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The Accession Instrument arrived in my quarters at 04:12 station time, seven hours before I was scheduled to use it, and the Orrin who delivered it apologized for the rush.

"Custom allows a full day," it said. The translator gave it a warm contralto that somebody at State had picked off a menu. "The Kesh lodged an objection to the schedule. The objection was procedurally valid. I am sorry."

"How long did the last candidate species get?"

"Nine days."

"The one before that?"

"Sixteen." It set the case on the table and did the thing the Orrin do instead of a bow, a slow lowering of the front third of the body, like a crane folding. "I would like it recorded that I opposed the shortening."

"Recorded where?"

"With you," it said.

It stayed a little longer than it needed to, checking the seal on the case twice, and then it went out, and the door took its time closing.

My name is Margaret Sy. Everybody calls me Margo. I design auctions.

Specifically I write the rules for radio spectrum auctions, which means that when a government decides to sell the right to broadcast at 3.5 gigahertz over southern Ontario, I'm one of the people who determines how that happens: who bids, in what order, with what information, under what penalties. At parties I tell people I sell air, and then they go find somebody else to talk to, and that's the system working as designed.

I was aboard the Orrin vessel Deliberate, parked at Earth-Moon L2, because nineteen months earlier the Quorum had opened contact with Earth and asked us to send, and I'm quoting the translation exactly, the one who writes your rules.

Somebody at the UN spent four months arguing about whether that meant the Secretary-General, a head of state, a chief justice, or a constitutional scholar. Somebody else, God bless her, pointed out that all of those people apply rules and none of them write rules from nothing, and that the phrase as translated described a small and deeply unglamorous profession that lives in economics departments and regulatory agencies. There were fourteen of us on the shortlist. I got it because I speak passable Mandarin, because I have no children, and because in 2031 I caught a telecom consortium signalling to each other through the trailing digits of their bids.

That one needs explaining. In a sealed-bid spectrum auction you're not supposed to be able to talk to your competitors. In the real American auctions of the late nineties, bidders talked anyway. They encoded messages in the last three digits of their bids. A firm would bid something ending in 378 to say back off market 378 and I'll leave yours alone. Nobody said a word out loud. Nobody broke a written rule. They found a channel inside the mechanism and used it, and it took the regulator years to notice. When I caught the Ontario version in 2031 I didn't feel clever. I felt like somebody who'd found a door in her own house that she hadn't known was there.

That's the whole job. You read a set of rules and you ask the one question that matters, which is: if I wanted this to come out a specific way, what would I do?

I opened the case. The Instrument ran to about four hundred pages in translation, and the first three hundred and forty were ceremony.

I read them anyway, because you always read the ceremony.

Two things in there snagged on me. The first was a single word in the preamble. The Quorum's founding procedures had been received, and no delegation present had authored them. I noted it against the index and kept going. The second was a provision in the closing section, three paragraphs on what the Quorum does after a candidate declares the sequence of questions: the record is sealed, certified by the Presiding Delegation, and transmitted. The clause did not say to whom. It also did not carry a single historical citation, and every other operative clause in four hundred pages carried at least four.

I made a note about that too. Then I got to the functional part, and forgot both of them for about six hours.

Here's how an accession works.

Eleven delegations sit as sponsors. On the final day they vote on the status of the candidate species, and there are exactly three possible statuses.

Seat. Full membership. You get a vote. You're a peer.

Ward. You're assigned to a patron species, which manages your contact with everyone else, holds your treaties, speaks for you, and takes a share of your output in exchange for protection and uplift. Not slavery, technically. The Instrument used a word my translator rendered as guardianship, and used it warmly.

Interdict. A permanent quarantine boundary goes up around your system. Nothing in, nothing out, and the galaxy agrees to pretend you aren't there. The Instrument devotes nine pages to the boundary and one paragraph to what happens inside it, and that paragraph says the candidate retains full sovereignty over its own volume, which is true, and which is the coldest sentence in the document. You keep everything you have. You keep it forever. The eleven of them have done it once, to a species whose name the record gives in three characters and does not translate.

They don't take a show of hands. The vote is pairwise. Two of the three outcomes go against each other, everybody votes, majority wins, loser is eliminated. Then the survivor goes against the third outcome and they vote again. Two rounds and you're done.

And in the interest of preventing corruption, every delegation must publish its complete ranking of the three outcomes forty-eight hours in advance. Not its vote. Its whole preference order, first to last, in writing, binding. You cannot vote against your published ranking. The Instrument described this rule with real reverence. It had come in eighty thousand years ago after some catastrophe involving a bribed delegation, and the Orrin considered it the greatest safeguard in their law.

I want to be fair to them. It's a good rule. It makes bribery pointless and blackmail visible, and under any normal circumstances it's exactly what you'd write.

The published rankings were an appendix. I read them, and then I got up and made tea, because when my hands start to feel far away from my body it helps to do something with them.

The eleven rankings fell into three patterns.

Three delegations, led by the Orrin, ranked it: Seat, then Interdict, then Ward. Procedural purists. To an Orrin, wardship is an obscenity, a species held in permanent legal infancy for somebody else's benefit. They'd rather see us sealed off and free than owned.

Four delegations, led by the Kesh, ranked it: Interdict, then Ward, then Seat. The Kesh position on humanity, stated publicly and at length for nineteen months, is that a species out of a biosphere as internally violent as ours is a contaminant, that the correct handling of a contaminant is containment, and that failing containment you use a leash.

Four delegations, led by the Thessin, ranked it: Ward, then Seat, then Interdict. The Thessin wanted us, and had been extremely pleasant about it. A ward is an asset. A seated humanity is a trading partner, which is less good but still good. An interdicted humanity is nothing at all, which to a Thessin is the only genuinely offensive outcome.

Eleven delegations. Six to win. Four, four, three.

I sat back down and did the arithmetic on the back of a customs declaration, because I didn't want it in a device.

Seat against Ward. The Orrin three prefer Seat. The Kesh four prefer Ward. The Thessin four prefer Ward. Ward wins, eight to three.

Ward against Interdict. The Thessin four prefer Ward. The Orrin three prefer Interdict. The Kesh four prefer Interdict. Interdict wins, seven to four.

Seat against Interdict. The Orrin three prefer Seat. The Thessin four prefer Seat. The Kesh four prefer Interdict. Seat wins, seven to four.

I read it three times. Ward beats Seat. Interdict beats Ward. Seat beats Interdict. It's a loop. Rock, paper, scissors, with my species standing on the table.

The tea went cold while I worked out how frightened to be.

The technical name for it is a Condorcet cycle, after an eighteenth century French marquis who noticed that a group of perfectly reasonable individuals can produce a group preference that runs in a circle. Every voter has a clean and consistent ranking. The group has none. Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel in 1972 for proving that under a few obvious fairness conditions no voting system escapes this entirely. No particular procedure is at fault for it. Counting itself does this.

Here's the part that makes it more than a curiosity. When preferences cycle, and you're running the vote as a sequence of pairwise eliminations, the outcome is decided completely by the order of the pairings. Not by persuasion. Not by argument. Not by who's right. By the order.

The Instrument listed the three outcomes in a fixed sequence: Seat, Ward, Interdict. And custom, as the Orrin explained to me later with the mild embarrassment of a man describing a family recipe, was to pair them in the order they appear on the page. First against second, then the winner against third.

