by Patricia Stewart | Sep 20, 2011 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Gregori Milankovitch relaxed in his folding camp chair, admiring the dull red sun as it skimmed along the cloudless horizon. “What a beautiful sunset,” he casually remarked.
“Why do you insist on calling it a sunset?” snapped Mrs. Milankovitch. “The sun never sets up here. It just races around the horizon every thirty-eight minutes. It makes me dizzy. I’m beginning to hate this planet. I vote we head back to base. There’s nothing up here but rocks.”
“That’s not true, dear. We found fish skeletons earlier today, and the nearest source of water is over 200 kilometers away. How do you purpose we explain that conundrum to Tom? This planet doesn’t have tectonic plates to raise a continent from the sea floor.”
“Maybe a tsunami,” she suggested. “This spinning top of a planet must have some quirky geology.”
“We’ve had seismographs on Alpha Adhemar for over a decade. The planet is dead. No earthquakes, no volcanoes, no nothing. It’s just a solid rock covered by a vast ocean.”
“Except for this content,” she countered, in an attempt to gain some advantage in the argument.
“Well, sure. But that’s because we’re at the geographic North Pole. If we were further south, we’d be a thousand meters beneath the twenty kilometer oceanic equatorial budge like all the other mountain tops.”
Returning to the fish debate, she offered, “How about a tsunami created by a comet or asteroid impact?”
“Oh, pleeeease. Did you forget about Beta Adhemar,” he replied, pointing toward the bright ‘star’ on the horizon opposite the sun.
“What about it?”
“It’s a super gas giant locked in orbital resonance with Alpha Adhemar. Every twenty-two years, its highly elliptical orbit brings it to perihelion such that it lines up with Alpha Adhemar’s aphelion. If there were any Apollo objects crossing Alpha?s orbit, Beta would have vacuumed them up eons ago. Give it up, Khristina. We need to stay here until we can figure out how these fish managed to walk hundreds of kilometers.”
“Maybe they are flying fis?” Khristina came to an abrupt stop when the sun dipped below the horizon. “What the hell just happened? Why did the sun set?”
“Oh my God,” exclaimed Gregori as his heart started pounding when he realized the implications, “the planet’s axis must be tipping over. Beta must have destabilized us. Quick, into the TRAM. We need to get back to the base before the sea reaches the assent vehicle.”
More than halfway to base, they received a garbled message that the rising tide was approaching fast, and they couldn’t wait another rotation. Tom started to say something else, but the transmission was lost. Twenty minutes later, Khristina and Gregori watched helplessly as a vertical contrail split the sky.
“There goes our ride,” remarked Gregori as he brought the TRAM to a stop. But along the horizon, he could see a column of dust being kicked up by a vehicle heading their way.
Ten minutes later, a second TRAM towing a trailer pulled alongside. Tony Salvataggio smiled, “Someone call for an ark?” he asked as he indicated the four person Ocean Explorer resting in the trailer’s cradle. “Space Search and Rescue said they’d have an Ocean Lander here in about six months. Well, don’t just sit there looking dumbfounded, climb aboard, we only have another hour before this rock becomes an undersea plateau.”
by featured writer | Sep 19, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Featured Writer
I flick wing over wing and dive, engines howling as some bright blue nastiness passes through where I was. Half committed in the dive I pull the nose up and jink sideways, broadside to angle of travel. The parachute effect yaws me and I float a moment as the world goes slow. Echo One seems to drift across my nose and I squeeze the teat that causes my railgun to punch a chunk of titanium through his centre section. His drive objects to my percussive realignment and my screens have to flash-compensate as he passes the pearly gates at Mach 9, in pieces.
Even as his pyre dissipates I bring the hammer down and perfectly bullseye the corona of his demise. Wish I could see that in long shot, a ring of energy, a ring of smoke, a ring of fire and pieces, and my exhaust like a shaft through the middle, with me as the arrowhead.
My teller flashes and I corkscrew into an inverse slingshot before even looking. Echo Two coming for the title, out of the sun. Please. In this day and age? I continue the dive until he’s happy, then shut the backdoor and open the flue. Still hurtling surfaceward at Mach 8 I flip apex over base so the sharp end is pointing the right way. Echo Two discovers this as he flies head on into a few kilos of titanium doing Mach 20. Ouch. But this allows me to reopen the back door and hurtle through his expanding debris cloud without a scratch.
This is frustrating for Echo Three as he was expecting me to still be heading down due to the impossible g-forces involved in attempting sudden manoeuvres at these speeds. Of course, any airbreather would be jelly by now. Forty gees will do that unless you’re some sort of cartilaginous predator from the benthic depths of the Pacific, suspended in a hyperconductive saline gel. Handily enough, that’s exactly what I am. I’m callsign Kilo Ten. A revered ancestor was callsign Kraken. Got a proud family history of killing things to live up to.
