JULY 2026 SCIENCE FICTION MICROSTORY CONTEST (Stories Only) > Likes and Comments
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IN THE WAKE OF HERCULESIt’s been a hell of a week. It started like any other at the Palomar Observatory where I was working as an astronomer. The interstellar comet Hercules had just done a close fly-by of Earth. As it departed the Solar System, the world heaved a collective sigh of relief that global nuclear war had narrowly been averted. But, relief was short-lived.
No sooner had the shadow of death passed us by than the world was invaded by alien races. No flying saucers, no flaming cylindrical projectiles from the sky. They just seemed to appear from nowhere. First one race, then another. I sat there sipping a cup of Luke-warm coffee, watching the tape of one of the first appearances in NYC. Those lanky, seven-foot-tall four-armed bug-like things that appeared on west 34th street in the middle of rush-hour. They materialized out of thin air, it seemed. Cars screeched and crashed, pedestrians screamed and fainted. Cops, feds and national guardsman opened fire. Helicopters launched missiles. Tanks rolled through the streets and fired deafening cannon bursts. And, as they did…they all vanished in shimmering waves of amber light. Like bad television pictures. They just disappeared.
The aliens returned fire with strange-looking weapons. And, they disappeared. “Are you watching that again?” Susan asked as she entered the lounge.
“I keep hoping I missed something the last 20 times,” I muttered. “One thing’s consistent…the ones who open fire are the ones who vanish. Both us and the aliens. Now, if it was just us, I’d figure they were knocking us off with their advanced tech. But, themselves too?”
“One of the other races, then,” she suggested, switching to another tape. Those shaggy purple things with the multiple eye stocks that had appeared in Moscow. “Same deal,” she observed, pointing at the screen. “The Russians open fire and vanish. The purple hair balls open fire with those weird tube things and they disappear too.” She sighed, coiling her hair around her finger as she did when she got pensive. “Maybe we haven’t seen the real chess masters yet.”
I finally gave up on the cold, bitter coffee and stood up, rubbing my tired eyes. I glimpsed the shadow at the door, figuring it was the janitor come to empty the waste baskets. I nearly choked as the alien came through the door.
One of the newly arrived races. Big. Eight feet or so. Arthropod. Multi-colored. Multi-limbed. Like a cross between a giant sand crab and a praying mantis. It just stood there, its feelers quivering. Apparently studying us. I felt like an idiot, not having the vaguest idea what to do.
My phone buzzed. It was the observatory director. “Yes,” I said in a dry throat. “Yeah, one’s in the lounge now with Susan and me. One of those Crab things that turned up in Beijing. Hang on…one of the hairy Moscow things just came in. Oh, and here’s one of the New York bugs. Better order coffee and donuts. Looks like we need to book a conference room.” I desperately tried to see the humor in the madness. Apocalypse humor? Without thinking, I reached under my shirt and pulled out the old silver crucifix my grandma had left me. I’ve never been particularly religious, but…well, this seemed like an ideal moment to start.
The crab thing apparently noticed and reciprocated by holding out some kind of metallic talisman of its own. The other two aliens did the same. On instinct, I got tentatively closer to the crab thing and…I suddenly found myself in another world. A world of towering trees and multiple moons under a lavender sky.
“Whoa…” I said, a bit unsteady as Earth returned. “Did you see that?” I asked.
“I saw a lot of things,” Susan said, also visibly shaken.
I shifted through a couple of other realities. Crystalline pyramids. Floating cities under a double sun. We were seeing their worlds, I realized. “Their memories?” I speculated aloud. “Or…Oh, God.” My blood ran cold. “Are we all just memories?”
Susan gaped, going pale. “The war did happen, didn’t it?” she whispered. “Hercules…it’s an immense A.I….collecting memory patterns from doomed worlds and combining them in a common matrix. Those who react violently are…”
“Deleted?” I suggested.
“Just a matter of finding common ground, I guess.” She pulled out her Star of David pendant. The world…if it could be called a world…melted into a blending of many worlds, like the colors of a rainbow.
