Science Fiction Experiment
My friend Patrick and I at work have been talking about writing a joint SF story together for a little while.
The idea is, one of us will write a bit, then hand off to the other one, who will write a bit more, and so forth. The only rules are that we can’t undo the things that happen in the other’s work (no “And then he woke up and it was all a dream” moments).
As such, Patrick asked me to kick it off, so here is the first installment.
No Title
The first thing he noticed was the sound of the wind. It was howling all around him, like the sound of a Glidian whale during mating season. As he pulled his head slowly off the filthy mattress where it rested, he was suddenly puzzled by the fact that despite the noise all around, he could not feel a breeze to match the sounds.
Pulling himself upright, the explanation for this became clear. He was indoors. Well, that is to say, he appeared to have a somewhat leaky roof overhead, and metal paneling all around that might pass for walls, if one were pressed to define them as such. The seams between the metal panels were none too sturdy however, leaving gaps as wide as his fingers in some places. It was through these gaps that what little light there was reached into the room.
“Well”, he thought, “At least that explains the wind. There must be a storm outside.”
His mind was still foggy from sleep, and it took him a few moments to glance around the small room he was in and get his bearings.
There was one small table in the corner. A lamp that had fallen over, and appeared to have no glowbulb in it at any event. A dilapidated bed on which he had been resting, with a single, grimy blanket. The blanket itself appeared to be actual woven cloth, rather than the polyfoil he would have expected. Odd. There was a half-empty glass of some kind of liquid on the table, which did not draw his attention, and a human corpse sprawled out on the floor near the door, which did.
“That’s funny,” he thought to himself, “I wonder how that got here. But then, how did I get here? Come to think of it, where is here? And more importantly, who am I?”
The shock of it all was almost enough to put him out again, but something inside him forced him to try to maintain his composure. He closed his eyes. Yes, that helped somewhat.
“He must be freshly dead,” he postulated, “Since I can’t smell anything decaying.”
Indeed, the corpse laying beside him in the small metal shack would almost pass for sleeping, if not for the lack of breathing, for the fact that his eyes were wide open and unmoving, and for the rather sizeable chunk of glass protruding from his midsection leading to a small puddle of blood beside him. Otherwise, the corpse was dressed in a rather sharp-looking suit, appeared to be in his early-to-mid thirty’s, unless he’d been to a rejuvenation clinic lately, in which case it would be impossible to tell. He had dark hair and eyes, and his mouth hung open in a rather odd expression of what could only be called shock. In a single glance this had been burned into the memory.
The sleeper opened his eyes.
“The date,” he thought to himself, “What is the date?”
For some reason, though he could not fathom why, exactly, knowing the date was incredibly important to him.
Unfortunately, the room was little help here. No clocks or calendars were visible. There wasn’t a terminal. In fact, there wasn’t even an optic data port for a terminal to connect to.
The man appeared to be wearing a personal datalink on his wrist. No doubt, that could tell him the precise date and time, as well as his precise position, the name of the planet he was on, in what star system, and what establishments nearby would be eager to provide him with refreshments, brand name trade goods, or exotic entertainments, for only a small fee.
He daren’t touch it.
He knew this instinctively, but he could not say how, exactly.
Rising slowly, he gathered his footing, and walked to the door, gently stepping over the dead man, and came to the door.
It was locked. From the outside.
This was not a terribly great problem, however, considering the quality of construction of the ramshackle building he was in. A well placed kick to one of the wall seams was enough to pop the weld, and allow him to bend the sheet-metal enough to exit the structure.
Funny. He was not even wearing shoes, yet his kick had been precise enough to pop the wall open in a single blow, and he barely noticed the sensation. His body had reacted almost automatically.
He slipped quickly outside, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the glare of the light around him. The wind was indeed blowing violently, and small particles of sand whipped across his face and bare chest.
In a moment, he saw that he was in a desert. As far as the eye could see, sand and rock and dried mud, and not a single sign of any other structure or any mark of civilization within sight.
“Well, that’s going to make things difficult,” he muttered to himself.
