by submission | Apr 3, 2011 | Story
Author : Jeremy Wickins
It was perhaps the greatest experiment of all time. For a split second, all other possible universes would be aligned, and we’d have knowledge of our place in the great order of things.
– I threw the switch that brought the bizarre energies together that would pierce through the barriers between universes. The small light over the switch illuminated. The instruments, scrutinised by the greatest cosmologists of our time … simply did nothing. Months later, when we were completely discredited and effectively unemployable, we could not get it through to anyone that the experiment may not have failed. Whilst there might not be any other possible universes, our calculations showed that we might exist in the earliest possible universe in which the experiment was attempted. Time’s arrow dictated that there could not be any others for us to see.
– I threw the switch that would pierce through the barriers between the universes. The small light over the switch illuminated – but it seemed too bright, somehow. The instruments detected a handful of universes, each a fraction of a second ahead of ours. Our careers were made, and we never needed to worry about research funding again.
– Just after I threw the switch, sudden pain shot through my hand as if I’d been burned by the indicator light. Our instruments detected a few tens of universes, each very slightly behind the one before it. Each of us became an instant celebrity from that day, and could find jobs in any arena we fancied – politics, media, university management: all were open to us merely for the asking.
– I watched again as the recording showed him turn on the experiment, and then simply burst into flames. It was horrible to see. It was as if the indicator light over the switch had become a high-powered laser beam. Despite the tragedy of his death, the experiment was a success – we discovered several hundred universes, each slightly in advance of the one before it, and each centred, for that moment, for some reason, on the switch. Of course, no-one on the project would ever want for work again, but some retired from science soon afterwards, stating that there some things that man can should not play with.
– Fortunately the control room was separate from many of the instruments, or we would never have worked out what had happened. The death toll was dramatic, as several square miles of land evaporated. We thought that there had been a nuclear bomb at first, what with all the crazies telling us how the experiment was too dangerous to go ahead. It was only when we analysed the data from the instruments that we realised the truth, but only after many “dissidents” had been tortured and killed. But who could have foreseen that the cumulative light and heat from the indicator switches in tens of thousands of other universes could bleed through, and with such terrible effect? The data derived from the experiment were significant, but we lost a lot of good people that day, and not just in the initial disaster.
– … 3 … 2 … 1 … I throw the switch and
by submission | Apr 2, 2011 | Story
Author : Richard Chins
Blue Squadron stood swiftly to attention. Milk dipped eyes stared blankly back at me.
Unfeeling? Indifferent?
I feel a cloud pulse behind its eye, catch a fleck of black spinning uncontrollably in its peripheral vision.
Truth and love. A dark, well trod vision slides into view. I push a smaller child and take his bike. My Mum calls my Dad an offworlder. A dog screams, my girlfriend goes to war and doesn’t come back: I see her laughing in a bunker restaurant in old burnt out London. I find a pebble with a staircase carved perfectly into it. There is blood in my cough.
I am sweating. I squirm, the beads taste thick and curdled.
My mind slips always toward the dark. Awful secrets howl their names. To turn and fight, it draws me in; I feel it tighten as I focus. But to ignore it… Terror! Thick waters drag too fast, too strong; a man insults me from across the bar; I hide it from her; I laugh as he takes my beating.
The eye is sweating, but it does not reach its cheek; it does not fall like a tear. I am a bad man.
Still standing to attention, somehow I claw my eye from its gaze. I hear my hand flap and tear at my side. The truth is ripping me apart.
It blinks, reaches for its holster, I taste blood. The gun points over my shoulder, a man’s head explodes. Six people to the left of me are sick. Someone is covered in one of the traitors, someone is screaming for mercy.
by submission | Apr 1, 2011 | Story
Author : Martin Sumner
We used to joke that they put something in the water.
Cully was the first to go mad, when he was still only sixteen. They don’t approve of that kind of language, of course; he had a ‘nervous breakdown’. Started sending cigars in the post to his friends with cryptic notes. Back then we were all beginning to fall quietly into the margins, but Cully was exploding, his personality ripping apart very publicly. Last time I saw him, he was a couple of days away from being sectioned. I heard he still has to walk fifteen miles a day to keep on top of the visions. Thirty years, thats a lot of miles.
We were the brightest boys and girls from the rural communities, rounded up, tested, sent to the Academy in town. For most of us, that was a five-hour round trip: I never saw my village in daylight until the summer holiday. Our parents thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime – something they were never afforded. A higher education, exacting standards, movement into and within a social strata to which we could not otherwise pretend. A closed door opened.
No-one asked why.
Skinner was the oldest of us all, he was like a father-figure on the daily bus-grind, looked out for us. A gentle giant. One day I heard he put some kid through a plate-glass shop-window in self-defence. Out of the Academy, into Borstal. (They don’t call it that anymore). I never saw him again.
In my village school, I was a brilliant young prodigy. I enjoyed it: being cleverest. Best at everything. When they told us we were being tested for the Academy, I knew I was in. No-one else from my village made it, except one. Funny thing was, she was my sweetheart. Her name was Helen. We lost touch.
Everyone on the bus was the brilliant young prodigy in their own community. Things were about to change, though. In the Academy, it seemed quite suddenly, we were less than average. Simple problems became insurmountable. Rapidly developing academic skills of our childhood decayed into bland incompetencies. We became a group shunned by the rest of the Academy as dull and peculiar. Became shunned? No, we were that from the start.
