Lightspeed Magazine Issue 1 Read online

  If Einstein is flying next to our train, looking into a mirror and wondering where his reflection has gone—will you ask him whether anything stands still, or if everything is always in motion? Relative to everything else, of course.

  And ask about Reno. If our trains crash there, should we consider that they’ve stopped moving? Or are they still in motion on Earth, relative to everything else in the universe?

  Everyone’s joined in the same future, except you. Time moves so quickly—accelerating to the point where we can hardly imagine what’s next. I went to sleep expecting to be cured. Instead, the AI woke me and said I no longer needed my body. It downloaded my mind, and now I see. You and I are eccentric, but part of a solar system, and I know now where we belong. It’s easy for me to travel along circuits, to expand my mind everywhere in the network—and then condense myself so small as to be negligible in the universe, here in one corner of a virtual city.

  I see they’ve sent a ship after you, moving at 99.99% the speed of light. It’ll reach you eventually. They’ll download you and you’ll fly back to me. Here, where we belong. I think I never left your orbit.

  I wrote you a long message to explain all this, but I think I’ll erase it and just leave ten words. I’ll tell you the rest when you arrive—when our perpetual motion comes to a relative stop.

  Vylar Kaftan writes speculative fiction of all genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and slipstream. She’s published stories in places such as Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons. She lives with her husband Shannon in northern California and blogs at www.vylarkaftan.net.

  Spotlight: Vylar Kaftan

  Which came first while writing this story, the relationship between the narrator and her absent partner, or the progression of science? How did you decide that one best served the other? Did you consider telling the story a different way?

  I have some friends in a multi-decade on-again/off-again relationship. Like the characters in the story, they get together, break up, see other people, reconnect, and do it all over again. They love each other, but they’ve never been able to make it work. I was thinking about them and their endless circling around a center they never seem to find. They reminded me of Newton’s cradle, also known as a “kinetic motion toy,” with metal balls on strings that transfer energy to the endpoints. It always seems like when one is in love, the other is looking away. In addition, the passage of time often changes how we view our past and present loves, and I wondered what would happen if one person had a lot more time to change than the other one. I don’t plan stories much, so I can’t say that I considered telling the story differently. I didn’t know how it would end when I started it.

  Do the limitations of relativity make it more interesting to write space-faring science fiction or just more difficult? What kind of scientific obstacles did you run into while writing the story?

  There’s always problems with science not wanting to cooperate with imagination. I imagine a world where I can shoot lasers from my eyeballs, but so far, science hasn’t cooperated. That said, I don’t think relativity is limiting at all. Creativity thrives on boundaries. If you don’t have boundaries, how can you push what’s possible? I fussed with the numbers to make the math come out right (thanks, Mike Brotherton and the Launch Pad workshop!) But other than that, not a lot.

  Your story contains a lot of intricate wordplay, in which you apply scientific terminology to relationships. How difficult was that to execute?

  Not especially. It’s how I think. Metaphor is how I learn science and math concepts—from happy little numbers dancing together on Sesame Street to the uncontrollable lust of alkali metals for halogens. You should see some of my chemistry notes from college. Dear Penthouse: I never thought I’d form a double covalent bond…

  What can you tell us about using the language of science to describe love? Of the many scientific metaphors you apply to relationships, is there one that is your favorite?

  It’s right there in the story: “And if love isn’t subject to physics, then it has no grounding in our universe. I can’t believe that’s true.” Everything in this world works through science—even if we don’t understand what that science is yet.

  Perhaps the most famous SF story dealing with relativistic travel is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Are you a fan of that novel? Are there other stories in that vein that you’ve enjoyed or were inspired by?

  Yes, I enjoyed it. I think the novel which underpins “Reno” is Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, a book which I affectionately call Physics for Poets. It’s not a traditional novel—more like a meditation on how time works, or doesn’t, or might. This book wasn’t a conscious influence; I only noticed it later. Italo Calvino is a good general influence too.

  Authors will sometimes find that they write often about a single theme. Is there a theme in “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” that runs through your other work as well?

  Most of my stories are ultimately about power and control. In “Reno,” the narrator alternates between control of the relationship and response to it, between action and reaction. Yet power comes when she gives up control, when she relaxes into the rhythm of their relationship and accepts what it is. The secondary theme is that love conquers all, which is a feeling I believe in. (Although love is vulnerable to the occasional bear trap.)

  Is There Anyone Out There Who Wants To Go Fast?

  Mike Brotherton

  That’s the question posed in the movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Ricky Bobby wants to go fast and thinks that driving NASCAR fits the bill. Now that is a comedy for the general public, and to the general public, NASCAR is fast. For scientists, and science fiction fans, however, that’s a ridiculous position.

  So, what is fast, then? And how fast can we go?

  Well, let’s start with cars.

  NASCAR racers average under 200 mph on the fastest tracks. World record cars—more rockets with wheels than cars—top out at over 700 mph, nearly the speed of sound. (That’s cool, but Buckaroo Banzai was able to drive his test car through a mountain.)

