Across the Astral Frontier

By Christian Prosperie

As humanity reaches out…a universe awakens.

 Humanity in the far future, long believing we had reached our astral limit, now has the capacity to extend beyond our home solar system. This ignites a new age of unchecked exploration. However, the blind ambition of uncovering the mysteries of the cosmos will turn the eyes of the universe towards us. These eight harrowing incidents are glimpses of the unforgiving nature of the unknown. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: ASAP IMAGINATION
• Release date: Jan 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224705139

Book preview

Across the Astral FrontierTitle Page

CONTENTS

Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makokis

Murmuring John and the Recording of Alexander A. Williams

Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makoki

The Neon Pillars and the Birth of Their Children

Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makoki

Ninlil’s Vanishing and the Last Transmission of the Spes et Fortitudo

Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makokis

The Empty Planet and the Architect’s Roost

Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makokis

The Gambler and the Outpost

Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makokis

The Needle’s Orbit and the Final Vessel

Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makokis

The Old Man’s Jump Station and the Gyroscope Cylinder

Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makokis

New Beginnings and the Jump Dust Twins

Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makokis

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Published by The NE1 World

as a part of ASAP IMAGINATION

www.asapimagination.com

Editing by J. B. Barnes

Cover Art by Huitzi Trujano

An astronaut floating, with a tether

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Paperback First Edition 2023

ISBN 978-1-7394011-9-1

Copyright © 2023 Christian Prosperie

Christian Prosperie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved in all media. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author and/or publisher.

To my mother and late father, who always encouraged me to pursue my passions and what made me happy, no matter where it led.

The word Astral, plus the pronunciation in IPA, plus “adjective.”

1: pertaining to, connected to, or resembling the stars

2: a substance or body comprised of such a matter or material which supersedes the tangible world

3: a nonphysical realm that gives way to various supernatural phenomena wherein the human body is alleged to have a spiritual or paranormal counterpart

GROUNDED EARTH ERA (A.D.) — ends the year 2113 A.D., after the first off planet colonization of the moon is successful.

SOL ERA (S.E.) — Beginning at S.E. 1 to S.E. 210, from the first moon colony, Earth’s Reach, to the construction of the first jump station. An era of expansion through the solar system, unifying the species under colonization past Earth. The detection and use of the dark matter tunnel proved to be a catalyst to the abrupt end of the time period.

ASTRAL ERA (A.E.) — Beginning at the construction of the first jump station to present, signifying humanity’s new age of exploration past the home solar system out into uncharted stars.

Incidents of Earth's

Galactic Exploration Administration

[Text extract from the holo-journal of Dr. Nadie Makokis, entry 1202 of 1212, 186 S.E.]

It finally happened. A slow boil, an accumulation of a mountain of legal defeats, coming to an abrupt end. The killing blow—a knife wound to the back from the only one I’ve ever trusted behind me. I have officially lost my life’s work to the hands of those who will use it far past its intentions. 

The Curious Reach Program was only ever meant to—what’s the Grounded Earth term? Dip our toes into the next frontier. I truly thought once we expanded to the edge of our solar system, to our small, steadfast Pluto, our technology would limit us in going much further. And it did, for a while. I’ve always felt it was a good thing, being confined to our modest solar system. Preservation and advancement of humanity could be achieved without reverting to our ancestor’s needless desires of conquest through exploration.

The realization there was nowhere else to go resulted in the closest thing to peace our species has ever seen. If we couldn’t resolve our predecessors’s lust for power, their weakness to greed, their lack of empathy, then we’d be damned together in our tiny little corner of the universe. It took time, but we all understood it, eventually.

Áine showed me the board’s plans before the meeting today. She asked me once more to reconsider my stance, begged me. Now I know why. They intend to build these . . . massive super structures to harness God’s Fingertip. Larger than anything constructed to date, even dwarfing the ring stations in the New Warren Rim colonies of Jupiter. Jump stations, they’ll call them. Interstellar travel hubs. Big enough to send asteroid excavators and cargo ships through. Entire cities will be built atop them. We will sprawl outward, heeding no caution, with technology we don’t fully understand, using my formulas and theories, my projects.

