X: Xavier and the X-Ray Eyes

 

Flash Fiction Friday: a bit of space silliness

Xavier and the X-Ray Eyes

Xavier and the X-Ray Eyes

Xavier Xanthum explored space.  With his Arcturian Warp drive, he’d been doing it long enough that time and age no longer had any meaning for him.  Twice he had passed through random uncertainty fields, and met himself coming.  Once he’d hit something strange, and the next ship he met told him a hundred years had passed.  He'd aged two days.

After that one, he’d sold his ship to an antique dealer for enough to buy one of the new-fangled ships with an even better faster-than-light drive, one that was guaranteed to keep him from ever being stranded in a gravity well or adrift between galaxies, both of which had happened to him in the past.

All of which is to say he'd seen plenty of weird things in his indeterminately long life.  None of them prepared him for the eyeballs.

The eyeballs first appeared in the galley.  That was where Xavier usually saw odd things, because this new ship’s robo-kitchen had some very strange menu items.  He didn't think anything of it until he'd had a good sleep and awakened to find the eyes still watching him.

He didn't know then what they could do.  He only knew that there was now some kind of alien--something--sharing his ship.  He supposed he might have picked it up in that last singularity, or maybe it--they?--came aboard from one of the planets he'd visited.  Maybe the one that he'd thought was uninhabited.  It would have been easy to miss a modest population of disembodied eyeballs.

After a week he began to notice that he was seeing things.  Not seeing things the way he did when the robo-kitchen got too imaginative.  That made him see things that were not there.  Now he was seeing things that were there, but not here.  He called it X-ray vision, but it wasn't really.  Not like the kind he'd dreamed of as a kid, that let you see through clothes and into locked safes.

But he found that he could see whatever the eyeballs were seeing.  Even if they were in a different part of the ship.  And they could see a wider spectrum than he could.  He stopped burning himself on his coffee, because he could see when it was too hot.  If, that is, the eyes happened to look at the coffee.

It was when the turbo-warp booster started acting up that Xavier got serious about the need to communicate with the eyes.  He couldn't fit even his face into the service tube, so he was trying to install the replacement twerger by feel, and it wasn't working.  He realized that the eyes could fit in the tube easily, and then he'd be able to "see" it all.  But he had to find a way to tell them where to go, and to keep them looking at the repair until he'd finished.  The eyes had a limited attention span, and were always drifting off after dust motes.

Xavier now had a near-perfect understanding of the air filtration system, but he needed something more.  How did you communicate with something that had no ears, and maybe even no brain? 

No, that wasn't right.  The things were flighty, but there was an intelligence there.  He tried sign language, since that was visual.

Signs meant nothing to an entity with no body.

Writing came next.  Again, beings with no corporeal presence had no way to develop a written language.  The eyeballs glanced at his message and drifted off after a dust mote.

With the ship drifting helplessly in space somewhere between the Horsehead Nebula and an unnamed star system he wanted to investigate, Xavier grew frustrated.

"Blast it all!" he exclaimed.  "How in space am I supposed to tell you what I want?"  His voice squeaked.  He wondered how long it had been since he'd spoken aloud.

The eyes turned to look at him.  And the answer appeared in his brain.

Just say it.

Unwilling to believe that the eyeballs had ears, Xavier tried an experiment first.  He thought back at them.  You know what I'm saying?

There was no response.  He said it aloud this time.

"You understand what I say?"

Of course.

Cheeky beggar.  "How can you--never mind now.  Let's fix this drive."  Years of talking to hallucinations had made it easy for him to adjust to the idea of talking to a pair of eyeballs.  He explained what he needed, and received the promise that it could be done.  The eyes disappeared down the repair shaft, and an hour later the ship was up and running.

After that, Xavier began to enjoy the eyes.  Not only did they give him "x-ray" insights into the bowels of the ship, but he enjoyed having someone to talk to.  In an odd sort of way, they became friends.

It wasn’t until the eyes helped him through a second repair that he realized the truth.

The eyeballs were a part of the ship.  The part that prevented him from being stranded, because they not only could see all the places he needed to work, but they knew what needed to be done.

