Project: Magnus

Over on G+ Bliss Mor­gan put up a chal­lenge where peo­ple had to make a story from the phrase And if by noon I'm blub­ber­ing like a baby, I'll be scream­ing your name and beg­ging you to save me

This is my take :)

"What the hell is that idiot doing now?"

Michaels chuck­led to him­self as the Com­man­der walked into the obser­va­tion deck. "He's cel­e­brat­ing, or com­mis­er­at­ing, or com­muning… I for­get what word he actu­ally used, it started with a 'c' however."

"Okay," said the Com­man­der as he stopped in front of the floor to ceil­ing win­dow to watch the float­ing fig­ure, "did he say why?"

Michaels took a seat in the lounge couch, sink­ing into the overly soft cush­ions and feel­ing deca­dent as he did so, "He's explained it to me sev­eral times, but to be fair, I don't under­stand it. It's the anniver­sary of the death of his wife and son."

The Com­man­der turned to glare at Michaels. "And what exactly does that have to do with him float­ing away from the sta­tion with no tether! He's going to get him­self killed and us sued!"

"On this day every year he makes arrange­ments so that he is in space, on a sta­tion or dock or some­thing like that. Never a ship. Once he did a cruise liner but it was docked so I'm not sure it counts."

"Once? That crazy Russ­ian has done this before?"

"Every year on this date for the past fif­teen years. Ever since the base he was sta­tioned on was attacked and they were all vented into space." Michaels crossed his legs and smiled. "He puts on a suit and stands in an air­lock. At pre­cisely 12:24 in the morn­ing he opens the lock doors and just floats out. He then drifts there for four hours before moving."

Com­man­der Reynolds leaned back against the thick view­port glass and ran a hand through his hair as he watched sev­eral crew mem­bers walk across the view­ing area.

"I'm going to regret ask­ing, but then what?"

Michaels stood up, regret­ful to leave behind the com­fort­able couch and walked over to stand beside the Com­man­der. He put his hand on the glass , "Then he does what­ever he can, short of call­ing for help, to get back to safety."

"And what if he isn't able to make it back? We just let him die?"

"He said not to retrieve him unless and until he speaks the safe phrase."

Com­man­der Reynolds sighed, "And what might that phrase be?"

"And I quote 'And if by noon I'm blub­ber­ing like a baby, I'll be scream­ing your name and beg­ging you to save me'. Hon­estly, I have no idea what it means," Michaels said throw­ing up his arms in a defen­sive pos­ture, "but appar­ently those were the first words he said when the res­cue team found him."

"And he does this every year? Recre­ates the event and cir­cum­stances of that event."

Michaels turned around and leaned against the win­dow as well, fold­ing his arms across his chest as he did, "Every sin­gle year."

The Com­man­der stepped away, shov­ing his hands in his pock­ets. "Why? What's the point? What point does it serve to put him­self in dan­ger every year?"

"Maybe he's just remind­ing him­self of how close he came to dying. Or maybe he's angling for a Sec­tion 8. Who knows."

"Well, at least he comes by that 'Mad Russ­ian' nick­name honestly."

Michaels sim­ply nod­ded and smiled.

"That… that's fuck­ing disgusting."

"It's fas­ci­nat­ing!"

"Of course you would think that. I'm not sure if that makes you just as dis­gust­ing or just fuck­ing weird."

"Think of the impact this will have on the world Jim. It will change every­thing we know about biol­ogy and neuroscience!"

"The only impact I'm think­ing about that of my lunch hit­ting the floor when I throw it up."

"Oh don't be such a baby. It's not that bad."

"Not that bad? Not that bad! You have his head cut open and his fuck­ing brain is full of worms. How is that not bad?"

"Well, for starters, his brains isn't full of these worms. It's made of them."

"Come again?"

"The brain is actu­ally a mass of worms. A colony if you will. We don't yet know how they com­mu­ni­cate. We do know that a giant ver­sion of the worm server as the spinal cord. You have to admit, it is fascinating."

"No. The only thing I have to admit is that it's disgusting."

"Oh grow up Jim."

