by Patricia Stewart | Nov 22, 2012 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
“A one-way ticket to Ganymede, please.”
“You can’t buy a one-way ticket to Ganymede.”
“Why not?”
“Ganymede orbits within Jupiter’s radiation belt. The law says no one can stay on Ganymede longer than six months. Therefore, you need a round-trip ticket.”
“That’s stupid. What if I only had four months to live, and just wanted to die on Ganymede.”
“Then they would use the return ticket to ship your sorry-ass body back to Earth. Now, either buy a round-trip ticket, or step aside so I can help the next person in line.”
“I want you to ask your supervisor.”
“Very well,” sighed the associate. She pressed her index finger against her temple and activated her comm link. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but I have a customer here who wants to purchase a one-way ticket to Ganymede… Yes, sir, I told him that, but he still insists. Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. Okay. He says for a 10% adjustment fee, you can buy a refundable round-trip ticket, and if you don’t use the return half, we’ll refund its cost. Take it, or leave it.”
“Fine.” He placed the scanner over his right eye and completed the sale. Six hours later, he was in a stasis chamber for the three month trip to Ganymede.
After being revived, he collected his cargo and headed to the spaceport’s ship rental counter. He said, “I reserved a compact ship. Steven Schwarz.”
“Yes, Mr. Schwarz. We have it ready. Would you like to upgrade to a utility ship? We are offering a sale today.”
“No thank you. The compact will suit my needs.”
“Okay. When will you be returning it?”
“I want to drop it off somewhere else. How much extra is that?”
“Where do you want to drop it off?”
“Earth.”
“Sir, these ships don’t have the range to reach Earth.”
“No worries, Miss. My doctorate project was to construct a device to generate a localized wormhole to transport me and the ship to near Earth orbit. But the initiation site needs to be close to a powerful gravity well, which is why I have to test it at Jupiter. So, if it works, I want to return the ship to an Earth-based port.”
“Well, I don’t know. Let me check with my boss. She pressed her index finger against her temple and activated her comm link. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but I have a customer here who wants to return his rental to Earth… Yes, sir, I told him that… He says he has a worm thingy… Beats me… Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. Okay. He says if you can get the ship to Earth, he’ll wave the drop off charge. But you have to purchase the supplemental insurance.”
“Fine.” Schwarz placed the scanner over his right eye and completed the rental agreement.
An hour later, he was staring at Jupiter through the large flight deck viewport. He entered the course, velocity, and wormhole initiation sequence into the ship’s computer and calmly presses the start button. The ship lurched forward and plummeted into Jupiter’s atmosphere. At the precalculated time, the wormhole generator activated. The ship began to tumble. Schwarz held on for dear life. A minute later, the ship appeared in clear space, not too far from the sun. But the sun was red, not yellow. “Computer, perform a spectral analysis of the star in front of the ship.”
“The spectrum identifies the star as Proxima Centauri.”
“Crap. Are there any gas giants orbiting Proxima Centauri?”
“The largest body orbiting Proxima Centauri is one tenth Earth’s mass.”
“Oh dear.”
by submission | Nov 20, 2012 | Story |
Author : Jack Holt
No one knows why the Darkness came back to life that day, but Stron the Peerless was sent to deal with it. There were others who knew the ancient ways of commanding the power of the Darkness, but none had studied them so single-mindedly as Stron.
It was forbidden to use the power of the Darkness, of course. It was too dangerous. Too powerful. So Stron’s obsession brought him only poverty, chastity, and scorn. He was Peerless, for no one cared to be his peer.
Then the Darkness awoke unbidden.
Eight hundred years before, the Darkness had carved a gorge a mile long into the ground. Now Stron passed the point where shattered boulders gave way to slick, glassy stone. He didn’t even look at the words etched in obsidian –every child learned them by heart:
“We came from the Darkness.
“In the Darkness we slept for fifty centuries. We soared through blackest space undreaming, and the Darkness tended to us. It cloaked us. It preserved us. It nourished us. Until we reached a world full of life.
“The Darkness descended upon this world. It thundered through the skies. It gouged the earth. It boiled stone with tongues of flame. And when it ceased, we emerged from the Darkness and conquered this world.
We owe our lives and everything we have to the Darkness. And here, the Darkness now sleeps, as we once did.”
At the end of the gorge lay a labyrinth of metal, and beyond that, the Bridge to the Darkness. No one had been here in centuries, but Stron found his way through it with ease. He had studied every map and chart and historical record ever made about this place, until he had recurring dreams of wandering these pathways looking for… something. In the dreams he knew, but in the morning he could never remember for what, though.