The eyeballs were a manifestation of the ship’s computer.  A computer that perhaps had grown as bored with the empty space between ports as he had.  Were they part of the original program.  He asked.

No. 

After a long, thoughtful silence, Xavier asked no further.

Lost in Space--Flash Fiction Challenge

I've bitten on another Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction challenge.  Playing on the "write what you know" meme, he asked us to take an incident from life and turn it into a bit of fiction, preferably genre fiction.  I'm going to take a pan that once went missing right in my house, and put it with a ghost on a space ship.  It's 1000 words max, but I came in well below.

***************************

Arthur had waited a long time for the chance to steal something.  He didn't even know why he had to, but ever since he’d died he’d felt like he couldn’t move on until he stole something from the living.  And there is so little on a space ship that isn't fastened down.  He couldn't believe his luck when he saw the frying pan, just lying on the counter like an abandoned sock.  As soon as he wrapped his ghostly hand around the panhandle, the whole thing vanished into the seventh dimension, where neither ghost nor living human could enjoy it. What was the point?

 *  *  *

Sarah was unpacking the shuttle.  They'd had a good holiday Down Below, but it felt good to be home again.  She and Gil had lived aboard the Lady Luck since they were married four years ago, and this had been their first real trip dirtside.  Haven was a fully Earth-like planet, and very little developed, so they'd been able to land the shuttle where they wanted and had enjoyed a grand week of fishing--you could even eat the local fish--and a lot of lying in the sun.

 She pulled the kitchen supply bin out of the shuttle, and the frying pan that had cooked so much tasty fish tottered on the top.  She didn't want it to fall, so she set it aside on the mechanic's bench and carried the box into the dining bay.  Some spacers let the machines do all the cooking, but Sarah liked to cook. She'd grown up dirtside on Golden, and always stocked up on what she called real food.  Gil laughed at her, and sometimes grumbled about the extra space her kitchen supplies took up, but he liked her cooking and humored her.  Still, he let her haul all the kitchen stuff off and put it away.

 Sarah puttered around the dining bay happily stowing her gear, then a glance at the chronograph told her it was time to fix some dinner, so she got on with it.  Just a simple dish, the last of the campfire bread she'd baked that morning, and a bit of the local cheese.

 It wasn't until the next morning that either she or Gil remembered the frying pan, when she wanted it to cook up some bacon she’d picked up in port.  She sent him to fetch it.  Gil came back in a minute.

 "It's not there.  Are you sure you didn't bring it up here?"

 Sarah sighed.  Typical male.  Couldn’t find his head if it wasn’t attached.  "I'll go.  I know just where I put it."  She did, too.  The trouble was, it wasn't there.  The bench was cleared and secured for zero-G, though they were still running the gravitation motor.  There was no frying pan on it.  She searched the cargo bay, then each part of the ship, even the ones they hadn’t entered since returning.

 There was no frying pan anywhere.

 "Gil, it isn't there.  And I KNOW I left it right on the counter.  Could the cleaning ’bot have picked it up?"

 "I didn’t run it last night, since we’d just got back. Anyway, it’s programmed to avoid the mechanic’s bench.  We’re the only people on this vessel, and we didn’t either of us touch it.” 

Sarah looked at him suspiciously.  ‘Are you sure. . . I know you think my cooking gear is an extravagance.”

 “Swear by all that’s sacred.  Anyway, I would never get rid of that pan when you had bacon to fry!”

 “I suppose not.  It’s gone, but no one and nothing could have picked it up."

 "Only a ghost," he said, and they laughed.

 * * *

Down in the cargo bay, Arthur’s last thought as he slipped into the eighth dimension was that, at last, he knew why he had to steal.  He’d never see that pan again—but it had freed him at last of the blasted ship.

Free Story!

I'm moving a little slowly, but picked up at last on a challenge put out by fellow-lunatic, I mean writer, Gus Sanchez back in September.

