Story A Day 14: "Cinderella Story / Young Neurologist"

Katie was nine years old and hiding out in the school library when she found a stack of old science magazines and started reading about neurology. It was the brightly colored pictures, the computer models of brain cells, that caught her attention. A few hours later, the librarian found her in a corner with a few of the more interesting issues and a dictionary flipped upside-down on the floor so she wouldn’t lose her page.

“Your mom’s here, sweetie,” said Miss Zelva with a touch of regret in her voice. “Time for us to close. You can come back tomorrow.”

She let the little girl take two of the magazines home, even though it was against library policy to lend reference materials. Katie was trustworthy, and she’d have them back the next day.

Going home after school never got any easier. The whole way, in the car, her mom ranted and raved about how selfish Katie was for making her mother pick her up from school all the time, for not just dropping the act and behaving like a normal child, how unfair her life was, the usual topics. Katie sat in the back seat clutching her backpack, rocking gently forward and back and staring fixedly out the window, hoping that if she didn’t respond, maybe it would stop. It never worked, of course, but it was better than the alternative. Katie hated fighting even more than she hated yelling.

When they opened the front door, the music was so loud she thought it might blast her into the sky. She could feel it hammer on her eardrums, every vibration distinct and painful. Pete, her mom’s current boyfriend, liked classic rock. He always said, “if it’s too loud, you’re too old,” which Katie never understood because she was the youngest and she hated the noise, and he was the oldest and he loved it. Probably because he was deaf from listening to it for too long. She kept these thoughts to herself. Being yelled at by her mom without ever saying a word was more than enough.

She managed to stash the magazines in her room before dinner, and after she ate she crawled into the closet with a flashlight and her latest reading material. The closet was one of her favorite places. With the bedroom door and the closet door both shut, she could barely hear the adults downstairs. She wrapped herself in blankets and settled in with an article on logic. Secure and comfortable in her nest, she caught herself nodding off more than once.

Out of nowhere, there was a voice. There was something strange about it. It wasn’t too loud like how everyone else talked. It was just the right volume. And the words were more distinct than she’d ever heard. They stood out in her mind just as clearly as if she were reading them off a page. It was a voice made just for her, and it was calling her name oh-so-gently.

Katie.

The voice was smiling. Friendly.

Don’t be afraid, Katie.

As though she would be afraid of a voice like this. It was the kindest voice she had ever heard.

It’s going to be okay. I’m here to help you.

There was a light, she realized, coming from somewhere. It was glowing blue, but she couldn’t find the source. That made her more uncomfortable than anything. She could always figure out things like that. This light had no source. It wasn’t coming from anywhere. It was equally bright in the whole closet. That made it impossible. Probably a dream.

I am your guardian, Katie. It is my job to protect you. You are not happy in this house, with this family. I have watched you suffer for long enough.

She was curious, now, about where this was going. A magic dream voice that had been watching her whole life and wanted to protect her. Everyone always watched her, always staring. Most people thought she was retarded or sick. Even the most well-intentioned people treated her like an invalid, or a baby, who needed to be taken care of. It was amazing how people would stare when they didn’t think you were smart enough to know they were staring. Whatever this voice was, it was nothing new to her.

I can take you away from this awful place. I can heal you and make you whole.

Katie wormed her way out of her nest of blankets and cushions and sat up. Talking was always difficult, but in a dream, when she only had to think the words and know she was understood, there was no problem.

What makes you think I need to be healed?

Hesitation. This magic voice clearly hadn’t been expecting that. Typical.

I can give you a better life.

Katie rolled her eyes.

What makes you think I can’t do that myself?

She crawled out of the closet, magazines in hand. As she turned to close the door, she saw the blue light fade away.

The house was dark and quiet now. She crawled into her bed, sliding her reading material under her pillow. She closed her eyes and pictured the models and diagrams she had spent the evening learning about.

I’m going to be a neurologist.

Story A Day 11: "Sullied Hat" / Action Scene

Lenka was seething. Teeth clenched, eyes bloodshot and bulging, taking deep, heaving breaths. Her hands were balled into tight fists, her fingernails digging into the palms of her hands, the pain unnoticed in the rush of adrenaline.

Toby looked up at her, wide-eyed and panicked. He looked down at the floor, where the hat lay, his dirty footprint clearly visible in the center. It had been a rash action. He hadn’t thought it through.

