OCR is Not the Only Font

A Twenty Year Decade

Challenge #13: Write a story responding to another writer’s piece from Flash Fiction Month 2012.

This is a response to Watching Butterflies by Elizabeth Mathis, aka. TwilightPoetess on deviantART http://twilightpoetess.deviantart.com/art/Watching-Butterflies-FFM-17-315340926

Robert always had people to talk to. That was, he considered, the strange thing about space. It was so big, so empty that you just had to stick together. Like the debris from a meteorite strike condensing into a brand new moon. Maybe. He had failed Astrophysics. He was happy just to watch the stars.

It had been exciting, getting onto the shuttle and seeing all those people. Everyone was off on their own adventure. “Space,” that old show had said. “The final frontier.” It really was. Except that frontiers didn’t really give you time for your own adventure. You needed to settle, to build, and to have someone check that your eyeballs wouldn’t go shooting out through a crack in your helmet the next time you went out for a stroll. Life in space was like a twenty-year coach tour. You’d see some interesting sights, but there was never really time to do your own thing.

Still, Robert had quickly got used to it. It was an adventure, even if it wasn’t his alone, and there was something invigorating about setting up camp not just on another planet, not just in another solar system, but in a whole new galaxy. It was like the human species had finally moved out of Mother Earth’s basement.

But twenty years in, with all the modules of the space station delivered and slotted together and the planet terraformed (for those who fancied getting their feet muddy again), it was beginning to feel much the same as Earth had. He could understand why people would want to feel at home, but this was starting to feel like less of a colony and more of a replacement goldfish. Swatting away one of the garden dome’s ubiquitous butterflies, he stared out at New Orion. He didn’t miss Earth, but he did wonder how much it had changed since he left.

A lot could happen in a twenty year decade, and thanks to relativity he’d been gone for two.