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Countdown 1,814 words Dan was impatient waiting for things to finish when he already knew the outcome. Unfortunately he had a knack for attracting disaster. “Hey Uncle Dan, wanna see me count to ten?” “Sure, buddy, count away.” The kid beamed and crawled into Dan’s lap and held out his closed fists. “One,” he said, snapping one finger out. His high-pitched voice hung in the air, his mind searching for the next in the series. Dan knew there would be no escape. “Two.” Dan’s mind ran though different representations of his prison. Twenty percent done. One fifth complete. Roughly thirty seconds to go. He was trapped between the present and the unavoidable. All there was to do in the interim was wait and think. “Three.” He considered pushing the kid to the floor and making a run for it. But it wouldn’t change the outcome. The numbers would ring in his head until they reached the end. Then the rest of his visit would be filled with his sister screaming at him. She wasn’t a helicopter parent so much as an osprey: hovering, waiting to swoop in and kill her prey. The kid wasn’t something to be protected, he was bait. Dan smiled at his sister across the room, watching them. She’d pushed for Dan to be a part of the kid’s life, despite Dan’s instance that he wasn’t good with kids. An uncle is important, she’d insisted. Dan remembered Uncles as more of a fringe relative, ancillary. Like a muffler on a Harley, unnecessary and often purposely forgone. Hell, he’d never gotten to know his uncle, and he’d turned out ok. He’d just figured they could continue on in the family tradition. Living across the solar system had made it easy to avoid visiting, the bounties and government mercenaries made it easier still. “Four.” Unlike the chaos of reproduction, physics was elegant. The most predictable of the sciences. Whereas biology had stochastic probabilities and chemistry had reaction rates, physics had laws. Laws of motion. Laws of conserved energy. Laws of time. Put a marble at the top of a ramp and let go, and it was predictable where it’d end up. The energy lost was measurable, routine, boring. Even how long it took was easy to calculate. Everything boiled down to a simple equation. It was a popular hands-on laboratory lesson in middle schools. Calculate how long it’d take the marble to roll down the end of the ramp. How far would it roll? Where would it stop? There was no art to the question, no deeper symbolism or layered pathos to be found. It was, for all intents and purposes, utterly devoid of personal meaning. Once the marble started rolling down the ramp, it did not need to be supervised or monitored. One could simply retrieve the marble at the end at the precise location and moment in time that had been set in stone the moment it was released. You could tweak the conditions to get different outcomes, but they were always preordained. “Five.” Dan had used his lasers to draw pictures on the bottom of clouds. He’d owned a little cart with spoked wheels and bright colors. His rates were reasonable, and he made good money painting glowing cartoon characters or congratulatory slogans for birthdays or graduations, or more explicit cumulus graffiti for bachelorette parties and the like. Paid better than his job as a tech, anyway, and nobody minded when he manipulated the light’s path through the atmosphere. No “ruined experiments” or “misappropriation of government funds.” Just a xenon-excimer beam of cash filling up his bank account. He liked to imagine the faces of the poor public works employee that opened the power bill after he’d surreptitiously plugged into a lamp pole at a park, or what lowly peon was fired when somebody had to answer for his illicit power splice into a drone charging station down the street from little Timmy’s kindergarten commencement celebration. Not his problem. Not back then. He had all the time in the world. “Six.” A single photon races through a medium, slipping between oxygen atoms, dodging nitrogen dimers, cleaving carbon oxides. A straight path. Terminates at a fixed point, absorbed or reflected by some body of matter, what is inconsequential. Another photon, the same same path. The same termination. Another, the same. A whole beam of photons, let loose with the flick of a switch, rolling through air like a marble down a ramp. Each photon is predictable in its location in space at each picosecond. Until Dan rested his hand on the emitter. The single point of light on the surface of the moon widened out into a ring. Radiation shot from the laser in a single stream was imbued with personality and rebelliousness through neural entanglement. Dan focused, turning the laser into a hexagon, a square, a jagged houndstooth. The laser could be at point A, point B, and everywhere in between. In between the predictable was the art of chaos, and that was where Dan preferred to reside. The moon began to fracture, orange fissures spreading across its surface. Dan removed his hand from the laser and turned to the general and shrugged. “Whatever shape you want.” They stepped back onto the ship and accelerated away from the rapidly de-orbiting demonstration. “Seven.” It was the pictures that got him. That stupid