by Patricia Stewart | May 28, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The shuttlecraft was careening out of control in the upper atmosphere of an uncolonized Class-M planet orbiting Alpha Mensae. Lieutenant Ashby reached down and touched the control panel to shut off the alarm. “What’s the Manual say we should do now?”
“Who cares?” responded Ensign Tappan. “The Manual told us to stay with the shuttlecraft. Considering that we’re about to be vaporized, it doesn’t seem like its giving us very good advice.”
“Would you rather be floating around in a spacesuit until your oxygen runs out? At least we have a fighting chance in the shuttle.”
Tappan scanned through the index of his hand held electronic Flight Manual, and displayed the recommended actions. “Well, let’s see. Ah, here it is, right after ‘kiss your ass goodbye.’ It says we should remain calm, disengage the autopilot, increase our angle of attack to 25 degrees, and begin executing S-turns to bleed off our forward velocity. Okay, you do that. I’ll modulate the underbelly force field and manage our life support system.”
“Wow, flying manually,” remarked Ashby. “I haven’t done that since my Academy days.” The ship buffeted erratically. “What’s the Manual say about landing?”
“Landing? Aren’t you being optimistic?” Tappan scrolled to the next section and read aloud. “At an altitude of three kilometers, our velocity needs to be approximately 600 kph. Maintain a glide slope of 22 degrees until we are exactly 80 meters above the ground. Then perform a flare maneuver to change our final glide angle to 1.5 degrees. Try to land on a flat patch of snow, sand or dirt. Water is acceptable if we have flotation gear on board, which we don’t. Oh, this is good; it says don’t attempt to land in a mountainous or rocky area.”
Tappan watched nervously as sheets of hot plasma shot upward past the forward viewport. The shuttlecraft came out of its final arc and headed toward a grassy field. Its landing approach had it passing 50 meters above a heavily wooded area. The radiant heat from the shields started a long, narrow forest fire. Ten seconds later, the ship was skidding on the grass. After half a kilometer, it came to a smoldering stop. The cabin began to fill with acrid smoke. Ashby and Tappan unbuckled themselves and scrambled out of the escape hatch.
The two men were standing 100 meters from the shuttlecraft when it erupted into flames. “That’s just wonderful,” said Ashby. “What does the Manual say we should do now?”
Tappan turned his body to block the sun from the viewscreen, “According to the Manual, we need to look for shelter and water. I say we head toward those mountains. Maybe there are some caves and a creek.” Per the Manual instructions, they used a bunch of rocks to create an arrow pointing toward the mountains, so a rescue team, if one ever came, would know where to begin looking for them.
After they walked several kilometers, they spotted a large cloud of dust heading their way, accompanied by the sound of stampeding animals. Ashby used his hand to shade his eyes. “There must be a thousand of them,” he said. “What does…”
“I know, ‘the Manual say’. Oh great. It depends. If they’re herbivores, we run with them and they’ll run around us. If they’re predators, we stand still, and don’t make eye contact. If we’re unsure, it says we should lie down and play dead. With our luck,” he remarked, “they’re probably scavengers looking for corpses.”
by submission | May 27, 2010 | Story
Author : D. Maurer
“Coffee?” I asked him; we were watching a recovery procedure. This poor sap died well over five hundred years ago. He was the oldest meat popsicle we had attempted to revive.
“Excuse me?”
“Would you like some coffee?”
“No. No, thank you.”
I looked at him and the giant polygon that the popsicle was in.
“You’ve been staring at that thing for at least 2 hours. Nothing’s happened yet. Not supposed to for a while yet.”
“But we never know.”
“But the machines notify…” I trailed off. We were not really doctors like they were back when this guy was first alive. More like engineers. That’s as good as bad.
He sighed. “Of course, but it’s not the same.”
Pause in the dialogue. I thought about it.
“I can see that.”
“See what?” He looked closer at the polygon. 13 sides. Matte black. Longer one way than the other, of course. Some industrial designer’s idea of modern. It sat in a small room. We sat in a small room carved from the other room by glass walls and a door.
“I mean, I understand. It’s not the same seeing them when they first wake.”
“Understand what? Oh. Yeah,” He leaned closer, nose almost against the glass.
“What did he have?”
“Something with his kidneys. Or his heart. Or cancer. Doesn’t matter. We’ve grown new organs. I’m not worried about anything but the brain,” he looked at me for the first time in hours. “And you should only be worried about that, too. The rest is,” he flipped his hand over, looking for the word, “fixable.” He turned back to the black thing.
We’d heard some people getting revived with massive brain damage; if the damage is too severe to a given cell, it’s abandoned by The Process. You didn’t want too many of those; even a handful in the wrong brain area was bad, but if someone woke up with a soup of cell components instead of proper nerve cells, there was really no telling.
