A Speculation of Stars: Science Fiction Short Stories, #1

By T. Thorn Coyle

Wonder. Dreams. Grief. Hope.

The human condition is filled with these. So is our future.

The five stories in this collection walk the spaces in between all of these. They ask what our future can be, and where our dreams can take us.

So here they are: revolutionary nanobots, wise capybara, space ships, and humans that are simply… more.

The future is up to us. Climb aboard and buckle in.

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Stories include:

Wreckers

Capybara Rapture

Dark Climbing

We Will Haunt You

Tabitha Takes the Prize

• Language: English
• Publisher: T. Thorn Coyle
• Release date: May 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201590185

T. Thorn Coyle

T. Thorn Coyle worked in many strange and diverse occupations before settling in to write novels. Buy them a cup of tea and perhaps they’ll tell you about it. Author of the Seashell Cove Paranormal Mystery series, The Steel Clan Saga, The Witches of Portland, and The Panther Chronicles, Thorn’s multiple non-fiction books include Sigil Magic for Writers, Artists & Other Creatives, and Evolutionary Witchcraft. Thorn's work also appears in many anthologies, magazines, and collections.  An interloper to the Pacific Northwest U.S., Thorn pays proper tribute to all the neighborhood cats, and talks to crows, squirrels, and trees.

Book preview

A Brief Introduction from the Author

Wonder. Dreams. Grief. Hope.

The human condition is filled with these. So is our future.

I love stories that walk the spaces in between all of these. The stories that ask what our future can be, and where our dreams can take us.

The future is truly up to us, collectively.

Here are five tales, all written with the support of my amazing Patreon friends. Some of these short stories have appeared in other collections, some not, but nonetheless these five stories all wanted to live together beneath one cover.

So here they are: revolutionary nanobots, wise capybara, space ships, and humans that are simply… more.

Climb aboard and buckle in.

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T. Thorn Coyle

Portland, Oregon

2021

1

Wreckers

Swirls of color and light. Image of a neural net in pink, purples, and blacks. Text reads Wreckers: a science future short story.

CAM LEANED on the front counter of her shop, the cold of rehabbed steel sliding through her crisp white shirt sleeves, chilling her skin. She read a poetry magazine on the screen rolled out on the countertop, cocooned within a wall of thumping neo-disco that blasted from the shop’s sound system.

Loud music and poetry. Two of her favorite things.

The bones in her head buzzed. Camara slid the sound down to a more reasonable level and pressed the com link embedded just beneath her ear.

Wreckers. Cam speaking, she answered.

Voice coms weren’t her favorite—someone else’s voice echoing inside her head was a little creepy— but answering the phone was part of running a business. Whattaya gonna do? Some people just didn’t trust mind to mind. Why they didn’t do speech text, she’d never understand. Old people.

Sure. Yeah.

Old or not, she’d take this person’s money when they staggered through the door, heart sore and with a splitting head.

Camara looked around the shop. Besides the plants carpeting most of the back wall, the place gleamed with stainless, titanium, and that new alloy, stonetran. Cam always kept things tidy, just like Wiley had. She couldn’t stand dirt or clutter anyway. She’d had enough of that growing up. Life was better now. The hydroponic system kept the plants healthy, and the fish and plants both fed her pretty well.

C’mon in. Anytime this afternoon is good.

She looked out the reinforced glass windows onto the lush forest of fruit trees, flowers, and benches that made up the central strip of the open mall. The peach trees were her favorites, their pale pink flowers just budding. In a few weeks, they would carpet the walkways until the night bots swept them all away.

Okay. See you soon.

The fish tank gurgled beneath the low thump of the disco beat. Cam turned back to the single room shop where she spent most of her days. It was time to work.

Two reclining chairs were prepped and ready for customers, as usual. They’d been empty all day. That’s how the biz ran. The shop schedule would be packed, especially around the holidays, and then taper off. Late spring and summer were the slowest seasons, which was fine with her. She could live on very little, and loved the time off, spending it at the beach. Or Spain. She loved Spain.

Besides, for her services? Camara charged through the nose. Wiley had taught her that.

Never be afraid to charge what your services are worth, he told her. These people need you. Don’t gouge them, mind, but charge a fair price. We help people here, but we also need to help ourselves.

Wiley’s idea of a fair price had seemed like a fortune to her. But she’d gotten used to it. Besides, she saw what some of the other places charged. People paid extra for lies.

She slung herself off the padded stool and went to check the equipment.

The shining metal boxes had the names their manufacturers gave them, of course. The Lethe 201 and the older, still perfectly serviceable, Memborn 300.

Camara didn’t use those names. She called the machines what they actually were, just as Wiley had, with every model the shop had ever seen. These two were Crusher and Smash. Truth in advertising, that was Wreckers’ stock in trade.

No people in white lab coats, looking like medical professionals. No people in sleek suits, either, pretending that this was just a process everyone went through when they reached a certain phase in their lives, like a facelift or cell rejuvenation.

Nope. None of that dogshit.

People who came to Wreckers knew they were desperate, just like all those other stiffs who tried to pretend they weren’t. Camara accorded the people who walked into the shop the respect they deserved. It took chutzpah to admit that your dreams just weren’t going to make it. That your ambition had been misplaced.

That it was time to move on.

Or worse: to finally admit that your dreams had sucked the life out of you and should have been killed off decades ago, but you’d been too stupid, or romantic, or inattentive to figure that out. Sometimes those people walked through the door after it was too late. Just husks. Remnants filled with pain.

Better to crush a stillborn dream early on than to let it leech you dry.

The folks who came through the Cam’s door weren’t the ones who tried the latest improvements in binaural technology, or flirted with Buddhism or ancient yoga practices in vain attempts to deal with their dreams.

These were the people who had injected drugs, or drank more alcohol than their oxygen supply could keep up with, who had