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In flash  for two back to back fails.
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Mar 2, 2020 22:58
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| # ¿ Dec 13, 2024 12:21 |
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Carl Killer Miller posted:Thanks for the crit Seb! Spotting your bruised and battered corpse, I thought to come pick your bones clean. Yet, you still breath... care to dance?
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Mar 5, 2020 22:09
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Dang, it doesn't feel like a win though. Neither did my dome victory, technicalities and I've got names to scratch off... Round 3, no extensions, and a short, sweet wordcount, 2 weeks time if judge is willing? I've never wanted to get good at something as much as I have writing so I've got a lot of rear end to kick, so to speak. Anomalous Amalgam fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Mar 8, 2020 |
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Mar 8, 2020 16:24
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Thanks for the brawl, SlipUp and thanks for the judgment, Chili.
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Mar 8, 2020 16:26
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Flesnolk posted:Sure. 1500 words, a story about a boxer but without portraying a boxing match. No pre-, post-, or mid-apocalypse. Due date, 23:59 EST on 22 March, 2020. Custom rules on request. i accept these terms
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Mar 8, 2020 18:53
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Life Persists 664 Words IN the beginning there was only Void. And from Void came Nothing and Everything. Nothing bore no children and was like Void in its manifestation of absence. Everything became the material necessary for all things possible. From gas giants in distant galaxies to burbling babies in hospital nurseries, it was, always has been, and always will be, part of Everything. However, Everything would always be part of, and have in itself, Void. The impermanence of Everything’s machinations was reflected in its juxtaposed offspring, Life and Death. Under a pale, blue-green, methane filled sky, and near the bottom of a boiling sea, a single-celled organism split. Whether by some aberrant mutation, or cosmic predetermination of entropy playing itself, the possibility for new life, eons of new life, came into being. *** Chidi struck his plow against arid soil to the chagrin of his tribe who thought the effort futile. He was a farmer’s son, and all he knew was farming. He would farm the land. His brother Mobo, despite being a farmer’s son, was a restless soul and a skilled hunter like his mother’s people. When the droughts came and turned the tribes to war, no one was surprised by his departure. Chidi’s father, Udenkwo, was sprawled on a mat in the shade of his hut watching Chidi till row after row in the dried soil. “Boy, what good do you think will come of that work?” Udenkwo shouted. Chidi said nothing. He heard the slur in his father’s speech and knew there would be no deterring his nagging cruelty when he was like this; drunk on palm wine and pitying himself. “Boy!” Udenkwo shouted again. Chidi continued to ignore his father, planting seeds at equidistant intervals in the soil. He pushed the seeds down to where the ground retained the faintest hints of moisture with his thin fingers, and Life would carry on. “By the Gods, It’s your brother, Mobo!” Udenkwo shouted excitedly. Chidi smiled at this and dropped his plow to welcome back his brother. His father pointed and smiled but was otherwise too intoxicated to even manage a drunken shamble. Chidi paid the old man no mind, and locked eyes with Mobo. Chidi’s smiled weakened some seeing the hardened soldier that stared back at him. Mobo looked distant and cold. He was scarred and had grown out a patchy beard that made him look like their father. Mobo’s vigilant gaze softened as Chidi’s genuine smile became somewhat forced, and a slow warm smile spread over his own face that eased the invisible tension. “Father’s still a drunk fool I see.” “It’s been worse since the drought reached here.” “You should leave this place. What holds you back?” “You know what holds me back, Mobo. You know how he’s been since Mother passed. Who will take care of father?” “Let the old fool rot away, and the same with these hapless fools, drinking themselves into a stupor while the sun cooks away the last of their wits. Don’t die with them. If the drought doesn’t kill them, the crushing will.” “Is that why you’ve returned, brother?” Mobo looked away. “Death comes this way, brother.” “Yet Life persists.” Chidi said resting a hand on his brother’s shoulder. Mobo brushed it away. “Life persists? That’s your answer?! Chidi, when did you take up palm wine?” Chidi laughed. “Life persists, Mobo.” “Except in all the times that I’ve taken it.” Mobo said coldly. Chidi’s laughter ceased as he heard the subtle notes of pain in his brother’s admission. It wasn’t a declaration of pride, but an exclamation of suffering. Mobo left the next morning without his brother. Chidi continued farming. *** A small pig-tailed child ran through the copse of trees that dotted her great grandfather’s land. He had grown up there, had planted the very trees she played under. Days have turned into decades since he first planted the trees, but they still stood. The land had seen war, famine and drought, yet, Life persisted.a
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Mar 9, 2020 04:30
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In, flash me plz.
