Tag Archives: scifi

A Last Ale at Blakes

blakes of dover

© A Mixed Bag 2010

He was sitting at a table nursing one of the ales for which Blakes of Dover is noted when she walked in. The young Japanese woman was immediately drawn to him, walked over, and took a seat at his table.

“I thought we might have a bit of lunch before you take me in, Mikiko.” Timothy nodded and a server came immediately over.

“Yes sir?”

He looked at the woman, “What will you be having?”

“Order for both of us.”

He ordered Beef with Chips and two more ales.

“I knew it was only a matter of time. I won’t bother asking how you found me. I’m glad you came alone.”

“They’re waiting outside to arrest you, Timothy. It’s either us or Mzimu.”

“It’s either prison or a shallow grave in a field somewhere.”

“At least you chose a pleasant venue for your last meal.”

The ales quietly arrived and the international assassin known as Hellspite proposed a toast to the one person in the world who had finally captured him. His career was finally over and he trusted her to finish what he started by bringing down the gang of human traffickers that had started it all.

I wrote this for the Sunday Photo Fiction Challenge of January 7th 2018. The idea is to take the image above and use it to prompt the creation of a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 198.

I’m obviously leveraging characters from my Mikiko Jahn SciFi/Adventure series. I’m thankful the photo included a very recognizable sign for Blakes of Dover and I discovered that Dover is less than twenty miles from Dymchurch where the latter part of my larger story takes place.

These events occur after my most recent chapter in the series and I’m not sure yet if this wee tale will become part of the canon. I guess it depends on whether or not I want Fleming (AKA Hellspite) to escape or not.

Oh, this scene is set specifically in the cellar bar which is perfect for a quiet drink and a small lunch.

To read other stories inspired by the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.

The Hawkhurst Gambit

church - dymchurch

St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Dymschurch as seen from the South.

“The lads play well together, Eileen.”

“Yes they do, Sean. I appreciate you taking us in while we’re in Dymchurch.”

“After all, what are family for?”

The two old friends sat in the Billingham living room by the fire as their two sons Timothy and Roger played with their collection of Pokemon cards at the kitchen table.

“You sure Suzanne doesn’t mind?”

“She’s not jealous if that’s what you’re thinking.” Sean picked up his glass of Port, sipped and then grimaced. “Got to speak to the Missus. This last bottle she brought home tastes like vinegar.”

“You do understand what I’m asking, Sean.”

“Aye. Richard must never find out though or it’ll mean both our lives.”

“He won’t find out if you hold up your end. I got a generous settlement from him and he doesn’t have to know about the rest. You’ll be well compensated as will your kin when the time comes.”

“You know it’s not the money, Eileen…”

“The families pay their way, we always have. I don’t expect you to take such risks, especially with your family at stake, all for love and loyalty.”

“I promise I’ll do my part. I see no trouble bringing Roger into the family business when the time comes.”

“Same with Timothy, Sean. Still, we have to be careful with the young ones. You don’t take the Hawkhurst oath without devoting your total allegiance to Mzimu.”

“Aye. T’would be death otherwise. When you leaving for Chicago then?”

“And you believed him.”

“Of course I believed him, Geoffrey. Yes, he could have been lying but I couldn’t take the chance.”

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Whatever Happened to Jamaica?

bultot art

© Roger Bultot

“What is it, Al?”

“Beats me Enrico, but my calculations say we’ve got another twelve hours and nineteen minutes to find out before the next reality shift occurs.”

“We wouldn’t be in this mess if that plane carrying MIT’s experimental quantum resonator hadn’t overshot JFK International and crashed in Queens. I wonder why only Jamaica was affected?”

“Probably has to do with the available power and the size of field it could generate.”

“Maybe it’s art, Al.”

“Enrico, do you ever wonder what happened to the original inhabitants here?”

“I hope they’re living in a better world than this one.”

I wrote this for the Rochelle Wisoff-Fields photo writing challenge of January 5, 2018. The idea is to use the image at the top as the prompt for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 100 words long. My word count is 100.

I was stuck on this one but then in the image’s URL, I saw “roger bultot art”. I Googled “Roger Bultot artist” and among other responses, found his Flickr page. Since it says he lives in Jamaica Queens, NY, I set my story there. The fact that it is fairly close to John F. Kennedy International Airport was a plus.

