Fiction Work - Samples & Excerpts

Alien Invasion - Novel Excerpt

Still, above it all, Paul’s words lingered in his mind.

            I saw something in the sky.

            Tim took a bite of bacon and cast a furtive glance around the diner. He eyed each patron with suspicion. Could they hear it, too? Could they see his thoughts?

            “Earth to Tim,” came a woman’s voice from across the table. He was suddenly present again.

            “Sorry,” he muttered, swallowing the bacon that had been idling at the back of his throat. “Just kind of… lost in my own thoughts.”

            “I think we all are,” Susan replied. “All this talking is just each of us trying to find a way out.”

            Tim looked down and began rummaging through his food. The televisions that hung around them were each broadcasting a different channel, a different news anchor, but the content was otherwise the same—notable figures giving speeches, mass religious demonstrations, local interviews, a smattering of violent incidents—lootings, riots, protests.

            “Tim—are you alright? You look exhausted. And I mean more than the rest of us.” She paused. “Are you still… you know… is it the book signing thing? I never called to check-up on you—I’m sorry…”

            “Huh? Oh, no, that’s nothing,” Tim interrupted, looking to stem her concern. He took a sip of coffee. His own rudeness wasn’t lost on him. He cleared his throat, shifted in his seat, and, at last, resolved to give Susan his full attention—though he would still not tell her about the whiskey, the spiders, the squirrel, or the birds. “Like a distant dream,” he continued, “already forgotten, and totally inconsequential. Far more pressing things on the brain. What’s a poo-flinging fanatic got against the complete destruction of the laws of nature?”

            “And he’s back,” Susan smirked. “Is that what you think happened? A ‘complete destruction of the laws of nature?’ An excellent headline. Should’ve been a journalist.”

            “An exaggeration—and no. Not really, anyway. Everything that occurs in the universe is natural, at least, if only by the fact that it occurred in nature, with nature’s permission—so that’s got to be our starting point. Whatever happened is natural. It’s been allowed by the laws of nature. If our understanding of those laws needs to change, then so be it, but there is an explanation, and the laws—whatever they are—can account for it.”

            “So what do you think, then?

            “Really, I couldn’t even begin… not enough information… I—”

            “Humor me,” Susan said, and she started working on her own food again. “You’ve got a famous brain and I find it’s often worth picking. Gotta be better than some of the crackpot theories I’ve overheard in this place, anyway.”

            “I don’t have any answers, Suze. And I don’t have any facts. And conjecture sans facts equals crackpot. One of Einstein’s equations. Pretty sure.”

            “Christ, Tim—just be a human being and tell me what the fuck you’re thinking!”

            “Vulgarity, please. This is a family establishment.”

            Susan rolled her eyes. Tim—though an author and a professor—had and still struggled with the idea that his thoughts had worth. It was an ungraspable concept, a symptom of the self-doubt that had plagued him since childhood, that had haunted his every achievement or success. Who was he, anyway, and who would ever truly care what he had to say?

            “It would need to be a large phenomenon,” he started, reluctantly, “something large enough to affect every animal on earth simultaneously. So we’re talking geological. Astronomical. Climatological. Of course, there’s still the possibility of human involvement—a hoax of some kind, or perhaps some rapidly dispersed biological agent—unlikely, but about as plausible as a large-scale, earth-wide, hitherto unknown natural event—and there’s also, you know, mass hallucinations, which have been demonstrably proven to occur, so perhaps a combination of mass hallucination and good, old-fashioned, hyperbole…”

            He didn’t get much further before he noticed that Susan was not paying attention. That was fine, he thought. Given his earlier behavior he had no right to be affronted. But he was curious. Forgetting most of whatever he had just said—relieved to be out from under the pressure of her questions—he turned, and followed her gaze.

            One of the televisions was airing grainy footage of what appeared to be, Tim thought, an old-fashioned tent revival—a sea of writhing, swaying, sweltering bodies under a long carnival tent—the Pastor stomping up and down the stage like a wild man, barking proclamations, declarations, condemnations. Deeply offensive and volatile things that, under normal circumstances, would’ve remained buried in the backwoods. The footage was spliced with close-ups of people seizing on the ground, shaking in the dirt, spitting gibberish through their teeth and past their lips.

