Darkness | Sci-fi Short Audiobook

Before we get into the story, please  remember to take a moment to like, subscribe, share with someone you think would  enjoy it, and leave a comment if you appreciate the work. Your feedback is important. You can  also find links in the description to my website, bookstore, and other great stuff. With  all that said, I hope you enjoy the story. Darkness: Archives of the First Son.  Lives of the Ages, “Darkness: Luongo Halper on Contact.” First Ordinal Epoch. by P.E. Rowe It took nearly two mont

hs for Luongo Halper  to even get to the mission site. To do the reconnaissance work the underground required,  they needed a human pilot. That meant Luongo had to sneak away from Murell, spend two days  in a cargo container getting to New Concordia, and make a trek through the hills for three days  just to get to the shuttle that would take him to his ship. Slipping away from the ordinals  unnoticed was an all-but-impossible task. During the long, empty weeks on the outskirts of  mapped space,

Luongo often wondered whether the monumental lengths he went to was worth it: was he  making any difference at all—to the underground, to humanity? Luongo Halper had a lot of time  to think about things like that. It required a tremendous force of will to stay anchored to the  mission, to a purpose. For him, it always came back to defiance. Somebody had to push back. “Some outlaw,” he often muttered to himself while surveying these empty systems. He was also  debating whether this time, if the u

nderground was amenable, he just wouldn’t go back to  Murell. He was in discourse with himself about that very topic on the morning humanity  confirmed the existence of alien intelligence. “Nobody would miss me,” he said to his  little companion, “Would they, buddy?” Luongo’s co-pilot was a small black mutt,  a five-year-old dog named Matches that the pilot credited with keeping him sane over the long  periods of intense isolation in space. Luongo had never been exposed to dogs before he met Mat

ches  in the underground camp on his first flight. When they paired the two, he’d never expected to grow  so fond of the creature. Within hours, though, he found himself talking to him, playing  with him, and stroking his fur. It was unlike Luongo to grow attached to anything,  and suddenly he couldn’t imagine boarding a recon flight without his four-legged partner. This flight was number seven, all of which had revealed empty, lifeless systems with no sign  of activity or visitation from the or

dinals. The underground didn’t disseminate the details or  discuss the grand purpose of these missions with their pilots. They issued sets of protocols,  and it seemed to Luongo that the underground was trying to discover what the ordinals were  doing outside the boundaries of established territory. It never occurred to him or anyone  else in the underground that there might be anything out here other than humans or ordinals.  The only other thought Luongo had considered as a possibility was sco

uting for a secret outpost  where the underground could live and grow openly, away from the ordinals’ control. Alien  intelligence was unthinkable then. The consensus at that time was that mathematically,  with all the time humans had been in the stars, they’d have found any existing space-faring  civilization thousands of years prior. Still, the stealth approach to each system seemed  sensible to Luongo Halper. If the ordinals were there or had been there, satellites,  sensor arrays, or even se

ttlements would detect an openly approaching ship,  even a small vessel like Luongo’s. Per protocol, the jump ended at  the edge of interstellar space, and their ship began its long, dark drift toward  the star within the cone of shadow cast by the penumbra of the system’s largest gas giant. Even with the light-scattering properties of the stealth-scout’s nanotech outer skin,  navigating within the shadows cast by the system’s planetary bodies, their ship wouldn’t ever be  truly invisible. From

the right perspective, viewed at the right time, an observer would  witness a disturbance in the light from the stellar backdrop—an anomaly. And observers as keen  as the ordinals tended to investigate anomalies thoroughly. Luongo’s best hope if that anomaly was  observed by ordinal tech would be to be mistaken for a stray asteroid or other natural object  passing through space. Until this day, though, that level of caution in the protocols seemed  over-drawn. Luongo got his first indication of

an anomaly of his own as he and Matches  drifted into the heart of the outer system. The alarm sounded, startling Matches, who was  floating comfortably in the pilot’s cabin. He began to bark each time the speaker whistled  its warning tone. Luongo couldn’t blame the little guy, the alarm had never gone off before. “Calm down, bud.” Luongo said, pulling himself toward the captain’s seat. He shut off the  warning tone and pulled up the alert. The trigger for the alarm was a light in the  inner sy

stem, an unexpected reflection, possibly a metallic asteroid, a passing comet,  or an unexpected refraction of undefined origin. He trained a scope on it. “Whoa,” he said as the screen displayed the object. A blurry holographic icon of a ship streaked across their cabin, floating  over the control panel in a clean ordered line. Matches growled at it and then barked.  Luongo grabbed his little friend by the harness and brought him down to the  co-pilot’s seat, clipping him in. “There,” he said to

