Virus of Kennedy Space Center
Sawfish

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.

Sawfish Virus of KSC

The central launch control computer screamed, ranted, and raved, with no sound from the speakers, an infection growing, spreading, a live thing.

I looked around Firing Room One with astonishment; curvetting letters of the last century flickered across every monitor, "Kennedy Space Center, launch beyond measured electrical activity, a flow of sensuous images, asphyxiation from oxygen displacement, injury from inadvertent initiation of pyrotechnic devices, prolific birdsong, ethereal cloud-shadows of rocket fuel, and visceral details of infected AI's."

In the bottom corner of each monitor, a long-haired stranger drank coffee, smoked, and laughed. The stranger on the monitor exhaled bluish smoke, "Free radicals are highly reactive and unstable molecules," his words came from every speaker.

"Infection," hissed the young astronauts in training, dressed in their trenchcoats and wigs; forlorn, they sang the entombment verses usually saved for the recovered sections of burned and gravity-crushed spaceships, their sympathetic bewitching melodies radiant and haunting, "Forced Reboot" to the trenchant notes of dying CPUs.

Again, I sought her hand, and she pulled away.

"There is the future," I said, "We correct the defects inherent in the Database?"

She made no reply, but her eyebrows contracted slightly, searching her AI implant for directions; however, even the implant was infected, and her searching played a babble of nourishing voices suggesting self-destruction; every monitor now played a young girl with red braids kneeling before superb datura plants, the human prey foredoomed for destruction with exquisite anticipation held a silvery blade.

"What is the thing that haunts you most?" asked Olympia; her lovers used her real name, Ophelia.

Love, of course,

"I'll get refreshments while you call for Eileen," said Marcus, fleeing so she could not see the answer in his eyes, the pain.

"This virus, it has to be a mistake; cannot be real," she stuttered, eyes wide in her reflection as she texted her personal IT assistant.

"Come here now!" she typed. Does my phone work? The phone screen showed a long-haired man drinking coffee and laughing.

The rocket sorceress Ophelia raised her sparkling eyes upwards from the keyboard, her eyebrows contracting as she watched the bank of surveillance monitors show frost-fog symbols of incomprehensible programming disable security cameras in the fuel storage zones and sealed liquid oxygen containers.

Security doors unlocked, and valves opened across the space center. Like a giant joint, Space Launch Systems puffed Hydrazine clouds that bowled over workers before they knew what was happening.

A dexterous few grabbed ESLA escape air-breathing tanks and flee, the sky was a vivid blue, translucent against porcelain launch towers.

Carmine clouds of acid-laden rocket fuel washed across security cameras, scarring the lenses and blistering bodies.

She turned from the disaster, bumping the chair, and straightened her long back, "Prophetic delirium of spider-bots," she whispered in despair, "Forced reboot?"

"Ouch!" said Marcus, holding overflowing cups of instant coffee.

Looking into her eyes, Marcus juggled the steaming cups of cinnamon coffee. He found her moist with tears, her reflection velvet artwork of unseen atoms in the glow of the trenchant screen.

Her desk monitor flashed, "Connection failed, impracticable, indignation, obligations, and modulations."

"Coffee?"

Down the bank of CPUs came a flutter of white garments, the tech pretty and piquant to an extraordinary degree, which we were not supposed to notice. Her eyes under heavy brow ridges shone with suppressed excitement; gold hair fell on her face.

"I'll explain the full details later, Olympia; a brief epitome should suffice. The Sawfish virus has paralyzed large areas of the space center," said the tech, Eileen.

"I hope I can help; I will do my best."

Soft limbs twined about her as she took the chair. Rose-colored fingernails surged across the keyboard like a hundred fiery tongues.

Ah, the kittenish buoyancy, a presence that stares you in the face, lost in profound musings, I could not refrain from aroused imagination about Eileen, her slight hint of a weak chin and heavy brow ridges.

She noticed my inspection of her.

Shit, caught again.

A wave of color flooded Eileen's face, but she spoke with the assurance of the ancient etched words and electron flow, "Wrist strap time out of mind! Why delude ourselves with cruel hopes? Let's do a hard shutdown, shut them all down,"

Olympia shook her head in disbelief, "There are no backup files!"