Beyond that, I decided that due to some terrible technological accident, every twelve to twenty-four hours or so, a different version of Jamaica appears on the site. Since the possibility of different quantum realities is limitless (in the fictional universe I’ve just created), all manner of strange and unreal things might appear, including the artwork in the photo above. Al and Enrico (named for Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi) are scientists studying the phenomena.

I guess we’ll never know where the people who were originally living in Jamaica ended up.

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

The Unwanted Gift

alien

From the 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” starring Michael Rennie

The public hoped after the spaceship carrying Klaatu and the robot Gort launched from the Ellipse just south of the White House, that it was all over. The newspapers, radio, and TV broadcasts reported the full text of the speech the alien had given to the international group of scientists assembled at the park by the esteemed physicist Professor Jacob Barnhardt. For a time, the citizens of the world were terrified that the Earth would be destroyed if the Americans and Soviets continued their efforts to develop nuclear power and advanced rocketry.

But with the passing of weeks and then months, when nothing else happened, humans, being who they are, paid less and less concern to the dire warning of the man from another planet and got on to the next crisis or fad.

However, governments capable of observing orbital space and a small but select group of scientists knew that when Klaatu departed, he left something behind or rather six somethings.

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Connectivity

deus ex machina

© davidschermann.com

People assumed he saw everything all at once, but if that were true, clearly the sensory overload would have driven him crazy the first half-second he’d been connected. The only reason it was possible at all was because of his unusual brain structure, specifically a complex network of interconnections that “shadowed” the typical systemic neurology everybody else uses for sensory processing. His “extra” processing system was ideally suited for managing massive amounts of digital information.

So Kelly Elliott agreed to become a guinea pig and let the eggheads at the Conceptius Institute on the University of Washington campus hook his brain directly to the internet.

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Resolution by Time Travel

the time tunnel

Concept art for the 1966 television show “The Time Tunnel”.

“We cannot start over, but we can begin now and make a new ending.” -Zig Ziglar

Operation Tic-Toc physicist Dr. Anthony Newman couldn’t let Senator Leroy Clark shut down the Time Tunnel project. He’d devoted five years of his life working with an elite team of scientists and engineers to perfect time travel, but that was less important to him than the main reason he had struggled so hard to be selected to work here.

He’d lost both of his parents, his Mom to a car accident in 1940 and his Dad nearly eighteen months later on December 7, 1941 during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He’d been raised by his Mom’s sister June Landers in New Jersey but there was nothing she could ever do to fill the enormous gap torn in his seven-year-old life.

He’d been recruited by the government while still at MIT. The brilliant scholarship student who graduated with a doctorate in Temporal Mechanics was first assigned to a think tank outside of Arlington in what he thought was a project involving theoretical mathematics applied to the uncertainty principle and expressed in five dimensions. In other words, science for its own sake with no practical use.

Then on this twenty-eighth birthday, he received classified orders to report to a top secret government facility buried beneath a remote desert region of Arizona: Operation Tic-Toc. Time travel was real. Now he had to help make it practical.

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The Chimera Problem

windmills

© Jules Paige

The first settlement on Hansen’s Planet was zealous about shifting totally from nuclear energy to renewable, sustainable, “green” energy within the first twenty-five years after arrival.

The problem was no matter what they tried, the indigenous bird-like creatures they called “Chimera” seemed just as zealous about committing mass suicide using their “green” technology.

“Various solar panel designs didn’t work because they’d fly into the concentrated light and burn or smash into the photocells, Bill.”

“Anita, I was hoping your Wind Turbine design would discourage them, but they’re flying right into them through the inhibiting air currents they generate.”

Bill Anghal was the Colony Planner and Anita Kahn was Chief Engineer, but they and the design team couldn’t develop a “Chimera-proof” power generation system.

“What are we missing, Bill?”

“I’ve got it!” They turned and saw Rolf Ingram running up. The eclectic scientist had been studying the “suicides” for months.

He arrived out of breath. “Look,” he wheezed. Deaths…not random…bodies form…patterns.”

“What?” Bill and Anita both grabbed at his iPad.

“Damn. The patterns formed by the Chimera corpses…” Anita let her voice trail off.

