A sketch for a space opera
Long, long ago, there was war in the heart of the galaxy. The core stars were ripped apart by the fury of that conflict. Lucky is a survivor from it; she is lucky to even exist. Her people, the flowing people, were destroyed by the measuring people.
War separates the victors from the losers. The victors survive and the losers are crushed from existence and from memory. To go home would have been death, so Lucky fled. She programmed her ship, the Expedient, to take her away from the galactic core, away from the planets where her people once lived and into the skeins of stars that make up the spiral arms of the galaxy. That was a long time ago. Few of the places she once knew can now support life. She has been a refugee since, drifting from star to star, in a half-life of suspended animation, known as slowtime.
The Expedient charts a careful course, ploughing its lonely furrow between the stars, always away from what she once knew, ever alert for signs of the measuring people. She’d stop running but it’s now all she knows. Eventually her ship comes upon a back-water of the Milky Way, known locally as the Orion Arm. That’s where Earth is. Could it be a good place to hole up?
I began this project back in 2013 - a point of time I felt confident enough to tackle the subject. It's a mix of alienation - feeling all alone in a world that neither knows nor cares, and paranoia - knowing if you are identified, that's the end of you. I grew up in a sink estate in the North of England and... well... I make a connection on the latter too –my mother was a refugee.
An extract
...Life in a Northern Town
Drip.
The sound echoed through the kitchen. The paint peeled from the walls. The living room held a table and chair. Lucky coughed, a wet chesty sound.
Upstairs were two rooms; cold, draughty and bare. A home; a mid-terraced council house, sharing its side walls with adjacent houses. Outside, a narrow strip of soil, eighteen inches deep, adorned the front, squeezed under the bay window, against a dilapidated wall. Only, this wasn’t home; but she needed a residence, with household utility bills, bank statements, references, a CV; all for proof of identity. All fakeable. How true did she make it? Where did she start?
July 2016 I picked this work back up and it currently stands at 30k words.
