Every place they looked at didn’t fit their needs.
As they had a growing family and needed a lot of space.
Reaching the address of yet another listing, they talked to their real estate agent.
This one was nice, pretty blue with green and brown highlights, but why was it so cheap?
Having to be honest, the agent admitted the place was infested with vermin, but a good exterminator astroid would take care of that problem.
Looking at the arrow of time, he felt that it was wrong. It didn’t explain his bouts of DeJa’Vu.
Oh, that’s why he had spent so much of his life putting together this machine from those moments.
Only did he have the balls to press the button and see what would happen?
Pushing it he winked out of time. When he woke up he had a feeling he should make a time machine…
Steel girders littered the broken skyline
That the wind howled through
Reaching for her shotgun, Lily watched for the Others
Until she was locked away in her hidey-hole
Couldn’t be too careful ever since the Others had landed
The war for Earth had been devastating to both sides until the Truce
Under that, no new Other could come planetside
Relying on those already here to finish the job without destroying what was left of the planet
Except now no one knew who was winning anymore
We didn’t even know we were being conquered.
How about that for humanity’s divine right?
First shoe to drop was when Amazon just went dark. Like not even a 404-error dark. A spinning wheel of painful waiting torture was the only eulogy for what was king the day before.
Facebook and Twitter were soon only posting stories about end of the world scenarios. Left wing, right wing, any crackpot scenario of the end of the world was jamming everyone’s feeds. Reddit was the same, no matter the voting of the members. Hell, 4chan was even doing it. Like what the hell, 4chan?
The aliens took over so smoothly that by the time we realized what was happening the only thing we could do was to surrender. Any attempt at pulling the plug and they would go all Terminator on us. We expected the AIs we would be fighting would be the ones we created, but we were naive. The alien AIs controlled every digital system on the planet. The best part was we were all home waiting for COVID-19 to be cured, but the virus that killed off the autonomy of the human race was digital. No mask for that.
Double the trouble was not what Marcus wanted
Usually, he tried to avoid fighting when time traveling
As it didn’t really prove anything in his world
Looking at the two thugs with their swords drawn he knew he didn’t have a choice
Watching his foes split apart, he hesitated drawing his weapons
If he played his hand too quickly he would lose his only surprise
Everything would come down to timing
Lazily he took a small step back
Daring his attackers to press their perceived advantage
It must have been too good a temptation
Now they charged him. He pulled out twin pistols from where they were hidden
Going to be tough to explain the bodies, but better them than him
Image: i.pinimg.com/originals/c4/fa/be/c4fabeaaa443e3f499f5676dc0044950.png
Stars stare without blinking
Putting me ill at ease as I float here
And wonder if I will ever feel solid ground beneath my feet again
Can’t believe those brilliant blue skies are so long gone
Everything out there is so black
To be an interstellar adventurer
Really should be so much more exciting
And it was two years ago, but now?
Viewing the infinite from inside my craft
Everything just seems so small and too large at the same time
Leaving me to wonder why I booked this flight
Image: universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/ESO_-_The_Milky_Way_panorama_by.jpg
Mavis looked at the data and she was amazed at what she saw. “Bob, have you accurately summarized the numbers?”
Bob looked up from the display. “The numbers have been correlated and verified. The data is as accurate as the instruments doing the analysis.”
“Bob, this is extremely improbable.”
“Improbable it may be, but the data is the data.” Bob returned to looking at his display.
“Which sample does this characterize?” Mavis asked.
“Sample 3245A. That was the one that…”
“…that we discarded the rest of the genetic material,” Mavis interrupted.
Bob turned to Mavis. He gave her a critical look. “Mavis, that was very unprofessional.”
Mavis looked at the floor. “My apologies, Bob.” She returned her gaze to Bob, but it took on a look of wonder crossed with hunger. “It is just the ramifications of this data means we might have cultivated a new intelligent lifeform.”
Bob shrugged his shoulders. “That is why I have called for the sterilization of the sample.”
“What?”
Bob shut off his display and stood up without a word. He walked towards the door before continuing. “The experiment was a success. You did your job. You will be hailed as the greatest scientist of the times.”
Mavis followed his progress across the room. She tried to find words. “Then why destroy the sample?”
