SciFi – The Word Worker

New

https://pixabay.com/photos/mystery-road-fantasy-magical-fog-4532583/?fbclid=IwAR2Wbsi76EMr_2NZOMpLzY2IBnVezKmcaQnHvuSM-sMa-yCHDZgU85fzCrM

I could almost imagine I was back home in Spruce Falls. The gravel crunching beneath my feet. The whisper of foliage in the silent wind. Fluttering wings, scritching and rustling of undergrowth dwellers, twittering and chattering far overhead. Then I open my eyes to… pink.

The Overseers insist I’ll get used to it. I’m not sure I trust their dessicated, spiny heads, but it’s not like I have a choice. The memory of home twists my gut even now; it’s the only sight of Spruce Falls, of Earth, that anyone will ever see now. That is, if I can bring myself to keep the appointment with Imprint Labs. I know it’s mandatory, but…

The afternoon fog is rolling in. I shouldn’t have taken a walk after Midmeal, I’m late for Assignment now. Maybe I’ll just hide out here in the woods and make my own new life on Milorqan. Not like my dad never took me rough camping, I could make it.

Except that Earth wasn’t pink with – smelly? – gases that turn every afternoon into (wow, eye watering!) gray depression. (Why didn’t they warn us about the stench?) I’d better get back inside before I cough up a lung. Maybe Assignment won’t be so bad after all. At least I can get out of this stupid coverall and look like I belong.

Three Suns Eve

https://pixabay.com/photos/lost-places-attic-architecture-4211518/

“Thalia!” Her little brother’s high pitched shriek penetrated the thick timber walls even with the doors almost entirely closed. “Thalia, Mama says thirdmeal will be ready in three clicks.”

Eben threw the door wide and stood panting in the sudden light. “Eben, please!” Thalia shaded her eyes with one hand and fanned herself with her thick brush broom. “It’s Three Suns Eve!”

The boy carefully pulled the door closed and perched on the ladder. “When will we go below?”

“At Sister Dawn, Eben. You know that.” She returned to her sweeping; any stray debris from the windowing would destroy the hydraulics and trap them on the surface under the suns. “We honor the coming of the Sisters’ fire with an offering of song and crystal. The spirits of the Sisters fill the crystals, and in their rainbow light we raise the shields and descend.”

“And then we party!” Eben jumped off the ladder right into the middle of her pile, scattering chaff. He ducked his head with a sheepish grin at Thalia’s glare.

“Oh, nevermind,” she groaned. “I’m almost done anyway. Tell Mama I may be a little late for thirdmeal; I want to oil and dress before eating. It wouldn’t do to be unprepared for my first Sister Dawn joining.”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re just like Dada. Who cares about robes and ceremonies?”

She laughed and smacked his britches with her broom. “Scat! You’ll feast soon enough. Let me finish or there won’t be ceremony or party.”

Market Day

https://pixabay.com/photos/fantasy-floating-island-dream-3049543/

Shara peered through the nearest window as she worked the complicated controls. Jumping onto the long crank shaft to add her full weight to the effort, she grumbled under her breath. The thing creaked louder than a banshee shriek, and moved about as fast as old Piet dozing in his armchair. She heaved a sigh of relief when the shaft suddenly dropped and a thudding jolt confirmed a successful landing.

“Cam! Jolie! Are the booths packed?” She hurried into the other room, pulling her carefully brushed market coat over her shoulders. Her siblings waited near the door, the double tongues of their rolling booths locked into their hip implants.

Cam grimaced from his cycle. “We’re ready, but one of my gears has a nick in it. Makes the tongue jump. My hip is already sore just cycling in here from the storeroom.”

Shara grimaced. The twins shouldn’t even be cycling heavy machinery yet, but since Piet had weakened and Mam succumbed to cloud sickness, there was no one else. “We’ll just have to make enough to replace it today.” So much for fixing the crank shaft.

She stuffed the leather pouch holding their permits and a few stray chits into her coat and locked her own booth into her sockets. “Watch out for dracs; the young ones can survive above the miasma for a while, and sometimes even make it up here over the cloud line. We don’t need radiation burns on top of everything else.”