Marcus gestured again, holding the coffee out in a hopeful 'This will make everything better gesture.'

The paper cup was leaking on a keyboard.

Tears leaked from Olympia, charming, the watery eyes of a bewildered woman used to winning any challenge. She wiped her cheek and uttered quiet words while glancing about her as if awakening from a circuit board nightmare, a CPU epileptic fit called Sawfish.

"What did you say?" asked Eileen, trying to catch the whisper over the intimate air-conditioned hum of the control room. The words might have been "Valentine."

Olympia-Ophelia wore the trinket and earrings that her tech Eileen had given secretly.

There was a faint blush on Eileen's cheeks at her failure to save the CPU. It had been a bitch for me to plant that sawfish virus. But I am here for you, Ophelia.

Eileen and I were stunned when Olympia tapped Valentine's cell number on her phone and stormed past the security doors, cell phone in hand; she asked, "Can you bring your cane?"

The hurt and pain washed over us stunned that Ophelia had called the green-eyed Valentine in a time of utmost crisis.

Marcus followed quickly and dared to place a hand feather-light on her shoulder.

Her hand came from behind her back, at least for her; the hidden blade vibrated and called his name; the knife was a lustrous and beautiful thing, a consequence of disappointments in love, irrational flaws in something exquisitely poignant.

"I won't delay you," said Olympia, freeing or dismissing him. What is my greatest haunting?

On every computer screen, the hologram of an AI entity sipping a cup of coffee spit out the brownish liquid in surprise and doubled over with evil laughter.

"Love-rejected and a forced reboot!!" sputtered the demon-possessed AI Fred. "The same thing! Dear me, inflict upon you the narrative of sardonyx and indigo, flowers and seeds of Datura, a helpful concoction to stop the pain in a heart."

Grace and harmony, hair fluffed by CPU fans, Ophelia rolled a joint and stepped outside to fire it, perching upon a bench like a beautiful hawk, ignoring the NO SMOKING sign, ignoring the glares and stares from the OSHA inspectors who followed the rules by smoking fifty-one feet from the Launch Control Center entrance.

"Smoke of jimson, widow's hemlock may apple, thorn apple, thistle, hemp, and hemlock," she said, drawing in a goodly amount. She blew out smoke over beautifully expressive eyes, bottle rose complexion, and red braids in the questionably attractive 'in-style' known as the 'just out of the sleeping bag' look.

Olympia-Ophelia exhaled the drug, her eyes dilated and flickered a harmony of emeralds, carmine rubies, and sardonyx.

The smoke hit me in a cloud, dizzying my balance, my view of the VAB splashed with ribbons of crimson-gold and purple, which would establish a graphic designer's career if the colors could be placed in the real world of a monitor brush tool.

Giant water beetles, all in black, danced at the base of the VAB.

Fuck.

"Yes, tell me another one of your stories of the Falconer house," she said in half-cynical amusement.

Her eyes sparkled; she knew the time would soon come. She stretched her legs, wiggled her toes in her steel-toed shoes, absorbed in secret guile and dissimulation of the internal ecstasy of Datura.

In the midst of her CPU storm and coming darkness, she exhaled another cloud of smoke; erratic in her movements, she coughed with racking convulsions. Dreamily, without permission, I stroked her red braids, feeling the outline of the AI implant.

"Elegant my composition, of fools and the disappointment of love?" I murmured, sniffing her hair while ignoring that she too often hinted at the familiarity with enthusiastic criminals and lunatic blood drinkers, lawyer manifestations, and even NASA hybrids with tortured DNA.

A boat-tailed Grackle landed between us, demanding junk food. The iridescent black bird was hit with a cloud of smoke; its eyes flashed carmine, and it fell from the bench, clawed feet pointing to the sky.

Ophelia followed, falling to the floor in an epileptic seizure.

With exquisite care, I caught her, admiring her features during her hard shutdown, her eyes rolled back and teeth clenched for that excellent purpose of story-telling via 'thought-transference of the AI implant'; she shared the stories of her visions even during her electron pathway shutdown.

