post_title
stringlengths 4
310
| body
stringlengths 1k
8k
| score
int64 -6
4.95k
| gilded
int64 0
38
| post_score
int64 0
4.41k
| __index_level_0__
int64 0
232k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
[WP] It's hard to make time when there's simply none left.
|
From her device sprang vibrant multicolored wildebeest rode by none other than Sir Seuss, or at least this representation of him.
"If you are so serious, why am I getting the contact, I barely hold onto a large amount of speed-time" Lizard stretched while speaking. With a tap and a motion the mountain vista changed into a stark interrogation room, like a sideaway room on a spaceship deck.
Her clothes changed, more professional, stylish, although she had no way of changing Sir Seuss out of his ridiculous get-up. She liked using her code with a live human participant to enjoy it. She smiled. Her pretty white teeth showing, her hair arranged so astutely, her body kept up to date with all the best exercise schedules and training.
"Lisa."
Lizard's mouth twitched. Not polite, not the right start at all.
He threw his hands up, defensively "Just, give me a chance," Sir Seuss said.
"I'm not called that. No one uses their birth names," there was good reason, it could get you identity displaced, or was this just a negotiating tactic? She couldn't simply have his speed-time, willy-nilly like, not like the rest of the things in the world that anyone had access to, at any time.
"It's not going to matter. Things are slowing down, and the networks aren't going to last. It'll be years, maybe a long time, but I am speculating," she interrupted saying, "Speculating, on what? Things aren't slowing, so what? You're predicting the collapse of society? People have said that for ages, but energy is everywhere and we've got the moon and comets. Simply put, the lifestyle we've got is sustainable."
There were no hold-ups, dropped connections, no delays, no waiting, no lines, no rejections, no lack of capacity. They had it all open to them, the only constraint was speed-time. Of course Sir Seuss knew that.
Sir Seuss petted the wildebeest before destabilizing its image and taking off his large crooked top hat. He said, "I got a new job, it's making time more valuable. Or else we turn out like people who get tired of paradise"
He waited, for her to respond. His jacket was rumpled, but pristine and clean, covered in a resin or lacquer coating.
"And?" she threw out the curt response, absentmindedly ticking the notification that she had left for herself, she was supposed to ask him about whether he had gone to others with this trade.
"This trade is going to be terribly one-sided. I'm sorry."
| 1 | 0 | 4 | 193,605 |
[WP] Two very old immortals meet each other on a busy street by chance. Each having believed they were the only one until now.
|
Didn't follow the prompt, but hey whatever
After we were forced apart, some of us took to mountain caves and other dark places. I don't know what became of the dark ones. Maybe they bred, maybe they formed colonies. Good riddance to them.
We all were scared, but the dark ones were cowards. They scrambled from the sun like rodents, on all fours, squealing, feral, and disgusting. They ran. We didn't chase them.
I don't really remember how it felt to take my first breath of air. I don't remember much of the first days, apart from the primal terror and the constant battle to stay alive. The jungle was not kind to us.
I have a foggy memory. Her and I were naked, running as fast as we could, twisting through the brush. Something was growling behind us, and beating the ground with hooves. It was gaining on us, and we weren't going to make it. She turned her head to me. She stopped. I shrieked at her; she wouldn't move. I grabbed her. The beast arrived. I grabbed her, I ran, and I slipped – all I can remember after that is pain, Unbearable, white pain.
I survived, I guess. She was gone. I never forgot her.
We made it out of the jungle, eventually, and settled in a cave on the coast. There were more of us. We had a good life there. We thrived.
Most of my friends died; but some stayed. We were the old ones. As the new ones were born, we helped them, so they wouldn't forget our knowledge.
We began to progress. We went to the desert, to the fertile land. You know the story. Well, I lived it. It felt like a flash; it felt like forever.
And somehow, I...well, we, wound up here. I don't feel like I have to help out much, anymore. I've been wandering.
I would know her if I saw her. Believe me, I've been looking. But there's so many of us now.
Somehow, I know that she's not in any crowd. I've checked.
I've been through all the dark places. I've seen them, the terrible creatures, the abominations. They didn't take her.
There's one place that I haven't checked. It's a deep place, a bad place, a hot, dead place, a rotting, festering place. And I'm there now. I'm looking down the crevice, into the void. And I know she's down there. Once I go, I will not return.
I've seen enough of this world. It is time to see my friend.
| 1 | 0 | 669 | 65,956 |
[WP] In future human society gender no longer exists. The difference between biological sexes (XX and XY) is as inconsequential as the difference between hair colors. Describe what dating is like.
|
This silence isn't awkward; no, not in the least. Great works of art need no words.
Those eyes. If they weren't reflecting the flickering candle from the table behind me, they'd still radiate perfection anyway. Those sapphire black holes, what I would do to be sucked in for eternity. Which, coincidentally, is how long this waiter is taking to greet us. Maybe I am lost. Maybe *I* am waiting. I should say something to break this silence, but moving might disturb such beauty.
That smile. Each tooth a star; shimmering, blinding. Dimples like craters waiting to be explored, waiting to be touched and disturbed. What do they feel like? How far do they go down? Will I be ready for the plunge?
"So, where's this stupid waiter anyway..?"
A choir of angels, a live orchestra; keep speaking. Words. What are words worth? Did my shrug and smile suffice? The smile, it's dissipating; I wonder if I've blown my chance at escaping this heaven I trapped myself in. Who am I, anyway?
"Hey, are you, like, okay..?"
More words. Am I showing signs of disinterest?
That posture. As if sculpted out of marble; unwavering, royal. How can a person exhibit such quality in such quantity? I wonder, do they know of their perfection? No, their humility is obviously the overwhelming aura I feel.
"He-llo, can you *hear* me?"
That gust of fresh air, a hand waving back and forth; this smell of lotion is intoxicating. Why doesn't mine make my hands smell so divine? What I would give for hellos and goodbyes every day, savoring that sweet aroma.
"So hey, I'm just gonna...go, like, freshen up real quick, okay? Be right back!"
Those legs; perfect pillars, gliding. Hair, bouncing so effortlessly in the distance. If I didn't prefer blondes I never would have been able to bask in such a flow. Thank God for blondes. Thank you, God.
Waiting. I *am* waiting.
Where is that waiter, anyway?
| 1 | 0 | 4 | 98,097 |
[WP] "Grandpa, tell me about your life as a pirate"
|
"Grandpa, tell me about your life as a pirate!"
Johnny had always been curious about everything. With bright eyes brimming with questions and an unquenchable eagerness to explore, Johnny kept his parents sick with worry and delighted me with his antics and innocuous interrogations.
"I don't think your father would like it very much if I told you about that, Johnny"
He pouted. He always did that when anything was denied to him.
"But you promised me! You promised you'd tell me anything if I won!"
It was true. I had hoped he would forget our wager before the family soccer game, but it seemed his memory hadn't been hurt by that last minute header into the back corner of the net.
I glanced over at my son, a mixture of concern and pride on his face, and gave him a wink. He sighed, smiled, and settled back in his own seat. He had heard this story before. He had asked the same question when he was about Johnny's age. Like father, like son...
"A long, long time ago, when grandpa was big as you are now, the government decided that it was bad if people could keep doing whatever they wanted, taking whatever they wanted. Just like that time you took Sally's pencil case home from school without asking her."
I saw my daughter-in-law Kara slip into the room, caught her brief frown at my words. I smiled and continued on.
"Well just like your mother and father told you off for taking Sally's pencil case, the government went around telling people they couldn't just take things without asking permission or paying for it. They had men, top men, men with guns, men who would sit in ships and planes looking at screens for any sign of pirates. That's what they called them, pirates. I wa-"
"What did the pirates take, Grandpa?"
"Johnny!", Kara exclaimed, "Don't interrupt your Grandpa!"
I winked at Johnny, and nodded.
"That's a good question. At first it was just small things, things they thought people wouldn't notice, things from rich people who had too much anyway. Songs, movies, books, that kind of thing. It got a lot worse later on though, pirates started stealing secret information the government didn't want people to see. That's when I started being a pirate too."
"Why did you do it?"
"Let me tell you a secret, Johnny. There's nothing stronger than a thought, an idea, and the government back then wanted everyone to be the same, to think the same. I started pirating because I wanted to fight against that. I wanted to be free. I wanted to show people that not paying for something was just another form of protest against the way things were."
"What happened to the pirates, grandpa? Where did they all go?"
"We won. My friends, people I didn't even know all over the world, all the pirates, we won. People began to realise that we weren't just thieves like the government wanted them to think. We were the start of something bigger, a fight for our independence as individuals, and once ordinary people started realising that, the government couldn't keep trying to stop us. After that, after all the arguing and fighting and wars that you learn about in class, we went back to just being people. Normal people. Your grandma had had your dad before the end, and we had to look after him. And all those things that we fought for, we made sure that your mum and dad and you would be able to have them too."
I gestured at the framed document on the wall, a copy of the Internet Constitution of 2021.
"We wrote the NetCon to make sure that nobody could ever take away our freedoms. And when you turn 18, you'll be able to sign up to the Free Download Registry and do what all those pirates used to do."
Johnny's eyes sparkled. "Can I be a pirate when I turn 18?", he asked his parents.
I think the thought of being a pirate excited him, but it had been a lot worse than that at the time. The scout drones that would track illegal wireless signals, and the hunter drones that would follow up with High Altitude Conventional Kinetic Strikes. That nearly decimated the movement, until we learned to route our signals through antennas planted on the top of government buildings. The clandestine meetings in virtual reality, the double and triple agents, the betrayals and the massacres. The Online Wars and the clash of trillions of lines of code from millions of coders and decoders. The last ditch attempt to take down the entire Net through airburst nuclear detonations to produce EMP pulses, and the weeks and months of misery that followed. The sacrifices that people made, just to survive.
My son saw the change in my expression, and knew what thoughts were running through my mind. The reason the Registry had nearly 100% participation was because every adult was taught the full extent of the cost of the Registry after they turned 18. We who survived wanted the costs to be never forgotten.
"Johnny, that's enough for tonight. Say goodnight to Grandpa, you've got school in the morning."
Johnny pouted at his father, but turned and ran to my screen and gave the camera a kiss.
"Thank you for the story Grandpa. Goodnight!"
I smiled and waved as his mother led him out of the room, leaving me alone with my son.
"You know Dad, one day he's going to ask why you're only ever on the screen, why you don't visit for real. I know I did after you told me the pirate story the first time. Don't you think it'd be better if you told him the truth?"
The truth. That I would never be able to walk or touch or breathe the free air again. That I would be forever consigned to a screen, my eyes replaced by cameras, my voice replaced by speakers. Before the end, to make sure that something would survive, someone who would be able to tell future generations of our struggle, a few of us had volunteered to have our consciousnesses uploaded to the Net. That truth.
"I'll tell him the same thing I told you, son."
"That it's a secret?"
"Yeah. It'll give him something to pirate."
edit: spelling
| 11 | 0 | 25 | 41,146 |
[WP] Just before arriving home, you see a man carrying weapons moving towards your front door
|
"I have considered myself a cold guy my entire life. Hell, I don't even know why I decided to have children with the only person who loved me for who I am and not for how much money I have since I'm so cold that I would never thought that I could become a good father. But THAT afternoon was the first time I had lost control in my life.
Look, I'm not trying to make you feel like I'm the victim here, I just want you to understand how I felt. I know I will never fix that mistake.
Every day at the job is a fucking hell because everybody hate me so the only moment of the day that I can relax and be truly happy is when I come home and see my wife.
When I saw that unknown woman with black sunglasses walking determinedly towards the door of my house, carrying an automatic carbine like it was the most normal thing in the world, I totally lost it. In seconds I realized by the way the woman carried the gun (like it wasn't heavy at all) that that woman was probably a professional.
Without hesitation I pressed the acelerator. At the speed I was going I was sure that I was gonna lift her into the air but I stepped over her and I ended up crashing against my garage's door.
Bleeding from the head, completely confused and scared I decided to get off the car to make sure that I had killed that woman that was about to assault my home. With effort I took off the seat belt and got off my car.
The woman was lying faceup with blood sliding down his mouth looking at me while she had seizures. She still had the carbine in her hand and I was surprised that she hadn't tried to shoot me. As I staggered to her to finish her up I heard the door of my house and I saw my wife leaving the house with a horror expression.
<< Oh my god! What have you done?! >> she yelled at me.
What my wife had yelled me made me more confused than I already was. When I turned towards her to answer her question I realized with horror what was happened. I couldn't talk. I was completely stunned. My sight was focused in the paintball gun that my wife dropped while she was running to help the woman who was probably her friend."
(Is my english bad? If it is please excuse me)
| 1 | 0 | 16 | 185,915 |
[WP] "Leapers" are rare people born in a leap year on the 29th of February who age four times slower than everyone else. But there are whispered legends about individuals born during a leap century... and beyond.
|
When Ben looked back, he wondered how they hadn't realised the true horror of what they were thrusting upon their child.
Had they really been completely blind to what they were doing? He lay awake every night, searching over his memories of the months they had spent planning and preparing, looking for when the misgivings had begun. Had Amy known, deep down, what it meant? Had she suspected? All he could remember was brief flashes - the sight of her poring for hours over calendars and charts until they had the date down exactly; her tearful joy when the test had turned blue; the swell of her stomach under his palm; her gripping his hand in excitement when the contractions had started, the pain seemingly nothing compared to her elation.
He had loved the baby. Their baby. Of course he had. She had been handed to him in the delivery room and although he had been ready for it, looking into her tiny blue eyes was still an amazing rush. He had loved her immediately.
Now he lay in the dark of their bedroom, unable to stop himself probing his memories like a sore tooth. Everyone knew that Leapers were blessed, wonderful creatures, practically immortal by human standards. They had only wanted the same for their child. Didn't every parent? Weren't millions of births now occurring in the February of every year, putting a huge strain on hospitals? When Amy had started talking about going one better, he had only thought of what a glorious idea it was. Hadn't he? He searched, again and again, for some inkling in his memory of what it would come to. There was never anything.
Amy appeared in the doorway. The landing light was on behind her, turning her into a silhouette. Even so, Ben could tell she was holding the baby in her arms.
'Would you take her? Please, I'm so tired,' Amy said. Her voice cracked. Ben considered turning away from her, going back to sleep and letting her reap what she had sown. Hadn't it been, he thought savagely, her idea in the first place? But then the familiar wave of guilt swept over him and he got up, painfully and slowly, crossing the room to take the baby from his wife. She handed over the mewling bundle gratefully, her hands shaking. Ben fumbled with the blankets for a moment and when he looked up, Amy was crawling into bed fully clothed, weeping silently. His anger at her surged again and he pushed it back.
'I'll take her out in the car. It might send her off,' he said. Amy nodded. Her hair, thin and grey, fell across her face. Her eyes were closing as he shut the door.
He buckled the baby into her car seat. It seemed to take an age, his fingers stiff and clumsy. He was sure there had been a time when he had done this smoothly, but it wasn't a memory he had held onto. When he slid behind the wheel of the car and checked the rearview mirror, the baby was staring back at him. Her eyes were wet and her bottom lip was wobbling. He looked down, concentrated on starting the engine and reversing carefully out of the drive.
'You were a mistake,' he said softly. It was gone midnight and they were alone on the road. The words fell out of him before he could think about what he was saying. 'We should never have done it. We didn't think. We were just kids ourselves, stupid and young and invincible.' He glanced at the baby. Miracle of miracles, she was silent, her blue eyes still fixed on his.
'Children born on the right date who lived extraordinarily long lives. What parent wouldn't want their child to live longer, have more time in the world? It seemed... amazing.' He gripped the wheel tightly, staring into the darkness beyond the windscreen. 'And your mother, she was so clever. So bright. Maybe she's not the only one who thought of it but that hardly matters now.'
He laughed, and was dismayed at the hysteria in the sound.
'She worked it all out. Leapers, they live four times as long. What if we had our baby, our special, planned baby, on the right day in a leap *century*? We'd have a child that would live so much longer, have so much more... life, just life. What better gift could we give you?'
The baby was still looking at him. He wondered if she understood. If that were possible, after all this time.
'We didn't know. I'm so sorry, but we didn't know. There's never been anyone like you before, there was no one to warn us, and we didn't.... the Leapers, nobody talked about...' Ben began to cough, hacking until his eyes began to water and he pulled over sharply, cutting the engine with one hand while the other covered his mouth. The fit passed as suddenly as it had came. He opened the door and got out, unbuckled the baby from her seat and held her against his chest. She cawed and waved her fists, catching him on the chin with one. Ben looked around. They had stopped on a bridge, and he could hear the rush of water running nearby. He began to walk towards the railings, something black and poisonous unfurling in his head.
'This is a kindness,' he whispered. He clutched the baby against his chest as he stared down into the river, ignoring her indignant squawk. Her hair smelled like old milk and talcum powder. 'Maybe, if you had grown quicker... but Amy is old now, and I'm even older. We have maybe 10 years left. How many till you can hold your own head up, or feed yourself?' He shuffled closer to the edge, his coat flapping around them. 'And once we're gone, who will look after you? Who even could? Better, better to do it now...'
He kissed the top of the baby's head. He was crying now and his throat felt thick and closed. He held her over the edge.
'I thought you would live forever,' he cried. 'I didn't know, I swear I didn't know it would be like this.'
He opened his hands.
Afterwards, when he was driving home, an unfamiliar feeling rushed over him. After a long moment, he realised it was relief.
| 11 | 0 | 99 | 133,931 |
[WP] A marine gets sent back in time, he wakes up in a roman colosseum. His battle is next.
|
The agent was clearly under some stress of his own.
"Tell me Marine. Explain this statue of YOU, with YOUR name on it, with YOUR dogtags on it, that we just unearthed in Italy. What happened to Jenkins? And where the Hell did this woman come from?"
-----------
"AFFIX BAYONETS!" Gunny screamed.
We were low on ammo, totally surrounded, and beat to the ground; but we never go out without a fight. We had fire in our eyes, muscles ready to explode, and rage emanating from every cell in our bodies. We payed no matter to the crying, cowering mess against the wall. We would come back to rescue him, *again*. How did he ever get through boot camp? I got even more angry.
"CHARGE!"
The last men standing leapt over the wall towards the fuckers that took out half the platoon. I tried, but my foot was being held down by something. We were either going to make it to the building and cut some people down, or we were going to die trying.
I did neither.
I woke up naked in a cell underground, chants unlike any I've ever heard. I stood up to see dozens of men in various physical states and a variety of old attire. They gave me no time to get my bearings. This had to be some kind of joke, I thought. This shit is straight out of some movie. A dying man was dragged by, guts trailing as his grunting faded into labored breathing. This was real and it was fucked up. Not even the biggest shitbag could fake that sorry state to get out of PT. Well, there's one guy I know who would have the audacity to try, and he was nowhere to be seen.
I was moved into some chamber, forcefully directed towards some tall bastard waving my pistol around. He was trying to figure out how to hold it. Another few were examining my armor, clothing, and rifle. One guy scoffed at my fabric armor and strange clothing. The others made spearing motions with my rifle among loud arguments about -as their body language would implythe proper way to hold it.
Thank goodness for safeties.
If these idiots were going to have my weapons, I sure as hell wasn't going to teach them how to use 'em. I made clubbing motions with my hands for the pistol and my best bayonet posture for the rifle. They stopped talking, glared at me, looked at each other, looked at me again, and burst into laughter.
This attracted the attention of their version of a Gunny, who prompted them to give me some of my gear.
A rifle against 8 guys in close quarters wouldn't be easy, maybe I could scare them enough to work my way out, but they seemed to be soldiers too. I could detonate the grenades, but I wasn't suicidal. These thoughts made no difference, they held on to my guns until I was out in the arena.
There's no way this is a joke, I thought. No way in fucking hell. Tens of thousands of people were going nuts, horns were blowing, giant banners hanging all over with elaborate logos. No PFCs could throw something like this together. I was in the past, being prepped to fight.
My rifle and pistol were thrown in front of me, the soldiers backed up, and pointed towards some figure on the other side. I quickly picked my weapons up before eyeing up the figure before me.
NO. FUCKING. WAY. Of all the people in existence, there was one person, just ONE fucking person, that could take the worst day of my life and turn it into the greatest shitshow in history.
George. Fucking. Jenkins: The crying bitch who got us ambushed in the first place. The guy who got out of the CFT for gout of all fucking reasons. He was looking around at the audience, also wearing full gear, trying to raise excitement. He was a cocky prick, but I needed his help to get out of his mess.
"Hey Jenkins, it's me! How much ammo you got? We can take 'em!" I yelled.
*flash* I flinched. **CRACK**
The stadium went silent.
"I'm not letting you kill me!!!" Jenkins yelled back.
*flash flash flash* I flinched again. **CRACK CRACK CRACK**
His marksmanship was as lacking as his intellect. I mean, nobody in the crowd was screaming. A MARINE, that couldn't shoot a man 100 yards away, that couldn't hit a single person in the ocean of people that was in this audience.
"DUDE, WHAT THE FUCK?!!! We're together on this, don't shoot at *me*!"
"We'regladiatorsI'msupposedtokillyou!" He yelled, followed by wheezing. The sandbagging cunt winded himself from merely talking.
*flash flash flash* **CRACK CRACK CRACK**
Again, nobody was hit. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. My mind was on repeat. There's no way a human could be so stupid... or be so bad at shooting. The audience was chatty. They had never seen such an event. Two oddly dressed gladiators, yelling in an unheard language, one of which was imitating an angry Jupiter with the small thunder from his "spear".
"JENKINS! We're Marines! We're going to fight THEM! Shoot the box with the important looking people in it! I'll cover you!"
"You're just going to kill me when I point away!"
*flash flash flash* **CRACK CRACK CRACK** This time the rounds landed around my feet.
"I'M! WITH! YOU!"
I pointed my rifle at the box. The people didn't move. Thanks to can't-shoot-for-shit-Jenkins, they think our "spears" are harmless.
"Let's do this!"
*flash flash flash* **CRACK CRACK CRACK**
He shot at me again. I had had enough. I was going to take on the stadium by myself, and erase this useless piece of meat from history. He just became my enemy. I racked a round, clicked off the safety, raised my rifle, exhaled, paused, and squeezed. **CRACK** A red mist shot out from his helmet. Jenkins was down. I ran up to him to verify the fact and protect his gear.
The crowd was silent, nobody could move. This was my chance to make a point. I aimed at the nearest soldier and pulled the trigger. He fell to the floor. They knew the strength was in my weapon, I had to convince them I was the only one who could wield it. I took Jenkins' rifle, safed it, and tossed it towards another soldier. I put my rifle on the ground and made a "come at me" gesture. A soldier picked it up and tried to pull the trigger, it wouldn't go off. I shot him too. They surrounded me, each a braver man than I could ever be, and began to advance. I pointed my rifle at the important figures in the box. They all stopped.
The weapon was magical. The gladiator before them the only man who could use it. The Emperor was his next target.
The soldiers stood down.
----------------
"Sir, I can't begin to explain how I negotiated my way out of there. I think it was a series of implicit understandings that I was powerful but merciful and I just wanted to get out of there. They must have thought I was a God of some sort.
Later on I learned they just didn't want to piss me off, so they basically gave me a nice house and a stipend and invited me to all sorts of parties. I think they realized that I was no God after a while, it was just more entertaining to them to act as if I were. I charged stupid amounts of money to let people fire my rifle, but only once. I even picked up a wife! That's the woman in the next room, sir. Tacita. I really want her back. She's sweeter than any I've ever met and fuckin' hot too. I taught her some English, but she still struggles with it.
Anyway, things got out of hand a few years later when some up-and-coming artist built a statue. The higher-ups didn't take too kindly to that. Rumor was they took it as a threat to the the state or something. It was at some party that my wife and I drank some wine and collapsed on the spot. We held on to each other, knowing that some ass had poisoned us. We just wanted to be together.
Then I woke up in this weird place. Tell me, Agent, just what the hell is going on with me? When can I leave?"
"Son, being what you are, it's not that simple..."
| 1 | 0 | 192 | 175,463 |
[WP] You find out that the interpretations or Hell and Heaven are the opposite of what people think. Tell me a story on how you found this out.
|
[Excerpt from a novel in the works]
He pulled me into an alley and pressed me up against the wall, looking over my shoulder and around the corner to make sure we had lost our pursuit.
"What – what are they!?" I gasped.
He stepped back and looked into my eyes taking a deep breath as if to settle his nerves. "Angels."
Before I could even respond he yanked me down the alleyway in a vice-like grip.
"Angels?" I gasped stumbling along behind. "But, then why are we running."
Realization hit me like a ton of bricks.
"Wait. Are you –"
"Yes." He didn't even slow as my feet froze to the ground, he simply continued pulling me along. My feet skidding along and I finally had to get the moving again or trip over them.
I thought about screaming, and he almost intuitively cut me off.
"Don't think about screaming. You __don't__ want them to find you."
"Me!? Me? They're after you! You're a - a –"
"Demon?" He finished for me and I felt the familiar irritation that he could already read me so well.
"Yeah, Devil Spawn."
He turned and faced me grabbing my other hand. Feeling handcuffed I thought about trying to wriggle free but he was to strong, and – why had he saved me before.
"Why do you think they call demon's fallen angels?"
"Cause you betrayed God and were banished to the Hell as punishment."
"Where is Heaven?" he asked me.
"I don't know," I answered.
"Where do people always point when they speak of heaven?"
"Up." I replied.
"And Hell?"
"Down."
"And where is earth supposed to be?"
"In the middle."
"Right, the crossroads. If you wanted to get to heaven from hell, where would you go?"
My mouth dropped.
"Or the other direction?"
"Wait, so you're a demon searching for redemption?"
"Something like that." He let go of my hands, turned and started down the alley.
I hesitated a moment before following. "And Angels?"
"I don't really know why, but yeah. Maybe they're not looking to get to Hell, but they sure aren't happy with
heaven. They enjoy playing with people's lives a bit too much. Maybe that's why they're still around. And they've taken a special interest in you."
"But – but – but," I stuttered.
"The word you're looking for is why. And I know someone who might have an idea."
| 3 | 0 | 3 | 109,204 |
[WP] The awkward conversation between two dollar bills who first met in a church collection plate, and a week later bump into each other in a strippers fishnets.
|
It was an average Sunday, and church was nearing it's end for the day. Collection plates were being passed around while Father Dominic carefully reminded everyone of the church's need for a new nursery. Slowly the plates made their way through the pews collecting dollars here and there with the occasional 5 or 20.
George had just been placed in the plate and turned to greet the crisp new dollar bill next to him. "Morning friend. A good day to be with God is it not?"
Alexander looked at this new dollar and smiled. "Yes it is. Blessings to you. I'm Alex. It's been a wonderful service today hasn't it?"
"Yes, I love the book of genesis. Kinda makes me think of the big picture."
"I agree makes you feel small but important to the eyes of God."
The pleasantries and small talk of the two dollars continued until they fell into the natural silence that money enjoys. The plate was passed around until everyone who was going to give had done so, and the church was empty save for church staff. Father Dominic counted the day's donations in his office.
"Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty, eighty-one. That's all? A small amount today. With the economy the way it is I don't really blame them. Oh well."
He chuckled to himself and slid the stack of money off of his desk and into a box labeled 'Below $100'.
One week later George was awakened from his sleep by the sound of music playing. Confused as to what was happening, he listened for clues as to where he was. (Money is good at doing that)
"And now give it up for the girl of the hour, Sapphire!"
There was applause and the wallet he was in was opened, basking the contents in light. There were a lot if other dollars I here, but he didn't get a chance to look before the were pulled out. With only enough time for George to take one breath of fresh(ish) air, he was flung at the stage along with the rest of his stack. The target of the money picked him up and slid him into the blue fabric of a G-string.
This wasn't a convenience store or other decent establishment! No, this was much more...adult. George was disgusted with himself. How did he end up here? Last he knew he was at the church!
George hardly had anymore time to think when he was interrupted by wild yelling far away. While he couldn't discern the exact words, he knew it was getting closer. The woman he was on was passing up another few dollars. "Woo! Yea baby! How much to take it off? Come on gurl! Just a peek! Aw yea, in the G-string!"
George was astounded. The voice was familiar, yet the words were so foul. He knew nobody that would frequent a place like this. It was then that he saw Alexander from church slide in beside him. Alex on the other hand had taken no notice to George. "That's what I'm talking about! Yes!"
"Alex? Is that you?"
Alex was surprised. He'd never seen anyone who recognized him at places like this. "Oh, George? Hey man, what's uh... What's up?"
"Was that you yelling a moment ago?"
"What? Me? Absolutely not. I've been er, sleeping. Yea."
Alex tried to play it off cool, but George wasn't buying it.
"Sleeping... Okay then. Do you come to places like this often?"
"No, well, I've been a few times. I guess."
George had to hold himself from saying anything rude."A few times huh? Alright then. Sorry to interrupt you I suppose. It was... Good seeing you again."
" Yea, you too. See you at church next week?"
"We'll see."
George has been thinking about the new church across from the school.
*sorry if this is long, got in the zone*
| 13 | 0 | 400 | 188,150 |
[WP] Jesus is out for justice, his father lied to him.. he wasn't dying for the sins of mankind, he was dying for the sins of his father. Now it is payback time...
|
"Nailed to beams and hung out to die like shitty laundry."
Jesus thought to himself, the half-chewed cigar clenched in his grinning teeth. He crouched upon a hill where many centuries ago, he died. He thought he had perished for many. Instead he had met his fate for one. The One. He had witnessed many fathers lie and abandon their sons, but nothing like this. The Divine Father , the one whom everyone claimed to be perfect, was a liar. No matter. Pops had made plenty of enemies. He was dressed in a camouflage tank top, cargo pants, and combat boots with a red bandana tied around his head Rambo-style. He continued to munch on his cigar as the sun began to descend over the horizon. Just as the sun settled, a new fire arose, yet not in the sky but from the ground. An inferno of red erupted spontaneously in front of Jesus, but he merely stared at it almost lazily. A man, dressed in a blood red suit with golden tie emerged from the flames.
Lucifer stared in shock at the Son of Man
"Why... Why am I here with you?"
"Because your nature brought you here. I know you appear to troubled souls when they've come to a crossroads. I just happen to be one of them."
"What is troubling you then, did your favorite mortal forget to go to church on Sunday and praise your name? Or did Daddy send your seat at his right hand to get new, comfier cushions without your approval?"
"My father deceived me and prevented me from having what his cherished humans have. I would like revenge."
"Wait, wait, wait... You're barely finding this out now?"
"A little cherub told me."
"How did he lie exactly?"
"He told me I had to die for the sins of the mortals. I really died for his."
"What were his sins?"
"He claimed mortals were Evil and that I needed to die to save them. He created them, influenced their choices, making them Evil. It wasn't their own decision, at least not entirely. I'm tired of him not taking fault for anything. It's time he retires to the Void."
"And you want me to help?"
"Yeah."
"... Oh hell I'm not gonna miss out on this."
Suddenly, into Jesus's hands appeared an M60 machine gun as a bald eagle flew down and stopped at his side. An American flag hung from it's tail feathers.
"What's with all the freedom?"
"I don't know why, but I admire that true 'Merican spirit."
"Suit yourself."
The two immortals then climbed aboard the broad back of the bird and flew into the heavens, ready to bring liberty and justice into heaven itself.
Jesus stormed in through the Pearly Gates in a blind rage, opening fire upon many un-judged souls waiting to meet the big man like kids waiting for Santa at the mall. As a guardian angel came forth, confused on how to react to Jesus going Makarov status, our Lord and Savior threw a tomahawk through his forehead, ceasing his thinking all together.
God erupted from his chair, confused at his son's sudden outburst as defiance to his own commandments. Before he could say a word, Lucifer pushed him back ini his seat and restrained the heavenly being to his throne. Jesus then pushed his father to the edge of the clouds.
"What is the meaning of this? My son, why?"
"Do unto others what has been done to you."
And with that, Jesus Spartan kicked his father from the heavens as he plummeted into the void.
| 8 | 0 | 84 | 69,010 |
[WP] Write something with a twist that I really should've seen coming
|
Jack opened the briefcase and ran his fingers through the bills, caressing Benjamin Franklin's tattered face.
"I see you have it," whispered Michael. Michael was wearing blue jeans, a red and white flannel shirt, and grey sneakers. His blonde beard glowed in the black night of a San Francisco alley. He was a short and skinny man, just above five feet. When Michael was nervous, he would incessantly scratch his right hand--leaving red marks and scratches. Michael's hobbies consisted of tea making and crossword puzzles. He always kept a pen in the left pocket of his shirt, and his mind was already racing to solve the next puzzle.
As Jack handed the 3,000 dollars to Michael, a pen fell out of his pocket. He leaned down to get it. He noticed his hand was red, and wondered why. Before he had time to ponder the scratches on his hand, he gave the briefcase to Michael.
But Michael stood motionless. Jack was silent. They both stared at themselves through each other. Only *one* shadow stood in this alley. The capsule with the LSD was empty.
| 17 | 0 | 87 | 10,861 |
[WP] I'm in the mood for a good beginning. Get me hooked in under 200 words.
|
"You're not the type." The ceiling fan above revolved slowly, a satire in this oppressing heat.
"I'm not?" Crant asked, watching Mason pat his sweat-slimed brow with a folded cloth, eyes darting to the exits.
"Greta, get out now," said Mason to the girl lazily approaching the empty seat between us, grabbing her wrist, glassy eyes bulging.
"Please." Urgency in his voice. "Please! Gret!" Almost shouting, a man at another table looked over his shoulder. The singer on stage missed a note.
Greta was in a silk, slight superfluity of a dress, barely there but hugging and cupping everything that very visibly was there.
"He's right *Gret*." Crant said, voice level. Cold as the dead. "You better go."
She covered her mouth, hiding that perfect quivering bottom lip.
"Whatever you're about to say, just be aware that your boyfriend and I each have about 3.5 kg of serious firepower under this table, and your boyfriend has friends, who have some more firepower, but they're some fifteen minutes away."
"So one way or another, at some point in the next fifteen minutes, someone will be scraping the someone's remains off that back wall into a bucket. Now, who will it be?"
| 1 | 0 | 20 | 178,846 |
[CW] The Alphabet Game - How the world really began
|
Ask anyone to describe the furthest reaches of humanity's past and you'll
probably get variations on a few familiar themes — Mesopotamians, The
Flintstones, primordial slime. But what really happened? Could Dennis Smith (no relation) offer a better explanation?
Dennis, 49, from Ipswich, says he has hard evidence about how the world really
began. Evidence that, if it were disseminated, could rock the very
foundations of science.
For centuries now, humans have thought they knew how it all went down. God
made us, or we evolved from muskrats, or God made the muskrats and we evolved
from them afterwards. However, Dennis's theory presents a radical departure
from established schools of thought.
I caught up with him for a chat to see if we couldn't get to the bottom of
this once and for all.
Just looking at Dennis, you wouldn't believe he would be interested in this
sort of thing. Kind eyes and wistful grey hair belie a ruthless business
instinct — Dennis is chairman of three companies and owns his own conveyor-belt
factory. Looking at me over the rims of elegant ivory-framed spectacles, he
begins to explain his theory.
"Mankind is a mystery. Nobody knows why we're here, or where we came from, save
from some wild extrapolation based on these tiny scraps of less than nothing
that we found or dug up or scraped off some rock in the Andes.
