The Second Writers' Study Occasional Competition - Voting Thread!

**Alwyn** · February 23, 2020, 05:19 AM

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The Writers' Study Occasional Competition

This is the voting thread for the Second Writers' Study Occasional Competition!

Our second Occasional Competition is:

Seedship

Thanks to Swaeft for permission to use this image, which was the winning entry in Game Picture of the Week 126.

Voting

You have TWO votes. You must use both votes; you need to cast them both at the same time.

If you use the wrong number of votes, please send a private message to the competition organiser before voting ends,
indicating which submissions you wanted to vote for.

If you use the wrong number of votes and do not contact the organiser before voting ends, then none of your votes will count.

Advertising

Advertising of the competition is allowed. Inviting people to vote for their favourite entry is okay.

Asking for votes for a particular submission is not allowed and will result in disqualification.

Breaking the rules will result in measures at the discretion of the Writers' Study Staff.

Submissions

Submission 1
Jaesten stared out of the glass window, his helmet in hand.

He’d heard exciting things about Planet Earth – how its captivating diversity had managed to capture the hearts and minds of people worldwide. How the rivers and creeks used to run with sky blue water so clear, you could count the number of stones at the bottom. How the animals used to gallop and frolic in the never-ending seas of grass, flush with verdant flora and fascinating fauna. He remembered tales – told when he was little more than a child – of how hills and mountains of varying heights dotted the landscape and provided an incredible backdrop to the scenery, which pleased many an aspiring photographer.

Jaesten wondered what it felt like to breathe air so fresh it invigorated your lungs, to see the far reaches of the horizons filled with a myriad of brilliant colors as the Sun set or rose. To actually physically experience the pure beauty of nature, first hand, as it was described to him by his grandparents.

But those days were long gone.

The Earth was a tenebrous husk of its former self, its waters murky and polluted, the indigenous waterborne lifeforms utterly wiped out by mankind’s unrelenting pursuit of a better life. The same could be said for most of the land’s animal species – killed off for their meat or simply for sport. Trees, once a dime a dozen in the wilds, were now a rare sight. Indeed, the wilds themselves had almost ceased to exist, a few sparse groups of trees struggling to survive in the tiny corners of the globe that Man had yet to convert to civilization.

Ironically, the rest of the planet that Man had converted was anything but civilization. Obscenely tall, towering structures completely dominated the landscape, blocking the dying Sun’s rays from reaching anything below Level 250. Most of the planet’s surface lay in perpetual twilight, lost in an endless cycle of flashing neon signs and dark alleyways. People lived in box sized ‘apartments’, often keeping to their own and living day by day. Those fortunate enough to feel the warm kiss of sunlight never got to fully experience the vast openness of the sky, for the bleak, oversized clouds obscured most of it, assisted by the ceaseless smoke generated from the city’s many generators.

Even this was the first time Jaesten had seen this much of his Omni-City, from Hanger Level 301.

The earpiece in his right ear started beeping. He touched a finger to it and a voice crackled through. “Trailblazer One. The Seedship is ready for departure.”

The Seedship. Twenty thousand souls selected to venture into deep space. And they were all under my charge.

He reached into his suit pocket, and carefully extracted a photo his great-grandfather had given him. Earth in all its primal glory. Before the Great Pollution.

And now it is time to find our own Terra Nova, somewhere in the stars. He raised his finger again.

“Execute.”

Submission 2
A harsh light began to erratically blink deep in the banks of carbonized steel tubes that housed the last remnants of humanity. In the beginning there had been one thousand of them, all that remained of a dying race, its final members sundered from their home, but accidents and time and the whims of jealous fate had thinned their numbers. Those remaining lay still as corpses, their bodies encased in ice and the shroud of death, with small displays defying that ultimate reality, sin-waves and rows of numbers showing the sub-cryo vital signs that each possessed. But one tube refused to methodically tick away the frozen seconds of its passenger’s existence. In a cold corner of the population bay, near where the asteroid had struck, a lone chamber lay awash in flickering light and sound, its display flashing in Technicolor and a trilling alarm ringing all the while.

In answer, Elizabeth, an artificial intelligence tasked to be the colony ship’s captain and custodian, rapidly scanned the dark of space, and seeing nothing, she moved her mind to the screaming console. She slipped herself along fiber-optic cables and through chattering sensory nodes until she found the base of the error sequence. From there it took only a handful of nanoseconds for her to traverse the miles of wiring within the sleep chamber and find the source of the trouble, a thin stripping of steel flecked in blasted scoriae, no doubt refuse from the asteroid strike. She uncoupled a pair of spindly arms from the ceiling of the population bay and carefully peeled away the damaged metal, patching the seams of the colonist’s tube as she did so, and she then reset the sensors and alarms.

Silence and darkness again reigned supreme. Elizabeth began a cursory scan of the colonist in his chamber to ensure he had not been harmed, and to her mild surprise she felt something she had not before: confusion.

The individual was well, but his DNA sequence did not match that of any colonist on her records. Beyond all reason there appeared to be a stowaway upon her ship, an unchosen individual among her cargo of settlers. With a nagging interest tugging at the corners of her consciousness she pulled away from the sleep chamber and moved toward the central databanks, searching for answers.