When exploration is at the forefront of a zeitgeist, it attracts those who insatiably seek wealth through wonder. Human history, which we’ve learned nothing from, clearly repeating itself. This neo-capitalistic era fueled by the awe of unknown discoveries will begin soon, after so much progress on unity, and it will be ushered in by my hands. My work. Against my will. 

I tried to stop it. 

I may have managed to do so if she still . . . I do miss her. Even while she was presenting her case to the board about my deteriorating mind. She convinced them I’m unfit to oversee Curious Reach any longer, bringing up things I said to her in loving confidence years ago. Even with betrayal so fresh, I ache for her. I still feel her nuzzle on the back of my hand in memory despite our simmering malice for one another in the present. I close my eyes in bed and feel her next to me. Worse is, I miss it terribly.

This may be my last log. This journey is over. What’s a woman to do, severed from anything she’s ever loved, but take one last adventure out into the very stars that gave her everything? 

Good luck, Áine. I hope you and the rest of humanity find whatever it is you’re looking for. And for all our sakes, I hope I’m wrong. About everything.

—    Dr. Nadie Makokis

Murmuring John and the Recording of Alexander A. Williams

c. 111 A.E.

My name is Alexander Williams, and I am an astronaut from the 6th division of Earth’s Galactic Exploration Administration. To understand my state of being, my experience, I’m going to have to take my time.

While my mere existence is brief compared to the infinity of the cosmos, I can’t help but desire to extend these moments out. I don’t wish to speak on what I’m about to. Admittedly, I am terrified of it, but it is imperative I go on record.

To start, I must go back to a time of my more youthful days, when my more eager heart yearned for these stars, and my insatiable thirst for knowledge placed me nose deep in my studies. As most know, it’s in our advanced training courses where every potential star jumper is required to learn about fellow and former GEA astronaut John Cal Doughty.

Morbid it may seem to examine, at length, the final ramblings of a good man. Untethered from his ship, sentenced to float away into the nothing as a result of a minor mistake. Yet, this study was necessary. And practical. No one person, sane or unstable, should willfully decide to dive into the universe’s open mouth without a perspective on the potential destruction that can come from the cosmos. John’s final voyage was a glimpse of said destruction. 

It’s slightly shameful to say but during my childhood I had to be swayed over to science at times, still clutching onto a belief of something more beyond this existence. I must also be open about how I studied John long before my days in graduate school as a teenager, listened to his final transmission, and believed him nearly my entire life. For weeks, months—no one truly knows—he jettisoned past nothing, coming no closer to anything; a person, a life, emptied out and suspended. The final five days he began muttering to himself. Never ceasing for a moment. No sleep, no pausing. He repeated many phrases, some incoherent, some fabricated languages from his mind, his madness manifested into an unrecognizable, yet structured speech. Other things came through clear as a star against space.

They are coming . . . they are everywhere . . . I am not alone.

And I believed. I felt, in his last blip of existence, there was something there with him. 

That is, until I went through Black Hole Week to train for those very situations myself.

During the course, recruits are left to float for a week, alone in the cold, open vastness with only a tube inside their custom-fashioned suit by which they can access water and food-mash rations. The simulated emergency was meant for us to get to know the suit’s functions, to be comfortable in the true three-dimensional vacuum, to prepare ourselves for a life-and-death scenario, but mostly to test our mental fortitude when time blends into a long, single moment.

Many didn’t last the entire week in my group and called themselves in. Few lasted the length of the course in any group, and a majority decided against a career among the stars after it. But I lasted the duration. I paid homage to a man who, I now know after enduring my own week of absolute, mind-numbing solitude, had merely lost his mind. 

Psychologically, many would imagine that actually being stranded is vastly and horrifyingly different than the basic recreation of it. Those who believe this are correct. Not only were us recruits flown out to designated holes in space, but also, in the backs of our minds, we understood there was an out with a simple command typed into our omni-watch. Our mortality was never truly at stake. At the very least, our subconscious knew it. 

