Category: My work

Echoes in the Vacuum: Part III

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Read Part I and Part II first.

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Part III

meteor or comet

Image by Ed Sweeney

The boy went through the motions, pointing the scope at Kepler-3b, at Kepler-43b, then setting back to zenith and angling to focus on Lutwidge-7, then Asimov-5a. Finally, satisfied, the old man left him alone with his broom.

The boy aimed the scope at Gallun-Z. He had only one hundred times more magnification to go before the scope failed him.

He used every bit of it.

He zoomed in on an area that covered about twenty-five city blocks. The buildings were bulbous and layered, like stacks of flattened pearls. Each had an iridescent sheen of pink on gray, or green on white, wafting in the dim light of the setting star. And…yes! Movement.

Winged creatures flitted or wheeled between the towers, their feathers glinting gold.

Some flew in groups, each clutching the edge of a great net full of metallic rocks, or of a purplish substance that looked like plant fibers. They carried these to the east side of the city, where they seemed to be building another one of the pearl towers.

Closer to the center of the city, there was an open space where more of the winged creatures flocked, swooping about. He noticed several of them collide with, or latch onto each other, and he thought at first it was some kind of battle. But others came and perched on the towers at the edge to watch, every now and then fluttering their wings in unison. Then he spotted a great black ring being passed back and forth between the creatures, and he concluded gleefully that it must be a game.

So the boy watched the city for hours, enthralled. He found them at times awesome, and at other times humorous, the way you or I would find a lion’s pride or an ant mound.

He came back the next night, and watched them until it was time for the rickety joints to make his inspection. And the next night, and the next night.

He watched the new tower built. He watched new windows (or doors?) cut into others. He saw a real fight break out, and saw as other creatures flew in to stop it. He saw a line of smaller creatures following their parent, in a V shape, to a pond, where they splashed and dove and showed off with astounding backwards free-falls.

The boy spent most of his summer nights studying them. And during the days at home, he sketched pictures and made copious notes, which he hid in a hole he’d sliced at the bottom of his mattress.

A month before school was to begin again, as he angled the scope toward the correct position in the sky, he noticed something. A streak of light.

A comet.

Was it the same comet he’d tracked weeks ago? He saw no other in the system. It was the comet he’d seen just before finding the civilization. Like a herald announcing the marvel to come.

He smiled a little as he peered at that streak of blue ice, just for a moment before once again adjusting the scope to point to his city of winged creatures. He wondered for the hundredth time why this had not been reported, why it had been hidden. He entertained thoughts of claiming its discovery.

Epileptic Makes First Contact! Eugenics Exception Makes Greatest Discovery in Human History!

But these were only dreams. He continued to hide his notes. Someone had already made this discovery. Someone had covered it up. And the boy had no doubt that if he tried to uncover it, Someone could easily have his living license revoked.

The boy couldn’t sleep the next day. But it was not thoughts of conspiracy and government-sanctioned execution that kept him awake.

It was thoughts of the comet.

How near it seemed to his fantastical bird world.

How much nearer than before.

The next night, he looked for the comet again. He began the process of calculating velocity.

This process took him two days, and a great deal of research on the webs. He checked his numbers thrice and four times and ten times, but no amount of recalculating would change the results.

The comet was heading for Gallun-Z.

The comet was two hundred and fifty million cubic miles in size.

In approximately twenty-three Earth days, the comet would collide with Gallun.

And there destroy all life.

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Tune in tomorrow for Part IV.

Echoes in the Vacuum: Part II

  By

Continued from yesterday.

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Part II

canyons

Image by Snowpeak

The boy started small at first, looking at just Campbell-38. It didn’t look so very different from the photos.

You’re a fool, said the boy to himself. Nobody’s hiding anything. He’s just a crotchety old man who wants everything done his way.

