SEAHORN EPUBLISHING YEAR END EDITION 2015
XENOPHOBIA ONE Patrice sat next to the open port of the interstellar transit on route to the asteroid cities orbiting Pluto. There, she would begin her new assignment as mineralogist. It was a 16 month post, but the end pay would allow her to go on work hiatus for three years. She planned on finally making a trip to Earth, to study the remains of cryptoids found after the Second Ice. But for now, all she need concern herself with would be the 18 hours a day, 7 days a Terran cycle that she would be out in the asteroid fields, mines, and casino sites. She was especially thankful for the new environment suits for prolonged space exposure. Thanks to the Bill Gates Quantum Computers on Mars, tesseract technology could now be applied to commercial use and every Terran cycle life. It would be 13 minutes until she found out first-hand how the new environment would work. TWO Patrice woke up. She looked around her. It was freezing cold, but she found herself floating in a very large round room made of some kind of shiny material. She noticed movement to her left. It was a drone, with a needle about four inches protruding from the front end. It circled around her floating form, then quickly lanced her left forearm. The drone pulled back, its sleek rectangular body about five feet wide by seven feet long, with dials and gauges glowing red.
The drone had deactivated. Patrice felt a cool rush, much too much like the Gran Mons White Heroin she would buy from Chinese space pirates when she shopped the asteroid malls of Earth's Moon. Patrice felt lost memories return, and her sense of time and placement became current. Somehow she had wound up in her environment suit. The suit had activated. Which meant the ship exploded or was destroyed. She instantly remembered the sub cortex training for all aspects of using tesseract based environmental suits in an emergency, deep space expulsion. She gave verbal commands for gravity and life support, which, in less than 4 minutes, had removed the weightlessness and the cold. The circular shape of the warehouse sized sphere converted into a rectangular shape, more like the real dimensions of a warehouse loft in the cities on the light side of Moon. Patrice was pleased. This environmental suit was made exactly to her specifications. The tesseract technology had literally compressed a warehouse sized loft into a wearable space suit. This was to allow folks who became shipwrecked in space a better chance of survival. Many Terrans who had been floating for days or in a few cases, weeks, before they were found survived with the standard space suit technology in the year 2063, but it had driven them all mad. The isolation and confined space of the space suit had caused some to simply open the suit up in deep space. The shipwrecked deep space travelers just could not stand the
prolonged confinement Or, in extreme cases of claustrophobia brought on by prolonged drifting in space, became forever addicted to Gran Mons White, which was the only drug known to sedate people trapped in space suits for more than 76 hours and keep them remaining sane. The Terran Moon produced the Gran Mons White heroin, purest in Terran Know Galaxies. The trapped space travelers became so fucked up and hallucinating that they literally put themselves into stasis. And soon develop an everyday habit. Such was the value of Gran Mons White heroin. Patrice walked over to a shiny metal suitcase about 4 feet wide and two feet thick. Patrice hummed a tune deep in her throat. The locks on the case opened, the top of the case floated up. She looked inside.100 keys of Grans Mons. This was the real reason she would be in the steroid mines for 18 months. And, Patrice thought, was probably one of the reasons the interstellar was destroyed with her on it. THREE Patrice had spent seven hours with the virtual computers and monitors. She logged practically no causalities except a fat guy who apparently fucked his tech up on his suit. The picture of his floating frozen corpse welded to the inflating spacesuit made her throw up. Patrice logged all survivors, some as far away as a light year. That was some fucking explosion, Patrice thought, activating the 3D food replicator.
