by Duncan Shields | Oct 22, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“Okay, they’re coming! They’re coming! Quick hide! Oh man this is going to be great!”
All the people scattered snickering behind bushes, trees and rocks all around the clearing as the cryopositor’s trunk arm extended down from the obscenely huge colony craft. The ship’s back end protruded out of the atmosphere. It hung in space, gravity repulsors awake and maxed. It had Ark of Terra barely legibly written on the side. It had been in space for six hundred and thirty-eight years.
The long tube dangled down from it until it first found and then stanchioned itself to the ground. All of the millions of people in the ship were still frozen. Only the most important and competent were awoken first as an advance welcome party. They were in the cryopositor now, awaiting to take their first breath of a completely unexplored and possibly hostile frontier world.
Little did they know situations like this happened now and again. The Exodus from Earth had entailed fifty-eight ships over the course of ten years. Nearly a billion people had managed to flee the crowded culling pit that our home had become in those ancient times.
Then we had discovered FTL. After that, we’d been included in an interstellar family of extra-terrestrial beings with thousands of different races. Their tech was our tech. Human lifespans were no longer finite. The far reaches of spaces were more accessible. It was a glorious time.
This had all happened while the Arks floated silently towards their impossibly far-off planets. Millions of hopeful humans asleep in a dreamless night, automated systems keeping them on course. So far seventeen of them had touched down over the last two hundred years on different planets. At first, we’d let them think they were alone for a year or two, letting them get set up before revealing how the course of history had gone. They resented us for that and in retrospect, it was condescending of us.
Now, here, the 18th Earth Ark was touching down on Melandra, or as their star charts knew it, H-L571.
The door to the cryopositor opened. Three people in spacesuits came out. The lead one boldly took his helmet off. His eyes were wide open as he took a first breath of alien air. He smiled as motioned to his two compatriots. They, too, breathed their first. The one on the left unfolded a flag to plant.
We chose that moment, all three hundred of us, to jump out from our hiding places.
“SURPRISE!”
by submission | Oct 19, 2012 | Story |
Author : Nathan Martin
Jev killed a cop. Technically, he pushed an undercover narcotics agent into an airlock and blew the outer hatch. Technically, it was the loss of pressure and lack of oxygen that killed the cop. Jev just pushed the button. Would’ve gotten away with it too, if the sun-burned corpse hadn’t made half a stable lap around the earth before smacking into Orbital Main station. Some luck.
He reached out and tapped a button on the console. The image on the main screen of Earth, slowly passing below him, blanked out. He was sick of looking at it. Six days since the launch, and still he sat there in his little ship, not quite ready to jet off. “Execution, or space mining,” they told him. It was an easy choice. Still, he missed the drugs.
He closed his eyes and stretched, unable to avoid brushing some portion of the ship’s interior no matter what angle he chose. When he was finished, he tightened his seat mesh to restrain his floating. He looked down at one of the screens; several windows were open, none of which were the tutorials he was to spend the next six months of flight time studying. A pop-up was on the screen, an override from Orbital Control. They were becoming more frequent, now that he was closer to overstaying his welcome. The latest pop-up informed him that he had, “12 hours 37 minutes 32 seconds to vacate Earth orbit or be terminated.” This one was bright red. He closed it and unhooked his seat mesh, floating free.
Grasping the overhead wall rungs, he moved hand over hand to the small cold box at the back of the cabin. He pulled out his last beer bulb, bit the tab off, and put the nipple in his mouth. He wondered if he was the first to drink the whole supply before leaving orbit. It was nice and dim in the cabin with the main screen off.
“Why am I still here?” He thought. “What the hell am I doing? I can’t go back down. There’s no way. I’d be dead as soon as I set the course.” He scratched the new tattoo on his wrist that marked him as a convict-miner. It itched. “I could say, ‘fuck asteroid mining, I’m going to Mars.’” He finished the beer bulb in two more gulps, and realized that he was speaking aloud; he hadn’t noticed the transition from thought. He continued. “They wouldn’t take me there, either.” The ships transponder was hardwired from the outside, marking him for what he now was.
He handed himself back over to the seat before the screen. There was only one thing left to do. He tapped a button and turned the screen back on. Earth burst over him, and he found himself missing it for the first time. Ice cream. Couscous with tomato sauce. Gravity.