The Turning Point

https://pixabay.com/photos/city-urban-future-technology-6885193/

Jax had always hated Cosmopolis with its plasfalt streets, adamantium tracks, and neon lighting. It was as if the city founders had built their idea of a city on bad sci-fi movies from the 20th century. Probably had, he thought with a grim tug at his sleeves. Back at the end of the 21st century, when the mission to settle Proxima business moon had launched, two generations would have been born and died on the ship carrying them across space. The generation that built their new home would have been raised on memories in an artificial world.

Now, of course, wormhole technology had linked systems much farther than Alpha Centauri into a “small universe.” With little distance and time between Earth and colony, the settlers of the last century or two showed little variance from modern Earth culture. Cosmopolis, however, remained apart, preserving their artificial world in a bubble of self-exaltation.

Jax sighed as he tugged on the sleeves of his bodysuit. It certainly wasn’t designed for comfort, but at least the dull coloring made him hard to spot in the dim street. Venturing out of one’s registered residence during curfew was risky, but his business could not be conducted under the suspicious eyes of Cosmopolitans.

“I see you made it,” a hard voice spoke behind him. “No, don’t turn,” it snapped as he jerked into motion. “You can hear what I have to say just as well with your back turned. If you are caught, or lying, you must have no information with which to give me away.” After a brief pause, the voice rasped even more harshly. “I know how to hack the AI. Cosmopolis will be ours within the month.”

Network

Photo by Becky Strike, Oak Alley Plantation, LA

The storm clouds rolled in to compete with the afternoon’s brilliant blue sky. Right on schedule, Lije thought with satisfaction. He settled onto the bench beneath the metal pergola to watch the show.

It was a particularly fine one today. He had put the finishing touches on it himself only this morning, and rather regretted being the only one in the Botanical Walk to see it. He would have enjoyed watching the reactions. No matter; he wouldn’t have long himself if he didn’t want to get wet.

He rose and moved to lean against the brick pillar opposite the bench, patting it affectionately. No one would ever guess the pergolas true purpose; the designers had been brilliant. He let his gaze drift to the metal over his head and froze. Was that rust? It couldn’t be! With a quick glance around just to be sure he was alone, he yanked the bench closer and stepped up for a closer look.

There. Just at the joining. His cheeks flushed with hot anger; someone must be removed from the Maintenance Corps immediately. Neglect like that could jeopardize the entire network; the delicate fibers forming the weather matrix within the pergola could survive no exposure.

A peal of thunder jerked his attention to the sky as the first drops struck his face. His jaw dropped in horror as what should have been lightening pixelated across the sky. Once, twice, as the water plinked against the metal rows, then a section of cloud went blank. The storm roiled distortedly around the electrified tiles revealed behind them, pixels flickering.

The Relic

No one would ever have known it was there, in that tiny retreat from the bustle and concrete tucked in a cluster of apartments. No one remembered that before the garden, before the apartments, before the city, it was there. The city rose around it from apocalyptic waste, slowly but determinedly reclaiming the destruction.

Once walls had surrounded the artifact, high impenetrable walls guarded by marines armed and armored with the pinnacle of military technology. Then budgets and memories failed. First guards then walls disappeared, redirected to new pursuits and construction as civilization marched onward to cover the past. Still it remained, an unimposing but immoveable relic of forgotten death.

Eventually the city overtook it, and a developer born into Upper End luxury fancied it to be an old broken fountain. It became the centerpiece of nostalgia, a hodge-podge tribute to the geometric tranquility of the ancient English garden incongruous between siding and palmettos of The Southern Age as discovered by archaeologists. Birds and lovers alike twittered about its intricately molded layers and cooling sprays, pretending to know of times far before memory.

Until the day the topmost fountain ground to life and the birds flew away. Iron screamed against iron and gears long unused turned layer after layer, settling each within the other until all rested in the base with a click. And they came to repeat history, the hordes of destruction, pouring from the lock to scour the Earth clean for another beginning.

The Farm

https://pixabay.com/photos/old-elisabeth-houses-historical-3284212/

It had been there for 200 hundred years, looking exactly the same. Just another farm, with a neat farmhouse and barn. Everyone joked about cows in the house and family in the barn, because of the chimneys, but no one had ever thought much more about it.

Which I guess was strange in itself, now that I think of it. Especially since no one was ever invited there. I didn’t know anyone, even village elders, who had ever seen the inside of that house. Once a month someone would show up in town for supplies, but they were so stand-offish few had even been close enough to talk to them.