She ordered up a pineapple strawberry milkshake deluxe, using pattern “Mickey D’s”. Thank god she remembered to get the fucking replicator programmed for real food as well. Patrice knew that a lot of folks had grown so accustomed to replicators that they forget to program the fucking things before long deep space runs. The ones that would end up stranded and floating in life pods end wound up eating 3-D printed corndogs for a month before a Terran Deep Space Corps programmer can even get to them. Lucky for Patrice, the Gran Mons had become currency in the asteroid cites all over the Terran Known Galaxies. Patrice got a worried look on her face, sipping on what was left of the shake. She then ordered another pineapple strawberry shake, with a 56 percent indica supplement. Patrice had never known what it was like to get high in a tesseract environment. She was about to find out. But she knew it would get awfully boring in this warehouse floating in space. Until a rescue mission could be called out, approved, implemented, launched, and searched for, it could take over a Terran month of floating, stranded in deep space. She finished the second shake, fell right to sleep with that one thought in her head. Stranded in deep, unchartered space for over a Terran month. So, fucked up it will be, thought Patrice. FOUR Patrice woke up in the chair next to the virtual console. Even
though the chair she was in was hard light, the virtual program for the chair had included a programmed 10 comfort level. She felt like she was literally floating in midair. Damn, Patrice thought, welcome to the world of an intergalactic drug smuggler. She tried to stand. Her eyes hurt. Why the fuck would her eyes be hurting? Suddenly, her whole body was racked with incredible pain. She stumbled back down to the virtual chair. Blood had started to run from her eyes. Patrice felt the blood rushing from her nose, as well. Patrice was not even aware of standing up and giving a verbal command for ordering up a med drone. She did, the drone applied the necessary injections, and Patrice crumpled back down to the virtual seat again. Patrice voice keyed a virtual console in front of her. It appeared, glowing blue green. She signaled the deep space communicator. She wanted to pick up any survivors. Instead, a warning signal of bright red, then green, then blue erupted. “Are you sitting down?" The voice was a deep space communication. Just in front of Patrice appeared a secured commlink from the captain of the interstellar vessel that she and her contraband were on blew up, stranding Patrice and 153 passengers onboard. “Key in your security codes and override, Ms. Octoclare”, said the Captain. Patrice had not been called by her last name in a very long time, let alone “Ms.”
Patrice looked at the hologram projection of the Captain. “How did you know I had codes for ...?" Patrice began. The Captain held up his arm. The sleeves of his uniform pulled back just enough to show track marks. Now Patrice knew why this communication had to be super encrypted. “Is the package safe?" asked the Captain, looking far too nervous just to be getting a hauling fee for Patrice’s contraband on this trip to the Asteroid Cities. "Yes," Patrice said sitting up, but feeling very sore. The medic drones were still flitting around her, taking scans and administering laser dosages as the pain all over Patrice’s body began to subside, including her eyes. “I'll get back to you, "the Captain said, with Patrice noticing the holographic images of medic drones flying around him as well. "Captain, are you...all right?" Patrice asked. "Give me your coordinates. I have a couple of subspace drones with hauling capacity in case I had to unload in FTL.” Patrice pulled up a trans warp and sub space speed database in a holographic window to the right of her while she fed data from another hologram screen into the trans warp data base. “I can get the bump over to you...," Patrice said, talking like the dealer to the junkie instead of passenger to the captain. "Do that, but look at the fucking holo I sent," the Captain said, signing off. The coordinates appeared suddenly in holographic form. Patrice used her right arm to sweep the holo from the air to the
hard unit on the holotable to her left. She always carried for emergencies and heavy encryption storage and communication. She looked at the data that appeared in the 30 inch holoscreen that floated in the blue sphere encryption cloud. After 15 minutes, she threw up. Suddenly the cause of the pain in her body and eyes was horrifyingly revealed. The hygiene drone appeared from the aft storage locker. Patrice allowed the drone to hypo clean her, and then hit the replicator for a third strawberry shake, this time with a 100% indica supplement. Three hours later, Patrice woke up again. The encrypted sub space VPN set up between her and the Captain. It showed the captain looking at her. In the background, she could make out the sub space cargo drone from her life pod. "You saw?" he said. "When is rendezvous point arrival on my end? " he said, taking the needle from his arm, the blue glow emitting like a strobe light from the exposed veins as the Gran Mons crept up the captain’s forearm. The subspace drones must have reached the captain already. The thought did occur to Patrice as she drunkenly sat up in the virtual chair to tell the captain about the purity of the shit see had just sent him. Because of subsonic travel and infrared radiation from space, Mons only gets stronger the longer it stays in open space. And this batch of Gran Mons White had been in transport almost steadily thru the Obama Asteroid Belt for three days straight.
But after seeing the video, she could understand the captain's need to shoot up. FIVE The holo Patrice had viewed three Terran hours ago before she drank the indica charged strawberry shake looked like some 21st century torture porn shit. The video showed the captain, who looked extremely fucked up on Mons, drift off to sleep. Suddenly, Patrice saw in the hologram things, some kind of bipedal alien things seven meters tall. They seemed to flow into the field of the projected hologram, walking like Terrans. Only the heads on these things were shaped like large logs. The creatures had attached some type of light belt around the torso of the sleeping Captain. The captain woke up, looked around, and started screaming at the top of his lungs. "Oh my Gods!" the Captain screamed. “Bad trip, bad trip!!!" The log creatures then started to insert long shiny orange tubes the size of small hoses into every open orifice of the captain’s body. He screamed so shrilly that blood spurted from his mouth as tubes were placed directly into his eye sockets, the ruined remains of his eyes oozing out the sides of the tubing as they slid inside the captions’ skull. As the tube placed at his mouth was shoved down the captain’s mouth, blood spurted from the tubes in his nose, erupting around the tubes like faucets in a jetstream.
