Student Spotlight: Lucas Carroll-Garrett

Why do you write?

I think I write to get out of my own head. I tend to get too wrapped up in my own thoughts: obser­va­tions that turn into pat­terns that turn into stories. Without some­where exter­nal (like a page) to put them, I might go mad.

Is there an author who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work?

That’s a tricky one for anybody, and due to the years of dis­tance between my for­ma­tive stories and my serious attempts at writing, I can’t point to a certain person in terms of style. Looking at sto­ry­telling con­cep­tu­al­ly, perhaps my great­est inspi­ra­tion would be the writer/artist Hiromi Arakawa. Her graphic novel series Full­met­al Alchemist still astounds me with its struc­ture, blend­ing dozens of mem­o­rable char­ac­ters, a cool steam­punk world, nation­wide con­spir­a­cies, and mean­ing­ful cri­tiques of both science and reli­gion into the most intense and sat­is­fy­ing con­clu­sion I’ve ever seen. Her story con­vinced me that a tale about a fun and fan­tas­ti­cal adven­ture did not pre­clude the pro­fun­di­ty needed to change the lives of its readers. In a sense, expe­ri­enc­ing it as a kid gave me a goal to strive for. I suppose that’s what influ­ence means to me.

Why did you choose Stonecoast?

Hon­est­ly, it was a bit of a seat-of-my-pants deci­sion. I needed a break from science, at least for a while, and I had branched out into cre­ative writing. However, my inter­est is mainly in the Fantasy genre, so I needed a rep­utable program that also took Popular Fiction seri­ous­ly. My pro­fes­sor rec­om­mend­ed Stonecoast and I liked the balance it had between inten­sive res­i­den­cies in Maine and learn­ing from home. So here I am.

What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?

I have a limited pool there, with only two-ish semes­ters of expe­ri­ence and a single in-person res­i­den­cy so far. That being said, each one of my work­shops has left quite the impact, and I vividly remem­ber the PopFic dinner where D.A.D. showed me a casual text message he got from George R.R. Martin. I also remem­ber a lunchtime con­ver­sa­tion at my first res­i­den­cy with my fellow fantasy nerds about how our stories are way too big to be fea­si­ble. Talking like that, for perhaps the first time, I felt my stories were being taken seri­ous­ly. And I am eter­nal­ly grate­ful for that.

What do you hope to accom­plish in the future?

I have an Epic Fantasy story churn­ing within me, one of prob­a­bly unre­al­is­tic scope and ambi­tion. But it’s also deeply per­son­al and I feel the need for it to exist, so I’d like to become skilled enough to make it right (and to actu­al­ly get the thing pub­lished!). Along the way, I hope my stories can make readers happy and make them think at the same time. Ideally, they would make enough money to afford food as well, but now I’m reaching.

If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?

Prob­a­bly Harry Potter so I can get those sweet, sweet roy­al­ties and not have to worry about starv­ing to death while I write what­ev­er hell I want. But in all seri­ous­ness, the idea of having written someone else’s story is a bit uneasy for me. I’d rather write some­thing true to my own dis­eased mind. If I had to pick, I would prob­a­bly go with Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy since it also has that excel­lent balance of enter­tain­ment and thought­ful­ness I admire. But, alas, I only wish I could be that funny.

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Featured Work

The Last Horizon

A Short Story by Lucas Carroll-Garrett

    Digaught tapped his foot while the space­ship cut its way towards the void, fol­low­ing the pattern to where it ended. The edge of the uni­verse. The edge of infinity.

The hull monitor still glowed a blurry yellow through the translu­cent stasis fluid that filled the cockpit. Still stuck in the worm­hole. And the ship would need another minute to slow the quantum saw-engine enough to emerge at the loca­tion of the atom it had entan­gled itself with. The clicks of its teeth were still rever­ber­at­ing up through the pol­ished metal sphere of the cockpit at a steady beat. Digaught worked his tongue against the smooth, firm flesh of his sucked-in lips, trying to do some­thing with his excite­ment. Finally, finally, he would find some­thing unknown, a place with no quantum entan­gle­ment maps or Laplace Charts, one he could actu­al­ly explore instead of simply fol­low­ing the pattern laid out by his pre­de­ces­sors. The idea set his other foot to tapping too.

