Captain Pike
10-26-2010, 02:52 PM
I submitted the following story as an entry to the short story contest last year and I was much chagrined at its reception. I don't believe I got a single vote! It was too much story to pack into the 2K box required by the contest. I wasn't able to embellish the details enough, maybe?
I mean this story contained several very imaginative doomsday scenarios (scenarioux?) Laser beams cutting through delicate satellites in orbit, their tender metal skins, liquefying, evaporating and re-condensing into metallic globes! There are descriptions of "hacking in" to satellite control systems and countermanding transmission signals, changing them into demands for subliminal suicidal ideation!!
I wanted to describe these things more verbosely, more completely, maybe by glossing over, what I think were, very creative ideas in science fiction, perhaps nobody could follow my rant.
And maybe there are two stories here (I often do this). I will attempt to indicate the two different parts. Please give me an idea where this failed so miserably.
Meek Inheritance -- or "Armageddon Channel 666" (LOL)
"I hate moving...", Jim said, out loud though alone in his office. He hastily placed the items on his desk into a cardboard box. Pulling open the big, wide drawer of the desk, it slid, diagonally into view -- a photograph of a younger couple. Jim picked up the photograph, straightened up briefly, musing, "now who the hell were these people?", he wondered, brow furrowing. The photograph was tacky; a bit of the pigment smeared off the image, leaving a sticky greenish resin on Jim's thumb.
The photograph showed an attractive, blond haired woman, lying half on a couch. There was a man in his late 20s kneeling on the far end of the couch, looking thoughtfully across the room. Jim had remembered seeing the photograph before. The picture looked as if it was taken during a party, the young man had a glass of wine and other people looked to be socializing in the background. Jim couldn't recall either the man or the woman in the foreground although they seemed oddly familiar. There was something possibly foreign about the photograph, the man was dressed casually but the style of his shirt was different in some way and the woman, looking upward had a Western European appeal, French or Austrian, Jim thought.
There was an odd sense of déjà vu around this image that was moderately upsetting. He set the picture down and marked the box after filling it with the contents of the drawer. Securing this, he added it to an ambitious pile and continued to pack, all the while, thinking about the photograph. Where had it come from, who had taken it? While he remembered seeing the photograph sometime in the past, he concluded that it had come into his possession by mistake as he crossed once more to the desk and picked it up.
Incredulously, he now recognized in the photograph an old friend, John, leaning against a doorframe, smiling -- a full-length profile, slim and suave! Jim's blood ran cold. "Professor John...", he said aloud dreamily, remembering it had been his nickname. He recognized the rather comical look on his old friend to be characteristic of his having had a couple of drinks. He shook his head dramatically, and then fixed his gaze on the image of the professor. There could be no doubt -- this was undoubtedly Professor John. A feeling of terror rose in him -- how could he have missed this before? He couldn't have, something was wrong. He would simply call John now, explain his quandary and get to the end of this. He walked out of the room, still looking at the photograph but as he approached the phone, he stopped. How long had it been since he had talked with prof John? And, what would he say?
"Aw, this is ridiculous!", Jim scoffed, slinging the photograph. He had the rest of the afternoon to pack up his office and take the last few pieces of furniture out of this rental space and get out of Dodge. This was just the kind of thing he could get wrapped up in, wasting the time on something meaningless when he had important tasks to complete. Shaking his head, he walked back into the room, "why I otta!", he said, again out loud, this common, comedic phrase from his past. This time, it was his index finger that picked up a bit of the waxy, paste-like stain from the picture.
He finished packing the odds and ends and loaded up his pickup with the boxes and few remaining furniture items left after his last night in the rented office. Standing in the doorway, Jim was sure there was one other thing that he wanted to do before leaving but he couldn't, for the life of him, think what it could be. He left the building for the last time.
Here is the possible beginning of a different story.
