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The Back of Stars by Jake Teeny

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THE BACK OF STARS

Jake Teeny

Peter once read a very convincing article by a very prominent physicist explaining that we live within one universe of an infinity of universes.

This fact both elated and depressed him.

First, if there were an infinite number of universes, this meant that in a handful of them Peter had climbed Mt. Everest, swam in underwater caves, drank thousand-dollar bottles of red wine and actually tasted the difference.

But having an infinite number of universes also meant that she existed. The woman with long, dark hair and the daisy yellow dress.

He would see her in his dreams sometimes, always from the third person. Peter watching himself be happy with her.

And if those infinite universes existed (truly infinite), that meant every time Peter dreamed of Peter being with her, one version of himself actually was.

Such an odd sensation to be envious of oneself, Peter found.

So without concern, he signed as many checks as needed, hiring gray-bearded gurus to assist him in the way of controlling dreams. But even after he learned to shift the colors of his slumber, summon her from anywhere, Peter found it not enough.

To know that she was somewhere but wasn’t actually here…

So Peter took what spare money he had left and hired a police sketch artist to draw her face for him. Then he hired a private investigator to see if he could find her. Peter knew that although he himself existed in this world, it didn’t mean she existed here somewhere, too.

But one day, Peter’s detective found her.

With the last of his money, he flew across the country to see her. And when he knocked on her door, she answered.

Just like his dreams. The hair. The dress. The love, the love, the love. Like all of Peter’s infinite selves exhaled at the same time. Moments later, however, a young child stepped forward and asked his mother who the stranger at the door was.

But the woman said nothing. Just gave a quiet smile. The kind for when you want to say a thousand words but can only manage two.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Her voice was different somehow. Lighter.

“It’s too nice a day to be sorry,” he said.

The son got bored and left the two of them to stand there like that, gazing across universes at the single star shared between them.

“In another place…,” she said.

“Another place,” he said.

“But somewhere,” she said.

“Always somewhere,” he said.

He waved farewell, then, and walked slowly away from the house. At the last moment, though, he couldn’t help turning back to look at her. But the door was already closed. The day was already late. And Peter simply couldn’t afford to catch a different flight home.

Food for Thought

Many physicists do in fact believe there are an infinite number of universes in existence. And if there really is an infinite amount, any reality you can imagine exists somewhere for some version of yourself. If this is true, would it devalue the meaning and significance in your own life? Or would it expand your life to greater proportions? This in turn raises a philosophical consideration related to relativism. That is, if in fact it could be unequivocally proven that there were these infinite universes, would it even matter so long as you couldn’t interact with them? Beyond the fun thought experiment, it forces you to consider what it means to exist outside of one’s perception of it.

About the Author

Jake Teeny is currently pursuing his PhD at Ohio State University, where he studies the psychology of persuasion. Be careful. Continuing to read this may convince you to check out his website, www.jaketeeny.com, where he has more short stories and life-transformative thoughts on psychophilosophy. Or don’t. You’re free to do whatever you want…

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Magnets of the Soul by J. Robert Dewitt

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MAGNETS OF THE SOUL

J. Robert Dewitt

The nurses open the blinds and tell the pilots it is time to wake up. They roll the carts into the ward and hand out breakfast trays with mashed peas and eggs and fruit all sectioned into shapes. Max sits in his bed and stares at the shapes. He tries to murmur words like circle and triangle, but the words will not come out. He cannot make the smoke.

The students stand in front of Max’s bed clutching clipboards to their chests as the doctor explains. The pilots immersed too far, he says. Their minds entangled with their ship’s computers. He lists off words in his hand and steams out terms like electromagnetic aphasia and backfire inanition and the students scratch down the puffs of jargon with their pens. Max tries to grab the words floating from the doctor’s mouth, but they waft from his hand and fade.

They were all once great pilots, like Trou, who every morning rolls his wheelchair to the lounge windows where he watches the birds on the trees. He sits all day in the sunlight, his shadow revolving around him like a sundial. There is Viktor too, the giant Russian who cannot stop laughing. He strips off his gown when the nurses are not looking and runs naked through the halls, billowing plumes of laughter until the nurses pin him to the ground and stick needles in his butt.

When it is time to sleep, the nurses shut off the lights. In the dark, the pilots whimper in their beds like dogs. Max whimpers with them, dreaming of his life before he could not see the words.

SciPhiSeperator

He had come up from Earth on a two-day shuttle to work as a pilot. The move had been hard. His wife, Mary, was back on Earth, working alone, and they had just bought a home together.

“It’s just for a little while,” he promised her in the bedroom before he left. “You know the only way I can be a pilot here is if I gain some wings up there in space. They won’t even look at my resume without some kind of flying experience, and all the starter spots on earth are filled. Plus we need the extra money.”

“I know,” she said, holding his hand. “I just wish you didn’t have to leave.”

“I’ll be back soon.” He smiled. “It’s space. The new frontier. I bet I’ll get a pilot position in no time.”

But when he arrived at Langrage Station 1, everything was taken: the space cruisers, the garbage junkers, the mining shuttles, even the prison transports to the Phobos labor camps. All he could find was a position at a shuttle servicer on the dark side of the moon at Langrage Station 2, a cheap place called Super Space Repairs where some of the smaller, mining shuttles tuned up before their jump to the belt.

His manager was a short, fat man named Gordo who smoked cigars and swore constantly. He gave Max a repair ship from their hangar, an old pre-war type with rusty thrusters and a couple of busted mechanical arms. It was hard getting used to the old controls, but soon enough Max was out fixing shuttles, thrusting a little this way, thrusting a little that way, mending tile after tile on the mile-long mining ships.

Months passed. Applications went out. Max received no offers.

“Please come home,” Mary said over the phone. “Being with you in the virtual web is not enough. I need you here.”

“Just a little more time,” Max said. “Any day I’ll nab a good position, and then I’ll come back, and we’ll be together. We just need to make it through this rough patch. Just think of it as an investment. That’s all it is. An investment.”

Months became more months. Repairs increased. Soon Max and the other pilots could not keep up with the demands of the shuttles.

“We can do better,” Gordo said one day. “We’re putting a new face on this place. Out with the old, in with the new.”

The next day the old ships were gone from the hangar. In their spots stood new repair ships, shiny and sleek.

“These babies don’t need thrusters,” Gordo grinned at Max and the other pilots standing in the hangar. He slapped one of the new ships on its side, the curved surface so polished it reflected his body and warped it into a man even shorter and fatter than himself like a mirror in a funhouse.

“They’re new fangled, these puppies,” he said. “They move using these clouds of electromagnetic particles we got pumping out from our probes floating about. You get that through your heads? The whole things magnetized, so all those electromagnetic pulses are tugging on you here and there and all over. You know, like strings on one of them wooden puppets.”

Gordo removed his cigar from his teeth and blew a milky puff of smoke that splashed across the surface of the metal. He laughed.

“Now get out there and make me some god, damn money.”

The speed of the new ships was extreme, so extreme that Max threw up in the first minute of flight. He could go fast. Too fast. He could travel at 200 miles per hour and come to a dead stop in one second flat. He could zip up and down and back and forth and zigzag and spin. If a refinery shuttle needed service three miles away, all he had to do was attract his ship’s magnetic hull to the quadrant’s regional particles and away his ship went, flying across space, the electromagnetic lines of attraction pulling him at top speed. When he finally docked back at the hangar that night, his stomach felt like a punching bag, and he threw up again in his bunk.

