Space Station Museum

Recently, there was news about how the International Space Station will one day be deorbited.  And this was met with cries of “Can’t it just be boosted into a higher orbit,” or, “Can’t it be turned into a museum?” and other such things.  And my knee-jerk reaction is that it should be preserved as a historic “building.” But then reality kicked in.  The station is getting old and there’s no telling how long some parts of it will stay safe.  Having a controlled reentry after all the crew and science are taken off is infinitely better than a catastrophic break up with crew – or tourists – onboard leaving a huge debris cloud that could damage satellites or other stations. 

While thinking on all of this, I realized that the ISS could live again someday as part of a museum.  This would be in orbit – as part of an even larger space station – and would start with models of everything: from spacecraft like the Vostok capsule of Yuri Gagarin, to the Space Shuttle, to the Chinese Shenzhou, as well as all the space stations from Skylab and Mir and the ISS.  And then there would be the full size versions, so the tourists could try to cram into a Mercury capsule or just float around in Mir.  These wouldn’t be a full recreation, there wouldn’t be any need for solar panels for example, just the interior space.  Any views out windows would just be video screens showing what would have been seen.  And since this would be in zero-g, you could cram things in any orientation they could fit.  Like you could have the Crew Dragon mockup squeezed in between the Tiangong and Salyut 1 mockups.  And this museum wouldn’t be the entirety of the complex.  Like you could be inside the Skylab section, and just on the other side of the bulkhead would be the linen closet for a hotel. 

While it will be a sad day when the ISS is deorbited, hopefully it will be replaced with bigger and better stations.  And while these replacements will primarily be used for science, they will one day be replaced with even bigger, even better stations that will still do science but will also hold tourists.  And as more and more humans live and work in space, hopefully someone will eventually build a space station museum so that future generations can marvel at how “small” the ISS was.

Short story – “The Gift of Vomit”

“The Gift of Vomit”

I turn off my phone and set it back on the dresser.  Just as I snuggle back under the covers, I hear my upstairs neighbor’s alarm going off.  The muffled blare goes on for several seconds before blissfully stopping.  For a minute or so I hear the vague sounds of him moving around before quiet returns.

I take a deep breath, and hope to go back to the dream I was having about my ex-girlfriend’s sister. 

My poor neighbor will be trudging through the rain on his morning commute, while under my warm blankets things are so peaceful.  I’ll have a nice relaxing day, all because I told my boss I threw up breakfast.

***

This was originally published in 2014 on a now defunct website.  Of course, back then if you did call in sick it probably wasn’t that big of a deal.  Now you’d probably get bombarded with an endless stream of “Nobody wants to work anymore” BS. 

***

I started reposting these stories on the third Thursday, and that the day this goes up happens to be St. Patrick’s Day is a complete coincidence.  The story isn’t titled “The Gift of Green Vomit” after all.

Random Story – New computer problems

This is just an odd little story from my life.

My first three or four computers were secondhand.  One that belonged to a friend’s boyfriend worked fine for writing stories, but it didn’t have the set up to get online.  So around 2005 I decided I’d buy a new computer for myself.  There was a kiosk in the local mall where you could pick out what you wanted in a computer and they’d ship it to you.  I should have had them ship it to where I worked, but I didn’t think of that.

At the time, I lived five minutes from work, so I’d go home for lunch.  I went home one day to find a note from UPS that they had three packages for me and that they’d try to deliver again the next day.  The complex where I lived had six or seven apartment buildings and the next day when I went home for lunch, I saw a UPS truck parked in front of the third one from mine, so I pulled in next to it.  I waited for a couple of minutes, and when the guy came back out from delivering something I asked if he had anything for me.  He did, but only one package.  So I took it to my apartment and was really happy to have new … speakers.

I had to go to their pickup center or whatever to get the rest of my computer.  It was drizzling that day, and the one box that I think just had the monitor in it easily fit in my car.  But the other box with everything else didn’t want to go in the passenger seat.  No matter how I turned it, it didn’t want to fit.  I think I had to cut it open, take the keyboard and some other small things out, and crush the top of the box down before it would fit in my car.