Time slowed down. He raised his eyes again. Lenka’s face was closer, now. Her arm was raised. She was going to hit him with one of those tight fists of hers. Her knuckles looked sharp.

Fortunately, he was quick on his feet. He leaned back to dodge her swing, lost his balance and landed on his back with a thud. Before she could bear down on him again, he pulled himself up and darted away.

His escape only further infuriated her. She took off after him, stumbling in her high heels for a moment before regaining her balance. He got a short lead on her, enough to put him out of reach. Growling, she kicked off the shoes and continued in her stockings.

Toby dashed out the front door and started for the street, jerking to the side at the last minute and making a trip around the back of the house. Lenka was close behind him, and he didn’t dare to hesitate. He reached for his skateboard as he passed by, nearly missing it but managing to get a grip on the rough surface. He whipped it around in front of him as he came back to the front of the house, tossed it down on the sidewalk in front of him, and chuckled to himself as he built up speed on the slight downhill incline. She’d never catch him now.

He heard a shriek and finally looked around. She had stepped on a particularly pointy rock in her bare feet. She could handle the pain of those awful shoes of hers, but not a tiny stone. Toby let out a hearty laugh as he turned back around, just in time to see the rapid approach of the telephone pole before he blacked out.

Story A Day 07: "Hierarchical Enlightenment"

The big day had arrived at last. Jing steadied her breathing as she climbed the steps to the examination chamber. One final test, and she would reach the second-highest level of enlightenment.

She took her seat at the flat edge of the half-moon table, carefully folding her burgundy robe beneath her. There were three examiners seated at the rounded edge, each cloaked in the sacred black and white of the highest elites of the Sisterhood. The keepers of the Truth Entire.

Maybe, one day, Jing would be one of them.

But first, she had to pass this test.

In the center sat Min, head examiner. Jing had faced her before. Each time had been a different challenge, unexpected and shocking. There was never any way to prepare. And each success had led to a new level of understanding, new information that the lower levels and the common people would never know, for the sake of their own safety and happiness.

At times, the tests would last for days. Many were physical challenges, but most were of the mind.

Min looked at the applicant sternly. This one would pass, she was sure. She felt pity for the poor soul who had no idea what she was getting into. No one ever did, and that by design.

After a deep breath, she asked the one and only question for this test. “Imagine you have reached the next level of understanding, and the information you receive contradicts everything you have ever believed, everything you have ever known.” A long pause for this to sink in. “How do you feel?”

Jing’s answer was perfect, of course, and Min’s heart filled with regret as she carried out the promotion ceremony. It was necessary, of course, for a few humans to fully understand the truth, to allow the masses to go about their lives in peace.

But, she thought later as she put away her robes, it was a shame that such a burden had to fall on the shoulders of such a lovely, pure-hearted young girl. She filled a glass with cold water and used it to wash down the pill that allowed her to sleep each night.

As she lay awake, the horrors of reality racing through her mind, waiting for the drug to take effect, she comforted herself with the knowledge that there was one more of them to share the burden. Some day very soon, she would take her leave of this life and its unhappy burdens, content to know that another waited to take her place.

Story A Day 06: "Static Food"

“You know, when I was your age, you had to push a button to cook your food.” Gram was complaining again.

“I know, Gram,” replied Sam. “You told me before.”

“Not just one button, either.” She wasn’t going to stop. Sam resigned himself to listening to it once more. “First you had to push the buttons for how long you wanted to cook it for, then you had to set the temperature, then you had to push start.” She crossed her arms and looked sternly at her grandson, as though expecting an apology.

“Sounds like those were rough times, gram.” He hoped they could leave it at that.

No such luck. “Our food didn’t dance around for us, either. It just laid there on the plate.” Still the expectant look.

“Sorry, Gram.” The apology wasn’t enough. “Those must have been rough times.”

Wrong thing to say. “They weren’t rough times! They were better times! Back in those days, people actually had to work for what they had.”

“By pushing buttons?” Stupid thing to say, but it was too late.

Gram leaned in real close, her jaw clenched. He was gonna get it now. She lowered her voice, as though what she was about to say wasn’t fit for public consumption. “And in those days, boys and girls had their own clothes. You didn’t see little boys running around in dresses back then, son.” She sat back up and spoke to her dancing food. “Everyone had a place back then.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “I’m not a little boy, gram. I’m fourteen years old.” He smoothed out a wrinkle in his flower-patterned skirt. “And it’s not a dress.” For once, he didn’t avert his eyes. He stared straight at her. “And I look fantastic.”

