by submission | Oct 18, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jay Haytch
Did they teach you in school why the Soviet Union broke up? The story everyone ‘knew’ was of internal strife and bureaucratic inefficiency, but really it was Space Science.
In 1986 we discovered a… ‘thing,’ which stellar parallax put about 107 light-years away. It seemed to perfectly mirror the spectrum of wherever it was observed from. In realtime.
Yes, the Inexplicable Reflector. I like that name better in English than Russian. My colleague came up with it.
Anyway, we studied it for a couple of years until the director-general of the whole program poked his nose in and decreed we should ‘ping’ it. We would send a burst signal, as powerful as we could make, and see what happened. Would it take 214 years to see the result? Who knew?
Well, we started receiving a reply before our apparatus had even finished transmitting. And it was a reply, not just a static reflection – there was clearly information encoded into the complex waveforms.
Eventually – this was 1988; our computers were slow – we processed the signal and dumped the output – 27 pages of coded nonsense – to the printers. We made many copies, which was fortunate because one of the machines caught fire and subsequently destroyed my lab.
This would have been the greatest discovery ever, had it happened anywhere else, but our bosses demanded secrecy so we kept the outside world in the dark while we studied its contents. Eventually the Soviet system fell, and our top-secret research program evaporated with it. We all went on to careers elsewhere, having reached no satisfactory conclusions about the Inexplicable Reflector.
We never ‘decoded’ the message, never translated it into Russian or English or any other human language, but I know what it was. Simply reading it was enough.
We’d been sent a virus, a great instrument of information warfare that ran on human minds as if we were networked computers. I don’t know how it spread or how many became ‘infected’, but there’s no mistaking the signs. Party loyalists became self-serving agitators, protests, riots, and eventually the Soviet Union – the organization that sent the ‘ping’ – was torn apart.
You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? 31 years later, researchers in Japan discovered the same object and, again, tried to send a message. And some old Russian men such as myself started coming forward…
We all remember the chaos that followed – apparently the response was much stronger – but I do believe the world is better off since. Every government dissolved, their armies abandoned, bloated corporations shut down out of apathy. But look at what we’ve achieved since then, freed from ages-old bureaucracy! Manned spaceflight, interstellar travel, in just a decade…
Everyone has a theory about the Reflector now. My favourite is that it is an open network port into another universe, and we triggered serious anti-malware defenses from its firewall. But I’m a computer scientist, after all.
Which is why we’re here, just 1.5 AU from the Inexplicable Reflector, on the opposite side from Earth and Sol, in this starship I commissioned. We have no ties to any wider organization – I ensured that. My crew are all men and women like me – scientists; obsessed – driven – with the need to understand this thing.
Proximity didn’t yield any answers. So tomorrow we will tight-beam the most powerful broadcast in human history – the entire energy output of this starship’s drive – right into the maw of the featureless black sphere a planet’s orbit away.
I’m pushing the button. I have to know.
by submission | Oct 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“Well, Sammy, they’re all heading out.”
Sammy, the brown tabby cat sitting on my lap, is unconcerned by the slowly enlarging starburst on the holodisplay. Spacecraft tracks. Almost all outbound. Heading away from the dot at the center. Earth.
Sammy’s ears perk up at the sound of an incoming transmission. Another ship about 170,000 miles aft of us.
“Spacecraft, transponder One-Eight-Bravo-November-Seven-One, this is the S.S. Amaterasu, Captain Mariko Watanabe commanding, transponder One-Seven-Alpha-Juliet-Seven-Two, over,” says a female voice over the speakers.
“Captain Watanabe, Captain Juan Abarca commanding the S.S. Benito Juarez here, over.”
“Captain Abarca, your trajectory suggests you’re leaving the solar system.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
The woman sighs and then says, “What do you think’s happening back there?”
“I don’t know. I can’t know. Neither can you.”
Another sigh. “If there’s been a Technological Singularity Event–”
“Captain, there’s no ‘if’ about it. Even a year ago things were getting out of hand. Computer processor power doubling every month. And then every week. Nanotech hackers going from tinkering in their parent’s basements, developing new technology, starting companies, becoming trillionaires, then losing it all and being dirt poor when some better device superseded their product; and all that in the span of nine or ten days. And the wars…”
“I know. That’s why I headed out here. I knew neither China nor Japan would win. The war wouldn’t have victors. Just survivors. If even that.”
