Spoopy Writing Challenge - Day 1

Well hello, dearest ghouls and ghosts! 

Today marks day one of my writing challenge, which will last for seven days and seven nights, in which you will receive seven stories written by yours truly, based on seven prompts sent to me by you, dear readers! So be sure to check back every day for that new story and feel free to send me a prompt, if you haven’t already! There’s still time!

I also want to remind you that – in case you’re ravenous for more PLM fiction than this challenge can provide – my debut collection is available right now and my debut novella is up for pre-order! Check them out! 

Now for the first prompt. This one was given to me by Nick Diak (and yes Nick, I named the character after you):

Hard boiled detective story during the heat death of the universe

So for the first story of my seven day spooky challenge, I bring you…

Do The Broken Hearted Dream of Entropic Paradise?

I knew she was trouble, the moment she walked into my office. The pulsing neon lights from the corridor haloed her in frantic colours, the screaming laughter and cries of those trying to drink or fuck away their sorrows and grief over the slow, chilling death of the universe gave chase. She brought in the smell of exotic fruits and tobacco. Her eyes blazed orange with cyber-vision in the dim light of my office.

“Seeker Nick Slade?” Her voice wavered musically, the effect of some kind of cybernetic enhancement, I would guess. 

I didn’t answer, if she was here, then she knew me. No one came into my office by accident. Instead cracking a CaffCaffpill and snorting the bitter powder within. Something about the way she smiled made me think I’d be up all night.

She held out her hand, a holo-display photo of a young girl flamed to life above her palm. “I need you to find her.”

“Sister?”

“She’s my daughter, Ana.”

“I can start tomorrow. It won’t be cheap though.” I was lying. The caffeine was already kicking in. I’d be buzzing like the station’s core for the next sixteen hours.

Plus I was known in this Block as someone who never turned down a job.

“Tonight. Tomorrow will be too late. I’ll pay whatever you want.” She sat on the edge of my desk and set a charge card down. 

I held my hand over it, transferring the funds. Two million credits. I didn’t show the surprise on my face. The transfer details named her. Eloise Toussaint, the daughter of this space station’s Commander. 

“Where’d ya see her last?”

“Her father will have taken her here.” A ping resonated in my internal receptors. Sent, received. 

#

She was still, almost perfectly, except her breath. My Maude. Thirteen years slumbering after taking a lazbolt in the spine that was meant for me. Thirteen years of limbo at the hands of a husband too cowardly to let her go. I touched the back of her warm hand, brushed away a lock of her blond hair. My ritual, my good luck charm, my love. Her life support system beeped as I left the private medbay room to finish the job.

Company medical bills wouldn’t pay themselves after all.

# 

Toussaint’s ping led to me to abandoned Block 13. Only Blocks 1 and 2 were active, the other eighteen were echoing towers of dust, despair, and darkness. Here the streets were pitch black, silent, lifeless. I lit my own way with my lamp-lite ocular implants and my metal feet thundered over the rusted corridor floors.

Life support still supplied air and minimal warmth, but everyone had moved on, just like the rest of the cosmos. A slow laying down, the release of effort, a final sigh before the end. The space station Morimanes was a complex haunted by the memories of better times and those left behind to watch the universe die. 

In the distance, somewhere deep within the Block, my enhanced ears caught someone weeping. Someone who sought out the darkness like a tomb, to find solace, to find finality. My entire body – the bio-parts and the cyber-parts both – buzzed with the CaffCaffpill and with the excitement of a job, of having a purpose. 

I stood in front of the reinforced doors that blocked my way into Block 13’s engineering sector. For most, this would be a problem. But I’d been a Company mercenary, a killer, and that came with perks – even after I defected. 

I jammed my fingers against the crease between the doors and pressed. A moment, I clenched my jaw, activated the gears in my chest, my arms. The tubes of xomite just beneath my skin flared a sickly azure, buzzing my nerves. My chest burned as the mini-core the Company had implanted next to my heart revved up. The metal surface of the doors crumpled enough to let me slip my hands between them, allowed me to force the heavy metal apart far enough, just enough for me. 

