Dark Matters
So, I have a new short story out just in time for Christmas. In fact, it’s in the Piedmont Journal of Poetry and Fiction’s new collection, Holiday Tales and Adventures (now on Kindle and in print). I’m pretty proud of it. If you’re a fan of sci-fi, the TV show Black Mirror, mystery, morality plays, Dante’s Inferno, or Dr. Faustus, this one’s for you.
It’s the first story in the collection, so the Amazon preview will give you a chunk of it for free. In that same spirit, here’s the prologue and first act (first thing I’ve ever written in the 2nd person, enjoy):
Dark Matters
A Morality Play in Three Acts
Scott Davis Howard
You yawn, shiver, and board the commuter hovertrain, sipping your medicated coffee as you search for a reasonably clean seat on which to spend the seventy-nine minutes from Nashua to your law firm in Hartford. Sweeping some bagel crumbs from the Teflon upholstery, you settle into an unobtrusive nook. You’ve been looking forward to the final chapters of the VisualClassic library book that you’ve been watching for weeks: Dante’s Inferno. The immersive imagery has been haunting your dreams every night, but you can’t seem to get enough. The company spared no expense on this production. Yesterday, you left Odysseus burning in torment and met the giant Ephialtes, who would take you and Dante down into the 9th level of perdition--that’s one floor above my cubicle, you chuckle, thinking briefly about the office. You cough. Your coffee tastes like Robitussin.
Just then, the Cerebrocastor Alert buzzes inside your head. The Pharma-Tech node in your cortex flashes an image of a frosted white corpse onto your inner-eye, overlaid with three-dimensional letters, spelling:
F. Baur McClelland Memory-Scan Special in Three Acts--WORLD PREMIER!
It’s followed by three blinking options: ACCEPT, DISMISS, and SNOOZE. You’re annoyed, and you consider cancelling your ad-blocking subscription. You grunt, realizing that this must be one of those premium ads that don’t get blocked. Glancing out the window at the suburban sunrise glinting on the frosted lithium Solaroofs, you consider winking to dismiss the alert or perhaps flicking your eyes to the right to at least snooze it until later. Then an audio track plays in your inner ear:
“How did F. Baur McClelland turn himself into the richest man in the universe? How’d he become the first immortal human being? Experience the story as never before: in the first-person! Today’s compete-memory brainscan, newly authorized by Baur’s only living descendant, is an immersive tell-all exposé, and at a low $339.99, who can pass it up?”
You sigh. He’s right. It’s too much to resist. How in the universe, you wonder, did a 41-year-old maintenance technician on a doomed mission studying Sagittarius-A manage to escape nearly-certain death and zero-in on a 90% pure ionized lithium asteroid floating half a lightyear away? How’d he convert that almost incalculable wealth into a pharmatechnical empire that increased the standard human lifespan by 30%? And to top it all off Baur then invented the first fully-effective cryogenic liquid helium freezing and thawing device? It seemed too much for one man to accomplish in a lifetime. Sure, there’d been plenty about it in history class, at least three immersive movies, two-dozen documentaries, dramas--even a musical--but the opportunity to live it all first-hand through a scan of the man’s own mind?
The blinking options projecting on your inner-eye intensify to the point where they flash painfully and a slight buzz can be heard, thrumming with each change of visual severity. You flick your eyes left, selecting ACCEPT, and wink, beginning the program:
ACT I: December 25th, 2610 CE
The warning claxons blare in your ears as you take a desperate look across the cramped control room and out the viewport at Sagittarius-A’s swirling maw, growing ever-closer. You figure that you’re probably less than a minute from crossing the event-horizon. In the distance, the bodies of the engineer and commander have already passed the threshold, along with the scattered wreckage and debris that’d been blasted from the hydrogen fuel cell they’d been attempting to repair. Their white spacesuits are beginning to darken from the redshift as they fall deeper into the gravity-well, and your degrading high-speed orbit’s dragging them out of your field of vision. They’ve already spaghettified, you know, but that can’t be seen from the outside due to the singularity’s effect on light waves. At least they got to die together, you think, feeling how incredibly alone you are. A very merry Christmas to me, you add, full of ironic self-pity, then shrug: at least the corpse of the pilot is here with you, zipped into a bag in storage.
