by submission | Aug 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Daniel Fuhr
“The concept is simple enough. We send a very powerful telescope out faster than the speed of light to a calculated area, then zoom in to the Earth at a specific location and hopefully we can watch past events.”
“What you’re talking about is time travel?”
“Nonsense, were talking about a simple process. We make calculations based on the curvature of light. We account for the alignment of planets and other bodies that could get in the way. Then we send the telescope out to the location, take some pictures and bring it back. If I were to say something to you, move faster than the speed of sound next to you and hear myself speak, did I just travel through time? No, I just went from point A to point B, however time remains a constant.”
“So you are claiming these pictures are authentic, taken from your telescope.”
“Completely valid. In a few years, we will have a telescope powerful enough to go further out into the universe and we can see as far back as the dinosaurs.”
“This is astounding to say the least. The questions we can have answered. The history we can recapture. The possibilities. Now, what’s this one here, the blank sheet?”
“That’s the flashback. As I said earlier if I were to say something at point A then travel faster than the speed of sound to point B to hear it, I would never hear myself speak due to the sonic boom from breaking the sound barrier. That blank sheet is a flash from breaking the speed of light, we call it flashback. And that brings up the problem.”
“What problem?”
“The reason I contacted you. The faculty can calculate where to place the scope and improve it to see clearer images. From those pictures I handed you, you can already see our capability to zoom in to read the cover of a book.”
“What does that have to do with flashback or with the clergy?”
“Ah, you see, that picture wasn’t flashback. Neither are any of these, or these. They look similar to flashback, but when we start to zoom out dramatically we see something else.”
“What is it?”
“The question isn’t what; it is a Papal Bull, sent directly in front of the telescope for all years before 700 A.D. For all purposes our telescope is being censored. The question I ask you is why?”
by submission | Aug 5, 2010 | Story
Author : Credentiality
“This is our in-system debugger, for when we want to get really close-up. It isn’t necessary for setting up hurricanes, but it’s a good excuse to go down and play.” Bar helped Nim set up his avatar and load in.
“Heya Phil, how’s business?” asked Bar, stepping into the tackle shop.
“Good, Steve! Haven’t seen you for a while. Ready to break last year’s record?” said Phil, obviously pleased at the prospect of business.
“Yes I am. Bill here thinks I got that mounted marlin at a swap meet. So I told him to come get one for himself. When can we head out?”
“How about right now? I’ll start loading up.”
The fishing boat pulled out of the harbor and sped into the gulf of Mexico.
As Phil settled into a movie in the cabin, Bar/Steve and Nim/Bill made a show at the stern of sorting out their fishing rigs. As they did, Bar explained: “The interface is pretty nice. Each component of the simulation has an identifier you can reference when you need to tweak something. The system will try to make it look natural, but there’s only so much it can do when you move a mountain or part a sea. They tend to write down stuff like that, and that can ruin thousands of years of simulation in some categories. You really want to avoid angry anthropologists knocking on your door.
“We have to be especially discreet now, given the humans’ sophistication. But weather is chaotic enough that we can get away with almost anything. And you’re looking a little green, so let’s calm down these swells,” said Bar.
Nim only nodded, inwardly grateful. Seasickness was indeed making it hard to concentrate.
Bar stood, raised his hands, faced the expanse of the ocean and commanded “Mits’vah yam galit schluffen!”
Nim waited expectantly, arm wrapped around his stomach to quell the unfamiliar nausea.
“Crap, I forgot. They changed the policy last semester. People were careless with the true names, and the humans started catching on. Developed a whole mythos about it, even guessed some of the names. And I had just gotten the major ones memorized,” said Bar, annoyed. “The new names are a lot less impressive.” His avatar sat unnaturally motionless while, in the real world, he fished for the cheat sheet.
“Quasar sickly pillow, seven semicolon flatly. Waves off,” Bar said, with much less grandiosity. “Just doesn’t have the same ring to it.” The swells immediately calmed, and within a few minutes the sea around them was smooth as glass. Nim was duly impressed.