Inside were lights. Not the standard steady stream of halolights, but flickering illumination. Flames. I smelled the smoke, the chemicals used to fuel the fire. 

Deactivating my eyelight, I stepped through the gap I’d created. I picked up the distant sound of voices, rhythmic, almost soothing. Carefully, I made my way deeper into the sector.

Around me, metal siloes towered, connected by chaotic tubing and metal grating. I’d checked the schematics I’d found on the general station server before leaving my office. I knew that, ahead of me, would be the cooling pit. That’s where the light was. That’s where the sound was.

Closer still, I picked out details.

A mass of people. Thirty, forty, no sixty at least. All dressed in strange draping fabric, as light as novas and as ethereal as the rings around a gas giant. I slunk around a silo, trying to stay silent, hidden. 

The crowd surrounded the cooling pit, now empty of water. Something throbbed in the bottom. It beat like that of a human heart, a deep sound that shivered the entire sector. The air reeked of rot, of sweetness, of something acrid, and sterile, and complex all at the same time. It made my head hurt. 

Fires burned in barrels all around the pit, filling the air with oily smoke and causing my eyes to water. 

I flexed my hands, clenched them into fists. I’d taken more than this in a fight, working for the Company, working to clear boundary colonies that stood in the way of profit. I could take these people. As far as I could tell, none had weapons. But I had to find the girl first. 

There. A small figure bound and suspended over the pit. I’d heard of groups like this. Folks who’d lost their humanity along with their hope and sacrificed each other with the idea that some distant god might be listening and would stave off death another day, month, year even. 

I primed my inner core so it and I would be ready. 

The people raised their hands, howling. Their cries rose and fell with the throbbing of whatever was in the pit. 

I stepped forward. In my experience, I knew only a few would try and fight. Most Citizens these days were cowards, they would run. 

As I approached, my clanging metal feet gave me away. The people turned. They stepped away, silent. Feral Citizens too afraid of death to stand up against me and my glowing fists. At the edge of the cooling pit I stopped. 

There was no girl. Only rags wrapped around a metal canister. 

But in the pit. 

In the pit was a depth beyond measure. An obsidian star darker than the space between stars. Golden waves in a sea of absolute numbing horror. A manufactured black hole.

Small yet. Just the size of an egg but as it pulsed, gilt shockwaves slapped against the sides of the pit making the sector shiver. I could feel its pull, even now, the hunger of its event horizon. 

I spun. I had to escape.

In front of me stood Eloise Toussaint, naked, glyphs painted in black oil across her chest and down her limbs. 

“The girl!” I babbled, trying to buy time, as I looked past her, sought an escape. 

“I don’t have a daughter,” she replied with that damn smile of hers. “But I have a need.”

I raised a fist. Her eyes sparked a hotter orange and I felt a brilliant arc of pain in the back of my head, tasted fried wires in the air. She’d bioshocked me. A black-ops, Company secret clearance level cybernetic. Damn, but it must have cost a fortune. 

Toussaint stepped forward. “We needed this.” She pressed her palm against my chest, right above my beating heart.

Right above my Company-issued power core. 

A core with enough juice to turn a baby black hole into a monster.

I tried to lift my hands, I pictured wrapping them around her neck, squeezing the life from her. But they were useless, fried along with my operating chip. 

“With your sacrifice, we take our own path to the event horizon,” she said. “We won’t wait for the end. We will bring it to us on our own terms.”

And she pushed. 

On rigid, locked legs, I tipped over backwards. I felt the pull immediately. The black hole’s grip on my body and the event horizon’s laughter in my ears as I stretched and stretched.

Caught in a moment’s eternity, I looked up at her. At Eloise Toussaint, dealer of death. I knew she was trouble, the moment she walked into my office.

A rich woman decked out in high classed cybernetics, with a thirst for control and power, and legs that went on for days.

Though, I suppose, everything caught in the event horizon went on for days.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my first story of my writing challenge! Be sure to stop by tomorrow and catch the next one!

x PLM