Author’s note:

Following a quick poll on Substack Notes, I’ve settled with my idea to post excerpts of this series of stories as and when I write them. As a result, you may be reading something here which doesn’t actually make the final cut, or which slots in later into the story during final revisions. I might also repost newer, polished versions of some older chapters and scenes which proved popular the first time round.

I share these stories here, as they are, because I think you will enjoy them.

The full STEPHANIE GLITCH story looks like it will be told over several novellas, each ending with the end of an era of sorts. These will culminate in a big hardback book and a movie series, eventually, but at first will be released as eBooks and Paperbacks.

Of course I cannot share it all here for free for the same reason I don’t turn away paychecks at my other jobs; time = money, and writing these books (using only my human brain and no ‘AI’ (because I respect the time you put into reading the things)) takes time.

However, I will do my best to show you only complete scenes, so you are not left with accidental cliffhangers.

And, given it’s going to be a series of books now, the first one will be cheaper than the rest, to give people a taste of the action.

Here is what I think should be the start.

[ Click Here for your soundtrack for today’s reading ]

The ammonite shunted itself backwards through the crags in the rock, expelling seawater from its hyponome. Once past the boiling volcanic vents, the spiralling creature secreted itself deeper in the rocks, hiding. Others had tried retracting into their shells, but it was not sufficient. Whatever parasites had escaped the leviathan from the Great Unreachable had no issue scooping live ammonites from their shells.

The leviathan was a parasitised thing from which the hunters emerged. Even as its spheroid body slumped through the ocean they burst forth, launching themselves at frightening speed through the seawater from holes chewed into the leviathan’s giant body. The ammonite had seen its hulking form sliding darkly downward into the deep black trench below the ocean, and for reasons it could not understand nor express, felt drawn to that black pit which became the leviathan’s grave, like slime mould to nutrients.

But the hunters had not all left the body, and now she was down here, the ammonite had no choice but to find refuge among the volcanic vents and cave networks that littered this ancient, living rock. And so she pressed onward, spurting another jet of water, her shell hitting a stone wall, her heart feeling the harsh thump as its casing slammed into the ends of the cave.

A light like a new sun erupted from one side. It was like the light from one of the vents, but stronger, whiter. It carried with it a coldness, not heat, and its movement was like that of a living being. The ammonite was afraid. The light swept over her, shining through the slim gap between the whorls of her shell, casting a spiralling shape against a far wall of the cave. She glimpsed this briefly with her right eye, noticing that this cave wall was flat, shiny, and that lines stranger than the sutures on her shell were woven here in intricate patterns upon the thing. To her ammonite mind, it seemed as though she was nestled against the striations of an unconquerable shelled beast.

One of the hunters screamed in the heat of a volcanic vent, its horrid voice resonating dimly out through the water until it reached the ammonite as little more than a memory of pain. She turned to face the dim noise, seeing it as a sheet of rippling white sound, and briefly saw the cumbersome form of the hunter as its pearlescent skin peeled away in the vent. Already, roving pairs of Coccosteus were satiating their curiosity by tearing up this flaking, silverish skin as it floated away. The ammonite felt a rumble somewhere deep below. She propelled herself back again, tilting her body, and slotting into a crevice where the surviving hunters could not find her. She angled her shell to fit. Here she waited for them to inspect their dead companion, and watched as their strange limbs struggled to propel them through the water. The hunters were long and slim compared to the ammonite, their heads protruding not from a shell but from a torso to which was attached four long limbs. From this distance, secluded in the grey rock, the hunters looked like deformed Ichthyostega, those four-legged, tentacleless creatures who had ventured into the Dry World beyond ammonite reach, and had returned with strange vegetation in their mouths and strange glances in their eyes.

But the hunters were not Ichthyostega; they were bigger, ganglier, and could create sunlight from strange lumps on their skins. Their heads, bulbous and impractical, held one solid compound eye of near-orange colour, beyond which was a strange luminescence. The ammonite kept watch with her left eye, trying to compress from these strange creatures a hint of their origin. Had the leviathan really fallen from above the Dry World, slipping into the oceans from the Great Unreachable? Was the waterless world the Ichthyostega found a gigantic air pocket, and beyond this, was there an ocean large enough to host the Leviathan? Could such an ocean exist?

The ammonite’s thinking was informed by the shining material at the end of this long cave, by the strangeness of it, and the unmapped depths of these volcanic vents. The Ichthyostega had spoken of the land above the land, and the rocks that fell from the Great Unreachable, but most ammonites did not believe these tales, not least because many did not have the capacity.

Their lives, for now, were filled with the basic processes of proliferating their genetic code. Vast incomprehensible things would remain vast and incomprehensible. But some ammonites noticed, and fewer of them remembered. Fewer still were curious, and only a handful were curious enough to find their way to the corpse of the thing which had fallen from the Great Unreachable, and to carry between their eyes thoughts of vast air pockets and oceans above oceans.

And only one ammonite was fated to figure out what all of this meant. Through coincidence or destiny or some other presently unknowable mathematical force, she was here, right where she needed to be.

Weird endnotes:

I am very pleased that Minecraft (the game I am now working on getting a job playing) has brought Nautiluses to the shores of our digital worlds. Stephanie’s world is set in 2016, so she doesn’t get Nautiluses in her Minecraft world… but I am seriously tempted to change that.

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If you’re new, you’ve not heard of that big weird poetic sci-fi novel I have been writing forever, so I’ll start by telling you it is called THE STEPHANIE GLITCH and it is about reincarnation. The first novella is already up on Amazon, and there are going to be at least six more.

It’s a big, weird story.

Eventually it will be a big, weird hardback.

And then a big, weird TV series.

If you’re worried you’ll be lost today, don’t be. This excerpt happens a few million years BEFORE anything else in the book.

Polls

You voted, I listened. Today’s post is Sci-Fi

Ammonoidea 1

The ammonite shunted itself backwards through the crags in the rock, expelling seawater from its hyponome. Once past the boiling volcanic vents, the spiralling creature secreted itself deeper in the rocks, hiding. Others had tried retracting into their shells, but it was not sufficient. Whatever parasites had escaped the leviathan from the Great Unreachable had no issue scooping live ammonites from their shells.

The leviathan was a parasitised thing from which the hunters emerged. Even as its spheroid body slumped through the ocean they burst forth, launching themselves at frightening speed through the seawater from holes chewed into its giant body. The ammonite had seen its hulking form sliding darkly downward into the deep black trench below the ocean, and for reasons it could not understand nor express, felt drawn to that black pit which became the leviathan’s grave.

But the hunters had not all left the body, and now she was down here, the ammonite had no choice but to find refuge among the volcanic vents and cave networks that littered this ancient, living rock. And so she pressed onward, spurting another jet of water, her shell hitting a stone wall, her heart feeling the harsh thump as its casing slammed into the ends of the cave.

A light like a new sun erupted from one side. It was like the light from one of the vents, but stronger, whiter. It carried with it a coldness, not heat, and its movement was like that of a living being. The ammonite was afraid. The light swept over her, shining through the slim gap between the whorls of her shell, casting a spiralling shape against a far wall of the cave. She glimpsed this briefly with her right eye, noticing that this cave wall was flat, shiny, and that lines stranger than the sutures on her shell were woven here in intricate patterns upon the thing.

One of the hunters screamed in the heat of a volcanic vent, its horrid voice resonating dimly out through the water until it reached the ammonite as little more than a memory of pain. She turned to face the dim noise, seeing it as a sheet of rippling white sound, and briefly saw the cumbersome form of the hunter as its pearlescent skin peeled away in the vent. Already roving pairs of Coccosteus were satiating their curiosity by tearing up this flaking, silverish skin as it floated away. The ammonite felt a rumble somewhere deep below. She propelled herself back again, tilting her body, and slotting into a crevice where the surviving hunters could not find her. Here she waited for them to inspect their dead companion, and watched as their strange limbs struggled to propel them through the water. The hunters were long and slim compared to the ammonite, their heads protruding not from a shell but from a torso to which was attached four long limbs. From this distance, secluded in the grey rock, the hunters looked like deformed Ichthyostega, those creatures who had ventured into the Dry World beyond ammonite reach, and had returned with strange vegetation in their mouths.

But the hunters were not Ichthyostega, they were bigger, ganglier, and could create sunlight from strange lumps on their skins. Their heads, bulbous and impractical, held one solid compound eye beyond which was a strange luminescence. The ammonite kept watch with her left eye, trying to compress from these strange creatures a hint of their origin. Had the leviathan really fallen from above the Dry World, slipping into the oceans from the Great Unreachable? Or had it been something more earthly, perhaps a rock cast out from a large and undiscovered volcanic vent?

END

The first novella in this series, THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, Killing A Universe, is currently available on Amazon »Here«

The segment you just read is new, and will form the 0th chapter in the full book. I know that sounds weird, but trust me, I have plans.

Author’s note:

This twist in the story feels right to me, not least because the original cover design for TSG had a big ammonite on it, but because the theme of psychic communication across time is made more explicit here in this opener, long before we even meet Stephanie. And, having Stephanie stumble into her narrative almost as if she’s a secondary character in her own story* brings a real atmosphere and weight to her teenage angst that I don’t think could be sufficiently put across by merely telling you she feels that way.

*This is a risk publishers and agents would hate, which is another reason self pub is better for writers like myself. I’ve also bought 100 ISBN codes so I need to make use of them. That was a big purchase.

Even more

I can only afford to post little stories and excerpts for free because sometimes people will read them and then buy a bigger story, or a collection of stories. They might even buy a shirt. I have a few more of those on the way, all coming to the linktr.ee/phillipcarter linktree store.

Everything

Free Sci-Fi Friday - last chance

There are now four days left for the latest free Sci-Fi bundle I joined, after which some of the books might become a lot harder to find.

I know I’ve posted on the official FFF newsletter already, but I thought I’d give you a chance here to jump onto it, too.

https://books.bookfunnel.com/aprilfantasy/d19mgtidvi

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• August 23rd, FREE FICTION FRIDAY returns with a new thing set up on StoryOrigin, which will be my first StoryOrigin promo.

• August 30th, FREE FICTION FRIDAY is back again with a larger promo on bookfunnel

• 2025, Sci-Fi comedy Fringe show

• 2035, the robots take over and I become their king

Today:

• News about THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

• Part 6 of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

  ---

In the previous Stephanie post, I added a bit of this chapter as part 5 was quite small. Here, so you don’t feel lost, I’ve put the entirety of part 6 (so there’s some overlap in the last post).

Making reading easier.

The Stephanie Glitch is a novel about death and reincarnation, about cosmogony and finding where you belong (even if that place is space).

When I wrote the first, quite messy draft in 2016, it was somewhere around 90,000 words. That’s perfect for traditional publishers. What wasn’t perfect is just how weird the book is, so I decided recently to rewrite it and publish it myself. I know Stephanie a lot better now, and the novel is better for it.

Because of the type of story it is, it works fairly well as a serial. There are chapters, and parts. Parts are smaller than chapters, you’ve been reading those. You’re currently halfway through chapter 1.

At the end of some chapters, Stephanie leaps between realities, so the structure of the book lends itself to multiple eBooks. That means I can have part of it out in bookstores before the final story is ready.

My goal is to put out a few more parts, introduce people to Stephanie, and then eventually launch pre-orders for the full novel.

The thing is, if you signed up here recently, you might have missed earlier parts, and might have to navigate back to them.

That works, but it isn’t ideal.

So I had an idea.

Introducing ‘sendfox’

My friend Aaron Frale introduced me to this. So I’ve now got a sendfox. It facilitates automated emails, which a lot of businesses use. I want to use it for something else. I had an idea.

I could deliver a story to you, or a poetry collection, piece by piece.

And you wouldn’t miss the start if you signed up six months after launch, because you’d be put on email 1 first, then email 2, then email 3.

With that in mind, I saved up some money and got sendfox.

The idea is that I can republish Stephanie chapters 1 through 6 there, and stagger them. So you could sign up and get them once every two weeks, from the date you signed up. The emails would come out automatically at set intervals.

It won’t just be for Stephanie. Older posts from Substack which are archived now, such as WHO REALLY INVENTED SCIENCE FICTION? could be added infrequently between parts of TSG, and when TSG is complete, the automatic newsletter might start sending you free bits of the next project.

I’m still going to be posting here, of course. I am making this move so that I can share my best posts to all new people. Most of you joined after WHO REALLY INVENTED SCIENCE FICTION? was archived, and to show it to you all I’d have to do a lot of posting and reposting. Having it hosted elsewhere, and linked to from the automatic mailer, would mean nobody misses it.

And this is great for book chapters.

I will launch the sendfox soon. I plan to send 30 parts of the story out.

I would also be sending out bits of Stephanie’s poetry, worldbuilding, etc. I’ve been digging through a 2015/2016 notebook recently and found a lot of her writing. She was, and probably still is, a better poet than I am.

What do you think?

Please “Like” this post if you would want to join the newsletter. I’ll be posting a link to it soon.

And if you can’t “Like”, please vote on this poll instead.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

PART 6

Click here for other chapters

Toumai zipped through another small airlock, reappearing in a hall carved out of one of the larger asteroids. He rushed past the hulking algae corridors, noisily clicking into place on a Y-shaped junction. Chemical sensors behind his vents told him the readings here were correct, the air was clean. Everything was still working. No sabotage. As he got closer to the research deck, he unfurled three mechanical arms from his underside. This particular body carried no weapons, but if he had to, Toumai could stab or electrocute the intruder with his tools.

He got to the door. At this proximity, his own sensors could pick up the presence of a body in the room, could hear the nervous heartbeat. He switched off his fear. He opened the door and entered, beaming an immediate visual report to the Dreamscreen network, keeping the sleeping crew informed. The intruder, clad in a heavy dark-blue spacesuit, slowly turned a chrome-orange visor his way.

“Identify yourself.” Toumai demanded. The intruder chuckled nervously, trying to take control of the situation. When they spoke, their voice was projected from a small speaker set into the neck of their suit.

“What are you going to do with that, weld me?”

Toumai let off a warning zap from one of the tools. The intruder flinched. Toumai moved forward and upward, positioning himself diagonally from the intruder. The intruder stood still as a thin mesh of greenish light emerged from the base of Toumai’s obsidian eye, casting a fine net over them. The scan lasted less than five seconds.

“No weapons,” Toumai tilted his head. The intruder copied him.

“Why would I bring weapons?”

“You are an intruder.”

“I am a visitor,” the intruder said.

“Distinction irrelevant.”

Toumai loomed in idle silence for a few seconds, processing the information. Any good assailant could improvise a weapon, and this one had already violated one law of nature by teleporting. She was dangerous. She needed to be dealt with.

“Toumai, you and I both know that you weren’t instructed to kill intruders.” She pointed at the ceiling theatrically. “Just in case one of them was from upstairs.”

“Upstairs?” the machine asked for clarification.

“Yes, you know. The other universe. The one you were built to search for,” the intruder said. Whilst she was still looking up, the intruder worked out the places this mechanoid could not reach based on the length of its neck and the ends of the rails. There were two corners of the room where, if necessary, the intruder could avoid his attacks by getting on top of the rails. She might even be able to jam them.

A message rippled out through the dreamscreen network that could not be misunderstood: Toumai had to disable the intruder, by any means necessary.

As if sensing this secret conversation, the intruder lunged forward, grabbing Toumai by the white handles either side of his head, pressing his three spindly arms underneath him with the dark blue chest of her space suit. Her orange visor clinked against his bulbous head. Toumai jerked upward, trying to shake her off. The intruder seemed to be enjoying the fight.

“You’re an elegant thing, Toumai. We need to work together.”

The machine spun on the rails. The intruder worked out the approximate weight tolerance. Something in her voice commanded attention and obedience, even from a machine. His motors whirred inside his eyestalk. The deep light behind his obsidian lens twinkled. Up this close, the intruder could almost smell the oil of his joints through the vents in her suit, and Toumai could almost see the face behind the visor.

“Let go of me,” the machine said.

“Scan me again. I’m not here to fight,” said the intruder. She fell back, landing lopsidedly, and extended her arms out to her sides. “See. No weapons. I’m capable of fighting, but I choose not to.”

Toumai scanned her again.

“I know,” Toumai said, his social programming kicking back in. It was obvious from her body language that this human female would only start a fight out of fear. Fear was what motivated her to jump forward and to wrestle with him, but fear of what? She had waited patiently for Toumai to arrive on this deck before doing anything, abandoning the strategic advantage of being in here alone with her body for over a minute. That was long enough to damage at least the outer components of the pod, to attempt to break into the computers, but she did nothing. The intruder had stood perfectly still, waiting for Toumai as if she had all the time in the world. So, what was she here for, if not invasion?

By now Toumai had unfurled his compressed arms and readied himself for another tussle.

“I’m not ready to go home yet, so if you could put the zapper away, I would appreciate it,” the intruder said, pointing at Toumai’s welding attachment. She reached up to her neck, clicking something.

“Don’t worry,” she said. The machine watched as the intruder twisted the neck of her helmet, releasing it from the rest of the suit. She placed it gently on a nearby console, and looked up at Toumai. Her eyes were blue-grey, her hair dark, and her face was stoic, exhausted. The image made its way through the dreamscreen network, rippling through the semi-conscious minds of the crew. The intruder looked as if she had been awake for days without rest. Toumai stared at her. She began the delicate process of removing her hair from the neck joint of the suit.

Toumai scanned the contours of her face. No match. He defaulted to the basics.

“State your name and intention.”

“My name is LP, the letters L-P,” the intruder said. “I’m here to protect her.”

“She is already protected, you are a security risk,” Toumai replied. LP glanced around his bulbous eye to look at the opaque pods set into the wall behind him.

“No, she isn’t. Look.” LP stepped further back, lifting an arm and clenching her fist. Her gloved fingers tapped at buttons hidden in the palm, and a hologram display sprung out of the dark-blue forearm of the suit. It was a smooth, glossy neon orange, like amber. It depicted a crude external scan of the starship Artifice. LP pinched the air around the hologram. It responded by shrinking down, zooming out away from the Artifice and focusing elsewhere. A long way away from the ghostly ship, a fleet of jagged arrow-shaped forms lingered, holding back, maintaining the same speed as the Artifice.

“Virtualists,” Toumai announced.

“A small fleet of what you call ‘spikeships,’ for her I imagine.”

“They don’t know about her.”

“Well, that’s reassuring. In that case they are probably just chasing us because we dropped our housekeys.”

The machine chose to ignore this for now. A question remained unanswered. He lowered himself from scanning position, making his round body level with the intruder, breaking her line of sight with the pod.

“Define upstairs.”

The intruder turned away from Toumai, walking to a large window set into the wall opposite the pods. Outside she could see the other asteroids that made up the Artifice, their connecting corridors and spires arcing toward each other. This window faced inward, toward the central rock to which the rest were anchored. LP looked around, trying to ascertain which of the brown-grey rocks housed the living crew, which held the dreamscreen servers, which were oxygen farms. She reached toward the glass and the image changed. Now the screen showed data from the pods and the room.

“It’s like this ship,” she said. “Like this screen. Her universe is an image of yours, and your universe is an image of another. But it’s not a strict hierarchy. There are branches, parallels, like the asteroids that comprise this ship. There could even be worlds between hers and yours that you haven’t detected, worlds her soul slipped through unnoticed. I think what happens here affects what happens there, but I’m not sure if it works both ways.”

It was a lot to take in. Toumai relayed the information back to whoever was listening in on the Dreamscreen. It would not be long before the human crew found their way to the chamber, before a proper conversation could be had with her, but for now this interrogation would suffice.

“And you are from one of these other worlds?” the machine asked.

“Yes.” LP laughed slightly at how straightforward the question was. “Only machines could care so little about the implications of such an answer.”

“What are the implications?” the machine probed further.

“That you’ve found what you were looking for out here in Martian-Jovian space, so close to home, yet so far away.”

“How did you travel here?” Toumai asked. His voice was different this time. LP was taken aback, but a moment later realised what had happened. She tilted her head playfully, her grey-blue eyes staring piercingly into Toumai’s.

“Oh. Hello captain. Waking up?”

A woman’s voice echoed from the robot again. “Answer the question.”

“I got here by dreaming. Specifically, by using a device that induces a deep sleep. When certain people use it, they can detect and even visit other universes.”

“Parallel universes?” the female voice asked.

LP unclipped the wrists and gloves of her suit, disconnecting them and discarding them beside the helmet. She got up and sat on the table beneath the large screen, using the chair as a footrest, looking back at the opaque cylinder across the room. The screen, now idle, switched back to the view of the rocks outside.

“Who am I talking to exactly?” LP asked.

“Elspeth. Now, please don’t put your boots on the chairs,” the female voice replied.

“They’re new boots. Freshly manifested.”

“That’s not important.”

“It is, look, no dirt.” LP lifted one foot to show Toumai.

A sharp click emanated from inside Toumai’s head, an archaic indication that the caller had hung up. Toumai’s body moved almost imperceptibly, tilting as it looked at LP.

“You are wasting time.”

“No such thing as wasted time. Just getting comfortable. She called from the Dreamscreen didn’t she?” LP asked.

“Correct.”

