by submission | Mar 8, 2013 | Story |
Author : Xauri’EL Zwaan
Evelyn offers me a bouquet of white lilies. I know immediately that she’s hiding something, but I indulge her little game. I take them and breathe deeply; she knows how I love complex smells. These have a spice that matches nothing in my chemical pattern bank. Genemod flowers; that’s unlike her.
“Happy anniversary, Darling.” She’s not happy, but trying desperately to sound it.
“What’s wrong?”
She flashes with anger. “Nothing.” I know she’s lying, but I also know that forcing the issue will just mean another fight. I’m not eager for a week of verbal silence and kinesic screaming, so I drop it.
I’ve put every ounce of the love I still feel for her into dinner. She picks at it in silence.
She asks me about my day. Surprising; she never wants to hear about work anymore. I tell her about charting trajectories for blinkships in Reimann space. She’s becoming angry, hostile; my words trail off.
“Your enhanced genetics must help you a lot with that.”
I sigh. “Can we please not do this today?”
“I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t stand it — being read like a book, feeling stupid and incompetent all of the time. I’m done with you. It’s over.”
I stop thinking about work, about the books I’ve been reading, about sex. I stop browsing blogs and watching the stock ticker. I focus entirely on her.
I’ve been expecting this for months now. That’s not the problem. Everything is out in the open now; but she’s still hiding something. She perches on her chair like a vulture.
My lips and fingertips are starting to feel numb.
“What have you done, Evelyn?”
“These flowers have enhanced genetics, too. They were made just for you, darling. Just for your DNA.”
“But I love you.” She stands over me as I slip to the floor.
“You smart bastard. I finally got one over on you.”
by Clint Wilson | Mar 7, 2013 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
Just because mankind has invented time travel doesn’t mean we can go traipsing along down through the ages all willy-nilly. Firstly, one may not, under any circumstances, completely materialize into any previous plane of existence at any time whatsoever. Paradox has been proven and if one chooses to reverse then it will be strictly as an observer and an undetected observer at that, spying from the fringe of existence and never any closer.
And due to phase fluctuation one must always traverse dressed in period correct attire in case of temporary accidental fade in; the technology is good but not perfect. I knew all too well the rules, and when it was finally my turn to use the machine, I came prepared in my Victorian era brown tweed suit and bowler hat.
I sat inside the chamber and as the batteries charged up to wormhole penetration strength I rested my hands upon my umbrella walking stick and readied myself for my fantastic journey.
With a flash my surroundings disappeared and I found myself sitting on a bench in the second story of a Victorian mansion. I turned and looked out the multi-paned window to a beautiful garden below, where a horse and carriage were just pulling up to the grand entranceway.
I heard a noise behind me and spun my head quickly to see a well-dressed family appear at the top of the stairs. Even though I knew that I was invisible to their eyes my every nerve froze as I listened to them chat in their mundane and pompous fashion. So and so was rumored to be engaged to such and such. How much money did they have? Were they of proper breeding? I continued to remain motionless while the group came up to the large window and looked out… through me!
Suddenly a voice called from down the stairs and the father grinned and shouted back, “Coming right along Simpson, you don’t have to invite me for a drink twice.” Then they all turned to go.
I found them all so intriguing with their stiff clothes and their plastered down hair. And as they made their way off I stood up from the bench to get a last glimpse of these wonderful historic creatures, long since dead yet so vibrant there before my eyes. And as I did, the young son of the family, a boy of maybe ten or twelve years, turned in his wide brimmed hat and his smartly tied neck ribbon… and he saw me.
For an instant his eyes locked with mine and I knew I had phased in; and just as quickly the super computer back home adjusted my temporal position and I disappeared from the boy’s sight. But in the split second before I blinked out of existence I heard the lad say, “Look mother, a ghost!”
It wasn’t a result they were happy with back home, but still an acceptable cover to avoid paradox nevertheless, one that worked over and over again while they worked out the bugs of the great machine.
I returned back through the wormhole more excited than ever, already planning my next visit should I get the chance, utterly thankful and completely in awe of the brilliant minds of my time.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 5, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Humans are crazy. This is a long voyage.
I pretend I’m a greedy Noah sometimes. I pretend that I brought two hundred humans and said ‘fuck it’ to the animals.
