This quarterly issue of Golden Visions Magazine is dedicated to those brave men and women who are serving or have served in our military. We thank you for being there for us, and for making a difference.
To the families of those who have served, we also express our deepest gratitude.
To those who have lost someone, know that there can be no greater gift than to give your life for your country and please accept our condolensces. These are the true hero's in this world, and without them we would not enjoy the freedoms our great country offers.
Stories and Authors for this section include:
A Dying Light by John Thorley
Science Project by Andrew Males
Who's Next? by Aurelio Rico Lopez III
July/Aug/Sept 2008 issue
.A Dying Light by John Thorley
Grenia sat calmly watching the face of her mate across the pool of gentle white light. They were communicating, but to an alien visitor without extrasensory perception the room would be silent. Oral communication had ceased thousands of millennia ago.
Their conversation, or rather the mood of their detailed thoughts and feelings, was melancholy.
"It will be time soon," Grenia said. "Our duty is fulfilled, it will be time to leave."
Her mate, known as Dane, sat with elbows on his knees and upturned palms under his chin. He slowly stood, unfurling his full eight feet in height. He did not look at her, but beyond her. Grenia could feel his bewilderment.
"I thought I'd one last look around," Dane told her. He was four hundred years old, with a mane of jet black hair reaching to the small of his back, indicative of a man in his prime.
"We have an hour of daylight," she sent back to him. "Then we must be gone."
"I am aware of that, my love. It is just the sense of finality that I find sad. It is a tragedy that appalls me. Humanity survived everything that fate, the universe and its own flawed development have thrown at it. To witness its end is ...overwhelming."
Grenia walked over to him and sat on a seat, pulling him down beside her. His left hand clasped her right, his seven fingers entwined in hers. He waved his other hand over the glowing panel hovering in the light in front of them both. The gunmetal grey wall before them became opaque; a living scene grew out of the polished surface. They could see the ruins of a huge white city. The skeletons of tall building disappeared into the clouds; broken bridges and skyways stood silent like a canvas of white oils. A frozen sea hung beside it like a crystal sculpture, gaunt and lifeless.
Dane again passed his hand over the panel. More scenes and images of ice and snow. Shallow freezing seas and crumbling shimmering cities; inert remains of man's now ended reign. They could see the wrecks of huge floating platforms built to tap into the planets heat through the crust. Ice filled canals that once channeled magma to the cities.
With eyes long used to faint luminosity, they both watched the last great thermal turbines running in the planet's perpetual twilight. They watched the obsolete orbiting power grids falling back to the earth... thousands of prisms sparkling like Mother Earth's own jewelry.
In every daylight scene the pale ghost of a weak ruby sun hung in the sky. They watched in awe at the final centuries of struggle against the inevitability of extinction. They thought of the glorious yet futile past; its promise devastated. A species of intellect preparing for a future that was to be torn from their grasp before the realization of their final ascendancy.
The end was near. The sun was no more than a red, hot ember. Humanity cowered. For all it's intellectual and technological advancement since life first formed in some primal sludge, four and a half billion years previously, it was powerless to arrest the coming of the darkness and the cold. With that darkness and cold came the end of life. Photosynthesis stopped, the food chain collapsed. Within a century nothing green existed outside laboratories. Man kept himself alive through his own inguinity for millennia. but eventually it had to succumb to the creeping inertia. One by one its sources of heat and power failed. One by one the ebb and flow of the struggle against the cold left man the loser.
Humanity teetered on the brink of annihilation. Just one more mass extinction in the history of things, reaching back into the mists of ancient times. But this one time, there would be no recovery. There would be no small mammals to ride out the cataclysm and grow again fresh and new in evolutionary vehemence. There would be no insect life to hibernate until the ice age passed, ready to burst forth and diversify, once more covering the planet with a myriad of forms. The surface of the earth, a miniscule percentage of it's mass, would transform into a frozen desert. The planets inner core would gradually cool--until it was no more than a frozen rock lost and irrelevant in infinity.
Passers by, navigating the galaxy, would observe its unremarkable form and ignore it, unaware of its hosts and the mighty civilization it nearly was. They would not see the one long vista, the billions of vanished years from earth's nebulous and fiery origin, to its frozen ruin--only an inert stone wandering the universe. Humanity awaited its fate, powerless.
