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Project Liger | Part 3: Interception
“Wow. This is awesome” I said. “But what’s going on?”
“Let’s go the café, meet the rest of the crew and help you catch up.”
“Sounds good” I said.
We went into the elevator. There were 256 floor buttons, labelled 0 through 255.
On our way up, Hex told me about the ship’s vertical structure, with the engine room at floor 0, and the control room at floor 1. We were going up from floor 2 to floor 16, where the café was. Also told me floors 0 through 15 are utilities, 16 to 31 are shared facilities, and 32 to 255 are individual apartments. HSS stands for Hyper-Spaceship. With my entrance there were now 88 people living on the ship.
“And the war itself,” Hex continued, “is between us and an evil force, and we aren’t sure of exactly what it is yet. But anyways, it keeps destroying the universe, and we keep regenerating the universe. But we can only do that a finite number of times since a key redundancy property of the fabric of spacetime takes a hit every time. We’ve got to stop this evil force, whatever it is, before it destroys our universe forever.”
“Do you have any idea of what it is?” I asked.
“None of us are sure, but one theory is we are the inhabitants of a vast, perhaps infinite computer, and something is hacking our reality.”
“So this ship is outside of our normal reality?”
“Precisely so. We have so much to cover at the café.” He paused to reflect on things.
It all seemed very interesting, although I felt we should’ve been at the sixteenth floor already.
“Hey Hex, is the elevator usually this slow?” I asked.
“Uh, no it isn’t” he said.
I looked at the floor indicator. We were at around -50,000 and going down fast.
“Does this have something to do with it?” I pointed to the floor indicator.
“Shit” said Hex. “When the doors open, follow me. We will run as fast as we can to a reset point. Got it?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“No time for questions. This stuff happens sometimes. Just follow me and kill anything or anyone besides me that gets near you. Nobody outside is our friends, even if that’s what they pretend to be.”
He handed me a phaser gun.
Hex double tapped his watch, spoke “Negative floor glitch. Two affected, we've been intercepted through the elevator. Outlook uncertain” into it.
The elevator stopped. Floor -72,510. The doors opened. It looked like a mid-century gala, with people relaxing and jazz music playing.
Hex whispered to me: “Again, follow me. And kill anything that approaches you. No time for questions, just trust me. We run on the count of three. Three, two, one. Go.”
We bolted out of the elevator.
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Credit for the second image (black and white photograph): Crystal Gala
(First image is my own artwork)
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Project Liger | Part 2: Crash Landing
Now I was freefalling. It looked like the inside of a tube, maybe three meters in diameter, with what looked like stars outside, and cool colours inside. It was exhilarating at first, but it just kept going. I was expecting to arrive somewhere sooner. After what seemed like five minutes, I had gone from skipping heartbeats to being bored. I got out my phone, unlocked it. Crap, there was no signal. No meme browsing.
Then my phone rang. The caller's number was about thirty digits. Probably the least crazy thing I had seen today. I answered.
"Hi" I said.
"Hi" said what sounded like a man on the other end.
"What the hell is going on today?" I asked.
"Stuff."
"Are you real?"
"Yes. I'm assuming you are."
"Of course. Why am I stuck in this wormhole. What the fuck is happening?"
"It's looping right now; we can pick you up now that we've established contact. But first, I gotta tell you something important. We have a security protocol where we don't exchange real names. Pick any code name."
"Call me Tiger."
"Cool, Tiger. You can change it anytime you want, just let people know. My code name's Hexadecagon, like the shape. People call me Hex for short"
"Nice to meet you, Hex."
Hex hung up and I immediately saw a solid-looking surface below me approaching faster than anything I'd ever seen before, excluding astronomical objects. I bent my knees a bit before I crashed onto a floor. A sudden jolt of extreme pain and then I was standing up as if it had only been a millimeter drop. I was in what looked sort of like a teleporter room from Star Trek. There was a guy standing behind the desk control panel.
"That was cool" I said.
"And you thought that second story challenge looked bad" he said. "Luckily we got fast healing for the entry fall."
It was Hex.
"Hex, right?"
"Yes, I'm Hex. You must be Tiger. Welcome to the team."
He walked over, and we shook hands.
"You probably have lots of questions” he said.
“Lots” I replied.
"Cool, we’ll get to those soon. I already have a feeling you're one of our MVPs. I say that because your code name is only one letter away from our team’s name. Our team is called Liger. And our side of the war is code-named Project Liger. Welcome aboard the HSS Liger."
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What Hexadecagon was referencing (Second story challenge): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjIynhErIDY
(Credit for image at top: found on https://www.livescience.com/wormholes-may-be-stable-after-all)
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Project Liger | Part 1: The Fireball Glitch
One morning, I opened my blinds after eating breakfast. It looked nice outside, except there were fireballs raining down from the sky. I saw a guy was running past my apartment building, screaming at the top of his lungs, and got hit by one, got knocked down. Lots of blood. I won't describe that any further. I stood there, staring at the scene as it continued to unfold. At first there weren't that many of these things, but soon it was pouring with them. Also, they weren't exactly fireballs, they looked more like crappy movie glitch effects, streaking down, making craters, making noise. I heard one hit the top of my building. Loud crash and I heard screaming above me. I live on the second floor of a four-storey building. It sounded like that fireball had penetrated two ceilings. Some of the impacts were much worse. Like one soon after that: a faster one which obliterated one of the nearby high rises. That shook me out of being idle.
I started pacing around my room, trying to think of what to do. My phone rang an emergency alert. No instructions. Looks like I had to figure something out myself. A fireball came in at a slight slant and took out all my windows, along with my desk. My outside wall was gone, and the floor now felt unstable. I took my phone and ran the other way, into the hallway. I went to the stairwell and saw the wreckage of the floor above me. There was only one other person there, running downstairs from the floor above. A bathtub flew mostly sideways and hurtled him and itself through the front door. I'm guessing it killed him. In the seconds I was running down the main stairs to the basement (hoping for better shelter), I didn't see anyone else. I heard only a few screams. Come to think of it, I feel like most of the people had been gone since before this started. The screaming should've been louder, and there should've been more people running around, as well as flailing around with that high rise I mentioned, as it fell. As strange as that part was, there was no time for contemplation.
I got to the basement in seconds, and on the way a large shard of glass missed my head by centimeters. Not gonna lie, it was cool to see it blaze past and smash into a million pieces on the other side of the atrium. Now I was in the basement. Everything here was intact. I thought about trying to hotwire a car, but I don't know how, and I don't know where I'd go anyway.
I shouted out to see if anyone else was there, instead of wasting a minute to look around. Nobody responded. I started looking around. Outside and above, I heard the pounding of those nasty fireball things.
Two minutes later and I was still there, scouring the place for anything useful, and my mind for ideas. Just then, a quarter of the ceiling collapsed, the rubble made a huge mess (epic understatement), and fire started spreading. One car near the collapse blew up. I was running out of time.
Looking around even more frantically, a turquoise glimmer caught my eye. Under one of the cars. I looked, and there appeared to be some sort of wormhole where concrete floor would've usually been. I couldn't fit under the car. I had so much energy in me that I had no trouble lifting the car over and capsizing it out of the way.
I stared into the wormhole. I had no idea what exactly it was or where it went to. The fire was spreading. The portal looked like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. Heck, the whole scene did.
Another fireball crashed through the wall a few feet away, shooting debris right by me. Now that the wall was broken, I could see the sky was red. Way worse than the summer of 2021. Bright, glowing red. The ground outside was on fire and these things were coming down in sheets. The fire was closing in on all sides.
I jumped through the portal.
(To be continued)
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