by submission | Jun 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : K. Pittman
In the crypt, the door about to close, she dances. Her bodysuit lined with cpipe and circuits, feet bare on plascrete, steps unpracticed but confident.
She dances, gazing briefly at the helmet on the low shelf beside the windowless crèche, beside the suit’s lined tabi, beside a neatly folded stack of gray utility garments, beside her ring, beside her wife’s ring.
She hadn’t danced at their wedding. There wasn’t time or space there in that floating, golden moment in the bursar’s office. A signature, a brief, lingering kiss, a tap of the chit on the flat screen. An aircab. Lifetimes ago, before broken past.
She hadn’t danced as a child.
Mama was sick, Papa was old, and they had no friends. There were no others, no predecessors, no cousins, no siblings. “You were a gift to us,” her parents would say, at their brief meals between endless rotating shifts, lying past pain and stress and trouble, past thin walls vibrating pointless hate and sick ambition. “You were the best thing that ever happened.” She didn’t dance, but her childhood was relatively untroubled.
She kept to herself, and while a happy child, didn’t dance.
School had no dancing. The other kids danced, though; in their rooms, cam-to-cam and face-to-face, secret dance parties peeped in snips on devs over mealbreak in School’s evening shadowed breezeways, like some old movie everted.
There was no explicit rule against it, but there was no public dancing. There were uniforms and drills, tests and training, mealbreaks, lounge cycles, and a loosely enforced caste system, and compulsory viewing of mendacious school news, full of what she’d later call “mathematically attractive” student anchors unquestioningly and unwittingly lying about nothing and everything, about out- and in-school. The em-ays were about the same, in her nascent estimation, as the snitches, and cowards, and idiots, and quiet creeping killers, which were all the other kids. Not her scene.
She kept to herself, got decent marks, never thought about dancing.
The crypt door is closed now.
Streaks of gray fall across her eyes as she rocks and sways to a music alit from within her, her head, her body – patches of colligated melodies and rhythms swell and she starts as it, she grows as it – shuffles shakes shimmies shudders springs left prances right sways gently into turgid mental winds viscous in unseen swirling colors pulled aloft by time, shapes pushed into forces.
Soon a bell, the sound of a bell, will fill the crypt, followed by bitter cold and sleeping stink, and what she’s been told is a dreamless hibernation until the ship, the carriage of her crypt among millions of others, assumes a safe parking orbit over the terminus of a new world, under the disk and staring eye of a new system sun. Her wife waits for her in a hablab, watching the birth of a Spindle while stealthy probes map the planets and circling dust. The sound of a bell, and she’ll don the tabi, attach the helmet to the suit’s cowl, climb into the creche lined with quilts of acceleration gel, and sleep the sleep of sleeping sleep.
Many long tomorrows from now, she’ll dance with her brilliant love under concatenations of alien constellations, and those tomorrows are tomorrow, but that’s tomorrow.
Tonight ends soon, after a bright tone, and tonight she dances for the first time, seconds against the bell.
by submission | Jun 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Tom Moro
We are the light of life
We are the seeds of salvation
We are the light of life
We are the gateways of creation
We are the light of life
Gene slammed his head against the wall, tears streaming down his small, flushed face. Fear had been pouring through his body for so long that he was crashing into adrenaline exhaustion, shaking, fevered, barely able to move. But he was so close. They wouldn’t win, not now.
The chanting was intensifying as the asteroid neared its destination. In the sightless black, desperately feeling along the wall, the boy was permeated by the deep, dead voices. We are the light of life… The sound had been going on for weeks, so long that his lips unconsciously mouthed the words, his brain too tired to resist. He could not remember sleeping. He could barely remember anything but these endless, dark rooms.
The priests had taken his family to the temple. He could remember that, the confusion of his little sister, his mother’s straight back. They had stayed in the temple, marked as priestesses (whores/slaves) to pay for his father’s sins. The sons though (brothers he had brothers) were taken to the depths, to the rocket chambers. A man with holy hollowed eye sockets had made them kneel and showed them the rockets and told them what an honor this was for the planet, for their family.
They were walking miracles. They would go up into the sky and travel in a great blessed mountain. The mountain would be full of life, seeds and bacteria and humans (blood sacrifice), and it would fall on to a dead world. They would die, crushed and burned, and it would awaken that world for the Great Mother. They were heroes. They would go to Heaven and have ice cream and vids and sex. Miraculous.
