Reality Hack
Award-winning Science Fiction short story first published on the Center for International Maritime Security website on Dec 2, 2021, as the Third Place Finisher in the U.S. Naval Instiitute’s and CIMSEC’s annual fiction contest.
Virtual Reality (VR) is an excellent way to train troops for a task that could kill them should they make an error during real-world training. In the modern world, electronics is nearly always interconnected—online. What if the enemy hacks into your VR system? When this happens, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. “Reality Hack” puts you in the middle of such a situation. Your job is to figure out what is happening so you can identify what is real and what is virtual, distinguish friend from foe, and survive with your sanity intact.
First Contact
First contact is not always what you might expect.
Two saurian astronauts from the planet Arcan in the Ran star system are about to circumnavigate their moon, Logan, for the first time. Instead, they end up on an alien starship from Earth.
The Cold Spot
Just what is The Fine Structure Constant, anyway?
The starship Andromeda enters the Cold Spot in the Cosmic Microwave Background—the CMB. Earth scientists have concluded that the Cold Spot is the intersection of two universes.