“Not safe to have her do that too long?”

“Correct.”

“So your tech is similar to mine, but in its infancy.”

“Your tech is more advanced?” Toumai asked. LP smirked.

“Scan me again, have yourself a little Roswell moment.”

“Clarify,” the machine said. LP tried to cross her legs, but the spacesuit was too restrictive.

“When they reverse-engineered alien tech in Roswell. You have a Roswell here right?”

Toumai didn’t reply. A silent vote was drifting through the Dreamscreen network. Consensus had not been reached, but the general feeling was that this intruder should be incapacitated sooner rather than later. He considered his options. He could kill her if he needed to, crack her head with his own, or at least threaten her enough to force her to teleport back out to wherever she came from. He could remove oxygen from this room, or electrocute her.

LP reached for one of her suit’s dark-blue forearms and reactivated the hologram of the spikeships.

“You need me here.”

“Why?” Toumai asked.

“Because I can save her. And I can practically hear the gears in your head turning you know. Harming me won’t save this ship.”

“The gears in my head are not responsible for my thought processes. They are used for movement.”

“I know,” LP said. “It’s a metaphor.” She leaned back, cracking her joints.

“Now let’s talk about how we’ll deal with those Virtualists.”

“How will we deal with them?” Toumai played along. LP continued. As she spoke, she gestured toward the amber-coloured hologram of the ships.

“The Virtualists are just outside your scanning range, so they already know the limitations of your ship. One of them might have helped build it. Or they found the plans somehow, or they have better scanning tech. It doesn’t matter. They know who your crew are and what you’re hiding here, and they want it. You need me because I am your only strategic advantage. They don’t know I’m here. They don’t know I exist. I am the unknown. We won’t act now. Let them think you have no idea they are coming.”

Toumai’s social programming kicked in, permitting more expressive language.

“That is suicide.”

“It is strategy. This place started out as a mining base. Do you still have mining explosives?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me robot. Could you bring them out?”

“They are disassembled, inert.”

“Then we’ll rebuild them. I’m going to connect them to sensors, turn them into proximity mines. We can use nearby rocks for shrapnel.

After a split second Toumai replied, “That would be a temporary deterrent.”

“But it would work,” LP replied. There was a moment of hesitation.

“Correct.”

“Then we shall do it.” She switched the hologram off and turned her attention again to the cylinders set into the back wall of the room. She cracked her fingers and got down from the console, walking over to the cylinders. She hesitated, then turned to face the middle one. Inside the opaque surface was a murky silver-greenish liquid. She could only see the outer edge of the fluid as it came into contact with the glass. Everything inside was obscured.

“Show me,” she said gently. Toumai considered the request, weighed it against what he had learnt about the intruder so far, and waited for his crew’s response. Elspeth approved, and Toumai sent an impulse into the pod glass, rendering it transparent. A human skeleton floated inside the greenish liquid. Schools of tiny insectoid machines, too small for their bodies to be seen with the naked eye, glittered like stars under overhead the lights as they worked on the skeleton. The intruder was fascinated by it. The skull, from this angle, looked gentle and wise.

“Is this her?” LP asked softly.

“Who?” Toumai asked for clarification.

“Stephanie. Who else would I ask about?”

“It is the body allocated to her,” Toumai replied. Silently he sent the report into the Dreamscreen network, keeping the sleeping crew informed. LP winced and said, “I felt that. Stop talking about me behind my back.”

“How did you know?” Toumai asked.

“I’m in your head. It’s blurry, wobbly. I can’t see much, but I know if you’re thinking about me. I know what I look like in a mind, machine or not. I can see it bouncing around the room like light.”

LP rubbed her hands together, leaning close to the glass, staring at the skeleton. The white room felt huge and fragile now, a void sparsely populated by meaningless screens and buttons, panels and support beams. Even the main screen, occupied by the tremendous vista of stars and nebulae outside, was a mere distraction from this cosmic miracle, this freak of nature.

“You’ve printed bodies before in this universe, correct?”

Toumai’s head clicked. Elspeth spoke through him.

“Not for a while. There was a global moratorium on the technology. Only individual organs.”

“That’s the official story?”

“It is the truth, as far as I know.”

“So there’s a moratorium. But you’re not on Earth, is that the loophole?”

“There is no loophole LP,” Elspeth said impatiently through Toumai’s head. “What we are doing here is not merely a private experiment. It is a response.”

“A response?”

“We don’t know how she did it, but this young woman sent us images of her world.”

“What?” LP could not remain distant anymore. Her eyes widened.

“We didn’t find her, she found us.”

“Incredible,” LP raised a hand to her mouth, resting her nose on a knuckle. She inhaled deeply, closing her eyes for a moment, her mouth open, silently miming the thoughts racing through her head. She kept one hand on the glass, her fingers splayed as if in an attempt to hold the entirety of the pod the skeleton floated within. Toumai watched this, and Elspeth watched through him. She continued talking.

“Stephanie has nightmares in her time, visions of the world ending.”

“And you believe them?” LP asked, eyes still closed.

“Something extraordinary is happening here. We have known for a while that reality has scars, open wounds. You teleported here, you should accept that.”

“I know about them. I’m just working out what you know.”

“What we know?”

LP peeled herself from the glass, turning to face Toumai, imagining a tall woman standing in his place. She breathed in the cool, clean air of the ectogenesis deck and cracked her shoulders.

“I saw Stephanie’s visions too, from far away. You shouldn’t have been able to pick up on them. This whole thing, this ship hunting her signals. It shouldn’t be happening, but it is.”

“What do you mean?” Elspeth’s voice asked. Toumai moved slightly on the rails, perhaps puppeted by Elspeth’s curious subconscious.

“I mean her signals only leaked into dimensions you could access and energies you could translate because reality is more damaged than I thought.” LP mused, her features taking on a conspiratorial shape. “The process is further along,” she said darkly.

“What process?”

“I’d ask you to sit down for this, but you’re suspended from the ceiling inside a robot’s head. You’re not awake are you?” LP checked.

“Not yet, working on it.”

“Okay.” LP stood back from the pod, addressing Stephanie’s unfinished skeleton as much as she was addressing Toumai, addressing Elspeth and the silent others on the ship. Outside the rockets propelled the Artifice along the edge of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, skimming a gravitational ocean, hunting for whirlpools or breaks in the wavefronts.

“The universe is dead. It’s been dead a while. In fact it’s decomposing around us. I don’t know what started it, what killed the universe, but I know people like Stephanie, and I have a knack for seeing a bit further ahead.”

“Wait, dead?”

“We’re in the heat death or something worse. I’ve not figured it out, but life, intelligent life, seems to be evolving a way to notice. I noticed. Stephanie is noticing.”

“I can’t believe this,” Elspeth said.

“I can feel it sometimes,” LP said sadly.

“She’s precognizant,” Elspeth said.

“No,” LP corrected. “She’s clairvoyant, and far-sighted about it too. She can see across the emptiness between realities better than I ever could.”

Toumai shook his bulbous head.

“We think this thing is time travel,” Elspeth said.

“Am I not evidence against that theory?” LP asked.

“We don’t know who you are or when you are from. You could be from the future.”

“I’m from upstairs,” LP said. “The universe you are out here hunting.”

“We are not hunting a universe; we are looking for Stephanie.”

“You are looking for evidence your reality is real. Everyone always is, since the dawn of consciousness. And you don’t know who she is. Not really. Have you checked your historical records for her?”

“As extensively as we could without raising suspicion,” Elspeth replied. LP turned back to the pod. Toumai moved around LP, looking into the pod alongside her. The white room didn’t feel big anymore. It felt cramped and dangerous, as if it was some empty corner to some vast machine, as if the body slowly printing in the greenish gel was a secret even from its supposed creators. Something didn’t feel right. LP knew, on some primal level, that she was in immediate danger.

“And anyway,” Elspeth said. “You came here somehow, so she must be important.”

“I am important. All of us are. Even the Virtualists, who, by the way, will probably attack soon.”

“Why?” Elspeth asked.

“Because I’m a splinter, the universe wants to push me out.”

“Then we need to bring her here, as quickly as possible.”

“Finally something we can agree upon,” LP said. She placed her hands on the glass, looking up at Stephanie’s empty skull, permitting the Artifice crew another cryptic shred of information.

“Stephanie is already here with us; the universe just has to catch up.”

END

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Last time we saw Stephanie it was April.

Part 5 is quite small and part 6 is quite big, so I’m giving you half of part 6 as well today.

Today’s soundtrack is Plein Soleil, by Jonathan Fitoussi.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

liquid confidence in confidence

lyrical itch of cider syrup

a conference. I can’t dance

so don’t ask me to dance

but I’d like to blend in like furniture

just belong somewhere once

Stephanie folded the poem away quickly, turning to a different page in her notebook and putting it deep within her bag. Emma smiled and placed a neon green concoction ceremoniously in front of her friend.

“What’s this?” Stephanie asked.

“Atom-smasher apple.”

“Not a fishbowl.”

“They ran out of bowls.”

“We had a bowl.”

“The other thing, ran out of the drink.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“This looks poisonous,” Stephanie said.

“Technically it is.” Emma blew a strand of orange hair from her face as she sat down.

“You know what I mean. It looks like the acid in a bad 80s horror.”

“I know. I picked it for the name. Thought you’d think it was cool.”

“It is cool, thanks.” Stephanie turned the glass so that the painted skeleton was facing towards her. This one was off-white, and it appeared to glow whenever the roaming lightshow left their table. She ran her thumb over the skeleton. Several almost imperceptible spikes of sense experience crashed on the shores of her subconscious. The coarse texture felt like lashings of hailstones against the subsurface of her thumb. She remembered walking on the beach as a child, the spray from the ocean, the coarseness of sand at her favourite beach. She remembered skipping stones with her grandfather. Now, all at once, the last drink settled into her brain. Stephanie was finally relaxing.

“You look bored.” Emma took a sip of her drink.

“No, I look like I am thinking,” Stephanie raised her voice over the music.

“What about?”

“I’m going to miss it here.”

“You’ll have more clubs at uni.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“You’ll miss me?”

“And Jay and everyone else.”

“You can always come back.”

Stephanie nodded, but remembered an important detail about some of her older friends who had gone to university the year before, whose last messages still lingered in her phone’s inbox.

“Yeah, but who does?” Stephanie asked. She got out of her chair, pointing to the toilets across the bar. Emma nodded.

“You’ll come back,” Emma said.

“Of course I will, it’s only the toilets.”

“No, I mean here. This town. You’ve got your granddad.”

“And I’ve got you. Save my seat.”

Toumai zipped through another small airlock, reappearing in a hall carved out of one of the larger asteroids. He rushed past the hulking algae corridors, noisily clicking into place on a Y-shaped junction. Chemical sensors behind his vents told him the readings here were correct, the air was clean. Everything was still working. No sabotage. As he got closer to the research deck, he unfurled three mechanical arms from his underside. This particular body carried no weapons, but if he had to, Toumai could stab or electrocute the intruder with his tools.

He got to the door. At this proximity, his own sensors could pick up the presence of a body in the room, could hear the nervous heartbeat. He switched off his fear. He opened the door and entered, beaming an immediate visual report to the Dreamscreen network, keeping the sleeping crew informed. The intruder, clad in a heavy dark-blue spacesuit, slowly turned a chrome-orange visor his way.

“Identify yourself.” Toumai demanded. The intruder chuckled nervously, trying to take control of the situation. When they spoke, their voice was projected from a small speaker set into the neck of their suit.

“What are you going to do with that, weld me?”

Toumai let off a warning zap from one of the tools. The intruder flinched. Toumai moved forward and upward, positioning himself diagonally from the intruder. The intruder stood still as a thin mesh of greenish light emerged from the base of Toumai’s obsidian eye, casting a fine net over them. The scan lasted less than five seconds.

“No weapons,” Toumai tilted his head. The intruder copied him.

“Why would I bring weapons?”

“You are an intruder.”

“I am a visitor,” the intruder said.

“Distinction irrelevant.”

Toumai loomed in idle silence for a few seconds, processing the information. Any good assailant could improvise a weapon, and this one had already violated one law of nature by teleporting. She was dangerous. She needed to be dealt with.

“Toumai, you and I both know that you weren’t instructed to kill intruders.” She pointed at the ceiling theatrically. “Just in case one of them was from upstairs.”

“Upstairs?” the machine asked for clarification.

“Yes, you know. The other universe. The one you were built to search for,” the intruder said. Whilst she was still looking up, the intruder worked out the places this mechanoid could not reach based on the length of its neck and the ends of the rails. There were two corners of the room where, if necessary, the intruder could avoid his attacks by getting on top of the rails. She might even be able to jam them.

A message rippled out through the dreamscreen network that could not be misunderstood: Toumai had to disable the intruder, by any means necessary.

As if sensing this secret conversation, the intruder lunged forward, grabbing Toumai by the white handles either side of his head, pressing his three spindly arms underneath him with the dark blue chest of her space suit. Her orange visor clinked against his bulbous head. Toumai jerked upward, trying to shake her off. The intruder seemed to be enjoying the fight.

“You’re an elegant thing, Toumai. We need to work together.”

The machine spun on the rails. The intruder worked out the approximate weight tolerance. Something in her voice commanded attention and obedience, even from a machine. His motors whirred inside his eyestalk. The deep light behind his obsidian lens twinkled. Up this close, the intruder could almost smell the oil of his joints through the vents in her suit, and Toumai could almost see the face behind the visor.

“Let go of me,” the machine said.

“Scan me again. I’m not here to fight,” said the intruder. She fell back, landing lopsidedly, and extended her arms out to her sides. “See. No weapons. I’m capable of fighting, but I choose not to.”

Toumai scanned her again.

“I know,” Toumai said, his social programming kicking back in. It was obvious from her body language that this human female would only start a fight out of fear. Fear was what motivated her to jump forward and to wrestle with him, but fear of what? She had waited patiently for Toumai to arrive on this deck before doing anything, abandoning the strategic advantage of being in here alone with her body for over a minute. That was long enough to damage at least the outer components of the pod, to attempt to break into the computers, but she did nothing. The intruder had stood perfectly still, waiting for Toumai as if she had all the time in the world. So, what was she here for, if not invasion?

By now Toumai had unfurled his compressed arms and readied himself for another tussle.

“I’m not ready to go home yet, so if you could put the zapper away, I would appreciate it,” the intruder said, pointing at Toumai’s welding attachment. She reached up to her neck, clicking something.

“Don’t worry,” she said. The machine watched as the intruder twisted the neck of her helmet, releasing it from the rest of the suit. She placed it gently on a nearby console, and looked up at Toumai. Her eyes were blue-grey, her hair dark, and her face was stoic, exhausted. The image made its way through the dreamscreen network, rippling through the semi-conscious minds of the crew. The intruder looked as if she had been awake for days without rest. Toumai stared at her. She began the delicate process of removing her hair from the neck joint of the suit.

Toumai scanned the contours of her face. No match. He defaulted to the basics.

“State your name and intention.”

“My name is LP, the letters L-P,” the intruder said. “I’m here to protect her.”

“She is already protected, you are a security risk,” Toumai replied. LP glanced around his bulbous eye to look at the opaque pods set into the wall behind him.

“No, she isn’t. Look.” LP stepped further back, lifting an arm and clenching her fist. Her gloved fingers tapped at buttons hidden in the palm, and a hologram display sprung out of the dark-blue forearm of the suit. It was a smooth, glossy neon orange, like amber. It depicted a crude external scan of the starship Artifice. LP pinched the air around the hologram. It responded by shrinking down, zooming out away from the Artifice and focusing elsewhere. A long way away from the ghostly ship, a fleet of jagged arrow-shaped forms lingered, holding back, maintaining the same speed as the Artifice.

“Virtualists,” Toumai announced.

“A small fleet of what you call ‘spikeships,’ for her I imagine.”

“They don’t know about her.”

“Well, that’s reassuring. In that case they are probably just chasing us because we dropped our housekeys.”

The machine chose to ignore this for now. A question remained unanswered. He lowered himself from scanning position, making his round body level with the intruder, breaking her line of sight with the pod.

“Define upstairs.”

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Multifaceted

I plan on posting some readings of TSG to tiktok soon, and I’ll post a link here once I’ve done it. Tiktok lets you put 10-minute videos up now, and I’ve got a decent audience there who seem to like sci-fi.

If you are curious, here is the first five minutes of my other book, WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? as read by me on Tiktok.

WBTH tiktok reading

I also do a lot of Minecraft + Comedy content on tiktok, and my Minecraft livestreams (over at twitch.tv/realphillipcarter) often involve conversations about my books and my writing process. In fact a lot of my stand-up material comes from improv that happens inside those livestreams. I’ll say something, someone will tell me it was funny, and I’ll commit it to memory.

Without people there, I don’t think I’d remember half the jokes I’ve made.

Multidisciplinary

Many of you know by now that Stephanie is a project that’s very important to me. I first wrote THE STEPHANIE GLITCH in 2016, bending the rules of the third year of my Creative Writing degree by submitting parts of her universe to different modules. Her poetry showed up in Writer’s Workshop, the main body of the story showed up in Fiction, her dialogue was tested out on the two occassions I actually went to Script class, and I even tried turning some of her life into choice-trees inside an RPGmaker game after my Digital Adventure Games class.

Stephanie was always multifaceted and I wanted to graduate having finished a book, rather than holding a loose folder of the beginnings of stories. I managed, but Stephanie didn’t find a home with a publisher, and I had family stuff to do when I graduated, so I put the querying away for a while.

My next book, Who Built The Humans?, came out first because it was finished first. The idea of a collection of interconnected Sci-Fi stories came about because I was working on a leaflet to advertise Stephanie, and realised I simply had too many ideas for alternate realities, some of which needed their own book to live in. The leaflet was supposed to be four stories, but I had ideas for sixteen, and these were then cut down to the eleven universes that are in the book today.

Multiverse

The story BEYOND UNCERTAIN STARS is about 45,000 words, and any sensible marketer would (and did) tell me to publish it on its own, but with WBTH I wanted to create something really valuable and original, I wanted the book to feel alive, and letting you move between its chapters in almost any order was a big part of that. BUS needed to be in WBTH, but it will appear as a standalone story later this year, so it can have its own life.

Stephanie has some interesting links to WBTH. Her ‘universe’ appears in a small part of the book, showing a fight LP has with the Virtualists. There’s also Journey to Rapa Nui, a short story about a generation ship whose resident AI is reluctant to let them settle on an uncharted world. That’s part of Stephanie’s story too, and will probably be repackaged as a standalone story later this year if I go the self-publishing route with Stephanie.

Developing the newsletter

I wanted to get to know everyone here better, so I’ve made a survey that you can take which asks about your reading habits. My hope is that I’ll learn what’s popular, and can work to make more of it.

One of the questions is:

“Who is your favourite Science Fiction author, and why?”

And if you’re not doing the survey, I’d still like to know the answer to that one. I’ve had people mention Brian Aldiss and Robert Heinlein to me a lot before.

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And don’t forget, the $20 gift card giveaway is still active. Just subscribe, refer one friend, and you’ll be entered into it. Refer a few more friends and you get to unlock my post archive.

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The earlier parts of the book are split into microchapters, as the perspective alternates between timelines. This is the best way to make a big plot as simple as possible. So, some emails will have multiple chapters.

Missed the first part? Click here.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

2

Toumai checked the signal once more. It was not a glitch. The beating heart had a faint murmur. Printed hearts would not suffer this issue. He had also discovered that there had been a spike in temperature and air density inside the research deck at the moment the heartbeat was detected. Air had been suddenly displaced by something within this sealed chamber. But the pod was secure. The airlocks were sealed. The skeleton had not prematurely grown flesh and broke free. Something else was there. Something human.

If Toumai’s new suspicions were correct, an intruder had just teleported into the most sensitive laboratory of the starship and was stood in front of the most precious living experiment in human history. But there was just one problem with this theory: Teleportation was impossible.

He pressed onwards, shooting through another connecting corridor between two asteroids, his body rattling as it rumbled over the curved golden tracks.

3

Stephanie was staring at a TV screen above the bar, depicting some unknown music video. A record player needle was dropped onto an LP, the camera zooming in. Stephanie drew it on the back of an upturned coaster, the drawing illuminated only when the roaming laser lights passed over her, some simulation of the aurora borealis. The outline of the record became something else now, a planetary ring, before shifting again. It was an enormous train track, a particle collider, a spiralling descent into a black hole.

“What did you mean, how old life is allowed to get?” Emma asked. She was halfway stood up, still not fully committed to entering the shuffling crowd of people that had condensed around the understaffed bar.

“We might not last long enough to make a big enough game,” Stephanie explained. “It would be like you dying in the middle of an art exam, unable to finish a portfolio.”

“A preferable alternative,” Emma joked, “I ruined the last layers of detail.” She got up and walked into the crowd.

Almost immediately after her friend had gone, Stephanie took her battered notebook from her little bag and began writing something. At first no words arrived on the page, so she waited. The music was too colourful, the lights too noisy, and the smell of scented smoke from the dancefloor smoke machines filled her head with pink.

