by Roi R. Czechvala | Jan 3, 2012 | Story |
Author : Roi R. Cechvala, Staff Writer
Helmut Rose made his way down the broad avenue to his office at the Aerospace Centre. He looked up at the hundred foot long banners displaying the movie star good looks of the President’s face. Hitler’s picture was everywhere. The only resemblance to his great-grandfather was an untidy shock of black hair on the forehead and pinched moustaches.
Berlin was electrified. Overhead, Zeppelins announced “Alles Gute zum Geburtstag Führer” in brilliant colours flashing and crawling around on the dirigibles silver skin. Adolph Hitler IV’s birthday celebration was shaping up to be bigger than last year’s.
As was his habit, before heading to his office, Rose visited the engineers of the Von Braun Zentrum für Raum Studium. As he entered the spacious, brightly lit room, an enthusiastic “Heil Hitler” rang out from the assembled men jumping to their feet with an outstretched arm.
“Heil Hitler,” Rose replied, casually throwing back his right hand. The men looked harried, but bright eyed and excited. “How’s it going? Everything okay?”
Heinrich Globus, lead engineer on the Ares project, strode over and pumped Rose’s hand. “Perfect Herr Doktor, Perfect. Who could have imagined Mars’ approach would match up with the Führer’s celebration. The launch will occur on time. It’s almost as if it were a birthday gift from God himself.”
“‘Gott Ist Mitt Uns'”, eh Heinrich,” Rose laughed. “I hope not. We don’t need some Jew god interfering with the triumph of the German people.” They laughed.
“This launch is a tribute to you Herr Doktor. You must be proud.”
“I am but a humble administrator, Heinrich.”
“Don’t be modest Helmut. Everybody knows that Werner couldn’t have made it to the moon without you. And your ICBM’s? They have kept the British and their American lap dogs at bay.”
Rose felt colour rising in his cheeks. “I am just doing my small part, but thank you Heinrich. I must get up to my office. Make sure the men get a good rest after the launch. They’ve earned it.” The head of Germany’s space program strode briskly to a bank of elevators.
Rising to the top floor of the towering structure he thought back to the metaphorical heights his career had taken him. As a young man on Werner Von Braun’s team, he had sent three men to walk on the lunar surface. Now a team of eight were soon headed for the red planet.
Entering the outer office, his secretary beamed at him. “Guten morgen, Herr Doktor. Are you excited? Just think of it, our Aryan astronauten on another planet.”
“Yes Greta, truly a coup for Germany, though hardly unexpected. Still it is a great accomplishment.” He retrieved the morning paper, Der Informant, from her desk and made for the inner office.
“Oh, Herr Doktor? There are two men waiting inside who wish to speak to you. Reporters I imagine. I hope that’s okay?”
“That’s fine, Greta. Danke.”
Entering his sanctum sanctorum, two men rose to greet him. They were identically dressed in black suits, black leather trench coats and black fedoras. Had they not been wearing the unofficial official uniform, he would still have recognized them for what they were.
Rose sat down behind his massive mahogany desk. “How may I help you gentlemen,” he asked, the disdain evident in his voice.
“You are Doktor Helmut Wilhelm Rose? Director of the ZRS?”
“I am. What can I do for you?
The man continued. “Herr Doktor…,” he consulted a small notebook, “… Rosenbaum? We have a few questions for you.”
The Gestapo man smiled widely. A smile that never touched his piercing blue eyes.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 1, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My entire celebrity life is online for people.
There are over a million people looking out through my eyes, breathing in time with me, feeling my exhilaration as six months of rehearsal come to a head and I perform my number-one hits to a crowd of fifty thousand people in a Barcelona arena. My body is taut with the proportions of a goddess thanks to Olympic trainers and amazing surgeons. The online population’s hearts are racing along with mine. They’re smelling the air of a packed coliseum and tasting my Evian in between songs. Women and men both are dialed in behind my eyes and being me.
Each one of them is paying six hundred dollars to experience it. In my peripherals, the ones that have kicked in an extra hundred are chattering to each other and sending me messages. Scrolls of text run up either side of my vision that I have trained myself to ignore.
My encores end with a massive fireworks discharge and the stage goes dark. The crowd screams my name as I strut backstage along with my backup dancers and band.
A swath of names in my peripheral vision pops and fades. Their tickets have expired.