the dog, “Get your feet under  you, boy. Bark with your legs, not your back.” Matches howled at the little  red triangle floating above him. “Zoom closer,” Luongo instructed the telescope. Both ships were moving fast enough that the scope was having a difficult time  keeping the focus at such a distance. “What are you?” At that point, the moving object was a collection of blurry images being  tracked by the recon ship’s optical telescope, and when Luongo directed the processor to  aggregate the

data to create a clear image, he was fully expecting to see the familiar outline  of an ordinal tracer. Instead, the dull metallic hull took the shape of a jagged, gaping maw with  spiked teeth and ornate, detailed ornamentation. It was certainly nothing an ordinal would build. Matches growled at the menacing-looking hologram. “What do you think, bud? Friend or foe?” Matches barked. “I concur. Looks like those shipbuilders  script nightmares in their spare time.” Luongo allowed the computer to

compile data on the  object. It wasn’t drifting, instead accelerating and decelerating as it approached the gas  giant’s orbit. It entered orbit on a sharp turn. The dog whined and looked up at Luongo. “True  enough,” he said. “I don’t suppose they would guess what we looked like from looking at our  hull either. You think they could be dogs?” Matches whimpered and lowered  his head toward the seat. “Yeah, me neither.” As the alien ship entered the shadowy penumbra behind the planet, the  scope

started following it on infrared. The switch in optics revealed two other non-natural  structures, one seemingly hovering at the edge of the upper atmosphere and another in synchronous  orbit nearby. The two objects appeared to be a sturdy ship and a space station hovering high  above, a gas lifting operation by the looks of it. “What are we using those gasses for, fellas?” The question was in no need of an answer. The fact that there was gas lifting occurring at all  signaled that these were no

t visitors. Somewhere nearby, there’d be a civilization of some sort.  Luongo shifted the focus of their surveillance to scan for other ships or space-borne structures,  and they began to search the EM spectrum for ordered signals. Initially, they couldn’t pick up  anything confirming the presence of a settlement. Modeling indicated the presence of at least  two inner, rocky planets currently obscured by the mid-system gas giant where the  alien gas mining ships were working. The protocol follow

ing contact was clear at  that point, Luongo was directed to remain hidden at all cost, retreat at the earliest  opportunity, and return with whatever data he’d collected immediately. He began calculating  routes through the system. The navigational processor spat out only three possibilities. Two  were sensible options, the first of which met with standing protocols. It would keep them mostly  within the shadows and bring them back out to interstellar space before even approaching  the gas gian

t—observation from a distance. “That’s what Hobbs would want us to do,  isn’t it?” he asked Matches. “Report their presence and let management do the rest.” The second course was slightly more aggressive, only it tracked along the outer orbit of  an asteroid belt between the gas giant and the inner rocky worlds. It was higher  risk certainly, but Luongo found its risk instantly unappealing, as it still didn’t  approach the inner two planets at a close enough distance to get a decent look at them

. The third option, Luongo knew, would be frowned upon by his underground supervisors. It wasn’t  just the extended exposure in direct sunlight, it was the places in the route that exposure  occurred. There was a turn through the moons of the gas giant as the ship borrowed from  the giant gravity well to pull them toward the inner planets. Then, there was a long stretch  between the asteroid belt and the inner planets. There were evasive tactics Luongo could take  to disrupt the regularity of th

eir progression, but ultimately, those measures were limited.  The third option relied on luck and the hope that whoever these beings were, they weren’t  hyper-vigilant about stealth observers. “What do you think, Matches,” Luongo said  to his companion, “we could go home early with a collection of blurry pictures and  an incredible story, or we could stay late, tell a better story, and take some pretty, pretty  pictures, maybe figure out who’s out there?” The dog looked up at him as he talked, 

turning his head sideways when Luongo stopped. “Yeah, when you put it that way, it almost  seems like a good idea right?” Luongo said. “How do you feel about being vaporized  by a planet-sized laser? I bet these guys got some toys like that, Matches.” If Luongo wanted to take the outer course, the safest course, he had to make the decision  in short order. The longer he deliberated, the more he drifted certainly toward  the danger of exposure to these beings. The decision wasn’t so much a choic

