Tag: Science Fiction

Terrible Reviews: Welcome to Limetown

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There’s this thing I’ve been looking for for a long time.

It’s something missing in contemporary media.

We have fantastic books, mind-blowing films, life-encompassing television shows, soul-consuming video games. The literature and stories are awesome. But one medium has fallen by the wayside: media for the ear.

Storytelling has become more and more visual as cameras and the ability to broadcast have become accessible for any berk with a smartphone and internet access. And that’s a good thing, awesome even. But for years before the television came around, it was stories for the ear that captivated audiences; stories where only the actors’ voices, soundtrack, and sound effects told the story. It’s hard to believe that we could be so captivated these days. But that’s what I’ve been waiting for.

Podcasts are taking us back in that direction — just look at the success of Serial to see that. And I loved Serial. But, at its heart, Serial was a detached look into a cold case twenty years gone; an examination of facts and places and names and events, kept at a journalist’s clinical distance.

But I wanted something that went one step further. Something that would tell a story that would suck me in, a story where I could care about the characters, where there was a lingering behind-the-scenes mystery, where there’s that unease and tension that can only be crafted by a master storyteller.

Well, it’s here.

I discovered Limetown yesterday while my wife and I were looking for something to listen to on the drive out to Grandma’s house. Today, I listened to the second episode.

And I am hurting. HURTING. For the next episode.

From their website, Limetown Stories:

Ten years ago, over three hundred men, women and children disappeared from a small town in Tennessee, never to be heard from again.

In this seven-part podcast, American Public Radio host Lia Haddock asks the question once more, “What happened to the people of Limetown?”

The show begins in that clinical sense that Serial and This American Life use, but by the end of the first and carrying on over into the second episode, the show takes a hard left and the story comes to life. I won’t be sharing spoilers here, because you really owe it to yourself to go and have a listen. But this is that thing I’ve been looking for.

It’s masterfully crafted. It’s believably voiced. It’s beautifully soundtracked. It’s science fiction, thriller, suspense, human interest, all in one. And it has its hooks in me something fierce. It’s like This American Life meets Welcome to Night Vale. Serial meets The X-Files. Your local nightly news broadcast meets Fringe. If you like science fiction, if you like the unexplained and the inexplicable, you’ll love this. If you enjoy the fiction I post up here, Limetown is right up your alley.

There are only two episodes out so far, with another five slated for the coming months, and they cannot get here soon enough.

If you are listening to podcasts, you need to be listening to Limetown. Seriously. Go get it.

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.