BANDING MINNOWS (SCIENCE FICTION)- CHAPTER TWO

in #writing6 years ago (edited)

BANDING MINNOWS - FROM DUMP TO UTOPIA

CHAPTER TWO

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“KAI” She stretched in bed and yawned, “Please play to be free by passenger.” The band was practically ancient but she loved them anyway. They were basically one with nature. In their music videos she saw the earth, the way it used to be.

“KAI, play to be free.” Silence.

“What’s wrong with it this time?” She murmured under her breath as she left her room. She entered the computer room.

“Oh.” The processor was unplugged. She plugged it and booted the computer.

“KAI, play…”

“Please get to the surface immediately. Critical mass will be reached in 102, 99, 96, 90…” Her father’s voice warned. Critical mass? She had weeks till then. And what was with the strange countdown?

“KAI, ready the jets.”

“Battery store low. Unable to…”

“No! No, KAI. I’m not going to die buried beneath this rubble. Ready the fucking jets.”

"Mind your language, young lady." She could almost hear her father say.

Instead she heard KAI say, “Gladys, you used up all the batteries trying to transmit…”

She stopped listening to KAI and started looking for a spare cell. She threw open all the drawers and found nothing. God, of all the ways she imagined dying! Well, this was fifth on the list.

Critical mass means the jets would not be able to generate enough power to get her out from under all the rubbish.

Her father’s room! He always had a spare of everything. She ran there and sure enough, she found one in his desk.

“30, 22, 16…”

“Shit!” She removed the old cell and replaced it with the spare. “KAI…”

“On it.”

The jets sputtered to life.

“Now, KAI!” She yelled.

The earthship broke through the rubble and made for the skies. The sheer blue of it never ceased to amaze her. She exhaled slowly, relief washing over her entire being.

“Warning. Battery power is low.”

“What? Can’t I catch a break?” She wailed.

“Prepare for rough landing” KAI stated simply.

“What’s wrong with the solar panels, can’t they charge the batteries enough so I land this thing?”

“Nope.”

The ship stopped mid-air.

“And you said to prepare for rough landing. Free fall is more like it!” She held on to the desk and braced herself. She screamed when the ship hit surface and began to somersault. She lost her grip and banged her head on the corner of something sharp. In that instance, everything turned black.

Her hands went straight to her head when she came to. She heard a loud banging sound coupled with equally loud ringing in her ears. She must have hit her head really bad. Plus, there was a huge hole in the ship’s floor.

“God, KAI.”

“Gla-dys”

“KAI, are you alright?”

“G-gla…” KAI was malfunctioning.

She tried to get up. The ringing had stopped but not the banging. She lost her footing but broke her fall with her hands.

“Hey! Hey! Is someone in there?” So that was where the banging was coming from. Someone was banging on her ship.

“Hey!” She called back. “I’m in here.” Gladys staggered out of the computer room and headed for the room that used to house the travel pod. There was no saving the greens now. She trampled them on her way to the pod room. There was a door that led outside. She opened it.

“Careful!” A voice said. She looked up and saw a crate falling. The cube of rubbish was an inch short of crushing her skull wide open when it stopped right over her head.

“You gotta be careful on the surface, missy.” She finally saw him. He was just a scruffy and lanky looking teen pointing his watch at her. “You almost killed me flying this junk around.” He hit his fist into the ship. He looked at her wrist. “Where’s your umbrella?”

“What umbrella?” She staggered forward. She had still not fully recovered from the crush.

“People who come this way usually have one. Hey Careful!”

That was the last thing she heard him say before she started her free fall to the ground. Luckily, he reached out and broke her fall before she hit the crates of rubbish.

She tried stretching her legs when she recovered consciousness. They hit something rubbery.

“You’re up!”

“Where am I?”

“You are in my travel pod. We are going to get your head checked.” He said with a smile spreading across his face. Gladys sat up. “You are the first missy I've had in my pod. Here,” He tapped the seat on his right. “come sit by me.”

She arched a brow at him.

“Come on, the view’s much better from here.”