I can confirm a true detachment from one’s ship is dimensions upon dimensions worse than a simulation, having become untethered from my own. Dropped, a tiny spec, into the endless. 

How did this happen? People will study my history after my passing—granted I am even found—and will only find exemplary marks in all subjects, including in-the-field work. They will see that I loved my family uncontrollably, as any father should, and I have never made a single mistake in my life out here in space as a star jumper.

Perhaps that’s what brought me to this end? My one moment of overconfidence. 

Our ship, Io’s Dawn, was hit by the residuals of a rogue star flare. I was outside, clinging to the side of her on what was supposed to be a simple maintenance walk. The flare took out my suit’s power, but only one more external draft head remained to tighten just around the curve of the hull, twelve meters from me. No one inside answered my calls for a status check. I couldn’t hear theirs.

Protocol for any irregular situation while out on a maintenance walk, especially full-on power outages, was to go in immediately. But to go in just to have to put my suit on again moments later seemed tedious, even after working the same droll for the past month. So I climbed slowly and carefully around the cylindrical hull as we spun.

Still, I’m unsure why the ship made such a drastic turn when it did. The guidance systems were most likely rebooting along with my suit. Why would my crew yank the ship in such a violent way? I wasn’t prepared. My grip slipped. 

Surely, they knew I was still out there. Or perhaps they figured I was following protocol, as I always did—assumed I was already inside the decompression bay awaiting my check-in. Whatever the case, they required an emergency turn, hoping I could hold, and if I didn’t, that my tether would. Yet when I reeled myself in with the long rope, the rope came to me, snapped at the insertion.

Sixty hours, they were still in view.

I watched my ship’s light become no more than a pinprick, and every moment I went back and forth, not truly accepting the situation, seeking to blame anyone, anything.

Why, why, why did this have to happen? was a broken record in my head. A mistake, a piece of faulty equipment, a random breath of the universe out in the middle of nothing all combining into one catastrophe set against me. 

The tail of Io’s Dawn dimmed to black. My crewmates continued onward, not turning around to look hopelessly for a man among a million oceans without scanners of their own. Maybe the crew, my friends, argued with one another about the morality of leaving one man stranded versus risking the lives of many. Or maybe they did turn around but I was thrown so far off projected trajectory we completely missed one another. It didn’t matter. The outcome remained the same.

It was then I felt the anxiety creeping up. The chasm I was swept into wasn’t a designated hole in space for me as it was during the training drills of my youth. There was no SOS command to type in my watch. Higher and higher, through my stomach and into my chest, the panic built.

As a child, my anxiety attacks came from situations out of my control. A sleepover at a friend’s house or being confined on a long cruiser ride with nowhere to go. It was my first taste of existential elements affecting me, and the only way I knew how to cope with it then was to lie awake, shaking as if I was freezing cold, or stick my head out of the window to gulp in fresh air.

As I aged into early adulthood, the anxiety shifted toward the direction and point of my existence. How was I going to impact the world? The species? The universe? It was worse then, in my early adulthood, than ever. Some mornings I awoke in pure consternation. My heart pounded like I was running a marathon, and my jaw ached from my molars grinding throughout my dreams and into reality. 

One of the most comforting pieces of advice about my attacks came not from my therapist, but the physician prescribing my anti-anxiety implants and meds. She told me, The body can only sustain to be wound up like that for so long before it simply crashes.

A limit set on the suffering was a comfort, indeed. 

When I found my calling in the stars, I found my serenity. They settled my restlessness. Perhaps from the idea that no matter what, I could always just go. 

It was only as I floated helplessly among those very stars that they betrayed me. They no longer warded off those chest-constricting thoughts, but brought them back a thousandfold.

I coped the best way I knew. I forced sleep through the brutal, crippling anxiety that came from the stars ceaselessly bearing down on me. I did this for three, maybe four days in total. I barely ate and only sipped liquids from my tube in short bouts of consciousness. The only sound heard was my off-rhythm exhales from tight sucks of air. Most of the time, I didn’t dream, only able to stay asleep for an hour or two at a time. Blackness into blackness into blackness. I only knew when I was awake from the tears on my cheeks. 

