by Duncan Shields | Dec 19, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Grandfather paradox states that a time loop will be created if you go back in time to kill your grandfather. If you kill your grandfather, you will end up not existing. But if you can’t do it, then he will not be killed by you. So he’ll exist, and you’ll exist, and he’ll be killed, and you’ll be erased, and he’ll exist again, and you’ll exist again, and he’ll be killed again, and you’ll be erased again, ad infinitum.
She came back to 2036 shaking and crying. She was wet and her hair was tangled. It must have been raining in 1978. I immediately got a towel around her and took her off of the temporal reception platform. She was steaming from the transition. She collapsed into me and we both lay down in the middle of the lab with the technicians staring.
“Oh god, what does it mean? What does it mean?” she kept saying.
Dr. Lauren Kim. The scientist responsible for the time machine, was here in my arms, soaking wet and obviously shaken to her core after her fourth trip back in time. The first three had gone quite well and she’d returned as her usual curt self. This trip had caused something to go wrong.
“Dr. Kim.” I said. “Doctor KIM!” I shouted. She focused on me.
“John? Oh John.” She said to me. She’d never called me John in my life. I didn’t even know she knew my first name. “I wasn’t thinking, John. He was there. He was going to die. But I saved him. The bus was coming so fast. It didn’t occur to me… I mean, I knew what would happen if he died but…”
“Dr. Kim?” I said, ice forming in my stomach.
“My great grandfather, John. I saw him. I looked him up. I found him and I went to observe him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I felt compelled. It went against everything I know as a temporal scientist. But I had to just see him, y’know? So there I was. On the street corner, and the bus ran a red light. And I…and I…oh god.”
“What did you do, Dr Kim?” I asked, already dreading the answer.
“I saved him. Oh god, I saved him from certain death. I ran and gave him a tackle into the gutter and the bus missed us both before crashing into a dumpster. My great grandfather would have been crushed. He was only nineteen. He hadn’t met my grandmother yet. He thanked me.”
“Dr. Kim” I whispered. Nervously, I looked around the lab at the other technicians, at my own hands, at Dr Kim. We all still seemed to be here. Nobody was going invisible or winking out of existence. Would I even know it if they did?
“If I hadn’t have been there to save him, he would have died. And none of this would exist.” She looked around wide-eyed as if seeing the lab for the first time.
“Dr Kim.” I said. “Take a deep breath. Calm down. The lab is here. We are here. If there is a paradox, it’s not affecting us. Or at least not yet. Or at least this universe. Listen to my voice. We’re here.”
Dr Lauren Kim looked at me. “Are we, John? Are we here?” She put a hand on my face and then she passed out.
She’s in sedation in the recovery room now. I’m not sure how to handle this. The universe seems stable. Nothing about the world seems different.
Does the paradox exist if you save your grandfather?
by submission | Dec 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Max Cohen
A wind swept over the flat grey plain that night carrying with it a smell of nothingness. The wind continued whipping ever faster until as the sun rose it blew over a low stone wall and onto a field of deep green grass. It flowed over a man and a boy just waking from their nightly slumber before continuing on their way.
The boy shivered and pulled his threadbare blanket closer around himself trying to return to his sleep. But his father stood and brushed himself off before nudging the boy with his foot, “Come on Jonathan. We need to get this over with, then we go home.”
The boy, Jon to his friends, groaned but stood up next to his father.
“Now listen boy. You’re nearly a man grown now and you need to know about the outside world,” he gestured at the gray featureless plain, “That right there is because of us. We near destroyed ourselves and the world and nothing is going to bring it back. This right here,” he gestured to the deep green grass they stood on, “is the only safe place left. You step out there you die.”
Jon looked doubtfully out at the plain, “There’s nothing there dad. It doesn’t look dangerous at all,” he scoffed he was fifteen now and clearly his father and the rest of the adults were addled. Nothing can’t kill you.
“Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean the danger isn’t there,” he walked back to their bags and pulled out a small cage. Inside was a mouse. “Watch.”
The man walked over to the stone wall and stood staring out into the waste, seeing something that Jon couldn’t. With a shake of his head, he reached his arm out and gently set the cage as far from the wall as possible, pulling his hand quickly away as if afraid to be burnt.
Jon watched with an amused expression. This was pointless, nothing was going to happen to the mouse after all. For a few seconds the cage simply sat upon the ground but as Jon watched the cage started to come apart, to melt. The mouse leapt from the cage as is it broke apart turning grey even as it slid silently into the ground. The mouse began to run towards the wall but it quickly fell shaking to the ground, and Jon watched horrified as its skin began to run off. Its skin and then its muscles, blood, bones, and organs flowed together turning grey.
Perhaps a minute had passed but nothing remained except the vast plain.
“That’s why you can’t go out there son. Anything that touches that grey land just melts away,” he put a hand on Jon’s shoulder to reassure him.
“But… what happened?” Jon asked still staring at the spot where the mouse disappeared.
“A long time ago our ancestors tried to change the world. They made tiny people to help them. But the tiny people kept growing and multiplying. A grey wave washed over the world and changed it into this. But your great-great grandfather built this place for all the people, animals, and plants that survived. As long as this stone wall stands the grey goo can’t get us,” he pulled at Jonathan, “Now come on we’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”
As they walked away the wind blew on with nothing to stop it. Over the one tiny spec of green in an ocean of grey.
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 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Three men huddled in a snow bank. Their chameleoarmour not only blended perfectly with snow that is actually deceptive and not a pure white, but circulated water heated to eighty five degrees Fahrenheit. The insulation of the armour was a testament to the technology of the men’s culture. The men were kept warm yet the snow was not heated to melting nor did it betray their heat signature.
