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?”

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.

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.

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?”

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.