by submission | Dec 29, 2015 | Story |
Author : S T Xavier
This whole “first contact” thing is such a hassle. Neither of us can understand each other. You’d think we’d have spent more time learning their language before coming down to talk, but of course we didn’t. Management knows best, after all. “Don’t worry, Sporlek,” they told me in the pre-contact meeting, “you’re the right Antari for the job! That’s why we hired you! We trust you to go down there and do what you need to do to get those creatures on our side!”
Lousy managers think they know everything. Not one of them has ever been the Antari-on-the-spot for making first contact! They don’t know what it takes! All they know is their numbers and their reports and that they have to make it look good for the higher levels of managers. Their numbers look better if we don’t waste time on what they referred to as “that ridiculous verbal nonsense”.
As such, the only research I’ve been allowed to do was in their symbology. Thankfully, with their picture screens and symbol markers all over the place, it hasn’t been that difficult. I don’t understand all of them, of course, but most of them are obvious. For example, the green sign with the arrow pointing to the white square is showing the creatures how to escape their captivity boxes. Or the four-cornered yellow one showing the creatures how to walk between the white lines on their black speed pitches. I think I know enough to be able to perform my function.
My craft drops me off in the center of a large area full of the creatures. It’s easy for them to notice me, of course, since I’m two grablecks larger than they are, not to mention the shape of my cranial membrane. A few of them start screeching and running away, while a few others start using equipment from their storage pouches to flash lights at me. Eventually, some creatures in blue with authority symbols show up and point their authority sticks at me. These are the ones I want to talk to.
The first thing I need to explain is that I come in peace, which starts by giving my name. I pull a large laser etcher from my storage pouch and point it at the ground. I’ll etch my name in the green ground plants using a symbol so they can understand. A round portion on the left, leading to a large upward arc, which comes back down to another round portion on the right. A dot right below the top of the arc, then a wavy line above it. Perfect.
I point to the symbol, then to myself as I say my name. “Sporlek!” They look at me, then at the image, then back at me. I point at the symbol and speak again, louder this time. “Sporlek!” Then I point to myself and speak. “Sporlek!”
The creatures look back and forth a couple times before they all start bouncing weirdly. They seem to be in some kind of pain. A few of them fall down and hold their middles, unable to do anything else. The authority creatures put their authority sticks down and make the same sounds as the rest of them.
A few of the creatures come up to me and hit me hard on the back, while still making that sound. Their faces seem to be covered in joy instead of fear. Maybe that sound is their version of laughter? I wonder why they’re laughing at my name. Maybe it was too soon for first contact on this world after all. The managers are going to be mad that their reports are messed up.
by submission | Dec 28, 2015 | Story |
Author : Phil Gagnon
Our destiny was to spread from our cradle, to go forth and tame the universe. Our motivation for this was simple; pandemic, mutually assured destruction, cometary impact, the thousand ways that humanity could die. Whether by fate, chance, or its own hand being bound to one planetary sphere pushed us to leave our wrecked Earth.
For half a century this was the drive of the preeminent governments. War, catastrophe, opposition parties axing budgets when they came to power, and the multitude of events were but a sideshow. The progress we made was astounding.
Another decade or so is all that was needed. A hundred habitats hung in a delicate necklace around the world, the assembly points for the massive starships whose hulks had begun to arrive from planetside piece by piece. In our drive to escape our crèche, we pushed too far.
We had known for well over a century of our irreversible effect on the climate. Sea levels had stabilized just shy of the worst case predictions. The modeling of category six and seven oceanic storm systems was less a guess and more a hard science.
Nature, in its creativity, knows how to escape the perfect algorithm. Two years ago, a quintuplet of category six storms threatened landfall. Highly unusual to see more than two raging at any time, four was unheard of. Outside of statistical probability, but there they were.
From the habitats, the spearhead of colonization, we watched the storms intensities increase. Reports claimed that they had surpassed category seven, into the newly created classes of eight, then nine, and eventually ten.
In our industrial might, our ravenous consumerism, we pushed past the saturation point for a true greenhouse effect to take hold. One of the last transmissions from the ground indicated sustained winds over 450 knots, 830 kilometers per hour! The death toll had reached into the billions.
A year had passed since the last radio signal had been detected from the surface. The Lunar H-3 Facility had gone dark shortly after. Last night, I watched yet another habitat blaze through the atmosphere below us. We are alone, the sole habitat left perched above our homeworld.
From my perspective as station commander, the talk amongst the crew of deorbiting was too much to bear, so I sabotaged the manual controls. I refuse to let suicide by fire be the ultimate end of our miscarried race.
