Tag Archives: scifi

The Light is Alive

55 Cancri e

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“You can’t be serious.” Marshall Arnold was the Surface Team Lead for the Tyche expedition and his Science Officer Bertha Rose had just told him something impossible.

“I would have missed it if I hadn’t compared my readings to Marco’s stellar observations.”

“But what made you take readings of dying Tiagos?”

“Blame Gracie. She has this weird intuition and made a connection between the Tiago religion and death rituals with their screwy biology.”

“So wait a minute, Bertha. Gracie…”

“Call her over and ask her, Marshall.”

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Long Climb to Sanctuary

passage

© Sue Vincent

The cities were lost to the Grendels and most of the human race was dead. The early news reports Neville Smith heard said that the disease had been introduced to Europe and the Americas by groups of refugees from Somalia, but the conspiracy theory websites released documents stating that something got away from the CDC and it was their own staff that spread the infection causing a global pandemic.

The last report before all telecommunications and the electric grid went down was that up to 94% of the human race had died. Only one percent of humanity was immune. That left the Grendels, well, that’s what Neville called them. Human beings who were mutated by the virus becoming…what? In the poem “Beowulf,” Grendel was cursed as a descendant of Cain from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. The creature was said to devour live warriors and in the real world, the mutants consumed the dead.

But that was over three months ago.

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The Last Festival

desert crossing

Found at a travel blog

“…I’m trying to erase you from my mind …you’re my religion and my belief…”

This wasn’t Yunin Obia’s first pilgrimage to the Holy City for the Festival of Qet but it would be her last. Every devotee of the God Slaz was required to travel to the great city of Shilarbor once every year for the Qet when Barkon’s orbit brought the planet closest to its sun. Motorized ground or air transport was allowed but it was considered a greater act of piety to make the journey on foot.

Yunin was healthy and relatively young and so encased in her skinsuit with the required possessions for the festival strapped across her back, she trudged across the soft sand from dusk until several hours after dawn each day stopping when it became too hot to go on. Then she slept in her insulated body tent until the desert permitted her once again move forward.

Occasionally, she would see another pilgrim in the distance. Sometimes they travelled in groups of three or four, but again, the greatly pious made the trip on foot and alone. Yunin had chosen an approach that was distant from aircraft flight paths and vehicle roads to accentuate her solitude. It also made it possible to hear the God Slaz’s voice a little sooner. She wanted to see if He knew what she was planning.

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Stepping Back

swanage pier

© Sandra Crook

“It’s not real.”

The building and pier are quite real, Jonathan.”

“But the scene inside the cafe looks like a painting, Raven.”

“Simply step through the door as you did previously.”

Jonathan Cypher walked toward the painting on the building in the English coastal town. Then there was an actual door and everything changed.

“It is now 1927. The men inside are members of the Communist party. A Soviet agent has recruited them to assassinate the King of England. You must stop them.”

The man without a past stepped back in time ninety years on his mission to rewrite history.

I authored this for the Rochelle Wisoff-Fields writing challenge for 26 January 2018. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 100 words long. My word count is 100.

I did a Google image search and discovered the Pier Head Cafe is located at Swanage Pier in Southern England. The Bizarro comic strip for 24 January 2018 depicted a one-panel joke set in 1927 so I had the year stuck in my head. I looked up 1927 at Wikipedia and discovered the following items:

  • January 19 – Great Britain sends troops to China to protect foreign nationals from spreading anti-foreign riots in Central China.
  • March 24 – Nanking Incident: After six foreigners have been killed in Nanking and it appears that Kuomintang and Communist Party of China forces would overrun the foreign consulates, warships of the U.S. Navy and the British Royal Navy fire shells and shot to disperse the crowds.
  • November 12 – Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin with undisputed control of the Soviet Union.

So I hatched a plot of the Communist party of China to assassinate King George V of England. The man who is passing himself off as a Soviet agent is really working for the Chinese (I edited this paragraph to be more historically accurate as per my conversation with Neil below). The word limit prevented me from explaining things in more detail.

I once again am using the characters Jonathan Cypher and Raven last seen in The Kepler Tomb. Of course there was no real plot to assassinate the King of England in 1927, but I needed to make up something.

To read other stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.

Primordial

primordial soup

© Gyaban

The last place Christopher Sanderson expected to wake up was in a comfortable bed in a richly furnished and adorned room, though he was surprised to be waking up at all. Bright sunlight from the large open window on his right momentarily blinded him, but he welcomed the warm breeze, the rustling of tree branches, and what sounded like friendly bird cries which were so different from the cries of dying men.

Then it all came back to him and his beating heart began to race.

He heard two quick knocks on the door which then immediately opened. A very large Japanese man entered carrying a tray. Christopher sat up in bed and noticed for the first time he had been dressed in silk pajamas. Last he recalled, he had been draped in rags soaked in sea water and blood.

“Do I have you to thank for my rescue?”

Without replying, the fearsome looking man set the tray down on a side table, stepped back, and then bowed.

Not knowing what to do, Christopher nodded back. “If this is a Japanese prison camp, the accommodations are certainly a great deal better than I would have expected.

The large man finished his bow and though the gesture seemed polite and genteel, his facial expression was one of hostility and even malevolence. Without a word, he then turned and left closing the door behind him. Christopher was directing his attention to the tray when he distinctly heard the sound of a lock being engaged. Perhaps he was a prisoner after all.

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Deadly Comfort

Lorie Petty

Actress Lori Petty as the character “Noss” from the 1999 Star Trek: Voyager episode “Gravity.”

“What will my heart allow when loneliness holds me down.”

