Nothing Touched Him
Konrad Ilves was crushed to death in a room where nothing weighs anything at all, and the only witness was a robot that cannot harm a human being.
Stories tagged “hard-sci-fi”
38 stories found
The Erratum
A mathematician finds one small flaw in the universe, far out in the nineteenth decimal. When it is observed, the cosmos does not repair the error — it revises whoever noticed.
The Cartographer of the Dark
The neurologists sent Maya to us because they had run out of explanations, and astronomers are the last people anyone thinks to consult about a six-year-old girl. She does not draw houses, or dogs, or her mother.
The Weight Between Stars
You are the only human alive who can see dark matter — the vast unseen weight that holds the stars in place. And the men who run the world want your map.
As Predicted
The first letter arrived on 14 October 2027. It was 4,213 words long. It identified itself, in its opening paragraph, as a transcription of an electromagnetic burst recorded on the lunar far-side observatory.
The Still Point
The body would not stay still, and that was the first thing wrong with it. On a station where nothing has weight, an inspector reads a murder in two slow vectors.
The Contraction
I logged it on day 47, just to be sure, but I had been seeing it for five days. Centauri B was closer.
The Widening
For forty years the pulsars kept perfect time, and gravity was the one thing you could lean on. Then, on an ordinary Tuesday, the weight of the universe began — very quietly — to let go.
The Refusal
The signal arrived on the morning of 14 March 2071, was confirmed independently by seventeen radio observatories within four hours, and was, by the conclusion of the following week, the most-studied phenomenon in human history. It came from a region of the sky in the constellation of Cygnus, at a distance of approximately thirty-eight light-years.
The Axiom of Choice
They spoke to us only in mathematics. The final proof would let one human understand them completely — but no one who reads it stays human.