What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 3)

by Aimee Ogden

Ozzi parts ways with Hob when the first thing he does upon returning to the habitat is to start stripping off all his clothes. Alone, he opts for an irresponsibly long, hot shower. He can eat cold mealmixes for a day, if the mini-solars can’t make up the energy deficit. Then he sits down with his compendium. First he plugs in the datasafe—but no, not today, he can’t look at any of that footage right now. Instead, he pulls a connection to the satellite. He sends a series of data requests to be forwarded to the quantum relay, eats fully half of his buttersweet stash, and folds himself into bed.

When he wakes up, Ozzi is at the foot of his cot, swiping fruitlessly at Hob’s blinking compendium. “I have so many emotions, I should be able to interact with this fucking thing,” Ozzi says, as Hob blinks at him in confusion. “Unfortunately I think they’re all just annoyance.” 

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What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 2)

by Aimee Ogden

Quiet is a rare commodity in the habitat. Hob takes a moment to bask in it after he’s shucked his suit into the first empty locker. A friendly electronic hum—from the air circulation fans, the water recycling system, the pair of cleaning drones—takes the edge off the silence. As does the occasional scuffle from the ever-expanding family of field mice that’s made a home under the northwest solar array. Hob really does need to take care of that too, at some point: another little undesired exorcism.

A few kinks linger in his back, all the muscles that clenched up in anticipation of his fall, which haven’t figured out yet that they can let go. While he massages the sore spot over his hips as best as he can reach it, he pulls up the latest download packet from HQ and flicks through it. Blink, a pay stub deposited in his account. Blink, the smiling faces of the latest set of new hires, terraformers and exorcists alike. Blink, a sample serving of news headlines. A blurb about rapid changes in Zethari weather patterns careens past him, and he double-blinks to dismiss the rest of the packet before the news has another chance to leave a mark.

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What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 1)

by Aimee Ogden

The third week of a planetary exorcism is the hardest—at least if the planet in question has megafauna to deal with. Enthusiasm wanes even faster on worlds that never evolved past microbes. Hob’s crew always comes in like a team of intrepid explorers, swapping stories with the outgoing terraforming crew as they run down the handover checklist. But after ten, fifteen days, the work slows down, as the crew moves farther from the terraforming origin nexus. That’s where the ghosts are densest, the hauntings the most intense. Along the meridian lines that the crew follows around the planet to the secondary terraforming nexus, only the most stubborn haunts linger—the ones that won’t clear out at just the first reminder of their own recent mortality. The ones that don’t seem to give a shit that Hob and his crew are working to a strict deadline. Exo megafauna have, unsurprisingly, absolutely no sense of human decency.

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