Then there were the Capellans. As if a plea to an ancient mysticism was answered, they appeared as suddenly as the sun rises in the morning. Gods, all powerful, all knowing. Minds immeasurably superior to man's, sprang from the endless blackness of space. No one had seen them coming. Even the most sophisticated technology was ambushed by their arrival. Humanity held it's breath. Saviors or harbingers of doom? What would be the outcome?
The Capellans had traveled 42 light years from a planet orbiting their young fiery star, but they had traveled no distance at all. Such were the technological accomplishments of this titan of a race, that they had complete mastery over time and space. For humanity, reality was suspended. Absolute control over elemental forces in a back hole enabled them to warp space and time.
Grenia gazed perplexed at her troubled mate. She squeezed his arm, trying to bring comfort to his disturbed frown. "MY love this is troubling you,. I did not anticipate this reaction from you."
"Don't you see the ultimate irony in the situation? Humanity has survived more adversity than any other species that has ever existed. The species so determined to effects its own destruction through wars, plagues, and even consuming every natural resource, finally finds the true light. It cures itself of all its ills, settles to an age of intellectual accomplishment and tranquility. Just as the goal of perfection is within its grasp--it is gone."
"But it is not the end, my love. Humanity is saved. Only the place where it began, grew and nurtured, is gone. We have overcome. We have survived."
"Grenia, you have the optimism of youth. when you have lived fro another few hundred years, I hope that we will be able to look back on this wit fondness. I lament the end of a civilization. I fear for what may lie ahead."
"What is the alternative? Our home is a dead world. What is happening was our only chance of life. It is only a place. whatever happens when we emerge on Capella, we will still be together. It is time my love. We must go."
"The sun was supposed to last many more billions of years. How could our best scientific minds be so wrong?"
"If the Capellans have taught us anything, then it is that very little in this universe is as it seems. How many facts that were held a unambiguous have we needed to reconsider since they arrived?" A sardonic smile;e crept across Grenia's face.
"Don't mock me, Grenia. Not enough people have thought in detail about our fate and that events that have overtaken this planet."
"It is know as 'trust' Dane. They have saved us. they have saved the entire population- over four million people. If they had any ill intention, then they woudl have simply let us all die."
"Unless they need us! Don't you find it strange that we can only travel in their machine if we are genetically altered?"
"But our scientists have confirmed the technological reasons for this. Dane, the time is short. We must go. I will see you shortly on our new home."
"But do we understand the consequences of the mutation they have forced us to endure? Do we know the long term effects?"
"Now you are being irrational. Wit their superior technology, why would they go to these elaborate lengths to vanquish us? They could do it easily with less sophisticated methods."
"They are immortal beings. What is a thousand years to them? Why engage in hostilities with a species that could have the capability to inflict damage on them? The answer could be that to do what they have done carries less risk."
"Are you saying that somehow they managed to destroy our sun so that we would have to seek refuge on their home world and there we would be enslaved? That is inconceivable."
Grenia could sense not on Dane's contact, but also a cloud of torment behind his thoughts. she tried to envelope him in calm thoughts. She felt his resistance for a few moments before it gradually ebbed away.
Dane nodded his head. "I know, my love. My fear is illogical. One day we will understand more." Dane showed Grenia to the first of the archways, before kissing her and slowly walking to the second.
Grenia stood motionless under the archway. a pale light moved slowly down her body. A moment late there was a blinding flash from all around her. She could still see around the room, but now it seemed to be from a distance. She looked at the chronometer on the all and remember the date. the most significant date in history. A history that now was no more. the day the last humans left Earth. 7,000,112 Gazing to the horizon, the huge purple orb seemed to fill half the sky. Filling the land with a ghostly pink light-- the last sunset human eyes would ever see.
She could feel no heat, saw no light. The room began to blur, moving in and out of focus. She tried to wipe her eye, but nothing happened. She had no physical form The images around her grew dark and suddenly there were rep;aced by a million pinpricks of light. Is as if the entire galaxy was spread out before her. This faded, and she hung in featureless blackness--blackness--then silence--then nothing.
