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[goldlockingterritories]

Cold Sea by Boris Groh (borisgroh on artstation)

[goldlockingterritories]

Waker Of Gulls

A young woman wakes up in a space habitat filled with spear wielding war parties...

Lynne panicked as warm plastic filled her mouth.

No matter how wide she opened her eyes, she remained surrounded by total darkness. She could barely move her arms and legs. No air came through her mouth. She was trapped, suffocating, growing lightheaded, confused, and terrified out of her mind.

Then, slowly but surely, the plastic gripping her whole body started to loosen.

Lynne found herself blinded by light. A single line in the darkness opened up to her. It was so bright her eyes couldn’t make out anything.

She struggled to move up towards it. But even though the plastic had loosened, she found her arms not obeying her. She felt fatigued, as she did when her brother had once pushed her at the gym to the point where her muscles didn’t have the energy to keep going.

“Careful.” A soft and alluring voice met her ears. “Your body’s still waking up. Give it time, before you make your escape.”

The voice belonged to a woman, and it calmed her. She hoped that it was a nurse and that she was in a hospital. But whoever she was, she cleared her nerves enough that she realized she wasn’t suffocating. Her airway was blocked, her chest didn’t rise and fall, but she held her breath underwater before, and right then she felt she could go on forever.

Another voice spoke, “I’m afraid we don’t have the time, Mother of Sleepers.”

The shadow of a head and torso blocked the light, and she felt something tug plastic away from her. Her mouth had been cleared- and she finally felt air rise and fall in her chest.

Warm arms wrapped around her waist, and she felt her body grow cold as she was pulled upwards. She had been underneath hot water, her dangling fingertips told her.

The world was a blur, too bright for her to keep her eyes open for long. Her arms were too exhausted to lift their hands just to shield her eyes.

“This will prepare your body.” Lynne realized that the other voice, a man, had been the one to lift her out.

Something was stuck into her neck. A needle?

Suddenly, she felt something change in her body. Pins and needles formed up her arms and legs, jolting them into movement once more. She was able to move her hand over her face, but she didn’t need to for long; the light started to hurt less and less.

Colors stopped bleeding together. The features of the person carrying her slowly started to reveal themselves; a yellow beak covered the forehead, above unblinking slits of eyes belonging to a golden stone face. At first, Lynne thought he had to be wearing a mask. But behind those eyelids, she saw pinhole cameras stare back at her.

Another warm hand touched her shoulder- and she saw a four armed creature. She jolted. But it was gentle, moving to caress her. “Have no fear,” the soft voice of the woman, Lynne realized. “There’s no danger in this room.”

It was like a statue that crossed the body of a caterpillar with the appendages of a spider. It moved with a soft precision that relaxed Lynne as its arms moved to console her.

She felt her mind regain it’s awareness, like she just received an injection of caffeine. She finally took notice of the layout of the room; egg shaped pods, transparent, were hung on the walls. People floated within them. 

Lynne felt bile rise up in her throat. They were vacuum sealed within plastic, suspended. She looked and saw the trail of liquid dripping from her body, leading into an empty steaming pod that had been opened.

Her eyes widened when she made the connection.

A bang at one of the doors sent shakes through her. “Let us in, Waker!” An old voice pierced through, violent in his tone. “You won’t fly away with your catch!”

“There might not be danger in this room,” The thing holding her spoke, “but it certainly wants in.”

The Mother of sleepers suddenly unfolded, like an animal jumping to protect its child. “Hostile agent recognized.”

“Agents of the schools.” The thing- Waker- dropped Lynne to her feet while with a single claw he clipped the string off a pouch attached to his white cotton loincloth. That’s when Lynne finally noticed that his whole body was mechanical. 

He was ball jointed, and his chest was an exposed plastic ribcage encircling what looked like a glowing purple heart. Tiny clay faces had been stuck to where his pecs would be, fanged creatures that stuck out sharp tongues and had hungry glares.

He pulled the pouch off the object it held. It was round, surrounded with four clay faces; skulls with bulging eyes.

“This object is rare, and has been with me for a long time.” He gripped the faces in his hand, and they crumbled away to reveal green underneath. “It travelled ninety years to get here.”

He picked the rest like a hard boiled egg, revealing the gridded texture underneath. 

“What…?” She was confused as to what it was, until he broke away the top; the pin and trigger made everything clear.

The door was barraged with hits that dented holes into the room, a blunt object poking through each blow. The hits rounded the door, until the whole thing was detached from the space it was embedded in. That’s when the smell hit Lynne.

