Lisa smiled thinly, looking down at the tendrils of vapour rising from her cappuccino, while floating words appeared in the space just above her head. The bulky, capitalized words were invisible to anyone but Terry. He sighed, and they flared in size.
Did a UFO crash into the interstate? Is a nanite swarm consuming and assimilating all electronics, including batteries, alternators, and starters? Did a rampaging Ultra Rex carve up the asphalt? Doesn’t matter! Well it does, actually, but the carpool isn’t coming either way.
The Lunar Module hatch popped open. Leonard’s boots emerged sole-first as he crawled backwards onto the egress platform. The sun glared against the black velvet sky just above the S-band dish atop my full-scale replica Eagle. Earth was in half-phase to my left, over the long-abandoned ruins of the spaceport. About a dozen or so tourists in tightsuits sat in the bleachers.
Detective Solomon Zhou studied the silver-haired woman seated across from him in his office. She claimed, and the report verified, that she’d been in a coma for the last seven years. Yet, she remembered things from that time. Awful things.
We are tasked to choose the less travelled
Before leaving earth, we must remember birdsong
Madeleine stalks through the streets of London, her net transmitting a careful stream of instructions, left here and right now. The voice of her AI is Bowie, his proper Britishness soothing, with a hint of the devilry she’d heard in her Thomm’s voice, so many years ago she’d forgotten.
“We’re close to departure, ma’am.” How easy it would be to hide my emotional anxiety behind protocol and procedure, to blame the intellectual rigor of exploration for my emotional detachment. From the trees that line the field’s edge, the whirligigs screech and hoot. They crowd the branches below their nests and skitter in the light of our transport vehicles. The fleet of shuttles blaze like a star cluster in the twilight. The throbbing hum from the propulsion systems has set the gigs on edge.
I woke, curled and alone on a rumbling dark bus, remembering someone I’d done my best to forget. Remembering the Other Me. It had been a long, cold day. A double-socks, leggings-under-jeans kind of day. You couldn’t stay outside more than a few minutes without feeling like you’d lose some extremity or patch of skin to the cold. I was running away from home.
You must know, first, that every moment is merely one of a constellation spread across the sky of my life. These moments, here with you, are the only ones that matter, the only ones I never want to leave.