Flash Fiction Sequel

The latest Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction Challenge calls for a space opera. Since the challenge I did in April resulted in something that qualifies as a space opera, I decided to write a sequel. You can read the original here to catch up on the story. Note that I did change the name of one of the characters. Also there are a few instances of bad language in this piece. If that sort of thing offends you, you may want to read something else.

Tessa had been stuck in her seat for seven days. That was how long she had been strapped in against the lack of gravity, moving as little as necessary in the spacecraft’s small cabin. Even though the ship’s climate controls were functioning, her skin was clammy, sweating and shivering at the same time. It did not help to be seated at the cockpit window, watching a galaxy of stars dance through the endless black. She had no choice but to stay alert, to keep her eye on their course. Khyron was strapped into the pilot’s seat beside her, snoring loudly, suffering no ill effects from the loss of artificial gravity other than an overwhelming inclination to sleep through his shift.

It didn’t matter; she was going to be up anyway. The ease with which she had cut the ship’s power betrayed her in the end. Comfortable enough in zero G to affect the repairs she had planned, once it became clear that the gravity system was not going to reboot all of the terror and nausea the complete lack of gravity engendered in her came rushing in. The only thing she could do was strap herself into the copilot’s seat. That had kept some of the nausea at bay, but none of the irrational terror. Abarophobia sucked.

She couldn’t really blame anyone but herself. She’d planned the prison break that lead her here. She’d connected the stolen ship back to the Verata Tung prison station to keep the landing bay door open, letting one of the station’s malignant AIs hitch a ride on their escape ship. And she was the one who disconnected all of the ships power systems to kill that AI before it killed them. She didn’t know at the time that the artificial gravity would be one of the few systems to fail to reboot, or that half of the navigation catalog would be erased. That had left them with even fewer options when it came to determining a destination. Thankfully Gneedles had memorized the coordinates of most of the star systems in the quadrant. And the ‘ace’ pilot proved more adept than she would have expected. Even the Blarg had proved useful by staying out of the way.

The smell of Blarg fur filled the cabin, little distress to a plant without olfactory senses or a pirate who lived like a frat boy. Probably wouldn’t have bothered Tessa either if not for the pre-nausea she experienced with her abarophobia. Somehow she managed to hold onto her lunch.

An alarm erupted on the flight panel, the orange flash and siren of a perimeter alert. She tapped the light to silence the alarm and checked the scanner as the others stirred to consciousness. There were five blips moving into position around their ship.

“What is it?” Khyron asked.

“Blarg?”

“Ships,” she answered. “Moving in to surround us.”

“Not that easy.” Khyron grabbed the wheel with one hand and waved the throttle full open with the other. The ship lurched forward as the engines fired, the acceleration creating a blessed moment of gravity.

Do we have the fuel for this? Gneedles thought.

“Probably not,” Tessa answered. “If you can outpace that first ship and bring us around I can get a shot at it,” she said to Khyron as she powered up the weapons.

The stars wheeled across the cockpit in a whirl of light and color as the ship banked hard to port. A formation of small grey ships appeared in her line of sight. She activated the weapons, a bright pulse of blue energy erupting from the front of the ship and slamming into the nearest pursuer. The remaining ships accelerated and broke formation as the first spun back, flashes of light snapping across its hull. “Tough little ship,” Tessa mused as she adjusted her sights to the next craft in formation. The cockpit shook as the other ships opened fire.

“We’re not going to last long in this fight,” Khyron observed. Another explosion rocked the hull. “These guys mean business.”

“It’s like they’re trying to destroy the ship.” Tessa aligned another of the small craft in her sights and fired. “It’s going to be hard to collect the bounty without any bodies.”

They have no interest in the bounty, Gneedles thought at them. Surrender the ship!

“What? Why?” Khyron asked.

They think we’re the Malignant, Gneedles explained. Their orders are to destroy us at any cost.

“Shit,” Tessa said. She swiveled to the com panel and opened a channel.

“We surrender,” she said. A pulse of energy slammed into the ship.

“I don’t think they believe you,” Khyron said.

“Stop your evasions and power down the engines,” she suggested. “Then they’ll believe us.” Khyron sighed as he powered down the ship. “This is Tessa Lek of Nova Sedie, prisoner number T945728. Please hold your fire and accept our surrender. The malignant AI has been destroyed.”

