FRIDAY FICTIONEERS - 28 Oct - OLD DYNAMITE - My 100 Words

Old Dynamite

He was a real piece of work. Even though his little boy was terrified of horses, he insisted on taking him out on the trail.

  So, I saddled Princess, my gentle Welsh pony, for the boy and let them get acquainted while I saddled his father’s horse.

While I led the boy around the ring, his father spat encouragement, “Are you going to spend all day walking around in circles?”

Then I tied Princess securely and brought out Old Dynamite, holding the harness while his father mounted.  Then I whisked the boy behind the fence.

Good Old Dynamite!

FLASH FRIDAY - 21 of October - The Egg - by Linda Palund

The Egg - 100 words

          My oar sliced silently through the looking glass surface of the water as I rowed to the island.  I knew something was wrong.

         It shouldn't be this quiet.

         Where were the birds, whose eggs I had come to count?  They should be watching me from off shore or circling above my head

         I beached the dinghy and crept through the brush, careful not to disturb any nests. But there were no nests. There were no eggs.

          At last! One perfect nest. But inside, instead of a spotted egg, lay a hideous stone marble, exuding a poison that made me shudder.

http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/flash-fiction/the-marble-100-words/

Linda Palund moves to Fiction Victim too!

This is my new site, where I will work on whims and whimsey. I will enter contests and participate in "Flash Fridays" and other Flash Fiction here.

Below is a Scifi story I am trying out, and more of these will appear soon...

POWER SOURCE - CHAPTER 5 - THE MISTAKE

          The next time Max opened his eyes, he was looking straight up into the eyes of a hypno-technician. He recognised it at once, because the eyes locked onto his in an instant and, never blinking, they began to implore him silently with their gorgeously soothing depths of limitless love.  But he wan't lulled and he wan't fooled. He was prepared for this and almost anything else they wanted to throw at him.
          Tom Elliot watched through the one way window and shook his head grimly. A few minutes later, when the technician reported its lack of success, Tom sent it away and made the call to headquarters.
          "Jack," he said, connecting at once through his direct line, "I hate to say this, but we blew it. We should have taken the wife, too. It's only been 8 hours, but I can see that there isn't a chance in hell that we can get Max to willingly give us what we want.  He'll never willingly join the Company. There is no way we are going to get those plans out of him without more leverage."
          "No, don't you think we tried that already?  We should have known he'd already be vaccinated against our truth drugs. And, no, he's way ahead of us there, too.  He's got some software block installed in him so our hypno-technicians can't get anything out of him either. You have to believe me, Jack. We're lost unless the Director relents and lets us use something more effective, like out and out torture." Tom paced the cubicle.
         "That is, unless it's not too late to pick up the wife.  Listen, jack, it may not be too late.  If she's still at home, I can get Dr Lerner to pick her up. I'll have him tell her that Max is staying with him and wants her to join him. I'll think of something - and I'll put together a back up plan, too. We're going to need her for leverage, I realise that now.  Yes. it was a mistake. Right. I'm on it now." And he hung up and stopped pacing to watch Max, who was still lying prone on the bed in the next room. But Max was struggling with his straps now and looking pretty pissed off.
          Might as well send one of the aides in there to let him loose, Tom thought. Get him to relax a bit. Wait for him to put his guard down. Then he checked the contact list on his cell for Dr Lerner's name. Yes, there it was.  Good. Max trusted him, so there was no reason why his wife should be suspicious. He rang the number. "Lerner? Yes, it's me. Look, we have a bit of a problem with Max. No, he's fine. None the worse for wear, believe me.  Just misses his wife. Yes, I'll admit we made a mistake. We should have brought the two of them in together.  No, that's just the problem.  He won't give it up and he is insisting that we bring him his wife. We think we can get him to be more forthcoming if he is certain his wife is all right."
          "I need you to drive over to their house and pick her up," he continued. "No, I have no idea if she's still at home or if she's noticed that Max is missing. I'm hoping that she thinks he's with you at the University." Tom watched Max through the glass again. He'd better get an aide in there quickly before he hurt himself. Then he turned away and sat down in the plastic chair near the small table by the door.
          "Listen carefully, Lerner.  This is what I need you to do. First, I want you to telephone her. Tell her that Max came to your house early this morning. Tell her that he thought his data was being compromised, so he brought his PC with him and came directly to your home. Tell her he is with you and that he's safe, but that he is worried about her and wants you to bring her to him."   
          "No, just make something up if she questions you further, or wavers.  But tell her you are on your way and for god's sake, get over there as fast as you can.  Yes, and bring her here."
          He rang off and stood up, pressed the  buzzer by the door to call an aide. A young man, dark skinned and fine boned, neatly dressed in white lab coat and carrying a small chrome tray with various glass tubes in it, answered the bell.             "Dil," Tom addressed him, reading the name tag over his pocket, "I need you to sedate out guest again.  You had better do it while he's still restrained."
          "Yes, sir," Dil answered, waiting expectantly for further instructions.
          "Then, when he's out, I want you to take off the straps and remove them from the room, so that when our guest wakes up he can move around freely in our guest room and use the facilities. Understood?"
          "Perfectly," Dill answered, turning on his heel, and he walked back out into the hall.
          Tom let the door shut behind the aide before sitting back down in the plastic chair and with his elbows on the table, cradled his head in his hands and began to work out his back up plan.

