Lamppost

By Malcolm W. Keyes

"Tell me: What are you guarding, from what, and why?"

"Sir?"

"Not the text book answer. Your answer."

Jonah wasn’t sure what Walkingstick wanted from him. "We’re guarding an area of intersecting multiversal space—"

"I said, ‘Not the text book answer.’ You sound like a damn orientation video. This is a test. Pass it."

Jonah tried hard not to let his frustration show on his face. A soldier never disrespected their superiors. That was something his father had told him when he was still the man Jonah knew. Obey first, argue later.

"We’re guarding that big black spot in the sky, sir," Jonah said.

"Really?" Walkingstick said. "And why is it black?"

"Because there are no stars on the other side, sir."

"And why not?"

"Because a trillion years ago, some alien scientist in that universe invented a self-replicating machine. The machine didn’t know when to stop and eventually turned everything in its universe into copies of itself. Stars, space dust, everything."

"And what does that have to do with you?"

Jonah wondered how long Walkingstick planned to play this game.

"I keep the machines out," Jonah said. "If even one of the machines passes through undetected, it could do the same thing to our universe."

"Right, like a virus," Walkingstick said. "Final question, Moore. Why is that bad?"

Jonah didn’t understand. "Sir?"

"Let’s say one of those machines landed on a moon somewhere out of the way. It would take years to convert the whole moon. Decades to convert a solar system. You’d be dead, and your children’s children’s children before anyone even noticed a problem. So why do you care, Moore?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Malcolm W. Keyes
• Release date: Jul 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466124790

Malcolm W. Keyes

Malcolm W. Keyes is the pseudonym of a published author who wishes to keep his self-published works separate from his traditionally-published ones. While Malcolm is not a real person, he believes his writing is every bit as good as his creator’s. The lack of a physical body perturbs him, but he is nonetheless happy to exist.

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Lamppost

Malcolm W. Keyes

Copyright 2011 Malcolm W. Keyes

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles by Malcolm W. Keyes at Smashwords.com:

A Dream for Annie

Fox and the Rest of Us

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Table of Contents

Copyright

Midpoint

Author

Lamppost

by Malcolm W. Keyes

~

Jonah had thirty-six hours of nothing but time during his shift guarding the Lamppost, and he spent nearly all of it in Free Flight. The other five guys on duty got through their shifts by listening to music, watching movies, running simulations and generally killing time in any way except sleeping. If you were caught sleeping, you were gone, end of story, military benefits and protections be damned.

Everybody who did guard duty was on go pills—Command practically required you to be. Jonah sometimes wondered, with so much at stake, why Walkingstick and the others at Command didn’t schedule shorter shifts. But then, he didn’t have to wonder. It was a money thing. The hard gravity burns required for jumps into 4th dimensional space drained the ships’ fuel cells dozens of times faster than normal 3rd dimensional flight. And since it would take decades to reach the Lamppost using the 3D gravity drive, Command just pumped their pilots full of go pills and scheduled inhumanly long shifts and cut their costs in half. Leave it to the military to be economical about the preservation of the universe.

Jonah took the go pills because he liked the way they amplified the sensations in Free Flight. Customizable biases—the acronym for Built-In Artificial Sensory Cues had simplified itself into an actual word over the years—made Jonah feel as though he were the ship. The controls and cockpit dropped away, leaving him floating in the blackness of space. When he moved, he felt and heard the wind rushing by him. If he wanted to speed up or change direction, he changed his breathing or the position of his body.

Jonah was always in Free Flight. Always. While the other pilots sat watching screens in their cramped cockpits, Jonah was soaring through space, doing back-flips and barrel-rolls, chasing occasional meteors, sometimes just hanging weightless in the coolness of space. In the academy, Jonah’s instructors had told him he had a strong HFI—Human Flight Impulse—the phenomenon that created flying dreams in nearly every human being. Human minds, they had said, were made to fly, even if their bodies were not. And Jonah’s mind was the best they had seen. Most pilots found Free Flight too disorienting to use regularly and believed the controls were too subjective to ever replace hands-on and automated flight methods.

Every night during his shift, Jonah proved them wrong.

After a few hours of flight, Jonah forgot all about his ship and its gravity drive, busily anchoring itself to distant gravitating matter—like a spider slinging webs from branch to branch—in order to speed up and change directions in milliseconds. During his thirty-six hours on security, Jonah was a god. Every few days, one of the silver, tapeworm-shaped bogeys would come soaring out of the blackness of the Lamppost, and nearly every time, Jonah was the first in position, the first to fire, and the first to log a kill.

Tonight, however, there had been no action at all.

When his shift was over, Jonah came down out of Free Flight mode, opened an orange juice, and prepared for the jump into hyperspace. Outside Free Flight, he felt claustrophobic and small. The narrow cockpit, every detail of his uniform, even the pouch of orange juice in his hand pulled him back down into his petty, human circumstances and anchored him there. Jonah was alone. He had done everything his father had told him, but now his father was gone, retired, living planetside on Little Kansas. Whenever Jonah tried to talk about his job—his entire life, basically—his father would change the subject to the church, what God was doing in his life, or what flowers he had put on Jonah’s mother’s grave that week.

Jonah tried to put the whole mess out of his mind, something that was getting harder and harder to do as weeks turned into months.

When the pre-jump protocols were complete, Jonah noticed a message indicator blinking in the corner of his desktop space. Command gave every pilot nearly unlimited access to FTL bandwidth, to keep them firmly connected to the people they were protecting—shrinks had their hands in everything pilots did these days. This was one of the first times Jonah had actually gotten a message while at his post; even his