Grounded

It's a truism that sometimes the most well-meaning acts can have the most unfortunate consequences.

The patient before me is one Andaz McClintok, although he doesn't answer to that name – none of my patients will answer to their birth names – but I will not humour him by addressing him the way I know he wants me to, the way he is used to being addressed. This is not spitefulness on my part, believe me. Andaz and the other thirty-three like him have got to adapt to their new lives now, whether they like it or not, and part of that adaptation involves having and using a personal name.

A course of intensive physiotherapy has reversed some of the severe muscle atrophy in this patient, but underneath his white hospital gown, his arms and legs are still stick-thin and he cannot as yet walk unaided. His skin is still dead-white and it will take some time for the pigment to build up enough for him to go outside safely. His hair will never grow back, of course - all his hair follicles were destroyed to prevent hair growth interfering with his Interface. His scalp is a smooth white egg apart from the tracery of thin red scars spidering over its surface where the Interface connections were surgically removed.

He eyes me dully as I sit down opposite him and wish him a good morning. His breakfast tray lies nearby, untouched. His gaze drifts down to his hands folded neatly in his lap - still thin and clawlike despite the therapy.

"Andaz. Andaz?" I repeat his name until I manage to break into his reverie and he looks up at me – either that or he's just fed up of hearing his name over and over, "Andaz, you have to eat. We talked about this, didn't we? You agreed to start taking your meals last time I was here. Don't you remember?"

He looks at the tray with the same lack of interest as he looked at me – and at everything else, then allows his gaze to settle once more on his folded hands.

"Andaz, look," I say, trying to bring him back to the here and now once more, "I know you're not used to eating. I know it must be strange and distasteful, but this is how things are now, you have to accept this. Dr Maddizon says your digestive system is fully functional now so please, at least try something."

I place the tray in front of him. The food's not bad, actually, and smells appetising even to me. Maybe the smell gets to Andaz too because, after a minute of so of incurious staring, he gropes for the plastic spoon next to the bowl and guides a wavering spoonful into his mouth. I can see his jaw working as he moves the food around inside his mouth, getting all the different flavours – or so I think.

He lets the spoon fall back into the bowl and pushes the tray away again.

"Don't you like it?" I ask, "I can get something else brought in?"

"No flavour," he replies. His voice, so long unused, is hardly more than a croak.

Suddenly, he buries his face in his hands and does the most human thing I have observed him do so far – he begins to weep, his body convulsing with great wracking, utterly abandoned sobs.

On an intellectual level, of course, I know perfectly well what this poor shrivelled man must be going through – I am a trained psychologist after all - but it is only now that the full force of the loss he has endured, and the utter hopelessness he must be feeling, really hits me.

The Compassionate Uses Act of 2657 was meant to do good. It was meant to put an end to what was essentially a form of slavery.

It had long been the case that only the human brain possessed the necessary complexity and processing power required to navigate a starship safely across the void – and only the rarest type of brain, at that. Children were tested at age seven – and those precious few who passed the tests were Interfaced, becoming, in effect, a starship's living heart and brain. Their frail human bodies were replaced by a sleek metal hull, as their ears and eyes were replaced by long- and short- range sensors, able to scan the full width of the electromagnetic spectrum, not just the tiny slit of the visible available to ordinary humans. Their limbs were replaced by Tachyon-Ion converters and all of space was theirs to roam.

They had had no choice as children.

We gave them no choice as Ships.

With the advent of sufficiently advanced neural net AI to replace them, it was decided that we, as a society, would undo the injustice we had perpetrated against the ship-children as they were called. We would free the poor creatures "trapped" inside the remaining thirty-four starships still in existence.

The ships were ordered home and, once there, their human pilots were disconnected and brought here. The ships themselves were dismantled.

As I say, sometimes the most well-meaning acts can have the most unfortunate consequences. We have freed their bodies, of course, but in so doing, we have deafened, blinded and crippled them.

How can the flavour of a bowl of soup compare with the subtle 'taste' of millions of different particles as they stream through your detectors?

How can seeing the most beautiful landscape compare with being able to survey the majesty of the very stars themselves in all their glory?

How can walking or running compare with gliding along the curve of space at near lightspeed?

"Oh, Ship," I whisper, "What have we done?"

Another Failed Attempt at Getting Published

Back in December, I sent off the story below to a Flash Fiction competition, the winning 20 entries of which would be published in an anthology entitled "Thieves and Scoundrels". The stories all had to be 1,000 words or less and had to be SciFi, Horror or Fantasy.

