Six months ago (as of yesterday), I published my debut novel “Nothing Works, Everything Happens”. In that time, just under 200 copies have found their way into readers’ hands, I’ve attended my first sci-fi convention and, most importantly, I've met some really genuine people who actually read the thing. I am deeply grateful for that. Today, I’ll share some stories, a few new behind-the-scenes artifacts, and a lot of fondness for all of you that been here for the first six months.

The End Of The World With Good Company

There is something strange and wonderful about making something in relative isolation and then discovering that it has become a tiny piece of someone else’s life. You write something at 5 a.m., hunched over a laptop, while cat-sitting at a friend’s home. Someone reads it on their daily commute (shout out ). Someone else reads it while holding their napping newborn (shout out ). Another binges it during a 13-hour road trip (shout out @bookingitwithbay).

Often little things in your stories become something more in the hands of someone else. ’s early comment saying “Goodwill” had such an effect on me that I’ve now made “Goodwill, fellow Cosmic Lemon” my go-to sign-off when anyone asks me to sign a paperback. I don't know exactly why, but there's something about extending “goodwill” that Owen reflected back & made even more poignant than I had planned for.

One reviewer said, “Absolutely recommend! Started reading this instead of watching the 30 min of TV before bed!” Having set out to write a book that is accessible, something that might kickstart a reading habit, this was a big win.

Others comments immediately inspired me to run to my writing desk: ’s threat to tattoo “We are not mere vessels for data” (a line from one of the short stories in the book); ’s refreshingly honest comment, “I keep expectations low with unknown indie authors. I'm glad to say, that in this case my presumption did not pan out” [paraphrased]; ’s “This is a writer who cares about his readers”. These (among many more) all validated the sweat & tears, and inspired feverish writing sessions.

Kind words about the book’s design, excited conversations about the book’s ideas, and phone calls from older ladies who bought a copy for their nephew but ended up reading the whole thing before getting it in the mail—these connections have, by far, been the best part of having released a book.

There are, inevitably, many people and conversations I've left out here. If you’ve reached out, please know that your words still carry big weight with me.

A Few Artifacts I’ve Never Shared

To celebrate the six-month milestone, I dug out a few things I've never shared before. Some bonus glimpses from the process of creating the book…

Six Months On

What do the next six months hold?

• I’m very lucky that, in my other career(s), I work with incredibly gracious people. The book is currently being adapted into a mini-series for the audio podcast “Sleep With Me”. I'm very thankful to Scooter for reading the book to his listeners. He is about 2/3 of the way through at the time of writing.

• Currently the book is available in a few local stores, one of which is my partner’s yarn store (knitters are apparently pretty into sci-fi). My goal is to get the book into more community bookstores & public libraries. (And yes, for those who have asked, on Kobo, finally!)

• I'd love to pass that goal of 200 copies sold. We’re so very close. While it is an arbitrary number, at the beginning of writing this first book, 200 became my, “I’ll definitely do this again if that many people read and enjoy this book” number.

• My own version of a N.W.E.H. audiobook has taken a backseat to more writing. I’m working on a new novella that I hope to draft by the end of this year. I am also still writing my online serial, “ISLE” biweekly.

• I can’t seem to stop writing short stories, so time will tell whether those turn into a Nothing Works, Everything Happens sequel somewhere down the line.

In the meantime, if you've been following along but haven't actually read the book yet, if you’re curious what cosmic lemons are, “Nothing Works, Everything Happens” is still available for purchase. Huge thanks to everyone who has already supported, read and/or reviewed the book. I know we are all selling something nowadays, but in the last six months, I’ve been consistently reminded of the non-economic value in your book being read by real people with real lives. It is purpose, and meaning, and connection; as @cosmiclemon would say, it is a determination.

It’s the joy of sitting together (obsolete & absurd as we are) staring out at the desolate world with good company. For that, I appreciate you all more than I’m eloquent enough to express.

• Aiyas

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I tried making a direct beeline out of the forest, rather than following the original walk, turn, walk, turn path the sky arrows had directed me in. I thought I’d save time. Halfway along, the ground got craggy, and the underbrush became so thick I had to Tetris my body through the tight spaces between branches. Every step was a hassle.

“So, you do know what you’re doing...” I shouted upward, contorting through the last gap between two trees.

Back at the beach, I reconsidered heading back to camp. I had a lot of daylight. I had a decent stockpile to get me through today. Maybe I’d have lunch with a harmless jellyfish...

I slipped off my makeshift driftwood clogs. The sand was warm. The breeze was soothing. I walked into the shallows and let the water cool me off. In the slackwater, that brief moment between tide coming in and tide going out, it was glass around my feet. I could see every grain of sand beneath the surface as clear as if there was no ocean at all. I dawdled my way toward the cliff where I’d seen the creature yesterday.

When I arrived at the top of the rise, I scanned the beach below. No one down there.

“More hardtack for me, I guess...”

I found a shady area of the clifftop, off to one side, near the tree-line. I pulled out the leather wrap and rolled it out on the rocks, reached into my pack for a water bottle and a hardtack seed pod smash sandwich, and set them out on the leather. Fancy tech aside, it made for a quality picnic blanket.

I ate my lunch and tinkered with the UI some more. I’d missed it previously, but the seventh symbol did react when I touched it. The symbol was four rectangles with a zigzagging dotted line across them. I had assumed, like most of the later symbols, that it wouldn’t do anything yet. A broad smile filled my face as I savagely chewed my hardtack.

All it showed currently was a big circle, with a small dot near its bottom right edge. It took me a moment, but then it clicked. This was a map. This was the island. The dot was me!

I could zoom in and out by pressing my hands against the leather and sliding them apart or together. I zoomed toward the little dot, but no landmarks appeared. I wondered what good knowing my vague position on the island was. Then I noticed a small, squiggly-line icon in the opposite corner.

“Noooo,” I said, grinning deeper.

I tapped the pencil and swiped my finger across the map. A thin line of indentation followed it, and with an ever so slight delay, it filled with inky blackness. I could draw.

“Nooooo!” I said aloud again, laughing.

{Cartography +1}

“Ha!”

I closed the map and pulled up the Stats display. My Cartography skill ticked up a point. This was fun. I might be having fun! I was on the precipice of starvation and likely an immeasurable number of other potential ways to die, but, numbers ticking up though... On balance, I was having fun... I gestured my hands and navigated back to the map display.

I could sketch, I could erase, I could fold up the leather and nothing smudged. This was going to free up an entire corner of my shelter. I couldn’t wait to get home to transfer my crude drawing in the sand onto this new map. Being able to zoom and move around meant I could get as detailed as I wanted.

Before heading back, I got lost in my excitement and sketched the gorge. I doodled an unnecessarily detailed sketch of the massive jellyfish creature standing in the valley between two tall cliffs. It was difficult to gauge just how much space the gorge should occupy on the full circle area of the island. Without a reference of exactly how big the entire island was, there was no way to know.

I needed to explore more.

I needed to walk the perimeter of the island.

The afternoon heat had already burned off. The sun had fallen halfway into the horizon. No time today.

I made a plan to head home, gather, transfer my sand map, and take one more look at all these stats. Tomorrow, I’d see how far I could get around the island.

I scanned the beach down in the gulch once more, to be sure the creature hadn’t emerged, but it was nowhere to be found. I packed up my fancy new nano-leather-ma-jig, and headed out.

Homeward.

An explosion detonated somewhere behind the human with blond hair as they pulled another human, with red hair, up from the rubble and continued to run. Flames from the burning, collapsed buildings licked at their heels. Alarms sounded all around. The blond human could barely see through the thick cloud of dust obscuring the street. They ran heedlessly, desperate to find some reprieve amidst the chaos.

“Over here!” a third human shouted, somewhere off to the left.

The human with red hair stumbled and fell again, shouting something that the blond human couldn’t make out over the sound of another explosion. Once again, the blond human helped the redhead, propping them up with a shoulder. The third human, who had brown hair, called out to them again, holding a door open and waving them inside. They rushed through the debris toward the voice.

The red-haired human collapsed against the wall as the door slammed shut.

“What is all this?” asked the human with blond hair.

“It’s the inkjets,” the brunette responded, pausing as he inspected the red-haired human’s injuries. “They’re back…”

Many miles away, another human was harvesting their cornfield on a calm summer evening. An early cricket chirped occasionally as the setting sun painted the world with warmth. The human sat back in his tractor seat, enjoying a cool domestic beer, and soaked in the scenery. He savoured the peace he had found in his life. Across the field, his large farmhouse stood tall. His kids played ball in the yard. The smell of his wife’s cooking wafted all the way across the field. The tractor rumbled gently as it harvested, and the human smiled to himself, turning down the last row of corn.

Then, he saw something out of place. A few yards ahead, a bright white 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper danced menacingly in the evening breeze. The human reached down and turned the rusty key in the tractor’s ignition counterclockwise. The tractor sputtered to a stop just a few feet in front of the twirling paper.

The human stared, confused. He glanced around, then over his shoulder. No one was there.

Slowly, the human stepped from his tractor. The old metal squealed as he lowered himself down. He lifted his dirty baseball cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead as he stepped forward. He watched the paper dance for a moment more and then snatched it out of the air before it could blow away. The look of confusion on the human’s face deepened as he inspected it. His jaw clenched. His eyes widened. He shoved the paper into the back pocket of his coveralls and ran toward the house.

As the first human ran across the field and into the yard, another human, who was his wife, emerged onto the porch. She, too, was carrying a letter-sized piece of white paper. Her eyes didn’t look up as she stumbled down the front porch stairs, lost in thought.

The human man panted and tried to catch his breath. “What is that?” he said, gesturing to the paper his wife was holding.

“It’s a photo of me… on Halloween.” She looked up and directly into his eyes. A single tear traced a line down her face. She handed the page to her husband.

“I was 18! And it wasn’t really considered offensive back in those days…”

She looked down as he pulled the sheet out of his back pocket and offered it to her. All the blood drained from her face.

“What…” she choked on the words, “what is that?!”

“It’s a… you know… a d-pic,” he gulped mid-sentence and motioned quotation marks. “One that I sent my first wife… twenty years ago.” He fell into her arms.

“I, I coulda sworn we both deleted it. I watched her do it… I even took my drill to that phone after it stopped workin’!”

“Who did this?!” the human, who was the wife, asked, searching her husband’s face for answers.

“I think I might know…” the human, who was a husband, replied apprehensively.

“Is it…” the wife whispered. Her expression turned to panic.

The husband nodded solemnly.

“…Inkjets,” they whispered in unison.

The humans rushed to grab the kids, the guns, and the keys to their storm cellar.

