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It had been a long voyage. Longer than the time that had actually passed. A small eternity trapped within the confines of a spaceship hurtling toward a planet hostile to life, but that had valuable minerals tech billionaires were willing to pay good money for.

He’d boarded the ship full of dreams of future wealth. Hadn’t even minded the tight confines of the quarters he’d been given–a single bunk with a small locker within a dormitory cabin he shared with 49 other men–and had seen the shared amenities as the price to pay for the work he’d accepted.

When his two years of service were up, he would go back to Earth and his family with a hefty bonus to add to the fat monthly paychecks his family would be using to survive while he was gone. He would be able to get a nice house on a large plot of land and he’d be able to sit out in his yard enjoying the open sky and the sweetness of mother nature. Two years didn’t seem like such a sacrifice.

Except it was more like five years, as the voyage from Earth to Mars would take a year and a half each way, the company not wanting to use more expensive fuel than they had to. It was easier to have the ship travel at slower speeds, as the time of the people aboard ship was cheap to the executives running big companies.

He had accepted the sign on bonus and that was that. Ever since his signature went on that piece of paper, he’d been a piece of equipment to the company rather than a possible consumer of their products.

In the darkness of his sleep cycle, resting within the cramped confines of his bunk with the curtain drawn closed, he would wonder if he was ever going to be allowed to go home.

Once he finished his term, how willing would they be to ship him safely home? Or would it be cheaper for them to "have an accident" that resulted in his death? A one-time million dollar death benefit paid to his family was much easier than taking him all the way back to Earth.

He didn’t know if it was the depression of living within the confines of the ship, with its recycled air that always had a bit of fart smell to it, but he was beginning to worry about whether he would ever see his family again.

He wished that he’d studied more about spaceflight. The things he’d learned from the friends he’d made amongst the other miners… It terrified him.

Sometimes when he was alone with his own thoughts, he would think that he could feel the cancer growing inside him. His bones decalcifying. His organs shifting and warping within the blood filled bag of his skin.

He would make himself scared when he let himself think of his growing doubts about the company and the company’s plans for him. He would wonder if maybe he needed some extra vitamin D. If maybe the lack of sunlight was giving him depression or something. But he knew that the hull of the starship barely offered any shielding from cosmic radiation, which was why the company had made the decision to forego windows altogether.

There was no looking out at the barrenness of space. No gazing at the blinding light of the sun. No fantasizing while gazing at stars "whizzing" by the porthole windows.

Space travel was nothing like he had imagined as a child. And maybe he had lied to himself about how things were going to be when he’d accepted this job. But here he was: On a spaceship headed toward a poisonous planet that was bombarded with more radiation than was good for long-term survival.

And once there, he would be given a narrow bunk and a tiny locker in a shared dormitory of the underground habitat that would be his home for the two years of his work term. A human tool used by the company to make more money than he had ever seen or would ever see in his entire life.

Lying on his bunk, he imagined himself as a saw or a hammer mounted on the wall of his garage above his workbench. And if he closed his eyes hard enough and quieted his breathing, he could imagine the sounds inside his house, of his wife talking to the children in the living room while the TV played his favorite show in the background.

Homesickness was a real sickness. Like the cancer he feared would grow inside him. Both brought the shadow of death into his mind. Both made him wish his family were near at hand, for him to hug and kiss and talk to. But they were on Earth, and he was here. Somewhere between Heaven and Hell. Hurtling toward a strange planet that would never be his home.

=END=

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

He wiped his hands on his apron and looked at the ingredients arranged in front of him. "Okay. Carrots, heavy cream, milk, two kinds of cheese, butter, flour and spices, looks like everything is here and ready to go."

The timer went off and he turned to drain the elbow macaroni. Then he set the macaroni aside and set about boiling the carrots until they were softened while he readied the personal blender. It didn’t have a large capacity, but it was all he had.

When the carrots were done, he drained them and put them in a bowl to cool before they went in the blender with the cream, milk, and Worcestershire sauce. It was then that he realized everything wasn’t going to fit in the blender all at once, so he decided to blend the carrot mixture in batches.

Only when he pushed the start button, nothing happened. A red light flashed on the front of the personal blender.

"What?" He shook the blender, thinking maybe some of the carrots were blocking the blades, and pushed the button again. Nothing happened. "Dammit!"

He had a pound of cooked elbow macaroni. He’d shredded a bunch of cheese. He’d mixed the flour with all the spices. There was no way he was stopping now just because his blender wasn’t working.

He grabbed a potato masher and a large mixing bowl. He dumped the carrots and cream out of the blender into the bowl and wished that he’d known the blender wasn’t going to work before he added the liquid. Then he could have cleanly mashed the carrots and whisked the dairy in. As it was, he had to try his best to crush the carrots that kept floating out of the way of the masher.

