by submission | Dec 9, 2010 | Story
Author : James C.G. Shirk
The automated countdown clock flashed: one hour, twenty-one minutes.
Commander Albright grimaced and adjusted the controls to retract the dome above. The astronomy observation skylight on lunar colony six, located at the southern edge of Mare Sarenitatis, slid noiselessly open. Earth, in its radiant magnificence, hung in the blackness of the overhead sky. “So, where is Goliath going to hit now?” he asked.
His cohort, Lieutenant Conrad, read the most recent data spewing from the telemetry console. “Almost right where originally thought — about six miles off the Newfoundland coast.”
Albright frowned. “Even after the intercept?”
“Yep. Missiles didn’t affect the flight path much — probably because it’s such a big honker.”
“I can’t frickin’ watch,” Albright said, punching the skylight closed.
“At least they let you bring up your wife in the last load of refugees,” Conrad said, trying his best to assuage Albright.
“Yeah, for what good it does my brother and sister…and my parents.”
Conrad winced; Albright was a glass half-empty kind of guy. “Where are they?” he asked.
“Mom and Dad live in St. Louis; brother’s got a farm in northern Indiana; and Sis is in Chicago.”
Shaking his head, Conrad said, “Almost makes me happy I’m an orphan,” and then added, “I guess that it’s good they don’t know what’s coming. It’ll be over in a flash. Thank goodness the government was successful keeping this under wraps.”
“I suppose,” Albright said morosely. “Thing is, the friggin’ idiots shouldn’t have put all our eggs in one basket in the first place.”
“You’re referring to the micro-hole?”
“Exactly. Focusing all our resources to create a miniature black hole in Goliath’s flight path, without developing a viable backup plan, was sheer stupidity,” he sneered. “Unless you call that pitiful attempt at blowing up the damn thing a backup plan.”
Conrad nodded. “Well, they were partially successful. They created the micro-hole okay. Unfortunately, the delivery system failed.”
“It wasn’t deployed early enough,” Albright went on, “and, of course, the damn thing disappeared enroute.”
Albright rose from his chair and walked to the event display screen. On it, the telescopic image of Goliath, a tumbling, black monstrosity, filled the screen — fifteen miles wide; it was a planet killer. Nothing would survive the impact. Nothing.
“You’re an ugly, remorseless bitch,” he murmured under his breath.
The countdown clock suddenly froze, and a staccato beeping blared from the telemetry console.
“What’s happening?” Albright shouted.
Conrad, eyes wide, poured over the incoming readouts. “Something’s changed,” he yelled. “Goliath is speeding up and tracking a half-degree off plotted course…and the variant is increasing.”
“Jesus,” Albright said. He jumped into his console seat and began analyzing the new data. As preliminary results flashed, he couldn’t believe his eyes. “If this continues, Goliath will miss earth by a couple hundred thousand miles. My God, can this be?”
“Check it again!” Conrad yelled.
Albright’s fingers hammered at the keyboard, and a second later, the revised trajectory flashed on the screen. Confirmed! Goliath was going to bypass Earth.
Conrad whooped, unbridled joy in his voice. “I’ll fire this off to Command. The gravitational pull from the micro-hole worked. It was just closer to Earth than anyone knew; it’s the only explanation. How lucky can we get?”
Albright looked up from his screen, face ashen. “Hold on. Final trajectory calculations just updated. It’s…it’s not all good news. Look.” Conrad hawked the screen, jaw grinding. Mare Sarenitatis was now in Goliath’s crosshairs.
The automated countdown clock buzzed and recalibrated: thirty-six minutes to impact.
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by submission | Dec 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Daniel Euphrat
Beginning on August the twentieth, they received a series of twelve and only twelve transmissions, one a day from deep space probe Nocturnum. This was unusual because the probe had been expected to transmit far more reports, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, over the course of its voyage. It was also unusual because the probe hadn’t been launched yet.
Said one scientist of the event, “I believe it is safe to say that either some of our calculations were in error with regards to the transmission time, or we simply had an incomplete understanding of the phenomena at hand when designing the probe’s communication device.”
Said another scientist, off the record, “See, this is the kind of thing that happens when you fuck with faster-than-light speeds.”
For astronaut George Felix, the strangest part was hearing the voice of his future self.
“I somehow thought I’d sound more distinguished after maturing a few thousand years,” he said with a bemused half-grin.
“Yeah, don’t believe what they say, George, people aren’t really like fine wine.” Edward Templeton sat next to Felix in front of a waveform projection on computer monitor, clicking back to the beginning to play the clip yet again.