They put the heroes in ships and then in repurposed asteroids, and locked them in and played the chanting. We are the seeds of salvation… Gene had sat against a wall for days and peed on himself. There was no food. The boys in the asteroid muttered to each other and lurched around, but slowly, the heroes all grew still. They all began to chant.
Gene liked to read. And the priests might have stuck him in the dark and filled him with chanting, but he still understood things like terraforming and conquest and theocracy and tyranny. Better yet, Gene was a mechanic’s son who liked to read. And they could take away sleep and sight and family, but they couldn’t take away that Gene damn well knew how to stop an engine.
It took him two weeks of crawling and fumbling to understand the vents, to begin to picture how the great engines shoved them through the stars. It took him three more days to find a crippled boy who had a metal walking stick. Another day waiting for that boy to die. And then four to break and break and break everything he could reach.
Two more vents. Two more vents and the engines would automatically shut down to avoid a useless, still-in-space explosion. They would be stranded in orbit until someone fetched them. They would all die, mindlessly chanting, starving. But they wouldn’t die burning on a dead world, sacrificed to spark life in the service of the Great Mother. They would be a failure.
Gene pushed himself up. Two more vents.
by submission | Jun 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
General Mortensen glanced again at the timer on the wall, ticking down the minutes until the door at the other end of this glorified closet would open. Twenty programs he oversaw for DARPA, and this was the only one that really felt weird. The door behind him led to the outside world, the door in front of him to a tiny control room overlooking a small habitat which simulated a space capsule headed for Mars. Separating the two was this airlock and a few billion dollars worth of computers and sensors. Everyone thought it was just a NASA simulator, only a handful knew it was also something else.
The countdown reached zero. Mortensen stepped into the control booth and the sweaty handshake of the idealistic young scientist who had conceived of the project.
“Doctor Robeson, good to see you again.”
“General, welcome back, sorry about the wait but we must characterize every atom for this to work!”
“Yes, I know. So why don’t you just show me what you wanted to show me, so I can go somewhere more hospitable?”
“Of course, General. As you know, this facility has been upgraded to allow us to track the location over time of each and every atom within the boundary. The computers are then supposed to use that information, the basic laws of physics, and a ton of processing power to extrapolate backwards and determine the location of every atom within since the boundary was established.”
“Yes, and it hasn’t been working. Heisenberg and all that.”
“Very good, General, but the problem was mostly just time – we may be dealing with imperfect data, but with enough time and a closed system we can get incredibly accurate!”
“So it’s working now?”
“Yes!!”
Robeson bent over the controls, brought up video on two displays.
“The one on the left is truth – habitat footage from two months ago. The one on the right is the extrapolation. They line up within measurable limits – every word, every twitch exactly as predicted!”
Mortensen stared at the displays, gathering his thoughts. Did the man not realize what he had discovered?
“General, just think – someday we could extrapolate the entire history of the human race. Every big question answered!! This will be the biggest innovation in science EVER!!”
“I see. It really is perfect? I need you to be absolutely sure, willing to bet your life on it.”
“Perfect General, perfect.”
“Can it predict forward? Predict what will happen in this booth in, say, five minutes?”
“It should be able to – I haven’t tried, spoilers and all that, but I can run it for you I suppose!”
The scientist bent over his controls, entered the time differential, and sat back while the computers processed the result. A scant minute later, a video started on the simulation screen. He leaned forward, trying to make sense of what he saw, before turning, panicked, to the General.
Who was now holding a pistol.
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you? Your simulation was just physics and chemistry, and it is perfect. Every twitch, every word, you said. Can’t you see what that means? No soul, no free will. We are here in this room not by choice, but because the laws of physics said we must be. Do you know what will happen if we let that knowledge out of this room? What people will do when they know that nothing they do is their choice or responsibility? Your computer knows. Look!”
Robeson turned back to the screen, in time to see the simulation go suddenly black. A second later, so did everything else.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Bringing the sleepers out of cold storage was always a difficult process.
The actual thawing out was almost fault-free. That was no problem. The problem was the emotional and psychological fallout that happened when they tried to join in with the new society.
The old ones, the ones that were dying of cancer or whatever disease was incurable at the time, are the ones that adjust with a minimum of fuss. The fact that they’re now alive is the most important thing to them. Everything’s gravy after that. They can be rejuvenated, shunted into new skin that suits the environment, and put to work. They don’t care that everyone they know is dead or that this new future is an alien place. It’s an adventure for them.
