![]() His wife, Dala, kept a clean home, and a flock of tiny tidy-bots grazed along the carpet or circled the ceiling, hunting for grime. The bed rose and fell, like a palm tree swaying in the breeze, which meant he’d have to repair its hoverpanel later. The bronze sunlight of early morning on Wurlitzurnia crept lazily through the enormous porthole windows of the bedroom. He hadn’t been back long from test runs in space, and he was trying to reorient himself to what he remembered of home. He ignored much of its unnecessary spectral data and tried to limit himself to the visible beauty of his home. He rubbed his living eye and brought his cybernetic one online. The dream, if it had been one, seemed so real to him, and the imagined odor of ozone still seemed to tingle in his nostrils. Winchester Stranglehold awoke so violently he tore the upper half of his body from its charging unit. ![]() She lay an angelic hand on his control panel, and all went black. “Yes,” he said over a crackly speaker somewhere. Winchester stared at the destruction around him and thought of his dying ship. “Winchester,” she said, “the buzzbomb virus is heading for the past. She stepped forward to the panel where Winchester’s eyes were housed. A woman in silver chainmail with white hair and wings glowed as though light were a halo or a crown. The dead static noise from the device resolved into the same chaotic view of the bridge he saw with his living eye, but with an addition this eye couldn’t see: On the bridge stood a radiant figure. ![]() Winchester’s cybernetic eye came online, which surprised him since he didn’t ask it to. Why would the ship send a signal through time? thought Winchester. It almost escaped his attention, not being as important as a crashing spaceship. Its own creaks and groans matched Winchester’s screams. He stopped, but the panic and din of the dying bio-ship X remained. He turned on his ears to the sound of someone screaming and realized it was him. He saw many of his other body parts flopping helplessly as they attempted to control a ship that would no longer respond. ![]() He forced himself to see what sensors could no longer tell him. Winchester opened his living eye, glanced at the bridge, and winced from the smoke. He and his ship fell toward planet Wurlitzurnia, which filled his scanner views over the golden crust of the ship’s hull.Īll his dreams of falling as a child had led to his becoming a pilot, and none could compare to this moment of silent awe and terror as the tickle of gravity slowly tightened into a fist. The spaceship into which his body had been incorporated for weeks had started to reject him, eliminating him like a disease, reducing his neural relays to a smell like burning hair and ozone. The ship was crashing, and there was nothing Winchester could do to stop it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |