Luck

PROMPT: An ancient god of war had always seen women as boring, weak and inferior. But in the modern times there are less and less people who remember his cult, until he's left with a single follower: a young and motivated pacifist woman.

“Sadiq!” Her own name, shouted across the office, jerked her head up and out of the piece she was working on. Her supervisor -- big, red-faced, always angry seeming -- stood in the doorway to the bullpen where she worked, glaring at her. As she looked up, he jerked his head toward himself: Come with me, the gesture said, you’re in trouble.

She reached out and set her hand on the tiny statuette on her desk: the tiny God her parents had worshipped, had carried across the desert, had tucked into their daughter’s dress, to watch over her, when she was taken to America with a plane-load of “orphans” after the war. She remembered the practice of the men in the village, where her father had been headman, who made this obeisance to the shrine in the center of the village, before a fight, or before practice.

They had regarded themselves as fierce warriors, worth ten of any neighboring village, and it might have been so, but it wasn’t a neighboring village who’d come for them, and they’d been outnumbered by a lot more than ten to one.

Heroics

PROMPT: Turns out that the purpose of life is war. Humans are self-multiplying shock troops, left to our own until our numbers get high enough to be useful in the ongoing galactic war. Today our previously thought to be useless DNA has been flipped to ON.

“When I say ‘flipped on,’ I don’t mean there was a physical switch thrown, all at once, I...”

“Do you mean that the mechanism went from a passive, stand-by state to an active, doing-things state?”

“I... yes...” The two men turned a corner, Doctor Hamblin taking the wide outside and Colonel Jacobi cutting the inside. There was another long corridor; Hamblin, new to the space, wondered if the maze-like atmosphere had any other purpose than to allow Jacobi to walk while he talked. He fully expected that after thirty more intense-dialogue-filled seconds they would arrive back at Jacobi’s office, where someone else would be waiting to talk to him.

“Is it a lot more complicated than that? Lots of detail and difficult-to-understand nuance?”

Ghost Written

PROMPT: A ghost is trying to haunt someone but can't get his attention

I’d be the first to admit that it was a missed opportunity. Hell, for both of us: what scientist doesn’t want to see proof of the supernatural? I mean, honestly: it’s only supernatural because it hasn’t been reproducibly described yet in the literature; then it is no longer ‘supernatural’ but ‘a newly discovered phenomenon.’ And newly discovered phenomena have names: generally the name of the person who wrote the article.

So as much as anything, I guess, this is the story of the Nuttal Effect, as might have been.

I will start by saying that there is no orientation for new ghosts. You die, and then you’re a vaguely-associated discorporeal presence. It actually takes quite a while to get your consciousness together, and it takes an effort of will to keep it from dissipating -- never entirely, of course; that would be too easy, but enough to allow you to flow along in a sort of fugue consciousness.

Until something attracts your attention, as Trevor Nuttal attracted mine in the spring of 1962.

RUN

PROMPT: You are at a popular Japanese restaurant, eating alone. The waiter brings a complimentary fortune cookie. You open it and it says "RUN"

“Hey, is this some sort of joke?” Caroline waved the fortune out of her cookie at the waitress, who stopped for a second as she went past. She cocked a hip and read it. “It says to give it back to you,” she said, and gave it back to Caroline.

The fortune said, “Don’t show anybody else.”

As she watched, the letters faded, blurring and spreading out to make the background of the little slip of paper a little less stark white before re-congealing into a single larger, bolder, serifed word: RUN.

She shoved the tiny piece of paper in her jacket pocket and walked out of the restaurant; if they were worried about her not paying the bill, they could take it up with the fortune cookie.

The Weekend Project

PROMPT: Blue prints for a cheap faster than light space craft are simultaneously emailed to every address and posted to every website along with a message from a human who claims to have seen the edge of the universe.

“It looks like everybody got it.”

Ajay finished taking a pull of his beer and set it down hard on the table. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “How would you even prove that?”

“Well, so far nobody has come forward who didn’t get it.” I looked out at the nighttime city; from up here it was calm and quiet, the occasional car-horn giving the only clue that the neighborhood was making its weekly Friday-night costume change from Business Casual to Club Formal.

Ajay took another pull at his beer; I could tell he was having hard time letting go of the “everybody got it” assertion. You can’t say things around Ajay without being willing to either back up your statement with suitable proof or else listen to him give a lecture on the importance of checking your sources.

Cease and Desist

PROMPT: Science actually discovered immortality years ago. It turned out it was a profoundly bad idea, so they destroyed the knowledge instead of publishing it.

Before getting down to business, you must bear with me while I give you some of the history of our little organization, its purpose and its membership.

It didn’t start as a cult. Just the opposite, in fact: At the beginning, it had been a publishing tree, sort of a predecessor to the modern journal system. Someone who had produced results might send it to a circle of their friends, and if that circle found the results notable, they might pass it on to another circle of interested persons. The repetition of the experiment and the publication of results happened in the same manner, bouncing from one end of the small, scattered circle of interested parties to another.

The initial publication of Jacobsen’s findings had been met with a sort of fascinated skepticism; previous claims about life extension had been made, of course, and always turned out to be either grossly overstated or complete balderdash; and besides, results themselves were very difficult to confirm, requiring, as it were, a lifetime of study. Jacobsen’s results, however, were different.

When it all changed

PROMPT: After several generations of living on a spacecraft, they finally arrived at the earth-duplicate planet that harbors intelligent life

This one went a completely different direction than I think the prompt's author was intending... 


The news came in just after breakfast, but management decided to sit on it until dinner time. Trying to work out how to frame it, I guess; working through the contingencies.

In the middle of the afternoon, a new entry appeared on everyone’s calendar: All hands, in the central cafeteria at the main site; remote sites to teleconference in; no exceptions.

We weren’t really big on all-hands, or meetings of any kind bigger than the immediate team doing the work at hand; this gig was more or less pure execution from start to finish. We’d been dropped on the planet with ten thousand people, five years, and all the heavy equipment we could use, along with blueprints for four cities and assorted industrial sites.

The idea was, five years after we dropped, the colonization ships would start arriving, and we’d want to have housing and workplaces and basic food-and-sanitation infrastructure in place so that the million or so people frozen and stored on each of the big ships would be able to spend a week or so waking up and then be able to get right to work.