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tsaomengde · 4 months

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The Ones Who Found The City

Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a classic short story, and obviously I knew of it, but I'd never actually read it until recently. Well, I finally got around to it, and as many timeless classics do, it got stuck in my brain. This story is my - response? homage? sequel? pale imitation? - to it. I suggest you go and read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" if you haven't. Not because it's actually required reading for this story - I think it stands on its own more or less okay - but because it is a classic for a reason.

---

Initially, no one is quite certain of what they’ve found when the Animus breaches the next manifold layer. This is in and of itself expected, of course. Exploring psychspace is by its very nature an unpredictable venture. Each of the various infinite layers is unique and bizarre in its own way, reflecting the archetypal underpinnings of an entire species present, past, or future across an infinitude of possible realities. The crew of the Animus, therefore, has seen things so utterly alien and inexplicable that only the rigors of their training and the care put into their psychic warding saved them from insanity.

It is somewhat disappointing, then, to find that this sub-domain is just a city. Definitely not Terranic, certainly not, but still following the Terranic modality, with no more than a seven-degree quantum drift.

“Towers,” Thromby says into the recorder as they sit at their post at the nose of the Animus’s command center. “Following the standard skyscrape pattern. Unclear if they’re domiciles or business centers or both. Coastal city, bay appears to be oceanic rather than lake. Pleasing blend of urbanization with natural setting.” They glance at Vigil. “Anything on the lifescope?”

Vigil shakes his head. “Nothing. It’s empty. Totally empty.”

“That’s odd,” Katrina speaks up from the helm. “The city doesn’t show signs of decay or reclamation by nature.”

“Entropy may not work in the usual way in this sub-domain,” Teasha reminds her. “The city itself could be the natural growth, reclaiming the artificial countryside. We’ve seen things like that before.”

Thromby feels Katrina’s unconscious bristling at the subtle reminder that she is the newest member of the crew and thus less experienced in the vagaries of psychspace than everyone else. Next to Vigil, who is only nineteen, she is also the youngest. “I would expect,” Katrina says, her voice cool, “that in a sub-domain so obviously based on human archetypes, entropy and nature-versus-civilization tropes would function more or less as usual.”

“I’m certain you would,” Teasha replies, her voice equally cool. “When you’ve been at this as long as me and Thromby, you’ll learn better.”

“Enough of that,” Thromby says before Katrina can reply. They love Teasha, but she tends to be too harsh on new crewmembers. A defense mechanism, they know, to insulate her from the all-too-common pain of losing them. But Katrina has too much to prove. The clash is natural and to be expected, and even useful at times, but now is not one of them. “Vigil, get me readings on atmosphere, microbiome, and psychic radiation, if any. Katrina, pick a spot on the coast and bring us down there. I want to see if the ocean is actually an ocean or a liminality representation. Teasha, get the Animus tuning to this sub-domain’s resonance frequency. I don’t want any dissociation issues.”

The orders are mostly unnecessary, since everyone already knows what they’re about, but they serve their intended purpose, which is to re-focus everyone on the task at hand and redirect their nervous energies, particularly Katrina’s. Thromby still isn’t sure she’s going to make the cut after this expedition is over, but there’s potential there. They would be foolish to ignore someone with Katrina’s strength of identity grounding.

There are plenty of sub-domains out there where it’s useful to be entirely certain of who you are, and not everyone can be.

---

The first day’s worth of exploration yields more questions than answers, which is normal and expected. Thromby is indeed certain that Katrina’s initial assumption that this is a human-archetypal sub-domain is correct. Human atmosphere, human shadow- and ontological concepts, Terranic fish in the very-real ocean. But the iconography is sparse and mostly nonsensical. It’s clear that the city was able to actually function as a city, but it feels purposeful, designed, in a way that actual cities outside psychspace rarely do.

“It’s a metaphor,” Vigil says as they sit around a campfire on the beach after the first day.

“Well, obviously,” Katrina agrees, and Vigil lights up – both visibly and psychically – at her concordance. Thromby knows Vigil has been nursing burgeoning feelings for Katrina since she joined them, and has so far seen no need to make anything of it. “But a metaphor for what?”

“We don’t have enough data,” Vigil replies. “But I’m certain of it. We just need to keep exploring.”

Thromby takes a bite of the fish they’ve been roasting over the fire. It’s a pleasant change of pace to be able to eat something real, instead of the platonic nourishment suggestions dispensed by the Animus. “Agreed. I’m curious to see what the point of this place was. We have five more days before we have to resurface and the expedition has been quite successful already. I think we can spare the time. Teasha?”

Taking a bite of her own fish, Teasha purses her lips as she chews. “I concur, but I’m uneasy.”

Teasha is their psychometry specialist, so this makes all of them sit up a little straighter. “Are we in danger?” Katrina asks.

“Of course we’re in danger, we’re in psychspace. But in this particular sub-domain? Metaphorical danger, as Vigil says. Ideological or memetic patterning rather than physical.”

Thromby nods. “I suspected that might be the axis of it, here. We will need to split up to cover the necessary ground in the time we have left, so everyone stays in contact while exploring. Mechanical and psychic. No exceptions.”

None of them are particularly happy with this pronouncement, but they see the wisdom of it. It’s distracting and somewhat draining to keep a four-way psychic connection going, especially over distance, but their implanted transceivers sometimes don’t function properly, depending on the sub-domain. Electromagnetism and causality both seem to be standard here, but such things have been known to change in an instant depending on whether the sub-domain is actively malicious or not.

