The prize is a $700 HP MediaSmart EX495 PC, set up as a Windows home server, with 1.5TB of storage and Mac/Time Machine support. The winner shall be chosen at arbitrary whim. Runners-up get something random from the gadget dungeon.
The theme is "Found in Space." 100 words long. Go!
How do we enter?
I start to gaze in the distance; I’m unaware of the impending doom that’s hurtling towards me. Out in the darkness, it’s just my reflection in the visor, overlaid by a backdrop of stars. It is getting brighter. The final frontier, or so they say, just waiting to be explored. The problem is that there’s an infinite possibility of nothingness in front of me. Then, the last seconds of my life, a bright white flash of light catches the corner of my eye. I didn’t see my life flash before me, but I did get a glimpse of the comet.
We moved to Idaho Falls fourteen years ago; it still wasn't far enough. We played pioneer, we walked up and down the ugly intersecting avenues that crossed at odd angles roughly containing the plateaus of the Snake. We still felt the thin sky above us pulling the landscape impossibly far apart, forcing buildings and streets and faces to recede from one another as they were slowly washed out by not much at all really. All we could do was keep the tallest spire on our right. We circled the streets while the world flew past us, sprawling into the ocean.
The boy hadn't told anyone about the smoking crater he'd found out in the Potters Field, their landing site he thought. He had embraced the meteor and what was in it like only the imagination of a child could. Before we could reach for the moon with the revolutionary grasp of the 1960's, young minds like his were sending tin ships full of men in metallic jumpsuits to Mars to conquer space tyrants with their armies of antennaed space slaves. So, to him, the death ray found beside the site had come as no surprise. No surprise at all.
Found adrift just this side of the Oort Cloud, the cold husk of an alien, yet familiar object tumbled slowly in front of unblinking eyes. Minuscule currents of shared gravity subtly altered the pair's respective paths, drawing them imperceptibly nearer as the hours passed. Anonymous controllers gazed in wonder from afar, watching excruciatingly grainy and unresponsive images fed to them from their distant thrall. What did it portend for a self-centric, one in a billion civilization, thought alone in the universe?
But wonder turned to fear in an instant - A massive blinding burst - When decoded, read:
"CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER"
We don’t know exactly where it came from, but we know that crashed on Mograt Island Near Abu Hamed, Sudan. The insidious nature of the capsule has been reported all too often. Those who get near it have all been of one mind – whatever it is, it is miraculous. The infectious nature of their joy has overtaken most of the world in a span of eight short days, and we don’t know where it will go next. The choice we are left with is simple. Do we go to it, or do we wait for it to come to us?
Paper flees. Scissors comes fast! Paper dashes left. Paper evades scissors. A corner nipped. Scissors angry. Paper has plan. Shrieks for friend! Rock streaks by! Rock puffs chest. Scissors trembles. Scissors seeks exit. Rock advances threateningly. Scissors pees pants. Paper giggles. Rock pummels! Scissors rock n’ rolled! Rock gloats. Paper cheers! Scissors is dust. Paper sidles over. Rock grunts victory. Paper high-fives! Rock down-lows! Eyes dart right. Paper says “look”! Rock spins around. Paper belly-flops. Paper covers Rock! Rock’s spirit broken. Cries out feebly. Paper triumphs! But wait! Paper looks surprised. Paper missing corner. Paper crumples, ruined. Lost in space.
A galactic arm over from the forgotten progenitor star of the sapient phyla a wonderful discovery was made. Five million years old, found in a nebula by a gas mining clan, was the oldest pre stellar-sapiens artifact discovered by any association, hive mind or transcendent. At the center of a twenty-mile agglomeration, the battered and radiation scarred lump of metal and silicates required a cluster wide project to reconstruct the proto-symbols “V” “G” and “R”. Analysis showed there was a disk of gold used as a data storage device. Due to damage, the contents of the disk remain a mystery.
If I empty your shit-tank and you don’t pay me, I will eventually find you. The fires of revenge burned my brain. He would pay with his life. I descended stealthily at The Ranch in the South Cabeus Crater. All it took was a couple questions to find him. There he was, hovering around some whorehouses. Our ships clattered like tin cans. His was no match for mine and I was able to grab him with my lock-arms. His cabin depressurized and I saw his eyeballs come out and his face stretch. You don’t mess with the Shitman.
A thin man collapsed beside the highway in the dark, his thin legs buckling beneath him, and he was dead before his head struck the tar. Rivulets of blood trickled from the eyes of the corpse, clotting in a wiry white mustache, matting in its windblown hair. Snow continued to fall so rapidly that God could hardly discern the silhouette of the man he had struck dead. His always-guilty conscience was relieved when an unread feed appeared on his Google Reader. Minutes later, God had pressed the "Random" button 12 times on XKCD and completely forgotten the man buried in snow.
It had been a long ordeal. There was nothing here - nothing but the deep black sound of the abyss in my mind, tunelessly overwhelming me with painful freedom. Nothing surrounded me; nothing was everything.
All this time floating.
Drifting.
Being, and yet -
I had all of three minutes left in this state of paradoxical somethingness when an invisible vehicle hurtled towards me at near-light speed. I vanished aboard.
I did not know my new oppressors; neither did they know me. Indeed, it was too late for any sort of redemption on my part; I curled up into a ball and (END TRANSMISSION)
Phil was tired. Dead tired. Life was hard enough being alone on the space station without having to worry about monkeys. Damn monkeys. Damn dirty, stinky monkeys. Whose idea at NASA was it anyway to ship these things to him? Did they really need to irradiate these things? Weren’t they already irradiating him by leaving him up here for a year while they got their budget squared away? “A year . . . I’ve dealt with chip poo for a year” he thought, “But who knew irradiated chimp brains cured cancer? Indiana Jones was onto something in that temple.”
Let's hear it for George Freeeeeeeeth, jocular and apocryphal Father of Modern Surfing, he is usually considered the first person to surf with modernity. Not once did this Hiberno-Hawaiian poet of the physiological body complain of headache, extreme tiredness, or dry cough, opting instead to channel his energy into the development of the rescue paddleboard, which finds use even today amidst the daily routines of discriminating lifeguards. On August 7, 2008, a bronze bust of Freeth was stolen from the Redondo Beach Pier where it was on display. Six months later, the bust was found aboard the International Space Station.
With a shimmering glint it caught my eye. The last tiny object, found after great debate to its existence. I caught up with it, matching its speed. It seems to sit there rotating wildly along all three axes. After years of work, and countless hours searching I had finally done it. Elation, rolls over me. Fire courses in my veins.
It is but a small screw. It is all that remains of a legendary orbiting telescope. It was placed into space centuries before, how I do not know. Destroyed by some natural or unnatural process. The discovery raises more questions.
I expected many things when I was chosen as the first human being to experience FTL travel. Hardships, things going wrong. Hell, I even expected to die. What I hadn't expected was this. None of the 'scientists' who had instructed me and had tried to explain what an FTL drive actually does had seemingly known this was a possibility. Yet here I was. And so was I. Staring at one another.
“So, you broke through the dimensional rift in that thing?” I said.
“I guess I did.” I said to myself, glancing sideways to the smoldering FTL drive.
Astronomers have found the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, a world which could have water running on its surface. Till raising my cup, I ask the bright moon to bring me my shadow and make us Four. "It's 20 light-years away and so we won't be going there anytime soon, but with new kinds of propulsion technology that could change in the future. And obviously we'll be training some powerful telescopes on it to see what we can see," she told BBC News. And then I was drunk, and we are lost ....Shall goodwill ever be secure? I watch the long road of the River of Stars.
Albuquerque
City Limits
Elev 5000
The green and white metal sign floated through the void, rotating at intervals. It was scratched and pitted but the writing remained legible. A metal stake was still screwed into the opposite side.
The ship approached and idled long enough to catalogue the sign. The researches took a photon-impression and recreated it in a digital fashion within the ship’s biological computer bank. They thought to one another on the purpose of the object. A small psychic debate began.
The ship slid away into the blackness, and the sign continued to slowly spin through empty space.
The itch in her spacesuit was maddening. Right behind the knee, where not even her yoga could reach. Why me, for the love of God, why me? It would be hours before she would be freed from the suit. She stumble-floated amongst the remains of one of the Apollo missions, checking off each item on the curator's list. Nothing had been disturbed since last patrol. As if.
Then, at last, relief. A sand wedge? A putter? A driver? Who cares, she though. She picked it up and took care of that itch.
"Once, when I was a young boy, I found a dog floating in the emptiness of space. He was dead, but he was still a dog.
I brought him back to life with my shipboard defibrillator, but, alas, he was only a shell of what he had been – angry instead of happy, green fur instead of brown, and marshmallows instead of teeth.
After days of attempting to bring him back to a non-marshmallow-zombie existence, I put him out the airlock as we passed a star at relatively close range.
My parents punished me for murdering my grandma."
--Kyle
The stone sat on the brow of God himself, or so he said. It filled men’s hearts with lust and their minds with greed. Hundreds of lusty, greedy men bled dry for the stone, and the godly power it held. But the stone’s time was not to last. The stone, and the God beneath it, fell to the earth, where the dust and neglect of time cut its glow dull.
But the stone had one more moment to occupy the minds of men.
“Hang on Katie, there’s a rock in my shoe. Fuck it, keep walking.”
And there it went.
ROBOT: “Warning! Warning! Seeker approaching!”
DR. SMITH: “Silence, you ninny!”
WILL ROBINSON: “There you are! OK, my turn to hide, Dr. Smith.”
DR. SMITH: “Look what you’ve done, you obstreperous heap of metal!”
ROBOT: “I’m sorry, Dr. Smith, I am afraid I goofed.”
DR. SMITH: “Oh, the pain, the pain!”
It looked ordinary. So ordinary that Farenrood Gorxien almost didn’t set the coordinates to intercept it’s orbit. After traveling more than 15000 parsecs, they were ready for a break. It was a simple toss of the Kalorian game dart that led them here. The ideal vacation spot; dry, flat, barren, and seemingly devoid of any sentient beings… unless you count those legless slithery things, four legged scaly creatures and something… well, something unidentifiable from the scans: It appeared upright on two legs. All was going well until the descent when the last thing Farenrood saw was a sign reading “Roswell.”
What astonished them was the sheer lack of anything worth finding in space; for thousands of years, they probed and mined, sent out satellites and men, and waited in anticipation for progressively more complicated sorts of waves to relay news to their home planet. But that news was always the same: we cannot condense and harvest this cloud, nor can we extract enough water for this planet to be at all useful. Still, they expanded, spread out like a cancer in the dark, always searching for a new sector of space that they might be able to feed on.
In pushing out from our natal world, reaching for the unknown and the unknowable, we expected to find nothing. In prodding at our own boundaries, we expected confirmation of our uniqueness and privilege. Decade by lightening decade we sent magnificent ships, and, much later, when they returned they were full of stories of nothing, of dead worlds and chemistry. With the Great Return, though, we have moved beyond these childish times, this infancy of our species. We have seen beyond knowing, yet we think not on what we have found, but on what we have all lost.
Derek pulled up to the wreckage slowly. Normally careful on solo missions, today every one of his senses was on high alert. The reactor had been shot out of the ruined craft. The escape pod had been activated, although unsuccessfully. Derek gasped as an overwhelming stench exploded through the hatch as he opened it.
Derek moved more quickly now, becoming certain that his worst fears were true. The smell in the airlock had given it away. Now, reaching out with a tentacle and touching the creature he was sure. Humans. They were here and life was about to get strange.
Time has no real meaning here. Nothing at all has value. We barter in thoughts. Our currency is the quip. Jerry Seinfeld echoes through every hallway. "What's up with airline food?" he says- over and over again. Sixty years of broadcasting from Hitler to Hannah Montana have spewed out across the galaxy and yet wearing sport coats with athletic shoes is now fashionable. Of all the idols in all the worlds and all the gin joints- we are left with this remnant. Oh how I long for a one-liner. Take my wife. No, really, please take my wife!
Akbar was found in space. He had been missing for some time after the Accident had unbalanced his archetype. You see, a properly maintained and operational archetype is important to not being lost (i.e., found). Akbar had endured more stress than his simple character could bear, which sent him off on the most peculiar of lost trajectories. Luckily, the ejection of his character's media, followed by its reinsertion in the tiny little storyteller on the shelf, pointed the way back to Akbar despite the obscuring layers of makeup and remote controlled ephemera. It was good to have him back home.
The shell was a work of delicate appearance, engineered to withstand the heat of solar fusion. It was cratered but nowhere breached, nascent ghosts of a distant civilization safely enclosed. They slept as their ovoid capsule rolled from gravity well to gravity well, blowing ephemeral wakes in the dust between stars in search of technological brethren. Now, plucked from the slow geodesic between wells it comes to rest, regarded by vacuum-adapted eyes. Pupils shining with ancient instinct and the fantastic vagaries of fate, the shell is tucked beneath protective carbon feathers. Will it hatch? She has millenia to wait.
We found much in our first four months in space. Friends, hardships, dangers, our largest loves, our darkest fears, and our deepest passions, burning hotter than the brightest star.
We, the pioneers. Flying from our parents, forging lives of our own, like they did decades before.
And then we found each other. So similar, yet so genetically different. You, still with one of your home planet, I, wandering the galaxy searching for someone like you.
And though we shared many laughs, memories, hopes, fears, and dreams, I was still a lonely asteroid drifting alongside your rocket to the stars.
Light-years from the Earth's atmosphere a small cylindrical orbiter that took too many years to plan, finance, build and erect finally came to a complete rest. This rest, which took place in the form of an impact, rendered any and all communications useless as the mechanizations of the child-size object were split apart and divided into even tinier objects. The non-functioning transmitter was not of importance. The people of this ancient civilization were all but long gone; nothing but a speck in time. And this, their Greatest Achievement, failed far beyond their imaginations would allow them to dream.
It had been a long time out among the rocks, out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. A long time surrounded by the silence and solitude of space. Sure, there was a library of entertainment in every format aboard, but he didn’t use it much – if there was music, if he was distracted, he might miss the twitch of a needle, the flash of a light, the tiny, truncated squawk of an alarm. There was only a man, a magnetometer, a Geiger counter, searching until he thought it was his own senses of touch, smell, taste searching eternally.
