Author: Ridley

Here’s what I came up with for the Terribleminds.com Flash Fiction Challenge: The Subgenre Tango. It’s kind of “military sci-fi,” but it’s very much not at the same time, and the mythology aspect of it is very modern and very obvious. It’s not my best work, but it does have the virtue of being genuinely “flash” in that I wrote it in one sitting and it’s actually under the assigned word count for a change.  I was in a bad mood when I wrote this one. ————————————————— Sergey M’tume’s tour of duty in Zone M was less than a week from complete when the distress call came in. If things had just stayed quiet for another seven standard days, he’d have entered the entangler/detangler device, watched the think suck a hellish amount of power from God knows what source, maybe geothermal but probably a pair of nuclear fission reactors, and wake up the next morning next to a similar EDD close enough to one of Earth’s Lagrange points to start thinking about being home with his family. Sergey M’tume really, really wanted to be home with his family.  Tours were long because, although long distances could be traversed at speeds that still felt magical to Corporal M’tume, the energy costs were so high that they were largely restricted to military usage and even then, they were used judiciously. A common joke among troops was that every time they were deployed, you could see the sun grow dimmer.  M’tume was, of course, the only troop in the area. Early warriors used weapons which would require to several blows to incapacitate a single opponent. By the twentieth century, it was possible for an individual to carry a device which would reduce a city to rubble. The continuation of this trend meant that Corporal M’tume had at his disposal the capability to wipe out all life on a planet if he needed to. Several times, in fact, although you had to have a seriously twisted imagination to think of reasons why you’d ever need that kind of ordinance. The signal came from Dalt 3. “Of course it did,” thought M’tume. Getting a call this late into your rotation was bad enough, but the folks on Dalt would only ask for help when things got really bad. Don Dalt was a legendary individualist, rugged and charismatic. When the overcrowding on Earth finally reached the point where borders became unenforceable and people had to live face to face with their neighbors. Dalt bristled at having to restrict himself in any way, feeling it was a moral failing to submit in any ways to the will of a “society.” Dalt and like minded unique individualists, fed up with accommodating proximity to other people, packed up and left.  The Daltian exodus was unique in human history. Instead of rag tag refugees carrying whatever possessions they had on their backs, these were some of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. They had connections, both civil and military, which allowed them to bring a substantial portion of their goods with them.  Recent surveys had found an Earthlike world in a system which didn’t even have a proper name yet. The Earth government spent a small fortune setting up an EDD station nearby. Dalt and his crew claimed the planet, which would become known as Dalt 3, and sailed their enormous yachts to the Lagrange EDD station. No one is certain how they received clearance to move so many massive vessels. The energy cost would have bankrupted even men as wealthy as Dalt. Rumor had it that they’d managed a subsidy from the Earth government, but this was never proven. They’d been the best, the brightest, and certainly the most confident individuals on the planet. They were leaving behind a world that did not appreciate their contributions. When they left, both the standard of living and productivity of the planet spiked in a way which was hard to explain, but Dalt and his people suspected that the government was cooking the books. What else could it be? Corporal M’tume’s ship suddenly started picking up….he wasn’t sure exactly what. There was signal, but there was so much noise that he was reasonably sure his vessel didn’t have the ability to pick out any specific communications. He frowned. He had no great love for the people of Dalt 3, who complained about the presence of even a single troop in their sector, but the electromagnetic cacophony M’tume was receiving boded very, very ill for the Daltians. Dalt 3 was a marvelous beautiful world. The surface was approximately ninety percent water, but the land poking out of the seas was uniformly magnificent. The terrain was rugged, mountainous, lush, green, and warm year round. The large amounts of ocean allowed the Daltians to keep a good distance from each other. No doubt this was a good thing as the Daltians were fanatical about their individualism and protected it fiercely. Weapons which had been outlawed on the surface of the Earth, similar to some of the ones carried by Sergey M’tume and his ship, were commonplace on Dalt 3. Most Daltians would look at your suspiciously if you didn’t have one with you. Of course, most Daltians would look at you suspiciously anyway. As Corporal M’tume began the long process of matching orbits with Dalt 3, he finally was able to get some definition on his telescope. The early images had been fuzzy and out of focus. Sergey pulled a stock image of the planet up and compared the new visuals he was getting. There was no more green on Dalt 3. There were no ships in orbit. There were no cities. There were no buildings. Corporal M’tume suddenly became conscious of the complete lack of anything resembling communications on any band. Later, in his report, he would say that he was overcome with grief at the realization that Dalt 3 was now completely free of human life or, as surveyors would later learn, all life of any sort. In truth, his next thought was “How the hell am I going to write a report on this?” Over the next three days, Corporal M’tume deployed all of his communications buoys in low orbit and took as much detailed footage of the surface as he could. Dalt 3 was now a world…

