Sponsor |  sam-diablo | Sep 1, 2006 2:37pm | | Any short stories/half finished plot ideas - your own work only |
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| | | archonknight | Sep 1, 2006 4:05pm | Hi this is my first story I will post here, hope you all like ^.^
the Tales from the Frozen Earth
Eve the Created
Birth
The soft whoosh of the feeder tanks echoed throughout the white machine room as they emptied their blue fluids into the transparent chamber. Machinery begins to move and the Nano-robots buzz to life.
In the chamber, a shape begins to form as the Nano-robots weave the synthetic bones and flesh. After a few hours of working, they cease their labors.
The fluids inside drain out of the chamber where now a naked humanoid shell stands. The Nano-robots forming webs across the beings skin as they prepare to add the last touches. Finally, their creation is almost complete.
A long thin needle is introduced into the chamber and is injected into the being. The needle's contents spread throughout the humanoid shell, finally after a few minutes the needle's contents are widespread enough in the being's blood stream and creates the processes necessary for life to begin.
The being in the chamber eye's shoot open, the air burns them and soon they become blood shot. Its eyes are entirely blue with no irises, it turns its pale white head and seeing for the first time its new life screams out in agony as the fluids inside jump-start its nervous system.
The pain subsides and the machines open up the chamber. The being stumbles out of the chamber into the cold white machine room. The walls are pure white and seem to expand far beyond the true borders.
The being falls to the floor, its legs still to weak to stand for long. It looks at its hands and sees the white pale flesh that covers them. A thought enters the being's mind. What am I? |
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Sponsor | | sam-diablo | Sep 1, 2006 4:16pm | Excellent contribution, thanks Archonknight :)
(i'm not turning this into a conversation thread, btw, just posting so #2 can continue with his exciting tale!) |
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Sponsor | | tigerdragonbrand | Sep 1, 2006 4:18pm |
archonknight posted:Hi this is my first story I will post here, hope you all like ^.^
the Tales from the Frozen Earth
Eve the Created
Birth
Hi, I like it very much! You descriptions are vivid. Well done! :) |
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| | | archonknight | Sep 1, 2006 4:19pm | The being laid on the floor exhausted from the long process that ended in its own creation. The burning in its skin and eyes had subsided but the being was having a hard time focusing on the room.
The walls seemed as though they simultaneously expanded and closed in and was quickly became disorientating. Finally giving up trying to make sense of the room the being closed its pale blue on blue eyes and slept.
The being dreamed for the first time in its short life, in its dream it saw many unfamiliar shapes and colors all swirling around in a gigantic cloud. The being felt itself fall into the cloud of rotating colors and a sick feeling entered the pit of its stomach.
Feeling nauseas the being opened its eyes and saw before it another being of equal height. The only thing different about it was that it looked different from its own pale skin.
The strange new being spoke the words came out a mixed garble of indecipherable speech.
"001 :1:0001 :1111:0010001110000111, :111::1:00011 00100011101 0100011:1111:01000011000011100001111:1:00011:1111: 000101?"
This new being was acting strangely. It nodded its head and then walked over to the wall on the right side of the room. It tapped the wall five times, the sound echoed inside the room.
Finally, the stranger removed from the wall a small piece of something. It walked over to the being and held out the object in its hand.
The stranger smiled and nodded its head. The being took the small object and looked interestingly at its smooth surface.
Then the burning began, as though something inside was set on fire. The feeling ran up its arm and finally went into the being' head. Here it hurt for a second then the pain subsided.
The stranger smiled and spoke again.
"Can you understand what I am saying? If you can nod your head."
The being nodded its head and the machine seemed pleased it spoke again.
"Good, your creation is finished. I am the Anima Machina known as Dios, and you are my creation. I have named you Eve and if my research was correct you are based upon the body type of a human female."
Eve looked at Dios and said in a frightened tone, "What am I?"
Dios seemed happy, Eve could tell by the air surrounding him.
"You are the result of a hundred years of my hard work. You are the first biological being to exist on this planet in over five thousand years."
