sci-fi shorts.

[rambler]

ok so this is just a thread for people who want to publish their (very) short stories. the idea being that if there all in one place they're more likely to be read and discussed.

this was a little thing i did for the cerebral effect team. this is not going to be used by them, but was more of a showcase of my writing. unfortunately i got a bit carried away with the idea. it's not very good, but in the interest of getting everything going and all. it's very short, only 2 pages in word. the crap formatting on these boards means i have to format it a certain way, but i think it makes it easier to read anyway.

 

[rambler]

I don’t know why it hit me then, but just then, at the top of that building, looking over the dark city, it all came back to me.

The streets. The festivals. The people. Uniclothe, Easyburger. All those meaningless things. Dinner deals. Twenty-nine cent hotdogs.

Lying on the grass at night, watching the stars.

Amy.

-------------------------------

The wall vanished in a blink. Blowing out towards us, punctuating the silence with a deafening bang. Instantly everyone in the room was up, firing their incendiary rounds wildly into the breach, retreating, running up the stairs. Too late.

The three men on the stairs were torn apart instantly, blood turning to a thick red vapour. Bones and muscle and sinew smashed violently into the surrounding walls.

I looked back at the breach - plaster and mortar blown away, the metal framework bent inwards. Then I saw it, the stubby, plated leg stepping inelegantly through the fissure. A tank.

‘Here’, I tossed an armour piercing round to one of the new recruits curled in the corner. A pretty, Chinese girl. She can’t have been older than twenty – just a kid.

‘Nothing else will dent it’. I watched as the scared girl fumbled with the thing, eventually pushing the fat shell into the back of the guns barrel, before snapping the thing shut.

‘wait’ I said. ‘wait for my signal’
She nodded, her dirt smeared face looked close to tears. I tried to dig up some empathy for the girl, for what I was about to do. I could find none.

The tank edged further into the space, it’s head jutting through the gap finally.

‘Now!’ I screamed.
The girl’s shot hit its leg, exploding in a shower of blue sparks. Barely any damage, but it served its purpose.

The tanks mechanical head swung round, weapon pods cracking open. It’s high calibre autorifle screaming to life. That was the chance I needed. I ran for the stairs – the only way up. The last thing I heard was the girl’s scream, for a hundredth of a second, before that deafening cacophony of gunfire cut it off abruptly.

-------------------------------

The new recruits had arrived today, angry, scared. All of them better soldiers than I would ever be – trained from birth in the wasteland camps. All with their shaved heads. Mostly men. One girl stood apart from the gaggle, looking scared and utterly awkward holding the big grey rifle that sagged from her arms. The men talked among themselves, occasionally looking back at her, laughing.

‘If I die, this war will last forever’

A few of the men looked at me as I said it, but soon turned back to their plotting.

How could they win, even think of winning? Fighting was all they new. They didn’t remember the old city, before the war. How could they? That was all over long before they emerged from those lonely artificial tanks that they were conceived in.

Clones. Not even new people, just copies, carbon copies of the dead.

They could never see what I do when I look at the city. And what do they see? When I look down, all that way, I can still believe there are cars wending their way home, people laughing on street corners.

-------------------------------

The tank crept up the stairs steadily, its six fat legs supporting its giant armour plated body by bracing the wall on either side. Around me people were shouting, one man flung himself out onto the landing, screaming as he wildly unloaded his clip at the ascending vehicle. His head detonated with a loud pop, skull and brain splattering the wall behind. Now pockmarked with bullet holes.

And then they were all that was left. Them and me. The combat modified, raised by war.

One of them placed a pressure mine on the wall, just behind the top of the stairwell, before they all hastily made their way to the top of the building. I ran up and stood behind them, backing away.

Then they began firing, they shot out the floor below, the stairs, the walls. Everything. The tank would not be able to get here now. The men’s explosive rounds sounded dull to me now. Quiet.

I reached up and touched my forehead, I was bleeding. When had that happened? - Shrapnel, from the first blast.

Down below, I could still hear the ominous monotony of the tanks gears, the thump of its legs pinning the walls with every step. Coming relentlessly closer.

-------------------------------

I met her again, a long time ago. We looked at each other for a long time. I thought she remembered me, but she didn’t. Just a copy. And who was she now? It is a strange thing. To think a new person has stolen the body of someone you loved. Someone you love.

After a time she looked away, embarrassed, shy.

She moved just like her.

