Tag: Scifi

Short Story: Desperate Seas

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 2 Comments

Gray hell rose over the trawler’s bow. It pitched, speared a crest. The sea’s angry maw snapped between drinking-bird dips, Everest peaks, before the jaws closed for that brief moment of progress. In that way, each time it felt eternal, damned and condmened by unknown forces to test one’s endurance.

With it was a rhythm. The rise and fall of chestfuls of breath upon the vast sea of some infinitely-massive cosmic-being’s skin. Riding waves to their crests, as dust rides the twitching ripples of a sleeping giant.

More than that, it was like walking amongst Gods. Those few men whom first did so on the Moon, would again someday on Mars, and forever every planet after that. No matter how mundane it was became, it wasn’t in the moment and that was the point.

It was the ride. Sailing gravity. Surfing twenty tons of ship and cargo. Driven inexorably by gravity, diesel bass-rolls. Meanwhile the shrill-gales are constant. Rain persistent scattershot on steel. Hard, sub-zero buckshot held at-bay by fiberglass and hope.

The precious hope of two men too long ashore and too newly asea, but with a lifelong ambition; trawling. Fishing. No care but the sea and the weight and the rate. Even miles out waters, more or less total isolation, were still coastal waters. Further than that, were deep waters rarely traversed uncesssarily; country’s waters, bridged later by international waters beyond all potential shipping lanes now outmoded.

All of them, the pair called home. They’d long hoped to do so, the sea filled their veins as sure as blood fed their hearts.

Pate manned the helm, fearful of nothing. The sea swelled about him. Long-range satellites weren’t needed to tell him a fierce storm was brewing. The sea told him. Each rise. Each fall. Dipping scents of saltwalter. Bucking rudder-wheel beneath his hands.

Lou felt those too, decidedly trusted satellites, images, and guiding sciences more. His bones still creaked like the ages-old sailor cooped up inside him all his life. Creaks and science agreed; the sea’s mood was foul, growing fouler by the minute.

Even the air knew it.

Luck hadn’t won out much this long. A day from port, barely into a routine, and only a few hours of letting the currents work them. They’d barely felt things out, were hardly near a boon’s weights. Now, they could be crushed and it wouldn’t even be worth the weight.

Muscle and diesel had cast them off, the sea was ordering them in. Now.

Pate wouldn’t quit so easily though. His strength, daresay stubbornness, emboldened Lou’s own self preservation. Nonetheless, the latter kept himself nearby, half-eying charts, maps, satellite imagery, eyes and ears attuned to every new melody emerging in the persistent rhythm.

All told, things weren’t looking great. Tropical-storm and only getting started. It wouldn’t let up anytime soon. Then again, it had come from nowhere over only a few hours. The waters were too cold, the season too early. Science and reality were harsh mistresses to reconcile at times.

Pate wasn’t much for science. He rode through life on feeling. That was why he Captained the ship. Lou knew that. Like it or not, Pate was right. Captaining was about feel more than hard logic. He’d simply never had the knack, the skill or proper heart.

Self-management had taught Lou to do anything. Navigating and mating a ship was hardly applied rocketry. The dichotomy between he and his partner delineated their personal belief in science’s fundamentals.

Lou believed the laws of averages held ample room for anomalies that could allow it to thrive. Pate felt the utterly measured chaos merely muddied the pattern via the anomalies. It was chicken and egg between Einstein and Newton.

Compounded by this, Pate made room for only one or the other, missing the overall possibility that neither was mutually exclusive. That neither could mean both.

At some point or another, Pate had decided he no longer cared. Since then, challenging his way meant challenging an idle giant. No matter how much Lou wished to, he wouldn’t.

Thus the ship pitched and plunged. The swells grew. Their violence rocked the pair in their skin. Each rise fought gravity. Weighted, cement blocks pulled their guts. Each fall fought inertia that forced their guts in again.

The pace was sickening. Lou knew it was time. Drag lines any further and they’d snap. They, the rigging, the whole damned thing. With ‘em would go the whole trip.

Before Pate could argue, Lou shouted, “Keep course.”

The engines groaned, barely audible over the sea’s fury as the cabin door blew back on its hinges. Lou held it with both hands, let the ship rise and hurl him along gravity to shut it. Scatter-shot rain peppered the air from the billowing gales. He could only imagine how those sailors on tea-routes used to feel.

He shifted his weight, keeping close in-reach of anything he might need to brace on. Each step became a battle, a feat. He tug-o-war’d his way along, half-hanging or half-falling, half-slipping across slicked-wet deck. Each wave-crest was a nothing; each dipped swell, a moment of fearful hesitation when facing the encroaching nothingness before ship teetered over and he used or bore its momentum.