Eve looked back down at her hands; they were pale and white but strangely warm. She smiled as she ran one of her fingers against the back of her hand; she looked at Dios and asked a question of him.
"Dios, what was that thing you gave me?"
Eve saw Dios's reaction of slight guilt.
He answered her query in as simple terms as possible.
"That object I gave you were simple Nano-robots they allowed us to speak with each other."
Eve did not understand the meaning of the word, she could see Dios realize his slip up and he thought for a moment then explained his answer.
"A Nano-robot is a tiny little machine that can get inside small places and do what you want them to do. They went through your arm into your brain where they gave you the knowledge needed to understand my words."
Eve kind of understood and so she nodded her head. Dios smiled and spoke again, "Eve I have a lot to teach you in such a short period of time, sit down and let me begin."
Eve sat back down upon the cold metal floor, goose bumps rose on her arms as the cold spread through her body. She shivered and Dios saw her discomfort he went to the same wall as before and tapped it a few times. Slowly the room began to warm up and Eve stopped shivering.
Dios walked back over to Eve and sat beside her, his metallic skin mirrored the room.
"Let me begin."
Eve nodded and Dios began to teach.
~Thanks for the great reviews ^_^ |
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Sponsor | | sam-diablo | Sep 1, 2006 5:23pm | Most welcome!
Great story...i wonder if there's more, because, if not, i may have to insist you write some more as i'm hooked! |
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| | | archonknight | Sep 5, 2006 3:18pm | | Thanks theres more but I dont think it'll fit lol Maybe I'll write soemthing short and post it here. |
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Sponsor | | MindHunterINFJ | Sep 7, 2006 9:07am | NOTE: The following is an untitled vignette (short story) from my recently completed and copyrighted book: "Childhood's Rend: Memories Of The Dog Star." Copyrighted 2006 by Jack Clifford. All rights reserved. I am posting merely to share and to solicit criticism and feedback, and any additional publication in cyberspace and/or the print media and/or elsewhere is strictly prohibited without the prior, express permission of the author. ANOTHER NOTE: The story is too long for one post so I have broken it down into multiple posts. FINAL NOTE: The spelling IS correct: the story is set in an alternate/parallel universe! SORRY, FOLKS, I'm trying to get the "hang" of posting multiple parts! :)
Yes, I knew about Nalen Hill on the Bug Tussle-Saginau Road where---just a few short yards down the other side---Hank Jayner was buried. I had seen his grave and had heard the story, a story that happened even before Old Man Nalen or any other black came to Bug Tussle and squatted on the forty acres of paper-thin, dirt-poor land of these impoverished DeCoq Hills, accompanied only by a Freedman Bureau mule and new hope that, with freedom, things would be different from those days on the Morris Plantation when they were property of Old Colonel Daniel and his young wife, Belle, who, though treating them kindly by all reports, still kept them in bondage, chattelized as mere property.
After all, it was little consolation to folks devoid of freedom and thus forlorn of hope that at Cristmas Old Colonel Morris once promised his slaves that they could have a vacation from work so long as the fire that they built on Cristmas day burned and put forth visible smoke from the chimney and that they, the slaves, outsmarted and outwitted their master by cutting a swamp sweetgum tree, sawing off a huge butt cut, burying it in the mud of the slough for well over a month so that it could soak up tons of moisture, and then placing it as the back log in the Colonel's vast fireplace where it simmered and smoked for nigh onto a month, a month of respite from slave chores if not slavery itself.
