Flipsider*

“I need to piss." ‎‎ by @wannabe-rocketman

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Flipsider* MASTER POST

Astronaut Seamus Banks wakes up to two dead crewmates and a snarky AI named Sammy for company. The two find themselves on a mission to research a wormhole in the Oort Cloud 1.28 light years from home. Who knows what they’ll find.

TABLE OF CONTENTS WITH LINKS BELOW

1. Nobody Home

1.5. Still Nobody Home

2. Once in a Lifetime

3. Champagne Supernova

4. Fearless

5. Dirty Work

MORE TO COME

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i’ve had three chapters already out for a while but i’m a lazy piece of shit yall are gonna have to wait for it to hit tumblr also new cover yayyy woohooo

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Flipsider* CHAPTER FIVE: DIRTY WORK

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

My bottom hits my seat and I scooch it forward a smidge towards the table in front of me. My eyes scan the room around me. Just a meeting room. There is a bunch of neat posters on the wall, though. Even the boring parts of Johnson Space Center are cool. I take a can of Arizona out of my backpack. Mucho Mango. Yummy. I crack it open (I pry the tab open with my teeth because my nails are too short) and take sip after sip after sip. I am parched. I gulp some more down and— "Hack! Khh— sh— auck—shit!" That went down the wrong pipe! I keep on coughing while I gulp down some more drink to relieve my throat. I feel a tap on my shoulder.

"Dude, are you fine?" It's the black-haired lady sitting next to me.

"Hel—hi... yep. I'm good," I spit out raspily while shakily holding a thumbs-up. I scan the room and there's a sizeable amount of eyes looking at me. I turn back to the lady. "I don'— what's your... your name?" 

"Maggie Baxter!"

"Mmm-hmm," I respond while I nod. "Good to know," I say as I draw a face on the notebook paper in front of me. That's my good pen.

Baxter stares at me for a solid five seconds, wearing an awkward grin on her face. "Well hello, Mr. Good Tuno," she says with a small giggle in her voice. 

My name! "Oh! Me! I am— my name is Sssseamus Banks," I answer. "Just... waiting for this to start."

"Oof... I can tell. Speaking of your name, the seating chart entailed an Irishman."

I giggle to myself briefly. "So what— what actually happened is umm... there was this... this giant vat of brown gravy— Ha! No... just an odd family tree," I pause before taking a sip of my drink. "But yeah, I get that a lot. In colle—"

The door opens up and I shift my head over. A balding man with a thick mustache strolls up to the desk up front and fiddles with a laptop. After a bit of waiting on my part, the projector flickers to life with a presentation. He faces towards us. I think I know this guy.

"You may know me; I went to the Moon last yea—" Someone starts clapping a little too soon. "Anyways, my name is Winslow Baker. People call me Winnie, but you all can call me Baker."

Baxter taps my shoulder and cups her hand around her mouth. "He sends you out to Mars if you call him Winnie," she whispers.

I acknowledge Baxter with a nod and turn back to the front. 

"... so I've been to a few places, and I know all of you just gotta get away from here— or I think I know. Whatever," he pauses for a bit before clearing his throat. Sounds like there's a lot of gunk in there. "So you might've heard of this next big thing," He says while the projector switches to a slide of a pulsing multi-color dot. 

"Thats th— nevermind," I interrupt.

"No, no, continue."

I feel the collective gaze of the room shift towards me. "Th— that's the umm... the uhh... the wormhole they found?"

"Bingo. Do you have any theories about it that you wanna share?"

My throat and chest tighten. "No... not— not in particular," I mutter.

"I'm sure you have something."

"Uhhmm... well," I force out. It feels as if the entire room were breathing on my neck. "I thhhink wha— whatever makes it all ummm... colorful is prob— probably makin— maybe the thing distorting the space around it is the... source for those colors," I say shakily. Baxter gives me a thumbs-up in the corner of my eye.

"Now that's a thinker we have here! I’m sure you’ve got some more big ideas."

‎‎ ———

"Yo, Sam, imagine if I ate like... a spoonful of these little grape-looking things and I just kinda— just melted into a puddle of slop and goop," I say to Sammy while acting out the sort of movements you'd expect from melting. 

"I can imagine. It'd probably make the mission easier," she says while dragging a piece of equipment that probably shouldn't be dragged. The main lab has a good amount of room over the bio-lab so we're just moving anything we need. 

"Sounds like mutiny. We— I gotta string you up to four horses."

"I have eight legs."

"Shush...fine, eight horses." She's a genius really. "The name— I feel like naming the little aliens Grapebugs. The first option I had— my first pick was Grapelights but that sounds... it sounds like something out of fantasy," I grunt while rolling a shelf full of glass over to the lab. 

"I don't know, the wormhole out there seems pretty fantastical to me."

"It's more science-fictional than anything else... mmm-hmm. I'm so correct," I say, while lifting the shelf over the bump in the lab entrance. The wheels are just small enough to not roll over the rim and instead they just bump into it repeatedly. Guhh. It wasn’t even that hard, I just want to mentally complain about it. Sammy and I do a couple more retrieval runs to get most of what we want or need into the lab before we start sciencing all over the place. We’re gonna science ourselves blind. “And that’s it. For now. I think.”

“Saying a whole lot of nothing today, are we?”

I ignore Sammy’s comment. “We’ve got… aliens to look at,” I turn to Sammy and hit her with the brief raising of both eyebrows. “There wasn’t anything but the Grapebugs in there. They don— I don’t think they eat othe—“

Sammy raises one finger as she interrupts me. “I think I know,” she says while tapping her camera bulb in the sort of way one would tap their head after a good idea. “What if they photosynthesize?”

“We’re over— this is all over a lightyear away from the Sun! The only light out here is from Mister Kingdom.”

“I never said they used the light from oursun.”

I stand there thinking for ten seconds before I open my mouth. “It’s a wormhole… the Grapebugs! They made the wormhole! They— they— they made it to find more light!”

“Yes! They got unlucky, maybe that’s why they’re so far out!”

“Raaagh! High five!” I raise my hand and Sammy raises one of hers. My hand throttles towards hers as fast as it can. A sharp pain shoots through my hand and the sound of banging metal is made. I scream and writhe while flailing one hand with the other. 

“I’m made of metal,” she says exasperatedly while shaking her camera bulb tilted slightly downwards.

“Well— yes! I’m aware! Very aware! Ha! Ow,” I shout while flailing my hurt hand around, now by itself. I take a look at my palm. Pink. So pink. I like pink… pretty color. Pink Floyd! Love that band. I grab an ice pack from a lab freezer and wrap it in a microfiber towel. The texture is terrible but not terribly terrible. I just kinda stand there for a little while taking in my surroundings. I give Sammy a couple of awkward waves in the meantime. After a bit of small talk about nothing in particular, Sammy and I return to expressing our scientific prowess. We’re so smart. Maybe more so Sammy than I, but wenonetheless. We can do this. "Okie, back to business." I put some more samples under the microscope and sit down on one of those little barstool chairs. Not too good for my back. I open up a laptop and cast the microscope's feed onto the screen. "What to do?"

"You could see what they're made of, that's what."

"Good idea," I say as I slowly lower the chair with a lever. It takes a smidge longer than I'd prefer, but I get it all the way down. I grab the nanopipette machine from across the lab and attach duct tape it to the counter by the microscope. It's a very precise piece of equipment that's (as the name would suggest) a tiny pipette for studying individual cells. Gotta keep it steady. I suck up a little cell and place it in its own little petri dish. If my eyes get really close up I can see the colors shifting as it does whatever a tiny alien wormhole-making cell does. Neat. I stick the dish in the analyzer doohickey and wait a little while. "Well let's see what you're made of, Mr. Grapebug.."

"What if that was a miss? Ms.Grapebug?"Sammy murmurs before chuckling under her "breath".

"Shush," I say. I turn to the readouts for the chemical makeup. Hmmm. While predominantly (big word) hydrogen and oxygen (water), the other elements like nitrogen and carbon are constantly switching places. The percentages are flucuating without stopping. That's not right at all. It can't be the light the cell gives off messing up the readings; they still fluctuate when it goes dark. "This...thi— hmmph... this is fucked. Horrendous juju in the Jojo. I can already see the space monster under my space bed," I say to Sammy. "In space." I stare at the freaky readouts and try to make sense of it. Maybe a machine error. I take out the petri dish and nibble a little skin off my lips for analysis. I stick it in there and try again. I check the readouts. Alright. It looks exactly as it should. Not a machine error, then. I put in the Grapebug cell in there just to make sure. Oop. Still flucuating; definitely just some bad juju. I've got a sort of juju eyeball going on. I laugh to myself quietly. Stupid joke. I hit the The Thinker pose sitting on the counter with my feet on a barstool and my chin resting on the backside of my hand. What if it's four-dimensional? It checks out. The sharp pulsating growth, the odd colors, the flucuating measurements, Mister Kingdom. It checks out! "Sammy, I have an idea, but— but we gotta kill this thing first."

"Imagine if the rest of the sample just attacks us like a swarm of angry wasps. Also, idea?"