  Aircraft, of course, can go much faster than that. Several times the speed of sound, in fact. For instance, the SR-71 Blackbird, which I first learned about reading X-Men, can fly at nearly 2200 mph. That’s St. Louis to Cincinnati in 8 minutes. Now that’s pretty fast.

  But not fast enough to get you off the surface of the earth. For that, you need escape velocity and that’s some 11 miles per second.

  Now, when talking about spacecraft speeds, or the speeds of planets or stars moving in their gravitational dance, kilometers per second are the units of choice. The Earth moves at 30 kilometers per second around the Sun. The Sun moves at just over 220 kilometers per second around the Milky Way. The Milky Way is falling through space at some 1000 kilometers per second relative to the microwave background radiation.

  But, still, this is not really all that fast.

  Jets from quasars, cosmic rays, neutrinos spewed forth from supernovas…ok, now we’re moving fast. 300,000 kilometers per second fast. Lightspeed. The ultimate speed limit.

  Over a century ago, Einstein tried to imagine what it would be like to travel at the speed of light, and basically what he determined was that it would be pretty damn weird. The energy to accelerate to lightspeed approaches infinity, or you can look at it as your mass going to infinity. (I’m heavy enough, so I’ll choose the former perspective.) Time stretches out to infinity, too, which is a handy feature of relativistic travel. Back to this in a moment.

  Our fastest spacecraft to date, Voyager 1, now pushing into interstellar space, is only moving away at about 17 kilometers per second, and it used a bunch of gravitational tricks to help get it going that fast.

  Now, in principle, it’s possible to imagine traveling at close to lightspeed, but there are many practical problems. At lightspeed, specks of gravel hit like mountains, so those must be cleared out of the way one way or another. Rockets of variou
s forms seem to fall short, requiring ratios of fuel-to-payload too outrageous to actually work. Spacecraft that don’t carry their own fuel work better: solar sails, laser or particle beam propulsion, or variations of ramjets that scoop up interstellar hydrogen as fuel on the fly. The energy and engineering both are daunting, but it may be possible, although unlikely given current understanding.

  But when you talk about technology beyond the above imaginings…now that’s truly entering the realm of science fiction. Maybe dark matter particles, much more plentiful than hydrogen gas, could be made to serve as fuel. Maybe zero point (aka vacuum) energy can be exploited. Who knows? Breakthroughs are always possible.

  In science fiction, of course, there are many ways to go faster than light. There’s the hyperspace of Star Wars, the warp speed of Star Trek, the space folding of Dune. And that’s just for starters. Faster than light travel is probably the most often used fantasy element in science fiction, and many of the consequences of this fantasy are not held to realistic treatments.

  While it may cause a lot of science fiction fans to grumble when you say it, in the face of science today, lightspeed is a hard limit…maybe there are ways to cheat on Professor Einstein’s test, but not even Captain Kirk could do it with today’s understanding (short of reprogramming the entire universe, of course, and he would try).

  This reality leaves many fans and visionaries depressed and in denial. It makes the universe look too big, they say, and our solar system the only pond we humans will ever get to swim in.

  Except…there is another way of looking at the situation. With enough energy, enough speed, there is no practical speed limit in principle for the traveler.

  The time dilation effects of relativity mean that time passes twice more slowly at 87% lightspeed, seven times more slowly at 99% lightspeed, a hundred times more slowly at 99.995% lightspeed, and infinitely slowly as lightspeed itself is approached infinitely closely. And a person moving at lightspeed, perhaps transformed into photons by an unknown technology, could travel everywhere in no time.

  Now that would be fast.

  NASA may be or may not be the future of manned spaceflight, but they’re one of the main players today and may be tomorrow, too. So, can you imagine it? An overlap of fans of car racing and science fiction, sitting down together to cheer on NASCAR? Astronauts racing to the stars? Eventually approaching lightspeed itself? Who knows what the future holds?

  So, is there anyone out there who wants to go fast?

  Mike Brotherton is the author of Star Dragon and Spider Star, editor of the anthology Diamonds in the Sky, and an astronomy professor at the University of Wyoming. He’s a graduate of Clarion West and founder of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. He blogs at www.mikebrotherton.com.

  The Cassandra Project

  Jack McDevitt

  It’s an odd fact that the biggest science story of the twenty-first century—probably the biggest ever—broke in that tabloid of tabloids, The National Bedrock.

  I was in the middle of conducting a NASA press conference several days before the Minerva lift-off—the Return to the Moon—and I was fielding softball questions like: “Is it true that if everything goes well, the Mars mission will be moved up?” and “What is Marcia Beckett going to say when she becomes the first person to set foot on lunar soil since Eugene Cernan turned off the lights fifty-four years ago?”

  President Gorman and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Alexandrov, were scheduled to talk to the press from the White house an hour later, so I was strictly a set-up guy. Or that was the plan, anyway, until Warren Cole mentioned the dome.

  It was a good time for NASA. We all knew the dangers inherent in overconfidence, but two orbital missions had gone up without a hitch. Either of them could have landed and waved back at us, and the rumor was that Sid Myshko had almost taken the game into his own hands, and that the crew had put it to a vote whether they’d ignore the protocol and go down to the surface regardless of the mission parameters. Sid and his five crewmates denied the story, of course.

