ORIGINAL FICTION: "For Moments At Seventeen" by Keith Hamilton Cobb

For Moments at Seventeen
(Because the Commonwealth is human-centric, and everything is measured in Earth years. Silly, yes?)

If now is a time that is forever “after this last” and “before that next thing,” then the now, or series of nows, that comprised the six months after I had, by what means I don’t really know, delivered myself from indenture to a ring of flash and weapons traders, and before anyone had ever offered me a fee to take a life, were peaceful. The verbal contract with the traders, a colorful but pernicious cast of characters who called themselves The Consortium, dictated that I remain in their employ for another full year. If I had not been bored, restless, at odds with their methods, undercompensated, and underappreciated …well…I am still. Suffice it, however, to say that if I had not been seventeen, which is to say had I been the mature and prophetic sage that I am today, I probably would have stayed. A funny thing, the propriety of thieves who will cite you your obligation to the letter of your contract with the gravest decorum while robbing everyone blind and fatting themselves on the fruits of your labor. Funny too are a young man’s impulses. Perhaps afraid that, once finding me gone, they would be even angrier with me to realize as well that I had run with some sizable portion of their contraband and thus be compelled to a more fervent pursuit, I instead took flight with nothing. I was to learn that, despite having left them with all that was “theirs” except for my humble self, my having broken my scoundrel’s oath and bolted at all gave them umbrage enough to pursue me to exhaustion, on sheer principle I suppose. It was a decision on my part that I can’t even label as juvenile, for it was one that no other Nietzschean male over the age of nine, to my knowledge, would ever have made. I surely should have filled my packs with all the tradable goods I could carry if I were to be hot-footing it around the sky for who knew how long with who knew how many of the syndicate’s badmen on my six. A large, maximum-yield firearm or two would have been a fairly smart bet as well in retrospect. But hindsight is flawless, and by seventeen I had begun, strugglingly, to come to terms with a much earlier realization, which was that I wasn’t any other Nietzschean male over the age of nine. All of my thinking upon my missing pride considered with the inexplicable nature of the very un-Nietzschean decision-making processes that I had involuntarily come somehow to employ brought me to this single unsavory, and yet perhaps ultimately liberating conclusion: The Kodiak had nurtured me in the cultural embrace of an unmistakably evolving ethos. It was more than that. It was, on some level, genetic. I’m sure of it now. Either way, however, I was, for better or worse, but usually to my extreme inconvenience, imbued with sensibilities that were in direct and perpetual conflict with some greater Nietzschean imperatives. And as if that were not issue enough, the ancestors had not then the common courtesy to remain present and account for them. There were no elders to whom I could turn for consult as moments of crisis arose. Nor, in repose, was there anyone left with whom I could leisurely discuss the pros and cons of having made choice “A” over choice “B”. One of my father’s many tenets to me was, “You are forever on your own.” How right he had been proven time and again, especially since he and all his tribe had left the visible plain, but there was precious little comfort that I could derive from his prescience now. I was a puzzle, I’m sure, to the sinister rabble with whom I’d been consorting, but no greater an enigma than I had become to myself. The reasoning that fueled my choices was most often untenable, sprung from overly fertile emotional soil seeded with exotic, un-native ethics culled from several years wandering among the non-Nietzschean, displaced from anywhere I might have ever called home, estranged from the native mind. Reflecting on this while space trotting unarmed and destitute, on the run from smart and livid gangsters, was a