Machine Language

By Sherry D. Ramsey

On the damaged colony ship Strelka, limping toward the sanctuary of a nearby planet, Yuka and the other surviving colonists--even the children--struggle to keep the ship moving. They pilot remote rovers on the planet's inhospitable surface, searching for a region where they might have a chance at survival. 

 

But tensions on the ship are high, and the few left uninjured in the disaster--the Fulls--hold themselves separate from the many who survived, but not intact. When Yuka's remote rover encounters a robotic explorer that didn't come from the Strelka, she's not sure what it means...or who to trust with the information. If she can communicate with it, she might gain valuable planetary data. But what if it poses a threat to the colony even more dangerous than the ones they already face?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sherry D. Ramsey
• Release date: Feb 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781990178023

Sherry D. Ramsey

Sherry D. Ramsey is a speculative fiction writer, editor, publisher, creativity addict and self-confessed internet geek. When she's not writing, she makes jewelry, gardens, hones her creative procrastination skills on social media, and consumes far more coffee and chocolate than is likely good for her.Her debut novel, One's Aspect to the Sun, was published by Tyche Books in late 2013 and was awarded the Book Publishers of Alberta "Book of the Year" Award for Speculative Fiction. The sequel, Dark Beneath the Moon, is due out from Tyche in 2015. Her other books include To Unimagined Shores—Collected Stories. With her partners at Third Person Press (http://www.thirdpersonpress.com), she has co-edited five anthologies of regional short fiction to date. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies in North America and beyond. Every November she disappears into the strange realm of National Novel Writing Month and emerges gasping at the end, clutching something resembling a novel.A member of the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia Writer’s Council, Sherry is also a past Vice-President and Secretary-Treasurer of SF Canada, Canada's national association for Speculative Fiction Professionals.You can visit Sherry online www.sherrydramsey.com, find her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter @sdramsey.

Book preview

MACHINE LANGUAGE

A short story by

Sherry D. Ramsey

Copyright © Sherry D. Ramsey 2018-2020

Cover Design by Sherry D. Ramsey ©2020; Background photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.com

All rights reserved. The author retains all copyright in the content of this book.

No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission from the author.

This book contains a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, entities or settings is unintentional, coincidental, or entirely attributable to the whimsy of the multiverse and fluctuations in the space-time continuum.

This story first appeared in Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide v. 5, USA, Dreaming Robot Press, December 2018.

Ramsey, Sherry D., 1963-, author

Machine Language / Sherry D. Ramsey

Email: [e-mail]

Web: www.sherrydramsey.com

Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada

Machine Language

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-990178-02-3

Yuka pushed the joystick control forward with her right hand, sending the remote rover probe scuttling down the side of a grassy hill. With her left hand, she zoomed the rover’s camera out for a better view of the entire valley. The mechanical fingers of her prosthetic left arm responded slower than she would have liked, so the camera panned out in jerky starts and stops. She glanced down at the pale green skin covering the hand and sighed. She wouldn’t even care so much that it didn’t look like a real hand if only it worked better.

The rover’s camera revealed yet another deep, thickly-forested valley waiting at the bottom of the hill. Trees like overgrown fungi stretched tall, spindly fingers toward the low-hanging cloud cover. Yuka squinted at the screen. The vegetation changed from one valley to the next, and these trees were different again, sprouting lacy, white, leaf-like growths along their trunks and branches. At the very top, they brightened to orange and wove