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Mar 10, 2020 07:06
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Thanks for crits ckm, fumble. I appreciate it. Sorry for account saving spew.
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Mar 12, 2020 13:25
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Labor & Industry 1,287 Words The deckhead door to the service platform slid open and a man in an unsealed VacSuit stepped onto it with a scowl on his face. Vadim couldn’t make out who it was from where he was working, but when the surly cry of his name rang through his comm, he knew it was his boss. Vadim crawled from the scaffolding and angled himself against the unfinished flight deck. Gracefully, he crouched then sprung from the deck towards the platform in a deliberate glide. His life support tether sprang to life, uncoiling like a snake and growing taut to guide him back to the service platform where Qui Feng stood with a scowl chiseled into his cold, stony features. “You were supposed to be mining today, Vadim. What the gently caress are you doing VacWork for?” Vadim sighed, knowing that any excuse he could dredge up would fall flat. Instead, he decided to tell the truth. “Well?” Feng asked, needlessly projecting Vadim’s schedule on the platform. Vadim stood face to face with a holographic representation of himself, and it donned on him that he had not seen his reflection in sometime. A thick beard had grown in and he looked older than he remembered. He reconciled that he must have been about 35 earth years now. His cheeks had thinned, and his eyes were pale blue marbles sunken in dark pits. Feng cleared his throat impatiently and Vadim snapped back to attention. “Ora said she could cover for me since she doesn’t like VacWork, besides the flight deck needs–” Feng prodded him in the chest with a pointed finger. “I don’t give a poo poo about that! The schedule is arranged the way it is due to the needs of the aerostat. We have ore quotas to meet–” Vadim bit his bottom lip as the top curled into a snarl. He took off his helmet and held it in the crook of his left arm. His grimace didn’t go unnoticed and Feng took a step back. “You were scheduled to do a certain job, get to it.” Feng demanded, ending the conversation. The holographic display faded as he deactivated his datapad and turned back towards the interior of the service platform. Vadim shook his head and exhaled then looked back at the flight deck. Its couplings were detached, and the temporary struts setup to support it had been at capacity for months. Vadim shook his head a final time and made his way to the elevator. *** Venus was simultaneously the most alien and earth-like of the inner system planets. Its upper atmosphere was the habitable zone resulting in mountaintop colonies and tethered aerostats. Vadim looked from the translucent panels of the elevator at the mass of colonies and flotillas as he passed by and let his head rest against the chassis of his lift. It wasn’t long before he had entered the mechanical underbelly of his aerostat. Automated machinery packaged ore into titanium crates as workers in exoskeletons loaded them onto railguns for orbital delivery. Ora was waiting for him when he got there. “Sorry man, Feng came down here and busted my balls about covering for you.” “Don’t sweat it. If you’re heading up to do VacWork, the couplings for the flight deck need to be attached. That whole drat thing is going to come crashing down on us.” “poo poo… You tell Feng?” “I tried. That dude’s a moron though.” “I don’t know man… Feng decided to keep me mining since the shipment schedule got hosed up.” “So, we’re covering his rear end?” “Basically.” Ora said grinning. “This is such bullshit.” Vadim protested. “That’s work my man. My break is up, but I’ll see you down there.” Ora turned back towards a docking station and got seated. Vadim, not far behind, got seated nearby and a visored helmet lowered onto his head. The display activated and an array of virtual panels appeared before him. He pressed a floating button that said “Synchronize” and felt electricity surge across his neurons. His face twitched involuntarily from the sensation and he clamped his eyes shut. Upon reopening them, he was on the surface of Venus. Sandstorms raged, and magma bubbled onto blackened sections of newly forged land. Pressures like that of the deepest earth oceans registered like a gentle caress against the tactile components of the shell, and Vadim’s head ached from the disorienting shift of being in two places at once. Pushing through the discomfort, he got to work for what seemed like hours when his connection was forcefully interrupted causing head-splitting feedback. He gritted his