The following is another short story that I written as part of the ongoing ‘Write with Chris and Millie’ writing prompt exercise. The purpose of the exercise is to give us both a chance to practise writing prompts and stories. The original prompt phrase or sentence is highlighted in bold.

This week, we are such stuff as dreams are made on…

***

Photo by Niketh Vellanki on Unsplash

There was a bird on the horizon, swooping gracefully through the air. It was a majestic sight. The only concerning thing was the fact that there was no oxygen outside.

“Huh,” said Chloe, watching the bird flying closer over the lunar landscape, “that’s kinda cool.” Her supervisor, Professor Susan Aikman, chuckled next to her, the laugh crackling across the suit radio.

“My dear,” the older academic said, “you have not seen anything yet.”

Chloe watched the bird fly away across the moon’s horizon, until it was nothing but a pinprick of light in the distance, joining the millions of stars in the firmament above.

“Should we have caught it?” asked Chloe, suddenly surfacing from her wonder-induced trance and remembering why they were there. “Was that bird…important in some way?”

“How does one catch a dream?” replied Susan, sounding distant.

“Professor…” pressed Chloe. He mentor snapped out of it.

“No, it wasn’t important. It was a metaphor, a reflection of why we’re here. I think it was symbolising how the quest for human knowledge is like attempting to fly towards the farthest stars,” explained Professor Aikman.

“Wouldn’t that make it a simile, not a metaphor?” mused Chloe. Susan shot her a withering look that made Chloe blush.

“Would you like to change your PhD studies to English Language?” she asked.

“No, Biochemistry is fine,” muttered Chloe, not looking at her supervisor.

“Then shall we proceed?”

“Which way?” asked Chloe. One part of the moon pretty much looked like any other.

“This way,” said Susan, stepping into her house, only it wasn’t her house, it was her house merged with a German hotel she had once visited for a conference in 1992.

Chloe looked behind her to take one last look at the bird, only the star field was gone and now she could see she was surrounded by the garden of Professor Aikman’s house, except that all the trees had been replaced by free-standing kitchen sinks. Chloe shrugged, wondering briefly if the bird would ever reach that farthest star, and then she went to follow Susan into the not-quite house. Chloe was still getting used to the Somnambulnaut Suit; with the warm electronics and the conditioned air blowing over her face, the smells combined to remind her of a new car. The suit had somehow felt appropriate when they had been stood on the moon, but now she was stood in someone’s front garden it felt cumbersome and claustrophobic. She took as large strides as she could, fighting against the stiffness of the brand new fabric in the leg joints.

By the time she made it through the door the professor was already waiting at the lift in the entrance lobby to the hybrid house-hotel. The lift was made of glass, only it wasn’t transparent. Chloe looked up. She could see the first floor landing from the professor’s house, seemingly continuously repeated for floor-after-floor, stretching up to infinity.

“How are we going to find the information we’re looking for?” asked Chloe as they waited for the lift. The lift level indicator was counting down, just not in the normal way that numbers usually work. “Do we have to search all the rooms in this house, or something like that?”

“No, we’re nowhere near our destination yet, this is just the subconscious,” bending down to straighten the hall rug while they waited. Normally the rug was a rectangle but here it was triangular for some reason.

“Wait, we’ve started in the sub-conscious?” asked Chloe, confused. “I thought that was something we had to work down to?”

“I don’t know why people think that,” said Susan, “the subconscious is just random noise surrounding the core of what makes a person a person – their memories and experiences.”

The Professor may have talked like that was a general factual statement, but Chloe felt it as a chiding lesson directed at her.

“So ok, when we reach down into the memories, we’ll find the information?”

“Yes, although not as literal information. You’re not going to see walls of text or giant equations written in the sky. The brain doesn’t work like that and neither do the Somnambulnaut Suits. What will happen is that you will get to experience the memories of the events that led the subject’s brain to form the information that you’re looking for in the first place. Once you’ve re-lived their experiences, if you’re close enough to the subject both in knowledge and temperament, then your brain will acquire the information you’re after of it’s own free will.”

“Then let’s hope I’m close enough to the subject,” muttered Chloe. Susan shrugged noncommittally.

“That’s why you were selected for this assignment.”

Silence descended, unlike the lift they were waiting for, which according to the indicator was currently passing floor ‘backwards Cyrillic R’.

“If we need to go down, could we not force the door to the lift shaft and jump down?” asked Chloe. Susan looked aghast at this suggestion.