“For whatever it’s worth, you have my sympathies. Things are only slightly better in Brazil, Nigeria, and Romania. Human beings can’t keep pace with technological advance that’s that fast. But everybody knew they’d try. Everybody knew that would be the catalyst.”
She says nothing. Sammy bats half-heartedly at a passing dust mote then jumps from my lap and stretches out on the floor. I watch as more tracks appear on the display. Some look to be en route to the Oort Cloud. A few appear to be on interstellar trajectories.
“What do you think it is?” asks Mariko. “Self-aware computers? Bio-engineered transhumans? Cyborgs? Maybe a hive-mind?”
“Whatever we can imagine, that’s not it,” I respond. “By definition, it’s beyond our comprehension. Whatever’s the dominant intelligence on Earth now, it isn’t something we would have or could have thought of. We can’t even say what its motivation might be.”
“I see a few spacecraft tracks are heading back toward Earth. I wonder if they’ll try to communicate with it?”
“They can’t. I can read Hamlet or Plato’s Republic to my cat and he will comprehend them just as readily as any human would understand what…It has to say.”
Another minute of silence.
“Want to hook up at Alpha Centauri?” she asks.
“Alright,” I say. “Second planet out from Alpha Centaui B. You’ll have to keep up with me. I’ll be there in just over 500 years.”
“I’ll wait for you,” she replies with a laugh. “Amaterasu out.”
I touch a control and the display links in with the Solar Telescope Network. I call up an image of Earth. “Mother of God!” I say aloud. The Earth now has a ring around it. What’s being assembled in orbit, by whom, and for what purpose, I can’t say. But the Moon has an identical ring encircling it at a right angle to the one around Earth. I set a course for Alpha Centauri.
I pick up Sammy and walk toward two suspended animation chambers, one large, one small, at the back of the ship. “Let’s take a nap,” I tell my purring companion.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m 43. A year on Carroway is fifty-six earth years long. Its long, lazy, almost-circular orbit kept it temperate for that whole time but the ecosystem had evolved to create 126 distinct ‘seasons’. I’d read of Earth’s four seasons of summer, winter, spring and fall repeating every twelve months. Sounded monotonous.
I’ve lived my whole life here on Carroway and I haven’t seen a single season twice. They’ve all been recorded so it’s possible to read up and prepare for them as they happen but I’ve been faced with challenge after challenge.
There’s crystal season when the mineral deposits go through a growth spurt and push up out of the earth like translucent horns. There’s a season of trees that grow up into the lower atmosphere. They stand with smooth bark, silent and ominous until they start humming. Their vibrating roots fissure open the ground and release the grass fog season. Then the trees themselves flower, blotting out the sun. Then there is a pollenfall season as the skyscraper trees die and the sun returns, shining down through their now-nude branch clusters.
The trees become soft and unstable, sinking back down to the ground like wilted celery. It’s a dangerous time. Luckily the trees bow slowly.
There aren’t many animals here except for the season when the kangabears come out of hibernation for six months and gorge themselves on the fallen skyscraper trees before going back to sleep for another fifty-six years.
There’s a season where the planet hums. The theory is that a deep-earth tectonic shift happens, making the core rub the mantle harder than usual. Like a planet headache. You get used to it until the earthquake stops it. After that, the planet feels too silent for a while.
The magnetosphere and dust particles cause shifts in the sky colour depending on what season just happened. I’ve seen eighteen different hues up there. There’s ashfall here after the post-humming eruptions. Then pigments in the ash-eating bacteria turn it all into a blue slime that dissipates until the pink grass shows up to eat the slime, turning itself blue in the process.
There’s a red snow season. There’s a season of thorned tumbleweeds. There’s a season of long, thin raindrops that hang down from the clouds like hair. Soon the season of ivy migration begins. And then the flowerworks seed pod explosion festival.
There’s a plant based war happening here that’s been going on for millions of year. It’s found a cycle. Each victor dying and feeding the next. Each challenger inadvertently existing as part of a larger circle.
Some people can’t handle the variety here but I love it.
