by Duncan Shields | Jan 24, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Technically, there were still two sexes.
The gene techs realized that there was one way to double the births of a new colony. Doubling the births meant a more stable gene pool in half the time it usually took. The solution was obvious but it was hard for the human minds back on Earth to swallow.
Two puberties.
One set of people grew up as women and then changed into men on their twenty-fifth birthdays. The other set grew up as men and then changed into women on their twenty-fifth birthdays.
In theory, this meant that everybody got a turn being pregnant and giving birth. The younger women would be impregnated by the older men and the older women would be impregnated by the younger men. Fertility drugs meant that twins and triplets were common.
Scientists. Too deep in their own experiments and repressed sexual urges to see the trouble they were creating. Freud would have had a field day.
The scientists thought that the men who turned into women would still have aggressive enough sex drives to seduce the younger men and that the women who turned into men wouldn’t objectify the younger women in an oppressive way.
In practice, the young ended up having sex with the young and the older ones ended up wanting to have sex with the young. Second puberty became a death knell. The second puberty women became known as cougars and the second puberty men become known as trolls. It was demoralizing to go through the second change.
The colony doctrine makers tried to make it a law that each person must impregnate at least one person while male and have at least one child while female.
The added pressure of legislation caused a resistance. That resistance became a violent rebellion. People were executed when they turned twenty-five. The colony’s social structure took a downturn into hedonism and savagery.
The colony was branded off limits to the shipping lanes and abandoned. They were on their own. It’s a dare now for new space-freighter drivers and pirates to visit the place and attempt to ‘enrich the gene pool’. The planet is no longer on any official charts and its location is spread by word of mouth.
A colony of young savages. Its nickname is Logan’s Eden.
Now, new colonies are populated solely by either male-to-female humans or female-to-male humans but never both. Everyone gets a turn being male and female and giving birth but rebellion is avoided.
by submission | Jan 23, 2011 | Story
Author : Jason Frank
“Space is… so vast, so empty, so cold… anyone who has experienced it must desire confinement, fullness, warmth…”
The Greatest Lover of Space (TGLoS) speaks but the words, filtered through the protective arrays of my specially constructed spacesuit, become little more than a series of data points.
“Early on, I became a starship captain. Some fiction I had enjoyed as a child convinced me, incorrectly as it turned out, that this was the quickest route to love in space. A captain’s life, alas, is not a lover’s life. The responsibility of command proved oppressive (pressing concerns are the enemy of love). There were also the difficulties of managing an entire crew in love with their single captain (chronic in-fighting, zero esprit-de-corps). I gave it all up, I had to. I became more of… a drifter.”
My suit, I realize, does not offer complete protection from the allure of romanticized narrative. Mere content seems unlikely to overpower me, however. I press on. Boldly, I ask TGLoS about one of the more inevitable consequences of love in space: offspring.
“Oh, there have been some, perhaps many. The first that come to mind were the Albuntians. Those I birthed myself, not realizing that the rather invasive love of their species would leave me with a crop of youngsters growing just below the skin of my forearms. While the birthing was an incredibly painful process, it endeared me to the little ones all the more. The Albuntians love only in season and my little ones were born out of season. They left on the first cargo ship out of port. They don’t write but I often wish they would. There are rumors of other children which I cannot be completely sure of, owing to the distortions of space/time. If they do exist, it is likely that one of them will one day take my place as The Greatest Lover of Space.”
Noting these facts, alongside reminders to follow up on some of the rumors mentioned, I ask about any specific experiences, events, or happenings that stand out in the mind of TGLoS.
“Once, for what I was later told was a period of three months (time did not pass for me) I was taken into the living body of an Ilgesian firque. By turns I was partially digested and then rejuvenated. There was something mythical about it all. I imagine that I would still be there had a scruffy group of space poachers not intervened. I didn’t hold their interruption against them and even managed to love two of them before hot-blooded in-fighting claimed them both. I rode back to civilization with their robotic accompaniment, a poacher-bot all but immune to love. Our eventual parting was so poignant that the poor droid’s circuits were entirely blown. It stands at our place of parting even now, a somewhat eternal monument to love.
Having enough data to file my report (and a rapidly depleting suit battery), I thank TGLoS and rise to leave. In doing so, my suit catches on the rough corner of my chair, tearing a small hole. TGLoS is at my side immediately, asking me if I am injured (I had let out a bit of a squeal as the tearing was taking place). I make assurances that I am fine but somehow a lone finger finds its way into the tear, probing gently. My suit compromised, my head already swimming, I cannot help but be loved by The Greatest Lover of Space.
by Roi R. Czechvala | Jan 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
Harry Morgan was a bear of a man. Over six feet and in excess of 240 pounds. He eschewed a prosthesis, preferring to simply pin up the sleeve of his MCU where his left arm had once hung. He wore the morphic combat uniform of the Confederacy even though it had been three years now since his retirement.
For all his size and the deep scars that crossed his face, he was a gentle man. Slow to anger and much slower still to violence. It is no small wonder then that he lay upon the purple sand beside a methane sea bleeding his life away.
