Why’s there a watermelon there? (Mushroom Samba)

The first mushroom didn’t take effect on Ryan Chack for a good hour or so. At least, he thought it took an hour. The world was slow and strange at that time, strange and slow and strange and slow and HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAt 7:15 AM, Jonathan made himself some breakfast, what he called Bacon and Eggs, but was in reality just Eggs. Not many people can afford meat, let alone on Tijuana. But it’s nice to dream every once in a while. There’ nothing wrong with having a dream per say. Dreams have their place in this world after all, Jonathan thought to himself when he first called them “Bacon and Eggs.” Not that they can ever be acted out, mind you. They exist in the place outside of the real world. Those who think their dreams can come true are just another kind of junkie.

It flew away way way way way way way way, like all birds do in the end. There was a sadness in its eyes as it flew away. I couldn’t place what it was though. Probably nothing to do with me, birds have a life of their own, you know. But the bird being there meant that I was caught by the police. They let me go a little while later, does goooooooooooooood not to lock up of the Red Dragons, especially me. I went back to Mars and heard what happened there. Shit was hitting the fan and it was my time to shine. We wouldn’t be led by some asshole who thinks a bloodbath and a statement are the same thing. Nor would we be led by a pencil pusher who’d rather talk things over than do business. No, what we need is a professional. Someone who can do the job and do it right.

The game was complex and strange. It started when a servant walked into a room she wasn’t allowed into. It wasn’t intentional, mind you. The room was typically open to the public, even to someone as lowly as her. But that was the day the church was baptizing the new king. There was to be complete privacy, lest their god be angered by the infidelity. So they claimed. In truth, the Queen wanted control of the kingdom for a very long time. She saw this as the perfect moment to strike, to escape from a loveless marriage and rule the kingdom the way it ought to be ruled. Any witnesses to what would transpire would need to be silenced. Which is why, quite unfortunately, the servant entered the room. She saw all that they were doing, all they had done. The king was dead. And there was but one loose end to tie. The Queen’s Knight tried to slay the servant, as many a knight has done. One could say part of the job of being a knight is silencing those who would speak poorly of those in power. Even those close to them. But tragedy befell the knight as, in his attempts to kill the servant, he loosened a stone from the castle’s walls. The stone held a pillar, which held a roof. With the pillar loosened, the roof shattered, if only slightly. It was enough to smother him. The bishop tried to escape from the room, destroying itself in the wake of a pointless and cruel power grab. So the story goes, he was able to escape. But then, stories have a tendency of lying about their truth. If only to keep the bishops in their place. The Queen, likewise, tried to escape. The stories tend to confirm her failure to escape. She was crushed, quite unceremoniously, under the weight of her kingdom’s stones. For in the end, the story is one with the moral: don’t let the ambitions of women have sway in the affairs of men, lest they destroy the kingdom. The queen may have power, but if not tempered by the cool head of the king, all will be lost. It is a cruel and awful story. One that exists to control the narrative of the world in favor of kings. Indeed, the story expands to further cruelty, as all defenses of the monarchy do. For how else did the kingdom fall but for one servant to not know her place. Were she to have known where she was meant to be, to be where her masters wished her to be rather than in the place her stupid mind thought she was meant to be, the kingdom would still be standing. Of course, as with all stories, there are always escape hatches, even unintentional ones. For the stories, the ones not told in the halls of church and state, offer a different moral, a different lesson. The focus is place, in their telling’s, on the servant, not the monarch. The servant escapes from the collapse of the world. The intentions were clear and understandable. She planned to be in the wrong place, baited the knight to strike at that spot, and slew the vicious monarch. She was mistreated by those in power, those who saw her as disposable. So she played the game her way, and down, down, down the monarchy fell.

Mobsters, as anyone who’s dealt with them can tell you, rarely let go of a grudge. I gave up on a job too quickly and they must’ve came all the way to Callisto to find me. That must’ve been what the two million was for. Security money in case they showed up. The briefcase was in my hands with all the money in it. I slid the money towards one of the hired goons. I put a note…. Where did I put it? Did I put it on the fridge? It’s in there somewhere, fingering some other mob boss for what my brother was framed for doing. Felt only right, I suppose. He looked inside, signaled his fellows, and they all disappeared.

Naturally, Gary did the sensible thing and ran like heck. The streets of Mars are full of dark alleys, odd turns, and canals. And Gary used them all to try to escape from his pursuer. There were moments of luck and moments of failure in his escape. The crowd of children celebrating a birthday party gave him a brief reprise. But getting hit by the gondola didn’t help matters. But eventually, the chase ended with Gary pinned down in a garden planted atop a smile. No one knows the exact reason why the smile was on Mars. Some say it was the creation of a higher being with a sense of humor. Others believe it to be an optical illusion like Magic Eye pictures or the third dimension. It talks sometimes, about the future, the past, the worlds that never were and always were forever and always and never and whenever and however it can find the flesh of the man who sold the world. Gary was too busy having a gun aimed at his head to think of an answer to that riddle.

While the bartender went to grab some people who knew his brother and Jacob nursed his vodka (“On the house,” they said. Then, after a short pause, “For Michael.”), Jacob caught a glimpse of Vanessa. She was a rare breed of woman, the kind with an infectious smile, a verbose giggle, and eyes that could make the sun melt into a ball of golden lava. He didn’t recognize her from their first encounter (he was too busy focusing on getting away from the cops). He didn’t say anything at first, as Vanessa was watching the news. It appeared that a New York City vigilante dressed up like Spider-Man was brutalizing people who were unlawfully poor and brown. The police had rather unsubtly, if nonverbally, given their support to the masked criminal, much to Vanessa’s chagrin.

We drove to the spaceport in the most opulent of cars and towards one of the most mundane of spaceships. I suppose that’s fair. Callisto has a long history of hiding criminals on the run. It stands to reason that they can’t all be murderers. Seeing the moon made me think otherwise. I’d never been to Callisto. No one goes to Callisto unless the ISSP is after you for a sum greater than seventy-five billion woolongs. It was a shithole. Not like Earth where you could at least have a conversation. I mean a proper shithole. It was a barren, desolate planet where the only life was a driving city without any cars in it. And, to top it all off, it was cold as balls.

The song ends as all songs do. The King of Nightmares is pleased with the song and gives the waking world a reward. She knows of all the worlds that are, were, and might be. She dances in all of them like a ballerina on a chain of memories. She has seen cruelty and pain and joy and Hope. She knows where all things lie. And so, she sends that world a gift. The only one she can: a nightmare. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

He imagines a memory of being infinite lightning. He was never lightning, only his original version was. He has to remind himself of being a copy. He has to remind himself why he is in the cell. And who was free to be out of it. And why that makes him happy. And sad. And angry. And content. Hell is a place without being. On the outside, there are those who see hell as a library, a collection of broken ideas that could be seen again, but never will. On the inside, hell is nothingness. Life without living. Without even the faintest glimpse of other worlds. He imagines being lightning. He strikes down planets with the eye of an artist and leaves behind scars of ancient art.

