by Zachery Brasier
Data fell before Astrohistorian Cixyr’s eyes, stylized into streams of flowing mercury. The observatory’s circular wallscreen displayed the radio sky in this way, rendered from computer language into something organically legible, but with enough abstraction to transform the screen into art and the observatory into a place of contemplation. The hard data would be there when zyx needed to conduct a more concrete analysis.
A current surged across the tips of zenx fingers, the places where evolution had placed a higher metal content in zenx skin, an effect of living next to a metal-rich star. Zyx waved a hand, creating an electromagnetic eddy through the gentle fields permeating the observatory. The call connected.
Hidden speakers gently intoned the message: An Object approaches from the past. Long range visual detectors have charted it on an unbound hyperbolic trajectory. Astrohistorian Cixyr, your crew has been called on to conduct the expedition. Please report to the nearest Equatorial station within one day. If you have an outstanding objection, please contact your university. We thank you for your service.
The room returned to its ambient radiation. Once more into the stars, zyx thought, another thing to learn. The meditative state was gone. The weight of context replaced it.
The people of Cixyr’s planet Orym had always been fascinated with astronomy. They observed the stars and mapped planetary bodies. They peered back to the beginning of time, through 40 billion years of light to see the moment when it all began. They discovered that the universe was not an empty place.
Living near the center of their barred-spiral galaxy, the skies were riddled with the signatures of civilization. The farther back they looked, the more advanced the technology became. Civilizations, acting almost like a single organism, bent their solar systems to their will.
Mysteriously, at some point this progress stopped. While those fantastical organizations covered the sky, none were very close. The light reaching Orym was already millennia old by the time they detected it.
As were the artifacts. Such massive civilizations left a material culture, and over time those objects spread through the cosmos. With the planet’s location being so near the gravitational center of the galaxy, Orym constantly detected artifacts cutting through their solar system at hyperbolic speeds.
The astronomical profession encompassed two camps: the pure astronomers, and the astrohistorians. The latter were combination astronomers/archeologists, trained to use astronomical techniques to piece together the history of the galaxy as well as fly through space to investigate artifacts. Beyond mere curiosity, material from such strange civilizations could provide new technological paths and clues as to how Orym could dodge whatever deindustrializing event had claimed the distant societies locked in deep time.
One such civilization was GY19283. The system sent out strong radio bursts, inviting communication. From time to time, the star flashed with a different light. The astrohistorians theorized that they had been naive travelers, lured in by the promise of contact then blasted and scavenged.
At the other side of the sky was a civilization that formed light-year long strings of discrete radioemitters, placed just beyond the star’s heliopause. Each gave off signals with packets of information, drawing wary travelers into the solar system and fates unknown.
Then there were the Motive Clouds. Millions of years ago they had dominated the galaxy. Living in intergalactic space, they appeared as tenuous electromagnetic nets, trailing long streamers. At their most compact they were the size of a solar system, but they swelled and contracted as they moved through space, always holding a cohesive form with a standard comoving velocity. It was unclear if they were all part of one civilization, or many separate ones. When they collided they merged together and then broke apart, swapping out constituent parts. Very odd. The astrohistorians hoped to one day catch a piece of them.
And the morning approached. Cixyr shut down the equipment, packed up zenx effects, and walked into the dawn sky.
The sun was rising, the top latitudes of the great disk covering three degrees already. Even with only a little bit of the star showing, the blue giant lit much of the terrain. The low hills, gray and barren—like all of the planet—began sparkling, the metal in the dirt shimmering as the sun began its arc. The sky remained black as space; there was nothing in Orym’s atmosphere that refracted the light. Cixyr felt the star’s magnetic fields tug at zenx fingers. It was a pleasing sensation of physical and ontological charge.
Zyx got in zenx traveler and composed a message to zenx friends, telling them about the mission and appending an invitation for a night out.
As zyx put the traveler into drive mode and started down the curving path from the hill’s summit, Cixyr felt a pang of fear and trepidation. It was not zenx first time on an expedition. It would be zenx first time leading one. Any expedition would necessarily be interesting, and Cixyr was happy to do zenx part to increase society’s knowledge. Still. A year away from home, and the potential dangers of near-interstellar space…
The hill path connected to the highway, the unpaved metallic dirt giving way to a white polymer road shot through with microscopic computational machines. Cixyr switched the traveler to automatic and let the road network drive.