Returning your focus to the display, your eyes scan across no less than five warning lights. Hull stress has eclipsed safety limits. Fuel reserves read zero. Batteries are below 23%. The explosion rent a small hole in the oxygen tanks, too--O2 levels have already dropped to 52% and continue their precipitous decline. This means that even if you can break free from the gravity and escape, and even if you get into a suit, you’ll be dead of suffocation within thirteen hours. Giving a defeated sigh, you wonder when the maw’s pull will supersede the artificial gravity device and pin you to the wall.
In preparation for the inevitable, you do the only thing you can think of, you smash open the emergency medical case and fumble for the syringe of Triphaetonal. With shaking fingers you remove the plastic cap on the needle, skim across the instructions on the syringe, and pry off the safety-blocker that prevents overdose. You jab it into your thigh, injecting the maximum amount--three times the opiate dose recommended for your body-weight. You flop into your chair, sigh contentedly, and try to focus your suddenly-heavy eyes on the yawning hole in front of you. Your lips form a goofy smile, and the tune of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” starts playing in your mind. You seriously consider singing along.
You blink; it feels like an age passes. When you open your eyes, the ship is spinning--or, you wonder, could it be your vision? The vessel’s titanium skeleton begins to creak and groan around you, like sea-ice, and you casually consider whether you’ll die from g-forces before the ship implodes, or if it will crush you like a mouse in a trash-compactor first. This strikes you as funny, and you giggle. The sound of the claxons begins to warp. Does gravity affect sound waves? you wonder.
“What a time to be alive,” you hear a resonant and aristocratic British accent from the command chair. Turning your head, you’re amazed to see a red-skinned, black-bearded Satan relaxing there, goat-legs crossed, long, black-nailed fingers fidgeting contentedly with a lit cigarillo. The smoke whorls into the air around his pointed horns.
“What the Hell?” you manage.
“Exactly,” he nods.
“What is this? Are you real?”
“As real as you are,” Satan responds, taking a draw and exhaling a smoke ring.
“But why you?”
“You were expecting, perhaps, Santa Claus?” the devil smirks. “That would seem more seasonally appropriate, I suppose. At least he’s my anagram, so, close enough, eh? I’m red, and I do plan to offer you a gift.”
“Am I,” you hesitate, trying to focus your scattered thoughts, “dead?”
Satan chuckles, “We’re all dead. We’re born dead. Time is an illusion.”
“Have I, crossed over, then?”
“The event-horizon?” Satan asks. “Why, yes, I’m afraid so. To anyone outside, you appear to be redshifting right now.”
“No, not into the black hole. Into,” you swallow, “you know, Hell?”
“Oh my, no.” Satan’s reply is blithe. “Not yet, at any rate.”
“Why are you here?” you ask.
“Well,” Satan shrugs, “I suppose that you’d call me a manifestation of your subconscious mind as it attempts to deal with the incalculable weight of eternity. But in reality--if there is a reality--I am the physical manifestation of the philosophical concept of eternity. You see, once across the horizon, you become everlasting. Time ceases to have mathematical value. All points, future and past, overlap here. Everything to ever enter a black hole has already entered, from the internal perspective, and since all black holes will eventually swallow everything, including each other, the omniverse is already here--all of it.” He pauses for a heartbeat. “World without end.”
Satan scrapes a nail across one of his teeth and then examines it, running his tongue around his mouth. He clears his throat and continues: “From the external perspective, I suppose, motion still occurs and the gathering of space-time, and of souls, as you humans so quaintly call them, is an ongoing process. That’s what your Bible always gets so wrong, that Hell is a work in progress, that eternity is ongoing--I daresay that is sheer human idiocy. Eternity is and has always been, from the very moment of its conception, complete.” Satan raises a blue-black eyebrow. “Am I boring you?”
