Funeral

Stringer's mother stands, looking down at the grave. The wind whistles and gasps as it tugs at their clothes, the few spare trees, the words of the priest. The old man had been a bastard but one look from his mother had warned him never speak ill of the dead. Despite everything the old man had finally broken the only contract that matter to her. Now she is left keeping a contract with the dead.

The graveyard is untended, overgrown. The weathered stones, pocked with the spreading stains of lichens are scattered like chess pieces. The church wall is hidden behind blood-coloured ivy and dark vermillion moss. Tall grasses, yellowing in the Autumn sun, rustle. Barely a couple of hours back and Stringer wishes he could be gone again. But something wrong has happened. Something that no-one will tell him about. They fear him. He has become an outsider, he feels it in himself as much as the ragged, furtive stares of the village.

Moral Neutrality

‘Arnie!’
The shout reverberated urgently around the chamber, falling on deaf ears.
Arnie’s head slumped forward, his foppish blond hair flopping lifelessly over his slightly protruding eyes. His hands were fixed to the controls in front of him, knuckles tight white against the silvery metal of the grips, flesh literally bonded to the machine.
‘Arnie? What’s going on in there? Arnie!’ Bill continued to shout but Arnie just wouldn’t move, wouldn’t respond. The glass layer between them began to fog with Bill’s vocal moisture and a deep sensation of physical panic started worming its way through his body. He banged on the glass, feeling it bend slightly under his strength. Still nothing. It was time to get help.
--
The man who responded to Bill’s breathless phone call did not give his name as he entered the control room. He grunted at Bill in combined recognition of his presence and his status and then strode confidently straight over to the glass panel.
The man, dressed in an anonymous civilian suit of dark blue with a light blue shirt and striped tie, peered myopically through the clear glass. For a moment it looked like he was going to reach up and touch the glass, trying to form a connection through the barrier, but then he hesitated and turned back into the room. The full force of his questioning stare came to rest on Bill.
‘What happened?’ he asked, the first time that Bill had heard him speak and the voice was unexpected. It was a weak voice, tremulous and uncertain as if the man was searching for words from deep within limited resources.
Bill blinked. He didn’t really know where to start. ‘He just stopped.’ It seemed so inadequate as an answer and, from the look on the strange man’s face, he wasn’t the only one to think so.
‘Just stopped?’
‘Yes. He was operating as normal one minute and then the next thing he’d just, just stopped. Suddenly he wasn’t doing anything anymore.’
‘No warning? No message?’
‘No. Nothing.’
‘And it’s never happened before?’
‘No. Arnie’s been a good worker. Never any problem at all, let alone a complete breakdown like this.’
‘Arnie??’
‘That’s what I call him. He’s an R-9 model after all. It just seemed to fit.’ Bill looked into the enclosed chamber, hoping for some sign of movement from the android on his throne, some twitch in the thick wires that connected Arnie to the computers that fulfilled his directions.
...

System fall

Fifteen years out. The array of sensors poking out from the shield send an electrical pulse to the core which takes the decision to begin the rotation, turning the engines to start the deceleration of the starship so that it will be slow enough to be caught by the gravity of the growing, pinprick yellow sun. As the engines cycle through their tests before they dare to reignite, the rows of tanks buried deep within the protective shell of the ship are filled with gelatinous growth mixtures while three thousand zygotes are checked for flaws that would cause them to be discarded. Eggs that pass the test, that have not been damaged by cosmic rays, radiation or age, are injected into the gel along with the alchemical mix of fluids that will prompt the growth of the cells into humans.

The core, meanwhile, starts its slow communications with the chaperones leading the way. Over the course of months evidence is checked and rechecked, compared with the observations taken at the start of the journey, two hundred years distant, and corrected. Aboard the pathfinder vessels robots are readied and prepared; on arrival, five years before the starship, they will fall into orbit around the largest gas giant in the system and begin to dismantle several of its moons for raw materials. These will be used to construct the station habitat and the mining equipment required to extract the brief flickers of anti-matter generated by the collision of the sun’s rays with the power of the gas giant’s magnetosphere.