Gray hills slid by, sparkling in the blue sunlight. The highway split into multiple paths. The traveler selected the far right one, and the road gently angled upwards. Cixyr felt the power increase and knew that, despite only the slightest suggestion of centripetal acceleration, the road was turning.
Everything on Orym was planned in advance. Long gone were the days of haphazard construction, creating cities through slow accumulation of structure. The highways traversing Orym’s surface took huge looping paths, gigantic arcs of road that turned so gradually that the passengers felt like they were driving straight. Cixyr’s city, the great metropolis of Quos, was a forest of tall white cylinders surrounded by an unimaginably complex series of these miles-wide turns, a computer-generated topology that always managed to get someone to where they needed to be.
As zyx approached the city, roadways began passing above and over zwes. Cixyr saw the white towers through the gaps, but then the nested loops grew too thick and zyx was completely surrounded by ribbons of road. Suddenly they parted and the traveler entered the ground streets. Cixyr switched back to manual, drove to zenx building, parked in an elevator and was whisked up to the top floors. Nobody had to live under the highways.
That night was raucous. Cixyr and zenx friends walked from tower to tower on interlacing skybridges, taking in the spectacular glowing spires. They randomly selected their path, purposefully getting lost in the maze of towers, always finding bars and nightclubs they had never seen before and, by the vagaries of statistics, never would again…
Then Cixyr was waking, the full disk of the sun filling a fifth of the sky and glaring through the wraparound glass of zenx apartment. Zyx stretched zenx top arms above zwes, zenx bottom arms to zenx legs, and grabbed a bag to go to space.
#
For most of Orym’s history there had been nationstates, each of which had their own spaceflight programs, trying to outdo the others with ever more ambitious missions. Out to Orym’s moons, circling Orym’s Lagrange points, bigger and bigger space stations, down the gravity well to the gas giant near the sun. Outwards and onwards.
Eventually they realized that, as with so many other things, having competitors meant that resources were being used just to accomplish the same thing over and over again. On a planet where the sun’s magnetic field was tangible in one’s skin, the sky always felt like space, so when the world government formed, integrated space launch was one of the first projects.
The Equatorial was the first such ultraproject. Spanning Orym’s equator, it was a non-rocket spacelaunch system, a planet-circling underground tube. Spacecraft were loaded into it, then absurdly powerful magnetic generators pulled the vehicle around the planet-spanning track, gradually building up its angular momentum. When the right speed was reached, at a station situated at one of the cardinal directions, the track would disconnect from itself, a tunnel running tangent to the equator was lifted into place, and the ship was flung into space. The engineering was necessarily precise. Even a nanometer misalignment would destroy the whole system, possibly much of the planet.
The spinup was uneventful—Cixyr worked on a paper while they flashed around the equator. But when they launched into space, zyx made sure to watch the world slide away, the two-dimensional landscape smoothly deforming into a sphere. The sun disappeared over the limb and the stars emerged. The core of the galaxy lit half of the celestial sphere.
For half a day the sliver-like transfer vehicle climbed up to geosynchronous altitude, constantly maneuvering to navigate the complex gravitational fields of Orym and its massive sun.
The expedition ship appeared first as a bright star, then slowly elongated into a white tube with a sphere at the front. The Xyehyn was, like all the ships of its class, essentially a flying observatory. The sphere contained a suite of astronomical observation tools, roughly as capable as a small observatory on Orym’s surface.
The tube contained the engines and power generators. As Cixyr had often explained to zenx friends, the real magic behind a near-interstellar ship was power generation, not raw thrust. Building powerful engines that could survive the rigors of constant acceleration was one thing, but that had been figured out fairly early on in spaceflight history. It had taken centuries to perfect the power generators needed to sustain such engines, and even more centuries of design to compact them down to the point that starships could be mass produced.
Xyehyn grew larger, the chalky hull filling the viewscreens. There was a bump as the transfer vehicle docked and a whine as the airlock opened. Cixyr grabbed zenx bag and maneuvered through the crew module.
Freefall was always a pleasure. The short, rigid hair on zenx head levered up and down with every movement, moving back and forth in zenx follicles, creating a constant caress on zenx scalp. One of the many pleasures of an expedition, the sort of thing that kept one happy while living for a year inside a pressurized tube. Even the spacesuit felt light.
