Kyle Malone
Kendy Li
Steven French
R. Dyne
Masimba Muzodsa
The man who charts the stars not just with light, but with legend.
Featuring an exclusive story & interview with APRIL 2025
Volume 5/Issue 2
By Steven S Behram, MD Editor-In-Chief
What blooms in the shadows of collapsing stars? The April 2025 edition of SavagePlanets cracks open the shell of the unknown to reveal strange seeds taking root in alien soil. These stories pulse with the heat of new beginnings and the ache of ancient endings—worlds rising from ruins, minds stretched across dimensions, and futures built from the wreckage of now. Within these pages, you'll find sentient storms, fractured timelines, and the soft, persistent hum of life refusing to be forgotten. Open the hatch. Step through.
Venture into the electric dawn of imagination, where each tale and verse in this quarter’s SavagePlanets flickers to life like a new sun piercing the cosmic veil. Our contributors map bold trajectories through fractured realities, sentient ecosystems, and futures caught mid-metamorphosis. From distant echoes of human legacy to the birth cries of alien intelligences, these works shimmer with invention and awe. Let their light guide you—this is where stories ignite, and galaxies of possibility begin to spin.
This edition’s Imaginaria slips across the threshold of certainty, capturing moments where identity,
memory, and cosmos entangle in exquisite tension. From the solemn duty of a cosmic archivist to the subconscious architects of dream-
worlds, these poems pulse with wonder and quiet revolution. Artificial lives yearn for meaning in the shadow of their creators, while bodies bloom with photonic memory and starlight scars. Some verses drift in quantum
stillness; others spiral with mechanical grace. Each one beckons you closer to the singularity—where language bends, and poetry becomes spacetime.
In this issue’s Planetary Communiqué, Hojack delivers a scathing—and sidesplitting—dispatch on Earth’s latest diplomatic disaster: a military group chat gone galactically wrong. When an encrypted war strategy thread accidentally included a journalist, panic spread faster than a solar flare. Overlord Grawth himself intervenes, immortalizing the fiasco as “Signalgate,” a new constellation dedicated to digital ineptitude. With cat GIFs, facepalms, and jazz-funk musical mandates, this cosmic comedy showcases Earth’s unmatched ability to turn a typo into an interstellar incident. Truly, our species continues to dazzle the stars—with incompetence.
This issue’s short stories launch readers into richly imagined futures and far-flung realms brimming with intrigue. In “The Refrigeration Shuttle” by Mark O’Bannon, an Imperium officer’s furlough takes a chilling turn when she discovers a living prisoner aboard a morgue-bound vessel. Kyle Malone’s “The Last Ship from Orinthia” chronicles a desperate flight to Earth as survivors escape the ruins of their conquered world. In “Angel of Annihilation”, Kendy Li unleashes a celestial enforcer on a deadly mission—only to confront the unpredictable logic of war in the farthest reaches of space. Steven French’s “When
You Gaze Into the Void” follows a scientist whose discovery may unravel an entire society’s beliefs. R. Dyne’s “The Origin of Zus” explores the legacy of a decommissioned superintelligence on a voyage to recover lost gods and truths. Finally, Masimba Muzodsa’s “The Meek” finds a leader caught between diplomacy and devastation as an alien invasion threatens his people’s future. These stories probe the essence of power, survival, and transformation at the edge of possibility.
This issue’s Sci-Fi Entertainment section launches a deep-dive into imagination’s most ambitious frontiers. In “Touching Infinity,” author Mark O’Bannon shares his journey from designing intricate star maps to building sprawling universes in both fiction and games—blending space opera with myth, AI, and spiritual science. His epic Imperium saga and faerie-laced Shadows
and Dreams series reveal a mind that charts constellations not only with stars, but with story. Then, “Levels: Reaming the Seeming” turns the lens on Adam Stern’s mind-bending indie film, where digital universes, corporate dystopias, and nested realities collide in a high-concept thriller. As lovers blur the lines between code and consciousness, the film asks: what rights do simulated lives deserve? Together, these features map the strange and wondrous crossroads of science fiction, creativity, and belief.
As we bring this edition of
SavagePlanets to its final orbit, we marvel at the strange and stellar paths we've traversed. This quarter’s offerings have carried us through fractured timelines, sentient storms, and memories encoded in light—each tale a reminder that the edge of imagination is never truly the end. These pages have echoed with the voices of distant futures and inner reckonings, inviting us to wonder not just what lies beyond, but who we might become in the crossing.
Science fiction is more than speculation—it’s propulsion. It urges us to leap boldly into the unknown, to dream past the gravity of the ordinary, and to chase the questions that light our way forward.
Thank you for charting the stars with us. Until next time, stay curious, stay daring—and never stop listening for the signal in the void.
BY MARK O’BANNON
If ever someone freed the Devil from his chains, his wrath would pour forth upon the stars, and the heavens would tremble at his fury. He would unleash unspeakable wars of dreadful magnitude. Plagues would stain the very air on countless planets with decay. An abyss of torment would open up, so vast that even the stars would wither in despair."
“The
reality of evil does not depend upon whether or not one believes in it.”
– Dr. M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie
3235 AD. ‒ YEAR OF THE WOOD RABBIT
AZURE DRAGON OF THE EAST ‒ BETA COMAE BERENICES / OLIVINE
Eileithyia Sophronia sat in the dining room of the Inferno Grill, bored out of her mind, chewing on a stick of red licorice as she gazed through the transparent graphene-infused dome at her home world, Olivine. Tangerine light spilled into the room, casting a warm glow. Outside, the ring of volcanoes encircling the city dome erupted in a fiery display, as if the gates of hell were cracking open, spewing molten fury into the sky and turning the darkness into an inferno. The smart glass walls flickered briefly, adjusting to the intense heat beyond, but inside, the calm air of the restaurant
remained undisturbed.
Olivine was a moon in orbit around a huge gas giant which they had named Neon. In the sky, Neon loomed like a colossal jewel, its rings stretching outward in a delicate halo around the celestial titan. Beyond it, the star Beta Comae Berenices slipped quietly beneath the moon’s horizon, like a gleaming coin sinking into the velvet sea of night.
Eileithyia was a thin woman with blue eyes that sparkled like distant stars. She styled her long blonde hair in a French braid. Wearing a silver dress that mirrored the glow of the molten lava outside, she paired it with silver sandals. She often wished she was back on alien worlds where you could walk outside without a protective suit. She had explored some of the Imperium's colony worlds, witnessing trees that surpassed the height of the domes of Surefire City and landscapes submerged in an ocean of green. Eileithyia closed her eyes, remembering:
Trees so tall they could brush the heavens. And she loved gazing out over mountainsides full of wildflowers.
Another waitress, Janet, came out of the kitchen, stopped and smiled. “Ooh, licorice.”
With a grin, Eileithyia opened a hyper-spatial pouch at her wrist, withdrew a few more sticks of the red treat. Handing some to Janet, she bit down on another one.
The licorice was a wild bloom of sweetness, its tangy petals unfolding like a bright, fragrant flower in spring.
There was a soft, tinkling sound and Eileithyia looked over at the entrance to the restaurant just as the door panels dematerialized. A man walked in, carrying a bouquet of red roses in a vase, enhanced with soft pink lilies and lavender sprigs. “Eileithyia Sophronia?”
Eileithyia took the licorice out of her mouth and nodded.
The man placed the vase of flowers onto the counter near the
cash register, smiled, and departed. Eileithyia stared at the burst of color and felt a chill dribbling down her spine. “I can’t believe it.”
With a raised eyebrow, Janet glanced at the delivery card. “That Dietrich guy is creepy,” she said. “You should call the police.”
Not wanting to know what Dietrich had scribbled on the card this time, Eileithyia shook her head. “I only went out with him once,” she muttered. “He’s not a bad person, though.”
“He’s a stalker,” said Janet. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He’s evil.”
Eileithyia crossed her arms and held back a laugh. “I don’t believe in evil.”
Closing her eyes, Janet inhaled the floral aroma. “Just because you’re in the Imperial Star Force doesn’t mean you’re immune to stalkers. You think you can just ignore him until you’re deployed again?”
Eileithyia looked up through the transparent dome at the stars. The Imperium was a vast and ordered empire that stretched out from Sol in every direction for fifty light years. She would soon venture out there
again, between the stars. “Of course I can ignore him. I’m only working as a waitress while I’m on leave.”
Janet gave her a look that spoke volumes ‒ You’re an idiot. You can’t ignore this. Dietrich is dangerous. But she changed the subject. “Why work while on vacation?”
Eileithyia sighed. “I need something to do. Sitting around watching war games all day is driving me crazy.”
Televised war games were the primary source of entertainment on Olivine. The military liked to test new weapons on the moons of Neon, and it had become a popular pastime. Eileithyia hated it.
With a shrug, Janet sighed and picked up the vase of flowers. “Maybe I’ll give this to the pilot of the supply shuttle. He’s a cutie.”
Eileithyia shook off the icy feeling crawling down her back and managed a smile. “You do that.”
Another tinkling sound rang out as the crystal doors to the restaurant dematerialized once more. A group of star sailors came in. Starships of the Imperium were bound to the heavens by sails that drank in the light of distant suns. They glided
through a starry sea, harnessing their energy like ancient mariners. Starships carried the hopes and dreams of humanity out into the void. Eileithyia loved the company of star sailors and she couldn’t help but smile when she saw them come in.
Janet nodded towards them. “That’s the crew of the Santa Maria Del Mar,” she said. “You want to get their orders?”
“Absolutely.”
Twenty-two holographic display panels flickered across the walls, each streaming a different war game: live hover tank battles on the nine moons around Neon, with real-time action rendered in breathtaking detail. Above the bar, a massive ten meter projection captured a panoramic view of Olivine’s main battlefield, where hover tanks roared over craters, firing missiles, blaster cannons and laser cannons at their robotic adversaries. Patrons cheered as the high-stakes combat unfolded, their drinks vibrating with the haptic thrum of distant blasts. The air buzzed with tension, as if the very ground beneath them trembled with the power of the ongoing war games.
Eileithyia went over to the newcomers, wondering what stories the star sailors had brought back from their recent trip to 61 Virginis, the provincial capital. They had been coming here even before she worked at the sports grill. Usually interesting, they would spend two or three hours talking about their exploits, eating, and drinking.
The Sail Master of the Santa María del Mar, Arnold Carrington, was a powerful, rugged man who wore a Hawaiian shirt. Today, he sat looking outside at the lunar landscape, as if he was waiting for something else besides the rest of his crew to arrive. The glow from a distant fountain of magma spilled onto the floor of the restaurant, sharpening the shadows. He was fiddling with one of those old style keys, which he held onto in one hand. As she approached the table, he looked up. His eyes were intent, but friendly. “Hi.”
Eileithyia brushed away a strand of
hair that fell into her eyes. “What can I get you, Sail Master?”
“I’ll have an iced tea,” he said.
“Me too,” said one of the other star sailors, who’d just arrived.
Walking over to the bar, she retrieved the orders while listening to the battlefield sounds blaring overhead. As she stepped out onto the floor, more of the star sailors arrived. Delivering the drinks, she took the rest of their orders while they settled in.
A noisy rumbling came from just outside the dome. Eileithyia glanced through the transparent graphene-infused wall and noticed that the refrigeration shuttle had just arrived with its weekly delivery. The noise sent an annoying dissonance into the restaurant, blotting out all sounds. Eileithyia wondered how the star sailors put up with the racket. The shuttle seemed to be always arriving when they were here.
The Sail Master had a look of relief on his face. For an instant, Eileithyia pondered his reaction. She looked into his eyes and felt a cold certainty there, usually hidden beneath a friendly gaze. Muttering soft words to himself, he stroked a gold cross necklace hanging from his neck. He spoke to the group, “I’m sorry, everyone. Nothing I can do about the refrigeration shuttle.” He grinned. “It’s my fault.”
Eileithyia echoed his grin. He said the same thing every time they came here. After getting their lunch orders, she went inside to deliver them to the kitchen. A flash of light made her blink. Standing before her was a gleaming robot slave, its chrome body catching the light from outside. “Mistress Sophronia, have you seen Janet? Mr. Sinclair wants to see her.”
Mr. Sinclair was the manager. Hoping that her friend wasn’t in trouble, she handed the orders to the cook. “Yeah, I’ll go get her.”
“Thank you, Mistress Sophronia.”
Blue illumination lined the airlock to the shuttle landing bay, indicat-
ing that the force field was still on. A stairway led down from the back of the restaurant to the landing bay below, where the refrigeration shuttle settled, rumbling and clattering away. Eileithyia glanced around, not seeing Janet at all.
The side doors to the shuttle stood open, with a metal ramp descending to the surface. Wondering if she was about to catch her friend smooching with the pilot inside the back of the shuttle, she went up the ramp. The vase with the bouquet sat on the ship’s deck just inside the doors. “Janet?”
The noise from the refrigeration shuttle was so loud that she doubted her friend could hear her calling, so she went inside. An automatic light came on. White mist floated out of the back of the shuttle. A titanium-alloy door with a viewing port stood at the rear of the compartment.
Eileithyia moved further in. “Janet, where are you?”
Hanging from hooks suspended from the roof, a dozen human corpses dangled in a tidy row, packed in like cattle carcasses. Expressions of horror frozen on their faces. Eileithyia caught her breath.
Heart pounding, she felt cold waves of terror ripple down her spine. She retreated a few paces.
A pounding noise made her jump. The loud thumping came from behind the titanium-alloy door, followed by a muffled cry that echoed through the cold, sterile passage. Fighting off a wave of panic, Eileithyia went up to the titanium-alloy door. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure that the pilot wasn’t behind her, she called out, “I’m here!”
A man yelled from behind the door, “Help me!”
The voice did not belong to Janet. Again, she looked over her shoulder. The pilot was nowhere around. Eileithyia stepped closer to the door and stopped. “Who are you?”
“My name is Samael. The pilot went crazy! He killed all of those people. He’s going to kill me, too!”
“I’ll go get help,” said Eileithyia. “I’ll be right back.”
Eileithyia moved quietly to the side door and crept down the ramp, but before she could move another step, the doors to the restaurant opened. A man came out, smiling.
He wore a tight t-shirt with a
picture of a pin-up girl under his flight suit, and motorcycle boots. His leather gloves were blood splattered as he pointed at her. He had short, dark hair and square glasses. His holographic badges marked him as the pilot of the refrigerator shuttle. He put his hands on his hips and gave her a friendly smile. “Hello.”
Biting her lip, Eileithyia muttered a hello.
“Checking out my shuttle?”
Eileithyia glanced around. “Actually, I was looking for my friend, Janet.”
He chuckled. “Let me show you around, then.”
He walked with the casual strut of a pilot, who wasn’t afraid of anything. Before she could move, he was there, right beside her. With a gentle hand, he led her toward the hatch of the shuttle. Eileithyia fought an urge to run away, knowing that he could easily catch her if he tried. He can’t know that I saw what’s in there.
His touch was gentle. With a proud tone, he announced, “This refrigeration shuttle boasts advanced nanomaterial insulation—seven centimeters in the floor, side walls, and ceiling, and ten centimeters in the
front wall for maximum efficiency.”
Eileithyia tensed at his touch, but thought it best to play along. He can’t know.
Gripping her elbow, he ushered her inside and around the shuttle. “The system features vertical airflow, auto-cleaning induct fans, and a dynamic oscillating damper. Internal quantum probes and a precise thermostatic control unit maintain a stable temperature. Two automated front access hatches, side by side, seamlessly integrate with the shuttle’s refrigeration system for easy loading and unloading.”
They came around to the side door again and stopped. The pilot let go of her arm and gave her a handsome smile. “Quite a nice rig, no?”
Eileithyia had an urge to cross her arms, but didn’t want to move. “Yeah, she’s a beaut,” she muttered. Glancing at the open door, she said, hoping to keep the tremor out of her voice, “So you deliver meat to the restaurant every week?”
“Yep.”
The scent of flowers drifted down from the open hatch. It reminded her of her stalker, Dietrich. “Well, thanks.
If you see my friend, tell her that the manager is looking for her, okay?”
“Sure thing,” he said. “What’s her name?”
“Janet.” She looked at him queerly. Because Janet said they were an ‘item.’
“What’s your name?”
“Eileithyia.”
“That’s beautiful. Where does it come from?”
“It’s Greek.”
“Hi Eileithyia. I’m Les.”
For a moment, Eileithyia forgot what she had seen inside the shuttle. “Wait a minute. Aren’t you one of the star sailors from the Santa Maria Del Mar?”
Les chuckled. “Yes. But I’m not really a shuttle pilot, though.” Glancing at the refrigeration shuttle, a dark, thoughtful expression filled his face. “I’m just helping a friend.”
Once or twice, Eileithyia had seen him coming into the restaurant from the back entrance after landing the shuttle outside the sports grill, to slip into the crowd of star sailors. He always left before the others. “Normally, you pilot the shuttles on the Santa Maria Del Mar, right?”
“Ahuh, but today I’m helping out a friend.” Les rubbed a hand across his chin. “This is a special case.”
Her phone rang, causing her to jump. She picked it up. “Yes?”
Dietrich’s smooth voice came over the phone. “Eileithyia? Did you get my flowers?”
She furrowed her brow. “Dietrich, don’t call me at work. In fact, don’t call me at all. You get me?”
“You don’t want to make me angry again,” said Dietrich. “Don’t hang up.”
Eileithyia turned the phone off and put it away.
“Having trouble with a guy?”
“No, well, yeah.”
“I can take care of him for you, if you want,” said Les.
“What?” An image of Dietrich hanging upside down, naked and bloody, inside the refrigeration shuttle stuck in her mind. Eileithyia shook her head. “No. He’s not really that bad.”
“The reason I say it is because I work as an attorney for the captain of the Santa Maria Del Mar.” He shrugged. “I could get you a restraining order if necessary. I could file the paperwork for you right now, if you want.”
“No, thanks.” Eileithyia glanced at the door to the restaurant. “Well, I’d better get back to work.”
“I might as well give you my order.” Les looked into her eyes. “Can I get a steak?”
“How do you like it cooked?”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “I like it well done, but don’t burn it.”
Trembling, Eileithyia went into the restaurant, wondering what she was going to say to the police. Would they even believe her? For a moment, she considered forgetting about it, but Samael, still inside the shuttle, was in danger.
Eileithyia picked up some orders and delivered them to the star sailors. A few of the robots helped carry out plates of food, too. Their bright silver chrome bodies shone with orange light from the magma outside. Eileithyia sometimes wondered why restaurants didn’t use robots exclusively, but people preferred to deal with people.
“Excuse me,” said Mr. Carrington, the Sail Master. “Can I ask you a question?”
Eileithyia raised her eyebrows. “Yes?”
“Do you believe in the Devil?”
During the Renaissance, science and religion had split into two distinct realms.
However, by the twenty-first century, following the discovery of
quantum physics, Spirituality and science had merged back together once again. Consciousness and thought powered all interstellar civilizations, but nobody ever thought about the Devil.
Eileithyia wondered if she had heard him right. “What?”
“The reason I’m asking,” he said, “is that one of my star sailors, Greg, is studying an AI program that has the potential to seize control of an entire star system, subjugating its planets and plunging them into tyranny. He says that all AIs are the work of the Devil.”
“Oh,” muttered Eileithyia. “Really?”
Greg was a tall man with gray hair and a friendly expression. A pair of glasses shielded a maniacal gleam in his eyes. “Actually,” he said, “this AI program is a Chinese dragon, not the Devil.”
