Chris’s Comments (group member since Nov 04, 2015)

Chris’s comments from the Science Fiction Microstory Contest group.

Justin,

It's always nice to have more stories to read! Every month, this group turns out some of the best and I look forward to reading yours. Its definitely load of fun! Welcome to the club!

A Question of Time

“I was wondering when you’d get here,” the curious old man declared anxiously then corrected himself. “Well, I really suppose I wasn’t. I knew exactly when you’d arrive!” He chuckled.

“Where am I?” I asked, suddenly disoriented.

“The best answer to that question is that you’re everywhere…and nowhere.” He stroked his long white beard, evaluating my reaction to his answer.

“What the heck does that mean?” I wondered and surveyed my surroundings. We were, the two of us, atop a mountainous outcropping, overlooking a vast wooded valley. The air smelled fresh and the wind, clean.

My elderly companion had a crooked posture and his experienced eyes still held the twinkle of a youthful wonder. “I see you got my message,” he noted and motioned to my hand.

I’d truly forgotten about it, the tiny microchip still gripped in my palm. It dropped from the envelope when I opened the mail and I barely caught it before it hit the counter. As soon as I did, I was transported to this place, talking to a stranger whom I’d never met before. “How did I get here?”

“I’d like to tell you it was by U.S. mail,” he giggled. “But that would be an oversimplification. Welcome to the end…or the beginning.”

“Who are you?”

“For the purposes of introductions, it’s easiest to explain that I’m you.”

“Me?” I doubted then peered closely, finding myself in the old man before me. “That’s impossible!”

“Says who?” the elderly me replied. “Yes, yes. Go ahead and pinch yourself. Slap yourself in the face if it’ll convince you. You’re not dreaming.”

Following a long consideration, I queried, “Why am I here?”

The old man who shared my identity took my hand and shook it sincerely. His was cold, likely the effect of poor circulation and thinned skin that comes with age. "This is the end of the Earth. Tomorrow, all of this will be gone,” he said and turned to the lush green valley stretching as far as the eye could see.

“Gone? You mean the Earth will be destroyed?”

“Tomorrow, December the 17th, 3864, at 5:34am a rogue asteroid about the size of a small planetoid will hit this exact location, decimating the entire planet down to the last microbe.”

“How could you possibly know that?” I wondered.

“Because I’ve seen it coming with my own eyes, of course!” he declared plainly.

I figured out his game. “You’re talking about time travel. There’s just no way!”

Without warning, a second version of the older me materialized, “Then I’ll reappear,” he explained.

The first older me followed with, “To prove it to you without a doubt, I’ll disappear,” and he did exactly that!

“How…how did you do that?” I was stunned.

The remaining elderly me replied with a smile, “What can I say? It’s a gift.”

“Did you bring me here, then?”

“Yes...and no.”

“Okay, you lost me,” I noted and held out the chip in the palm of my hand. “How does it work?”

“That’s just it, you see?” he explained. “It doesn’t. You do. The chip is just a trigger…a quantum actuator with a set of coordinates for this place. It activated the power to shift within you. We have a rare gift indeed, the ability to travel to any when we want, at the speed of thought. And we’re not alone,” he added. “There are more like us, each with their own marvelous gifts. Now,” he said, “there’s a lot to do, a lot of lives to save, and I’m getting too old for this. I need to get you up to speed if you’re to replace me. The question is, are you ready?”

“Wait,” I replied, “if you’re an older me, then haven’t you already done all these things we’re supposed to do?”

“That’s lesson number one: stop thinking so linearly,” he chuckled. “Do you really think that with infinite possibilities and timelines that we’re the only versions of us? And are there only a finite number of lives to save?” He extended his hand once more. “So, I’ll ask you again. Are you ready to step into a much larger universe?”

“Where will we go?”

“Into the future…" He leaned in with a sly grin. "...or the past.”

“Is it safe?”

“Ha! No,” he snickered. “But it’s a helluva ride!”

So, I took his hand and we disappeared.



727 words

Congratulations Dorthe!

Okay, I hope I've corrected the link to my email so that I should be getting them better now.

Sorry, I didn't get the notifications. I'll see if I can link the site to a different email address and see if that solves it.

Anyways, congratulations Dorthe! :)

Beware the Visitors
by Chris Nance

Illustrious Archon, I humbly come to you with a dire prediction in the form of a tale too fantastic to be true, for the truth is oft times veiled by shadow. You may ask, Excellency, who is this humble creature that kneels before me, begging an audience, and I should reply that I am no one…just a grain of sand in the desert, though I felt it my duty to bring to you the gravest of news. I shall tell you a story of a voice that came to me in a dream, or at least I considered it so, for I was readily in my bed and nearly asleep. Softly it said, “They are coming.”