Soon the flying became second nature. Every day the shuttles docked inside the clouds and Max and the pilots fluttered and flashed like wasps about them, their ships’ robotic fingers thin as needles, tinkering with hulls by minute attractions and repulsions, precise and meticulous. But still it was not fast enough.

“We need to go faster,” Gordo said. So they put great computers in the ships, and the pilots wired their brains into the processors. With the mere flash of a thought, they moved their robotic arms and zipped across space.

“We need to be more efficient,” Gordo said. So they connected their minds together via the cloud’s electromagnetic pulses and moved as a swarm about the shuttles. Their thoughts and feelings wove in one great web, each aware of the other, all working as an organic team.

“We need to work more,” Gordo said. So Max went out into the cloud day after day, working until his mind was a daze, and he could barely open his eyes. Then one day he came back to the hangar, and he could not speak.

He was not the only one. Many had felt it. The doctors all had their theories about its cause. Perhaps the pilot was flying in the sphere during the passing of a solar flare, and the electric patterns of his mind mixed with the electric patterns of the sun. Or perhaps the pilot was installing his last catalyst rod, and a small, magnetic meteor flashed through, disrupting the particles. Or perhaps it was something internal that started slowly, nothing saliently wrong at first, a pilot returning to the hangar after his nth repair day, feeling fine, feeling his nth relief from work, eating his nth dinner, returning to his room and scratching out the nth date on his calendar and then waking up the next morning completely changed.

The pilots had all kinds of words for these backfires: frizzled, fried, solared, pancaked, powzzled. They had bought insurance for these. Gordo had warned them of the risks when they entered those clouds of magnetic particles. But the money was good, and everyone knew that speed came with its sacrifices. At least being frizzled or fried was not the worst thing that could happen. At least they did not make a quadrant mistake like Chez and smash into a mining shuttle at 400 miles per hour. They had a word for that. They call that dead. Speed came with its sacrifices.

“Gordo tells me you’ve stopped talking,” the service station doctor said to Max. He shined a bright light into Max’s eyes. Max was silent. He could see words puffing from the doctor’s mouth, but he could not understand them.

Mary visited the next week. When she walked through the medical bay door, he did not stand to greet her. She ran to him and clasped his face in both her hands and cried. He thought he knew who she was, but he could not remember her name. She said the name Mary out loud, and he saw it pass from her lips in a smoky stream, beautiful and smooth like silk. He loved it. He wanted to feel it between his fingers. But when he reached out for it, it vanished, and he could not find it again.

They brought him down to Earth to a white building where a nice woman in a white skirt wheeled him into a white room with white tiles where, standing beside a group of white-clothed young men and women, a doctor wearing a long white coat gazed at Max and smiled and said:

“We have a special guest today, students. This is Mr. Maxwell Harris. He has what we call electromagnetic aphasia. We’re going to be studying him this month, so take notes.”

They did many tests. They looked at his brain with lights and scanners and probes. The doctor pointed to parts and trails of pontificated smoke passed from his lips and whirled around the students. Sometimes the smoke was long and complex. Other times it was terse and short. Then one day he said something that Max had never seen before, and when it flowed from his mouth, it moved like the smoke from an extinguished candle. Ribbon-like and smooth.

“Do any of you know who Thales is?” the doctor asked. “Thales, you know, the first scientist and first philosopher?”

None of the students raised their hands. The doctor smiled.

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is a fragment of Thales that I want to share with you. I think it will help you all understand the pathology here of Mr. Harris. The fragment goes something like this: The magnetic stone has a soul because it sets the iron in motion. That’s it. That’s the whole fragment. Now what do you all make of that?”

The students stood quietly. A few looked at each other in confused glances. None of them understood the significance.

“Now I know what a lot of you are thinking. You might be thinking, geez, what an anachronistic way to think, right? Of course magnets don’t move iron through souls. They move iron by electrons and pulses and quantum forces. But I want you to think for a minute. Ask yourself. What are these electrons and pulses made from? Quarks you might say. And what makes those? String theory you might say. And those? At some point you are as clueless as you began. Shortly you realize that the mystery of how the magnet sets the iron in motion is just as mysterious to us as it was to Thales.”

A student raised his hand.

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Earth Awakens, Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston, Reviewed by Mike Phelps

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Earth Awakens, Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston

Mike Phelps

Earth Awakens is the finale of the First Formic War trilogy, but also serves retroactively as the fertile ground from which Card’s classic Ender’s Game series springs. Prequels can be funny because at once they break new ground and are shoehorned by preexisting material and expectations. This Formic trilogy will apparently be followed by a Second Formic War trilogy with the first book due out in 2016. Earth Awakens foreshadows the continuation of hostilities with the Formics as well as Battle School. But before that Lt. Mazer, Bingwen, Victor and the other major characters from the first two books are back to take on the invaders.
Card and Johnston boil down the alien invasion and humanity’s response as a struggle between individuals fighting against a collective onslaught. Thirty years ago this would have been seen as a depiction of the Cold War between the West and the Communist bloc. You could draw general parallels today between the ongoing struggle between individual liberty and the power of the authoritarian state. As Earth’s governments falter in their response to the invasion the handful of civilians and soldiers band together and launch an ambitious attack on what they believe to be the Formic mother ship.
The details of the invasion and the efforts to stop it are secondary to the larger issues Card raises. The theme of this trilogy and especially of Earth Awakens is that a handful of individuals, including a miner in the asteroid belt, a school kid from China and a New Zealand Special Forces operator join forces. The rag-tag bunch plays a powerful role in defeating a single-minded alien hive without individuality or passions. This is the freedom and individualism of the West versus the totalitarianism and collectivism of the East writ large. Going against the current culturally standards, Card also includes big business capitalists in the ant-alien coalition. This is a refreshing change since science fiction authors often put big business in league with invading aliens as part of a grand conspiracy.
Earth Awakens like the two previous books in the series work in isolation from their famous source material. Perhaps not up to the same level as Ender’s Game and the early sequels, fans of earlier books will appreciate the finishing touches that point the way to the future they’ve already fell in love with.

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News

There isn’t too much news this week. Things continue to come together and I am in the process of organizing and preparing the items for February. I am in the process of organizing first payments to people, which is exciting.
If you are waiting for an answer on a final read of your story I actually managed to read a chunk of the pile last week and expect to get more read this week and will start sending email with final answers shortly. Sorry it is taking so long.

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A Struggle for Primacy by Brian Cato

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A STRUGGLE FOR PRIMACY

Brian Cato

I can see him clearly through the window, John Walton, looking not a day over fifty. Revolting! Cloned flesh adhered to a metal skeleton, a computer brain inside. A stain upon all that is moral and pure. A man who thinks he is above death.

I try to picture what I need to do, but cringe at the thought of it. But my very disgust, my horror, my loathing, only reinforce my determination. My mission must be completed. Those who would live as gods must be brought down, the world must be made safe for the rest of us.

After his granddaughter has tucked her children in and gone up to bed with her husband, I wait another twenty minutes. He remains in the living room, the lights out, watching the flexidisplay.

I go through a last minute check: the battery pack is charged, my rifle loaded and ready. I inhale deeply and exhale, once, twice, three times. Then I’m off, out from behind the tree, moving across the yard. I heave the brick through the window and swing the sight of my rifle to eye level.