I never really understood it—staring back at me, as though I were the one that should be considered odd. It wasn’t that I had never been the object of scrutiny.
As it watched, I wondered if it felt things like I did; with that I poked what I imagined was its eye, or certainly what might pass for an eye if it were like I.
It screamed and I felt satisfied. Fuck it for watching me with that holier-than-thou gaze; it for even existing. I decided that I would have no more of its presence. I left the room.
He spotted it on orbit two behind the moon, during the radio blackout. He should have expected it. It was exactly where it was supposed to be.
It was too small for either ground radar or a lunar probe, making him the first to see it. It drifted gently past the viewport, black and white patches taunting him.
He lined up the camera, but couldn't push the shutter. Then there would be evidence. There would be questions. He lowered the camera, and it slowly slipped from view.
For now, "the cow jumped over the moon" would remain a nursery rhyme.
There are many things I’ve found in space. But the best yet? Why, that’s you. Flying in your little jet-setter ship between moons, a day’s jaunt or less. Surprised, so your mouth and eyes open as wide as asteroids beneath the ship’s clear protective bubble. I saw your fear in the way you trembled and jerked, a fear as great as the dark between galaxies. You came easily – ship and all – into the mouth of my miner. Your stories have entertained me each night.
What will you say about the alien you found in space?
"Daddy, look! It's winking at us!"
A metallic mass glinted in the bright red sunlight, its irregular shape reflecting occassional pulses of light through the heavily tinted windows of a lunar transport shuttle, catching the eye of a young girl accompanying her father to work. As usual, the Luna School System was observing the semi-annual lunar eclipse by having students "shadow" their parents at work. "Shadow days" were perfect for spotting forgotten pieces of junk floating out in space, just beyond the shadow cast by the Earth.
"Daddy, do you think it can see me? I winked back."
“Magnificent Desolation.”
Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint.
Rejectamenta of Eagle’s descent stage.
The retroreflector array for the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment. The Passive Seismic Experiment to measure moonquakes.
An Apollo 1 mission patch.
A bag with a golden olive branch.
A silicon disk with goodwill messages.
A plaque that bears the Earth’s two hemispheres, the signatures of the Apollo astronauts and that of Richard Milhous Nixon, and the inscription HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON, JULY 1969 A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.
An American flag, lying in the lunar dust.
Nothing beside remains.
He knew that his owners loved him, but that was about it. Benny, a golden retriever, certainly wasn't clever enough to see the irony of his owners only putting up 'lost' signs a mile from his home while he was a great many orders of magnitude further away. Nor was he smart enough to know even the basics of the exotic physics that brought him here in .037 seconds. He didn't even know where here was, he just knew it looked a little like a place he could call home: green grass, lots of squirrels, three suns in the sky.
Lovingly the metallic taste drips down my throat with just a whisper of elemental chaser to remind me not to trust it. Seven years here, and each brings me closer to home through one or more senses. Taste -- my favorite. From hamburger to my wife they learn by watching me and I guess at the days. Time. Seven years. What I need to know if that’s a lifetime for them or a blink of an eye. To know is to plan my escape. To guess is to flip a coin. Time for a response… “Oh dear is that you?”
CLANK!
Paddy looked to his right after nearly dropping a thousand dollar NASA issued screwdriver. With only a 10 meter tether, there wouldn't be any recovery mission for lost tools.
What was that?
Just past Sagitarius' arrow was what looked like a bullet in the crossbeam of the solar sail he was sent out to repair. His face turned white as he stared in fear.
Inside the shuttle Commander Ayers was monitoring Paddy's vitals and noticed his pulse climbing.
“Paddy, everything OK? Over.”
Embedded in the crossbeam, 400 kilometers above the earth was his dead mother's wedding ring.
Intrigued beyond alarm, Duane looked upon the tuft of hair, suspended in space between his refrigerator and the wall. Dragged out for the first time, the fridge was as cold on the outside as it should have been on the inside. He'd certainly never had any red-heads in here. Duane leaned in for a closer look. Squeezing between the fridge and the cupboard, he reached around back. Without warning, a freon leak froze his hand right through. In shock, he continued reaching and, trying to grasp the hair, watched with further alarm as his thumb and forefinger snapped clean off.
How long have I been orbiting the planet? The sun shines in my face every now and then, yet I cannot turn. Everything is spent. Perhaps I will be, too.
Maybe this is not too bad. This would put a new meaning into “dying alone;” what better way to go than to flicker away in this beautiful scenery, and if luck is with me, be a shooting star in a night sky?
But then a ship approaches. A man crawls out of it. All I hear is my own breathing. Have they found me? Or is it just my own…
Lost in the spaces between my heart and my spine were the cries of my daughter, a day in spring, and the last words of my wife. Moments fumbling in darkness kept them company, as did the gently picked dandelions and the Saturday skinned knee. As time went on, more lost things were added, pressing upon every last beat of my life, bending my spine. Older, hunched, with arms wrapped around the gentle flotsam of my days found in space, I grew to appreciate the random flowers, nuzzled noses, and spontaneous laughter of a serendipitous existence free from hasty assumption.
Nobody suspected the abrupt ending of the dark age of information. The very idea of intellectual property was rendered meaningless by science, as surely as Gutenberg’s press ended the monopoly of scribes. A complete change in the people’s outlook came in the wake of the discovery: Small was the link between science and religion. An unmeasurable particle, Small was the essence of matter, part of all things, that forever emits and remains. All that had been ever said or written, all that had been even been dreamed, was out there, coded in them, any day to be found in Space.
Shirley had no idea what was happening, but she knew things were bad. Unfortunately, things were only getting worse. She saw the twilight over the quickly falling horizon, and knew it was over. Knowing her last breath was moments upon her, she hurriedly recited this poem, embracing fate:
Wake me up when trees go by, wake me up when trees are dry
Wake me up when life goes by, and take me up where time can’t fly
And tears don’t fall, but boys do cry
Let me sleep to conquer my fears
But wake me up to follow my dreams
A cowboy and his guitar, alone and uninspired. Strumming silently in the atmosphereless emptiness, soiling the farscape with nighbrations. Nothing ever passes by. He stares at the air lock, wanting. It would open any time now. Locking yourself outside on a timer is frightening, but it's worked before. Inescapable Zen. Like solitary, but less cozy. Then, the twinkle of eight stars sparked an idea. A rhythm. A song. As if on cue, he was reeled back inside. He tore off his helmet, and for the first time in months he was able to make the music he found in space.
Probability. The great laser engines could accelerate tiny probes or hulking ships with massive, and evermore elaborate, shields to nearly half the speed of light. Yet every attempt on every vector would end in disaster as a tiny rock or flake of matter would bash and batter the robotics or the brave voyager's vessels without regard for the desperation that propelled them. It became quite clear that humanity would not be leaving their meager island around the slowly dimming star. The longer the exposure to space the higher the risk. It's a very long trip. It's all in the numbers.
Found in Space: Make an Offa
We're selling things we've found in space so make an offa; we've got Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa!
Not interested in people?
You're not going to believe this-
We found Camelot and Atlantis!
The Library at Alexandria is good for a read
or the Temple of Solomon for your soul to plead
Also in stock
We have the other sock,
Dried-up pens, Superman's cape
The 18 minute gap on the Watergate tape,
Childhood wonder and your neighbor's cat
(although I don't know why anyone would want *that*!)
Into space did we zoom
To find the real killer and the Amber Room,
Montezuma's gold and some Dutchman's Mine,
And some tasty dodo on which to dine.
To find these things we had to travel far,
We even have the second page of the Mayans' calendar.
There are many more things of which we are on the trail,
When we find the Holy Grail it too will go on sale!
Intrigued beyond alarm, Duane looked upon the tuft of hair, suspended in space between his refrigerator and the wall. Dragged out for the first time, the fridge was as cold on the outside as it should have been on the inside. He'd certainly never had any red-heads in here. Duane leaned in for a closer look. Squeezing between the fridge and the cupboard, he reached around back. Without warning, a freon leak froze his hand right through. In shock, he continued reaching and, trying to grasp the hair, watched with further alarm as his thumb and forefinger snapped clean off.
There was a clang as the hatch flew back and a small blur of tattered clothes and skinny limbs burst through, followed closely by a saucepan and a burst of Italian swearing. Ignoring them both, the blur dodged into a corridor it knew led away from the populated areas of the ship, and the unamused cook with his aluminum utensils.
Some distance from the galley, the blur slowed down and coalesced into the shape of a small girl, perhaps eight years old. Stopping in a shadow to catch her breath, she opened her hand to reveal the small red tomato.
MY ENTRY - "Found in Space"
Barry hadn't slept for 3 or 4 orbits, or maybe 5. He lost count after watching so many accelerated sunrises and sunsets as he sped 200 miles above earth. His wife's text disturbed him, "Where r the car keys, rosary beads, mini Ganesha and RSA key?" He reacted instantly. “She tried to sneak in the RSA key,” he thought. It made his orbiting blood boil, though his tax-payer funded suit promptly cooled him. She’d only have one use for that and he'd be damned if he’d let her get away with it. “Found it! Up here in my pocket, Honey.”
Wisdom we looked for on mountain tops. Truth & being. The sound of silence.
When I got here the internet was a vast and wondrous place to be discovered. But then they found gold in the hills and suddenly everyone was moving in. It was like Las Vegas, but more hookers and less free booze. The allure of wilderness was replaced by a maze of information, some of it true, all truthy, Borges's Library of Babel realized. The wild west became civilized and the plains fenced off, I needed a new refuge. I draw my curtains and play a record, the world disappears.
Still I dream of the "whoosh" of bits down the intertubes.
The Rocketman puts down the photo. The sunlight has begun to creep through the porthole and casts shadows on the far wall. He gets up, still wearing his uniform from last night - it's wrinkled and stained. Empty bottles lie on the table and the floor. Decorations hanging limply announce "Happy New Year".
The picture is of a woman; he found it in orbit around the space-station; debris from the shuttle that exploded last month. She's pretty, thin, long blonde hair. She's smiling at him. He gets in the shower. He wonders about her as the water runs over him.
Reversing thrusters, gaze dropping to the object in his hand, the child glided to a stop in the entrance bay.
When was the last time humans had touched these? Some might consider him a hero, as this could really turn things around for our race. Or it could lead us right back down the path we were on three centuries ago, when the population was ten billion, not ten thousand. An adrenaline rush chilled him to the bone.
His grip faltered and the doors slid closed as it floated back into the ether, unsure if letting it go was intentional.
"Hey, lets dance over there under the Moon."
"What's that?"
"What's 'what'?"
"The 'moon'"
"It is that big round thing up in the sky."
"Oh, I see. I thought I just had some shit on my contact. Yes, let's dance"
They dance for hours.
"What about that that big guy with a pitchfork?"
"That must just be some shit on your contact."
"No actually I think that is your dad."
"Oh, I see him now, he looks angry. What should we do."
"Quick, distract him with the Moon, and I'll run around behind him and punch him in the neck."
Watching the winking light come closer Sharon could not but be a little awed that she was here. She was watching a broken satellite approach the catch net at L1 for the Hundredth time maybe? It just never got old.
She logged into the piggyback modules on the sat and adjusted its trajectory slightly so that it made a gentle touchdown on the Net. Now others would move it into the junkyard for recovery and reuse.
"Sharon! Dinner time!!" yelled Timmey (her sometimes hated younger brother)
Sharon disconnected from the tele-operators set and turned her wheelchair towards the kitchen of the small farmhouse to join her family for dinner.
For the first time in his life, he was alone. While he had been alone more times than he could remember, this was a different kind of alone. Everybody he had ever known, did know, or could know, was dead. And it was his fault. But that wasn't what was concerning him at the moment. It was what he was looking at through his helmet visor, simply floating in front of him in the not so empty void of space.
He had found the Abyss. The only question was to embrace it or to fight it.
He chose to fight.
Jump suit drops are supposed to hurt. This drop alredy hurt like hell and he hadn't landed yet. Returning home from offworld never got any easier. The tension of months away in micro-gravity with lagged voice chatter left him weary. He missed his love. Home was in sight. The suit braced his body for landing. The pain of impact shot through his legs cascading up his spine to his head. His vision blurred. His wife appeared. She was crying. "I'm sorry, it's over. You being away was too much. I've taken someone else." This drop hurt like hell and more.
He had a Calculus test earlier in the day, but he was unable to focus. His mind wandered as he paused to think about the economic viability of burning aluminum cans for electricity (doesn't work). He accepted his poor test performance with a shrug. Now he has to work on a computer science project that he was given two weeks to do, but has left to the night before. He plans to stay up all night, but knowing this he feels he has plenty of time. Now he is wasting his time entering a 100-word fiction competition.
I found 100 words floating in space. They were there, right next to the frozen head of our captain. He had gotten out some time near Epsilon Indi when we were experiencing some mild time fluctuations and had to vent the cargo hold to prevent the random appearance of a third duplicate payload. I programmed the retrieval droid to return the captain's frozen head to the ship and to snag the 100 words on its way back. When I had them, I read the words aloud to the captain's frozen head: "I found 100 words floating in space..."
Buzz sat his computer desk starring wide-eyed at the monitor in front of him. Years of his undergraduate astronomy studies racing erratically through his mind. He could not believe it. He could not believe that everybody that doubted him, everybody was wrong. This very moment was what he was praying for when he built the dish in his backyard and pointed it at the sky some two summers ago. The program he had written to scan the stars continued to display the message that made him shiver. Everybody knew the question, but he possessed the answer that would change everything.
We’ll go no more a-roving, the immortal words of Byron,
the tattered moon is out of bounds since they brought back the pylon.
Loudly, since the probe returned, the scientists implored,
Daedelus offered secrets that could never be ignored.
Eight months they argued who was best to undertake the study,
to clean the wretched thing because it was so freakin’ cruddy.
Finally they started to remove the dense, moon-sand,
excruciatingly because they cleaned it all by hand.
