“The Shell Game”

10,9,8, Isn’t humanity great? The glistening metal rocket stands on her launch pad facing the heavens. Shards of light are sputtering from the underbelly and smoke swirls about the rockets. It is a bullet to pierce the perfectly tranquil sky.

7,6,5, The onboard crew feels alive! A revolution is about to begin! A milestone for the growth of mankind! They will be the first humans into the great beyond. They were going to touch heaven and find their gods.

4,3,2, Our dreams about to come true! The sputter turns into a full burst of fire, roaring and heaving the metal mass up, up, up into space.

One. A beam of light arcs through the night sky leaving a trail of man made clouds.

People on the ground, around the world, and in mission control burst into rounds of applause and joyful celebration. The rocket is away, the rocket is away. It’s ascending beyond the ionosphere. The blue sky gives way to blackness.

We encroach on the moon and in one gravimetric push we slingshot off of it! Go forth! Go forth! Into the great unknown. Go to Mars and places beyond. The rocket passes the red dead sands of Mars. Or did it? Mars seems kind of,flat?

The Captain of the astronaut crew is baffled as he floats amidst his comrades. The blackness of space after the moon is no more and—is that a theatre light? A star is hanging on a black pole?

CRUNCH! The small spaceship hits a wall. The Captain and his crew swim to the porthole of their tiny cockpit. Their mouths agape. Their eyes fixed with astonishment. Was it all a lie? Were years of scientific posturing, debates over planetary bodies, and mountains of data on stars that they couldn’t see with their eyes for naught?

This is what they saw: Spread before them, flat and black was a gigantic surface. On it were lights to represent stars. Looking through another window at the rear of their cockpit they could see the moon and the Earth orbiting around each other and the sun off in the distance. They could also see Mars,at least apart of it, a sprawling sea of red painted on the black surface. This wall,it defied everything that the scientific community ever strung together as a theory of their place in the world. Then the ancients were right, they were in the center of it all.

“What does this mean?” one of the astronauts asked.

Discouragement and failure permeated the groupthink.

The captain put on his bravest face. “It means we explore.” They all put on their space suits and opened the door. The Captain made his first bold step onto the surface of the large black thing. It had a gravity of all its own and made it fairly easy to walk. The trio of men journeyed across the surface, and found an airlock. With the push of a button, they opened the airlock and stepped inside. There they found the atmosphere breathable and took off their space suits.

Inside the wall, there was a labyrinth of corridors, running this way and that. The first thing the intrepid explorers ran into was a computer terminal. The Captain sat down at it. There was no keyboard or mouse. In frustration he poked the screen and the terminal lit up. A diagram appeared and in English it was written: “You are here.” With an arrow.

The three explorers were pleased and investigated the map looking for things of interest that might guide them on their journey. A marker labeled “command center” was a fine example of where they could begin to ask questions. The men went there. The corridors had automatic doors that hissed and zipped apart when they were close enough. Even the door to the command center did that.

The command center was an amphitheater with a gigantic dome enclosing it. The dome itself was a television screen and partitioned into 232 screens. Astronaut #2 investigated the wall of the command center. He noted that when his eyes met one of the small partitions it automatically bulged and pushed aside the other screens. It was aware that it was being looked at. Each screen displayed a person. One screen showed an elderly man waiting for a bus. Another showed a couple picnicking. Still another showed starving people in a part of the country where no one on Earth cared to look; it was amazing that whoever these people are did not ignore it all the same.

In the center of the amphitheater was a globe on a pedestal. It read “environmental controls” underneath. The trio of adventurers crowded around and studied the globe. Astronaut #1 poked it with his finger and the globe spun. He breathed on the simulated Earth and the clouds parted. It surprised him. He blew harder and the clouds blew away and curled together forming little swirls along the surface of the planet. He poked other parts of the planet. “That is an incredible simulation.”

Astronaut #2 was busy looking at the 232 screens around them and noticed that the tiny people there were in an uproar. People ran for their lives. Some people just died. Buildings in the background were crumbling to the ground. Tornadoes and hurricanes were brewing and tearing apart cities. “Hey! Wait! Stop doing that!”