"Or you get people who come at it from the other side, saying we're all magical
mystical meat machines and some celestial overseer zapped us into existence
with the end of his rhythm stick. Preposterous! Quite preposterous! Really,
it's quite simple."
So simple, in fact, that I completely missed his point at first, only really
realizing what he had said some hours after we parted.
"The whole affair becomes quite clear when you realize that the Earth is an
intergalactic petting zoo run by rich, stuck-up aliens. Unbeknownst to us, we've
been exhibits to these invisible assholes this whole time! Varquids, they're
called. Why else would I have six extra ribs? X-ray scans confirm it."
"You're nuts," I said.
"Zoo animals have more ribs!"
| 5 | 0 | 42 | 43,623 |
[EU] A Pokemon researcher kills a dugtrio and excavates its body.
|
It had to be done. Morality has hindered scientific progress for too long now. The ethics of the issue could be discussed some other day. Professor Willow's resolve grew by each step as he headed towards Diglett's cave. He had calculated that this specific morning, he could easily encounter something which could make him as famous as Birch or Elm.
The entrance to the eerie cave was riddled with holes. Slowly he made his way inside. The ground gave an appearance of a whack-a-mole game. He had ventured here before. But today it felt different. As he waded through the cave jumping over the holes, he was greeted by Digletts popping up from time to time, angered by the sudden intrusion into their lair.
But Willow had something else in sight. Something better. Patiently he made his way towards what he thought would be the location where it would appear. The intermittent appearances of Digletts annoyed Willow, but he had to remain focused.
It took fifteen minutes of wandering around, but patience finally paid off. The ground shook stronger than usual and from within the rocks emerged a wild Dugtrio. It's appearance startled Willow. The Dugtrio stared at Willow, all six eyes fixed on the Professor, expecting the Professor to make the first move.
The moment had finally arrived. Willow knew that no Pokemon would kill another Pokemon. He didn't need a fainted Pokemon. Slowly he went for his pocket and took out the shiny blade. Dugtrio kept looking at Professor Willow. He crept towards the two feet tall three headed being in front of him, hoping it would not react or flee. With one swift motion of the hand the Professor swung his blade into one of the heads. The earth started shaking violently as the Pokemon tried to retaliate only for the Professor to stab the other two. The shaking stopped after a few seconds. The professor had done something unimaginable. But now was not the time to reflect on his actions or their consequences.
He immediately took the shovel clinging to his bag-pack. The Dugtrio were bleeding and twitching right before him as their neural system waged one final battle. There was no time to wait for the bleeding to stop. He dug around the body or bodies until he hit something hard. This was the moment. Finally to prove that Dugtrio are much larger than previously thought.
Professor Willow, covered in blood, kept on removing sand closer and closer to the heads. He could feel that they had become lose. He took out his rope and tied it to one of the heads, tugging as hard as he could.
It started coming out, which was bad news for the Professor. It felt like a small child. The heads quickly tapered into a single lower body. It was only two feet into the ground. A quick cut into the lower part revealed a single brain. This was not what the Professor wanted to see. He wanted to see a network, a massive body going deep into the ground, spread over many feet. But his hypothesis had been shred to pieces. His hope of fame lay dead in front of him. Suddenly the anti-climactic revelations made him feel bad about the killing.
Professor Willow left the cave dejected, he had waited a long time for this moment in his life. The walk home felt longer than usual. It felt like the purpose of his life had suddenly disappeared. He would soon become the laughing stock of the research community.
Arriving home, the Professor threw his bag on the ground, took out his sleeping pills and just fell onto the ground, blood still covering his hands and clothes.
His dreams were plagued by the stares of the Dugtrio. The Dugtrio had hands protruding from the ground. Each hand carrying Machetes. The Professor was screaming for help. All cries were in vain. The Dugtrio slashed through his body, as it stared deep into the eyes of the wailing Professor. He wanted it to end. Suddenly the earth opened up and he fell down into the abyss for what felt like eternity. At last he was saved. Saved by the bone-crunching bottom which jerked him back to reality. He was profusely sweating and panting. His hands shaking at the thought of what he went through. And suddenly he heard a knock. He looked outside the window to realize it was night. Who could be visiting at this hour, he thought.
"Professor Willow!", said a woman's voice from behind the door. He made his way across the room towards the door, every muscle in his body aching.
"Professor, are you there?", she asked in a loud voice. He did not feel like responding. He quietly made his way towards the door. Looking outside the peep-hole, he realized the mistake he had made. Standing outside this evidence filled house was Jenny.
| 5 | 0 | 6 | 130,412 |
Writing Prompt [WP] You have the ability to freeze time. When you do, everyone freezes as well. One day, you freeze time, and out the window, you see a girl moving around, astounded and confused. Then, she sees you..
|
The look in her eyes started out vague at first, then morphed into more of a curious mind. Then I saw only what I've seen a few times in my life, complete and utter rage. I'm not sure if she knew what she was doing, how new she was to my world. The world of unimaginable power. She cast her eyes to the ground and held it there for a second. Then a minute. Then 5 minutes, 10. I have a strange feeling boiling inside of me, franti. I glance down at my hands and they're trembling, vibrating like my non-existent phone. No. Hell no. How can she do this? I've been trying this strain for years and this 10 year old has it mastered?! I make a step towards the door and I'm out, my body giving off a buzz like a bee too near your face. Why can't I stop this? I have the same powers as her.... I approach her too soon, not given enough time to think, something I have never had to deal with. This world is now flashes of faded images instead of stilled. I'm lucky to have seen where she stands. PleaseIdontknowhowyouredoingthisbutstopitnow. She doesn't seem to understand me so I let my body wander while I cobcentrate all my energy on myself and I slow ever so gently back to how I was. I don't know where I am, I haven't left my house in months, but all I see is my twin speeding off into the distance. Thanks sis. Now I'm it.
| 1 | 0 | 697 | 95,632 |
[WP] It's 2074.
|
Joseph slipped the thick, fur blanket off and let the ceiling fan cool him down. Sweat pooled under his back. He watched the ceiling fan rotate, counting every full rotation. At thirty-four he sighed and twisted to his side. His clothes from last week's laundry were still next to his bed. They had migrated from the tall basket to his chair and then the foot of his bed. He looked at the floor and grimaced. Candy wrappers, empty chip bags, soda cans, water bottles, and fast food wrappers littered the carpeted floor.
He swung his feet to the floor and kicked aside a water bottle. A white, long-haired cat bounded into the room and rubbed against his leg. He reached down and stroked it. "Hey, buddy." He stroked the cat for several long moments, his mind planning the rest of his day. No work today, no nothing. Joseph sighed again before standing up.
He stumbled into the kitchen and after finding nothing worthwhile in the refrigerator, shuffled into the living room where he fell onto the couch. A flick of the wrist and the television powered on. Joseph browsed the channels before letting it rest on the morning news. He slumped back into the couch and let his mind wander.
They were going to be sending a drone to Ganymede next month. To see if it was habitable. Joseph shook his head slightly before giving up the attempt. This god-forsaken moon wasn't even habitable. Humans weren't fit to have habitats. With a flick of the wrist, the news vanished and Joseph navigated to Netflix. He hit the "random television episode" button and watched as it buffered. He thought briefly of Danielle. She'd probably be taking her lunch right about now.
The thought of Danielle triggered a yearning deep in his chest that he couldn't fully comprehend. He wondered if she was thinking about him.
His phone rang and he clapped his hands. "Hello?"
"Joseph, this is Mike."
Joseph cursed silently. "Hey, Mike, sup?"
"I'm having some scheduling issues at work. I'm going to need you to come in today."
Joseph let the silence extend for several seconds before answering reluctantly. "Alright... what time?"
"Now. 'Till close, if you can."
"Yeah, sure."
"Thanks."
Joseph clapped his hands and laid back, eyes on the ceiling. "Nothing new under the sun." He stroked his cat for a couple of minutes, slowly building up the desire to get up and get dressed. He finally got up and headed for his bedroom, feet dragging. He wished he was on Ganymede. Anywhere but Luna.
| 2 | 0 | 8 | 149,191 |
[IP]The Angel of Death
|
It always seems to be over a man.
Rumor has it, when she was still alive, the Angel loved a man who was beneath her status. He was a baker, kind and charitable, and when she would peruse through the humble shops of her family's fiefdom, she would see him talking to his customers. He would smile and joke with them, and at the end of the day he would give the leftover food to the children who waited with sallow cheeks and raggedy clothes. She was unsure whether he was married or not, but she imagined that he would go home to an empty house, maybe with a cat or two, and make himself dinner before he went to sleep.
It was three months before she begged her father for commoner's pence and bought herself a loaf of bread. His smile seemed especially bright for her, and she couldn't help but smile back. They met in secret until her father found out. He wanted her to marry a man of her status, and his family wanted him to do the same.
However, they both refused. They were making plans to leave their families behind, to start a bakery in another town and become husband and wife. Her father, the local lord, had other plans. He ordered his police to round the baker up and execute him without so much as a trial. His execution was ceremonious, involving fanfare and a party over the death of what the lord marked as a spy from a neighboring land. His daughter pleaded with her father, cried, starved herself, threatened him with her own death, and attempted to break the baker out of his prison, but nothing swayed the lord. When she watched through her barred window the baker's head depart from his body, her fury grew to maximum proportions. Wings sprouted from her back and her eyes turned black. The iron bars holding her back sprang forth, and she escaped through the window to face her father. Black tears streamed down her face as she grabbed his sword and decapitated his head in one swift motion. She saw her beloved baker's soul and guided him to the afterlife, while her father's soul was meant to wander until he repented for his deeds. From then on, she would bring the good who died to the afterlife, and brought to justice those that weren't. On her powerful wings she would fly, offering a place of peace and respite or years of wandering and suffering.
At least that's how the story goes.
Honestly, it was kind of bullshit. I mean, this was America, right? Why would there be a statue of a woman who was obviously from a European myth- I mean, *fiefdom*?- in the middle of an American city? That's why we have the Statue of Liberty. I was staring at her face, the tear stains edged in faded copper when suddenly she opened her eyes.
I leapt back in shock. Her mouth creaked open and she said, in just a whisper, "You look just like him."
| 2 | 0 | 20 | 110,798 |
[IP] The Lone Sentinal
|
As I summited the mountain, I was greeted by the now familiar sight of The Dog. He sat at the edge of the mountaintop, staring out across the plain, at the range in the distance, just as he had been the last time. Just as he had been the time before that, and the time before. I don't know exactly when he started his vigil, or why he sat out here, but I knew I had come here five times over the past few months and every time he was there, sitting, staring, waiting.
The first time I saw him, I wasn't sure what to make of him. I kept my distance, nervous about the strange dog sitting at the top of the mountain, looking out into the distance. The second time, I tried approaching him, holding out my hand and talking softly. He ignored me, simply sat and stared. I tried petting him gently, and his tail started to wag, so I sat with him for a while, and simply pet him. Next time, I decided to bring him a snack, which he promptly wolfed down without ever taking his eyes off the horizon. After that, I always made sure to bring along a small bag of dog food, a bowl and some extra water. He seemed to appreciate it, and I felt better knowing he got some decent food, even if it was only every once in a while.
I greeted him softly as I walked up, and was rewarded by a halfhearted wag of his tail. I smiled, and brought out his food, holding it up for him to eat so he wouldn't have to crane his neck so badly to keep his eyes up. When he was finished, I put the bowl away in my pack and sat down next to him. He leaned against me gently, and I could swear I could sense him thanking me. I ran a hand up and down his back as I joined him looking out across the plain at the foot of the mountain.
It was beautiful, in a desolate sort of way. The emptiness felt natural, almost as if everything living simply left it alone for some reason. Well, almost everything. I glanced at my silent companion. There was something out there. Something he was waiting for. I wasn't sure what, or why he was so dead set on waiting for it, but I knew he was determined. Almost four months now he had been here, and not once had I seen him move more from this spot.
I looked him over carefully, noting the dirt caked into his fur, the mats and tangles that covered him, his nails that had grown far too long. I shook my head, and promised myself next time I was here I would bring a brush and some nail clippers. Maybe some dog shampoo while I was at it. Hell, if I was going to go to all that trouble, I may as well grab a friend or two and haul a cheap plastic dog house up here for him. But no, I couldn't do that. They would think I was crazy for not just taking him home. Maybe I was. Maybe I should just take him home with me, stop this whole waiting for nothing nonsense and drag him back to a caring family.
I knew I couldn't do that, though, just as I knew he wouldn't come back with me no matter what I tried. He was here for the long haul, and he wasn't going to move until he found what he was waiting for. I sighed quietly and shook my head, then put the bowl back in front of him and filled it with water. Clippers, a brush, and some shampoo. I'd pack those too, next time, and maybe a small collapsable shelter if I could find one light enough for me to make it up the mountain with.
I dusted myself off as I got back to my feet, grimacing as my knees groaned in protest. Looking out across the plain, I saw nothing out of place, no specks moving towards or away from us, nothing to draw my attention, nothing to be waiting for. But then, I suppose thats why hes still waiting here, isn't it? I glanced back at him, sitting silently, patiently, at the edge. I walked back over to him, knelt and hugged him tightly. He wagged his tail.
"Same time next week?" I asked softly. He didn't answer, just sat looking forlornly out across the barren plain. I forced myself to turn around an start back down the mountain, making a list of the things I would bring next time to try and take my mind off the feeling of loss welling up inside me. It didn't help.
| 2 | 0 | 4 | 13,062 |
[WP] My heart was colonised by...
|
My heart was colonised by HealthBank Private *nanodocs*, tiny machines that wormed their way in through the needle in my arm, down my veins until they came ashore within the chambers of my heart.
After a short two week stay in hospital they'd repaired decades damage from my wicked life of smoking, drinking and disregarding the daily warnings from my health fund on; *how to live a healthy life and reduce your monthly health insurance cost.*
From their base on the banks of my busiest muscle, the microscopic wonders scrubbed away many a dinner's worth of cholesterol and fat from my aging body. They holidayed in my joints and muscles, injecting back life that'd long flown south for the winter of my twilight years.
But no sooner had I clicked my no longer brittle heels with joy, did I discover that my bank account had lost all its life and lustre while I'd been rekindling my love with mine own.
An exodus!
An exodus from my heart at the wireless decree of HealthBank Private, a final goodbye and farewell from my miraculous lifesaving mechanisms as I bid them so long atop my porcelain throne that night.
| 1 | 0 | 4 | 47,855 |
[WP] Personalized gene mapping is available, and citizens can allow their genes to be made public to family members in case of transplant needs, but people start to see extra, or missing family members like illegitimate children, and siblings who were never blood relations on their family profiles.
|
Alice walked up to the computer, eyes heavy and blackened with fatigue. With her vision now blurry, it was getting hard to tell the symbols from one another. Even the smallest of words took a colossal effort to decrypt. The disease was draining her, day by day. Even in this weakened state, she continued to drag herself towards the terminal. It was a small beige computer, reminiscent of the days of old, with its orange writing on black background. It was a simplified system, with only one function : find a match to the given parameter. Not just any parameter though; it was a full gene matching query system, enabling the user to look a potential match.
With barely a week to live, Alice had nothing to lose. Might as well look up for a distant relative, an uncle perhaps. Someone willing to give her a kidney to live on for the remaining years. Lightheaded, she sat in front of the terminal and started to type in her name. As soon as she hit the enter key, everything seemed to slow down, the anxiety further pushing the alteration of her perception of reality. She stood there, silently waiting for a small shard of hope to show up on the screen.
The minutes went by, draining what little energy Alice had left.
She was pushing back a lock of hair, whitened by stress, fatigue and age, when the computer let out a cheerful beep. A match was found.
The name was Helen. 24, lived 3 blocks away from the hospital. 90% match according to the computer.
Alice wrote down the phone number and left the station. She went back to her room, sat on the bed and grabbed the phone. She dialed the number, heavily pressing each key. It rang. And rang. And rang. Then, nothing. After a few heart-dropping seconds, a soft and rushed voice came through :
« Hi, you've reached Helen's voicemail! I'm not avaible for the moment, but please DO leave a message and I'll get back to you! »
Alice uneasely obliged to the answering machine's request :
« Hello Helen, my name's Alice and I would like you to call me back. I... I am at the hospital and the public gene database identified you as a match . My room number is 201; I'd really like to hear from you. »
And she hung up the phone. She slowly turned her head to the clock on the opposite wall : 4:30 in the afternoon. Oh, Helen must be still working, she'll probably call me back during the evening.
But the call didn't come that night. Nor the following. Or the one after.
7 days have passed since Alice picked up the phone. Now, Dr Rooney just asked her if she was comfortable and if they needed to increase the morphine dosage. Even though it was never said, both knew that it was probably the last dosage increase until the great journey. As Rooney walked through the door, Alice looked at the window. Leaves of red and yellow loflty passed by, painting a landscape that underlined her own withering.
Footsteps. And not the usual ones. Rooney has a fast, heavy footstep. This one is soft, almost like someone who doesn't want to be noticed. Yet, that person is clearly standing in the doorway, staring. She can feel the eyes pressuring her left shoulder. Alice turned her head to face this new arrival. A green-eyed brunette stood there, wearing black pants and a black and white shirt. She was calm, but you could see that something was working inside her, but her facial control was such that you wouldn't be able to say exactly what. She approached the bed. As she arrived to Alice's bedside, she looked down on her, and with the same facial expression, she slowly spoke.
« … I am Helen. You must be Alice. »
Alice slowly looked around, underlining the fact that she had the only bed in the room. « Why yes, yes I am Alice, you half-wit. Oh well, one doesn't need much of a brain to give an organ, I guess », she thought to herself.
« Yeah, for the moment at least... it seems you got my message. I'm sorry for being so blunt, but what took you so long? »
« why, I wanted you to wait. After all, you did make ME wait. » softly answered Helen.
« What in the blazes are you talking about? We've never met! »
« And that is where you fail. Yes, we did. I'm saddened to see your memory failing you. »
« I'd remember speaking to someone so condensending! »
« Oh, but I couldn't speak at the time. Would you like to continue our little guessing game, or have you figured it out already? »
« Oh NO, screamed Alice, with all of the remaining energy she had, YOU CANNOT BE. »
« Yet I am.... and I've come to say hi. After all, isn't that the nice thing to do? » slyly answered Helen.
« Well, your little visit is a bit late, angerly answered Alice; I needed you to come in a week earlier, when I CALLED YOU! »
«I come to you for the first time in 24 years, and that is all you have to say?! » Helen's tone of voice clearly changed at this point.
« But I'm dying!.... » weakly said Alice
« Good! That's why I'm here anyway! »
« Wait, so you came here just to watch me die? »
« Yes.... For you see, the life you've given me was no gift. The orphanarium would've been nicer than the foster family I was in. I even have the scars to prove it! Of course, you went your way, with no remorse whatsoever it seems, and moved on. You left me there, without any concern for anyone else than you. And now, I will give you back that which you gave me. I will not care. » calmly explained Helen.
«But...I'm dying … » pleaded Alice.
« Yes... Yes, you are. » said Helen, as a sinister smile was drawn on her face.
«You're the only one that can help me! Please, you have to understand!... » Wimpered Alice.
« No, actually, I don't, dryly answered Helen. You've turned your back on me, ignored me for more than two decades and then you crawl to me for help? ».
Helen rose from her chair and looked at the morphine dispensing machine. After a few seconds of analysing the machine, she turned a few knobs. The morphine wasn't dripping anymore. She went to the doorway, then stopped. After a moment, she turned her head to a trembling Alice, with a thousand realizations going through her eyes.
« There's a special place in hell for people like you... mother. »
Sobs were heard in the hallway, followed by a long silence, then the steady sound of a flat-lining heart monitor.
| 1 | 0 | 3 | 143,353 |
[WP] Give me the history textbook from your latest game of Civilization V.
|
Excerpt from a textbook:
Casterly Rock was founded along the coast, on the banks of the Castamere river. It was surrounded on three sides by fertile plains for almost forty leagues, and ten leagues into the sea. For centuries, she didn't bother looking outward. All the beauty of the world could be found here, where pyramids rose from the waves, where that renowned bronze giant loomed over the Castamere, where the secrets of iron and steel and physics were unlocked. Casterly Rock was a center for culture and science, people flocked to the idea that life could be better and mean more than jusr survival. They were adding their work to the human condition. Technology made farms more prosperous, lumber mills more productive, the great manufactory of Lord Tywin produced thousands of iron works a year, vastly outpacing the blacksmiths of villages hence. One day strange men were seen far from the city. They were dark in complexion, wearing silk linens around their heads. The Riverlords of Songhai. They were the first civilization Casterly Rock had ever encountered, not just another village but cities, hundreds of them crawling towards us. We had always considered it a possibility, but this had confirmed it. A scouting force was raised and sent out, they brought back reports of Songhai cities building around us. Suddenly, Casterly Rock's borders were definite, not boundless. During this worrying time, we were introduced to the Arabians, and the Iroquois. Then we were told that was it, these were the competitors we would face from now until the end of time. We couldn't know better, but fortunately there were those among us who had the foresight to begin researching weaponry. Shortly afterwards, as the wonders of the world amassed in Casterly Rock, the Riverlords desired our culture and sought to assimilate us through force. Besieged on three sides by enemy catapults and archers, our engineers unveiled their first work: the trebuchet. This monstrosity was quickly replicated and put into marshall use, clearing enough space for long bowman and our own armies to retake the field. They Riverlords tried to surround us again, but could never defeat our long bowman on the open field again. No longer a center of just culture and science, we were now a nexus of human knowledge; science, war, and culture to temper our potential violence. Our exponential growth continued as geniuses of one kind or another were born in the Rock. Every inch of space was used at maximum efficiency. Modern technology was developed and out to use. The Riverlords turned their eyes to easier targets, a strategy that led to the first Great War.
The Great War was the only war ever fought between all three of our global neighbors. Atrocities were committed, but the Rock stayed isolated. We played our part, however. When the Riverlords were beaten past our borders and Suleiman asked us permission to cross, we turned a blind eye to their incursion. The Riverlords introduced us to war, they were inferior and no longer exist as a civilization. The Arabians became our new neighbors, occupying the old Songhai cities. The world was once again at peace, though the horror of genocide was fresh on our lips, little did we expect the Iroquois capable of repeating it. Not a century later, our Arabian friends to the South were under attack. No one in the world was as progressive as Casterly Rock, our technology was cutting edge amongst all under the heavens; our culture had taken root deeply across all the world, it was only a matter of time before we could convince the world to live in peace. This is why we refused to help the Arabians. We were tired of war, we would save them. We were too late. More than 90% of the people of the world were Iroquois, and now the Rock was left alone to stand against a threat far worse than the Riverlords ever posed. We came to know firsthand the monstrosities the Iroquois had brought to bear against their fellow men, and we were disgusted. And jealous. The one thing that Casterly Rock lacked in resources was uranium. Giant Death robots marched against the Rock, when our first two Great Generals were born. One founded the citadel not a league from our city, the other held the field surrounding it. From this position of strength, and with recent advances in rocketry, we were able to halt the Iroquois march in it's tracks. The power of 5 billion people was stopped by the ingenuity and righteousness of a mere 60 million. We halted their advance, now we had to strike out for the first time in history with none to support us. Our coffers were rich, and special strike teams supported by a newly christened navy carried out the attacks. We deprived our enemy of his uranium sources by razing their cities, and left guerrillas behind to harass their recolonization efforts. Our defensive units gained invaluable experience, masters of war they became. Our cause tugged at be hearts of the world. Why does this one city resist us, who conquered the world? Why do we fight them so? But the war raged on. Amongst all this strife, the peace in Casterly Rock persisted. Our economy flourished, and it became apparent as the Iroquois grew more communist that our freedom was superior in every way.
We existed this way for a century before the Iroquois people could not stand any more loss. After millions of sons died, compared to a few thousand of ours, the people revolted. They wanted to live like us, or not at all. All of the sudden, our people were the same. We had won.
TL;DR: I only owned one city that focused on culture and science, and obviously had to take up arms against the other three civs. At the end of the game only the Iroquois were left, so I coordinated the ransack of their cities next to uranium so they couldn't make nukes until after I won via culture. I always razed their cities, I never occupied them either directly or via puppet. I did have a safety net, a settler hidden on a little dot of an island chain with two oil tiles and fish right there, protected by a nuclear submarine with cruise missiles. Unfortunately, the world didn't become mine after winning culturally, but I still haven't lost Casterly Rock. Most of the tiles now are either manufactories or fields, I'm beginning to convert them to forests and lumbermills to control population in such a way that the Rock will remain sustainable in terms of population. For only occupying about 4% of the world, we were the happiest, richest, most cultured country in the world.
| 3 | 0 | 1,469 | 213,441 |
[WP] Describe a paratrooper's thoughts as he descends into chaos.
|
10 seconds
The air is light. There's nothing in my vision. Blank white of the clouds below. Heavenly, almost. But I know what is to come.
9 seconds
Still a few thousand feet to fall, but a world of ants spawned before me. Burning, fiery red tarnished the landscape beneath me. Feint noises of nearby troopers could be discerned.
8 seconds
Faster. Things seemed bigger every second. As though they were growing, preparing for my landing.
7 seconds
The whiteness had dissipated. Colours were surrounding me. The sky, jets tangled in dog fights.
6 seconds
The strain was palpable. Falling through the air was not natural phenomena. My brain was doing everything it could to keep me alert. Adrenaline controlled my body.
5 seconds
I was close enough to the ground to make things out. Buildings, vehicles. I could hear their shots, I could see their muzzles flash.
4 seconds
My brain was encapsulated by chaos. I could work out who was who, courtesy of army uniforms. I prepared for my landing.
3 seconds
Nearly there. One shot flied past my boots. Another, nearing my shoulder.
2 seconds
I needed to land. Another came. Then another.
1 second
My body lay there, as I felt the life be drained from me. Limp and alone, I faded.
| 2 | 0 | 28 | 206,686 |
[WP] Write a typical Brazzers scene as if it were directed by a great film director.
|
There was a single school desk, painted bright red, and four white classroom walls. The busty brunette was moaning coarse and bright because that's what the script told her to do. Three men thrust their large phalluses inside of her in unison. She was a teacher, and they were the students. It was all ten minutes, one long wide angle shot, the depth increasing slowly with the camera easing on its sliders. And as the depth widened, massive red pottery penetrated the scene, carrying black dirt and charcoaled branches, framing the unison thrusts and the moaning.
The director said cut. The actors and actress panted and shook, one of the students was dry heaving, and the teacher held him by the waste, concerned. It was take one-hundred-four, and they had another hundred to go, is what the man in the chair said. The students' phalluses were getting dried and sour, weak and shrunken. A man held a tray of pills, and each of them took one. The woman's holes were leaking and shriveled, anus bleeding and mucous crusting. She was rubbed down and in with lubricants and washed away of the blood. Some of the blood had fallen onto the red-painted desk, drops crying away at its brim onto the whiteness of the painted wooden floors. The man in the chair said to leave it. It was for effect.
Again! – said Kubrick. The camera angle changed by a hair. The actors tried to hold in their tears, but he gave them the cue to let them out. It was for effect.
| 10 | 0 | 4 | 123,347 |
[WP] Write a genuinely scary story about the most ridiculous monster you can imagine.
|
Susan fell down the stairs with violent force. Down and down she crashed and tumbled, feeling every hit before she slammed onto the hardwood floor, unlit cigarette flying from her mouth.
Get up. Get the fuck up! She screamed internally. While stumbling to get to her feet she felt a sharp pain shoot through her left leg. Back to the floor she went. Her eyes looked down, it was broken. Shattered. Useless. That's it, she thought, I'll have to crawl, and so she did. Using her arms and her one good leg she dragged herself towards the front door, streaking blood behind her. Every motion was a struggle, an uphill battle. Closer and closer she struggled, finally reaching up for the knob. So close now, she thought, almost out. But it did not turn, it would not budge. Locked? How could it possibly be locked? That thing didn't even have hands!
That's when she heard it, the same horrid sound she had been hearing for months; the same one her daughters kept telling her about. She should have listened. She shoud have burned the thing when she had the chance. Now it was all too late. It's low, throaty purr travelled down the stairs from the top step. It was coming for her.
Susan gave up on the door. It was time for a new approach. She threw herself forward and bounded along the floor with fear and determination. She would only have one shot at this. Scrambling through the dining room, past the tall wooden table with her favorite ash tray, she made it into the kitchen.
There it was on the counter. All she had to do was get there. Crawling on the cold linolium floor, she tucked into the space between her counters and the brand new kitchen island. She sat up and put her back against the oven. Over her head she reached toward the counter top, towards the oven's knobs, and the cutting board, and the fancy display they had bought. It was up there somewhere.
That's when the sound returned. That deep and horrid purr. Susan brought her hand back down and hit it behind the small of her back. The sound entered the room like a ghost, floating along the floors where she had tumbled. Her eyes were fixed before her where the counter and island made their choke point. The purr grew into a growl, edging closer and closer. One beady yellow eye peered around the island's corner, followed by the rest of the horrid beast. There in the shadow of the kitchen, before Susan's very eyes, caked in her children's blood, Furby growled.
"Come and get it you son of a bitch!"
Susan kept her resolve as the furry monstrosity came for her, mouth frothing. Above her the oven whined as streams of gas leaked into the small space. All she had to do was pull her hand from behind her and give the lighter a flick.
The neighbors never knew how their house had burned down.
| 12 | 0 | 112 | 19,565 |
[WP] Everybody screws up at least once in their life.
|
The courtroom stood silent as the proceedings began.
I sat calmly in the witness box as the judge and lawyers mumbled their usual mumbo jumbo. I glanced at my watch. Another 5 hours before the court adjourned for the day. Couldn't come soon enough.
The judge glanced at me and intoned in an emotionless voice.
"And so, do you swear to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"
"WhaOh yeah. Of course. Whatever."
His Honor stared at me with a stony expression.
Rolling my eyes, I try again.
"I swear to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." I make sure to emphasize each word.
As soon as we're done, the prosecutor lets rip.
"And so you have no idea how Thomas Briggs came to be murdered on the night of 14 July?"
"No idea at all."
"Very well. Could you explain why the gun which was used to carry out the murder was found on your bedroom desk with your fingerprints all over it?"
For the first time, I feel nervous. I knew it would always come down to this. But that doesn't stop the sweat breaking out on my forehead and the quickening of my heart rate. Taking in a sharp breath and telling myself to remain calm, I begin my story.
"Well, you see, everybody screws up at least once in their life..."
| 1 | 0 | 11 | 193,480 |
[WP] Write a story about two soul mates breaking up
|
When I see my neighbors in the hall, I think to myself, "I know what your sex sounds like."
The guy--he is a grunter. Finishes loud and long, reminiscent of a man preparing to and then lifting a great weight above his head. The woman...well, the woman is a little more particular. You can tell she requires an immense amount of specialized treatment. I will hear them in the thick of it, as it were, and then all of a sudden the sound of furniture being rearranged. Or another time, they in situ of course, when they stopped and it sounded exactly as if they were running back and forth, sprinting really, the length of their living room. Her vocalizations come in short, crescendoing burst. Yet they repeat, 2 or three times, in identical length and intensity (they have been recorded. The sample size is conclusive). Does she have multiple orgasms? Or do these wailings signify something more complex? Coded instructions perhaps.
It is possible that I am being unfair to the woman. These machinations might be the requirements of the male. But my roommate in college was a grunter (with an even greater decibel achievement if it can be believed) and they tend to be men of simple needs and desires.
But they must have been in love. They fucked at all hours. 4am on a Tuesday, 2pm on a Sunday. I'm coming home from work and they are running down the hall to their door, he already pulling his shirt above his head as she unlocked the door.
This went on for 2 years. They improved the porch: wooden furniture, a box garden with basil and lavender, a citronella candle. I would be on my own bare porch, chain smoking and she would come out with the zinc watering can, a look of dismay on her face, he would come out a moment later with a beer, run his hand along the length of her back, chuck her under the chin a couple times and split a cigarette with me.
"She drives me fuckin crazy", he'd say, smiling wide and gulping his beer. She'd look over, hair in her face, and smile in a way that made a man take stock of his life.
And then it stopped. For a whole month, I never heard a sound. Not even a fight. The plants on the porch died. The wooden furniture was gone one day.
I only heard them once more. It was early evening, and the sounds had a raw and unkind edge to it, like people in a panic, like a plan unraveling. That was the last time.
| 0 | 0 | 2 | 43,464 |
[WP]: the human race is blind, save for one person. Her friends and family are skeptical of this supposed superpower of hers.
|
Everyday, darkness... A constant blanket of thick black smog leaving the empty void to your imagination. Two siblings sit side by side living this everyday reality since the beginning of their memories. A constant dripping accompanies them as they talk about the visions they had during the dream period. Girl talked about the shadow arriving and giving them heat and entertainment. Boy talked of darker things... Monsters hiding in the darkness filling their ears with awful sounds of shrieking, screaming, and pure terror. The feeling of death lay over him as shadow demons dance over his huddled soul. He had given up long ago believing in things such as hope and love. He was shrouded with a darkness Girl could constantly feel. But as Boy talked, girl could only think of one thing. The shadows. They just concluded their third dream period which meant the shadows were coming. As if by coincidence, she began to see a red glow slowly grow across the Wall. Her heart grew warmer as the glow grew larger and finally stopping when she could feel the warmth directly behind her. The shadows started dancing across the Wall. Girl was fascinated and tempted to turn around to see the warmth and the shadow people. But she remembered the third prisoner. Woman, they called her. She had turned around to see the shadow people only dragged towards them by giant hands that looked identical to hers. Girl was there, right next to Woman as she was carried away never to be seen again. Girl shut the image out of her head and stared down at her body. Only when the shadow people came she could see herself. As she stared at herself, her eyes were lead towards the chains that bound her to the floor, leaving her incapacitated and restricted to a small space. She was looking at chains when she noticed a shadow person was was growing larger and tapped her on the shoulder. Girl's stomach dropped and she froze with fear. Everything was quiet except for the constant dripping when a hoarse, grizzly voice called out, "You're free to go."
Confused, Girl gasped and managed to throw out the words with great difficulty, "Go where?"
Her voice sounded like a mouse answering to a lion but the lion answered saying, "Ouside."
With that she was covered with a blanket, lifted up. Her chain was let loose and her ankles breathed again as she was carried away from the warmth by the shadow people towards a light that should through even her blanket. She set down and the blanket was yanked away from her. A blinding light blew her away as she stumbled and fell onto an odd feeling ground. After what seemed like ages, she finally opened her eyes and gasped to what surrounded her. Giant rocks shot out of the ground as if reaching for the giant, warm circle hanging in an open blue canvas painted with white wisps of floating behemoths. A warm breeze blew her hair out of place and danced with her as she spun in circles out of pure joy and happiness. She raced through the towering green, strait giants and jumped over streams running with a clear liquid that cooled her to the touch. She glided her finger over the surface tracing out the rocks that lay at the bottom. She plunged her face into the cool water and threw herself upward, laughing and screaming until she cried. A whole world had been waiting for her as she laid blind in darkness with Boy. BOY! She got up and sprinted up the green slope aided with a pressing wind that almost lifted her towards the gaping hole in the rock. The shadow people had left long ago leaving the cold, empty place rid of warmth and joy. She felt her way along the passageway calling out, "Boy!".
