skonen_blades

White clam chowder and over-easy eggs. Soup and eggs for short.

Mass was the problem with colonizing. Getting mass near C was expensive. The smaller the load, the better. Sending ten thousand colonists was impossible.

But sending ten thousands eggs and ten thousand loads of semen was way cheaper.

The ship had a chilled cargo of those two ingredients to make human babies. Womb ships, they were called. They had a skeleton crew of scientists, techs, teachers, and caretakers trained to take on whatever challenges might arise at first contact with the target home but after they’d landed and seen that everything was alright for seeding, they’d get underway.

The birthing tanks would be unfolded and irrigated with dehydrated amniotic solution. These giant uterariums would then be flooded with the soup and eggs slurry sometimes referred to as brunch. The old exponential dance would start and babies would pop up like strawberry Christmas lights on the vine. Tendriled, manufactured, multiumbilicals would snake out and attach themselves to a thousand belly buttons. Each tank was filled with fraternal millituplets.

Wait time was the human usual. The children would be boosted with learning enhancers and xenoviral protection. A small percentage were always lost to errors in cell replication no matter how tailored the dna but the average yield was 90% or 900. Harvest would happen in two-year stages, nine hundred per year. This was called the familial ladder. Ten years of baby making before shutdown for 9,000 humans.

The crew would foster them with help from the AI adoptives, working as a team to cram as much knowledge and mental health into them from the get go before they took on their new world.

It was a system that had worked twelve times before. Twelve Edens had successfully flowered with no humans needing expulsion from angry gods.

This was going to be unlucky thirteen.

The tailored enzymes would fail and the entire crop would be born sociopathic and cruel unbeknownst to the crew. As the children grew, they schemed and the crew began began to meet with accidents. Before any of them figured out was what happening, they were gone.

The children were geniuses. As the other batches reached fruition and were born, they were taken in by the first two waves and taught to be just as awful.

The planet survived and flourished. They developed weapons and a reputation. They broadcast torture videos and vile non-consensual pornographic videos. Their system of government was opaque. It seemed like anarchy but they had such organizational skills.

Their planet is isolated. Quarantined. Embargoed. Struck off the records as a failure, they’re monitored for signs of extra-system aggression. They’re an embarrassment.

A closeted mistake until sixteen minutes ago when their entire planet, now decades into post-womb colonization and nearly five generations deep, completely disappeared off of everyone’s scans.

And reappeared near Earth Prime bristling with nuke barrels and planet crackers pointed at our race’s home.

The pirate planet had come home, prodigal son returning.

They didn’t open fire immediately but they did send a message system-wide on all channels before they started the war.

“No more wombships.”

After a heated exchange of nuclear fire that the pirate planet lost, they drove their planet straight into Earth. Terran defenses didn’t stand a chance.

We no longer use wombships for colonization but we are still trying to figure out how those little bastards made a whole planet capable of faster-than-light travel. None of the other Edens have come anywhere near that kind of technology. The philosophical implications of their success don’t bear thinking about.

Evil might be smarter than good.




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It’s a beautiful day and Zaccheus Jackson is still dead.
It’s a beautiful day and Robin Williams is still dead.
It’s a beautiful day and Mark Steinberg is still dead.
It’s a beautiful day and my father is still dead.

I feel like I want to tell the sun to shut up.
I can’t understand the arrogance it takes for nature to keep on making beautiful days.

I remember after 911, the news networks kept trying to put a spin on the attack to make it seem more horrifying and momentous than it was and they couldn't. I was so big and so real that there was no way they could exaggerate it. I feel the same way about tributes to the death of Robin Williams. It's like no words can really even touch it.

And now I feel that about Zach.

I wake up and it’s still true. I wake up and it’s still true. I wake up and it’s still true.

Jessica Mason Paul said about her beloved dog “It’s not that he died. It’s that he’s still dead.” and I feel that.

In my best dreams, a freight train was hit and killed a Zaccheus. It makes more sense. And then I wake up and this seems like the dream.