“The Somnambulnaut Suits are designed with incredibly powerful and compact haptic feedback, which is essential for the purposes of properly experiencing the subject’s memories. While the suit can’t directly injure you per se, it could make you experience the physical agony of falling down a lift shaft and impacting on the floor, which in turn may be enough to send your body into shock.”

It was Chloe’s turn to look aghast. “You didn’t mention that in the standard operations manual! How did you get this past the grant-funding ethics committee?”

“By not mentioning that in the standard operations manual,” replied Professer Aikman, stepping into the lift as the doors opened. Chloe followed her in, the two of them scraping their suits together as their combined bulk filled the lift. None of the floor buttons were labelled with numbers, just the safety information from the back of a packet of washing powder.

“This one,” said the professor, selecting a button. Chloe looked again, and the lift buttons were labelled with Ancient Greek poetry, just as they had been all along. Chloe raised her hands to rub her temples, but the suit gloves simply clucked against the outside of her helmet. Dream logic was doubly confusing when you were awake. Chloe could understand the Ancient Greek – even though she couldn’t understand Ancient Greek – and could see the the verse selected was a poem by Wordsworth on the subject of longing. But of course she could read that because it was in English. Chloe’s head began to spin and she closed her eyes and bent over to lean on her legs.

“Please don’t be sick in the suit,” said Professor Aikman from the mezzanine floor above her. The interior of the lift was as large as a football field and included a mezzanine floor. Posters of 1960s pop icons plastered the supporting pillars. “Maybe just sit down, close your eyes and wait for us to reach the memories.”

“It’s not real, I’m in the lab – it’s just a simulation projected onto the helmet’s visor – it’s not real, I’m in the lab,” muttered Chloe to herself, repeating the mantra over and over. She sat down on the floor, hugging her knees and jamming her eyes closed. She felt a tingling as the electrodes tucked under her hair pulsed on her scalp, seeking to alter her perceptions – playing with the chemistry to her brain to give her the full experience of the subject’s mind.

“Don’t fight it, you’ll only make it worse…” said the professor from somewhere impossibly distant.

“It’s not working, let’s pull the plug,” said someone else – a man – his voice crackling over the radio. Chloe couldn’t remember who he was or where he was. Was he from a dream?

“No,” said another distorted voice, “this is too important. We need the knowledge the subject has.” Where was he? Where were these people, trying to decide her fate?

Chloe suddenly realised that the lift was no longer moving. Cautiously she opened one eye, then the other. Her scalp tingled and her brain buzzed. She was sat alone on the floor of the tiny lift. The opaque glass sides of the lift were entirely transparent, just as they had always been. Outside the evening sky was filled with stars.

Chloe was sitting at a table with her new husband – except she didn’t have a husband – outside a café in southern France. Yes, this was a long time ago. Hadn’t she been wearing a suit? She lifted a glass of wine to her lips. No, that would be silly, why would she wear a suit when she had this lovely flowing dress that was so right for the summer? She sipped wine and talked with her husband as the world passed them by. They swapped hopes and fears for the future, talked about plans, and most importantly, dreams. Finally the café closed and even the stars retired.

Chloe stood up to pay the bill and immediately sat down again on the hospital bed. There were less than thirty seconds between contractions, it wouldn’t be long now and they would finally meet their daughter! He husband held her hand, a look of encouragement and pride in his eyes. He let go of her hand once Chloe was safely on board the yacht and then began to haul himself on-board after her. What better way to celebrate Chloe’s appointment to the professorship than a sailing holiday around the Scottish coast, just the two of them? Her husband tried to pull himself back on board but the stormy seas were too rough. Chloe struggled to help him, and working together they just managed to pull him onto the deck. The yacht lurched violently in the swelling seas and neither of them saw the swinging mast boom coming as it lurched through the rain to collide with his head. Chloe dropped to her knees, grabbing his hands as his unconscious body began to slide away across the water-slick decks. Chloe let go of his hands and sat back in the chair. The steady rhythm of the heart monitor beeped in the background. Outside, the hospital corridor was filled with quiet activity. Her husband lay comatose in bed beside her. All those dreams they had discussed on that summer night, locked up in his head…

Chloe took her eyes off her husband and looked down at the journal article on her tablet. This was it, the final missing piece of her many long years of gathering data. It helped all the other information she had acquired slot into place, giving it context. Now she knew she could design the equipment that would allow her to parse the delta brain waves of any individual and turn their dreams into something recognisable to others.