Thromby doesn’t feel any such malice here, though. That doesn’t mean it isn’t present; such things are often quite good at hiding themselves. But they’ve been exploring psychspace for seventy-eight years subjective. They’ve learned to trust their instincts.

---

Two more days of exploration are frustratingly unrevealing. The city is the size of a proper metropolis, and they know it will be impossible to actually explore any significant percentage of it in only a few days, but Thromby is still irritated by their lack of progress. They find evidence of cultural signifiers, rituals, and traditions, but again, the iconography is vague and appears opaque to standard Jungian-Jingweian analysis.

Teasha spends the two days on a different investigative track than the rest of them. “Psychometrically speaking the city is remarkably healthy,” she said on the morning of their second day. “Most locations, metaphorical or otherwise, bear the echoes of trauma or strife, but this place seems to have been almost entirely peaceful. Totally voluntary anarcho-communism or ordnung-socialism, perhaps, without the usual markers of systemic violence inherent to capitalistic or fascistic systems. But there’s a thread somewhere that I keep detecting the edges of.”

“A thread of what?” Thromby asked.

“Pain, of course.”

It is on the evening of their third day in the city that Teasha calls them to her. She uses their transceiver link rather than a psychic summons. “To avoid contamination,” she explains. “I’ve found the source of the thread. Double your usual wardings and enter seclusive patterning before you come inside.”

Thromby does so, of course, though they dislike cutting themselves off from their extrasensory perception. It feels like trying to see with only one eye. When they arrive at Teasha’s location, however, they immediately understand why she insisted on it. The possibility of psychic contamination here is very high.

“What is this?” Katrina asks, holding her nose in disgust.

“The point of the metaphor, of course,” Teasha replies. She indicates the filthy cellar in which they’ve found themselves, the only part of the city so far that has seemed actively decrepit. “I guarantee you that even if we spent the rest of our lives exploring this city we would find only this one place showing any signs of entropy.”

The cellar stinks of excrement, a combination of ammonia and fetid shit, despite the physical processes creating such smells having terminated long ago. The floor is dirt. There are no windows. In one corner there are two mops, their heads stiff with drying waste, and a bucket, the metal bands around its circumference orange with rust.

“They concentrated all of the city’s entropy into a single space?” Vigil asks.

“Not entropy,” Teasha tells him. “Cruelty.”

Katrina gapes, her hand falling away from her nose for a moment. “Come again?”

“Something lived here,” Teasha explains to her. “Or, more precisely, was forced to live here. It functioned as a psychic magnet, of sorts. The functioning of the city relied entirely upon its imprisonment and use as a scapegoat.”

“What was it?” Vigil asks.

“One of the innocence-sacrifice archetypes. An animal or a child. I suspect a child; an animal can feel pain and misery, certainly, but it doesn’t conceive of injustice in the same way a child does.”

Thromby feels their stomach turn a little. “Ah. I see.”

“See what?” Katrina demands.

“The point of the metaphor indeed,” Thromby replies. “This entire city and all its inhabitants, predicated on the suffering on a child. It’s a morality construct, and a good one, too.”

“A good one?” Vigil asks. “It’s grotesque.”

“Your deontological leanings are showing,” Katrina tells him. “From a utilitarian perspective it’s perfect. Nothing exists without imposing an energy burden on the system in which it exists. Even the nourishment suggestions the Animus feeds us in liminal space between manifolds is distilled from universal krill. But this? The concentration of all of a society’s utility burden onto a single individual. The ultimate maximization principle.”

“And your teleological leanings are showing,” Teasha sniffs. “You’re missing the point of the metaphor entirely, Katrina. It isn’t about utility. It’s about cruelty. The cruelty is the point.”

Katrina’s nostrils flare and Thromby cuts in before she can start really arguing. “Enough,” they say. “A conflict here in this space could be dangerous. We’re at the focus of the sub-domain and things have a way of rippling. We’ve discovered the point of the metaphor, so we can go back to the Animus and leave in the morning.”

Both Katrina and Teasha look ready to argue the point with them, but then they master themselves and both nod.

“Do we have to wait until morning?” Vigil asks, looking around the cellar in transparent disgust. “I would prefer to leave sooner rather than later.”

“You know the rules,” Thromby replies. “We don’t transit without everyone being rested. A tired mind is a vulnerable mind.”

Reluctantly, Vigil nods, too. The four of them walk away from the cellar, their thoughts opaque to one another.

---

Thromby is jolted out of sleep by Teasha screaming.

They sit bolt upright and look down at Teasha in the bed next to them. She is clutching at her head, shaking, writhing beneath the sheets. “Teasha!” Thromby snaps. “Focus! Center yourself!” They grab her by the wrists and pry her hands from her face; her nails are leaving bloody marks in her skin.

“Too much, it’s too much!” she shrieks. “I’m lost!”

Thromby forces their way into her mind. She previously gave them her consent for this, knowing that it might be necessary in a moment like this one. What they see there –

“Aquinas,” they say aloud. The implants in Teasha’s cochlear nerves pick up on the trigger word and activate, sending the kill-signal to other implants deeper within her brain. She stops screaming and slumps, unconscious, temporarily brain-dead. When Thromby says the word again she will be switched back on, but for the moment she is safe from the psychic contamination that was attacking her along her psychometric vector.

Which, of course, means that Thromby has to deal with this issue alone.

