Alien being and other attractions

  Scene 1: Toy company   MASTER SHOT:         Bill in front of desk marked Vice President             BILL:   What do you mean you have to let me go?                                Do you forget that we go back to kindergarten together, Ritchie?                         I know the economy is bad. But I don’t make THAT much money here.                         No, I don’t want another job for less money                  ...

    SCENE 1: New York City Space Port – day time   A dark limo air car hovers near the entrance with a very pale boy (EARL) inside. Two other limos are in front and back of this car, hovering like guardian angels, although the drivers and armed guards are standing on the sidewalk, their attention focused on the doors to the terminal. Earl is an 11-year old somewhat lethargic boy, squinting out at the city as if this is a rare sight. He sings a soft song to himself, although it is clear from his expression that he is very sad. In his hand he is clutching a very ornate sympathy card. Outside, his nanny complains to one of the guards that the boy needs to be taken away from this place. “He’s had a terrible ordeal,” she says. “He can’t be left like this.” “The government says we have to wait, we wait,” the guard says unsympathetically. “But the boy is in shock,” the nanny argues. “You don’t lose both your parents on the same day and get over it easily. Not at age 11.” “Which ...

  The first thing I thought when I heard my space suit rip was that Louise wouldn’t love me any more. She couldn’t stand to look at a dead bird on the sidewalk or to feel a loose tooth in her mouth, so I knew she would hate a man who lost both legs I came out to repair a sensor on the ship’s side and my suit light failed. I should have gone back to the air lock and replaced the lamp, but I thought I could handle the repair without more than the external ship lights to guide me. With the ship headed for a dangerous asteroid belt, we needed the sensor active. I didn’t know the ship had already reached the outer ring of the belt and one of the random stones had struck the sensor, leaving a ragged tear in the metal that caught my suit in the dark shadows. My second thought hearing the rip and seeing the gauges go crazy on my helmet screen was that of death. Maybe that might have been kinder since men who survive accidents of my kind stop being men in minds like Louise’s. Cold rippled t...

 I worry too much. But it’s not everyday that your best friend from high school gets sentenced to 15 years in jail for getting supposedly carrying prohibited goods. And I take this out on the truck as I slam the buttons for the gears to get it up to the loading dock. My friend says he didn’t know the goods were stolen. The robot judge says, “the law is the law and justice must be served.” I slam the gear buttons again. The truck just won’t line up right, even when I punch the code for computer guidance, warm air swirling beneath the frame, making the metal shake. I keep expecting to hear the squeal of the warehouse robot, scolding me for not performing right – they check, double and triple check, convincing us how unreliable we are. One wrong move and I might find myself sharing a cell with my friend. They do this in the name of safety; we being raised from birth to prevent us any possibility of danger, robot risk managers telling us risk is bad. And god help us if we hurt a machin...

  On some days, it isn’t even worth my time getting out of my bunk. I can sense something will go wrong. But when nature calls, you got to go. All right, so maybe I should put my pants on since the john is a few doors down the corridor from mine. But this seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through in zero gravity when all I need to do is pee. To tell you the truth, I’m used to traveling on Rim shops – those all male little flits where you spend the whole trip naked and nobody cares. Here on a co-sex corporate ship, everything is tied up in regulation where a man can’t even breathe too hard without getting written up and fined – if a man is unlucky enough to run into an officer at the time. Which is exactly what happens now. And worse, I run into Lt. Walker, perhaps the stiffest bitch in the whole corporate navy, so stiff in fact, a lot of people call her “Mrs. Jack Frost” behind her back, and make jokes about what kind of fool might want to marry her. At first, she doesn’t se...

                                                          I sit down before the fireplace, newspaper in my lap, the frustration of work fading in the back of my brain, this chair my refuge each day as the sun sinks, my young son stretched out on the rug before the flames with pad and crayons. No music to fill this space; his scribbling and the flames crackling on the logs all I need. “Let’s see what you’re drawing, Bobby” I ask my son. He slips the paper into the brighter light for me to see, his blue eyes glittering with firelight and excited expectation. “Do you like it?” he asks. I react as if I have a bone caught in my throat. The vivid features of green-scaled creature stare back at me, a talented rendition, but with a gruesome outlook on the world, as if reflecting some inner turmoil, I know nothing about. "It is, well, unus...