by Duncan Shields | Aug 1, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was sixteen when they came.
They touched down in large ships all over earth, silently with no visible means of propulsion. Jagged, asymmetrical leviathans ridged with glowing seams and thousands of softly humming translucent spikes as tall as skyscrapers. Their spindled undercarriages contacted the ground and there they impossibly balanced, footprints with no more square footage than a volkwagen bug. Islands on tiptoe with their furthest spires still in space.
A triangle of light spasmed open in their base and they came out.
They floated silently and ghostly like their ships did. They were made of a dark metal that could be made intangible at will. Red sensors ringed their masses. No two of them were the same size. Their appendages dangled, chunky black tentacles of many different widths, some cables nearly dragging on the ground as the beings floated out of their vessels. The smallest one I saw was as long as a cat and the largest was the length of a bus balanced on its bumper.
The missiles we’d fired at their ships at first contact still hung there in the upper atmosphere, barely moving in some sort of time-retardant field. The bullets and shells that had been fired at them from the ground troops did the same. So we stopped. We didn’t know if our stilled ordnance would go off when the visitors left. Our noisy impotence in the face of their silent superiority became embarrassing.
They scanned everything. They took no interest in us except to regard those that came close to them with a whirring chirp of blindingly quick quadrary math. Scientists and mathematicians figured out their language but the numbers still didn’t make sense.
Small ones for flowers but long ones for gardens, small ones for trees and massive ones for forests. Medium ones for buildings but huge ones for cities. London’s number was bigger than Vancouver. Damascus had a larger number that Paris. Water seemed to make the math go recursive and eat itself.
A temporal theoretician named Davis figured it out after some terminally ill humans approached the aliens in search of a divine cure. They were measured and forgotten by the aliens and left disappointed to succumb to their diseases. Those measurement numbers took on meaning after their deaths.
We don’t know how long they’ll be here but the aliens appear to know how long each of us will live.
People seek them out now. It’s a dare to get yourself measured. New parents bring their children, newlyweds find out how long they’ll have together, and one presidential candidate famously got measured at a press conference but the result was scandalously disappointing.
The aliens seemed to have a sense of time like we have a sense of smell. Common opinion is that the passage of time whorls around them and that they are more sensitive to it. That they smell time in chains and whips, in spills and gusts, in pours and dams. When we speak to them, they seem to only measure our word lengths and move on. Perhaps they’re entropy police cataloguing the known universe. We don’t know if they’re sentient or automated.
We are not intelligent life to them. They speak in measurements and nothing else. How they invented space travel is a mystery to us.
All I know is that I was measured yesterday and I have another forty-three years to live. I plan to make them count.
by submission | Jul 30, 2011 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
“When do you have to leave?”
“Couple weeks.”
“Is it set in stone?”
“You know I can’t stay in one place for longer than a month. Guild rules.”
She lay quiet, pressed against him.
“Maybe you could put in for a leave?”
He pushed up one his arm, looking down at her warm body, framed in blue lines from the ceiling vents.
“I can’t stay,” he said. “I have a job to do. I service this whole sector.”
“But I thought — maybe you wanted to stay?”
“With you, you mean.”
“We’re very good together. I feel–”
“For me? Or because you’re lonely?”
“I want you to stay.”
He settled back in the cushions. The blue star overhead glowed dimly, in its passive phase for a year before the flare season started.
“How long is your service here?” he asked.
“Fifteen years, and then I retire.”
“Do you know how long I’ve been traveling?”
“I don’t know.”
“Twenty years in personal-time. I stopped paying attention to real-time after the first month. Every time I get into the FTL pod the universe goes on without me. I can’t worry about it.”
“I’ve only taken the trip once,” she said. “To get here.”
“We don’t stay anywhere because we have to keep moving. I have a thousand more assignments to service before I can retire. That’s one per month, and I’m twenty years down. I have sixty to go.”
“Real-time?”
