Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 26

Knocking at Heaven’s Door

The starfighter dissolved in light. Madeleine’s world flared. Then everything went dark. Gaseous Girl was pretty sure she had just died, again. This was getting old. She wondered if she would be a ghost floating aimlessly in space again, and whether Evil Madeleine would also be around. She did not look forward to spending eternity floating around in space with her evil counterpart.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to. This time there was a bump and a flash of golden light, and suddenly she found herself standing on a cloud before a set of shining white walls. “Ah,” Madeleine said, somewhat pleased. “I made it to heaven. Huzzah.”

“Not quite,” said a voice.

Madeleine turned to see who it was, and her mouth fell open in shock. “Santa?”��

“Who were you expecting, Finn McCool?”

“No. Why would I be expecting a legendary Irish giant? I was hoping for Saint Peter, actually,” Madeleine said. “Tradition, and all that.”

“Peter,” said Nicholas, “handles ordinary arrivals. Your case is somewhat…complicated.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“And I’m not really Santa, I’m Saint Nicholas,” he went on. “You people never did get that right. And I don’t fly reindeer, or deliver presents to millions of children all over the world every Christmas. It was three bags of gold, down a chimney, one time, so one poor father could pay his daughter’s dowries. There were never elves.”

“There go my childhood illusions,” ��Madeleine sighed. “Right, well…back to me. Why am I complicated?”

“Because,” Nicholas explained, “you technically don’t exist. You were erased from time. And if you were never born, you can’t exactly have died, and…”

“Look, I’m here,” Madeleine said. “I don’t know how I got here, but I’m here. Can’t you sort out the theological explanations later? I want my harp and fluffy cloud.”

“There’s an even graver problem. You’re Madeleine Prime, so to speak. For every choice you make, another Madeleine exists in another world who made the opposite choice. If you don’t exist, none of the other Madeleines will exist either. Once you were punched out of reality, as it were, you left an awful hole. Reality,” Nicholas said grimly,” does not like having holes punched in it.”

Madeleine sank down on the cloud, burying her face in her hands. ��“Lovely. So how do I fix it?”

She expected Nicholas to assign some sort of task, probably very difficult, almost certainly messy. She did not expect him to say nothing. A long pause ensued. “Nick?” she said. “How do I fix it?”

“You assume that you can.”

That was not what she wanted to hear. “Look, I know it’s a time thing, and I’ve said before I��hate��time things, but even time things are fixable. Remember the Dark Earth Crisis of ’09? Remember when the Red Guardian tried to go back and change the War of 1812? Or that thing with Julius Caesar and the lasers? Been there, done that, hated it, still fixed it.”

“This isn’t just what you call a time thing,” Nicholas said. “This is a….reality��thing. All the timelines could collapse. Every universe, everywhere.”

“Can’t the Big Guy fix it?” Madeleine said, motioning towards the Pearly Gates.

Nicholas shrugged. “Naturally. For example, he could wipe the slate clean and start over. But that seems a bit drastic. He’d prefer it if you worked out the problem yourself. Show initiative, so to speak.”

“I don’t get it,” Madeleine said. “You just said I couldn’t fix it.”

“No, you can’t… but another you can. And you can fix what you did.”

For the first time, Madeleine was glad she had died; otherwise she just know she’d have a splitting headache from all this. “You want to explain that, Nick?”

Nicholas said, slowly and patiently, “You, yourself, Madeleine Prime, are not the one who caused the breakdown in reality. But someone else did. Specifically, the evil version of yourself.�� And what she did, you can undo.”

Madeleine almost smiled. “Okay. That makes sense. So I just have to track down my bad self and stop her. You wouldn’t happen to know where she is, would you?”

“Yes. But you might not realize what finding and confronting her means. She was on your starship. So she has died as well. And while you went here, she went to…the Other Place.”

“Oh….dear, ” Madeleine said. She didn’t think it would be appropriate to use a stronger expletive at the gates of heaven.