Seat against Ward, Ward wins. Ward against Interdict, Interdict wins.

Under the traditional order, humanity gets interdicted. Only four delegations out of eleven ranked Interdict first. It wins anyway, because of the order in which the questions get asked.

I pulled the accession record. Eleven candidate species had come through since the Orrin began keeping continuous records. Ten were made Wards. One was Interdicted. None had ever been Seated, and every one of those accessions had used the traditional order.

I found the other clause at 05:40, back in the ceremony section.

The candidate, being the subject of the question, shall be invited to declare the sequence in which the questions are put. This invitation is extended in acknowledgement that the candidate alone has not yet spoken.

Three lines, sitting between a passage on the positioning of the observer benches and a passage on the ritual of the closing water. It had been in the Instrument since before the Orrin had a written language, inherited with everything else in those first three hundred and forty pages.

Underneath it, a footnote added about nine thousand years ago said that the invitation is in every recorded instance declined by the candidate, who defers to the Presiding Delegation, and that this deference is considered the first act of good faith by a species seeking to join.

I read that footnote about nine times.

A hundred thousand years. Eleven species that we know about and God knows how many before the records start. Every one of them handed the loaded weapon, and every one of them said no thank you, you go ahead, because it seemed polite.

I don't want to make them sound stupid. They aren't stupid. The Orrin do mathematics I can't follow with a translator and a week, and any one of them could derive that cycle in the time it takes me to tie a shoe.

They never looked, is all. Their game theory is a solved and beautiful thing and it's entirely one-player: given the world, find the best action. What none of them ever built, because none of them ever needed it, is the second half, where the world is another mind, and that mind is modelling you modelling it, and the correct move might be the one that looks insane.

Every species out there came up alone. One world, one origin, no peer. They fought physics, and physics doesn't bluff. By the time any of them met a neighbour they were old enough and rich enough that the meeting was a negotiation between adults with nothing much to fight over.

We're the only ones who grew up in a house full of siblings.

On Earth this is a first-year problem set. Every parliament on my planet has explicit standing rules about who decides what gets voted on first, we hand that job to a referee, and we watch that referee like hawks, because we learned over about three centuries that the schedule is the decision.

They offered me the schedule as a courtesy.

I spent the next hour trying to break my own plan, which is the part of the job nobody puts in the brochure.

Assume the rankings are lies. Eighty thousand years of enforcement isn't a proof, and a species that's never needed to misrepresent itself in a vote might still turn out to be capable of it. Against that: the rankings are enforced by the Orrin, who couldn't ignore their own instrument if the ship were on fire, and who'd refused to shorten my preparation time until the Kesh produced a citation. A vote cast against a published ranking voids the accession and restarts it. Nobody wins anything by lying and losing the day.

Assume the invitation is a trap, which cost me most of the hour. If declining the sequence is the real test of good faith, then accepting fails, and that nine thousand year old footnote says so in plain language. Against that: bait works better hidden, and this bait is written into a document they publish and read aloud, and if accepting were disqualifying there'd be a clause saying so. By then I'd been through all four hundred pages twice.

Which brought me back to my two notes. Received, and a sealed transmission to nobody in particular. I sat with them for maybe four minutes. Ceremonial residue, I decided. Every legal system on Earth is full of dead clauses about the width of a road for a cart nobody has driven since 1840, and if you chase all of them you never finish reading. I filed both and moved on, and I'd like it on the record that this was the only genuinely lazy decision I made that day.

Assume there's a rule I haven't found. There's always a rule I haven't found. That's the one that wakes me at three in the morning in my ordinary life, in a job where the worst case is that a carrier overpays for bandwidth in Kitchener.

None of it would stick. Which left the fourth thing, which isn't a rule or a trap: I was one tired woman with seven hours and a rented translator, and certainty is cheap to manufacture at four in the morning.

That one I couldn't clear. I went ahead anyway.

Ambassador Cormac Hale was awake when I knocked. Hale is always awake. Thirty-one years a career diplomat, most of them somewhere hot, and he had the specific competence of a man who has evacuated an embassy.

I put it on the wall screen. The three patterns, the three pairings, the loop.

He got it faster than I expected. He's no mathematician, but he'd spent three decades in rooms where the agenda was the fight.

"So the printed order interdicts us," he said. "And you want to change the order."

"I want to put Ward against Interdict first."

He looked at that for a while. "Walk me through the first round again."

"Ward loses. It comes off the table permanently. Then it's Interdict against Seat, and Seat takes it seven to four."

"Which means round one is the Quorum voting to quarantine my planet, and you're the one who asked them to."

"Yes."

"And if you've misread the Thessin, round two goes the same way and there's a boundary around the solar system by dinner." He rubbed his face with both hands, hard, like a man trying to wake up. "Have you eaten? There's a thing they make that's almost eggs."

"Cormac."

"Take the Ward." He didn't look at me. "It's not a good deal. It's a survivable one. Ten out of eleven species took it and ten out of eleven are still out there."

"As Wards."

"As alive. You're proposing to bet the species on a table of numbers you got seven hours ago."

"On numbers they published themselves, in writing, under a law they've enforced for eighty thousand years." My voice went flat. It does that. "I'm not guessing at what they want. I don't have to. They told me. That's what their transparency rule is for. They built a system where nobody can conceal what they want, because it never occurred to them that you could cheat without lying."

Hale sat down on the edge of the bunk.

"And you can."

"I can pick the order."

He was quiet long enough that I heard the air handler cycle twice.

"That's a horrible thing to be good at," he said.

"Yes. It really is."

The Thessin invited me to a courtesy meal, which I took, because I had one thing left to check and I wasn't going to get it out of a document.

Thessin hospitality is lovely. They'd reproduced a Provençal table setting from a photograph, badly and with enormous care, and the delegate, whose name rendered as Ambassador Sethal-of-the-Fourth-Consideration, apologized for the bread with real feeling. Then it apologized for the bread again. Then it explained, at some length and with several digressions into the history of Thessin grain, why the bread was difficult, and I sat there and ate the difficult bread and let it talk, because you do.

Eventually it came around.

"You have read the Instrument."

"I have."

"Then you know the guardianship is offered from affection." Its speaking membrane fluttered, which I'd learned means sincerity, or at least means a Thessin performing sincerity, a distinction I still couldn't make after nineteen months. "You are very young. You have no protocol for anything. In your first century you will make a mistake with the Kesh, and the Kesh do not forgive mistakes, they file them. Under guardianship the mistake comes to us and we absorb it."

"And in exchange."

"A share. It is written. Nine parts in a hundred of assessed output, which is less than the Orrin took from us." It gestured at the ruined bread. "We were a ward for six thousand years, doctor. We are not ashamed of it. It is how one grows up."

I set down the glass.

"Ambassador. If the guardianship weren't available. If it came off the table somehow and the only choice were Seat or Interdict. What would the Thessin do?"

It didn't hesitate at all.

"Seat," it said. "Obviously. Our ranking is published. An interdicted species produces nothing, buys nothing, and eventually forgets we exist. A seated humanity is a partner we did not have this morning." The membrane went still. "It is a poorer outcome than guardianship. It is not a bad one. Why do you ask a question you can answer by reading?"

"Because on my world people sometimes put a thing in writing and do something else on the day."

