by submission | Mar 14, 2010 | Story
Author : Petter Skult
“How was the game?” Ann asked as Jeremy crawled through the hatch. She had to wait with the answer until he had pushed it close, metal screaming.
“It was awesome!” He replied breathlessly, as he threw his bag off his shoulders and went directly for his cot to change clothes. “Jenny and Ahmed’s characters planned on having a garden party for Jia – that’s Mark’s character – on account of her getting that promotion.”
Ann chuckled lightly, continuing to fry that morning’s catch, the smell of meat permeating the whole container.
“Hey mom, what’s a ‘water cooler’? My character is supposed to go there to meet all of his new workmates, but I have some trouble imagining it.”
Ann explained what a water cooler was, and for good measure what it meant to ‘shoot the breeze around the water cooler’. Jeremy listened intently while gathering his .22 rifle, clearly making mental notes. She tried to keep the ruefulness out of her voice. By the time she was finished he was ready to go. He was already looking a bit glummer. Ann felt sorry for him, having to go out there again. When she had been his age…no use thinking of it.
“When’s the next game?”
Jeremy lit up.
“We talked shifts; I’ll be on night for the next week, Ahmed, Jenny and Mark are all crazy as well, but we thought Wednesday the week after that.”
“That sounds wonderful, dear. Be careful up there now.”
“Of course mom. See you tomorrow!”
Jeremy crawled back topside for his evening guard shift. Ann continued frying the ever-grey little pieces of rodent, stirring them in the sudden silence with her wooden fork. She was thinking absently of water-coolers and garden parties and promotions and regular jobs. Things that her children might only know through make-believe, role-playing games they play when they get together for those brief moments when there was no alert, no danger, no attack.
Still, she was happy they were allowed those moments of escapism into a world so completely foreign to their own.
by submission | Mar 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Credentiality
Cynthia was reluctant when it came time to leave the Machine Monastery. Nobody had predicted that machines would be Buddhists. Crazed killers, perhaps. Indifferent to humanity, perhaps. Cold calculators, almost certainly.
She had learned the tactile pleasures of sanding the walnut sides of an imperfect jewelry box she had made herself with hand tools. The visual pleasure of brushing a finish with a wet edge.
The empty contentedness of sweeping a floor. The ragged exhaustion of breaking out old concrete sidewalks with a sledgehammer and hauling them to a skip. The gleam of a toilet scrubbed clean.
The machines had done all these things, mostly better than humans could, and had found the same peace from their lessons. Cynthia would go back to her life in the city, where her finance skills would pay the bills, and where machine and human craftsmen continue to do their jobs with the labor-saving tools that made mass production cheap. But perhaps in the summer she would take another vacation to the mountains east of town, away from the noise, and rejuvenate with the joys of manual labor.
by submission | Mar 12, 2010 | Story
Author : William Garnett
The day the universe stopped expanding was the same day all the traffic lights failed to turn. But it wasn’t just the traffic lights. Cars didn’t start. Dogs didn’t bark. Radios were silent. Microwaves paused. Automatic drive-thru teller machines didn’t take cards and didn’t dispense any money. Nothing moved. All was at a stand still, and no one noticed because no one could think or remember, or even forget. No one could point it out to anyone else.
Then the universe began to contract. But no one really noticed it, because with the contraction of the universe, everyone’s mind and perception also began to shrink, so that any forward thought process ceased to occur and so people regressed and slid back along the evolutionary scale and grew hair in places where there had been none. They tore down the cities and set them on fire. They tore down each other in ways they had read about but had thought they would never do again because they had evolved to a point where popping brains out of a neighbor’s head was something only beasts did. But they were beasts now and couldn’t think straight or forward anymore. Blood ran thick on the broken sidewalks–on all the failed and burned infrastructure.
Men fought each other over women and killed each other’s young to ensure the advancement of their genes, which was ridiculous, because everything was regressing and going backwards so that the very idea of advancement itself was impossible, and the genes themselves would never survive. But they did it anyway. The blood lust that had never fully left the species reemerged to full strength as bodies were dismembered and emptied of their guts.
The universe continued to shrink, and as it shrank, all life regressed to globs of cells, and then just to cells, and then just to tiny strings of mindless amino acids. Eventually, everything was reduced to molecules, and then atoms, and then quarks, and strings, and then nothing.
The nothing regarded itself and found it paradoxical that it could do such a thing, and as it regarded itself, it found itself lacking and then once again it attempted to make something out of itself.
by Collaboration | Mar 11, 2010 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer and J. S. Kachelries
“Command and Control says that we will not be permitted to land,” stated Taylor O’Leary, the pilot of the return module.
Despite knowing that O’Leary wasn’t responsible for the decision, Jonathan Hartwell argued, “They can’t do that. The alien spores are dead. They can only live on Mercury.”