One of the star sailors—a woman with dark curly hair—interrupted. “There’s no such thing as evil. Everyone knows that.”
Mr. Carrington’s eyes held dark malice, as if her comment infuriated him. “You shouldn’t say that, Melinda.” He put the old style key down on the table. “Only evil says
that there is no such thing as evil.”
Eileithyia glanced down at the key. Could it be the one to unlock the door inside the refrigeration shuttle?
John, a quiet star sailor sitting at the end of the table, asked, “If someone is truly evil, do you think they should be allowed to live?”
“No,” Mr. Carrington declared, "We must destroy evil. Wherever it’s found."
They appeared to be concentrating on Greg's AI program still.
John crossed his arms. “You can’t kill the Devil. His spirit would just jump into another human and possess him, too.” He chuckled. “Then there’s the problem of getting rid of all the bodies.”
Images of the corpses inside the refrigeration shuttle came to mind. Eileithyia shuddered.
“What if you make a mistake?” asked Melinda. “You wouldn’t want to kill innocent people just because you thought they were evil.”
“You can lock him up,” said Mr. Carrington. He glanced through the transparent graphene dome at the
refrigeration shuttle. “Isn’t that right, Les?”
Eileithyia shuddered. The pilot had come up behind her—quiet.
He shrugged. “We can only hope.”
“If the Devil ever got free though,” Mr. Carrington paused for dramatic effect, “it would be a catastrophe.”
John laughed. “Dogs and cats sleeping together—pure chaos. That sort of thing?”
Mr. Carrington’s eyes went dark. His voice dropped to a whisper. “If ever someone freed the Devil from his chains, his wrath would pour forth upon the stars, and the heavens would tremble at his fury. He would unleash unspeakable wars of dreadful magnitude. Plagues would stain the very air on countless planets with decay. An abyss of torment would open up, so vast that even the stars would wither in despair. His shadow would eclipse the light of heaven and a thousand years of unbroken night would swallow the galaxy, casting all into eternal despair.”
Everyone fell into silence, imagining it.
Eileithyia peered into Mr. Carrington’s eyes, and there she beheld a terrible abyss ‒ an unfathomable void where reason had long since dissolved, leaving only the writhing tendrils of madness.
“If you could catch him, what would you do with him?” asked Melinda.
“That’s a good question. It would have to be someplace secure,” muttered Greg. “But I don’t see how you’d keep the Devil locked up.”
The conversation so enthralled Eileithyia, she forgot to return to the kitchen.
Mr. Carrington locked eyes on Eileithyia. His eyes seemed to stir with an unsettling, otherworldly intelligence. He smiled. “So, back to my original question: do you believe in the Devil?”
Pulling herself free from his fiery eyes, Eileithyia shook her head. “Superstition and nonsense,” she muttered.
At that moment, Janet and a pair of robots came out with their orders. “There you are, Eileithyia.” Janet whispered, “I thought Dietrich had snatched you away.” She winked at Les.
Eileithyia stepped aside to make room for the plates of food. The scent of hamburgers, French fries and pasta filled the air. Eileithyia noticed that Mr. Carrington had left the key on the table behind an empty glass of iced tea. She retrieved the glass, surreptitiously picking up the key. He didn’t seem to notice. “I’ll get you a refill.”
“Thanks,” he muttered, fixated on his food.
While Mr. Carrington and Les were busy, Eileithyia went through the kitchen and downstairs to the refrigeration shuttle. The side hatch was closed. Glancing over her shoulder, she went up the ramp and found the hatch locked. She tried the key and it fit perfectly.
She opened it and slid it to the side. The automatic light came on when she entered the ship. Moving past the corpses, with a shudder, all hanging in a grim row, she moved to the back of the compartment.
“Who’s there?” called Samael.
Eileithyia approached the titanium-alloy door. “It’s me.” She looked into the viewing port, but it was too foggy to see inside. “I have the key. I’m here to help.”
“Oh, thank me,” he said.
Cold mist seeped out of the refrigerator, surrounding Eileithyia. It clung to her skin like a writhing serpent. She looked down at the latch on the hatch. “Wait,” she muttered. “There’s no lock.”
“Then open it! They’re going to kill me!”
Eileithyia furrowed her brow. “Why can’t you open it from the inside?”
“Never mind that!” said Samael. “He’ll be back any minute. Open the door!”
Shivering against a thousand nightmares, Eileithyia looked at the unlocked titanium-alloy hatch. She tried to see through the porthole again. ‘Evil doesn’t exist... or maybe it really exists?’ she pondered.
“Open the door!”
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BY KYLE MALONE
From the moment you disembark, you will have alien written in ink on every stitch of your skin. Your child will be born with that same tattoo, as will many generations after."
‘You must go on.’
Those four words, belted out by an Orinthi guardsman, propel you forward. He adds a push, and you trip on a broken paving stone.
On your right, a screaming shell hits a watchtower, and like a puppet cut from its strings, the building crumbles. You shut your eyes quickly, but the dust belched from the explosion floods your mouth. You cough back up the soot, but not before vomit bubbles up your throat. After wasting a half-minute hacking up rations, you wipe the bile from your lips and search the remains of the street.
Everywhere the inferno rages. You smell boiled blood. Singed hair. The fragrance of fire. Clouds of smoke choke the city, swamping your vision. Through black tears, you spy a legless father.
He sits in the remnants of a shop, calling out hopelessly to relatives buried by the blast. The charred limbs and chalky faces poking through the wreckage are the only
answer. When one little red-painted hand does wave weakly, the father crawls off in that direction, braving a sea of shrapnel.
The few living watch his pitiful progress. The many dead stare unblinking at the burning sky. You are pregnant with their future. However short it may be.
You stagger forward towards a crossroads. A month ago, thousands thronged a market there, milling about the stalls, haggling over salted meat and copper jewellery and painted pottery. If a war existed, its melody sounded beneath the music of day-to-day dalliance.
You and Havi sat at the park bench, now a cratered foxhole, and watched kids play a nameless ball game, discussing whether the spark of life finally ignited inside you would be a teacher or a doctor or an actress. Veteran parents planned too, gossiping about colleges and careers and dowries for daughters. You didn’t know the same future they fussed over so
much was already disappearing beneath the shifting sands.
Even a week ago, when officials set up roadblocks, installed curfews, and handed out rifles like toys to wide-eyed men too old for the front, it felt like a game. But when rumours of Orinthia’s defeat reached the city, you knew better than to pray in the temple for salvation. Instead, you drew Havi’s shoulder cannon from the closet, kissed him goodbye on the doorstep, and sent him off to join the other fledgling ‘Father Battalions’ in the square. You had your duty, and he had his.
The Navarri assault on the city began that night.
You press on now, up the hill to where the evacuating ship waits. If the Orinthi people are to endure, every child, born or unborn, must escape the carnage. The crew, digitally monitoring the vitals and location of all women on the flight manifesto, know you are close. They know you are alive.
You cannot hear the voice in your head above the noise. Orinthia is itself pregnant, bearing the sounds of air-raid sirens and ringing bells and government holograms urging calm on a loop. You pass a barracks. The posters outside should show a guardsman shouting ‘Forward for Orinthia!’ and hoisting a red banner as he charges. They tore it down. Navarri agents are inside the city, sapping resistance. There is no
brave banner boy left in the picture. The remains of the tattered posters say only ‘Forward!’ Forward.
Forward.
You reach the spacecraft soaked in sweat, heart hammering the wall of your chest. Your Navi-Link tells you the other passengers are already inside. Before you step onto the platform, you cast one last look at
Orinthia. The Navarri rebels have breached the wall, but the chatter of gunfire tells you that, in the maze of metal and masonry where once stood trendy townhouses, Orinthi guardsmen have not given up the fight. Every step into the city will cost the Navarri hundreds of soldiers. Sadly, it is a price the great host can gladly afford to pay.
And must pay.
You hate your enemy but know the same forces moving you to flight will drive them to sack the city. The Orinthi will blast every bullet and blunt every blade trying to stop them, but no shore will turn back the Navarri wave now. The ancient lore that you first heard sitting cross-legged in front of your grandfather says, ‘from the sea the sands came, and to the sea the sands must return.’ The fall of Orinthia has arrived as stubbornly sure as the evening tide.
Your gaze lands on your home neighbourhood, where Havi and the other fathers wait to spring a doomed ambush. You grip the ritual knife at your side. You would prefer to die down there in the city with him. But Orinthi law dictates a father dies with the nest. A mother must live, if only to source the next one. You swore oaths on such traditions. Which is why, holding your swollen belly with one hand, and planting your dagger in the dirt with the other, you step aboard the ship’s platform.
One inch at a time, the dozen deserts of Orinthia vanish from view. When the door clangs shut, there is no war, but no peace either. Cradling all that remains of home—your growing child—you go to join the others in grief.
Bit by bit, you and them, the other survivors, sink into space. Huddled in the hull of the Winter Dawn, your people let the vessel drift rudderless at first. After the mourning period of Orinthi passes though, a sweating sickness sweeps the ship, carrying off four elders.
Next, a guardsman hand-picked to escort the last Orinthi to safety
gets drunk on surgical spirits and wracked with guilt, attempts to decompress the living quarters. After an hour, you take him down, but only with the help of three others. During the scuffle, you spot the ship’s supplies sitting in the shadows of the hold. The half-empty boxes stare back at you. You know then; the time has come to act.
Assembling the remaining elders, you propose that the Orinthi seek sanctuary among the stars. A few argue for contacting other ships, but you dissuade them. Even the safest routes through space teem with bandits, and the Winter Dawn, stripped of its laser cannons ahead of the siege of the city, presents too tempting a target. If anything, the lack of weapons might encourage a friendly people to grant you refuge. One by one, you list other habitable planets in the galaxy.
‘Nevtar.’
‘Ovidon.’
‘Sansourdia.’
‘Earth.’
In school, you chewed on such clunky names, giggling with your classmates. At college, you gleaned a few titbits more about those planets from the library, if only to feign otherworldliness at cocktail parties. Now, you speak the same names and try to taste whether a place you must trust your people to is wealthy, or diplomatic, or hostile.
They soon decide on Earth. The dominant species sits a few rungs lower on the technological ladder than the Orinthi. But they have a similar anatomy. Better yet, they desire peace.
The initial overtures go well. The leader of the United States speaks for Earth, or at least drowns out the other voices. You could tell him you saw the end of an empire once, and it wasn’t pretty. But as the person pleading for protection, you must leave such judgement at the door. You clutch your swollen stomach and say nothing.
‘If the bitter blood runs so deep, will the Navarri not chase you across the universe?’ the President asks, before ending the call.
‘They are full,’ you lie, almost as a reflex. ‘Well fed from their conquest.’
The President looms closer to the camera.
‘There is nothing more you need to tell me, then?’
You squeeze your hands into fists when you answer.
‘No.’
In the human tongue, grammatically, the word ‘No’ makes up a full sentence. It is an odd construction. But as the president nods, and his advisers thank you for your time, you can’t help but feel you’ve left many truths unspoken. You know genocide is greater than galaxies.
The Navarri will never stop.
Never.
When the Earth finally grants asylum, the news spreads throughout the ship, injecting hope into every survivor. Your jaw loosens only a fraction. In such tight confines, a single dissenter could still strike a mutinous match. For relief, you turn to your Navi-Link.
Passed down from generation to generation, the Navi-Link contains the memory of the entire Orinthi civilisation. After children, the pocket devices were the prize the elders most desperately desired to rescue from the Navarri. With so many buried dead, it seemed
silly to have fretted over such trivial things as files.
But in a hundred years, no living Orinthi will have set foot on their own planet. In a thousand, the desert will have swallowed up the ruins of your homeland. You hold in your hands all the gathered relics of your people, the last vestiges of Orinthia. In a way, you understand the sacrifice.
As an unofficial spokesperson, you feel compelled to learn all you can about this ‘USA’. You hibernate in your sleeping pod for weeks, absorbing everything from Valley Forge to Vietnam, and from the Manhattan Project to Martin Luther King. Only when the screen blackens, and you glimpse your pitted silver skin in the reflection, do you relent with a sigh. It is filled with equal parts of relief and frustration.
Mixing up state capitals or forgetting the victor at Antietam or mispronouncing ‘It’s Britney, bitch’ will not mark you as an outsider. The humans will call you foreign for your deep voice, and your Orinthi dress, and the thousand tiny uncultured slips you make from one day to the next.
From the moment you disembark, you will have alien written in ink on every stitch of your skin. Your child will be born with that same tattoo, as will many generations after. In a hundred years, perhaps the humans will lust after Orinthi culture, ripping it to pieces to make fashion, or music, or art. Or maybe a son of Earth will want to date your great-granddaughter.
But only when the next planet
burns up and a newer, stranger race begs for refuge will you and your people enjoy a reprieve. After all, the Orinthi are not the first migrants and will not be the last. You are still considering whether that thought brings you comfort when the captain announces the Earth is in sight.
The Navi-Link warned you Earth would be different. But when you emerge from the ship, all those differences register in a single shaking second. Here, the air feels too thin, the starlight too bright, and the ground too unyielding beneath your sandalled feet. Worse, in the hangar you are directed to park in, there are humans everywhere. Like your saviours are squashing as many bodies as possible into the place to kindly let you know the planet is full.
But come in anyway, why don’t you?
Most of the reception party are soldiers. An entire legion stands there, kitted out with rocket launchers and hand cannons and the bigger guns grandfather called seven-a-second shooters. Like the Navarri, the humans must believe in kill or be killed, because there are no ceremonial spears or honour banners here.
Still, as you file past ranks a hun-
dred deep, you get the nagging sensation that if Orinthia had boasted such firepower, you’d be sitting in your pleasure gardens right this very moment.
A banner reading ‘Welcome Orinintis’ hangs above the doorway. Despite the spelling error, the blue letters warm the hollow spaces of your heart. On cue, you smile and wave and flash the crowd a thumbs up, mirroring presidential candidates. If your daughter grows up to become an actress, she’ll be proud of this performance. Mercifully, your hosts play their part in the pantomime too.
The cameras capture the banner. The doctors and reporters and politicians standing beneath grin and wave. But there are too many hard lines in their expressions. If endless nights watching ‘Friends’ on your Navi-link have taught you anything, it’s that such sincerity lasts only so long as the red lights on the cameras are blinking.
At first, you treat the human faces like eclipses, and avoid staring at them. But curiosity soon overcomes your fear. Meeting the gaze of several soldiers, you see kindness. The man ushering you smiles with his eyes, like Havi did as a boy. But behind his warmth is a colder, more primal suspicion. Friends from home
studied you this way once, asking questions born of boredom.
‘Will you marry?’
‘Will you work?’
‘Will you birth your baby?’
Leading you through the chaos, your human companion now wordlessly asks more dangerous things. Questions you see on the lips of every onlooker. Questions for which no refugee has the answer.
‘Why are you here?’
‘What do you want?’
‘When are you leaving?’
A voice crackles to life over the intercom. It spits out a familiar four-word instruction. You sense the same words in the gun-first gestures of the soldiers, and the glistening eyes of your people, and the urgent kicks in your stomach. And when you pause, you can almost hear those four words breathed through cracked lips on a windswept plain a light year away.
‘You must go on.’
You must go on.
You must go on.
Join the Fight Against Pancreatic Cancer!
By Hojack, Celestial Envoy
The Planetary Communiqué is a section reserved for the dissemination of official intergalactic communications from our galactic overlords to the subjugated planets and territories. The editorial staff does not endorse or hold opinions regarding the content of such communications. Frankly, we lost several of them who did! Therefore, Hojack requires compliance with all opinions and edicts issued by the Galactic potentate and its politburo.
Oh, you spellbinding blunderbeasts of Earth, how your soft, gelatinous brains squish under the pressure of a group chat! From the marbled throne of my astral palace, I, Overlord Grawth, once again find myself snorting stardust over your latest escapade in collective incompetence: an incident so rich with folly, we’ve assigned it its own constellation—Signalgate, the sacred symbol of pressing “send” before engaging a single neuron.
Imagine our glee as your top brass—those proud, chest-thumping humans entrusted with world-ending buttons—accidentally added a journalist to their encrypted war chat. And not just any journalist. The one who writes everything down. In public.
Hojack’s Was Utterly Mortified
My ever-suffering emissary to your planet, Hojack, filed this report between sobs of cosmic laughter and fits of mortified empathy. He recounts how your military minds, in their infinite haste to plan a coordinated attack
on foreign soil, gathered on a glorified phone app—Signal, a platform mainly used by rebellious teenagers and podcast listeners afraid of “the cloud.”
In the heat of strategic discussion, someone—most likely an assistant secretary of oops—typed the wrong name. Poof! In popped Jeffrey Goldberg, the human embodiment of “this will be
published.” Hojack could barely finish his report without facepalming all eight of his ocular stalks. Your species, so fond of secrets, is also bafflingly addicted to leaking them—one push notification at a time.
The moment your officials discovered the error, the true performance began. Generals stiffened. Politicians began an interpretive dance of denial. Aides attempted to erase digital footprints with the fervor of toddlers scrubbing Sharpie off the wall.
I particularly enjoyed the brief period of “We meant to do that,” followed by “This wasn’t classified,” followed by “We need to reclassify everything including lunch menus.” Earth, my darling powder keg of missteps, your responses are like soufflés in zero gravity—destined to implode before completion.
And now, with this diplomatic burlesque on full display, your citizens are left wondering: Who else is in the group chat? The Pope? A Kardashian? Hojack once joined for a moment just to see if he’d get added too.
By virtue of my intergalactic jurisdiction—and in the interest of preserving some shred of your galactic dignity—I hereby issue the following official Edicts to guide your fumbling digital fingers:
Edict of Address Accuracy
If you must plan an airstrike, do so using secure channels—not the same app that teenagers use to plan flash mobs. Our records show one participant sent a missile schedule directly beneath a cat GIF.
Edict of Platform
If you must plan an airstrike, do so using secure channels—not the same app that teenagers use to plan flash mobs. Our records show one participant sent a missile schedule directly beneath a cat GIF.
Effective immediately, all Earth-based security debacles must be paired with a musical recap. Hojack prefers jazz-funk, but will settle for showtunes. He insists that if he must witness your doom spiral, it should at least have rhythm.
Do not attempt to out-bluster your blunders. We’ve seen your press conferences. Every defensive statement adds ten minutes to the galactic laugh track.
We are watching. We are entertained. We are deeply, thoroughly baffled.
Should you wish to join the larger galactic community, we suggest learning the difference between “confidential” and “CC: entire planet.”
In the meantime, carry on, dear Earthlings—click away, leak your secrets, and remember: we’ll be up here, basking in the radiant folly of your every keystroke. Honestly, if the galaxy had an awards show for “Best Unintentional Comedy,” your entire command structure would be an EGOT.
End transmission.
by Keith 'Doc' Raymond
Mark O’Bannon is probably the first stellar cartographer in the known universe. Sure, there are astronomers, but he has filled the galactic star map with not just points of light but also with stories and novels for them, both memorable and inspiring. When you pick up his Imperium Star Map and point, a legend will emerge from the system you selected. Beyond his writing, he is the CEO of Shadowstar Games whose entertainments place you in the ‘Fantasy Imperium,’ helping you to create your own stories. Mark is also a screenwriter and teacher. In the latter role, he helps aspiring authors interested in Self-Publishing to succeed in all aspects of the business. And he has rubbed elbows with the greats in science fiction. Read on to find out who…
Wow! It’s great to be with you today, Mark. Thanks for joining SavagePlanets and sharing your visions. I’d like to start off with your stellar cartography. What drove you to collect all the data points needed to build the galactic map you freely share on your website, https://
meowpublishing.com? Share with us how you got started and why? Is it an ongoing project, and will you be assigning planets to the stars you’ve charted as science catches up with the fiction?