POWER SOURCE - Chapter 4 - Wake Up!

         Max was gently awakened by vague muffled sounds, coming to him like the soft cries of the seagulls calling from faraway over the ocean. He hadn't opened his eyes yet and he just lay where he was in a dreamy state. He felt sleepy still and thought perhaps he should allow himself to fall back to sleep.

He decided to turn over and that was when he realised that something wasn't quite right. The sheets must be twisted around him, he thought, because he seemed to be caught in them and actually, he could not move at all. "Maddy!" he called out for his wife, and his voice echoed back to him, all muffled and weird, and he opened his eyes for the first time.

He was laying flat on his back in a bedroom, but not his bedroom. The light was dim, but he could see the low ceiling and inset LED lights and recognised the design of one of those new Plastiment Homes. The rounded corners of the room gave it away. And it wasn't a sheet that was wrapped tightly around him, although he was covered by a sheet and quilt, he was strapped with his arms at his side to an otherwise relatively comfortable bed.

He still felt groggy and his eyes were crusty and he wanted to reach up and rub them, but he couldn't and that was when he started yelling.

"Hey! Is anybody there? Hey!" he yelled louder, with his voice reverberating in his head, causing an uncomfortable pain to begin to throb in his forehead.

"Hey, what's going on? Will somebody come in here please?"

He wasn't so groggy that he hadn't already conjectured what was happening to him. He had always known, ever since his father had revealed what he knew that awful night on the Island, just before he died, that he would also be watched and if he wasn't careful, he too would be in danger of being too useful an asset to be allowed to live his own life and make his own choices.  There were lots of greedy servants of unscrupulous and obscenely wealthy organizations who would not hesitate to take what they wanted if they couldn't buy it - and he had made it clear that he wasn't selling.

No one came into the room when he called and he wondered if anyone was in the house at all. But he had heard voices, he was almost certain he had heard voices. He could turn his head and he did so, surveying the room, looking for a window or one of those one-way glass devices that looked like a mirror.

It was a nicely decorated room, if you liked the modern minimalist style.  It looked like it could be someone's real bedroom, but somehow he doubted it. It was just a clever duplicate, made to resemble a comfortable home and to put who ever they usually kept in here at ease. They were probably watching him through one of their one-way mirrors right now.  

He suddenly remembered Maddy again, and felt a pang of fear. He wondered if she had been taken, too. He wondered if she was safe. And he began to fret and worry and he had to bite his lip to keep himself from crying.

Power Source - This is the Outline Scenario for this Sci fi story

A power company teams up with an evil venture capital company to mine what appears to be an unlimited power source from another dimension. 