Mind the Reality GapI can’t remember why I signed up for the study but the advert had been simple enough: Paid Research Opportunity. Must be over sixty.
I turned up at the address expecting the usual questions and paperwork. Instead, I was ushered into a spotless white room where a machine swept silently around my head. It felt like an MRI scan, only quicker. Less than ten minutes later, I walked out with a surprisingly generous envelope of cash and a sleek silver smartwatch.
“I seem to be getting rather a lot for very little,” I said.
The technician smiled without quite meeting my eyes.
“High-fidelity calibration.”
That was all.
The following morning, I boarded a Superloop bus feeling rather pleased with myself. It was supposed to be a simple, pleasant day out. Just me, exploring London by bus. Once you cross sixty, you qualify for free off-peak travel - a marvellous perk.
My watch vibrated gently, its face glowing with a holographic message.
SELECT DESTINATION
AUGMENTED NAVIGATION AVAILABLE
My daughter is forever telling me to try something new every day, so instead of choosing somewhere familiar, I scrolled down the list until an unfamiliar destination caught my eye.
Aetheris Green.
Well, London is enormous. One cannot possibly know every corner of it.
Somewhere after the third stop, the gentle rocking of the bus lulled me to sleep.
When I opened my eyes, I was back at the very same stop where I’d boarded.
“Only I could sleep through an entire bus journey,” I muttered.
I chuckled to myself and started walking home.
Then I noticed the silence.
London is never peaceful.
The pavements were spotless. Every window reflected the same pale afternoon sky. A row of pigeons stood perfectly still, as though someone had forgotten to animate them.
People walked past in calm, measured steps. No one looked at a phone. No one argued. No impatient cyclist shouted at a taxi driver..
Even the traffic lights changed in perfect unison.
A chill crept through me.
When I reached my street, the bricks of my house looked a shade too bright.
My front door had no letterbox, or lock. Only a smooth black panel that shimmered faintly as I approached.
“This is ridiculous,” I whispered.
“A dream. That’s all.”
I reached out anyway.
The moment my fingers touched the panel, the world flickered.
A translucent grid rippled across my vision.
Then a voice spoke from somewhere inside my head.
“Roger, do you read? Subject’s neural loop is degrading.”
“Latency spike confirmed.”
“Initiate reset.”
Reality stuttered.
One blink and I was lying in a bedroom.
Everything was immaculate. Crisp white bedding. Warm oak floors. Sunlight poured through windows far larger than any Victorian terrace could possibly have.
It looked like one of those impossibly expensive magazine homes.
For one glorious second I thought perhaps I’d imagined the whole thing.
Then I climbed out of bed.
The floor dissolved beneath my feet.
The room shattered into sheets of white static.
I fell through them.
Weightless and directionless.
The voices returned, louder now.
“Rendering failure.”
“Anchor unstable.”
“Recover the subject.”
Something hammered inside my skull. I clawed at empty air until my hand found the cool metal of the watch.
Its screen had changed.
JOURNEY IN PROGRESS
Without thinking, I pressed it.
The world snapped sideways.
I woke with a gasp on the floor of my own bedroom.
The ceiling still had its familiar damp stain.
The floorboards squeaked.
Outside, a siren wailed somewhere in the distance while someone shouted about a parking space.
Never had London sounded so beautiful.
Two days later, I went looking for the research centre.
No such company existed.
I still have the watch. Every so often, usually just before dawn, it lights up by itself.
The battery should have died months ago.
The screen displays the same message every time.
RETURN TO DESTINATION?
I never press it.
Instead, I turn over, grip my old cotton sheets, and thank God for the beautiful, messy reality of the off-peak bus.
Last Tuesday, I caught the Superloop again.
As I tapped my Freedom Pass, the driver smiled.
“Morning.”
I smiled back.
Just as the doors closed, he glanced at my wrist.
“Back again?” he asked quietly.
I looked down.
I wasn’t wearing the watch.
Temporal ShiftCopyright © 2026 by Jot Russell
We joined up on Roosevelt Island, July 4, 2001. The fireworks were a fitting celebration to the completion of our mission.