Suicide rates for them only hover around sixty per cent.
It’s the idealists that we hate, the ones that voluntarily went under, going the only direction in time that was available to them. There were a lot of people in the past that believed that they were born in the wrong century. They believed that they would have been way happier in the middle ages or on a starship sometime in the future. They were usually meek assistant managers in retail stores or online-warrior data-entry drones not at home with their own egos.
These are the ones we have the most trouble with.
They immediately demand to see who’s in charge. They want to see the future. They want to see the planet. They want to see the space ships. They want to taste the cool future food. They want. They want. They want.
They didn’t have what it took to enjoy life to the fullest in their era so they expect it to be different here. When they’re shown their cell after being taken out of the Awakening Compound, they start to complain. When they’re put into the new body construct that can withstand the vacuum and the solar radiation, they complain more. When they’re told that they need to work, they complain loudly.
When they’re told what happens if they don’t stop complaining, they stop complaining.
They usually only last a few months before cutting their tethers and hopping out into space, dying silently if we’re lucky, sobbing into their intercoms on widecast if we’re not. In the last twenty decades, only two have lasted more than a year. They have no compunction about throwing their life away after the Big Disappointment.
We have a joke. We say that there’s a reason why it’s called ‘cry’ogenics. That always makes us laugh. It helps us not to feel cruel when they start wailing and sniffling. It helps us not to feel like murderers just for waking them up.
Life’s a disappointing one-way trip. It’s an immutable law for the universe. Even in the future, there’s no exception to that rule. These fools thought it would be better down the line. My heart used to go out to them but not any more.
by Clint Wilson | Jun 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
In the heart of the cluster, near the most populous planet of all urban worlds, the battle raged most fierce. There was no more bargaining. There were no more peace talks. Both sides, containing countless races, killed at will. There was at least one large battle cruiser exploding in low orbit every fifteen minutes. Countless short-range fighters popped like so many insects on a re-entry windscreen. For those below, in constant survival mode, and on the continuous hunt for prey from the other side, one of the biggest hazards was dodging falling bodies.
She could take no more. She had to do something. The majority of both armies were nearby. Everyone in this quadrant was pretty much insane, hell bent on killing one another. This would be the place to strike; if there was to be any hope for the survival of intelligent life in the rest of the galaxy.
She knew how to fly the family yacht.
In the middle of a fierce volley a Xanthphantzian captain was interrupted by his communications ensign… “Look sir, off the starboard bow!” For a moment the battle seemed to disappear and all on the bridge stopped what they were doing to watch the beautiful sailing ship pass silently between their massive vessel and the nearby smoking and burning cruiser of their adversaries.
The elegant human woman stood upon the deck of the small but graceful pleasure boat, protected from the cold harsh elements of space only by a thin survival bubble. She was like a goddess under a glass dome. Her ship was a gossamer butterfly amongst so much carbon-scored grey steel.
Both sides seemed hypnotized as she passed; solar sails spread wide, casting glimmers like diamonds against the starry backdrop. And onward still she careened… into the very heart of the battle. And as she continued forward, others stopped their fighting to gaze in wonder at the strange and beautiful sight, until she reached the very epicenter of the war, where two massive galactic warships had been, up until recently, busy trying to vaporize each other. And not one officer or soldier fired a weapon as the beautiful gossamer yacht glided amongst them all.
Suddenly the communication consoles of ships on both sides crackled to life. Her face was even more striking up close. Her high cheekbones and wide-set eyes made her seem both mysterious and regal. She spoke to anyone within earshot of a ship’s address system. “The time has come for closure on this chapter. You’ve all fought bravely and I hope every one of you feels at least somewhat vindicated.” She then held up, for all to see, a simple wormhole opener; a device that occupied most ships’ galleys.
It seemed harmless enough… what could a wormhole opener do? They had failsafes built in. They were for retrieving food. One would not activate anywhere near a dangerous place like for instance in the fire of a planet core… that would be deadly to potential users. It is difficult to imagine what would happen if a transference line were to open in the vicinity of say… a super nova. All that energy would be instantly drawn through. Luckily the opener would not activate in such circumstances. The real trick would be if you could predict where a super nova was “about” to take place, a real trick indeed.
“It’s all about sacrifice,” she said as she engaged the device and the fires of creation poured forth.
