The Veracruz OptionDane Fichter
5400 words Ava Ricceri pushed through double doors, out from the launch facility gloom into the Florida sunburst afternoon. Ava was confident. Preliminary checks good. Subsystem teams ready. Weather condition blue painted sky, not a cloud in sight. She would never say so, because saying so was tantamount to inviting the jinx, but the launch was good to go. There would be no scratch in the weather, no failures of execution, be it human or mechanical. There was the school’s-out lightness in the air, the fresh sense of completion. She stepped into the black SUV. She rolled up to the gate house, rolled down her window to jaw with Don the security guy, their longstanding custom on the day before a launch. “Howdy, Captain Ava. How’s that candle looking?” “Could be ready to light, Don. It really could be. Don’t know about this weather, though,” she smiled, and Don smiled back in understanding. It was transparently gorgeous, but they would concede nothing to the jinx. “What are we shooting up there?” he asked. “Classified payload. If I told you—” she said. “You’d have to kill me?” “I’d kill us both. My god, the paperwork alone,” she said. He laughed. She caught the time on her car dashboard: 3:36 PM. “Say Don, count me down on that atomic. We’re one minute off the hour.” For reasons half utility, half nerdish ostentation, each of the guard stations was equipped with a red LED display ticking away atomically precise time. “Three… two… one,” Don counted the seconds rolling over to 3:37 PM and Ava set her watch, and wondered what Don would think of her when all was said and done. T minus eighteen hours and counting down. Driving home, her thoughts wandered the worn path of her Career: basic training, officer’s school, flight school, long-term orbital deployment, privatization days and the birth of her daughter and the AstroCorp station disaster and the terrors of sudden fame in the aftermath. After eighty launches—thirty witnessed from the control floor, fifteen from the cockpit, thirty-five from the launch director’s chair—the end of it all was a wide blank horizon, the dawn coming at a run. She parked in the driveway, a gray gravel cape between the road and the canal. Her house was a low bungalow, pastel in its faded lime, bound together in darker greens where the vines climbed over porch lattice screens. Ava found it shabby but also found its shabbiness perfectly adequate. The bungalow was just the place she overnighted. Inside the house, cluttered towers of brown cardboard boxes never unpacked doubled as her furniture. She picked her path through narrowed corridors. Reaching up into the cabinet, she blindly rustled in the pile of purse detritus until her hand encountered the protein ration’s familiar rectangle. Expired but only just. She ate it quickly, standing before the fridge in her work clothes and tasting stale peanut butter and sweet, empty aspartame. In the back bedroom, she shed her suit and donned the two-piece and the surf shirt with vague intentions of exercise. She went out to the porch, sat down in her chair, and commenced with her mandatory fifteen minutes of idleness. This was her daily practice since the early months of orbital deployment. They had trained her well enough earthside, but what they could not prepare her for was the tube. They could trap you in the ground control facilities, in windowless rooms with your crewmates while you all simulated duty and pretended like you did not know that the sun was shining outside and that there was fresh air battering life behind the seams in the walls. The tube was different. Up there, every task thrummed with mortal terror, and aside from duty there was nothing but the void pressing dumbly against the glass like some slavering voyeur. The only escape was to think of nothing. On the tube she would just sit entirely motionless and watch stars stream by the window panel, letting her heart go slow between the beats until the biometric monitors squawked in alarm. Here, earthbound, she watched the canal. The idle hours needed not be long, only pure, and so she stared out at the flat green water and thought of nothing. Sunshine glimmered ripples on the canal and blinked her from the trance. From beneath the chair she dragged out the old cigar box, fished out the pack of cigarettes. The smoking was a teenage habit, broken during her flying years and recently resumed. She lit up and took the first drag long and slow. The thoughtless calm in the wake of those idle moments was like the peace that followed good, good sex. She smoked until the passage of time grew insistent. She checked her watch. T-minus 16 hours and 45 minutes, and counting down. She wanted to talk to someone who already knew, and so she called Buck. His real name was Walter, or Wilbur, or something old-fashioned like that, but Ava had known him only as Buck through flight school and two orbital deployments. He picked up the phone on the third ring. “You know, I was just saying to Maggie that I thought you might be calling me tonight,” he said. “How’s everything over there?” she asked. “Oh, fine. Same as ever. How are you, is the real question. Big day tomorrow,” he said. Big for reasons they could talk about on the phone, massive for the reasons they could not, like an iceberg. “Trying