by submission | Jan 31, 2015 | Story |
Author : Gray Blix
“I don’t see anything, mommy. I want to go inside.”
He was lying in his child-sized lounge chair next to her adult-sized lounge.
The nights were clear and warm in Stella’s corner of the world after the astronomers’ announcement, so people looked up at the sky expecting to see new stars pop into view every few minutes, like flashes of light during a meteor shower. They were disappointed. It was too soon to see the phenomenon with naked eyes. Not enough photons reached earth. Only telescopes with special lenses and cameras that accumulated light over long time periods and recorded them as digital photos proved the astronomers correct. Since only astronomers had such equipment, a lot of people didn’t believe. They thought it was a scheme to get government funding.
“All right, Todd. Get ready for bed. I’m going to lie here awhile longer.”
The photos weren’t very convincing. Views of a distant glowing cloud. And there was no catchy name for the phenomenon, since scientists weren’t sure what it was. A rebound from the Big Bang — the Big Crunch? Or the opposite, cosmic expansion speeding up and tearing the universe apart — the Big Rip? Or another universe crashing into ours like a tsunami, piling up galaxies in a wave of debris sweeping towards us — a Cosmic Collision? Even ten years later, when the brightening night sky was apparent to all, scientists still couldn’t agree on what it was or what to name it, but a journalist called it “Starshine,” which caught on.
Through the screen, “Mom, that guy is at the door. Should I send him back here? I’m going over to Kristi’s house to study.”
“All right. Send him back. And you be home by 11:00. No excuses.”
As her son’s car backed out of the driveway, Craig pulled a lounge next to hers and joined her looking up at the night sky.
“Todd still won’t call me by my name.”
“He’ll come around.” Unbuttoning his shirt, “And I’m glad you came around.”
“What if Todd comes back?”
“He’s going to have sex with his girlfriend… so you can have sex with yours.”
As more years passed, people grew increasingly fearful, turning to religious leaders, to politicians, and to scientists for answers. Could the stars be stopped before Earth was destroyed? Amidst prayers and proclamations of martial law, scientists explained that even though the approaching galaxies appeared to be a solid wall of light, individual stars were actually far apart and none might pass close enough to collide with our Sun and its planets. Of course, they downplayed the likelihood that even if it escaped direct hits, our solar system would be torn apart by the gravity of massive objects passing nearby and pulling us into the wave.
Stella closed her eyes against the starshine. She didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t care. When nights became as bright as days, daylight saving time was abandoned. Time itself was abandoned by many. Unless you had a job or other time commitments, what did it matter when you slept or ate or did anything else?
As Craig closed the screen, Todd whispered, “She hasn’t said a word since we got here. The baby’s sound asleep, but maybe we shouldn’t go to the service.”
“No, no, you two go ahead. I’ll watch the baby… and your mom.”
He sat in a lounge next to hers and took her hand.
She looked over, “They said it was billions of light years away. That’s billions of trillions of miles.” Looking up, “And yet, twenty years later, here it is.”
by submission | Jan 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Richard D. Deverell
My name is Jackson Smith. I work as the coroner for a large county with a small population and even smaller infrastructure. Last week, a train derailed in our county, dumping toxic chemicals that killed more people in the week after the accident than the derailment itself. I hadn’t slept in nearly forty-eight hours when I had a conversation that forever changed my life.
It was nearing three A.M. as I wrote up my notes on one of the victims of the chemical spill when I heard a noise from the other room. At first, I attributed it to lack of sleep and the depression of seeing so much of my community come through my office. A clatter followed the indeterminate noise, so I went to check it out, fearing that some reporter had snuck in to get photos of the disaster.
Inside the other room, one of the corpses was sitting up, bent at the waist with its legs straight out. I thought it was the result of rigor mortis or outgassing until the body turned to look at me.
Now, I’ve seen plenty of zombie movies, but this wasn’t some horror-show grotesque that looked at me. The skin way ashen, but the eyes shone with intelligence. The corpse looked at me and said, “Have you seen my liver? I feel empty inside.”
I was at a loss for words, but, my parents raised me to be polite and the corpse was looking at me expectantly, so I stammered, “Um, it’s with some of your other organs in sample jars in the fridge. For testing.”
The corpse paused a moment, processing, before he shrugged. “Okay, just remember to put it back when you’re done.”
“Uh-huh.”
The corpse paused and looked around. Seeing the clock and the late hour, he looked back at me and asked, “Shouldn’t you be home?”
I rubbed my temples, overcome with weariness from the lack of sleep and because I was barely able to process the current situation. “I should be,” I said, “but there’s a lot of work here and nothing there, so I’ve been working.”
The corpse gestured to a chair in the corner, “Sit down and tell me about it.”