The half a million that are left have paid a thousand dollars each for the backstage experience. My body’s vital signs pump through the optical cables all over the world to wherever they are. Other celebrities are backstage crowding me for smiles and handshakes. Fans with real-world passes are there. There’s one girl with cancer who got her ticket as a last wish. I pose for pictures with her and I nearly cry. All over the world, five hundred thousand people nearly cry with me.
That lasts a half hour. I say a prayer with my fellow performers, we talk about how good tomorrow night is going to be in Los Angeles, and I head down to my dressing room. As I walk down the stairs, many of the names in my field of vision wink out.
There are a thousand people left in my field of vision. The super rich who can afford to be at this level at most of my concerts and a bunch of lucky strangers who have scraped together ten thousand dollars each to get this far.
Once in my dressing room, I undress slowly in front of the mirror and let them stare at my toned, sweaty body. Then I climb into the shower for a long, long time. Even when I close my eyes, I can see the names in my peripheral talk to each other about how amazing this is.
As soon as I reach for my towel, most of the names wink out. There are sixteen left and they have each paid a million to still be here. There are four new names but the rest are familiar to me, almost old friends at this point.
The door to my room opens and my lover enters with that famous smile. His body is also perfect. He won another Oscar last year. Behind his eyes, people lean forward in their sense chairs, aching with the knowledge that they are about to have sex with one of the best-selling pop musicians on the planet. Behind my eyes, sixteen people brace themselves , ready to athletically fornicate with a dreamy leading man.
The only time we’re alone is when we are asleep or going to the bathroom.
He touches my shoulder, going in for a full, hungry kiss, and my towel dramatically slips off of me and onto the floor.
by submission | Dec 31, 2011 | Story |
Author : Aradhana Choudhuri
“No. There’s no funds, Mr. Lawrence. None. We work with what we’ve got.”
“Then you have to repurpose this satellite, Mrs. President, or we start losing vital assets. We’re deep in Kessler syndrome time — LEO and GEO are going to have one catastrophic collision after another, each spawning off more debris. Chain reaction.”
“I get all that. That’s why I gave you Webb! The science lobby’s gonna go nuts if I give you this one too.”
“It’s the only one left that can monitor that segment of the graveyard orbit, warn us before we start losing the Geostationaries.”
“Why can’t you build more telescopes on the ground? I can scrounge a few million out of discretionary.”
“Ma’am, Earth-based telescopes can only look out at night. We’re already using each and every ground asset we can just to keep the nightside covered from dusk to dawn. Anything sunside we won’t know about till satellites start going down.”
“What about other countries? China started this problem with their testing, and they’re the only ones with enough money left to spend on watching outer-space garbage. It can’t hurt to ask.”
“You want to ask the People’s Republic of China to launch a constellation of telescopes pointed at us?”
“Nevermind. Tell me why the Japanese repurposing their visible-spectro-thingamabob satellite wasn’t enough.”
“It was never designed to focus fast-moving near-Earth objects. Pointing requirements have been thrown out the window, delta-V budgets make any kind of repositioning? The point is, it’s not enough.”
“The science lobby is powerful, Mr. Lawrence.”
“So is the telecom lobby, Mrs. President, and it’s a helluva lot more relevant to the average taxpayer.”
“I’m aware of that. That’s why I’m here.”
“Yes Ma’am. This is no longer about competing priorities — it’s about threats to the vital infrastructure of this country. You think the ARGOS/NOAA-L collision was bad? We’re going to start seeing one like that every three months.”
“When will the next one happen?”
“In ten minutes? Tomorrow? Probability goes up to better than ninety in two months.”
“Allright, Mr. Lawerence. I’ll sign it. You’ll have Kepler by the end of the quarter.”
—————-
…peoples of earth…2051 by the…transmission…share…speck of light in a…static…we heard you…must have…scope…hear us…wait…response…
—————-
…earth…093…share joy…by now you…have telescopes…transmit…AMGE…hear…respo…
—————-
…ello?…
by submission | Dec 30, 2011 | Story |
Author : TJMoore
Sam squinted into the dimly lit cupboard, the all but extinguished ICL held out in front of him like a jar of fireflies.
With a sigh he gave up on the fading lamp and began searching for the rye seeds by hand. He did like a good seeded bread and if he didn’t get it mixed up tonight, he’d have to wait another day to bake it, which may be the case anyway if it was cloudy tomorrow.