Astronaut #1 stopped and stared at the screen that Astronaut #2 pointed too. “Oh shit! Undo! Undo!” Every breath he made created more turbulence. The Captain finally dragged him away. They all moved away from the environmental controls and tread softly.

“We could be gods here!” Astronaut #1 exclaimed. “We could right all the wrongs of the world.”

“Like how you created all those natural disasters?” Astronaut #2 replied.

“Let’s keep going,” the Captain said to break up the bickering amongst his men. “There must be someone here who can help us.”

The trio of brave men left the command center and walked through the endless maze of corridors stopping every so often to consult a map. Food and water were of no concern when they ran out of their own. There were bathrooms and even snack machines. No matter where they went, they found no one. Other doors led to other rooms and yet no people. The found empty crews quarters. They found diaries and read them to try and learn who the people were.

One entry went like this: “The people are discontent with living in the Sphere. The walls are gray and boring. Life here is listless and they call our civilization advanced. We have, according to all our literature, seen and done it all, and now we are just bored and playing a game with the blue and green thing we made in the middle.”

Another entry went: “Goodbye gray world. We are going to Earth. I would rather live in the game than observe it.”

Unfettered by this new disappointment, the Captain moved forward on their expedition. He first checked another terminal and brought up a map of the place and asked the terminal to zoom the map out as far as it could go. A sphere emerged from the outward zooming. “A Dyson Sphere,” he said.

The astronauts lived in the Dyson Sphere for a few days. They explored the rooms and the walked the endless corridors. They made some calculations and concluded that the sphere was huge, billions of miles in diameter just to contain one planet, one that they synthesized to alleviate their boredom.

Being the explorer he was, the Captain then asked his men: “Why did they build this shell? What’s beyond it?”

The trek began again. They got their bearings and headed away from the side closest to Earth and went towards the outermost part of the shell. There they found some windows, and outside found a space unlike anything they had ever seen before. It was aquamarine and swirled and flowed like a gelatinous mass. Shadows of things swam in the liquid.

“We were supposed to keep going beyond the limits that humankind has gone and find our creators. I say we cross this gulf too,” the Captain said. The other two men agreed and they were on their way to find a means to escape the Dyson Sphere and enter into “jellospace,” as they dubbed it.

There were ships docked on the outermost edge of the Dyson Sphere. The daring crew entered one and set sail through the jellospace. The most prevalent sound they could hear while traveling through the jellospace was the constant sucking noise the vessel made as it darted through the thick goop. Onboard the small ship, the crew had living quarters, food and water supplies. Along the way they saw many varied and interesting sights. There were other Dyson Sphere’s for one thing. It amazed them that there could be things billions of miles in diameter that were trillions of miles apart. There were huge reptilian and whale-like animals that swam to-and-fro. They witnessed the birth and death of these creatures as they crossed the great abyss in their quest to fulfill humanity’s destiny. They faced electrical storms: the jellospace was filled with electrical pulses and strange branches that networked and webbed for billions of miles in all directions. The substance, as Astronaut #2 put it, was brain-like not jello-like.

Thirty-four years past and the astronauts reached the end of the jellospace. Here there was another wall and another door. The men, now in their sixties, docked the ship and clambered out of the porthole door. Again they explored the new space. Again they found no one, just trillion of miles filled of empty buildings. They did find another control center and learned the map of the jellospace. It was a bubbling, boiling, seething mass much like a water droplet suspended in zero-gravity. From this vantage point they could control the entire jellospace much like they could control Earth from the environmental controls in the Dyson Sphere.

Again the Captain asked himself, “what lies beyond?” Their journey propelled them forward to find the outer edge of the shell of this Super Dyson Sphere (for lack of a better name). For a month the men journeyed. They found diaries along the way.

An entry read like this: We have created spaces of our own. Within those spaces we have created creatures that inhabit them, and those creatures have become sentient and intelligent enough to create creatures of their own. We have truly reproduced the very stuff of life and that life will continue to reproduce in this way while we can no longer. We have always thought of ourselves as the shell. We created the white fluid and at the yoke there was new life being conceived by our machinations. Now, I wonder if we are not just another yoke, and that beyond us lays a vast fluid leading to yet another shell. We leave life to reproduce on its own and go in search of our own creators.”

