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[ As always, all my stories are 100% human-written ]

( This chapter has some limited profanity, so it’s NSFW )

SYNOPSIS

After scientists discover an alien pyramid orbiting Jupiter, Galina Agafonov is tasked with a mission to make first contact with the aliens. She says goodbye to her son Viktor, and assures him she will be home in a few months.

But first contact doesn’t go as planned, and Galina’s ship is sent hurtling back toward Earth.

Elsewhen, an eccentric amphibian trader by the name of Duran is dealing in human treasures. He comes across something so rare that his only way to value it and keep his head is to visit the museum systems of ‘They’, a nameless, ageless species of aliens who collect almost anything they encounter, including their visitors.

Will Duran escape their exhibits, and will Galina ever see her son again?

Find out in THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE.

THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE

CHAPTER 4 - TO THE STARS

On the day of the launch, everything went perfectly. The public still had no idea what the real mission was about, believing the lie because it was the truth. This really was the first manned expedition beyond Mars. It really was the first attempt to send humans this far out into space, and to return them safely. But Galina and her crew had been briefed about potential disasters the likes of which hardly anyone back on Earth could comprehend. If there was a biological agent that infected the crew for example, the Pallas starship had strict instructions to ferry their bodies into Martian orbit and shut down there, where future missions could safely isolate and investigate alien biology in the decades to come.

If there were living beings on the tetrahedron, a strict plan was in place for first contact. Galina was the designated communicator. After the ship’s computers had had their chance at mathematical flirting, she was to be the ambassador for the human race, most of whom would have no idea she was up there representing them.

The thought weighed heavily on her as the rocket lifted itself from the Earth’s surface, levitated by controlled explosions on its way to contact with the Pallas starship. The Pallas had been put together partially in orbit, the work of an unprecedented partnership between most of the world’s spacefaring nations.

Galina felt her hair compress at the back of her head, her body sinking into the soft seat, her skin pulled back against her skull. She had done this before, but this time felt different. It felt faster, more violent, as if the crew were not simply leaving the planet but were being forcibly rejected by it. She held the Lego escape pod so tightly in her right hand that she felt its cylindrical shape change under the force. Luckily, Viktor had drawn up instructions on how to repair it, which were safely tucked into Galina’s personal belongings, right between two printed photos of her mother, and Viktor as a baby. The two of them would right now be sat in mission control, no doubt worrying about Galina in their own ways.

Galina looked to her left, to EM, and to her right, to Jeven and Clance. All were more serious than usual, all apparently struck with the same foreboding feeling that had kept Galina awake the night before.

“Fucking hell,” Clance said, holding back vomit. Jeven smirked. On the night before launch Clance had cockily placed a bet that EM, being the youngest and least experienced, would get sick first during launch. Jeven had just won $400. EM was the first to laugh, then Galina, then Jeven. Finally, once the nervousness had settled and he was sure he wouldn’t throw up, Clance burst out laughing too.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about that damn pyramid last night,” Clance said.

“Me neither. It’s haunting me. I’m only going there now just to get the thing out of my head,” Galina admitted. “After that, I never want to look at a pyramid again.”

As the rocket left Earth’s atmosphere EM tapped Galina on the arm, showing her a four-sided dice she had brought with her.

“You can’t roll dice in space,” Galina said. Then she realised the shape of it, saw EM’s eyebrows moving up and down, and laughed with her.

It would be hours before they reached the Pallas, days before they reached Mars, weeks before they reached the pyramid, and months before they returned home. Galina turned her attention away from the Lego spacecraft, focusing on the important business of babysitting the ship’s computers. From here until Mars, almost everything was automated.

The Pallas was a large, semicircular ship that loomed heavy against the rocket approaching it. The crew connected the two craft without incident, stepped across the proboscis bridge between them, and released the rocket back into Earth orbit, where it would wait until their triumphant return. The Pallas set off on its silent mission, each minute piercing further into regions of space that had never before been reached by humans.

“You’re past the threshold now,” mission control said on the telephone. There was a dark silence in the cockpit, the whole crew consumed by the realisation.