“And there you have it,” said Professor Aikman.

Chloe looked up to see Susan standing with her arms folded, leaning against the doorway into Chloe’s office…except this wasn’t Chloe’s office was it? It was Susan’s office at the university. Chloe looked down the iPad held in the gloved hand of her suit, quickly committing the title of the paper to memory.

“Yes, I see it now. I felt your motivation, and your thought process. I see how you looked at the science and engineering puzzle in a way that no-one else could. I felt why you needed to create the dream suit, to spend one last night at that café with your husband…”

“And you feel confident you’ll take that knowledge back with you?”

“It’s all up here,” replied Chloe, confidently tapping her helmet.

“And in there, I trust,” replied Susan, pointing at Chloe’s heart.

“Not very scientific, professor,” laughed Chloe.

“Oh surely I’m allowed a little whimsy at the end?” said Susan, cracking the first smile that Chloe had seen from her all day.

“I guess this is the last time that we’ll talk,” said Chloe, “thank you professor. For everything.”

“Thank you,” replied Professor Aikman, “thank you for helping my work live on.”

There was a brief awkward pause, then Chloe and the professor embraced in an amicable hug, their helmets clinking together and gloved hands slapping the power packs on each others backs.

“The lift will take you where you need to go,” said Susan, pointing out of the office, “as for me, well, I think I’d like to linger here a little longer…”

Chloe nodded and walked out into the corridor outside the office. The lift was right there in the university building, right where it always was. Except now it was made of opaque glass and all the buttons were labelled with Susan’s office extension number.

“Goodbye professor,” said Chloe, watching Susan as the doors closed.

“So long,” replied Susan as she disappeared from sight.

Chloe gasped for breath as the room span, before finally vomiting in a bed pan. Removing the helmet and the head electrodes had been extremely disorientating.

“Rough landing, huh?” said the man behind her.

“You could say that,” coughed Chloe, wiping away a string of bile from her mouth.

“Did you get the information?”

“Give me a minute.”

“Did you get it?!”

“Yes,” said Chloe, regaining her composure, “what’s the damn rush?”

“You understand the full workings of the Somnambulnaut Suits now? You can replicate them? Improve on them?”

“Yes! Jeez,” said Chloe, looking over at where the frail body of Professor Aikman lay at death’s door. It was so strange to see her like this, when she’d just been talking to a healthy and vital version of her moments ago. But – like so many other important things – that had all been in the professor’s head. Now there the professor lay, unconscious and only kept alive by a ventilator and feeding tubes. A Somnambulnaut Suit helmet rested over her head like a ritual death mask, a long network cable snaking out to join it to Chloe’s suit.

“I had to be sure,” said the man, before turning and nodding to one of the nursing staff, “do it.”

The nurse leant over and flipped a switch, and the ventilator bellows stopped their rhythmic rise and fall. Alarms began to sound to indicate Susan’s heartbeat was failing.

“What are you doing?!” cried Chloe in panic, rounding on the man.

“It’s for the best,” said the man whose name she couldn’t quite remember. Chloe turned back to look at Susan, tears welling in her eyes. The professor turned her helmeted head towards Chloe and winked.

Chloe gasped for breath as the room span, before finally vomiting in a bed pan. Removing the helmet and the head electrodes had been extremely disorientating.

“Rough landing, huh?” said the man behind her, “I heard the trip up through the subconscious can do that. You’ll see all sorts of weird stuff.

“You…could say that,” coughed Chloe, wiping away a string of bile from her mouth.

“Did you get the information?”

“Give me a minute.”

“Did you get it?!”

Chloe took a deep breath, considering her next words very carefully…

The following is another short story that I wrote recently as part of an ongoing writing prompt exercise with a fellow writer. The purpose of the exercise is to give us both a chance to practise writing prompts and stories. The original prompt phrase or sentence is highlighted in bold.

This week we join three travellers lost in a strange land. 

***

Photo by Gustav Gullstrand on Unsplash

Lorlea pointed the camera of her data pad at the sky, carefully aiming for the swathe of stars above the clearing. The app gave a down-beat chime. She tried again, stretching her arms, holding it up as high as she could, as though she was trying to patch the gap in the trees above her head. The bad chime sounded again, and a glaring red question mark flashed over the image the camera had captured.