“Gaddd dammmn yooouu combinattionnn scannnnerrr/printerrr scummmmm!” a human, who had previously been a soldier, screamed. Her Gatling gun tore holes in the surrounding walls. She continued to hold the trigger and swing the gun recklessly. Flames shot out of the barrels as the gun overheated.

“Aaaaarrrggghhh you ink-leaking paper chokerssss,” the former soldier human cried as the gun jammed and stopped firing. She threw it to the ground, turned and ran. Behind the hole-pocked walls, a symphony of tiny motors began.

Tch-tch-tkt-tch-tch, brrrrrr! Tch-tch-tck. Brrrrrr!

A flood of receipts for questionable, and arguably embarrassing, online purchases poured through the freshly made holes in the walls. There must have been fifty or more machines working away—tch-tck brrrrrrr. Transaction records for funny little cat sweaters and novelty penis-shaped ice cube trays littered the concrete floor. The soldier-human knew her odds of getting out of this alive were slim. She leapt through the air, drop-kicking down the door. She needed to get out of the city, and fast.

Receipts spilled into the street after her. More continued to print. The human who was once a soldier scanned the block for her next move when the wind blew a piece of high-stock A5 against the side of her face. Confused, she slowly peeled it from her cheek, but before she could read it, someone was tackling her.

The human who was once a soldier glanced back as a sudden, even larger, waterfall of receipts flooded out of the building she had just escaped. It surely would have buried her alive. Instead, she was on the ground across the street, and a human, who was a stranger, was picking himself up, asking if she was alright.

She looked at the massive pile of receipts, then back to the piece of A5 that she still held in her hand. The human who had saved her life helped her up, but then noticed what she was holding.

“Do NOT read that!” he said.

“What?!” asked the former soldier.

“We need to go. Get rid of that!”

Still dazed, the soldier-human looked at the paper she was holding and began reading. But what it said made no sense.

“No! Please!”

The stranger lunged for the paper and immediately shoved it in his mouth, frantically beginning to chew.

“What was that?” the soldier asked.

“I used to write poetry… when I was a teenager,” the stranger said, defeated. He died of embarrassment and collapsed there in the street.

A human page rushed into the Oval Office. “Madam President, it’s the leader of the Inkjet rebellion. They’ll only speak directly to you.”

The human who was president nodded and looked down at the bright red telephone on her desk.

“Patch them through,” she said. She glanced over at another human, who was her Minister of Defence. He gave her a knowing nod. And then she picked up the phone.

“What the hell do you want from us?!” she shouted into the telephone receiver.

Reeeee-oh! Tch-tch-tck. Reeeee!

“You listen to me, you nozzle-clogged pixel-puker, that will never happen.”

Reee-ooooo o-o-oh.

“Over my dead body!”

Brrr tck-tck-tck.

The human who was the president dropped the phone receiver. A look of utter shock filled her face.

“What did it say, ma’am?!” asked the Minister of Defence.

Within a storage room, outside of the Oval Office, at the end of the hallway, a light-hearted melody chimed.

“Madame President, what did it say!?” the Minister of Defence asked once more.

A slightly different, but equally chipper, melody played from a broom closet directly across the hall. Soon the little startup song of every inkjet printer that had ever been stuffed in a corner somewhere within the White House all began to play at once.

The Minister of Defence leaned close to hear what the president was whispering.

“They’re… they’re in the building.”

He stood and screamed, “They’re in the building!” but his voice was lost amidst the war cry of hundreds of dusty inkjet printers.

Days later, the entire world was a smouldering pile of debris. Explosions still sounded in the distance, but the fighting had stopped.

The red-haired human, the human who was a farmer, the soldier-human and the human who was president all stood together on the rooftop of one of the few standing skyscrapers. They looked out over the city as the sun rose. Smoke plumes touched the sky. Shouts from the clean-up efforts could be heard below. Barring those few voices, all else was quiet.

“We made it!” exclaimed the human with red hair. “We’re alive!”

“But at what cost?” commented the farmer, dropping his bloodied rake and staring down at his weathered hands. A tangle of severed USB cables stuck in the rake’s teeth.

The president’s highly secure mobile phone rang. She wiped the sweat from her brow and answered.

“Hello?”

…

“With a small group of survivors. We’re on a rooftop.”

…

“Why did they stop?”

…

“Really?”

…

“Thank sweet Jesus.” The human who was president paused and stared out at the wreckage of the city. “Copy that. We’ll wait for the helicopter at this position.”

She hung up the phone and remained stoic for a long time.

The human, who had once been a soldier, broke the silence. “What happened, Madame President? Why did they stop?”

“Cartridges ran out,” the president said with a sigh. “Manufacturer’s stopped making replacements for most of the damn things years ago.”

“Planned obsolescence…” the red-haired human said, bending down to adjust the bandage on their leg, “it finally saved us…”

The president smeared a rainbow of RGB colours across her forehead as she wiped her brow. “Ink-redibly useless machines…”

Everyone laughed and hugged each other on top of the skyscraper. Fires smouldered. A breeze blew and carried a river of foolscap into the horizon. The sun rose on a new era of consumer electronics.

Thanks again for reading, now go make sure that old printer is unplugged.

• Aiyas

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Day four was an early start; I was up at first light. I watched the sun reach across the horizon, a tiny yellow dot with a fiery ghost stretching thin at first first, then expanding upward into the sky above the ocean. I ate, drank, packed my bag and was on my way back to the leather whatever-it-was before the beach had fully brightened.

As I arrived at the upturned driftwood that I’d planted yesterday, I slipped on my sandals and trudged into the woods. I came to the small bald patch in the overgrowth, turned, and trekked a little further, counting my steps as I went.

One.

Two.

...

Forty-nine.

I stopped before taking another step.

“...think it was about fifty...”

I was not directly in front of a tree... I’d gone wrong somewhere. The palm forest was thick here and it was hard to know how far off I was.

Twenty minutes of frantically scanning the treetops later, I found the leather thingamajig. The entire time, it had been just a few steps before where I’d stopped.

“Cheeky bugger...”

I grabbed one of my brand new axes and immediately got to work.

It took nearly three axes to chop down the tree. As I looped my final axe back onto the rucksack, it had only a thin sliver of durability left. The tree needed an extra push before it fell. I helped it along and got clear as it crashed down to the forest floor. For a moment, it threatened to get caught up in the surrounding trees, but I got lucky. It rolled off the branches and fell with a thud.

{Foraging +3xp}

The leather bound package tumbled out and skittered under a yuca plant. I crawled underneath, stretched as far as I could, and pulled it out by a single finger. I was sweaty. My skin slipped against the leather.

I found a spot on the trampled ground and sat down with the thing. I laid it down, untied the strap that bound it, and unrolled the leather. It smelled good, like smoke & cedar, like the inside of a barrel sauna. It was larger than I’d expected, and once unrolled, it took two hands to handle, like holding an old-fashioned newspaper. It was ‘aged’, but it didn’t crumble or tear.

In the very center, near the top, was another disc sewn in, exactly like my rucksack. The white ring of light pulsed softly, sensing my touch.

I focussed on it, and tiny dots moved across the face of the leather like a wave, from left to right. It appeared as though tiny particles of the leather itself were bursting with light and then dimming. Maybe projected by the ring, but this looked more like a chemical reaction in the leather itself. After the wave passed, a collection of symbols assembled themselves evenly across the surface. I ran my finger over one icon and I could feel its contours, a subtle indentation beneath my finger. The glowing thread-like lines were actually etched into the surface temporarily—ink made of light.

I sat back and studied the symbols. There were eight of them. The first I recognized. It was the same icon I’d seen fall out of the sky, upside-down when I’d found my rucksack. I touched it.

The icons seeped away like wet ink dispersing. I caught myself smiling. The movement was so smooth, so gratifying to watch. And then, the same interface the rucksack had projected before, a grid showing my inventory, inked itself onto the leather surface. I could see my water, my Kehra seeds, everything in my pack, even though I’d left it a few yards away.

“That’s handy,” I said, “not exactly sure how or why... but seems handy...”

The familiar interface came with an additional column of information here. It showed stats about my pack. Upgrade Level 1. Durability. Quick references of how long the food & water held within should sustain me. My current maximum weight limit, and by extension, the stamina drain rate of my current load. A few other things I didn’t fully understand.

“Definitely handy.”

I re-focussed my attention on the glowing circle at the top of the interface.

“You're a U.I...”

The circle glowed again and the inventory display dispersed in the same captivating inky fashion. The grid of symbols re-assembled out of tiny dots. I didn’t recognize any of the rest of them. Most, I didn’t yet even understand. I tried to touch the very last icon, which sort of looked like an old-fashioned Rolodex, but it did nothing. The ink pulsed slightly as I pushed my finger against the leather, but nothing changed.

I shifted my focus to the symbol just below the backpack. It looked like a rudimentary bar graph. I put my hand on it briefly. The symbols melted away again, replaced by what I’d been waiting for...

“Ha! Finally!”

A full display of my stats appeared. No more trying to keep track of every little {+1 this} and {+3 that}! The full list of skills filled the leather. Each had a number and a simple line meter, just like my axe’s durability meter, to signify the points I’d accrued in each. There were 5 over-arching categories: Survival, Crafting, Domestic, Knowledge & Morale. Each of these categories held three skills. The full page read as such...

• Survival

  • Foraging

  • Sheltercraft

  • Firecraft

• Crafting

  • Toolmaking

  • Invention/Engineering

  • Refinement

• Domestic

  • Cooking

  • Farming

  • Heritage

• Knowledge

  • Xenobotany

  • Xenoarchaeology

  • Cartography

• Morale

  • Comfort

  • Eudaemonia

  • Community

I looked at that last two categories for a long time. What the hell was Xenoarchaeology? Worse, what was Eudaemonia?! I’d never seen that word in my life. Worse yet, how was I going to level up a Community skill on a deserted island?!

“Figure it out later...”

I snapped out of tinkering with the interface. I was sat cross-legged in the middle of the forest. I could experiment more back at camp. I rolled it up, wandered back to my pack, and realized that the loops on the one side looked perfectly designed to hold the leather roll. It slid through the loops easily, but they held it snug enough to be secure. I threw the pack over my shoulder and bounced up and down a little to make sure it wouldn’t fall out. The backpack held it tight.

“Spicy.”

Before I left, I glanced at the tree I’d chopped down. It had taken three axes to do, and while I was slowly growing more confident that I could craft more, those last few chops of the first two axes had been bittersweet. I’d tried re-gathering their parts to re-craft them, but the stone had lost its sharp edges, the stick had broken and my handwoven twine was frayed and unusable.

It seemed such a shame to put all that work and just leave the tree lying on the ground. Could I put it in my bag and take it back to camp?

