Kieve's Random Ramblings

[Kieve]

I'm one of those people whose head is constantly filled with random threads of narrative, stories both silly and serious, long and short. I've found the best way to "let them out" is through writing, which has lead to a somewhat bizarre catalogue of short tales and snippets. Not sure how many would interest the community here, but I had one recently I thought might strike a chord, and figured I'd share.

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(Untitled)

"You'll die," said Marco.

"No," replied Weston, "I will finally live. I will be immortal." He looked upon the great white machine with the adoration of a proud parent. This ship, this ugly, boxy, angular vessel, which brooked no comparison to the sleek rockets his grandfathers had envisioned, whose hide was composites and ceramics and materials so strange and alien they would never have imagined in their time - this fine thing was to be his, and his alone.

"You're a fool, and you'll die a fool's death," his pessimistic companion declared.

"If it is foolish to chase your dreams, to live them, I would not wish to be a wise man. How many hundreds of years, Marco? How many has Mankind waited for this moment, dreamed of it? How many since we looked up at the stars and took it in our heads that we should be out there, among them? To stride vast distances of nothing, as the Gods do. I shall meet them all, Marco, the Christian and Islamic and Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Myan, Sumarian, and all the rest! I shall shake Ra's hand, ride Apollo's chariot, help Orion fasten his belt!" Weston's eyes grew wide as his excitement tumbled from his lips. "I will see with the eyes of Hubble and Kepler, Chandra and Spitzer and Herschel, drink from the ice of comets, breathe from distant nebulae, bask in the warmth of newborn suns. The whole of the universe, the length and breadth of infinity, all of it within our reach at last. Our mother Earth, a green bud, at last blossoming, flowering, spreading the pollen of human civilization into the cosmos. It all begins here, Marco, with this. With us!"

Marco shook his head, hiding a smile. Weston's passion would not, could not be undone, by words or force. Death itself might not stop him, he considered wryly. The boy had been born with stars in his eyes, rocket fuel in his veins, his head forever far, far above the clouds, where molecules of gas danced lonely waltzes through the edge of space before bumping into another of their kind. His future on this world had only ever been to leave it. "I will miss you, my friend."

Weston clapped him on the back. "Oh cheer up already! You're standing at the feet of history as it's being written, this is no moment for melancholy!" A heartbeat of silence, two, ten... "I'll miss you as well. And Renee. Florida. Earth. But just look out there." He pointed to the night sky, the star-flecked darkness behind the spacecraft on the pad. "All of it, this whole solar system, the Milky Way, someday we'll look at it as 'home,' they way we think of our towns now. Someone will ask where we're from and we won't answer 'New York,' or 'Cincinatti,' no sir, we'll say 'Earth,' or 'Proxima Centauri,' or 'Gliese 667.' They'll teach geography in stellar terms, not national ones. Just imagine it Marco, imagine that day!"

"You really are a madman, Weston," Marco told him, laughing. "But by God, I wish we had a million more like you. Just don't forget to send us some damn fine pictures when you get up there, would you?"

"Pictures? I'll send holovids. People will have the wonders of the universe, right at the tips of their eyeballs. But it won't be the same, you know. They won't feel the warmth of a new sun, they won't hear the patter of dust on the hull or the radio-band sonatas of gas giants singing them to sleep. There's only one way to have that - they'll have to follow me up." For a moment, Weston's voice grew low, serious. "Make sure they do, Marco. Space is vast, but it's not empty and it's not meant to be lonely."

"We all do our part, Weston. Get some rest, you'll need it tomorrow."

---

I've always liked Ray Bradbury's work, but somewhere along the line he became my "favorite" author (at least of Sci-fi). There's an earnestness in his writing I greatly admire, and I've been itching to try and capture some of that. So you might consider this a sort of literary homage to his style. Hopefully I succeeded.

"Hide & Seek" was another I thought might have some merit, short as it is. Maybe one day my muse will feed me a continuation of it, but for now I suppose it stands well enough on its own.

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Hide & Seek

No one knew for sure where the Rocket came from. One day it was simply there, a gleaming silver Fifties-style space needle, perched on three stubby fins. There were no visible hatches or windows of any kind, no openings in its smooth metallic surface except the exhaust nozzle in its base. And perhaps most mysterious of all, the ground below it was still green and fresh, without a single trace of scorching or interstellar fire.

