The Cosmonaut Who Died Twice - Parts 1 + 2 (free sample)
The Cosmonaut Who Died Twice - Parts 1 + 2 (free sample)
A free sample of a new novella, from Phillip Carter
There is an eclipse today! I’ve never seen one before. I am currently in Utah seeing it with my friends. I’ve probably posted about it to my instagram.
This is a free sample of THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE. I’ll go into more detail about how this new subletter works at the bottom of this email, as this is the first post here.
Basically, serialised stories will live here, as well as free samples.
You can now also signal your support for my weird writing, and get yourself a comfy shirt at the same time.
I have over 30 designs on my Grumbleshirts website, most of which are niche memes about Lego.
THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE
THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE is a 13,000-word novella about a cosmonaut who, you guessed it, manages to die twice. It is dark and mysterious and zany, and it connects to WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?, WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?. THE EARTHLOOP TRILOGY and THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, sitting right in the middle, between Earth and the rest of the universe.
I said I was working on a big thing.
This novella tells the story of someone who exists between the main timelines of my larger works. It all clicks together, like Lego.
You can pre-order the full book here. It’s $2.
It comes out at the end of May.
And it shouldn’t have to be said, but I didn’t use AI to write it.
I used my brain.
Today’s soundtrack is Gary Numan - Jagged
THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE
Before they found her, Galina Agafonov was a cosmonaut. It was her decision to change the trajectory of the Pallas at the last minute, diverting the doomed starship toward a backup dash through the planets, a desperate bid to slingshot the thing around Jupiter and careen back to Earth.
It was the last course of action available.
It was the least likely outcome to their mission.
But the thought of it kept Galina awake at the academy long before she stepped into the rocket. It kept her in the simulators well into the early hours of the morning. It kept her eyes open, fixated on the plastic ceiling tiles of her bedroom, as she imagined herself as the starship Pallas, spinning and whirling and adjusting her trajectory between cartoonishly disproportionate planets, moons, and asteroids.
It was the nightmare scenario, the utter devastation of every other possible worldline for the crewmembers on the Pallas; that something should go so wrong during first contact that the humans picked to initiate that terrifying, tentative step, should be sent running back home, their ship half dead, their crew soon to follow.
1. Starwoman
Galina, EM, Clance, and Jeven had convened at the academy bar. Galina and Jeven were interlocked arm in arm, dancing to the instrumental end to The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me Baby. Clance was watching them from the bar, perpetually adjusting his hair and pretending not to look over at EM, who was again scribbling something in her notepad.
Once the song ended, Galina and Jeven found their way to the bar.
“Karaoke ended forty-seven minutes ago,” Clance told them.
“We’ve been dancing very fast,” Galina said, her temporary Russian American accent loosened by the alcohol. She put on an impression of Clance’s Texan drawl.
“So for us, honey, it’s still Ten of the Pee Em.”
Jeven bent over laughing, leaving Galina to lose her anchorage on him. She grabbed onto the bar, sidling up close to Clance and smiling.
“Time dilation,” she added.
“I got the joke,” Clance said. “Your last drink before the big day. You sure you want to make it excessive?”
“You forget my mother was Irish,” Galina said, pouting. “And anyway, you’re becoming a grandfather. We have to celebrate.”
“Is that true?” Jeven looked at Clance over Galina’s shoulder. The shorter man found his way to the bar and ordered something quickly.
“It is indeed. He’ll be a year old when we get back.”
“Or two, if the aliens are talkative,” Jeven said.
Galina sidled back to the dance floor, picking another song to sing on the laptop behind the DJ booth, before trying to Riverdance her way back to her fellow astronauts. She looked up at the ceiling, at the homemade solar system decorations that visiting high school students had donated some years before. Amid them all, just beyond the inaccurate orbit of Jupiter, a grey plastic tetrahedron, formed of four triangular sides, loomed. She stared up at it, watched as disco lights cut into its 3D printed grooves.
“Inaccurate,” Clance said, looking at the arrangement of planets.
“Inspiring,” Galina replied. She turned her body around looking for something in the amateur sky above the dance floor, trying to piece together constellations from glow in the dark stars, glittery nebulae, and scrunched up asteroids.
“Is that his?” Clance pointed to a toy spaceship behind Mars, just out of Galina’s eyesight. She bent down slightly, shifting her perspective.
“Yes! There he is. My Victor.”
“He’s a good kid,” Clance said.
“I know. I told him, get good grades and you’ll be making paper planets for a cocktail bar on the day I come back home. He laughed at this; said he wants to become a poet.”
“And will you let him?”
“He’s a person, not a dog. Poet, astronaut, doesn’t matter.”
Clance raised a large, cartoonish eyebrow.
“As long as he’s happy,” EM interjected. During the conversation Jeven had retrieved her from her outpost, bringing her back to the group.
“Precisely,” Galina replied. “As long as my Victor is happy, I am happy.”
Jeven nodded, waiting for an opening. Galina drunkenly watched disco lights playing through his auburn mop of hair.
“I’ve been thinking about the manoeuvre,” he said. “If the pyramid is hostile, we’re going to need to turn around faster than anyone’s planned for.”
“They’ve run us through this,” Galina said.
“I know but, EM has an idea.”
At this point EM nodded. “I propose we stray from planned trajectory by five degrees, give ourselves room to drop out of orbit if things go wrong.”
“And if they go right?” Clance asked.
“If they go right, we’ll be fine.”
“No, we’ll be five degrees off.”
There was a silence between them, interrupted from all angles by the last moments of Don’t You Want Me Baby.
“It is worth the risk,” Galina chimed in. “Good idea EM. But we don’t need to change, everything is worked out. If the pyramid isn’t dead, if it is alien, if it is hostile, we will simply keep on flying until we go back around Jupiter, coming home quickly and with as much data as we can gather from a safe distance.”