Best case: memory loss was common, incontinence close second, but you were alive. Catheter and therapy took care of the urine issues; time and therapy took care of the memory.
And he stared at the damned polygon for another hour before it opened. When it did open, it revealed a bald, naked, and scared human being.
We entered the room and I spoke quietly to him. I spoke a dozen old languages and dialects; my partner, a dozen others. Between us we had most of the popsicle languages covered.
“Richard, we’re here to help. You were frozen when you died; we cured what killed you and you’re still alive,”
“You can hear me but probably cannot talk. We will teach you these things.”
“You died in 2034. The year is 2561. You have been dead for 527 years but now you are alive. You were rich and your investments have paid off handsomely. You are rich almost beyond measure. Your first-hand history will serve you well. You lived in an interesting time.”
He was trying to talk, a sound close to “Matilda?”
His chart said he was married. This Matilda had moved on and had elected not to be frozen and revived. A good sign he asked about her, though. Memories and all.
“We’ll get to that sir. Can you stand?”
He could. We led him to the recovery area. He only peed a little bit on the way there. I talked to him because he was more alone now than I could imagine.
by submission | May 26, 2010 | Story
Author : Q. B. Fox
17th April 2002, a concrete room, off an unmarked tunnel on the Northern Line.
“How long were they down?”
Simon looked up from what he was doing, and even in the dim light of the rack mounted servers I recognise the pinched expression.
“12 days. A power supply shorted some circuits in Prophet a week last Friday. Without the proper predictive model Lösch became CPU bound by Saturday morning, so we shut it down before something else broke.”
Lösch, both the software and the specialist machine it ran on, was named after the 20th century economist Sir Richard Lösch, whose work on monetary systems was the underlying principle of the program.
But it became apparent when they started trying to run Lösch that this theoretical model wasn’t designed to incorporate real feedback efficiently. So the coders built predictive software to take real information from the markets, combine it with the theoretical model and feed its predictions back into Lösch. The pun was just too delicious for them not to call it Prophet.
“12 days?” I frowned. “The economy’s pretty stable now; surely leaving it to run itself for 12 days won’t have caused any problems.”
“Ask Dr. Rob,” Simon indicated the other corner of the room. Visible only by the light of green text reflected in his tiny spectacles, and from his pallid, sweaty skin, Dr. Rob chewed his tongue like cow and silently scanned his monitor. Who themed green text on a black background? Dr. Rob was old school.
“Imagine,” Simon explained, presumably as it had been explained to him, “walking on a tightrope. Lösch keeps its balance by a gentle nudge here, a small purchase there. I’d assumed that because Lösch was making more frequent smaller trades that the whole system was stabilising. Turns out I was wrong.”
I turned towards a grunt expelled from Dr. Rob; he was rolling his eyes in an exaggerated manner that would have been comical if he’d known he was doing it.
“It turns out,” Simon continued, “that we’ve been tightrope walking in high winds, and that Lösch was correcting and counter correcting the whole time. Now imagine our tightrope walker blacks out for a second.”
I imagined and gulped back a sudden rush of financial vertigo.
“The first forecast from Prophet this morning was showing hyper inflation in the near future, could be as bad as 65%. We set Lösch to work on it. The data came out about an hour ago. You can tell the prime minister that, as of today, Lösch can hold the inevitable off for about 5 years but eventually it will happen.”
“And we can’t stop it?” I was alarmed.
“Not without something beyond the scope of Lösch,” Simon explained, “not without a major human intervention. Dr. Rob’s working on it, but don’t expect an answer any time soon.”
Contrary as ever, Dr Rob’s deep bass filled the room for the first time. “We need a recession, a genuine, but planned, collapse of confidence.” He chewed. “And I think I have an idea. Have you ever heard of sub-prime mortgages?”
by Roi R. Czechvala | May 25, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
“Okay, this is some of the best footage of the conflict we have seen. We spent a lot of money to have Johnson’s eyes and optic nerves replaced with the latest equipment including superconducting neural jacks, which can operate at higher temperatures. The liqO2 containment and the rest of the apparatus housing, except for the interface of course, is totally contained within Johnson’s body.
“Brilliant, that should bring our costs down. What did Johnson think about this?”
“Well Sir, it wasn’t a hard choice. He had signed a fifty year contract of indenture with the company as a labourer in the helium mines on Pluto. He soon saw that a minor cosmetic change and a ten year assignment as a war correspondent in the Belt was far better than languishing for fifty years in a mine to retire to a pleasure colony to live out his remaining, what, maybe ten years, twenty if he’s lucky?”
“Dependents?”
