The Second Sky

Bradley Nordell

Description

With macabre essence of Stephen King to the strange wonders of Bradbury and a hint of Asimov's far-futures but with the pen a scientist comes the Second Sky. A hard-scifi look at the breadcrumbs to tomorrow.
From stories about teleportation and an apocalypse on Mars to Twilight Zone-esque stories about parallel realms, dreamlike technological perceptions, and new worlds, The Second Sky and Other Stories is a far-future work that explores the depth of human nature, love, grief, existential threats, and a visionary look at the earth, the solar systems, and humankind’s pursuit for survival.
In “The Reaper Men,” a man walks the highways of the dead to bring the data that could just save a pandemic-stricken world.
In “Somewhere in a Dark Star,” the crew of the Osiris starship must figure out a way to escape a black hole.
In “The Last Days of a Martian Flower,” a brother and sister try to tell the inhabitants of Mars that a planet is dying, despite the reluctance and conspiracy to keep them there.
In “Second Sky,” mother and husband try to figure out what to do as an alien space shift arrives on the earth. Through their grief over losing their daughter, they are face-to-face once more with the second sky of truth.
Across many genres, stories, and points of view, Nordell takes us through the far future from horror to hard science fiction in these twenty-one stories, exploring the reality beyond the one we experience every day. Here we see the horizon of the other place, the future beyond landscapes familiar to us, and the place beyond the realm of known and into the second sky.

Sujets

• Horror
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 12 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665740951
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE SECOND SKY
 
AND OTHER STORIES
 
 
 
BRADLEY NORDELL
 
 
 
 

 
Copyright © 2023 Bradley Nordell.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
 
 
Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6657-3878-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-3879-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-4095-1 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023905227
 
 
Archway Publishing rev. date:  09/29/2023
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
To Jackie, Michael, and Nicole
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
—George Orwell
In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.
—John Archibald Wheeler
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
 
Fireflies at Dusk
Time’s Entangled Anti-Spaces
The Reaper Men
A Letter to a Leaf across Solis Terra
The Color of a Rose
The Last Days of a Martian Flower
The Black Daffodil
iTranscend
Lost within a Dark Star
The Portal to Yesterday
The Last Book Speaks
Pendulum Nights
The Second Sky
The Green Light across the Stars
Prometheans Rise
That Which Waits inside the Door
To Doubt the Dark
The Nightmare between Realms
The Machine That Dreamt of Tomorrow
In Tenebris
To Build a Hope
 