No, there was no hope in this, only a sense of triumph perhaps, a fleeting and insignificant but nevertheless rewarding victory for folks too long denied victory, of any kind, but they did have hope as the Civil War loomed in 1859---they called it "New Hope," the church they established when Peter Whitlow and his fellow slaves, in defiance of laws prohibiting such assemblies, convened in secrecy on the banks of the Washita River to praise and to worship the very God whose white subjects, Cristans no less, had come in the slave ships to faraway Africa to traffic in human flesh with the infidel Harab Muslin slave-traders and then carted their fathers and grandfathers and mothers and grandmothers away, shackled like animals in filthy ship holds, to this new and strange land. This religion of the white man, the Cristan religion of the buyers not the Muslin religion of the sellers, Peter Whitlow saw, offers hope for it promises a tomorrow where the pain and the suffering and the tears of the present world would all be assuaged and voided and made of no effect, so New Hope Baptist Church it was and Greater New Hope Baptist Church, in Maldoon, it still is.
All this naturally flashed through my mind as the old man spoke, but it is so strange, most strange, that at this very moment when the old man accosted me and began to render asunder everything that I had ever known and believed and accepted as reality and reduce ("transduce" is maybe the better word) it into one minute and fragile and meaningless piece of infinity no bigger than the end of a needle that I would recall both the black folks of Bug Tussle and this Confederate soldier buried on Nalen Hill. It is strange because I did not until a few minutes later know that this old black man, Fred Counts, had lived near Nalen Hill years ago. Maybe some sense of him emanated from his soul directly to mine, or I absorbed some ethereal wisp like osmosis across the distance between us in the still and hushed and hospital-fragranced air. Or maybe I knew instinctively already, even before he told me his story, knew perhaps with some primordial, vestigial memory the truth of which he would soon speak, knowing it already but nevertheless listening with rapt attention, transported outside and beyond myself as he told me the story: as he shared with me his past---and mine.
Whatever the case, and I cannot explain it, Hank Clay Jayner's sad story came to mind at that exact moment, and I saw as if there that mounded grave under the hickory tree with pine knots as both headstone and footstone, and as I remained immobile, tongue-tied, before this old black man, I recalled how this Confederate soldier, son of old Dr. Thomas Jayner at Saginau, had deserted his unit, Co. B, Captain Stark's Company (Clarkson County Volunteers), 1st Regiment (Fagan's) Arkansa Infantry, in which he had enlisted with great fanfare on May 8, 1861 at Big Rock, and tried to go home, leaving a war that at first had been heroic and glorious and patriotic, but that soon became a swirl of death and dying men and horses and wounded creatures with legs and arms and other body parts severed, perhaps with a cannon ball or with the bone saw of the regiment "surgeon," all without any anesthesia except the excruciating pain.
Yes, Hank Jayner, missing and wounded at Shiloh, "about 2 p.m." on April 6th or 7th, 1862, at least so said the "Report of Killed, Wounded & Missing at Shiloh,"and then hurting and wounded in the hospital in Tunnell Hill and Atlanta, Mississippi for much of 1863, had seen too much to maintain any illusions whatsoever about the glory of the war, and he had long ago given up his enthusiasm for fighting much less for the sacrifice of dying for a South that he knew, whether its people knew it or not, was already in 1864 gone, doomed, passé, history, and so to continue fighting, so he thought, was futile and worse than useless, and besides all he wanted to do was to go home.
Yes, all Hank wanted was to go home. So one dark night, September 10, 1864 it was, the day he drew his last monies ($66.00), when the clouds obscured the crescent moon, he slipped away from his unit and commenced his travels back across time and space to a place he called home, a place soon to be transmogrified into something new and strange and bereft of human chattlery in the post-war era, a place called Saginau where all that he had ever known and loved in his short life resided: his family, his fiancée, his church, his land. It was the dog days of late summer and early fall in Bug Tussle as he trudged down the dusty Bug Tussle-Saginau road toward home, having just a few hundred yards before left the Upper Murfreesboro road that winded its way through Bug Tussle and on to points south and west, coming by the Methodist Church with its cemetery where later the ramshackle one-room Bug Tussle School would stand, hungry an |
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| | | archonknight | Sep 7, 2006 5:14pm | Great story Mindhunter.
Here's a glimpse at something I am working on now.
Memory of a lost time
The late november sky was heavy with snowclouds advancing over the landscape. Cassandra sat watching them. "Aren't they something?" She asks Sean, her friend who sat beside her. He nodded and laid back. Cassandra watched the way his eyes moved and his little twitches. "They are something Cass." He says at last looking upon her instead of the clouds.