“None.”
“So we’re in the clear?”
“Asses covered, Sir.”
“Do any of the other news services have this technology?”
“No, it is only available within the Imperium, even then, only to certain levels, Sir.”
“Fine,” Avery Winston, Vice Minister of News and Information, breathed a sigh of relief, “Let’s see this wonderful footage of yours.”
“Patrick Johnson was trained for three months with the Royal Marines before being dispatched as a correspondent to Europa. We thought this would be a routine assignment to test equipment, but, well, see for yourself Sir.”
Charles Lufkin dimmed the lights in the expansive office and a kaleidoscope of colour appeared on the TriD screen before them. Slowly the prismatic maelstrom coalesced into an image of Marines in various stages of undress. It was a scene from an infantry barracks. Suddenly the world spun and came to focus on a door. Green plasma blasts burst through it followed by thick belches of white smoke.
“Hold it there, we’ll have to cut that, it will disorient the viewers. We’ll have people puking from motion sickness. The sponsors will ream us.”
“Yes Sir, this is the raw unedited footage.” Lufkin resumed the shot.
No sooner had the green bursts punched holes in the hatch, when something obscured the bottom half of the scene.
“What’s that?”
“The targeting sights of Johnson’s weapon. We wanted him to be totally one with the Marine unit he was embedded in. Now look there Sir, let me back it up for you,” Lufkin waved a hand at the screen and the image reversed. “See there? You can actually see, if I slow the feed, a bolt of plasma bore a nifty little hole through the gooks head as he peeks in past the broken hatch. If you look closer, you can actually see the plasma discharge of the rifle itself as Johnson fires the fatal shot.”
“Amazing.”
“Now watch this, your gonna love this.” Lufkin waved his hand at the screen again and the scenes of intense close combat blurred into a single image. “There.” He slowed the image until a green dot appeared on the screen. It grew slowly until it engulfed the entire screen. With a jerk the scene tilted crazily coming to a rest with the floor at a 45 degree angle. Slowly the scene irised to a narrow tunnel. Just before the screen went black an elderly woman appeared, arms outstretched.”
“Who’s that?”
“As near as we can tell, that’s Johnson’s grandmother.”
“What’s she doing there? How did she get onto a Marine base?”
“That’s the thing Sir; she’s been dead fifteen years.”
“You don’t mean…?”
“Yes Sir.” Lufkin smiled.
by submission | May 24, 2010 | Story
Author : Liz Lafferty
Seven years I’d waited for my DNA match.
Seven years of anxiety about what she would be like. Seven years of stress about whether she’d find me attractive and a suitable provider.
Nineteen billion people inhabited the planet. I never understood why it was so difficult to find the right person. The wheels of Sovereign Earth ran slower than any single nation’s government had before. Always paperwork.
The idea behind DNA review seemed palatable: to prevent physical defects and mental illness. I’d just never thought I’d have to wait so long or that I wouldn’t love my match.
Whoever she was, we were the fortunate ones. We’d get life partners. We’d get to breed, have a plot of our own in one of the eight hundred outliers of our city. It would be better than the concrete and steel, four hundred and ten square feet we were entitled to as singles. I’d recently lost my only window, too, when some bureaucrat’s son trumped me on the ‘need’ scale.
The match meant freedom.
I’d picked up my papers yesterday morning from the databank in Pelnan. I’d slept with them under my pillow.
I only knew her by her serial number. It would be imprinted on her spinal column if I wanted to check once she arrived. I didn’t. I just wanted to see her, say a few words, find out if her match had been as difficult in finding as mine had been.
And then…the rest of our lives.
I was expecting the knock but it startled me anyhow. When I opened the door, my sister Livy stood there.
“Liv, my gosh, how are you?” I pulled her into my arms and hugged her. I hadn’t seen her since my work orders came in. When I gripped her shoulders, she stared at me like she didn’t know who I was. “What’s wrong? Is it mom?”
“No. I…” Tears rolled down her face.
“Tell me!” I nearly shook her to find out why she was so upset.
She held up her papers. They had the Sovereign Earth databank seal. Like mine.
“I came here to meet my DNA match.”
I might have gone as pale as she did. My legs gave out and I collapsed into the only chair I had. “You mean…”
She nodded her.
“Oh, Liv. I’m sorry. How long have you waited?”
“Nine years. I thought this was it. What about you?”
“Seven.”
Seven years I’d waited for my DNA match.
Seven years to find out the clowns running Sovereign Earth matched me with my own sister. The next election cycle seemed years away. And it would probably take that long to convince the czars running the databank they’d made a mistake.
“Could be worse,” I finally said.
“I don’t see how.”
“At least we’ll have our own plot of ground.”