Eventually she managed to draw the first half of a spiral galaxy, copying the curve she had drawn on the coaster. But it soon changed, wrapping around itself to become the beginnings of an ammonite shell. She penned the chambers in gently, allowing the pen to wiggle and form the natural sutures. As always, she wanted to add a skull somewhere in the design, but didn’t feel confident enough to finish the piece. The music kept thumping through her bone marrow, the smells and chatter kept mixing into prickles of light, and the passing lights continued their hasty evolution into thudding, shaking embraces against her entire body. The music changed, and blues and greens now hovered through wispy tendrils of smoke machine smoke, embedding Stephanie in a personal nebula. She hunted for coloured pens or pencils, discovering all she had was another black pen.

Stephanie looked up from her table and surveyed her surroundings. She was dressed like everyone else here: Black boots, black dress, dark eyeliner, but she didn’t feel like she belonged. Emma, however, stood out like a unicorn at a funeral. She was in a bold white thing that faded into rainbows at its base. Her ginger hair was natural, which placed her firmly in the minority. Still, she was already making friends as she waited at the bar, already making strangers laugh at her jokes.

“I’m the alien,” Stephanie mouthed to herself, before writing the words above the ammonite. She began penning in little cartoon eyes into each chamber, adding comma-shaped flecks of movement, as if the thing was spinning or oscillating. Someone carrying two handfuls of pints stopped to look down at her drawing, but she didn’t notice. She added a little stick figure to the top of one of the ammonite’s chambers, then numerous exploding planets in the background. Finally, she added some dialogue above the stick figure.

“Do you ever get the feeling the world is about to end?”

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4

For Toumai, nervousness began as a performance, a mask put on for the humans. Back when they were awake, the crew had got together and spoke of their theories. Stories of alien archaeologists or godlike scientists were passed around the table like arrowheads or bones, each chipped away at and refined as the humans huddled together in their new space-age cave. They bounced ideas off each other inside the white-walled interior of those hollowed out asteroids, their extraordinary minds free from the endless chatter back down on Earth. Toumai had absorbed all of this, absorbed the new mythologies the humans wove around themselves, draping them over their small tribe like furs against the endless night of the cosmos. He watched as they clutched coffee cups ceremoniously, as they debated the motivations of imaginary gods, and pondered the structuring of theoretical multiverses.

Toumai had read about gods before he was switched on. He knew humans would make gods of stars and weather cycles, of birth and death. He knew they would place them wherever a difficult question arose. Gods were what waited in the darkness, in the ignorance between discoveries, in the space between research fields, in the fear before death and in the ignorance after birth. Gods arose when grief or beauty could not be sufficiently explained by cold science. But what Toumai did not expect was that that behaviour, like some impossible interspecies virus, would one day get inside his head too.

A collection of ideas chattered through the dreamscreen from the Artifice’s hibernating crew.

She was out there, thinking, beaming her teenaged thoughts through space and time. What if she managed to build herself a body here from the raw materials in the asteroid field? And if it wasn’t her, then who was it? Whoever it was could violate the known laws of physics, bypass all security measures on the Artifice. They could kill the experiment, kill her before she even got to her body. Who would do that? Are the Virtualists already here? What if we’ve woken something up we shouldn’t have? What if we’ve looked too far, opened too many doors?

Something changed. The heartbeat on the sensors in the research deck suddenly sounded different. It was faster, stronger. Toumai recognised the change. He was no longer the only nervous being awake on the ship.

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I wanted to republish the first few thousand words of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH here because we just reached 1000 readers, and only 25 people saw it the first time round.

And a lot has changed.

For the first few chapters of the book, the scenes alternate between Stephanie and LP, the dimension-hopping astronaut. By the third eBook installment, those realities will have collided, with strange consequences.

Stephanie’s synaesthesia also now plays a more central role. It is almost a character itself, and all of her experiences with the condition are based on my own. If you remember that autobiographical book I was writing about synaesthesia, Stephanie has taken a lot of the content from that, changing the shape of both books in the process.

Sort of how Earth and Theia changed each other, and the solar system, forever.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

The astronaut’s lifeless body slipped through a hole in the hull, surrounded by a procession of debris and pink-silver hull-foam and that looked like an exploding wound in the side of some giant, ancient beast. The circular starship had been torn in two, its glittering entrails scattered to the cold depths of space.

The mission had failed.

Outside the black hole lingered, hungry and immortal.

EARLIER

Toumai’s motors wheezed as he slid desperately through private airlocks and corridors. His eyestalk wobbled as he turned tight corners. He scanned the area ahead. The sensors repeated the same impossible story: A human heart was beating in the research deck. But the only body there was unfinished. It didn’t have a heart. All other hearts on the ship were accounted for, all sleeping, all natural. The machine checked the most recent progress logs for the research deck, searching for evidence that something was wrong, that there was a glitch, that the data would change. It didn’t.

SKELETAL STRUCTURE OPTIMAL

PRINTER BUG PERFORMANCE OPTIMAL

!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: PREMATURE BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES DETECTED.

!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM ACTIVE.

!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: LIVING BODY OUTSIDE POD.

If the machine could feel regret, he would have regretted not installing cameras on this part of the ship. His programming quickly formed a network of ideas.

The Artifice was a long way from home.

Nobody else was out here.

It could be the project.

It could be a civilian.

It could be a stowaway Virtualist.

It could be an alien.

The crew were not prepared to fight.

The intruder would have to be contained or killed.

Whirring around his spherical metal head, these ideas collided, annihilating each other until only the likeliest thing remained. The crew were all accounted for, all sleeping peacefully in their quarters. The simplest answer to the heartbeat mystery was that the unfinished body in the research deck, mindless and malformed, had somehow birthed itself prematurely from the cylinder and started walking around. But that was impossible, the body was only a skeleton this morning. If it grew any organs prematurely, they would have died already.

Unless it had developed, or inherited, a mind.

Unless that mind had orchestrated the swift construction of new flesh.

Unless she had done something impossible.

Toumai queried the pod itself. All systems were normal. The printer bugs were still in idle communication around the skeleton, their tiny processors ignorant to the growing panic in the silent starship. It made no sense. Perhaps the printer bugs were faulty. Perhaps they had banded together and commandeered the skeleton. It was a ridiculous idea, but one his social programming seemed happy to suggest, an amalgam of human nightmares and old stories scraped from the Dreamscreen.

Toumai’s social programming recommended terror, so that is what he emulated.

The blue light in his bulbous eye darted around desperately.

“It’s the same thing, rearranged,” Stephanie said. She touched her glass to Emma’s and drank. Her thumb traced the black skeleton printed onto the glass as distant disco lights kicked up holograms of it like echoes of light.

“Spacing out?” Emma asked. Stephanie smiled and looked at the empty plastic fishbowl at the centre of the table. She picked it up.

“No, spacing in. It’s like this fishbowl. If there were fish in it and not just booze. If we were fish, and other fish could make smaller bowls. It’s like… You know how a universe could be born from a black hole?”

“I absolutely do not know about that. You never bring it up in conversation multiple times per day,” Emma quipped.

“Anyway. Well, the fish in the ocean and the fish in the fishbowl have different experiences. But if the bowl was big enough, they would have the same experience, until they reached the edge.”

“I see,” Emma said.

“The edge of the fishbowl would have different physics.”

“Because the water gets stuck.”

“Sort of. But what if the real ocean isn’t fishbowl shaped?”

“I don’t know,” Emma admitted.

“A society in the future might be able to make lots of bowls.”

“Fishbowls?”

“But bigger.” Stephanie’s eyes received the red and yellow beams of light from the corners of the club, and her brain translated these into subtle thuds that felt as if they were generated in the jelly within her eyes. At the same time, the cool feeling of the glass in her hand became flashes of white and crackling green. The texture of the painted skeleton became the grooves and peaks of an unmade record, its delicate synthesizer landscape painting a picture of sound inside Stephanie’s skull. She ignored it.

“At one point, in the distant future, it might be reasonable to expect it is more likely we would be in a fishbowl than a real ocean, because there would be more fishbowls than oceans.”

“And it was all a dream,” Emma quipped.

“The worst ending to a story, I know. But not a dream, a new reality.”

“Functionally remarkably similar to the original. I know Steph, you’ve told me before.”

Stephanie took another sip of her drink. “If the fish swims far enough it will reach the edge, and things will look different. Water currents will bend back inwardly, space would behave differently. An advanced, or really old society of fish in the fishbowl might be able to tell they were inside one.”

“Are you asking me to buy us another fishbowl Stephie?”

“Yeah, sort of. But think about it.”

“I’d rather not. Drink?”

“It’s like… what if the fishbowl wasn’t perfect?”

“What?” Emma finished her drink and looked remorsefully at the plastic fishbowl between them.

Stephanie pointed at it, drawing attention to its imperfections. “What if there’s seams, some evidence it was built?”

Emma played with a straw in the empty fishbowl. “And what if you could stick a straw in it and suck out whole planets?”

“I was getting to that part,” Stephanie said, her eyes wide and mad with excitement.

“Of course you were,” Emma smiled. Stephanie broke eye contact and focused again on the printed skeleton on her glass. As she took another sip of the neon green drink, she imagined the skeleton was a real thing bobbing around inside the glass, waiting to be freed. The red and yellow disco lights created a heartbeat hum inside her head, her synaesthesia turning sound into touch, touch into sound, and colour into new dimensions of spacetime.

“You could move more than planets. If the straw pierced the fourth dimension.”

“You’re a nutter, Stephie.”

“I know. Cherry fishbowl this time?” Stephanie said.

“That’s pure sugar.”

“Did you think the mango one was real mangoes?”

“No, I thought they were simulated mangoes projected from a holographic plane in the fourth dimension of nebulous non-Newtonian spacetime intersecting a moebius strip.”

“Aww. You do listen… sort of.” Stephanie replied.

“As much as I can. Now stop talking about what’s real and what isn’t and start mentally preparing yourself for dancing, because there will be dancing,” Emma warned. Stephanie nodded in mock subservience.

“Dancing isn’t real,” she quipped.

“Oh it will be very real,” Emma warned her.

“No it won’t.”

“I’ve had enough of you.”

“No you haven’t.”

“I have.”

“Having enough of me is not real.”

“You won’t be real in a minute.”

Again a laser beam of yellows and reds cut across the dimly lit table at the corner of the bar. Again the thump-thump of a ghost’s heartbeat emerged primordially inside the jelly of Stephanie’s eyes. Again it zipped its way through to the centre of her brain, the centre of the universe, and rested there like a small animal sleeping, waiting to be awoken.

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Your free bookshelf this week is free fantasy and scifi. It’s quite a big one, and you’ve got 26 days to explore it.

Free Fantasy & Sci-Fi

Missed last week’s?

Last week’s bookshelf was epic sci-fi and fantasy. So a more specific shelf, catered more to bigger worldbuilding and such.

Last week's shelf

At the end of each month, I’ll post an overview to Free Fiction Friday, which is where I also (very occassionally) post writing tips.

Free Fiction Friday

High quality, genre-bending writing advice and books from real Human writers.

By Phillip Carter

I’ve picked LP II today not least because one of the main characters in TSG is called LP, but because I feel that I am again entering a new era of this multi-layered story, one which I think you’ll agree is the best era thus far.

Evolution/Synaesthesia

As always, I’m keen to keep improving my designs and stories before they reach the public. I really liked the cartoony and punky covers for THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, but I knew they strayed a bit far from genre expectations.

It’s a hard balancing act, being weird and original but still appealing to the humans in charge of putting books on shelves in places.

But I found a solution.

Like me, Stephanie has Synaesthesia, which means her brain translates light to sound, sound to light, amongst other complications. She’s crosswired, and it is this unusual [dis]ability which enables her brain to translate an ancient, hitherto unheard signal from the universe into a bright kaleidoscope of colour and music and energy.

Stephanie has within her head the perfect combination of evolutionary quirks, and it is this cocktail of weird which means she not only picks up signals from outside the universe, but she can actually understand them.

She is a human telephone between here and the afterlife.

But the afterlife isn’t just somewhere you go when you’re dead.

It’s a whole universe.

It gets weird.

With these plot points in mind, I wanted to make a cover that emphasised Stephanie’s cosmic journey of parallel-self discovery. I wanted to allude a bit to WBTH as well, because the books connect in a way. Beyond that, I wanted to show some of the TimeShips which are seen in all three series, EARTHLOOP, WBTH, and TSG. It was important to make these myself rather than pay someone else to do it, because this way I could embody Stephanie and build them out of building bricks.

This part took the most time, because I hand-built them in LegoStud.io, which I’m pretty proficient at, but building perfect triangles with bricks is never going to be easy. Nonetheless, I did it, and these little toy spaceships allude to Stephanie’s precognizance in the opening chapters of the novel.

Turn and face the strange

So here’s the cover. What do you think?

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Expedition into the Simulation

You can grab a teaser eBook for THE STEPHANIE GLITCH with the button below, as well as several other sci-fi and fantastical reads by other authors.

Sci-Fi + Fantasy

When you go looking for Stephanie, she’ll have this cover. It was a hastily-made temporary cover for promos, I’ll replace it soon.

Synopses

The Stephanie Glitch is…

• A psy-fi novel about a psychic who learns her world is ending

• A new universe where time flows outward in every direction

• An exploration of a fractal and fracturing reality

• A journey of parallel-self discovery

• A poem about existence, written as a 160,000 word novel

• A mind-bending trip into a parallel world on the brink of collapse

• Another book by Phillip Carter. You know what to expect

Do you have a favourite synopsis?

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Previous parts

(Note: I’m sharing a slightly older draft of the book here on Substack for vague artistic reasons. It’s still a complete story, but the final thing will be shinier).

Toumai’s orbed white body leaned in close to the glass. The slow knitting of the printer bugs was undisturbed.

“Hello Stephanie. Can you see me?” the robot said in LP’s voice.

Long Play knelt by the yellow-orange machine somewhere else in the Artifice, staring into a screen that showed what Toumai’s other body was seeing. She tilted her head, and the machine copied her across the open space between hollow asteroids.

Marek sat on a large red chair behind her, watching the curious astronaut prod the little rover and speak through it. She doted on it like a pet. Marek wondered if in her universe, robots fulfilled a different social niche. Despite all the scans and checks, a part of him still wondered if this stowaway was dangerous. He brushed back his black hair, sighed, and composed himself.

“How long until the Virtualists catch up?” he asked the room.

“Between five and eight hours,” Toumai replied. Marek nodded, sitting up straight and addressing the intruder.

“It’s closer to four,” LP interrupted.

“How can you be so sure?” Marek asked.

“I can’t. But I’m rarely wrong about these things.”

“Long Play. Whatever you’re doing, you should do it now.”

“Working on it,” LP said. “I’m going to need that chair.”

Marek reluctantly left the chair, standing close by as Long Play got comfortable in it. She turned it side to side with her feet, rocking herself.

“So, you don’t know where her universe is?”

“No,” said Marek.

“But it’s different. It’s not the past?”

“We are not sure.”

“Not enough data.”

“Correct.”

“Is there a signal coming in now?” LP asked.

“No.”

“She must be busy.” Long Play glanced at the little rover’s screen, now poised just past the armrest of the chair. She stared at the image of the unfinished body for almost a minute, willing for it to grow flesh and talk.

“And you can’t speed that up?”

“Not without a risk of deformities. It will be ready before the Virts arrive.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” LP said. She made a twirling movement with her finger, and the little yellow-orange rover turned its screen to show Marek.

“Show him the spikeships.”

“This is the data from the mines,” Toumai explained. He displayed a graph of points in space. The mines were an orange cloud of spheres, the spikeships a swarm of green spheres. Some were destroyed by the detonations, others nimbly swooped under and over debris.”

“I’m no fighting expert, what am I looking at?” Marek asked.

“They’re not full speed,” LP said grimly.

“What?”

“They were faster a few hours ago. They are not travelling at full speed. They aren’t in any rush to get here. Why?”

“Perhaps they know you’re here?”

“That’s not relevant. They’re from your universe, I don’t have history with them.”

“Maybe they’re holding back for orders?”

“Maybe. Someone or something has told them to slow down. What do they know? What are they planning?”

The question went unanswered. The yellow-orange rover and Marek stood still, as if waiting for LP’s answer to a rhetorical question.

“I think we’re already in firing range,” Long Play said.

The machine was silent. Marek, Toumai, and his sleeping crew had no answer to this that was worth voicing. Long Play was left alone in her dark premonition. She sniffed the cool air in the room, picking up the faint scent of nearby flowers.

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Mother

Stephanie stared out of the bay window of her mother’s front room. The morning mist was still vanishing, slumping away in ghostlike entities as commuters ploughed through it. Stephanie thought of nebulas and starships again, lost herself in futile daydreams.

In the background, her mother was talking animatedly on the phone to someone. Apparently, someone had overpriced an item at the local car boot sale, and the person who had bought it was already struggling for money. Stephanie glanced back into the beige room, catching a glimpse of the shopping channel on the huge grey television. Her mother exchanged niceties with the person on the phone, hung up, and changed her tone.

“She doesn’t know when to shut up,” she said.

“Doesn’t she?” Stephanie quipped. It flew over her mother’s head.

“You should come back to church,” she continued.

“No thanks,” Stephanie readjusted her position on the beige chair, almost sinking into it.

“There are nice boys there.”

“That’s not a selling point.”

“They dress properly.”

Here we go, thought Stephanie.

“Do they?”

“Yes. Not like your friend. What is it, James?”

“Jay, Mum.”

“Jay. I really don’t see what you see in him.”

“Oh you’re not wasting any time today, are you?” Stephanie straightened herself up on the chair now, turning fully to face her mother, who had yet to sit down.

“Life is finite, Stephanie,” her mother preached. She was stood in the middle of the room, surrounded on all sides by knick-knacks, crucifixes, candles. Her impressive, blow-dried hair almost made contact with the heavy glass pendant lamp suspended from the ceiling. Stephanie amused herself by imagining the thing giving her an electric shock, even though this was likely impossible.

“And because of that, you need to choose wisely who you give your time to.”

“You know what? You’re right. I do,” Stephanie replied. She glanced around at the room again, thinking the decor alone might have been reason enough for her father to leave. She imagined her own exodus from this place, her own last moments in this childhood home. Her mother hadn’t decorated in over ten years. In some places, though Stephanie would never point it out, she could still see the marks her eight-year-old self had imprinted on the flock wallpaper. Behind pipes and the edges of radiators, in places too low for adults to notice, a much younger Stephanie had etched fossils of her childhood into these off-white walls.

“This Jay boy means trouble,” her mother insisted.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t. What do you mean?”

“I mean he is trouble. I don’t like your new clothes. All this black.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t talk back to me Stephanie. It is beneath you.”

“I just don’t understand what you don’t like about black clothes.”

“It is not the clothes themselves,” her mother explained. “It is what they represent.”

“Freedom.” Stephanie smiled and adjusted the lapel of her leather jacket.

“If you mean the freedom from going to heaven, yes.”

“Mum, it’s just clothes.”

“With skulls and dark lyrics. Spikes.”

“It’s a style. I know you had one in the eighties.”

“Don’t be like this.”

“Sorry.” Stephanie’s heart sank. She never quite knew when a conversation would become an interrogation in this house, but it was guaranteed to happen eventually. She looked to the window again. The mist had finished fading now. The world was clear, too clear, as if it was a studio background to a bad movie.

“I want you to come back to church.”

“Mum, I said no.”

“You could help with the bake sale. It would be nice to give you some purpose in life.”

“I have a purpose.”

“Writing lyrics for these dead metal bands is not a noble purpose though, is it?”

Stephanie stifled her laughter. “Mum, it’s death metal, not dead metal.”

“Tomato, toma-to.”

“And that’s not even the music we are working on. It’s dark wave, goth at the most.”

“And that’s what Mavis is scared of Stephanie.”

“Oh Christ. You’ve spoke to her about this. No wonder.”

“Mavis is an upstanding member of the church.”

“She’s very rarely upstanding,” Stepanie muttered to herself.

“What?”

“I said I don’t know how she is upstanding. Didn’t she just overcharge someone at the car boot?”

“Oh, he had it coming.”

“You seemed very angry about it on the phone.”

Stephanie’s mother raised a narcissistic eyebrow. Two distinct realities had clashed now, two different versions of Meredith Shaw. Stephanie smirked, on some subconscious level understanding the puzzle she had just unpicked.

“Well... I am angry about it. But that does not mean Mavis’ advice is not worth listening to. Her nephew got into that dark wave music and he’s a pagan now.”

“What’s wrong with being pagan?”

“Well...”

“Mum, it doesn’t matter. I am not going to church. Dad doesn’t drag me to his dungeons and dragons games, you shouldn’t drag me to this.”

“He still plays that satanistic game?”

“Not a word.”

“What?”

“Satanistic is not a word, mum.”

“It is.”

“It is not.”

“Well. It should be.”

“Okay.”

The TV channel shifted to a segment about a papercraft set. Stephanie’s mother turned away from Stephanie, her focus now solely on this advert.

“You seem stressed,” she said after a while.

“I’m not.”

“Tense.”

“Nope.”

“I could get you to the doctor.”

“I can book it myself.”

“Let mum help you.”

“I don’t need to go. I’m fine.”

“You’re always so on edge, Stephanie.”