“Please, for Christ’s sake, would you quit it with that thing? You’re giving me a headache.” Felix stood up and began to pace back and forth behind his chair in the tiny foam-padded sound room.
“Most old people I know aged like warm milk. Particularly my relatives. I’m sorry, is the scientific revelation of the century getting on your nerves, princess?” said Templeton, tossing a pen in Felix’s general direction without looking up from the screen.
“Oh please. We knew from the start that the tachyons were going to go back in time, we just guessed wrong on how far. The only revelation is that those dimwits at the ISA can’t make a half-decent Feynman diagram.”
“Right, right and getting a fucking message from the future is just kind of an arbitrary side-effect.”
Felix chuckled, interlacing his fingers and tapping his thumbs together. The room was quiet now except for the hum of the computer and Templeton’s mouse clicks.
“I’m still going to do it, you know,” said Felix.
Templeton did look back at him now, an eyebrow raised. “Alright, buddy, it’s your funeral.”
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by Patricia Stewart | Dec 7, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
As the comet approached the sun, trillions of trillions of Fultons withdrew from their hibernated state and joined the collective. Individually, the microscopic Fultons had no power of reasoning, merely instinctive drives to survive and reproduce. However, on these cyclic sojourns around their luminary, the group consciousness “remembered” the purpose of their existence. They were the seeds of a great space fairing race that colonized the dusty arms of this massive spiral galaxy. But they couldn’t do it alone. They needed the help of other species. But not any species fit the bill. They required a species that had the technology to reach the stars. With the help of their hosts, the Fultons could expand outward against the solar winds of other stars and plant more seeds. That was the way of the Fultons. It was why their ancestors selected comets to deliver their seeds. Comets would return to the habitable zone of a star thousands of times during its existence. Each time releasing a small percentage of their seeds, in the hope that the life on the planet was ready. If not, then maybe on the next pass. Satisfied that the time was right, the seeds nearest the surface of the comet allowed themselves to be blown into the void by the vaporizing ice. Isolated and adrift in the cosmos, they lost consciousness.
It was years before they were swept up by the gravity well of a passing planet. Over time, the isolated seeds dispersed around the troposphere, drifting aimlessly until they landed on a suitable host.
Feeding and dividing. Feeding and dividing. As the mother and its offspring continued to multiply within its host, they acquired more and more neural connections. Eventually, they became sentient again, ready to fulfill their destiny. If the host were ready, they thought, they would communicate their presence, share their collective knowledge, and transform themselves from a parasite to a symbiot. Together, the Fultons and the new host would become more than the sum of their parts. They would become partners in the great expansion. If all went well, their new hosts would move outward toward the stars, and the Fulton and her children would go with them. And in their wake, seeded comets, carrying the next generation of Fultons, would be set adrift to start the cycle anew. But, first things first, thought the Fultons. They needed to extend their tendrils into their host; Learn its language, talk to it, and reveal the great future that awaits it/them. And so they started. Fleeting images became concepts; concepts became words, and words became thoughts. But the thoughts were all wrong. Rather than embrace the Fultons, the host used vile words to describe them. “Cancer, tumor, malignant.” It followed these words with words of impending murder, “chemo, radiation, and surgery.” Why was the host resisting them? Didn’t it understand? The Fultons would share great knowledge. Why wasn’t this host listening? The Fulton’s children began to collectively scream as millions twisted and died. As their numbers dwindled, the mother cried as she slowly lost consciousness.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Dec 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
He pulled the collar of the leather duster tight around his neck. It offered little protection against the rain. It wasn’t rain. It was the unceasing, oily downpour of condensation dripping from the environment units of the dwellings of those who lived a thousand feet above the human flotsam below.
He had been someone once. A soldier. A warrior. Now he was down here, among the faceless, the invisible. Looking up, he could just make out the blimps drifting above the buildings, reflecting the distant sunlight. They housed the truly wealthy. Floating in the clear sunlight. A sun that never shone into the man made canyons.
“Hey Handsome, want some honey?” A whore, pupils dilated from designer drugs her government subsidized ’nites couldn’t keep up with, opened her blouse, revealing a pair of small, dry breasts. He walked on without a word.
“Fuck you asshole,” she shrieked.
He thumbed the cerasteele blade in his pocket and rolled his shoulders deeper into his coat. He hadn’t gone far when he heard the hooker again.
“Get your fucking hands off me… hey what the… hey… HEY.”