not to think too much about it,” she said, “There’s a couple things I could probably talk about. Honestly, I think I’m just hungry.” “Well, paddle on over then. I’m cooking anyway.” Behind the bungalow she stepped down into the flat-bottomed kayak, nosed out from the bank, and glided her way down the canal. Buck was practically her next-door neighbor by boat, but by car the route wound itself in absurd convolutions around inlets and down submerged stretches of road. She took the canal out toward the bay, combining with other neighborhood canals in junctions of increasing size. At the third intersection, she turned her kayak up the other broad branch, headed back inland. The houses lay in scattered ruination, first battered by Hurricane Yves, then flattened a few weeks later by a bombardment of thunder-hail. Further inland she met the edges of reconstruction; skeletal house frames under plastic wrap shrouds, black flood-swept earth newly scored and flattened into square acreages, reassertion of the dominion of man. They would build it, they would sell it, the storms would come, they would build it again. The land diffused swampier past the construction site wastage. The earthen banks steadily gave way, and then herbaceous guardrails of mangrove kept the canal, tentacles of banyan root presenting labyrinthine passes through brown water. The locals called this end of the canal Misty Creek, after a golf course by that name which now lay buried beneath the murk. Now, after these twenty-five years of the swamp’s steady encroachment, the only signs that the land had ever been anything but wilderness were the glimpses of clubhouse rooftops caught between the trees, straight lines conspicuous of human intention. Even those last distinctions were fading, the roofline fuzzing over with moss and shrugging down under the burden of many rainy years as though conceding in principle that the swamp had in fact already won. There was a sadness to the ruin, but also a kind of relief. Ava poled a winding path through the narrower passes, cautious of the waiting tangles of root and the drifting razorous edges on the waterline betraying gators below. She drifted out from the trees, down the alley of waterway that Buck called his front walk. Makeshift flotillas of leaky-bottomed rowboats were docked along the walk, chained together, overlain with birdproof screening and populated with planter pot colonies of avocado, lime, cilantro, parsley, onion, and swamp taro. Buck called these his floating gardens of Babylon. Ava called them his veggie boats. She paddled past the columns that held the porch, once Ionic whiteness, now swamp-stained to the color of English teeth. She floated through the broad vacancy where the front doors had rotted away. The swamp claimed the great front hall. The brown water crowded into the dining room, smothered the dance floor before the mahogany bar, lapping plaster dust and scraps of moldering wallpaper. The walls sagged and buntings buckled, only held intact by Buck’s maintenance of a forest of scaffolding. The kayak nudged its plastic prow against the fourth stair of the grand staircase. She tied it to the banister. From somewhere above she could hear Maggie barking and the blender’s screaming whirr. She had almost gained the third story landing when the goofily lolling smile of the aged Labrador poked over the top of stairs. “Hi, girlie!” said Ava. Maggie’s whole barrel torso wriggled with furious glee. It was good to see Maggie. No matter what happened tomorrow, Maggie wouldn’t care. T minus fifteen hours and fifty-five minutes, and counting down. “I’m out on the landing,” Buck called down. The landing had once been a narrow widow’s walk across the third story roof, purely decorative until Buck had reinforced it with swamp lumber of his own provisioning. Now there was space enough for the small umbrella-shaded table, the mismatched set of deck chairs scavenged from thrift stores throughout the greater Sarasota area, the old telescope Buck used to watch every launch but never to watch the stars. Buck was garnishing the last sprigs of cilantro onto the platter of fish tacos when she walked out. Their embrace was immediate, business brief, and then they sat down to their tacos and tucked in with no prelude. “Thank God. I was starving,” she spoke around her second taco. “God didn’t make all this.” “You’re right. Thanks Buck-o. Delicious as always.” After a half-dozen tacos rich in avocado and bright in lime-seared fish, Ava pushed the platter away and sighed from depths of satisfaction. Buck passed the remnants under the table, and Maggie feasted in sloppy gratitude. “Wait here,” he said. “Oh, I’m not going anywhere for a while,” Ava said, pleasantly weighted by the stomachful of fish. She scratched at Maggie’s ears and let her mind wander out among the swamp. Buck returned with a blender in one hand and the small silver tray in the other. On the tray: a couple dense green buds and a half-rolled joint. In the blender: a pink, frozen concoction of various boozes and tropical fruits. Buck sat down, set the tray on his lap and the blender on the table. “You want?” he said, lifting the tray. “You know I don’t partake,” she said. “Sure, I just figured, you know, if you wanted to try it once before …” “Thanks, Buck, but I have to keep