“Right,” Rolf leaned over her shoulder. “It’s a language. The Chimera are intelligent. They’re trying to communicate.”

I wrote this story for the Sunday Photo Fiction Challenge of December 31st 2017. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for writing a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 200.

The image immediately made me think of all of those wind turbine farms, and then I thought about the problem they pose to birds and bats. I did a small amount of research looking at articles such as Will Wind Turbines Ever Be Safe For Birds? and Wind farms are hardly the bird slayers they’re made out to be—here’s why as well as Solar Farms Threaten Birds and Why Solar Power Is Good for Birds. Like it or not, there is no such thing as a 100% safe form of energy generation for the environment and wildlife.

So what happens on another planet when the first established colony settlement wants to go totally green avoiding the mistakes of people on their mother planet only to discover that a native life form insists on exterminating itself using your best efforts at sustainable power production?

The story’s conclusion was one idea I had for an answer. An intelligent alien race that couldn’t think of any other way to communicate except by how they arranged their deaths.

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

Extravagance, Thy Name Is Humanity

mars

Scientists have revealed a provocative new theory of moving planets like Mars, pictured, into an orbit that would create habitable conditions through such methods as using a satellite’s gravitational pull. (NASA/GODDARD)

The plans were extravagant in the extreme. For centuries, the thought of creating a Dyson Sphere, that is, manufacturing an immense hollow ball around the Sun with the inner edge of the shell positioned at One AU or the exact distance of Earth’s orbit from its star was thought to be the absolute cure-all for every problem introduced on the mother planet by human beings. The inner surface area would capture one hundred percent of all generated solar energy, providing an all but inexhaustible amount of power and living space, so humanity would run out of neither.

One of the biggest drawbacks was that you’d have to cannibalize every other object in the solar system just for the raw materials, plus you would have to find a way to create the energy necessary for the manufacturing process. However, the engineering genius even to design such a fantastic structure didn’t exist among Earth’s best and brightest and probably never would.

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You’re Too Early

soldier hitler group

Hitler (far right, seated) with his army comrades of the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 (c. 1914–18) – Found at Wikipedia

“Confess, Adolphus. We know you’re an anti-Semite. We know what horrors you are going to commit.”

“Please, Fräulein. I’m blind. I’m supposed to be in hospital. Who are you? Where have you brought me? I’ve done nothing. I’m just a wounded soldier.”

“Rivkah. Leave him in his cell. I need to speak with you.”

She stood suddenly and spun away from the shoddy bed with the terrified soldier upon it.

“In a minute, Barak. I’m busy.”

“Now, Rivkah. We’ve made a terrible mistake and you’re about to make another.”

“Fräulein, who is that with you? What language are you speaking?”

“Fine.” She scowled at her older brother and stormed toward the open door to the dilapidated prison. Barak slammed the door and then secured the rusty lock.

“Wait,” the young Austrian called through the door. “Don’t leave me.”

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The Alternative Lens

glasses

© Enisa

The specially designed mannequin upon which the glasses were kept was distorted, being pushed partially out of reality. This was Silvia Mason’s goal. Her employer had paid millions for the world’s greatest thief to break into a classified government facility and steal the experimental Alternative Lens, but she was going to keep them for herself. Once she put them on, she would be phased fractions of a second outside normal time. She would be invisible, intangible, could go anywhere and do anything.

She entered the vault without being detected but had only one way out. Wearing the Lens. She put them on and every alarm conceivable blared and flashed around her.

The Captain of the Guard had arrived looking very pleased with himself. “Take them off. You cannot escape.”

Silvia started to laugh but then the others appeared in her phased reality.

“We never use the Lens because the phased reality is occupied by very unfriendly inhabitants.”

By the time she was visible again, even strong men vomited at the horrific sight of her remains.

I wrote this for the FFfAW Challenge for the Week of December 26, 2017. The idea is to use the image above to inspire the creation of a piece of flash fiction between 100 and 175 words long. My word count is 175.

The mannequin’s head looked strangely unrealistic so I thought up “phased invisibility” or a device that pushed the wearer slightly out of normal space-time, enabling them to move in five dimensions. However, no one ever said such a reality might not already be occupied by horrific and deadly beings. So much for Silvia’s escape plan.

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