It had been gut shot. A slow painful way to die. He silently cursed the self sealing feature of his suit. A quick rush of his oxygen into the near vacuum of the planets atmosphere would be more merciful than this.
“You bastard,” he said, wincing from the painful effort to speak. “You murdering bastard.”
From a vantage point atop a boulder, further up from the lapping tide, an envirosuited figure stirred. “Now, now, calm yourself or you’ll bleed out faster.”
“Is that your game? You want to watch me suffer slowly? You want to watch me die?”
Casually, the seated figure examined the weapon in his lap before quietly responding. “Die? Now why would I want you to die? Suffer? Yes. Immeasurably. But die? Emphatically, NO. I want you to live. And you shall. You shall bleed to death. When you die, your monitoring system will shut down and within a scant heartbeat you will be frozen through. You suit will activate the beacon and within hours you shall be rescued, resuscitated and resurrected in all of your glory.”
“Why,” he gasped, spraying his visor with blood soaked phlegm.
“So I can do it all over again.”
“But why? Why at all, you crazy fuck?”
“Why? WHY?” The voice took on a disembodied quality as it rose to a banshee shriek. “Why,” he repeated a third time, his voice growing calm once again.
“Why? Because I like you. And Mother liked you. She always liked you best.”
by submission | Jan 18, 2011 | Story
Author : N. Thomas Parshall
If I hadn’t made the tran-atomics strike, we couldn’t have afforded the cottage in Coventry. If we couldn’t afford the cottage, we wouldn’t have been docked during the strike. If we hadn’t been docked during the strike, we would have waited to start our family. If we had waited, we would have been destroyed with the rest of Earth Force. So the birth of my daughter saved the rest of my family.
We watched the feeds as the invaders swept aside the efforts of the belters. Our friends and neighbors died two for every one they destroyed, and there was nothing we could do. Time and again, I caught myself about to leave for my singleship to help. Then I would remember that I had rented it to a friend, and I had no way to defend us.
We watched as the invaders came within range of Earth’s primary defenses, and for once were glad that they had been so paranoid of us belters. And we cried when we saw that it wasn’t enough.
The invaders died by the thousands, yet again, but they had enough left to bombard the home planet. Even our simple scopes here in the belt could see the flashes of death on her surface. And still they fought. Missiles left from an unsought war a hundred years ago lifted slowly and locked on to anything in Near Earth Orbit. By then the only things left in that orbit were invaders, and as slow as the missiles were, more invaders died.
I supposed they knew they couldn’t win.
The few hundred invaders that were left turned to flee the system. As they flowed outward along the path of destruction they had wrought, they seemed to have forgotten the rest of the belters on the far side of the system. Weeks had passed and every ship capable waited for them. No invader left the Solar System.
That was a decade ago. Ten years at near light speeds. I know that we learned how to reach these speeds by studying the wreckage of the invaders, but it doesn’t matter. They came for us out of the black, and that is how we will come for them.
Ten years for me, nineteen for you. Daughter, this is why your father had to leave. You saved us once, and now it’s my turn.
by submission | Jan 16, 2011 | Story
Author : J.D. Rice
Discovering how to travel forward in time had been easy. Scientists had been experimenting with the accelerator for decades, perfecting safety limits, performing animal testing, making it ideal for human use. Set a dial, flip a switch, and a human being will be frozen in time until a set date. They even worked it out so you would continue to move along with the Earth through space.
The real trick, we knew, would be traveling backwards through time. Accelerating someone to the point of time freeze was simple enough. It followed the standard rules for relativity. The faster you move, the slower time passes. All we had to figure out was how to remain stationary and safe. But traveling backwards? That was a whole different can of worms. It raised questions about string theory and temporal paradoxes.
They told me it couldn’t be done, not in a thousand lifetimes. So I decided I’d just skip ahead to when it could be done and prove them all wrong.
The process was simple enough. The accelerators were getting ready for commercial use, to freeze people with serious illnesses until a cure could be found, so it was easy enough to procure a testing unit. I took it home, set the dial forward by a thousand years, and hit the switch. Protocol said that when they discovered my body in the accelerator they had to put it in storage until the thousand years were complete. The capsule’s outer shell would protect me from major wars. The external censors would delay my unfreezing if the atmospheric conditions around me were unsafe. Only the destruction of the Earth itself could keep me from waking up.
And so it was that I found myself on this strange new world. I woke up, feeling fresh and excited, and took my first breath of that oxygen-heavy air. The sky was dark, lit only by two pale moons and cluster of unfamiliar stars. The ground had a dusty, copper tint. The only vegetation were twisting, tangling blue vines.
Checking my chronometer, I found that I had been in temporal acceleration for over ten billion years. The Earth must be long gone. Destroyed by our dying Sun. Maybe even destroyed by humanity itself, a thousand years in my future, ten billion years in your past.
You found me disoriented and confused, barely surviving on the bitter fruit growing from those blue vines. Mad with loneliness, I welcomed your assistance with open arms. I’ve subjected myself to your tests. I’ve told you all I know about how I got on your planet. I’ve answered every question you have thought to ask me these last fifteen years. Now please, answer one of mine.
How do I go back in time? How do I get home?