I accepted his invitation, thankful for anyone to talk to, even the dead. “It’s been a rough week. Do you remember what happened?”
He shook his head.
“Okay, well, you and many others were killed as the result of an accident. As the only coroner in the county, I’ve been pulling double and triple shifts just to keep up.”
“Yes,” he said, “but why isn’t there anything at home?”
“I don’t really have anything besides work.”
He scratched his chin. Such a strange gesture for a dead man! “Is work fulfilling, at least,” he asked.
“No, but it distracts me.”
“From what?”
I thought about it. Why did I work here? I’d been in this job for nearly a decade without advancement or improvement. Most people barely knew me and I made no effort to get to know them. Afraid I was being rude or taking too much time, I said, “I suppose it distracts me from life.”
The corpse pondered this and gestured to the refrigerator. “My organs are in there,” he said, “but you’re the empty one.”
I turned to the fridge, following his gesture, and when I looked back he was lying down again and still, as though nothing had happened. At a loss, I went back to my office and work. I’m not sure what frightens me more: that we had a conversation, or what he said.
by submission | Jan 29, 2015 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
The President of the United States watched the viewscreen in the Oval Office as it displayed what appeared to be mist condensing on the lens of the camera that had recorded the video. After a few seconds, the tiny droplets started coming together and sliding to the edges of the screen in rivulets.
“That’s helium-neon rain, Madam President,” said the administrator of NASA seated next to her. After a few minutes the mist dissipated and the video showed a dark, copper-colored liquid flowing slowly around the camera. It gave the impression of the view from a submarine sailing through an ocean of maple syrup.
“That’s liquid metallic hydrogen,” said the administrator. “We’ll jump ahead because this pretty much stays the same for most of four hours.”
After he advanced the video, something started to appear in the flowing liquid. Over a span of two minutes, a few circular objects materialized. The circles multiplied and resolved themselves into dome-shaped structures. A few people in the room gasped. Lines started forming, connecting the domes together. Small oval shapes moved along the lines. A few spherical objects appeared to float above the domes, moving slowly in various directions.
“Is that what it looks like?” asked the President.
“We believe so, Madam President,” answered the administrator. “We think this image is an ‘aerial’ view of a city.”
“There’s a city on the surface of the core of Jupiter? So at Jupiter’s core conditions are Earth-like?”
“No, ma’am,” said the administrator. “The pressure inside that part of Jupiter is around 600 million gigapascals.”
“In English?”
“Normal atmospheric pressure on Earth is a little less than 15 pounds per square inch. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the pressure is eight tons per square inch. The pressure inside Jupiter at that depth is on the order of 300,000 tons per square inch. That’s why the Jupiter Deep Exploration Probe was so expensive and took so long to build. Whole new technologies had to be developed to survive the conditions that deep inside a gas giant.”
“Even at the bottom of oceans on Earth,” said a Senator seated across the room, “we find life. Could life on Jupiter adapt to that pressure?”
“Not life as we know it,” replied the administrator. “Even matter itself behaves strangely under those conditions. The atmosphere above the city is composed of hydrogen in a supercritical state, neither liquid nor gas. And the probe registered temperatures in excess of 60,000℉. The core itself appears to be solid, which was theorized for some time. But no one imagined anything like…this.” He gestured at the frozen image on the screen.
“Could we communicate with them?” a congressman asked. “Radio, maybe?”
“Sir, we don’t know if what we’re looking at is the Jovian equivalent of New York City or the Jovian equivalent of a coral reef. It looks like a city, but it may not be. If this is a civilization, we don’t know how or even if their technology could receive any kind of signal we can send.”
“If that’s a civilization,” said the President, “we’ve already sent a signal. Even to beings so different they can live in that kind of environment, the probe would still be recognized as something obviously artificial, made by intelligent creatures, wouldn’t it?”
“There’s no way to be certain, Madam President,” said the administrator.
“Send another probe.”
“Madam President, the cost–”
“You’ll have the money.” The President smiled. “And to think that jackass I’m running against just announced he’d cut NASA’s budget if he got elected.”
by submission | Jan 28, 2015 | Story |
Author : Michael Jagunic
Brick stands motionless as mechanical arms snap the exosuit around him: torso first, then limbs, weapons, and finally helmet.
“It’s like God creating life, you know?” he says. “You start with a soul, slap a body around it, and then send it shrieking into the harsh light of the world.”
He’s trying to lighten the mood. He’s failing.
Outfitted in my own exosuit, I lead Brick down the dimming corridor. The dying lights are on purpose—no reason to maintain full intensity up here. Still, power has been ebbing for weeks. A few weeks more and the rest of the lights below will be just as dim. And then dark.
We waited as long as we could. We hoped as long as we could.
