by submission | Dec 20, 2011 | Story |
Author : Martin Berka
‘Ebra drifted down the hallway, the candle hanging by a string from her wrist. It gave no warmth, a blessing: even in the far-ship’s state of efficiency, ambient heat was plentiful. It barely gave light either, which was fine by the bearer, but since this was fading to nothing, she would have to get more, or be blind. By its weakening glow, she checked the last stasis pod in the corridor, and via the hub, moved to the sun-room. In ‘Ebra’s shaded mind, dull revulsion sparred with a rare excitement.
She pulled herself along through a sharply-angled, ever-narrowing maze of bulkheads and emergency shutoffs. The candle had served well, but it died now, leaving the watchkeeper in darkness. Fortunately, she now saw the light of the sun-room. Creeping along the wall, she turned on every filter in her goggles and made sure her block was holding up. Half-gripping, half-sliding along the wall, careful not to damage the ubiquitous solar collectors, she approached the single heavily filtered window to the outside world.
Tenebra peeked out at the world below, visible as the barest curve of the here-sun’s light, fleshed out by occasional flickers on the surface. Up close, those flickers would hold one’s attention for the rest of a short life: the here-planet was fierce, wild, as far as such living adjectives could apply to a body of nearly-molten rock, and made Venus seem tame, as far as such a domestic word could apply to the home-sun’s renowned probe-killer.
Yet from orbit, the here-planet’s dull, red inner glow was overshadowed by its horizon, so bright that ‘Ebra had already turned away, covering her eyes with one arm and using the other to propel herself backward, out of the sun-room. Despite her precautions, the after-image of the here-sun’s rays, searing light along a dark arc, filled her vision for a few dozen rapid heartbeats.
No one had told Tenebra exactly what went wrong with the far-flight; her darkness was the solitary sort that never sought attention, that never bothered brighter sparks. The far-ship was suddenly in need of fuel and repairs, using a twilight orbit around a death-planet to draw maximum energy from a bright-star, while avoiding radiation. The batteries were charging, the robots were on the here-planet, somehow staying ahead of attrition, and the far-seekers could be on their way in a few years, if enough energy could be harnessed. Almost boring, until they ran out of spare stasis pods.
Tenebra returned to deeper parts, the candle at its brightest in weeks. A few seconds of the here-sun’s light, even so greatly reduced, were always enough.
She thought back: she could have done the job without looking, without the sheer brightness. Even the home-star’s light had burned her too-bright skin, driving her to the dark of space. But she had risked the pain, now and every time before. Ideas were defined by their opposites, and darkness needed light to know itself. Now, back to the solitude of minimum power and light, sufficiency, watching over a ghost-ship. As others rested unconscious, to pass time, Tenebra also rested, having the time of her life, in darkness.
by submission | Dec 17, 2011 | Story |
Author : Ian Rennie
Dear Tony, Amanda, Vladimir, and Manami,
If I set this right, then this message has appeared just as you lost radio contact with Earth, alongside the real figures for how little fuel there actually is on your ship.
The first thing I want to do is apologize. You don’t deserve this. Nobody would deserve this. You deserve much more than an explanation, but an explanation is all I can give you.
Ultimately, this has come down to money. For decades NASA, ESA, and JAEA have been asked to do even more with even less, and as a result we’ve been forced to be a little more creative than we would have liked with our budget.
One of the largest costs of any Mars mission is the cost of bringing the ship back. All the way there, you have to lug the fuel to bring you all the way home again, meaning that the mass of the craft turns out to be more fuel than anything else. However we span it, a return trip to Mars costs exponentially more than a one way. We looked at sending the fuel first for you to collect when you got there, we looked at sending means of manufacturing the fuel for your return journey. Nothing worked. We could afford a one way but not a round trip.
We could have been open about it, recruited specifically for people who wouldn’t have objected to spending the rest of their life on the red planet. It would have been a bigger trip, but it would also have been a bargain rate for multiple years of data collection. This wasn’t possible politically. No elected representative would sign off on people going to Mars to die there.
So, we’re left with this, and I’m sorry. Your instruments have been lying to you the whole time, telling carefully constructed untruths, making sure you and everyone else believed you would be coming back.
You will be remembered, and honoured, and loved. The news will call this a noble sacrifice and they will be closer to the truth than they know. We’ll come back to Mars sooner, and in greater numbers, to honour the four brave souls who died on the takeoff of their return trip.
The countdown on the explosives should be nearing zero now.
Godspeed.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Dec 12, 2011 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Thirty seven people packed into the conference room. The table sat twenty four. The rest stood along the walls. They didn’t care. The excitement in the room was nearly palpable. Low murmurs circulated throughout the cramped space. Occasionally a nervous laugh burst forth. The air, while not festive, was hopeful.
As if darkness had suddenly fallen, the room was plunged into silence. A small rotund man entered carrying a sheaf of papers. He was immaculately dressed in a slate grey three piece suit. Not a hair was out of place on his peculiar egg shaped head and his carefully groomed mustache accented an otherwise non descript face.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began in a strong confident voice; a voice that did not match the otherwise innocuous appearance, “I suppose you know why we are all here.” A round of nervous laughter met this casual remark. “The decision has been extremely difficult. All of you are highly qualified. In fact all of you are, with very minor exceptions of course, equals in intelligence, temperament and background. Any one of you would be an excellent, nay, a perfect candidate for the job.”
The gathered applicants looked from side to side. From a field of well over five thousand prospective aspirants, they had, through exhaustive mental as well as physical trials been whittled down to the thirty seven assembled here.
“The challenge is daunting. Living in what amounts to a tin can orbiting 22,000 miles above the equator, alone, for eighteen months is certainly not for the faint of heart. Of course there are rewards.” This time the room launched into overt laughter at the barely disguised allusion to the twelve million dollar pay check awaiting at the end of the solitary sojourn.