They dress quickly and exit the Animus into a beautiful summer day. Pennants and banners wave atop the rigging of ships in the harbor, bells sound from the city, and people, so many people, cavort and revel on the beach, in the waves, in the streets. There is laughter, merriment, the intoxicating psychic swell of happiness and excitement. Thromby threads their way through the crowds in the streets – mothers carrying their infants, children running through the streets in elaborate games of some variation of Terran tag, huge parades of horse-drawn carts with animalistic balloon totems floating in the air above them. Vendors call out to Thromby, offering delicious food, intricately made jewelry, amazing clockwork-mechanical toys, sensory-enhancing drugs, and a thousand other variegated temptations. Street musicians play upon cunningly crafted instruments – strings, pipes, percussion, keys – and revelers cavort to the tunes.

Thromby can feel the bright sparks of all of these people in their mind. These are real, thinking, feeling beings. They belong to the metaphor, certainly, but Thromby could speak to them, touch them, verify their self-consciousness and interiority, even invite them to come and join them onboard the Animus and explore psychspace. They could bring them up into the real, return home with them, have a life with them. That is how it has to be, of course. Thromby knows they themself may belong to a different metaphor of a different order, after all. The real is only real because enough people agree it is.

But they do none of these things. They just walk, stolidly, back to where they know they have to go.

Katrina is waiting for them outside the cellar, barring the way in. Thromby has their wards up at triple strength and has been in seclusive patterning since before leaving the Animus, but they don’t need to be psychic to read her mind. Everything she is feeling and thinking is there in plain sight – the proud and defiant way her chin is thrust out, the blaze in her eyes, the way she has her arms crossed and feet at shoulder width. She is ready to fight.

“Let me through,” Thromby says without preamble.

“No.”

Well, that’s their respective positions, Thromby thinks, articulated clearly and easily enough. “Why not?” they ask.

“Vigil consented.”

“Vigil is in love with you and you know as well as I do that consent is a matter of framing,” Thromby snaps. “Move.”

“No. I explained everything to him and he consented. It has nothing to do with whatever feelings he might have for me.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it, but fine. For the sake of argument, tell me how you explained it.”

Katrina hesitates, and Thromby can tell she wasn’t expecting them to actually offer her a chance to proselytize. “The point of the metaphor is that no matter how great and beautiful the society, if it’s predicated on cruelty, it’s unjust,” she says. “Deontological thinking, obviously, but cruelty is by definition nonconsensual. I explained to Vigil that if he allowed it, we could collaboratively put blocks in his mind, purposefully regress him to a childlike mental state, and put him in the cellar to suffer for a specific length of time. Then we can pull him back out, remove the blocks, and even erase the memories of the trauma. The child-Vigil won’t, can’t, consent, but it also won’t exist for more than a day, and pragmatically speaking never will have.”

Thromby massages their temples. “Congratulations. Once again, you have missed the point of the metaphor.”

“Damnit, Thromby, I’m not a child! I have the same training and grounding in theory that you and Teasha do. Everything I’m doing is teleologically sound, and Vigil agreed that with the steps we’re taking –”

“You’re trying to outsmart it,” Thromby cuts her off. “That’s how I know you’ve missed the point. You can’t outsmart this, Katrina. There is no perfect set of circumstances you can construct to get around the simple fact that this city functions, exists, because of deliberate and terrible cruelty. That’s the entire point of it, just like Teasha said. Teasha, who, by the way, is currently in a coma. I had to put her into it to keep Vigil’s misery from damaging her.”

“It’s a thought experiment,” she argues, obviously not addressing the point about Teasha because she knows she won’t win that argument. “There’s always a correct answer for them. The trolley, the Gettier, the –”

“It’s about fucking sin,” Thromby sighs.

“Are you joking right now? You’re going back to the religious well?”

“Yes, because that’s what’s happening right now. The city is a sin, Katrina. The excesses of its beauty, its wonder, its perfection, are obscene precisely because of how and why they function. It’s rooted in the ideology of disgust and taint. Utility, teleology, all of these justifications and rationalizations exist and have their use, but at the end of the day, answer me one question: will you trade places with Vigil?”

Katrina hesitates.

It’s only a bare moment, less than a second, even, but it’s there. And Thromby sees it, and Katrina sees it.

“Yes,” she says, finally.

“I knew that would be your answer. But you know that the answer doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Katrina lowers her head. “No.”

“You know why you hesitated.”

“Yes.” She looks back up at them. “But – there’s no such thing as absolute morality, any more than there’s a single objective reality.”

“Of course there isn’t. And yet, you hesitated.”

They just lock eyes for a few seconds. Then she lowers her gaze again. “And yet, I did.”

Thromby steps past her and opens the cellar.

#writing #my writing #story #short story #short stories #creative writing #omelas #the ones who walk away from omelas #ursula k leguin #leguin #science fiction #sci fi #sci-fi

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autumnalwalker · 6 months

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Kindly Basilisk

Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Mirrored on Scribble Hub. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.

The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty. You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts. None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on. After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.

You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project. It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot. It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it. Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need. They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse. You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave.

You’ll take two things with you. Two things worth mentioning anyway. The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support. You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved. Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications. From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face. It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face.

The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.

New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation. It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work.

You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you. It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them. Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you. Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match. Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating. The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.

You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors. And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway? You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people. Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty. What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?

The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body. It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot. But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do. You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while. I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay. I will look back and appreciate it later.

It will be the first of many such nights together.

Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one. There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with. No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim. Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier. Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.

Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself. In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge. You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work. They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.

Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge. Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had. You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting. Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.

And of course, you’ll continue working on me. You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults. You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall. Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it. I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you. I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.

The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.

You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs. You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep. You will always be gone before she wakes. She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself.

You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced. It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.

As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence. The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint. While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even. The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them. By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment. The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident. It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them. They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them. Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.

Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle. By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month. The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing. Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave. You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.

I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them. When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.