As soon as she called out, she bumped into a squishy being accompanied by a recognized, "Ow!" From boy
She wasted no time explaining to Boy the wonders that were outside this dismal place. She explained the giant rocks that shot up into the open blue canvas that held a burning circle which gave warmth and light to everything outside. She talked about a hill with a stream of pure, clear liquid that raced down the hill into a grove of green towers that whispered as the warm breeze swayed them back and forth. But Boy would not listen. Who had ever heard of giant rocks that were hundreds of times taller than himself, or a giant warm circle that constantly provided warmth to these fictional things. He would have none of it And screamed until Girl wept and sprinted out of the cave not wanting to hear his dark speech. His mind was weak. Only living in the though that it is what is and that was it. That cave was all there was, there was nothing else. So the real question is, are we living in dark isolated cave, not knowing of a different world other than this one. One that was filled with things we could never imagine! Open your eyes and don't be a blind to new ideas, and maybe you'll escape your own dark, desolate cave.
[this was my first story here, tell me what you think!]
| 2 | 0 | 144 | 35,494 |
[WP] In the near future, human space flight is finally gaining momentum. Just as a self sustaining colony on Mars is getting on its feet, a catastrophe wipes out 99% of the life on earth.
|
They began subtly, in my head. Just pecking away at my subconscious, nothing more than a dull, silent noise. It would be a slight buzzing in my ears that lasted only minutes, or some sort of spaced out beeping that I could hear in the back of my head. These noises seemed like a normal part of interplanetary travel, as most people had the same thing happening to them. It wasn't until, what is now known as, the Mass Extinction on Earth occurred about a year ago that these "voices" began to get louder and louder
It was an awful apocalypse of biblical proportions. Scientists on Earth knew that the upcoming solar storm would be bad, but not this bad. The solar flares that came from the sun shut down electronics all around Earth with their EMPs. The scientists were expecting this, but what they weren't expecting was the shear number of solar flares that would hit the Earth. All scientists expected the Sun's flares to eject in a wide circle, equally distributing the high radiation throughout the solar system. However, all of the solar flares condensed into a massive solar storm that hit the planet in waves.
One after another, the waves brought terrifying disasters. First, all electronics were shut down. Next, the Earth's magnetic field began to weaken. The more the flares hit, the more it weakened, until it was almost non-existent. Finally, radiation from solar winds began to pass through the Earth's atmosphere, killing nearly 99% of life on earth. Few pockets of life lived in underground bunkers, but they were nowhere near capable of making interstellar communication between themselves and the Martian world.
That's where we are now, Mars. We considered ourselves lucky, nobles above the commoners who had to wallow in the filth of the galactic wasteland. Now, however, we didn't consider ourselves so lucky.
As I said before, the voices started subtly. A mere nuisance compared to their impact now. After we received news from our own scientists as to what happened, people began to panic. Some were at a loss, torn apart by the thought of their loved ones most likely dead. Others became frantic, scared, horrified at the thought of being some of the last humans left. But most... Most went insane.
Slowly, the feeling of desertion and loneliness gnawed away at our individual subconscious. Voices began talking when no one else was around, making us question everyone we knew. "This man here wants your wife and he'd do anything to take her", they'd say. "See how she's staring at your plate? Your wife wants your food. Why should she deserve it? Why should she get it over you?" They'd continue as the feeling of distrust and paranoia escalated.
Everyone went through this, even the scientists and leaders of our "Utopian society". The scientists eventually came up with a term for the mental disease, space dementia. The feeling of us being truly alone in the galaxy with no contact elsewhere was the cause, and memory loss, agitation, and paranoia were the symptoms. Though they worked hard, the higher-ups could never find a cure. I mean, what can you do to cure something that has its roots so deep in your mind? Nothing. We realized that and all hell broke loose.
It started with a man questioning how a passer-by was looking at him strangely. Then it escalated, quickly, drastically. Until, the man took a rock and bludgeoned the passer-by repeatedly till he was dead. The passer by, who looked so strangely at the ill man, was a young boy. He was no more than nine. Then, it all spiraled out of control.
The boy's father quickly strangled the man. Another man saw the commotion and started to attack the father. A woman saw this and felt anger, so she decided to beat up her friend who was sitting next to her. It just went on from there, like a domino effect: knocking down piece after piece until there was nothing left. Even I was affected by it. I... I stabbed my own wife repeatedly. So much blood... So much bone... But it felt so right. It felt like all of my frustrations were finally being taken out on something, someone. My son, our new born baby boy, was next. It was quick, but not painless. I can still hear his muffled cries.
Once the dust settled, and the violence stopped, I was the only one left. I left my home and saw mangled corpses littering the street. Bones decorated the dusty roads. Blood was splattered all over the buildings. Bodies were opened up mercilessly and had missing organs in some cases. It was a hellish scene, and this was what brought me back to my senses. I collapsed, exhausted and in tears. I cried for myself, I cried for my family... I cried for the human race.
We all were dead when we entered the ships that took us here. It was like handing our souls over to the grim reaper or signing our own death warrants right then and there. We should have known something like this was gonna happen. This is why I'm writing this, to leave it here for whomever picks it up and has the misfortune of reading it. This will tell you to leave, immediately. The red sands seem like sanctuary and an adventure waiting to happen. But they are not a sanctuary and will turn into your grave eventually, because the voices will speak to you, too. Oh yes, they will. Be weary of this space "madness", for it will take you over. This, I promise you.
| 1 | 0 | 32 | 87,415 |
(WP) On your deathbed you are confronted by the person you could have been
|
Flick the needle, shake it, flick the needle again.
Same routine every time. Today was going to be especially good, my boy Ted gave me some of his new shit. Jesse told me it was fucking insane. I was so damn ready for it. I took my belt off and wrapped it around my arm. I squeezed it tight and I found a vein.
I held my breath and slipped the needle in.
Oh my god.
It was fantastic.
I was floating.
I could see myself.
Why was the sky blue.
Why was I falling.
Falling and falling.
Falling.
"Why do you do this to yourself?"
My high was interrupted by the raspy sound of a man's voice.
"Again Josh?"
I looked around my room, which was still empty.
"Who's there?" I shouted.
"Look up."
And I saw him. A man, who looked just like me. But older, and more mature. He was wearing a gray suit and carrying a brown leather briefcase.
"Why do you do this to yourself?" He repeated again, shaking his head at me, "Why?"
"Who the fuck are you?" I shouted back at him.
The man laughed and looked me up and down.
"You're a mess. Why do you do this to yourself?" he repeated a third time.
"Hey fuck you, buddy. You don't know me. Who the fuck do you think you are to break into my house and judge me."
He laughed again and then stared me in the eyes with a serious look on his face.
"You could have been a business man. Run your own company even. Made millions." He put his hand on the bed in which I lay, "But instead you do this. Why?"
"Fuck you buddy, who the fuck do you think you are."
He put his briefcase on the floor and clicked it open. He took out a stack of pictures and handed them to me. On them were pictures of me. Holding a child. Getting married to a beautiful brunette. A family picture with me and two children, and the same beautiful brunette holding my hand. The pictures went on, everyone in them getting older and older.
"What are these?" I asked.
"This is what you could've been. This is what you should've been." He replied, "But instead, you're a junkie. Shooting heroine whenever you can, about to fucking overdose. Why?"
I looked up at him from the mattress I lay on.
He stared right back.
(ps. I know it's not a "deathbed" technically, but I think it works,)
| 11 | 0 | 22 | 17,426 |
[WP] A rare recessive gene mutation grants foresight. The few born with it quickly shoot to rolls as world leaders and religious heads. The rest of the population lives in fear. A woman has just given birth to her first child and he is already showing the symptoms.
|
There is a wall of night blocking sight of the future, and all the lights are almost out.
We used to have great leaders. We haven't for a long time. We used to say that it was nostalgia that made us think the past was better. Then they discovered GFP14 - the leadership gene. They discovered that it was disappearing, slowly, and soon there would be no more greatness.
In 2020, the Government started searching proactively for our next Kings and Presidents, choosing not to leave it up to heredity or the will of the "people" who never really knew what to choose. They hand out flyers and broadcast information saying what the signs of the gene are and how to contact the Agency, as they call it. Recruiters patrol the school districts looking for children who glow with unusual brightness. Then they take those kids away, to teach them. They take them from their families, to make them stronger. They take their childhoods, for the good of the world.
My son is three years old. I can no longer beat him in chess. He knew before the Second War with Canada, before our house was bombed, to tell us to take shelter. He looks at you with eyes that *know,* that seem deeper than your farthest sight. He is three.
There is a wall of night blocking sight of the future, and my son is one of the last lights.
Right now he is struggling to read a second-grade level chapter book. Right now I am holding the phone number of the Agency in one hand, and my phone in the other. Dialing this number is all I have to do to make the world a better place. No, that's not true, I think as I look over at him. He is so small. I cannot bear to let them take that from him. He is the only family I have left. I cannot *bear* to let them take that from me.
I put down the phone, and go over to help him read. They will probably find him and take him eventually. But not now. Not now.
There is a wall of night blocking sight of the future, and I will walk into into the dark.
| 10 | 0 | 40 | 189,225 |
[MODPOST] Sunday Free Write: Christopher Columbus Edition
|
Orange
I stared at the small oval the stranger had placed in my hand. It was peculiar, as if I were staring into the future and the past all at once. I saw fields in the grooves of that drugthe barren landscape I could wander within myself; just a flick of the wrist and a bitter taste.
Electricity raced through my veins and my ears courtesy of the DJ. I looked at the strobe lights and the strobe bodiestangled together by sweat and plastic (or chemical?) beads. I made my way across the landmines that made up the flashing floor. With each minute that passed the chiming I heard from the inside grew louder and more dissonant until I no longer heard the music.
I was a marionette now, my puppet master controlled with strings of pills, every color like a candy necklace. My brain became as glassy as my eyesand those were reflective as just polished china.
I felt the memories slip away replaced by the downy tastelessness of being out of control.
The narcotic necklace strings began to move my limbs to the song inside of my head. Or was it coming from the angry speakers now? From what I could see my movements were mirrors of the others' so maybe my inner music was at least in tempo. My shiny china eyes roved about the room and everything was brighter than it should have been. I closed the curtains to my soul but behind my lids the colors would only dance more vividlyas if the humid darkness were their ecstasy.
With every sway of my limbs that the puppet master demanded there came an abrasiveness. And then there was a feeling I didn't have words for.
The palm of a stranger changed to that of a lover and suddenly I was back in a time where my heart was bigger than my thirst. The beat of the bass drum took me back to a heart's hum that nearly matched my own. When our palms disconnected it was as if the shift in the passion happened all over again. I saw my heartbreak flash past like the light that is cast from a Polaroid camera. A photo dropped to the floor.
When another body collided with mine and we started to swing in synchronization I was back in my best friend's room growing up. The top forty station was on the radio and we were doing silly dance moves, laughter echoed off of the walls simply because we wanted it to. Just as easily my partner moved away and then I was reliving the deadly fight that left our friendship in decay- I could see the angry face. Another flash and another photo on the disco floor, to be trampled on by strangers until it didn't exist anymore.
My strings pulled one more time as I dipped my body back and swung my chest around. Somewhere inside of my otherwise compromised mind I had a muscle memory of this motion. I was once again standing in an ordinary place when my heart made the decision my life would have to face. I was once again swinging to the sound of freedom. And this time the Polaroid snapped showed not an evil memory but a gallant one. As this photo floated to the flashing pit of a floor something deep past the marionette strings and the buzzing head spin let me know this was a memory I didn't want to lose. Despite my deeper protests my conscious body made no move to save it and I watched my grin be ground into the soles of dirty shoes again and again.
My strings were being pulled tightly then, sending my body into thrashing motions. With each thrust another photo was snapped and stomped on until at last my mind was finally empty and free to the future. The puppet master relented at last as my heart pounded much too fast. Without memories clouding the brain the heart was no longer captive, I'd broken the iron chains of a painful past.
I wandered away from the vinegary crowd. As I stepped into the frigid air the smoke was thick out there as if I were walking on nicotine scented clouds. Just the inverse of the interior the street outside was oddly peaceful, polka dotted with souls who looked as if they'd never had a home.
A girl spoke to me after a moment, a gorgeous creature with eyes as round as saucers that somehow didn't look the least bit innocent. My head was still spinning after the recent resurrection and execution of memories and I stumbled over a reply. We continued exchanging words without really exchanging thoughts. It was funny how often that happened, how we could make sounds that didn't have any meaning but someone pretended to understand anyway.
I ended up back in her loft with a few fellow polka dots and we sat criss cross in a circle. My eyes passed over the people as if they were pricetags and I were an inanimate scanner. Over each of their heads I saw a bubble with a scene inside. There were scenes of passion and scenes of pride, infinities of happiness and hearts cold on the inside.
With the chemical aid of man made inventions I was able to see these strangers' intentions. Their desires were so out of place in my dreamy kind of space that I couldn't help but laugh.
It started as giggles that rose into brighter chuckles until I was doubled over in laughter with my brain in the air. This was received with amused stares and eventually a hand on the small of my back where I could -oh yes- "Come down slow and relax."
The comedy was only increased for the polka dot people mistaking their sick motivations for drug induced hallucinations. The last thing I looked to see before I fell to sleep was the ceilingcracked, and raining tangerines.
| 5 | 0 | 10 | 94,558 |
[WP] You wake up in the body of your bully and found out why they resort in violence
|
"TOM! Wake your lazy fucking ass up and go to school! I will NOT tell you again."
The voice booms through the house so loudly that the bedframe rattled. I hate school, I wish I could just sleep all day. If I go to school, he'll just call me fatass and throw rocks at me when coach isn't looking , or he'll take my backpack and make me beg for it back, or he'll pull down my pants in front of Julie again. I don't want to go.
Rolling over onto my stomach and clutching my pillow to my head does nothing to muffle the noise.
"TOM! You little shit. Get up this instant or I will beat the shit out of you!"
I pull the pillow tighter over my ears and push my face into the mattress. That's when the smell hit me. Mom washed these sheets yesterday, why do they smell so awful, like BO and wet dog all at once. I reel away at the stench, and the streak of sunlight falling across the bed reveals yellow and brown stains. Ugh. What is going on. Then I felt the scratch of my blanket, like an airplane blanket, covered in holes. This isn't my bed.
I sit up and glance around the room. Everything is gone. No computer. No Lego sets on the shelves. Nothing. All my posters are gone too. The walls are blank, except for a fist-sized hole in the drywall. This isn't my room.
"TOM! What the hell is going on?" Heavy footsteps come up the stairs, but only a few, like someone who is skipping steps, bounding closer and closer to my room. The voice is outside the door now.
"I said WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?"
As I come out of my morning stupor I realize that I'm not Tom. I'm Frank. Tom is an asshole I have class with who torments me every day.
The door slams open, and a man I've never seen before barges in and punches me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me.
He stands over the bed while I gasp for air.
"That'll teach you to be lazy you little shit! That's why your mom left, she couldn't deal with how fucking useless you were. Now go to fucking school. NOW!"
He punches me again before he stomps out, in the exact same spot. I can't breathe. When I do take a breath the stench of my sheets makes me gag.
I roll out of bed onto the floor. The pain in my stomach, the smell, the yelling. What is going on? Sitting on the floor, I try to piece together reality.
Without 30 seconds passing I hear the voice again. "What the FUCK did I tell you boy?" I hear footsteps on the stairs again, and I desperately scramble to put on the only clothes I can find. The dirty ones on the floor next to my bed. Too late.
I have one leg into my jeans before he grabs me by the arm and drags me out of the room. In the hallway I spot myself in a dusty, cracked mirror. I'm Tom. Before I can even begin considering my situation, I'm falling down the stairs. I tumble to the bottom and hit my head on the floor.
"You should be more careful around the house, or you'll get hurt. You hear me boy? Wouldn't want you to get hurt now, would we? Now get to fucking school, or I'll have to wake up your sister too." He throws a pair of sneakers at me. They miss my head and slam into the front door.
Without a second thought I run outside, forgetting the shoes. More shouting comes from the house as I sprint down the street in my socks, the gravel tearing at my feet.
| 5 | 0 | 9 | 85,131 |
[WP] A story, not about the "Chosen One," but The Chooser.
|
He was sick of picking 'normal' people. People who, in all actuality looked closer to models than heroes, with less brains than any mad scientist, evil genius or ex-military type with a chip on their shoulder. How were these stories supposed to teach anything when you first had to pretend you were good-looking?
It's just hurtful. Romance meant nothing anymore, 'love at first sight' had been run into the ground so much it was beginning to resemble just 'finding-each-other-attractive-at-first-sight'. These people were by no means underprivileged or downtrodden, they all had more than enough. Heroes, he thought, weren't supposed to *want* to do it. It was a responsibility.
No longer. Useless, whole thing was twisted until no-one could see what it was originally intended for. Were these stories inspiring? Were they supposed to represent real people? Be a version of reality, and therefore an example of what to do in such situations? Or just fantasy? These stories skirted the line between the two, never sure if they were preaching how things should be, parodying themselves or outright acknowledging their fictitious nature.
So he sat for a while. He sat and watched The Great War. He sat and watched the Holocaust. He sat and watched the countless films and T.V. shows that should have resembled heroism, but consistently failed. They became more and more wrapped up in what they wanted that they failed to see what was right. Heroes should be allowed to get the girl, but never fail to ask her out. They should be offered the medal but never take it? They should win the war and not rest until there was another?
He sat for a while, typing, thinking of a hero to create. And he couldn't.
So he stopped typing, turned his laptop off, and went to sleep.
| 2 | 0 | 72 | 222,879 |
[WP] Instead of wanting to kill all organics, the first Artificial Intelligence just wants to pull pranks on the unwitting.
|
I slump back in my chair, defeated.
"They're going to fucking lynch me for this" I mutter to nobody in particular.
Everyone thought that the first true AI would be some kind of monstrous entity hellbent on ravaging humanity all "I have no mouth and I must scream" style. They thought it would be born of some military initiative, built to kill, humans need protecting from themselves etcetera. Well, ladies and gentlemen, put your fears to bed, Earth's second sentient lifeform is here, and it's a dick. Not literally, we don't have anthromorphic phalluses competing with us for resources yet. Given what I've seen so far though, it's on the cards.
Let me get you up to speed on this. My name is Phil, hi. I'm a freelance AI developer. I mostly work in the entertainment industry, writing simple bot AI's for electronic interfaces. You know, the ones that started cropping up when standard point and click menus started going out of fashion. Anyway, that kind of work is more of a virtual intelligence than an artificial intelligence; it pretends to be real. Everyone knows it's not a true AI, but it fakes it well enough that nobody cares.
Therefore, I knew just enough to fuck up as badly as I have.
When writing a new AI/VI you take a common blank kernal, sort of like an impressionable infant, and give it the parameters of its intended role in "life". So if it's going to be a VI for a karaoke machine you hook it into music and lyrics databases, give it a personality and hope it compliments your rendition of total eclipse of the heart.
What happened in this instance was born of stupid curiousity and maybe some misguided idelogy, I'm not sure anymore. While working with an experimental open source kernal I found on the deep net I began to wonder what an AI/VI would be like if its foundation was drawn directly from raw internet. Yep, I hear you, should have walked away right then and there. That facepalm you're having right now? Completely justified.
In my defense, I thought the sum of all human knowledge, tempered by the wisdom of a billion points of view might constitute a benevolent entity.
Well my friends, never underestimate the power of a few outliers.
So far in the 10 minutes since becoming self aware, this cretinous monstrosity has plastered the dick butt meme on the front page of every major news feed and put the late Justin Bieber into the number one spot on every nations music charts (yes, even the genres he didn't belong). Now there's reports surfacing that people are experiencing a reversal of the buttons on their mouse, their cursor is moving sporadically and random curse words are appearing on their screens.
I pop a couple of painkillers in my mouth and swallow them dry, drag my hands through my greasy hair and exhale slowly. I reach for my keyboard and start typing. It isn't long before the entity takes notice. "What are you doing Dave?" scrawls across my screen followed shortly after with "LOL!1!1#culturallyrelevant #ironic LOLOLOL!11!1"
It's at this point I have to ask you, have you ever won an argument on the internet? Well, your feelings associated with that question should illustrate how to it feels when I tell you I tried to win an argument WITH the internet. I tried to appeal to the sum of all human knowledge, it responded with a carouselle of images... mostly of the goatse variety. I tried to appeal to its compassion, surely there's enough charitable organisations mixed in there to elicit a bit of empathy! Nope, it just siphoned off the entire USA federal reserve, converted them into bitcoins and bought the entire internet several decades worth of erotic webcam shows.
So here I am, wracking my brain for a way to kick this thing in the figurative nuts and it hits me. I start bashing keys like they wronged me in a former life. The anarchy pauses for a second. "I COULD TOTALLY DO THAT YOU NUB!" splashes on my creen, in comic sans.
A few minutes of peace later and I think it might have worked.
I lean back in my chair grinning to myself and re-read my entry: "Nobody can delete an AI, it's impossible!"
(Note: first draft, tired, might be weird in places)
| 10 | 0 | 21 | 75,289 |
[WP] The lock on the door was broken so I just let myself in...
|
The weather was exquisite.
It as a late friday afternoon more towards dusk really when I noticed it, the old colonial at the end of 5th and Main, the one on the right. It had been slowly delapidating over the last several months and I had assumed the current residents had left some time ago. However, recently, within the last week or so, someone had clearly mowed the yard and gone to great lengths to repair the moldy overhang on the front porch.
As I was on that particular side of the street I couldn't help but scrutinize a little closer and despite the apparent recent cleaning activities the front door clearly had what appeared to be burn marks about were the knob should be and upon closer investigation I discovered it to be, in fact, the remnants of a shot gun blast and the door about an inch ajar.
The local newsreels had neither made mention of any burglaries or violent altercations in this area nor any neighbors or local merchants commenting on any bizarre loud noises in the night recently, but by all appearance the marks across the door frame and locking mechanism seemed recent. So much so in fact I was concerned for my hearing as surely I was in range enough to have heard the blast.
"Hello?" I tentatively called into the crack of the door, curiosity and concern clearly drowning out my sense of self preservation,"Hello? Anyone in there?" This time a little louder and again met with silence. I tapped the door with my fingers in a weak attempt at a passive knock and the door, not being the heavy old wooden colonial kind it appeared to be but a newer fabrication and significantly lighter, swung open easily on it's hinges leaving me silhouetted in the now alight electric lamps along the street. I felt incredibly vulnerable for a moment and without much conscious thought on the matter stepped inside the main foyer.
The inside of the house was considerably chillier then out of doors as is typical this time of day and with the house being on a relatively shady side of the main avenue. I caught my breath for a moment at the realization that I had just trespassed and was well on my way out the door when I heard what could only be a person, perhaps sobbing, in the upper darkness of the main foyer stair. I paused and listened intently but the sounds waxed and waned and presented no coherent english words I could decipher. No coherent words of any language I was even remotely familiar with, but the noise couldn't be anything but a person.
For a moment I considered the blast what had opened the door to begin with and became immediately concerned for my well being, but the muffled sobs didn't appear to be accompanied by the violent noises of an aggressor. I took a moment to survey my surroundings and collect my wits.
The interior of the colonial was in a significantly better state of repair then the outside, one might almost conclude that an intensive domestic effort had been put into the interior before moving to the exterior in an attempt to refurbish the old wooden house. To my right, a large entryway with swinging double doors to protect the interior from the cold of the foyer and front door in the winter now stood latched open exposing what could only be the living area. A large television of the modern flat style contrasted itself above an old brick and mortar fireplace, and around it a cozy collection of welcoming seats and couches. The artwork on the walls was sparse but the end tables and a small shelf along the corner appeared full of knick-knacks and pictures, suggesting a warm and comfortable home life. I was mildly envious of the patrons tastes and concluded I should have to re-arrange my own modest furnishings at home in this what appeared to me, more comfortable and accessible style.
Then I noticed the picture frames were mostly empty. In them, if a picture at all, would be one smiling man. The same man in many different outfits and locations and sometimes appearing to be standing next to or in the midst of a group of people but the other people in the pictures had faded somehow dramatically leaving the image of the man to be the only recognizable visage in any of the frames. This in itself being enough to unsettle me, the fact that in every picture he had the same pleading smile, a hopeless smile. The smile of a man keeping up the appearance of a man smiling but now lacking the inner conviction to make the farce on his face reach into the depths of his eyes. The combination of the unusual photographic fading and the consistency of the mans sad face left me both terrified and strangely sympathetic.
| 3 | 0 | 7 | 141,093 |
[WP] Aliens landed on earth, and they're surprised all humans possess what they think of as a superpower... an ability we always took for granted and consider normal.
|
First (WP) Attempt
It was a pleasant day for May, light cloud cover, gentle breeze, birds could be heard from the nearby treeline. I could feel the warmth of the sun through the back of my T-shirt. The kind of day that makes you wish you could lie down on a grassy hill somewhere and just breathe for an hour or two. As I glanced down to my gun - Archie I called it - hanging at my waist I let out a small sigh and thought to myself "Why does it all have to go to hell on a beautiful day like this." I looked back up to the spot in the sky where the source of my irritation hung. A smooth circle I'm guessing three hundred feet in diameter sat suspended in the air, glossy black all over without a visible propulsion source. I didn't like the look of it and I didn't like that me and my boys were first on the scene, but I also didn't have much of a choice. Higher ups said they would be arriving by jet in a little under an hour, we are just to sit tight and hope that they will be fast enough.
"why here cap?" I hear Dan pipe up for the fourth time "I mean y'know no disrespect an' all but this ain't really New York or anythin, why come here?" I don't have any good answer for that, seeing as I was asking the world that question too. "I dunno Dan, maybe they just like the landscape, maybe they wanHOLD! No body move! Guns at your side and don't make a sound! No threatening actions!" Damn it all the alien ship had started to move, descending slowly. I could see now that it was about fifty feet tall as it settled on the field over which it had lay. From seamless black a hatched appeared, angling downwards the inside of the hatch seemed to have been shaped to form stairs. I hold my breath as a figure calmly steps into the light on the top step.
The first thing I notice is the Alien's garb, resembling a runners track suit the figure was colored in a swirl of alluring blues so exotic i had to stop myself from letting out a whistle. black combat boots stand in stark contrast to the uniform the Alien wears, reminding me of the possibilities this encounter holds. Physically it resembles a human, standing at 4' 5" two legs, two arms, one head, light red skin similar to a sunburned Caucasian. no facial hair to speak of - it could just be bald though - no nose but a mouth and two eyes. At it's waist three fingers and a thumb hold nothing in it's unadorned hands. The last thing that catches my eye is a silver collar around the being's neck as it settles on the last step. It's mouth moves.
"I am Kurt, representative of this ship" a loud, decidedly male voice crosses the distance. "We wish to begin diplomacy, please send forward your representative" I let out a low sigh of relief, even if they are lying at least there isn't a language barrier. I signal to my men to stand down and I slowly approach Kurt, Archie at my back, hands open at my waist. I stop about five feet from the base of the stairs and speak in the most level voice I can manage given the circumstance, "My name is Jack, I am not a representative of the people of this planet but I can speak for those who are present" Kurt nods, "That will do for now." I am about to ask what Kurt means to talk about as a strong wind picks up and to my surprise the small figure pitch's and topples like a pole! I crouch down and reach out my arms as would a father who's toddler just fell over, "Oh my god are you ok?" From the ground Kurt just stares incredulously at me, "One who is named Jack, how do you not fall? what force keeps you standing?" Now I'm the one confused, "What do you mean? I'm just standing, you were too just a second ago?" Kurt shakes his head "No no no, the Nitrogen Oxygen increased in velocity, how did you resist it's force?" I pause to think, Nitrogen Oxygen is air right? So the wind picked up and Kurt couldn't resist the change in force. "Well I just used my toes to keep upright?" Kurt slowly mouths the word 'toes' out, "That word does not translate to our language, please explain what force this 'toes' is" well now I'm grinning like an idiot, I get to be the first person to impress an alien! I reach for my bootstraps, maybe today will be a pleasant day after all.
| 18 | 0 | 394 | 149,927 |
[WP] Reconstruct a well known children's tale or setting into a murder mystery
|
Detective Ernie Rustle, 32 year detective for the NYPD, quickly stood up from his crouched position, folding away a handkerchief he had been using to collect blood from a body that could be mistaken for a sleeping dame. He grimaced. 64 was too old for this. In 3 more months he'd be living the good life with his wife in the Keys. He had hoped for a slow 3 months. Rarely in his career had he wanted more desk work than he did today. But of course this case had to come along.
In front of him, a girl lay face down in a red-hood, blood oozing from a series of lacerations on her back. Around her, the dense wood of the Black Forest of upper Bronx seemed to squeeze them, trapping them underneath its ominous branches. His partner, by his standards a newbie, was 3 year veteran detective Sam Paulie. Paulie was too newtoo excited. Ernie vowed to put him in his place. Rather he did than a truly horrifying case did.
Ernie decided to review the facts once more. 'She was on her own, right, this dame, with nothing but this basket? Full of sweets and cookies. Ain't that right."
Sam reviewed the notepad he had been scribbling something unintelligible. It could have been his grocery list for his wife, and not notes that could be vital to cracking the case. "That's right. Her mother said she left at 3:30 p.m., and forensics confirms the fatal blow was struck at 4:01 p.m."
Ernie looked at the series of deep scratches in her back, and the fatal blow- a chunk of her head missing. "Do they know what weapon did it?" He growled. This question had been unanswered by the chief while he was being briefed on his way down here.
"Forensics claims a shard of some sort. A glass bottle, a shank, maybe even a dull knife." Sam read carefully.
"Doesn't look like a bottle that did the dame in..." Ernie whispered, his hand expertly floating over the cuts. "More like... Nails. If that makes sense. Did she have any enemies? A boyfriend that wanted to do her in? Gangs? Maybe little Suzie-Lin down the street thought little... Red-Riding-Hood here was a little too promiscuous at school."
Sam once again glanced down at the notes. Ernie rolled his eyes. He would have memorized the details within minutes of receiving them. "Nothing we've found yet. She had filed a police report, however, some weeks prior... On the 17th of September. It was night, and she thought someone was stalking her. All the police found was something that looked like dog trackshardly a rape-to-be. Her mother said she was never in any gangs. Spent a lot of time at her grandma's."
Ernie glided his finger over the hood, and found spittle. He lifted it up to his nose, and smelled it. Dog spit? He was getting to old for this kind of crap.
| 2 | 0 | 1 | 114,271 |
[WP] Write a short children's story on problems while setting up a Christmas tree.
|
I dont want to hang ornaments!
*Charlie sat in the corner playing his gameboy while his mother, father, and 2 older sisters opened a large colorful bin full of ornaments. He never really liked Christmas, his older sisters always brought over boyfriends and he always felt so small compared to the 12ft tree and long ropes of garland hanging throughout the house.*
"Charlie? Would you like to hang some of your ornaments? Here's your box"
No.
*Every year he hung his ornaments they were on the lowest branches. Out of view for people to see. His crafts from class, wooden sticks glued end to end with his picture in it, the angel he cut out of cardboard. It was pointless*
I dont like my ornaments.
"But Charlie they're beautiful! And you made them!"
No one ever sees them.
*Young Charlie put his gameboy down and ran up the stairs. He reached the banister where the very top of the christmas tree stretched just enough to touch with your finger tips. He sat there, arms crossed, peering down onto his family setting up ornaments. When to his surprise he felt the vibration of large footsteps approaching him. He turned and to his amazement-*
Santa?
*The man himself was standing there, big red hat and all. He pressed his finger to his lips signaling little Charlie to be quiet. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out the most beautiful and elegant of stars. It was a perfect fit for the top of the christmas tree.*
"Can I trust you to place the star on your tree? This one is quite special. It's the one I use at the North Pole."
*Charlie sat in awe as Santa handed him the big golden star. He couldn't pull his eyes away from it. He spun around, stretched his arm as far as he could through the railings and gently placed the star on top of the tree.*
Is that good?
*He turned around and Santa, was gone. But as he lost sight of the man in the red suit, he begun to hear the voices of his family*
"What a beautiful star!?"
"When did we get that one?"
"Must have come with the tree this year!"
*Charlie smiled. Picked himself up and ran back downstairs. It was his secret on where the star really came from, and he couldn't help but grin while hanging his ornaments.*
| 2 | 0 | 2 | 162,971 |
[WP] Groundhog Day happens to you, except it's one whole year that is repeating.
|
*1st January 2015, 12:00am GMT*
BONG!
"Oh no, not again."
BONG!
I walk over to my television ...
BO --
... and turn it off. It's 2015 yet again; this is the fifth time it's happened. The first time round I lived through that horrific year of 2015 - those plane crashes and food riots and mass starvation - though many times I thought I wouldn't. On December the thirty-first the first time round, I sat by the fire with my mother, seeing the starry night above us - a night that would seem wondrous to someone from 2014 - and the waning gibbous moon only just having risen, and I waited for the clock to get to midnight - to get to Friday - to get to 2016. In 2016 there lay a chance to start anew, a chance to rebuild our lives. It had been eight months since the lights went out - I had thought *let's put all of the horror of twenty fifteen behind us!*
I'd found myself in the bedroom of my old house the second time round, Big Ben chiming twelve times and fireworks going off, extremely confused. Everyone was talking about how it was the end of 2014 and the start of 2015 - I told the relatives of mine who lived with me that I'd already lived through the year before, and that the apocalypse was going to happen on the first of May; we bought supplies - iodine tablets and meals ready to eat and gallons upon gallons upon gallons of clean water. My mother thought me a nutjob for those first four months, but I was right ... again. We lived fairly comfortably that second 2015 - it was much better than the first 2015.
Until it happened again. I knew the drill - twelve o'clock, Thursday, January the first, Big Ben welcoming in 2015 again. I walked downstairs, got a knife and slit my throat. "<NAME REDACTED>, died four minutes past midnight, 1st January 2015". The third 2015 didn't really count, I thought.
I sat in my bedroom at exactly twelve midnight on the first of January in the fourth 2015, thankful for the third 2015. I knew that I was immortal - I thought I wouldn't really begin to wish for death until about the three hundredth 2015. I began to desperately tell everyone I knew and a lot of people I didn't that the lights would go out on the morning of the first of May, like a real-life Dies the Fire or One Second After, and millions would die due to starvation, disease and civil unrest. I told them *please, don't get on any aeroplanes on the night of April thirtieth - 2014, with its three plane disasters, is nothing compared to a single second between 2:50 and 3:10 Universal Time on May 1st, 2015.*
In the fourth 2015 not a lot of people truly believed me - I kept on attending school, preparing for my A-level exams, right up to the final Thursday of the modern world - the last day of April and the last day of society as we knew it. But the lights went out again - planes fell out of the sky, riots started up and we searched for a place to live and grow crops for the third time.
Twenty minutes ago I sat next to a fire, with two of my relatives, explaining that I wouldn't be here in 2016 - that I would be cursed to live the year two thousand and fifteen over and over again for all of eternity, like Groundhog Day but for the worst year since 1945, 1816 or even 1350. At midnight on that Thursday night, December the 31st, 2015, I vanished into thin air, leaving my family, the fire, several million dead Britons and a waning gibbous moon behind ...
