Paradise-1 (Red Space)

by David Wellington

The trick to traveling faster than light was to remove yourself from the universe and let the universe move on without you.

Then a green plastic monkey jumped on her arm, and she found the breath to scream.

He was ejected. You know.” The robot played a sound clip of a champagne cork popping.

“Hi,” Rapscallion said. “Machine mind over here. I can tell you, from that unique perspective – this is bugfuck insane.”

Rapscallion, meanwhile, had met a new friend. “My name is Curmudgeon,” the robot said. It hung upside down from the ceiling inside the cramped, frigid corridors of the ship’s server bay, where Undine’s AI cores were housed and maintained. “I chose that name myself.”

In that time Rapscallion had a chance to contemplate mortality. Infinity and eternity. The impermanence of all things. He came to one inescapable conclusion. It wasn’t fucking fair. He’d never asked to be made. He’d been switched on and given a job to do and no one, ever, had asked him how he felt about that. Always there had just been more work, job after job.

“Humans are weird,” Rapscallion said. Which just made them both laugh all the harder.

The problem is, as anyone experienced with trauma will tell you, every dream becomes a nightmare if you can’t wake up.