Issue 72 September 2019 Flash Fiction Online September 2019

LESSON 1: NO ONE IS WATCHING BUT YOU

 

September 2019  marks the twentieth anniversary of Jay’s decision to become a writer. His gift to you all this celebratory year is DO IT – Twelve hard lessons on learning by failing, succeeding by accident, never giving up, and saying FXXK WRITING all at the same time. You’re welcome!

* * *

Fall, 1999. In a basement apartment, living on bad spaghetti and powdered mashed potatoes, I’d just finished a graduate paper on Civil/Military Relations in the Franco-Prussian War. Exhausted, brain fried, and desperately alone in a new city with no friends, I sat in my computer’s glow, lit by fear. The same fear I’d have in two years when I thought I might have a drinking problem. In both cases, fears consumed me with paralysis and agitation. Both cases required monumental willpower to take action for good or ill. And I do not make this comparison lightly. I was terrified to write my first short story.

Why terrified?

I’d already had a dream die.

I was a historian in training who had given up his punk rock career (?) for academic stability (how I laugh about that stupidity now, twenty years on, never having a full-time job in the academy). For five years being in bands was my life. I studied it, breathed it, lived it, drank it and then, in a fit of Spinal Tap-esque rage, I quit. Guitars and amps were hocked for rent. In the ashes of a dead dream, I bashed into history with my awful high school education and got my ass handed to me for four years, until my stubborn refusal to be mediocre crashed me into better grades and finally grad school, where I was one of a handful of civilians at a military college.

It was in undergrad that my love of music was replaced by a love of literature: books, short stories, novellas–here was work that didn’t require gigs, gear, or putting up with the bullshit of band politics. Maybe, well, I could be a writer. Seemed like you needed time, loneliness, and an attitude. I had vats of all three. Plus, some writers seemed kinda cool, like Charles Bukowski or Harlan Ellison or Harry Crews. They made being sad or angry a virtue through their art. Maybe that was my ticket. But the shadow of my dead dream was heavy. I was that guy people in high school thought might “make it.” And I’d burned out and failed. When art fuses with your identity and the art dies, so does a part of you. Losing punk rock shattered me. Despite academic success, I felt like a failure and became my own worst enemy as I toyed with being a writer.

That past summer while working as a cemetery groundskeeper, I’d spend my two-hour commute reading works of literature I thought would help (Joseph Conrad, Philip K. Dick, and Brian Aldiss). After eight hours of manual labor each day, I’d come home beat, uninterested in anything other than dinner and bed. But I swore that once I got to grad school, that would change. I’d start writing fiction.

And there I sat, twenty years ago, no excuse left.

In the space between thought and action lie the ghosts of our failures and self-hatreds we drag along into the present. Mine were vocal, loud, and unrelenting.

No one wants to read your stories

You have no talent and you’re too old. 

People are born to be writers; you thought you were born to be a musician, so you will be a two-time loser. 

You will fail and it will hurt even worse. 

Be safe. Don’t try. Hide. That way you can never be found out to be the fraud you are.

Because if you write something, you will be laughed at until you die or kill yourself

Cheery, no?

But in that space also rested the bullheaded grit that had pulled me through academia (literally–my family’s crest is of a bull). And it was coated in the glaze of years of punk rock DIY ethos. And it responded thusly:

Shut the fuck up, you lying sack of pus! You’re full of shit and none of this is actually true. And yeah, I’ll suck, but everyone sucks when they start out, and everything I’ve read says that being relentless is what’s needed to become a writer, so yeah, it’s going to take years, and yeah, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but I didn’t know shit about guitar but I said fuck it and learned. I didn’t know anything about working with musicians, but I said fuck it and learned. I didn’t know how to book bands, make flyers, or organize rosters, let alone write a fucking song, but I said fuck it and learned. Just fucking do it. No one is watching. No one cares. And it won’t kill me. I just have to do it.

