The Return of Captain Cosmos

Or how I ended up writing some weird sci-fi

As I write this, the House of Representatives are still mired in the GOP-made muck of trying to elect a Speaker of the House. I’m not going to talk about that right now. What could I say? This clown show is fairly obvious in its absurdity and I don’t have anything to add to that discussion.

So instead I’d like to share the first piece of fiction is a really, really long time. It came out of a prompt sent to me by my good friend, Patrick. He originally sent it as a prompt for ChatGPT (and boy, I could talk about those implications all day), and it inspired me to come up with something myself. I don’t remember all the details used as a starting point, but I do remember it included a character named Captain Cosmos, a style in the vein of Grant Morrison, and AI. I completely forgot about the AI bit, and went more for a Morrison-type mood than style, but I’m still happy with how this turned out. I hope you like it, too.

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He nearly missed the distress call.

Captain Cosmos, hero of the spaceways, was sliding through Sector 232, alone in his Sabre and alone with his thoughts. Sector 232 was a lonely part of space, rarely used once it was found to be bereft of any precious elements and rich in rugged, lifeless planetoids. Still, it could provide a handy shortcut depending on where you were going, and the Captain was going home.

Cosmos subconsciously goosed the engine at the thought. When he was younger, adventuring across the void seemed to be the most important, most exciting thing he could be doing. His wife had been understanding, and his children young enough to see him as a faultless hero no matter how long he was away. But the kids were living with his now ex-wife and old enough to start feeling resentful.

He goosed the engine some more. It was time to go home.

The silence of the cabin was pierced by a sharp tone, repeatedly alerting him to a sudden distress call. The Onboard had been dutifully scanning the area, boosting and analyzing any background noise that seemed out of place. It had gotten lucky—a minute more and the Sabre would’ve been out of range and the signal missed.

Captain Cosmos’ thoughts of home were gone, buried under the twin habits of exploration and duty. Going to full-manual, the Captain swung the fighter in a long arc and zeroed in on the signal. The planetoid looked like any other drifting through the sector; dusty, barren, dead and devoid of anything but craters and shadows. The sensors bleeped just before Captain Cosmos saw it, a glint on the surface that disappeared as quickly as it had winked at him from the dark.

The Sabre glided smoothly toward the surface before hitting a teeth-rattling wave of turbulence. But that didn’t make sense, Cosmos’ thought as he wrestled with the controls. There wasn’t any atmosphere down there, nothing to cause turbulence at all. A sudden wave of nausea hit him and faded. Closer to the surface he could see the shining spot on the ground more clearly now, a steady spot of light nestled between two small craters.

Cosmos brought the Sabre in for a landing,  a few yards from what he now saw was wreckage. Whatever it had been was destroyed utterly, a mangled, unrecognizable twist of alloy half-buried in the dust. The Captain clicked his helmet into place and hopped down the gangway. There was no atmosphere but there was some gravity, enough that he could bounce around on the surface without launching himself into orbit.

A couple of well-practiced hops took him to the wreckage. It had been a ship alright, something no bigger than his own Sabre. The ship was bowed, as if some great weight had been dropped on top, and deep, uniform grooves indicated something had been scraped across the alloy. Anything that could’ve helped identify the craft was gone, wiped away from the now-polished surface.

That, Captain Cosmos thought to himself, made no sense at all.

He stood and stretched and let out a sigh. This was one mystery in space that would go unsolved, he thought. The wreckage didn’t look especially recent, and he doubted there were any …

Another glint caught his eye, and he spun in that direction while his hand went smoothly to his sidearm. About a hundred yards away, tucked halfway under the shadow of a boulder, was a man. Or at least, something humanoid. It was hard to see from this distance, and he’d left his longviewers in the Sabre. But it was definitely humanoid, slumped forward so the plastiglass of its helmet caught the distant sunlight.

He cautiously made his way to the body. He was already thinking of it as a body, the posture a sure sign the being was already dead. Still, he had his sidearm out just in case. Experience had taught him long ago that it was never a bad idea to have some firepower on your side when things got weird.