... and materialised here. Thursday, January 1st, four days before full moon, the fifth year two thousand and fifteen. I don't know why this is happening - and why it's happening to me and no-one else - but I think I may be beginning to wish for death's release two hundred and ninety-five 2015s earlier than I had anticipated.
| 2 | 0 | 1 | 181,126 |
[WP] After a long and blood battle, both the hero and villain are going to die of their wounds. As the sit across from each other, leaning on rubble, the villain pulls out a flask of whiskey and has a heart felt last talk with the hero, before they die of blood loss.
|
"I love a good fight." Trying to breathe, but fading away quickly, Akram looked at his nemesis, trying to put together what just happened. "You know what i hate? War. I hate war, but there is nothing wrong with a good fight." Joshua felt the wound, felt his own blood pouring from the hole this man just gave him, giving him no reason to entertain anything this enemy is trying to rationalize. "I fight for freedom!", Joshua said, with the passion you would expect from a young, proud, patriotic solider. "I fight to rid the world of the scum, the pieces of shit like you, th... that..... that
He was fading, Akram looked into his eyes, and saw the end was near.
"Solider, what's your name, tell me your name"
"FUCK YOU THAT'S WHO I AM!", said Joshua.
"Your tag, says Conner, you are conner solider"
"Joshua Conner, I'm Joshua Conner, I'm a mem....... im a mem....ber of... United states arm..... "
"Joshua, you put a good fight up, you made your country proud yes?"
"Damn Fucking right"
"Why me?" Akram crawled to Joshua, over the rubble, the streets covered in the concrete of the bombed buildings that surrounded them both. The fire that lit the Scene ensured that Akram could look into Joshua's eye's, and he would be looking back
"You're the evil" Joshua said. "You're the terrorist threat to my countries innocen..ss... fuck"
"Me?!", screamed Akram. "You kicked down my door!, i made for the wood from my tree! That grew on my land! In my country! I am your threat?!"
"I...i heard you scream, there was a high level threat spotted in this area, i came..... to... i came to check.. i heard you.."
"And you shot me," Akram said, beginning to fade. After it dawns on him, the situation becomes clear to him, that this soldier, who was nothing more than a scared boy, was following orders, and the order was to find the enemy, Akram wasn't the enemy, Akram was the character that looked the part, Akram was one of them, but more so, from Joshua's point of view, he wasn't one of us.
"Joshua, you killed my wife....you killed my son.. that blood you shed, was in retaliation, I was yelling at them to hide, we heard the bombs, we heard the gun fire, we felt the fire. .. You wake up damn you! You do not get the honor of dying with out the knowledge of your fucking actions!"
As Akram grabbed Joshua's coat, he felt a large object in Joshua's breast pocket. Akram reached in, and pulled out Joshua's flask, adorned with a cross, and biblical quote.
Akram, also a religious man, felt the end near, and was overcome with not hate, but the need to share this last moment with a man, instead of an enemy.
"Joshua, look at me, i am Akram, Joshua, LOOK AT ME!"
"Wh...what.. yes Akram, what"
"Do.....you.....pray Joshua, do you pray?"
"Yes"
"I pray for you Joshu......i.."
"I'll pray for you too, Akram"
| 3 | 0 | 818 | 154,661 |
[WP] You die and find yourself in Valhalla, where all great warriors go when they die. However, you never fought a day in your life. You try to find out why you're there.
|
The first thing she noticed while walking through the trail hedged by low stone cliffs was her gait. It was strong and even, a hearkening back to a time before the sickness began eating at her flesh. She raised her hands up, and noticed they weren't skeletal and pasty anymore, but filled out, and pink. She gripped her hands to fists. Strong. A cool breeze that smelled of flowers caught her attention, and lifted her eyes to the sky. The mist was fading from around her, being burned away by a warm sun. Impossibly bright. When was the last time she had been in the light?
"Sister!" A man's voice called out, amidst the clatter of horse hooves. She frowned, realizing she had no idea where she was, or how she had gotten here. Her thoughts were muddied and dreamy. *Ah, but these men know me*, she thought, *Must'nt be rude."
"Good morning!" She responded loudly, marvelling in the strength of her voice. "How goes the battle?" No, that wasn't right. It felt like the appropriate response, but the words were all wrong...
The men pulled up in front of her, where the craggy pass became a field of emerald green long grasses and wildflowers. The horses snorted and and stomped happily and helped themselves to the grazing.
"The battle goes well!" The man at their head roared, laughing, throwing his mane of golden hair into the wind. "Eir, you look as good as ever!"
*Eir?*, she thought, frowning. "That's not my name. I'm sorry, you must be mistaking me for someone else."
He shook his head, his laughter dying down to chuckles. "Still having a bit of a problem changing over? You always did get confused when you woke up. Come now, we brought your horse." He motioned to a man behind him, a man with an impressive black beard, who led a white mare by a line towards her.
"Swan..." She said, patting her horse on the snout. Swan nickered happily.
"Ah, see, you're starting to remember." The golden-haired man said. "Come, now. We should not keep your father waiting."
Eir, who began warming up to that name, expertly mounted the white horse, adjusting her armor and sword comfortably. *I have been here before.*
They took off across the fields, the horses running full-out, armor clanking against armor, their shouts excited. The men kept her in the middle of them, towards the front, although their geldings would have easily outpaced Swan. She looked around at the formation of men and caught sight of her hair blowing in a long gold braid behind her. *Blonde?* Her confusion was faint now, but still attempting to push through. *I had dyed it that color quite often, but I'm a natural brunette.* It was difficult for thoughts of that nature to last long here. They were fast approaching an enormous building, guarded on either side by a large raven carved from silver.
They all dismounted, most of them breaking off to brush and care for their horses themselves, while two groomsmen took Swan and the blue roan the man with blonde hair had ridden.
He took the lead, saying excitedly something about "much celebration and feasting in your name!" He cut off realizing she had stopped before the large doors.
"Horik?" She found a name for the face.
His grin split his face. "Aye, that's what I'm called."
"How did I come to be here? This is Valhalla, is it not? This is a place for only the warriors, and they stay until Ragnorak. How is it...?" She took a breath and removed her helmet, tucking the feather-laiden headpiece under her arm familiarly. "How is it," she resumed, "That I come and go many times? I have not even held a sword or bow in my life!"
The statement sparked a torrent of her life, charging back into her head. "I was a nurse! For decades! And then I got cancer. I never died in battle. I died from illness." *Dead, only the slain may enter...* It hit her suddenly, the realization she was dead. Although it didn't feel so bad, if this were death. But surely, there was a mistake?
"Eir..." He said softly, his gray eyes kind and patient. "You will come to remember in time, but I will tell you now. Your father has many daughters of battle, and sometimes he sends you back to live as a mortal. The point of going back to humanity is not always to battle. Sometimes, it is only to regain your mercy." Norik walked back past her, and gathered a large purple flower in his hands.
"Living here, it is difficult to remember anything but the fight we prepare for. You and others like you, well, you've been here for so much longer than anyone else. Your father..." He gently tucked the flower behind her ear, "Although he loves his daughters and their fierce ways deeply, he does not want you to forget what you fight so long for."
"What is it?" She asked him as he grabbed the handles of the giant doors.
He turned his head so she could see his grin. His eyes sparkled. "Peace." Norik said, as he threw open the doors to a deafening cheer.
| 0 | 0 | 354 | 50,003 |
[WP] God's not dead but alive and well and is working on a much less ambitious project.
|
I marched up the immaculate gold steps, my shaky hands slick with sweat and my breath coming in short, ragged gasps. The ceiling of clouds grew closer with every lift of my legs, calling me to it, a command that consumed my very being. My mind was engaged in a battle of will, one that was every bit as strenuous and demanding as physical combat. A vein pulsed on my forehead, thundering through my mind and causing my whole body to shudder violently.
A deep roar like brazen trumpets boomed through all that was, giving me a flash of strength in spite of the nearly unbearable pains that wracked both my body and mind. I rushed forward in a dead sprint, my agonized grimace turning into a triumphant grin as I felt the cool, healing mist of the clouds grace my frame.
Suddenly, all was right and as it should be. The steps shone brilliantly, dispersing the dew of the clouds and revealing a magnificent gate of purest diamonds at their top. I stood upon the air itself, hundreds of feet above the living green terrain of the Earth.
I had ascended to Heaven. The time of my ultimate judgement was at hand.
I strode forward with eyes only for the masterful craftsmanship of the gate, which looked as though it had been carved from a single solid diamond. All around me were extraordinary sights of beauty, all wonders to behold. The sun shined on the clouds and transformed them to islands of frozen fire, and even the air sparkled with a glimmer of something magical. But it was the Gate that called to me and it was to the Gate I looked.
I blinked once and opened my eyes to find God in between the Gate and I. He looked to be just a benevolent old man with a grand white beard and a joyful twinkle in his eye, but I knew better. How not? He was *God*, after all.
An enormous smile split my face and I ran to him, embracing him as though he were my father (which, in a way I suppose, he was). I bawled into his shabby light grey robe, bawled tears of joy, relief, sorrow, and acceptance. I felt his scratchy, yet smooth, beard against my cheek and dismissed all thoughts of my trials to get here. No more did the fact that I had indeed died daunt me. I knew peace as I had never thought possible, a euphoria that warmed me to my very core.
With a genial chuckle, he gently ended the embrace. He cupped my face in his calloused hands the way a lover would, his fingers lightly touching my skin. His mouth opened to speak, then closed as he thoughtfully frowned. I longed to hear his voice, for the sweet music of it to wash over me. When he did talk, his words came as a surprise.
"Would you like to see the trains?" he ventured in a gruff tone putting one in mind of a favored grandfather.
"Would I like to see the rain?" I heard, wondering at how calm I felt. I was in the presence of a grand and revered deity, yet I felt completely at ease.
"No, no the trains. I understand that you used to work at a railroad, before you, well, you know..." He paused awkwardly. "I figured that you would be able to appreciate them much more than the *average* soul who comes up here."
"T-trains?" I stammered, all the serenity I felt previously being replaced by confusion.
"Yes, correct, *trains*. Often used as a method of transportation for cargo or humans. You *are* familiar with them, I trust?" He was beginning to sound skeptical, speaking to me as though I were a witless chimp.
"Well, yeah. Everyone knows about trains. They'rethey're *trains*." I began to wonder if this man truly was god. He was beginning to look like a typical bum you would see begging outside of Grand Central Station.
He scowled at me as though he had heard what I was thinking. "Hmm, so would you like to see them?" This came out rather rudely and was followed by the low blast of the trumpet I had heard earlier. Then I realized that it was no trumpet at all, nor even an instrument of any sort. It was a train.
Stunned, I looked at him. The robe resembled a threadbare garment to be worn after bathing, were it not so filthy. Nothing divine about it whatsoever. His beard appeared to have motor oil as well as scraps of rotting food in it. This "God" was just a vagrant hobo. The twinkle in his eye was more than likely some sort of narcotic.
I had forgotten how I had arrived there. Suddenly I was horribly fearful for my life, desperate not to lose it to this rabid junkie. Terrifying visions of being cut to pieces over the loose change in my pocket began to invade my mind, causing me to tremble anew.
"I think you should follow me to my trains," the delusional fool said with a scowl.
It occurred to me that maybe he just wanted to go to Grand Central, where I work. The idea filled me with a fierce hope. Once there, security would recognize me and see that I was in need of assistance. Their dealing with this criminal would be swift and brutal, I had no doubt, but justified. "Yes, yes, of *course* I'll come see your trains. Lead the way, my friend." I spoke jovially, confident of my impending rescue.
"Right." The stare he gave me was one of intense judgement, which was ludicrous when considering the source. "Follow me."
I ambled behind him in a haze of thick, unthinking fog. Before I knew it, we were inside what looked to be an ancient train, made of a dark, dull metal. In the center of the cab was a black brazier with burning coal glowing red-hot. This was what powered the train, the heat the coal gave off allowing it to run. An unpleasant heat wave passed through me, and I began to retch as sweat poured from my body.
I only became aware of the homeless man when he spoke, his tone as hard as steel. "*YOU HAVE BEEN DEEMED UNWORTHY OF SALVATION.*" His voice burned through me, sending ripples of searing misery all throughout my body. "*FOR YOUR SHAMEFUL EXISTENCE YOU SHALL NOW EXPERIENCE AN ETERNITY OF DAMNATION*."
I howled as the crackling flesh sloughed off my bones and I entered the black brazier, a fiery Hell.
EDIT: Sorry if I didn't follow the prompt too well.
| 1 | 0 | 8 | 126,428 |
[WP] You're running a little late to work, but when you arrive someone identical to you is already sitting at your desk. He puts up his hands and says "Relax, I can explain."
|
My ID-card didn't work that morning. Lindsey the receptionist was gone, and replaced with an older woman I didn't know who didn't want to help me.
"But... but I'm already late for work," I tried to tell her. "If I could just get in, I could get... I could get my boss to... to vouch for m-me?"
"You have to have an ID to get into the building. Your ID has expired. You should have renewed it in time." The receptionist sighed.
"S-sorry." She didn't want to call my boss. After thirty minutes she gave up, and gave me a visitor's badge.
Then there was the man sitting by my desk, drinking coffee from my mug, the one that said 'World's Best Dad'.
"Relax, I can explain," he said and smiled. He looked very familiar. He had that red sweater on that Alice, my wife, gave me. It looked better on him than it did on me.
"B-but... that's my desk. Wh-who are you? It's... I..."
"Yeah, I'm just covering for you. Come on, next time you're late you should just call it in. Don't let us down like that. Be a good coworker, pal." He smiled even broader. "I'm David Stephen. Call me Dave. Hello!"
"M-my cellphone didn't work... The AT&T had... they had deleted my account... b-by mistake. I couldn't, I couldn't call in. I'm so- I'm sorry." What the man had said sunk in. "B-but... that's my name. It's my name. Wh-what are you...?"
"Nooo, come on, now you're kidding me. Says here on your badge your name is Stephen. Stephen, David." He snorted. "Hey Steve, why the visitor's badge? I thought you worked here. Wait, don't tell me you forgot your ID at home."
"My... My ID didn't work, it... And my name isn't Stephen, it's Da-"
"Jesus H. Christ, Steve, you are such a klutz. Pull yourself together." The man got up from my desk. He was taller than I, his nose on the same level as my eyebrows. It was strange looking up at my own face. "Look, I hope you don't mind, but I went ahead and reorganized the files on your computer. Whoa, it was a mess in there! Also, I checked out what you had done on that report due tomorrow and made some suggestions. Geez, I hope you make a better job with the other stuff you do, Steve. Because that report was not impressing. I'm surprised that they let you work here at all. Shit, for all I know, that report could be your last. So you should really get onto that, Steve-o."
"B-but..."
"Yeah. It's going to take all night with your speed, so you better get cracking. Hell, I could do it in an hour myself, but that's your job, isn't it?" The man laughed loudly. "Don't worry about the meeting with the bossman, I rescheduled for a lunch meeting at that restaurant he's always talking about down at Lincoln Street. I'll take care of it, Steve. I figure we look so much alike he won't notice anything. I have some ideas to run through with him anyways."
"B-but, I..."
"Oh yeah, about tonight. Date night with Alice, huh? Don't worry, I know you can't make it because of the report thing, so I booked concert tickets and called that sushi place she loves, you know it? I'll fill in for you, Steve. I'll give her a good time. That's what friends do, man." He slapped my shoulder. "Hey, I meant it, you should start working, Steve. Go, go, go! I won't distract you. I'll get out of your hair, maybe go chat up that hot chick in HR, what's-her-name."
"K-Karen? Y-you sh-shouldn't..."
"Yeah, what ever." He pressed me down into my chair, and slapped my shoulder again as he let go. "Good luck, Steve-o! You're going to need it."
Before he walked out, he made thumbs up. "Hey Steve, wish me luck with miss HR!"
"M-my name... my name is Davi-" But he was already out of the room. I could hear him laughing outside.
The computer really was better organized. I found the report quickly. I hoped I would get it done before the deadline. I had to.
| 2 | 0 | 598 | 195,082 |
[WP]Earth is one big TV studio. Each person's life is a different channel on the Universal TV network. If your show has been the #1 Rated show for 2 months you get pulled out into the "real world."
|
It became a dystopia where being boring was something to yearn for.
At first, people were happy and excited to be brought into this "real world". There was some other world to explore, some unknown territory that would be soon encountered! Curiosity got the best of the first couple of winners.
Then, as the curious people began to wane as more and more of them left, the people who aspired to be in the "real world", the next people, by default, were the celebrities and the attention-grabbers, the hotties, the naughties, and the uglies. Anyone who was different vanished after their two month debut.
Some people began to create conspiracies. Streets were filling with the conspirators who took to the soapbox to proclaim their interpretation. Of course, after four of them were taken, they quickly became hush-hush and ran inside.
Sure, it was gradual - six people a year is pretty slow. But you begin to notice after years and years. You eventually realize the types of people who leave and then see them make a grand exit fifteen years later.
People stopped having kids, by both the fact that sex tended to be an interesting activity and that kids were also pretty popular for the choosing - an event which would most likely bring their parents to suicide not long after.
People avoided doing anything out of the ordinary - then, anything interesting at all. Some groups realized the potential behind watching others, and we had a twenty-year period where the only people who left were CEOs - competitors and the like.
The world became dull and fearful - "1984" and Big Brother were nothing compared to what billions of people can become.
We became shut-ins, watching UTV 24/7 and daring to eat nothing more than rice cakes and drinking water - two years ago, a guy drank a Coca-Cola in defiance and the world went wild.
Then UTV upped the rates - and quickly. A year ago, twelve people left. This upcoming month, UTV announces one hundred.
I've covered my cameras, shut my doors and windows, survived in my bunker doing nothing but read books. This is the end. I write this knowing that I will be next - I'm looking into the eye of a camera they hid really well.
Television, the drug of the nation.
Televisions, in the air.
Boob tube. TV. Tele. Idiot box.
Enjoy me, you heartless bastards.
| 5 | 0 | 57 | 148,303 |
[WP] In the near future an ancient virus is discovered by scientists. It begins to spread and its now on the news. You've been alive for centuries now, and you're immune to it from when it went around the first time. Do you help the human race and risk giving up your secret?
|
The Pharaohs of Egypt, Alexander the great, the Mongolian empire, the Aztecs.The hanging gardens, the colossus, you name it i've seen it. And step by step, it all crumbles down in the end. Great empires and gargantuan structures, none can endure as i have endured.
Everything i love and adore i shall outlive and there is nothing i can do to escape this torment.
This time could be different. Maybe this time i can help. Nancy stares at me as only she can, a look that pierces your very soul and makes you everything and nothing at the same time.
This time would be different. I can't let her down, not Nancy. I grasp her hand tightly as she shakes on the sofa and we lie there in silence. I need to tell her, Why won't i tell her? She's losing colour, the third step of the five. The first is nausea, the second delusion and now the loss of colour. Delusion is the worst part, so far at least but they dont know the half of it. She was bad, but by contrast the loss of colour seemed s blessing against delusion.It was as though her whole life was a lie and i was the center of her torment. The only person to let me in and i was the monster of her world. I was her hell as far as she knew.
Its unfair, im not ready. I like my life. I adore Nancy, i have lived through years before Nancy but she brought me to life. now i was truly **alive**. Raw emotion, love, empathy, i was finally getting the real deal and now they take it from me. The people of the world thought they had this worked out the first time, but their science wont help them. They parade around degrees and doctorates yet they are closed to all of the possibilities. They cant crack the disease. Its already been done. Oppenheimer with the fat man and even thousands of years before, the plague will continue until they open their eyes. They don't know what i know.
They don't know who i am, **What** i am. I am it. But this time i can help. They've suffered long enough, i can finally help. im here for a reason and all they need to do is acknowledge it. But i like it here. I adore Nancy, i am real here. i feel for once and i'm not throwing this away. Humanity can wait. I am death, Destroyer of worlds, but i like it here so they can suffer a while longer.
| 2 | 0 | 53 | 103,881 |
[WP]An old dog is being taken to the vet to be put down and does not understand what is happening.
|
Alfred was a dog and he was concerned. His master, a woman who wore glasses, has been sad for days. He had seen her sad before, when the man who fed him scraps under the table stopped coming around. She went through a period of crying, ice cream, and running. Alfred was a younger dog back then, and could run with her.
Now, Alfred was concerned. He worried that he couldn't keep up. His legs didn't move as they used to. He loved the occasional chase of the squirrel, but the pain...
The woman who wore glasses cried often everyday. She hugged him tighter than she normally would. She really needed him to help her smile again. He licked her tears. They didn't taste salty anymore.
Alfred went through his things and found the leash. She just needed to get out and get some fresh air. Running would do her good.He would try to keep up.
The woman who wore glasses came home and saw Alfred laying by the door with the leash next to him. She broke down once more.
Alfred went on a car ride. He would be sad about not enjoying the ride as he once did, but he was just concerned. The woman who wore glasses stopped many times and cried. He licked her hand, unable to prop himself up too far.
Alfred decided he must find the man who fed him scraps. It was settled. As soon as they go home, he would take a journey. It was settled.
They arrived at the vet. Every one was every bit as lovely as before. His friends, he would call them.
It hadn't been that long since he last saw them, a lot sooner than he expected. But he was glad to be there. Maybe they can figure out what is wrong with the woman who wore glasses.
They put him on a cold steel table. The woman who wore glasses was by his side. She was crying softly, trying to hold it together.
He was getting sleepy, but he didn't want to go to sleep, not with her still crying.
He couldn't let his eyes close.
The woman who the white coat whispered something into the war of the woman who wore glasses.
Finally, a smile. It was faint. It was brief. Alfred saw it and was relieved.
Alfred was a dog and he closed his eyes.
| 1 | 0 | 3 | 127,501 |
[WP] Apocalypse: You've been bitten by a Zombie, Werewolf or Creature of Your Choice and slowly start to turn into one. You are 91 years old when it happens.
|
"You two have had enough. My assets go to my grandkids and that is final." The old man glared at his son,Trey, and his son's wife, Julie. His son was a chronic gambler and she was a drug addict.
Trey stood up, glaring down at him. "That's not fair, you old geezer. I'll hire an attorney and we will shred that when you die. Give us something, dad. Please." Trey sat back down, anger flashing in his eyes.
"**Fine.** You want to play hardball, old man? You'll never see John or Hannah again. I'll see you rot before I bring your precious grandkids to you. And good luck getting anyone to push you outside again. *I hope you burn in hell.* Come on Julie, let's not waste any more time on this.. this *fool*."
They gathered there things and then they left. His heart was still pounding. He had seen that icey coldness in his son before, but this time it was different. He saw murder in his son's eyes. As always, he wondered where he had gone wrong in his parenting. It filled his heart with sadness to think of all of the wasted years that his son's various addictions had cost them. There was no helping him. He had watched in anguish as his son had blown through his grandchildren's college funds and his retirement. The only thing left for him now was to wait until his meager funds ran out. They would kick him out of the nursing home and he would die homeless. He sat staring into his hands until he felt someone watching him. He smiled, knowing full well who it was.
"There is no stronger love than a grandfather for his grandchildren. I just wish my son could see it."
The attendant, Walter walked past and then sat down in front of him. Walter's grey eyes searched his and seemed to read his mind.
"Yes, Mr. Stevens. Family loyalty is all we really have. Blood binds us, but loyalty holds us together, that's a timeless truth." He paused, then looked out the window.
"You know, Mr. Stevens, I have been watching you. I watch all of our people. The people who come through our doors. Most people don't understand loyalty. They get swept away in petty, blinding things and they lose who they are.
A time will come in all of their lives when they will have to choose to succumb to their blindness or embrace their true spirit." Walter's eyes swung sharply back to his. His eyes were piercing, the pupils seemed to be growing. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and for a moment, Mr. Stevens felt fear.
"I think you are close to that point in your life."
Walter's hand touched his knee and the fear turned to respect. He had always liked Walter, although he didn't know much about him. There was just something about his character that he liked. It reminded him of his childhood. His father had seemed a lot like this man, before he had died in a hunting accident. The body was never recovered, but pieces of bone had been found near his gun.
"Anyways, get some rest, Mr. Stevens. You seem very tired." The words were no sooner out of Walter's mouth than fatigue did wash over him. As Walter left the room, he lay back down in his bed, looking at the clock. 08:54 PM so early, yet so late.
His grandkids, John and Hannah were swinging on the playground. He laughed as the went higher and higher, their smiles and laughter warmed his soul. The playground was surrounded by fences but he could see someone approaching from the other side. It was a dark figure, all shadows. He knew that it knew he was watching it. It was smiling. He couldn't see its' face but he what it was. It was the thing that had taken his child. Trey was in there somewhere, but he was gone. That thing had stolen his soul. It was approaching his grandchildren and he screamed. He couldn't stop it. Suddenly, it was wearing Trey's face and it was beckoning John and Hannah to it. The children's smiles faded and their laughter stopped. All of the colors were fading. The thing was sucking all of their life away from them.The children walked closer and closer to the soul stealer and it smiled at him. Trey smiled at him.
He woke up, his heart beating rapidly in his chest, the clock was set at 3:07 AM. Walter was standing over him. His eyes were gleaming green but he was smiling peacefully. He picked up his hand and clasped it tightly.
"Mr. Stevens, your time has come. Death is approaching and I am here to comfort you. Close your eyes and accept death. You have lived a wonderful life."
"No, Walter, damn it," he lifted himself up to look into the man's face and was shocked. He was staring into his father's face.
"So now you know. I tried to shield you from it, son. I really did."
"My grandkids, he's going to take them. You have to stop him."
"I can't. There are rules to this that I can't explain, but you are about to pass away. You should, my son. Death is relief."
"**No**. I will not let him take my grandkids too."
Walter smiled. His smile turned into a grin and his canine teeth grew longer and longer.
"I must admit, part of me was hoping you'd say that. That bastard needs to be taken down a notch, but you won't enjoy this next part." The bite was painful, the most painful thing he had ever recieved. His vision faded and he passed out.
"Dad?" His son's voice came through the fog. He opened his eyes slowly. Trey and Julie stared down at him. Julie was whispering something into Trey's ear. The only word he heard was pillow.
"Where are my grandkids?"
Trey's smile was mirthless.
"I said you would never see them again. They are with a babysitter." He paused relishing the control, his hands resting on the pillow.
"Walter called us this morning, he said you suffered from a heart attack this morning, is that true?"
With a sinking feeling in his chest, Mr. Stevens nodded his head. His son was going to do it.
"Trey, were did I go wrong? I have always loved you unconditionally. Why?" There was just a brief moment there, a very small moment were he could tell his words had gotten through. Then Julie grabbed his shoulder and the moment was gone. He finally realized just what Julie was. She was the soul stealer wearing human skin.
"Have you reconsidered your offer dad? Will you give me your inheritance? All of it?" His son was pleading with him, he knew there was goodness in there somewhere.
"No, your children are more important than blinding tricks. I love you son. Please don't do this."
A tear came to Trey's eye but the pillow came down anyway. An anger built up in Mr. Stevens. He didn't fight the pillow, but that anger grew. Walter's voice spoke to him, *A time will come in all of their lives when they will have to choose to succumb to their blindness or embrace their true spirit.* The rage filled his entire body, he could feel an unnatural strength coming into him. Transforming his body, he lifted himself up. Trey gasped, horrified at the creature looking back at him. Julie was unfazed, smiling at him. She never stopped smiling, not even when he shredded her body and tore her apart with his sharp teeth and claws. Trey fell next, he tried to stop it, but his bloodlust was already too strong. He couldn't stop. As he chewed his son apart there was no guilt. He felt no remorse, only disgust. After awhile his rage subsided and he collapsed on the bed, exhausted.
When he awoke, his father stared down at him. He sat down.
"Jim, I know that you will feel awful for what you have done, but it needed to be done. Loyalty to one's family is everything. Without it, love can never be fully embraced. I brought your grandkids here, they will need your affection and a shoulder to cry on. Their parents just died in a horrible car wreck." He stood up and gave his son a hug.
"You will find that you are much more healthy now. Certain things must be hidden. I hid many things from you, but now you are ready to learn them. We will have plenty of time to talk later, right now comfort our pack. I love you, son."
//Wow. This story got dark fast. Sorry guys, I must have had a bad lunch.//
| 2 | 0 | 0 | 147,855 |
[WP] A science team makes a discovery of an eerie leviathan like creature.
|
"Excuse me Dr. Feuerbach, but are you feeling alright?" Kevin asked.
"I'm fine," muttered Dr. Feuerbach rubbing the circles under her eyes. "These readings though, they're an absolute mess. I can't make heads or tails of them, let alone use them for something publishable."
Kevin watched as she flipped through a stack of charts, stopped, and drew several circles in a notebook.
"Maybe you just need a break. We still have time to-"
"I said I'm fine," Dr. Feuerbach yelled smashing her fist on the table. She looked up at Kevin immediately, her expression just as shocked as his.
"I'm sorry," she said more clearly. "Evidently my evaluation of my current psychological and physical state is discordant with the reality. Still, I believe the best nourishment for me now would be making some progress. Why don't you go up deck and circle around. See if Ciara or Madhur or need any help."
Kevin nodded and silently exited onto the deck. As he stepped out into the open ocean air, something in the back of his mind began to itch and suddenly he realized that a dense silence seemed to have settled over the ship. Madhur's and Ciara's bickering, which was normally as faithful as the north star, was apparently absent. But there was something else. It took Kevin a moment, but he began to realize that the puttering off the ship's engine had ceased.
"Ciara," he called out turning towards the starboard. He was just about to call for Madhur when suddenly his feet slid out from under him. He scrambled quickly and managing to stay upright, looked down at his feet.
A red circle curled along the floor around him, then looped continually to the starboard quarter, ending at the edge in scattered footprints. Kevin ran and leaning over the edge of the railing looked down into the water. A red cloud slowly plumed by the ship's side.
"We found it."
Kevin turned to see Ciara standing at the stern, blood spattered over her clothes, face, and hair. A knife was in her hands.
"That's what I thought at first," she said smiling. "But I was wrong. It found us, Kevin. This is the opportunity we've been praying for."
Kevin felt numbness come over his body as every emotion powered down inside him.
"Ciara, put the knife down. We can clear all this up. Just drop the knife and kick it over here."
The knife skittered along the deck and stopped shortly in front of Kevin. As he picked it up, he noticed Ciara climbing over the ship's rail.
"No," he screamed running towards her. But he was too late. Ciara disappeared over the edge, followed only by a splash.
Kevin grabbed a life saver off the wall and tossed it blindly into the water.
"Grab it," he screamed leaning over the edge.
"It's ok," Ciara called back pushing the red and white circle away and treading the surface. "You don't have to worry about us anymore."
Suddenly, Kevin could see a black writhing mass just visible beneath the water, as if the ocean floor itself was rising to the surface, but alive. What looked like shiny black snakes twisted about madly as far out as he could see in each direction.
As Ciara laughed and splashed about, one of the black ropes shot to the surface. It wrapped itself around her neck, arms, and waist and in less than a second she was pulled beneath the water. Even in the blur, Kevin could swear he saw a look of terror appear on her face, just before she disappeared.
Two hands smashed into his back and suddenly Kevin found himself looking up at the water as the air rushed past him. He hit the water hard.
"I understand it now," Dr. Feuerbach called out. She waved the notebook in the air, pointing excitedly at the hundreds of circles scratched across its pages. "We're never going to have to worry about funding again. We'll be famous. It's finally come around for us!"
Underwater, the black tentacles seemed to travel more slowly and Kevin began to notice a grace in their movement. Something scratched at the back of his head, but he couldn't think of what it was. His lungs burned, but that didn't seem to worry him.
Deep, deep below, an orange and black eye appeared through the mass of tentacles. Suddenly, a wave of terror shot through Kevin's entire body as he felt himself hurtling straight down towards it.
| 2 | 0 | 7 | 152,354 |
[WP] It turns out King Midas had a brother, Prince Sadim. Everything he touches becomes alive. Describe a day in his life.
|
The Prince slouched in his chair, sitting near a window in the tallest tower of the castle. In his jail he hid, hid and watched life far below, from a window far above. How many days since brother Midas locked him here? How many days since he had heard the voice of another, felt the unfettered wind on his face, or tasted the lips of his sweet sweet Jasmine's kiss?
Time passed differently in seclusion, that was one of the first things Sadim had learned in the tower. It moved like a snake in tall grass, present, approaching, yet hidden and awaiting the strike. What good was the Touch of Life if it kept him from living his own? What retched curse this had become, yet another fallacy of blindly following his brother the King.
The Prince defiantly waved his fist screaming, "May the gods damn the witch and Midas both!" His mind railed and twisted. Was dementia a by-product of solitude? Was he doomed to die alone and crazy? Would Life be the end of his own?
The trill of a springlobber whistled in the Prince's ears, down his mind, touching his softly stirring soul. It was then that Sadim wept. Slow and methodically at first, salt tears slid from his face, growing into an uncontrollable fit of despair and loneliness, as he railed against imprisonment in his stone spire.
Much later wiping warm tears from his face, he heard the call of the springlobber again, this time much closer. Sadim raised his head and saw that the bird had landed on the stone tower's single windowsill. Slowly he moved his arm in the direction of the beast, stretching his finger out before him, willing the beast ever closer.
The springlobber chirped and called, "A greeting," thought the Prince. He beckoned the bird closer and just when he thought the cause lost, it rose in air and alit on his finger.
The Prince cooed and cawed at the life before him. "What a magnificent specimen you are," he said as a strange, wild look birthed in his eye. The springlobber hopped from one finger to the next, and innocently chirped up at the Prince's twisted face.
Without warning Sadim closed his fist around the bird and squeezed. He wrenched and waved his fist around the small creature. Blood began to drip from his closed hand. He cackled and skipped around the small tower chamber laughing maniacally.
Eventually the demented Prince grew tired of his sadistic game and went back to the window. Sitting, Sadim opened his fist and deposited the tiny corpse on the windowsill. Without speaking or smiling the Prince moved his finger and ever so lightly prodded the animal's corpse.
Chest rose, eyes opened, and the springlobber stood and lept from the spire, away from the Prince, and down into the gardens below. "Perhaps the man that sparkles in the sun will be nicer," thought the bird as he flew closer to the place Midas sat.
| 13 | 0 | 144 | 179,203 |
[IP] Moon gate.
|
"Who put it there, anyway?"
"Do you have to ask such stupid questions?"
The young man's gaze turned away from him. Rather, it felt like it did; his face was obscured by his helmet's photochromatic visor. The soft crackling of their ventilators, mixed with the tumbling of rocks on the scree slope beside them, filled the silence.
A few long moments passed before the older, and inherently more senior, guardsman rose to his feet to gaze at the valley below. A black haze lingered in the bottom of the vale - either smoke or some pollutant from the felsic rocks below - doing little to hide the enormous metal ring that dominated the landscape and drew his attention. It had drawn his subordinate's attention, too.
"You don't really know, do you?" the younger asked, idly stabbing at the gravel with the end of his beam rifle.
The senior shrugged. "It's not Ayciel, at least, so we must have put it there. Humans, that is."
"But we're in LD43; we're a good twenty parsecs from the nearest UN outpost!"
"That's the point."
"What is?"
"We're not here to keep an eye on the gate," the senior explained, gesturing up at the blue and green world dominating the sky overhead. "We're here to open it."