Now that I'm waiting on feedback on the Ninja Librarian, I thought I'd keep my chops in shape with some short stories, and a writing prompt is a nice starter.  So I followed Gus's link to http://thestorystarter.com/ and clicked the random phrase generator until I got something I liked (I did notice a certain tendency to reuse a few phrases.  Lots of stories about avoiding arguments!).  I settled on the prompt,

The veteran kindergartener threw a feather within the space ship to avoid the argument.

Here's my story:

Feathers in Space 

"Class! Class!  Please line up for roll-call!"  The teacher sounded weary, even at the start of the day, as all adults did in the gravitational sector of the ship.  Children were allowed to spend at most two hours a day in zero G, but to save power--the artificial gravity field took a lot of power--most of the ship had little or no gravity, and adults spent little time under gravitational pull.  So even the teacher, who was in the Field more than most, moved and spoke slowly and with fatigue.

Max knew that.  He'd been in he kindergarten class for as long as he could remember--at least two sets of children had come and gone while he stayed on.  He couldn't believe that only he had figured out that graduating from kindergarten was for chumps.  He'd talked to older kids--they could have been his brothers; who knew?  No one knew their family on the ship.  Families were a luxury, like gravity.  Everything was communal, and the population was strictly managed to maintain the exact number of inhabitants desired.

Anyway, those older kids had told him the sad truth: after kindergarten there was no more nap time, which was a good thing, but there were no more snacks, either.  And you had to learn strange things called grammar and algebra, and the history of the Earth, which seemed stupid even to a little kid.

Earth might as well be a myth, for all the good it would do them.  The colony ship was never going back, and wherever they were going, it would be different.  Even the youngest kindergarteners, who were a lot younger than Max, could figure that out.  Besides, the teen who had taught him the skills needed to survive in the Ship said that they wouldn't even get there in Max's lifetime.  He would spend his life on the Ship, which was fine with Max.

So Max decided early on that he'd just stay in kindergarten, with the toys and snacks.  The teachers never seemed to notice--they had to rotate teachers in and out every few weeks.  Max thought it was because the gravity took such a toll on them.  Or maybe it was the children.  Karl, his teenaged friend, said it was so that all the adults could spend enough time in the gravity field to stay healthy.  The actual teaching was done by computers, anyway, so the teacher didn't matter much.

Whatever.  The rotating teachers meant that no one really kept track of things.  Including Max.

He was starting to get taller, though, and soon someone was going to ask the question he didn't want to answer: how old was he, anyway?

In fact, the teacher, having gotten them all to  line up--the last teacher had insisted they sit in their desk-pods for roll, so it was a change and took them by surprise--was calling down the list of names.  Of their full names, which gave Max a jolt.

"Suzy TenSevenTwelve.  Johann FourTwentytwoTwelve."  Since no one knew his--or her, needless to say--parents, children were surnamed by their hatchdate.  First names came from a random name generator in the Ship's computer.  Later, they would get surnames to match their work specialties.

"Maxwell SevenForuteenTen."  The teacher halted.  She looked around for the child who matched the name.  "Maxwell?  Is this correct?  Are you a Ten child?

Max pretended he didn't know who she was talking to.  It didn't work.  He stood a head taller than any other child in the class.

"Maxwell," the teacher asked, confused but trying to be kind.  "Have you had a problem with kindergarten?"

Max shook his head.  No, he had no problem with kindergarten at all.  That was why he was staying.  But that didn't seem to be what the woman meant.

"It looks as though they haven't moved you on to first grade.  Or," she looked at him dubiously, "have they misprinted your hatchdate?"

Max didn't like the direction this was taking.  Desperately, he looked around for a distraction.  Suzy was playing with a large feather, collected from some bird in the farm area--another place where they had to keep the gravitational field on.  Max reached over, snatched the feather, and threw it toward Rommel.  It wasn't much of a missile, but Rommel could always be counted on to raise a distracting fuss.

Suzy yelled, but the feather never reached Rommel.  Caught by the steady suction from the air duct, it moved further upward, and disappeared into the opening, where there should have been a grate.  That morning, there wasn't.

As everyone stared at the place where the feather no longer drifted, an alarm began to sound.

Max had a very bad feeling about this.  He'd been in kindergarten along enough to know.