After a month the men stopped at a window staring out into a vast ocean of a substance none of them could describe. The Captain dropped to his knees tired and despondent. It was as far as humanity could go. He extrapolated in his mind: If they crossed this open space what would they find? Another shell? The man who had written the diary entry hoped to find his originators there, but in truth, his gods would have finished their work and gone searching for their gods. So on and so forth.

Okay, it’s more than one page. I came up with an idea and ran with it not knowing where it would lead me. That’s the best kind of writing. It’s also the kind of writing that you just pull straight out of your ass. This is serious some of the best shit I could come up with. I did manage to check the spelling and most of the grammar before I decided to upload this. I should put my best foot forward, but I tend to just put it in my mouth. Enjoy the story. If not the language, the essence of it.

“Cosmic Strings”

So this tree fell in the woods… It fell on a rabbit running from a fox, and subsequently rolled over the fox — and tumbled down the hill. Ants made their hill too close and the metropolis of mud, larva, and royalty amongst the insects of the world was wiped clear of the forest floor by the tumbling log. A million tiny screams sounded at once, but only a stray bird could hear the likes of the billionth extinction of ants, and then it flew away. Standing trees caught the massive rolling log before it could inflict further damage upon the natural world. You think anyone heard that?

What caused the commotion? A hair. Really, a fraction of a hair’s width wire had fallen from the heavens and bolted through the tree that caused so much devastation. The animals that survived the ensuing mayhem accepted the presence of the newly invisible wire as if it were always there and went about their daily business hiding and preying upon one another.

Here’s an interesting story about the wire: Spiders that strolled by the wire on their nightly hunts climbed the razor thin thread and built webs across the base of it. One adventurous spider climbed the thread up and up. It figured, in only the simple way a spider could, that it would find the end of the line and build a web there. The night passed, and soon days did too, and the spider didn’t find the end of the thread, he just kept climbing. If spiders weren’t loners and kept history books instead, they would have written that this spider had gone the furthest that any spider has gone. He was the first one to reach the top of the troposphere before giving up from the extreme cold and lack of breathable air and falling eighteen kilometers to his death.

Man did not yet realize the coming of the wire. Not until the day the forest land the wire had fallen in was being torn down to make way for a brand new MegaMart. Toby, upon his bulldozer, was sliced clean in twain by the transparent and hard-to-see wire. It caused a ruckus. The foreman found the two halves of Toby and the pile of insides that spilt out. The bulldozer itself was split down the middle but only to the back of the driver’s seat. Toby’s blood lead to the discovery of the interstellar dental floss buried deep in the dirt. The red glistened in the midday sun and the foreman squinted his eyes and made out a length of the wire. Curiously, he did what men usually do when they first come face to face with new things. He poked it.

Twang! Like a guitar string the wire vibrated and shimmered as the pulse of his poke went along the thin line. The foreman tilted his bemused head to the sky. The wire was hooked to nothing that he could see. They had torn down all the trees around it. He asked his workers where the wire was tethered too, but the lunch bell rang and the workers weren’t being paid to be bemused by a piece of string as narrow as a line of atoms and instead, went off to eat. The foreman decided for himself that the wire went off into the blue sky — it was a cloudless day and not a weather balloon or other unidentified flying object could be seem anchoring the other side of the line.

Twang! Twang! The foreman strummed the line. He threw his hands up. Whatever it was, the tethered, infinitely indistinguishable line leading to the heavens was holding up construction on the new MegaMart super store. “Cut it down boys!” He barked after the lunch session.

One man took a pair of office scissors to the taut fishing line. Snip! The scissor blades were parted from the handle. The line stayed in one piece. Another construction worker grabbed gardening shears he had bought at the MegaMart three blocks away because they were on sale and put the blades around the defiant thread and clamped the blades. These blades too were removed from their handle with not a hair shaved from the line. Rotary saw blades were placed on the heavenward string but the metal was peeled off the discus and shrapnel hurt the men more than the cosmic string. A katana was dueled against the thread; the master of the blade claimed that nothing could withstand the carbon steel of his blade, and the katana too was made shorter by eight inches.

