Acquired Stardust
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@projecthypershort
He was special, and they always pushed him to do more. No one else had abilities like him, and they worked hard to take advantage of that. One day it would be "teleport a meter," the next day it would be "teleport ten." With every success they pushed him harder, and with every success he grew weaker. He never said no to a challenge, though. And when they asked him to teleport the full length of the kingdom, he did. Or at least most of him did.
She was just one person, a poor swordsman and a poor fighter. But she couldn’t be killed, and she was patient. If it took her a day or a century, one wound or a hundred, she would work her way through every man, woman, and child in the kingdom until there was nothing left. Nothing but her.
Dragons are happy creatures. Not for any deep philosophical reason stemming from their immortality or ancient wisdom. Rather, it’s because of the stability of their income, the security of their housing, and the tidal waves of fire they can summon against anyone who threatens it.
It dug its claws into his leg and he watched as the mangled creature tore out flesh and muscle from his body. By the time it finally reached the bone he passed out. It felt like blinking. In one moment the world around him was dark, vision filled with violence and the slaughter of his companions, his mind screaming in pain. Then he closed his eyes. He opened them again to the medical tent. Midday, if not a little earlier. He knew what he would find if he looked down at himself, and so he didn’t. He kept his eyes shut, focused on the lone sounds of the doctor whispering to his assistants, and the distant artillery making new trenches at the front. At the end of the day it was just another lost battalion, on another failed push in a war they would never win, against an enemy that they had never successfully stopped.
She liked fire. Fire was simpler than most of the things in her life. When they put the gun in her hand and directed her to the cities, it was like a sort of meditation. In a way it was like being the master of a wild animal. She found that which moved and burned it until it didn’t. The flames ate everything, and they rewarded her with the ashes of the things they used to be, pungent with bitter aromas that filled her. She knew she must have killed thousands, though she never kept count. More cities burned at her hands than under any other Judicator. And she loved what she did.
The scene unfolded quickly. They tied him up and threw him down the concrete stairs, dragged him through the rubble; when he continued to squirm they beat him with metal bars until he stopped, then threw him into the back of the truck. They took him well outside the walls after that, dumped him in a field where they thought no one would find him. But I did, and though he was dead when I found his body, he didn’t stay that way.
Asteroid mining is a poor man’s job. Sure some strike it rich, but for most of us the most exciting thing you’ll find is wreckage from the old battlefields. The old wars were all-consuming; whole planets and moons got reduced to the fields we now scour. Most of what’s left isn’t even worth selling for scrap. The most complete thing I ever found was a helmet. It could have belonged to a child or a soldier, there was no real way to tell after all those years. Whoever used to own it, they died bad, and you could tell.
There was no mirror or lake for reflection, yet he could see himself clearly, like he was standing above his own body. He couldn’t reenter it, nor could he make himself move despite using all his might. Instead he took the time to examine himself. He was handsome, he thought, if not for the immense stab wound in his stomach and the arrows embedded in his throat and chest. In hindsight, that might have explained a lot about his current predicament.
Her heart hurt, a lot, and it would hurt for a while. It had been thirty years since she last used it, though. For thirty years it sat in a jar on a shelf, while machines in her chest worked in its place. So by many metrics it was a miracle it still worked at all.
Just gotta quit faffin’ around and do it. It’ll take three seconds, and then it’s done. You put your arm in, the magic does its...well, magic, and then you’re good to go. Yeah, you lose the arm in the process, and yeah it’ll hurt, but it’s gotta be done. Such were the terms of the treaty.
“What a sight!” The fox exclaimed, hopping around the overgrown rocket fuselage. He put his nose to the ground; there were old smells there, among the bones and bits of metal. At one point it must have been a great structure, he thought. Now it would be home for many generations of young.
I wish I had words for someone as special as her. Nothing felt real, she would remark. She didn’t feel real. But in a world where truly nothing was, where everything was an image induced by machines and computers, she was perhaps the only real person I’d ever met.
She says she loves me back, but the stone around her neck says otherwise. All her life the necklace has given away her emotions, a curse of its life-saving properties. Rejection I could take. But when she speaks, it’s hatred that I see in the gem. Anger and hatred.
None of this shit works, but they buy it anyway! I mean, I got degrees in business and marketing, but I can barely open my mouth before it’s all sold. When the demand is there, you’ll run out of stock no matter how broken it is. Rebreathers, oxygen tanks, and radiation shields alike. They’re older than sin and will break within five minutes of walking outside, but that hasn’t stopped anyone, and it’ll be a hot minute before I stop them.
The drips are infuriating. It’s hard enough when you’re just parched. When you’re barely a day from dying of thirst, it’s borderline maddening. All the remaining water in the world, flowing through to me barely a drip at a time. And not only that, but there’s a queue. And we’re all thirsty.
The wave was partly magnetic, or something like that. “Like a tsunami in space,” was how they said it on TV. They said it would fry any electronics not under a mountain of lead. The bigger issue, of course, was that it threw the planet out of its orbit like a pool ball hit a little too hard, flying off the table. As our little ball rolls farther from the table and into the dirty bar, it strikes you just how little any of it mattered. The sun gets smaller every day. It’s like drifting from shore, and words can’t convey that frustrated hopelessness. To lose a loved one to the ensuing cold and darkness, a needless death that the universe neither knew nor cared about, that no one will ever remember. It leaves you speechless, not because you don’t feel it, but because even if you scream, there’s no warmth left to receive your cries.
Every week was an opportunity to test a new device. The bad ones could kill hundreds; the good ones killed thousands. If they were ever used against people, then there would rightfully be dozens of lawsuits. The very nature of the devices was often brutal and violent by design. The creatures beneath the walls weren’t human, however, and since they had never shown signs of their numbers thinning, or empathy for the humans they killed in their own time, no one was bothered when bits of limb and flesh were sent careening into the night.