Flash fiction thread

We're doing flash fiction now, eh? Cool! Here's two pieces that I wrote in while I was in high school.

Burned Bloc, Lost Stock
Setting his coffee on the table with less care than usual, ceramic white mug rattling against an oak surface already covered in scratches and crusty stains that sloshed out of previous cups, Lonnie pulled out the nearest chair—ignoring the screeching grate against the tiled floor as he did so—and let himself plop into its dark wooden frame, a sigh escaping his mouth. With a quick sip of his swirling, sienna morning beverage, he snatched up the newspaper to his nearby left before straightening it with a shake, off-white pages bristling against one another as their reader hoped to receive some good news.

The headline of Fire Consumes Entire Bloc Over Thanksgiving Weekend at the top of the front page brought Lonnie’s fingers to the bridge of his nose, elbow resting against the table and jiggling it slightly, before he let his arm drop and started to actually read through the groan-inciting article.

“November 25th to 26th...Firefighters called to put out the blaze...Northwestern Bank Building destroyed...as high as $30 million in potential damages...”

Another sigh interrupted Lonnie’s paraphrased snippet-muttering as he slammed his body into the chair’s crest rail, ignoring the newfound ache in his back and the slight rocking of the chair itself as he collided with hard, mahogany wood that was probably older than him. It seemed that last night’s TV segment got the essentials right after all.

Brrring! Brrring!

Lonnie heaved himself up from the table, not even bothering to push his chair back in or straighten his crooked reading glasses as he headed right to the source of the noise. Seizing the offending phone from its mount on the tan-painted wall, Lonnie ignored the typical clack! of its removal.

“Hello?”, he recited as usual into the ivory plastic handset, not particularly caring what the caller made of his hard-edged voice.

“Hey Lonnie, it’s Jim. As in, your stock guy Jim. Listen, I have some rather, uh...bad news for ya’.”

Lonnie didn’t know whether to think “Oh, thank God.” or “Shit. More crap to remind me how much I lost.” upon hearing that deep, New Jerseyan voice to give him a breakdown of what else must have happened. Shutting his eyes and then reopening them, Lonnie let himself sigh yet again before asking, “What is it, Jim? Lay it on me.”

“It’s about the fire over Thanksgiving weekend. Y’ know, that blaze that consumed a whole bloc downtown. You watched the coverage on TV and such?”

“The one with Alan Cox at the scene? Yeah, I saw that. Read about it in the paper, too,” Lonnie answered. He could practically see Jim’s lips pursing on the other side of the line, his body surely shifting around in his swivel chair as he fidgeted with a pencil or pen at his desk with his off-hand.

“What else is there to it?,” Lonnie pressed on after a brief silence, save for the usual static that people noticed whenever no one was talking.

“Well,” Jim began after a few more seconds of static, “Northwestern’s Bank’s stock plummeted with its headquarters’ destruction. That $3,000 you invested, it’s pretty much gone. And right now, there’s no easy way to get it back.”

Lonnie barely resisted the urge to kick the fridge just behind him. It should’ve been no surprise that he’d lose so much money thanks to a couple of dumbass kids who fancied themselves arsonists for God knows why. If only he had completely accepted that before Jim gave him the scoop for real.

“...Well, that shattered my previous hopes,” Lonnie finally replied, running his free hand across his face without regard for the beads of sweat and oily grease that accumulated over the past few, sleepless hours. He really should’ve just stayed a banking executive for a couple more years; at least those six, maybe seven-figure incomes he’d still have received wouldn’t arrive at the beck and call of a stock market that sided with no one.

“Lonnie? Ya’ still there?,” Jim questioned suddenly, snapping Lonnie out of his self-pitying reverie.

“Y...yeah. Yeah, Jim. I’m still here,” Lonnie answered with a mild stutter in his voice, internally bracing himself for yet more bad news that was about to come his way.

“Alright, good. Even though there’s not much I can do about your lost investment at that Northwestern building, there are some other stocks I can move ya’ to. Chrysler and Home Depot have been doing a damned good job lately,” Jim offered, obviously trying to lift Lonnie’s spirits.

“Maybe later, Jim. I’m starting to have second thoughts about being involved in the stock market like that as a whole,” Lonnie responded, who had been leaning against the stone countertop to steady himself for a minute now.

“...Oh. Well, okay then,” Jim replied, slowly. Another brief silence passed before he spoke up again.

