io9 Concept Art Writing Prompt Mar 13, 2015

Give Me Shelter

The Ark began as barely a blip on the jagged and tumultuous horizon. Dove negotiated his way gingerly across the frozen lake, his mind focused on getting inside and resting his cold and aching servos. He's been here before. It seems the most profound tragedy of his life that the world is round. In his mind he plays over the daydream of a flat world, extending forever in all direction, nothing but unending hills and valleys and oceans and forests, unrelenting newness everywhere. On a rational level he knows there are far corners and destinations he will never visit, but standing there, facing the Ark again after ten years, he feels acutely aware of the closed system of the world.

You can run as far as you like, the road will eventually take you back home. In school they told him the Universe was infinite, so sometimes he dreams of rockets instead.

We tried to cure the warming Earth. Our attempts did not have the results we anticipated. The huddled remainder of the human race waits out the Ice Age in a crumbling, decaying Ark. They sent out two messengers, Dove and Raven. No one ever heard from Raven again. Perhaps Raven found the one corner of the world not bent and rounded. Perhaps he found a rocket.

His direction was as sure as his programming. His life would resume in the way it had before the expeditions. He would carry on, as ever, repeating the same tasks, going forward blindly into the future.

io9 Concept Art Writing Prompt, Dec 04, 2014

The Astronaut Lights a Candle

It was murky. Pitch black, really, which made Harley  nervous. He didn't like to admit it, but this kind of unenhanced shadow gave him the creeping willies. They'd been instructed to turn off their gear by an almost giddy Zechariah, the night's MC. Harley tried not to squirm,. Not with Bethany next to him, He knocked on the door. There was a creak, a movement barely perceptible in the darkness, and Harley felt the uneasy certainty of someone nearby.

"Come on, this isn't--" he began and was interrupted by a flash of light. A candle self-ignited. Ahead of them both, in the gloom, stood a man in an old-style astronaut costume.

Jesus, Zachariah," Beth exclaimed. "Is that you?"

The visor didn't budge. The dim candlelight limned Harley and Bethany's costumes--a Century Knight and an old-style fire fighter--in dim and flickering relief.

"Come on, Zac, is that you or what? How much did you spend on that?"

"Nothin'" Zachariah brought up the gold visor and smiled, unable to resist letting them in on the deal her got. "I have an uncle in the space program. Zachariah Hendricks seemed to have a lot of uncles. "Come on, he said. "Party's this way."

You bringing out this welcome for everyone?" Harley asked dryly, inserting himself between Zac's astronaut and Bethany's fire woman.

Pretty theatrical, no? The second set of doors, at the far end of the dimmed hall, opened to Zac's cramped and uninspiring bahcerlor pad. What had Bethany seen in the guy. Thankfully they were late enough that things were going in a decnet clip,. Musketeers and samurai, old-style lawyers and heart surgeons, made up to look unenhanced just like the ad old days. Someone, as ever, wore a toga. The decor was decidedly Old Earth, full of trinkets Zac must have got from one of his innumerable, shady, unnamed uncles. Harley relaxed a bit upon seeing Levi (seasteader) and Vikram (NASCAR driver, a bold choice, even if all the little logos did lend themselves to his predilection for puns). He knew they would run point on Zac. The bell rang, an ominous tone their host must have imported for the occasion, and the astronaut disappeared again.

io9 Concept Art Writing Prompt: Jan 15, 2015

Somewhere Beneath the Sea

The room smelled of salt and stale air. Or would, according to Choudhry's scanner. He was breathing the recycled stuff, pressurized, hint of lavender for the high-stress environment of this abandoned section of The Diving Bell City.

What an evocative word. Abandoned. One seldom got a chance to use it, these days. Once the seas swelled and the Inland Migration began. Even now, their job was to refurbish a section of Diving Bell for more human habitation.

Collins approached the fissure. "Not lookin' good," the American drawled in imperfect Hindi.
"Finding Nemo, how's it going with you?"

"I wish you'd stop calling me that, Kulkarni admonished from outside the Bell. "Nemo didn't even meet the sharks. That was his Dad."

"Yeah, well, nobody remembers the Dad's name. How are our buddies doing?"

