Universal Symbols pt. II

This is a continuation of the last entry, Universal Symbols; I'm making an attempt to construct a real story with a real three-part plot &c &c out of one of these snippets. Please bear with me while I flail.

It would have been 34 hours from San Francisco to Yakutsk, had the flight from Harbin actually left the ground; instead, it was another 24 hours in Quingdao before I could go on. Astonishingly, although I didn’t have a visa for China, nobody seemed to give a shit if I wandered out of the airport, so I ended up having a fun little one-day mini-vacation in Quingdao.

Everybody I have talked to tells me that this couldn’t possibly have happened and that it doesn’t match their experience of China’s customs practice and whatnot, but there you go. I think it bears on this story not at all, except that I had a surprisingly great day, and I bought a coat more appropriate to Siberia than anything I had in my closet in California.

Yakutsk is bleak. I was arriving in late May, the temperatures ranged from freezing to damn-it’s-cold, and the locals were all walking around in shorts and t-shirts because it was warm. The city is designed around cold weather survival, and if it looks sort of weird in spring, it’s because everybody is used to there being mounds of snow everywhere.

Universal Symbols

PROMPT: Humans are not native to earth. After aliens defeated the human race, they banished captives to earth stripped of modern technology. Over time history became legend and legend forgotten. That is until in a mountain cave a mural drawing is found and an ancient metal object unlike ever seen before

Jack was someone I took with an ever-increasing grain of salt; he’d been one of the smartest of the group of us at B.U., but as the rest of the group worked their way into STEM fields he went down the Humanities hole, coming away with a degree in Anthropology and then hieing himself off to Arizona State, of all places, to pursue his doctorate.

Of the rest of the little crowd we’d formed that first year of college, most of us ended up in computers; it was just... what happened to STEM students in that time and place; whatever you started off studying, the nineties’ computer industry just sucked you right in and made you a programmer.

I ended up in Interface Design, which may have contributed to the barely-concealed distain I felt for Jack and his line of work: Interface Design people are relatively low on the techno-totem-pole, being one of those disciplines where you’re either wizardly good at it or you’re a Fine Arts major with a license to talk a lot of bullshit.

Settling Up

PROMPT: The US military reveals that it's been at war with an advanced alien civilization since the Roswell incident, and its been winning

“That is so much bullshit,” said Freddy, pointing the neck of his beer at the TV hanging behind the bar. CNN was doing its endless around-the-clock coverage trick, a woman anchor dominating the screen above three different scrolling text streams.

The most prominent scroll said, “...United States and its NATO allies today announced victory in a secret war against an alien civiliza...” The TV’s sound was off, the anchor’s words superimposed as captions over the scrolls, the effect one of a good-looking professional woman above a jumble of semi-readable text.

“If it’s a hoax, it’s a pretty good one... I mean, how many people have to be in on it, to make it come off like...” Jimmy, the bartender, was wiping out glasses. It was the middle of the afternoon, and I was pretty sure that Freddy and I were the first customers of the day, just off the morning shift; I wasn’t sure where all the glasses Jimmy was wiping out were coming from; just a nervous tick, maybe.

“Listen,” said Freddy, “I was in the Army for, what...” He looked at me, looking like he was mentally counting on his toes. “Twenty years.” He took a long swig of his beer. “If we were at war with Aliens all that time, like they say, I’d have known it. I mean, I heard of fighting wars and keepin’ it secret from, you know the populace, but how do you fight a war and keep it secret from the Army?”

To the stars... and back.

PROMPT: As humankind expanded into space and colonized, they began to notice that something on Earth kept humans alive longer, more than just oxygen. Without it, humans only live to be in their mid 30's. The human race has no idea what this missing key is.

“Maybe it’s love.” She pulled the ridiculous bag down out of the overhead luggage rack, narrowly missing his head.

“Love.” He ducked under the ridiculous bag and pulled his own sensible black bag out from under the seat. People were beginning to move toward the exit in a way that suggested that the door was open.

“Yeah, love. I mean, it’s a fundamental human thing, right? It’s something...”

“I love Mom and Dad, and I’ve never been to Earth.” Not yet. Not for another twenty-three hours, according to the schedule.

“Yeah, but... I mean. What if it’s, like, love of Earth? Like, Earth itself.” The ridiculous bag didn’t have a shoulder strap, just these huge long handles; she had to cock her whole body against its weight to keep it off the floor, so moving down the aisle toward the door was like a weird asynchronous penguin waddle.