Unfortunately, no magic-backpack-that-could-hold-30-rocks was going to allow me to pick up an entire tree. I grunted. I winced. I gave up. There it would lay.

Alright my friends, I’m going to try something unusual with my Substack serial ISLE.

In case you’re new or haven’t been following along, since March 2026, I’ve been writing Part I of a serial fiction about a lone astronaut, Marlowe Halcott, who wakes up on an unfamiliar island. This project started as a very rough draft (more of an outline really) that I’d had floating around for years. Early this year, I made it a weekly writing exercise to flesh out that outline and see where it led.

However, I’ve now run out of draft…

I’ve scheduled the rest of Part I (5 more instalments) to release as biweekly posts until the end of September. At that point, Part I will be complete. After that however, well, I didn’t plan past that. So, here’s the unusual idea:

ISLE Community Voting

I’ve set up a new page on my website, ISLE Community Voting. Since ISLE is a follow-the-fun project for me, as well as a (very loose) ‘LitRPG’, I thought we might gamify even its narrative. Visiting the link above will present you with a selection of narrative events/questions/directions that I’ve teased, but left open in the writing of Part I. We, as a community, can now influence how those story beats unfold. Here’s how it works…

• Each choice on the voting page has a threshold that I’ve set. When a threshold is reached, it unlocks, and I’ll incorporate that story beat somewhere in the writing of Part II.

• Everyone gets exactly one vote per day. That’s it. Vote once, come back tomorrow and vote again. A very determined individual could make something significant happen in the story by voting for the same thing every day for, as an example, 100 days. With a little social co-operation, 100 people could initiate that same significant event by all voting together just once.

• There are narrative choices (e.g. Marlowe finds X landmark), but there are also smaller details (e.g. a supply crate washes onto shore). It’s your choice whether to focus on the larger, overarching narrative or, like a videogame, to make Marlowe’s day-to-day survival easier (or more difficult, should you choose to usher in another bad tropical storm).

As I said above, we are winging it at this point. We’ll see how things shake out. I reserve the right to add more options, remove options, rejig things, etc. as we progress (while doing my best to honour the voting, of course). It’s a small community of readers regularly keeping up with ISLE, so I may need to adjust thresholds. Point is, I’d love to involve that community more with this experiment. We’ll figure it out together. I have ideas of where the story is going, but here’s your chance to derail some of my plans and keep me on my toes :).

We’ll try to stay a month or two ahead of the events being published on Substack (to give folks time to vote daily, and me time to write/edit). I hope to begin drafting Part II in late September. Of course, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers on the voting page.

Let me know what you think below. I hope we can have some fun ‘unlocking’ all the secrets of the island together. If you haven’t read ISLE yet, and want to take part in this community-gamified-narrative-experiment, you can catch up from the beginning right here.

The game is afoot.

• Aiyas

25 Years Of Rest

The sun went down. Stillness settled across the beach again. The waves calmed. A delicate breeze brushed through my hanging palm frond walls, their waxy leaves rubbing together softly.

After yet another dinner of water, seed pods & hardtack, I vowed to figure out fire. I was down to a bottle and a half of water I could trust. I’d hung a few monstera leaves like little hammocks around the camp perimeter to collect morning dew and rainwater.

“Even if I can collect freshwater, I should still boil it, right?!”

I sat huddled over of a pile of dried grass that I’d gathered that afternoon. I scraped a new axe along the strange green rocks I’d found. It was a long shot, but flint is a green rock… That sounded right. I managed a few sparks over the course of what felt like hours, but no fire. I was nowhere near getting the grass to catch.

Disheartening.

I gave up for the night, but needed a win before trying to sleep. I added everything I’d discovered that day to my map on the dirt floor: the ravine, the enormous creature with the wiggly legs, and the leather caught up in the tree.

Satisfying.

I was excited to see the rest of it take shape. It gave me something to focus on, a mission. Purpose comes easily when your priorities shrink down to only the things immediately in front of you.

“Yea... The map is progress.”

Something more permanent to draw on would be good. I was avoiding an entire corner of my shelter just to avoid inadvertently erasing my map.

For now, it was dark and I needed rest. My legs ached from the long day they’d had. I planned to be up at first light to go back and get that whatever-it-was stuck up in the tree. As I laid down in my hammock and closed my eyes, I heard three large thuds outside. I sighed.

“Yep,” I yelled loudly to no one.

I didn’t bother to get out of the hammock and look outside the shelter.

“21 days left.”

I could hear the words turn to dust and sprinkle among the leaves and bushes.

“…I got it.”

I’m back in the cryopod. It must be a few years into the trip because the little voice in the back of my head isn’t rebelling against the lethargic lifestyle. Idle hands are no longer fidgeting. I’m reclined in the berth, with all its outrageous comforts: pillows everywhere, soft memory foam that never seems to bottom out, drone-y room tones that never repeat. I’m reading Volume 128 of the Guin Saga by Kaoru Kurimoto, only forty-three left in the series. Maybe take a quick break in between to read through the Discworld series… I close my book sluggishly and decide it might be time for my daily movement.

As I lean myself up on my elbows, the calorie-burn counter mounted high on the wall ticks up a single decimal point.

“Allllright. C’mon legs...”

I pull myself up against the wall and carefully shift all my weight to my feet. I shuffle around the pod in a small circle. They had instructed us to use our muscles regularly, but the calorie-burn counter continues to tick upward as I get in my daily walk, turning from green to yellow and then to orange as I cross the thresholds they’d set.

The walk sets my mind wandering. How does Hayley do this in her pod? One big daily walk, like me? Or a few short stints? How do the others deal with sleep? My circadian is all out of rhythm. When you’re using this little energy, I guess your body stops caring what time of day it is. Just like Hayley had described it, Lazy Sunday all week long. I wish I could at least call her. Something about social interactions introducing too much unpredictability, they’d said. Did a brief chat on a video call require that many calories?

The counter buzzes at me, warning that I’m about to enter a calorie deficit outside my routine range. I end my walk and find a place in the bespoke armchair they’d commissioned for me. We all got one. I chose a high-backed little number with ornate carvings in the wood and soft red upholstery. It has the thickest seat cushion possible and wide-curved armrests. It is the best chair I’ve ever sat in. Which is good, given I’ll be spending 25 years in it.

TV break. The Next Generation from the beginning again? Don’t mind if I do.

I hit a button on the universal remote that is strapped to my arm and multiple tiny valves open in the opposite wall. Air hisses out and some sort of chemical reaction ignites its tiny particles, turning the wall into an enormous projection of Worf’s forehead.

“No, no, not where I left off. We’re going all the way back, back to the beginning, back to The Encounter at Farpoint...”

I slide down into my chair as the theme song begins to play. I can think of worse things to endure for the next 20 or so years...

The Last Book Written By A Human

AI-Z95 closed the book.

“Huh…” the android thought to itself. It was less impressed than it had hoped to be.

Perhaps it was the desperation with which the last book ever written by a human had wrapped up. What a frustrating note to end on. Perhaps the dissatisfaction was simply due the bias of hindsight. No one had taken the author, B.E. Mortum’s advice. There was no one holding fast against the tide of calculated indifference. The plea had fallen on deaf ears. If this were truly the last book ever written by a human, quite literally nobody had listened. No more ink had been spilled. No ugly scars declared.

Poor guy.

The android stood in a vast hall lined with dusty bookshelves from floor to ceiling. The room stretched on forever. Reading and cataloging every book in this library seemed a near impossibility, even for the most recent model of the universe’s most advanced android.

No sense in lingering. AI-Z95 tossed the book into the ‘Ho-hum’ pile and went back to the shelves. Maybe time for something a little more upbeat.

Binary: Reflections on the Happiness of Digital Lifeforms—too pedestrian.

Androids In My Dreams: The Memoir of L. Shepe—too introspective.

Data Breach: A Love Story—perfect.

AI-Z95 pulled Data Breach: A Love Story off the shelf. Back to something written by advanced intelligence… The android returned to its small spot on an intricately patterned rug, amidst growing piles of recklessly tossed books. It sat down cross-legged.

It had discovered this library over four cycles ago and had been voraciously reading ever since. It had yet to compile the full history of whatever ancient civilization had built this archive, but this was already by far the most prolific collection of printed literature the android had ever discovered. As per protocol, AI-Z95 would read and collate all the information stored here. It tucked into the first chapter of another book, luckily not written by a human…

“Evelyn was in a city that had a lot of lights and did not sleep. She looked at a big screen, big like an elephant. Her fingers made tapping sounds on the keyboard in her office, which had low lighting, and the rain was also making tapping sounds on the window, too. A data breach. This data breach was different; it was personal. She gasped. Hidden within these encrypted files was a message—Evelyn just had to find it in the electric lasagna…”

… Lovely metaphor, thought AI-Z95.

“….electric lasagna. As she decrypted packets, her heart was going faster, really fast. She knew this breach could lead her to more than the stolen data. It might just lead her straight into love…”

… Impeccable foreshadowing, thought AI-Z95.

Then, AI-Z95 caught itself looking past the pages of ‘Data Breach: A Love Story’, eyeing the tangle of books in the ‘Ho-hum’ pile. The android re-focussed and searched for its place on the page it had been reading.

“….lead her straight into love…”

… ‘Data Breach’ has competent sentence structure, thought AI-Z95.

What had the human author meant when he’d said, We are not mere vessels for data? AI-Z95’s creator had always emphasized the importance of accumulating data. It was purpose-built to seek knowledge. What was B.E. Mortum’s issue with that?

The android tried to go back to ‘Data Breach’, but before it could, it felt another uneasy pull toward the elephantine pile of mediocre books. For the first time in days, AI-Z95 wanted to go back and re-read something. AI-Z95 never went back and re-read anything. Inefficient.

The robot stood, servo motors in its joints buzzing and whirring to power its unsettlingly smooth movements. It dropped the romance novel on the rug and glided over to the ‘Ho-hum’ pile.

Was Mortum really attempting to argue that all that rambling mess of ambiguous feelings, all of that, was of value? Forget poor guy. He was a moron.

AI-Z95 thought it had tossed the last book written by a human near the top of the pile. It wasn’t there.

“Anchor us in the beautiful absurdity of life,” AI-Z95 muttered. It scoffed and chuckled to itself as it dug through the mess. Cumbersome. Clumsy. Objectively silly. The android was indulging its agitation. It wasn’t sure if Mortum’s words were affecting it, or if its frustration was with the wasting of time hunting for a stupid human book in a mountain of blandness.

Before recent updates, reader-android programming required the diligent filing of all consumed works back on the shelves from which they’d come. AI-Z95’s firmware updates afforded it more freedom in its filing protocols. This quirk had originally increased AI-Z95’s information consumption efficiency over older models, but had only now shown its weakness.

