Category: Writing

End of an era

Was chatting with Jason earlier and found the need to check into the Homestead Space Wiki for an image. Found thousands of spam pages instead, and no legitimate edits as far back as the log files went. This would take weeks at least of solid management to fix for something that’s had very little use.
I’m tired of flogging a dead horse. The RP was fun while it lasted and they’ll always be fond memories, but nothing’s been written in years and the repeated mantra that something’s round the corner rings hollow.
Wiki’s been backed up and deleted. It’s far more trouble than it’s worth in it’s current state; a liability to my server and my active domains.

I may still write based on that universe, but the big stories will never be concluded and as a collaborative collective universe.. it fell apart a long time ago. RIP.

Proteus Prescot

From LJ archive: 01/30/2008 13:56:00

So, weird dream last night. All in the style of a short film. Here it is, retouched a very small amount for consistancy.

Starring Simon Pegg. “Proteus Prescot”.

So Pegg exits a florists carrying a massive collection of bunchs of flowers, each with a barcode label hanging off it, next shot he enters an office block with the flowers. Next shot he leaves looking annoyed with the bunch much reduced.
Dumping the remaining flowers in a bin, he picks up his mobile and dials as someone races out of the building after him, looking disheveled. Pegg calls for a taxi and it imediatly bleeps back “You have been assigned auto-taxi 52”. While this happens though the guy from the office starts franticly telling him it ment nothing, presumably with Pegg’s girlfriend. Pegg yells at him and storms up to the taxi pulling in. The taxi has the number 42 on the rear, but because of the yelling he’s misheard the number so gets right in. The android at the wheel turns to him and does the stilted “where to?”
“The usual.” Pegg answers, still annoyed and gives the guy outside the finger as the taxi drives off.

A bump wakes him. The sun has gone down and Pegg dropped off in the back seat. Outside the taxi is driving down a country dirt track, surrounded by high hedgerows on each side, no streetlights anywhere.
“Where are we??” He asks the android driver, sudenly worried. “Almost there.” says the android as the track opens out to the front of a small cottage with warm yellow lights in the windows.
“No, this ins’t my home. You’re not my cab, are you?” He demands, pressing his phone against some sort of reader in the back of the drivers seat. The driver pauses for a momment. “I’m sorry sir, there is currently no signel to authenticate your ID. Please call the help line to obtain an override code.”
So Pegg gets out of the cab and wanders around abit with his phone, unable to get a signel. He walks up to the door of the cottage.
The door flys open and a crazy large 60yo-or-so woman in a folk-music style hat with bells on is on the other side. She manhandles him into the room. “Ah! There you are! Ahah! Come, come sit!”
She pushes Pegg down onto a wooden stool and goes back to sitting right next to a huge old wooden-case TV set with Inspector Morse showing on it. Beside her laying on a chaise-longe is a 50 or so year-old man with a bushy greying beard, and on the other side of the TV a dull-witted looking man with a shorter beard and huge beergut sits up to the navel in a tin bath, aparently naked. The man on the sofa starts jabbing the lady with various pointed objects, to which she alternatly replies, “Yes, that hurts, no that feels good, that one too..” all while not looking away from the TV.
Pegg sits there speachless, struck dumb, crouched up to avoid touching anything.
The man in the tub gets up and simply states, “I need to go have a bath”, walking across in front of Pegg and into another room to his right. The man is indeed utterly naked, but his gut covers his crotch at the front. At the rear though the man has a tail. As if a pigs tail had begun to grow, then carried on in the style of the the occasional genetic throwbacks, giving it an unpleasent broken look.
As Pegg can’t help but let his eyes follow the man out of the room, he spots an old cork noticeboard beside the door covered in newscuttings, but most prominantly is a faded red activists poster. As he stares at it, the camera zooms in on portion of the text. Something like, “these changes to be implimented by Prescot in the handling of genetic materials are feared could lead to escape and contamination of the local genomes, leading to dangerous mutations”.
He turns back to the ‘couple’ and sees the man is now pressing a jagged chunk of ice into the womans spine. “No, that’s good, good, no actually it hurts. It hurts. IT HUUURTS!!” She works up to a scream. Pegg stands and edges toward the door as she cries out again, “Well, was nice to meet you, I’ll see myself out.” he says to the mutants. The old woman looks up to him cheerfully and says, “Oh, take care deary.. oh no, wait.. DON’T LET HIM GET AWAY!!”
Pegg bolts for the door as the man stands up and a violent splash is heard from the next room.
He sprints across the small lawn and into the back of the cab, yelling, “Go, go, go!!”
“Please enter the override code.” The android cabbie replies calmly.
“I don’t have it, this is an emergency, just get us out of here!”
The engine starts and the lights come on, but the two men are out of the house. The huge naked man is on the bonnet and the other is at Pegg’s door, rocking the car violently as he locks it. “A person is blocking the way. We cannot move until they have safely disengaged the vehicle.” The driver answers, adding sadly, “Sorry about this. It’s my programming, you see.”
As Pegg claws open the seperator between the driver and passenger compartment, climbing through and trying to pull the android out of his seat, we see him look up as the old man aproaches with a concrete flowerpot above his head. As Pegg screams, still trying to pullie the robo-cabbie free, the last thing we see is the flowerpot being thrown at the windscreen. It cuts to black with the sound of smashing glass.

