The Short Version

The follow up to my first self-published short story, The First Punch, is available through Amazon for Kindle. Once again, it is £0.70p. Buy it here!

The Longer Version

If you don’t know what these stories are, I recommend you click the above link for The First Punch, as that post has more detail about what I’m doing and, if you need it, what Kindle is. In short, Wrong Universe is a series of short stories, set out kind of like episodes in a TV series. I am writing as and when I find time, and releasing them in eBook form through Amazon for the lowest price I can set. The Lonely Station is story number two, and here’s a little bit about it.

Firstly, for those who read The First Punch, you’ll notice that this story is considerably longer (nearly three times longer, in fact) and is bordering on novelette, rather than short story. While a few people did mention that they thought The First Punch was a little on the short side, the increased length of this story was not intentional. My original plan for this series was to be an audio podcast series and, as such, the length of The First Punch was by design; approximately 4000 words, as that equates to around half an hour of audio with my average spoken words per minute. The audio series may still happen, in the future, but I have no certain plans for that anymore.

With The Lonely Station, I just started writing the story (I usually make my stories up as I write), and let it finish when it finished. As a result, the story is longer (as I’ve said), and there is a little less slapstick and a little more grit.

I think this story is a better indicator of what to expect from future Wrong Universe stories than The First Punch was.

Now, below is a cover shot and the blurb. Follow the link at the top of the post, or click the image to get to the Amazon page where you can buy the story (I encourage everyone and their dog to do so), and if you’d like a taster of what to expect, I have posted a small excerpt below that.

The Lonely Station

When the crew of the experimental faster than light vessel, the Parker, are stranded in a strange universe, the last thing they need is to be locked up on suspicion of being pirates!

And, because no universe is without a sense of irony real pirates attack while Shan and her crew are being held.

The untested crew of the Parker need all of the skills at their disposal to overcome to their senile jailer and the invading the space pirates, but will that be enough?

An Excerpt

VIVA was not true artificial intelligence. She didn’t really feel anger, fear, love, but she could simulate those emotions to an almost indistinguishable degree. Her creators had seen fit to make this distinction, so as to avoid VIVA’s emotions getting in the way of her duty, while still making her personable. The problem with this was, simply put, they did a very good job. At some point, simulations become so sophisticated that they can barely be called simulations any more.

VIVA was angry.

She knew, of course, that she wasn’t really angry; she was just simulating anger perfectly, and she could turn that simulation off any time she liked. She wasn’t thinking about this, however, because she was too angry.

She was angry because these filthy pirates had kidnapped her crew, and now had the audacity to try and blow her ship up!

The internal thought processes of a sophisticated thinking machine, such as VIVA, are not readily understandable by the average human mind. While VIVA may talk like a perfectly normal human, the way her quantum central processing unit processes thought is nothing like the way a human mind processes thought. The differences are drastic, and incomprehensible, and so a look at her thoughts at this precise moment in time would give the looker very little insight into to what she was thinking.

Roughly translated, however, she was thinking, Bugger this!

She fired up the Parker’s engines.