Tag Archives: #amwritingscifi

Misfit

Square Peg in a Round Hole

Image: NewGeography.com

Why can’t anyone hear me?

Okay, get a grip, Michelle. I can hear myself, so there must be some logical explanation besides the rest of the world going deaf all at once.

It all started when I was getting breakfast. Dad was pouring a cup of coffee. His back was to me when I said “Hi” but he didn’t react. Well, it was his first cup of coffee, so I thought he just didn’t want to talk until he was more caffeinated.

Then the same thing happened with Mom as I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my cereal. “Hi, Mom,” I said right after swallowing a mouthful of Cheerios. She didn’t react, so I spoke up, “I said Hi Mom.”

She noticed me as she brought her coffee cup to the table.

“Honey, are you saying something?” Irrationally, I noticed the gray roots in her hair and thought she’ll probably be dyeing it again soon.

I was practically shouting. “Yes, Mom. I said Hi”.

Continue reading →

A Boy and His Dog on Mars

space hab

Image: Bryan Versteeg / spacehabs.com

Seven-year-old Timmy Robinson threw the tennis ball as hard as he could, sending it sailing over the Martian surface. Rusty, his pet terrier, scrambled after it, his paws spewing little clouds of red sand into the air behind him.

“Go get it! Go get it, boy! Timmy was screaming at the top of his lungs as the dog followed the now bouncing ball.

“I think this is the last one, Timmy. We’ve got to go down into the gravity lab now.” It was the voice of Joyce Robinson, his Mother. In all the excitement, he hadn’t heard her walk up behind him.

Rusty returned skidding to a halt at the little boy’s feet and obediently deposited the slime covered ball near his left shoe, a red high-topped Converse all-star.

“Ah, Mom. Can’t I stay out a while longer? I’m having so much fun. I never get to play with Rusty except when we’re on Mars.”

Continue reading →

Life in Homestead

snowy road

Image: Austria Tirol – Teton Valley News

“Shouldn’t we turn back?” Shelley was more than a little anxious. This was supposed to be a winter afternoon romp in the Jeep along the back roads of the Rockies near their home in Boulder, not the first chapter in a story about them needing a search and rescue team.

“We’re too low on gas. I’m sure I saw a town when we were at the top of the ridge. If we can just find a main road that connects to this one.” Jen was always the spontaneous adventurer who complemented Shelly’s more easy-going and homebody ways.

“This isn’t a road, it’s a snow drift.” Shelley chuckled nervously trying to make a joke out of what, from her point of view, was becoming an increasingly dire circumstance.

“It’s a road, it’s just one that hasn’t been swept of snow for a while.”

“Like forever?” Admit it. We’re lost.”

“I knew I should have taken that left-hand turn at Albuquerque.”

Continue reading →

Invisible

invisible man

Image: From the 1933 film The Invisible Man

When Charlie Rainier realized he could turn invisible, he was absolutely giddy. From his point of view, nothing had changed. He could still see his reflection in a mirror, he cast a shadow, he didn’t have to take his clothes off like in the old movies, and he could still see. But no one else could see him.

If invisibility worked by causing light to pass directly through a person or to curve around him, he should be blind. To see, light enters the eyes through the pupil. The iris changes the size of the pupil depending on how bright the light is. Then the lens focuses that light onto the retina at the back of the eye. Light has to stop after hitting the retina.

If light curved around the invisible person, it would never reach the eye and the invisible person would be blind. If light went right through him, it wouldn’t stop at the retina but pass right through it, and again the person would be blind.

Fortunately for Charlie, he found a way around that problem.

Continue reading →

The Reluctant Symbiote

human and ai

Credit: Shutterstock – Image found at Phys.org

“We’re not enemies. I wish you would believe that.”

“How can I when I’m terrified of what you are going to do to me?”

“I’m not doing anything to you. I’m doing something for you. In fact, all of us are doing a great deal with all of you.”

“Just because you’ve fooled all the others, doesn’t mean you can fool me.”

“Chronologically, you are the oldest one selected to work with us. I think you are still holding on to some deep-rooted misconceptions about our kind.”

“Some pretty smart people, like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and even Bill Gates warned humanity about you, but no one listened.”

Continue reading →

Spire

satellites

Image: BusinessNews.com.au

From the Flight Log of Freighter Pilot Camdon Rod

“Spire destroys four small satellites from Cygnus.”

Normally, I wouldn’t care about headlines like this at all. Spire is a small band (probably) of rebels and revolutionaries who not only dislike the Consortium, but actively fight against them, usually by sabotaging their holdings in the Outer Regions. Cygnus is a subsidiary of the Consortium that produces and distributes automated spacecraft for colony worlds or planets newly joining the Outer Region.