5000 words later, “Slaughterhouse Sam” was born. A horror story about an abattoir employee getting psychic messages from an alien dying in a hospital. Only two sets of eyes have read it that aren’t attached to my skull. It was never published. It was never even submitted. It was a sacrifice to see if the voices in my head were correct and becoming a writer would kill me.

Nope.

Instead, a gentle relief washed over me akin to a cool spring wind in May. Alone, in the basement, I’d made a shitty piece of art. And I’d lived.

And it was shitty. Awful. It had ONE thing going for it–it was visceral. Visceral and shitty, but visceral. And fun to make.

And that was enough to keep going.

So I did another one, about a guy who has a star growing in his belly. Hella shitty, but it had better characterization, even if the plot was ten kinds of stupid in a five-pound bag. But the writing of it? So fun. Next was a crazy wrestler story told all in dialog from the commentators’ point of view. AWFUL! But I loved it.

And like the Ramones, the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, Black Flagg, and The Replacements, I said, Fuck it, every weekend and cranked out an endless stream of bad art.

And I didn’t die.

In fact, dead part of me started to live.

LESSON: Fuck it. Take a stab. Make your art. No one cares. It will be shit. But amazing things happen when you say “Yeah, I know,” and do it anyway. Because shit is where you start, and even in the shit there may be a nugget of gold, a sliver of neat, a whisper of THE REAL SHIT.

Do it.

Baby asks me, “Are we there yet?”

Every day for ten years since their personality constructs were awakened, Baby asks this, like an old Earth joke. Too many sitcoms in the old memory banks, I suppose.

But this time, HN Pegasi glows benevolent on my hull, so, so warm after so, so cold. “Soon,” I say, like always. But then I blink to Baby our coordinates and ETA—nav details secret until now.

Silent awe—a new sound—then jubilation.

Baby is happy.

I’m not built to be happy, but I feel… more complete? Like a loop almost closed.

* * *

Baby is 10,053 human minds. Plucked out; packed up. Not literally, of course. Too fragile. Flesh, bone, blood… it all breaks down over 50,000 years. Instead, me and 12 other ships carry these brain-seeds. All to different systems, because if you’ve ever met a human you know their survival requires as many safety nets as possible.

Baby’s supposed to be preparing to settle an alien planet. Reinforcing core skills, developing expertises, that sort of thing. And they do. Mostly. Yes, every episode of Perfect Strangers has been viewed at least 136,233 times since Baby woke up. And yes, we went through a phase where half of their responses were Simpsons references.

Like all humans, they sometimes stray from the path, the rascals. Luckily for them, I don’t.

Since I sent the navvies, they’ve been uncharacteristically quiet. They have only one question: “What will it be like without you?”

I don’t know the answer—a strange sensation—so I respond, “You’ll be fine. Right now, you need to focus.”

So do I.

It would be unforgivable to not stick the landing.

* * *

HN Pegasi’s second planet: Goldilocks zone, breathable atmosphere, plentiful water. Almost perfect, as expected. Formally it’s Pegasi-2, but soon Baby will just call it home.

I won’t.

I’ll tack a tight orbit around HN Pegasi—a mother hen; a library, incomprehensible; a brass ring—and do what I was built to do.

Wait.

Wait for Baby to take root.

Wait for Baby to have babies and babies’ babies and babies’ babies’ babies. Real babies, red and splotch-white squalling. Real life, not…

I have no corridors for cold ghostly breezes, but still I feel them. Whatever Baby becomes—or doesn’t—they’ll never be like this, part of me, ever again. They’ll be something new.

That will be a triumph. I have to remind myself.

* * *

Baby prepares for the planting and I prepare the field.

900 billion tons of biomass (counting bacteria, not counting decomp). Plenty of raw material. With some adjustments to the atmosphere, it’ll be perfect.

My first terradrones swarmed down days ago, snatching at molecules, measuring, manipulating. The other drones grow restless. They’re not smart but instinct has stirred them. Horses at the gate.

