Sunday, December 10, 2006

New Beginning 172


"Ready to swim, Bortis?"

Bortis grinned at the figure swathed in psiscan equipment and finished shouldering the Ops room door open, trying not to drop the box overflowing his arms. He sidled in cautiously, but still clipped the door jam and barely caught the box with his knee.

Bortis tapped the door shut behind him with a heel, grinned. "Hi Harry. Ready for me to save your drowning ass?"

He plopped down his box between the command chairs; it filled the space. "Jeez, my back."

Harry made obvious eye gestures between Bortis and the box. Bort grinned, jerked a thumb at the occupant of the other chair, whose head was still swathed in the the mirrored dome of the diving rig, wires and leads jacked into the psi diver's dual skull ports. "I promised Jeno my next successful synthcat, for," he waggled his brows, "services rendered."

They both laughed. Jeno, still deep in the Web, didn't react physically, but Bortis watched Harry blink at the sudden imagery they both received from Jeno. None accurate, all embarrassing.

"I hope you don't show everyone in Ops that info, Jeno. People would believe it."

Again laughter, this time over the audio, a canned laugh from an old vid show.

Jeno extracted herself from the psi-diving rig and gave the two men a withering stare. “Remember we have to download those reports in time for the briefing.”

“Sure, Jen,” Bortis said as she left the room.

“Okay,” Harry said. “What’s really in the box?”

Bortis lifted off the blanket that was covering two large circuit boards and a vid-pod. “Here,” he said. “Patch this into the memory core while I hook up these boards.”

Harry squinted at the tiny writing on the side of the pod. “Playboy Confidential, 2213? What...?”
Bortis gave Harry a sly wink. “Who says geeks like us can’t get the hot chicks?”

Harry broke into a wide grin. “All right! Me first.”

When Harry was hooked up and ready, Bortis booted up the rig.

Harry seemed to be enjoying himself at first, but then, after a few minutes, he screamed, “No... No... No... Nooooooooo...!”

Bortis hit the emergency power down and helped Harry stagger out of the rig. “What happened?”

“You idiot,” Harry shouted. “You got the polarity wrong! I’ve just been psi-violated by a synth-Hugh Hefner.”


Opening: Writtenwyrdd.....Continuation: Anonymous

20 comments:

Rei said...

Does anything interesting happen?

Nothing interesting yet...

Anonymous said...

I...didn't understand this at all.

I stumbled over the technology, the terminology, and the jokes. Um. I think there's a good science fiction story getting started here, but it was a little too inaccessible for me to get into it.

McKoala said...

There were too many new widgets, wodgets and concepts in these first few words for my tiny brain to cope with. Not my genre, though, so over to the rest...

Anonymous said...

Evil, maybe the first alteration of your portrait that I sent in was over the top. Surely you had no objections to the picture of the beatnik Evil Editor!

Anonymous said...

"door jamB". Unless door peanut butter is also coming. Too many things are swathed. And I also had a lot of trouble figuring out what was going on.

Evil Editor said...

Evil Editor doesn't open attachments. He gets too much hate mail to risk it. Perhaps if you place your artwork on your blog and give us the address...

Anonymous said...

Hate mail? You get hate mail?

Wow, you're bigger and more influential than I thought! Hate mail is a sign the goverment is trying to take you down, man. You're upsetting the order; rocking the boat; bobbing the apples.

Respect.

Anonymous said...

The continuation was hilarious.

HawkOwl said...

Either I'm getting senile, or the minions are coming around to my way of thinking. It's the second time this week I've agreed with everyone. Possibly even the third.

All the grinning and buddiness aggravated me because I have no idea what they're being cute about. Unless they're gay. And I don't get "the box overflowing his arms." A box is a solid. It doesn't flow. Maybe the contents of the box are overflowing. Unless Dali had something to do with it, then I could see the box "flowing." That would also explain why it "plops."

So maybe it's a kind of Dali meets Dune GLBT metafiction experimental type thing. I'd read some of that. But if it's just plain science fiction... I'd pass.

Anonymous said...

We have only 150 words to launch a story with these New Beginnings. The author didn't do badly at all, considering he/she is introducing a whole new world. I'm no SF fan, but I would definitely read more, just to find out where it's headed.

And the continuation was great!

Kate Thornton said...

The continuation was spot on!

Anonymous said...

Either I'm getting senile, or the minions are coming around to my way of thinking.

Naw...its the holiday spirit is working its magic on ya, Hawkowl. Those sugar-plums visions you've been having are really a symptom of this thing slurping your frontal lobe out with a straw while you sleep.

Other symptoms include a sudden and uncharacteristic lack of curmudgeonliness. :-)

HawkOwl said...

Anonymous - Good guess, but no. :) "Holiday spirit" makes me very, very cranky.

HawkOwl said...

sundae best said...
We have only 150 words to launch a story with these New Beginnings. The author didn't do badly at all, considering he/she is introducing a whole new world.

Therein, I think, lies the weakness of the New Beginnings. No speculative fiction writer would try to explain the whole setting in the first 150 words. The New Beginnings are amusing, but the standards set by the minions are not necessarily functional in the context of writing novels for publication.

But hey, they're entertaining. What more can one ask for?

Anonymous said...

So, what's your excuse the rest of the year, hawkowl?

HawkOwl said...

14:08 - The rest of the year I'm just mad at anonymous blog comments.

Anonymous said...

Cool. Here's another one.

Anonymous said...

Isn't Bortis the name of Genghis Khan's wife, played by Maureen O'Hara in The Conqueror, with John Wayne as Genghis Khan?

writtenwyrdd said...

OMG, Bortis, Ghengis Khan's wife as played by Maureen O'Hara? Frightening...

Hawkowl is right, SF is difficult to explain in 150 words. Two pages might see you satisfied, but half a page? Nope.

It is still interesting to see what the minions make of the openings, though.

Anonymous said...

Alright, here's the blog containing other EE portraits. Let me know, minions, if you uncover anymore of these relics!

http://EEPortraits.blogspot.com