“A little,” you admit. “Maybe confusing me, more like.”
“Ah, right,” Satan shrugs, a little disappointed. “You are only a maintenance technician, after all, and you had to forge an intelligence examination score to even get on this mission.” He snorts, “Bad choice, that. Should have stayed in that apartment in Billings and gotten over your divorce instead of running from it. Then you wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t have made and covered-up the mistake that eventually crippled this ship and killed the rest of the crew.”
“How do you know about. . .?” you trail off.
“My dear fellow,” the devil tests the point of a horn on his finger, “I am Satan, after all.”
“So what is the--”
“The point? The reason I’m here? The why? Ouch!” He draws his finger back from his horn and sucks it briefly. “Why, I’ve already told you: I’m here to offer you a gift.”
“What kind of gift?’ you ask, suspicious.
“Your life, and, oh,” Satan sighs, bored, “anything you want, really.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You expect me to say, ‘no catch,’ but,” he draws out the syllables on the last word, “it is in fact the usual catch: your soul. Eternal torment. Damnation.” He yawns. “Demons, pitchforks, boiling pitch, utter hopelessness, perdition, inferno, you know the drill.” Satan flicks out a forked tongue, licks his index finger and thumb, and then uses them to smooth the mustaches in his goatee.
You glance out the viewport, seeing nothing but black, and feeling, rather than observing, it spiral down into oblivion. Unnoticed to you before, the emergency lights have come on. Everything seems dimmer, and you can actually track the wavelike motion of the light beams.
“What choice do I have?” you ask. “Death?”
“Death,” Satan agrees.
“What can I ask for?”
“Aside from your life?” Satan shrugs his red shoulders. “The usual, I suppose. Wealth, power, knowledge, sex. But you’d better hurry. Your body is about to fail.”
You focus your wandering thoughts and come to a decision. “Okay, I’ll take life--I want wealth though, to be the richest man in the universe; and I want brains, to be a premier genius of mankind like Einstein, Huang, or Hawking--but not crippled like Hawking,” you add, hastily.
“Anything else?” Satan asks, masking another yawn.
“I want love,” you add hastily.
Satan gawks. “Who do you think I am?” he demands. “Love” he says the word with distaste, “is not in my purview.”
“Fine, then, lust--successful completion of any lust I have.”
“Any lust?” Satan asks shaking his head. “You do remember Paris and Helen? It’s an easy way to end up dead. Perhaps you shouldn’t be so greedy with your gifts.”
You nod your head, thinking his comment sensible. “Fine,” you agree, “strike the lust. Money and intelligence seem good enough for me.”
“And--just to be clear--in exchange I get your soul when you die?”
“Agreed,” you nod. “Do I have to sign a parchment or something?”
“Please,” Satan chuckles. “We are in the 27th century.” He pulls a datapad from his waist and holds it out. “You really think I used to ask cavemen to sign a parchment? Heavens no, we spat on our hands and shook in those days. This, you must admit, is more elegant. Your thumbprint, if you will.”
You extend your thumb and scan it into the pad. No sooner does the scan complete than a dreadful, resonant laugh fills the control room. The smell of thick, electrical smoke assails your nostrils, and the laugh fades into the lazy crackle of fire.
***
You cough, sit up, and retch over the side of your chair. The air is cloudy and acrid. An electrical panel sizzles to your left. A lone, forked tongue of flame laps into the air from a node of circuits.
You stand, unsteadily, and pull the extinguisher from the wall, spraying the fire. It’s cold in the ship--everything’s frosted. The emergency lights are so pale that half the command room is bathed in shadow. The batteries must be on their last reserves. Rubbing your temples, you try to remember where you are and why. You recall the explosion, the black hole, the Triphaetonal--and Satan? Was it real? Couldn’t be.
“Why aren’t I dead?” you ask the empty room. No one answers.