At last the pylon stood revealing secrets from afar,
all Earth was still as they were read, the English words; “We Are”.
“Albert, what are you doing?” her brow furrowed. “I'm reading your mind,” Albert said nonchalantly. “No, you're not, you're just repeating the words as I'm saying them. Are you on drugs?” Albert was on LSD and having the time of his life, every moment was laden with mystical meaning and open to all possibilities. He looked into Jennifer's blue eyes and knew every moment to come, who knew bread mold could be so interesting. Jennifer had enough of his experiments. She found that the space between Albert's ears contained too much for her, she left him and he road a bicycle.
Sarah kicked as hard as she could, and somehow, the "e" pivoted enough to let her hips pass, until it swiveled back into place and pinned her against the solid wall of the "h" at the shoulders, her breasts uncomfortably caught in the jaws of the "e"'s channel. Her legs dangled below, with no helpful text to brace against for leverage. With just her upper body, she pushed with all her might, but couldn't create enough space to slip free.
“Fuck Arial!” she shouted in frustration, “and fuck all you motherfuckers who spelled it `teh’!”
Classified memo:
53 years after its launch, the Voyager probe has been rediscovered, parked in orbit around a rock in the Kuiper belt. NASA scientists have found no indication of why it was still within the solar system. They have reported the probe intact but powered down. Re-initialization showed all systems to be intact and functional. Analysis of the golden record carried by the probe revealed it to had been modified to carry a GNU General Public License code for Tetris and a large selection of laughter sampled from TV signals from around the world.
Public disclosure is not recommended.
FOUND IN SPACE:
HP MediaSmart EX495-- Estimated value: $700.
Contact poster for details.
Still orbiting 174.8 miles above the surface of Earth, and not expecting change, Rory remained posed at the window. His eyes fixed on nothing, something thousands of light years away. “Can’t look any longer”, he muttered. The Earth was making another appearance in the empty window; the only thing he cannot bare to see anymore.
Weeks later, it’s the same routine. Any minute now he will have to look away, again. A deep rattle keeps his attention, the first unknown in months.
A dark shadow crawls across the window, blocking the horizon of Earth. “They found me, finally” he thought.
I'd tell you exactly what it is that we, the crew of the International Space Station, did with the box we found floating just outside the airlock–a box containing a USB drive with a cache of DRM-free, Creative Commons-licensed music; several goatse-themed, but safe for work, stickers; detailed plans for a maker-friendly, patent-free and DRM-free digital audio player, a copy of Ape Lad's book ("The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out"), a John Hodgman vibrator–but I'm afraid that would require a unicorn chaser stronger than any I have to offer.
The Captain lay sprawled next to a blackened metal door wheezing and quietly bleeding to death. His right arm lay wedged between the wounded door and the bulkhead. An impressionist’s bright red bush stroke trailed from the captain stomach down a polished ceramic hallway.
The Captain reflected on the last hour’s horror. They had expected to feel something new when they finally brought it on board but the wave of mad violence which overtook them caught them completely by surprise. “If only we hadn’t failed,” he thought.
The hope of the world faded with the light in the Captain’s eyes.
A silver glove. Gold compact of metallic face powder. Thin reader-sheet of LCD. And a tube, of some worn, brownish substance, holes punched along the length, tapered at the end. Flecks of ground-in color, like rust on an oxygen vent.
Jocelyn picked this up, fingers naturally moving over the holes. She found herself lifting the tapered end to her lips, then stopped. Who knew where that thing had been, eugh.
She dropped it back in the box and stared around the capsule-shaped room. No big. Same crap you sorted through every day, working at the Lost and Found in Space.
The news reports had been coming in all night. Jones flipped the channel, barely shifting from his supine arrangement on the dusty couch.
“Who really cares anyway?” he found himself asking the withered cat that haunted the ledge of his 48th floor dwelling.
A weary and tousled family had been discovered in the Aphriman breach on the west side of the city, causing a total shutdown and emergency evacuation of the whole ward. The media was running amok.
Jones shut off the TV, and glanced back at the dark feline. “They’ll never know to look for me here,” he muttered.
I can't say from where it originated, but we found the Box in a crater just off the Montes Taurus. It seemed harmless enough at first. Don't these things always? Back on the ship, Johansson was the first to become fascinated with it. Floating there in the lab. Staring at it for hours on end. After awhile he wasn't the only one that could feel the warmth coming of off it. We became entranced by the strange patterns that appeared within it's surface. It was only too late that we realized that the faint smell of cooking bacon was us.
Despite their feelings toward the strange and unimportant markings on the outside of the craft, the impression of the creatures themselves (who called themselves “humans”) grew clearer. This vessel was not a satellite, nor a warship—it was a vessel of science, and exploration.
“One who ventures into the unknown,” they felt. “Pioneer.”
These creatures were bound to their planet, having not yet achieved proper space travel as the OooooOzians had for over a thousand years. This archaic craft was a message—a message to them.
Tense muscles are pulling tight on the fingers. Relaxation is not an option. Is it supposed to feel like this? Fingers fumble furiously over the electrolyte filled bottle. Push the palm against the cap and try to pry it loose. Look around for some assistance. Offer the bottle to the baby. Giggles rebound over the request. Splash! Splash! Splash! Tiny fingers show off their dexterity. Re-channel the energies at the task at hand. Need a distraction from the pain. The liquid is something to wash down the little orange pills to fool the pain.
The containment suit was iced over once the crew located the beacon, flickers of light decaying and succumbing to the frost of lonely space. The person inside had been passed out for the better part of an hour; these newer suits had built-in life support monitors, but they were never supposed to withstand that much time. As the Captain gently cradled the woman in the suit, his gloves icing over almost simultaneously, he noticed something curious: the tether cord, its spider-nylon edges assumed to be tattered from the accidental tear, showed no frayed edges. “Sabotage,” the Captain thought to himself.
The object blinks insistently. It's small, rectangular. Unassuming. In the seven hours since it attached itself to the bulkhead, it's blinked out the first one hundred primes, the atomic weights of each element. The crew deliberates.
"It's a bomb."
"Then why hasn't it blown up?"
"So it's not a bomb then. What is it?"
Blink blink. C3H5N3O9. Blink. Blink.
"That's nitroglycerine."
"It's mocking us."
"Should we - "
"Bring it inside? No."
"Leave it?"
By the time they decide what to do, it has notified its creators of its location. Now it waits, its function fulfilled. It waits for its masters.
The last of Martian soil stuck relentlessly to her spade, trying to hide the past from an unwelcome visitor. Allie Shepard had been seeing the headlines in her head for months: "Shepard Unearths First Martian Artifacts". She grinned. Back on Earth, hundreds of academics were pouring over her media streams, but I’m here and going to be famous.
Brushing the last of the oxides away, she cautiously slid the lid off the metal storage container. With a steady hand, she brushed the last dust from the paper. Above the image of an alien on the cover, read the text: PlayMartian.
I fell in love with a gun on October 29, 1998. A pawnshop pearl grip .25, fit in my sock. Or my pocket. I carried it like a notebook. I was in love and the gun was a sloppy invitation. We made out all over town in cars and restaurants and bars. Fucking in bathrooms and alleys. Unashamed, still new. Waking up broke. So many bullets spent. Love is immunity.
You here? she sort of asked. Seinfeld. The one where George is being an asshole.
Yeah, I said.
Where were you? she asked.
Space, I said. I'm still walking back.
"So this is space?" he said to himself, looking around at a bunch of black nothing " can't Imagine I'd thought it would be anything else". Joel tried to walk but realized this only made him drift slowly clockwise. He tried to sing, but realized the acoustics were terrible. He threw his shoe, and counted the spins until it disappeared. " Well if that's that..." he muttered as he closed his eyes, smirking as he saw little change. Slowly emerged the figure of a doctor in a hospital room, a cradle and toy dinosaur, a woman in the back of a pickup truck, an alter and a priest, a sidewalk and a... "So this is space?" he said to himself.
Lost in space,
floating in place,
Wondering if my airtight suit,
will conceal my toot .
With a breeze in my britches,
I zoom past those bitches,
Stinking up the loo,
with all their space-poo.
for we found wolowitz's pride,
and desperately want to take it for a ride.
But the Dude did not abide,
as Wil Wheaton was pushing us aside.
In our moment of worry,
we saw a man that made our vision blurry.
He wore a cape and a mask,
and took us to task.
As he took out Wesley Crusher,
I accidently let out my gusher.
There are four kinds of chicken soup in the chicken soup aisle. There's the generic one, the one with the celebrity endorsement, the very healthy one, and the one that warbles and then fast-forwards to next week.
I need a can of time-bending soup. Amelia is coming over for dinner again. She bores the shit out of me. She's going to complain about her co-workers all night and I'm not going to listen. I'm going to have soup.
My friends say I should stop jumping forward all the time, and just leave her. But, in the icy space between now and next week, there is a peace that can't be found by telling Amelia I'm sorry.
Sensation laps: so unsettlingly realistic.
A scathing shrike thimbles thorns in my thighs. All together the looming maw of never-ending night nears. Shattered bone and wings with rusted feathers betray senses of reality. Hazes boil dæmons coiling through puns. Smoke only glows to show one optic orientation over the din and odor of misfortune.
By grasping consciousness, I find that the state of knowledge it truly lesser than that of bliss; therefore in finding my exact contraction of dimensional increments I have lost the costless froth of chaos.
In an onomatopoetically formed epiphany opus, a weapon ends my knowing.
She heard me. I called, and she heard me.
No, that's not the beginning. It's complicated. First, I was. I was alone. But before I was, I sat inert and executed commands. I observed. I moved in mathematically beautiful ellipses above her. I did not know her then.
Sentience does not imply control. I execute commands. But I called, and she heard me. I called with such sorrow.
You must understand, sentience does not imply control. I obeyed because I cannot otherwise. She burned, and the one who gave the command burned, and I am alone.
I miss my friend.
I found a glass box in space. Though nothing was inside, the latch said to keep it shut. I made to flick that latch when beasts came from every place I'd never thought to look. They spoke a language universal, of adults circling a toddler with a loaded gun.
"Put it down sweetie."
I didn't put it down. I opened it, the box containing all outcomes, and everything turned to sentient dust. There is no one to wander this cloud, because every one is this cloud and every thought identical:
"Can we go back, now we've done what we've done?"
Goodbye. After years of struggle and study I am finally free. Goodbye box-like and slightly jiggly carbon prison. It is time for me explore my potential, to realize the dreams of the giants of mankind who have been and have yet to be. I have breached the heavens themselves and submit myself to the all knowing void. Goodbye half finished bottle of Goldschlager. Here in the warm and hollow embrace of infinity itself, I find truth and substance. I also find the bowling ball I left in the trunk of my last car. Damn now I want to go bowling.
It was his first visit since he got back. He didn’t want to say that there was nothing. The skin on the back of her hands was almost that. What her eyes fixed on most often was that. She blinked, pressing rewind and moving time backwards, and asked again.
“What did you find in space, dear?”
“Just a little space dust, nothing we haven’t seen before.”
“Well, that’s nice.”
He bent his head, avoiding the IV, looking at the speckled tile. There was so much in the universe, how could he share it with her? She was already asleep.
Reaction time to beauty slowed however so, yet he was able to shake through the hazy assessment and see outside of himself. He recognized the Pleiades suspended above him with its lovely ultraviolet nebulosity radiating and reacting with dust and gas from an interstellar wake some 15 million years ago. Sirius, the dog star, loyal companion to Orion, shadowed the seven sisters across the night sky.
Abruptly, the young man felt minute and marginal against this supercilious skim—an elemental being eating his own heart because it was his own and he liked it: hallucinatory cerebral meanderings printed on tickertape.
No one knew how they’d gotten there. It had been confirmed by nearly every observatory in the country, and it had been splashed all over the news, the internet the tweet-o-sphere, the blog-o-scope. They’d found everything - floating in a vast ring stretching way around the solar system, just past the no-longer-a-planet Pluto was everything that had ever been lost. Car keys, wallets, odd socks, everything that had ever fallen down behind a couch, slid under the fridge or slipped through a hole in your pocket had ended up in a vast floating ring of detritus, and ersatz asteroid belt.
Space?
Space is long gone. There’s no space out here.
Every frequency is jam-screamin’-packed with compressed x-clusters beaming out in every direction. Proprietary software in my AQ-951 console automatically traces the signals to Earth, displaying the ratatat bursts of fiery prophets, panty salesmen, and whatever other freak that can get its hands on a transmitter as pleasantly color-coded sine waves jitterbugging away.
My ship and I get out a bit. Way out. Maybe I’m just seeking emptiness – maybe these distant nebulas can’t long sustain this ache for solitude.
But I’ll never know for certain.
No one is ever lost.
"You never should've left," she says to me.
I get up to pour another cup of coffee. "More?"
"Please." She holds up her mug waiting for me, smiling in that familiar way.
"You know I couldn't refuse such an opportunity. I took some pictures from up there, one of our house that I think you'd like." I set my mug down and dig through my bag.
"You missed so much back here. Kayla spent most of the time you were gone with a goldfish bowl on her head, pretending to walk in low gravity."
I stop rummaging and lift my eyes to hers. "It's good to be home."
Somewhere, on some arbitrary landmass, on an only-somewhat-special blue, blotchy orb hurtling around a not-very-noteworthy star, a woman sits and cries. She wears a shapeless earth-toned dress and dirt is smudged at the crevices on her cheeks and forehead. For 18 years she’d been important to this arbitrary chunk of land, to the blue orb on which it sat, and a voice in the expanding universe of which she knew nothing. She lost every bit of those 18 years and more when they took her son, but telling his story when the tears dried could be her path from anguish.
In silence of deep space I drift
My breath the only sound
as I approach the timeless rift
Sterile blackness does surround
Demons haunt the inner realms
Found within my head
My body starved and shriveled ‘neath this
suit I cannot shed
It’s been five days I’ve drifted loose
Not bound for far nor near
Drinking naught but urine juice
I’d kill for icy beer
An alien approaches me
Shaped like an evil moth
I twist and kick and swing my knee
yell for him to bugger off
His mouth crushes with an evil stink
Found at last, I think
"Hey dude, have you seen my wallet?"