“It makes no difference. I don’t age in the FTL pod. I think I started my tenure over a hundred real-time years ago, but it doesn’t matter too much. All the out-system stations need us, and we can’t stay or the system breaks down.”
She was crying, silently. “But you could stay. We could send a tightbeam to your Control Network and they could take you off the rolls. We can live here together.”
“I don’t travel to settle down,” he said. “I travel to make sure none of you go mad from the isolation. We have no other purpose.”
“You have free will. You can choose to stay.”
“And the next station has to wait an extra month for personal and sexual contact,” he said. “It’s not possible.”
“So go now, then,” she said, a sudden surge of anger drying the tears. “No sense keeping them waiting. I’ll just wait here for the next gigolo to stop by. You have no other purpose, after all.”
“Whatever you want,” he said. “I’m here to service you and you alone. If you want me to go–”
“No! Don’t leave me!” She came up and clutched him, desperate, feeling for his face and pulling him down in a passionate kiss. They coupled hard and fast and she slept in peace. When she woke up, he was making breakfast.
“Are you ok?” he said.
“I’m sorry. It gets harder every year. I’ll be fine.”
“I can stay my whole shift here, if you want, so you only have three months to wait for the next one.”
“That would be nice.”
He brought her coffee and they drank together, looking up at the vents where the blue sun shone. Instruments on the asteroid’s surface constantly recorded and transmitted information about the star’s cycles, valuable information for the Collective.
“It’s not so bad,” she said at last. “I’ll get over you. But I’ll be dead long before you retire.”
“I’ll remember you.”
“Promise?”
He looked out at the stars. A hundred lightyears to the next station, and a hundred more after that, and further and more and on and on.
“Forever,” he said, and smiled.
by submission | Jul 29, 2011 | Story
Author : Julian Miles
John was quite something to see when he got his threatening on. The bioluminescents lacing his body in intricate whorls and knotwork turned varying shades of red or white as his eyes darkened to black. The natives were terrified of him. Which was the whole idea. Natively inhabited water worlds were an unplumbed resource due to the difficulty of establishing relations with them.
John had left the military when his pod was slaughtered. I became his podmate by virtue of being the only aquatic physiognomy specialist turned freerun trader. We ran our ship half wet, half dry. It meant we could trade in stupid gravity zones and get places sane or dry people couldn’t. Plus John’s part dolphin, part shark splicestry gave us kudos in the oddest places. All of which got us a lead to our latest splashdown.
Karessia was named after Trutch Karessin, the first man to discover the locals here regarded humans as a delicacy, not as peers. Which is why I was in a zerosee suit and John was handling the diplomacy. This was entirely based on the local religious tendency to shun places where the influence of their god of death was felt. We were just making the influence a little more visible above the patrium node we had located.
John came hammering past me, tail moving swiftly but with relaxed power as his pectoral fins handled the manoeuvring. I could tell he was grinning, but that was only because he’d told me that was what the little biosparks by his mouth meant.
“Flee for your lives! The Reaper of the Colossus is here!”
Oh, how he loved this bit. His broad spectrum sonic roar hit the Karessians and they scattered, frantically trying to genuflect and swim away simultaneously. I was about to instruct the ship for a plant drop when John’s red and white turned blue and green, his primaries of confusion.
“Dave, we may have a problem.”
I scooted my rig over to him and took a look over his dorsal fin. Hanging in the blue, right on the colour change between high water and deep water was the oldest Karessian I had ever seen. Wrinkled over his entire body, but still muscled like an athlete. His left hands clutched a truly formidable polearm, its head reflecting highlights from John’s luminescence. His right hands were behind the shield that covered his entire right side.
“Amp your spectrum analysers, Dave. That shield and the pointy end of the big stick came from the same thing, and I don’t think it was a rock from around here.”
I was about to hit the analysers when something occurred to me. I hit the lights instead. This far down, the simplest things became obscure. The bright white light made the Karessian duck his head behind his shield, but it made the letters on that piece of metal leap into view. Two rows of text, in English. Wonder and a prick of fear intruded on my routine.