“Things go smooth in Florida?” Tric asked.
I laughed. “Al-Qaeda's gonna have to find some more pilots.”
“Next time we should just...”
“Just what?”
“Tell you later. Ready to head home?”
I nodded and engaged my suit. The spheres formed and Tric's grew transparent before dissolving into time. I started to shift forward, but the world suddenly grew dark. It wasn't just the calm of fireworks, but the entire city. The rotating scatter of heavenly objects were Earth's sole luminescence. As my eyes adjusted, the presence of a city's ruin formed around that which had just been a park. Tall trees had long since grew through the broken streets, and I quickly realized that what ever this foreign city was, it had died long before.
I walked over towards the water's edge and stared across the Potomac. The airport, Pentagon and surrounding buildings were also replaced by that of a massive and broken metropolis. I looked to the sky, trying to defend an excuse that it was caused by a massive asteroid. No, this could only have been brought on by us messing with the past. But we were careful to return only a couple years, take out the hijackers, and have no other contact. On top that, we married our time-lines here in Washington before we were to return to the present.
A nerve struck like a stone on my brow. I recalled a joke that Tric had made, only it wasn't a joke. “Take out Muhammad,” he had laughed. I knew he hated Muslims, but I didn't understand just how far his bigotry went. He didn't want to kill nineteen, he wanted to destroy their religion. My only choice was to return to that time-line and stop him from what, he didn't realize, would be our annihilation.
I tapped the controls on my sleeve. The stars paused their dance and quickly retreated back from the future. The sun burned my eyes, but only for a moment as the band it formed across the sky dissipated back into darkness. I increased it's speed, creating a constant arch across the bright sky. This rose and fell with the seasons, and I turned to watch the tallest of trees recede back into the broken payment.
As its sprout escaped into the ground, a layer of ash briefly formed upon the land and was gone. Like a switch, the city clicked back to life before me; towering glass and steel a hundred years prior to our efforts at such structures. And upon one, the image of a double-headed eagle.
“Romans?!”
It made sense. Without a common language, religion and enemy for the middle eastern tribes to unite against, the Roman Empire was able to rebound and advance beyond its years in engineering, including that of the atom.
I continued back until the towers were replaced with more modest structures. Using the suit, it was easy to gain currency for transport to Mecca. The trick, however, would be finding that needle in the haystack. It would have been easy to learn of Muhammad's home in the past of my time-line, but here, his life was obviously short and non-notable. Fortunately, they kept good records and I knew his date of birth. It was just a matter of time.
**
Tric stepped from the sphere that appeared outside the uncle's house.
“You here to help me, Phil?”
“From destroying our world, yes.”
“Don't you see? With our suits, we can fix any outcome and live like kings!”
“Our suits?” In a glance, I understood that the power of the suit had corrupted his ambitions, because I felt its influence upon me. In that same glance, he knew that I knew and started to engage his suit. Without thinking, I drew my gun and shot his control arm. It produced a sudden overload, causing the sphere to glow bright before imploding in upon itself.
Behind the dying echo of the sphere, I saw the child's look of disbelief. With little Muhammad's fate secure, I jumped forward in time and wondered if that vision influenced his path. Mostly, I realized that it was the suit that represented humanity's greatest threat and reworked my mission to block its creation.
**
I stood witness to history's recurrence of 9/11 and hoped the struggle to follow would eventually turn friends from foes as Pearl Harbor once did.
IllusionBrad Farnsworth stared emotionlessly into the third of twelve tabs on his computer. Tracking commodities was mind-numbing.
“How’s everything going over here?” Terry, his supervisor, stopped at his cubicle twirling a quarter across the backs of his fingers.
Brad instantly straightened up, feigning satisfaction. “Oh, uh, great!”
“Awesome. And your work?”
“Um, terrific,” he lied. “Everything’s fine.”
“That’s good to hear. You’re one of the best,” Terry grinned, tucking the quarter into his front pocket, but not realizing he missed. It rolled under the desk. “Keep it up.” He continued down the aisle.