"I... I think this little guy is a higher dimensional lifeform! Just gotta kill it and see if anything changes," I say while bringing the petri dish to the microscope. I swap out the nanopipette for a nanosyringe, which is basically just a really tiny needle to kill things with. It has other uses, but those are boring."Oh, umm... Sammy! Could you lower the ship to 150 kilometers from Mister Kingdom?" She gives a thumbs up and I experience a small jolt a few seconds later. "Awesome," I say quietly. I maneuver the nanosyringe up to the Grapebug with a series of buttons and... a flash of purple-green appears as the tip makes contact. Did I kill it? Another flash. Nope, it moved out of the way. I keep on trying and it keeps on hauling ass. I pause and reconsider my actions. I think I need to trap it. I scour through some drawers until I find some of those itty-bitty rubber bands. I fall into my seat and spin around to Sammy. "I... have a plan. This thing won't— it won't stay still!"

"If only you had a small tube of sorts..."

I pick a nanopipette up and hold it out in her direction. "That would be the plan. The plan I mentioned, to be specific. Specific, specificly specific..." I trail off. I slurp up the Grapebug cell into the nanopipette and tie a knot with the rubber band. It's that kind where you can tighten or loosen it if you pull on it. The knot expert over here. Something about that thought rubs me the wrong way. Can't quite put my finger on it. I slowly shimmy the knot towards the front of tne nanopipette until it's reasonably close to the end. I haul over another nanopipette machine, this time for the nanosyringe. I set machine numero dos next to the first one and maneuver both their attachments until I can see the tips of both under the microscope. Alrighty. I line them up and tighten the rubber band as hard as I can, adding another band for good measure. All that moves it a little so I have to remaneuver the thing. Could be worse; could be broken. I line them up once more and inch the tip of the nanosyringe into the nanopipette. The point is given a little resistance before fully slipping in. Whole lot of innuendos being thrown around. The rainbow light from the Grapebug grows brighter and fluctuates faster as the distance closes. Flashes of purple-green spark up and become a steadily growing light. The Grapebug zips about and I stumble back from the microscope and turn to the screen as the light becomes too bright to easily distinguish anything. The light grows so bright that I can clearly see the output of a single cell as if it were a firefly. It flares up into a flash until it goes dark in the blink of an eye. Huh. Neat. "I think it— it just kinda backed itself into a corner and like... impaled itself. Dummy."

"Another young soul taken before their time, I suppose. Go analyze the cell!"

"I'm going! I'm starting to go! Preparing to go... whatever," I respond. I squeeze the remains of the cell into the petri dish and place it inside of the analyzer machine thingy. I glance at the screen and the numbers are stable. There's also what looks like more matter than I put in. So it was four-dimensional! Maybe. I think so. The readouts are mostly hydrogen and oxygen, with a bit of carbon and nitrogen. There's some trace elements in theres, but I don't really care about those a whole awful lot. The chemical makeup of this thing is concerningly similar to that of an Earth cell. Probably just what works out best for life. Don't wanna be a conspiracy theorist about it. "It's basically just an Earth cell... if you ignore a couple of important things." 

"Just a couple. Are we done now? Can I go?"

My head whips around to face Sammy. "Wha— who— what do you mean we? You just sat there whi—"

"I came up with an idea or two," she interrupts while holding a finger up.

"But, yes, it's probably a good time to rest a little." I see Sammy skitter away to the dorm and I follow. I walk past a window and Mister Kingdom takes up the whole of the small viewport, periodically vanishing as the ship rotates. Pretty. "Maybe we can stop the ship ten kilometers above the surface? I'd like it." A ceiling arm gives a thumbs up and I continue along my merry way to the dorms. I climb down into the module and jump into my messy bed. I cozy up under the comforter and open up my laptop. For the next maybe hour and a half or so, I write down my big scientific findings while I eat some exceptionally good beef jerky and listen to soft rock through my earbuds. Bit of an oxymoron; soft rock. A small jolt travels through the whole ship. We must be there. That felt way quicker than it really was, like when you're home alone on a rainy day. That's how it felt: nice. I get myself out of bed and my feet feel like they have a bit less weight on them. Not a lot, but a bit. I bring my face up to the nearest window facing Mister Kingdom. The surface spins around lazily while it takes up whole field of view. I step back and take notice of the rainbow of light shifting across the room as the ship spins around. This is the pinnacle of natural lighting. I should probably get new samples. I spot Sammy playing Tetris as I begin to make my way over to the lab. My evil laboratory for evil devices. I arrive to the lab and replace the jelly stuff in the sampler. I wonder what the jelly tastes like. I dip my pinky in the jelly and stick it in my mouth. Just kinda gluey. Big discoveries going on up here. I close up the sampler box and carry it with me like a suitcase while I walk over to the airlock. I put on my spacesuit and depressurize the airlock. The wormhole is (as one would expect) otherworldly. It spins in front of me and the stars on the other side trail around themselves behind the rainbow film. My eyes divert their focus back to the hull of the Jojo. That's weird. There's a faint trail of purple-green in the path of the ship's rotation. It stands out clearly from the frequent purple-green flashes you get this close to Mister Kingdom. "Sammy... is the centrifuge— is the ship spinning slower? Am I crazy?"

"You're going mad. Ha! No, let me check... 0.96 gees. You're right this time. It's a January 4th miracle."

"Good to know, will fix in a bit. I think the Grapebugs have a high enough density here to slow down the ship a little bit. Maybe... maybe that's what the purple-green comes from— maybe it just comes from whatever process the cells use to move around."

"Uh-huh."

"Excited, aren't you?" I say sarcastically as I clip my tether on and start to clamber to the top of the airlock. I attach the sampler box to the my waist area. I pull myself up and roll on my back before standing up and returning the holding the sampler box in a normal way. I go forwards, take a left, and then a right until I'm heading towards the middle-back of the crew quarters. I re-attach the sampler box to its stand and open it up. We're close enough that it doesn't matter which direction the ship is facing; there's going to be more than enough samples. My knees bend and I sit down and face the wormhole while I wait for the sampler to catch some new stuff. I wanna look at the pretty colors! It's like the sky is spinning in front of me while purple-green flashes zip past like fireflies. I gawk at this for the next few minutes before grabbing the sampler box and heading back inside. The airlock repressurizes while I just kinda stand in there waiting. I take off my helmet and gloves before dropping the sampler box off in the lab for later. My legs bring me to the cockpit and I stare at Mister Kingdom. I see Sammy skitter up next to me before she tilts her camera bulb towards my head.

"What's the plan here?"

My heart beats heavy in my chest. I take a deep breath and lick my lips before I stretch my finger out towards the wormhole. "Th—there's," I place my hands on my hips. "We gotta... we gotta go in there eventually." Sammy nods and I keep on staring. "So... that is— that's the plan?"

"That's the plan."

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Flipsider* CHAPTER 4: FEARLESS

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

What? My head whips itself back and forth in an attempt to give Sammy a mean glare. Not on the left. Not on the right. She's inside. Of course. "Let— just let me have a moment!" I shout exasperatedly. My eyes drift to Mister Kingdom as it dominates the space above me. "Just one!"

"I did! Earlier in the a— just get the samples and I'll shut up! Maybe. Probably maybe!"

"Okie..." I sigh. "You better! Please?" 

"Fine! I promise. Probably."

"I— I need that to be yes! The answer will be yes! Pretty please?" 

"I promise promise."

"Well," I pause. "I'll get to work then." My hand drifts towards the hull of the ship and I begin pull myself along to the middle of the crew section around where the sampler should be. Hopefully. I do a lot of hoping these days. It's a nice thing to do. I bring myself to the side of the ship that faces Mister Kingdom and throw myself on top. It takes a bit of grunting and stupidly flailing around, but I get it done. Eventually. Across the hull there's a bunch of different science experiments and stuff going on. All sorts of protuberances and protrusions.Very fun words. I clamber past a window and decide to take a peek inside. Same as usual. I think. Anyways, I make my way over to where the sampler should be and my eyes survey the hull. There: no. Over there: also no. A little bit to the right: almost looks like it. Right there: hmm... looks like it. I float over to about thirty feet from what I think is the sampler and inspect the fine details. "Yep! Found it!" 

"Yeah, and I found a pack of stickers!"

I pump my fist and "stand" up on the hull by tugging on the tether so my feet stay "grounded". The adequate term here would probably be floored. I waddle over to the sampler in the sort of way a drunkard would walk on the Moon. It's an odd feeling; I'm walking like there's gravity but my arms are the only thing pulling me down. Weird. I stop within arms' range of the sampler and step on the button that raises the sampler up from the hull. A rectangular box the size of a large suitcase rises up on what looks like a scissor lift. It stops about a foot above my head. Hmm.There's a little knob to adjust the height manually, so I just finagle with it until it's good enough to work with. Now that that's done, I stick my feet into some handholds (footholds?) to stay put while I manage the whole operation. I try to do all that but instead I accidentally kick myself loose trying to stick my other foot in and start slowly tumbling. While I breezily spin head over heels, Mister Kingdom catches my eye. Too pretty to ignore.I get back to business and this time I succeed. My feet are planted and my body is ready. I open up one of the panels on the left side of the half facing towards me. There's this sort of goopy flypaper sticky enough to catch small particles but not enough to be a problem if I touch it. I move over to the other side and repeat the process. We're all se—ooop... nevermind. Official protocol from NASA is that one side should be facing towards the wormhole and the other away; we want to know if any particulate matter is moving a certain direction. I slowly bend over backwards and look up. Mister Kingdom is above us. I could detach the whole box with a button located on it, but I'm not going through the hassle of securing it properly. I'm not gonna go inside either.

