The Second Sky: And Other Stories

By Bradley Nordell

From stories about teleportation and an apocalypse on Mars to Twilight Zone-esque stories about parallel realms, dreamlike technological perceptions, and new worlds, The Second Sky and Other Stories is a far-future work that explores the depth of human nature, love, grief, existential threats, and a visionary look at the earth, the solar systems, and humankind’s pursuit for survival.
In “The Reaper Men,” a man walks the highways of the dead to bring the data that could just save a pandemic-stricken world.
In “Somewhere in a Dark Star,” the crew of the Osiris starship must figure out a way to escape a black hole.
In “The Last Days of a Martian Flower,” a brother and sister try to tell the inhabitants of Mars that a planet is dying, despite the reluctance and conspiracy to keep them there.
In “Second Sky,” mother and husband try to figure out what to do as an alien space shift arrives on the earth. Through their grief over losing their daughter, they are face-to-face once more with the second sky of truth.
Across many genres, stories, and points of view, Nordell takes us through the far future from horror to hard science fiction in these twenty-one stories, exploring the reality beyond the one we experience every day. Here we see the horizon of the other place, the future beyond landscapes familiar to us, and the place beyond the realm of known and into the second sky.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Apr 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781665740951

Bradley Nordell

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Bradley Nordell has been a seeker of knowledge and a dreamer of worlds since childhood. Bradley is a scientist, fiction writer, and poet. His fiction and poetry infuse science and humanities, acting as breadcrumbs for tomorrow. Currently, he works as a scientist for a space solar cell company; is the editor at Consilience Journal, a peer-reviewed science-poetry journal; is a nature photographer and birder; and TEDx speaker. Bradley lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his dog, Eiseley, and two cats, Nova and Tesla. Medium: https://bradleynordell.medium.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BradleyNordell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bradleynordell/

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Copyright © 2023 Bradley Nordell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3878-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3879-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-4095-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023905227

Archway Publishing rev. date:  09/29/2023

To Jackie, Michael, and Nicole

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

—George Orwell

In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take

into account other dimensions of a broader reality.

—John Archibald Wheeler

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Fireflies at Dusk

Time’s Entangled Anti-Spaces

The Reaper Men

A Letter to a Leaf across Solis Terra

The Color of a Rose

The Last Days of a Martian Flower

The Black Daffodil

iTranscend

Lost within a Dark Star

The Portal to Yesterday

The Last Book Speaks

Pendulum Nights

The Second Sky

The Green Light across the Stars

Prometheans Rise

That Which Waits inside the Door

To Doubt the Dark

The Nightmare between Realms

The Machine That Dreamt of Tomorrow

In Tenebris

To Build a Hope

Acknowledgments

About the Author

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Reality is a fickle thing. As human beings, with our limited senses, we perceive only a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, a piece of the auditory spectrum; and our noses, compared to, let’s say, a dog’s are, well, almost nonexistent in their ability to smell, sift through those smells, and create a sense-based story on those aromas. Life is mostly hidden to us. We live most of our lives in the dark, dancing on only a pinhead of truth. Furthermore, the information we do gather is stored in certain bundles of neurons, within ones and zeros of neuronal firings, which are then compiled into a piecewise puzzle (recall that our vision is limited to 135 degrees and filled with holes due to the fact we have two eyes and a pupil in between both) that our brain fills in later. This puzzle or story is then projected back outward into reality to form our perception of it. Each process has its limitations and is far beyond the complete picture of what is. The isness of reality is mostly hidden from us.

So, what makes reality real? And how can you trust what you experience is real? How do you know there’s not another hidden reality just beyond the one you experience?

And that, again, is another complex thing that baffles most of us. Once again, we see things only at a specific part of the length and time scale. We do not see the quantum fields enveloping us. We do not feel the trillions of particles zipping through us at time scales beyond our comprehension. We do experience more than three dimensions. Humans exist in the middle of time, seeing neither the billion-year evolution nor the femtoseconds of kingdoms rising and falling in the quantum realm. We are quite limited. One thing we do have is the power of storytelling to explore new realms. Technology, too, is opening these doors to experiencing more reality and realms once hidden to us. What will we find there? What new secrets will be revealed?

The stories in this book explore those realms. From the hidden darkness of the far future and apocalyptic landscapes to new technology allowing us to switch minds with another, these stories take place in what I like to call the Second Sky, which is the boundary beyond the world we have always known and others that are so close to us. It’s a place where, when you finally take off the mask of our once limitations, you see a new realm filled with possibilities, paradoxes, sorrows, and beauties—a leaf across the cosmic oceans, a hope in ruin, or a set of eyes that can see beyond the colors of the rainbow. Come with me, my fellow reader. To the future. To the past. To the place beyond border. Come and see what lies beyond the second sky.