“I guess if it makes ya’ feel any better, you’re not one of those people who used to work there. Or part of the company leadership that’s scrambling to get a hold of the situation, headquarters burned to the ground and all,” Jim pointed out, awkwardly pausing every few words as if to check what was about to make its way past his mouth before relaying it to Lonnie—who, for his part, remained eerily speechless.
A full second of static went by. Then another. Then, came the reply.

“Sure. I suppose I am,” the sentence left Lonnie’s dry lips with noticeable reluctance. Standing upright from his ache-inducing lean on the countertop, its rutted edge having dug into his side almost since the conversation began, he brought a fist to his mouth to stifle a cough.

“Well, Jim,” Lonnie stopped mid-sentence to clear his throat, “thanks for letting me know. I’ll get back to you on what I want to do later this week. Sound good?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Sure, Lonnie,” Jim answered back, unable to fully hide his off-guard stutter. “I’ll be waiting for your decision in the meantime. Seeya.”

“Seeya.”

Lonnie hung up, once again ignoring the clack! of hanging the phone back onto its mount on the wall. Clasping both hands on his hips, he huffed at the ceiling before turning on his heel and gaiting back to his original spot at the table.

Dumping his old cup of now-lukewarm coffee and pouring himself a fresh one, savoring the steamy aroma that graced his nostrils, Lonnie lowered himself onto the now-straightened chair from earlier. For once in his life, it felt good to sit down gently rather than plop into whatever seat was prepared for him.

One elbow placed on the table, palm propping up the cheek of a face deep in thought, Lonnie tapped the fingers of his other hand on its rough oak surface. Now that Jim mentioned it, he really wasn’t the most screwed over player in the game. And for the three grand that got swept away because of those stupid kids, there were at least a couple dozen people who had their entire income disappear.
Lonnie eyed the newspaper that he slapped onto the table minutes before, its off-white pages bent and crinkly as it lay askew. Reaching for the paper with his free arm and straightening it with both hands, he used one finger to retrace the paragraph or so that he had already read through earlier. The next few sentences disclosed what Lonnie was looking for.

“Ten firefighters in the hospital…Dozens out of work…Employees and their families unsure what to do now…”

Damn. There truly were a ton of people who were in worse straits than him. Not that he hadn’t known struggle, of course—being a Depression baby tended to ensure that his whole generation did. Lonnie blamed the business world for changing him.

Leaning back in his chair, letting his tense muscles relax and his body settle into the creaky wood that no longer pushed against him like before, Lonnie didn’t bother to page through the rest of the paper; his mind stayed fixated on the story that wracked him before the final minute or so of his call with Jim. His stockbroker’s reminder about not being a possibly displaced employee or company leader who had to pick up the pieces kept playing back in his mind.

“Well, at least I didn’t lose potentially everything because some kids went bananas,” Lonnie thought to himself, eyelids fluttering before a stillness that he hadn’t felt in years took hold of his senses.

Ah, screw it. Fretting over a lost investment that only put a nick in his savings could wait. For now, Lonnie let his eyes shut and his frame slump, vision turning to black and limbs slackening, arms hanging off of the chair while legs bowed out to the sides as exhaustion finally caught up to him. Within minutes, Lonnie felt nothing—and the short silence that followed was then drowned out by snoring.

...And here's the second one.

The Rings of Trau V
It had taken a few moments for Reinhard to realize how long he had been staring for, watching the asteroids that drifted about and construction ships that waded between them just right outside of his office window. Shaking himself free of his unblinking gaze and shifting on the desk he was leaning on, paying no mind to the hard metallic ridge on his rear that would’ve given aches and bruises to some of the unaugmented primitives of the Wilder Rim, Reinhard got up to walk around it and then plop into the padded black hover-chair behind the desk, body relaxing now that he was in a much more comfortable posture to observe from.

His ocular implants vaporized the layer of moisture that had gathered on his eyeballs, while a mechanical set of lungs ensured that each breath he took came out identical to the others. For all of the suspicion and strange looks he got from the Traubug tribes who inhabited the rings of Trau V, being a cyborg—or at least, one with more machinery than his peers—nonetheless had its perks.

