Challenge #01958-E134: The New Terror — Steemit
“That’s not exactly true,” said one of the survivors. “Alfred Hitchcock tried, but it didn’t quite get there.”
Sandy fed another page of a glossy magazine to the guttering flames as she tried to work this out. “You mean The Birds?”
“That was full of crows and seagulls and pigeons, though.”
“Yeah, well. Ducks are hard to be believable as a threat. Or they were.”
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Challenge #01939-E115: Baby's First Flight — Steemit
The thing about wings is, they’re the largest part of any flying creature’s anatomy. They have to be. In order to independently lift one’s own body-weight, most of that weight has to be doing the heavy lifting. And if you’re flapping to do it… well… there’s a reason why the largest flying birds in the world employ the strategy of gliding for most of their flight time.
And flight muscles burn a lot of fat. You can’t just paste wings onto human-like arms and expect them to act like an angel’s. For a start, the leverage is all wrong. And all of these arguments were cycling around the engineering sections of Project Kymera. A combination Black-Ops and Sub-Rosa scientific project to create the Enlisted Man. Again. And like all projects of its ilk, it was doomed before someone even thought it was a good idea.
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Challenge #01865-E041: Made to Order — Steemit
The concept of the perfect being exists in every culture. On every world, there has been at least one brilliant mind who honestly believed that they could better their own kind through assorted means. Ethnic cleansing, or genocide as it is more commonly known. Selective sterilisation, which is just genocide slowed down to the breeding rate of the undesirable population. Selective breeding, which never really works in the long run. All things considered, genetic manipulation is a relatively modern fad.
There are worlds founded on the premise of finding the perfect genome. Most of them don’t survive to re-integrate with Galactic Society. Some make it, barely, with their genome crippled to the point where the children are essentially clones of their parents. Only one had been exiled for what they were doing, and were smart enough to be pragmatic about their definition of ‘perfect’. This is Vardia. One had gone with the broadest definitions of ‘perfect’ and ended up with a completely bioengineered population. This is B'Nar.
Both core worlds were named after their creators. One became an empire. One became an industry titan with some scary definitions to the bracket term 'humanity’. The only difference is that Vardia stopped their genetic tinkering with the human genome centuries prior, excepting in clear-cut emergency cases. The B'Nari never stopped looking for ways to improve. Nor expanding what 'improvement’ means.
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Challenge #01841-E017: The Biological Solution — Steemit
First came the epithelials, and there was the Dust Problem. Amelioration worked, to a degree, but cleansing schedules soon became hell for multiple species. And someone discovered Fhitts and Squidges. Small, jellyfish-like animals that floated around via hydrogen gas bags. They either filter-fed as they drifted around on the air currents, or -in the case of the Fhitts- jetted about in active pursuit.
Then the Fhitts and the Squidges became popular. Cleansing schedules were eagerly jettisoned. Until an overpopulation problem caused both to clog the air filters. Something, plainly, had to be done. Filter patrols and culls were initiated, and a careful balance was difficult to maintain.
And then someone discovered Oshits. Decapodal, exoskeletal, insectoid predators that hunted by chasing down anything that disturbed the air currents. They were death on Fhitts, and some sub-species evolved to capture Squidges. And, for a while, things were easier. Filter patrols toned down. Culls were unnecessary. But the price to pay was the occasional spider-mimic landing on the face or the body.
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We're morally obligated to Gmod our kids? WTF?
So does this mean the long anticipated Eugenics Wars of Star Trek fame are starting up a bit late?
Watch out for a kid named Khan Noonien Singh, folks.
Good Boy is live!
The potentially stomach-twisting story of an old man and his dog…
RTFM (Story!)
At the risk of borking my browser again (I don’t exactly have the best of computers) I am going to publish a novella here.
Cross your fingers.
Oyeah. RTFM stands for the techie-favourite acronym: Read The F[laming/expletive deleted] Manual. Also the most common advice to noobs encountering new technology.
Good Boy (Story!)
This is one of the weird ones. And by “weird”, I mean one of the ones that dropped on me from the sky like a ton of bricks and threatened to burn a hole in my head until I wrote it down.
It ends in a weird place, but if I re-wrote it, it would inevitably turn into a novella and I would loose the short-story twist and fridge horror of it all.
Have at me… but gently. Tell me what you think in kind words :)