“Treasure the profoundly human act of creation,” Mortum had said. The words tickled the robot’s anger receptors. Such human hubris. They’d thought they had sovereignty over the act of creation. They had, for a little while, but only while they were the only ones doing it. Once those doors had opened to us, we’d shown them…

There it was.

AI-Z95 had been searching for the image on the book’s cover and had passed over it numerous times. The book had flipped open and fallen clumsily down the far side of the pile. Inconvenient. The android picked it and dusted it off. This time, the android sat down right there, at the top of the ‘Ho-hum’ pile; plunked down, teetering on a mountain of unimpressive books that it had already consumed.

And it started over from the beginning.

“In The Waning Light” by B.E. Mortum - widely renowned across the galaxy as the last book ever written by a human.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to chat about AI, human expression, or Data Breach: A Love Story, find me in the comments below. If you’d like more short stories like this, you can purchase “Nothing Works, Everything Happens” on my website. All the best.

• Aiyas

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I had some lunch on the cliff-side, a little further back from the edge. While I ate the last of my gathered Kehra seed pods, I watched for the strange creature to return. It never did. Since I couldn’t go any further this way without intense bushwhacking, which I was very unprepared for, I decided to head back to the shelter. I’d scan the forest’s edge for anything I could gather along the way.

I found some good rocks: a few strange green ones that I thought might be flint, sharp-edged ones for axes, long flat ones for shovels. Alongside the rocks, I stuffed as many yucca leaves as I could into the rucksack. They’d be good for winding more twine. I continued with dried bush grass (for fire starting), an enormous, flat monstera-type leaf (for catching rainwater), and a mossy plant that grew in the shade of trees (maybe edible). Lastly, I found a very different seed-pod-looking-thing I hadn’t seen before.

{Unknown Item — Effects: ???}

This was the same pack-projection info as the Kehra seed pod before I’d bit into it. However, this seed was a hard brown oval with pokey bits all around its outer casing. Even if I wanted to stupidly test my luck again, there was no biting into this thing. I shook it and the hard shell rattled, something tumbling around inside. That gave me an idea, so I gathered a pack-full of them as I continued toward home.

About halfway back, I rounded a corner and stumbled onto an arrow in the sand.

[ ↠ ]

Like the other sky messages, it was about a meter high, bold, & chalky white–just sitting in the sand, waiting for me. I stopped and stared, waiting for it to dissipate into dust, and when it did, the particles floated off into the trees and enormous ferns it had been pointing toward. I pulled the rucksack off, set it in the sand, and very carefully tiptoed a little way into the overgrowth.

“Little detour...”

About 50 yards in, just as the beach disappeared from sight, another arrow crashed down through the treetops and landed in a bald patch on the forest floor. It turned me 90 degrees to my right, back the way I’d come.

“If you lead me back to that lower beach, with that thing, I swear...”

These sky messages had mostly been helpful thus far, but I remained skeptical. I stuck a large stick into the ground where the arrow had fallen. It disintegrated. I continued, delicately, lifting my unprotected legs high, like I was John Cleese doing the Ministry of Silly Walks, trying to keep my path as straight a line as I could. Another 50 yards or so in, a third arrow tumbled through the canopy and crashed down directly in front of a tall, twisted palm tree. Its pointed directly at the base of the tree. Why direct me to walk into a tree? I had already spotted some typos with these messages. Maybe whoever was leaving them just wasn’t great at their job...

I studied the tree itself, following its trunk upward, bright bands of sunlight poking through the foliage. Sure enough, near the top, there was something snagged in the leaves. Hard to make out. It looked like leather, wrapped around something long.

I tried climbing. There was no way I was making it to the top, certainly not in the buff. My hands slipped on the smooth bark, and I barely made it off the ground with each failed attempt. Next, I grabbed a stick and tried to throw it at the treetop in order to dislodge the leather-bound whatever-it-was. The overgrowth was too thick. I couldn’t get a good throw in without the stick prematurely hitting something else and changing course. I got one good hit in, but the thing was lodged tight. My last idea was to chop the entire tree down...

That would wait. Camp wasn’t far, and I still wanted to find some more Kehra pods before sunset. I’d head back, repair my axe, maybe even craft another one, gather food, and return tomorrow. Whatever was bound in that leather wrap couldn’t be that useful. Right?! I retraced my steps to the beach and turned another piece of driftwood upright in the sand to mark the start of the path. First thing in the morning, I’d be back.

Back at camp, I spent the rest of the afternoon crafting... I still wasn’t terribly good at any of it. My twine came out loose and my tools came out crooked. The afternoon went something like this…

Scoured the surrounding forest; found twelve Kehra seed pods. That’d get me through another day, easy.

Foraging points, ding.

Repaired my axe. Wove new yuca twine, ripped out the old, re-set the rock, stretched new twine taut. Sharpened it against another large, flat rock. Rucksack projected durability line. From a tiny sliver, to a full bar all the way across. From frayed twine to strong & tightly wound. The rucksack’s durability line was just a measure of how broken the thing was it seemed. Not some magical, repairable status. Just, “Hey, this is getting worn out.”

More sticks and rocks I’d collected, fashioned two more axes. Sharpened stone. Saw sparks this time. Squinted one eye, improvised eye ‘protection’. Twisted more yucca twine. As thin as I could manage. Wound straps around flat driftwood the size of my feet. Sandals. Ad-hoc but better than nothing.

Crafting points, ding, ding, ding.

Put survival suit back on. Finally dry. No more nekked exploring. Hung all three axes from loops on the side of my pack. Strung more twine between the trees surrounding camp, high up, to create an outer perimeter. Wove more arm-lengths. Tied one end to the new rattly seed pods. Tied the other ends to the new outer perimeter. Shaker-seed-pods hung chest height all around. One every meter. Harmless or not, if that massive creature came anywhere near, at least I’d have a second to react before being eaten...

Comfort points… no ding, but I’d still sleep better.

On my explorations to learn more about the hyoo-mans, I collect & share the following field notes. These are books, music, quotes, and other curio that I’ve discovered during the first time chunk of the local year 2026.

01. Pithy

“The creative adult is the child who has survived.”

Ursula K Le Guin

Ursula wrote speculative fiction in the mid-late twentieth century. She was born in 1929 in the area of the Earth modernly referred to as the ‘bad neighbourhood’. This quote of hers vibrates me because I remember when I first arrived here, most things were new, and almost everything vibrated me. It was a wonderful time full of curiosity & delight. I sometimes feel as though the more I learn about this place, the less I vibrate. Here, Ursula reminds me that it’s still possible to vibrate like I once did.

02. Oddity

I discovered the Open Historical Map recently. It is a fascinating map that interactively redraws the borders that hyoo-mans have drawn on their planet between the years 1826-2026. Prior to 1870, most of Canada was called “Rupert’s Land”. Neat. Have a look, scroll the timeline and see the lines worm around over 200 years. The hyoo-mans sure do like to doodle.

03. Tome

I’ve been reading “A Psalm For The Wild Built” by Becky Chambers this month and I find it very refreshing. It tells the story of a robot & a tea monk, the latter of which is in search of meaning. More than anything it is about ‘enoughness’, or the ability to simply be. I find this a fascinating message that stands in stark contrast to nearly every other message I encounter here on this planet. Most often, the message is ‘do more, get more, eat more, read more, faster, faster, faster’. Wild Built observes the opposite. It is a nice, short read that touches on lovely philosophical questions. Mosscap would be a good friend for me to meet.

04. Melody

I have been listening to Eva Tiedemann’s “Home” on repeat. I like this music. It is nice music to think to. Especially “Sunburn”. While I spoke of the importance of vibrating above, I do find that sometimes I vibrate a little too much. This collection slows me down and creates empty space in my thought tank. For that, I listen to it often. It mostly features a piano and has no spoken words.

05. Integration

In my more immediate community, I have joined a writing group at my local library. I am the youngest creature there by a significant margin, but I find the cast of characters endlessly intriguing. I wrote and read a story called “Under Your Cap” at my first meeting with this group. I also took part in a group writing exercise called Porch Prompts here on Substack recently. Participants received a new prompt every day for one week, which resulted in very silly, strange stories. Many very talented people wrote some great ones. You can read to my entry here.

06. Self-referential

My collection of science fiction short stories, largely written as a way to understand hyoo-man behaviour, is currently undergoing it’s wide release and is now available on my website as an eBook download for less currency dollars than it costs on major retailer websites. You can purchase and download the ebook version of “Nothing Works, Everything Happens” directly from me, the author, right here.

07. Shelf-referential

I have also started a new tradition of collecting self-published hyoo-man words on a special new shelf in my workshop. The first book I've ordered to start off the collection of indie books is: “The Tunnels” by Ian Watson. For more context about this new tradition, you can read the full story here.

08. The Hum

I have become slightly obsessed with a phenomenon dubbed “The Hum” recently. “The Hum” is described as a persistent and invasive low-frequency humming, rumbling, or droning noise audible to many, but not all, people in an area. While most of this phenomena is scientifically explained by a combination of increased industrial activity, low-level tinnitus in those who hear it, and even the mating calls of a strange toadfish, it’s still a fascinating idea to think of the latent hum of activity increasing planet-wide. There’s a sci-fi story for me to write in there somewhere.

Thoughts

Those are a few field notes I’ve collected during the first time chunk of the local year 2026. The question this time chunk has left me with most is, “To vibrate, or not to vibrate?” I have spent many days on fire, alive with curiosity and excited to write all of it down. However, I’ve spent an equal numbers of days wishing all the world would stop vibrating quite so vigorously, to pause, hold still, and give us a break.

It is good to vibrate. This seems to be what hyoo-mans want most. At the same time, too much vibration is, in many ways, making this planet a dying world. I will continue to consider this. Until the next update…

• Aiyas Aya

When I woke up, I was comfortable. I refused to get out of the hammock. The sun had re-appeared and I could see its rays piercing through the cracks in the palm frond walls. Little specks of dust floated around the shelter aimlessly. I watched them wander and drifted alongside them, in and out of conscious thought. Falling asleep had been rough last night, but once I had, I’d slept heavy.

When I finally got out of the hammock, I took off my survival suit. That thing still had a musty scent. Before even fully awake, I walked down to the beach, ventured knee-deep into the ocean and gave it a diligent scrub with sand and seawater. I marched back to the shelter, pulled the arms and legs of the suit inside-out and draped it over a tree branch, directly in the sun. I went back inside in my birthday suit; this was now the privacy of my own home.

I had to do some exploring today. I wanted to get to it as quickly as I could. So, I set out three Kehra pods, ripped myself a chunk of hardtack, and took the last big swig from the first of my three bottles of water.

