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    Going Somewhere Else and Other Stories
    Going Somewhere Else and Other Stories
    Going Somewhere Else and Other Stories
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    Going Somewhere Else and Other Stories

    By Amber D. Sistla

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    About this ebook

    This is a collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories. Please look inside to read about an explorer preparing for a journey that never ends, a young woman facing a monster that cannot be defeated, a death angel who's never actually collected a soul....and more stories.

    Table of Contents:
    **Going Somewhere Else
    Originally published in Cosmos Online Magazine
    -translation in Hebrew, Mercury magazine March 2009
    -translation in Greek, Ennea magazine #439 Jan 14, 2009

    **A Place to Call Home
    Originally published in the April/May 2008 issue of Cosmos Magazine.
    -translation in Greek, Ennea magazine #442 Feb 4, 2009
    -Honorable Mention in Gardner Dozois' _The Year's Best Science Fiction:
    Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection_

    **Homo Sylvanus
    Originally published in the Oct 2008 issue of Jim Baen's Universe.

    **Not the Chosen One
    Originally published December 27, 2010 in Daily Science Fiction.

    **Just Play the Game
    Original fiction

    **The Opposite of Defeating
    Original fiction

    **The Day Nobody Died
    Original fiction

    About the Author:
    Amber D. Sistla was born in Oklahoma and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. She has a degree in computer science and has six U.S. and E.U. patents. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Nature, Jim Baen's Universe, Postcripts, Cosmos, Bull Spec, and Daily Science Fiction. She is an active member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAmber D. Sistla
    Release dateSep 30, 2011
    Going Somewhere Else and Other Stories
    Author

    Amber D. Sistla

    Amber D. Sistla was born in Oklahoma and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. She has a degree in computer science and has six U.S. and E.U. patents. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Nature, Jim Baen's Universe, Postcripts, Cosmos, Bull Spec, and Daily Science Fiction. She is an active member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

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      Book preview

      Going Somewhere Else and Other Stories - Amber D. Sistla

      Going Somewhere Else and Other Stories

      by

      Amber D. Sistla

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      * * * * *

      PUBLISHED BY:

      Zephyr Publishing on Smashwords

      This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this story are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

      Cover art created with images courtesy of NASA at courtesy of nasaimages.org.

      Going Somewhere Else and Other Stories

      Copyright © 2011 by Amber D. Sistla

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

      * * * * *

      Going Somewhere Else and Other Stories

      Table of Contents

      Going Somewhere Else

      A Place to Call Home

      Homo Sylvanus

      Not the Chosen One

      Just Play the Game

      The Opposite of Defeating

      The Day Nobody Died

      Going Somewhere Else

      By Amber D. Sistla

      "What sort of person volunteers for a mission that never returns?" The reporter raised his eyebrow when he said person, as if he were using the term loosely and wasn't sure it still applied to me.

      To be honest, I don't know how much it applied to me either. I mean, I'm still me, but what makes a person a person? Is it the emotional connection? Ambition? Obsession? If so, I am 1 for 3, but then, I always was.

      ;) Oh, you know me; I always gotta be going somewhere else! I texted. We were doing the press conference with only the text interface in order to demonstrate how it would be on the II Explorer 1. A voice interface would be wasted on board the survey ship; I mean, who would I talk to? The reporters laughed, and my handler seized the opportunity to end the press conference on a high note. The II program needed all the positive press they could get. II, that's Integrated Intelligence where man is turned to machine as opposed to AI, artificial intelligence, where people attempt to turn machine into man. Turns out, it's easier to do II than AI. Don't ask me why, I'm not the specialist.

      I'm not sure what they did or what parts are still intact, but the memories, the personality quirks, the neuroses from my mother--all still intact.

      My mother--she's the real reason I signed up. When I was growing up, my summer break Tuesdays were always the same. On other days I would be stuck doing chores for the old lady next door, but Tuesdays were special. My mother worked two jobs, and Tuesday was her one day off. After breakfast, we would dress in our best clothes, get in the car, and start the two hour journey to the airport in the city. Maybe she went by herself when I was in school; I don’t know. I do know it was the furthest she ever traveled from town in her life.

      It might seem silly to dress up to go to the airport, but the airport was fancier than any place in our small town. We would go to the eating area and pick a table right in the middle.

      The honeymooners, the business travelers, the soon to be divorced couples, the tired families, the foreign visitors, the young, the happy, the sad, the old--none escaped my mother's scrutiny.

      While she was observing them, I observed her. A casual observer might describe her as indifferent. Most of the time, they would be right; she was not an emotional woman. Most of the time, my mother went through life. Not happy, not sad, she just went through life. But I was not a casual observer, and in the airport I could see in her normally inscrutable eyes a spark of emotion. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul; if that's the case, her windows had been welded shut, curtains drawn, and boarded over for as long as I could remember. But in the airport, I finally saw something in my mother's eyes.

      It took me a while to understand what I was seeing. I used to think she was incapable of feeling emotions, and so when I saw that spark in the airport, I became obsessed with the whats and whys of it. At first I thought it was jealousy. But it was more than that. But it needed words to describe that I hadn't learned yet like feral, primitive, and wanton desire.

      I never got the courage to ask her what the travelers had that she craved. Some fearless adventurer I am, huh? But that was the dynamic of our relationship--I would ask no questions, she would share no answers. Except finally, in her own way, she did share. I was eighteen and going to college on the other side of the country. She took me to the airport one last time. She extended the one-way ticket towards me, and as I reached to take it, the force of her hungry gaze caught me. For one long moment we stood like that, not touching each other, but each grasping the ticket. Then she released the ticket, clenched her hands at her side, and told me, "Don't ever come back. Always be going somewhere else."

      I never saw her again. I could say that I was a poor student and couldn't afford the tickets home for the breaks during college. Or that I started work immediately after college and my job kept me really busy. Those were excuses, not reasons; the sort of things you told nosy people who wondered too much about things that really weren't their business in the first place. Honestly though, I knew she didn't want me there. She didn't want me to go back, but most people wouldn't understand that. When she died, her will was forbade me from attending the funeral. It probably caused a lot of talk around our small town; people who didn't know any better probably thought she didn't care for me. But I understood; in her own way, that instruction in the will was how she showed she cared. She cared enough to prevent me from going back.

      That's why I signed up for the II Explorer project. After a while, you run out of places on Earth that are somewhere else from where you've already been. Not that one

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