“Now I’ve crossed one hundred thousand miles,” Galina joked, trying to brighten the mood.

“We won’t be able to broadcast that?” mission control replied.

EM put her Rubik’s cube ‘down’ for a moment, letting it float in front of her. “Why not?” she asked innocently.

“It’s Bowie. Space Oddity,” Galina explained.

“Oh.”

“You can’t be that young.”

“She is,” Jeven said. “Control. Can you put Godzilla on the line.”

There was a pause, after which someone in mission control lifted a heated blanket up to the camera, revealing Jeven’s pet lizard.

“I’ll be back soon,” Jeven said, his face taut and serious. To EM, he looked as if his eyes were holding back the weight of the world’s emotions. She felt that this moment would be the one the editors would broadcast, if the crew didn’t return. That bridge between species, a metaphor of the relationship humans would soon attempt to strike up with the aliens. That is, if the public were ever informed of the truth.

A few moments later, mission control moved the camera to face Clance’s family. EM turned to Clance, whose smile now seemed to be performative. His eyes betrayed his silent panic, and EM hoped this wouldn’t translate into the video feed back down on Earth.

“I love you guys,” he said to his family. He waited for a response. Out here the time difference was a constant reminder of just how far the Pallas was. It would soon become impractical, then impossible, to conduct a conversation with anyone back home. This would be the last time until the ship’s return some months later.

Once Clance had his conversation with his family, mission control moved their attentions to Galina.

“Galina, we have someone here to talk to you,” mission control said. The camera panned down to Viktor, who raised a Lego minifigure of himself to the camera, hiding himself out of frame.

“Hello mini-Viktor,” Galina said. She plucked the Lego escape pod from the air, spinning it for show, then fumbled with it to extract her own minifigure. She noticed the spiked black hair of her son popping up in the bottom left of the frame, and remarked, “New haircut?”

The boy was disappointed at first, then laughed, showing his mum his new style.

“Kimberly did it for me. She wants to get into fashion.”

“It is very fashionable.” Galina gestured to the other crewmembers, who positioned themselves floating in front of the camera.

“Very spiky!” Clance said.

“Like a 2016 Gary Numan,” EM confirmed.

“I might try that,” Jeven said. He brushed his greasy hair and smiled as it stayed up in zero gravity. Viktor laughed and Galina laughed with him, looking up and smiling at Jeven during the delay between Pallas and Earth.

“I love you mum!” Viktor said a moment later.

“I love you too,” Galina replied. She had finally extracted her minifigure, and set it spinning close to the camera. In the near future Viktor tried to do the same, but dropped his on the floor. Mission control permitted him some extra time to pick the character back up, and show it to his mum.

“I’ll see you again in a few months, but I left videos behind, and letters,” Galina said. She knew this would not be enough, that this would never be enough, but it was more than nothing.

The crew said another round of goodbyes to their families, pets, and friends, before closing the recording and opening comms with mission control only.

“We wish you the best of luck. Millions of aspiring astronauts look up at the sky tonight and hope for your success. You have already, as of this morning, taken a new step for the human species. Everything beyond this is a bonus,” Anton said. He lifted Godzilla up to the camera, and the lizard raised a front leg as if to wave goodbye.

Galina turned around and saw that Jeven was trying not to cry.

After a final rundown of the mission plans, mission control hung up. Galina turned to her crew, each of whom had a distinct look on their faces.

“We shouldn’t be out here, not without the public knowing why,” Jeven said.

“It’s the greatest existential mystery. Are we alone? No. And yet, we are keeping it secret,” EM added. She grabbed the Rubik’s cube from the air and continued playing with it.

“Oh come on, we’ve known we’re not alone for decades. We just aren’t allowed to talk about it,” Clance said. Everyone turned to look at him.

“What?” Galina asked, voicing the trio’s shock. Clance tried to lean back, accidentally spinning himself backwards in place. He gripped the side rails and righted himself.

“Well, you know how my daughter has a son on the way?”