For days, people crowded around the Rocket, cautiously poking and prodding and snooping. When the craft stayed silent and dead, they grew bolder, tapping and hammering and even attempting to cut into the metal to get at whatever workings might be inside. Their efforts were wasted. The Rocket stood silent and impassive, its hull unblemished and whole despite their drills and saws and torches. No diamond tip or fiery plasma could make so much as a scratch on the strange craft.

Since it had "landed" in the park, out of the way of all but the weekend Frisbee-throwers, the townsfolk were content to leave it alone and forget about it. Certainly, the mystery remained, but it was neither an obstruction nor a danger, and so it became an idle curiosity instead. Gossip, rumors, and fanciful stories circulated through the town, and the surrounding counties, but there were no answers to be had.

Three months passed. A small group of children were playing in the park, enjoying their last few days of freedom before school resumed once more. They dodged around and between the Rocket's fins, heedless of the black exhaust nozzle over their heads as they pursued one another in a game of tag. But as bottomless as a child's energy may seem, they did eventually grow tired and turn to the more passive activity of Hide & Seek. And that was when it happened.

While the other children scurried off to hide among the bushes and trees of the park, seven-year-old Victoria had a different idea. She crept around one of the Rocket's fins, looked up at the tall gleaming object, and asked quietly, "Please, let me in?" And so it did.

A doorway appeared in the base of the Rocket, a small oval of white light, and it extended a ramp down to where she stood. Hesitating for only a second, young Victoria walked up the ramp and disappeared inside it.

"Five!" counted down the Seeker, whose name was Timothy. "Four...! Three...! Two...! One...! Ready or not, here I come!"

And ready or not, there went Victoria, streaking skyward on a tongue of orange flame and white smoke.

To this day, no one's been able to find her. She always was the best at Hide & Seek.

Edited September 17, 2016 by Kieve

[Kieve]

I have a particular fascination with meteors, comets, asteroids, and other assorted stellar debris. There's a certain dread anticipation to knowing that, of all the myriad cosmic detritus out there, one or more of them may eventually have "Destination: Earth" stenciled on the side. Which isn't to say I'm about to start prepping for Doomsday, but it's humbling to know that for all the wonder and possibility up there in the black, there's a chance one of those "possibilities" could be Game Over.

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Daylight

Dawn didn't break, this morning. It shattered. The world turned on its side, and bloody lances of illumination fell on the hills, sundering them. There's an old rhyme about red skies at dawn, but we had no warning, no time to take warning. When the sun rose, it was angry, and everything on our side of the horizon bore its wrath.

You think I'm speaking in metaphor? That some calamity we can't name fell on us from the heavens and started tearing up our world? No, my friend, this is literal. Every morning is like this. Our world is being continually ripped apart as it turns, and no matter where you live, dawn is the worst of it. That's when the absolute cold of night meets the shock-heating of solar exposure and the surface goes from freezing to vaporizing in seconds. So of course your next question would be, "why do we live in such a hellish place?"

This is all we've got left.

It used to be a planet - decent one, too. Had water, air, ecosystems, the works. Guess the cosmos didn't like that too much, since they sent another rock on a collision course with ours. But not just any rock. No, friend, there are little ones that melt in the sky before they hit the ground, there are crop-dusters and city-killers, crater-makers and harbingers-of-the-apocalypse that'll wipe your world clean so what's left can start over fresh. And we'd seen them all, over the millennia. But this rock, oh this one was the great-grand-daddy of them all. This was a planet-buster, may as well have been a planet all to itself. Twice our mass, less than a quarter our size. It was an interstellar musket-ball of a rock, and when it hit dead-center after getting a nice slingshot off the other side of our sun?

Most of us are just counting our blessings there was enough of our mudball left to make a comet from. I'll bet even your planet blinked when that thing hit us. Winced, more like.

So we live on a comet now, half a hundred left out of a few trillion. Preserving the species, amirite? Somehow our little bunker managed to hold together when the world itself got blown to shreds, riding what's left of the mountain it was buried in through space. But hell, you already know all this don't you? You can see it in your telescope when you look up at night, hurtling down out of the black. We've had a good run, even all these centuries after The End, but it was bound to catch up with us eventually. Maybe the rock that hit us was in our shoes now, carrying the last remnants of some other poor sucker's civilization with it. Our turn to pay it forward, I guess.

But hey, for whatever little it's worth? We're really sorry to bump into you like this.

[Bill Phil]

Pretty good stuff.