Runner

[victorhadin]

Another day, another short story. Here we go:



Runner.





Motion.

It was the first thing it noticed upon awakening. Odd that it should be so, hanging as it was in so much distilled nothingness, as it was. But vacuum or no, some central focal point needed to be drawn out for the measuring of velocity. An arbitrary point, suitable for such, else how is one to measure one’s velocity?

It chose it. A point some distance ahead, and getting closer. It was visible as the focus of a dominant relative acceleration upon it, drawing it in.

-Clarify-.

It hung in space. Around it, dots blazed dimly in the infrared. It’s senses reached out, to discover more, but to no avail. It concluded that they were impossibly distant. Ahead of it, something much larger, or much closer, shone. Senses probed and scanned the wavelengths, the patterns of frequency emitted, and issued it to be a cool body, relatively. A reflector in the higher frequencies, a source in the infrared. It had a partner, some distance away. It too was a cool body, though substantially smaller. Aside from the two was something else; a massive body some distance away, and it blazed intensely on all wavelengths. A star, then.

It focused forwards, upon the close spherical mass which was drawing it nearer. It sensed that this was important.

-Name! You need a name!-

It was an odd impulse, but strangely apt. It needed a name. He needed a name. An entity needs a label. He looked at his surroundings and pondered something appropriate.

-Runner.-

It seemed reasonable. He had motion, and so it fit, more-or-less. One who runs is one with a destination, which he seemingly had also. The sphere up ahead glowed softly.

He shifted his meagre body, realigning just so, and wondered why he had done it. It had come as an impulse from within his mind, instinctive and distant, yet irresistible. It was odd, he thought, that such a thing should be so. Why should one’s mind remain unknown?

Interesting.

The impulse had come from within, and yet was external. It was an order. No. A statement of how things must be, not an order. It was not, however, this mind that had thought it. Not this conscious, feeling, thinking mind, this thing known as Runner. It was, nevertheless, a part of him. A subconscious sub-entity.

Machine schizophrenia.

Odd.

He observed the spherical attractor up ahead once more and wondered at it, and how it was different from this vacuum in which he moved. It’s image in the infrared was dappled unevenly. A large section of it was in relative shadow, glimmering dimly, brighter in some regions. He focused further. The dappled regions moved, minutely. Between them he could see wide stretches of differing infrared signatures. Oceans, landmasses. The whole moved steadily as the sphere revolved.

Focusing further. Mountain ranges, their shadows and peaks showing distinct temperature variations. Currents flowing through seas and oceans, carrying warmth or transporting it away in slim probing fingers, their edges blurred and intermixing with other distinct currents.

Further out. The sphere was slightly flattened, oddly. It was hardly noticeable from this angle, coming almost in-line with the flattened axis of the sphere… from ‘above’? Around the edge of the object, clouds could be seen jutting up, silhouetted. Huge cumulonimbus barely a feature in the halo around the world, so vast were the scales.

Again he manipulated his heading, adjusting for the rotation of the sphere. Again he failed to understand why he did it.

As far as he could tell, he seemed to be focusing on a specific point on the surface of the sphere. Curving in, under the attractive force emanating from it, the force growing as he neared.

He considered.

At this rate, with the attractive force growing as it did, varying inversely with the square of his distance from the centre of the sphere, he would be drawn into it’s surface soon.

Clearly it was important, then. This, perhaps, was the reasoning behind the subconscious sub-entity, and it’s puzzling orders to land at just the right location on it’s surface.

What would happen when he hit it? Would he slow down and touch it gently? Perhaps the sphere would rebound away from him, gaining his velocity and flying away at a similar speed.

How big was the sphere?

It was a vexing issue. He could tell, from the data his senses fed him, that the sphere was larger than it’s small, cold, companion. He could tell that it was considerably smaller than the distant luminous star. What he could not readily identify was his own size in relation to it. All he knew that he was… well, himself. He felt and was conscious. Surely, then, he must be big.

No. He couldn’t be all that big. Indeed, with the sphere now growing to take up much of his visual horizon, if he was the size of the sphere or bigger he would have impacted it already, perhaps.

The sphere must be enormous. The distant star larger still. He wondered if they too were conscious, as he was. Perhaps it would be he that ricocheted wildly off the sphere when he struck, while it barely moved enough to acknowledge his blow.

He noticed something else, looking to the horizon of the sphere again. Above the halo of infrared emitting atmosphere were other things; free-floating rapidly-moving entities. They orbited it’s bulk, shining brightly in reflected radiation.

They were tiny. He felt smug in his consciousness, and his probable bulk, as he closed in. Their negligible scale, dwarfed by the target-sphere, was truly nothing. He wondered if they were simply dumb, or unconscious objects. Perhaps even mental facets of the sphere itself.

He grew closer to it, and that hidden side of him again made an adjustment to his course, pinpointing him again on that tiny abstract point on the surface of the sphere. He wondered at the aims and logic of this hidden personality within him, and why it directed his actions so. He never even contemplated disobeying.

He was close now, and was beginning to redraw his assumptions of scale. He was clearly very close now, the details of individual cloud formations evident and clear to be inspected in detail; distant tiny flashes within them on the lower wavelengths showed static discharges within.

The objects in orbit were close too, in their own halo around the sphere. If he were so enormous he would have impacted or interfered with them by now, so he clearly wasn’t. Evidently he had grossly overestimated his importance.

-Runner the Arrogant.-

The orbiters glinted with reflected radiation, scintillating. Strangely, other objects seemed occasionally to break away from some of the orbiters, to begin a descent towards the sphere themselves. Intriguing.

His unconscious directed him again, and as he approached, faster now, his sense of scale, of his own scale, decreased.

And decreased.

And decreased.

And then he had passed the orbiters, streaking past them in a blur of frightening velocity; their blurred, indistinct images a collage of scintillation and a certain cold mechanical foreboding.

He was small.

As the orbiters faded overhead and the surface of the sphere grew and grew in his field of view, he found himself shuddering slightly now, acted on by forces neither he nor his subconscious guide had instigated. A glow, intensifying, surrounded him as he plunged through this mysterious indistinct medium in the halo of the sphere and his unconscious leapt into action, stabilising his trajectory towards the target point. Always that same point.

What was all this? Why was he here?

Why was he moving so fast?

He looked out to his side, as far as his senses would allow, and saw other things. Other tiny objects, penetrating the atmospheric halo, some dropped from the orbiters, were coming down, glowing brightly, hotly, as they tore through the gaseous medium.

-Oh.-


------------------------


The missile tore through the atmosphere, it’s plasma trail thickening and intensifying, for short seconds. Impacting the ground, it threw up a great font of debris. A fireball. A dissipating shockwave.

And more missiles guided themselves down. Another day in the spaceborne war.

[Peregrin Toker]

[Krusty The Klown] What the hell was that?? [/Krusty The Klown]

Good stuff:
+ One particular facet of your writing style I laud very much is your ability to go very in-depth with your descriptions without slowing down the pace.
+ It leaves the reader thinking....
+ The idea of telling the story of a interplanetary war from a weapon's point of view is very original.

Bad stuff:
- Like "Armies", it's a little confusing. Then again, so are most stories which go into detail with their descriptions.
- I'm not finished deciding whether it's a good thing that this story ranks up so high on the WTF-meter.

[victorhadin]

*Deliberate and shrewd bump.*

Anyone?

[Singular Quartet]

Now that was weird. Excellent work, and I am jealous of you for it. Keep it up.