I have decided to post my sci-fi novel on this site. The posting will probably fail like my other projects, but hopefully it will work. Here goes...
It was what appeared to be another very good day. The sky was clear and blue as it usually was, and the air was cleaner than it had been for decades. Thousands of people walked around doing their daily business, through a city of towers of glass and steel that reached heights never seen before. The sky thronged with silvery flying transports, travelling in orderly paths, as they had done since the city was born. And down in the city’s bowls, below the colourful advertising holograms and traffic lights, below the network of steely grey roads and bridges that spanned the city’s floor, the machines and generators that ran the city hummed and turned obediently, as they had done for hundreds of years. All was happening as it should happen, surreally perfectly. And on top of one of the kilometre-high towers stood a man watching the city, almost as if in a trance. He watched as the sky turned from blue to a red so fiery that it looked as if the depths of Hell had been poured out across the world. He listened as billions of glass windows shattered. He felt as the ground shook as if an earthquake of titanic proportions had rocked the world. He tasted the sharp, bitter taste of pulverised steel in his mouth. He smelt the smoke from millions of tonnes of boiling plastic. He watched as an ocean of searing, burning, molten bronze consumed the city.
And then he woke, in the same plastic pod that he went to sleep in. Looking out of the same plastic bubble window, lying on the same air-filled bag, wiping the same sweat from the same brow. He then realised with the same mind that he had before he went to sleep, that what he had seen was simply a nightmare, a concoction of thoughts made by an under-stimulated mind. The man reached out for the release handle, and pulled it. With a quiet hissing sound, the plastic bubble-dome lid hinged open, and a voice message played its soft, calming words across the cabin. ‘Good morning officer Jim Clark’ it said in its synthetic voice, which had been named ‘Sofia’ by its manufactures. You could tell from the quality of the voice that it had been made by the Aramcom Corporation. Aramcom, once a major oil exporter before the 2118 catastrophe, was now the most famous electronic goods producing company in the republic, and was almost regarded as the official software and electronics company by the general population. It was most famous for its intelligence software, and had created computers that were as smart as humans, although lacking in consciousness.
After glancing out at the stars through his electronic display window, which was fed a live feed of the view from a camera on the outside of the ship, he went to his computer console, which sat underneath another display window on the opposite side of the room. He looked at the screen. There was something unusual about its colour. Normally the background was plain white, or at least a grey colour, but today there was an odd pattern on it. Nevertheless, Jim began operating the console, and once he had run the programs that he needed to, he began getting ready for another day of work aboard the Blue Windsor. Then Jim remembered the dream he had last night. The way it had stuck in his head was strange, as Jim normally never remembered his dreams. He ran the sequences of the dream through his mind, as if in replay, as he performed his usual morning functions. He washed, cleaned his teeth and dressed, as if on autopilot, whilst his mind played out a scene from the dream elsewhere. He began wondering about how strange the dream was. One thing that separated this dream from the others was its content. Ever since he was about twelve, Jim rarely had dreams, and the ones he did have were simply rambling nonsense. This one was different. Unlike most of his dreams, there was no real plot line to it. It just featured him standing on top of a tower watching a city being destroyed.
Jim’s train of thought was interrupted abruptly by a loud warning message on his computer. It read ‘Please deposit weekly report ASAP’. Every week, Jim had to write a report on the journey of the week before, and deposit it in the mail system the day after. The night before, Jim had wrote his report using his portable electronic notepad, and had transferred the file onto a removable memory chip, a small, flat, square, silvery thing that could easily have been misplaced. And unfortunately for Jim, it became more and more obvious that that was what happened to it, as he frantically routed through cupboards and draws, finding everything except the tiny plastic square that he desperately needed. In his mind’s eye, he ran through the places that it could be. Not in the cupboards, he already looked in there. Not in the draws, they were full of other silvery pieces of electronic hardware. Not on the tabletops, they were free of all clutter in an almost Zen-like way. As he began to forget which places he had already eliminated, Jim decided that there must be a more efficient way to do this. As he reached into his pocket and began to pull out his electronic notepad, his memory was suddenly jolted. He began to recall to himself, clear as day, how he had placed the memory chip, inside its transparent plastic case alongside about five others, into his right-hand trouser pocket. He also remembered, perhaps even more clearly, where he had put that pair of trousers: straight into the laundry chute, and all the way to the back of the ship.
Jim set off in a hurried pace towards the stern end of the spacecraft. He wasn’t worried about what all the water and cleaning agents had done to the chip. He didn’t care about the heat of the dryers and the pressers. Nor did he mind the idea of the all-important chip falling out of the pocket and onto the hard metal floor. The plastic casing, which he had bought in the mega-mall of zemlya Five, would protect against things like this, he thought. He was worried, however, of being late to breakfast. Today was America-day, which meant usually mini-pizzas, cereal and croissants, all enhanced with the latest ingredients from all over the republic. If he missed this veritable feast, he would have to make do with the Crunchee Bar, essentially dried wheat and Sagittarian marsh oats mixed with chocolate chips, which he had bought yesterday from the tuck-shop. And he knew that the only company that made worse chocolate than the manufacturers of the Crunchee Bar was Nestle-Cadbury, which was in most people’s opinion a lumbering corporate dinosaur that should have kicked the bucket hundreds of years ago.
Jim walked on through the metal corridors. As he got closer and closer to the back of the ship, he noticed that the décor became less and less brilliant. The walls, which were shiny, blue and curved near the ship’s bow, became dirty, grey and square. Computer panels lit the corridors with an eerie green light. Square plates of metal had been removed from the walls by technicians, revealing the wires and circuit boards that kept the ship running. There were fewer electronic windows too. The last time he saw one was about five minutes ago, through which he could see one of the vast clouds of dust, gas and alcohol droplets that littered this part of the galaxy. Jim also noticed that he could see less executive officers, who, wore a uniform of white cotton shirts with Chinese-style collars, and more technical and mechanical workers, dressed in blue overalls. As Jim got closer still to the stern, the noise of the engines above him, which powered the huge thrusters, began to sound throughout the maze of corridors, which now simply had grey aluminium panels lined with pipes and wires for walls, and a metal grid for the floors and ceilings, through which the corridors above and below the one Jim was walking in could be seen. Red light lit the tunnels, making the whole place seem like the bowels of some gigantic furnace. Executive officers like Jim rarely went down here, which, whilst it was only a few hundred metres from the comfortable offices and crew quarters of the ship’s bow, felt like another world.
Hey there! Looks like you're enjoying the discussion, but you're not signed up for an account.
When you create an account, we remember exactly what you've read, so you always come right back where you left off. You also get notifications, here and via email, whenever new posts are made. And you can like posts and share your thoughts. Sign Up
Sci-fi story!
bro can i ask u to paragraph it a little more inshaAllah. i am interested, i just want it to be easier to read
Hide
Looks like you're enjoying the discussion, but you're not signed up for an account.
Posting Permissions
Bookmarks