August’s Son of Pictonaut effort ended up being very “stream of consciousness” on my part, as I mashed together bits and pieces as I wiki stumbled down a rabbit hole from Fukushima’s Wikipedia entry. As bizarre as it might sound, I actively encourage you to google snippets of the story as you encounter them and see how everything fits together. Or don’t. I’m not a cop.
At lot of things have happened since the last post I made here, back at the arse end of 2016. I had a small nervous breakdown, my dad died, I bought a house, I got married. But one thing that there hasn’t been a lot of is writing. At least not fiction. I’ve got a short story of about five and a half thousand words that I started in the wake of my father’s death from what I have been quanitly calling “MEGA CANCER,” but it remains unfished. His suddden, but not unexpected beefing of the coil mortal isn’t really to blame for the lack of words, merely one of a myriad of other contributing factors. Other things have been the focus of my attention: my wonderful wife, picking up art again; fiction just hasn’t been a priority. Although I did release an RPG back in 2021 based on a setting I helped write , that was pretty neat. You can find RoadSpire here.
However, at the start of this month my good friend Sam resureccted the Piconaut Challenge (with my permission) under the name “Son of Pictonaut.” It would have been rude not to participate. So here we are, image in hand; the work of Caspar David Friedrich, the iconic The Wanderer above a sea of fog.
The story is a prequel of sorts to both Yogic and Shaman that I have cheerily titled “The Old Ways Must Die.” Enjoy.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been playing a lot of Paradox Interactive’s Stellaris. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a galaxy spanning real-time strategy game that is absolutely loaded with random events and AI interactions. These random events and the scenarios it throws up make the game ripe for making self-created narratives in your head.
I started playing it in May, and had some great laughs with a ruler who became addicted to drugs and in doing so accidentally became immortal (I’ve generally been assuming that it’s Melange.) A few weeks back a patch was released that made a lot of my older games incompatible, so I started a new one. I came back to it this weekend to help take my mind off things happening in the real world. (For those following me on twitter you’ll already know that this wasn’t exactly a success.) After two days of almost solid gameplay I stopped for the evening and promptly wrote 2,000 words about the crazy nonsense which had been unfolding. I’ve interspersed the story with some edits of screenshots I took as the game was unfolding. I hope you enjoy it.
Star Fortress Adamant
Beyond the stars we call home,
In the places where dark things roam,
Within the folds of stellar mists,
There a grand fortress sits.
At the sight of the Old Empire’s demise,
There Star Fortress Adamant lies,
A bulwark against the horrors of space,
The last protector of our benighted race.
With walls thick and gates never ajar,
Forged within the heart of a neutron star,
Bristling rail cannons and fields of plasma lance,
Launching salvoes that make foes dance.
Never yet have its walls been breached,
Nor the strength of its shields been leached,
The fortress protects from cosmic ill,
We sleep safe at night by their strength of will.
Adamant stands against stellar strife,
Its forces buying freedom with their life,
From its maw its soldiers sally forth,
To lie foes out upon reality’s swarth.
Clad are they in blood-red plate,
Mono-filament sabres held straight,
Astride steeds with hearts fuelled by anti-matter,
Their shod grav-hooves raising a clatter.
Their armour all blows it turns,
From tyrant’s claw to star-dragon burns,
Protection fierce that cannot be broke,
Nor their mighty spirits bear a yoke.
From their course they do not stray,
No matter the cost they are forced to pay,
Their home’s title no quirk of nomenclature,
Adamant by name, adamant by nature
Deadlines
The cauldron bubbled as the colloidal data gushed from its rimy transfer hose; mixing with the liquefied quartz storage solution. It became a seething sea of froth and foam, as icy, crystal white tried to mix with lurid, actinic green. The fibre optic inlet pipes strobed with a terabit storm of code, but the two liquids still resolutely refused to be miscible. The internal clock was megahertz below spec, and the run-cycles remained irregular and off-pattern.
It wasn’t working.
“Ugh, the SysAdmin Magus is not going to be happy,” Delthani v7 sighed and swept her sweat matted hair out of her eyes. “I don’t think I can face another neural flensing.”
Dejected, she slumped to her workstool, head in hands. Her eyes drifted up to the side of the cauldron. Beneath the patina of defrag slop, and carbon slag, she could still see the glimmer of her grandmother’s name in faint bronze letters:
Delthani v5
~ Bionic Alchemy ~
~ Cyber Witchcraft ~
v5 wouldn’t have put up with the SysAdmin’s outrageous requests. Her mother – the infamous v6 – would have broken the asshole’s skull right across the quantum write-head mooring. But no. v7 was a people person, she wanted to please. She wanted to be helpful, even if it landed her neck-deep in some datamancy which couldn’t work either practically, or theoretically. But she’d always had a hard time saying no to people, especially the ones in the fancy computation-hats of the lead Ops team. Ye Gods, she wanted one of those hats so bad.
She wished her mother was still here, not a kiloserver sectors distant. She could have gotten her out of this mess. Hell, if v5 was still around she probably could have gotten this mess to work! She played by the old rules, the ones from back before the BIG patches.
Delthani wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. The cauldron was sucking all the moisture out of everything. Hydroscopic little shit that it was. She supposed she should clean this all up and try again. She stood up and went to fetch the tungsten pail of bit-quench from the shelf. Next to it sat a slim vial, no bigger than megabyte ampoule, glimmering purple and iridescent in the cauldron-light.
Where had she gotten than from again?
It had been a gift from that mad, old net-hag in the exchange burrows. She’d promised that it was “the total antithesis of a problem.” Delthani had mostly taken it just so that it would keep the old hag happy. She was a nice sort, and exchanged old ero-chat logs for pastries and calculation off-cuts.
“Well maybe just a soupçon. A cheeky little dash. What’s the worst that could happen?”
As in trickled in the cauldron flashed hard red: boot failure. But before she could curse, it flashed pale blue and held. The status feed flashed.
# Compile Complete #
“Well bugger me…”
Things have been quiet on the blog for front for a few months. One might assume that this means I haven’t been doing any writing. This is not entirely true. Between the start of October and the end of December I bashed out eleven and a half thousand words for an open submission. January and February were then spent not doing any writing, as I was consumed by the nervous and uncertain energy of “waiting.” In the end the piece wasn’t accepted for publication, but I’m still inordinately pleased with myself that I actually tried.
With the waiting out-of-the-way I got back to working on one of my pet projects. Gayane Al-Taftazânî and her associate Almund Skeete have made their inevitable return. The stories in and around their strange futuristic world now run in excess of fifteen thousand words, so I thought it high time to give the collection a name: The She That Wanders Cycle. Below is part 4 of Gayane and Al’s personal adventure “On a Bright Angel’s Wings.” As ever, it was an uncomplicated joy to write. I hope you enjoy it.
Image by Tebe Interesno
The Rogue Verbumancer 