Noise

I’ve got a short science-fiction piece for you this week, as well as science-fiction themed recommendation at the bottom. Enjoy!

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It sounded like wind, though there was no such thing on the moon. Safe in her biosphere, she didn’t want to go out. Didn’t need to. The walls were clear plastic to utilise the Moon’s meagre light. She could see there was nothing out there, and her suit would mean she wouldn’t be able to feel if there was a breeze. But her radio was squawking. HQ could read the sensors’ disturbance and demanded to know what was going on.

She consoled herself that there were no monsters on the moon either. Nothing and nobody until the next starter colony miles and miles over the horizon. She armed herself with a camera and a microphone to record what was out there, and a screwdriver to protect herself. Earth-learned patterns of behaviour were hard to shake.

Even when she adjusted the camera’s settings to cycle travel through different colour frequencies, she found nothing, and the microphone’s needle twitched at her footsteps, but otherwise remained still. She could hear it, though, a low rushing like wind or waves. No wonder HQ was getting excited.

If they were to find water, then the mission would start paying dividends in this generation, rather than in two or three down the line. She had been sent out to be caretaker for the enormous greenhouses full of engineered plants which were designed to pump oxygen into the air, jumpstart an atmosphere in preparation for humanity’s invasion. Arrival, not invasion. That was just how they had joked during training, when management wasn’t around. Still, she glanced up at Earth’s red and brown ball, which had only recently come back into view. When she had been a kid, it had been green and blue with white clouds for contrast. The sound was coming from behind her now, from inside the sphere.

When she turned around to see what was happening in the biosphere, it looked, from this angle, like the tall plants were also staring up, as if they’d also noticed the burned ball in the sky. Wind swirled around their green shoots, but it wasn’t the wind that was causing the plants to move. It was the plant’s movement that was causing the wind as they communicated with each other. She took a step towards the biosphere, and they turned to face her.

They whipped their bodies, and a gust of wind slammed the airlock door shut. She had four hours of oxygen left in the suit, plenty of time to prise out one of the sphere’s hard plastic panels. Instead, she sat down to watch the red rock of Earth. She could turn the air supply off now, but in this case, using up all the oxygen was the right thing to do.

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Bandcamp is bringing back Bandcamp Friday this year. It’s always the first Friday of the month when Bandcamp waives their fees, so it’s the best day to support independant musicians.

The first one of 2022 is tomorrow, and if that’s too short notice to decide what to buy, then I’ve got you covered!

You know that scene at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the apes are messing around with bones, until one of them works out how to use it as a tool to kill other apes, thereby initiating evolution/civilisation?*

And you know the way you’ve always wondered what it would sound like if, instead of apes, it was a bunch of primitive Jarvis Cockers, and they were messing about with bones until they suddenly invented music? Well, head over to Bandcamp tomorrow to buy Thank’s new album, Thoughtless Cruelty, because that’s exactly what it would sound like!

*If you’re a keen Kubrick fan with strong feelings about this film and hate how I completely misunderstood the true significance of this pivotal scene: keep it to yourself, okay?