The Somewhere near the northwest corner of Afghanistan, outside of a large cave, a dozen or more men sat around a blazing fire in the darkness. The wind blew steadily, fanning the fire whose smoke and embers blew in a narrow stream across the desert into the darkness. One man was standing nearer the fire and speaking excitedly with violent gestures, his name was Terieq. It had been night in this part of the world for several hours as the Terminator was rapidly approaching London. After a time, there seem to be agreement among the men and a small electronic device was produced and was carefully planted on the ground up wind of the fire. The group grew solemn as Terieq adjusted this mechanism. A reddish LED began slowly to flash on the small device. The men joined in a jubilant chant. Terieq connected a laptop computer and its screen came to life.
All over North America postal customers had been receiving a flyer containing a marketing packet for a new company whose business was the production of high quality still prints from digital images which could be uploaded to its site. The images were designed to evoke feelings of auspicious familiarity to the affluent folks glancing at the sample photos after a hard days work. It seemed unfortunate that some error had been introduced in the printing of these marketing photographs, apparently allowing ink from the photographs to stain the would-be customers hands.
A curious heat bloom was too much of a temptation for reconnaissance satellite NSA 53/71--G. The firmware in this particular type of satellite was designed to carry out a mundane photographic regime guided by an ordered list of so-called "hotspots", although the data collected was rarely studied by anyone anymore. A significant strategic advantage in its heyday, this type of craft had now been demoted to a sort of security surveillance camera for the Earth, except for one small distinction. The craft's programming also provided that certain anomalies would preempt the ordered list provided for its general operation and began a high-definition study of the anomaly.
71--G's curiosity had definitely been whetted by the sudden campfire light coming from the high desert in Afghanistan, the fine control servos articulated the "can", as it is called, much resembling a simple reflector telescope, adeptly through efficient and exacting elliptical motions to reduce image aliasing.
A small, rapidly growing high-tech firm had hired a social misfit but software Savant high school student to fill the position of "Programmer Protégé" for the summer as part of a community outreach program. The very spirit of the young, corpulent computer programmer, who designed this segment of the satellite's control program, verily came alive; his puffy, pubescent face grinning proudly behind his sadly stereotypic thick glasses as he keyed in his masterpiece amid chugs from his dog-eared carton of chocolate milk. The student's design, glossed over at the time of its creation by his superiors as a lucky happenstance, would, after having been quietly purloined and pirated by a shiftless climber, have its methods extolled gloriously as the cutting-edge work of a genius engineer in one of the top trade journals.
Tragically, a coded series of infrared pulses, much resembling those used by a simple remote control, reawakened a vestigial "back door", originally created for the innocent purposes of convenient focus recalibration, was used to implant an hellish redirection of purpose. With that "can" aimed at the campfire, a new programming was uploaded to the satellite. When one writes software which will control a multimillion dollar unmanned spacecraft, any disaster-scenario mitigation functionality which can be packed into its design might be worth its weightless mass in gold.
NSA 53/71--G, following its hyperbolic, nonequatorial orbit was at this time, crossing under, but relatively near the ring of fairly densely clustered, geosynchronous orbiting commercial satellites. This maneuver was in every way similar to what happened thousands of times in the past, except that this time, 71--G directed a complex burst of infrared pulses with exacting precision directly into the receiving antenna arrays of several cable-television "cows", as they're called in the industry. The cows hiccuped momentarily and then continued to transmit a subtly augmented signal. Along with the fine programming normally offered by Bravo, Lifetime The History Channel as well as a score of others, the customers received a subliminal, nasty little bit of chatter from the Antichrist.
Finishing this, 71 -- G began systematically taking out his counterparts as soon as they drifted into proximity. That's right, the Cold War paranoia may well be gone but the "defensive" components of their design live on. Somebody once figured out that these satellites collect nearly 4 times the energy from the sun needed to support their benign processes. That person has been missing since 1987. Their massive weapons batteries, brimming with charge, were delighted to "show their stuff". It's amazing what a stream of charged particles can do, traveling through a vacuum only a few short kilometers into one of their brothers who had the audacity to imagine that their so-called enemies would never amass the technology to fire upon them. The truth is, their enemies never did.