Finally, he reached the Bridge. It was just as he had imagined. His heart raced, but his head felt clear and calm. Time seemed to slow down. He wondered, is that was something the Darkness can do? Then he breathed deep, and carefully enunciated each syllable of the words that even after a lifetime of study he only vaguely understood.
“Computer, emergency shutdown, all systems. Authorization code Romeo Charlie Sierra.”
“Acknowledged.”
Then Stron the Peerless felt his way through the now lightless room to the captain’s chair and spent the happiest moments of his life sitting quietly on the bridge of the once proud Interstellar Colony Ship ICS-3173, “The Darkness”.
by Julian Miles | Nov 19, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The room was smoky with the singed emissions of substances that made tobacco seem like a health supplement. Everyone knew the risks, but when you were fighting the greatest tyranny to ever rule humanity, longevity just didn’t enter the equation.
General Pantoro couldn’t believe what he had heard: “We’re sure about this?”
Intel Captain Lokus smiled: “It’s confirmed, sir. The damn thing has no defensive field generators and no trace of fusion armour.”
Major Ekrofan raised a fist: “Then we should strike against – what did you say Una Galacta had named it?”
Lokus checked his brief before replying: “Torush One.”
Ekrofan laughed: “Bloody silly name.”
All assembled looked to General Pantoro. He pondered for a moment, then nodded decisively: “Let’s take their new toy away. Tell the Antares and the Ceres that they are cleared for nuclear engagement.”
The twin battlecruisers Antares and Ceres approached the near lunar diameter sphere that hung in equidistant orbit between Earth and Mars. They were heavily cloaked and relying on the chaos created by their attack to give them time to escape, accepting the fact that they might have to go down fighting. It was worth the sacrifice. Torush One was an unknown element, silvery-white with sections of mirror-like reflectivity. Una Galacta had noticeably decreased military operations since it had arrived in orbit, probably from some hidden construction facility. Which indicated how overwhelming they thought it would be.
In the smoky room, a communications officer approached the General. He whispered to Pantoro, whose brow creased before he entered a secure comms booth. The conversation he had was short and he exited the booth with a look of terror on his face. He rushed to the main comms board: “Abort the attack! Stand down all combat units! Stop! Just stop!”
Antares fired first. The damn thing was so big, missing was not the issue. Everyone agreed that all the nukes had to land dead centre to rip their way to the heart of it. With a ripple in space, the Ceres appeared and unleashed her payload as well. The ships used every nuke the Resistance could muster.
General Pantoro sat and cried. No one could get a word of sense from him.
Antares and Ceres linked their comms:
“I’ve got nothing on detectors. Not one hostile or any countermeasures against the nukes or us.”
“Confirmed, we seem to have caught them napping.”
“Hang on; I have surface geometry variance from the target.”
“No impacts yet. What’s the cause?”
“Unknown. There’s a dimple forming in the centre.”
“A what?”
“A crater. Right where we’ve targeted. It’s getting deeper and the rate is accelerating.”
“Do you get a bad feeling about this?”
“Yes. Disengage and get the hell out is my instinct.”
“Agreed.”
Torush One flowed into itself, the crater sinking far enough to become a tunnel as the object changed from sphere to torus. The nuclear hopes of the Resistance passed cleanly through the hole, hurtling toward Earth where automated defences destroyed them.
Pantoro looked up, his face ashen: “It’s not their superweapon. It’s an intergalactic arbiter, sent to end the futile war we’re engaged in and the tyranny we fight. Una Galacta will become a benevolent leadership under threat of unstoppable annihilation.”
The room erupted with cries of “Victory!”
The General stood slowly: “No. Una Galacta ceased hostilities and delayed informing us so we would think that Torush One was theirs, make a desperate attempt to destroy it and in so doing, contravene the ceasefire. We will be liquidated for that. Una Galacta regard ‘last man standing’ as an acceptable win.”
by Clint Wilson | Nov 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
This is what I’ve been waiting for my entire adult life. All my work has come to this. From the moment I signed up for theoretical physics as a youth, I was destined to arrive at this day.
Countless alternate universes with a finite number of combinations means one thing and one thing only. It is most certainly mathematically probable that somewhere out there there is an exact copy of this universe, identical in every way, right down to its smallest detail. And that means that somewhere out there there is also an exact copy of me, just as creative, just as smart. Everything I have ever done, he has done. Everything I will ever do, he will do. So obviously since I have concentrated all my efforts into building a device to bridge our two universes, he has done the exact same thing over on his side. And this is good.