But the second night, he looked at two more worlds that were not on the old man’s list. The third night, four, and so on, until he was looking at ten or a dozen different stars and planets and moons every night, noting them on a pad he hid in his pocket, so he didn’t waste time looking at the same world twice. He pushed the limits of the scope’s power, further and further, until he was spying worlds thousands of light-years distant—worlds no one else could see unless they traveled there themselves by Spacial Disruption. He peered at the swirling neon gases of a nebula. Tracked a comet for awhile.

He didn’t know what he was looking for.

Until he saw it.

It was on Gallun-Z. It was big. Unmistakable.

It was a city.

Actually, several cities, cluttered all over the planet’s land masses. There were honeycombs of winding roads, and bulbous, yet symmetrical structures, and artificial lights twinkling on the night side. And—maybe—movement.

His gut grew tight with excitement and disbelief. Impossible. Yet there it was. Countless men and women had hop-scotched across the universe, discovering strange plants, beasts and diseases, yet he, planet-bound, had discovered what none of them had.

Or what none of them had reported.

It was late, and the man would be in any moment. The boy reset the scope and slipped down the stairs and picked up his broom.

Had the man ever seen what he just had? Did he know?

The boy ached to run home, to search Gallun-Z on the webs and to find out if it had yet been landed by human pilots. But he had to finish his shift—his pointless, sweeping shift—and it was another two hours before he could finally leave.

He typed in the planet’s coordinates. There were, indeed, shuttle mission photos, taken three years ago, according to the logs. He saw craters and mountains and canyons. Nothing else.

He thought for a moment that he had miscalculated, and the world he’d seen was not Gallun-Z after all, but he checked the starmaps and was sure he’d been correct. Surely the S.D. program had discovered it. Yet there was no news of it anywhere.

Someone, somewhere, was hiding an entire alien civilization.

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Tune in tomorrow for Part III

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Echoes in the Vacuum: Part I

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Well, I promised you a sci-fi short, and here it is. It ended up being too long for flash fiction, though, so I’m posting it in five parts.

I’m not sure how I feel about it.

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Part I

observatory beneath a starry sky

Image by Chris Samuel

The most powerful telescope in the world was a relic. Once man’s only window to the further reaches of the universe, now a third-rate museum presided over by a pile of rickety joints who had never completed his Ph.D., and the boy he had hired for the summer.

Sometimes in the fall and winter, the train would bring a wash of sixth graders from the local middle school to liven up the place for an hour or two. The rickety joints would lean on the stair rail at the telescope’s sight, rasping the history of the space program over a chorus of whispers, giggles, and bored sighs.

“But eighteen days after its completion,” he said, “Harmon Graham successfully tested the first Spacial Disruption engine. And that,” the rickety joints paused, staring at nothing for several seconds, until some of the children began to snicker. “…Was that,” finished the old man at last.

It wasn’t that modern schoolchildren had lost their longing for the stars; most thought themselves destined to be explorers in the S.D. fleet. But they hardly found it interesting to look through a device at the boring old moon (all that could be seen in the middle of the school day), when on the webs they could find hi-res photos and video of truly distant planets, taken by astronauts who were actually there.

The boy was different. The other kids could try their luck with the S.D. program when they were old enough—he couldn’t. Even the ones who failed the rigorous flight school could save up their pennies and visit the safaris on Kepler-62f. But he could never leave the skin of the Earth.

Of course, there were a lot of things he couldn’t do. By law, he couldn’t be a surgeon. He could never have children. His parents had to apply for special dispensation just to give birth to him.

But the stars were closed to him by more than the law of man. The miracle of technology that gave mankind access to even the most distant worlds in the blink of an eye—that technology would fire in his brain like the seizures that sometimes plagued him. But stronger: strong enough to kill him.

Yet it was the stars he longed for most.

Have you ever craved something you were deathly allergic to? That was the boy and space travel. He sometimes prayed and asked God why he had this longing he could never satisfy. Sometimes he searched the webs for some scientific rationale. But God gave him no answer, and science was indifferent.

When it was his class’s turn to visit the old observatory, and he had stared through the great glass lenses at that daytime moon, he knew this telescope was the closest he would ever get. And that summer, he begged the rickety joints for a job. The old man had frowned at him, his deep wrinkles nearly hiding his eyes.