“You did your job,” he said again. “My job is to make sure we do not do something that would cause the destruction of our kind. I am not taking any chances that this lifeform might compete with us. The sample will be destroyed.” He punctuated his statement by closing the door after himself.
Mavis stared at the closed door, her mind racing. What could she do to save that which she created? She opened back up the display. The fourth planet was slated for sterilization within the traditional period of rotation. Bob had even slated the planet for magnetic field reduction. He would see that any life that lived through the initial destruction would slowly mutate and die out from the solar radiation.
She altered the display to look at other planets nearby. There was another planet, the third one from the sun, where her lifeforms might yet live. It would be harder than the idyllic fourth planet, but the equatorial region might be hospitable enough. She would have to not even show interest in the third planet, or Bob might suspect something and check there. No, she would have to show constraint and fortitude to pull this off.
A few commands later and she put her plan in motion. Now all she could do was wait and scheme for when she could effectively check on her new experiment.
The accolades and praise had been amazing, but the nagging desire to confirm her attempt to save her creation kept her from truly savoring the experience. Bob finally took a promotion to a new scientist who was working on the next new thing. The new Bob was not as proper and did not focus on her, for which Mavis was happy. She eventually managed to secure a ship to visit the place of her scientific triumph as a way of closing out her career. She claimed she wanted to verify that all traces of her discovery were gone, so she loaded her vessel with numerous probes. The new Bob did not care and signed off it. He seemed happy to be rid of her for a while. Mavis laughed at the irony there.
The fourth plant was a desolate crimson brown wasteland. She let the grains of the dead soil drift through her grasp and fall to the ground. There really was nothing left, though the technology she did see there gave her hope. Something had sent the artificial lifeforms here, and she had hoped it was her creations. If so this was her second generation. She felt the hubris of pride, and she enjoyed the feeling. Still, she was nervous. What if these beings were not from her lifeforms. Maybe another race had come here to try to learn her secrets?
She purposely had avoided the third planet on her way into the system, but the return trip would take her right past it. Mavis had done so to limit exposing what she had done from the original Bob back home. The current Bob would probably not check on her, but it was not statistically impossible. Still, there was nothing more to be gained by delaying on Sample 3245A. She returned her craft and began the journey home. She would either be victorious or defeated. There was only one way to find out.
As she approached the third planet she released a series of probes. They started to inundate her displays and she felt vindicated. Those were her lifeforms. She had been right. They had grown faster than she had predicted. The data kept pouring in as she completed her flyby. She was sad to watch the planet get smaller and smaller, but the data coming in kept accumulating.
Mavis worked on the data, and a troubling pattern began to emerge. Her lifeforms had somehow kept their primitive sides while growing in technology and understanding of the universe. No other lifeform that had developed sentience had ever managed to do so. It was expected that once intraspecies cooperation developed that those base instincts would be bred out of society. Her creations seemed to have somehow rejected the natural order of things for a more scavenger existence. It was so alien to her sensibilities that she found herself becoming annoyed, then upset, till she passed horrified leaving that far behind. Now she was glad that she couldn’t see the blue dot out the viewports.
She inserted some commands. The blue orb, the third planet, would be scheduled for sterilization. It could not be trusted to spread its viral thoughts through the rest of the universe.
The only question was how to deflect causation of such a viral existence from her. She then smiled. She would blame her original Bob for not being thorough enough. That would work. He deserved it.
That done, she wondered if she could salvage the second generation of lifeforms left behind on the red dust planet.
Image: downloops.com/wp-content/uploads/edd/2017/05/Starfield-Stars-Universe-FlyBy-Motion-Background-Video-Loop-Sample2-1.jpg
Walter looked down at his baby girl and felt pride at creating such a perfect little person. She returned his stare, no comprehension on her face of the significance he would have in her life, but he knew how much she would change everything. She would be his legacy; his gift unto the world. The baby started to cry out, looking for succor, a wet diaper, or maybe even both. Walter looked at his assistant. “Well, are you going to take care of this?” he asked.
The assistant hurried over to take the child, almost dropping her in the process. “You harm one hair on that child they will never find your remains,” Walter said. The assistant fled the room with the crying infant. The automatic doors closed, cutting off the annoying sound. “It is going to be a long few years,” Walter said to himself. He turned his attention to the monitors showing every room in his domain. He traced the path of the assistant as the assistant searched for the wet nurse. This experiment would take years, but Walter was a patient man, at least when it came to his research.