When he was done, there were still some small chunks floating around in the orangish mixture of carrot, milk, and cream, but it was the best that he could do.

"Oh well. Nothing is perfect," he muttered, adding butter to a large saucepan over medium-high heat. He stirred it around with a wooden spoon to help it mix. "As long as it tastes good… Looks don’t matter."

And he was right.

The macaroni and cheese wasn’t beautiful, but it tasted like macaroni and cheese. Somehow there was no carrot flavor, though the small chunks were obvious. He guessed the carrots would have given the finished result the yellow-orange color of boxed macaroni and cheese and nobody would have even noticed they were in there.

"Next time, I’ll do better," he told himself. Then he forced a smile and carried the large covered bowl out of kitchen to the dining room table. He put it down next to the bowl of salad and platter of chicken wings. "It’s dinner time!"

There were cheers and the slap of bare feet on the hardwood floor.

Watching them eat, he felt a sense of contentment. Sure, the macaroni and cheese hadn’t come out as perfect as the picture alongside the recipe, but it tasted good and that was what was important.

Perfect looking but inedible compared to less than perfect looking but delicious, and delicious would always win out.

Because cream always rose to the top, unless it was blended with carrots. And then it mixed deliciously with the cheddar and gruyere to cling to every bit of the macaroni pasta.

"Anybody want seconds?"

"Me!" "Me!" "I want some!"

"Alright. Have some more salad too. It’s good for you."

=END=

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

Merry Christmas if you celebrate. Happy Holidays for everyone! May the next year be filled with happiness and joy and all the good things your heart desires.

Seriously dudes: Don’t let those blackhearted monsters get a hold of your soul. We spread commonsense, decency, kindness, helpful information for our neighbors and our communities and our country at large and for our global neighbors who also wish us well so we can have a planet populated by a humanity that isn’t killing itself and every other living thing on it, and philosophy.

I think it’s a little terrifying that some people don’t ever consider things deeper than "Explosion big! Motorcycle crash! Why girl constantly criticizing hardworking dad?" Especially when it turns out to be "Dad is a dangerous guy doing dangerous things that adversely effect the people around him. In the real world, his sort does all that goofy shit while in other countries. Meanwhile, because this show is set locally and involves his family, we are aware that the things he does are by all definitions bad. Bad for him. Bad for his family. Bad for his community. Bad for the country. Bad for the world. Bad."

We love Roger. Roger is fun entertainment. Roger is being protected by a government official with a propensity for breaking laws. But what if Roger wasn’t an alien from space but like that guy that pretended to be all different kinds of people and scammed all those places?

He pretended to be an airplane pilot!

His actor made him seem like he would give some excuse and talk his way out of actually having to fly a jet full of people. But the real guy the movie is based on?!?

American television and movies show that we are leaning hard into secularism(?). Is that the word? Whatever it is that has people grab their kid and push and shove their way through a crowd of people. Just violently shoving people out of the way, singularly focused on saving themself and/or their child.

It’s why Boy Moms scare me.

Because if that’s not all fake shit done for clicks… It’s still indoctrination. It is still a propaganda, or mind control, or Conditioning ala C.J. Cherryh.

For reals: In the book with all the giant bugs and the battles between billionaires, one of the azi is turned into a citizen by running a single long tape. He takes the mind-opening medication, his master straps him into the chair, and she orders him to watch that tape and she leaves the room. And that tape is some programming to break the Conditioning they use to control the azi. (And after that, he is no longer destined to die at 40 years old like the other azi. He is a Citizen now.)

And the point of the azi reference is that the tape is not for Conditioning, it’s for breaking conditioning.

It’s like, you have to go through hours of tape, and the purpose is to counteract all the beliefs and bullshit that were previously taught to you over the course of your whole life. From the time you were a baby!

And I guess it’s like when they do cult deprogramming.

Like, for a while there the news was full of all kinds of stories of parents rescuing their teenaged children from music sex cults. And they would hire dudes to go in and get their children back for them.

It all got a bit overshadowed when other parents started sending their children to weird sex cult summer camps. Like, they were letting their teenaged children be manhandled by sadistic counselors who would sexually assault them to change their sexuality. PARENTS PAID MONEY TO DO THAT TO THEIR CHILDREN. Our attentions immediately shifted to focus on all that.

So if the "rescuing teenagers from cults"-thing kind of fell off, I’m sorry for that. Or maybe they were forced to form an FBI department that has since been defunded and reassigned for some mysterious reason. Maybe we didn’t have as much weird cult stuff because the government was preventing what they could.

Like, parents can take their children pretty much anywhere they want. If the parents join a cult, nobody can stop them from forcing their children to join the cult. Which is why there were so many weird MLM-situations happening out there. But if a child joins a cult, their parents can take them away from that.

It’s just that the biggest cults around are whole family experiences. People choosing to destroy their own communities and the planet to show their obedience to an antichrist.

