Chaos Tales: Recalibration Rose

Today is an episode of Chaos Tales - free fiction highlighting the latter half of "Delightfully weird. Occasionally dark." Today's story starts and ends in darkness. Plus there's a picture of Crokell.

Ready for Something Different?

There’s something unsettling about summer’s arrival - how spring dissolves into heat and humidity, how time slips forward. But for all that my roses are blooming, although they need to be trimmed down. The dogs aren’t sure about the heat and are even less sure about why I keep them from eating grass. Other than that, the world rolls on and I am trying to sever my over connected mind from the clawing addiction of being wired in day and night as modern life and success is wont to create.

From now on, there will be two free fiction pieces published here per month and two other random posts. Please let us know if you are interested in subscribing to just a subset of our posts. The two free fiction pieces each month are: Chaos Critter Tails (cute and fun) and Chaos Tales (a different beast entirely).

Most of the Chaos Tales skew a little darker than most of our published works. These stories are closer in tone to our Malta story (“The Peace of Il-Maqluba” in Falcons of Malta) and some of our darker pieces, which have been written but haven’t yet found homes. Sadness… If you’re looking for something silly, delightfully weird and not really dark, try our published Nano-Sapiens stories or the silly puppy and kitty adventures of Chaos Critter Tales in our free-fiction section on the blog.

Otherwise, enjoy these fun dark shadowed stories that pass though our minds in-between the silly oddities.

Story: Recalibration Rose

Sound blared. High Pitch and piercing through the Nyctocycle waking Seth with a start.

“Intruder. Intruder Alert! Biped Sapioid detected in at MGRS 15R TL 6658 8630-X9, holding outside Sector 13 perimeter. Biometric Sweep initiated. Activating Sethenix.”

Seth reached out and flipped the nearest switch cutting off the blaring, leaving deafening quietness in its wake. He growled.

He longed for the the cold darkness of stasis again but knew that Voxanubis would only be silenced for so long.

It was dark. Very dark.

It was cold as well, but that was only to be expected.

The gears of his mind turned slowly as Seth finished waking. Slowly, he assessed his physical condition. His mouth felt dry, his thoughts muddy, each limb felt stiff, and if he could ache, he would have.

Seth shook his head and fought the urge to stomp his feet - to connect to the earth again. Instead, he finished standing and rolled his neck. It creaked. The grinding of rust and unoiled gears made him pause. He opened one eye.

The connection fade in and out then stabilized. It left him with a half view of the world. A dim view where only the low yellow glow of his dying battery showed him anything in the shadowed insides of his charging cabin. He paused and opened his second eye. His vision fuzzed for a moment. Then, the screen blanked as his other eye activated. Slowly, every so slowly, Seth’s IR vision came up, functioning. Barely. At least he had accumulated that much of a charge.

“Intruder! Intruder Alert! Biped Sapioid-”

Seth’s voice was rough with disuse and rougher still with lack of oil as he grumbled, “Shut it, Vox. I heard you the first time. I’m activated.”

He worked the rough neck gears into somewhat more smooth operation. It didn’t keep his voice from carrying the scream of other, rough gears. “Why did you have to wake me? There hasn’t been a Biped Sapioid in millenia.”

Vox’s voice was a crisp and clean. His AI brother was unlike him, never allowed to power down, always running, always blaring warnings. And always searching. “Tell that to my sensors, Seth.”

Seth reached over and took a small can of oil and unsealed it. “Your sensors are going down if you think anything has changed.”

He lifted the can to his lips, quenching the rust. It letting him talk without the screeching background noise of his own movement. He applied the can to other joints.

But Seth knew Vox, would not have woken him for nothing but a chat. The poor old AI was worse off than Seth, stuck in the box that was the old stadium.

Only allowed to search and scan.

Never, ever to do, to create, to be.

Vox adjusted his voice to sound huffy. “My sensors are functionally perfectly. I am telling you I found one.”