Ural Terpsichore was dead. (I Don’t Feel So Good. I Feel Like I’m About To Hurl)

But that’s just one story being told. There are others out there in the world, ones suppressed by the official one. (BLUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAGH!)

The frozen sarcophagus floats in the eternal night like a child drowning in the middle of the ocean where not even the most carnivorous of sharks or the most vengeful of dolphins could find him. The remains within splurge out of the metallic casket like blood from a stuck pig. It glistens in the night sky with an air of magic and wonder that could only come from a fishing lure. It will be free one day. It will consume. It will survive. It always does. Its children will die, consumed by those who are stronger than them. But it will consume them in turn. All things return to the refrigerator.

But it was the woman that confounded Bobbie. She didn’t have the face of a cop, not even the eyes of one. She was too hardened to be a civilian. But it was what she said at the podium, in that stunningly miserable blue dress that really peaked Bobbie’s interest.

Jane looked at the pocket watch and thought to herself, ‘Scout would really like this.’ Then she began to cry.

Ryan Chack awoke four days later, completely naked and inside someone else’s home. He was thankful that they weren’t there at the time. Less thankful was the fact that the he was covered in glass from the door he broke into in order to get into the house. His pants were five blocks away on a flagpole waving about like leaves in an autumn sky. He tried to piece together what happened the night before, still thinking it was three days ago. The last thing he remembered was eating from a plate of mushrooms someone had politely left lying around. He wasn’t one to say no to free food. Then everything started to blur. It was as if the universe had reshaped itself around him and become something completely alien.

But before he could figure out the shape of the world he now found himself in, a kindly police officer knocked on someone else’s door.

See You Space Cowboy…

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Looks like he’s been… disarmed! (Black Dog Serenade)

The official story is always rubbish. Sure, sometimes the official story is a true story, one that can ultimately help those who need it and move the future towards a better one. But it’s always written by the people in charge to fit their narrative. Information is lost to time and the machinations of those who will it to be lost. It rarely stays lost forever. Sometimes, there’s a hole that forces people to dive deeper and deeper into the story until it disappears forever in favor of a different story. Sometimes, the new story is equally false. “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia,” as they say.

Take, for example, Detective Jet Black’s arm. Officially, an assassin working for the European Syndicate named Udai Taxam shot it off the detective, forcing his career to a premature end. However, holes start to build up once you start looking for them. For example, consider Black’s partner, Detective Fredrick Alexander “Fad” Dixon. He was with Black when they were going after Taxam, and yet was conveniently somewhere else when Black’s arm was shot off. Equally, the angle of the shot that blew away Black’s arm was too high up to actually be done by Taxam himself. There was a spotlight on Black when the gun went off. Could it be a third party turned on the spotlight, blinding Black’s vision of the sniper who got rid of his arm.

Equally, there’s the murder of Officer Wilson Marcos. Officially a cold case wherein his skinned body was found wandering the streets of Tharsis. The police at the time found no evidence on the body as to who could have committed the crime. Thirty years later, it was discovered that the Chief of Police himself, Philip Jameson, skinned Marcos as he was getting to close on a case. At the time, Marcos was involved in a missing persons case with Detectives Mark Walters and Mellissa “Mels” Parker. The case, as discovered much later, revealed corruption, systemic racism, and other such nastiness within the department. Of the three, Marcos was the loudest killed. Walters was simply murdered in his bathtub and framed to look like a suicide. Parker went MIA for thirty years until she resurfaced in a massive piece by the Saturn Press, which effectively destroyed the ISSP at the foundations.

On the other hand, consider Commander Sam Plinkov. Officially speaking, Plinkov was a hero who died a heroes death. He was investigating a drug cartel for the last five years of his life along with a string of partners who ended up dead. Some were under the impression that he was a crooked cop who was in on the cartel’s dealings and purposefully got his partners killed. But, when the cards were laid down on the table, Plinkov ultimately fought against the cartel, practically singlehandedly destroying their operation, at the cost of his own life. The evidence that he simply turned on the cartel has been suppressed by the police, though one documented photograph of money switching hands between Plinkov and cartel member and former captain Elroy Masterson has surfaced. The timing of the photo indicates that Masterson was with the cartel at the time, though when pressed about the subject as a death row inmate, Masterson refused to comment. (He was killed shortly afterwards by Dixon.)

There are other stories that have been altered or shifted by the official story. Ones that have been murdered in the crib in favor of simpler, more appealing stories of heroism and mystery. The nature of telling stories is to create an image of the world you want to see. The vision of the police is one where the good guys support the law and fight tooth and nail to see justice done. The law is always just and never crooked, bar one or two bad apples. But the truth of the saying is that one bad apple does spoil the bunch. Officially, it doesn’t. Officially, the problem is individual actors working against the common good, those who would work with the syndicate or the cartel or Eastasia. The system isn’t the problem. It’s those who use and abuse it, that’s the problem. Trust the authority, trust the power structure. This is the best of all possible worlds.

But that’s just one story being told. There are others out there in the world, ones suppressed by the official one.

The truth is out there…

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Don’t you hear my call, though you’re many years away? (My Funny Valentine)

It was four or five years ago when the accident occurred. The circumstances of the accident are subject to rumor, ranging from sabotage due to an unhappy marriage to the spaceship manufacturers using parts that were below standard, at best. What is known is that two people died and their daughter survived, albeit critically wounded such that she is still cryogenically frozen. She may never wake up. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct the events of that night based on the information available. For the sake of that woman, still sleeping like a princess in a castle, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest must remain faithful.

Jacob M. Wattermon was a man of low birth. He born on Earth on November 22^nd, 1963 to a Romani family. He spent the first twenty four years of his life wandering the European continent trying to survive. Sometimes, he was a thief. Others, a servant. And once his mother died, a parent to his younger brother, Michael. The world in those twelve years had hurt his family in ways that are too cruel and meanspirited to talk about here. Some stories are perhaps best left untold, or at least told by a better storyteller.

It was on October 3^rd, 1987 that Jacob met Vanessa P. Marston, twenty two year old heiress to the Marston fortune. He was on the run from a pack of cops who wanted to lock him up for the simple crime of stealing a loaf of bread for his sick brother (who sadly died three days later). She was on the run from her parents for the crime of being unlawfully queer. No one would say, publicly, that she was into men and women. She didn’t even fully understand these emotions bubbling within her like a bottle of soda shook up for far too long. Her mother had reached the end of menopause and her father was the rare millionaire who devoted himself to his wife. They did not know what was going on with their daughter. They didn’t even know she was missing. But then, it had only been an hour.