“Look Jon, maybe you’re right, but it’s not going to change their minds. After what those spores did to our base, they can’t risk letting us contaminate the Earth. There are over eight billion people down there, versus just two of us. Face it, we’re expendable.”
“The spores didn’t kill us. They don’t kill people.”
“It’s the universal acid they secrete. It destroys everything.”
“They haven’t damaged the module. It’s taken us three months to get back to Earth. Those damn things are everywhere. There are probably billions of then in our clothes. They’re harmless. If they were still dangerous, we’d be dead.”
“Jon, you’re a scientist. Use your head. Maybe they’re just dormant. If it turns out that they can live on Earth…” O’Leary was interrupted by an emergency alarm. He drifted over to the master panel and punched up the codes. “Damn. The reactor is overheating. Maybe those bastards are still alive. We need to move the ship away from Earth before she blows.” As the primary thrusters fired, the reactor’s coolant line ruptured and the ship began to spin out of control. Despite their best efforts, the ship tumbled toward the Earth. Moments later, it exploded.
Most of the debris burned up during reentry, but much of it, including trillions of spores, slowly drifted through the upper atmosphere and eventually into the troposphere. NASA was able to collect a few hundred of the microscopic spores using a Lockheed ER-5 high-altitude research aircraft. Testing at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta concluded that the spores had the ability to reproduce, but they were not active. After months of experiments, the scientists could not get the spores to feed, reproduce, or secrete acid. Apparently, Earth had dodged a bullet. However, the United Nations passed numerous resolutions prohibiting exploration of any extraterrestrial body until adequate safeguards were established. Eventually, the fervor died down, and most people forgot about the incident and went on with their lives.
But the spores continued to drift around the globe hoping to settle in environments that were suitable for them. No one at the CDC thought that the key factor keeping the spores dormant was the low flux density of neutrinos on Earth. On Mercury, because of its proximity to the sun, they were bathed to ten times the number of neutrinos, and they could grow and multiply. On Earth, however, there were only a few sources where the flux density of neutrinos was high enough to revive them. And, eventually, the spores found them all, one by one. They thrived in their new environments, and their populations grew exponentially. Of course, they also began secreting their corrosive fluids. At first, it was assumed that terrorists somehow managed to destroy the Aircraft Carrier CVN 76 Ronald Reagan. No one thought it was the spores, even as nuclear power plants around the world began exploding one after another.
by submission | Mar 10, 2010 | Story
Author : Bryant Pocock
“Dammit,” grunted Sam as the wrench slipped and he lost his grip, drifting slowly away from the mining craft. “Now I’m really in deep shit.” Mentally running through his options, the panicked miner came up with nothing.
The battered and stinking p-suit never came with a long-distance radio, so that was right out. Similarly absent was the fuel for his maneuvering jets or the (theoretically) Company-mandated safety tether. These he had pawned at the Company Store to pay his fare on the freighter to this lonely outpost. That left the small but efficient solar collector on his back to power the oxygen scrubbers, electric heater, and water distiller to keep him alive, floating through this asteroid field until he starved to death. Or there was always the grisly possibility that a microscopic spec of space dust, traveling faster than any bullet, would pierce a pinhole through kevlar and flesh, spewing a miniature fountain of bubbling blood and precious atmosphere at entry and exit. One way or another he would die here, floating and turning slowly, meters away from his modest habitation capsule.
Considering this possibility, he preferred suicide. Sam pondered this solemnly for several minutes, said a quiet prayer, and tugged hard at his helmet seals. Nothing. It seemed that the only pieces of safety equipment still functioning in this man-shaped composite crapcan were the vacuum-activated safety locks.
This left the pistol strapped to his side. The only non-vital piece of kit that Sam had held onto all these years, he had been wearing it since before he sold the hydro farm back on Earth and set out for the asteroids to try his luck extracting ore. “Second Amendment and all, can’t be too careful,” mumbled Sam to himself. Not that any government’s constitution held real sway in this corner of space, but Sam had lost count of how many times the old-fashioned revolver had saved him from unpleasant confrontations. Now it was once again helping him forge his own destiny.
As he drew the gun and said his prayer again, Sam suddenly remembered with surprising clarity the voice of his high school physics teacher, droning in his driest monotone, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” A smile crept over the old miner’s face. Turning the gun away from his helmet, Sam took careful aim and fired all six rounds, slowly and deliberately.
It took nearly two days, but eventually the impulse of those few ounces of lead moving at the speed of sound was enough to send Sam gliding slowly to within an arm’s reach of the thruster pod he had been repairing. He was even able to grab the dropped wrench before making his way back inside the small metal can he called home.
“Damn the Company and damn this cloud of rocks,” thought Sam out loud, banging a fist on the bulkhead. “Soon as I can, I’m getting back to God’s Green Earth. But first things first, I’m getting my hands on some more bullets.”