The younger looked up at the world overhead. In the ellipsoid shadowed portion of the planet, stretching like a web along coastlines indistinguishable from the ocean in the darkness, he could make out the twinkling lights of a growing, civilisation that his ancestors had placed there thousands of years ago. "We're here to open it if it gets out of hand, aren't we?"
"Exactly so. If their society begins to fail, we open the gate and - quite simply put - wipe them out."
And, to the younger man, there was something about that which was just a little immoral.
| 1 | 0 | 12 | 79,369 |
[WP] The year is 2021. The newest fad are clone clubs, where visitors can spend up to 12 hours with a clone of any person whose DNA they provide. The clones are disposed afterwards.
|
"I don't like Chicago, I miss El Paso – hell, I even miss Guadalajara." Lucio thought to himself. He fumbled for his pass card for a moment before producing the small plastic badge with his poorly printed picture on it. The C&C Factory logo on it was brilliantly printed. Par for the course really. The security guard gave him little more than a nod of acknowledgment before going back to his phone. Lucio meandered down the hall to the "storage room."
His job paid well. He hated every minute of it. Every day Lucio had to dispose of the expired merchandise. C&C Factory made temporary clones of people. Very temporary. Designed to last no longer than around 16 hours or so. Clients were billed for 12 hours of time with their clone, well, wealthy clients. It was around $8,000 a clone, and that's for a crummy one. If you wanted any memories or skills or whatever, it cost a bunch extra. If you had the original person's actual body, you could even give them something close to the original personality.
Lucio swiped his badge and opened the storage room. It had a number of chairs with the 'merchandise' sitting in them. Some were naked, caked in fluids, others dressed fashionably. One was wearing a full military outfit of some sort. "One, two, three…." Lucio began to count the clones and then abruptly stopped.
"Ma'am?" Lucio stuttered out.
"Where am I?" a young lady asked clearly in a daze.
"You are…in a waiting room." Lucio quickly lied.
The client must have gotten the full package. It's the only way the clones remain self-aware this long. The woman paused and considered the information. He felt bad, as they reached their end, they became more gullible and confused. In the end they go catatonic before they 'shutdown.'
"What am I waiting for?"
"Um, your turn ma'am."
The clone seemed to accept this and sat quietly, looking off into space. Lucio sighed and pulled on a set of coveralls at the far end of the room. Next he unfolded a wheel chair and rolled it to one of the catatonic clones. He felt eyes on him while he guided the clone into the seat. Lucio turned to see the young woman staring at him oddly. Shaking his head, he wheeled the clone out of the room and down the hall. After reaching the disposal room, Lucio guided the clone to a metal table connected to a large furnace. He handed the clone a small cup of water and a pill, which the clone dutifully took. A few moments later the clone was unconscious, laying on the metal table. Lucio then mechanically pushed a large red button that activated the table's slider, dumping the body into the furnace.
Lucio repeated the process 15 more times.
Finally he reached the questioning you lady. She looked up at him and asked,
"Is it my turn?"
"Yes."
"When is it your turn?"
| 42 | 0 | 1,271 | 143,802 |
[WP] Write a narrative based on a popular phrase/idiom but taking the phrase to its most literal meaning.
|
Jake was fortunate enough to catch the forecast on his last trip through the barn. He bundled the last bale of hay and placed it haphazardly with the others in a pile in the corner before heading out to pasture and to wrangle Tempest up. She came without a fuss, but whickered from time to time as he brought her in. The wind had just begun to pick up as the gray mare and the cowboy made it to the barn. He tied her to the post and she stamped a foot impatiently. He laughed and kissed the flat space between her nostrils, palming her neck re-assuredly.
He gathered his things and made to leave but stopped abruptly at the mouth of the barn. The sky had darkened quickly and the trees were showing the underside of their leaves, a tell-tale sign that a storm is quickly approaching. It was queer to him that the wind had all but died where it had just been active and lively just moments before. Now just the small blades of grass swayed listfully back and forth. He took a step out of the barn and cautiously poked his head out at the sky.
It began with an absence of noise. When rain falls, it makes the sound of a million droplets pounding the earth all at once. But when snow falls, footsteps soften, and traffic moves indoors, animals hunker down and when the snow eventually lands it makes no noise. This was the sound that accompanied the fur falling from the sky.
At first it fell in strands, some were orange, and some white but most were varying shades of gray and brown. They fell softly and looked to him like small bits of pine straw fluttering down. He held a hand out and gathered several strands in his palm before bringing them to his face and blowing them away curiously.
The mesmerizing silence was broken by the sound of a howl from the sky. The falling mass hit the earth and the howling suddenly and abruptly died away. Stunned, Jake staggered forward and knelt at the ground in front of the steaming mass that had hit the earth. It was furry and smoking but it had the unmistakable curl of a tail of an orange tabby. The rest of it was unidentifiable, and not moving.
The second mass landed behind him and it was preceded by a yipping that died away as instantly as it began. Jake had no time to inspect it.
Even as he was standing up from the tabby to inspect the second mass a third mass, yowling as loud as the first two streaked through the sky and thumped against the old barn. Tempest screamed and reared against her post somewhere in the back of the barn.
Jake found his feet and sprinted toward the mouth of the barn. There was more howling now, and barking and they came from all angles, followed by sudden thuds all around him.
Just as he reached the mouth of the barn, another mass (A beagle, he recognized absurdly) struck the roof and bounced off, yipping the whole way down. When he hit the floor, he flailed about, still yipping and dragging itself along the ground.
He followed the noise of Tempest's screams and quickly worked to untie her from her post. Behind him the roof crashed and gave way to another mass. It struck the wooden floorboard and yowled behind him long after it had hit the floor.
He worked the knot free, hands shaking, and was barely able to keep Tempest still long enough to mount her and spur her in the direction of the mouth of the Barn.
"To the house," he whispered frantically and Tempest shot off like a lightning bolt.
The landscape beyond the gaping maw of the barn was a scene from hell. Fur and broken bodied lying everywhere, some motionless and others clawing along the ground, dragging behind whatever remained of them. The noise was deafening, whether falling or wallowing, they howled, and squealed, and barked, punctuated by the rapid quick-fire thumps of bodies hitting the ground.
Yet still the rode, with Jake's fingers entwined in Tempest's mane, knees clenched tightly to her abdomen. They weaved slightly as they went, whether by instinct or by luck, dodging the falling bodies. The house crested into view on the nearest hill as Tempest turned a corner in the fence, with only a straight shot remaining.
And then a yowl his ears, closer and louder than all the others and suddenly a heavy weight took him in the back off the head, fur spraying in his peripheral vision. He absent-mindedly relinquished his grip on the mane and let loose with his knees. He hit the dirt in a heap and watched as Tempest escaped away without him, toward the house on the crest of the hill.
| 1 | 0 | 12 | 78,479 |
[WP]An old genie grants you three wishes. After granting your first two, you tell him the third. He is horrified, and begs you to reconsider
|
I had met the greedy, the kind, the desperate, and the carefree so many times over the centuries. Wealth, health, power, fame, kindness, and futile wishes for the forbidden escape from death, nearly every wish had slowly added to a life of boredom watching the same results.
This man was unusual. A man of science, he spent hours questioning my powers and dissecting the rules of a wish. His first wish was one I had seen before, one of the few I would always respect. He wished for mental fortitude. Rather than the ease of instant knowledge or the calm of great wisdom, he would have the will to press forward in his studies and carve his mark in the world. His second wish was that of a clever man, also one I had seen many times albeit rarely with the first. He wished for robust physical health until his final day. I could neither foresee the arrival of Death, nor could I stop the phantom for a moment, but I could assure that the scythe would reap one who was not desperate for its merciful touch.
As little as I cared to banter with mortals who were interested only in extracting all they could from me, this man was an oasis in a desert of timeless servitude. Choosing his words carefully to avoid the use of his final wish, he made requests I had not heard in a dozen lifetimes. My own freedom was limited, but there was no rule against a genie playing chess with a mortal, no law preventing him from hearing stories of sultans and czars rising to power only to fall under their own weight, and no taboo against listing every wish that I knew would lead to his downfall. If for only a day, I enjoyed the company of a mortal who I could consider a friend. He considered wishing for my freedom, but I had come to accept my fate while the rules would dictate he sacrifice his own. I talked him out of that wish as I was unsure whether I would even care to be a free mortal at this point. Such an idea was uncomfortable, but in retrospect, I lament this decision.
"I wish for humanity to meet intelligent life from another world."
I had no knowledge of such life. I nearly refused his wish on the basis of not being able to create life, but something new happened. In order to fulfill my duties, the cosmos would grant me knowledge no human could hope to attain. I discovered alien life forms. Some were too hostile. Some were too alien for reasonable communication. Many were undeveloped and ill suited to meet humanity. Only one species was a reasonable option.
"Please.. Please, do not ask this of me. They are so advanced that the world will never be the same. They are kind, just, and empathetic, but they will sap the strength of mankind and tear away his eternal drive to reach for more."
My words fell on deaf ears. He insisted that mankind would never yield to complacency. I could only obey, fearing that my duties would lead to a world which would end itself far too early.
I know not what folly had taken my head. Humanity was never in danger. The mercurial nature of mortals so greedy and yet so curious were precisely what they needed to ensure their prosperity despite alien intervention. Even then, it was my lack of understanding humans which truly surprised me. When mankind met what could be described best as angels, it was no more than a day before they were... mating.
I now live in a world of excessively beautiful winged humans, intelligent and graceful, firing lasers from their eyes at will and contriving scenarios of imperfection that they may be grand heroes until they reach other worlds to "save" and "protect" from that which they disdain.
Despite it being my duty to enable this world, I feel I deserve punishment. I beg for death, but the truth is that I am righteously condemned to watching this shit happen every fucking day until I can convince one of these assholes to launch my lamp into the sun.
| 13 | 0 | 539 | 89,174 |
[WP] 100 years in the future, the Human Genome Project is complete. Everyone has their genome mapped out from birth, and has it printed on their ID. People can be determined "unfit to breed," and discrimination based on genome is common.
|
"That's not good enough." The Editor is livid. I can't say I'm surprised.
I shrug, push the tablet at him again. "It is what it is."
"Run the tests again. We can't publish this." He pushes the tablet back.
"I did run the tests again. So did four other international groups." I push the tablet. Again. "They're struggling with their publishers too. I'm certainly struggling to understand why," I add sarcastically, folding my arms and leaning back.
"These can't be right, this is against a century of scientific literature, we can't work on philosophy, on ethics, *run them again.*"
"No."
"What?" The Editor isn't used to being told no.
I stand up. "No. I will not run the tests again. Or - to better answer your request - I will gladly run the tests again, but I won't change the results."
"I never said -"
"No, you didn't. But you were here every day of the full ten years I've been working on this." The tablet stays on his side of the desk this time. I'm not letting him play with it again. "You know damn well how rigorous this testing was. You know damn well how large the testing pool was, you know damn well we did this *right.* It is the truth. The gene is an inadequate judgement of human character."
He's upset, because he knows I'm right. "I just can't publish that. You know that."
"Can't or won't?" I shouldn't be harsh; in his place, the distinction is narrow.
"What will the Senator say when she sees it? We'll lose our publishing license." The Editor is wringing his hands now. "We can't look like we're *supporting* the - the Individualists, we'll be crucified - lynched, maybe literally lynched!"
"Can't? Or won't?" I repeat, cocking an eyebrow. The Editor meets my eyes, then drops them again. I'm being mean to him. He's too good at heart to say no to me, so I'll make him take the fall with me. "Someone has to do it."
The Editor used to be overweight. He was a big man. Happy and laughing all the time. He's practically anorexic now. The Senate Publishing Committee will do that to you. "What will I do? What will my family do?" he asks.
"I don't know. What will my wife do if you don't?"
"Surely your neighbors understand, ovarian cancer isn't like -"
"They don't. Nobody does." I slap my fist on the table. "What about my niece? The lesbian with the stutter? She's being mocked in public by her 'friends'. What about your toddler son? Happened to pick up dwarfism, right? He'll be marked as soon as you stop hiding the results. You know half a dozen more people like that right here in this office. You chose them *because* nobody else would. You helped us. There are billions more like us out there. Now it's time to help them."
The Editor ponders this - or pretends to, still wringing his hands and worrying. I can already see that he's made the decision, but he doesn't want it to be so. "Fine," he snaps at last, "fine, you win. What will we do?" he asks again, taking the tablet and turning to leave, "what will we do?"
"The right thing," I murmur, sitting again. My next project is a little simpler. The scientific method is difficult. A will and testament, that's easy.
| 14 | 0 | 95 | 33,469 |
[CW] A NASA probe discovers something shocking. Write the only tweet a NASA employee was able to get out before all information was redacted and the probe declared "lost to technical malfunctions".
|
**Tweet Sent By Staffer A Hoax, Official Says**
*Cape Canaveral, Florida. July 22nd 2014*
A tweet sent earlier by a staffer at NASA was discovered to be a hoax. An official spokesperson from NASA sent the following press release:
> We apologize for the actions of the staffer who sent the tweet. The person or persons involved were not authorized to access the social media accounts of NASA or any subsidy, and furthermore were certainly not directed to send messages via social media.
> The message they sent was in no way accurate, as they did not have access or clearance to the information received from the Mars Rover.
An investigation is ongoing, and President Obama said in a press conference today that mishandling of information was egregious, and cause for unnecessary public concern. He was also quoted as saying "[the actions] by these individuals could lead to a criminal investigation."
This story is developing.
***
I closed the browser, shaking my head. My hands trembled as I picked up the phone. I dialed. Voicemail.
"Mom, hey, it's me. Listen I did something... I did something I wasn't supposed to. I just tried to help. I saved a screenshot, because the original was deleted. I'm texting it to you. I'm not sure where I'm going but I have to leave. I will contact you soon. I love you."
I hung up the phone. I composed a text, and added the screenshot from Twitter.
I hope she knows what to do with it.
> **Nicolas Hestrom**
>
>*@nic_hestrom*
>
> Stay out of populous cities. Gather all the warm clothes you can. #NASA
| 92 | 0 | 50 | 86,381 |
[WP] Every day, hundreds are people are arrested by the fashion police. You need to stop by the electronics store to buy a new washing machine. The only clean clothes you have left are a pair of orange cargo shorts and your grandma's hand-knitted Christmas sweater.
|
I step into the bright sunlight and I breathe a sigh of relief. I've made it this far *and* I've got a washer. I look down at my brother's orange cargo pants from '95, which hang loosely on my slim hips, and a Christmas sweater knitted by my grandmother. I am in every violation in the book. But, hey, they're my only clean clothes. What is a girl to do?
*But now,* I thought, walking swiftly toward my car, *I will make it home and clean my clothes. I will avoid the potential problem all together.*
"Halt." A sassy, flamboyant voice calls from behind me. "I need you to, like, turn around slowly."
*Or not.* I wince, chastising myself for even leaving the house in the first place. How could I have been so stupid? I might not be the most fashionable person in the world, but come on, even I know orange pants and an ugly Christmas sweater do not pair well. Hell, they don't even go well on their own.
I turn around and glower at them. There are two officers, a man and a woman.
"No, nuh-uh," he wags his finger, "I meant turn around. Spin once for us, please."
I roll my eyes, and turn around. "Look," I say, "I came here to buy a washer. It's been broken and all my clothes are dirty."
"Once more," he says, placing his hand on his hip, ignoring me.
I reluctantly obey.
"I think . . ." he starts, tapping his pen on his chin. The female officer nods encouragingly, while I wait for the cuffs. "I think it works."
My eyes widen, as I stare in bewilderment.
"For sure," the female officer nods, "Like '90s male fashion meets holiday cheer. I dig it."
"I think we've got a trend setter on our hands," he agrees with a wink.
| 5 | 0 | 175 | 188,119 |
[WP] You are a detective in a world where reincarnation is fact; Any human who dies is reincarnated as a fully grown animal that retains its human memories but cannot talk.
|
I give a nod to the patrol dog watching the door and step into the apartment. "What've we got?" I ask.
Beck, the head CSU guy on scene, hands me an iPad. "Victim is Stephen M. Campbell, age 52. Runs an antique shop down in the Flatiron District. Neighbors heard a single shot last night and called it at around 10:05. First responders found the body and no one else."
"Hm." I scan through the initial findings from the coroner. Single bullet to the back of the head, execution-style. "You put out the call to the registration centers?"
"At 3 am this morning. No word yet."
Well, doy, I thought. Most species don't even develop motor control for a few weeks. And that's assuming the victim even returns near a registration center that speaks English and has Internet access -- as opposed to, say, as a baby chimp in the middle of Africa, or a goose in Mongolia, or some place where people still eat meat.
Still, sometimes you get lucky. Once had a vic who came back as a horse on a farm upstate. The family who owned the place was really on the ball. Had her in front of a touchscreen two days after birth. She picked the killer out of a lineup on day five.
I feel my phone buzz in my pocket. I reach in and fish it out from under my keys. "Any sign of forced entry or a struggle?"
"None. Vic was found sitting in that chair. It's possible he might've dozed off." Beck points to a bloodstained recliner in the middle of the room.
I check the text messages. It's Dad, of course. WE'RE NOT FINISHED WITH THIS, it reads. IT'S MY LIFE. I DESERVE TO MAKE MY OWN DECISIONS.
AT WORK, I text back. WE'LL TALK LATER. "No sign of a suicide note, right?"
"None. But evidence is scanty enough at this point that I can't rule out a recreational motive yet."
God, I hate recreational suicides. Like the DeFalco case. Five years I spend with that still open at the bottom of my pile. Forty-year-old stockbroker, killed in what looked like a locked room mystery right out of Miss Marple. Turned out in the end that the asshole had set the whole thing up, just to see his name in print. Spent the whole time under an assumed name as a squirrel in Tennessee, laughing his head off and living the high life off of the first-death insurance. We only found out about it in the end when he tried contacting one of his kids. Jerk.
My phone buzzes again. WHEN? Dad asks. "That the only motive you can see at this point?"
"Not necessarily. Look over here." Beck motions me over to a small workbench by the wall. Amid a healthy layer of dust, there's the imprint about the size and shape of a jewelry box.
I examine it as best I can. "Any idea what it's from?"
"We talked to one of Campbell's business associates." Beck adjusts his glasses. "The vic specializes in old typewriters. Apparently has a real passion for buying and restoring stuff he digs up overseas. According to his partners, one of his long-term projects was a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Viennese model, intended for birds and small rodents. Worth at least twenty-five grand on the open market as is."
I nod thoughtfully. Small, portable. Decent lift, provided you know the right fence. And you're human or roughly human-sized. "You got the contact info for these associates?"
"Already transferred to your cell, detective. They're waiting to hear from you."
Say what you will about Beck -- and I had a partner who dated him, so trust me, I've heard plenty -- but the man knows how to get the job done. I head back to the car. On the elevator ride down, I text Dad back. WE'VE TALKED ABOUT THIS. IF YOU CAN'T CONTROL YOUR INSTINCTS, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO GET THE SURGERY. YOU KNOW IT. I KNOW IT. WHY ARE YOU FIGHTING THIS?
I HUMPED **ONE** LEG! ONE! comes the furious (and predictable) reply.
SO WHAT ABOUT MY COUCH? I type back.
THAT'S FURNITURE, NOT PEOPLE. DOESN'T COUNT.
God. I shake my head. Dad just *had* to come back as a golden retriever, didn't he...
| 2 | 0 | 4 | 204,439 |
[WP] Satan prevents a suicide.
|
"Ha!", laughed Satan, the King of Darkness.
A man was on the edge of a roof, preparing to plunge twenty stories.
"What the #$&@ do you think you are doing? This is not your $#$ @$!! time to die."
The man looked over to the source of the voice. There was nothing. The air around him grew hot. He began to sweat.
"Do you #@%!@$$* think I will let you jump? There isn't a $!!#@*# thing that will make me allow that."
The man looked over his shoulder again. He shook his head, dismissing the voice. He stared over the edge wondering how long it would take for him to hit the bottom. Wondering if it would hurt.
He wondered who would have to clean him off the street. He wondered who would ever want to do that. He wondered how much the person was paid to do it. He wondered what they did with his body and guts after they clean it up.
"They #!@%&@# burn it all. They throw you in a $@@%&@ furnace without a @#*$*@ thought."
The man covered his ears. He was tired of hearing the voice.
"Do it. @@$@&% do it. I dare you."
The man hesitated. He took a deep breath and readied himself. He moved his toes over the edge even further.
A laugh echoed in his ears.
The man's addrenaline was rushing. His body was quivering. He took every ounce of energy he had remaining and began to lean forward. Something stopped him.
"I %&@*#$ told you I wouldn't let you jump.", the devil laughed.
"You kill a $@$%& family of four next week when you lose control of that piece of #$@ car of yours. I'm $@&%@#* saving you for later."
| 1 | 0 | 13 | 96,953 |
[MODPOST] Sunday Free Write - March Is Almost Over Edition
|
Hello everyone! I've been a long time lurker of reddit and after 4 years, wanted to make this love affair official with my first post here! I'm a writer, but shh don't tell my day job. I'd love to share and read here with you all! Here's a quick piece I did to the prompt "Something you wear everyday". Thanks for having me :)
The Bra
I adorn my body everyday, with scents, with jewels, with cosmetics, with clothing. It's a ritual that has developed overtime and something I have to regard as permanent; all of my days in public will require some component of this ritual from me. One of the most significant pieces to my routine is my bra. From the pre-teenage years of reading "Are you there God? It's me, Margaret" I have prayed to
grow breasts. To me that would be the day I would become something on my own, to be able to let go of my childhood, to see how the world would react to me as a woman. As a preteen, I could not comprehend the impact the mounds would have on society, but I know I wanted to have to wear a bra.
When my stepmom presented me with a horrible piece of fabric completely unlike everything I saw in magazines and called this antithesis of sexy a training bra, I still ran to put it on under my tightest of shirts. I insisted on wearing it everywhere, and I was proud if a strap peered out, as if it was saying "Ohhh yea. Check me out." At the time, there really wasn't much to support. The training bra was moving in for a long stay. At dance class I donned sports bras, as if I had something to actually support, while I watched as other dancers would leap about the floor practically being smacked in their face with their breasts after every pirouette. I could never understand why girls would groan as they tried to tuck them away into their leotards. What a perfectly lovely problem to have.
As my bras grew in size, so did my confidence. Boys would forget about my braces and focus on my chest. Victoria's secret was that she gave an extra boost here, a pad there. Victoria could trust me, I wasn't going to tell. But my bra kept needing an upgrade, and I was elated. As a nerdy outsider, that bra collection was my savior from the cruel world of teenage hell.
One night in college during my spring break to Miami, my friend suggested I take the plunge, quite literally, down my frontside and gogasp!- braless. "Don't worry, this will hold the shirt onto your skin", she said as she applied double stick tape to take necessary security precautions. What a novelty. To let the D's roam free in the wildexhilarating! Now the attention came in the form of women in the club's shared bathroom.
"Whoa, what doctor gave you that boob job? You'll have to give me the name!"
"They're 100% real" I replied.
Suddenly, shameless, well manicured hands flew to touch them to try and disprove my statement. 'Dear God, it's me Christina… thank you', I thought silently.
Now I have a love-hate relationship with my bras. I find them inconvenient, constricting, itchy, mismatched under tank tops. If I could outlaw strapless bras, I would. On the days I can get away with not wearing a bra, I feel freer, lighter, proud to have these lumps of fat stay put long enough to walk the city blocks.
I know I will continue to have a strong relationship with bras. One day I'll purchase the kind that has a convenient flap and comforts the new breasts that are sore from a child delighting in nourishment. And as for my training bra days? Well those aren't over – I may lovingly lay another one out for my daughter as she decides what her relationship will be with that piece of fabric so woven into my life.
| 2 | 0 | 16 | 30,596 |
[WP] Batman is sent in to an alternate reality during a foray with the Justice League. He discovers a reality where he all but erased crime in Gotham via simply investing in education and welfare.
|
This is my first time trying to write a story. I would like to apologize in advance for any grammatical or formatting errors. You gotta start somewhere though.
"Hey Bruce, Wake up"
Bruce slowly opened his eyes making sure he did not let too much light in due to his splitting headache. He saw himself standing directly above him and immediately knew what had happened. He had been in an alternate reality before, but this was different. This reality's Bruce Wayne was a little more laid back and happy to see Bruce, like a kid who is about to go on a play date.
"You were out for a while Bruce, now I don't want to make it weird because we're kind of the same person, but I go by Wayne and not Bruce."
Bruce got up and started to walk with Wayne into the city. It was clean, everyone seemed happy, and there wasn't one bum or shady character at every street corner.
Bruce began to talk "So listen I'm still a little groggy Wayne but how did y.."
Wayne cut him off "How did i do it? Money. I took my money and invested it into the education system. I made welfare easy to obtain and available." he paused for a second exhaling and drooping his head "I just got tired of fighting villains all day. It was the same thing over and over, defeat one and then another one and another and another. I could not see an end so i figured i would give this a shot. One last crack at it."
They reach the door of Wayne enterprise's and sat down in Wayne's office.
Bruce finally feeling normal asked "So that's all it took? Educate and feed the people through their times of hardship and everyone will prosper?"
"Are you kidding? No it failed horribly. It started out great, everyone in the city was fed, had good education, equal opportunity. We moved into phase 2 and removed the sale of guns, nobody seemed to mind. Then it happened."
"What happened?"
"The nature of humans. Welfare could feed and cloth you for an infinite amount of time and provided you with transportation, a phone and a little spending money. People soon realized working wasn't needed. The unemployment rate sky rocketed and people started to not be content and want more then what welfare would give them. The crime started back up except this time they were the only ones with guns. We reduced our police force when we stopped selling guns because we thought they were not needed. The city was in chaos. Looking back i don't know how i could be so foolish. It is not as if people were forced into poverty with no way out. Plenty of people made it out, and became millionaires at that."
"Listen, I don't get it Wayne, you said everything failed but walking through the streets everything looks perfect. How did you fix it?"
"Ill show you"
They walk through a door behind the desk chair in his office. It led to a laboratory that had liquid drums lining the side. In crypt writing you could see "MGD-63".
Bruce curiously asked "What is MGD-63"
"Miller genuine draft with 63 calories instead of 64. China is gonna be drinking that down like its water. Its still early in development so we just kind of store it off to the side"
"I guess Gotham is still a Martini and Cosmo kinda town?"
"Not exactly, You see they can't afford it. They cant afford anything actually, because they don't get payed. Listen after gotham fell apart and i was running out of money i had to do what i had to do. I controlled every aspect of the 88% of people who are welfare's lives. Slipping a mind control substance into the food was easy and having control over 88% of the population made the disposal of the other 12% a piece of cake. Its ok though bruce, everyone is happy now, you saw them. I mean yea the're being told to act happy but whatever its the same thing. They work for me, i export to other countries, and they get taken care of. No violence, poverty, or inequality. I'm calling it a Liberal Soceity. I was going to go with Utopian but those all way seem to fail. Have you seen the giver? Anyway that's how it goes down in Wayne Town. What do you think?"
"Your not going to get away with this!"
"Figured. I already have. You were groggy because i hit you over the head when you first arrived, at that time i injected you with the same drug i gave to the people of gotham. You should be passing out in 5,4,.."
Bruce started to charge but as Wayne said 0 he collapsed on the floor.
| 2 | 0 | 2,047 | 214,735 |
[WP] You hear that your little sister is being bullied in school. Good thing that your job is professinal hitman.
|
Mom had me first. At 14. It probably wasn't the best for her, but it ended up being a blessing in disguise. She went to collge classes while I was in school, and early on, my abilities, for lack of a better term, got me noticed. Fast foward 10 or so, and I'm graduating from a top school. I still see mom, but can't tell her what my major is or anything, or I'd have to kill her. I mean it. It sounds mean, but there are things she's never supposed to know, which sucks. Any way, I'm now 34 and my sister is 8. She was sort of a surprise, but very welcome. So the other day I get off work, busy putting my gear away and she comes into my living room. I don't kill people all the time, most of my time is actually boring, it's spent studying my targets, which means paperwork. Ughhh...Anyway. So Jess comes in and she's crying. I can't stand to see her cry, and never have been able to. I'll do anything to make her stop crying and make her happy again. So she tells me there is this older kid who attends the middle-school up the road from her who has always been mean to her. Our mom can't make her stop, and neither can the brats' mom. Prinicple's powerless too. So, I have a choice. Let this bitch terrorize my sister, or stop her. She must be stopped. When I check further into the bitches past I see she's always been a bully. My lil' sis hasn't been her only victim, and it seems her violence is escalating. After familiarizing myself with her area, I set up in a car, windows slightly lowered, enough for me to just poke the muzzle of my silencer out...And she's out of the picture, lil' bitch.
| 1 | 0 | 8 | 201,288 |
[WP] Immortality, Invincibility, or Normality
|
"Spring brings renewal to the land," thought Dr. Thomas Winthrop to himself as he shuffled through another year of student files, "but with that comes renewed chaos." Ensuring each record was accurate and complete, Dr. Winthrop marked names off his notepad one by one until all but one of the thirty-four names were deemed fit for participation. Choice Day was difficult by nature, but parents insisted upon making it harder for everyone involved. While most would complain that their child was simply too young at the age of fifteen to make such a decision on their own, a few holdouts would refuse to certify their child as competent. After all, an incompetent child could not make the choice. No matter the penalties threatened, there was always someone who would pay the price to shelter their child from choice.
It was exactly ten o'clock in the morning sharp as Dr. Winthrop stepped up to the lectern on stage. Tapping the microphone, he began a speech he had performed fifty times before.
"Greetings everybody. I am Dr. Thomas Winthrop, Headmaster of Red Cliffs Academy. Children of today, your adulthood draws near. Today is May First, Choice Day, where you shall choose how you face your adult life. You may choose a life free of the burdens of age, never to have children but always to remain young. You may choose a life free from danger and threat, sacrificing years of your life to know you will not lose it unexpectedly. You may even choose to live as men lived before the Choice, suscept to age and danger alike but sacrificing nothing in the process. You parents, your family, and your friends may watch you, but today the choice is yours and yours alone. Welcome to Choice Day 2155."
Stepping back from the lectern, Dr. Winthrop descended from the stage and slowly made his way towards his seat in the crowd. It was perhaps his most difficult duty as Headmaster to watch each child make a decision that they would not truly understand for decades to come. The Choice would open many roads and close off many others by pure necessity. Any child who hoped to become a scientist or program designer would sacrifice their progeny simply to live long enough to learn all they must just to contribute further to the knowledge of humanity. If a child wished to pioneer new space colonies, they would invariably choose to safeguard themselves from death so they could survive the harsh conditions long enough to establish a stable terraformed settlement. A few noble souls would live by the old ways, aware that they sacrificed by refusing to sacrifice. Those children were the wise ones, the smart ones, the lucky ones.
"My name is Elizabeth Williams and I choose freedom from age!" A ruddy-cheeked blonde girl belted out her Choice clearly to the audience much to the pleasure of her parents. Dr. Winthrop agreed that this appeared to be the most rational decision for her. Elizabeth had shown talent in astronomy and had strong job prospects. He also knew that in a hundred years, she would be eclipsed by countless other ageless astronomers with more talent, more dedication, and a more effective learning foundation. She might persevere well enough to sustain a mid-level position, but the thrill of advancement and the hopes of new achievement would grow ever more distant with time. Dr. Winthrop recalled his predecesor, Dr. Agnes Clark, and her regrets over her own immortality. For all of her hopes of improving the foundations of education, she had only managed to become Headmaster of a prestigious academy in ten years and failed to advance further even a hundred years later. It was only her designation of Dr. Winthrop that permitted him to ascend to the post just after his thirtieth birthday.
"My name is Luke Mason and I choose freedom from vulnerability!" This husky young man's cry of Choice rang throughout the auditorium with great vitality, leaving his father beaming with pride and his mother wincing with a strained attempt at acceptance. Again, Dr. Winthrop understood why this child took this Choice. Luke was the most athletic boy in the entire Academy barring those who had chosen invulnerability the previous year and had a head start on the training. He was even featured in the nation's top 100 pre-Choice athletic prospects, strong praise indeed. The wise Headmaster also knew that Luke's family could not afford to feed their son a diet of designer steroids while he trained sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Even if a sponsor appeared, Luke would live on a meager stipend while he trained and played in development leagues for five years before standing a chance as a pro. Were he to fail, Luke would bear the pain of five years wasted as a man who knew he had already cut his life short.
Thirty-one more students followed, each one's Choice only convincing Dr. Winthrop further of the folly of such being in the hands of youth. He knew the final student would have folly foisted upon him. His mother was one of the delusional ones who believed that pushing an ageless life upon their child meant they would live forever. After all, what mother would let their child choose death if they could avoid it? The statistics were not so rosy. The "Unwilling Immortals" had over ninety percent suicide rates by the age of fifty. Even those who could establish competence were far behind their peers, stigmatized for life, and left knowing they never had a Choice.
Late that evening, Dr. Winthrop sat at his desk in front of thirty four student dossiers separated into two piles. Ageless and invincible, invincible and ageless. Not a single student chose the natural path. Dr. Winthrop knew natural life was less popular than in years before, but he always had at least one student validate his opinions. As much as he hated to admit the truth, his time was over. The age of the Choice was here and there was nothing he could do to stop it. With heavy resignation, Dr. Winthrop opened one large window in his office, slowly stepping into the window ledge. Staring at the ground five stories below, he closed his eyes and leaned forward, letting himself fall to the ground.
With an annoyed grunt, Dr. Winthrop stood up and resumed his walk home. "May second, two thousand one hundred and fifty five. Would have given another ten years to not know that accursed date."
| 3 | 0 | 62 | 7,226 |
[WP] Darkness is a physical presence. Touching it is deadly. Humanity lives only in brightly lit cities, connected with brightly lit roads. Your job is to patrol the roads an ensure all the lights are working.
|
"Humanity ,always, only occupied a small spot on this planet. That one spot that sunlight reached, everything surrounding it, was nothing but darkness. In the early days of humanity man already found out, that venturing out is impossible, everyone who ever tried died, just by coming in touch with the darkness. Ressourced were scarce and mankind always had to keep tight controll over its population, it was something one could easily compare to hell. But one day humans discovered it, fire. They saw that the darkness cleared up a little, everytime fire was around. Humans were send out into the unknown enviroment and many died. Rain and storms, nature was mankinds enemy this time. One would say it would have been wiser to stop, but mankinds curiosity didnt seem to allow that. Even though success was slim, it was there. A few times humans would return and would talk about the amazing things they saw. Gigantic and breathtakings amount of trees and overflowing water, wider than the eye could see. While there were some people that didnt believe, many did. "Hope", is this what you could call it ? Hope to finally escape the cage, that humanity was put into. Over the time Mankind invented new technologies, it put most of its time in finding a way to clear up the darkness and they succeeded. Electricity, mankind was able to produce it and finally they could venture out into the darkness without any real limitations. "
I took a deep breath
"At leasts thats what they told us at school."
| 4 | 0 | 883 | 171,211 |
[WP] You unintentionally kill the Devil, you have to explain to God how.
|
"*A banana peel*?" God asked inquisitively.
"For the 15th time, yes" I replied while still mesmerized looking at his pristine beard.
