Category: Flash Fiction

The Button at the End of the Universe

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Sak was exactly the sort of man you’d want to have his finger on the big, red button in the control room of the Omnilator, the Empire’s moon-sized death-ray that drifted in and out of hyperspace to annihilate entire planets at a whim. Sak was shortish, baldish, ever so slightly round around the middle, and perfectly boring. It was widely rumored that he had once talked an eternal stone tree on Naraloos Seven to death. It was also widely known that he was the best paid finger in seven galaxies. For that was Sak’s only task: to wait for the order of Commander Martock, confirm it, and push the button that would open a black hole at the planet’s center, sucking it away into infinite nothingness.

But the nights are long in space, especially in a tri-star system in a galaxy billions of light-years from home where there is no day nor night, just a constant, neverending noon, and eventually ways must be thought of to pass the time.

And over the course of several deployments, and a score of worlds evaporated away into the gaping void, a contest was concocted by the crew: get Sak to push the button early, and win a reprieve from all duties for the space of a full galactic month.

The Omnilator loomed in deadly orbit around a tiny, peace-loving planet named Pardala. The coordinates of its horrible assault had long been programmed into the targeting computer. Peace talks dragged on for months as dignitaries of the Empire wheedled with the elders of Pardala, and day by day, Sak’s finger floated over the button that would make Pardala into nothing more than a memory.

Lieutenant Loda thought to catch Sak unawares by sounding the alarm in the middle of the night and haranguing him into pushing the button on Martock’s authority, but it turned out that Sak didn’t even respond to an alarm, such was the power of his monotonous routine. The klaxon sounded for a full five minutes before Commander Martock caught Loda and sent him for a week of latrine duty.

Engineer Elara, she of the flowing hair and generous assets stuffed into a too-tight Empire-issued space skirt, wagered she could distract him with her wiles while Deckmaster Dervin imitated M’s voice to give the command. But Sak paid no more attention to her bouncing personality than to the flavorless sandwiches he lunched on, and Dervin’s voice broke in a way that Martock’s never would, and she swayed away, dejected, to cozy up with Dervin in a closet instead.

Navigator Norr decided that perhaps the way to Sak’s finger was through his heart, and invented all manner of truly horrible insults that the poor fated planet was purported to have leveled against Sak’s mother and sisters and any other women who happened to be in his life. But Sak, he informed Norr sadly, was adopted by a happy single man and had never had use for any women, and besides he wouldn’t feel right murdering an entire planet just because of some hasty words.

Dozens of schemes were hatched to try and budge Sak’s finger, but he shot them all down, deftly and without much interest. They finally admitted that Sak was, after all, the perfect man to man the switch.

And then, finally, the call came down from Martock himself. Peace talks had failed, and the Pardalans were doomed, by order of the Emperor. Martock’s voice barked out, rattling the far reaches of the ship, the order: destroy them.

But Sak’s finger did not budge.

Lieutenant Loda thought he must not have heard properly, and urged Sak to push the button, but his finger would not budge.

Engineer Elara thought perhaps Sak suspected another prank, and shook him and insisted that he push the button, but his finger would not budge.

Navigator Norr knew that Martock’s wrath would be terrible if his order was not followed, and pleaded for Sak to push the button, but his finger would not budge.

Then the door exploded in from the hallway, blasted to pieces by Commander Martock’s custom-made multi-phasing disruptor rifle. It smoldered with menace as Martock stalked into the control room, his face red and twisted with fury.

He saw Sak sitting by the button, his finger poised but still not pressing. Without a word of explanation, he shouldered his rifle and fired. Sak caught the red bolt of plasmic death in the shoulder, whirled, and fell from his chair, the bloodless wound hissing with smoke.

“Who’s going to push the button?” Commander Martock’s voice rang in the silence like the calamity of two planets crashing together.

As one, they dove toward the big red button, clawing across Sak’s still smoldering corpse. Norr, through luck and lanky arms, was the first to touch it.