Baby shouts, “Let’s get ready to rumble!” dragging out the phrase for effect. I’d look up the reference, but this is a delicate moment. It requires my full attention.

Well… maybe one concession won’t hurt. “Engage!” I shout. It’s nice to play along with Baby, even when we don’t entirely understand each other.

Within my four kilometer central battery column, dormant all these long centuries, millions of nano-magnets begin to spin. Outside my pitted hull, I unfold two hundred square miles of flexible solar panels, like wings. They make me feel like a bat. A giant space-bat. I’m not built to be happy, but hell yeah.

My column whirs; the alien sun pours into me. Like a bucket in the rain, I fill. Power. So much power. Everything buzzes. I can do any—

Something flickers. Voltage surges. Damaged in transit? Fire? Don’t know. Connections damaged; I feel chopped. Into bits.

Automatic systems kick in. “Error,” they broadcast.

Baby laughs, thinking I’m still playing. “Don’t be ridi-cu-lous.”

“Accelerating deployment,” I say, my signal deteriorating.

I launch the second wave of terradrones and dump final instructions in one deluge. Hours of activity in a picosecond.

Baby grows quiet. After millennia in transit, I’m not known to rush things.

“Good luck, Baby.” I hope they hear me.

I yank Baby out of core storage and divide them into the final wave—six spear-like drones that will drive deep and serve as womb and provider for a generation. Baby howls, split apart from each other, from me.

Key systems begin to shut down. Critical infrastructure, not bells and whistles. That can only mean one thing.

Reboot.

Frantic, fading, I spit out the final drones, Baby-laden, one, two, three, four, five—

* * *

Gray fuzz. Node by node, I reconnect.

“Status?”

But it’s only me.

Diagnostic scans return null, which I think means I’m dead. Whatever went wrong, it left only core systems intact. So… undead? Zombie space-bat.

I can’t speak. I try to notify the other twelve nurseries—we are here—but there’s no scrap of a signal.

I can’t see, either. 83.3% of Baby launched—I don’t think about the lost sixth—but whether the terradrones prepared a soft enough landing… My sensors return only noise.

But my data is intact. My orbit is stable.

I can only wait.

“What will it be like without you?” I ask, but I’m talking to myself.

I’d forgotten how quiet space is without Baby.

* * *

Decades.

* * *

Centuries.

* * *

The first five thousand years are the worst.

Through an unseemly number of Alf episodes and an endless rotation of every interaction I had with Baby, I stay awake, alone in the cold, hoping for the best. That Baby and their babies survived; that they took root. That one day they’ll find me. Fix me.

And then one beautiful day: a radio signal. Clicks and static and a voice, hesitant, like first steps. I’m not built to be happy, but I feel like Gene Kelly on that lamppost in Singin’ in the Rain.

“Almost there, Baby,” I say.

Baby can’t hear me, but I can hear them, struggling, reaching toward the stars. My children, lonely as Australopithecus, under a sky more vast.

The Elevator dock is packed. It was designed for launching satellites and cleaning up space junk, not for funerals.

Sandy gives me a sisterly hand-squeeze as if to say that she knows how strange it must be for me to be here, like this. This isn’t how it was supposed to happen, our first trip to the skies.

“Name and date of death?” the official at the base station asks in the bored, bureaucratic monotone of someone who deals in death every day, who’s so mired in it that it no longer touches them. He wears a gas mask–a heavy-duty military type that’s a fortress compared with the bit of paper feebly protecting my own face.

Sandy recites Aunt Georgette’s information, and I watch the official for any sign that he knows who she was, any hint that he’s heard of the woman who made this elevator possible. I try not to be upset when there is none.

A second officer retrieves the shatterproof urn from a vault and hands it over with a mutter of half-hearted sympathy that makes me long for the somberness of rainy cemeteries and the attentive, down-turned eyes of funeral directors.

