Wednesday, June 23, 2010

flash fiction--outpostSciFi

MannedExoticStationSuzi 

He sips the breeze. He barely hears himself as he utters to the olive haze on the horizon: "Suzi can never die." Cooper thinks, slower this time, of how he--how any scientist--could make a machine like that. He reflects on the sparkles coming off the ocean.  "A work of art, billions of years in the making." It is a beautiful, imaginative thought, a little disconnected from him now--it pronounces new plans inside his mind, quietly but forcefully, as if a message just returned. He could decide to kill her. It is a simple, monotone thought, not entirely out of his realm. Exotic stations--even this Manned Exotic Station Suzi (M.E.S.S.)--are where scientists go to save the world, aren't they?  It's possible--maybe even certain--that someone or something targets a Xradio beam right here, to this island, to Suzi. Something calculated, Landing, last site; something looked at these cliffs and that ocean on their own screen. By reaching this force field, you surmount the extreme conditions of your own immediate surroundings and enter your zone of hope, the dead zone you seek, a dead zone where even bacteria have been eliminated.

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