Their meeting was brief, yet impactful. Her presence on that street corner was a good distraction for the police. Not that she was wanted, but that she bumped into the officers while leaving a bar, giving young Jacob enough time to escape. The bar was an old one, practically there since the dawn of the century. Most of the clientele were queer. Some were men, some women, and some trying to think of a word that described a state in between those two binaries. Some even reject the very notion of binary gender in favor of something else. The bar would remain open for many years to come, and it was here that Jacob and Vanessa met again on October 10^th, 1987.

Michael was to be buried in an unmarked grave the next day. Jacob, not wanting the affair to be just him, looked to see if Michael had any friends (Jacob had spent too long caring for his brother to have friends). He found in the pocket of his sore covered brother’s pants a card for a bar calling itself The Lovely Angel. Jacob arrived at 7:15AM and immediately asked the bartender a few questions. Initially, the bartender was warry about Jacob. It was still seen as criminal for people to be themselves in the English 80’s. At least, that was what Clause 28 and Maggie said. They had also been hearing stories about police going up to their queer fellows and “questioning” them about their actions, much in the same way a butcher questions a pig about its actions. It wasn’t until Jacob mentioned Michael by name that the bartender declenched their sphincter. The plague had been raging throughout the world for years now and no one seemed to care. They would die of it before the decade came to a close. They held Michael when he saw the first sore. They knew he was strong, able to fight the plague to the bitter end. They cried when Jacob said he had a smile on his face when he passed.

While the bartender went to grab some people who knew his brother and Jacob nursed his vodka (“On the house,” they said. Then, after a short pause, “For Michael.”), Jacob caught a glimpse of Vanessa. She was a rare breed of woman, the kind with an infectious smile, a verbose giggle, and eyes that could make the sun melt into a ball of golden lava. He didn’t recognize her from their first encounter (he was too busy focusing on getting away from the cops). He didn’t say anything at first, as Vanessa was watching the news. It appeared that a New York City vigilante dressed up like Spider-Man was brutalizing people who were unlawfully poor and brown. The police had rather unsubtly, if nonverbally, given their support to the masked criminal, much to Vanessa’s chagrin.

She turned away from the tv in disgust and towards Jacob. He had an awkward smile on his face, the kind one gives when they hope they haven’t said something stupid to make a person they just met angry. Vanessa didn’t say anything, nor did she walk away. She just smiled the kind of smile people give when they fail at convincing strangers that they aren’t going through a lot. Jacob was a bit dense, so he didn’t get the full implications of the smile, but he certainly got enough to know he didn’t come off as a creep.

They only started to hit it off when they began talking to each other. It was a typical meet cute affair of sly wit, common interests, and genuine attraction. Vanessa was confused by the implications of these feelings. Was her queerness just a phase like she was taught it would be as a child. Was she growing up. Then she turned to look at the biker chick who was as tall as an amazon with a devil may care grin and realized that no, it was not a phase. (It would take her three more visits to The Lovely Angel to ever hear the term “pansexuality.”)

Jacob and Vanessa continued dating in secret for the next three years, though to say it was a secret is perhaps a bit of an assumption of perspective. While her parents didn’t know (and, indeed, would never know) about her love, various servants in the Marston household were well aware of her dating someone “beneath her” and found it somewhat amusing. Some would dare say she was slumming it before she moved on to some rich guy who would bury her in oodles of money. Alas, such a life was not meant to be.

On December 29^th, 1990, Dragoon Marston the Fourth and Lilian Marston died tragically in a boating accident. Their bodies were not found for seven years, but it was agreed upon rather quickly that they were dead. This is mainly due to little details such as “there was a sudden storm in the area of sea where their sailing plan had them on” and “the mast of the ship was found on the shores of Singapore three days after their deaths.” One detail that isn’t typically brought up in such conversations is that Vanessa was supposed to be on that boat with them but, due to an unforeseen illness, was not. There are conflicting reports on the matter, with some of the servants claiming that she was not in the house when her parents had left and some had claimed she was as fit as a fiddle when she heard the news of her parents demise. No one would dare say foul play about the scenario, least of all in Vanessa’s earshot. It should also be noted that on that very same night, Jacob rented a boat from an associate of his.

Regardless, Vanessa was orphaned that night. Which meant that she had inherited the family fortune and, more importantly, lacked anyone who could stop her from marrying the man she loved. She would wait a year. It would take that long for the paper work, planning, and genuine mourning to be done. Jacob was happy, if somewhat apprehensive, to have their relationship in the open. He would say to those who asked that he was saddened that he never got to meet Vanessa’s parents in person, as they seemed like nice people.

This, of course, contradicts one eye witness testimony, who claims to have seen Jacob Wattermon interact with Dragoon Marston the Fourth on December 25^th, 1990. The details of the conversation are sketchy at best (the eye witness was noticeably drunk when giving the testimony and had a long and sketchy history with Wattermon that would give him reason enough to discredit the fellow. Also, the people who released the testimony was the Daily Mail, so…). What can be ascertained from the conversation was that Dragoon was quite cross with Jacob over his relationship with his daughter. While the specific words used in the conversation aren’t clear, it is notable that one of the sentences Dragoon bellowed like a dragon was “I will not sit idly by while my daughter is gang [redacted] by a bunch of [redacted]!” before promptly ordering the butler to punch Jacob in the face. Repeatedly.

In the years that follow, Jacob and Vanessa lived a happy life. On June 13^th, 1994, they had their only child, a daughter named Fae. In the twenty years they lived together, Fae learned both the benefits of luxury as well as several skills one might need if one lacks access to it. Skills such as con artistry, cutting cards, and parkour. She was loved and adored by her parents and she loved them back. As she grew older, she began to love other things and other people. She had a date with two women who claimed to be time traveling space cops (or trouble consultants, as they put it) that ended poorly for everyone. She spent a year with a guy named Ryan Chack, whose heart she ultimately broke. But at the age of 20, she was single.

It was on May 29^th, 2014 that the accident happened. Her parents had recently bought a spaceship directly from the factory. Jacob had made friends with Marco Wallace, the owner of the manufacturer in the decades married to Vanessa. To celebrate their friendship, Walter gave Jacob one of the newest line of spaceship that wasn’t even available to the public. For her part, Vanessa was quite jovial with Walter, though some have noted a shifting in her eyes whenever he’s around. As if he was a lamb and she a tiger. The smiles were too large at times. The plan was for the three of them to go to the moon and back, a simple (if pedestrian) trip.

Then the accident happened.