"Grow up? You're stand­ing there, with the head of some­one I once knew open and pok­ing around in what use to be his brain and are telling me that they eat his brain and spinal cord and replace them with a giant morass of worms and I'm not sup­posed to be upset or grossed out by that? I knew him Cara! We went to school together and now he's.… fuck, I don't know what he is. He's not him, I know that."

"We aren't sure if they actu­ally eat the brain—"

"Now is not the time to nitpick."

"I'm sorry."

"Noth­ing to be sorry for. You didn't kill him or remove his brain or replace it with… those. Just look­ing at that thing… mov­ing, writhing like that is mak­ing me queasy.

Look, just bot­tom line it for me, do you know how to iden­tify these things yet? Or bet­ter yet, kill them?"

"No. But I'm work­ing on it."

Power.

I learned at an early age that it would be my weak­ness, my undo­ing. At least in the eyes of 'civ­i­lized' soci­ety. I got my first taste of it way back in 5^th grade when I had been appointed class mon­i­tor while the teacher when to lunch or a meet­ing or some­thing. The pure joy I got at being in con­trol of my fel­low stu­dents fate intox­i­cated me. I had the power to cause oth­ers to get deten­tion or extra home­work or demerits.

Years later I heard the phrase 'Per­cep­tion is real­ity', but I never really under­stood what that meant. Did it mean that what I see is real? What about what oth­ers saw, how did that affect the 'real­ity' I saw? It wasn't until I remem­ber being the class mon­i­tor that it dawned on me. As a mon­i­tor you had no 'real' power, it was all an illu­sion. You had the abil­ity to influ­ence the teacher who could, but in the end it was ulti­mately up to them as to wether or not to dis­ci­pline any­one. But every­one thought it had power. Every­one 'per­ceived' the posi­tion had the power to do all those things.

After that my life path was set. I wanted power and knew that I didn't actu­ally have to have any, just needed to appear to have some. I didn't need power to get oth­ers to do things I wanted, I just had to appear to them that I did have the power. I sim­ply had to alter their per­cep­tion of reality.

Then I found the book.

At first I had no idea what it was, I just knew it was some­thing spe­cial. I could feel it, sense it. That first night I paged through it read­ing the list of names and what turned out to be their man­ner of death but at the time I didn't know that. I rec­og­nized some of the words as ail­ments and sick­nesses and oth­ers were things like car crash and infec­tion. Some were quite lengthy, one even describ­ing in inti­mate detail the man­ner in which some­one had died includ­ing when and where.

I keep using the past tense but that's incor­rect. I ulti­mately learned that the death descrip­tions were not in fact how they had died, but rather how they would die. The book pre­dicted the death of the per­son listed. But again, I didn't know this when I first found the book. All that would come later, and at a fairly high price.

I began research­ing the names listed and even­tu­ally learned that the man­ner of death listed was in fact the man­ner in which each per­son had died. It meant noth­ing at the time because there was noth­ing to indi­cate it was any­thing other than what it seemed; a book of names and how they died. No dates. No loca­tions. Just the names and how they died.

That was until I looked up the last name. Michael Water­son. He was still alive. In the book he had been listed as hav­ing been killed in a motor­cy­cle acci­dent involv­ing a crane and a water truck. It didn't strike me as odd that it had was so spe­cific because it hadn't been any more spe­cific than any others.

Noth­ing pre­pared me for find­ing out he was alive. At first I began to doubt myself, I had to have picked the wrong Michael Water­son. There had to be more, one that was dead and had died in the man­ner spec­i­fied by the book. I don't remem­ber why it mat­tered so much other than it upset me. So I went back to search­ing. I spent 3 days dig­ging into obits and police reports online from around the state, then the coun­try try­ing to find the right Michael Waterson.

Then, thank­fully, I found him. Except it was the same guy I had located orig­i­nally that was still alive. His obit­u­ary was listed in an online news­pa­per some­where in Ohio. He didn't live in Ohio but rather in Mary­land so why was he listed in Ohio I won­dered. Because he had been trav­el­ing cross coun­try to visit rel­a­tives. And had dri­ven through Ohio, right through a major con­struc­tion zone. A motor­cy­cle had tried to cut across sev­eral lanes of traf­fic, the effect of which was that another dri­ver had tried to avoid the cyclist, plowed into Water­son and dri­ven him off the road.

