by Duncan Shields | Mar 4, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was refreshing in a way, this whole ‘not having to talk’ thing.
The blue Radocephamoeba across from me ‘listened’ patiently to the string of questions embedded in the constant flow of my pheromones and body odor. There were subtleties in our smell that we had no idea were there.
The Radocephamoebas were huge semi-transparent shape-changing tentacled scentograph andromorphs. They were here doing research. They had no outward sensory apparatus of any kind that we could see. They ate by osmosis. When they were hungry, ovals would appear on their bodies like liver spots that oozed numbing digestive juices. Food was pressed to one of these ovals, the food absorbed, and the spots would disappear.
I could still see this one’s lunch floating in the thickness of his torso.
Other than that, their bodies, as far as we could tell, were basically giant noses from tip to stern. Every slippery pore was a nostril. The connected cells of their bodies did the rest. Every cell was a small brain. Together, they computed.
When referring to ‘my’ assigned Rad, I always called him Big Blue because of his brilliant mouthwash colouring and his size. The Rads differed in colour from one to another wildly. They were called Jelly Babies or Jelly Beans in popular slang.
Using several tendrils to rapidly tap answers out on a laptop for me, he answered questions that I didn’t fully realize that I was asking. I had no control over my pheromones and they really held nothing back. I was unintentionally candid and honest in a way that I had never been in real life when Big Blue took deep, silent sniffs of my long, rambling pheromones.
The First Team had thought it was telepathy for three full hours after first contact until a communication apparatus was successfully set up. Oh, how they all laughed. It was famous footage.
One thing the Rads could do was go ‘silent’ and stop smelling. Scientists were fascinated by this and research was underway.
There was only a certain temperament of Rad that volunteered to research the humans. Earth was incredibly ‘noisy’ by way of stink. Every person on the planet was shouting out their true thoughts, unfiltered intentions, hopes and dreams for all the Rads to hear.
Apparently, Big Blue was a talker and loved to listen. His replies to me on the laptop were verbose at any rate.
Now, I call him Big Blue when I’m writing my reports down but he says that I named him something else from the complicated smell reaction I had when I first saw him. He took my name for him from that reaction. It goes something like:
“Holy (alarm) that thing is huge I don’t know if I’m up for this it scares me I wonder how my mom (parent twosex breed half) is doing I think I’ll have a late meal (food type) am I just standing here staring be professional they think in smell they think in smell they think in smell-“
Each time he types it out it’s a little different but he always colours a bit darker up top with what we now know is mirth.
They’re equally fascinated by our ability to have not only one but five senses to their two senses of touch and smell. They marvel at our ability to deal with the input.
The Rads told us about a far-off race that has over twenty-six senses.
The two-way research traffic has so far been very rewarding. First contacts don’t always go this smoothly.
by submission | Mar 3, 2009 | Story
Author : Eric L. Sofer
Humanitarian, Not Vegetarian
We were assembled for the yearly Meal of Thanks, and we had imported food, delicacies from Earth. Dad gets it through his job; he works for a corporation that does space exploration. About forty years back, they found this planet, Earth, and its inhabitants, Humans, and it turned out that we can eat Earth food. I don’t like it, but the rest of the family loves it – and it was what we having for the Meal.
I was helping my mom with appetizers, preparing Spanish peanuts and Brazil nuts. I was more than happy to be in the food prep chamber because Great-Uncle Goje joined us this year. Dad said Uncle Goje was actually born on Earth, but I don’t know if I believe that. Dad says a lot about Earth that must be fabrications. Example: he says Earth people live in square constructs called “buildings” instead of caverns. How could someone want to live in a fake cavern?
I brought out the snacks with a spon for each bowl. My stupid little brother was hanging on Uncle Goje’s every word. The old beast was going on about how he had been on Earth long before we ever landed there, and he wanted to live in peace, but there wasn’t anyone on Earth like him. Except for his old friend, “Mr. Cong” – “…and they treated him like a king, I tell you!” Uncle Goje sputtered.
I settled down to suffer when mother came out. “Hope everyone’s hungry! There’s plenty of Earth food Earth tonight!” My mother had worked overtime this year – to make my dad happy, I think. After the Observation of Silent Gratitude, Dad had to name every single thing, as if he personally had gone to Earth, caught everything, and prepared it.
“That’s Virginia ham, that’s Canadian bacon, those are French fries and Idaho potatoes, and these are called Brussels sprouts,” he said, pointing at each container. “English muffins, Belgian waffles, Hungarian goulash, and Elle, this is called Irish stew – I bet you’ll love it!” he said to me. I thought he’d probably lose that bet, but I showed respect – it [i]was[/i] the Meal of Thanks. My stupid brother, picked up something from a bowl – I think Dad called it Swiss cheese – and started to pop it into his mouth.