  I’d just made the point to the pool of reporters that it was Richard Nixon who’d turned off the lights—not the astronaut Eugene Cernan—when Warren Cole began waving his hand. Cole was the AP journalist, seated in his customary spot up front. He was frowning, his left hand in the air, staring down at something on his lap that I couldn’t see.

  “Warren?” I said. “What’ve you got?”

  “Jerry….” He looked up, making no effort to suppress a grin. “Have you seen the story that the Bedrock’s running?” He held up his iPad.

  That started a few people checking their own devices.

  “No, I haven’t,” I said, hoping he was making it up. “I don’t usually get to Bedrock this early in the week.” Somebody snorted. Then a wave of laughter rippled through the room. “What?” I said. My first thought had been that we were about to have another astronaut scandal, like the one the month before with Barnaby Salvator and half the strippers on the Beach. “What are they saying?”

  “The Russians released more lunar orbital pictures from the sixties,” He snickered. “They’ve got one here from the far side of the Moon. If you can believe this, there’s a dome back there.”

  “A dome?”

  “Yeah.” He flipped open his notebook. “Does NASA have a comment?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I said.

  He twisted the iPad, raised it higher, and squinted at it. “Yep. It’s a dome all right.”

  The reporters in the pool all had a good chuckle, and then they looked up at me. “Well,” I said, “I guess Buck Rogers beat us there after all.”

  “It looks legitimate, Jerry,” Cole said, but he was still laughing.

  I didn’t have to tell him what we all knew: That it was a doctored picture and that it must have been a slow week for scandals.

  If the image was doctored, the deed had to have been done by the Russians. Moscow had released the satellite images only a few hours before and forwarded them to us without comment. Apparently nobody on either side had noticed anything unusual. Except the Bedrock staff.

  I hadn’t looked at the images prior to the meeting. I mean, once you’ve seen a few square miles of lunar surface you’ve pretty much seen it all. The dome—if that’s really what it was—appeared on every image in the series. They were dated April, 1967.

  The Bedrock carried the image on its front page, where they usually show the latest movie celebrity who’s being accused of cheating, or has gone on a drunken binge. It depicted a crater wall, with a large arrow graphic in the middle of a dark splotch pointing at a dome that you couldn’t have missed anyhow. The headline read:

  ALIENS ON THE MOON

  Russian Pictures Reveal Base on Far Side

  Images Taken Before Apollo

  I sighed and pushed back from my desk. We just didn’t need this.

  But it did look like an artificial construct. The thing was on the edge of a crater, shaped like the head of a bullet. It was either a reflection, an illusion of some sort, or it was a fraud. But the Russians had no reason to set themselves up as a laughing stock. And it sure as hell looked real.

  I was still staring at it when the phone rang. It was Mary, NASA’s administrator. My boss. “Jerry,” she said, “I heard what happened at the press conference this morning.”

  “What’s going on, Mary?”

  “Damned if I know. Push some buttons. See what you can find out. It’s going to come up again when the President’s out there. We need to have an answer for him.”

  Vasili Koslov was my public relations counterpart at Russia’s space agency. He was in Washington with the presidential delegation. And he was in full panic mode when I got him on the phone. “I saw it, Jerry,” he said. “I have no idea what this is about. I just heard about it a few minutes ago. I’m looking at it now. It does look like a dome, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Did your people tamper with the satellite imagery?”

  “T
hey must have. I have a call in. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear something.”

  I called Jeanie Escovar in the Archives. “Jeanie, have you seen the National Bedrock story yet?”

  “No,” she said. “My God, what is it this time?”

  “Not what you think. I’m sending it to you now. Could you have somebody check to see where this place is—?”

  “What place? Oh, wait—. I got it.”

  “Find out where it is and see if you can get me some imagery of the same area. From our satellites.”

  I heard her gasp. Then she started laughing.

  “Jeanie, this is serious.”

  “Why? You don’t actually believe there’s a building up there, do you?”

  “Somebody’s going to ask the President about it. They have a press conference going on in about twenty minutes. We want him to be able to say: ‘It’s ridiculous, here’s a picture of the area, and you’ll notice there’s nothing there.’ We want him to be able to say ‘The Bedrock’s running an optical illusion.’ But he’ll have to do it diplomatically. And without embarrassing Alexandrov.”

  “Good luck on that.”

  The Bedrock story was already getting attention on the talk shows. Angela Hart, who at that time anchored The Morning Report for the World Journal, was interviewing a physicist from MIT. The physicist stated that the picture could not be accurate. “Probably a practical joke,” he said. “Or a trick of the light.”

  But Angela wondered why the Russians would release the picture at all. “They had to know it would get a lot of attention,” she said. And, of course, though she didn’t mention it, it would become a source of discomfort for the Russian president and the two cosmonauts who were among the Minerva crew.

  Vasili was in a state of shock when he called back. “They didn’t know about the dome,” he said. “Nobody noticed. But it is on the original satellite imagery. Our people were just putting out a lot of the stuff from the Luna missions. Imagery that hadn’t been released before. I can’t find anybody who knows anything about it. But I’m still trying.”