He reached the stern, more wet than any land-born creature before, shivering, freezing, and littered with microfriction-wounds from the salt on the air. He wrapped two hands around a hold, kicked a lock-lever. The sea lurched.

He rode the momentum to a panel, one arm hugged it, and cranked the nets in with a half-frozen hand. The crank-chains wrangled the nets top-side despite the sea’s furious protests, gaining only the slightest hint of power as they crossed the hull’s side.

A distant, warped whale-song reached Lou, mottled by spray and waves. It rang of something tragic, remniscent of frightened death. He craned for the cabin on instinct, expecting Pate to be cursing at him, saw nothing. Pate still-dutifully helmed the waves in spite of their violence.

Lou cursed himself for costing time. Already half-frozen, he needed every second that the ship lulled to secure the rigging before they altogether rose again, screaming.

With it came the distant cry, nearer this time. The sound was desperation. He’d have said a beached whale were there islands nearby. The sound was too small though, too distant yet too near. Above water. It forced a pause over Lou.

He strained his ears against wind, rain, his own breaths, poring over and through them until he heard nothing at all. He waited, zen.

Nothing.

He eased slowly back into action, heart infected by the lingering empathy its cry had pierced him with. He swung the crane about slowly, watchful and alert, wondering. He positioned the net, lowered it; one side went utterly slack, freed its contents.

Again the cry, like spears in the chest, heart, and mind. Prolonged. Near. Beside his skin.

The sound pierced Lou’ bones. It staggered him, knocked him to his knees long enough he was forced to pull himself up, around the cooler’s edge. Lou suddenly knew only of the utter calm the sea had taken on, as if watching, waiting, ready to strike if need be.

There, atop a mound of fish, lie the cry’s source.

Were Lou not so rigidly scientific, he’d have thought himself seeing things. Even then, the horrible, piercing wail of desperation would’ve convinced him otherwise. Its eyes could only have driven it home; however decidedly queer and foreign, they were sentient, intelligent– alive.

And pleading.

Empathic communication imparted their will on the air. Above all, its form was exhausted.

Equal parts lizard, fish, amphibian, and woman. She gleamed with scale-webbed hands barely clutching out and up. The slits lining the neck and nasal-passages choked on air beneath gleaming, terror-filled eyes.

He knew the look. It was the same slumped, fraught peril of soldiers too long at-battle, sailors too long and sea, knowing they could be forced through another fight, another league, another contest. Lou had seen himself time and again looking the same. Every creature exhibited it when pushed past their limits and somehow still going, doubly so if as terrified as she presently appeared.

It was but a moment before Lou grasped one of her arms. Pulled her into him. She helped, using what strength she could muster to fall into his arms and ease their burden. He hefted her in his arms, the calm now silent amid the rest of the chaos blowing just nearby.

She pointed, tired but lucidly, toward the sea. Lou understood. She’d been caught in the net, fought until nothing remained in her, was now drowning in air. The sea was judging his intentions.

He let instinct and duty urge him toward the ship’s edge, to a knee beside it. She managed a fish-like grimace, conveying both her species elegant ssence and her own gratitude. Then, with a light touch of his face, she let herself roll back into the sea.

Lou choked on nothingness, watching her ripples glide away in the ship’s wake, to be swallowed by the sea along with her. It once more began to swell; angry, but less so. He re-engaged his muscles and finished his work in stupefaction.

He returned to the cabin to find his partner and the sea tempered by one another. Pate said nothing, was simply quiet. Back on land, Lou told again and again what happened; No-one ever believed him.

Short Story: Someone Else’s Heaven

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

She awoke on her bed, certain of where she was and completely unaware of how she’d gotten there. Kris had a bad habit of waking up in familiar places for unfamiliar reasons. More often than not, it was a combo of drugs and The Arcade that did it.

The bar was a retro-retrofit of an old-time saloon. Someone had once attempted cash in on a wild-west craze with it, but far as Kris knew, she’d never lived through one. That the Arcade had been abandoned thirty-odd years or more before its present incarnation.

It wasn’t the best or the worst place in town. That was reserved for Downtown and the ghetto respectively. Though nowadays an argument could be made that everywhere that wasn’t Downtown was a ghetto, it was an argument made only by the people unaware of a real ghetto’s realities. Kris had grown up in that part of the city, and really, it was a different world.

One of the things about being black in Jackstaff; Male or Female, you were certain to interact with the ghetto, no matter how hard you tried not to. If you came from it, you lived it. If you didn’t, your family or friends did. Else-wise, your enemies or rivals did.