It would have been a site to behold. In no time following the contact of a stitching beam of concentrated, high energy ions upon delicate aluminum structures, this shiny metal liquefies immediately and blows apart silently, vaporizing, then re-condensing into perfect shiny spheres, they cool from molten state to hundreds of degrees below zero as they ricochet and drift around the broken up pieces of the defenseless craft. Slicing through the winglike photovoltaic solar cells, the purplish beam sparkles in the dark void of space as the dissipating electrical energy arcs and shorts out in the delicate circuitry being destroyed as if by high-speed caterpillars munching double time through the fragile capillaries of a leaf.
Back on Earth, trouble was afoot in North America. People stood up from their TV shows and began to drift around mindlessly, some amiable, others resentful and violent. The Center for Disease Control couldn't make sense out of an apparent infection which was springing up in terrifying numbers in independent and remote areas just as much as in the cities. Not only were emergency rooms full but absenteeism at hospitals and key institutions was an all-time high. Even worse was the suggestion that even the people showing up for work were useless.
Nearly everybody was affected. The malady was an Alzheimer's like affliction attacking young and old alike -- folks didn't seem to know where they were, who they were or what had happened. Every so often there was an instance of a person with extremely violent tendencies. One report described a passenger in a car suddenly grabbing the wheel just in time to swerve into the oncoming lane to affect a head-on collision.
Things had gone from bad to worse for our friend Jim. One look in the rearview mirror revealed the most intimately horrifying glimpse of the devil himself, snickering and grimacing. His porous red skin along with yellowed, tusk-like horns were just too terrifying for Jim's already taxed mind -- unable to break his stare, he rolled down over an embankment.
The city streets were lined with corpses, both victims of getting hit by automobiles and failed attempts to fly. It wasn't as though these were suicides; instead the individuals had simply made fatal mistakes. Here and there, the addled sat carrying on animated conversations with the dead. Since no animals were affected, this scene grew more gruesome as the days went by, serving as a veritable buffet for scavengers.
There was a smattering of unaffected people. Who would watch no TV at all over the few days it took for all network transmissions cease? The television is the natural information source we consult during widespread tragedy.
The previously homeless cared for the children of the affluent. The busiest doctors, a few actively cruising, purest yachtsman, only the most serious hikers and a very few awakening from comas were left to make sense of their world. It was truly the meek who inherited the earth.
I mean this story contained several very imaginative doomsday scenarios (scenarioux?) Laser beams cutting through delicate satellites in orbit, their tender metal skins, liquefying, evaporating and re-condensing into metallic globes! There are descriptions of "hacking in" to satellite control systems and countermanding transmission signals, changing them into demands for subliminal suicidal ideation!!
I wanted to describe these things more verbosely, more completely, maybe by glossing over, what I think were, very creative ideas in science fiction, perhaps nobody could follow my rant.
And maybe there are two stories here (I often do this). I will attempt to indicate the two different parts. Please give me an idea where this failed so miserably.
Meek Inheritance -- or "Armageddon Channel 666" (LOL)
"I hate moving...", Jim said, out loud though alone in his office. He hastily placed the items on his desk into a cardboard box. Pulling open the big, wide drawer of the desk, it slid, diagonally into view -- a photograph of a younger couple. Jim picked up the photograph, straightened up briefly, musing, "now who the hell were these people?", he wondered, brow furrowing. The photograph was tacky; a bit of the pigment smeared off the image, leaving a sticky greenish resin on Jim's thumb.
The photograph showed an attractive, blond haired woman, lying half on a couch. There was a man in his late 20s kneeling on the far end of the couch, looking thoughtfully across the room. Jim had remembered seeing the photograph before. The picture looked as if it was taken during a party, the young man had a glass of wine and other people looked to be socializing in the background. Jim couldn't recall either the man or the woman in the foreground although they seemed oddly familiar. There was something possibly foreign about the photograph, the man was dressed casually but the style of his shirt was different in some way and the woman, looking upward had a Western European appeal, French or Austrian, Jim thought.
There was an odd sense of déjà vu around this image that was moderately upsetting. He set the picture down and marked the box after filling it with the contents of the drawer. Securing this, he added it to an ambitious pile and continued to pack, all the while, thinking about the photograph. Where had it come from, who had taken it? While he remembered seeing the photograph sometime in the past, he concluded that it had come into his possession by mistake as he crossed once more to the desk and picked it up.