  This one’s a response to Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Ten More Titles over on Terribleminds.Com. If this challenge seems similar to last week’s, that’s due to the fact that Mr. Wendig got a little lazy. Fortunately, the titles we were given this time around were spectacular.  This story’s a little…different. Enjoy? 1 September, 2019   Greetings students of the Newman-Phillips school, We are pleased to inform you that, as a result of your completion of your coursework at the school, you have been selected to participate in a project which will surely seem so incredible to you as to appear impossible. You are going to be a time-travelers. While this will be a great adventure, perhaps the greatest experienced by any human, we must be blunt: Your journey has a purpose, and it is not one to be taken lightly. The future is broken. In a time between yours and ours, humanity lost their way. They ceased to be the masters of their own fate. They very nearly ceased. They may yet. We have selected you so that you might arouse your species, our species, and steer them clear of the disaster ahead. Here is what will happen: This evening, you will meet in the gymnasium cavern. It is being equipped with beds, terminals, and enough food and supplies to survive your journey. You will go to sleep tonight and when you awaken, ten years will have passed. You will be administered drugs to ensure you sleep. We have not tested the effects of time travel on a waking mind, but the results of our simulations are disturbing. You will not want to be awake. The device which will allow you traverse will require time, perhaps a week, to recharge. When it has recharged, you will go to sleep again and make another jump of ten years. You will repeat this process several times until you arrive at the critical time, prior to the beginning of troubles. We have tried to anticipate your concerns. Here are the answers to some of the questions we presume you will have: 1. The machine is a small gravity wave generator. It is not ideal, but we were limited by how much information we could send to your time and what resources were available. 2. We can send matter, and even living beings forward in time, but only information can travel to the past. Otherwise, we would have been equipped to solve the problem ourselves. 3. You can use your waking hours to learn about the current time period, but you will not be able to leave the cavern. We cannot afford the possibility that any of you might be abducted or otherwise unable to continue your journey. You are all of enormous importance. We will attempt to provide additional information as is possible. However… 4. Time travel is an imperfect activity under the best of circumstances. These are not the best of circumstances. Your jumps may not all be exactly ten years in length and you may under- or over-shoot the expected time of arrival. You are the brightest minds of your generation. We trust you to improvise. 5. When you arrive, you will not only be able to leave the gym cavern, but you will also be able to leave the complex. It will be terrifying, but we know that if anyone can adapt, it is you. Again, we trust you. 6. We have located a small network of people living near the time period when we expect you to complete your journey. You will be provided information about them during your waking periods. They will help you acclimate to the new world. They will assist you in any way possible. They will be your most valuable resource. Use them well. This opportunity will not be extended to any others. The cost in time, effort, and most especially resources to coordinate this effort in our distant past is immense. We teeter on a very fine edge between success and failure. Success would restore humanity to it’s rightful role. Failure would mean oblivion. We understand that this must sound insane. It is insane. It is the last throw of the dice and, in such circumstances, one does not always have the luxury of consulting the odds. We deeply regret having pulled you in to this without your consent. We know this is a long shot, but understand that you exist in the blind spot of what humanity is up against. They’ll never see you coming. You can do this. We love you. We believe in you. Good luck, The Future   Shit,” Carl said to himself, waking up at his desk for the third time this week. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and felt articulate enough to elaborate on his initial reaction. “Shit shit shit shit shit shit.” 2039 was just starting to come online, right on schedule, and, while Carl had made all of the tweaks he’d planned on making, it didn’t feel finished. He was a stickler for details, but he had to keep reminding himself that he was comparing his work to his own experience, something the students couldn’t do. In the early 2000’s, with the rise of the internet, it became possible to access an unprecedented fraction of human activity. Shortly thereafter, it became possible to make a backup of what was essentially the entire network. In theory, one could then restore the whole thing and experience the internet as of a certain date in the past.  In a sense, the hard part was over. Running the students through the most of the first two decades of the century offered the most opportunities to fuck up the continuity, to give the kids a chance to bump up against the walls of their garden. If they’d made it this far, the rest should be easy. They’d only be spending a week in 2039 while “the tunnel machine recharged” and they’d spend most of that seriously disoriented. People had been anticipating the singularity long before it actually happened, but they’d gotten it almost comically wrong. Most people assumed it would be started by an artificial intelligence which made the leap to self-awareness, growing in all ways imaginable at incredible speed, outstripping the human ability to react. What actually happened was so much more mundane, so much more ridiculous, people…