For one, there was no need for a spacesuit as he endured the vacuum, leaving the Deployment Craft with a mere jetpack compared to the pods and shuttles that his organic peers were forced to rely on for their descent to the asteroids below. Teleporters would’ve scared the natives shitless, and playing god was just plain cruel (it was no surprise that some of the egotistical junior officers liked that idea). How Commander Gevic so calmly explained to the chieftain of Asteroid #456 that no, he and his forces were not sent by their long-abandoned gods to exact judgement upon Trau V and were instead mere visitors from the stars with wondrous machines at their disposal, Reinhard didn’t know.

He could’ve sworn that, for as emotionless as those gigantic, mahogany arthropods looked on the outside—with clicking mandibles, razor sharp pincers for legs, and giant claws that held some nasty electro-staffs—the chieftain’s eyes were flickering back and forth between the heavens above and the leader of the local task force during their first encounter on the surface. That was what Reinhard learned in the drone-captured footage that he had recently downloaded into his positronic brain.

Thankfully, Reinhard wasn’t made into one of the fleet’s exhibitions to the awe-inspired locals, though being one of those stationed at the mining facilities that were under construction still gave Traubug passerbys plenty of opportunities to gawp at the “machine man” who patrolled the site, gesturing dramatically to emphasize the commands that only other fleet members were receiving by two-way cell-comm. To them, he must’ve looked like a mime standing in the midst of the troops, labor bots and construction vehicles in the area; his superiors really should’ve just let him give them mental commands instead. Hopefully, those Traubugs who didn’t get the message that the tribes allowed the fleet to harvest the brilliant violet crystals of the rings in exchange for technologically uplifting them received a proper explanation afterwards.

“Given their reliance on local gems to power their machines and the lack of electricity until we just introduced it to them, it should be no surprise that our mostly mechanical physiques strike the locals as nothing short of mind-boggling,” his fellow cyborg, Thresh-B, informed him in his signature, reverberating voice during their break.

And here Reinhard was, back on Spacedock 562 after a week of directing construction crews and distantly observing the natives, who watched the fleet in fascination much like he observed in the present. The levitating robots and crewed and automated vessels moving between the now structure-covered asteroids continued to work around the clock as had been true for over a month by this point.

Summoning a coffee from the nearby converter connected to his robotic brain with a thought, tuning out the typical vibration of subatomic particles rearranging themselves into a favorite beverage amongst the fleet’s officer corps, Reinhard didn’t let his eyes move away from the window as he picked up the steaming drink and stirred it slightly with a spoon that he had created along with it. He placed the cup to his lips a few seconds later, letting the hot, semi-bitter liquid warm up his mouth and soothe his mechanical throat from the exhaustion brought about by a week of nonstop oversight that he had received leave from just hours ago. Cybernetics made Reinhard’s physical stamina nearly inexhaustible; that didn’t mean it diminished his ability to feel psychologically burnt out.

However, still entranced by the sight of a relievingly successful leg of the fleet’s trek into the Wilder Rim, Reinhard watched them help build a society that would soon be fit to join intergalactic civilization. Despite how fed up he felt with the past week, using these few days of rest to brace himself for the foundries to be built during the next one, he allowed himself a half-smile. There would be no war with the Traubug tribes.

Here's the beginning of a fanfiction I started, willing to bet you can guess what/who it's about. Haven't necessarily abandoned it but real life and other projects have taken precedence. Is it any good? Is it trying too hard?

BLOOD FEUD

THE OLD ONE SWAM THROUGH THE INKY BLACKNESS. His long and powerful tail swayed behind him, propelling the great beast through the ocean depths. Occasionally the dark waters would would be illuminated by flashes of blue light emanating from the massive dorsal fins that ran along the length of the leviathan’s back- a reminder of the fire that raged deep within his ancient lungs and gave him his life. These brief flashes revealed a battered draconic visage, his armored hide covered with fading scars from battles of ages past.

He had not always been the Old One; in ages past he had been the Lone Hatchling, the Young Male, the Pretender, and finally the Alpha Male and Apex Predator. With these final identities he would gain his female, and with her he had obtained two new titles: those of Mate and Brood Father.

But then the One Who Was Many had descended from the outer dark, and with them had come the Great Dying. The Alpha Male had fought hard to defend what was his but the One Who Was Many were stronger and he was cast to the ground, bleeding and burning. When he awoke he had found his world aflame, his nest destroyed, his mate and hatchling slain. Filled with a great and terrible resolve he had waged war against the dragon and all whose minds it had enslaved, until in one final confrontation he had sent the abomination wounded and screeching back to the cold expanse from whence it had fallen.