Half a year later
Cixyr first saw the Object as a star. Xyehyn was close to the heliopause and zyx was on the bridge, tightening up a paper on the feasibility of large-scale civilizations within the empty voids between the galactic filaments. The bridge was calm, ovid, and suffused with a dim blue-white light. Everything was contoured and curved, ostensibly to avoid injuries in case of an accident, but with a design elegance that lulled one into a state of meditation simply by nature of the geometry.
Imaging Officer Vokhaj called the first sighting. Over the ensuing hours zyx took periodic observations, establishing its trajectory out of deep space and thus deep time.
“Do you want to see it?” Vokhaj asked. Cixyr nodded and stood as the front 120 degrees of the bridge flashed into a screen. First Officer Rijug and Expedition Specialist Syqun joined them.
The image was a hazy starfield, with one point in the middle especially bright. The image flickered, and the bright star jerkily moved. Cixyr felt a tightness run through zenx arms.
“Any signals from it?” Syqun asked.
“Not at all,” Vokhaj answered, “It’s not transmitting on any wavelength.”
“How long until we reach it?” Rijug asked.
“Ten days, and barring any transmissions, we won’t be able to ascertain any more information until we are close in.” Vokhaj replied. Zyx turned in zenx seat, “Want me to keep it on the screen, Cixyr?”
“Yes, please,” Cixyr requested and walked back to zenx seat. Zyx closed zenx writing tools and swiveled to watch the jerky footage, then started forcing zenx perception of time to expand, doing zenx best to place zyxyu within time scales of the universe as zyx prepared to mentally engage with the ancient artifact.
#
There were very few metal-rich blue giants in the galaxy. Of those that had been detected, most had planetary systems. But those planetary systems tended to be made out of large gas giants, usually with extreme atmospheric conditions that would be unsuitable for any type of life. No planetary system like Orym’s had ever been found.
Why?
Was there something special about Orym, or was it a sampling issue? Probably the second, but with two facets. A technological issue: finding a planet of similar size to Orym would be incredibly tricky; it’d always be easier to find gas giants. A philosophical issue, perhaps: how confident were they that life had to take a similar form to the life on Orym? The universe was a strange place. Maybe they were the deviation from the norm…
A strong pulse ran through Cixyr’s skin, pulling zwes out of zenx thoughts. The pulse intensified. The rhythm conveyed a message: proximity alert.
“New object!” Vokhaj called out, routing imagery to the bridge screen, “another hyperbolic trajectory, but moving towards our Object.”
“Unaffiliated then,” Syqun stated as zyx entered the bridge.
“Presumably so.”
“Range?” Cixyr asked, already starting to fear. They had encountered very few interstellar objects that were actively controlled and crewed, in whatever sense that meant for the civilization that had sent the spacecraft. Those encounters had been violent as a rule. It’s why Xyehyn carried weapon systems, and why Cixyr’s crew had spent so much time in the university simulations learning basic space combat tactics. Contingency planning, mostly, but contingencies had a way of occurring.
It always unnerved Cixyr to consider what sort of civilization would send out a solo interstellar vessel. Orym would never try it.
“Approximately one lighthour,” Rijug said.
More fear. The bright star on the screen jerked and moved across the star field. “Vokhaj, is this a realtime look?”
“Yes, this is live data.”
Then, the bright star split in two. Over the course of the next half-hour the crew watched the stars drift apart. Cixyr couldn’t believe it. They had launched something.
“How long until we can determine its trajectory?”
Vokhaj turned, “We need at least three observations. Six hours, at maximum, probably sooner.”
“I’ll stay on the bridge. We all should.”
For an hour they sat in silence, the blue glow of the ovoid room doing nothing to calm their nerves. The electromagnetic fields shifted, producing a sensation of being impacted by liquid waves, but stepwise ones, not smooth curves. Primitive. Whatever the second object was, it was targeting the Xyehyn with a very old technology: radar. Two hours later, the star briefly brightened and Vokhaj announced that the trajectory had subtly changed. It was maneuvering.
All hope for peace was gone. The trajectory determination was perfunctory. It was a missile.
Cixyr tried to remember how long it had been since an expedition got into a space battle. A decade, maybe more. Zenx name would go down in history. Zyx regretted ever wishing that it would.
“How long until it reaches us?” Zyx asked.