His pod was small. She could not stand up straight in it and she was a solid five foot five. But he was right. The blue sky, though dotted by some large drones which were releasing their junk unto the surface, was a great view. She smiled.

“So, do I keep calling you missy?” He asked.

“I’m Gladys. What’s that?” A large edifice zooming right into the sky caught her attention. She did not see it from afar since its glass panels reflected the skies. The closer they got, the more she realized how huge it was -- magnificent, really.

“I am Danny,” he said.

There was a huge entrance cut right in the middle. Danny’s ship went right through it. Gladys’ eyes widened at the awe-inspiring sight.

“Welcome to Rubble City.”

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Hi ronyxoxo,

This post has been upvoted by the Curie community curation project and associated vote trail as exceptional content (human curated and reviewed). Have a great day :)

Visit curiesteem.com or join the Curie Discord community to learn more.

Yay! I got curied. Turned my day right around. Thanks. :)

Rubble city... Let's see what rubble city has for Gladys.... I am glad Danny was there to save her from falling (maybe Into pieces?)

It was a great read.

Thanks @audreybits. Glad you think it's a great read. I probably didn't make this clear in the story but Gladys is human. She resides (or resided) in the "earthship" with KAI which is the AI responsible for controlling the ship. Uhm... maybe chapter one will make it clearer (I hope).

Yeah, I did grasp that.... I might to go over to the first chapter to see how it all started
..

Oo great. The "maybe fall into pieces" got me all riled up. Sorry. Let me know if chapter one helps bring it all together. Thanks.

😃😅😅 Sure, I will....

Thank you for sharing this sci-fi story, love the idea of AI in our routine daily life. That makes everything much easier for us. great build up tension while count down, every second the reader himself tries to speed Gladys up to look for the batteries. I was glad she was able to fly away and now she has a new person she met Danny, would be interesting to learn about him more :)

Yea. Thanks for your feedback. Much appreciated. More chapters to come... :)

Hey, @ronyxoxo.

I've read both chapters. Very intriguing so far, with lots to reveal. From the storyteller's point of you, that's a good place to be. Write in the present, and then methodically (but not predictably) dole out how we got there.

So far, feeling the loneliness, disorganization, desperation and exasperation of Gladys, the desire of KAI to help when it really needs help, too, and the friendliness of Danny to a complete stranger, which generally sends up warning flags.

Looking forward to discovering why she's trying to contact the past, how she hopes to bring her father back, how he died, who she and her father are and why they've been essentially hiding under garbage crates, how the planet they live on became a planet of rubbish and who Danny is and what his true intentions are.

Congratulations, too, on the curie. Always awesome when they show up. :)

So, how are you approaching this? Is the story basically done (even if only in your mind—you know where you're going and more or less how it ends), or are you going chapter by chapter?

Thanks. This feedback makes me soo happy.

Basically it's done in my head. I have a general outline of the direction this would take. But I'm taking it chapter by chapter also. Since it's my first go at writing a sci-fi I'm in no rush, writing only when I have connected the dots.

Any recommendations for me?

If you're asking about sci-fi in particular, it's pretty much like any other storytelling, in my mind, just with a futuristic slant. So continuity is still going to be a factor, and keeping things from getting anachronistic (unless, say, a rolex showing up in the story makes perfect sense), is probably a good thing.

I would say the biggest thing to avoid would be committing to any major plot twists or turns that you're not fully sold on because they're hard to retract or walk back if you're writing and publishing as you go. I've written a couple of novels, and it was actually kind of fun to write myself out of corners I put myself in, but depending on how things go, it could cause troubles with preceding chapters that have already been published if suddenly something else is introduced, or the background is changed, or something like that.

Otherwise, taking it slow, letting it breathe and settle as a story can't hurt. Committing to the story and making sure you're supporting your world building as much as you can is good. If you're not buying it, neither will your audience. People who read sci-fi are pretty used to suspending reality, so get daring if you want, but you still need to stay within the confines of the world you built. Stray from that and you will probably lose some folks.

Thanks for the solid advice.

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