Surely, I was startled and replied, “Who can this be in my room at night?”

“We are friends,” was the simple reply.

So in my anxiety, I asked, “Which friend comes to me without warning to disturb my sleep?”

“We are you and you are us,” it stated.

“How can that be?” I wondered. “For I am certainly here and your voice is not mine, to be sure.”

“We are Sularian and you are Sularian. Not exactly you…but you all the same.”

“Indeed?” I asked. “Why is it I cannot see your shadow in my darkened room?”

“We are the mere voice of ourselves from a dead world…an echo of our people lost to extinction.”

“Now I know you do not speak the truth,” I replied. “For I am standing here in my room. I look out my window and see my familiar Prism Peaks diffusing the starlight across the landscape. I too, assuredly, hear the wind through the whistle brush. If you are in actuality the voice of Sula and what you say is true, that ours is a world now dead, how can it be so?”

“Veritably, ours is a future that, for you, remains unwritten. We have come to save you from a dire fate. Now, your mind is aptly open. Perhaps if the eyes of others were so, we may save even ourselves from a bitter fate.”

“Very well, Echo of Sula, what message have you for a modest astronomer?”

“Beware the visitors. They have traveled afar and come bearing peace, yet carry within them such suffering and death that none will survive, though not of their intent. What begins as one Sularian will become two, then four, then all of Sula.”

“Death? Suffering? Can that be right?”

Humbly, Archon, I’ll explain that I was next struck by revelation in my mind…visions of a rocket, slender and polished white. It was marked by a crook, serpent, and broken triangle, proceeded by red lines on a white field, beneath a starry sky. Then, I suffered upon a plain littered with our kin, my own skin marked by boiling wounds the likes of which none on Sula had ever seen. “Turn your eyes to the heavens,” I was told.

And truly, Magnificence, that was the last word. I was so shaken I could not sleep through morning. Beginning my regular tasks, the whisper in my mind was nearly lost to the day, and would have otherwise been discounted as a dream, had it not been so vivid. Regretfully, I kept it secret, for who would believe me, and of that I beg your forgiveness, Excellency. Rightly, for three months I studied the heavens with a diligent eye and fading expectation, my experience waning.

Then, on the eve of the Trisolar Eclipse, I discovered a spot in my telescope, the flicker of light where none had been before. At first, I thought it to be a defect in my lens, a speck on polished glass, yet it reflected the suns like the moon and I knew the truth. Highness, I was the Sularian that detected the approach of their vessel and it has taken me better than a month to secure an audience in the presence of your radiance. I have heard the talk that travels amongst our people and, while I am nothing, an unassuming astronomer from a modest cast, I beg you with humility to turn them away. For I have seen their avatar clearly in our mutually strained communications, a lengthy ship bearing the mark of stripes of red and white beneath a star filled sky. The crook, the serpent, and the broken triangle are surely letters of their alien language. Alas, I foresee a clandestine doom and if we indulge these people from Earth, we shall surely perish.


749 words

Way to go Andy! Great story! :)

Chris Nance
Standoff
by Chris Nance (rights reserved)

“So, what now?” I asked, staring down the barrel of my Colt plasma carbine in a stalemate. I didn’t get a response and I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised. My adversary was fucking robot, after all…a mindless drone tied into the Scolax Continuance. Blasted meat-machine caught me by surprise while my back was turned, so I was more than perplexed as to why it didn’t just shoot. When I slowly pivoted to face it, drawing my own sidearm, I discovered the face of my brother staring back at me, still wearing the remnants of a tattered Alliance uniform it no longer had claim to. Those sonsofbitches.

The goddamn thing only stared at me, his piercing gaze never faltering, and paused in time like a statue with fiery white eyes. You’d swear he was a mannequin, lacking even the faintest of tremors or fasciculations that come from a pumping heart and calculating nervous system. Instead, embedded alien circuitry relayed fiber-optic information to every inch, making the host a slave to the machine.

“Are you still in there somewhere, Pete?” I wondered and the damn automaton flinched, if only just a little. “Is that why you didn’t already shoot? They weren’t able to reprogram every bit of you away, were they? There’s still just enough…just enough of you in there to hesitate.”

