Starting afresh + free bookshelf
Lots of sci-fi here today.
Before we begin, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has been supportive of that serious poem I posted the other day. I was surprised by how many people enjoyed it, so I’ll be posting more soon. I’ve already fired that one off to the BBC and booked myself in at a serious poetry event.
If you want daily writing updates (and jokes), I’m realphillipcarter on tiktok and instagram.
I wanted to republish the first few thousand words of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH here because we just reached 1000 readers, and only 25 people saw it the first time round.
And a lot has changed.
For the first few chapters of the book, the scenes alternate between Stephanie and LP, the dimension-hopping astronaut. By the third eBook installment, those realities will have collided, with strange consequences.
Stephanie’s synaesthesia also now plays a more central role. It is almost a character itself, and all of her experiences with the condition are based on my own. If you remember that autobiographical book I was writing about synaesthesia, Stephanie has taken a lot of the content from that, changing the shape of both books in the process.
Sort of how Earth and Theia changed each other, and the solar system, forever.
THE STEPHANIE GLITCH
The astronaut’s lifeless body slipped through a hole in the hull, surrounded by a procession of debris and pink-silver hull-foam and that looked like an exploding wound in the side of some giant, ancient beast. The circular starship had been torn in two, its glittering entrails scattered to the cold depths of space.
The mission had failed.
Outside the black hole lingered, hungry and immortal.
EARLIER
Toumai’s motors wheezed as he slid desperately through private airlocks and corridors. His eyestalk wobbled as he turned tight corners. He scanned the area ahead. The sensors repeated the same impossible story: A human heart was beating in the research deck. But the only body there was unfinished. It didn’t have a heart. All other hearts on the ship were accounted for, all sleeping, all natural. The machine checked the most recent progress logs for the research deck, searching for evidence that something was wrong, that there was a glitch, that the data would change. It didn’t.
SKELETAL STRUCTURE OPTIMAL
PRINTER BUG PERFORMANCE OPTIMAL
!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: PREMATURE BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES DETECTED.
!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM ACTIVE.
!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: LIVING BODY OUTSIDE POD.
If the machine could feel regret, he would have regretted not installing cameras on this part of the ship. His programming quickly formed a network of ideas.
The Artifice was a long way from home.
Nobody else was out here.
It could be the project.
It could be a civilian.
It could be a stowaway Virtualist.
It could be an alien.
The crew were not prepared to fight.
The intruder would have to be contained or killed.
Whirring around his spherical metal head, these ideas collided, annihilating each other until only the likeliest thing remained. The crew were all accounted for, all sleeping peacefully in their quarters. The simplest answer to the heartbeat mystery was that the unfinished body in the research deck, mindless and malformed, had somehow birthed itself prematurely from the cylinder and started walking around. But that was impossible, the body was only a skeleton this morning. If it grew any organs prematurely, they would have died already.
Unless it had developed, or inherited, a mind.
Unless that mind had orchestrated the swift construction of new flesh.
Unless she had done something impossible.
Toumai queried the pod itself. All systems were normal. The printer bugs were still in idle communication around the skeleton, their tiny processors ignorant to the growing panic in the silent starship. It made no sense. Perhaps the printer bugs were faulty. Perhaps they had banded together and commandeered the skeleton. It was a ridiculous idea, but one his social programming seemed happy to suggest, an amalgam of human nightmares and old stories scraped from the Dreamscreen.
Toumai’s social programming recommended terror, so that is what he emulated.
The blue light in his bulbous eye darted around desperately.
“It’s the same thing, rearranged,” Stephanie said. She touched her glass to Emma’s and drank. Her thumb traced the black skeleton printed onto the glass as distant disco lights kicked up holograms of it like echoes of light.
“Spacing out?” Emma asked. Stephanie smiled and looked at the empty plastic fishbowl at the centre of the table. She picked it up.
“No, spacing in. It’s like this fishbowl. If there were fish in it and not just booze. If we were fish, and other fish could make smaller bowls. It’s like… You know how a universe could be born from a black hole?”