The other three astronauts nodded. Clance leaned into the receiver and made sure it was turned off.

“Screw it,” he said. “They can’t fire me now. I figured it was a good time to properly talk with my pa, going away and all. We don’t talk much about anything, especially space. Not since his dismissal.”

“Go on,” Jeven said. EM had stopped playing with the Rubik’s cube. Galina was half-listening, checking up on the diagnostic screens. All was going according to plan.

“Half the parts on this ship are reverse engineered from shit we found in the desert,” Clance said. “That’s what dad says anyways. And I’m inclined to believe him.”

“Why?” EM cut through the story like a knife.

“Because he’s my dad, and he hates liars. And they wouldn’t fire him for nothing.”

“What did they fire him for?” EM asked, gentler this time, but still cuttingly efficient. Galina glanced over at her. EM was not like this on purpose, it was just her personality. She cared a lot about the truth, and getting to it efficiently. When she was this blunt, it was a sign she felt safe with the people around her.

Clance thought about the question, formulated an answer.

“I suppose he wanted someone to talk to, and in my absence, got chatting to the local press. There were triangular ships in North America, Canada, Vietnam. In the second world war, fighter pilots cut down some black orbs as well. In one case, the black orbs and the triangular things ‘danced’ with each other above the Pacific.”

“UFO sightings,” Galina said. She turned away from the diagnostics.

“Yes,” Clance said uneasily. “But dad said they caught one in the fifties.”

“I’m sorry Clance,” Jeven said, “I’m not convinced. If this were true, surely they’d have briefed us on it. Surely they wouldn’t tell us that what we are doing here is first contact when it’s second, or third.”

“That’s just the thing,” Clance said. “Technically, there has been no contact with living beings, not yet.”

That’s the mysterious end to chapter four of THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE. There are eleven chapters in total, making this point about 33% of the way through the book. The full paperback will be around 80 pages.

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3.  Viktor

Viktor pushed his Lego spaceship across the carpet. Since his last product demonstration he had added a gear to each axle, and another two gears at ninety-degree angles to those, so that the front of the car-ship-thing had a rotating drill, and the back of it had a turning satellite dish. These could be accessed by pulling off the front and back panels, which were loosely attached to a careful arrangement of studs sticking out between tiles.

Galina imagined EM might have some innocent but corrective points to make about the effectiveness of such a design, which reminded her they hadn’t had dinner together for a while. Galina had been quite antisocial. She supposed she was compensating for the intense closeness she would soon experience within the starship. After all, the entire crew lived on the same ‘street’ of staff houses. Everyone had a view of the lake, most of them had a dim glimpse of the towers, if they had telescopes in their upstairs bedrooms, which several did. Jeven had once used his to beam a toy laser into a spot on Clance’s wall for a prank, before calling him to say strange red lights had been spotted on campus. Naturally, Clance hung up when he saw the red dot above his television.

Galina watched the Lego dish change shape as Viktor unfolded something akin to flower petals out from its underside. She was amazed with his ingenuity.

“And what does that do?” Galina asked her son.

“It checks for aliens,” the little boy adjusted a hinge at the dish’s base. It broke off briefly, but he reattached it with only a small frown. Galina smiled, watched his careful movements, wondered if she’d spoken too much of work at home.

“How does it do that?”

“It uses the dish to listen, like a big ear.”

“It’s very nice,” Galina said. She went silent, hearing her words played back in her head. She didn’t believe herself. She sounded fake, distant. She looked over her son’s head, out the window, into the flickering sunset reflecting on the lake’s surface. It reminded her of the campus pond, of the conversations she had to keep away from the world, of Clance and EM and Jeven. She felt a dark tension inside her chest. How could she convey to her son that some nights mummy simply didn’t want to go to space? That sometimes all she wanted was to forget about the pyramid, to hold little Viktor and abandon the mission?

She looked back to her son, the ‘security risk’. No family could be told about the object, and many offers had been made for a permanent babysitter long before Galina was briefed on the reality of the mission, all of which she refused. They were separating them from the very beginning, plucking her from her baby just because some cluster of data analysers had decided she was not just a brilliant pilot and captain, but that she would get along with her crewmates for the extended mission.

