by Duncan Shields | Apr 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The grey ghost of no-longer-used subway tunnels echoed with heavy footsteps. Eyes the colour of brake lights swept the halls for any signs of intelligent life. The civilization that lived here was long gone.
The metal creature walking through the tunnel had to reconfigure to fit inside. It walked softly on seventeen legs. It had no name for itself. It was an extension of the star dwellers that fell through this atmosphere and found a richness of data to fill memory banks. The only thing better than a living civilization is a dead civilization, thought the creature. With a dead civilization one can take one’s time.
Not just cataloguing, not just recording. Cross-referencing. Extrapolating. That’s what the creature was doing. At its core was a neutronium half-dwarf star tightly wound around a pinprick of a black hole. The creature had thousands of this planets’s orbits to investigate the fallen buildings. It was left behind along with several others to record. One per continent.
It looked as if the indigenous life had tried to divorce itself from its origins on this planet. Structures that were at odds with their surroundings yet made from them. Rock cut into pieces and then stacked into square shapes to provide shelter. Everything changed. Everything translated.
Whatever destroyed them didn’t destroy the plant life and the insects or even the mammals. In the wake of whatever cataclysm claimed them, the natural order of this planet surged back.
Green moss covered everything on the surface. From space, the planet was two colours. Blue oceans and green continents. The creature has taken aerial surveillance of all of it before moving down to the surface.
Here, underground, in the old tunnels that must have been used for transportation, the life remains untouched like a tomb. Whatever functioning electrical conduits the creature walks close to light up like spirits at a séance. Video cameras, control panels, track-light switches, and security lights all glow and spark as the creature walks past.
Still no bodies indicating intelligent life. By the creature’s estimation, nothing recorded so far could have built this civilization. It’s found scattered bipedal life down here in the dark amongst the skittering, screeching quadrupeds, like they all gathered here at the end, as if there was a chance of safety underground. These bipedals have only the most rudimentary physical upgrades and none of the intelligence enhancers other races needed to create complex societal systems. They could not have built these buildings, vehicles or tunnels. They have no language. They only scream and hide when they see the creature.
The creature will walk and record and presume for millennia until its memory banks fill and it needs to head back into space and rendezvous with its central library. There is no rush. There is silence here broken only by dripping water and wind blowing through cracks.
It wants to find the creators. It wants to find the ones responsible.
So far nothing.
by Patricia Stewart | Apr 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“It was one hundred years ago today, on April 6, 1992,” stated Joshua Noyle, “that one of the greatest minds in the history of mankind passed away.”
“And who might that be?” inquired Tom Vittna, although to be honest, he didn’t really care.
“Isaac Asimov, of course,” was the matter-of-fact reply. “And today, I will continue the legacy of his favorite story, The Last Question.”
“Is that why you dragged me out here to the edge of the solar system, to pay homage to some long dead science fiction writer?”
Annoyed, Noyle raised his hand and began ticking off his rebuttal. “One, he was much more than a science fiction writer. Two, that story encompasses the essence of universe, the ebb and flow of time, the very…”
“Okay, okay, I yield. What’s the plan?”
“I plan to decrease entropy in a closed system.”
“What, reverse entropy? Violate the second law of thermodynamics. That’s impossible. Damn you Joshua, if I knew you were bringing me out here for such a lame brained scheme, I would have…”
“I can do it, Tom. I just need you to stay on the ship and watch my back. If the experiment goes awry, I need you to shut it down remotely.”
“Whoa, what experiment?”
“I’m going to take the Entropy Reverser with me in the shuttlecraft and establish a reverse entropy bubble around it. I’m not sure what will happen on the inside, so I need you to collapse the bubble by throwing this switch five minutes after I start the experiment.”
At this point, Vittna was more concerned about his friend’s sanity than anything else. Better humor him for now, he thought, and figure out how to get to the medical cabinet for the hypo sedative without raising suspicion. “Alright, Joshua, I’ll stand by the switch. But tell me what you expect to happen, er, inside the bubble?”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure,” Noyle replied. “In many respects, entropy is a measure of the direction of time. As time moves forward, entropy is always increasing. I suppose that when I reverse entropy, time will move backward. I’m taking an atomic clock with me to measure the effect.”
“Is it safe?” inquired Vittna as he meandered toward the storage closet. As Noyle began answering, he ducked onto the closet. He found the sedative and returned to the bridge, but Noyle was already gone. Looking out the forward viewport, he spotted the shuttlecraft moving away at maximum speed.