Patrice remembered viewing the holo: she had never heard anything in the Known Galaxies scream like the captain was screaming. Then, his body started to violently spasm. Orange large balloon shaped objects appeared around the floating, spasming and blood drenched captain. Some kind of holocorders, thought Patrice. The Captain’s spasms abruptly ended as his body, hovering in midair, suspended by what appeared to be anti-gravity effects of the belt around him, stopped. The captain was then turned around and examined by the aliens, using blue probe like flashlight devices. The captain screamed again. Apparently the probe lights caused pain as well. Then the Captain stopped moving at all, hanging in the air like a puppet, blood dripping like a cascade from his body to the floor of his escape pod.. Either the captain wad dead or passed out from the excruciating pain. Patrice watched the fifteen minutes of the hologram as the captain hung limp in the middle of the escape cabin, hoses spreading out from him as blood cascaded to the floor. But somehow the Captain appeared to be still alive. Suddenly, one of the aliens turned toward the holofield screen, giving Patrice an extremely good look at them. A bright red flash. And the image of the hanging, tortured captain was gone. A new audio stream began to play, having had to go thru
encryption once it reached the holo console of Patrice’s escape pod. It began to play: "...remember every second of that. Then they used some kind of ray on me”. “The pain was gone and I could see again. But I looked around me, and saw pieces of myself in bloody gobs, dripping from my body to the floor.” “The fucking ray of theirs even grew back my motherfucking eyes.” “Then I saw my eyeball that pooped out when they were sticking those fucking tubes in my skull. It was on the floor in a puddle of green shit. It was on the floor next to my holo chair.” “I woke up. They were gone. But they left a message. It was in Galactic Universal.” "The message said: "As long as your species travel in our space, this will happen. It has happened to you and all the Terrans in the life ships that emerged from the larger one that was destroyed. “We destroyed the larger ship.” Patrice sat upright, sweat beginning to run down the sides of her face. “This will happen to all your species again. Leave our space.” Then the hollow from the aliens on board the captains’ life pod disappeared and was replaced by the captain’s live heavily encrypted feed. “Since I was the last one to jettison, I’m the farthest out. Once all
the pods rendezvous, you will be able to merge and activate the emergency FTL jump drive.” “We’ll wait, captain,” began Patrice. “No, you won’t”, said the captain, sliding from the holo chair he was on to resting on his knees. Even Patrice could hear the captains’ knees as they cracked against the cabin floor of the pod. “Estimated time for me is 18 hours arrival. Jump coordinates dictate a 15 minute margin of recharge for the FTL .But it’s a one shot charge, at 15 she’ll be ready to blow. All the escape pods will have to be there at the rendezvous point.” The captain’s face distorted in pain. The Mons was beginning to kill him. ”I won’t get to the rendezvous point until 45 minutes after all the escape pods rendezvous.” The captain‘s left arm reached out to the floor, steadying himself as he stood upright. His eyes were glowing a bright blue. Mons overdose. “I won’t make it. You will, you and the passengers and crew. Sit on that holo I sent you. Only broadcast it out if the motherfuckers launch some kind of new probe. Your call.” Then the captain crumpled, to the floor. Patrice sent the holo out to all the stranded passengers. She then hit the 3-d printers at full capacity, churning out combat drones and surveillance deep space drones. And hand weapons. The three printers started humming away. Twenty minutes later, Patrice held a particle beam pistol and truncated hololaser. The particle beam pistol was a last resort.
Fuck if she was going thru that shit she saw in the captain’s holo again. She made another indica strawberry shake with the replicator, then sat back in her holo chair. Already, deep space feeds from the other survivors of the exploding deep space liner were coming on multiple holo screens floating in front of her as her buzz started kicking in. It showed all the survivors in their pods doing the exact same thing she was doing. She launched and monitored the surveillance drones that would surround and escort her escape pod as she raced thru hostile alien space to the rendezvous point to FTL the fuck out of here. As her indica and strawberry buzz started to really kick in and she was finally able to sit back in the holo, a large red glow started to appear on the aft wall of her pod. From the holo feeds emanating from the other stranded passengers, she began to hear exclamations and loud cursing and yelling. Then the screams started. THE END