The Stephanie Glitch - NEWS + Part 6
Future:
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
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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