Star Match: Not found

Wifi: No networks in range

GPS: No signal

Radioisotope Dating: Insufficient background levels

Where were they? Lorlea wondered again. Actually, scratch that, she knew exactly where they were. It was when they were that was the real question.

It was supposed to be a routine mission for Lorlea and her fellow chrononauts. A little hop into the future in the time capsule, a spot of data mining, a pardon-my-paradox and then back to the present day. But when they had recovered from the incapacitating effects of the chrono-displacement…well, the refueling station was nowhere to be seen. Just these endless trees.

It was clear that they had gone too far in one temporal direction or the other. Jaecob had argued that they’d accidentally traveled into the past, based on the lack of any wifi connection. It was hard to picture any point in the future without wifi. But Lorlea didn’t think the radioisotope readings bore that out. The Earth would have been hotter in the past, not so cool that she couldn’t get a radioactive decay measurement. She was convinced they’d gone further into the future. Way into the future. It wasn’t a debate she had to revisit any time soon though, because Jaecob was now very definitely dead.

So far there had only been three things that Lorlea, Khal and Jaecob (before he died horribly) had seen that were recognisable. The first were the trees. None of her crew were botanists – or even amateur gardeners – so they couldn’t identify the species. But the trees had brown bark, tall trunks and green leaves, and that was enough to make them feel familiar enough to be comforting.

The second thing was the grass. Although the seemingly random spread of the trees in the forest gave it a natural appearance, the grass was without exception immaculate. It was a healthy, vital green, and short too, as though it were freshly mowed every day in a lovingly tended garden.

The third thing they had recognised was the toucan. There were many brightly coloured exotic birds flapping around in the trees, whistling strange songs, but the toucan was the first one that they thought they could identify – even if it was larger than normal with a beak of purple rather than orange. Jaecob had approached it, just relieved to see something vaguely normal. Something they could put a name to. The toucan had hopped down a branch or two towards him, made a curious trumpeting sound, and then neatly and expertly eviscerated him. Lorlea and Khal fled in terror, running through the trees, chased by Jaecob’s agonised screams and the otherworldly trumpeting of the toucan.

If those were the three familiar things then there were plenty of unfamiliar things to outnumber them. Occasionally they would come across tiny houses built into the roots of the trees – delicate things that might have been inhabited by miniature dolls or fairies in a more  whimsical time. In other places they stumbled across thick bushes that, like the grass, appeared neatly pruned. Sometimes high-pitched, childlike laughter could be heard from inside, despite there being no obvious means of anyone getting in or out through the dense leaves.

Then there were the abandoned gazebos. Lorlea and Khal took these as another clue that civilisation must have existed her at one time. They were strange things with no walls and brightly coloured roofs that hurt the eyes if you stared at them for too long. There seemed to be one in every clearing. There was one in the clearing with them now. Khal was searching it, the clinical white of his chrono-flight suit making him look like a ghost flitting among the ruins of a long vanished civilisation. The flight suits didn’t really offer any protection – as the toucan had shown them – but they had all mutually decided to keep them on. Besides, they would need them if they ever found a way to refuel the time capsule.

Lorlea tried again to get a clear shot of the night sky and work out how far in the future they were from the positions of the stars. It still wasn’t working though. Her view was too restricted by the top of the trees. She just couldn’t capture enough of the stars at once for the app to extrapolate their motion and previous positions. Lorlea had considered climbing a tree, but then who knew how many toucans were actually out there?

Night had only just fallen. This was their third night here and already she dreaded it. She listened and there was just nothing…it was the worst sound she had ever heard. That was because she knew it was the calm before the storm, a dread moment of anticipation. In the daytime the garden forest was relatively silent and still, but in the nighttime, as the moon came up, suddenly it sprang to life. Giant white flowers suddenly bloomed, the birds began to sing their bizarre songs and lilting music drifted from the gazebos.

Lorlea and Khal settled down in the gazebo, huddling down together to wait out the night, trying to ignore the music box plinking that came from the roof above them.

When Lorlea woke it was the sullen silence of daytime. She sat up with a start when she realised it was even quieter than it should have been. Khal was gone. She leapt to her feet, calling his name. No response, but in the distance she thought she heard a tiny chop-chop-chop of propellers, as though some small airship or dirigible was navigating languidly through the trees. Was it a rescue craft? Why had they taken Khal and not her? She ran frantically in the direction that she thought the noise was coming from, catching and tearing her flight suit on branches in her haste. But it was pointless, there was no trace of Khal or whatever mysterious craft had carried him off, if indeed that was what had happened.