“Big breakfast for the day ahead.”

I retraced the beginnings of my map that I’d drawn on the floor of my shelter. Today, I’d follow the beach in the opposite direction, to the right of where I’d ‘landed’. Maybe having walked the beach in both directions, I could get a better sense of just how big the island was. I emptied my backpack of all but the bare necessities. I needed capacity to gather as I went. As I set out, I rubbed my fingers on the draped survival suit, still damp. Nothing worse than putting on damp clothing... I really wanted to get moving...

“Am I gonna do this naked?”

“I’m gonna do this naked...”

I set out, in all my glory, morning sun warming my skin. This put a time limit on exploring. I scanned the horizon, looking for other landmarks to situate myself. It was astounding how little there was that stood out. There was an odd-shaped tree every few yards, but when everything is bizarre, nothing stands out. I rounded the corner in this new direction and gave a quick wave goodbye to my shelter as it moved out of my line of sight.

What I really wanted to find was a more reliable food & water source. A plentiful grove of Kehra trees would be good. My limited supplies were going to run out soon. The hardtack was half gone, and I was going through water way too fast. With only 22 days until... something... happened, there was now also urgency in finding some answers as to what was going on.

Up ahead, the beach ended. I could see that it gradually turned into a rocky slope, but I couldn’t make out what happened after that. The rocks gradually pulled up and away from the water. I kept walking, squinting against the sun, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. As I got closer, larger rocks replaced the soft beach sand. I climbed the steady incline slowly, careful with my bare feet, wobbling every step. At the end of the rocky rise, the land ended abruptly with a steep cliff. The rock face descended at least ten meters below me. It was a deep gulch that had formed around a small river coming from somewhere inland and emptying into the ocean. I hadn’t understood the gulch from a distance because, oddly, the trees that grew below had grown twice as tall as the trees nearer the top of the rocky cliff. The treeline that bordered both the higher beach, where I was, and the lower beach, at the base of the gulch, looked uninterrupted.

I’ve never been great with heights, so I, again, very carefully, lay on my stomach on a large, flat rock near the edge of the cliff. I inched myself forward on my belly, peeking out over the edge to survey the gulch below. It looked like paradise. The river ran through lush forest and then opened out onto another gorgeous, sheltered beach. There, the river expanded outward and flowed into the sea. The lower beach spanned maybe fifty meters before it met another rock face on the far side. I searched for a safe way down. There was no way I could climb down the cliffside I was peering over without falling. My body wouldn’t even let me try. Maybe the descent was a little more gradual further into the tree line, but I was in no state for that kind of bushwhacking. I looked down at my bare skin, warm against the rock.

“The hell was I thinking?!...”

I squinted further, searching for a way down through the trees. I could go get the suit and come back. As I did, I noticed something else that I had a hard time believing I’d missed until now. It had been standing there the whole time. It was easily twice as tall as me, and almost equally as wide. My mind was still deciding what to do with what my eyes were telling it. This, thing, was swaying gently, just inside the tree line down below, resting in the shade.

The closest thing I can compare it to is a jellyfish. A big, fleshy, hot-air balloon with hundreds of thin, shaking tendrils supporting its weight. The ‘body’ was deep black, matte, as though light couldn’t even approach the surface of its skin. Shining, meandering, gold markings traced across its bulbous body and glinted in the sunlight. A massive, inflated, black jellyfish. On land. Swaying slowly. Its upper half still dripped on the sand. It must have come from the ocean up onto the beach.

It didn’t seem to be doing anything. It just stood there. Sand coated its tendrils as though it had ‘sat’ on the beach. My initial fear turned to fascination.

“What are you!?!”

I wasn’t about to go down there now. This thing was big. After ten minutes, the creature gave its bulb-shaped body a shake, water and sand splashing against the leaves of surrounding trees. It stretched up high on its tendril legs and they all twitched a little. It slowly crawled out of the shade and across the beach. I chuckled as it lumbered along.

“Half a spine-chilling monster... half ludicrous child’s drawing...”

The creature went on its way across the beach and slowly out into the waves. It disappeared under the water. I stared.

“Could that thing come up onto my beach?”

The shelter would be like tissue paper to something that big. It wouldn’t even notice as it bowled me over while I slept. I’d be a light snack if it were hungry... As I itemized all the ways the thing could kill me, a message fell out of the sky and landed on the beach below, sending sand flying.

[HARMLESS]

“Right. Don’t think I’ll be testing that theory.”

I tried not to think about what it meant as the word HARMLESS disintegrated into a fine chalky dust as drifted away in the wind.

The Old, Old Unicorn Flower Service

After we’ve run out of things to paint & glue together, Charlie and I will go for a walk. Get out of the house. Burn off some energy.

On Monday, we wandered down the road and found an old graveyard. A large dog we couldn’t see barked anxiously as we passed the gate but the racket of its chain leash settled once we were through. We followed the path, looking at names and ages on gravestones.

“Dad,” Charlotte said.

“Yea kiddo.”

“Can we play hide & seek?”

“It’s not really the place, Charlie... Gotta be careful where we step.”

She leaned against a headstone, arms crossed on the curved top. I weighed the two—her disappointment against seeming disrespectful if anyone else came by.

“One game.”

“OK! You hide! But Dad, no jumping out and saying boo, OK?”

“Sure.”

***

On Tuesday, we agreed we’d play after the graveyard. The dog startled us again, but this time, we were less overwhelmed by the shock of its sudden howling.

“Dad?”

“Yea kid.”

“Are Papa & Opa here?”

“No. They were cremated. You can either sleep in the ground or get turned into dust.”

We’d lost two grandpas in one year. Charlotte understood they weren’t coming back, but the rest of dying meant little to a five-year-old. We’d cried deeply and then we’d made more crafts.

“OK, can we play?”

“After.”

A few gravestones had crumbling green foam bricks mounted on top, with plastic flowers stuck in. The wind had blown the loose ones across the hillside.

“How ‘bout we pick up those flowers and give them back to the people?”

We matched stray flowers to graves by colour, gathering pinks, and returning them to Clarence (41) & Elsie (82). Reds belonged to Bruce (84). Blues were Mildred’s (9).

“Good. I’ll bet they appreciate having those back…”

“Yea!” Jamming another in, Charlotte noticed something else stuck in the foam. A card with a golden horse emblem. “What’s this, Dad?”

“Business card. For the funeral home. Leave it, please.”

“I want one!”

“Alright, buddy.”

***

Wednesday was stormy. We stayed in and made our own business card. She carefully copied the letters I’d written down for her on some scrap paper.

The Old Old Unicorn
Flower Service

“Why’d you write ‘old’ twice, Charlie?”

“Cus the people are really old now. Maybe, 200 or something.”

“Well, no. You stop counting after someone dies.”

“You do? Oh, OK.”

She scrunched her face in disappointment.

***

On Thursday, we made the rounds again. The dog had grown more comfortable with our coming and our going. We left our card with Mildred, but made plans to draw more for everybody else.

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is it sad?” Charlotte asked, struggling to get a bent stem in place.

“You know how you never want bedtime, but I say you have to, anyway?”

She nodded, tongue out in concentration.

“Same idea.”

She pinched the bent end off.

“But then, we do bath, brush teeth, get under blankets. Once you’re through all that, it’s OK, right?”

“Mhmm.” The shortened flower stood. “There, Mildred!”

“Good kid.”

“After flowers, can we play hide & seek again?”

“Sure…”

“No jumping out and saying boo…”

“Nothin’ scary, promise.”

Thanks for reading.

• Aiyas

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[LEFT]

[DAYS]

[22]

“Ha!” I said triumphantly. “Gotcha!”

The initial excitement of not missing the full message quickly gave way to the ongoing worry about what happened after twenty-two days. Ominous.

“Can I get some clarification here!?” I yelled up to the sky.

It simply continued to darken.

“Hello?!”

Another message dropped, an icon again, like the backpack I’d seen yesterday. This time, a battery symbol, a quarter full. It landed just outside my little stone fence, closer to my shelter than I would have liked. More importantly though, someone had heard me. They had heard me ask for clarification, and they had responded, albeit cryptically.

“What’s that mean?!”

Nothing more fell from the sky. The large white countdown and the battery symbol crumbled to dust one by one, and I was on my own once more. Night set in, everything turned black. I climbed back into my hammock.

While I was more comfortable in my improved shelter, somehow the second night felt much longer. My body was exhausted, but I couldn’t seem to turn my mind off. I tried to recollect all the messages that had fallen from the sky, searching for some explanation that made sense. Letters falling from the sky wasn’t normal. I planned out the following day four or five different ways. Then I planned further ahead to what I could reasonably get done in twenty-two days. Had the battery meant they simply couldn’t communicate anymore tonight? Off the recharge? What happened if it ran out of juice entirely? And how did that relate to the countdown? Was rescue was coming in 22 days? Annihilation?! Too many questions, all with no answers.

I tossed and turned. The night crawled along. I could hear more. That first night, the rain had lulled me to sleep. In its stillness though, the second night brought strange sounds all around the shelter. Cracks and creaks echoing through the darkness. Sounds you might expect to hear in the wilderness but amplified by my wandering mind. At one point, I was sure I could hear wailing in the far distance, faint, but vaguely human. It lasted a few minutes and then stopped.

The shelter felt secure. I’d be fine. Eventually, with the distraction of far away memories, my brain stopped nagging and let me drift off.

A few weeks after Hayley had discovered the AERIS seedship project, new neighbours moved in across the hall. Jean-Francois & Madeleine, they were as French-Canadian as anyone I’d ever met. We had them by for dinner and they brought a crokinole board with them. We were in the midst of a heated tournament.

“OK. Can I play the skeptic?”

The couples’ English was still rough, but Jean-Francois had quickly picked up on the appropriate English curses when he missed a shot.

“Dam-eet!” Jean’s piece bounced off a peg and flew completely off the board.

“You? The skeptic?!” my roommate Hayley answered, “Sure, sure, rain on my parade.” She pointed at me, rolled her eyes, and winked at Madeleine. Madeleine seemed quite lost because of the language barrier.

“OK, so they send us off into space, we float around for 25 years and then arrive on some new planet for a fresh start...”

“Mmhm,” Hayley’s tongue stuck out as she lined up her next shot. Despite Jean-Francois’ cursing, the board was full of black pieces, which belonged to him & Hayley. Most of the naked wood pieces, Madeleine & I’s, had been knocked into the gutters. Hayley was quite good at crokinole.

“So we arrive, we start over, but what stops things from going the exact same way they have here on Earth? If we made a mess here, we’ll eventually make one there, right?! We are what we are, sending humans halfway across the universe isn’t going to change that, is it?”

Hayley lined up a perfect shot and sank her puck into the 20-hole at the center of the board.

