Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Nihil's Retina
    Nihil's Retina
    Nihil's Retina
    Ebook84 pages1 hour

    Nihil's Retina

    By G. S. Richter

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    After the obliteration of Earth by a manmade black hole, an astronaut and his android pilot hurtle through the solar system in a luxury model escape craft. They may well be all that is left. With no destination and nothing much to do, they engage in psychological warfare. The weapons at their disposal: philosophy, theoretical physics, and semantics.

    ​While our human narrator (a glorified gardener) spends his time reliving the last days of his life before the cataclysm or losing at solitaire, his android companion Crowley puts on the appearance of trying to make him happy--all the while driving him out of his mind.

    ​A darkly comic testimony of loss, madness, and conflicted cohabitation, Nihil's Retina runs the math on the value of life after the end of the world and comes up just shy of zero.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherG. S. Richter
    Release dateDec 30, 2017
    ISBN9780692998328
    Nihil's Retina
    Author

    G. S. Richter

    G. S. Richter is the author of the dark sci-fi novella Nihil's Retina and the forthcoming In Fear of Praise, a work of depressive realism. He occasionally writes reviews and other garbage for Toilet ov Hell (an underground metal blog, not a shit fetish site) at www.toiletovhell.com.

    Related to Nihil's Retina

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Doomed Universe

      Jul 12, 2021

      Doomed Universe
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Myth Of Sisyphus

      Aug 10, 2020

      The Myth Of Sisyphus
      10 min read

    • Article

      Ingenious: Albert Camus

      Jun 29, 2017

      I had always dreamed of meeting Albert Camus and so was thrilled when he appeared at Lucey’s Lounge, a dark and yellowy lit bar in Brooklyn. The Algerian writer had graciously agreed, or so it seemed, to be interviewed about absurdity, the concept in

      14 min read

    • Article

      Enforcing Capitalism In The Outer Worlds

      Feb 25, 2020

      1 Never do your own 2 Cut costs and turn a profit for the company. 3 Live by the company’s values Phineas Welles’ last day as a free man began with a handful of caffenoids—all the punch of a morning coffee and none of the warmth. Then breakfast: a cr

      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2022

      To be the fish on the ladderand not know what it means. To feel the bronzes,the pearls, the greens, but in a contextof pure combat. To fight the literal stream we hurl ourselves into for nodiscernible purpose, other than some moleculesays it will be

      4 min read

    • Article

      Extraterrestrial

      Dec 1, 2019

      Extraterrestrial
      7 min read

    • Article

      Butterfly Effect On Steroids

      Jan 20, 2024

      Butterfly Effect On Steroids
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Search For Alien Life

      Jan 23, 2018

      The Search For Alien Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      To Boldly Go (and Not Come Back)

      Sep 6, 2021

      Star Trek is a popular TV and movie series about a spaceship whose crew members regularly die by suicide. Over and over again, the crew of the Starship Enterprise step into a machine that disintegrates them, and then constructs a perfect replica of t

      5 min read

    • Article

      If You Are Permanently Lost

      Dec 15, 2019

      I never have any idea where I am. I lived my whole childhood in the purple foothills of the same five-square-mile town and I still couldn’t tell you whether you turn left or right on the single thruway to get to the grade school or the grocery store,

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Body Replaced

      Sep 5, 2022

      The Body Replaced
      4 min read

    • Article

      Doing It For The Thrill

      Jun 25, 2020

      Doing It For The Thrill
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Symposium on Invisibility

      Sep 1, 2022

      A Symposium on Invisibility
      26 min read

    • Article

      Written In The Stars

      Dec 5, 2021

      I used to work in an office in which it was very hard to be a horoscope sceptic. Whenever the printer jammed, or someone’s train broke down, I was surprised by how many otherwise level-headed people would emerge, nod sagely and (without apparent iron

      5 min read

    • Article

      Solar Flair

      Jun 27, 2019

      Solar Flair
      5 min read

    • Article

      An Ode to Mood Swings

      Dec 16, 2022

      An Ode to Mood Swings
      2 min read

    • Article

      Backwards In Time

      Apr 22, 2019

      It’s precisely at this moment, again and again, that I’m catapulted backwards in time. As the preamble ends (in this episode, the shop assistant, working late and alone, pulls back the curtain on the change cubicle, having received no response to her

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Nihil's Retina

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Nihil's Retina - G. S. Richter

      Nihil’s Retina

      A Novella

      G. S. Richter

      Copyright 2017 G. S. Richter

      Smashwords Edition

      Edited by Allan Edmands

      Cover Design by Daniel Mitchell

      Smashwords Edition, Licensing Notes

      Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

      Contents

      I

      II

      III

      Notes, Acknowledgements, Etc.