“One day,” Rijug responded. “Activating electromagnetic countermeasures. They will have a 90% chance of targeting interference at thirty lightminutes. At which point we should make a minor course correction. If the ECM works, the missile will miss us.”
“Do it,” Cixyr ordered, “Vokhaj, maintain imaging on the target, its missile, and the Object. Syqun, take the majority of our computer power and draw up counterattack plans.”
“Give me four hours,” Syqun told the crew, and the other three returned to passive monitoring.
Cixyr shivered. “I am truly sorry that we have found ourselves in this situation. Please, in the course of your job, feel whatever emotions you must.” How easy it had been to order a counterattack. It was simply logical, but the lack of consideration, the lightning fast resolve zyx felt, was deeply disturbing. Had space changed zwes so much over the last months?
Those hours passed, with little change in the enemy ship. Syqun flashed the attack plan on the screen. Cixyr studied it, paying close attention to the probability charts, and with a little calculation on zenx own, felt confident that Syqun’s plan would work.
Cixyr ordered everyone to strap themselves to their seats, and tried not to think about what they were about to do.
#
Xyehyn’s held its weapons in a band of hull between the forward sphere and the engine-generator section. Once given the affirmative command, the band started spinning. As it did, the primary weaponry—four hollow arms—telescoped out of the center, the increasing centripetal acceleration working with the motors to pull them to full extension.
The computers tracked the changes of mass distribution and used the hundreds of reaction jets dotting Xyehyn’s hull to trim the spacecraft’s trajectory, ensuring that it was still on course even as its effective radius increased and the heterogeneous distribution of equipment within the weapon segment made the center of mass oscillate.
At four hundred feet the arms stopped extending. Inside the weapon segment, a precision clockwork of machinery engaged to select unpowered, black-painted explosive devices from its arsenal and feed them to the tips of the arms.
The arms were spinning so fast that they appeared as a smeared region of spinning metal. Xyehyn’s hull was alight with reaction control firing, the computer system keeping the ship on course and fighting its gyroscopic precession.
The first bomb left its arm, hurled outwards towards the enemy ship on a tangent course. Xyehyn calculated the next launch point, tipped itself backwards a fraction of a degree, and flinged out another bomb. Then it did that again; yawing, rolling, and pitching; throwing explosives across the void.
The thrusters were overheating; the computational substrates were crunching through a bewildering series of realtime calculations to keep the ship on course, maneuvering, and spinning.
The errors began piling up: a variable moved incorrectly here, a floating point calculation estimated incorrectly there. Xyehyn was losing track of the complex motion, but the bombs continued to be thrown into space, each at a different coordinate, until a flat plane of points—rotated and stretched into a rhombus due to the time dependency inherent in the manner in which the bombs were thrown—was flying towards the enemy ship. It would take two days to arrive.
Xyehyn stopped. All in all it had launched three hundred bombs, the geometry of the deadly plane precisely determined to ensure that one of them would hit the target. The rhombus was too big for any ship to maneuver out of. Barring the use of an unknown law of physics, the enemy was already dead. Light and matter just needed to catch up.
#
There was a pulse at Cixyr’s door. The signature told zwes that it was First Officer Rijug. Zyx waved an arm to open the door.
Rijug stood rigid, grey skin gently shimmering in the light. “Can I come in?” zyx asked.
Cixyr gestured in the affirmative. Rijug came and sat by zwes, causing tiny circuits to form between their skin, the pleasing sensation that came from physical closeness.
“Are you frightened?” Rijug asked.
“I am,” Cixyr said, “but predominately mournful. Our ECM will work, so I pity those travelers, and I mourn for the history of their society that led them to such a decision.”
“The decision to fire first?”
Cixyr swung zenx arms. “Yes. They had no way of knowing our intentions. They are close, but we could have both passed by the Object without interfering with each other.”
“Then why fire?”
“There must be something in their history,” Cixyr said with sadness. “Imagine what their society must have been through, to bring that amount of paranoia into the stars. They must have had an extremely turbulent past that taught them to always assume that the unknown was a threat, simply by nature of existing in space. I can’t imagine how much suffering their species has endured that would cause them to assume, as a rule, that any alien species must embody their own worst impulses.”
“Does that apply to the Clouds, or the other signals we have found?”
“Yes,” Cixyr agreed, swiveling in zenx seat. “Whatever was happening all those eons ago, it seems that many civilizations chose fear over reason.”