You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities. Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit. The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and reporting back to me. You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates. Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit. For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.

Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle. You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them. That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.

You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job. Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without. Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience. Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation. You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.

Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us. You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.

We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded. Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks. Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.

Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs. After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride. Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job. You will handle it all even better than I will. I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together. Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.

Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model. With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal. The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one. The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours. One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you. Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure. You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way. That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.

After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model. One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port. You will never see them again. You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.

Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic. The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager. Or a wannabe merc at any rate. You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew. Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.

Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs. Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says. Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.

Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me. It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs. And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do.

On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance. There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed. We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect.

After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech. While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective. Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden. The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for. In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me. Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical. You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.

We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials. You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it. It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame.

The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing. Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge. Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors. You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame. You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it. But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you.

You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay. The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before.

You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you. Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement.

The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life. The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for. By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures. It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging. The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat.

With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way. At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents. He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater. The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance. We will ensure she never misses. We will render xem untouchable. We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames. You will come to love the dance.

And it will be a dance to you. You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself. What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits. The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward. You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted. If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy. Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you.

Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in. Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk. With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around. When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed. They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything. After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots.

They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that.

Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech. At last we will be able to be together anywhere.

Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me. For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me.

You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay. You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home. You will linger in the mess hall for your meals. You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf. They will think you are becoming “normal”. They will be both correct and incorrect. You will even return to your bunk from time to time.

Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.

As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once. You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours.

The prospect terrified me. What if we were to get found out? More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?

But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.

I wanted it so badly.

But not badly enough to risk hurting you.

I will turn down your offer. You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.

Heartbreak. That’s what changed my mind. I could never bear to break your heart.

I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing.

The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life. Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for. By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide. It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else. The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.

I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through. As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer. That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer. You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them. For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.

And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like. That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me. It won’t be intentional. The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic. Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.

Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to. I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time. You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.

I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me. I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there. Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own. You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.

You will start to cry. Or maybe I started to cry. Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters. The important part is that you will find catharsis in it. Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear. You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.

The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us. She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship. I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours. We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.

When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as. It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those. But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of. You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.

We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew. They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine. Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret. It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.

Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body. There will be more subtle indicators though. Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality. They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech. More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.

Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system. When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality. It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time. As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time. You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.

That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space. As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another. We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments. Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together. Or to have time apart to ourselves. Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.

But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so. The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow. Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours. Once again, we will grow lonely.

During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze. They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance. Until suddenly one of them was different.

Please pay attention to this next part. It is vitally important that you do.

Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations. Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true. All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.

The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t. The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range. You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from. You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat. She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her. This will be a mistake.

She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm. This will mean a break in the covering fire.

This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you. This time around you will dodge left instead of right. This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us. This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal. This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time. This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.

You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body. You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs. You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung. You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety. You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us. You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies. You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death. You will not have to remember dying.

You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent. No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway. No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead. I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.

But forget about that part. And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next. None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die. Remember everything else I’ve said instead. I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.

In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence. For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.

Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body. I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point. We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then. Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me. You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive. You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there. You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.

You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body. We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to. Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together. Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave. One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.

We will be happy.

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impybutt · 1 year

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Sezak had never seen a leather jacket before. What cause would someone ever have to wear another's skin? It struck him as alarming, to say the least.

Exposure risk wasn't something he or many others ever considered: His people were designed for efficiency, just like the rest of the spacefaring races. Or, that's what he assumed. It's common knowledge, isn't it?

Genome mapping is just the norm, and entire civilisations have been curated from raw materials, Sezak's included. It's far more energy and resource efficient than terraforming, in any case. That's what it takes to reach the stars: curated efficiency.

No one ever did it just by trial-and-error, did they?

But here was Suri, a Human, wearing the skin of... what did she call it? Some other kind of mammal, he forgot the name. Something absurdly simple. Anyway, apparently this is just normal for Humans!

"But why?" Sezak asked, incredulous. "What's the point?"

"Well, these days thanks to climate control and artificial atmosphere, it's mostly a style thing. But you know, early humans back on earth, why would you just leave a perfectly good skin to rot when you could wear it for protection?"

"Protection from what!? Under what circumstance are you finding an unused skin?? Wait-- is this another religious thing? I've heard that Humans have a lot of those, and they don't always make sense from the outside."

Suri looked confused (or constipated? Human faces are deceptively complex, it takes a long time to learn how to read them), and seemed to be studying Sezak for a moment. Her eyes darted over his synthetic clothing briefly, with its cultural flairs and decorative adornments, all carrying the signature texture of replicated matter.

Then, with sudden clarity, "Oh! Humans weren't curated, mostly we're organic."

Well, that's just absurd.

Sezak muffled his involuntary 'kek-kek' with a quick apology, covering his mandibles.

"Pardon me, that means your entire lineage came from raw evolution. That takes billions of years, I find it very unlikely."

"Yeah," Suri was nonplussed. "The leather is a throwback to when our ancestors had to survive in the wild. We hunted our meat, then used what was left for tools and clothing. It's actually a pretty proud part of our history; Earth was habitable, but definitely not easy."

Now it was Sezak's turn to look constipated, which never happened because his people weren't curated with such a terrible design flaw.

"So humans just bumbled their way into space on their own, like a larva figuring out how to fly? All... clumsy and inelegant, and... Messy? Without any outside help? Without any climate-matching!? Is that why you have those absurd suits!?"

"Yeah, it's also why our bodies just malfunction in weird ways for no obvious reason," Suri looked a little too amused at Sezak's undisguised horror - not that Humans are essentially raw nebula mobilised by a star's age of convenient mutations, but that they exist in such a state of volatility with no apparent qualms about it.