Plan B. Men with shovels at the base of the stubborn wire heaved dirt away night and day. Twelve feet down the thread was still anchored further down. Twenty feet more and they couldn’t find the end of the line. Forty-one feet and eight inches later the men gave up and threatened to strike for doing the laboriously stupid task. MegaMart decided the best way to handle the situation was to fire everyone and start again. The foreman on the site was told to do something about the wire, and to do it goddamned fast if he didn’t want to find himself unemployed.

“I reckon,” the foreman responded in kind. “We need ourselves some scientists.”

MegaMart hired the best scientists money could buy. They brought them in from M.I.T., Caltech, Stanford, and all the other smart sounding Ivy League schools. Just to be fair and meet their labor employment quotas MegaMart also brought in some minorities and urban kids as interns.

Experiment #1. A clever physicist came up with this. Vibrations on a string would eventually bounce back once they hit the other end. They could use it to determine the length of the cord and make a guess as to where exactly the other end of the line was. He tried this: A sensor was put around the wire and hooked to a computer. On a small LCD screen the vibrations of the wire were visible as a sinusoidal read out. The noise was filtered out. He deftly strummed a pattern of vibrations on the cable that showed as major pulses on the monitor. Then they waited. A day passed by with no return. A week and still nothing. The physicist left the task of watching up to his dutiful grad students and went off to attend a String Theory summit in Geneva, Switzerland. He returned and still more nothing. Another week later, the physicist received a frantic and jubilant phone call from his students. The pattern had come back, diminished, distorted by noise, but recognizable by the computer software.

What did they learn? The end of the wire was some ten light years in space. They knew the exact direction in which the wire was pointing and using some more computer software they were able to plot the trajectory of the wire out ten light years. A star was at the other end and months ago a planet had been discovered. Could this be? The MegaMart scientists blew a collective gasket. Someone on that planet sent this string to Earth and it meant that life existed there.

Experiment #2. Another physicist revealed this simple childhood invention that fascinated him as a six year old and eventually led him to study science in college and graduate with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. He demonstrated. Using two grad students, he took two plain Dixie cups and popped a piece of twine into the bottoms of each cup and secured the twine with a knot on each end. He commanded his grad students to go further apart until the string was tight and straight and had them speak to one another using the primitive telephone. There was general applause; most people were just trying to be nice.

Back to the cosmic thread. He tied a Dixie cup to the heavebound cord with a short length of fishing line from a tackle box he brought with him. He pulled the Dixie cup until the wire was taut and exclaimed, “Greetings. We are men from Earth! And we bid you welcome! We mean you no harm and seek your reply!” The pulses from his voice translated into vibrations on the string that disappeared into the sky and through the heavens.

Weeks later the scientists got their reply. To their astonishment it was in English. “Please stop yelling. We can hear you just fine!”

The scientists tried to open communications with the aliens on the other side of the line but their communiques were met with silence. MegaMart Coroporation grew tired of waiting for the extraterrestrials to phone back and set to work completing the superstore. The area around the wire was turned into a small amusement park filled with fast food vendors and the park housed an alien themed carousel and Ferris wheel. The scientists were outraged. MegaMart fired them and installed a Dixie cup and a fishing line as a permanent feature of the newly christened “Cosmic String” and charged ten dollars to anyone who wanted to speak to aliens. Most people were disappointed since the replies weren’t instant.

The aliens though were baffled. Costumers were irate. The scientists were up in arms over being fired and restricted from entering the premises. Lawsuits were filed every which way. Tabloids ran stories that MegaMart duped the public with a story about aliens that speak English to loosen coffers and contended that the so-called “Cosmic String” was a hoax. String theorists didn’t take MegaMart’s marketing spin lying down either. Calling the wire the “Cosmic String” cheapened the study of String theory they proclaimed. MegaMart’s marketing team rebuked them: “At least we have a string, what do you got?” With mounting costs, MegaMart’s board of directors decided that the controversial site should be shut down.