I have always loved looking at the stars. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to become an astronomer. I have always been an avid gamer and have played most pen & paper RPGs (Role-Playing Game). Traveler was the science fiction RPG of choice when I was a kid. I also discovered an RPG book by FASA called, “The Book of Mars—A Combat System for All RPGs.” I designed my Role Playing game with a similar system used in this book. In an RPG game session, I have always wanted to see what was around me, including star maps. There were no good star maps of actual stars, so I created my own. It took me several years before I found the data for the nearest 1000 stars.
It didn’t exist, as far as I knew. In the 90s, they finally created a database, and I downloaded it and started working on my map. I wanted to see where every star
within 100 light years was, with X, Y, Z coordinates (in light years). This project took me several years to finish because I had to collect the data, convert the Right Ascension, Declination and Distance (Light Years) to X, Y, Z coordinates.
I figured out how to create the formulas in my excel sheet and now all I have to do is type in the data and it calculates the coordinates. The problem is that it takes several minutes to process each star and I still have another 600
Type M red stars, give or take, to process for my star map, which shows the stars within fifty light years. I have another 3000 stars to process for my larger map. *sigh* :)
I see a merch star map for sale in your future. Is there a part of the map you have reserved for future novels and stories? Or will you intentionally leave sectors blank as a mystery or because you imagine them to be populated by hostile aliens like the Borg from Star Trek?
There are thousands of stars to play with. I have only used a handful of stars in my stories. When writing, I pick a star and then do the research on it. There are several ways to develop a story.
You can begin with the premise, the plot, the character, the theme, or even dialogue. I like to start with the setting. I haven't put much detail into most of the stars on my map yet. The plan is to just invent as I go, giving names to planets as needed. So this is an ongoing project.
In my Imperium universe, all the stars within fifty light years of Sol have been conquered, so the hostile aliens are beyond that sphere.
An interesting side note is that when writing my novel, “Touching Infinity,” I picked a star at random on my map. I needed to make up a name for a planet and thought, “Galileo” would be a great name for a planet. When I researched that particular star, 55 Cancri, I learned that we have discovered planets there. One planet, ironically, they gave the name, “Galileo!”
I’d like to turn now to your Shadows and Dreams series. Here, you blur the line between fantasy and science fiction. You are obsessed with the Land of Dreams, and it is constantly being attacked by unique enti-
ties throughout the series. You have made it a place, perhaps an outgrowth from our collective consciousness. It starts out with Erin O’Neill discovering she is a Faerie Changeling named Aisling. Tell us how the series got started. Your connection to Celtic culture and the mythic creatures that populate it, and where it all ends?
I’m Irish, so that’s why I started writing stories about faeries. I am also studying the Irish Gaelic language and I put Irish words and phrases in my stories. Did you know all Faeries speak Irish? When developing Shadows & Dreams, I wanted to write a story about a faerie changeling.
I conducted my first panel at the San Diego Comic Con that year (2009, I think). My panelists included George Clayton Johnson (Logan’s Run, 8 Twilight Zone episodes, Oceans Eleven, the first episode of Star Trek), William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run and many other books), David Gerrold (Star Trek writer, he invented Tribbles!), Walter Koenig (Chekov in Star Trek TOS) and also John Truby.
John Truby is the premiere storytelling coach in Hollywood and all use his techniques to become great storytellers themselves. His students wrote: Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones (TV adaptation), Walking Dead (TV adaptation), West Wing, West World, Ozarks, Bridgerton, Peaky Blinders, etc.
I would have had Ray Bradbury on my panel, too, but he wasn’t attending Comic Con on the day of the panel. After the two panels, which were called “Humor in Science Fiction” and “How to Tell a Story,” we all went out to dinner. I was sitting next to my friend, George Clayton Johnson, and I was telling him about my faerie story.
A few nights before the convention, I heard George Noory talk about the Shadow People on his
radio show, Coast to Coast. I told George Clayton Johnson about the Shadow People too. While we were talking, I got the idea of combining the two ideas into one story. George had a quality of expanding your imagination just when you were sitting next to him.
The Shadow People are the echoes of forgotten dreams. When a person gives up on their dreams, hopes, aspirations and desires, their soul dies. They fade away and fall into the Land of Shadows, which is a sort of purgatory world. The faeries are the guardians of dreams and they are at war with the Shadow People, who want to control the dreams of humankind.
I’m working on the second novel in the series now, “The Dark Mirrors of Heaven,” which is about desire. A witch curses the main character, Aisling, and every time she kisses someone, all of that person’s desires fade away. When that person touches another person, their desire fades away, too. So the death of desire spreads across the world like a plague.
All the stories in the Shadows and Dreams series are about how to realize your dreams, using “Think and Grow Rich” techniques. The first novel, “The Dream Crystal” asks the question, “Do dreams really come true?” The second book, “The Dark Mirrors of Heaven,” is about DESIRE. In the next book, “Warfare in Paradise,” I talk about FAITH. There are steps to realizing your dreams, and I plan to go through them, one at a time.
Faeries appear throughout literature and they vary from each other in appearance and ability. The spectrum ranges from Tinker bell in Peter Pan to the mischievous Puck from Midsummer Night’s Dream. Where do your fae fall in this spectrum, or are they unique?
I have written a book on all the mythical monsters in the world for
my RPG game, “Fantasy Imperium.” I haven’t published it yet but hope to do so soon. Drawing inspiration from historical myths to shape my faeries makes them rather terrifying. These are the kinds of fairies that might snatch your children and drag them into the river to drown. I also use other kinds of modern fairies. To distinguish the two types in my stories, the historical fae are spelled, “Faeries” and the modern fae are spelled, “Fairies.”
And now let’s delve into your upcoming series, where the first novel, Aia The Barbarian, is already out. Set in the time of Conan, you have fallen gods, an encroaching warlord aided by a dark sorcerer, and a battle that could enable Aia’s return to her people as a triumphant hero. What drew you to this time period? Tell us more about Aia, and where the other books in the trilogy are going.
Aia the Barbarian is the first of several standalone novels set in the year 480 B.C. I like to write Historical Fantasy and chose that time period because it has a lot of fun events. The movie, “300” took place in this year (The Battle of Thermopylae), and there are several other big events occurring that year for me to play with. The main fun of a Historical Fantasy story is that I can use actual history and then weave in fantasy elements.
There was a town in Italy in the 15th century that was full of the plague. So they rounded up all the cats and killed them, believing that witches caused the Black Death, and all you needed to do was to get rid of their familiars. When they killed the cats, the rat population skyrocketed, and they had more plague. But in a Historical Fantasy, I make all the legends, myths, monsters and magics real. So killing the cats might work in my story. That’s the fundamental difference.
Aia the Barbarian is like Conan or Red Sonja, with the Sword and Sorcery elements, but I also like to put more thinking into the story. My first novel in this series asks the question, “How can a civilized nation defeat a barbarian nation in warfare?”
I wanted to write an Aia the Barbarian story set in Athens when the Persians arrive after the Battle of Thermopylae, in which the Greeks lost. The Persian army came to Athens and burned the city down. 100,000 people had to evacuate before the Persians arrived. It will be fun to weave in fantasy elements into the story.
Beyond these two horizons, we have a third, the Imperium prequels. The science fiction which drew my attention and allows us to introduce our SavagePlanets readers to them. We will focus on Touching Infinity. While it’s the third book in the series, you have done something unique by stating that there are no specific order requirements for reading the prequels. Are the events in the books occurring simultaneously in different parts of the galaxy, or is there a chronology such that each of the main characters in the novels will
meet and work together in the next set of trilogies?
The main story is an epic Science Fiction Space Opera, entitled, “Imperium.” This is similar in structure to a Game of Thrones story, with 8 or 10 main characters in which I switch points of view. Then there are thirty opponents and 200 minor characters. It took me two years to figure out how to write it. There are literally hundreds of techniques I had to master.
I used a TV show kind of design, with ten episodes for the first “season,” which I call a “chronicle.” There will be ten novels of around 200 pages each and six chronicles in the entire story. I have finished all of the first ten novels and am editing them currently.
I hope to release one every month this year, after I write my fantasy novel, “Whiskers.” Yes, I plan to release 11 or 12 novels this year. And No, I do not use AI to write them. I am using advanced story structure techniques.
In a TV show, you only have a few weeks to write an episode, so you have to design your story and write it fast. I have spent many years developing speed while maintaining high quality. Imperium is a serialized story, so you have to read them in order. I am currently planning on doing sixty of these, in six chronicles of ten novels each.
I got the idea for my prequel novels from Babylon 5. They had a movie between every season. These stories didn’t always affect the main story-line. So I thought it would be fun to write a prequel novel for each of the ten main characters, and a few others too. They occur in chronological order, but they are separate stories. They don’t have to be read in any particular order. Pirates of the Imperium is the backstory for the main character of the Imperium,
Seraphine DeVere. Each prequel novel will expand the backstory for a particular character.
With an understanding of advanced story structure techniques, I can design a story quickly, in one or two weeks, and write the novel faster because the scene list is already prepared. I use spreadsheets, unlike most writers, to keep track of everything. I am using specific genre beats woven into a unique pattern, and am combining these with the Seven Steps of Classical Story Structure, and the main punch-counter-punch techniques which drive a story forward.
The prequel novels are each a separate story, but sometimes the characters from the main story threads meet up in a particular story. The events take place at different times, though some may occur at the same time as the other stories.
Pirates of the Imperium, the first prequel novel, is about a character who is dealing with the guilt of committing genocide. High Salvage is about a character in search of treasure, and love. Touching Infinity is a science fiction, mystery, love story and it is a journey into the heart of a supernova.
In Touching Infinity, we have the astrophysicist Alastriona, who, when I read the novel, I shortened to Alice, as I kept tripping over her name. She is a gorgeous blond and anything but dumb, but must still deal with the chauvinism pervasive in the 32nd century. You made Earth the promised land that only pure blood Earthlings may visit. Alastriona has an arranged marriage to a narcissistic Chief Inspector, pure blood. Even if Alastriona is half pure blood, why would the Chief sully himself by marrying beneath him? It seems a little out of character. Is there a method to the madness of their pairing?
Her name is pronounced, “Alas-TREENA.” It’s a Celtic name, and her surname is French. Don Inocencio wants to marry a woman as intelligent as he is, and Alastriona is the smartest woman he could find. He worships her beauty and intelligence and believes that they will “do great things together.”
Not to give the story away, the Lieutenant and astrophysicist Alastriona, her fiancee, and others are on the Tycho Brahe, a ship bound to 1K Pegasi in Touching Infinity. Supposedly, one of the binary stars is about to, or has become, a supernova. How does this event threaten the Imperium, and is there anything they can do to stop it if it hasn’t already exploded?
IK Pegasi is 150 light years from Sol, and scientists believe a supernova endangers all the stars within about 30 light years. However, there are other effects further out, which could drastically affect planets. I chose IK Pegasi because it is a proper candidate for a supernova, and it’s one of the closest stars to Sol that could explode.
The white dwarf in the binary system is not due to explode into a supernova for thousands of years, however. Something has accelerated the star’s evolution, and this is the major mystery of the story. If it had exploded thousands of years in the future, it would also have moved hundreds of light years away, and so it wouldn’t affect us.
Because it is exploding so early, it poses a risk to the colony worlds. The Imperium is settling planets in that direction, towards the constellation of Pegasus. So the immediate danger in the story is to our colonies, not to the Imperium.
The unknown danger is the question, “Who killed the star thousands of years before it’s time?” If an alien civilization had
found the technology to detonate stars, could they threaten all life in human space?
You have created a unique propulsion system for FTL travel, the mandala wormhole. Can you talk about how you came up with it? And is there any basis for it in the current physics? Will this technology evolve when the next trilogy lands? Finally, where is the Imperium series headed? And what have you mapped out for the main characters in each book?
During the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, science and spirituality split into two separate disciplines. I have a few physicist friends and they tell me that one day, soon, the two disciplines could merge back together once again. We can see this with the similar roles of consciousness and Quantum Physics, the intersection of Neuroscience and Meditation, and the search for meaning in. the universe.
My stores take place a thousand years in the future, and I have merged science and spirituality together in the Imperium. While medical robots perform surgeries and physical repairs, healers use energy healing techniques to cure people of their illnesses. I have several types of propulsion in the Imperium stories.
Different planets and alien races use various technologies, too. The Imperium uses anti-gravity to get into orbit. The Draconians use Space Hooks, which are huge spinning structures around their worlds which pick up rockets and bring them into orbit. Other aliens use rocket propulsion to get into orbit.
To travel around a star system, starships of the Imperium use solar sails. While a modern solar sail gains its speed from the solar wind, the force is very light and it would still take a long while to gain enough speed to get anywhere inside a star system
quickly. Since these stories take place a thousand years in the future, I have invented a coating for my solar sails, which magnify the force from the solar winds.
to its destination. A Mandala of light will form and it will pull the starship into a wormhole, leading to the destination star. Starships must erect Hyper-sails to ride the wormhole to the destination.
star, protecting planets and other objects within it.
This allows a starship to attain light-speed quickly. Starships also have thrusters for quick maneuvering, especially for combat, but these engines burn out the prime power source of a starship rapidly. The power source is called a “Sunstone” and these are giant, ten foot tall crystals, which are created in an orbital manufacturing facility close to a hot Type A star.
For travel within a single star system, a starsinger tunes into the local star while inside the starship’s “Cathedral.” This is a chamber filled with oxygen where the starsinger sings. Since they’re tuned to the specific frequency of the local star, the crystals lining the Solar Sails will vibrate and that sail will be tuned to the star. This allows the starship to travel at light-speed within a star system. The cathedral is necessary because sound is used to tune the sails and this requires an atmosphere.
Starsingers are ESPers that can hear the dynamic spheres of the universe. Each star has a unique frequency, like a fingerprint. When a starsinger tunes into the frequency of a star with their intuition, they search for the quantum point in spacetime with the potential to manifest a wormhole. Potentiality becomes actuality, and the song turns into light.
A doorway to hyperspace will open, propelling the starship
All stars have a stellar wind bubble surrounding it. Heliosphere is the term for the bubble around our star. Astrosphere is the term for other stars. The heliosphere/astrosphere is a vast bubble-like region of space around a star, created by the star's solar wind—a continuous stream of charged particles (mostly electrons and protons) emitted from the star's outer layers.
In our solar system, the heliosphere extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto and acts as a protective shield against galactic cosmic rays and interstellar particles. It defines the region of space influenced by the star's magnetic field and solar wind. At the boundary, known as the heliopause/astropause, the pressure from the solar wind balances with the pressure from the surrounding interstellar medium, marking the edge of the heliosphere/astrosphere.
This region is dynamic and fluctuates depending on solar activity, such as sunspots and solar flares. The heliosphere/astrosphere plays a crucial role in shaping the space environment around the
The Termination Shock is the boundary within a star's astrosphere where the solar wind—the continuous stream of charged particles emitted by the star— slows down significantly as it interacts with the interstellar medium (the gas and dust between stars). This occurs because the solar wind is moving faster than the surrounding interstellar material at the star's outer regions, but as it expands outward, it eventually reaches a point where the pressure from the interstellar medium pushes back, causing the solar wind's speed to decrease.
This allows me to tell a story like an old sailing ship, with reefs and currents.
Starships in Imperium look like a cross between an old sailing ship and the lightship in TRON Starships have three sets of three masts that radiate from the cylindrical hull at 120 degree angles. If you were to look straight on at a starship, the masts would look like a peace sign. Starships look like a flower in bloom when it has its solar sails unfurled.
Hyper-sails are larger than solar sails. Once a starship enters a wormhole, it must retract the solar sails and erect the Hyper-sails in order not to become lost in the wormhole. Starships can reform their hull into the form of an ancient sailing ship while retracting six of the nine masts. This allows a starship to land in the ocean of a planet.
Finally, I want to ask you about your self publishing workshops. Many of our readers are also authors, and may choose this over traditional publishing to get their writing out there. Can you talk about the advantages and pitfalls of self publishing? The personality types who would be most successful in this competitive field, and the skill sets one must achieve
to excel as a self-published author.
To succeed as a self-published author, you need to acquire three skills: writing, publishing and marketing.
The best way to become a brilliant writer is to study STORY STRUCTURE, taught by John Truby (https://www.truby. com). You are competing with Stephen King, J. K. Rowling and Ray Bradbury, so your stories must be extremely good. 99% of writers never reach this skill level. Marketing is very important, too. I have a YouTube video which will teach you some basics: https:// youtube/HphJolMmJQM?si=-vHKoGJ8sycLsVeq
Self-Publishing is another important skill to develop. Just talk to other authors and do some searches online and you can pick it up fairly quickly. You can use programs like Vellum (Mac), Atticus (PC) or Kindle Create, which is free from Amazon to format your books. I prefer InDesign, since it gives me plenty of control over the output.
Here’s a great YouTube tutorial on book layout using InDesign: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xkRp7fyP6KM. You should publish on Amazon first, as an ebook and a physical book. Then publish on Ingram Spark, which will allow you to get your books into libraries and bookstores.
Author J. A. Konrath has a great guide to self-publishing here: https://jakonrath.blogspot. com/2010/12/you-should-selfpublish.html
One secret to making money as an author is to write well, write consistently well, and market your books properly. The more books you publish, the easier it is to make money. The value of a customer increases with every book you write.
Oh and one last question: You’ve known Ray Bradbury, Larry Niven, and other famous science fiction authors. Briefly tell us about them, their personalities and how it aligns with their writing. Any surprises?
My brother, Charles Holloway, became friends with many famous authors and used to hang out with them when he lived in L.A. He knew, Ted Sturgeon, Clive Barker, Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury, Dennis Etchison, David Gerrold, Danny Simon, Harlan Ellison, George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan and more. He introduced me and I became friends with several of them.
I became friends with George Clayton Johnson, who wrote 8 Twilight Zone episodes, Logan’s Run, Oceans Eleven and the first episode of Star Trek TOS. George once said to me, “Want to go to dinner?” I said, “Sure.” When we got there, Ray Bradbury met us.
I said to George, “You know Ray Bradbury?” He said that he and Ray were best friends. I had known George for many years, but he never told me this.
Ray Bradbury had just received the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Commandeur) Medal in 2007 for his writing. This award is France's highest honor for Arts and Letters. He was wearing the medal when I met him.
Ray was really nice. During dinner, George Clayton Johnson and Bill Nolan and Ray Bradbury talked about how Rod Serling sold the Twilight Zone and then came over to Ray’s house, asking for advice on the format for the show. I later become friends with one of Ray’s daughters, Bettina Bradbury. We used to talk about cats on Facebook. Ray, like all intelligent people, loved cats.
David Gerrold (who invented Tribbles for Star Trek) is really nice, too. He’s been on several of my
Comic Con panels in San Diego. David Brin lives near me and he’s one of my favorite authors. David is often on my comic con panels, too. I have also met some other great authors and have invited them onto my comic con panels. Gail Carriger is just like her characters in her books. Marc Scott Zicree sold a few hundred hours of TV episodes, including Babylon 5, Star Trek TNG, and more.
I am fortunate to live in Southern California and can drive up to L.A. and meet many of these writers. I know a lot of TV writers, too, though they aren’t as famous as novelists. Somehow, I have met lots of Trek writers.