Leaning back into his chair, Brad discovered Terry’s coin and, picking it up, his whole world instantly changed. His normally plain cubicle became dilapidated – soiled around the edges, with worn walls and a wrecked workstation. Wormy appendages squirming from around his keyboard and his monitor scrolled with messages like, ‘It’s a busy day,’ followed by, ‘You’ll never have enough,’ and, ‘You have to keep working’.
Baffled, Brad nearly fell from his chair, dropping the quarter. His reality immediately snapped back to normal. It had to be his imagination. Finding the coin again, he picked it up from the floor, with hesitant fingers.
The rotten desk, tattered workspace, and squirmy tentacles returned. Dubiously reaching for them, he was startled when they reached back. The quarter dropped away, and his plain, unremarkable workspace returned.
Brad glared suspiciously at the coin for several long minutes before gathering his courage to hold it. Once more, his ruined cubicle appeared under a wrecked drop ceiling, next to discolored walls. Instead of office security cameras, eyeballs on stalks surveyed a wrecked office. Oddly, it was business as usual for everyone else.
Brad moved to the windows, cracked and filthy now. The clean, typical metropolitan scene of stacked freeways and high-rises became a dystopian wasteland. A yellow haze backdropped crumbling buildings, and whole blocks were pulverized into ruins. A few rusty cars and busy pedestrians went this way and that, as if nothing had changed at all, though nowhere near in the numbers he was used to.
Billboards displayed messages like, ‘They’re not really your friends,’ or ‘The next stress is just a day away’, and a hotel sign across the way was replaced with, ‘No time for rest.’
Instead of helicopters or planes, there were bizarre alien vessels with glowing green parts and frightening claspers, and newer otherworldly structures stretched out amongst the city’s decay. Brad then discovered towering, gangly creatures, like impossibly massive spiders, strolling over whole city blocks, long tendrils dangling down to the streets below, gently tapping unwary passersby. One of the monsters suddenly passed directly in front of the view when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
Brad turned to discover a hideous oozing creature with a dozen eyes growing from stalks upon its head. He let out a gasp and the quarter tumbled free. It was his supervisor, Terry. “Management would like to see you,” he said, recovering his coin. “Wouldn’t want to lose this little momento.”
Escorted to the conference room, the department manager was already there with his back to them, staring out the window. “So, you’ve seen it,” he said as Brad took a seat.
“I’m…I’m not sure…” Brad admitted.
“Yes you are,” the man corrected, joining him on the other side of the desk. “This project has been in the works for years,” he explained. “Now tell me, what did you see?”
He sheepishly replied, “Uh, a yellow sky, ruined buildings, giant monsters, strange messages…” He trailed off.
“Only your subconscious mind would normally see the messages. They keep you distracted, sew distrust, and work harder. We occupy your mind with trivialities, so you don’t see the truth. Physical contact ensures a better illusion. And certain artifacts,” he spun a silver pen between his fingers, just like Terry’s quarter, “allow us to see through the illusion.”
“Illusion?”
“We’re almost finished with your planet,” the man grinned. “We arrived just in time to collect the last of your organic resources before you had tainted them completely. We’ll finish by harvesting humanity. Now, what do with you.” He stood. “Terry, please escort Brad here down to the demoleculizer. I’d like to collect his subcomponents while they’re still fresh.”
“Do we have to? He’s one of my favorites,” Terry noted, horror falling upon Brad’s face.
“It’s no time for sentimentality. I tell you what, if you take him down to Processing now, I’ll overlook your little infraction here.”
He sighed, “You’re the boss.”
In Flight MovieThe dream was the same. He was falling. Again…or was it again? He could not keep track. Sounds alternated between screeching in his ears and speaking to him insistently.
“Altitude. Altitude.” Whoop, whoop. Whoop, whoop. “Pull up. Pull up.”
His head lolled from side to side, hitting something with a heavy thud but not causing any injury. Other voices called to him. Faint. Distant. Overlapping. Panicked.
“Do you copy, over?!”
“Altitude.”
“Pull up.”
