To be fair, everything that happened was ultimately my fault. I am not the easiest person to be around, or to work with, and it’s a character flaw that I’m constantly working on. Still, he chose to escalate our disagreement to physical violence, which I never would have wanted. All I can do is defend myself. Unfortunately for him, I’m a lot better at that than I look. I’m not muscular, and I in no way intimidate people, but I can take a punch, and I know how to avoid a punch. But this guy; damn is he fast. He throws his weight into ever blow he sends, and I’m starting to get tired. I’m thinking this might be it, I’m going to die. The more he goes at me, the less I can remember how this all started. I know I disrespected his heritage, and my remark was completely out of line, but I can't recall exactly what I said, or even what his background is. Not that it matters, I keep trying to get a moment to say something to defuse this situation, but he has no plans to give me that opportunity. All I can hope for is that someone happens to walk into auxiliary engineering, and distracts him long enough to let me escape. As angry as he is, he’s being pretty careful with the equipment and instruments. In an action movie, all this stuff would be completely destroyed by now, then magically returned to working order before they needed it again. He doesn’t want to lose his commission on this vessel, I guess, and I assume if there’s no lasting evidence that the fight occurred, he won’t have to worry about it. A smarter opponent would somehow use this weakness against him, but I don’t know what that would look like. I can’t think straight, of course, and if this goes on much longer, I may stop thinking forever. In a desperate final move, I bolt for the exit, but he takes my arm in both his hands, like he was just waiting for me to try this. He lifts me right up off the floor, and swings me over towards the viewport, which is half the size of a standard adult human. Now, I’m not saying I’m an expert in xenobiology, but I was fairly certain his species was not strong enough to break a polycarbonate window. Maybe that’s not the point, because whether he’s supposed to be strong enough or not, my body shouldn’t be able to survive striking the window that hard. But I just crash right through it, sure I’m on my way to dying in the vacuum of space. Yet I land on the cold, hard floor of the hangar bay. I just lie there for several minutes, bleeding and broken, thankful that we hadn’t actually launched yet. A man hobbles over with a bottle in his hand, and lifts up my arm to check for a pulse, spilling some of his bourbon on my face, burning the cuts under my eyes. The only reason we never left is because the pilot is drunk. My lucky day. I wake up in the hospital hours later, and the Admiral is standing over me. “I’m here to thank you, Ensign,” she says to me. “Had you not let yourself be thrown through that window, we would not have learned how deficient it was...until it was too late. You saved the lives of everyone on your ship.”
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Current Schedule
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Sundays (macrofiction)
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The Advancement of Mateo Matic
Now that the lineup has been irreversibly established, and their reliance upon the direction of any external force removed from the equation, Team Matic must decide for themselves what missions to take. As they approach the year that changes everything, they may find themselves on a long detour.
Click here for the complete list of volumes thus far
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Weekdays (microfiction)
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Mateo Daily
Daily installments of The Advancement of Mateo Matic have temporarily replaced all weekday stories.
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Saturdays (mezzofiction)
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Mateo Daily
Daily installments of The Advancement of Mateo Matic have temporarily replaced all Saturday stories.
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- Multiseries
- Single Series
- Darning Wars
- Recursiverse
- Miscellaneous
- CONTACT
- About Me
My name is Nick Fisherman III. It's not my real name, but that's not because I'm trying to hide from my former agency, or something. I named myself after someone I've known for most of my life, and he chose it in honor of his late best friend. I took up writing when I found myself failing 8th grade science, and realized I might never reach my dream of becoming a biochemist, a meteorologist, and a quantum physicist. I started developing my canon after a scouting trip to an island inspired what I thought would be my first novel. I founded this website upon the advice of many people, who told me I needed to get my work out there, and not wait for an agent to accept my manuscript. You can expect one new story every day. Weekdays are for microstories, which are one or two paragraphs long. They're usually only thematically linked, so you won't have to read one to understand another, but they do sometimes tell a combined story. Sundays are for my continuous longer story, The Advancement of Mateo Matic, which I started in the beginning, and won't end until 2066. Saturdays are for long series, most of which take place in the same universe as Mateo, and add to the larger mythology.
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