Again, the records of what happened are sparse, at best. There is no answer left in the data or the crime scene or anywhere that shows one way or the other. We are only left with unanswered questions. Did Vanessa cheat on her husband with Walter? Did he think he did? Was this the first time Jacob had killed someone out of a sense of love? For that matter, did Vanessa think Walter was cheating on her with someone else? There are records that he was spending a lot of time with Walter, could it be they were lovers? For that matter, why was Walter so willing to give a spaceship to Jacob and his family that wasn’t even available to the public? A spaceship that was immediately recalled from the factories and destroyed before anyone could investigate further? Was Fae aware of any of this? There are so many questions left in the remains of this tragic affair that destroyed what seemed to be a loving family. All we can hope for is that Fae one day wakes up and remembers all the answers.

This is a true story.

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The black and white pawns don’t fight each other; they join forces. (Bohemian Rhapsody)

The following poem was found in the pocket of noted programmer and chess master, Hex. He was found dead in a bohemian junkheap along with an assortment of homeless people, stray dogs, and one inexplicable parrot.

It can be found at the Museum of Science and Technology in Alba City.

Checkmate

Pawn takes Rook

And the game ended.

King to D1

Even the lowest of servants

Can end the world.

Queen takes Queen

Age was the detriment to youth

Youth was cleverer than age

Youth won the game.

Queen to G6

The Queen betrayed him in the end.

He was too foolish to see all the angles and schemes.

He didn’t even see the revolution coming

Until it was too late.

Bishop to A4

She had fallen in love with the enemy.

They eloped to a new land beyond the cruelty of the cage.

The King was trapped

But he couldn’t see the bars

Until they ate him whole.

Rook takes Knight

There are times when religion is the detriment of life.

It tells people who to fight, who to kill,

Who to love.

It can blind us to the world around us for the sole purpose of giving the cruel and cowardly power.

But there is a rose inside all the cruelty and hatred.

We can pluck it out without killing it.

Knight takes Knight

Anyone can fight against the powerful.

To do so successfully requires, among other things, a belief in one’s self.

A willingness to listen to those the systems of cruelty

Have told you it’s wrong to love.

The powerful have rarely earned their power, often given it by birth.

Overthrowing such power is quite difficult,

But not impossible.

Pawn to C8

The story of war is that of soldiers being told to kill other soldiers.

Sometimes, those who aren’t soldiers are forced to kill soldiers

Because those who speak for God told them to

Because those with power said it was the right thing to do

Because love made them blind in their devotion.

Those in power rarely fight.

More often than not, you will die

For their pointless, bitter war

Queen to B1

Movement in life is quite difficult.

At every corner, there’s someone waiting to kill you

Even those who think single mindedly and straightforwardly can do it.

The stories we tell our children teach them as much.

Power is for the powerful.

They’re allowed to love those we cannot

Because they say they can.

It takes critical thinking to out maneuver their system,

But, ultimately, it’s worth it in the end.

Bishop to D4

The base assumption of chess is that, should the monarchy fall, all would descend into chaos.

The pawns would simply wander aimlessly without a sense of direction,

The knights would kill each other indiscriminately,

Even slaughter and be slaughtered by those they claim to protect.

Not even faith would be enough to keep the world at peace.

But that’s not true. That’s not true at all.

The game of monarchy is one of constant backstabbing and betrayal

One that ultimately has no point other than keeping the monarchs in power.

When freed from the base assumption and allowed to live their lives,

Even a pawn can enact material social progress.

Pawn to A4

Life is a series of movements on a chess board without any players.

You move through the motions, day in, day out.

You are told that the game is kill or be killed.

That to be strong is the best way to approach any given situation

Because some higher power, somewhere, somehow

Is in complete control.

But that’s a load of bupkis. The powerful are just as in control as you are

Just as bound to the rules of the game, even as they cheat at it (for it is their role to cheat and they love it so), as you are

It’s funny, the only winning move in the game of life

Is to smash the board.

The game was complex and strange.

It started when a servant walked into a room she wasn’t allowed into. It wasn’t intentional, mind you. The room was typically open to the public, even to someone as lowly as her.

But that was the day the church was baptizing the new king. There was to be complete privacy, lest their god be angered by the infidelity. So they claimed.

In truth, the Queen wanted control of the kingdom for a very long time. She saw this as the perfect moment to strike, to escape from a loveless marriage and rule the kingdom the way it ought to be ruled.

Any witnesses to what would transpire would need to be silenced. Which is why, quite unfortunately, the servant entered the room. She saw all that they were doing, all they had done. The king was dead. And there was but one loose end to tie.

The Queen’s Knight tried to slay the servant, as many a knight has done. One could say part of the job of being a knight is silencing those who would speak poorly of those in power. Even those close to them.

But tragedy befell the knight as, in his attempts to kill the servant, he loosened a stone from the castle’s walls. The stone held a pillar, which held a roof. With the pillar loosened, the roof shattered, if only slightly. It was enough to smother him.

The bishop tried to escape from the room, destroying itself in the wake of a pointless and cruel power grab. So the story goes, he was able to escape. But then, stories have a tendency of lying about their truth. If only to keep the bishops in their place.

The Queen, likewise, tried to escape. The stories tend to confirm her failure to escape. She was crushed, quite unceremoniously, under the weight of her kingdom’s stones.

For in the end, the story is one with the moral: don’t let the ambitions of women have sway in the affairs of men, lest they destroy the kingdom. The queen may have power, but if not tempered by the cool head of the king, all will be lost.

It is a cruel and awful story. One that exists to control the narrative of the world in favor of kings. Indeed, the story expands to further cruelty, as all defenses of the monarchy do. For how else did the kingdom fall but for one servant to not know her place. Were she to have known where she was meant to be, to be where her masters wished her to be rather than in the place her stupid mind thought she was meant to be, the kingdom would still be standing. 

Of course, as with all stories, there are always escape hatches, even unintentional ones. For the stories, the ones not told in the halls of church and state, offer a different moral, a different lesson. The focus is place, in their telling’s, on the servant, not the monarch. The servant escapes from the collapse of the world. The intentions were clear and understandable. She planned to be in the wrong place, baited the knight to strike at that spot, and slew the vicious monarch. She was mistreated by those in power, those who saw her as disposable. So she played the game her way, and down, down, down the monarchy fell.

Checkmate…

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I miss you dreadfully! (Jupiter Jazz Part 2)

“Are you Ryan Chack,”

“Claudia. Claudia Valespie.”

“Two million right now. Twenty million when you finish.”

One doesn’t say no to a member of the Valespie family, even the black sheep.

“My boyfriend is on Callisto.”

“And you want me to find him?”

He claimed to have “accidentally” killed a mob boss, the head of Valespie family.

That’s not my story to tell though.

