by Patricia Stewart | Jul 22, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“You know, Cyrus, you can’t violate the law of causality. Even a freshman Liberal Arts major understands Feinberg’s reinterpretation principle. I swear, if I’ve lugged this receiver out here for nothing, I’m going to kick your ass when I get back to Earth. Over.” Byran unstrapped himself from the communications console and floated toward the galley to find something to eat. His conventional electromagnetic radio transmission would take fifteen minutes to reach Cyrus, and another fifteen minutes for the reply to return to his one man cargo transport, the SS Grand Eastern.
A half an hour later, Cyrus’ reply arrived. “Stop complaining. You were going to Jupiter anyway. Besides, you need to look at the bright side; I’m going to make you famous. Just like Thomas Watson,” he added with a chuckle. “In addition, you moron, Feinberg was talking about sending messages into the past. Superluminal particles don’t violate any of the currently accepted theories of faster than light communication. Over.”
Byran activated his throat mic and said, “Superluminal particles? I thought your thesis involved evanescent wave coupling, or a quantum non-locality. Over.” He glanced at the chronometer and decided to go to the treadmill to start his daily workout.
Thirty minutes into his regiment, he heard Cyrus’ voice in his earpiece, “Stay focused, Byran. That was last year. Now, I’m working on creating a columnar beam of tachyons. They’re perfect for this application. Once created, they have to travel faster than light. It’s one of their properties. Although detecting them is easy enough, it’s next to impossible to create them with an extremely precise energy level. They’re super sensitive that way. The less energy they have, the faster they go. I won’t be able to send a coherent superluminal communication stream until I can get the power level drift of my transmitter to less than one picowatt. I’m getting close, though. Hopefully, I’ll have the bugs worked out soon. Over and out.”
***
The following day, the notification indicator on the tachyon receiver aboard the Grand Eastern chimed. Byran pushed himself off of the starboard bulkhead and drifted over to the receiver to read the monitor. The message was a continuous line of characters.
“etaLooTeBlliWnoissimsnarToidaRAnoitceriDruoYgnidaeHsIeralFraloS8XssalCA.”
Byran studied the gibberish for several minutes before realizing its meaning. “Holy crap,” he said, as he launched himself toward the shielded safety room. After several hours, he emerged and sent Cyrus a radio reply.
“Thanks for the warning, Cyrus. I made it to the panic room just in time. However, you definitely need to work on the energy level of your particle stream. The characters are not traveling at the same velocity. The end of the message was traveling faster than the beginning. Thank God I’m dyslexic, or I’d be dead. Over.”
by submission | Jul 21, 2009 | Story
Author : Adam Zabell
Commander Deborah Sagmeiser began the ‘big reveal’ of Project Beta. This briefing used to be a formality which celebrated the human race. She looked across the table at a bespectacled middle-aged man, brought into the fold against her better judgement, and wondered how much room for celebration was left.
“Time and space travel,” she explained, “use identical but polarized technology. Like those elementary school cartoons showing self-propagating, transverse oscillating waves of electric and magnetic fields, the physical laws of interstellar travel are twinned with intrachronological transfer.” First Physicist Nikolayev’s eyes grew wide as his scientific intuition processed the implications. His previous assignment had been Project Coeus, whose hyperspatial engineering had drilled Chang’s Five Theorems into his soul.
Commander Sagmeiser tapped a display screen to reveal the Sixth Theorem. “Outside of Project Beta, FP Nikolayev, this collection of variables and constants are an expensive and ruthlessly guarded secret. Within, the past several centuries have seen it used to great effect.”
“It is a reasonable approximation to say there are two timelines measuring the existence of humanity. They branched five hundred years ago, subjective, because Project Beta achieved what nature could not. For two dozen generations, a fleet of C5T ships explored a sterile universe. Discovering rocky planets in every astronomical ecosphere, none of which could manage more than a kind of proto-life. Collections of nucleic and amino and betain acids, barely self-replicating, a light broth in salty water. Psychosocial analysis showed our species on an inevitable descent to suicide because of cosmic loneliness.”
“Within that context,” the Commander continued, “Project Beta developed the C6T technology. Eighty objective-years ago, we finished our prototype ship and went back some four billion years to fertilize the most promising worlds. We returned at intervals to cultivate a spectrum of cultures a bit slower and poorer than ours in preparation for when the C5T survey ships were scheduled to arrive. Five hundred sub-years ago, that was the Fluvuluvians. Twenty years ago, the G’trn.”
