Read Online Lights in the Deep by Brad R. Torgersen - Free Book Online

both the arrays and the sample to a safe harbor, and the rest was history.
    The observatory, along with the bodies of Howard and Tabitha, was allowed to continue on its eternal journey towards the vastness of the far-away Oort.
    I bided my time as just another adolescent Outbounder: lounging around in the public spaces, getting used to my new body and its revelatory mobility, and playing on the direct-connect system. Hundreds of thousands of minds, most human, a few alien, all feeding into and interconnected by a vast, peer-based sharing system that was serverless and extended as far as communications equipment could make it go. Not quite a pooled mind, since everyone kept up their privacy barriers, but enough crossover so that we each could learn and access enough information that it was like digesting an entire college semester every day of the week.
    I also managed to stay in touch with the freckly red-head from the clone center. Physically, Colleen Keilor was a good bit older than I was, but age didn’t seem to matter much to Outbounders.
    Col and I got along quite well.
    A couple of years after I awoke among the Outbound, their Quorum announced its intention to begin reclamation of the solar system. The Quorum asked for volunteers to spearhead the effort, which would involve not only cleaning out all the killsats that still prowled between the planets, but a partial terraforming of the wasted Earth.
    It would be a protracted effort—the greatest challenge of the Outbound Age.
    Col and I signed up immediately.
    • • •
    Irenka Elaine Jaworski-Keilor was born in the midst of the Inbound flight of the First Reclamation Flotilla. Bright-eyed, and with a face and smile that seems eerily familiar, she brings my wife Col and I a great deal of joy. Once, Irenka would have seemed an impossibility. But through the years of changing diapers and teaching her to read and write and do math and use direct-connect, I’ve gradually accepted the fact that impossibilities are routine in my new, expanded reality.
    We’ve reached Jupiter, and found the scorched remains of the old settlements. The killsats were waiting too, but we made short work of them, radioing our progress back to the Second and Third Flotillas which were launched in our wake.
    There’s work aplenty for the new inhabitants of the solar system.
    I hope that some day I can take Irenka down to Earth and show her a world I once called home, and which, hopefully, with a lot of fixing, might be called home again.
    ▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼
    “Outbound” came together over the winter holiday season in 2008. It was the mixture of two different stories which I’d started and stopped earlier in the year, and which seemed to unconsciously complement each other so well, I decided to blend their components and draft an entirely new story from scratch.
    Very often, when you’re a new writer just starting out, you don’t have a lot of faith in your craft: your ability to execute the story in your head—only this time on paper—such that readers will find it as engaging and enjoyable as you do in your mind.
    Then, there are stories that just seem to click.
    “Outbound” was one of these: I knew when I was done with it, that it was (at that point in time) the best thing I’d yet written. So strong was my surety, that I felt almost electrified as a result. “Outbound” was going to be the story—the one that would put me over the top. Having never sold fiction professionally before, and after many years of fruitless effort, I knew I’d finally (finally!) generated something above-the-standard.
    So you’ll understand if I tell you I was significantly crushed when “Outbound” did not win for its quarter of the L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest; in which the story had been a Finalist.
    How could this story have failed?
    I’d written “Outbound” specifically with the Contest in mind. After studying past winning stories. And when I