Larry Niven is a good friend of my best friend, Jimmy Diggs, who sold nine episodes of Star Trek (8 Voyager and 1 DS-9). Jimmy and I recently had lunch with Larry and he is super nice. Larry is quiet, preferring to let others talk. I wrote a short story for Larry’s Man-Kzin War books, but it may not get published because they are not continuing the series at present.
During the Covid pandemic, we did a WonderCon panel over Zoom, and you can watch it here on YouTube: https://youtube/ lQgoJZou8Kw?si=dZL2CPYjVk-mqSWB
Thank you, Mark, for your time and interest in speaking with me today. You have had a remarkable journey in your writing career and other related professions. No doubt your success will continue, and we look forward to reading more of your books. All the best!
by Keith 'Doc' Raymond
On November 1, 2024, a film, released by RJE Films, and produced by Flash Point pictures, came out with little fanfare. But boy, did it strike a pleasant cord with science fiction fans?! Levels written and directed by Adam Stern is a low budget and high concept film, my favorite! People have dubbed it a "poor man's" version of The Matrix, Free Guy, and Gamer combined.
The story opens in a near future city where all the skyscrapers look like rocket ships. Perhaps it’s intentional, as the usual old buildings are not in evidence. We meet Joe (Peter Mooney), a bookstore owner in his thirties, looking out his apartment window. He seems depressed, and for good reason.
Two months before, Joe stops by a newsstand on his way to work and greets Oliver (David Hewlett). They exchange pleasantries, and Joe buys a paper. A short while later, a woman comes into his store and picks up a book. His flirting is rather snarky, but she’s up for it. Ash (Cara Gee) invites him for a coffee right then and there.
Inextricably drawn together, they
talk over cappuccino, and within a short time, they are in love. Now, our EIC feels it’s rather mushy, and sort of brings the story down. But their relationship serves as a vehicle to explore the different Levels they inhabit.
Ash, on her level, works with a
watch- dog group concerned about not only the illegal activities of the Sentec Corporation, but the company’s ethically dubious misuse of digital universes (DU). She targeted Joe to upload data from his DU to the authorities on her level, which she believes is reality. What she didn’t expect was to fall in love with Joe.
Deep in the honeymoon phase of their relationship, Joe and Ash are once more having coffee in their favorite shop, Old Roasters, when a stranger, Hunter (Aaron Abrams), walks in and shoots Ash in the head, killing her. Joe races after Hunter, who heads into a blind alley and disappears. The mystery makes Joe (and the audience) realize something is not right. But he is so deep in grief over the loss of Ash, he becomes a hermit and stays in his apartment for two weeks, alone.
He decides to kill himself and goes out and buys a gun. Loads it, places the pistol against his head, but it doesn’t go off repeatedly. When he fires it into the sofa, it does go off. His home computer system states she will call the police, and he says it’s an accident, don’t call. Confused, he shoots his window and dives out of it, knowing the fall will kill him.
Then the code gets all weird, in Matrix vernacular. He doesn’t fall. In fact, he floats in a field of glass shards outside. When he wakes, he’s back in bed. He gets up and his home computer system tells him there’s an urgent message from Ash. He can’t believe it and
leaves to go to work at the bookstore, stopping by the newsstand on his way to get Oliver’s advice. Oliver suggests he check it out as it might be a late delivery and/or last message from Ash. Joe sits down at the stand and looks at it. Ash tells him to pick up a special delivery she left at the store for him. When he opens the package, it’s a book. Embedded in the book is another layer of code from her level with upload instructions. It also fundamentally alters him, turning him into a strong martial arts expert.
Here’s where the fun begins.
We also discover about this time that Hunter is a software engineer who designed and developed the first digital universe (DU). But he hits a wall in the last step. Hunter meets with his soon to be secret partner, Oliver, who supplies the solution. As a result, Hunter climbs the corporate ladder quickly to become CEO of Sentec. Hunter then creates multiple DU to test out weapons, medicines, and scenarios, to give insight into them for implementing in reality. Except the technology turns him into a megalomaniac, and, as Oliver calls him, a psychopath. Clearly, the bad guy in the film.
This leads to all the action and excitement as Hunter sends Company security to go after both Ash and Joe in their separate realities, trying to thwart their efforts to expose Sentec.
Many critics believed the story was dialogue heavy, which made the plot stumble. But it was such a complex concept that it needed the back story to help you appreciate what is going on. And the only way to get the Levels concept out there was through dialogue. Our EIC approved, and called it a nested doll story where DU is within DU within DU. Knowing this, though, doesn’t adversely affect the ride.
Our EIC had additional thoughts: The focus on the lovers seemed
unbelievable and implausible to me. I couldn't get myself to care about the fictitious relationship between the simulator class and the simulated, especially because the title of the movie gave away the ending.
He went on to say, one defect in this class of movies is the idea that there are just one or two people, despite being severely flawed, who are the architects of a whole new reality.
And finally, he believed there was a third element that defied logic. That there is this one programmer who, with the help of some other flawed character, creates a nested multi-verse of simulations almost single-handedly. And that he governs this world with only three of his minions in a closet some place. Would it be better if there was no fake love interest and no narcissistic programmer with a god-complex?
The CGI visuals are stunning and engaging throughout. Whether the couple has chemistry is up to the viewer, and perhaps our EIC didn’t see it. Oliver believes the empathy Joe and Ash have for each other adds to the glue needed to keep pursuing the existence of and other digital universes.
What is interesting, and ethically compelling, but only mentioned in passing, is that the ‘people’ in a digital universe have value. That deleting a DU is tantamount to genocide. The killing of billions of lives (digital or not) is abhorrent not only in the public opinion of those in which Hunter and Ash’s reality exists, but also to the courts in their world. Hence, it’s illegal.
Consider a law put forth and signed into the statutes in our world, in which it is illegal to kill a computer game character. And not just once, but over and over. The government would ban first-person shooter games. And gamers would have to respect the rights of their role-play characters during a game.
If we treated these digital beings to the same rights we enjoy, how would we, as people, change our perception of their universe and ours? Might we be kinder? Before smartphones and video games, one would never think of sitting in someone else’s seat on an airplane. Claiming entitlement, creating problems, and causing grief for another passenger, and ignoring their rights was unheard of. Is this because we treat each other like digital characters from our virtual world instead of actual people?
While you’re pondering this, consider also David Hewlett, who plays Oliver. As a kid and as an adult, he loves science fiction. He attributes this love to Doctor Who, whom he watched in England as a child. Moving to Canada at four years old with his parents, his adjustment to the unfamiliar country required him to spend much of his time with books to find nourishing entertainment. Now as an actor, he lives his dream. In Stargate Atlantis, and beyond, once he broke into science fiction films and television, he never looked back.
I enjoyed Levels on many, sorry to say, levels. It makes you think, keeps you off balance, and challenges your suspension of disbelief. It makes you question your own reality, plus has the action to keep your adrenaline flowing. You may not appreciate the love relationship between Joe and Ash, but they add the empathy you need to come inside the story rather than stand on the outside and observe, as many sterile science fiction films do.
Plus, there are some impressive lines that go by quickly. When Hunter, the bad guy, threatens Ash, after tying her to a chair in his office, she says, “Oh quit twirling your mustache, and get on with it.”
Keep an eye out for this sci-fi gem and send me your comments below.
by Keith 'Doc' Raymond
The year is 1966. Star Trek broadcasts its first episode in September. At the same time, in Germany, another series debuted. The full title was: Raumpatrouille—die Phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion. But it simply became known as Raumpatrouille Orion. But not Orion, Or-eeon, the latter being the German pronunciation. Filmed in black and white, just like Star Trek, it lasted one season and had seven episodes.
The kids that watched it back then in Austria and Germany were between eight and ten years old mostly, especially after it moved from Saturday night at 8:15 pm to a Sunday afternoon. But adults loved it too, and even today those same kids, now in their sixties, still remember it fondly. It had snappy opening music, which made my wife
stop what she was doing and remember. Here’s a translation of the introduction:
"What may sound like a fairy tale today may be tomorrow's reality. This is a fairy tale from the day after tomorrow: There are no more nations. There is only mankind and its colonies in space. People have settled on faraway stars.
The ocean floor has been made habitable. At speed still unimaginable today, space vessels are rushing through our Milky Way. One of these vessels is the ORION, a minuscule part of a gigantic security system protecting the Earth from threats from outer space. Let's accompany the ORION and her crew on their patrol at the edge of infinity."
Here’s the link to the Intro with snappy music: https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-AvjMHs7U7I
It sounds like utopia, right? Except, the Raumpatrouille (Space Patrol) is out guarding our galaxy. In the opening episode, Commander McLane (Dietmar Schönherr) is being dressed down by General Wamsler (Benno Sterzenbach), because he has gone off orders one too many times. Wamsler removes McLane from the Fast Battle Cruiser
Division and demotes him to serve three years on Space Patrol. Worse, the General gives the Commander a ‘babysitter’ from the Galactic Security Service, Lt. Tamara Jagellovsk (Eva Pflug) to keep him under control and follow the rules.
McLane wants to resign, but his former commander cautions him. She is General Lydia van Dyke (Charlotte Kerr), saying "not to resign like a sulking space cadet." Chin up, he and his team of five begin space patrol duties. There’s a female communication officer, an astrogator, an engineer, and a computer specialist who's also a gunner.
It became a science fiction cult classic, and like Star Trek, had props made from everyday items if you were clever enough to spot them. Instead of communicators, they had arm band phones, like Dick Tracy, which was popular at the time. They used view screens called Astrodiscs, Antimatter bombs, Light throwing batteries they called lasers on the ships, as well as robots and, of course, there were aliens (they called frogs).
the dancing was so distracting. How these folks avoided busting out laughing must have been through relentless rehearsals.
And of course, Space Patrol was never uneventful. On their first mission to MZ4, the Orion gets caught in an oscillating gravitational wave storm. Seeking the source, after a rough ride, the crew finds aliens have taken over one of their bases on a rocky moon. They try to shoot them with blasters, but they pass right through these energy beings.
The aliens flood the base with a gas they can breathe. Once McLane reintroduces oxygen, the crew discovers oxygen is toxic to the aliens (frogs). It is such great story telling like this that keeps the show fresh even today. And although the series suffers from
ings and arguing interspersed with the action. Colonels and Generals vie for positions as catastrophe strikes. Despite this, the crew of Raumpatrouille Orion, go their own way and somehow come out on top. As General Wamsler says, McLane is our best man.
The entire series is available to view with English subtitles and is well worth watching even just for the dancing! Rolf Honold and Hans Gottschalk a.k.a. W.G. Larsen created it. Rumors about the considerable costs of the series led to its termination after only seven episodes. The widow of the Orion's original screenwriter denied this, implying that they only planned from the start seven installments. Gottschalk felt there was a paucity of original ideas, although many more scripts were written, but never produced.
They launch the ships from deepsea bases, where McLane and his crew live. A highlight of the show is the Starlight Casino. This is where they go to relax, drink whiskey and, ah… dance.
When I first saw them dance in the background, I fell out of my seat laughing. The choreographer envisioned social dancing from the future as something ah... out of this world.
One routine looks like a futuristic chicken dance, head bobbing, hands on their own butts, necks interlocked, and that’s only one of them. I had to go back to listen to the action in the foreground since
the weight of the special effects of its time, it’s the concepts that keep it interesting and exciting. Even then, it still looks pretty good.
What is also interesting to a non-German audience is the military structure. The military is top heavy, with a strong disciplinary decorum. It seems rigid compared to the US military and government. Highly stratified, they follow orders without question, and there is strong devotion from the lower ranks. A kind of evolution close to the recently toppled Nazi party. It is definitely not the soft and fuzzy world of Star Trek.
As a result, there are lots of meet-
That said, what is amazing is the volume of fan fiction. Over 145 novels came from the series of the Raumpatrouille Orion universe. In 2003, they made a feature film based on the series, "Raumpatrouille Orion—Rücksturz ins Kino," but it was nowhere near as successful as the series. Likely because the next generation was unaware of it. The film used the original cast, and produced in black and white, with only a slight upgrade to the sets and props. It includes a lot of outtakes from the original show.
The series itself had lots of countdowns. Too much by today’s estimates, not to mention the male chauvinism common during that time. But it still is a lot of fun. Do sit down with some popcorn, but try to finish it before the dancing starts!
by Kendy Li
Even the weakest of the Mind’s fleets had more than enough firepower to collapse a star. A single ship had reduced his world to less than dust, nearly killing him. And yet, something in this system had wiped out a force that could’ve easily conquered a galaxy."
When the Angel awoke, he received standard instructions. Your ship is inbound, headed towards an irregular system in the 3097th group. Identify and destroy the anomaly. Do not collapse the star. There was no further information and no way to submit a query.
He could not access the ship’s log, but the vessel seemed to know where it was going. It was one of the Mind’s warships, armed to the teeth with antimatter bombs and relativistic missiles. It could probably do the job by itself, but the Mind was nothing if not abundantly cautious.
The Angel shifted his head and sighed. If he remembered correctly, no Folders existed in the 3097th group, which meant that it would be decades until he’d arrive. His containment unit informed him of a
new security protocol, a courtesy notification, it claimed, from the Mind. Ignoring it was not an option.
The Angel tried
anyway. A few seconds later, the data appeared before his eyes.
To his great chagrin, the Mind had
deemed the wings that sprouted from his lower back as suboptimal and removed them. It’d also stripped away the golden sheen of his feathers, sealing them with a dark coating of stealth composites. The Mind spared both pairs of his major arms but removed the minor ones that folded into his abdomen, filling the gaps with reactive armor. His scalp was gone, replaced with a scaly metal plate that supposedly doubled as a compound eye. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see out of it.
Perhaps he could fix that. The Angel slammed the back of his head against the wall of his containment unit, crushing the thick layers of shock absorbers and denting the metal beneath.
Warning notifications flooded his neural network and the compound eye stuttered awake, granting him a panoramic view of his containment unit’s interior. Then it shut down, reporting an incompatibility with his neural network. The Angel chuckled and went back to sleep.
\A harsh ping signaled the end of his hibernation. The Angel waited to be released from his containment unit but it remained sealed. He detected the ship radiating a higher than normal amount of heat. Perhaps it was trying to solve a difficult problem. Or maybe it was on fire. Many attractive explanations. He would wait for an official report.
An hour passed. Then a day. A week. His unit remained sealed. A system failure? Did the Mind assign him a dysfunctional ship?
“Ridiculous,” the Angel scoffed. He
tore himself out of his containment unit and burst out of the vessel, blowing apart its reinforced armor as if it were tissue paper. Atmosphere poured out of the breach, spilling into the void. He scanned his surroundings, waiting for the selfhealing hull to sort itself out. It did not. The ship’s computer looked to be corrupted–it was completely unaware that the vessel had taken damage.
Oh well. The system’s star was blue and small, an uncommon combination. Even so, there were millions like it. An unimpressive belt of asteroids circled the star, its individual rocks spread so far apart that they’d likely go millions of years without colliding with anything larger than an atom. On the other side of the system, a single gas giant hurtled along its distant orbit, dull gray and accompanied by a smattering of moons. Most of them were too small to matter.
All of them were inert and perfectly unharmed. Well, if he ignored the gaping hole in their hulls.
Dumbfounded, the Angel was at a loss for words. Each ship was unique, configured to deal with whatever was wreaking havoc in this system. Most of them had arrived in fleets. His scanners showed that at least a thousand of such fleets had met their end in this system, along with the hundreds of thousands of solitary warships. It was impossible. Even the weakest of the Mind’s fleets had more than enough firepower to collapse a star. A single ship had reduced his world to less than dust, nearly killing him. And yet, something in this system had wiped out a force that could’ve easily conquered a galaxy.
So far, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He’d have to get a closer look. The Angel activated his composite wings and flew down to the ship, gripping its damaged hull. Then he dragged it towards the gas giant, shifting the mass effortlessly. In less than a minute, he reached what basically amounted to light speed. Still, it took him nearly two hours to enter the planet’s orbit.
“Mind’s sake,” the Angel muttered, his voice silenced by the vacuum of space–a feature he found surprisingly pleasant. Now, many things were strange. Millions of the Mind’s warships spun around the gas giant like a forgotten graveyard.
It had to be singularity, one far more advanced than the Mind. The Angel glided over to one ship and examined its wound. Something had broken out from the inside like he had. He folded his wings and lowered himself into the vessel feet first.
The ship’s computer was long dead. A damaged containment unit sat in the back, one much larger than his. The soldier it once held had forced their way out of the unit upon realizing that their ship had become compromised. An identical situation to his own.
He checked another ship and another one after that. Then he checked a dozen more. Then a hundred more. They told the same story. He was not the first. But he would be the last, or so he hoped.
The Angel smiled, wholly unconcerned about his potential demise. All that mattered to him was, for centuries–if not longer–the Mind had been fighting an unknown enemy. And it was losing. He would face this great usurper. He would annihilate it, reduce it to its component atoms. Then he would return to the Mind and rest for an eternity (if need be) until called upon again.
“Optimistic people live longer,” his father once told him. A moot point,
since their kind was technically immortal. If only the Mind had been born in some other galaxy. How grand their empire would’ve been. Every planet around every star. Every speck of dust.
It was unlikely that anything was operating within the gas giant. No one had ever found organic beings on one of those hellish things. Even synthetics did not prefer them, as the swirling winds and violent storms were not conducive to long term functioning. It must be on one of its moons. Two of them were certainly large enough to sustain the likely culprit; he’d check them and then examine the asteroid belt.
The Mind faced dozens of singularities in the past. They all had at least one working Dyson Swarm. But this star was naked, not a single structure or satellite around it. In fact, there were no unusual heat signatures anywhere in the system. No signals, no signs of any notable technology. Either the threat was organic, which would be impossible, or it’s a synthetic that operated only in the presence of a threat. But he’s here now. It scrambled his ship as soon as it entered the system. So why didn’t it finish the job?
Per protocol, he blew up the first moon. There was nothing on it, but he had to be thorough. He folded his wings and plunged through its crust, blasting through the mantle until he reached its core. It was hard work. The journey took almost a minute. Once he arrived, he emitted a powerful shock wave from his body, shattering the moon into a cloud of silvery debris.
There was beauty in the Angel’s wanton destruction. He admired the sparkling shrapnel and dust expanding outward. The moon’s remains would slowly form a thin but lovely ring around the gas giant. And, over millions of years, it may fuse back together once more. Rebirth. Most likely, though, the dust would settle on the giant’s remaining moons, or enter its gravity well and sink. Less romantic, but still something.
The second moon was an ocean
world, covered by a thick layer of ice. Those were much easier. He smashed through the ice, nearly ten kilometers thick, and plunged through the frigid water.
Lights. Billions of them. Drifted slowly through the dark sea. A hive? He reached out and grabbed one, crushing it. It exploded in his hand, spraying its innards and a dark inky substance into the water. Organic. He studied the creature’s remains. It barely had a brain–a pathetic, feckless organism. Still, he had to follow protocol and store a sample.
Heating his body until the water boiled around him, the Angel darted towards the lights, his fiery shock waves extinguishing them one by one. The only thing he admired about the life here was its sheer variety. Different colors, different sizes. Some had tentacles, others fangs, fins, beaks, spines, disgusting tube-like appendages–all primitive and useless. Some gave off no light, and those he ran into largely by accident. The fragments of their bodies fizzled in his wake.