“Fuck it,” he said. He tapped into the navigation system and activated the presets. The engine behind him began to roar, and he barely remembered to re-hook the seat mesh before he was tossed back into the cushions. Earth dropped out of view and was replaced by a slur of stars, drawing him away.
by submission | Oct 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Robert White
“Wait. I don’t get it. I thought transit was supposed to be instant”
“It was. It is.” The scientists are always so snarky. “We did all the tests, sent animals and clocks back to the beyond and everything was instant. So this here cannot be happening.”
“Look, I may be a glorified janitor on this ship, but I know ‘happening’ when it happens.”
“No you don’t. This isn’t technically happening. We are experiencing it, sure, but time isn’t really passing. We are experiencing the passage through space as if time is passing.”
“Okay, Scientist Guy, if you are so smart, how long will this not be happening?”
“About three hundred and seventy light years.”
Scientists never answer simple questions simply. “How long will that take? I still see earth like we haven’t left orbit and it’s been like a month already.”
“Every Planck distance is taking up one Planck time.”
“Translation, forever, am I right?”
“More or less.”
“And the things?”
“These ‘things’ as you call them are hallucinations made manifest. Our perceptions are dictating the configurations of mater, but it’s all transient. When the ship arrives it will all disappear. It has to do with the plasticity of distance and perceptions when delta-t is zero.”
“Yea, okay, sounds like you don’t really know.”
“Well there is no control here for proper experimentation.”
“Okay, you said something about a ‘spatial distortion wave’. What’s that again?”
“The projector compresses space around the ship and then the ship coasts through the distortion.”
“How big is this distortion?”
“I takes up zero distance, It’s a threshold. So essentially the front of the ship is already there while the back of the ship is still where we started.”
“But we’re moving around on the ship.”
“Well… maybe.”
“And the livestock isn’t here, and didn’t have the problem because…?”
“Animals don’t really experience time the same way we do. They don’t understand the idea of ‘now’ being a different thing than ‘before now’ and ‘after now’. They just have ‘now’.”
“Even though my cat remembers me?”
“Yes.”
“So your solution is…?”
“Well we aren’t really aging, so we just wait it out.”
“Forever?”
“Yes.”
“I think I’d go mad.”
“Probably we both will.”
“No deal.”
Stress, they say, is what happens when the body resists its natural desire to beat the hell out of someone who really deserves it. I hate stress. I cold-cock Mr. Scientist and he drops like a rock to the deck.
“You people make everything so damn hard.” I haul his behind straight to forward observation. “Here is what’s really going to happen. I am going to look out that window and see the target buoy. See! There it is. And that means that that window and that part of the ship is already ‘there’.
“So I figure I’m gonna draw a line across the deck, and wait a second for me to really see that everything on that other side of the line is already ‘there’.
“Then I am going to throw your dead weight over the line.
“And now, since you are ‘there’ and I know exactly where the bunched up space is, I am going to take a running jump…
“And here we are.”
The translation engines spin down immediately as space expands behind us.
I look down at Mr. Scientist and his bloody face. “I may just be the glorified janitor on this ship, but you know what? You people think way to hard to ever really get anywhere.”
by Clint Wilson | Oct 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
For a person thrust into such bleak and hopeless beginnings David had done well for himself.
His parents, murdered by a slum gang when he was but a boy of five, and he himself taken into slavery, he had spent over a decade in their chains, toiling under their whips.
But remaining subservient he had persevered, secretly teaching himself to read at night by starlight, in the crumbling ruined library that served as both stable and slave quarters. Sometimes his eyes would tire and he would climb the east wall, right to the end of his neck chain, and from there stare up at the stars, and beneath them the distant blaze of lights that was the city of the privileged. There he dreamt of a life where children were educated about the wonders of the universe, and people achieved many great things.
It had taken him more than ten years of careful watching, before one night under the cover of cloud he finally managed to slip his chains and steal away. The walk to the city had taken longer than he had expected, as he slithered along alleyways and crept through shadows, but eventually he had found his way.
Then after scaling the high wall avoiding spotlights all the while, and landing feet first on a bustling sidewalk, it had not taken him long to find sympathetic ears amongst the citizenry and so quickly he was taken in, cleaned up, and fed well by the educated and technologically advanced people.
* * *
After eventual cyberintegration and a full two-year acclimatization and education program, he was given his own spacious apartment with all the latest amenities, and placed where he wanted to be most, the scientific workforce. He received employment as an intern at Starcorp’s interstellar exploration program where he assisted developers in the creation of, of all things, a new revolutionary spacesuit.
