Monday, June 22, 2009

More Fiction for Your . . . Something that Rhymes with Fiction . . .

I've been assaulting all my friends with this little site called Ficly. It's a community based entirely on short-short fiction. Have a story idea that'll use less than 1000 characters? Publish it. See someone else's story and really enjoy it? Write a sequel or prequel. It's a hell of a lot of fun, not to mention incredibly challenging. A thousand characters (including spaces) averages around a couple hundred words.

Here's a couple of stories I posted. Each one is close to the maximum allotted characters.

And yes, I've been on a bit of a sci-fi kick lately. Also, you may find the second one to be kind of a gross out.

Sweeper

May 12,

The ship had been drifting out-system for over a week after the initial mayday. It was one of those messages. The kind that ends in a scream, which itself ends in a gurgle. Our ship, a Sweeper class lovingly called Blood ’N Guts, was deployed. Even outfitted with the new drive, it took us several days.

When we reached it (its ID tag proclaimed it the Accretion), we hailed the crew, got no answer. We hadn’t expected one. Scans showed no life-signs. There were no heat sources, aside from the computer on the bridge. Life-support had automatically shut down when the computer registered its crew was dead. Before hibernating, it changed the distress signal to a warning signal.

The ship still contained atmosphere, so we popped it.

Now we wait. Standard policy is twenty-four hours. We have to let it get nice and cool in there.



Negative Pressure

May 13,

We found the first one in Medical Bay.

Whether patient or experiment, I’ll never know. He—no, it, always it—lay back on a gurney. Straps crossed at forehead, chest, and hip. Padded manacles locked down the hands and feet. It had been a feisty bastard. It craned its head to look at us, and the strap across its forehead peeled back the weakened flesh like a hood, exposing a crosshatch of fine muscle, a patch of yellow skull.

Don’t know how it sensed us. Couldn’t smell us or hear us. Couldn’t even see us—its decaying eyes had ruptured from the vacuum we had admitted to the ship. It opened its mouth, and though there was no air to carry the sound, I swear I could hear the moan.

I raised my pistol and shot it from three feet away. A bolt of plasma erased its face and boiled away everything beneath. It thrashed a bit, but even if it hadn’t been strapped down, the cold had stiffened its joints.

I watched it for a moment, then spoke into my suit’s radio. “Clear, Medical Bay.”