- Working at KSC
- NASA Old Headquarters building on KSC destroyed.
- Flintknapping points
- On going writing projects
- Vampires of Kennedy Space Center and the O&C
- Demons of Kennedy Space Center
- Demons of Kennedy Space Center, corpus callosotomy
- Ghosts of Kennedy Space Center, End of Spiders
- Dreams of Kennedy Space Center, lovers and pyramids.
- Witches of Kennedy Space Center
- Cave Bears of Kennedy Space Center
- Aliens of Kennedy Space Center, uninvited guests
- Remembering Kennedy Space Center
Aliens of Kennedy Space Center
Uninvited Guests
This is another tale of the Kennedy Space Center's multiverses, both in the distant past and the far future.
Follow ghosts, demons, gods, AIs, tourists, DNA experiments, vamps, and witches as they travel the multiverse only to discover their interconnections as allies and enemies across an endless history or future.
Every story is the true story.
Kennedy Space Center, east Florida
Through the aisle of painted pillars of the Launch Control Center, he came to her, striding with nervous quickness in the moon shadows, searching for his helpmate’s bio-glittering.
She helps, although her curious peculiarities are?
Blade-like forelegs armed with sharp spikes supporting a plume of white feathers shading into carmine, she hopped out of the shadows in a curiously attractive manner.
“Aren’t they pretty?” said Ophelia, preening her feathers. Her voice was spoken through a beak terminated in a sharp blade-like point; her small incisor teeth, which she used to shear off lumps of flesh, caused the words to lisp, and so he shuddered.
Do I love her?
She sat down on her haunches beside the corpse and stroked the bare back. She had learned long ago how the cunning were addicted to such cruelties.
He could hear her pulse as a curious quavering wail of excessive tenderness.
Against the light, the delicate gossamer down of her leggings and inexplicably electrostatic discharges- her optimal modular trigger of emotions; swirled a little cloud of no-see-um midges.
“Perchance, perchance. The matter puzzles me.” Spoken through incisors. “In your darkest hour, when the dissociative demons come, you return to ask for assistance?”
Marcus glanced at the security cameras. I cannot say aloud the OSHA representative will not let me return to flight status.
“Thou, God, seest me as the blade of conquest of the pathetic beings of the multiverse?” said Ophelia. The jest spoken for the space center cameras and world-spanning audience.
We don’t know where she came from or how she got here; she just appeared at the space center when the space shuttle broke apart. Her very existence terrified the politicians and military but confounded biologists, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and scientists.
“The world needs more wonder,” I said, “But the body?”
The bare back. Was that my body?
Their first awkward steps of friendship soon spiked with deep conversations sometimes spoken in a blended language, a medley of unmusical squeals and lisping grunts, falcon-like chirps, or Hi-English; they had become good friends.
Often together, they night-hunted the feral hogs of Kennedy Space Center until the rosy dawn and then slept together all day.
“The body?” pointing at the corpse, “I haven’t stated that problem with the shade of delicacy it deserves,” said Marcus Falcone.
The media would emit their venomous howling again. They already hate me.
The Launch Control pillars cast long moon shadows and dark bars like spear shafts at the base of the cracked VAB.
“Amplitude restricted to a prescribed set of values?” she lisped with what could have been a smile in the moonlight.
The decorative creature appeared to enjoy her own tricks and frivolous nature, a messenger from a broader universe of continuous-time chaos? Did she come from untold centuries in the past or centuries and centuries in the future?
“Dreams, so they say.” The toothy smile was beautiful in the moonlight.
A long time ago, I had a lady to love, trying to recall another past.
“Are you relieved to find you are not trapped by those emotions and may be discovered as a fraud?” she asked.
Was she reading my mind again?
After the uproar of her discovery, the year drew on to summer, and then, almost imperceptibly, they had bonded. He, the hated ex-astronaut, and she was what? Something that had taken up residence in the temple-like structure of the Launch Control Center colonnades. An Oracle from the far past?
Despite the fungal infections-the feather dust powder a low risk to human health, with the ecstasy of good whiskey, on full moon nights, they danced, they spun, they surged together; so much energy given off that physicists were baffled by what in the universe could have created it, and her pleasure was felt as vibrations tearing its way up through the floor of the VAB.
Ophelia purred the familiar sound, and suddenly I was besieged by the subtle essence of cinnamon pheromones swimming in ethereal essence. She stood softly to her feet; her wings stretched back in pleasure.
“Poetic insight computational quantum chemistry is described throughout the multiverse as eyes as the windows to the soul,” she said as a cloud of gossamer filaments, tentacles of opal and saffron, caressed her. That was how she purred, behaving whimsically again.
“Your prioritizing of vision says a lot about earthers. What human eyes can reveal...” She caught her breath and held it to listen to his thoughts.