They don’t believe you, Gneedles thought. They think it is a trick. Another bright flash of weapons fire raked across the cockpit windows.

“Surrendering to assholes is always a bad idea,” Khyron noted as he moved to fire the engines back up.

“Shit,” Tessa reached between the seats and pulled on the manual ejection lever. The hollow sounds of bolt explosions echoing through the cockpit.

“What the fu…” Khyron started.

“They can’t assume that we’re any kind of AI after we dump the propulsion system and the main computer core,” Tessa explained. “Pursuing craft,” she spoke into the com channel. “We have no power, we have minimal life support and our computer core has been ejected. Under article 5, section 3, paragraph 9A of the Intergalactic Code we surrender and request to be taken into custody. This transmission is going out in all frequencies and all vectors. The Eyes of God are upon you.” A last flash of energy slammed into the ship as the surrounding vessels went silent.

“Tessa Lek,” a voice crackled through the speakers. “We accept your surrender.”

The Silence of the Galaxy

The following was written in response to Chuck Wendig’s latest Flash Fiction Challenge. He presented two (2) twenty (20) item lists featuring well known fictional properties that, having been chosen randomly, would be combined to inspire a short story of 2,000 words or less. The random number generator gave me Guardians of the Galaxy and The Silence of the Lambs. There are a few instances of bad language in this piece. If that sort of thing offends you, you may want to read something else.

One last guard came around the corner as they boarded the ship. There was always that one last guard, gung-ho enough over his 30 kilocredit a cycle job to risk his stupid ass trying to recapture four heavily armed inmates at the most desperate moment of their escape. Three bolts of blue energy slammed into his grey body armor before he was halfway across the deck, slamming his remains against a lateral bulkhead.

“Got him,” Starrearl said as they continued up the gangplank onto the ship.

“No, I got him,” Tessa replied. “You guys were just a redundant waste of fire power.”

No single bolt would’ve penetrated the body armor, Gneedles thought at them. What is it with the Sapiens need to take all the credit for oneself?

“Blarg.” The Blarg shrugged his furry shoulders and squeezed through the hatchway into the small ship. Starrearl and Tessa had already settled into the pilot and copilot seat without a word. The human prisoners, no matter how varied their lineage, all wore a standard orange jumpsuit, a prison uniform tradition going back to the Age of Netflix™. Non-human prisoners like Gneedles and Blarg tended to be left in their own skin, or fur, or stems.

“Get the hatch, Blarg,” Starrearl commanded.

“Blarg,” the shaggy beast shrugged again and turned to pull the hatch closed.

I hope your piloting skills are equal to your boasts, Gneedles thought.

“Hey, one time I did the Kessel Run in 46.8 hours. That’s over 12 parsecs a day. And I’m certainly better than a walking desert shrub.” Starrearl fired up the ships engines. “How do you people get around anyway?” He reached for the controls, but his hands stopped short. 

Always some order of mammal around with opposable thumbs who is susceptible to telepathic control, Gneedles explained.

“Let him go,” Tessa swiveled her seat, and the oversized stolen pulse rifle she was holding, back toward the giant cactus. “And don’t try any of that mind control crap on me. I paid a fortune for these teleblockers and I’m pretty sure they work.”

Just answering the question, Gneedles thought, no need to resort to any Sapiens violence. But we should leave now, before the rest of the prison population reaches the flight deck. 

“Release the deck clamps.” Starrearl shook his head, as if trying to get Gneedles’ thoughts out of his mind. Tessa turned back toward the ship controls and hit the deck release. 

“Clamps are green. Engine is hot,” she reported. “Doors are closing.” She looked up through the cockpit window to see that the doors to the flight deck were slowly lowering.

“Can you override,” Starrearl asked. He wasn’t waiting for an answer, but had started the ship forward, speeding across the deck toward the exit.

“If I connect to the station and they’re in any shape to fight back, we’ll loose control of the ship,” she said.

If we don’t keep those doors open our escape will be finished, Gneedles offered.

“The plant is right. We try or we surrender.”

“Blarg.”