Galina got up, walked to the bathroom, left Viktor alone for a moment. She looked at herself in the mirror, at the manic fear in her eyes. She dreaded sleeping. The pyramid had invaded every dream now, every idea, every memory. If only she could talk about it, it would stop looping through her mind.

The whole thing reminded her of Roswell and other UFO incidents. All those stories of knocks on the door at night. All those pale men with gaunt faces. All those warnings, so subtle as to dissolve in your ears as soon as they were whispered.

“Bad things happen in the desert. People go missing all the time,” Galina mouthed, remembering a documentary on UFOs Clance had shown her some weeks before. Like every other crewmember she had become preoccupied with finding some anchorage for the pyramid in media or folklore. Skinwalkers, Chupacabra, Moth men, none yielded anything remotely like the Pyramid. Even pyramids on Earth were quickly brushed off as unconnected, because unlike the tetrahedron out in space, each of these had four sides to its base.

Whatever the thing was, there was no precedent for it in fact or theory or fiction.

In every way possible, it was alien.

Galina washed her face and stepped back out of the bathroom. Viktor had barely noticed her vanishing act. He was preoccupied with taking off and replacing the wheels that drove the dishes and the sensors as he pushed the toy across the small carpet by the sliding doors. Galina drew the blinds closed, shutting off the universe, a rodent hiding from an asteroid in its burrow. But the future was hurtling in still, the lights atop the campus flickering dimly through the fabric blinds. She drew dark emerald curtains over these, another protective layer against infinity. The warm light of the fireplace felt brighter now. Galina composed herself.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at a long part of the Lego model.

“That’s the communications tower.”

“What’s that for?”

“It’s so you can call home.”

Galina sat back on the sofa, fidgeted.

“I’ll call as soon as I can,” she said unconvincingly. Her son, not knowing any better, accepted the answer. Galina watched as he repositioned dishes and antennae, pretending to make a direct phone call between the ship and mission control. Perhaps she had told him too much of the minutiae of space travel. Still, this childish version wasn’t so bad. Viktor picked up a little Lego phone and had one of his minifigures walk about outside the spaceship. Galina recognised their pacing as the pacing she did whenever she had a long phone call from family. She smiled, but somewhere deep within her mind she knew that she might not make those calls again. It was as if something would go horribly, inconceivably wrong out there in space. She wished she could stay here, in this perfect house on this perfect fringe of the finest campus she had ever stepped foot in. In many ways, this was as far as she’d ever really wanted to go. Space was just the magnet that dragged her here, physics just the job that paid the bills.

Viktor turned to his mother and removed a small spaceship from the side of his Lego machine. He passed it to his mother.

“What’s this?” she asked with genuine interest.

“The escape pod. It’s good luck!”

“It’s very nice. Is that me in there?”

“I couldn’t make it super big. But. I imagined everyone else fits too.”

“Everyone else does fit, you’re right.”

“Or everyone gets their own, and you can race home!”

“That would be fun!” Galina agreed. She zoomed the toy escape pod through the air, watching as little Viktor laughed. He would be a genius someday. He was already a genius, even if he didn’t realise it. Galina finished playing with the escape pod and passed it back to her son, who refused it.

“You should take it,” Viktor said. His mother bit her bottom lip.

“Why?”

“Silly! I said it’s good luck!”

“Well. In that case,” Galina smiled. “I suppose I have room for it.”

She put the spaceship down on the arm of the sofa and leaned forward, hugging her son. She wept softly and silently over his shoulders, another secret she would have to keep from him. When she sensed he had had enough hugging, she stood up and turned to the kitchen island, which was combined with this central room. As she walked she knocked the escape pod by accident, having forgotten about it.

The thing tumbled and smashed on the floor.

“Oh no! I’m so sorry Viktor!” Galina said, the tears almost starting again. She was worried he might see, but the little boy had already rushed to save the escape pod and had managed, somehow, to put the cockpit back on already.