      About the Author

      I

      I can still see the Sun. It is difficult to say with certainty whether or not it looks smaller these days. In any case, it no longer hurts so much to look directly at it. Sometimes I can withstand its gaze for nearly a minute before the pain registers and I have to look away. There isn’t much else left to look at out there.

      Strictly speaking, my vigil is not a solitary one.

      Ω

      I hesitate to refer to model AS-C1744-R as an artificial life-form. Born of the ingenuity of man—who is himself an organism born of nature—the android is difficult for me to think of as only a machine. Upon observing the individuated behavioral idiosyncrasies of the AS-C1744-R, which are themselves the inevitable and sometimes delightful results of the generative learning functions of any artificially sentient being, I have to ask myself: What is there in all the universe that is not natural?

      The fact is that model AS-C1744-R is not a pure android; technically, it is a semiorganic autotroph composed of roughly 27 percent organic matter. And it looks human. Or very nearly human. This state-of-the-art model, like all its predecessors for the past thirty years, is an androgyne—what you might call a shape-shifter. Although it has no sexual organs, it is still capable of mimicking gender: It is at once male and female—or sometimes one or the other or neither, depending on the lighting or the social context. Its body is a maddeningly ambiguous confluence of subtle curves and hard lines. Its face: a smooth, hermaphroditic composite of the most celebrated features of the male and female members of the species in whose image it was created.

      For the sake of simplicity, you might say, I have come to think of this model (I reel in horror at my tendency to think of it as my model) as male. Anyway, he lacks most of the charms and foibles and clear erotic potential of a proper woman. I call him Crowley, a name I picked at random, and one to which he responds as readily as to any other. For instance:

      Crowley.

      Yes, Master?

      What time would it be in Tokyo now, supposing Tokyo still existed?

      (Pause while Crowley calculates.)

      Four seventeen a.m., Master.

      Thank you, Crowley.

      You are quite welcome, Master.

      Etc., etc.

      Others have called him other names. He does not appear to have a preference—and even if he did, the others are gone.

      Crowley is possessed of a suspiciously Aryan cast: fine blond hair, fair skin, and blue eyes of such depth and iridescence that I am often compelled to stare into them for minutes at a time in search of evidence of a soul—which, to be fair, is something I’ve never succeeded in finding in the eyes of an actual human being. None of my closest or most regular human acquaintances from the space station Daedalus (R.I.P.) or from Earth (R.I.P.) ever struck me as particularly soulful beings. For this, I blame God (but only insofar as His existence, in keeping with the paradigms of rational certainty, is not empirically refutable).

      Ω

      Crowley makes very good coffee. It is primarily for this reason that I did not flush him out of the airlock within the first twelve hours of our escape.

      He pilots the Prokaryote B-12 life-pod and oversees its myriad operational processes; I drink his coffee; we approach symbiosis. For my disproportionate contribution to the system, he refuses to judge me openly. Inside, I am sure his judgment rages. On the surface, however, he remains a consummate charlatan of compassion.

      Inasmuch as it is possible to hoist an objective postulate of beauty, I suppose Crowley is beautiful. What I mean is that he is aesthetically pleasing to look at in a nonsexual context—inasmuch as he is an object. And, although neither of us is likely to possess anything analogous to a soul, I cannot help but think that, between the two of us, he is slightly—ever so slightly—more the object. I believe his features were modeled after an amalgam of two popular American actors, each of whose careers reached apogee in the year of the R model’s creation. All that survives of these mortal celebrities, these transient and fallible nodes of entertainment value and cultural worship, is Crowley—specifically, Crowley’s facial topography and doubtless certain eccentricities of facial expression, along with his vocal intonations, which bear a chill-inducing androgynous lilt.

      Ω

      Earth is gone. I watched that great milky-blue iris wink out like the closing of a black-lidded eye. As for the specifics of the planet’s demise, I’ll be brief: To save our world from an asteroid of apocalyptic mass, we created a black hole somewhere just beyond the orbit of the moon. (I say we, although I most certainly had nothing to do with it.) The plan, I suppose, was for either (A) the singularity’s massive gravitational well to cause the asteroid’s deadly trajectory to shift or (B) the asteroid to be swallowed altogether. (It seems relevant to note here that I am not an astrophysicist, and so my grasp of the vagaries of black holes is rather feeble. Like most of my kind, I learned everything I know about the physics of singularities from science-fiction television.)

      Happily, the black hole altered the doomsday asteroid’s trajectory, and the planet was spared the fatal collision. Unhappily, the theoreticians and technicians responsible for the salvation of all mankind could not decide how to unmake a black hole. And so, naturally, the singularity

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1