"Sammy, the... the— hmmph. The ship is facing the wrong way."

"You were the one who pointed it like this!"

"I— look, I don't care. Just point it towards the wormhole, please."

"Hold on to something."

I give a thumbs up, "Yup, I kno— aggh!" I yelp as I fall on my ass out the blue. Ouch. I steadily push myself back under the weak "gravity" that the ship's rotation creates. Mister Kindom descends in my field of view as the ship turns towards the ball of colors. The ripples of rainbow light crawl along the hull like a car's shadow against a house. Those purple-green flashes trail along as my whole vision becomes taken up. The gravity slowly weans as Jojo comes to a stop. I reach my hand out and— oop. My feet slip out from under me and my arms flail as I try to grab the hull. The ships rotating the other way. I lose my grip and I fall away from the hull maybe about ten feet and my tether goes taut. I dangle for a second before I propel myself up the tether and back to the hull. No more gravity.

"Do better next time, I guess," I groan to Sammy.

"We say 'thank you' in this house."

"Uhhm... thank you, Sammy. Now let me have my moment! Don't interrupt me either."

"You did say 'thank you'. And I promised but pshhh."

I hook my tether to a rod on the sampler box and slip my feet out of their holds. I just float there for a while. The whole spectrum of colors controls my field of view as it shines beautifully on the ship and in my eyes. Ripples come and go across the surface of Mister Kingdom while thin clouds of whispy fog linger over like what you'd see at a pond. A grin creeps along my face and my eyes begin to water. That's fine. My hand stretches out towards the surface and the feeling that I could splash my hands in it like water comes to me. Wow. I push myself off the hull and towards the wormhole as I giggle to myself. I slowly tumble over myself as I drift towards the bubble of color. I close my eyes and I laugh and I cry. The trip was worth it. I can do this.My eyes open and I grab my tether. "That was nice," I whisper to myself. That's enough for now, I'm heading in. I tug on the tether and I see the sampler box float past me attached to the rope. Neat. I absent-mindedly look at the box for a while and uh-oh. My tether was attached to the box. The box was attached to the ship. I flail the tether around until I'm facing Jojo aaand I can see the whole thing. I must be over a kilometer away. I pull the box to myself and push it away in an attempt to move towards the ship. The tether goes taut and I begin to tumble and flail. Stupid.

"Sammy! Hey, Sammy! I'm a bit stuck!" I shout at the top of my lungs. I preform a swimming motion, to no avail. Don't know what I was expecting there.

"Yeah, I can see that. You're a little far out there."

"It isn't my fault this time! I— I think that the uhhh... the tether pressed against the detach button," I say while trying (and failing) to stop spinning.

"I'm just gonna say it's your fault."

Puffs of gas come from several places over the hull of the ship. The ship returns to pre-sampling orientation and momentarily stops. Jojo begins to move towards me as Sammy laughs over the radio. Probably at me. I wait another couple of minutes until the ship is maybe about 200 feet away from me. It briefly comes to a stop before lining me up roughly with the middle of the crew section. Or rather, the center of rotation between me and the box.

"Watch this."

Sammy brings the ship about twenty feet away from me. I let go of the box and now I'm only fifteen feet away (and still spinning). My eyes spot a Canadarm zipping towards me along the hull. It extends outwards towards the closest point of my spin and grasps my ankle. I get shaken around for a bit and manage to grab the box. It pulls me towards the hull and I make contact. "Okie, you can let me go now," I say, out of breath.

"You're going inside first."

The arm drags me in the direction of the airlock where I see Sammy waving from the window. I wave back and she gives me the middle finger. Three of them, actually. Rude. She opens the airlock door laughing while her camera bulb jitters up and down. The arm throws me through the door and shuts it while Sammy repressurizes the airlock. I smack into a button or two and Sammy moves faster than I've ever seen her move before. Those weren't even important buttons! I think. "Those buttons weren't even important," I say while I twirl around to Sammy with the box held against my chest. 

"One of them wasn't, the other was the jettison button!" she shouts while angrily shaking her camera bulb.

"Well I make mistakes," I tell her. She aggressively nods. Well. I take off my helmet and let it float while I make my way over to the lab. I gently toss the sampler box into there and take off to the cockpit. I need some gravity. I scan the cockpit and look for the centrifuge lever-button-whatever. My hand grips the lever and I almost pull it, but I remember something I think Sammy doesn't know. The cockpit can rotate. I float into the pilot's chair, buckle up, and call Sammy over. "Do you wanna see something neat?"

"Sure. I hope it's neat."

"It's gonna be neat. Prob—probably. I think," I say. I look around for the switch that unlocks the cockpit's rotation and my hand gently grips the secondary joystick. My thumb rests on the even smaller joystick on the top of it and I turn to Sammy. She gives me a small nod and a thumbs up. Guess we're ready. I nudge the mini-joystick with my thumb and the whole cockpit rotates to the right. I see Sammy slip up a little and throw herself into her dedicated chair. Kinda looks like one of those seats at the playground with dents for your legs. You know? The ones your dad spins you around in until you fall off? Anyways, she was in her seat. And the cockpit is rotating,that too. "Is this neat? I think it's neat, personally."

"I will admit it is kinda neat."

I pump my fist and do a little cheer for myself. I look up and the docking port is directly "above" us. We've done a full ninety degrees. I keep rotating it for the next couple of seconds until we're right back to where we started from. I think there's a song called that. Sammy unbuckles her seatbelt while I stay sat. I reach down to the side of my seat and find another tiny joystick after some bumbling around with my hand. This ship has like a bajillion joysticks. What's the deal with that?The seat slides to the right on rails in the floor and I pull the centrifuge lever. My body lightly jerks to the left and a itty-bitty bit into my seat's cushioning. Sammy falls sideways and skitters back into her seat. The ship is rotating(as intended). I steadily feel the tugging from both directions settle into a force pulling me to the floor. It's like swinging a ball in a big circle above your head and it stays in the air. Everything moves with the ship, so it feels just like gravity to someone in the crew compartment. The crew compartent is extending away from the ship with long cables so that it doesn't have too spin as fast for the same amount of gravity, and is rotated to a more horizontal orientation. Instead of climbing through the ship, I can just walk throughout the thing. 

"We are set! Oh! I need to be taking a shower. I haven't done that for... two— two weeks!"

"I can't smell it, I don't really care. Also, found some of your t-shirts in storage since you apparently couldn't. They're on your bed."

"Thanks," I say to Sammy while I run to the airlock. I shimmy out of my spacesuit and I toss it on the ground. I pause for a second before I lift my arm and smell myseeeew-yuck! I flinch heavily. It's bad bad. It's miasmic, really. I walk to the hallway where the dorm was and I see it is now more of a hole than anything. The crew compartment rotating set it below most of the other modules. I climb down and stumble over to my bed. I open the box of t-shirts and grab the baggiest one I can find. It has this nice mustard-yellow that goes well with my jumpsuit. I like little things like that. Anyways,I head over to storage and rummage around for a new jumpsuit before I head over to the bathroom. I step in, get what I need from the cabinets, lock the door, and get undressed. I make sure to turn off the lights outside the shower and turn on the ones inside. You can always use some nice lighting. I stand in the warm water just kinda staring at the wall for a little bit. Then I start thinking; what should I call those purple-green flashes? Well, I can't think of anything purple and green other than the Joker and grapes. Jokerlights? No... grapes taste good, though. Grapelights it is.Following my amazing revelation, I later and rinse myself and all that jazz. My hands accidentally tear out some small chunks of hair while doing the shampoo and conditioner. I put a little more of both, just to be sure. I rinse out my hair and turn the shower knob to cold. Whenever I don't, I just feel all miserable and sweaty and sticky for the next couple hours, regardless of how many fans are blowing cool air. I turn the water off, step out and nearly bust my head open, dry off a little, and put some product in my hair (as if anybody other than Sammy were here). Actually, I don't wanna look bad on the videos I'll inevitably have to record for the press. So there's that. 

I dry off some more, get dressed, and put a little more product in my hair. My teeth get brushed and my face gets shaved and I'm ready to go. I admire myself in the mirror for a while and hit a couple of silly poses. Like Elvis. Stepping out of the bathroom, I notice Sammy playing Tetris again. "Hey, look at me! I am uhh... I'm all fresh. Mmm-hmm," I shout while waving at Sammy and nodding my head. I am all fresh.

"Good for you. You're dripping everywhere with that hair of yours!"

I ignore her last comment. "Am I all fresh? Do you— is the outfit alright?" I say while proudly gesturing to my jumpsuit, with its upper half tied around my waist like a hoodie.

"Yes, Seamus. You're all fresh. And the outfit is alright, too."