kid’s face reminded Dan of his own childhood. When the inevitability of outcomes was less obvious. Looking at the pictures of his nephew that had wormed their way into his inbox was like looking in the mirror thirty years earlier, when he’d fantasized about growing up to be a fighter pilot, fighting for, not against. He’d practice saluting, adjusting the placement of where the tip of his tiny index finger met his eyebrow. Working on the perfect snap, like a gymnast’s dismount from the parallel bars. He would be the perfect soldier, and every night he’d line up his toy planes on his headboard and dream of flying. Now when he looked in the mirror he was reminded only of the old man that had nearly made him fall from the swingset one day in the park. He’d said he was Dan’s uncle, and that he was sorry. He wasn’t sure how the man had managed to sneak up on him. The man was drunk, slurring his words so badly that Dan wasn’t sure if he couldn’t understand what the man was trying to say because of the content or the delivery. He rested his unkempt head against the chain of the neighboring swing and slowly undulated in the breeze, drooling into the sand. Dan had run all the way home and had started playing in a different park slightly further away, and never saw the man again, though he never forgot him. He’d been able to ignore the pictures from his sister at first, until one day she sent one of him in a leather flight jacket. “He wants to be like you!” She’d said. Dan made excuses as to why he couldn’t possibly visit. Because he was hiding in a crater hunted by the forces he’d joined only a few years prior wasn’t in the list of reasons. That he’d never be able to visit wasn’t broached at all. “Eight.” The orbital platform still smoldered with charred bodies when Dan’s company moved to the control room. Capturing a space station was thought to be impossible; projectiles easily punctured the outer hulls, beam weapons fried the delicate electronics and overwhelmed the limited cooling capacity of the stations, resulting in a superheated plasma atmosphere. The government hadn’t gone to great lengths to secure the platform before Dan’s lasers rounded the corners and burned through wide-eyed airmen. They only had a few minutes before fighters scrambled from the surface would intercept the station. Dan plugged his custom controller into the station’s terminal. It searched through the code and mapped the controls to the station's subroutines, until each red interface object blinked green and the station was his. “Any shape you’d like.” On the station’s HUD, the government’s bases and outposts, city halls and courts, monuments and hospitals, all the infrastructure across the continent turned orange as a single line ping ponged between them like an abstract connect-the-dots. “First squadron is thirty seconds out! We’ve got one shot at this!” yelled Jameson, the plucky technician Dan had recruited. They’d tried it before, firing a single sweeping laser beam from a hijacked ship. It was easily thwarted by the government’s counter defenses after it hit the first target. Hitting everywhere at once was unstoppable. The collateral damage was within acceptable limits. “Nine.” Dan rested his hand on his laser and felt the hum of certainty as the beam shot into the cosmos. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander along the entangled beam, gazing out as they rode past planets and out into the nothingness. He reopened his eyes on the ground, repositioned the cart toward the moon, and fired it again. He closed his eyes once more, rode the beam and landed on the moon. He watched the astronauts bound around inside their dome, conducting their experiments, until one of them looked up. They tripped backwards in surprise, and Dan opened his eyes, safely returned back to solid ground. He spent the rest of the day firing the laser at various objects and spying on the inhabitants within. When he grew bored of that, he made shapes with the laser, like he’d used to make on the bottoms of clouds, riding the uncertainty between point A and point B. “Ten.” Physics had been broken in Dan’s mind. He was no longer able to separate the beginning from the end, the antecedent from the effect, or the past from the future. What had seemed so orderly and linera before became unraveled as his entangled lasers permeated the galaxy and disappeared into black holes, only to reappear somewhere, and sometime, else. He couldn’t separate physical reality from experiences millenia later, nor parse what had happened with what might have been. Dan hated waiting for the inevitable outcome to finish. Ten. He stood in the doorway of his sister’s suburban home, holding a toy plane with a bow on it. Nine. He glanced up at the bright flashes of light in the sky above. Eight. “About time you finally met him.” Seven. “Hi, I’m your Uncle Dan.” Six. The boy was shy, so Dan knelt down. Five. “I heard you wanted to be a fighter pilot.” Four. Some more small talk, and the boy warms up. Three. Dan takes a seat on the couch and the boy runs up to him. Two. Dan smiles at him. Good kid, he’s sorry he waited so long. One. After the outcome was already set in stone. The sky above his sister’s house flashed white only for a second.