Apparently astronauts would now be able to float through vacuum, bask in deadly radiation; collide with meteors even, naked as jaybirds if they wished. Protected by the fractalchip-generated warp bubble and fed life support via tiny wormhole tendrils, it was believed that one might even dive beneath the surface of a star unscathed, although admittedly this had yet to be tested.
All of the workers in David’s division were extremely proud of their technological wonder that would certainly soon greatly advance manned space exploration. So no one, except perhaps the yet to be discovered missing new intern of humble beginnings, could understand why or how the prototype had been stolen from the lab that night.
* * *
As the morning sun rose over the heart of the slum the slave keeper, en route to inspect his herd, was greeted by two of his guards, dead with their skulls smashed in. He barely heard a whisper as David dropped on him from the top of the east wall, his old stargazing perch.
The slaver tried to fight back but it was of no use. Suddenly he looked into the face of the strange intruder with the shimmering colorful skin, and he remembered the escaped teen of years gone by. “You…” he managed as a shimmering fist came down and shattered his face. As his vision wavered he saw another one of his guards run up behind the escaped slave wielding an axe. Without hesitation the weapon swung down and there was a flash at the back of the interloper’s head accompanied by the sound of the blade chipping.
David laughed and turned on his new assailant. There would be much blood spilled today, much blood indeed.
by submission | Oct 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : Desmond Hussey
“Greetings, friend and foe. I humbly thank you all for temporarily putting aside our differences and attending this unprecedented, historic peace conference.”
Twenty-three translators echo my words into twenty three different alien languages for the heterogeneous collection of delegates filling the cavernous convention chamber.
“My great-great-great-great-grandfather started this inter-planetary war – a war I hope to end today.”
A confusion of muttering, chirping, slurping and howls erupts from the congregation as my words are translated, absorbed and reacted to.
“He certainly didn’t intend to. Great-grandpappy4 George was a peaceful man, I’m told, who happened to be the leading specialist in laser technology when Earth’s astronomers detected a massive asteroid headed straight for us in the year 2035, Earth reckoning. He was asked to design and build an enormous laser on the moon capable of blasting it to smithereens – which he did, and in 2040, the asteroid was successfully destroyed.
“To us, he was a hero.
“However, in the brief, but hectic blasting frenzy, one shot missed. One fateful, three hundred gigajoule beam continued straight on through space for fifteen years until, despite all probability, it destroyed a space vessel belonging to the Thitherith.”
The reptilian delegation collectively hisses.
“The Thitherith, mistaking our errant laser as an act of war, assaulted Earth in a massive invasion in 2096. They brought lots of lasers of their own. With the aid of our fledgling space fleet and Great-grandpappy4 George’s laser, we managed to push the Thitherith out of our solar system.
“But not for long.
“For thirty years the attacks persisted. For thirty years the solar system and surrounding regions of space were ablaze with lasers, explosions and death. Then things got really heated.
“You see, with all those ultra-powerful lasers zipping around it was just a matter of time before another spacefarer got hit by a stray. Before we knew it, three other local races were up in arms over perceived, but unintentional hostilities. Of course, they all brought lasers.
“By 2140 we had regular laser battles from Cygnus to Sagittarius and five more indignant races had joined the fray. By 2190 lasers were bigger and more destructive, four home planets were asteroid clouds, seven were uninhabitable and multi-colored lasers criss-crossed the heavens hourly. On top of all this, reports of armed armadas bearing down on this sector seeking justice were coming from every quadrant.
“It’s now 2227. Twenty-three races are currently at war. Existing laser-beams will pollute the galaxy for fifty more years before they are too weak to do any harm.
“It is time to do something
“I’ve dedicated my life to stopping this escalating catastrophe. It has occurred to me; in the one hundred and eighty-seven years of galactic mud-slinging since Great-grandpappy4 George fired the first accidental shot, no one has addressed the fact that it was a simple faulty assumption that got us into this imbroglio. We have collectively believed that space beyond our local sphere was so inconceivably vast that our actions could not possibly adversely affect anything or anyone else. We know, now, this was foolishly naïve. We know, now, it’s a small galaxy afterall.
“I hope to convince this honoured assembly that our horrendous conflicts have been the result of a tragic misunderstanding – one that we can end. Today, by ratifying the Neodymium Accord, we can put aside our endless hostilities, stop polluting space with violent energy and ban the use of destructive laser technology. Today, we can choose to work together toward the first United Coalition of Planets and an age of peace.”
The room fell silent. I wait with baited breath.
