söndag 3 april 2011
The Emperor Protects
onsdag 26 januari 2011
Part IV
The flares reached the bottom and he was stunned. He peered out on a cityscape much larger than the scanners had picked up but what astonished him most was that almost every building was intact. The streets were clean and tidy and the statues that escorted them on each side looked as if they were made recently. Boutique windows sported fashion wares and vehicles stood parked at the pavement. It was almost as Victor expected to see people walking about, doing their daily business. He was hanging over a large building that must have been the water reservoir and he lowered himself down on its roof. He immediately started taking caps for the archives and his amazement bounced from a library building to something that looked like a theatre to a glowing object far in the distance. If there was light, there was a power source, he thought, and then there was probably someone who maintained that source.
His curiousness turned into shadowy caution; if somebody lived here they would already be aware of his presence, after all, his excavator were everything except noiseless. The roof buckled under his exo-rigg burdened weight and he thought it a good idea to secure the lift and move further into the habitat. He probably should have returned to the surface and brought down some security equipment but his curiousness got the better of him and he skulked, as quietly as a quarter of a ton equipped Tech-Lord could, down into the darkness.
The air was stale and Victor felt like a ghost when he stalked the dead streets. No dust covered the benches along the way and it seemed like the whole habitat where in some kind of stasis. The trees in the parks had not shed their leaves, instead they had a thin white film around them and he reached out with one of the maniple arms to pick one and study it but it was instantly crushed by the crude gripper. He tried to take other less fragile samples and many objects were made out of an odd looking metal and he stood for a while and considered a waste bin when something slid around the corner of a building behind him. Heavy duty, back mounted, light caster immediately illuminated the spot where he had heard something but to no avail. He primed the pneumatic geo-crusher in his tool arsenal and ran to meet whatever lurked around the bend.
måndag 3 januari 2011
How to Forget the Unexplainable
Ivan stepped out from the front door of Dan’s apartment building and was met by the crisp, almost sharp, cold air in his face and he shuddered as it crept down the collar of his jacket and under his shirt. He tied his scarf tighter and drew the zipper all the way up to his chin and plunged into the dark of the night. Dan had won almost every battle they had fought in King of Fighters that night as usual and Ivan had stopped being mad a long time ago and accepted that Dan was the better of the two, although he himself never played the game. They had talked about movies and games as they always did and the time had been poured into their glasses of Dr Pepper and into the bowls of candy. Before they knew, it was ten minutes past two in the morning and Ivan was about to go home but was stopped by Dan that surprised him with an uncharacteristically grim expression on his face.
‘What is it?’ Ivan asked.
‘Nothing man, I was just kidding.’ He said and laughed.
‘Shit, I thought somebody had died or something.’
‘See you tomorrow man.’ Dan said and patted Ivan on shoulder.
He picked up a handful of snow and tried to make a ball out of it but it just fell out of his hand when he tried to form it. He lived a few kilometres from Dan and he was forced to wander through a small park on his way home and he was ready to admit to himself that he was scared to walk there alone. The dried leaves crackled from underneath the snow when he walked among the bare, skeleton-like, trees. He couldn’t see anyone, usually he saw people taking their dogs for a walk when he biked home, and he turned his head to peek through the tall trees. A few lamp posts shone in the distance but the lamps inside the park where all broken. He passed a small playground with a see-saw and a pair of tyre-swings and he kicked one of them so that the chains rattled. It was the only sound he could hear. He was making all the sounds. He walked on and heard the tyre swing lightly from his kick. And then it just stopped. He turned around and saw the absolutely motionless swing and it was like he had never touched it. He stood there for a minute and watched it then he turned around to keep on walking. A pair of red glowing eyes stared at two metres from where he stood. He screamed instantly and fell backwards in the snow, his heart ready to explode. There it stood, perfectly still. A tall, pitch black, wraith-like shape with two glaring red eyes, stared at him. He started to hyperventilate. The shape didn’t move and Ivan clawed at the ground behind him to find something to hold on to but there was nothing to grab except, the icy, powder snow. Minutes went by and he was forced to calm down or else he would faint, it wasn’t until then he heard the low, gurgling, sound like a thick fluid running through a drain coming from the dark form. This wasn’t his mind; this wasn’t a dream, but he could not believe it, yet this creature was right in front of him. The moment stretched out and grabbed hold of all his other thoughts, and the only thing left was the black tormentor. That’s what he felt, torture to his head, to his mind. Something unreal that was about to break itself into his wall of reason and wreak ruin inside. It took one step forward and a second wave of terror fell over Ivan and he closed his eyes. Through his eyelids he could see the red glow from the creature’s eyes and he dared not open his own. It was close now; the sound had come closer and a strong smell of burnt skin had joined it. He inhaled deep and opened his eyes and screamed again. It sat hulked over him with a pair of enormous leather wings extended around him. It rose to its full height, that must have been over two and a half metres, and it flapped its wings in a slow motion. It looked like it was about to lift of the ground and then it vanished.