Acknowledgments
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Reality is a fickle thing. As human beings, with our limited senses, we perceive only a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, a piece of the auditory spectrum; and our noses, compared to, let’s say, a dog’s are, well, almost nonexistent in their ability to smell, sift through those smells, and create a sense-based story on those aromas. Life is mostly hidden to us. We live most of our lives in the dark, dancing on only a pinhead of truth. Furthermore, the information we do gather is stored in certain bundles of neurons, within ones and zeros of neuronal firings, which are then compiled into a piecewise puzzle (recall that our vision is limited to 135 degrees and filled with holes due to the fact we have two eyes and a pupil in between both) that our brain fills in later. This puzzle or story is then projected back outward into reality to form our perception of it. Each process has its limitations and is far beyond the complete picture of what is. The isness of reality is mostly hidden from us.
So, what makes reality real? And how can you trust what you experience is real? How do you know there’s not another hidden reality just beyond the one you experience?
And that, again, is another complex thing that baffles most of us. Once again, we see things only at a specific part of the length and time scale. We do not see the quantum fields enveloping us. We do not feel the trillions of particles zipping through us at time scales beyond our comprehension. We do experience more than three dimensions. Humans exist in the middle of time, seeing neither the billion-year evolution nor the femtoseconds of kingdoms rising and falling in the quantum realm. We are quite limited. One thing we do have is the power of storytelling to explore new realms. Technology, too, is opening these doors to experiencing more “reality” and realms once hidden to us. What will we find there? What new secrets will be revealed?
The stories in this book explore those realms. From the hidden darkness of the far future and apocalyptic landscapes to new technology allowing us to switch minds with another, these stories take place in what I like to call “the Second Sky,” which is the boundary beyond the world we have always known and others that are so close to us. It’s a place where, when you finally take off the mask of our once limitations, you see a new realm filled with possibilities, paradoxes, sorrows, and beauties—a leaf across the cosmic oceans, a hope in ruin, or a set of eyes that can see beyond the colors of the rainbow. Come with me, my fellow reader. To the future. To the past. To the place beyond border. Come and see what lies beyond the second sky.
FIREFLIES AT DUSK
I couldn’t take the sorrow anymore, so I began to walk. Always at night, I would set out just before sundown and return when the moon was nothing more than a spotlight in the inky, untenanted sky.
As I walked, I thought about the past—my children who are now grown; my wife now buried; and I, but a ghost. As I walked, the shadows followed one by one.
I was an old man with a limp in my right knee. It was a reminder that some wounds never heal. On each walk, I felt my cotton-white hair swaying in the wind. There was always a chill breeze that littered those nights with a solemn moan. My only friends left were insomnia and that sleepy cat, Nabokov, who’d reached the ripe old age of twenty-two. His time would soon be up, just like mine. Eighty-six years old. Where had the time gone? It seemed to leave only a bitter taste in my mouth and a constant tremble in my hands. I could barely button my shirts anymore.
I walked to remember and to forget. Insomnia was a mistress that kept on asking for more, whispering promises at the edge of night and stealing them back by daybreak. I walked to ignore her. I walked to find my final moment in time’s great divide.
“Why is it so hard to die?” I asked the emptiness on my strolls each night.
The only thing that answered back was the silent stalking shadows.
With each footstep, memories flooded into my mind—flashes of uncontrollable truths. The hot iron rod burned in my throat with each swallow. Grief is a hunger that is never full, and the roots of sorrow infiltrate deep inside the soils of a man’s soul, until eventually you can’t tell the difference between it and joy. The shadows know this; they cast each bet upon this unalienable truth.
When the hurt was too much, I counted the stars above. The most I ever counted was 4,193. To me, the stars held other stories, countless love tales, and civilizations trying to find their ways in a universe bound to chaos and its brutal reign. The stars connected us across those cosmic islands of endless and glorious time.
I was a romantic to my core, you could say. My imagination was as wild as my heart, which did not dull with age but only became less grounded—a horse galloping free in a field. My former pragmatism was almost lost. When life got that old, to dream was the final doorway before death. So that was what I did. As I walked along the path, I carried my fantasies and rumination of other worlds. The dark was a canvas I could paint my ideas on and see the truth within—a place where I could count those infinite nuclear furnaces of hope.
During those walks, I noticed that the inexplicable shadows were growing closer, like a lioness waiting to pounce in the long grass. They came in many forms. At times, I noticed them reaching out to grab me from the plants beyond the path. My heart raced as my footsteps quickened.
“Who out dare?” I asked, not expecting a reply. “I’m an ol’ man with no money or time. I’m not worth ya trouble.”
Whatever was hiding in the shadow didn’t respond or care to reveal its shrouded self. It crept along nonetheless, and it waited.
Then after enough time had passed, the shadows began to speak to me. At first, I thought I was going crazy. But after a while, I figured it wouldn’t matter anyway. An old bag of regrets like me would go mad eventually. For in time, all those neural connections I had made would snap. And I was lonely. The shadows spoke, and I listened. My feet strode along with each heartbeat.
The shadows were also shape-shifters, and they took many forms during those walks, like fog and dust forming into magical shapes in an instant. The shapes were always those of memories and loved ones lost—the night puppeteer’s taunt.
Every walk was a different lesson—a different memory. Sometimes they were my mother sitting in her rocking chair, crocheting a new blanket and telling me about our ancestors in Ireland—once bootleggers in New York to politicians in Kansas City. Other days, it was my father, who survived Vietnam physically but not mentally. He was a quiet and depressed man who wrote poetry in secret. The tattered whiskey-stained notebooks were found after his death. Their words contained the secrets to the meaning of life if only I could have understood their idyllic riddles. Other days, the shadows took the form of my wife and kids—memories of San Francisco, walking along the pier. Or there was the time we got lost in Paris, looking for the spot where Sartre had once sat. There were first bike rides, days at school, birthdays, the first kiss with my wife, and the time I dropped her birthday cake in the lake. Oh, how we laughed! All of it mixed, like kaleidoscopes of the heart.
As I stepped onto the path, memories shuf