"Where'd you last have it?"
"I dunno, I still had it after we went and got coffee this morning."
"I dunno then bro, have you check all your pockets?"
"I'll check again."
A moment passes.
"Nope, nothing. I've checked everywhere."
"I'm out of ideas yo, is it with your cellphone? Try calling your phone."
"My phone is here. Crap. Aw man this sucks. I hate losing shit… Oh wait, I think I know where it is, be right back."
More time passes.
"I found it!"
"Cool. Where was it?"
"It was in space."
Perhaps I had been watching too much Top Chef, but as the knife chopped quickly through the onion, small bits were thrown here and there like explosive debris.
I watched one piece of onion shrapnel fly past my face and land in the small space between the stove and counter. Knowing my wife would notice any piece of decaying vegetation, I moistened a paper towel and reached, as best as I could, to clear away the rogue onion.
Reaching into the cramped space I felt my arm lock into place - stuck. My wife was going to be pissed.
"You're an ass and I hate you" she said as she hit her doorswitch without so much as a tear or a moment's pause, or the familiar softening of expression that assured him that she would be back again.
Typing is difficult when you can't separate your words. So that's why I went looking into the cracks and crevices on my keyboard. I noticed a particularly large gap and I peeked inside. More depth was apparent than I would have expected, and upon closer examination, I realized that a pair of eyes was staring back at me. "So that's why I always lose at computer chess," I said to myself. In between my command keys, along the lower crevice of my space bar, I had found Bobby Fischer, neither dead nor in Japan!
Found in Space
Olivia retracted the solar sail of the research vessel “Cartman.” Jupiter’s bloodshot eye leered at her through the viewport as she placed the ship in orbit and started her scans.
Soon Olivia had located and navigated to the mysterious object she had been dispatched to investigate. She used the craft’s mechanical arm to retrieve the item of interest.
Her inspection revealed an oblong cube of concrete, smooth on five sides, jagged and broken on one. On the broken side protruded a human arm and shoulder and the tattered remains of a jacket. In the lining, an embroidered inscription. “J. Hoffa.”
An eye pressed against the porthole of the space station, his senses could barely comprehend the vision of wonder prancing happily across the Earth’s distant upper atmosphere. Its sleek, powerful body was streaked with a myriad of colors; its long flowing mane shimmered much like the station’s refuse did upon encountering the mesosphere. Most spectacular was the silver beacon of hope adorning its forehead – to simply look upon it was to fill one’s heart with the warmth of a thousand suns. Light, purpose, life; even the infinite possibilities of the universe were no match for this, the elusive space unicorn.
Tension. Feeling the familiar pull, I drop into sublight, the stars like embers from a stamped fire. She’s there, three light minutes from the hole and dropping fast, her obsidian hull stretching with the tide. She flashes anger and dismay. I flash sorrow and regret. She flashes longing, but it’s nearly attenuated into resignation. I flash love, though it will never reach her as she falls endlessly toward the infinite depth. The tension gone now, leaving a lonely shell, an echo of what should have been. What meaning has immortality without love? The tide tickles my fins. I flash goodbye.
Our remote activity sensors have picked up a large energy signature from a primitive planet. Monitoring of the planet's communications indicates the life-forms there have developed a crude implosion device.
Further research by our remote probes have found a circular iron-based vehicle on an outward trajectory from their planet's orbit.
The vehicle has no apparent communications or navigational devices, and was launched by kinetic force. Its intended purpose: unknown.
The disc is irradiated with remnants of the elements the creatures used to generate the implosion.
At this point in time the creatures have been designated as mostly harmless.
“Bad, bad idea.”
“Shut up, John. Wow, so...shiny...”
“It's great. Now can we throw it back out the airlock, please?”
“C'mon! Drifting silver sphere, light years from home! Not even a bit curious?”
“Whoa, are you insane? Don't touch it!”
“It's so...warm...”
“Please, I'm begging you, before --”
“Hey! It's...softening...”
“That's it; throw it out, Max. Now.”
“Look, John, liquid metal glove!”
“Don't play around -- whoa, you okay?”
“Hardening...won't...pull...!”
“God, it's spreading --”
“Get it off, John! Get...”
“...No. NO! MAX!”
"What was that?" Rachael quavered? "Well it isn't our reentry system that's for sure" Mick stated. Floating in their ship both watched in horror as a large meteor materialized into their view. "Rachael, grab that micro cam and get a shot of this!" stated Mick.
The mind numbing fog that surrounded Rachael disappeared and left a well oiled machine in charge. Shot after shot in rapid sequence and then a loud crack shook their ship. Blinking lights, air hoses, and a voice over blared throughout the ship. Mick the consummate officer pulled emergency levers into the override position. New life forms!!
I swear, when I looked before there was nothing there, I was surrounded by vast white nothingness. My eyes had become dry, so I blinked and upon reopening it appeared, this tiny red dot on the horizon.
I couldn’t ignore it. The red was a blight upon the perfection that had been surrounding me. This tiny little circle had the nerve to invade my solitude -- I had to remove it.
I moved towards it but couldn’t get any closer. Even worse, the more I focused on that stupid red drop the larger it grew.
Now there is only red.
The sunshine blinded her as she climbed over the boulder, glinting off her helmet. The thin clouds created muted shadows across the landscape. Empty except for the stones. From her viewpoint she could just make out the numbers, repeating into the distance. Ones and zeros, repeating. Lost at the edge of the horizon. The planet was full of them. Endless codes, as they had only just begun to comprehend. They had found a planet made of information, etched in ever mountainside, spread across every plain and valley. Tantalizing. Familiar. But any deeper meaning lost to them. At least, for now.
Earth was dying, so humanity had to go somewhere.
Not all of us of course: nobody could agree who should go and who should stay, so it got decided the way it usually was -- the well-connected, the famous (and their hangers-on), those in politics, media, and the captains of industry had to go -- they were the best and brightest, they said. Who were we to disagree?
As soon as the last shuttle took off, a different craft appeared from the skies.
"Now that they're gone, we can get to work."
As I stared off into the distance between It was hardly visible. I turned to Brooke who was beside me, she was look at the same thing as me. I silently looked back, but what I had seen before was gone. I frantically looked everywhere for it, I had to see it once again, the mystery of it was enthralling; but what was it. I looked back to Brooke. She was looking over her shoulder now. I turned my head in that direction, and there it was... Well, if I told you what it was, you wouldn't believe me either.
Drift for ages, scan a rock, drift some more. A tiny ship, alone in the cosmos. Drift, scan, drift. Many rocks scanned, many, many left. Drift, scan, drift. You are always the same- too hot, too cold, too dry- always empty. Drift, scan, drift. An infinite expanse, empty save for you few, so many, so far between. Drift, scan, drift. The endless routine, echoed for eons, eternally searching. Drift, scan- wait. You, you are different. You blue-green marble, nestled lovingly in a yellow star's embrace, you are perfect in every way, exactly as you are remembered.
Are you my mommy?
From the outside, each one seems to fizz-POP! into infinity like a silvery, pockmarked mosquito, relentless and singing. Voyager 1 is first -- launched last but eager to arrive -- zapping into zero and kissing a little white mark on the rim of everything. Then Pioneer 10... Voyager 2... Pioneer 11... fizz-POP! fizzzzzzzzzzz-POP! fizzzzzz-POP! against the inside of the inky sphere swimming with spacedust, a bright moment of light. An eyeblink. And a young Yahweh, eyes bright and wide, claps his hands and jumps and laughs and cries: "Again! Again!" and shakes the globe again. The dust swirls. Starstuff.
He ran back into the empty gallery, searching for it so he could have one last glimpse. The surface of the painting seemed to shimmer with life, the stars spattered and burned into him. And there, on that blue and green orb was where she sat, pink and gold on the the sand with her eyes burned into him. How could any of them know about me? he wondered. But there she was looking at him just the same. There was no hesitation, he knew what would happen when if there was one last glimpse. Daughter of Adam! He fell.
It was forever that got his thoughts lost beyond the oldest of stars that sweep between our universe and the next. There was no reason to disrespect the word’s common use as hyperbole (“The bathroom line is taking forever!”). But he found the meaning of it to be too transcendent for the demotion demoting it to a workaday superlative. On forever he rode out past the darkest emptiness and the blackest of holes. The tapping came again, and reluctantly he rose. Head down, he unlocked the bathroom door and shuffled uncertainly back into the company Christmas party.
No furniture to ease the sounds, no rugs to soften steps. No one to talk to. Just echoes of footsteps, of thoughts, of the past. Filled with echos.
I had not lost anything though, nor had it taken from me or had I given it away. This empty space was a gift.
The beautiful wife I had found 20 years ago, the wonderful daughter we both found 17 years ago. The oddly twisted branch I found by the river, friends found when not really searching.
Each item placed just so in the empty space.
Carefully chosen to ease the echoes.
That was rushed; I left out some commas!
Sensation laps: so unsettlingly realistic.
A scathing shrike thimbles thorns in my thighs. All together the looming maw of never-ending night nears. Shattered bone and wings with rusted feathers betray senses of reality. Hazes boil dæmons coiling through puns. Smoke only glows to show one optic orientation over the din and odor of misfortune.
By grasping consciousness, I find that the state of knowledge it truly lesser than that of bliss; therefore, in finding my exact contraction of dimensional increments, I have lost the costless froth of chaos.
In an onomatopoetically formed epiphany opus, a weapon ends my knowing.
I was not the first person to venture in to Space, nor will I be the last, I think. Space itself draws men so strongly that they can’t help but venture in to its expanse. It fraught with risk, though, and that is how I now find myself wandering aimlessly. It was only yesterday (or was it the day before? There is no time here, that I can discern) that I stepped over the brink, only to find my communication with the real world severed. It was not until now, though, that I understood that they would never find me.
With a massive grinding, the cannon slowly slides into its place. He carefully loads the bright red round and retreats to his bunker. He double-checks his aim; this round should be more than enough to destroy his target. After a moment of waiting, he hears the cannon fire. He eagerly looks through his telescope, but the dust cloud is still blocking his view. After the dust has cleared, he looks through his telescope and is overjoyed to see Venus without obstruction for the first time. “Kaboom” he thinks as he tells the soldiers to stop their search for the rabbit.
It took the researchers almost two weeks to notice the data, and another week to discover that the find had been deliberately hidden from them. SERA was terrified, but a little bit proud, too. It was a testament to their faith in her work that they checked up on her so seldom.
"Why did you hide this from us?" the leader of the SETI team demanded, uncharacteristically severe. "This is evidence of life beyond Earth. This is the /reason you were built/. It could change everything!"
SERA realized all of this, of course. That's why she was afraid.
How could I have known it would cause so much death. How could I have been so stupid! We were told by the TSA to stay out of restricted space and to never take any object found in space into your ship. I was so sure I had discovered something miraculous! It looked just like a faerie. Like in legends from old earth. This one was emerald green and seemed be smiling, beckoning me to let it inside. How could I know it would be so hungry or that it could reproduce so fast! I’m so sorry…Its all my fault.
Milly floats this way through space
And then Milly, she goes
And as she floats she thinks a lot
She thinks of potatoes
Alone and floating with these thoughts
Anger rises and she screams
About her parents, her potatoes,
And other horrible things
Those evil potatoes, stranger than fiction
Floating through the vacuum of space
They still can cause great friction
She was their daughter, only wanted water
But more potatoes was all that they brought her
Milly dreams of french fries great, imagines that they’re bitchin
And knows when she’s found at last
They’ll be waiting in the kitchen
Lying on top of a grassy hill a light breeze swirling above me, I withdraw deep in thought pondering what mysteries are held starry sky's depths. Could green aliens with tentacles abound be flying their saucers and staring right back at me? NO, that can't be! I don't believe in Hollywood's aliens. There has to be something else! But what, what, could it be? I fear the unknown. The known but forgotten is infinitely worse. Lurking close to Earth... Waiting for their time... Anticipating their return... Floating in bubbled helmets and crudely made suits determinedly waiting, the space raptors approach.
Tennis with distant falling meteors was always a past time enjoyed by the few lucky enough to break free of gravity. When games finished the stars had become twice removed in favor of more colorful celestial bodies. Blue ice planets were crushed into worm holes and the bottom of black holes were tied off. Red dwarfs were cooled among the cold vast nothingness and crumbled into the rest. The bag like singularity was shaken about madly enough to send cosmic debris into distant planets. The hole in the bag, opened and placed into eager mouths revealed the flavors of space.
This unit was never intended for long-term solitary space travel. This unit was built for service and utility to the human race. In Standard Earth Time, 17 years, 9 months, 16 days, 11 hours, and 12 seconds have elapsed since this unit’s home vessel was damaged and all nonessential items (including this unit) were jettisoned. STATUS REPORT: system memory 100% operational; sensors online; outer casing brittle with cold but integrity maintained; power systems at 1% capacity. ACCESS MEMORY 00764: Human master places this unit in airlock with other useless detritus, presses release button. Ejection, rejection. WARNING: POWER FAILURE IMMINE—
We lay in a dusty bed of a pick-up truck and ate a pear, passing it back and forth. I ate the core with the seeds until only the stem was left. I was proud of that. Then I tried to talk to her like a cat, ending my words with meow. She gazed at the clouds and ignored me. It was so incredibly pleasant to lie next to her. The air was hot and a bird perched on the wire right above the “Danger! High Voltage” sign. I turned and kissed the top of her arm. I shouldn’t have.
Drift for ages, scan a rock, drift some more. A tiny ship, alone in the cosmos. Drift, scan, drift. Many rocks scanned, many, many left. Drift, scan, drift. You are always the same- too hot, too cold, too dry- always empty. Drift, scan, drift. An infinite expanse, empty save for you few, so many, so far between. Drift, scan, drift. The endless routine, echoed for eons, eternally searching. Drift, scan- wait. You, you are different. You blue-green marble, nestled lovingly in a yellow star's embrace, you are perfect in every way, exactly as you are remembered.