“Think they’ll be waiting for us?” Brick asks.
“Yes,” I answer. “And they’re legion.”
At the end of the corridor, we come to the hangar, where the last three Hoppers loom like dusty dragons before the hangar door. The hangar once housed twelve Hoppers, but the other nine are no more than scraps of mangled metal now, lost somewhere out there beyond the bunker walls. No matter. The only Hopper I care about is the one Maddox was flying when he tried to save us.
Maddox, Brick, and I had been thick as thieves even before the Solar Army landed this planet, and we stuck together through everything: the Door opening up, settling this bunker, the Anti-Event. Them pouring through from the other side, slaughtering us in droves, clawing our Hoppers out of the sky and cracking our tanks as easily as they did our skulls.
When it got down to just the three of us and our distress calls were still going unanswered, Maddox couldn’t take the waiting anymore. He offered us a quick goodbye, and then flew a Hopper directly into the Door. I watched the whole thing in the control room while Brick said a prayer in the chapel. The vidlink showed a view of Maddox’s cockpit as he took one last run at them.
And that’s when I saw something.
“Brick. We need to talk about the plan.”
“I remember. Stay stealthy, sneak away.”
I look at him, knowing that all he can see is my black visor. “No. That used to be the plan. Not anymore. You remember when the Door first opened? Solar Army tried to pass a drone through.”
“Drone just kept on flying like the Door wasn’t there. It’s a one-way door, for them.”
“No,” I reply. “It’s not. When Maddox flew into the Door—”
“He passed right through, just like the Drone.”
“His Hopper passed through. But when Maddox hit the Door he disappeared. He didn’t pass through…he passed through. His ship crashed, but in the second before it did, I saw. He wasn’t in it. The door, it must have to do with organic matter or…or I don’t know, but…”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because I know how crazy—”
“Yeah, it’s crazy. They came from that side.”
“You have a better plan? If we have to die, don’t you at least want to see what’s on the other side first?”
“The other side? Those things came straight from hell!”
“Maybe. Or maybe they’re guarding the gates of heaven.”
Seconds pass. An eternity.
“Okay, Johnny,” Brick says. “Doubt it matters whether we die in this universe or the next.”
“Right,” I smile. “Let’s go take a peek behind the curtain.”
With the slam of a lever, the hangar doors yawn open. In the distance, the first of them takes to the sky.
by submission | Jan 27, 2015 | Story |
Author : Lindsey McLeod
When the doorbell beeped, Henry didn’t bother looking up from the Independent Galactic Dispatch. It would beep again in a few moments, once the customer had glanced around the shop and decided that there was nothing they wished to peruse further. Even a potential purchaser, as unlikely as that idea was, could wait. Henry’s knowledge of the debate on legal rights for robotic cup holders was shabby at best, and the Indy was currently helping to rectify this.
A shadow fell across the page. Henry swallowed a sigh. “Can I help you?”
The woman was studying the dusty radio on the counter with a hint of disdain. “Yah, yah. I’m just looking.”
She didn’t immediately slide away from the counter though, so he was forced to politely endure her umbral encroachment with a thin smile. He watched her in annoyance, unable to fully devote himself to the grand pursuit of wisdom as she meandered about the room, picking up various objects with increasing ennui. One listless tentacle caressed a withered photograph of some twentieth century President Nobody. Prime Minister Something or Other. He wondered whether he could pass the coffee stain off as blood. A bit of tangible history.
The same tentacle fondled the engraving on an open silver locket with a gesture which was, if not a sibling then definitely a first cousin, of complete boredom. Her shoes made syncopated clicking noises.
Henry returned his focus to the Indy, drawing his sprkker-weave cardigan closer around him. The Courts versus V-Type Holder 1138775 could wait until later. The advice column this week was about introverts. Interesting. Perhaps it had some useful information he could use. The subheadings read: Try reaching a new goal; Interact with people; Choose your own boundaries. The shadow fell again. He took a calming breath. If only interacting with people didn’t actually involve interacting with people. There was a whole galaxy out there and he’d be quite happy if it stayed that way instead of repeatedly barging into his little shop. “Can. I. Help. You?”
“These fortune telling cards,” the woman said, brandishing said item. “Have you tried them?”
Henry squinted at her. “Fortune telling is entirely outwith the realm of science.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
He felt hopelessly adrift. “Then no.”
She opened the pack and started shuffling them one by one. “Pick a card, any card,” the woman drawled.
Most of her eyes were a deep, lustrous brown. Challenging. He looked down at the Indy. Then back at her. He drew a card and glanced down. She eyed him impatiently. “Was it the Lovers?”
“Does it matter?”
“That wasn’t my question.”
He smiled in spite of himself. “Then yes.”