At the sound of shattering glass, he stands and turns. The first shot is clean, his right temple sheared off by the bullet specially designed to fragment into buckshot on impact. His hand jerks up to the side of his face, he screams in agony, but then his pain suppression algorithms kick in. His eyes flash in anger, and he scans the lawn, searching for me.

As he begins moving in my direction, I steady and aim again. I squeeze the trigger, but he’s moving too quickly, too unpredictably. Having located me, he’s run to the window, swung over the ledge, and launched himself onto the lawn.

You self-righteous little wretch, he sneers. You think bullets can hurt me? You think I would spend millions to build a fusion to load my mind into and they wouldn’t bother to make it bulletproof?

He calmly walks towards me, menacing, confident. I swallow hard to quell the feeling that I’m in over my head, and train the sight on his left temple. The second time I do not miss, his left hand flies up to the side of his face. Behind him, lights are flickering on inside the house. He pulls his hand away and holds it before his face, looking at the blood in the light streaming from the windows. The metal revealed under the flesh that’s been stripped away glints coldly. Revulsion rises in me once more. Despite all my preparation, every fiber of being being screams at me to get away, to run away from this monstrosity that’s been shot twice, but advances nevertheless.

What are you, an ecowarrior convinced people downloading themselves into fusions will ruin the Earth? A religious nut certain that I’m a monster in God’s eyes? A humanist who’s concluded that fusions will be the downfall of humanity? It won’t matter. As long as we control the corporations, it’s just a matter of time before you lunatics are eliminated.

I toss my rifle. I’m from Human, All Too Human, I force myself to say, knowing that I need to engage him, to keep him distracted. As I reach down to unclip the two electrodes, I mechanically begin reciting our organization’s literature, Those who seek to fuse themselves, those who seek immortality, are the very people who have spent a lifetime bending the rules, hoarding riches for themselves, trampling on the ability of others to make their lives better.

He’s less than five feet from me. I begin raising the electrodes, one in each hand. Then somehow, my hands sweaty and shaking, I lose my grip on the left one. I fumble for it, but he’s right on top of me. His right arm curls back, and then flashes forward, the back of his hand whipping across my chin and sending me reeling.

Survival of the fittest, he laughs. I deprived no one of anything. Every last penny I made, I earned.

Lying on the ground, an empty death staring me in the face, there’s a strange gathering sensation in the center of my chest. A wave of determination takes hold and rejuvenates my will, steadies my hands. I fumble for the missing electrode in the grass. By taking credit for the inventions of others, by lobbying the government to rewrite the tax code to your benefit, by paying everyone in your employ substandard wages, by acquiring and dissolving any competitor who was even the slightest threat. At last, I’ve got it. The will to power taken to the extreme . . . He lunges at me and clamps his hands around my throat.

Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same, he says. His hands are tight around my throat, but not so tight I can’t speak. Say it, say ‘I’d have done the same’

I manage to click the electrodes into place, one on each temple. Say it!

I would . . . I know I have mere seconds to flip the switch, never.

In the time of a thought his hands tighten, a ring of iron around my throat. Feeling as though my trachea will burst, I fumble for the switch around my belt. The edges of my consciousness start to blur.

Bzzzzt! My fingers blunder over the switch, the super-magnet kicks on. Every bit of data in his brain is instantly demagnetized, wiped forever. He twitches, his face still frozen in a hateful snarl, his hands locked in place.

I push him off of me, but his grip does not loosen, instead tearing at the flesh on my neck as he topples. Desperate, I try to pry his fingers loose, to no effect. Realizing I have but moments left, I focus on a single, sustaining thought: For some of us, there are causes worth dying for. That’s what it means to truly be human. I imagine I must be smiling as my awareness fades . . .

Food for Thought

1) Advances (whether genetic, pharmaceutical, or technological) appear to be on the way that will allow us to extend our lifespans further and further. Should we make use of them at all ? If so, how should we decide who can benefit from such advances? How should we balance the wants and desires of those who have been around for great lengths of time and accumulated much to themselves with the wants and desires of those just starting out?

2) What obligations, if any, do people in positions of power, whether financial or political, have to those they have power over? Do people who have great wealth have a greater obligation than others to do good with the resources they have? If so, are the wealthy in today’s society living up to those obligations (especially in comparison to the wealthy in our recent past)? If they are not, what can we do so that the next generation of wealthy have a greater sense of their obligations? Have them study philosophy?

3) This story is told from the point of view of the narrator. How did this affect your perceptions of the two characters and the issues around them? Do you feel that the media today does a good job of portraying fairly what life is like for members of all classes and subcultures?

4) The United State was founded on the back of a rebellion, many deaths, and much suffering. Can a rebellion ever be just? Under what circumstances? Are there circumstances under which a rebellion is not simply just, but under which people have a moral obligation to rebel? What, if anything, would have to change in America for the conditions to be right in the twenty-first century?

5) Following up on the concept of rebellion, many people who commit mass murders today (some of whom are called terrorists) believe they are doing so for a just cause. If you feel conditions call for a rebellion, what criteria can you use to determine if you are right or if you are insane? In a world in which many people are invested in preserving the status quo, or are preoccupied by distractions like television or social media, what is an appropriate response to injustice? Peaceful protests? Civil disobedience like tying yourself to a tree? Open rebellion? Quiet acceptance?

About the Author

Brian Cato pursued dual majors in philosophy and chemistry at Brown University. He worked on and off as a synthetic organic chemist for major pharmaceutical companies for ten years, taking breaks to spend a year teaching English in China and to write. His novels draw on his unique training in rational thinking and the scientific method as well as an abiding interest in the phenomenon of the mind, the genesis of identity, and the persistent irrationality of the human creature, himself included. His website can be found at www.briancato.com

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The Philosopher Limitation by Y.X. Acs

Philosophy

THE PHILOSOPHER LIMITATION

Y.X. Acs

Doctor Mandalay was not a man given to indulging in illusions. He knew things broke and things went awry, no matter how well you planned. But despite this uncertainty, the necessity of the attempt was obvious, crucial, it would occur and had, in a sense, thus already come to pass. Dr. Mandalay would travel back in time or die trying.

Mandalay had identified his conviction as the same motivating historical Christians in their willingness to become martyrs, and, in so doing, he was pleased to count himself among the ranks of a rare and select group, one that included Socrates, Galileo and even Madame Curie, in a less substantial sense.

In any case the experiment would go forward, if for no other reason than to silence the prattle of the sophist dilettantes and para-scientific muck-rakers.

SciPhiSeperator

As it was, the experiment did have profound implications not only for science but for philosophy as well. Mandalay had been obliged to invite an agonizing array of notables to his ‘proof of principle’ soiree. The list included many luminary philosophers, but had explicitly excluded religious figures, a choice Mandalay made for both diplomatic and methodological reasons. Natty, aged newspapermen, bloggers and physicists rubbed elbows with celebrities.

At last Mandalay called the room to attention, “Thank you all very much for coming. I feel particularly grateful for the attendance of Professor Stephen Hawking who flew all the way from a lecture tour in Bern so that he could be with us this evening.

“I will keep my introduction brief, and will only allow myself a simplified restatement of the principles underlying tonight’s experiment. For, of course, the hope is that tonight we will be given a first proof regarding the reality of time travel, but I would like to remind everyone that this evening’s endeavor is predicated upon another, very specific hypothesis, one which will likewise be proven or disproven based on the evening’s results.