“I just don’t like being told what to do, I can make my own choices now.”

“And what are those choices?”

“What?”

“Does he offer you things?”

“Things?”

“Drugs. Alcohol.”

“No mum, I can find those perfectly fine on my own.”

“What?!”

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This is a microchapter from my upcoming novel THE STEPHANIE GLITCH.

Don’t worry if you’re new and you’ve missed the last chapters, you can find them by clicking on this bright orange button.

Other chapters

So here she is. I think I’ve got about 400 new people here since I posted the last chapter.

Hello, by the way!

The big delay is due to the way I am publishing THE STEPHANIE GLITCH. I put Stephanie on a shelf for a while as I queried some publishers and hybrid publishers… but I didn’t like any of them enough to entrust them with Stephanie. So she’s going to be self-pub. Same decision I made in 2016, but more concrete. Now I am 100% sure she needs freedom.

And she’s going to be seven novellas, eventually combined into one hardback tome, released first as eBooks.

So a serialised novel, in which each episode is its own unique universe.

Weird, but if you’ve been here a while, predictably weird.

And in case it wasn’t abundantly clear, I won’t be using any ‘AI’ (which isn’t really ‘I’ in any sense of the word) in any of my writing, not least this book, which is explicitly about AI running entire universes… badly.

No robot bullshit here. Just good stories.

So let’s begin.

Toumai’s orbed white body leaned in close to the glass. The slow knitting of the printer bugs was undisturbed.

“Hello Stephanie. Can you see me?” the robot said in LP’s voice.

Long Play knelt by the yellow-orange machine somewhere else in the Artifice, staring into a screen that showed what Toumai’s other body was seeing. She tilted her head, and the machine copied her across the open space between hollow asteroids.

Marek sat on a large red chair behind her, watching the curious astronaut prod the little rover and speak through it. She doted on it like a pet. He wondered if in her universe, robots fulfilled a different social niche. Despite all the scans and checks, a part of him still wondered if this stowaway was dangerous. He brushed back his black hair, sighed, and composed himself.

“How long until the Virtualists catch up?” he asked the room.

“Between five and eight hours,” Toumai replied. Marek nodded, sitting up straight and addressing the intruder.

“It’s closer to four,” LP interrupted.

“How can you be so sure?” Marek asked.

“I can’t. But I’m rarely wrong about these things.”

“Long Play. Whatever you’re doing, you should do it now.”

“Working on it,” LP said. “I’m going to need that chair.”

Marek reluctantly left the chair, standing close by as Long Play got comfortable in it. She turned it side to side with her feet, rocking herself.

“So, you don’t know where her universe is?”

“No,” said Marek.

“But it’s different. It’s not the past?”

“We are not sure.”

“Not enough data.”

“Correct.”

“Is there a signal coming in now?” LP asked.

“No.”

“She must be busy.” Long Play glanced at the little rover’s screen, now poised just past the armrest of the chair. She stared at the image of the unfinished body for almost a minute, willing for it to grow flesh and talk.

“And you can’t speed that up?”

“Not without a risk of deformities. It will be ready before the Virts arrive.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” LP said. She made a twirling movement with her finger, and the little yellow-orange rover turned its screen to show Marek.

“Show him the spikeships.”

“This is the data from the mines,” Toumai explained. He displayed a graph of points in space. The mines were an orange cloud of spheres, the spikeships a swarm of green spheres. Some were destroyed by the detonations, others nimbly swooped under and over debris.”

“I’m no fighting expert, what am I looking at?” Marek asked.

“They’re not full speed,” LP said grimly.

“What?”

“They were faster a few hours ago. They are not travelling at full speed. They aren’t in any rush to get here. Why?”

“Perhaps they know you’re here?”

“That’s not relevant. They’re from your universe, I don’t have history with them.”

“Maybe they’re holding back for orders?”

“Maybe. Someone or something has told them to slow down. What do they know? What are they planning?”

The question went unanswered. The yellow-orange rover and Marek stood still, as if waiting for LP’s answer to a rhetorical question.

“I think we’re already in firing range,” Long Play said.

The machine was silent. Marek, Toumai, and his sleeping crew had no answer to this that was worth voicing. Long Play was left alone in her dark premonition. She sniffed the cool air in the room, picking up the faint scent of nearby flowers.

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After a few months researching and chatting with my beta team, I’ve decided that The Stephanie Glitch is actually seven novellas. The eventual hardback will collect them all together, but the eBook will be split into seven parts.

Each time she ascends through the multiverse, a new book starts.

Essentially, each one is a whole new story, with Stephanie being the only recurring character.

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This is Mycelial, a story whose first draft was briefly available here, on Substack. I published it online at a time when I knew it was likely unsafe to do so. Some vast machine might chew it up and help someone vomit out a collage of its ideas.

When I published it to Amazon (no link, no sales pitches today) I ticked the box that said I am the rights holder.

And I am.

It came out of my brain, after all.

Right?

Unfortunately it’s not that simple any more. For the past few months a lingering shadow has been eating away at myself, and at almost every writer I know. Sure, some have embraced the machines, but their book covers look worse for it, and in some cases, they’ve made their lives as authors worse.

I read this article today. I want to focus on the final lines.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/8/27/generative-ai-ad-intellectual-property

Do we care who made it, and why, or do we just want the picture? That's why some people are horrified by music generators or Midjourney, (or, 150 years ago, were horrified by cameras), and others aren't worried at all. 

Whilst I get the sentiment, this is a very limited perspective that dulls down the edges of the article, sands away any points made. It’s speaking only on the side of the consumer, not the creator. The people ‘horrified’ by these churnalism machines are not the people drooling over ‘Prompt: lustful dragon ladies imagined in a 1980s movie style with sepia filter and bright blue anime eyes and brown hair and also she is in space.’ No, the people worrying are the people whose job it used to be to satisfy those strange commissions in the dead of night, hunched over their computer.

Do we care who made it?

I think in some cases, a discerning consumer should care, in the same way you might care where your ‘fresh’ fruit came from. You could write entire essays about that. For example, if you sit outside tonight and watch the sunset. If I teleport beside you and show you that the sunset is a hologram, a meme, a blend of several hundred thousand sunsets that came and went long before your birth… would you still enjoy looking at it? Does it still contain beauty?

Is it still a sunset if there is no sun?

In THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, and indeed EARTHLOOP, there are scenes where a false sky is presented over the real thing. It is a gut-wrenching feeling, having reality torn out from under you, and it motivates Nori Furukawa and Stephanie to pursue the truth of their own separate worlds relentlessly.

Whilst Nori fights off an alien invasion from outside of time, Stephanie hunts down an interdimensional poet, hoping against hope that they are the key to finding her ‘true self’ and not in the meandering, tiktok aspirational video sense. In the literal sense that Stephanie believes she too is a copy of a copy of a copy.

Aren’t we all, in a way?

Do we care who made it, and why, or do we just want the picture?

The last lines speak to the creator-consumer dynamic. Someone who wants a pretty picture of an anime lady with big boobs holding a laser gun, can now ask a machine to poop one out. Fair play to them, perhaps artists can now have more time to draw what they want to draw (I know one furry artist who, whilst now broke, feels at least some weird freedom in her customer base vanishing overnight. She never liked drawing wolves [redacted] each other senseless anyway, but it paid her bills, something she’s now struggling to do.)

The author is dead.

We are the luddites, in a way. Us difficult organic beings. We creators, we computers of grey matter and musculature. When I write parts of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH where she talks to AI, the AI is often vastly more intelligent than the AI we have now, but it poses the same threat. It’s vastly smarter than Stephanie too, and this presents some conceptual barriers in communication. They simply do not share the same values. Stephanie wants to be ‘real’, to be unique, but the machine in charge of her reality is more than happy throwing up a carbon copy of her home town, complete with NPCs disturbingly reminiscent of her old friends.

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(If you get this, use the same email you’re reading this on, so I don’t sign you up to this newsletter twice!)

A central question in THE STEPHANIE GLITCH is:

How does Stephanie know she’s not a machine?

She does develop a test, but I won’t spoil it. The main philosophical issue of whether or not you are reading an email from an AI or from an author under threat from AI is yours to answer and yours only.

Is Phillip Carter real? Is he worth investing in when a machine could do a sloppy job pretending to be him? A hard question.

Do we care who made it, and why, or do we just want the picture?

It is a question posed from limited perspective. Who is WE? We, in the context of the article, seems not to be everyone, but only the people who are consuming the art. Whilst we all create and consume at different times in our lives, and indeed in each day, the question is framed only for people in the consuming mindset.

How do these consumers afford to consume the AI stuff anyway?

They have jobs.

Which leads me to my next point.

Every single human job, every single one, will eventually be eaten up by automation. And then who pays who? Where does the money come from, and how do we survive?

Industries come and die. We know this. Perhaps the last industry to go will be funeral directors, something I breifly tried to get into before realising most of them are family-owned and I don’t fancy marrying someone just to get on an apprenticeship.

Movie studios had some internal pushback against new animating software, factory workers smashed the machines that would replace them, and more recently Onlyfans models have considering suing AI users making images in their likeness. Deepfakes of Donald Trump, the Pope, and all sorts of people are muddying the waters. Anyone not born into this new age is particularly vulnerable to being tricked by its myriad methods of lying to our faces.

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Nothing is real. So why bother?

Any true artist creates for the sake of creating. I find working with chatGPT to be almost as tedious as co-writing with another human, almost. Painters will keep painting because they like to paint. Musicians will keep playing on street corners. The issue, which nobody seems to properly grasp or worse, seems to gleefully ignore, is that AI is only seen so darkly because it is an existential threat to anyone who makes a living from art.

We live in a pretty simple system.

• We trade tokens (money) for services and goods

• We gather tokens by selling services and goods

• We spend tokens on services and goods

• Rinse and repeat

Therefore, someone needs to have useful, wanted objects or skills, in order to gather the requisite tokens needed to buy the food to keep them alive. It is not enough to stop buying into services, food isn’t cheap.

How it’s affecting people

My furry artist friend couldn’t heat her house the other month.

Some of my writer friends have considered quitting.

And I am darkly amused by how everything I predicted in 2016, in the first draft of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, has come true. In the first draft, her original world was just on the cusp of entering into a universal basic income scheme, thanks to automation demolishing literally every human job.

The existential crisis brought about by this was enough to send Stephanie into a state of extreme astral projection (which future English Lit students might see as a dissociative state, which I won’t argue with). From this state of out-of-body experience, she travels through the multiverse, leaving her old body behind and alive like Toa Inika Matoro from Bionicle.

(I am now contractually obliged to sneak in Bionicle references into all my posts)

It is entirely possible that in the next few years, we will see AI-written literature that is to the average person, indistinguishable from the poetry they see from humans on instagram. They might even enjoy it more, and I don’t want to stop them from doing so. What interests me is thinking ahead, wondering how I’ll be able to pay the rent, what existence I can eke out for myself, if writing books proves fruitless.

I’ll still write them, obviously.

But what else could I do?

I find myself looking at jobs which feel safer than others. Bar work seems to be one, as does security. Anything human-facing, essentially, seems a safe bet.

I’m getting back into writing for people’s weddings as well. Because let’s face it, getting a chatbot to write your best man’s speech isn’t flattering to the bride and groom. It’s lazy. In this instance, you absolutely need the human touch.

Because we all know, religious or atheist or not, that AI-work is soulless.

What comes next?

As I said above, every single human job can and will be taken out from under our feet.

This should not be a bad thing.

It should be liberating.

AI could be a beautiful thing if it didn’t threaten your ability to put food on the table. Right now it is optimising code, finding novel solutions to diseases, discovering new things in space and in physics.

It could be this powerful for working people, too.

Imagine a world where the job you do is an addition to your life, a craft you care about that you do because you love doing it.

Maybe as a society we should raise the bottom line from homelessness to something slightly better, considering the vast leaps in technology we've been through. Imagine a world where, if you lose your job, you don’t have to explain to your children they need to skip meals.

Imagine a world where people going through crises don’t wind up on the streets.

Imagine a world where for every job lost to automation, a person is given a safety net by society, made to feel they aren’t obsolete, but valuable.

Imagine a world where human life has value outside its utility to its workplace.

Essentially, I want to live in Star Trek.

The spaceships would be nice, too.

We are still hunter-gatherers

I know my past self would care a lot less about AI drowning the bookshelves of the world if he was confident he could afford to live next month.

I’m lucky that my book sales have picked back up in recent weeks, but I am an anomaly amongst my peers. And I have a safety net too. Not everyone has family to fall back on if it goes wrong.

This isn’t about artists. It’s about everyone.

We need a safety net.

Because the world is changing.

We can work alongside AI for a better planet, if we sort ourselves out.

Stephanie isn’t that far-fetched any more.

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If you are reading this email within the first hours of its release, I’ll be writing Stephanie stuff live on twitch.tv. It doesn’t cost anything to watch.

Can’t be bothered reading this email and want to skip to the livestream?

Impatience button

Hello all.

It’s been a month since the last Stephanie post. So, where is she?

Right now she’s dying, but the book is more alive than ever. Stephanie’s impending ‘demise’ is a second inciting incident, concrete proof that she’s right, that her whole world really is simulated.

And ‘dying’ is the best way to avoid dying.

I’ve just completed my first two shows at the Manchester Fringe, proving myself as a time-travelling sci-fi poetry comedian, telling jokes about alien abductions to a double-booked wedding, yelling when the mic broke, and throwing aliens into an audience more than happy to frogmarch the pint-sized plastic probers out onto the perve-pocked pavements of Manchester. On my last day, I saw a drugged-up man readjusting his privates in the middle of the street with such ferocity that I was half expecting a cartoonish popping noise (or grisly horror noise) to indicate he had finally located his manhood and, in his desperation to locate it, tore it off by accident. The shortest manhood discovery, in more ways than one.

Why am I telling you this in a Stephanie update?

Because, as always, she was somehow involved.

On the last night of my show, I asked the audience to pick from three subjects. Love, Love a bit darker, or Simulation theory. They chose simulation, so I read out ON-SIMULATION from WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?, which many of you may have noticed not only included a prequel for THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, but a comedic universe of slam poems about the folly of human experience, the end of time itself, and crab ghosts.

You may also know that some of the poems in this book within a book (more on that later), including ON-SIMULATION, had a character within called Sci-Fi Stevie. Now, only a handful of people have noticed some of the secret layers to the book (meaning a lot of people still think it should have been several books) so I’ll save you the digging and say this.

Sci-Fi Stevie is an alternate universe Stephanie.

Her love of Sci-Fi, her dead-end office job, her inclination toward Tin Foil Tim, the conspiracy theorist who thinks life is a nightmare inside a robot with PTSD. All of it makes sense again if you remember Stephanie from later chapters, which is why the book can be read in any order, and should probably be played through thrice in a year, like your favourite record.

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So THE STEPHANIE GLITCH is a bit more complicated to write than a standalone novel, even though it is one. I want to be careful that I know the next few books beforehand. But that isn’t actually why updates have been so slow.

Stephanie is by far my weirdest book, so I doubt the average publisher would want it. That means I’ve had to go self-pub again, but I wanted to do it differently this time round. I learned a lot from publishing WBTH.

So, I am preparing a manuscript to send to Unbound books. That’s why updates have been slow. I’ll be sending it out later this week, and eventually we will find out if the book becomes available to vote on.

If you’re not familiar with Unbound, it’s essentially like LegoIdeas for books.

If you’re not familiar with LegoIdeas, it’s a crowd-pushing platform. People can vote on what books they want to see, with the winners eventually being put up for crowd-funding and getting publishing contracts. I like Unbound and have done for a few years.

I am going to write some Stephanie tonight, for part 8 of this newsletter. You can come and watch me writing it if that suits you. I’ll be going live in a few minutes.

You can watch my livestreams on Twitch.Tv for free. Most of them are dark comedy, chit chat, and Minecraft stuff (yes, all at the same time, I have a unique niche). The writing streams are a bit rarer, but I’m working on improving that.

They also contain the odd bit of comedy, but it’s mostly me ranting about simulation theory and writing fight scenes and mind-bending dialogue on spaceships or collapsing planets.

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And if you were wondering what I listen to when writing and not on stream, here’s one album that’s helped me through the last Stephanie chapter.

See you on the stream!

The Stephanie Glitch

We are approaching the end of the first big chapter now. Stephanie and Lauren’s worlds are soon to collide. Thanks for being here and reading this. I am currently submitting it to Unbound books and will let you know how that goes.

LP walked through a long and darkened starship corridor. She had kept the boots and gauntlets of her spacesuit on, preferring their comforting weight to the feeling of the undersuit alone. To her right wheeled a short yellow-orange machine, one of Toumai’s many avatars. Above and to her left the golden rails were empty.

“Would it not make sense to leave this body with Stephanie instead, since it can shoot things?”

“You can teleport. If I need someone to shoot things, I will use you.”

“It’s not easy,” LP said, “But fair enough.”

“Anyway,” Toumai’s wheeled robot replied, “The orb has greater diagnostic tools. If something goes wrong with the printing, he is the most useful.”

They passed under a mesh of support beams. LP glanced up at the cavernous form of the asteroid above. Here the naked brown-grey rock was exposed, no doubt sealed by microfoam on the other side, but nonetheless a threatening reminder of just how close everything was to the murderous vacuum of space. She jumped up and tapped the rock with the tips of her fingers, the gloves scraping on the coarse surface.

“Nature at last,” she said. “So tell me about this chair, how comfy is it?”

“Is comfort really as important as you claim?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

They continued through the narrow corridor. Here the wires and tubes that serviced each section of the Artifice were exposed. LP thought about this. Toumai leading her through her was like an animal rolling over and revealing its soft spot. She glanced again at the wires; red, green, blue, yellow, and thought about how easy it might be to cause trouble.

“You trust me,” she said, barely hiding the surprise in her voice.

“The crew has determined you are not a threat.”

“Good. Good. I have a theory they might want to hear.”

They passed under a rack of shelves, each filled with spare parts, tubing, tools.

“Go on,” Toumai said.

LP slowed her pace as if the thought was thickening the air around her. She glanced around conspiratorially, leaning close to the rover.

“These images she’s sending. I think they are a distress signal.”

The little rover twisted its centaur-like body beside her.

“Why would she send a distress signal?” Toumai asked. LP thought about the question. She felt an almost imperceptible intuition that she was being watched, and not just by Toumai or by the spirit of Stephanie, but by something else, something cutting through the regular angles of space and time, something other. Something that wanted to harm her.

She shook the feeling off, tried to ignore it, pushed it back.

“Maybe knowing her mind has at least two bodies to occupy?” she suggested.

“The signal was sent before we began printing,” Toumai said.

“That’s neither here nor there, and neither is Stephanie,” LP quipped. Then she stopped and remembered the feeling, saying, “That’s not the end of my theory.”

They began walking again. The yellow-orange machine chirped, “Elaborate.”

“She sends you these pictures when she’s sleeping. Her head isn’t screwed on right. She’s loose, not fully in either world. Naturally she wants to explore. She sends these signals out like someone calling out in a forest. You said they show up everywhere. Not just from the intersect, but around it.”

“Correct.”

“Then there are multiple holes. We just don’t have the tech to detect them here. Maybe they don’t last long. Either way, she’s sending them, looking for where the images came from.”

“She is not conscious of the mechanism of acquiring them?” Toumai asked.

“Not yet. It comes naturally.”

“I see.”

“Toumai. I think Stephanie is building a bridge.”

“A bridge?”

“From there to here. She saw into the Artifice. Maybe on some level she knows.”

Back in the biogenesis deck strands of musculature continued their languorous expansion over the skeleton. The cheekbones were bathed in red fibres, the eye sockets filling out. The printer bugs went about the task without complaint, barely visible, always present, like the beginnings of a fog.

What did you think?

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We are rapidly approaching macrochapter 2, in which LP’s and Stephanie’s worlds collide. But in case you missed anything, here’s a giant button.

And another button for those who are new and want to start at the beginning.

I hope you like those new buttons. I think they’re cool.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH - Part 6

Recommended listening.

Stephanie’s mind travelled to skeletons on shot glasses and movie nights in with Emma. College was now littered with invisible spikes of anxiety that crept up on Stephanie when she least expected it. Even the library, which was once a peaceful refuge, was now a huge noticeboard for the hastily written slogans of various faculties. There was a white noise of terror looming around every corner. They even had some early exams in there on some days, as if to foreshadow Stephanie’s eventual failure, and nobody ever warned Stephanie not to walk up to the door and stare in like an idiot before noticing the sign. She had probably scared about a dozen sociology students half to death. She entertained the thought for a second, thinking about how amusing Emma might find it.

“What was the yelling about?” Stephanie’s grandfather asked.

“What yelling?”

“Upstairs.”

“Oh god. That was out loud?” Stephanie asked.

“It wasn’t too loud, I did worry, however. Bad dream?”

“Yeah. About uncle Andrew’s funeral.”

“Oh, that’s a weird thing to be dreaming about. You were barely there.”

“I know,” Stephanie said.

“It was a long time ago. Surprised you remember. It’ll be because things are changing. Dreams about death come about when your life changes its path. Going to university is a big thing. You’re the first in the family.”