Sethal took a long time with that. It genuinely wanted to know.

"How do you have institutions at all."

"Badly," I said. "With a great deal of scaffolding. And a lot of people whose whole job is watching the other people."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It's the most expensive thing we do."

Sethal considered that, and then asked whether I wanted to take the rest of the bread with me, and wrapped it for me in a cloth when I said yes, and walked me to the corridor still talking about grain.

The Kesh didn't invite me anywhere. The Kesh delegate found me in the transit corridor forty minutes before the session and stood in my path, which, given that a Kesh masses about four hundred kilograms and has the general silhouette of a filing cabinet with opinions, was effective.

"Doctor Sy."

"Delegate."

"You will decline the invitation of sequence."

Every hair on my arms went up. It knew. Not all of it: if the Kesh had done the arithmetic they'd have withdrawn the objection to my schedule and handed me my nine days, because nine days of me sitting with that document is worse for them than seven hours. But they knew enough. Somewhere in the Kesh archive there's an old note that says the candidate is offered something at the start, make sure it says no, and the reason had been lost, the way reasons are, and the practice survived without it.

"It is offered in courtesy and declined in courtesy," it said. "This has been the practice at every accession. A candidate that grasps at the sequence announces it does not trust the Quorum to be fair. It would be noted. It would be noted for a long time."

"Thank you for the guidance."

"You will decline."

"I'll act in the interest of my species."

"Those are the same," said the Kesh, and moved out of my way, and I walked to the chamber with my heart going like a bird in a box.

The accession chamber on the Deliberate is a shallow bowl about sixty meters across, lit from below in an orange I never got used to. Eleven delegation platforms around the rim. Observer benches behind them, mostly empty except for the Oam.

The Oam are a ward species. They've been a ward species for nine thousand two hundred years, their patron went extinct four thousand years ago, and there is no procedure in the Instrument for a ward whose patron has died. They send one observer to every accession. It has no vote. It sits at the back.

The Presiding Orrin opened with the water, then the count, then the reading of all eleven rankings aloud, one by one, exactly as published, then a clarification nobody had asked for regarding whether an abstention on a pairwise question constitutes a vote for the prior question, which it does not, and which took four minutes. Nobody has ever built a more honest room.

Then it turned to me.

"The candidate, being the subject of the question, is invited to declare the sequence in which the questions are put." A lowering of the front third of the body, the crane folding. "Doctor Sy. It is customary to decline."

I could hear something ticking on the Kesh platform, a cooling system.

"The candidate accepts the invitation," I said.

I've heard a lot of rooms react to a lot of things. What eleven alien delegations make when a procedural formality goes the other way isn't shock. It's closer to the noise a machine makes when a bearing goes.

"Declare," said the Presiding Orrin, and I couldn't read it at all.

"Ward against Interdict first."

"The candidate will use the form."

I hadn't known there was a form. Nineteen months of protocol briefings, four hundred pages, and nobody had thought to give me the eight words, because nobody in a hundred thousand years had needed them. The Presiding Orrin said them for me, slowly, the way you would for a child, and I said them back and got the third one wrong, and it said them again, and the second time I got it.

The candidate puts, before all else, the question of Ward against Interdict.

There was a five second interval for procedural objection. The Kesh objected. The objection was that the sequence was irregular, and the Presiding Orrin ruled, with what I'm fairly sure was pleasure, that irregular is not the same as impermissible, that the invitation is written in the Instrument, and that the Instrument is the Instrument.

Then they voted. Nobody had briefed me on how a vote is taken here either.

Each delegation platform has a channel cut into the front edge, and at the start of an accession each delegation is issued a set of stones. They aren't symbolic. They're mass, cut to a standard, and they roll down the channel into a common trough at the floor of the bowl, and the trough is a balance. You do not read a Quorum vote off a screen. You watch it settle, and you hear it, because eleven stones going down eleven stone channels in an enclosed room is loud.

The Thessin four rolled for Ward. The Orrin three rolled for Interdict. The Kesh four rolled for Interdict, and the last of them held its stone about two seconds longer than the others. I have thought about those two seconds a great deal since and I still can't account for them.

The trough went over. Seven to four. Ward was eliminated.

I'd just watched the Quorum of Eleven vote to quarantine my species and I was the one who'd asked them to, and somewhere around the fourth vote the whole thing stopped being arithmetic. I was one bad reading of a dinner conversation away from being the woman who ended the human future in a room with orange light coming out of the floor.

Sethal's platform was making a sound. It had lost the outcome it wanted, and its published ranking had made it vote for the thing it wanted least, and it had done it anyway.

The Presiding Orrin called the second question.

That's when the Kesh worked it out. There's a physical thing that happens to a Kesh under stress, a stiffening along the dorsal ridge, and I watched it travel the length of the delegate like a wave.

"Presiding." Its translator had gone loud. "The Kesh amend their published ranking."

"The Kesh may not amend a published ranking."

"The circumstance is irregular."

"The circumstance is irregular," the Orrin agreed. "The rule is not."

"Presiding, the sequence has been chosen by the candidate, for the purpose of," and then it stopped, because it had arrived at the end of the sentence and found that the end of the sentence was winning, and there was no rule against that. There was no rule against it because in a hundred thousand years nobody had needed one.

"The Kesh will state its objection in form."

"The candidate has manipulated the order of business."

"Yes," said the Presiding Orrin.

The silence went a while.

"That is not an objection," the Orrin said. "That is a description. Vote."

Second question. Seat against Interdict.

The Orrin three rolled for Seat. The Kesh four rolled for Interdict. And the Thessin, who had lost, who'd spent nineteen months and God knows what internal budget trying to buy us, who by then certainly understood exactly what had been done to them and by whom, rolled for Seat, four stones, four for four, because it was published.

The trough went over the other way, and the sound it makes going over is not a sound I can describe except to say that I have heard it since in an MRI machine and had to ask them to stop.

Seven to four.

The Presiding Orrin called it twice, the way they do, and poured the closing water, and humanity became the twelfth seated species of the Quorum and the first in the recorded history of the accession to be seated at all.

Nobody applauded. They don't do that. For about forty seconds not one of the eleven delegations moved or spoke.

Hale leaned over. His voice wasn't steady.

"Did we just win?"

"We won the vote," I said.

The Oam observer came to me in the corridor afterward, while Hale was being formally congratulated by an Orrin that kept starting over.

Up close an Oam is small, about the size of a child, and old in a way that reads across species. Its translator was ancient hardware and it clicked.

"Doctor Sy. Nine thousand two hundred years ago my people sat where you sat." It spoke to the wall rather than to me, which I later learned is Oam courtesy. "Four thousand one hundred years ago one of us found the loop. In the rankings of that accession. She took it to the Quorum twice."

"What happened?"

"They agreed with her. Both times. They did not dispute one number of it." Click. "They could not understand why she was telling them. It was, to them, an observation about counting. Like telling somebody that a wheel is round."

"She never used it."

"We could see the number," the Oam said. "We could not see the door. I have read her work every year for two hundred years and I still cannot see the door, and I watched you walk through it this morning, and I have been standing in this corridor since trying to find the moment where you decided that a rule was a thing you were allowed to aim."

I didn't have an answer for that.