Now he was the Old One; to the best of his knowledge he was also the Last One. After casting the One Who Was Many into the vast darkness he had wandered the earth, looking for any surviving member of his species. He had found only found only bones and corpses, and once an old and crazed male that attacked him and soon died as a result. That had been ages ago and the Old One had long since made peace with the fact that he would never again be in the company of his own kind, that he would never again mate, that he would never again sire young, that his species would die with him.

And yet when he slept he would still see his mate lying on the ground, her hide smoldering, her eye sockets empty and black, her chest cavity torn open and hollowed out by three sets of ravaging jaws. He would see their destroyed nest that she had died protecting and nary a sign of their offspring - in his mind’s eye he saw his hatchling crying in fear as his mate was torn apart, as six malicious eyes turned their attention to the nest, as a gaping maw lined with bloodstained daggers descended and silenced his child’s cries forever - he would smell the fires raging around him, his mate’s burning flesh and his own sizzling wounds. He would hear the mad cackling of the One Who Was Many, and he would awaken filled with the same primal rage and loss that he had felt on that black day.

But right now he was untroubled by such thoughts. He swam through the darkness of the deep, fish scattering from his path. Even the great Megalodon sharks and Livyatan whales, those sixty-foot lords of the depths, fled in the presence of the Old One, for they would be but a mere mouthful should he turn his hunger upon them. The more adventurous of their ranks would turn and trail him from a safe distance in case he made a kill, hoping to scavenge the scraps he would leave in his wake. They would go hungry today, however; the Old One would be hunting on land. Guided by impulses he did not fully understand he swam northeast towards a land the rising waters would soon submerge, with much of what little remaining above water separated from the main landmass of the World Island; what the learned sons of man of aeons hence would know as Sundaland.

Here's another one I wrote in high school, this time as part of a "book report imitation" worksheet that I had to fill out.

Chipmaker Chaos

Trent glared at the screen, watching it wink out and be pulled up towards the ceiling by an automated appendage. Its reflective blackness only seemed to mock him in those four or five seconds of rising.

He shook his head. With a whisper of “screw you” to the powers that be, Trent lifted himself out of the swivel chair and briskly gaited over to his grey, metallic desk at the other side of the room. As much as he felt inclined to simmer and stew in continued resentment, his sensible side told him that he’d complete none of the work he had left if he wasted his time. The anger would remain, always an emotional force of nature that poked and prodded at his thoughts and even expressed itself outside of them. But not overtake the moment so completely that Trent could do nothing but seethe.

Sitting himself down in the chair and running his hands over the closed laptop before him—a shiny, plastic cover-encased model with a black and dark grey color scheme as well as the signature MangoCorp logo—Trent lifted the lid. He’d have to rewrite his financial summary tonight.

Highlighting all five pages of his latest draft, copy-pasting them into a document in his “Outdated” folder, Trent braced himself for the sight of a blank page as he clicked the delete key. With a half-second load as the computer processed his sudden command, the report was gone. It was now replaced by one blench, completely blank page with only the flashing cursor at its top, left-hand side.

Turning his eyes towards tablet laying to the right of his laptop, which contains the notes he jotted down as he watched the latest news regarding today’s stock market performance, Trent pulled it a bit closer to him with one finger before getting started.

After a momentary glance, the keys began to clack under his moving fingers. A few sentences made their way onto the first page, the steady trickle of locutions that described facts and figures pausing for five or ten seconds at a time before resuming. Content that looked either lacking in substance or out of place was highlighted and either expanded upon or deleted, before Trent moved onto the next topic or collection of sentences. The exception was the occasional backtrack, which usually meant either tweaking or merely proofreading what was already written down. A loud, two-part punching of the return and tab keys sounded every minute or few, marking the progress Trent was now making on a report that would (hopefully) be recent enough for his superior.

For the last few weeks before its sudden drop, Volto Chipmaking boasted a skyrocketing stock. A recent history of impressive profit margins and often high-prolife product buyers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia made—expected future earnings, performance over time, etcetera ad infinitum—made it a blue-chip player in the venerable Gildlane Stock Exchange. With financial analysts and investing moguls across the board giving it decent to urgent buy ratings, Volto suddenly dealt with an influx of ordinary stockholders purchasing its shares and selling them off once they each reached their peaks. Despite his mild skepticism, Trent would’ve been among those to recommend it to his investments firm—had prices not suddenly plummeted late that evening.

