I had an eventful night last night. Originally, I had written something that looked like the beginning to Osiris-9, but after a few read overs (okay, more like a million) I realized that the narrator felt as if he was just rambling at the reader.
So I had a stroke of awesome and came up with this, the new opener. I think this may be what the final version of it looks like, pretty sure. (rough draft, obviously)
If darkness is all that you have inside and you’re fully consumed by the veil of emptiness that beckons and reaches out for you with only an icy grasp and a howling silence – Do you lose yourself? Do you retain your humanity?
And when you reach that point of no return, do you shut down and allow the whispers to take you away; to stifle out any glimmer of normality left inside?
These are the meanderings of my mind as I drift alone here along the solid hull of a ship I never thought I’d see in its true environment.
In space, if left alone for too long, its darkness becomes you.
Chapter1:Ignition Sequence Start
“Power clear,” A man in a control tower, about twenty miles off the coast of Antarctica, confirms.
The countdown begins at ten and falls fast.
“All systems are go. We wish you, Vincent and your crew, luck and Godspeed…”
From the dead silence around us the ships systems hum loudly, with an ear-shattering tone that vibrates all the way up your spine and then sounds off with something like a tuba blowing air directly at the back of your skull.
“…whatever you find out there, we hope it’s worth the enormous distance you’ll be traveling.”
A faint tickling sensation grabs at the corners of my eyes and my cheekbones fill with warmth.
“We are go for launch.”
The sky shoots outward, coming closer and closer like the world’s collapsing in front of you – Coming down, all memories and fragments of things from the past float by in a surreal, cloudy haze.
Sagging eyes twitching over version twenty seven of a massive blueprint that details a ship reconstructed from an alien piece of hardware. A piece of something found out in the deserts of Afghanistan during the hype of Operation: Desert Storm, orchestrated by the science and military institute, government funded, “ZeroFactor,” whom don’t exist, along with whatever classified projects and research that they conduct.
A giant bug of a ship re-modeled, re-welded, re-everything, just to look closer to something NASA might have built. Part Discovery, part covered in cold gray snags and fifty foot long spikes that all spin around regulating the gravitational normality of the vessel.
Years later, every monitor, every speaker in a tiny little office in a drab little building somewhere in the middle of a penumbra reverberates with a humming bass pound and a tickling, screech that shatters glass and pulls the blood from the furthest part of your nostril.
These klaxons assault the mind with every tick of a second and what do we find?
Something out there, something far and deep within the Andromeda Galaxy is signaling us, for reasons entirely unknown. Symbols shift into numbers and numbers stretch into lines, nothing makes sense and that thought washes away like a waterfall – Reminded of the red, blood shot eyes staring wearily at myself through a mirror for two years until we finally gave up and decided that it had to be done.
For the better of mankind, we’ve got to figure this out. I tell myself. Leave the family behind, Kathryn, Dante, Jack, without a clue in the world as to what I am or what I’m about to do. And all the liquor in the world can’t quell that paining square in the middle of my chest.
Even though this has been my dream for as long as I can remember, sitting all scrunched up inside of a cardboard box, as a child, surrounded by crude drawings of star clusters and planets – I regret leaving behind my brightest stars and even with the idea of never coming back, I tell myself – I must come back. I will come back.
Night as dark as the cocoon of space, we finally burst through and pound into Earth’s orbit, coming to a jolted halt and the planet I once called home seems so other-worldly with its blurred blue and white and far-away distant green.
The two people beside me, Aryanna and Lex, both let out an exhausted gasp and I allow my head to fall back, eyes glazing over at the sight beyond.
I do belong here.
“Please confirm your status, Osiris-9.”
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So, if you’ve made it to the bottom of this post, allow me to say one more thing. Even though the coupon for a free copy of PaxCorpus is gone, you can still acquire the novel via Smashwords.com, Nook, iBooks and Diesel for $1.99. That’s probably less than you spend on a cup of coffee! (although, there will be other coupon offers in the future) As always, thanks for reading. I wouldn’t be here without you, the reader.