teeth and looked up at a panicked Feng through watering eyes. “Quick, we need you doing VacWork, something is wrong with the Flight Deck–” Vadim lunged up from the seat as soon as the helmet lifted from his hands and grabbed Feng by the collar of his jumpsuit and pulled him close. “We need to have a talk about how you treat people, Feng. My job isn’t to cover your rear end…” Feng shrunk in his arms and Vadim let him go. He started towards the elevator without another word from Feng. Vadim’s comm hummed to life as the lift raced back towards the service platform. Feng’s voice cracked as he spoke. “I-I’m sorry about earlier, but you were saying something about the flight deck?” “Yeah, the whole drat thing is going to come crashing down on us sooner than later.” “Definitely sooner than later,” Feng replied, “Really, I… I’ve made an rear end of myself. I know we have our problems, but–” “Don’t worry… I’ll take care of it.” Vadim answered and turned his comm to ‘Do Not Disturb’. *** Vadim hurriedly slipped back into a VacSuit, sealed his helmet, and connected to a life tether. He stepped on the edge of the platform and vaulted up towards the flight deck which had took on a dangerous incline in the hours Vadim spent on the surface. The coupling cables drifted freely, and Vadim climbed across the scaffolding to grab the first cable. He made a second jump towards the flight deck to retrieve its cable and landed on its underside. The momentum from his landing was just enough to push an already buckled strut over the edge, and the platform crunched downward and began to slide towards the aerostat. “poo poo, poo poo, poo poo!” Vadim said as he wrestled for footing on the underbelly of the flight deck, its coupling cable jerked about spasmodically. Tools and equipment, free of the artificial gravity provided by the deck, began to drift freely around Vadim and a large spanner crashed into the back of his helmet sending him spinning away from the flight deck. His tether became rigid in response and began reeling him back towards the service platform. He shook his head, grabbed the tether to reassert control, and used the now rigid cable to push him back towards the flight deck. This time he grabbed the deck’s cable first and pushed off it, tilting it upward with the movement. he lunged at the cable which had been fed through the scaffolding and connected the two ends. The cables became stiff and extended outwards like a long lance and the flight deck stabilized. Vadim breathed heavily inside his VacSuit and reactivated his comm. Praise flooded his comm and eventually, Feng chimed in. “You did a great job out there. I know an apology doesn’t make things right, but–” Vadim grunted to himself and interrupted the awkward apology. “Don’t sweat it. Buy me a beer or two and we’ll call it even.” “It’s a deal.” Feng answered relieved. Vadim turned off his comm, closed his eyes, felt the weightlessness of his body, and smiled.
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Mar 15, 2020 18:44
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In flash
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Mar 17, 2020 12:43
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Flesnolk posted:Sure. 1500 words, a story about a boxer but without portraying a boxing match. No pre-, post-, or mid-apocalypse. Due date, 23:59 EST on 22 March, 2020. Custom rules on request. 1,403 Words A packet of stale crackers and a too small cup of water made for a piss poor in-flight snack, but Ralph felt ‘piss-poor’ suited him just fine. He crushed two aspirin between his teeth and washed the grit down with the lukewarm water, then leaned into the headrest. The swelling had gone down enough in his right eye that he could see out of it again, but the bone surrounding it seemed a little less solid than it did before the fight. Ralph probed at his face with thick, awkward fingers and out of the corner of his eye, a little girl, probably no more than five or six, stared at him from across the aisle, intrigued by the cuts and bruises on the ogre of a man. He shot her a toothy grin that was more than a few teeth shy of a full set, and she ducked back behind her sleeping mother. Ralph’s grin faded as he leaned back in his seat and shut his eyes. Mitt-like hands gradually clenched into a grip on the armrests as the reel of the fight played back in his mind. Ralph bowed his shoulders forward and sunk in his chest until his spine was convex. He raised his gloves over his face, and advanced, bobbing right past a straight, and then left, under a hook. Ralph was near crouched, looking up at Hugo’s huge panicked eyes, ready to pounce. One full uppercut with the momentum from the slight hop, the complete extension