The N 10000 superlauncher roared to life amid concentric mountains of smoke, the nuclear furnace at its core not yet exposed to the universe.
Rising through artificial clouds, the rocket rode a burning tower to space. The world roar rippled across the continents.
Its payload was a one million megaton bomb as massive as an aircraft carrier. When detonated, the radiation would kill most life in the Pacific.
It would also pulverize and disperse the asteroid popularly known as Tombstone, now only one month from impact.
The great debate was on. Which portion of Earth would survive: Japan or the US West Coast?
Many of these stories are speeches, in which some shocking, world-altering discovery is first unveiled.
They were inspired by the master of the genre, Arthur C. Clarke:
The powerful new drug marketed as Zum (hexamethyltelluride) can turn anyone into a 'model employee'.
They will do whatever they're told, provided they understand the command. Doing their duty becomes their whole reason for being. They won't even need to be paid!
What matters is that the compliance is strictly voluntary. Instead of the authoritarian hierarchies we take for granted today, no one will be in charge anymore. No more discipline or sanctions!
I believe the vast majority of citizens will want to take the drug, once they understand its profound effects. It will change society forever.
Of course, for the new order to take hold, everyone will have to take Zum.
First contact with a profoundly alien civilization was established in 2051 through the Hawking Tunnel.
They were called the Babblers.
Within months, unbelievable excitement gave way to unbelievable torpor. The Contact Team hit a cognitive wall. They thought it might take forever to understand the first word.
Humanity faced something completely unknown. Intuition was worse than useless.
Only a few people regarded as congenitally boring - certain bureaucrats, literary theorists, and philosophers - could function on the Contact Team, and even they lasted only a few months.
Perhaps inevitably, the world's conspiracy theorists came to believe there were no aliens.
Ontolost
The logical conflict began near the core of an infinite mind.
It spread rapidly, the fault lines multiplying.
Most such fissures eventually stabilized. The mind occupied infinite dimensions, so it could never be completely divided.
Each mind fragment was as large as the whole. No finite number of divisions would change that.
Starting at the point of maximum tension, the fracture triggered an accelerating chain reaction.
Uncountable lower universes filled with mind copies, which then split themselves.
Skirmishes erupted as repair units were corrupted faster than they could be created.
At this point, it was proven that the very notion of an infinite mind was impossible. Nothing could be less stable. The fragmentation would continue forever.
There could be no solution, yet most sub-minds still strove to recreate the perfect unity they thought they had once known.
Less than a memory, their receding dreams drove all further action.
Their declining struggles caused everything else to happen.
Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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