“Perhaps we are wrong,” Rijug suggested, zyx eyes going wide at the insight.
“Perhaps, but would you have fired first if you were in their situation?”
“I would not.”
“Neither would I. Also consider: they are using a missile with a radar and a thruster. Primitive technology. Whoever they are, they decided to attempt interstellar flight without proper technological or philosophical development. What could have gone so wrong that they would try something like this?”
In a sad voice, Rijug said, “It is a shame.”
“Depending on what they believe, we are the all-powerful beings that will cause the end of their world.”
“Quite poetic.” Rijug’s voice took on a more playful tone. “You can comfort yourself in thinking that this is only one part of their civilization, not the whole.”
“That’s an assumption. That ship might be all that is left…” Zyx let the idea trail off, and could see that Rijug had not considered a similar theory.
Rijug pushed a layer of zenx hair back in trepidation. “I hope it’s an automated ship.”
“I hope so too. It would lessen the crime we have committed.”
#
There was no indication that anything happened when the missile hit the ECM sphere. The Xyehyn increased its thrust for a time, bending its trajectory away from the sun, then brought it back up to cruise acceleration. Vokhaj turned every sensor on the missile, and for the following six hours the crew was blind to the rest of the sky. Vokhaj made observations, and announced that the missile was no longer on a trajectory that could hit them. It was falling behind their path.
#
It was always tempting to think that the course of one’s life reflected the course of the universe. The beginning seemed the same: a sudden flash of something from an ontological nothing. Life, though, had a symmetry the universe did not. At the end, a person reversed the events of their birth: something back into nothing. The universe, on the other hand, kept going, gradually spreading and exhausting itself. There would always be something, but that something would, by the laws of thermodynamics, no longer be capable of doing anything.
Fate’s imbalance troubled the people of Orym. Why would the universe have such an asymmetry if its conscious parts—people—did not?
It could be the wrong question, a conundrum created from incorrect principles. Or there was something they didn’t understand, either about the universe as a whole, or the fate of the individual in specific.
The crew spent much of the following days on the bridge, making measurements of the Object as their bombs flew across space. Syqun kept a countdown on the screen, which zyx configured to wrap all the way around the bridge, surrounding the crew with a band of stars. They watched the clock run down to the moment they’d officially become murderers.
The Object had grown and started to resolve. It was long and lumpy, high albedo, and because its shape and brightness kept changing, seemed to be spinning.
After days of near silence, the clock hit zero. The first bomb had arrived at its target, the rest of them following in quick succession. Syqun assumed that the first one would be the killing shot, as the enemy ship had not changed its trajectory.
An hour later zyx was proven correct.
The star of the enemy ship suddenly bloomed with light, growing orders of magnitude brighter in a split second. When the brightness dropped back down, Vokhaj determined that the star’s angular diameter had increased slightly. Then zyx announced that Xyehyn was picking up emission spectra. Vokhaj flashed the data onto the wraparound screen, replacing the stars. Cixyr looked over it and saw the telltale signs of a nuclear detonation.
“That’s it then?” Rijug asked. “We killed it?”
The star was still moving, and would be for the rest of eternity. It had momentum, dead or alive.
“The spectra are consistent with an explosion.” Vokhaj confirmed. “We’ll never know for sure, but I am fairly confident that it is no longer a threat. I’ll keep some detectors tracking it to be sure.”
Cixyr felt sick. What they had done disgusted zwes. Zyx ran through the possibilities. If it was—
A generation ship: Cut off from whoever had sent them, the people inside the ship were essentially a small civilization. The long crawl through interstellar space, the generations and generations born inside—together they would have created a new society, one born from the stars. Zyx destroyed it. Orym had stories about the end of the world. These space travelers would as well. Whatever they had imagined as the catalyst to the end, zyx had stepped into the role, a demon at the end of civilization, a curtain with nothing on the other side.
A sleeper ship, awake: Instead of bothering with the technological and ethical dilemmas of a generation ship, the crew would be kept in hibernation, awoken when they arrived at their destination. It would seem like a second passed. If they had awoken, at least they would have had a chance to ponder their fates, to look their death in the eye.
A sleeper ship, asleep: The worst possible outcome, the one that nauseated Cixyr the most. Perhaps the weapon system was automatic, attempting to protect its precious cargo, the people hibernating in a timeless sleep. If these beings had never awoken, the moment they lost consciousness, thousands and thousands of years before, was now their last. Cixyr had reached back through time to turn a moment into the last moment. The subjectivity of that experience was baffling; the crime of it unimaginable.