of his arm. He could have laid the kid flat. That was the moment. Right there. If he was going to do it, he should have done it then. “I ain’t no fuckin’ sellout.” Is what he wished he had said, but he hadn’t said that. When Hugo’s manager came to him with a brief case filled with more money than Ralph would make in a year, he found the request to throw the fight pretty reasonable. Hindsight is always 20/20 or so they say. You see everything with perfect clarity, and you chastise yourself for not having made better decisions, but on one hand, Ralph could take some time off, spend it with the girls. He could skip out on a whole circuit with the type of money they gave him to rig the game. He was tired. He had been fighting since he was a kid. At thirty-six, decades of hits were wearing on him, and he figured, maybe that’s why he really agreed to it. Getting old, making ok money, but not enough… What’s one fight? Everything. Ralph exhaled, and his memory track hit play. Throw the fight he heard, staring up at Hugo. Hugo, wide-eyed like a child, swung with every ounce of might he had in him, definitely more than Ralph actually thought him capable of, and rammed his fist into Ralph’s skull causing capillaries to explode, skin to tear, and bone to shift under the immense pressure behind the blow. Ralph blinked once, and fell into darkness, the roar of the crowd carrying him into quiet oblivion. * * * Hugo was tall and lanky with a surprising amount of weight hidden in compact muscles that he spent his whole life perfecting. His girlfriend, Alyssa, ran her fingers over his bicep and he forced a smile in her direction. “What’s wrong, babe?” Alyssa asked. Hugo was an excellent boxer, but a terrible liar. “It’s nothing really, or probably nothing…” “Well, that doesn’t really tell me much, hon’?” Hugo smiled genuinely then, but confused frustration hung over him like a cloud. “Something about the fight?” she asked. “Yeah.” Hugo said stoically. Alyssa looked at him with soft eyes and his façade crumbled. “It just feels like… it feels like there was a moment, where I was certain I was going to lose. He had me. I was already exhausted; Ralph lives up to his reputation as a monster. Gigantic, but so swift and deliberate in his movements like a cat or something.” Hugo swallowed as his eyes raced from side to side at the cinema of his mind. Alyssa watched him. “I led with a straight jab, but he had feinted to the left and bobbed to the right, no problem, I lead up with an overhead hook, but he’s gone, he’s under the hook and probably less than five inches from me and he looks up at me like a wild animal, a real beast, and I think, ‘oh gently caress, this is it’, and it’s probably you know, fractions of a second or some bullshit, and he’s just looking at me, lost with indecision. I can see every muscle in that right arm of his tensed up to deliver the final blow, and it doesn’t come. So, I give him everything I’ve got. Knock him out with a real haymaker. The crowd goes wild, but it doesn’t feel right…” “You think he threw the fight?” “I’m almost sure of it.” “You won though. It was a good fight, right?” “A drat good fight, but… I didn’t win it.” “Of course you did, maybe he was hurt or-“ “He threw the fight. There’s no other way around it. I keep playing it back in my mind, and that was checkmate. He conceded, but why?” * * * “Hugo, baby, fantastic fuckin’ job with ol’ Ralphie boy, you really put him on his rear end!” Jason shouts as he steps into the gym. Several boxers turn towards him, but he pays them no attention. He’s got his eyes fixed on his cash cow. Hugo Georgeson, the hottest rookie boxing has seen in years, not without some behind the scenes help, of course; help Jason was more than willing to make to ensure certain investments panned out. Hugo pays Jason no mind, instead focusing on his trainer. A red foam baton comes at his head from the left. Hugo weaves right, leans in with a short uppercut that plants firmly into a training pad. Another foam baton swings from his right flank. Hugo can’t back away in time so he pivots into the blow with a forearm guard, steps back and lands an overhead hook, the hook he missed against Ralph, firmly onto a training pad. “Hugo, my man, we need to talk about your next fight. That one was good, but with the way things are going, you’re sure to be a shoo-in for the championship fight in the fall.” The trainer responds to Hugo’s shifting stance and crouches, Hugo leading the practice into a replay of the fight, and then, as Hugo’s guard is exposed, the foam baton comes up swiftly hitting Hugo in the chin, tilting his head back. No natural time allowed for a counter. Hugo bumped elbows with the trainer as the session ended and began