Commander Sagmeiser paused, savoring the last moments of Nikolayev’s innocence. “There was much debate within our Sociological Unit about how we should balance exobio aggression; in the end we settled for enmity from every fourth species. The inevitable wars would cost millions of lives and billions of dollars, but our racial ennui had stopped before it started.”
“Having created in our own image, we made certain none of those races would independently develop time travel. Usually a simple matter of giving some desperate alien physicist the first Five Theorems, we short-circuited any natural discovery on every foreign world. Let one of those seedlings peek behind the curtain of history, and the consequences would be disastrous. It’s why Project Beta is always and forever exclusively human, why joining our family is always a one-way trip.”
“We’ve successfully managed time, our most precious resource, for millennia with only modest intrusion. That all changed last week; the C5T ship Yoolis Night has discovered a race we never seeded.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 20, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Thirty two years. He’d lost count of the number of homicides.
A Detective for twenty one of those years, John Barrick wished he knew how good he’d had it as a beat cop.
There was no going back now.
John opened the back door of his cruiser. Reaching in, he grabbed the zip tie holding his prisoner’s hands behind his back and dragged him roughly out onto the ground. The car’s suspension wheezed at the change in load, re-leveling itself.
Barrick pulled the limp figure’s head back by the hair and snapped a sim cap under his shattered nose.
“Wake up, Stanton,” he shook him, pushing the cap into the man’s nostrils until he recoiled from the smell, “wake up.”
Stanton coughed and sputtered, hands straining against the binding and head twisting behind the wide tape covering his eyes. He finally managed to get his feet underneath his body and propel himself upright.
“This doesn’t smell like the cells,” his speech slow and calm, “I want my legal representative.”
Barrick unclipped the heavy gun he’d hung on his belt, and prodded the unsteady man in the back with it. Stanton moved hesitantly away from the prodding, puzzled at the whining sound that followed each jab in the spine.
“I’m tired of catching you, Stanton,” John’s body ached with fatigue as he pulled the prisoner up short before a half meter square opening in the ground. “I keep putting you in the box, and you keep coming back and doing the same shit again and again.”
Stanton grinned, exposing broken teeth behind cracked lips. “That’s the beauty of virtual. I can do twenty years of that standing on my head, and when my time’s up, you’re just a little older and none the wiser. Twenty years in a bit box don’t mean shit to me out here. It’s just the economics of law, don’t beat yourself up over it.”
Barrick had seen Stanton convicted seven times since he’d been on the force, each with a twenty year term in virtual lockup; fully immersive confinement with the realtime clock turned way down. The prisoners rode out the whole sentence, but the taxpayers got to save the expense of a full term crate in a big house somewhere with all the amenities. Economical. Mostly effective, except for the Stanton’s of the world.
Barrick clipped the gun back on his belt, and gripping the other mans shoulders, propelled him forward until one foot hovered over open air. He kicked the other foot out violently from under him and stepped back as Stanton dropped ten feet down into the darkness.
“What’s this, pre-v isolation?” The voice was still calm above the sound of him pushing himself upright again in the darkness. “That’s against protocol, when my lawyer hears…”
The rest of his words were muffled as Barrick wrestled the heavy wooden lid into place over the hole. Unclipping the heavy gun, he leaned into it, listening to the whine as the igniter primed and enjoying the satisfying pop as it discharged steel framing spikes through the lid and into the crate below.
The clip emptied, Barrick tossed the gun on top of the crate before filling in what was left of the hole and spreading the remaining dirt.
As his cruiser climbed the gravel road back to the highway, Barrick eyed the towering paving machines at rest behind him. In the morning, they would lay down a mile wide stripe of concrete and asphalt, locking the door on Henry Thomas Stanton for the very last time.
While they worked, for the first time in thirty two years, John Barrick knew he’d be asleep.
by submission | Jul 19, 2009 | Story
Author : Jamison B. Medcalf
Technical officer Jones had had his first job at 12 during the 2127 crash following the Antarctic War. Those were simpler times when perma-jacks that fed the Internet into your brain were less common.
Nowadays only those aboard colony ships got sleep. Deep frozen sleep for years in the void of space while people on Earth had their brains awake 24-7 thanks to the new drug, Ap. Ten years off your life for only having to sleep once a week.
Colony ships like the Rosetta were needed to set up the seeds of a new city on some far off world so that great Transport vessels could come next with its thousands of comatose passengers. Earth couldn’t hold any more people and was low on breathable oxygen. The crew of a colony ship will sleep for years and awaken a few months away form the eventual destination to begin preparations for arrival. Timing was everything. Time meant money and lives with every second being worth more than the last.