“So, no pressure?” Stephanie asked, hiding her worry under a polite tone.

“None at all. And how was your night with Emma?”

“Decent, didn’t do much, just nice to relax with a friend you know, before exams.”

“It’s nice to have a close friend,” Stephanie’s grandfather said. “Your grandmother was my best friend.”

Before Stephanie could decode or anxiously invent any hidden meaning in what her grandfather had just said, he guided her into the living room and sat her down with breakfast.

“Do you like bits or no bits?” he asked. Stephanie snorted, her mind elsewhere, before realising he was talking about orange juice.

“Are they the big bits or the little bits?”

“Pulp.”

“Good band,” Stephanie said, “Go on then. Thanks granddad.”

“No need to thank me,” he said, pouring Stephanie a tall glass of orange juice with the little bits. He followed her steadily to her chair and pulled up a footstool. Stephanie sluggishly lifted her legs into position. Her grandfather placed a cooling migraine pad on her forehead and passed her the juice, which she drank half of almost right away. It rejuvenated her, dragging her mind upward through her multiverse of nightmares and dreams and memories, pulling her into the present and the real. She was still hungover, but the dryness and the pain of it had mostly been suffocated under the orange nectar and the arctic feeling in her forehead. She felt like a plant being watered after a thousand years. Her mind turned to the future, to plans and parties (often the same thing), to the coldness sucking the bad thoughts through her skull and discarding them in the air.

“I’ve got a thing in a few days, an event in town, Battle of the Bands. I was wondering if I could stay over here again?” Stephanie asked.

“You never need to ask Stephanie. You have your room, you have your key, and by the looks of it a lot of your treasures are here,” her grandfather said.

“Thanks granddad.” Stephanie was doubly thankful, as a pile of clothes was barely a ‘treasure’ and her mother would have had another, unkind term for her things.

“Now give yourself ten minutes to rest. Your brain will fall out if you rush yourself. You still have a lot of buses you can afford to miss at this time. Don’t stress.”

Her grandfather always knew the right thing to say. In fact, even if he said the exact same thing that someone else said, it would be relaxing. He was the kind of man that exuded a feeling of safety and security, like a walking, talking castle.

Stephanie closed her eyes and processed things at last. The coffin nightmare faded away, but in its place lingered that uncomfortable feeling that something wasn’t quite right with the world. She still felt as if she was being watched, but that whatever was watching was neutral. That the universe, whilst not in any way under her control, would go her way.

Stephanie returned to her bedroom after breakfast, still feeling the lingering effects of the previous night’s alcohol. She pawed around her shoulder bag and found a scrap of paper with a spicy sauce stain on one corner. She remembered writing the poem whilst eating the kebab inside the shop, remembered splitting a whole jalapeno with Emma and watching as Emma’s face scrunched up. Stephanie sat cross-legged on her bed and looked at the poem.

Between now and then and elsewhen

a river a kebab and something else

nothing is happening

it’s so cold time has frozen

and we are warm in here

and I’m always hungry

It wasn’t her best poem, but it was fuelled by two-for-one drinks and motivated by a yearning for a time which had not yet happened, so Stephanie forgave it. In fact, she came to the conclusion that if she rated her poetry based only upon how honest it was, that this was in fact one of the best. It might not have been the most technically complicated or imaginative, but it captured a slice of the night out better than any blurry drunken photograph could have. Briefly she thought about showing it to Emma.

Quietly she collected her things together. Pens, notebook, phone charger, eyeliner, mind, body, soul. She tucked away anything that would fit back into her bag before heading to the bathroom. Now for the hard part, waking up. She stepped into the shower whilst brushing her teeth, not because she needed to save time, but because she could not be bothered allocating different blocks of time to both activities. This was the most efficient way. She wasn’t going to be around forever.

The lingering taste of the orange juice shot through her body as the water started. She saw flashes of green and speckles of silver through the neon haze, smelled the lavender shampoo and felt the coldness of colour at the top of her eyeballs. All her senses were entangled again. Not knotted or overlapped, but grown together and twisting, like tree roots or fat red veins sharing a tributary. Colour and smell and taste and sound and texture and electricity intermingled in her mind. The shower, on full blast, pelted the skin of her scalp with rhythmic bursts that reminded her body of last night’s nightmare.

Stephanie relaxed. Her skull became the metal hull of a starship falling through reality-holes. The starship punctured pink-purple-green vortexes, only to reappear in the midst of a storm of brown and grey asteroids. Pelted by the rocks, the starship crunched and clattered, chased by pufferfish-shaped pursuers, smaller ships with evil intent emanating from them. Stephanie felt unsettled as she focused on these smaller spaceships, shivering and shaking herself free from the dream vision. The spiky forms took a while to fade. She nearly slipped in the shower. The starship continued on in the memory of her dream, kicking up dust and chaos as it careened towards a distortion in the velvet black canvas of space.

A black hole.

Stephanie was staring down at water spiralling into the plughole. She breathed in the steam, smelled the shampoo and focused on the percussion of the water above and the spiralling of the water below. She smiled and chortled to herself, picking a strand of purple-black hair with her right foot. There was a time not so long ago, when she wanted very desperately for her external decoration to be entirely purple. Hair pins, hair, a few piercings, tattoos, dresses, jeans, corduroy trousers, wide-brimmed hat. All of it had to be purple. But she had only worked her way halfway through the list before becoming exhausted, bored with the artifice of it all. She also didn’t suit hats as often as she wanted to, and she had yet to obtain any tattoos.

That was a good word. Artifice. She liked that.

She kicked the hair around. She worked on the spaceship again. It was circular, a ring of old rocks tied together by metal and glass and wire, with a central structure that shifted as she tried to imagine it. There were cables and dishes and sensors, airlocks and vacant screens. She saw last night’s shot glasses again, the skeleton on the glass, and pushed the thought away.

Keep thinking about the spaceship, try to learn something new about it.

Hold the spaceship in your mind.

Her mind’s eye shot through the rocks, caught a glimpse of a dark blue spacesuit. It was bulky and angular, heavy duty. The suit was abandoned. Beside it was a vague human shape, blurry, not fully realised. A flash of lime and red took over from the image, a fractal, undulating picture formed from Stephanie’s grandfather’s pocket square. The one he never wore. Stephanie’s attention fell back into her own world. But she didn’t want to be back yet. She tried to push the image away.

She refocused on the plughole. She thought about the hair, imagining it was an invisible string that refused to be eaten by the black hole. The spaceship travelled along the string, into the mouth of the black hole, and out of the mouth of another without issue. It never really entered the hole. But it entered a spacetime anomaly generated by it. The black hole was the engine, the pathway was the string. The string intersected with another string, with the black hole, with the waves and ripples of spacetime. At the intersection of two strings, it was possible for space to be folded so tightly as to snap. Stephanie blew water out of her nose as she stared down, fixated by the crystallising idea. The string was a denser form of spacetime. From the spaceship’s perspective it looked like a tube, a four-dimensional crack in reality, but it wasn’t. It was both. It was the root of an impossible tree, bigger than the universe itself, bigger than time. All within Stephanie’s head. It would make a decent story, if only she could remember it.

And then it was gone.

Stephanie felt a blackness at the back of her eyes, a sleepy, nauseating ache. Her hangover was mingling with the pressure of the water on her head, trying to push her back under. She stretched her hands and stood up straight. The spaceship daydream vanished, the black hole turning back into a plughole, the cosmic string turning back into hair, the spiralling gravitational waves turning back into wastewater. The neon colours left the tops of the ripples, the normal white of the shower floor replaced the emptiness of space. She was back.

Stephanie finished washing her hair, turned the shower head onto a gentler mode, finished brushing her teeth, and sang a lonely Bowie song to herself. Afterwards she wrapped up in several towels, making eye contact with herself in the bathroom mirror, remembering the skeletonising lights of the bar and the little skeletons on the glasses. The face looking back at her felt unfamiliar.

“Hello Stephanie,” she said in a voice not her own. It freaked her out for just a second, before she realised she had been singing and yelling all night. Her new voice was cracked and hoarse. Her normal voice was on its way back, slowly. She put one hand tentatively against the glass and made a print in the condensation. Something about the combination of sense experiences: the toothpaste smell, morning breeze rattling something outside, left foot half on linoleum and half on bathmat, the smell of sweat and hair conditioner, the brightness of the morning sun refracting through frosted glass. All of it combined felt wrong. It was as if this combination wasn’t an arbitrary colliding of average things, but a secret code written into the universe. She began to unpick it. She stepped back, turning her attention to the sink. She ran the tap and the black hole appeared again, then the buttressed dome of an observation deck superimposed over the plughole cover. She reached for green mouthwash and briefly lost her concentration. She went back to the mirror. Someone else was still staring blankly back, a human body half empty. Her body. Older. She passed it off as a hangover and shook her head aggressively, reminding herself about the headbanging through the medium of cracking and strained muscles.

“I won’t get that old,” she said to herself. Her usual voice was rebuilding itself.

“Hello. Hello spacegirl. You’re sleepy now.” Nothing like a Bowie reference to resurrect yourself.

After a minute or two of peaceful lingering she went back into her bedroom, cleaning herself up. But something drew her back to the bathroom mirror.

“I’m Jareth,” she said to herself. She thought about how it had taken her over a dozen watches of Jim Henson’s The Labyrinth to notice that David Bowie played the enigmatic baddie. She had no idea when she was little that the man on her favourite CD was also the Goblin King. The revelation when she was thirteen or fourteen had stirred something primordial inside Stephanie’s head that even now kept its momentum. You can be more than one person at once. It wasn’t always useful information – it is easier to get along with people if you come across one-sided, rather than trying to be multiple things at once – but it was enlightening. Through Bowie, Stephanie knew she didn’t have to settle on anything. She could just be herself. She could be multitudes.

But who was Stephanie? She turned away from her reflection. Briefly she felt as if it was watching the back of her head, as if her soul had disconnected from her eyes and fell backwards. She hurried downstairs, walking into the kitchen and picking up a large green apple and holding it for a moment before putting it back down. It seemed too green. The ceiling of the kitchen seemed lower than usual. The windows were the wrong width. Everything was subtly altered. It reminded her of the junk bedroom scene in The Labyrinth, but weirder. This wasn’t a fake house. It was real, but someone had adjusted the parameters. The universe had forgotten the minor details, but Stephanie hadn’t.

“You can have it,” her grandfather said. Stephanie picked the apple up again and looked at it, imagining it was a small planet. Again, the image of the skeleton on the glass resurfaced, then the pattern of the red and lime paisley pocket square she had gotten for her granddad so long ago.

“Thanks Granddad. I’ll see you later maybe, or if college ends late, on the weekend.”

Stephanie hugged her grandfather, put her coat on, and stepped outside.

Author's notes (minor spoilers ahead)

This marks 16410 words of the novel. The creeping realisation that not all is what it seems has settled in, Stephanie knows things aren’t quite right, and LP is about to be caught by the Virtualists.

I had thought about getting this beast traditionally published, but for reasons I won’t bore you with, I think I’d rather go selfpub again. The main thing tradpub has which I don’t is marketing. I have found an editor, so now all I need to do is hire a marketer, which I plan on doing before the end of April. It’s all working in Stephanie’s favour.

There have been two main drafts to this novel. The first one had a lengthy first chapter before Stephanie finds proof she lives in a simulation. The second one started with LP contacting Stephanie directly (that’s your minor spoiler) and included these bits from Stephanie’s life as flashbacks, while she’s going on her adventures through time and space.

Ultimately, the first one was boring and the second one felt contrived. This third, final one is not a compromise between the two but a new beast. Some of Stephanie’s life is hinted at here, and expanded upon in those long quiet nights on board generational starships later on in the book (another spoiler).

My hope is that while Stephanie’s life is building to its conclusion, LP’s is also holding your attention. Their universes are not far apart now, and a cataclysm is on the way. When they meet, it’s going to get weird.

Really weird. It will make the plot twists in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? feel calm by comparison.

Hope you enjoyed it, thanks for being here. - Phill

Recommended listening (for this scene, a bit of Pulp fits perfectly).

New subscriber? Thanks for being here. You can teleport to part 1 of The Stephanie Glitch by clicking on the ammonite.

If you can’t see the ammonite on your device, click here.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH - part 5

Stephanie stirred in her sleep. She was not herself. She was younger and smaller, helpless, held dangerously close to a rectangular hole in the universe. The hole was balanced on a string. It was a spinning hole. A cube. A sphere. It changed whenever it was observed. It wanted to be unknown.

Everything around her was bright, too bright, but the hole was blacker than black. It went on forever and she knew it well. It returned to its true shape and intention under the pressure of her consciousness. It was her uncle’s coffin.

Her mother held Stephanie’s tiny body above the void. She heard her father’s voice mumble something, but it was too late. She was falling. She felt her little legs and arms flailing, but it was useless. She slipped into the void beyond the coffin and into a black abyss that ate all light and sound and smell. She looked up as she was falling, seeing a rectangle of light shrinking above, her vanishing doorway to safety. Suddenly it was over, but she was back in the church again, this time watching things from above the rafters. She could see the back of her own head. The void-drop had not happened yet. The story was repeating, the record skipping. The Stephanie ahead of her was a child.

“She’ll be fine,” Stephanie’s mother said, lifting her little body from the pews. Above them a brutal laser show of kaleidoscope light blasted through stained glass, turning the oppressive dust of the place into a nebula of overwhelming colours.

“She doesn’t need to go,” Stephanie’s father interrupted, but it was too late. Little Stephanie was already being marched toward an open coffin. The older, floating Stephanie clenched her right hand, remembering the fragment of stone pillar she had once gripped for comfort all those years ago. She remembered wishing to be with the other children again, who moments before were too noisy and talkative and frightening.

“Meredith. I don’t see the point,” Stephanie’s father said, his dress shoes clack-clacking on the stony floor. Stephanie’s presence remembered a blue wave of scratching light.

“She deserves to see him. It’s her right. She has a right to see him,” Stephanie’s mother announced. She approached the coffin, holding little Stephanie aloft and terrified. Uncle Andrew was in there, displayed like one of the big dolls in the toy shop. Before Stephanie could get a good look, he faded away, and a black hole opened up in the rippled white silk at the back of the coffin. A whirling white-silver fabric slipped away into a colourless void below. Little Stephanie called out into it and watched as a candle slipped and fell inward, drifting and shrinking as it fell through the endless black.

Her mother dropped her in. Older Stephanie, bound to her younger self by an invisible chain, was dragged down too. She fell through the rafters like a ghost, trailed behind her younger self, watching in third person as her younger body vanished into the void that would always be hungry, that would always want her to fall in. The void that had followed her forever.

“Agh! Agh!” Stephanie yelled out loud, her voice escaping her nightmare and bouncing around her room. Back in the nightmare, her parent’s confused faces were a shrinking blot of colour against a velvet black universe. There were no stars in the void inside the coffin. No movements. No pockets of warmth or breeze or any of the usual things human bodies would process subconsciously. The utter absence of these sensations was blinding. Little Stephanie panicked as she tumbled further, as she lost all awareness of up and down, left and right. She kept falling until falling no longer felt like falling, until falling was something meaningless and obscure and distant. Her mind, devoid of stimulus, started making things up. She saw biting teeth and staring eyes flying past as she fell endlessly. Fragments of buildings and rocket ships and coffins rushed past. Stars appeared and exploded. Galaxies spun into each other, and vast tendrils of light grew like cracks across the whole black canvas, reminding Stephanie of flaking paint on ancient pictures. There were things writhing under the paint. Stephanie turned as she fell, slipping into one of these cracks and yelling something incomprehensible. She fell through images of metal corridors and nebulae, each collapsing into the next, each spiralling and splitting like cuboid cells into blues and chromes and pinks. Everything smelled cold and metallic, her skin was itching.

Finally, she fell into nothing. The void became Stephanie. The nightmare would go on forever.

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Until her foot hit something solid. Pain rung out through her veins and time changed. She was back in the rafters above her younger self. This time there was hope, but she slipped and fell through the nebulae of coloured dust, spiralling through the beams of stained-glass light towards the coffin. Her sprawling teenage arms allowed her to reach the sides this time, to hold on for her life against the suction of the void below the coffin. But it was not enough. Stephanie tore the silk lining down with her, scrambling for a grip on something attached to the outside world. She banged the back of her head on the edge of the coffin as it ate her, as she was pulled further and further down towards death.

“Fuck!” she yelled. A cold sweat bathed her body in a primal, frigid haze.

“Fuck!” she thrashed about in bed. She wouldn’t die this easily.

“Fuck,” she murmured hopelessly. Her eyes were open. The black void was leaving, the nightmare bleeding away, spiralling like a whirlpool. Stephanie woke up, shaking off the sounds and smells of the dream. It was over. She mumbled and stirred and swore once again for good measure, sitting up groggily. She could smell eggs and toast. Mum never made eggs and dad always burned them. This was granddad’s house. Peace.

She could still taste last night’s alcohol on her tongue. Her lips were dry and cracked, her eyelids weighed down by the centuries of music she had danced through in her big boots. She felt a rising pain in her leg. Her foot was dangling over the side of the bed. She had kicked the bedside cabinet hard in her sleep, knocking it into a weird angle. Her heart was racing, her face cold and itchy, her body covered in cold sweat. She turned. The pillow smelled of kebab and wet hair. A bit of garlic mayonnaise waited for her on the other side as she turned again. An image of a dead man flashed before her eyes. Then reality crept back in. She had never been dropped in the coffin; she had turned away from seeing her uncle at the last second. She had never seen him at all. But she had cried, and her overactive imagination had plugged in whatever horror images it could conjure to fill the gap. She kept crying, and her grandfather had rescued her from the funeral, taking her to the beach to skip stones and explore on that horrid day so many years ago. He turned it into an adventure. He made it safe.

Truly, Stephanie had no idea why the memory stressed her so much. Perhaps it was simply because this was her first encounter with death. But that didn’t feel like a good enough explanation. The void beneath the coffin felt real, like a nightmare given shape in the waking world. Nobody else saw it, but Stephanie had repeated the nightmare so many times now that the void felt like a memory.

She twisted her way out of bed and thought about the night before. She smiled at the thought of Emma’s pita hat and the 80s playlist that had taken over the dance floor. She remembered the skeleton on the glass. She reached for her notebook and drew it hastily, before writing something down.

Skeleton in tube

brain in jar?

Floating here, aimless

With old momentum

She smiled. She added a little retro rocket ship with an alien in the circular window. She had swerved staying at her mother’s or father’s again by highlighting her grandfather’s proximity to the best bus route. She had spun comfort into efficiency. It was an old and tired excuse. The best kind of excuse. It was woven into the tapestry of her language now, and had become true through simple repetition, aided perhaps by the fact that it was actually true to begin with, some years ago. The part which was a lie was that Stephanie secretly enjoyed the longer bus journeys more than the convenience of staying with her mum. But she couldn’t give this excuse to just her mum, so she had to sacrifice some time with her dad to avoid hurting her mother’s feelings. As she thought about it in detail like the riddle it was, she realised she might be inadvertently hurting her father’s feelings too, but then remembered his knowing glances and nods whenever the excuse was used. Whether spoken or not, he was in on it. She sleepily checked her phone to check in on him, and to make sure Emma was still alive.

DAD:

D: “Hungover?”

S: “No. Didn’t stay out long.”

This was a lie. Stephanie pushed a greasy patch of garlic sauce off the screen.

D: “Can pick U up after college, say hi to Granddad for me”

S: “Okay, will let you know.”

EMMA:

E: “Kebab tonight? Jk. I think I might be dead”

S: “Still got some left.”

E: “Gross”

Stephanie smiled. Her dad didn’t seem to mind, and Emma wasn’t dead. No texts from mum though. She was probably at one of countless social groups, in which numerous old ladies would throw insults -and sometimes little pots of jam- at each other. Stephanie leaned forward and found some socks on the floor, sleepily putting them on and looking at the half-closed blinds. She began to forget the nightmare. She checked her phone again for no real reason, brushed her teeth in the little bathroom, and stared at herself in the mirror.

The person staring back was unfamiliar. Stephanie couldn’t quite pin it down, but something in her own face felt alien. She yawned and closed her eyes. An image of a night sky flashed through her consciousness, along with a feeling of intense coldness and isolation. She felt alone all of a sudden, lonely, but that wasn’t it. She didn’t feel alone, but as if she was being watched by something too distant to communicate with. This paranoia drove her prematurely downstairs, where she could barely disguise that she was still a bit drunk from the night before.

“Morning Granddad,” she said. Briefly she caught a flash of her mother’s face, along with a sharp pang of guilt for not visiting for a while. Then she realised she wouldn’t be allowed to wear the clothes she had on at her mother’s anyway. They were too dark, or too moody, or aggressive, or ‘satanistic’ or some other term her mother had picked up in church.

“No beans today, it’s early, I know what you’re like,” Granddad said. Stephanie hummed in agreement, then checked her phone again.

“Not good with the morning beans,” she confirmed. The thought of writing this down as a potential band name for Jay crossed her mind, but she let it go.

“Are you staying long?” granddad asked.

“Not really, sorry, I don’t have much time,” she said.