You stumble over to the panel with the warning lights. Only three are flashing. Hull stress reads normal. Fuel reserves are at zero. Batteries blink below 6%. The oxygen tank, however, seems to have stabilized somehow: O2 levels have stopped dropping at 19%.
What happened? you wonder and punch up video and sensor records from the computer. Ten minutes of study shows you the gist. As you fell toward the back hole, your centripetal speed increased, and just as you were about to pass the event horizon, the hole spat something large out, which collided with you, connecting at the precise location of the O2 tank and sending you rocketing out into space at an incredible velocity. It was a perfect storm of coincidence, the trillion-to-one lottery. Had your speed been a hair different in either direction, you would have either missed the collision entirely or been pulverized. Unbelievably, the impact sealed the O2 tank.
You look out the viewport at an unfamiliar star formation. You’re stopped, or at least at a slow orbit. You walk to the window and gaze out, looking for a planet. Instead, you find only a jagged silver meteor, surrounded by a cloud of similarly reflective dust and debris--nothing else as far as the eye can see.
According to the computer, you’ve traveled almost half a lightyear in a span of twelve hours and were drawn to a dead stop while passing through the field of a nearby magnetar. Its glow can be seen in the distance, about the size and color of a pearl. The coincidence of it all has passed the point of improbable and reached the level of ludicrous inconceivability.
Yet, here you are. You check the scanners to discover that the asteroid, similar in size to the continent of Australia, is composed almost entirely of lithium, the most valuable metal in the galaxy.
And to crown all, the lithium’s ionized--perhaps because of its proximity to the magnetar star--making it a fully-charged battery of unimaginable proportions. You glance down at the blinking light on your console and smile.
“Eureka,” you intone, followed by a happy whistle, which shortly becomes the opening bars of “I’ll be Home for Christmas.”
***
For the rest, check out the collection: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1675935939/ (PRINT)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082S634XP/... (KINDLE)
Published by PJPF in 2016
Scott Davis Howard is an avid anglophile, a Virginia high school English teacher, a husband, a father of two, and the author of Three Days and Two Knights: An Amusing Arthurian Adventure https://www.amazon.com/Three-Days-T.... PJPF’s collection Holiday Tales & Adventures can be purchased at the following link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1675935939/
It’s the first story in the collection, so the Amazon preview will give you a chunk of it for free. In that same spirit, here’s the prologue and first act (first thing I’ve ever written in the 2nd person, enjoy):
Dark Matters
A Morality Play in Three Acts
Scott Davis Howard
You yawn, shiver, and board the commuter hovertrain, sipping your medicated coffee as you search for a reasonably clean seat on which to spend the seventy-nine minutes from Nashua to your law firm in Hartford. Sweeping some bagel crumbs from the Teflon upholstery, you settle into an unobtrusive nook. You’ve been looking forward to the final chapters of the VisualClassic library book that you’ve been watching for weeks: Dante’s Inferno. The immersive imagery has been haunting your dreams every night, but you can’t seem to get enough. The company spared no expense on this production. Yesterday, you left Odysseus burning in torment and met the giant Ephialtes, who would take you and Dante down into the 9th level of perdition--that’s one floor above my cubicle, you chuckle, thinking briefly about the office. You cough. Your coffee tastes like Robitussin.
Just then, the Cerebrocastor Alert buzzes inside your head. The Pharma-Tech node in your cortex flashes an image of a frosted white corpse onto your inner-eye, overlaid with three-dimensional letters, spelling:
F. Baur McClelland Memory-Scan Special in Three Acts--WORLD PREMIER!
It’s followed by three blinking options: ACCEPT, DISMISS, and SNOOZE. You’re annoyed, and you consider cancelling your ad-blocking subscription. You grunt, realizing that this must be one of those premium ads that don’t get blocked. Glancing out the window at the suburban sunrise glinting on the frosted lithium Solaroofs, you consider winking to dismiss the alert or perhaps flicking your eyes to the right to at least snooze it until later. Then an audio track plays in your inner ear:
“How did F. Baur McClelland turn himself into the richest man in the universe? How’d he become the first immortal human being? Experience the story as never before: in the first-person! Today’s compete-memory brainscan, newly authorized by Baur’s only living descendant, is an immersive tell-all exposé, and at a low $339.99, who can pass it up?”