This other dimension was discovered by the cosmophysicists of the mid 21st Century, but was tippy top clearance - level 11, and only  a few knew about it.  Max was one of them - and he is the one who is about to sell his mining plan to another power company.  

Oh, yeah, we have run out of power sources by now after nearly destroying the planet with our carbon induced Global Warming, but at least we have reduced the population a bit.  Max is kidnapped by the forces of evil... who want the monopoly on the new power source.

Powers of evil forget that they need Maddy, Max's wife, to force him to do what they want, so they manufacture videos of her and pretend she is being held captive.

Maddy herself goes on the run with the dogbot, K9-5.

The evil ones plan to set up a power station somewhere in New Mexico.  No one is to know where the power is coming from. All Hush Hush

Problem – MAX gets the power coming in – All is fantastic for the forces of evil and even life as we know it seems pretty damn good - but something in this dimension has to be traded for that power – substituted – like mass for mass.  Turns out this other dimension begins to extract their missing energy from the Sun.

Temperature and weather changes begin to occur.

And meanwhile Max's wife, Maddy, and their dogbot, K9-5 are planning a rescue mission for Max.

POWER SOURCE - Chapter 3 - Danger - by Carlos Repuesto de la Table

          There was an empty space on the desk where Max's PC always was. Always. He never moved it, never brought it to work, and I know how important it is to him. He doesn't trust the communal storage at work and he would never, god forbid, use the Cloud, so he routes all his data here, to his PC. 
          Oh, God, we should have been so much more careful with our security here!

          K9 was trotting around the desk, sniffing the air, his ears pricked up and turning on their gyros, trying to collate the information and figure out what went wrong. He finally stopped, cocked his head to one side and turned his glittering eyes on me. "Phone Max." was all he said.

          But there was no answer when I called Max on his cell. Even if he was in his lab, he would always answer his cell phone.  He always takes my calls, even if only to let me know he can't talk right now. Maybe the server was down, I thought hopefully.  I would have try to call him through the University switchboard. My mind went blank, and I had to turn to K9, who was sitting motionless beside me now, "Max's University line?" I asked.

          His eyes darkened for less than a second, then " 415 328 7999" 

          I rang the number and someone at the reception picked up, "SF University Science Lab, Emma speaking."

          “Hi, Emma, please, can you connect me with Max Green”

         After several long minutes, during which I paced the room about a thousand times with K9 watching me curiously, the voice came back: “I'm sorry Mr Green is not in right now.”

          “What do you mean, he's not in?  Has he been in? Have you seen him this morning?”

          “Mr Green has not reported in at all today”

          Oh, my god, now I was really getting worried. 
         "Please, Emma, will you have him call his wife as soon as does get in? Thank you." and I hung up and stared down at K9.

          "Max isn't at the University" I reported, and K9 began to go through his collating mode again, his ears twirling and his eyes dark. Then he stopped and trotted around the Max's desk again, and looked up at me, his eyes glittering, 
          "Probable incident. Data Compromised. Max in Danger. Roxie in Danger. Shift to level 5, evacuation protocol, at once." 

          He was right. This wasn't good. Max should have been at the University at least an hour ago. I wondered, just for a moment if I had forgotten something. If Max could have taken his computer himself and just gone off to meet someone? No, impossible. Not without telling me -and not without informing K9, who was programmed to detect changes in routine. 

          But "Level 5" was pretty extreme. Still, I knew what K9 meant.  There might be real danger here. The project Max was working on was worth a lot of money. But was it really "compromised?" Was the danger real?  I wondered if I should call the police... but, no, that wasn't part of the protocol, you never know exactly who they are working for, but in a case like this, you can be damn sure it's not you.

          If only we had taken more precautions. If only... Oh we were stupid, so stupid...Why had I turned the bot off before going to bed? And Max...

