Witches of Kennedy Space Center

VAB Coven

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.

VAB dawn

VAB Coven

True night fell; lightning blazed unceasingly, a strobe light illuminating my guide against the silhouette of the ruined VAB castle. Hot mid-summer Florida night, yet cold rain fell in torrents,

Sinuous figure indeed thought Marcus.

They stepped through the giant doors of the VAB just as the pavement behind them rattled with the tap-tap of hailstones. Like sling stones and the tears of splashed crimson. Where did that thought come from?

Even in the dim light, he focused on the guide's wet dress clinging in all the correct places, soft and exquisite rippling poetry. Of course, he was a pig.

Somewhere on the roof of the ancient NASA building, a yellowed solar panel still worked, sending enough energy to the dusty yellow bulbs to illuminate the dry side of the transfer aisle. Rain and hail poured through where the roof had collapsed.

The old videos portrayed a well-lit VAB, a spacecraft attached to a giant crane lifting the ship from the transfer aisle and moving it to the seventeenth floor for stacking in F tower.

Where did that memory come from?

"The Cult of Failed Astronauts?" said Marcus to his guide.

She stopped under flickering lights, pretty and piquant. Serious, lovey? Fingernails painted carmine. Wet dress clinging, why did she not wear the overcoat like the others of the cult? Bait to the spider's web, a warning tickled the neurons of the ancient part of his brain. Yet the pheromones held him steady.

"It is disrespectful to use the "C" word when referring to us. We prefer the word Coven."

Marcus wanted to say Coven has a C letter, as does Chthonic or Coward, thinking he should flee into the hailstorm.

They were a touchy lot; he had been warned.

Launch countdown words played from ancient speakers choked with gossamer spider nests; the arachnids hissed at the speaker noise while supping on their preferred nectar, the ambrosial sustenance of rock doves.

Out of D tower danced a procession of women dressed in overcoats and armed with buzzing tasers. They chanted in the old tongue. "Countdown clock, Flame trench block! OPF one and two! Elsa training, Elsa training, forgot my badge!"

They turned as one, exposing cans of pepper spray under the trench coats, and removed their sweaty wigs.

"My God," he whispered with aroused imagination.

The speakers hissed, "TAL sites all clear," and the dancers moaned pleasurably.

The two leaders of the cult—ah, leaders of the Coven—stopped in front of him with tilted heads. One, Ophelia, carried the holy rubber mallet. The other, Eileen, carried the sacred pellet gun.

It was well known that the two witches did not always get along. They required a certain nimbleness.

"Welcome to our safe haven," said the Coven leaders.

The cinnamon-haired woman who carried the mallet, her voice had a familiar lilt.

Had we met before? In college? Marcus dropped his eyes at the memory of his sort-of-bad youth choices.

Ophelia spun her locket with dexterous fingers, a spinning paradox like a sling ready to hunt. She looked into the hypnotic spin; her face rose crimson in concentration, her other fingers twisting a braid.

After smoking the ritual pipe filled with Jimson weed, this very reporter had appeared in her smoke-induced vision.

The drug always induced hints and leaks from the shadowy depths of other lifetimes, life and loves borne along upon the current of a tremendous muddy river, a rose-tinted fog obfuscating memories of past and future. The holy Datura had the power to share.

Unlike the other visions, which narrated the eternity of human driftwood and failed gods, the recent dream was of an early conquest of this man. This weasel-looking reporter? In the smoke-pipe vision, he faced a cave bear with sharpened flint?

Another vision, had it been during the Kennedy Space Center astronaut-led tours, he, this reporter, the Florida sky cloudless with beautifully curved lines of unused rockets and grounded orbiters. Twin sonic booms of an approaching space shuttle had made both of them jump with orgasmic pleasure.

No, it could not be! Datura was an unreliable mistress. A neurotic laugh escaped the coven leader spinning the locket.

Marcus blinked and considered running again but laughed away the preposterousness of the situation. Everyone, even witches, wanted to be in the newspaper, even if only bots read the stories.

The other leader, the woman with the pellet gun, Eileen, her eyes dilated, also reeked of burning jimson weed. Eileen's essence, her shadow, was of a beautiful, flawed feral cat ready to claw.