Incredulously, he now recognized in the photograph an old friend, John, leaning against a doorframe, smiling -- a full-length profile, slim and suave! Jim's blood ran cold. "Professor John...", he said aloud dreamily, remembering it had been his nickname. He recognized the rather comical look on his old friend to be characteristic of his having had a couple of drinks. He shook his head dramatically, and then fixed his gaze on the image of the professor. There could be no doubt -- this was undoubtedly Professor John. A feeling of terror rose in him -- how could he have missed this before? He couldn't have, something was wrong. He would simply call John now, explain his quandary and get to the end of this. He walked out of the room, still looking at the photograph but as he approached the phone, he stopped. How long had it been since he had talked with prof John? And, what would he say?
"Aw, this is ridiculous!", Jim scoffed, slinging the photograph. He had the rest of the afternoon to pack up his office and take the last few pieces of furniture out of this rental space and get out of Dodge. This was just the kind of thing he could get wrapped up in, wasting the time on something meaningless when he had important tasks to complete. Shaking his head, he walked back into the room, "why I otta!", he said, again out loud, this common, comedic phrase from his past. This time, it was his index finger that picked up a bit of the waxy, paste-like stain from the picture.
He finished packing the odds and ends and loaded up his pickup with the boxes and few remaining furniture items left after his last night in the rented office. Standing in the doorway, Jim was sure there was one other thing that he wanted to do before leaving but he couldn't, for the life of him, think what it could be. He left the building for the last time.
Here is the possible beginning of a different story.
The Somewhere near the northwest corner of Afghanistan, outside of a large cave, a dozen or more men sat around a blazing fire in the darkness. The wind blew steadily, fanning the fire whose smoke and embers blew in a narrow stream across the desert into the darkness. One man was standing nearer the fire and speaking excitedly with violent gestures, his name was Terieq. It had been night in this part of the world for several hours as the Terminator was rapidly approaching London. After a time, there seem to be agreement among the men and a small electronic device was produced and was carefully planted on the ground up wind of the fire. The group grew solemn as Terieq adjusted this mechanism. A reddish LED began slowly to flash on the small device. The men joined in a jubilant chant. Terieq connected a laptop computer and its screen came to life.
All over North America postal customers had been receiving a flyer containing a marketing packet for a new company whose business was the production of high quality still prints from digital images which could be uploaded to its site. The images were designed to evoke feelings of auspicious familiarity to the affluent folks glancing at the sample photos after a hard days work. It seemed unfortunate that some error had been introduced in the printing of these marketing photographs, apparently allowing ink from the photographs to stain the would-be customers hands.
A curious heat bloom was too much of a temptation for reconnaissance satellite NSA 53/71--G. The firmware in this particular type of satellite was designed to carry out a mundane photographic regime guided by an ordered list of so-called "hotspots", although the data collected was rarely studied by anyone anymore. A significant strategic advantage in its heyday, this type of craft had now been demoted to a sort of security surveillance camera for the Earth, except for one small distinction. The craft's programming also provided that certain anomalies would preempt the ordered list provided for its general operation and began a high-definition study of the anomaly.
71--G's curiosity had definitely been whetted by the sudden campfire light coming from the high desert in Afghanistan, the fine control servos articulated the "can", as it is called, much resembling a simple reflector telescope, adeptly through efficient and exacting elliptical motions to reduce image aliasing.
A small, rapidly growing high-tech firm had hired a social misfit but software Savant high school student to fill the position of "Programmer Protégé" for the summer as part of a community outreach program. The very spirit of the young, corpulent computer programmer, who designed this segment of the satellite's control program, verily came alive; his puffy, pubescent face grinning proudly behind his sadly stereotypic thick glasses as he keyed in his masterpiece amid chugs from his dog-eared carton of chocolate milk. The student's design, glossed over at the time of its creation by his superiors as a lucky happenstance, would, after having been quietly purloined and pirated by a shiftless climber, have its methods extolled gloriously as the cutting-edge work of a genius engineer in one of the top trade journals.