Story A Day 05: "Shame" / "Acquired Confirmation"

I combined both the official Story A Day prompt with the Bay12Games daily prompt for this short story.

It was just like playing a video game. Darrell grew up playing video games, and he had a knack for piloting the drones. He picked it up quickly and breezed through the training course. It was easier than video games.

And it was easier than pointing a gun to a flesh-and-blood person and pulling the trigger, too. It was just a screen. They were just pixels. Target locked. Missile Detonated. Confirmation acquired.

Just like a video game.

50 points.

That’s not to say that Darrell was heartless. He knew what he was doing, and he had his sleepless nights wrestling with the morality of it. He’d rehash all the familiar arguments. It’s not like they were doing this out of hatred or malice. There were evil people out there. People who wanted war, who wanted to murder innocent Americans. The sort of people who’d fly planes into buildings. They’d gotten a lot of them, but there would always be more. There would always be people who hated his country, people who would kill his whole family given half a chance. These people had to be taken out.

Anyway, it was a job. He needed the money. What else was a poor black kid from Mississippi going to do? Work at McDonald’s? It was a job, with good benefits, and this way he wouldn’t have to actually go out and risk his neck on the front lines. He had managed to get himself a skilled job, and he intended to do well at it. He intended to keep it as long as he could.

All this might seem brutal, targeting someone from miles away when they couldn’t defend themselves, had no advance warning. It might seem unsportsmanlike. Unfair. But fairness wasn’t for war. Nothing about this world is fair. If he couldn’t take out the target cleanly from the air, a whole load of infantrymen would have to risk their lives to bust in there on foot. There’d be huge bombs dropped, loads of civilian casualties, not to mention dead American soldiers. No, it wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was better than it would be otherwise.

Of course, at least then it wouldn’t be him having to pull the trigger.

He rolled over in bed, flicked on a flashlight and shone it on the photo of his family. They needed him to come home when his time was up, and he might not be able to do that if he was on the ground over there. He was doing what he had to do to protect his country, his family, his own life.

He was human, after all.

He did his best not to think of his next target, maybe asleep in his own bed right now, having this same conversation with himself as he struggled with his own decisions. I’m doing what I have to do. I have to protect my country, my people, my family. They’d kill me if they could. I can’t feel guilty about killing them.


Darrell gave up trying to sleep for a while. He’d do what he had to do the next day. He was a man, and he’d do what he had to do. But there, in the dark, he allowed himself a few private tears of shame.

Story A Day 03

I have two stories today. I was very dissatisfied with the official Story A Day prompt. It was less of a prompt and more of an overly-narrow, overly-specific writing task from which I couldn't get any inspiration. Instead I kept twisting my brain trying to find a way around writing exactly what the prompt writer had in mind while not technically violating the instructions.

I didn't like that at all. I've always thought of a prompt as a semi-abstract, totally open idea which can be adapted to any writing style, genre, or even language. So I have started a set of alternate writing prompts for this month on the Bay12Games forums. In the end, I wrote a short story for each of these prompts. Neither of them has me particularly excited, but tomorrow is another day.

Official prompt: “Work the words vermillion and musky somewhere in the next 250 words you write.”

“V-E-R-M-I-L-L-I-O-N. Vermilion.” Tommy bit his lip and clenched his sweaty fists, nervously watching the judges confer. There was some disagreement, but in the end they all submitted to the official dictionary spelling.

“We’re sorry, Thomas. That is incorrect. The correct spelling is V-E-R-M-I-L-I-O-N.” One L. Just one. He should have known.

Trying not to cry, he stumbled awkwardly and gracelessly down from the stage and took a seat in the front row with the other disqualified fifth-graders. He stared straight ahead, not daring to wipe away the tears that escaped his eyes, afraid to call attention to them. Everyone would laugh if they knew how upset he was over a stupid spelling bee.

“Amanda, your word is musky.”

Amanda grinned maliciously, staring straight at Tommy with that vicious glee he had gotten so used to as she spoke primly into the microphone.

“Musky.”

Tommy squeezed his fists so hard his fingernails dug into the palms of his hands. He kept pushing, harder and harder, trying to get out his frustration. Trying to prove to himself that he was strong.

“M-U-S-K-Y.”

He pushed harder and harder. He wanted to cut into his hands and make them bleed. Harder and harder, to prove how angry he was.