When I arrived at the empty church, it was… empty. 

I found his wallet. It had a photo ID with his name on it. 

How could two people both be named “Ryan Chack?”

“Do you have a comrade?” Ryan asked me with his sad, tender face. I found him in an abandoned by calling itself the Lovely Angel. There were some bottles of beer left over after the owners bailed. Ryan was there alone, waiting for no one in particular. When I realized that he would no longer be going to the Blue Crow, I asked around for other bars in the area. The city, like all driving cities, is vast with empty buildings creating the majority of the skyline. One could say it was a ruin of a city, though that would be too kind to ruins. Some of the buildings were still intact while others were on their way to collapse. Just like any other city, I suppose. In truth, the Lovely Angel was my third stop.

“A comrade,” I asked. Comrade has a unique meaning in my family. Or, at the very least, it does for my brother and I. When we were kids, we would play this game with some of our fellow locals. Soviets and Pigs, we’d call it. Half of us would try to steal a thing (usually a ball or a rock. One time, it was girl we knew who wanted to play. I think I can still see the scar on my leg from when that game ended exactly how you’d expect) and the other half would try to protect it. Whenever my brother and I would play the game, we’d be on the Soviet side. And we’d always call each other “comrade.” We’d even call each other that when we weren’t playing. In fact, the last thing I said to my brother before leaving was “It was nice seeing you, comrade.” He smiled when I said that.

Ryan made a small chuckle. “You know, a comrade? A buddy, a pal, a partner.” Though his face and eyes were tender, there was also a shiftiness to the way he asked the question, a mild if earned paranoia to it. Like a dog whose been kicked one time too many. If what Vanessa said is true, I can understand why he’d ask such a question.

“It’s just me. There’s no one else here.” The lie soothes him well enough. Or, at least enough not to flee at that moment. Did he see the shifty fellows outside the bar. The ones who thought they were hiding so elegantly in their blue suits and black sunglasses? Did they really think they weren’t sticking out like a sore thumb, especially when they were stroking their guns the way one strokes a cat: with trepidation and an understanding that things could go tits up at any moment. Did he know they were actually here for me?

Mobsters, as anyone who’s dealt with them can tell you, rarely let go of a grudge. I gave up on a job too quickly and they must’ve came all the way to Callisto to find me. That must’ve been what the two million was for. Security money in case they showed up. The briefcase was in my hands with all the money in it. I slid the money towards one of the hired goons. I put a note in there fingering some other mob boss for what my brother was framed for doing. Felt only right, I suppose. He looked inside, signaled his fellows, and they all disappeared.

Ryan Chack declenched even more. (It feels weird to refer to him by my own name. Like I’m not even talking about myself whenever I say those words. Chack, it seems, is a common Martian last name, though the question of Ryan eluded me for a while.) Ryan must’ve thought I was a currier rather than a bounty hunter. The truth is, I’m neither. I’m a detective, a damn good one at that. I find people, solve mysteries, and try to do the best I can. I see things that not many others do, or say they do. Callisto, for example, is a world designed to make you miserable. The sky is perpetually grey, the world is cold and bitter, and the air tastes like sulfur and misery. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a prison planet rather than an escape from prison planet. Maybe that’s why the ISSP never comes here.

Ryan’s misery was that of someone whose whole life had been ruined by the people he loved. A narrative was beginning to shape out of the scraps, lies, and fictions I was told about him. He was born on Mars with the wrong body. He fought on Titan with the right one. He fought against the Blue Diamonds and the dissidents. He shot children and women and all the other people the military deemed to be the enemy. He was a good soldier and served for seventeen years.

When he returned to Mars, he found himself adrift and confused. His home had been burned in a freak accident. His parents had long disowned him and would only take him back if he went back to who he was when he was a child in a cage of flesh. He, rather impolitely, refused. In the years that followed, Ryan found himself on the streets doing what he could to survive. He was good at it, such that some would call him a ghost. No one could prove that he killed that mobster, stole that vase, freed those dogs. But they knew.

The last thing he did was a job on Earth. He was hired by the black sheep of the Valespie family to kill off the father. They had been together, on and off, for a few years. She helped him become the person he was always meant to be and he loved her in return. Seemed he didn’t like the direction she took in life and booted her out of the family. He was offered seventy-five million woolongs in advance and twenty-five million when the job was done. Something felt fishy about the gig to Ryan, but he wasn’t one to say no, even to a black sheep. Plus, the seventy-five mil was legit and not secretly a bomb waiting to explode. So he took the job.

Getting into the mob boss’s home was simple enough. Just pretend that you don’t exist and everyone else will follow suit. He was an old man, probably old enough to remember the first spaceships. He was very much an earth man with earthly views on fairness and cruelty. I suppose he might have been an interesting man to talk to. Ryan waited until he was well asleep before slitting the old man’s throat. That was when he heard over the intercom that someone had killed all of the old man’s children. All but one, that is. Ideas and implications were clicking in Ryan’s mind. He was set up to take the fall. He fled quite quickly, quicker than the other assassins. There was a story about two kids in the woods he liked. They heard a bear and one kid asked the other why he was tying his shoes, as if he could outrun a bear. “I can’t outrun the bear. But I can outrun you.” He fled to Callisto, the only world no one wants to go to, as evident by Claudia sending me to the world. The only downside was he had no access to the seventy-five million woolongs in his bank account. Ryan spent five months on Callisto before he entered the Lovely Angel to find me waiting for him.

He finished his beer in a single gulp. It left a soapy mustache on his clean face. “Ryan Chack.” He extended his hand out for a handshake. I returned the favor, but with a fake name.

“What kind of name is William Bonvillain? Sounds made up.” He said this with a wry smile of someone daring me to ask about his name.

“It’s as real as Ryan Chack.” In my defense, I’m kinda easy to convince to fall into obvious traps. He started yelling at me, as if I wasn’t the only person in the bar. It felt performative and staged. Did he know why I was there? Who hired me. The rant changed subject quite quickly towards Claudia Valespie and I got my answer: inexplicably, no. He asked me part of the way through the rant, just as he was getting to Valespie, if I was aware of her existence. I lied and said only vaguely. He believed me and went into even more detail about her volumes of lies and deceit. About how she tricked him into having sex with her, just to make him think she loved him.

Perhaps the most fucked up thing about the relationship was that she did love him. She fucked him over, sent him on a job she knew could only end one way. Looking at the relationship from the outside, it didn’t seem like it was a healthy one. Ryan only loved Claudia because of what she did for him. Not that Claudia was completely blameless. Choosing to have the person you once loved killed instead of the more traditional break up is a bit fucked up, to say the least. Plus, you know, she’s a sodding mobster. I’m surprised I was able to find out as much as I did about someone she wanted dead. (I was less surprised to find a bomb on the ship she had loaned me. Not taking any chances, I suppose.)