Of all the options, that last was the worst. Hood rats, Kris knew, stuck together like a rat-king. They traveled in packs, could devour you in passing swarms. She was just glad she’d managed to dodge them as much as she had.

She let her eyes focus. The groggy blur of perpetual hangover resolved into the water-stained ceiling of her loft. Like the rest of the world, her place was in between worlds; not a slum, (mostly in name only) but not the hangout of the Elite either.

Mostly, it wasn’t a slum because some damned fool got it in their head to paint half the town without actually repairing it. Then, they charged higher-than-normal rent rates for ghetto-slum living. The idea caught on, spread like wildfire.

Now, it was damned near impossible to find a place not molding, mildewed, or otherwise rank. Even if, you’d be nearer uptown than was affordable.

Kris couldn’t complain too much though. She’d lucked out. Even as she stared at the spotted ceiling, she felt a warm body beside her. She was only vaguely aware of it until her periphery resolved again and formed into the smooth, supple outline of a petite body.

The night rushed back like a freight-train. If she’d been standing, it would’ve knocked her down; sitting, it would’ve stolen the wind from her. The body was the newest bartender from the Arcade, Yuki.

Yuki was the kind of Asian-American girl whose parents hailed from their homelands. They never let her forget that. Half-Nipponese, half-Korean, she’d said once she’d “been cursed with the worst of both worlds,” from parents both monumentally judgmental and over-demanding.

Yuki’d played along until she’d turned eighteen, then fled San Diego to wander North, fucking, sucking, smoking and snorting until ending up in Jackstaff older, broke, and looking for work. She’d yet to recognize that was how most people ended up in Jackstaff.

All the same, she’d bar-hopped and couch surfed since her arrival. Months had passed with the only semblance of stability the nightly rush of gaming, drugging, and bar-tending. In a way, Kris felt, they were perfect for each other.

That feeling had gotten the best of her. She couldn’t say for sure how much so yet, but the aching in her legs and the warmth in her groin said it was enough. The distinct feeling of her cotton mouth spawned by moaning rather than drinking and getting high confirmed it. Unbeknownst to Kris, Yuki remembered it all, was too dead asleep to say it.

Didn’t matter in the end: good nights were marked by lost memory; the best by the severity of bodily exhaustion come morning. Judging by Kris’ strained lower-half, this was one for the record books.

She tried to rise from the bed; her legs wobbled, knees buckled. She fell to her ass on the bed with a whompf of old mattress. Yuki groaned half-asleep, mumbling something in Nipponese first, then Korean. She pulled the wool blanket over her head, further blotting the gray leaking in from the frosted windows, then stilled again. A moment later, she was snoring again.

Kris surveyed the room, awaiting her legs’ wake up: nights were cold already, forced the peeling trim to condensate and peel further around the windows. The drafts were enough to make her knees lock-up first thing in the morning. Usually though, that was only if the windows iced over on the coldest nights.

She suspected Yuki as the cause for her lameness this morning. Or part of it. It explained why they’d slept ’til noon; they’d been unconsciously spooning for warmth.

Kris shivered, boyshort panties and t-shirt too little to cover anything worthwhile. Her nipples hardened, forming small circus-tents on her chest. She groaned, rose again, and wobbled like a drunken sailor until she caught her footing. Gait wide, low, she sumo-wrestlered her way to the kitchenette to make coffee, lace it with Irish cream.

The ancient auto-drip protested its continued life with spitting hisses and gurgling moans. Kris ambled across the loft, returned in flannel pants and a spare blanket; as near to fully clothed as she was willing to approach so early in the morning.

Yuki tossed again. Kris poured liqueur in, then coffee, stirred. She swiveled to lean back, letting the warming plate radiate at her back while staring headlong at the bed. Yuki’s outline deformed, re-formed, pulsating beneath the woolen blanket that rose and fell with her breaths.

Kris’ eyes wandered again, up, to the decor tacked to the plaster wall. A black and white photo, enlarged to poster size; two women, spooning from a side angle. Perfect shapes, perfect skin, perfect nudity, and perfect joy; all hinting that level of perfect, pornographic class every half-romantic/half-pervert aspires to and knows doesn’t exist.

Kris stared at it, as she did every morning, assessing whether or not she’d attained that level of perfection. As usual too, she doubted it.

Even if something felt different– she guessed her jaded cynicism was finally taking over– waking up beside Yuki felt the image’s utter antithesis. The girl’s life was so hellish she’d begun running, never stopped. No perfection involved, save perfect despair.

Fact was, Kris knew the pair in the image. They weren’t a couple. They weren’t even gay. They were straight. Straight as every lipstick Lizzie drunk on curiosity then hungover on shame.