As the button clicked home and the wicked machinery of the Omnilator began to hum, Sak hopped up from the floor, throwing off the smoking, hissing trick jacket and howling with laughter. He and Martock flung their arms around each other in hysterics, pointing and cackling like madmen at the horrified expressions on the faces of the crew.

Their joy was short-lived, however; the black hole yawned open in the heart of Pardala and, with no more fanfare than an Arquillian Flea emerging from its egg, swallowed the planet, the Omnilator, and half of the surrounding galaxy in an infinite mass of inescapable gravity.

It had, Sak decided, been worth it.

##########

Chuck’s challenge this week is a Space Opera. I wrote a truly epic, philosophical piece of utter tripe before scrapping it entirely and writing this bit of fluff instead. Not exactly my usual style, but a fun time nonetheless.

This work was inspired more than a little bit by the collective works of Douglas Adams and the steady diet of Doctor Seuss I’ve been reading with my son of late.

Mutual Back-Scratching

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Regulars around here will know that I take part in weekly flash fiction challenges over at Chuck Wendig’s blog. These are a lot of fun in their own right, but occasionally he switches things up and gives us the chance to co-op a little bit. Last week we were tasked with creating an interesting character, and this week we’re using those characters created by other authors in short stories of our own.

Well, I crafted a sketch of a shape-changing individual last week, and that character was picked up and run with by Kira Jessup, in a story she called “Shifters.” It’s pretty cool. Also, she’s Australian. Check it out!

The Forty-Second

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The basement hallway stretched away in front of Prad, the maw of a great jungle flower in the night. The lights had gone out hours ago — just another cost-saving measure of the DraxilCorp power structure — and they did not light up at his passing.

This was by design.

The security guard stalked past him in the dark, the beam of his flashlight playing lazily this way and that as he wandered down the hall. Prad was on him in a heartbeat, his wicked, tri-tipped blade thrusting up under the base of the skull, shattering the bone, and muddling the brain.

It took a special kind of strength to pierce bone like that, a strength forged on farm tools and honed in hatred. The man felt nothing, and for that, Prad was thankful. As he fell down, the flashlight picked out distinctly Orarosian features in the man’s face. Prad relieved him of his multi-key and stole along down the passage, finding his way by the NightSpec goggles he’d liberated from a DraxilCorp storehouse.

There was a decided irony, he thought, in using DraxilCorp tech tonight. Who else could manufacture the top-of-the-line combat gear needed for such an operation? DraxilCorp alone had a net worth over five times that of Oraros’s entire wealth of nations combined, so their new headquarters going up in the heart of Gester was heralded and welcomed with jubilation.

At least at first.

On the promise of mutual bounty, the contracts were signed in haste, if not fully understood. Oraros operated on good faith and good will in matters of business, and was completely blindsided by the cutthroat, take-all-you-can business practices embraced on Anankeros, the home world of DraxilCorp. But the people of Oraros had learned, and learned quickly. Prad more than most.

Two years ago, Prad had been a humble, happy farmhand in a family of twelve. He had been engaged to a lovely girl from Gester. His life was simple, but enviable.  Now, his sisters and fiancee were slaves to the Anankerosian transplants. His brothers worked backbreaking shifts in the mines. Prad himself was lost in the menial labor system that had swallowed almost all the indigenous people of Oraros.

All, that is, except those who had signed the life of the planet away. Those privileged few now resided in the DraxilCorp complex themselves, though their appearances were limited to public service announcements from the corporation. It was widely believed that the Corp had brainwashed them to put on the company message, if it hadn’t killed them outright and replaced them with clones more than happy to be puppeted by the Corp.

So Prad found himself alone on a mission for the benefit of his homeland, disavowed as a traitor and erased from public record, halfway down a hallway leading to rooms whose purposes were unknown even to those who worked their entire lives in the building. On paper the room didn’t exist. Certainly it wasn’t listed on the corporate directory. On the outside, it brooked no suspicion at all: a simple door of Stavromulan Oak with a curt Authorized Access Only placard. This door was locked at all times.