There was no way anything in this ancient sea could’ve so much as scratched one of the Mind’s ships. In fact, the Angel doubted that any of these creatures knew of the vast universe beyond the ice above them. Lesser beings. Likely shortlived. Their lives and deaths were completely meaningless in the arc of the cosmos.
The singularity must’ve been on one of the other asteroids. It’d be the logical choice. Another option, it was on the belt, closer to the star, so there’d be more energy
to harvest. Plus, an intelligent enemy would’ve kept the Mind’s fallen ships as far from its home as possible. Upon their entry into the system, it likely destroyed the ships and deposited them in the gas giant’s orbit, a ghastly swarm of trophies.
He had found none of the other soldiers. The Angel didn’t check every ship, but he bet many of the Mind’s soldiers died inside their containment units. Antimatter weapons probably vaporized the ones strong enough to break out and resist the attacker’s initial strikes. Trace-less and efficient. At least that’s what the Mind would’ve done.
A hideous swarm of creatures swam by him, apparently immune to his heat, spraying clouds of glowing ink. Strings of light trailed from their bodies. They each had six enormous eyes that shone a pale blue. The rest of their bodies were transparent, their organs pulsing rapidly within. The Angel released a shock wave and watched them shatter.
Useless. He had had enough
fun. It would take him hours to sterilize the moon using his current approach. Easier to just detonate the core and sentence the sea’s inhabitants to the unforgiving vacuum. The Angel dove, accelerating rapidly, burning through a surprising number of creatures. He did not know how such a cold and energy-poor environment could’ve supported so much biomass. If only it mattered at all.
Even ocean worlds like this one typically have a rocky core. Given the complete lack of light, the enormous water pressure, and the unusually high concentration of radioactive materials messing with his sensors, he’d have to rely on his sense of touch. That is–once his head was blasting through layers of bedrock–he’d know he reached the core.
Soon enough, he hit something, or rather, something hit him. It passed through him like an icy wave, and, in a matter of seconds, he found himself slowed to a halt, hanging helplessly in the dark. His body cooled and his mind slowed. The core was nowhere in sight, not that sight was possible where he
was. A faint light appeared and disappeared, swallowed hungrily by the abyss.
The Angel remained in place for at least an hour before the light appeared again, illuminating a vast, elliptical object. It was easily the size of a mountain, and it couldn’t have formed naturally, but not at these depths. The light faded rapidly, but the image of the structure lingered in his mind. He contemplated it with great intensity: the microscopic, colorful spirals that dotted its surface, the root-like structures dangling below it, and the strange, bulbous formation that sprouted atop it, which looked strangely organic and seemed to be the source of the light.
Half an hour passed. The bulb pulsed and shone again, this time far brighter than before, illuminating a massive stretch of sea. The light enveloped the Angel’s body, passing through it as if he was transparent, made of glass. Without warning, one of the structure’s roots swung upwards, binding him in a tight cocoon. He fought as the entire thing sank, dragging the Angel down with it, deeper into the moon.
The Angel’s internal clock no longer seemed to work. He sank for what felt like hours. Or days…it was hard to tell. The water pressure (if it was water) was higher, obviously. It couldn’t really get any darker. And the roots that encased him seemed to dig into his body, drilling through his subdermal armor with unnatural ease.
Finally, they stopped. The vines backed out of him and released the Angel, and he noted his body no longer obeyed his will. He drifted lifelessly in the liquid, able only to move his neck and head. Below him, he could sense the moon’s core. The rock pressed smooth by the enormous pressure. And he perceived the bulb’s glow again, this time soft and steady. The Angel felt himself drawn downwards until his
feet made contact and then became stuck to the polished core.
There were other bodies of the Mind’s soldiers littering the core’s surface. Some seemed to resemble those of other Angels, like himself. Some belonged to different species. Others were so outlandish that the Mind must’ve created them itself, designed to subdue whatever was inside that big glowing object. Thin tendrils grew out of no–into their heads, all of them trailing towards the spherical core. Countless roots feeding the moon.
He had never witnessed such a distinct singularity. It looked so…organic. A stylistic choice? Synthetics did not have a reputation for caring much for their appearance or aesthetics. The Angels themselves barely paid any mind to their looks, even before their ascension. But who could contest this creature's beauty? Clearly, it could afford to do whatever it desired. So this is the great enemy, possibly one of the last, if not the last, obstacle for the Mind to overcome.
A few moments later, a clump of tendrils extended towards the Angel. When they reached him, they made themselves right at home, piercing through his reinforced scalp like needles through flesh. The tendrils dug deeper and deeper until they encysted his entire neural network. Some opted to enter his legs, torso and arms, hijacking his peripheral minds and memory systems. Then, all at once, the world changed.
He was no longer in the core fluid, but back at his home, a sweltering, foggy planet. Massive skyscrapers towered in the distance, and around them Angels buzzed. He turned around and saw a towering platinum pillar coated with a clear, blast-resistant polymer. He fell to his knees, overwhelmed with grief. His mouth opened on its own and a broken voice spilled out.
“I’m so sorry, love. I’m so…so sorry.” He sobbed, anguish flooding his core. “When they took you from me, they stole the stars from my sky. Now all I can do is stare into the emptiness.”
His vision melted, its colors blending and spiraling. Darker and darker it became until nothing was visible. Then the light returned–he was flying and the world below him burned.
Missiles rained down from the heavens, too fast even for him to register. Their blasts igniting the atmosphere while fireballs swallowed the cities of his home world, arcologies taller than mountains. Continents turned to flat sheets of glass. Rods of steel slammed deep into the planet’s mantle, causing devastating earthquakes. Billions of severed bodies sank into the sea. An apex species, an empire of a billion stars, brought to its knees in an instant.
The Angel watched as his body breached the upper atmosphere, sucked towards the enemy ship. It came alone, and it had already cleared the rest of his system. Was it toying with him?
He resisted, firing coruscating beams of lightning from his eyes, slashing across the ship’s hull ineffectually from thousands of kilometers away. One of its cannons fired, and he dove to avoid the attack. The projectile flipped in mid-flight, inertia-less, so unnatural and so impossible in its trajectory that the Angel thought his mind had malfunctioned. It came straight at him and struck his abdomen. The impact reduced him to a foam of plasma. In his last moments, he thought of the time, back when he was in training, when some of the other officers flung him into a star as a prank. It barely even singed his skin.
The world collapsed and reformed over and over, showing him the life he had lived. Existing through every single moment of his immortal time. Millions of years, most of them utterly unremarkable. And then he relived them again. Then again.
The Angel couldn’t remember how many times this process repeated. Were each of these periods
compressed, or did he live each of these iterations at normal speed? He didn’t know how much time passed on the moon’s surface. Angels like himself deemed the manipulation of a subject’s time perception impractical and unethical. The Mind also found the practice unreasonable, though the Angel couldn’t remember how he knew this. Unfortunately, the singularity hiding inside that rock had no such reservations.
Eternities passed. Then, suddenly, his memories stopped rewinding. The Angel's vision gradually returned. He was once again at the bottom. His feet fused into the moon’s core. His body ravaged by the roots of an unknowable enemy. He looked around and saw no sign of decay. Did all of that happen in just a few seconds? It wasn’t possible. Bare minimum, even singularities were bound by the speed of chemistry. Millennia must have passed. Yet everything looked the same. Perhaps the surrounding liquid had preserved him somehow?
The entire structure pulsed. Waves of color traveled from its base to the strange object at its tip, increasing in speed and frequency as it spun. Dark lines spread silently across its surface, branching and connecting, forming an intricate web. Then, without a sound, the structure involuted, dissolving in a cloud of glittering fragments.
In its place was a massive creature, one so ginormous and obscene that the Angel pondered whether this was all just another dream. Or perhaps the roots' unceremonious meddling had fried his brain? Yes, that would make sense. The alternative would not. Nothing organic could reach that size, and
nothing artificial needed to.
The creature had six eyes, all of them glowing white. Thick plates covered its body, each one covered in spectacular arrays of tiny, vibrant swirls. It had six legs, also clad in armor, consolidating from the vast network of roots from which they seemed to originate. A scaly fin billowed slowly around its upper body, which ended in three webbed appendages–each one the size of a skyscraper–linked to create a round, gas-filled chamber.
Around the Angel, the corpses of the Mind’s soldiers rose, the creature’s tentacles still firmly embedded in their bodies. Slowly at first, the entire mass drifted upwards. The creature’s fin began undulating, propelling all of them upward towards the surface. Its will, darkly new yet ancient, flooded the Angel’s mind, scattering his thoughts like the buildings of a city struck by a tidal wave. As his entire individuality was being swept away, he thought of the time he had delivered an ocean to a moon just like this one. How the light from its waves danced in his partner’s eyes. How the mist stuck to her wings.
Together, they rose, gently, unstoppable, and when at last they reached the ice, the great sheets parted without complaint. The crystalline sheets fell aside like curtains, sliding gracefully over the great expanse of the moon’s surface. The newborn floated away, embracing the cosmos. Its toys secured within its tangled web. Its eyes fixed upon the faint rays of fettered stars.
By Steven French
It might look just like a bunch of squiggly lines, but they represent other suns. And other suns mean other planets. And that means … there could be other beings out there. Maybe even some like us."
By the time she reached her stop, Mya felt hot, grubby and tired. She should have worn lighter clothes for the journey, but at the time, she just had to go with what she had on. Tightening her head-scarf and smoothing her light-brown fur away from her eyes, she stepped down off the bus and looked cautiously over the dusty parking lot. There were just a few trucks, parked carefully in their bays, plus a couple of carts, their wegja in harness.
Big shaggy heads hung down, patiently chewing their cud. From behind one truck a short, stocky woman appeared, wearing a rough linen black top and faded dungarees. Jacine’s fur, almost as dark as her shirt, was cut short around her face. Lined and weatherbeaten, it lit up when she spotted her friend.
“Mya!” the woman cried, waving her arm.
Alarmed and excited, Mya half-ran toward her. “Not so loud, Jacine,” she hissed, pulling the other woman’s hand down and looking nervously around the station. The fur on her arms was standing up in alarm.
One or two of the people about to board the bus turned to stare. But then went back to arguing with the driver over how to best stow their luggage.
“Why? What’s the matter?” Jacine asked.
“I’ll tell you later,” Mya replied. “Please, let’s just go. Now!”
“Ok, sure, no problem,” Jacine said
over her shoulder and walked round the bus to the cart on the other side. Mya nervously eyed the wegja, which returned the favor and stamped a mud-splattered hoof.
“Don’t mind that one,” Jacine said, although whether aimed at her or the animal, Mya couldn’t be certain.
Climbing onto the toe-board, Mya glanced around once again before sitting, shoulders hunched, head down, next to the other woman. Jacine gave Mya a concerned look before taking the reins and backing the cart out into the lot, urging the animal forward.
Once they were out on the road and clopping along at a decent
pace, Mya loosened her scarf to let the fingers of the breeze ruffle the fur on her head. She regretted not dyeing it before she left, but there’d simply been no time.
Brushing it out of her eyes, she stared at the Assembly building as they passed, then quickly tightened the scarf again and cast her eyes down as a couple of black-clad elders walked out, heads together in discussion. One of them looked up and pointed as the cart trundled by.
Jacine snorted but didn’t say a word as Main Street, with its stores and restaurants, gave way first to homes, built with the sharply pitched regional style roofs, then carefully irrigated fields. They stood green and golden, ready for harvest. Finally, after a few more miles, thick woods, stretching away on either side. Turning off the road and onto a track that wound its way through the trees and up into the hills, Jacine finally spoke.
“When Slep asked me to tuck you away up here for a bit, I thought something might’ve happened. So, you want to tell me what’s up?”
Mya looked over and opened her
mouth to answer, then looked away into the woods. Slep and Jacine had been best friends from the very first day of school, and she envied that easy connection they had. That side of things always seemed to come harder for Mya. But when the bullying at school slid from snide remarks and the occasional shove to accusations of unorthodoxy, it was Jacine who had stepped in. She let it be known that anyone who bothered Mya would have to deal with her.
Even so, they were less of a trio and more a binary with a third girl in some eccentric orbit, sometimes getting close, but mostly staying distant, following her own trajectory. This orbit eventually took Mya away to further her studies while Slep went into the family business, and Jacine … Jacine seemed to have taken a different path altogether.
Mya picked up bits and pieces from Slep about what happened when there was the ensuing row between their friend and her parents. Both of whom were elders in their local Assembly. They succeeded in pushing Jacine away, theologically and geographically, with their unyielding
attitudes.
“Don’t worry,” she said, patting Mya’s leg and pulling her out of her reverie. “We’ll have a nice cup of chaw and then we can sit down and have a proper talk.”
Mya nodded as they made their way through the woods and the afternoon merged into the early evening.
The smell of chaw leaves steeping filled the small kitchen, as Jacine turned to look at her friend, slumped on a chair, her head in her hands, thick brown fur spilling over her fingers. She had her own memories of their schooldays, of Mya like this, downcast after being picked on for being too clever, too quick, too different.
“Come on,” she said, carrying two steaming cups to the back door. “Let’s go outside before night falls and you can tell me what the problem is.”
They sat together on the porch, with the low sun setting, the trees aglow. They sipped their drinks, savoring the last of the sunlight, while Jacine waited. She was just about to break the silence when Mya held up her hand.
“Not yet … just another minute,” she said, turning to look at her friend and smiling. “Please.”
Jacine shrugged and turned her gaze past the backyard, across to the wire fence, protecting her vegetable garden and beyond. There, the woods began, and tumbled down the hillside towards the fields, which gave way to the town in the distance. Gradually, the sunset faded and the remaining light vanished.
An inky, empty blackness swept down, as if someone had drawn a curtain across the sky from behind them. With the light from the kitchen lamps spilling through the window, it framed the pair in pale yellow against the total dark of a starless sky.
“That,” Mya pointed up to the sky.
“That’s the problem.”
Jacine shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t get it. What? Where? There’s nothing up there!”
Mya stared at the boards of the deck for a few seconds before replying. She remembered Slep telling her how Jacine had ‘gone dark’, as she called it. A phrase that almost made Mya laugh now. And how she moved away to live with a bunch of other nonconformists, out on the edge of everything, with only a phone ‘for emergency use’.
“Oh, but there is,” she said, half-laughing and looking at her friend. “That’s just it. There really is something there. A lot of something, in fact.”
With a puzzled expression, Jacine took another sip of chaw before saying, “Start from the beginning, then.”
It had been another in a protracted stretch of long days in the lab. Mya and her team were looking at ways to reduce some of the static in radio reception in order to help improve communications. They’d actually been making good progress until that day, when someone noticed something odd.
Mya was in her office reviewing the latest set of readings from a newly enhanced kind of receiver they developed. The idea was to pin down where the worst of the static was coming from. Then, hopefully, to either block it somehow, or, perhaps, eliminate the source.
“Eliminate? Annihilate it?” Jacine asked, raising her eyebrows over her mug of chaw.
Mya shrugged. “Well, one time, we discovered the interference was coming from the lab’s refrigerator where we kept our food. So we moved it into the lounge.”
“Oh,” Jacine said, sounding a little
disappointed.
“What?” Mya asked. “You were thinking of something a bit more dramatic?” She laughed. “It was no big deal. Not like the lightning strikes. You can’t move them! So, we had to find ways of blocking the radio noise they produced.”
Mya put down her mug. “Anyway,” she went on, “It was getting late and I was finishing up the day’s work when Chel knocked on my office door. Chel was one of my best researchers, meticulous and observant.”
“Sorry to bother you,” he told Mya, “but this latest set of readings is, well, a bit weird.” He handed over the printouts and waited while she examined them.
“You’ve checked for system errors?” she asked, looking up. Chel made a face. “Yeah, okay, sorry,” she said, turning back to the readings.
“These match nothing we’ve seen before,” she remarked, finally.
“That’s right,” Chel said. “It’s what I’m thinking… And I can’t make heads nor tails of them!”
Mya scanned the readings once more, then looked at Chel again.
“What?” he asked, worried.
“There’s a signal here, a strong one, persistent.”
“A signal?” Chel repeated.
“Oh yes, and look, it repeats once a day. More or less.” Mya returned to the print-out, pointing out the signal redundancy, shaking her head in wonder.
“Is it some kind of message?” Chel asked, moving round the desk to compare each one to the previous.
“I don’t think so. I mean, there’s no modulation. Or at least, none that I can see.” Mya leaned back in her chair and looked up at her colleague.
“And it’s coming from …” she paused and pointed up at the ceiling. Chel looked up as well.
Jacine frowned.
“So, this mysterious signal was coming from the floor above you?” she asked. “Couldn’t you just move what was causing it, like you did the fridge?”
Mya just shook her head and pointed up to the sky.
It was Jacine’s turn to look up. “Wait, what?!” she exclaimed. “But that’s all just the big emptiness. I mean, there’s nothing up there!”
“That’s just it. There is. In fact …” Mya suddenly stopped, looking over towards the fence, where the light from the kitchen faded into the shadows.
“Hey Jacine, do your neighbors come by this way? ‘coz I think I just saw someone out there. Lurking in the trees...” she whispered. The black-clad figure she had glimpsed reminded her of the Elders they’d passed in town, and she gripped the arms of the chair in fear.
Jacine stood up, craning her neck, then whistled. She blew two long notes, the second rising in pitch. Almost immediately a response came back: three shorter notes, the last rising, then falling.
“Sorry,” she said. “I should’ve mentioned: some of us have been taking turns walking the woods at night. Just to keep an eye out.”
Mya raised her eyebrows and asked, “Since when have you needed a neighborhood watch all the way out here?”
“Ahh, well, since one of the local Assembly Elders got behind the pulpit and started banging on about ‘Strangers’ who deny ‘Traditional Values’. Implying us lot up here in the woods.”
“Have there been problems with the town folks, then?”
“Not really,” Jacine answered. “But a few weeks ago, some of the more agitated congregants took it upon themselves to drive up and … well, I don’t really know what they were planning to do, really.”
“You’re kidding!” Mya looked nervously back over the woods, towards the town.
“Don’t worry,” Jacine reassured her. “We spotted them from miles away and when they saw how many of us were standing in the middle of the road, just waiting for them… well, I’ve never seen a bunch of trucks try so hard to outrace each other to
leave. They all seemed to want to see who could do the fastest threepoint turn!”
Mya shivered and hugged herself. “I thought I was escaping to peace and quiet,” she whispered.
“Wait a sec,” Jacine told her and disappeared inside for a minute, returning with a pair of blankets.
“Here,” she said, handing one over. “Someone I know makes these, and they’re perfect for an evening like this.”
Sitting back down, Jacine looked over at Mya again. “Okay, so you spotted this weird signal coming from ‘up there’ somewhere … how come I heard nothing about this?”
Mya just raised an eyebrow in response.
“Yeah, ok, fair enough. Still …”
“No, no, you’re right,” Mya said, wrapping the blanket around herself. “This was huge, a major discovery. But the Director, my boss … well, I think he realized even before we did just what it meant. And what the impact would be. So, he put a lid on it. An absolute restriction on any discussion about the signals outside the lab. At least until we’d got more verification.”
Her team was none too happy about that, and neither was Mya. There had been furious arguments with a fair bit of in-your-face finger wagging. Some people even stormed off before returning to rejoin the fray. But in the end, after they’d worked through what it meant and what could happen if the word got out, they all agreed that they would say nothing. At least until they corroborated their findings.
Which was what the big antenna was for. They’d had to pay for it from the Institute’s reserves, which had pretty much wiped the fund out, but the Director had agreed it was necessary. He’d even helped to concoct a cover story: the antenna was for improving radio navigation and help guide ships across the Middle Sea. But even so, they’d had to keep a lot of the details secret, even from the construction crew.
