”
I sigh. “Can we please not do this today?”
“I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t stand it — being read like a book, feeling stupid and incompetent all of the time. I’m done with you. It’s over.”
I stop thinking about work, about the books I’ve been reading, about sex. I stop browsing blogs and watching the stock ticker. I focus entirely on her.
I’ve been expecting this for months now. That’s not the problem. Everything is out in the open now; but she’s still hiding something. She perches on her chair like a vulture.
My lips and fingertips are starting to feel numb.
“What have you done, Evelyn?”
“These flowers have enhanced genetics, too. They were made just for you, darling. Just for your DNA.”
“But I love you.” She stands over me as I slip to the floor.
“You smart bastard. I finally got one over on you.”
by Patricia Stewart | Mar 6, 2013 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
As the FNG, I was the crew’s gofer. When anyone needed a lackey, I was the guy. But hey, it was the price I was willing to pay to get into space. Today, I was helping the Chief. He needed to replace the Finnegan Pin that couples the ion reactor to the primary bulkhead, and that meant that we also had to stop the ship’s rotation. How awesome is that? Getting paid to work in zero-g. I love my job.
“Okay, Josh,” said the Chief, “go to the maintenance locker and get me a three foot spanner wrench. And make sure that it has a Heisenberg insulator on the handle.”
“Roger, that, Chief,” I replied as I launched myself toward the aft section. After an effortless flight across the 120 foot wide engine room, I snagged the top rung of the safety rail surrounding the upper deck, and pirouetted myself feet first toward the tool lockers, waving to the Chief as I disappeared through the open hatch.
I drifted over to the inventory control terminal and entered the code for the spanner wrench. While I was waiting for the retrieval cart to produce the wrench, the ship’s intruder alarm sounded. I could hear yelling in the distance, and PPKs discharging. I froze for a few minutes, not knowing what to do. I came back to my senses when I heard the Chief arguing with an unfamiliar voice. Gathering my nerve, I peaked around the hatch. There were two pirates roughing up the Chief.
Before we had set off, we had been briefed by the Rangers that pirates were in the sector, and freighters were easy prey, because they knew we would run with less than a half dozen men. I thought about working my way through the vents to get to the Bridge and radio for help, when one of the pirates left the engine room. The lone pirate had his back to me. That’s when I decide to help the Chief first. I grabbed the spanner wrench from the tray, and slowly moved onto the balcony. I launched myself toward the pirate. Like a peregrine falcon, I swooped down on him. With all my strength, I swung the wrench and split his skull with a vicious two-hander, and then tumbled out of control into the reactor fairing. With lightning speed, the Chief grabbed the PPK and rushed to help me get reoriented. “Great work, kid.”
“We need to help the Skipper” I stated.
“Too late, Josh. Those bastards pushed him, Pete, and Gabriel out the airlock. They’re only keeping me alive long enough to restore the gravity.”
“What do we do?”
“I suppose most on them are scouring the ship looking for you. Maybe they left their ship unguarded. Let’s find out.”
When we entered the pirate’s bridge, we found two of them looking out the ports toward the Endeavour. They weren’t expecting a counterattack, so they were easy pickings for the Chief. As I went for the radio, the Chief went back to the docking station. I heard him fire a shot, and then I heard the outer hatch of the pirate’s ship slam shut. When the Chief released the magnetic clamps, the decompression blast from the Endeavour pushed us clear. Looking through the port, I saw three flailing pirates blown into space with the venting atmosphere.
“I blasted their controls,” the Chief explained as he came back to the bridge. “They can’t close the hatch. In ten minutes, they’ll all be sucking vacuum. Ah, nice. Here come two more,” he said with a satisfied smile.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 5, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Humans are crazy. This is a long voyage.
I pretend I’m a greedy Noah sometimes. I pretend that I brought two hundred humans and said ‘fuck it’ to the animals.
Transporters have given the human race the ability to flicker from post to post at speeds previously believed to be impossible. Good for us.
However, a human can’t just beam to Alpha Centauri. There needs to be a receiving station there.
There are long-range ships peopled with volunteers like myself that take centuries to reach far-off planets and set up a transporter sender/receiver. Input/Output posts, they’re called, or I.O. towers. Fitting, since the first transporter was invented on Jupiter’s moon Io by the poor, doomed, Doctor Swanson. The one that took a bite out the gas giant, adding an extra eye.
The ship is huge and mostly automated except for us humans. There are two hundred of us. Only one is awake at a time and we work in two-month shifts.
There are astrophysicist and engineering specialists amongst others that have downloaded their brains into A.I. constructs that we can awaken if an emergency arises.
Other than that, we are free to stare out the windows, eat, and just monitor the passing Doppler universe as we skate under the milk-skin thin ice of lightspeed.
Personally, I think us two hundred volunteers with a penchant for loneliness are completely redundant. I mean, if a true emergency happened at these speeds, we’d wink out of the universe in a flurry of greasy atoms and be none the wiser. We wouldn’t know what hit us.
I think we’re included as lucky charms. We’re the prize in the cereal box. The drive to include humans on the ships is verging on nostalgia. It’s inconceivable to have a space mission without humans, regardless of how superfluous we are.
But hey, that’s why I signed up. I like the isolation. Sometimes, I turn on the lights in the crew room. 199 full green tubes and one empty one; mine. I’ll walk down the white alley and look into the green tubes. I’ll see my co-workers faces, sleeping in fluid, suspended like they’re falling. I’ve only ever met Jared and Tina, the one who comes before me and the one that comes after me. There’s an hour of overlap. I wake them up, they put me under. It’s brief and we don’t talk.
We’re all the same, picked for our sociopathic natures. We prefer to be alone.
Communications at this speed are nearly impossible. Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll get to where we’re headed and it will already be populated. Like we’ll be regarded as antiques or that day’s curiousity. Maybe there’ll be a parade.
Or maybe it’ll just be a rock system and we won’t be able to find any planets to hook up our terraformers to. We’ll just spend our lives in the spaceship, out of fuel for a return journey, winding down like a handmade clock.
Most likely, everything will go textbook. Computers are hardly ever wrong.
I’m a passenger and I’m happy about it.