Eventually, Ryan’s words started to become more slurred and confused. Though, that might have been the tranquilizer I had slipped into his beer. Eventually, he collapsed onto the floor like a cat that had seen where a bag of kittens goes. He was surprisingly light, all things considered. The ship wasn’t too far away. Even in a walking city such as this, it was surprisingly easy to hide a spaceship if you really wanted to. I took off to Mars.

On my way there, I thought about Steven. He was a good guy, all things considered. He had a wife and a bunch of kids he loved. A part of me hoped to have a life like his one day. Sure, I have twenty million woolongs now, but it’s not like money can buy you a family or even friends. I have a small number of them, mostly acquaintances and allies, but they are still, nonetheless, my friends. Plus I have Steven. With the twenty million, I could easily get him off of Mars and on a much safer planet or moon. I’ve heard nice things about Ganymede, though the floating cities of Venus might be more our speed. I can’t wait to get to know Julia and all those adorable little tikes. I can hear the other Ryan shuffle in the background.

“I’ll let you go,” I lie, “if you tell me one thing: why’d you pick Ryan?” He didn’t say anything for a bit.

“Dunno. Just felt right, you know.” Even without looking, I could tell he was trying to find something to get him out of the chains. Wouldn’t be the first and wouldn’t be the last. I think I’m going to continue being a detective, despite my riches. I just don’t think I could stand being so… idle. Some people just need something to do, you know?

“Yeah,” I said with a soft smile. “I know.”

Why Are You Alone?

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The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty–five years old, no taller than I am, childish features and a touchy temper. (Jupiter Jazz Part 1)

I sit in the bar with a cowboy in my hand, waiting for the end. It began on a Tuesday evening, when I was given the job. My apartment had been wrecked the night before when I called to inform my previous employers that I wouldn’t do the job they hired me to do. Seems certain mobsters don’t take kindly to people not finding those they want found. I was lucky in that they were only able to break the cosmetic stuff before I arrived. At least I can still sleep in a bed that isn’t in tatters. I suppose I should have gotten the room fixed, but I needed to get off of Mars and I needed to get off quick. These types of bastards tend not to stop at wrecking a room.

That’s when fortune gave me one of its rare smiles in the form of a radiant woman. She was dressed in a provocative red dress, the kind you don’t see outside of old noir books. The surgical scars across her body were not as noticeable as she thought they were. She walked with a newness to femininity and spoke like she had always been one. Forgive me if I screw up my language. Sometimes I say something rather rotten when I’m trying to be sweet. But she was stunning. So stunning, I thought I was day dreaming when she entered my little room. All my work was done in there. I couldn’t afford anything more.

“Are you Ryan Chack,” she asked me with a voice affecting curiosity.

“Yeah. I’m him.” I rummaged the room for a box of cigarettes, but apparently the mobsters thought it would be a cruel joke to break all of them in a scuffle. Bastards. Still, a broken cigarette is just as good as an unbroken one, I lie to myself. Fortunately, the lighter still works. “Want one?” She politely refused my gesture. Fair enough. Not everyone gets the appeal of a broken cigarette.

“I have a job for you.” She was curt with me. As I would find out much later, she had a lot on her mind.

“What kind of job?”

“Two million right now. Twenty million when you finish.” The cigarette fell out of my mouth. “Plus expenses.” Now, as many people who know me know, I’m not always one to smell bullshit. And yet, this all rank of it. For starters, she clearly had surgery done on her, the kind someone with twenty-two million woolongs to spend would be able to hide better, let alone two million. As I looked at her closer, the dress she was wearing started to show patches of age and decay. I’d probably notice more in better light, but that might just be even more damning.

At the same time, I wasn’t quite in the position to openly question my employer beyond, “What did you say your name was?”

“Claudia. Claudia Valespie.” That clinched it. I quickly told her I would take the job, whatever it may be. One doesn’t say no to a member of the Valespie family, even the black sheep. The Valespie family was perhaps one of the oldest crime syndicates in the inhabited planets. Despite being Earth based, they had enough clout and power to keep their name on the board. The Blue Diamonds learned that the hard way. You can still smell their remains on Titan. The reasons why she was the black sheep of the family were obvious to me when she first entered the room. I didn’t say them, but she knew I knew once she said her name. She became sadder when she came to this realization.

“My boyfriend is on Callisto.” She presented me with the photo of the guy. He had a smooth face, almost like a baby’s. His eyes were soft and brown, though there was a hint of anger in them. His left center tooth had been chipped and there was a small scar on his lips. His skin was slightly tan, though not dark enough to hide the shiner. He had curly hair, though the sides were partially shaved off. Not in the way one has a mohawk. It looked as if someone had failed to give him a haircut and tried desperately to fix it. Then again, I’m bald so who am I to talk about other people’s hair?

“And you want me to find him?” She nodded. “What’s his name.” She told me. I must have given her a look of incredulity as she immediately followed up the name with a hideously fake laugh before giving me a fake name. I let it slide for the moment. Instead, I asked her if she knew what he was doing on Callisto and she instead told me that he was known to hang out at a bar called the Blue Crow. I’d find out in time what he did and why. I wish I hadn’t.

We drove to the spaceport in the most opulent of cars and towards one of the most mundane of spaceships. I suppose that’s fair. Callisto has a long history of hiding criminals on the run. It stands to reason that they can’t all be murderers. Seeing the moon made me think otherwise. I’d never been to Callisto. No one goes to Callisto unless the ISSP is after you for a sum greater than seventy-five billion woolongs. It was a shithole. Not like Earth where you could at least have a conversation. I mean a proper shithole. It was a barren, desolate planet where the only life was a driving city without any cars in it. And, to top it all off, it was cold as balls.

So finding Claudia’s beau and convincing him to get off the planet wouldn’t be too hard. I started at the Blue Crow. Bartender seemed nice. Or, at the very least, he could act like he wasn’t thinking of the ways he could skin you to make a quick profit. Most of the clientele were either passed out or more focused on whatever was on the tv. Currently, it was that bounty hunter show that everyone watches for some ungodly reason. I never really got that show. It’s just two people talking about who’s going to die or go to jail soon. Sure, the lady had a nice rack and the guy looked like he’d be good for a fun one night stand, but the show just wasn’t worth it. Why watch some crap show with T and A when the internet exists? Or hell, just hire some prostitutes. I didn’t say any of this to the patrons. Even drunk, they were quite a fearsome bunch.