As he closed in on the body, Captain Cosmos could see a small shelter just behind the jutting rock. It was low to the ground, its rounded top laced with an embedded solar array. The glow of the shield was visible, a heatwave-haze surrounding the shelter that kept the structure safe from minor damage and, most importantly, provided an atmosphere for the occupant. It was, the Captain realized with a start, Galactic Coalition standard issue.

This was getting grim, he thought, and was only slightly queasy with surprise when he saw the body was wearing a GC uniform. Did he know this pilot, he wondered?  Was it a friend? A former lover? Cosmos couldn’t remember any alerts being issued for missing servicemembers, but he admittedly didn’t pay much attention to the grind of correspondence from headquarters. Whoever this was, they seemed to be human, or close to it. Five-fingered gloved hands lay limp at the being’s side, attached to just two arms leading up to slumped shoulders supporting a single, roundish head. The radiation shield on the helmet was down, hiding the pilot’s features.

The Captain sighed. Dying alone on a nondescript and anonymous rock was no way to go. The being’s suit looked damaged, but not fatally. The poor creature had likely survived for days, possibly a week or two. A small pile of supplies and equipment, everything that would have been in the ship’s emergency kit, was scattered between the body and the shelter.

The ship. Captain Cosmos looked back at the shallow bowl of metal. Whatever had gone on here happened after the ship set down. Judging by the condition of the emergency equipment, it may have come down hard. Many of the supplies were damaged; did that include the emergency beacon? Or had there just been no one in range for all that time? Either case was plausible, he thought.

Whomever the pilot was, they had still been able to find the kit, set up the tent, and hunker down for a time. Which made what he noticed next even worse—the oxygen switch housed snugly in one of the gloves was open and disconnected. Not damaged, just … off. At some point the pilot chose to slowly suffocate, facing the useless remnants of a ship that could no longer save them.

Cosmos let out another long exhalation. Squatting next to the body, he reached out to push the shoulders back so he could see the name patch obscured by the helmet.

A low, almost unbearable tone suddenly rolled over him, felt rather than heard but piercing his skull like some awful, nauseating sound. Captain Cosmos whipped around and felt his sanity nearly slide away. Cetacea caelus momentum rose to the surface of his mind, his training more deeply ingrained than he would have guessed. Space whale.

The name was a misnomer. The space whale, so rare it could almost be considered a legend, didn’t even look like a whale. Language, though, didn’t have a word big enough to capture the immensity of the creature. Pale almost to the point of translucence, it looked more like a mixture of millipede and unshelled lobster. Blind eyes hung from slowly moving stalks, and a wetly segmented belly undulated like a dry heave. Even harder to watch was the way space-time bent and warped in its wake, whorls of smeared colors that were like corrupted visions of the void itself. The creature flickered in and out of time and space, here and everywhere at once. And there were more. Captain Cosmos realized he was looking at a pod.

At least a dozen of the creatures were gliding over the planetoid, casting the entire hemisphere in shadow and a wash of tortured relativity. A smaller whale, a calf the size of a skyscraper, surfed in the wake of its parent. Its eyestalks swung about restlessly, looking for anything of interest.

It spotted the Sabre.

With terrible slowness, the calf slipped away from its monstrous parent, covering a frightening amount of space in nearly no time. Captain Cosmos started to run for his ship, but quickly realized that was suicide. Running back to the boulder for shelter, he vaguely noted that the damaged ship was gone. Not even the crater remained.

Before he could think, the calf murmured, calling out with a thrumming that loosened his bowels and put him on his knees. The Captain watched as the calf dove languidly toward the Sabre, its hollow proboscis extending to sample the ship. In the final moment, the calf changed its mind and arched its body back toward the pod above. But not quickly enough. Pointing nearly straight up, the calf’s tail-end still scraped a divot into the surface, carving out a crater where the Sabre had sat.

The ship was now crushed, flattened like a can under the heel of a careless and indifferent child.

Captain Cosmos lifted his head against the settling debris and last breaker of space-time. Sweating and dazed he looked at the body of the pilot, jostled onto its side and the embroidered name patch now visible. Even as the body faded into the future, the Captain could see the name was his own.