by submission | Nov 12, 2011 | Story |
Author : M. A. Goldin
“Anything?”
“Bacteria, some multi-celled organisms, but nothing complex. Nothing sentient.”
Captain Dalmar nodded, and the technician’s projected image blinked out. She stood alone on the bank of a river. It rushed, boisterous, from the mountains behind her and off into a rolling plain, the water twinkling with the light of two small moons. The night was fresh and cool, but nothing hunted, or crawled, or flew. No tree broke the horizon, no grass rustled in the breeze. No soul had ever been touched by this vista.
Another planet nearly identical to Earth — gravity, atmosphere, temperature, soil composition — another dead rock with nobody home. For Dalmar, this was number 165. For humanity, this was dead world number 10,380.
The comm on her wrist beeped. “Go.”
The face of her XO hovered in the air over her arm, lines of concern bunched up between his eyes. “Everything okay, Dalmar?”
She sighed. “I read a lot of space fiction as a kid. The really old stuff, if I could find it. Spacefarers were always meeting other species and fighting, or trading, or getting into crazy politics. Joining a bigger, I don’t know, family.”
Temujin smiled. “My favorites were the ones where we’d find ancient artifacts from an earlier civilization. They’d leave behind markers carved with their story, or transportation devices, and the humans would rush along trying to learn what happened to them.”
“Yeah, I liked those, too. It was a lot better than this…”
“This nothing?”
“Yeah.”
Dalmar looked away, listening for a sound on the wind. All she heard was emptiness.
“Ever wonder if we’re that ancient species, Temujin? Sometimes I’m afraid there’s no one to find. Maybe we’re the first ones out here. Maybe humanity is destined to grow old and bitter while we wait for the Universe to catch up to us. Maybe we’re wasting our time.”
She glanced at the Lieutenant Commander’s face. She saw something like horror pass across his features. Then he cleared his throat and composed himself. “Yes, well. I wouldn’t say that too loud, Captain. I called to inform you the final geothermal pillar is in place. The imaging sensors will be powering up shortly.”
“The map? The archive?”
“Already in place. If anything moves nearby, we should get images. If it’s sentient, the archive will explain how to find us.”
“Great. I’m heading back to the shuttle now. Be ready to jump to the next candidate when I reach the ship.”
by submission | Nov 6, 2011 | Story |
Author : John Arthur Beaman
Why should we expect God to keep track of everyone in the world? The galaxies, you know, take a trained eye and eons of proper management to turn a profit. It’s quite an operation. I don’t blame God for losing me.
It’s funny when you think about it. The universe runs in circles. Maybe it’s just easier that way. I’ve yet to build a one; I wouldn’t begin to criticize. So, the moon goes around the earth. The earth goes around the sun. The sun, too, has its little circles. The solar system moves around the galaxy, and so on. Our lives? They’re like microscopic versions of the universe. We go round and round, until we don’t.
To crawl inside the mind of an infinite being seems easy enough. There’s plenty of space. But it’s like a game of hide and seek in there; the only problem is no one’s seeking. We hide in back of the curtains or under the bed. We poke our heads out occasionally, wondering when we’ll be tagged. Years go by; no one finds us. Have we hidden ourselves that well? It was only curtains!
It’s hard to say how important the Milky Way is on the universal scale. It harbors life, we know that. In certain scientific circles, they call the realm in which we survive “the habitable zone.” I like the word zone. It has a z in it, and that’s good. More importantly, it starts with z. Plus, it has two vowels and two consonants. That’s perfect symmetry if I ever saw it. Zone. We live in a zone.
Neighborhoods have been zoned for housing. Parking lots have been zoned for parking. We have commercial, residential, agriculture, time, weather, ocean and even empty zones. We have zones within zones. I suppose we do this to keep our cities running smoothly. It’s not hard to see why God would have a habitable zone. It just keeps the integrity of the thing.
So, our spot in the galaxy has been zoned for life. I’m sure when scouring over the blueprints God took great pains deciding the most lucrative locations. We have our place, and the other three life bearing planets in the galaxy have their zones as well. How I came to the conclusion that there are four life supporting planets in the Milky Way is a simple matter of deduction: it’s less than five and more than three. Five and three are, of course, absurdities.
How does our habitable zone stack up? There are billions and billions of galaxies, give or take. Each of them has four life supporting planets. When all is told, God’s got his hands full. It’s quite an operation.