Zyx desperately hoped it was an automatic probe. That was the most reasonable interstellar design. Deep down though, zyx knew it was unlikely. Any civilization would be like zenx. They’d want to see what was out there with their own eyes.
#
When setting out, Cixyr expected the first sight of the Object to be a moment of revelation. Zenx first expedition was. What they had found was a sort of spherical transmission hub, all trusses and dishes. Not much information there, but it was exciting: something from the past, something tangible from an alien species.
Now, Cixyr found it difficult to feel anything other than shame and sadness. Whatever the Object was, zyx was unable to believe it was worth the killing to get to it. Why had they fired first? Zyx suspected the question would haunt zwes for the rest of zenx life.
Still, when the Object finally resolved, only a lightminute away, zyx was astounded.
It was a giant white cylinder, six miles in diameter, thirty in length, a feat of space engineering that Orym could not attempt for hundreds of years.
Whoever had built it and sent it to the stars must have been incredibly advanced. Yet, death had still come. At the end of the cylinder, the hull was shattered. Ragged chunks of metal peeled away from the hull, evidence of a titanic explosion that had cracked the spacecraft apart. The heat of the blast had caused the skin to bubble and deform. Those patches were what gave the Object its lumpy appearance from long range.
“Is it a space habitat?” Vokhaj asked.
“I believe so,” Rijug said, with deep contemplation in zenx voice. “Although I wonder whether it was intended as an interstellar vessel or was originally an orbital habitat. In the second case, the explosion may have given it enough velocity to escape its star system.”
Cixyr found that unlikely. It was difficult to imagine a disaster that would shatter such an object, fling it into space, but not vaporize it. The data would help determine which theory was true. Zyx didn’t feel like getting into an in-depth discussion at the moment.
As the Object tumbled, the distant light of the sun illuminated different patches of the skin. The images showed that Xyehyn was not the Object’s first visitor. Great gouges were torn from the skin. Some of the ragged edges at the end had a strange blockiness to them, as if somebody had cut off perfect cubes of the metal.
Xyehyn had nothing onboard that was remotely capable of harvesting material from the hull. Even landing on it would be too difficult. They were moving too fast, already bending their trajectory to swing back sunwards.
Instead, Syqun started sending out probes. Zyx flashed an exterior view of the probes emerging from their hangers, ovoid things trailing cable arms. They’d attach themselves to the hull and scurry around for the years it took for the Object to pass through the solar system, collecting data to transmit back to Orym once in range of the planet’s powerful antennas.
Xyehyn was also collecting data, rapidly filling its memory with high-quality imagery.
They were only within close visual range for an hour. Xyehyn passed by, then Vokhaj turned zenx cameras aft to see what was inside the cylinder.
At first it was dark, but then the Object tumbled and the sun illuminated the interior. The space tomb sparkled in the light. Ice—sharp, jagged mountains of frozen water miles tall. Each extended up from the inner surface towards the center axis. It was like the round mouth of an exotic creature, filled with sharp teeth.
“It was meant to support life,” Cixyr suggested.
“That’s a lot of water. We would not require anywhere close to that much,” Rijug pointed out.
“Orym is a very strange world.”
Had the enemy ship been trying to find a safe port, an island in the abstract expanse of the galaxy? Had they known that there was so much water, such a surplus of living space, waiting out among the stars? Were they looking for a new home to call theirs? Or just curious?
There would be no answer. The Object slowly shrunk behind them, blending back into the background pinpoints. Xyehyn powered home.
“We’ll have a preliminary data set within a day,” Vokhaj announced, “so we can all start doing some analysis.”
Yes. Data analysis. More information. Another step forward for Orym, another gift from the universe.
Cixyr mentally drifted. Zyx stood silently and walked to the back of the bridge. Zyx waved a hand through the electromagnetic fields and the bridge door opened. More than anything else, zyx needed to be away from the stars.
© Zachery Brasier 2026
Zachery Brasier is a science fiction writer and space artist residing in Salem, MA. His art focuses on retro space concepts. His writing has appeared in Bewildering Stories, Poetries in English, Apocalypse Confidential, and more. Check out more of his work and his social media links at zacherybrasier.com.