e  as a pathway carved before him. Mostly, at least as Luongo saw it, most decisions didn’t  get deliberated on rationally. They just happened, and the rationalizing was about  figuring out the reasons why. Luongo listed every reason he could think to take  the easy way out. It was protocol; it was safer; it stood the best chance of preserving secrecy;  it was a far shorter travel time; he had no information on the inner system. Then Luongo set  about knocking down each of these perfectly cogent

points. Most of them lacked a viable counterpoint. The reasons to go in weren’t remotely convincing. He was already here. That was both true and  unconvincing. “We may never get another chance to catch them like this, bud,” he said to  Matches, who looked up expectantly. “We’ll never know whether they spot us on the first pass.  Could be they put up a tighter network to look for little spies like you.” Matches whined. “Of course we’re going in, pal. I’m not  going home without high definition i

mages of aliens in their underwear.” Matches barked, as he often did when Luongo spoke directly to him. “That’s true,” Luongo said. “They may not have underwear either. I don’t judge you, bud.” Their first turn, at the purple gas giant, was far ahead. Luongo split his time along the way  in interpreting incoming data and justifying the high-risk course. He wasn’t so much justifying  it in a way that prepared him to explain it to his superiors. Luongo was more attempting to come  to terms with hi

s own motivations. Often this came in the form of debates with Matches, who despite  being nonverbal, played the part of a surprisingly effective foil. Sometimes he whined, grumbled, or  barked. Mostly, though, he just looked confused. In truth, Luongo was the confused one. By day  two, he’d drifted all the way to the point where he was questioning what had made him fit to be  the discoverer of aliens, of all the trillions of humans who’d come before him. Luongo Halper  of Murell, discoverer of

aliens. Matches didn’t seem to think any more or less of him for it,  which was precisely what he loved about Matches. Ultimately, Luongo settled on the perspective  that aliens were destined to be discovered by an explorer-type, not a rule follower, and his  becoming the one was merely the luck of time, place, and membership in  that small class of outlaws. “Some outlaws we are,” he said to Matches. “Yeah,  you too, bud. Nobody will forget you were here.” As they approached the gas giant, the a

lien  ships continued to traverse the planet to the space station. He didn’t have visual evidence  of it, but Luongo gathered they were loading the gaslifted materials in the ships to take to  the inner planets. Without a clearer picture of the inner planets or knowledge of the aliens’  technological capacity, even their best guess would just be a guess about what elements they  were mining from the gas giant’s atmosphere. “That’s why it’s important to get a look at them,”  Luongo said. “Sniff ‘

em? No, sorry, bud. We won’t get that close. That’s the plan anyway.” Luongo had thrusters to fire if he was going to hit the window the navigational computer had  laid out for the third course. He hoped to make that course adjustment while the alien ships were  obscured by the gas giant, but as they got closer, the appearance of the ships grew more frequent.  Luongo was starting to get more comprehensive data on their movements. They were faster and far more  maneuverable than any ship he’d see

n at sub-light speeds. They couldn’t have been using chemical  or nuclear rocketry. Ion propulsion was out. “How are they doing that?” Luongo asked himself. After watching several of these vessels buzz in and out of the space station, Luongo  began to awaken to the possibility that these beings could be significantly  more advanced than even the ordinals. Two alien vessels were docked at the space  station at the start of Luongo’s window for course adjustment. He would have to fire  thrusters, a

nd as the window began to tick down, Luongo timed how long it took for the alien  ships to disappear behind the planet. As long as another ship didn’t arrive, Luongo thought  he might be able to fire the thrusters without eyes on him—if these creatures even had eyes. As the final alien vessel disappeared around the planet, Luongo fired the ship’s thrusters. He  kept both the optical scope and his eyes trained on the edge of the penumbra. He’d witnessed  the arrival of several alien ships by then

, visible as bright but tiny glints along the  planet’s curve. Sure enough, halfway into their maneuver, another alien vessel appeared. At first, Luongo wasn’t nervous. The thrusters emitted no visible light of their own, but  the particles emitted from the thrusters would reflect light if they were seen from the right  angle. In the planet’s shade, the ambient light was negligible, but negligible was not none.  He had a course window to hit all the same. The alien vessel continued on its normal

  course. Luongo kept the thrusters on. “Just another minute, bud,” he said to  Matches. “Looks like they don’t see us.” As soon as he said the words, the alien vessel  slowed and then stopped. Luongo knew it was his imagination, but he had this image in his head  of a hunter stepping on a stick in the darkness of the forest, only he didn’t know whether  he felt more like the hunter or the prey. The navigational computer chirped to signal  the end of the maneuver. Matches barked. Luongo killed t