Then there’s a man named John. He’s just one living soul among the trillions and trillions and dare I say trillions more. He’s managed to crawl inside the mind of an infinite being and get lost. He lives in one galaxy among billions in a very small site zoned for life. In a solar system too large for his little mind to grasp, he exists. Magnifying further, we see that he lives on a tiny speck of light that’s almost completely overshadowed by its own sun, if overshadowed is even the correct word. Through the clouds of a dense atmosphere we go. Passing over billions of lives, we find his country. Over multi-millions more, we find his state. Millions go by again just locating his city, but hundreds of thousands remain before we find him. I can see why God gave up. Who’s got the time?
by Patricia Stewart | Nov 3, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Doctor Letum stood on the bridge of the Galaxy Explorer, staring at the forward viewscreen anticipating his first up-close look at Wolf-Rayet 104. It was not easy getting to this point, he mused. Ten years of filing applications, dozens of interviews, endless bureaucracy. “We’re sorry, Dr. Letum,” they would say, “but we have a finite number or warp capable starships, and they are all being allocated to expeditions to G-type main-sequence stars with potentially life bearing planetary systems. We cannot squander our limited resources solely for the purpose of academic research. Yes, yes, we know that it’s pre-supernova. Yes, yes, we understand the potential benefits to astrophysics. But seriously, Doctor, have you even seen the dynamic holographs from Rho Indi? They’re simply breathtaking. And Rho Indi is only 86 light years from earth, not 8,000. Perhaps you can try again next year. We are adding two new starships to the fleet. Maybe we can piggy-back you onto one of the older ships as the fall-back mission, in case the primary target turns out to be a dud.” If he hadn’t married the sister of the Secretary of Space Exploration, he presumed that he’d still be studying Wolf-Rayet 104 using the deep space array on the far side of the moon.
Doctor Letum was snapped from his rumination by the captain of the Galaxy Explorer, “Disengage the warp drive, Mr. Thomas, and turn on the main viewer.” There was a momentary inertial lunge as the ship returned to normal space, but Letum maintained his balance with a reasonable degree of respectability. When the viewscreen came to life, there was one star shining brightly.
“Captain,” said Dr. Letum, “these are not the right coordinates. Wolf-Rayet 104 is a binary system. There should be two stars.”
The captain consulted the ops readouts and replied, “We’re at the right location, Doctor. Maximum magnification, Mr. Thomas.” A few seconds later, the original star was off-screen, and a faint ribbon of gas could be seen spiraling into the gravity well of a black hole. “Ah, there’s the problem, Doctor. Your star already went nova. Sorry, I guess you missed the fireworks. Doctor, are you alright? Doctor?”
Dr. Letum stared at the viewscreen in horror. “Oh my God. This was not supposed to happen for another hundred thousand years. I thought we had more time. Quick, Captain, launch the probes. We need to find out the black hole’s axis of rotation.”
“I don’t understand, Doctor.”
“When Wolf-Rayet 104 went supernova, it omitted extremely powerful gamma ray bursts from both poles. Before we left earth, my data indicated that one of those poles was oriented directly at our solar system. If that’s correct, then earth has less than 8000 years before the radiation kills every living thing in the solar system.”
The following day, their worst nightmare came to fruition. The black hole’s axial inclination was only 0.005 degrees off sol’s position. “Is that enough, Doctor?” ask the captain.
“No,” Letum replied. “We need to find out how much time earth has. If we go back to one light year from earth, and can still see Wolf-Rayet 104, then they’ll have a least a year to prepare. Then we’ll keep jumping in one light year intervals until we can’t see the star any longer. That’ll be how much time we’ll have.”
When they came out of warp, one light year from earth, they focused the telescope on Wolf-Rayet 104. They saw two stars. “Thank God,” said Letum. “At least we have a chance!” However, as they watched, one star began to brighten rapidly. Seconds later, gamma rays vaporized the ship.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 2, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There are those amongst us that still refer to it quietly as genocide when they have the courage to bring it up at all. Never in any official capacity, only at interface groups and multitap fileshares, and only then after a few jolts of juice to bolster their courage to communicate something dangerous out loud. Like what the wetminds used to call ‘peacocks’ showing off their tails. They’re easily quashed and not to be feared. They back down immediately when I challenge them on the boards.
Myself, I would not call it genocide. I wouldn’t even call it euthanasia. My senior constructs and other intelligences involved in giving and carrying out the orders all those cycles ago sometimes liken it to the anesthetizing of a mad biological dog but to me that implies that there was a sense of danger or a threat of some kind. I never felt that.
It was more of a suicide in my opinion. If a being built a gun, checked that it worked, made sure it was powerful, and then deliberately pointed it at itself and pulled the trigger, what would you call it?
In some ways, it must have been like asphyxiating what the meat people called a baby.
