The Writers Take: Short Story... STARDUST

A trip to the stars not by chance, but by necessity.

Hello world! No commentary this edition, no thoughts on other creative expressions, just a fun, raw, sci-fi short for you to all enjoy, written by me. Enjoy STARDUST.

It happened. We lost. The world ended. It doesn’t matter who dropped the first bomb. Because everyone dropped the last. Within five hours of the first marine nuclear warhead hitting the submarine, every nation, with a nuke, both known and unknown, dropped enough to light the whole world on fire. 

But this isn’t the story of the end. This is the story about beginnings. 

Because five hours is a whole lot of time if the fate of a species is at stake. Well, it's a whole lot more than five hours. Project Avandra, named after the Greek goddess of travel and adventure, was a 20 year-in-the-making secret project funded by god knows who, and for god knows what reason. Well, actually, I do know what reason. They believed that the world's economic systems had grown out of control, and that capitalism was no longer a tool of prosperity but a tool of destruction. War is good for business and business was booming in the late 2100s. 

It was not IF but WHEN we would go too far. War was just too damn lucrative, and someday, somewhere, we’d punch too hard, and that would be that. So Project Avandra was born, to save 66 humans, the crew of this starship, with a Fusion Drive fueled with the potential of humanity residing amongst the stars. Appropriately named Pegasus One, the steed of the cosmic oceans. 

In secret it began construction, not only of the physical beast, but of the crew. Who would be part of the crew, who would even know about the ship, and how would you even decide who to choose? Impossible decisions had to be made, ripping families apart, telling people the bleak truth of the world, and committing their lives to something that may not ever happen. And asking them to forfeit their friends, hobbies, activities, to live on this remote island until the day came… or didn't. 

But this isn't the story of the crew's assembly. This is a story about History. 

Because it did happen, and the day did come, and we acted. We launched at two and a half hours after the first nuclear warhead went off. And we orbited earth for a painstaking two hundred and sixty seven minutes, or four hours and just about thirty minutes, or simpler yet, three orbits. We watched, as the earth burned, as our loved ones perished in a blaze of fire, and as the human race, erased its history from the planet that gave it life.  And then, we were it, the last 66 humans to live, to breath, to see, to feel. We were grains of sand washing away as the tides of time gave way to the oceans of tomorrow. 

Tomorrow was today, we were now a cosmic species, a science fiction truth. What’s that saying, All science started as fiction?... Well, now this fictional idea was reality, so where to go? What to do? Were we down shits creek without a paddle? No, we were not. We had plans, and a fusion drive. We were explorers, we were mothers, we were the best of a species whose morality had long since waned. We were prepared to repopulate a species that would be human by DNA, but foreign to what we saw destroy itself. 

But this isn’t a story about voyage. This is a story about Stardust.

Because all things, living and not, are made of stardust. So we had hope. We had hope for a future with other stardust things, with other planets that could sustain us, that could care for us, that could endure us. And we? What did we see? We saw a second chance, to do things for our species, not for ourselves, to do things that would endure, not rust away through time. We saw a chance to be our potential, our full potential. 

So we searched. For years, for the perfect home, a habitable planet that had the ingredients for life. A place we could use as a home base, a place we could start anew from, and a place we knew could be called home. But not a place we would stay forever, like our species before the end, our formative years were defined by where we went, and what we did, not how we stayed home. So we knew, if our species were to endure, were to thrive in the cosmos, that we would need to create a society whose morals adhered to this concept of exploration. Of purpose. Of adventure. 

This IS a story about finding new worlds. This IS a story about our purpose.

Because now, 10,000 years after we found our new home, after we made our settlement, and after we created anew. We have a civilization of five million humans, but we aren’t like our ancestors, we aren’t selfish, and absorbed with a need for power, we are curious, wondrous, excitable. We are alien to our past, and our future. Every man and woman share a common goal when they turn 25 years old. They get a starship, and they go out and explore the cosmos until they come home with the coordinates of another habitable world. Another place we can live, explore, and thrive.

We are explorers, healers, planet seekers. This is the story of your adventure.

Now, class of 10.137 Are you ready to go into the great unknown and find our next worlds to cherish and discover? To pioneer a new frontier for our people.

A classroom overflowing with more than a hundred wide eyed candidates filled with pride and honor as they listened to Admiral Dullas, the last of the blood lines from the original earth voyage. Looks of amazement and wonder streaked across everyone's faces as they screamed: 

YES MA’AM. 

Saluting the candidates Admiral Dullas moved from the hanger floor back to a control room to watch the joyous event. All 137 candidates got into their starships, checked systems, and in unison prepared for a launch that would see the largest class to date go out into the stars to find worlds to discover, and not only planets to explore, but explore the very meaning of what it meant to be human.

GUNGNIR, ICONIC ARTS and other musings…

I wanted to take a moment during our intermission here to shamelessly and directly promote my two companies. Gungnir Entertainment, (www.Gungnirbooks.com) a genre-focused publishing company with best-selling titles from yours truly hitting shelves nationwide this Fall.  With books focused on classic sci-fi ideas like “What does it mean to be human” and “is the bible right?” “Adventures throughout the stars” are just a few of the prompts for the books you can dive into with Gungnir. Gungnir’s website will launch this summer, and you can stay up to date on the forthcoming titles on my Instagram, @matthewmedney, or at my author page on Simon & Schuster. 

And then there is Herø Projects. The Perennial leader in custom comics and animated services, Herø is a state-of-the-art creative studio that has worked with talents such as Bobby Wagner and the NFL, Floyd Mayweather, Shaggy, Nghtmre, and brands such as Remi Martin, Live Nation, and Rolling Loud. If Branding through storytelling isn’t your thing you can check out our original titles, the Onyx line with books such as Stable, Remnant, and Best Selling Comic The Red.  To learn more about Herø Projects visit us at heroprojects.io.

Iconic Arts is a next gen IP and franchise studio leveraging the best story-tellers and technologists to reinvent how stories are told. www.IconicArts.com