As with all simple solutions there are complex problems. When the CEO issued the order to the regional MegaMart manager over a conference call he received this back: “I would love too, but something just came down the Cosmic String.”

“What is it?” The CEO asked.

“It appears to be an elevator cart.”

The scientists were rehired and readmitted onto the premises under armed escort to study this new marvel. This time reporters tagged along and they documented the first honest-to-god alien craft that wasn’t a blurry Frisbee wafting around in the sky. The military tagged along too to ensure that no honest-to-god aliens would come out of the first honest-to-god alien craft that wasn’t a blurry Frisbee in the sky. The first sign of trouble, they would nuke the entire state to avoid alien invasion.

The scientists stepped up to the door. There was one button to push and it was pushed. The doors opened. No smoke poured out. No busy flashing lights emitted from the elevator car. No honest-to-god aliens stepped out and greeted men with honest-to-god alien one-liners like “we come in peace and you go in pieces,” or “live long and prosper.”

Nothing happened in fact except the doors of the elevator car opening to reveal…the inside of the elevator car. The car itself was about three times the size of an elevator car you might find in any skyscraper, except it has a porthole as well. It was insulated with various layers of metals to keep the emptiness of space out and to keep the goodness of breathable air in. There appeared to be a small lavatory, a sink, and some other provisions to ensure the safety of any traveler brave enough to travel on the elevator over the interstellar track. The scientists knew what this meant: they would have to draw straws as to who would go. The military assigned their best sharpshooter to the team — it was two-man operation, one way, on an elevator. Rations were provided, communications equipment, weapons, and video cameras.

The new space men entered the elevator. On the inside there was a panel with ten buttons. Each button was labeled by a number. Each man resisted the childhood urge to poke every button and picked the first destination labeled “2207.” The doors closed. The two man operation team waved goodbye and up they went. Each man had enough room to sit, move around a little and wait. As they passed into the ionosphere the men floated, but the elevator picked up speed planting their feet firm to the ground and sped up. They couldn’t tell which way they were going; it wasn’t up, so they agreed that it should be forward.

The velocity of the elevator picked up again when they escaped the Earth and Moon. Mars was up next. They had reached it in a mere couple of days and kept zooming into the great beyond. They whizzed by Jupiter at twice the speed of Mars; Saturn darted by the window at four times the speed, Neptune even faster on their exponential increase in acceleration. Pluto was just a blur along with all of the other planets that scientists were still trying to determine if they should label planets or just big rocks that could potentially hit Earth.

The scientist spent his time plotting velocity graphs and going over Einstein’s equations of relativity. They were approaching the speed of light, and one should at least make an attempt to be prepared in that case. The soldier did pushups, because who knew what was on the other end of the elevator track, and if it should be hostile, well, one should at least make an attempt to be prepared in that case.

One morning, the soldier woke the scientist up. “What’s that?” He pointed out the window. There were surrounded by whiteness.

“My god,” the scientist said. “We must now be going at the speed of light. We’re going so fast that we can see photons standing still all around us.”

Then ten minutes after that the blackness of space returned. They looked like they were going backwards.

“What’s this?” the soldier asked.

“I think what we just experienced was like a sonic boom. The light we saw around us was a barrier of light and we’ve just gone past it. If I’m right, we’re going backwards in time, but forward in space!” This made it difficult to account for time, but both of them continued to count time as moving forward, despite the fact that it was moving backwards.

The elevator slowed down. They could tell this because the light barrier returned and then vanished again. After a while both men floated and to their astonishment they were in orbit of an Earth-like planet.

“Uh,” the soldier said looking out the window. “Does that look like Italy to you?” He was correct, it was Italy. They were able to point out other notable features that defined the Earth-like planet as Earth. This baffled them even more, but before any rousing discussions could be made the impact into the upper atmosphere knocked them back. They free fell inside of the elevator car. The velocity decreased and they were again moving slowly through the lower atmosphere until they touched down on the ground.

Ding! The elevator doors opened once again without any smoke or fanfare. The two-man team stepped out. Crowds of people were gathered around them and cheered. There were no aliens, just regular everyday Earth people. The surroundings looked familiar too — in fact it was the MegaMart super store that they had left behind except now there were more buildings around them. The cars were sleeker looking. There were more things in the air flying to and fro.