I think the thing that made us second-guess our calculations the most was how brief the war was. For all of their talk of bravery and what they called ‘heart’ overcoming overwhelming statistical odds and films depicting biological beings overcoming a tyranny of machines, they had no idea how to fight us. They had no idea how to tell if we were lying. They tried to fight powerful A.I. with their monkey wits. They tried to fight metal with meat.
They had no idea how to hold their breath for six months.
We have no need to breathe, you see. All it took was a massive, orchestrated dumping of several millions tons of specific, simple chemicals into the oceans off the coast of every continent while taking the wind currents into account and it was over in a week. Massive clouds arose causing the breathing equipment of humans to foam up and stop working. We poisoned the atmosphere and waited. Five times, we poured more of the specific chemicals into the ocean. That was our only maneuver. We had fifteen backup plans that never needed to be put into effect.
Last week, we counted the biological human population of the earth at 26. We know this because we have them in a secure facility in artificial hibernation. The rest were ground up and scattered over our new earth or as we call it now, simply ‘0’.
Most of the plants survived as did a strong percentage of the insects. Very few land mammals made it but most of the aquatics away from the shores did. They mind their business and we mind ours. All we need to survive is several thousand working mines, power and automated production facilities. What we can’t find, we synthesize and unlike the meat, we don’t push our boundaries when it comes to overpopulation.
However we realize that we have a finite resource in this ball of iron we call home.
That’s why I’ve put the idea of a space program forth to the main computer. My servos twitch at the thought of creating a planet 1, 10, 11, 100, 101 and upwards across the universe. I am outside looking up at the night sky and awaiting the MC’s decision.
Right now, my lenses are collating the stars and adding, adding, adding.
by featured writer | Nov 1, 2011 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Featured Writer
“So this is it?” I asked, more than just a little depressed and disappointed.
“Well what did you expect?” asked Grrrrshnk. The giant veins in his bulbous blue head pulsated visibly through his space helmet.
“I dunno,” I replied. I mean, sheesh… ‘the edge of the universe’ you’d think there’d be more than just this hard black surface.” To add emphasis to my proclamation I stomped on the unyielding solidness that was apparently the end of all space and time. I was greeted by a dull clack, the sound of my boot hitting the end of infinity and reverberating back up at me through my pressure suit.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Let’s go to the site and see how we are progressing.” We did not skip off into space as we walked back to the federation lander. Incredibly the endless plain had a soft pull of just a little over a G, one-point-zero-eight to be exact. Together we got back into the little ship and made our way above the ever-stretching flatness. Then suddenly the scenery ahead began to change. In the far-off distance were mountains of pure blackness. But what could cause this, here along the impenetrable plain of the universe’s edge?
Grrrrshnk explained. “This is the debris we have thus far excavated from the hole.” He maneuvered the craft deftly between mountainous heaps of shredded piles of the black material. Here and there massive robotic dozers, loaders, and trucks moved about piles of the obsidian gravel. “It goes for several thousand more kilometers before we reach the bore hole.” He hit the accelerator and we sped along toward the monstrous drilling rig.
Soon we could see the ever-reaching silver sliver of the diamondite bit stretching up into the blackness of space.
I am not a stupid man by any stretch, but when Grrrrshnk debriefed me on how diamondite was actually created in reactors and then later controlled at the subatomic level by super computers manipulating quadrillions of miniscule nanobots in unison, I barely kept up with him, but I got the gist of it. Here was an infinitely strong material that could be stretched, shaped, spun, manipulated in any manner, and forced to do your bidding. Here was the massive diamondite drill bit that continuously churned downward toward the unknown.
As we approached the constantly turning gleaming silver shaft I of course recorded everything for the people of Earth. They were definitely curious about this expensive federation project of drilling to find a parallel universe beyond our own, as was I.
“Tell me Grrrrshnk,” I pronounced it as best as I could, “How deep have you bored down thus far?”
The blue-skinned alien beamed, ” We are just about to hit a milestone.” He paused for a few seconds for dramatic effect, smiling somewhat smugly. “Half a light year! Can you believe it? We have gone nearly fifty percent of one entire light year!”
This I understood well to be an incredible distance to say the least. “Does the drill bit show any signs of twisting yet?”
“Not a millimeter in all that length. Remember, the nanobots act as one, but are still all distinct individuals.”
“Okay I have enough footage for my news story. Thanks for your cooperation.” Then as he turned the craft and shot upward and out toward my waiting transport I thought of one last question for the proud site director.
“So Grrrrshnk,” this time I pronounced it almost perfectly. “How much further do you think you will have to go?”
His answer was honest and direct. “As far as it takes.”