You sigh. He’s right. It’s too much to resist. How in the universe, you wonder, did a 41-year-old maintenance technician on a doomed mission studying Sagittarius-A manage to escape nearly-certain death and zero-in on a 90% pure ionized lithium asteroid floating half a lightyear away? How’d he convert that almost incalculable wealth into a pharmatechnical empire that increased the standard human lifespan by 30%? And to top it all off Baur then invented the first fully-effective cryogenic liquid helium freezing and thawing device? It seemed too much for one man to accomplish in a lifetime. Sure, there’d been plenty about it in history class, at least three immersive movies, two-dozen documentaries, dramas--even a musical--but the opportunity to live it all first-hand through a scan of the man’s own mind?
The blinking options projecting on your inner-eye intensify to the point where they flash painfully and a slight buzz can be heard, thrumming with each change of visual severity. You flick your eyes left, selecting ACCEPT, and wink, beginning the program:
ACT I: December 25th, 2610 CE
The warning claxons blare in your ears as you take a desperate look across the cramped control room and out the viewport at Sagittarius-A’s swirling maw, growing ever-closer. You figure that you’re probably less than a minute from crossing the event-horizon. In the distance, the bodies of the engineer and commander have already passed the threshold, along with the scattered wreckage and debris that’d been blasted from the hydrogen fuel cell they’d been attempting to repair. Their white spacesuits are beginning to darken from the redshift as they fall deeper into the gravity-well, and your degrading high-speed orbit’s dragging them out of your field of vision. They’ve already spaghettified, you know, but that can’t be seen from the outside due to the singularity’s effect on light waves. At least they got to die together, you think, feeling how incredibly alone you are. A very merry Christmas to me, you add, full of ironic self-pity, then shrug: at least the corpse of the pilot is here with you, zipped into a bag in storage.
Returning your focus to the display, your eyes scan across no less than five warning lights. Hull stress has eclipsed safety limits. Fuel reserves read zero. Batteries are below 23%. The explosion rent a small hole in the oxygen tanks, too--O2 levels have already dropped to 52% and continue their precipitous decline. This means that even if you can break free from the gravity and escape, and even if you get into a suit, you’ll be dead of suffocation within thirteen hours. Giving a defeated sigh, you wonder when the maw’s pull will supersede the artificial gravity device and pin you to the wall.
In preparation for the inevitable, you do the only thing you can think of, you smash open the emergency medical case and fumble for the syringe of Triphaetonal. With shaking fingers you remove the plastic cap on the needle, skim across the instructions on the syringe, and pry off the safety-blocker that prevents overdose. You jab it into your thigh, injecting the maximum amount--three times the opiate dose recommended for your body-weight. You flop into your chair, sigh contentedly, and try to focus your suddenly-heavy eyes on the yawning hole in front of you. Your lips form a goofy smile, and the tune of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” starts playing in your mind. You seriously consider singing along.
You blink; it feels like an age passes. When you open your eyes, the ship is spinning--or, you wonder, could it be your vision? The vessel’s titanium skeleton begins to creak and groan around you, like sea-ice, and you casually consider whether you’ll die from g-forces before the ship implodes, or if it will crush you like a mouse in a trash-compactor first. This strikes you as funny, and you giggle. The sound of the claxons begins to warp. Does gravity affect sound waves? you wonder.
“What a time to be alive,” you hear a resonant and aristocratic British accent from the command chair. Turning your head, you’re amazed to see a red-skinned, black-bearded Satan relaxing there, goat-legs crossed, long, black-nailed fingers fidgeting contentedly with a lit cigarillo. The smoke whorls into the air around his pointed horns.
“What the Hell?” you manage.
“Exactly,” he nods.
“What is this? Are you real?”
