Tag Archives: space exploration

Creativity, Fiction

Makers of History

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From the Microcosmicon, 38:

“I’m Empress Rathoi!” Nili screeched from her dingy cubicle.
“Every two damn minutes,” Anned grunted, turning in her sleeping bag. Old Nili was getting worse.

Anned wasn’t much better off. She’d wind up a meaningless husk, like everyone else on Toreadis.
Yet something rebelled within her, coherent, alive, like the stars judging her from above the collapsed Toreadian skyline.

The following day she snuck onto an airship for Arctamam. First, the pirates welcomed her among their ranks; and when the constitution was abolished, the revolutionaries. After the war, she was crowned empress.

Nili never knew of her role in history.

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

The Jewel in Space

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From the Microcosmicon, 36:

It glinted like a forlorn beacon in the night of space.
“No heat from it,” the captain read from his control panel.

“Never seen anything like that before,” his companion muttered. “Let’s turn back.”
“I bet the Empress would want it among her crown jewels. We go.”
So the spaceship approached the light. From up close, it was no larger than a life capsule, suspended by a thin rope.

Then the captain saw it taking shape behind the radiance. The fish whose fangs opened like jagged mountains on a starless cosmic throat-chasm. Its body going on. And on. And on.

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

The Soul’s Journey

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From the Microcosmicon, 33:

The Explorer III reached the end of the Suctan system eight months after departure.
But when the ship was about to trespass, it… bumped into the sky?

Suddenly a slit of light tore across the vastness. Then it yawned open, revealing not the outer universe the Suctanians had observed from afar, but an endless contortion of titanic interlocking mechanisms, each feeding into the other with impersonal, meaningless coherence.

Finally, a voice echoed from the reddish depths.
“Welcome back, souls. Now that you have spontaneously gained consciousness of the nature of things, you are fit to enliven us. We’re one again.”

MQS

The Soul’s Journey
Creativity, Fiction

The Circumstances of Greatness

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From the Microcosmicon, 30:

Finding the draft card in my mail, I knew I had to flee. I had so much to live for. Not that I’d ever done anything with my life, but I wanted the option.

I stole a military pod and left Alpha-Fenoler. For months I survived on freeze-dried food in the great star-washed nothingness.

Then a ship appeared. My capsule was pulled in. I panicked. They’d call me a traitor! I’d be quartered!

But they were not Alpha-Fenolerians. They were from the Interstellar Reconstruction Forum. They hailed me as a hero for preserving Alpha-Fenolerian DNA to repopulate my war-consumed planet.

MQS

The circumstances of greatness
Creativity, Fiction

The Origins of Morality

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From the Microcosmicon, 15:

In my enthusiasm, I twirled the gun so quickly it flew off my hand and a laser shot hit my wristwatch. I retrieved it gingerly.
The doors opened, and I finally met my commissioner.

I consider myself unprincipled. You pay me, you get results. But before me was something not merely alien, but inhuman.
“Welcome, Mr. Long,” it said through countless foetid mouths, stretching scaly arms toward the gun.
Chink. Chink. My eyes fell on the dozens of wristwatches that were heaping on the floor.

I pointed the gun toward myself.
Shortly after, thousands of Mr. Longs left the spaceship.

The Origins of Morality

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

Allies

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From the Microcosmicon, 14:

The Xandal’uc slaves marched onto the Magna. The spaceship departed.
Ten days in, the captain spotted pirates.
“It’s our lucky day. More slaves!”

But clearly pirates were the lesser problem. The Hyperleeches they were fighting were more worrisome.
“We must join forces,” the pirates told the captain from the bluish, buzzing screen.
“We don’t have enough manpower.”
“Of course you do.”
So the slaves were freed, the Hyperleeches vanquished.

“Now help us with the Xandal’uc,” said the captain.
“Sorry, that’s too much to ask of free men,” the pirates laughed, leaving.
The slaves approached the captain. They were not amused.

Fighting the Hyperleeches

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

The Visionary

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From the Microcosmicon, 10:

Riddle me this. I’ll try to present my case as succinctly as possible, and you will be the judge.

You graduate top of your class. You win study grants. You travel the world. You lecture in crowded halls. Everyone praises you for your special vision and your daring challenge of academic conventions. You have something no one else has, they say, and they encourage you.

Then, finally, you land in the space program. They are sure you will discover something unbelievable.
And I did.

Why then, If I may ask, am I the one wasting away in a padded room?

The Visionary

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

Fighting the Vast Ones

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From the Microcosmicon, 7:

It was a galaxy teeming with life. Nations ranged from small islands to whole systems. Travelers were daring. Adventurers trafficked. Merchants brought their culture with them. Dissidents of all stripes were sure to find a more suitable place somewhere else.

Then the Vast Ones came from outer space, and no one was ready.
To face the emergency, the galaxy united under an emergency government headed by the Liberation Front.

Untold lives were lost.
But the invasion was staved off.

Yet, the Liberation Front is still there, and everything everywhere is uniform and gray, a vast oneness with nowhere to go.

Fighting the Vast Ones

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

Planet Empathy

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From the Microcosmicon, 6:

“I’ll come back with the measurements.”
“It could be dangerous! We don’t know anything about this planet!”
“That’s why I’m going.”

My capsule landed. I exited. Dusty light slanted greenly on me. Orbs. Rainbows.
My worries subsided. The vastness of all seeped into the bottom of my soul, assuaging, comforting. No self, no otherness. Unity danced everywhere, overcoming all opposites, compassion without beginning nor end.

I was moved. I couldn’t wait to tell the others.
I started back. Or tried to. But there was no ‘me’ to respond to my will. And I wafted away in deaf rivulets of ecstasy.

Dissolution of the self

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

The Waiting Ones

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From the Microcosmicon, 5:

Farodor fell away, a dying man’s eye drooping shut.
The Transplanetary Lifeboat Aeterna began her pensive trudge across space as the planet went out in a burst.

Initially, all those aboard counted themselves fortunate for escaping a terrible fate.

But then, as months chased each other meaninglessly in the great stillness of everything, a gloom descended upon them. One hundred years separated them from Neo Farodor. Only their grandchildren would see the New Era.

And they realized that there is a fate heavier than death—being stuck between the old life and the new, between one purpose and the next.

Those who wait

MQS