Seven journeys across time, space, and the imagination.
Journeys, space travel, time travel, quests, spaces in between, portals…
In this second volume in the Far, Far Away series, we’ve gathered together the words of seven authors who’ve had the courage to explore the furthest reaches of reality.
Slip between the layers of space and time to discover what lives in the pockets. Find love in the most unexpected of ways and watch it thrive across the tapestry of history. March with the soldiers of a forgotten kingdom as they travel on foot and question the value of life and the hereafter. Then meet the gods and journey with them to correct the timeline of the mortal realm.
In this collection, you’ll get stuck in a time loop you won’t want to leave, experience the revival of an impossible connection between man and machine, and meet the aliens who will make portal-hopping possible in the near future.
So pack your bags for an epic journey and enjoy the trip… From Here to There
Included in the Anthology:
“Embedding” by Elana Gomel
There was nothing above me except
the weight of worlds. Tears frozen beneath my eye, body broken,
indistinguishable from the wreckage where I lay. Jupiter’s heavy presence
threaded through the maelstrom raging in the sky above but the planet itself
was unseen. Beyond the atmosphere lay Saturn and Mars and Earth, along with the
billions who called them home.
A mirrored helmet came into view,
the protective gear of a rescue marine. I saw my own face, a sleek metal oval
stencilled with serial numbers and pockmarked with debris, a lone eye sitting
dead centre. Flanked by cracked sensors that used to tell me everything and now
nothing. I had no voice to complain because the speakers from the bottom half
of my skull sat ten metres away.
Unseen and unheard, the sky was
crowded with electromagnetic oceans, gravitational waves, and subatomic grains
yet to be catalogued by humans. Earth had been studying Jupiter’s moons for
over a century, yet I was the first to make contact with the largest one,
Ganymede. On a mission to explore its surface, the unusually dense magnetic
storms between the massive planet and tiny moon were hard to predict. The
brutal forces drowned out my thruster exhausts like breaths in a tornado and
tore off parts of my body like so much flotsam. Out of control and spiralling
towards the frozen landscape, the last thing I remembered was the great plumes
of ice and rock thrown into space as my titanium exoskeleton careened into the
icy surface.
I do not know how long I was offline.
While one marine rebooted my power systems, the other surveyed the crash site.
They reconnected my neural core and spoke to each other of a larger rescue
vessel on its way to tow me home. Climbing atop the broad surface of my chest,
they communicated their surprise to one another, wondering if the faint
activity in my brain was something new or simply old commands stuck in a dying
loop.
No such luck, I knew. My speakers
were damaged, but if I could talk I would tell the marines that she was on her
way.
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