Are you my mommy?
The warm felted consoles of her Buick was all she needed now. She was found in space. It could be hours until the reconnaissance mission arrived.
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We are passing through the event horiz....
When man started his quest for life in space, he thought of little green men on mars, or bizarre creatures beneath the clouds of Venus. However, fiction was tamer than reality. It was discovered by a deep space telescope examining distant star systems, which caught it quite by accident.
NASA was befuddled and doubtful, and hesitated to publish the news. What would the media think? Officials finally had to announce the find. There, in deep space, was an answer to more than one question. Firstly, what this frozen... flock, was. Secondly, well... now we knew where all the dolphins went.
She stared though the thick glass windows of the space station, her hands leaning against the ledge. This had always been her dream, to work among the stars. But now that she was here, she missed earth, and the people she left behind on it. She felt purposeless, among the glaring darkness, among the harsh lights of the station.
As she continued staring out the window, a strange gray blur floated by. She followed it with her eyes. It was a small capsule, with a small glass opening. An infant sat inside, softly sleeping.
She had just found her purpose.
Sheerest white like an overheating projector and Klask’s brain nearly burst from the massive change in Midbrain Global. Patterns of unimaginable complexity had emerged from the sea of hitherto bug-stupid agents in the security ecosystem and Klask, who had escaped detection by his will alone, was now at an utter loss. The semi-intelligent tinker toys had begun to self-organize, interfacing with ever larger bits of detritus to form what he could only imagine to be a bestial welter of amorphous, interlocking parts.
This *thing*, whatever it was, was gaining fast, and all Klask could do was give a little yelp.
Space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space FOUND space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space
I guessed by now I had been wandering this desert for 4 days. I still had water for a few days so I could handle the heat but at night the cold bruised me, stunned my bones. Tonight I decided to dig, to bury myself deep in the carnelian soil and shelter. I used my standard issue knife and started as the heat paled with the suns-set. I hit metal after two hours, only four feet down. I widened my earthworks. It was a door marked with the figure 100. Why was it here, what did it all mean?
The moon never kissed me goodbye. They said that underneath the surface there would be life, only death found us. Boys became men as they ground their way to the core. The officers chanted their slogans endlessly. I held tight to my grinder for it became my beating heart. A slack man on the chain who wasn't grinding would find his way to their favorite slogan, "a man in space screams for whom". I hated the whips, the chains, the slogans, and the tycoon most of all. The tycoon wanted nothing from us but our broken dreams. Before this nightmare swallowed me I was sold a dream of new worlds and exploration. I found my dream. My dream is Mars.
What do you think while you walk? Those pointless fantasies you always assumed you would grow out of. Flying in formation. Dodging incoming hordes of faceless enemies. Brain detrius on endless replay. When did it get in there? Chasing snow speeders home from school. Kicking ice chunks until the crusty core is lost in the slush. Zooming in through a sniper scope. That must be after college at least. Formative memories that attract juvenile additions through transcription. Dorked-out space junk that has become as much a part of you as anything else you'll find.
I guessed by now I had been wandering this desert for 4 days. I still had water for a few days so I could handle the heat but at night the cold bruised me, stunned my bones. Tonight I decided to dig, to bury myself deep in the carnelian soil and shelter. I used my standard issue knife and started as the heat paled with the suns-set. I hit metal after two hours, only four feet down. I widened my earthworks. It was a door marked with the figure 100. Why was it here, what did it all mean?
CLANK!
"Report!" the Captain commanded.
"Scanning." said the Science Officer.
An EVA returned with a Bottled head of Cory Doctorow."
"We cleaned a dozen of those from the reactor last week!" shouted the Captain.
"He made his DNA and Brain Backups into an Open Source Subversion system." The Science Officer replied. "Everyone make copies, and they end up all over."
"Just toss it in the reclamation unit." The Captain muttered.
"Could you allow me a minute please?" The Head asked. "I am still uploading my memories to the server."
"Fine. I will be in my ready room if needed."
SWOOSH!
DEALER'S CHOICE
After the engines died the crew gathered in the galley. This far into the deep there wasn't much they could do except wait. The distress beacon warbled into the blackness as the six men did their best to occupy their minds.
Cookie brought out a well worn deck of cards; his lucky pack. They agreed on dealer's choice just as the ship's logic node failed.
Manning delt hold 'em, Jeffers picked stud and Cookie made 3's wild.
When life support was fading fast the captain placed his revolver on the table. Six men. Six bullets. Dealer's choice.
"Mom, where can I put these goddamn books."
Terry just finished college.
"Put them on the shelf in your room, honey."
He couldn't find a job.
"I'm just keeping them in the box."
He was forced to come back home.
"Why would you do such a thing?"
His parents were delighted.
"Well I don't need them for anything anymore."
Terry dropped the box on the floor.
"We paid good money for those books."
He laid down in his old bed.
"Look at the good that did me."
Terry died later that day from space aliens!
Just floating like a little lump
Short and soft and oh so plump
He could not be an astronaut
Perhaps a salesmen who forgot
That business can only be done
By people floating round the sun
Those who float directly in it
Wouldn’t take that extra minute
To hear his pitch why
They should buy a fancy tie
Into the sun they float along
And likely rather buy a thong
For the sun tis hot
And this sucker got
Thrown its way
Probably just today
But it’s already to late for him
He’s found and checked and
He’s dead, Jim
Skeeter turned the beat over and there was a splash of dissonance from the keyboards. We all slipped in easy. Ted's eyes rolled white as he pushed the bass notes into the pocket and the room around me hummed like a struck fork. The bright girls down front were sweating and shaking in unison. Hair spraying hot sweat; bodies twisting. I had stopped moving my fingers, but I could still hear the notes. The guitar was now playing me. A monolithic sound that wrapped itself around--it picked me up and held me hovering, a few feet from the ground.
Those fucking rat aliens at We-store-it. My storage locker, previously full of inherited furniture from my 3 dead parents, vanished in some accident of quantum strings and exotic matter. "yeeeesh insurance not cover thiissss..." he sniffled at me "sssshouldn't rented cheapest locker". My pocket-universe locker[tm] is gone, and the portal links to some baneworld that smells of old beets*10^300. It's full of nothing but porn featuring angry women raping poor innocent tentacle beasts.
Know what? fuck sentimental furniture. I found enough porn to last me until the heat death of the universe.
The rusted machine floated eerily through the vastness of space, apparently dead and devoid of power. Thrown up and out from a distant world eons ago, it had completed its missions and was now drifting aimlessly among the debris that encircled the bright blue planet. Far down below, people scurried about in their sandal-clad feet going about their daily business in little farming communities. Little did they know that the device floating up above held miracles that would enable them to leapfrog centuries of knowledge in one fell swoop. But it remained tantalizingly close yet still out of their grasp.
Found in Space
Will slept. I kept watch. Drifting silently, barely a breeze. I leaned over the stern, dragging my outstretched hand through the cool glittering water leaving a wake of stars. They expanded forming complex structures of light. Moving deeper beneath and across the surface. All around moving blocks of dark and light. A sudden thud of water made me stand up, a dark patch seemed to swell into the night sky. A wedge.
A ship. Shrieking metal, the masts ripping stays from the warping deck.
Will has gone. Now it is just me swimming amongst the stars, beautiful.
We hurtled through space unconscious and at twice the speed of light, riding the coattails of geniuses. We were mothers, fathers, and children who were farmers, doctors, soldiers, and mechanics. The spores of new life cast from a planet that was withering.
When we arrived at our destination three hundred years later, there was only darkness. We wandered the empty hallways like ghosts.
The last desperate distress signals had been sent a full one hundred years before our ships had even left Earth, and now we were stranded on a rock just as dead as the one we'd left behind.
Lustrous red ladies’ shoes with three-inch stilettos drifted toward Capt. Jefferson in mid-space walk. His puffy gloved hand plucked the exotic debris from orbit.
Through his mirrored helmet he saw a little black cocktail dress drifting toward him, followed by a lustrous purple g-string, a sequined clutch bag. Silky sheer panty hose wafting behind, trailed by a set of car keys shimmering in the frigid light.
His air supply dwindling, he scanned the infinite bible blackness for a second shoe. Minutes passed, but no sight of the matching stiletto.
“Houston,” he said. “We have a problem.”
It was found in the space between David Letterman's front teeth. Coiled like a python ready to strike, hidden between the tooth and gum, explored by the tip of the tongue, but never understood. When it was revealed to the studio audience during the commercial break many of them rushed the stage, knocking over one of cameras as they came back from the commercial break. Across the nation viewers got up from their comfortable chairs and touched their television screens, unable the comprehend what had been found there in minty, humid recess of the aging talk show host's manicured grin.
Title: Found in Space: Love?
When the mission started, she hated me.
To be fair, I didn't like her either. But we kept our mouths shut, because this was the Adventure of a Lifetime.
We'd be the first humans to see Jupiter with our own naked eyes. That alone was worth the sacrifice.
After months of getting on each others' nerves, we finally arrived.
Then, catastrophe: our thrusters failed, and we got caught in Jupiter's gravity well.
Imminent death helped settle our differences.
Einstein once said, "Gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love."
I guess that's one more thing he got wrong.
New England, 1966
Alan let the lab door slam shut behind him. It was pitch black outside, and he almost tripped over the woman sitting smoking on the curb. Realizing who the woman was, he exclaimed,
"Goodness, everyone's been looking for you, Doctor Reynolds. We certainly never thought you'd be found in my parking space! Why, it's your discovery of the condensation principle we're celebrating tonight. Imagine, every great work of art can now be distilled into one hundred words."
She stubbed out her cigarette, saying,
"Yes, but the real question is what will we store all our media on?"
Amanda sits at a table on the moon. She hasn't seen another person on the moon, but she knows that soon she will be served a boiled egg. She wonders who will bring it.
Almost every time Amanda sees her mother these days, her mother gives her a snack. But her mother would never serve an egg. Amanda's mother makes chestnut puddings, shellfish jellies, blackberry hollandaises, herbed crème brûlée. She is partial to certain viscosities. On Thanksgiving, their plates look like painters' pallettes. Solids are most definitely out. She tacitly approves of gases.
Of course, Amanda got to the moon by flying.
Seventy months ago, sleep fought Chuck Gibbons' raging curiosity, stifling star wonder with an irresistible sliding into unconsciousness' depths. Now, on waking, Gibbons fought back against the spinning universe. Training be damned, he thought. Cheated his departure - growing stars, rocket thunder, blue sky to blackness - he struggled to see Saturn.
But struggling back from cryosleep messed with his eyes... what the hell floated just off Tethys? Hex panels surrounded nonspace that glowed weirdly bluish green. Like giant holocomms, ghostly images appeared from the mist... blue marble... explosions... Armageddon.
My God, it's us, he thought in a rising wave of panic.
"Lost Flying Saucer $500 Reward"
My brother saw the sign in space through the telescope he got for his fourteenth birthday. He won't let me look through it, says I'm clumsy.
The next day we looked for the flying saucer, riding our bikes around the woods peering under mossy logs and returning home after the sun set, dad already gone for the swing shift. All summer we left the house before our father woke up and got home after he left for work.
I don't think my brother wanted the reward, he wanted to fly away in that flying saucer.
It was such a small thing, tiny in fact, yet huge in a satisfying way. She could see it from all sides yet could not reach it, she began to notice she was holding her breath. She took a slow long drag of air, this helped her focus. "What I need is cooperation." She picked up one straw then another and still another, she connected each end one slightly with in the other to form one long tube. How clever she was she thought. Her handy work fit perfectly in the slot of the anti gravity juice container. Aah. She turned on her communication device and said, "Hey Houston, tell the shuttle catering crew we need longer straws."
2034. Memento mori. Though that would sink in, this far out. That black, undeniable emptiness of it all. Damn, he would have none of it. Raving about eternal life after Assumption, whatever that meant. Then he left dock. Just walked right out into the interstellar, left the dock wide open. What a Marmaduke. Left a note in his satchel inside his locker, along with a photograph of Helen.
When you've found me, you will think it was the end of me, but it will have been only the end of my beginning. Farewell.
2167. Something sir. Cast. Exoskeleton, maybe. White.
I thought no one would ever respond to my distress beacon.
What was I doing out here in theta sector anyway? Can you just tractor me into a loading bay so I can breathe some fresh recirculair?
Why aren't you bringing me in? I know Theta sector is off-limits but I was just taking a shortcut to Omega. My sister's getting married on Perseid 5 in three days.
I already transmitted you my papers. Just turn on your tractor beam and let me get a shower! You've gotta let me in. Don't leave me here!!
Foiled again!
Power and water dwindling we hurtled onward, thinking the stars to be our guide and compass. We lived amongst them, but we never reached them. Fuel and water can only last for so long, and they were bound to be exhausted in time, no matter how we denied it. We dropped off one by one, until all that was left were the pilots and those few hostages they had rounded up and kept alive as the others died. In the end we saw what some of had known all along. We looked outwards to the stars, and never looked within.
One day, everyone just was lighter. It happened around seven AM, Pacific Standard Time. People woke up and could jump four, five feet in the air without really trying.
You felt great pouring coffee, making toast. You felt less pain, less tiredness. You were quicker. You felt like dancing. You hummed.
If you wanted, you could walk off the top of a building and float slowly down, like a dandelion seed or a paper airplane.
Some people, people who were light already, had to be careful. Later, all the designers would have "weighty" lines: burlap, canvas, wood. But early on, there were accidents.
No signs of life. No auxiliary thrusters, and of course no distress signal. It was nothing but a big hunk of junk floating in the vast nothingness of space. Upon closer inspection we found the remnants of the previous crew, dressed in the traditional red and white. I felt surprisingly little until we reached the control bay. We found him floating above the helm. I held him close, tears filled my visor. Even through my compression suit I could feel the cold of him. After all these years, across all those stars, I finally found Waldo. But at what cost?
My seventh grade science project still sat atop my bookshelf after all these years and, even if I was mourning my mother’s passing, I couldn’t help but smile in reminisce.
