Science Fiction
What will tomorrow bring? Utopia, dystopia, a muddled, uncertain middle ground. There's room here for near future semi-realistic explanations and beyond the beyond post-singularity nightmares. Let's see what develops.
"Which is more important, books or people?"
The question was posed in jest, but over the years I had come increasingly to believe that if the librarian's veins were opened, ink would flow from them rather than blood. Even so, I did not expect him to answer as he did.
Pay attention. This may be my only chance to communicate with you. Read carefully, and think--really think--about what I'm saying. Please.
You believe you are in front of a primitive computer, reading text on its screen. You believe you are safe at home or at work, and likely in good health. You believe the year is 2011 AD.
As Hevsen tied the new ladder together outside the workshop, his knot slipped on one rung, sliding over a tiny bulge in the wood. No big deal. No one who'd grown up in that city of ladders and clock towers would ever fall because of a loose rung. He finished the rest and secured it to the workshop doorway with a solid modified double hitch that wouldn't slip in a hundred years. Then he climbed down to his waiting spider, fired up the engine, and drove down the city's webs to enjoy the evening.
Six months later, his uncle Shaln was climbing with a box of bolts and gears and other hardware balanced in his arms. When the rung slipped, he lost control of the box, only righting it after a single nut had slid out the box's handle and fallen into the city below. Shaln himself had been in no danger. He quickly forgot the episode as he brought the hardware inside and set to work on his latest commission, a palm-sized butterfly that beat its wings in time to the ticking of the second hand in its tiny clock.
After two days of space travel, I briefly considered suicide. It seemed the only way to save myself from Kael's crappy rations. The crappiest kind, the white pouches with token descriptions like "MEAT" and "VEGETABLE" stamped across the front in bold, black letters.
"Almost there," Kael said as he looked out into space from the driver's seat. I could hear the excitement in my brother's voice, see it in his eyes that danced as if the pinprick stars and sweeping darkness he saw now was unlike any other patch of infinite space.
Clarke stood on the dunes, watching the party coalesce on the beach. Over the horizon, and the grey swell of the ocean, lay Africa. Beyond their borders. Outside. Lands of suffering. A knot formed in his stomach just at the thought. He shifted his focus, tried to relax, and scanned the crowd for the familiar gait of his brother, longing to catch a glimpse of his face, but from a distance he couldn't quite resolve the features of the crowd. The wind blew hard off the sea, flicking his hair around his eyes and making the task more difficult. The exhibits, consumer products whose trails constituted art, stood on pedestals on the beach, the crowds floating between them.
"You've not really entered into the spirit of things, have you?"
"I'm afraid there's something wrong with your daughter, Your Lordship," the physician said.
The lord's chair squeaked as he shifted. He cleared his throat and ground his teeth together. He didn't ask the obvious. He didn't say anything at all.
The first thing you need to understand about gel, is that there is no reason, at this point, to assume it is in any way harmful. Certainly, if you were to slip in it, fall and injure yourself, that would be bad. So tread carefully. Avoid stepping in gel especially; it is the slipperiest new substance. Gloop is a bit thicker, it has a sort of syrupy, marshmallow-like texture, at least as compared to gloop, but nevertheless--tread carefully. The same applies to gunk, gack, gludge, fludge, and frunk, but we do not have space here to address these relatively rarer varieties of new substance. If necessary, a supplement to this document will be created later. The present document will, from this point forward, confine itself to gel and gloop.
Grass grows under gel, and while it does die under gloop, this is most likely due to gloop's property of opacity, which ranges from roughly 88-94%. Grass, due to the nature of photosynthesis, requires sunlight, which it cannot get when covered in gloop.
Most of Noma's study friends were growing their own boys with the new Vampire, Werewolf, or Wizard Seed kits. Her best friend Celestine invited Noma to the grow room in her family compartment to take a look at a half-grown vamp.
"I specified the golden hair and dark eyebrows," Celeste said, "but he opened his eyes for the first time yesterday, and they're this weird greenish color. I ordered sky blue. Skies were blue, right?"
