Originally published in The Opposite of Memory: A Collection of Unforgettable Fiction, February 2024
“People use the hypercrystals for all sorts of reasons, of course. Not just big decisions, like this one.”
Sometimes two roads diverge in a wood, and you can never know what would have happened if you’d taken the other path. Or so I’m told. It hasn’t been that way since before I was born.
Like my mother before me, I lay my hand on the hypercrystal when it’s time to decide what I want to do with my life — whether I want to have a child and become a mother or… not. Continue reading “Two Roads Diverge”
Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, August 2023
“Will a space station — where people just live their lives, instead of doing groundbreaking scientific research — be painfully boring after having been my own glorious self, inhabiting and haunting the computers of Wespirtech?”
The people walk my halls like it’s any normal day. Scientists work on their research. Administrators try to balance budgets without understanding why they’re constantly coming unbalanced. (I unbalance them. Humans don’t know what they should spend their money on as well as I do.) And everyone acts like it’s a perfectly normal day.
“It had been a long day, but it made her happy to spin with Callie. It reminded her of the world with carnivorous purple dolphin creatures and how the two of them had spun on the slippery surface of an iceberg after slaying one.”
The Checkerboard Ultrarocket shot through the hyperspace portals linking Zorpa II’s location in the universe back to the Milky Way galaxy, the terran solar system, and finally Earth. The greens of Earth’s continents looked richer and the blues more regal compared to the faded shades of Zorpa II’s honeydew green oceans. Earth is a beautiful world, and all worlds are like gemstones set in the black backdrop of space. Even dusty, rocky asteroids and icy hunks of comet, hurtling aimlessly through space, are the bits of gravitational color that make the universe complicated and exciting. Continue reading “Commander Annie – Part 6”
Annie reached out too, but hesitated before touching the silvery surface. “May I?” she asked. “Is it safe?”
“Can I show you something?” Ootel asked, standing up from the bed and stepping toward the closet. “I’ve been building something too… Not a spaceship, but I had hoped it would let me travel to other worlds.”
Ootel scooped a bunch of the clothing off of the floor of the closet and dumped it in the corner of their room; then they kicked a few of the remaining robes out with their hind hooves. Once the closet was clear enough for both of them inside, Annie followed them in. Ootel pushed aside the hanging clothes, and behind them, Annie saw the two of them reflected in an oval mirror. A green bipedal giraffe standing beside a human girl, both of them wearing simple, practical clothing. Annie smiled. She knew that Callie thought their space helmets looked goofy, but she loved how she looked in a bright red bicycle helmet. Space helmets are cool. Continue reading “Commander Annie – Part 5”
“Annie’s heart jumped at the idea of bringing Ootel back to Earth with her to visit.”
Annie resisted the temptation to explore the rooms more thoroughly and simply scanned each of them from their color-coded doors to see if her Roomba was inside. Though when she came to the topaz paneled room, it seemed to be a pantry of some sort, filled with objects that her scans suggested were edible. She grabbed a few handfuls of brightly colored blobs wrapped in some kind of foil paper. They looked like candy, and she stuffed them in her shorts pockets and the empty spaces in her backpack. She couldn’t turn down sustenance. She might need it later. At least, that’s what she told herself, but truly, after the deliciousness of the baby’s chocolate cake, she simply couldn’t resist stealing this alien candy. Continue reading “Commander Annie – Part 4”
“By the time Annie craned her neck around to look over her shoulder, down at the ground below, she was easily three stories high.”
The more Annie thought about knocking on that door, the more she pictured the total chaos that would ensue if one of the alien creature’s she’d met on her journeys had shown up on her own doorstep. Her parents would have freaked. They didn’t like a harmless little garter snake; if they met an actual alien from another planet, they’d call the police or beat it away with a rake. Something horrible. Continue reading “Commander Annie – Part 3”
“You want to come with me?” Annie asked. The tiny flower-eye winked at her.
Annie grabbed her backpack from the far side of the pile of sleeping bags, slung it over one shoulder, and went out the back door, carefully avoiding the entertainment room where Doris and Ryan were doing their puzzle.
Outside the air was crisp; a breeze had come up and blown the earlier heat away. The stars looked bright. Beaming. Calling to her. Continue reading “Commander Annie – Part 2”
“Commander Annie was a daredevil, and she’d built her spaceship to handle rough landings.”
The Checkerboard Ultrarocket cruised through the upper atmosphere of Zorpa II. Commander Annie sat cross-legged in the cramped cockpit of her tiny, homemade spaceship and watched the enticing purple deserts and pale green oceans glide by. After her first aborted attempt, she’d never had the courage to land on Zorpa II alone. She’d been waiting all summer for Captain Callie to have time to join her, but Callie had been busy with a summer math class her mother was making her take. Continue reading “Commander Annie – Part 1”
Originally published in Commander Annie and Other Adventures, November 2023
“The universe didn’t blink in our staring match, it redefined how staring matches work by growing additional eyes.”
The universe is fundamentally composed of irony. We live in a story, and that story has a genre. It is a satire. Let me repeat the most important idea here: the fundamental building block of the universe, the smallest, indivisible component is irony. When you take an umbrella, and so it doesn’t rain — dramatic irony. The viewer, whoever or whatever exists outside the universe, or perhaps simply the personality of the universe itself gets to laugh at you. It knows; you didn’t. Dramatic irony. Continue reading “When the Universe Listens”
Originally published in Commander Annie and Other Adventures, November 2023
“The plesiosaur wasn’t showing up as an attackable creature. She flipped open her adventurer’s log and scanned through it, trying hurriedly to find the right quest text and read it.”
QuestCrusher20 zipped through the zone, zooming from one quest to the next without reading the text. She didn’t need to. Just follow the dots on the game map, and like breadcrumbs they led her from a cluster of satyrcorns to kill for their horns to an area strewn with mecha gears that the friendly robots of Robotica needed her to gather. Quest after quest, she could figure them out on the fly, and it only slowed her down to read the flavor text or listen to the NPCs tell their backstories. Continue reading “Speed Questing”