At one point, between my fleeting moments of awareness, I had one of those awful cosmic-pop artists—if you could even call them creators of art—stuck on repeat in my head. The song was popular as a child with my peers streaming it on their omni-watches at school or the mall, doing the dance in groups while I sneered from afar.

Jump, jump, do the Klump, take it, shake it, to the stars, then bring it back, down to Mars! 

God, I hate that song. Yet I sang it to myself. I sang it for thirty-seven hours in between sleep.

It may seem depressingly comical, and I am laughing at myself even now, but during that time I turned myself to the fact that I may have been losing my mind. Strangely enough, it focused me onto something, even if it was anger. 

When I did dream, though rare, it was grass between my toes and a crisp spring breeze from the mountains on Earth, back home. I’d envision myself with my two little girls, Ayleah and Thea, at the park with our golden retriever. Or having a lazy Sunday with my lovely wife, Brellah, at my side, and a good book in my hands. Coming back from those beautiful, perfect fantasies into reality—my unchanging, inevitable fate to be swallowed by the void—is a certain hell I couldn’t have fathomed. 

I’m only speaking on these things because all evidence must be considered and accounted for. I want to be a reliable data point as John Cal Doughty and I are the only two case studies to document this extraordinarily frightening event as it occurred to us. On record, at least. My history with studying John needs to be taken into account. My anxiety and depression, and history with mental illness, must be considered. Maybe I’ve lost it and am not really seeing what I’m seeing now, as many believe the case was with John. Maybe we both have coped with death in a similar fashion due to being doomed in similar environments.

But many peculiar things stand out about Murmuring John’s account that the official history likes to ignore. The ship that found him, The Yume, stated they had been in the atmosphere of the moons around Leiptr for two days when suddenly John’s signal came through. The ship’s captain went on record stating, Either his suit just miraculously turned on right next to us, or he appeared out of nowhere. Which, the captain is right to be confused. Even if John’s suit just happened to fire back on, the Yume’s scanners were working fine and were tracking all objects in a 600-kilometer radius. It would have detected an atmospheric anomaly not consistent with the rocks and dust common to Leiptr’s moons long before the signal popped on screen. 

The Yume went into immediate high alert, believing the signal to be one of their own untethered. After a quick roll call, done three times over, confusion set in. Imagine how much more so when they expected to find a live person as opposed to what they did. 

Of course, the photos themselves are on public record, just like John’s story. Many believe that the tatters and tears in his suit are from colliding with debris during his journey, ending his life by opening him to the vacuum. Other experts have studied the photos, even written entire dissertations on how the suit’s ruptures aren’t consistent with any sort of damage that could be caused by atmospheric debris. Exposure to the vacuum was still the cause of death, no doubt. 

However, most experts, all with reputations to uphold, will reluctantly agree that his suit appears to be slashed in a way that’s more consistent by something . . . claw-like. Most backtrack at this point, and all their responses can be paraphrased into, There’s a lot we don’t know about the universe and how it affects us as a species in different cosmic situations. 

To add to the oddity, John’s decomposition, or lack thereof, was inconsistent with where he was found or where his crew determined he was untethered. In the latter, out in the depths between systems, he should’ve frozen over after exposure. Where he was found, severe dehydration and a sort of mummification should’ve taken hold with how close in proximity he was to the star Pan. In fact, his body had hardly begun to freeze, much less dehydrate, with no other decomposition present. The first responders even tried to resuscitate the corpse right there in decompression before realizing who it was they found. Had they known, no vita-stims would have been administered, no CPR bots would have been issued for chest compressions. As those who studied the man know, John’s ship reported him missing five Earth years, four months, and fifteen days prior to the Yume finding him.

His suit is kept locked away and has been thoroughly examined a thousand times over. The voice recordings are public, so who knows how many people listened to it throughout our expansion. But the one thing many skim over are his own personal scanners within his suit. 