FIREFLIES AT DUSK

I couldn’t take the sorrow anymore, so I began to walk. Always at night, I would set out just before sundown and return when the moon was nothing more than a spotlight in the inky, untenanted sky.

As I walked, I thought about the past—my children who are now grown; my wife now buried; and I, but a ghost. As I walked, the shadows followed one by one.

I was an old man with a limp in my right knee. It was a reminder that some wounds never heal. On each walk, I felt my cotton-white hair swaying in the wind. There was always a chill breeze that littered those nights with a solemn moan. My only friends left were insomnia and that sleepy cat, Nabokov, who’d reached the ripe old age of twenty-two. His time would soon be up, just like mine. Eighty-six years old. Where had the time gone? It seemed to leave only a bitter taste in my mouth and a constant tremble in my hands. I could barely button my shirts anymore.

I walked to remember and to forget. Insomnia was a mistress that kept on asking for more, whispering promises at the edge of night and stealing them back by daybreak. I walked to ignore her. I walked to find my final moment in time’s great divide.

Why is it so hard to die? I asked the emptiness on my strolls each night.

The only thing that answered back was the silent stalking shadows.

With each footstep, memories flooded into my mind—flashes of uncontrollable truths. The hot iron rod burned in my throat with each swallow. Grief is a hunger that is never full, and the roots of sorrow infiltrate deep inside the soils of a man’s soul, until eventually you can’t tell the difference between it and joy. The shadows know this; they cast each bet upon this unalienable truth.

When the hurt was too much, I counted the stars above. The most I ever counted was 4,193. To me, the stars held other stories, countless love tales, and civilizations trying to find their ways in a universe bound to chaos and its brutal reign. The stars connected us across those cosmic islands of endless and glorious time.

I was a romantic to my core, you could say. My imagination was as wild as my heart, which did not dull with age but only became less grounded—a horse galloping free in a field. My former pragmatism was almost lost. When life got that old, to dream was the final doorway before death. So that was what I did. As I walked along the path, I carried my fantasies and rumination of other worlds. The dark was a canvas I could paint my ideas on and see the truth within—a place where I could count those infinite nuclear furnaces of hope.

During those walks, I noticed that the inexplicable shadows were growing closer, like a lioness waiting to pounce in the long grass. They came in many forms. At times, I noticed them reaching out to grab me from the plants beyond the path. My heart raced as my footsteps quickened.

Who out dare? I asked, not expecting a reply. I’m an ol’ man with no money or time. I’m not worth ya trouble.

Whatever was hiding in the shadow didn’t respond or care to reveal its shrouded self. It crept along nonetheless, and it waited.

Then after enough time had passed, the shadows began to speak to me. At first, I thought I was going crazy. But after a while, I figured it wouldn’t matter anyway. An old bag of regrets like me would go mad eventually. For in time, all those neural connections I had made would snap. And I was lonely. The shadows spoke, and I listened. My feet strode along with each heartbeat.

The shadows were also shape-shifters, and they took many forms during those walks, like fog and dust forming into magical shapes in an instant. The shapes were always those of memories and loved ones lost—the night puppeteer’s taunt.

Every walk was a different lesson—a different memory. Sometimes they were my mother sitting in her rocking chair, crocheting a new blanket and telling me about our ancestors in Ireland—once bootleggers in New York to politicians in Kansas City. Other days, it was my father, who survived Vietnam physically but not mentally. He was a quiet and depressed man who wrote poetry in secret. The tattered whiskey-stained notebooks were found after his death. Their words contained the secrets to the meaning of life if only I could have understood their idyllic riddles. Other days, the shadows took the form of my wife and kids—memories of San Francisco, walking along the pier. Or there was the time we got lost in Paris, looking for the spot where Sartre had once sat. There were first bike rides, days at school, birthdays, the first kiss with my wife, and the time I dropped her birthday cake in the lake. Oh, how we laughed! All of it mixed, like kaleidoscopes of the heart.

As I stepped onto the path, memories shuffled in the shadows, showing me pieces of a forgotten life. Eventually I walked, not to forget but to remember.

Tears and laughter comforted me—that was until they stopped. Ultimately my well of memories ran dry, and the shadows grew silent. I knew, then, what those shadows were and what they wanted. I knew what was to come. The end was nearing. And when the realization came full, the shadows got hungry. So I ran.

I ran without a destination. I ran from fear and toward a sliver of hope. I ran, and I counted the stars.