Into a crane.

And it had hap­pened yesterday.

At first I refused to accept what my brain was telling me, that the book had pre­dicted the death of Michael Water­son. It was insane. A book can't do that.

But peo­ple can.

So maybe some­one else had writ­ten Michaels name and man­ner of death in the book. That too was insane. How would writ­ing that name and death in a book cause some­one to die? It was absurd. Com­pletely and totally absurd.

And yet…

So I decided to try an exper­i­ment. I wrote the name of a some­one I found in the phone­book and beside it I wrote 'fire'. And waited.

I did it for no other rea­son than to prove to myself that the idea was com­pletely absurd. That I was mar­gin­ally insane just for think­ing this could hap­pen, could be real.

Then the guy died when his house caught fire.

Dis­be­lief didn't even begin to describe how I felt. Although I still didn't believe it was any­thing more than a coin­ci­dence. So I did it again, only this time I wrote 'drown in kid­die pool' as the cause of death.

Five days later the obit appear in the local paper. The per­son I had ran­domly selected from the phone book had in fact drown to death in a freak­ing kid­die pool. I did it 3 more time with increas­ingly odds man­ners of death just to prove… some­thing. Anything.

Every sin­gle one came to pass. Every. One.

The book was power. Power over life. Over death. So many ques­tions. So many pos­si­bil­i­ties. I had no taste for death really, the oth­ers had sim­ply been to prove that it was real. I felt a twinge of guilt over each one but I hadn't actu­ally killed them, just writ­ten their name in a book.

I didn't know if that was a legal recourse or not, but I also didn't know how any­one would be able to link things back to me. It's just a book. If any­one found it I could sim­ply say it was a record, a diary of deaths for a project of some kind. I had no idea what kind of project, but wasn't going to worry about it.

How­ever I was insanely curi­ous. Did the deaths have to be sud­den and vio­lent? Could I give some­one can­cer with the book? It seemed like there was a win­dow of five days in which the deaths took place but what about some­thing like leukemia. That took longer than five days.

Could I give some­one the plague? Could I give some­one a dis­ease that they had already been inoc­u­lated against like chicken pox or polio?

What if I wrote down that some­one would die on a train but then tried to shot them before they got on the train, would they die from the gunshot?

Could I sim­ply give some­one a dis­ease that didn't kill? What about one that killed but not a phys­i­cal death? What about some­thing like Parkin­sons? Or alzheimer's?

Could I make some­one else kill another person?

All this ran through my head as I tried to sort things out. I now had real power. I had to pro­tect it, to insure that it would server me.

I decided then to run two more final tests. I had been hav­ing issues with a group of thugs down the street so I decided to have one beat another one to death. I wrote it in the book and added a time and date to see what would happen.

Ten min­utes before the time I had cho­sen I started walk­ing down the street on a path that would take me directly past the group that had been harass­ing some of the locals. In short order an argu­ment started and every­thing began to hap­pen just as I had writ­ten. One started beat­ing the other, blood and teeth fly­ing every­where. I smiled and con­tin­ued walk­ing mak­ing sure not to pay too much attention.

I walked in a cof­fee shop, ordered a drink, sat at a table and took out my new note­book. I smiled to myself as I began to write my fathers name, the man I hated most in my life. Beside his name I wrote a sin­gle word: Alzheimer's.

I was smil­ing the entire time.

(yes, I real­ize the sim­i­lar­ity to the Death­note anime. It's partly what inspired this, and partly the image of the guy smil­ing as he gave his father Alzheimer's)

This came as a result of one of the Lit­er­ary+ writ­ing assignments

Min­erva Chad­wick nee Hawk leaned against the rail­ing at the stern of the Hawk Fam­ily owned and oper­ated Mer­chant Air­ship, the Valor of the Sky. She stared at the writhing scene below, cap­ti­vated by her imag­i­na­tion of what cre­ated the dis­tur­bances she could see.

“Cap­tain, what kind of crea­tures live in the Rift?”

