PLEASE NOTE: This is Part Two of a three part story. Part one is available here:
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Natsuki and John were having the same argument they’d been having since the morning after their wedding.

“John you should be the chairman,” Natsuki said one more time.

With a sigh Hull replied, “Honey look the board has already accepted you as chairwoman and it's what your father wants and my father wanted.”

“Do we always have to follow their wishes?”

Last year, Richard Anderson wrote "Visions of Sound," an excellent story about humanity's first voyage to another star. This time out, he's written a prequel to that story, explaining how the world depicted in "Visions" came to pass. We will be serializing this story, but in keeping with our new policy of giving our readers great big steaks rather than literary chicken nuggets, the installments will be much longer. The story will conclude on March 21st.

So, without further ado, we are very please to present "Free Are The Stars,"

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October 30 2042

Welcome to our first new story of 2010!

To help us celebrate our return to running original fiction, Tessa Dick has generously allowed us to repring her short story, "Bear 2.0," a tale of futurewar, cybernetics, and the devaluation of the human soul. We're pretty excited about this, since this is not only our first original story of the new year, but it's also our first story by a published author, rather than our normal gaggle of talenten amateurs. It comes from Tessa's 2008 anthology, "Quachi and Other Stories and Poems."

Tessa has been a great friend to us and our site, and we're deeply indebted to her for allowing us the loan of her talented mind. Thank you, Tessa! We appreciate it!

The complete story is under the jump.

Amber Dawn Watez sat in a corner booth of the lounge, her drink forgotten as she read the latest test reports on project 1701. To an outside observer she was just staring off into space humming to herself, but in reality she was deep into the charts graphs and mathematical modeling of the report that were display on a pair of contact lens she wore. The Lenses made her eye color seem to shift every few seconds as she changed pages, a byproduct of the obsolete technology she was using.

And we were grey
            I sat in the rosy sunset with the love of my life. My lukewarm tea sat forgotten on the table as I gazed at her for the millionth and last time. She was grey, and the lines on her face reflected the years we had spent together, the laughter and the pain of our lives on this dying planet.
            "The tea is very tasty, love."

I must have been walking across campus when it happened.

It was a small bible college on the edge of Appalachia - pretty scenery, naïve girls, stolid minds. I hated the place, and it hated me, it and I were a poor marriage from the moment we’d met, but I’d made my bed and had no choice but to lie, cheat, and steal in it. I’d gone to a bigger, better state school before a nervous breakdown landed me here, the victim of loving parents who felt a Christian environment would be better for me than a secular one, I’d meet a better class of people, I’d get in less trouble, my mental wounds would heal more quickly here.

Stony Hill, Florida, 1964