Snow: Inktober Appropriated Short Fiction

It had snowed for a million years before my boots made their prints in the drift. There were no clouds on this airless moon, even of methane - they had frozen out when the parent planet began its march away from the sun some point during the trial of Galileo. It was the planet's RINGS that did the snowing.

There had been another moon once - of rocks, oozes, and most of all water ice. It had strayed into the planet's roche limit and been crushed into those glittering rings. Not all its water had been frozen though; under the thinnest of protective ice shells life had evolved - and thrived.

I picked through the snow and pulled out a ray-worm. It looked like it belonged in the frozen food aisle. As I put it in my sample bag I realized this was the value of my life. To be alive, and here, to know that others had been once.

Ash: Inktober Appropriated Short Fiction

You’re not serious about monetizing physics until you can predict supernovae. Then, get to them as fast as possible, and profit.

We’re not the first to deal in superuranics and neither are we the only ones. What we do have is the best coverage. Our miners travel the whole galaxy; their ships the only ones heading TOWARDS supernovae. Play it safe and the competition will beat you to them. Arrive too soon and be destroyed by the most powerful explosions in the galaxy. It’s best to leave the piloting to the accountants.

After mining, the markets need to be predicted. Data scientists pick out which expanding empires (we think) won’t run out of steam, and if their neighbors won’t either. Once identified, we then beat the super heavies into light sails and laser them on their way. (It’s assumed our branch offices will be there by then to receive; Sales has its own data scientists.)

That’s where I come in; I’m sales. First thing I do is show the prospect that superuranics do exist; that the ‘islands of stability’ are not just physicist wet dreams. I’ll put down a dull-silvery ingot and wait for them to check its density. Once their scientists start losing their minds, I move on to price.

Super heavies are VERY high melting point, and with a bit of graphene mixed in they’re strong enough to survive closeby nuclear explosions. This makes them perfect for pulse engine pusher plates. A fleet with pusher plates can be lasered up to near light speed, sneak for centuries while cold as the interstellar medium, and then slam to a stop on a barrage of antimatter detonations. Thus instead of their enemy swatting out invading VN dusts before they grow into war factories, they must face READY-MADE navies.

I always sell to both sides.

People say that it’s our fault these sorts of wars happen, with immense fleets irradiating target worlds before dropping legions to further pacify the ashes. They claim our entire industry allows cultures to successfully invade each other. That’s true – by supplying the machinery of war we make war an option.

But if we don’t do it, someone else will. Why should we give up our business? Our customers sure don’t want us to.

The ones that live, that is.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04250v1

http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/03/27/nuclear-pulse-propulsion-gateway-to-the-stars/#sthash.Cfdpaff1.dpbs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability#Possible_natural_occurrence

https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW170817Kilonova/index.php

https://www.thoughtco.com/actinides-606643

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbihexium

Dragon: Inktober Appropriated Short Short Fiction

"Is this everything you have here on their extinction?"

"Mostly," the man said. "There's more of course, but this is all that we have dug up."

He was a man in the broad sense; within the bounds of the general template. I had seen quite the range in my work. It is hard to believe that when we were uni-planetary humanity had consisted of a single pattern. Yet, that is what the archaeology shows.

Before me were clear-walled vaults of climate-controlled jewelry, burial goods, and garbage. Historians used gloves as they peeled the stories off them. The prize of the collection was a black granite standing stone that glowed in radio: waste heat from its self-repair circuits. Maintained on its surface as fresh as the day they'd been carved, were inscriptions.

"Can you read it?" He asked when I got to it. “We've not seen it's like in even our oldest databases. Yet, it's mathematical roots are obvious though we have not been able to derive beyond a point with certainty."

"It was called Volm;" I replied, I recognized the symbols like old friends in a crowd. "It was a geometrical languages derived from proofs so humans could decrypt their ancestors’ records rather than remember their languages.”

"That seems awkward."

"Your culture is too young to know the event horizon of memory. Volm was meant to be a language of deep time. One for leaving notes for a reader who may not come for millions of years."

"Is that why you can read it? Because the Empire has endured so long?"

"I can read it because it was written to me."

He seemed surprised at that.

"To an Imperial officer?"

"No. To ME. It tells of the coming of the Dragon; its speed, mass, and rage."

"The Dragon? That's a myth!" He laughed.

I gave him a look and his smile disappeared.

"It's a myth to YOUR people. Among the ice palace tribes it is a hungry demon their dancers recall in songs. In the Book of Diamond Leaves they thought it was a comet, right up until it burned their moons. The Dragon is real. I have been following it for over a million years."

The man opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it. He had the disturbed frown of one whose worldview had just been smashed with a hammer.

"You-you follow it?"

"I’m hunting it. These are the carcasses it leaves behind," I gestured around the vault. "Often another culture will settle among them, and produces these when I arrive and ask."

"If what you say is true, that this Dragon must be thousands of years ahead of you. How could you possibly hope to catch it when buried ruins are its spoor?"

"Because dragons like to double back."