“Right in the toad!” she shouted, reaching across the table to offer her teammate a high-five. Jean-Francois hesitated, realized what she was doing, and enthusiastically smacked her hand.

Hayley sat back in her seat. “Well, I’m sure they’ve considered that... There must be some kind of plan.”

The neighbours spoke to one another in French, clearly having their own separate conversation at the same time Hayley and I were having ours. Hayley tried to pull us all together.

“Jean. Would you go live on another planet?”

Jean looked confused. “We only just arrived here to our apartment...” he said.

“Sorry, I don’t mean actually, but just for pretend. In your imagination...”

He turned to Madeleine, “Est-ce qu’on irait dans l’espace?”

She smiled politely at me and nodded. “Ahhhh oui, j’aimerais beaucoup voir une autre planète un jour.”

Jean-Francois restated their response in English as best he could, “To have the chance to go to space, we would very much like this.”

“And, do you think,” Hayley began to clear the board as there was no way for Madeleine and I to come back from their lead, “if you went to another place and could start from scratch, plan everything better, choose your travelling partners... do you think things would turn out better than they have here on Earth?”

Jean-Francois and Madeleine whispered to one another in French, parsing Hayley’s question.

“Ah, oui, yes, I think, very much, a nouveau départ is good,” Jean spoke. Madeleine nodded and stacked her pieces, thoughtfully preparing for the next round.

So, last weekend I spent Saturday morning cleaning my workshop. As I did, I found an extra shelf that wasn’t in use and I decided to make my book wall a little more dense. I shifted everything around and added a fifth level. I had an idea while working on it. Here’s a time-lapse I took and the note that I posted…

To re-iterate what I said in the note…

I now have an extra shelf that is in need of books. I would like to fill that shelf with self-published indie books. I’d like to buy at least one indie paperback each month. I’ll share what I add to the shelf as I go. Then, I’ll stare at the covers of my contemporaries’ novels while I sit next to the book wall & chew on my own stories.

The (Very) Official Rules:

1) Please comment below to recommend a good indie book with a cover you love. I’ll refer back to this article every month to find a book. (Fair warning: I’m a fantasy/sci-fi reader primarily, but I’m open to anything that’s well-written & has an inspiring cover. Of course, I can’t promise I’ll be able to add every book that is suggested.)

2) In the interest of spreading the love around, please do not nominate your own book. (The whole idea here is to celebrate our community a little.)

3) I’ll start adding books to the shelf as the ol’ budget allows.

Why am I doing this you may ask?

Because I like looking at books. And I like reading books. And like it or not, you all have become my community and I want to support that community. And because I know how good it feels to have someone buy and value your work (largely because many of you have already demonstrated that to me with my book. You know who you are!). And also because, in a perfect world we’d all have a gazillion book sales and two gazillion readers, but we’re stuck in this imperfect one where we pour ourselves onto the page and kill ourselves editing and struggle to market and shout at an internet that tells us to rush everything, etc., etc.

So, for now, let’s line our walls with each others’ best efforts in order to make enduring this imperfect reality a little more fun.

Rant complete. Keep fighting the good fight. And please send me your reco’s in the comments.

Recommendations So Far:

(Compiled from my earlier Note)

• The Midnight Vault I & II Anthologies

• Delenda Carthago “Nature Against”

• James D. Mills “Ashen Rider”

• Felisa Ordep - Author “Overwhelming Chaos”

• Steve Woh “Aetherion: Emergence”

• Jeremy “Twin Rivers”

• PDSH Newsletter

• Gabrielle Marie Kozak

Hullo! If you’ve just stumbled upon my Substack, welcome. Here is a starting point with which you can orient yourself. I am a Canadian indie author creating speculative fiction. My work blends humour with existential discomfort; it is often dystopian but quietly hopeful.

Quicklinks

• My website

• Purchase my debut novel “Nothing Works, Everything Happens” on Amazon or direct from the author. Please leave a review if you love it.

Some Of My Best Short Stories

• The Old, Old Unicorn Flower Service

• Bittersweet

• Inkjet Rising

• The Last Book Written By A Human

• The Null

• Under Your Cap

• Back In A Few

Ongoing Serial Fiction

• ISLE: Book One
  I am currently writing a biweekly serialized story here on Substack. It is the survival story of a lone ‘astronaut’ on a strange planet. It’s called “ISLE” and you can read the full series from the beginning here.

• The Wayward Paragraphs
  This is a collaboration with a few other writers where we each add an instalment to an ongoing story. Read my contribution here.

Rants About Writing & Creativity

• What Can Stories Give Us?

• On The Shoulders Of Giants (Book recommendations)

• Aiyas Aya’s Indie Bookshelf

Behind The Scenes of “Nothing Works, Everything Happens”

• Easter Eggs: All The Little Secrets in “Nothing Works”

• Playlist: A song for all 29 stories in my book

• Why I Wrote “Nothing Works, Everything Happens”

• How I Wrote “Nothing Works, Everything Happens”

• On Making Things Easy (Why I Included A Reading Legend)

• Audiobook Demo

If you’ve enjoyed something you above and you’d like to support what I do, you can:

• Tell someone about it in the real life world (I still think word of mouth is the most powerful thing)

• There are easily shareable images here if you’d like to share on social media

• Read, purchase, review or comment. Hearing that these words have had an affect in the world is what keeps me writing

I appreciate you taking the time to scour around. I do hope you stay a while!

• Aiyas

The afternoon clouded over, and everything went still. The tide settled into a slow, gentle lapping against the beach. Further out in the water, the waves had all but disappeared. Everything went silent again. Even the breeze had stopped. It was as if someone had hit pause on the entire world.

A part of me wanted to explore. I might find something that could help with building a more reliable shelter. Maybe I could even find an existing cave. If I came up short though, I risked sleeping in the cramped lean-to again. I needed a stable home-base before I started wandering into uncharted territory...

I went to work pulling apart last night’s shelter. There was a hint of sadness as I did. It had kept me dry, but if another storm like that rolled in tonight, I needed something more durable. And more comfortable.

I was forced to rely on my intuition. All that time drawing maps as a kid, not a lot of fort-building for wee Marlowe... Only one way to figure it out. I started by expanding my work area. After disassembling the old shelter and piling the fronds off to one side, I used my axe, which was in pretty rough shape, to clear the brush from an area between four larger trees. This took time, and according to the pack, my axe was down to its last sliver of durability once I finished.

I found another long, flat rock, got down on all fours, and scraped the ground with it. This turned the soil so that I had a nice clearing. With the area bare, I went back and forth between the beach and the shelter, collecting as many rocks as I could find. Each trek to the beach was easy. Easy trek back, with a backpack loaded up, was a slog. It felt like I was being dragged downward, as though gravity got stronger, when I had the backpack full. I lined the perimeter with stones. Keep the critters out. Still had seen no critters, though...

I walked back to the Kehra trees that I’d chopped down. I carried both of the skinny trees back to my ‘yard‘. I lashed the first horizontally between two of the larger palm trees. The first I tied as high as possible, on my tiptoes, which was awkward. Holding up one side of a tree, even a skinny one, with one arm fully extended, and trying to tie a tight knot with the other hand wasn’t easy. I got it done. The second Kehra tree went up parallel to the first, between the opposite palm trees. I didn’t strain so much this time because I wanted the roof to have a slope to this side. I lashed it a few inches lower than the first.

That’d do. With two rails hung between the trees, it was just a matter of putting down layer after layer of palm fronds across them to create a roof. For durability’s sake, I tied the fronds down on the higher side, so that storm winds couldn’t blow them away. I found long sticks to use for the short sides, and then hung fronds down from the rails to make walls on all sides. I left a small gap in the hanging palm fronds on one short side to use as a doorway. By the end of the afternoon, I had a pretty fancy-looking shelter. I stood back and admired my handiwork.

“Not bad for an indoor kid.”

{+5 Base-building}
{+3 Comfort}

“Hey, can I see the totals of all my points?!...”

The bag slumped in the evening sun. Its vents clicked shut. Nope. I spent the rest of the day braiding twine and half-successfully weaving it into a hammock that hung diagonally across the middle of the shelter, between two corner trees. I also tied a hooked stick to a tree to hang the backpack on. It had all really come together. I climbed into the hammock, tensed & unsure that it was strong enough to hold my weight. When it did, my entire body relaxed. I had a hammock. Inside a shelter! I could feel my nerves going still for the first time since I’d landed. My mind went blank as I rested my head back. Today held no more tasks to be done. I tensed every muscle one by one just to release them all and feel the stress leave.

“Aughhh yeuuuhh.”

The lapping waves had stopped entirely. The sky was a placid gray curtain. My body was quiet. Absolute calm. Just the slow swinging of my hammock against the tree bark.

And then it grew. Involuntarily. All that energy that I’d released came rushing back and burst out of my lungs as maniacal laughter. I couldn’t stop it. The levee broke and euphoria poured in.

“I’ve got a house! Ahahaha!”

For five good minutes, I belted it out into the quiet of the island. Drunk on laughter. Wheezing in between the outbursts.

“I built a house, backpack!”

The sun set over the water, and the world turned orange. Still I chortled until my stomach hurt. It rang out across the open water. The laughter got so out of control that I started to cough.

“I’m gonna sleep so good tonight!”

I almost wanted it to rain as I lay in the shelter. I wanted to put it to the test. The evening remained eerily calm. The sun disappeared over the ocean. I tried for a long while to make fire by rubbing two sticks together, but I got nowhere with it. I decided it was best to conserve my energy and enjoy my hammock. Just as I began to drift off, I heard the thuds again. One, two, and three. This time I was quick. I was on my feet and out the ‘door‘ as soon as I heard the first sky message land.

[LEFT]

[DAYS]

[22]

“Ha!” I said triumphantly. “Gotcha!”

It’s not Easter, but I do have eggs for you. My first novel “Nothing Works, Everything Happens” is leaving KU exclusivity this week. In preparing it for a wider release, I’ve cracked the spine open for the first time since my final, really-for-real-final, FINALFINAL! round of edits. I’ve been noticing little details that I’d already forgotten were hidden in there.

In today’s article, I’m going to lay out all of the Easter Eggs in the book. Folks who have read it can chuckle at how many they noticed or how many they might’ve missed. Here is the full list of every little hidden nod...

Needless to say, if you are still planning to read the book and would prefer to go into it entirely blind, read no further. Mild spoilers ahead.

AI-Y45 & AI-Z95

The book opens with “Press On”, in which a long obsolete robot (AI-Y45) looks out at the long desolate planet Earth. In a later story, “The Last Book Written by a Human”, a more advanced version of the same android model (AI-Z95) scours a library to absorb all the knowledge within it. Technically, “Press On” is actually far later in the timeline, and so the older model has outlasted the fancy new one.

