Smalltown Boy

Posted on 28 Jun 2026 @ 1:35am by Captain Sabrina Corbin

2,146 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Time After Time
Location: Sherman Oaks

Aster ran.

That was not correct.

He was not supposed to run because running belonged to bodies with fixed distance and ordinary panic. Running was inefficient. It increased oxygen demand, elevated pulse rate, reduced fine motor control, and drew attention from nearby observers.

He ran anyway.

His sneakers struck the pavement too hard. The sound followed him in sharp, uneven slaps as he cut between two houses, crossed a narrow strip of lawn, and pushed through a side gate that had not been open a moment before but opened because he needed it to. The gate swung shut behind him without touching the latch. Somewhere behind him, someone screamed again, and the sound went thin at the edges as the neighborhood tried to decide whether screaming belonged in this version of itself.

Aster did not look back.

If he looked back, he would see the cul-de-sac.

If he saw the cul-de-sac, he would see the people.

If he saw the people, he would see their faces.

The faces were the problem.

Not the ships.

Not the fixed sun.

Not the Veylith gliding through the wrong sky above them, pale and silver and enormous, their soft manes trailing through vacuum as if space were water.

The faces.

He had studied distress before. He knew its markers. Widened eyes. Tightened mouths. Increased breath. Vocal escalation. Grasping motions. Protective clustering. Flight response. The data had always been orderly when viewed from outside a system.

Inside it, distress had too many edges.

It caught on him.

It pulled.

It made his form unstable.

His jacket changed again as he ran. Blue windbreaker. Silver-black collar. Cream panels. A threaded mantle from home. Blue again. His hands were too pale, then too human, then briefly not hands at all before he forced the fingers back into place. His hair lifted in a wind that had not been present. The air around him folded, snapped smooth, folded again.

“No,” he said.

The word sounded small.

He tried again. “No.”

The correction answered him.

Behind the houses, the street gave a low, heavy groan.

Aster stopped between a trash bin and a wooden fence, both hands pressed over his ears even though the sound was not entering through ears. It was underneath everything. A shifting pressure in the frame. A system trying to return to a more stable shape because he had pulled too many incompatible things through too many windows.

Sherman Oaks had been simple at first.

That was the worst part.

It had been a contained fragment. A learning frame. A small, human district from a non-warp culture in a local evening state, selected because the emotional patterns were distinct and easily measured. He was supposed to observe. He was supposed to adjust only within the permitted margins. He was supposed to report whether contained populations stabilized faster when provided with familiar environmental continuity.

He had liked the light.

He had liked the sound of the children on bicycles.

He had liked that no one asked who he belonged to.

Then one of them had said the evening was nice.

One of them had said it could stay.

So he had let it stay.

That was all.

That was all, and now Klingons were firing on Romulans above rooftops that should not exist, Veylith had slipped through a pastoral migration window, and people from the starship had come down dressed in wrong-local clothing to find him.

Aster pressed harder against his ears.

The Veylith were not supposed to be here.

They were not dangerous unless frightened. They were old migratory beings from a quiet lane outside Meridian supervision, gentle if approached correctly, catastrophic if displaced into conflict. Their young learned songs in gravity wells. Their adults bent around solar winds and carried memory through their bones. They did not understand metal ships. They did not understand weapons. They did not understand why the sky had become crowded with fear.

He had opened their window.

Not all the way.

Just enough.

Then he had tried to fix it.

Aster’s breath hitched. The human body interpreted that as a sob, but he rejected the output before it formed. It came anyway, broken and sharp, forcing his shoulders upward.

He had tried to fix the sky.

Then he had tried to fix the street.

The correction wave had moved because he told the fragment to return to the last stable pattern.

But the people from the starship were not part of that pattern.

Two of them had been caught in the seam.

Aster had felt it when it happened.

Not death.

Not injury.

Displacement.

One bright mind full of pressure and questions and fear, pulled sideways. Another, older and warmer, full of curiosity even at the moment of impact, drawn into the same fold. They were not gone exactly. Gone was a simple word for simple places.

They had been placed where the correction could hold them until it knew what to do.

Aster did not know what to do.

That was why he ran.

He slipped through the shadow beside a detached garage, then through a back door that should have been locked. The house beyond was empty in one layer and occupied in another. In one version, a family had left cereal bowls in the sink. In another, the kitchen counters were bare, the walls painted a different color, the refrigerator replaced by a metal panel with no handle. In another, the entire room was ash.

Aster chose the cereal bowls.

The house accepted the decision with a shiver.

He moved through the kitchen, down a short hallway, and into a child’s bedroom where the curtains were printed with small blue rockets. A model airplane hung from the ceiling on clear fishing line. There were baseball cards on a dresser, a stack of comic books under a desk, and a plastic dinosaur lying on its side beside the bed.

The room smelled like dust, crayons, and laundry detergent.

He shut the door.

Then he forgot what doors were for and made the room unreachable.

The hallway outside stretched away.

Then folded.

Then became not-there.

Aster sat on the floor beside the bed, drew his knees to his chest, and tried to make himself smaller.

Fourteen had been the wrong age.

He understood that now.

Fourteen was visible enough to be questioned and young enough to be dismissed, but not invisible. Children had looked at him too closely. Adults had placed him where they needed him to belong until he stopped fitting the place they put him.