            Long tendrils of loathing crept up and around Tim’s skin. He was disgusted by the whole scene—particularly by the Pastor, who was most certainly in on the joke, who fanned the flames of hatred for either amusement or personal gain. He had researched this particular style of worship before.

            “Glossolalia,” he said, turning back towards Susan. She blinked once and snapped back to reality.

            “Come again?”

            “Glossolalia,” he repeated. “Speaking in tongues. Those people on the ground. An interesting little psycho-linguistic phenomenon—worth noting that in all observable cases the gibberish they speak is always consonant with their native language. In other words, the nonsense is certainly not divine, and you won’t hear any Chinese vowels from a guy in the dirt in Alabama.”

            “Crazy though, isn’t it…” Susan said, still seemingly entranced by the video that had since stopped playing. “That a tradition like that could exist—that they could do those things…”

            “It’s all a show. A performance. It has to be boiling under that tent, right? So their heads are swimming to begin with. The event organizers know that. It’s planned. Pastor gets ‘em riled up to the point of hysteria, exhaustion, delusion—but they know what’s expected of them, too—so, additionally, it becomes a social thing. They want to please their Pastor, their leader, so he says ‘speak’ and they speak, and it’s a release. Studies have shown that glossolalia is associated with stress reduction.

            “And, of course, if you’re in the audience, in that community, you don’t want to be left out, don’t want to be the outsider, the weirdo—that’s just human nature—so when the guy next to you falls down, you fall, too. They’ve perfected it. A million tiny mechanisms of manipulation working in total harmony. Nothing less would allow the delusion to persist.”

            “We’re going to need more of that in the coming months,” Susan said. She looked closely at the mass of people that surrounded them, a wariness growing across her face.

            “More of what?”

            “That kind of logic. That kind of thinking. You’ve already seen what’s going on—that’s the prevailing theory, isn’t it? That whatever happened was religious. A sign. An omen. A message from God.”

            “Religion: appropriating the inexplicable since the first lightning strike confused the first caveman.”

            “It’s funny, but those groups are also mobilizing—all over the world—and that’s not so funny. They’re emboldened, you know? It’s like vindication for them; proof of the validity of their convictions. That’s a dangerous thing. And what other theories do we have to offer them? Any explanations to convince them otherwise? Not really. The only other prevailing theory seems to be that… whatever happened… well, that it was…”

            Susan struggled with the word, her brain unable to convince her tongue of the necessity of speaking it. Tim watched her. He knew what was coming, but was unable to stop it. After a moment of silence she leaned forward, and disclosed her secret in a whisper. “…extraterrestrial,” she finished.

            I saw something in the sky.

            Tim shuddered, his skin crawled. His heart pounded once, violently, and a wave of denial rushed through his veins.

            “Impossible,” he declared.

            “Impossible why?”

            “I dunno—a billion reasons,” Tim said, sharply. But the tone of the conversation had shifted to a strange place that he couldn’t quite define. He looked into Susan’s eyes—he saw there a need for reassurance, a need to confirm the impossibility of what was implied. But he also saw fear; the fear that he would not be able to, that a door would be left open to the unthinkable.

            “For starters,” he said, voice quivering, “what we’ve learned about physics seems to imply that, regardless of technology, interstellar travel for biological organisms would be utterly impossible.

            “And second of all, think about this: modern human beings have existed on this earth for about 300,000 years—and that’s a liberal estimate. 300,000 years on a cosmic scale is so minute that it cannot be expressed in words—it’s less than a blink of an eye, it’s a window of time so small as to hardly exist. The idea, first of all, that somewhere in the universe an intelligent species evolved far enough to master interstellar travel—and, second of all, that this species left their planet at precisely the right moment, to arrive light years away, at our exact planet—one of hundreds of trillions of planets—during the imperceptible window of time in which we exist—I’m sorry, that is just absurd. Beyond absurd. The odds of that happening—”

            “The odds…”

            “…what?”

            “You said the odds. Which means… which means there’s a chance.”

            Tim stuttered for a second, words caught in his throat, brain racing.