Then Molly Fern moved into the county with a sun allergy. While the rest of us slept, Molly roamed the countryside, and did she come around with some wild tales. Rumblings underground, strange lights in the house and barn, and pulses of what looked like smoke from the chimney folly. She caused quite the excitement for a while, but when she reported seeing people with missing skin exposing clockwork joints, most people decided she had a loose gear or two herself and tuned her out.

Not me. Which is why the two of us were hiding near the farm when the sky opened like a cellar door. No one will ever believe us, so I don’t know why I’m writing this down, but Molly thought it was important and I’d do anything for her. I can’t even explain what I saw through that door, but I’ll tell you this. I understand why the mice scatter when we open the cellar.

The Gates

Sasha loved the Gates. They were older than memory or record, if the old ones could be believed, though they showed no sign of age. Unlike the longhouse built around them, the burnished wood of which had grayed and rotted several times even in her short lifespan.

She ran a hand over the stone, soaking the warmth of it into her cold skin. That warmth was the reason her people had built the longhouse around the Gates; in a frigid landscape, warmth meant survival. The whole village lived in the shelter of the Gates, worshipping the impossible life they maintained.

The stone hummed beneath her fingers and she jerked away, eyes widening. The thrumm became visible vibration and Sasha stumbled backward, breath coming in ragged gasps as the arch of the Gate began to glow. Farther down the longhouse a second Gate followed suit, then a third.

Then the portion of the longhouse in front of her vanished, replaced by a view of shifting sand and barren red mountains. The sky above them terrified her most with hints of purple and orange streaking a dark blue horizon.

A strange figure stepped into view within the arch. Inhuman, insectile, it clicked with what seemed angry urgency and beckoned to something behind him. Sasha fled screaming as an unimaginable army streamed into the longhouse. She never saw the hosts streaming from the other Gates as one by one they activated.

The Edge

https://pixabay.com/photos/dam-gigantic-panorama-summer-4451353/

They called it The Edge. In reality it was a dam, the greatest feat of engineering ever achieved. The power of the great glacier harnessed, tamed, to do man’s bidding. To him it was more.

The wars of the twenty-third century had left scars upon the fertile equator and stripped the temperate plains to desert. With water rationed and food scarce, desperation had created The Edge to warm and distribute the ice of the polar climates. Longing for what was lost had diverted a mere fraction of arctic power to pockets of living memory.

Like this mountain stream, tumbling rocks over and over in its tiny rapids, only to filter through the moss into infinitesimal falls. Like many, he came often to walk the swinging bridge, artificially propped above waters that could have been waded, hung at the edge of empty air like so much possibility. Unlike many, he came to grieve.

He knew what others would not acknowledge. The Edge, the last great hope, was doomed. A century, maybe, could be wrung from the glacier, but no more. If the scars were not healed, and soon, The Edge of the future would be its end. And with the insulation of memory become recreation, there would be no healing.

First Contact

Bluing was it’s favorite time of waking. The sand, brilliant white for so many matings, took on the hue of Aurora for only three. Others avoided the surface during bluing, fearing the overling would walk the sands with her obliterating heat. R’ik knew better; so many matings it had spent alone in the beauty.

It tasted the soft silica, savoring the cool sweet flavor. Brighting soured the sand, drawing moisture from deep in the mountains to clump and harden the silica into cakes. The tribe would graze freely across the dunes, absorbing what life force the cakes held. Only R’ik avoided filling its wells, waiting for Aurora’s wings to soften and dry the surface for a treat it considered a blessing all for itself.

It stopped at the top of a tall mountain, surveying the deeply blown dunes below. The soft hues of the bluing stroked its sensors with pleasure more satisfying than any mating. Suddenly a white flash disturbed the surface, whipping around the crater of a dune as if driven by a great storm. Fear stabbed R’ik; perhaps the others were right and Aurora had come to punish it after all.

The tiny brighting stabilized, and others joined it, creeping from a shadow that had not been there when the tribe went below. Awkward creatures carried the tiny brightings with some evil magic; they moved on appendages too small to hold them and sank into the sand with every motion, and their bodies bulged in all the wrong places so that they appeared top-heavy.

R’ik shivered, dread filling it. What horror could take the power of Aurora and learn to wield it for itself? The power and evil of this strange being must be beyond comprehension to subdue Aurora’s wisdom. It must warn the tribe immediately.