So far’s she knew these days, they weren’t even friends. They had been, once, when the photographer took the image. Somewhere between there and here, one screwed the other’s man, and they ended up at each other’s throats.

Still, the image had a resonance. Art was art, regardless of reality’s shortcomings.

She’d zoned out so hard she didn’t even notice Yuki ambling over. “Some for me?”

Something stirred inside Kris. Her eyes fell dully to Yuki.

So much happened in the span of a heart beat, it felt as though time stopped with her outside it, still running. Yuki’s voice; the high softness as petite as the rest of her. An edge of perfectly feigned timidness suffused it, concealed otherwise atom-honed steel. Something in its timbre, its rhythm, opened a flood gate in Kris’ mind.

The night came rushing back.

As if happening again, in doubled-time, Kris saw herself in the Arcade alone, bored. She saw herself getting high in a bathroom, Yuki with her. Nipponese lips pressing hers, shotgunning pot-smoke into her with growing heat of arousal,

Then, Kris remembered the hustling; players at the tables where the oldest console games ran on emus. She faked out a bar-full of players, letting Yuki run the bets’ odds rise until they’d worked the crowd to a sufficient level of belief.

Then, Kris wantonly kicked ass.

She stormed and combo’d her way through ultra-gore M-Ks, Doom M-Ps, and Street-Fighters. Each time, she won killings, killed winnings. She drank and drank, smoked and smoked. Before long, she was making eyes at Yuki; the girl who’d run from hell, somehow wound at its edge as herself someone else’s heaven.

Kris realized it then. That was what she’d felt. Why she’d brought Yuki home. The girl had wandered, drifted. She couldn’t be allowed to anymore or who she’d become would begin to be tainted. Kris felt all her feelings anew. Her stoned revelations hit in double, triple time along the gallop of a metal beat from a long-past era.

Love at first feel, and they both knew it.

They hated it for making them wrong, making them have to take back what they both thought they knew about the world, about love, but loved it too because they loved each other.

Time resumed at-once and she found Yuki before her, coffee steaming in a hand. She shoved the mug onto the sink counter separating the kitchenette and loft, shoved Yuki atop it. She didn’t resist. In mere moments they were back in bed, breath heavy, bodies slicked with sweat.

The collapsed beside one another afterward. Kris lit a mix of hash and grass, still naked on the bed. Liqueur coffee steamed the air, melding into the skunky smoke of the lit spliff. Kris watched Yuki’s small breasts sink with hit, thoroughly enjoyed the sight.

She recollected her bulwark of memory, her feelings. Mostly, she wanted to be sure Yuki’d felt it too. Her tacit admission came with a smile and nod. Then, a deep kiss that ended with blowing smoke into Kris’ mouth.

She took their joint as Yuki slurped up coffee.

“I guess you’re right, ya’ know?” Yuki finally said. “I was running. For a long time. Now I don’t need to.” She laughed paraphrasing Kris, “Running from hell to end up someone else’s heaven.”

Kris was right, too, and neither one minded a bit.

Short Story: Carbon Copy Defects

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Stone and asphalt stretched for miles ahead. His classic muscle cars were all but gone from the world nowadays. For relatively good reason, too; they polluted with noise and toxins, fumes from an old, less conscientious way of life. More than that, the cars were almost impossible to repair requiring ever part to be specially hand crafted from quality steel.

Mostly though, they were just too damned expensive to run. Petroleum oil was scarce. What could be found was usually reserved for private owners of old-world wells. They stockpiled and hoarded it like doomsday preppers during an apocalypse and twice as vicious. To even hear a muscler run was mostly a thing for vids and museum-goers.

That didn’t stop Murphy. He raced along, as he’d been doing for hours, through mountains outside the city. Out here it was just him, the stars, and eight cylinders of pure Big-Block chaos exploding in the night. Behind him, the city was a hive of light and noise. Pulsing. Throbbing; a vast organism teeming with infinitely more parasites.

It wouldn’t have been easy, had he bothered to look, to separate the so-called transportation from the people. Murphy didn’t care to. They were all automatons to him. Besides, nothing was worth breaking the spell binding him to the car, the fire, the cracked asphalt. The curves of every road, the thumps of every pothole and ridge screamed of gravity, exhilaration, a past now unmatched by an insurmountably different present. His dry-clean only, electric air-car, rechargeable torch world couldn’t hold a candle to it, even had it known what one was.

Still he drove, pushing the car further from ordered “civilization.” He abandoned it as it had once abandoned the car, let the night swallowed everything but the sky’s most prominent pinpoints of light. Even the glow managed to struggle after him.