Seeds found, he turned the ICL back on to use the last possible lumens to measure out his ingredients. He’d have to mix and kneed in the dark, but he was skilled at that by now.
Fondly, he reminisced on days gone by when he could simply drive to the store, any time of the day or night, to buy whatever he wanted from wherever it came from. So many things had been lost.
The war for fossil fuels had been fairly brief once all the combatants came to the conclusion that the fight would destroy the prize. But the technology to support the population at the time did not exist without it. The war for survival lasted much longer and was more brutal than any war fought in recorded history. The survivors who didn?t live near the oil were few and hardened. Sam was such a person.
He and his neighbors, the Andersons and the Downins, worked every minute of every day just to stay alive. It took acres of land per person to produce enough food and all of that land had to be worked by hand. The Andersons had a horse which helped some, but the horse itself required several acres and a lot of additional work to keep it through the winter. The horse was also a valuable commodity that required constant protection from raiders. Sam was an exceptional shot had earned a reputation for keeping marauders at bay.
In the now dark kitchen, Sam carefully covered his bread dough with a clean cloth and set in the old gas oven to rise. The oven could be used occasionally when he had accumulated enough methane from his generator, but during the summer he used the solar oven exclusively. He groped around and found the cradle for the IC Light and plugged it in to recharge when the sun came up. He had five solar collectors on the roof that provided a few watts of electricity on sunny days; an acquisition he had made just before the wars when he could still drive to the city. A hand crank weather radio sat on his repair bench, waiting for the day when he found some spare parts to fix it. There were no radio stations broadcasting anymore, but the radio also had a light and a power outlet for recharging cell phones back in the day. He wished it was working now so he could take it on his scouting trip in two days. He and the Downin boy were going toward the city to look for glass.
by submission | Dec 29, 2011 | Story |
Author : Ian Rennie
It’s not really time travel. Not how that expression is traditionally meant, anyway.
It has long been a maxim of those involved in my kind of research that you can look back and travel forward, but never the other way round. In a way, everything we know about forensic science is a way of looking into the past with slowly increasing resolution. My work is just another step down that road. A bloody big step, but a step nonetheless.
Every movement leaves a trace. Some leave more of a trace than others, most leave a trace so small as to be beyond invisibility. Theoretically, if you had a completely closed environment, you could infer everything that happened within that environment from an accurate enough look at its current state. In practice, that’s nonsense. The world is much too complex, too many variables need to be accounted for. Plus, once you look at things closely enough, you can’t be entirely sure of exactly where everything is, let alone where it was.
Electromagnetic signals are a lot simpler, comparatively speaking. With enough computing power and enough time, it becomes only really really difficult to figure out what a signal was, rather than impossible.
The Hartnell Array has made it even less difficult than that. I won’t go into details about how it works: every time I try to explain it to the chiefs of staff I can see their eyes glaze over. Instead, I try to talk about what it can do.
With enough time, and enough energy, any signal that was ever broadcast can be recovered.
Obviously, the implications are considerable. I’ve had scientists from every field asking for time on the Hartnell Array once its up and running. Even before it was finished it was booked up for the next decade. However, the British Army paid for it, so the British Army get first use.
Well, second use. Officially we’re testing its capabilities for another two months. Unofficially I’m enjoying the major reason why I agreed to build the thing.
“Everything in order?” I ask Dr Patel. She doesn’t understand my enthusiasm, but she humours me.
“Signal reconstruction is complete. Playback is ready whenever you want.”
I settle into my chair, and hit play. The music starts at once, as does the image, blurrier than I remember from my childhood yet no less magical. In awed silence I become the first person in more than half a century to see these images.
Recovering television isn’t difficult compared to some things. There were so many broadcasts at such a strength that you can pick and choose. The only real decision was what to recover first, and for me there was no question.
106 lost episodes, of which I was now watching the nineteenth. We were getting them at a rate of four a day. We’d have every one within the month. I sent the pristine recordings to the BBC within the day, but that first viewing was mine alone.
Dr Patel walks in as the episode finishes and smiles indulgently. She never liked the show, but I think she’s happy that I’m happy.
“Everything in order?” she says, handing my words back to me.
“Perfect.” I say “I think we should go after The Daleks’ Master Plan next.”