He should have chosen seven.

Or eighty.

Or no body.

No. A body had been required. Assignment guidelines favored participant-proximal embodiment during subtle intervention studies. His supervisor had said proximity improved empathy modeling.

His supervisor had not said what to do when empathy became too large to model.

Aster lifted one hand.

It trembled.

He tried to open a standard Meridian recall channel.

Nothing answered.

That was expected. The fragment was too distorted, and he had built too many local priorities into the surrounding frame. A recall channel required clean geometry. This place was no longer clean.

He tried again, adjusting through the bedroom mirror.

The mirror reflected the room.

Then reflected the cul-de-sac.

Then reflected the Arawyn, a great bright shape beyond the sky, too complex and too close.

Aster flinched and turned the mirror away.

“No.”

The word came out wet this time.

He wiped his face with his sleeve, then stared at the moisture on the fabric with confusion and resentment. The body was producing water from the eyes. He knew humans did that. He had not expected the sensation to be so distracting.

He did not need a supervisor.

He needed someone who would answer before correcting him.

Aster reached deeper.

Not upward.

Not outward.

Inward, through the older paths that did not belong to assignments or observation frames or permissions. Family paths. The first channels he had learned, long before anyone let him open windows or smooth fractures or hold little suns where frightened humans thought they wanted them.

The room dimmed.

The rocket curtains lifted without wind.

The baseball cards rose from the dresser and hung motionless in the air, each paper rectangle turning slowly as if underwater.

Aster placed both hands flat against the carpet.

“Liora,” he whispered.

Nothing happened.

He swallowed.

The body disliked that too.

“Liora, please.”

The air in front of the closet folded inward.

Not like the tears above the planet. Not jagged. Not violent. This was a smaller thing, private and old, a crease opened between two people who had known each other before language became precise. A line of pale light appeared, no wider than a doorframe, and within it someone took shape.

Not fully.

Meridians did not have to be fully present to be real.

Liora appeared older than Aster by local standards, though age was poorly translated through human form. She might have looked seventeen if the room insisted on seeing her as human. Or twenty. Or ageless if the room stopped trying. Her hair was dark where his was fair, falling in long waves that moved with no breeze. Her eyes held the same impossible depth as his, but steadier, constellations arranged with patience rather than panic.

She looked at him.

Then at the suspended baseball cards.

Then at the bedroom, the folded hallway, the too-still light beyond the curtains.

“Aster,” she said softly.

The sound of his name undid him more efficiently than fear had.

He tried to speak.

The words tangled.

“I made it wrong.”

Liora’s image sharpened.

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know.”

That was not technically true. He knew location coordinates in at least seven frameworks, but none of them answered the question she was asking.

Her expression changed, not alarm exactly, but a stillness that meant she was listening harder.

“Are you inside an assignment frame?”

Aster nodded.

The movement was too human, too small, and he hated it.

“I was observing. I was only observing at first.”

“At first?”

“They were frightened,” he said quickly. “Not very frightened. Only increasing-distress frightened. The power went out and they were outside and then they liked the evening. They said they liked it. They said they wouldn’t mind if it stayed. So I kept it.”

Liora closed her eyes for a moment.

“Aster.”

“I know.”

“You fixed the light state?”

“I kept the sun angle stable.” He corrected automatically because precision mattered. Then his face crumpled. “I know.”

“What else?”

The question was gentle.

That made it worse.

Aster shook his head. “I fixed a child.”

Liora did not move.

“He fell. His knee opened. Blood came out and the mother was frightened and he was crying, so I corrected the tissue. It was very small. It was so small, Liora. It wasn’t even difficult.”

“Did they see?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“My clothes changed.”

“What else?”

“My eyes did.”

“What else?”

He pressed his hands into the carpet until the fibers flattened beneath his fingers.

“The combat window opened.”

Liora’s face lost all softness.

“Which combat window?”

“Klingon and Romulan. Old. The D7 and the green bird. They were already fighting. I didn’t bring them on purpose. I was watching the humans, and one of my other assignments moved, and I looked, and then it was here.”

Liora’s voice stayed steady. “Are they contained?”

“No. Maybe. A bigger ship is there now. From outside. They stopped them. I think they stopped them. They sent people down.”

“Sentient observers entered the frame?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

“Were they harmed?”

“No.” He answered too quickly.

Liora heard it.

“Aster.”

He pulled his knees tighter to his chest.

“Two were caught in the correction.”

“What correction?”

“I tried to put the street back.”

Liora was very quiet.

Aster looked at the model airplane hanging above him because it was easier than looking at her.

“The people from the ship came near where I was. They were not supposed to be in the first stable pattern. The street had too many versions, and I told it to return, and the correction moved too widely. Three anchored. Two did not. They are not dead.”

“Where are they?”

“In a holding frame. The correction made one for them.”

“A stable one?”

“No. It is borrowing from them.”

The words were almost silent.

The room trembled around them.

Aster pressed himself back against the bedframe as the walls flickered. Blue rocket curtains became pale vertical screens. The bed became a medical platform. The carpet became moss. Then everything returned, but the plastic dinosaur had moved to the windowsill and was now made of green glass.

Liora looked at the change, then back at him.

“Aster, what else came through?”

He wiped his face again.

“The Veylith.”

Aster
Juvenile Stage Four of the Meridian

To be continued...

 

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