The road dipped suddenly; the city disappeared behind rising mountains. A cavalry of three-hundred and fifty horses screamed in charge, leading his assault into the unknown. Where they might end up, only the road knew. All Murphy was certain of was the emptiness ahead, the order behind, and the chaos within.

Something had been lost in his world. No-one was sure what, or how, but a transition had occurred. The world went from choking smog, dirt and gristle, to smothering, white-walled sterility where microchips could be made on street-corners. There were still places resembling that old world; dirty and gritty, but further and further between than most knew. They were poor imitations anyway, lacking the life, the soul, to their grit. With the car at least, that soul was fire; smoke, the price paid.

The remnants of that world were the places you ended up when you’d run dry on luck– or couldn’t pull the weight you tried to throw around. They were gang recruiting grounds for the latest incarnation of street anti-heroes, or in some cases, corporate soldieries. They were places where metallic and neon recreated recurrent, age-old scenes of depravity and poverty in perpetual damp and wet; places dark of midnight even at high-noon, where warped reflections in puddles were better descriptors than even the most high-res vid-cams could manage.

But it was still Murphy’s world, not the one before. It was an imitation. The last, bleak scrap of tattered canvas hanging from the frame a once-proud masterpiece. Beneath it, or rather perhaps surrounding it, was a swaddle of so-called humanity smothering itself into obedience, compliance, or death. The choice between wasn’t a choice, but an outcome serving the purposes of those wrapping the bundle. If Murphy could’ve had his way, he’d have burned the whole damned thing, child of civilization included.

Instead, he burned fuel in a car a century older than him and made of over-pressurized fossils infinitely older than even that.

And all of it, just to forget, for even a moment.

It would’ve made him think, if he weren’t so engaged in avoiding it. That was the way of his world. People thought too much, never acted, and always about the wrong things; money, jobs, taxes, Social I-D numbers, angering or upsetting the infinitely spawning pool of overlords above them. Rather than act against their miserable realities, they tempered themselves with self-inflicted fear, fulfilling their own nightmares by becoming the oppressed they feared becoming.

The only difference between those people and the visions in their heads, Murphy knew, was the lipstick stained over-swine they feared falling to, but equally failed to recognize their present overlords for.

The whole thing made Murphy sick. So sick he drove: He wasn’t wealthy. He wasn’t a genius. He wasn’t married, engaged, expecting a child, dating a would-be model or even a wannabe model. He just was. In the moments before merely existing, he’d been many other things, including driven enough to scrimp and save to afford the car, and after, the fuel.

No one existed anymore. They were all imitations of imitations, generationally mutated over and over again, by impersonally impotent, carbon-copies of one template. Each one was just as defective as the last.

Murphy wasn’t really any different, he’d just pushed himself toward something different. His fear was letting fear win. Even then, he’d still lost, like everyone else. It was why he had nothing but the car, a full tank of petroleum fuel, and the insurmountable urge to drive until one used the other and both died out. The only other thing he did have was a six pack and a bottle of twenty year old whiskey. It wasn’t even particularly good whiskey, but it was his.

He imbibed most of the six pack on the way to the mountain-top and back down the other side. Now, near its end, he pulled off on the side of a cliff-face. It only just rose above one of the forests littering the mountain-sides.

At the very least, his world had managed to stay beautiful, though he wasn’t sure anyone knew it– or ever would.

He took the bottle of whiskey and leaned against the car’s warm front end. There, between the stars and the car’s radiating heat, he remained, thinking of nothing and merely existing.

And it was there he saw it:

An entire world spread before him. Few lights dotted the horizon; air-transports ferrying those carbon-copy defects between metros; the same ones that had signed away their rights to land and property for lazy money, city-life conveniences, never realizing the noose they were fitting around their own necks, their children’s, granchildren’s– every other carbon-copy defect that would ever spawn from a portion of their template.

Murphy saw it now, felt it now, but didn’t care. He was over the mountain. Before him, fog hung a veil over the low lands amid a sterling gray while forests rode mountains along ragged, saw-tooth waves to peaking crests as glistening and white as any could be.

Murphy had seen it before, but he knew it now; this was a different world. The mountains were different; the trees were different, every one a vastly varied organism. Down to their cores. They weren’t carbon-copies. They weren’t even their antithesis. They were what they were.

That, he decided, was why he’d come. He commemorated the event with a swig from his ten-cred whiskey and raised it in a toast at the moon for another.

Moments later he was back in the car, once more charging toward the unknown. The fuel wouldn’t hold up forever, but wherever it ran out, he’d start anew.

The world he’d left behind wasn’t his world any longer. He had a different world now, the world. Earth. One where, no matter how similar it appeared; every rock, every tree, every patch of soil was different,teemed with infinitely varied lifeas his old world had teemed with parasitic copies.