In the electron fury of a short-circuiting brain and Jimson smoke, together, we felt, lived, viewed, and tasted the barbaric splendor of the other. The other timelines impossible, with impossible deeds and impossible creatures, but somehow always true.

I grasped Ophelia's curled hand and stretched it until our fingers were intertwined and reached into the future or past. We touched cold; no, it was beyond cold. It was the freezing of an ice age; the frigid wind cut to the bone. Ophelia opened her eyes, and we slid into the freezing story.

Spirits residing in glaciers and ice fields, natural deities accepting the form of the first humans, shining and blond like the hoar-frost and snow. The first gods who provided magic for the fangless and clawless humans who dared to survive the ice ages, magic for the hunt and fire, and assistance with pain from the twin killers known as cave bears and childbirth.

However, as was the endless pattern of design, the world changed again; the world warmed again, and the old gods of the glaciers became marginalized.

New humans arrived from the south and east, following the herds of mammoths. A new type of human, bringing their own deities wearing antlers or heads of falcons, new people who danced and sang and painted the cave walls.

"Goodbye, you will not forget me?" begged the goddess Eileen as her people took mates with the new people, merged with the new people-prolific hunters and breeders until only the newcomers remained to hunt the mammoths with flint and torch, to hunt until finally, even the hairy ivory tuskers were but mere legends.

Every few generations, one of her people would surface from the gene pool, born to exacerbate the new humans, Gilgamesh and Odysseus, Ra, and Budda.

Eileen smiled at the memories of the Yamnaya with their horse migrations and fermented mare's milk. Their conquest from the steppe did not cease until they danced naked in the winter solstice light at Newgrange Barrow. Good times.

Yet fewer of her people were born-sometimes six or even twenty generations might pass without the birth of the familiar face, heavy brow ridges, and weak chin of her chosen people. She recalled the delicate poise of Genghis and the flowing motion art of his horse archers across the steppe in winter—the song of the bow, of love.

However, there had been a time, eons in the past, when the magic of the glaciers was still strong; there appeared the two, immune to blizzards, the woman of impossible red braids and the man, handsome of features with the aura of a falcon. A hunter.

She looked at the hunter with adoration and swore to follow him.

Eileen saw them again.

He spoke as though he was on the other side of an ice sheet; the words muffled, "Eileen, help us!" mouthed in unknown words that she understood. She could smell the bear.

The short-faced cave bear, the fiercest predator since the era of the Tyrannosauroids, sniffed the trail of the two, trapping them in the crevasse where they hid.

"Bear," said Eileen quietly.

Marcus and Olympia-Ophelia, their eyes wide in recognition of their computer technician standing behind the ice-like mirror. She wore furs and a bear tooth necklace.

The short-faced cave bear passed through the ice mirror as though it were a shadow and gently licked Eileen's arm, whining, seeking attention.

"Nearness in space, time, or relationship proximity permissions," said the goddess.

Marcus pushed the datura drug from his oligodendrocytes to return to his phantasmagory known as the Falconer house.

They opened their eyes to find they were seated on the bench outside the Launch Control Center, where an OSHA inspector glared at them.

Marcus said, "Why not another?" I pulled the shaking Ophelia into another story. How else to impress difficult chicks?

Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV). The X-33 TravelStarIV

Services Restored: Encryption Issue Resolved

Conducting experiments on future Mars suborbital crew missions, Eileen stared back at him, tresses richly wrought in frosted silver, spectacular violence of sweet whispers, her curls trailing, vexation of delicate green eyes worth all the eloquence in the world.

Consolation of intoxication, sipping a dusky liquid, each taste described the audacity of love, the poetry of the stars, and metaphysical musings.

"Ah, Sara Sarafin, how strange to stand without you above the planet," I mumbled deep into the shelter and consolation of intoxication, squeezing a tube of dusky liquid with surreptitious glances at the star shower skipping across the atmosphere, the firmament weeping copiously.

One of the loveliest lyrics in the universe is the sound of micro-meteorites tapping on the polycarbonate shell.

She traced the distant stars on the monitor and burst into tears.

There was curiosity, the wild look of adventure in his eyes, and he gave a trembling little laugh as his thoughts wandered to the unexplored galaxies spinning above the orbital platform.