“What it comes down to, that is, the only thing differentiating you, is a simple matter of weight. As you know it costs roughly one hundred thousand dollars to launch one pound. Thusly, out of this group the lightest and most qualified physically will be awarded the position.” A few corpulent individuals shifted nervously and stared in guilty, gluttonous sloth at their overstuffed shoes. “Not only weight, but manual dexterity have been factored in to our decision.”
A raucous “BOOYAH” erupted off to one side of the speaker. A small man dramatically ripped off his prosthetic legs and proceeded to do a handstand on the armrests of his motorized wheel chair.
“Pack it up and head home suckers, the job’s mine,” he yelled from his inverted position. Settling himself back in the chair, he continued his self congratulatory celebration. “Whooo HOOOO, don’t need no legs in space, they just get in the way. Haha. Don’t need legs for walking around. Useless in spa… oh… shit…” His face went white as his eyes fell on Herschel “Monkeyboy” Greenbaum.
Greenbaum’s father was the chief biologist at Genedyne Laboratories. He had pioneered the work in the hybridization of primates. Specifically between spider monkeys and humans.
Herschel regarded the amputee coolly as he brushed and patted his hair with his feet while casually twiddling his thumbs.
by submission | Dec 10, 2011 | Story |
Author : Timothy Marshal-Nichols
Black; void.
Agnieszka did not believe she had seen anywhere this empty. It was unexpected.
Thus far it had not been a particularly good life: the degenerative illness; stuck in the minuscule grey bunkers of the menials accommodation block; reliant on handouts from other menials. For the past forty years Agnieszka had wasted away to a slender stick; her dirty blue overalls hung limply from her frame; her thin face made her black eyes look enormous. And then the offer came: three key strokes to reset her life, another start, a reboot, all it would take was three little key presses. She’d jumped at the chance, she shouldn’t have.
Weeks later, after the tedious desperate wait, she’d been ushered into the gleaming expanse of the research institute; here to be the first to go back in time; the chosen one to be experimented on. There wasn’t much for her to do; no training was needed. She had been stripped, showered, dressed in white paper overalls newly ripped from their cellophane, and been given a superficial medical examination. From there she was marched through the laboratory; driven out to a half buried concrete bunker where she descended in a lift to a platform. From there she walked alone through a narrow passageway to the chamber where she was to initiate the experiment.
The door slammed shut, bolts hissed. All that remain of the world outside was memory, and an occasional faint metallic clang.
Inside the bright grey chamber the shiny metal walls were smooth and polished. There was almost nothing here; just a bright blinding light above; the faint outline of the door she had just entered; and a small hip height console jutting out from the far wall, on this those three precious keys. She waited, should she? She didn’t want to do this any more. She waited; they, those above ground, would be expecting some response; she waited. She strode to the console and looked at it. Slowly she pressed the Ctrl key with her left hand little finger, and quickly took it away. She waited; could she back out? There were no communications with the world above. Again she pressed the Ctrl key with her little finger and then, tentatively, held down the Alt key with her forefinger. Closing her eyes she lightly tapped the Delete key with her right hand thumb.
And where was she now? Void; black.
She was supposed to have been transformed into a younger version of herself; one long before her illness had taken hold; but this was not it, this was certainly not it.
The burning sensation was ripping her apart. Time was both standing still, compressed into an unimaginable fraction of a second, and stretching exponentially. Her previous frail body was crushed into an infinitesimal dot, so much smaller then an atom, and was expanding into a whole new universe; she could feel everything as the rate of acceleration diminished.
As the singularity had crushed her; she’d become one with space-time; she was a god, the god Agnieszka.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 9, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There is a tremendous amount of other life in the universe.
The universe is encrusted, moldy, infested, slushy, teeming, and stuffed with life. The amount of life in the universe is staggering. Much as the earth is populated with a bewildering array of lifeforms developed to take up refuge and thrive in the most bizarre of niches, so too does life perform on other planets.
The segmented iceworms who would evaporate from the touch of a human hand on far-away iceballs. The gas-giant sparrow clusters and tectonic-plate-sized manta rays that lurk deeper. Algae that lives under constantly shifting volcanic plates. Spores that float dormant and content in vast reef schools through space. Entire asteroids of silicate life that steer themselves by committee like herds of sheep.
There are no sets of temperatures, gas composition, gravity, radiation or light that completely precludes life. Anywhere in the galaxy. We are engulfed and surrounded by it.
The one thing that all life besides us has in common is this. It speaks no language and has no conscious thought. It knows fear, the urge to reproduce, affection, and the thousand other instinctual gifts that any natural life is heir to but it does not think. It does not reason. It does not question. It has no sense of self or sense of God. It merely lives.
Our television programs that spew out into the universe have contacted over five hundred million species of aliens. But those ideas and tv scripts have hit other life forms the way that sunlight hits a fox.
Giant centipedes with massive, radio-receiving antlers get our shows and shake their heads at the noise and paw the ground. Old reruns of Three’s Company tumble through the photo-voltaic flake crystal storms of fibre-optic minnows on dark blue ammonia shores, lighting them up in waves of colour that play havoc with their mating rituals. Broadcasts of old black and white films cause entire herds of black spheres on tiny moons near a distant planet to stop rolling, all sense of direction disrupted. Saturday Night Live reruns from the early eighties are cutting tiger-stripe swathes through the flimsiest space-webs of solar sail creatures astronomical units wide drifting in space. Reality television is causing one planet’s dominant predators to enter hibernation early, triggering a continent-wide shift in the ecosystem.
We are contacting, inundating, and even harming millions of races daily. All to no effect other than the casual ebb and flow of natural selection. The universe is crowded.
But we are alone.
