[Estimated reading time: 2 minutes]

I drove to Issaquah with the top down, my favorite brown jacket wrapped me in an orgasmic layer of comfort. "Pink Floyd" played through the speakers, of course. (It plays now, though a different album.) I sped through the twisty roads and trusted the GPS to get us there safely. Of course it did.

At the bar I ordered the barleywine I'd come for, and a cheap order of buffalo chicken sliders. My mind didn't process in that moment that combining spicy food with a barleywine may not have been the best idea.

I read a different book now, Top 10 Volume 2. The book had one issue left, and that's the time it took me to drink my beer, have the spicy sliders, and notice a man and woman sit down at the bar.

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[Estimated reading time: 15 minutes]

Under a late-March sky, under hues of gold and blue and white, our world changed.

I was reclining on a patio chair in the shade of a large umbrella, a glass of sherry on the table by my side, a book in my hands. I had rented this cottage for the month and on this, the second day of my stay, went through the bookshelf in the living room and settled on this book to read.

Nothing too fancy about it, just your average pile of pages bound in a red leather cover, black letters etched into its surface, lines crisscrossing in some random abstract pattern on the front. I opened the book, took in the smell of paper, pondered at how curious it was that this scent still continued to mine the depths of my emotions, and began reading.

The book started out as a mystery, a plain and by the numbers murder with half a dozen characters and three separate storylines that I knew would careen around until they collided. But with each chapter came the more and more frequent digressions.

The characters were talking about the murder less, had started going off on tangents that I was sure would somehow matter in the end. Seemingly unimportant details from childhoods were brought up, stories of long-forgotten friends or lovers began to insert themselves into otherwise-ordinary courtroom scenes and graduation speeches.

The background characters took it all in stride, never piping up to interrupt the strange and unexpected soliloquies.

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[Estimated reading time: 3 minutes]

I roll out of bed and pull on a pair of flannel pants, matching shirt, red and blue patterns on both. I walk out of the bedroom, down the hallway to the bathroom.

I place a bucket under the sink and open the tap, then release my own stream into the toilet. Water going into two different receptacles.

With a practiced and steady hand I reach up above the sink into a plastic bin, pull out a measured spoon of blue powder, and dump this into the bucket.

Once I'm done I wash my hands, transfer the contents of the bucket into a plastic watering can in the shape of an elephant, and walk around my small apartment, watering the dozen or so plants I have scattered on every windowsill and some counters.

The plants are simple creatures, they want little. Some blue medicine mixed into a bit of water and that's all the plants need.

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[Estimated reading time: 2 minutes]My name is Mina and I am all alone in this world.

I was born in 2451, on January 30th. That was twenty and four years ago.

"The government" is no longer a concept where I am from, but if there was a modern counterpart to it, then it was the Council of the Third. The Council funded research into FTL travel and eventually was able to come up with a prototype, a vehicle designed to break free of our measly physical laws and travel through a sort of hyperspace. Or was it a wormhole? Or spice?

Wasn't really paying attention when they taught me all that stuff, covered it in the classes leading up to the launch. I wasn't interested in it, beyond the bare essentials. We'll get to them, later.

So there I was, in orbit.

The prototype ship was nicknamed Nostromo for its strange shape. I was floating outside it, going over every inch of her surface, checking her for holes, ruptures. It was tradition, that's why.

She was a beauty, the gray outline of her side, in the glow of the sun and the African continent below us. I slowed myself a bit and enjoyed view and the serenity of the fly-by.

I entered the ship through the free airlock. The other airlock connected the lab to ship, so no way was I getting through it. Doctor Roland was already in the ship when I got in. She updated me on my vitals while I went over the pre-flight checklist.

She didn't have much to report. The mission was still a go.

Twenty minutes later, I detonated the explosive charge that destroyed the lab, while a larger charge vaporized the Council headquarters. That was my actual mission. The Council of the Third, Airborn Division Three was a mask that I used to find my way onto the Nostromo. Once aboard the ship, I made short work of the scientists who designed it, then flew into the void.

They'll never catch up. That's what I remembered from the lectures.

FTL has an upper speed-limit, and I was at it. I was alone forever. The world I was born into did not matter anymore, it was beyond reach.

The ship was not built to navigate between the stars, this was a prototype we were hoping would fly us to Mars. When I slow down, I will be flying on manual. Finding a star with a habitable planet around it will be a miracle. Setting down on a planet is astronomically unlikely, I realize that.

Finding my way back to Earth was an impossibility.

Wherever I am, and wherever I find myself on this trip, it will be a new, different world.