***
When Noyle was far enough away from the mothership, he primed the Entropy Reverser. A few seconds later, three green lights flashed across the control panel. Smiling, Noyle activated the Reverser. Instantly, he regretted it. He tried desperately to inhale, but the cabin air refused to fill the partial vacuum within his lungs. Millions of chemical reactions within his body no longer sought to lower their free energy, but to increase it. The fluids in his body froze solid. He died an agonizing, but rapid, death. The bubble began strengthening exponentially. It reached out beyond the fundamental force of electromagnetism, and began reversing the nuclear forces, and finally, gravitation.
***
Back on the mothership, Vittna watched as the shuttlecraft collapsed in a flash of blinding light, followed by the explosion of space itself. In a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the cosmological inflation consumed his ship and raced outward in all directions. In a few minutes, the new expanding universe would be cool enough to begin nucleosynthesis.
by submission | Mar 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Four minutes. That’s how much longer I have to be human. Or, if things don’t go as planned, to be alive. I could have elected to be anesthetized for the procedure. If I had and anything went wrong, I’d never know it. I’d simply never wake up. But I chose to remain conscious for the transformation. Death will be almost instantaneous if this doesn’t work. And if it does work, I want to be wide awake and remember the moment when I became…something else.
How long has it been since anyone underwent a totally novel transformation? It must be nearly 300 Earth years. Yes, that sounds about right: around the year 2700. The first settlers on Venus. That was a particularly difficult one. Surface temperatures over 460°C and an atmospheric pressure almost 100 times that of Earth. It took the bioengineers even longer to transform people to live on Venus than it took them to adapt a human subspecies for life in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Not every world is a Mars or a Titan that will let you get by with only a moderate amount of biological transfiguration. Even the people who live on Luna still look vaguely like humans from Earth. The extremophile worlds just don’t tolerate much evolutionary baggage.
Just over two minutes. They told me the neural scanners will continue operating right up to the end. Theoretically, I shouldn’t notice any “interruption” of my consciousness. From my perspective, one moment I’ll be here in the ship and the next I’ll be out there, neither the spacecraft nor my original body surviving the transformation.
In my new form (again, theoretically) I should be virtually ageless. If that’s true, maybe I’ll live long enough to see the human race, in all its various forms, finally achieve the age-old dream of traveling to the stars. It’s hard to believe that after a thousand years of spaceflight, we’ve still never succeeded in reaching even the nearest star system. Multigeneration ships, suspended animation craft, near-light-speed vessels, countless schemes to create wormholes and space-warp corridors. And yet no one who has ever tried to cross the gulf between the stars has ever signaled back that they made it. But surely humanity won’t be confined to one solar system forever. One day mankind will leave the cradle and take its place among–
Transformation! It worked! My personality and memory are intact, preserved in a network of magnetically-woven plasma. I am vast. How could that infinitesimal creature I was a moment ago have ever been me? I can…”see” isn’t the right word. I can perceive the last remnants of the spaceship that brought me here vaporizing. And here’s a 500 kilometer wide spicule jetting alongside me at 20 kilometers per second, but to me it feels like a pleasant breeze. Now, I have to modulate the local EM field to emit a radio signal to let them know we’ve succeeded. After three centuries of stagnation, humanity has slipped the bonds of planets and moons and comets. Mankind has finally colonized the Sun!
by submission | Mar 29, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Tara giggled and leaned over the railing of the walkway, peering down the cyclopean shaft. “You know,” she told Camus, “I bet that if you were to fall down this you would fall forever and ever and never even stop.” She trilled out a laugh again and kicked a can off the edge.
“Hey, silly,” Camus rasped in his failing synthetic voice, “Stop that. For all you know there might be somebody down there. How happy would you be if you had a can traveling some ludicrous speed hit you on the head?”
The young woman paused and considered this. She frowned and bit her lip. “I suppose I wouldn’t like that a whole lot.”
It was sad, Camus thought to himself, how Tara had the mind of a child and would always have the mind of a child. She couldn’t help it, of course. Nobody can help how they’re born.
It was sad.
“Right,” he affirmed. “You’d be pretty mad, I’d imagine.” He shoved his pry bar in the access hatch’s lock and pushed all his weight against it. It gave out with the shrieking typical of unhappy metal. “OK. I’ll go first, and then you follow me. Stay close, alright?”
“Yes, Cammy,” Tara chirped. “And be very very quiet so that the monsters don’t find us.”
