The Very Devil
"You, Malcolm, are the very Devil."
His mother shook her head and bent to retrieve the pieces of shattered plastic. The boy was eight years old and clumsy, and had just dropped a scale model of the HMS Churchill on the polished wooden floor. She sighed at him.
He wanted to apologise, to say it was an accident; but the fear took him and he ran out the lounge and upstairs, to his room.
His new sister started to cry.
He was going to get as far away as possible. He looked out of the window, to the stars.
Nine Point Eight
This is Earth-normal gravity, but he is not Earth-normal.
Lead in your boots. Oh yes, and lead all over his skin, making his heart work harder and his muscles complain.
If he falls on this ship he will reach the ground faster and it will hurt more. So he'll have to make sure he doesn't fall.
He thinks of cargo ships and zero-g. He lets the metal mug fall from his hand and watches as it drops to the floor with an Earth-normal gravitational acceleration of 9.8 metres per second.
Lead in your boots. Oh yes, lead in his boots.
Humans
I hate humans.
Emotional, I know, an insult to the logic and intellect for which my people are known.
But the smell...
I tell him all the answers, I give him solutions. But he is too primitive to understand.
My sense of duty is the only thing that prevents me abandoning my mission. Someday, maybe, he will listen to me. Someday he will defer to my greater understanding.
But not yet.
He smiles at me, as patronising as ever, I snap to attention as my training demands.
His eyes light up, he commends me; "Good dog, Porthos."
Stupid human.
Carry Me To Titan
Titan, Tallahassee, it's all the same. Same sun, same stars...OK, there's the rings an' all, but still...
Half-way to Alpha Centauri's where it starts to get weird. When it suddenly hits you that the gravity well you're in ain't the one you were born in.
Existential angst and all that crap, I guess. Sneakin' out'a the nursery.
Out here though...out here you never quite know where you are. Constellations get all twisted round cos your line of sight's all wrong. Nothin' quite looks the same anymore.
You never get even a little homesick, huh?
Cosmopolitan
He loves meeting fellow 'aliens'. The humans are charming enough—and fascinating—but it's easy to feel distanced, to feel—as they say—"out of the loop". Of the other non-humans on the ship, one can't talk to him and the other won't.
But these new people are friendly. Explorers, they say, from so very far across the galaxy, seeking a cure for the plague that is killing them. Their technology is impressive, but the people themselves are falling apart. They survive through replacements and nanotech.
He wonders what will become of them, this dying race who call themselves 'Borg'.
Splitting Infinitives
"I can't...this is like nothing I've seen before, Captain, I really don't think I can translate this."
"Hoshi, they were pretty insistent about sending us that message. We need it translated. I trust your ability to do that."
He did the 'sincere' look at her. Bastard, she thought.
So she replaced sleep with syntax; and two days later she stood before him with an English translation. She swayed a little, and her eyes were red.
Hoshi cleared her throat, started to read from her notes; "Simply by passing this message on to five people, you can enter our free prize draw..."
Scent
Her Captain thinks she has a sixth sense, but it's really just a fifth.
It tells her things, information to be subjected to logic and reason—sensory input from which to draw conclusions.
"He can always tell when I'm coming home," he says, shaking his head in a gesture she has learned to interpret as confusion. "How does he do that? How can a dog know where I am?"
He can smell you, she knows, but doesn't say.
She breathes in and notes that Ensign Sato reeks of Lieutenant Reed; another secret to keep.
Humans aren't ready to know everything.
What Once Went Wrong
He had a dream once that he could walk through time.
In the dream he was gifted with hindsight and spoke with an angel. He changed things, because he was allowed to.
He was a wandering saviour.
He dreamt that he went back to the ship, and he gathered his sheep around him and said not to do that, to do this.
And so there wasn't any blood, and there wasn't any smoke and there weren't any screams.
It was a good dream. It felt real.
But in the end he woke up, and they were still dead.