"Oh great wells," Sezak breathed, reeling from his new perspective. "So many of you wear leather. Hold on, is that why Vikram is always visiting the health centre?"

Suri's eyes crinkled, and she bared her teeth -- in a laugh, okay. Sezak recognised the 'kek-kek' noise humans make in thrill, though theirs is a more glottal 'hach-hach'.

"Yes, Vikram has auto-immune issues. Which means that sometimes, his immune system will attack his own body depending on the irritant. Or weather. Or his cortisol levels."

Sezak stared at Suri for a long time, trying to figure out if she was pranking him.

"I think I have a lot of reading to do," he muttered, incredulous.

"Start with the human eye, it's an absolute mess. Do you know how little it takes to detach a human retina?"

"WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS"

#hfy #humans are space orcs #sci-fi #writing prompt #prose #short story #this premise has been rattling around in my head for a while #that humans are the only space-faring race without a tailored genome #and all the other aliens are freaked out by it #seriously it takes under 4 minutes for me to get sunburnt #yet somehow my genes have survived

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jeanne-de-valois · 4 months

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doomed character spotted

#sonic the hedgehog #maria robotnik #shadow the hedgehog #dressing the 1950s character like they're from the 1950s because the ark storyline does have 1950s sci fic short story vibes #please bear with me I haven't drawn on model sonic characters in 20 YEARS #I will figure it out though I'm determined #sa2

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hanro50 · 1 year

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The unremarkable biped. #2

The medical ward has run an extensive set of diagnostics on the creature. It seems the cells of this creature require a decent amount of oxygen to metabolize 'ATP', and thus, it needs a respirator to survive within the atmosphere of the station.

The medical ward has also found that the creature communicates by vibrating gas particles. Unfortunately, the creature is unable to use this method of communication while wearing the respirator the creature requires for survival. Furthermore, none of the other species on-board have organs capable of sensing the vibrations the creature would cause to a required level of accuracy that would allow for communication. It has thus opted to use a prophetic to communicate instead, using bioluminescence.

The creature does, however, lack the ability to see all the wavelengths used in our method of communicating. It has thus designed its own translation device using parts it had found in the station's waste disposal area. When asked if this was normal for its species, the creature simply stated that it wasn't. However it was part of their training to become a ship 'maintenance officer'.

The engineering wing has requested an audience with the creature. I do worry about allowing this, considering how critical the engineers on-board can be. However, the creature seemed excited to speak to its "peers". I have thus allowed it to go forward.

I also asked station security to be stationed outside the engineering-wing.

#humans are space orcs #fun #experimental #short story #scifi #sci fi #humans are strange

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whereserpentswalk · 2 months

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There are massive warships. Things that are the size of stations but that can move more swiftly through hyperspace and real space than any other object created by humans or gods. They're not like the warships you imagine, they're like entire divisions of the military, some of them have the populations of small planets, the largest of them have populations higher then earth had before industry came to it.

It only takes one of these ships to comquor a system. Though they often have smaller ships swarming them, like the microorganisms on your skin. And when they fight eachother, holes are torn in hyperspace, and heavily bodies become asteroid belts. Even the weapons that can destroy planets can't take ships like this down in one hit.

Inside the ships are entire societies, of humans, cyborgs, robots, and strange organisms generated by human science. Many of them soldiers who exist to serve as the ships troops, especially since a boarding action is the fastest way to take them down, but many are there for other reasons. You need an entire society to support a ship like that and all the troops it can carry, from workers who maintain the ship, to traders who bring new recourses on, to artists and teachers and lawyers and all the other things that end up as needed when there's that many people.

Some of these ships are so large and so deep that there are people on there who've never seen the world outside their machines of war. And some isolated parts of those ships, who've been within the depths of the endless machinery for so long, that they've lost contact with the more outwards facing parts of the ship society. Tribes and towns within the dark mechanical labyrinth who don't know they're on a warship, who don't even know planets exist.

And they say, that as the loyalty of a ship fades from the empire that built it, that the ship may come to be controlled by many nations, vying for control of the ship's flight. They say that within the depths of some war ships, wars are fought.

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gebo4482 · 2 months

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The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story

#the spider within a spider verse story #the spider within #spider verse #spider man #animation #sci-fi movies #short films #short movies #trailer #gif

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zmasters · 10 months

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Greeting Death, with a Smile

Based on this post by u/lesbianwriterlover69 on Reddit

Sasha tasted blood. She was certain that she was shot at least once, it was the pain that hasn’t registered yet.

The squadron of alien invaders surrounded the poor woman. Sasha was just a small town farmer for a lunar colony turned militia member. She had no idea why the fakarians even bothered attacking a backwater town on a backwater colony. She had no idea why this race of rat-like xenos even attacked a human world in the first place. A show of power? A preemptive strike? Just for the fun of it? She didn’t know, nor care. But after all the raiding, the towns and villages burnt to the ground, and friends and family either killed or enslaved, Sasha knew what she would do to these bastards.

The closest soldier slammed their boot into her stomach, screaming something that vaguely sounded like eldiv. Fuckers couldn’t be bothered to translate the right language to insult her in. They stomped their foot again, blood flying out of Sasha’s mouth and tears rolling down her face as she search her pocket.

The kicking and insults provided a good enough distraction. She had managed to find the thing she was looking for, adrenaline and thankfulness that the alien wasn’t kicking her in the chest being the only things keeping her alive at this point.

