The Crumbling of a Nation and other stories

By Ryan David Ginsberg

Ryan David Ginsberg bursts onto the literary scene with this hauntingly beautiful collection of stories that cannot be read just once and then forgotten. They are stories to be read again and again, stories that will stay with the reader long after the book has been put down.

Within these stories, you w

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Ginsberg Publishing House
• Release date: Jun 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9798986976655

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Copyright © 2024 by Ryan David Ginsberg

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The stories Tommy Longhorn, Amber’s Son, A Million Times Over Again, The Termination Bureau, A Baby is Born, and The Unknown Writer first appeared in It Was Just Another Day in America: a collection of poems and stories, though they have since been edited and revised.

The last story, In the Algorithm We Trust, contains the first three chapters of a work in progress of the same name. If you are an agent or publisher interested in reading the entire manuscript, hit me up.

The cover was created with the use of AI. It’s a long story—but basically, I paid two cover designers who both provided me with AI generated covers. When I confronted them about their use of AI, they refused to return the money I had paid. So all I had was AI covers and way less money.  I am not happy about it. But it is what it is. I hope I will soon have enough money to pay for a third (and ideally, final) cover designer for a second edition of this book.

But until then, here we are.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 9798986976648

The Ginsberg Publishing House

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tommy

Longhorn

APPROACHING THE MILKY WAY GALAXY at a speed once thought to be impossible is a ship captained by an extraterrestrial being whose name is best translated into the English language as Tommy Longhorn, and a telescope manned by the highest-ranking squadron in the US Space Force is aimed directly it.

It is the sighting these soldiers have waited their entire careers for:

A real-life UFO.

The telescope they are looking through is attached to a high-powered Astroblaster created to shoot down any extraterrestrial threat to their nation of birth—the United States of America.

However, the soldiers do not shoot, nor do they even flinch at the sight of the ship, for they are unable to see it for what it truly is. You see, Tommy Longhorn, the extraterrestrial captain of the ship, has turned the exterior camouflage setting to the ‘ON’ position. As a result, the soldiers see in the ship’s place just a tiny speck of space dust—though that speck does not remain in their vision for long.

Rotate! commands the general, and so the soldiers angle their Astroblaster a single degree to the right, a procedure that takes the entire squadron and several minutes to accomplish.

And with that tiny movement, the speck of space dust that is, in actuality, an extraterrestrial ship nearly three square miles in size vanishes from sight.

Oorah, says the general.

Oorah, say the soldiers in unison.

And together the squadron studies every inch of the new piece of space now visible to them for any potential threat to the United States of America—though all they see is space dust.

Tommy Longhorn is a member of a universe-wide coalition of species known as the Confederation of the Cosmos. The Confederation has been in existence for billions of years and consists of tens of billions of species from tens of billions of planets located throughout hundreds of billions of galaxies. The Confederation is constantly searching the Universe for more species to add to this already large coalition, resulting in a never-ending exploration of the Universe, of which Tommy Longhorn has become an integral part.

He is a Planet Explorer.

His duty is to travel to planets upon which intelligent lifeforms have been discovered and live among the species. He integrates with their society, observes their way of life—their culture, their beliefs, their actions. He enters into relationships with members of that species, eats their foods, worships their gods, reads their literature, observes their art, studies their architecture, learns their laws, practices their politics, plays their games, attends their schools, participates in their…

He lives life as it is lived on the assigned planet, for that is the only way to truly understand a species.

After completing his observations of said planet, he is tasked with the responsibility of recommending to the Governmental Board of the Confederation whether or not the studied species should receive an invitation to join the Confederation.

And so it came to be that Tommy Longhorn, an extraterrestrial being, a member of the Confederation of the Cosmos, and a Planet Explorer, found himself on a ship disguised as a speck of space dust located many, many lightyears away from his home planet, bound for the Milky Way Galaxy:

More specifically, bound for the planet Earth.

In his office, he prepares for arrival.

This office is filled with hundreds of thousands of books written in thousands of languages from thousands of species from all across the Universe, all of which he can read with ease despite being monolingual, thanks to his Omni-Lingual Lenses, which, when turned to the proper setting, translate every written word in front of him to his native tongue of Klementyme. Among the books, sitting randomly upon the shelves, are little knick-knacks to remind him of home: a necklace his mother used to wear, an old uniform of his father’s, some pictures drawn by his kids, and various figurines, among other things.

Hanging on the wall across from his desk is a picture, a painting, and a piece of paper, all in matching frames.

The picture shows Tommy, his wife, and his four children taken the day before his departure. Tommy is quite large, even for his species, standing at just under ten feet and weighing just north of 800 pounds. He has thick, blubbery skin, like that of a hippopotamus. That skin is a bright purple, nearly luminous. He has four arms and four legs. He has six eyes, all of which blink entirely out of sync, with no two ever closing simultaneously and with no obvious rhyme or reason to the order in which they blink. One eye may blink four, five, six times before another blinks at all. As for his wife, she is pale green. Her skin anything but luminous. She is much shorter than Tommy, standing at roughly seven and a half feet and weighing roughly 500 pounds. As for their children, one son and three daughters, they are all varying shades of blue—some light, some dark—and stand at roughly eight feet, give or take a couple of inches.