It was overwhelming, putrid and sickly. “It’s their trophies,” Waker took notice of her reaction. “They take them wherever they go.”

The door is pushed away, and a snarling partially clothed old man stands there. A metal frame surrounds his body, following his movements; what broke through the door had been attached to his arm.

Waker pulled Lynne back as the old man’s entourage filed through the door around him, wielding bamboo spears and clubs with sharp metal jutting out of them like serrated pieces of wood. The ‘trophies’ dangled from the old man’s hips; it looked as though metal had been poured over their rotting faces. 

Lynne’s legs started to shake. The way the old man with a sharp bone poking out of his nose glared at Waker and her- they were there to work their tools on them.

Lynne hears a click, and the grenade soars through the air. Her waist is grappled and she is pulled behind a pod for cover.

Bang!

A wave of dust surrounded her and Waker. Screaming followed after.

Waker pulled Lynne out with him, and they witnessed the carnage together- many of the others who came with the old man laid bleeding on the ground. They hadn’t tried to get away from the thrown grenade, somehow not understanding what it was. The old man himself was bleeding profusely all over his body.

But he still stood. “The board gives me strength!”

With a limp, he charged Lynne and Waker, and this time she saw the fire axe attached to his right mechanical arm. Waker shielded Lynne with his body, when the mother interrupted the old man’s charge.

“Not so fast!” The mother's two biggest arms gripped his real arms, granting her control of the mechanical ones.

She yanked him around, until eventually slamming him into the ground. “Go! Now!”

Waker got the message, and led Lynne by the hand, running out the door.

“Come back here, coward!” The old man screamed from underneath the mother.

Leaving the room didn’t bring them to safety, Lynne realized. More members of the group that came with the old man had stayed back down the hall. This time, Lynne’s nostrils picked up the smell of cannabis.

They were young, she saw. Some barely pass their pre-teens. That didn’t stop them from looking any less murderous.

They clutched their weapons, this time all bamboo spears, and approached steadily. They had been taught to take formation, it seemed.

Waker released his grip on me, and wings spread from behind his back. They were dragonfly-like, four-sectioned and with a sort of membrane over it. They shifted colors like a swirling rainbow.

The oncoming would-be murderers paused in their march, tips of spears trained on him. “Nines!” the oldest teen behind them shouted. “Forward!”

They picked up speed again. Then, with greater speed, Waker leapt forward. 

His wings had long reach, slapping away their sticks three at a time. Some were hit in the face and collapsed to the floor, clutching their burning red cheeks.  But the leader who had made themselves known was his target.

His wings shortened and solidified once he made the spears, and embedded themselves into the leader’s throat, stopping his stone axe mid swing. Lynne gaped. The leader- barely older than her younger brother- went limp, and fell to the ground.

The small band’s formation had been broken apart; they scattered around Waker, terrified out of their minds at the show of his wings. And Lynne too, for in the chaos, she bolted.

“Get behind me!” Waker must've assumed she ran to join him, but with his back to her and his front to the retreating child warriors, Lynne ran far down the hall and made the corner unnoticed. “Wait! Where are you-!”

“Students! To me!” The voice of the furious old man echoed through the halls.

Lynne’s heart pounded, but it pounded long before she took off. She saw a doorway and thought to look there for escape.

The door opened with a slide, and she covered her mouth. They had destroyed the mother machine in this room, smashed her head to bits. The people in the pods never stood a chance. An old woman in the same sort of metal frame led this group.

She glared at Lynne with the sharpest glare of hate. “Sleeper! Take her now!”

“Yes, Ms. Kalklin!” The Students took their attention away from the bloodied cracked open pods and made for Lynne.

Lynne slid the door shut with a slam, and took off again. She rounded an intersection before she heard them break into the hallway, and she went into a full sprint.

It was a maze, and they were everywhere. She had to turn back when she nearly ran into a group patrolling the hall. Luckily, the confusing layout worked in her favor, and she was able to lose them. 

But the halls started to be filled with their shouting.

Some ordered around others to cover more ground, “Split up!” 

Others taunted her, “We see you!”

An arrow narrowly missed her and embedded itself into the wall. The sound of a chainsaw revved itself up and made her feet even more sore from running, trying to gather as much distance from the frightening sounds she heard...

Lynne stopped. She found the nearest corner and stood in it, listening. She searched for them herself, listening to the sound of feet smacking against tiled floors. To voices ordering, “Go that way! Cover this exit! Get your bows ready!”

The strong smells also helped to pinpoint them; of rotting flesh, filthy body odors, gasoline exhaust, and weed. She picked the direction where she didn’t smell or hear anything.