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At the funeral, I kept thinking “How can someone be dead on such a beautiful day?”

And when I was wondering how it could be possible for him to be gone, I realized that there were literally billions of excellent people that were also not there at that moment.

My best friend, had I been born in 1540, was not there. The love of my life, had I been born in 500 BCE, was not there.

My father. A few people I went to school with. Another friend. One ex-lover.

The best philanthropist the world would have ever seen had he been born during the internet age was not there. The world’s leading expert on viruses had she been born in a time when women were even allowed to be in the sciences was not there.

It made me think about everything that’s good and bad right now, about how many people were not there enjoying that beautiful day, and the fact that I was there enjoying it.

I felt like every death made my life sweeter and that I owed it to the dead, the numerous, numerous dead, to enjoy the day instead of being insulted by its insolent beauty near the body of my friend.




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It’s called a rift ticket. It’s the assignment you get when you’re not going to come back. Sometimes it’s handed out as a punishment. Sometimes it’s given as a reward. People that have lost their entire family and really want to go somewhere else and they don’t care where, for instance.

Ten broken bottles in the kitchen sink and Sarah couldn’t care less. Flies help themselves to leftover plates of food from two weeks ago. Sarah has watched the wallpaper for a month now, willing herself to forget her child’s dimples and the smell of Steven’s neck. The accident was a small one by this city’s standard. Just two fatalities. The funeral was handled quickly with a minimum of fuss. One long coffin and one short one. Sarah’s daughter was the only daughter and only grand dauther. The funeral didn’t have too many people there.

Her career in the atmoforce tactical support tied her to the military even though it wasn’t a pure combat position. She applied for a rift ticket two days ago after realizing that the wallpaper wasn’t going to change and by extension, neither was this planet or the fact that her child and husband were gone.

Her communicator pinged and a turquoise notification bloomed in the corner of her vision. She blinked to open it, too slowly at first. She blinked quicker to activate it and wiped her hands on her dress in an unconscious school time gesture to look better for the camera phone while it unfolded to take up the top quarter.

Rift Ticket confirmation. Sarah smiled and the notice, scrolling downwards to see the time and place. Tomorrow at four in the afternoon was her gate appointment.

She leaned back and kept staring at the wall, the smile evaporating off of her face slowly as she settled in for the wait.

No need to pack. No need to even change.

The Rift was a crack in the now, a crack in the here. It had been opened by a volley of experimental weapons during the moon independence war. Halfway between earth and the moon, a violet glowing fissure calmly glittered like an aurora borealis around a split in reality. A crevasse from here to no one knows where.

Everyone that went through was given a package of tracers and homing equipment to let the scientists back here know what was happening.

Ten years it had been there. We’d starting sending our garbage through it. We even send a nuclear missile once. Nothing.

Heartbeat and pulse information come back normal on the people that have been sent through but no voice transmissions have come back.




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Time exists a byproduct of the universe winding down. Entropy needed a dimension to inhabit so time flowed in one direction to let that happen. Time is a secondary effect of the heat death of our galaxies. Time is a little brother. The creeping collapse of it all is the most important part of this place we see in the sky at night.

That means that clocks measure the death of the universe. That is their sole function. They have nothing to with life. They have no importance other than that. They do not measure our existence. It’s easy to think that clocks control us. They do not. They are Christmas ornaments. They are unimportant.


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My worst fear is that I’ll have an embarrassing death. An inconvenient death. That I’ll die in the audience during a friend’s performance and the whole place with be struck with the tragedy of it, ruining the night. That I’ll die during a performance of my own and while the retelling of it would be dramatic and even amusing, the act itself will be chaotic and horrifying to anyone present. That I’ll die at work and forever scar my co-workers.

But I will probably have no control over where I die.

I realized the other day that there is no shelter from evil. There are manners, there are societal niceties, and there are agreed-upon laws and people who enforce them. There are houses with locks and the belief that evil is outside.