“You in at nine?”

“Ten.”

“That’s not too bad, but I would have woken you up if I knew.”

“No, it’s okay, I forgot to set an alarm,” Stephanie said. She sat at the little table in the kitchen. She had her food and talked briefly of exams and student loans and how the last few weeks had flown by so fast she wasn’t even sure if they happened, and how Emma had reconsidered uni then reconsidered her reconsideration. Granddad nodded through the blurred mess of it all, and even if he couldn’t quite keep up with her ridiculous pace, Stephanie was just happy to have someone who tried, and who pretended to not notice she was still sobering up.

“I can do my own breakfast next time, it’s okay,” she said.

“Dislike the eggs?”

“No, it’s not that. I just feel bad.”

“I have paracetamol.”

“I mean guilt. I feel guilty.”

“Oh, well you shouldn’t Stephanie. I was making eggs anyway. You need your rest after all that studying,” Granddad said. Stephanie briefly thought she had gotten away with stumbling in at three in the morning, but Granddad winked at her.

“Were you with Emma?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Is that her boot at the bottom of the stairs? I couldn’t find the other one. I checked the front garden.”

“Oh no, sorry Granddad. It’s mine. Thanks.”

End (for now)

And here’s the simulation theory video. Anton Petrov is one of my top 5 science communicators. He’s brilliant

Simulation theory video

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A slightly bigger post today, at 2784 words. That’s because this is all one sub-chapter, one big scene. It felt wrong splitting it in half.

I’ve changed the font on my Substack slightly. Should be easier to read in the mobile app and through email. Let me know if it’s any better.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

PART 4

Recommended listening

The Artifice fell like a blood drop through a vortex of rock and dust. Behind it countless interstellar objects clattered and converged upon the space it left behind, spinning into a makeshift shell that the Virtualist cruisers could barely penetrate.

“We knocked two down,” Toumai said emotionlessly.

“Be more excited,” LP said. “That’s two less for me to deal with when this plan stops working.” She looked to the diagnostic screen. Upon it was a digital reconstruction of events behind the ship, objects mapped and rendered in real time. She pulled the ghostly image loose from the screen, clicking it into her own holograph display, and watched as the Virtualist spikeships slipped between larger rocks but bumped into smaller, faster fragments.

Behind the lumbering form of the Artifice, the jagged shapes of other Virtualist spikeships zipped between and around the rocks, following the invisible path carved by the gravity bursts. LP knew it was only a matter of time before one of them got through, and then a matter of hours or days before they caught up to the ship.

“Talk to me,” LP said, “What’s the backstory?”

“Surely we should be discussing strategy,” Toumai said.

“We are. Tell me about yourself, about the ship.” LP glanced at the image and saw another Virtualist cruiser battered by a storm of cosmic debris.

“I am a starship intelligence, and you are a human from a higher reality. We do not have much in common,” Toumai said coldly. LP leaned on the edge of a console. She laughed.

“Where I’m from the computers aren’t very funny. I like you. That was funny.”

“It was not meant to be,” Toumai said.

“I know, and to be honest, that helped it,” LP said. She stretched and cracked her joints, the noise filling up her spacesuit. It was as if she hadn’t moved in centuries, as if she had only recently been thawed from deep sleep. She twisted and cracked again and said, “New body, a bit stiff.”

Toumai’s social programming saw an opportunity for humour, an old joke from crewmate Elspeth, repackaged and delivered to a new audience.

“I know the feeling,” he replied, “This particular shell needs oil.” He whirred and moved his eyestalk, flexing a joint that creaked as it moved, echoing the movements of the crew member some months earlier. LP smirked and exhaled through her nose.

“See. Robots here are funny. I’ll miss that when reality collapses.”

“Elaborate,” Toumai said darkly.

“See, now you want backstory. Okay then. Reality is ending. We have that in common. That and her,” LP said. She pointed to an empty space in the room, pretending to be pointing at Stephanie.

“She is not invisible,” Toumai said. “She is over there.” his bulbous head turned to the glass tank.

“I know that. But she’s not there, is she? Not unless she’s already linking to her new body, which I doubt. Also, it feels wrong to point at her skeleton. It’s morbid. I know you could speed up the process by the way. Those printer bugs are basically idle. You should do that. Hurry up.”

“She is not ready,” Toumai said assertively.

“Well neither was I and I turned out fine, only died four times, or was it five?”

Toumai ignored this, choosing instead to focus on the issue at hand. He stored this information, if it was information and not fiction, and kept it for later.

“From the messages we have gathered, Stephanie’s psychological profile indicates such a traumatic change in circumstance may lead to psychosis.”

LP shook her head at this, toying with the gloves of her spacesuit. She moved to put them back on, then shook her head and mumbled something inaudible to herself.

“I didn’t have time to wait and I’m pretty well-adjusted. No underlying health problems, definitely no lingering psychological issues.”

“You are right. We should know more about each other,” Toumai admitted. LP sighed in relief and slumped to the floor. Her spacesuit clanked.

“I never thought you’d ask,” she said. She reached up to the loose hologram of the debris field behind the Artifice and pushed it back toward its projector, watching it fade and bleed away before reconnecting with its host.

“My name is Long Play, like the records,” she said. Toumai’s eyestalk whirred over to her, extending to reach down and face her. All the while LP knew that he would be keeping track of the spikeships following them, his machine mind never truly in one place or moment. In that way Long Play felt remarkably similar to him. Underneath all the skin and metal and beliefs and programs, there was something more honest. She could almost imagine that Toumai was motivated not by his programming, but by an insatiable curiosity as inevitable and emergent as life itself. Every unknown was a new adventure, his imperitive was discovery. It was beyond human and beyond machine, something other, something that guided them both. Toumai didn’t know it, not yet, but he was alive too.

“Why?” Toumai asked, shaking LP from her thoughts.

“What do you mean why?”

“Why are you called Long Play?”

“Because that’s the name I liked. That’s reason enough.”

“Was it your birth name?”

“That’s not relevant. It’s my name now.”

“Understood,” Toumai said, returning to idle silence. He filed the next five questions away in his head, saving these for later too. LP noticed in Toumai’s huge eye a hint of purple underneath the black lens, perhaps circuitry reflecting back at her. They sat for a while and talked of LP’s journey, the functions of her space suit, and how it felt to teleport from place to place. Toumai was particularly interested in physical sensations, in the human body’s reactions to teleportation. Eventually, the conversation turned back to Toumai.

LP asked, “What was it like, the atmosphere, the feeling, when the researchers found out about Stephanie’s universe?”

“It was electric, as humans would describe. They were noticeably more animated for several weeks. But they were also anxious about the implications.”

“And how did the Virtualists find out?”

“I imagine they intercepted our communications with our laboratories back on Earth,” Toumai explained. As he was talking, he was monitoring the feed of the Virtualist cruisers in the asteroid field behind them. LP could practically hear his thoughts whizzing through the hull of the ship, his voice whispering through the air.

“And now they know the answer,” LP said, “And they don’t like it.”

“Indeed.”

“And do they know about Stephanie?”

“If they have intercepted our communication with Earth, yes.”

“They will have,” LP’s voice grew dark and cold. “That’s settled then, they’re following us to kill her. We’re at war.”

“How do you know?” Toumai asked. He followed LP around the room.

“Once they get hold of her, use her talents to see their way out of this universe, do you think they’ll keep her around?”

Toumai shook his head in two broad sweeps. At any other time, the cartoonish gesture would have been humorous.

“Precisely,” LP continued. “So, you must have had a plan before I arrived. What was it? What were you going to do when the Virtualists turned up?” She got off the floor, using Toumai’s eyestalk to pull herself up. She patted him on the head before moving sluggishly to a chair and sitting down, sighing as she reclined. Toumai moved around on his rails, gliding effortlessly toward the middle of the room and looking down at LP. Briefly he turned to the skeleton in the tube, looked it over, and turned his attention again to LP.

“Very few scientific projects are equipped for interstellar battles,” Toumai said. LP remembered his three little arms, that were now tucked away in the space below his eye.

“Fair point. But you do have your ‘combat ready avatar’ outside, don’t you?”

“It is less threatening than I had you believe,” Toumai admitted.

“I see.”

The machine slid away, releasing his little arms, giving the impression of a professor pacing a lecture hall. LP could almost see him stroking a scraggly beard or twirling a moustache.

“The experiment was to be conducted in deep space. The creators knew the impact of their work and wrote a cover story. Officially, the Artifice is testing new propulsion technologies.”

“And that lie worked?” LP asked. She unclipped the heavy boots from her spacesuit’s legs and sighed in relief, stretching.

“It was the truth,” Toumai said simply. “It is why we are near a black hole.”

“I see, so try out a new propulsion system, create universes as a hobby,” LP said.

“Discover,” Toumai clarified. LP shook her head and smiled.

“It gets a bit fuzzy, doesn’t it? A bit complicated.”

She paused, curling her toes against the stone-cold floor. The coldness made the interior of this spaceship feel more real, more physical. Bit by bit, data packet by data packet, Long Play was getting used to this reality. But something wasn’t right. Something was still off. Was the gravity too high? The air too dense? The light too green? No, something different, more subtle.

“Wait a second. A new propulsion system?”

“Yes,” Toumai replied.

“What is it?”

“A spacetime bubble.”

“A warp bubble?”

“That is one name for it.”

“And you didn’t think to use this earlier, you know, to fly us away from the Virtualists?”

“Operating the spacetime bubble requires locking onto pre-existing pathways.”

LP scrunched up her face for a moment and asked, “Pathways?”

“Scars in spacetime,” Toumai said. His tone was too conversational, not at all helpful. LP briefly wondered if the robot was being vague on purpose, then it clicked. Her eyes widened.

“Intersects.” She scratched the side of her head and waited patiently for confirmation. When none came, she was disappointed.

“I am surprised you didn’t discover this yourself when you scanned me,” Toumai said. LP’s disappointment turned into impatience.

“I didn’t put much focus on the ins and outs of the ship. I focused on Stephanie, not the Artifice as a whole, but where she located. Her universe. And where she was connected to. This room.”

“She isn’t located in this room.”

“Oh, so now you’re all spiritual? A part of her seems to be. The part that sees you.” LP unlocked the chest of her spacesuit now. It took her another half a minute to fully remove the torso and set it down. Her undersuit was light grey, supported by a matrix of silverish lines and meshes. She twisted and cracked her spine once more, loudly and completely.

“New spine, not sure why it needed cracking. Anyway. This black hole,” she began, feigning ignorance, “How does it make your warp bubble work?”

“The black hole itself does not do anything directly. The pathways congregate near black holes and contain small regions of negative energy. The captain, Elspeth, likens them to the strands of a spider’s web being pulled closer by a weight placed upon them. The prevailing theory is that the high gravity of black holes condenses the pathways enough that they are pulled into local spacetime, becoming physical objects near the black holes.”

“They’re invisible until you get up close,” LP added.

“That is correct.” Toumai tilted his head curiously. He sensed that LP knew more than she was letting on, that she was feigning her ignorance. “Do you have these in your universe?”

LP smiled. “I did. These ‘pathways’ Toumai. Where I am from, they are called Intersects.” She moved to unclip the upper legs of her spacesuit and shook her head, deciding against it. She liked the weight, the feeling of being anchored to the ship, of being solid. Even after all these hours this new body felt alien, nebulous. She was surprised she could concentrate at all. The wrists were too dainty, the fingers too long, and the knees too small.

“How could this be wrong,” she said, poking at herself.

“What are you doing?” Toumai asked.

“System check. Anyway. Our prevailing theory was that the intersects were remnants from the early universe. They formed in the same way cracks form in rapidly cooling lava. Indeed, there were some theories of a pattern to them, but by the time I left nobody had proven it. The story goes that the universe, spacetime, once behaved like a liquid, and it cooled so quickly that it cracked. Same reason black holes and whirlpools work similarly. We had just begun discovering the intersects when I,” she paused, considering what to say next. “When I started my journey. Some people thought they were relics from an alien civilisation, but I never saw a reason to think that when a simpler explanation worked just fine.”

“And what is the simpler explanation?” Toumai asked.

“That they were cracks in spacetime, like I said. We’d only just begun discovering them.”

Toumai considered the words carefully, committed them to memory, sent them through the dreamscreen network to the sleeping Artifice crew, then began again. He straightened out his body and began moving around the room again, as if he was pacing on the ceiling.

“The Artifice has flown some distance since emerging from the last pathway. Even if it could get back, we would only succeed in moving the fight to another location.”

“So, what we need is another intersect nearby that the Virtualists haven’t mapped. Have you scanned the area?”

“Research has been focused elsewhere.”

“On Stephanie?”

“Correct. Finding more pathways was not a priority until you informed me of the Virtualists following us.”

“How long will it take?”

“Depending on the scale of the scan-sphere. A few days or weeks.”

“To send out probes and look for intersects?!”

“Yes.”

“Fine. I’ll do the first scan for you, point you in the right direction,” LP said. Toumai whirred around to her and tilted his bulbous head.

“How?”

“Stephanie isn’t the only weirdo on board. That said, she’d do a better job here than I ever would. Her farsight is better than mine, but she can’t manifest a damn thing, whilst I can.” LP looked around the room, closed her eyes, then looked around again. She breathed in deeply.

“Smells like hospital in here by the way.”

“Manifest?” Toumai asked. Long Play swung one leg up onto the table holding her helmet and gloves and started stretching.

“I’ll show you in a minute. Changed my mind about the trousers.” She looked over at the glass cylinder containing Stephanie’s future skeleton and muttered something to herself. She unclipped something on her leg, brought her leg back down and raised the other, stretching and unclipping again. After a few more seconds she was finally free from the rest of her spacesuit. She stood up and began moving idly around the room, pushing the chair away and frowning. Her undersuit was one continuous piece of clothing, covering her body in a warming, self-regulating mesh that would communicate her biosigns to the suit. Even now she could read her own heartbeat on the wrist-mounted projector or screen. She looked around the room again, considering something vital.

“I miss my comfy chair,” she said, focusing on the skeleton in the cylinder. “Do you have any comfier chairs?”

“Why?” Toumai asked.

“Easier to navigate in. Get to think about intersects rather than how uncomfortable I am.”

“Is this a necessity?”

“Oh absolutely. Can’t do the weird thing without it.”

“The crew quarters have nicer chairs,” Toumai gave in. LP got closer to the cylinder.

“Then we shall go there. Toumai, do you think she can see us now?”

“She has no eyes,” Toumai replied. LP held her laughter behind a smirk.

“She does have eyes. Somewhere. And she saw you, didn’t she?”

“She sent a signal whilst she was sleeping. Images of this ship, as seen from the inside.”

“Remote viewing.”

“That is correct.”

“I mean, really remote. Across the dark and murky boundary between universes… Through time and space and what lies between. Where the creatures wait. And that’s how you found her,” LP said.

“Creatures?” Toumai asked.

“A joke.”

“I see.”

“She sent packets of data from her world to this one. Why?”

“I don’t know,” Toumai admitted. LP shook her head.

“No, I was asking myself. Asking her really. She sent her experiences, her feelings. She sent impressions of herself and her environment. Images, data, and you traced the origin point to this unassuming patch of spacetime.”

“That is correct.”

Long Play walked back to Stephanie’s cylinder, reaching out and touching it again. It was cold, but through the palm of her hands she could feel an ambient hum. Life was on the way, expectant and burgeoning, bubbling up from the lifeless. She could feel it. Stephanie was almost here, partially here. Long Play smiled up at the floating skeleton, which was by now swarmed by tiny clouds of printer bugs on their way to build musculature. Without looking back to Toumai she finished the conversation.

“So technically, Stephanie found you.”

END (for now)

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Author’s notes:

I might be breaking some unwritten writer’s rule by telling you this chapter ending gives me goosebumps, but it does. Every single time I read it I am spooked. Stephanie has gone from nervous teenager to ominous alien intelligence in a few thousand words.

And I can guarantee, dear reader, that her life is only going to get weirder.

How to support THE WEIRD WORLDS OF PHILLIP CARTER:

The weird worlds of Phillip Carter is a reader-supported publication. This writing thing is my day job, so any donations or book sales help enormously. The last time I asked I got £6, which paid for most of a £6.90 train ticket, which I then used to get to an open mic and practice my sci-fi comedy set.

If you do check out my Ko-Fi, you can donate as little as £3. You can also buy a signed copy of WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? while stocks last, or commission a custom drawing of David Bowie as a lawnmower, or a Dalek doing something obscene (provided it ends in ‘ate’). Be weird. And yes, the obvious one is already taken, but I will happily draw it again.

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Boring stuff:

Regarding going paid, I’ve been refining things. Substack paid tiers are nice, but they aren’t as flexible as Patreon. I’ve chatted with a handful of you over the last few weeks about how to improve this publication, and I think sending stickers to your house every now and again is a lot of fun. It won’t end at stickers either, since 2019 my first handful of readers have been asking for TSG themed enamel pin badges.

With Patreon I can efficiently include print-on-demand goodies for specific tiers, as well as Discord community badges, the keys to exclusive online spaces, and other cool things. I have lots of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH and other sci-fi designs for stickers and bookmarks which I want to use, so I’m working on it. I want to be able to say thanks to my supporters with something beyond exclusive stories, something you can stick to the back of your wife’s head (ask her first).

Should be able to get a little book on there too, in the future.

Stay weird

— Phill

As usual, I am leaving my section titles in because they are sometimes amusing, and so it is easier for you to navigate.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

PART 3

“This isn’t dancing. Dancing is social.”

“It is dancing,” Emma said. Stephanie adjusted the back over her shoulder as Emma took her hands and joined in with the dance.

“Stand awkwardly beside the dancing people?” Emma smiled convincingly, raising her eyebrows. She continued raising and lowering her eyebrows a few more times, as if the decision to stand near dancing people was the best decision that had ever been made. Stephanie tried not to laugh.

“You could always take a year out, come to my uni for a week, see how you feel,” Stephanie raised her voice over the music.

“Sleep on your floor, sample the nightlife?” Emma asked.

“Yeah!” Stephanie shouted.

As they pushed through the crowd with no particular destination in mind, glancing back at their abandoned table as it was claimed by a trio of younger girls, Stephanie caught sight of another skeleton glass filled with light greenish liquid, perhaps a cocktail. The skeleton on this one was a silver-grey, and for a moment Stephanie remembered an idea about a skeleton floating in a glass tube somewhere. The image lingered in her mind as they approached the dance floor, giving her an idea for a story.

“You good?” Emma said. Stephanie re-entered reality. She looked up at the Bowieesque light show of red and blue lights, breathed in a puff of fake smoke, and prepared to embarrass herself by either dancing or not dancing.

“Hungry.”

“As soon as I ask you to dance you want to leave?”

“I want to eat,” Stephanie said.

“Right now?” Emma began dancing, weaving through the crowd backwards with a lazy rhythm that did not match the music at all. They weren’t at the dance floor yet.

“You’re dancing. This is dancing.” Stephanie feigned disappointment.

“No I’m not.”

“You definitely are. Your feet are moving.”

“I am walking rhythmically,” Emma protested.

“That’s dancing.”

Emma winked, saying “No, it isn’t.”

The pair danced to the rest of the song, jumping up and down out of tune with everyone else, but everyone else was too drunk to notice.

“Proper want chips now you mention it,” Emma screamed over the music.

“Maybe after this song,” Stephanie barked back, “Celebratory kebab.”

“Is that another of Jay’s band names?” Emma yelled through the crowd.

“No, just a suggestion.”

“It’s a good suggestion,” Emma said. She reached out for Stephanie’s hand again as the crowd split them apart. The pair crossed the threshold between regular floor and disco floor. The disco floor stood slightly higher than the rest of the bar, and from here Stephanie could see all the way from the toilets to the entrance. Both places were presently occupied by bickering couples, and as the enormity of the place began to be processed in her brain, Stephanie felt a deep stabbing anxiety for her friend. She reached out and got Emma by the shoulder, bringing her onto the disco floor.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

The anxiety faded as suddenly as it had arrived. From here Stephanie could see that the mass of people was really a clustering of much smaller groups, each preoccupied with their own conversations and awkwardness. Strangely, on this lit-up floor, Stephanie felt pleasantly invisible.

After a while the pair finally managed to get in tune with the music. The colours shooting through Stephanie’s perception mingled with the real colours shooting from the projectors, and everything was beautiful and chaotic and meditative again. Another brilliant darkwave song came on a few minutes later, bringing with it a trio of impossibly tall goths. One of them noticed that Stephanie and her brightly adorned friend both knew the words.

After brief, incoherent introductions had been yelled over the song, the truly awkward dancing began. Emma was spinning and moving her arms about in slow motion to some chorus about being buried alive, Stephanie was swaying from side to side just appreciating the music, and the three tall goths whose names would be forgotten by the end of the night were jumping up and down beside them. One of them was the happiest goth Stephanie had ever seen. In fact, he was so happy that he made Emma look bored by comparison.

“Shall I leave? Am I embarrassing you?” Emma teased. She started headbanging out of tune, throwing her lion’s mane of ginger hair back and forth. Stephanie didn’t respond. Instead, she turned to the tallest of the goths and tapped them on the shoulder.