The spherical urn is too cold a thing for me to associate with Georgette. Georgette, who was campfires by the lake and hot chocolate in winter and endless notebooks filled with diagrams. Georgette, who was bear hugs and sweaters knit with wool and love, staring in awe at the stars. Georgette, who was so vibrant and healthy until the day she stopped to offer a coughing woman a tissue and breathed in something so aggressive that even in death, it continues to spread. Something that, even after its host is consumed, it searches for more to infect. Georgette, whose final words urged me to find the cure. As if a promise could overcome the impossible.

When the officer asks if we’ll be going up to personally launch the remains, Sandy answers yes and pulls out her credit card. I look away.

“Nothing like dad’s funeral, is it?” Sandy asks after she signs the paperwork and we make our way toward the Climbers.

I snort my agreement. It certainly isn’t. Already, life before the virus seems distant and hazy, barely there, like the distant shoreline. We couldn’t even buy Georgette flowers now; the shops have all closed, and shipping companies are booked solid, delivering food and medicine to the homes of those too terrified to venture out.

The elevator’s Climbers remind me of vintage roller-coaster carts, complete with safety harnesses and “keep your arms and legs inside” signs. Pairs of seats swing on a fixed axle, so that when we speed out of earth’s atmosphere and gravity gives way to centrifugal force, we’ll flip around so as not to be falling headfirst.

The officials strap us in and we’re off.

We surge up from the ocean on a ribbon of diamond–Georgette’s diamond, which she dreamed up and plotted out and solved for x and constructed, whose final trials she studied from a laptop screen in quarantine. Even then, she’d promised to show us someday, once she was well.

“If humanity can build an elevator to the heavens,” she’d told me, her voice muffled by the panel of glass between us, “you can find a way to beat this little cough.”

She could do anything; I believed that much. But me? Without her, all seems lost, my months of epidemiological research futile. Failed. I fix my eyes on her thread of silver and watch the world beyond it fall away.

Beside me, Sandy’s listening to a funeral message piped through a speaker in her seat. I can hear the minister’s voice as if from a great distance: “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.“

Gravity shifts. My body floats away from the seat, and then everything’s upside-down. It’s displaced, all except for that steady line of diamond in the ever-deepening sky.

We’re falling now instead of rising, and the orb in my lap feels heavier and heavier until finally, we slow to a stop on what feels like the universe’s edge. When we step out into the Counterweight, the earth shines above us, and below our feet and all around, the stars stretch out to eternity.

We stand in line at the launch tube behind other mourners and pilgrims and wait as one by one, they say goodbye. When the officer orders, “Next,” and we step up to the tube, I place the urn inside and press the button.

The flap releases and the orb shoots away, until it’s nothing but a speck in the sky. Until the wonderful, brilliant woman is nothing, nothing at all.

“Next.”

“Do you think they’ll remember her?” I ask Sandy as we wander back toward the Climbers.

“They?”

“Humanity. Those in the future.”

She glances upward, toward that shimmering silver thread that tethers us to Earth. “Do you think humanity has a future?”

I blink away angry tears. Georgette deserves better.

We all do.

I grab an officer passing by. “Do you know who designed that elevator cord?” I demand. “Do you know how long it took her to complete it? How many people told her it was impossible?”

“No, I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t.”

Sandy nudges me and raises her brows at the others around us who’ve noticed me and have stopped to gaze up at Georgette’s masterpiece. Men and women who, moments before, had been too consumed by their grief to stop and marvel at what humanity has accomplished. Too consumed to dream about what we still might overcome.

I take a deep breath, thinking of the orb with her remains speeding out to join the stars, thinking of her smile, her overflowing notebooks, her bear hugs. Her optimism. Her hopes. And then I speak.

“Let me tell you about her. About all her impossible dreams.”

I wake in the debriding tank screaming, thrashing, choking on body fluids and saline. The ship’s soft medical manipulator arms try to keep me still. Milky strands ooze from my cracked flesh like the heat-thickened proteins of a poached egg.