And he intended to experience as many his meager, remaining life-span allowed.

Back in Sol Again: Part 3

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

3.

Dinner and a Show

The stressful nature of the preceding few weeks, both pre-flight and en-flight, assured some crew would require a few days of R-and-R before Homer continued on. Too much remained to be done aboard both the ship and the outpost to indulge too much, but luckily, a full twenty-four hours of rest was mandated for to keep crazy at-bay. That time was then doubled to ensure everyone let their hair down. In uncharted space, with a few thousand people working day or night, and hundreds more disgorged at each outpost, crazy needed to be at bay.

Thus, Ingstrom gave all but his skeleton crew their promised forty-eight hours. Everyone but Simon, Niala, and Lina. Others had pulled short straws too, but none knew the ship better, leaving them the only crew qualified to oversee the next, most hazardous twenty-four hours. The same twenty four hours before their own R&R was scheduled, and the same they would be forced to power through without sleep.

The ISC mused that the twenty-four hours following the docking, idle-cyle of the Homer’s sub-light engines was the time frame supposed by the ISC for anything to fail catastrophically, if ever. Their logic ran that anything not-yet catastrophic, but eventually catastrophic, would be caused by manufacturing or assembly defects encountered via the final, untested ship’s abilities. Such problems would be irreparable, even despite the extensive pool of repair parts and know-how.

In other words, what the ISC was deliberately not saying but meaning was; if Homer hadn’t blown up on launch, or during travel, it might still blow up in the next twenty four hours after docking, but if it didn’t blow up by then, it probably wouldn’t. At least, not of its own volition.

What that also meant was Simon’s hopes for Uruk station could be premature. Certainly, Ingstrom might’ve taken the ship to a safer distance, but he trusted his intuition that Homer was just fine. Everyone else trusted his intuition too, and there own where his fell short. Personally, Simon wasn’t sure he cared one way or the other, seeing as how the ship blowing up meant it taking him with.

In response, he took to paranoid anxiety and excessive coffee intake. Something in the back of his mind told him, after his eighth cup, not much of his insides would remain if he continued on his way.

He heard the concerns… he certainly didn’t heed them, but he heard them.

He silenced the voice with the childish challenge of chugging the last of that cup, then vibrated to the break room for another. By his return the voice, and his better sense, were silent. The act was, paradoxically, more an indirect self-preservation than challenge. With more hours than he wished to count left between he and real sleep, Simon pursued his caffeine intake on a kamikaze run.

Risking the only ship presently within a few dozen light-years capable of reaching them in an emergency wasn’t on his list of priorities. While he doubted the ship could suffer catastrophic failure– in other words, explode– from his slacking on the job, he wasn’t willing to allow even the remote possibility an opening. Before long, he found himself incapable of doing more than sipping coffee and staring intently at his console.

Fatigue wasn’t so much the issue. Suns knew Simon’d pulled enough all-nighters at both college and the ISC to function roughly as long as necessary without sleep. He was one of the few, lucky souls still capable of deriving energy from coffee and caffeine. (Unlike most other Solsians, whom were generally becoming immune to its effects.)

Rather, the issue was one he didn’t wish to admit. Given his place on the first, interstellar colonization voyage, billions of kilometers from Sol, even more from Phobos and “home,” it was understandable. His need for caffeine, coffee, anything to keep him awake, was even simpler than fatigue:

He was bored out of his mind!

The fact was, Homer was at its peak. The ship was brand new, resting and recharging from its first interstellar jump and extra-solar flight. Journeys it had made with the ease of a hot knife slicing butter. Everything was so nominally “green” Simon felt at ease concluding the ship was perfect.

The outpost was another matter. Like most things he had his hand in, he was confident in the ISC’s maintenance bots. Robotics was more a hobby for unwinding than a secondary occupation, but that only made him better with it. He’d overseen the various robotic units at the ISC for years now, a pass-time that had begun innocuously months after his minor fame was imparted and he’d found himself strung out, utterly overwhelmed by stress.

His fame had afforded him more lab-techs and interns, and thus more projects and responsibility– and, quite frankly, more people to screw things up. Things he was always forced to fix somehow. The stress caused a slight break down, so bad for a while that he’d have relished the idea of leaving Sol. He’d have signed on to the expedition in a heart-beat then, despite knowing he’d have regretted it later. So far the actual outcome of the expedition was beyond expectation, but in the interim he’d found peace in the mindless electronic tinkering and tedium robotics required. It had been his go-to ever since.

Presently, he was having a silent argument with himself. One side argued against things going as well as they seemed. The other argued he was an ungrateful twat for looking gift-horses in the mouth. Mostly he agreed with the second part, and mostly from wishful thinking.