“It’s only seven pieces,” he said happily, reassembling the thing.

“I’m so clumsy,” Galina said.

“It’s okay I can improve it!” Viktor had clearly seen this accident as a test of the craft’s robustness, and was quite happy to change things. Galina made her way around the kitchen island, putting away any thoughts of the pyramid and the mission.

“Who wants astronaut food?” she asked Viktor. Every aspect of their lives had been reshaped around the mission, even down to playful jokes at dinner time. Viktor put the reassembled escape pod on the kitchen counter and opened the cockpit, removing a minifigure from it. Galina spun the escape pod on its base, looking at the minifigure standing beside it. She wondered how long little Viktor had spent picking out the perfect face, the perfect hair. Somehow, these details always took him far longer than the complex planning and construction of entire spaceships, which seemed to come naturally to him.

“Macaroni and cheese?” he asked.

“I don’t know if we have any in,” Galina joked. She opened a top cupboard, revealing boxes upon boxes of the stuff. This would last them until launch day, at which point Viktor would receive a new shipment of his favourite meal, and an extended visit from his grandmother, the only babysitter Galina approved of.

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THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE

THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE is a 13,000-word novella about a cosmonaut who, you guessed it, manages to die twice. It is dark and mysterious and zany, and it connects to WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?, WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?. THE EARTHLOOP TRILOGY and THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, sitting right in the middle, between Earth and the rest of the universe.

I said I was working on a big thing.

This novella tells the story of someone who exists between the main timelines of my larger works. It all clicks together, like Lego.

You can pre-order the full book here. It’s $2.

It comes out at the end of May.

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And it shouldn’t have to be said, but I didn’t use AI to write it.

I used my brain.

Today’s soundtrack is Gary Numan - Jagged

THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE

Before they found her, Galina Agafonov was a cosmonaut. It was her decision to change the trajectory of the Pallas at the last minute, diverting the doomed starship toward a backup dash through the planets, a desperate bid to slingshot the thing around Jupiter and careen back to Earth.

It was the last course of action available.

It was the least likely outcome to their mission.

But the thought of it kept Galina awake at the academy long before she stepped into the rocket. It kept her in the simulators well into the early hours of the morning. It kept her eyes open, fixated on the plastic ceiling tiles of her bedroom, as she imagined herself as the starship Pallas, spinning and whirling and adjusting her trajectory between cartoonishly disproportionate planets, moons, and asteroids.

It was the nightmare scenario, the utter devastation of every other possible worldline for the crewmembers on the Pallas; that something should go so wrong during first contact that the humans picked to initiate that terrifying, tentative step, should be sent running back home, their ship half dead, their crew soon to follow.

1.   Starwoman

Galina, EM, Clance, and Jeven had convened at the academy bar. Galina and Jeven were interlocked arm in arm, dancing to the instrumental end to The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me Baby. Clance was watching them from the bar, perpetually adjusting his hair and pretending not to look over at EM, who was again scribbling something in her notepad.

Once the song ended, Galina and Jeven found their way to the bar.

“Karaoke ended forty-seven minutes ago,” Clance told them.

“We’ve been dancing very fast,” Galina said, her temporary Russian American accent loosened by the alcohol. She put on an impression of Clance’s Texan drawl.

“So for us, honey, it’s still Ten of the Pee Em.”

Jeven bent over laughing, leaving Galina to lose her anchorage on him. She grabbed onto the bar, sidling up close to Clance and smiling.

“Time dilation,” she added.

“I got the joke,” Clance said. “Your last drink before the big day. You sure you want to make it excessive?”

“You forget my mother was Irish,” Galina said, pouting. “And anyway, you’re becoming a grandfather. We have to celebrate.”

“Is that true?” Jeven looked at Clance over Galina’s shoulder. The shorter man found his way to the bar and ordered something quickly.

“It is indeed. He’ll be a year old when we get back.”

“Or two, if the aliens are talkative,” Jeven said.