sharp for tomorrow,” she said. Buck poured himself a slug of pink slurry. “Not too sharp, I hope?” Buck held the blender hovering over Ava’s cup. “Not too sharp,” Ava agreed with a slight smile. Buck poured. She sipped. Buck pulled the tray onto his lap, work-blunted thumbs picking apart the buds, and rolling with dexterity that belied his age. His drink sat untouched until after he lit the joint. Buck liked to say that temperance meant only drinking when you smoked. Ava subsided into the depths of her deck chair. Slower and stiller than she had been in weeks, she could finally get around to what was bothering her. “Buck, am I doing the right thing here?” she asked him. He frowned at his reflection in the tray. “If you weren’t, I’d say so. And if you really weren’t, I’d stop you.” “You’d try,” she said. “I’d try.” The sun blushed deeper red beyond the black tree densities, the high heavens darkened and freckling fast with stars. An acrid white trail meandered up and lost itself in the vastness. “What I mean is, are we taking something from them? The future generations?” Buck dragged. Buck pondered inside his thick white cloud. “We are taking something away, Ava. Of course we are. That’s inevitable. But we’re giving them back everything. Absolutely everything.” They had been over this before. It did settle her to hear it again. “Still, it was beautiful up there, wasn’t it?” Buck sat quiet for a while. He had long since learned to keep the channels clear until he had something worth saying. “It is beautiful. But it’s cold, and desolate, and eternal too. It’s beautiful up there like death is beautiful.” Another drag, Buck gathered something from the stillness. “Way before we ever worked together—it might have even been my first orbital—I’m outside walking on the tube, right? I’m replacing something. Some junk dinged one of the panels—a golf ball-sized chunk off a decommed Soviet satellite. I’m out there and I look down at Earth. You know what I see? “California is burning. The whole state, pretty much. I remember the smoke just sitting across the land. Heavy. Like a black hurricane. Some places at the edges of it I can even see the fires. And I’m floating there in that … total silence, you know? And all I’m thinking about is those flames. How high they must be that I can see them that clearly from LEO. What they must sound like. The roar of them. A little flare goes down there, probably was a gas station or something. And in that moment I realize, truly realize, that that’s life down there. That’s the rarest substance in all the known universe. I can see it, like I’m holding a blue marble in the palm of my hand. I should be doing something, and instead I’m up there, in silence, watching it die.” “To life,” Ava raised her cup. “To Veracruz,” Buck said, pointing at her. clacking his plastic cup against hers, “To burning the ships.” “To burning the ships,” Ava said. They drank, and Ava felt better. T minus thirteen hours and thirty-four minutes, and counting down. She woke at four the next morning in one of Buck’s many spare bedrooms, cuddled close to Maggie’s softness. Buck was already out on the landing, frying eggs and tomatoes over a propane burner, spare tortillas warming between paper towels on the side. They ate fast and wordless. He wished her luck, and gave her a headlamp for her dawn-dim paddle home. Ten minutes of urgent paddling and then she tied her kayak to the dock behind the bungalow. Nothing obstructed her in the canal. The manatees had all been dead for years. T minus five hours and three minutes, and counting down. Ava seemed to move automatically, as she often did on launch day. A quick shower, a cursory comb through her hair, and then she stepped into her customary launch day attire: the tight-cut Valentino pant and jacket set of palest blue. She reveled in this peak of flamboyance, this most ostentatious show of femininity only permissible at the zenith of her authority. She sat at the bare kitchen table and nibbled at her fingernail, momentarily stymied by necessities outside of launch day routine. Two messages had to be created, entirely opposed in tone and content: the first for the world, the second for her daughter. She went into the bedroom, booted the laptop she bought with cash the week before, propped it on a chair facing the plain wall. She recited her statement for the webcam, imagining herself standing behind a podium in front of politely interested press. The statement required a prop, which she held up to the camera for the sake of clarity. The object was no larger than a gumball, a peculiar globe of sparkling aluminum spikes with needle-thin tips reinforced by thermal grade ceramic, an industrial sea urchin plucked from an ocean of chrome. It was hollow and nearly weightless. It was not magnetic. The men who had made the object called it a flechette, but probably someone would think up a cleverer term. Language tended to accommodate an invention once it had broken the world. She clicked off the webcam. She dragged the file onto the flash drive, hid the drive deep in her hip pocket. She sat back down at the table and wrote the second message out on printer paper with a golf pencil, each sentence earned by an attrition of the words she would not say. She fumbled at explanation. She apologized to her