“Hey. Can you pretend I just said something really funny?”

The man laughed loudly. Emma looked to him and back at Stephanie, yelling, “Hey, what did you tell him?”

“Oh, nothing,” Stephanie grinned.

“That’s not fair,” Emma replied. She reached out and grabbed Stephanie, pulling her further into the dancefloor and spinning her around.

“Tell me what you told him, or I’m going to make you do a silly little dance.”

“No,” Stephanie said. Emma grabbed Stephanie’s wrists and began moving her around like a puppet, speaking into her ear. She got her feet under Stephanie’s and began the awkward process of dancing for two people.

“Tell me.”

“I told him to pretend I said something funny.”

“Why?”

“So we can both feel awkward.”

“Oh, my dancing makes you feel awkward?” Emma released Stephanie, who quickly turned to face her again.

“If I say yes, will you get worse?”

Emma didn’t respond. Instead, she guided Stephanie into a circle of older women, who were having a dance-off, and inserted her into the group. After a minute or two of awkward drunken dance battles in the centre, Stephanie re-emerged with messier hair and murder in her eyes.

“I am going to kill you.”

“Kebab first,” Emma reminded her. She started weaving back and forth between more dancing groups, but Stephanie now had food on her mind. She grabbed Emma by one finger and dragged her away from the dance floor, even as she was still dancing and saying hello to people.

“I think I got invited to a wedding,” Stephanie said as they reached the front door.

“By the circle women?”

“Yeah.” They exited the bar. Stephanie winced as brutal hailstones pelted down from the black and orange sky, clattering against parked cars and bus stops. It felt as if the clouds were closer and angrier than usual, as if the outside world was demanding she go back inside. There was something ancient and threatening about the weather. It pressed a part of Stephanie’s consciousness back into a metaphorical cave, but the thought of hot food kept her going. She walked ahead of Emma, stepping carefully out into the street and walking with purpose and speed toward the roundabout that would lead them to the kebab shop.

“It’s freezing,” Emma said, as if Stephanie wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

“Kebab,” was the only response given. It was a fine argument.

LP and Toumai discuss Stephanie

There was a moment of tangible confusion. LP turned to face Toumai and stared into his blank eye. The machine selected his next words carefully.

“I do not understand.”

“I don’t expect you to. Look, your captain will wake up you know, now you’ve told him.”

“I believe he trusts my decision making.”

“No matter. I guess we don’t have long until I have to have a talk with the grown-ups.”

LP placed her naked hands on the cold glass, directly opposite the skeleton’s hands, and looked up into vacant eye sockets. She tried to get back into her thoughts.

“She is unfinished,” she said.

“I am aware.”

“She has such a beautiful skull, don’t you think?” said LP. She bumped her forehead lightly against the glass, pressing against it. She recalled her own experiences in coldbeds and stasis chambers, the feeling of waking up after decades, the smell of the coldbed gel and the prickling sensation as her nervous system rebooted itself after a false death.

“I said beautiful skull, don’t you think? It is freezing in here by the way. How long has everyone been asleep?”

Toumai ignored both questions.

“Why do you want to extract her, if you can simply defend this ship from the Virtualists?”

“I won’t be able to forever,” LP replied. She pulled her hands away from the glass. She twisted and stretched inside her dark blue spacesuit. Toumai replayed what she had said, checking it again. Dishonesty. Misdirection. It wasn’t an outright lie, but it did cover up the real answer to the question.

How to counter vague answers? Ask straightforward questions.

The machine nudged in close to LP, his welding arm releasing a single warning spark.

“Where are you from?”

“Upstairs. Another universe. I already told you.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I told the universe I was here, and it put me here.”

“Is her universe in danger?”

LP barely glanced back at him, still entranced by the teenage skeleton floating in the cylinder and the printer bugs that attended to its construction. The final layers were being added now, preparing for the attachment of musculature. Toumai was growing impatient. Another spark, this time close enough for LP to feel it against the tiny hairs on her skin.

“Is her universe in danger? Yes or no.”

LP considered the question, contemplated the benefits of giving a detailed or flippant answer, then returned her gaze to the empty skull of the girl in the tube. She thought of how far she had come to get here, how far she still had left to go, and if there was time left to prepare.

“All of them are.”

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Steph eats kebab (Hologram kebab)

Stephanie crossed the road with a strip of kebab meat hanging between her teeth. Emma carried the yellow Styrofoam box and a box of cheesy chips behind her like a loyal servant.

“Uni,” Stephanie mumbled. Emma grunted in agreement.

“Uni means free money to create chaos,” she said.

“Uni means more kebab shops,” Stephanie explained. She raised an inquisitive eyebrow, envisioning the foreign kebabs at the other end of the train tunnels. She stopped on the corner of the next road, turning back to see the kebab shop. The distant windows were steamy against the frigid cold outside, and the image of someone moving around inside the place, behind the steam and the heat, reminded Stephanie of the skeleton glass and of the short story she hadn’t yet written down. Whatever it was, it was still forming in her mind, crystallising like grass in winter.

The pair got to outer edge of a roundabout, which was illumed by a grim yellow light from within. From this distance, it looked as if some alien spaceship had given up upon landing here, choosing this place to die.

“We’re not going through the subway,” Emma said.

“I know,” Stephanie replied. She turned her attention back to their pilgrimage, to the roundabout. It had five unappealing exits, each with a precarious strip of pavement for pedestrians. The centre was occupied not by flowers or fountains or a small mound of dirt, but by a crater in the earth into which the subway had been carved. The subway was a sickly yellow corridor of cracked tiles and flickering fluorescent tubes, a cannula forced through the old skin of the earth, its bloodied exit wound opening up into the roundabout crater. From where they were stood, Stephanie could just about make out the grim aura of the thing over the brim of the roundabout. She led Emma to the left, following the busiest part of the road where a pub was still open, and a 24/7 garage was still selling pork pies to any drunk who could understand its sliding door, or later in the evening, its small theft-proof kiosk window. The subway, whilst hideous, was a landmark on days and nights out, something to dimly recognise from the top floor of a bus. But as far as Stephanie knew, nobody had ever actually used it to get from one side of the roads to the other. Instead, most people would take the long way round, orbiting it. The subway seemed to exist only to distinguish this roundabout from others nearby, or as somewhere for people to sell drugs.

“Almost back,” Stephanie said. They crossed another road, looking both ways carefully. Taxis were known to appear from nowhere here. The pair turned the next corner and could see the bar ahead.

“Not done,” Emma said, slowing down. She sat down on a low-lying wall to some café and continued eating her cheesy chips, passing Stephanie the kebab.

“It’s freezing,” Stephanie said after a long and cold minute.

“No chips in bar.”

“They’ll be fine with it.”

“Jay got told off for taking cookies that time.”

“You’re wearing a summer dress. You are going to die.”

“Chips give warm,” Emma replied. “Big warm inside tummy.”

“We’ve got to go back, I’m cold.” Stephanie said. She tried to pluck Emma from the wall, but her friend was bigger and willing to fight for her mossy chair. A late-night bus rumbled past, and Emma finished the last handful of chips. They continued walking. Emma took the kebab box off Stephanie and began eating what was left of it. By the time they were almost outside the bar, she only had the pita left.

“I don’t want to lose the pita,” Emma said.

“Don’t have to. Look,” Stephanie said. She took the pita bread from its Styrofoam prison and lifted it above Emma’s head. She set it down, putting an unreasonable amount of care into angling it properly.

“Hat,” she said. Emma smiled.

“Greasy hat.”

“Delicious hat.”

“Meat infused hat.”

“Meat juice spice hat.”

“If only Jay were here to collect these radical band names,” Emma said. “Do you think they’ll let me in?”

“Just tell them it’s a beret,” Stephanie said. They walked the rest of the distance to the bar and stood laughing outside for a moment. Stephanie got a blurry picture of Emma posing with her new hat. The pair back inside without issue. Emma picked bits off her ‘hat’ as they sidled up to the bar and offered scraps of it to her tall goth friends when they inevitably reunited and got chatting.

“Jagerbomb?” Stephanie said. Emma’s eyes lit up. She ate a bit of her hat and moved to the bar. As they waited, she explained a little more about her upcoming assignment.

“One of the things I’ve got to do,” Emma said, biting the hat, “Is paint something meaningful to me. But I can’t pick just one moment.”

Stephanie reached up and picked a loose slice of red onion from Emma’s hair and handed it to her, raising her voice over the music and saying, “This one’s pretty good. And the river that time.”

“We need a third moment,” Emma replied.

“We’ll make one someday.”

“Your fresher’s week?”

“If not earlier.”

Finally, as if ordained by fate itself, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance began playing. Stephanie grinned and began to pogo madly in place. Emma joined her, smiling broadly as a herd of goths and emos and other people from adjacent subcultures started copying them. Eventually the whole bar seemed to be copying Stephanie’s signature move.

“I didn’t know they’d play Bowie!” Stephanie said.

“They don’t,” Emma replied. “I got Nath to request it.”

“Who’s Nath?”

“Big mohawk boy.”

The rest of the night was a hyperactive blur of Jagerbombs and 80s tunes. At some point Stephanie stole the remaining quarter of pita hat and dropped it. Its sacrifice was mourned with more Jagerbombs and slow dancing to several songs by The Cure.

End (for now)

Thanks for reading. You can expect the next chapter to come through in two weeks.

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The bit after the end.

My last post ‘releasing stories backwards’ contained an explanation of the next four stories I’m making free, and why I picked them. It’s been moved over to the new Spoilers subletter. You’re not subscribed to it right now, and you don’t have to be. It’s included as a tab on the main page of this Substack, which you can dip into as and when it suits you.

What I want to know is how many people who are here for my stories, are also interested in posts like ‘releasing stories backwards’. Your input here will help me refine the shape of this Substack newsletter.

I’m enjoying the subletters feature on Substack. I was thinking today that I could make a ‘time travel’ subsection and fill it with time travel stories. I certainly have enough.

This means some of you will have read this part before. But don’t worry, we are almost at the point in the story which has not yet been published before. We should get there soon.

All through the club cheap disco lights were beaming greens and pinks and blues across the table, turning the air into a symphony of plinks and twinkles. Large speakers punted out some doomy darkwave song, and this intermingled sporadically with the light-sound inside Stephanie’s head. The whole spiky cluster of sensations was finally smoothed down by the scented smoke from the smoke machines, rolled into a glossy marble of sensation that throbbed inside her chest and her head. It all came together beautifully. It always did here, provided the music and the drinks flowed right. It was as if each sensation cancelled out the next, creating something akin to the eye of a storm. It was chaos. It was meditative.

She looked over to Emma, who was ordering yet another round of drinks. She stood out like a sparkling unicorn in a dystopian sci-fi, a rainbow-clad creature in a sea of black leather and spiky hair. If Stephanie’s mother could see them both like this, especially how Stephanie had dressed (black on black on even more black), she would lose her mind. Stephanie smiled at the thought.

She observed the strangers orbiting and chatting, bumping shoulders, and making friends. Even though her clothing wasn’t much different from everyone else’s, Stephanie was worried people would notice her, notice she was a fake. They might infer from some signal in her body language that she didn’t like every single song, that she didn’t even know half of them. The strangers milling around her table should have been her people, antigravity hair and gigantic boots, but even after an hour of idle chit chat and smiles with strangers, Stephanie still felt like an alien here.

“Vodka coke for the alien staring at that tall boy’s head,” Emma said. Stephanie returned to reality, realising now that she had spent the last minute lost in a purple mohawk across the bar.

“Yeah, sorry. How long have you been here?” Stephanie asked.

“On this planet? Nineteen years in June. At this table, watching you astral project? About three minutes.”

“Shit, really? Do you think he noticed?”

“I don’t think he’d notice if you told him to,” Emma quipped. She tilted her head to the boy. He was currently fascinated with an overhead blacklight, which had illuminated his friend’s nail polish and face paint, leaving only floating specks of neon green as she passed into the shadows and became invisible. It became clear that he was very drunk.

“Right,” Stephanie said.

“Were you daydreaming?” Emma asked.

“No, more like, remembering actual dreams.”

“How are they now? You still having those space nightmares?”

“They weren’t exactly nightmares,” Stephanie finished her last drink.

“You know what I mean,” Emma said, sitting down.

“No nightmares, but it’s weird. I keep dreaming of tunnels.”

Emma set the drinks down. “Like the subway?”

“No, like the one at the train station, but weirder than that. Like space wrapped up into a tube.”

“Outer space?”

“Yeah.”

“So, the space nightmares?”

“Different this time,” Stephanie said.

“How?”

“My brain falls out and flies through a tube of stars.”

“Where is it going?” Emma scrunched up her face. “Doubles are too strong.”

“I don’t know,” Stephanie said. Emma could tell the dream had unsettled her friend, so she changed the subject. At the same time, the darkwave song that had been playing faded out into a metal song that neither of them recognised.

“So,” Emma yelled helplessly across the table over the screaming intro, “uni.”

Stephanie looked at the skeleton on the little glass again.

“Seriously?” she took a swig of the drink, feeling its flavour as clouds of colour.

Emma was relentless, and uncharacteristically serious. “Yeah seriously. You actually going?”

“If they take me. It’s a conditional and I’m doing okay so far.”

“Wow. I’d say we should go out to celebrate but, here we are.” Emma gestured widely at the club around them.

“I’d prefer Bowie,” Stephanie raised her voice over a guitar riff.

“So would Jay. Where is he anyway?” Emma asked. “He’s not texted me.”

“Band practice I think.”

“Ah, radio silence.”

“Is that his new band name?” Stephanie asked.

“No, I think their name is Frozen Aisle for now.”

“Frozen Aisle For Now?”

“Just Frozen Aisle.”

“Ah. Well, you never know with them.”

“Yeah, not their best rebrand but I’m sure he’ll have another soon,” Emma said.

“I was a fan of Grannie’s Yarn Monster,” Stephanie replied.

“Me too. It really captured their eclectic vibe. Was a bit too friendly though.”

“Or Evil Sauce,” Stephanie added.

“Frederik’s spaceship fingers,” Emma said. Stephanie grunted through her straw as she drank.

“Yes. That once was fantastic!”

At this point the man loosely affixed to the purple mohawk stumbled past with a few of his friends, hiccupping and waving at Emma, saying brief hellos before moving to the crowd around the bar.

“You know everyone don’t you?” Stephanie asked. She curled her nose at the pinkish smell of smoke machine smoke emanating from the dance floor.

“Not everyone, just enough people to get by.” Emma brushed a curling lock of ginger hair away from her drink and finished it. “You’re going to have to get social by September you know Stephie. I can’t be there to hold your hand.”

“And I won’t be here to hold back your hair.”

“That was one time. I hate rum.”

“Doesn’t matter. I thought you wanted to crash my fresher’s week?”

“Only because I’m not going myself,” Emma explained. “I only want the socials, not the academia. I’ll leave once the party stops. I am allergic to academia, remember?”

“That’s fair,” Stephanie took another sip of her drink, and was briefly distracted by the cartoon skeleton on the old glass. At that moment a beam of green light pierced the air, bouncing around playfully, cutting into the glass. Stephanie felt a distant tingling noise at the back of her mind, as if some ancient clockwork thing just started moving behind her eyes. Some mechanism unlocked and folded itself away in the shadows. Her brain felt cold, like a ruin her consciousness was exploring.

“Migraine?” Emma asked.

“What? No.”

“You zoned out.”

“How long?”

“About seven seconds.”

“I’m fine. So, academia,” Stephanie nudged the conversation back onto its rails, hiding her discomfort. She thought of rails and trains, monorails, the whole night club fitting in one giant carriage. The ‘space nightmare’ resurfaced, this time with a monorail track leading deep into the star tunnel. Stephanie shook the daydream away, drowning it with more vodka coke and some light headbanging, just as the music died down and everyone else stopped.

Emma drank some of her own drink, scrunched up her face, then began again, “I get the point of uni, but I mean what would I study anyway? Minimalism, sketch, cubism, surrealism? What’s the point?”

Stephanie got the impression that this question was not aimed at her, but rather the whole universe. She plucked a word from nowhere.

“Virtualism?”

“I don’t know that one.” Emma frowned.

“I made it up.”

“Oh. Sounds cool.” Emma’s previous question lingered in the smoky air. This was one of the rare moments in which she looked confused, overwhelmed by choice. Usually, she was quite happy to do everything at once, but university loomed in the timeline of her life like a fork in the road. She couldn’t go left and right simultaneously without splitting into two people. Or could she?

“You see, I could find stuff to paint or write about outside. You know, like when we went to the caves that time, or the river with Jay.”

Stephanie nodded, “You’re still doing the art exam though yeah?”

“Of course!” Emma replied with fake glee. “I love doing exams that distil creative endeavours into a stream of meaningless numbers.”

“What?” Stephanie raised her voice over an impressive riff.

“I said, I love doing exams that break creativity into numbers and scores.”

“Oh. Sorry,” Stephanie said. Green sea urchins of music soared through the air, and a white and gold coldness cut through from the smell of some overpowering cocktail some strange suit-wearing boy had convinced the bar staff to concoct for him. A cherry-flavoured cloud dissipated in the jelly of Stephanie’s eyes.

“What for?” Emma began again as the music died down, “Even if I don’t use my grades to go to uni, I still want them. It’s like an art prize, but I don’t have to pay anyone to enter and there’s slightly less wankers.”

“It’s an art course,” Stephanie said. “That’s where wankers come from.”

“Not true. Artists don’t reproduce. A steady supply of wankers is due to business studies courses. Those guys reproduce like crazy.”

“Do they tell their wives?” Stephanie asked.

At this point the music was low enough that a nearby table could overhear the conversation, but Stephanie and Emma were too engrossed in their discussion to notice the weird looks sent their way.

“I personally think wankers are a universal constant, so when one dies, the universe spontaneously creates another, like matter out of a white hole,” Stephanie explained.

“That’s a new record for you making a conversation about space,” Emma said. She pulled the straw out of her drink, dropped it on the table and tried to finish it in one gulp. She failed.

“So why are you going to uni?” she asked.

“You’ll hate this. But I want to learn more about the universe, about people, and I can’t do that here. You can make art anywhere.”

“Okay then, make art right now,” Emma teased.

“I have a poem,” Stephanie smiled. Emma was quiet for a moment.

“Getting into physics but hates maths,” she finally quipped. Stephanie stirred her drink.

“Yeah but, maths is poetry. I just don’t know how to read it yet. It’s codified.”

“I like that, codified. Mind if I steal it?”

“Sure. It’s not my word.”

Emma scrunched up her face at the last mouthful of drink. “It sounds like your kind of word.”

“Thanks,” Stephanie said. A cluster of people bobbed and chatted beside their table, carrying what looked like one of every drink that was being served. Emma nodded approvingly at them and one of them smiled back.

“I guess I could paint a student union bar, or a canteen,” Emma said.

“It’s not too late to apply,” Stephanie replied.

“Do a mural somewhere. Paint equipment onto the walls. A Bunsen burner? Never see any good surrealist, or ‘Virtualist’ depictions of Bunsen burners.”

“Why would an art class have a Bunsen burner?”

“To burn the bad art. I don’t know.”

“How about a collage of your student ID, made with chopped up textbooks?”

“Yeah, then I could burn it!”

“No burning things,” Stephanie said.

“Okay, fine,” Emma said. “I’m tempted now.”

“Don’t think you need a degree to make a collage though,” Stephanie said.

“No, probably not. Don’t need college for collage.”

“But you might need a degree to sell it to someone.”

“Yeah. If only five-year-olds could get degrees. Fridge art is a fucking goldmine.”

Stephanie snorted. Her drink almost came out through her nose. She laughed with Emma until they were both weeping, until a song Stephanie recognised started blurting out of the speakers. Stephanie began to move in her chair with the beat. Finally, she plucked up the courage and got up.

Emma looked on in mock shock, nodded, and said “You know this one?”

“I do.” Stephanie sighed inwardly, still batting away the last of the laughter.

“Dance?”

“For what reason?”

“Because that’s what humans do, and you’re already doing it. Look.”

Stephanie looked down. Her feet were indeed moving, stomping along to Rammstein.

Share The weird worlds of Phillip Carter

Some people have told me privately that 4400 words was a bit too steep for a newsletter, but others have loved the length of it. I find myself cutting it off at natural cutoff points, but that does sometimes mean the word count can vary, usually from 2000 to the 5000 range.

I want to know what you think, so I can make posts better in the future. If you have a desired length for a chapter, let me know.

(Disclaimer: whilst I have re-launched my paid tiers, Stephanie’s story will remain free. The paid tiers are best suited for people who want signed books, behind-the-scenes content, deleted scenes, and secret stories. You do not need to be a paid subscriber to read Stephanie.

I am leaving the scene titles in so you can get a glimpse of what’s happening in each beforehand, in case you put this down half way through and come back.

THE STEPHANIE GLITCH

Toumai detects an intruder

It was a cold Tuesday morning and the universe had just begun to implode.

Toumai’s motors wheezed as he slid desperately through private airlocks and corridors. He cursed himself for not leaving an avatar behind on the research deck. Precious seconds were being wasted. The human crew were another asteroid away, too far to beat him there even if they were awake.

