By Jake Dean
I leave the doorway of my pod and follow Steve’s lanky frame down the white corridor. We’re tiptoeing for some reason, like that’ll somehow stop them from seeing us.
I’d like to believe, if we get caught, that I have an excuse. He’s my superior. I’m just a lowly maintenance officer. But I know it probably won’t fly and I’ll be pulled before some tribunal. What are they gonna do though? Fire me via video link from a dozen light years away? Tell me to pack my things and… wait for a lift home?
Steve pauses at the door like he’s having second thoughts. A wave of relief washes over me until I realise he’s forgotten his key.
‘Do you mind?’
‘We’re gonna get in so much shit.’
‘You don’t have to do this.’
I scan my key before I can back out.
The door slides open and the vents above hiss, coating us with a mist Steve says protects the outside world from our germ-riddled bodies.
The greens of the plants here are like I’d only ever seen in old photographs, the sweet air is a balm, and the water… The water! It’s so damn blue it hurts. There’s very little here that resembles anything like the toxic hellscape back home. There’s something infinitely sad about that, when you consider this is how parts of it would’ve looked before we screwed it all up.
Still, it’s impossible to tell what’s lurking amid the gorgeous little coves that dot the coast. Steve’s the resident biologist, but so far, he’s surveyed very little and remains coy on what else calls this place home. Here’s hoping it doesn’t have sharp teeth.
He’s striding ahead now, boots crunching the rocky ground, towards the maintenance pod, the only thing on this planet I have any authority over. He turns to me, impatience like lasers from his eyes.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ I say, fumbling for my key.
His face turns again when I show him my creation.
‘Is this it?’
‘What did you expect?’
‘I dunno. Thought it’d be bigger.’
I’m bristling, but I say nothing because I know he’s anxious. Besides — doesn’t it look almost identical to the pixelated image he’d shown me? An elongated platform, pointed at the nose, with three fins on the bottom to improve directional stability?
Steve picks the board up and runs a hand and eye along its rail, before holding it under his arm. His mouth curls in a grin at one side.
‘You’ve done well here, Kev.’
Peace restored, I close the pod and we walk again in silence, glancing back towards base and our wrist monitors for signs we’re being watched.
Seeing my creation under his arm, it’s all suddenly becoming so real. Months of plotting have come to this. We’re going surfing.
When Steve told me about the antediluvian pastime — his great-grandfather had been a champion of some kind before our oceans were ravaged by neglect — I said it was a stupid idea.
But the days turned into one long monotonous grind. The maintenance checks, video conferences and team safety meetings. I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility of gliding along the face of a wave in the rocky cove just a hundred metres from base.
Eventually I relented to Steve’s badgering and gradually fashioned the board out of a broken door. I watched in horror the first day when my sander sent a plume of plastic shavings cartwheeling out the door into the pristine ecosystem.
We reach the cove in less than a minute and at first it resembles a lake. But soon a shimmering lump appears near the foot of a moss-covered rock shelf. The lump of water darkens and then, with nowhere left to go, it trips over itself and runs towards the middle of the cove and distant moons, leaving a white-water trail in its wake. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
Steve’s half-grin turns into a full-faced smile and I realise mine has too. Still, my heart’s racing, and we’re silent again as we take off our suits and lay them on the rocks. Another wave reels along the cove.
‘How big do you reckon that is?’
‘Waist-high maybe?’
‘Please tell me nothing’s gonna eat us.’
‘The data is inconclusive, Kev.’
The water’s like a warm bath and stunningly clear. Dregs of seaweed ebb lazily along the rippled ocean floor. We walk towards where we’d seen the waves break earlier, the water up to our waists. The board floats between us. I scan the cove for fins and tails.
‘I think you should do the honours.’
‘No way! I have no idea what I’m doing.’
‘You think I do? Look, theoretically you just lie down, create propulsion with your arms, and stand up when you feel the wave’s energy move you on its own.’
‘Oh, when you put it that way.’
Steve laughs with his eyes closed and his long narrow face to the sky — something I’ve never seen him do — but before I can react, another lump jolts us from our reverie.
Slow-motion now. Steve’s howling, wild-eyed, and flailing his arms, willing me onto the board. I oblige instinctively as the wave approaches my feet.
Steve once told me waves are the product of wind blowing across the water’s surface, sometimes thousands of kilometres away, created by storms days earlier. It’s so fantastical, my brain can’t even fathom it, let alone the fact we’re re-enacting an ancient dance we’ve transported across the galaxy like a flickering candle.
I feel the wave’s energy pull me gently towards shore and I spring to my feet, my heart beating loud and the offshore wind caressing my face.
About the Author
Jake Dean
Jake Dean is a writer and waverider living on Kaurna land in South Australia.
His fiction has appeared in White Horses, The Fiction Pool, Sweaty City, Underground Writers and others.
He's utterly convinced there's a perfect wave breaking somewhere else in the solar system right now.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Natsumi Tanaka is a writer living in Kyoto, Japan. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous Japanese magazines such as Anima Solaris, Kotori no kyuden, and Tanpen.
Evan James Sheldon’s work has appeared recently in American Literary Review, the Cincinnati Review, and New Flash Fiction Review.
Matthew R. Doherty currently resides in Leeds, England, where he spends most of his free time writing about military history, but his other consuming passion is for science fiction.
Joanna is a writer who lives in the bush near the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Andrew writes science-fiction and fantasy from the state of Maryland on the eastern coast of the United States, often drawing ideas from jogs through forest trails at sunrise or a tasty beer at sunset. 
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Simon Petrie, born and educated in New Zealand, now lives in the Australian Capital Territory, where he is paid to be careful with words.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