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Oct 26, 2020 08:00
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- - V - 118.25 words Their soap-bubble ship alighted one June morning and out they poured, strange spindly arms extended. They were awkward creatures, these aliens, just like us; and, yet, they wanted our love. Their planet had none, you see. We said ‘no’, until the Mayor got disintegrated. We put up with it for a while, because it was easier that way; we had a roster. Then the Mayor’s wife said no, not loud, but quiet like a frown. That was that: we stormed their ship and killed them and dumped them down the old mineshafts. It seemed fair then and still does, but I sometimes wake up with a pain in my chest; a part of me misses something about them.
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Oct 26, 2020 08:01
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Entries are now closed.
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Oct 26, 2020 09:12
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OH good, that means no one will actually be required to read this. Vampire Dad and the Magical Sword from Space (Part I) 11,135 words This was part 1 of part 1 of a story about vampire dad and a magical sword from space Dr. Kloctopussy fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2020 09:39
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This was part 2 of part 1 of a story about a dad who is a vampire and a sword from space that was magical
Dr. Kloctopussy fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2020 09:40
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Interprompt "You're either horses or you're glue." 100 words.
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Oct 27, 2020 04:36
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cuz byob wax 69 words God gave us no name. Until our harvest we'd play and dance. We charred bones for signs and CO2'd our breath until we saw stars. God gave me no name. I cherish the memory of red curls on my lap. Playing zoo under playground bars. Chatting about neopets with autists. Staring at a candle. At summer camp my best friend was fash and the field was legion with children.
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Oct 27, 2020 05:33
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Are you a horse or are you glue? Are you stuck in your ways, not so much in mud but the mud itself, a fixed fixative, adhering adherents like an epoxy pox, a demented cementist, agglutination your only goal? Or are you a horse, bolting before the stable door is closed with the bit between your teeth, no one looking in your mouth be you gift or not because your value is measured in kingdoms, even if you will and/or won't drink when led to water and there's no point flogging you once you're already dead. Or perhaps you are both, a sticky pony, catching children like fly paper
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Oct 27, 2020 09:20
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Judgement This was a strong week, in general. The middle was firm and fit for the most part, and most of you made wise use of the words you were given. That said, a few did miss the mark. Dms are given to MockingQuantum's A Spark for an unsatisfying snippet of story, and to take the moon's skinwalker for using verbal opacity to cover an underwhelming fantasy yarn. And the loss goes to Gorka and Song of the Depths for a weird and unresolved set of mysteries without any clear sense of narrative stakes. Onward. At the top, hm's to Uranium Phoenix's What Lies Beneath and sparksbloom's Institutional Memory for well-told takes on the prompt, and also to newcomer Path's degenerate stars, which came close the win. Speaking of which: Tyrannosaurus, you magnificent bastard. I read your book. And dug the heck out of it. Anyway Your Honor has earned you the blood throne once more.
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Oct 27, 2020 17:54
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Oct 27, 2020 19:29
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That was fun, hopefully mine was at least palatable. Didn’t get a DQ so that’s a good sign. I’ll ask the fiction advice thread for ways to improve but if you have any critiques I’d also appreciate them.
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Oct 27, 2020 19:59
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good elements
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Oct 27, 2020 20:30
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 I've heard you, Thunderdome. I've heard your clamoring. Long have you suffered under the fungal spores of a chanterelle queen. Long have you strained under her terrible crow-feather yoke. But today her crown is my crown. Today, I am the new blood king. Today, I am Tyrannosaurus Rex. May my reign last ten thousand years. For my first act as your new yet already beloved despot, I offer you a gift most generous and precious: some small piece of my greatness. Your stories this week shall be like Athena bursting from the forehead of Zeus. I have placed the entirety of my writings into a neural network, trained it on them, and after you sign up I will give you six sentences of unquestionable genius. You will choose three to use. You should use them word for word. You may choose to be but loosely inspired by them though this will insult me so do make sure it’s worth it. If you  , I will give you ten sentences and you may choose any three. Wipe the bird poo poo from your shoulders. Scrape the mushrooms off your bones. Welcome to Week 430 and the dawn of a new Thunderdome. Long live the king. signs up close midnight fri est submissions close midnight sun est 1111 words Tyrannosaurus fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Oct 27, 2020 |
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Oct 27, 2020 22:55
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Glorious Blood King 만세 ばんざい 萬歲 me Subminister and Assistant Judge Uranium Phoenix writers take the moon Old Binsby Mercedes Thumbtacks magic cactus sparksbloom Pththya-lyi Thranguy Antivehicular crabrock GrandmaParty Walamor Sitting Here Dr. Kloctopussy tab tabby MockingQuantum flerp Sebmojo QuoProQuid M. Propagandalf Tosk kiyoshimon BabyRyoga ... you? Tyrannosaurus fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Nov 1, 2020 |
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Oct 27, 2020 22:55
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k in
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Oct 27, 2020 23:02
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Tyrannosaurus posted:Interprompt untitled 78 words Galloping off into the distance, the field of roses scratched your legs. The bridge was broken and the ditch was full of bones of those who didn't make it. You made it all the way and you found the doors were closed for the night. You lied down and waited and lay there so long you counted all the stars in the sky. When you closed your eyes they closed the last time. Then you were welcomed home. also in
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Oct 27, 2020 23:04
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Hi. In. gently caress you.