Back in my apartment, I got everything set up.  I had my new, fancy computer on the left side of my desk, and my old, clunky computer on the right side.  All I had to do was transfer all of my stories.  For the previous ten or so years, I had used 3.5 inch disks.  When I was picking what I wanted for my new computer, I didn’t even think of adding a 3.5 inch disk drive because I just thought of them as standard.  So how could I transfer all of my stories from a computer not hooked up to the internet with only a 3.5 inch drive, to a computer hooked up to the internet with USB drives?

I took three or four disks and crammed them with as many stories as I could fit.  I then got in my car and drove the ten or so minutes to my local library which had a couple computers with 3.5 inch drives hooked up to the internet.  I emailed my stories to myself.  I then drove back to my apartment, and downloaded them to my new computer.  So it took over half-an-hour to move my files a foot.

I had a lot of individual stories, but for some I kept multiple versions of them as I revised them.  So it took me five or six trips to move everything.  I usually went to the library after work, but on Saturday I made two or three trips just to be done with the damn thing. 

That computer died five or six years ago, but I’ll always remember the pain I had setting it up.

My Putin Prediction

My prediction is that one of these days, a group of Russian oligarchs and maybe some of the Russian military, will go to “arrest” Putin.  There will be a struggle and he will, regretfully, be shot … in the back of the head.  They will declare a ceasefire, and start pulling their troops back from Ukraine.  They will then release all these documents showing that they tried to stop Putin from these criminal acts but HE ACTED ENTIRELY ON HIS OWN.  They will then say, “Since the one responsible for all of this is dead, can you call of the sanctions, return our yachts, and just let bygones be bygones?”

Voter registration drive and book sale

It seems every other year here in the US we face an election that WILL DETERMINE THE VERY SURVIVAL OF THE NATION.  And after going through this for the last five or six never-ending election cycles, there is a strong desire to just listen to music and play video games.  But to be a buzzkill, elections are important in that they will determine the intensity of the dumpster fire we end up in.  So I’ve come up with a deal: if you take a few minutes to register to vote, or confirm your voter registration, you can grab any – or all – of these six ebooks on Kindle for free.  Admittedly, there’s no way for me to know if you register or not, so we’re just working on the honor system.

How do you register to vote or check your registration?  You can either do it through your state’s website, or on a site like Vote411.  I don’t know how long it takes to actually register to vote since it’s something I haven’t dealt with since the last time I moved over ten years ago.  But checking your registration only takes a couple minutes.  The reason you should check your registration is that the lists of voters needs constant updating as people register, move, and die.  And even without nefarious voter purges, it’s possible for mistakes to happen.  If a mistake is caught early, it can be fixed early, and things can go smoother on Election Day.  You don’t want to find out you’re not registered after waiting in line for eight hours. 

If you’re reading this but don’t live in the US, then you can still grab my ebooks for free, I’ll just ask that you do whatever is necessary for you to participate in your political system.  If you live in a dictatorship where you can’t participate in your political system, I won’t ask how you managed to get online.

The following six ebooks will be free from Monday February 21st, through Friday February 25th.  But you can register to vote or check your registration anytime.

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? Stephen L. Thompson’s attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of his short stories with a political element into his Political Pies anthology. His stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, his goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

Duty

For reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.

A Man of Few Words

A Man of Few Words is a collection of fifty flash fiction stories by Stephen L. Thompson. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers? How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? These questions and more are explored by Stephen using less than 1000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.

The majority of the stories were previously published (most by Stephen himself on his website) but all were revised for this collection. In addition, each piece is accompanied by some background information on the origin of the story or a funny tale about the writing of it to give a fuller experience.

Brain for Rent and other stories

Brain for Rent and other stories is a collection of five of my short scifi stories to give a sampling of my writing. The collection includes: “Brain for Rent” about a ne’re-do-well failed writer with a conceptual implant who discusses his work with a young woman thinking of getting an implant herself. “The Demonstration” is about a different young woman wanting to show off her latest body modification. “Self Imprisonment” offers one solution of safe keeping the backup copy of yourself. “The Best Job Ever” is about a necessary – yet unpleasant – human/alien interaction. And the collection ends with “Why Stay?” which explains why, after years of fighting the humans, the robots just deactivate.

An Ounce of Prevention

Like most people, Jason Fisher wanted to make the world a better place, but he doubted he would ever have the chance to make much of a mark. Then a “woman” came to him, asking his help to save humanity by threatening it.