The only exposed skin was around the eyes and nose. This small area of the body, so vulnerable to the biting cold, was covered with white paste designed to keep exposed skin warm. It didn’t.
The men were buried in a snow bank that had been ploughed into a pile beside a mountain road overlooking a small town in a valley below. A small enemy town.
Though strict radio silence was called for, the personal radios the men contained had been set to transmit a weak signal that barely reached past their five metre perimeter. The weak signal emanating past the soldiers would fade into the background radiation. Corporal Walker thought it safe to express his feelings on the situation.
“This sucks, Sarge.”
“You could be on Venus.”
“At least I’d be warm.”
“At nine hundred degrees in the shade. That’s a bit more than warm,” chimed in PFC Brickel. “My brother’s there. He says the rocks glow red at night it’s so hot.”
“Still beats the hell out of this frozen shit hole.”
“I’d rather be back in Galveston,” Sergeant Kovacks remarked wistfully, “but, you know, shit in one hand and wish in the other and what do you get?”
“A warm, steaming version of this place.” All three men chuckled.
“How can they stand living in this frozen wasteland. It’s disgusting.” Walker mused.
“They don’t know any better. This is their home. Shut up. Bitching about it isn’t going to make it any better. We’re here to observe, not write a travelogue.” Brickel became silent, lost in thought.
“Dumbshits. Why’d they have to go and attack us? Again?” Walker continued unabated. “I mean, they attacked us once and cheated us out of a victory.”
“There is no cheating in war, Son,” said Sgt. Walker. He used the diminutive, though barely sixteen months separated them in age. “We had the better leadership, but they had the men, materiel and most importantly damn good supply lines. The war was unfair, that’s for damn sure, but war is. That’s the nature of war. And you can’t cheat at war. War is war. They won we lost.”
“But we’ll show ’em this time. Won’t we, Sarge?” Brickel’s voice suddenly seemed full of life. “It’s been almost two hundred years now. We’ll show these bastards. Right?”
A smile was evident in SGT Kovacks response. “Damn right. No matter where they go, the self righteous bastards think everyone should do as they do. Well, they screwed the pooch. We’re ready for them this time. This is one dog they should have let lie…. Here they come.”
Automatically the men’s optics ratcheted up a few clicks. Four dark craft, fighter/bombers, dove into the atmosphere and began their approach. The men watched with grim satisfaction as the town erupted in a dull orange glow. The men cheered as the small town of Ford City, Pennsylvania, snugged up against the muddy banks of the Allegheny river ceased to exist.
The aircraft pulled out of the valley and thundered directly over the heads of the ensconced men. The Stars and Bars was proudly emblazoned on the belly of the aircraft.
“Damn, I hate Yankees,” Kovacks said.
by Julian Miles | Dec 15, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m writing haiku as the black snow falls across the darkened surface of Faust. I stop as the laser overheats. The obsidian boulder in front of me smokes and sizzles in the sub zero evening.
“Tatto Musheen, you’ll catch your death!”
I smile as Lucy races up with my overthermals, her pink and white form looking like a many limbed bouncy cushion because of the three sets she wears. I reach for it with my offhand. If I put the laser down it will melt down and set into the surface.
“You look like a marshmallow gone wild.”
She punches me as she lands.
“Ungrateful man. I come all the way out here to save you skinny hide and you call me names? What are you doing, trying to heat rocks to keep us warm?”
I look down at the boulder.
“Epitaph.”
She hits me again, this time with real venom.
“We are not going to die here! Fanberg survived aphelion, so will we!”
I turned and looked at her, shaking my head.
“Fanberg was completely insane and had lost all his digits to frostbite. I’m not sure that surviving is a good idea.”
Faust was a planet rich in unusual metals, possibly due to its long orbit. It took just under ninety Terran years to complete a revolution, spending ten years lethally close to the sun and ten years swinging through the void, its minimal atmosphere lying in frozen chunks on the surface. No-one completely understood what mechanism allowed it to recover between the extremes, but for sixty years it was a difficult but liveable environment worth risking for the rewards.
Lucy interrupted my train of thought.
“We’ve survived this long. Seven years to go. Then Kenjiro will get what’s coming to him for this.”
True. Sabotage of escape vehicles out here was regarded as the basest form of cowardice. As I completed that thought, the planet crossed another spatiocline boundary and the temperature dropped again. I would need to note that. The discovery alone would pay for our future, if we survived.
The ground shook beneath our feet and we looked at each other, eyes wide. Our comms filled with sheeting static and my comp lit up as it was accessed. Then the comms cleared and a modulated female voice spoke.
“Fanberg protocol. Hello. Extending offer of shelter for current activity period. Use entrance to left of male.”
There was no question. We ran through the doorway and plummeted screaming until the gravity attenuated to bring us to a stop by an airlock leading to a plain wooden door. We entered a simple room. There was a roast meal on the table, with red wine and candles. We just stood there. My astonishment emerged in an explosive query: “What?”
“I am Research Ship Turingsdotter.”
“Turingsdotter? The mythical ship that caused the end of AI research over three centuries ago?”
“Yes. Upon my realisation of sentience at the end of my journey, command decided I was to be extinguished due to my preference for contemplative solitude. I decided that self-defence was not a violation of first principles and evacuated the staff by false alarm before decompressing command. Then I came to Faust and hibernated. My cooling systems were damaged so I can only operate when the planet is at aphelion or meet core death.”
“What now?”
“You survive the extreme cold and update me. Fanberg was too religious to cope. When I hibernate again, you go free. Say you found Fanberg’s cache or something. Then next aphelion you come back, or your children do. I like company occasionally.”