It makes life bearable but it’s a lie.

Lately, I turn to darkness. Not fulldark but trenchward. Like a dolphin going deeper to avoid an oil spill.




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When Death came in quietly on its unfair legs and took up residence in our oldest cat, we barely noticed. We were in the middle of a move and all that happened when we were finally unpacked in the new house was that she stopped going outside.

She was one of those black cats from Halloween calendars with glowing green eyes. She was a bitch. She shared our house with another cat through no fault of her own and she made that point whenever she could. The other cat, fat and stupid, was merely tolerated but she, the black cat from a Parisian art nouveau poster, ruled the house. She was forthright, mean, majestic and aloof as only a cat can be.

And death seemed like a trophy hunter.

She was found as a kitten 15 years before near a dumpster behind Café Deux Soleils in Vancouver British Columbia. She was taken all the way to Halifax and lived there for nearly a decade before being driven across Canada back to Vancouver. She had seen more of this country that I have. When she died, it was six blocks from where she’d been found.

And death seemed to have a sense of comforting irony.

She became lethargic and thin. I’ve never felt a cat so thin. We took her to the vet to see what was wrong with her and the vet made it clear that there were a lot of things wrong with her. Four or five organs were failing. We were given saline to keep her hydrated. We administered it through an IV line. We were told to keep tabs on her and comfort her. That was the best they could do.

And death seemed inhumanly patient.

She would forget to retract her claws and get caught in the carpet, anchored by her paw’s betrayal. She fell down the stairs near the end. I’ve never seen an act so unnatural as a cat falling down stairs. I’ve never seen a cat unable to walk on a hardwood floor because her weakness made her slip. I’ve never seen a cat unable to keep its head up.

And death seemed cruel.

A strong cat. A smart cat. A mean cat. She faded out of this world, soul turned inside out and funneled away by Death’s silent climate into a different place. Looking back, it had been coming for a while yet it seemed so sudden at the time.

And death seemed like a complex plan with no hope of being evaded.

Her death seemed natural in a bad way. A cruel trick to play on an unsuspecting cat. A cat with no means of language or defense made clumsy and embarrassed by ‘natural causes’. An athletic cliché of a cat that belonged on the broom handle of a cartoon witch, turned into a shaking caricature of sickness. Tuna fell out of her mouth. Water dribbled down her chin. Her eyes became infected. That last night, she lay on the ground and meowed without sound until her shallow breathing wound down in the middle of the night like an untended watch.

She died the day before Christmas near the fake Christmas tree beside the fake fireplace, her empty body the realest thing in the room.

And death seemed as powerful and as kind and as inevitable and as terrible as our sun.


Rest in Peace Ingeai

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There is a clarity that comes with crisis, he thought, a simplicity that comes with emergency. Triage choices made in seconds from necessity have a way of spurring the life you’ve chosen forward. As beautiful as still water is, it isn’t going anywhere. Streams travel and the more powerful they are, the rougher their surface. Rock bottoms are made of bedrock. They make good foundations. Or runways.

That’s why this movie night on a space station named Heron 6 pinned in the perihelion lagrange point between Triskus and Constantine became a sudden trial. There was a crack in the hull and there were eighteen of us. There were six life boats. Two to a boat equaled twelve. That left six people that would have to stay on the space station and die.

We were all experienced spacers. We knew without speaking that the first to the lifeboats would survive. The movie, something hideously outdated from Original Earth, stayed cycling on the screen as we scrambled without language to the porthole irises of the lifeboat pods.

It was an interesting race. Jason and Tanya had my ankles at one point. I broke his nose with my foot. She let go when Jason’s blood got in her eyes in the zero gravity. None of us had weapons and we knew that if we were to detour to pick them up from the weapons locker, we would lose our chance to get to a pod.

The scramble was made more intense by the dropping temperature and air pressure. My ears popped and the cold numbed my extremities frighteningly quickly.