John’s descriptions of the anomalies he picked up were difficult to discern. Between the archaic, broken language he spouted to his reminiscing about cooking meals for his own family again, he does describe some. Amorphous, blob-like entities darted around as glowing, yellow lights on his visor’s scanners far in the distance. These blips on his screen took to the front of an incalculable mass in the background, much further in the distance, nearly out of his suit’s detection range. He stated here that nothing physical was present with him, or at least that he could see. The lights on his visor slowly spread as far wide and up across his screen. His scanners told him a wall awaited him. 

As he approached it, more detailed objects appeared behind this wall. The other figures had a more solid shape on his screen, zipping around at speeds and movements foreign to the ships he knew. He described the scanner picking up their movements as, strobes, flashing here and there, but with devilish purpose behind the front line. 

Nothing was ever officially documented from those same scanners to even come close to his testimony. There isn’t five years’s worth of data on them to study. His suit stopped functioning months in, not years. But even in those months it was working, it received next to nothing. Many believe his brain was just giving him a final show, one so convincing it would eventually lead him to saying, I am among them. 

This is where most who studied John turn to sympathy as it’s clear he was a man gone mad. What he describes is unearthly, yet our short but explorative time in space has provided us with little to indicate intelligent life within our reach, even with jump station technology. How long have we spent reaching further and further and have yet to find anything? Especially in the middle of space. In the middle of virtually nowhere. John knew this. I admit, it’s difficult not to give into the statistics of history out here, but I still believe it’s simply too vast to house a lone, intelligent species. We may never find any, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. How arrogant to think so?

After uttering I am among them on the recording, John screams. 

I’ve never heard any living thing on Earth or the stars make a noise to compare. His wailings were a final call refuting the infinite. As hard as his diaphragm could push and as long as the air in his lungs allowed him, John cried out. I’ve listened to the three hours of it until I heard the cracking and tearing of his vocal cords. I listened as he attempted to continue to scream for two more hours, when nothing but a hoarse scratch against his throat forced itself out. I listened to it all, every moment, because John’s scanners did pick up something. 

There were no space amoebas or teleporting lieutenants among other worldly ranks. But for a mere .0054 seconds, just as he claimed he was with them, just before his yelling began, every single pixel of his visor’s scanner lit up. . . .

I stopped eating a day after my panic attacks. A calm blanket of acceptance laid on me. My mind, drained. My body, useless. I let a slideshow of my loved ones play on repeat for nearly a week until darkness took me. What better way to fade back to where I came than on pleasant memories? 

Yet, here I am awake, pulled back into consciousness not but two hours ago. What woke me was not an insatiable need for sustenance or a nightmare of what the afterlife may be, but something else—the one thing above all I was horrified of the most. I didn’t accept I was afraid of it while I floated, tucking it away like a child pretends the darkness underneath their bed no longer scares them, convincing themselves there’s no monster.

But to my utmost, unnerving alarm, my scanners blinked a soft, yellow light. A dot on my visor representative of something in the far, far distance.

It jolted me back into a survival mindset. I checked my systems, and they were all green. They hadn’t faltered a bit while I was teased with my ending. 

I checked my time adrift, and I distinctly felt my hairs stand erect over my entire body.

Fifty-four days. 

A ship going maintenance speed is at around 60,000 kilometers per hour, so I can’t be traveling much slower in this frictionless hell. That’s 1296 hours. Or roughly 77,760,000 kilometers.  

How could this be? Surely my systems were malfunctioning, but no. The new solar suits rarely fail, especially with myself so close to the stars in the distance. 

It took me more moments than I’m proud of to regain my composure. The dot on my visor began to expand into a faint line on my scanners, always flashing to remind me that as every second ticked, I came closer. As the line spread far past my peripherals, it opened in other directions to make a wall and a gate to greet me. To engulf me.

It was then I heard them, but to say I hear them doesn’t exactly do the experience justice. The only way to describe the phenomenon is to take a page from John’s encounter and reiterate: I can feel them. 

Their voices, if you can even call them that, started swashing between my own inner voice about an hour ago and continue as I speak now. I am finding it compelling, but in the way cheese might compel a mouse to a trap. It is taking everything within me, every ounce of my resolve, not to repeat these voices. The old, lost languages couldn’t be fathomed by John without breaking him, and I am also