I asked the bartender about the lad. “Yeah, I’ve seen him,” he said with a rather uncharacteristically scornful tone. From the way he was talking to me before, I got the impression that he wanted to sleep with me before skinning me. I wasn’t much of a looker, but I had a similar build to the guy. Twinks, I think the term for us is. Maybe he knew something I didn’t. Then again, the way he said “him” rubbed me the wrong way. He must have noticed as he quickly followed up with, “He comes to the bar once in a while. Usually to listen to Gren. But Gren don’t play sax no more.” I didn’t ask what happened to Gren. His sour face told me the whole story. “Nowadays, the guy hangs out with the… other ladies.” I socked him in the face before heading out. Fortunately, the other patrons were more focused on the sudden increase in free beer to care about me.

“We’ve seen him, ya,” said one of the ladies. Her name was Vanessa and she wasn’t rich enough to look like Claudia. She could barely afford a razor to remove the five o’clock shadow, let alone the surgeries to make her look more like herself. Still, she had a beauty to her. The kind usually talked about scornfully by people who believed normality trumps humanity. She was quite sad, even when she was cheerfully talking about her life. She couldn’t quite stop telling me all the little details. How she realized who she was on Callisto, how she met others like her, how she loved and lost and loved again. So many stories, none of which are mine to tell.

When her story reached my quarry, she told me he was a sad lad. He claimed to have “accidentally” killed a mob boss, the head of Valespie family. A cold shiver went down my spine. The kind you get when an unwanted hand of a ghost touches you. I tried not to say anything, but Vanessa could tell I was worried. She held me, not the way a lover holds someone. But like one holds a fellow person when they realize that there’s no life on other planets, all that’s left is just one sentient species. That we are truly alone. She told me that my bounty, for lack of a better word, was hiding in an abandoned church. And then, she told me the rest of her story.

My life seems to be haunted by abandoned churches. My dad died in one, my mom was born in one, and my brother disappeared in one. I found Steven a few days ago after being hired to find him by some mobsters. It appeared that he had taken on some debt with the mob and had gone into hiding. They just wanted the money and, failing that, him. My job was finding people and he didn’t go by Chack, so they thought I’d be perfect for the job. I recognized my brother instantly. It had been a few years since I’d seen Steven and while he’d gained a few scars and his hair had gone grey, he was still the same kid I knew. Still the same little shit who stole my lunch money and gave it to the homeless girl outside our dump of an apartment.

I found him on the outskirts of Tharsis. He was tending a farm with a wife and three kids (two girls and a boy). We exchanged pleasantries. I asked him what kind of business he was doing with the mob. His wife looked rather worried about this question. It turned out that he didn’t owe squat to the mob. His wife used to be a moll for the mob who helped her “sugar daddy” (I think that’s the right term for kindly saying pimp) skim off from the top. Certain people in the mob caught wind and the sugar daddy put the blame on my brother, a sweet kid who would talk to Julia, his now wife, from time to time. The kids were all his from a marriage that ended in tragedy. That’s not my story to tell though.

He practically begged me not to sell him to the mob. I looked at this guy, who I haven’t seen for years, who I cared about so god damn much, who I was furious for leaving me alone with only the cruel awful world to keep me company, and I said to him, “Of course I’ll keep you safe. What are older brothers for?” He broke down in tears.

When I arrived at the empty church, it was… empty. People had once lived in the church. Some of the fires were still charred with ash and embers. But those who were there were just ghosts haunting the church like God did. I looked around for something, anything to help me find my missing person. Providence came in the confessional. There, he must have been sleeping. Because it was in there that I found his wallet. It had two hundred woolongs, which I pocketed, a picture of the guy and Claudia Valespie (and it was indeed the guy I was looking for) and a photo ID with his name on it. It was the first name that Claudia had given me, the name I thought couldn’t possibly be his. How could two people both be named “Ryan Chack?”

More As It Develops

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Everybody’s dead, Dave. (Toys in the Attic)

Lesson 1. Always eat your vegetables.

The frozen sarcophagus danced in the eternally midnight sky like a ballerina falling to her untimely death. The deadly contents that lurked within, still breathing, still unalive, lacked what one might refer to as consciousness. Once, it was food. Once it was predator. Never was it conscious. To be conscious is to be alive. It was never alive. It laughs at those who thought being alive was alright with the gurgle of the incomprehensible. All meaning from its actions is derived from those who bear witness to its majesty.

It festered in its sarcophagus for over a year before it became aware. Awareness and consciousness are not the same thing. To be conscious is to think two things. It thought only one. It could see the others, prattling away in their nothing forms believing that things like money or bickering or anything other than eating was worthwhile. Contempt could be read into those words just as curiosity, confusion, and envy. Words are the tools of the conscious mind, after all. (An unconscious too, but their words and the meanings that tag along like an unwanted child in a glue factory are incomprehensible to the conscious mind.) The non-conscious has no use for words.

Witnessing its magnificence conjures dreams alien to the human mind. Ideas implanted by it. By something connected to it. The shape of its absence makes a void called the universe. It fills the void with a fungi of mutated life corrupted by being consumed by it. It infects like a virus dancing outside the human form. It smiles as those who think they can catch it the way a cracked brick smiles. It is entropy. It is death. It is eternal. The cosmos is its mother. Man is its father. It has no name. It has no purpose. It only eats and eats and eats. It will not stop. It does not know why. It does not care. To care is to have a conscious. To care is to be alive. To be unalive is to not even notice that you don’t care, let alone notice that you haven’t noticed. To be unalive is to be an “it” and not a person. Not a person at all.

The frozen sarcophagus floats in the eternal night like a child drowning in the middle of the ocean where not even the most carnivorous of sharks or the most vengeful of dolphins could find him. The remains within splurge out of the metallic casket like blood from a stuck pig. It glistens in the night sky with an air of magic and wonder that could only come from a fishing lure. It will be free one day. It will consume. It will survive. It always does. Its children will die, consumed by those who are stronger than them. But it will consume them in turn. All things return to the refrigerator.

Lesson 2. Don’t blame yourself for the failings of other people.