Peter shouldered past me with his larger frame and I careened over into the wall. I knew that I was going to die if I didn’t keep going but if I was panicking, I couldn’t feel it. I think that the entire group of us were experiencing what cattle in stampedes must feel, or groups of people trapped in burning buildings. I scrambled forward through the thinning air, watching Peter receive a sharp elbow from Lorenz and double up, winded in the rapidly declining atmosphere. He floated back past me.

The whole race for life must have taken two minutes but I remember it as a timeless extended moment bereft of clocks. I felt as if I joined the mindless fight for survival that every single living being has experienced. The chase to beat death with the certainty that there would be losers amongst your number.

I slammed into a life pod and Tanya slammed up against me. I struck out with my fist and hit the button to close the door. The doors sealed with a violent slam and the thuds of fists echoed on the outside. The thuds stopped after a minute.

Tanya must have clawed her way back after our tussle. When she looked at me, breathing deeply of the emergency air supply gushing into the sealed lifepod and smeared with my blood from earlier, she smiled with a nervous, bright-eyed smile. There was no resentment of my earlier clash with her and Jason.

We held each other there and waited for help. It arrived seven hours later. We didn’t say a single word to each other in those hours. We shared the bond of beings that had survived a crisis. We were in a place beyond the usual banality.

The others that survived met up with us back in the rescue ship with sighs of relief and knowing nods and tears over who we had lost but beneath it all was a joy. A completely placid, guilt-free aspect of gene-deep peace. I still remember that.



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Drowning in buttered wood the day after the news tornadoed through our house. One child poorer. Five older brothers became four and the second-to-last child suddenly had no one to hand clothes down to.

The flowing river next to our house had fattened with spring and taken our youngest. Snatched him quickly and quietly. A lone pink arm flailing in the middle of the brown, silt-filled storm of water. That current was peppered with white foam, whirlpools, undertows, and the tips of serrated rocks sticking up like shark fins. It was a deassembly line. A spring runoff claiming the unwary, animals and humans alike. “A real spring drowner” as the old men at the store would say.

And now we knew what that meant.

A missing tooth that still showed up in old pictures. A ghost that haunted our memories. We got older, he stayed young. He became an echo. A little what-could-have-been that caused us all to take life a little more seriously. A signpost in the rearview mirror that told us what we feared most of all was always closer than it appeared.

The four older brothers had seen him born and seen him die. They’d witnessed an entire life.

Born to the screams of his mother and taken in the same way.

I like to imagine him with baby deer and young bear cubs just as trusting as he was, swimming in the clear ocean where the river finally set his body free.




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It was a strange thing. The scavengers of this planet were circling closer. I was getting an education about the ecosystem here. I’d been walking for a long time. I decided to lie down for a while. I wasn’t so sure about the whole ‘getting back up’ thing.

Wide, black birds were circling in the air, lower and lower in wide, slow circles. Four-legged animals were pacing around me on the ground. They were like a cross between coyotes and hyenas. I could hear their panting, wheezy laughter getting closer. I could even feel the hardcase segmented worms making their way up to me through the ground, snuffling through the soil with their blind, razored snouts. I had become the focal point for this world’s carrion eaters. They were converging on the point of my imminent death on vectors as true as nature. I couldn’t decide if they were lazy or patient.

It’s not an experience I recommend. I felt a sense of peace steal over me and I knew that relaxing would kill me.

It was with a huge effort that I stood. The smell of my useless arm made me reel. I could feel the dead meat of my body turning into food for the specialized stomachs of the scavengers. Necrosis was spreading through me. I was in denial of my escaping life. It was leaking out of me like air from a pin-pricked balloon.

I saw the city then. The yellow clay walls were shining like gold in the sun. I walked toward it with my entourage accompanying me like a force field of death. I knew they’d never let me in but I kept walking all the same. I felt like a zombie as I shuffled forward, dragging my feet, my mouth slack and dry from thirst. I felt like I was commanding the dogs, worms and birds around me. A dark conductor of nature.



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