"Yay! Well do yo—"

"There's still a sample waiting in the lab!"

"Oop. Okie, I'm going!" Sammy and I begin to scramble along to the lab. The scrambling was mostly me, but whatever. I stumble through the halls and arrive in front of the lab. I nearly have to do a double take. The lab rotated ninety degrees so that all the sensitive equipment is the right way up. I knew it was gonna happen, but it still catches me off guard when I see it. Pretty neat, though. I grab the box and push pull it along the way to where I'm headed using a bungee cord that I snatched from a random drawer. It gets set down onto the counter around where the microscope is and I turn to Sammy. "You said Mister Kingdom got... bigger?"

"That would be correct. It kinda wobbled around and stuff when it happened," Sammy says while illustrating the wobbling movement with three of her hands.

"Well, now I'm curious!" I say while I begin to make my way over to the SLIGOT interface. After walking in a circle and taking a right where I should've turned left, I eventually complete my thirty-ish foot odyssey. "It's a Christmas miracle", I think to myself on Januarary 2nd. Did I spell that wrong? Wait. Yeah! It's January. I'm a genius. Back on topic, I've made my way over to the SLIGOT interface. I click through all the buttons that I need to and I check the diameter. 238.6 KM. Oh my. I'll figure out how that happened later. Sammy wasn't lying. "You weren't lying."

"Yeah, yeah. The samples are waiting!" she shouts while angrily pointing to the microscope.

"You're right," I murmur under my breath. I snap on some gloves and grab whatever equipment I need before I stand in front of the box. I unlatch whatever latches need unlatching. I grab a sample slide off of the counter in one hand and a Q-tip in the other. There's this sort of clear goopy liquid that's supposed to suspend whatever dare crosses it's path (or something along those lines). I scoop some goo out of the one of the Petri dishes inside the box. Closer to a Petri square, but it's the same difference. I spread it onto the slide and place it under the microscope. I can feel my heart beating in my chest. "Woo! I'm excited!" I flick on the light and begin to examine. I adjust focus until a little dust particles unblurs. Not very exciting. I shimmy the slide back and forth to see what's going on down there. Nothing, a bit of dust, more nothing, a larger bit of dust, a flash of color, even more nothi— roll that back! A flash of color! "I think I found something, Sammy!"

"Good for you."

I shake the slide about until I find that flash of color again. It's this odd pulsing lumpy orb. Huh. It pulses in a sort of unusual way; the orb expands and shrinks as a whole on a regular period. Like if you scaled something bigger and smaller in a graphic design application. Too even and too jarring. I can barely see it slowly changing colors. It's just kinda sit— oh! The particle shifts shapes into a sort of vine or branch shape and flashes purple-green. I hold my breath. Three little bulbs grow on the branch and split off before zooming away with a flash of grapelight. My heart sinks and my stomach drops. It reproduced. That particle is a cell! I've discovered life outside of Earth! I back up from the microscope. My breath becomes heavy as the widest grin I've ever had spreads across my face. My eyes water as I laugh and cheer and jump around. 

"What's the fuss about? Tell me!"

I flick on the screen display for the microscope and a monitor comes to life. I fall to my knees and point at the screen. I scoot forward on my knees and wrap my arms around Sammy. "Aliens are real! And—and—and I found them!"

"Well I'll be damned! Ha! That's exciting and all but you could've said 'please' before you started hugging me!"

Snot runs down my face and my lips quiver. 

"Please?"

"Sure."

[flipsider-asterisk]

COPY PASTING IT RN

courtesy of @m87mia

[flipsider-asterisk]

CHAPTER FOUR TODAY (probably) RAGGHH

[flipsider-asterisk]

Flipsider* CHAPTER 3: CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

I pull up the keyboard interface and rename ERB-1 to Mister Kingdom. That's what I call a nice name. I look over my shoulder. "Hey, Sammy! Do yo— umm... how are we feeling about the new name," I say with a finger pointed at the screen.

"It's neat, sounds cool."

"Good enough for me," I respond. Skimming past navigational data, I inspect the ship's readouts for Mister Kingdom: DISTANCE, MASS, DENSITY, YADDA YADDA I DON'T CARE ABOUT THOSE,and EST DIAMTER: 45 ± 0.71 Km. Hmm. Damn. Bigger than anybody on Earth thought it was. I'm sure that it doesn't make that much of a difference. Maybe. I should look at those other readings, those are probably important for scientific research and whatnot. Now I care.

DENSITY: 0.008 ± 0.0007 g/m³

DIAMETER: I ALREADY COVERED THAT

MASS: 400,000 ± 500 T

GRAVITY: ≈ 0.0 m/s²

Checks out. I grab onto some handholds and instruct Sammy to turn the engine back on. One of the ceiling claws grabs the stick in the cockpit and slowly throttles the engine to normal power. The gravity increasingly pulls me down until I'm standing on my own two feet. This time I don't throw up. My eyes dart back to the SLIGOT's navigational panel. It reads ETA: T MINUS 15 Hr 32 Min. I'm going to sleep it out. My feet drag me to the lab exit and I stumble out into the main corridor. I stare at myself in the mirror for a little while and continue on my merry way. I make my way back to the dorm and throw myself face down into bed. My eyelids are heavy.

"Sammy, wake me up if something inte—"

‎ ———

My eyelids creep open. Ding-dong. There's a package. I drag myself out of bed and nearly knock over a cup of flat soda on my nightstand. Carpeted floor. What matters is that everything is dry. I head to the kitchen and grab some chocolate chip cookies. I stuff one in my mouth and the others in the pocket of my robe. I slip a little bit on the now hardwoodfloor with my socks on. I stand on my tippy-toes and peek through the peephole on my front door. Nobody there. I stuff another cookie in my mouth. I probably look dumb as hell. With a cookie still in my mouth, I open the door. A pile of letter lies at my feet. I pick them up and take them inside. Should probably use the restroom. I shut the door behind me and set the letters on the couch. I do my buisiness, scroll on my phone for a couple of minutes, and wash my hands ( with soap and water, of course). I sit on the couch and look through the letters. Bills, taxes, newsletter I signed up for, news letter I didn't sign up for, NASA, Reader's Dige—

"NASA!"

My hands snatch the letter and shake heavily as I open it up. My heart pounds in my chest and my lungs feel tight. I should probably get that checked out.

‎ ===

You, Seamus R Banks, have been accep

‎ ===

I leap up into the air before I even finish reading the first sentence. "Let's fucking go! I did it! I did it!"

I pause to breathe and tears begin streaming down my face. I laugh and I scream and I dance. "Yes!" I tumble back on to the couch. A hand touches my shoulder. I look behind me. It's The Gorilla.

"Good job, kid," The Gorilla says in a very gorrillaly.

"Th—thanks."

‎ ———

My eyes flutter open. What? Cold sweat runs down my... everything. I'm shaking, not because of illness or anything; Sammy is just gripping my shoulders and shaking me violently. The light coming from outside is a bit brighter and a bit more colorful. There's some odd color in there and my head hurts. Probably slept too long.

"Seamus, something happened!" She shouts, her camera bulb jittering back and forth.

"Wuh? How long have I been asleep?"

"Like thirteen hours! How did you even do that?"

"Tired. Also, I had this dream that was pretty much an accurate flashback, except for the... there was a gorilla at the end." I also used the restroom. Uh-oh. Is that what the sweat was? I feel my pants over and over to make sure. Dry. Thank God. Any— again, what happened? " I shout.

"Mister Kingdom got bigger."

I shoot upwards in bed. My mind runs blank for a few seconds before I snap back to reality. How? Why would it do that? I leap out of my bed and fall on the ground. My arms push me back upright and I scramble out of the dorm. Wait! There's a covered window in the dorm! My legs fly below me and I scramble back into the dorm. I see Sammy skittering besides me.

"There— there's a window over in the umm... back! It should be facing towards Mister Kingdom," I gasp. I need to breathe. I take a quick break and grab my aching knees. "Okie," I cough. "Let's go." 

"Crewmember Seamus Banks' heart rate is 176 BPM," says Jojo's system robot in its flat voice. It isn't a proper AI, all it does is tell me when I'm straining myself. Probably didn't hear it on my EVA through all the clambering I was doing.

"I'm doing fine. Ha! Everybody point and laugh!"

"You— you don't have a heart! You're a robot!"

"I have plenty of heart (metaphorically). It's like in the Wizard of Oz."

I ignore Sammy and stumble my way to the covered window. It's a rectangle about a foot tall and three feet wide. I place my hand on the lock to unlatch the sliding door covering the window. I stop. What if the lights are pretty?

"Sammy, do me a favor and dim the dorm lights. If it's pretty I want the colors lighting this room up. Pretty please," I ask. Sammy nods with her camera bulb and the lights dim to a little the level you'd get with curtains in a naturally lit room. Of the few ship systems Sammy can control, the lights are one of them. The folks at JPL didn't want SAMI 9000, so they only really gave her minimal control. She can use the ceiling arms to press buttoons and stuff, though. Anyways, the window. My hand flips the latch open and I slide over the cover. My eyes widen and my brows raise. "Holy shit," I blurt. I whistle as I gawk at the sight. The light shines across the room in every color I could hope to see. Red, orange, yellow, green, magenta, blue, and so on. I stare at the rai— what was that? I flinch a little bit. There's a half-second flash. Another. There's some color I've never seen before. Purple-green. Not purple and green; this color is both purple and green at the same time. It almost reminds me of staring at a colored light for too long. Like an afterimage. "Cool. Sammy, look at that!"