I Believe I Can Fly

PROMPT: A man who has superpowers when he hear music. The power depends on the song.

She rounded the corner at a dead sprint, that goddamned Springsteen song pumping loud through her headphones. Everything around her was a blur, but long practice allowed her to look for the bad guys: there, two armed men in ski-masks waving pistols, a third loading bags of something into a crappy stolen getaway car. She put her head down and powered toward them.

The two men with guns saw her and began to turn the pistols in her direction, but she was across the courtyard faster than they could swing their arms and had the pistols in her hands in an eyeblink. A quick pass around the getaway car allowed her to snatch the pistol out of the waistband of the man loading the bags; then back out of the courtyard, ditch the guns, and back for the big fight scene.

Communications

PROMPT: A probe to Mars makes a startling discovery: Another probe that we did not send.

“It doesn’t look like anything...” He stopped, hearing what he was about to say echo around the world in blog posts and opinion pieces. He cleared his throat, fiddled with the zoom on the external camera.

“It’s clearly something.” She sounded irritated. He couldn’t tell if she didn’t hear his ellipsis, and was irritated because there was obviously something sitting there, or if she did hear it and was irritated by its implications being stupid, or whether she was irritated by his cowardice at refusing to state the obvious.

The omnipresent mic allowed them to communicate in the airless capsule, allowed them to get laggy feedback from earth, but it was never far from his mind that every word he spoke into it would be heard by literally everybody. If he said something questionable, it would follow him forever.

The omnipresent mic impeded communication by making it potentially painful to say something stupid.

Hoodie

A mysterious hooded man hands you a digital watch. The numbers that appear on the watch seem to change at random.

The guy’s hoodie was surprisingly deep. I don’t mean it was intellectually complex or whatever, it just... hid his face really well. It cast shadows in all the right places to make him seem sinister and mysterious. It obscured his features.

When I was a kid, and I got a hoodie for the first time, I imagined the hood covering my face and casting deep shadows like that, like I was a character in a comic book or the grim reaper or something; but really, a hoodie’s hood normally just covers your head, maybe keeps out a little rain, keeps in some body heat.

So the guy caught my attention for the perfection of his hoodie.

Act of God

PROMPT: A man sues God because his insurance company won't pay for the damages done to his house in a storm. To his complete surprise and Horror, God actually shows up.

“Mister Jackson, it says here that you’d like to call God as a witness.”

“As God is my witness, Your Honor.”

“Was that meant to be funny, Mister Jackson?”

“Yes, Your Honor, just a little bit.” There were titters from the gallery at that.

“Mister Jackson, I assume that there’s some kind of point being made here?” The Judge did his best to sound both bored and put out.

Ivan Jackson put his hands behind his back, looked at the attorneys for his insurance company, at the gallery.

Incident at Tel Medigo

PROMPT: Armageddon happens and the forces of Heaven and Hell come to Earth for the final battle... only to have vastly underestimated the technological advancements of mankind.

“All right, Corporal, walk me through it, from the beginning.” The big man spun a chair around and sat in it backwards, facing a younger man doing his best to sit at attention.

The younger man was obviously exhausted, and streaked with grime from head to foot. He was still in battle dress, although he’d divested himself of his armor and helmet; his rifle leaned against his chair.

“Sir, as I told Sergeant Gurney, we were patrolling south of the Kibbutz, just near the, the hill...”

“The archaeological site.”

“Yes sir. We were in three vehicles, myself, Privates Stanley and Kurtz, and Specialist Chin in the lead, Corporal...”

The nice watch-list future

PROMPT: Two pioneering time travelers step through a time portal, only to discover that the process has a "scrambling" effect and that both have arrived into the same past from radically different futures.

Something about the way the road curved around the base of a low but steep bluff played hell with the wind, causing a constant, chaotic flow of dust devils and localized mini- dust storms. Visibility tended to be crap in 2057, and this corner had a reputation for playing hell with the cameras and sensors of cars; there were more accidents here than anywhere else in the greater metropolitan area.

There’d been a push to move the road somewhere else, or lower the bluff, or something, to change the conditions; the problem was, more or less, that that stretch of road had been there since ancient times, had run that route when Jesus rode his donkey into town. It was widely said, though not believed, to be the corner where the Good Samaritan was mugged; so of course everybody involved dragged their feet and argued about it, so it remained, dusty and dangerous.