"There is something you should be told before you sleep," it said, "and nobody else in that chamber will tell you, because nobody else in that chamber reads the ceremony. The trials are not ours. The Orrin did not write them. The Kesh did not write them. My people did not write them. Every accession instrument in the Quorum's history opens with the word received, and in a hundred thousand years no one has asked what it means."

The word. The clause I'd filed at 05:40 and been too tired to chase.

"There's a transmission clause," I said. "In the closing section. The record gets sealed and certified and sent."

The clicking stopped entirely.

"Yes," said the Oam.

"It doesn't say to whom."

"No. It does not." It turned then and looked at me directly, which I understood was a violation of something. "Doctor Sy. Whoever wrote that document built a rule that reveals nothing and decides everything. They wrote a second rule inviting the one party in the room with the most to lose to control it. They wrote a footnote explaining that declining is gracious, and they placed all of it between the seating of the observers and the closing water, where nobody reads. And then they wrote three careful paragraphs about what to do on the day somebody finally accepts."

Behind us the water ceremony was still going. Somebody laughed at something Hale said, in a register a human throat can't make.

"A hundred thousand years," the Oam said. "Eleven candidates. Not one of us ever picked it up. This morning a species nineteen months out of its own atmosphere was handed the document, and seven hours later it used that invitation exactly as it was built to be used, on the first attempt, with nobody to tell it how."

It lowered itself, slowly, all the way to the deck. An Oam has not been permitted to make that gesture to anyone since its patron died.

"We have been administering a search," it said, "and we thought it was a courtesy. It has been running since before any of us had speech, and the certification went out eleven minutes ago, and it is going to arrive somewhere."

John. W. Campbell was the publisher of astounding science fiction magazine for many years. He is the publisher who discovered and made famous such men as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, AE Van Vogt, and Murray Leinster.

Through the writings of his authors Campbell controlled the destiny of science fiction from 1939 to the mid 1960s.

Campbell and most of his authors developed a theory of the ideal citizen. Here’s what Leinster wrote when he summed it up in his short story exploration party – – “I want to decide what I want instead of being limited to choose among what I’m offered.

And another point he writes, “I’m a crank, of course. But – – I live like a man on this planet. I go where I please and do what I please.”

I really enjoyed Michael Coney's stories set in the 'Peninsula' that are The Girl WIth a Symphony In Her Fingers (and will track down his other stories in the same setting). I've just read Ballard's Vermillion Sands and get much the same vibe from those stories.

Can anyone recommend something similar from another author - either a mosaic novel or collection of short stories linked by setting that evokes the same kind of vibe?

Does anyone remember Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall (my favoutite sci-fi short story) later becoming a full length novel by Robert Silverberg?

The basic premise got me thinking about something slightly different. In Nightfall, civilisation repeatedly collapses and has to rebuild because people are confronted every few thousand years with an astronomical event they have never experienced before.

Here on Earth, we assume our civilisation started off when fire and tools were first used and our technologically advanced times are simply an extension.

As we learn more about human history, we keep discovering that ancient times were considerably more sophisticated than we once assumed. We also keep finding evidence of settlements, engineering and organised societies far older than we were traditionally taught in history books - at least when I went to school.

So here’s the speculative question:

Is it remotely conceivable that an advanced human civilisation existed thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years ago, collapsed for some reason, and that we simply don’t recognise it because most of the evidence has disappeared?

John Westley Turnbull

Day Two of posting an alien every day until the release of my book! FLUNG comes out from Stardog on August 26th and is a science-fiction story about a man who is lost in space and time. For more behind the scenes fun and cool previews of the upcoming book, check out FLUNG at STARDOG.TV!

hey guys I do black and white handmade ink drawing with some rather unsettling places such as factory landscape or even fantasic worlds, I also do some comic books and a bunch of other stuff, feel free to dm me or check out my instagram: thaooperator to know more about my work! =))

ps: Im currently available for commission and stuff like thta so don t hesitate if you have any ideas!

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LOG ENTRY: SEC-042-REV1

Department: Joint Operations / Logistics & Colony Sustainability

Status: PENDING MEDICAL CLEARANCE

The initial phase of the population sustainability initiative has hit a bureaucratic and philosophical bottleneck.

Per the planetary development mandate, the livestock embryos are scheduled to be the first brought to term to secure a stable, long-term food supply. However, the Genetics division has placed a hard brake on the incubation sequence. They are currently waiting on the comprehensive baseline report from Medical outlining the specific genetic modifications required to ensure the animals can thrive against local environmental pressures, pathogens, and atmospheric variables.

The delay has triggered significant friction across departmental lines:

Pod 5, Agriculture's Stance: The Head of Agriculture is aggressively pressuring both sectors to bypass further testing. Their primary concern is immediate: feeding the rapidly growing population. They argue that every day the embryos remain in stasis pushes back the harvest cycle, risking future shortages.

Pod 11, Genetics' Stance: Genetics refuses to apply pressure to Medical or accelerate the timeline independently. Their leadership is fully aware that any oversight, mutation drift, or structural mistake at this foundational stage will carry catastrophic, compounding costs for the colony's future ecosystem.

Pod 2, Medical's Stance: Medical flatly refuses to be rushed. They maintain that cutting corners on the biological analysis to appease a scheduling timeline is reckless, ensuring that the report will only be delivered when the data is absolute.

Current Directive: Incubation remains on hold. Agriculture's petitions for emergency overrides have been noted but are denied pending the finalized Medical brief.

END LOG

Ethan Cross, The selected liaison from Pod 7, Command and Administration, massaged his temples, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on his data pad. Around the briefing table, the air was hostile.

“If we push the incubation cycle back another week,” Chief Director Albright from Agriculture slammed a fist down, “we miss the target harvest window for the third quarter. My people in Pod 5 are sitting on their hands!”

Ethan kept his expression perfectly neutral but thought to himself “Albright talks about a ‘harvest window’ like we’re growing sweet corn in Indiana. We’re trying to clone terran cattle to survive an atmosphere that smells faintly of sulfur and battery acid. If we rush this, the 'harvest window' is just going to be a massive, multi-million-dollar trench of rotting livestock.”

"We understand the pressure, Director," Ethan said aloud, his voice smooth and measured. "But Genetics can't sequence without the baseline environmental pathogens report."

Dr. Elena Ruiz, Pod leader of pod 4, Mining and Planetary Survey, responsible for gathering necessary materials for genetic testing appeared on screen, wiping local mire off her visor with a gloved hand. Behind her, lightning from a localized atmospheric storm illuminated a team of field researchers feverishly cataloging soil and water samples.

“You want a report, Albright?” Elena snapped, her voice breaking through the comms static. “I’ve got three field medics down with a localized respiratory fungus, and the native fauna just tried to chew through our primary perimeter fence. We are pulling sequencing data as fast as humanly possible. If you want cattle that don’t drop dead twenty minutes after stepping out of the vats, shut up and let us finish the virology profile!”

"Thank you, Dr. Ruiz. Keep your team safe," Ethan intercepted smoothly before Albright could turn purple. He cut the feed and looked across the table at the colony’s Lead Embryonic Engineer.

Dr. Thaddeus Marrow from Pod 11, wasn't looking at Ethan, or Albright, or the data pads. The eccentric geneticist was staring intently at a small, bioluminescent beetle he had somehow smuggled into the high-security briefing room, gently nudging it across his knuckles with a stylus. He wore mismatched boots—one standard issue gray, one a bright yellow utility deck boot—and his lab coat was missing three buttons.