Dry air settled quietly over an open expanse of sand, rustling furls and eddies into small, invisible tide pools. Some swept against the base of the Elevator, perhaps a bit hopelessly. The Elevator did not mind, for it had stood, eclipsing an ever-moving band of desert, for centuries, and would continue to do so for centuries more. Its paint, once so proudly kept, was weathered. Dull. Rust had found a permanent home in the neglected, resilient metal.
The age of the Elevator did not ward curiosity. Dozens of lucky and wealthy were brought to its shadow every year, eager, anxious. Some thought they knew what to expect, others arrived readily content. And what they faced no one, save few who had ridden the Elevator, could tell.
Joshua Hemmings and Beverly Amherst climbed up and up and up. They had spent weeks devising a plan to avoid the elders who would have kept them from venturing to the surface. In a thousand years, a lot could change. Whatever catastrophes had occurred in the past would have healed by now, the surface returning to its pristine, life-filled abundance. A new Eden awaited.
Their entire population had moved underground over a thousand years before. Thanks to a steady degradation of their technological assets, due to a lack of production facilities and spare parts, it only took a few hundred years to forget their past, forget the surface, and forget where they came from. All they had were the few books they discovered in their library, a rare resource in light of the digitization of all knowledge into a wonderfully handy and portable, but ultimately irreparable, technology.
As a responsible parent, you've chosen only a safe, beneficial slate of genetic modifications for your children. But once they go away to school, they face a bewildering variety of changes in their friends and classmates. How will you know which of their peers are acceptable for them to have visiting your home? Here are eight ways for you to help them tell a safe modification from a dangerous mutation.
1. Get to know the parents. Your children's friends' parents are your best source of information, even if they don't realize it. Do they brag about little Lindy or seem unusually invested in Stevie's accomplishments? It's exactly that sort of parent who will cross the line when it's time to make selections at the genebank. Does their background seem a lot different from the other parents in your area? There may be a reason why something seems off to you. Trust your instincts!
Myles strolled over to my table in the lunchroom and said he'd die for me, just like that. I didn't know how to answer him or if I'd heard right.
"What did you say?" I had to crane my neck back to meet his eyes. All these months we'd worked in the same carbon-fiber recycling plant and I'd never noticed how tall he was. I'm not sure I'd paid much attention to him at all until that moment.
On Centuri Primus, it's said one has only to set foot onto the planet to feel God's embrace. Ask a question, get His answer, think of a friend you once knew and you're talking to, feeling, their presence. Other planets have different protocols, but each has been linked into the Wholeness. Except Earth. The universe is alight with God's glow, yet we remain in a darkness of our own stubborn design.
I live in the shantytown surrounding the space elevator warehouse complex, a hundred thousand people fighting tooth and nail for day labor, shelter, food, and water. Nearly all of us want to leave. You can see the longing in our eyes when a car ascends through the elevator tower. You can hear it in the sudden hush.
Sophomore Megan Carroll marched into my office five minutes early. She carried a bulging backpack that threatened to consume her slight frame but that she pretended wasn't heavy. Her shoulder-length blond hair was perfect; she somehow escaped having the bedraggled look everyone else had when they came in from this nasty New England cold.
And here I was, the school counselor, with a beehive of nerves in my stomach.
The connoisseurs milled and mingled from one end of the long, thin room to the other. There were seven different tasting stations set just far enough apart to allow conversation between tables. A nostalgic, almost retrospective feel had been chosen for the night's theme: soft Plutonian cotton covered the walls and examples of the local system's ancient and primitive arts were strategically positioned to take attention from the servers as they poured. Here a rudimentary portrait with smears of actual pigment long dried atop a canvas square; there an open leather binding, its fan of pages each stained with line after line of tiny archaic symbol; even a maze of brass tubing, bent into the most intricate and seemingly unnecessary swirl of what had once been considered a sort of music maker.
