Science Fiction

To Infinity and Beyond: Imagining Liba College Futures and Other Science Fictions

Short Stories

By Ami Regier

***

The new entrepreneurial president was desperate. What small colleges do that no other form of higher education can do, he thought, is create a world. It is a very special, intense world, characterized by full-body, full-mind, live time scenarios 24-7, involving arduous journeys through the rugged terrains of, among others, liberal arts, technology, music, undergraduate research, and athletics. With much creativity, small colleges create their own educational structures and intercollegiate competitions. While musing about this, the president was multitasking along with the first-year students, having occasional google hangouts while reading the community-wide text Reamde, by Neal Stephenson. Reamde imagines that videogame realities are starting to intersect with real-world economies and power-brokers. In Reamde, students in China hack into Russian mafia financial data in order to make college tuition money. The data sets get imported into the game and held for ransom. Students problem-solve how to win access to the data sets in gaming logic (by winning in the game construct) but end up resolving real-world conflicts. When the president read the line about how people were tracing each other’s locations in two realities, the president turned to the webcam and shouted “Brilliant—that’s it!” Before long, the college had shifted the location of classroom learning into narrative worlds. A new major combining gaming, programming, international business, and writing was developed. Students developed problem-solving methods in the narrative context of multiplayer games, writing the next plot event after each problem was solved. As in Reamde, tuition money could be sited in the game, with portals for payment and collection based on student research, labs, logic proofs, performances, and creative activities built into the game. Soon, students world-wide were enrolling in the narrative world of Liba College. Residential inhabitation was optional, but students tended to choose it, because they could live as their game avatars and written selves during the duration of each class segment. Invented lives of mathematicians, economists, scientists, computer programmers, musicians, innovators, and super-athletes became real lives.

Continue reading →

The Crying Sky- Prologue: Deuteronomy

Short Stories

By Ben Preheim 

Not many alive today know how to listen, but for the few who do, they would know that even the trees were nervous.  The shaggy bushes and neatly trimmed hedges stood on edge; their leaves were silent.  The air was still, the animals quiet. A figure in a flowing black cloak strode like a ghost down a narrow rubbish-strewn street. He had been overwhelmed by the noise and chaos of the main streets.  These people were insane in their love of bright lights that burned without wood or oil, and their noisy vehicles. He chuckled, they called this progress, but they were barbaric than they had been hundreds years before.  The air was so laced with pollutants that it nearly made him choke.

He made his way to what the locals called Seraphim Abbey.  He could see it now, plainly visible in the pallid light of the possessed lamps that illuminated it.  The abbey was a large gothic church with a majestic rose window at the front, flanked by two square stone towers.  One tower held the bells, sweet bronze bells that rang on festival days.  The other tower had an enormous clock face on the front side; its hands read five minutes from midnight.

Tension started to build in his chest, and he shivered with excitement.  Oh, how long he had waited for this moment.  After years of preparation, plots, and counterplots, he had come to this moment.  He could barely contain himself.  Finally, after so many years, he’d be able to complete his mission.

Continue reading →