SS - Walking the Dog

From "C.L.U." - Daft Punk

**This story is mostly not true**

“So. It has come to this.” The girl with the bright red hair glared at him.


I debated the merits of coming to his rescue. But really, he had done this to himself. He had slept through his alarm. He had failed in his sworn duty. He deserved the consequences.


But then a wet nose prodded my arm and milk chocolate eyes gazed at me hopefully. He sat back on his haunches, his tail wagging. “I don’t love you,” I told him.


His tail wagged more.


I sighed theatrically and turned away. The dog wandered back over to where the siblings remained in frictitious tableau. I had no doubt the girl would care for the dog as she always did once she had finished verbally eviscerating her brother but something needed to be done now.


“Alright then!” I whistled for the dog’s attention. His ears perked up. “Wanna go for a walk?”


He leapt like a happy frog and pranced in circles around the room. That was his way of saying: YES, YES, YES, OH PLEASE! He wasn’t a terribly subtle creature but his exuberant affection was endearing.


The extra tesser suit in the exit chamber was a little roomy but it would do. I filled the outer pocket with doggy bags and attached the subspace link to the dog’s collar. “Ok!”


The first few stops were made to the dog’s favourite comets so he could mark them again. For a centuries old science experiment, he had retained disappointingly ordinary dog instincts and behaviour. Then we tessered to a nearby astroid field. I let the dog run loose. Other than an obnoxious school of space fish and a shy rock hunter, I didn’t meet anyone (for copyright reasons, I can't mention the bounty hunter and jedi knight that were attempting to murder one another). When he’d had a good sniff and seemed content, I linked us to the ship and we tessered back to the exit chamber.


The ship was silent when we returned but I assumed the brother was napping and the sister had gone to her basketball game (one more win within this galaxy and they’d move on to an all-galactic tournament within the time frame of the fourteenth millenium).


I wrote a silly short story and heated up leftover meatballs for dinner. The red headed girl arrived home and we sat down to eat together. After awhile it seemed strange that her lazy brother hadn’t joined us.


“Hey, should I go wake your brother?” I asked.


She raised her eyebrows, “he’s not sleeping. After you left, I threw him in the trash compactor.”


I turned to look at the chute next to the sink.


“Oh it’s too late.” She cleared her dishes from table and set them in the cleaner. “I already ran the cycle and jettisoned the refuse.” She licked red sauce from her fingers. “He shouldn’t have forgotten to walk the dog.”

SS - The Way it Ends

The Way it Ends 

from "Beautiful Letdown" (Switchfoot) 

   Stars streamed past the viewing window. I fumbled against the straps holding me in my seat. I had to see the end for myself or I wouldn’t believe it. The clasps came free and I fell forward. Pain tore up my side. “Dammit!” I ran my good hand over the bandage. It still held firmly to my skin. I grit my teeth against the ache and crawled to the window. After so long in near-weightlessness the false gravity of the escape pod pinned me to the floor. I wouldn’t have been able to stand even if the cursed Salzen hadn’t burned my left arm and leg to uselessness. Damn the traitors to Ursa’s Hole!

    At the window, I managed to pull myself up enough to grasp a handhold to one side of it. Behind my pod’s trail of exhaust, I could see it: the Galanthos Space Sation, pride of the living Planets, masterpiece from the combined skills of the nine races. It took three hundred years and millions of engineers and artists to build it. Its destruction took less than three seconds.

    The first explosions happened on the far side from me, just scattered flashes of light and a hazy halo of debris developing in eerie silence. Then a burst of light blinded me. By the time I blinked away the tears and afterimage, nothing but a dark smear across the stars marked where Galanthos had been. Words rose unbidden to my mind, last lines from an ancient poem. I whispered them out loud to the silence:
    “This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.*”  



*TS Eliot's "Hollow Men"

August Song

Paranoid Android



“Did you hear that?”


With considerable effort, I pulled away from my sketches to answer my usually silent friend, “What? The air filter?”


“No,” Joam shook his head impatiently, “The sound that doesn’t fit. Wait a minute and listen.”


I waited. The struggling air filter cut in and out, our cooler hummed in one corner of the room, muted conversation came from somewhere further down the hall, nothing that “didn’t fit”. “Joam-“


“Sh.” He held up a hand. His face was tense with concentration.


Annoyed, I stayed silent but my mind began to turn back to the assignment I had been working on. How could I lower the energy needed to Slyman’s limit? Maybe if I-


My thought process slammed to a halt. What was that? Now that I heard it, I wondered how it had escaped my notice before. It was mesmerizing.


Joam raised an eyebrow at me.


I nodded but didn’t speak. The noise reminded me of a pre-storm wind but more delicate and piercing with a mathematical precision to its movement up and down in pitch. I felt an absurd urge to cry.


“What is it?” I whispered.


Joam opened his mouth to speak but the sound stopped abruptly. Ponderous curiosity changed to confusion on his face. Then an alarm began to shrill.


Air breach, dorm seven. Air breach, dorm seven.


I scrambled to grab my oxygen mask as the door to our room sealed and the air filter cut off completely. The warning sirens shrilled in my ears even after I had sealed the bulky mask in place but the haunting sound from minutes before replayed in my mind. I had to find its source.