By the time the humans are fully grown, and the neuronal and chemical components of their brains encouraged into the configuration of the memories of their original bodies, their new home will have been constructed, their starship gently nudging itself into a local parking orbit, ready for them to disembark to their new lives.

Daylight

Camille sat on the fallen tree trunk, caressing the ruffled bark with smooth fingers. Around her a single shaft of strong yellow sunlight threaded into the forest clearing. She felt warmed by its caress. Sparkles of fragments of dust twinkled in the strangely harsh exposure of the ray, wafting in the draught, floating in haphazard patterns of fall.
Her visitor introduced himself with nothing more than a grunt of acknowledgement. Camille stood up, reluctance visible in the exaggeratedly slow movement of her muscles, and moved tentatively towards him.
Grmph stood two heads taller than her and was covered from top to bottom in a thick and matted coat of dark green fur. His limbs were long and heavy, powerful blocks of potential violence, his face hidden beneath the slightly more delicate feathering of his facial fleece.
Camille stood detached from him, looking up into the general area of his face with a forced smile, and opened her arms in welcome.
‘Thank you for coming.’ She started, pausing until he nodded, wanting to make sure that she was being heard. ‘I have a job for you.’
Grmph tipped his head to one side to indicate that he was hearing her, that he was listening.
Camille’s heart was racing, adrenaline pounding her body into frightened numbness, but she couldn’t say what she was scared of. It wasn’t of Grmph, he was reasonable in his violence, a creature that would only unleash the power of his body for a good, or well paid, cause. She knew also that she shouldn’t take his ineloquence as a sign of lack of intelligence.
It wasn’t that she was scared of what she was asking him to do either. The job simply had to be done. There was no choice. She had thought about it ceaselessly for days and unending nights and had come up with no other way.
‘I want you to kill my father.’ She said, her voice shaking resolutely.

Ambassador

A dusting of snow lies on the just-frozen surface of the water garden. A bird flies across the surface, landing briefly in a display of all four of its wings before launching itself back into the air. The sky overhead continues to lighten, the weak, yellow sun occasionally breaking through the low cloud. I sit on the cold wood of the observation deck, a tea slowly cooling in its vacuum cup, the steam rising elegantly from its bowl. To be asked to sit here, to wait, is something of an honour and a test.
There is a sound like the tearing of paper behind me and I slowly turn to see Weran coming out form the door to the main complex. He is short for a Renonsian, only seven foot, but he has all the casual elegance of his species that always makes me feel inadequate to the light gravity of their moon. He clasps his forearms together in greeting, bowing slightly to expose his rear wings. Although they are not able to support any Renonsian in flight they are elegant, well-looked after, the feathers falling along his back in a short cascade of muted colours.
“Ambassador.” He says, in English. I understand their language well enough to be able to speak it flawlessly, the twenty year flight gave me plenty of time for study, but they always insist that dialogue be conducted in our tongue. None of the reasons that I have heard have convinced me why.
Behind Weran another Renonsian emerges, taller, dressed in the light armour of their warrior caste. Finally, I think. This is turning out to be a very interesting day.
I have seen many soldiers while I have been here. Although they nominally fall under the command of the civilian authority they conduct themselves with a disdain for any that are not of their caste. The civilian administration defers to them in a great deal, although there is a separation of concerns between economics and politics that has been proving particularly difficult to navigate.