They were moments from death as their eyes met. A last brief need touched them both as they hurriedly lent in to kiss.
They ray struck her before they could, disintegrating her into a cloud of expanding dust. Forever after he would remember not being kissed by her lips but by the still body-warm soot that enveloped him.

Super-transition

Just thinking of how many super heroes and super villains purport to have had that defining moment where they became one or the other. Some moment of supreme stress, anguish or rage.

I can’t think of a villain who was kicked off on their career of mayhem by being dumped by their boy/girlfriend. But in the worlds various court systems, this level of emotional distress can be enough to plea someones way out of a murder charge just as much as the death of a loved one can. As can so many other unbeleivable defences.

Though you must admit it would be piss-easy to cast someone as a villain if their moment was “gay panic” or seeing a woman expose her ankles.

Of course, whether they see themselves as the villain is another matter completely.

Writing: Disposable FTL premise

Some ad-hoc writing on the premise of a disposable FTL system.

The matte funnel-shaped device sat dead out in front of the ship while it’s backdrop of stars spun around and around. The ship was spinning up for jump gyro-stabilisation. Putting the spin on the ship was the only way of keeping the course at FTL speed reasonably straight. The slightest discrepancy in mass had lead to the early Hoppers being flung wildly off their path, tumbling and tearing themselves apart. It was far more reliable to rifle the ship for handling the unpredictable gravitational eddies that buffeted the ships protective field as it hit midpoint.

The rest of the crew had all headed off to their duty stations now, or secured themselves for flight. A few hours ago the observation deck had been packed in nervous silence as the updates had trickled over the intercom. People were attentive as one of the Pinches had been unloaded from the rack, and watched with silent fear as it had been fuelled up with antimatter. The SS Boseman had been lost that way; a slight fluctuation in the magnetic containment of the transfer line. A single atom tearing the line open, obliterating the ship. The “Black Bit” quantum-entanglement data feed told mission control everything.

At one point the ensign had halted his words for a second, and the whole room had bodily stiffened to a fearful acceptance that death was an instant away.

But now it was out there. In a few minutes time the antimatter would annihilate with it’s matter half, destroying the intensely charged field coils and creating a precisely focussed funnel of gravitational energy, pulling two distant points in space together for a few seconds.

Hundreds of sensors had us placed to within fractions of a millimetre of our set distance from the Pinch device. Close enough to be pulled into the correct portion of the gradient, far enough away not to be destroyed by the radiation blast or it’s monatomic debris. If the dispersing field around the ship didn’t fail, it would still overload at the other end, with the rhythmic popping of capacitor banks being jettisoned before they too exploded. And with luck we would find ourselves within 5 Au of our destination, still with enough time to correct for insertion into the target star-system. If not, then we’d have to pick another system and try another Hop. These things don’t work for short journeys yet.

Hopping so far in an instant only to spend the following couple of years coasting on the final leg seems an insult to some. Trust me that you need that rest to regain your witts. But it’s still a better option than spending an extra 70 years coming the scenic route, or arriving too close to correct your delta-V and passing right past your target.

The blast shields are closing. Next the forward 30 decks will be evacuated of personnel and air. The magic time’s coming up fast now. Wish us luck!