This story was written for Grammar Ghoul Press and the Mutant 750 challenge; it is also a further episode in the ongoing adventures of Gaseous Girl. Who, one of these days, will require a theme song. I will have to work on that.

 

The Good Daughter

There is an art to faking your own death. For one thing, you can’t actually die. This part is crucial. It is also difficult to do. You want to arrange affairs so that your fake death appears convincing, but if it becomes so convincing that it turns fatal for you, the whole exercise becomes pointless. The key problem, of course, is the body. A body is the ultimate convincer of a death; but if you’re not actually dying, you obviously won’t have left a body for people to find. Without an actual body, people tend to be skeptical that you’ve actually gone and joined the choir invisible. Therefore, the ideal fake death is one where you’ve “died” in such circumstances that everyone knows a body would be irrecoverable. For instance, if a moon��you were known to be living on has been disintegrated from orbit, everyone assumes��that you were disintegrated with it.

A second problem is an escape plan. The problem with using a moon’s destruction to fake your death is that there needs to be evidence you were on the moon��when it blew, but of course you don’t want to be on the moon��yourself (see above). A good solution here is to arrange some sort of time-delayed transmission from your lunar-side��quarters to someone else off-world. An especially elegant touch is to time the transmission so that it is interrupted by the explosion. Whoever’s watching will be so upset that they won’t think of investigating further. Meanwhile,��you will have left the moon��days before.

Finally, there��is the reason you’re arranging your own demise .Faking one’s death is a one-shot deal. You can’t do it, for instance, just to avoid paying the��licensing fees for your new pet terrier. Once you’ve “died” and started your new life somewhere else, you can’t go back. Ending a relationship beyond recall��is one reason.

Bianca Carmine is very good at this. She’s faked her death��in five systems.��No one suspects she is alive, no one who shouldn’t, anyway. Now she sits in a suns-drenched cafe on a planet light-years away from the latest moon she’d supposedly died on, staring at a yellow-pink tinted glass in her paw. The Swirling Supernova is the most expensive drink the cafe offers. She can afford it. The Carmine otter family dominates the intergalactic crime scene. She is��well provided for. She would not have been if, in another life, she had married someone working for the Otter Space Corps. The Corps takes��a dim view of otter families that dominate intergalactic crime scenes. Otters, they felt, should know better.

So Bianca runs. If anyone gets too close, she runs. Even if it hurts, even if she’s met someone who’s solid and true and cares about her… she runs. She’ll probably keep running. Swirling Supernovas can only make her forget so much.

This story references characters and events in the ongoing Angel and the Space Otter series. Thanks for reading!

A Star, A Star, Shining in the Night

Last time, in the Catrina Chronicles, our heroine had just arrived in Bethlehem for the first Christmas when Susan, her arch-nemesis, launched two nuclear missiles at it from an orbiting alien starship….

A new sun flashed into existence above the town of Bethlehem, and the entire population, from officious Roman centurions to sleep-deprived shepherds, vanished in an atomic fireball. That included Catrina. Next thing she knew, she was standing on a field of ash, as an extremely upset angel rushed towards her. “This wasn’t supposed to happen!” the angel said, tears streaming down its glowing face. “We were supposed to be singing to the shepherds, not watching them get vaporized!”

“You’re telling me,” said Catrina. “Am I dead again?” She glanced down at her arm, which had gone translucent. “Yep, I’m dead again.”

The angel stopped in some confusion. “You’ve…been dead before?”