Andrea Norton was a survivor, the only survivor. Five years ago their interstellar ship Astraea came out of jumpspace during a class seven solar storm which blew out the ship’s electronics, or most of them. The heavily protected emergency systems held up for the most part, at least long enough for the computer to jettison the crew module toward Kepler 452b’s only habitable planet. The EM shield around the mod protected the twelve astronauts in hibernation long enough to enter the planet’s atmosphere.

Unfortunately the landing was a little rough.

Andrea was the only one to wake up. The surge protectors on the other eleven hibernation pods had been fried upon impact which meant their systems bypassed the required five-hour revival process and immediately exposed the suspended occupants to ship normal temperatures and atmosphere. They died within minutes.

Andrea woke up to the slow realization that she was the only one left alive. The module was mostly intact but the emergency batteries would only last a few weeks. It was long enough for her to partially restore the backup computer which let her assess the outside environment. It was livable, as the big wigs at NASA predicted, which was good because life support was going to fail along with the batteries.

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The Kepler Tomb

ruins

Fantasy wallpaper

Note: This story is over 6600 words long not including the afterword. You might want to get yourself a cup of coffee or tea and sit down in a comfortable chair before proceeding. Alternately, bookmark the page and read the story in stages. I hope you’ll find the effort worthwhile.

I found myself in the ruins again. I never imagined that I would wake up walking in the footsteps of an exo-archaeologist on a planet orbiting the red dwarf star Kepler 438b. No matter what I do, I wake up again in the ruins. On Earth almost a century ago, people thought the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun came with a curse. The curse turned out to be a myth, but it spawned any number of horror films, television shows, and novels. On Kepler, it turns out to be real, or real enough to keep me trapped here in a recurring nightmare.

How did I get into this mess?

As far as I know, my name is Jonathan Cypher but I only know that much because it’s what Raven told me. She also said I’m sometimes known as the Never Man, but so far that means even less to me than being Cypher.

All I know for sure is that I woke up one day in what looked like the bombed out ruins of Los Angeles. Then I kept waking up into a different world and a different life, including a particularly hideous nightmare. My most recent set of dreams had to do with saving someone who would otherwise have died in the London Blitz in 1940, but depending on who I saved or which other option I chose, subsequent history changed, usually meaning thousands or tens of thousands of people died who would otherwise have lived.

I finally managed to figure that one out, but now I’m in this mess and again it’s thanks to Raven.

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The Jammsright Limit

ramjet

Artist’s conception of a Bussard Ramjet – Found at Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is)

It had taken months for Arturo Patel to arrive at and get through the Heliosphere, the official barrier between the solar system and interstellar space, in the stolen prototype Jammsright-powered craft. He’d invented the Jammsright drive so he thought he should be the first to use it to leave the solar system and voyage to another star system.

The government hadn’t seen it that way since not only wasn’t he a qualified astronaut, he was fifty-nine years old. The bleeding edge space explorers have (with rare exception) always been young men and women who were thought best fit to endure the rigors of space flight.

Once he had managed to bypass the security interlocks between the space station and the ship’s docking arm, it was child’s play to hack the sensor systems causing the monitors to show everything was in standby mode when in actuality, the ship was being fueled and prepared for departure.

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Saving One

St Paul's

St Paul’s Cathedral in London during the Blitz 1940

The dark-haired woman with the shimmering gown sighed. He hadn’t noticed that she was breathing before. “This is only the beginning. There are a great many things you will need to learn.”

“Such as?”

“Such as why you left four people trapped in a collapsed building with a bomb about to detonate?”

“I forgot about them. How could I…?”

Then he woke up. There was about to be an explosion. He could only save one of them.

Sunday, 8 September 1940 – London

A building had collapsed on them. Everyone who had taken shelter in here from the bombing had died except for those four, a man, a woman, and two children. Suddenly another man was standing in the center of what was left of the basement.

“Where…?”

It was dark, night but he could see outside through holes in the walls above them. There were explosions, the sound of thunder, the ground repeatedly shook. The black air was shattered by bright flashes of destruction. The drone of aircraft engines acted as background noise.

Jonathan Cypher saw five important things, a man, a woman, a little boy, an even younger girl, and a bomb. It had a Nazi insignia on it. Was it ticking?

“Sir, please help. We’re trapped here.” The man’s legs were buried under rubble. The woman, probably his wife, was unconscious with a head wound. The two children were clutching at her and crying hysterically.

“There’s about to be an explosion. You can only save one of them but please be careful whose life you save.”

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The Switch

mlk

The Google “doodle” for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018

Nevada Drivers Licences

Corey March
1983 Escondido Street, Apt. 2A
Las Vegas, NV 89119
Sex M, Hgt 5’11, Wgt 160
Eyes Blu, Hair Brn
DOB 02/27/1997

Eddie Brown
5549 Doolittle Avenue, Apt. 11
Las Vegas, NV 89108
Sex M, Hgt 6’1, Wgt 200
Eyes Brn, Hair Blk
DOB 06/21/1997

“Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

There was a time when a person’s race might have been listed on a state driver’s license, but those days are gone. The tiny mug shot on the left side of the document tells the tale, assuming it says anything at all. However, Corey’s driver’s license photo shows a smiling white kid with the tips of his blond hair dyed purple while Eddie’s photo shows an equally cheerful looking African-American youth.

Corey woke up realizing it was Monday and hating that fact because his first class, American History, was at nine in the morning. He didn’t like mornings, especially when he’d been up past eleven drinking beer and playing “Doom” with his roommate Johnny. Oddly enough, he didn’t have a hangover and didn’t even feel all that tired, but those clues weren’t sufficient.

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