“Get out of there! Eject, eject, eject!”
“Altitude.”
Whoop, whoop.
Abruptly, the falling stopped.
***
USS Nimitz, CVN-68
0700 Hours Zulu Time
Persian Gulf
Lieutenant Jeff “Jazzy” Jackson sat in his F-18E Super Hornet and watched as the various deck crew scurried around his fighter like bees servicing their queen. Steam whipped across the deck as the carrier neared flank speed for flight operations. Outside, the sound was deafening as the Super Hornet’s engines spooled up to maximum power, straining against the restraints that kept it anchored firmly to the deck. The plane’s strobe lights flashed in alternating staccato patterns, like a rave in the middle of the ocean, and adding to the surrealness of this particular night flight. Jackson adjusted his oxygen mask and seat harness, then looked at the small photo of his family tucked into a corner of the instrument panel – a special memento he took on every flight.
The deck officer confirmed readiness at all stations with simple hand gestures, saluted Jackson crispy, then knelt smoothly into the launch pose with right arm fully extended. Instantly the Super Hornet accelerated from zero to 150 knots on twin pillars of flame along catapult one. His wingman, Lieutenant Allen “Spooner” Thomas, followed thirty seconds later on cat two. They formed up and flew to their assigned patrol sector, hitting the tanker enroute to top off their tanks. Each aircraft was fully armed.
***
“Did you see that?!” exclaimed Spooner, breaking radio silence. Jackson waggled his wings slightly to acknowledge the message and hopefully shut his wingman up. He was younger and less experienced, which could get a naval aviator killed if he wasn’t careful.
“It doesn’t show up on my scopes,” he persisted.
“Cut the chatter Spooner,” Jackson hissed back as quietly as he could, knowing full well his volume had nothing to do with the detectable electronic energy zipping back and forth between the two planes. Again the mysterious blinking lights they had been following crossed in front of them from left to right, then vaulted straight up at a staggering speed, only to slowly come back down a few miles in front of the Super Hornets.
“Follow my lead,” Jackson said tersely. Spooner waggled his response. Their engines dumped copious amounts of fuel into the exhaust as they both hit the afterburners, creating their own columns of light. They rapidly closed the distance between themselves and the unknown aerial phenomenon, which now maneuvered lazily, seemingly unaware or unimpressed with the two terrestrial craft.
***
The dream was the same. He was falling. Again…or was it again?
“Do you copy, over?!”
“Altitude.”
“Pull up.”
“Get out of there! Eject, eject, eject!”
“Altitude.”
Whoop, whoop. Whoop, whoop.
***
“They’re pulling away!” yelled Spooner.
“Spectre Flight you are weapons free. Repeat, weapons free.”
“Missiles armed,” Jackson responded evenly. “I’ve got intermittent tone…Spectre One, Fox Three.”
A missile dropped from the inboard fuselage pylon and rocketed away into the gloom, its own exhaust now a speck of light rapidly closing on the intruder. The glowing bogie paused midair, jinked right, up, then down, completely avoiding the missile, which detonated harmlessly after expending its fuel. Spooner’s missile also hit nothing. Jackson pulled the trigger for his Hornet’s gatling gun, filling the sky with tracers, an impressive if ineffective display.
“It’s coming back Jazzy!”
“You break right, I’ll break left, then circle back for another pass.”
“Copy!”
A brilliant flash of light pierced the darkness. Jackson’s fighter shuddered, then began tumbling towards the ground.
***
“Do you copy, over?!” screamed Spooner.
“Altitude.”
“Pull up.”
“Get out of there! Eject, eject, eject!”
“Altitude.”
Whoop, whoop.
Abruptly, the falling stopped.
***
On board the vessel, Jackson lay draped on a low table that pulsed with living light. Had he been conscious, he would have felt the device covering his entire head. A thin gray figure with large eyes looked at his associate and thought to him.
“Run him through the encounter again. Let me know if in any of the instances he does not attack.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Peace.”