Sammy moves up to the window. "Colorful. We get there in like an hour."

"Do you not see the purple-green?"

"I see purple and green. Like, seperately."

"There's a color that I didn't know existed!"

"I don't see it. Sounds like you need to go outside."

"I can't go outside! We are in—"

Sammy cuts me off, "There's an airlock, stupid."

"Crewmember Seamus Banks has had a spike in blood pressure."

"I'm gonna turn off that notification," I murmur. I stomp my way out of the dorm and into the main corridor. My hands and feet clamber down to the back of the ship. I pass the bio-lab on the way down. Like the main lab, it rotates to keep everything upright. Unlike the main lab, it's more of a cylindrical shape. They put it there so we could study worms and plants or whatever up here. On the flipside (is that what that phrase means? ), a more niche case it'd be used for would be if we found alien life, like germs or little green men on the other side of the wormhole. That'd be pretty neat. Back on topic, I've made my way over to the systems module. It's this big wide cylinder near the rear of the crew quarters. There's all sorts of buttons for things that aren't important enough to be in the cockpit. Mostly data readouts. My eyes scour the room until I find the medical notification controls. I turn off any alert that could happen when I yell a little too loud. I look around for Sammy, she isn't here. Probably trying to figure out what I meant by purple-green. I climb my way back to the dorm and stroll into Sammy's CPU room. A quiet static comes over the intercom.

"Hey! What are you doing? That's my brain."

"I'm going to look at your camera feed. Just to make sure you really can't see purple-green," I answer. 

"Mmm-hmm," she says, chuckling a bit afterwards.

Her CPU room is underneath everything else (in centrifuge) and in the middle. Physically, its a bit wider than the main corridor and maybe seven eighths of its height (or length, it depends). Oddly, it's the only module not to be cylindrical; the module is more rectangular in shape. Right now, it's taller than it is long with respect to gravity. There's a ladder that runs between the walls of computers on two sides so I can access different levels in vertical orientation. While they're floors at the moment, the different levels become walls in centrifuge mode. Blinking lights and wires pass me by as I climb down two levels to the central interface area. It sounds cool, but it's mostly just a bunch of laptops. I open up a couple of the laptops so that I have multiple monitors to work with. Never hurts to have more screens.The screens present me with a new challenge: a password. I rack my brain for a memory of the password. Nothing. Surely they would've put something so important out in plain sight, right? I take the laptop of its mount and turn it around. Nothing. I lift it above my head and check the bottom. There it is! The password (jojo_sami ) is sharpied on to blue tape on the bottom. I type in the password and all the screens unlock at once and blind me with the loading screen. Like the sun. The screens go back to dark mode and I get to work. I'm in the mainframe. There's a couple of subsections on the main screen. SAMI Boundaries, SAMI Camera Feed, SAMI Data, SAMI Personalityand so on. Don't want to mess with the boundaries or personality. Not because something bad would happen, it would make me feel mean. I click on her camera feeds and drag it to the main laptop that I'm using. I am greeted with a 360-degree Sammy eye view of her playing Tetris on a laptop. Wait, she's good.

"Sammy, could you move over to the uhh— window."

"I'm playing Tetris!"

"You can pause it for a minute!" I tell her. She hits the p key and skitters along towards the window. She gets about three quarters of the way there until a charging cable wraps around one of her ten arms. She tugs it out of the socket and continues on her merry way. 

"Now what?"

"Umm... just stand there for a second," I answer back. She gives a little nod and sits down with her hands below her main body. Mister Kingdom is a fair bit closer than it was when I last saw it. I bring my face closer and closer to the screen until what I see matches what I would see. Mister Kingdom looks about as big in space as the full moon does in the sky. Maybe even a bit bigger. I (and Sammy) see rainbow sunbeams slice through a cloud of gas or dust currounnding the whole thing. I can make out the stars on the other side, but just barely. Jojo's hull is lit up like the bottom of a pool, rippling and waving with color. A flash comes up on Sammy's view. Instead of what I saw, it just sort of quickly alternated between purple and green. Huh. "So you can't see purple-green. It's probab— I think it's because you have cameras, not eyes." 

"You're just mad I can see more stuff than you."

"Yeah, alright. How long until the engines shut off? Feels like something I should know."

"Twenty-four minutes and... twelve seconds. The ship will stay about five hundred kilometers from Mister Kingdom."

"Thank youuu for that, I'm gonna head to the cockpit. You can— you can move from the window now." I climb out of the CPU room and clamber into the intersection module. Sammy skitters right up next to me and almost bumps into my leg. Talk about personal space.I hoist myself up into the pilot's seat and I wait, wait, and wait some more for the next twenty-something minutes. For those minutes I sit down and appreciate the sight of the stars in front of me. No I didn't. I lied. I actuallygrabbed a laptop and yelled when I kept on losing to the easiest bot on chess.com. This ship has everything on the computers.

"Yo."

"Yo. What's up?'

"Shutdown in thirty seconds. You're welcome!"

"Thank you, Sam. I am as welcome as can be at the moment," I reply. I buckle my seatbelt (which I should've done before) and prepare for zero-g. The quiet shaking of Jojoslowely subsides and Sammy gently lifts off of the floor. My stomach drops but I don't vomit this time (hooray! ). I already vomited so I'm immune for six months, like the flu. I chuckle a bit at my own joke. I nearly get out of my seat before my mind tells me something: we have to stay away from Mister Kingdom. If we go into centrifuge mode as we are (perpindicular to the surface), it'll be much harder to use the maneuvering thrusters to stay at a constant altitude. But if we spin parallel to the surface of Mister Kingdom we can have the thrusters ready to fire at a moment's notice. And, I get to have a pretty view of the lights. It's a win-win situation. "I'm taking manual control for a quick second."

"Don't kill us! Ha!"

"Better hope I won't," I laugh. My eyes scour the area for the switches that toggle rotation and translation. I find them and flip them on. I grab the joystick, which has another smaller joystick, and start to rotate Jojo. The maneuver I'm trying is sort of like a reverse belly flop; Mister Kingdom will be right above the cockpit. The rainbow light creeps into the cockpit and I almost over-rotate the ship while I gawk. We're not dead. I like to look on the brightside. The surface slowly peeks into view and it's big. I halt the ship's rotation once we're properly oriented. I set the RCS (maneuvering) thrusters to keep altitude and fire every thirty minutes. That wasn't as hard as I thought."Wouldn't you look at that we're still alive! I can do this! I'm going outside. I wanna see it up close."

"Congrats. Remember the tethers!"

I float out of the cockpit, past the cupola, and into the airlock. All the colors shine through the window and nicely light the room. I put on the spacesuit pants, or rather, I try to.In zero-g they just kind of flop around lazily all over the place. Eventually, I wrangle them on and put on all the other pieces of the spacesuit. I heed Sammy's advice and grab some tethers so I don't float off into the wormhole. Alrighty. I float past the inner door and shut it behind myself. I do a double check of everything just to be safe and then press the depressurize button. The air hisses out of the airlock as outside sound grows sillent. The green LED blinks and I open the outer door. I tether to a rail and clamber out the airlock. It almost looks unreal. I'm in the blackness of space, but the place is lit like the bottom of a pool in every color of the rainbow. Sunbeams shine through clouds of gas and dust where there should be nothing. I crane my neck up to take a look at Mister Kingdom. Stars shine through the surface as it ripples like water. I keep on staring slack-jawed. That's the prettiest thing I have ever seen. Hundreds of purple-green flashes appear and dissapear back into nothing. My eye twitches. Probably nothing. I see a second sun shine on the other side of the wormhole. I squint my eyes and I cry with a smile on my face. I can't see.Without gravity, the tears pool up and just stay there. It's not like I can wipe them away, so I improvise. I shake my head like a wet dog and I chuckle. I hear static over the helmet radio. Must be Sammy.

"Crybaby!"

[flipsider-asterisk]

Flipsider* CHAPTER 2: ONCE IN A LIFETIME

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

"You're a doctor, right? What are you doing here being a library assistant?"

"Oh, no, no. Masters. I got my degree in astrophysics at the University of... at the University of Washington. My thesis was on dark matter, real nerd stuff." I set a book down and turn to Bennie as she spins in her office chair. Good for her. I clear some gunk from my throat and resume my speaking. "Having a rich uncle is pretty cool, got me most of everything free. As for the library job, just thought it'd be nice."

Bennie stops spinning in her chair and rests her arm on the desk. "I did it because I need money and everywhere else sucks." She takes her arm off the table and whips her pointer finger out to some kid in baggy clothes. "You! What are you looking for?" 

"Oh— umm... nothing really. There's like a uh... a computer cart just kinda sitting in the large print section," 

He murmurs as he shoots Bennie a look. She's being obnoxious. Should I tell her that? I think I'll let it be. Like the song.