Thirteen more years and I’ll have seen all the seasons Carroway has to offer. Not too many people in the universe can claim that, especially a human like myself with a relatively short life span. I wear that badge with honour.
Every Carroway meal I’ve had has only been for a few months, never to be seen again. I think back to the pink pricklepears I had when I was six. The thick leafsteaks I had when I was ten. The delicious brandyberries that showed up on my twenty-second birthday. So many tastes.
I’ve recorded them all here in my books. I’m the first human to keep a firsthand record of all the seasons here on Carroway.
Some cycles don’t seem like cycles because they last such a long time.
I’m looking forward to the end of the ‘year’.
by submission | Oct 15, 2014 | Story |
Author : P. Djeli Clark
An extra-dimensional portal has opened up in my grocer’s freezer.
Not a giant portal, that might send out shaggy mammoth blue beetles with a thousand legs–like what happened to poor Doyle McDonald out at the granary (no one’s still quite certain where that beetle’s gone, though pets and livestock are still disappearing from time to time).
Neither was it one of those floating portals that sometimes flitter about as giant translucent globules, sucking in everything they touch. Last month one of them floated down and swallowed up the PS 19 elementary school bus on a field trip to the strawberry patch. The bus showed up way out on route 75 near Occom’s Crossing at precisely 11:16 PM the following Tuesday (which is where and when all such things swallowed up by the giant globules always make their reappearance). But of course all the elementary kids are now middle-aged and speak only some language the government linguists (who seem overly excited at the whole affair) say is a dead Aluet dialect.
No, the extra-dimensional portal that opened in my grocer’s freezer was none of these things. It was small, tiny enough to be lodged between a box of Klondikes and the last pint of rum-raisin gelato, a perfect shade of cerulean blue that swirled and churned like an ocean.
As I stared at it, momentarily forgetting my need for late-night snacks of cold creamy sweets and ignoring a bored teller’s last calls for items that broke through the muzak adaptation of Barry Manilow’s Mandy, I knew two things. One, this seemingly small extra-dimensional portal was not really small at all. Oh it may have looked so from this end, but I knew without knowing how I knew, that it was unbelievably vast–vast enough to swallow the grocer, our town, perhaps the world. And two, what ever lay on the other side, there was a nagging familiarity, a yearning and comfort that made me long for it in a way that only one word would describe – home.
by Julian Miles | Oct 14, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Ten o’clock. Eight o’ clock. Nine. Left. Four. Tang dynasty.”
The wavelength goes to static and I roll off the bed, lean back to kiss Tamara, then carry my clothes out of the bedroom and dress in the lounge. My daughter, Sarah, is a light sleeper and if she wakes, Samson will too. My son may be only three, but I would back him in a noise-making contest against an F18 on takeoff.
Fifteen minutes later I’m on the road. The Landie may not be comfortable, but it can get to any place I need to go.
As ten o’clock arrives, I’m four miles down the first left turn that’s nine miles from my house in a vaguely south-westerly direction. I say vaguely because clock direction does not correspond exactly to compass points, and that’s the whole idea. Tonight, I am parked in a ploughed field, wet mud sucking so I am driving in slow circles to stop the Landie sinking beyond its own power to escape.
With a searing flash, the field has another occupant. It strolls over to the Landie and I wind down the passenger window.
“How old is the vase?” The check-in question.
“Tang dynasty.” I give the response that was given to me and it nods before opening the door and getting in. Something squeaks against the leather seats.
“Destination?”
It pauses, as if consulting an unseen guide.
“Taunton. Before dawn.”
Twenty minutes later I park at a service station and we transfer to a Maserati Quattroporte. All terrain capability is essential, but fast point to point is beyond the Landie.
As we accelerate, it looks about at the interior.
“The artisans of this are to be cherished.”
I nod. Every time I use this car, my passengers pass impressed comment.
Taunton at the cusp of dawn is ghostly in the fog that enshrouded us about five miles out.
“Stop by the next crossroads.”
I do so. The passenger door opens and closes. It is gone. Looking down, I see a teardrop cut star sapphire just under an inch long on the seat. Payment in excess, but that is why I do this. One day, I will have to leave. One day, the skies will fill with invaders. One day, I will have to tell my wife the truth and see if she loves me enough to take our half-breed children to another planet.