The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories

The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories is a collection of five, short, scifi stories to provide a sample of my writing.

A being from the distant future with almost unlimited powers comes back to help Ian Steele make the world a better place in “The Most Powerful Man in the World.” One bookstore customer has an entirely different reason for wanting books in “Black Market Books.” “Motherhood” tells the story of Thomas Gillespie, the surrogate mother for a baby AI. “Storyteller” is about an author thinking his book into existence. And “Deadworld” is about the alien world humans are reborn on – in alien bodies – after we die.

Random Story – A horse in a vase

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Several years ago, I was dating a woman heading into Valentine’s Day.  And I really didn’t know what to do.  I could have taken her back to the restaurant where we went on our first date, but I had taken her there in mid-January because of a fight.  So one day, in early February, we were at a store and she saw these foot tall, red vases.  She picked one up and looked at it for some time, but finally decided against it.  So later that night, after dropping her off, I went back to the store and bought one.  I also bought two bags of Hershey’s Kisses to fill the vase with.  But then I thought of something else.

She liked horses, so I went to the toy aisle and found a plastic horse that would fit in the vase.  My whole idea was that then she could honestly tell people that her boyfriend got her a horse for Valentine’s Day.

About a week before Valentine’s Day, we broke up, which was for the best.  We did an exchange of items – spare keys, books, etc. – and I thought about including the vase, but figured it would probably just come flying back at my head. 

A couple of months later, after eating all the Kisses, I had a vase with a horse that I didn’t know what to do with.  Then she reached out to me because she needed help with something, and over a few months we tried just being friends.  Afterwards, I did wonder if the “help” she needed was some ploy to maybe get back together, but if that was the case it blew up because of a weird string of events that are probably another Random Story.  Anyway, in that short window when we were friends, I gave her the vase, which when I told her why I bought it she said that would have been a very good gift.  As to the horse, I think she just rolled her eyes.

Rural socialism

I live in a very rural area.  It’s about fifteen miles from where I live to where I work, and my preferred route has about ten miles of back roads where I’m more likely to see deer than cars, with the final five miles on a main road.  Where I live is also very red.  I believe 80% of my county voted for Trump in 2020, which was a few points higher than in 2016.  I don’t see as many Trump flags as I used to, but I don’t know if they’ve finally been taken down or were just put away because of winter weather. 

Anyway, a few months ago as I was going to work, I wondered how many people actually live on these back roads.  And it’s hard to say because there are numerous little roads going off into the woods and I don’t know if there’s one house back there or ten.  There are also numerous camps in the area and when you just see glimpses of a building through the trees as you drive by it’s hard to say if that’s a camp or a house.  To make things easy, I’ll just say that there’s 100 people living along those ten miles.  There’s probably about the same on the five miles of main road, but that does bring you in to the business side of town, not the residential side.

Since these are Pennsylvania back roads, they’re … okay.  I’ve driven on worse, I’ve driven on better.  But I was wondering how much it costs to pave these roads.  Now, I started looking online, but it seemed every site I found gave different numbers, from a few hundred thousand dollars to over a million.  The high end were for actually building roads, but even just simply repaving an existing road is expensive, especially since these roads wind around and over hills.  Without finding an actual bill – or driving an expert along the roads so they can calculate how much it would cost – there’s no firm way for me to know how much it would cost to repave these back roads.  For simplicity sake, we’ll take a low end of $100,000.  Oh, that’s per mile.  So for the ten miles of these back roads, that would be $1,000,000.  Of course, maybe we only repave it every decade, so that means the 100 of us who live along these roads need to come up with $100,000 every year, or $1,000 each.

That’s just for these roads I said are my preferred route.  When the weather gets bad, I take another route which is five miles of back roads and ten miles of main road.  I don’t normally take this route because it brings me to the other side of town which I then have to go through.  So that $1,000 a year is just for the decadal repaving of this one ten mile section of road and doesn’t include stuff like plowing in the winter or any other maintenance.

So how do these roads get paved?  Well, the government takes taxes from heavily populated areas and redistributes it so that us rural folk aren’t left with the whole bill.  Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my neighbors used these roads to go to some “Taxation is theft!” rally where they scream that the tyrannical government never did anything for them.