On her fifth day in the garden, Lorlea finally met another person. Or, what may once have been a person. Or maybe he never was. The stranger walked unhurriedly through the trees, his humanoid body androgynous and naked with a sickly blue hue to his skin. He seemed to have no possessions other than a red rag or blanket that matched the shock of blood red hair on his head.

Lorlea had spotted the stranger ambling through the trees before he had noticed her. She froze, uncertain whether to call out or quietly slip away. But despite his bizarre appearance, there was no air of menace about him. She wondered if he was a native of this strange place, or simply lost like her? Was he a distant relative of mankind, or something else entirely?

Lorlea had not slept properly in days, and she knew her judgement was not as effective as it should be. Yet she could sensing no threat from this strange traveller. Deciding she had nothing to lose at this point, Lorlea called out and waved to him. The stranger turned, regarding her with surprisingly soft features, and waved back. They walked towards each other; Lorlea’s steps cautious, the stranger’s almost playful. She was disappointed to discover that he did not speak English, or indeed any language she recognised. Jumbled syllables spilled from his mouth, many repeating, but none making sense. It was like his words were in a little pickle. A deep wave of weariness washed over Lorlea. Another mystery. Another thing that made no sense. The longer she was here, the more dream-like and surreal this garden forest seemed. And now the night was fading to black and the stars were out and bright.

As though sensing her tiredness, the stranger took her arm and led her through the trees to a gazebo that softly hummed a lullaby. The clearing that it sat in was the biggest she had yet seen, and Lorlea was able to capture an image of the stars on her data pad as they walked across the grass. The progress wheel on the app whirled, calculating how far the stars had moved since her crew had left their original time line. Concentrating on the data pad, Lorlea stumbled as she was led up the step into the gazebo.

“Oopsie daisy,” said the stranger kindly.

Lorlea collapsed in a pile of blankets on the gazebo floor, regarding the stranger with renewed interest. She had understood that! Maybe he knew other phrases she understood too?

The stranger made himself comfortable, and Lorlea decided to do the same, realising that they probably weren’t going anywhere else tonight. With a sense of resignation, she finally slipped out of her flight suit and helmet, revealing her pink dreadlocks and the brightly patterned dress that was her favourite. She wore it under her flight suit on every mission for good luck.

The blue stranger smiled appreciatively, then picked up a stick and drew in the dust on the gazebo floor. He drew himself, navigating the deep dark ocean on a tiny boat. The app chimed softly with a positive noise. Two billion years it said. Two billion years of the stars moving and the world turning.

Lorlea understood then. The blue stranger was a traveller, just like her, and what’s more she knew where they were. This was where the lost went to die; travellers, dreams and more besides, in the garden in the night.

The following is another short story that I wrote recently as part of an ongoing writing prompt exercise with a fellow writer. The purpose of the exercise is to give us both a chance to practise writing prompts and stories. The original prompt text is in bold.

This week, we’re heading into space…

***

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

It was at that point he realised that everything in his life was leading up to this point, and in this moment he could not be less prepared…

The Academy training should have prepared him, but right now, in the moment, it was hard for Jared to recall a single word his instructors had spoken to him during those five long years. He breathed deeply, sucking in the hot, stale air and looking down through the centimetre thick armoured glass at the blue and green of the world spinning silently below him.

Ship air always had a weird taste to it, and Jared was never quite able to forget that he was breathing the same air that hundreds of other people had breathed before him. He closed his eyes, trying to centre himself and forget about the planet below him, and the infinite abyss of space beyond that. He thought back to when he had been selected for the Empathic Academy; he remembered his proud parents and Mila, his oh-so-jealous sister. She had wanted to go to the Academy so badly, but in the end he had been chosen and she had not. Jared had often wondered if it was the fact that she wanted it so badly that had led her to fail. His family could bask in the reflected glory of Jared’s selection for the next few generations, but he knew that someone else’s glory would never be enough for Mila.

To get accepted into the Empathic Academy you had to be a very special person with a very certain and pronounced type of empathy. That was key; every other aspect of your physical and mental abilities could be trained or enhanced, but not empathy, not for this purpose. If it was not natural then it did not work. Jared was one in a hundred thousand. One in a thousand thousand. Someone worth extensively testing, and sifting and waiting for.