-------------------------------

Here it comes. Thudding onto the broken landing below. Head craning up, scanning pulses and topography lasers flicking on and whipping around the room.

One man starts to edge forward, out onto the broken landing, observing the thing below with visual equipment that obscures his face. The rest of them men wait on the other side.

The pressure mine under its foot blows one of its legs of. Thick artificial muscle and cables blow apart like fat, synthetic worms, spilling out of the leg’s thick plating which ricochets off its body and clatters around the room.

The whole thing starts to tip. It swings its body round, jutting out another of its legs to right itself. Recalculating, realigning. The man sees his chance and steps forward, controlled, calm. He lowers his anti tank rifle, pointing it down. The machine sees him, but it can’t respond in time, its position is too awkward, too off centre. The round hits it. He fires again and again blowing dark ragged holes into the crippled machine.

Below, the tank stops. The scene is frozen for what seems like minutes. Then it starts to sag, collapsing on its giant haunches like a dying elephant. It’s legs grapple feebly with the floor, trying to lift itself, straining against the inevitable. Straining against so much more, against these new recruits, this new form of life.

-------------------------------

Hours later I saw it. I didn’t bother to tell them. No point. Too late. A giant black wraith sweeping down on us like some kind of dark angel. Drifting quickly towards us in a huge accentuated arch. It was barely visible against the night sky. Black on black. It’s fringed wings rippling in the cold air.

The giant bomber, the Mechanised Airborn as they were known by their allies. It would have been called by the felled tank. No point in sending in infantry, too much trouble. There’s nothing they want here. Just destroy them. Just send a bomber to wipe them out. That was the policy.

I still love the city. It’s still beautiful to me, especially from up here, so high. The air smells different up here.

I look back at the girl. The person who had shot down the tank was not a man after all, just impossible to tell with the helmet on - her figure so similar to a mans from a lifetime of physical exertion. God, she looked just like her. Except that Amy wasn’t as muscular, wasn’t as skinny. I stared at her. That hardened face, hardened body. Hardened mind.

Not her mind. Not my Amy’s mind. She was someone else. An impostor. A clone. A carbon copy.

And then they heard it. Too late. Always just too late. But it didn’t matter, not to me.

The bomb fell silently on us, like a blanket. Like your mother tucking you in to bed when you were little. For the last time.

She looked up. Up to the heavens, just as it detonated. She always was beautiful.

The explosion spread around us in slow motion, her face frozen in time. Looking up, looking up to the stars and the sky. We would be together now. Forever. Me and my beautiful Amy, with one another, into the light.

-------------------------------

In the distance the watch tower observed the explosion. The building buckled, brickwork blown away from its bowed metal frame, straining to stay upright. Straining against so much more.

The men in the watchtower looked on as the building, and the men inside were incinerated in an instant. Their men – the new recruits, this new form of life. - The future of combat.

 

[Sloth]

Rambler - Have a look over here:

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=85553

Btw: If my CO likes you, {still can't get in contact with him, New years and all} you've got the job.

 

[rambler]

got it, didn't see that other thread, and thanks, looking forward to the e-mail when you do get in touch with him.

 

[Sulkdodds]

Cool.

Well here's something I wrote after playing too much Dystopia.

From the hotel room, you can see all the way across the Bay, even out to Habour Island where the tangle of freeways meets to form a glowing yellow haze above the toxic waters. Out there, oil tankers and tugs trawl the black scum; mutant seagulls follow in their wake and dive for scraps. Right now, yellow and red lights that are choppers and jumpjets thud left to right to congregate like a flock of crows over the Invincible - an ancient aircraft carrier of old. Once, it served in some far-off middle eastern shithole back when the army was unified. Nowadays it's the property of Uncle Phil's Homeland Defence, and Phil himself grins smugly down on the harbour, his face tethered there above the ship.

A thousand miles up, give or take, at the point where 'up' ceases to make any difference, holomercials stretch thin between corporate satellites. There are too many stars in the sky these days: too many orbital flights, too many stations and data havens and gravity-well startups that will last maybe a week before going bankrupt and scuttling their craft.

Follow the invisible microwave pulse of information. Ride it down from the orbital networks, down through the Ozone Preservation Zone where swarms of nanobots knit the very air back together, down through thick acid cloud banks to suddenly blunder like a frightened rabit into the blinding lights of the surface cities.

Down through the smog banks, down past the ghosts of corporate commandments: you must buy this - down between the thrusting skyscrapers, grown, literally, from the dregs of old buildings, down past their mirrored faces that ripple like liquid in the breeze.