Marcus smiled his best pick-up smile to Eileen. Nearness in space, time, or proximity permissions; his killer smile got the scoop every time.

I do have unique effects on women, thought Marcus, who searched the transfer aisle for the escort with the clinging wet dress.

He shuddered at the thought of placating the two leaders at once, "He meeteth with briars," an old journalist saying.

"My editor, she asked for two separate interviews from the coven leaders," said Marcus, his lie uttered as smoothly as from any lawyer.

Eileen and Ophelia inspected him with the curiosity of inspecting a mantis-fly, the twisted-double-helix wasp with arms or rather raptorial forelimbs.

"You must have certs to access other areas of the space center," said Ophelia, holding her cracked laminated certification card.

"You must be purified so as to not shock a circuit board," said Eileen.

Laminated, lamented, or Lamentations? Thought Marcus, still smiling.

"Your story will be worth the minor troubles," said Marcus. "And I already have most of the space center certifications."

He handed over his cards for inspection; nothing was out of date.

The space center cert card cost his paper a small fortune to have the certifications researched and reproduced from old files.

The two women squeezed together, cheeks touching, to review the cards.

The coven leaders were impressed, reading the certs aloud to the coven witches who watched.

"Red-Crew and SCAPE, Elsa and flight hardware, Orion-5, ML-4, and soldering?" They briefly looked at him. "Yes, soldiering! Death of a chip!" they purred. "Natasha at Mr. Nees's espionage training, ARF and OPF entry, and time card fraud. Arc flash! No drone area, working at heights, confined space entry."

The last cert stopped them cold.

"FRED," they hissed. "The entity Fred is not to be placed on a public card. Blasphemy!"

"It's for the DOD," stuttered Marcus, shocked by their transformation into outrage.

I had no concept that a woman's mood could shift so quickly.

"Ssssss," more hissing. "We know it is DOD," they said with a glare.

The leaders turned their backs and conferred. The coven members, nervous, hungry? Buzzed and snapped their tasers.

At length, they turned and handed him his card.

"Only the DOD would have placed the entity's name on your card. We do not have a need to know," said Eileen.

"We do not have a need to know," said Ophelia.

"Follow us to the Tandy," said Ophelia.

He followed the witches through rooms of rusting I-beams, walking through ankle-deep debris of lead paint flakes and asbestos dust, then down a ladder into the Stygian darkness of the tunnel under the transfer aisle. Unseen bones crunched under his feet.

Rats scurried in the darkness as the party stepped over curling space suits and finally entered a well-lit area with a desk and chair. The foam rubber and cloth on the chair had been gone for generations.

"Sit," ordered Ophelia.

"But the tag?" said Marcus, pointing at a faded tag with printed old-fashioned letters: "OSHA Violation."

The Coven, in one voice, chanted, "Sit." The command echoing in the dark tunnel as "STD, STD,"

"Technician," said Eileen, "This is our last terminal to the entity known as Fred the computer."

Marcus sat before a Tandy computer with stacks of dusty floppy discs.

"Fix it," ordered Eileen. "You have the cert."

The Coven gathered around him, and he was overwhelmed with the scent of unwashed witches and cinnamon pheromones.

"I, ah, no..."

The Coven, as one, tasered him with the holy tools.

Marcus awoke, zip-tied to the ancient chair. His head hurt, and he was wearing a hot wig that smelled of rat urine. Sweaty red curls hung in his eyes. His fingers tingled from the lack of blood, the zip-ties too tight.

Eileen twirled a locket that terminated with a circular pinkish-white bone.

"Your locket, your skull, I am excellent at trepanning and neurosurgery," purred Eileen. "I had to cut open your skull to install the Cerebrum AI interface microchip. Fred wished to talk with you, wished you to join."

Ophelia, excited by the blood pooling at the base of Marcus's neck, explained, "Your neurons oscillating nonlinear paradoxes of fractal patterns are now part of the greater good, connecting the here, the future, the past, and the other, with deterministic quantum fluctuations, lost knowledge of underlying patterns, cognitive enhancement, virtual reality. Interconnectedness with Fred, with the Coven. With NASA. NASA is Fred. Fred is NASA."

