Story of the Story, Day 4 - "Saving Diego"

Junkies, psychotropic drugs, backwater planets, and inscrutable alien gods

For my ongoing “Story of the Story” series, I have been exploring the inspiration behind and how I wrote the stories in my debut short story collection, Histories Within Us. Today, I talk about my story “Saving Diego.”

“Gilder Nefan Sunset” a 3d render by me

Saving Diego

Gilder Nefan is a backwater planet at the edge of the galaxy, inhabited by a culture of ultra-religious Judeo-Islamic zealots who shun technology and who smoke a psychotropic drug known as sweet jisthmus to reach transcendent states of consciousness. This mind state let’s them speak with inscrutable alien beings known as numens, whom they consider messengers of El Shaddai, or God.

Mikal and Diego are two estranged junkies. They were once close friends back on Earth, but when their drug den gets raided, Mikal panics and flees, leaving a high and helpless Diego to get arrested and sent to prison.

Now, many years later, Diego lives on the distant Gilder Nefan, smoking massive quantities of sweet jisthmus and communing with Saa, a numen, or alien god-like being. But this communion is more than mere talking. The incorporeal Saa holds Diego under her complete mental, physical, and emotional thrall.

Deigo has invited Mikal out to this backwater planet at the edge of the galaxy to help him get free of his addiction to sweet jisthmus and Saa’s overwhelming influence.

“Saving Diego” is the first story I wrote in my Terra Diaspora, and I was greatly inspired by Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, and his so called “slow-zones” or areas of the galaxy where faster-than-light travel and intelligent minds are impossible.

I imagined numens as super-intelligent inscrutable aliens that have no physical form, and who dwell in a vastly different conscious framework from us. They are so different, in fact, that most of the time we cannot perceive them without the help of the powerful psychotropic drug sweet jisthmus.

There is something about this planet, Gilder Nefan, that has stuck with me all these years, and I keep returning to it. The planet re-appears in my short story “Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air” and it shows up again in my forthcoming novel Space Trucker Jess. Theirs is a culture that shuns tech, even though they live in a world where one can change gender as easily as one changes clothes, where machines can print out anything from a hamburger to a starship, where virtually every need can be instantly met. Yet the people of Gilder Nefan choose to reject all that so that they can focus on their religious devotions.

I am not as zealous as the people of Gilder Nefan, but there is something seductive about leaving behind all the noise of technology and so-called “progress” to focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else, be it art or music or reading or meditation or walking in nature. Our technology promises to liberate us, but in many ways it binds us with invisible chains that restrain our physical, mental, and emotional beings.

“Saving Diego” is about the price of liberation.

You can read “Saving Diego” in my short story collection, Histories Within Us, which is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Kobo and Indie Bound, and elsewhere.