Making a human being is ridiculously easy for most of the population. Just insert tab A into slot B and leave behind a bit of genetic residue. If slot B is compatible, ovulating, and able to bring to term, bam you have a human being. The big problem is that human being is a misplaced mishmash of human material that randomly wins the genetic lottery to have the possibility to spread half of its genes in some random encounter later on. There has to be a better way, and many scientists took it upon themselves to find it.
Once Walter had been one of those poor fools. Dolly the sheep was first cloned in 1996. After that people were in a race to clone a human, which was illegal in so many countries that it caused researchers to find hiding spots in some of the more backwater parts of the globe to try their hand at immortality. Experiment after experiment met with failure, or worse, abominations of genetic flotsam.
Walter had found a small spot in a third world country that had a friendly dictator who worshiped money much more than any god. He had sold the man a bunch of beans, promising that a clone would be the perfect way to keep the palace in the family so to speak. The buffoon ate the whole thing, even allowing him a choice of hosts for his pet project. Walter liked that one. It was always hard to find volunteers. Still, cloning a person was such a stupid idea. Cloning flawed beings just continued the madness. This is where Walter’s genius had taken over. If you want to move closer to perfection, you choose what matters to do so.
Walter brought up his chart and marveled at his brilliance. You take the heart from a world class cyclist, the lungs from a deep sea free diver, the liver from a man who drank heavily well into his nineties and never developed sclerosis, and of course his own brain. You clone the best parts and put them together. It had taken years to get all the pieces to work and transplanted into this baby. Of course that part had been fun as well. He enjoyed playing insert tab A, but of course it was all for science.
Gary wiped his nose on the left sleeve of his t-shirt as he carried his twelve pack of Milwaukee’s Beast in one hand and smoked his off off brand of the week cigarette in the other. The twelve pack would have been getting heavy, but Gary had decided it was easier to carry a few of them beers on the inside, saving his arms. This was turning out to be a real crummy Valentine’s Day. Even the prostitute he usually used was busy doing some free lance work on the holiday. Gary couldn’t wait to get so stupid drunk that he wouldn’t wake up until Valentine’s was over.
Gary was about to lighten his load again when suddenly he heard that noise. He has heard it on and off for the past year, but he always blamed it on the beer. He began looking around, trying to see what could be making such a weird noise. It always happened when he was alone.
Suddenly a light appeared to be falling from the sky. As it got closer Gary began blinking his eyes rapidly. He knew his eyes, or the beer combined with those awful cigarettes must be playing tricks on him. At least that’s what he kept telling himself as what he could only describe as a spaceship hovered twenty feet overhead. The worst part about the whole thing was that Gary was having a déjà vu feeling. He ran for the forest, but the craft moved impossibly fast, cutting him off. Gary slowly backed up, his beer and cigarette held in front of him as charms to ward off this evil spirit. The spaceship was about the size of an eighteen wheeler and glowed faintly green. The hairs on his arm stood on end, the world turned blue, and then suddenly Gary blacked out.
When Gary came to, he was naked with a box on his lap. The empties from what had once been his twelve pack were scattered around him in a circle that faintly reminded Gary of that Stonehenge place he had watched on the Discovery Channel a couple of years back. The thought of missing out on drinking all those beers almost made Gary cry. Gary opened the box hoping that maybe there would be a beer or two that had survived. Unfortunately he revealed only an array of chocolates, a single red rose, slightly smooshed from being inside the box, and a folded note. The note read, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day. You were so good, we thought we should buy you chocolates and a rose. Love, GRA$@G34q’
Gary began to cry. At least someone loved him.
Adam came out of the lab building and was heading for the mess hall when he noticed Eve talking to an older man in a military uniform. Actually, Eve was the only one talking. The man was yelling his part of the conversation, and Adam could tell Eve was not happy to be on the receiving end. Adam decided food could wait and headed over to see if he could help bail Eve out.
Eve was definitely at a physical disadvantage. Not only was the man loud, he was tall, wide, and looked hard. That impressed Adam. Too often military lifers let themselves go. Admittedly not as much as Adam had let himself before coming here, but still for a military man a potbelly would slowly crawl out of its muscular cocoon and those arm muscles would begin to droop a bit to for the wings. This guy could still military press a platoon or two at once. As Adam got closer it was easier to make out what the man was yelling.