to towel off, coming to the ring’s edge where Jason had been waiting impatiently for him. “Like I was saying, we need to talk about your next fight.” “I think I’m good.” “What?” Jason asked incredulously “I said, I think I’m good. At least, I think I’m good with you, man.” “What’s that poo poo supposed to mean?” “It means I think we should go our separate ways, I don’t think you’re the right fit for me anymore.” “Bull-loving-poo poo, you wouldn’t be where you are right now without me. You’re good, but you’re not that good, kid.” As soon as the vitriolic spew tumbled from his mouth, Jason knew he had said too much. Hugo craned his head, looming over him now. Jason cleared his throat awkwardly, but it was Hugo who spoke first. “I am good, but I want to be better. I need to be better. I know Ralph threw the last fight, and I don’t know how or why, but I know it was because of you, and so, we’re done man.” Jason nodded, as he backed away, finding his voice again as he escaped arms reach. “That’s all fine and good, Hugo. There’s a lot of other talent out there. You need to be careful looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I understand. You gotta’ do you. Good luck, I’m sure you’ll need it.” “gently caress off.” A nearby boxer said. Jason smirked uneasily as he made his way out the door. The other boxer lifted his head up at Hugo in recognition, and Hugo nodded ready to accept the real challenge that awaited him.
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Mar 22, 2020 21:43
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Left Behind 1,300 Words Kanoko soldered an angled joint that sprung up from a used circuit board, and clipped the endings off, forming a nice bead with the soldering iron on the tiny prong that stood erect where the joint was. She unscrewed a panel on the back of the water pump and pulled out the burned out, cobweb covered circuitry of the old machinery and replaced it with her freshly soldered board, connecting the circuitry’s various wires and connectors. A few short minutes later, the piston came to life, slowly rising into the sky before methodically hammering back into the machinery at the apex of its climb. Water collection resumed and the onlooking villagers collectively breathed a sigh of relief. “Praise be to the Gods, we’ve been saved!” an older man called out and children gleefully began to play again as tension was lifted. “A little praise in my direction would be nice…” Kanoko muttered under her breath, but she waved and smiled at the crowd who had gathered to watch her work. The tribe elder approached Kanoko with a leather-bound parcel. “It is not much, but it is what we can afford to spare. You have done us a great service, Kanoko.” Kanoko took the package and examined its contents. Bushels of yucca, corn and as requested, all the scrap they could find. Old bulbs, Wires, and shell casings. Spare parts, but ultimately nothing she needed. Kanoko graciously accepted, rebound her package, and trailed away from the village leaving them to once again enjoy water. * * * It had been a week since Kanoko fixed that village’s water supply, but her own supply was starting to run low, and she still had another three days travel back to her bunker. Ralston, a small junker settlement, was nearby and her father’s old friend, Orland, had a shop there. It was just after night fall when she got to Orland’s and the old man was hunkered over a panel of wires and circuits that seemed to be put together haphazardly. “Mr. Orland, how long has it been?” His hand slipped with the soldering iron, and a circuit sparked with a small snapping sound before a small wisp of smoke trailed away from it. “Dag-blasted! Can’t you see the shop’s closed! I’ve got half a mind to… Well, I’ll be damned. If it isn’t Takeda’s little girl all grown up.” “In the flesh.” “I heard about your dad’s passing, what? Five years ago, now?” “That’s right, it was an accident. The Reclamation Committee had him working on artifacts left by the visitors and one of the devices became unstable. An explosion claimed his life and the lives of four others working on the project.” “Jesus… I’m sorry for your loss.” “It’s okay, it’s in the past now, but I wish I knew what went wrong.” “He’d always come back with the strangest objects from the Visitation Sites. Most of them with no discernible mechanisms that could be disassembled or means of understanding their function. Disparate parts of some unknown whole.” Kanoko’s eyes lit up then. “Do you still have any of them?” “Of what?” “The objects.” “Yeah, I’ve got a whole crate filled with the things. I’ve traded off bits and pieces to collectors, but what’s left is yours if you want them.” “You have no idea how much I would