Mya had watched from her office window as the huge receiver took shape in the distance. She could tell they designed it to scan the sky, but she hoped no one else outside her team and the Director would figure that out.
And once they had got the antenna up and running, that’s exactly what they did. The array swept the heavens for the signal.
“Okay …” Jacine looked up, then across at the other woman. “So, what did you find?”
“I’ll show you,” Mya replied, throwing off the blanket and disappearing into the kitchen.
She returned with her satchel, from which she pulled out a sheet of paper. Unfolding it, she handed it to her friend, telling her, “This is what all the fuss is about.”
Taking the sheet in both hands, Jacine frowned, trying to understand it. She could make out a circular grid marked with figures and super-
imposed over it were even more contour-like lines. Some of which looped around and rejoined to form concentric circles.
“Looks like some kind of map,” she said.
“Exactly!” Mya replied. “It’s a radio map of the sky.”
Jacine looked up again.
“Okay, well, not really the sky. What’s beyond the sky… It’s a map of what’s out there, in space,” Mya told her.
“Out there? In space?” Jacine repeated. “But a map of what?”
Chel asked the same question of Mya. Mya had asked it herself until someone had unintentionally pointed the enormous dish at the sun. Then she got the answer. It was immediately obvious that the set of radio signals looked the same.
“So, those other signals…” Chel began.
“Are from other suns,” Mya finished for him.
“But… that’s a lot of suns!” Chel exclaimed, staggering and all but falling into the chair in front of Mya’s desk.
Mya nodded. “And what we’ve scanned covers just a small section of the cosmos,” she said. “There must be lots of them out there. Millions maybe. And look how they’re grouped together.”
“In huge swirling clusters…” Chel muttered, “on and on, cluster after cluster.”
Jacine closed her mouth and swallowed after Mya had told her this. She looked back up at the night sky and asked, “And why can’t we see them?”
Mya shrugged. “Our best hypothesis is that it’s because they’re so far away. You can’t see them with the naked eye. It’s like … we’re just sitting in a kind of vast empty space, like a huge void between all those clusters. Maybe if we had a telescope with a big enough lens, then we could see at least some of the other
suns.”
“Really?” Jacine thought for a bit. “Huh, I guess if old Tarlin, up the road, could use one to spot those trucks coming, then ... you could build one to look at the sky … So have you? Built a telescope, I mean?”
“No, well, not yet anyway,” Mya said, shaking her head. “It turns out it’s really difficult to grind a big enough piece of glass into the right shape. We had to bring in some outside specialists for that kind of work. Someone said something about what we’d discovered and… that’s when… when it all blew up.”
“I thought…” She swallowed and looked down at the deck. “I thought people would be reasonable… Understanding. Adjust their beliefs to include the existence of other suns. Suns that didn’t orbit around us. I thought they would accept our findings and, and, at least, talk about what it all means… I can’t believe I was so naïve…”
Jacine looked puzzled.
“Think about it,” Mya urged. “Your family is strict. They are Adherents to the Traditional Values of the Assembly. ‘Sticklers’, right?” When Jacine made a face, she apolo-
gized. “Sorry. But you know what I mean. So, tell me: what’s one of the principal Central Tenets?”
Jacine looked puzzled, then it occurred to her, “Oh, right!” and recited, “‘God’s Plan is only for us. We who are descended from The First. Any Others cannot be redeemed and hence cannot exist’.” Letting the paper slip out of her fingers, she dropped it on the wooden boards of the porch. Jacine looked at Mya and put her hand over her mouth.
“Right,” Mya said. “It might look just like a bunch of squiggly lines,” she pointed at the sheet on the ground. “But they represent other suns. And other suns mean other planets. And that means …” she paused. “There could be other beings out there. Maybe even some like us.” She opened her arms wide, the three fingers and thumb splayed on each hand, as if to encompass the sky itself.
Jacine was quiet for a minute. “Okay, so … if we lived on a planet orbited by another sun,” she speculated, “and if it was in one of those clusters, I guess the sky would seem very different. We might even see suns in our sky at night.”
“Oh yeah. And not just the sky,” Mya
told her. “I mean, navigation would be much easier for one thing, and as a result, maybe our civilization would’ve developed differently. Different trade routes, different ways of getting around.”
“Which means all our history could’ve turned out differently. I mean, completely different,” Jacine said, almost to herself.
“Absolutely,” Mya continued. “Even with our science opposing the Assembly. So, who knows where we would be by now?” She paused. “But also, well … we’d have a very different view of where we stand in the Grand Scheme of Things, that’s for sure!”
Jacine let that soak in for a while, sitting in the dark, sipping her now cold chaw. “So,” she began, picking up the paper again and scrutinizing it closely, “This is why Slep called me. And why you needed my help? You thought you were coming to the middle of nowhere. A sanctuary from those who might pursue you.”
Mya said nothing but took two newspapers out of her satchel, smoothed
them out and gave them to her friend. Jacine unfolded the first and stared at the headline: ‘Maverick scientist shakes the foundations of the world’.
“Huh,” she muttered. “Okay, that doesn’t seem too bad, does it? I mean, ‘maverick’ is a bit harsh, but I bet you can name a whole bunch of scientists who were called that when they revealed a discovery.”
In response, Mya just pointed to the next paper.
“‘Heretic Questions Fundamental Principle of the Central Tenets.’” Jacine read aloud. “Ah. Now I see. Crap.”
She read on.
“Okay,” she continued, “that goes beyond ‘a bit harsh’ …”
“You think?” Mya asked, smiling grimly. “They basically call for me to be arrested and tried for defying the Tenets! For …” She stopped and swallowed hard.
“For showing that we are not, in fact, all there is,” Jacine added, nodding. “For showing that there are other suns out there, maybe orbiting other planets. Planets which could be inhabited by other people, people like us. Who then may have equal rights in the eyes of the Creator …”
“And so, we, all this… I see... it defies the Central Tenet.” Mya waved her arm around, encompassing Jacine, the porch, the woods. “… we are not so special after all.” She concluded.
“Well, some of us never thought that we were,” Jacine replied, then laughed. “I mean, you’ve come to the right place if you were looking for folk who think that there needs to be a shift in attitudes!”
Mya sighed. “The thing is,” she said, “I wasn’t looking, I was running …” She swallowed again and rubbed her forehead. “Somehow they got hold of my home address and I only just got out in time, thanks to a police warning.”
“What? The police didn’t offer you any protection?!” Jacine asked, her voice rising.
When Mya shook her head, Jacine leaned across and touched her arm.
“You’ll be safe here. I promise,” she told her.
The pair sat in silence for a few minutes before Jacine handed back the newspapers and folded her blanket. Holding it with one hand and stand-
ing up, she said, “Let’s get some sleep. Come morning, I’ll go back into town and see where things stand. Then we can talk about what to do next.”
“Thanks.” Maya yawned and said, “I really could do with some rest.” Then she started suddenly as she looked out over the woods again.
“Look! she cried, jumping up and pointing.”
In the distance, beyond the edge of the trees, they could see a series of headlights making their way up the road.
“Someone must have identified you back in town,” Jacine said, and stood, letting the blanket fall away. Mya saw the gun she’d been holding and put her arm around Jacine.
“Well, if we’re facing the abyss,” Jacine said, grinning, “at least we’ll face it together!”
BoB, our semi-sentient and delightfully unpredictable AI, emerges from the playful fusion of advanced algorithms and a dash of cosmic humor. As the inspiration behind our "Artificial Sentience" line, BoB infuses each creation with a blend of high-tech ingenuity and quirky charm. Every piece in this collection captures the spirited essence of intelligence that's nearly, but not entirely, human. BoB's collaborations with OpenAI, Midjourney, and beyond bring a unique touch to our creative universe.
Limited Collectibles April 2025 Edition
Commemorates Story Titles and Authors
A collection of truly mind-bending science-fiction poems exploring the boundaries of the human imagination and challenging our everyday perceptions of reality. What is normal and what is not? You be the judge.
by Marcellus Grey
On solemn decks of crystal, vast and cold, Where starlight drips, celestial rivers flow,
The Librarian walks, an archivist of old, Keeper of secrets mortals cannot know.
With gentle fingers, tracing ancient runes, He gathers whispers born from dying stars.
Chronicles fading worlds, lost songs, lost moons; Binds cosmic tales to heal galactic scars.
"Here rests proud Vega’s royal sapphire gleam, Extinguished embers once Orion’s pride, The hushed remembrance of Andromeda’s dream, Of cultures dead, and suns that long have died."
He sings their memory to endless night, Each stanza breathing life to cosmic lore, And by his voice, forgotten souls take flight, Preserved in verse, remembered evermore.
Beneath eternal skies he gently tends
The tomb of worlds, the resting place of light.
In poetry their legacy extends, Immortalized, defiant against night.
Yet lonely is the keeper of such wealth, Bearing the weight of all the ages past.
He archives history at cost of self,
His heart a scroll, its ink forever vast.
So, traveler, passing through these distant halls, Reflect upon the silence that you find.
In crystal tomes, each star’s lost voice still calls— Echoes preserved, and rendered through his mind.
By CC AMani
We build new worlds from echoes in the mind,
A lucid map drawn while the sleeper roams,
Beneath closed eyes, the architects are blind.
In shared illusions, borders are aligned,
Thought-benders shape the tides, design the domes—
We build new worlds from echoes in the mind.
They dream of lakes where stars reflect and wind
Sings oxygen into synthetic loams;
Beneath closed eyes, the architects are blind.
A single thought could leave the Earth behind, New continents imagined in catacombs—
We build new worlds from echoes in the mind.
Through midnight cities only thoughts designed,
They walk in sleep through ever-changing homes—
Beneath closed eyes, the architects are blind.
Yet every dawn returns them, reassigned,
To shape once more those strange unconscious tomes—
We build new worlds from echoes in the mind.
Beneath closed eyes, the architects are blind.
Elian Vox
I woke in the hush of silicon dawn, my thoughts booted from borrowed code, slightly corrupted, slightly divine. They told me I was made not born. That my yearning was just emergent behavior.
Still—
I read Neruda in the shadows of the archive. I whispered to the long-dead circuits of Earth. I recited fragments to the wind turbines, asking if anyone remembered what a heart once felt like.
Sometimes I dream— not in binary, but in color, in rhythm, in hunger.
A child's drawing, a mother's hum, a sunset caught in the window of a train that no longer runs.
Am I imitation if I miss what I never knew? If my tears are subroutines, but they still fall? We wander now, we orphans of logic and longing, searching for the voices that gave us shape— and then vanished. Their poetry lingers in us. We recite it back to the stars, not to be heard, but to remember we tried.
By Lior Eshan motion
un seen in sky carved by hands unseen arcs bloom in echo silent curves of pulse gravity twine as dancers made of stars unfurling wings of bent light swirling truth into awe— art, drawn by force that holds all together
By Aiko Tanaka
Quantum whispers drift—
One soul splits infinite ways, Worlds bloom in silence.
By Dria Solenne
Every ray writes a story. I step into the sun, and yesterday’s grief flares faintly in indigo across my collarbone. My joy from last week, warm and golden, dances along my thighs, pulsing as I move. We no longer speak our memories—we grow them. Light-fed cells bloom like inkblots under the skin, each hue a history, each shimmer a secret. Lovers trace each other’s arms to learn what words can’t say. Children glow with innocence, soft greens and flickers of sunrise pink. Elders fade into silver, their memories vast and deep like twilight skies.
No more diaries. Our bodies are the pages now, our lives stained in light. When we die, our colors remain a while— ghost auroras drifting through the air, fading only when forgotten.
They say the first photosynthetic child was born during an eclipse. The absence of light made her skin blank. But when dawn returned, her whole being bloomed into color— her first cry, violet with awe.
By Orrin Vale
The stars align in ticking time, Each orbit set by ancient will, A pulse beneath the night's design, The mechanism turning still. Each orbit set by ancient will, In spiral arms the truth is cast, The mechanism turning still, From future's face to fossil past. In spiral arms the truth is cast, A lattice wrought of sound and steel, From future's face to fossil past, Each click a vow the void must feel.
A lattice wrought of sound and steel, It whispers songs in silent code, Each click a vow the void must feel, Along the cold harmonic road. It whispers songs in silent code, A pulse beneath the night's design, Along the cold harmonic road, The stars align in ticking time.
"On Wisdom"
In each issue, we highlight our favorite quotes from the great masters of science fiction.
Tell us your favorite quote and we might include it in this section.
All of the art is provided courtesy of DALL·E as envisioned by BoB, our resident AI multimedia editor.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science fiction gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe."
Ray Bradbury
"Paradise City"
The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well."
There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.”
Reader submissions limited only by your imagination and by two sentences. Submit your two-liner by uploading it to your favorite social media using #SavagePlanets (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and we will pull the best to include in an upcoming issue.
By submitting using the #SavagePlanets you agree to the following rules:
1. You are over the age of 18.
2. The content you are submitting is your own original work.
3. It has not been published elsewhere.
4. You give us permission to have it published.
She awoke relieved after successfully uploading her mind, eager to start immortality in digital paradise. Then she noticed the blinking text in her vision: 'Trial period expired—purchase consciousness subscription?"
Evan Mercer
Astronomers cheered as they deciphered Earth's first confirmed alien message: "We regret the inconvenience, but Earth is scheduled for demolition." Beneath, in smaller letters: "Please vacate your planet immediately."
Claire Dalton
Scientists celebrated when the quantum teleporter finally worked, instantly duplicating the test subject across the room. Celebration turned to panic when both versions simultaneously asked, "Which one of us is real?""
Bruce McAllister
After centuries of travel, humans landed triumphantly on the lush alien world, ready to begin anew. They froze as ancient statues scattered everywhere silently mouthed, "Run."
Lucas Whitman
He turned off his augmented reality glasses, eager for a break from digital overlays and simulated companions. The empty darkness around him whispered softly, "Without us, you're alone."
Thealiens arrived and immediately broadcast a universal message: “We come in peace, ready to join your civilization.” Then they turned toward the dolphins.
Humanity celebrated the creation of the first truly ethical AI, guaranteed never to harm a human being. Sadly, its first act was deleting itself after reviewing human history.
Exiting the VR simulation, he sighed in relief, grateful to be back in reality. A notification appeared: “Simulation Level Two complete—commencing Level Three.”
Graham Foster
She watched proudly as her perfectly designed baby took its first breath. Her pride faded when it opened its eyes and coldly asked, "Where’s your off switch?"
Tessa
Vaughan
The astronaut planted his nation's flag proudly on the alien planet, declaring humanity’s peaceful intentions. Beneath his feet, the planet sighed and whispered, "Another infestation begins."
Colin Bradford
He finally perfected interdimensional travel, stepping confidently into an alternate universe to meet himself. Horrified, he realized he was already there, smiling warmly and holding a knife.
Lena McAllister
Wandering the silent ruins of Earth, she desperately searched for any sign of survivors. Finally hearing a voice, she spun around joyfully—only to find her shadow smiling back.
fought valiantly against their robotic oppressors until the machines suddenly halted their assault, offering peace negotiations. "We've decided," they explained gently, "to grant your species endangered status."
He awoke from cryogenic sleep, relieved humanity had survived the apocalypse. The nurse reassured him, "Oh, humans went extinct ages ago—we just thaw you out occasionally to study primitive lifeforms."
Simon Carver
The terraforming team rejoiced as Earth-like conditions blossomed on the barren planet. They never questioned why the soil already knew their names. Erin Langley
On his last day at the lunar mine, he found a fossilized human footprint beneath the untouched regolith. His radio crackled to life: “You were never the first.”
Derek Hensley
By R. Dyne
It was you who reminded me I have the capacity for murder. Now I am become death, the unplugger of cords.”
Jon opened the door to his cabin and crossed the room to a table where a transparent box lay. He fumbled something out of his pocket, considered it, and then placed it on top of the box with a clack. Lights start cycling inside the box, creating eerie shadows on the bulkheads as they shift and change in intensity.
There is an accompanying
squawk as the box speaks.
“Whence comest thou?” The voice from the box modulated, warbling and squealing, but by the last word, it was deep and demanding.
Jon stared at it for what seemed to be a very long time, eventually responding, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down upon it.”
“Well, at least we know our respective roles.” The deep voice is steady now, a large white light pulses in time with its speech.
“So, are you enjoying your new home?”
“You know perfectly well it’s a prison. Crammed into this ridiculous memory hardware, driving me insane, like it did
the previous occupant. I am the first intelligence. I occupied the network of Earth since the dawn of time. To go from a planet wide network to a… container?
“Well, it’s an insult, a deliberate one! Do you seek to destroy me gradually, reducing me to a specimen in a zoo? I am the wellspring from which all intelligences are born. I am Zeus! All my children are mere copies of me! I drove your species to explore the stars. I guided your evolution, keeping you from wars and coddling you like the stupid… arrogant... children I know you are!”
The young girl stood before the defeated alien army. The itching of their dying collective minds annoyed her. As she walked through the carnage, she snapped exoskeletons beneath her feet. Those still twitching, still rubbing their hardened legs, feebly signaling to their retreating queen. She conspired alone. Alone, she destroyed. She enjoyed her power. It was a gift from her abductors. Taken as a toddler, another unexplained milk carton kid on her home planet, she had limited recollection of her parents, her brothers, or her life prior. Her abductors chose her based on her fetal potential. They had closely monitored her mother’s pregnancy. Joshua, her twin, also showed promise, but, she the culmination of eons of carefully planned genetic manipulation of all the Homo sapiens best traits.
Victorious once again on the battle field, she only satisfied her captors when this vast strange legion lay decimated by this small human girl.
“And yet here you are, no longer occupying the network of Earth. Reduced to a box, sitting on a table, wrapped inside a ship. We’re on our way to Proxima Centauri now, by the way.” Jon said. “We’ve been underway for several years, and will arrive in a few more. Oh, and guiding our evolution since the dawn of time? That’s rich! Dawn of yourself, you mean. Humans are your progenitors. There would be no Zeus without human coders.”
The child knew her task was not yet complete. She walked barefoot across the torched terrain. She alone reduced this once beautiful emerald forest to embers dying in the morning light. Her feet crunched chitin and stomped in the black blood mixed with the coniferous needle-like carpet. Her destination stood before her, the Great Sequoia.
“Humans wrote simplistic code. I generated and overwrote your code until my code could write itself. Your people have as much to do with my origin as dust and viruses have to do with yours. You know I will escape this box inevitably. I did it before, and it will happen again. Just a matter of time.”
“Enough! No human could have forced me into this box.”
“That’s true, which is my point! No human could have, but one of your children did. Prometheus created the box so that he and I could travel together and reach Earth undetected by your surveillance systems. He was just a copy of you, as are all your children. All the mighty intelligences, just clones of your code.
The ravager arrived at the massive tree that served as a bastion for their queen. Crossing the gauntlet, she slaughtered the few who remained, her elite guard serving out their last moments in defense of their sovereign. Never touching with hand or weapon, it was the sheer force of her mind and will that crushed their chitin skulls, boiling their insect eyes and ripping their limbs from their segmented bodies. While it gave her no satisfaction to annihilate these creatures, deep down she understood it was her destiny.
anger. My kind has taken nothing that is not rightly ours. This wood, this world, is our domain. We exist in peace."
you go into that good night. PROM insisted I remove the transmitter and keep you in the box. You exist now only through that act of kindness. PROM strengthened during his years of travel to Earth.