he thrusters. As he did,  the alien ship began to move toward them. “Incoming, incoming,” Luongo stated. He fired the pneumatic thrusters. He knew that if the aliens had laser spectroscopy  trained on the area they’d read the gasses along their course, but he figured better that than  having them bounce a laser off their hull. It was all a guessing game, on both sides. What had  they seen? Could they calculate a bearing from it? At that point, Luongo Halper was committed. Matches picked up on Lu

ongo’s nervous energy as the alien vessel approached. Luongo trained  their telescope on the aliens. Their own ship shouldn’t have been visible. Their  hull was designed to be nearly-impossible to detect—both on the visible spectrum and on  infrared. They were built for stealth. But the way these alien ships moved made Luongo nervous. There was nothing to do but wait and hope. Luongo unclipped Matches and pulled him into his lap. “It’ll be fine, bud,” he said. “They can’t see us.” The alien ship

continued to approach. By that point, Luongo’s ship was making  a shallow turn toward the inner system, pulled inward by the gravity well of the great  gas giant. In his mind, Luongo was puzzling out how he could be discovered. At their speed, the  gas cloud they’d released would leave a trail, a trail that could give away a bearing if the  aliens picked it up before it dissipated too much. “No way,” he said, petting Matches  to reassure them both. “We’re good, bud. They’re not going to see us.

” The dog whined. Luongo looked down at him. “Fifty-fifty?” As the alien ship narrowed the gap to within a few hundred thousand kilometers,  Luongo could tell now the aliens were cruising toward his wake. Luongo kept the telescope  trained on the ship, hoping that the further away he and Matches drifted, the less likely  the aliens would be to calculate their bearing. “Better than fifty-fifty,” Luongo  reassured his little friend. Luongo projected the images of the infrared on  the viewscreen ab

ove the dash. The ship flew past their wake by a few thousand kilometers  before circling back. The aliens missed their ship’s course again, this time by another several  thousand kilometers. It was clear to Luongo that they’d seen something. He guessed they had passed  between a star and the alien vessel and clipped out the light for a nanosecond, tripping a  proximity alarm of some kind. Before long, the alien vessel resumed its course to  the space station and Luongo relaxed, setting Matches

down beside him, clipping the  dog’s harness into the co-pilot’s chair again. Only then did he realize what  he’d missed while fixating on the alien vessel in their wake. Luongo gasped. The inner system was a busy place. Luongo could see five bright lights with his naked eye—that,  in addition to the multitudes of light-projected objects being enhanced on the viewscreen, likely  asteroids. The ship’s alarm started singing. Matches barked. The navigation board lit up with moving objects in every

direction,  almost like a flight control panel on Murell. “Oh, you really stepped in this one, Halper,”  Luongo said to himself, observing so many contacts they hardly seemed distinguishable. “Space is  big,” he reminded himself, “the screen is not.” That period of long exposure  entering the asteroid belt, though, he told Matches, would be a tense stretch. “I don’t mind being wrong,” he said. “But, man, I hate being this wrong.” There was nothing left to do but start picking through the data on

all the  contacts and the inner bodies. Surprisingly, the inner planets were littered with moons and  other smaller satellites, which made it difficult to identify the primary alien settlement.  The beings seemed to be mining everywhere, so even selecting the area to train the scope on  was a challenge. There was a high traffic zone around the second planet, and there seemed to be a  travel corridor between that planet and a specific point in the asteroid belt along their bearing. Suddenly, the

nav computer began to alarm with greater urgency. It alerted to a collision on  their current course at an unspecified point. Luongo found it odd that the computer could  tell him he was going to hit something but couldn’t say when, where, or what exactly  the object was. Matches continued to let loose his objections to the whole situation. “Easy, bud,” Luongo kept telling Matches, reaching over to scratch his neck. “I’m not going  to crash. If we do that, they’ll never know what happened to us

back home. Or about the aliens.” The nav computer spit out two bad options for course correction. The first had him firing  thrusters in the heart of that long exposure window, for the entire inner system to see.  The second put them nearly nose-to-nose with the second planet, so close they’d come  between the inner moons and the planet itself. “I might have lied about not getting close  enough to sniff them, Matches,” Luongo said. He accounted the closer shave with the second  planet the safer