My fractal amplifier will indeed begin to open a hole in the froth of space-time. But it will be a funnel, narrowing to a finite point, leaving me unable to peer into that other side. Luckily for me though there is an exact copy of myself who has built the exact same device, and if his machine opens a coinciding funnel in space-time at the exact same frequency in his universe, then the two will touch at their points, and if we are correct, they will help each other open the rest of the way.
I sit in the protective booth and key in the final commands. There is a hum as the giant capacitors begin to take on their full charge. City officials will be banging on my door soon enough as I’m sure the power grid is quickly draining in my direction right now. No worry, the laser array sends a bright flash through the room and just like that, the porthole is suddenly open in the middle of my lab.
It is very much a circular hole about three meters across. It looks like a mirror, as on the other side is an identical laser array set up in front of an identical glass booth. This is when I notice me sitting in there.
Ignoring safety protocol I remove my goggles and step out of the booth, just as does the other me. We walk toward one another silently.
“I knew you’d come,” we say in exact unison.
“Of course you did,” we reply. Then, “It’s the only way this would have ever worked.”
I step up to the hole and place my hands palm forward, as he does the same. But unlike a mirror where one feels cool glass, we feel the touch of each other’s skin. Then we suddenly look up and around. “The hole is starting to close! I knew it wouldn’t last long.” The opening is now only two meters across and shrinking fast. What to do? There is so little time. Then the light comes on in his eyes as we share the same idea. “Hurry!” we say.
We twirl one another through the door, me spinning into his side and he into mine. Then as we let go our hands we crouch and catch one last glimpse of one another as the inter-universal porthole snaps shut.
I stand up and look around, knowing he is doing just the same in my lab. And I know that when I speak aloud, so does he. “Now, let’s see just how identical this place really is.” I smile and go to answer the knocking door.
by submission | Nov 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Hugo swallowed his last protein pill, paid his bill, and left the cafe. As he walked out the door, the rocket thrust from a young lady leaving the parking lot by jetpack blasted him with fire. It was only his quick reflexes that prevented him from being badly burned. As it happened, only his right pant leg was slightly singed. Mildly annoyed, he brushed himself off and proceeded to his flying car.
Hugo switched on the engine of his small, helicopter-like vehicle and began to slowly ascend. The aeromobile’s downdraft turned pebbles, bottle caps, and other assorted debris in the cafe’s parking lot into high-speed projectiles. The cafe’s windows and three parked cars all sustained minor damage. As he gained altitude and began to move forward, he saw the wreckage of another flying car embedded in the wall of a department store. Flames and thick, black smoke poured from the crash site.
After getting home and putting his car in the hangar, Hugo picked up the newsreel the “paper boy” — an antiquated term that for some reason people never abandoned — had thrown on his front lawn. Hugo went into his den and loaded the microfilm into the reader. The words “The Daily Gazette” appeared on the screen. Immediately beneath them appeared “August 3, 2000”. Hugo turned on the radio and after the tubes warmed up, big band music filled the room.
For an hour, Hugo caught up on the latest news. General Atomics was going to make another attempt to launch a manned rocket to the Moon. When GA’s fission rocket blew up shortly after launching last week killing everyone aboard and spreading radioactive debris along the eastern seaboard, there was serious concern they might be discouraged and not try another launch. General Atomics’ stock was up five points on the news they would try again. Should have told my broker to buy a hundred shares of GA last week, Hugo thought.
He scrolled the microfilm to the technology section. He read about an “electronic brain” at the University of Pennsylvania that could perform 5,000 mathematical operations in a single second. And the engineers had somehow crammed all that computing power into a mere 1,000 square feet of floor space. Hugo found this very impressive, although he couldn’t think of any practical use for such a calculating machine.
Hugo skimmed through the remaining sections of the film spool. He perused an item about the President meeting with the Russian Czar to discuss the potential threat posed by the Kaiser. He read that the Brooklyn Dodgers would be playing the Giants next week at Ebbets Field. He saw what sort of jumpsuits fashionable men and women would be wearing this winter.
At last, Hugo came to the letters to the editor section. One amusing missive caught his eye. The writer rambled about “the way we live now”. He claimed the rising incidence of cancer was caused by waste from atomic power plants. The death toll from aeromobile accidents, the letter said, was catastrophic because most people didn’t have the skill and reaction time to safely pilot flying cars. Ray guns, videophones, slidewalks: the author disparaged them all. He even warned that zeppelins filled with flammable hydrogen were “unsafe at any altitude”.
Hugo shut off the microfilm viewer and lit a cigarette. “Why would they publish such anti-humanistic, Luddite claptrap?” he said aloud. Some people will never be satisfied, he thought. Why, I bet that malcontented crank will live to the ripe old age of 50!