“Let’s get the hurricane set up for next week and get back to shore. I have papers to grade this afternoon.” Bar went impassive again while he found the appropriate invocation. “Pink flatiron spittoon comma nineteen geese.” He sighed, dejected. “New tropical storm. 8E20 joules, 14 days. Random start, landfall in New Orleans.”
Above them, the sky flashed twice in the ultraviolet region that Bar and Nim could see but which the real humans could not. Then ultraviolet clouds gathered across the sky at what were surely hypersonic speeds, swirling and gathering. Nim watched, agape. They gathered purpose, driving northwest, and then were gone. Nim realized he was seeing a fast-forward preview of the storm’s path.
“Pretty neat light show, huh? Let’s cast out, and I’ll show you how to catch a marlin while we head back. If I can find the fish password.”
by submission | Aug 4, 2010 | Story
Author : W. Kevin Christian
The room was not cold. It was not wet. It was not noisy or colorful. It was quiet and white. No pictures on the walls. No carpet on the floors. There was just a table with a man on it and a black-and-white digital clock hung from the ceiling directly above his head.
The clock read: 9,999 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 58 minutes, 11 seconds…12…13…
The man felt no physical pain, no fatigue nor hunger. In fact, he was perfectly comfortable because he felt very little. It had paralyzed him. Though he could breathe and move is eyes, he could not blink. Not that there was much to see.
The man wiggled his eyes back and forth. He wanted to see how many times he could do it in a minute, a game he had invented.
9,999 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 10 seconds…11…12…
He set a new personal record.
The man tried to picture the Earth, his home, his childhood. The vaguest shadows flickered in the back of his mind, but all he could really picture was a bright white ceiling and a black-and-white digital clock.
9,999 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 45 seconds…46…47…
The man had been trying not to get his hopes up for 10,000 years. He had been disappointed before: at 1 day, at 1 week, at 1 month, at 1 year, at 10 years, at 25 years, at 50 years, at 100 years, at 500 years, at 1,000 years, at 5,000 years. But still there was that hope. He waited anxiously.
9,999 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 57 seconds…58…59…
And then he came out of it. He was back in the bald man’s basement. Reminders of distant memories flooded his senses: a leaky pipe dripping into a small puddle, the smell of mildew and wet wood. They burned his mind like no fire could. He had muscle control! He was hungry! He hurt! There were so many possibilities! The feelings overwhelmed him like boiling water overwhelms an ice cube. And somewhere deep within, the cube cracked.
The man howled.
A perverse grin crossed the bald man’s face, his mouth letting out a slow, toad-like chuckle. The feeling of power intoxicated him. The look 30 seconds with the program could put on a person’s face! It tickled him in the darkest of ways, as if holding something young and innocent at the edge of a cliff overlooking hell. The power! The suffering!
“Are you ready to talk?” the bald-man asked.
“Anyyy…thing…,” the man said shakily, “…juuuusss ett it down…”
The bald man placed a chrome-colored metal box about the size of a deck cards on a black, homemade-looking table.
“So where is she?”
“Phoenix. Thaddriss…in…my wallet.”
The bald man chuckled again and grabbed the chrome box. He poked at it with his index finger and turned its backlit screen towards the man.
“How does 10 minutes sound?”
The man screamed and fought against the metal cuffs that bound him, blood streaming from his wrists as he did so.
The bald man rumbled with laughter. “Hmmm, I don’t know if I can wait that long. Better just make it five.”
by submission | Aug 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Andy Mee
It would be easy to say that they had disappeared, but that wasn’t quite true. What was once a row of Victorian terraced houses still lingered in the cold swirling air, now just a choking dust, like a visible air-borne virus. An hour before sunrise, as she trudged through the dusty remnants of the quarter, Eve impulsively guarded her eyes from the waltzing smoke and dust circling above. She couldn’t re-route. She’d be late.
This wasn’t an excuse to miss Lockdown. According to them, these bombings hadn’t happened.
