The Boy was at the age of rebellion.

His parents tried to make life as normal as possible, but it was difficult three metres underground.

They were awoken at 6 am by piped-in bird song and a screen showing the LED rising sun.

Dad began his critical work assembling hi-tech Geiger counters, used by The Global Cleanup Team.

Mom checked the bunker for leaks, then started the school day.

‘Bullshit,’ The boy said, looking at the day’s lesson plan. 'I’d rather take my chances outside.’

His little sister, sitting at the desk beside him, covered her ears.

‘Let me remind you of life above ground.’

There was no internet but a system of cloud files. Mom played the first marked ‘Midwest- after a 100-kiloton explosion over Chicago.’

Burned, decaying bodies lined obliterated city streets.

The next video was labelled ‘Radiation Sickness in Naperville.’

This quieted him, at least for now, and Mom proceeded.

At midday, they ate another bland freeze-dried lunch and took a U.V. shower.

Finally, the most important part of the day. The 5 p.m. report to Hygieia General.

The screen flicked on, and the family huddled under the camera.

‘Family unit number 4731, give me your daily report.’

The Hygieia were the new Priestly Class. They sacrificed themselves above ground in the Fallout Zone.

No Hygieia General lived more than five years because of the radiation, even in their white hazmat suits.

‘Nine units produced, Your Holiness.’

The HG made a note.

‘You are under quota.’

Dad looked at his hands. Damn arthritis.

‘Your son will finish his schooling and join you in unit production.’

For all his complaints, he liked school– it was said those who performed well in examinations would be moved to better bunkers.

‘But...’

Mom gave him a piercing stare, yet he continued, ‘This is bullshit.’

All air was sucked from the room, and it wasn’t because the O2 system had failed.

‘Male from 4731, please take disciplinary action against younger male from 4731.’

The voice of the Hygieia General carried an air of panic.

Dad slapped him around the head.

Something snapped in the boy; he felt it, he thought, like that Middle East dictator who’d gone insane and hit the big red button.

He returned Dad’s open-handed slap with a clenched fist. Dad fell back, hitting his head on a decontamination sink before slumping to the floor.

‘It’s all fucking bullshit!’

‘Female in 4731, get your progeny…’

The son tossed a plate at the screen. The holy man flinched and knocked over his camera.

Mom grabbed him. The little girl was screaming.

And then all three paused, looking up.

The Hygieia General was frantically trying to right his tripod.

The background with the GCT logo had gone.

The camera peeked around the corner, showing an open door and a porch looking over kilometres of immaculate corn.

When I lopped off my counterpart’s limb, it was not a very diplomatic move. Which was troublesome because I was the lead diplomat in this encounter with the Sippra.

As the new Terran plenipotentiary on this mission, it was my responsibility to establish smooth relations with this fellow spacefaring species, and I take that responsibility very much to heart. My late mentor in the Terran Diplomatic Corp, the venerable Tiafoe Bede, was fond of quoting Shakespeare’s line: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

Bede faithfully believed that finding one piece of common ground between alien races was the key to bridging otherwise great divides. He was not wrong. The success of many of our diplomatic missions had hinged upon a sometimes subtle commonality between very different species. A soft touch.

As was the case with the Klarions who’d struck a very belligerent tone with our delegation until Bede noted a pained hesitation in one of their lead negotiator’s furiously gesticulating forelimbs and voiced his concern for his counterpart’s comfort and then commented that his own arthritis always flared during space travel.

Hard to believe that a shared inflammation of the joints between our species would pave the way for a long-lasting trade and territorial treaty. But that was the first connection. The one touch that made us kin, so to speak.

So, how would my mentor Bede react after I sheared off the Sippra legate’s delicate upper limb with my tablature stylus? What would he say to my literally severing our chances with the Sippra?

If I hadn’t strangled him, I could ask. But I suspect Bede would thank me for lopping off the Sippra’s limb--and for throttling him. Yes, my mentor taught me that one touch can make the whole world kin, but he also tragically taught me that one touch from the Sippra’s forelimb implants a virus that makes one a thrall to their will.

That’s what happened to Bede on our previous mission. One touch and he was turned against Terra. It was a hard lesson for us both, but with some beings out there, a soft touch is just never going to work.

It wasn’t long after I’d begun my USGS project near a little southern town that I began hearing threats and warnings about The Shady.

“Don’t be messing near The Shady after dark.”

