Woohoo! Congratulations, Susan!

All right Susan.

Congratulations Susan!!

Great news, Susan!

huh. so the insomnia gods drove me to write a 3pp story/sketch for something or other. I have no idea where it's going, but yay. writing! Also? Am amused by part of the premise.

Now what should I do with it.

Write it and show us! We don't just like to write, we like to read, too.

(for your amusement... distraction, etc. I'm not looking at it in the daylight, so ... ehhn. I feel like I should say "while you were reciting your poem, I just jotted this down in my journal and think it's pretty ok, so I'll just read it to everyone now." Ok. here goes.)

Everything is conserved

"They gave it to us. A single one. No more, ever. And you guys broke it?"

"It was inscrutable."

"We couldn't use it. We wanted to find out how it worked."

"So you broke it."

"It wouldn't respond to any input we provided. None of our power sources. No signal."

"And you broke it because it was non-responsive."

"If we could observe the inner workings, we thought…"

"and breaking it let you observe them how?"

"well, we didn't know that it was solid all the way through."

"…"

"Yeah. We broke it."

Stalking out of the room where the engineers were still leaning back in their modular chairs was all he could do. His heels rang the floor. His fingers wrapped around the shard of what once was their ticket to fame, certainly. And to space. To adventure, riches, and eventually salvation. Well, at least to fame and space.

And now, they were land-locked in the finest sense. Because in order to understand how something works, simian brains needed to smash it open.

We're better left on the ground, he thought.

-*-

Back in his stateroom, the captain looked about him. It was a spaceship captain's room – best that money could buy. It was in a spaceship, the first of its kind. Settled for 5 years now, and likely for the rest of all godblinking eternity in a cow pasture in the flatlands of Oklahoma. Sad little rusted thing that people would come to see after they'd visited the giant tin Paul Bunyan up north. He was captain of nothing. It was time to fire people, and go back to work. If they'd let him.

-*-

There it was – his broadcasting company, His brainchild, had been the point of contact for the space travelers. They called themselves something, but he couldn't pronounce it, so he called them Blayards. He'd had them to his beach house in Boca. He'd brought them to the penthouse in Manhattan. He'd shown them how to use media channels to twist an election, and two fashion seasons. They'd liked that so much, they'd given him a copy of one of their Engines.

Paul Blays was one of those men who sees a thing, and then sees a lot of other things, far off, that he will go any distance to gather unto himself. He retired the next day, used his witness protection connections from an old scandal that he'd buried by tossing up some family who had starved their kid (not really, but he made it seem so) to the masses. He mostly disappeared. And built a spaceship for the engine. He – the new he, Michael Yards – used "family money" to hire the engineers away from BMW, JPL, and JHU. He flew them home on weekends, out of the heartland. But he stayed with his ship.

Until they broke it.

-*-

He was sitting in his stateroom, on the meditation couch his interior-decorator daughter in law had suggested as appropriate for a ship's captain with hypertension. She was into loads of crap, as far as he was concerned, but also pregnant with his grandson. So, whatever. He was sitting there, with the shard of the thing in the palm of his hand, when he remembered to check his blood pressure. Of course it was high. He employed idiots. He closed his eyes and imagined a waterfall. He imagined the waterfall bursting into flame and running back to the engineers like a Warner-Brothers-TNT trail and blowing them to bits. He imagined the waterfall. It wasn't working. He imagined his frustration flowed from him like a river. He imagined his rage rolled from his shoulders, down his arms, to his fingertips, and from there off and away. He imagined –

His palms were warm. Hot. The engine shard was lit up like a Christmas tree and heated. It had turned on. How.

-*-

The Blayards, or whatever they were called were old, very old. They would not survive a return (continued...)

( continues...) trip back from wherever they were going. They didn't care. Their faces had a sense of continually bemused – he'd thought it was just anatomy.

Nope.

It turned out, it was a lack of rage. Rage pushed them onwards in the universe, certainly, but they never felt it. Their engines sucked it all up as quickly as they could generate it. They only needed to stop every once in a while to fuel up. Which is why, he suddenly understood, they'd chosen him.

Damn, Sox. That was awesome. I love the way you turned things on their heads. Logic destroys, anger creates.

Ohhhhh. I want more of this.