Day 64 Writing Short Stories

Artifact

I always planned to go down with guns blazing, ever since I saw how they did it in the Old West. That seemed like a man’s way to die. And it was going to be so and soon if I didn’t get myself out of this. I watched as the screens of my spacecraft blinked red. The warning sign was rapidly counting down the impact time, letting me know that my immediate death was on its way.

“Fucking moronic international galactic cops,” I cursed out and clutched a metallic sphere with no seams in my hand.

The bastards had launched their bombs after I had failed to comply with their request to surrender. They could have gone the other way, but they had to play big macho with their shiny new guns and spaceships.

“Yeah, yeah,” I shouted at them, waving my hands in the air, almost making the sphere fly off my hand.

But I couldn’t have surrendered. I had too much to lose, and my life wasn’t one of them. I had just found a motherlode of unknown alien artifacts, and they fetched a good price on the black market. I wasn’t willing to lose my artifacts. They would make me filthy rich.

And I would take a bullet for becoming filthy rich. That was the only thing I had ever wanted out of life; that and to die with guns blazing; and to become a space cowboy. The latter I already did. So that was one out of three. Not bad for a boy from the lousy part of the galaxy.

“Ten, nine, eight…” the computer voiced out.

“That’s not helping,” I said, paused, and added, “You should be fucking helping me!”

“The impact is imminent,” the computer stated.

“Fuck,” I said. The computer didn’t like it when I cursed, but I had overwritten the system so it wouldn’t note it every time. Now it randomly stated its opinion and remained silent for the rest of the ‘fucks’.

There was nothing to do. I clutched the alien artifact and closed my eyes. Then my stomach lurched, the nasty way, and nothing happened.

I blinked my eyes open and saw a distant part of the galaxy open in front of my face. The international galactic cop’s spaceship was nowhere to be seen.

The alien sphere flashed green and blue, humming until it went mute.

“What the fuck just happened?” I asked.

“It is impolite to curse,” the computer stated.

“Fuck that. What just happened?”

“It seems that the spaceship was relocated by an unknown force to the fourth supercluster.”

I swirled the sphere in my hand. It felt as cold as it had a moment ago, but it had definitely done something.

I grinned, knowing that I wouldn’t only be filthy rich; I would be super rich.

—

Oh, writing went better today, at least with the short story. Editing felt harder than yesterday—the voices inside my head mulled over every decision I have made. I’m already growing sick and tired of the book, but there are a few tweaks I need to make before I can put it out there. I’m more sure that I don’t want to publish it on Amazon; I will have to look into Patreon or the Coffee Cup thing. I feel like it’s the wrong book to publish in a place that represents the wrongs in this world. I’m not yet sure how I will publish it here on my blog or how to turn it into a physical book, but let’s see what happens. I have a lot to think about.

What I got today was a conversational sci-fi rags-to-riches story written from a first-person POV. I hope you had as much fun reading as I did writing. I tried to hone the skill of mixing action with world-building to make the text more show than tell. I hope I got it right.

Thank you for reading! Have a glorious day ❤