“As real as you are,” Satan responds, taking a draw and exhaling a smoke ring.
“But why you?”
“You were expecting, perhaps, Santa Claus?” the devil smirks. “That would seem more seasonally appropriate, I suppose. At least he’s my anagram, so, close enough, eh? I’m red, and I do plan to offer you a gift.”
“Am I,” you hesitate, trying to focus your scattered thoughts, “dead?”
Satan chuckles, “We’re all dead. We’re born dead. Time is an illusion.”
“Have I, crossed over, then?”
“The event-horizon?” Satan asks. “Why, yes, I’m afraid so. To anyone outside, you appear to be redshifting right now.”
“No, not into the black hole. Into,” you swallow, “you know, Hell?”
“Oh my, no.” Satan’s reply is blithe. “Not yet, at any rate.”
“Why are you here?” you ask.
“Well,” Satan shrugs, “I suppose that you’d call me a manifestation of your subconscious mind as it attempts to deal with the incalculable weight of eternity. But in reality--if there is a reality--I am the physical manifestation of the philosophical concept of eternity. You see, once across the horizon, you become everlasting. Time ceases to have mathematical value. All points, future and past, overlap here. Everything to ever enter a black hole has already entered, from the internal perspective, and since all black holes will eventually swallow everything, including each other, the omniverse is already here--all of it.” He pauses for a heartbeat. “World without end.”
Satan scrapes a nail across one of his teeth and then examines it, running his tongue around his mouth. He clears his throat and continues: “From the external perspective, I suppose, motion still occurs and the gathering of space-time, and of souls, as you humans so quaintly call them, is an ongoing process. That’s what your Bible always gets so wrong, that Hell is a work in progress, that eternity is ongoing--I daresay that is sheer human idiocy. Eternity is and has always been, from the very moment of its conception, complete.” Satan raises a blue-black eyebrow. “Am I boring you?”
“A little,” you admit. “Maybe confusing me, more like.”
“Ah, right,” Satan shrugs, a little disappointed. “You are only a maintenance technician, after all, and you had to forge an intelligence examination score to even get on this mission.” He snorts, “Bad choice, that. Should have stayed in that apartment in Billings and gotten over your divorce instead of running from it. Then you wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t have made and covered-up the mistake that eventually crippled this ship and killed the rest of the crew.”
“How do you know about. . .?” you trail off.
“My dear fellow,” the devil tests the point of a horn on his finger, “I am Satan, after all.”
“So what is the--”
“The point? The reason I’m here? The why? Ouch!” He draws his finger back from his horn and sucks it briefly. “Why, I’ve already told you: I’m here to offer you a gift.”
“What kind of gift?’ you ask, suspicious.
“Your life, and, oh,” Satan sighs, bored, “anything you want, really.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You expect me to say, ‘no catch,’ but,” he draws out the syllables on the last word, “it is in fact the usual catch: your soul. Eternal torment. Damnation.” He yawns. “Demons, pitchforks, boiling pitch, utter hopelessness, perdition, inferno, you know the drill.” Satan flicks out a forked tongue, licks his index finger and thumb, and then uses them to smooth the mustaches in his goatee.
You glance out the viewport, seeing nothing but black, and feeling, rather than observing, it spiral down into oblivion. Unnoticed to you before, the emergency lights have come on. Everything seems dimmer, and you can actually track the wavelike motion of the light beams.
“What choice do I have?” you ask. “Death?”
“Death,” Satan agrees.
“What can I ask for?”
“Aside from your life?” Satan shrugs his red shoulders. “The usual, I suppose. Wealth, power, knowledge, sex. But you’d better hurry. Your body is about to fail.”
You focus your wandering thoughts and come to a decision. “Okay, I’ll take life--I want wealth though, to be the richest man in the universe; and I want brains, to be a premier genius of mankind like Einstein, Huang, or Hawking--but not crippled like Hawking,” you add, hastily.
“Anything else?” Satan asks, masking another yawn.
“I want love,” you add hastily.