“Musky.”

She shot a cute little smile at the judges and twirled a ring of her curly hair around her finger. She snuck another cruel glance at Tommy as everyone began to applaud. They didn’t even need to wait for the judges’ ruling, because any idiot could spell musky.

He opened his hands and looked. No blood. Just little indentations on the skin that would go away in a few minutes. He was too weak to even make himself bleed.

Fortunately, no one looked at him now. He was invisible again. Just like always. His clothes were wrinkled and mismatched, his hair greasy. He talked too loud. He smelled like sweat even though he showered every single day. No one wanted to notice a person like that, so no one did.

He pushed through the crowd to the door and ran outside rather than watch the awards ceremony and listen to the stupid speech about how they were all winners, really.

Bay12 random prompt: “funded cheating”

Aditya finished his presentation and smiled humbly as the big bosses applauded.

“It’s brilliant,” said Mr. Cunningham, standing up to shake the presenter’s hand. “Tell me, are all the guys in India as smart as you, son?” He winked at Aditya as though he were a child.

“I don’t know, sir,” he replied. “There are too many of them for me to keep track.”

All the bosses let out a big laugh. Aditya knew how to play this game.

Mr. Cunningham put his arm around the smaller man and leaned in. “You’re gonna do well in this field, son. We’re giving you full funding for this project.”

The project was confidential, of course. Always defined in the vaguest and most professional of terms so as not to reveal its very simple goal.

The public cried out more and more for equality, fairness. There were all these upstart organizations calling for better education for minorities, programs designed to encourage women to join scientific fields, even non-profits pushing for more rights for immigrants. And to everyone’s surprise and against all odds, they were succeeding. Things were changing.

The class system was failing. After so many years of working perfectly behind the scenes, it was all falling apart.

The big bosses were not at all pleased, but they hadn’t been able to find a way to stop it.

Aditya’s plan was simple. All he had done was a little research. He had a list of names of administrators in Ivy League universities, officials in charge of standardized tests and other assessments. Some were sympathetic to their cause; all could easily be bought. All that was needed was a little “funding.” An investment in the education of the big bosses’ children and grandchildren, to keep them in the lead, to give them the advantages that were their right by birth. And to keep the undesirable elements out of these prestigious institutions.

The real beauty was in Aditya’s talent for keeping the “funding” legitimate from start to finish. He was a genius with paperwork, and the bosses hadn’t been able to find a single hole in his plans. Not a trace of risk for any of them.

And so they didn’t hesitate to transfer the money directly to him to get things going. That was step one. The cash couldn’t ever be traced back to any of them.

After the first round of convoluted transactions went through without incident, the bosses were confident enough to give him the rest of the money. Most people would consider it an enormous amount of money, but it wasn’t much to them. Anyway, they trusted him. He obviously knew what he was doing.

Aditya didn’t waste any time now that he had all the money. It wouldn’t take long for them to notice things were no longer going according to plan.

By the time they realized something was wrong, it was too late. The money had been distributed to so many different people that they could never get it all back. Aditya’s family back in Bangalore would never go without again. But he was not a selfish man. It was so much money. He kept only what they would need. The rest, he spread around the poorest communities in the Philadelphia area. Every family got something. He personally made sure none of the children were hungry, none of the elderly sick, before he headed to the airport. His last action before boarding the plane was to send out a press release from his smartphone exposing the whole scam. Then he bid the United States goodbye and flew home.

They would never find him. He had intentionally misspelled his last name during his entire stay in the country. Even when comparing it to official documents, none of the Americans had noticed.

He remembered his first conversation with Mr. Cunningham. He had done very well in the interview, and at the end, the boss had asked him, “So how long did it take you to learn English?”

“English is my native language, sir,” had been the obvious reply.

Mr. Cunningham had laughed heartily, as though Aditya had delivered the punchline of an excellent joke.

The joke was on him, now.

Story A Day 02: "Magnetic Words"

For the Story A Day challenge.

The kids sat around in their tree-house looking glum. They called it a tree-house, anyway. It was an abandoned warehouse, all boarded up because the roof had caved in. When they broke in for the first time they found nature taking the place back over. There was grass on the ground, and a young sapling had taken root right in the center, like it was the king of all the other plants. That’s how they got their inspiration. That’s how they found out what all the grownups had done.