Transporters have given the human race the ability to flicker from post to post at speeds previously believed to be impossible. Good for us.
However, a human can’t just beam to Alpha Centauri. There needs to be a receiving station there.
There are long-range ships peopled with volunteers like myself that take centuries to reach far-off planets and set up a transporter sender/receiver. Input/Output posts, they’re called, or I.O. towers. Fitting, since the first transporter was invented on Jupiter’s moon Io by the poor, doomed, Doctor Swanson. The one that took a bite out the gas giant, adding an extra eye.
The ship is huge and mostly automated except for us humans. There are two hundred of us. Only one is awake at a time and we work in two-month shifts.
There are astrophysicist and engineering specialists amongst others that have downloaded their brains into A.I. constructs that we can awaken if an emergency arises.
Other than that, we are free to stare out the windows, eat, and just monitor the passing Doppler universe as we skate under the milk-skin thin ice of lightspeed.
Personally, I think us two hundred volunteers with a penchant for loneliness are completely redundant. I mean, if a true emergency happened at these speeds, we’d wink out of the universe in a flurry of greasy atoms and be none the wiser. We wouldn’t know what hit us.
I think we’re included as lucky charms. We’re the prize in the cereal box. The drive to include humans on the ships is verging on nostalgia. It’s inconceivable to have a space mission without humans, regardless of how superfluous we are.
But hey, that’s why I signed up. I like the isolation. Sometimes, I turn on the lights in the crew room. 199 full green tubes and one empty one; mine. I’ll walk down the white alley and look into the green tubes. I’ll see my co-workers faces, sleeping in fluid, suspended like they’re falling. I’ve only ever met Jared and Tina, the one who comes before me and the one that comes after me. There’s an hour of overlap. I wake them up, they put me under. It’s brief and we don’t talk.
We’re all the same, picked for our sociopathic natures. We prefer to be alone.
Communications at this speed are nearly impossible. Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll get to where we’re headed and it will already be populated. Like we’ll be regarded as antiques or that day’s curiousity. Maybe there’ll be a parade.
Or maybe it’ll just be a rock system and we won’t be able to find any planets to hook up our terraformers to. We’ll just spend our lives in the spaceship, out of fuel for a return journey, winding down like a handmade clock.
Most likely, everything will go textbook. Computers are hardly ever wrong.
I’m a passenger and I’m happy about it.
by Julian Miles | Mar 4, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The speaker hums as the decoder scans for the encrypted channels that the Chendrin use. I know I shouldn’t give in to this ghoulish need to eavesdrop, but I cannot help myself.
“Seventy-four. Seventy-four. Anything on your sweeps?”
“Negative, command. Nothing except asteroids and bits of the last twenty-nine ships sent to find out what happened.”
The Chendrin are a superior race, when judged by their own opinion. They consider us intergallactic upstarts who should remain within a few AU of Earth until we learn respect for our elders. As you can guess, Earthers didn’t take to that idea. So the Chendrin started interdicting us. Pretty soon, it was a war. Problem is, now they’ve stomped our colonies and fleets, they have to prise us from the little outposts and marauder stations. Not that they have worked out the difference yet.
I run a marauder station. I have a whole asteroid field that spans one of the main supply routes for the battlegroup resident in our solar system. I spent a year setting up after I got here, then the fun started. Since then, the Chendrin armada have not received any letters from home. Or anything at all.
“Command, we’re coming up on the wreck of the Cladrana. It looks like it took a pair of direct hits from something with a half-kilometre diameter impact field.”
“We’re sure the Earthers don’t have pressor field technology. It must be something else.”
That’s right, kiddies. The Cladrana played tag with a pair of asteroids and lost. Time to cause an accident. I press the red button.
“Command, encoded burst transmission just rec-“.
The message fragments as the Cladrana explodes, her drives, armoury and anything else that could go bang wired to do just that.
“Booby trap! Taking evasive action to exit vicinity!”
“High and fast, Seventy-four. Rise above the asteroid field.”
“Obeying.”
That is the last Command will hear from Seventy-four. At flank speed it rises, collecting a terribly advanced thin cable sheathed in stealth wrap. Each end of that cable is firmly attached to a small asteroid. They work out what is going on faster than any so far, then target the asteroids to give them just enough of a push to miss. I watch as maintenance luggers start work on severing the cable.