“The implications of this particular hypothesis have already been well picked-over in other venues, so I will simply restate its primary claim, this being: that the influence of philosophy on history is sufficiently slight so as to enable a statistical certainty regarding its quantum non-interference. If this is true, it follows that philosophers stand as chronologically manipulable phenomena for the purposes of experimental travel in time. Or, put differently, we can meet, communicate with, and could even kill any given philosopher without damage to the time-line. Therefore, so long as a time-traveler follows certain well-established guidelines, we should be able to enter a new era in human movement, one that is no longer limited by the past or the future. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: My Time Machine!”

The curtain fell and a gleaming copper and bronze apparatus stood revealed. It was a spherical exoskeleton of metal bands containing a seat. The flash-bulbs adored it for some time before Mandalay mounted the stage and saluted the audience.

Then, gripping the hand-brake, he proudly exclaimed, “On my return I shall have visited the past or I shall not return at all!”

SciPhiSeperator

Two Years Earlier:

Mandalay woke and was satisfied to see that it had rained. He’d left his copy of “Being and Nothingness” on the patio, face-down, so that the spine bore the weight of its ideas.

At this point in history he’d become convinced of the accuracy of his own ideas, all that was left to do now was illustrate it mathematically, and then publish the results. This was not personal, he reminded himself. As a scientist, he had a responsibility to ensure the safest entry possible into the era of time travel. After all, what if the scientific community had remained ignorant of the ‘philosopher limitation’? It was quite possible that a catastrophically ill-fated venture might have been formulated and executed, one that interfered with the works of engineers or artists, or, god forbid, that of other scientists.

As he’d written on his blog just the evening before: “Should anyone, anywhere, use my research for the purpose of non-philosopher limited time-travel, the results would be catastrophic, almost certainly resulting in a paradox that would take the form of a chain of atomic explosions ranging in time from the point at which the alteration was first effected to that at which the chrononaut first embarked.”

Chrononaut. . . he’d liked that word from the very start.

It was nonetheless irritating to have practically every mechanical detail regarding time travel worked out, his sphere approaching completion, and yet to remain limited by the lack of an appropriate test subject. It had been a slow process for Mandalay, who found it an odious task to read their works and biographies. Especially since he had to locate one who’d truly stayed a philosopher their entire life, one who had limited themselves solely to the philosophical in their work and hadn’t dabbled in history or education or any of the other, more practical, domains.

Still, Mandalay counted himself lucky to be living in a time when philosophy stood on its own feet, different from and even counter to religion. Without philosophy’s rise as a self-subsistent body of thought time travel may have well-remained impossible.

But still, he had to pick one…

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News

Sci Phi Journal has been up and running for three weeks now in the new format and things seem to be going well so far. I am getting the hang of getting the items out the door and it is getting faster to process things. I am finally getting back to reading the submissions and I expect to make progress on that over the next couple of weeks now that I have the rest of January processed. People can also look forward to the digest version coming in the next couple of days and if you are a subscriber then it isn’t to late to let me know you would like the first digest version (You can have both if you like). If you haven’t subscribed yet head over to our Patreon Page an pledge today!
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Also, Cat our resident artist has been busy of late and so there isn’t any art for the next couple of stories. I would ask, if anybody would like to help with the artwork we do have a spot open. Cat does fantastic work but her time is finite so if you are interested. It doesn’t pay much at the moment but if the magazine grows it will pay better. Send an email to editor@sciphijournal.com if it sounds like it might interest you.

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Red Dwarf’s Inquisitor and Judgement Day by Ben Zwycky

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RED DWARF’S INQUISITOR AND JUDGEMENT DAY


Ben Zwycky

The popularity of Red Dwarf lies not only in its irreverent satire of classical science fiction tropes, great banter and interaction between the well-developed characters, but also in the genuine and often strong science fiction narratives that it explores (not only for their comedic possibilities). The failure to appreciate these aspects of the show by the studio executives attempting to create Red Dwarf USA (their preferred writing process instead focusing on creating a series of one-liners) led to that project being intensely unpopular with viewers and ultimately not picked up for production by the studio1.

For many, series five of Red Dwarf is a high water mark, with the three episodes “The Inquisitor”, “Back to Reality” and “Quarantine” being major factors in the series’ popularity. “Quarantine” is an action-packed episode involving some interesting sci-fi ideas played for maximum comedic effect, whereas both Back to Reality and the Inquisitor are much more philosophical. On the surface, “Back to Reality” looks at reality versus delusion (made well before the Matrix series of films turned this into a fashionable sci-fi trope), while its primary focus is actually the basis for self-worth: what makes a life no longer worth living? What defines us so much that its loss would cause us to despair and die? How fragile a foundation have we built our lives upon?

“The Inquisitor” asks a superficially similar question with a very different focus: what is a worthwhile life, a life well lived, and how would we justify it?

In the episode, the crew are captured by a mysterious and powerful entity calling itself The Inquisitor, who takes them back to the mothership to be judged, each individually, beginning each interrogation with the question:

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“You have been granted the greatest gift of all, the gift of life. Tell me, what have you done to deserve this superlative good fortune?”

It is a sobering question, because the honest answer is nothing. Life has been granted to us not out of obligation to us for something we have done, not a reward or wages, but as a gift, the greatest of gifts, perhaps even something, dare I say it, that is worth being grateful for in and of itself.

In context however, that is not really the question that the Inquisitor was asking. Kryten earlier explains who the Inquisitor is and what he does:

“Well, the legend tells of a droid, a self-repairing simulant who survived to the end of eternity, to the end of time itself. After millions of years alone, he finally reaches the conclusion that there is no God, no afterlife, and the only purpose of existence is to lead a worthwhile life. And so the droid constructs a time machine, and roams eternity, visiting every single soul in history and assessing each one. He erases all those who wasted their lives, and replaces them with those that never had a chance at life: the unfertilized eggs, the sperms that never made it. That is the Inquisitor, he prunes away the wastrels, expunges the wretched and deletes the worthless.”

So, the question the Inquisitor asked was far more serious, even terrifying:

You have been given this astounding gift, this incredible range of opportunities. What have you done with them to justify this enormous investment in you? What reasons will you give to dissuade me from erasing you from history and giving your opportunities to someone else?

The worst part is, the judge you have to convince is yourself. There is nothing you can hide. Your every private action, thought and motive is known, your own personal standards are used to measure you. How many of us would pass? May I suggest none?

It reminds me of the start of Matthew 7:

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” – Matthew 7:1-5 (NIV)

So in an ironic twist, the atheist droid uses a Christian method to judge us. In the episode itself, the Cat and Rimmer pass the test by having ridiculously low standards for themselves, while Kryten and Lister escape by tricking the Inquisitor into erasing himself from history and thereby undoing all of his work. While these are funny and even clever from a story point of view, philosophically they are a dodge, a way to avoiding facing up to the true horror of being our own judge.

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In truth, no-one has standards as low as Rimmer and the Cat. Every time you are disappointed with or angry at someone, you are judging the behaviour that disappointed you or made you angry. That is a standard you have agreed to, a measure you have used, which will be used to judge you. Things aren’t looking so rosy, are they?