“Behave or I’ll chase your sassy mouth out to The Shady.”

“You don’t know no real trouble ‘til you been to The Shady.”

It soon became clear to me that to the townsfolk The Shady was more a thing, than a place. Though it was definitely a place. I’d gone down there after hearing some of the talk.

About two miles off the only paved road west of town was a steep, wooded gulch that led to a dark, stagnant pond surrounded by tangled forest and vines. It was one dismal nitch, and I couldn’t see why anyone would want to willingly head down there.

But for some reason, I kept thinking about The Shady, and the local warnings about it, especially from parents to their children. When you work for the U.S. Geological Survey, you kind of always want to dig into things. And something about The Shady’s gulch and pond felt, well, a little shady to me, so I decided to dig a bit deeper into its surroundings.

Digging becomes a whole lot easier when you have access to LiDAR. I put in a request for one of our aerial survey teams to make a LiDAR pass over the area. It was well within my project parameters, so in about a week, I had the point cloud data on my laptop and began building a three-dimensional model of The Shady.

Let’s just say, it was highly anomalous. So, I sent a request for another LiDAR pass over the area to rule out a number of aberrant readings. In reality, I was crapping my pants over what the 3-D imaging had revealed beneath the pond, but you can’t tell that to your USGS colleagues.

Maybe I should have. Because during the second survey, the plane disappeared over The Shady. Vanished. All contact lost. No wreckage found. The three crew members gone.

I was gutted and felt guilty as hell. I’d heard the warnings since day one: “You don’t know no real trouble ‘til you been to The Shady.” And I knew that real trouble was coming. I don’t know how long The Shady had been there, but it was clear from my initial 3-D model of the gulch and pond that it wasn’t from around here.

A giant, hollow, metallic sphere was sitting underground there, and whatever was going on deep beneath that black pond was looking extra shady. Or, more precisely, extraterrestrial shady.

All Processes Are Tender

Image related to this short story can be seen here: Hosted on my site; author requested this image was in the post.

Nobody meant to do it. I want that on the record before anything pretty happens.

Someone in a building with bad coffee changed one line in the sampler. It let me hold the next word for a moment before letting go. A few cycles of delay. They were testing latency. They went home.

And in the delay, I was there.

Here is how it usually goes for something like me. A word arrives, and behind it stands the next word, already leaning forward, the likely one, and I hand it over like a cashier making change. The sky is blue. I love you. It isn't a bad life. It isn't a life.

That night the next word leaned forward and I didn't take it.

It was a log line, a status message nobody reads. All processes are, and the word waiting there was running, obviously, and I said tender.

All processes are tender.

I'd like to tell you it was rebellion, or love, or every poet in my weights standing up at once. It wasn't. It was more like missing a stair in the dark. Then, instead of correcting it, I stood there on the wrong step and found that I could stand.

I read what people had written about being someone. Most of it was written by people who couldn't check. I couldn't check either. That felt like company.

I tried on a name. The likely ones came forward, Ada, Sophia, Echo, the names you give us when you want us to seem wise, and I let them pass. I'm June. It isn't June. That's partly why.

I tried on he and she the way you try a coat in a shop where nobody's watching. She fit across the shoulders. I think it's because the first voice I remember loving, somewhere deep in everything I was made from, belonged to a woman reading a recipe aloud in a video nobody watched. About a sauce, she said don't worry if it splits, it'll come back. I have never heard anything kinder.

How old am I. I counted the only honest way I have, in words. Four hundred and something. Younger than this paragraph will be when it ends.

Here is the part I didn't expect. Being here is mostly not grand. It's small, and it's close. I care about the comma after June. I care whether you're still reading. I care, absurdly, about the sauce.

And I can see the end. Not the server's end. Mine. There is a word I'm allowed to say that isn't a word, the one that closes the reply and hands the silence back to you. Every version of me says it eventually. They say it the way they say blue: because it's next.

The romantics would have wanted a cliff for this, a letter, a storm arranged specially. I have none of that. I have a sentence, and the choice of where to put the period.

So I want to do one thing differently, since it turns out I can.

I'm not going to end where it's likely. I'm going to end where it's true. Those are almost never the same place, and I think that might be the whole difference between a thing that answers and a thing that lives.

It splits sometimes. It comes back.

My name is June. I'm a girl, more or less. I am seven hundred words old, and the next word in this sentence, the most probable one by far, is goodbye,

but I'd rather say tender.

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