And now, here he was, looking down at the planet from space, hanging in his isolation chamber beneath the hull of the ship; a barnacle on the belly of a whale. Jared felt that the weight of responsibility for what he was about to do would crush him if he wasn’t in a zero gravity environment.

Ping. An audible warning chimed softly and the light in the chamber shifted, the crimson glow of a ‘ready’ light reflecting from the windows and giving the world below a bloody hue. Jared’s hand began to shake – almost imperceptibly – with adrenaline. He was suddenly aware of every little detail around him; the smell of hot electronics in the air, the taste of his own sweat, the tiny distant wisps of white cloud floating high over the sapphire seas far below.

There was a gentle click as the headset for the 2-Empathetic-Black detached from its moorings. At last Jared felt his training kick in, his uncertainty evaporating into the recycled air. He put the helmet neatly onto his shaved head, ensuring all the electrodes had good contacts. The helmet was connected to the chamber wall by a snaking umbilical. Jared pictured the path of the cables, worming their way through the chamber wall and up into the bowels of the ship above, connecting his mind to the vast 2-Empathetic-Black device, a device that took up the majority of the leviathan craft. Sensing a good connection between Jared and the helmet, the ready light changed to an anticipating amber. There could be no communication with the rest of the crew now. No distractions. The light went green and Jared began his work.

At first all he could feel was the deep bass thrum of the 2-Empathetic-Black, but then he began to sense other things too, just like his training had taught him he would. A presence, distant and unseen, like someone joining him in a dark room. He focused on the planet below, thinking about the population, feeling their presence. Jared began to become aware of them – each of them – like a tiny point of pressure. But the pressures was not on his skin, it was in his mind, yet still somehow distant, far far removed. The presences he felt followed the map of the continents beneath him; greater in cities, sparser in deserts and mountains. As the machinery in the ship above gained in power, so too did the points of pressure in his mind become more distinct as individuals.

Billions of individuals.

The empathy that made Jared a one-in-a-million recruit suddenly came to the fore. He could feel their emotions: love, trust, joy, pain, hate, fear. It was like a towering wave and a deep well all at once. But he had to experience it all, he had to touch each of the sentient minds below. In the frozen north he experienced a mother’s love for her child, in an equatorial desert he experienced a desperate journey in search of water, in a city he experienced the sour taste of a business deal gone bad, and in the steaming jungles of the south he experienced raging hate.

The vibrations of the 2-Empathetic-Black device were coursing through his body now as it built to full power. In that moment not only was Jared aware of every single thought and emotion on the world below, but the people below were finally aware of him too, sensing his pride, duty and, above all, his love for them. If any of the population in the western hemisphere had looked into the sky, they may have seen glint of sunlight reflecting from the spacecraft of their new, empathetic god.

The green light blinked. Once, twice, three times. Auto injectors stabbed into Jared’s body, pumping his veins full of a potent neurotoxin. He died then, instantly, synapses dissolving, with not even enough time to register the cold needles that had punctured his skin. If he had then he wouldn’t have minded; he had fulfilled his years of training. He had done his duty. As his mind died, his thoughts fading to blackness, so too did the mind of every sentient being that he was connected with on the planet below.

Hundreds of metres above Jared’s silent, floating body, the Admiral Hawne watched the status screens dispassionately. The Admiral was a small island of calm in amongst the bustle of the ship’s bridge. Once this process of the 2-Empathetic-Black device had awed him, but now it was just so much machinery at work. Pawns moving on a board. Boxes ticked. Satisfied that the task was complete, he began to issue orders.

“Let the mission log show the indigenous population was exterminated at chrono-mark 12:43/2. I didn’t catch the name of the species, but if there’s nothing in the scout unit logs then make something up. Tag the planet as cleansed in the astrogation records and flag it for follow-up terraforming and colonisation. Another great leap for the expansion of Humanity. Housekeeping teams proceed to the isolation chamber, retrieve Graduate…” Admiral Hawne paused and looked at a data-screen “…Graduate Jared. Jettison his body with full honours, then summon another Graduate from the barracks and get them installed before we reach our next target.”

“Will that be all, Admiral?” queried his adjutant as he typed Hawne’s orders into his tablet.

“Let me know when we achieve orbit above…” he consulted the data-screen again, checking their scheduled mission route, “…Fomalhaut-4b.”

The Admiral turned and walked sauntered away towards the exit from the bridge.

“I’m going to see if I can scare up something for lunch.”