At first, it had gone so well. Even the youngest of them, six or seven years old, could draw a tree. They worked in pairs with spray-paint cans. One did brown, the other green, just a rough shape, enough to get the point across quickly. The older kids would do a quick stencil to go with it: REMEMBER ME?

Within a week, half the city was covered with little trees. It all looked so much brighter. There hadn’t been much green around there for a whole lot of years. They all felt pretty good about themselves until the police started their crackdown. A few kids had gotten locked up overnight to teach them a lesson. Parents were called out of their drab gray offices where they worked their boring gray day jobs to pick them up, losing money and making them all kinds of angry. They increased the patrols, always on the lookout for anyone suspicious. It got harder to find a place that wasn’t being watched.

The kids started getting sneaky then. Everyone knows when you tell a kid not to do something, it just makes them want to do it even more. They got pushed, and they pushed back. Grownups were always underestimating how clever kids can be, assuming they knew more just because they were older. But all the kids knew how dumb they were. They watched for all the wrong things.

They’d get all the black and brown kids to dress up in baggy jeans and hoodies with the hoods up and walk around looking nervous. That always caught the cops’ attention. A nervous-looking white kid might need help, but a nervous-looking brown one was almost certainly up to no good. That’s how they thought. That’s how stupid they were. The dark kids would lure away the cops while the white ones would move in and get the job done. It worked for a while.

But grownups had ways of making up for their stupidity. They talked to the city government, went on and on in public speeches about the menace of juvenile vandals. As though they had done anything to hurt anyone. The only thing they had done was make the grownups feel guilty about how thoroughly they’d destroyed everything natural.

There’d been parks, once. Trees. Real ones. Ones that grew up out of the ground and made the air a little sweeter. Then the parks got smaller and smaller. New buildings went up. People talked a lot about Progress and The Economy and Population Density and other stuff like that. Everyone was sad to see the parks go, but it was Necessary. They all pretended that the declining air quality was due to smoking and old car engines. They made new laws about smoking that everyone ignored. They built a new fleet of city buses. Then they just carried on and everyone forgot about it, as though it had always been that way. More buildings kept going up. Old wooden ones got torn down, replaced with Modern Architecture. Concrete. Glass. Metal. There was metal everywhere.

When the cameras went up, the kids started to lose hope. Those things were always watching, for Public Safety. They tested them, just once, and Oliver had gotten picked up in under two minutes. He was 13 and brown, so they were talking about trying him as an adult and putting him in real jail.

So the kids sat around in the tree-house and looked glum and tried to come up with new ideas.

“We could do it everyone at once.” That was Sasha. She was 12, and she was the one who had found the tree-house in the first place and started the whole thing. “They can’t take us all to jail, can they?”

James rolled his eyes at her. “Well they wouldn’t take you to jail because you’re a white girl.”

“Yeah,” nodded Buddha, grinning. They called him Buddha because his parents were from India and they couldn’t pronounce his real name. “They’d probably write up a whole heartwarming story about how a gang of criminals corrupted your fragile little white mind and give you a bunch of extra money for college.” A few of the kids laughed half-heartedly.

“Don’t laugh at us! That’s not fair,” retorted Laura, offended at the suggestion. She was Sasha’s little sister, only 8 years old.

“No, it’s not,” agreed James with a sigh.

No one had anything to say to that. They were quiet for a few moments, staring at the little tree and feeling sorry for themselves. Finally, Lisa, the oldest of them all at 14, slammed her fist into her palm and stood up.

“This is stupid,” she declared. “Those stupid grownups are ruining the whole world and punishing us just for saying we don’t like it. There has to be something we can do.”

“Not without going to prison,” groaned Buddha. “There’s no way to paint anything now without getting caught.”

“Why do we have to use paint?” asked Tommy innocently.

“What else can we use?” countered Laura.

There was another silence, but a productive one this time, as everyone thought about that one.

After a few minutes, Jose jumped up and clapped his hands on his head. “I got it!” he cried, then jumped up and down excitedly for a few seconds while everyone else demanded to know what he got. “All the buildings, all the new ones, they got metal all over them!”

The other kids nodded, following him so far and wishing he’d get to the point.

“Magnets! My dad’s company makes magnets! Those super-strong ones they use to build cars and stuff! He brings home boxes of them all the time!”

The next day, they met again, and this time Jose brought a few boxes of thin, heavy metal bars labeled neodymium magnets. “I tested one on the way here. Looks like they use the right kind of metal in most of the buildings. I couldn’t get them back off once I stuck them!”