‘VEY SHI’
‘LOSSUS’
“John, I think we’ve lost a mining opportunity and made a fortune.”
“Dave, I think you’re wasting valuable lost survey vessel listing query time.”
by submission | Jul 27, 2011 | Story
Author : Julian Miles
I opened a channel to the Finnvael;
“This is Handler Orchus, what is your intent within the Olympus Theocracy?”
The long silver needle rotated itself rapidly to orient at least nine firepoints on me. Well, that was a clue.
“Orchus, this is Captain Rufus Hartnell of the Sol Three Alliance. We are coming to offer assistance with your situation.”
No honourific. Rude, but acceptable and allowing an informal stance.
“Thank you, Ser Hartnell. But we do have the situation, as you put it, in hand. It happens every couple of centuries and we have procedures to deal with it.”
There was a chuckle over the channel. Rufus sounded like someone I could get to like over a tankard of ale or two.
“Orchus, my respects to your Theocrats, but a rampaging war machine that threatens S3A vessels demands our intervention.”
My scans came back at last, void eagles are quick but a light year or two still requires noticeable travel time. I ran a quick eye over the details: Twenty-two thousand marines in full atmosphere armour, twenty-eight atmospheric sky fortresses, one hundred and ten near orbit interdictors, fifty-two open space cruisers. I tapped my gauntleted hand on the console. Hardly a cargo for assailing a single space bound monstrousity. Then my eye lit on the last line; Sixteen planetary pacification drones. Ah-ha. As my ancestors would say; “Gotcha.”
“Captain, I see that your ordinance is architected for planetary governance.”
There was a startled silence, then I caught a few words before the channel was cut.
“Dammitall, how do they do that?”
My console emitted a ruddy glow as my Ares meters went critical. Oh, they were trying this again, were they? So be it. As the Finnvael unloaded an indecent amount of violence at my tiny, unarmed ship I switched channels to one only the Handler ships are permitted. Despite the gravity of the situation and the way my ship rocked under the onslaught, I smiled as a deeply primitive bond was renewed.
“Here boy.”
Behind the Finnvael, something quicksilver manifested, an impossible immensity, a masterpiece of nanofluid, cryonic majesty and void. Great eyes spun with whorls of red as my lifelong duty, companion and terror sank all three sets of molecularly phased teeth into Captain Hartnell’s doomed command. I felt my smile turn to feral joy. It would be like a puppy for months after this, something so big that it could use all of its heads, plus hundreds of bits to be chased across near-space as they flailed, died or fled.
by submission | Jul 25, 2011 | Story
Author : Timothy Marshal-Nichols
“I haven’t time,” Ujala said, “where is it?”
She set the House Bot on the kitchen table and stared at it intently. It looked like a small upside down metallic tea cup, pure white and hovering millimetres above the perfectly smooth table surface.
“Come on. I have to get to work,” she pleaded. Ujala was already late, she was always late, and miserable job that it was she needed the credits.
Ujala was becoming more frustrated as the Bot remained stationary, watching and – was it grinning? If it was then it was extremely annoying.
As Ujala bent down to scrutinise the bot. Her long straight hair cascaded across the table. One of the Bot’s six antennas telescoped out and almost stroked her brown hair. Annoyed Ujala flicked it aside and the antenna slunk back into the Bot’s frame.
“Next time I’ll remove your power cell,” she said.
The Bot looked up at her forlornly. Why did they give these bots these evolving characters? When it had first been allocated to her it have been so docile, so compliant. Now it was becoming so mischievous and always wanting to play.
“Where’s the transport keycard?” she demanded. “I have to go. Please.”
The House Bot waggled its antenna and started to dance about on six mechanical legs. Its movement reminded Ujala of something – what was it? – something she had seen in the old days. It was like one of those dog type things when they wanted to play.
