Tag Archives: MindLoveMisery’s Menagerie

Test Flight

spacecraft

Image found at Vector News

Cory was conducting another sweep of the void in search of any contacts in the area of space where what Krista called “the indiscriminate drive” deposited the ship.

“Nothing, Captain. No coalescent bodies of any kind. I’m only reading dust and hydrogen gas. Impossible to tell our location in relation to the Solar System without a frame of reference.”

“That’s fine, Mr. McKenzie. Continue scans until further notice.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Captain Forest Quinn volunteered to command the experimental jump drive vessel Kingfisher, Elon Musk III’s brain child. In theory, a ship equipped with the Tesla drive could instantaneously jump from one point in space to another using a virtual point-to-point link through subspace. All of the unmanned probes including a quarter-sized model of the Kingfisher jumped to specific coordinates between fifty and three-hundred light years from Earth and returned safely by virtue of their AI guidance systems.

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Never Trust an Angel

woman pointing gun

Young woman pointing a gun (Shutterstock)

“As far from the east from the west has He distanced your transgressions from you, she said. If your sins are frozen like the snows on Kilimanjaro, I will melt your heart like the wings of Icarus, she said. Ha! The best of times, the worst of times and brother, this is the worst of times.”

“Quit your bitching Milo and put your back into it.” The prison guard waved his shotgun vaguely in the young convict’s direction to emphasize the point.

He held up his pickaxe momentarily entertaining murderous thoughts, but even if he could bury the business end of it in that fat pig’s chest before he could react, the others would cut him down in a New York minute. Not worth it. Milo brought his tool down on hard, merciless rock, as hard as his stoney heart.

How had he ended up here? Oh yeah. Her.

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Resistance

resistance

Actor Christian Bale as John Connor in the 2009 film “Terminator Salvation.”

The words blurred into one another, every yellowed page like the one before. Joe Kelley had been confined in the Detention Center for nearly a week and compelled to read and view all manner of anti-Christian and progressive texts and films in an effort to “correct” his views on the existence of God and particularly the God of the Bible.

He was surprised they hadn’t simply arrested him, beaten a confession out of him (or “disappeared” him like so many of his friends), and then sentenced him to a long prison term. Then he realized that with his son Gabe being a high-ranking official on the local Public Education Council, the Progressive Enforcement (PE) Police didn’t want to embarrass him by having the news media report that his Dad had been convicted of seditious religious beliefs.

At first, his Counselor Mx Torres considered “converting” him to a state-approved inclusive Christian church, but when the psychological test results came back, the recommendation was to completely reprogram him to deny all faith in Christ.

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Deadly Magnificence

solar flare

An artist’s illustration of a flare from Proxima Centauri, modeled after the loops of glowing, hot gas seen in the largest solar flares. The planet Proxima b, seen here in an artist’s impression, orbits Proxima Centauri 20 times closer than Earth orbits the sun. A flare 10 times larger than a major solar flare would blast Proxima b with 4,000 times more radiation than Earth gets from solar flares.
Credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa/Carnegie Institution for Science, NASA/SDO, NASA/JPL

Meredith Wallace stood outside the lander and stared up at its magnificence visible only because of her helmet’s shielded visor. The gigantic loops of glowing hot plasma from Proxima Centauri were large enough to be seen from 4.6 million miles away because they were twenty times as large as solar flares from Earth’s sun.

No one had predicted such a massive build up of magnetic energy within this star. The cluster of sunspots, the flare’s eruption site, was just north of the sun’s equator and positioned almost directly at the planet. The electromagnetic radiation wasn’t visible to the unaided eye, but for Meredith, the coronal mass ejections were like an astonishing Phoenix rising from its ashes, climbing far into the space between star and this world only to follow relentless magnetic forces back down like a brilliantly flaming Icarus.

“There’s no hope then.”

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The Wraith and the Child

beliefs

Image found at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie blog

It must have been his surgery that caused the nightmares. He always found himself in the dark alone. No, not quite alone. There was another presence, something hiding in the shadows. The Wraith.