(750 words in story) Justin Sewall © 2026
Reviews/critiques welcome
"Memento Mode"by J.F. Williams
Albert had taken Trish and the kids to Sunday brunch at Hal's Diner and they were all back at the house sleeping off the Carnivore's Special so in this alone time he jumped into the Duster and drove downtown, parking along the roundabout that encircles the common, and watched as hordes of smartly dressed people walked by. He pulled out his smartphone and brought up the app. "Medieval," he swiped and the chip implanted behind his right ear vibrated slightly, and he was surrounded by quaint little stone or stucco-and-wood-trim buildings. Passersby wore tights and tunics, or long robes, or armor. A red dragon the exact size of a bus sauntered by.
Albert swiped again, for "Prehistoric", and the dragon became a mastodon, while the strollers wore animal skins and carried clubs along with their smartphones. Among the throngs, the grey "skeefers" stood out. Morose-looking and plodding in their steps, drab in their apparel, they had eschewed the app, isolating themselves to the real world that the app disguised. They stood out as grey blotches in the simulated worlds.
As Albert exited the Duster, one skeefer caught his eye. An elderly man with thinning white hair, he wore a wrinkled grey suit over a black t-shirt. Albert knew he had seen the man before but couldn't place where. They made eye contact. This was something one always avoided with skeefers because they had a reputation for being crazed, for stopping people and rambling.
At once, the man accosted Albert, grabbing his arms and staring into his eyes. "Check the log!" the man whispered. Then he pushed Albert away and ran.
A little shaken, Albert swiped back to "Modern" and watched as a few of the app users, negotiating other worlds though dressed like him, were sometimes amusingly out-of-sync with their surroundings, and interacting with thin air. Check the log, the old man had said. He opened the app and clicked on a little gear symbol. "Review log" was a selection but the screen flashed amber when he swiped: "Memento mode disabled. Log unavailable. " He opened the little gear symbol again and another selection was "Memento," which he enabled. He felt a tingle behind his ear. Thousands of entries appeared on the screen. He quickly scrolled down to the beginning. It read, "Switched to Modern." The next line up said, "Memento disabled."
"Modern" was not really a simulation. Why would it be? Albert actually lived in the modern world, after all. He clicked on the simulations tab and to his surprise a few more appeared. "Modern" was one, and another was "Home."
His perceptions were now subtly changing. He realized that many of the things about his life, his job, Trish, the kids, the 1971 Duster, were things he knew but in the way he knew his own birth and early childhood, as memories without experience, cobbled together from stories and photos. If "Modern" were just another sim, what would "Home" be? He swiped it.
The sky turned grey, as did the buildings, which were now blocky and plain-faced. What once was a bus, then a dragon and a mastodon, was now a great lumbering creature covered in scales and horns; his Duster, a smaller version of that with a saddle. Everyone looked like skeefers. He saw the man in the grey suit and ran toward him, grabbing him by the arms. "I did what you said," Albert told the man. "I checked the log."
The old man grinned. "See! Now you know the truth!" he said. "If you’re hungry, a leviathon was slaughtered just this morning so there are plenty of steaks at the mess. They're tough and foul-tasting but super nutritious."
Albert's memory had mostly returned. He remembered now the world was bereft of color and flavor, along with art, and whimsy, and hope, that the ruling oligarchs had made it this way and provided the app, originally developed for treating PTSD, to prevent discontent. Trish and the kids had been phantasms, as were the job and the Duster.
"I want to go back," he told the old man.
"Oh, but you mustn't," the man said, shaking. "You can't live a lie. You can't avoid the truth. Delete the app!"
Hours passed before Albert used the app again. He was ready to delete it but stayed his hand. Instead, he selected "Modern." He hesitated but then selected "Disable Memento," and for a split second, just before the chip buzzed, he remembered he had done that a hundred times before.
(750 words)
The Pod LifeThe sunrise came early. Inside the Advanced Armored Weapons Pod, the disembodied soldier’s brain stared for only a moment. Had he been seeing with organic eyes, he would have been blinded. Absent eyes or the rest of his body, he was seeing through augmented reality cameras and saw the full spectrum, including the gamma rays though the AAWP’s implants.