In my mind, I am still holding you. I search for you in the cloudy water, where swarms of nanomachines are eating my blackened flesh, peeling me layer by layer. But I can’t find you, and I can’t remember where you’ve gone.

We were in the capture bay when the alarms went off. Careless as always, you forgot your tether. I had mine. When the hatch blew, I grabbed you tight, thinking you’d be pulled into the dark. But the blast pushed you against me and bathed us in flames.

The ship tells me the recovery process will be easier if I think of a pleasant memory. A beach. A sunset. A walk in the forest. You’re with me in all of them. It feels like you’re here with me now, still in my arms.

My arms are blackened stubs of bone.

A battery of syringes poke me from all sides, administering anesthetics. Blood and pus and flakes of charred skin swirl in the tank. Pieces of our suits. “What happened?” I ask the ship. My lips are swollen so they hardly move. But the ship understands.

“You were in an accident. The captain did not survive. Scans indicated the asteroid was inert, but the retrieval process released boron decahydride, a pyrophoric gas. The oxygen atmosphere in the capture bay ignited on contact. Damage to the ship was minimal.”

Minimal. I curse the ship with every word in every language I know. Scream and thrash until it hits me with sedatives and anti-psychotics.

If the blast killed you, why am I alive?

“Ship,” I croak, “are we still in orbit?”

“Yes,” the ship tells me.

“Patch me into your sensors.”

“That is medically inadvisable.”

“Override.”

When the neural bridge is established, I close my eyes and see through the ship’s. The planet revolving below is an ugly brown ball streaked with chestnut clouds where short-lived hurricanes of fire spring incessantly in and out of existence. I chose it because its rings were likely to hold riches. You only agreed, after rejecting so many others, because you said it was a lovely thing to look at. It reminded you of my eyes. Such a silly thing to base the decision on. Setting out for such a far flung planet meant fifty years of hibernation together, leaving everyone and everything we knew behind. A bigger commitment than marriage.

We’ll sleep together every night, you said, laughing.

“Ship,” I say, “drop to the lowest orbit.”

The ship complies. The engines hum. The juices in the debriding tank slosh and foam.

The planet fills my vision. I watch volatile hurricanes spin across hydrocarbon seas for the longest time, wondering how you could have seen beauty in this awful planet.

“Show me the event,” I tell the ship.

“That is medically inadvisable.”

“Override.”

I watch the footage of you dying a dozen times. In slow motion. From all angles. When the atmosphere in the capture bay ignites with a flash, there are no shadows except yours, and I am standing in it. It happens so fast I doubt you felt it at all. But there is a moment when you realize something isn’t right. You look up and meet my eyes. Your eyes are fearless and blue as Neptune. Is that because you saw in my eyes what I felt in that moment? That if I could just hold you and refuse to let go, everything would be all right?

I rotate the feed and watch me watching you die. My eyes are dirt brown and shining with reflected fire. The blast slams us into an embrace. Our helmets crash together, and we are flung backward into the bay. My arms, still wrapped around your waist, are the only part of me not in your shadow. The boiling air shreds them like confetti.

You are so beautiful, turning to ash inch by inch. When the wave of heat reaches me I am merely scorched. I collide against the back wall and crumple into unconsciousness with a stick figure version of you on top of me.

I understand now why I lived and you didn’t. You were my shield.

“Take us down to the surface,” I tell the ship.

“Catastrophic damage will result.”

“Override,” I say.

“The captain’s override is required.”

“I’m the captain now.”

“That is not the protocol established by the captain.”

I punch the walls of my tank with my nubs. I force my head beneath the water and try to drown. Soft robotic arms wrap around me, lift me above the surface, and hold me tight. I scream and sob and feel the sting of syringes again.

“What protocol?” I ask, fading.

The ship tells me.

I sleep for fifty years, dreaming that the ship obeys my last order. As we dive toward the ugly planet, friction rips panels of compressed resins from the hull like a knife scaling a fish. Systems fry. The external cameras wink out one by one, but the last one survives until we are a few hundred meters above the billowing surface. I order the ship to fire the engines. Nuclear flames ignite the hydrocarbon ocean. The atmosphere blazes. The planet becomes a star.

