Stories tagged “science fiction”
-
Fishers of Men
It wasn’t our fault. I kept telling myself that. We were the ones who’d been oppressed. We weren’t the wastrels. But the lady’s picture stayed with me, telling me otherwise. In my mind I could see her eyes looking down at me wit...
-
Browser History
“Grandpa,” asked Cindy, “how come I can’t browse you further back than your wedding?” He put his hand on Cindy’s shoulder and looked down at her Tactive. “That was the day I decided to start recording.” S...
-
Darkest Night
It is night and the planes have done their work. I can feel the power, floating in the currents of the air, lying on every surface. Doubtless the enemy is wondering what has happened, why there is grey dust everywhere. They’ve been on edge for da...
-
Heaven's Applause
The missile arced into the cloud banks sharply. Shedding Machs like water, it slowed from its cruise speed to strike velocity. The satellite linkup was still (thankfully) live and satellite visuals picked out the target and the missile throughout the E...
-
War Machine
The operation of a HyperSpace Advancements Military firearm starts with the simple motion of a trigger backwards into the gun casing. The gun then requests confirmation from the grip, accessing the smart glove holding the weapon. When received, a fibre...
-
Cartographer
Our little ship coasted on the rough turbulence around Yvonne’s Delight. We were five days out from the Hydras, running a shipload of tetrahydride to Phis Minor. The pilots up front yelled incomprehensible vectors at each other, every now and the...
-
Thor's Hammer
They say that weapons forged in the heat of the battle can never be used outside the glory and the death of the fight. They say that weapons used in battle will never be content to rest idle. They say… I cared not what they said. My enemies near ...
-
Unforeseen Consequences
“The saboteur… my God, I’m so stupid. It was… I was… oh -” Security Chief Furlough grabbed me firmly by the shoulders and shook me. “Snap out of it, carto. Where is he?” “Must’ve hopped aboard...
-
Aftermath
Consciousness returned slowly — along with a fierce pounding in my head. “Take it easy, carto.” I opened my eyes to see Captain Harrigan standing over me. I started to sit up, but he put a hand against my chest and pushed me back down...
-
Upgraded
I was rolling code – lots of it – and faster than I ever had before. Whole paragraphs of algorithms sprang fully formed across my vision. I was composing symphonies of solutions and feeding them into the system at a blistering pace. But som...
-
Not Quite Right
The captain wanted answers that I couldn’t provide. “They told me you cartos were weird, that you had to be inherently unstable to do your job, but this… this is fucking off-the-charts weird. Tell me what the hell is going on, carto, ...
-
Theories
Harrigan had me checked over again. Visual inspection this time, given the incident with the nanosurgeon. Whatever else it had done, the nanosurgeon had fully optimized the implants. It wasn’t a weld; it was better. They released me with a provis...
-
Binary and Ternary
The code kept coming, line after line after line, numbering in the millions, then the billions, and kept on coming, a never-ending flow of programmatic creation the purpose of which was still unclear. Sometime in the past, several million lines ago, th...
-
Next Moves
The lights on the command deck were off, with just our stations providing illumination. It was all we had power for. Vec broke the silence. “So. What now?” Valid question. Once the code had stopped generating, it had begun a cascading compr...
-
Into the Unknown
Humanity had been using the jump logic for almost seven decades, but since the initial, incredible discovery of the code that could bend spacetime, there had been no other notable progress. Cartographers now learned the same rules as they did sixty-odd...
-
Route to Nowhere
A request. After the rather hostile takeover of our shipboard systems and my own mind, a request from the overseer for instructions seemed almost laughable. I swiveled my chair and let my fingers do what came most naturally to them. “What’s...
-
Streamlined
Our blocky little ship spun around and pointed nose-first into the jump zero, ignoring the precious radiation shield plate at the back of the ship. There was no radiation spike as our delicate prow entered the zero, however, and the external sensors no...
-
The Unknown
We drifted. When your entire frame of reference has been removed, there’s little else you can do. There were no stars, no constellations, no dust clouds, nothing visible anywhere that could give us an idea of where we were. It was dark in every d...
-
Altered Heading
Like a subterranean sea creature, we edged towards the light. The properties of this jumpspace appeared to be similar to our own existential plane, but there was no point in risking repercussions from using high-radiation, high-intensity thrust. The li...
-
Symbols
We sat in near-silence for a long moment, staring and trying to make sense of the symbols. “They look… familiar somehow,” was my first thought. “Like I’ve seen them before, but I’m sure I haven’t.” Harrig...
-
Deadline
“The last backup battery just died.” The flight director finally laid his head on his desk. “So, that’s it, then? The world’s done for, and we have no way to bring our probe back.” If only everyone could know just ho...
-
Trial and Error
Immediately the flow and ebb of the computer system, familiar to me as a life-long friend, pulled me into its embrace. I wrote a core shell, extended it to transmission preparation, added flange modules and self-regulating failure-coherence blocks. But...
-
Final Frontier
The restraints were tight against my chest almost to the point of restricting my breathing, but they were necessary. I flicked my way through banks of switches, checking the giant rocket over and over again. No-one had ever done this before; everything...
-
NavComm
I peeled myself out of that reality and sat rubbing my temples for a moment. It took that long for me to realize that everyone was looking at me. “Well?” Harrigan demanded. I sighed. “It’s… complicated,” I replied. &...
-
Top-Level Logic
“This must be the logical next step up in terms of cartographical thinking. I can only assume the same race that we reverse-engineered the jump turbine technology and the overseer from made the same discovery. Our computer recognises them because...