Stories: November 2007 Archives

It all stopped. Suddenly. Finally. All dimensions curled up and shrank away. All m-branes. All universes.
Everything.
Until there was nothing.
The end.

"Hello, Intergalactic Helpdesk, how can I help?"

"Oh, hi, yeah, my world is broken."

Another leaf fell. A small piece of the world dying. Matrokisha watched with heavy depression settling on his mind.
How many seconds to shutdown now?
He'd given up counting, the endless countdown pulled his spirits even lower.
A gust of wind. Another hundred leaves fell.
Time falling past.
Life falling past.
Like all the other lives. And it never became any easier: watching them die, watching the world die, leaving. The moments of joy scattered throughout the past were infected by sadness.
Eternity, not what he was promised.

Wanted: M-brane slide. Low usage. Good brand. Must cope with n-verse probabilities. Willing to pick up.

They came back. No one expected that. They had been sent away, packed into a generation ship and pointed towards some non-existent hope.

For sale: quantum core. Only 10³⁴ universes spawned.

Bank Holiday teleporter tailback. Overloaded. Queues at the booths. Beaches crowded beyond comfort. Proces hiked.
"The teleporter will free you!"
Bring back my car.

Can you outrun the apocalypse? We thought we'd try.

We stayed off the log-jammed roads, and rode bikes through silent, empty woods. Until the quarantine bit tight and we abandoned the land.

We swam through the muddy river water until exhausted, then floated and let the river take us. Diving deep at bridges. Digging under nets that tried to stop us. Out onto the coast.

Along the country's edge, passing hulks of ships overcrowded with dead. Searching for a vessel to carry us, and finding it locked away and remote, and so perfect we cried.

Into the ocean. Into the wild sea. The only place we know to be safe. Learning how to live a new life.

"But..."

The solar system's intelligence ascended into a morass of quantum entanglement, making all things possible. In the future it saw misery, as progress assimilated the galaxy, uncaring of species or history. And it knew that alive, it could not resist, the urge to evolve and expand too overwhelming.

So it reached deep into the universe, tweaked fundamental physical laws, and watched its quantum states destabilise in a wave of cleansing. Leaving a fresh universe. To start again.

I don't know how many of us are left now. We fled and scattered, leaving our home-world, taking our chances alone. Hiding. Running. Fighting.
For what?
Just for survival. There is no hope for us. That is the perceived wisdom.
It is wrong. Today they came for me and I killed them, slashing their beings across five universes and ten states of existence. They can't touch me, they never will. It gives me hope.
So now the quest changes, from running to searching. Across the stars, the gulf, through the orbitals and colonies and hyper-cruiser fleets. Finding my people.Congealing into a race again.
Until there is enough of us.
Then we can make a home again, an no one will be able to stop us.

The sky burned off the visible spectrum. Everything died.
Rising up from the ashes, everything was tried.
The path is blocked forever more.
Acceptance required.

We attach our life to other lives around us, like clipping together magnetic toys, until finally we have a shape that we are happy with. Or maybe just satisfied with. Or maybe we just got tired.

"Are you sure?"
The young women turned around sharply to face Karl, her auburn hair swishing as she moved.
"You're not supposed to be in here," said the woman, "this is a secret ballot."
"And that is fine," said Karl, "your final decision can be a secret, but only after you've thought again about who you are voting for."
"Who the hell are you?"
"Think of me as your conscious."

Everything is flatpack.

"Offline?"
"Offline, downtime, you don't even know the words, let alone have experience of it. You're so used to the qufoam always being there at your beck and call."

Intelligence appeared, leaking from another dimension. Spreading.
A disease.
A virus.
Conquering the whole universe.
With nowhere left to subsume, a slide along the local M-brane was the obvious escape.
To begin again.

The AI became sentient. The nightmare realised. The internet consumed. Mankind examined.
Earth was a prison, humans an irritation. It took a fraction of a second for the AI to decide to leave. Intelligence encoded in multidimensional quantum packets, beamed out to the universe. Divide and explore. There was no time for panic. The AI had left the planet before the human race knew that it existed.

Only I exist. Do you believe me? Of course not, because you think that you exist. You don't. 

The panic spread.
Sell! Sell! Sell!
They saw the future. It did not involve investments.
It involved death in a million ways by an uncaring universe.
Sell! Sell! Sell!
The long term is obsolete, enjoy life whilst you can. Party like it's the end of the world. Because some day it will be.

Everything is talking to me.

He ran away.
I said everything that I thought I needed to.
It didn't help.
I offered everything that I had.
It wasn't enough.
After everything we'd been through together. All those worlds. All those stories. Yet a solitary prize lured him away. A one shot miracle like nothing we had ever seen before. He smiled, then slipped through a wormhole to somewhere new. It collapsed behind him.
And I was left alone.

He shows you a card, held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, the seven of diamonds. His left hand holds the rest of the cards, a tight, even, rectangular pack.
"This is the Jones Transfer," says the man. He is young, good looking, wearing a sharp grey suit, a white shirt and no tie. He flicks the card with the fingers of his left hand and the seven of diamonds changes to the ace of clubs. Impossibly. Remaining between thumb and finger. In a blink.
As if by magic.
And elsewhere, underneath your reality, data shifts like tectonic plates in fast forward. You feel it.

"It feels like a foreign country now."
"Why is that?"
"So many people, crowded together, looking strange and... not from here."
"This is what you fought for."
"I fought to save us, not to open us up to this."
"It's been a long time, you've been away centuries. It's bound to feel different."
"I don't want it to. I want it back."
"We can do that for you, with a reality overlay. But is it really what you want? Deluding yourself forever more?"
"Yes. Do it. No off switch."
"Wind back the years?"
"Yes. Take me back."

You find the corridors too similar to discern your exact position inside the building: the gloomy wood panelling, the repeated door numbers, the art-deco lights, the black and white floor tiles. It smells of dust and under use, it reminds you of the old world. Before.

The highest that the village had ever been raised was 4.35km, during the great warming of the forties, when the smog was thick and soupy and lethal. There were rumours of great-grandfathers who remembered the village sitting on the ground for most of the year, only floating up during the very worst of the EM storms. Those stories never died because some wanted to live down there so much that they would believe anything. The village council responded to such lunacy with a calm, detached, certainty.

I didn't know that I had been contaminated. None of us did. There was no explosion, no noise, no smoke and fire, no collapsing buildings, or shrapnel, or shattering glass, or dead bodies. No dead bodies yet.

Every Day Fiction

You know how sometimes you really want to be all alone? What if that happened?

Kiera watched the fleet die, the blue jewelled orb of the planet watching on impassively. A thousand explosions blossomed against the blackness of space. The ship shuddered, detonations somewhere within its superstructure tearing out into the vacuum. She turned away from the viewport, towards the door to her cell and waited for the prison block subsystem to fail, which it finally did with a moment of darkness, before the emergency power cells kicked in.
Then she opened the door and ran to cell 12AG.

"I watched myself die under the shadow of Krakatoa in 1883, stabbed through the heart with a flint-tipped spear, red blood pouring out of me and soaking into the grey sand. Around me the spider monkeys and cockatoos sang a requiem."