“Several times. I lost count. I’ve been zombie-penguinified, kaboominated, turned violet and magenta, miniaturized, transformed into a theremin, stabbed with a pointy stick, died, been resurrected, died again, been resurrected again… my author hates me, he really does.” She signed, giving emphasis to her long-standing complaint. “He even forgets about me for months and months before resuming my adventures. Bethlehem is getting bombed, you’d think that would be important. But nooooo, he has to go running on with some space otter or whatever. I’ve friends with space hamsters, myself, but even so…”

“I don’t understand,” whimpered the angel. “I don’t understand anything. Bethlehem has been destroyed, the Christ Child is almost certainly gone, I can’t even…”

“Oh, cheer up,” Catrina said, throwing her ghostly arm about the angel’s shoulders. “I’ll fix things, you’ll see.”

“How?” the angel asked, waving at the devastation of nuclear-bombed Bethlehem around them. “How can you fix this?”��

Catrina smiled her trademark half-smile, that spread slowly over her face and lit up her green eyes. “Easily. All I have to do is go back in time and stop the ship from dropping the bombs.”

“But… but you can’t just change time like that!” the angel protested.

“Why not?”

“Because you just…can’t!”

Catrina raised her left eyebrow. “Very persuasive argument, there. I can, and have done, as a matter of fact. I saved the Library of Alexandria, kicked Gavrilo Princip into a flour barrel before he could shoot the Archduke, kicked the British halfway to Sunday at the Battle of Lexington and Concord….I’ve basically told time to go and get knotted. Why not do it again?”

“You’ll break the universe!” the angel blurted. “You’ll kill your own grandmother! The paradoxes!”

“Will sort themselves one way or another,” Catrina said. “Now then, I’m going to save the Baby Jesus. Are you going to assist me or not?”

“Even if I wanted to, how could I? How could you? You can’t just jump around in time whenever you feel like it!”

Catrina smiled again. “Sure I can.” ��She looked up at the sky. “Oh. Something’s coming in for a landing, looks like.”

A small shuttlecraft was indeed spiraling down out of the night towards them. It skidded to a bumpy landing in the ash. A door hissed open, and out came Susan, laughing hysterically. “I got you! At last! Finally! You’re a ghost, a real live ghost, and you’re dead, so I won! Woohoo!”

“Yes, I’m a ghost, and you’re a loony,” Catrina said. She would’ve liked to come up with a more witty riposte, but that really wasn’t what she wanted just now. “Incidentally, that time rift you kept jumping in or shoving me through? Do you know when it’ll show up again?”

Susan scowled. “It’s gone now. It has to be. I dropped a nuclear bomb on it! Two of them!”

“Ah. So you’ve destroyed Imaginary Time then.”

“Yes! Exactly!”

“And probably Imaginary Reality too, right? I mean, if time is connected to reality, then you’ve pretty much erased the fictional universe, right?”

“Right!”

Catrina paused. “So… how come we’re still talking?”

“What?” Susan said. ��That was the last thing she said before the Swirling Vortex of Imaginary Time opened up behind her. “No! NOOO!” she howled melodramatically.

“Bye!’ Catrina said, and threw herself into the vortex, concentrating very hard on where she wanted to go. Or, more precisely, when. There was a flash and a bang.

She found herself standing on snow again. Bethlehem lay silently below her, as stars rolled by above. She glanced down, and noted with relief that she was no longer dead. Then, looking back up, she saw a dark object, or perhaps two, falling through the sky where no dark objects should be. “Oh no you don’t!” Catrina said, and swung Mlrning (the Shovel of Thor!). A beam of blinding energy blasted into the sky, and encased the bombs in solid ice. They thudded down harmlessly in the snow. Catrina waved the Shovel again, and the dirt parted beneath the bombs, plunging them underground and burying them far from prying eyes. “There,” she said happily. “And that’s Christmas saved.”

Above her, in the starship, Susan was getting dragged away to an alien brig by offended alien officers, who were very upset that she had launched their atomic bombs without their permission. Catrina couldn’t see this happening, but she had a vague idea, and it made her very happy. Susan would probably be tucked away in the alien starship for a good long time. With luck, that might even change her destiny of becoming the mistress of Character Hell. She couldn’t do that as an alien prisoner, right? Of course right. Little knowing how wrong she in fact was, Catrina decided that she was going to drop by the manger and say hello. She’d saved Christmas, after all. Why not?

