by submission | Nov 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Hugo swallowed his last protein pill, paid his bill, and left the cafe. As he walked out the door, the rocket thrust from a young lady leaving the parking lot by jetpack blasted him with fire. It was only his quick reflexes that prevented him from being badly burned. As it happened, only his right pant leg was slightly singed. Mildly annoyed, he brushed himself off and proceeded to his flying car.
Hugo switched on the engine of his small, helicopter-like vehicle and began to slowly ascend. The aeromobile’s downdraft turned pebbles, bottle caps, and other assorted debris in the cafe’s parking lot into high-speed projectiles. The cafe’s windows and three parked cars all sustained minor damage. As he gained altitude and began to move forward, he saw the wreckage of another flying car embedded in the wall of a department store. Flames and thick, black smoke poured from the crash site.
After getting home and putting his car in the hangar, Hugo picked up the newsreel the “paper boy” — an antiquated term that for some reason people never abandoned — had thrown on his front lawn. Hugo went into his den and loaded the microfilm into the reader. The words “The Daily Gazette” appeared on the screen. Immediately beneath them appeared “August 3, 2000”. Hugo turned on the radio and after the tubes warmed up, big band music filled the room.
For an hour, Hugo caught up on the latest news. General Atomics was going to make another attempt to launch a manned rocket to the Moon. When GA’s fission rocket blew up shortly after launching last week killing everyone aboard and spreading radioactive debris along the eastern seaboard, there was serious concern they might be discouraged and not try another launch. General Atomics’ stock was up five points on the news they would try again. Should have told my broker to buy a hundred shares of GA last week, Hugo thought.
He scrolled the microfilm to the technology section. He read about an “electronic brain” at the University of Pennsylvania that could perform 5,000 mathematical operations in a single second. And the engineers had somehow crammed all that computing power into a mere 1,000 square feet of floor space. Hugo found this very impressive, although he couldn’t think of any practical use for such a calculating machine.
Hugo skimmed through the remaining sections of the film spool. He perused an item about the President meeting with the Russian Czar to discuss the potential threat posed by the Kaiser. He read that the Brooklyn Dodgers would be playing the Giants next week at Ebbets Field. He saw what sort of jumpsuits fashionable men and women would be wearing this winter.
At last, Hugo came to the letters to the editor section. One amusing missive caught his eye. The writer rambled about “the way we live now”. He claimed the rising incidence of cancer was caused by waste from atomic power plants. The death toll from aeromobile accidents, the letter said, was catastrophic because most people didn’t have the skill and reaction time to safely pilot flying cars. Ray guns, videophones, slidewalks: the author disparaged them all. He even warned that zeppelins filled with flammable hydrogen were “unsafe at any altitude”.
Hugo shut off the microfilm viewer and lit a cigarette. “Why would they publish such anti-humanistic, Luddite claptrap?” he said aloud. Some people will never be satisfied, he thought. Why, I bet that malcontented crank will live to the ripe old age of 50!
by Duncan Shields | Nov 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The sentence was passed. The switch was flipped on the transporter and Caleb’s protests were cut off in mid-scream. The concrete block fused with his head.
The first transporter accident taught us a valuable lesson about the covalency bonds between atoms. We already knew that it was the strongest force in the universe. To disrupt even a few of those bonds released the power and destructive energy of an atomic bomb.
Fear made us put safeguards in place to make sure that no transporters could accidentally force two objects to try to fit into the same space at the same time. Two things the world isn’t short on, though, are crazy people and ways around safeguards.
Jackie Shaugnessy was one such crazy person. She wanted to destroy the television station where her ex-boyfriend worked. The possibility of destroying the entire city or even that side of the world was a bonus to her. She was off-balance with love grief.
She also had a degree in microcircuitry and beam theory. She worked all week to disable the safeguard programming and hardware. She was very good at it. She even changed the spatial projectors. A receiving station wouldn’t be needed. She’d just appear wherever at the co-ordinates she entered.
She would have had several patents to make her rich beyond her dreams if she hadn’t gone through with her little act of terrorism.
On Friday the 9th of December, she set the co-ordinates, stepped on to the pad and pressed her remote control. With tears in her eyes, she disappeared from her apartment on the south side of Brooklyn.
Her molecules flew through space.
And reassembled in the wall of her ex-boyfriend’s office. There was a mild jostling at an atomic level but nothing happened other than that.
Her ex-boyfriend looked up from his morning coffee to see the tips of two shoes, an arm in a pink sweater, most of a breast, and a cascade of hair protruding from his wall.
