COSMONAUTUL: Cry Me a Future
A cosmonaut listens for grace. A scientist listens for the future. History listens for blood. Chapter I of a Substack epic. Best experienced with headphones.
See the desert, for it is golden, wide and vast, filling the hermit’s eyes with tears as he watches an oil bike cut across the dunes, raising black clouds of smoke like a snake, a black serpent slithering across the purple sky.
The rider arrived without removing the skull-shaped helmet, stopping before the hermit’s cave, empty grave of a long-forgotten warlord. The hermit put his prayer rope away, his fingers still following invisible beads, and did not look up.
“I thought it was death itself coming to take me unrepented,” said the hermit.
“Nay,” said the rider. “But I am here to take you all the same. The flags of war hang low in the capital. Banners fly high. Maidens sing songs of glory. Young men drink to the blood they will spill, red wine already staining their faces.”
“That is good for those who are still of this earth.”
“Yer-holy. I have come to take you, as death would take you. And know this: if I return alone before the throne of the Padahar, the one who comes for you next will be death itself.”
The hermit smiled and crossed himself. No words were spoken. The rider shook his head, then mounted the oil bike and rode off, leaving a trail of smoke.
The hermit watched him go. He picked a skull from the ground and looked into it as if he were looking into my eyes.
“Bless you, child,” he said.
And for a moment, I, Mihai Văzduh, felt blessed deep in the tar that is space itself.
His benediction was so powerful that the iron flower—the metal rose that always grows in my left shoulder—stopped its painful chant for a brief moment. This is the power of true blessings, not that of the fake priests who roamed the village of my youth, a cold mountain village in Rucăr, lush and green, pressed between forests and stone, where mist clung to the roofs and winter lingered even in summer.
My poor peasant parents and forefathers looked at those priests with empty, cow-like eyes, kissing the cross and the icons with fear and trembling on their lips, as if afraid the mountains themselves were watching.
But this that I received is a true blessing, the one that cuts across space and time, a grace that shines even in the Nether. A blessing like I thought Kaplan once was. Through the steel tendrils that run inside my veins, I can feel his mounting fear.
Kaplan was alone in the room. He stared at the anchor that bound us, a black orb floating in the middle of his old office. The same one I entered all those years ago. Or was it moments? After all, it is all just the Moment. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. All in due time, all in due time, my dear boy, as Kaplan used to say.
The radio in the corner, warped beyond recognition by radiation, played a strange melody, one that could never spring from a human soul. Unheard by human ears until now, it became a lullaby for Dr. Kaplan, letting him fall into a torpor that allowed him to dream on and on of my return. His last solace.
A knock at the door, abrupt, followed by the bashing entrance of Radu Demetrescu1, his handler. Whenever he saw Kaplan, his face twisted as if his nose had been invaded by a foul smell. Still, the only thing foul was Radu’s own compounded bitterness and jealousy.
“Any news, Doctor Kaplan?”
“Can’t you hear the music of the sphere, Lieutenant?”
“If one can call that music. But I suppose the bar is set rather low after the degeneracy you were exposed to before you were allowed to flee to Romania.”
“Ah, Berlin was beautiful in the days of my youth. If only you could have seen it. Maybe you’d still be a poet.”
“I am a poet. But serving the Captain and the PCR2 is a higher calling.”
“Don’t you find it ironic, Lieutenant, that you ended up working for the very race you despise most?”
“We both work for the cosmic program. We are employees of the same state. The state that saved you from being eradicated in the Reich.”
“Saved me only so far, Lieutenant. I can’t remember when I last experienced joy. Tormenting you is one of the few pleasures I have left.”
“Doctor, nothing you can do or say will offend me. You are the only one who can contact the asset, or so High Command believes. I do not. A time will come when everyone sees through your lies, and then I will be the one to put a bullet in you.”
“Or they will put a few in your Captain and his camarilla.”
“Enough. This is high treason you’re speaking. So no update, Doctor?”
Kaplan shook his head. And with that, the lieutenant left.
Kaplan remained there, still shaking his head, praying for my return, for the end of the National Legionnaire regime—ideally for a mixture of the two. But I can say this: whatever will kill the Captain will also give birth to the Padahar, even if that gestation takes eons.