I float in the microgravity of an observation blister tidally locked with the planet below, sequestered from the enraged crew. I watch the billowy blanket of the global storm. I muse on this station becoming a headstone for the lifeforms of earth, hung high above as a marker and warning for whomever may visit in the flung future.
I long for a view of the coasts, of the world spanning oceans I know lay beneath. With a snick and a pop I depress the emergency vent switch. As I shed a tear, my last thought flashes in the silence of vacuum… A White Marble.
by submission | Dec 27, 2015 | Story |
Author : Morghan J.
“You understand why I require payment up front in a hard currency; when I complete my task, you will have no reason to pay me.” The woman idly stirred her cocktail, eyes latched on the man in a wheelchair sitting across from her at the bar table, his eyes gaunt and traced in shadow, with a leg twisted and broken. The man picks up his drink and looks at it before setting it back down.
“Of course, of course. How much will it cost?” He asks, and she grins.
“Depends, how much can you afford? I’m not a charity; there is an inherent danger in my line of work.”
He knocks back the remainder of his drink in one swift motion, “I’ll make it worth your while. When will you be there?”
She shrugs “When I am. I have a lot of clients, some are higher priority than others. Should be within a month.”
“Think of the event,” she says, pulling a pair of electrodes from her watch. “But don’t focus on the details; details just clutter your mind. Focus on the when, and the where.” Attaching the electrodes to his temples, she continues, “Build the scene in your mind, think of what you could see, focus on what day it was, what time, what year.” A row of five red lights appear on the face of her watch.
“I’m trying, but it’s hard not to—”
She holds up a hand, pausing his speech, “I know, but that’s why we are doing this. My services are useless if I’m dropped in the middle of the ocean. When and where; focus. Here, take this as well, it will help you sleep after,” she hands him a pill and a glass of water, he drinks, and goes silent, lost in thought, and slowly the lights turn green. “Ah, excellent; your memory of this is very strong, normally it takes much longer to prepare.” She detaches the front face of her watch, handing it to him. “Now keep focusing on the event. Don’t let more than one of those lights turn red. This is your anchor. It holds you here. It holds me here more accurately. If you forget, if you stop focusing, you will shift,” she steps back a pace. “Remember, focus!” She taps a now exposed button on her watch, and two blinding flashes of light fill the room.
The stars clear from his eyes, and he notices two wires hanging from his temples. He looks down. An odd device connected to the wires sits in his hands, looking like the face of a watch, with five lights rapidly switching from green to red. He hears movement and looks up. A woman he vaguely recognizes is standing in front of him. A fresh cut on her cheek slowly oozes blood, a drop of which falls and splatters on the floor. He recoils. “Wh—Who are you! How did you get in my house? What is this thing!” He gestures to the watch face now sitting in his lap, one electrode having sprung loose from his temple and wound itself back inside the casing when he recoiled, the other still attached. She smirks, reaches forward, and plucks the other electrode from his temple, slotting the watch face neatly back onto its back.
“That is not important. What matters is the job I was hired for is complete. Good day sir,” she taps her watch again, and a third blinding flash fills the room.
He reaches up and rubs his eyes, clearing the stars from them once again. He pauses; probing his mind, he remembers where he knew the woman from; she fought off four men who were dragging him into an alley in the city many years ago. He thinks of the event, and remembers a flash from around the corner. The woman that saved him got a cut on her face when one of the assailants threw a bottle at her. It must be coincidental; he is in an entirely different country, halfway across the world. But yet, she was standing in his kitchen just moments ago. Seemingly out of nowhere, he begins feeling exhausted, even the troubling thoughts of the woman don’t stay in his mind for much longer as he staggers to his bed, collapsing into a long sleep. He wakes up the next day and goes for a jog, with no recollection of the evening’s events.
by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 25, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Dara rolled out of her bunk and onto her feet in a smooth, practiced motion. On the way to the door she winced as the tightness in her calves made each footstep painful, but by the time she’d hit the column midship the ache had mostly receded. Aging in low gee sucked just as hard as aging planetside.
Grabbing the ladder loosely with both hands and using her boots for stability on the outside of the rails, she dropped the six stories to the lower observation deck and galley in a few measured breaths. The landing brought her aching joints back to the forefront of her mind, but only for a moment.
“What in Spanner’s Starweld is that?”
Turing turned from the beverage dispenser he’d been fiddling with and admired his handiwork. “It’s a Christmas tree.”
Dara walked suspiciously around the two meter tall green cone that filled the center of the room, the tables having been pushed back around it to make space.
“That’s no tree,” she poked the green surface of the thing tentatively, “I’ve seen trees in my day, and that sure ain’t one of those.”
