The Second Ship

Sometimes life drives you to do entirely new things, things you never believed you could do.

Leaning back in the couch, she let her mind relax. Think, Heather. Think. She visualized a grid containing the origin of a coordinate system. A perpendicular set of lines labeled “x axis” and “y axis” appeared to float before her. She drew a single point located right three ticks and up four ticks from the origin on the grid, then followed up with another point, connecting the two with a line. It was there, floating perfectly in the air before her. Right, she thought. She added another dimension to the grid to form a cube, and into this cube she drew spheres, ellipsoids, cubes, and pyramids. It was easy. The equations came faster and faster, as if she had fumbled around and found a switch in the dark. A part of her mind turned on, big time. Adding a fourth dimension was easy. She took her three-dimensional grid cube, shrank it to the size of a pinhead, then formed a line of these cubes. Five dimensions formed from a plane of the 3D grid cubes. Six: a cube made of cubes. Seven dimensions: a line made of the new cube of cubes. On and on the mental sequence spun from her mind. Easy. Oh so easy. She no longer had to think about the equations that represented the shapes. Merely visualizing the shape brought the corresponding equations to her mind. She didn’t have to solve them; she just knew them. It was beautiful beyond her wildest imaginings.

Your journey will proceed faster with a brief delay.’ In other words, don’t go off half-cocked, but don’t wait until the other fellow shoots you either.” A

Once it was out of radio range, there was nothing

Having had some experience as a sci-fi writer myself, I found Suddenly Paris to be a very nicely written, YA Sci-Fi novel that turns the story of THE MATRIX on its head. It explores the following question. What if, instead of being people trapped in a synthesized dream world, we only think we are real? The ethical and existential questions that go along with computer generated characters inside a simulation acquiring self-awareness without an awareness that they are living in a simulated world are dealt with in a very entertaining story. Enjoy.

Look, just producing energy cleanly doesn’t clean up the environment. Energy is the fuel of consumption, and rampant consumption is what drives the train of environmental destruction. This promise of clean, cheap energy is the siren sitting on a rocky shoal, calling us all toward an ecological shipwreck. It says, produce more. Consume more. No need to fret or worry about conservation.

was as if all life in the vicinity sensed the presence of a hunter and remained frozen, hoping that through absolute stillness, a state of safe anonymity could be achieved.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Gilbert McFarland was tall and slender, with brown eyes and a mouth upturned in a perpetual smile. His thick brown hair was hidden under the old floppy fishing hat he always wore, which sported an assortment of hand-tied flies and a button that proclaimed ONE FISH, TWO FISH, RED FISH, BLUE FISH...

Every basketball wimp needs a lesson, and you seem to think you’re somewhere above your true station in life.

What do you know about the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory?” “Never heard of it.” “It’s a big, two-million-pound bottle of heavy water over a mile below ground in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario. The whole thing is surrounded by a sixty-foot-thick array of photomultiplier tubes and is suspended in a huge tank of light water.

I finished reviewing all the data we got on our last trip out to the ship. As much as I hate to admit it, it turns out Mark is right. We do need to build both a subspace receiver and a subspace transmitter.” “I keep telling you to listen when I speak,” Mark said. “It’s not that we need it to receive a signal. But we’re going to want to put data on remote network lines, not just receive. For that we’ll need a focused subspace wave packet that will induce a signal in normal space. You can almost think of it as Faraday’s induction principle applied across a subspace to normal space interface.

For that we’ll need a focused subspace wave packet that will induce a signal in normal space. You can almost think of it as Faraday’s induction principle applied across a subspace to normal space interface.

Over a year ago, Heather had read an article on quantum twins. Quantum theory predicted and experimentation had shown it possible to produce a pair of particles that shared the same quantum state. If something was done to one of the particles that changed its state, the state of the other particle changed at exactly the same time. This was true no matter how much distance separated the pair, something that at first glance appeared to violate the special theory of relativity’s prohibition on any information traveling faster than the speed of light. But the twin particles were bound together as if by magic.

It was easy. The equations came faster and faster, as if she had fumbled around and found a switch in the dark. A part of her mind turned on, big time. Adding a fourth dimension was easy. She took her three-dimensional grid cube, shrank it to the size of a pinhead, then formed a line of these cubes. Five dimensions formed from a plane of the 3D grid cubes. Six: a cube made of cubes. Seven dimensions: a line made of the new cube of cubes. On and on the mental sequence spun from her mind. Easy. Oh so easy.