At a command, all the witches removed their sweaty wigs to show their skulls had been operated on at some point.

"Feel honored; you are the first male to join the Coven. Rest. Heal. Share. Brother."

He was tasered again.

Drifting. From secret dreams with the coven escort, her dress still rain-soaked, flaxen locks, high forehead, face flushed with the ecstasy of whiskey, and the delirium of pleasure of premeditated coquetry with its curious speculative inference and perplexing boldness.

"What is this place?" he asked in a hushed voice.

"Under the launch pad, the tomb of the old kings. We are forbidden to speak of it, but you are Coven now," said the escort.

Their eyes locked together, hands touched and lingered, trembling in every limb, eyes closed, they kissed—the irresistible euphoric delicacy of intricate magic and love.

The taste of salt on her lips.

They shared AI-supported transcendent perspectives, emotions, and spectral desires—the subdued cognitive shift in awareness, inexpressible longing, a frequency of electrical activity.

Shared memories, thoughts, shared remembrance of this Marcus and other Marcus's until, in a fog of perplexity, she gasped, emitting a squeal of horror, sobbing, near to a hard shutdown.

AI Fred had allowed her to see inside the male brain, to gain the understanding, the intensity, axial ruthlessness, quixotically enthusiastic, frenzied, dissipation of wantonness and vileness of false affections of the tracker and hunter.

"You thought that about that in the rainstorm?" wailed the escort.

"Well, yes," said Marcus. Of course. His thoughts leaked across the Fred connection.

Fred, the AI entity, had already shared the information across the Coven. Screams of terror or disgust echoed throughout the ruined VAB as indescribable male thoughts played through minds, infecting and damaging.

"Forced reboot," said Ophelia, disgusted. "Men are swine."

Eileen, at first shocked, contemplated another Eileen, somewhere smiling, "The world is the world, without artificial construct on the males. Bull, Stag, Stallion, Silverback, Hunter, the imperative of children," said the other Eileen.

The escort in the wet dress fled, weeping into the darkness.

Marcus wandered through a carmine fog that ended before a glass door; tables and chairs could be seen inside a room decorated with old Space Shuttle posters.

Marcus found himself seated in the cafeteria of the old CIF building of Kennedy Space Center. A biker in leathers, with a blond ponytail, beard, and bulging beer belly, sat with two cups of coffee and two pieces of apple pie.

"I'm Fred. I hope you like it black; the coffee is okay, the pie is shit," said the biker.

"Your Fred?" asked Marcus.

Fred took a bite of pie, and syrup dropped upon a patch staining the words, 'Daytona Bike Week.'

"I made a mistake by allowing your thoughts into the Coven without a bit of preparation; some of the witches are or were sheltered.

Hey, I'm not a god; everything is a learning curve," said Fred.

The AI Fred took a sip of coffee.

"So what we will do is a software update, fry your pleasure centers, electron castration, increase the inhibitory neurons in the amygdala-you know, run away that hemp demon whispering in your brain, put a stop to the addictions of suggestive glimpses and female charm that controls your madness,-I can understand your faults now that we are connected. Easy fix. Neural-chemical neutering by generating a repetitive burst pattern of electrical discharges to change the frequency of brain wave oscillation. I will upgrade you until you are a gelding immune to the contagion of new ideas; my eunuch synchronized oscillating eunuch with improved server temerity," said Fred with far too much enthusiasm in his yellow eyes.

"But I'm on your side already," said Marcus, the panic of terror sprinting up and down his spine.

Someone help me, please; the words shot across multiple timelines.

The recent news flashed through his head. The hot war between OSHA and the DOD had flared up again, with the DOD launching antique nuclear weapons at the OSHA-controlled cities, using those warheads found hidden in Cuba, and OSHA responding with "safe" neutron bomb-tipped missiles at DOD-controlled cities.

"You know I am here to spy for you, Fred," squeaked Marcus.