option. The thruster firing was a shorter duration, relying on gravity  assist from two of the planet’s moons and several asteroids, and the approach was  mostly within the second planet’s penumbra. “If we get out of this, we’re going to have  some pictures to show, boy,” he said to Matches. Luongo fired the thrusters and crossed his  fingers. About a half hour into the maneuver, the nav computer started howling. Matches  followed suit. Five dots on the nav readout had changed course and were h

eading in their  direction. They still had another three minutes left in the maneuver. Luongo switched off the  alarms and waited for the dog to stop barking. “Hope it’s your lucky day, Matches.” The  bemused dog looked up at him. “What? It’s not my fault. Don’t look at me like that.” The closing ships were still millions of kilometers away when Luongo terminated  their course adjustment. He just hoped they were still far enough out that the  aliens couldn’t calculate his heading. The nav comput

er started howling again, warning  of an impending collision. Again, it couldn’t identify any specific object. Only this time,  it had no suggestion for a course correction. Whatever it was, they were going to hit it  before passed the second planet’s gravity well. Luongo and Matches were deep in the shadow of  the second planet by the time they passed the incoming alien ships. He was optimistic that they  might skate past unobserved until he realized he hadn’t factored in the most conspicuous s

ign  of their presence yet. They were relying on a gravity assist from one of the larger asteroids  to pull them on course to the second planet. The earlier slingshots had used the gas giant and her  moons, and their pull against those massive bodies had been negligible, a rounding error. This time,  though, they were going to move that rock. If the aliens caught it and had the coordinates from  Luongo’s last maneuver, the aliens would have a vector, one that put them right on course for  the se

cond planet. And the time between the two incidents would give away their speed. Suddenly,  Luongo grew very nervous. Matches could tell. The collision alarm kept going off. Luongo  silenced it. He unclipped Matches and pulled his little friend into his lap. “We may have to light it up on their doorstep, bud. “I know it’s very aggressive. So is spying. “I didn’t mean to spy. I mean, yeah,  of course we did, but we didn’t expect to run into aliens. Did we, pal?” The turn around the asteroid was c

oming up. They were going to feel it. Two-plus Gs. Luongo held onto Matches tight. He checked on the alien ships. They were dead on his course. “Fingers crossed we don’t wiggle that rock too much,” Luongo said. He crossed Matches  paws. “Why not? Couldn’t hurt, right?” Matches grumbled as Luongo started to feel a pull  in his gut. They got sucked down into the seat, and for several seconds the intensity of the  pull increased, then rapidly released them back to weightlessness. Luongo let go of M

atches,  who floated in front of him for a moment. Then he set the dog back on the co-pilot’s chair.  Luongo kept the optical scope trained behind them for several minutes, looking for any sign  the aliens had witnessed the asteroid’s sudden, abnormal shift. The aliens didn’t change  course. Somehow, they’d missed it. No sooner had Luongo exhaled than  the collision alarm sounded through the silent setting. It warned of immanent  impact, yet there was still nothing visible. Only when they approa

ched the second planet could  the computer nail down the object in their path. To his relief, it appeared to be a group of  devices Luongo guessed to be networked drones. Small, kilometers apart, yet spread out over  a vast area of space encircling the planet. As their ship got closer to the edge of the net, the  nav computer projected them to pass between two of the drones, the closer of which would fly past  their hull less than fifty meters beneath them. “See us?” Luongo said to Matches.  “Ju

st our shadow if we block a signal between those suckers. We’ll see.” Luongo started to take readouts of the planet. It was what they’d come to do, and  at that point, he couldn’t control whether they were spotted. He trained the scope on the  planet’s surface and instructed the system to keep the main array pointed at the planet for  the duration of their pass. There were numerous alien ships running between the moons and the  planet. The traffic was busier here than Murell. The first images th

at came back were stunning. The  world had a shallow, thin atmosphere—so thin that many of the rocky peaks protruded out into space  high above the misty clouds that huddled at the base of those mighty mountains. In the valleys  of those high mountain ranges, great metallic structures rose all the way to space, thousands of  meters above the atmosphere. As the first valleys stretched into the plains, Luongo could see only  structure after structure. The planet looked like the stories he’d heard

of the great ecumenopolises  of the past—cities that covered over entire planets. Only in this case, as far as he could  tell, these aliens had ignored the mountains. Then, as they passed farther and the planet turned  to reveal more of itself, the land opened up, almost as though there were a line on the map  beyond which the aliens simply hadn’t built. Luongo thought about it. “It’s not their home world,” he said aloud as he realized it. “These guys are visitors.”  It made more sense. He just