And yet that is the point, isn’t it? We want the wrongs of this world to be corrected, bad and selfish choices to result in significant negative results for the offender, the people who got away with it in this life to not get away with it in the next.

Won’t it be great to see every arrogant bully being brought down low and getting their comeuppance, to see all those scandals people tried to hide being shouted from the rooftops, all those webs of lies unravelled, those who stirred up needless trouble standing face to face with all the damage they caused, and those with sordid secrets becoming utterly transparent…

Wait, now let’s be reasonable, nobody needs to know about the terrible ways I wanted to lash out when those kids were annoying me, or those selfish plans I made, or especially about that time I…

This is not looking good at all, and it shouldn’t. We object to double standards in this life, how much more should we object to double standards on Judgement Day?

If Christianity is true, then the Red Dwarf crew’s escape route is not available to us. There is no way to trick God, and his standards are infinitely higher than ours. Even our own standards, if we are honest, are far beyond our ability to meet. So what would this process look like?

Our every judgement is played back to us and our every offence against those values displayed for all to see. Our own moral outrage passionately condemns us to an inescapable fate and demands the ultimate punishment, a greater despair than we can imagine.

We are guilty, lost, helpless.

And then a man quietly comes up besides us and calmly states:

“Do not punish them, I am the guilty one.”

Before we can react, the judges we embody forcefully decree, “Let the punishment begin!”

We watch in horror as he is taken back to a brutal period in history, where he is betrayed by one of his closest friends and abandoned by the rest, seized by an oppressive regime and shuttled from one sham trial to another, like a pawn in a cynical power play. His own people, whom he came to help, disown him and scream for his death. He is mocked, ridiculed and sneered at while being beaten and then flogged, gouging deep bloody furrows in his body. All of this agony and shame he accepts without protest, making no attempt to defend himself or his reputation.

The judges we embody approve of each blow, cheering each new humiliation and applauding each new trickle of blood down his increasingly disfigured form.

In his weakened state he is forced to carry a load he cannot bear up a slope he cannot climb, insulted all the way by the crowds and our judges.

He is finally publicly tortured to death in the most degrading way possible in front of his own mother, so he can see the pain in her eyes as his own life ebbs away. His Father looks away, the skies darken and he is left utterly alone.

With his dying breath he declares “It is finished.”

Our judges concur. “It is finished, justice is served.”

The broken corpse is taken away and sealed inside a tomb. There is silence as you process what just occurred. Lost in thought, you lose track of time until great doors open in front of you and a warm, beautiful and living light streams into the room from the other side. A man steps through the doors and approaches you.

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It is the same man, only different. The light seems to be emanating directly from him, causing the air itself to come alive and fill the room with an otherworldly aroma. You look back at the tomb; it is open, empty. Your list of offences has also disappeared.

“What happened? How is this possible?”

“Death could not hold me. I took your place and bore the wrath you earned. If you wish to accept this exchange, then follow me, change the way you think and live, and you too will overcome death’s greatest sting.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then nothing has been paid for you, your original sentence stands and you carry on as you were.” He gestures towards the judge. “Being your own boss. Setting your own rules.”

About the Author

Ben Zwycky is an English ex-pat now living in the Czech Republic. Before, during and after obtaining a master’s degree in chemical engineering, he worked as a hospital porter, cleaner and server in a community centre, research assistant, EFL teacher and currently works as a freelance proof-reader and translator together with his Czech wife, who literally fell into his arms in the year 2000 and with whom he now has five children.

His first novel, Nobility Among Us, is inspired in part by the country he now lives in, its many perfectly preserved medieval castles and chateaux standing side by side with modern constructions and technology. His first poetry collection, Selected Verse: Faith and Family, tells the story of how he met his wife, among other things.

Ben’s website is benzwycky.com

Red Dwarf_s Inquisitor and Judgement Day

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Upgrade by Axel Schwarz

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UPGRADE

Axel Schwarz

Just before sunrise was always Sam’s favorite part of the day. His place wasn’t much—two-floor walk up, peeling paint, a moody oven—but it did have a view. The bedroom wall was one large piece of curved glass, and as he lay in bed he looked out over the smooth slope of the station into the chalk dust and charcoal sea of space, waiting for the sun to peek out from behind Earth.

He had lived in the same apartment for so long he could tell the date just by the location of the stars. “November 1,” he said in a low voice. Without thinking he slid his hand toward his wife Rachel, stopping only when he remembered she wasn’t there. They used to talk about the stars, which ones would soon be disappearing from their mornings, which ones would be showing their faces in a few days.

His fingers traced the cold, empty divot on her side of the bed. He still couldn’t bring himself to sleep in the middle. Then he remembered the significance of today’s date, and felt a tear begin to well behind his eye. Sam coughed it away and shook his head. Before another one came he got out of bed. He could skip the sunrise today.

As usual he got ready in exactly ten minutes. Rachel used to chide him for being so proud of his consistency. It used to annoy him, but now he missed her scolding him as he checked the clock. In the kitchen, he searched for breakfast. He was never a cook, and since Rachel died every day seemed to be an epic struggle to find food. Sam decided—more like the empty fridge decided for him—to go to the Company cafeteria. The food was mediocre and he ate there more often than he’d like, but he didn’t want to eat alone today.

He walked down the two flights of stairs to the door leading out to the station’s hallway. Most of the apartments on the station had elevators, but he and Rachel chose one with stairs because it reminded them of pictures they had seen of ancient apartments on Earth, the ones saved from demolition now preserved in a handful of museums. Both of them liked old things, and Rachel’s hobby had been to fill their apartment with knickknacks from the past: chipped ceramic teacups, a frayed and faded woven rug, and for Sam a cracked baseball bat made of real wood. Their friends teased them about their funny tastes, but Sam knew they secretly enjoyed visiting Sam and Rachel’s apartment. It just felt different, more real somehow.

Going down the stairs made Sam’s knees ache and creak. When he reached the bottom he opened the door into the hallway. At this hour it was filled with an empty silence, not even an echo of footsteps from somewhere down the long corridor. As he walked, the walls beside him glowed with advertisements for the new B Android, following him like a lighted shadow. A disembodied female voice read the list of features scrolling down the wall. “New features…including…more facial muscles…for real emotion…and 10% more pores…so the skin looks even more human…” Sam shook his head and tried to ignore the ads.

As he approached the entrance to the Company cafeteria he thought again of Rachel. It was a day like this he had met her here in the cafeteria. He had showed up early, a brand new employee. She was alone at a table. Sam had felt shy, but gathered the courage to smile at her. Rachel was not shy. She invited him over, asking him questions about where he was from and what his new job was. It turned out they were both in the customer service department, so she gave him all sorts of advice about what to do, which people he should make friends with and which people he should avoid. By the time breakfast was over, the cafeteria was nearly full, Sam was in love, and the rest—as Rachel liked to say every time she told the story—was history.

Lost in the memory, Sam didn’t realize he was standing in front of the lone cafeteria worker serving that early. She was staring at him. “Sam? You okay?”

The question shook him back to the present. “Oh, yeah. Sorry, Carol.” Carol was ancient, her wrinkled skin draped loosely over her body, hairnet giving order to the last of her thinning strands of stark white hair. Sam was never quite able to figure her out. She spoke in a friendly tone, but it almost seemed forced, unnatural.

“Just some eggs and bacon, please. And a slice of French toast.”

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“I know. That’s what you always order.”

