Somewhat Sammie

By Jan Schaeffer

A bottle of whiskey falls from the sky, and survives the impact of landing, on a patio table at Crabby Whack Brewery. The Crabby Brew logo assures the bottle's quality, and yet it contains neither brew nor quality, but rather an offensive backwash liquor, crafted by a heavy-handed amateur.

Sammie is a master brewer, at least according to Gerald; Crabby Whack's most loyal and alcoholic customer. These degenerate barflies contend with the ramifications of the whiskey's mysterious arrival. They are thrust into new lives, carefully prepared for them in an orbiting nursery of interstellar organisms.

This is a genosphere, an embassy of galactic peoples-- of motorized seaweed, Brygorrin goats, and ambitious jellyfish with questionable plans for the Solar system. This is the synthetic homeworld of Somewhat Sammie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543455526

Jan Schaeffer

N/A

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Jan Schaeffer.

ISBN:                  Softcover                        978-1-5434-5553-3

                            eBook                             978-1-5434-5552-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 10/11/2017

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CONTENTS

Part 1 — The Bottle

Crabby Whack

Storm

Sammie, Sammie

A Pod Opened

Part 2 — The Embassy

Human House

Sammie Killed A Minotaur

Dancing Mushroom

The Gerald Situation

Part 3 — Coping

The War Of Sleeping Seaweed

Dreaming Of Ordinary Things

Part 4 — Moondance

None Given

Create Yourself At Home

Helpie Helps

Reduce The Sugar

Mothership

Earthbound

Part 5 — Voices Of Reason

Magnificence

Finger Jam

Hello, Humble Humans

The Founding Of Sol

Sunlight

Death Of A Jellyfish

Part 1

THE BOTTLE

Anywhere, everywhere, all in the scope of a grape; there was no stuff. No hydrogen, helium, or heavy metals— no solids, liquids, or gases— not an atom in sight, if there was sight, which there wasn’t. The universe amounted to little more than plasma soup.

The makings of stuff.

Residing in this shapeless sludge, was Sammie. He mingled with trillions of unborn stars. Broken into subatomic bits, and cosmically whisked to completion, his ingredients fumbled at a semblance of form.

The grape expanded and cooled. The universe took its first easy step onto the periodic table. Ions merged, and proper stuff was born— hydrogen nebulae collapsing at critical points, into dense spheres of active fusion.

Stars, man.

Atomic nuclei collided in their cores, and heavier atoms formed. The universe was climbing the table of elements, learning to make new stuff.

Not learning, really, but flailing so much as to be inevitably miraculous, thus achieving a similar progressive effect. What was lacking in intelligence, was compensated by the sheer abundance of possibilities.

Un-stuff had evolved into stuff, and stuff had evolved a greater complexity. And from this complexity, sprang life— which evolved, and made the stuff into jiggers and what’s-its.

So a picture formed, of eight planets, and 180 moons, and thousands of peripheral planetoids, and clouds and rings of mountains and dust, all in orbit of a star.

And caught in the gravity well of Sol 3, was a bottle.

The bottle descended mysteriously through the rapidly thickening atmosphere. Its quality was assured by the Crabby Brew logo, and yet it contained neither brew nor quality, but rather an offensive backwash liquor, crafted by a heavy-handed amateur.

With the crack of a gun, it landed. Through some miracle of structural integrity, the bottle landed, intact and upright, on one of the patio tables at Crabby Whack. It didn’t crack, chip, tip over, or offer any explanation.

Sophie was startled.

She looked at the bottle, which looked like a bottle. She looked at the sky— just sky. She swiped at the bottle, and recoiled mechanically from the heat of the glass. Confusion tilted her expression, and she checked the sky again with invigorated scrutiny.

What was that?, Doris interrogated, what’s that doing there?

Sophie tested the diminishing heat with her fingertips, fumbling for an answer; airplane?

"What about an airplane?"

I don’t know, I was asking, Sophie answered in frazzled deflection, "I mean— never mind, is what I mean."

The eyes of Doris went listless with sudden, and she wore the standard of her form; a thin-lipped, stone-faced inquisitor.

The eyes of Sophie marched determinedly over the curves of the bottle, and paid no mind to the scarecrow at Crabby Whack’s back door. Doris went back in.

Sophie popped the top and smelled the whiskey. Unremarkable. At length, with several glances to the empty sky, she returned to the bar— bottle in hand. She was disappointed that something so unbelievable had happened. There would be no point to telling this story, beyond undermining her credibility— a useless miracle, if ever there was.

She placed it on the bar.

She placed it on the bar, appealingly apart from the liquors on the back shelf.

Crabby Whack

Hey, said Sammie, amused.

Yea, Gerald responded with imprecision and dispassion, to the lightly lifted pitch of an incoming joke. Sammie making a joke was no momentous event, and usually required nothing more than a grunting fracture of a chuckle in acknowledgement.

Gerald paid no mind. In this brief moment of introduction, he felt no panic or inner-turmoil— no need to appreciate such serenity. He was hardly aware of anything, swimming in the contented air of after-work beer. As his lips reached eagerly for the tilting glass, Sammie finished his thought.

So the moon just blew up.