Above Kulkarni and Collins, and Choudry the sharks danced an intricate waltz, like bees. Only Kulkarni, the resident shark-wrangler, actually spoke their language. To anyone else it looked like a menacing swarm. "Sections eight and ten are fully collapsed. Everything inside smells too corroded to be of any use."

The Diving-Bell City was a research outpost, once upon a time, a proof-of-concept for human colonization of the oceans. Abandoned (there's that word again) when the money ran out, now pressed back in to service in the midst of an exploding refugee crisis. Outside, the sharks dove and swarmed. Choudry had the distinct understanding of what a goldfish must feel like upon meeting a house cat. They were harmless, of course. Everyone knew that. Fully domesticated, radio-implanted and enhanced. Choudhry couldn't hake the feeling, however, watching the predatory grace of these ancient beasts, how little humanity's basic assumptions about nature had served them thus far.

io9 Concept Art Writing Prompt: October 30, 2014

He Does Not Sleep

The wind howled and whistled outside the cabin. She wan't sleeping now. She couldn't sleep now. Propped up by a waking charm, her eyes on her charge. It didn't sleep. According to the guide books, they never did.

"How old are you, girl?" The mummy asked. Its voice a whisper like dry leaves on frozen ground.

"How old are YOU?" Alice shot back. The guide books said they will try and engage, to be wary of charms and hexes, even after you had them.
I am Nine thousand, two hundred and seventy years old. I have seen empires crumble to dust, I have seen generations--
"Blah, blah, blah. Save me the cities fall to ash, systems of thought and government are forgotten, occult sciences lost to the sands of the hourglass, I've heard it all before. This is not my first rodeo."

It was, in fact, her second. Her first was at the tail end of her apprenticeship. Carraby had been there.

"Ah, a senior monster hunter, then." a coldly amused detachment shone through the scritch-scratch of his voice.

"I do ok. So, Ninety-two hundred years."

"Ninety two and seventy"

"Oh, well, ninety two and seventy. But, really, how many of those were good years? Sixty? Fifty? what was the life expectancy of the average man back in your day?" That the mummy, who had so far declined to give his name (she hoped it was one of the good ones,like Imhotep or Teth-Adam, though they would probably have put up more of a fight), didn't bother Alice as much as it seemed to bother the Federal Marshals to whom she'd been apprenticed for five years. Or polite society, which held that extending one's life beyond the generally agreed-upon century was tacky and wasteful and grounds to be hunted. What bothered Alice was that the man she was looking at could no longer be considered a man in any traditional sense. he was a corpse propped up by bandages and runes, as old as the pyramids and as crumbled. What bothered her, and why not tell the dry old zombie this, was what did he get out of it>?

"When was the last time you tasted food?" she asked. "When you kissed someone you loved. Do you even feel anymore?" The mummy remained silent. His eyes, smoldering cinders set in his skull, seemed to gaze past her to some indefinite point beyond the cabin. "I mean, if it were me, I'd kill myself."

A coughing, retching, scritch-scratch sound. It took Alice a moment to realize he was laughing. "My dear child," he breathed. "You never told me, how old you are. Twenty? Forty? So hard to tell now, in your birth skin. How fast it is gone,. How brief and fleeting are all your days. You would rather die than live as me? Truly? Because your life, so new, has never been confronted with the blackness that awaits you. One day, child, you will die, as sure as the turn of the Earth. And one day you will truly begin to understand that. Your strength will fade and your flesh will sag and your vision will blur and you will forget names and places and histories. Then the terror will be upon you. And you will do anything, anything to escape it."