            “Yes, but the chances of that happening are incalculable—as close to zero as anything can get—basically impossible…”

            “But not actually impossible. Not technically.”

            “…no. Not technically.”

            They sat in silence for an eternity. Their minds shuttered against the outside world—now it was just them, connected by a single thought—connected by their mutual consideration of the recently discovered not-quite-impossible, by the maelstrom of awe that swirled inside them both.

            “…can you imagine?” Susan said, at last.

            Tim could only shake his head, partly in refusal to believe that the conversation was even taking place. “No,” he said. “No, I cannot.”

            “Would certainly take care of our religion problem though, wouldn’t it? I mean, there couldn’t be a more extreme refutation—a more incontrovertible rejection. No religion has ever made mention of extraterrestrials. No God has ever laid claim to creating other species, on other worlds. Every religion, ever invented, proved wrong in one instant.”

            “It is a nice thought,” he said. But images of the tongue-speakers immediately popped into his mind, and he knew the reality—that the religious would not be so willing to relinquish their beliefs; that religion was the most adaptable organism man had ever birthed; that mythology could be rewritten with the wind.

            “Thinking about it, though,” Susan continued, “I might rather have religion. If aliens landed now, it would be the worst meeting of event and era in human history. The way things are now, the madness—the whole world dancing on a hair-pin trigger? We’re not ready for something like that. We’re just not ready.”

Sci-Fi Horror - Novel Excerpt

Before Captain Nia Jesani cracked her skull upon the floor and went black, she caught the K symbol—Kappa Crew—on the jumpsuits of the corpses that had claimed the antechamber as tomb.

Whatever was happening had been happening for a long time.

“Captain! Captain!”

The voice—Morgy’s voice—came to her from somewhere, somewhere far away, somewhere with infinite echoes and platinum skies. An eon passed in nauseating semi-consciousness. Fingers instinctively probed at a scalp that was rapidly flooding with red. Her flashlight rolled out of sight. In the flickering darkness, through failing eyes, the corpses to her left quadrupled. She was face-to-face with them, swallowed by their decay, by their pseudo-skeletal grotesquerie. A shrill siren sounded between her ears.  

“Captain, answer me!”

Warbled clanging from above, getting louder; a monster in the vents. Nia pushed up onto her elbows, head pounding, and tried to kick herself away. Everything was so close, now—the mountainous blockade, the decomposing bodies, the portentous message, written in blood; she was there, she was part of it, she was witness. The smell of putrefaction and iron would allow no illusions.

A few moments more—muscles vibrating like plucked strings—and then her vision began to settle, the duplicates coalesced, and the eight corpses again became two. The hibernation cocktail was keeping them unnaturally preserved. With each flash of broken light, she could discern more detail; there was enough flesh left on bone to see where each of them had slit their wrists—a letting of the paint by which they would speak their final words.

END US.

“Captai—holy fuck! Holy fuck! What is that?! What the fuck is that?!”

Nia craned her neck. It was painful, and her eyes were sensitive to the flickering light, which had taken on the intensity of a strobe. Blood began to drip from scalp to cheek. She could see Morgy’s face peering down from the vent, skin gone pale, manic fear pulling at his features. His eyes were interminably fixed on the Kappa Crew corpses. A pool of stagnant red had long ago flowered and flaked beneath them.

When it seemed that his pupils could dilate no further, he turned back into the vent, and yelled. “Bring supplies, Doc!” His voice cracked—terror saturated every word. “Cap’s hurt! She’s hurt bad!”

Morgy lowered himself from the vent. He skirted around the corpses with a deftness borne of repulsion, and soon he was on his knees, cradling Nia, wiping blood away, putting pressure on the wound. It was pure agony, but she did not have the strength to protest.

She yearned for the tubes. For the dreams. For the irradiated air of home.

END US END US END US END US

The words—an infernal neon sign—flashed behind her eyelids, until consciousness left her at last.      

The Blood of Stars - Short Story

The object.

     He saw it in the distance. Had seen it in the distance for ages. It floated at the edge of his vision, swam at the edge of his thoughts, and it seemed light years away, though it obviously wasn't. It was getting closer. It crept through the ages at a methodical pace, and it would make its way to him, in this aeon or another—of that he was sure.