A man ran up to the elevator wearing a slick business suit and a MegaMart cap. He extended his hand and smiled brightly. “Welcome to the future!” He announced.

“Future?” The scientist asked.

The man turned to face the crowds of reporters and gawkers and spread his arms apart. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the press, you have just witnessed MegaMart Global Corps’ inaugural time traveling flight of fancy! These gentlemen are from two-hundred years in the past! Think of the possibilities! Now you can go back and visit your great-great-great-grandparents. They can visit you! With more Cosmic Strings being launched through time everyday, you’ll be able to travel to any year, any part of history! See D-Day as it happened. Travel around Athens in the time of the Greeks! Meet Jesus! And don’t forget to stop at your local MegaMart when you do! Not only is MegaMart Global in every country around the world, but now throughout the history of all mankind! We truly are the greatest place to shop for all your needs for all time!”

Four days ago she received an anonymous message: there would be a mission and she would have to accept the terms, or it would spell the end for her. Three days ago the details came in an encrypted attachment including schematics of a large tanker ship. Two days ago she gathered all the equipment and resources she needed. One day ago she rendezvous with the ship, sneaking onboard through the backside and quietly making her way into the storage decks. Military personnel guarded everything. She made no time in finding a private, snapping his neck, hiding his corpse in a crate, and dawning his uniform. For the next six hours she acted as if she were always there helping the other soliders move crates and vehciles onboard. She made mental notes of everything. Three years of military experience had given her the edge to fit in with her new comrades and no one questioned her. Two hours ago the ship launched from port. Thirty minutes afterwards it breached the atmosphere; she waited listening to the metal bowel of the vessel trembling as it crossed into the great nothingness of space. Five minutes later the artificial gravity system was turned on. Her watch vibrated; she pulled her sleeve up and noticed the time: 00:00.00.

Nodding to her so-called comrades, smiling at officers, and hurriedly making her way down the corridors of the ship, she made her way into a janitorial closet. She pushed aside the shelf careful not to tip over any of the supplies. From her pocket she produced a small automatic screwdriver. She inserted it into the groove and with a press of the button unhinged a vent grate. She reached in her entire arm’s length and produced a satchel and threw it over her neck. Carefully, the grate was re-screwed and the shelf pushed back. She pulled a cart out, filled the shelves with cleaning supplies, filled the bucket from the small sink in the corner, and stabbed a new mop into it. Hidden on the bottom shelf amidst the garbage bags was the satchel. With a deep breath she backed out through the door and with some haste began to wheel the cart down the corridor right by military officers busy about their duties. Ten minutes of rolling the cart brought her to a service elevator. Once inside (and alone) she produced a card from her satchel. She studied it. If the information on the magnetic strip failed they would be upon her within ninety seconds. The mission that she had spent four days preparing for to get to this service elevator would be for naught. She slid the card. The light took a milisecond to respond and the tube began its decent down the shaft.

A disembodied voice called to her: “Excellent work. I’ve been watching your progress.” It wasn’t really a voice, but more of a thought that translated into a voice in the back of her mind. A way of “telepathically” communicating with one another. She responded with nothing to his thought-speak. “And I’m here to make sure you don’t get cold feet.” The man’s voice was sharp and concise. The doors of the service elevator opened with a hiss into a darkened wide-open room. The wheels of the cart rattled as she pushed them onto the grated catwalk. Before her were large pipes and steam of a boiler room.

“You should be able to see four clearly marked pipes labeled, one, two, three, and four. Make your way to the first one,” the man thought-spoke to her. She rattled the cart across the catwalk towards the end. “Stop there. You’re making too much noise. Open the satchel. You’ll find a box inside. The code is alpha-alpha-delta-charie-tango-nine. Open it.” She produced the box from her bag — no bigger than her hand — ran her fingers over the rounded edges, flipped it over and entered the code and her thumbprint. Both were excepted. It popped open. Inside was a small device. A row of LEDs lit up and began blinking. She had enough knowledge of electronics to know that it was a count down timer written in binary. There wasn’t much time. “Place it under the first turbine,” the man said.