His eyes remained fixed but he had a tremble in his lips, as if he was grasping to say something but couldn’t form the words. The Scolax had planted a demon in him, a devil of technology built of glowing circuitry, and he was obviously trying to fight it. I could sense the gritting of his teeth and the tension in his muscles as he strained against the software that told him to shoot, that told him to exterminate or integrate any human he came across. Still, he just stood there without words.

My brother was just one of millions, huge populations captured and converted into mindless, obedient drones. Their objective? Honestly, I couldn’t give a shit whether they were trying to take over our planet, eradicate us, or just grow their own numbers. All I knew was that they were using our own people against us, their very souls overwritten and reprogrammed by an alien intelligence.

We both joined up at the same time. Pete and I were young and stupid with some sort of romanticism of a heroic war. We were assigned to the same unit with a mission to recapture old Phoenix. Anyways, we were cornered and he was dragged away in the firefight just before we were swarmed by the marines sent to rescue us. I still wake at night from the nightmare, his terror in my mind as they applied the patch off in the darkness, my human brother merging with alien tech. That image of Pete, fighting and screaming as he disappeared into a horde of drones is what’s driven me to kill every last one of those bastards.

Pete’s hand was shaking now, the alien pistol starting to quiver. He dropped the barrel momentarily and I peered closer. I could see the suffering, if not from the glowing alien bits, from the sadness in his brow and the single tear that soaked his quasi-metallic cheek. “You can fight this Pete. Don’t let them control you,” I pleaded and knew in my heart it could never be true. In fact, it only made things worse. His barrel corrected and his aim became more true.

There’s no mistaking who shot first. A charged round pierced his chest and he dropped instantly, pistol sliding away. As the life faded from his glowing eyes and tech, I rushed to him. I suppose that weariness from battle, from having lost too many friends to the Scolax, made me a hardened asshole, but I didn’t have any more tears to shed as my brother faded away. After all, he’d died a long time ago, snatched from his own humanity. At least I’d freed him of the struggle, the torment written on his face. Even so, I wish it could have been different.


684 words

Yes, I see your point in that, Andy. Would making the group private really affect finding new members, do you think? Doesn't it only add the extra step of having to ask the group permission to join, kind of like a Facebook or Linked-in group? Yes, it would make posts private, but I'm not sure whether that would affect new members to the group or not. Maybe, then, we should do a trial of privacy and see how it goes. :)

I think it would depend on whether any of the members intend on publishing the work here. When I joined the group a few months ago, which I've really enjoyed by the way, I looked at it as more of a way to improve my own writing, whilst sharing my ideas and creativity with others. I really never planned on publishing the short stories posted here. I say leave it public, but that's just my opinion.

Good Job! :)

The Price of Immortality
by Chris Nance (all rights reserved)

“So, are you ready?” my sister asked me.

“Are you kidding, Jeanne?” I replied. “I’m probably more ready than anyone in this room.” We sat in the reception area, waiting to be called back for my procedure. “I mean, I’m so done with this thing…this cancer they say is incurable.”

The procedure was called Bridging and The Bridge was, for lack of a better description, a means by which we could obtain immortality. Hunger, disease, and even death were all about to become a footnote in history. Sure, it took scientists three centuries to finally crack every mystery of the human brain…to not only replicate the firing of neurons but decode our very essence. Then seemingly overnight, cyberneticists engineered a way to download, carry an entire consciousness, into a synthetic Exabyte Brain…The Bridge was born.

“It’s almost time,” Jeanne noted. “We should be next. Are you scared?”

“A little,” I admitted. “I’m just ready to be whole again.”

“And what about the price?” she asked.

I shrugged it off but knew she was right. The price was steep, though I really had nothing to lose. After all, the doctors told me six months at best. Most people could never afford the procedure on their own, the factory-new cybernetic body. I remember that anatomists pushed for years for a genetically grown option, but the results were, well, messy. Finally, defeated, they admitted we were still millennia from growing a functioning organism that could tolerate the Bridging process. Even then, organic tissue was still susceptible to disease, could still be too easily injured.

The Synths were the solution. With a titanium endoskeleton, silicon and polymer components resisted corrosion. Better, if a part was somehow damaged, it was easily replaced. Tactile sensors felt every touch and optics saw across multiple wavelengths. No lungs, no heart, no need for oxygen, a Synth could still appreciate the marvels of life, without the worries of aging. And the cold-fusion micro-reactor meant we could nearly live forever, even in the vacuum of space.

