Tag Archives: scifi

Traveling the Road Back

old car

© Al Forbes

William Shaw was pulling the modified 1902 Cadillac Runabout behind his SUV to an abandoned country road where he would be unobserved.

He’d purchased it from an elderly widow, her husband’s pride and joy, but the old man lacked stamina and finances to restore this beauty.

Shaw unloaded the Cadillac at his destination. Appropriately costumed, he got in and activated the controls. He’d spent a century building wealth and the time transmitter so he, an immortal, could go back and correct his worst mistake. This time, he’d arrive in Southampton and prevent his beloved wife Julia from boarding the Titanic.

I wrote this piece of flash fiction in response to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ Friday Fictioneers challenge using the accompanying photo prompt, and attempting to write a complete story in 100 words or less. I managed exactly 100 words.

To read more stories based on this week’s prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

I am somewhat manipulating the plot from the 1980 film Somewhere in Time starring the late Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.

In this case, William Shaw, an immortal, or at least very long-lived person, met and married a woman named Julia in the very early 20th century. They had a falling out for some reason, and she left him. She boarded the RMS Titanic at Southampton on April 10, 1912, and died when it sank early the morning of the 14th.

Shaw is an immortal, but he can’t go back in time. However being an immortal, he has nothing but time and patience in amassing wealth and eventually inventing a method of time travel that could be incorporated into a vintage automobile (no, he doesn’t have to travel eighty-eight miles per hour).

In the original history, Shaw didn’t go after Julia and she died. This time, he intends to prevent her from boarding the Titanic and save her life. They’ll spend however many years they can together, until enough time passes and she finally dies of old age.

He creates one critical problem, though. Now there are two of him in the world, and from 1912 on, there will always be two of him.

Another Chance

goth

Image: mookychick.co.uk

Jeff and Mary Edge were getting a divorce and they didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

Mary’s parents suggested that they try marital counseling, but Mary was tired of Jeff’s drinking and Jeff was tired of Mary not getting a job to help with the family finances.

They’d had it with each other and they weren’t going to talk to Mary’s parents, a counselor, or anyone else about it.

Jeff and Mary didn’t even talk about it with their seven-year-old daughter Morgan.

Jeff was at the wheel and Mary was sitting, sulking in the passenger seat after meeting with the divorce lawyer. He was going to take Mary back to her parent’s house where she was staying for now, and pick up Morgan for their weekend visit.

Jeff was sober and would be throughout the visit. When he dropped Morgan back with her mother Sunday night, he planned to go back to his seedy one bedroom apartment and get roaring drunk. The hangover he’d have when he went to work on Monday morning would be worth it.

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The Running Man

the man who walked homeThe explosion was centered near the southern shore of Groom Lake, Nevada, in what used to be a large military base known euphemistically as Area 51. It took out almost all of Southern Nevada along with parts of eastern California, as well as western Utah and Arizona. Hundreds of millions died and yet there was never an official explanation for the cause.

Earth’s largest crater was created on Saturday, August 7, 2048 at approximately 3:01 p.m. PST. The cloud of dust thrown into the atmosphere caused spectacular sunsets for the next decade. Unfortunately, the explosion also vaporized all of the nuclear weapons stored at the Groom Lake facility. Over that next decade, cancer annihilated nearly sixty percent of the human race worldwide, and that wouldn’t be the worst of it.

10,983 A.D. adjusted to the modern calendar.

“I’ve made it. I’m alive. But just what the hell happened?”

Charles William Jefferson stood gazing at the vast wasteland through the view screen of his Temporal Suit. He was only supposed to go ahead a century and instead, this.

“There’s nothing left. What the hell did those bastards do?”

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The Corridor

corridor

© Dale Rogerson

Ken Watanabe wasn’t shown the entrance off the courtyard when he took over Santa Fe’s historic Museum. The ex-Curator gave him the keys. The door had been locked since 1943. No one knew why. There was no eastern door inside, but it was apparent on the outer wall.

Hesitantly, he used his key, opened the door, and saw a lit, multi-arched corridor. Then he heard a voice at the other end. “Glad those Japs were locked up after what they pulled at Pearl Harbor.”

His father was interned here 74 years ago on Ken’s first birthday. He never opened the door again.

There’s a larger story being told but it’s hard to compress into 100 words or less.

The photo reminded me somewhat of Southwestern architecture, which is why I placed my tale in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I wanted to do a “corridor through time” story, but I needed a date where the other end of the tunnel linked. I looked up Santa Fe at Wikipedia and discovered that during World War Two, it had a Japanese Internment Camp. Beginning in June 1942, 826 Japanese-American men were arrested and imprisoned.

I remember actor George Takei saying that when he was a small child, he and his family were similarly interned because of their Japanese heritage. Thus my tale was born.

I wrote this as part of the Friday Fictioneers challenge hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. The goal is to write a short story of 100 words or less based on the photo prompt you see above (and as I mentioned, I just made it at exactly 100 words).