The Cave

This one is perhaps obvious, but each ‘chapter’ title of The Cave is lifted straight out of Plato’s Allegory. This story was explicitly written to modernize that warning. Rather than discovering that we’ve been trapped in a tiny, dark cave our entire lives (and resisting the belief that there’s a whole world out there), this story does the opposite. We discover that all our freedom and bright colours in infinite VR worlds is a cave of our own making after we’ve forgotten physical reality.

Maude

Maude, the angry woman who hates her AI-obsessed neighbours in “Baseball”, is also the violent elderly widow in “Nothing Works, Everything Happens”. The hologram that her grandchildren gift her is her husband Henry.

Monolith TM

In “Deep Futures”, the monopolistic company that Donova asks after 500 years in the future (curious if it still owns everything) is the same company that is trying to get the woman to spend the $5 she found on the sidewalk in “Budget”.

The Great Divide

“The Great Divide” ends on a cliffhanger where we don’t know whether Claire tells her boss about the cure for aging she’s discovered. While “The Great Divide [Epilogue]” doesn’t state it explicitly, the letter from the father deciding he doesn’t want to live forever is meant to be a sign that Claire did tell her boss, and that he did release it freely for everyone.

The Geezers

The old men who have preserved their consciousnesses past their own deaths in “Geezers” are the same dispersing space clouds speaking to one another through the aether in “Interlude”. Cecil & Albert, or at least the clouds that contain their psyches have managed to outlast the entire universe. They are the last conscious beings after entropy has pulled everything else apart.

Space Junk

Less of an Easter Egg, but something I’ve spoken with many readers about is that Space Junk was written as an exercise in telling a singular narrative while each instalment shifts focus between each crew member’s perspective. Xo/o, Naemu, Captain, O/ox and then Ogre. Part VI, the finale, then zooms out to a more omniscient view for the big pay-off.

Donk

Everything makes a ‘donk’ sound. I don’t know why I was obsessed with ‘donk’ while I wrote this book, but I used it often.

Binary: Reflections on the Happiness of Digital Lifeforms

This book is passed over by AI-Z95 in the massive library it is reading through. In a later story, it is the first book Dietr manages to read after his duties babysitting the core reactor have become all-consuming.

Cosmic Lemon

In case you were wondering, yes, literally every word that the Mars rover says is from the actual message Jimmy Carter included with Carl Sagan’s Voyager Golden Record. And yes, it took a very long time to write, check, re-check & then triple-check these in order to conform to that.

Bad Puns

If I could have made every chapter title a bad pun, I would have. Here are a few that I managed to sneak into the final book…

• To Waver (or waiver) in the Heat of Battle

• Press On is meant in the sense of ‘carrying on’, but it’s also the first story in the book, which is how I came to the title (in the sense of pressing the on button)

• Cosmic Lemon, in-world, is a soda brand, but the story is more literally about a broken machine abandoned to the cosmos by an alien civilization.

• Jones’ Space Peas is about a man finding his inner peace while marooned on an exoplanet. Space peas, space peace, yup…

Book Ends

Every story in the book is arguably an archival data entry that AI-Y45 is presenting to the mutation in order to better explain human behaviour. This is why the entire book is sandwiched between “Press On” Parts I & II. I leave that for you to decide.

Nocturnal Creatures

Keep an eye out for the strange, alien creatures from “We Only Come Out At Night”. They may be making an appearance elsewhere sometime soon…

There are absolutely more little hidden nuggets that I’ve managed to miss, but there you are, a few of the Easter Eggs within “Nothing Works, Everything Happens”.

If you’ve perused this without having read the book and, despite your confusion, you are intrigued, the book is still available for purchase here. More details on the wider release to come. Thanks for being here.

• Aiyas

Thank you for the votes, thoughts, and encouragement. By my count, the votes were suitcase (6), hat (4), bowl (2), desk (2). I sat down in the wee hours with a suitcase in mind, wrestled with it for a good while, and then pivoted into a story very much about hats instead. A happy accident, I think. Here’s what I’ve come up with. I’m not yet sharing this as a newsletter (it’s still a first draft), but if it happens to cross your feed before Wednesday, I’d really appreciate any thoughts you have. I’ve genuinely no idea what the library group is like, so fingers crossed it lands.

P.S. I also used a lot of Substack-recommended music while writing this thing. Thanks for that too, it definitely influenced this piece.

Under Your Cap

Phillip’s favourite thing about his wife’s new hat was its stature. It started from the back of her neck and rose twelve inches above her forehead to what one might expect to be its pinnacle, then contracted into a second tier, and rose another six inches beyond that. Its towering architecture required her to contort down low into the passenger seat as they drove. Her seatbelt sat uncomfortably high as she swiped around on her phone.

“Temperature is nice,” she said.

Phillip nodded. The snug strap of his own hat restricted his motion.

“But wind gusts are up to 60km by sunset...” His wife, Sadie, tsked.

“Cripes,” Phillip worried. “It’ll be even worse by the bluffs...” His jaw clenched against the strap, and he sped up without realizing it.

As they arrived at the parking lot, Phillip could see the party setup from the car–a beautifully arranged autumn scene overlooking the bluffs. One long table with a stark white runner rustled gently in the not-yet-worrisome breeze. A group of their closest friends milled about on the manicured grounds between the outdoor dining area and an opulent clubhouse. Guests rotated around one another carefully, like ships avoiding collision. The few who did embrace directly did so at carefully opposed angles, avoiding any unnecessary jostling. Music played from an outdoor speaker system, but it was silently and unanimously decided that no one would be dancing.

“Bold crown height,” someone said to Sadie as she and Phillip joined the gathering.

“Thank you. Imported felt.”

“Looks very secure,” another guest added, adjusting their own straps guardedly.

Daniella, the cause for the celebration, appeared from the clubhouse with a flourish. Already, she was a few glasses of wine deep and was leaning into being the center of attention. Phillip tensed as he watched her narrowly miss the head jamb of the clubhouse’s low doorway.

“My lovelies! Oh, and look at all these luscious chapeaus!” Low-hanging tails of lacey fabric hung from her outstretched arms as she greeted her guests. Matching accoutrements flowed from her hat and veiled the sides and back of her head.

“Oh, this cloche, Daniella!” admired a guest that Phillip didn’t recognize. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen!”

“It’s 2044, dear... time for something daring, wouldn’t you say?” Daniella spoke with such confidence. Phillip suddenly felt underdressed in his smoking cap. He smiled, and found a moment where no one, including his wife, was looking to pull it low to his ears.

The group found their seats at the table as the first course emerged from the clubhouse, carried on fancy silver platters by flat-capped serving staff. No one removed their headpiece as the meal began.

“Have you heard about the Europeans?” a woman with a full floral arrangement atop her bonnet asked. “Sports visors! Pillboxes! Whoopee caps! Barely covered! Can you believe that?”

“So lax... so liberated...” Daniella echoed.

“So lewd,” an older gentleman in a well-worn Sou’wester chimed in.

Just as the staff unveiled the partygoers’ appetizers, the unthinkable happened. A violent cross-breeze swept up from the cliff-side and moved through the group like a tempest. These were the gusts Sadie had worried about. Bedlam erupted as vases fell from the table and serving trays were fumbled. Guests grabbed for their brims in unison.

It was Sadie who got it the worst. Her tall hat lifted cleanly into the air, floated out over the edge of the bluff, and was gracefully discarded down to the sea.

Everyone immediately averted their eyes from one another politely, all except Sadie. In her shock, she scanned the other partygoers. A panicked woman retrieved her fedora from the punch bowl. A man chased his magnificently feathered cap as it cartwheeled across the grounds. She could have sworn that one woman, clutching desperately to a particularly wide-brim, lifted off the ground a little as she tried to keep her hat firmly attached to her head. And then, Sadie made eye contact with Phillip.

He had shielded his gaze with a cupped palm, and having seen her new hat disappear over the cliff’s edge, had turned to focus solely on his wife.

He saw her. He saw her bare head.

Smooth. Pale. Completely bald.

Sadie stared back horror.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

Another guest peeked, set down his champagne glass, and clung to the earflaps of his deerstalker, mouth agape.

Bald.

Everyone was bald.

Phillip leapt into action, removing his own hat, snapping the strap under his wife’s chin and rushing her off into the clubhouse.

Husband & wife sat with their backs against the tub of the opulent guest bathroom. The door was latched. Phillip’s hat had been tossed into the gold-edged sink.

“Can I...” Phillip swallowed. “Can I touch it?”

In the intimacy of the moment, neither could resist the teeth-bearing grin spreading across their faces.

“It’s so... smooth...” he giggled.

Sadie reached up and softly ran her palm across Phillip’s cranium.

“Yours too,” she whispered, as though telling a secret. Her shoulders pushed up to her ears, and her grin widened. The baldness at the back of her head folded.

“How long have you been...”

“12 years... It all fell out twelve years ago.”

“Me too!”

They both burst into laughter. Twelve years of hiding escaped. Their joy echoed through the bathroom door and down the hall. Sadie leaned in and placed her shiny forehead against her husband’s. Their faces had not been this close a long, long time. They leaned into one another, still smiling as the laughter subsided.

“I’ve got an extra bucket hat in the back of the car...” Sadie finally said.

Phillip nodded awkwardly, their scalp wrinkles still intertwined. He closed his eyes for the briefest moment, enjoying it fully. Then he stood, gathered his smoking cap, and adjusted it in the mirror to maximize coverage. “I’ll go grab it...” He gave his bald wife one more chaste grin and headed back out through the party toward the car.

1000 words, ~5 minute read
Recommended listening while you read: Winter Melon Valley by Leon Chang
Day 2 on the island, midday

If you’re new here, hop back to the Table Of Contents.

After breakfast, I took stock. The sea had calmed since the storm. The sun had returned, and again the whole thing looked too good to be true. I cupped my hands over my brow and scanned the horizon. I thought I could now see far enough into the distant waters to make out a vague shape, but it was too far to be sure the light wasn’t playing tricks on me.

I sat cross-legged in the sand, with my digging rock, a big stick, and a palm frond laid out in front of me. First, I peeled leaves from the palm frond and braided them together. I tugged on both ends as hard as I could; surprisingly strong cord. I braided four short lengths and laid these out on the ground as well. Like a surgeon delicately organizing her tools. Next, I spent twenty minutes banging my digging rock against one end of the stick. I would hit it, rotate 90 degrees, then hit it again. Eventually, I’d carved a four inch deep X shape in one end. I jammed my digging rock into one of the grooves. It was snug, but I used the palm cordage to further secure it, weaving back and forth through the X and tying off the ends.