Tragically, a coded series of infrared pulses, much resembling those used by a simple remote control, reawakened a vestigial "back door", originally created for the innocent purposes of convenient focus recalibration, was used to implant an hellish redirection of purpose. With that "can" aimed at the campfire, a new programming was uploaded to the satellite. When one writes software which will control a multimillion dollar unmanned spacecraft, any disaster-scenario mitigation functionality which can be packed into its design might be worth its weightless mass in gold.
NSA 53/71--G, following its hyperbolic, nonequatorial orbit was at this time, crossing under, but relatively near the ring of fairly densely clustered, geosynchronous orbiting commercial satellites. This maneuver was in every way similar to what happened thousands of times in the past, except that this time, 71--G directed a complex burst of infrared pulses with exacting precision directly into the receiving antenna arrays of several cable-television "cows", as they're called in the industry. The cows hiccuped momentarily and then continued to transmit a subtly augmented signal. Along with the fine programming normally offered by Bravo, Lifetime The History Channel as well as a score of others, the customers received a subliminal, nasty little bit of chatter from the Antichrist.
Finishing this, 71 -- G began systematically taking out his counterparts as soon as they drifted into proximity. That's right, the Cold War paranoia may well be gone but the "defensive" components of their design live on. Somebody once figured out that these satellites collect nearly 4 times the energy from the sun needed to support their benign processes. That person has been missing since 1987. Their massive weapons batteries, brimming with charge, were delighted to "show their stuff". It's amazing what a stream of charged particles can do, traveling through a vacuum only a few short kilometers into one of their brothers who had the audacity to imagine that their so-called enemies would never amass the technology to fire upon them. The truth is, their enemies never did.
It would have been a site to behold. In no time following the contact of a stitching beam of concentrated, high energy ions upon delicate aluminum structures, this shiny metal liquefies immediately and blows apart silently, vaporizing, then re-condensing into perfect shiny spheres, they cool from molten state to hundreds of degrees below zero as they ricochet and drift around the broken up pieces of the defenseless craft. Slicing through the winglike photovoltaic solar cells, the purplish beam sparkles in the dark void of space as the dissipating electrical energy arcs and shorts out in the delicate circuitry being destroyed as if by high-speed caterpillars munching double time through the fragile capillaries of a leaf.
Back on Earth, trouble was afoot in North America. People stood up from their TV shows and began to drift around mindlessly, some amiable, others resentful and violent. The Center for Disease Control couldn't make sense out of an apparent infection which was springing up in terrifying numbers in independent and remote areas just as much as in the cities. Not only were emergency rooms full but absenteeism at hospitals and key institutions was an all-time high. Even worse was the suggestion that even the people showing up for work were useless.
Nearly everybody was affected. The malady was an Alzheimer's like affliction attacking young and old alike -- folks didn't seem to know where they were, who they were or what had happened. Every so often there was an instance of a person with extremely violent tendencies. One report described a passenger in a car suddenly grabbing the wheel just in time to swerve into the oncoming lane to affect a head-on collision.
Things had gone from bad to worse for our friend Jim. One look in the rearview mirror revealed the most intimately horrifying glimpse of the devil himself, snickering and grimacing. His porous red skin along with yellowed, tusk-like horns were just too terrifying for Jim's already taxed mind -- unable to break his stare, he rolled down over an embankment.
The city streets were lined with corpses, both victims of getting hit by automobiles and failed attempts to fly. It wasn't as though these were suicides; instead the individuals had simply made fatal mistakes. Here and there, the addled sat carrying on animated conversations with the dead. Since no animals were affected, this scene grew more gruesome as the days went by, serving as a veritable buffet for scavengers.
There was a smattering of unaffected people. Who would watch no TV at all over the few days it took for all network transmissions cease? The television is the natural information source we consult during widespread tragedy.
The previously homeless cared for the children of the affluent. The busiest doctors, a few actively cruising, purest yachtsman, only the most serious hikers and a very few awakening from comas were left to make sense of their world. It was truly the meek who inherited the earth.