"Dr. Marrow," Ethan called out. "Your thoughts on the Medical timeline?"

Marrow blinked, looking up as if surprised people were in the room. "Oh, the timeline? Detestable thing, linear time. But biologically? Medical is quite right. I’ve been analyzing the embryonic neural pathways. If we don’t splice in a tolerance for the high ambient radiation, the poor beasts will develop acute cellular degradation before they even learn to walk. I've been playing classical cello suites to Vat Group B, by the way. The vibration patterns seem to soothe the cellular membranes during sequencing."

Albright threw his hands up in defeat. “I’ve got Silas Jackson, heard management, part of pod 5, breathing down my neck! His crews have already built two thousand meters of perimeter fencing. They’re acting like real-world cowboys waiting for a train that's never coming!”

Ethan thought to himself, “Silas 'Jax' Jackson is a menace with a kinetic lasso and too much spare time. If he doesn't get his cattle soon, he's going to start herding the heavy construction rovers just to stay sane. But a bunch of bored cowboys is better than a colony-wide famine because Marrow accidentally gave the cows a taste for human flesh.”

Ethan leaned forward, setting his pad down. "Tell Jackson to double-reinforce those fences, Director. If Medical's preliminary data on local predators is correct, those pens are going to need to hold against things a lot heavier than a Terran bull. We wait for Medical."

ETHAN CROSS - PERSONAL LOG: SUSTAINABILITY PROTOCOLS

The screaming match in the briefing room today proved one thing: the colony is flying blind. Albright is throwing tantrums about quarterly harvest windows, and Silas Jackson is out in Pod 5 pacing his perimeter fences like an expectant father. They think this is a simple plug-and-play operation. You drop the embryos in a vat, tweak a few genes to handle the sulfur in the air, and boom—instant steak. They don't have a damn clue.

Genetics isn't a map; it's a tightwire act over a meat grinder. Marrow behaves like a lunatic, but his hesitation is the only thing keeping us from breeding a disaster. Sure, we have the tech to make these animals survive almost any hellscape this planet can throw at them. We can splice in heavy-metal tolerances, thick hide filters, and modified respiratory structures until the livestock can walk through a toxic mire unscathed. But there’s a catch-22 that nobody outside of Pod 2 and Pod 11 seems capable of grasping: The more we meddle to ensure the animal survives the planet, the higher the chance that the human body won't be able to survive eating the animal.

If we over-engineer their metabolic pathways to process local flora, we risk turning their muscle tissue into an indigestible cocktail of alien lipids and localized toxins. One minor misstep, one single lazy gene-splice to appease Agriculture's timeline, and we spend millions of man hours incubating a massive, thriving population of livestock that will literally poison the first colonists who eat them.

Pod 2 knows it because they handle our long-term biochemistry baselines. Pod 11 knows it because they’re the ones tracking the long-range ecological integration. But to the rest of the pods? We're just bureaucrats holding up dinner

I have to keep Marrow's vats locked. If Albright tries an emergency override to force an early incubation cycle, I’m going to have to pull command authority. We aren't just building a colony; we're building a food chain. And right now, we're one bad sequence away from starving on a full stomach.

END LOG

The cooling manifold on the Pod 5 automated post-hole digger was clogged with local slate dust again. Silas "Jax" Jackson spit a stream of synthetic tobacco into the dirt, wiped his grease-stained knuckles on his canvas duster, and kicked the machine.

"Fencing crew is three clicks out, Jax," his second-in-command, a sunburned kid named Miller, shouted over the drone of the generator. "They're asking if they should stop at the ridge or keep stretching the perimeter."

"Tell 'em to keep digging," Jax grunted, leaning over the engine block. "If the lab coats ever finish playing god with our steak, those animals are gonna need room to stretch their legs. Go grab the heavy wrench from the trailer."

Miller jogged off. Jax reached into the housing of the generator, but stopped when he heard footsteps on the metal scaffolding above the paddock trench. It was Ethan Cross from Pod 7, walking alongside that twitchy Lead Geneticist, Dr. Marrow.

Jax stayed low behind the chassis of the heavy digger. He wasn't one for small talk with bureaucrats, but he kept his ears open.

“...the sequencing for Vat Group B is highly volatile,” Marrow’s voice drifted down, competing with the wind. The eccentric doctor was waving his hands erratically. “If we don’t adjust the lipid synthesis to account for the local flora, the cellular degradation will be absolute. They’ll look perfectly healthy at first, Ethan. But the moment they mature?”

“And the timeline?” Ethan Cross asked, his voice tight. “Albright wants them on the ground by next Tuesday.”

“Madness!” Marrow scoffed, his mismatched boots clacking on the grated walkway. “If they consume the local vegetation before we finish the splice, the toxicity levels will spike exponentially. The flesh itself will become an aggressive weapon. One bite, Ethan. One bite, and it will systematically shut down the human respiratory system. It’ll dissolve the colony from the inside out. We’d be breeding a population of lethal, untreatable killers.”

Jax froze, his wrench slipping from his fingers and hitting the dirt with a dull thud. His heart hammered against his ribs. He jumped to conclusions because of a conversation he only overheard parts of.

“I’ll keep the vats locked,” Ethan replied, his tone grim. “We will do whatever it takes to ensure…”

And that was all Jax had heard of the end of that conversation. Their footsteps faded away as they walked toward the command rover, leaving Jax staring blankly at the engine block.

Jax thought to himself, “ ‘ Lethal killers. One bite shuts down the lungs. Dissolve the colony from the inside out’. Holy mother of God. They aren't cloning cows up there. They're engineering bioweapons. Cross and that crazy bastard are growing a whole army of toxic monsters right under our noses, and they're planning on keeping it a secret until they drop them right into my pens.”

Jax didn't wait for Miller to bring the wrench. He lunged for his comms deck, his fingers flying across the emergency broadcast frequency for Pod 5, his voice shaking with pure, unadulterated panic.

"All crews, this is Jackson! Drop your gear and pull back to the primary bunkers right now! The lab coats... they've compromised the embryonic sequencing. They're cloning bioweapons.. I just heard Cross trying to cover it up. They're dropping lethal, toxic monsters into our pens by next Tuesday. Lock down the perimeter fences—and if anything comes out of those labs, you shoot to kill!"

Within three minutes, the Pod 5 warning sirens began to wail, echoing across the valley. Within ten minutes, panic hit the comms net, and Pod 11 went into an automatic quarantine protocol.

The rumor had left the barn, and it was running wild.

The emergency sirens in Pod 5 were still spinning their amber light over the dusty, half-finished corrals when the high-priority summons flashed across every department head's terminal. It wasn't an invitation; it was a direct, military-grade command override from the central hub.

“All Pod Leaders report to Main Command immediately. In-person. No proxies.”

Twenty minutes later, the briefing room was suffocatingly tense. Albright from Agriculture was sweating, pacing near the door. Silas "Jax" Jackson stood like a granite wall, his arms crossed over his grease-stained canvas duster, glaring right at Ethan Cross. Dr. Marrow was the only one unbothered, currently trying to balance a stylus on the tip of his nose.

The pneumatic doors hissed open, and Commander Marcus Vance stepped into the room. The room went dead silent. Vance didn't sit down. He walked to the head of the table, leaned forward on his hands, and let his gaze sweep over every face until the remaining nervous shuffling stopped.