“What do you want? Where are you?”

He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He was sweating. “Don’t come near me. Leave me alone.”

The Wraith said nothing. It made no sound at all, but he knew it was out there stalking him.

He turned and ran, stumbled over something and fell. Then he got up and ran again.

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Retrieval

nostromo

Promotional image of the landing module of the USCSS Nostromo spacecraft from the 1979 film “Alien”

“We’re going to have to delay exploring the base of the escarpment until Reggie and Austin repair the lander’s main engines.” I don’t want us to encounter anything out there we can’t runaway from in a hurry if we have to.”

Captain John Weiss was addressing the other four crew members of the freighter “Joseph Conrad” in the galley.

“Well what the screw is taking them so long, John? They’ve been at it for over six hours and if we don’t recover the Company’s lost probe, we’ll never collect our cut of the reward.”

“Calm down, Linda. You know this kind of work takes time.” His first officer was intelligent and competent but impatient which is why even with her service record, she’d never made Captain.

“They’re probably snoozing down in the engineering bay.”

“Not likely, Santiago. I just got a progress report from Reggie fifteen minutes ago. They don’t want to be down there any longer than necessary.”

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Boots

sinatra

Promotional image for Nancy Sinatra’s 1966 chart “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'”

“You keep saying you’ve got something for me.”

Aiming down from the observation deck of the tower, Charles slowly pulled the trigger of the Remington and the first student dropped on the quad. He was surprised that all of the other people down there didn’t panic and run. Maybe if he killed enough people the monster in his head would stop making him do this.

“You’ve been messin’ where you shouldn’t have been a messin’”

The second person went down. Most people don’t think actual rifle shots sound real. They think it’s firecrackers going off, or maybe a car backfiring, or construction equipment operating.

His Timex said about four minutes had passed since he started shooting when he saw the first cop.

“one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.”

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The Accidental Traveler

snow

© Mara Eastern

He’d been surprised by the snow when he woke up this morning. It wasn’t in last night’s weather prediction, but as Marty McFly says every time someone watches “Back to the Future,” “Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?” Then he chuckled to himself as he remembered why. Last night he’d fallen asleep on Friday, July 24, 1970. This morning when he woke up, it was Thursday, January 9, 1986.

Phil Morton was just a few days shy of his sixty-fourth birthday when he became unstuck in time and place. Fortunately, he was in good health both physically and mentally, so he was able to endure the shock and stress involved.

The first time it happened, he woke up at home less than a year in the past and for a whole day, he thought there was something wrong with his memory. How could he remember the first seven months of 2018 when it was only July 22, 2017? He had awakened in his own bed. His wife was with him. The grand kids were visiting. Everything was normal except he recalled living almost another full year that for everyone else, hadn’t happened yet.

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The Ocean’s Daughter

swimming pool trust

Photo credit: BleachFilm

“Are you sure you want to do this, Sis? We can wait until a better time.”

“There’s never going to be a better time, Cody. You heard what my counselor said. Sooner or later I’ve got to face this. I can’t be afraid of the water all my life.”

“Okay, Darya. You’re in charge. Remember, I’m going to be with you all of the time so if you get in trouble…”

“I know, I know. Look. I’m nervous enough. Let’s just do this.”

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Tangency and Darkness

dracula

Promotional image for “Theatre68 presents Dracula”

Jessica had no way of knowing that her relationship with Everett was a moment of tangency and thus was doomed to end as abruptly as it began.

She always met him on the veranda behind her Father’s house. Summer nights in Georgia were sultry and each moment that passed as she waited for the sun to set was as fragile as a butterfly’s wings. Jessica could feel drops of sweat describe tiny rivulets across the tops of her mocha breasts and then down her cleavage. She held her thighs close together and swayed slightly with a warm breeze as the final rays of daylight succumbed to the rule of the kings of darkness.

Then he appeared on the far side of the manicured lawn and yet she could hear his voice as if he were whispering in her ear. “Come.”

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