My heart palpitated with every lost breath and with each star. I traveled along the path farther than usual, fleeing the slithering shadows that came for me. I could see them morphing and moving in their transformative scythe-like embrace. This part of the trail was unknown to me, but I didn’t care. I needed to flee that which came. So I escaped into it with a surgeon’s calmness.

At the end of the path, I saw a green aura in the distance. Though the shadows lurked quietly beyond me, I sought only the mystery that lay ahead.

I continued, coming to the edge of a massive hill and meadow. I stood and looked out. The field seemed endless. The darkness ebbed and overshadowed brooks. Giant trees of dogwood, oak, and northern white cedar cast their shadows about. The residual formations of Russian sages and snowberry bushes twisted. The distorted heads of bulk thistles bobbed and sat within that darkness. Bluegrass swayed and brushed itself along my shins, moving delicately across the high hills and into the unseen world of the field. But in the forefront and within the night danced the creatures that made their light—the insects of summer. The lumens of delightful childhood memories played out their movie of warm nostalgia inside my heart. Behind me, the shadows crept closer, and before me, truth danced along the grass.

The fireflies flicked on and off. Their synchronicity of a tireless love song bore the beauty of the night in an everlasting instant. I watched, not only amazed but understanding that, at that very moment, the secret of nature and the universe was hidden among the flickering of the bioluminescent twilight.

I understood, then, that the Lampyridae’s truth was one of purity and the cosmic unraveling of all human folly. It was simple, unique, glorious, and raw all at once. It was as if the great kingdoms of every civilization were but monuments to this very act of harmonious love between the light and the dark. They were elegant yet straightforward creatures, beyond a dimension of emotion we could know again. We had forsaken nature and the ways of the shadows that stood to highlight that graceful moment. Yet I felt it was ironic that humans had tried every way to undo the habits of earth’s azure streams, pure skies, and twinkling dreams that existed in the impermanent now. This was the truth. It was what I had been walking to find—my final battle before the end.

Beautiful, cosmic, and unchanging, the fireflies were all that was—nature in its most authentic ways. Off and on reality went, every second dawning comprehension of life, both bounded and unbounded at once.

The meaning of life was as simple as fireflies at dusk.

These are my stars, I whispered, knowing I could never count the millions upon millions of fireflies that now filled this night. I understood, too, that it didn’t matter. That wasn’t the point. It was as if the ground and sky had switched. A giant mirror in time cast down upon those lands and reflected the ever-expanding cosmos. And I, Orson Fredrick Clarke, was but a blade of grass in the endless expanse on a single rock among billions in a unique garden of a meditating monk. I felt small, but also an immense warmth embraced me like a lover’s hug at first meeting.

I watched and waited and fell in love with the moment. All the while, the shadows approached me. They, too, grabbed at me, taking pieces I no longer needed. They fed and drank and absorbed the heat of my life. That moment was my end, and I no longer cared. In the twinkling wishes of the night, I saw my wife among the fireflies, and for the first time in months, I knew I would sleep serenely in the bed of time.

TIME’S ENTANGLED

ANTI-SPACES

ONE

C aptain Veranda Kel Nakamura stepped outside the teleportation device into an unfamiliar world. It was a moment that any Q-port traveler feared most—especially since she was the first, a true Magellan, traveling quantum mechanically through the void of space-time. And when you toy with quantum technology, you never know what you’re going to get. The downside to probability functions , Veranda thought to herself.

The room swarmed with bluish holograms among dead white walls. There was no smell, which was odd, since she expected something, even oil or the paint off these walls. However, looking closer, she noticed they weren’t white but made of some liquid material that seemed to be moving slowly and responding to shadow and light and forms within the room. Some SMART material, she mused, like chronothermal or elastomers that respond to light and temperature. In truth, all she could really conclude was this was a much different room than the one she had left only moments ago. This meant one of two things, she considered—that she was tied either to a different time in civilization’s history or to a different place. Or both, a voice spoke inside her mind. But that, she mused, would be a complete anomaly and a mountain she would only climb if faced with that.

She could see faces flashing in those holograms and voices speaking around her but could not make their words. She saw only one other form beside her in the room that was not made of complex diffractions of light worlds away. It wore a silver bodysuit, with various gadgets along the belt. The suit itself seemed highly technical, like some sort of liquid metal that reflected a shimmer of colors at various angles. Its face was covered by an obsidian shield. It held some sort of TechPad in its hands—information swarmed along the surface of it in a quick burst of blue holograms that hovered just above. He looked up only momentarily to acknowledge the presence of the traveler.

Welcome, Captain Nakamura. We’ve been waiting a long time for you and have oh so many questions.

Veranda spun around, trying to find the location of the voice.