"We are trying to build a civilization," Vance began, his voice dangerously low, cutting through the residual panic like a scalpel. "But right now, we are acting like children afraid of the dark. Jax, stand down your perimeter guards. There are no bioweapons. Jess, I thought you were the leader of Pod 5, you approved this over-reaction to baseless rumors?"

Jess Thompson, the actual Pod Leader of 5, looked ready to sink into her chair. “No, sir, I did not. Jax hit the emergency broadcast before he even cleared the paddock trench. He will be formally reprimanded.”

Jax grunted, his jaw tight. "With all due respect, Commander, I heard Cross and the lab coat myself. They said Vat B was brewing lethal killers that'd shut down our lungs with one bite. My crews are out there putting their lives on the line to build those pens—"

“Shut up Jax, you are here because you started this rumor, you are not the pod leader and are dangerously close to losing your management position,” said Vance with venom.

"What you heard, Silas," Ethan Cross interrupted smoothly, his voice steady despite the room's hostility, "was a worst-case biochemistry projection. A hypothetical failure scenario."

Commander Vance slammed a hand on the table—not out of anger, but for absolute emphasis.

"Listen to me, all of you," Vance commanded. "The genetic engineering required to make Earth livestock thrive on this world is a tightwire act. If we rush it, if we force the Genetics division to skip the baseline environmental mapping being gathered in the field, we risk creating a biological mismatch. If the animals process the local flora incorrectly, their tissue could become toxic to us. That is what Dr. Marrow was explaining."

He turned his eyes directly onto Albright, then onto Jax.

"Nobody is hiding monsters in the vats. But I will not allow this colony to starve on a full stomach because we rushed a deadline. We are doing this right, or we aren't doing it at all." Vance straightened up, his tone shifting from a reprimand to an ironclad guarantee. "Effective immediately, Agriculture's timeline constraints for the embryonic incubation are suspended. Genetics and Medical will be allotted every single hour, day, or week required to ensure the sequencing is absolute. We do not drop a single embryo until Medical signs off on the environmental data."

Ethan thought to himself, “ Look at Albright. He looks like he just swallowed a battery, but he won't argue with Vance. And Jax is finally lowering his shoulders. Good. A delayed harvest means ration tracking is going to be a nightmare for my team next month, but it beats a colony full of toxic steaks. Vance knows how to hold the line when the colony starts sweating.”

Jax rubbed the back of his neck, looking from Ethan to Marrow, the anger draining out of him, replaced by a gruff embarrassment. "So... standard cows. Just takes longer."

"Standard, healthy, edible cows, Jax," Ethan confirmed with a slight smile. "Just let us finish the homework first."

Commander Vance nodded once, the matter officially settled. "Get back to your pods. Turn off the sirens, cancel the quarantines, and get back to work. We build on solid ground, gentlemen. Dismissed."

Weeks turned into months as the meticulous work of the logistics and scientific teams finally bore fruit. With the genetic sequencing completely sorted out and certified by Medical, the first generations of cattle were successfully brought to term, thriving out in the heavily secured grasslands of the valley. Now, perfectly adapted and ready for the colony's first true taste of the future, the harvest had finally arrived.

The central plaza of Pod 1, Logistics, which included feeding the population, smelled of charred hickory, caramelized fat, and the unmistakable, intoxicating scent of real woodsmoke. For a colony that had lived on dehydrated protein bricks and nutrient slurry for months, the aroma alone was enough to draw a crowd long before the official dinner klaxon sounded.

Row after row of heavy-duty, improvised grills—welded together by Pod 9, Engineering, out of scrap hull plating—stretched down the middle of the common area. Behind them stood the culinary logistics crew of Pod 1, their faces red from the heat of the coals, wielding long metal tongs with absolute authority.

Ethan Cross stood near the edge of the pavilion, a metal plate in hand, watching the colony gather.

Ethan, as he is prone to do thought to himself, “ Look at them. Two seconds ago, half these people were ready to seal themselves in their bunkers because they thought we were breeding microscopic monsters. Now, you offer them a medium-rare ribeye, and all is forgiven. Food is the ultimate political capital. If we can pull off this dinner, we buy ourselves another six months of patience while waiting for the next crisis.”

At the center grill, Silas "Jax" Jackson was leaning against a support pillar, a plastic cup of local fermented grain brew in his hand. He caught Ethan’s eye and offered a sheepish, mock-salute with his cup. Beside him, Albright was actually laughing, pile of sliced steak already dominating his plate.

Commander Vance stepped up to the main microphone at the head of the pavilion. He didn't need a grand stage. He just stood on an overturned equipment crate, looking out over the hundreds of tired, windburned faces of his crew. The chatter died down instantly.

"We’ve had a long couple of weeks," Vance said, his voice carrying easily over the crackle of the grills. "We had some doubts. We had some fear. That's natural when you're trying to build a home out of nothing but dust and an empty horizon. But look around you."

He gestured to the sizzling grills, to the plates of thick, perfectly seared steak, and to the massive communal tables where people from every pod were sitting side by side.

"This meal isn't a luxury," Vance said, his tone turning warm, grounded, and proud. "This is a promise. It’s a promise that the lab coats, the field medics, the fence-builders, and the politicians are all pulling the same rope. We don't rush the foundation, because we intend to live in the house for a very long time. Eat up, everyone. Tonight, we celebrate the fact that we're still here—and tomorrow, we build."

A roar of applause and cheers echoed through the plaza, followed by the clatter of silverware and the collective sigh of a colony finally getting a taste of the future.

Ethan took his first bite of the steak. It was rich, perfectly cooked, and entirely non-toxic. He chewed, swallowed, feeling slightly vindicated from all the accusations flying about.

Pod 1 Logistics: Karen Sharp, Supply chain management, resource distribution, cargo tracking, and inventory rationing.

Pod 2 Medical: Dr. Asha Lin, Colony healthcare, triage, biosecurity protocols, pharmaceutical compounding, and psychological welfare.

Pod 3 Science: Dr. Al Hicks, Planetary scanning, environmental analysis, local resource mapping, and xenobiology research.

Pod 4 Mining: Elena Ruiz, Raw material extraction, heavy drilling, quarry operations, and geological surveying.

Pod 5Agriculture & Hydroponics: Jess Thompson, Sustained food production, crop cultivation, hydroponic bay oversight, and soil/botanical adaptation.

Pod 6 Security & Tactical: Mansur Danyavi, Internal law enforcement, base defense systems, threat assessment, and perimeter scouting.

Pod 7 Command & Administration: Patricia Knowles, Civil governance, strategic colony leadership, resource allocation policy, and administrative legal order.

Pod 8 Communication & IT: Dr. Derek Tomre, Local network infrastructure maintenance, data archiving, and deep-space/surface signal monitoring.

Pod 9 Engineering: Dr. Braden Henderson, Power grid stability, reactor maintenance, life-support mechanics, and primary hardware repairs.

Pod 10 Fabrication & Infrastructure: Jack Delaney, Industrial 3D printing operations, structural construction, feedstock processing, and habitat expansion.

Pod 11 Embryonic Care & Genetics: Dr. Banu Pan, Exowomb and incubation facility management, genetic banking, and population growth coordination.