“Aarg!” my mother hissed at him. “You remove the stasis field from that or you’ll get sick as a spinner, and I’ll have to take you to the med center!” Aarg stuck one of his tongues out at her when she turned away and used his spon to remove the stasis field, and stuffed the wriggling bit of food into his maw.
As predicted, the family dined with gusto, while I just toyed with my food. At last, Uncle Goje leaned back in the special split back chair we have for him, to accommodate his back spines, and asked Mom, “’Thra, my dear, do you mind if I smoke?”
She sighed and nodded, and Uncle Goje puffed out three rings of smoke, and then ignited them with his breath, and I took my cue. “May I be excused to do homework, Dad?”
“Go ahead, Elle,” he answered. “And Aarg! Stop playing with your food!”
My little brother lifted a claw as a small piece – I think it was a German rye – screamed and struggled as Aarg grabbed it with his fangs and gnawed it to pieces. I ducked down the corridor into my chamber, and into my slime pit.
I don’t care what the rest of my family says. I hate Human food.
by Sam Clough | Mar 2, 2009 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
We stole the blinkpacks from the research facilities at Ceti Alpha. Stable displacement technology, suitable for individual use. We sealed the holes in our assault armour and slapped on the packs: suddenly we could step through walls and down corridors, infiltrating past sentries and guards and turrets with ease. You could even rig a spare pack to act as a bomb: find something big, displace it into something bigger. If you squint, an overlap detonation looks a lot like a nuke.
From there, we blinked around the perimeter worlds, looting, stealing, hoarding all the high technology and research material we could find: and what we found shocked and horrified us. The colonies were so far ahead of the core worlds that some of them had ceased to even resemble humans. Halfman recombinations with terran or alien stock, populations translated entirely into a digital form or living out in the open under a half-klick of liquid methane.
We blinked out as far as we could; we found terror. Machines. Of arguably human origin. Some even still bore ancient factional flags. There were hundreds of millions of them in every system we checked. Half our men didn’t return, and most of the rest never left again. We dug in the archives, and the libraries; we even unearthed a few buried data centres to find out who to blame.
These were clanking replicators, skewed by thousands of generations of isolation from intelligent guidance. They replicated out of control, torching systems and turning the rubble into more of themselves. One advance party discovered a strain that spent the resources of entire planets to extinguish stars in one shot.
We figured out a plan. It was our only hope of long-term survival. No-one could see any other way. We knew we’d be remembered as monsters, but in the grand balance, we thought that it would be better that someone was there to remember us at all.
We committed grand and unholy sabotage across the thousand worlds. Shocktroops equipped with blinkpacks teleported deep into power stations, factories and defense relays, breaking and fusing and detonating. Navies were brought down in port, armories reduced to useless scrap. We left a thousand worlds without a single communication array or functional ship.
Quickly-assembled arrays folded space, and our navies appeared in colonial orbits. Purification-yield nuclear devices, biological warfare agents and cleansed the hundred worlds we needed. The engineers of the core worlds were flung to these hundred barren wastes, and were set to work. All the while, our fleets tore through the perimeter worlds, conducting a campaign of total annihilation: the might and fury of old humanity, rage driven by our history, our twenty-four thousand years of hatred, violence and war.
We didn’t understand the science, but we certainly understood the engineering. We turned those hundred worlds into the triggers for a giant chain reaction that would wipe out a reasonable portion of our cosmological back yard; isolating the core worlds with a rift of space washed clean of matter. This was our firebreak, our last best hope of survival. We doomed two hundred and fifteen billion people for the sake of thirty billion.
Was it worth it?
I don’t know.
by submission | Mar 1, 2009 | Story
Author : Benjamin Fischer
“I want to talk to the shaman.”
Borhani’s words drew blank looks from the Lakota braves. A few raised their eyebrows and the surliest of the lot paused his cigarette long enough to spit.
“The medicine man,” said Borhani.
“What the hell are you talking about?” said the surly one.
“Your wizard,” Borhani added.
“Ain’t got no wizards here,” came the reply.
Surly took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled. The soldiers waited, radiating their collective distaste of the foreigner.
Borhani started again.
“I’ve been told that your war party has strong magic. That you can call in the gods against your enemies.”
The Lakota shifted awkwardly, a few fingering the automatic rifles slung across their flak vests.
“Mister, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said a tall brave.
“The raid on Saint Cloud,” said Borhani, growing impatient, “where you were ambushed by antitank elements at that bridge over the Mississippi–you were able to regroup because a meteor strike stopped the counterattack. Who did that?”
A slow, toothy grin broke across the faces of the braves.
“You want Stars-Fall-At-His-Command,” said the tall one.
“Yes,” said Borhani.
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” asked Surly.
“Take me to him,” replied Borhani.
Surly flicked aside his smoke and started for a nearby hovercraft. Borhani fell in beside him, trudging quickly through the crushed grass of the circled war party. The plump camouflage skirts of a dozen raider skiffs marked out its edges. Surly led the pale foreign man to a particularly worn and dented specimen.