Fred

Fred woke up one morning and could see nothing but colour. It wouldn’t have been so bad, it didn’t sound so bad, but it wasn’t just the colour of now he could see. The memory of colour became visible to him also.
Streaks of colour, stripes of shades, swam in front of his confused eyes.
The only way he could get out of bed and make his way to the en suite bathroom was by working out how dense the lines were, hoping that the denser the colour, the more permanent the actual thing behind the colour. His wardrobe formed a relatively solid block of dark blue for him to steer around. The open door to the bathroom was signified by a dark patch, particles of light blurred across the darkness so that even this wasn’t firmly delineated in his sight.
Running water from the shiny grey reflective mass of the cold tap, shards of reflections glittering out across the sink in a bewilderment of rich jewels, reached more by touch and memory than sight, appeared like a fractured stream of individual drops of silvery blue moisture. Pink blurs represented Fred’s hands. He felt the water in the normal way, the shock of the cold subsiding in the growth of familiarity. Pooling the vibrant liquid in the palms of his alien looking hands, Fred splashed his face, hoping for reconciliation with what he expected to be reality.
A blur of stubbled pink in the vague outline of the place where the mirror usually hung reflected what he assumed to be his face.
He tried to peer at himself, screwing his eyes together in an imitation of seeing, but this made no difference. The straggly lines of colour were all around him, surrounding him in movement, drowning him in visual stimulation.
Fred felt okay. He didn’t feel dizzy or disorientated. He didn’t remember banging his head or feeling any different from normal. So what was going on?
In the bedroom, which seemed like another world away, Fred heard his alarm go off with harsh tones. It took him some time to negotiate his way back to the relative safety of his bed and to knock about on the bedside table to find his alarm. On the way he cursed his habit of leaving his worn clothes in haphazard piles across the floor, they were now like traps waiting for his unlucky feet, tripping and trapping his surprised toes.
Fred sat on the bed, sighed, then lay down and closed his eyes tightly. Wanting this to all just go away…

terror, even when overcast

You see, I was there. All you know, you saw on television, through the internet, blurred with commentary and idiotic rambling by people who knew nothing about what was happening. Filling others’ ignorance with their own base desires and cravings. I didn’t see any journalists, just the suffering. I can only think that the journalists stayed away, reporting by looking inwards from their hotels and the fly-over footage provided by the UAVs while they stayed safe in the knowledge that no-one could possibly contradict them.
I was going to work. It had already started and none of us standing on the platforms knew. I had seen it and not understood.
The sky is always open, even when patterned with the flowing underside of clouds piled over each other, sliced by the arcing paths of darkly silhouetted birds. It is the sky of a flat land, not hemmed in with hills or mountains, stretching and filling the mind of those willing to look upwards. The shapes above tear and fight leaving wounded pictures of emptiness. Only when the tram arrived did I look down, back at the earth.
I was jammed against the doors once they closed, as usual. Trying to avoid the press of strangers bodies, find enough space to be able to place my feet in balance against the jagged movement of the tram. I turned myself around to look through the window, through the condensation forming on the glass, at the speeding scenery; The blank spaces between people melt. The tram passed under the twin concrete flyovers of the M62. The gap between them a grey shaft of light punctuated by the upward flight of a startled pigeon and the illumination of an inane and brilliantly coloured graffiti. Beyond it the industrial estates, the tarmac retail park, the endless lines of garages selling cars hidden behind industrial scrubland.

It was as the tram descended into Manchester that I realised the colour had gone. Then the tram stopped, shaking to a sudden halt with the application of the emergency brake. The carriage mood split into annoyance and the usual expectation of shoddy service. Then the doors opened. I almost fell out. After checking that there was nothing coming that might injure me, and irritated at the way I had almost fallen from the tram, I jumped down already composing the letter to the company in my head.
It is not so simple a thing to describe. What happened next, I mean. A few on the tram had followed me down. The rest were stoic, watching me from the window with impassive faces. Looking down the road towards Piccadilly I caught sight of its head, rising and falling above the buildings. A shade of non-colour, almost the same as the sky but of a different light, a feeling of reality broken and ground under foot. A daikaiju imagined by Escher. Then it screamed, crying with a scent of destruction, dust billowing around it even as the scream began to try and infiltrate my own mind. It feels now like it was a reflexive, animal instinct that caused it to destroy the city. It was not a judgement, or a warning. It was not summoned by some ancient Mayan treasure brought to the museum, or physical experiment at the university. It wasn’t some super-dimensional rift caused by City’s win in the derby. Watching it I knew that it had always been there. We had just never seen it before.
I turned and ran.