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Hiding in Plain Sight · Original Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 500–900
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Song of Rain and Thunder
I’d have come here just for the smell of the forest, if I’d known.

There weren’t many of us on that stolen starship. “Not many” is one thing for a ship, but for a whole planet? That makes us rare. Precious, even. The way it should be.




It was impossible to sleep through the rain coming down on the wood shingle roof, so we both sat on the front porch, staring into the darkness where the kerosene lamplight failed to reach the trees. It was impossible to talk, too, but we were comfortable together in the drumming silence.

I leaned back and felt the chair creak beneath me. I couldn’t hear it, but I knew its aches as well as my own bones. The old oak was smooth beneath my fingers and slightly sticky with the humidity of a summer storm. It was a humidity that wasn’t doing my lungs any favors, nor the lever-action carbine slowly rusting where it leaned against the door.

Across the porch, the old woman with a quilt over her lap looked as tired as I felt. Still, though, I couldn’t help but smile when I closed my eyes and saw the ever-present red light blinking in the lower corner of my vision that said:

NO CONNECTION




When I sat up, my wife was already looking at me, with eyes only a worried wife can have. She must have seen it before I did.

CONNECTING…

Watching the dots appear one by one at the end of the word was the most terrifying thing I knew. Waking up to a bear between you and your gun was scary, but a bear could only kill you, and eat you, and shit you out, and then you would be a source of nutrients for the trees. You would be something that’s scarce in the universe. You would be valuable.

Though the processor was still embedded deep in my brain, I knew it would never connect. Pulling the graphene transmitting antenna out of my scalp was the second most painful thing I’d ever experienced. Pulling the damn thing out of her head was the worst.

My hands were shaking so bad it took me three tries to light my pipe. My wife stood up and put her hand on my shoulder before kissing me on the forehead. Neither of us needed to say a word. She had her chores, and I had mine.




A post-scarcity society, they called it. I’d read in one of the old economics books - the kind they banned - that as a resource becomes more plentiful, it becomes less valuable. After the molecular makers and scavengers had become cheaper than plumbing and ovens, nobody was willing to pay any amount of money for gold, calories, or clean water. Every resource was plentiful, and its value - marginal utility was the term the books used - was nothing.

And there was no resource as plentiful as people. Numberless, valueless, worthless.

People had filled up their first planet and poured into the stars, ever searching for more planets to make just like Earth. Colonized planets became ubiquitous. They were always finding new planets, and occasionally, they found this one.

I leaned against a tree and watched them. Little Columbuses and Armstrongs, they fancied themselves. The “first” explorers of a new planet, and every one of them had the glassy, unfocused eyes that told me they were watching data feeds. They didn’t see the trees, didn’t feel the damp on their skin, and they didn’t smell the living green growing around them. I took another puff on my pipe and blew the smoke in a ring toward the nearest one.

He was looking right at me. Or through me. Without my data link, his eyebrain didn’t realize I was a person. It didn’t highlight me in green or red. I was translucent to him, as the others in his group scanned the woods behind me with a dozen different wavelengths and overlaid the three-dimensional map onto his vision.

This planet was a paradise, an unspoiled Eden. The kind of place that everyone wants to go to honeymoon or retire. And he couldn’t see it. He didn’t see the pristine forest, or the deer across the way, or the crystal stream, or the rifle I raised toward him.

And his “friends” didn’t hear the shot. The audio sensors installed from birth in their ear canals didn’t detect the signature of a laser discharge, and they automatically cut out any sounds louder than the pain threshold. As far as their eyebrains were concerned, it was just another thunderclap from the quaint weather above.

Everyone wanted to escape to a nicer place. And when they got there, they promptly did their best to turn paradise into the hell they just escaped from.

But this was our paradise, and true, sometimes we went hungry here, or got sick. Sometimes the rain and thunder kept us awake at night. But this planet wasn’t like the rest of the billions in the galaxy. It wasn’t covered in swarms of humans. We had to work for food and shelter and tools. This planet was unique. Valuable.

I jacked another round into the chamber and took aim at the last of the walking, breathing network nodes. People should be valuable.

NO CONNECTION
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#1 · 1
· · >>Miller Minus
Good Stuff: What it's doing, it's doing well. You really get to understand the mindset of the narrator as he's misanthropic and protective of "value", and has a strange, warped view of it that's kind of fascinating in a "that's so wrong" kind of way. The writing is solid, and the depiction of humanity as kind of mindless colonizers, while nothing new, tied together the themes and thoughts of the narrator really well. Chilling in a good way.

Bad Stuff: It's good at what it does, but I have to say it's not to my taste really. The warped, anti-human, callous mindset of adding value by making humans rarer is best watched at a distance; otherwise I can't sympathize with the narrator and tried to distance myself from him because it was distasteful, which hindered my enjoyment. More helpfully for you, I will say the beginning was too choppy. I couldn't tell in the first scene if they were in a ship or in the forest, and when they were in a cabin it threw me for a loop. Next, are these people really not noticing the thunder and sudden loss of connection with individuals? I'd figure someone would notice the coincidence soon enough. And I could be trying too hard, but I couldn't tell if the narrator was a very warped human or an alien with, well an alien perspective. Some physical clues might have helped.

Verdict: Mid Tier. I appreciate the craftsmanship and thought on display, and it does work well at what it does. But I personally don't like the flavor enough to want to see it from that perspective, and more relevantly, there are some oddities that bothered me with the events being depicted. A good try, and to be fair I admit a lot of this is just my subjective opinion!
#2 · 4
· · >>Miller Minus
I would think:

That going to explore an alien planet where you can't detect anything that's actually there is an invitiation to get eaten by the local equivalent of a bear, poisoned by alien pollen, crushed in a landslide, or washed away in a flashflood.

Letting the newcomers sense the world around them would also give the story more conflict, author. The newcomers could be working for the society that our narrator and the others have all left behind, but they're explorers because they also don't much care for the artificial bubble that society lives in. The narrator can then give the newcomers the choice of tearing their antennae out and staying or being killed. That would also give you a chance to present the infodump in the middle as dialogue when our narrator explains to the newcomers why the settlers are there. Just a thought.

Mike
#3 · 1
·
Everything that >>Baal Bunny said!

But for real, I like what you're trying to do here. The idea of picking a friend/lover and just absolutely disconnecting from fucking everything is something that really hits home with me. Sorry, fellow humans. Sometimes we suck.

But the foolish vulnerability of the newcomers, and the reduction in conflict that this creates makes it harder for me to enjoy it all. But, to go ahead and dispel the notion that I have original thoughts, I'll also agree with what >>HiTime said about the craftmanship on display. It all comes together in a way that's paced well—both in terms of the pace of the action, and the pace at which we receive information—but the whole picture just feels a little short-sighted when we get to it.

But that's all from me. Good luck in the contest!

Edit: Wait, before I go, I just realized that Baal's suggestion would remove the prompt from the story. Not that that matters anymore, but I had another thought—maybe the narrator has the option of being hidden and just killing them as above, but makes the decision to show himself so as to give them a real chance. It might add something to his character?

I'm rambling, and this isn't my story, but I just thought I'd pipe up. I'll go now.