The crowd, of course, many of whom found themselves in the backwoods of the Old Earth system for the first time, adored these authentic details. Anything to remind them of their superiority, whether over their past or present peers, was to be considered in the most suitable taste.
Hers was a life of spoons. Their size, their shape, their ability to measure sugar. Maela lined them up in neat rows in front of the plain white ceramic cereal bowl filled with plain white porridge.
Indecision tugged at her like the coy beckoning of a distant lover's finger, tempting her towards one spoon over the other. The one with the deep oval head would scoop up great gobs of breakfast, but wasn't very good for scraping out the thin white lines that formed as the scraps of mush cooled and hardened. The one with the steep slope would help with that, but everything seeped over and dripped out of the shallow sides. And she could only choose one. One every morning. That was her promise to herself.
Future Societies
What will tomorrow bring? Utopia, dystopia, a muddled, uncertain middle ground. There's room here for near future semi-realistic explanations and beyond the beyond post-singularity nightmares. Let's see what develops.
by Edoardo Albert
Published on Aug 5, 2011
by Will Arthur
Published on May 30, 2011
by Daniel Ausema
Published on Jun 27, 2011
by Alec Austin
T minus three and a half years:
In two weeks, Karl Hoestler will graduate from the Akademie Der Zeitreise with an Untersturmführer's commission in Temporal Operations. Karl does not know this yet. At the moment, he stands fidgeting in the chill white hall outside a classroom door, listening to the low voices of his thesis examiners percolate through the gap separating the door from the hallway's polymer tiles. He is afraid of what they might be saying about him and the work he has done, but when they go silent, his fear only intensifies. In that silence, it seems that his future has been determined, its pattern fixed and written in time by the old men in the classroom, these instructors to whom he has entrusted his fate.
Published on Sep 23, 2011
by James Beamon
Published on Jan 5, 2012
by James Bloomer
Published on Aug 2, 2011
by Sue Burke
The man had deep worry lines between his eyebrows, although he was only in his twenties. When he woke up after a restless sleep, he immediately looked at the window. Mid-afternoon sun shone through cracks in the blinds. He checked his bedside clock: 5:51 a.m.
The clocks were still wrong . . . and in sudden panic, he reached out for his wife. Yes, she was still there, still safe beside him, or as safe as she could be. She lay with her back toward him, her shoulders bare and beautiful.
Published on Oct 13, 2010
by Katie H Camp
Published on Feb 21, 2011
by Michael Canfield
Published on May 10, 2011
by Ronald D Ferguson
I clenched my eyelids, and my memories trickled in.
John Ashley. Twenty-three years old. Terminal cancer. Crying parents. Cryogenic storage. The first cold moment. The last brief hope: they would awaken me when they had the cure.
Published on Jun 21, 2011
by Ralph Gamelli
Annette, who had grown more upset with each occurrence, looked at him solemnly across the table. You called out my name again, she thought to him, the coffee cup in her hand trembling perceptibly.
Who should I call for help if not my own wife? he thought back.
Published on Sep 22, 2010
by Michael Guillebeau
“Three thousand habitable planets in the known universe, and I'm stuck on the only one without solitude,” Ricky the kidder said.
Published on Oct 6, 2010
by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Published on Feb 14, 2011
by Erik M Igoe
Published on Apr 15, 2011
by Thomas F Jolly
Published on Mar 3, 2011
by Marissa Kristine Lingen
Published on Sep 7, 2011
by Jaime Lee Moyer
Published on Dec 31, 2010
by Stephen V. Ramey
Published on Jun 20, 2011
by Robert Lowell Russell
***This story features nudity and violence. It is intended for adult readers.***
Published on Jul 28, 2011
by Mark Sarney
Published on Apr 18, 2011
by Marge Simon
In an overcrowded world, a high bar on reproduction was enforced. The odds were high, but after seven years came notification that we would be allowed one hemaphrodite offspring.
Published on Oct 14, 2010
by Derek Ivan Webster
Published on Jan 27, 2012
by Joseph Zieja
Published on Aug 15, 2011