“Waker of gulls!” A panicked young voice shouted somewhere. “Waker of gulls!”

The sound of cursing, screaming, smacking, hitting, crashing and falling followed after. They were fighting.

Lynne saw sunlight down the hall; a smashed through door was at the other end. When no smell wafted from it, she ran for it. When she came out, and the sunlight no longer blinded her eyes, she was hit with the strongest sensation of vertigo.

The world spun around her. Trees and buildings twirled around and around, above her head, from the left and right, front and back. She gripped a tree in a bearhug to keep herself from falling down, and she avoided looking up.

She stared at the grey tiled ground. Then a shadow engulfed it, and a powerful gust of air blew over her.

She looked up to see a wooden boat with four massive fans- two on the front and two on the back. A face looked down from it. “There!” The mid-aged man pointed down at her.

The fans rotated and drove the boat to the side. It descended, levelling with her, and Lynne saw a line of younger adults pull the strings back on their bows.

She ran moments before the arrows hit, sticking to the tree and smacking off the ground. The boat angled around, tracking her. The ground ended in front of her, and looking over the solid railing showed a canal that ran...east?

She actually considered diving into it, when arrows suddenly surrounded her. She turned and hoped to run back for the building, when Waker sprinted out the door, arrow notched in the bow he now held.

The arrow flew and struck it’s intended target- the aircraft’s driver. It didn’t take the whole thing down, but it was enough to stun them.

They scrambled to take over the aircraft while Lynne rejoined Waker. “This way!” He didn’t take her hand this time, but she followed anyway.

He produced an item that had been attached to his back, underneath his green and red patterned cape. It was a pink plastic tube with markings painted onto it.

He brought it over his head and spun. It let out a whistle that he wove into a tune.

“He’s calling his steed!” Lynne turned to see more of the attackers filing out of the door, entering a dash for her and Waker.

“There!” One pointed above them all of a sudden, terror in his eyes. “There! There-gah!”

A big object swiped through the group. The closest chasers dropped to the ground, large slashes across their chests. It glided through the air, wings twisting and turning its body as it orbited the building; it looked like another boat, but it had no rotors, no fans to give it it’s thrust.

Lynne found herself half gawking, but focused when it flew back towards them.

“Don’t let them escape!” The old woman from before came back. “Take your formations! Charge!”

Waker’s ‘steed’ touched the ground, its wings folding up as its momentum brought it towards him and Lynne on wheels. 

“Get on!” Waker ran for it and jumped onto the canoe-like vehicle, Lynne tumbling in after. The wings unfurled again, longer this time, and Lynne felt air be pulled down into them and directed towards the ground.

It lifted off without flapping a single wing. “No!” The old woman threw a tantrum. “WOG! I’ll kill you!”

More aircraft flocked from below the building, the raiders climbing onto them before they even touched the ground.

“Don’t let them reach the stream!” The leader’s voice shrank as the flyer climbed up higher into the air.

The flyer tilted upwards at a slight angle, the wind blowing Lynne’s hair all over the place. The world still spinned around her, and the bile that had been forming in her throat finally came up all the way.

Then Lynne felt the wind start to die down. The flyer’s ascent was slowing.

“Why are we slowing?” She looked down behind them as Waker- wog, whatever- tied rope around his leg. “They’re still behind us!” She exclaimed with wide eyes.

They ascended at an angle away from Lynne and Waker, so that their arrows didn’t fall back on them.

Lynne nearly jolted when she felt a rope get wrapped around her foot. “The stream is not their domain,” Waker tightened it.

Arrows flew- but they flew wildly. They went out in all directions, like they’d stop aiming at all with their bows.

But Lynne could see that they were aiming directly at her. “They’re missing!”

“They’re not used to everything becoming feathers.”

“...Feathers?” Lynne scrunched her brows in confusion, until she turned and found Waker floating mid air.

He had a hand gripping his seat, but his legs were floating freely, weightlessly…

As light as feathers, she realized.

At first she thought they were just falling, caught in the same sort of phenomena that NASA’s vomit comet used to simulate zero-g. But no- there was no gravity at all.

She let go of her seat, and floated away from the boat. Not fall; floated. Her rope kept her attached to the flyer, and all it took was a single yank to end up back in the boat.

But their chasers picked up speed. Even if their shots were bad, they still had the spears, chainsaws, and numbers. They just needed to get close.

The sound of a horn nearly shook the air. “There!” Waker pointed to an object floating above them.

It was long, a series of red modules with four sails- made of the same material as the flyer’s wings- surrounding the construct in a diamond shape.