A total conversion bomb. Nobody was crazy enough to build one, and no one would ever use one. But the signature was clear. The light and radiation traveled at the speed of light and the shockwave was not far behind.
Seconds later, he got confirmation: “Abort mission. Mission no longer relevant. Save yourselves. Rendezvous at coordinates…” The signal just stopped.
He was still perched on his hill, exposed to the shockwave. He tilted his weapon array downward, aiming for the deepest part of the valley and launched everything he had. As the last round penetrated the Earth, he could see a mountaintop sheering off in the distance.
He jettisoned his empty weapons array, raced to the bottom, fell into the chasm with seconds to spare and dropped hundreds of feet into the earth. The far hilltop was blown off and filled in the valley. Afterward, it was silent.
In the days that followed, he contemplated his life choices. Having one’s brain transplanted into an AAWP grants one virtual immortality. Whether his service lasted a decade or a century, he would have been reunited with his body, held in suspended animation since the day he was recruited. The pod could keep him alive indefinitely. It lacked only one thing: an Off switch.
He did have one consolation: The pod contained a library, one that surpassed the Library of Alexandria many times over. Storage was cheap, and each pod had a petabyte or more.
The complete works of...everybody. He worked his way through the classics, understanding so much literature for the first time.
There were manuals for everything he had clearance for and soon he was modifying his pod. Augmented reality gave way to virtual reality. The multiple AI assistants became characters as the stories came alive.
Later, he did find the Off switch, but it was no longer important. He could be a spy, a detective or any character in any book. He could stay within the plot of the story or improvise with the AIs as his supporting actors. What if Romeo and Juliet survived? How would history have changed if JFK finished out his term? Would the Great Resource War even started if climate change had been averted?
What could he learn with all the time in the world to learn it?
--
It took nearly a century for the radiation to fade. The landscape, once known for its rolling hills, was now flat as western Kansas. Farmers and ranchers moved back in. Someone drilled a well and hit something.
Once the military understood what they had, the “unexploded ordinance” was transported to a secure site.
--
The team gathered in a conference room to strategize.
“The good news: he’s alive and awake.”
“The bad news?”
“He’s in some kind of loopback mode, getting sensory data from the processors and sending motor activity back. He’s trapped in some kind of simulation. If we try to break him out of the loop, the results could be catastrophic.”
“Can we join the simulation, reach him that way?”
They quickly linked a VR system to the weapons pod. A few hours later, the “first contact” person had his answer: “He’s not coming out. Think about it. If you could live one exciting lifetime after another in there, would you want to return to the real world? I suspect it would be boring as hell. He didn’t have a choice about staying alive, but he chose a life more varied and exciting than any of us will ever have. As a veteran who’s served longer than anybody’s been alive, I think he should get to stay where he wants to stay.”
“What about his knowledge? I’m sure he’s surpassed most of mankind by now. I’m sure he could teach us a thing or two.”
“Well, he’s keeping a journal, a memento of his experiences, adding several hundred pages a week. He’s fine with us reading it.”
“Well, what does it say?”
“It starts out, ‘it was a dark and stormy night…’”
Voting details:First round votes:
Tom Olbert => Rejoice
Rejoice Denhere => **Justin
Jot Russell => JF
Chris Nance => **Justin, Greg, Rejoice
Justin Sewall => Greg, JF, Chris
J.F. Williams => **Tom, Greg, Rejoice, Jot, Chris
Greg Krumrey => **Tom
Finalists:
In the Wake of Hercules by Tom Olbert
In Flight Movie by Justin Sewall
Second round votes:
Tom Olbert => Rejoice; ****Justin
Rejoice Denhere => ****Justin
Jot Russell => JF; ****Justin
Chris Nance => ****Justin, Greg, Rejoice
Justin Sewall => Greg, JF, Chris; ***Tom
J.F. Williams => ***Tom, Greg, Rejoice, Jot, Chris
Greg Krumrey => ***Tom
Winner:
In Flight Movie by Justin Sewall
Elements: Augmented reality; A special memento