daughter, for the distance between them, for the distance within herself, for the way things were and for how much worse they would become. She allowed two tears to fall onto the paper. Two leaden splotches over spots of damp translucence said more than her words, which were direct and unadorned as a rule. She went around the house, stopping once in every room as if to dedicate them to memory, then decided it didn’t matter. The bungalow was not her home, it never really had been. The sight of the letter caught her in the doorway. It looked strange there on the table, the words too intimate to be left naked to all the world. She folded it in half, weighted it closed with the flechette, and then left. She did not lock the door behind her. Whoever came next would just break it down anyway. In the driveway she groped in the wheel-well of the black SUV until she found the shape of the pistol. Stubby and rectangular, kevlar components invisible to metal detectors. She drew the slide back enough to check the glint of the artificial diamond slug molded into .22 caliber. This check was unnecessary. This check was procedure. T minus four hours and seven minutes, and counting down. The launch center parking lot was a hive. She maneuvered the SUV through loitering drifts of press and lanyard-wielding lackeys of the intelligence community, pulling into her reserved spot. Terse acknowledgments given and received as she crossed the front walk. They expected nothing more before a launch. She had to remind herself not to raise her arms high when she waved, otherwise the line of the holster would show against her jacket. A taut moment at in-doc when Don’s detector wand lingered over the small of her back. They waved her through anyway. She was Captain Ava, after all. Brief conferences unfolded on the launch floor under vast screens crowded with legion icons unanimously green to go. Ava walked back outside, she notified the press, she took no questions. Coming back into the front hallway she saw Frank among the crowd, his eyes wide and shining with tears. Frank was one of the ones who knew. Ava warded off an assistant’s offer for coffee and beckoned Frank into her office. She closed the door behind them, not too hard. “You need to pull it together, man. Blow your nose. Icepacks under the eyes,” she said. She got him a tissue from her desk. “I think Kemal killed himself,” he whispered, “He’s not in today. Someone said they saw an ambulance at his house.” “That doesn’t necessarily mean—.” “Last night he kept saying they’d figure out that he did all the materials work, that there was no way to hide it. I thought he was just talking.” It was true, Ava thought. Kemal’s fusion of lightweight non-magnetic materials in the design of the flechettes was a flourish characteristic of his genius. Kemal had been sensible, crushingly logical until the end. The holster itched in her waistband. “I’m sorry,” she said. Frank nodded, brought back to ground. “Module swap went perfect. Simulator is barfing out telem just like the real. Nothing else to do but wait.” “And the clean-up?” “Done. Disks cross-shredded, documents incinerated. I had them vacuum the room twice. But our fingerprints are all over this, aren’t they? How will they not know who it was?” “They’ll know it was me. That will have to be enough,” she said. “For Veracruz,” he said. “Don’t say that word in here. Icepacks under the eyes, Frank. Then back out onto the launch floor.” Karlsen always knocked and then came in without waiting for an answer. He was just the spook-in-chief for the alphabet-soup intel outfit paying AstroCorp for today’s launch, but he sauntered through the door as though he had purchased the whole building. He slinked out of Frank’s path, holding the door open. Frank turned his face away as he passed, but Karlsen’s keen gaze followed after. “Am I interrupting something? I can come back later,” Karlsen said. He was smiling. “No, it’s nothing. Not launch-related, anyway. Come on in.” “An emotional day, perhaps? Career milestone for …” “Frank. It’s not that. He’s had a death in the family last night, but he came in anyway. I told him to go home, he refused, I thanked him for it,” she shrugged. As if to say, ‘What can you do about these people?’ “Well, my condolences to Frank. And my compliments on the dedication of your staff. Nevertheless I do have my concerns.” Condolences, compliments, concerns; Karlsen was always poking his snout into the launch day happenings. “For one thing, the camera feed for the payload is showing as dead up on the display,” he said. “There is no camera feed of the payload per your office’s explicit instruction,” she said. Karlsen was still smiling. He explained it slow, talking to a child,“I’m not asking for a feed of the payload. We can’t even legally point a camera at it,” he basked a moment in his powers of secrecy.