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.

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.

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.