She moved quickly, down the stairs, across another catwalk, and towards a cluster of tubes and whirling magnets. She slipped the device underneath as far as she could reach.

“Good girl. You have less than ten minutes to get off of that ship. I suggest you make your way above deck, across the bow and take one of the lifepods. I would move without hesitation.”

She bolted up the stairwell, across the catwalk and into the service elevator. It took a minute for the elevator to reach the upper decks, but it felt like an infinity. The doors opened into a brightly lit white corridor. From her holster she drew her weapon — a glock — and crept along the walls moving as quickly and quietly as she could. She could make voices traveling down a perpendicular hallway, they were echoing and still quite a distance away. There was a T-junction where they would meet, and she would have to be ready to fight or die. There was no time to go back the other way. She closed on the corridor and so did the voices. Without hesitation she fired first.

The silencer had muffled her bullet. The impact surprised a portly man in a red hawaiian shirt and straw hat. Her actions stuttered as three screams ripped into the quiet corridor. A woman and two children — the fat man’s wife and kids. The woman grabbed her wide-eyed, dead as a doornob husband and sobbed. The children screamed and cried. She held her gun on them. The woman coming to her senses a couple of seconds later began to whimper, “Don’t kill us…take whatever you want…” She tossed her purse to the feet of the girl with the gun.

“Dammit,” the man’s voice said. “You need to get off of that ship! Stop wasting time! Shoot them all and get moving!” She raised her gun at the three living bodies huddled together. And fired. Three times. The hallway was silent again. The ship was so large no one had heard. There was no time to take care of the bodies; she hurried away from them and took a few twists and turns that eventually lead to a pair of double doors. She pushed them open onto the deck…of a cruise ship. Children ran by her screaming and shooting one another with water pistols. Parents scolded them for doing so. Elderly folks were playing shuffleboard and discussing pleasantries with one another. The girl walked as nonchalantly as she could through the crowd. She tucked the gun into her pocket and avoided the children running by her and the glances of idling civilians looking to strike up a conversation.

There were three minutes left. Less than that. She approached another set of double doors and there two guards exited. One was speaking with his finger pressed to his ear — a small walkie-talkie. The other man was looking around. Instinctively she doubled back. Behind her were two sets of two men on their headsets and scouring the deck with their eyes. One of them pointed at her. It was over. She had been caught and in less than two and a half minutes the mission would be over whether she was dead or alive. She didn’t want to be dead. They were coming for her from all angles trying to remain as non-chalant as they could. For the twenty seconds she was looking she had stuffed her hand into her pocket and twisted the silencer off. They were approaching her like a net tightening over her. She waited still. Five, four, three, two one…she pulled the weapon from her pocket and fired into the crowd. Shrill cries arose as the gunshots went off. In the choas she fired at the guards and ran headlong, and fast. She pulled a K-bar from her side holster and plunged it into a guard, and tore it clear through. With a quick spin she leveled the other man by his side and with her glock she fired wildly behind her to increase the pandemonium.

Her body crashed through a set of double doors. There was one minute left. She replaced the cartridge of her weapon and made her way down the corridor her gun fully exposed aiming it at anyone in her way as a silent means to tell them: “get the hell out of the way.” Thirty seconds to go. Even if she could be propelled far enough in the lifepod she still might not escape the detonation. She entered the walk way to the rows of lifepods and entered the first one she could see. She slammed the door, punched and stabbed the buttons to activate it the pod and retracted the doors. Through the tiny circular window she could see guards entering the door. With one final jab she pod was free and she ejected into the great expanse of space. There was no gravity. She floated around the teardrop shaped vessel. She swam to the porthole and stared up at the ship. It wasn’t a tanker — this was a luxury cruise liner. A flash and violent eruption ballooned out of the lower back end of the ship. The hull fractured in many placed ejecting puffs of fire and smoke and with one final eruption the entire ship was torn in half. White specs flittered out of the ship…bodies that were tossed into the freedom of space. They would spin and float forever as frozen corpses. She covered the porthole with her hand and curled her knees to her chin.

“Mission accomplished,” she spoke.