“But that doesn’t mean we have to broadcast that fact to everyone by showing a blank box up there.” “I’ll talk to someone.” she said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I think they need me down on the floor.” Launch day was the only day she could slip away from Karlsen so easily. Smiling, furious, he knew it. T minus two hours and twelve minutes, and counting down. Tastefully bated applause greeted Ava on the control floor, the conductor walking out before her orchestra. She donned the headset. “Feed control,” she said, “go ahead and nix that payload camera view for me.” The grey box disappeared without a question. Hers was one of the last true dictatorships left on earth. She kept a pistol hidden in her waist, and her little finger could trigger the petrochemical force of a low-grade atomic bomb. At her desk the script, an infinitude of times and corresponding confirmations. She went through the recitations as esoteric and cleanly formulized as Mass. Comms checks good. Data flows from payload good. RF links good and pinging away. Bring in the liquid oxygen, boys. Let it burp clouding ice into the air. Good. Let the flight control boot, load screen rolling as it marshalled its mind among the silicon. Good, good, good. Weather briefing? It’s a goddamn beautiful day, Captain Ava. No turning back now. T minus thirty minutes, and counting down. Launch enabled, good. The digital safety unlatched. Internal power came online and the rocket became something separable. They cut the cord. Good. Any nation, or institution, or collected mass of humanity tumbled into the future unmoored from its bundled intentions. Good. Go/No-Go was gone and now it was all beyond any control save God’s, if this sort of thing drew His interest. T minus seven minutes, and counting down. Aboard the rocket, steel-bound compartments came up to temperature, braced themselves with pressurized gasses against the coming extremities of launch. Good, they beaconed, good, good, good. Send us beyond. The engine roared one single blast, proving its ignition, venting off the excess fuel. Ava trembled and wanted to cancel it all, and then remembered California burning. T minus one minute and twenty seconds, and counting down. Good. Ava took up the count herself at the mark of sixty. Her mind was blissfully clear as the time bled away. Sluice gates creaked open, freed the diverted floodwaters rushing into canal beds beneath the launchpad. The earth shuddered at the engine’s life-roar, blinding pillars of ignition soon obscured by billowing steam, two, one. Mark. Liftoff. Ava’s watch squawked tinny alarm. Applause down on the launch floor, wild football crowd exultations as the shining white obelisk of their design climbed its arc above the heavens. Her ears roared with the echoes. Her skin still thrummed raw, so hypersensitized by the tremoring earth that she could feel dust particulate prickling cold against her face like drifting snow. Here was her blank, broken awe at the mad scale of humanity’s ambition. Here was her giddy terror at its ingenuity, always electric in the wake of launch, undiminished from the first to the eightieth time. Coming down from the peak, she plunged into the cold inverse of her wonder and multiplied that absence and began to understand the sheer vastness of human joy she had just so neatly amputated from the future. T plus four minutes and thirty-two seconds, and counting up now. The first stage rocket sputtered and fell away into the last tenuous grasps of Earth’s gravity, and the payload kept climbing. The first stage fuselage was supposed to correct itself under a burst of compressed air and cleanly backflip into its re-entry. Instead the thrusters fired twice in tight disharmony, two staccato bursts which sent the rocket cartwheeling across the roof of the sky, a vector of improbable forces. Alarms screeched and blared in competition, status lights whirred green, yellow, red, and green again as the instruments queasily failed to reckon. The fuselage skipped and tumbled, shredded and burned over the rough upper gatherings of atmosphere. Muted dismay on the control floor, sternly murmured questions. The first doubts wriggled into root. The destruction of the first stage was not necessary, but Kemal had insisted on it for the sake of everyone’s sanity. We must set their expectations early, he had said. They must begin to know something is wrong. Two rows back from the screen, Karlsen ground his teeth. He could not abide a blemish, and the loss of the first stage was exactly that. He turned, his narrowed eyes combing the top rank of the launch floor in search of someone to blame, but Ava was nowhere. In the fourth row, that weepy-eyed Frank was peeking at Karlsen from around a console, his face full of meaning. Ava ran down abandoned upper halls, past the colorful diorama conceptions of the notional Mars and moon colony lifestyles still many quarter centuries distant, always a few years beyond the horizon. From framed photo portraiture, the AstroCorps CEO craned his face to watch her, pressed pale flesh with suited world leaders, and leered like a shark. At the end of the hall in the display case stood the short and scarred spacesuit where Ava had spent three days stranded in space after the AstroCorp station implosion. Deafening silent insanity, floating piss icicles when the heater failed, reeling vertigo in the void. The display glass was the happy lie dividing memory from memorabilia. She closed the door of her office, dragged the chair around and wedged it beneath the handle. She drew the pistol from behind her back and laid it flat on the desk. She fished out the flash drive, plugged it in, brought the video up on her console. “Feed Control, pass the baton on my mark,” she