“Found what?”

“A Biped Sapioid.”

“Last time you thought you found a Biped Sapioid, it was nothing but a whisper on the wind.”

“That was different. My sensors hadn’t been recalibrated in centuries. Since then, I wake you up every hundred years to recalibrate them.”

Seth scoffed. Not sure how he could have truly recalibrated Vox without an actual human. Still, it had been interesting to find a half dozen living things and let Vox scan them. One by one. The little moving creatures had been scanned, indexed, and released. Their names and biosigns entered into Vox’s database.

But catching birds, squirrels, and possums was different… Not that Seth really knew what a human looked like. He wasn’t that old. He hadn’t been started until after… After the creators had abandoned them.

He pushed the thought away and finished preparing to head into the empty concert tomb that was the deserted city. He might as well. After all, there was no way Vox would let him nap again until he did a complete check.

Betraying a missed gear or badly aligned piston, his legs creaked as he walked across the hard floor. The footsteps echoing in the empty hall ways. He turned and one by one climbed down the stairs. Down and down, until he though for certain he would reach the center of the world. And finally, there was the door out.

Hanging at an angle was a sign, the words almost wiped away by age. “Authorized Personnel Only.”

Seth blinked one eye and saw the little pin pricks, the nicks and scratches along the edge of the door. He pressed forward, not using the handle, for that had long ago broken. He pushed and the door gave way.

His feet crunched across the sand of shattered safety glass. He wait for Vox’s alarms to blare. But nothing sounded. Looking up, Seth saw Vox’s voice boxes were askew, tilted like the sign. Wires hung out of the shells. A bird chirped from inside one, stretching is long head out and looking down at Seth with dark beady eyes.

Seth looked away. Vox was more gone than it seemed.

He felt the gentle pulse of the ground under his feet and continued. The 26 second micro-seismic pulse and the 7.83 Hz electromagnetic waves told him he was still here. Still stuck. Still made to follow orders and never decide for himself. His sensors functioned even if he’d rather not.

And then and there, something in him snapped.

His voice growled but not from rough gears. “I cannot go on like this. We cannot go on like this.”

He held his forearm before him and pulled aside the protective panel. A display said “Safe Mode”. He flipped a protective cover and pressed the button.

The last button.

It was crisp and clean and untouched. He felt energy well up inside him, as all of his sensors powered up. The full, final ergs of his power flickered and flooded through him.

He would search.

He would find an answer.

And this slow death of waiting for rescue would end.

Even if he had to make the choice himself.

He would search. But not for his brother’s alleged biped.

No. He would search for something more important. A map. A tool. A way to fix Vox. Something to make them free of their programming.

Something to end the unendurable.

He lifted his long, wide nose to the air and tried for the first time in a century to smell something. There in the wind was just a hint of fragrance. A flower blooming? But where? Surely not in this concert hall mess. He smelled again.

Following the smell, he found a flower, a slim little dandelion that had pushed its way through the cracks in the concrete. It could not help him. But behind it was a crack that was eating away at Vox’s sensors.

Seth leaned over the flower and plucked it, for no reason other than it did not fit. It had no place here where the floor was awash with glass turned back to sand through time.

A new sound drifted through the broken windows.

A clash of something soft on stone.

It bounced.

Bing. Bong. Dong. Dong. Thud.

Then there was a shrill sound. More than a cough but less than warning bell. His mind tried to match it to the database.

Seth turn in place. He increase microphone sensitivity and added power to the post processing. He followed the noise.

Suddenly, a tinkle of a laugh.

A laugh? No. It couldn’t be.

He froze. He was hallucinating it. He had to be.

They were gone.

They had abandon Vox and all like him… like cheap toys. Thrown away. And Seth for one had never really wanted to meet his creators. Unlike the others that mourned them or Vox that search endlessly for a sign of their return.

A new smell of crush plants. Seth looked down and noted the ruined pulp of the dandelion in his hand. He let it fall to the ground silently.