Satan gawks. “Who do you think I am?” he demands. “Love” he says the word with distaste, “is not in my purview.”
“Fine, then, lust--successful completion of any lust I have.”
“Any lust?” Satan asks shaking his head. “You do remember Paris and Helen? It’s an easy way to end up dead. Perhaps you shouldn’t be so greedy with your gifts.”
You nod your head, thinking his comment sensible. “Fine,” you agree, “strike the lust. Money and intelligence seem good enough for me.”
“And--just to be clear--in exchange I get your soul when you die?”
“Agreed,” you nod. “Do I have to sign a parchment or something?”
“Please,” Satan chuckles. “We are in the 27th century.” He pulls a datapad from his waist and holds it out. “You really think I used to ask cavemen to sign a parchment? Heavens no, we spat on our hands and shook in those days. This, you must admit, is more elegant. Your thumbprint, if you will.”
You extend your thumb and scan it into the pad. No sooner does the scan complete than a dreadful, resonant laugh fills the control room. The smell of thick, electrical smoke assails your nostrils, and the laugh fades into the lazy crackle of fire.
***
You cough, sit up, and retch over the side of your chair. The air is cloudy and acrid. An electrical panel sizzles to your left. A lone, forked tongue of flame laps into the air from a node of circuits.
You stand, unsteadily, and pull the extinguisher from the wall, spraying the fire. It’s cold in the ship--everything’s frosted. The emergency lights are so pale that half the command room is bathed in shadow. The batteries must be on their last reserves. Rubbing your temples, you try to remember where you are and why. You recall the explosion, the black hole, the Triphaetonal--and Satan? Was it real? Couldn’t be.
“Why aren’t I dead?” you ask the empty room. No one answers.
You stumble over to the panel with the warning lights. Only three are flashing. Hull stress reads normal. Fuel reserves are at zero. Batteries blink below 6%. The oxygen tank, however, seems to have stabilized somehow: O2 levels have stopped dropping at 19%.
What happened? you wonder and punch up video and sensor records from the computer. Ten minutes of study shows you the gist. As you fell toward the back hole, your centripetal speed increased, and just as you were about to pass the event horizon, the hole spat something large out, which collided with you, connecting at the precise location of the O2 tank and sending you rocketing out into space at an incredible velocity. It was a perfect storm of coincidence, the trillion-to-one lottery. Had your speed been a hair different in either direction, you would have either missed the collision entirely or been pulverized. Unbelievably, the impact sealed the O2 tank.
You look out the viewport at an unfamiliar star formation. You’re stopped, or at least at a slow orbit. You walk to the window and gaze out, looking for a planet. Instead, you find only a jagged silver meteor, surrounded by a cloud of similarly reflective dust and debris--nothing else as far as the eye can see.
According to the computer, you’ve traveled almost half a lightyear in a span of twelve hours and were drawn to a dead stop while passing through the field of a nearby magnetar. Its glow can be seen in the distance, about the size and color of a pearl. The coincidence of it all has passed the point of improbable and reached the level of ludicrous inconceivability.
Yet, here you are. You check the scanners to discover that the asteroid, similar in size to the continent of Australia, is composed almost entirely of lithium, the most valuable metal in the galaxy.
And to crown all, the lithium’s ionized--perhaps because of its proximity to the magnetar star--making it a fully-charged battery of unimaginable proportions. You glance down at the blinking light on your console and smile.
“Eureka,” you intone, followed by a happy whistle, which shortly becomes the opening bars of “I’ll be Home for Christmas.”
***
For the rest, check out the collection: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1675935939/ (PRINT)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082S634XP/... (KINDLE)
Published by PJPF in 2016
Scott Davis Howard is an avid anglophile, a Virginia high school English teacher, a husband, a father of two, and the author of Three Days and Two Knights: An Amusing Arthurian Adventure https://www.amazon.com/Three-Days-T.... PJPF’s collection Holiday Tales & Adventures can be purchased at the following link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1675935939/
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