Was that you? she asked the person standing idle by the machine.

The person said nothing but pointed to the left wall.

Veranda turned to see a floating head of a man. He wore strange looking semitranslucent glasses and a mustache that seemed to be threaded into a hook at the edges. The man’s skin was dark brown and wrinkled. Wisdom and joy seemed to swallow his presence, alongside a dangerous smile.

Ah, there you go. You find me, traveler.

Who are you and where am I? Veranda asked.

The floating head laughed. She could hear others in the background mimicking him and assumed he and the others were being projected from some other location.

The head spoke, breaking her reverie. So many questions, yet before we prooooceeed onward … let me ask you one. Where did you come from?

She looked at him puzzled.

After what seemed like an eternity of silence, the head spoke again, this time with more conviction and a sense of impatience. I asked you a question?! A damn fucking question! The head paused, closing its eyes. And then after finding its equanimity, it spoke again. The whole act seemed completely insane to Veranda. Sorry. Where, traveler, are you from?

Earth, she said quickly, not wanting to anger the person before the head again. I’m from Earth.

Hmmmmm. As the floating head spoke, he brought out a giant hand that twisted the ends of the mustache. Very interesting. Where might this Earth be located?

In a … a … do you mean what galaxy?

Yes! the voice screamed again.

Milky way. It’s a spiral galaxy nearest Andromeda. Earth is twenty-five thousand light-years from the black hole at the center.

The head turned to whisper something that she could not make out. A few minutes later it returned. "Was, traveler, was the Milky Way galaxy. But sadly, it is no more."

Veranda’s face contorted in shock and utter horror. Only moments before, she had been there, at the Cerebraine station, near Earth in the Milky Way galaxy. It existed. It was. And she, in the first of many missions to save both worlds, was stepping foot onto the first teleportation device to travel to an unknown location. She was nothing more than a curious explorer, taking a chance at a new Promethean fire—the Q-port. This place would be their new land, and she was its Magellan. Humanity had sent her because this was their last hope. The world was sick, and she had to find help. This could be a way to save humanity, she had thought, a gateway across the stars to a new home for everyone.

But how could she save everyone if there was no place to return to? Had the mission failed? Had she also traveled forward in time as well as space?

Veranda turned back to look at the teleporter, known as Q-port. Her once ship across the seas of space would now be her own ark to go back and save whomever she could. The Q-port was a sizable half-dome machine, composed of superconducting coils, Casimir plates, coherent laser interferometers, and a Bohm-von Neumann PWQ-correlator. It was in good shape. And it had nuclear isomeric batteries, which should last another billion years—unless, she thought, she had somehow traveled that far in time.

Veranda turned back to the floating head and who she assumed was the leader of these new alien people.

What year is it and where are we? she asked.

What year is it? the face asked in a dubious manner. What year is it?!

And then the screen went blank. Veranda turned to the person standing idle with his fancy-looking pad.

So, what was that all about? she asked. And who are you?

He looked up from his pad with a large sigh. That was our leader Sol. Nemodurian Francistine Kaleran. And as to me … just ignore I’m even here. And to this. He paused to spread his hand out toward the Q-port and the room. Well, let’s just say some of us have been waiting for you.

What do you mean waiting? I only left a few minutes ago.

A loud sound cackled through the room as the hologram came back on, this time with a new face, a woman’s face. Her dark skin glistened in the light, as her blue holographic eyes seemed to show to show a calming and curious feeling.

Hello, Veranda, she said in a soothing voice. Sorry about that. Our leader gets … excited, especially at this historic moment. My name is Dr. Aurelia Theodihya Venecier, and I lead the scientific department on all Intergalactic Space Transport Anomalous Systems, or simply InGaSTAS.

Oh. So, what year is it?

Aurelia bit her lip. Well, what year did you leave Earth?

I left Earth around 7205 Sol. of the Luna Era.

Hmm. Well, this would be about a billion revolutions around your star after that. Of course, we aren’t in your solar system anymore.

What happened?

Your star went red giant four billion years before it was predicted.

That’s impossible. How?

Well, we are hoping you may tell us that, Captain.

It was fine before I left.

Then why are you here? And why did you keep sending things to our place in the world? To our … She turned her face to sneer at someone behind her. Why were you trying to destroy us!?

Veranda stared flabbergasted at the screen. However, the treatment she’d received since exciting the Q-port was now becoming clear to her. Somehow they had mistaken her for another traveler. But she was the only one to ever travel in the teleporter. Or was she? Could there have been others. Possible other test objects had made it to this place in the galaxy.

Where are we? she asked, voice low, with a tremble on her lip. And who are you?