Sam smiled and shook his head. “Sorry, I guess I’m a little out of it today.”

“Oh yeah,” said Carol. “Upgrade Day.”

Sam scoffed as he grabbed his plate. “Upgrade Day…Upgrade Day…” he grumbled to himself. “Who cares about Upgrade Day?”

To his surprise, when he looked up at the endless rows of tables and chairs he saw his friend Harvey. Harvey had already spotted Sam, and was waving to him to come on over.

“Hey partner,” said Harvey. “Happy Upgrade Day!”

“Go to hell, Harvey.” Sam smiled.

“What, you’re not excited about the newest android?” A low laugh rumbled in Harvey’s prodigious belly. He had salt and pepper hair that was turning more salt every day, and had started to grow out a beard. Sam sometimes teased him to try out for the role of Santa Claus for the Company Christmas party.

Sam shook his head. “Meet the new droid, same as the old droid.”

“You mean you can’t tell the difference between the new A and the new B?”

“I can’t tell the difference between the T and the B,” said Sam. “Why do they need to make so many androids they have to go back to the beginning of the alphabet?

“Because they’ve got more pores, and more facial muscles.” Harvey was still laughing.

Sam waved his hand dismissively. “They already look like us, talk like us, how much more like us do you need them to be? It’s a little creepy, if you ask me.”

“Me too,” said Harvey. “Why do we need new ones when the old ones work perfectly fine?”

“Couldn’t agree with you more,” said Sam. Sam had liked Harvey since they first met, not long after Sam had met Rachel. Because Harvey worked in the maintenance department for the Company, his shift started earlier. He was usually in the cafeteria before the rush, when Sam liked to go.

“So, how are things?” asked Harvey. “You don’t look too happy.”

“Remember what happened exactly one year ago?” asked Sam.

“Oh, that’s right.” Harvey’s tone softened. “I’m sorry bud, I forgot.””As if I didn’t like Upgrade Day enough already,” said Sam.

“I don’t blame you,” said Harvey. There was an awkward silence, and Sam ate to occupy himself. “How are things at work?” asked Harvey. “That new kid Aaron still bugging you?”

Sam shrugged as he tore off a bite of bacon with his teeth. “Oh, he’s alright I guess. He stopped pestering me with all those questions, now that he’s got the hang of the job. It’s my boss that’s bothering me more now than anything.” Sam had never been a complainer, but he found himself doing it more and more since Rachel was gone. He made a silent promise to himself to change that.

“What’s going on with your boss?”

“He’s a new guy. Not much older than Aaron. Zach is his name. He keeps getting on me about being more efficient. ‘Increase your calls per hour, Sam. Don’t dawdle on the phone, Sam.’ It drives me nuts.”

“Dawdle?” asked Harvey. “That doesn’t sound like a kid to me.”

“I think he’s trying to use vocabulary he thinks an old man like me would use.”

Harvey laughed, and despite his best efforts not to, so did Sam.

“You’d think they’d value someone with my experience.”

“I know,” said Harvey.

“I help the Company by making connections with people.”

“I know,” said Harvey.

“It’s not about efficiency, it’s about building relationships with our customers.”

“I hear you,” said Harvey. “You sound like an old man.”

“I am an old man,” said Sam. He sighed. “Aw hell, Harvey. You think maybe it’s time for us to retire?”

“No way,” said Harvey. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t work. And Harriet’s still working, so I’d just be at home getting into trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, after I blew up the oven she doesn’t let me fix anything around the house anymore.”

Sam laughed. “That’s right. She didn’t talk to you for a week.”

“Ruined her mother’s china.”

“What I don’t know is, how come you can fix every machine in this whole station, but you can’t fix your own stove?”

Harvey stared at Sam in mock anger. “What I want to know is, how come you can’t increase your calls per hour?”

Sam shook his head. “You know they’re trying to get us to talk to two customers at once? They want us to use one ear to talk to one customer, and the other to talk to another one.”

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“Do they know you don’t have two mouths?”

“What’s that?” asked Sam. He stuck his finger in his ear and wiggled it around.

“Oh, come one. You still didn’t get your hearing checked out?”

“Nah,” said Sam. “It’s fine. It’s just my right ear, and it only goes out occasionally.”

“I’m telling you,” said Harvey. “That’s what doctors are for. Why don’t you go get it checked out? The Company’s doctors are just down the hall from you.”

“Don’t talk to me about doctors,” said Sam. His voice grew angry.

Harvey raised his hands. “Sorry, I know it’s a sensitive subject.”

“If Rachel hadn’t gone in for that checkup…”

“Sam,” Harvey’s tone had softened again. “I know you think they caused it. But they didn’t. I swear. We’ve all gone to the doctor lots of times. You included. You really should go get that checked out. I had the same problem a few years ago, and now I can hear like a twenty-year old again.”

“Hey,” said Sam. “The only good thing about Rachel not being around is I don’t have anyone to nag me anymore.” Sam realized it was the first joke he told about Rachel being gone. He considered that progress.

Harvey laughed. “Fair enough. I’m just saying it ain’t that big a deal.”

“I know, I know. I’m just being lazy.”

“Speaking of lazy,” said Harvey, “We better get to work. This space station’s not going to run on its own.”

“Might as well,” said Sam.

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Review, Armada by Ernest Cline, reviews by Mike Phelps

[easyazon_image add_to_cart=”default” align=”left” asin=”0804137250″ cloaking=”default” height=”500″ localization=”default” locale=”US” nofollow=”default” new_window=”default” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Wcvrk9laL.jpg” tag=”superversivesf-20″ width=”329″]Armada takes the position that the “alien invasion of Earth” scenario is played and long overdue for a tongue-in-cheek send up. A high school senior named Zack, is a gifted gamer, specializing in POV shooter games that simulate air-to-air combat. Zack’s hold on reality is tested as he becomes aware of a secret worldwide organization preparing for an impending alien invasion. He also learns he and his fellow gamers have unknowingly been co-opted by a vast military-industrial complex that has been using movies and video games to prepare the population to fight the aliens. If all that isn’t enough to make his head spin, it turns out that the late father Zack has been idolizing is alive and at the center of the global conspiracy.
Zack is crammed to the gills with enough pop culture trivia to make the most committed fanboy giddy. Ernest Cline wrote quite a few funny lines, but they are eventually buried under the shear weight of science fiction, video game and other pop culture references. The references to Star Wars and Missile Command were welcome at first, but a knowing smile later turned into a frown as opportunities for meaningful dialogue between characters were neglected in favor of them trading movie quotes with one another.
Armada tries to be the ultimate wish-fulfillment story for every sci-fi/gamer who ever sat in his basement dreaming about saving the world and getting the girl. Zack gets the girl. She’s cute, smart, edgy and one of the most skilled gamers around. In other words she’s every nerd’s fantasy. She points to the larger problem: the constant stream of references, the long lost father, the perfect girl, the video game training feel like a dream. I half expected Zack to wake up and realize he’s been in third period algebra all along. I’m glad Cline didn’t pull the “it’s all just a dream” cheat, but the boyhood fantasies fulfilled themes feel like almost the same thing.
I’m on record with other reviews as not having a lot of patience with the overuse of the government/global conspiracy to withhold the truth to advance an otherwise promising storyline. Armada takes it a step further with the aliens spinning their own even less convincing conspiracy to test Earthlings. Even with these and other frustrations, Cline has written a mostly entertaining story that will likely appeal to gamers, particularly the older ones who nostalgic for the golden years of the nineteen – eighties.