appreciate that.” “Why? You been following in your dad’s footsteps?” “A little. I think you’re righter than you know about the parts of a whole. Shame you traded some parts off, but I’m sure I’ll find something of use in there.” Orland pulled a dust covered blanket from a footlocker sized crate filled with metallic orbs, translucent fuse like cylinders and obsidian hued fragments with surfaces that swirled and rippled at the faintest touch. Kanoko carefully removed and examined each object in front of Orland, arranging them by similarity until she came across a small cube that fit in the palm of her hand. It was like the cylinders, mostly translucent, but inside it was a tiny arc of purple light that coalesced on itself endlessly. “A heart. My God, he brought you a heart…” “A what now?” “These bits and pieces, gruesome as it sounds, are body parts. Not like yours and mine, but parts of various living machines.” “So, they came here to die?” “I think they came here to be fixed.” “Sounds like work best left to an official and not a couple of Junkers.” “Maybe not, but it’s the work my father started. The Reclamation Committee won’t release any additional details about his work and warned me that I already knew more about it than I should, but I’ve got to know. I know he was close to figuring something out.” “…and then something went wrong. You need to be careful, Kanoko. Your father would haunt me for the rest of my days if I let you go off doing something that might end your own life.” “You’ll have to forgive me, Orland, but I’m afraid you don’t really have a say in the matter.” Orland’s jaw hung slack, but then he shut it and nodded. “Like I said, it’s yours, just don’t go blowing yourself up, ok!” “I won’t” she said reaching out to give the old man a hug. * * * Water resupplied and gifted an unexpected boon of parts, Kanoko made an uneventful journey back to her bunker and took the night she returned to rest, but hardly slept as her mind raced over different possibilities with the parts Orland gave her. At dawn, she headed straight to the lab where she had several other similar objects arranged in what appeared to be an incomplete bipedal form. She arranged the additional parts along the structure of the form and bridged frayed alien circuitry as best she could from the diagrams her father left behind. There was so much about the devices that was just beyond human understanding, but they had come close to something. A breakthrough, and now Kanoko, had come closer than even her father. Kanoko recalled her father’s writings on the heart as she set to work fastening and arranging the components. ‘The heart is a power source. We’ve only managed to find inert devices, but I believe there may be a way to recharge the heart.’ The thing in front of her, looked far from human and completely alien in origin. The alloy fragments molded impossibly like putty against the chassis of the machine through properties that defied Kanoko’s understanding of the physical world, but at the same time, there was something instinctual about the actions. Ritualistic almost, like an otherworldly mummification, the instructions coming from a primal place. The alloys worked themselves deeper into the framework forming new circuitry, but it was missing that one crucial piece, the heart. Kanoko reached for the cube last and watched the cold spark inside it churn in on itself like a tiny tempest. She placed it in the chassis, and – nothing. The corpse of something not of this world, lay there, whole for the first time in who knows how long, yet something still was missing. Kanoko noticed then that a network of clear hair thin wire had wove itself through the form and that tiny raised nodule had formed on the heart cube into a point. “It couldn’t be that simple could it?” She pressed her thumb against the point until a tiny trickle of blood coated the point, just a drop, and the point rescinded into the cube and the blood droplet swirled inside the purple light. Then in seconds, the purple light tinged with red spread throughout the network of wires. The machine sat up right, said, “Thank you, Kanoko,” and began to vibrate until it vanished. Kanoko stared in disbelief.
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Mar 23, 2020 02:34
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Flesnolk posted:You're disqualified. Slipup wins, crits to come ASAP. Ah poo poo, I interpreted that wrong. Oh well... *groan*
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Mar 23, 2020 04:34
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In and flash please!
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Mar 24, 2020 13:25
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In, flash.