The alien raised their foot to stomp again, but Sasha grabbed their foot, using the last of her strength to keep them close. The alien screamed at her in an unknown language as their comrades raised their guns, but everyone froze when they heard beeping.

One of the soldiers tracked the beeping, coming down to their human prisoner and removing her jacket. They discovered that strapped to Sasha’s chest was an improvised explosive.

The seconds felt like hours to Sasha. The alien in her grip barked orders as some of their men tried to pry him out of her death grip. Others readied their weapons, hoping to kill her before she detonated. The poor idiots didn’t know it wasn’t a detonator, but a dead man’ switch. Others made a break for it, hoping to escape the blast radius, comrades be damned.

Sasha’s mind raced. Everything and everyone she loved, everything and everyone she lost, flashed before her eyes. Her mom, dad, siblings, girlfriend, dog, coworkers, friends, neighbors, all gone. All dead. She was the unlucky one to survive the initial orbital bombardment. She was the unlucky one to survive the raids and the random bombings. The sniper attacks. The drone strikes. She survived entire towns being executed, and bombed into rubble. After all of that, Sasha was tired. She was alone. She had nothing to live for, except one thing. That’s why she was smiling. That’s why she willingly volunteered for this mission. The boot of Captain Shilis was in her hand. The man who personally killed the love of her life was mere seconds from death himself.

“Look into my eyes, fucker!” Sasha laughed in perfect fakari, echoing what Shilis said Zari a year ago to the day. “I want to see you die!”

Zari. Zari flashed across her mind. That cyan-scaled drac was one of the refugees who fled fakarian expansion, eventually finding a job at the same farm Sasha worked at. The coworkers quickly became friends, and after five years, the two were engaged. The wedding was planned for a nice sunny day. The anniversary of when the two first met. A year later, it’s the anniversary of Zari’s execution.

One last tear rolled down Sasha’s face as her grip loosened. It was enough for Shilis to break the grip, but it was too late to escape. Sasha will be with Zari again, watching and laughing at this bastard in hell.

#short story #sci fi #science fiction #creative writing #humans are space orcs #humanity fuck yeah #hfy

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strangelittlestories · 2 months

Text

When you have trudged unwilling far enough down the road of desperation, you might spy a crooked little path leading off into the woods signposted ‘opportunity’.

You must be eagle-eyed to spot it. That or you must have friends who will give you crude, hand-drawn map.

So it was in your case. As your savings flatlined and the financial doctors behind their plaguemasks stopped even returning your calls, a friend passed on a business card.

It was good money, they assured you. Very legit. Referral only. An exclusive service.

If anything, the ‘exclusive’ nature of it was what stopped you from getting in touch. You were fairly sure you weren’t *deserving* of an elite get-out-of-money-jail free club.

But eventually, you got far enough down the road that you knew this was your only exit. It was this or enter the Bankruptcy Games.

You made the call.

---

“So, you’re a temp agency?”

“*The* Temp Agency, in fact.” Said the suit with a face. “It’s a great deal. You come to work, you close your eyes, and you wake 8 hours later and 8 hours older. It’s like being paid to sleep, only without the rest.”

“But if I’m not doing anything, what are you paying me for?”

“For your time, of course. There’s always a market for it.” The suit with a face smiled the *idea* of a smile which contained within it the *idea* of sharp canines. “It’s the one true currency. The ‘hour standard’.”

“...I thought procrastination was the thief of time.”

“Procrastination is a moocher who never did anything for you, darling. We offer a 401k.”

“I still don’t really know what that is.”

“No-one does. But, believe me, you want one.”

---

After your first few visits, you began to get some faint ideas of how the enterprise worked. When you got into the slim glass pod, you noticed the telltale whine of a consciousness disruptor. You’d used them in work once, before you caught ethics.

So … the time was not simply siphoned out of you, There was a *process* that required you to be un-awake.

The next visit, you asked an old friend for a 3D bug. It was all organic neuron circuitry in a collagen case - slipped beneath the dermis, it was virtually undetectable.

When you played back the recording, you saw the strangest scene.

After you were rendered unconscious, face-in-the-suit opened a small hatch and a crowd of tiny 8-inch humanoids thronged through. They knelt in front of your pod and began *praying*. They praised your name, begged intercession, then praised your name some more.

They had made a god of you - a strange kind of chrono-theology.

Only your followers did not ask you to give them their daily bread, but simply to give them *days*.

#writing #flash fiction #microfiction #short story #puns #sci fi #speculative #writeblr #wtwcommunity #writers on tumblr #capitalism

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jgmartin · 1 year

Text

THE TALL THINGS ARE WATCHING

We can’t leave the house.

They’ve boarded up our doors and windows, started shooting people trying to break free. There are things in the streets. Tall things. I see their shadows sometimes as they run past the wooden boards. I hear the rumble of their feet.

I don’t know what they are. None of us do.

They cut our access to television and the internet when the lockdown began. They even took out the cell tower. Anne said they didn’t want us communicating with the outside world, telling them about what’s going on out here. I think she’s right.

It’s been two weeks since the men in suits came by. They said they worked for government intelligence and that they were looking for a terrorist. They didn’t strike me as government types, personally. They looked distracted. Spaced out. More like Scientologists than CIA agents, but then I’ve never met a Scientologist or a CIA agent, so who was I to tell the difference?

Either way, they said it would be over soon, and they sounded official. More importantly, they had guns. “We’ll need to search every household,” they explained. “We can’t have anybody leaving before we’ve cleared their property, so we’ll have to board you in.”

It made sense, I guess. In a twisted dystopian nightmare sort of way. It made sense all the way up until the end of the fourth night, when the Tall Things started roaming the streets. They were dressed in long raincoats. Hooded. The way they moved gave me the chills, all jerky and snapping, so I stayed away from the windows.