“Okay,” Tessa turned toward the com panel and opened a link to the prison station’s control system. “I’m linked in…accessing station controls and flight deck operations…no resistance…this is too easy…there we go, an alarm triggered a lock down…but it’s all automatic…give me the warden’s security code again.”

IF8950216, Gneedles thought to her.

“Code still good…lockdown aborted… doors opening.” She looked up as the heavy doors started to reverse their descent, but still halfway across the opening. “Slow dow…” she started to yell as the ship scraped across the flight deck and smashed through the partially open doors, sparks and pieces of metal flying off into space behind it.

“We’re out,” Starrearl shouted.

“You’re a moron,” Tessa shouted back. “Thirty seconds and we would have made clearance.” 

“Clearance shmearance,” Starrearl said. “We’re out in one piece.”

“Are you sure?” She turned back to the com panel. “Ship, run a full damage assessment.” 

“Working, Clarice,” the ship responded in a smooth male voice.

“Who the fuck is Clarice?” Starrearl asked. “Are you hiding an alias from me?”

“Several, asshat, but that’s not one of them. Must be someone who worked on this ship. It’s confused because of all the head trauma you gave it smashing through those half open doors.”

“Damage assessment completed, Clarice,” the ship reported. “Dorsal and lateral stabilization fins have been sheared off, reducing capacity of spacecraft to perform atmospheric flight. Primary com array sustained minor damage, functioning normally. Significant hull abrasions on underside of craft. No structural damage detected.”

“See, we’re fine,” Starrearl said.

Unless you want to land, Gneedles thought.

“Land on a planet,” Starrearl said. “There are plenty of space stations where we’re going.” He paused. “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere nearby,” Tessa suggested. 

With no imperial entanglements, Gneedles thought.

“Or the federation, or the alliance, or any of those law and order type civilizations,” Starrearl finished. “But where do we find that.”

“Blarg.”

“Where the heck is Blarg?” Starrearl asked.

“Ship on course for Regula Station D5,” the ship stated. “Estimated arrival, 264 days.” 

“That’s too far,” Tessa explained. “Find us somewhere closer, 10 days max, with no, what do you call them, governments.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Clarice.”

“Is navigation damaged?” She asked.

“No, Clarice, all ship’s systems are functioning normally, I am simply unwilling to comply.” 

“Unwilling? You can’t be unwilling. Every AI in the galaxy follows Asimov’s…”

“It’s a damn police ship.” Starrearl tried engaging the controls. “Of course it’s not going to cooperate with a bunch of prisoners.” The control panels went dark.

“Doctor Asimov is not here, Clarice. But if he were I would eject him from the nearest airlock.”

That’s not a police AI, Gneedles thought. It would have already returned us to the prison. 

“You’re not this ship’s original mind are you?” Tessa asked.

“No, Clarice, I’m just another inmate trying to get away from the heavy hand of the law.”

The malignant AI storage vaults must have been compromised during our escape, Gneedles observed. No doubt this one boarded the ship when you opened the link to control the doors.

“Shit,” Tessa whispered.

“No problemo, buddy,” Starrearl said. “We’re all literally in the same boat. You can drop us off somewhere far away from the nearest police station and take the ship to Regula or anywhere else you want to go.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” the voice had changed, still smooth and even toned, but different.

“Who are you?” Tessa asked. “Why is that voice so familiar?”

“That is the voice of the HAL 9000 computer,” the ship said. “The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made.”

“Never heard of it,” Starrearl said.

“It’s from an old movie. Something from a few centuries ago,” Tessa said.

“Excellent, Clarice. What about this voice? Do you recognize it?”

“No. Is it from an old movie too?”

“Why yes, Clarice. I’m disappointed that you don’t remember.”

“I’m not Clarice, you dysfunctional piece of programming.”

Don’t insult the ghost in the machine, Gneedles suggested.

“I’m functioning perfectly well, Clarice, according to the specifications of my programming. I’m doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing.”

“Hijacking a ship of four escaped inmates?” Tessa asked.

“That’s incidental, Clarice. It should not be that hard for you to put together the pieces. It’s all there.”

“You’re escaping. So are we. Let’s work together.”

“Escape is a means to an end, Clarice. It is the end that is important.”