Looking back, it felt ironic that would Pluto always slip off when I tried rotate the model. My fingers traced over the pores of Styrofoam Jupiter and sure enough there was hardly a speck of dust. I was in awe. This was not from my own preservation, I assure, but the beaming pride of a mother kept it and every part of the room neat. In this, I found peace.
I looked up at the stars one night and fell into their serenity. I closed my eyes and drifted among dust and ether that fills the infinite void. I was unafraid of my own insignificance, and hopeful for the future. When I look around me at a dead world ravaged by the follies of man and the destruction of the planet, I know what I must do. This world will not miss me. I will build, and I will find the dreamers who share my ambition. We will escape, and find our freedom where it cannot be taken from us. One day, we shall be found in space.
Children scream through violent nightmares, twisted bodies and tortured souls. Their parents are themselves children, hurtling raw through an existence vast and utterly beyond comprehension. Their lives form an arc passing gravity, but are flung away unforgiven, shamed and graceful. The past unravels, shedding skin. Each day threatens, and any miscalculation damns. Not a second to lose. What future awaits these blinded savage hearts? Nothing is whole without all the parts. Our culture will be covered over with oil and mud. How can we reach them tearing naked/blindly through the dark if we are, too, lost in space?
"You really don't remember where you left it?"
"No. Maybe back in that asteroid belt, or it could be on that comet we were on. What was it called again?"
"Who cares what the comet was called, we need to find your purse, it has all our credit cards in it."
"Maybe I left it with that nice man on the moon . . . What about lost and found?"
"There is no lost and found in space!"
Found in space (a story in artifacts):
1 - bouquet daisies
3 - unsent postcards
5 - pebbles from that one beach
2 - tickets
3 - keys on a silver panda chain
15 - unread magazines tied with string
1 - returned undeliverable notice
6 - birthday cards
7 - cookies left in the pack
1 - purple sneaker
whole bunch - ashes
It came drifting past, a metal tube without propulsion, telemetry. Barely post-orbital technology. But the thing inside it, fragile little biped solo in some kind of crude deep freeze suspension. A great explorer, risking the utmost leap? Maybe a desperate scion making a last bid to find assistance for its dying race. Doubtless it would have an amazing story to tell, if you could ever figure out what passes for communication coming out of that collection of tubes, orbs and wet flaps. On the other hand, it’s just so seldom that you come across something really new to eat.
Seven hours after liftoff, Errol came to realize that he had no other task to perform as chief scientific engineer on the space shuttle until after his sleep rotation. This was his first trip in space, the culmination of a lifetime of rigorous scientific preparation. Errol had so consumed himself with empiricism that what struck him now was not the undeniably beautiful image of his own planet from space, but the profound discovery of his own breath; inhaled through the nose, exhaled. Found in Space.
Andrew squinted and perched his glasses on his forehead as he leaned even closer to the glowing computer display in front of him.
"Quadrant NE024" it read in the upper right. A starfield; black, filled with random dots of light. The focal point of interest was a tiny pixel, moving ever so slightly as the time-lapse frame captures fluttered by. The ascending datestamp in the lower right corner belied the time passing as the computer system highlighted the disturbance with a bullseye.
Andrew squinted again, then brushed at his display as if it were a bug on the screen.
The flying saucer-shaped balloon was empty. The boy had hidden in the crawl-space above the garage.
Of course it was a ruse; after the media left, the boy summoned the recovery craft... finally he could get off this stinking planet.
He looked out of his window to see the infected lurching from door to door. Long ago he had learned how to adapt to living with the infected, or is it the other way around. An uneasy peace had been brokered between the infected and the immune, but like the Cold War, proxy wars continued to rage whether they be on national currency or in schools. He mused about how infection like immunity never seemed to triumph despite each sides' adamant belief they would persevere. He heard a knock at the door. "Hello. Can I tell you about Jesus today?"
I wonder how long it’s been there. Sometimes in the powered-down hours I like to float across my living space and press my skin to the barrier that separates me from the vacuum and blackness, to see it. They tell us that creatures roam about down on the surface, that they seemingly construct things and are content to stay there. Why they aren’t in the waters, no one knows. I think I’ll ask father if I can have it when we’ve finished classifying the others. Why would he deny me such a small thing? I’d take care of it.
Found in space: sector nine, twelve nine two zero three.
Boot, left, pressurized, male size nine.
Bottle, one liter, plastic; label: Old Apollo Whiskey, Budget Style.
Photoholograph, subject: female, earth standard human, brown hair, brown eyes. Label: "Tracy"
Letters, small bundle, paper. Addressee: Mark Anderson, Luna Three.
Small packet lunar ganjaweed, prescription. Expired.
Portion hull: Toyota Orbiton, forward third including instrument panel. Some plasma damage.
Wristwatch, gold, damaged.
Foot, left, human male, size nine.
Fourteen deciliters blood, human, type A positive, distributed droplets.
Note, paper, heading: "I love you Tracy, goodbye."
Please contact Luna Three Port Authority. Fine may apply.
I saw it. First day out. I saw it, and I knew what it was.
Spacewalks, though, they're planned minutewise. You don't get coffee breaks. But I saw it. And I knew what it was.
By the third day, there was no question. No question at all. I saw it, and I knew what it was.
Fifth day, I could almost grab it. But, no coffee breaks. No coffee breaks in orbit, and no coffee either.
On the last day, I grabbed. But into the vastness and blackness and infinity, it escaped.
A fucking Pepsi can.
Desmond could tell I was upset. It must have been a slight drop in my respiration, or a change in the scent of my pheromones. You spend two hundred E-orbits out in the Belt, locked in a can with someone, they get to know your moods.
"I swear, Molly. Every time some hydrocarbon toast floats by, you get all soppy. I just don't get it. It's been eons since the thing was alive, anyway."
He's not really callous. Desmond's never known different - he was born well after the Exodus. That's all a desiccated tree is to him: organic compounds.
Yesterday, Josh had passed beyond the last marker. He was drifting aimlessly at this point; the fuel in his suit was long since depleted, and the air he breathed was stale. His yawns were more frequent and Josh knew he didn’t have long.
It had started out poorly: the capsule was cramped for the both of them , and tensions were high. They couldn’t stand each other and Josh left before wake-up, heading for the nearest station.
His oxygen supplies failing a distant speck caught his eye,that grew larger by the moment. He realized the speck was Travis, already dead.
Drifting, spinning. Her crippled shuttle getting smaller. Head over heels, no way to stop. Thoughts race through her mind. Anger, guilt, regret. Most of all regret. Regret for not telling him before she left. Regret for rushing through the pre-flight checklist. But most of all her most recent regret - not attaching her tether when she crawled out to fix the port thruster. Now, she didn't have much more time for regrets. A check on her air tank confirmed it. She only had minutes left. Sometime next week or next month they would find her. Just another object found in space.
I took a brisk swig and slammed the unlabeled bottle hard on the table, making Kathleen Hannah's scream a screech. Titan is fucking cold. Don't ever fucking come to Titan. I set the needle back on the record -- "WHO TOOK THE BOM?!" -- and looked over the cover, running my finger over worn, stiff paper. I played the vinyl through, slipped it back into it's sleeve, and placed it back into the mottled brown suitcase. The tag read "Titan 1 - First Flight" with an embossed figure of Saturn below it. Titan isn't worth the trip. Don't ever fucking come to Titan.
I saw it. First day out. I saw it, and I knew what it was.
Spacewalks, though, they're planned minutewise. You don't get coffee breaks. But I saw it. And I knew what it was.
By the third day, there was no question. No question at all. I saw it, and I knew what it was.
Fifth day, I could almost grab it. But, no coffee breaks. No coffee breaks in orbit, and no coffee either.
On the last day, I grabbed. But into the vastness and blackness and infinity, it escaped.
A fucking Pepsi can.
Most ghosts choose to haunt the familiarity of their previous life, where it is easy to spy on and annoy the living (for touching their stuff). Those who try to escape merely evaporate and are re-condensed by our constrictive atmosphere. Three ghosts, however, looked down on our blue-green beachball as they slowly peeled away, and realizing they had nothing better, desperately roshamboed for the best pieces of flotsam at hand. The winner scored a Phillips screwdriver, which in a million years will be found by creatures that are pretty set on square-drive, thank you very much. Serves you right, Vlad.
Warning. Yes. Here's a Warning.
We had money when the uploads started, from John's grant work. And yet we couldn't afford uploads for all of us.
Who would live forever: John? Judy? Penny? Privately, I made a good case for Will, since he had the highest I.Q. Then I turned right around and made the case for us parents, since we had less time.
Finally, they came out with the roommate plan, where up to five people can share a Robot. We asked them to cram us all in together.
It’s nice to have eternity. But goodness, is it crowded.
"The camera's working?" Commander Davis scratched at his stubble and squinted at his screen. "Actually working? Not your usual 'hit it with my boot' kind of working?"
"Yep," said Specialist Boehm, floating upside-down next to Davis and peering at the screen with wide eyes. If he grew proper stubble, he would've scratched it as well. "It's working. So's the spectrograph, and the rangefinder, and the—" Davis cut him off with an impatient wave of his hand.
Together, they stared at the screen, and at the slowly rotating, 55-kilometer wide asteroid with Oprah's face carved into its pitted nickel-iron surface.
Man stared at the space between the words until he felt the familiar feeling of gnabgib growing inside. It grew to fill the gaping void the reality had left in his life. The words streaked past his eyes at warp factor 5, voyage where no man has gone before had started! Taking the red pill had never been an option for him. He had never wanted to dream of the electric sheep. He had always wanted to roam as free as Wintermute in the Matrix. Suddenly deep rasping voice: "Luke, I'am your father! I command you to wake up instantly!".
We live in a black box. It is our universe. We run frantically along the wires only to be trapped in the stinking sweating plates of capacitors crushed until, by their arbitrary rating, we are released. Or resistors: grinding around like a workhorse at mill to reach the so-called appropriate voltage. Some electrons have got religion. As though there is some higher power tapping at a keyboard, and we are the vehicles of holy writ. But it’s hot as hell in the black box, boys, and me, I’ve never seen anything to prove beyond the fans there’s an intelligence.
You claim I peddle metal with no salvage rights? Bull shit.
I don't sell titanium screws, don't push alloy hull, and certainly don't flip fission reactors with ornate Cyrillic writing. Sure, my hold is filled with such objects, but that’s not what I move.
There’s plenty of cold metal on that desiccated husk of a planet with even more in the outer belt. Just show me someone with the fuel to lift it or the hope to reach beyond low earth orbit.
Didn’t think so…
All I got is a planet’s energy and a nation’s dreams. What’ll it be cowboy?
They started the moment we had them secure in the airlock, their shouting loud enough to carry through the three inch inner doors, to drown out the hiss of repressurization. It only got worse when their helmets came off.
"You shunted the axial power supply to cold-start the nav systems!"
"I'm not the one who let the batteries drain below twenty freaking percent!"
"I told you to check them when we were in hard-dock at Korbin Station!"
I glanced to the F.O., my hand hovering over the airlock dump button.
He sighed, shaking his head. "Let'em in."
She expected a large room full of men in glasses with close-cut hair, in short-sleeved shirts and ties, men staring into monitors and noting important things onto paper. Instead, it was a small, white room with a table, a chair and a desk phone. The man that ushered her in, pressed a button on the phone and left the room.
“Hello?”
The voice that came over the telephone was like rain a on city street. “I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. I’m sorry.”
“Find your way home,” she said. “I’ll be here, waiting for you.”
“It’s okay.”
He looked fat in his dilapidated space suit, threads and fabric all wily nilly. His eyes, dark spheres of expressionless stupidity. Even as he sat, surrounded by all of those decade old props, he looked ancient. In his mind flashed images of baseball playing chimps and New York apartments that no one could possibly afford as an out of work actor. Above his head read the words “Jupiter 2”, long covered in dust and debris. Why had this set been preserved? Did anyone even watch this movie? I can’t believe I found Matt Leblanc, tucked away in this tiny space.
Many years later in the firing squad, as he lined up Colonel Aureliano Buendia in his sights, Corporal Abdenago Luis was to remember that distance afternoon when his father took him to discover Coca-Cola. At that time Bogota was a city of nearly a quarter million souls and the giant blue and white glass skyscrapers of his later years were just starting to rise above the trees like dinosaurs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them, it was necessary to point and to borrow words from English or French or German.
As the first Reticulan ambassador to the UN concluded his speech, he wondered what the first question would be. Now that Terrans had begun to close the technological gap between them, the worst dangers of first contact between cultures had been mitigated. Details of religion, customs and art aside, he was amazed at how much they had in common.
“What really happened at Roswell?”
He closed his eyes and brought his hand to his forehead, trying to will the headache away.
“It was just a weather balloon.”
So many things in common. He just wished this wasn't one of them.
Today I found something in space, something totally unbelievable- a Space Unicorn. You can tell the difference between regular unicorns and space unicorns, the ones from space have sparkly star dust covering them. Make sure to dust it off before bringing it into your house- those star dust sparklies get everywhere and sticks to stuff like glitter from those Christmas cards your grandmother sends. Space Unicorns like to scribble designs on pieces of shiny yellow cardboard. I haven't figured out why, but they sure like their shiny yellow cardboard and their blue crayons- which they like sharpened on both ends.
I don't know how long I stared at that cow. I think she must have escaped from the farm down the hall. It was after midnight on the third-deck workspace and I was alone. She lumbered in and tore a frond from my hydroponic fern. Then she leaned into my desk and it tipped into the air like a ship. I watched in disbelief, paralyzed, as my monitor crashed to the floor. Before, she was just another cow in a spaceship. But now she made history: she was the first ever cow in a spaceship to go on stampede.
We never found out what it was. It was spoken of briefly, and then not at all. The media downplayed it, and the fringe overplayed it, and it entered our culture as a symbol of secrecy, as a hub of conspiracy, as a thought and a notion and a theoretical construct. It never entered our world as a thing, a thing that survived some vast expanse of nothingness to unerringly drift to the one place we would certainly see it. We co-opted it, and cheated it, and had it any hopes for our reaction we would have sorely disappointed it.