I turn to Bennie while I scratch a pimple or something on the top my scalp and beneath my hair. 

"Do you want—" She closes her eyes and gives a thumbs up. Well, alright. I push myself out my chair and start my trek to the other side of the library. I feel a soft whipping against my legs. My eyes zip downwards to see my shoelaces assaulting my pants. I'll deal with that in a smidge. I watch the library-goers do as they roam the shelves or somehow manage to incorrectly play Connect Four. I don't know what the opposite of a miracle is, but it's probably that. My eyebrows furrow slightly. 

"How do even do that? It's Connect Four! 'Well uhh four pieces touch eachoth—' You made an L shape! That guy has a receding hairline! ", I mumble to myself under my breath. How am I supposed to work like this? Forty-something year old man can't play one of the least complicated games ever! Fuck! I need to not be bothered by this. I stop in my tracks, look at the ceiling and close my eyes, and resume my walking. I hear a muffled beat in an adjacent room. There's this kid who comes in here on the weekend and plays with the synthesizers. Actually pretty good music. I think I recognize the melody from somewhere, but I'm not one-hundred percent sure. 

A chime rings from the ceiling speakers and Bennie's voice rings out,"Alright people! Public closing time in five minutes!"

After an uneventful stretch of walking, I arrive at the large print section. As expected, there is a cart of laptops just kind of sitting there. I would've appreciated if that kid had put it away, but he probably didn't know where to put it. I pick up my pace a little bit and I make— my feet are swept out beneath me and I reach my arms out to the book shelves. My hip hits the cart and I fall face first onto the shelf to my right. Bang! My nose throbs and I feel dripping out of my nostrils. My left hand shakily grabs onto the cart to pull myself up off the floor. My right hand pinches my nose while I tilt my head up. Don't wanna bleed all over the books, or myself, for that matter. I tilt my eyes down slightly in order to see the full extent of the damage. Books everywhere. Guhh. I pull out my phone and text Bennie.

‎ ===

‎ ‎i nocked over a bookshelf

‎ *knocjed

‎ KNOCked

Wow

‎ in large print

‎ can you help 

‎ p.lease :c

Dude

You gotta get better at typing

And bodily coordination

That too

‎ HEY

‎ meanie alert at my six o'clock

But yeah, I'm coming over there right now

‎ ===

I hear the closing time chime and see Bennie walking breezily my way. 

"Hurry! And get me a tissue or two," I shout. Bennie holds a thumbs-up high above her head and snatches a good amount of tissues off a table next to her while she walks herself over here a little faster. I just stand there and wait for her to get where she needs to be. Bennie walks up to me and pulls a wad of tissues out of her cargo pants and drops it in my outstretched hand. I give her an eyebrow raise. That's like ten tissues. I fold a sheet into a small rectangle and put it up my bleeding nostril. My finger points to the aftermath of my tumble. "Okie, look over there. That's our problem."

"I'm well aware. Also, okie?"

"It's... that's how my mom says it, okie? Anyways, you gotta help me out."

I pull the bookshelf up from the floor and Bennie helps me scooch it over. We take a quick breather from that exilleratingexperience and start picking up the books from off of the floor. I put that book in this shelf and this book in that shelf. Wait. That book goes in that shelf and this book goes in this shelf. I eye up the spines just in case I mess up and switch Asimov with Verne. It happens to the averagest of us. After a while and some minor bickering, Bennie and I get the job done and we almost need to do it again when blindly I back up into the bookshelf because I was looking at a cool book cover. Bennie scolds me about while I plug my ears with my pinky fingers and close my eyes while pretending not to hear her. I pull out my pinkies and quickly glance at them. I do a double-take. I need to clean my ears bad. I'll take care of that when I get home. Probably maybe. Now that all is done, we clock out for the night and lock up the library. We stroll over to the parking lot and stop outside our respective cars and linger for a while. Bennie takes out a pack of cigarettes and puffs smoke into the the beam of light from a pole towering above us while I just kind of stand there awkwardly. I feel like I gotta do something now. I open my car door and pull out my stainless steel UW bottle from the side. I take a sip. Red Gatorade? I open it up and peek inside. Red Gatorade. I decide to speak up and break the silence.

"Umm... so— how— what do you want to be when you grow up?"

"Well, I've alwa—" The cigarette drops from her mouth and she snaps her head towards me. "What do I want to be when I grow up?"

"I meant— fuck! What would your ideal job be? That's what I meant to say." I breath in deeply and pinch the bridge of my nose. Wow.

Bennie laughs and stomps out the ashes on the asphalt. "Probably an author. I've always liked writing. Making things up is fun. And you?"

"Ever since I was a little kid, I always wanted to be an astronaut." I lean on my car. "When they landed back on the Moon for the first time after twenty years of absence, that was real big for me, it was awesome. My rich uncle, Johnny, he inherited a good chunk my grandparents' business and worked as a flight instructor for his own enjoyment. He always took me flying on the weekends. After a while he taught me how to fly. I got my pilot's licence and only almost crashed like... thrice. I think. Back on track, I submit an astronaut application to NASA every time they open up."

Bennie looks at me and nods. "Mmm-hmm.Yep. The big question is whether they'll be more surprised by your towering five-foot-five height or by the fact that the guy like you is named Seamus Banks. Pretty sure I knew an irishman with your exact name."

"It's a complicated family tree."

She opens her car door and sits down. "Oh, did you hear that they found a wormhole or something in the Orb Cloud or whatever it's called."

"What?"

Bennie closes her door and starts the car. "Yeah, pretty neat. Anyways, goodnight!" she shouts as she backs out of her spot.

"Bye Bennie! Bye! Byeee!" I wave at her as she drives away and her windows roll up. "Have a good night! Bye-bye!"

‎ ———

I shovel a microwave dinner into my mouth and look at Sammy. "That's pretty much how it went down. Still mad about the Connect Four guy," I say to her with alright and lukewarm spaghetti stuffed in my mouth. I'm famished.

"That Bennie girl is right, that's a very white name for a brown guy."

"Like I said, it's a complicated family tree! Even worse, this pasta is cold! Umm... could you stick this in the microwave? Please?"Sammy gives a thumbs up and one of the ceiling claws picks up my bowl and whisks it away across the dormitory.

"Just out of curiosity, what's your middle name?"

"Oh! R," I pause for a second. "Why?"

"You have to spell it out?"

My lips spread thin. I laugh through my nose and a fat booger splats on the table "Dude." I slam my hand on the table in front of me and laugh hysterically. It's not thatfunny! "Ow!" A sharp sting hits my tongue, I bit it. My joy briefly ceases before near immediately starting back up again from the sheer stupidity of the situation. I cough,"I can't— I need a breather! I— ha-ha!" 

"Here's your hot TV dinner. Hurry up, we got things to do!" 

I get the last bit of laughter out of me and scarf down the hot pasta. Sammy has a point; NASA didn't send me nearly two light-years away for me to dilly-dally and tell stories. With how things went, it's a miracle I lived to dilly-dally at all. NASA got the alright stuff. Anyways, off to the lab! I walk my way over to the hall and into the intersection module. It's a small hub that leads to the primary airlock, cupola, dorms, and the main corridor of Jojo. The main corridor is pretty much just a tall tube with a couple of levels and offshoots to important modules. Oddly, Sammy's computer room is connected at multiple points to the main corridor and the intersection. I clamber down the ladder the the main corridor and clamber some more until I'm at the lab's level. The fun thing about the lab, other than the science, is that it rotates based on if Jojo is in thrust mode or centrifuge mode. There's a lot of sensitive equipment in there that needs to be kept upright with respect to gravity. Essentially, you can always walk around the lab instead of climbing through it. Unfortunately, the rotating mechanism requires very complicated plumbing for the lab. 

"Close that trapdoor before you get yourself hurt," Sammy reminds me. I realize something now: Sammy sounds like Lois Griffin. Well, alright.

"Good idea."

I shout the trapdoor in the floor and trudge my way into the lab and almost trip on the raised rim around the entrance. The alright stuff. Across the room is a nice cupola that gives me a view of the stars. Appreciated. The lab itself was big. Plenty of room for all sorts of things. Of all these sorts of things (beakers, computers, tools, equipment, random chemicals I'll never need) I'm looking for one thing: the SLIGOT. Sounds like a slur. The official name is the Starbound Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observation Tool. It's this very complicated, very large, and extremely expensive piece of scientific equipment. Through all this science I don't understand (and I'm a physicist!), the SLIGOT maps the gravitation of masses. I mean— I understand the main mechanism behind it. All over the outside of the ship there's a hundreds of tiny laser interferometers wrapped around the hull. Basically, there's this near-infrared laser that gets split into two. A mirror re-combines the two lasers into one laser, and by measuring how the two beams interfere with each other, you get your reading. In this case, they're measuring gravitational waves. That's the science I do understand. What I don't understand is how they measure it so well. After a while of stumbling around I locate the SLIGOT interface. It's this set of four square screens and a mess of physical buttons and knobs in the frame surrounding them. There's also a trackball for good measure. I flip the on switch and the screens return the favor and light up. I'd be a bit concerned if they didn't. The screens flicker briefly and all but the visible-light camera screen read NO READINGS AVAILABLE, SLIGOT NOT IN USE, and DISABLE ENGINE FOR ACCURATE MEASUREMENTS In clockwise order, to be specific. I place my hand in my hair.

