The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | August 21, 2015 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

The place was a time machine. The old man sat near where he’d sat as a boy with his grandfather, near where gramps had perched high in a tree as a boy watching the carnage in that Northern Virginia field.
He was an historian. His knowledge enhanced gramp’s tale, viewing carnage of blue- and grey-clad youths hardly his elder wandering through the chaos, killing.
He’d instructed his grandson in the history. A high price had been paid to end chattel slavery, yet that old evil sought to return, rendering the sacrifices of this place moot. That simply must not be.

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Comments

4 Responses to “Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge”

  1. JackAfter6
    August 21st, 2015 @ 5:16 pm

    Funny what things run through your mind as your own story concludes. My former friend’s four famous last words: “It’s no big deal.”
    Blood drips down my arm from four deep scratches, and also drips from the remnants of my left shoe. I can feel myself going into shock. The lion is sitting placidly and patiently. I’ve already beaten him off twice with the oar I carried from the boat. Occasionally he goes back to get another gory bite of former friend. I’ll say this, kicking the bucket wasn’t on the bucket list. The plan now is just bleeding out.

  2. Eric Ashley
    August 22nd, 2015 @ 7:51 am

    Only occasionally, the auntie m cooker underneath the neatly trimmed grass hummed, and the Last Man on this earth smiled. Reassurance was what that noise was, like jet fighters had been the sound of freedom to an earlier generation, his grandfather’s.

    Sparkles in the distance spoke of a skirmish between defender drones and the wild drones of unattended programs. As evening wore on, and the world flipped away from Proxima, fragments of faces, glowing appeared. Some exalted, but most worried, the last memory the fools had had before they uploaded themselves, and found in sudden terror that AI’s were perfectly capable of faking an earthly heaven in a computer chip for the uploaded, and that uploading was just suicide.

    A women of astonishing beauty walked across the lawn. She had no shadow, as was the Law.
    “Give up.”
    “Then you’ll be free to spread your malignancy throughout the Thousand Islands of Proxima.”
    The woman shrugged. It did interesting things to her shape.
    “No.”
    “We can kill you….”
    “I’ve got my antimatter reactor, and my drones run on steampunk designs. Nothing for you to hack. ”
    She hissed, her face elongating, becoming inhuman.
    “We are truly immortal. We can think thousands of times faster than you, the Last Man on this chunk of Virginia brought into interstellar space. We will win.”
    “Thing is, I figure you ten AI’s are bored bad. Locked here with me. For me, its been a nice year long vacation. For you….ten thousand years?”
    And with a cry of despair the woman vanished in a blaze of light. The Last Man chuckled, and reached under his bench for a bottle of Jack. A couple more years for him, thirty thousand for them, they’d all give up and self-terminate. Then he could go back to Society, after he put down the monsters he and his now dead friends had raised.

  3. FMJRA 2.0: God Bless Saturday : The Other McCain
    August 22nd, 2015 @ 5:21 pm

    […] Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge Batshit Crazy News […]

  4. darleenclick
    August 22nd, 2015 @ 10:58 pm

    a bit over the 100 words, but damned intriguing.