Disaster strikes a mining asteroid, where workers use and study a unique bacteria that helps produce a valuable ore needed for interstellar travel.
Music: “Space Discoveries” by Andrew Sitkov
Video description
Video Description: “Rain of the Bacteriophage” Trailer. Duration, 41 seconds. “Space Discoveries” by Andrew Sitkov. Digital drawing. Within a translucent dome, there stand four towers. Three are clustered at center and one stands apart at left. Pipes or conduits branch off into the ground from the base of each tower, just visible below the uneven ground. At bottom right in the distance are structures under the dome that glow under hazy light from a comet that streaks by, its head at top left, and its tail grazing the dome. Title card with the words “Short Story” and “Genre: Science Fiction,” is displayed at center. Tagline is displayed at bottom. It reads: “When an accident leaves two colleagues stranded in their vessel in an unfamiliar region of space, they call for help, but find they must rely on each other in the end…whatever end that might be.” Title card and tagline fade. A watermark of the word “storyfeather” appears over the image. Animations: The head of the comet begins to glow with pulsing spikes of light, and halfway through, the tail of the comet streaks behind the tail. Lines from the story appear in sequence: “‘We’ve detected a comet,’ she said, ‘heading our way.’ Production in all four towers was shut down…Manufacturing was shut down…there was an accident in Tower One. The comet hadn’t just left behind ice, dust, and a few scratches on their dome. It had left behind something that no one expected, and no one would have thought to look for if it hadn’t been for the accident.” Site URL appears at bottom center throughout and fades at end. As the last line disappears, the image blurs and darkens, the story title appears at center, and a text card appears at top that reads “Available to Read Now storyfeather.com.”
Welcome to Year 10 of Storyfeather
Every year’s short stories (mostly) follow a theme. For Year Ten, every month’s stories share a genre or theme, some anchor point that the reader can rely on. But within that, there are strange concoctions brewing. The genre’s merge, archetypes collide, mythologies mash…welcome to the Year of Fusion.
November’s Base Elements:
SPACE-VEMBER 🚀MEETS LOVEMBER 💙
FUSION RECIPE:
Base elements for November are Space and Love. The story takes place on a mining asteroid on which a newlywed couple lives and works.
And the fusion element? I rolled my Story Cubes dice again, five of them, and three had images that I found intriguing: a bacterium, rain, and four towers. Thinking about those four towers in space evoked an image of an asteroid with a protective dome (that maybe looks a little bit like a Petri dish when seen from ground level at a distance…no?). And what if a hardy bacterium had evolved on this asteroid somehow? And what if the rain was a danger to the mining colony?
INSPIRATIONS and BACKGROUND:
Elements of the story, like the name of the asteroid, Prospero, refer to the Shakespeare play, “The Tempest.” And the name of the bacterium, Prosperotrogon is a combination of the asteroid’s name and the Greek word “trogon,” meaning “eater.” When first discovered, this fictional bacterium appeared to be “eating” the asteroid, chewing the raw materials.
Genre: Science Fiction
Tags: Ash, Ashish, Asteroid, Astrobacillus, Bacteria, Bacterium, Prospero, Prosperotrogon, Tower, Vera, Virus
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