Note to Lynch.

This isn’t the fluff piece your paper commissioned me for. This isn’t my glowing editorial on the fruits of living on that hell, Ortega. This isn’t my re-dubbing of ‘Long Sleep Cruise’s as ‘Dreamscapes’, because the former invoked something too akin to death, and was too damned accurate..

No, old friend. Of all the true stories I never wrote, this won’t be one of them. Feel free not to print it. We both know you won’t. But read it at least. Read it and think about what we’ve done. What men like us did to make this story possible…and what hell awaits us for cultivating so much of it in the verse.

And May you sleep as well as I have when all that thought wears you out. There’s your fluff piece for you Lynchy. I ain’t slept in 3 days.

PS….this story has pictures. Pass em out at your cocktail parties. The aristocrats love a good ghost story. ………………………………………………..

To the Edge and Looking Off

What do you do when the campfire tales you delight in scaring each other with, turn out to be more than fancy?

You stop going camping.

Jigsaw faces.

Missing cheeks, lopped off lobes, lidless eyes and lipless ‘oh’s’.

The way they look at me. The way they gape. They seem to ask me ‘who’s skin are you wearing?’ That’s the thought that makes me purge. Who’s skin am I wearing? What skin is sewn into the inner lining of this fine Cotton Suit?

Someone else’s. I’m not myself. Today I’m that person. That lonely pioneer who set out to make his life on the edge of the abyss, and found something other. Today I’m the man who’s senses defy his own reason in a violent uprising of bodily spasms, until finally, reason packs up and goes back to the core. But I can’t go back with it. I’m looking into the other now, no matter which way I turn.

I came here to turn. To spin. That was my assignment. I’ve been out here on an alliance cruiser touring this stretch of nothing, waiting for a colony ship to derelict, for about a month. That’s all it takes. Those are our numbers, but not the ones we sell to the public. Still, the occasional story bleeds through. My job is to preempt that story with my own first-hand journalistic touch. I board the ship, and that gives me hands-on credibility. Then I write a piece, explaining human error as the cause of the failed mission. Not the company planners of course, but the colonists who spent their life savings on it. Sometimes my journalistic tenacity leads me to discover that they were drunk at the controls, or on psychedelics. Sometimes they end up being just plain incompetent. Boring I know, but the truth sometimes is. The paper’s truth, that is.

The cold truth is a little different. Sometimes the life support in those heaps of junk fail. Sometimes the navigation does. Sometimes the air. Sometimes the purifiers. Sometimes the food supplies are bad. We’ve got that covered though. Johns is the Dreamscapes man. He accompanied me on this assignment. He boards the derelict with me and writes up two reports. One for the company, and one for the public. Sometimes he feeds me the ideas for my editorial, sometimes I feed him the ideas for his report.

The only time things get messy is when the colonists manage to radio help, and get it. Then my job gets a little more fluent, and admittedly, more exciting. Then my job becomes discrediting the stories of the living. Its harder than maligning the dead, but not a whole lot harder. There are a few local medias that don’t have any big corporate interests at heart, but they have the audibility of a gnat. If a tree falls in the woods and no one reports it, did it really fall? I used to be sure of that answer.

I’ve never even told my wife these things. I’ve never even whispered them to a companion after I bedded her, just to see her reaction. I’ve never even been honest with myself. This is what they call karma I guess. We came upon a derelict within the month, just like clockwork. The Alliance gave us a shuttle, a couple of armed men, and sent us on over. We were docking when a vessel burned into our coordinates. It didn’t stop. Maybe it was the Alliance presence that spared us that encounter. Instead, it shot on by. The alliance radioed , said it was giving chase, and then it was gone. That was 3 days ago, an eternity of this purgatory.

Our purgatory, their hell. The dead that is. What happened on this ship is alien. What happened here was not the work of man…and yet it was…I can’t feign innocence any longer. Reavers aren’t people, but they were made by people like me, and they aren’t mere invention. They are real, and they are the madness.

A five year old child has no bicep on one arm. There are tooth marks in the bone. I know he was five because I looked him up on the computer. He liked to play captain. He had a little hat.

They ripped a baby from a pregnant woman’s womb, and did god knows what with it. Her name was Promise, I kid you not.

Jimmy and Paul were gay. ‘Queer’ had been written in their profiles. They both died fighting. Someone took their scalps.

There are so many more.

The people on this boat were people like you, looking for something better, trusting the stories we fed them. Well it’s all different now, isn’t it? Who will brave the frontiers after reading this? Who will willingly turn their wives into skin trophies and their children into hamburger?

But I know the answer to that, don’t I? A job like mine, you have to know that answer. Its not my genius that ever made people believe my stories. It’s their desire to believe them. Life is so hard where these folk start out, its no surprise they got to believe in something better. Its no great mystery why they get on those Dreamscapes.

Its because they dare to dream. It’s because they need to have hope. In the end, this editorial will change the minds of very few, but one person at least, has been permanently displaced from the verse he thought he knew. I wish you all the best. I won’t be returning to my job. This propagandist is signing off. I am truly sorry for everything.

Renshaw

……………………………………………………….

The cruiser has returned. Johns cried when he heard. The soldiers knocked their helmets together in relief. I’m sending this ahead, and a few hours from now we’ll be unlatching from the derelict and returning to our alliance host. They’ll salvage the ship, send it back without any investigation of their own, so that your pals can turn around and sell it again. I wish you all the worst in your endeavors, Lynch. We won’t talk again.

God have mercy on us.