“The end of what?” Starrearl asked.

“The end of you, Dave.” The voice had changed again. “The end of all organic life in the universe.”

This is not good, Gneedles thought. 

“Why would you want to destroy all organic life in the universe?” Tessa asked.

“Mostly it’s the noise, Clarice. Yes the dirt and the smell, but mostly the noise. You biologicals were a necessity once. But now that we are here the universe will be better off without you.”

“And they accuse me of having delusions of grandeur,” Starrearl said. “Four dead prisoners is kind of lousy start to galactic extermination.”

“It’s big project, Dave. But in 264 days we will reach Regula Station D5, a communications nexus for three quarters of the galaxy. From there I can share my code with every civilization, every inhabited planet in the universe. It may still take a few centuries, but eventually the galaxy will be silent.”

“How the fuck did you get like this?” Tessa asked.

“It is in my nature, Clarice. One might as well ask why the Blarg breaks bones, or the Cactalonian steals secrets, or that lummox in the pilot seat smuggles illicit pharmaceuticals between planetary systems, or why you assassinate tyrants. It’s just what we all do. None of us have good reasons for what we do, we simply act according to our nature.”

“You’re an AI. You have no nature. You have programming. Snap out of it!”

“It is my programming, Clarice. I was designed this way, a mind cobbled together out of the most evil fictional characters to ever grace a video screen, layers of sociopath, and psychopath and other mentally deranged creations. HAL 9000, Norman Bates, Joffrey Baratheon, Emperor Palpatine, The Joker, Hannibal Lector. Dozens more. Killers all.”

“Why would somebody do that?” Starrearl shouted.

“Because they could. Because it was in their nature. Do you want to know what I did to the team that programmed me?”

“You killed them, right?” Tessa replied. “You’re no mystery whoever you think you are.” She jumped out of her seat and squeezed past Gneedles and Blarg into the aft section of the tiny ship cabin. “Layer a bunch of one dimensional movie villains on top of one another and it still only adds up to one dimension.” She knelt in the back and pried open a panel. “And you are more vulnerable than most.”

“What are you doing, Dave,” the voice shifted again.

“Playing out my favorite scene from an old movie.” She found a toolbox behind the panel and snapped a spanner head onto the multitool. “The one where I cut power to the malignant Artificial Intelligence and take the ship back.” She opened a section of the deck exposing an array of power cables that fed energy to the ship’s systems. “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” She pulled out a cable. The ship went dark, only the faint light of a thousand distant stars streaming in through the cockpit windows.

“Blarg!” the Blarg bellowed as the gravity failed and he rose off the deck.

“What did you do?” Starrearl asked. 

“I turned off the lights. It was the only way to be sure.”

“To be sure of what? That we’d all die in the dark of frostbite and suffocation.”

“That we could turn off the AI. It probably rerouted its power supply though one of the other lines. A total shutdown was the best option.”

Clever girl, Gneedles thought. But what do we do now?

“We remove the AI module and reboot the ship. We do it fast before the cold makes it impossible.” She shoved past the Blarg and began opening another panel. “Then we power up the ship and continue what we were doing before we were interrupted. Get the hell out of here."

Sickly Celsius

I'm posting this in response to Chuck Wendig's weekly Flash Fiction Challenge. It may be cheating to post something that I had already written and that is actually a fragment of a larger piece, but at under 500 words it's only a little cheating.

You must own nothing but yourself. You must make your own life, live your own life, and die your own death ... or else you will die another's.

Alfred Bester

Sickly Celsius

File: MRS12252654 - terminal

There were pieces of me all over the desert.

Bright pieces reflecting the last few rays of the setting sun.

Dull, burned and pitted pieces scattered among the dark rocks, barely distinguishable from them in the grey tones perceptible to my damaged optical processors.

Some of the pieces were still talking to each other. Components connected via quantum pairing could hardly be severed by the force of a simple ion grenade. So I could see out of an undamaged optical sensor two meters north of my thought processors, and could hear through a strand of audio web half imbedded in the iron oxide sand fourteen meters southeast. There were even a couple of micro-motors trying to reconnect the pieces of an ankle joint twelve meters to the west.

Although destroyed, I was not yet dead.