"Mm-hmm. Okie." I spin myself around and Sammy is just kinda standing behind me fiddling with a laser pointer. She chuckles and points it my face. I raise one hand in front of my eyes and place the other on my hip. "First of all: cut it out. Second of all: could you um... shut off the engine?"

"Let me use my claw powers." A ceiling claw comes whirring down the rails and she throws the laser pointer up into it. The claw flips it around like a pencil in between its fingers. "Catch." Ow! She chucked it at my forehead! Oh buddy. I pick up the laser from off the floor and start running at Sammy and— 

"Whoa!" Every loose object is violently tossed up into the air.  Jojo lurches down along with my stomach and my arm reaches for what was once the ceiling. At least the engines are off. I throw up a little in my mouth but I swallow it. Tastes bad. Could've been worse."Hey, Sammy... don'—just don't do it that fast next time. Thank you, though."

She sulks a little bit and gives a thumbs up. Not quite sulking, there's no gravity. The body language is definitely there, though. Anyways,I float over frantically towards the SLIGOT interface and switch on the necessary buttons and switches for taking gravitational measurents. Some stars pop up as scattered little red dots. I flick between cameras and I stop for a quick second. Wow. It isn't very large, but it's certainly there. Well, it is very large; the wormhole is somewhere between seventeen to thirty-eight kilometers across. Not very large on the screen. There's a sort of an uneven constant rippling, like a stone hitting water. I zoom in on it and switch off the measurement overlay so I see exactly what the camera is picking up. Wow! It's full of colors! Beams of rainbow light shine through a cloud of dust around it like the sun in an old room. The wormhole itself resembles a rainbow marble pulsing periodically. I hear Sammy climb behind me.

"Pretty."

My eyes divert their attention to the navigation screen. There's a map showing all sorts of numbers but not important. The big thing I'm looking at is the map. It shows where I'm going and what I'm near. A dotted line lead to what I think is the wormhole. It reads EST: ERB-1. It stands for Epic Rap Battles. (It stands for Einstein-Rosen Bridge, I lied.)Somehow, NASA managed to give something as cool as a wormhole. If they can't name it, I will. I dig my iPod out of my pockets and scroll through my playlist. I have my phone somewhere, but that's a later problem. There's all sorts of songs: Beast of Burden, Echoes, Barrytown, Champange Supernova, Mister Kingdom, Pian— Wait. I like that one. That's the new name. ERB-1 is now Mister Kingdom.

[flipsider-asterisk]

Flipsider* CHAPTER 1.5: STILL NOBODY HOME

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

Sammy pipes up concernedly,"You alright, Seamus?"

"Um... yeah. I'll be fine. Just gotta— just gonna do an EVA. For the new year," I respond as my hands let go of eachother. I feel tired, but that's alright. It's alright because I feel better now. 

Okay, let's do this. I set down the rescue flares on the floor and make my way over to my space suit. Not quite unlike my jumpsuit, it's a nice bright navy blue and a bit bulkier than is optimal. Tons of cargo pockets, too.Not a fat spacesuit with movement difficulty like EMU or Orlan, just bulky in the way really heavy tactical gear is. Not sci-fi slim either. The suit comes in about four main parts: gloves, pants with boots, helmet, and torso. The stripes and highlights and pocket flaps and things are black and there's a bunch of nylon straps and a big bulky tool belt with bags around it, those are white. A nice color scheme always helps. The helmet is closer to a sphere than any motorbike helmet, and is solid white with a long black stripe down the middle and blue highlights. It moves with the wearer's head, which solves the problem of needing to turn your whole body to look more than forty-five degrees in any direction.

I slip into the torso, pulling it over my head like a tee shirt. I make sure not to bump into anything with the big life support backpack. Next goes the pants aaand I was supposed to put those on first. I take off the torso and vocalize my upsetment as my legs slip into the pants. I once again put on the torso and snap the gloves into their sockets. Finally, I pick up the helmet and pop it into place. I clap my hands and cheer myself on. I bet I look really cool right now. I think there's a mirror in here somewhere. My eyes scout the airlock a until they spot what I'm looking for: a covered up mirror on the wall. I roll up the curtain on the mirror and I do look pretty cool!

"Wooh!"

I pick up the three flares and stuff them in one of the bags on my tool belt. Stepping towards the airlock, I gather two extendable tethers and connect them to my suit. It's gooooOH SHIT! Something tapped my shoulder! I fumble a wrench out of my belt and whip myself around and... "Oh! Hi Sammy! Almost gave me a heart attack there!"

"Hi, Seamus! Just wanted to make sure the EVA goes well," she giggles.

About waist height to me is Sammy; her mobile form, that is. She very closely resembles half of a big metal sea urchin with eight two-jointed telescoping arms that ended in radially symmetrical five-fingered robot hands. All of these arms are on the bottom half of Sammy, on the top half she has a big bulb of a bunch of cameras and sensors. She has a couple more on her body, arms, and hands. It looks a little freaky, but it helps her see and navigate so it all works out. All of her joints had an unlimited degree of movement, as long as Sammy didn't bump her arms or hands into something, she could hit any pose. On her top half she had a couple of pockets and straps so that she could carry tools around or tether to whatever. There's also some bags that her camera bulb rests above.

I realize something just now. This is my first EVA. As far as I'm aware, nobody else's first EVA involved New Year's fireworks. As far as I'm concerned, I have a better first EVA than anyone else in history. Every other astronaut can suck it. Back to the task on hand. I step into the airlock and attach one of my tethers to a hand hold on the inside. One time when I was a kid, some astronaut forgot to tether and pressed the jettison button. He was fine, though. They had to maneuver the ship over to him while he just spun around. I learn from history, so the tether gets attached. I see Sammy do the same in the reflection in the window. 

"Alright. Lets go out."

I close the door behind me and press the big DEPRESSURIZE button on the wall. The room begins to hiss, getting quieter and more more muffled by the second. A big green LED bulb flashes on as the pressure gauge hits zero atmospheres. The world is quiet, just me and the sounds of the spacesuit. I take a deep breath and walk over to the outer door. My hand grasps the handle and I slowly push the door open. The slight squeaking sound of opening the door travels through my suit into my ears. The sound of my feet hitting the metal grid platform ring through me as I step out into space.

"Pretty neat."

While I attach a tether to a handrail, Sammy does this odd sort of rolling motion out besides me and my radio crackles to life.

"I'm going to just sit here and watch. Have fun!"

"I will," I say smiling as the stars hit my eyes. I walk past the metal grid wall to get to a place where I can get an unobstructed shot. There's two metal grid platforms, one for acceleration, the other for the centrifuge. They form a sort of an L shape, creating a floor and a wall for both modes of artificial gravity. Both have ladder rungs for orientation change. Right now, the ship is accelerating; gravity makes it more of a tower than a house. I zip my head around and take in the sight of the ship. All sorts of modules stacked on top of each other with all sorts of flags and company logos. The most noticeable is next to the big red NASA logo; the mission patch with our names and the name of the ship. Jojo. I stand fixated on the ship for a solid five minutes. I even almost cry a little. You wouldn't get this back home, that's for sure. I check the time. 

Jan. 1, 2039, 00:02. 

I pull out the first flare from one of my big pockets and point it forwards and up a little. I count down from three and then I squeeze the trigger. A red and streaking ball of light erupts in front of me and zips foward. Shortly afterwards, it falters and falls down and out of my line of sight. I smile to myself and giggle a little bit.

"Now that was pretty neat. Again! "

I pull out the second flare and point it a little more upwards. Same results, same giddy reaction. 

"Okay. One more time!"

I point the third flare up and I— oop. I accidently fired it straight up. My head and eyes track the ball of light as it rockets upwards, shrinking smaller as it goes. "Uh... well wouldn't you look at that Samm— oh! Don't do that." 

Sammy inquires to me, "Are you actually stupid, because huh?"

"Yeah, maybe!"

The ball of light stops shrinking and starts growing. It's heading directly towards me. My arms stretch out forwards and my legs scramble beneath me as I clumsily try to avoid getting hit by the flare. I get maybe eight feet before I trip over my own foot and slam into the floor. Ouch. I clamber with my arms and I crawl onwards as the area around me gets steadily redder and redder as the fireball careens towards me. My heart pounds in my chest as I desperately claw at the metal rungs beneath me. I feel a scuttling on the ground as Sammy grabs me and drags me into the airlock. I scream as she slams the door behind us. Not out of fear or anything, that whole thing was just kinda crazy. 

A hissing sound fills the room and sound returns to me as the airlock repressurizes. I lie down on my back while my lungs fight for breath. My hands shakily move towards my helmet and weakly pop it off. Sweat runs down my hair and face into my eyes. All that sweat is stinging my eyes. I take off my right glove and wipe my face with it as my eyes blink over and over trying to wash out the salt. I weakly turn to Sammy coughing and with my forearms pointed upwards.

"Happy New Years."