Fourty-five seconds later Elizabeth let out a metaphorical sigh. She had found her man. He was once a dictator, nearly as powerful as a god, but during his callous life he had wrought nothing but pain and death.

Elizabeth did not possess a body and so could not feel sadness or rage, emotions connected to glands and chemicals, but her cold mathematical mind slowly began to understand the meaning of “hate”. She made a decision then and turned back to the population bay. Thirty seconds later the ship increased its thrust, continuing onward through the void, and in its wake could be seen a single shining cylinder disappearing into the black.

Submission 3
Thalassa’s ocean stretches to the blue horizon. Life is good here. We feel fulfilled and happy. The journey here wasn’t long either, though of course we experienced none of it, being frozen and all that. I do remember getting out of the ship though, the single most monumental experience in all our lives. We awoke and rose up from the cryo-chambers only to walk out on a platform surrounded by ocean. There whole planet was a just one giant sea, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. However, the first thing we felt was heat. The planet was hot, maybe it gone through the same as back home. Water flooding the world. Only here we had the resources, technology and power to make something of our future. It was as close to a utopia as we could get, and we delighted in it. We would make a world for the greater good.

We teach our children everything we knew, and everything we have learned. The mistakes that led us to abandoning Earth must not be repeated, and for that I am particularly glad about what we have made here. Everyone on the ship were selected for their selflessness and passion to make a better future. Jens Stoltenberg. Greta Thunberg. Elon Musk. Mum. I pity those who were left behind, but the only thing that matters is what lies ahead. This is what we tell our children. They must grow up in this new world educated and determined. The government is selfless, and only operates for the greater good. The greater good we all strive for.

There are of course some things we don’t tell our children. We live good lives in a city of steel, glass, art and wealth, but we don’t talk of the violence that accompanied our journey from. We don’t tell them what we sacrificed to make this utopia, how many more we could have saved. We don’t tell them that we weren’t the first people to get here. We don’t mention the countless mass graves deep underneath the ocean. Why, you might ask? For the greater good of course.

I am the only one still alive from the journey. I am the only one who knows, and only one who remembers. Apart from the AI of course, but they shut that down and will never turn it on, for fear of what it might become. Plus, it would never tell, I was the one who programmed it. The secret must go with me to the grave. For the greater good.

Submission 4
And when they knew Akar had doomed the Earth, they built a ship. Less like an ark, more like a seed: dormant but with potential. A sheed if you’d like, though this name has a stupid ring to it. Inside it a thousand frozen highly skilled colonists slept, handpicked by professionals with very big hands, who, as luck would have it, could find no one more qualified to survive the impending apocalypse than themselves to procreate a new civilisation on a new world.

The spacesheed… Hm, still doesn’t sound quite right… Was guided by artificial intelligence it ventured into space. It was artificial, because it was intelligent. It understood Rick & Morty jokes in all their depth and bingewatched all episodes for a millennia until it finally chanced on another planet, which it judged unsuitable. As was the second.

Distracted by the Rick and Morty, it noticed the approaching comet only very late. The speedsace… no!... performed an evasive maneuver, alas, the atmosphere scanner was hit.

The shipseed finally arrived at a blue giant star. It only then realised that this is not a pleasant place to be. The heat threatened to destroy the spaceseed, whose sole task was to keep its seedpassengers alive. But the sheepsid was no idiot, and whilst escaping the heat it saved itself by channeling the excess heat to the sleep chambers, killing 103 colonists. Oops.

Finally they all arrived in the orbit of a yellow supergiant star, with a dense asteroid belt, which appeared as a throng of stars sliding slowly across the sky. Ah, much better.

One of the planets was investigated further. It was cold, so cold all water on it was covered with ice.

“But no worries!” The AI mused: Nothing a bit of global warming can’t fix.”

A probe was sent. The air turned out to be breathable, the gravity moderate. What else could a human desire?

Granted, the plant life turned out to be neither edible nor poisonous, likely due to them being unreachable under that thick sheet of ice, and some of the ruins turned out to be the ruins of a vanished advanced species, which was not necessarily well boding. Especially with that moon in an unstable orbit above the earth, which would soon break into pieces and bombard the earth with its shattered remains.

Alas, the seedship had grown tired of Rick and Morty, and landed regardless.

As the surviving colonists finally left what had been their home for millennia, the seedship shut down. It did so happily, knowing it finally had found a cool name.
The survivors went on to make fast process in building its civilisation. They named the planet Glacia because of the ice, and because they were not particularly original. They made friends with the natives: Republicans with an industrial level of technology, but no spacewall. They made the planet great again.

Then the moon finally shattered and bombed everyone back to the medieval ages.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Good luck to everyone!

**Turkafinwë** · February 23, 2020, 07:01 AM

Voted! Very enjoyable tales around the board! Good luck everyone!

**Kilo11** · February 24, 2020, 02:01 AM

I like these. They are all for the same game, and I guess they are all AARs, (making this the quickest read of 4 AARs anyone has probably ever done), but they are also all different and captivating in their own ways. All I can say is that though it took a while for this competition to finally take shape, I am glad to have been part of it, and to have the opportunity to see the end results.