“You need to just follow orders and not think! No matter what your designation is, at the end this is a penal colony under my jurisdiction,” the man said trying to beat Eve back with the force of their delivery.
While Eve did cringe a bit, she did not give too much ground. “Your jurisdiction is on that side of the wall,” she said pointing at the offending wall. “Over here is FBC territory and I call the shots.”
That sounded like a perfect introduction for Adam. As he covered the remaining ground quickly and stuck out his hand in the direction of the man and put on his billion credit smile. “Adam Durst at your service, and you are?” Adam asked. Eve rolled her eyes so far back Adam was worried she was about to pass out. Mr. Military though never skipped a beat. As a matter of fact he even kicked his voice up a notch, which Adam didn’t think was humanly possible.
“Did I talk to you?” Mr. Military asked.
“Well, not exactly, but I thought” Adam began, but the man cut him off.
“Then shut the hell up and let me finish!” the man practically screamed at Adam. Mr. Military turned back to Eve. “You may think you have authority over here, but I still call the shots.”
Eve stood up a little straighter. “You can go visit your space on the other side of the wall, or you can go back through the portal, but I think this meeting is done.”
Mr. Military was obviously not done. “Did I say this meeting was done? You will sit your ass right here until I say this meeting is done. You FBC idiots need to realize this isn’t Federation space.”
Eve was about to speak, when Mr. Military cut her off. “Complain all you want, but this world is a penal colony in the end. That makes you being here a favor, and I can work to remove that problem sooner rather than later if you keep pushing me.”
Eve seemed to take this last threat as an almost physical blow. She started to slouch and divert her eyes. The man could sense her about to cave in. A smirk spread on his rugged face, and it was light of a sun coming over the horizon on some hellish asteroid spinning in the cold of space.
Adam didn’t like what he saw. “Or she can push how much this planet is a resource. As a matter of fact this place is one in a billion with respect to almost everything, including possible expansion in this galaxy. You know what that means? They’ll have to remove this piece of crap penal colony,” Adam said.
The man never too his eyes off of Eve. “Keep this idiot under control,” he said. “I won’t ask again.”
Adam shook his head in disbelief. “Did you just call me an idiot?” he asked.
“Adam,” Eve said with an edge to her tone.
“I most certainly did,” the man said as he turned to Adam. The sunlight in the man’s expression was gone and the darkest, coldest expression pummeled Adam. Mr. Military continued. “I almost had the men scatter your worthless atoms anyhow when you crossed over, but I was told I would pretty much lose the coordinates on the jump gate”.
Adam realized he was in big trouble now, but that never stopped him from going all the way. “That would have been the stupidest thing you ever had done. Good thing you have someone with some smarts around you, or else…”
Adam hadn’t even seen the man move, but Adam found himself on his behind in the grass, his jaw felt dislocated. The man towered over him, blocking out the sun. He looked like he was about to explode again when Eve placed a hand on the guy’s arm. That seemed to calm him down some. “If you ever disrespect me again I will kill you with my bare hands. You have rights lower than a piece of shit here, do you understand me?” Mr. Military said. He didn’t wait for an answer that wouldn’t have come anyway due to Adam’s dazed state. The man just turned and walked back towards the portal.
Eve bent down and gently touched the rising swelling in the shape of the man’s fist. “You fool! That’s General Haden Marks. You are technically his. He really could kill you, and there isn’t a thing I can do about it.”
Adam mumbled something along the line of thanks, or maybe I couldn’t let him treat you like that, or maybe the rain was purple with puppies last night. It was hard to tell from the fog of a concussion and the rapidly swelling shut right side of his face. Still Eve took it as a sign of some sort of encouragement. At least that’s how Adam took it as he laid back down on the grass.
Eve spoke into her comm link. “I need a medic in the common square by the gate. We have an idiot down.” Adam thought her words had such a nice ring to them.
Stories and photos from Scotland
Abdi Mohammed
We Survived and Arrived - Now as Warriors We Thrive
With previous posting of "Our World" on Blogger
Sharing is Learning
Author GD Turner, Horror, Science Fiction, Poetry
Random Stuff I Think You'll Like
Things I love, typically with people I love. Will likely be hiking, baking, and doing other things that make me happy.
The Official Home of Rolli - Author, Cartoonist and Songwriter
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