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?”

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.

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...”