Eve looked up at the star-poked violet-plum sky. In the eastern corner of the night sky a reddish-purple haze was spreading into the darkness above.
Lockdown had begun, she’d have to hurry. She gazed to the heavens and felt a slither of fear run the length of her spine as the stars started to disappear.
She remembered the clouds. At least, she thought she did. They had gone when she was very young. Yet, even now, she still pictured them, still drew their individual white shapes in her mind. No two the same. Not like them.
Her pale grey standard issue overalls were now a heavy brown of incinerated brickwork and slate. Maybe she’d stand out a little in the Vault.
If you listened carefully, you could still hear the elders whisper of ‘rain’, tales pouring from their mouths; storms of a time before. Echoes of an age before the sun burned away the clouds. They saw it coming, but they let it happen. That’s what they couldn’t understand.
The elders still talked of the colours of dawn, the star-poked violet-plum sky, a million shades, oranges, reds, purples – dawn’s tapestry. Nowadays they waited for the blackness of safety. She believed they missed colours the most.
Eve finally arrived at the checkpoint, seven minutes after Lockdown, fifty three minutes before sunrise. It was folly that she would beat herself up about later as she slept through the day.
She handed her pass to the guard.
She noticed (or perhaps it was just her over-active imagination) a different expression in his face today. What was in it exactly, she couldn’t tell. Anger? Disappointment? Relief? She was, after all, later than usual. His face soon fell back to default: blank, glazed. The black-metal gun was placed back into its holster to rest, while they went through the daily routine: her spreading, him scanning. The hand-held detector ran over her rigid body but, obviously, remained mute. She knew the rules. He detected the chip in her left forearm, opened the gate, and she entered.
The darkness swallowed her as the warmth of the coming day wafted into the open wound of the vault’s concrete tunnels.
by Patricia Stewart | Aug 2, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The weakening of Earth’s magnetic field was becoming critical. It had been decreasing five percent a decade since the early twenty first century. If the decay could not be reversed, near-lethal doses of charged cosmic radiation would bombard the surface of the Earth without being diverted. Although humans could tolerate the higher radiation levels, it was predicted that the increase in charged particles would kill the bacteria in the soil that create the nutrients that sustain the plant world. Without the base of the food chain, humans would eventually perish too. Therefore, twenty-five nations voted to fund Professor Johnson’s radical idea to jumpstart Earth’s hydromagnetic dynamo.
The “Dynamo Regenerator” was ten kilometers in diameter, and more than three hundred meters tall. During operation, it consumed the entire output of two dozen 60-gigawatt fusion reactors.
“What do you expect will happen when you throw the switch?” asked a reporter from the Global Post.
“It’s quite simple, really,” replied the Chief Engineer. “Earth’s magnetic field is primarily generated by eddies caused by the interaction between the liquid iron-nickel outer core and the lower mantle. Right now, they are rotating at the same rate. That means no eddies. No eddies; no magnetic field. The Dynamo Regenerator sets up a harmonic frequency wave at the boundary layer between the outer core and lower mantle. It’s analogous to a skier on an unstable pack of snow on the side of a steep mountain. We’re simply attempting to start a Hydromagnetic avalanche. If it works, we’ll create a super-eddy, and reestablish Earth’s magnetic field.”
A disembodied voice then announced, “All systems are green. Start the Regenerator, Chief.”
The Dynamo Regenerator was activated. The lights dimmed and a high pitched whine began to build to a crescendo as unimaginable energy pulsed into the bowels of the Earth. The effect was almost instantaneous. The digital magnetometer began to climb from 2 to 10 microteslas in only a few minutes. The reporter asked, “Is that good?”
“So far,” replied the Chief Engineer. “At this latitude, the field needs to stabilize between 30-60 microteslas.” As they watched, the field climbed to 25…50…100…500…and then the meter started flashing 88888. “Oh shit,” moaned the Chief Engineer.
Nervously, the reporter asked “Higher is better, right?”
