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.

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.

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?”