She felt his eyes upon her and smiled back at him.
"I leave in a few days." Sean said, his eyes seeming as though they looked a thousand miles away. Cassandra nodded, "I know all of Tera has been talking about it. Do you really think war will break out?"
He shook his head. "Cant really say but regardless I am being sent off to the city to serve."
"But why? Isnt it pointless?" She asked, her questions thinly veiling the fact that she loved him.
"No its for a good cause." He says smiling. Cassandra shakes her head, "You sound so naive you know."
He nods, "I know but I've no choice in the matter." He says.
Cassandra holds back a tear that threatens to fall upon her pale white cheek.
"I love you." She says at last. "Please dont go." She begs.
He sighs deeply.
"Why did you have to say that." He says looking at her sadly. "Why now? At the parting of our ways do you say that? You know its to late for me to change my plans, I'm already in the service. If I dont show up at the Garrison in a weeks time they'll come and arrest me. Do you know what happens after that?"
Cassandra nods her head, "Dont say it."
"No I am going to say it Cassandra, cause you need to know how serious this is. They hang those who dont show." He says looking at her angrily. She looks away from his angry eyes. "I am sorry I yelled." He at last says in apology. "Its just that if I knew how you felt all this time I would've stayed, I wouldnt have joined."
"But its to late now." She says softly, her words carried a melecholy tone.
He nods. "Yeah it is." She looks at him and leans forwards kissing his cheek. Caught off gaurd he looks at her. She smiles at him. "Come back to me Sean. When its all over come back to Tera. I will be waiting for you until then." She promises.
Sean nods, "I promise I'll come back and then we can pick up the pieces." Gathering his courage and his nerves he leans towards her this time. She expects it and they kiss. The sky begins to fill with falling snowflakes that hover in the air around the two friends. |
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Sponsor | | MindHunterINFJ | Sep 7, 2006 5:28pm | NOTE: The following is an untitled vignette (short story) from my recently completed and copyrighted book: "Childhood's Rend: Memories Of The Dog Star." Copyrighted 2006 by Jack Clifford. All rights reserved. I am posting merely to share and to solicit criticism and feedback, and any additional publication in cyberspace and/or the print media and/or elsewhere is strictly prohibited without the prior, express permission of the author. ANOTHER NOTE: The story is too long for one post so I have broken it down into multiple posts. FINAL NOTE: The spelling IS correct: the story is set in an alternate/parallel universe! SORRY, FOLKS, I'm trying to get the "hang" of posting multiple parts! :) PART TWO:
cemetery where later the ramshackle one-room Bug Tussle School would stand, hungry and tired and defeated not so much by the withering and smothering heat of this searing August afternoon here in September as by the dishonor that he, a deserter to the sacred Southern cause, carried in his breast.
A few hundred yards past the cemetery on the left side of the road was the old Stainbridge place, where several decades later my grandmother, Allie (who would die of the flu in 1921), Grandpa Hart Clifford's wife, would be born. The cabin was logs, and an unpainted picket fence ran alongside the road, enclosing a yard full of holly-hocks, and rooster combs, hydrangeas, and other flowers in carefully tended beds, flowers that now wilted and browned under the scorching September sun. A barn, old and sagging even in this time, was across the road on the right.
In the yard was an old woman, perhaps the first Stainbridge bride or maybe another surnamed bride, whose name is now lost in time, to come across via Georgia from the Virginia mountains, a captive to a husband who could not, simply would not, be content until he moved to the very ends of the Harth and a passel, even then, of snarling and fussing and sometimes snot-nosed Stainbridge younguns crying out for her attention. She wore a patched but clean bonnet to shade her head from the sun, and she knelt as she pulled grass from the flowerbeds, absorbed totally in bringing some beauty to this beauty-less place. She did not even hear the man, Hank, as he walked up, shuffled really, wisps of dry dust kicking up behind him with every step, and she was startled when he called out:
"Hello, ma'am, do you think I might have a dipper of water and maybe a biscuit to eat? It's been days I've been travellin' now, and I rekkin I'm jest about beat. I'm jest about plumb wore down to a nubbin'!"