A ten year mining commitment with BlastCor in the asteroid belt was a small price to pay for immortality. Sure, I wouldn’t see any of my family or friends for a decade but with The Bridge gaining popularity and costs coming down, we’d probably all be Synths by the time I got back. Anyhow, I figured I’d make new friends.

“Martin Hathaway?” the Synth nurse, whose name was Mary, asked kindly on her approach. “Are you ready?” Her luminous blue eyes stared back at me and I was surprised at the trust they conveyed even though her translucent skin revealed hers was a budget Synth.

“Yeah, that’s me.” I struggled to my feet. All the treatments, the chemo, retrovirus therapy, even the nanorobotics, had really taken a toll on me. Still, the hardest part was leaving my sister. “Well, I guess this is it.”

She cried into my shoulder as we embraced. “I’m so happy for you,” Jeanne sobbed and tried to fake a smile.

“I love you Sis. I can never repay you for your time, or your support,” I admitted gratefully.

She rolled her eyes. “You know I’d do it all again.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” I joked as tears streamed down my face. Deep down, I knew how hard her taking care of me was. She’d been my biggest supporter for the last three years, through the diagnosis and side effects and sickness. As much as she was glad for me, I’m sure she was relieved to get a part of her life back that my illness had taken. Not that she loved me any less, but the burden was becoming too much for even her.

“Mr. Hathaway?” the nurse nudged. “It’s time.”

“Take care of the kids,” I said to Jeanne as my hand left hers. “I’ll see you in a decade or so.” That was the last time I saw her, nearly five years ago, and I miss her more than ever.

Now, I’m just a Hauler, an ore carrier, and I’m sure if I was going to be rescued, I’d already be back at the mine. There weren’t supposed to be any demolitions that month and the accidental explosion was enough force to overcome the low gravity and launch me into space. I used to think The Bridge was a miracle, every function replicated and enhanced with precision…true immortality. I’ll tell you though, drifting off into space alone, immortality isn’t a blessing. It’s a curse.

(747 words)

I also don't get notifications, I'll have to check my settings and my spam filter.

The Collective (743 words)

by Chris Nance
all rights reserved


“You have to eat, Mr. Anderson,” my wife said. “After all, we’ll need you healthy if you’re to join The Collective. This is the fifth meal in a row that you’ve declined.”

Maybe it was the low blood sugar talking but I really wasn’t in the mood for a debate. So, I pushed it away. “I’m not eating you’re stinkin’ food,” I replied and meant it. I didn’t want anything to do with their attempts to domesticate me. They lied to us and we were too desperate.

It was about a decade ago when the moon exploded. An asteroid, they said, plunged through its core, shattering it. Tremendous chunks showered the Earth while the bulk of it drifted off into space. We never saw it coming….a ‘random act of God’ our best scientists claimed. Still, we were so sure of ourselves…so sure of our own technology…of our ability to adapt to even the worst disaster. We were wrong.

It was more than just the impact effects creating a nuclear winter, the ocean’s tides almost completely stopped and the finely balanced environments of the Earth plunged into chaos. Whole species and ecosystems disappeared in a mass extinction. We began running out of food. Without the sun, sea currents and tides, the microorganisms of the oceans disappeared…along with the fish, insects, and other animals that depended on them, including us. Mankind was devastated and only the strongest survived. Broken and desperate, we looked for a miracle.

So, you can imagine that The Collective was a gift from Heaven. Their ship appeared out of nowhere, offering rescue for our species that seemed too good to be true. Their community of worlds brought hope, dozens of races from around the galaxy, content and with a collected purpose. At least that’s what they claimed…and we went willingly.

They told us it would be hard work, but there was more than enough for all. They were at least honest in that regard but there’s and old expression that says ‘sometimes the answers you receive depend on the questions you ask.’ We never thought to ask if there was a price.

After ten years of scrounging from old food stores and sickly plants, most every man, woman, and child was more than ready, so we left for space. The aliens were more than eager to give. Truthfully, we were provided ample food and witnessed wonders few of us could ever imagine. In retrospect, we were less dubious than we probably should have been.

We reached their Collective as refugees within just a few weeks. They explained that it would take time to process all of us, of course. After all, integrating millions of immigrants took time, they claimed, and there were over four hundred groups in front of mine. My wife’s was forty seventh. The day her group was called was the last time I saw her…because what came back was not my wife…at least not the woman I loved. Sure, she looked the same, but the mechanical tone in her speech and her emotionless expression told the truth. It was as if her fondness for me was erased and replaced by something too analytical, too well designed. She’d been rewritten.