The mummy relaxed his posture. He'd leaned close to Alice to further the urgency of his message. Now he was finished. Long ago, before trains and airships, before Rome and Carthage, before Aristophanes and Alexander, he had been a prince. Prince Nanefer-ka-ptah. In the bloom of his youth he imagined he would truly live forever. As did every young man and woman since the dawn of time. Reality eventually set in. He hurtled toward the end as though on an out-of-control chariot. He was going to die. He was going to die. He was going to die. He followed rumors of occult magicians in the west Let them bind him in runes. On his death bed let them change everything about who and what he was. The girl--so young, an eyeblink ago he'd been that young-was right, in part. It had been so long since he felt the touch of a lover, so long since a woman as lovely as this even moved his desire that it felt as a barely-remembered dream. There ware consolations. he felt the pull of the moon on the tides. The hum and drum of magic eddy and shift. And, foremost, he was alive. Coolly, he regarded his captor. Reconsidered his options. He began to form a plan.

io9 Concept Art Writing Prompt: Jan 8, 2015

Bringing in The Harvest

It was a myth that Earthborn had four hundred words for "ground." Muri only found eight in her reading: land, landscape, sod dirt, park, field, terrain, continent. There was excitement in Canticle all that morning, (another Earthborn word, she was certain). The delegation was coming. One hundred and one Earthborn, the first to visit Red Storm in a thousand years. Muri's mother discouraged her from feeling too excited. Earthborn were delicate, willowy things, unaccustomed to the Jovian heaviness and likely would not leave their carapaces. So she should not be making any plans to play overball with anyone. Muri was an expert on Earthborn, she knew all that, would have been the first to tell everyone at school if Miss Choi didn't bring it up first. Of course, that's where the lesson stopped. There was no mention in Ms Choi's class that we were descended from the Earthborn, that Jovian children evolved from those slender, brittle people on the third world. News pundits scoffed at the notion, dismissing it as irreligious and unpatriotic. The very idea that the people of Jupiter shared blood with the Earthborn or with the fethered couatls of Venus, the Dryborn of Mars, or the cold metallic intelligences of the Middle Belt,

"And I suppose you think the woven ships just appeared out of nowhere?" Ms Choi went on to remind them in class that day, at length, of the Parable of the clock makers, and made everyone copy it down.

When Muri got home, her mother scolded her again for being a nuiscance and speaking out of turn. That Ms Choi was wrong seemed not to enter in to it. Muri watched the news later, footage of the carbon harvesters hauling one of the great wind snakes to build a meeting place for the Earthborn, When her mother was asleep, Muri got out the big dictionary Aunt Cirrus gave her, and read long into the night.

Voyager Two

I am so far from you now.

I remember watching TV as the Voyager 2 probe sent back the first images from the planet Neptune. I was nine years old. My father told me the probe had been launched three years before my birth. I imagined it up there all through my lonely youth, toiling forward in dark and uneventful silence.

I go through routines. Alarm. Commute. Job. Takeout. TV. Sleep. Alarm. Commute. Job. Takeout. Sleep. Hurtling, as ever, through the dark. I wondered in those nights as a kid, if Voyager ever got lonely. Did it remember in its circuits or its bones what it felt like in the warmth of the sun?

Though there is nothing, really, now to observe (Neptune was the last friend it made) Voyager keeps it up, checking and rechecking, waiting for some sign, magnetic or gravitational, that it has passed some definable border, some sign of progress.

Seven years ago, the digital tape recorder failed. In 2008 the planetary radio experiment cut out. The place doesn't smell like you anymore. I found a hair on my jacket and it took me a couple of minutes to realize it was one of yours. What could I do with it? Couldn't throw it away, so I was stuck on the floor in my coat and shoes ready to go out to some stupid movie with this ridiculous blonde curl in my hands and nowhere to keep it. Some time next year, they figure, the gyroscope on Voyager 2 will give out. Another ten years or so after that, its nuclear heart will finally stop beating. It will still be moving, of course, carried forth by inertia, an echo of us in the long night, keeping its solitary vigil. Not lost, exactly, but headed nowhere in particular, its only choice to just keep moving.

Speeding Bullets

I don't know which story you've heard. They are, in fact, mostly lies, and I would know, I used to own the damn networks. He was not cooked up in some Middle-Eastern (or Kenyan, thank you, President Trump) Islamo-Fascist Genetic Cookery. He was not sent as an advance scout to breed with human women. He most certainly did not sell his soul at a crossroads like some old blues man.

The truth is he was born on the other side of the Sun. The truth is our planet once had a twin. In one of those rare candid moments he told me he thought Earth got the looks, but Krypton, well, Krypton got the brains.

