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I'd like to go, let me have a go.
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Oct 9, 2013 19:39
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 10:45 |
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e:quote:The Birds And The Beads “Dad? Why aren't there any children any more?” “Well...” said Bret. “It's a long story.” “We got time.” said Ryan. Bret nodded. “It's hard to say when it all started. Was it Star Trek? The Internet? Holoporn? It's like trying to explain what lead to World War 2. Maybe there wasn't a single event...I dunno. But what the Nazis did to Europe is what nerds did to sex. Course, there was a time when nerds were looked down on, they got the poo poo kicked out of 'em regular. But mid noughties, it started bein' cool to be a nerd, play video games, spend all your time on computers, y' see?” “You mean people used to not use computers?” “That's right son. We used to play baseball instead. Anyway, there was a lot of anxiousness. You watch films from then, it's all based around awkwardness, not havin' the balls to go up to a woman and be like, 'Look, I'm down to gently caress.'. You go to a bar all the men'd be at one side, all the tail be at the other. All those goddamn nerds spent so much time on the friggin' internet they forgot how to talk to one another.” “I hate nerds.” whispered Ryan. “So it was that that got the ball rolling on the robots. Back then they were dumb, had 'em working in factories and so on. I think it was the Japanese that invented the first sexbot though, maybe in 2015. Fully lubricated system, skin that were soft, all had faces like supermodels. They hooked it up to porno 24 hours a day and that thing knew how to gently caress. Course, nobody wanted to gently caress 'em at first. Back then they had these dolls you blew up before sticking your pecker in, but that were no good. Think it were the Europeans that got into it early, had 'em to replace human prostitutes. You'd go into a brothel, they'd get you twisted on jagermeister and then go into this dark room. Half the people didn't even know they were doing the dirty with a machine.” “Then what happened?” “Wasn't long before frat houses started importing 'em. It started as a joke, get the new guy to have his dick sucked by robocop, y'know? But people started to prefer it! Them sexbots could give as good as any real woman but you just stuck it under your bed afterwards, forgot about it. Lot of misogyny back then.” “What about girls?” “Ah. Took some time for them to join in. But they'd been using dildos and poo poo for years. Sooner or later everyone was fuckin' robots rather than each other. Wasn't until some nerds started giving them personalities, teaching them how to talk it got weirder. See, the robots didn't give a poo poo. They were just reading lines. But the goddamn nerds fell for it, they started getting emotional about 'em.” “But why aren't their any kids left?” “They kept making 'em smarter, more life like. That and food shortages lead to folk not sleepin' with each other, but plastic people. You only get a kid if a man and woman sleep together.” “And if a robot and a woman sleep together?” “Goddamn cyborgs.” said Bret. They both went quiet, huddled together in the dark. Out through a hole in the concrete they could see the robot city lit with lasers and dry ice. Bret looked at his last surviving son, wishing he could have brought him into a world that hadn't been destroyed by nerds. The burnt pages of comic books blew along empty roads. Toys of long dead actors remained trapped in packaging for eternity. Bloated corpses wore t-shirts of forgotten internet memes, non sequiturs as strange as hieroglyphics. The father and son drifted off to sleep beneath the collapsed bridge, beneath the toxic clouds, beneath the rotting satellites, beneath the electric moon. justcola fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Oct 13, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 08:20
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I'll have a pop. 
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Oct 15, 2013 18:55
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The Cnidarian Question (936 words) Thousands of miles of bone covered by a coloured skin, slowly turning the bleached whiteness of death. The sky screamed infernally overhead burning deeper and deeper through the ancient reef. It was the time. Unknowing, each mouth kissed the sea, releasing motes out from their stomachs that drifted into the ongoing storm happening beneath the foam. The cells that caught one another began to change, drifting down far from where they began onto a sheet of rock. The polyp grew a mouth and began to grow another, attached by a tiny membrane. And these copies would go on to grow another copy. With identical mouths they snared plankton, reaching upwards on a limestone skeleton towards the shifting sky. In it's eight thousand year existence, the coral reef could sense that a change was coming. Death. It's life was many orders of magnitude slower than any other animal and so it's death appeared to be relatively quick. Parts of it starved or were broken off, others were above the water, forever caught in the frantic strobing of the star. On it's borders there was a creature making it's way through the crumbling towers, crawling with an affray of spikes. The huge starfish the colour of dusk crept across the reef, pushing their stomachs onto it and taking away a soup of sea water and digested coral. They moved slowly across the outermost layer, leaving nothing behind but blank stone. It gorged itself on mile after mile on an animal that didn't even know it existed. The reef waited. Over towards where the sun rose it felt a strangeness in the water, a rotating churn. In moments huge areas of the reef were torn away, obliterated by moving air, ripping polyps off bone, tearing them to wet shreds. The crabs and fishes that lived amongst it's structures began to dwindle, living hard lives amongst the barren stone. Black, oily poo poo was poured over acres of the reef, drowning the mouths beneath an avalanche of waste. But it continued to wait. On the reef lived a variety of different species of coral, and each species had colonies numbering the billions. They grew over decades, attacking other corals in their territory, capitalising on empty space, slowly exploring the fringe of the reef which itself transformed faster than the coral could manifest it's destiny. In the caves and over the mountains swam sea snakes, slugs, worms, fish, octopuses and turtles. More closely related to hard coral are the gorgonians, fractal sheets of living polyp that stretch into the water like enormous leaves. Similarly the jellyfish float through the water like the ghosts of bells, catching light in thin membranes from the setting star, colouring them crimson. All of this looked the same as it had for many epochs.Empires of colour rose and fell over the centuries, more dramatic and complex than any that could happen on the land. Yet it what was happening on the land that would bring an end to the Cambrian frontier. Soft five pointed animals climbed into the metallic things across the ocean. They wore their skeletons on the inside, the only signs of hardness were white crescents set in the holes atop their necks. The holes moved up and down, making dry sounds in the air. The metal rays began to soar through the sky with their reflections caught on the brine beneath, on each wing of the things were long, hard tubes with fins coming off of the side and their ends painted in yellow and red. The bigger pieces of metal seemed to grow little clouds around them with a booming noise and from then they moved silently over the water, their echo taking time to catch up. As the moon gyrated on the other side of the planet it pulled the water away, exposing parts of the dead reef up towards the silent metallic things. They passed above, going towards the land, before making elliptical orbits back over the reef in the crystal water. The metal cylinders on each wing was dropped, one, two, three, four, down towards the water. When they hit they made indents into the sea as the surface struggled to keep, yet in they went anyway, plummeting down towards the reef, crashing through the coral and throwing up silt which threw up a brown fog. And nothing happened. The light rose again. The soft animals wore black skins and plastic around their faces as they travelled through the water, down towards the eight cylinders. Already starfish and crabs had begun to explore the strange new hardness which had fallen from above. The soft animals swam towards each of the things, leaving behind little mounds of plastic before disappearing. And then the bombs went off. An underwater fire bloomed outward, roaring across the coral, shattering it's bones. The entire ocean pressed against this sudden bubble of heat, the water clapping together and then surging upwards, throwing pieces of death in the air. A shockwave continued over the reef eviscerating any soft flesh. The reef disappeared beneath a cloud of blood and sand and when it cleared nothing was left. The coral did not feel anything. It had lived a long life unknowing anything but itself, it's purpose was simple. It had no choice. It was unaware at the beauty in which it created, the systems of life it supported, even of the corals surrounding it. In the black silence of it's existence it felt a hunger that lasted a thousand years. It wouldn't be able to comprehend the manner in which it's life ended. But then again, neither could we.
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Oct 19, 2013 14:36
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