Jones was currently going mad from boredom and loneliness and knowledge of his fate. His sleeping bath had malfunctioned and now he was going to die. He was mostly through his own food rations already and if he ate the other crewmembers then they would all starve in the last few months off the journey once everyone awoke. So instead he worked. He plotted courses and wrote notes and calibrated terraforming machines. He tried to fix the sleeping bath but it was no use, the thing was shot and no spare parts existed save those on his crewmates baths.
Two months into his awake period he gave up trying to ration food. He wasn’t working anymore. Instead he wrote. He wrote all of his goodbyes and an explanation of what had happened and what command could do in the future to make sure it never happened again.
He wrote out his memories and hopes and things he wished he had done. He felt like he had all the time in the world. In fact, he hadn’t been this bored for a long time, which was why he was going crazy.
Jones mapped the ship in his mind and walked it with his eyes closed just to pass the time. He made delicate zero-gee sculptures by lifting small objects into space and then he took digital images of them for his crewmates to see when they awoke.
When they awoke, he realized, he would be long dead. It was the third month and he was almost out of his food when he simply stopped. He sat and stared into the blackness of space out a window and wondered what they would say, what they would do, when they found his body. He hadn’t been so still for so long before in his life to his knowledge. Eventually he got out his personal computer and wrote one more thing before swallowing a handful of pills and strapping himself into the command chair to stair out the window into space.
Dear Earth and Whom It May Concern-
I think if we all took some time away from the Net and the Vehicles and the Noise we could all learn a thing or two about what it means to be alive.
Looking out the window he decided the stars, the same stars he saw every day and every night for hours on end, weren’t so boring as he had thought. In fact, they didn’t seem very far away either. All it took was time, and he had all the time in the world.
by submission | Jul 18, 2009 | Story
Author : Q. B. Fox
At night, when everything’s finally fallen quiet, the terraces sing; or maybe moan, I’m not sure which. The water where it laps over the first floor windowsills seems calm, except when a boat stirs it up. But deep underwater, by the front steps and in the old basement flats, Gary says there are currents that tug at the foundations. The old brickwork complains at the weight above; a choir of fallen, drowning angels.
I try not to listen. I just try to sleep.
It’s still dark when the Big Girl in the Red Dress comes up the stairs from the floor below, heading off across the rooftops. She seems fearless over the loose slates, crossing the most precarious wires between the buildings. But she won’t take a boat.
Gary says that she’s seen what’s in the water. I don’t know.
When the water’s low you can almost make out the front door or the shadows of long abandoned cars, but I’ve never seen the big, moving shapes people say they can see.
I think the Big Girl in the Red Dress is ill; she’s always red-faced these days, feverish maybe; and she never speaks to us anymore either. Gary says she drinks too much. He says he’d drink too much if he’d seen what she’s seen.
It’s still early, barely light, when we take the boat up the Earl’s Court Road. The Hustler’s are already there, trading out of skiffs and rafts. These days they are all big, burly men; sour faced and sombre, eyes darting nervously downward, or to the high ground in the north. I hear one say that when the water’s low you can almost walk on dry land at Nottinghill or Speakers Corner. I smile; even I know there’s nothing that way until you reach Camden.
We look, but there’s no food for sale; everything’s for sale except food and that’s all anyone wants to buy. There are millions of people left in the city and the flat-roof gardens aren’t enough. “Never mind,” says Gary, “maybe tomorrow.”
We head back down towards Redcliffe Gardens, keeping the spire of St. Luke’s on our right. There are currents that pull you out over Brompton Cemetery if you go too far. Boats go missing there; just below the surface are statues and mausoleums; and the colonnades. Some people say there are other things too.
We step out onto the pontoon at Coleherne Court. The men keep their distance; teenagers really, some no older than me. Mostly they wear long leather dusters, despite the heat. It’s sweaty and steamy already and they’re shirtless under their open coats. They’re so skinny, they eat no better than us.
Finally one comes closer. He has monkey on his shoulder. No one smiles, except the monkey who bears its teeth. No one, not even the monkey, looks up; they all keep their eyes on the gaps in the pontoon.
When we get home again, the Post has left a letter for us. It’s from Mum. I don’t know how the post is still running, but it is. Our letter has been sent over the wire from Cumbria, but at one point it must have been typed out again by hand, because it’s full of mistakes. Mum doesn’t make mistakes.
“Christ,” spits Gary, “I’ve told her not bother. I’ve told her we’re alright in the city, that we high above the ground.” He still looks nervously at the water. “We’re not leaving.” We both know that there’s no way to leave anyway and nowhere to go.
“We’re just hanging around,” I grin.