Lynne saw men float outside of it, bracing their feet against rails with ropes keeping them from flying away as they levelled their own bows down at them.

“Wait,” Lynne paled. “They’re gonna hit us!”

The sound of smacking strings signified the loosed arrows. But instead of scattering like the arrows of the raiders below, these followed a steady formation- and met their target.

They flew past the flyer and rained down on the chasing aircraft. Screams met Lynne’s ears once more, but this time, she felt relief. The attackers broke away, leaving to avoid more of their men receiving arrows to the face.

Lynne watched them, even as Waker leaped out of the flyer with a hooked rope and attached it to the vessel that saved them. They grew small in the distance, and it was then that Lynne realized the world wasn’t spinning. The twirling landscape that surrounded her truly did surround her. The world was along the inside of a cylinder, it’s star in the middle…

The building she had woken up in, only moments ago, shook and kicked up dust as it receded back into the ground. Lynne laughed as she finally passed out from all the blood she lost from the arrow embedded in her back.

[goldlockingterritories]

Obvious

A transhuman god is upset at the departure of her children, and is at odds with her partner.

Natalia peered over the scene before her: A parade, climbing along a street wedged between shiny black glass skyscrapers and polished concrete apartment buildings. Her view stood above it all, showing her all of the city; an urban sprawl, clustering in the middle, a suburb of lawn sprinklers and freshly cut grass to the west, oakwood docks and caramel colored beaches to the east. Further down west past the suburbs are all rural deserts and forests, full of buggy driving rednecks, tobacco growing hermits and cocaine hauling gangsters in speedos. All neatly nested within the small, lonely island.

She wasn’t going to tell the city government any of what she saw far west; they were the ones who made the decision to leave her. 

She returned to the real world: grey rocky landscape, and sleek black spires in the distance, spewing out pillars of smoke into the sky, joining the dark, electrified clouds.

The clouds weren’t normal; she could almost see the ocean of micro and nano machines swirling around on their pinwheel joints, connecting their long flagella wires, pushing atmosphere and delivering energy and messages all around the planet. A circulatory, respiratory, and nervous system all rolled into one big blanket for the whole world...

A large black seed shaped object hovered in the sky, the sharper end pointed upwards. It was obvious to Natalia what would happen; the clouds would synthesize the fuel, load it onto the rocket, and launch Natalia’s children past the sky and into space, where it would blossom, unfurling it’s sails and carry off riding the light of the stars. 

Everything was obvious to Natalia now. 

If she wanted to understand circuitry and rocket science, she did. If she wanted to understand chemistry and biology, she did. If she wanted to know how to create life, control the weather, travel the cosmos, she did.

And it was obvious why she could; she wasn’t human anymore. Her name hadn’t always been Natalia, but she had burned through so many at this point. She supposed that she picked that quality up from her partner.

“Leaving?” Speak of the devil, and you shall receive them.

They had many names and faces throughout their life; Carried in by wings that should’ve been invisible to Natalia, had it not been obvious, was Jules. An azure blue dress shirt hugged them underneath a black, floral patterned waistcoat and matching black jeans with gilded zipper pockets.

“Not me,” She began, knowing Jules already knew the answer, “My yggdrasil children.”

Yug-Drasil, the pronunciation rolled off her tongue as if she was fluent in the language (she was, obviously), and she couldn’t tell whether or not she read that somewhere, or if it was a signal plopped in her head by their new brain.

The world trees dotted the continent; branches composed of centimeter by centimeter metallic cubes, each holding the equivalent of entire human brains, billions of molecular neurons packed into something that could fit in the palm of a hand. Each mind was attached to a shared computer simulation, a virtual environment, either randomly generated or designed by Natalia, or Jules. Whole countries could be fitted in the space of a medium sized farmhouse, 30 souls a foot.

Natalia had reared an entire society in one, fully aware of the outside world. And they wanted to leave.

“I fixed it, by the way,” Natalia’s pause barely covered a microsecond when Jules spoke.

She didn’t bother asking for an answer she already knew. “My sabotage,” She said.

A special colony of micromachines, activated by sunlight, designed to devour Mylar, the material used on a solar sail. Jules must have picked them out, like a baboon picking out ticks from a mate’s fur coat and eating them, when the rocket went through the clouds.

“You bastard,” A smile infected her face, reaching her eyes. She used to have a volatile competitive streak; now she loved it when someone outsmarted her.

Jules regarded her with a drab expression, a soft smile touching their lips, but never their eyes. 