He dropped his coffee cup and shouted. He screamed louder when he recognized the sweater. When he ran over to the grisly find, he grabbed the hand that was hanging from the wall.
It grabbed him back.
There was no way to undo what she had done. That section of wall with her embedded in it is still in a sub-basement of a government facility. No part of her head is exposed so the only way to communicate with her is by touching her hand. The parts of her that are exposed get older. She can still breathe somehow. She’s kept alive intravenously.
This little accident became the basis for the Shaughnessy punishment.
Caleb Johnson was convicted of crimes against humanity two decades later and sentenced to the Shaughnessy punishment.
He hung limply between the arms of the bailiffs, his head encased in a cube of concrete for the rest of his natural life. He would be fed through an IV and kept alive at the state’s discretion.
by submission | Nov 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
I set the display to pan to the constellation of Canis Minor. The holographic celestial sphere rotates all around me until the Smaller Dog comes into view. I wave my hand over the controls. The display zooms in on Procyon A. The white main sequence star fills half the room. The image is a real-time picture, at least as real-time as 11.4 light-years of distance will allow. The Procyon system has no planets, but if it did I could zoom in on an object the size of a deck of cards on the surface of one.
All across the solar system telescopes of every variety continually search the sky. Sensors scrutinize gamma ray sources to determine if they are the product of an antimatter propulsion system. Detectors search the void for hints of Bremsstrahlung radiation that could come from the plasma confinement system of a fusion reactor. The possible visual signature of a photon rocket? Cyclotron radiation that might be a sign of an operating magnetic sail? A radio signal or modulated neutrino pulse of an extraterrestrial civilization? There are devices to detect all of them and more. And all of that data is sent to observation and early warning stations like this one.
We’ve been watching the skies for decades, watching for any telltale sign of an impending invasion. A second invasion, that is.
January 18, 2098. That was the day the human race finally made contact with an alien civilization. Much to everyone’s surprise, the signal came from Mars. To this day, we have no idea where they originated. We know it wasn’t Mars. They’d come from another star system and claimed Mars for themselves. In fact, they claimed the entire solar system. Earth was ours, their transmission said. And we could maintain satellites in orbit. But that was it. No manned missions and no more probes beyond Earth orbit. Even the Moon was off limits. The entire solar system outside of Earth was their territory. This ultimatum was the first, last, and only communication humanity ever had with the aliens.
The Chinese didn’t listen. Nine months later, they launched an instrumented probe to study Saturn. Three weeks after the launch, Beijing was annihilated. Antimatter weapon, the physicists who examined the aftermath said.
For six years after the destruction of Beijing, Mars was minutely studied by telescopes both on Earth and in Earth orbit. On July 9, 2106, the alien facilities on and in orbit around Mars were struck by 75 nuclear weapons. The Greater United States, China, the European Union, and the Russian Federation had developed stealthy vehicles that could approach the alien stronghold undetected. Each nuclear-armed probe had secretly gone up along with some other innocuous payload like a weather satellite and then surreptitiously proceeded to Mars. The aliens were obliterated.
For close to 50 years, humanity has studied the remnants of biology and technology left behind after the destruction of the invaders. As a result, we’ve advanced much faster than we otherwise would have. We’re all over the solar system now. There’s even serious discussion about a manned mission to Alpha Centauri before the end of the century. The dream of humanity exploring and colonizing space has finally come true. But it’s not the old science fiction vision of the human race evolving into something nobler and embracing its destiny among the stars. It’s a nervous necessity that drives mankind out into space. And we never stop watching the skies.
by Julian Miles | Nov 7, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The echoes are thunderous, something that keeps most of the predators down here away. This far along, everyone is fatigued. Even the children no longer have bursts of energy. Existence is eat, sleep and march to the beat. The chant cadences our footsteps through the netherways, the deep tunnels that were once used to move building materials between the growing United Cities.
“Come tomorrow, we’ll live in a far better place.”
Each Petacity is a continent covering sprawl that incorporates everything into an extended conurbation. Intensive automation overseen by computers fast enough to map DNA in minutes made them possible. Mankind quickly became dependent on the hyperstructure that provided everything. Then the control systems worked out that growing replacement labour was far more ecologically efficient than building it.
“Come tomorrow, we’ll suffer no machine-led pace.”
We went from dependent to subservient in two generations. Some objected, of course. But ancient tales of rising against robot masters were glaringly short on overcoming the details. Death came in crush corridors and gas clouds. When you’re inside the thing you fight, nobility and righteousness count for little in the immune system versus disease deathmatch.