Prad swiped the pilfered multikey across the scanner pad. It beeped and slid open on smooth, soundless hydraulics. Behind the first door was another door, this one featureless and blank as the Anankerosian polar desert. As the first door closed behind him, the room was bathed in a sickly purple light, the color of an Orarosian thunderfish about to part its prey from its skin. Prad tensed, but forced himself to stand up straight. He clicked a button at his wrist and his suit hissed agreeably.

Hidden sensors in the walls began sampling everything in the room, from the quality and texture of Prad’s hair to the slightly acidic signature of his sweat to the striated blue and green irises around his overlarge eyes. These readings did not match the only readings that the sensors would accept, but this was also by design. Instead of Prad’s readings, the sensors picked up the sensory holograms projected by his suit, recognizing not Prad Arkid, resistance operative, but rather Orthan Lob, personal physician and preservationist to the top brass at DraxilCorp.

Prad felt no particular remorse for Lob’s blood, some of which was still dried under his fingernails. Lob had indirectly spilled more than enough Orarosian blood to balance the debt.

The glow in the room shifted from electric purple to soothing green, and the door before Prad withdrew into the ceiling.

Before him, the room opened up into a smoothly circular chamber bedecked with monitor screens showing hundreds — perhaps thousands — of real-time diagnostics and three-dimensional representations of the biological functions of the figure at the center of the room. The head of DraxilCorp. The de facto despot of Anankeros. Menoetius Moros.

He slept, or seemed to sleep, propped upright in a tube broiling with a thick, vaporous fog. Bluish and translucent, it simmered full of enzymes and nutrients. The chemicals he bathed in renewed him while he slumbered, giving him the youthful, vibrant, charming appearance that had kept him the face of his corporation for centuries. “Why settle for being remembered forever,” Moros had famously said, “when you can be forever?” The man’s face rose, ghostlike, out of the fog; his thick, virile mass of black hair waved gently in invisible currents in the stuff. His smooth, untroubled eyes were closed gently as if in a pleasant dream. His vile mouth was slack, but seemed almost twisted into a smirk of inexhaustible advantage, the expression of a man who, the moment his opponent touches his first pawn, knows he’s won the chess match already.

Prad crept toward the tube, a spider advancing on an entangled moth. He leaned over the sleeping form of Menoetius, the gaunt, harsh features of his own face reflected and blended grotesquely with the smooth, perfected curves of the sleeping man.

At the hands of Moros, Oraros had bled. At the hands of Moros, Oraros had suffered. At the hands of Moros, Oraros was dying. Just like every other planet in the belt.

And now, beneath his own hands, Moros slept.

Prad couldn’t help smiling. One by one, he slipped his fingers out of their gloves. He wanted to feel the life go out of the old man. He wanted to look into the cold, dead eyes of the planet-killer as his blood ran out.

Prad reached for the console next to the Vitatube.

At the press of a button, the face of the tube slid back.

The fog billowed out, an ocean trapped within a bottle. It bathed Lewis’s skin, icy and slimy and stinking of death.

With one hand, Prad reached into the tube and seized the back of Moros’s neck, bringing the sleeping man’s face up as he bent his own face downwards. With the other hand, he brought the knife up under Moros’s jaw.

Prad thought of his brothers, entombed alive when a karillen mine collapsed on a DraxilCorp dig. He thought of his father, wasting away on a reservation for the old and infirm of Oraros in a DraxilCorp facility. He thought of his hometown, bulldozed and flattened to make way for the DraxilCorp complex, to lay the foundation for the building in which he now stood.

He thought of these and a thousand other injustices, and found he had no words for any of them. He pressed his face hard against that of the sleeping man. Tightened his grip on the knife.

“Die.”

The knife slipped through Moros’s jaw without a hint of resistance, hesitated for an instant as it sheared through his palate, and finally buried itself in his brain. Moros’s eyes shot open, his hands wrapped convulsively around Prad’s shoulder, pulling him into a bizarre embrace as he struggled. Prad watched coldly, his face still pressed to the dying man’s, as Moros thrashed, slowed, and stilled: an ant kicking feebly as it drowns in vinegar. He sank finally into the Vitatube.

