On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 179, of 240 so far.

Suitable Pastimes

“Mr. Ross, it’s a great pleasure to finally meet you. You must excuse my tardiness in coming to greet you personally, but my duties must take priority.”

The captain was an unassuming-looking man, but to Ross’s eyes, he had the same vague air of artificiality shared by everyone else aboard.

It’s the perfection, he thought. No blemishes or bad hair or asymmetry.

Ross extended his hand and the captain looked at it for a moment in confusion, and then seemed to remember something. He shook Ross’s hand a little awkwardly, like it was something he hadn’t done before, but his smile was warm and genuine.

“I’m grateful to you, sir,” Ross said. “More than I can ever say. Much less repay.”

The captain nodded, conveying the impression that this was something he heard often. His uniform was sleek and efficient, and Ross already knew that it was somehow inlaid with technologies for communication, health monitoring, and a host of other things. It was like an upmarket leisure suit in some ways, but made of a material he had never seen before he arrived.

“It was our duty and our privilege to help,” the captain said, “though I’m afraid we’re still no further forward in determining how exactly you ended up here.”

The here in question was a thing that seemed impossible to Ross, and yet it was an undeniable fact. The starship was vast beyond all reason, immaculate and even plush in every detail, and possessing capabilities that strained his credulity. At that very moment they were travelling at hundreds of times the speed of light, by distorting the very fabric of space around the enormous vessel. And the gravity within was entirely normal to him. All of it was a fantasy in the distant year in the 2020s where he had been living out his unremarkable life until the events of a few days earlier.

One moment he’d been at home, and the next he was outside somewhere unfamiliar, gasping for breath. There was a strange light, and then darkness, and he had awoken in a medical bay more than two hundred years in the future, and far from not just his home, but his own solar system.

It had been sheer luck that a vessel had been close by, and had detected his life signs. He would have asphyxiated in minutes on the alien moon, its thin atmosphere barely capable of keeping him conscious. The means by which an ordinary man from the early twenty-first century had been torn from his world and his time period was a mystery to everyone.

“Your crew have all been very hospitable, especially in these strange circumstances,” Ross said, and the captain nodded once more.

“I trust you’re feeling well, and adapting to your surroundings?” he asked, looking at Ross sympathetically. “The doctor tells me you’ve been given a clean bill of health.”

It was a stratospheric understatement. The ship’s chief medical officer, an intimidatingly intelligent and perceptive — and, of course, pretty — woman, had nonchalantly told Ross that she’d taken care of a few things while he was unconscious, besides regenerating his damaged lung tissue. He ran through the list in his mind, or at least what he could remember of it.

Eyesight restored to optimum. Two heart defects corrected, one major. Genetic predisposition towards hypertension deactivated. Three present cancers cured, one at terminal stage. Future cancers prevented. Small clot forming in the brain dissolved. Dental status fully reset. Assorted immune boosters. Muscle tone corrections and cellular rejuvenation. Hairline restored.

Ross was forty-eight years old. The doctor told him that, after her ministrations, his physical life expectancy was in the range of another seventy-five years. She’d also told him to come and see her about any body modifications he’d like to undertake. Ross didn’t know what she’d meant by that, but he’d thanked her anyway.

“That’s what she said,” Ross replied, the sense of unreality swimming through his mind once again.

“Splendid,” the captain replied. “Then you must take your time to acclimatise, and when you so choose, find something to occupy yourself. We’ll return to Earth in a few months, but until then you’re at liberty to select any interests or pursuits you wish. We have thousands of possibilities for suitable pastimes.”

The ship cleaned itself via some sort of particle sweeps when chambers were vacant, and an advanced type of atmospheric filtering. There was apparently an inexhaustible supply of energy. Myriad opportunities for work, study, and leisure. His quarters were a multi-room palatial suite. Food was available at all times and in all locations, summoned from the air by matter-sequencing technologies. Clothes were provided in the same way. As were any other items either needed or wanted.

The captain was speaking again.

“We all recognise the shock you’ve endured, of course,” the man said. “Emotional health is critically important. You should feel free to speak to any of the psychological health officers, at any time and for any reason. You’ve undergone a huge change.”

He gestured at the nearby window, which showed the blackness of space beset by the eerie, twisting aura of the self-generated wormhole they were travelling through. Ross glanced at it without much interest.

“I don’t find it shocking at all, sir,” Ross said, drawing a raised eyebrow from the other man. “We’ve had stories of space travel for my entire life. Books and television and films and games. Our fiction predicted all of this and more. That’s not what troubles me at all.”

“But something has been troubling you nonetheless,” the captain said, and Ross nodded now.

“You work by choice, and you’re kept in perfect health, and you’re never hungry, or cold. You can have everything you want, and none of you are poor, or sick, or alone.”

The captain’s brow furrowed, as he tried to grasp the point.

Ross sighed. “You said I can find something to occupy myself, but I’ll need to find a dozen things. Or a hundred.”

He looked around the room, in this technological paradise where everything was so easy, and so beautiful, and so settled. Then Ross returned his gaze to the distinguished man standing across from him.

“What will I do, captain, with all the time that I used to spend being afraid?”

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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