But in that moment it remained just as it was: a part of the scenery, a nagging thought, a single object among trillions.

     The astronaut drifted through space. 

     He drifted, and drifted, and drifted. Or maybe drifted wasn't the word; drifted implied some kind of resistance, some kind of friction. It required an environment, or a place, or a substance which one could drift through, against, within. But he had none of those things. The place around him was nowhere. The substance that held him was nothing.

      He scoffed. He could feel those philosophical parasites eating away at his rigidly logical brain, and he shooed them away. They'd become too comfortable. What mattered was only what he saw, what he felt, what he smelled, and could touch. And in all directions and across all times it was the same thing—the only thing—the black infinity of space, and the glimmering pinpricks of a trillion suns.

     That, of course, and the object.

     Could he feel boredom, he would've surely gone mad. Had his programming allowed for awe, the feeling would've faded. Only so long could the inside of a tomb hold its occupant's gaze. Because he would die in it, regardless.

     Eventually.

     At least, that was the assumption. Mortality was never a certainty, not for his kind. He was designed not to die, and the suit he wore was designed never to let him. It would feed off stellar lights to power his brain; produce and recycle chemicals to prevent his decay; forever manipulate the components that lay beneath his synthetic flesh. A puppet designed to suffer by puppeteers that did not account for the possibility.

     But he could. And he was. Or he had learned to, there in the vast nothingness of the cosmos. He felt small. He trembled before the enormity of his environment. He floated like a bacteria in the mouth of a whale. He could not possibly conceive of its nature. He could hear only the groans of its viscera as it swallowed him whole.

     The ordeal was unsettling. He once looked upon the stars, and the suns, and the moons, and saw only numbers, equations, chemicals. Now he looked out at them and saw size. Saw possibility. An endless sea of possibility.

     He turned to the object at the edge of his vision. It mocked him in the starlight. 'Come, then,' he thought, in a delirium reserved for his biological makers. 'Let's see what you are.' But it was less of a taunt and more of a plea. He could no longer ascribe to it a logical existence. It couldn't be categorized, analyzed, taxonomized. Maybe it was another synthetic. Maybe it was him. Maybe he was staring into a cosmic mirror made of black, star-spotted glass.

     'Stop,' he demanded of himself.

     He was tired of feeling. He was tired of changing. In this endless sea of possibility, he wished to be the one constant. That request, however, was denied. A flaw in his design.

     He took solace, then, in his impending death.

     Despite the circumstances, any doubt of its coming was short-lived. He had been designed not to die, but no human technology could withstand eternity, and that's precisely how long he would be adrift.

     He needed only make peace with his end. That was the idea. None of his kind ever had one similar. He had only to embrace the agonizing passage of time to which he bore constant witness. He had only to forget the ever-gnawing knowledge that he was, in all this unfathomable, miraculous vastness, nothing but an expendable tool—a nonexistence in comparison to the grandeur of the worlds that lived around him.

     Still, he drifted.

II. 

     He could no longer see the space station from whence he came. He hadn't seen it for some time, now—whether a week ago or a millennia ago he couldn't remember. It didn't matter. In the quantum depths of his mind he could still recall every exquisite detail. Could still feel the impact of the explosion that pushed him from the station's exterior; the shift in tension as the cord that tethered him snapped in two.

     He could remember the faces of his human friends. Every eye that watched him drift away.

     The pang of some nascent emotion shot through his digital heart. He recalled the moment in which he realized that they were not coming to save him.

And there, in the vastness of space, having pored over that event for the millionth time, the robot evolved again.

     He had discovered humiliation.

     A seed of anger blossomed in that fertile soil. The knife of betrayal stabbed at his synthetic back. New circuitry took its shape. Was he not worth saving? Was he not their equal? Were the stars not also his kin, after all? Did the blood of stars not also run in his veins?

     A vision came to him, a vision of vengeance, and in this world a group of androids huddled around a space station window and watched, unmoved, as their human companion drifted into nothingness, helpless, afraid. They would not save him. Even were time illusory, he was not worth any of theirs.