The doctor smiled, revealing jagged teeth and a foreboding essence that sent chills down her spine. Veranda had picked up, from their strange slit eyes and facial structures, that they were close to human but not exactly. However, it now became even clearer that they could be long descendants through evolutionary means from her.

As to where we are, this is the third planet from our two suns in the Gliese 6-alpha solar system. Your people called this place Zarmina. And we are the Zarminians. We are here because you sent us. We are here to stop you. To protect us from you. This next part is going to be unpleasant. I’m sorry.

Sorry for…

And then the room flashed into an obsidian vortex of darkness as the Qport turned on.

TWO

C aptain Veranda did not see a second copy of herself, as was expected. Was it possible it was still back in her world? If so, was she indeed herself or the copy? The identity paradox was too much right now. And she kept wondering if the theories were wrong and if it were possible, without unified quantum gravity, if teleporting a macroscopic object held to different rules. Whatever had happened, nobody could have foreseen this, she thought.

The chalkboards of thought and theory stood now in the shadows of the obsolete.

The first thing she noticed was that the world wasn’t precisely … right. For it was inverted, a mirroring asymmetry of the one she’d left. So, when she stepped outside the door of the Q-port, expecting to feel the solid piezoelectric ground, she instead felt only air as she fell.

Her stomach lurched as gravity pulled, causing his heart to palpitate as the strands of sanity loosened. She closed her eyes, praying it was all a dream. Falling, wailing, grasping at nothing.

In the darkness, she danced upon the edge of the impossible. She screamed until her larynx cracked. Was this how she died? Did the device fling people into a realm of nothingness to fall forever?

The answers were too dreadful to bear.

Help me! she croaked. Endless darkness consumed all sound. Then it was over. Light and physicality had returned. A juxtaposition of symmetry now set right as she opened her eyes.

She was in a room.

The room contained bright ivory walls that seem to be in a constant movement of some odd liquid crystal material, an ephemeral dance of amorphous structures. It reminded her of a heat haze mirage along a highway on a summer day. Within the walls, machines moaned and creaked, calling out some alien feeling. It looked like some sort of spaceship. This room and place isn’t an organic world, she thought. What nightmarish dreamscape had she traveled to? What was this?

Hello, traveler, said a voice, which sounded oddly familiar, yet completely alien at once. She turned to see three people. One of them was herself but in a male form.

Where am I? she asked.

Her male twin smiled back at her. Your device sent you quite far, he said.

How far exactly?

Can you place a number on something so infinitely finite? For this … is the place of opposites, you see. It’s all relative, in the end, I guess.

What do you mean? How do I get back? she asked. I want to get back to my family. I shouldn’t have come.

All three of the so-called humans laughed in unison. A part of her knew what the answer to this question would be—that some doors, once opened, would remain closed forever.

She clenched her fist tightly as she stared at this twin of hers. Could it be a ruse? A trick of some sort? Or maybe a dream? What if the device had failed and left her with brain damage? So many possibilities, each one with a lower probability than the last.

You’ve sent a lot of things to this place without our … permission, her other said, walking around her now, scratching his chin. And why do you think there is any going back? Or a place to go back to? Why is it that you think the universe can allow us both to exist in the same place at once.

The woman’s face contorted. Er—is this a … umm … a parallel world?

The two men and one woman looked at each other. Her twin turned around to the back wall and spoke. Show her.

The walls, those waving solid metamorphs, changed from translucent to transparent to the vastness of space. Captain Veranda saw the Milky Way and Andromeda and so much more. There, she saw a trillion worlds colliding, looped and connected by the immense energy and dark matter of existence, chains of black holes to others, across countless times. A thousand wonderments and dreams were fusing as unified reflections. But in each, she saw a twin—a unification of negative and positive, light and dark, malevolent and benevolent. But before she could comprehend its infinities upon infinities, the vision was gone—all she’d seen was nothing more now than a fading ghostly nightmare to be forgotten.

The room, with her three judging faces, returned.

As you see, what you created was a one-way trip. And you don’t belong here. This room is a safety net from you interacting with our world. This place is our feeding room. It was made of exotic matter to contain us, to make sure we don’t destroy—

A feeding what? she interrupted.

But before he could finish, part of the floor opened as if some trapdoor was there, and a creature of sort ebbed through it, filling the bottom of the floor of the room. Without viscosity, it climbed the walls and slithered within the air, as if gravity had no power over it.

What the …, Veranda shouted, feeling her body tremble as she backed up as far she could go. What is that … thing!?

"It is that which makes sure the universes are balanced. Our worlds are twins, one positive, one negative. They cannot touch. For if they do, worlds could be destroyed. And that