Calling Rearden down from Niala’s post in comms was more an act of defiance against those two, argumentative brain-parts. Inner-monologues had a way of making him tired; like talk-radio with smooth-voiced DJs. Rubbing that vocal silk along his hyper-sensitive brain was akin to something primal, intimate, but the other side of sexual. It was comforting, as if a paternal voice read to him from a favored physics text-book to lull him to sleep.

By the time the argument passed fully, he’d torn himself from the throes of his ebbed attention span. Rearden appeared, its rounds done and its cells charged. Officially, Rearden had no station. It wasn’t even really under the ship’s manifest, however it took residence in Comms to act as go-between for techies Sol, Uruk, and ship-side. Rearden too, was both willing and able to come and go as it pleased. Between its general acceptance as crew-member, and the built-in comm-system Simon had given after the events on Ganymede, Rearden could do its job from anywhere.

To say the little bot enjoyed Simon’s company missed how extremely complex and sophisticated its programming was. It was sentient, in a way, but lacked the higher functions of AI that allowed them to run rampant. Rearden could learn, certainly. It could even react much like a normal, living being.

But in the end, Rearden wasn’t alive. It did not feel, though Simon was loath to say it had no feelings. Certainly Rearden had a self-preservation instinct. More than that, it was capable of reasoning and logic. Saying one hated the bot (so long as not in jest) would make it react as if fearful of that state. It would work to correct it. It was loyal, willing to go the extra mile to ensure the safety of its so-called friends, (though one would be hard-pressed to argue it, it technically had none) but wasn’t above trading jabs. It also, as a rule, had no problem harming other living creatures, though it wasn’t programmed to kill intentionally.

Simply, Turing’s eponymous test wasn’t applicable to Rearden. Thus, it couldn’t be said to live. Then again, Turing would be hard pressed to examine its history– life– and admit that it did not.

Rearden’s neural-mapped memory meant it was nearly indistinguishable from Solsians on a fundamental level. Rearden could think like a Solsian with all the same power of abstract thought, however rarely used. It also had Solsian definitions, memory included. Its memory, like its thought processing, was based on Solsian neuronal storage, effectively giving it the same memory limit and speed of every Human’s three-pound gray matter-glob. It remembered. It reminisced. It joked.

While not technically living, through a roundabout method of rationale it thought of itself as such. Everyone else did too, and most called it “friend,” or “Rearden.” Whether it could ever become more than it was, for instance a true AI, didn’t matter to it. Not because it was incapable of something resembling ambition, but rather, because it further separated it from the people it cared about. (If “cared” weren’t so grossly misleading.)

Rearden had proven, with its existence alone, that simple inclusion and friendship– daresay love– was the tool to temper the want of ridiculous power. Whether it truly understood that mattered less and less as it aged. It believed it did, if belief were accurate, and that was enough. That, and the ability to be a superhero sometimes…

Which it could sort of do. From time to time.

Those two things kept it from wanting too much change or power.

Rearden liked its place in things. Like all the varying species it met and occasionally befriended, it had certain advantages and disadvantages, certain uses and failings given context. But it had a place, a niche, and it knew it. It even found others nearby that enjoyed its presence. Even when forced to call on its abstract thought-processes, it could do so despite danger. And sometimes, it got to do cool things that made it seem more superhero than ten-pound, hovering gourd of wires, sensors, metals and plastics.

Simon liked Rearden’s place in things too. That was why he called it in to begin tinkering with its hover-jets and testing its internal connections. He ensured everything vital (and some things not) was up to snuff. Were it not for his robotic tinkering during his worst days, Simon might’ve lost his mind. Rearden especially had given him more than its weight in solace.

Commanding interns and techs and researchers was a wonderful thing when everything went smooth. The other ninety-nine percent of the time, it was chaos enough to bring even the most experienced anger management specialist to a boil– or to the end of a noose, depending on the day. Rearden was excellent at tempering that boil and helping to avoid the noose.

Once more Simon wiled away the hours tinkering with Rearden. They passed in a forgettable haze, until he was able to sleep. Having surpassed even his post-grad thesis coffee records (already miles beyond anything a normal Human could ever achieve) he managed to keep himself alert long enough to reach his bed, then collapse face first into it. He was out before Ingstrom sounded over the comm, never even felt the F-drive engage.

In a blink, Homer was gone, nearer Gliese 867 than before and only two days’ sub-light from arrival. Unlike most drives, the F-drive was sensitive to the immense gravity fields of nearby stars. As a result, every fold required targeting the extreme limit of a system’s gravity while ensuring it remained within reach of the ship’s sub-light speeds. Spending too much time between stops was as yet inadvisable, given the F-Drive put them more and more light years from Sol and its resources.