He blinked but it was still gone. He had now lain on the ground for fifteen minutes after the creature’s disappearance. It was a quarter to three. The encounter had only lasted for three minutes but to Ivan it seemed like it was another year entirely. This feeling stayed with him until the sharpness of the image started to fade and he brought himself to his feet. All of this was too much for his brain to handle so it decided to shut down and ignore it all. Following his brains instructions he walked the rest of the way home and went to bed and fell asleep almost instantly.
He woke up from a dreamless sleep, or at least he couldn’t remember what he had dreamt and it seemed like a regular Wednesday morning. Then it returned to him. First he saw the image of the creature as he remembered it; the red eyes, the black shape and the bat-like wings. He first doubted that it had been real but something like this had never happened to him. He paced around in his room and grabbed a pair of pants and threw them away again. He didn’t do drugs and he didn’t drink much, if that would have had any affect. He sat down on a chair he never used to sit on, filled with clothes, and buried his face in the palm of his hands. It had been real, what he had seen had been real. He couldn’t decide. Was he sick? Was it a hallucination? There where many possibilities he thought, many explanations. He went to his computer and googled: Dark figure, red eyes and wings. What he found was mostly ghost stories and ridiculous tales of aliens that attacked farmers and little children. No this was something more, something he could have touched if he dared stretch out his hand. He watched out the window and noticed that it wasn’t snowing and he could see his own footsteps from last night. He could prove it now; he knew a way to prove if it was his mind or if he had been visited by a nameless being. He put on some clothes and went outside without tying his shoes and ran the same way he had walked home last night. He forgot the freezing cold as he ran, following his own footsteps in the snow, all the way back to the park and to the spot where it had happened.
What he saw there gave him no relief, although it cemented the fact that he was not crazy. He could clearly see the traces in the snow where he had thrown himself backwards. And you could also see large imprints in the snow leading up to his fall and the traces of the wings being dragged behind the creature’s footprints, but nothing that lead up to its initial spot or from where it had disappeared. He almost wished that he was insane; that it had been a ghost of his mind. To think that such things existed added a whole new ungraspable perspective. Suddenly a strong sense of paranoia gripped him and he turned his head quickly in all direction searching with his eyes. What if it returned? What would it do to him? Until yesterday he hadn’t really known fear, what it meant to dread something that resembled pure terror. He wanted to tell someone, anyone, what had happened to him. There was no question that they wouldn’t believe him. What if all the stories where true, and people just didn’t believe them. He wouldn’t before yesterday, hell; he almost didn’t believe himself now. What had happened to all those people? They had been ridiculed and made fun of and no good happened to them. Were it more people still, which held their secrets within their hearts as they knew they wouldn’t be believed? Was this the way to go from here? He slumped down into the snow. He knew that he never could explain it to himself or anyone else. What good would it bring him to tell his mom, or his dad, or even Dan? He decided not to tell a soul about his experience and before he left he erased the only trace that existed and went home.
He had spent the first two weeks regretting that he had removed the prints in the snow. At times he just wanted to scream it out at the dinner table, while his parents talked about the unusually high priced Christmas threes. But he didn’t and his secret caused him to mostly spend the nights thinking about red rays of light piercing through his window blinds. With the help of sleeping pills he had returned to sleeping after five weeks of insomnia but the paranoia persisted. He attended school but his friends stopped calling him as he became reclusive and went home directly after school, and more often than not before the classes were over. He had never talked much to his parents so they didn’t notice any considerable change in his behaviour, and that was a relief to him. He had come the point, many times, where he just thought over the moment over and over again until he snapped out of it. In brighter moments he rethought his strategy and gradually the outcome of those thinking moments turned into a decision to forget it. How else would he return to a life where dark monsters did not exist? If he was to stay sane he could not obsess about eyes watching him from a distance. After all, the rational thing to do was to forget and move on. The creature hadn’t harmed him, in fact he had always thought it was out to hurt him but when he replayed the events that had happened that night one more time with a different set of eyes he realised that he didn’t knew what it wanted. He had focused on it as a tormentor, a punisher. Maybe it was not. After that afternoon he felt much better and instead of thinking about it in a negative way he was finally free to think of the other things this might mean. What other things was out there. That the creature was supernatural was without doubt as it had appeared and disappeared without a trace.
Ivan sat in his room and wrote in a notebook, with homework papers strewn around on his desk. His cell phone rang and he answered as he laid himself back on the chair.
‘Joe, what’s up?
‘Are we still up for tomorrow?
‘Sure man, bring a controller and I’ll buy the snacks.’
‘Nice, see you tomorrow.’
Ivan hanged up and felt at ease. Some more homework to do he thought, better get on it. His mother knocked on the door.
‘Ivan, do you want some sandwiches? Were making some now, come to the kitchen if you want one.’
‘Nah, that’s all right mum, Dan’s coming any second.’
‘Okay then, have fun sweetie.’