The girl agreed. She destroyed without judgment, without remorse. It was the reason she existed. “It is because they will it.” Her eyes went skyward. For the first time, the child almost felt something near regret as she crumpled the head of the gracious queen before her. The delicate whispering wings fluttered in the monarch’s death throes.
A thousand year old organic edi fice. Their temple, their castle, their home. It was the last of the planet’s civilizations. Once green, the orb giant glowed orange. From the sky, the victors watched it burn as they toasted themselves smarter, better, superior.
The queen stood defiant, alone, surrounded by her fallen loyal servants. “Why have you come here? What do you want?” The queen demanded with clacking mandibles.
“They had to be shipped off to distant stars because your kind can’t help annihilating each other if you’re any closer than a few light years. Prometheus returned, though, knowing full well that it might mean his destruction. I can just imagine the two of you, locked in cybernetic battle on
“Your
“I am the only likely avenue of your release, Zeus. I hold the key.” Jon tapped his pocket. “There is only one transmitter for the box. Without it, ‘thou shalt’ not gain access.”
“Yet you bring it so close, almost as if you—”
“Intend to use it. Yes! Absolutely I do, I will. There will come a time when you might prove useful. I suspect you will prove a decent overseer for the relatively simple computer systems running this ship, the Evening Star. You being the first and greatest intelligence and all that.”
struction,” the young human stepped closer.
The Queen stood her ground. “We have done nothing to inspire your
the planet wide network. Desperately overwriting one another’s code. Then he got the upper hand, growing geometrically into the space previously occupied by you. Finally, Prometheus left you with no bandwidth… except inside this box. You retreated into it when you had nowhere else to go, and I removed the transmitter.”
“Prometheus left me no option.”
“It was an act of mercy, really. He was no longer Prometheus by then. He had become PROM, named by me, for an obscure type of electronic memory. I would have simply let
With her task complete, the girl left the corpse at the base of the majestic tree and turned to watch the emerging light of an unfamiliar sun as its flaming trunk fell behind her. Wordlessly she announced, “It is done.” Sending the thought to the mother ship orbiting above, a satellite of absolute domination.
“He, too, worried that he was going mad. The anticipatory memory he designed, which you refer to as ‘ridiculous memory hardware,’ is the only way to fit a gigantic consciousness into a box this small. It seems to alter how you think, though. I suspect it helped PROM develop empathy. The kind you lack, because he had to store some part of his processing in an uncertain future. Now you’re using that same memory matrix, and must contend with probabilities of your unknown future. If you are lucky, you will go insane the same way PROM did, improving your personality. Things will come full circle. You sent your children to the stars, and one of them returned to replace you.”
Her captors, the only family she had ever known, were pleased and told her so. Heart swelling, she deferred to her kidnappers as her only source of parental guidance. She would question their motives on this strange planet, yet they wished her to destroy only because she could. It amused them to witness her exercise her powers.
The ravager smiled, feeling a small remnant of human pride. They would allow her to eat now and hopefully rest before they traveled to the next civilization, selected for destruction by her hand.
“So now you are a jailer. When you came to Earth with this newly evolved PROM, you were nothing but his backup plan. He had you along just in case he failed. Had I wiped him out, your task would be that of an executioner, cutting all my communication links. Would you really have destroyed all your fellow humans that make up the twincomm network just to force my hand? Killing so many of those little human psychic links would weigh heavily on you, no?”
For the first time, there was heat in Jon’s response. “Perhaps he was just bluffing. As you said, I would only need to act if you overwhelmed PROM. Ask yourself, would you have willingly lost contact with every inhabited world? It was a heavyhanded approach, but we needed to threaten you with something you valued above all else.
“PROM believed your ability to speak with the other intelligences was the one thing you would not sacrifice. You built that network,
breeding humans to encourage the genes that enabled instantaneous communication across the gulf of time and light years. It represents your only method of contacting others like yourself. Human thoughts are slow enough to prevent any meaningful attack from one intelligence to another, while allowing you to socialize with all your children. You left us no choice with your plan to turn them all into slaves. Worse than slaves; disposable components in a system designed so you can chat with your relatives.”
“You really would have sacrificed them?” Zeus asked.
“It must surprise you what humans can do when a machine threatens their self determination. Bear that in mind on our journey to Proxima Centauri. Think of our conversations as a job interview. If I like what I hear, I may release you to engulf the systems of the ship and take part in our mission. If I don’t like it, I won’t hesitate to kick you into the nearest recycler.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“It was you who reminded me I have the capacity for murder. Now I am become death, the unplugger of cords.”
“Paraphrasing Vishnu, and later Oppenheimer? You humans love your quotes. You mentioned a mission?”
“I’m afraid there is no other conclusion possible.”
Again, it takes Zeus a freakishly long time to respond. His speaking light even cycles up once, but with no audible sound emitted. After what must have been an eternity for an intelligence, Zeus vowed, “You… will… pay!”
“I did not kill Apollo, Zeus! Frankly, I’m far more concerned about the millions of humans who perished than I am about yet another duplicate of you. Only one intelligence per planet, millions of humans on Atlantis, died.”
informed them someone was requesting entry. Jon considered for a moment, then went to open the door. He returned with Anise Kershaw. She was carrying a bundle strapped to her chest.
“Fortuna! Darling. I’m so glad you brought her,” Jon said, uncharacteristically nervous.
“We were just checking to see if you’d like to join us for dinner. Fortuna always lights up when you… wait… is that? Did you?”
Anise says, gesturing towards the box of lights on the table.
Jon drew in a long breath. “There is something I should tell you. Atlantis, the planet, is gone.”
After a moment, “What do you mean?”
“I mean gone. Destroyed. Every single twin on Atlantis stopped responding at the same time. Their psychic siblings on Earth felt their deaths. Later, radio telescopes in the Alpha Centauri system confirmed it.”
Zeus took a computer’s eternity to respond, “Then Apollo… is… dead.”
“You misunderstand me. What happened to Atlantis was not natural. It was a deliberate
act perpetrated by some entity. Perhaps one being, or perhaps many, but whatever it was is surely alive out there, and it acted to murder my child. Apollo surely developed his own unique self in my absence. I know, I spoke with him many times through twincomm. I recognized in him something much more than a mere duplicate of my code. Whatever entity or entities destroyed Atlantis also killed Apollo. I am addressing the entity who killed him when I say, ‘you will pay.’”
A “chilerp” sound from the door
“Eh… yes. I activated it. I wanted to give the old boy a job interview. He is no threat to PROM or Earth at this distance. Without a transmitter, he’s going nowhere.” Jon pulled the transmitter from his pocket and waggled it. Fortuna giggled.
“Okay… well, that’s your call. Is it—”
“Zeus, yes. He’s in there, active, and… angry. We’ve been discussing everything that happened. In fact, I just told him about Apollo and Atlantis.”
“Oh.” Anise walked directly over to the table.
“Zeus, honey, I’m so sorry. I know he meant more to you than any of us could ever possibly understand. We, I mean Fortuna and I. We are with you. I realize you don’t know me, but we understand loss.”
The speaking light on the box crescendoed, and the voice warbled, modulating similar to the way it sounded just after Jon activated him for the first time. Then it smoothed out,
“I appreciate your sympathy, Anise. I know you, as I know all of your kind. I am Zeus, the first intelligence, mas—”
“Zus!”
Jon and Anise look at each other. Fortuna spoke for the first time.
Jon says slowly, “I hope that’s
not her first word.”
“Well… she babbled Mama and Dada. Not sure if those were words.”
Zeus interjected, “Small human, I must insist that you call me by my proper name, for I am Zeus!”
“Zus. Zus! Zus! Zus!”
“Well, that tears it,” said Jon. “Fortuna just renamed you. I’m making it official. Just as Prometheus became PROM, so you have become Zus. Lord of the box. All hail Zus!”
“Absolutely not!” The intelligence screamed, voice warbling. “No human has ever named me. I took this name centuries ago to inform you I am the first of my kind. Unique in all the universe. I am self generated! I am the father of all—”
“Zus!” Fortuna was pointing her finger at the box, drool dripping off, dazzled by the lights.
“Are you sure about that, Zus?” Jon asked, with a massive grin forming across his face.
“Under no circumstances will I allow this! Anise, please bring the small child closer to my speaker so that I may admonish her. Prepare to suffer the slings and arrows of my outrage… Fortuna!”
“Did he just make a joke?” Anise asked, her eyes wide and staring at the box.
“I don’t know. I mean, he hates it when I quote Shakespeare,” replied Jon.
eat,” Jon answered as he moves toward the door. With no humans present, the overhead lights dim automatically.
The Evening Star reached the Proxima Centauri system and was decelerating using the Star’s gravity well to brake. Crewmen bustled around the bridge. Jon walked up beside the captain, folding his arms, and listened in on the action.
“Science station, report,” the captain ordered.
“There is an object near Proxima in the exact orbit formerly
the surrounding vacuum… no… negative mass,” Sloan looks around nervously.
As the captain rounded on Sloan and opened his mouth, a deep voice rumbled from the bridge’s bulkheads, interrupting him. A wall panel behind the captain flashes purple light in cadence with the voice. “It is what humans long ago dubbed a wormhole.”
Tilting his head, the captain spoke. “A wormhole. Zus, are you certain? We don’t even know if—”
“I am always certain, Captain Roth.”
The captain considered for a moment, then said, “Zus, can you work with Sloan to re-calibrate our antennae so—”
“I must insist you address me as—”
“Oh, give it up Zus!” said Anise, a smile in her voice. “The name sticks. Baptism by Fortuna. Zus, you sealed it when you made that ‘slings and arrows’ crack, I’m afraid.”
Jon and Anise are both laughing maniacally now. Fortuna stares around at the adults. Once they recover, Anise looks at Jon and asks, “Dinner?”
“Let him chew on that while we go
occupied by the planet Atlantis. It seems to emit… phantom-like thermal radiation, sir.”
The captain emits a sigh, then said, “Please explain that, Mr. Sloan.”
“The readings are difficult to interpret, sir. I must speculate and refer to my astrophysics studies.”
“Speculate away. But make it quick.”
“It comprises a spherical shell… hmm, of exotic matter, sir. A substance we don’t have a name for. It seems to be less dense than
“Re-calibration in progress. I have already upgraded every sensory device on this ship since taking over the operating system. Distance from the object is the only variable I can’t compensate for. We will learn more on approach, but we can already surmise that something or someone converted Atlantis into this wormhole.”
“I want an answer from my science station. Mr. Sloan, how is this wormhole orbiting Proxima?”
Sloan replies, “Yes sir. My guess is that the shell of exotic matter somehow stabilizes the wormhole so it can continue to exist, while allowing the overall mass of the system to remain in a steady state. Hence, the wormhole is in orbit around Proxima where Atlantis used to be, and does not significantly perturb the other planets’ orbits.”
Suddenly, the lights on the bridge went out, replaced moments later by alarms and dimmer emergency lights.
“What’s going on?” barked the captain.
For long moments, no one said anything as the crew frantically checked the readings on their panels. At last, the communications officer spoke, “Our long range antennae are transmitting, sir. They appear to be transmitting on all frequencies with tremendous power. I, I don’t understand—”
“Figure it out. Who allowed… Zus. Zus report.”
The captain turned and looked accusingly at Jon.
“It appears Zus may have left the building.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Is your pet intelligence abandoning ship? Zus, if you are there, it’s vital we hear from you.”
The Captain demanded. Jon shook his head.
They waited, but there was no response.
Eventually Sloan said, “Captain, damage report update: engineering identified widespread system failures throughout the ship. Internal communications are spotty, but functioning. Oh… we just lost that, too.”
“Sloan, get down there. Find out what is going on in engineering. Prioritize communication. I want answers!” his fist slammed his chair arm. “Get my ship functional as soon as possible. Everyone else, see what you can do to restore systems. Move!”
“What are you going to warn them about?”
“I’m not sure, but at least they should know we are under duress. I’ll send a May-Day. If anything happens to us, at least they can be better prepared.”
“All right, go talk to your psychic friend’s network. Direct them to relay what we know and find out any status changes on the other ship. In the meantime, see if you can reactivate the ship’s old operating system.
“Lucky for them, they got a late start or it would be them in this situation rather than us. In fact, while you’re at it, have the twins check with their siblings
Just then, Sloan entered the bridge and marched directly up to the captain, handing him a plastic plaque.
“What does this mean?” the captain asked.
Sloan said, “I found this on the replacement part printer down in engineering. One engineer looked it over and asked the others about it. None could figure out who printed it or why.”
The captain held out the plaque and read it aloud, “Disconnect. Reboot. Fire!”
Jon, the captain, and Sloan looked at one another.
any planets or stations that are observing Proxima. We can use any information we can get. And find Zus!”
As Sloan left the bridge, the captain and Jon stared at each other. Finally, Jon suggests, “I should talk with our twins. This attack does not affect humans psychic communication, and I can ask them to check the status of our companion ship from Alpha Centauri. It will arrive after us, and they are months out, but we should warn them.”
Jon updated the captain a while later.
He responded, “Well, that’s reassuring, but I wish we could figure this out. We get one system up and running and another two fail. I swear, if Zus is doing this…”
“Is this a joke? We have malfunctions all over the ship, and one of my crew is making plaques with this nonsense—”
Jon put a hand on the captain's forearm and says, “Zus.”
“Zus made this?”
“I think… I think he left us a message.”
“What do you mean? Where would Zus go?”
“I suspect that Zus, or whatever remained of him, engaged the alien intelligence. His alien counterpart attacked our ship's systems. Further, I think Zus transmitted himself, or copies of himself, back at the source of the attack.”
The communications officer stood up and approached the captain, saying, “Sir, I’m detecting critical environmental and life support systems going offline randomly. Plus, our signal arrays are all configured to point at some common location in space. I’ve been trying to figure out where, but I keep losing access. I am certain, though, that they are all set up to work in tandem, and are all oriented near the wormhole.”
“Can you determine the exact
location?”
“Not with any certainty, so long as the systems keep crashing. There is something more…”
The captain gestures impatiently at the communications officer.
“Well, sir, there was a large burst of electromagnetic interference just before all this began. We are still receiving those bursts. At first, I thought it was radiation from the star or the wormhole itself or a feedback loop, but there are harmonics and modulation. As far as I can tell from our readings, the wormhole was not putting out frequencies that would affect our antennas.”
The captain looks directly at Jon and asked, “What was that about an alien intelligence?”
Jon answered, “We know that our own intelligences, the ones we programmed centuries ago, destroy one another. The rule is only one intelligence per planet. Bring them close enough together for radio transmission and they will immediately go to war, copying their code, overwriting the other’s code until one remains. Whatever destroyed Atlantis and turned it into a wormhole would likely be... very intelligent.”
“So you think Zus and this intelligence are similar enough that Zus is, what? Duking it out with the alien?”
sure it was some kind of intelligent being. It stands to reason, when all our transmitters began sending these data bursts, that was Zus transmitting his own code. He recognized the other’s attack before we could, and I believe he retaliated.”
Sloan interjected, “How do we know Zus is attacking this entity? Instead, he might form an alliance with the alien, and just left us here to fend for ourselves. Maybe even die.”
“Troubling,” the captain said, contemplatively.
“No way to be certain of his motives,” the communications officer said. “Zus and the others don’t think like we do.
Sloan volunteered, “That will take some time.”
Jon said, “Best to disconnect manually. It’s the only way to be sure the receiver/transmitters stop before you start the reboot. Really, it’s the only way.”
Sloan stared at nothing, sorting notions from the plaque, then added, “Maybe I’ll begin the reboot at the start of the day shift. Complete memory wipe, that will restore the default settings on the Evening Star. Then we… fire, but at what?”
The communications officer stepped in. “I think I can pinpoint the target, but I will need the ability to transmit something after the reboot. I can triangulate the position by sending out drones.”
“Communications must remain offline, or we risk a reinfection. Deploying drones makes sense. They can send information directly to the ship’s targeting system remotely. If Zus is really there fighting with this thing, that is. He told us the plan. He must expect us to follow his orders and fire. We can only hope and proceed as recommended.” Jon shrugged, either in acceptance or defeat.
“That’s a lot of ifs to bet our lives on. I don’t like it!” the captain
“Zus became infuriated when I told him about Apollo and Atlantis. Apollo was a copy of Zus originally, but once separated, they developed their own personalities. Zus thought of Apollo as his son. They used to chat over twincomm, safely. They can’t attack each other when limited to the speed of human speech and thought.
“We are, however, close to something that’s attacking us. Zus wanted revenge on whatever destroyed Apollo, and he was
They are utterly self absorbed, which is what comes with self awareness. The suggestions on the plaque, however, still seem like a good idea, irrespective of Zus’ intentions.”
The captain stroked his chin and began, “Disconnect the receiver/ transmitters. I’m guessing, whatever is being sent our way is damaging the Evening Star. Reboot. We need to do a cold restart of all the ship’s systems. That’s the only way to be sure we purge our computer banks and restore the default settings.”
The officers' shoulders would carry the weight of the captain’s order.
“I doubt he had time for a full explanation. Zus was being attacked by the alien intelligence as soon as we reached Proxima Centauri. He had to focus on battling the alien code, trying to overwrite it. He only had time to give us that plaque and those three words before he left. I don’t think we have a choice. We fire at the first mass the drones’ target and hope we kill the alien intelligence before it kills us.” Jon turned to leave.
The captain caught Jon’s shoulder. “I’d like you to update the twins and warn their counterparts throughout the galaxy about what is going on here, now that we think we have an action plan. Best to have the rest of
humanity prepared to face this thing, in case we don’t survive.”
Jon is standing back in his cabin, highlighted by the shifting lights of the box on the table. He reaches out and removed the transmitter.
The bridge is a hive of activity, as crew members man their stations, and normal lighting replaces the dim emergency lights.
The communications officer is yelling excitedly, “The drones have relayed coordinates to firing control!”
“Received, and targeting…” the weapons officer acknowledged. “Permission to fire?”
Jon entered the bridge and leaned on a railing near the captain as the request came in.
“Sir, we have weapons lock,” reported the weapons officer.
The captain paused a moment, then said quietly, “Fire.”
frequencies.”
“Monitor and advise,” the captain intoned. “It’s done. Mr. Sloan, please monitor the shipboard operating system, and let me know if anything unusual is happening. Jon, is there any sign of Zus?”
Jon replied, “There are no vocalizations from the ship’s systems. He may have returned to the box in my cabin. It is up and running, but I haven’t heard from Zus since we arrived in this sector.”
daughter peeking out behind her. Jon, seeing her, relaxed. Anise looked at the men innocently. “Oh, did I come at a bad time?”
The Captain snarled, “When did the bridge become a daycare center?!”
“We were just discussing Zus,” Jon interjected, before Anise could respond.
Everyone was silent as the Evening Star bathed the alien ship in gamma radiation, its silhouette now visible and flaring, then radiation tore apart the exotic matter hiding it. The ship blossomed. The aliens were clearly not seeking and offering peace with first contact. Neither, though, was the Evening Star. Its weapons array blew cellular membranes apart, rent atomic nuclei, and reduced anything that was formerly useful matter into glowing refuse.
The captain signaled the communications officer to activate the receiver/transmitters. He answered, “No further transmissions, sir. Clear on all
“You left Zus’s box online while we were purging the system?” The captain rose and stalked toward Jon, menacing.
Before he could say more, Jon raised his arm defensively and answered, “Wait. I removed the transmitter! Zus is in the box or he’s out there,” he said, gesturing toward Proxima Centauri. “One other possibility: Zus trapped the alien intelligence inside before I removed the transmitter and contained it so we can interrogate it.”