END OF CHAPTER 1
Thank you for reading, my dear Netherwalkers!
This piece, and the Cosmonautul series as a whole, will be published on the 24th of every month throughout this year. Think of it as my Watchmen: a series built patiently, issue by issue, to turn speculative fiction on its head. With this project, I’m going for broke. I’m not interested in a cautious or diminished version. The audio and artwork are original and composed specifically for this series. I want to push what fiction and literature itself can be.
Many of you have accompanied me on this journey already, and I’m deeply grateful for that. I know, without question, that the most steadfast supporter of Mihai Văzduh is J Wirrowac, and I want to acknowledge that openly.
I would also be remiss not to thank three writers whose influence and encouragement mattered more than they probably know. Links to some of their pieces are below.
Thaddeus Thomas offered me feedback half a year ago. I don’t know if he remembers it to the T, but much of what I’m doing here is a direct attempt to live up to that conversation. I hope I did him proud. If not, at the very least, his name belongs here. I also want to point you toward The Literary Salon, which remains, in my view, the hearthstone of the fiction community. Bar none.
Aurelian Ashmore, quieter but no less influential, inspired me deeply through his work and the way he once adapted one of my pieces. I won’t indulge my vanity by naming it here. Instead, I’ll link below one of my recent favorite pieces of his, one involving a god-killer, which says far more than I could. He’s also given everyone the tools to approach narration the right way.
And Andy Futuro , who has consistently supported my Notes-rants about the future of art and whatnot. and whose novel No Dogs in Philly I’ve begun reading. It’s already promising in all the right ways. More than that, Andy’s work pushed me to go further, to take my own risks seriously.
All of you, the writers mentioned above, the poet mentioned below, and every one of my subscribers, are people actively working on your talents. I’m grateful for each of you taking the time to read this far.
I want 2026 to be the year of D A C O F U T U R I S M. If you haven’t already, join the Nether Street Blues subscriber chat. My hope is to foster a real community there: for collaboration, cross-pollination, and shared myth-building, and to make Dacofuturism a living thing this year.
Thank you for walking the Nether with me. This work takes a great deal of my time and a modest amount of money to exist in the form you’re reading it now. If you find value in it, a one-time contribution or becoming a paid subscriber helps me push this art further than I could alone, and further than I’ve taken it before.
Radu Gyr: In a reality I may or may not inhabit with you, dear reader, Lieutenant Demetrescu did not outlive the regime he served. After its collapse, he was imprisoned and endured decades of hard labor and inhumane torture, until rank, uniform, and biography were burned away. What remained was a name spoken in whispers: Radu Gyr, poet.
Within prison walls, he composed poems never written down, only memorized and passed from mouth to mouth, breath to breath. They moved like contraband hope—small candles carried through dark and frozen nights. Whether such poetry redeems a soul is not for us to decide. That it kept many from extinction is beyond doubt.
For English-language readers seeking work written in a similar spirit, I recommend the following poem by a friend of ours right here on Substack.
Programul Cosmic Român (PCR): An initiative that officially never existed. According to the surviving fragments, the PCR emerged in the early 1940s at the margins of Romanian scientific and occult research, orbiting the work of Dr. Jeremiah Kaplan (known locally as Vasile Câmpeanu) and the short-lived Cosmic Interstellar Research Society. Unlike conventional rocketry programs, the PCR rejected the lunar obsession of its contemporaries and pursued traversal through what Kaplan variously termed the Antiplane, the Ur Zone, and, finally, the Nether.
The sole confirmed “success” of the program was the departure of Mihai Văzduh, a peasant-born assistant whose name was later erased from official history and preserved only in unreliable testimonies, forbidden archives, and at least one prior iteration of this narrative.
Readers curious enough to consult materials from a former reality may access an archival fragment here.
The audio is fantastic! I was blown away by how you orchestrated this entire piece between the prose and the audio and the art. Excited to see where this story goes.
Hypnotic and skin-burning at the same time! I love the audio you added here, it reminded me a lot of the Tron series! Entering a world that is only fragmentarily known, opening up other possibilities. I'm looking forward to the next chapter! Bravo Stefan!