by Patricia Stewart | Feb 11, 2011 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Horatio Kiddleson stared open-mouthed at the turbulent accretion disk as it swirled into the ergosphere that surrounded the bottomless gravity well. “Dammit Schwarz, you didn’t tell me our destination was a black hole.”
“Quite right, young man. And believe me; it was not easy finding a licensed pilot that didn’t know V404 Cygni was a black hole. I wasted a year searching for someone as unenlightened as yourself.”
“I may not know every celestial object in the quadrant,” Kiddleson rebutted, “but I know how to jettison your sorry ass out the airlock. I’m getting us outa here. They don’t call them things ‘widow makers’ for nothin.”
“Hold on, son, that’s all about to change. I’ve invented a Quantum Gravity Shield, which will make this ship impervious to the effects of gravity and hard radiation. But you don’t need to take my word for it. How about a simple demonstration? I’ll activate the shield and you can take us in for a closer look. Just drop down to one AU. This old plasma burpper will still have plenty of power to escape if it doesn’t work. I’ll even sweeten the pot. I’ll double your payment if I’m wrong.”
“Double you say? Hmmmm. We can do one AU on half impulse. Okay, Schwarz, it’s a deal. But I’m pullin’ out at the first sign of trouble.”
Schwarz activated the Quantum Gravity Shield, and the ship descended to 93 million miles in a matter of minutes. “Wow,” said Kiddleson, “we don’t even need a radial velocity to maintain this distance. I think that thing may actually work.”
“There was never a doubt,” replied Schwarz with an arrogant smile. “How about dropping us down another 60 million?”
“Sure, why not. This excursion will make me famous, not to mention rich.”
Again, the ship plummeted like a geosynchronous space elevator on steroids. But at 40 million miles, something started to go wrong. “Hey, Professor, I don’t feel so good. I’m getting light headed.”
“It looks like the graviton compensator is out of alignment. You better take us out so I can fine tune it.”
“No can do, Professor. Whatever’s happening, it’s preventing me from activating the ion drive. If you can’t fix it on the fly, we’re crashing into the event horizon.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Kiddleson. The event horizon isn’t a material surface. You can’t crash into it. It’s just a dimension where light can no longer escape the gravity well of the singularity. We can pass right through it. Of course, if the generator’s imbalance gets any worse, we may get Spaghettified first.”
A few minutes later, the ship passed through the event horizon without incident. In preparation for escape, Kiddleson rotated the ship outward, into the overpowering brilliance of the incoming photons. He frantically began manipulating the controls. “How much longer?”
“Got it,” Schwarz replied. But Kiddleson didn’t need to be told, he knew it the instant his body wasn’t being pulled like taffy. He rammed the throttle to full, and initiated the warp drive a few seconds later.
Safely back in space, Schwarz looked up from the shield generator toward the cockpit. “Oh my God,” he exclaimed. “Where are the stars? Crap, it must be time dilation. While we were within the black hole, time stopped for us, but the rest of the universe aged a trillion years. All the stars have burnt out. The universe is dead!”
Kiddleson began laughing. “Now, who’s the idiot? I shut the iris when light started pourin in. Stop worrying.” Kiddleson opened the iris and stared open-mouthed out the viewport. “On Shit,” he said, “no stars.”
by Roi R. Czechvala | Feb 10, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
“Allright men, listen up.” Even without the aid of his complant or the voice magnification of a batt’suit, First Sergeant Lesimov could easily be heard over the scream of drop ships as they streaked through the atmosphere. “True to their kind, the little bastards are holed up in caves in the mountains. It’s up to us to go in and burn ‘em out. SUIT UP.”
“I hate my suit,” whined Private Kitchen, as he donned his helmet and subvoked the HUD panel, “I know it was fitted for me and I’m the only guy who has ever worn it, but it smells. It smells like farts. Somebody else’s farts. I know my own farts.” He lifted his visor and took a sniff inside the suits torso. “Yup, those aren’t my farts.”
Slowly he shrugged into the torso while the gauntlets extended and assembled themselves. “I’ll bet that Spanish guy, Rio, or whatever his name is farted in my suit,” He grunted as he bent to apply his greaves. Placing them against his shins, they expanded and sheathed his feet and lower legs in nearly indestructible plasteele.
He watched as his cuisses wrapped and joined with his greaves and codpiece. “Ow, that hurts. I wish I’d never joined the infantry. I don’t want to fight. The recruiter lied to me. He said there was a chance I would never see combat, but here I am. Lying bastard. He promised me I’d never see battle. When I get back… I’ll show him. Who does he think he is anyway?”
Pvt Kitchen stood and stretched to check the seals of his batt’suit. He powered it up and checked the readings as one by one they came to life in his visor. “I guess its okay. This thing was designed by a moron. I could do a better design job and I dropped out of university. Smells like cabbage in here. I know somebody farted in my suit.”
He took a few tentative steps to check the gyros. “I should have joined the Navy,” he sighed. “That would have been fun. Sailing off the shores of Europa and Ganymede. Watching as the Marines made their drop while I was safe and snug with all my buddies on the carrier.” Kitchen smiled at the thoughts of the good times he’d shared with his Navy friends. The rest of the Marines considered the Navy as somewhat effete to say the least, but not Kitchen; he bore a special affinity for the boys in blue.
“I always thought that a few months afloat with the sailors would…”
“PRIVATE KITCHEN.” First Sergeant Lesimovs voice came pounding through Kitchens complant so hard that he thought the device might actually burst out of his skull. “You do realize that you had your ‘plant voked on the company freq the whole time don’t you?”
Pvt Kitchen said nothing as his suits thigh pads began ‘cycling a sudden gush of urine.
“Care to shake the sand out of your vagina Kitchen and join the rest of us?”