I heard a few of the processed, the reprogrammed humans, talking the other day. They were like my wife, emotionless drones. Robotically, they evaluated their new assignments in the nearby asteroid field. One of them made the mistake of providing too much detail, talking without uncertainty about their weapon, an Asteroid Rail Gun.

They were so proud of it, you see? We’d been set up to fail from the beginning. The aliens destroyed our moon and sold us on the promise of a new beginning. They waited patiently for our world to die, until only the strongest were left, until we were desperate…because they can only take control if you’re willing. And they needed more workers…more slaves.

“Number four hundred seventeen,” they announced.

“Your number’s up, Mr. Anderson,” my wife explained coldly.

“In more ways than you know,” I replied. “What if I refuse?”

“You’ll have that option, of course.” She smiled mechanically. “I’m pleased to say that, so far, we’ve had sixty three percent compliance.”

“And the other thirty seven percent?”

“They did not comply.”

“Will it hurt?” I asked. I’d never known them to lie, so I’d consider her answer as sincere.

“Only if you don’t comply,” she responded.

So, I enjoyed my last meal.

Good Job! :)

Legacy

By Chris Nance (all rights reserved)

“This message, this note, is the final testimony and legacy of the planet Earth, for I am the last of our kind. Despite all of our wisdom and technology, we could not save ourselves from the loneliness. It’s our hope that the seeds we’ve planted will grow into a new community, offering new promise to the galaxy.

Ours was a short lived race, at least short in terms of the lifespan of the universe. It’s taken us thirty thousand years of recorded history to reach this point…to waste away in despair. Truthfully, it never really occurred to us in the beginning that we might be the first…or the last.

When we initially dared to listen to the stars, we thought the silence from our radio-telescopes had to be wrong. A thousand years of scanning the sky yielded only silence, not even hint of a manufactured alien signal. Even so, statistically, our best scientists figured that of the trillions of stars in our galaxy, several hundred should have planets where some sort of life was kindled…and of those, at least a handful of the discovered systems should yield some sort of sentient civilization. We were wrong.

As I record this message, the universe is nearly fourteen billion years old. We were so certain...so sure that there would be other races out there willing to talk, willing to trade, willing to grow with us. So, it was that much more of a disappointment when we finally ventured outside our own solar system, traveling to most of the nearby suns, and found nothing. Worse than nothing, we found no life at all. Not a single microbe on any of the tens of thousands of planets we explored. Still, we remained confident and optimistic.

Humanity pushed deeper into the galaxy, determined to find out if we were really the only sentient race in the galaxy. Every vessel returned with the same report…nothing. There were so many habitable worlds…so many opportunities for life and so many disappointments. Millions of ships over thousands of years had mapped nearly every star system possible and not a single one had any trace of life. So much unrealized potential in the quiet of space. Finally, in the summer of our year, and after nearly ten millennia, we surveyed the last system of planets in the galaxy and the truth was unescapable. We were truly alone.

Now, ours is a race of explorers. Since the day we first stood erect and emerged from our forests we looked to the stars and wondered. It was a slow start but humanity tested the limits of our world and conquered them. We grew beyond our petty wars, conquered every disease, and saved the Earth from centuries of abuse. Even so, we always dreamed of the heavens and meant to travel there. Our courage pushed us skyward and we explored our own solar system and then trillions of others. Our brightest minds solved nearly every kind of puzzle imaginable…the most challenging enigmas in the furthest corners of the galaxy. Finally, with nowhere left to explore and nothing new to learn, humanity began to despair. We wondered – is this all that there is? Is there nothing more? So, we wasted away, a lonely race with all the answers and without any kin with which to share our discoveries.

So, in our last days, as the fire of our own species wanes, we’ve left a portion of ourselves, hints of humanity, sprinkled throughout the galaxy. If you’ve discovered this message, it means our attempt to seed the stars has succeeded and our hope is fulfilled. This archive, our Library of Eons, is our legacy to you…a fragment of an ancient memory. Use what we’ve learned to spread harmony and community throughout the galaxy. Perhaps, you’ll be even greater than our humanity. Good luck and peace be with you.”

“[Did the Telaxians hear that message?]” Captain Glast asked his first officer over the deafening roar of particle charges, the frightening avatar of an unrecognizable aged alien with a singular silken flower in its lapel, staring back at him in pause.

“[I believe so,]” he responded. “[Did you understand any of it, sir?]”

“[Not a word. Anyways, we can’t be distracted from our mission. Delete it and continue the bombardment.]”


716 words