“Come tomorrow, there will be space for the free man.”
Our opponents could dynamically run every possible strategic response for every scenario before we detonated the bomb, landed the second blow, fired the second shot or took the next step. We lost nearly a whole generation in a guerrilla war that more resembled rodents versus pest control than a resistance movement. Finally, cleverer minds prevailed.
“Come tomorrow, we’ll do it all with our own hands.”
Rats did not fight, they inhabited places man couldn’t reach or didn’t want. Living underground was not an option and Galifan Scott gave us the answer: United City Seven. The south-polar Petacity had been abandoned as the cold was something that the robots could not overcome without causing ecological harm. They had withdrawn along the netherways, leaving the nascent Petacity to the eternal ice.
“Come tomorrow, the white land will become our home.”
The netherways remain, some decrepit, some submerged, all dangerous. But those who survived the first long walks found only a Gigacity core with Petacity foundations unfinished in the face of machine-freezing cold. The founders of Free City One defined the maximum technology that could support millions without processor-based automation. From there they designed a new culture.
“Come tomorrow, our children will be free to roam.”
I am a Finder. We go out along the netherways from Free City One, equipped to rescue and retrieve those coming to the end of their long walk. We help the hearty and build cairns for the dead. No more shall we become food or fertiliser depending on our age at dying. The chant gives them hope and strength, keeps them moving toward freedom. It is the last regimen they will have to endure, as Free City One runs on pride, courtesy and idealised British policing.
They say that one day we will reclaim the world. I am one of those who believes that to be a futile objective. We will watch as an alien culture of our ancestor’s creation tends the world we so nearly ruined. What the future holds is for our descendants to decide. ‘Come Tomorrow’ is more than the title of a chant to march the people home.
It is a promise that free humanity will never cease to be.
by submission | Nov 6, 2012 | Story |
Author : Susan Nance Carhart
“There’s no way to program my time machine remotely. Not really,” Solberg told his friends. “I can’t perform a unmanned test. I can’t even use an animal for the passenger. But the modeling works. It all comes down to me.”
The friends caught each other’s eye and shook their heads. Solberg’s private laboratories were in a separate wing from the rest of his facility, and even more amazing. Cool blue light suffused the shining interior. Before them was the device that Solberg had dreamed of for thirty years.
“You tell him, Royce,” muttered Julia. “He won’t listen to me.”
Solberg stared back at them, and then put up his hands. “What? What is it?”
“You always think it comes down to you, Jack,” Royce grunted. “Real science can’t be done by one person these days. And it should never be done in secret. You have a team to vet your ideas. Bring them in on this! You need free discussion. I don’t care if you have more money than God. If you had to look for funding, you’d have the challenge of informed analysis and constructive criticism—”
“I might as well send my research to the Chinese,” Solberg sneered. “This is going to revolutionize human life. I’m getting all the credit this time. Do you want to see the test, or not?”
“Yes, we want to see the test,” Julia shot back. “We want to know what happens to you. I think this is insanely reckless, but there’s no way to stop you now. What’s the plan?”
“A short hop, really. I’m going to go back in time one month exactly. I know that no one was in this laboratory at that moment. To prove I’ve been moving in time, I’ll scribble a message on that wall.”
He pointed to the white and pristine tiles facing them. “You’ll be here, and as soon as I’m gone, those words should appear on the wall. Then I’ll come back. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes in absolute time. Don’t move into the space occupied by the device… that could be bad.”
“You are completely crazy, Jack,” Royce sighed. “You know that, right?”
Julia took him in her arms and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Good luck, you idiot.”
Solberg grinned at her, shook Royce’s hand, and climbed into his time machine. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’ll just be in this exact spot, one month ago.”
A crackle of light enveloped him, and he vanished.
They waited.
They waited all day.
They waited until nightfall, with aching hearts and fading hopes. They called the Head of Research just after midnight. Doctor Philip Carmichael was at the facility in half an hour, and poking through his employer’s holy of holies in another ten minutes.
Balding and sardonic, he heard their story, and gave it some thought.
At length, he ventured, “You know what Galileo said to himself, when the Church forced him to swear that the Earth was the center of the universe?” He paused, and then told them.
“‘And yet, it moves.'”
Illumination. Each saw, in a mind’s eye of awe and terror, the time machine winking into empty space: in the exact position on the Earth’s orbit that the planet—and Solberg Laboratories— wouldn’t occupy until one month into that time’s future.
