by submission | Feb 2, 2009 | Story
Author : Hilary B. Bisenieks
The last time I saw the surface of the moon, it was pristine save for a few sets of footprints. I had been struck dumb at the majesty of the black—an eternity of stars from horizon to horizon—while the others filled my ears with the chatter of their radios.
We were the first on that little patch of dust and rock, far from the Sea of Tranquility which had been designated as protected, along with the handful of other pre-commercial landing sites, long before our voyage had even been viable. There was no flag there, just as there was no wind to make it flap. When we left, nobody took note of our names. We were just a load of rich passengers to everyone on Earth. We were only remembered by trivia buffs preparing to compete for billions of dollars on quiz shows.
There were people who cared: the scientists whose work had made our vacation possible, the pilots who hoped that ours would be the first of many such trips for them, the CEOs whose companies could turn a profit marketing increasingly down-market lunar trips. They cared about the advances, the experiences, the possibilities, but not the moon itself. While we leaped across the lunar surface, they planned to develop it.
When our time was up, we returned to our module to make the long trip back to Earth. I wept in the safety of my suit as we took off. While there was still gravity, my tears slid across my face before being reclaimed by my suit. My grief and my joy were purified and offered back to me as nothing more than water.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 1, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Caught.
I’m stuck to this wall with thick maglets encasing my glowing hands. My eyes are weeping constantly and I can’t stop my long tongue from flopping down to my chest and tracing lazy circles in the sweat-matted hair there. It’s so hot here. The cluster of my eyes light up yellow and take in my surroundings. I open up my nostril slits and wetly snuffle the air for the faint stink of friends. Any friends at all within this complex.
My footclaws sheathe in and slide out over and over again as I think. I’m stuck up here, arms outstretched, legs splayed and tail pointing straight down. It’s not uncomfortable but they are not going to let me go.
There’s a low, deep growl that’s resonating in me. A low, thudding drumroll in my chest. I’m thinking and I’m humming. I’m trying to imagine back to where I screwed up.
All the energy I push out of my hands just gets absorbed by the maglets. They soften but they will not melt. Hell, they’re probably the way they power the prison that I’m in. A few kilojoules of energy from my angry fists and they can hold me for days thanks to my own poor impulse control and my race’s natural instinct for anger that we have still barely learned to control.
Posessors. Demons. Overtakers. Biters. Light-darkeners. The Tribe.
They’d have you believe that we can change shape and see in the dark. We are just as vulnerable as any meat machine, though, and that is what scares me now. I think that this is what they refer to as the first degree. If I remember correctly, the first degree is letting the prisoner wait. The second degree is showing them the tools that you are going to use on them to get the information you’re after. The third degree is asking them the questions over and over again. Or maybe it’s the actual torture. I’m not sure.
Either way, my mind is racing with animal fear and a deep need to get out of here. I’m not interested in finding out what the actual third degree is.
I wish I was back with my cubs and my breedbeds in the hive but this is the risk I took, joining the defense.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jan 31, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Revy leaned heavy against the bathroom sink, his reflection in the streaked mirror staring back battered and bruised. Stitches poked through pink flesh behind his jaw and beneath his hairline, bloodshot eyes sunken and dark. How long since he’d slept? He couldn’t remember.
In the corner of his vision lurked the promise of ability. He focused, and a window zoomed into focus. “Status: Online, Idle…” He wished he knew how to make it do something. He winced through the pounding in his head, swinging open the vanity mirror to expose bottles of pills. Mixing a fistful of pain meds and anti-biotics, he dry swallowed them, feeling the fizz as they partially dissolved in his mouth.
Cho said the pain would go away in a few weeks.
Cho. He remembered Cho. He’d bought illegal bio-tech from him a few times, but this was different. “Real serious shit,” Cho had said, “top secret shit. You pay big cash money.”
Revy’s head ached as memories forced themselves to the surface. The money he’d stolen, from whom he couldn’t recall. The operating theatre, Cho gowned and chatty, the nurse counting backwards with him from one hundred. He remembered a recovery room, the feel of his battered face through bandages.
Revy closed the cabinet door and studied himself in the mirror again. The stitches were dry, maybe a week old. They should come out soon.
Cho was dead.
Those memories clawed at the fog inside his head. Cho talking about training, promising to teach him to use his implant. He remembered the silent thunder of booted feet, men shouting. Cho screaming outside his room, words he could hear but not fully comprehend.
He remembered gunfire.
It had been days since he’d found himself curled up on the fire escape of his apartment building outside his kitchen window, bare feet screaming from the cold steel and the snow.
“Status: Online, Scanning…”
Sound overwhelmed him as he stumbled out of the bathroom; the fan in the kitchen, a music player from the floor below, the old recluse coughing from his apartment near the elevator. The noises were amped up, wrapped in soft static. He leaned his head against the thickly papered wall, watching his front door through the haze of his living room as it shimmered in and out of focus. He heard the elevator door open, and the door to the stairwell. He could hear boots, men. Revy closed his eyes, listening as they made their weapons ready while closing the distance to his door, to him. The pounding of his heart increased in frequency. Adrenaline flooded his system, clearing the fog and easing for the moment the throbbing in his head. Revy retreated into the bathroom; the window wasn’t too far from the fire escape, maybe he could jump.
