300 WORD WRITING CHALLENGE #18 -- VICTORY TO REMEDY!

[Perpetual Man]

Ashes to the Winds

No-one knew where it had come from.

Was it alien or something borne of this Earth?

There was no easy answer but the one certainty was uncertainty. Everyone had a theory, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Yet they all agreed on one thing. It was beautiful.

It (or was it they?) rose (grew?) from the ground like the inverted roots of a great tree, twisted, entwined lengths of what appeared to be some form of carbon. In the sun it seemed grey, polished to a perfect sheen. In other lights it was a black as midnight, unnerving.

After the initial appearance people did not seem bothered by it, in fact it became a tourist magnet, they took photos with it, ate picnics under it, even got married under it.

And if it grew a bit, day by day, who noticed?

Until light ignited within the tubes, brilliant golden, twists and turns, veins of fire… and it moved.

Whatever it touched, grass and plants, transformed rapidly transmuting into something similar, dark filled with light… then it consumed them, causing the vegetation to wither and crumble to ash.

The more it destroyed the faster it grew.

Small animals and insects followed. Then humans.

The faster it consumed the larger it became, the bigger it was the faster it devoured.

Scientists called it the perfect killing organism. A transformative wave that destroyed what it touched only after consuming it. Anything organic was a source of food. Worse some humans it left in an intermediate stage, semi-organic zombies that spread the infection.

Time ticks away.

375 days is what they give us. Little more than a year. Then everything will be gone.

The Earth as dead as Mars.

A failed warning.

Ultimately the things we don’t understand will kill us.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Budding Enterprise


The bulldozers are coming. They must want this little concrete clearing for another building. Even at this moment, a thoughtless child tugs at me. The pain stabs at my heart as a twig rips free, and she skips off, squealing in delight. But no one notices, no one cares. It took me three moons to muster the energy to send out that twig, that little sprout of green hope, and she casts it aside in favor of a shiny bottle cap.

The city has become unbearable, unlivable, yet still the humans build, and pave, and pollute.

I am the last of my kind for as far as I can stretch my senses. Am I the last of my kind in all the world? Sometimes I think I hear my sisters, sighing on the wind, but it could be my desperate hope talking instead.

The city looms on every side; metal, concrete, plastic and glass are my new forest, and the humans are their spirits. Blind spirits, who work against each other in greed and cannot see the harmony they destroy. Most of my branches have given their life, sent their sap to the core to foster enough energy for that little, green sprout, while each sprout of the humans works only for itself, and yet it is they who are the stronger; they who will survive.

The shining rays of morning glint off the bulldozers, illuminate men with shovels. Is this the end of me?

No, they carefully tear out all the concrete in my clearing. My roots stretch tentatively free.

On the wind, I hear confusion, struggle, and then joy.

A young hamadryad — my new sister — and her sapling, happily planted.

And they’re digging more holes. More glorious holes.

 

[Moonbat]

The In-Screwed-Tempo-Mental Blues


The blunder café was so jazz that feet are obscured by a heavy fog, not like the blues bars I'm used to. He sat shimmering by the kit in a blue suit and hat, filling every gap with poly-rhythmic fills. I wanted to play with him, to curl around that beat and fall into its groove. I joined in and got lost in the form, in the maze of edges and circles. When I awoke from my musical trip I was meeting Claude as we powered away from my planet into the night of stars.


Claude wasn't a typical intellagent, Claude needed music. Claude could create anything; sonatas, orchestral movements, free-form, hard-cool-bop and more, but Claude lacked the ability to jam. Claude always said real musical expression could only come from diasporids. Claude was the conductor, we were the instruments, the orchestra. It started with some simple surgery to give my thumb an extra knuckle; helping me reach and play those distant notes, the fleeting ones that seem to slip in and get lost before they're fully formed. I became a better musician, I should have known it wouldn't stop there.


We landed in Galaxtonbury field yesterday, the rain was heavy and claustrophobic. I was wheeled out and anchored on stage. Claude's avatars fussed around me. Sound check is always painful, as painful as silence. I live to play, to become part of the song. I'm sewn into the beat. It runs through me and forces out noises. I'm not a musician any more I'm an instrument. Playing a few eccentric chords that only an ex-diasporid can express. With Claude's orchestra its always jazz; painful, disharmonious, aleatoric jazz. I miss home. I miss my hands. I miss playing the blues.

 

[The Judge]

The Silver Sweetbriar


Once, long ago, in the land beyond the seas, there lived a silversmith. From every country people came to gaze at the wonders he devised; envoys from kings and emperors vied to purchase each masterpiece.