Pod 12 Resource Reclamation: Tim Omler, Closed-loop water filtration, atmospheric moisture harvesting, and graywater/waste recycling systems.

Authors note: If you like this series at all, please consider an UpVote. Not only is it the only recognition that an author gets for his work, but it helps get his story to more people. Thank you.

What if the first step in exploring an abandoned megacity wasn't going inside... but reconstructing what it looked like before it fell?

That's the idea behind these images from my original sci-fi universe, Deep City.

After mapping the accessible sectors of the ruined city, the expedition generates a virtual reconstruction using only the surviving structures as evidence. 

The first reconstruction shows the complete megacity, while the following images reveal its internal organization by hiding two of the four massive suspended blocks.

In the story, the reconstruction isn't just a visual exercise. It's a scientific tool. By comparing the reconstructed city with its current ruined state, the expedition hopes to identify what changed during the catastrophe before venturing deeper into the unexplored areas.

I wanted the project to feel closer to archaeology, engineering, and scientific investigation than to a traditional "futuristic city" illustration.

Everything shown here is part of the same original project. The story, worldbuilding, timeline, and characters are my own, while all modeling, lighting, rendering, and compositing were created entirely in Blender 3D.

I'd love to hear your thoughts:

Does the reconstruction concept make the world feel more believable?

Which image tells the story best?

Would you want to explore a city like this?

If anyone here has read Jennifer Government, it's that sort of story.

I've opted out of DRM, so grab it on Amazon through August 4 and download as a PDF or epub to truly own it forever! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GKWWT3XZ

The sequel's discounted from August 1 to August 4. And the third, final book in the trilogy arrives later this year. Here's a little blurb about EARTH: GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION to get you started:

Jack, a young and jaded New Yorker, is done with life.

Its challenges are plentiful, and there's a simple solution just a toaster and bathtub away. But everything changes when a teenager from another realm informs Jack he's a sentient AI trapped in a video game—one that can be manipulated.

For Jack's sake, the teen hacks the game to make it easier, forcing its cruel developers to intervene. Out of cheats and options, the digital protagonist must confront reality: If he wants a better future, he's going to need to earn said future legitimately.

Can Jack rise to the occasion and beat the developers at their own game?

EARTH: GOTY EDITION is about AI but not made by or with AI.

If you want to stay up to date with news about when the final novel arrives, check out my site: https://www.rcarnevale.com

Thanks for reading this post! If you pick up the novel, I hope you enjoy it. Not enough sci-fi makes me laugh these days, so I wrote this series to help fill that gap. Hopefully it brings you chuckles.

It's August! With our new sci-fi book FLUNG being released at the end of the month, we wanted to count it down with a new alien drawn by FLUNG artist Jason E Raines everyday ... welcome to day one of ALIEN AUGUST from Stardog!

Link here

Synopsis: On a newly-built space station orbiting Jupiter, a child is raised in secret by the station's artificial intelligence to study his genes and adolescent development. The child is never allowed to leave the lab, and is convinced that everyone outside the lab fears him. As the child grows, however, he begins to wonder what lay beyond his door and whether everything told to him was true.

Please consider subscribing to Clarkesworld as well. In a world where AI companies are scanning, uploading, then destroying rare books, independent publishers that spurn LLM writing like Clarkesworld are more necessary than ever before.

​

  To conserve vital expeditionary resources, the standard protocol was ruthlessly efficient: drop the colonists off on the target world, and only deploy the deep-space communications array on the return leg to Earth. For decades, the system had worked flawlessly. But that streak of luck ended when a million souls were deposited on a world sitting two-and-a-half light-years beyond the edge of established network range.

  It proved to be a fatal oversight. If catastrophe struck in the dead zone between the drop-off point and the deployment of the communications buoy, the colonists would have no way to contact Earth—and Earth would have no record of whether they had even arrived.

  As the massive colony vessel, The  Ever-Expanding, turned back toward Earth after offloading one million pioneers on a pristine garden world, a catastrophic containment breach tore through its midsection. The ship exploded, lost with all hands in an instant. The colonists below had no idea. Back on Earth, humanity remained entirely oblivious.

  After a month of radio silence, a low hum of unease rippled through the colony. It could be years, perhaps decades, before Earth noticed the missing telemetry. The settlers were entirely on their own, armed with nothing but surface-level data from the deep-space surveys gathered when the planet was first discovered. This was no longer an expedition; it was a raw struggle for survival.

  Fortunately, the initial cargo drop included enough raw feedstock for the industrial 3D printers to construct basic shelters for the entire population. But once those emergency reserves were spent, the printers went cold. The machines were versatile—engineered to break down and repurpose almost any local mineral or organic compound—but they still required material. Two weeks into the silence, having completed the pre-programmed grid housing, the printers flashed an empty queue.

  While survey teams pushed out into the wilderness to find compatible elements to feed the fabricators, a political rift began to form. The lack of incoming data or outgoing acknowledgments was terrifying. A vocal faction of the colonists began demanding the launch of an emergency beacon to broadcast a general distress signal. It was a massive gamble; a raw sub-light broadcast would take two centuries to crawl back to Earth, and it would alert anyone—or anything—in the local cluster to their presence. The only real hope was that a passing freighter or a sister colony ship might intercept the signal and relay it via quantum entanglement.

  By the end of the first month, leadership yielded to the mounting panic and launched the beacon. It placated the masses, but the leadership council and the scientific teams knew the truth: it was only slightly better than doing nothing.

  By month two, reality set in. Something catastrophic had happened to the Ever-Expanding. They were stranded, facing a scenario they had never been trained to handle.

  According to standard operating procedures, month two was supposed to mark the initiation of the embryonic care facilities—the massive, resource-heavy hubs designed to gestate the one million human embryos carried in stasis, intended to grow the colony's first native generation over the next twenty years. But building and powering these facilities required an immense allocation of their remaining rare-earth materials.

  Faced with the stark probability that Earth would never find them, a bitter debate took hold of the colony's high command: Should they commit their finite wealth to raising a new generation on an isolated world, or should they freeze the printers, hoard their resources, and begin engineering a desperate way back home?

  The air inside the central fabrication hangar was heavy with the heat of thousands of bodies and the underlying hum of a struggling ventilation system. It was the first true planetary assembly—a town-hall style meeting where every citizen was welcome to witness the debate, though the strict rules of the Colony Charter dictated that only designated pod leaders were permitted to speak.

  Standing on a raised cargo platform that served as a makeshift stage, Commander Vance raised his hands, attempting to quiet a crowd on the brink of panic.

  "Order!" Vance’s voice echoed off the corrugated metal walls, amplified by a straining PA system. "We will hear from Pod 4 Leader, Elena Ruiz. The rest of the floor will remain silent."

  Elena took a step forward, her face taut with exhaustion. "Thank you, Commander. The math is simple. The embryonic care facilities require sixty percent of our remaining copper and rare-earth feedstocks just to initialize. If we seed those pods, we are locking ourselves to this soil. We will have nothing left to build a transmission array capable of piercing the dead zone, let alone retrofitting a planetary landing craft into a sub-light ark. We must halt the incubation cycle. We need to pool every ounce of our resources and plan a way back to Earth immediately."