Galina sidled back to the dance floor, picking another song to sing on the laptop behind the DJ booth, before trying to Riverdance her way back to her fellow astronauts. She looked up at the ceiling, at the homemade solar system decorations that visiting high school students had donated some years before. Amid them all, just beyond the inaccurate orbit of Jupiter, a grey plastic tetrahedron, formed of four triangular sides, loomed. She stared up at it, watched as disco lights cut into its 3D printed grooves.

“Inaccurate,” Clance said, looking at the arrangement of planets.

“Inspiring,” Galina replied. She turned her body around looking for something in the amateur sky above the dance floor, trying to piece together constellations from glow in the dark stars, glittery nebulae, and scrunched up asteroids.

“Is that his?” Clance pointed to a toy spaceship behind Mars, just out of Galina’s eyesight. She bent down slightly, shifting her perspective.

“Yes! There he is. My Victor.”

“He’s a good kid,” Clance said.

“I know. I told him, get good grades and you’ll be making paper planets for a cocktail bar on the day I come back home. He laughed at this; said he wants to become a poet.”

“And will you let him?”

“He’s a person, not a dog. Poet, astronaut, doesn’t matter.”

Clance raised a large, cartoonish eyebrow.

“As long as he’s happy,” EM interjected. During the conversation Jeven had retrieved her from her outpost, bringing her back to the group.

“Precisely,” Galina replied. “As long as my Victor is happy, I am happy.”

Jeven nodded, waiting for an opening. Galina drunkenly watched disco lights playing through his auburn mop of hair.

“I’ve been thinking about the manoeuvre,” he said. “If the pyramid is hostile, we’re going to need to turn around faster than anyone’s planned for.”

“They’ve run us through this,” Galina said.

“I know but, EM has an idea.”

At this point EM nodded. “I propose we stray from planned trajectory by five degrees, give ourselves room to drop out of orbit if things go wrong.”

“And if they go right?” Clance asked.

“If they go right, we’ll be fine.”

“No, we’ll be five degrees off.”

There was a silence between them, interrupted from all angles by the last moments of Don’t You Want Me Baby.

“It is worth the risk,” Galina chimed in. “Good idea EM. But we don’t need to change, everything is worked out. If the pyramid isn’t dead, if it is alien, if it is hostile, we will simply keep on flying until we go back around Jupiter, coming home quickly and with as much data as we can gather from a safe distance.”

“It’s dead,” Jeven added, his fair eyebrows forming a V shape. “But we all know it’s artificial. The chances of natural rock being beaten into that shape are… miniscule.”

“The heat signatures indicate otherwise,” EM added. She closed her notebook, and for a split second the rest of the group caught a glimpse of one of her drawings: An astronaut shaking hands with a triangular robot out in space, Jupiter in the background, with Saturn and her rings looming further still.

“Are we supposed to have that pyramid here, in the bar?” EM asked.

“They’ve got documents, fakes, to leak,” Clance explained stoically.

“Let me guess, it’s a prototype spaceship, one of ours,” EM asked.

“Exactly. The public don’t need to know yet.”

“They should announce it when it speaks to us,” Jeven said.

“The Callisto probes talked to it, but it didn’t reply.” Galina took a sip of her drink.

“Maybe it doesn’t like us,” EM said.

“Maybe it’s shy,” Jeven added.

“I’m not sure heat indicates life,” Galina said. “The thing could be an engine, or more likely, it’s a fragment from some collision.”

“Then why hasn’t it cooled down?” EM asked. The next song on the Karaoke machine began to autoplay, Duran Duran’s Invisible, and Galina very quickly finished her drink.

“Could be a new material. We’ll find out soon enough.” She took EM by the wrist and led her to the stage.

2.   Down In The Park

Later that night, Galina laughed and grabbed onto a lamppost, spinning herself around, stumbling onto a new trajectory. She went off course, her glittery heels scraping now into loose gravel, grass, and the edges of the academy pond. Above them, above the simulators and the desert and the eagles and the sky and the delicate membrane of Earth’s atmosphere, the faint light of Jupiter pulsed in the sky.

