Nano Writing Month, 2017.16-17

[mc776]

Every day, write some bit of fiction. Preferably over 50 words, but there will be no standard beyond "something". Posting is entirely optional.

2017.17
He underestimated his captor. It was not a particularly sophisticated stratagem, but it displayed a brilliant intuitive grasp of his own psionic capabilities - and it certainly did what they - well, his captor anyway - wanted to do.

It is deceiving to put it in such simplified terms, and he wasn't sure of the specifics himself, but suffice it to say for now that, by the time they suddenly launched off the planet, Guillaume had somehow wired the bladed artifact to the Phlogistroni's plasma cannons that let it launch a combination ethereal/electromagnetic attack that momentarily overloaded all of the Ellobius' sensors while maintaining the ether scrambling throughout - thus also masking the rift direction signature when they shot off into hyperspace. When they last had visual of them, the bounty hunters were still stupidly blasting away at them thinking their quarry was still in the city!

The ramifications of this were obvious enough: his captor did not actually need his cooperation to use his power. Billy could just plug in the ancient bladed device he was in into any amplifier and psi-blast the shit out of whatever he wanted.

This was no genie-in-a-bottle exchange anymore, but rather... come to think of it, there weren't any fairy tales that read like this, were there? Those where it's not even a matter of oppressing another person anymore, but simply using their substance as an inanimate object without recourse to dialogue, not even that of threats and coercion?

Fortunately poor old Billy hadn't actually clued in on this yet. He could still continue the charade for a while - why yes, he's changed his mind, that was an excellent show of military genius, you have passed my test, let us surge forward to our inexorable conquest, ave Victor Guillaume, rex basileusque in coelo maximus stellarum. But it would only be a matter of time before the game would be up: his captor would either notice something a little off about the timing of his statements, or... he would force him to do something he couldn't even bear to pretend to agree to.

There were many times when he'd stopped reading his captor's thoughts as a matter of pure rational self-interest.

He was getting anxious for the next time the backdoor to the ship AI would open again. He needed to get this work done soon - and really needed someone decent to talk to.


...


2017.16
"So, uh, Gunnerbot, you're, uh... erm..." Orgoth began, and failed to continue.

I tried to help. "...probably wondering... why... you know..."

Finkelstein was a bit better. "...why these guys here are still lying where they are, when everyone kept, ah..."

Gunnerbot stopped us. "...telling me that when I send the light out I make what I'm shooting brighter so we can ask Jesus to take them home?"

Finkelstein tensed up a bit. Orgoth did the opposite and shrank a little. I sucked air through my teeth. "Yes," we all said in unison.

No one said anything for a good twelve seconds. Gunnerbot's monitor continued showing what our aerodrone was picking up of the still-smoking carnage on the planet's surface from last night - still searching for clues as to what our quarry might have been trying to accomplish in these ruins.

Finally Orgoth made that rustling noise that was a mycanthrope's equivalent to clearing one's throat. "Gunnerbot, remember when you asked Daddy and Jae why Hrothgar wasn't moving anymore and we talked to you about life and how it had to end..."

Gunnerbot's monitor blinked. Orgoth immediately shut up. We waited.

"...oh! Wait, all this time you guys really thought I still don't know about that!?" He laughed an easy, genuine laugh. A vise that had been tightening around each of us magically disappeared. "Daddy, Jae, Dan, my name is the Gunnerbot! I have full access to the onboard computers and interstellar web. Don't you guys think I would have tried looking this stuff up?"

I opened my mouth to speak. "Gunnerbot, I'm... we're really sorry that..."

"Look, I know what the energy output is on these lasers and missiles. Even before I read anything about people bodies I could take a guess why the maximum settings on the climate controls and artificial gravity are what they are. I know water evaporates in space and people bodies are mostly made of water. I've known for months, almost a year now."

I should put that number into context. Gunnerbot was about two years old; Orgoth had spent nine months in a daze putting the pieces together while we were stranded on New Harfang after the storm giants killed Electric Eye. Despite our initial plans for him we'd managed to avenge E.E. and escape using only our planetside weapons, and we didn't see any space combat until we'd been using Gunnerbot for the usual navigation and hyperspace prediction for just over a year.

Hrothgar the Hamster had been about a year old when Gunnerbot was first completed.

"But I'm still sorry that we deceived--" I noticed a slight change in angle on the monitor. I didn't know if Orgoth or Finkelstein could see it, but Gunnerbot was, at least from my angle, now very pointedly staring his camera into the spot below my collarbone where my baptismal cross was sitting under my shirt.

