Day 101 Writing Short Stories

Surprise

You know how these things go. You have this idea of right and wrong, and of course the state of things. This idea of yours makes everything more coherent and manageable. Then there is the universe and its habit of screwing with you, and the idea makes little sense any longer. He was starting to see that his ideas about matter, space, and time didn’t match how the state of things was.

He and his crew were on a heist at the biggest galactic hub in the known universe where humans and all the aliens alike came to exchange goods and ideas. It was where you wanted to be if you wanted to matter in the cosmos. It was a miracle it had ever come to be, but a couple of centuries of galactic wars had a habit of knocking sense into even the most stubborn bastards in the cosmos. So there was peace, but that didn’t mean everything was pink and cuddly, with ice cream and rainbows. No, the universe was still a shitty place to be, but less so as everyone wasn’t out to blow you up.

But about the matter, space, and time, and Kevin’s sense of what was possible and what wasn’t. Siobhan was screaming her lungs out at him for being so stupid as to get them this fucked up. Roy and Grxcf were calm, hovering next to him upside down. The lines of their bodies were oscillating. Especially Grxcf’s tentacles, which were doing a funky dance between the material and the immaterial. Siobhan’s voice came in waves, attacking his eardrum with a force that shouldn’t be possible. He himself was also upside down, watching his fingers in amazement. They were interacting with something, disappearing and appearing, and being in two states at once: here and out there. It would be the best trip of his life, especially as the vault’s chrome finish shot rainbows across every surface and onto him, Roy, Siobhan, and Grxcf.

Kevin knew that there was some weird alien technology out there, but this took the cake. He could already see that if this went on long enough, not a single atom would be left. And that was why Siobhan was screaming her lungs out. She knew what would happen to them. Roy and Grxcf didn’t. You couldn’t call either of them great thinkers. But Siobhan was another matter. She was too sharp for her own good.

Their employer hadn’t warned that the Ambs had this kind of technology at their disposal. But he should have figured it out. The Ambs had always been a secretive, superior alien race that didn’t look kindly on anyone prying into their matters. They were the last ones to reluctantly agree to a truce.

Here he was with his crew trying to steal their secrets so that their employer could become filthy rich, and who knew what else. Okay, they were more likely to be killed for it than to steal anything. There was nothing he could do to stop them from being evaporated out of existence. He appreciated the cool trick, but he would have rather kept his life and witnessed this some other way.

Grxcf let out a gurgle in his own language—something he occasionally did to clear his mind.

“What is it?” he asked.

The tentacled alien, who was a mash-up of something that looked like an octopus and a human with a hint of predator in it, let out another gurgle. Maybe the mad fucker was dying, but then he seized Kevin’s arm with his tentacle and pulled him close to himself. Another arm of his pointed at his belt, indicating that Kevin should take the little ampule that had always been there, making everyone think it was some sort of decoration.

Kevin tied his oscillating fingers around the ampule and pulled it free.

Grxcf indicated that he should mash it against his head.

Kevin pointed at his own head. The alien shook his head and indicated his forehead.

Kevin smashed the ampule against the alien’s forehead, watching as his hand, the ampule, and its contents went into Grxcf’s head.

“Wow,” he let out, then crashed onto the vault floor as whatever had been happening to them stopped.

Grxcf instead floated in the air, having turned into a massive ball that looked more like a planet than any living being. The alien was emitting a humming sound as it spun inside the vault.

Roy and Siobhan got up and watched their comrade in stunned silence.

Kevin knew they had no time for that. “Siobhan, snap out of it, and get whatever is inside the locker HSO’WBWU’29!”

His words freed Siobhan, and she rushed to the locker, breaking it open in no time. She took a small cylinder out. One that probably held the schematics their employer was after.

When Siobhan joined Kevin and Roy watching their orbiting friend, Kevin reached for the cylinder and slid it into the tube he had lodged in his suit. They exchanged the item in silence.

“What now?” Siobhan asked.

“We get out of here before the Ambs find us.”

“What about Gee?”

Before Kevin could answer, their alien friend sent a command into their heads, telling them to flee. Once he returned to his normal form, the device would activate again, and all of them would be destroyed.

“I’m not leaving him!” Siobhan said.

Grxcf gave them a command to leave.

“Siobhan, we go, or you are out of my crew.”

“But.”

“You heard what Gee told us to do.”

Again, the universe screwed with Kevin and his sense of right and wrong. As they drew the vault door open, the Ambs’ security pushed in and seized them all.

The head Amb looked smug with his sheep-like face. “You are all under arrest, and will be vaporized.”

“No, you won’t. According to galactic law number three-hundred-forty-two slash K, you have to take us to our human representatives. The augments in my head are already sending information of the situation to our lawyers,” Roy stated.

“What the fuck, Roy?” he let out.

“I’m a lawyer.” The boy, who had uttered no coherent sentences for the three years they had been together, straightened his back and looked like a scary motherfucker.

“Siobhan, now you are going to tell me you are some army-trained ninja that can take everyone down,” Kevin said.

Siobhan looked at her shoes and shook her head. “But I know my history, and we might have started the galactic wars again.”

—

This became longer than I intended. I was going to make a small snippet, yet this came out, and here we are. I had fun writing this one, trying a more direct approach with my writing. I planned this morning that today’s writing would be slow and stay in the moment, prolonging everything, but clearly that wasn’t in the cards. What I got today was a comic sci-fi story about a quest written in the third person.

Thank you for reading! Have a day of galactic proportions today, and see you tomorrow ❤