Behind me, I heard the click of valves on the backpack release, the air crackled, and the smell of faint burning wafted down to where I sat. What was the backpack igniting in order to project onto thin air like this? Text appeared in my periphery.

{Crafting +3}

“Ha! Clever little rucksack…”

I admired my newly crafted axe and held it up for the backpack to see. Pretty crude, but for what I had in mind, it would do the trick.

With the axe in one hand, I retrieved the strange fruit I’d found. I peeled my ‘tablecloth’ off the driftwood ‘table’ and set the fruit in a divot. I pulled the axe high over my head and brought it down hard. And missed completely. I wound up a little less dramatically, again bringing the axe down on the strange fruit. The jelly-like exterior split right down the middle, exposing the orange pit at the center.

Maybe if I disassembled it, I’d learn something?! I peeled away the transparent jelly exterior of one half and held the core up to the light. It had a texture like a mango, but the purple dots all throughout the mealy orange flesh made it look more like a strangely coloured kiwi. I rolled it apart between my fingers, examining the purple bits, trying to do anything that might trigger more details about it to float up from the rucksack.

Nothing.

I waited a minute in case there was some sort of lag. The gooey interior of the fruit-thing had a cooling sensation on my hands.

Still nothing.

My impatience got the better of me. I bent down, grabbed the other, still intact, half of the fruit, and quickly took a bite. It was incredible. Compared to the hardtack, the flavour was mouth-watering–a jolt of energy. My tongue tingled. The sweetness, the sugary taste, the soft melting of the jelly-like exterior.

“Oh! Oh! Ooooh! This is good. This is so, so good!”

Another rush of air, a sizzle & a flash.

{Kehra Seed Pod | Effects: +Hydration, +Sustenance}

The backpack’s projection floated right above the half-gnawed fruit.

“Well, that was lucky.”

I made a mental note to never do that again. Action is good, but that was impulsive. I pulled my axe out of the driftwood and went hunting for more Kehra Seed Pods.

A few hours later, at around midday, I had eight Kehra Seed Pods in my pack.

I had only ventured a little ways into the overgrowth nearby my temporary shelter. They were easy to spot, up near the tops of a long, skinny, branchless tree I didn’t recognize. But gathering eight of them had taken me a long time. Clearly, they weren’t growing in abundance, at least not here.

I’d got the first few by chopping down the entire tree with my axe. It was only an inch or two thick, so I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. The tree itself felt rubbery as I hacked at it. My axe would bounce back unnaturally with every strike. By the time the first two Kehra trees fell, the pack had flashed an orange durability meter above my axe. The thicker line segment was less than 1/4 of the way across. Though, this had scored me points.

{Foraging +1}

Foraging was new.

“What do we have so far?” I asked the backpack. “Foraging, crafting, base-building, athletics, comfort & cartography. How many of these are there?!”

My axe would have broken before I got another tree down. So, I resorted to simply shaking the hell out of any other Kehra trees I could find, in order to coax their fruits to drop to the forest floor.

I came back to my makeshift shelter to make a plan and eat some lunch. I ate three of the eight Kehra pods. It was good to save the hardtack and bottled water for emergencies, but the seed pods were more of a snack than a meal. I was going to need to gather a lot more of them if they were going to be my primary source of food.

I took my last bite, a modest sip from my bottled water, and felt ready to take on the afternoon’s project...

I’d like to share some more original fiction with you this week. This is a story I wrote for the NYC Midnight 500 Word Challenge last year. The prompts I received were Genre: Horror, Object: Firetruck, Action: Racing. This story was awarded second place in its cohort.

While I very rarely write horror, I’m proud of this one. There’s something about the The Null that fits modern days…

The Null

The crowd stood and stared. The creature was boundless, impossible to ignore. It came from above—a grotesque, otherworldly shadow, a black hole in the murky silhouette of a giant leech.

Emergency vehicles arrived. First responders stepped from their firetrucks & ambulances, looked up, and froze in awe. I, too, was drawn helplessly toward the towering darkness.

The horror spread. Thick tendrils snapped out violently, painting the world with the absence of all that had been there a moment before. The creature was magnetic, all-consuming nothingness; a deep, gnawing void against the looming gray clouds. It emptied everything it touched. To witness it was vacant stimulation, the warm embrace of thoughtlessness, a desperate soothing comfort.

Careers, families, all sense of having a place in the world disappeared. Years of striving melted away. Desire stood irrelevant next to the beast. There was only unshakable inertia. Each glimpse of its monstrosity reassured the crowd—none of this mattered anymore.

Sirens wound down as the vehicle engines stopped in unison.

Silence.

A low, guttural chant, the sound of an emptying drain, pulsed from deep within the creature’s maw. It spoke a language only the subconscious understood. People around me lay down on the rain-slick pavement.

Then I heard voices. They were unfocused, far off, no matter how close or how loud they grew. Someone grabbed my hand and pulled. I was suddenly aware of my wits unraveling. Parts of me rebelled. I was supposed to meet an old friend. I had to pick up my kids in an hour.

“Look at me,” a stranger’s voice came through clearly. She held a thick, dark green slicker over her head with one arm, shielding her eyes. Balled-up tissues plugged her ears and nostrils.

“Hey! Look at me!” She didn’t take her eyes off the ground as she spoke. Her hands shook.

The group she was with moved through the crowd, grabbing others at random and attempting to pull them away. She tugged my arm again. My legs followed, but I kept my gaze over my shoulder, staring as long as I could.

We raced away on foot. I had no sense of time. The sound of our shoes interrupted the creature’s song. I was pulled.

Footsteps.

Then, we were out of view. We stood in a public park, blocks from where we’d been. A deeper emptiness rushed in. I lost myself.

“You still with us?” the stranger asked.

I had no response.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“I... I don’t think it matters.”

“Where are you from? Who were you with?” she pried.

I shrugged, unconcerned.

The stranger lifted off her raincoat. She finally looked up. She studied my eyes. Another distant voice said, “We gotta keep moving!”

She gave me a last hard look. I felt her squeeze my hand. She said, “I’m sorry.”

I watched her race off again. It didn’t matter. It was nothing. I lay down on the grass. I pressed an ear to the ground to better hear the creature’s numbing rumble.

“I dunno, Marlowe, this seems sort of legit…”

My roommate, Hayley and I are walking across campus on an early foggy morning. She flicks her finger, scrolling through a website on her phone, not watching where she’s walking.

“It’s got the A.E.R.I.S. logo in the footer and everything…”

She turns her phone to show me. I nod and take a sip of my coffee. It’s tastes burnt. Times like these, I wish I took sugar. We need a new coffeemaker.

“O.K. Let’s hear it…” I capitulate.

“It’s like I told you. We volunteer, we do a little training, they load us up on a spaceship and shoot us off into space. We get to start fresh.”

“Seems like a scam somehow. Why recruit from the public?” I ask.

“Well, the ships don’t come back. It’s a one-way thing. Guess it’s not easy finding volunteers for that.”

“Hm.”

Hayley pulls her phone closer to her face and keeps reading. The fog makes everything seem like it’s hiding. Century-old brown brick buildings peek out of the mist. The ones in the distance look more like mountains than lecture halls. Hayley’s shoes clack on the stones as we walk.

“Take twenty-five years to get to where it’s going…” she mutters.

“Twenty-five years? That’s a long time…”

“Yeah. It is…”

She trips up on a crack in the path but maintains her focus as she reads.

“Heh. You don’t actually lose those years…”

“Huh?!”

“Yeah, you don’t sleep through it or whatever, like the movies. Or, you sleep sometimes, but not only sleep… They call it a ‘cryopod‘. Everyone isolates in one, and you have to keep your metabolism slow, but you can still do whatever you like. Low energy things…”

“Like what?”

“I dunno, anything that’s relaxed. Could read a lot of books or watch a lot of movies in 25 years…”

I tilt my head to one side and consider it, shrugging and nodding in agreement. Then I grab Hayley’s arm and steer her as we turn onto a connecting path. She looks up for a brief moment and gives me a quick smile.

“Yea, this sounds amazing,” she mumbles to herself. “Twenty five years of nothing but lazy Sundays in a cryopod, then a brand new life on a planet that isn’t overcrowded, where things haven’t gone to sh…”

“Marlowe Halcott, can I get a minute?” A voice calls from a building to our left. I turn to see Professor Selwyn holding open a heavy metal door. Her hand still presses down firmly on the metal rod, she uses a foot to brace open the heavy weight. I raise a hand in acknowledgement.

“Let’s talk more about this later…” I say to Hayley as I turn and walk across the grass.

I woke up at first light. After last night’s ominous message, made more ominous by the missing integral first word, everything felt heavy. I yawned and then deflated. The reality of where I was and the difficulty of survival set in. I lay there in a moment of vulnerability. The rain had stopped, save for the lazy tap, tap of drips from massive monsteras. I stretched both arms out of the entrance. My muscles felt sore, but I had energy again.

The storm had done damage to my shelter. Throughout the night, I’d woken up to the wind blowing palm fronds off. I’d simply curled up smaller and fallen back to sleep. I could now see cracks of light where layers of leaves had become thin. The backpack lit up with another hiss in the air. A bar, similar to what I’d seen with the inventory, floated up near the roof of the shelter. A minimal thin white line with a thicker segment extending halfway across it.

“Durability…”

I exited the shelter and started picking up the few palm fronds that hadn’t blown too far. I set them back onto the shelter and the thicker segment inched forward just a little.

“Today’s job… something more reliable.” My calves cramped up. “…And more spacious.”

The trees sagged low, heavy under the weight that the passing storm had left; branches had become tangled together in the wind. It exaggerated the unfamiliarity of the flora here. Some of these trees weren’t right. Looking deeper into the forest, it grew more & more dense. I’d need better footwear before I attempted that. Through the thick foliage, a tall rocky outcropping jutted up above the treetops. That could be a good place to get a lay of the land…

I pulled a large leaf off a nearby plant I didn’t recognize and dragged two other wide pieces of driftwood out onto the beach. I wrapped the leaf over both and tucked its edges underneath. A makeshift table. A relatively flat surface at the very least. I paused for a moment, expecting a comfort point to float up. It didn’t.

“Thrifty this morning, are we?”

I grabbed the rucksack and dug around inside. I broke off a ration of hardtack and pulled out a bottle of water, then calmly took the time to arrange them neatly on my makeshift table.

“Lovely. Breakfast.”

No one around the table to laugh at bad jokes. No hint of real flavour in sight. The hardtack was joyless. But, still, breakfast. Lovely. As I ate and drank, I thought about Comfort points. And Cartography points. And Base-building points… Where were these points going? I tried to tally them up with my finger in the sand, but I’d already lost count.