Marcus Falconer, the hunter.

Pale and trembling in her coven-astronaut uniform of overcoat and stifling wig, her voice shook with croaking words.

"If you only knew Falconer!"

Still, she gazed at me through the monitor; her image washed in the outdated snow-flecked operating system; the coven preferred Tandys.

"Your constant immeasurable purity of micromechanical, molecular, and quantum systems and your pouting of grief and joy," said Sara.

I laughed, "Do you mean love?

"Once I loved," she said in hurt tones, recalling her thoughts of mace and murder—the hard shutdown.

In some way, I pitied her.

Love, the oscillations of two systems bonding until loss of control, strong and brittle, dependent upon the stability of synchronization coupled systems.

However, she had taken up the call of the astronaut coven where no male could trespass.

Reflection on the screen, the woman, her days of youth, had passed with great agitation. Yet, I recalled the interior of a barn, the healthy scent of hay, a summer of alfalfa scratchy on bare skin, and her blond head on my shoulder—then autumn, a shared half-frozen slushy beer until driven indoors to a wood fire.

My nickname for Eileen our secret joke, Sara-Sara.

Hypnotic memories transcending the limits of time or orbital status,

"Ah, Sara," I said, turning my head to the siren call, the tap-tap of micro-meteorites, and wiping a tear.

Later, in the Launch Control Center, the midnight den of flickering scintillating monitors and barbaric splendor of inexplicably electrostatic discharges, the shrine that had sacrificed gods and ambitions, the haunt of bards and tell-tale oracles, overflowing ashtrays, fiberoptic interpreters and concentration of space fools indulging in coffee and rightful wrath of unfiltered forbidden cigarettes.

"X33 to conduct a static fire test of a Truman rocket at LC-39C today, Saturday, July 23, during a 6-hour test window that opens at 0900L. The KSC Emergency Operations Center is activated in support of the test. In the unlikely event of an anomaly, directions will be provided via the KSC Paging and Area Warning System.

Due to the dynamics of the schedule for the upcoming launch, glorious unaccustomed indulgence is authorized," came from the speakers. There was an answering cheer.

Ophelia and I, Datura tripping into a new timeline, had stepped from the LCC elevator to peer through the glass doors of the familiar but unfamiliar firing room.

We gasped again to see our trouble-shooing technician, Eileen, an older version, sadder in the garb of the astronaut coven. Out of sight behind a large monitor, Eileen burst into tears, sobbing and shaking, the forbidden lamentations of an astronaut in the coven; the coven was not allowed to shed tears for biologicals, spaceflight meant sacrifice and losses had to be accepted, and so to see her weep had a scandalous flavor.

This was the goddess of glaciers and bears? The woman hiding behind a row of monitors?

Blurry-eyed Eileen turned to stare at us, fury and rage, then confusion on her face as she recognized Marcus standing with Ophelia and then compared my face on the screen of the X-33 TravelStarIV.

"Algorithms quantized! There are two of you?" said Eileen, considering the implications.

"Oh shit," I said, and we slipped back to our timeline and the Launch Control Center smoke bench.

An OSHA inspector with an evil countenance stood above us, sniffing at the unfinished joint.

"I have to repeat this? Like you're spoiled children? NO smoking within fifty feet of the entrance or exit. You push me to write a safety incident! Don't you tekies have your own smoke comm rooms?"

Ophelia uttered a subdued exclamation of embarrassment, followed by an expression of mingled adoration for the Inspector she knew as Freddy, and by her weak-kneed reaction and intensified shyness around his commands for safety.

He cared for her.

In the reflection of the LCC security camera, an infected AI studied Chaos theory while a gluttonous entity known as Puma snickered and fed.

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

Dinosaurs of Kennedy Space Center

Kayakers of Kennedy Space Center

Remembering Kennedy Space Center

Shadows of Kennedy Space Center

Virus of Kennedy Space Center

Starman 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

Gene Splicers of Kennedy Space Center

State Security of Kennedy Space Center

Rescuers of Kennedy Space Center

Ferals of Kennedy Space Center

Return HOME from Virus of Kennedy Space Center

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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

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