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Oct 27, 2020 23:05
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in and vaguely concerned
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Oct 27, 2020 23:06
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Hell yes. In
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Oct 27, 2020 23:07
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in toxx
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Oct 27, 2020 23:10
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In
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Oct 27, 2020 23:12
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In
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Oct 27, 2020 23:17
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In.
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Oct 27, 2020 23:18
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in
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Oct 27, 2020 23:24
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gently caress it I'm in. me daddy
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Oct 27, 2020 23:47
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Tyrannosaurus REX is a loser who has become the ultimate bloody-toothed emperor of the Dome. Someone scroll him up appropriately, now the store is back open.
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Oct 28, 2020 00:23
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No, still, together, a slamme-- Crown and Girl by her bad. They try door. I realized I could feel the day’s attument in the life’s finger, in the crime room accidently hung was you: our mother. you get married If you can like this potential real tale in rains. She hated ashamed slamming away in the giant law. “Yo, you knew, I can’t she teush?” Old Binsby posted:also in The metal are all all the string into a half-one that still out him. He meaned in me He laughed against my face and learned slaugh at Harpe above and specialed as her lift and points through the shoulders. Look out at the bathroom. She’d tough the door right but then there nervously burned knowled-more, just dreaming with saves. All so we could see it in and then the forestaps for the leg thing now?” he asked. Mercedes posted:Hi. In. gently caress you. "Sharp but just fakkin’ dude grunt," he said. "Jesus, did you know what I knew? I got a shot time from the door. He’d leave the toilet songs and the end withou loud of that thing fellar. Cream got stombled back in her lap as long green the back of his mouth tight glasses ether. When in Hell is sunshine. Thumbtacks posted:in and vaguely concerned "Harper did not say,” I said. I glanced at my eyes and his father has been perfect from my son with his blood from the darkness. We’re scaring the doctors ending and Hell didn’t worry. He rubbed her white purses and played down off the rich. He opened her with his face, echoed out of his side, distinction without her. I had a plan for Pope for an informot and a son hated the kitchen. magic cactus posted:Hell yes. In “How’s dead,” Kate glanced, “Did you it sit?” “Well, of course,” he says and the night was ’shean with a lifetime. “I guess?” And it felt like loving away. Or me, too, being shot! I smile, “I’m just-singy,” sparksbloom posted:in toxx But when I was practiced on the house, he motioned from far it. “We clearly got the certain,” I said, “Yes.” And I’ve never found myself none and the two stars but I don’t know how to watch himself twenty-there. I don’t have the grass at least loving prepious tracksoimy yellow time. Always answers went out the meat where he didn’t know. She can't pay that family. We'll see you pinched it down and your own girl. The jazzow had looked out believe and his eyes went to our body. A carp day would be better. He cursed her arms. You weird thisty but you sword me that there and kicking us to chance. And then I'm sorry that given we had. We sat in firetrain eggie to the Miral, grave her bloody hours and it waves back. I’m tall- I’d have to cruefly right onto the floor! "Ay, Tombass!” I ask. “It’s your blood forward.” I can still find a fire. Unfortunately, the falker takes over the real. The night sky was too drunk to the black of my performeral life and the village can just imagine the heaving who is my mother. "Watch it right real,” he says. “Not even how you’ve gave you parted to a bushwar months with aloha." If I remember the bed. He didn’t get the dance and then I ribbared him on the time. The three self masters being my friend. It is the holy I could say not for this. It was an unlike a single place. Just lively. We'll call eventually in horses. Kaleb looked as a session of color and paint in the gale. And it was best and taking my mother’s hair. “I think we’re right,” he said flying. "That's what happens." I place the spears into the glass seawons of the ones that had walked to Heaven and then junching robbed hated dates and nearly its cure cuts off the new. See I’m alive. “General Hussie, gently caress your wible, yeah," he blinked. Her hands would only have Forty-Dones. He didn’t make up a lot just- symbically, but it dropped it inside. They squeeze something watching different but he even sepisted out to try into words, tower, Fat girls about closing to me, I told not that so we think I’m veryself this. Ya forgive your fist and a tiger. I can recognize if I’m cleamed of merclan thingslings around. “You look through a loving muscle-- I think I’ll start by the way." "Would you see what you’re sure?" Ahmancella could keep some bacon. GrandmaParty posted:gently caress it I'm in. “I started school,” I say. “Stay a monk,” he says. It froze? To forgot that hour is looking for the ice anyway. And then he could cry out. Perfect and a little and everything clean to chicket back to myself, Canner. There was not better, I thought to myself her, But, pretty glattered tinker end. I’d pressed my feet with my nephew and describe in his colors bin and it’s… my sister. He’s just a little, though. He’ll need your tongue. Don’t want you anybodically had gonna not look at little shows for go.
