Wolfechu's Stories

It's all in the timing (Challenge by numbers)

2008-06-08T10:17:11Z

December 21st, 2012. About teatime.

They couldn’t say they hadn’t been warned, but just in case, a clarion trumpet call resounded across the world; a pure clean tone, that even the deaf heard. The skies darkened as the Sun blackened, and the moon turned a lurid blood red.

And then a deep voice spoke from the skies:

HARK , MORTALS, FOR THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT IS UPON YOU . PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR -

“Er, excuse me?” came a lone voice from below.

WHAT ? came the terse reply.

“Well, is this the end of the world as predicted by the Mayans?”

INDEED . THE END OF THE 13TH B ’AK’TUN CYCLE .

“Right. Only,” the small voice continued, hesitantly, “which calendar are you going by?”

CALENDAR ?

“The proleptic Gregorian calendar?” the voice persisted, “Really, you should be using a GMT -correlation based on a JDN of 54285. Which would make it the 23rd, not the 21st.”

There was a momentary pause, before the skies started to lighten.

I’LL SEE YOU IN A COUPLE OF DAYS , said the voice in the Heavens, a touch grumpily.

The Big Picture (Paint a picture challenge)

2008-06-07T10:30:18Z

There is a gallery which few know of; those who do, tend to keep silent about it. You won’t find it listed in any catalogues, reviews are not written, or at least not published. It shows on no map. Something as important as the Gallery wouldn’t lower itself to the level of mere geography.

It contains but one painting. The uninitiated might consider this a rather paltry collection, until they actually see it; for the painting depicts everything. Every star, every planet, every person, every discarded cigarette butt.

Not on a one to one scale, obviously, but in minute detail. A lifesize portrait would be just crass; any cut-rate deity with a blank cosmos could achieve that. As tiny as the brush strokes are, however, the painting is still rather large. The canvas cannot be said to be properly flat, as it warps space/time with its mass.

Scholars have devoted lifetimes to examining mere fractions of it. Some of them, simply to appreciate the beauty of it.

Others are still looking for the artist’s signature.

This too shall pass

2008-06-07T02:33:22Z

It was half past the end of the universe, and the last human being alive was watching the death of, well, the only other being alive.

The Big Crunch had never happened; things had just slowly spread out, and they’d never quite reached a point of return. It had been a matter of time before entropy had won.

The cockroach lay on its back, feebly moving in the dim brown light; the best the ashes of the sun could manage. The others stars were long since dark.

Eventually its legs stopped whirring, and the man stood up, carefully. He did everything carefully nowadays; the slightest movement encouraged the ground beneath him to crumble.

He should have been long dead, too. Epochs before, in a brighter world, he’d made a deal with a force beyond his ken; his soul, for eternal life. He simply could not die. It had even been fun for the few billion years. Eventually, the whole planet would decohere into a fine haze of dust, but he would remain.

Perhaps, he wondered, it hadn’t been such a great deal after all…

No More Heroes

2008-06-03T06:42:31Z

There was a time when it felt like an honour to fight crime.

I’ve been in this business for nearly thirty years, and I’ve seen them come and go. I remember when Doctor Mayhem stole the Chrysler building; I fought against the Venusian Lobster Men when they tried to invade Earth to steal its supply of linseed oil. You felt like you were making a difference, righting wrongs.

Today, I defeated a guy whose buttocks detached and doubled as throwing stars. It’s like they’re laughing at the whole thing.

The heroes aren’t much better. I have nothing to do with the current Legion of Justice. I can’t take them seriously when they have members with powers like being able to turn their bodies into aspirin, or control tuna (live or tinned) with their minds.

Some would say I’m no better. I dress as a giant possum and battle evildoers. It’s what I’ve always done; in a more innocent age, it made sense. Left for dead more times than I can remember.

Nowadays, you can’t tell who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s just nuts.

That Soylent Green moment

2008-05-26T03:58:23Z

Consider this:

In the US alone, they operate over 40,000 restaurants, each selling an average of 300 burgers per day. That’s 1.2 million burgers, every single day. Even holidays.

How many burgers can one cow make? Let’s be generous and assume 100 patties. That means, every single day, they get through 12,000 cows. Every year, that makes 4.3 million cows.

That’s a lot of cows. More cows than I’ve seen anywhere. I’d be willing to bet that’s more cows than even Wyoming has.

And then, you have to consider how many competitors they have. Each of them, all going through cows at a similar rate. Continental America would have to be three feet deep in cows to support this. And where are you getting your milk from, even if you manage to wade through these cows? Did it cost more than its weight in gold?

At this point, it would be foolish to suggest that perhaps they get their meat from…. other sources. And very litigious.