To read more stories based on this week’s prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

You Are Not Expected To Understand This

comment

© Arun Thomas / Image: The New Stack

/*
 *You are not expected
 *to understand this.
 */

Glenn laughed out loud in spite of the enormity of the problem facing him.

“You are not expected to understand this.” It was probably the single most famous code comment in the history of UNIX and maybe the history of all Operating System programming. It first appeared in the Sixth Edition of the UNIX OS in 1975 and preceded the explanation of how context switching was performed.

The phrase has become so popular that it has appeared on everything from adult sized t-shirts to baby onesies.

The code comment disappeared in 1979 when context switching was rewritten for UNIX v7, but it lives on in the collective consciousness of nerdness.

The comment would have been a lot more funny if he understood the code that had been constantly streaming through his console for the past month. It reminded him of the scene in the movie “The Matrix” when Cypher was looking at the Matrix in code.

The code for the Matrix was too complex to be processed through an interpreter so you had to monitor it raw.

Too complex.

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The Barbie Syndrome

barbie body

© rehabs.com / dailymail.co.uk

She was forced to walk on all fours thanks to her oversized head, it being two inches larger than it was before the surgery. To make matters worse, her head was sitting on a neck twice as long and six inches thinner than the one she had before.

“Dr. Brennan, I can’t lift my head.” Sophia’s dream of being “Barbie beautiful” had turned into a surreal nightmare.

“We discussed all this, Sophia, and your head is the least of your worries. Your waist is only 16 inches, four inches thinner than your head. We had to greatly reduce the size of your liver and intestines to accommodate it.”

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Leigh

hands

Image: Natalia Drepina

Her hands, so petite, so delicate, in those lacy coverings, yes he would miss her hands. They were on their bed together kneeling, he was holding her gently from behind. His eyes were hot with tears.

“Don’t be sad, Gerald. You will be fine when I’m gone.”

“I don’t want you to go, Leigh.”

“We have no choice, darling. My diagnosis, I’m terminal.”

“There’s got to be something…”

“Hush, my darling. I’ve only got moments…moments…”

The world’s first humanoid companion robot went offline Thursday, January 13th at 10:55 a.m., a victim of atmospheric contaminants that toxified her cybernetic brain.

Written for Photo Challenge #147 from Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie.

I don’t know if I managed to capture the emotion of this moment in a mere 98 words, but I hope so. I’ve written similar (and much longer) stories about a man falling in love with an artificially intelligent humanoid, principally The Perfect Woman.

An Alien Walks Into A Bar

alien

Comic book cover from 1958

Frank Lyman was working on his third Vodka Collins when the alien came through the door. Frank had been stopping by Murphy’s Bar every Friday night after work for nearly ten years, and this was the first time he thought the booze was spiked.

All of the regulars at the bar, plus Murphy serving drinks behind it, froze like ice sculptures and stared.

“RJhmzzxpingwqupnmkl-ooo-dx!” Static came out of the alien’s spacesuit. It adjusted a knob on its chest.

“Better? Understand?”

“What?” Frank forgot to swallow and his drink dribbled onto his shirt.

“Spaceship broken. Roadside service here?”

Okay, I know the image I used as an inspiration doesn’t show a bar, but when I saw it, I thought it looked like the beginning of a bad joke, “An alien walks into a bar.” I wrote it for fun.

Flash fiction of 99 words.

Oh, the comic book was published in 1958.

Taking Care of the Family

counterclock

Image: Odditymall.com

It worked. I changed everything for the better. Now my son Charles marries a hardworking, loving wife and mother instead of a depressed lay about. Now my son Chris makes his career decision five years earlier and gets a tenured position before the recession hits. Now my wife has that business she’s always wanted and the franchise money will make her rich. The Time Changer worked, but with one catch. Instead of me being a successful scientist, I’m a divorced drug addict, dying of lung cancer in the local hospital’s charity ward, a total human failure. It was worth it.

I’ve been writing so much flash fiction over the past few days, that when this idea popped up, I thought I’d take advantage. No prompt, no challenge. Just the way my head works.

Uncle Eli’s Machine

the machine

© Sandra Crook / Found at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ blogspot

For two weeks, Evan had been investigating the odd, sprocketed contraption in the basement of the house he’d inherited from old Uncle Eli, an eccentric inventor who’d been tinkering with it for the past sixty years.

Evan didn’t fathom the machine’s purpose, but he did think he could get the gears moving.

He made one last adjustment with his screwdriver.

Evan jumped back as the large driver cog suddenly lurched one “ka-chunk” counterclockwise.

Then the light changed. “So, my time machine finally worked, I see.”

Evan turned. The figure speaking to him was Uncle Eli at age 26.

I wrote this as part of (last week’s) Friday Fictioneers challenge hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. The idea is to write a piece of flash fiction using a max of 100 words and base it on the photo prompt you see at the top of the page. The details are at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ blog (scroll down).

Read all of the responses to this flash fiction challenge at InLinkz.com (over 80 as of this writing).

My story is exactly 99 words long.