“Ulp… yeah Top, right away, Top.”
He began loping to the assembled group of Fleet Infantry Marines. They stood immobile as their orders and directives were downloaded to their ‘plants. “Bastard. He thinks he’s such a badass just because he has that diamond. Why if I thought I wouldn’t get thrown in the brig, I’d take him out behind the barracks and…”
“KITCHEN. Your ‘plants still open.”
The faecal reclamation pads in Pvt Kitchen’s suit began functioning.
by submission | Feb 7, 2011 | Story
Author : Ryan Swiers
From the sand she raised herself. The desert wind had coursed over her exposed flesh and the gritty pain of its wake made the effort slow. Sleek tendrils of sand rolled from her back. She realized a layer of the sand had once been her skin. She could feel some of it filter through her skeleton, passing around bones and organs and pocked limbs, surprised that it hadn’t claimed all of her as a fossil.
She stopped to rest on her hands and knees. Nine feet ahead she saw her discarded helmet. The color had left it. She swayed—an old, obstinate fruit on a wind-worn branch—to shake away the remnants of the desert floor. Careful, let it ease out. Don’t want the important things to go too. It was a slow, exhausting ordeal this resurrection.
To pass the time while her strength recovered she fiddled with the error in her date system. She picked at it like a child would a scab. Errors like these gaps in time and memory were becoming more frequent. Hadn’t she just done this?
Star alignment gave her the local time. That was easy, but when had she fallen? An estimate put her between twenty three or twenty three hundred days. And the time before that? Maybe a millennium. Who could say?
A human expression came to her: time can heal all wounds. True, in her case, it could; not many humans would bother rising from the dead much less wear their worthless skin again. Yet, this wasn’t what the expression meant.
“Forget it.” She said. Memories fade and rinse the soul clean.
Awake now, she felt scrubbed, thoughtless, and relieved. Forget the errors.
It was time to get up. Make new ones.
Although, maybe another five minutes. It was Monday after all.
by submission | Feb 6, 2011 | Story
Author : Zachary Murray
My mind came awake before my body. I was thankful that the sense of detachment was short lived, and it was good to feel the warmth of the fluid that filled the tank around me. I hated being in the tank. The whole breathing liquid aspect of it always left a bad taste in my mouth, and the regular sting of electrical pulses was the closest thing I could imagine to being cooked in a microwave oven. They said the shocks were to prevent muscle atrophy, but to me they were just a pain in the ass. I tried to laugh at the joke I stumbled upon, but having your lungs filled with fluid makes it difficult.
It’s not hard to get restless when you’re stuck in a near perfect state of sensory deprivation. I tried to open my eyes, but all I got for my trouble was a searing glimpse of the life-lights that lined the tank. It was still amazing to me that they had figured out how to keep a person alive off of light alone, for short periods at least, but they could have at least included a dimmer.
At that point I figured I may as well get comfortable, not that I could change anything of course, as there wasn’t much I could do until the techs pulled me out. In pre-jump training they told us to refrain from violent movements when we first woke up. They wouldn’t want us to break their fancy equipment after all. I could still see their smiles as they told us normal tank extractions averaged only five minutes, and not to be alarmed if it felt longer.
That thought was of little comfort to me since I didn’t have a clock to look at. Not that I could have opened my eyes long enough to see it even if they had bothered to include one in the tank with me. I could still remember how pissed I’d been after my first dunk. No one does well their first time and I was no exception. I came out swearing, my fists ready, and I didn’t calm down until they told me I’d only been awake for three minutes. Those three minutes had felt like a lifetime though, and just thinking about it made my chest feel tighter.
To pass the time I contemplated some violent movements I hoped to show the techs when they pulled me out. My dark reveries came to an abrupt end when my tank shook hard enough to send me bouncing from side to side. Several choice curses came to mind as I floundered around, but once again the fluid in my lungs kept me from expressing myself.
When things were once again still, and nothing else happened, I sat trying to decide if I should be getting nervous or not. I’d just come to the decision that everything was probably fine when the grow lights kicked off and I was surrounded by darkness. I realized the electric pulses had also shut off along with the lights. Oddly enough I missed the sensation. The tank felt much smaller as I hung there waiting, and I couldn’t help but remember that the lights never went off during training.
by submission | Feb 5, 2011 | Story
Author : Rebecca L. Brown
They hop-scotched their way to work, jumping between the numbered squares and collecting coloured stones as they went. The inner child told them they had to. On arrival, they coloured for the proscribed amount of time, the thick, waxy crayons clutched in two hands. The best pictures would go up on the wall.
They had replaced the inner child recently, moving from the almost teenage predecessor to a toddler barely old enough to qualify. There had been a general shift from skateboards and sparkling lip sticks to dollies and story time. Sally hadn’t minded too much, the glitter had gone everywhere and grazed knees had become tiresome, even when they were regularly kissed better.
Before they had the inner child, she had heard, there had been nobody to kiss it better when you fell down or make sure you coloured between the lines. With the rise of automated processes and the ban on travelling for pleasure, there had been mass suicides in a world where the majority lived lives filled with the meaningless and the mind-numbing.
This was better.
Soon, it would be nap time. Sally’s crèche mother would round her up with the rest of her group and they would go (holding hands, two at a time) to their mat. Afterwards, there would be milk and cookies and time for show and tell.
Today, she had brought a flower to show the inner child. She thought he would appreciate the bright purple colour. The inner children were chosen from those babies who were too sick to exist outside of the life support. Through their machines and speakers, they could live through their city populations. The last inner child’s favourite colour had been red. Nobody asked where they went when they grew up.
The flower was in a little vase on her desk. She drew a flower on her paper and coloured in the petals.