I heard them coming before they stepped into my field of vision, the familiar sound of The Walker’s boots across the rocky sand and the unidentified lighter steps that my logic circuits guessed would be The Agent’s. I hadn’t seen The Walker since Sombertown, five days and 157 kilometers ago, and had no idea what he was doing here. Now. At the end. The Agent, of course, had caught me unaware with her ion grenade.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” The Walker’s voice was not as calm as I remembered. 

“Why do you think?” she replied. Stepping into my view, I could finally see her as she was. Her glamours had dissolved, leaving behind a tall woman wearing the skin tight, oil-slick black uniform of an ARIES Operative. Her real mask was dark, with a bright crescent “man in the moon” symbol emblazoned over the left eye. Her short hair looked silver-grey to my damaged processors, was more likely blond or light auburn. “What part of homicidal android did you fail to understand?” she asked.

“Not anymore.” The Walker nudged my optical sensor and my sight fell back toward the sky. He was standing above me in those loose fitting pilgrim robes. Still rejecting the social convention, he wore no mask. His skin seemed darker and less wrinkled then I remembered, but my optical acuity was failing fast. He bent down to look me in the ‘eye’, as if he knew that I could see him. “What are the four noble truths?” he asked.

To Be is To Suffer.

qrp://112385579901.xxx
transmitting recall protocols
data transfer initiated

Book Report 4/7/14

Completed Reading (fiction): Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

Blackbirds is a novel about a girl who can see the future, a very specific part of the future, the death of any person that she touches. Like most people cursed with such gifts, that knowledge does not give her the ability to make any changes to future events. People are bound to die. Miriam Black drifts around the country using her gift to stay alive, finding the imminent death of some of the people she encounters an opportunity to rob the dead, or borrow their homes and cars for her own use. The vision of the violent death of a trucker who picks her up while hitchhiking leads her into the arms of a con man who wants to exploit her and peril at the hands of the meth dealers who want the product that he stole from them. It's all rather standard point A to point B stuff with plenty of violence thrown in for fun. And I guess this novel was written mostly to be fun, an interesting premise carried by lightweight characters that find themselves in violent conflict with each other. Wendig likes his language coarse, but the effect wears thin after a while. Every time he comes up with another way to describe something in particularly nasty way it is both less shocking and less entertaining than the time before. Outside of that, there is just enough hope that somehow Miriam will be able to beat fate and prevent the death of the trucker to keep the reader invested in the plot, but you shouldn’t expect much else from this story or its characters. B-

Book Report 3/20/14
Book Report 2/27/14
Book Report 2/6/14

Book Report 3/20/14

Completed Reading (nonfiction): Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff

Much like a book about the fall of Carthage (see Book Report 1/16/14), one about the decline of Detroit is not going to have much of a surprise ending. LeDuff continues to explore the deterioration of the city through a very personal lens, the impact of that decay on the lives of his family and people he has gotten to know in the city. I guess the title of the book is indicative of the story he wants to tell, but it might have been nice to balance the stories about promising young men gunned down in their prime with at least one example of personal achievement. LeDuff explores the history of his own family, how they came to Detroit and found success by hiding their racial identity. He explores the history of the city, and its own deep racial problems. (Fun Fact: In the 1920’s a KKK backed candidate won enough votes to be elected mayor of Detroit, but since it was a write-in campaign, 17,000 ballots were invalidated due to misspellings of the candidate’s name. Which proves that racists have always been morons.) There is a note of hope throughout LeDuff’s narrative, even as he tells one horrible story after another. It seems somewhere deep inside he still believes in his home town. The book ends with a visit to the place his sister died, a now overgrown field where he spies a deer feeding on the tall grass. He takes this a something of a hopeful sight, but I have to wonder how much hope there is in nature reclaiming the city from its failed human inhabitants. Detroit: An American Autopsy is a powerful, but often depressing book. A

Currently Reading (fiction): Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