Echo Three pulls a half loop with a roll out of his attack and ends up screaming down at me, flat out and very angry. Opens fire way out of range. He could have been dangerous if he’d kept his cool. As it is, I release a nanotube braced monofilament net, stand myself on my tail and punch it. Echo Three is about to become a cloud of hundred-mil chunks that will be a bigger threat than he ever was.
The skies clear as the smudges of dogfighting blow away. I click my beak as the blue fades to black and the stars come out. There’s always something magical about that transition. Seven hours to base. One hour debrief while the gel is cycled, then I get to go hunting again. Ocean depths are nothing to the vasty deeps of space, and I like to think we’ve made the transition well. Sleepless predators we’ve always been, but mankind gave me the stars, the enhanced smarts to love them and the means to defend them.
I pass the moons before engaging Hirsch, then flutter my tentacles to work out the kinks while my arms cue up some cetacean jazz and sketch three more kill-kanji for the hull.
by submission | Sep 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
I should have just slept with her, in retrospect. She had been attractive and suggestive, but there had been something about her that smelled like trouble, and sure enough, she had come back to the hotel bar with her arm wrapped around six feet of good old-fashioned trouble. Maybe I was supposed to be revenge on him for something he had done, but now she was going to use him to punish my rejection.
She pointed me out to him and he started striding towards me with blood in his eye. I stood up and stepped away from the bar. I should have just left, but I was at that stage of drunk where I wasn’t thinking straight but thought that I was. Besides, I was a little pissed at myself for turning down an easy score and at her for her betrayal.
As Trouble got near, the world started to slow down. The implant sensed my fight-or-flight response and responded by pumping me full of chemicals that made adrenaline feel like roofies. The artificial nerves switched from the setting that let me talk to people to the setting that let me count the beats of a hummingbird’s wing. No normal man could possibly defeat me.
Unfortunately, Trouble had that look too. Rather than rushing in like the angry fool he had seemed, he had slowed his approach and come into a fighting stance. He was an augment like me. Damn.
Science had not yet found a reliable way to replace muscles or change the speed with which they contracted, and that made a fight between augments a curious thing to watch. Fast thoughts, slow muscles. Make a wrong move and your opponent will see it, find the right counter, and launch his own attack, all faster than Bruce Lee at his finest.
I saw Trouble tense for a left jab, so I started to bring my arms up for a parry and cross. His left relaxed and his right dropped for a body blow, I began to bring my parrying hand up for a strike at his face, forcing him to pull ever so slightly back. Two attacks, two responses, and to those watching we might as well have been statues.
It went on like that for what seemed like hours, punches, kicks, shoves, slaps, all scarcely started before they were abandoned as futile. In the minutes we actually fought neither of us made a move more dramatic than a step, more obviously aggressive than a shrug.
Thankfully, I don’t stay in fancy hotels where the bars have nice clean floors, and the eternity it would have taken for him to look where he was stepping would have given me ample time to drop him. He didn’t see the wet spot until he started to slip, and an instant later the fight was effectively over. My left hand started to reach out, to help push him down while my right hand cocked slightly for a knockout punch on the floor. He had no way to counter, and it showed in his eyes. Along with a reflection of her face.
Bitch hit me with a barstool.
Despite our modifications, he couldn’t watch the floor and I couldn’t watch my back. They got in a few good kicks, then ran for it. I woke up a few minutes later, bruised but okay, and waited for the police. No one saw anything, not even the bartender, and the cameras were out so nothing came of it. I guess it helps to be a local. Fucking Pittsburgh.
by submission | Sep 17, 2011 | Story |
Author : Phillip Riviezzo
Mother warns me not to go too high, to stay safe and not ascend too many decks. It’s where the Things Above live, and they are dangerous. They hate us and want us all dead – thankfully, they’re too soft and weak to come down to our homes. Not that Mother need worry, since climbing too high hurts. I went up twenty decks once, the furthest I’d ever been, and I think I almost died. The gravity was so strong there, I could barely move, and I could feel my heart stressing to keep blood pumping. Supposedly, there are fifty decks, and past the fiftieth deck, the world ends. So we live down here, and They live up there.
According to the storytellers, passing down ancient songs and tales, it was different once. We didn’t always live here, in the belly of our Ark, kept warm by the glow of Mother Core and lulled to sleep by the rumbling of Father Drive. Once, the storytellers claim, we lived on an Ark that was round like a ball, not long and cylindrical. On the ball-Ark, everyone lived on the top decks, and there was no difference between the Things Above and us. But that Ark broke, the stories say, and we left. The people of the round-Ark moved to our Ark, and we flew away. They say this was a hundred grandfathers past, so no one knows what is truth. What happened next, though, is more interesting.