          Where, oh where was Max? I suddenly felt scared and alone. I sat down in Max's office chair and tried to think.  I had to collect my thoughts. K9 looked at me with his head cocked to one side. "Level 5" he repeated, but he could see that I was shivering, and he changed his mode, and trotted over and sat down beside me, leaning his small metal body against my legs. He turned his heating element up a notch. For a few moments, I felt safe and warm. It would be a long time until I felt that way again.

POWER SOURCE - Chapter 2 - Extraction

          We got him. It was easy.  A perfectly discreet extraction. He made it easy for us, living in that ridiculous house. We'd been watching him for the past year. Ever since he applied for the grant. We followed him on his move down to San Francisco and it was easy to set up surveillance in that house of his.

          All the new builds are plastiment - and they usually come with an option for debugging. We would have gotten in just the same, only not quite so easy. But this was, as they say, a piece of cake.  We could have picked him up on the road, but we needed those last pieces of intel he kept locked away at home. So we waited until he was ready.

          Then they always foolishly turn off their dogbot at night. We had overheard them debating this issue.  He wanted to save the batteries and she didn't like being woken up by the dog barking every time a pinecone fell on the roof. So smart and yet so stupid.

          He works late often, had to, he was close to finishing his designs, but he always came home to check his data.  He kept his intel at home; he didn't want anyone in the University knowing what he knew, so he kept it in a secure PC in the house.

          His wife is usually asleep when he comes home late, but she always wakes up and they chat a bit and watch some streams before going to bed. Then he gets up before she does, takes a look through his files, checks that its all there, and heads back to campus with the sunrise. We picked him up last night when he had just sat down at his work station.  All we had to do was drop by with our Steletto.

          We had already reprogrammed his window locks, so getting in was not a problem, and used our "Silence is Golden" femmebot to make the extraction.  Not even the dogbot detected her.  A tranquilliser dart and sturdy net and out the window and into the Steletto - and now we have him all to ourselves.  Max and his data and designs, and no one is the wiser.

POWER SOURCE - Chapter 1 - Mute

          When I woke up this morning, he was gone.  That's not so unusual, so I wasn't worried yet.  I turned on the dogbot and the coffee machine and walked down to the beach with K9-5.  All our dogbots have been named K9. It's not very original, but we still have a soft part in our hearts for that old Dr Who relic of the 20th century.

          Actually, for scientists, we keep a lot of old relics around. That's one thing we've always had in common. The love of antiquities, old music, old books, old robots.

We lived in an old house, too, made of wood, still standing after the great earthquake and tsunami of '34. It's in Stinson Beach, just outside of what was left of San Francisco.

          The house was built on a hill on solid bedrock overlooking the bay and the earthquake only shook it up a little bit and the flood waters just ran right through it, so in '59, when Max and I relocated to the University of San Francisco, it was selling cheap. No one wanted an old fashioned  wooden house anymore, just Max and me.

          It was low tide and the beach was deserted as usual.  I threw some pieces of drift wood for K9 like I always do. Its hilarious to watch him navigate through the sand dunes. Sand may not be the best thing for a machine, but he has special fans that blow the sand right out of his joints and it hasn't hurt him yet.

          He usually springs up and catches the wood before it even begins to descend. He always catches it, no matter how hard I try to trick him. He has sensors that predict the exact arc the stick will take, and sensors that pinpoint the spot he will grab it out of the air.

          He's sensitive all right, so its my fault that I did not realise something was wrong when we got back to the house.  First of all, I forgot that I had him on mute, so while I was making myself a bowl of cereal, he kept annoying me by clattering back and forth between Max's study and the kitchen and bumping into the back of my thigh with his cold metallic nose. I finally realised he was trying to tell me something, and strolled into the sitting room to pick up the remote control I had left next to the X-stream Machine.  I took him off mute.

          "Problem detected. Room 3, Max's study. Suspected theft." He announced immediately, and pranced off down the hall.

        K9's are always pretty terse, but his message was clear and I fairly flew to Max's study. The door was unlocked. Max's PC was gone. He never takes it with him. I began to feel sick to my stomach.