“I absolutely do not know about that. You never bring it up in conversation multiple times per day,” Emma quipped.
“Anyway. Well, the fish in the ocean and the fish in the fishbowl have different experiences. But if the bowl was big enough, they would have the same experience, until they reached the edge.”
“I see,” Emma said.
“The edge of the fishbowl would have different physics.”
“Because the water gets stuck.”
“Sort of. But what if the real ocean isn’t fishbowl shaped?”
“I don’t know,” Emma admitted.
“A society in the future might be able to make lots of bowls.”
“Fishbowls?”
“But bigger.” Stephanie’s eyes received the red and yellow beams of light from the corners of the club, and her brain translated these into subtle thuds that felt as if they were generated in the jelly within her eyes. At the same time, the cool feeling of the glass in her hand became flashes of white and crackling green. The texture of the painted skeleton became the grooves and peaks of an unmade record, its delicate synthesizer landscape painting a picture of sound inside Stephanie’s skull. She ignored it.
“At one point, in the distant future, it might be reasonable to expect it is more likely we would be in a fishbowl than a real ocean, because there would be more fishbowls than oceans.”
“And it was all a dream,” Emma quipped.
“The worst ending to a story, I know. But not a dream, a new reality.”
“Functionally remarkably similar to the original. I know Steph, you’ve told me before.”
Stephanie took another sip of her drink. “If the fish swims far enough it will reach the edge, and things will look different. Water currents will bend back inwardly, space would behave differently. An advanced, or really old society of fish in the fishbowl might be able to tell they were inside one.”
“Are you asking me to buy us another fishbowl Stephie?”
“Yeah, sort of. But think about it.”
“I’d rather not. Drink?”
“It’s like… what if the fishbowl wasn’t perfect?”
“What?” Emma finished her drink and looked remorsefully at the plastic fishbowl between them.
Stephanie pointed at it, drawing attention to its imperfections. “What if there’s seams, some evidence it was built?”
Emma played with a straw in the empty fishbowl. “And what if you could stick a straw in it and suck out whole planets?”
“I was getting to that part,” Stephanie said, her eyes wide and mad with excitement.
“Of course you were,” Emma smiled. Stephanie broke eye contact and focused again on the printed skeleton on her glass. As she took another sip of the neon green drink, she imagined the skeleton was a real thing bobbing around inside the glass, waiting to be freed. The red and yellow disco lights created a heartbeat hum inside her head, her synaesthesia turning sound into touch, touch into sound, and colour into new dimensions of spacetime.
“You could move more than planets. If the straw pierced the fourth dimension.”
“You’re a nutter, Stephie.”
“I know. Cherry fishbowl this time?” Stephanie said.
“That’s pure sugar.”
“Did you think the mango one was real mangoes?”
“No, I thought they were simulated mangoes projected from a holographic plane in the fourth dimension of nebulous non-Newtonian spacetime intersecting a moebius strip.”
“Aww. You do listen… sort of.” Stephanie replied.
“As much as I can. Now stop talking about what’s real and what isn’t and start mentally preparing yourself for dancing, because there will be dancing,” Emma warned. Stephanie nodded in mock subservience.
“Dancing isn’t real,” she quipped.
“Oh it will be very real,” Emma warned her.
“No it won’t.”
“I’ve had enough of you.”
“No you haven’t.”
“I have.”
“Having enough of me is not real.”
“You won’t be real in a minute.”
Again a laser beam of yellows and reds cut across the dimly lit table at the corner of the bar. Again the thump-thump of a ghost’s heartbeat emerged primordially inside the jelly of Stephanie’s eyes. Again it zipped its way through to the centre of her brain, the centre of the universe, and rested there like a small animal sleeping, waiting to be awoken.
Your free bookshelf this week is free fantasy and scifi. It’s quite a big one, and you’ve got 26 days to explore it.
Missed last week’s?
Last week’s bookshelf was epic sci-fi and fantasy. So a more specific shelf, catered more to bigger worldbuilding and such.
At the end of each month, I’ll post an overview to Free Fiction Friday, which is where I also (very occassionally) post writing tips.