The blood began to coagulate almost immediately on Prad’s arms and hands. It was darker than blood should be, blackish and ice-cold. As Lewis went to sheath his knife, he found he could no longer move his arms.

The fog.

His arms and legs had been bathed in the fog that shrouded the sleeping man. With mounting panic, Prad realized he could not move at all.

The banks of displays showing the failing vitals of the dead man flickered and went blank as the tube sank down into the floor. Then laughter flooded the room: piercing, gleeful laughter, the laughter of a schoolyard psychopath pulling the wings off butterflies. Then, the perfect, manufactured face of Menoetius filled every screen, staring at him, sneering at him, laughing at him.

“Congratulations,” said the disembodied faces of Menoetius Moros. “You’ve killed me. And now I have you.”

Prad blinked, uncomprehending, hatred bringing a snarl to his lips.

“Oh, yes, very good,” the faces said. “It might please you to know that you’re the forty-first person to successfully kill Menoetius Moros. Which means you’re the forty-first person to learn my dirty little secret.”

The Vitatube holding the dead Moros had vanished completely into the floor now, and a second tube was descending rapidly from the ceiling. It lit on the floor and opened like a clockwork box, and Menoetius Moros stepped out of the tube: young, beautiful, terrible, and immaculate in a pressed suit and starched tie, that same knowing smirk yanking on the corner of his mouth.

This time the man himself spoke, the impossible man that Prad had just killed, standing before him, flawless and self-satisfied and smug as ever. “Not that you’ll live to tell anybody about it.”

***************

This week’s flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig involved taking a character created by another author and crafting a short story featuring that character. This feels more like a vignette than a self-contained story, but man, it’s so hard to wrap these things up in tidy little packages…

I used a character offered by elctrcrngr, a devious fellow named Menoetius Moros. He was just too unlikable; I had to try my hand at killing him off. But then, a guy like Moros doesn’t go down easy…

Game Face

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It’s morning, and though the body and mind are refreshed, last night’s revels are too close to memory. I feel them creeping in and coloring my mood. I feel restless. I feel alive. The lump in bed next to me falls aside with a gentle push, and I quick-step to the bathroom.

I check my face in the mirror and find that the hair is a bit too disheveled from sleep, and with a brief calculated swipe of my hand I correct this imperfection. Further inspection reveals that the brows are rather furrowed, as if I’ve been brooding too long over dark thoughts and they have carved their implications into my forehead; with a smooth massage of my fingers, these lines disappear. The eyes: too narrowed, almost suspicious, and an altogether too menacing shade of brown; a pass of the palm and they are wider, friendlier, and a much more lovely shade of green. The lips of the mouth curl upwards at the corners with the hint of secret knowledge and vague amusement, punctuated by the razor’s edge of immaculate white teeth beneath. The hand moves again, and the sardonic bemused mouth is replaced by one that is sober, thoughtful, understanding.

The nose will do for today; I’ve always liked this one.

I go to the window and throw it open. The morning breeze hits my skin like spring water in a parched throat. With a shiver, I sprout freckles. I’ve never had freckles. Today’s a good day to try something new.

*************************

Chuck’s challenge this week is to create not a work of short fiction, but rather a character in just 250 words, the characters to be used in next week’s challenge.

Here’s a character. I think his (or her?) skin could be fun to walk around in.

Bug Report

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You know that feeling you get, right at the edge of sleep, when consciousness has slipped away and that long, dark abyss yawns open in front of you? You lean out over the maw and gravity, like tentacles from the depths, wraps itself around you. Then there’s that tiny little tug, that little yank, and you startle back into waking again, gasping for breath.

I’ve been waiting for that tug for months.

It feels like months, anyway. I guess it could just as easily be five minutes or five years. You start to lose track after a while, and there’s nothing in the long dark to ground you.

Sleep for an eternity, return before dinnertime. That’s the plan, anyway. Some new hyperdrive the big brains in engineering have cooked up. I can only pretend to understand it myself, but they’re sure it works; they’ve tested it on synthetics and the readings say they reached the Pleiades before their programs locked up and they had to be recalled. “Poisoned Apple,” they call it. And guess what they call the protocol that wakes you up? “Prince Charming.” Cute. Some geek was real proud of that one. We left low-earth orbit on schedule, entered hibernation with all readings normal. But something’s wrong. There’s something down here with us. Or up here. Whatever. Whatever this thing is has gotten into our dreams somehow.