“Stars, you got a visitor,” Surly called into the cavernous hatch.
“Roger,” someone answered.
A lean, tanned Lakota wearing a grey field jacket clambered out of the hovercraft. A mean-looking submachinegun swung from a sling on his back. His face was just as welcoming.
“Major Stars-Fall,” he said, offering a hand.
Borhani shook it.
“Travis Borhani,” he replied. “Junior partner at Lino, Rubin and Ozgener.”
“Lawyer. Huh. What brings you?”
“Messenger duty,” said Borhani. “I represent off planet interests.”
“Don’t you all,” said Stars, taking an offered cigarette from Surly.
“My clients have been attempting communications for a few months,” Borhani said, “but connectivity has been poor to say the least.”
“We don’t do the net,” said Stars.
“We noticed.”
“Uh huh,” Stars said, lighting up.
“My clients sent me here to request that you surrender your targeting equipment and cease calling in orbital strikes.”
Stars gave him a blank look.
“You may turn it over to me,” said Borhani, unfazed, “or you may deliver it to our satellite offices in Springfield, Kansas City, or Topeka.”
Stars was silent for a minute, nursing his cigarette.
“I suppose you have papers.”
Borhani nodded, pulling a sheaf from under his coat. He held them out to the Lakota.
Stars shook his head.
“Naw, I don’t need to see them.”
“You are refusing?” asked Borhani.
Stars nodded.
“You realize that this will result in further legal action.”
Stars took another drag on his smoke, the hint of a smile in his eyes.
“Tell your bosses that they ain’t collecting nothing,” he said. “And even if they did, it wouldn’t do them a bit of good.”
Borhani shrugged.
“It takes codes,” Stars said. “The gear alone is useless. Tells me your clients aren’t legitimate, else they could just shut it down on their own.”
“I’m just the messenger,” said Borhani.
“Fine. But we burned Minnetonka last night,” said Stars as he climbed back into his ship, “and we’ll probably have another go at Duluth soon. When whoever’s in charge up there gets tired of me, I’ll let you know.”
Surly touched the lawyer’s elbow. It was time to go.
by submission | Feb 28, 2009 | Story
Author : Dr. Alexanders
Hundreds of years of exploration, trillions of dollars into research on space travel, all culminating in the single most astounding and miraculous discovery in all of human history, and the only tangible result of that effort was the Unity Dome. Gerald shook his head as he walked through the padded corridor that cut across the barren surface of the moon, “Seems like a waste to me”.
His companion was noticeably more enthusiastic. “I can’t believe I was selected for the fifth viewing! I mean, you were there, the first to make contact but I almost had a heart attack when I got the hyperwave. It’s been such a rush. First class flight from Europa, a suite in the Tranquility Hilton! God above, I can’t believe I am this lucky!”
Gerald bristled at the unbridled enthusiasm, “Look, man, you don’t know what you are talking about. Like you said, I have done this before! It’s nothing to look forward to.”
Cameron seemed not to hear him, “A chance to watch an alien play, to see how they think and feel. An opportunity to view a mind so different than ours that communication is basically impossible! And it only happens once a year! Aren’t you excited?”
Gerald took a moment to remember how it had started. Humanity had been visiting alien worlds for almost a thousand years and discovered the galaxy to be a barren and boring place. Occasionally some rock would have pools of water on it and maybe some bacteria or some microscopic shrimp-like creatures, but nothing intelligent. The galaxy was nothing more than an empty space suitable for mining, dumping, and esoteric research. He had been hauling a load of toxic waste with a three man crew out into the middle of nowhere. Who would have thought that would have bought him a place in the history books? As the one manning the cockpit, he had seen it first, the smooth, black sphere hovering mere feet from their bow.
After that singular moment of elation, things had quickly gone downhill. Millions of minds had bent their efforts towards communication with the aliens but there were just too many differences. As far as anyone could tell, the aliens were just as confused and frustrated as they were. As beings of mostly light and energy, though they did have an organic core, they seemed to communicate through flashes of electromagnetic energy, in the visible through the microwave range of the spectrum, but no one could make any sense of it. At some point, Dr. Vandrashir had come up with the idea of the Unity Dome, and somehow had managed to communicate its purpose to the aliens, or at least we thought he had. And now, once a year, they came to the moon and met with humanity.
Cameron took Gerald’s long pause as an opportunity to ask another question, “Do you know what we are performing this time?”
Gerald was started out of his remembrance, “Oh… King Lear, I think. Who knows what they’ll make of that. Just remember that afterwards, when they take the stage, to put on your goggles. Otherwise the radiation they emit will blind you. Even with them on it’ll probably just be a confusing hour of flashing lights and low moaning, it just gives me a headache.”
Cameron didn’t seem to hear him, and as he stepped through the threshold at the end of the corridor into the darkness of the performing hall he said, “God, this is going to be the most exciting moment of my life.”
Gerald wished he could have shared his enthusiasm.
