The Stephanie Glitch, part 5 (and a bit of part 6)

(includes link for previous parts)

Phillip Carter

Jun 22, 2024

Click here to look at the other chapters.

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.”

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.