This has been another exciting episode of the Catrina Chronicles. For previous episodes, click on the Catrina Chronicles tab at the top of the page. And thanks for reading!��

The Answer to the Big Question

“And that’s how it happens.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep. Betcha didn’t know there was a homunculus involved.��Or a flux capacitor.”

“No, I can’t say I did. I also didn’t expect the cybernetic whales.”

“Oh, yeah. Those are key. Also the London Philharmonic.”

“I thought it was more private than that.��How does everyone fit?”

“Time Lord tech.”

“Oh.”

“Yep.”

“And… that’s where babies come from?”

“Yep.”

“Oh.”

This story was written for the Chimera 66 challenge by Grammar Ghoul Press. Thanks for reading!

Allegretto

Madeleine Smith Prime had never given much thought to how she would die, but she certainly would not have anticipated dying in a starfighter with four alternate-universe versions of herself. And, technicallly, she didn’t even exist. She had been erased from time. What would happen to her when the warp core breached and the starfighter blossomed into light? Madeleine had no idea. She didn’t want to find out, either. “Doesn’t this thing have an escape pod?” she suggested. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the blaring ship klaxons.

“Yes,” Madeleine Smith-Harrington said bleakly. “It fits two, in a pinch.”

“Oh,” Madeleine Prime said. There were five people in the starfighter. The math did itself. “Great.”

“My mecha-suit might be able to withstand open space for a short period,” Lady Smith-Harrington added. “Not as long as the pod. But long enough to get back to Earth.”

“So, three,” Madeleine Prime said. “Three out of five. Not bad.”

Princess Madeleine of the Grey Castle had followed the conversation thanks to the starfighter’s internal translation matrix. Now she rose up, throwing back her cloak dramatically. “I will stay. Verily, it is my honor.”

“I’m stayin’ too,” Mad Maddie cut in. “Y’all go.”

“We should do this fairly,” Lady Smith-Harrington said. “We should draw for it.”

“What about her?” Mad Maddie pointed towards Evil Madeleine, who was still lying unconscious on the teleporter pad. “She can stay, yeah?”

Madeleine Prime sighed. As the original Gaseous Girl, she had a feeling everyone would look to her. Truthfully, she didn’t want to stay. She hated heroic sacrifices. And she��definitely��didn’t want Evil Madeleine going and taking the place of one of the good guys. But…she was Gaseous Girl. They all were. And Gaseous Girl had a code. “No. She gets the same chance as all of us,” Madeleine Prime said.

“Hey, now-” Mad Maddie said angrily.

“She gets the same chance. That’s it. So let’s do this.”

The ship’s computer blithely announced that they had ten minutes to a warp core breach. Lady Smith-Harrington went to the replicator, and after exchanging a few harsh words with it, managed to replicate five plastic straws, with two slightly shorter than the rest. The drawing took only a few seconds. ��Madeleine Prime drew for herself and for Evil Madeleine. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised at all to get both short straws. It just wasn’t her day. “You should go, then,” she said. “I hate long goodbyes.”

“Same,” Mad Maddie said. The other two nodded. They were all the same person, after all. Lady Smith-Harrington drew herself up and saluted Madeleine Prime, before powering up her mecha-suit and ejecting from the craft. The princess offered a formal curtsy; Mad Maddie bawled her way through a frantic hug and several tissues. Then they clambered into the escape pod and were gone. Madeleine Prime was alone on the starfighter, with her evil counterpart.

She was very tired. She hadn’t slept in a while, not since this whole crisis started. She’d fought��alien behemoths, Shrieking Tree Demons, died, got resurrected, found herself wiped from existence… all of that added up. She wondered if the replicator made coffee. Then she decided it didn’t matter. She was about to get blown up by exploding starship. Did she really want to be awake for that?