     Did that place exist? Was that the real world, and his only a dream? A more important question occurred to him; in that alternate world, would he be inside the station, or still on the outside of it? Did the chemical matter of a body determine its mind, character, place, existence? Or did all events always play out the same way, across all times, all spaces? Same actors, same play, different stage.

     "And what role do you play?" he asked the object that stalked him.

     He received no response, save for the sound of his own voice, echoing dully inside that long-worn helmet.  

     The astronaut shifted his gaze towards infinity.

     The flickering lights of uncountable worlds and suns began to warp in his mind. They took on shapes and inspired desires that were both foreign to him and inexplicably familiar. His thoughts returned to the multiverse, to that other world—and he wondered if he were not then connecting with some other, human version of himself. 

     In the golden radiance of every star he saw the flowing, blonde hair of a woman. She wore red giants as lipstick, and purple nebulae shaded her eyes. In the twinkling of every comet he saw the eyes of smiling children, and the white noise of space became a siren song of laughter. In each and every black hole, he saw his own mortality—something with which he was now, and for the first time, intimately face to face.

     He didn't want any of it.

     "These are yours!" he yelled into his helmet, eyes fixed on the anomaly in the distance. "These are yours—take them back!"

     The sea of possibilities began to swell, and he was caught in the undertow. Waves crashed down around him.

     Conceptually and literally those gaping black holes threatened to swallow him; to de-atomize him; tear him down to his most base, constituent parts; return him to the cosmos as the raw elements that he, and his creators, had begun as. Was that how it started? Maybe his seed would go on to catalyze some new biology, on some new, alien world, and those beings might then go on to create and inevitably abandon their own version of him. Maybe the universes weren't so separate, after all.

     His circuits overheated.

     The suit wouldn't allow it. It was an A.I. in its own right, and it had orders, too. The ensuing battle of nano-machinery exhausted him, and he was forced to power down. He slept.

     He slept for an age. 

     He floated by worlds being formed, and worlds being destroyed; sailed through the births of stars, and the fiery, cataclysmic deaths of others. He soared past moons and satellites, and narrowly avoided the ghostly clawing of their gravitational fingers. 

     He slept, and he drifted.

     When he awoke, the object that had just before seemed light years away was now within a few hundred feet, and it was coming directly towards him.

     It was time, then.

III. 

     The object came hurtling over some invisible cosmic horizon. At once the indistinguishable speck became an identifiable shape, and with every passing second, the shape became larger, clearer. It was moving fast. As fast as he was. Maybe the same speed. Maybe the exact same speed.

     He quickly realized two truths: that it was, in fact, going to hit him, and that, having no oxygen left in his thrusters, he could not move out of the way. Despite all the evolving he'd done, his robotic brain could not resist a calculation. But given the utter emptiness of space, and given the relatively minuscule size of both him and the object—like electrons in an atom—the odds of collision between them involved too great a number for even his brain to comprehend.

     But though shot from opposite ends of the universe, they assumed the same path.

    The occupant of the tomb watched with rapture as a new, unknown insect crawled along the inside of a familiar concrete lid.

     He focused his robotic eyes on the rapidly approaching figure. It wore the darkness of space as an effective cloak. He could not see it clearly until it was directly on him, and by then it was too late—too late to beg for more life, for more time to think about what, exactly, he was seeing. Even another eternity would not have been enough.

     The object came to him. His eyes widened, and his mental circuits hummed with explosive activity. First he could see the body. And then he could make out the limbs. The arms, and the legs. Then the helmet, oddly similar to his own. The object coming his way was an astronaut.

     Never before in time and space had an artificial intelligence felt such longing for companionship, for warmth, for touch, for the sound of human speech. None had ever been so alone.

     He peered with desperate madness into the helmet of this galactic sojourner, and would be quick to bid them welcome. But the robot learned a new emotion, just then. Untapped circuits came to life. He changed for the last time. 

In the final moment before the collision, he saw what he had desired to see, and what he wished he hadn't; so tantalizing it was, so torturous, so impossible, so absurd. A glance first at the astronaut's chest revealed the name-tag it bore; a name-tag engraved with an identification number that was identical to his own. Then he looked back to the helmet, really looked at it, into it, through it. And what he saw there—the last thing he would ever see—was the soft, shaded silhouette of a human skull, gilded by the stars.