They spent the whole week writing on them with super-permanent markers before their first test run. They could stand facing the cameras and just toss them in the direction of the wall, and they’d stick. They wrote on both sides, so it didn’t matter which side landed and stuck. The cops tried to get them for it, but the judge said a magnet just couldn’t be vandalism because it was technically not permanent, but the cops with their big clumsy adult fingers could never pry them off. They talked to the building owners and suggested painting over the metal, but no one wanted paint on their modern architecture.
Before long, the whole city was covered with a few simple magnetic words: MOMMY, WHAT’S A TREE?

Story A Day 01: "Getting Home"

This is my first short story for the Story A Day challenge. Stories I post for this month will be a little rough and unedited. These are not polished final works; they're just whatever I can get done each day. Still, I hope you enjoy reading them.

How many years had it been since Andi left earth? She had lost count.

She just hadn’t thought about it in a while. Oh, sure, she would make small talk about it all the time at work, just like everyone else. The locals, the ones who were born here on Aysee and called themselves “natives” even though their parents were all immigrants, always thought it odd how the expats could spend just as much time criticizing earth as they did praising it. Depending on the mood and the topic of conversation, earth was either a mess they were glad to be rid of or an example that the Aysees really ought to learn from.

Twenty-three. It had been twenty-three years, she realized.

They still got messages from their friends and family back there. Andi’s parents had sent frequent mails through the interGal system at first, usually asking her when she would come home for a visit, but they came less and less often over the years. Eventually, they must have resigned themselves to the truth: their daughter wasn’t coming back.

There was always a reason. An excuse, really. It was too expensive. The travel took too long, and she’d have to sell her little house and pack up everything until she could get back. It was a lot faster to send information across space than people. Anyway, she had work to do. She was busy. That one was difficult to argue with. Busy can mean so many things.

She had intended to visit eventually, of course. When things settled down, when she had the time. When she could deal with seeing her family again. When she had built up enough psychological strength to fend off their guilt trips and misguided attempts to “help” her with her life. As though she weren’t an adult, approaching middle age now, fully in charge of her own life.

It wasn’t like they were going anywhere. They were getting older, sure, but not so old that anyone expected them to pass on anytime soon. And they certainly weren’t going to leave that ugly house they loved so much.

Andi remembered the last time she had seen it. It was a cloudy, gray day. Cold. Winter. There was snow here and there, but mostly everything was just gray and wet. Even on sunny days, earth’s sun was never quite bright enough for her. Alpha Centauri had an extra sun. It didn’t snow here. Everyone had to wear extra-strong sunscreen all the time, but seasonal depression just wasn’t much of an issue on Aysee. Earth could keep its snow. And it would, basically forever. Her parents could be happy in their unstable climate, and Andi could enjoy her suns.

She could visit when she was good and ready.

It wasn’t like they were going anywhere.

Andi avoided the earth news, as a rule. It was always sensationalized. There was no way of verifying any of it, not without a very long and very expensive trip through space, and she was absolutely convinced that it was mostly propaganda and sales pitches. Stuff to get the ratings up and sell the Aysees more junk they didn’t need.

Everyone was having the same conversation when she got to work, ready to face another daily grind. She dodged small talk on her way in, but couldn’t help overhearing the same few words again and again. Unbelievable. Tragic. Impossible. Gone. I can’t believe it’s all gone. She heard that whole sentence, verbatim, several times before she finally noticed how many of her coworkers were crying, and how many were obviously trying not to cry.

She tuned in long enough to get the important parts of the shocking news. She turned and walked straight back out the door.

Much to her own surprise, she didn’t cry. It had all been so far away. So far behind her. Another world. Another life. She hadn’t spoken to her parents in months, not even a mail. She booted up her computer and loaded up the interGal comnetwork. It was all still there. All their personal pages, all their photos and inane comments about food and impotent political statements. All of it was stored in the satellite cloud, and would remain there until the machines broke down.

She had planned to go back and visit them eventually. They were always asking her to come home.

She stepped outside into the cool night air. The suns had set and the stars were out. She craned her neck upwards and stared and stared, searching until she found it. Yes, there it was. Sol. The brightest star in the sky, the closest one in the whole universe. That was the funny thing about interGal communication. Faster than light. She’d be able to see it for another… almost four and a half years before it disappeared.