"Science Fiction" means—to us—everything found in the science fiction section of a bookstore, or at a science fiction convention, or amongst the winners of the Hugo awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. This includes the genres of science fiction (or sci-fi), fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, and even stories with lighter speculative elements. We hope you enjoy the broad range that SF has to offer.
Mary E. Lowd writes stories and collects creatures. She's had more than one hundred short stories published, and her novels include the Otters In Space trilogy, In a Dog's World, and The Snake's Song: A Labyrinth of Souls Novel. Her fiction has won an Ursa Major Award and two Coyotl Awards. Meanwhile, she's collected a husband, daughter, son, bevy of cats and dogs, and the occasional fish. The stories, creatures, and Mary live together in a crashed spaceship disguised as a house, hidden in a fairy garden in Oregon. Learn more at marylowd.com. Read more stories at deepskyanchor.com.
Lee-a-lei and her clone-daughter Am-lei perched in the Crossroads Station recreational airlock with their long spindly legs folded. The two lepidopterans exchanged a glance with glittering, multi-faceted eyes. Lee-a-lei was nervous and kept flapping her mechanical wings, but her daughter looked excited.
Am-lei didn't have wings. She'd followed the traditions of their homeworld and had her yellow-blue-and-purple wings cut off after she metamorphosed. So, she wore a simple zero-gee jetpack like a human or one of the canine Heffens would. The jetpack strapped around her thorax, firmly secured. Lee-a-lei had checked her daughter's straps several times.
Neither of them wore spacesuits--their exoskeletons protected most of their bodies, and a thin coating of amphiphilic goo around their joints sealed the gaps up well enough for an hour-long joy-jaunt around the station's exterior. An oxygen mask strapped over each lepidopteran's curling proboscis was the only other thing they'd needed to transform from planet-dwellers to vacuum-dwellers.
"Isn't this thrilling?" Am-lei fluted inside her oxygen mask.
Lee-a-lei heard her daughter's words through a radio strapped over her tympanal organ on the side of her thorax. The sound was muddied though by the vibration of the airlock floor under her talons. The doors would open soon.
A deep rumble, and then whoosh.
Enjoying this story? Don't miss the next one!
The thin air behind Lee-a-lei shoved her out the opening airlock doors. It was a waste of air, but the algae-filters on the station were extremely effective, and Crossroads got regular shipments of fresh air from the closest planet. So, a little air lost to make the ride more fun? No big deal. Life on a space station should be fun. Hell, life of any sort should be fun.
Lee-a-lei flapped her mechanical wings; there was no air outside the space station for them to push against, but the movement of her muscles triggered the jetpack function of her wings. She zoomed along the curve of the station, following her fearless daughter.
Lee-a-lei had been raised by a well-meaning but clueless human. By the time they discovered it was normal for lepidopterans to cut off their beautiful but vestigial wings, Lee-a-lei no longer felt like herself without them. So, she'd gotten specially fitted mechanical wings--much smaller and more useful, but they let her still feel like herself. A butterfly. That's how the humans she'd been raised around had always seen her, and it was how she'd come to see herself.
Now she was a butterfly--a cyborg butterfly--flying through the velvety blackness of space! Am-lei was right: it was thrilling.
Lee-a-lei flapped faster, and the jets in her cyborg wings pushed her forward in tiny bursts that matched the flaps. She flew away from the shiny metal walls and transparent aluminum windows of Crossroads Station until she could see its concentric rings, turning and twisting like a gyroscope, as a whole. It looked like a child's toy, discarded on a black sand beach. The stars and planets of the local solar system gleamed with the natural beauty of seashells, and space stretched away like an ocean in every direction.
Lee-a-lei lived her life inside that toy.
Swooping back toward her daughter, Lee-a-lei fluted, "It makes you feel small, doesn't it?"
"Not me," Am-lei answered. The younger lepidopteran had figured out how to use alternating bursts from one side and then the other of her jetpack to fly in zigzagging curlicues. Her six long legs waved grandiosely, as if she were trying to greet every star she saw. Their celestial light glittered on the many facets of her eyes. "I'm going to see all of it, someday."
I hope you do, Lee-a-lei thought. What she said was, "Take me with you."
"Of course!" Am-lei spun around with her jetpack and zoomed up to her mother. The young lepidopteran grasped the older lepidopteran's uppermost left talon with one of her own. The two butterflies--one with a jetpack instead of wings and the other with cyborg wings--flew together around the space station that was their home.
The End
This story was first published on Wednesday, October 10th, 2018
Author Comments
I didn't ride a bike as a kid, but I live in a very bike-friendly town now. So, I decided I should learn how to ride. As such, my daughter and I began learning how to ride bikes at about the same time. While wobbling along on that terrifying--yet thrilling--contraption, I kept imagining that I was learning how to fly a jetpack through space. This story is the result.
- Mary E. Lowd
Become a Member!
We hope you're enjoying Jetpack and Cyborg Wings by Mary E. Lowd.
Please support Daily Science Fiction by becoming a member.
Daily Science Fiction is not accepting memberships or donations at this time.
Rate This Story
Please click to rate this story from 1(ho-hum) to 7(excellent!):