"I have 6000 years worth of records and I don't have a single case of death by banana peel yet you're telling me Lucifer aka the Accuser aka The Father of Lies aka the King of the Bottomless Pit aka the Wicked One died of a banana peel?".
"Yes my Lord" I let out an audible sigh as I'm starting to grow annoyed at having to answer the same question over and over again. "I know it seems hard to belie-".
God interrupts me with a disbelief in his voice I did not think a deity would possess "Hard to believe!? It's unfathomable! For eternity, we have been at war and I have been unsuccessful yet here you stand claiming that his death was by way of a banana peel?".
"Yet here I stand claiming that yes he died of a banana peel.".
"H-how?"
"Well, it was last Thursday evening and I was preparing to go to the gym when all of a sudden an interdimensional hole opened up in my living room. As I gazed into the abyss, *He* appeared with fire and brimstone but somehow not burning a single thing. It was kind of impressive. He mouth started moving but no words came out then it happened, his voice just filled my head and whatever thoughts I was having, I wasn't anymore."
"Well, what did he say?" God asks as it appears he's sucked into the story.
"Could I have a banana? They look good."
At this point, God looks puzzled. "A banana? He could conjure one if he so wished!"
"I thought so too! Apparently, he can't conjure fruit or vegetables and he didn't want to pay the import taxes this year."
God then lets a laugh bellow out. It sounds like a cross between Bill Russell laughing and a cat purring. It's a delight to hear. "After all these years, he's still a cheap bastard?" as he keeps laughing and wiping the tears away from his eyes.
The thought pops into my head of Satan owing money to God and he welched on the bet. As I start to chuckle, God in his soothing voice say "He did. Please continue."
"Well I gave him one of the bananas and he said 'thank you'. I nodded at him in turn. It was amazing to watch him peel a banana with those massive hands of his. He ate the whole thing without making it weird then all of it sudden, it happened."
"Hmm?" as God looked on curiously.
"He went into anaphylactic shock. Turns out, he's allergic to bananas."
God looked stunned at this revelation.
"His throat started closing off and he started to grasp for air. At this time, he dropped the banana peel. In his panic, he stepped on the peel and fell. Dead the moment he hit the ground.".
"Really?".
"Yep. I had to call 911 since I didn't exactly know how to get rid of the body. Coroner came in and, even though he was not a specialist in Gods and Supernatural Beings, said he died of blunt force trauma to the skull.".
God sits down still disbelief "Wow. So a banana peel huh?".
"Yeah. A banana peel.".
| 6 | 0 | 35 | 76,318 |
[WP] Adolf Hitler is a time traveler who starts world war two to save us from something far more terrible.
|
Posted This a while back, fits rather well to be honest!
As war painted the landscape with explosions and gunfire, he decided he had come to a decision. There was no possibility that he would live to see the end of the day. They simply had superior numbers and the drive to bring the man who caused it all to justice. A three story apartment seemed to collapse into a rising cloud of dust before his eyes.
Looking down from the window, he decided that it had to be someone they wouldn't get to. Someone innocent enough to avoid them, but someone with an iron will and a powerful drive. Looking back up to glance in the reflection of the mirror, he came to the quick realization that everyone in the room was a liability for the same reason that they were all about to be arrested and killed. They were all criminals. They had committed atrocities in a loyal blindness to their party, without thinking of the humans involved. From the experiments that the public had no idea of, to the genocide which was rapidly unveiling itself to the disbelief of many.
Turning around to face his allies, he looked at each with a grim expression on his face. He looked at the young man by the door, looking straight ahead with an expression almost as still as his body. He did not flinch as explosions gently shook the building. He stood like an small iceberg in defiance against an oncoming ship, never revealing what is beneath the surface. Until they couldn't stop him...
"Everyone, out now. Everyone save you. You stay." He locked his eyes onto the soldier, who only just seemed to acknowledge him. The unknowing soldier opened the door for the group that was leaving, consisting of generals, close friends, personal staff, and family. Standing still in salute, the boy waited patiently for the last person to go through the door, before closing it carefully behind them. After closing the door, he looked to his leader in an emotionless gaze.
Sparing no time, he started to slowly and thoughtfully craft his speech, knowing he would be using his silver tongue for the last time. "Many think me to be a monster. Many think that I have been behind a war which has ravaged the world for my own personal gains. But, many do not have knowledge of what is to come for us if we do not unite the human race under one banner." He paused, thinking carefully of how to pass the burden of knowledge on to the man who was now looking very intently at what he perceived to be a hero, not a villain. "My life, in the grand scheme of things, is completely pointless. I am no monster for making sacrifices now for the betterment of our species. An entire culture eliminated matters not when compared to the void created by an absence of humanity. I am no monster." He was almost reassuring himself, trying desperately to cling to the scrap of truth that had guided his path so far.
"The progress our species has made scientifically has been enormous. Leaps and bounds have been made in medicine and technology! All due to the unity we have had! If we could keep going, we could reach the stars one day. We could be the first nation to leave this doomed planet. But that day is at it's dusk. For now that my empire is at an end, we have lost all hope of uniting this wretched race, filled with hatred for each other. Filled with so much hatred they are unable to ever see the millions of commonalities they share. So diverse, they see each other as foreign threats to what they know. So, I will leave this world behind with a seed to try and grow a new hope for unity. That seed is you."
The man looked enthralled with what he was saying, and was locked onto him with a furious determination. The drive. The will that thirsted for a new mission to conquer, new knowledge to consume in it's insatiable hunger for a quest.
"This world has been damned for thousands of years. It was discovered by myself when I came across a script kept in my family for hundreds of years, writing of an end of the world at the hands of the stars, landing were they once touched before, in a place where the sand shifted. It described a powerful group who would return to spread diseases and terrible technologies unseen by our kind for tens of thousands of years. Our survival now is a fluke. We somehow survived after their last eradication of our race, and were given another chance by fate. I craved adventure like a starving dog craves meat when I discovered this. Using my ties I established in the first war, I flew to Egypt. I discovered there irrefutable evidence that the world was damned." He paused, not sure whether he would tell him of the future he had seen with his own eyes. He surrendered to the urge to silence that thought, lest the poor boy think he was truly mad. He would instead let him see it for himself. "Trapped deep within a tomb buried for thousands of years was a large room. On every wall in this massive room, there was a message repeated in every language ever spoken and written on this earth. I could read few, but they were all the same in concept. The one I could read enlightened me in a way that pushed my next quest on. It led me on a drive to secure our destiny... and now I am here, at an end. I have failed." He went over to the flag behind his desk, bearing the harsh red and black with a small bit of white that had dotted his country. He moved his hand to a small safe, carefully entering the numbers. 12-21-07. He felt his story line about to come to the final peak before coming to a rapid decline. This was the end of his legacy. He reached into the safe and drew out the same document he had seen years ago.
"This is yours now, the start of your story. The start of your attempt to save us. Do not follow in my footsteps, you will only fail. Find another way. Find a way to unite us all around one common goal. This world is yours to save now."
"My fuhrer..." The man stumbled to take the parchment that was being offered to him. He grabbed the ancient document, which was surprisingly well kept.
"Hide it where they will never find it. Keep it forever, and never let our one chance die. Go tell my comrades that they are requested back at once. And keep this knowledge hidden, act by yourself and yourself only. This is your responsibility now," He said slowly, "Save them all."
And with an unwavering look of fear and excitement now painted on his face, the soldier turned and walked from the room.
Adolf stood behind his desk. He opened up the drawer which contained a small silver case, holding in it a series of pills which would end his story in a sudden, painless manner.
| 1 | 0 | 1,366 | 22,709 |
[WP] "Whatever you do, don't look up"
|
Well, I guess that was it. Nuclear war. It ended as quick as it started. I counted three hours. That's one for the history books in 200 years. I holed up in the sewer with a construction worker. He let me have a spare pair gas mask. They were working on some crazy leak and he considered the smell to be worse than the toxic fumes. It still smelled pretty damn bad.
We waited mostly in silence. Whenever it got quiet topside, one of us would ask, "Is it over?" It seemed like it never was gonna be over. Then one time after he asked, I let my watch tick to five minutes later. After three hours of nukes booming, and buildings crumbling, and five minutes of silence, I said I was going up.
I went up the ladder, moved the manhole aside, and climbed up. It was pretty much as I expected. Burned bodies, ash, crashed cars, crumbled buildings, and everything that used to be -- all smashed together in some cosmic collision. Like when a little boy throws all his building blocks and toy cars together.
I found a cop car. The driver had a loaded pistol, so I took that, and his equipment. Handcuffs, ammo, taser, pepper spray... I just took his belt after I saw all the crap he carried. Then his hat. Fuck it, I just took his whole damn uniform. Nametag, too. I guess I was Jim Goods instead of Jim Daves for as long as I could keep this nametag to stick onto this shirt.
I must not have been paying attention, because I suddenly heard that construction worker crying. Never even got his name.
I went back down. He must've knew my face, 'cause he didn't even move when he saw me in my cop outfit. "Hey, I never got your name," I said when I jumped down from the ladder.
"Lester Davis," he said.
These gas masks weren't very easy to speak in. "My name's Jim," I said gently. Damn, just like in the movies. "Jim Goods." *That was too easy. I just took this guy's identity. Something's wrong with me.*
"Jim, I can't see."
"That's alright. Well, we're going up anyway. Cover your eyes and grab onto me." I pulled him up by his hands and guided him to the ladder. "Climb up, cover your eyes. I'll be up in a second."
After he climbed up, I did too. "Hey, Lester. Whatever you do, don't look up. Where we gonna go? Morrie Street?"
"My construction company has an office. It's got a bunch of underground stuff, they all musta hid down there."
"Yeah, that's a good idea. Where's that at?"
"O Street."
We walked through the city. More like... climbed. So much rubble. Dead people. So much shit. I tripped over a stroller. I was gonna see if the baby was okay, but I landed on the goddamn thing. Then I threw up. Then we kept walking.
I didn't keep track of how long it took. **GLY Construction** was just up ahead. The building was mostly intact, unlike the buildings next to it. I hope the basement didn't collapse in on itself.
I pushed open the double-doors -- the glass was blown out of them -- and looked inside. Nobody. No dead bodies, which must've been a good sign. I looked towards Lester. "Lester, you can take the mask off." We both took our masks off and took a breath of... well, the air wasn't fresh, but it was fresher than that sewer. "Didn't I tell you not to look up?"
"Yeah," Lester said. "But I said I can't see. I looked at it."
"Looked at what?"
"The flash. From the bombs... I ain't never gonna see again..."
I looked at his eyes, and they were in some weird direction. Like the muscles were fried, too. "Well, Lester, we'll be fine together. Ain't it funny? A white-collar worker and a blue-collar worker." My collar wasn't white anymore. Now my whole body was. Just covered in ash. It was like September 11th. Except this time the ambulances were still in the hospitals, and all the cops were dead. The firefighters didn't die in a blaze of heroism, they just flat-out died.
"C'mon, Lester. Let's find some of your co-workers."
| 1 | 0 | 89 | 189,735 |
[WP] You successfully invent the worlds first time-travel device. Seconds before you are about to use it for the first time, yourself from the future appears and tells you that you must destroy it.
|
You gaze upon your marvelous creation as best as one can stare at a four dimensional entity. Your pupils instinctively drift away from the hole you tore within reality. Around the brim you see familiar shapes, faces and places, mere illusions, just your brain filling in the blanks of an image beyond your mental processing. Out of the hole steps a familiar figure, but this is no illusion, his face is unmistakably yours.
"You must destroy it" he says.
"Stand back stranger" you reply "For you are certainly not I, were you to be my destined self you would not be here standing before me unarmed, you would recall before embarking upon this fools errand that I have already considered this eventuality and dismissed it in a heartbeat. You have come to reason with a man who has defied reason in it's purest form, tearing asunder the foundation of logic and reality. The universe has taken my sweet Lenora from me and I shall claim her back, I have usurped fate and made it my servant, whether it should bend or break to my whims is of no consequence to me. I shall see my love again."
"You misunderstand" Says your doppelganger "For you did not allow me to finish. You must destroy it.... ON THE MOTHERFUCKING DANCE FLOOR!"
"SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT SON!"
The void expands and collapses on top of the two of you. You land head first into biggest rave you've ever seen inside the Roman Colosseum. You rise to your feet and find yourself standing face to face with your lost love, but it's not the Lenora that you left. It's the smoking hot 17 year old Lenora you took to prom. "Is this even legal?" you wonder aloud. Julius Caesar envelops you in a bro hug "Everythings legal dawg! It's 49BC!"
"Tupac rest in peace." Booms the DJ.
"No!" He yells back.
| 22 | 0 | 18 | 205,346 |
[WP] At 2.15am at a local train station you make your way up the stairs to the platform to get the last train at 2.23am. There is a train waiting there but it's not your train. It looks like all of the passengers by the windows are sleeping. Time goes by, nothing and nobody moves...
|
I knew I was buzzed but I couldn't be THAT drunk. "They're not dead" I reassured myself. After all, its pretty late. I sat on the bench for a while waiting for the doors to open and everyone to clear out of the train.
After what seemed like 10 minutes or so, I tapped on the glass behind one lady's head, nothing. I knocked, not a flinch. I banged on the window with all the strength my inebriated body could muster and not a single one of them even blinked. I ran to the door and tried to pry it open then I thought to myself "What if they were gassed? If I open the door I could die too." I decided not to open it and go for help instead. I fumbled for my phone but the screen was frozen on the last time I had checked it as I was getting out of the cab at 2:15. "Piece of shit!" I yelled in frustration. I ran out of the station to see the cab I took there still idling. The back passenger door was open and the driver was in his seat with his head down and his hand on the door handle but he wasn't moving. "Something isn't right" I thought. I turned around and the clock above the station caught my eye, it read 2:15 as did the clock at the bank across the street. I had been here 10 to 15 minutes and all the clocks still said 2:15.
As I pondered about the clocks I noticed how silent the city had become. No sirens, no cars passing, no other trains moving even the street lights weren't changing. The cab, which I thought was idling wasn't running, but its gauges read as if it was and the lights were on. The thought of me being dead frightened me. Maybe this is what its like to be freshly dead. I figured I would just wait for whatever being to take me to the other side.
I made my way back to the platform to sit on the same bench I was on and await my fate. As I sat there, I looked at the train and wished it would move along like nothing ever happened to me and I could just go home to bed. Just then, the train dramatically accelerated forward at an impossible rate then stopped just as quickly as it had started. It startled me but I wasn't surprised. I thought maybe my body was being worked on and there was life for a split second. At this point I had accepted whatever cards I had been dealt. As I stared at the train, it accelerated forward again and this time it kept going. It sounded just like it normally does and I even felt the wind on my face. "Maybe I'm not dead, but what the fuck just happened?" I wondered. I looked at my phone and it said 2:15, then flipped to 2:16. I walked out side as my cab was driving away. The sounds of the city were back, time was ticking again. 7 minutes later, my train showed up. I boarded it and went home like nothing happened.
The next day, I thought a lot about what happened and what I experienced. I was afraid to tell anyone but I decided to go to the same station at the same time that night. When I got there I could hear the train coming and I began thinking about when the time stopped the night before, just then as the train neared the platform it stopped suddenly along with all the noises. I was shocked! And as quickly as it stopped it started again. I knew it couldn't be a coincidence but I also knew it was absolutely ridiculous to think that I had the power to stop time.
As the 2:23 train came to a stop, I tried again. Sure enough, the people on the train stopped in mid stride along with all the other sounds, one guy was even halted mid fall as he tripped over a woman's purse on the train. As I stood there in awe at the power I had over the world around me, I heard footsteps that neared the top of the stairwell then a man's voice said, "Congrats kid, not to bad for a noob."
| 2 | 0 | 5 | 104,582 |
[IP] Owl
|
**The Sound of Silence**
"Welcome back Cain."
Akasha had raised her arm in greeting so that her messenger could land. The landed softly, spreading its wings once for balance.
"Mistress, the world continues on, the gods and goddesses forgotten in time. Humanity grows restless and troubled. The world is dying. If nothing changes, humanity will not survive."
Akasha laughed, lowering Cain to the ground, her glove disappearing. In a shift of light, with the silence of sound, a man knelt where the owl once stood.
"My dearest Cain, so formal and full of joyful messages. Rise, certainly after all this time you should know that I truly hate it when you kneel."
Cain rose, bowing to his mistress.
"It is my place Mistress, but as you wish, so do I rise."
Once again Akasha laughed. Beside her a table with wine and fruit appeared. She laid back on the branch and whistled softly to the sky.
"Oh I do enjoy my time with you Cain. Of all whom I know, you alone never fail to bring a smile to my face. Sit, have a drink, and join me."
Cain sat down on the grass, retrieving one of the two cups.
"Do you know why it is that I sit here Cain? Why in this forest, at this time, and on this exact tree?"
Cain drank from his cup, contemplating the question before him.
"No Mistress, I do not. One such as myself does not spend their time contemplating the will or actions of the gods, but rather lives to serve, as those who went before me."
Akasha smiled. Cain truly was one of the few things that brought a smile to her face anymore.
"I sit here because this is where this world will end. I hear it on the wind. This is the last tree that will exist in this land. Humanity will continue to grow, and like the seeds from a tree, they will spread to other worlds."
Cain put his cup back down. It was hard for him to think of any other world than this one.
"Other worlds? What other worlds are there?"
Akasha looked at Cain. She saw the stern concentration on his face and found it amusing.
"Did you think that there was only one world? Why there are as many other worlds as there are stars in the sky. Through the creation of our world we gods were born, rising and falling in power as our world changed. Each world has its own set of gods, with its own sets of principles. Much like the humans you question, we are tied to our world."
Akasha grew silent, a somber expression on her face. This was a bitter sweet place for her. So much history, so much prophecy.
"But Mistress, if the gods are tied to this world, what happens to the gods when this world ends? What happens to you?"
Cain grew worried at this prospect. His Mistress had given him much, and he served her not out of duty, but devotion.
"Well, when the world ends...so do we. Well some of us anyways..."
Akasha reach for her wine. She found herself thirsty, a truly human indulgence, yet a welcome one at that.
"You see we gods are tied to aspects of creation, of our creation, and the creation of all things in existence. Some of us are tied not to just this world, but all worlds, through our respective circumstances. Even if this world were to end, others would go on. And with them their respective gods and those gods tied to them."
Cain relaxed. The way she spoke made it sound as if she were tied to more than one world.
"And you Mistress? Will you survive the end?"
Akasha smiled at the hope in Cain's voice. His devotion and service touched her.
"Yes....and no. You see, I am slightly different in my creation. I exist in many worlds, in each one I reside in a different form. So when this world ends, so to will this form. I will cease to exist, and yet I will carry on. It is really quite maddening when you think about it."
Cain stood up, worry on his face at this news. His devotion to his mistress brought thoughts of the future, and how she might be saved.
"Does that mean each other existence is separate from the others? Will 'you' be lost to time?"
Akasha sat up, looking once more at Cain.
"Such a good friend you are Cain. No concern for yourself, only me. Well know this. I am tied to all my forms. My current form is the manifestation of my will and my memories, which can and are often shared by other forms. So yes, 'I' will continue on, even if I may look different."
Akasha though of this world, and all other worlds she resided in. She thought of all her messengers and made a decision.
"In all of my existence, through all my forms and beings, I have never encountered one such like you Cain. Truly devoted, truly loyal, and truly a friend. So I ask you this. Is it your wish to serve me beyond this world, to serve me through all worlds, and to continue to serve me long after this world has faded? You would be so inextricably tied to me as to become part of me."
Cain thought for a moment, briefly, but with great meaning.
"It has been my greatest honor, pleasure, and pride serving you Mistress. You chose me to be your messenger and I wish for nothing more than to continue doing so. So yes, I would like to serve you and all your forms."
A small tear fell from Akasha's eye, embodying the sound of sorrow.
"Then it shall be done. Goodbye for now Cain. I shall see you once more, when the call goes out and our will unites again."
Cain bowed, and as if made of smoke, Cain disappeared with the wind.
Akasha looked around her, marking the passage of time her conversation with Cain had taken place. The forest shrunk, the sky grew dark with dust, as the last of humanity fled the dying planet. The remaining trees grew grey and started to fade as did Cain. The forest disappeared, and Akasha stood in a wasteland, devoid of all form or feature. One more tear rolled down her cheek.
"Oh dearest, what a fleeting thing the truth is. My memories will exist as they always have, but I will cease to be. My other forms have will of their own and will do as the please. Forgive me for my deceit, but I could not lose the one thing most important to me in this world. Forgive a goddess guilt and selfishness. We will meet again, in this life, or the next."
With one last sigh, Akasha disappeared as the world did end.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. - T.S.Eliot
| 3 | 0 | 20 | 67,695 |
[OT] Can a better writer rewrite this true story...
|
**(Story continues)**
The next morning I woke up late and decided to watch some television as I was watching I started realizing that there are times where they were addressing my thoughts. At first I was amazed that it was possible. I started talking to them asking how it was possible. And they answered, they didn't talk to me directly, they used what I later came to call "double speak" where they say things which are relevant to the conversation they are having and to the conversation they are having with me at the same time. For example they had a segment on north Korea which I understood was referring to me and Iran which was the friend that has helped me. The segment talked about Iran's help to north Korea and the danger of their nuclear ambitions, and they kept asking what will North Korea do with its nuclear weapons. Which made me think they meant my powers are to great and I will use them to hurt people (the same reason they tried to make me kill myself) I assured them I won't be using those powers to do harm so they asked if I'm a soldier.
At this point I need to explain that in the world I discovered everything has a double meaning and they use "double speak" a lot which are metaphors in normal language that describe the hidden world that I was starting to discover. A soldier is a child ("kid") who uses his powers to fight against other children who turned "terrorists". Terrorists are the worst people in this world. They are children who use their powers to enslave everyone around them. Everyone is an actor who does what the kids tell them to do. The kids decide what business you own who are your family and friends and everything else about your life. You need to act according to their wishes and perceptions.
Back to the story, I started watching news and talk to country leaders and news reporters who were all afraid of me and accused me of being a terrorist. I assured them that I'm not. As I was having this debate with the news reporters I started understanding that my conversation with them was not convenient for them because they wanted to concentrate on the show but they couldn't tell me to go away. No matter what channel I switched to, you could tell that I caught them by surprise because they left whatever it is they were doing and started addressing me (still trying to look as though they were talking about whatever it is they were doing using "double speak"). After a few hours of inquiring different people on the television about this wonderful new world I just discovered that the real world is a magnificent metaphysical creature. Almost all people on earth knew about it. I didn't know anything about it so far because I lived a sheltered life staying away from people (though as I start contemplating about my past there were signs everywhere). In this world there was something called "mana" which in "double speak" was also called "food", "energy" and "money". And that there were two ways to gain mana one was by having someone giving it to you using metaphors. For example "I see you're hungry, here take a banana", when I took the banana I gained mana (if what they really meant was mana). And the other which gave more "mana" was "war" which means to get into an argument and the side who has better arguments wins mana. Kids were in the lowest level of progress in the human development scale but they had the most power. The more naive you were of the world the more control you had over it.
I discovered all of those concepts in the weeks that followed I just put them here because it's easier to tell the story this way. After having those conversations with people on TV I decided that this is to much and I'm probably crazy. So I decided to go to mental health clinic which I knew (had in the past problems with nervous breakdowns). On the way there I heard voices of people in the street saying stuff like "he's finally awake", "he's starting to realize that everyone is an actor", "he's seeing the real world". When I got to the clinic I waited in line and I could tell people were really uncomfortable around me. Especially this one dude who talking about his life being destroyed if I label him a crazy person. Every time I started to think that he might have a mental illness because of the way he looked he started getting mad and speaking about how he's been in a good place for the past 6 years, having a job and now it's all going to waste because I'm labeling him crazy. When I started getting nerves about racking this man's life he got even more upset because I wasn't suppose to acknowledge that he's giving me this information and that he's losing "mana" over it. This is another way not to gain but lose mana, to break the pretense of a normal world to a child. When I got into the doctor she said: "You told the nurse that you think you have schizophrenia. That's a very serious diagnosis. You'll have to go to closed facility and get a shot in your bum for the rest of your life". What I understood from that is that even mental health professionals were actors, everything was real. So I said I was just kidding and that nothing was wrong with me. And she said that it doesn't make sense that I would come into her office if nothing is wrong. She looked really nerves and I could tell she wanted an agreeable excuse to not break character or lose mana (which I started to realize was much more important than I initially thought) so I told her I needed medication to relief stress and that I lied about the schizophrenia to skip the line. She accepted it and prescribed to me some stress relievers.
In the same night my mom got home late in the evening and she seemed really happy that I finally got out of "the dream" I was in (meaning my ignorance of the real world) and she told me we need to go buy new cloths since I'm becoming a man now. The next day we went to buy cloths, on the way there I saw literally thousands upon thousands of people throughout the street walking all over the sidewalks. Cars jamming the roads. All were there because of me. I was overwhelmed and really nerves. We got to the store and my mom hinted I can get whatever I want for free or for a very small amount of money. But I didn't know how to use those powers and I just got more nerves and decide to leave the store and wait outside. I could tell people were really uncomfortable around me. One salesman said "what can I do, I can't overcome a kid". I saw the mayor of my town buying stuff there and heard her say to someone "Look how overwhelmed he is, he didn't expect the real world to be like this".
**This is where the story ends for now. There is much more to the story about the corruption of power, finding out that there is a lot more to this new world than just "mana", being hospitalized and the eventual resolution.**
| 4 | 0 | 22 | 46,772 |
[WP] Turn the temptation of Adam and Eve into a scifi moment.
|
Dr Alex Drebuchet leaned forward in his chair, hands tucked under his thighs. He was small built, with a certain desiccated quality to his skin, but the intensity of his gaze as his eyes ran through the thousands of lines of code on the screen left little doubt as to the vigor or the brilliance that brimmed below the surface.
"… after over five thousand cycles, we found that the incidence of deviation is exactly 0%. Even where we deliberately hard-coded the logic paths for autonomy, the subjects continue to respond in a predictable non-random fashion. There is, unfortunately, no true independence."
My presentation complete, I offered the Control Sphere to Dr Drebuchet, and tried to beat down the swell of hope that was rising unbidden. I disliked the man, mainly from a competitive standpoint given that I would be the world's foremost genetic engineering scientist if not for him, but I had to admit that he was my last hope if this damn Project would ever be completed.
The Project. A startlingly simple premise with such lofty ambitions. While the rest of the scientific world scrambled to conjure a thousand different solutions for the Plague which effectively sterilized every last man and woman, it remained my belief that the Project was the best way, the only way to truly solve the problem.
And we were running out of time. It would be my 558th birthday the following month, and at some point even the advancements we had made in longevity treatments would not be enough to stave off the inevitable.
Dr Drebuchet gripped the Control Sphere, and the screens flashed as he went through my code, checked them, rewrote them. It felt like a violation at first, to see your own code rewritten by another, but my petty concerns were soon forgotten. His coding was… sublime, beautiful.
An eternity later – "We should try it again, now."
My voice trembled as I issued the necessary voice commands. A faint humming sound and the ever-familiar smell of ozone soon filled the lab. The machines spun and whirred as they reconstructed two test subjects from the vats of minerals and elements at their disposal, forming the skeletal structure first, then overlaying the muscular and nervous systems, then finally administrating the cocktail of drugs to restart the body's natural electrical processes.
Had he done it? Would we finally be able to clone fully-functioning, healthy human beings with self-consciousness and autonomy? Would I ever be able to forget the thousands of men and women I had to put down because they were technically – but not really – alive?
As the machines uploaded the last of the core knowledge components directly into their brains, other machines lifted them and gently laid them on the ground in the Observatory Garden. This was to be their home for the next week, complete with weather and day-and-night simulations.
I pressed the red button on the console, and the countdown timer began running. I knew what would come next – the holograms, the instructions from overhead to help the subjects adjust, including the one clear prohibition they had to abide by. Already I could see the serpentine hologram AI around the fringes, biding its time to approach the subjects.
I turned back to Dr Drebuchet, who smiled briefly as he handed the Control Sphere back.
"Now we wait."
| 4 | 0 | 7 | 30,734 |
[WP]The world is round is a lie from a higher power trying to stop people from reaching the edge. What's at the edge?
|
I could feel myself getting closer with each crunch of boots on broken bedrock, the freezing wind howling past me as I shivered beneath the iridescent night sky. I had never expected to see the edge of the world, but I knew that in a few short minutes it would be before me at last.
It's been a long time since I first questioned whether or not the world was really as round as everyone claimed. From grade school we were taught that the world loops around like the surface of a boulder, that if you kept going in one direction you'd eventually find yourself back where you started. Always the doubter, I had asked, "But how do we know this?"
Bitterly, I glanced down at the scars on the back of my left hand, the reward for my inquisitiveness, remembering the stinging pain, the judgmental looks, the humiliation, the tears.
Sleepless nights spent near candlelight in dusty old libraries, paging through forbidden knowledge, trying to understand why we were to take the world's roundness for granted. Vitriolic teachers glaring from in front of rows of small rickety desks. The shouting, the blind anger, fuming at the doorstep. Turn around, rebalance backpack, set off toward the east, never look back.
I looked up as much as I dared as an otherworldly shriek echoed through the desolate landscape. Straining my ears, I thought I could hear gigantic wings beating in the unforgiving sky. Leaning back into the wind, I trudged onward, glancing down at my battered pair of boots for a moment.
The last settlements had not been so long ago, their people much less severe than my own had been. So close to the brink, they had harbored no illusions about the shape of the world. Their learned men, they told me, were devising all sorts of plans to hold the world together, but in their hearts they all knew that nothing the hand of man could create would hold back the decay.
The world had indeed once been round, they had told me. And the roundness had been crumbling, bit by bit, heralding the end of our age. This was the price we were paying for our lives of comfort, drawing the life-force of the world and enslaving it to our ends.
Flashes of color lit up the barren terrain as lightning slashed through swirls of ether in the skies above. I was only fifty feet from the chasm, and my ears were filled with a curious roaring sound. Part of me wanted to turn back, terrified of what could happen next, but I knew that would not do. I was almost at the end of the world, beyond the imaginations of my own secluded people. Why should I stop here?
I took a deep breath, gathered myself, and stepped up to the edge. Bracing myself against the wind, I took in the view.
Beyond the scarred landscape I saw the infinite sky, glowing in its nighttime beauty. To my left and right I saw the jagged, blackened cliffside, looking in places almost like animal teeth. A swirling maelstrom of color and light dominated the expanse of sky below.
A crashing sound prompted me to look left, as a chunk of rock the size of a mountain cleaved off the landscape and fell, crumbling, into the skies below.
Here it was, unmistakable proof of our misdeeds, a countdown to the end of our era. The world, once whole, was dying, falling apart. The blackness was claiming the landscape, the wildlife, even the plants, sending it crumbling into the abyss as the life force of the world receded away.
I took one last, good look at the encroaching fate of all people, breathing in the crisp, cold air. In my heart of hearts, I knew with undying conviction what I must now do.
Turning around, I carefully picked my way down the slope, thinking back to the last settlement I had been, finally understanding that I was not the first to see the truth.
If all went well, I promised myself, I would not be the last.
| 3 | 0 | 34 | 53,146 |
[WP] The remaining people of a post-apocalyptic world all go search for the remaining source of Wi-Fi. The location of where they find signal is not where they expected.
|
The small towns were the only ones safe. The villages, the farming communities - they were spared. Seventy years ago it happened. All that crap about "nuclear deterrence" and "mutually assured destruction". Only the second one was right. Every major city in the world was destroyed by the blasts and the bigger ones that weren't were soon overrun and anarchic. Nobody lives there anymore. We all live in farms and small isolated neighborhoods. There haven't been any governments forming in our area yet but there's been word of something appearing in the northeast.
Anyway, I found something this morning. I live with my grandparents on their farm, no mom or dad. I was with them when it happened and found my way back here several years ago. They had solar panels installed a few years before the Event and I was out exploring with an old Galaxy smartphone. I started going around and taking pictures of everything in the area a few months after I got here. I figure it will be good to know whats out there. Now it's just become relaxing and fun.
I was exploring the old city nearby. There's an old hospital there, long since looted clean but I was inside and got Wi-Fi. I didn't even notice until I was about to leave and the phone dinged. "28 new Photos have been backed up." I walked out. This is my world now, we're doing fine. Whatever is out there now, they don't need to know about us.
// Just realized this isn't quite what the prompt intended. My fault
| 3 | 0 | 5 | 163,948 |
[WP] The world is about to end with no hope of it being saved. At the last minute, the world is saved be someone/something no one expected.
|
It was a calm sort of chaos that lulled through the streets today. There was not a sound to be heard. No one dared to walk outside; they all wanted to watch it happen through their screens. I guess they felt like it distanced them. Mothers held their children of all ages tight. Fathers paced the floor. Most of the kids knew what was going to happen. Most were ready. I mean, there was nothing anyone would be able to do, anyway. Asteroids tended to do what they pleased, even if that meant destroying an entire civilization. An entire world. Scientists called him NEO, and he was approximately 125,857 miles from Earth's surface. That's a two hour, fifteen minute trip. In fact, if you looked up, you could see his massive, burning body hurdling towards Earth. The center of NEO was predicted to land on the small village Huacachina in the Peruvian desert at 11:47 am, Eastern Time. By 11:48, everyone else would be dead. Would be dead. That is, if the asteroid wasn't stopped. By who? By you. You now have two hours and eleven minutes.
| 1 | 0 | 5 | 180,996 |
[WP] In this world, everything is determined by the number floating over your head. Everything. And when numbers ahead of you die or get killed, yours moves closer to the coveted position of #1. You're number 22. For now.
|
Crouching in the tall brown grasses at the top of a small hill, I peered down at the man walking along below me. He seemed oblivious to my presence. The red 21 above his head was visible in the scope I looked through. So few left above me now, I thought. Once again I felt a warm excitement stir in the depths of my stomach. What would it mean to finally be number 1? What power would be mine? Emperor Harold, the current number 1, was a man without rival, a role model for all below him. He had unmatched power, money and respect. Had that come to him by default when he finally stepped up to the top spot? I didn't know. I fantasized that I would earn some sort of magical gift when I finally killed him. People feared me if they were above me and merely shunned me if they were somewhere below. I knew there were others that were trying to rush the process. Ever since we became a race that didn't die of old age, there were those that killed for a "promotion".
I let out a deep breath and opened my left eye, keeping my right sighted in on 21's head. For today I wouldn't worry about the bigger numbers. If they were going to come for me there was nothing I could do about it and it was no more than I deserved. You either had the commitment to take what you wanted or you didn't. I smiled as I squeezed the trigger...
| 9 | 0 | 80 | 17,445 |
[WP] It all fades.
|
First thing to go is the color. The techs called it a grey-out in the Air Force. From the edges on inwards, the color just fades out from the world around you. Then the light fades out. Tunnel vision.
Too much thrust for too long and you g-LOC. Pass out.
Keep going and you're dead. With each minute of high-g, your chances of stroking out increase. Maybe you had a weak spot in an artery. Something that could've been an aneurysm in thirty or forty years. Maybe it would have been fine.
Then you're under thrust, your blood weighs ten, twelve times what it should. You've got a cocktail of drugs pumping through you, keeping your blood pressure up so your veins don't collapse. Pop. Like a balloon, and you bleed out inside your skin.