“It’s dead,” Jeven added, his fair eyebrows forming a V shape. “But we all know it’s artificial. The chances of natural rock being beaten into that shape are… miniscule.”
“The heat signatures indicate otherwise,” EM added. She closed her notebook, and for a split second the rest of the group caught a glimpse of one of her drawings: An astronaut shaking hands with a triangular robot out in space, Jupiter in the background, with Saturn and her rings looming further still.
“Are we supposed to have that pyramid here, in the bar?” EM asked.
“They’ve got documents, fakes, to leak,” Clance explained stoically.
“Let me guess, it’s a prototype spaceship, one of ours,” EM asked.
“Exactly. The public don’t need to know yet.”
“They should announce it when it speaks to us,” Jeven said.
“The Callisto probes talked to it, but it didn’t reply.” Galina took a sip of her drink.
“Maybe it doesn’t like us,” EM said.
“Maybe it’s shy,” Jeven added.
“I’m not sure heat indicates life,” Galina said. “The thing could be an engine, or more likely, it’s a fragment from some collision.”
“Then why hasn’t it cooled down?” EM asked. The next song on the Karaoke machine began to autoplay, Duran Duran’s Invisible, and Galina very quickly finished her drink.
“Could be a new material. We’ll find out soon enough.” She took EM by the wrist and led her to the stage.
2. Down In The Park
Later that night, Galina laughed and grabbed onto a lamppost, spinning herself around, stumbling onto a new trajectory. She went off course, her glittery heels scraping now into loose gravel, grass, and the edges of the academy pond. Above them, above the simulators and the desert and the eagles and the sky and the delicate membrane of Earth’s atmosphere, the faint light of Jupiter pulsed in the sky.
“I am so drunk,” Galina said. “It is like I could trip and slip,” she laughed. “And fall and fall and fall until I rolled into her, up there.”
“Well don’t,” Jeven said. He held his friend back from the pond’s edge, watching the moonlight cascading off from it.
“Each photon a stone skipped. Each light a new trip,” he said.
“Always the poet,” Galina wrapped her arms around him. He rejected her drunken attempt to kiss him.
“Maybe tomorrow,” he said. He stood stoic, helping her put a high heel back on. Galina thought the moonlight made his jawline sharper.
“You look like a vampire,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“So easy to slip down here,” Galina said. “And up there too.”
“Even easier,” EM replied. She was lying on the grass by the academy pond, meticulously taking apart a beef burger. Clance had long ago gone to bed.
“It is precisely four in the morning,” EM continued.
“And how do you know that? Stars plotted against the tops of the workshops from this precise vantage point?” Jeven asked. EM smiled and shook her head.
“Look,” she pointed across the pond and to the right, where a beige gravel path snaked away to the telescopes and dishes in the distance. There was a small group of figures running across the path, illuminated by torches in their headbands. They were followed by a hollow-bodied robot, one of the campus’ new androids. An older version of this thing would be fitted into the Pallas starship, used for any repairs conducted on the outside of the ship.
“The nerds are on their morning migration,” EM explained. “Every day at ten to four they start their morning jog. They get to the edge of the pond dead on four, every time.”
“Nerds? You have a PHD in electrical engineering,” Galina replied.
“Point made.” EM turned the burger upside down in her hands.
“Do you think the aliens have burgers?” she asked.
“I think they might have one of you,” Galina said.
“We could swap them,” Jeven joked. EM turned and smiled at him, then Galina.
“What?” Galina asked, seeing the look in EM’s eyes.
“Nothing,” EM said.
Galina slipped, and Jeven caught her swiftly by the waist. EM continued her dissection of the burger, looked across the campus pond, and posed a final question.
“Are you guys having dreams about it?”
“Nightmares,” Galina admitted.
END (for now)
(The book will be on Amazon eventually. It takes a bit longer)
Q: What is ‘serials’ ?
Serials is a new subsection of my website.
It exists to collect together all my serialised stories.
Comedy, Sci-Fi, Horror, whatever: It all turns up here.
Fulls and Samples
Most stories will be completed here on this newsletter, after which I’ll probably ask you to go download the eBooks during a freebie week on retailers so I can rack up some lovely reviews (reviews keep books relevant to the all-encompassing algorithms in charge of reality).
Some of the stories might end instead on a solid chapter conclusion, and will then continue in paid works (such as eBooks, Paperbacks, or Audiobooks) simply because selling books is important if you want to have the money to feed yourself so you have the energy to write more books.
I may also put the ends of these stories on my paid tier or Patreon, if there’s a demand for it. That’s something I’ll work out with you all in May/June.
There will come a point, hopefully soon, where pre-orders for my books build up and they go viral on release day, making me superomegaultrafamous (the type of famous you need to be to make minimum wage as an author) and I’ll sell the requisite 37 books a day I’d need to call this thing a job.
(At the moment I’m on one and a half paid sales a week, if I behave).
I might even be popular on tiktok, which a publisher once asked me to be before they bothered with me. I could email them and say “Hey I am popular on tiktok now, but actually I don’t need you any more so here is a JPEG of a cat wearing a silly hat” and then never speak to them again.
When I do free samples, I won’t just cut a story short at an arbitrary point, because it irritates me when newsletters do that; I will instead try to provide something that feels well-rounded even if you’re not going to read the full story.
That way, even if you can’t afford a book right now, you can still read enough of it here to know if you’d like the rest when you can afford it.
That will be the case with this story, which is why I said it’s a free sample in the beginning. I’m going to show you a lot of Galina’s life in the hopes you might find it interesting enough to want to know what happens afterwards. The story happens in two main parts, with the middle having its own sort of conclusion. So I’ll end there. I think it will take about three posts to fit the story on this newsletter.