Shipminds and Angels Bound, and Other Futures: Addison Smith Chapbook Collection, #1

By Addison Smith

Explore ten science fictional futures in this collection of all new stories by science fiction author Addison Smith. Published here for the first time, the titular story, 'Shipminds and Angels Bound," is a tale of loss and grief as a detective finds a body strung up in wires and connected to a spaceship's navigation. This "angel" leads him through his own past with loss, and makes him face a decision he cannot be prepared for.

 

In addition to this, "Shipminds and Angels Bound, and Other Stories," contains nine standalone shorts exploring strange and distant futures. This is the first installation of the Addison Smith Chapbook Collection.

 

Full Contents:

"Shipminds and Angels Bound"

"Redwater Siren"

"We Gather Beneath Ships and Stars"

"Three Voids Waking"

"A System of Many Minds"

:To Those Who Dictate My Mind"

"Happy Monster Splat Day!"

"Nirvana Software Systems Release Log Entries 1106.4.14.003-NULL"

"Breakout!"

"Waiting for Contact" 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Addison Smith
• Release date: Jun 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227942401

Addison Smith

Addison Smith (he/him) is an amorphous being constructed of suspended cold brew and kombucha. His mind is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast formed around a brainstem of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus. He's doing his best, though. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications including Fantasy Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction. Addison is a member of the Codex Writers Group and you can find him on Bluesky @addisoncs.bsky.social.

Book preview

Shipminds and Angels Bound

The corrosion was the first sign I was looking at a murder. The girl's body stood upright in the ship's navigation pod, arms wide with tubes and wires erupting from her like spreading wings. I stepped across the ship's bridge to get a closer look, wary of setting off any proximity alerts or contaminating the crime scene. I wasn't supposed to be there, so it would be best if I went unnoticed. Up close the girl was just as angelic as the calculating machine they dressed her to be. The Angel systems looked human enough, but they were fabricated bodies meant to coexist with the chemicals and drugs necessary for faster-than-light travel. The girl in the tank might have been displayed as one, but her body had rejected the tubes, her skin red and oozing with infection where they pierced through her. It was a gross display of desecration, the way the tubes coursed through her skin and organs, and there was nothing accidental about it.

The rest of the ship looked abandoned. Its captainship was lost in a paperwork shuffle and the vessel awaited arbitration. That could take months and made it a good place to dump a body outside the more secure station. It was a wonder anyone found her before decay set in.

I opened my HUD. As the optical overlay came into focus, a message played through my system, both text and audible. Hello. What is your name? I swore. Commjacking was a fact of life in the station the past few months. It started as teenage rebellion, but like anything else it got picked up by the scammers, and was just a new way to spam people's systems. It wasn't effective, but it was annoying. I discarded the message with an optical flick.

I flipped through the files my connection had obtained. The interviews were tagged with text, so searching them was easy. I brought up the ship mechanic who had found the body and subvocalized a question. Have you seen this before? Has anyone ever tried to pass off a body like this?

The mechanic shook his head in my vision, looking just as confounded as the interviewer. I don't know why they would. It's kind of a lot of work. He pointed to the back of the girl's head, to a patch beneath a flow of auburn hair. See those capillaries? There's over a hundred of them going straight to the spine, all down the back. Every one of them is installed perfectly. More than that, they're not stabbed into the flesh. Those are permanent ports they're plugged into. This took a long time. And why go through all that just to put her on display?

I stepped up to the pod and inspected the capillary tubes in question, shining my flashlight on the connections. Fluid pooled within their winding length, stretching outward in the wings of their namesake. The system was disengaged, the pumps turned off and lying in wait. The psychic concoction was a clear fluid but a thin haze of red intermingled in the connection points, as if her blood still flowed when they were connected,

I flipped to the next question. What would happen if she was alive when they hooked her up?

The mechanic ran his hand through his short hair, as if unnerved by the very thought. "Yeah,