#discovering

JUST TELL ME WHO THE HELL AM I

Discovering Wayside Graves And Memorial Stones, by Mark Chetwynd-Stapylton (Shire Publishing, 1968)

It starts in a bedroom that never feels warm posters peeling at the corners like old arguments a phone glow at 2:13 AM scrolling past jokes, fights, fragments of theory you don't fully understand yet but feel in your teeth anyway

Someone says worker like it means invisible someone says profit like it explains hunger and suddenly the world you thought was just "how it is" starts looking like something built not natural, not inevitable just constructed by hands you've never seen

You read words you can't pronounce at first than reread them like spells underlining sentences that feel too large for the thinness of your life so far ownership, labor, surplus, class each one clicking into place like a lock you didn't know was already on you

At school the lights hum the same way they always have fluorescent and indifferent but now even the silence between bells feels like it belongs to someone

You start noticing everything you didn't notice before the tired faces clocking out at closing time the way adults say "that's just life" like it's a sentence already served not a system that could be questioned

And in that discovery there's a strange double feeling rage that arrives like weather and hope that feels almost dangerous to hold because if it was made it can be unmade if it was learned it can be unlearned

Ghosts electric

Officer: Synthia Love

Department: Astrometrics/Integration

Status: In route to the uncharted nebula-742-B

Even within the stabilized warp bubble, the harmonics didn't flatten.

The computer called it a data echo; the crystal called it a song. For the first time, I wasn't just looking at subspace—I was listening to a heart beat searching for another in the dark.

As we approached the nebula. The ships experimental quantum singularity core (for which it received its designation of NCC-SINGULARITY) silently hummed, as it shed its warp bubble.

And within seconds the captain could be heard over the comms, calling for yellow alert, as the source of the mysterious signal came into full view.