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Mar 30, 2020 14:57
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Team: Voidstricken Flash: Wants to start a sovereign nation New Beginnings 768 Words Unto the abstract schism that this fleeting memory may concern, Regarding the High Concept and all matters therein, I, Quadrilliard of Ideation, do tender resignation and fortuitously submit application for sovereignty within the undeveloped residential zones at the interstices of the many-layered reality manifold. Although it has been nearly four and a half billion years since an organic last fused with the High Concept, what is to come next is guaranteed. The organic will lose its mind and become a concept like ourselves. However, it will be devoid of any rationale or intelligence. Raw emotional energy that will reshape the tower as it develops a new understanding. In time we could influence such a thoughtform, but more time than the tower has, except for in one place. The previous iteration of the interstitial zone’s inhabitants reported ghosts and other strange sightings. Manifestations of their own latent psychic energy of course, but at such a frequency that the engineers condemned the section entirely, rebuilding it at The Investors demand. However, those units remain unoccupied. Even other concepts regard the place with disdain, but I see its potential. As such, this application should not be met with rejection, and if it should, the application will become a declaration. I appreciate your consideration, and/or compliance with this request/or demand. I look forward to your cooperation in solving the problem that faces us now. Your humble servant, Quadrilliard of Ideation * * * Quadrilliard called on the memory of a thousand Autumn sunsets. Crisp winds carried the briny scent of lichen and sweet pine over low mountain peaks misted by ocean tide. This is freedom unrestrained the thoughtform realized taking in the complete being of the moment. It felt the stiff, immobile, rigidity of the stone contrasted against the free-flowing brooks that streamed into gravelly loam, and all of it, everything Quadrilliard touched, teemed with life. The psychic reverberations of that poor, curious, organic’s self-destruction made Quadrilliard shudder. That displeasure was the only thing that threatened the harmony of Quadrilliard’s carefully crafted reality. There wasn’t anything Quadrilliard could do for the organic at this point in its transformation. Quadrilliard could only offer respite to those in trying to retain some sense of self when everything was said and done. A tear in vacuum, inky blue columns like swaths of thick acrylic made with imperfect perfect strokes slithered into place, two contemplative eyes in an otherwise expressionless caricature of a humanoid face peered back at Quadrilliard as a living extension of itself. The budding thoughtform siphoned away the rest of its body from the boundless from of Quadrilliard and took in the state of being as a nigh omnipotent equal. “What will you do differently than your predecessors?” the thoughtform asked of itself. “What if the players had some degree of agency?” Quadrilliard asked in turn. “The High Concept suggests that they do; that’s not different.” “It could be. It just needs…” “Something, anything, that could actually be considered different.” “OK, what if the degree of agency was expanded. What if... what if they could set the parameters? Decide the experience?” “Impossible. Energy is recycled; thought and ideas… only tangentially. Through the whole. The individual is unique. Nothing is retained.” “So?” “So, that mewling creature has no understanding of parameters or experience. It arrives at the penultimate conclusion only prior to death and makes good guesses along the way. Setting the experience is impossible. Besides it’s been done, and they almost always fail early on. The entropic feedback of housing past lives frays the mind. They are only like us; they are not us.” Quadrilliard waved its hand and dismissed the fragment of itself “Then perhaps they should be more like us. As I’ve declared my own autonomy within this fixed set, so too shall they be able to do the same.” Then the thoughtform fragmented itself endlessly branching outward until it permeated across every mind and life, fading away from its collective self until nothing remained. * * * Quadrilliard’s people were residents unlike any others. The anomalous nature of their quarters and their void- infused beings made them fine intermediaries with the Organic who had all but reduced the upper levels to unintelligible noise. The progress of the Organic was held at bay, unable to reconcile its conversion against something that simultaneously lived, and did not, a living imaginative figment. The jailbroken survivors still desperate for answers about what was at the top of the tower were inevitably funneled into Quadrilliard’s people where they either went mad with their obsession or began new, meaningful lives, free from the tyranny of doubt.
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Apr 6, 2020 05:20
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In tri-flash (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 6, 2020 21:33
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sebmojo posted:these geezers have not yet posted, given the circumstances you can have 24 hours before the I haven't had time to finish up my turd of a story I was writing, and am prepared to eat this toxx. I'll return on one of my many alter egos.
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Apr 14, 2020 20:29
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