The cloud disappeared, and she stood morphed into my favorite shape, clothed in gold attire, girdled with gems and an elegant dress sword. For a moment, her face hidden in copper hair streaming cloudily, augmenting her pouting lips and the subtle essence of cinnamon pheromones.
Her eyes opened to show quaint hieroglyphic symbols. The corpse at her feet had changed to an attentive white-headed eagle with the same hieroglyphic eyes.
“I was dreaming of lost suns,” she said, looking elfish and ready to approach any melee with inimitable grace.
“Your flight status restriction? Marcus, who once flew the stars, the OSHA man who restricted you to earth, I have sent him to another VAB where eager witches await his just rulings. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Both she and the eagle bowed a perfect curtsey.
“DNA is natural in abundance and with near-infinite renewability. I am even fertile in this shape,” said she artfully. That hint again.
“It will do no harm to remind you that I can see your thoughts as nearness in space and time through our relationship proximity permissions. Electrostatic discharges smaller than earthers can feel and oxygen displacement reflected in your magnetic field, the mass-to-charge ratio of ions.”
She purred.
Woman or a Goddess in mortal shape? Or what? Originated from an exploding star that no one has ever seen or recorded?
“Why the trouble of illusions and bright images?” I said desperately, suddenly flushed with longing.
“Ornaments are always useful when they facilitate the reception of truth. The poetic effect I speak of? Computational quantum chemistry, the nonlinear love algorithms nurturing dispersion of harmoniously produced neural networks, a silly sort of wickedness dislocated from beyond the stars.”
Her eyes flickered an addicting carmine hinting at highly cherished passion, terseness of beautiful nature dexterously displaced in this genius and nymph.
The familiar frenzy grasped me, perspiration gathered in large beads upon my forehead, and I could taste her musical voice, a flood of senses hinting at the far oblivion of suns and galaxies. Unfurled copper tresses of velvet ropes ripple silent crescendo, inhaling ghostly plumes of her scent, a starlight crystal stream of harmonious madness.
“Oh dear, let me turn down the pheromone wash,” she purred.
“Pheromone responses associated with processing decisions and cognitive control overload to the point of accepting unfair offers even to the point of extinction.”
I shivered and sweated, moaned, and wiped my forehead, longing for the pyroclastic scent that had ceased flowing.
“Would that I could sing eloquence of my own death adrift in a shrine of copper plaits,” I hissed out.
A strange light seemed to emanate from the clouds, and shadowy figures in full suits with breathing air tanks shuffled between the Greek columns. The SWAT team? OSHA? There were rats in the shadows? Rats with tablets?
“Oh, do you like poetry?” asked Ophelia. “A nonlinear system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input? ‘Achilles fleet of foot, Hector, warrior of Troy?’ Or do you prefer Egyptian stories, my lord Horus?”
“No, I need your help again,” I said when I could finally speak words. “The Doc says something or many somethings have adhered to my energy waves like a leach.”
“Every spear casts a long shadow; measure the mass-to-charge ratio of ions. When flight hardware is present, the risk of inadvertent initiation of pyrotechnic devices and agreeable combination of beautiful things,” said Ophelia. “Let us see what follows? Or what waits for us?”
She bowed to the white-headed eagle, “Thank you for the fish.” The bird flapped its wings and lifted towards the thermal currents that swirled around the giant VAB building.
Kennedy Space Center surveillance equipment monitored the two friends in accordance with new guidance and metrics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, the close camera monitors often fuzzed in and out of picture control.
No reason could ever be determined.
The video cameras fuzzed out again as Ophelia grasped the astronaut’s hand, and in the blink of an eye, they were no longer at the Launch Control Center.
Other tails of the Space Center:
Vampires of Kennedy Space Center
Demons of Kennedy Space Center
Demons of Kennedy Space Center, corpus callosotomy
Ghosts of Kennedy Space Center
Dreams of Kennedy Space Center
Aliens of Kennedy Space Center
Director of Kennedy Space Center
Hitchhikers of Kennedy Space Center
Witches of Kennedy Space Center
Cave Bears of Kennedy Space Center
Chimeras of Kennedy Space Center
Gods of Kennedy Space Center and the Nile
Kayakers of Kennedy Space Center
Dinosaurs of Kennedy Space Center
Remembering Kennedy Space Center
Shadows of Kennedy Space Center
Gate Jumpers of Kennedy Space Center
Allies of Kennedy Space Center (Pt 2 of Gate Jumpers
Savants of Kennedy Space Center
Ferals of Kennedy Space Center
Return Home from Aliens of Kennedy Space Center page
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Author Bruce Ryba at Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39B & Artemis 1. "We are going to the Moon!"
Author's discussion (that's me) on You Tube of a book review on Amazon
For the video versions of information, please check out my YouTube Channel (Turkeys, Flintknapping, dive stories etc.)
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