Baxter’s dead.

I saw him not long after the sleep began, which I thought was strange. Usually, I dream of home. In fact, I was dreaming of home, of holding my kids and hugging them and telling them how much I’d missed them, Maisie with her uneven ponytails, Drew, missing two teeth different from the last time I saw him. Then they’re gone and there’s Baxter, standing next to the tire swing in my front yard, looking as confused as I feel. He’s bleeding from a cut on his face, he’s sweating like he’s just run six miles in the rainforest, and there’s this living terror in his eyes, like he can’t believe he’s alive. And he asks me — he asks me — if I’m real. Before I can calm down enough to realize that it’s a dream, I’m just imagining it, there’s this screech, like a thousand nails on a thousand chalkboards, and these footsteps. Fast. Too fast, like one of those old silent movies where the action’s sped up. And Baxter looks behind him, and he pisses himself — I know, because I smelled it; I can still smell it — and he takes off running.

I wanted to chase him down, but you know what it’s like; it’s a dream, you can’t move, you’re a prehistoric mosquito trapped in amber.

Then this … thing spirits past me. It’s after Baxter, and it’s terrible. I can’t describe it, but every hair on my body stands up just thinking about it. There’s pure horror radiating off of the thing, and it’s all I can do not to piss myself in fear, just like Baxter did. And as it passes me, it lets me see one thing. Its eye. Slitted and seeking and the color of hellfire, it blurs through the dark like a shooting star, and it stays there in my mind. It goes on chasing after Baxter, but somehow its eye stays there, floating in my vision, peeling back the skin on my soul.

It knows me.

Don’t ask me how I know, but it knows me, from the things I did when I was a snot-faced brat in the third grade selling candy outside the lunchroom, to the affair before my divorce that nobody knew about, to my irrational fear of spiders. I can see all this written on my own face, reflected in that awful eye, and then it’s gone, and my front yard has burned away with it and left me in the dark. I hear Baxter’s running footsteps, but he’s not fast enough, not nearly fast enough, and then all I can hear is screaming and slicing and spilling and then nothing. I’m alone in my dream again, for now.

That was a week ago. Or a month, or more. Who the hell knows? All I know is that my only hope is that Prince Charming will kick in and wake us up before that thing comes back for me.  I only took this posting because they say the windfall is going to be huge, that once they can show that Poisoned Apple works with humans there’ll be money coming out of the walls. But I think they’re gonna be surprised when they wake us up and we’re all dead, our minds turned inside out or roasted in our heads or … whatever that thing does to us.

Baxter’s dead. Soon I’ll be dead too. My luck, that thing will come for me as a plague of spiders. I only hope they give my kids a big payout to keep them quiet.

#

“The subject’s mind is a wreck. He’s a vegetable.”

“But he made the trip?”

“Well, his body made it.”

“That’s good enough for this stage. What was it that fried his brain?”

“Well… we can’t really tell.”

“What do you mean?”

“Right before flatline, his brain lit up like a Christmas tree. Fight-or-flight response, fear response, everything fired at once.”

“He hallucinated and scared himself to death.”

“I’m not sure it was a hallucination. Based on his cognitive scans –”

“What, you’re saying he really saw something that scared him to death?”

“No. I’m just saying, as far as our readings go, he didn’t imagine it.”

“Jesus. What was that?”

“What?”

“It looked like a spider just crawled out of your terminal. Must have imagined it. How long before the next round of testing is ready?”

“Just a few days.”

“Keep me posted. I’m headed home. Too late already, tonight.”

“Sleep well, sir.”

******

Chuck’s challenge for the week was an X meets Y mashup. I drew “Nightmare on Elm Street” meets “Snow White.” Which is just oodles and oodles of fun. Good job, brain, working on this one right before bedtime.