“No.” He was firm. “Nothing for you to do. Why’d you want to work here, anyhow?”

“Why’d you?” shot back the boy.

“’Cause the past is important,” snapped the rickety joints. “You can’t hold on to what you have if you don’t know how you got it.”

“Teach me,” said the boy. And the old man sighed, flicked his hand dismissively and limped over to the supply closet. He drew out a broom and shook it at the boy until the boy came and took it from him.

“Two rules, kid. One, if you open your mouth, it better be to ask a question. You’re here to learn, not to yammer in my ears about what you already know. Two, no looking through the scope when I’m not here.”

The boy opened his mouth, then closed it and nodded.

“Well get going then.”

So the boy came every night and swept the floor that didn’t need sweeping. Once each night the man tottered in and sat in the chair in the corner, and told the boy how to angle the telescope to see Asimov-5a, or Lutwidge-7. And the boy could look through and see craters and canyons and seas. Soon, the old man taught him the use of the more powerful lens, and he could pick out pebbles in a dried river bed. Hundreds of light-years away, and it was like he could reach out and touch it.

There were maybe a dozen different stars and planets that they looked at over and over. Eventually, the rickety joints would say “aim at Kepler-3b,” and the boy would have to do it from memory.

One night, the boy diverted from the old man’s instructions. He twisted the knob to aim the scope just slightly higher. “Why don’t we look at Campbell-38 tonight? We always look at Kepler-3b, but never Campbell-38.”

The rickety joints shot out of his chair and bellowed. “No! Away from there!” he grabbed the broom and rapped at the boy’s ankles. “You look at no worlds but those I’ve taught you.”

The boy rubbed his ankle. “But why?”

“Because I say. If you want to see Campbell-38, you can find pictures on the webs. Not through my scope.”

So when the boy went home in the wee hours of the morning, he searched the webs for photos of Campbell-38. There had only been one expedition there, but there were plenty of photos. And there were mountains and canyons and strange rock formations. Much the same sights he had seen on the other worlds.

But photos were photos. They could be made to look like anything. What you spied through a lens was the real thing.

The boy knew this.

And he wondered what the old man—and what the entire S.D. program—was trying to hide.

The old man spent more time in the observatory for several nights after that, keeping one eye on the boy as he read his books. But the boy did everything he asked and nothing he didn’t and so the old man eventually left him alone again, to sweep the floor that didn’t need to be swept.

That was when the boy made his move.

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Tune in tomorrow for Part II!

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Farewell: I Go to My Home Fries

  By
potato

Image by Rusty Clark

As I alluded in my last non-prompt-related post, I recently joined the Church of the Lonely Potato (braise him!).

I was hoping to avoid this, but…I must stop blogging. To follow in the footsteps of the Transcendental Tuber and achieve perfect Loneliness, I must stop writing altogether. Those dedicating their lives to hashbrown hermitude have time for nothing but reclusiveness and root vegetables along the Via Solanum Tuberosum.

This final goodbye, itself, may leave a dark spot on my previously unblemished peel, but though it condemn me to an eternity in the Deep Fryer, I could not leave you without acknowledging our many happy years together. I was thinking about it during my bacon-bit baptism, and I swear – my tears at this farewell could salt an entire bag of Lays.

As I enter the service of the Solitary Spud, I know that it may seem like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, but this vegetative void shall not be fruitless. When the masher finally descends to escort me into the buttery clouds, I know I will have nothing but au gratinitude for all that the tater tot me.

His eye is upon us.

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50 Words in the Trenches

  By
Photo of WWI soldiers in the trenches

Image from Ellen Thompson

“We’re standing in our own graves.”

Jim looked at Harry, at the rivulets of water cutting streaks down his muddy face. He looked at his combat boots, ankle deep in trench sludge mixed with blood. Eighteen days in a standoff. Rations gone. Ammunition dwindling.

“Yeah,” he replied. “But we’re standing.”

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