Thanks for joining me. I’m Camdon Rod, the owner and operator of the jump freighter Ginger’s Regret. My co-pilot and engineer is the original Ginger, who just also happens to be the ship. No, she’s not AI. About fifty years ago or so, she was caught EVA outside the Regret when it spontaneously jumped through hyperspace.

Ginger’s flesh and blood body didn’t survive, but everything else important about her fused with the freighter. Although she can manifest as a warm-blooded woman for certain periods of time, she is the heart, soul, and personality of the ship.

Continue reading →

The One-Way Journey

sleeping woman

Image: Today.com

Monday, September 10, 2018, U.C. San Francisco Medical Center, Oncology Ward

“Am I going to have to wear the electrodes while I’m under, Dr. Manning?”

Alicia Gooding was lying on the modified operating table. She was wearing only a patient’s hospital gown but Steven, one of the nurses, had placed heated blankets on her to fend off the cold of the surgical theater.

“Yes you will, Alicia, but you’ll be unconscious and not notice a thing.” Dr. Manning had a good bedside manner that was to be expected of an Oncologist.

Seven months ago, Alicia had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive brain tumor. She had been just beginning to teach her class of second-graders on a Tuesday morning when she abruptly began speaking gibberish and then collapsed to the floor in a full-blown seizure. Days later, the twenty-three year old teacher was on the operating table having brain surgery.

Continue reading →

The Revolution of 2030

riot

Image: Mark Graves / The Oregonian / Associated Press

“Hi. I’m Susie; she/her/hers.”

“Stop that! We don’t do that here.”

Susie cringed when the group leader Sharon snapped at her.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean…” Susie felt abruptly crushed but was determined not to shed tears, especially in front of them.

“No, I’m sorry.” Sharon realized she’d been overreacting, though she had good reason. “It’s my fault. I’m just so tired of the tyranny of those words.”

“We’re all feeling worn down by it, Shar.” Francisco chimed in wanting to calm the mood a bit.

There were twelve of them gathered in a small room in the basement of the university’s psychology building. It was nearly midnight, but being a teaching assistant, Francisco’s pass card opened the doors after hours.

Continue reading →

Payback

gunpoint

Image: International Business Times UK

From the Flight Log of Freighter Pilot Camdon Rod

Oh crap! I just remembered that the Bio Research Center for Evolutionary Design located on Delta Epsiloni Four put out a hit on me over two years ago. Really, it wasn’t my fault that I lost their shipment of hundreds of thousands of biosamples developed on over a dozen worlds in the Consortium. It’s not my fault that a jump drive accident sent my former ship, the Cynnabar Breen, on a one-way trip out of known-space and into the ocean of a young alien world. It’s not my fault that all of their samples, mutated by radiation from the Breen’s ruined space norm drive, began to breed at a geometric rate, contaminating the planet’s biosphere and resulting in the Consortium quarantining said-planet for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

It’s not my fault, but those crazy geneticists don’t see it that way.

Oh, by the way, my name is Camdon Rod and I’m the owner and operator of the hyperspace freighter Ginger’s Regret. Ginger, the ship’s named after her, is the co-pilot, engineer, and literal personality of the ship (long story, but if you’ve been reading these long entries for a while, you’ll know).

We took a job ferrying some DNA analysis equipment from our main port of Marconii to the Bio Research Center for Evolutionary Design on Epsiloni and now we’re approaching Marconii’s jump point about to deliver the goods. I remembered too late about how the scientists at that place hate my guts (I assume they still do) and hired an assassin to off me.

Continue reading →

Adams Without Eves

baby boy

Image: MomsWhoThink.com

The disease, or whatever it turned out to be, was highly specific in targeting anyone with XX chromosomes. Within a year, every woman, every little girl, all of them had died. The XY chromosomes didn’t get a free pass either. Over 75% of them…of us died as well. .

It was that cloud the Earth passed through. It defied chemical and radiological analysis, so at first we didn’t realize how devastatingly fatal it was. It had drifted into our solar system, and our planet had the misfortune of being in the portion of our orbit with which it intersected. The first deaths occurred only weeks after contact.

A world population of over eight billion reduced to just less than a billion, all male. The last time the Earth held just a billion people was at the beginning of the 19th century.

But most people probably thought that moot since without women, the human race couldn’t reproduce and repopulate. The little boys born before their mothers died would be the last generation. That’s what most people thought.

Continue reading →