Bit of news first: I’ve got a new desk and chair!
Wait, no, that’s not the news, the news is that I finished The Last Echo!… kind of. There are a couple of things I might still change in it, so I’m gonna sit on it for a short while before I decide what to do. In the meantime I’m back at work on Heat Stroke and The Sandformer, years behind on updating my notes (which becomes a bigger task with each passing day) and worried that my word count estimate for the Sandformer is too conservative. The Sandformer is currently teasingly close to the 50% mark and there’s still so much that needs to happen within my outline, which makes me think that it’s more likely to end up being around 250,000 words rather than the 200,000 that I thought before. That’d lower my progress percentage by quite a bit, so take that bar with a grain of salt for now.
Now, for my last micro story for a while, (if you’re unfamiliar with flash fiction then read one of my previous posts because I can’t be bothered to explain it every time) it’s about a nameless stowaway on a space elevator fleeing Earth. Enjoy.
Elevating
Thirty-six hours, a day and a half squeezed into a small rusting box with five other scavengers. We ascend into the sky, stowaways on an elevator with only two floors, Earth, and space.
The first few hours are the worst, as we leave the planet and gradually become weightless. It should be astonishing, amazing, to enter a microgravity environment, but instead it’s sobering. Losing gravity means we’ve entered the most dangerous part of the trip.
LEO, Low-Earth Orbit, has been a minefield for decades, a minefield of space junk, and each piece threatening to hit the elevator and kill us all.
That’s not the scary part though… No, the thing that scares us is when the elevator stops. It judders to a halt, waiting for the path to clear, for some dangerous piece of debris to pass by. And all the while we hear the tinkling of dust, as tiny shards of metal, and other miniscule detritus, batters against the elevator, as if it were being sandblasted.
It’s cold. We can see our breath in clouds of vapor as we sit cramped between supplies headed for the station. The air smells stale, sterile. Time passes. We’re silent, we’re scared, and we’re tired. When we do speak it’s in brief and impersonal exchanges.
We’re all here for the same reason. We’re sick of Earth, sick of the cramped and continent spanning slums, of the oppressive governments, and of the forced labor in the rooftop fields above our homes, or in the factories beneath them.
Of course, they say that the space station is the same, just as cramped, decrepit, and unjust. But the line between truth and propaganda has been long since blurred beyond recognition. They can’t be right.
It has to be better than Earth… it just has to be.
Thanks for reading, don’t know when I’ll post next, so just check back every day for the next ten years, ok?