Cap­tain Nicode­mus Hawk handed off the con­trols of the ship to the nav­i­ga­tor and walked over to join Minerva.

“No one knows”, he said look­ing out over the rail­ing, “none of our devices have ever been able to pen­e­trate the clouds that you see, and no one that has ever ven­tured in has ever returned.“

“A bit melo­dra­matic don’t you think Captain?”

“Not if it’s the truth. Why else do you think we still have these mechan­i­cal air­ships? They are the only thing that can go over the Rift. No other elec­tronic device can even get close before it shorts out. Even the ones car­ried in air­ships go dead when they get close to the border. “

“So the field, or what­ever, that dis­able elec­tron­ics extends upward from the surface?”

“For as high as we have been able to explore yes. Some spec­u­late that it extends out­side the atmos­phere itself and into space.”

“Is that possible?”

“You are the one with the sci­en­tific mind Min­erva, you tell me, “ the Cap­tain smiled, “The only other thing I can tell you is that humans can­not stay too long near the Rift with­out get­ting very sick.”

“Almost like what­ever shuts off the devices is try­ing to shut off the body as well?”

“That is a good way to look at it.”

“How very inter­est­ing. How very inter­est­ing indeed. I would very much like to know what could sur­vive in that environment.”

“If any­one can find out, I believe it is you.”

Wal­ter stood still. Com­pletely. Absolutely. Still.

He lis­tened very care­fully and heard noth­ing. Clos­ing his eyes he tried to remem­ber what he had read in the mag­a­zines about expand­ing his senses.

Even­tu­ally he heard it, the tini­est of pings as some­thing very tiny jumped.

Wal­ter opened his eyes and spun around, bring­ing the vac­uum wand up in a two-​​handed grip as if he were a bar­bar­ian wield­ing a giant broadsword. He kicked out with is left foot, switched on the machine and per­formed a semi-​​perfect two handed lunge.

Stand­ing up again he flicked off the machine and lis­tened again. Imme­di­ately he heard it, thou­sands of tiny pings com­ing from behind him.

He whirled, flipped on the machine and charged into the bed­room with a mag­i­cal grin on his face, deter­mined to finally erad­i­cate the Space Fleas.

“I am look­ing for a piece of the Matrix.”

“A piece of a matrix? Why come to me with this?”, asked Talos as he

“Not a matrix.”

“Wait, you are look­ing for ‘the’ matrix? The World Matrix?,” Talos asked laugh­ing, “Son, thats just a leg­end. A fairy tale told to young bots to get them to sleep. It is not real.”

Aneil shifted in his seat. He was becom­ing most decid­edly uncom­fort­able with the laugh­ing the old shaman bot was doing at his expense. He had been to the Dark Con­ti­nent sev­eral time in the past as a researcher and infor­ma­tion gath­erer. He had per­formed his duties well enough that he had been assigned Lead Researcher for the Noble Project, which was where he had encoun­tered the leg­end of the Matrix.

At first he had dis­missed it as just another crazy story just as the shaman had, but the more research he did for the Noble project the more he dis­cov­ered ref­er­ences to the ancient leg­end. So many so that he had began to won­der if there might actu­ally be some­thing to it.

He sub­mit­ted a pro­posal to the Admin­is­tra­tors but was refused on the grounds that it was all based on here say and cir­cum­stan­tial evidence.

Which meant he was fund­ing this trip with his own credits.

The sounds of the ser­vos whirring in the old bot as he paced around the room brought Aneil out of his mem­o­ries with a start. He real­ized Talos had been talk­ing to him. He glanced up to see him star­ing down as if expect­ing an answer.

“I am sorry, I was not lis­ten­ing. What did you say?”

“I was say­ing, assum­ing this ‘world matrix’ is real what makes you think it is around here or that I could help you?”