That was until a rounding error or some such sent them all packing and he found himself the lone survivor, a rocket ship baby in the reeds of central Kansas. Utterly unprepared for a life on Earth. I sometimes think he would have had it easier born with green skin and antennae rather than brown skin and crinkly hair. And let me put those other rumors to rest. I actually, in hind sight, liked the guy. Who is Don Quixote without a windmill to tilt against?

That's all over, now.

The last time it happened, the last time he caught me, was right after that Brown kid got shot. I remember the news in Metropolis Precinct One's HQ. I remember the grinding of his teeth like a bridge about to collapse. Bail set at one billion dollars. I was out the next day.

"I don't know if you know," my benefactor said, an official, representing companies, interests, men with deep pockets, "how much they hate him. How much they're terrified of him." He intimated something big was on the horizon. They wanted me on the lam for deniability. Unimpressed as I am with being someone else's puppet, free is free, and this is my last shot. I've been on the run three months. Metropolis PD impounded my helitank. I've seen her on the news, mowing down protesters with rubber bullets (honest).

It's dark out. Autumn chill setting in. Three in the morning and the precinct is nearly deserted. They seized the rest of my assets too, but the tank has a Kryptonite power core. All I need. Whole place lit up orange with high sodium lamps. No point in going for the stealth approach. I'm Lex Fucking Luthor.

I'll miss him, of course. The rest of them? Bored billionaires and lapsed royalty. I'll have them sewn up in a week. It was gratifying, at first, the way they turned on him in small and subtle ways. Now I suppose it just made it easier. I hate easier. A pair of duty officers approach down the steps, guns already drawn.

"Gentlemen," I tell them. "I'm here for my ride."

The one in Gotham has a spotlight to get his attention. For Superman, there's no need. The alarms have already been raised. He probably heard them back in Missouri. I angle her up above the skyline of my city and drink it in. (And speaking of drink, thank God these knuckle-draggers never broke into the mini-bar.)
I had three months to listen to the chatter from underground. Can't have him operating like this. The super-menaces, Bizarro clones, the Atomic Skull, Metallo, Brainiac, all there to keep him busy, to keep him distracted, to keep him guessing. Me most of all. And that was all fine, but the game has changed. Men in power, men of privilege, terrified now. They built a machine under Liberty Island. My destination.
I hear him before I see him, the clap of thunder keeping pace wit me but waiting to see what I do. Could have a biological payload on this thing, or nuclear. Or chemical. Haven't tried a good nerve agent in a while. Good for a laugh. He gives me this look like I've seen a thousand times before, the "I'm disappointed in you" look, the "You should use your vast intellect to feed the hungry not build helitanks and Kryptonite death rays" look. So I put her down at the feet of Lady Liberty. I think he knows already something is up when his feet touch the soil. All that lead. I step out of the tank, regal as ever in my old battle armor and my scotch-and-soda.

"What's your game, Luthor? I'm in no mood."

"I know. I saw you on the news. Marching with the protesters. Last straw, you out there, the one black man on Earth immune to bullets.

"Get to the point."

Oh, he's all business. "I'm going to miss these little chats," I tell him. "I really am. The two of us. Outlaws. I think they've helped me grow."

"What's under Liberty Island?"

"I honestly have no idea. Shall we take a look? The Man of Steel and the Billion-Dollar Bail Jumper? I'll admit mine doesn't have the same ring. I'm sure you can find the door."

He could have made a go of it, he really could. Below there's a hum of electricity and the Geiger counter on my armor is pitching a fit. Keeping the Towers standing, Hurricane Katrina, the Haitian earthquake. Me. I don't suppose it'll ever make sense to him. The ways in which they hate him. His people ate sunlight, for Christ's sake. We get down to the base of the chamber and I recognize it. One of my own designs. A massive cyclotron. Beneath the magnetic ring, on the main floor, are thousands of munitions crates, and I finally get to see it, the moment when all that repressed chin-up carry-on melts away. I glance at one of the crates up close, confirming what I already know.

"They ship out tomorrow," I tell him. He doesn't look like he hears me but I know he can. He can hear my goddamn cells divide. "Starting tomorrow every cop in America will be carrying Kryptonite bullets."