Delicate the chalices he created, intricate the three-masted nefs for royal salt, but not in these lay his renown, for he had learned to give life to his creations: silver fish swam in silver oceans; silver bees supped on silver flowers; silver birds sang in silver trees.

The silversmith’s greatest delight was his daughter, Eglantine. But as she grew in beauty, the people who came from every country gazed less at his silver creations than at his child; the envoys vied not for his works, but for his daughter’s smile.

The silversmith grew afraid, and the silver fish no longer swam in silver oceans, but were caught in silver nets. He brooded, and the silver bees remained inside their silver hives. He fretted how to keep his daughter safe, and the silver birds mourned in silver cages.

The briars came slowly, silver stems pushing through the earth. In his mind he saw the silver thorns catching at the people, ripping at the envoys; he saw the silver brambles twining into nets, arching above the workshop like a hive. He saw his daughter, silvery pale, unsmiling, inside a cage.

The silversmith took his hammer. He smashed the nets, he smashed the hives, he smashed the cages. He smashed the briars. One bramble alone he let survive, growing against his workshop so he would never forget.


They say his daughter herself later learned the silversmith’s art and created children of her own. And people still go to gaze at wonders, envoys still buy each masterpiece, and birds still sing amid the roses of the silver sweetbriar.

 

[Fitzchiv]

Guilt

The way we tell it is in the eyes of the many the Guilt arrived on a Thursday; for some the day got dark, for others it never got light. Governments knew well ahead, of course. Four hundred miles of hand wrought man-shaped black iron don’t just creep through the solar system without being spotted, and when it arrived they’d long since disappeared underground.

It took forty months to tear ourselves apart. Guilt sat in stationary orbit, perennially blocking out the sun; an eclipsing effigy of our own futility stamped deep into the sky. Crops died and order failed, cities crumbled and religion festered.

Somehow the Russians had been out of the loop, their leaders stuck above ground like us. Siberia bloomed under flickering payloads heaving toward Guilt; grains of crystallised futility winking their way into the endlessly black form. The long winter had sunk its roots deep; every man was for nothing, let alone himself.

Not many remember Guilt’s fall, nor its impact near old Chicago. Even less, whether one last guttering flame limped from the east causing it. Moments of sweet blindingly unfettered sun tormented the alert, before damp months of dust-born shade set in.

That real darkness is when the Sacrifices were chosen. Fifty men from god knows where; the last good boots, faltering courage, rations enough for one way. They’d visit the corpse and end it, somehow. No one questioned how.

Ten days from ankle to ear, through pipework hair, over rust-bubbled scabs. No one’s sure what drove them to the head, but hopelessness is sure. Of the Fifty who dropped into the ear canal, only one crawled out – wax smothered, broken, whispering in the voice of a thousand modems:

“HE IS GUILT. HE WILL DELIVER US, IF WE ASK.”

We asked.

 

[Ursa major]

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Decision Tree​

The reclusive sculptor arrives and my suspicions – my hopes – are proved correct. Though she’s heavily disguised, her nose and eyes give her away: Sophia. I knew she hadn’t died in that accident. I have to speak with her.

By closing time, the crowds have gone and I’m hiding within a knot of the branches for which the sculpture is renowned. The great, brushed aluminium tree reaches up, in places meeting the inner surface of the hemispherical building that forms its gallery.

The lights dim until all is dark. I wait, wanting to be found by Sophia, not a member of her staff.

“Who are you?” Her voice, deep and quiet, gives me the shivers?

“Your greatest admirer.”

“Ah, a fool.”

“But you saved us,” I say, “over and over again.”

“Yet doomed us all.” The lights come on. “Do you see the red flowers?”

They cover the tree. “Yes…?”

“They signify death,” she says.

“I know: deaths avoided. The alien device let us avoid all those disasters, kept us to the path of survival. Each one of the myriad branches touching the dome is a crisis you steered us through. Only you knew how to use the device to see all those parallel universes, to see where our other selves had made mistakes, ones we might avoid.”

“You don’t understand. The ceiling is our extinction horizon. The device was a test, a trap. Using it revealed us to be unworthy of existence. Follow me.”

We walk to where the great tree emerges from the ground. The sculpture’s name, UTILITY, is written up the trunk.

Sophia clears earth from the bottom of the tree, revealing a thin wire terminating in a withered, blue flower – “Not using the device: our only route to survival” – and the sculpture’s full title, FUTILITY.

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[Ursa major]

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