This is the same competition that Don't Feed the Pixies entered and wrote about here.  He was not successful and, gues what? Neither was I.

Anyhoo, here's the one they didn't want....

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Hello, Padre. Is it that time already? My, how time flies when you're having fun. Sorry, that's just my little joke. The condemned man can have a little joke, can't he, Padre?

No? Oh, well.

I know I'm supposed to confess all right about now and seek redemption or something, but I have to tell you Padre, I'm not about to do that.  I've lied, cheated, stolen, fornicated and murdered my way around the Ninety Worlds all my life, and if that slimeball Soleki hadn't ratted me out, I'd still be out there doing it right now.

I won't lie to you, Padre, I've done nothing good with my life - and I don't regret it.

That's not what you wanted to hear, is it? That's not how the script goes. Well I'm sorry to disappoint you, Padre, but I've loved every minute of my life!

Okay, I can see you're not buying the bravado and the bullshit, that's very perceptive of you.

There is one thing I did – a theft, actually - that I would undo if I could. Just one, mind, I'm not going soft or anything just because it's my last day.

I just need someone to know this one thing before I go. It's the least I can do.

I once worked aboard Premier Spaceways' holiday ship, Vivace.

Ah, I see you remember what happened aboard that ship. Well, that's the thing, Padre, the authorities never did work out what caused all those deaths, but I know.

It was me.

Don't look so shocked, I never killed those people, they died just the way the Tri-Dee news reported it. It was my fault is all I'm saying.

I was flat broke and in debt up to my eyeballs with all the wrong people. Back then, I had a lousy poker face, an addiction to gambling, and a misplaced belief in my own luck – a most unfortunate combination, I'm sure you'll agree.

Anyway, there was a pair of plasticrete overshoes or an involuntary stroll out of an airlock sans spacesuit in my near future when Temple Jai offered me enough money to get clear and, like a fool, I jumped at it.

Jai said the device was harmless, just some piece of alien tech-junk he'd picked up offworld. I should have known better than to believe anything Temple Jai said, the rat-bastard. I heard he once sold two of his own mothers just for beer money.

Anyway, all I had to do was get a job on a certain ship, using the fake ID Jai gave me, and take this little thing aboard with me. Each day, I was to hide it in a different passenger's cabin, then at the end of the trip, give it back to him. That was all.

It sounded like easy money.

Did I ask him what the device was? Of course I did, but he point-blank refused to tell me and threatened to call off the deal if I didn't shut my yap.

It was a funny-looking thing, about the size and shape of an egg, but very heavy with a kind of translucent pearly shell. The innards - what you could see of them through the shell – were always slowly swirling around. There was a hint of wiring in there too if you looked real close, and a couple of button-like studs on the outside that you could press with your finger.

Maybe that's where it all went wrong. Maybe I fiddled with the thing a bit, I don't remember for sure anymore. Or maybe Temple Jai knew exactly what the thing did and didn't give a shit - I wouldn't put it past him. He's dead now though, so I guess we'll never know.

We were about a week out from Lumiere when the killings began. One morning, Mrs Soraya Ahmed stabbed her husband to death over breakfast. Sarr T'kel bludgeoned his new Sarra to a pulp the next day, then the day after that, Ikk 'ut set fire to the cabin it was sharing with its mates, killing all eight of them.

Now, I'm no genius, but even I managed to work it out. All the passengers that were doing the killing and those that died were ones in whose cabin I had hidden the egg-thing. Now, I've done some killing in my time, but only people who crossed me, only people who deserved it. Killing strangers for no reason has never been my bag, so you better believe I quickly put the egg-thing back into its box and hid it in the ship's hold, well away from people.

There were fifteen more deaths after that, all from the rest of the cabins where I had hidden the egg-thing before I realised what was going on. The captain put us back to port immediately and there was a massive investigation, but no-one ever figured out what had happened.

I heard they had to scrap the Vivace not long after that: no-one wanted to travel in a boat where so many newlyweds met such a tragic end.

You see, Padre, that was the saddest part. As luck - or Temple Jai, maybe - would have it, I'd been assigned to work on the deck where all the honeymoon suites were - where the love was strongest and freshest.

The egg-thing was some kind of syphon: it just drank up all that love, every last drop. Temple Jai had an eager market for that rarest of commodity and stood to get very rich selling the love I stole for him.

The thing is, Padre, nature abhors a vacuum. When all that love got sucked out of those people, something else rushed in to fill the void, something as fierce and strong as the love had been – except it was the exact opposite of that love.

So there it is - the one thing I ever regret stealing.

You can tell the guards I'm ready to go now.