    “Will you cut that out?” his pilot’s voice flared up in his brain­wire, as pointed and pierc­ing as a failed note on a violin. “I’m trying to con­cen­trate on align­ing the quantum entan­gle­ment. Or do you want your pre­cious mod­i­fied space-cutter to lock onto some random aster­oid and smash us all to pieces?” 

    “That’s just how much I trust you, Vvivraza” Digaught sent back with a wink. He was grate­ful for the brain­wire since his actual tongue had not evolved for all the subtle vibra­tions in her name. Vvivraza’s burst of hums came back clearly enough for him to inter­pret: the human equiv­a­lent of a fed-up snort. He glanced behind him and squint­ed to see her tank through the cloudy fluid. His pilot’s gelati­nous body was spread out like a web, con­nect­ing sky-blue pseudopods to a dozen dif­fer­ent inter­faces. She was working hard. Infin­i­ty was a big number after all. To go past it, to outpace the omni­di­rec­tion­al expan­sion of the uni­verse, she would have to syn­chro­nize the engine with a Penson Com­pact­i­fi­ca­tion Diagram, a tes­sel­la­tion of light and matter updated in real time. The edge lay beyond infin­i­ty, so infin­i­ty had to be tamped down and forced into a place. Maybe impos­si­ble, even for Vvivraza. But at least she wasn’t turning green again.

    Digaught forced his limbs to be still and prepped his suit. First came the tra­di­tion­al nanofiber, sealing in a pro­tec­tive layer of stasis fluid. Then came the rein­forced exoskele­ton, its living chitin plates grab­bing onto his body one by one and growing togeth­er into a seal. They layered over each other, forming a spher­i­cal shell bristling with obser­va­tion equip­ment that con­nect­ed direct­ly to the probe. He was the only one at real risk in this mission, but he didn’t want to take any chances. If he did cause his pilot to mis­cal­cu­late, he would never forgive himself. Not this close to the edge. 

    Oxygen tubes tickled their way up his nose, car­ry­ing the stale smell of ster­il­ized air. “How’s it looking?” he asked Vvivraza. A series of con­fi­dent thrums, deep and bold, pulsed through him. The stasis fluid sucked away from his eyes so he could see the suits’ dis­plays— all green— and he grinned. Every­thing was going as pre­dict­ed. Next would come the ejec­tion. Then the fur­thest step anyone in the uni­verse had ever taken. 

    “Guid­ance is syn­chro­nized with the quantum pattern,” Vvivraza report­ed. “The instant we return to the observ­able uni­verse, the probe will launch you into whatever’s just past the edge. All systems are stable.” There was a pause. “Are you sure about this?”

    Digaught sent back a human snort. “A little late for that, isn’t it?”

    “No. Now’s the last chance for me to ask.” There was another pause and Digaught flicked his display to show his pilot. There was a little green in her now, just around the dark mass of her central nucle­o­lus. “You don’t need to do this. And we don’t know what will happen to a human. None of the unmanned probes we sent ever came back with any­thing, not even a scrap of data.”

    “Sure, but they weren’t damaged either.”

    Vvivraza was mostly quiet for a while, and the saw-engine had to slow to almost a com­plete stop before Digaught could feel the little prick­ling vibra­tions of her concern. “How do we know you’ll come back?”

    “We don’t. That’s why I have to see for myself.”

    She sighed with a dis­cor­dant strum. “You humans. You’re all crazy.”

    Digaught laughed and punched the ele­va­tion button. “You’re damn right we are!” 

    If she replied, it was lost in the rum­bling as his suit rose to lock into the sec­ondary propul­sion system. The dis­plays flashed red then fil­tered back into green. Vvivraza gave him the all clear and he shoved in the igni­tion. The vessel began to move. 

    It was conical, like the first ships to leave the old world. Tipped with a grav­i­ta­tion­al warping device made of dark matter, it com­pressed space enough to negate the vessel’s mass. Then the rocking began, a series of fission explo­sions at the rear, shoving the probe forward with the force of the atom. Digaught closed his eyes as it left the space-cutter and matched the speed of light. He wanted the first thing he saw to be what­ev­er lay beyond the edge of the universe. 