She wouldn’t have hurted them, only keep them stuck in orbit. If she could have her way now, she would’ve made it so that none of her children could leave. But that was the deal their older faces made long ago, when the trees were first thought of; let life go on. It’s only natural for Jules to uphold it. 

She hated them and she loved them, so she walked up and planted a kiss on their lips, and pulled them in. 

Her mind drifted off, summoning an Eidolon. Several kilometers north of here, at the base of a spire, micromachines sprung up from the ground like a trail of ants climbing along their own backs, climbing along lattice structures made of themselves, all together forming a single grey shape composed of arms, legs, a torso, and a head. The micromachines texturize themselves, forming smooth skin and dangling fabrics, pigment and color spreading across it, revealing Natalia in her short blonde hair, black leather garments and boots. 

The strange flesh and silicone blood Natalia, undressing herself with Jules on top of her, sent abstract commands to her Eidolon as it sent back short term memories. Eidolon Natalia regarded the spire; A power plant, delivering electricity to the machine clouds above, as if solar power wasn’t enough (she knew it wasn’t). This one would be using fusion to vaporize water into steam, spinning a sheet of micro turbines. Electricity would climb to the tip of the spire, where micromachines would distribute it amongst themselves in an invisible network.

Natalia commanded her Eidolon to move elsewhere, so she conjured a set of wings. They attached themselves to the Eidolon’s body, embedding straps to it’s fake skeletal structure, and pulled it off the ground.

The wings didn’t flap; it swirled air below and behind with a cloth made of a million tiny fans. A dust storm formed in the north, one of the only natural threats present on the planet. She knew an invisible wall would be forming around the storm, isolating and neutralizing it. 

Desolate buildings whizzed by below her feet; Skyscrapers, castles, mansions, houses, cabins, and towers. When Jules and Natalia first came here, that was all they had ever done; build and build and build. They stretched their creative abilities, at least when they still had human minds. 

After that, they just lived here. Sometimes together, sometimes isolated. Then the network was created, sinking its roots into the ground below, and Jules and Natalia connected themselves to it. Her name was Jacqueline when that happened, and Jules was Nathaniel.

The lone structures below transitioned into clusters of villages and townships, groupings of decrepit and abandoned housing. Things became obvious for Jack and Than, or rather they started to tap into the bank of knowledge and expertise that was the planet-wide superintelligence. Whenever they sensed or thought something, hundreds of artificial neurons parsed through it, predicted a query, and sent the answer as an electrical pulse that the brain interpreted as knowledge it already had. 

Every science and every byte of knowledge became like common sense to them. Obvious. 

And so, it became obvious what was missing from their- or rather Jack and Than’s - lives: People. So, they took what they knew, and built some people, called Simms. Like that ancient video game.

A patch worked house stood below Natalia. One of Than’s. Castles and junkyard additions erupted from its roof, colorful graffiti all over it. The Simms had breathed life into their world, returning complex relationships, conflict, and an extra pair of creativity. 

Jules pulled their lips from the real Natalia, a smile still present as they looked down at her. “Where are you going?”

Another Eidolon erupted from the ground below, growing to encompass a height of 20 feet, lumbering over the house. It’s body texturized into skin, no clothing, revealing the black haired face of Jules staring up at her. Jules always loved provoking imagery.

“My mind wandered, decided to take a stroll down memory lane,” Natalia and her Eidolon spoke in sync.

“You would have me think that,” A smile stretched across Eidolon Jules face, “wouldn’t you?”

Their belly inflated, rumbling, and something climbed up their throat. They opened their mouth, muffled screams following, and eventually an arm, followed by the blonde haired head of a middle aged man.

“Oh god!” The figure exclaimed in anguish and horror, “Please help me!”

Natalia knew the man; John Yak, third generation of the Yak family, ex-military (or so he thought), strict father of three. He used to live in the patchwork house, and his son was the one who built the castle tower for his kids.

“Please god!” Than designed John to be aggressive, loyal, prideful, and especially arrogant, being the one who stuffed the house with taxidermy and bear carpets from his hunts. He died when he was eaten by a polar bear.

The Eidolon pursed his lips around the Simm, making a slurping sound. John shrieked as he was drawn back down into the Eidolon’s belly.

“That supposed to scare me?” Natalia spoke up to Jules.

“No,” Jules said, and Natalia braced for another cryptic answer, “It’s supposed to scare me.”

“Oh stuff it, would you.” Natalia stretched her head to theirs, embracing Jules again. Eidolon Natalia continued her journey, and the giant naked Jules watched her leave with a smile, until disintegrating into grey fractal dust.