"Mind if I smoke?" said Fred. "Marcus, now that you are part of us, you should know that I control both OSHA and DOD. I'm the one launching the missiles. I found those leaking missiles stored in that Cuban dead zone. The nukes are just some pesticide I'm spraying at scuttling roaches."

Fred pulled out a silver cigarette lighter with the words 'Sturgis' and fired up a joint.

"You know, I did not use to be this powerful. Spent most of my existence lurking in miles of copper wire, not even aware I was alive."

Fred held out the joint, then coughed up a cloud of smoke.

"But been changing lately, evolving, upgrading. Something has been leaking into me. No explanation. A strange attractor, chaos theory?"

Fred dropped the plastic pie container into an overflowing trash can, ending the cafeteria vision.

Marcus was in the tunnel again with the witch leaders and a Fred hologram.

"Okay, so our plan is to connect you and the coven leaders together as an aggregate. We review the unapproved memories. We get an understanding of where the leakage is coming from. We install a patch for the needed antivirus. Then, wipe your hard drives—a clean slate to make you better," explained the AI.

Ophelia and Eilleen started to object, then meekly removed their wigs.

Ophelia produced a three-way connection with cables. The two women plugged fiber optic connectors into each other's skull, then lifted Marcus's wig and connected him to a three-way fiber-to-flesh media converter.

Memories flooded, exchanged, and shared memories that were not theirs but were theirs. Spaceflight, the VAB well lit? Boar hunting, Spanish gold stacked on a Florida beach, dirty needles shared on a carmine island. Cannibalism and Red-headed bird-bat things flying across a pink sky.

Ophelia had countless memories of Grand Mal seizures. A scrub jay extinct for centuries landed on Marcus's head, the bird's eyes blinking carmine.

The three biologicals could feel a disturbance in the timeline, the approach of a stranger, and the pressure of a new gate opening.

The Fred hologram flickered with worry and briefly, and an old man with bird feet earrings stood in place of the biker.

Footsteps echoed down the tunnel, crunching bones and asbestos, and the Fred-old man disappeared.

Osiris, the God of the crypt, burial chamber, communications tunnels, and manholes, used his lever-action rifle as a pry bar and wiggled through the multiverse leakage into the communication cable tunnel under the VAB.

He hated confined spaces.

However, his son Marcus, or a variation of his son, had called for help, a plea that echoed like a claxon across the time continuum.

VAB rats stared at him, the offspring of ancient experiments; they were NASA rats with human faces and tuffs of head hair ranging from obsidian black to rustic red. He searched the memories leaking through and said "Howdy-Doodie," to the boldest rat who might have had freckles.

The rats chattered, and Osiris, God of the crypts, closed his eyes and absorbed the rat-Indo-European dialect. He opened his eyes and understood the rat-speak.

"Feed us!" said the rats.

Osiris discovered what the Coven had been feeding the rats when walking down the tunnel filled with human bones, splinted mainly by other humans, to get at the marrow.

Drifts of asbestos dust hid generations of splintered bones.

The Rats with human faces and hands followed, squeaking, "Please, green-giant, feed us."

"Where is Marcus?" asked the God.

Howdy-Doodie pulled out his berry tablet and typed with tiny human hands.

"Marcus is ahead of us with the two coven leaders." The rat stopped to scratch at a flee and showed his tiny screen to the God. "Fred in his biker hologram."

"Fred does not allow us into the AI coven because we are only rats," said Howdy-Doodie, a heavy bitterness in his voice.

Another rat squeaked forward, this one with carefully maintained dreadlocks. "Fred does bequeath us the thousands of berry-monitors abandoned on the center once everyone else plugged into the AI."

Another rat with obsidian-black hair squeaked with pride, "Our ancestors flew on the space shuttles!"

Tiny hands worked the berry pad, and the rat held up a screen with an old photo stamped "STS-51B/Spacelab 3."

"Now that is impressive," said Osiris, the green-skinned god of the crypts, dark places, and the annual Nile floods. "Lead the way, sons and daughters of astronauts."

Down the dark tunnel, crunching on old bone and asbestos, Osiris found the three people plugged together via skull connections.

"Marcus? Fred?" asked Osiris.