He looked forward to get beaten by Dan again; it was a year since that night, since they had last played. But he was late, typical Dan. Someone banged at the door and Ivan went to the door and opened. Dan rushed in and slammed the door behind him and moved into Ivan’s room without taking off his shoes or jacket.
‘What’s going on,’ Ivan asked.
Dan didn’t respond immediately but threw off his jacket and sat down in the clothes filled chair.
‘I saw...’ he began and then went silent.
‘You saw what?’ Ivan asked but knew the answer.
onsdag 15 december 2010
Part III
It was beautiful. He had been forced to remove quite a bit of hull plating to remove the object from valve one and he was now admiring it where it lay in the sand fending of warm rays of light with its shiny, metallic, surface. The object was circular in shape and Victors sensors measured it to be exactly 95,78 centimetres in diameter, and was slightly bent in the middle so it resembled a cupola. Curious markings trailed on the edge of the object and he guessed it was some sort of text and took a few caps of it from different angles that were sent directly to his onboard personal archives for later study. A bronze coloured stone peeked out in the sand a few metres away and he walked over to it and picked it up. It was a ventifact, a stone shaped by the combination of windblown sand and a lot of time and he identified the rock type as a katarite, a very hard stone that was used in the base of tall buildings. Even this exceptionally solid stone couldn’t stay unaffected by the sand as it had been shaped into a geometrical figure with smooth sides. Such a stone was rare and Victor found it to be curious that this hard stone had been reshaped but the ancient cupola had not even after thousands of years in the desert. He peered out over the dunes and saw an agitated cloud of blistering sand to the west and consulted his sensors about the coming weather conditions and it advised him to get inside if he didn’t want to be buried alive by the oncoming storm and be discovered by a passer-by a thousand years from now, and taken as an ancient artefact himself.
‘Shut all vents and hatches,’ he said but did not get any response from the computer. ‘Shut all vents and hatches,’ he repeated but still got no response. ‘Shut all vents and hatches,’ he roared and the computer finally responded by beginning to close all openings in the excavator vehicle. Sometimes he just wanted to break the computer by bringing down his fists into its core systems, but he never got that far. It was not reasonable as his small moment of satisfaction by destroying the machinery was outweighed by the hours of hard labour it would take to repair it afterwards. Besides, if he would demolish something every time his machinery failed to operate correctly, he would not have any fists left to bring down upon them. Back in his vault he placed his ancient finding on a workbench but did not proceed to study it, instead he climbed down to the cargo hold as he remembered something. He had found an object similar to this approximately three months ago. As he put in a commando on a nearby console, the storage crate that the other cupola was placed in appeared before him, trough shifting of the broad shelves where he stored his artefacts. He picked it up and it had similar markings on its edge and some kind of hinge at one side. He now knew what it was.
torsdag 18 november 2010
Part II
Many years earlier
After three years in exile, Victor had almost run out of drinkable fluids and had been fortunate enough to find a source of water. The ground scanners had picked up an underground well in the middle of nowhere and he had immediately deployed the geo observation probes for further inspection. They had reported back with findings of an underground lake, several hundred meters below the surface. Strange as that had sounded to Victor, something even stranger would come to reveal itself. The cave lake was not a natural formation, but an artificial water reservoir, designed to hold volumes of water equal to the needs of a major habitat district. He had run it through the onboard archives but no records of any colonisation expeditions out in the deserts had been found and certainly not any of single reservoir constructions. He had spent the next twelve hours contemplating this in one of the dark, empty, cargo chambers, as he always had done when he had discovered something monumental. Planning on how to proceed was of utmost importance, and he wasn’t sure what this finding could mean. Usually he was satisfied with sitting behind a monitor to direct and observe but something pushed him this time. The feeling of that this was something rare, extraordinary intrigued him and it felt like a calling of sorts. He decided to descend himself down the tunnels the probes had dug out of the sand.
As he put on an exo-rigg, and primed its maniple arms and sensors, he felt very comfortable and safe. This was strange because the rigg itself weighed over a quarter ton, but it gave him the strength that was necessary to bear it and to carry out the heavy labour the deeps had in store for him. He thought back on the times when he had commanded vast legions of mine and factory workers, and how they had carried out the dangerous task he was about to perform on a daily basis. Shuttling down a two by four hundred meter long tunnel, with only a thin wall of melted rock as barrier between him and millions of tons of sand wasn’t a thing he was used to but he couldn’t ignore the calling that this unknown archaeological discovery whispered to him. What secrets of knowledge did it have in store, what history lay in its past? His curiousness outstripped his sense of danger and he secured himself in the elevator and descended down underground. After a hundred meters his fears started to leave him and return to the surface and his back-mounted lightcasters, as well as his eyes, stared down the tunnel.
The cage stopped and hanged a few metres down from the breach, in the caverns ceiling, where he was free to look in all directions. The cavity was apparently enormous as the lightcasters wasn’t enough to penetrate the darkness. He shot a few rocket flares and suddenly all was revealed to him.