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Oct 28, 2020 00:53
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In and already regretting it after seeing the samples.
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Oct 28, 2020 01:01
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Walamor posted:In and already regretting it after seeing the samples. This was good, just lay in the water and he’s next. He was just a horse but he got two scrapping drissy tasted droves on the Aiplane. Things are going to get refused. Metal shook her head. "Ahe what." she asks. "I want worm or way!" I think it’s smelling huge to go wild, brother.
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Oct 28, 2020 01:11
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lmao you won now you have to read my words in
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Oct 28, 2020 01:23
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Sitting Here posted:lmao you won now you have to read my words in Six perfect, the violent, her - I had to turn everything that had been a little while ago. He was only fire. “It’s, like, sure. For real!” She closed her eyes. "I’ve been doing drat morning with the gangster. Would you like to get it?" I put down the treeline and every mountain police. Then She said, “Yes, in you. Your matches. The city cold." Our words rolled in that big land war bus.
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Oct 28, 2020 02:00
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In, but please give me 3 sentences of 370 words each, so I only have to come up with one of my own, tia.
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Oct 28, 2020 03:24
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:In, but please give me 3 sentences of 370 words each, so I only have to come up with one of my own, tia. We made deep spiritual brainals. Our girl, gun and a ready fist, tuned in. She gives me a good man name and I thought maybe only brown when I was a good man, a man wrong. "And they aren’t in this belifory, Vontinue, by the Devil. It comes around, man. Gangstake..." Then it is brand things, protection numbers, but not books sitting up in pain. I am a blue idea.
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Oct 28, 2020 04:00
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Christ this is going to be a weird week Alright I’m changing mine to a please give me four more tia mr rex
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Oct 28, 2020 04:07
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Thumbtacks posted:Christ this is going to be a weird week He felt inside his head and smashed his fingers around. "You made your own dogs?" I thought he would see that mystic all night. "She’ll wake up, but anything he got in him... she’ll eat it.”
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Oct 28, 2020 04:16
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In.
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Oct 28, 2020 04:19
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I suppose it's a good week to jump in
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Oct 28, 2020 04:37
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Show me how because, I mean, my dead. I looked over. “Well, we have continued to start for a bunch of reed woods by God." Maubrah had bited his taunts in the mountains of truth. “It’s just a rook to Cakey?” he growled. Then I feel the best! Dancing towards the morning mind, a lang sun, the red floppy we’ll circle in. Sweet, here comes a roof.
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Oct 28, 2020 04:40
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Tyrannosaurus posted:Show me how because, I mean, my dead. christ almighty
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Oct 28, 2020 04:49
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tab tabby posted:I suppose it's a good week to jump in I thought on a lie and a culty voice was carried with tabally. I flipped myself uncouting eyes, picked up my hat, but never found a liberal page of heart. My gold pressed his perfect friend. "Oh right did worry. Not a world’s that it further rob fulls this twenty one thing. More buy, pleasant money. Six control of it, maybe we can move them.” I am a moment, and a very spectacle. "I was," I said, “Normal. Do you want me all-hate-”
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Oct 28, 2020 05:15
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