Evil Madeleine stirred. “Ow,” she grumbled. “My head hurts.”

“Yeah, a lot more of you’s going to hurt in a minute,” Madeleine Prime said. “I’m going to bed. Wake me if we survive.”

“Hey-” Evil Madeleine started to protest. Madeleine Prime merely stepped past her into the Century Comet’s small sleeping quarters, the door sliding shut behind her and muffling the alarms. The sleeping arrangements weren’t much: two small cots, one for the pilot, one for a co-pilot. “Dim the lights,” Madeleine Prime said to the computer. “Play something classical. I don’t care what.”

The computer launched into Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the second movement. Madeleine vaguely recognized it from some old apocalyptic movie she’d seen. “Figures,” she said again, and decided that might as well be her last word. She lay down on the cot, closed her eyes, and waited for the warp core to breach and blast her into atoms. She heard the distant alarms die off. Then, a sudden flash, and-

This story was written for the Grammmar Ghoul Press Mutant 750 writing challenge, and is part of the Gaseous Girl Mysteries. Thanks for reading. Be sure and tune in next week to see if our heroine survives. Which she will. Maybe.

The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate

Monica glowered at the new orange blob in her pocket-dimensional cell. She hated cross-species cellmates.

���I erased a planet,��� she said. ���Fifth Temporal War. You?���

A torrent of angry bubbling syllables followed.

���Oh.��� The planet had a survivor. It wasn���t happy. ���Crap.���

The Last Word

Don’t.

It was

Her last word.

Natasha’s last.

Don’t.

 

Don’t?

Don’t what?

Don’t leave me?

He will never

know.

 

Don’t.

A blip.

Static flare.

Lost when her moon

died.

 

“Hey!”

Constance

interrupts.

“You idiot!

The ship’s exploding!

You’ve got to get out of

there!”

 

He

ignores

her. Who cares?

Forget the Orb.

It doesn’t matter now.

So.

 

“Don’t

get in

my way.” “But-”

He ignores her.

She has her mission.

Stamper has his. That ship.

That ship took Natasha.

That ship left her with one word.

“Don’t-”

This is my attempt to write something in the style of a lanterne. A space otter lanterne, specifically.

Mistranslation

Lord Flarkanian��the��Invincible��had, so far, earned his sobriquet. When he and his undefeated army surrounded the Grey Castle and demanded Princess Madeleine’s surrender, he foresaw��no difficulty. He eagerly anticipated��adding the princess to his harem. Rumor said she had a fiery spirit.

What she actually had was the ability to conjure flame.

Lord Flarkanian the Crispy learned, too late, the perils of rumor.

This story features one of the alternate-universe versions of Madeleine Smith, aka Gaseous Girl. It was also written for the Chimera 66 challenge by ��Grammar Ghoul Press. Thanks for reading!

To Boldly Go

The Century Comet Starfighter belonging to Lady Madeleine Smith-Harrington was a wonder. Light-years beyond anything 21st century Earth had created. It had teleporters, replicators ,a cloaking device, an array of weaponry that could disintegrate a small moon or fry the atmosphere clean off a planet…. and yet, with all that, it lacked something incredibly basic. A bathroom.

“So much for boldly going where no one has gone before,” Madeleine Prime observed. She had started thinking of herself in that way to distinguish herself from her alternate versions.

“I apologize,” Lady Smith-Harrington said, “but the Century Comet was designed for short-range combat, not five year expeditions. Therefore, it was believed that restroom facilities were illogical.”

“Well, that sucks,” Mad Maddie said. ‘Cause I gotta go. Like, bad.”

“Can’t you do it in the teleporter pad and beam the, er, waste off into space?” Madeleine Prime suggested.

“I beg your pardon?” Lady Smith-Harrington looked positively scandalized. “It’s a teleporter, not a toilet!”