Eventually Gliese would prove to be more than anyone anticipated, but before then, Simon would have to live down one, last proof of his being an ass.

Unlike before, this one began with waking up. Also unlike before, nothing signaled the idiot’s coming save its deep, internal knowledge of being one. After the previous night, it wasn’t as conscious of that fact, and as such could be somewhat forgiven for what was to transpire… but only somewhat.

The hungover stupor that accompanied binges of most types greeted Simon on waking. The throbbing headache and dull-eyed fatigue followed him through his morning routine of showering, shaving, cutting himself shaving, and imbibing more coffee. Then, in anticipation of the date ahead, which he confirmed more than once through the day, he readied for his coffee and dinner with Lina.

The recent disgorge of ship’s passengers coupled with its immense capacity meant Simon could spend the better parts of his morning and afternoon transforming a recently-emptied cabin into a cafe-like compartment. He brought in various electric cookers, hot plates, coolers, and other appliances; replaced the generic art and dressings that lined the digital view-ports, (glorified televisions playing pretty pictures) and put up various, old-time picnic blankets. (He still didn’t know where Rearden had found them and wasn’t sure he wanted to.)

To doubly ensure nothing went wrong, Simon prepared a variety of foods, coffees, and other items to cover as many bases as he could. Then, after another shower, and a wait in which he expected he might need of another from worry-sweat, a knock sounded at the cabin-door.

He flattened his hair, did his best not to pant, then kept from sprinting or stumbling to the door. It opened on Lina, as beautiful as ever, standing before him in casual, hip-hugging denim and a long-sleeve shirt.

“Hey,” she said, half-waving one arm. The other clutched it.

“H-hey,” he said breathlessly, once more moon-struck.

“Can I–”

He managed to shake off his stupor, “Y-yeah. Sorry. Come in. Please.”

She stepped in, rubbernecking, “Wow. You did this?”

“For you.”

“It’s… lovely,” she said with a breathless smile. It lit the room, Simon with it. He led her to the various hotplates, burners, coffee, and coolers to reveal the buffet. She charmed him with her accent, “And this? All for me as well?”

He fell under her spell and nodded mindlessly. She smiled again, wider this time. Simon felt it infect him. Simon was certain he was dreaming as their eyes met and her face glowed. He thought it an angelic apparition, then recalled the overhead LEDs. They twinkled in her eye while he, less dully than he believed, stared back mesmerized.

A conversation took place without words as she gave a coy look away, as if to say no-one had ever done something so selfless nor romantic for her. He replied with a look that said he did it only for her, and could never for anyone else. Her look back sealed his doom.

No matter how ecstatic the next moments made him on later recollections; no matter how amused, or grateful, or even aroused; his doom was sealed.

She took his hand in hers, and in the way that such things happen, moved with slow-motion swiftness to kiss and embrace him. And he, being the fool that found himself in love, yet still a fool, kissed her back and once more prepared to reveal the fate-string sewn.

They kissed deeply and passionately. Long enough to stamp affection into one another’s minds. Lina pulled away. Simon was frozen; his dullard look in full fashion; mouth-open, as if trying to comprehend something baffling– or perhaps, from stroke’s wonderful hallucination. The foremost was clear as she moved forward in hopes of preserving all of his obvious effort. He returned to reality to follow her…

And could never be certain, no matter his subsequent recollections, if the coffee-hangover stupor was at fault, or the stupor of Lina’s wonderful, English kiss. The outcome remained immutable, for in a few deft movements, he swiftly destroyed everything save his hopes.

He stepped carefully over various cords strewn about before a moment like an eagle-eye nightmare crossed with a cartoon cat-mouse hunt: He tripped. A hot plate went with him. Its pot of spaghetti launched skyward. He dodged it unconsciously, managing to knock a tray of meats from atop sterno-burners. They collided with bowls of dip and potato salad. The jumble of food tumbled toward the floor as he rapidly deduced the universe’s nightmarish joke–

Just as the spaghetti pot deduced its gravity.

It shifted in an arc, tumbling end-over-end, tomato-laden contents emerging like a past-monster exploding across the room. The pot aimed for the coffee’s glass decanters and struck. They shattered, loosing their contents like the blood-flood of an ancient horror film spilling from elevators. The liquids followed the spaghetti pot’s final dance with gravity to its terminus-bow on the floor.

Simon stood, utterly frozen, staring. And just like that, felt he’d ruined everything. Forever.

But just like that he’d sealed in Lina’s mind– as she doubled her over in utterly uncontrollable laughter– that there was no-one in the universe she loved more than him.