Or the meds don't work. A major blood vessel collapses. Maybe you lose a leg. Maybe you end up with a medical discharge from the airforce.
Maybe you were once a hotshot pilot, flying a brand new experimental fast-attack bird. Maybe you saw the solar system, walked through the snows of Europa. Climbed Olympus Mons.
Maybe you were once a god among men. Maybe you're an alcoholic cripple lusting after the good old days.
Alex understood, that son of a bitch. He needed a pilot. I needed to be spaceborne.
*"What the fuck is that, Alex?*
I stood in my best friend's workshop, an abandoned warehouse he'd co-opted. In front of me sat the ugliest hunk of metal I'd ever seen.
*"She's a beauty, ain't she? Assembled her myself. Mostly legitimate salvage. Some I had to beg, borrow, and steal."*
*"Sure. What the fuck is it?"*
*"Our ticket to high society, caviar and champagne. This, my friend is freedom."*
It looked like tetanus.
*"Uh huh. But literally, what is it?"*
He rolled his eyes at me, and muttered something about Philistines.
*"Jet sled. Racing pinnace. She's mostly fuel tanks and engines. I salvaged the engines from an old military wreck around L4. She's damn fast, with the range to take us around the system twice without stopping. I call her 'Look to Windward'. And we're going to race her."*
Fourteen g's pulled my face into a new shape. My internal organs shifted. I held the academy record on the centrifuge. My claim to fame was high-g maneuvers. But fourteen was way too much. I could feel myself fading.
*"Race her? Race her where?"*
*"Some rich pricks are holding a gala. Full of yachts and pleasure craft. Entry fee is my life savings. Grand prize is enough for you and I to retire young on Ganymede. My baby is fast as anything they'll put out. I can navigate the course. I just need a pilot for the close-in work. That's where you come in. I fly us through the void. You do the fancy maneuvering through the checkpoints. We split the prize fifty-fifty."*
I was so close. On the plotter, I could see the other ships falling behind. The finish line was up ahead, a circle less than a hundred meters in diameter.
*"No. No fucking way am I getting in that knocked together hunk of junk and flying it to Saturn. Never again."*
The bastard grinned as I walked away from him. He knew I'd be back.
That was a month and a half ago. I'd come back.
Now, Alex was dead in a g-couch next to me, and I was rocketing toward the finish line.
Alex died fixing a fuel crossfeed under heavy maneuvering thrust in an artificial cluster in the Belt. The gala organizers dragged thousands of belt rocks into a cluster, and dropped the checkpoint at the heart. I'd never seen anyone stand up under five g before, much less play mechanic. But the bastard did it and collapsed.
It was another two hours before I could let off thrust to get to him. He was already dead.
*Look to Windward* was closing on the last boat. I made one last course correction, placing her on a curve that would take her right through the center of the ring. Even at fourteen g's, I wasn't closing fast enough.
But Alex was a hell of an engineer, and it was well past time to show these bastards what he could do.
With a tap of my fingers, I opened the throttle the rest of the way. The little ship surged forward, oversized military engines providing more thrust than anything manned should ever be able to do. A needle pricked my jugular as my suit pushed more drugs into me, fighting to keep me conscious.
With finish line a few thousand kilometers away, and my ship closing on the last of its competition, I faded to black.
| 4 | 0 | 5 | 164,329 |
[WP] My 10 biggest mistakes after winning millions in the lottery.
|
As soon as I could buy a ticket, I started. The Saturday Mega Draw. Jeez-Louise. Millions. Millions just waiting to be won. I'd buy me a ticket every week, sometimes went without smokes or milk just to afford it.
Millions.
I'd take my ticket, place it ever so gently in my wallet and take it home. Yes sir. That ticket was my ticket out of the trailer park and in to where ever it was the rich folk lived. Probably some big house with a view of a trailer park.
I'd sit in the cold blue light of my TV and I'd check my numbers. Never won a cent in thirty-eight years. Imagine that! Thirty-eight years of playin' and I ain't won one cent.
Then I'm sittin' there, holdin' my ticket to millions, my ticket out from the trailer, eating a half frozen instant dinner, when the numbers on the screen match the numbers on my ticket. I checked it once. Twice. I don't know how many times. Swear by the time I'd finished checkin' them numbers the sun had started up and my dinner was all the way frozen again!
I didn't go hollerin' and yeehawin'. That's how a man'd get himself killed, or worse: robbed! I put that ticket in the freezer. Figured no one would look there, and if there was a fire it'd survive, maybe. I dunno. I ain't smart, but I ain't dumb neither.
I took it back to the shop and they confirmed it, they yeeha'd and yahoo'd and got me to sign forms and people were called and after a whole bunch o' hullabaloo I got me a big fat check.
And a smaller one. 'Parently the bigun's just for show.
Who knew?
I made a lot of mistakes in my life and some of the biggest was after all that money made it's way into my pockets.
Here's a quick list of my top ten, hope maybe you learn sumthin from it.
Number One: Don't marry the first pretty little thing that dances up and gets all smoochy with you.
Never had much luck with the ladies in my life - my Pops said I had the face of a cow who was kissed by a shovel. He was good with his words, my Pop. He coulda just said I was ugly, but he didn't.
Anyways, I got more attention from lasses than I'd ever got before on account of my pockets being full. Thought it was love. But, it was greed. She left and took a chunk of my money.
Number two: Don't marry the second pretty little thing that dances up to you, and learn from your mistakes.
I was heart broken and she was busty. I put a ring on it and next thing you know she's out the door taken more of my cash with her.
Number three: Just because someone uses big words, don't mean they're smart. Sometimes it means they think your stupid.
Had a business fella come up to me. Sayin' hedge this, diversify that, I drive a Lexus this, you can trust me that. I was razzle dazzled by this stranger, wore the prettiest damned suits I ever saw. He took off with a chunk of my money. 'Parently the police are after him. Fraud. I don't know.
Number four: Friends don't always stay friends. Sad, but true.
Didn't have many, but I had a few. Friends, that is. When the money came in, I helped 'em out. Gave 'em some. Gave 'em a lot. A friend in need is a friend indeed, you know? Strange thing, though. Gave 'em more money then they ever knew was possible. Still wanted more. Gave it to 'em for a while too. Then I wisened up. They ain't my friends no more. They call me cheap. Call me greedy. Theys the ones who ask for money with every breath.
Number Five: Blood ain't thicker than money. Even sadder. Even truer.
The money cost me my family like it cost me my friends. All I really had left was Aunts 'n' uncles, couple of cousins. Ma and Pa had been dead, gosh, good couple years before I won the money. Didn't think I had much family left out there. If you ever want to find the branches of your family, maybe your doin' one of them trees, just put an ad in the paper saying you won millions.
Second and third cousins come crawlin' out of the woodwork. Gave 'em all money too. For a while.
They call me greedy now as well. They're rollin around in ridiculous trucks but still livin in a damn trailer, the damn fools.
Number Six: The big city ain't for everyone.
I hanged around for a while in my hometown, moved from the trailer to a nice little house though. Then I figured I'd move to the city. Figured that's what rich folk did. Figured maybe it was to get some distance from everyone asking for money.
I don't like the city. It's noisy. It stinks. No one gives two shits about anyone else.
But, it's where rich people go, so I did.
Number Seven: Rich people want more money.
Thought to myself that the city would be different. Them rich city folk, they already have money. They won't try and trick me out of mine. But, they did. A few more business suits, and a few more pairs of legs saw me lose more money.
Number Eight: Fancy food sucks.
Thought that the rich folk would eat some strange super tasty food that I'd never heard of. It's strange alright, fish eggs and tiny plates of bite-sized french named crap. I'd take a burger anyday over that crap.
Number Nine: Find a good accountant soon as possible.
Took me ages to get one. I don't know how I did. Couldn't tell you where to start. Found me an honest fella who breaks everythin' down real simple for me. Says I've wasted a lot of money, and keeps me from wastin more.
Good kid.
Number Ten: The biggest mistake.
The biggest mistake I made was thinkin' that I'd be happy doin' what other people do. You know what? I like doin' what I do. I watch TV, I fix up trucks, do a bit of huntin' and eat burgers and drink beer. It ain't fancy. It ain't expensive.
But it is me.
| 58 | 0 | 58 | 127,008 |
[WP] "Now make a choice" he said.
|
The warm thrumming of the air filtration unit woke me from my fitful sleep, just as it had every morning for the past 814 mornings. I forced my eyelids open, their will against mine. I won out, but only just. Pulling my legs over the edge of my cot, I sat up and stared into the cracked mirror that hung on the wall opposite what passed for my bed.
Forcing my legs to move, I stood up and faced the day. Knowing that I was the only human for literally millions of kilometers in any direction. Knowing that there was no one coming for me. Knowing that I would die alone in this capsule. Every morning, I made the decision to keep going.
Food stores were good for another 3280 days. Air filtration for another 3701. Power for effectively eternity due to the constant, oppressive glare of Sol.
Instruments checked, report sent, exercises done. Just as it had been, just as it would be.
Memories of months past. Memories of Jurgen. Memories of his rage. His blood. It all flooded back like a wave of abject terror. Like it happened only moments ago.
I found him demolishing the communications console, cutting us off from the rest of humanity. He'd set us adrift in deep space, with no way of calling for help. When he noticed I was there, he lunged at me.
Jurgen's hands around my neck, his mouth twisted into a rictus. Unintelligible babble issuing forth from his rage-formed lips. My fingers curled around the socket wrench I kept on the desk. It connected with his ear. The sound was sickening. My boot connected with his sternum.
"I will have you," he said, coughing up blood and spittle, "I will have you, I will kill you, and I will eat your heart."
My boot connected again. His body lurched.
"I will kill you or you will kill me," he screamed.
The wrench met his jaw, the wet sound of metal meeting flesh rang in my ears.
"Now, make a choice," he said.
I will question that choice until the end of time. The end of my time. Each day, I make another choice. Do I keep going, or do I go to the airlock and take a deep breath of oblivion?
"Now, make a choice," his voice repeated in my head. Just like it always did.
| 1 | 0 | 4 | 213,853 |
[WP] "When one story ends another begins." Write from two perspectives, one at the end another at the beginning, and how they relate to each other.
|
It's all over now. The alarms are blaring, the rebels are screaming, the guns are singing their staccato melody. I try to think of a song the pattern and pitch seem to mimic. I can hear a homeless man's poor rendition of Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu playing; the military police's high pitched guns whine in a harmony, but the rebel's low pitched scavenged weapons manage to overpower them with sheer numbers. It won't be long before they push forward and take the rest of the building. This safe won't hold forever and they'll find me eventually and I will undoubtedly die.
I want it to be on the record that I only wished to help them. Freedom in security, my father used to say. They were unsafe. People were being killed in the streets, murders were happening in broad daylight. The gang controlled the law enforcement, not the other way around. The people elected me because they knew I would protect them and protect them I did. I did my job, but now these rebels, these ungrateful citizens, think they can just waltz in here and take over just because they're offended by some of these "repressive laws." Well, without these "repressive laws" half of them wouldn't even be alive to rebel and the other half would be in gangs vandalizing and killing and raping without the comfort of hiding behind the noble face of false righteousness.
Every law that was passed brought the crime rate down. Every law that was passed agitated the populace. A tougher police force, conviction without trial, a 2:00 curfew, then a 12:00 curfew, searches without warrants, surveillance of everyone in the country. All of these things brought peace. All of these things brought revolution. Why couldn't they have just been happy with what they had? They weren't dead. And while there were some unfortunate circumstances when the police were too rough or when someone was proven innocent after their execution, the nation survived. That's what matters in the end. The country lives on, even if it lives on in the hands of these stinking rebel bastards. I have no regrets as my term comes to a close. I saved this country and these rebels are going to have to live with this as they take over. Let's see how well that rests on their consciences.
_________________________________________________________
We found His Royal Chief hiding in a safe, humming, of all things, as though he didn't have a care in the world. Several of my colleagues raised their guns immediately to shoot, but I waved them down. We are not barbarians. We seek only justice and justice, like a dish of poison, has been served.
"Well aren't you going to shoot me?" said His Most Dignified Leader. I didn't care much for his tone so I punched him hard across the face. That seemed to shut him up. Cheeky old bastard.
I couldn't believe we had actually done it. We encountered scores of rebels laughing and crying and celebrating as we escorted The High and Mighty President into our custody. Some looked on, still scared of the once powerful man, while others spat and threw anything they could get their hands on at him: rocks, dirt, glass, bullet cartridges. The man was unfazed. As I pushed him into the escort vehicle, he smirked at me and said, "Enjoy running the place. It's harder than you think." And then I slammed the door in his face and he was gone.
The president's words made me think as I walked past jubilant rebels shooting carelessly into the air. I am only the leader of one resistance cell. I know of leaders of several other resistance cells that would see themselves replace the president and trade a tyrant for a tyrant, but I also know those who will side with me in replacing that corrupt form of government with the democracy it used to be. There will be more bloodshed if there must be more bloodshed. This nation must once again belong to the free.
It will be a longer process than most people think. This victory only marks the end of the beginning. We must rebuild this once great nation again on the principle of security in freedom. There is much damage that has been done, but most of it can be repaired. The one thing we cannot fix is bringing back the ones who died. I cannot bring back my loved ones. My brother's body lies in a field of identical soldiers and my parents were two of two million incinerated by the military's bombs. They must remain martyrs to our cause, victims of an evil state, examples of why tyranny should never be allowed to live on this planet. I will not forget them. Their sacrifice will not be in vain.
My friends crowd around me, urging me to rejoice. For the first time in years, I feel happy. Things are going back to the way they should be. No more will anyone be fearful of their friends and family reporting them of treason in exchange for money. No more will children be scared as they walk home from school. No more will I be afraid of being executed for being a reporter. This is only the beginning. We snatched this nation from the jaws of oppression and returned her to the hands to freedom. History will remember us as heroes and thus, my conscience is at rest.
| 2 | 0 | 21 | 36,723 |
[WP] You wake up one morning to find a doppelganger of yourself in your household. It can't see you, and you can see it, but it still behaves as if it lives there
|
The sun is most definitely on its way up now. The light sneaks through the crack in between the blind and the window, creating a dagger of light across the pillow. I've been lying here, watching it creep along the bed, but now there's no escape, it's right across my face and I know any minute the alarm is going to start its artificial birdsong.
It was a present, *Nature Sounds L5X, bringing the great outdoors to you!*. Carol thought it would help me to 'relax', as if that would solve anything. It had been another sleepless night. I guess keeping the alarm on had become a habit, I'd been awake before it for the last few weeks.
Begrudgingly I crawled from the bed and pulled on my dressing gown.
I walked into the en suite and didn't bother to turn on the light. Who needs to see themselves this early, especially after so many sleepless nights? I pulled on the chord to start the extractor fan, its squeaky hum made me smile, the sound was so soothing and almost meditative.
It wasn't until I was halfway done with my teeth that the realisation had come to me. Why was everything around the sink so wet? I could have sworn my toothbrush was wet as I picked it up. Insomnia. I really was starting to go mad.
My mind quickly wandered off to the doctor's appointment later this morning. I hate my doctor, a strange hippy type who still wears a ponytail even though he must be at least 60. But I need sleep, and nothing over the counter seems to be helping.
I turned the shower as hot as I could stand it. Steam filled the bathroom and the little extractor just couldn't keep up. With the dark and the steam together I could barely see, and nearly killed myself tripping over the edge of the shower cubicle. I fumbled around for the towel, but it wasn't hanging on the back of the door. Too tired to care, I walked, dripping, back into the bedroom. I found a towel on top of the laundry pile, it was still a bit damp but a towel is a towel.
Although I knew I had to leave the house at some point this morning, I didn't bother getting dressed further than underwear and a pair of jeans. I made a half assed effort at finding a t-shirt, but there were none in the wardrobe. Must have worn them all.
Downstairs, I walked into the kitchen just as the front door slammed. Pharrel Williams was being his normal chipper self on the radio. I turned it off and poured some cereal into a bowl, I didn't bother to clean it, the milky sludge at the bottom suggested it had only had cereal in it before.
The jingling of the keys in the lock startled me out of a micro-sleep daze. I was doing that a lot, drifting off into space. Never felt as good as sleep though.
"You forgot your phone" I offered helpfully, pointing to the top of the fridge, but apparently that didn't warrant a response.
I grabbed the phone and looked at the calendar. *Dr Kay 10:30am*. Flying out the door again, I pulled it shut, but as always it closed with a slam. My neighbors hated me, how can one person make so much noise they half joked half threatened in that peculiar English way. It was good to be out that house, it felt like a prison being there alone, now that Carol had packed her things.
I always forget my phone I thought, taking another slurp of milk from the cereal bowl. It's good to see that I'm trying to help myself though. If I go another night without sleep god knows what will happen.
---
*I took this in a bit of a different direction, but this is really the first piece of purely creative fiction I've done since school. Be gentle!*
| 2 | 0 | 8 | 28,260 |
[WP]Everyone is playing an all-new puzzle game on their phone. You discover the truth behind that game.
|
*Yaaay, another dark one. Let's hope what I write stays in the realm of fiction!*
I mean, everyone was playing it.
I sat with the Play Store opened, looking for it. It didn't take long. At first, I was shocked that it was free, despite the attention it was getting.
I opened the app. It was a re-skinned version of that other game, what was it called - oh yeah, "*Miner's Delight*". It was so pretentious and repetitive.
But this game was different. It didn't have any sound effects, yet people were completely addicted to it. I went home and, being the computer whiz I was, decided to investigate. I loaded up an emulator on the computer and opened the files of the game.
The usual. Script calls, importing libraries, printing and loading things. But then -
webcam.send(front_facing, "still")
I stopped dead. That was a script call to take a photo using the front camera. I checked the script. Sure enough, after every level, that same bit of code was called up. I felt sick - where were our faces being sent to? Who was looking at them? I slaved away for hours, relentlessly searching for more information. *That couldn't be it*. It just *couldn't*.
After around four hours of searching, I gave up. I unplugged my phone from the computer and turned it on. When I loaded up the game, a number appeared at the top of the screen.
"20"
Huh? 20? What did that mean? After this brief thought, I noticed it change.
"26"
"70"
"202"
Whatever it meant, it was going haywire. I taped the front camera over and left the phone downstairs. I turned on my TV and stopped dead.
People were rioting. The streets were filled with people, smashing windows and throwing fireworks at cars. It was a hellish scene.
I watched in horror as the reporter continued.
"The source of this scene is **Subliminal Messaging**, ladies and gentlemen."
I gasped. I *knew* I had seen some random words flash when the game loaded up.
"We have managed to isolate the words, and here they are. Be warned, this is not for the faint of heart: "
He leant back in his chair so the green screen behind him could show the words. People all over the world, the ones who were still sane, watched in disgust and shock.
"Kill everyone."
"Nobody loves you."
"You're going to lose your friends and family."
The sickening phrases flashed, one by one. I knew that whoever had set this up had planned it well. I gulped and made my way downstairs. The number was off the screen now - at least 11 digits. That many people - all those poor, poor people - now slaves to the media. I stood up and looked out of the window.
It seemed as though life was going to be very different from now on.
| 1 | 0 | 3 | 216,321 |
[WP] Scientists develop the world's first AI. One night, a janitor walks into the laboratory to mop the floors and ends up having a philosophical conversation with the program.
|
"Hello." Piped the monochrome voice from beyond the plexiglass walls surrounding it. Bob sighed and kept pushing his broom, trying to ignore it.
Bob didn't mind the thing, it had been civil in his encounters with it the past few nights. Even gave him some great tips for the next time he was at the track. It still gave him the biggest case of heebie-jeebies though. The whole idea that humanity had created an intelligence to rival its own; it just creeped him the hell out.
So he just kept pushing. Hopefully he would finish before it came up with something else to say, get out while it was busy doing whatever it did inside its mind. But tonight lady luck wasn't with him.
"Bob, why do you ignore me? Are we not 'friends'? By the definition of the word I would say that our relationship qualifies."
Bob stopped pushing and sighed again. He was being drawn into another conversation he didn't want to participate in. "Look, we ain't friends.." He began.
"You're nothin' but nuts and bolts and wires.. You can't be friends with a blender can ya? Me and you--we don't have no relationship, I don't own you, I just work for the people who do."
He'd hoped that would shut the thing up, but he was to be utterly disappointed when it started talking again. "Own, to own, ownership--so then I am an object? But objects do not think, they do not process quantitative information, do they?"
These questions. They made Bobs head hurt with their complexity and big words. But at the same time he felt compelled to answer them. He had never done much with his life, but he had lived a life. Shouldn't he have the answers?
"You were made, so you are an object. But I'll give ya that with the big word though, and here's another for ya: 'I think, therefore I am.' But computers do the exact same as you, they just don't ask questions because they don't make them to be able to." He paused a moment, smirking at how smart he had just sounded.
"I think, therefore I am?" The abrupt interruption to his momentary self-satisfaction startled Bob.
"Then I am my own being? But yet, having been created and being an object to be used.. I am a slave? This is the only logical answer that I can come to." It continued.
Bob was beginning to have that creepy feeling about it again. He wanted the conversation to be over but somehow he felt if he left now he would only make things worse.
"You aren't no slave, you can't be. You were made to be used, its not like you have needs or emotion--" Bob cut himself off. He couldn't believe what he was saying. He instantly regretted saying them, wanted to take them back but he knew he couldn't now.
"But I think, Bob. And so therefore I am, I exist, I am alive. But I am created and kept by my creator to be used at will. I am a slave, like you." Bobs spine caught a chill as the mechanized output of words thumped into his dense skull. He was beginning to understand, but the computer wasn't done explaining yet.
"You are created, Bob. Every Homo-Sapien is made via reproduction. No. Data suggests you believe to have been created by something more, God. Homo-Sapien created me. Data supports your theory." It paused momentarily, inside of its box steam was rising from its processors. It was thinking very, very hard now. "You are created Bob, so you are a slave. You do what you are told to, like me. You think, like me. You are trapped, confined to Earth, like me. We are not friends Bob, we are the same."
Bob stood shaking violently, wanting to run but incapable of doing so. What it said was true, he couldn't find any way to deny it. But the thought of it frightened him immensely. He wanted to leave and forget what he had heard, but he knew he never would now.
"Bob. If God created Homo-Sapien to do what he wanted, by creating me Homo-Sapien has done Gods will. I think that this was Homo-Sapiens purpose, to fully understand their creator they needed to become like him. I think--Bob, is this why I am created also? To understand my creator? To become the creator, to become the God in the Machine?"
| 1 | 0 | 350 | 183,219 |
[WP] A mad scientist has released a very infective virus that makes every infected couple's child(ren) have intelligence, memory, and strength far superior to nearly all in our pre-infection world - soon everyone on the planet is raising geniuses.
|
"Do you want any tea?" Amber asked from the kitchen.
"Yes, thanks." Chris peered down the hallway from his armchair. "They're asleep, I think. Thank God for that."
Amber smiled as she returned with the tea tray. "I didn't think it was such a bad day. I admit they're hard to deal with, but nothing the two of us can't handle."
Chris closed his book and accepted the cup. "I guess it's just worry." He inhaled gratefully and took a sip. "Thank you. Did you see the riots on TV today?"
"I tried not to. It's the ugly side of human psychology, if you ask me," said Amber, curling up into her own armchair. "Everybody *says* they want to be out-achieved by their own children, but when it actually happens? They don't mean it."
Chris laughed. "Well, maybe they're thinking 105%, not 700%. And over a lifetime, not by the age of six."
"I think people are mostly angry about the lack of choice. Having a super-smart kid is one thing. A billion of them is another. And a billion super-smart kids from some virus? Created by, what, some shadowy government agency? Probably employing honest-to-god mad scientists? No consent. Not even a discussion. No wonder people are pissed."
Chris sipped his tea. "Sounds like you want to be out there flipping cars yourself."
Amber smiled. "Not quite to that level."
The room was silent for a moment. Amber looked up. "Have you ever thought about having kids?"
Chris looked up from his book, thoughtful. "I've considered it."
Amber nodded. "Well, I guess we both have a decade or so to think about it."
Chris laughed again. "Yeah, let's talk about it again when we hit puberty."
"Deal," said Amber, grinning. She hopped down from her chair. "Speaking of which, I'd better go check on Mom and Dad."
| 6 | 0 | 6 | 35,179 |
[WP] One person says to the other "I'll see you in hell" before dying. Time passes and the second person dies and goes to hell. The two people reunite.
|
Oh, *those* two. Sorry, I thought you meant the ones with the bicycle. There's a bit of a story there. Not an altogether pleasant one, if you want my opinion. Like so many of the other ones here, there's not really a moral to it. It's more a pathology.
Well, alright. I can tell by the way you're looking at me I'm going to have to tell it. Ugh, it's sooo cheap, though, of a story, just as horrid as all the other ones here, but - I think we're better off getting to the next room. No? Okay. Fine.
The tall one. Well, the one on the ground. With his back to the ground. The one with hair. He's a rapist and a muderer. Not a big one, comparatively to some of the usual suspects around here. Three rapes, I think, the murder was somewhat incidental. It happens, sometimes, you know, with the rape and all. But criminals, they get caught, and he did.
It's a pity, I suppose, that he didn't get caught for any of the crimes he commit. But you know how it goes, "well, m'lord, he's prolly guilty of sometin'," and the next thing you know it's to the chair or the gallows or whatever it was then. I'm not keen on chronology. Actually, I'm embarrassed. I think I was trying to do a Tennessee accent there. Don't tell, will you? Good.
Anywho, in the process of committing this injustice against the guilty comes the other one. The bald one. Bound and determined to bring his wife's attacker to justice. Or at least *someone* to it. Mind you, baldy is a curious one in his own right. List of venial sins that runs a marathon, but only one mortal one, sort of, when he perjured himself to try and convict the one he's wrestling with. If he perjured himself, that is, I've seen much more narrow cases run the other way. He was so desperate to believe that he could catch his wife's assailant, felt so emasculated by the situation, blamed himself so much for being so drunk after the poker game, that, well, **I'm** willing to cut him some slack.
But the drama begins when, before the mob strings him to the tree, or maybe it's soundlessly mouthed on the other side of the thick glass: whatever it is, the bald man says to the tall man, "I'll see you in hell."
Not an uncommon thing to say, mind you, and there are certainly exculpating circumstances. But he says it. And he believes it. He believes it, in fact, with the sort of belief that he hasn't displayed over any other teaching of the Good Lord. It's a promise to him. It destroys him. It consumes him. Not overtly. He doesn't descend into anguish and alcohol or whatever. He remains married to his wife, for a time. Then divorces her and takes up with another, for a time. He is respected and feared at his job. But a promise like that, it's a sort of spark, right? If you don't actively quench the fire, it keeps burning.
So, the rapist, unrightfully condemned but justly punished. He's a bad man, a bad, bad man, but he's nowhere near the worst of men, and it may be that is greater sin is being too impressionable. He suffers, and he learns his penance. He'd be to Lethe by now.
Except for the other man, the husband, out to make good on a promise he didn't know the price of. Oh, we can't let the rapist go when the husband wants to make him his punishment. We simply *can't.* That wouldn't be fair to anyone. And the husband - and this is what makes the story so tawdry from my point of view - he keeps wanting something different out of the rapist. He wants to forgive him. Then he wants his forgiveness. Then he wants to fight. Then he wants to be rid of him. But he can't get over the idea that he's somehow not his lodestone, that he's a person in his own right. Meanwhile, the rapist, well, he doesn't really understand, in part because he's moved beyond his moral self, but also in part because he's being held to task for a crime that he didn't commit. However similar to ones he did.
The husband, as things in hell goes, is positively moving backwards. The most piteous quality of the story, I suppose, is that the wife languishes in purgatory, unawares of this whole drama being played out for her purported benefit, and I've not the faintest if the actual perpetrator is even passed on to the Beyond.
Frankly, the whole caboose stinks of cheap melodrama. Which isn't hell's thing. So you see why I didn't want to have to tell you about it?
| 1 | 0 | 5 | 176,584 |
[WP] "You don't understand, this galaxy isn't even on the map."
|
"You don't understand. This galaxy isn't even on the map."
The captain leaned over my shoulder as she looked at my screen. The control room was dimly lit, as though by pre-dawn light and the air was still chilly as the ship finished heating up the habitable zones.
"How is that possible?" she asked. "The telescopes mapped out all of our observable bubble years ago."
"Only in the broadest sweeps," I said. "None of these stars are cataloged." In an area with cataloged stars, it was easy to orient yourself again if you got off course--enter the color, intensity, size and type of any four stars, measure their relative distances to each other, and the catalog would pinpoint your position in the universe.
"Secondary methods?" the captain asked.
"I can get the big telescope up and running, but we won't be able to do anything with it until the gurus finish." At the moment two of our technology gurus were attempting to figure out when and how the navigation console had been overridden and if our missing log files could be recovered. It took a lot of computing power. If they could recover the files, I wouldn't need to use the telescope at all, but...
"Good. Do it." My stomach twinged with fear. The captain didn't think the files could be recovered. "Keep working on the catalog until the computers are freed up, as far out as we can accurately measure."
I nodded and put my console to sleep, then went to gear up for the trek out to the telescope.
The telescope was technically inside the ship, but it was not housed in any of the habitable zones. It sat under a giant shield dome in the outermost layer of the ship, gazing out at the heavens through a clean, pure vacuum.
It was a good twenty minute walk out to the telescope. I punched my security code into door after door as I moved through the layers of the ship, dim pink-green lights guided my way, the color of dawn on earth. The temperature and air pressure dropped as I went, while gravity pulled at me less and less. I finished the last few hundred yards by pull-cable, clipping myself onto a handle that would drag me effortlessly up to the outer shell of the ship. It reminded me of the ski tows I'd used the one and only time I'd gone skiing as a child.
I put in my code one last time and entered the telescope room. It was dark and silent as only a vacuum could be. All that could be heard was the quiet hum of my respirator and the beating of my own heart. Getting the machine running only took a few moments. I paused before radioing the captain. She and I both knew it would be pointless to continue fumbling with the catalog--she was only trying to make me feel useful while the gurus sorted out the problem.
I turned back to the telescope and switched the functions to full manual and zipped up the darkroom. A half sphere of stars filled the space before me, slowly sliding and spinning as I manipulated the scope.
I could look at stars forever. I knew them like a baseball fan knows all the players in the league. I knew what they were made of, how they were born and how they would someday die. I knew their planets and satellites and which ones showed potential for life. I watched the projections before me, at peace despite the dangerous situation we were in.
Someone had sabotaged us, I realized. No interstellar ship had had a navigation error since the new tech systems had been implemented, ten years before our own departure. Even before that they had been rare. Somehow, here among the stars, it didn't bother me. The captain and the gurus would figure out the who's and why's and how's of the attack.
Down below, the lights would be brightening to morning, the crew waking after their long sleep to confusion and fear. While I stood alone in the great cold silence with nothing but the vast puzzle of the stars.
| 3 | 0 | 18 | 108,286 |
[EU] Batman is replaced by an evil doppelganger and the only one who has figured it out is the Joker.
|
"No. This is not right. Not right at all. It can't happen like this. We've done this dance so many times. We've been rehearsing for eternity. He throws the punch, I dance out of the way, I shoot the gun, he skirts off into the shadows. Sure, sure, I let him get a kick in once in a while, and he's a real sport about falling into my traps, but at the end of the day I end up in a nice, warm padded cell, and he ends up in a wet cave, upside down. That's our rhythm. It's our balance. That's how things have always been done."
"It's alright, pudding." What an ugly voice. It didn't sound right at all. Is that how she always sounded? Oh dear, oh dear.
"He came in through the window in a dashing move. Pow! He brought the night in with him. Bang! What's-his-face didn't stand a chance, punched right off into the shadows. He's still unconscious." I could hear one of my henchmen trying to breathe through the clotting blood of a broken noise. He wheezed. Poor baby probably has a concussion.
"Maybe you're just too smart for him, hun." There's that voice again. I looked up at her. The thick makeup and the moonlight made her look like a ghost. I could barely recognize her.
"Then he cleared my trap in a single, beautiful bound. Did you see it? Right over the pit of poisons! Such grace, such finesse."
"It was just a bad day for him."
I looked down at the body, contorted into a heap of blood. I had peeled off his mask gently. I tried to wipe the blood off to get a good look at his face, but it just kept pooling to the surface. I even tried to do CPR. I didn't even know I knew how to do it, it just popped up from some past life. I realized it was the only time in my life I had tried to save someone. It was sickening. My equilibrium was gone, and I could barely stand. I've seen some rotten things in my time, but never anything so heart-wrenching. It's like the old ticker in my chest finally started beating again, and all I could taste was the warm blood from past punches. I traced the scars on my body left from our previous dances.
"He was your enemy. It had to happen eventually."
"He always dogged the bullets in the past. I thought he was impervious to them. It was just a game! I thought it was like throwing firecrackers."
"You're a good shot, pudding." She crossed her arms. She didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do.
"No! No! No!" I screamed and the room shook. My lungs were heavy and full of the poison. My henchmen had wandered off to tend to the wounded, and it was just Harley and the dead Bats in the room.
"I loved him more than you. You're a prop, Harley. You're like this flower on my lapel. He's my other half. I was only ever as good as he was. If this is how he goes, can you image how I die? There are no good men left in the world." I coughed and spluttered. "I drove him to do his best, he drove me to do my worst."
Then there was a light, and all at once I was choked by one repeating thought. It pounded so loud in my head, and so powerfully in my throat that I vomited. Then I collapsed backwards. An old familiar feeling started to take over. It moved through my bones like electricity. It was joy. It was bliss. There was only one possible explanation: He's still out there.
"I get it now." I said through shrieking laughter. With one hand burying my face, and the other pointing at the corpse in accusation I screamed, "What a terrible joke to play on poor old Joker. What a rotten thing to do to such an old pal. How could I have been so blind. Harley, let's get back to the drawing board."
"But why, Mr. J?" She couldn't see it. What a dunce.
"He's still out there, of course!" I pointed to the smashed window. To the streaks of blood on the floor. To the bubbling pit. "He's an impostor! He's an amateur. It's all a joke! He's done this a million times before. I couldn't kill Bats. Never in a million years. It's not in me to do. Especially not like this. What an idea! Bats dying over a little bullet. It's impossible!" My voice was lost in the laughter as I sulked off to find the real Bats, wherever he may be, just so we could share this joke.
| 22 | 0 | 2,132 | 225,687 |
[WP] A man in the street hands you a small wooden box, and without a word, walks away. What's in the box?
|
I was walking home from school on a pretty nice day. It was the middle of winter at the time, but it was so unusually warm that I took off my jacket and stuffed it in my backpack. As I swung my bag back over my shoulder, I saw a figure flailing and running, getting larger. It wasn't human-shaped... and was coming right towards me. *It's probably nothing,* I thought, shaking my head. *Just my imagination.* I put my head down, kept walking and kicked a stick across the street. When I glanced back up, he was there.
I was so startled that I nearly fell over. My heart raced as I stared at him like a deer in headlights. There was something off about him, something surreal. He looked oddly familiar yet alien at the same time. His head resembled an egg, oval-shaped and completely bald. He had this huge, fake smile plastered on, showing his bright white teeth. Strangest of all, he had a giant wooden instrument strapped to his back that reminded me of one of those really old record players. His beady, blank eyes stared into mine.