Turing sipped from his mug while maneuvering to stand beside his Captain.
“Technically it’s not really a tree, it’s foamed vegelite, suspended on a cellulose frame. I’ve been growing it for the past few weeks, when the lighting switches to darktime, it fluoresces.”
Dara had never thought much of the religious holidays, nor had her crew, and that Turing had put such apparent effort into this thing surprised her.
“Why in the weld would we start celebrating Christmas now? We left the jolly fatman behind decades ago with everything else.” The smell of whatever Turing was drinking was starting to itch a part of her memory long unvisited.
“We have children on the ship for the first time this year, and it will be nice for them to have something to look forward to each year. I mean, we still acknowledge birthdays, and they’re just marking arbitrary revolutions around a star that we’ve been running away from for ever, so what’s the difference?”
He had a point, and Dara had to admit his handiwork was impressive.
“What in the weld is that smell, is that –”
“Coffee. Yes it is.” Turing cut her off, handing her a mug of her own. “I’ve been growing synthetic beans for months, I think I’ve finally got it right.”
She held the mug under her nose, breathing deeply of the aroma and letting it unlock that part of her brain she’d put in a box so many years ago. Morning rituals, sunrises over the bay.
“Merry Christmas Captain.” Turing stared past the tree and out into the expanse of space beyond, flecks of light slowly receding.
The Captain stood beside him silently for a while, savouring the coffee and admiring the view. Maybe somethings shouldn’t be left behind after all.
“Merry Christmas Turing,” she spoke finally, “Merry Christmas.”
by submission | Dec 24, 2015 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
The ship skimmed the border between light and darkness as it had for millennia. Mankind found it by accident. In their quest to explore space, they had finally traversed the distance between Earth and Mercury. The ship had been so small that it was never noticed as it circled the planet along the terminator between its light and dark side. But, as the first manned vessel approached the planet, they used Mercury’s shadow to block out the brilliance of the sun. And, since they were now much closer than any telescope could possibly see, their instruments detected the ship in orbit.
Commander Ricci ordered his ship into a parallel orbit with the alien ship. As they pulled alongside, everyone marveled at the strangely beautiful vessel.
“Where do you think it came from?” Jeffreys, the pilot, asked.
“I don’t know,” Commander Ricci said.
“It’s been there a long time,” Cyrus Esch, the navigator, said. “Over two thousand years, from what I can tell.”
They looked at each other.
“We have to board it,” Commander Ricci said.
They talked about it awhile. Esch and Jeffreys tried to protest, but they knew that they had to board the alien ship. It was, after all, their purpose for going out into space—to explore. Jeffreys and Esch had different viewpoints as to why, but they had both become astronauts for precisely the same reason. They wanted to know what was out there. Esch’s Midwest religious upbringing had prompted him to see what God had created. Jeffreys, the atheist amongst them, simply wanted to know why the universe existed.
“We’ll draw straws to see who goes onboard,” Ricci said. He quickly took three pieces of wire and cut them to three different lengths and held them in his closed fist. Jeffreys drew the short wire.
He looked nervously at his comrades.
“We’ll be in constant touch with you,” Ricci said. “You’ll be all right.”
Unfortunately, that did not dissuade his fears.
##
Thirty minutes later, they docked with the alien ship. The universal docking clamp held firm to what they believed was an access hatch to the ship.
Jeffreys fitted himself into a spacesuit and stood by the airlock. Even in the cool climate controlled suit, he was sweating.
“What do you think is out there?” he asked Esch.
Esch adjusted Jeffreys’ oxygen controls. “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “But, someone or something left that ship here for us to find. There must be a purpose to it.”
“What if the purpose is to destroy us?” Jeffreys asked.
“I can’t believe that God would allow that,” Esch told him. “Besides, as old as that thing is, you’d think it could have destroyed us long ago.”
Ricci walked into the airlock bay. “You ready?”
Jeffreys nodded. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Good.”
Ricci punched the button to the airlock and it opened. Jeffreys reluctantly stepped inside. As the door sealed, Jeffreys stared out at them, afraid.
Then, he turned and opened the airlock. He stepped through and touched the hatch to the alien ship. It glowed where his hand made contact and slid open.
##
Jeffreys rushed through the airlock. The panic on his face told Esch and Ricci everything they needed to know.
“Destroy it!” Jeffreys screamed as the airlock pressurized. He unclamped his helmet and shouted, “Destroy it!” again.
Esch looked at Ricci. “What happened?” Esch asked through the comm.
“Jesus…he’s …,” Jeffreys said, but he never finished the sentence. For, in the next instant, the alien spaceship exploded and took them along with it.