“I am so drunk,” Galina said. “It is like I could trip and slip,” she laughed. “And fall and fall and fall until I rolled into her, up there.”

“Well don’t,” Jeven said. He held his friend back from the pond’s edge, watching the moonlight cascading off from it.

“Each photon a stone skipped. Each light a new trip,” he said.

“Always the poet,” Galina wrapped her arms around him. He rejected her drunken attempt to kiss him.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he said. He stood stoic, helping her put a high heel back on. Galina thought the moonlight made his jawline sharper.

“You look like a vampire,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“So easy to slip down here,” Galina said. “And up there too.”

“Even easier,” EM replied. She was lying on the grass by the academy pond, meticulously taking apart a beef burger. Clance had long ago gone to bed.

“It is precisely four in the morning,” EM continued.

“And how do you know that? Stars plotted against the tops of the workshops from this precise vantage point?” Jeven asked. EM smiled and shook her head.

“Look,” she pointed across the pond and to the right, where a beige gravel path snaked away to the telescopes and dishes in the distance. There was a small group of figures running across the path, illuminated by torches in their headbands. They were followed by a hollow-bodied robot, one of the campus’ new androids. An older version of this thing would be fitted into the Pallas starship, used for any repairs conducted on the outside of the ship.

“The nerds are on their morning migration,” EM explained. “Every day at ten to four they start their morning jog. They get to the edge of the pond dead on four, every time.”

“Nerds? You have a PHD in electrical engineering,” Galina replied.

“Point made.” EM turned the burger upside down in her hands.

“Do you think the aliens have burgers?” she asked.

“I think they might have one of you,” Galina said.

“We could swap them,” Jeven joked. EM turned and smiled at him, then Galina.

“What?” Galina asked, seeing the look in EM’s eyes.

“Nothing,” EM said.

Galina slipped, and Jeven caught her swiftly by the waist. EM continued her dissection of the burger, looked across the campus pond, and posed a final question.

“Are you guys having dreams about it?”

“Nightmares,” Galina admitted.

END (for now)

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Q: What is ‘serials’ ?

Serials is a new subsection of my website.

It exists to collect together all my serialised stories.

Comedy, Sci-Fi, Horror, whatever: It all turns up here.

Fulls and Samples

Most stories will be completed here on this newsletter, after which I’ll probably ask you to go download the eBooks during a freebie week on retailers so I can rack up some lovely reviews (reviews keep books relevant to the all-encompassing algorithms in charge of reality).

Some of the stories might end instead on a solid chapter conclusion, and will then continue in paid works (such as eBooks, Paperbacks, or Audiobooks) simply because selling books is important if you want to have the money to feed yourself so you have the energy to write more books.

I may also put the ends of these stories on my paid tier or Patreon, if there’s a demand for it. That’s something I’ll work out with you all in May/June.

There will come a point, hopefully soon, where pre-orders for my books build up and they go viral on release day, making me superomegaultrafamous (the type of famous you need to be to make minimum wage as an author) and I’ll sell the requisite 37 books a day I’d need to call this thing a job.

(At the moment I’m on one and a half paid sales a week, if I behave).

I might even be popular on tiktok, which a publisher once asked me to be before they bothered with me. I could email them and say “Hey I am popular on tiktok now, but actually I don’t need you any more so here is a JPEG of a cat wearing a silly hat” and then never speak to them again.

When I do free samples, I won’t just cut a story short at an arbitrary point, because it irritates me when newsletters do that; I will instead try to provide something that feels well-rounded even if you’re not going to read the full story.

That way, even if you can’t afford a book right now, you can still read enough of it here to know if you’d like the rest when you can afford it.

That will be the case with this story, which is why I said it’s a free sample in the beginning. I’m going to show you a lot of Galina’s life in the hopes you might find it interesting enough to want to know what happens afterwards. The story happens in two main parts, with the middle having its own sort of conclusion. So I’ll end there. I think it will take about three posts to fit the story on this newsletter.

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