Edge Of Oblivion

From an Academy-honoured screenwriter comes a mind-bending thriller - a bold vision of quantum AI and time travel, and a meditation on Fermi's Paradox

- Kirk Weddell

He built an AI to change the world. Now they have just 24 hours to save it.

After the initial jolt, it felt like falling. Mitch closed his eyes to block out the sweat oozing from his furrowed brow as he fell.

And fell.

The only sound in the cramped space was his own breathing. He held his breath and heard his heart beating - felt it beating against his eardrums. Fast. So he started breathing again.

And opened his eyes.

A thin frost rimmed the window in front of him, collecting at the edges of the inner pane. The oval stretched from just an inch or so above his head to halfway between his sternum and belly button. They'd installed a window so he wouldn't go crazy, so he could see that, though he was in a graphene coffin, he hadn't been buried. Instead, he was falling away from the station on a re-entry trajectory; all he had to do was avoid burning up, or skipping back out of the atmosphere, and deploy a parachute that had been folded up for... how long? He tried to force the thought from his mind.

But someone would have replaced it if it had passed its shelf life.

Wouldn’t they?

They'd have sent up a replacement chute for him.

If they thought he would ever have to use it, or if there really was any chance he'd make it back to Earth alive. The graphene coffin was officially called an EEP, an emergency escape pod. Only to be used as a last resort. That gave some clue as to his chances of surviving the fall back to Earth. Outside, the stars mingled with spots of frost and dust caught on the window, and the little bits of things that whirled around him inside the EEP. Light from behind him washed out some of the starfield - the dayside of Earth beneath him, with its resplendent deep-blue seascapes, ochre landmasses, and precious, rare, life-giving atmosphere - still two hundred miles below, but coming up fast.