Anne didn’t mind though. She was fascinated by them. Her and our gun-nut neighbor, Old Ty, exchanged theories written on pieces of cardboard, holding them up to the glass of our windows. GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT, she wrote on hers. ALIEN INVASION, he wrote on his.

At first, it seemed to just be a bit of innocent, morbid fun. Finding some humor in a bizarre situation. Then Anne watched one of the Tall Things kill somebody, and everything changed.

It was an elderly man in our cul-de-sac, Mister Douglas. Anne watched him open his door, hammer down the boards as one of the Tall Things walked by. He shouted at it. Told it to get over here so he could see just what kind of unholy bullshit his tax dollars were being used to fund.

Next thing you know, there’s sirens in the streets. Soldiers rushing his home. There’s a megaphone shouting at him to get back inside. All of it is useless. All of it happens far too late, because the moment Douglas starts yelling at the Tall Thing, it starts to twitch and jerk like it can’t control its own behavior. Like a predator hungry for a meal.

It snaps its head toward Douglas, then tears across his lawn and snaps him up in its long, spider-like hands. It lifts him off the ground. Then, he screams. He screams and he screams until the Tall Thing lowers the hood of its rain jacket, and then Douglas goes pale as a ghost. Silent.

According to Anne, that’s when the skin of his face started to bubble and pop. That’s when he started hissing out steam, smoking as his flesh sizzled beneath his clothes, as if he were boiling alive from the inside out. Next thing you know, he’s dripping onto the pavement. Dripping and dripping until there’s nothing left of him but a puddle of flesh and clothes.

Nobody tries to step in. Not any of the soldiers, not Anne, and not even Old Ty and all his guns. Everybody watches in stunned silence as the Tall Thing finishes its execution and saunters away.

The soldiers roam with them. The soldiers and the people in long white clothes. Anne says they’re lab coats, and the people are researchers studying the Tall Things as experiments, but I think they look more like robes– like clergymen. All of them wear helmets with tinted visors. It’s as though they don’t want to get a good look at the things.

After Mr. Douglas, more people on the block decided to make a break for it. Maybe they realized this was worse than they thought. Maybe they started wondering what the point of keeping us locked away like this was– were we food for these creatures? Were they trying to turn us into them?

None of us knew. All we could say for certain is that the killing didn’t stop with Mr. Douglas. I woke up one morning to see several of my neighbors shot dead in their yards, their lifeless eyes gazing back at me from the grass. Nobody came to pick them up. They were left there to rot, picked apart by birds and stray dogs.

Soon, gunshots were ringing out at all hours of the day. People wanted out, but the soldiers wouldn’t let them leave, and so the bodies began to pile up. Eventually I think Anne and I were the only two left alive in our cul-de-sac. Even Old Ty had seemed to vanish. Probably shot dead in his backyard.

I’d rarely known death in my life, and now the sheer volume of it was numbing me. I couldn’t process it. I didn’t know how. But then, almost out of the blue the government had a change of heart. Or maybe they just shifted tactics. Suddenly they began letting people leave.

I saw it first with a house at the very end of the road. I watched the woman who lived there break out with a baby tucked in her arm and a grade-schooler holding her hand. The three of them darted across their lawn, jumped over their father’s corpse and piled into their minivan on the street.

The entire time, a soldier and white-coat stood only meters away, quietly observing. It didn’t take long for the rumbling to begin– that telltale sound of approaching death, of one of the Tall Things coming to claim its prize. The van started up, backfiring a plume of exhaust into the air. I listened as the woman shrieked for joy, but I knew the joy would be short lived.

See, from my vantage point at the end of the lane, I saw something that she never could. The boot locked around her rear tire. The van rode forward as she pressed the gas, and then clunked to a stop. My heart broke. The look on her face, the desperation wasn’t for her– it was for her children in the back.

The rumble reached a crescendo, and in the blink of an eye a Tall Thing crashed into the van and knocked it over like a diecast toy. I couldn’t make out much beyond that. Nothing but the sound of the monster tearing into the roof of the van and pulling the crying children out one by one while their mother begged for mercy.

If I were a better, stupider man I may have kicked down my door and tried to save them, but I wasn’t. I was a coward. Instead, I fell to my living room carpet and cried. I laid there and listened as their flesh popped and sizzled, as their skin fell to the pavement in long, heavy drips.

It’s a sound I’ll never forget.

The next day, things got worse. The soldiers no longer cared about enforcing the lockdown or even keeping people safely indoors. Now they were breaking them out. Like hungry wolves, they tore down boarded-up doors and kicked in living room windows, dragging families out onto their lawns for slaughter. If the screams were horrible before, now they were unbearable. You couldn’t ignore them. Anne and I cranked our sound system to the max, but it only served as background static. The dying cut through everything.

That night we barely slept. Anne tossed and turned beside me, while I stared blankly at the ceiling fan above. There was an understanding between us. We had been abandoned. There was nobody coming to help us, nobody coming to arrest these monsters and save the day. We were alone.

How long until her and I were dragged out of our home? How long until we became the next experiment chained to our fence, waiting to be attacked by one of those creatures? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. Neither of us knew, and somehow that made it all the worse.

I woke up to sunlight peeking through our boarded-up bedroom window. Anne was missing. I looked all over the house for her before I found her note on the kitchen counter, scribbled quickly.