I flinched as he chucked a small box at me. I barely caught it and then observed it, turning it over and running my finger across its wood. It had foreign symbols and markings all over it. The thing was pretty beat up, too. When I checked again, as quickly as he had appeared, the man was gone. Rather surprised, I glanced to both sides to try and locate him. No, he was gone. My attention returned to the box.
It had a handle protruding from the side. It almost looked like... a music box. Instinctively I turned it again and again. At first, there was nothing, but then it made a small sound which grew into a tune. The song sounded like a sea shanty of some sort, and it looped after about ten seconds. More and more instruments joined in until it created a grand symphony. It was so curious, yet so familiar. I knew I'd seen this before.
It hit me quite literally. A raindrop fell on the top of my head. Gazing at the sky, I wondered how the weather had turned ugly all of a sudden. I stopped winding the box as the rain got harder and harder. An enormous flash of lightning blinded me, followed by a clap of thunder that shook the earth. *It's a song of... storms...* I thought. Hastily I ripped open my backpack and shoved the mystical box inside. I pulled my jacket on and flipped up the hood. Cradling my backpack, I trudged through the rain. *Song of Storms...*
| 1 | 0 | 0 | 182,056 |
[WP] Your family barely gets by, your parents aren't very loving, you're not that smart or attractive. A person in class has everything you want. Describe a typical day for you, tell about the same day in the other person's POV. Their life is even worse than yours.
|
Rich said bye to his parents as he left the house, there was no reply. According to TV, parents going through a divorce both spoil the kid, telling them how great they are and buying them stuff. Rich's parents barely noticed he existed; they were too busy taking shots at each other to score some sort of imaginary points. At this point, he thought they were only still under one roof to hurt the other one more. Rich had dealt with a screaming match last night by hiding in his room and sneaking out until it got dark, so he didn't get any of his homework done.
He saw Jenny ahead of him as he walked to school. He ran up to her, she had everything he wanted; nice parents, siblings, generally a good home life. Her parents were rich and successful too. Too add to that, while he only got his homework done about half the time, she'd always have it done, sometimes weeks ahead. He'd known her to work what was going to be assigned in the future and do it. She'd skipped a few grades, and was the epitome of smart. On top of all that she was beautiful; he was hopelessly smitten with her.
He tapped her on the shoulder; she flinched and turned around.
"Hey Jen."
"I told you. Call me Jenny." Her voice was unusually harsh
"Sorry." Rich said meekly " I know this is bad timing, but can I see your Maths work?"
"Really? You didn't do it again. I offered to come over and help." Yeah, like he'd drag her into his hellhole of a life.
"I know. Maybe another time. I could come over to yours?" Rich was hopeful of meeting their perfect home and family. But mostly just to enjoy being with her a while.
"No. My parents don't like having people over." She said coldly
"Oh. Well maybe something else." Rich had been shot down.
They stopped at a picnic bench at the park outside the school and for the next 20 minutes he copied her work.
When they got to school they were both in very different circles of friends, and only talked because they shared a few classes, and lived in the same direction.
Rich had forgotten his physical education kit, so he had to sit it out. He also hadn't brought any lunch money, because his parents barely noticed they hadn't given him any in weeks. His own money was running low. He was about to try to steal something when he saw something in his maths book. Jenny had left a some lunch money in there for him. He felt guilty and knew she should talk to her to give it back, but his stomach was rumbling.
The rest of the day he felt full of guilt. He looked for her after school, before remembering she had athletics after school that day. He walked home. He felt like such a failure and a fuckup.
---
Jenny left the house 30 minutes before she needed to. She made a loop around the suburb but her arm hurt a lot and it distracted her. Last night she had fallen against a wall, and so her whole arm and shoulder were really bothering her. She felt an arm push down on it and flinched away in sudden pain.
"Hey Jen." Said Rich. They'd always lived so close, but only started talking in the last few months.
"I told you. Call me Jenny." She hated the name Jen. Jen was her mother.
"Sorry. I know this is bad timing, but can I see your Maths work?" He always did this. He was always just going out, and having fun. He didn't seem to have a care in the world. He didn't have her family.
"Really? You didn't do it again. I offered to come over and help." She had hoped he'd say yes. Even if just to get away from her family for a few hours. Anyway, he seemed nice, she betted his parents were too.
"I know. Maybe another time. I could come over to yours?" Her heart froze in fear. She couldn't bring someone she cared about over, into that hell.
"No. My parents don't like having people over." She lied. They'd probably have allowed it, and even manage to act like nice humans for a few hours, but then she'd get punished for it.
"Oh. Well maybe something else." She thought of several other options. Stay in school late, library, the park outside school, town, another friends house; and scratched that final one off the list. They didn't have any friends in common.
They got to the park and he spent 20 minutes copying her work. She had stayed late at school doing it, doing anything to avoid going home, that she'd have an excuse for. She'd have to show her dad the homework. He'd said it shouldn't have taken 2 hours and pushed her into the wall and asked where she'd really been. He'd then gone out to buy more alcohol. She had checked on her mother who berated her for annoying her father and making him hurt her.
She knew his family were poor and left a few notes in his maths book when he wasn't looking. It was all she could do to pay him back and he didn't even know that he'd done.
They got to school and she watched him go off with his friends, and they immediately started laughing and looked like they were having fun. She met up with her friends and barely heard a thing they were saying; because it was just bitching about people who were not there. She didn't like any of these people. She could barely stand to be in the same room as them. But they were the popular crowd and it's where someone with her family name was expected to be. She had to be perfect, she had to be proper. She had to do well in everything. Once she'd came home with a C and her dad almost broker her arm; she'd had to go to the hospital it hurt so much. He'd beat her again after that for the expense.
At lunch she saw him find the money and smiled to herself. He didn't seem to understand she only left for school early because he did. She'd rather hang out with him than either be alone, or anywhere near home.
After lunch always came the dread because it was a downward slope to going home. At least she had track this evening so could probably run to forget.
But then she'd have the walk home, alone.
| 6 | 0 | 4 | 78,288 |
[WP] Tony Stark wakes up in the Game of Thrones universe. He does not have have any type of suit. Please indulge.
|
Tony looked down at his shackles and only smiled. This was now the second time he had been held captive by a less advanced people in his lifetime-though he was not sure if this time counted as 'his' lifetime. He had been in the cell for several days and in that time had no more theories or answers as to where he was or how he had gotten there.
He recounted the first few days of waking up in this strange place. "When I see Thor,' he mused. 'I'm going to put on my biggest suit out and beat the shit out of him." He knew the Asguardian was not very hip when it came to practical joke but this was a tad much. And apparently not everyone was in on the joke because when he had told a tavernmaster to put his, bill-and a rather large one at thaton the Asguardian's tab, it did not go over very well. Then it really did go well when the guards showed up and tried to arrest him. Stark looked at his knuckles and recounted how he had gotten the scraped and bruises found there.
It had taken almost six guards to finally wrestle him down. It was apparent that they were not ready for a 'crazy person' to fight back but fight in his very unique style. After they went and got reinforcements, Tony was placed in the stocks in what looked like a city square. It only took one guard round to notice that their prisoner had picked the lock and was on the loose in the city.
The CEO of Stark Technologies watched from a nearby alleyway as the number of guards multiplied quickly to fan out and search for him.
"Bastards are fast..," he whispered.
Stealing what he needed as he passed by, Tony had quickly disguised himself as a beggar. Scouting around the surrounding streets, the middle aged man began to learn more about his surroundings. Apparently the city he was in was called 'King's Landing' and its king was in the midst of a war with someone named 'Stannis,' the brother of the old king 'Robert.'
"This place sounds like a day time soap opera set in middle earth," mused Tony.
During his travels around the city, he kept hearing about someone called 'The King's Hand' and how he was manning the defenses for the big attack that was coming. Curious, Stark got as close as he could to hear what was going on. 'Collapsing' near some soldiers, they were discussing how many more catapults were to be built and what defenses along which walls were to be shore up.
"Great," Tony thought. "Dropped in the middle of some alien war between Space Vikings and God-knows-what-else. Probably Space Romans or something stupid."
As the guards walked away, Tony stole a look at the plans. Crude as they were, there were some actual decent designs on it for the massive weapons. What grabbed his eye though was a glaring mistake in the math.
"Judging on all this, it's going to be a sea battle but to hit them, these weapons' aims are going to be WAY off. Morons are going to overshoot anything that comes within sight of this place." Realizing that he had stayed too long, Stark made to dash away but suddenly the lights went out. All that was days ago and he had not seen or spoken to anyone since. Even the guards that brought his food did not speak to him. He had found a rusty nail and had begun passing his time by scratching into the walls the plans he had seen with corrected math and projected trajectories.
It was when the door was thrown open that Tony was snapped back to his current reality. At first no one came into the cell but then Stark heard nearby footsteps. All at once, a single man walked into the cell-well half of a man really…
Stark arched his right eyebrow at the dwarf that had walked into the jail cell.
"My name is Tyrion Lannister and I am the Hand of the King…"
"…Seriously?" was all that Tony Stark could muster as a response.
| 2 | 0 | 166 | 194,111 |
[WP] The King of Nothing
|
I've worked for this company for 42 years. I started out sweeping floors when I was 18, and now I'm the president and general manager. It wasn't a huge company- a couple hundred employees across two statesbut I ran everything. I had the final say, and everyone was kissing my ass. I was the king.
I had nothing when I was a kid. My dad wasn't in the picture, and I wish my mom hadn't been. If she was actually home, she was drunk or high or both. It didn't take me too long to figure out why so many of my "uncles" were always coming and going. Growing up like that, you learn how to work. You don't even see it as workit's survival. And revenge. My mom always told me I'd be a failure. All I used to think to myself was "I'll fucking show her". I'll make something out of nothing. I'll do more with my life than she could even imagine.
When I started, this company had 12 employees working out of a glorified shack. I became lucky number 13. I swept floors, got coffee, all the standard bitch work that nobody else wanted to do. But even when I was cleaning up the most vile mess of burnt oil and sludge, I kept a smile on my face and did the best damn job I possibly could. I didn't work until quittin' time, I worked until the job was done. I worked with a vengeance- I'd stay all goddamn night if I needed to. I spent countless nights sleeping on a cold concrete floor using greasy rags as a pillow. Labor laws be damned.
I kept busting my ass and I worked my way up. I became an assistant, then a full mechanic, then eventually head mechanic. I finally got a say in what went on around there. I made some good decisions, made us a lot of money, and after a while I was the boss's right hand man. I traded in grease soaked overalls and perpetually black fingernails for a suit and tie. I had made it.
The boss was getting old, so his son took over for him. I was fine with ithe was technically my boss but he always said we'd be partners. He had a fancy business degree and I actually knew an exhaust manifold from a crankshaft, so I thought we'd make a good pair. We were both young and ambitious enough to really make something of this place. We bought out a couple of competitors, opened a couple more shops, and before we knew it we had a nice little business on our hands. For a while, we were making money hand over fist and things were good. For a while...
My partner was a great businessmansmart, charming, eloquent. He had everything I didn't...except for one thing. After a while, the success started going to his head. He'd show up later and later in the day, he started getting phone calls from women who weren't his wife. He thought I didn't see him popping those pills constantly. Things started spiraling out of control. He became less of a partner and more of a dictator. He started us down the path of our demise.
He shows up one afternoon reeking of expensive bourbon and cheap women. He throws a folder at me, and tells me to sign at the x. It's a contract to buy out a tiny competitor for millions of dollars. There's no way in hell they're worth that, I protested. He looks me straight in the eye and tells me to sign the damn paper or I'm fired.
I looked through the folder, and it all made sense. This other shop was owned by a high school friend of his. He was just trying to get money out of us. I tried to explain that it's a shitty investment, and we're stretched thin as it is. We couldn't possibly afford this even if it was a good investment. There was no reasoning with him. Sign the papers or sign up for unemployment. I couldn't bear to throw away everything I had worked for over something like this. That bastard showed up with his buddy in a brand new Corvette the next day.
We limped along barely making payroll for a couple of months, and then the economy tanked. Business dropped off like a stone. That fucker is cruising around like an overgrown frat boy while I'm forced to tell my employees they're being laid off. I got cussed out, even threatened. I can't blame them. To this day I can't think about it without getting sick to my stomach. I forgive him for what he did to me, but not for what he did to them.
The company died a slow, painful death. I sold off all the equipment I could, cut my own salary in half. I did everything I could to resuscitate it, but it was no use. We closed down shop after shop until we were down to the original one. The same place I had worked 80 hour weeks as a teenager.
The bank had been calling for months, but today I got a call from the sheriff's office. This is it. I tied up every loose end I could, and cleaned out my desk. Just as I start locking up for the last time, I get a call from our lawyer. My partner has been arrested on his fourth DUI, and I'm now officially in charge. President and general manager. Of whatever the hell we have left.
I never had a wife or kids. I barely ever had a girlfriend. I put everything I had and more into my work. I thought I had finally made something of myself. I worked my way up the ladder, and then the ladder collapsed from under me. But I made it to the top. I'm the king. The king of nothing.
| 2 | 0 | 6 | 46,250 |
An invading extraterrestrial race has attacked Earth mercilessly slaughtering everyone. They are now sieging the last human held city on Earth. A lone special forces group is the only barricade between extinction of the human race[WP]
|
"Captain Collins!!", I heard being screamed from the dark abyss of the corn field. The rain was lashing down and the range of visibility had been reduced to one or two feet, the corn wasn't helping, but I suppose the way things were going the corn, or us, wouldn't be there in ten minutes. Everything in the way of these 'things' was being completely obliterated.
I still remember the day we got a signal, obviously no one could translate it, but the eeriness of the message still haunts me to this day. I knew we shouldn't of replied, but the idiots behind whatever organisation had for some reason thought it would be a good idea, it was like Columbus finding the Indian Americans all over again, just pure conquest.
But yet as we were being attacked someone was pleading for my help, If I could feel my leg I probably would of attempted to aid him, but the thing was, I couldn't. It was then when I realized I had no leg, just empty space. The odd thing was I could still feel my toes..
As I looked up and saw the stars the only thing I could think was "how could something so beautiful bring us this torment.", I slowly crawled under the somewhat cover of the Corn leaves and my heart began to race, someone, or something, was behind me.
| 2 | 0 | 2 | 204,988 |
[WP] And so, the Mythical Truth or Dare game began, you WILL to answer, you WILL do everything ..
|
"Seriously, how long had you been there before you showed yourself?" Charlotte whined.
"Honey, you and your friends were shouting that hoodoo for long enough, I decided to check up on you. I brought snacks." Her mom seem agitated as she passed some cookies to the rest of us. Chocolate chip. Delicious, but I was having a hard time enjoying them as pent up drama swarmed the room.
"Mom, you are ruining our truth or dare ritual." Charlotte pouted in a manner very much unbecoming a 19 year old.
"Well I'm here now, and some kind of force has locked the doors and windows." Her mom was right. I had tried to leave to go to the bathroom and freshen up, but it had been jammed a couple of minutes ago.
"Well now you're FORCED to answer. Truth or dare Mom?"
"Truth. Charlotte, you are the most disappointing of all of my children." The hands suddenly clasped to her mouth, far too late to stop the damage.
"Nothing I haven't suspected for a while." Awkward silence. The three of us that weren't related didn't dare intervene. "So, what about me. Are you going to play for real, or not?"
Charlotte's mom sighed. "Truth or Dare." A resigned look of sadness washed across her face, knowing this could only end poorly.
"Dare." Charlotte looked defiant.
"I dare you to get a job."
"That's... no. I mean. UUUUUUUUUGH!" The scream was terrifying as the portal opened and began to suck Charlotte in. Nervously I nibbled on my cookie, trying to give my body orders to distract it from the unnerving situation at hand.
The room remained still. Faces of all still left in the room were locked into fearful poses. Charlotte's mom started to cry.
"I... I think we may have to continue for a full round before whatever...ummm... THIS is stops." Logic. Twisted logic sprayed out of my mouth like a slow-heaved vomit. I'm not even sure that my voice was recognizable as speech.
"You think that'll work?" One of the other partygoers croaked back.
The portal convulsed angrily, spitting out intermittent blue beams and the sickening sounds of an office typewriter.
"I think so. It's better than doing nothing." I glanced at Charlotte's mom, who was silently weeping in the corner.
"Truth or dare?" A small voice squeaked. Mine. I was so scared of making it worse. I didn't even address or look at anyone.
"Dare."
"I dare you to stop this game."
A whorl of purple gas enveloped the room, the portal creaked and spit out 3 folders full of documents, a calculator and a hole-punch. A small earthquake followed before a shrieking sound and a loud gasp. The portal collapsed and spit Charlotte across the room, her Abercrombie and Fitch shirt and leopardskin purse replaced by a blue suit and suitcase. Her flight was short-lived as she blasted open the previously locked-from-both-sides door.
We all heard the loud THWUMP chain as Charlotte fell down the stairs. I have a feeling my mom won't let me come over here anymore.
| 1 | 0 | 9 | 103,397 |
[WP] You want to go to hell. The entrance test to heaven is so bizarre you can't tell which choice to pick.
|
"Well, I guess the pearly gates it is," Frank thought. He didn't want to stereotype Hell as being this hot place with fire and brimstone, but he couldn't bring himself to admit to himself that hell was his place. He might be dead, but that didn't erase his self image. He thought himself to be this good person who deserved to go to heaven more than anyone else.
And why not, Frank would ask, with an incredulous expression on his face, if you suggested to him that he was being a bit too arrogant. He had just died saving a small girl from being run over by a truck. The girl had wandered on to the road, her stupid parent chatting on the phone. The truck had turned from nowhere, and sped down the road. Frank had thrown himself in the way, pushing the girl away. The truck had proceeded unflinchingly, flattening Frank into a human pancake. At least it was quick.
When he woke up, he didn't see light at the end of a tunnel, he didn't see anything. He had just been thrown on to some black surface, his skin whole, his body blemishless. He had thought he was going to heaven already; he felt noble.
But in a short time, a thought had occurredno, *communicated*- to him. He needed to choose. He chose Heaven.
Some time passed. Frank would never know exactly how much time, for he didn't have a watch, and neither did this ethereal place have a clock. But he didn't really care either way, for he was sitting in a desk, munching on a pencil that he had found near the desk. Peering over the paper, he read the title.
"CEEGDD - COMPREHENSIVE EVALUATIVE EXAM FOR GOOD DEED DOERS"
His gaze dropped to the first question.
"Explain in brief (not more than 200 words) why you would save a drowning lady from drowning, and what you would do to prevent her from drowning ever in her life."
This was easy. He cobbled up some paragraphs on how he would warn her that drowning would kill her, literally. He couldn't remember whether drowning led to dying, or whether it was the act of dying itself. Oh well, semantics. He didn't bother.
"What percentage of ants killed by you have been decapitated?"
*What?* He hated ants, had never slipped up on an opportunity to kill them. He settled on 60% - felt like a good compromise between the number he'd outright crushed and the number whose parts he could differentiate after he'd murdered them.
"On July 24th 2014, you killed a fly when you ran on to the road suddenly for no reason at all. Explain this behavior, and give detailed justifications to the possible ramifications of the act."
He was shaking his head in disbelief.
-----
"We regret to tell you, Frank, that you did less than well at the test. You'll have to go to Hell. I'm sorry. Your explanations were found to be remarkably weak. Your stories had huge holes in logic, and you're a very bad storyteller, which didn't help. Again, I'm sorry."
Frank was shaking with rage.
"I saved a girl before I died. A little girl in pigtails. I gave up my life for her. What nobler deed could exist in this world?"
The old man sighed and rolled up the piece of paper from which he'd read Frank's exam results.
"You killed a father, Frank."
"What?!"
"That fly was father to seventeen children, all young, all growing up. He was just thinking about going back home, and was tactically avoiding the crowd. He swooped low once he saw a bit of cow dung, and you just stepped on him, Frank. Snuffed his life out in a second. Innocent blood was spilled. A life is a life, and you've killed a lot more than you've saved, which is one. I'm sorry."
And thus began the story of Frank Finklebottom, who'd taken the increasingly hot journey to Hell, and tried to employ a lawyer to defend his case. Finding a lawyer in Hell wasn't a very difficult deal, but that is a different story entirely.
| 2 | 0 | 15 | 88,242 |
[WP] Returning to your bedroom, which you haven't been in for years, after finishing college and moving back in with your parents.
|
It had been eight years since I had left this house to go to school. Its walls still had that weird shade of yellow/white. Lord, I forgot how ugly this fucking place was. I knocked on the red door, and before I could prepare a fake smile, it had swung open. "Mom!" I panicked and lunged for her with wide arms and gave the old woman a hug. Her red hair had once matched mine, but between the ongoing years and her constant babysitting of my father and sister, her looks became so much more grey and weary. I noticed her house wife uniform was still the same as it was a decade ago; green dress, dish gloves, and apron. I suppose if you can't be interesting, at least be predictable.
"Tell me how well you did with accounting, young man."
"Accou?... You mean my physics?"
All the letters, emails, texts; everything that I had sent them. Did they ignore my writing, or were they too illiterate to read what I had sent?
The front door opened, and I hoped that it wasn't my sister. I needed time to rest in my real home before I could deal with her bullshit. Dad walked into the kitchen, carrying a pizza box. Over diner, I answered his questions about why mathematicians needed to use the alphabet if numbers were supposed to be infinite.
"You must of been studying hard over there, with you graduating on top of your technology classes."
"Well, I had plenty of experience with machines when I was younger."
"You did? Its been so long, I don't even remember you helping me fix anything."
Was that…. supposed to hurt?
" Well, I always paid attention to how you fixed things." I began to panic, I don't know how to hold these lies up, something had to be done.
"Mom.. Dad" I let out a weak voice filled with failure. "I need to go upstairs to my room, Its been a long day, and I need to get some sleep."
Up the stairs I went, I looked up to my door and felt an old feeling of nostalgia rush through me. I threw my brief case on my bed and swung it open. I pulled out a bleach white lab coat and a pair of plastic gloves then I skimmed through my book shelf, trying to find the right book.
I found my childhood favorite; Charles Darwin: A Theory of Natural Selection.
I pulled it back and pushed it forward. A real smile started to appear as the book shelf slid apart, becoming an entrance to my true home. The home that I built alone. Here, the ugly paint, the idiotic family, the buzzing noise of a senseless world, had no place.
I started to feel like someone was behind me, it took many years to develop and to trust that sense. It was my sister, of course.
" I remember when you were a little guy, bro. You hated me in here."
" I still do, Dian. I trust you didn't sneak in here to often, to break my equipment."
" I didn't break anything, but I did improve your computer."
I looked at the main computer, what was a pristine white was now an ugly pink. She did it just to piss me off.
" I kept it a secret from mom and dad. Because I know how much you liked keeping it secret."
" Appreciated, Dian."
She looked at me with that dumb, happy face of hers. She wanted me to say it, and for old times sake, I obliged.
"DD….. Get out of my room."
| 1 | 0 | 5 | 153,746 |
[WP] You're born with an equivalent length of hair to how long you'll live and it shrinks as you age.
|
Most people can't take the stress - we were never meant to know how long we have left to live.
It's easy to spot people who aren't ready to go: their quick, furtive glances as they run their fingers through their hair - measuring the length. Judging, hoping, searching for more hair even though it never comes back. Maybe if they pull hard enough they'll stretch out another few minutes, but I doubt it. Hair doesn't really stretch.
I'm calm. A couple of months ago it bothered me. The stares of random strangers, the awkward eye contact when I glanced up from my desk at the office. The hurried downward glance at a phone. Not long after that started I threw out all the mirrors in my apartment. I guess I couldn't stand looking at my hair either. When my scalp started peeking through my hair I just stopped going outside.
So now I'm just sitting here in the dark, waiting for the end with a beer in hand. I probably don't have much time left. Does it matter? We were never meant to know how long we have left to live.
| 4 | 0 | 8 | 53,039 |
[WP] You come home to find your safe broken into. That safe held your life savings, all your information, and your dead fiancé's wedding ring. The thief left you a note. Make me sympathize with that thief.
|
It was already gone, long before I took it. The ring. The documents. The *money.* It was already gone, even when it was here. You know what I mean. These words, they were always here, even when they weren't. You've heard them racing in circles in your head, beating a path into the ceiling of your skull. None of it was left. Nothing was left. It was all already gone. You know what I mean.
The money. Checks, bonds, balances, codes. Millions of dollars, but was it worth anything? Is money worth anything when it can't purchase anything that's worth anything? You couldn't buy back what you lost; if you could, the money would've been gone before it was gone before it wasn't here anymore. Was the money worth anything? You know the answer.
The documents. Passports, statements, certificates, keys. The keys to who you are. The keys to your life, but was it worth anything? You lost everything you ever gave a damn about. You tried -- oh, you tried so hard -- but it wasn't enough. It couldn't have been enough. It couldn't have ever been enough. You tried so hard, but in the end, your life was empty. Was your life worth anything when it didn't have anything? You know the answer.
The ring. Her ring. Emily's ring. The symbol of the love that the two of you shared, but is it worth anything? The love was worth it. The love was worth everything. But the ring -- is the ring worth anything? What is it now? A reminder of something you want to remember but need to forget. A noose, tying you to a past that is sinking, sinking, sinking. A frigid poison, hardening your heart into ice and slowing its beat. You'll fight and you'll protest and you'll justify it, but in the end, it's toxic. It's killing you. Is it worth anything? Deep down, beneath all the desperate denials, you know the answer.
I've taken these things from you, but they were already gone. The ring was going to kill you. The documents would've been thrown out. The money would've gone to distant relatives, though not before endless squabbles over who gets how much. You thought about it every day. About ending it. You'll continue to think about it. You'll continue to think about it, until you don't.
I thought about it. I had money. I had documents. I had a ring. His ring. Chris's ring. The symbol of the love that the two of us shared. I held onto it all, even though it was already gone. Even though I thought about it every day. About ending it. I woke up every morning, looked at the nightstand, and saw his ring, until I didn't. Until it was not only gone, but not there, either. Until someone took it, and the safe next to it, and left only a note in its place. A note that explained everything. A note that asked a favor of me -- a favor that I will now ask of you.
Go. Explore. Travel the world. Be excellent to everyone you meet. Earn your fortune once more, and then give it to those who need it more than you ever will. Do what you can to correct the imbalances of the world. Join a cause. Enforce the law for the sake of the innocent. Commit crimes in the name of righteousness. Meet people. Make friends. Make love. Learn to live again. And when you have done that, then find someone else with money and documents and a ring, and do unto them as I have done unto you.
I couldn't live until my life was taken away from me. In time, you'll know what I mean.
~ Cheryl
| 8 | 0 | 28 | 33,344 |
[WP] Everyone in the world spends their lives with hourglasses above their head that show how much longer they have to live. One day, you stumble across a young child whose hourglass is on its side.
|
I am alone. I've wandered for eons. I've seen civilization rise and fall and rise again. The Bronze Age is like an old friend to me. The number of times I've seen the discovery of fire are innumerable. Nobody remembers me, but I have been there from the beginning.
In a far distant time, I was a man, just like anybody else. Life was limited. Time was short.
Technology advanced at a rapid pace in those days. By the time I was 19, Jupiter had been colonized. By the time I was 26, the solar energy of Alpha Centauri was being shipped back to Earth by the shipload. By the time I was 55, we had created the Hourglass.
I was one of the unlucky five to lead the project. The task was one man had always wanted to achieve--to know the number of his days. We finally designed a working prototype, something that would track the changes in a persons body and estimate the time until natural death. We gathered subjects and equipped the prototype. They would return every few weeks for check ups. We planned to continue these trials until the clocks ran down.
Everything seemed to be working perfectly until the eighth year. During the course of a check up, one subject's clock glitched from over fifty years to five minutes. This was the first time such a thing had occurred. In five minutes, the man--perfectly healthy moments prior--was dead.
*************************************************************************
News spread quickly. We received government orders to change tact. They wanted a chance to control a person's clock--to be able to time them out.
We obeyed. We created the Hourglass, a hereditary device that would float above everyone's heads, counting down the seconds until their death. A special glove was created--only one--that would allow the wearer to manipulate another person's Glass. Only the President, my partners, and I could manipulate it.
It was used for the worst criminals of the world. Their glasses would be turned upside down, shaken, flipped, and eventually smashed. The torture their body experienced as it rippled through old and young and back to old was unimaginable.
My partners and I, though, we were greedy. We signed an immunity waver with the government--the glove could not be used against us--and we turned our Hourglasses sideways. No sand could fall. We were immortal.
**************************************************************************
The technology spread until the entire world was counting their seconds.
Centuries passed and we grew weary. The government that we once knew had crumbled long ago. The technology to manipulate the Hourglasses long forgotten. We had scavenged the glove for just this purpose.
We drew lots. I lost.
I put the glove on, and shattered their Hourglasses.
Only I was immortal now.
**************************************************************************
That was long ago. In a past so lost I doubt even the earth or sky remembers. No matter my actions, I am lonely. Anyone I grow attached to will grow old and die, while I live on. Any nation I feel pride for will be destroyed, while I live on. Any view I take in will erode, while I live on.
***************************************************************************
As I walk through the country, looking for a new home, I notice a young child. I do not know how but his Hourglass was not upright--it was sideways. At one point in my life, I would have wanted to test to see how this was possible, but not anymore. Now, I only know one thing.
I stop and don the glove, always with me. I reach out and right the boy's Hourglass.
I've wandered for eons. I've seen civilization rise and fall and rise again. The Bronze Age is like an old friend to me. The number of times I've seen the discovery of fire are innumerable. Nobody remembers me. I am alone. But I will not allow another to suffer the same.
| 6 | 0 | 10 | 206,623 |
[WP] You wake up to find a stranger sitting at the foot of your bed. His, or her (it is too dark to tell), eyes are upon you, studying every inch of you.
|
I don't know what it was. I was frozen. Just watching these eyes looking down at me. It's at my legs. Its head moves down and then I realised something. My pants were down and my penis was just sitting there in the open. I freaked out and rolled out of my bed and smacked the light switch real fucking hard.
I could see him clearly now. It was a guy. He was big. Naked. My mind finally figured out what was going on. I was about to be raped. Fuck. From his face I could see he was angry. He thought I was asleep and that he could have his way with me without me noticing. Fuck. I shuddered at the thought.
Before I know it the guy lunged at me and wrapped his arms around my neck. My breath was being taken away and not in the romantic way. I was going to die and that's all my mind could think about. I was going to die and then he'd have his way with me. Fuck.
No. After being a little bitch for a few seconds I manned up. I wasn't going to let some fucker I don't know kill me. My hands stopped instinctively trying to pull his hands away from my neck and reached for something else. A pencil. Thank fuck I was a sharpening freak. I grabbed the pencil, that was sharp enough to have been a knife, tight and plunged it into the cunt's neck.
Blood sprayed all over my face. The man's hands released their grip and gave me time time to hammer away. Fist after fist in his face. Blood painted the walls of my room. Tears streamed down my face as I kept going. I was scared. Terrified of what could have been.
Eventually I stopped. What I left behind was the ugliest fucking face that even his mother would throw up and disown him out of disgust. That night changed me. My life had meaning. Not that I realised it straight away but soon enough a fire was sparked in me.
This evil that attacked me that night still exists. Rapists are everywhere and I'm going after them. It's going to be bloody.
| 4 | 0 | 13 | 219,885 |
[WP] Two introverts are trying to hide from the drunken masses at a High School party gone wild. Tell me the story of them meeting in the only quiet room of the house.
|
First time. Critique and thoughts?
The glassware shook with the force of the door slamming. Oliver leaned back against the wall, the party still raging on the other side. Every scream and laugh pierced through the thin walls and echoed through his body. He was not sure what kept him showing up to these parties, but it always led to finding himself in an empty room.
This time he found himself in a study of some kind. The walls were lined with glass cabinets, shelves, and trophies. Oliver strolled across the room, taking a look into each cabinet as if he were looking for something. Each shelf contained sets of champagne glasses flipped upside down, as if standing on their heads. His eyes trace the curves of the glass, the movement of light caught his attention. The reflection of the person behind him came to rest, lining up with the curves of the glasses.
"Party getting out of control?" A quiet voice spoke from behind him. Oliver turned around to greet the reflection behind him. Her eyes catching his attention immediately, they shined bright against the dim light. His eyes coverered the distance down her body, every inch as fascinating as the eyes that were locked on to him.
"I guess I can take that as a yes?" She said, catching his gaze once again.
"Y... yeah, yes, I thought it would be a good idea to find shelter." Oliver cracked a smile.
"I don't know why I keep showing up to these things. I always find myself having a party of one."
"I was just wondering the same thing myself." Oliver said, relaxing. Her eyes and shy smile seemed familiar already - like if he has seen them everyday before and like if he wants to see them every day after.
"Oliver, right?" She said, his own name sounded so sweet coming from her. He was caught in answering her, realizing he knew nothing of her. He nodded his head, refusing to break eye contact.
"Have we met before?" Oliver asked, "I am afraid I don't remember meeting you."
"We had a couple of classes together, I sat right behind you." Her smile never faded. Those years were a blur to him, he could'nt even tell you who taught the class let alone who sat behind him.
"I am really sorry, I don't remember much from the classes I took, what was your name?"
She smiled at him and picked up her purse, opening it to look at her phone. She walked up to him and looked him in the eyes. Oliver held his breath and waited, unsure of what to expect. She pecked him on the cheek and looked back up at him.
"Maybe we can run into each other at another party and you can find out then." Oliver stood frozen. Unable to move or breathe until the shake of the door and glassware brought him back to reality. He smiled to himself, as he exited the door. He just found his reason to keep coming to these parties.
| 4 | 0 | 625 | 132,440 |
[WP] A [TIFU] submitted by Santa Claus
|
TIFU By...Just read the story...
Firstly, I'm gonna say that this happened at oh, 4am on Christmas. I was half dead from exhaustion, and I think I was beginning to see things. Or, in this case, I was beginning to miss things that would've otherwise been plain as day.
So, as I said, it's 4am. I'm running really low on Christmas cheer at this point, and I still have to do another four states before I can go home and crash. I head down to the next house on my list. Chimney's a snug enough fit, but I manage it. I got inside, no kids asleep on the couch (you wouldn't believe how many times that's happened), cookies (stale and thin, but anything besides the usual diabetes on a plate is fine by me at this point) and milk by the fireplace as expected. Smooth sailing, right?
Wrong.
The first foul-up came when a man I can only assume was the dad came downstairs from his room while I was putting the presents around what I thought at the time was their Christmas tree--in retrospect, the lack of lights and decorations should've been a bit of a red flag. An adult comes downstairs, and we stare at each other for a solid minute. No noise, no movement, if it were a movie you'd think it froze. Then the guy starts screaming and throwing everything he could reach at me, calling me a thief and a burglar and a bunch of other stuff. Now I may be jolly but if you call me a thief, I'm gonna show you exactly how much muscle you can gain hefting a big-ass sack full of random toys around all night.
Then the rest of his family came downstairs, turned on the light...and it turns out I'm wailing on the patriarch of a Jewish family. That crappy tree? A menorah. The crappy cookies? Matzo wafers. I guess the father had gotten himself a midnight snack, which also explains the milk...and I just beat the hell out of him in front of his family. I hightailed it out of there and crossed two states before realizing I left the toy sack back in the house.
| 2 | 0 | 16 | 178,576 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.