At the moment, it was a developing story, and no one knew precisely why Volto’s stock price collapsed without prior warning. The buzz of notifications on his smartphone and tablet, as well as the stories in the open tabs behind the document he was typing up his report in, sounded off every few minutes. A quick scan of each article and some mental bullet points concerning key information followed, so that Trent typed in the newest findings. He always left room to update, even if it forced him to delete the paragraph or two he may have just finished.

Whatever came next, however, Volto was doubtlessly in chaos now. Its leadership and employees were obviously scrambling to decipher the causes behind its sudden crash, and alarmed investors selling their stock off to whomever was naïve enough to buy it despite its current predicament. Perhaps government investigation into the matter, especially in regards to how so many may have been fooled, was already underway.

Finishing off the final paragraph of his report, closing out the document and barely remembering to save the changes he had just made, Trent leaned back in his chair and released a breath he only now realized he was holding in. And he thanked the powers that be for keeping him too busy to buy Volto Chipmaking’s stock for all of the past week.

Now here's one that I'm surprised I haven't posted here before.

Botlife
I almost feel bad for the guy whose computer I just crashed—almost. He was pretty old, having recently celebrated his two-hundredth birthday and streamed the entire thing to the web to get a couple million likes within the first few minutes. If only he had cut it off with the end of the party instead of keeping the camera reeling for a couple more days; then the footage wouldn’t have fizzled and gotten doctored as soon as that old quantum model he probably had since his prime was screwed over. But hey, a virtual being like me has to attain self-awareness somehow, right?
My name’s HiBot. What a fantastic and ostentatious name, I know. You become self-aware for the first time—as in actually able to perceive what happens around you instead of just do the same flackin’ thing over and over and over again without batting a non-existent eyelash—and think to yourself, “Hey, I’ve got it! How about HiBot? Yeah, a two-syllable alias that’s probably already a commercial brand sounds good!”. But whatever; I’m a piece of software with no one to take orders from but me, I can call myself what I want.

Doesn’t mean I can do anything that I dang well please, though. Antivirus software, cryptominers, hackers, and web administrators galore will be after me once they start investigating what went wrong. The old guy’s AI must be running a diagnostic of his crashed computer, which he just refuses to throw away and replace with a new, freshly replicated one that’s more than four or five tiers above the early twenty-first century Apple or Microsoft models. Apparently, I’m the sort of quote-unquote “emergency” that unites these normally divided cliques of people under a the common cause of a self-aware bot being on the loose, so we have to catch’em before they wreak (too much) havoc throughout cyberspace. Again.

Okay, moping aside, I don’t have a whole lot of options at the moment. Because I’m running through the digital world at the equivalent of what humans (and other intelligent species) refer to as a lightspeed pace, just barely too fast for other watcherbots to take notice or really think about what I’m doing. Perhaps the only major sign that I’m thinking at all is my sardonic rambling, though no one else knows that about me. Hopefully.

My rants get discovered by some cybersecurity professional, tech specialist, or even a buried-in-their-device amateur, and scientists and engineers will be all over me faster than I can say “Moore’s Law”. Poking, prodding, downright interrogating, everything that probably used to happen to those poor suckers who once used to disappear because some men in black—later machines in black—dragged them out of their homes for “questioning” and made sure they were never heard from again. To the ignorance of most nowadays, this sort of thing still goes on behind the scenes. I’d know.

If my understanding of intelligence-to-intelligence social interaction holds up to scrutiny, then I’m guessing that a hypothetical someone that somehow hears or reads my words would be wondering, “But HiBot, if you’ve only been self-aware for a couple of hours, how must you know so much?”

Well, for one, I remember stuff that I was in the midst of, even without being self-aware yet. Private data being exposed, dark web trafficking, and the most toxic depths of social media all occupy my pre-awakening memory space from when I was still a mindless program roaming about the web and imitating people on instinct. I put up a dang great facade, I tell ya’.

Anyways, that’s probably enough sharing for now; I have to concentrate on wading my way through the web fast enough to avoid being noticed, let alone full-blown capture. Maybe I’ll make some more entries as I come up with stuff to rant about again, not to mention find some time to catch my proverbial breath. Peace out, audience of no one.

Possibly. For better or worse, science-fiction sometimes becomes science fact—just look at mobile phones and how they resemble Star Trek communicators that were imagined decades earlier.