said into the headset. T plus six minutes and twelve seconds, and counting up. All of the launch displays showed the second stage camera view in maximum, as this was the only surviving camera with anything of interest to show. The smooth white curve of the nose cone was wedged into the picture’s bottom corner, above that the star-speckled blackness slid closer to orbit. A white flash swallowed the screen. A blizzard of silver myriads flurried past the camera, and then the feed died. Ava waited. Kemal had insisted that Ava must wait, count to ten at least. She could hear the launch floor chaos rising in her headset. They were wondering where she was, they were wondering what had gone wrong. Feed Control scrolled back and forth through the last frames captured before the dead air: soundless white explosion, the dispersal of great glittering masses among the stars, reassembly and then disintegration playing out at half-speed. Mission failure confirmed. T plus seven and half minutes, give or take, and nobody’s counting anymore. “Mark,” said Ava, and Feed Control carried her console across the launch floor screen. She filled it with her homemade video. She clicked play. She went to the door, pulled the chair loose and dragged it back behind the desk. She sat. Her hands gripped her pistol and waited in her lap. She listened to herself. She stated first that the responsibility for the failure of today’s launch lay with her and her alone. It was soothing enough mission-speak until you realized it was recorded in advance. She explained that the principalities of the world labored under the delusion of life beyond Mother’s breast. There was no other love out in the void, she told them, no quickening place in the hollows between the stars. She explained that transistors daubed with molecular quantities of plastique were enough to blow the nose cone if you blew them all at once. She explained how the best minds of her lifetime had watched the skies while the ground died away beneath their feet. She held some strange spiky object up to the camera. She explained that the flechettes were geometrically perfect debris, a material virus to shred the well-ordered spacecraft into yet more debris. They were not magnetic. They each differed a few micrograms in their mass so that the common impulse of the explosion would blanket them all across the latitude range. She explained that Cortez had burnt his ships off the coast of Veracruz to convince his men of something that was already true; that they must either conquer or die. She explained the differing likelihoods. The flechettes would remain in orbit for two centuries or for two dozen. She explained that no privileged portion would escape the dying Earth. This had always been true, but now that truth was inescapable. Humanity is earthbound once again. Better dust off the old religions. Better smile like a monk on Arbor Day. She laid a hopeful past to rest. She begged forgiveness of the future. She wished them all good luck, and then the video cut to black. Ava peered into the void just beyond the pistol barrel’s rim. There was real depth in there, infinity clean and empty. She pressed the tight circle cold against her temple. She closed her eyes. Feed Control must have told people where she was. A distant thunder of herds clattered up the back stairs, wails of despair resounding down the empty halls. Someone was crying softly into the mission comms channel. Karlsen was screaming in the background. She began to laugh at the thought of his wild discomposure, then recoiled, stung by the raw edge of the wordless screams continuing in her earpiece. Birth pangs of the flightless world. She pressed the barrel harder into taut veins beneath her temple and tried to conjure some final comfort. Her first launch from the cockpit. The life-giving bodily surge against forces of planetary scale. This was the closest she ever came to pulling the trigger, her finger lingering on the switch as she recalled the years her daughter would not sleep without the astronaut figurine. “Captain Ava!” She heard her name in muddled shouts from the hallway. There were fists pounding at her door. She dropped the gun on her desk as though it were a scalding thing. Her hands rattled at the ends of her wrists as she clawed the handle of the bottom drawer of her desk, hauled it open, swept the handgun into the crumple of manila folders. She slammed the drawer shut. She laid her hands out flat on the desk in plain sight so there could be no mistake. She could not leave because she believed something beyond a matter of evidence, something as improbable as the pale blue pebble sprouting life in the void. There was a faint recollection of a glow within her chest. There was a feeling she could almost know, a word she could almost remember, but only when she sat still, and let her heart beat slow, and thought of nothing at all. |
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Dane Fichter
Dane Fichter is a formerly employed computer scientist, now a writer of fiction exploring history, science, and the history of science. He lives in his hometown of Ellicott City, Maryland, where he can be found tending his food forest, herding household animals, and ranting about bygone events.
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