He could hear them with high fidelity now, right outside the door. White light and pain shot through his head and he clutched at his ears in a vain attempt to block out the sensation. Had he been flash banged? Had he waited too long? His eyes squeezed shut, he waited for the heavy hands, for barked orders that didn’t come. Revy opened his eyes tentatively to find himself outside in the hallway, door pushed open to the stairwell, listening. The old man by the elevator was coughing into his phone, wheezing about gunfire and screaming. There was no screaming now. Revy found his hands comfortable on a large assault weapon. Scattered around his apartment doorway Revy counted eight bodies amidst spattered and pooling blood.
“Status: Disengaged, Idle…”
The only thing he knew now for sure was that he couldn’t stay.
by Patricia Stewart | Jan 30, 2009 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
The Deep Space Explorer held its position one kilometer from the anomaly. “What do you make of it, Cortez,” asked the commander?
“If it didn’t sound so stupid, Commander, I’d say it was a massless black hole. It’s spherical, about ten times the diameter of our ship, and is pitch black. But it has no mass that I can detect. I don’t understand how it is able to block the light of the stars that are behind it. There doesn’t appear to be anything there. We should be able to fly right through it.”
“Do you think that’s safe” inquired the commander?
“Honestly, sir, I don’t know. According to our sensors, there isn’t enough energy in that volume of space to melt an ice cube. I don’t see how it could possibly be dangerous. Although my gut says it’s a dumb idea, my brain wants us to enter it. After all, we came out here to explore the unknown.”
“Do we have any more unmanned probes?”
“Sorry, Commander. We launched the last one into the Helix nebula.”
“Then I guess we go in. But let’s minimize our risks. We’ll coast through the anomaly using only our inertia. We’ll set sensors on passive mode, and record everything. After we emerge on the other side, we’ll analyze the data and determine our next move.”
The black circle in the foreground of the main viewscreen began to grow as the ship completed a five second burn of its aft impulse thrusters. The background of stars disappeared one by one as the anomaly expanded to fill the screen. The helmsman announced, “Entering the anomaly in three, two, one…” The image on the black viewscreen suddenly burst into hundreds of fiery purple streaks shooting from the center of the screen toward the periphery, like a continuous fireworks explosion. Several seconds later, the lightshow abruptly ended. It was replaced by a field of stationary stars. The black anomaly was gone.
“Are we through?” asked the commander.
“Negative,” replied the science officer. “That isn’t the original star field. Whoa, sensor data are really bizarre. All of the fundamental universal constants have changed. The speed of light, Planck’s constant, and Boltzmann’s constant are trillions of magnitudes smaller than they should be. Even the four fundamental forces are different. Their ratios are the same, but their absolute magnitudes are way too low.” After a few awkward minutes of silence, he added. “Commander, perhaps the anomaly that we just entered is an independent universe, with different properties than our own. It has billions of galaxies crammed into a few kilometers.”
“That’s crazy,” remarked a navigator. “If that were true, our ship would be millions of light-years long in this universe.”
“Not necessarily. When we crossed the boundary, our matter must have been converted, so that now it is consistent with the fundamental laws of this universe. We’re probably super small now too.”
“Can we get home?” asked the commander.
“We should convert back to normal size when we pass through the boundary going out. Let me see if I can locate it.” After thirty minutes of intense analysis, the science officer reported, “I was afraid of this. It looks like our conversion didn’t occur until the aft end of the ship passed through the boundary. The bow of the ship was over a billion light-years into this universe before we fully converted. Each of those purple streaks must have been a blue shifting galaxy as we flew by. At maximum warp, it will take us over 10,000 years to reach the boundary.”
by submission | Jan 29, 2009 | Story
Author : William Tracy
Eighteen thousand meters up in the sky, two aircraft dance. The larger tanker hovers above the other, and the two vehicles mate. The space plane drinks thirstily, then releases.
The tanker banks to the right, leaving the space plane free to climb. It raises its nose to the sky, and stalls for one heartbeat. Then it shudders as the rocket engages. The sky outside the windows dims, and stars cautiously emerge as the vehicle enters suborbital space. Clouds swirl far below, and the horizon—noticeably curved—is shrouded in a thin veil of atmosphere and crowned by the glimmering aurora borealis.
Inside the cabin, passengers release their safety harnesses and gently rise, weightless. A man in a flowing robe maneuvers to the front, and turns to face his fellow passengers.
He speaks. “Lord, we are gathered here today to become closer to you. Possibly in the physical sense, and certainly in the spiritual sense. We are here to witness Creation, to be awed by its grandeur and by Your power. We look down on the sphere we call home, and we feel small, as we feel small in Your presence. We thank you for this opportunity to experience Your power. We thank You for blessing the engineers with the wisdom and foresight needed to construct this spacecraft, and we thank You for guiding the flight crew to bring us here safely.”
The congregation joins the preacher in saying “Amen.”
Hymns are sung, and prayers are spoken. A sermon is given. The service is carried out in a calm, orderly manner.
As if on cue, moments after the last “amen”, a chime sounds, and the captain speaks. “We have now been in space for two hours, and are ready to begin our descent. Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts now. Thank you.”
The craft enters the atmosphere. Its fuel spent, its wings swing into position to aerobrake. The vehicle descends to five thousand meters as it glides toward the landing strip.
Then a shoulder-launched missile leaps into the air and strikes the plane, ripping open the fuselage. The craft tumbles from the sky, and tears a burning gash into the earth.
We praise God as we do His work. Those who turn their backs on the light will taste the sting of Hell. The heretics will be purged from the land, and the true faith will remain pure.
God’s will be done. Hallelujah!