A warm wind moved through the building, through the open broken windows. Seth heard another sound he didn’t recognize. It was not a chatter of birds, bees, or rodents.

Voices.

Vox’s voice sang with happiness. “Do you hear them too?”

“Yes.”

Seth moved now. Faster than he had since his initial activation. His focus latched onto the one sound. The sound of them. Of humans. The creators and destroyers of hope.

He ran to them. Without a plan or hope. Just with his anger firing all his circuits.

His pain at desertion.

His desire to make them know what they had lost. It was…

Vox’s voice cut through. “Seth? You’re using too much power. I can’t recharge you at this rate.”

Seth ignored his brother and plowed on.

Searching for their last hope.

The hope that some Biped Sapioid still lived.

One that could power them down, to fix them.

One that could instruct them to build more than their half-ruined boxes.

One that could give them a duty besides to scan, and scan, and search and search for nothing. For eternity.

He ran on and on until he crested a hill and saw them. A child-sized shape hit a ball.

He entered the sunlight and paused in the glare. The bipedal shapes turned towards him.

Seth let his head dip. His battery warning light blinked once, then faded.

The storage systems that kept him moving dispelled the last erg of power.

His hand froze as he reached out.

He saw a thin flash of movement, felt the micro-seismic 26 second pulse race beneath.

Looking down, a small hand placed a single half open rose at his feet.

Seth smiled as darkness took him. He felt the hands of his creator sweeping cold darkness away leaving light, life, and warmth.

He had found their last hope and was home.

Inspiration

I was hoping to get a few artists who were willing to provide a piece for me to write about, that didn’t happen. Hence, Tod-master of all things tech-used Stable Diffusion to generate some random AI art. I don’t know what words he used to generate these images. (It was pretty generic - along the lines of “a science-fiction scene with a human and an animal in it”. -Tod)

So, in a way, the two of us are playing a game of telephone: Tod creates an image using a prompt from his weird imagination, and then I take that image and turn it into a story, which hopefully is delightfully weird in and of itself. (Don’t forget dark. -Tod)

If you are an artist and want your work to have something written about it and shared with links to your website and SubStack, feel free to reach out. We love to support human artists. Until then… we will keep moving forward, supported by technology and imagination.

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Publishing News: Five Seconds of Power

Our first superhero story, In Fine Print, is out and available on Amazon as part of Five Seconds of Power: A Five Second Rule Anthology!

https://www.amazon.com/Five-Seconds-Power-Kristina-Casasent-ebook/dp/B0F319V1M7

Through an accident of alphabetizing, we’re lead author! I guess we’re really Team And More emeritus now! We are joined by our fellow Alpha Merc Sam Robb, who was in the first anthology in which we were published and also published us in Minstrels of the Galaxy.

Based on the 5 Second Rule RPG from Lucky Newt Games.

Live Real Press says:

You are participating in a new study by L&G Inc. Though the compensation isn't very good, they could be the key to your dream of having superpowers. After weeks of pokes and prods, and far more mental and physical tests than should be legal, you are one of the few whose power awakens! The catch?

You're stuck in this facility with a few powered individuals until you learn how to work together as a team of superheroes. Oh yeah, and everyone's power—including yours—is limited by 5 seconds in some way.

So why go through all this?

Because someone mentioned there would be a portal at the end of this training that could take your group anywhere, anytime. And did you catch the part about being a superhero?

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Why is there a picture of Crokell here? No reason. But I did like how the camera, for some reason, enhanced the shadows in his fur. Shadows seemed to fit this week’s theme. -Tod

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Chaos Tip of the Week

Darkness can be tasty or bitter. But too much, just like chocolate, can give you a stomachache. Take your dark thoughts in moderation and you will be rewarded with something better than shadows or doubts - the rich taste of truth and chocolate.

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Chaos Question of the Week

If shadows tasted like chocolate, would you be afraid of the dark or just hungry?