Eight Episodes

by Robert Reed

• Word count: 3870

• Page count: 10

Eight Episodes is a science fiction short story by the prolific Robert Reed. Nominated for the 2007 Hugo award, it is a story about a short lived web series that proves to be much deeper than anyone initially suspects.

It follows the lifespan of Invasion of a Small World, a low budget web series about an Indian astronomer working in South Africa. When one of his graduate students discovers a tiny metal ball in an ancient rock, the world's scientific community comes alive with excitement. Further episodes of the doomed series reveal information about Earth and the solar system that is extremely accurate and ignites speculation about alien life in our universe.

The next three episodes covered not days, but several months. Again, none of the scientific work was explained, and nothing resembling a normal plotline emerged from the routine and the tedious. The increasingly tiny audience watched Dr. Smith and two of his graduate students working with an object almost too small to be resolved on the screen—another significant problem with the series. Wouldn’t a human-sized artifact have made a greater impact? The ball’s metal shell proved to be an unlikely alloy of nickel and aluminum. Cosmic radiation and tiny impacts had left the telltale marks one would expect after a long drifting journey through space. Using tiny lasers, the researchers carefully cut through the metal shell, revealing a diamond interior. Then the diamond heart absorbed a portion of the laser’s energy, and once charged, it powered up its own tiny light show. Fortunately a nanoscopic camera had been inserted into the hole, and the three scientists were able to record what they witnessed—a rush of complex images coupled with an increasingly sophisticated array of symbols.

Where you can find Eight Episodes:

• Eight Episodes originally appeared in the June 2006 edition of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine

• You can find an archived copy of this story at the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine.

• You can listen to a free mp3 version of this story at Escape Pod.

Robert Reed is a prolific writer of short science fiction with over 140 published pieces. After receiving a degree in biology, he has spent the last 21 years as a full time science fiction author. You can learn more about Robert Reed by checking out the old biography page of his website.

(This is a revised version of a post which was originally published on BestScienceFictionStories.com on Jan 25th, 2008.)