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A quote: “Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.” ~~ Honore de Balzac
After several years of 100-word stories, let’s start 2025 making the upper limit 200. I’ve so enjoyed many of the longer stories from you all, this is a good time to change and see what gets created with a larger yard to play in. No worries if you don’t make the 200 on the nose, just take it as the outer fence.
I’ll start with a story …
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Weariness and worry could not mask the elation in their faces. It was late when they checked in and hungry. I told them I was the only one on duty but I could make a hot meal for them.
They kept their voices low and stopped as I approached their table. I set the steaming, humble fare before them. They tucked into it speaking to each other in a language they must have felt I would not know.
They were wrong. I’m much, much older than I appear. And I already knew they were coming.
They argued over whether they owed their sponsor the information they gathered. Reluctantly, their pride overcame their instincts.
No matter. I knew what must be done and when they had retired, when the night was the darkest, I moved into their room and slipped into their dreams with a warning.
They had already witnessed one miracle. Now they would live to slip away and spread the word.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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.featured image original graphic by Darleen Click using Adobe Firefly
Cameron says: The three of us stood on the hill overlooking the city. The large man looked down the hill in thought as the stars seemed almost bright enough to blind. He spoke quietly. “I was here when this place was about five streets and a few houses. It wasn’t until after the Korean War that people started to bring their families and build lives here. It went from a town to be from to one that you moved to.”
He looked back to us. “But with that growth in population, it brought new problems. The kind of problems that civilized people know don’t exist. Whispers and legends that we think go away because we turn on the lights.”
The man turned to the other person. “You’ve been the Sentinel here for a long time. Are you sure of this?”
“It’s time,” he answered. Pointing to me, he said “I’ve trained this boy as best I could.”
“I accept your departure. Be at peace.” With a smile, the man’s body collapsed into dust that was quickly scattered on the night wind. The larger man turned to me.
“Congratulations. Guard the people here until it is time for another to take over.”
The lights of Phoenix spread out across the Valley of the Sun as brightly as they had when I was living here as a child. To look at them, no one would know that only five years ago this place had been a chaos of wreckage and wildfires.
The Chinese government had known their space station was dangerously unstable, even before the collapse of their gerontocracy and the military junta took over. Unlike the purpose-built modules by which Freedom, Peace, and Harmony had been built, the Chinese station was a lash-up of several Long March upper stages converted into pressurized volume for living and working, hence its nickname of “Flying Junkyard.” Nobody here in the US even remembers its Chinese name, or what it meant in English.
But everybody remembers the day its orbit decayed to the point of no return. Supposedly the Chinese space agency was going to do a deorbit burn and send it to the “graveyard of satellites” in the South Pacific. Something had gone terribly wrong and they lost communications. Instead of safely deorbiting, the station began to disintegrate as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere way too fast. By the time it went over Los Angeles, it was visibly coming apart, but it was on Phoenix that the bulk of the station crashed.
The Chinese government publicly executed several senior members of their space agency, supposedly as an apology for the disaster, but really because these men had caused the Chinese Communist Party to lose face before the world. Actual monetary reparations were less than forthcoming, but right then we were too busy dealing with the war in the Middle East to bear down on the matter — and the fact that China was a nuclear power may have had a role in our willingness to accept their apology.
Since then, there’s been persistent rumors that communications with the abandoned space station had been hacked by a malicious actor, possibly Iran. However, when the mullahs’ regime in Tehran fell, there was never any evidence found to back up those allegations. Even if we’d borne down on Beijing to pay for the damage , it probably would’ve broken their economy even worse than actual events did.
In the end, we rebuilt Phoenix ourselves for the simple reason that we couldn’t wait. We were in the middle of a war and neither ruined factories nor destitute people produce much needed supplies and materiel. It might’ve been a patchwork of insurance payments, private donations both corporate and individual, and Federal dollars, but as soon as the wildfires were out, people were rebuilding. Those first few efforts might’ve been more ramshackle than would normally be tolerated, but people had roofs over their heads again, and factories were back in productions. Even the most damaged hospitals were back in operation within days, although it meant patients on cots in the corridors while repairs were ongoing around them.
And now you have to look closely to see the scars.
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