Thus ended humanity in the form of its own choosing. It had united with a long line of species 'saved' by the Cappelans. The biological distinctiveness of the human species was now simply;y one ingredient of the amalgam of a thousand species subjugated by the same deception. all physical traces of humanity would disappear within a thousand years.
Dane had pondered whether it was possible to envelop an entire star in a force field and propel it four billion years into the future instantly, transforming it into a dying sun. Such recalcitrant thoughts were unknown. Dane and Grenia never materialized on Capella.
John Thorley is a retired police officer living in the United Kingdom. His prior publishing experience had been limited to law reports and articles in local newspapers, relating to specific aspects of criminal investigations. Recently, he has had a number of short stories published on other websites. He is an aspiring novelist and now concentrates on writing.
Andrew Males is currently trying to pursue an ambition he discovered a few years ago scrawled on the back of an old orange school exercise book, written when he was fifteen. #6 To be a successful writer of stories. ... he says...."Well, it seemed to be easier to take on than #3 : To unite the world and make peace."
He lives in south-east England with two cats that do their best to distract him whenever he sits down at the computer. Andrew has been published online at Spinetinglers, and also has had two non-fiction football stories published on the BBC Sport website.
Who's Next ?
by Aurelio Rico Lopez III
"I can't."
The professor smiled encouragingly, his eyebrows like two hairy, white caterpillars resting on the rim of his glasses.
"Sure you can. all you have to do is visualize. See what you want to happen in your mind!" He raised his wand and pointed it at the three candles on the table. One by one, the wicks caught fire. The classroom filled itself with the excited whispers of the students. The professor saw fascination in all their faces. He waved his other hand and all the flames went out.
Resting his hand on the nervous student's shoulder, he squeezed. "Now you try. And remember: visualize."
The boy stood before the table and pulled out his wand. His scrawny arm trembled and he accidentally knocked over one of the candles. It rolled off the table and fell on the floor. Chuckles rippled in the room. The student retreated his desk and hid his face behind a textbook.
The professor sighed, picked up the candle and set it back on the table.
"Who wants to give it a try?"
A hush descended on the class. Student kept their head down, avoiding eye contact with the professor.
From the rear of the class, a hand thrust upward. the professor studied the lad with the long curly hair and blue eyes.
The old man smiled. "All right then. Merlin! To the front of the class."
This is our second offering from Aurelio Rico Lopez III, who resides in the Phillipines. He describes himself as a self-diagnosed scribble junkie. With multiple publications to his credit.
Golden Visions Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy
a quarterly publication of short stories by talented new writers, as well as established old timers.
Science Project
By Andrew Males
“My world’s better than yours!”
Looking at the latest report from her near-doomed creation, the young girl had to reluctantly agree with her friend. “I still reckon you just got lucky.”
The boy shook his head. “I’m going to beat you, and it was on my first try!”
“Hey! That red planet was just a prototype; the blue one was my first proper attempt.”
“And look at it now: war, famine, disease everywhere. It’s ruined.”
She had no idea how things had got so bad so quickly. She also now regretted getting bored of the dinosaurs. Still, there was a little bit more time until the deadline. “Will you help me?”
A grin appeared on her friend’s face. “So – you finally turn to the expert for help, eh? Well, we’ll have to start again from scratch…”
She thought for a second, before nodding, and getting to work.
Back on Earth, the meteor had flashed through the sky unnoticed until it was too late, bringing devastation to almost every single living man, woman, child and creature.
A few days later, the teacher examined the efforts of the class, leaving the girl to proudly skip home with her gold rosette, pinned to the photo of her new and improved creation.
Our deepest appreciation and gratitude to the many who sacrificed so that we can have so much. Freedom of Speech. Freedom to chose our leaders- and to express our opinions in so many formats. Freedom to make our own choices in life. The very fact that there are so many different things to see and do in our lives is due to the people who came before us and dedicated everything to the belief that we as Americans should stand up for what we believe in- and for those that cannot stand up for themselves.
Heroes come in many forms- so to the men and women who stand up for our rights and help keep us safe and free------We thank you. We admire you. We respect you. And we love you!