In most stories, everyone lived close to Mother Core and Father Drive at first, and were all happy. But some people were weak, or lazy, or stupid – they had no skills or knowledge that was useful to all people, and they refused Mother Core and Father Drive the reverence and worship they deserved. So they were cast out, banished to the far upper decks to live their lives and the lives of their children exposed to the darkness of the nothing. As they left, Mother Core cursed them, froze their bodies so that they and all who came after them would remain in the shapes they were. They would receive none of Mother Core’s gifts, gifts she bestowed upon those who remained loyal and useful, to make us better at what made us special first.
There are other stories, though. They are less popular, and people do not tell them when the Coremen are around, since it makes they yell about heresy and hit people with their clubs and claws. The other stories start like the first ones do, with all the people leaving the round-Ark in our cylinder-Ark, but they are the opposite of the first stories. In the other stories, all people started high, at the top decks. But there was not enough room for everyone, so some people went down. It was decided, the stories say, by the size of one’s pockets – people with bigger pockets stayed high, while those without were forced down, closer to Mother Core and Father Drive where the ‘shielding’ was weak.
Sometimes, I understand why the Coremen dislike these stories, because they make no sense. Wouldn’t people with big pockets be better to carry tools, and so live closer to where tools are needed? Why wouldn’t people wish to be close to Mother and Father? They care for us, and in turn we care for them. It is us who heal Mother Core when she is sick, and soothe Father Drive when he tires. Can the Things Above claim to be healers for their dark gods? I don’t know, or care – I like it down here.
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Doctor Spake slipped the needle into the fatty flesh of the rat and depressed the plunger, then withdrew and watched.
“This rat is almost three years old,” the Doctor addressed the Senator standing opposite him, “virtually at the end of its lifespan as you can see by its appearance.
The Senator regarded the withered rat with distaste. The benefits of this science appealed to him, but the specifics and the dirty work was for others; he had no interest and little patience.
In the cage, the rat began to become noticeably more agitated, its sparse and flat fur visibly thickening, taking on a healthy looking sheen.
This the Senator took interest in.
“What’s happening to the rat? It looks like it’s getting…”
“Younger.” Spake cut him off. “The injected nano-tech has reverted the rat to roughly a third of its expired life.”
Senator Thrush looked back and forth between Spake and the rat, which was now feeding aggressively.
“You’re sure about this? Sure that this will work? I know what you said, but this…” Thrush regarded the Doctor as though seeing him for the first time. “Why haven’t you used this on yourself? You still look to be…” he paused, “sixty?”
“Eighty two, actually. Thank you. I installed an earlier version of the nano myself before I’d perfected the regression capabilities, and I’m afraid my installed version is incompatible with this one. It does have its benefits, for example I’m better at developing connections, if you know what I mean.” Spake smiled, a practiced, reassuring smile.
It took forty five more minutes to convince the Senator, and by morning Thrush left feeling and looking like a man half his age.
Months later Senator Thrush had achieved all but the most lofty of his personal goals, taking his party’s nomination from the incumbent in a landslide, his sights set firmly on The White House.
As he sat in his office late one evening, a warm summer breeze stirring the leaves of the tree outside, a fifteen year old bottle of Macallan disappearing one glass at a time, he found himself thinking of the Doctor. There had been messages that he’d been too busy to return, and he wondered if he should contract someone to keep an eye on the good Doctor, lest he forget his place.
Thrush suddenly felt ill, the room swimming around him. He pushed his glass away on the desk, trying without success to steady himself against the dark heavy expanse of mahogany.
“Senator Thrush. You’ve been negligent in fulfilling your end of our agreement.”
Thrush vomited on his desk, the voice coming from everywhere and nowhere, his head pounding.
“I told you my nano advantage was dependent on connections? Do you remember that Senator?”
Blood dripped from Thrush’s sinus, spattering on the desk.
“Specifically those connections are what you may know as quantum entanglements. They tie two distinct and different things together, like atoms, at a quantum level.”
Thrush felt his legs go numb, heavy and no longer under his control. Pins and needles itching his fingertips, crawling up his arms to his shoulders.
“While the good Doctor will have died of an apparent heart failure this evening in his lab, it wouldn’t be fair for a politician to never grow old, to benefit from the Doctor’s life work without having ever contributed anything himself. Would it?”
Thrush blinked, for a moment he could swear there were steel benches surrounding him, cool white tile against his cheek. Then blackness overtook him.
Spake flexed his limbs, massaging the numbness from his forearms and fingers.
Then he sat, removed a tissue from a box on the desktop and wiped absently at the blood on his upper lip.
“Senator ‘Spake’ Thrush, PhD.” The Doctor formed the words with his new mouth. As he poured himself another glass of Scotch he added “I rather like the sound of that.”