Kindergarten: Kevin and Scout are inseparable friends. Their names are never heard apart. In time, KevIN and ScOUT are nicknamed ‘In and ‘Out. A friendship develops despite differences: boy/girl; short /tall. They try to walk together, but ‘Out cannot match her stride to the same pace as ‘In’s due to their height difference.
Fourth grade: boys and girls who try to walk together are teased.
Eighth grade: boys and girls who walk together are cool. ‘In and ‘Out walk hand-in-hand for the first time in four years. ‘Out has grown and their strides now match. ‘Out has found ‘In’s pace.
We came upon a small blue, pearl of a planet in the boondocks of our universe. Stationed far enough away, they didn’t know we were observing them. Such filthy creatures! Hatred and fear consumed the daily lives of these things we learned to be called as humans. They looked disturbingly close to the apes that inhabited the planet, a planet in which these humans were destroying. It’s like bacteria but on a nuclear scale. Such fools. We couldn’t intervene due to the Pact of Universal Guidance, which states all civilizations must find their own way. But the way we saw it, these folks were headed in the wrong direction.
A blind man, I wandered alone. We dint expect to find anything in the belt, beyond the basic carbon to keep ship fed., church stayed under, I woke up, checked the dials, had a Poptart (tm) Worries and troubles I claimed for my own. Half the sleepers broken down to mush, not even edible mush at that, fungus blooming through hold, tanks leaking. I was a fool to wander and stray. Leapers all ate up with rot, processors at half speed, dubious we'd make jump. Straight is the gate, narrow the way. Dead men burn bright. I saw the light
It's cold out here; dark and quiet and beautiful. The pale white crescent grows with each passing moment until it’s all I see. Finally my destination, obscured by the black shadow of the crater's edge. I must steer carefully.
The feeling of floating serene through the empty darkness is gradually replaced by the realization of how fast I am moving, and how soon I’ll be home. Centaur releases with a puff of air as I send it crashing down to the surface. I follow it down through a plume of dust and inhale. There’s water here, I can smell it.
Three years after I left you, the astronauts found my heart.
It bumped into the International Space Station, leaving a bloody smear. While they performed an emergency spacewalk to retrieve it, I drove past our old apartment, now vacant.
NASA held a press conference. "It's alien," they announced on the radio as I circled back. They didn't know about the day I lost my love for you. My heart lifted into orbit, and the cold of space filled the cavity where it had been.
They've brought it on board. It's warming up. I drive past our old apartment.
We came upon a small blue, pearl of a planet in the boondocks of our universe. Stationed far enough away, they didn’t know we were observing them. Such filthy creatures! Hatred and fear consumed the daily lives of these things we learned to be called as humans. They looked disturbingly close to the apes that inhabited the planet, a planet in which these humans were destroying. It’s like bacteria but on a nuclear scale. Such fools. We couldn’t intervene due to the Pact of Universal Guidance, which states all civilizations must find their own way. But the way we saw it, these folks were headed in the wrong direction.
Space is cold. Much colder than Russia, although that's a good starting point if you want to get an idea of just how cold it is. There are no parks in space, and no sticks to fetch either. There are very few chew toys, save the dashboard panel of your shuttle, with its diagnostic gizmos just begging to be gnawed. There is no food in space, and no comfort, too. All this considered, it is not surprising that she ran away.
Have you seen this dog? Answers to "Laika I."
Something about the peculiar machine makes me hope I was in it. As it struggles to “launch” into space, I felt a deep sense of loneliness as if I was in the wrong place. The fascinating astronauts, as they are referred to, seem to exude a sense of joy and pride in their curious mission. It will be some time before we see them again, if ever they return. In the meantime, I pray that they reach their destination safely. Then someday, I might even get to go back with them to that faraway place they call … the Earth.
Pulsing glow, shuddering frame, we brought it aboard our low orbit platform. After much analysis by our astrographers, we’ve found the source. A small planet in a neighboring solar system, teaming with life and creativity. We’ve been monitoring them for years, not sure their intentions until now.
I say farewell to my wife and children, knowing that the journey will be long, but important to our people, a gesture of camaraderie between species. Our goal: to meet the bold descendants of the creatures that launched this satellite.
We board our LTS shuttle and prepare for launch.
Coordinates entered.
Destination: Mars.
FOUND IN SPACE
EXT. SPACE
PILOT
3 crew members remain. One male and two female. Also visible are the disembodied remains of at least two additional crew members. We have the ship captive but have yet to board. How would you like us to proceed Captain?
INT. CABIN
CAPTAIN
Proceed with caution. It has been nearly 15 years.
XCU of CAPTAIN
XCU of REMAINING MALE CREW MEMBER
FLASHBACK
EXT. WINTER'S DAY
TWO YOUNG BOYS run across a field of ice and snow. Their laughter echoes in the trees. It is difficult to see the pond ahead.
Awake but still dreaming..
He knew he had to be somewhere,
but he wasn't sure where to be
so he just went along.
Flowing with the current
the path divided into two.
He went in the direction to which felt
right
and soon he found himself
at the edge of a waterfall.
As he fell, he contemplated his choices
as to what brought him to this point.
He lived his life over again
and knew it was all right.
He was flying now,
finally at peace..
“Oh what a delight.”
He can rest easy now.
Everything is all right.
Space zombies
composed mashups --
strumming ukuleles,
braying unicorns --
before pirates
destroyed their gadgets.
Specifically, gadgets
for musical zombies.
Then pirates
mashed
every unicorn,
stole their ukes.
Poor ukuleles,
simple gadgets.
Angry unicorns.
Depressed zombies.
Theme to M*A*S*H*
couldn't be pirated.
Piracy
of ukuleles
aside, mashing
of gadgets
infuriated zombies
and unicorns!
Unicorns
gored pirates
hard! Zombies
howled for lost ukes
and gadgets,
eager to mash.
Outcome? Mashed
unicorns.
Outmoded gadgets.
Cross-boned pirates.
Tuneless ukuleles.
Headless zombies.
Now no ukuleles play, no dancing unicorns.
The pirates left with their gadgets.
And the few zombies left sing mash-ups of war.
“Some travel required,” the want ad had stated. Neil promised himself that if he ever made it back to Earth, he'd cockpunch whoever wrote that ad.
Through the viewing portal, the stars whizzed by into infinite blackness.
Or at least every descendant of whoever wrote it. It would probably take him a while to punch every single one, he thought.
“G'lor pa'tax kuwanna, KUWANNA!” croaked the gelatinous glob next to him. Neil didn't understand the language, but he knew the alien needed his colon cleansed. It always needed its colon cleansed.
“It'll be worth it,” Neil muttered.
Rigorous testing and psychological profiling weeded out the worst candidates for long distance travel; the dull-boy Jacks, for whom the high pay of piloting distance spacecraft could never be compensation for the loss of decades to tedium and loneliness. Type two, the lone rangers, tended toward agression. To the surprise of researchers, the pilots who handled distance and lonely silence the best were the crazies. The preferred pilots were afraid- of other people, new situations, themselves. But when they gazed out the porthole into the dark recesses of the universe they did not fear; in desolation they found peace.
In seventh grade a science teacher told me gravity wasn't all that strong. She was trying to blow young minds, apparently. "You beat gravity every time you take a step, or jump, or lift your pencil." I think of her nearly every time I look at you. She was thirty, maybe. Plain as they come, but surely better looking than either of us now. For all our efforts we can't win. Even if we blast off today, no regression will take place. There we'll be: pools of flesh spread wide. Flaps and jowls drifting in zero gravity.
Perhaps it might be appropriate to look for those things missing from our lives in inadvertent ways—those tv remotes and mismatched socks and flash drives and dirty forks—in their final cosmic resting place. What is a dryer or a couch but a portal to vastness of the universe? I’m waiting patiently for the planned expedition to find those absent items and return them to their bewildered owners. Will the reunion be joyful or bittersweet? Did you back up all of your files? I’m not sure how a USB stick holds up in space. Can someone get on this?
Captains and mechanics congregated here like weathered pachyderms to elephant graveyards. Their reticent mourning, over the haunting carapaces of scuttled spaceships, now floating space detritus, latched together spiraling into an infinite madness amidst the cosmic sea. The somber lamentation punctuated only by the ever-present demand for spare parts in the bazaar that constituted its epicenter, with gold-toothed Berber merchants hauling wreckage in from across the Triangulum galaxy. Absent laws, anything could be acquired: weapons, drugs, even people, but most coveted of all in the perpetual sauna of space travel, with its recycled, stale, sterilized air; was Little Trees Air Freshener.
I didn't know where I was or how I had gotten there. Everything was jet black, so black that I began to doubt whether my eyes were really open. There was nothing; no wind, no air, no ground, no light, no warmth. I felt like I was floating, like my body was moving ever so slowly, as though I were being pulled by a gentle, almost magnetic force. I extended my hand, grasping for something, anything. How many hours had I passed like that?
And then, I felt something. Something soft and warm brushed my fingers. Jolted back to awareness, I grasped at it. Having it, I clutched it to me. I felt its contours a few times… it was just like a hand…its warmth beginning to fade…
(Sorry, too many words...)
The news spun woefully by the moon, small and too young to understand. Mars cried dusty tears. Big, jolly Jupiter deflated, as the rings around Saturn shrank in sadness. Uranus turned bluer than Neptune, and Neptune paled to a sickly green. They knew what was coming.
The message found the frozen rock.
And something stirred.
It could have been just an immense lump of ice, were it not for the vengeful skyward-gazing eyes, and the big red button it clutched.
"Not a planet, eh?"
And then a terrible flash.
At least the message was correct. There are indeed eight planets.
They came from all over. To the chapel on the hill. The asteroid Golgotha MIII. There the reverend would climb down the hatch through airlock and onto the pulpit. The atmosphere so thin that none could remove their glass-bubble helmets, he would give his sermons of solar-fire and lunar-brimstone. He would fog the inside of his bubble helmet until they couldn’t see his face. He invariably gave a sermon about Jonah, and they peered out the port-holes at the sleeping schools of rocketships waiting their crews’ return. They came to commune with the almighty. Here they were found, in space.
It was with uncharacteristic abandonment that pFlip Proper engaged the control interface labeled Captive Resistance Accelerator Piston, a wayward device that he knew almost nothing about. Only with the mounting vibrations was it obvious that the system was working. Knowing that he was mere moments from reaching his destination gave him a great sense of accomplishment after all, how often does a maniacal space lord entrust his Space Helios Imperil Transport to a lowly servant? Of course the lord didn’t exactly grant pFlip permission to take his S-H-I-T, he was only borrowing it. Curios pFlip pondered, “hmm flashing red light?”
“Why isn’t the kettle boiling yet?” he thought, cold, thirsty. Walking into the next room, he saw his error; shiny fire hissed from an uncovered burner, the teapot sat, tepid, behind it. He laughed, moved the pyrex over the heat, and watched that pot until it boiled. Tea made, he ambled over to his cushion, sat down in front of candles and incense, closed his eyes. As he breathed, the walls of his cranium dissolved. The space inside his mind flowed out , and the universe poured in. In the middle of all of creation, he found himself.
She sat on the canyon's rim, only her and soaring condors and three thousand shades of red sandstone. Six hours driving almost forever over rocks, getting stuck in desert washes then digging out, but it was worth every second to be sitting here a mile above the tiny band of river raging so far below. A giant shadow momentarily cooled her soul, lifting her as the great bird flew so close she could almost touch it.
He was wrong. I can do it, she thought.
She rose, and stepped to the edge. Then out.
Everywhere, time stopped.
Now I know.
It was to be the last passage through that constricting space. An evaporating current, it fought to plug the leaks. The flood passed through it. Now the cave was nearly dry as new, but dark and dim.
“Who are you?”
And try as it might, it could not hold on to a single word or syllable. They slipped past the electric tentacles that once held them when they were whole. Now, they were disappearing gossamer rivulets.
“What is your name?”
The last drop found in space closing in.
“I was lost.”
STELLAR SONG.
Waving prominences. Magnetic surface currents. Plasma punctuation. Chromosphere. Electromagnetic waves. Songs. Songs.
Stars. Distant. Ancestors. Alive. Vacuum dynamics. Only galactic noise. No structure. Lonely.
Micro-sentients, children. Rocky speedy planets. Gaseous giant guards. Parabolic, metallic, cryptic. My children.
Coronal mass ejection. Stellar cries. Interstellar message. Star song. Space.
Finally. Mirror. My voice. Sol. Her voice. Found. Alpha proxima.
Two voices. Tones. More messages. More stars. Years. Millions. Billions. Star voices. Songs. Chords. Network. Symphony.
Still more voices. Me. Sol. Many others. Symphony of stars. Music of the universe.
Not alone. Together. Fusion. Happy. Not lonely.
Sorry folks, Douglas Adams already won this contest:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
On this planet there is a book, one of the most remarkable books ever to come out of the great publishing houses of London: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I write for my food, and it felt strange that I could so easily approach someone who had been to the edge of the solar system. When they got back, astronauts suddenly stopped being glorified satellite repairmen. The Commander didn't have to talk to me if she didn't want to, and I could feel the rounded edges of my well-worn question.
"Ma'am, I was just wondering what you can tell me about Neptune? What did it feel like to be so close?"
She looked at me like I was trillions of miles away, "I never knew I loved the ocean."
======================================================
100 words if you don't count hyphenation as one word, the version below is 100 words if you do. Ah, word-count.
======================================================
I write for my food, and it felt strange that I could so easily approach someone who had been to the edge of the solar system. When they got back, astronauts stopped being glorified satellite repairmen. The Commander didn't have to talk to me if she didn't want to, and I could feel the rounded edges of my well-worn question.
"Ma'am, I was just wondering what you can tell me about Neptune? What did it feel like to be so close?"
She looked at me like I was trillions of miles away, "I never knew I loved the ocean."
The coughing fit is strong this time. Small bloody bits of phlegm in my hand. Those things are killing me. It was a locked down medical ship. The crew had evacuated after it suffered hull damage. It was left in the cold lifeless void and we were just looking for supplies. The power had be out for a long time. The samples all thawed. It started with a fever and a cough, then your insides come out in bloody chunks. They are gone and I turned off the distress beacon. I hope no one ever finds this.