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News

[easyazon_image add_to_cart=”default” align=”left” asin=”B01A6Z0TX6″ cloaking=”default” height=”500″ localization=”default” locale=”US” nofollow=”default” new_window=”default” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51lIBnQa9zL.jpg” tag=”superversivesf-20″ width=”354″] I have some really exciting news. We didn’t get the end of Ben Zwycky’s [easyazon_link asin=”B01A6Z0TX6″ locale=”US” new_window=”default” nofollow=”default” tag=”superversivesf-20″ add_to_cart=”default” cloaking=”default” localization=”default” popups=”default”]Beyond the Mist[/easyazon_link] serial in Sci Phi Journal but now the complete story is available in [easyazon_link asin=”B01A6Z0TX6″ locale=”US” new_window=”default” nofollow=”default” tag=”superversivesf-20″ add_to_cart=”default” cloaking=”default” localization=”default” popups=”default”]ebook[/easyazon_link] through Amazon. Check it out and find out what becomes of Zephyr Walker in this wonderful piece of Sci Phi!
For all our subscribers, the monthly charge will be later this week and digest versions are in the works, keep an eye out for them.
Things are progressing but I am still behind on submissions, thanks for the understanding and sorry again for the delay. I will be getting to emails and getting back to people as soon as possible.

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That Day at Grandma's by Gregory L. Norris

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THAT DAY AT GRANDMA’S

Gregory L. Norris

That morning, Shane said, “Mom, I’d like to spend today at Grandma’s.”
His mother, who stood at the sink washing dishes, shot him a look through narrowed eyes. “You have school.”
“School isn’t as important as Grandma Bernice. Besides, it’s almost my birthday.”
Dishes clinked in the lime green plastic tub. “So?”
“So, this year the only present I want for my birthday is to spend time with Grandma. Can you drop me off at her place?”
Their eyes again met, Shane’s without blinking though, after a few seconds, his gaze resumed wandering around the kitchen, lingering on the dining table and four chairs and the view of the spring yard beyond the windows.
“Mom,” he said, “I’m sorry for being a loud and obnoxious kid.”
“All kids are loud and obnoxious,” she said. “Teenagers are just louder and more obnoxious.”
“I promise I’ll try harder,” he said.
A smile cracked his mother’s tired expression. “Wow, and my birthday was last month. Why do you want to go to Grandma Bernice’s?”
“To write a story. I think I’m going to be a writer.”
“No medical school?” she said dryly.
“What about being a German translator for the U. N.?”“No, and yes,” he said, nonplused. “I’ll probably also be a veterinarian, an astronaut, a radiologist, and a translator for the United Nations. But only in the stories that I write.”
“You can’t write this story at school?”
“No. School doesn’t matter. Grandma does. Besides, I’m dying for a cup of her coffee and one of her fried egg sandwiches.”
“Shane…”
“Please.”
Shane’s mother wiped her hands on the dishtowel, which bore a rustic country rooster weathervane. “Okay, but call your grandma first. Make sure it’s okay and she doesn’t mind you hanging around her apartment all day.”
“I remember the number. I never forgot it.”
“I should hope not. She’s had the same phone number for a million years.”
“Mom,” said Shane, “you’re a great mother. Not just good or okay or so-so, which everyone says about their mom. But really, truly great.”
Shane’s mother straightened. “Who are you? What did you do with my son?”
“How about I finish the dishes and you take a break.”

SciPhiSeperator
The warm breeze rippled through the butter-yellow Cape Cod curtains in his grandmother’s parlor. Sounds from the city street sang a chorus in the background; the television was tuned to a game show, its volume on low. A deck of cards sat beside a coffee cup—an opaque map of the globe pattern superimposed over clear glass, one of four in a set. The three matching cups hung from hooks above the stove. Other coffee cups on a shelf above the kitchen sink proclaimed that Bernice was the World’s Best Grandma and Grandmother Number 1.
Shane moved slowly about the first floor apartment in the brick building at 4 Daisy Street, his wide eyes lingering on details like the fans of painted pink coral on the parlor wall interspersed among family portraits and a print of the village blacksmith.
“Honey-bunch,” Grandma Bernice said.
Shane rolled his eyes. “Grandma, please say that again.”
“Say what?”
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“Honey-bunch.”
She repeated the nickname. They hugged. After several seconds, Grandma Bernice moved away, but Shane held on.
“So to what do I owe this wonderful spring surprise?”
“I needed to spend some time with you. It’s been too long,” Shane said. “And there’s this story I have to write today, and I really wanted to write it here.”
Bernice poured hot water from the silver kettle into another of the glass globe coffee cups. “I’m honored, but why here?”
“Look around this place,” Shane said, puffing out a sigh at the end of the declaration. “It’s so joyous. And you, you’re an awesome grandmother.”
Grandma Bernice beamed. “Thank you, Shane.”
He took the coffee cup into which she had spooned instant, sugar, and milk. Shane sipped. “This is the best cup of coffee ever. All the decades of coffee made in coffee makers to follow can’t compare.”
She waved a hand at him and resumed her game of solitaire. “Stop it, you sound crazy.”
“Maybe I am. Crazy for one of your super-duper amazing fried egg sandwiches.”
He ate it slowly, savoring the toast, buttered to perfection, and the golden yolk, which popped magically over his taste buds.
“Eat up. I’ll make you another,” Grandma Bernice said.
She stood at the stove. The skillet sizzled.
“I think it’s that cast iron pan,” Shane said. “That and, of course, you. The love you put into all of your cooking.”
“Huh?”
“It’s what makes your fried egg sandwiches so delicious.”
“They’re only fried egg sandwiches.”
“No, Grandma, they’re proof of Heaven.”
Grandma Bernice flipped the egg. “That’s a very big compliment.”
“I’m trying to be more grown up and appreciative of the many good things in my life, the blessings.”
“You’re one of my biggest blessings, Shane.”
Shane sipped the last of his coffee. “Can I come by more often?”
“You can visit as often as you want. Every day.”
“And you’ll make coffee?”
“Yes, and fried eggs.”
Shane exhaled. “Good. I tried to cook one like yours once and accidentally sprinkled the egg with allspice—I thought it was pepper.”
Grandma Bernice made a face and a sound. Shane laughed. The sun came out, and that warm May day renounced the last of its gray pallor.
SciPhiSeperator
Grandma Bernice’s afternoon stories played on the TV. The game of solitaire abandoned for the moment, she got lost in the travails of lovers, young and old, while Shane wrote words in a notebook and the butter-yellow Cape Cod curtains drifted in a sultry breeze.
“What did your mother think of the news about your writing?” Bernice asked during a commercial break.
“That it’s a fad, like being a scientist. Remember how I was going to cure old age so you’d live forever?”
“I do,” Grandma Bernice said. “You were going to discover the Fountain of Youth.”
“I think I have,” Shane said. “I’m going to write about you, and those stories and novels will get published in formats as-yet undreamed of, and you will live for as long as the written word prevails.”
Grandma Bernice covered her heart. “You’re my young genius.”
“I love you, Grandma.”
“Your mother will come around. She’ll believe in you, in time.”
“I know,” Shane said.
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Set to a soapy soundtrack of commercial jingles and the whispers of the warm breeze, she asked him what the story was about.
Shane’s pen ceased its whirls. He glanced up and his gaze wandered around the room. “It’s about a very old man dreaming very young dreams,” he eventually answered. “The man, near the end of his long life, has discovered that, after a lifetime of dreaming, of conditioning himself to dream, he can travel backward through time through those dreams and through pathways and neurons and memories, which he’s accessed by a kind of creative evolution. It isn’t time travel in the conventional sense; there are no slingshots through event horizons, no exceeding the speed of light. No time machines or mechanisms beyond his burning desire to be with those people in his past who matter the most. Those beautiful better angels he misses so much and needed to be with again as he lies dreaming in a darkened room in the world that exists at an impossibly distant future date.”
Their eyes met.
Shane blinked. “That’s what the story is about, Grandma.”
“It’s a wonderful story. I’m glad you wrote it today, here with me.”
Shane nodded and resumed writing. Outside the apartment, a car traveling down Daisy Street honked its horn. The warm breeze giggled and played with the sunny Cape Cod curtains and, on both the page and somewhere far away, an old man dreamed.