She looked up, her searching eyes taking in his visage---pale and drawn and sickly and chalkish despite the underlying tan---and his clothes, dusty and woolen and hot and homespun no less, but discernible as what passed as a Confederate soldier's uniform. He was but a lad of twenty-two or so, she saw, but his shadowed face was haggard, much too old for his age, and his eyes, oh, his eyes, they seemed lifeless, devoid of hope or caring or even living, dead things glaring out from his bony skull. But for the rhythmic moving of his chest he could have been a walking dead man, she thought, and she involuntarily shuddered at the idea.
"Why, I rekkin I can spare you some water and a bite to eat," she answered. "Come on inside the gate, and I'll fetch them."
As she shambled up the makeshift steps onto the front porch and on down the dogtrot hall toward the bucket of cool water on the back porch, Hank sat down wearily on an upturned block of firewood beside the large pile, only some of which had been split and stacked in preparation for winter. His shoulders sagged, and he fanned himself in the dead and breeze-less air with his gritty cap, shooing away the flies that tried to alight on his face. Only a few more miles now, and he would be home, he thought, and he wondered what his fiancée, Jennie, would think as he slunk back home from a war to which he had departed with such hoopla and hoorays and farewells, his precious Jennie and, yes, his mother and his father and lads and lassies from Bug Tussle and Saginau who followed him, whooping and hollering and reveling, all the way to the ford on the Washita River at Rockport as he rode away to Big Rock to enlist back in May, 1861, no, not, slunk, he thought, slithered back on his yellow belly like the coward that he was, only dismissing that thought immediately because he, if no one else, knew that it was not cowardice that drove him to desert but the despair and hopelessness that infused him from the blood and the guts spilled for what noble cause he no longer knew not.
"I am not a coward," he thought, "but Jennie will think that I am, and my father---that stern and unloving Methodist physician to whom honor and duty and loyalty mean everything---he will think so, too. Maybe it would have been better if I had been shot dead on the killing fields of Corinth or Shiloh and left as foodstuff for the hogs who feasted and gorged themselves there on the Confederate bodies."
Old Lady Stainbridge re-appeared, shuffling arthritically down the sagging steps, and she spoke kindly to Hank as she approached, the first words of acceptance, of non-approbation, that he had heard in days:
"Here you are, son. It's all I got cooked up right now, but I rekkin' ye welcome to whut I got."
And she handed him a large dipper gourd chock full of water along with two biscuits from which poked slices of salt-cured and hickory-smoked ham.
"Thank ye, kindly, ma'am," he spoke, "It's right neighborly of ye."
As he gulped down the cool water and wolfed down the ham biscuits, she tried to engage him in conversation, for she did not have many neighbors, and few strangers wandered down this dusty, winding path that called itself a road outside her gates, but the boy seemed evasive, even afraid, and she ceased her questioning. He did, however, tell her that his name was Hank Jayner, son of Dr. Tom Jayner at Saginau, but even this scant information she had to pull out of him. She was not a prying woman, so although she was curious and would have loved to know more, she did not ask him what he was doing on this sultry, humid September afternoon trudging down this Godforsaken road without his unit. He could be, she supposed, on furlough, but then that was not likely, given the state of the war right then---or so the folks said at Rockport, Swamp Gas County seat---folks who may have heard from the captain or crew of one of the longboats that plied, even in wartime and at great peril, the muddy waters of the Washita River down to the Red River and on under cover of darkness past the Mississippi River Union blockades to the blackmarket cotton merchants in N'Orleans who had never paid a fair price for cotton but who now, given the difficulty of smuggling the bales offshore and onto blockade-runners bound for England, offered a pittance indeed.
Yes, he could be on furlough, but she doubted it, and that left only one alte |
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