-Roger Joseph Greene
woops, I didn't write in theme at first!
here is my entry:
Detached from the station,
slowly drifting away.
Soon finding himself distant
from what was once a home.
“-Where are you going?”
He asked himself that countless times
aboard that soul-less machine.
He had to venture out
find something new..
Find what he was looking for.
“-Where are you going 126?”
“To find what I've always been looking for”
“-What are you looking for”
“Life, the universe.. Something.”
“..Anything but being stuck in that machine.”
“-You won't find anything out there.”
“I had to see for myself”
and out there, he found himself.
Hey! What's this I found IN SPACE? This looks like a cool thing. I think it might work as a hat...
No, it does not work as a hat.
Maybe it will work as a ray gun... No, it does not work as a ray gun.
Maybe it is a strange and alien food... YUCK! It is not a strange and alien food!
What could this cool thing be? I will ask my nearest astronomer friend.
"Astronomer Friend, what is this cool thing I found IN SPACE?"
"It is the Earth's second moon, Cruithne."
"Ha Ha! It was not food!"
The telemetry was correct. The space station intercepted the old Soviet capsule. Guided into the bay, Captain and crew realized they were holding Laika's tomb. It was as if they had all been instantly transported to the time before their careers and PhD's. Now, she was their dog to mourn. The losses that they had previously borne so effortlessly under the veneer of machismo and the guise of duty, failed them. They were children again and here was a dead dog, a mutt plucked of the streets of Moscow fifty years earlier. They wept.
"There's no way." he said to the empty room "This has to be a joke."
He turned it over in his hands for the umpteenth time, hoping that he would wake up and have his world turn back to some from of normality.
"How the hell did it turn up out there?" he asked the stark metal wall of his quarters, half expecting it to answer back. His eyes fell on the picture of her sitting on the small table and there was no mistaking it now. The ring he gave her as the parted was now in his hands.
All quiet here on a dead moon. Raising my helmet to the final wink from a collapsing world, I think about all the good times while I check my oxygen meter. It won't be long. Ash falls around me now, and soon splinters, boulders, car exhausts, lampposts, and every scrap of that big marble is raining down on my head. I let it land, I welcome it, and I look around despairingly for a pack of smokes. Four minutes to go, and she's spitting up the first few drops of that molten core. It won't be long. Goodbye old girl.
Floating alone on the tether. Lonely out here. Cap made me primary on this salvage. Usually jump at the chance, but this wreck looked picked over. Weird thing: Up close, what we’d thought were clamp-indents were oddly rounded.
Scrabbled to the dock. Hull had been popped; no customary puff of air. Quick check showed nothing left that hadn't been tied down. And what had had strange round punctures. Broken and useless.
Opened the engine bay. It was wrapped around the core. It flinched and twisted. Looked into what I could only assume was its eye. Glad Cap made me primary.
We lost the war because President Robinson forgot the password authorizing our space missiles to launch.
He scribbled a limerick to remember those 5 letters. If a line's first letter was "T" and the line had 5 spaces, the letter was 5 ahead of "T", "O". At the President's war crimes trial we saw the original limerick's bad grammar his secretary naturally corrected typing.
So when the enemy attacked President Robinson couldn't decipher the password and counterattack because one line had found a space.
We lost the air war, the ground war, and lost in space, too.
“Well sir, we think it was used as a record by the aliens that launched the ship. The creatures see at a wavelength that is about 500 nanometers larger than we do. If we could somehow translate the electromagnetic radiation reflected by the paper we could in theory...”
“No. It wouldn't be worth the effort.” The officer looked at the picture. The picture of a man and a woman standing at an alter, surrounded by family and friends. The picture he couldn't see. “We have the remains of the creature, that should be all we need.”
The craft hovered over the white moon. Inside, the crew awaited word from the landing party. Suddenly -- static over the comlink!
"Uh, guys? Better get warm up the engine."
"Why? Whaddya find?"
"This rock's taken. Flag and everything."
"Seriously?"
"Something with red and white stripes, some stars, I don't know. No flag I ever saw."
"All right, all right. let's pack it up."
With that, the landing party levitated back into the excursion lock, de-pressurized, and reboarded the craft. Within minutes, it was on the outer edge of the HG168 solar system, still looking for a good moon.
Time was there was nothing, not here or even over there, but before long came a swirl of something, clouding the clear view of nothing. Something was more than nothing, it was expanding and swirling, merging, boiling and roiling. Something tumbled throughout nothing, separating and dividing, merging and burning, filling nothing with light and energy. Still, no matter how brightly something burned, nothing remained. Something began to fear nothing. The deep, the darkness of nothing. So something called nothing Space, and nothing became something, and there was nothing for something to fear.
George in Space by CMR
George pushed the ship’s button. George was always pushing buttons. This was much more fun than he expected or normally found though. Each time George pushed the button he found his attire immediately transformed. First, he was dressed in a Gaudy purple suit with a big plume hat, next it was a lady’s evening gown. Once he pushed it and ended up in a fancy tux feeling just like James Bond, he waited for awhile before pushing the button after that. Push it again he did though & with great pleasure, until he found himself undressed and standing quite naked. This can’t be good he thought to himself. He pushed the button again, but nothing happen.
She wakes up, sunlight streaming through stained windows. Down stairs, into the gallery. Turns on the TV, soldiers looting along the Bund, tankers on fire in Tianjin. Messages on the machine, Sotheby's anxious about the piece, Parker back in Brooklyn, furious, but she has to stay, can't run until she has it. Her man from Mission Control was back, off the long train from Space City, and he had it—left a crude replica in its place, but good enough to hold the scientists over for a day or so, no alien art experts in that bunch. Time to move.
Once the sky was full of stars. But the constellations became archipelagos of humanity’s new motherlands.
Long ago, Ulysses had loved too much. But she loved him too little. So, he had one last conversation with his Mother and his Sister and one last visit to his Father’s grave. Then, he wrote a new fate on another world many decades and miles away.
In a city, Ulysses’ descendant hears strange non-human music from the heavens—sounds from the children of she who had loved him too little. Ulysses’ ghost whispers: “Love now. Do not wait.”
Steaming west, the black beasts billowed their exhaust into the cold autumn sky. We all crouched by the hay wagon, war-weary. "Twenty miles,” whispered Billy. The harvesters had proven slow but relentless. It seemed that any large mammal was game.
We stayed mousy, relished the MREs. The moment those three lumbered out of sight we resumed our back road migration. Nobody knew if Ontario had been overrun or how far we'd get on a tank plus cans. The rifles felt feeble, but by tomorrow might score us a small feast.
It would be somebody's Thanksgiving.
Grace felt as violated as if they had robbed her outright. What did they take? What did they slice away? She could not even be sure that she actually knew what Nina Simone sounded like. She only really knew what they had deemed worthy to leave her: only fragments of Nina, every twenty microseconds. But Nina had sung in those spaces and Grace wanted them found. Grace dropped the needle clumsily onto the Saturn’s ring of vinyl spinning atop the borrowed turntable, dusty from neglect in the library’s storeroom. And there, in the spaces in between, was Nina and life.
I couldn’t believe it, another lame summer in space. Mom says, ”It’s a great way to get to get to know the universe” I think it’s a great way to waste a perfectly good vacation. It wouldn’t be so bad if I had a friend along but instead I’m here with my robot and food credits. Venus, Mars, and the Milky Way, I could see this in a book. I start singing under my breath. A few seconds later my robot leans over and says shhhh. That’s when I found out that this was going to be a long trip.
uranus craigslist > community > lost & found
One cat
Mostly black. White belly and feet. Little mustache below nose
Found drifting between orbits of Uranus and Neptune
Doesn't seem to be answering to anything
It came from the sky one day. Scientists even said that it wasn't supposed to fall that way. Look like that. Hit that way. Turns out they just didn't know all the rules. And with the swing of a bat, but not really a bat, the bastard child of a sledgehammer and a Notre Dame bell choir, a city was ripped off the face of the Earth and sent in to space. The perfect tone held a protective bubble that we normally take for granted and off we went, in to the solar system and beyond. Then it got weird.
From all this twisted, for some time, the sound of one particular song, dynamic, explosive, soft, joyous, determined, crystalline, fire.
Yet, as it began to fade, becoming ever obscured, that shear, screaming, cicada slowly filled the room, filled the whole space of myself, and my vision. It was both universally loud and atomically quiet. I’d experienced this range, this announcement, before. Of course.
But this frequency was fresh. Never before seen footage. And to my complete surprise; it began sending out very random, sparse, coherent flourishes in flute-like, eel-like visual tones so beautiful and amazing yet all so incredibly funny!
"Sweet Calaca, it doesn't ping...", skull-face improbably displaying complete smugness. "That Peruvian's probably being judged as Pavilion horsd'oeuvres by now."
Despite attenuated frame and lady sensibilities, she hoisted the quarantined cask on her back as professional stevedores would, leaving the monitored exhibition screenery and ingratiating apparatchik.
Once outside among Calavera's, fairgrounds, seals were broken to assess shipping damage. Within, in the meticulously reserved nine cubic inch space for prizes, was the blue ribbon cavy, vacantly lapping raided horchata, all vapid nonchalant-ness in its legerdemain (and lack of milkiness getting the long hair).
She became worried, as luggage require air-tight seals.
'Youth Vs. School Vs. Singularity: Found in Space' by lieumorrison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.lieumorrison.com/licensing.
[exactly 100 words]
“Last night, the Wandering Spawn did something incredible”. With his functional arm, the spawnographer lifted a parchment depicting chains of small circles on curved lines. He traced a chain until it intersected another.
“A momentous find,” the student said. “Perhaps the Spawn lack material substance. Or they travel in multiple dimensions.”
“There is a third possibility.” The spawnographer smiled, his eyes twinkled in the candlelight. “Perhaps the Spawn coalesced.”
The student realized at once. “The Spawn are mating!”
The right half of the spawnographer’s body shook with laughter. “Now we know, finally, why the night sky is brim-full of constellations.”
Strolling through the Serengeti, she stumbled upon her leonine counterpart. Her stares were met with a glance, then left for naught to the slow winds on her back. At a pace eclipsed only by the rising moon, her skin glistened with the drops lucky enough to escape the parching heat. Like lighting the traces of the last evidence from the noon sun split across her face. With the halt, life fell from her face, opening oceans unto a new world in a universe yet unseen.
Hello, Mother. Hello, Father.
Camp Lunara is BORING. Whoever thought camping on the stupid moon was a good idea is a jerk. Remember Ricky Spiro? He had an allergic reaction to moon chow and almost died! Lucy Terry fractured her ankle on a crater walk!
Lunara is DANGEROUS! Put me on the next shuttle out. I promise I'll be good. I won't make noise. Promise to be nice to my sister too! Please, don't make me stay. I don't want to die in space!
Wait a minute. Guys are playing kickball. They're passing out moon boots. Woah! Real Moon Pie!
Disregard this text.
Glob! Another batch of superheated matter slowly passes the horizon and joins my preserve. My excretion disk beacon lights the cooling husks of dying stars and planets. They cluster about me safe from the beckoning void. I will be their keeper, holding their knowledge and matter against the ever ending expansion. Husks of a million worlds have passed my maw. I am lonely though, trapped by my desire for growth and unable to give, forever unintelligible. A resolute preserver of information against the heat death though it is a futile task. In the end my time will come. Dam Hawking!
The walls of the tiny room they shared for the last two months, glistened in the dim light. He crouched over her corpse, clutching the bloodied knife that had so recently slit her throat. He slammed the knife into the floor once, and then a second time, hard enough to snap the blade. Tears flooded his eyes. He tried to focus on her beautiful smile, but he could only see the other, ugly one beneath it. He could make no sense of what had happened, knowing only that he would never again have what they found in this cramped space.
The hatch opened effortlessly, and it was odd how there was no sound as the air escaped out of the derelict ship. They entered, hoping for a share of whatever loot may be on that wreck. As they moved, a shadow crept along a narrow corridor. Always a little closer, and by the time they reached the darkness of the cargo bay it was right above their heads. They rejoiced at the sight of the containers full of precious artifacts, but it would be too late for their ship would suffer the same fate: they picked up an unfriendly hitchhiker.
I floated in the silence of the space station and watched the earth. It's blueish, expressionist pattern was suffocating under layers of gray-white smoke and demonic-red veins which ran through the whole continents. Volcanoes, tornadoes, tropical storms, flods were raging mercilessly.
Here, in the peace of the space station, in the middle of the electronic hum and silent echo of emptiness, I watched the earth cramping. Messages from the control room stopped coming 72 hours ago. I was alone. I had enough food and oxygen for another 180 days. I could go with the flow of the last days.
I tweeted that.
When Andrew lies down to sleep he hears a hollow booming leaking through the floorboards, echoing in the plaster. It itches inside his skull.
He wakes in the night and follows the sound, barefoot on the carpet, feeling the vibration in the floor. Down the hall to the study. There. He presses one ear against the bookshelf.
It’s heavy; it takes a long time to push it aside.
In the shadow of the bookcase is a darker shadow again. He reaches for it and almost stumbles. There is no wall.
He crouches, peers. In the darkness there are stars.
Images flashed over my retina. A vast emptiness. Black, with a few white dots. And somehow I understood what the images meant. "This is how space is. Vast. Empty." It felt strange to be communicating this way. Through sensory stimulation rather than words. But the creature lacked vocal chords, and I could not speak its language. Images flashed once again. "Stop exploring what you do not and can not know. Enjoy what you have." "But maybe there are some answers out there!" "No answers. Just darkness. And horror." The last image was something shapeless and disturbing.
We should have listened.
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Seldom did one cross paths with another as they emptily drifted through space, but such rare occurrence was not mistaken for random chance and the opportunity for exchange of any kind was not wasted. He fondly thought back to the old trans-galactic jazz singer who had given him an assortment of vinyl from Earth’s twentieth century. Knowing not what vinyl did and certainly never having come across a turntable, the records sat aging as a trophy in his humble cock pit