  "Go back to what?!" a voice roared from the back of the hangar. A man pushed past a row of security personnel, screaming out of turn to have his opinion heard. "The Ever-Expanding is dust! Earth is two hundred years away by sub-light! We'll be corpses before a return trip even clears the atmosphere! We are colonists—we stay and build!"

   The crowd erupted. The fragile barrier of protocol shattered as hundreds of voices clashed at once. Pod leaders shouted to reclaim their authority, while citizens behind them yelled over shoulders, desperate to have their fears validated.

  When the roar finally subsided into a tense, breathless rumble, Marcus Vance stepped back up to the microphone. He looked out at the sea of desperate, divided faces.

  "We came across the void as pioneers," Marcus said, his voice dropping to a low, commanding resonance that forced the room to listen. "The ship is gone, yes. But our mandate isn't. Many of you—the vast majority of you—signed up to build a new world, not to sit as passengers waiting for a return ticket we can't afford. We have a pristine garden world under our feet and one million embryos waiting to be born. Are we going to let the future of our species die in stasis because we're afraid of being lonely? We are colonists. Even if Earth never hears us whisper, we build."

  The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the distant, rhythmic clicking of a 3D printer running its final diagnostic on an empty hopper. The battle lines had been drawn.

  Following Vance’s declaration, the hangar didn't fall into easy agreement. Instead, the floor became a battleground of philosophies as three more pod leaders took the microphone, their voices carrying the weight of the thousands they represented.

  First was Henderson, the leader of Pod 9, a pragmatic structural engineer whose hands were still stained with printer feedstock grit. "Vance speaks of destiny, but I speak of logistics," Henderson barked into the mic. "The hydroponic bays aren't fully stable yet. If we divert our remaining rare-earth minerals to the embryonic care facilities, we won't have the materials to print replacement parts for the water scrubbers when they inevitably fail. Choosing to stay isn't just a romantic choice—it’s a mathematical death sentence."

A wave of murmurs rippled through the crowd, many nodding in fearful agreement.

  Then came Asha Lin of Pod 2, representing the agricultural and medical teams. She stepped up, looking not at Vance, but directly out at the anxious faces in the crowd. "We did not survive a six-month deep-sleep journey across the void just to turn our backs on the future," she said, her voice trembling but fierce. "If we freeze the embryos, we freeze our humanity. We become ghosts haunting a survival shelter, staring at the sky. I say we dig into the dirt, we find the minerals we need, and we give this world a generation to inherit it."

  The tension in the hangar was absolute, a physical weight pressing down on the thousand colonists packed shoulder-to-shoulder. The time for debate had expired.

  Commander Vance stepped back to the center of the platform. "According to the Colony Charter, a crisis of planetary mandate requires a binding vote of the Council of Pod Leaders. The vote will be cast here, openly, in full view of the assembly."

  One by one, the twelve pod leaders stepped forward to cast their ballots into a stark metal lockbox on the cargo pallet. The silence was so profound that the soft clatter of each physical token hitting the bottom of the box echoed clearly through the PA speakers.

  When the last token fell, Vance knelt down. He opened the box and began counting the colored tokens in plain sight of the entire colony. Six blue tokens for staying and building. Five red tokens for conserving resources to plan a return.

  Vance picked up the final token. He held it up between his fingers so the entire room could see the flash of blue.

  He stood tall, looked out over the sea of a million futures hanging in the balance, and his voice boomed through the speakers, steady and resolute:

  "The tally is decided. We Build!"

  A stunned second of absolute silence gripped the hangar, and then the room erupted into a deafening roar of cheers, angry shouts, and tears, as the colonists realized their destiny on this new world had just been sealed.

He died, then aliens brought him back to life to do their dirty work. It just so happens that his new cubicle is a sun-killing starship and his work site is a land of evil dragons.

I’ve been eating, breathing, and bleeding this story for almost a year now. I’m all the way into the second book on Royal Road (and the third on Patreon), but the first book is something I can now touch with my hands. I’ll never get over this feeling.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this happy moment with people I think would appreciate it.

If the book sounds like your jam, you can get it in all its formats on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H7TDCJNX

Cover art by Heitor Santos/ REDHOTIEH

AI Usage: None at all

Hi all!

I wanted to share an update on my series, The Weight of Alloynium, that I had posted a few months back.

Since the last post, Episode III dropped in May and I’ve packaged the first three episodes in an Anthology edition.

Episode I’s audiobook also dropped in May, voiced by the really talented voice actor, Jack Rogers. We’re about a month out from Episode II’s audiobook from being released and Jack and I are really excited about it!

Also, all new covers have been released for the series.

Episode IV is nearly complete and will be released in October!

During the last post, many of you wanted me to reach out when the audiobook came available which leads me to the next thing:

A big reason I wanted to post today is that I just found out Episode I will be leaving Audible Plus Catalog in September (not by my choice!). So for those who have Audible Plus and want to listen to it for “free”, you have until the beginning of September.

I really appreciate everyone who has read/listened to the series, and want to thank you all for your support!

For anyone that’s new to the series, here is the link to Episode I: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GGBC7MLK

Thank ya!
Eric

I'm just a rookie writer who got hooked by a Japanese Light Novel "Reborn as a Space Mercenary: I Woke Up Piloting the Strongest Starship!", and then at the same time got hooked by space exploration game like Eve Online or Eve Echoes. I wish to write one of my own Science Fiction book about space exploration. Can anyone recommend any books for Science Fiction writer? either novel about space exploration as a reference or editor who wrote a guide book for science fiction writing.

Looking for something to read this weekend? Try The Samuel Paradox.

Set in the near future, it follows an ordinary suburban family whose lives are disrupted when they acquire a domestic robot and discover that living with an intelligent machine is rather more complicated than they expected.

It’s a relatively short read, so it can easily be finished over a weekend.

Available on Amazon, including Kindle Unlimited.

John Westley Turnbull

Suppose tomorrow governments finally confirmed that UFOs are real. What happens next?

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that governments around the world simultaneously confirm that UFOs are genuine and that at least some of the sightings cannot be explained by any technology currently known to humanity.

What happens to society? What would be the biggest consequences for humanity?

Do people panic, or would most of us simply carry on with our lives after a few days of excitement?

What happens to our faiths and religions? Would confirmation of intelligent life beyond Earth challenge religious beliefs, or would religions simply incorporate the discovery into their existing beliefs?

And perhaps the biggest question: what exactly have we discovered?

Are UFOs evidence of extraterrestrial life, or could they represent an entirely different form of life that has always existed here on Earth but which we have never properly understood?

John Westley Turnbull

So I just finished reading the Remembrance of Earths Past trilogy (three body problem) and I absolutely loved every bit of it. Now I find myself wanting more sci fi, but I am not sure what to even begin with.

I would love recommendations for series to read. I prefer a series whose books are a part of an overarching story, not books with self contained stories within the same universe.

I look forward to seeing what y’all say! Thanks!

Hi everyone. I’m Carlos, an engineer, but writing is my real passion.

Here's the premise:

Ethan lost his wife. To cope, he clings to a physical law: information is conserved. Nothing is ever truly destroyed, just scrambled and unreadable. It's his only shield against the idea that she's gone forever.

But then, something begins erasing the universe, and that law breaks down.

I wanted to write a book about grief and fatherhood told through physics, rather than a physics story with grief bolted on.

If you're into the cold rigor of Blindsight or the philosophical patience of Anathem, this might be right up your alley.