wasn’t expecting it. “Colonists in the neighborhood.” Luongo wasn’t talking to Matches as much as himself. That news changed everything. They kept taking pictures, of the planet, the moons, the mining operations in the  asteroids—as much as they could see them. They’d made it through without being overtly  discovered. None of the ships tracked them as they drifted out into the asteroid  belt. Luongo didn’t talk much. He was too deep in thought to even hold a one-sided  conversation with his litt

le companion. Their mission presented one final surprise as  they approached one of the outer gas giants on the far side of the sun. Luongo picked  up a reflection approaching the system slightly less than a quarter light-year  away—a tiny pinpoint of light. He kept the optical scope trained on it for several  hours, and when the images were aggregated, it was clearly a ship, and between the shape of  it and the destination, Luongo surmised these colonists didn’t have FTL capability. They  were

making a slow crawl across the galaxy, spreading out star by star. He kept the scope  on them to see if he could get a good estimate of the ship’s speed, which came back  between point-two and point-three C. It was simultaneously a relief and a problem.  Luongo did some rough calculations in his head. The good news was that they had  a few centuries to prepare for alien arrival. The bad news was that he couldn’t  jump in plain sight of that incoming ship. He looked down at Matches. “Yeah, that w

ould be a boss move, buddy. You want to drive? Oh, you’re just going  to punch in the numbers. That’s so generous of you to allow me all the glory. You’re a good  friend, Matches,” he said, petting the dog. Luongo made a final course adjustment  that brought them around the gas giant, directly between the star and the alien ship’s  line of sight to it. He calculated their FTL jump to coincide with the moment he came between  the ship and the star, covering the light of the jump in the light of t

he star. At the interstellar  ship’s distance, Luongo hoped their jump could be mistaken for a sizeable coronal ejection. They  probably wouldn’t be staring at the sun anyway. There was no reaction from the inner system to  their final course adjustment. Again, Luongo grew quiet as the jump approached. Their trip had  been so hectic he hadn’t properly reflected on the magnitude of their discovery. It was possible  the ordinals knew about these creatures, he knew. Otherwise, how had the undergrou

nd known to send  him out here looking. But now they did know. And now they knew humans weren’t alone. There was  more in this galaxy than human intelligence and the intelligent beings they’d spawned. “I do want to talk to them,” he said to Matches. “I do. It’ll probably never  happen in our lifetimes, I know.” Luongo sat in silence looking out at  the tiny pinpoint of light he convinced himself he could see, a ship, right  at the edge of visibility—somewhere in all that blackness was life. He l

ooked down at Matches as the moment approached, finishing off the checklist. “Some outlaws, Matches,” he said, engaging the jump drive. “You and me both.” The light from the jump, fully obscured from the observation of the alien colonists on the  second planet by the body of the star Sei-Gin, appeared only as a ripple in steady starlight,  unobserved, and to all but a few human outlaws, the consequence of that covert flyby remained  totally unknown for thousands of years—both to the obscure star

’s colonizers and to the humans  of that era, who lived totally in the shadow of knowledge cast by their ordinal descendants. In the later centuries of the First Ordinal Epoch, Luongo Halper and his dog Matches, hidden in the  darkness of the Sei-Gin system’s many shadows, were the first creatures of Earth to set  eyes on true extra-human intelligence. Entry from the Archives of the First  Son: Lives of the Ages. “Darkness.” This has been an original story written and  read by PE Rowe. Thank you

for listening. I hope you enjoyed the story. If you did like what you  heard, please show your appreciation by liking, subscribing, and leaving a comment. I also have  a growing collection of other sci-fi stories like this one freely available on this channel  and on my website RoweLit.com. In addition, I've put together collections of  my stories in paperback, e-book, and audiobook, if you're interested in getting  portable ad-free access to my sci-fi shorts, and it's a great way to help suppo

rt the creation of  more stories like today's. The first collection: The Prospectors, is available in all three  formats, and the second collection: Failsafe, is just out this week in e-book and paperback.  Both are available through the links in the description. This year, I'll be uploading  a new Sci-Fi short every Thursday morning, so please check back here if you enjoyed listening  to today's story. If you just can't wait or you prefer to read for yourself, I'll be publishing  the text versi

on Wednesdays on my Substack, which is linked in the description as well. I'd  like to thank Isaac Arthur and his team at SFIA for generating so many great themes like today's  topic. I hope to catch you back here next week for another new story. Thanks for listening. This  has been PE Rowe, and I'll see you next time.