Bounce off the signal nexus atop Hunter Tower. A sudden epileptic impression of sound, light, heat, noise, taste, touch: like razors in the brain. A salary suit buzzing past self-importantly in a cocoon of appointments and memos; the knifepoint silver sliver of another hacker, someone like you, on important business; the heavy roar of mass newscast, even the probing fractal fingers of a corporate AI - almost human, but the efficient symmetry of its cortex signiture gives it away. A million other sensoriums flash past in an instant. But you are aiming for this one. Ride the infostream outwards and upwards, arcing away above the tangle of freeways. Watch your vector. You're being sloppy, leaving traces an idiot could follow. Correct your course. There. Aim for the vertical downtown that blazes beyond the shanty sprawl.

Soar over the sinkholes, the ramshackle smear of Raintown, the living, breathing bustle. Streets wind and split like nerve endings, buildings built on buildings, dripping with corrosive downpour and suffocating under a heavy fog of particulates, contaminants, and rogue nanite clouds.

The hotel rears up glowing neon pink before you. Slip through the staff comms chanels and through the backdoor, bypassing the whole tedious security-check business at the hotel portal and streaming straight down into the brain of Hideo Rudkiewicz.

He sits cross-legged on the bed, eyes flickering in REM analogue, head twitching in that jacked-in way, meditating like a zen monk. Only the clatter of acid rain on the plexiglass, the high-decibel roar of traffic seeping through the soundproofing as a dull drone, the thud of choppers overhead. Adverts hang in the air, shining blue and red through cigarette smoke: they can't be turned off, but he pays them no heed. His mind is elsewhere.

All day his consciousness has been surfing the information ocean, flowing up and down the channels all the way to Japan and back again. This is his life, his element. In meatspace, he is scrawny and timid, three-day stubble on his chin and a shock of greasy black hair on his scalp. He is malnourished and sleep-deprived, crackling with coffee, jump juice, brain enhancers and about thirty lesser drugs he can, sad to say, recite the full names of. He spends less than five hours a day in his own body.

The other nineteen he's a ghost in the mainframes of the world; an all-powerful samurai surfing microwaves bounced between orbital mirrors and surface data hubs. He feels like he was born on these infocurrents: navigating them is a natural talent, his only talent. There, he can do anything. Trained in a Los Angeles basement by veteran silicon cowboys in the ancient art of coding, he slips beneath the surface of the net and shapes it at its very core: rearranging everything at the most fundamental level to suit his pleasures. Not even an hour ago he hacked a Jiamiata brain-farm monkey. The guy spent all his working time comatose in an orbital processing bank, and most of his free time ****ing a female colleague up and down the central zero-G well. He dreams of retiring to the Bahamas; he spent his childhood in war-torn Africa and he likes to read Russian literature. Hideo stole into his mind and took control of his body, and after half an hour he could see why the guy spent so much time with his woman.

Now twenty minutes later, Hideo jacks, feels himself jolted back into his old familiar self, rubs the net from his eyes. He still can't shake off the feeling that he needs a cold shower.

Peers around the darkened room, half-blind with information aftershock, and halls himself off the bed to grab at a cup of coffee, three hours cold, with one clawed hand.

He should get some sleep, he knows. Hideo sometimes feels that he's existing on a different plane of reality to the rest of mankind - they dance and flow around him in slow-motion, mooing and fretting about love, fashion, money...life. Sometimes he wishes he could join them, somehow jack into their culture (if only it was that easy) and find himself a corner. But this will not happen. They are sheep: pathetic wretches caught up in the pointless hustle-bustle of what his mentors called the 'matrix' - he recalls, foggily, that they stole the term from some sci-fi movie. It meant the rat run, the meaningless spiral. Get a job, get a house, marry, have kids, get a better job, get a bigger car, be a slave to the megacorps. They don't know the truth like Hideo does. He is above them; he does not need such abstractions. Money, material wealth, human company are nothing, and 99% of the people in this world are not even worth thinking about.

This is what his mentors in LA have taught him, and it would not do to dishonor them.

But sometimes, he feels like it's not enough. He does not know what the word 'friend' means, and has never really experienced human contact, but sometimes he wonders. Questions his detached existance. As he observed the sheep mill in their fishbowl, he found more and more that he wanted to...well, to do something. He watches and he listens and he coldy influences events to suit his needs. But sometimes...sometimes he wants to reach out and touch that world.