"What you said," Gunnerbot explained in what sounded like an attempt at a grown-up explaining voice, "was that when I trained my lasers on something, I would be bringing light and fire to the other people to ask Jesus to take them. And you're right: that's exactly what I do. That, at least," he looked me in the eye, "is not deceiving anybody."

He looked around at all three of us. "I've thought about this for a long time. I was a little upset to learn that you guys were trying not to let me know what was going on; but I understand why you tried. I never feel good about it; it felt wrong when I first did it and your explanation felt wrong - at first.

"But then I started seeing how, every time you guys told me to do it, who we were doing it to was always either about to do the same thing to us or to someone else. So it always had to be someone. And I've trusted Captain Alvarez to know who was the best someone for it.

"Even then your explanation never sat well with me. I didn't let you guys know that, though, because I thought it would make you feel bad. .... yeah, I know," he interjected when he noticed the ever slightest raising of the corner of Finkelstein's mouth. "And it bothered me until after Hrothgar died and I got in touch with Fr. Gabriel online."

The man who baptized me. "How did you know him?"

"Your mom introduced us when I was talking to her about Hrothgar. He is very wise and good. He taught me what death and life meant, and how all this Jesus stuff even fit into it... really, you guys had just left me hanging with that! Do you know how much weird stuff there is about Jesus on the net?!"

To this day I shudder to think what could have been done with the armaments of the Ellobius had Gunnerbot not had the good sense to reject sola scriptura and penal substitutionary atonement.

"Anyway, we've had lots of conversations and I'm learning a lot. What we do is still not good, but it's still part of the broken, fallen world we're in. So far you guys have never told me to shoot anyone that didn't attack us or threaten someone else, but I will have to be ready to disobey if you tried to have me shoot someone that wasn't a threat."

I was about to say something along the lines of "That is wonderful! I'm glad we had this talk and got this all worked out!" and let us all move on to tracking our fugitive, but Finkelstein, bless their terrifyingly logical heart, just had to ride that 800-tonne Altairese gorillephant a few laps around the room: "But why were you okay with it when we had you blast all of them while we were trying to reach the Phlogistroni?"

The monitor zeroed in on Finkelstein and abruptly stopped. The display did a rapid series of "zoom and enhance" sequences on the multi-fanged, spindly, many-limbed serpentine dead. The aerodrone was flying dangerously close to the ruined city walls. No one spoke for two whole minutes while he did this over and over again with the emerging footage; when Gunnerbot finally broke the silence his voice was barely more than a whisper. "They... they were people!?"

We looked at each other, then at the monitor. I found myself mumbling, "I... don't think so?" and feeling the tiniest bit of relief upon realizing I actually believed it. None of us had noticed any artifacts other than the remains of the ruined city; no clothing, no bags, no supply caches, no weapons other than claws and teeth.

We watched the aerodrone approach a mangled corpse that seemed to be moving, only to narrowly dodge a couple nasty swipes of those claws from one of the survivors who/that didn't appear to appreciate us snooping on what might be their/its only hot meal in years.

Orgoth was better at thinking about these things than Finkelstein or I. "Do we have footage of the fighting itself and the moments that led up to it? I don't recall anything that resembled an attempt to communicate."

"I just remember them constantly making a beeline for us," Finkelstein said.

"Not entirely. The ones that got past our shields did make some effort to avoid our line of sight. Remember the ones that got on the ramp while I was doing an ammo run? They must have been capable of at least some kind of theory of mind if they could do that - they might simply not be organized enough to do the same in a group."

"Are you sure they weren't just getting out of our line of fire - you know, that big glowing ruckus that was killing them by the dozen? I remember basically shooting nonstop back there."

"Did any of them try to get behind you like they tried to go after me? I definitely wasn't shooting the grenades continuously like you were with the Trashpanda."

I knew the answer better than he did. "None of them got anywhere near Orgoth. But that's because you" - I was looking at Orgoth - "were zigging and zagging all over the place and it would have been stupidly hard to get behind you without concealment."

"This is terrible!" Gunnerbot wailed. "We need to find an answer for this. Let's try to see if we can talk to them. But I don't think they'll listen to us, so if they won't let's at least pick up some of their dead and see if we can run some experiments..."

Experiments. On corpses. To see if they were people. I really wish the captain hadn't taken the last of the rum with her...