The Angry Astronaut Affair

By Leigh Kimmel

It only takes a spark to start a raging inferno.

 

One sharply-worded post online, and now Reginald Waite has a flamewar on his hands. A welcome distraction from the frustrations of preparing for a technically demanding space mission -- or so he thought.

 

The conflict just kept spiraling, until it attracted the attention fo higher-ups. Now Reggie's looking at serious trouble.

 

A short story of the Grissom timeline, originally published at Liberty Island Magazine.

 

This edition includes a bonus essay on the history of the Space Race in the Grissom timeline.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201247362

Book preview

By the time Reginald Waite returned home, the darkness of night covered the Houston metropolitan area. What a perfect close for a perfectly rotten day. It had been supposed to be a routine trip to Pasadena to discuss the specifics of a new model of satellite Antares was taking up next month, but he'd no more than started preflight checks on his T-38 Talon when he started finding maintenance errors. By the time he got everything corrected and in the air, he was running late enough that he'd had to use every trick he knew to eke enough speed out of the plane to arrive on time.

Ten minutes after he walked through the door at JPL, some idiot made a crack about Shepard clones always being hot to trot in more ways than one. God, but he'd wanted to punch that jerk, and wouldn't that be a scene, a scheduled shuttle commander decking an engineer. It'd be as bad as the Great Astronaut Catfight a couple of years ago, when Melinda Bates came home after a six-month hitch at Luna Station to discover this little technical specialist hooking up with her husband and had driven cross-country to confront the Other Woman.

No, it'd be worse, thanks to a certain former Senator pulling in all his markers to get one of his own clones installed as NASA Administrator. No way could Aiden McAllister look the other way about a disciplinary infraction by a clone of the man his own ur-brother had condemned as insubordinate, insouciant and immoral.

It had taken all the discipline of a career naval aviator to force the anger aside enough to get business done and fly back to Ellington. Now Reggie was finally home, sitting at his own computer, and he could let that icy wall of control melt away. Go on the Lovecraft Country game and burn off his anger dispelling shoggoths and Cthulhu-spawn, imagine they were everyone at JPL that he'd overheard making snarky remarks about clones taking over the astronaut corps.

As he woke his computer, he noticed that the forum window was in front of the gameplay window. A new post caught his attention:

From: Weeping_Willow

Subj: My Culture is NOT Your Cool Character

Date: Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 1508 MST(GMT+7)

I don't want to get into identity policing, but it really bothers me to see Native American characters being played by people who are obviously white. The sheer level of ignorance being displayed is offensive, especially when you consider what your ancestors did to us. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Show some respect and keep your games to your own cultures.

Reggie could feel his blood pressure rising, just like back at JPL. Except this time he didn't have to take it in silence, not now that he was using his own Internet connection, his own computer, and a screen name that would disconnect his online persona from his official identity as Captain Reginald Waite, USN.

From: Major_Tom

Subj: Re: My