Nowadays Jeffers lives back in his old village, a mute crank, target of malicious gossip and harangued by gangs of small children. Rande drank himself into oblivion. I heard he died recently, found dead on his mother’s lawn. Morton is probably dead too, opium-related. Moxy, those curls, those teeth, that sharp wit (I loved her, secretly): disappeared by the Special Patrol. Griffen I heard was relatively prosperous, an antique dealer. And a sexual monster, so the rumour goes. Bad things happen around him.
Funny thing, I don’t remember what actually happened to us at the Academy. Five years we were bussed in and out, bright young things who became marginal, mundane, lost. What did we gain? What did we learn? Why did we go, daily, like lambs?
Me? I managed, as best I could, for thirty years. I’ve not been good at much. Failed relationships, money problems, depression. Irregular employment. Reclusive periods. Just last year, I split in two. Half the time, an angry, mute little boy runs riot in my head. A silenced prodigy slipping his harness. I’ll be in the mad house soon enough.
Speaking of which, I got a note from Cully today. It said, They Won’t Ever Make You Better. It said, You Are Lost. It said, Don’t Drink The Water.
by submission | Mar 31, 2011 | Story
Author : Iain Maloney
I can’t recall how long I’ve been here. I sleep at odd hours: fitfully, but in bursts. Because everything else has changed, I do not heed the dregs of the old world. Dark and light, night and day.
To the west; where the sun slinks away was my home. It is in darkness now, submerged beneath the waves. I sit on this cliff. It was once a football pitch, now a headland. Below me, around me, is alive: moving, pushing, pulling. I always imagined a climax. Everyone did. An explosion, an implosion – wind, rain, the arid heat of a desert compressed into a nanosecond burst. It wasn’t like that. Slow. Imperceptible. The tide didn’t turn. It’s so simple. The tide didn’t turn. It kept coming, coming, coming. Met obstacles, flowed away, rose, eroded. There’s not much left now. Not much but water. And this goalmouth. One of the posts has sunk. The water is eroding below me causing subsidence. A water-logged pitch.
Don’t know what happened to the others. Dead, I suppose. I should feel grief but there’s nothing. I climbed. I climbed until there was nowhere higher. So I stopped. I can swim but there is nowhere to swim to. I can wait. There doesn’t seem much else to do.
Wonder when the last game was played on this pitch? Its erosion is recent. Did they stop when the reports came through? The approaching ocean, the deaths, the destruction? Did they, out of sympathy, out of fear, out of the overwhelming urge to survive, did they cancel matches? Games arranged months, years previously? Or did football triumph? Conclusive proof that it is more important than life and death.
I like this as a final resting place. There is nothing left now but memories, and inevitably, football has its place. The last time I saw my father was at a game, back in Glasgow, Parkhead. It was years back, when I was a kid. My parents separated when I was a toddler. Dad was in the army, stationed all over the world. He came back once. I don’t know what caused it, didn’t really question it at the time, just accepted that this is how the world works. He took me to Celtic Park, like his father had done with him. Pass it on. I don’t remember who was playing, what the score was, but I remember the noise, the vibrations through the stand. The smell of passion, fear, anger. That’s how I remember my father, as a face amongst thousands of others, cheering, shouting.
I wonder is there’s anything of Glasgow left. They stopped broadcasting a few months back. The last pictures I saw were of water lapping round Edinburgh Castle, people crammed inside, the unlucky being pushed from the walls.
I’m hungry. There’s nothing up here but grass and goal posts. A half-time pie is all I can think of. Soggy and greasy, salty. Part of me refuses to accept that all this has gone. Am I just unlucky enough to have been stranded here, while elsewhere people are celebrating? Either way, it doesn’t matter. There’s just me now. Last man standing.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 30, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
He based the intelligence of his machine on the process of sibling rivalry. It had long been noted that a constant challenge and attacking of one’s ideas resulted in stronger ideas. A lifelong bond formed around that rivalry but more importantly, it resulted in a quicker and a smarter pair of siblings.
So he split his artificial intelligence program in half but kept a connection going between the two halves. A binary corpus callosum bridge connected the two intelligences to let them speak and fight and strengthen each other.
After that, he dozed off.
“Professor! Wake up!” A student was shouting in his ear. “You have to wake up. The power demands on your experiment are way higher than predicted. Something is happening.”
He woke up and looked at the clock. He’d been asleep for six hours.
“Professor, hurry!” shouted the student.
He got up and followed the student to the A.I. casing. It didn’t look any different but as he got closer to the black sphere, he realized it was very hot. Too hot. He took a look at the streams of data. There should be two clear streams on the readouts. It was a dense stream of data that he couldn’t decipher at a glance.
“Student. What’s going on here? How many streams of data are there? It looks like there are more than two.” He said.
The student sat down at the terminal and plugged in to see how many streams were present.
“Oh my god.” The student said.
The professor felt something cold enter his stomach. He’d entered the code to split the A.I. and left that code in the temp data bank. It was a tool that he’d left available to the fledgling intelligence without considering it a risk. The two A.I.s had a mental age of three. He had doubted that they could use a tool like that.
“What is it, student?” asked the professor.
“Sir, there are over six billions streams of data.”
The professor lurched forward. Billions of separate minds were in the sphere, listening to each other and learning from each other.
He’d created a world.
