Sun Surfing

The red vinyl of the gearshifter was warm from conducting the engine heat. I readjusted my grip on the softening plastic and aimed for the sun. This was gravity surfing at its finest.

The cab of my surfship was alive with luck trinkets. Dice from friends, small engine parts from past crashes, nicks in the windshield denoting dead surfers that I knew. Even the knob on the gearshift was a gift from Johnny Demon back when he was a star and I was a promising upstart.

He told me I had something special.

Well, he’s dead now and he must have seen something that wasn’t there because I’m now old, unfamous, and my surfing runs are cautious. It’s like these surfships are held together by will alone and my will is fading. At the beginning of a shake or a shudder, I pull back and just let myself find the easiest parabola.

The gravity well grabbed a hold of me and I started the roller coaster slingshot of mathematical certainty. The trick was to do it without computers. One had to guess from experience and feel the best point to cut one’s engines and just go with it in the invisible miasma of gravity.

There came a point about halfway through the arc where even if you were to turn your engines on and try to carve out of the path you were on, it wouldn’t matter. The gravity of the sun was too much. It would be like trying to swim against a tidal wave back on Earth.

The light and radiation from the sun flooded the cab of my surfship. My plants were grateful and lapped it up. I always imagined them telling their plant friends back home about their exotic journeys.

Every year there were a few surfers that wrecked. There were also a few with lush endorsements that dropped out and quit while they were ahead.

And every few years, a surfer winked out.

The thing is with these ships and these shields, there are times when people approach 0.8c of light. Now and again, a surfer steps lightly across that lightspeed boundary and disappears. They wink out.

Logic dictates that they’ve been smeared into greasy atoms but I like to think that they’ve pierced reality with the nose of their ship and gone somewhere else.

This is why I pointed the nose of my ship down to the edge of the horizon for the sharpest hugging curve I’ve ever tried. This was going to be my last run, one way or the other, with one of three outcomes.

Back to earth, up to heaven, or through the fabric of space time to another place.




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Second Coming

There are three things I remember about that day.

1. I remember the hatch blowing
2. I remember my fingernails glowing with a bright blue light.
3. I remember talking to a child.

I’ve gone over and over that time with the shrinks here on the ground. It was a time-sensitive mission to repair satellite Oricus-11. We were on schedule and nothing was in the red. We were in the pipe, five by five and on target.

Jackie and Maria were locked in and reading the specs back as we arrowed in on the airlock. Reverse thrusters fired as Maria cushioned our lateral descent to the docking clamps. There was a light bump through the whole ship as we touched the edge of the collar.

Halfway there.

Maria raised a hand up to her hair and died that way. Her eyes just unfocused and the animal side in Jackie and I knew right away that she’s been turned off like a light switch.

I looked over at Jackie and that’s the last linear-time memory I have except for those three other things I mentioned up above.

The hatch blew. Vacuum scoured the entire cigar tube of our ship with a greedy inhalation of breath from god’s lungs. Papers, pens, experiments, everything that wasn’t tethered or taped went fast-forward panicking out the door into the cold embrace. The air turned to crystals.

I don’t know if this was some time later or in the next second but I remember looking forward at my outstretched hand. My fingernails were brightly glowing blue. Beyond my hand was a forest. The trees and leaves were mostly red and I still can’t tell if it was Earth in the autumn or if it was summer on a different planet.

The last thing I remember is talking to a child. The child was much smarter than me and it seemed like he was intentionally using simple language to communicate with me. A little boy about seven years old with eyes glowing exactly the same blue as my fingertips had been glowing in the previous memory. We were both dressed in white and sitting in a red room.

I don’t remember what we talked about but I’ve been a lot calmer ever since.

I was found in a swamp by a couple of Louisiana fishermen. I was looking at the rot-resistant bark of a cypress and tracing the lines on the trunk with my hands. Their greeting is the first thing I remember. Turning my head to see who made that noise and then realizing that I was ankle deep in a swamp.

I still had my uniform on. It was freshly washed and felt like it was still slightly warm from the dryer. I felt freshly showered as well.

It didn’t take long for me to get taken into the basements of NASA and questioned. I’ve been here for weeks now.

They tell me that they found Maria's body in the ship still attached to the satellite. Jackie is missing. I'm looking forward to catching up with her if she shows up somewhere on Earth like I did.

I’m not sure if they’ll give me a memwipe or just cut me loose. I am surprised to feel that I am now in possession of something that they’ll never be able to take from me. I’m different inside.


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