It has become an obsession, a drug, an addiction. To him, the world is one giant soap opera. At first, he simply watched - riding the participants as they tried to navigate the complex strands of their life. It was fascinating. Then he began to participate himself - just nudging at the start but later taking full control (they don't notice - convincing themselves that they are responsible for their actions. The human mind is an odd thing). Living vicariously through others. He has kept track of all the little situations, affairs, friendships, plots, feuds, struggles and triumphs, writing them all down meticulously in his notebook file. More and more often now he feels that his mentors must have made a mistake. This is incredible. Words can't describe it.

But even with all the drugs in the world, Hideo must sleep. He must take a break from the dance for now; it's three in the morning and most of his people are asleep. So many minds out there, so many lives. And slowly, he is coming to believe that his purpose in life, his one dream, is to join them.

He swallows five pills in one gulp, and sleeps the sleep of the dead.

 

[Adabiviak]

Sounds like Neal Stephenson.

 

[rambler]

Sounds like William Gibson.. or does it?

 

[Sulkdodds]

That's because it's Dystopia, which is basically the Neuromancer universe.

Oddly enough I wrote it before I read Snow Crash. :O

 

[Sloth]

Wierdly awsome.

 

[crackhead]

heh i couldnt be bothered to read that. still aint got round to reading the rest of the jurassic park one. heres my contribution. i wrote it a long time ago and i know its not very good. i feel confident that it can be classed as sci fi. also i should probaly change it from once upon a time lol. comments and crits welcome.

Once upon a time there was a room. The room was dark and desolate. There were no windows or doors. Just a single lounge chair facing a clock. The clock would weep all day long. There was a little yellow bucket under the clock to catch the tears. There was a man who would sit in this chair and watch the clock as it wept. One day he asked the clock why it was weeping.
“Why are you weeping,” he asked. The clock paused momenterily and then replied, “Time,” it said.
“Time?” asked the man.
“Time,” said the clock, “time is running out.” The man stood up very quickly with a confused expression on his face.
“Are you sure?” asked the man. “I thought time was infinite.” The clock paused again. “No,” replied the clock. “No it can’t be.”
“Why not?” asked the man.
“If time were infinite material possession would be useless and that would render clocks obsolete. Therefore if time wasn’t recorded it wouldn’t exist and thus wouldn’t be infinite,” Said the clock.
“Oh,” said the man. “Oh I see. So when is it going to run out?”
“When it has finished,” replied the clock
“Finished what?” asked the man.
“Finished counting,” said the clock.
“What does it count?”
“It counts time”
“It counts itself?” asked the man
The clock paused. “Well I guess so yes”
“But if it was counting itself it would only count to one and would have finished ages ago”
“Well I guess,” said the clock.
“Therefore time is infinite,” exclaimed the man.
The clock stopped crying. “I never saw it like that before.”
“So there’s no need to be sad,” said the man. You’re lucky you’re not a human.”
“Why is that?” asked the clock.
“Well I mean I probably only have 40 years left if that and I could easily die from cancer or pollution. I could get hit by a car tomorrow or get killed while someone try’s to steal twenty pounds from my wallet. I mean who’s to say that there won’t be a terrorist attack or that the water system isn’t contaminated with some kind of disease. I could be in a plane crash.” The man sits back down in the chair. “I. I could die tomorrow,” he said. He sat in silence. The man began to weep. The clock sat there watching him.

Fin.

copyright of luke smith 2005

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

heh i couldnt be bothered to read that. still aint got round to reading the rest of the jurassic park one. heres my contribution. i wrote it a long time ago and i know its not very good. i feel confident that it can be classed as sci fi. also i should probaly change it from once upon a time lol. comments and crits welcome.

That... Was very good and well written. My hat is off to you.

 

[Sloth]

@CrackHead - It was sorta confusing the first time i read it, but this time round, it's bloody awesome.

 

[crackhead]

heh thanks. just liek to say its copyrighted.

 

[Sulkdodds]

Curse you, I was going to copy and paste it and then sell it! :hmph:

 

[rambler]

oops, double post.

 

[rambler]

I'd just like to say that I truly hope that both tollbooth and evilsloth were being sarcastic.

“But if it was counting itself it would only count to one and would have finished ages ago”

....

 

[Sloth]

It meant to be confusing, he is confusing the clock!

Can't you see it, the clock!

[/crazy insaness]

 

[crackhead]

heh exactly everything doesnt have to make sense. and it does make a strange sort of sense.