“Right. Good girl.” Camus’s bad shoulder creaked and groaned as he crawled into the lightless access shaft. It was fairly roomy, he decided. For a coffin, at least. He kept crawling, listening intently to make sure that Tara was behind him and nobody else was ahead of him. If the map he’d found was right the shaft would go by some old store rooms. Hopefully they had food. He just had to find the right one, M778. He counted the rooms that went by under his hands and knees, feeling out the numerals: M772, M774, M776.
There it was. 778. And it was unlocked. Small miracles were better than no miracles, Camus thought to himself.
He undid the two bolts and eased the door down, revealing more black space.
“Cover your eyes, love,” Camus whispered back to Tara.
“Alright,” came the reply.
Camus switched on his headlamp. He played the dim beam across the walls, the floor, the mostly empty crates strewn about. It didn’t look promising, but it was worth a look. Camus eased himself down into the room and then helped Tara down. The two began to look through the refuse, searching for something edible.
“Cammy.”
Camus picked up a box. It was too light to hold anything, and he tossed it aside. “Yes?”
“Where are mommy and daddy?”
Camus paused a moment. “Mommy and daddy went into the sky, dear.”
“What’s the sky?”
“Above ground. They went above ground.”
“Oh,” Tara said. “Why?”
“Because they had to escape the monsters.”
“Oh,” Tara said. “OK.”
Camus picked up another box. He saw the wire attached to it too late. There was a snap and a foot long steel bolt smacked into Camus’s chest.
“Oh,” he said, grabbing his chest. Oil leaked between his fingers. Camus swore. Hydraulic fluid was rarer than food in this place.
“Come on, Tara,” he rasped. “Let’s leave. Before the monsters come.”
“OK Cammy,” she chirped. She held his rusting hand. “Are we going home?”
“Yes, love. We’re going to go home.”
“Can we braid my hair when we get back?”
“Of course.”
by submission | Mar 25, 2012 | Story
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Bertie was a kind looking old man of eighty who had more wrinkles from smiling than anything else, and who looked like he always had a joke on his mind. He wasn’t particularly tall, though he was clearly handsome once. His shirt was plaid and tucked into his pleated khaki pants.
Drene was taller than Bertie by a few inches, and although she had begun to look rather severe in her old age of seventy five she had a friendly smile ready for anybody and everybody. Her hair was perpetually in a white ball around her head, a hair style reserved only for the old, and she was always sporting a pretty, if not plain, heavy-cut, and old-fashioned, dress of some sort or another.
Bertie and Drene had no children or grand-children left planet-side, and to make up for the lack of company would spend every afternoon sitting on their apartment’s front steps watching the people go by. Sometimes Bertie would read the news on his computer, and Drene was usually knitting something colorful and vibrant – today it was a scarf.
“It’s rather nice that they learned how to control the weather,” Drene commented one day. “Though I do miss the rain sometimes.”
“Mm,” grunted Bertie. “Never feels quite the same any more. Always too temperate.”
“Oh hush,” Drene told him as she rummaged through her bag for a small gauge needle. “You’re always finding the bad things in the new tech. You should just be happy with change for once.”
Bertie set his paper-thin computer down on his lap and watched the people who walked by. “What about all the surgery and cosmetics? Can I complain about that?”
“Oh Bertie, why are you always going on about this?” Drene sighed.
“Because,” he exclaimed. Then, softer, “It’s sad.”
He watched the people go by. They were tan, perfectly so; They had well-proportioned noses and attractive cheek-bones; Their eyes were all blue or green, their hair blond or black to match; There was no fat on their bodies, just electrically stimulated and grown muscle; Nobody was taller than anybody else – the women were all five feet and ten inches tall, and the men were all six feet and four inches; Everybody had tattoos, though on closer examination they were really just different variations of the same popular thing; Everybody had perfect teeth and their clothes were all fashionable, albeit very similar.
“It’s sad,” Bertie said again. Everybody was the same at first glance, and sometimes even on closer inspection. “Kids these days.”
“They’ll grow out of it.” Drene paused her knitting to pat him on the leg reassuringly. “We did, after all.”
“Yeah, well,” Bertie grouched. “You’d think kids would learn more from the silliness of people before them.”
He turned back to his news. Long-range faster than light was finally ready for commercial use. Saturn’s Erys space station had finally reached twenty million people, and was continuing to grow. NovaCorp was finally beginning to harvest the core of Venus. The last veteran of the Gulf War had died. A senator had been caught having an affair.
Funny, he thought to himself, how some things never change while everything else is moving and changing and never stopping.
Bertie’s phone rang. He looked down at it and smiled, answering with a “Well, hello there.”
“Hi grandpappy,” a happy child’s voice giggled. “Daddy says we’re going to come visit!”
He smiled. Some things never change.