The homeostasis of Gerald was poked with a spoon. The beer retreated to the bar in full, and he responded with a gentle tone, what the fuck does that mean?

His fuck slid out as easily as its adjacent words.

It’s pretty self-explanatory, Sammie said.

Gerald leaned awkwardly over Sammie to see what he was talking about, which was the moon, which was blowing up. "No… Gerald insisted, stretching the word into oblivion, it’s got to be— something," said like a revelation.

That’s the moon, Sammie stated, "blowing up, and he pointed at the moon, which was blowing up, I’ve been a person for a while now, and I’m pretty sure I know what the moon blowing up looks like."

You’ve never seen the moon blow up before.

"Yes, Gerald, but I can extrapolate. There was a moon there, and now there’s not. And instead of a moon, there are a bunch of objects, slowly departing a central location."

But it’s a trick, obviously.

Neat trick.

"It’s not like the moon actually blew up," Gerald said dismissively, but his eyes were stubbornly fixed on the skyward spectacle.

Gotta disagree.

Yea, but—

"Yea, but?"

"It’s the moon."

"It’s more, was the moon. Now it’s objects departing a central location."

"It looks like that."

Sammie said, "mm-hmm" with an additionally slurred emphasis on the mm sound.

"There’s no way," Gerald said with deluded confidence. His mind objected to his own words as he spoke them, and his facial features scrunched in repulsion— brow, cheeks and mouth collapsing on his nose.

Sammie took a drink.

There’s no way, Gerald repeated, but his tone was different— lighter and purposeless, like he was just testing the sound of his voice.

Sammie took a drink.

And one more, there’s no way, this time with a dying lash of insistence, and Sammie glared a profound glare, and Gerald found himself awkwardly loosening a sweaty grip on Sammie’s sleeve.

"Earth is fucked. Really hard, fuckin’, fucked."

Yea, said Sammie, and took a drink.

Gerald sped through a short list of impending dooms, counting off each point with a finger; "wild seasons from an unstable orbit. Tides. And shit— the food chain. He found himself ignorant after three vague answers, but felt unsatisfied with his count, and it’s, fuckin’— the moon." His struggling momentum tumbled to a halt, and a fourth finger generously extended before he quickly dropped his hand.

"Was the moon, Sammie corrected, now it’s—"

"It’s objects departing now," Gerald interrupted, confidently sarcastic as he mocked.

But as he returned his gaze reflexively out the window, to a growing cluster of skyfall, he questioned the sarcasm of his tone. In a rush of panic, he scrambled out the door of Crabby Whack to solve the mystery of this obvious yet confusing hoax.

Gerald witnessed the sky, and a somewhat limited portion of the universe.

Most of the galaxies in that universe, confined to the scope of a grape in the prologue of this story, now retreated at relative speeds that challenged conceptions of what was even possible. Even the light of these galaxies, approaching at the speed of itself, could never catch up. Sufficiently affected by the bend of spacetime— the effects of which were more dramatic on this intergalactic scale— this light would be forever outrun by the growth of the universal void. These galaxies would remain totally invisible, regardless of the passage of time, or the magnification of any telescope.

And that was most of the universe.

This left the observable universe, more than half of which was obscured by a rock, to which Gerald’s feet, and 15 billion similar feet, were attached.

This left only the light of a trillion galaxies, about a trillion of which were still too distant for Gerald to detect.

This left a single glimmer of a neighboring galaxy and a mere 40,000 local stars, which ultimately found their way through the backwards flashlight beam of Gerald’s vision, only to become totally lost in the overwhelming glare of one nearby, middle-aged red dwarf.

Apparent in the the clear blue sky of midday was the light of this one sun, as it was emitted, and reflected off Venus, and a lonesome wispy cloud, and a 300-mile-thick blanket of gasses, and some objects departing from a central location, which looked like they had recently, definitely, been the moon.

Gerald walked back into Crabby Whack.

And debris, said Sammie, still sitting at the bar, "debris is the other thing, with the moon blowing up. That’s going to be your more immediate concern. Looks cool though."

Yep, Gerald hollowly agreed, that was the other thing. His mind was afloat, his denial at the edge of defeat.

But denial panicked and lashed out; "there is no, fuckin’, reason, Gerald declared, pointing at the moon accusingly, in the natural, fuckin’, world, that would support the moon, just—" Unable to say it, he mimicked an explosion with his hands.

He was boisterous in his plea for ignorance, and some patrons eyed him curiously before returning their gaze.

Yea, no way that thing right there, Sammie said casually, and took a dri— nope, empty glass. A well-conditioned morsel of Sammie’s mind panicked at the sight, even in a building full of booze. I rarely say this, he said with a baritone suited to profundity; a certain barbarity in his voice, but this calls for hard liquor. He ordered five shots by grabbing a bottle of whiskey and pouring five shots. Their quality was assured by the Crabby Brew logo.

Gerald switched the bar’s TV to the news. Moon Exploding? was the top story. The reporting was spotty, and the newscasters seemed distracted. They were, in moments, forgetful or uninterested in the camera— exchanging glances of terror with one another as they reacted to the meaning of their own uttered words. It was sloppy, really, and downright editorial.

And there was a countdown, which Gerald’s eyes refused to decipher.

Sammie commentated; "yea, the video