    The explo­sions pulsed faster and faster as each layer of hull fell away. The back-and-forth of the propul­sion sped up until he could no longer tell the blasts apart, melding into one con­tin­u­ous roar. He was so close that it seemed to last forever. Then Vvivraza’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion cut out. He was alone, past the last horizon. 

Digaught opened his eyes.

Color pushed across his vision. There was no light out here to see, and nothing for the visu­al­iz­ing instru­ments in his neural link to sim­u­late in his mind. Rather, his eyes reacted direct­ly to the unknown, a haze of soft colors like he was press­ing his thumb on his eyelids. Digaught had never seen these colors before, and so he could give them no names. Some were bright and cheery; others dull and thick with shadow. One hue, somber and moody, broke through another and cas­cad­ed across his unsee­ing eyes, not unlike a beam of light pierc­ing a distant cloud.

    He tried to look around, but found that his vision didn’t change, even when his head moved. He focused on the display, which showed no changes, no reac­tions to what­ev­er was beyond the walls of his suit.

Digaught found himself swal­low­ing back an acrid taste. An uneasy feeling had crept in along with the famil­iar weight­less­ness of space. It was the same sen­sa­tion he got when he knew someone was watch­ing him. No matter which way Digaught used his suit thrusters to turn, he felt like someone was staring at him from behind. The sen­sa­tion hard­ened into a pres­sure, but there was still no change in his vitals, accord­ing to the display. Cold pitted in his stomach. There was nothing logical about this feeling, he told himself. But then why was it the only sen­sa­tion he could pick up?

The pres­sure inten­si­fied, now from every direc­tion at once. Still no read­ings. Dighat was remind­ed of a house­fly, set­tling on a bright, alien wall, flanked by smells and sights it had never thought to imagine. Then a mesh of plastic would slam down and reduced the fly to a smudge of guts. The insect would notice it with just enough time to wonder why it was dead.

    The feeling built within him now, bulging the breath from his lungs and his eyes from their sockets. The colors mixed togeth­er in a noxious swirl, but the suit’s readout was the same as ever. No matter, no force, no change his instru­ments could pick up. Then why? 

    Digaught gritted his teeth. If this place didn’t have the same rules as the known uni­verse, he would just have to figure out the new pattern and exploit it. He had to, or this pres­sure would surely break some­thing vital.

He began the exper­i­ment, press­ing the panic button that should alert Vvivraza of a problem. The suit shook, and he had a queasy sense of being turned upside down, despite the lack of gravity. When he tried to right himself with the thrusters, his oxygen supply began to smell of rotting straw­ber­ries. Digaught reversed course, trying to go back to the uni­verse where things made sense. The suit froze in place. He hit the emer­gency burn and hummed back and forth, a thou­sand times each second. Digaught tried the sta­bi­liz­ers. Every­thing turned inside out. 

His head was pound­ing, burst­ing. He could almost feel the grey matter diffuse out into the stasis fluid, which had turned a sultry red. His arm wavered inside the display, like a reflec­tion on rip­pling water. When he grabbed it with his other hand, he could feel the firm­ness of muscle over bone, but also the dense fuzz of fur or mold. The display showed the two limbs shim­mer­ing into each other, folding out into inter­locked branch­es until they outgrew the sim­u­lat­ed screen and flow­ered into his own vision, pushing the colors aside.

Digaught howled and hit the panic button. Nothing hap­pened. He hit it again and felt the trickle of cold blood down his left nostril. The suit’s ther­moreg­u­lat­ing system kicked in, making him shiver. A third time and the entire suit screamed into his brain, metal shriek­ing like a dying horse. The pres­sure grew to unbear­able levels and he had to release it with a chuckle. 

    There was no pattern.

    This place had no cause and effect, no system, no rules, nothing he could discern. That’s why nothing had come back with data. The expe­di­tion wasn’t too dan­ger­ous to succeed. It wasn’t even impos­si­ble. It was simply some­thing that could not be described. Even now, while Digaught’s body shud­dered apart, his vitals display was a green haze of all-clear. As his mind smeared itself across the edge of time and space, the man could only think to laugh. 

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