But it would make a certain amount of sense.

Would you like fries with that?

Overview

2008-05-24T20:23:15Z

Imagine the earth, suspended in space. The nightside, for preference, and let your imagination have a sensitive enough camera to pick up, well, everything.

Every streetlight, every car’s headlights passing below. The thrum of electrical lines, the flurry of data passing through fiberoptic networks at impossible speeds.

Zoom out, but keep the resolution. Envision the whole network of electromagnetic chaos that covers the land (and the sea, for very few areas are not blanketed with microwave and radio transmissions). Watch the power and data flow back and forth, along channels more chaotic and complex than anything any spider could have ever have constructed. The entire planet, covered with a lacework of data and energy. A few tentatively exploring tendrils stretching from the surface, into the silicon minds of orbital satellites.

Millions of information junctions, communicating with each other as dictated by people who haven’t even an idea of how big a system they’re part of. The largest network ever seen.

Apoca-whatnow?

2008-05-22T21:58:01Z

The end of the World finally happened on a Friday, around sixish.

People had been predicting this for some considerable time, but it came as something of a surprise to the vast majority of them; most had been looking for the kind of portents that Hollywood had become so good at creating nowadays; fire in the sky, earthquakes, huge alien spacecraft.

What they actually got was a series of minor but inexplicable events as reality began to roll up like a window blind. Early that morning, there was a rain of jigsaw pieces over Europe, lasting exactly four minutes; each piece displaying the word ‘wet’. Across America, statues of the Virgin wept Mountain Dew. In Chad, every lamp post burst into a rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Experts naturally filled the TV channels to explain these things, at least for the hour or so before the end. At that point, their careers on the lecture circuit came to a premature end.

Without much further fuss, the world ceased to exist.

The syndication rights are being negotiated.

Binary Conversation

2008-05-17T15:40:14Z

“You know, they’ve got a lot of nerve, in my opinion”

“Who has?”

“Them!” he said, pointing towards the android serving behind the bar.

“Oh, right. Them.” The other man paused to sip at his pint. “Why?”

His colleague looked scandalised. “What do you mean, ‘why’? They come over here-”

“-from Japan,”

“-from Japan, probably, not a penny to their names, and take all our jobs!”

“If they had a penny, would that help?”

“You’re missing the point. I remember when you’d walk into the pub, and have a conversation with a real barman.”

“Oh.” There was another pause. “He wanted to know if you were still wanting to join the darts team this year, incidentally.”

“Who was?”

“Fred.”

“Who?”

“The barman. Wants to know-”

“-if I want to be on the darts team, yes. You said.”

“Was asking how your wife was, too.”

“I see. It’s only programmed to look like it’s showing an interest, you know.”

“He says there’s going to be a lock in tonight, if you fancy a couple after hours.”

Another long pause.

“Tell him yes.”

Time and again

2008-05-09T17:09:11Z

“It’s happening again.”

I knew he was going to say that. Whether that was part of the Chronoclasm, or the fact that I’d known Marcus Delphine for too long, it was hard to say.

The wind was getting up as he spoke, and it would start raining in a moment.

“Cause and effect,” Delphine said, “not effect and cause. I don’t know why people can never accept that.”

I shrugged. “It’s inevitable a stage 3 society is going to start working on time travel.”

“Yes, but you’d think they’d bother with a few safeguards” he snorted. “Instead, we’ve got just under a thousand square miles of the Midwest locked into repeating the same six minutes, over and over.”

He had a point. The effect had been a little more vigourous than intended. “So, now what? Control suggested psidelining the whole event, nip it out of reality.”

“It would serve them bloody right if we did. I don’t know, I need to think…”

A fine drizzle was starting to fall, then abruptly stopped. Delphine looked up at the sky, frowning. “It’s happening again.”

Causality casualty

2008-04-27T00:14:53Z

The box stood by the cornfield, slowly but surely falling to pieces.

There had been a war. A conflict with an adversary dedicated to the destruction of anything unlike themselves. It had raged from Event One to the end of the Entropic Curve, and all stops in between. And in the end, both sides burned.

The box had been in the vanguard of one of the major assaults: A battle through time, causes preceding effects, history being rewritten over and over. The universe had shook under the silvery devastation of their weapons. And through luck, be it good or bad, the box had been one of the last to fall.

It had been hurled from Time itself, screaming its loss as it fell, its crew dead, or never having existed in the first place. It fell to a world the War had never reached, its ailing systems throwing up the best camouflage it could find.

Decades passed. Self repair was no longer an option; the place it drew its power from was long gone. It sat by the cornfield, slowly but surely falling to pieces. Slowly dying.