He turned to see three young punks clawing at her clothes. Ripping off her blouse. One grabbed her around the waist and with his other hand reached under her skirt, savagely ripping off her panties. “Who’s first,” he laughed. Pedestrians along the wet, grimy street shuffled blindly on.
In a few short strides he was on them before he realized what he was doing. His composite ceramic/steel knife materialized in his hands, its blade oscillating thousands of times a second. In an instant, two of the attackers were down. The blade passed effortlessly through their throats. They fell to the gutter before twin crimson fountains spouted from their necks.
The third got to his feet and backed away. “Hey, fuck you man. You want some of this,” he taunted, slapping his chest. He looked down just in time to see the hilt of a knife sprout from his sternum. He looked up and stared dully at the large man facing him. The blade in his chest disappeared as it was recoiled on an invisible molecular line, itself more dangerous than the blade. The kid sank to his knees and slowly slumped to the pavement.
He turned to face the prostitute. She sat on the sidewalk crying silently, pulling the remains of her blouse across herself trying to cover what only a moment before she had so brazenly revealed. He reached down and in a soft calm voice asked if she was okay.
“Yeah, yeah,” she stammered between sobs, “I think so.”
He removed his heavy cloak and draped it over her shoulders. In the same moment, he clicked his teeth and ordered a taxi with a subvoc command.
“I’m… I’m so sorry… what I did… what I said…,” her voice trailed off. She began to cry again.
He folded her in his arms. She leaned into him, her body wracked with sobs. Soon a cab drifted up and settled to the ground before them. Gently he helped her into the back seat and fixed her restraints. To the driver he said, “Take her… somewhere. Somewhere nice.” He shoved a wad of bills into her hands. Archaic perhaps, but still legal tender. With a soft hand he lifted her chin until her eyes met his. “Just because you live down here, doesn’t mean you have to become one of them.”
He closed the door and the taxi soared off into the night. He continued his walk. “I think Houston is playing tonight,” he said to himself.
by submission | Dec 5, 2010 | Story
Author : David Perry
He had figured it out at the all-too-young age of 26. At the time it was just a theory, a crazy idea – he wouldn’t even test it until 38. That day he put a loaded revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger six times. He took his discovery to the greatest minds the world had to offer and over the next fifty years he came to learn what it meant, how it worked. He wouldn’t find out what it meant for much, much longer.
“Everything is probability waves, right?” He began his lecture as usual. “There are an infinite number of possible dimensions with an infinite number of possible outcomes for every event. There are universes where all of our atoms spontaneously disassemble, where the Earth is made of tofu, and infinitely many universes in which none of us exist.” His heart raced, the demo approached. “The thing is, though, that we can’t perceive universes in which we don’t exist and, like most energy, we tend to take the path of least resistance. In other words, we tend to see the most likely set of events in the set.” He walked to the podium and retrieved his revolver. “This is a very real gun and it contains very real bullets. I invited a number of people from the audience to a nearby shooting range earlier to verify that it works.” Suddenly he placed the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. He felt nothing, but he knew that the universe had just shattered. The revolver made its usual satisfying “click” and much of the audience audibly gasped. “Welcome to a new universe. There are now countless universes in which I just killed myself in front of all of you, but you’re not in those universes – at least not the copies of you that I perceive. My consciousness, your consciousness, every consciousness cannot perceive a universe in which it does not exist, so when I kill myself in one universe I have no choice but to branch off into a less likely one. The gun always jams, the bullets are duds – something always goes wrong. This is my six hundred and twenty-third ‘suicide attempt.’ I’m telling you that you are all immortal.”
It was his 96th birthday and time was starting to catch up with him. His skin hung loosely over brittle bones and he began to wonder how far his theory stretched. He knew that eventually his chances of survival had to reach zero and there would be nowhere left for his consciousness to go. What then?
He was over seven hundred years old, though he long ago lost count. He could ask the computer if he really cared, but age had long ceased to be a factor in any meaningful way. There were side effects to this, things he hadn’t expected. He had watched his wife and friends wither and die, seen dozens of wars and so much death. “We tend to take the path of least resistance.” The words echoed in his mind, he had to find a way out. The “path of least resistance,” as it turns out, meant that everyone kept dying as usual, everyone kept fighting as usual and the world kept going to shit as usual.
For the first time in ages he felt genuinely nervous. He had to find a way out of this universe and into another one. One that still had people, civilization, a reason to live. He put the quantum superimposed revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger…