My turn: I hit the blue button and countermeasures reduce their high tech to ornamental lights for a while. Said while being long enough for the real shipkillers to plow into Seventy-four like a pair of titanic sledgehammers. A pair of 550 metre diameter asteroids with five metres of stealth coatings and a lot of engines will do that.
Oh, that has got to hurt. Seventy-Four just became forty-one and thirty-three.
Threat broken, I release the drones from their hangars deep within another asteroid. They’ll finish up anything that’s warm or beeping then return to base. Meanwhile I can go for a juice pack and a piece of cake, then indulge in a shower and some sleep.
After that, it’s scavenging the pieces of Seventy-four while waiting for the next target or targets. No matter. I have enough traps rigged to take a dozen vessels at once, plus multiple concealed silos to dispense anti-voyeur nastiness against any ships who won’t venture into the asteroid field.
I have every luxury that twenty-five salvaged Chendrin freighters can give me. I have every weapon too. But I also have human ingenuity and no reason to quit. They will lose a fleet for every second it took my family to die when they cracked the domes of Mars.
by submission | Mar 2, 2013 | Story |
Author : Alex Bauer
It never started here, my dear. We are victims of circumstance.
It started with the fires, with her, as we watched the skyline burn in the middle of terrific night. Standing there on the lake shore, horrified beyond rational thought, among wailing multitudes while the city burned to so much carbonized slag. Her. Standing there next to me, face hammered into masks of sorrow and enchantment, painted with furnace shadows. Beautiful.
We had been left behind. There would be no salvation this time.
Every fear a thread–a final impulse–so I reached out and grasped that hand. Shock smoothed away the horror and I felt my expression mirrored in hers. She looked at me.
Looked at me. I mattered again, just like that.
Cool carboplatinum fingers reticently cradled mine. Marvelous control. “Darwin,” she hiccuped, singed hair whisking around green weeping eyes. Taken aback, I laughed darkly, nodded. I touched her cheek in a fit of fear-crazed need, something to show, for once, that I could be kind. Truly kind. I felt inlays beneath the skin, the reconstructed zygomatic, the carbofiber masseter relaxed under my caress. Recycled.
Someone loved you very much, once. Sent you away. Darwin indeed.
“Just so.” I said, looked up as giants hammered on the sky once more, the wheeling horizon all engulfed in flame. Nauseating vertigo, as if I’d spiral out of her hands and into the stars above. The skies were cracking above us. Spidery cracks heliographed the light of burning cities, peoples, their last stretched long fingers into the night. Flotsam and debris floated beyond the transparent shield, bits of smashed lightships and radiator panels glowing like banked coals.
Nearby stars blink and seconds later, ferromagnetics fireballed into the colony’s canopy at twelve kilometers per second. Each star a ship, each blink another shove toward the precipice.
Soon, I thought, the race between cooking or choking would be over. The lake itself began to burn. Sweat poured down the groove of my back. A breeze touched us, and I welcomed whatever came.
Excisement, the Enemy called it. For the consumption of thought. For the heresy of existence. Another volley battered the canopy and the end came in a single body-crushing tsunami of overpressure.
Decompression is equal parts waiting and celerity. The canopy over the city blew outward in rending silence, like it was sucked up by a giant’s straw. Brilliant tidal waves of debris and mezocyclones of fire fell up into the night before extinguishing. No one screamed, even when the fingers of the breach wrapped ‘round us, fetched us up into the night in greedy handfuls.
Excisement.
I never let go of her hand, even when the light went out in those weeping eyes. And here we are. Here I am. Floating here with her, in the depths. This vast ocean. Drowning. Anoxia is killing me and we’ve only begun to swim! Only these few minutes we’ve known each other. Reefs of transparent alloy float around us, glittering like wet jewels. If only she could see this.
Not even a name! I never told her mine. Better this way… isn’t it?
“Darwin.” I mouth, feel something like God’s own hand reach down my throat to tear the life away from this husk. Prosthesis spasms to the tune of dying synapses. “Darwin.” Oh. Oh, I am so sorry. Always so stupid, so awful, never thinking about others. Choking.
That’s her name. Her na–