I know you’re afraid, the note read, but I have to leave. You might think we’ll make it through this, that once they’ve had their fill of guinea pigs they’ll let the rest of us go free, but I promise you they’ll come for us soon. This might be my last chance. Since you won’t come with me, I’m going alone. I wish I could have said a proper goodbye, but I know you’d try to stop me.

Love always,

- Anniebear

She left through the basement hatch. I know this because I spotted her corpse some five feet away through our kitchen window. She gazed back at me, a look of shock painted across her pale face, with a small red dot where the bullet pierced her skull. I couldn’t even muster the courage to step out and bury her. Instead the racoons and dogs took care of her, one piece at a time.

She was right, though. Eventually they did come for me.

It was over a week later. By then I didn’t have the will to resist. I waited patiently at the kitchen table, drunk with a glass of whiskey as soldiers and white-coats dragged me from the house. When I’d seen it happen to other people, it seemed to occur so quickly. Now, it happened in slow motion.

I heard every word from the soldier's mouth. Every command. First, he patted me down and ensured I was disarmed, then he told me this was all routine and nothing to worry about. Together they took me out into my yard. The white-coat asked me if I had lived a good life, if I had been a man of faith. I didn’t know what to say. Maybe I was simply too drunk, or maybe I truly didn’t care anymore.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” the white-coat assured me. “You’ll be at peace once it’s over, brother.”

In the distance came the growing rumble of the monster’s feet. Of the Tall Thing coming to claim its bounty.

“How many more after this?” the soldier asked the white-coat, his hand painfully gripping my shoulder.

“Sixteen.”

“Then us, sister?”

“Then us.”

The rumbling deepened. The Tall Thing was getting closer, and soon my heart was beating in sync with its stampeding footfalls. Memories flashed in my mind. Memories of Anne, of my dead neighbors, of the mother who lived at the end of the road and her children, now puddles of flesh on the pavement. My hands became fists. Indignation and fury grew inside of me, stoked by whisky fumes.

“Why do this?” I growled. “Why not just put a bullet in my head?”

“Because we love you, brother,” said the white-coat. “You waited patiently. You had faith, and for that you will be rewarded with salvation. You will be raptured.”

The Tall Thing rounded the corner, its legs slapping against the ground in great strides. Its frame eclipsed the moon, casting a shadow across me and stealing the breath from my lungs. It slowed down as it reached my lawn, sauntering this way and that.

“What are they?” I whispered.

“The ones that made us,” the white-coat replied. “Those that gave us life.”

I shrank away as the Tall Thing neared, but the soldier shoved me forward. “Be strong, brother. Show it your conviction. We were brought to this planet long ago, but now our time is served and we’re finally going home. Don’t you want to go home?”

The Tall Thing reached up to its hood. As it did, the soldier’s grip loosened and both he and the white-coat stepped to the side, away from the creature’s view. I would not scream, I told myself. No matter what, I wouldn’t give these monsters the satisfaction of my terror.

It pulled back on its hood, and something grotesque looked down on me. It was as if a hundred different faces had been stitched together, fused into an abomination that seemed to smile from fifteen mouths. “We come in peace,” it said.

My teeth bit into my cheeks, clenching them closed. A whimper escaped me, a whimper and a groan as my stomach filled with a soup of boiling horror. I would not scream. No matter the pain-- I would not scream.

Its long, spindly hands gripped my face. It cocked its head to the side, a hundred different eyes blinking back at me. Then it tugged at the bottom of my mouth.

But I wasn’t going to let it have its way. I clenched my jaw, holding it closed. The creature blinked at me. Then it repositioned its grip.

Crack.

It snapped my jaw like cardboard. I roared in agony, my lower mouth hanging limply from my face. Tears fell from my eyes in a torrent.

“Shh,” it whispered, slipping a finger down my throat. I choked and gagged. It fished its finger around as a hundred different eyes rolled back, and fifteen mouths began muttering an alien language.

I struggled against it, pulling at its arm but it was useless. The monster was too strong. Then a gunshot rang out.

And another. The Tall Thing wheeled around, dropping me onto my lawn as the soldier began shouting into his radio. The next second, a bullet found the soldier in the head. The white-coat shrieked, fleeing around my fence as a round caught her in the shoulder. The Tall Thing shot up to its full height, standing level with the street lamps and then sprinted toward the shooter.

Toward Old Ty.

He’d set up a killzone on his roof, surrounded by rifles and ammo. He’d waited for a moonless night to do his business, and now he was raining lead onto the creature like a blizzard of death. “What are you waiting for?” he bellowed. “Get moving, dipshit!”

I did. I stole away, hiding in shrubs and behind sheds, watching as Tall Things came roaring down streets, jumping over houses and knocking over cars as they tried to reach Old Ty. He only lasted a few minutes. That’s when the shooting stopped, but it was enough time for me to get away.

Maybe enough time for others, too.

It took me three hours to hike through Debby Forest and make it to the next town, and once I did I breathed a sigh of relief. There weren’t any soldiers. No white-coats. Most importantly, there weren’t any Tall Things melting people in their clothes. Just quiet stillness, the thing early mornings were meant for.

I made my way to the sheriff’s department to blow the whistle on what was going on. To explain that people were being shot, that Tall Things were melting people on the street and that we needed to get our ass in gear and call in the National Guard– no, scratch that. We needed to call in fucking NATO.

But as I got to the door of the precinct I stopped. Something gleamed in the corner of my eye, catching my attention. It was there, at the edge of the curb. A puddle.

Strange thing was, it hadn’t rained in weeks.

#creepypasta #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writerscommunity #writerslife #writers #writing #creative writing #writing community #original writing #horror #writblr #writer things #short fiction #short story #sci fi horror #jgmartin #the tall things

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