His eyestalk wobbled as he turned tight corners. He scanned the area ahead. The sensors repeated the same impossible story; A human heart was beating in the research deck. But the only body there was unfinished. It didn’t have a heart yet. The machine checked the most recent progress logs for the research deck, hoping that something was wrong, that the data would change. It didn’t.

SKELETAL STRUCTURE OPTIMAL

PRINTER BUG PERFORMANCE OPTIMAL

!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: PREMATURE BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES DETECTED.

!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM ACTIVE.

!!!WARNING!!! POD FAILURE: LIVING BODY OUTSIDE POD.

His social programming recommended terror, so that is what Toumai felt. He listed the reasons for fear.

• The Artifice was a long way away from home.

• Nobody else was out here.

• It could be a stowaway Virtualist.

• It could be an alien.

• Humans were not prepared for first contact.

• The alien might be hostile.

The crew were all accounted for, sleeping peacefully in their quarters. The only answer to the heartbeat mystery was that the unfinished body in the research deck, mindless and malformed, had somehow birthed itself prematurely from the cylinder and started walking around. But that was impossible, it would have died already.

Unless she did something impossible.

Toumai queried the pod itself. All systems were nominal. The printer bugs were still in idle communication around the skeleton, their tiny minds ignorant to the growing panic in the silent starship. But something was still wrong. Perhaps the bugs were faulty. Perhaps they had banded together and commandeered the skeleton. It was a ridiculous idea, one his social programming seemed happy to suggest, an amalgam of human nightmares and stories scraped from the dreamscreen.

The blue light in Toumai’s bulbous eye darted around desperately, a mimicry of human terror.

Stephanie explains simulation theory

“The older life is allowed to get, the more likely it is,” Stephanie said. She touched her glass to Emma’s and drank. Her thumb traced the black skeleton printed onto the glass. Its texture felt like hollow rain and sent flashes of cold through her forearms. A distant disco light sent its message of yellow and red to her eyes, and her brain translated this undulating colour into subtle thuds that rang out from the jelly in her eyes.

“Spacing out?” Emma asked. Stephanie smiled and looked at the empty plastic fishbowl at the centre of the table. She picked it up.

“No, spacing in. It’s like this fishbowl. If there were fish in it. If we were fish, and other fish could make smaller bowls. It’s like… You know how a universe could be born from a black hole. Well, the fish in the ocean and the fish in the fishbowl have different experiences. But if the bowl was big enough, they would have the same experience.”

“I see,” Emma said.

“I’m not drunk,” Stephanie announced.

“I know,”

“A society in the future might be able to make lots of bowls.”

“Fishbowls?”

“But bigger.” Stephanie’s eyes received the red and yellow beams of light from the corners of the club, and her brain translated these into subtle thuds that felt as if they were generated in the jelly within her eyes.

“Are you lecturing me so I pay for this round?” Emma asked. Stephanie broke eye contact and focused again on the printed skeleton. As she took another sip of the neon green drink, she imagined the skeleton was a real thing bobbing around inside the glass, waiting to be freed.

“I might be. Cherry next time?” Stephanie said.

“That’s pure sugar.”

“Did you think the mango one was real mangoes?”

“Stop talking about what’s real and what isn’t and start mentally preparing yourself for dancing, because there will be dancing,” Emma warned. Stephanie nodded in mock subservience.

“Dancing isn’t real,” she quipped.

“I’ve had enough of you.”

“No you haven’t.”

Toumai approaches the intruder

Toumai checked the signal once more. It was not a glitch. The beating heart had a faint murmur. Printed hearts would not suffer this issue. On top of this revelation, Toumai discovered that there had been a spike in temperature and air density inside the research deck at the moment the heartbeat was detected. Air had been suddenly displaced by something within this sealed chamber. But the pod was secure. The airlocks were sealed. The skeleton had not prematurely grown flesh and broke free. Something else was there. Something human.

If Toumai’s new suspicions were correct, an intruder had just teleported into the most sensitive laboratory of the starship and was stood in front of the most precious living experiment in human history. But there was just one problem with this theory: Teleportation was impossible. He pressed onwards, shooting through another connecting corridor between two asteroids.

Stephanie feels alone at the club

“What did you mean, how old life is allowed to get?” Emma asked. She was halfway stood up, still not fully committed to entering the shuffling crowd of people that had condensed around the understaffed bar.

“We might not last long enough to make a big enough game,” Stephanie explained. “It would be like you dying in the middle of an art exam, unable to finish a portfolio.”

“A preferable alternative,” Emma joked, “I ruined the last layers of detail.” She got up and walked into the crowd. Almost immediately after her friend had gone, Stephanie took her battered notebook from its bag and began writing something. At first no words arrived on the page, so she waited. There was no blockage inside her mind, but outside. The music was too colourful, the lights too noisy, and the smell of scented smoke from the dancefloor smoke machines filled her head with pink.

Eventually she managed to draw the first half of a spiral galaxy, but it changed, wrapping around itself to become the beginnings of an ammonite shell. She penned the chambers in gently, allowing the pen to wiggle and form the natural sutures. As always, she wanted to add a skull somewhere in the design, but didn’t feel confident enough to finish the piece. The music kept thumping through her bone marrow, the smells and chatter kept mixing into prickles of light, and the passing lights continued their hasty evolution into thudding, shaking embraces against her entire body.

After a moment or two of staring at the ammonite, Stephanie looked up from her table and surveyed her surroundings. She was dressed like everyone else here: Black boots, black dress, dark eyeliner, but she didn’t feel like she belonged. Emma, however, stood out like a unicorn at a funeral. She was in a bold white thing that turned into rainbows at its base. Her natural orange hair wasn’t dyed either, which in here placed her firmly in the minority. Still, she was already making friends as she waited at the bar, she was already assimilated into the culture, already making strangers laugh at her jokes.

“I’m the alien,” Stephanie mouthed to herself, before writing the words above the ammonite. She began penning in little cartoon eyes into each chamber, adding flecks of movement, as if the thing was spinning. Someone carrying two handfuls of pints stopped to look down at her drawing, but she didn’t notice.

Toumai is nervous

For Toumai, nervousness began as a performance, a mask put on for the humans. But he had spent a while inside the dreamscreen with them now. He had truly shared their anxieties. Back when they were awake, the crew had got together and spoke of their theories. Stories of alien archaeologists or godlike scientists were passed around the table like arrow heads or bones, each chipped away at and refined as the humans huddled together in their new space-age cave, in this research station carved into raw asteroids. They bounced ideas off each other inside the white caves, their extraordinary minds free from the endless chatter back down on Earth. Toumai had absorbed all of this, absorbed the new mythologies the humans wove around themselves, draping them over their small tribe like furs against the endless night of space. He watched as they clutched coffee cups ceremoniously, as they debated the motivations of imaginary gods, and pondered the structuring of theoretical multiverses.

Toumai had read about gods before he was switched on. He knew humans would make gods of stars and weather cycles, of birth and death. He knew they would place them wherever a difficult question arose. Gods were what waited in the darkness, in the ignorance between discoveries, in the space between research fields, in the fear before death and in the ignorance after birth. But what Toumai did not expect was that that behaviour, like some impossible interspecies virus, would one day get inside his head too.

She was out there, thinking, beaming her teenaged thoughts through space and time. What if she managed to build herself a body here from the raw materials in the asteroid field? And if it wasn’t her, then who was it? Whoever it was could violate the known laws of physics, bypass all security measures on the Artifice. They could kill the experiment, kill her before she even got to her body. Toumai sent the uncomfortable thought through the dreamscreen. No doubt the human crew had thought of it too, but to not send it would be to withhold information, and to withhold information would be dishonest.

Something changed. The heartbeat on the sensors suddenly sounded different. It was faster, stronger. Toumai recognised the change. He was no longer the only nervous being on the ship.

Stephanie talks about uni with Emma

liquid confidence in confidence

lyrical itch of cider syrup

a conference. I can’t dance

so don’t ask me to dance

but I’d like to blend in like furniture

just belong somewhere once

Stephanie folded the poem away quickly, turning to a different page in her notebook and putting it deep within her bag. Emma smiled and placed a neon green concoction ceremoniously in front of her friend.

“What’s this?” Stephanie asked.

“Atom-smasher apple.”

“It looks poisonous.”

“Technically it is.” Emma blew a strand of orange hair from her face as she sat down.

“You know what I mean. It looks like the acid in a bad 80s horror.”

“I know, that’s why I picked it.”

 Stephanie turned the glass so that the painted skeleton was facing towards her. This one was off-white, and it appeared to glow whenever the roaming lightshow left their table. Stephanie ran her thumb over the skeleton. Several almost imperceptible spikes of sense experience crashed on the shores of her subconscious. The coarse texture felt like lashings of hailstones against the subsurface of her thumb. Now, all at once, the last drink settled into her brain. Stephanie was finally relaxing.

“You look bored.”

“No, I look like I am thinking,” Stephanie raised her voice over the music. “I’m going to miss it here.”

“You’ll have more clubs at uni.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“You’ll miss me?”

“And Jay and everyone else.”

“You can always come back.”

Stephanie remembered an important detail about some of her older friends who had gone to university the year before, whose last messages still lingered in her phone’s inbox.

“Yeah, but who does?”

“You’ll come back,” Emma said. “You’ve got your granddad.”

“True.”

Toumai meets the intruder

Toumai zipped through another small airlock, reappearing in a hall carved out of one of the larger asteroids. He rushed past the hulking algae corridors, noisily clicking into place on a Y-shaped junction. Chemical sensors behind his vents told him the readings here were correct, the air was clean. Everything was still working. No sabotage. As he got closer to the research deck, he unfurled three mechanical arms from his underside. This particular body carried no weapons, but if he had to, Toumai could stab or electrocute the intruder with his tools. He got to the door. At this proximity his own sensors could pick up the presence of a body in the room, could hear the nervous heartbeat. He switched off his fear. It was useless now.

He opened the door and entered, beaming an immediate visual report to the dreamscreen network, keeping the sleeping crew informed. The intruder, clad in dark-blue spacesuit and darker armoured panels, slowly turned a chrome-orange visor his way.

“Identify yourself.” Toumai’s voice was harsh and cold. The intruder chuckled nervously, trying to take control of the situation. When they spoke, their voice was projected from a small speaker set into the neck of their suit.

“What are you going to do with that, weld me?”

Toumai let off a warning zap from one of the tools. The intruder visibly flinched. Toumai moved forward and upward slightly, positioning himself diagonally from the intruder. The intruder stood still as a thin mesh of greenish light emerged from the base of Toumai’s obsidian eye, casting a fine net over them. The scan lasted less than five seconds.

“No weapons,” Toumai tilted his head. The intruder copied him.

“Why would I bring weapons?”

“You are an intruder.”

“I am a visitor. A traveller,” the intruder said. Toumai loomed in idle silence for a few seconds, processing the information. Any good assailant could improvise a weapon, and this one had already violated one law of nature by teleporting. She was dangerous.

“Toumai, you and I both know that you weren’t instructed to kill intruders.” She pointed at the ceiling theatrically. “Just in case one of them was from upstairs.”

“Upstairs?” the machine asked for clarification.

“Yes, you know. The other universe. The one you were built to search for.”

Toumai hesitated and the intruder moved forward, grabbing him by the little handles either side of his head.

“No. Don’t tell the crew darling. Not yet.”

Toumai pulled up and away from the intruder. He stopped the message before it was sent. Something in the intruder’s voice commanded attention and obedience, even from a machine. It was as if he knew the intruder already, as if they were inside his head. Toumai’s motors whirred inside his eyestalk. He calculated a private, risky decision. The deep light behind his obsidian lens twinkled. Up this close, the intruder could almost smell the oil of his joints through the vents in their suit.

“A message is held in the dreamscreen network. Our cooperation is the only thing holding it back. Once that breaks down, the message will send.”

“Scan me again. I’m not here to fight,” said the intruder. They stepped back and extended their arms out to their sides. Toumai scanned her again.

“I know,” Toumai said, his social programming kicking back in. It was obvious from her body language that this human female would only start a fight out of fear. Fear was what motivated her to jump forward and to plead with him, despite the threat of his little three arms and their tools. But fear of what? She had waited patiently for Toumai to arrive on this deck before acting, abandoning the strategic advantage of being in here alone with her body for over a minute. That was long enough to damage at least the outer components of the pod, to attempt to break into the computers, but she did nothing. So, what was she here for, if not invasion?

“I’m not ready to go yet, so if you could put the zapper away, I would appreciate it,” the intruder said. She reached up to her neck, clicking and twisting the helmet until it came loose. She took it off, placed it gently on a nearby console, and looked up at Toumai. Her eyes were blue-grey, and her face was stoic, exhausted. She looked as if she had been awake for days without rest. Toumai stared at her. She began the delicate process of removing her hair from the neck joint of the suit.

Toumai scanned the contours of her face. No match. He defaulted to the basics.

“State your name and intention.”

“My name is LP, like the records,” the intruder said. “I’m here to protect her.”

“She is safe,” Toumai replied. LP glanced around his bulbous eye to look at the opaque pod set into the wall behind him.

“No, she isn’t. Look.” LP stepped further back, lifting an arm and clenching her fist. Her gloved fingers tapped at buttons hidden in the palm, and a hologram display sprung out of the dark-blue forearm of the suit. It was a smooth, glossy neon orange, like amber. It depicted a crude external scan of the Artifice. LP pinched the air around the hologram. It responded by shrinking down, zooming out away from the Artifice and focusing elsewhere. A long way away from the ghostly ship, a fleet of jagged forms lingered.

“Virtualists,” Toumai announced.

“A whole fleet of what you call ‘spikeships’, for her I imagine.”

“They don’t know about her.”

“Well, that’s reassuring. They are probably just chasing us because we dropped our keys.”

The machine chose to ignore this for now. A question remained unanswered. He lowered himself from scanning position, making his round body level with the intruder, breaking her line of sight with the pod.

“Define upstairs.”

The intruder turned away from Toumai, walking to a large window set into the wall opposite the pods. Outside she could see the other asteroids that made up the Artifice, their connecting corridors and spires arcing toward each other. This window faced inward, toward the central rock to which the rest where anchored. LP looked around, trying to ascertain which of the brown-grey rocks housed the living crew. She reached toward the glass and the image changed. Now the screen showed data from the pods and the room.

“It’s like this ship,” she said. “Like this screen. Her universe is an image of yours, and your universe is an image of another. But it’s not a strict hierarchy. There are branches, parallels, like the asteroids. There’s no ‘up’ or ‘down’ in space, so which asteroid is higher than the other? I think what happens here affects what happens there, but I’m not sure if it works both ways.”

For now, this answer would suffice. The intruder could be questioned in more detail by the crew later.

“How did you travel here?” Toumai asked. His voice was not his own. LP was taken aback, but a moment later realised what had happened. She tilted her head playfully, her grey-blue eyes staring piercingly into Toumai’s.

“Oh. Hello captain. Waking up?”

Toumai’s voice returned, “Answer the question.”

“I got here by dreaming. Specifically, by using a device in the universe upstairs that induces a deep sleep similar to what you experience under dreamscreen. When certain people use it, they can detect and even visit other universes.”

“Parallel universes?” the female voice returned to Toumai.

“You said you wouldn’t tell them yet,” LP said.

“Efficiency supersedes my social programming,” Toumai explained. LP smiled and unclipped the forearms of her suit, disconnecting them and discarding them beside the helmet. She got up and sat on the table beneath the large screen, using the chair as a footrest, looking back at the opaque cylinder across the room. The screen, now idle, switched back to the view of the rocks outside.

“Please don’t put your boots on the chairs,” the female voice asked.

“They’re new boots. Freshly manifested.”

A sharp click emanated from inside Toumai’s head, an archaic indication that the caller had hung up. Toumai’s body moved almost imperceptibly, tilting as it looked at LP.

“She called from the dreamscreen didn’t she?” LP asked.

“Correct.”

“Not safe to have her do that too long.”

“Correct.”

Right now, there was no reason for the crew to wake up. The intruder was posing no risk to the research station, no risk to the experiment. Toumai could still kill her if he needed to, or at least force her to teleport back out to wherever she came from. He could remove oxygen from this room, or headbutt her with his enormous eyeball.

LP reached for one of her suit’s dark-blue forearms and reactivated the hologram of the spikeships.

“I can practically hear the gears in your head turning you know. Harming me won’t save this ship.”

“The gears in my head are not responsible for my thought processes. They are used for movement.”

“I know,” LP said. “It’s a metaphor. Now let’s talk about how we’ll deal with those Virtualists.”

“How will we deal with them?” Toumai reluctantly played along. LP noticed his tone, raised an eyebrow, but continued anyway. As she spoke, she gestured toward the amber-coloured hologram of the ships.

“The Virtualists are just outside your scanning range. They already know the limitations of your ship. One of them might have built it. Or they found the plans somehow, or they have better scanning tech. It doesn’t matter. They know who your crew are and what you’re hiding here, and they want it. You need me because I am your only strategic advantage. I am the unknown. We won’t act now. Let them think you have no idea they are coming.”

Toumai’s social programming kicked in.

“That is suicide.”

“It is strategy. This place started out as a geological facility. Do you still have gravity disruptors?”

“They are in storage.”

“Could you bring them out?”

“Why?”

“I’m going to connect them to sensors, turn them into proximity mines. Once a Virtualist spikeship passes they will activate, launching rocks inwards. It’s the best we can do with what we’ve got. The Artifice is already inside an asteroid field.”

After a split second Toumai replied, “That would be a temporary deterrent.”

“But it would work,” LP replied. There was a moment of hesitation.

“Correct.”

“Then we shall do it.” She switched the hologram off and finally turned her attention to the cylinders set into the back wall of the room. She cracked her fingers and got down from the console, walking over to the cylinders. She hesitated, then turned to face the middle one. Inside the opaque surface was a murky silver-greenish liquid. She could only see the outer edge of the fluid as it came into contact with the glass. Everything inside was obscured.

“Show me,” she said gently. Toumai considered the request, weighed it against what he had learnt about the intruder so far, and decided to oblige. He sent an impulse into the pod glass, rendering it transparent. Inside the greenish liquid a human skeleton floated loose. Schools of tiny insectoid machines, too small for their bodies to be seen with the naked eye, glistened under overhead lights as they worked on the skeleton.

“Beetle printers. Nice,” she said. Toumai rolled across the ceiling, following her. He didn’t respond.

“Is this her?” LP asked softly.

“Stephanie?” Toumai asked for clarification.

“Who else would I ask about?”

“Yes. It is her,” Toumai replied reluctantly. Silently he sent the report into the dreamscreen network, keeping the sleeping crew informed. LP winced and said, “I felt that. Stop talking about me behind my back.”

“How did you know?” Toumai asked.

“I’m in your head. It’s blurry, pixelated, but I know if you’re thinking about me.”

There was an awkward silence. LP rubbed her hands together, leaning close to the glass, staring at the skeleton. The white room felt huge now, a void sparsely populated by meaningless screens and buttons, wiring and panels. Even the tremendous vista of stars and nebulae outside was a distraction from this cosmic miracle, this freak of nature. This Stephanie.

LP focused her attention on the vacant eye sockets of the skull, imagining eyes and muscle and skin set into the face. She imagined imperfections, a fringe that needed attention, perhaps a cut to the upper lip. Privately she tried to convince the universe that Stephanie was looking back, that through empty eyeholes and empty regions of the universe she could look outward, that she could see this strange astronaut staring back at her and waiting for her to be real.

The moment was soon ruined. LP cringed again at a thought passing through the room.

“You just thought about suffocating me again, didn’t you?”

The machine twisted his body and tilted his head.

“I have defence systems in place.”

“To remove the oxygen in here and wait the ten hours it would take for me to run out of mine?”

“If that is necessary. I would also disable your oxygen supply.”

“Blunt force trauma. Nice. You know I’m not a threat, right?”

“What I assume about you could be biased by my social programming.”

“So you have elected to ignore that side of your head?”

“That is correct.”

LP sighed, disconnected her hands from the glass for a second, then realised something.

“You’ve got your other robots heading here as well, haven’t you?”

“A more combat-capable avatar is waiting outside, yes.”

“Typical. You antiviruses are always doing this,” LP shook her head, looking back to the skull in the pod and saying, “I’m sorry, some people just don’t listen.” She turned back to Toumai and asked, “So when are we staging this fight to the death? Before or after the Virtualists punch a hole through the hull and steal our half-formed friend?”

Toumai brought his bulbous white form around to LP’s side, placing himself between her and the exit to the room. The distant cobalt blues behind his lens flickered and rotated.

“Antiviruses?”

“That’s what we’re locking on to from what I said?”

“Why did you call me an antivirus?”

“Fine,” LP began, It’s my term for anyone who gets in the way of my mission. And that’s not just robots, but people too.”

“What is your mission?” Toumai asked.

“To protect her.” LP looked again at the skeleton. Work on the ribcage was over now, and a glittering cloud of printer bugs swam away to their vents, making room for the next generation of machines.

“I am also programmed to protect the experiment,” the machine said coldly.

“Are you hearing yourself? ‘The experiment’… she isn’t the experiment. You are.”

END

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