"It’s THE Antichrist. Get it right!"–Nah, brah, it’s "an" antichrist. As in there isn’t only one and more can pop up at any time. It’s why you’re supposed to beware of false prophets (and false profits).

Anyone telling you what the afterlife is going to be like is a liar.

We are frogs in the bottom of a well. Our view is like the one from inside the well in "The Ring" before the mom closes the lid on it. We either see a perfect circular view of a near empty sky, or we see an obstructed view of a near empty sky and part of the bottom of the cover that can suffocate us at any moment.

We do not know what happens after we leave this mortal coil.

There are plenty of people donning the guise of Christianity while firmly believing there will be no consequences for their actions. They tempt with money, with clout, or they force with threats and aggression. They’re basically the Bishops and Cardinals from the "Dante’s Inferno" videogame.

"If you attack and kill these people, you will not go to Hell because you’re doing it for the Church!" And then the guy goes to Hell and while he’s slogging his way through to rescue Beatrice, he sees all those religious leaders being tormented and punished because they were wrong.

Some guy telling you to do big time evil stuff–"Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a connection to Heaven"–with the promise that there will never be any consequences for your crimes is not to be trusted. He seems like an instigator out to ruin your life.

And there’s kids out there RIGHT NOW being raised–homeschooled!–by people that don’t believe the Earth is round.

There are a lot of people that are going to need trustworthy sources of information in the not-too-far off future.

So 2026 is a good year to become a beacon of hope. To be a source of commonsense TRUE information and not a bunch of grifter trickery and lies. It is a good year to be a better person because the world is going to shit and everyone should do their part to stop the destruction of civilization.

Society can change. Can become better for humanity and the environment and all the other creatures we share this planet with. The complete destruction of modern civilization is not necessary for the betterment of anything.

I’m making a wish that 2026 be a better year. And that every year afterward will get better and better and better. For all of us.

Happy holidays. Happy Festivus to the rest of us. Enjoy a glorious New Year.

My 2025 "12 Days of Xmas" attempt will be commencing sometime later today. Wish me luck. If you’ve got any themes or genres you would like, now is the time to ask, because I’ve got 12 days of stories to write and I don’t think up story ideas for the 12 Days until I start writing.

I leave all that to later-me. And hopefully that later-me will manage to write and post something that doesn’t suck. Fingers, as always, crossed.

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

We’re on the 3rd day of our advent calendar, and I think I’m posting about it earlier today than I did yesterday.

Advent Day 3: Some recipes and food-related stuff: https://www.patreon.com/posts/advent-day-3-145899541

Yes, the advent is happening on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/HarperKingsley) and I’m resharing it here.

Like 12 Days of Xmas, it’s free (to look at for entertainment purposes, not to be used for any kind of generative content or anything that involves scraping my content and loading it into a plagiarism machine for repurpose. The "transformative works" descriptor only applies for humans, not for machines they may use. Any bit of my content–past, present, or future–added to an LLM (or LLM-type programming code that fills the role of "AI" as currently described, including "algorithms" and all that that descriptor implies) comes with the creator copyright rules that any time the model containing my data is accessed the controller of the model or the owner of the server hosting the model will pay me $100. My content being added to their data servers is their agreement to pay me money and they will not contest in any way, and if they do they agree to pay me $1000 and another $500 per each day that they have hosted my content without my permission on their servers. If the content is loaded through users of their servers, the controller of any models using my content takes responsibility if the content becomes available through their servers to anyone other than the original uploader, as they should be ensuring they are not hosting and using copyrighted material without permission of the copyright holder. As such, anyone that uses my content to auto-generate any content for profit, clout, or view count agrees to pay me $200 every time that content generates $1000 or 10,000 views.) Enjoy!

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

P.S. I am not a lawyer. The intent is clear.

It is with both humor and hope that the law would be on my side if I ever went against a clanker and their machines that I claim copyright to all my works. Because AI is worth a lot of money, and I would like to receive some of it via the least harmful means possible. Especially if my content is being exploited for the enrichment of other people.

I also think it’s funny to think of that burst of legalese popping out at high speed in the middle of an introductory conversation. Like, "Welcome to our company. I’m glad to meet you on your first day. My name is… and I work in… And if you touch or move or in any way interact with my mug I have the right and obligation to take one thing from your cubicle and that thing will then belong to me. You agree to this exchange of property of your own free will and do not have any legal recourse but to let me take something from your cubicle. You accept that every time you’re in proximity to my mug you are under video surveillance and I have the right to use those surveillance videos in any way that I deem to do so. And we have… departments in our company with… employees across four floors. We’re on the east side of the second floor and the working elevator is on the west side, so make sure to come in a bit earlier so you can clock in on time. The copy machines are all on the third floor, so you should probably keep a nice pair of shoes in your cubicle for when you have to take ‘The Walk’ to the copiers."