I prop myself up, resting on my arms. My eyes dart around as a red light shines dully through the airlock window. My first EVA. I lie back down and I ask myself a question.

"Well, how did I get here?"

NEXT CHAPTER

[flipsider-asterisk]

Flipsider* CHAPTER 1: NOBODY HOME

Nobody Home

I need to piss.

I've been out of that coma... how long? Fifteen days. That sounds about right. For a little more than one of those days, I've been lying in bed. Lying with a navy blue jumpsuit two sizes too large and a comforter one size too small. I'm more than fine with the jumpsuit. Not so much with the comforter. All I've done in that time wasting away under the covers is binge some soapy drama show that I don't even like. I weakly roll out of bed before kneeling with my lower legs on the floor and my face on the mattress. After mustering enough motivation to stay out of bed, I limp through the dark and into the next room with my sleeping legs weighing me down like logs. I gently open the door to the restroom. It's hardly a room at all; more like a closet. Just a metal toilet and a sink in the wall. Reaching into my left pocket, I pull out a pair of earbuds and pop them right in. I sit on the toilet for the next eightish minutes listening to pirated songs off the old iPod they left me with. I flush the toilet and set off into the dark. Would've been there longer if the iPod didn't crap out so soon.

"Hey, Sammy. Can you turn on the lights? Slowly," I murmur under my breath. Her name is SAMI (Starbound Assistive Machine Intelligence), but we— I call her Sammy. One of the first properly intelligent AIs (and maybe the first that acts like an actual person). Definitely an assistant, maybe not intelligent. At the very least she's some company, and that's always appreciated. Almost always.

"Speak up, Seamus," Sammy's raspy Bostonian voice calls from speakers in the ceiling.

"Didn't know we were on first name terms. It's Banks to you!"

"Speak up, Banks," she says while waving her rubber-tipped hand-claw-thing lazily around the wrist.

"Turn on the lights as slow— hey! I said slowly!"

The cool clinic lights wash over the ship and my eyes flutter open and shut, over and over. I've been in near total darkness for a while. It's kinda weird, being so far out that the sun barely shines.

"Hey, Sammy. How far out— how far are we from Earth? Oh! Also... how long 'till engine shutdown?"

"We are 1.28 light-years out. One day and two hundred-eighty-four minutes 'till shutdown."

"M'kay. Awesome."

I think that's maybe... four, five hours? Somewhere around that range. Either way I still got three days to muck around before I start floating of the floor. The ship accelerates... deaccelerates, same thing. The engines accelerate the ship at around 15 meters per second per second (fifteen meters per second squared if I'm in a rush).

All of that produces 1.5 g-force; that's fifty percent higher than Earth's gravity. Makes it harder to get out of bed. On the brightside, it does keep my bones from just kinda crumbling to dust. Making my way to the dormitory exit, I catch myself in the reflection of the window. Translucently plastered in front of the stars and the pitch dark of space, I see myself; my hair runs shaggy down to my shoulders and pulled down and to the sides by eye level. Some water could probably fix it up. Walking out of the dorm, I bring myself out into the hall and up a ladder with some difficulty; this includes falling two feet, almost slamming into the floor, and hurting my wrist. I did it though,and now I'm up in the pilot's seat. Up in my high tower... yeah. I feel like this place needs some more inviting lighting than that of a hospital. 

"Sammy, please just make the lighting a smidge warmer."

"As you wish," she says with the lights sliding into a dull cozy orange.

"I told you a million times that I wanted warmer lights! You do it now and not the first twelve times?"

I'm over a light-year out from planet Earth and I've got a Siri in charge of keeping me alive. I'm living in bright times— bright times where the Sun shines through my windows as an equal to a dim lightbulb.

"You said you wanted it. Never asked or commanded."

My jaw drops and I stare at one of her little robot hands on the ceiling in disbelief. I point to the big toggle SAMI switch and give her a not really very stern look. I suppose the change of lighting is better late than never. Anyhoo, I run all the checks with all of the ship's systems, or at least what I hope is all of them. All good. The way that the cockpit is shaped is a little odd; a long and skinny cone with all the glowy buttons, switches, screens, and doo-dads above and infront of a pilot's seat equipped with joysticks, levers, and buttons. In front of me lies one uninterrupted window to see the stars. If I remember correctly the windows aren't even glass. Transparent aluminum, I believe. One of those weird materials that don't feel real, but are. It very much resembles the cockpit of some high speed plane, but looking at the ship's layout, it is wildly out of place with all of the more space station looking parts of the ship. Like it was glued on to the regular layout of mostly cylindrical modules.

Looking around, the clock catches my eye. Dec. 31, 2038, 22:32. I've got an hour and a half until New Years! Sammy didn't tell me this, but she alerted me of Christmas. Don't know what the deal with that is. Back on track, there wasn't really anything to do in terms of gifts so I just watched Elf in the Cinema section of the dorm (not really for cinema; just entertainment in general. That's all I use it for so its the Cinema section to me.) and got coffee stains on my jumpsuit. The sequel was pretty alright, all things considered. As of right now the projector is showing one of those ten hour loops of a log in a fireplace. Sometimes they threw a new log in, which I suppose is nice. 

What was I doing? The clock... New Years! That's what it was. Gotta get down to the storage module. If I am correct as usual, there should be a sizeable stock of emergency flares; the closest thing I'll have to fireworks. 

"You're forgetting something, Seamus. You want me to—"

"Op,op,op! Wait, let me think," I reply. What could I have forgotten? Deodorant, fixing my hair, glasses, a fresh jumpsui— my glasses!

I forgot all of those things, really, but cut me some slack; all my crew died. "Uhhm... the— my glasses, I forgot my glasses, Sammy. I noticed you used my first name again. I give up, I don't care. Call me Seamus."

"Do you want me to fetch your glasses?"

"No, thank you. I'll get 'em myself."

I head back to the dorm and spin one of the beds around like a hammock (they're hinged for centrifuge mode.) and snatch my rectangular glasses off of my nightstand. They never really made that much of an improvement to my sight, but a little help can go a long way, for what it's worth. "You know what, I don't need them. They can stay there," I murmur as I set my glasses back on the nightstand. Back to the flares, don't like how often I'm getting side tracked. The storage module is directly connected to the dorm, so I drag myself over to the door. I gently open the door. As usual, nobody else on the other side. Just a bunch of food wrappers haphazardly thrown around. I rummage through the heaps of cushioned white cubes lining every side of the room until I find exactly what I need. It might be hard to pick up for most people, but in one of the boxes with EMERGENCY SUPPLIES written on the side in big red letters, there's going to be emergency supplies. Bandages, defribilators, hand warmers, morphine, yadda yadda. Not important. What is important is the big red flare gun. There's a box with ten of them; plenty for a New Year's celebration. I gather three of them in one of the big pockets on the front of my thigh and I slowly walk down the hall to the main corridor. I take a quick glance at that cupola window I saw earlier. Same sight as usual. It's pretty, though.

I climb the ladder up the corridor, passing the lab and make my way up to

the Canadarm control room. Those arms are some pretty neat pieces of equipment, if I say so myself. I take yet another ladder and finally find myself in the airlock. There's a bunch of equipment tossed around from that last EVA my crew mate did; the last EVA Maggie Baxter did. She was as bright and as quick-witted as could be. Always ready with a solution or some brilliant joke. Long hair, a sharp jaw. According to Sammy, Baxter died from an undetected brain aneurysm and just... fell off the ship during EVA. When she tumbled she was vaporized in the engine's antimatter beam. I rub my temples and my eyes well up with tears. She was my friend. She was my friend! I try to gather my composure, but then I spot next to my navy blue spacesuit another almost identical suit. Not exactly identical; this one's nametag says Baker. Winslow Baker. A quiet guy, always reading a book and always ready to help somebody in need. Always donating to charity or volunteering at some new local non-profit. Balding, thick mustache. He died from a heart attack when he woke up from the coma. Baxter stopped the engines and gave him a proper space burial (a jettison out of the airlock). You can do this. You can do this! Can you do this? My knees shake and my hands slam onto my temples and I wince and I cry and I shriek as loud as my lungs and throat will let me.

Snot runs down my face and I babble like a baby,"I can— I— oh no, I can't do this! They were my friends!" I inhale sharply and choke on spit. "They were my friends," I whisper to myself with my hand clasped over my mouth and tears pouring out my eyes like rain roaring out of a storm cloud. I collapse to the floor and I sit against the wall hugging my shins. I woke up alone. I've got nothing to lose. No! I've got a lot to lose! I've got my life, I've got progress. I've got the future on my shoulders.

"Can I do this?"

I pick myself off and up from the floor and wipe the beaded-up tears from my eyes. I hold my own hand and I begin to think. I could go home right now. I could turn this ship around and go back to sleep. With my tear-blurred sight I see my reflection in the airlock window with my hair disheveled and my eyes reddened. My chest quakes as it breathes a deep, deep breath. In. Out. In and out and in and out over and over. My quivering lips crease into a smile and I chuckle softly to myself.

I can do this.

NEXT CHAPTER

[flipsider-asterisk]

CHAPTERS 1-3 COMING SOON

courtesy of @carhorno