This is a response to the writing prompt Flash Fiction Challenge: Choose Your Title And Write on Chuck Wendig’s Terribleminds blog.  —————————————– Edison always got out of bed when Derek’s alarm went off even though his husband inevitably hit the snooze at least twice. Having spent the first thirty years of his life only seeing a sunrise when the party went a little late, Edison was now a born-again morning person. It was a source of pride to him to get up before Derek, even though it was Derek who had a ninety minute commute ahead of him. Getting up early let Edison get the coffee started. Even though they owned a machine which would grind and make the coffee at a set time, Edison insisted that the machine’s version of coffee didn’t do justice to the beans they had flown in from the Caribbean, so he ground them himself in a spice mill and put the water to pour over the grounds on the stove. It pleased Edison whenever Derek told him how good the coffee was that Derek always made an effort to mention it. When Derek left for work, Edison gave him a quick, but not at all rote, kiss. Now alone, he changed into his cycling clothes. Early morning, just as the sun came up, was his favorite time to get on the bike and get his workout in. His morning rides gave his tall, slender frame a tautness that nearly countered the less-careful years of his youth. As such, he looked good for his age, but he didn’t look young for it. He timed his rides so that he would get home shortly before Derek arrived at his office. Edison asked Derek to call when he got to work, just to make sure the trip was a safe one. Even though a text would have served the same purpose, they always spoke, even if just briefly. It was going to be a long day for Derek. He was a vice president at a company which expanded and contracted with regularity. Today, Derek would meet with a client whose continued business was required to avoid a contraction and the layoffs that went with it. The outcome of the meeting was far from certain. It was a wonder that Derek could sleep at all. Some night he didn’t. Edison showered, regarded the thinning peninsula of jet black hair in the center of his scalp with the eyes of an executioner who was trying to decide “when,” not “if.” He decided “not yet.” Still in his bathrobe, he went upstairs and locked himself in to his studio. Edison and Derek lived in one of those modern homes built on a lot too small to contain it. There were no curves in the design, just blocks stacked up blocks. The third story, a loft which was probably meant to be a bedroom, was where Edison made his films. Edison came to film making relatively late in life. He’d always wanted to do it, but to do it right, the way he wanted to do it, it took time and money. He was working for a marketing firm when he and Derek met. It wasn’t precisely love at first sight, as the two of them were strong personalities who had little tolerance for drama. Their courtship had some of the characteristics of a negotiation, but however they got there, they arrived in a place of almost cloyingly romantic devotion. Derek wanted to give Edison what he’d always wanted the most, so Edison resigned from the firm and started working on his studio. The next step in Edison’s routine, and a routine it was, was to put on some instrumental music to put him in the right mood. He checked his mail, skimming past the usual spam and not-quite-spam-but-not-worth-reading messages. The only message was from Sharon, one of his oldest and best friends, and one of the few people Edison regarded as a peer. Sharon was checking in to make sure they were still on for lunch today. Sharon possessed apparently limitless resources, surprising amounts of free time for someone who held a full time job, and a taste for bleeding-edge technology. The fact that she’d sent an email was a concession to Edison’s preferences which Sharon regarded as kind of quaint. Now that the lunch plans were firmed up, Edison had only a few hours to kill, not nearly enough to do any serious work. It was, however, just enough time to check out the Moroccan film he found last week, mis-categorized, in an obscure corner of Amazon. A big part of making films was seeing as many, from as many sources, as possible. Most weeks, he saw as many as eight, sometimes ten movies. It was time-consuming, but Edison felt it was a critical part of the job. This one struck Edison as a competent re-telling of the Walter Mitty story, but with better music. The lunch was at a place within walking distance of Edison’s house. The movie ran a little long, so Sharon had already been there for fifteen minutes before Edison arrived. He’d ordered drinks for both of them. The restaurant was famous for two things: Having the best sausage supplier in town, and having access to rum of the sort that a little neighborhood restaurant shouldn’t be expected to have. Neither Sharon nor Edison ever missed out on sampling at both. Sharon waved to Edison, who had already seen her since she was the only other customer in the restaurant at 11:15. Not that it was difficult to pick Sharon out in a crowd. Sharon looked more like Sharon than anyone else on the planet. She wore her hair, and had always worn her hare, in a page boy cut which had probably been in style when she was twelve. She was very slightly cross-eyed, and she wore thick glasses a little too big for her face. Somehow, no matter what she wore, she looked like she was dressed “business casual,” even when she wasn’t. Sharon painted whenever she wasn’t working or having drinks with Edison’s circle of friend. She was good, too. Not terribly original, but her work was too good to be explained by having all the best supplies available to her. If she’d had lessons, and she…