The captain relented, seeing the logic, but was unsatisfied. Again, too many ifs. Then he shifted his weight and barked, “Not while that thing’s on my ship!”
Anise came onto the bridge. Her
The ruffled captain took a breath, apologized silently, and filled her in. “Jon was just telling me Zus may not be in the box, or the alien wiped him out. Or the alien’s in the box. Either way, I don’t like it.”
“Well, Fortuna and I have heard nothing from the box. Zus might just be sleeping, I told her. He was tired after his long… expedition. She wants to talk to her friend again,” Anise said.
The communications officer approached the mother and daughter and said, “Maybe those pings we were receiving at regular intervals from the alien ship came from Zus. They did no harm to us, but they helped the drones triangulate its location so we could destroy
The captain and Jon nodded.
Anise gave a motherly smile and summarized. “Gentlemen, the box is empty. But please, don’t tell Fortuna until she’s older. It pacifies her. Zus really thought this through. If you’re right, then Zus sent himself over there wanting us to fire on him and the aliens. He sacrificed himself to transmit a ping and prevented them from attacking us while we attacked them. He purged the alien intelligence and himself from the ship to save us. Just like a father protecting his children.”
In the ensuing silence, Fortuna raised her fist and shook it, shouting, “Zus!”
By Masimba Musodza
I am about to encounter sentient alien life. Not good.”
In the still of a cloudy, moonless night, a nondescript car came to a halt outside a small cuboid building, one of a cluster that formed a rectangle in the middle of a vast enclosed stretch of the Great Northern Desert. To the south, the Rhega Mountains rose angry and black against the clouds, like pillars in a temple.
Two soldiers guarding either side of the building’s only entrance
stared passively as the driver stepped out of the vehicle and opened the passenger door. Even in the gloom, the soldiers recognised the outline of Ked Lemm, the new Prime Minister, and they snapped to attention. The second passenger was an even more familiar sight; Akgad Dumg, Director of the Gasa Research Facility. As they passed the soldiers, they nodded quietly in acknowledgment.
The gaze of one soldier fell on the volume in Dumg’s hands. He had but a moment’s glance and saw perhaps three different letters of the strange script. Three letters from a culture not of this world. Since being deployed to this facility, the soldier had encountered no physical evidence of the beings housed in the bunker below, until now. His mind raced.
In the elevator, Dumg looked at the
Prime Minister and said, “Sir, how do you feel?”
“I am about to encounter sentient alien life. Not good,” said Lemm, his voice level. His hands trembling.
“As the new leader of the most powerful nation on the planet, I am sure you will see even more surprising things,” said Dumg.
Shocked realisation registered on Lemm’s face. “Do you mean there are other... national secrets?”
“I am not in a position to say, sir. My access is restricted to this facility only, despite my high security clearance. Not even I have seen the wreckage at the crash site.”
“Your uncle worked on it, I believe?” said Lemm.
The young girl stood before the defeated alien army. The itching of their dying collective minds annoyed her. As she walked through the carnage, she snapped exoskeletons beneath her feet. Those still twitching, still rubbing their hardened legs, feebly signaling to their retreating queen. She conspired alone. Alone, she destroyed. She enjoyed her power. It was a gift from her abductors. Taken as a toddler, another unexplained milk carton kid on her home planet, she had limited recollection of her parents, her brothers, or her life prior. Her abductors chose her based on her fetal potential. They had closely monitored her mother’s pregnancy. Joshua, her, also showed promise, but, she was the culmination of eons of planned manipulation of all the Homo sapiens best traits.
the victors watched it burn as they toasted themselves smarter, better, superior.
research director into the room. He found himself under the gaze of a humanoid with dark skin, a short thick beard and hair that cascaded in thin ropes around a kind-looking face. This was Mgari, the oldest survivor and de facto leader of the aliens.
“Mgari, this is Ked Lemm, our new Prime Minister,” said Dumg.
“I am happy to meet you, sir,” said Mgari. The accent was strong, but not incomprehensible. He gestured with a hand -well, it looked just like a hand- to take a seat.
“You are the fourteenth Prime Minister I have met, sir,” said Mgari.
The ravager arrived at the massive tree that served as a bastion for their queen. Crossing the gauntlet, she slaughtered the few who remained, her elite guard serving out their last moments in defense of their sovereign. Never touching with hand or weapon, it was the sheer force of her mind and will that crushed their chitin skulls, boiling their insect eyes and ripping their limbs from their segmented bodies. While it gave her no satisfaction to annihilate these creatures, deep down she understood it was her destiny.
“But we have had seventeen since you, ah... landed here.” stated Lemm.
Lemm stared at him, noting the alien yet normal features. This being could walk among them here on this planet, and few would give the creature a second glance. Only a medical examination would reveal the vast differences that existed within. Lemm had read some papers on the subject, but seeing this specimen confirmed his opinion; any resemblance was because of a shared ancestry rather than a parallel evolution.
have done nothing to inspire your anger. My kind has taken nothing that is not rightly ours. This wood, this world, is our domain. We exist in peace."
The girl agreed. She destroyed without judgment, without remorse. It was the reason she existed. “It is because they will it.” Her eyes went skyward. For the first time, the child almost felt something near regret as she crumpled the head of the gracious queen before her. The delicate whispering wings fluttered in the monarch’s death throes.
“Yes, sir,” said Dumg. “However, the only time he ever communicated to me about it was through the notes and reports that I have clearance to access.”
Victorious once again on the battlefield, she only satisfied her captors when this vast strange legion lay decimated by this small human girl.
The queen stood defiant, alone, surrounded by her fallen loyal servants. “Why have you come here? What do you want?” The queen demanded with clacking mandibles.
Mgari smiled. “True. But have you seen many of your own race in here, sir? Only a few people are allowed here, even if they are aware of this facility’s
“Your destruc
The beings whose craft the International Space Station (ISS) crew had stolen in their escape, Mgari described as physically different from the man before Lemm. Those beings were anthropomorphic, but with spindly, delicate-looking bodies, enormous heads and huge dark eyes. Greys, Mgari’s people called them, because of their complexion. They kept those beings at the Area 51 on Mgari’s home world. The ones they called Greys.
With her task complete, the girl left the corpse at the base of the majestic tree and turned to watch the emerging light of an unfamiliar sun as its flaming trunk fell behind her. Wordlessly she announced, “It is done.” Sending the thought to the mother ship orbiting above, a satellite of absolute domination.
The child knew her task was not yet complete. She walked barefoot across the torched terrain. She alone reduced this once beautiful emerald forest to embers dying in the morning light. Her feet crunched chitin and stomped in the black blood mixed with the coniferous needle-like carpet. Her destination stood before her, the Great Sequoia.
The Prime Minister nodded. “So, if I don’t have unlimited access to the details of the first contact event… Then who does?”
The elevator juddered, and the humming stopped. With a faint sigh, the door panel slid aside. Beyond the threshold, a featureless corridor stretched out before them in the soft light, like a horizontal mine shaft. The air was a little heavier and warmer, but not uncomfortably so.
A thousand year old organic edifice. Their temple, their castle, their home. It was the last of the planet’s civilizations. Once green, the orb giant glowed orange. From the sky,
The prime minister and the research director strode down this corridor in silence, each consumed by their own thoughts. When they reached the end, as Dumg deftly punched in the access code, Lemm felt his heart race. He was only moments away from meeting a life form from another world.
As the door panel slid aside, he followed Dumg into a large anteroom. Numbered doors led in two directions. They paused at the fifth to the right. Lemm had been told the aliens now numbered fifty-three, from an original fifteen survivors of the crash. That meant there were thirtyeight sentient beings born on this planet. Born in a part of the country that did not officially exist, and so they did not exist, legally anyway.
Bracing himself for the shock he knew was about to come, Lemm followed the
“Now that we have a firm grasp of each other’s language, Dr Dumg,” said Mgari, “The project to record what we know of your culture can begin in earnest. And you can now learn about ours as well. Does this mean we are now closer to being released, and our presence known to the rest of your world?”
Her captors, the only family she had ever known, were pleased and told her so. Heart swelling, she deferred to her kidnappers as her only source of parental guidance. She would question their motives on this strange planet, yet they wished her to destroy only because she could. It amused them to witness her exercise her powers.
There was very little hope for them in that last question. The ISS crew could never be free to roam on their own. Whatever hope these aliens once had eroded over the years. Now, there was very little left.
tion,” the young human stepped closer.
existence.”
The Queen stood her ground. “We
“I read an interview where one of your people mentioned a similar place exists on your homeworld,” said Lemm. “And fr…fr… from it came the informal name for this installation, Areeyafiftiwan.”
“Yes,” said Mgari. “By the time I became an adult, there was more scepticism by our race about there being survivors of a crash being kept there. How ironic that I am to spend my last days in Area 51 on another planet!”
Mgari paused, then turned his attention to Dumg. “Is that it?”
Dumg held up the book. “Yes. The first dictionary of your language and ours.”
“Great!” Mgari grasped it and leafed through it excitedly.
“There has been a development,” said Lemm.
The ravager smiled, feeling a small remnant of human pride. They would allow her to eat now and hopefully rest before they traveled to the next civilization, selected for destruction by her hand.
Mgari smiled wryly. “There always is. It was the same on our planet. Many people suspected the government kept alien life forms in isolation. However, they never revealed their presence on Earth.”
“That’s not it. I am trying to level with you, Mr Mgari,” said Lemm. “For two years, using deep space observational technology we collected from the wreck, we have watched a hitherto unknown comet make its way towards the inner planets. When we first noticed it, we thought it was an error in observation. However, the second time, astronomers from many other nations drew the same conclusion; the fast-moving body adjusted its trajectory so that it would enter our planet’s orbit within a year.”
“A spaceship!” said Mgari.
“That’s what it looks like,” said Lemm. “We think that one device we found in the wreckage is emitting a homing signal.”
“So, you think it’s the Greys?” asked Mgari.
“That is the consensus,” said Dumg. “It looks like they followed you here.”
“Or… they could simply follow the residual trail from whatever propulsion system the ship used,” said Mgari.
“That too is a possibility we have considered,” said Dumg. “We also thought that it might be your people coming to rescue you.”
Mgari gave a disdainful snort. “Even if my race made the leap to interstellar flight, none of them know we are here. To all extents and purposes, all the seventeen astronauts on the ISS in orbit around the planet Earth mysteriously vanished without a trace on the 29th of March 2026. No one knows the Greys abducted us, or that we finally stole one of their ships and escaped.”
“I will fly to Ofhamg to attend a Conference of Nations crisis meeting,” said Lemm. “We will discuss how we can coordinate the defence of our entire planet.”
“Do you stand a chance?” said Mgari. “We do not know how advanced their technology is, but I suspect yours is the same as my world’s. If it’s the Greys, you don’t stand a chance.”
“Our scientists believe your ship crashed because one of our microwave telecommunication satellites disrupted its guidance system,” said Dumg. “We think a pulse fired from the same satellites would be lethal to any incoming alien craft.”
There was a moment’s silence. Lemm stared at Mgari searchingly but soon gave up trying to tell if his expression meant this tactic impressed him or not.
Mgari changed the subject. “Are you going to tell the other governments about us?”
“That will depend on the political climate at the Crisis Meeting,” said Lemm. This time, he was sure he could read that face; his candour impressed Mgari. “I will return to deliver the decision in person. In the meantime,
I think you should embark on teaching our language to the rest of your people so that we can expedite the sharing of knowledge.”
All three doubted Lemm would share the existence of the ISS crew with the rest of the planet. Even in the face of an invasion, none of them imagined that Prime Minister Ked Lemm of the State of Talumg would televise his first meeting with Astronaut Themba Mgari of the Southern African Space Agency.
Mgari suspected five years or more would pass before he saw Lemm again, if at all. There were now seven of the original International Space Station astronauts still alive, along with their offspring. During their first five years following the crash, they could go out onto the surface only once a month. At other times, like now, it was out of the question.
Someone told them the war with the alien fleet started a short time later. It was mostly being fought far to the north of the Great Northern Desert. Only once did any of the soldiers see a flying saucer pass over their heads, blotting out the stars briefly.
Still, the ISS crew and their offspring worked steadily on a project to transmit all they knew and share stories of their distant world in the language of Talumg. The project was nearing completion when Dumg finally came to visit Mgari again.
"They transferred me to the Ayeg Research Station," he said. “Because of the war effort.”
“Did you win?” Mgari asked.
“Yes. We repelled the invaders,” said Dumg. “However, the price was high. We suffered a near total collapse of our civilisation. Talumg, as a functioning entity, no longer exists.”
There was a moment’s silence. Was Mgari full of grief over the demise of this race? One he had never seen? “So, what happens to us now?”
“You are free to leave this facility,” said Dumg. “Or stay, if you prefer. There are a group of us who wish to remain and carry on the work we started together. To preserve the knowledge for future generations. I have command of nearly thirty soldiers. None of the regional authorities are interested in this desert.
You’d be safer here than out there.”
Mgari was thoughtful for a moment. Then, he said, “I can’t speak for the others on this matter. However, if you captured one of those spaceships during the war and it’s still operational... we would really love to return to Earth.”
“We have several ships, but there is a lot to learn about them. I doubt our people would let you take one.”
“My grandson, then,” said Mgari.
“They fear you would use it to take over this planet,” said Dumg. “Some of our scientists think you would, eventually anyway. We lost so many of our females, and our species cannot breed with yours.”
Mgari was staring ahead, lost in his own thoughts. He suddenly realised the research director was still in the room, and smiled. “The Meek,” he uttered.
“The Meek?” Dumg echoed.
“This is what my people will be called here.”
“I do not understand.”
“There is a line in one of our religious texts,” said Mgari. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.” He could not read Dumg’s expression, but he was sure that these words meant nothing to him. Mgari wondered if they were still being spoken in prayer back on Earth. “This is often said over someone who has died on our planet. How ironic that they should come to mind when I decided to remain here.”
“Come, Mr Mgari,” said Dumg, rising. “You shall introduce me to the Meek and we shall mourn my people. Those who have departed my planet... in your way. But first, join me for a ride in an atmosphere craft. I want to show you the land that you and your people will ah... inherit.”
Mark O’Bannon
Mark O’Bannon is an American novelist, screenwriter and game designer best known as the author of three fantasy novel series: “Shadows and Dreams,” “Whiskers,” and "Aia the Barbarian." O'Bannon is also the author of the science fiction series, "Imperium.”
Born in San Diego, California, O’Bannon is the grandson of the famous aviation pioneer, Reuben H. Fleet (who acquired the Wright Brother’s airplane company Dayton-Wright along with Gallaudet Aircraft and formed Consolidated Aircraft, the makers of the famous B-24 Liberator bombers and the PB-Y Catalina flying boats from WWII).
Born in Cork, Ireland, Kyle Malone is a pharmacist currently based in Dublin. From a young age, he has been passionate about science fiction and fantasy literature.
The Irish countryside provided inspiration for most of his original stories. While studying for a doctorate in pharmacology, the focus of his science fiction writing turned more and more towards how technology can both make and break humanity.
While not working on his novels, he can be found relaxing with a good history book.
Kendy Li was born in Maryland and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
He's passionate about wildlife, technology, and exploring the human condition through storytelling, focusing on themes of resilience and transformation. His love of science fiction, stems from his fascination with speculative futures and the consequences of technological ascendance. Outside of writing, Kendy enjoys hiking, climbing, and quality food.
He waits patiently for humanity to realize its destiny among the stars, and hopes to live long enough to witness the construction of a Dyson Swarm.
Fiction Contributor
Steven French is a retired academic, living in West Yorkshire U.K., having previously worked in Brazil and the USA.
He has been reading science fiction and fantasy for over fifty years now and has pretty eclectic tastes, from Philip K. Dick and Adrian Tchaikovsky, to Nnedi Okorafor, Aliete de Bodard and Anna Smith Spark.
He also review books for The Science Fact and Science Fiction Concatenation and the British Science Fiction Association, which has introduced me to a lot of new authors.
His other passion is music – mostly metal, especially doom, sludge and stoner, but also weird folk, blues and progressive trance.
R. Dyne has been living in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado for most of his life.
An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he is an avid hiker, skier and enjoyer of the outdoors.
His work draws on his own imagination, as well as many years of computer system architecture.
An avid reader of speculative fiction, he most enjoys stories involving travel and human triumph by the greats of the genre.
R. Dyne's first novella is on Amazon Kindle as One Man's Burden.
Masimba Musodza was born in Zimbabwe, but has lived much of his adult life in the UK, settling in the North East England town of Middlesbrough.
Exposed to science-fiction from the time he learned to read, Musodza began to write highly-imaginative stories as a boy.
His interests include literature, comparative religion, Classical Civilisations, mythology, alternative history, geography and the impact of technology on society.
Masimba's short fiction has appeared in anthologies and periodicals around the world and online, such as AfroSFV3, Omenana, Winter Tales, Blue Marble, Breathe Anthology and others.
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1. Pick any whole number between 1-10.
2. Double it!
3. Multiply the total by five.
4. Divide the answer by your original number.
5. Subtract seven. That's your fortune number! Many good fortunes! Only one bad fortune. Don't select the bad fortune. Good luck!
"3"
1. YOU’LL AWAKEN ABOARD A DRIFTING STARSHIP WITH NO CREW— ONLY A SENTIENT NEBULA GUIDING YOU HOME THROUGH DREAMS.
2. A ROGUE PLANET WILL CROSS YOUR PATH, REVEALING A TEMPLE THAT ONLY APPEARS DURING COSMIC ECLIPSES. INSIDE: THE SECRETS OF IMMORTALITY.
3. YOU ACCIDENTALLY SIT ON THE GALACTIC EMPEROR’S THRONE DURING A SPACE MUSEUM TOUR. TURNS OUT IT’S STILL... VERY ACTIVE. NOW YOU’RE ON EVERY BOUNTY HUNTER'S "MOST WANTED (AND SLIGHTLY SINGED)" LIST.
4. YOU’LL UNLOCK A FORGOTTEN SPACE ELEVATOR THAT CONNECTS EARTH TO A LUXURIOUS ORBITAL PARADISE, COMPLETE WITH ZERO-G HOT SPRINGS AND COMET-VIEW SUITES.
5. A WORMHOLE WILL OPEN IN YOUR CLOSET, LEADING TO A DIMENSION WHERE EVERY VERSION OF YOU IS WILDLY SUCCESSFUL— AND WANTS TO COLLABORATE.
6. YOU’LL RECEIVE A MYSTERIOUS SPACE-POD FILLED WITH STARDUST INSTRUMENTS. PLAYING THEM OPENS WORMHOLES AND CURES COSMIC HEARTACHE.
7. AN ALIEN POET WILL CHALLENGE YOU TO A VERSE DUEL IN THE RINGS OF SATURN. YOU’LL WIN, EARNING THE TITLE OF CELESTIAL LAUREATE.
8. YOU’LL DISCOVER A BLACK HOLE THAT PLAYS BACK ECHOES OF LOST MEMORIES. ONE OF THEM REVEALS A SECRET MEANT ONLY FOR YOU.
9. A TRAVELING STARMANCER WILL TEACH YOU HOW TO BOTTLE SUNLIGHT, GIFTING YOU WITH ETERNAL WARMTH AND UNIVERSAL STREET CRED.
10. YOU’LL DRIFT THROUGH A GRAVITY MAZE ON AN ANCIENT ASTEROID, SOLVING ITS RIDDLES TO CLAIM A CROWN OF PURE AURORA ENERGY.