Food for Thought

“That Day at Grandma’s” is an unusual piece for Sci Phi Journal because it is about a young writer, writing science fiction. It is such a beautiful story and I loved it when I first read it. It is a sublime story about the simple pleasures of spending time with family and seeking immortality at the same time.

About the Author

Gregory L. Norris writes full-time from the outer limits of New Hampshire’s North Country. Raised on a healthy diet of creature double features and classic SF/F/H TV shows, Norris has written for television and film, novels, for national magazines, and numerous fiction anthologies. His latest release, Tales From the Robot Graveyard, features a foreword by Star Blazers’ Amy Howard Wilson and cover art by Battlestar Galactica conceptual artist Eric Chu. Follow his literary adventures on FB and at his tiny wedge of virtual real estate, www.gregorylnorris.blogspot.com.

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Catch a Falling Star by Edward M. Lerner

CatchAFallingStar-Cover

CATCH A FALLING STAR

Edward M. Lerner

2158

End over end, leisurely, the vaguely potato-shaped object rolled. Up close, the rock’s sunlit face shone brightly. As it tumbled, craters and rocky outcroppings materialized from and disappeared into pitch-black shadows. The apparent undulation of the surface was further complicated by the approaching ship’s own slow rotation, motion that afforded equal views through the windows on both sides of the passenger lounge.
With a gentle nudge from its maneuvering engines, the spaceship crept closer. A frail metal construct rose, glinting, from the shadows in a shallow, pockmarked concavity.
The lounge’s background music faded. A soft beeping replaced it. “You’re hearing the asteroid’s radio tracking beacon, emitted by the robot probe you now see on the surface. The rock measures roughly one and a half kilometers long by half a kilometer wide. Its official designation is (483188) 2007 FL. As you may know, this unremarkable object played an interesting role in our history.
“It is popularly known as Jason.”
2054
“You seem down, Doc.”
Jason Reed looked up. The tattered blueprints that covered his desk rustled, and he saw his hands were trembling. “I need more java,” he hedged.
“You need more than that,” Mike the Janitor said from the doorway. He claimed his last name was hard to pronounce, and that it pained him to hear it butchered. That made “the Janitor” his last name for most purposes.
Jason was good with languages but never pushed it. He had his own secrets, including his own real name. Nowadays, who didn’t have secrets?
Mike pantomimed a quick snort of a stronger beverage.
“Thanks. Maybe later.” Jason ran splayed fingers across his head. Strange: The reflex to comb fingers through one’s hair took no notice of that hair’s long-ago disappearance. Stranger: The trivial distractions his mind could invent.
Mike shuffled down the hall pushing the handle of his mop. A sticking wheel of the mop bucket chattered like teeth. “I’ll catch you later.”
Jason smoothed his stack of blueprints, only then noticing that the sheet currently folded to the top dealt with plumbing details. It contributed nothing to troubleshooting the too-warm office of the plant’s chief accountant.
How long had he been staring into space?
Jason folded over three sheets, bringing to the surface the connection diagram of the building management system. A faded red X obliterated the symbol for the computer that no longer optimized or monitored anything. That had long ago ceased to exist, except in scraps and shards in some unknown garbage dump. With the digital-control overlay gone, all that remained to “manage” the building was pneumatic logic. When it worked right, which wasn’t often, the modulated-compressed-air scheme could maybe keep the temp within two degrees of set point. Jason had looked it up once: The pneumatic controller’s design went back to 1933.
Damn Gateskeepers.
Coffee from a half-empty mug sloshed over the plans. Blotting frantically with a handful of tissues, Jason could not help but stare at the worsening tremor in his hands. They did not shake from disdain at the state of the building controls.
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He could have acted months ago. Why hadn’t he?
Because saving the world meant losing the one person in the world who mattered to him.
He didn’t want to go there.
The most likely causes for that office to overheat were a bad temperature sensor or a sticking damper. He would check out those first. Jason pitched the soggy wad into his wastebasket. With a sigh and angry twinges from his left knee, the two unrelated, he got onto his feet.
He needn’t have bothered.
Past a knot of staring employees, two goons in the uniform of the People’s Guardians searched the chief accountant’s office. The commissar assigned to oversee the plant hovered over them, radiating smug satisfaction. The factory’s routine production of light bulbs provided her no such opportunity to prove her zeal.
Damn Gateskeepers. Jason kept his expression neutral.
A gawker whispered to Jason. “They found contraband in the bean-counter’s desk. A Palm Pilot.” He enunciated the name with slow, portentous syllables. “A junior bean counter snitched. I heard something about files of cost data, and something about a spreadsheet, whatever that is. You missed the pinstriped perp walk.”
Lopez, the chief accountant, was a penny-pinching SOB and a bit of a pompous ass. Jason had never much liked him. Now, though, as he imagined Lopez in Gateskeeper interrogation …
He suppressed the urge to shudder. Being seen as sympathetic was the quickest way to join the accountant.
From points uncertain echoed the clatter of Mike’s mop bucket. Let the Gateskeepers sweat, Jason thought. He set out after the squeaky wheel and that stiff drink.
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The Time Trap by Michael Shanks

Our first short film for Sci Phi Journal is a fun little time travel story called “The Time Trap” by Michael Shanks, who you may know as Daniel Jackson from [easyazon_link asin=”B000F8O2Q0″ locale=”US” new_window=”default” nofollow=”default” tag=”superversivesf-20″ add_to_cart=”default” cloaking=”default” localization=”default” popups=”default”]Stargate SG-1[/easyazon_link]. I hope you enjoy.

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News

So the launch of the first item seemed to go well yesterday. It’s available now and I hope everybody enjoyed it. For those waiting on replies to emails or news about stories submitted, I am behind but will be in a position to get back to it now.
I hope everybody enjoyed “A Meeting on Infinite Stairs” and the first paid item will be from Edward M. Lerner, a story called “To Catch a Falling Star”. Expect to see that out Friday. If you have any feedback on the new format please leave a comment or shoot me an email editor@sciphijournal.com. It’s still not too late to subscribe for Fridays item!
Finally some exciting news, Sci Phi Journal scored three entries on the Tangent Online 2015 Recommended Reading List with “The Frankenstein Project”, “Shell Game” and “A Bottle of Red Zinfandel”. Which for our first year of running is pretty exciting.

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