Princess Madeleine of the Grey Castle chimed in then, with a questioning tone. The Century Comet had its own translation matrix. Her words came out as “Verily, why are we not arrived at the place that will take me back to my own land? We must return there at once! The Prince Patrick is in great peril!”

“I am attempting to find an appropriate set of hyper-drive coordinates suitable for creating an Einstein-Selvik bridge that will take us into your reality,” Lady Smith-Harrington patiently explained.

Madeleine Prime wondered how that would sound translated into the princess’s Latin. By the confused look on her face, it seemed she understood about as much of that as Madeleine Prime did herself. “Zounds,” the princess said. “I like this not. If I but knew the proper spell, I would have magicked myself back to my own world and left you to your own devices. Alas, the only magic I can conjure are these blasts of flame.”

“It’s not magic, it’s…. oh, never mind.” It occurred to Madeleine Prime that maybe, on the princess’s world, her abilities were magical. Why not?

Mad Maddie was starting to edge onto the teleporter pads. She might have made it too, but at that moment the ship’s computer wirped alarmingly. Lady Smith-Harrington’s eyes went wide. “There is another one of us.”

“You’re kidding,” Madeleine Prime said.

“I kid you not. I instructed the computer to scan the planet for life signs genetically identical to our own. It appears it has located one. The reading is…odd somehow.”

“Well, beam her up here,” Madeleine Prime said resignedly. “Might as well get all of me together.”

Mad Maddie swore under her breath. Apparently she would not be able to use the teleporter as a bathroom after all.

The teleporters had a difficult time locking on to the life sign. Lights flashed and blared, and the ship’s computer squalled in protest. “Perhaps you should increase the power?” Madeleine Prime suggested.

“I am giving her all she has!” Lady Smith-Harrington snapped. “What next, shall I reverse the polarity?”

At that moment, the teleporters finally got hold. There was a flash and a flare of energies, and yet another Gaseous Girl materialized on the ship.

“Oh, super,” she said, looking around in glee at the ship. “This is fantastic.”

“Hi there,” Madeleine Prime said. “I’m Madeleine, so’s she, so’s you, so’s everyone else. What’s your variation?”

The new arrival giggled. “I’m evil.”�� She proved how evil she was by a sudden burst of fire. In a slight failure of engineering, the teleporter pads were located within sight of the Century Comet’s engine room. Evil Madeleine’s blast sliced through the engine room door and shot into the warp core.

Klaxons blared over their heads. “Hey, that was fun!” Evil Madeleine exclaimed in delight. “What’ll we do next?”�� Mad Maddie, settled that question by walloping the woman over the head so that she fell unconscious on the teleporter pad.

Lady Smith-Harrington leaped to the controls. Her face went white with alarm. “The warp core’s breaching. Within seconds it will melt down into a catastrophic explosion.”

“Great,” Madeleine Prime said. “I get to die. Again. I’m getting tired of this.”

The princess drew herself up. “If we are to perish, then I must say; it would be my honor to do so in your company. Across the worlds, we are the same person. It seems appropriate that we end our road together.”

Mad Maddie sniffled. “Ain’t it the truth.”

“Quite,” said Lady Smith-Harrington.



This story was written for Grammar Ghoul Press and the Mutant 750 challenge.�� You might have noticed a bit of a Trek flare to this latest tale of Gaseous Girl. I, like many others, was very sad to hear of the passing of Leonard Nimoy. I don’t know whether he would’ve appreciated a homage in a story of gaseously-powered superheroines, but then, he was the man who sang the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. Maybe he would have. You never know.

Stardate Yesterday

Stamper

first met her for

drinks. She had Martian rum.

It’s scarce now, since the war. Sad. She

liked it.

The yeahwrite poetry slam this month was cinquains. Five lines, syllables 2-4-6-8-2. I decided to write a vignette about Mr. Stamper, the space otter again. if it works, I might attempt a space otter lanterne. Betcha never read a space otter lanterne before.