Challenge #02569-G012: To Join the Common Cause
We have to actively fight for our lives, perhaps our very existence. Thousands of people are killed daily by these beings. So what fraction of our government tries to actively prevent us from fighting back until they can find a way to profit from it? – Bard2DBone
When they came, they came in promises. They came with generosity. They came with shiny treasures. They especially came with more profits for those already wealthy. They came with bright lights and glittering technology and soft words. The rich left with them, and were never heard from again.
For a long time, we wanted to be selected. We wanted to be taken away. The Earth didn’t need more people on it, after all. The Earth needed a break from us. Time and again, year after year, some were selected and never seen again. Yet, year after year, the situation on Earth kept getting worse.
They came with promises of more for everyone. It took us years to realise that they meant more for everyone like them. We still don’t know the name of the person who managed to use their technology to show us exactly what happened to the ‘selected’, but they are -posthumously- a hero. Since that news got out, the whole world turned upside-down. Again. Everything changed. Again.
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Challenge #02568-G011: Stacked Competition
Wanna play yugioh? – Anon Guest
[AN: I have no idea how to play Yugioh, and I’m moderately certain that describing said game will impinge on someone else’s intellectual property… so today, the part of Yugioh will be played by a completely made-up game called Ebisnach]
Humanity loves combat. Synthesized or real. They have more or less tamed their competitive nature in the form of formalised synthetic competition. They call them all games, but the nature of Human games is always some kind of competition. No more or less so than their card games.
Humans also like to collect things. With a combination of collecting and card games, the species has come up with some truly complex systems of simulated combat involving nothing more than sets of colourful pieces of card stock. Humans insist that the best way to learn is by playing, mostly because the verbal explanations can take weeks. Only Humans can pick them up that quickly. After that, it’s simply a question of how deeply they dive into the fandom maelstrom.
Human Kee was, apart from one little quirk, a fairly amenable Ships’ Human. The reviews were glowing wherever ze went. There was only one red flag. It read, Do not, under any circumstances, get hir started about Ebisnach.
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Challenge #02567-G010: Assumptive Dread
Humans are not great because of what most people think. It’s not our physical capabilities or our ingenuity, not even or pack-bonding skills. It’s our heartiness and our healing ability that is boosted though the advancement of medical applications. Humans figured multiple ways how to rewrite our genetics codes before we had proper space travel, we were able to eradicate deadly diseases off the face of the planet. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if we created the prototype livesuit. But there always one thing that we’re unable to cure. When you hear the news it hit hard. When a disease is perfectly attuned to your body and you tried to cure it, you’re basically asking someone to mangle your body to have a chance to survive. Cancer is humanity’s greatest rival. – Anon Guest
Humans have a reputation for being unstoppable, and part of that is their ability to bounce back from injuries that other species would consider fatal. The other is their resilient immune system, their kill-or-cure biological strategies that sometimes come close to the first option, then the Human in question manages to pull through.
It’s not perfect. Nothing ever is. The Human immune system can turn against itself, cannibalising otherwise perfectly functional body parts, sometimes destroying the Human in the process. Sometimes, it creates more material at random, growing bone where there was once muscle. Sometimes it just eats the body a little at a time. The other way it can go is growing new cells with amazing rapidity. Those clusters of cells take resources from the rest of the Human suffering from their growth and, eventually, starve the entire being to death.
Humans have been trying to stop things like this happening since they realised what those things actually were. Early attempts - including divine intervention and rudimentary yet impossible magic - were not effective. Later therapies were hit and miss until their medicine figured out some precision. For the most part, for centuries at a time, Humans relied on a mixture of highly dangerous medical treatments and equally dangerous surgeries to rid themselves of the anomalous cell clusters. When it comes to “kill or cure”, Humans really commit.
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Challenge #02566-G009: All About Where You Stand
I want to see a Havenworlder from a high grav planet. Dense and tough by necessity from the environment, but with absolutely nothing dangerous in to it in its home planet. No rough terrain to fall down, plentiful food without any toxins that effect it, gentle weather that never bothers it, etc. – Anon Guest
Gravity is usually necessary for life to evolve. Most life comes to become on planets, with a rare few becoming in lower gravity environments that are also sealed against the greater vacuum of space. More often than not, life occurs on a planet of One Standard Gravity[1] or thereabouts. There are many more worlds in the universe with higher than One Standard Gravity. Statistically speaking, some of those are Havenworlds.
Of the Heavyworld species, the most famous intelligent species is the Gaux. They are not Havenworlders. Their struggle to the stars included the Two Standard Gravity environment that was their homeworld. THey have been described as looking like “the unlikely progeny of a centaur and a rhinoceros.” Humans sometimes refer to them as “the headless centaur ones”. They are a species from the highest known gravity environment.
Heavyworlders are less likely to follow the anthropoid[2] model. They are more likely to be quadrupedal. They are more likely to have robust frames. They are less likely to be Havenworlders. That said, there are statistical anomalies everywhere. Picture in your mind a more muscular variant of the hippo, roughly the size of a domestic pig. In the place of an animal’s head, the stub of a torso rises up in something that was not quite a head, but served the purpose thereof.
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Challenge #02565-G008: Around and Around They Go
Based off of this post: https://steemit.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-02375-f185-call-it-a-win
He remembered the portal made out of antimatter and tachyon particles, he tried replicating it multiples times but all ended in failures. Many times and many explosive experiences later he came across a strange matter literally called strange matter from a neutron star. Not only it was still stable but also within the same fabric of spacetime. Years later a woman inserted her hand into a three pronged device while a robotic voice exclaimed “very good, you are now in possession of the Aperture Science handheld portal device” – Anon Guest
[AN: Much though I’d love to ruin my prospects of actually selling an instants anthology for income, I have to decline.]
There had been very much ado about the portal. Five dollars was, indeed, five dollars… and Science was tempted to bet Steve that he couldn’t do it again. They also rather feared that he could do it again. Unfortunately, though Humans will do literally anything to win a five dollar bet, they’re less able to do it for a mind-bogglingly uncountable stipend.
In brief, though he may have been able to build the portal to win a five-buck bet, there was no way Steve could build it for a billion-dollar business investment. All sorts of theories emerged, mostly considering the vast distances between linked portals and what data could be obtained with teams, supplies, and enough stable time loops to theoretically accelerate technological evolution by ten to twenty thousand years.
The structure already there was ‘impossibly old’, data gathered from what cameras viewed through the portal. Living, organic eyes never saw the same thing twice, and didn’t like what they saw looking back at them. That was really how the experiments began.
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