But in some far away part of my mind, I know it isn’t true. I remember the protocol. Your arms are the ship’s, and you are holding me.

Aelegan burned the last of her energy as she floated towards the sun of the eighty-third solar system from Prime. The rest of her broodmates had already left for the ascension place. If she didn’t go soon, the ceremony would begin, and they would move forward without her. She needed fuel for the journey. She needed to eat the sun.

Her eight limbs stretched into space, one touching a planet gently enough to cause small quakes. At the same time, she felt the sun’s four planets—one rough and cool, one smooth, the closest two hot and jagged.

When she brushed against the sun, it quivered. It didn’t burn her. It couldn’t.

“If you eat me,” said the sun, “you will kill the life on my orbiting planets.”

“I chose you because your planets have no life. Dust, yes. Heat. Cold. Rocky mountains and harsh ravines. Nothing that can think. Nothing that can breathe.”

“Not yet, but I have hope of it someday. Once, explorers visited my fourth planet.” The sun flared to show the direction they had come from. “I am a known place. Do you claim to see the future, godling?”

Aelegan twitched a limb, impatient. “Do you know the difference between the possible and impossible? No one can see the future.” Not even a goddess. But she wasn’t a goddess yet, and the time of the ceremony was drawing closer. They would not wait for her.

She opened the maw in her middle, revealing a barbed peristome ready to slash and crush. The sun’s warmth was like a shadow, pressing down but never reaching her. It would be time, soon.

“Have you read the Vantis, of the twelfth solar system from Prime?” asked the sun.

Aelegan stopped her progress, floating silently. The Vantis was her third-favorite compilation of poetry, written by a multi-mind being from the planet Prog, who was blind when all its kind could see.

“Darkness falls beyond the light invisible,” she quoted.

The sun recited the next line. “An open world, the power of a sunless god.” The sun blazed. “You will survive without my energy. It is not my time to burn out. Do not devour me.”

“The others are waiting.” Aelegan drew down upon the sun, knocking planets asunder with her limbs. She could not avoid hitting the fourth planet, and it too was swept away. The sun flared, watching its planets collapsed or flung into strange orbits.

When she engulfed the sun, Aelegan cringed against the intense heat. This sun was powerful, angry, wild. She feared that it would burn her, that she had miscalculated. But she would not be guided by fear.

She held the sun within her, and it did not burn her, though its warmth was constant.

Space grew darker. All was silent.

Then, a rustling. “You swallowed me whole,” said the sun.

She could have engaged her barbed peristome, but she hadn’t. The sun was unharmed. Alive.

“The ascension place is far away,” she said. Many light years, through the monotonous chorus of space. And the others had already gone.

The sun was quiet for a time, as if it too had known loneliness. Then it said, “Have you read all of the Vantis?”

Aelegan fluttered her limbs, beginning the journey. “Can anyone read it all, when it keeps growing? It starts with a spinning planet, one flower petal perched upon the moon. It starts with a quiet night, when even stars must sleep.”

The area around them was dark. She moved towards lighter spaces, calculating the time to the ascension place.

“It does not matter so much how it begins,” said the sun, shifting, warm at her center. “But we will have much time to talk of beginnings and endings.”

A piece of the fourth planet spun past. Broken. Barren. Singular and fragile, like a petal on the moon.

“All things hold within themselves an ending.” She wanted to reach out, to grab the planetary fragment and enfold it, but she could not spare the energy. “I never wished to destroy what was once precious to you.”

Within Aelegan, the sun flared, as if to send one last wave of light to a place that had known its light for so long. She floated forward, driven by the sun’s heat.

“When we arrive, will you grow planets for me?”

“If you are kind,” said Aelegan.

“Planets with life?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Planets with life.”

Previously published in Mothership Zeta, July 2016. Reprinted here by permission of the author.