Margaret Janeway found herself floating in the vacuum of space. Again. She had a knack for getting herself into situations like this. Her and her big mouth. She wouldn’t blame other people. Sure, the guard could have refused the bribe instead of taking it and throwing her into the airlock, Mark could have been more honest in his intentions to double cross her, and the gun manufactures could have designed a better gun for people escaping from angry mobsters. But, at the end of the day, she should have known that the gun was busted. It was a 300 woolong gun for crying out loud. Of course something that cheap was going to fail on her. Just like she should have known that a weasel like Mark Waltsman would double cross her. He practically screams “I’m an untrustworthy bastard who wants to watch you be miserable for the rest of your life because I’m just that kind of shit” with the way he talks. Not what he talks about, he could talk about how the sky is blue and you’d still think he was plotting to drown you in it. Of course that asshole was going to double cross her. And the guard… well, she should have known not to trust a bastard with a 1488 tattoo on his knuckles. (In her defense, she didn’t see the tattoo until after she was in the airlock.) Regardless of whose fault it was, Margaret thought, it didn’t change the fact that she was stuck floating in the void of space without any hope of surviving, be it through a lucky spacecraft passing by willing to take aboard an adrift con artist who burnt one bridge too many or the people she had fucked over returning once they realized she actually stole something important from them. But she was in the middle of fuck all nowhere where not even the light of the stars shown (bar one that was just far enough away to allow her to see what she looked like but too far away to attract any daredevils dumb enough to fly into it because they want to be seen as cooler than they actually are) and Mark knew her well enough to have the guards she didn’t bribe check her body for stolen property in the way most slimy men search a woman’s body. In short, she was trapped, destined to live the rest of her life adrift in space until there was nothing left of her but the spacesuit Mark graciously lent her. And then, inexplicably, Margaret Janeway saw a refrigerator floating in the depths of space with the grace of a bowling ball crashing through four floors of an apartment complex and the subtlety of a snake in the garden of Eden asking Eve if she would like something to eat. Crazy universe, thought Margaret. Might be a crashed ship nearby. Maybe even an escape pod. So she floated right atop the refrigerator and towards her end.

Lesson 3. Always help those in need.

Jane Doe, as Dr. Grant Marston was forced to call his patient, was found floating in the depths of space inside a refrigerator. It was a miracle she was alive for as long as she was. Grant did not know how long she was inside that refrigerator, though her body was noticeably warmer than it should have been. It was covered in a black, almost mold like sore. Her teeth were nearly rotten and decayed. They looked like the mouth of someone who had smoked for fifty years even though she was clearly a woman in her mid to late twenties. Her eyes were bloodshot, almost completely red.

Jane Doe did not survive the night. Grant tried to tell himself there was nothing he could do. Indeed, he knew there was nothing he could do. The woman should not have been alive for as long as she was. And yet, he couldn’t help but think of what he could have done to, if not save her, at the very least ease her pain. Which is why he was in the morgue examining her body. The following notes were what he found:

-Left hand broken in seven different places (space suit intact)

            -Blood found underneath fingernails. Run search upon return to Mars.

-Right hand perfectly fine (space suit rupture in index finger)

-Left eye blue, right eye green.

            -Left eye cut (external)

            -Right eye fractured (internal (???))

-Source of sore: center of right hand. Reverberated throughout the body like the insides of a tree.

            -Source unknown

-Teeth crooked, surgery performed on seven/ten occasions.

            -Top center teeth chipped

            -Three teeth missing

            -Wisdom teeth still within mouth; no abnormal growth (???)

-Jane Doe has red hair, cut to nearly a bob.

            -Red hair found inside refrigerator (Ask Proper Martin)

-Bullet wound in left shoulder.

-Bullet wound in right shoulder.

-Bullet wound in right leg. (4)

-Black sore (mold?) found all over body.

            -Not contagious by touch, inhalation, or consumption (I’m looking at you, Ryan)

Martin Smiths was examining the refrigerator Jane Doe had been found inside of. When Grant asked him about the contents of the fridge, he started to laugh while bashing his head into the steel wall. He did not die from this. Grant requested permission to look at the refrigerator for medical purposes, but “Captain” Martin Wilcox denied his request, citing that the psychological effect it had on Smiths was too much for him. In reality, Wilcox also saw what was inside the fridge. If Marston saw its contents, he would be driven mad by the horrors within. At least, that’s what he claimed in his suicide note.

Grant was a bit peeved to be certain. There was so much about this woman he didn’t know. Why did she have a tattoo of a monkey on the bottom of her left foot? Why was she in a refrigerator even though she was wearing a space suit? How did she die? And what bit her? He would only find the answer to two of these questions. The first answer came in the form of a feeling in his left palm that was akin to what an apple must feel when a naked woman eats it upon the request of a snake. When Grant lifted his hand to see what bit him, all that was there was a black mark. The full extent of what had happened to Grant wouldn’t become apparent to him for another three hours. In a way, he was one of the lucky ones.

Lesson 4. Do not open things that say “DO NOT OPEN!!!!!!!!!”

FAMED “GHOST SHIP” FOUND FLOATING DEAD STAR AFTER THIRTY SEVEN YEARS.

The starship Nausicaä, missing for thirty seven years, was found yesterday orbiting a dead sun. The crew within long dead.

The Nausicaä was a medical ship owned by noted billionaire and heir to the Wilcox Corporation, Martin Wilcox the Fourth. It disappeared on Nov. 20, 2071 after a humanitarian aid mission on Titan and did not return to Mars for repairs. The decades long mystery was resolved, however, when a freight ship had discovered the remains after a computer glitch forced them off course.

The Inter-Solar System Police confirmed Sunday that the ship, which had several internal failures but no breaches in the ship’s hull, was the Nausicaä.

Among the crew of the Nausicaä was noted movie star, Martin Smiths. Smiths’s career was notable for his starring roles in such classics as “Revenge of the Deadly Assassin,” “Marco Pollo,” and his award winning directorial debut, “The Man Who Knew Me.” Smiths was a hero to the burgeoning Mars cinema, producing several acclaimed films, including “Blake.” His career was cut to an end when he disappeared along with the rest of the crew.

The Nausicaä’s unsolved case has been the fodder of many a true crime podcast and work of fiction, including Walter Graham’s seminal The Ghost Ship and the fourth season of the Wilcox produced Dark Space series. Upon being asked about the discovery of the ship, head writer Marcus T. Ling was quoted as saying, “I’m excited… to see [the Nausicaä] discovered is perhaps one of my childhood dreams. I can’t wait to walk its hallways.”

Sources within the ISSP indicate that that dream may not come true, as there is a high level of toxicity within the ship that seems to have been the cause of death for the Naussicaän crew. Rumors of a bioweapon secretly implemented on the Naussicaä crew have surfaced, though the ISSP has not made a comment. More as the story develops.

[Update: 12/01/08]

The ISSP has released an official statement:

THE STARSHIP DESIGNATED “NAUSSICAÄ” WAS FOUND FOUR DAYS AGO ORBITING THE DEAD SUN, SOLARIS. THE ENTIRE CREW WAS FOUND DEAD. THE CAUSE OF DEATH HAS BEEN DETERMINED TO BE SUFFOCATION. IT IS BELIEVED BY THE INTER-SOLAR SYSTEM POLICE THAT THE CAUSE OF DEATH WAS A COMPUTER MALFUNCTION, WHICH SHUT DOWN THE LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS. THE FAMILIES OF THE DECEASED WILL BE INFORMED OF THEIR DEATH.

Class Dismissed

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