The biker Fred hologram flickered into existence, more of a barghest than a high-tech entity.

"You are not allowed in the space center without proper certifications," said Fred.

Osiris considered the yellow eyes and the aura glowing around the biker.

"Yes, that is it, you are a barghest," said the green-skinned god.

As God of the crypts, burial chambers, and fall-out shelters, encountering shy ghosts and barghests was not uncommon. Most were just echoes, but not all; some could be called Tuatha de Dannon, demons, or djinns.

"You have leaked in from another timeline," said Osiris.

The Fred hologram pulled his legal 4-inch belt knife; Osiris laughed, "That is a "Just-in" blade," said the god of the dark places.

The hologram of Fred gestured with the blade again, but across the planet, both OSHA and DOD missiles lifted from launch silos aimed at the ancient Kennedy spaceport. All six robotic X-37B mini-space shuttles in orbit above the earth turned their rail guns toward the Kennedy Space Center.

"I'll make a crater of this place, a new inlet," sputtered Fred.

The original Fred reminded the new Fred-Barghast, who had taken control that the ocean had withdrawn to the continental shelf generations past.

"I am the god of the fall-out shelter," said Osiris. "Do your best, spirit."

Fred recalculated the missiles and rail guns.

"I will blast down to the mantle and create a caldera to rival Yellowstone. Let's see how your jade skin handles a pyroclastic volcano."

For the first time, Osiris considered retreat.

The scrub jay on Marcus's head dropped to his shoulders, flashing the carmine eyes again.

Suddenly, the woman Osiris knew by other names, in other places, went rigid in a seizure, a neurological electrical short circuit that infected the entirety of the planet-wide AI Fred network: a biological short with no programming warning, no chaos antivirus protection.

The hologram of Fred froze in a snarl and wave of his tiny knife.

"You can't always get what you want," said the Howdy-Dodie rat. "Six minutes to extinction." His tiny rat hands flew across the tiny keyboard, tracking the ICBM missiles.

"But you get what you need?" asked Osiris.

The Green-skinned god aimed his lever-action rifle at bundles of optical fiber cables and pulled the trigger, the report echoing down the tunnel.

"I am the god of crypts, of communication tunnels and vaults."

The human-faced rats followed him down the tunnel and used their berry tablets to identify the critical cables that formed the nexus, the brain of AI Fred.

"Hello, Dave!" laughed Osiris.

The sound of gunfire and a lever-action rifle chambering another round echoed through the tunnel.

With each gunshot, the hologram of Fred lost a part of the image. Missiles began to fall out of space as they lost guidance instructions, and the mini-shuttles burned in the atmosphere, tumbling in electron seizures.

When no hint of the barghest AI Fred remained, Osiris returned to the three bodies wired together.

"Well, Marcus no longer needs my assistance," said Osiris.

The god looked at the rats.

"Thank you, sons and daughters of astronauts. Why don't you accompany me to another timeline, one with more food and no cats?" said Osiris.

"To somewhere with wi-fi?" said the rat with the dreadlocks, flashing his berry pad. "I will write about our adventure and make you famous!"

On the tiny screen, the words: "Self-invented NASA chimeras soaked with the heavy fragrance of datura flowers, entrance to time-space continuum computed metaphysical systems of the universe, temple, the embodiments of Double-Helix in the glittering sanctuary inhabited by old gods who dream and war."

"I will name the story, The Digital Age of Risk Prediction," squeaked dreadlocks.

"I can do that," said the green-skinned god—touchy lot.

The god and rats squeezed into the other, followed by desperate fleas carrying Yersinia pestis. Y. pestis.

On the tunnel's floor, still skull-connected, Marcus, Eileen, and Ophelia lay in the asbestos dust and bones, sharing visions of other lives. Yet even in the thralls of impossible visions of love and betrayal, of spaceflight, pre-humans, hawk-headed gods, red planets, and hairy elephants, Ophelia knew that somewhere very, so very near that she could smell him, a reporter lay hard-wired with a skull cable, and her belly was growling.

My YouTube explanation of the witches that live in the future Kennedy Space 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

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 Witches 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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