“It is real Talos. I've found it. Well, most of it. Accord­ing to the leg­end it was …”

“Bro­ken into a hun­dred pieces and scat­tered across the world. Yes, I know the sto­ries as well”

Aneil stood and waled over to his pack. He extracted a small, intri­cately carved, metal box along with a small cir­cuit chip, ancient things he had found in an old tomb not far from here. He han­dled the chip del­i­cately over the Talos, then opened the box. Inside was red tri­a­con­ta­he­dron shaped object about the size of a closed fist nes­tled inside a blue lat­tice work cage. As Aneil removed the con­tents sev­eral places were vis­i­ble where pieces of the red inner object were miss­ing. Talos sim­ply stared.

“As you can see, it’s not quite hun­dreds of pieces. But it is real Talos. Only a few pieces are miss­ing. That crys­tal con­tains all the infor­ma­tion about the Novatun tribe that lived about 60 kilo­me­ters north of here. Within that infor­ma­tion I have found sev­eral ref­er­ences to the Matrix, or at least what I believe to be the Matrix. There are mul­ti­ple ref­er­ences to the ‘heart that rules the world’ being bro­ken and scat­tered. It con­tained a list of places where the ‘heart was kept’ once it was bro­ken. I’ve man­aged to deci­pher most of them.”

Talos just stared at the crystal.

“Sorry, it is in an ancient for­mat and syn­tax, how­ever you can read it if you use your uni­ver­sal bus port. “

Talos did as sug­gested and inserted the crys­tal into a slot on his left wrist. He froze for a moment as he quickly down­loaded and scanned the doc­u­ments it con­tained, search­ing for the ref­er­ences Aneil had mentioned.

After a few sec­onds he removed the crys­tal and handed it back to Aneil, “Yes, I see what you mean. There are a sub­stan­tial num­ber of ref­er­ences in the doc­u­ments. I assume this was an ancient archiv­ing device?”

“That is my belief yes. We found it dur­ing a dig over a hun­dred and twenty-​​five years ago. At first it was just mean­ing­less infor­ma­tion and we sim­ply cat­a­loged it and put it in stor­age, not giv­ing it a sec­ond though. It was not until I began see­ing more and more ref­er­ences to the leg­end that I went back and res­canned the infor­ma­tion on this crystal.”

“Assum­ing I agree with you and I know some­thing about where the Colos­sus is, why would I help you? Telling you would bring hoards of vis­i­tors to my per­sonal paradise.”

“Because I’m not the only one looking…”

Aneil was inter­rupted by a series of explo­sions out­side. As both he and Talos started towards the door a small rust red bot cov­ered in soot and oil clam­ored through cough­ing and stammering.

Talos knelt in from of the new­comer and took his by the shoul­ders, “Tim­Tim, calm down. What is happening?”

“The Vok,” gasped Tim­Tim just before he collapsed.

“The Vok! You brought those insane bots here?” Talos turned to Aneil.

“No. I was track­ing them actu­ally, but when I real­ized they were headed in this direc­tion I rushed ahead. I had though I would have more time. We must go before they find us.” Aneil said as he turned and grabbed his pack.

“Go? I’m not leav­ing. This is my home now.”

“Old man,” began Aneil as he pulled an elec­tronic device from his pack, “I do not have time for fool­ish argu­ments. You now con­tain a copy of the infor­ma­tion on the chip. Infor­ma­tion the Vok lack but greatly desire. If you stay they will destroy you to get it. Even if you offer it up. You know them, they will assume you are hold­ing some­thing back and tear you apart, vir­tu­ally and phys­i­cally to make sure. I will destroy you myself first.”

Talos stared down the bar­rel of the Sta­tic Gun, "Fine, I will come with you. But be warned, I will not for­get this."

Gen­eral Quer­cus looked out over the fields, sur­vey­ing the army that was now his. It was a task he didn’t want, but it had been his pre­dic­tion, a pre­dic­tion that had come true, that had made it happen.

Every year the armies of the Yard empire gath­ered up and choose sides. It had come, over the years, to be known as the Prun­ing. It had been com­ing ear­lier and ear­lier each year and this time Quer­cus and been ready. Ready to pro­tect and defend the Scythian strong­hold no mat­ter the cost.

In the dis­tance the yel­low flags of the Scythian army flut­tered, limp in the non-​​existent breeze. The day had turned hot, and early sea­son heat wave. It was hot enough to force the Gen­eral to turn up the sides of the com­mand tent while he gath­ered with the var­i­ous mil­i­tary lead­ers and advisors.

