Question for regular readers. Can YOU tell which of the following stories were written under the influence of wacky weed?
A suction mirror is the opposite of a solar sail. Light reflects off the mirror with a shorter wavelength but less total energy. The mirror gets a small boost in the direction of the reflected beam, hence the suction effect. Bouncing a lightbeam between two suction mirrors pulls them together like Casimir plates.
As the light frequency increases, its energy rapidly declines until uncertainty takes hold. In the last instant before the mirrors collide, a strange catastrophe takes place. According to the calculations, the apparatus should convert infinite energy from the surrounding universe.
In practice, quantum fluctuations disrupt the mirrors before that can happen, but certain symmetries are violated.
The mirrors turn out to be the ideal power source for a new type of weapon.
Tachyon guns can kill before they're fired, but they're very hard to aim.
Human genetic therapy took off and ended abruptly in 2019.
In that year it was discovered the R-112 virus gave 100% of its human hosts lethal cancer after a one month incubation period. No treatment could alter the inevitable disease progression.
Fortunately, it turned out this illness took a thousand years to run its course.
It took twelve minutes to jog around the space station, a 600-meter wheel rotating in the void. By moving counterspinwise, I could reduce my gravity as I sped up, like an inverted orbit. Feet tapping faster, it felt as if I was standing still. The smoothly curving carpet unrolled from the ceiling like a conveyor belt fifteen seconds ahead.
In this hypnotic state my mind emptied itself. I forgot who I was, how I had arrived, the incredible task to come.
For a moment all possible stories intersected.
The First Empire had achieved absolute supremacy over the universe. Now it existed only to perpetuate itself. Lesser species considered them gods.
Until January 2020, mankind was considered unworthy to know they existed at all.
As I looked up at the silver disk hanging in the cloudless sky some indeterminate distance above the parking lot, I knew only one thing: it could see me better than I could see it.
We had spent almost a week in the star system before we realized the seemingly uninhabited planets' masses were exact fractional multiples of each other.
Of course we attempted to leave at once . . .
The alien city appeared overnight on Saturn's moon Tethys like a frozen fountain. No one had seen the builders come and go.
Indestructible and almost unchanging, there was dim motion within.
An inexplicable mystery, after a while the city was completely ignored by the expanding human population of the moon.
When it vanished, no one could prove it had existed at all.
The rays of the approaching star began to heat the Egg. Slightly resembling a skull, it prepared to hatch into the civilization that would someday own this solar system.
The Egg trembled once, and then popped out of existence, dispersing like an intelligent cloud into components that would slowly multiply wherever they landed.
For almost half a million years, nothing more seemed to happen.
When the first trillionaire decided to eliminate 99% of mankind, he needed a supervillain with a built-in expiration date.
Almost no one cared that while the first AI was proven to be mathematically unstable, its development budget kept rising month after month.
Finally, I realized civilization was self-limiting. The human world would always be inefficient, no matter what economic system was tried. Incompetence inevitably increased faster than progress.
To avoid the coming collapse of civilization in a storm of lawsuits, fraud, popular ignorance and religious violence, it was time to put Me in charge.
Trick question. None of them were!
The most important SF novel ever: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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