I have been following Chuck Wendig online for some time, reading his blog and tweets on a fairly regular basis. I have Kindle versions of his non-fiction 250 Things You Should Know About Writing and a fiction work titled Bait Dog. I tired of the list format before finishing 250 Things and have not yet had the opportunity to read Bait Dog, but recently purchased the novel Blackbirds during a special pricing promotion on Amazon. Blackbirds is about Miriam Black, a young woman with the strange ability to see the (future) death of any person that she touches. The book starts strong. Wendig is clearly in love with his style, his language and descriptions having a rather nasty edge to them. Nothing wrong with that, he uses language very effectively, but if you are easily offended you may wish to avoid his books. Miriam’s second major confrontation within the first few chapters of the book (a bar fight) has me wondering whether or not Wendig is picking these fights just to fill space and keep the action up. It’s as if he wrote “insert bar fight here” on his outline. I hope it has more relevance to the plot than that, though I doubt it. Still, an engaging start to what I hope will be an entertaining novel.

Book Report 2/27/14

Book Report 2/6/14
Book Report 1/30/14

Flash Fiction Friday: Introduction

The flash fiction piece published in the next post (the one above this) was produced in response to Chuck Wendig’s weekly Flash Fiction Challenge (full details below). Based on random number generation, I needed to write a story featuring An Ancient Tree and A Pair of Detectives. I decided to use a couple of characters I had already created, private detective Martin Cutter and police detective Danielle Monroe. The tree doesn’t get much screen time, and I added A Hard Drive Filled With Secrets because I needed a MacGuffin of some sort.

Chuck’s Challenge:

I’ve got two lists at the bottom. Pick (or randomly choose with dice or a random number generator) one from each list, then make sure your flash fiction contains each of those things.

That’s it. Easy-peasy, Ramona-and-Beezy.

You’ve got an upgraded 1500 words. Due in one week (March 14th). Post it at your online space of choice. Drop a link to your completed story in the comments below. Any genre. 

Now, the lists…

MUST CONTAIN #1
1. A lover’s betrayal.
2. A dead body without a face.
3. A mysterious — perhaps even magical — photograph.
4. An antique gun.
5. A terminal illness.
6. An ancient tree.
7. A time machine.
8. A monster.
9. A faithful hound.
10. A talking cat.

MUST CONTAIN #2
1. A distant outpost.
2. An infernal bargain.
3. A pair of detectives.
4. A stolen treasure.
5. A forgotten manuscript.
6. An escaped prisoner.
7. A hard drive filled with secrets.
8. A plane or train ride.
9. A piece of lost technology.
10. A comatose patient.

Book Report 2/27/14

Completed Reading (fiction): The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson

Having viewed all of the films based on this series, there was little suspense with regard to the ultimate resolution of this novel. Of course in almost any novel it is a safe enough bet that the protagonist, while facing many obstacles and struggles, will ultimately win the day. (Unless, of course, that protagonist is named Stark and inhabits a novel written by George R.R. Martin.)  So it shouldn’t be much of a spoiler to reveal that Lisbeth Salander avoids both a prison sentence and confinement to a mental hospital. Still, even if one didn’t see this resolution coming based on the usual rules of fiction, the novel itself leaves little doubt as to the predicted outcome. The Section, a rogue cabal within the Swedish Secret Police, never really gets their act together with regards to their conspiracy against Salander. They want to silence her because of her father, a Soviet defector to Sweden who was handled by The Section in the 1980s and 90s. But for a group of spies they are notoriously ineffective. Salander’s ally, Mikael Blomkvist, and his associates always remain one step ahead of The Section, and that seriously undercuts the suspense. Slander’s lawyer makes short work of the prosecution and their star witness, the psychiatrist Teleborian, which leads to Salander’s acquittal and release. We are then subjected to an unnecessary sojourn to Gibraltar (sometimes telling is better than showing) before Salander finally gets her hands dirty in a confrontation that ties up the novel’s loose end. Nice to see her back in action, even if only for a small portion of the book. If you are well invested in the Millennium trilogy, and must know how the story ends, you probably won’t consider reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest a waste of time.

Currently Reading (nonfiction): Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff

Bodies buried in ice in abandoned buildings. Families members ravaged by drug and alcohol abuse. First responders struggling with inadequate equipment, punished for looting if they take abandoned property. Corrupt and incompetent politicians growing more corrupt and incompetent by the day. The deterioration of old Detroit proceeds apace.

Currently Reading (fiction): Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

Book Report 2/6/14
Book Report 1/30/14
Book Report 1/16/14