“Sir, you were about to explain your cur­rent strat­egy.” called out Viceroy Apium.

Quer­cus pulled him­self away from watch­ing the wiz­ards prac­tic­ing their magic, prepar­ing to defend the Scythian cap­i­tal from the yearly Prun­ing event.

“I’m send­ing a bat­tal­ion of troops to the west to the Hedge Moun­tains as well as east to the Gar­den For­est. The rest I am leav­ing here to pro­tect the city proper.”

“What of our rear flank?”

“We have an HOA in place with our neigh­bors there.” replied the General.

Viceroy Apium spoke up again, “I’d feel more com­fort­able with a Watch alliance. The HOA is merely an agree­ment not to attack, it doesn’t stip­u­late com­ing to our aid,”

“I agree with you Viceroy. How­ever ours is not to make pol­icy but to defend our nation for future saplings.”

“Sir!” exclaimed a sol­dier as he made his way to the tent while the oth­ers had been study­ing the map on the table.

“At ease Pri­vate Cera­sus. What do you have for me?”

“Sir, a report from Cap­tain Rud­beckia.”, The sol­dier says, pulling a sheaf of papers out of his back­pack, “He says he has encoun­tered the Fes­cue army just out­side the Gates of Fence.”

Every­one around the table looked up, mak­ing the Pri­vate very uncomfortable.

“Go on, does he say any­thing about esti­mated forces? What kind of hard­ware they have, anything?”

“Yes sir” replied the sol­dier, lick­ing his lips ner­vously, “He states there are a bat­tal­ion of Crab­Grass Tanks as well as Dan­de­lion and This­tle Aer­ial Assault ships. He also men­tions see­ing Clover trans­ports and a group of Rag­weed carriers”

“Very good, thank you pri­vate, “ replied Quer­cusl keep­ing the shock off his face, “You are dismissed.”

Gen­eral Quer­cus turned back to the map and began to again explain “I don’t expect….”. Turn­ing around he noticed that the sol­dier he had dis­missed was still there, still stand­ing at attention.

What is it soldier?

Well sir, it’s just…

“Spit it out son.”

“It’s just… there is chat­ter from the Squir­rels sir. They say they’ve seen Axes and Shears as well.”

Every­one around the table gasped as Quer­cus cov­ered his eyes with hind hand. “My god, they really are going to do it aren’t they. Well, we will give them a fight they will not for­get. This is a Prun­ing that will be sung about for ages to come.”

The other lead­ers gath­ered around the table began to cheer and applaud the Gen­eral who stepped back, and care­fully drew his sword, “For Scythia!”

“For Scythia!” came the rum­bling echo.-

Mor­ton Pen­win­kle stood watch­ing the skies. He wasn't so much watch­ing them as wait­ing for them to fall and he wanted to be sure he was look­ing when it started.

He shoved his hands deep in his pock­ets, it was after all fairly cold, and stamped his feet to make sure he stayed warm. In all hon­esty he wasn't really expect­ing the skies to fall. That would have meant some­thing went right, and based on the fact this was the fourth time in as many months that the end of the world had been pre­dicted, yet had failed to hap­pen (after all, if it had he wouldn't be here wait­ing). The doom say­ers were start­ing to get as bad as the weather men.

He shook his head remem­ber­ing the global pan­demic that almost was, but wasn't. Sup­pos­edly Mad Cow dis­ease had become so per­va­sive and stub­born this past win­ter that it was going to hit everycow all at once, then mutate into a new strain. Some CDC researchers pre­dicted it would re-​​animate the cows after killing them cre­at­ing what amounted to zom­bie cows. It didn't sound so bad con­sid­er­ing that peo­ple had got­ten really good at killing cows over the last few hun­dred years until he real­ized that it meant no more steaks or ham­burg­ers. He still wasn't sure how that was going to 'end the world' (and yes, he used air quotes every time he men­tioned it) but it def­i­nitely would have meant din­ners would be a tad less inter­est­ing. Although on the whole, it was bet­ter than zom­bie squir­rels. At least reg­u­lar squir­rels stopped chat­ter­ing long enough to sleep.