To the left of this family portrait is the letter Tommy Longhorn and his mother received when he was a child, announcing the death of his father, who was, like Tommy is now, a Planet Explorer. His father had completed sixteen missions before the one that finally killed him. After all communication had been lost between the Planet Exploration Group and his father, a team of Galaxy Defenders was sent to the planet his father was exploring, existing somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy. Upon investigation, the Galaxy Defenders discovered that his father’s identity as an extraterrestrial being had been detected by the species of this foreign planet and that he had been hanged in the square of the planet’s capital. His body, which had already begun to rot, was still hanging in the square when the Galaxy Defenders discovered it, along with a sign upon which had been written words that were too gruesome to be copied in the letter. In the middle of the night, the Galaxy Defenders cut down his father’s body, brought it to their ship, and flew it back to his home planet, where he was given a proper and honorable burial.

The letter was signed by the highest members of the Planet Exploration Group, along with small, personal messages of grief and sorrow.

And no, the species that killed his father did not receive an invitation to the Confederation of the Cosmos. Instead, they were placed on a list of species considered to be severe threats to the Universe itself.

They have been kept under close watch ever since.

To the right of the family portrait is a painting of the entrance to the Planet Collective on the day it first opened to the public. Tommy has always been obsessed with the Planet Collective. He visited many times as a child and takes his own kids to visit every time he has the chance, his most recent visit being just two months ago.

The Planet Collective is a scientific haven involving a synthetic solar system built around a sun long ago discovered to have an empty orbit. It was an idea thought up by a group of the Confederation’s most prestigious scientists, where they bring in small groups of every species discovered in the Known Universe to live in the Planet Collective, allowing scientists from all over to perform all sorts of experiments with all sorts of species while never needing to leave this singular solar system.

Over a span of multiple millennia, this collective of scientists, whose members are constantly changing as the generations come and go, have created thousands of planets of various sizes and distances for that once lonely sun. On each planet, they have constructed thousands of habitats that emulate those found throughout the Universe. And as more species are discovered each day, the quicker the Planet Collective continues to expand.

A synthetic planet is currently being constructed to emulate that of the planet Earth, upon which scientists hope to carry out experiments for billions of years to come—experiments that can help the Confederation understand even more than they already do about life, evolution, and intelligence.

But before any studies can take place in the Planet Collective involving the species of planet Earth, Tommy Longhorn must first complete his observations.

And so, as he sits in his office—in front of a picture, a painting, and a letter—he prepares for those observations by studying the 12,093-page portfolio prepared for him by the thousands of Life Inspectors who visited the planet Earth before it was decided that the planet, and more importantly its apex creature, was finally ready for a Planet Explorer like Tommy Longhorn to conduct a more thorough exploration, evaluation, and recommendation.

In this portfolio, hundreds of millions of years’ worth of research, observations, and experimentations had been summarized for Tommy Longhorn, including the geographical breakdown of the Earth, the chemical makeup of its atmosphere, the strength of its gravity, and so much more.

But most important of all, the portfolio provides Tommy Longhorn with the information he needs to best understand the planet’s apex creature: the species he has been sent to the planet Earth to study, the species that will one day be added to the Planet Collective, the species he will soon live among:

Human beings.

The first 500 pages are filled with sketches of human beings, providing the chronological evolution of the species, physically and societally, over a duration of nearly four million years. The next 1,000 pages are filled with photographs, handwritten notes, laboratory experiments, x-ray scans, copies of memos sent to and received from the Planet Exploration Group, transcripts of conversations had with various human beings, letters written to ‘the Planet Explorer eventually assigned to the planet Earth’, and so much more.

The final 8,000 pages discuss the over 4,000 human beings the final Life Inspector abducted during her final 783 visits to the planet, upon whom incredibly invasive experiments were conducted, externally and internally.

As a result of these experiments, three critical technologies were created to aid Tommy Longhorn in his observations of the planet.

The first is a bodysuit that will allow him to camouflage himself as a human being with just the push of a button. The second is a speaking device that will translate any word spoken by Tommy Longhorn from his native tongue of Klementyme into a language the human being he is talking to can understand. And the third is a hearing device that works in the exact opposite manner, translating their words into Klementyme.

For the only way Tommy Longhorn can understand what it is like to be a human being is to be a human being—or at least to be as close to a human being as is scientifically possible for him to be.

While still a few hours away from Earth, he puts the portfolio down and goes to the kitchen. He grabs a tray of food from the icebox and places it in a machine similar in appearance to that of a microwave on Earth, only it does not have any buttons and certainly does not operate like a microwave. Once the door to the machine has closed, the food inside is scanned and the ideal temperature of each item is determined.

After a few moments, the device dings gently, softly.

He opens the door and grabs the tray and takes it to the table across the way and sits down to eat. On the tray is a thick piece of what looks like T-bone steak, only the meat is dark grey and the fat is light yellow and the bone is neon green and the meat is not actually meat at all. Next to it is a pinkish blob of mashed-up fruit topped with