Then there was the comet that was going to pass extremely close to the moon, shift­ing it out of it's orbit and, at the very least caus­ing all kinds of destruc­tion as the grav­i­ta­tional forces worked to bal­ance them­selves. Worst case sce­nar­ios had it crash­ing into the Earth itself. All the sci­en­tists were in agree­ment that every­thing would work itself out and har­mony would once again reign, but there was a very likely chance human­ity would not survive.

Then of course the comet missed. Later it was dis­cov­ered that there was a round­ing error and that it had missed the moon by sev­eral mil­lion miles instead of the pre­dicted few hun­dred feet. Mor­ton always shook his head at that one. Being an accoun­tant for the Fifth National Bank of Welling­ton he always had a pro­found respect for num­ber and tended to guf­faw at the mis­take when­ever it came up in con­ver­sa­tion. Which it did. A lot.

And who could for­get the alien inva­sion. Mil­lions upon mil­lions of alien ships had sud­denly appeared in orbit just above the planet. It was cer­tain doom or so the pun­dits had pro­claimed on every talk show they could squeeze them­selves onto. No chance of human­ity sur­viv­ing this, it was most cer­tainly an inva­sion, then had pic­tures of the ships and everything.

Until one researcher had dis­cov­ered that the alien ships were in fact noth­ing more than space fleas and that the orig­i­nal dis­cov­erer had sim­ply mis-​​focused his tele­scope. Then every one that went to ver­ify it and dis­cov­ered the mis­take decided that since the gen­tle­man who had made the dis­cov­ery was so well respected and so very pop­u­lar that it must have been they that had made the mis­take and so pro­lif­er­ated the false claims for sev­eral days.

So it was with a shake of the head that Mor­ton turned around and shuf­fled back into his house when the PA sys­tem started to chirp to life and the announcer came on and stated that the launch of the nuclear mis­sile aimed at the enemy had been can­celled due to a mechan­i­cal fail­ure. He had hoped all along there wasn't going to be yet another post­pone­ment but had put a pie in the oven, just in case.

This is the last of the twisties for a lit­tle bit. Have a cou­ple other ideas queued up for the next few weeks. As always, enjoy!

p.s. Every­one should feel free to use the 'High­lighter' thing if they feel the need. I'm still give it a test to see if it's worth it.

He thought back to the inci­dent as he fell to the ocean floor, the water slow­ing his decent to almost noth­ing. The other had man­aged to work their arm under under­neath him, and as he shifted his weight to move the coral he had attached to broke away caus­ing his cur­rent predicament.

On the way down he had hit another piece of coral that had been razor sharp, slic­ing off a por­tion of one arm. There had been very lit­tle blood and the pain had already began to sub­side as the wound had closed itself off fairly quickly.

As he hit bot­tom he was able to glance back the way he came and saw the other sit­ting on the top of the coral in his old spot, most likely obliv­i­ous to the events that had tran­spired. He bore no ill will toward the other, they prob­a­bly hadn't intended to knock him off the reef after all. Besides, no one could have pre­dicted it would have given way just then.

He sighed inwardly and took his bear­ings, try­ing to deter­mine the best path back to the top where he had been. Once he located the route he set his mind towards the goal and began the long trek.

He hoped the arm would grow back before he reached the sum­mit. Scars were cool and all, but try­ing to explain this to the other starfish wasn't some­thing he was look­ing for­ward to.

He received the all clear sig­nal, banked left and began his approach. It was a move he and hun­dreds of oth­ers had done before, yet at no point did he relax his con­cen­tra­tion. Too many times he had seen or heard of a sud­den gust of wind catch­ing some­one off guard and knock­ing them either off track and they had to cir­cle around and try again, or slammed them into the sides.

The humil­i­a­tion that came with being tossed around because you weren't pay­ing atten­tion was some­thing he wished, very strongly, to avoid. Espe­cially since the inci­dent last year. Besides, with over 50,000 oth­ers in the hive, it wasn't like there was a place for a Bee to hide when the mock­ing became too much.