Okay sirs of !writecel it is time to shine shit in the streets
Our guru sir @Downie has allowed me to make the first short story prompt for this group of rdrama brahmin . If you haven't seen this thread https://rdrama.net/h/bharat/post/206128/i-found-peak-midwit-foid-fiction
Please be obliged to peruse it, sirs.
You have two weeks and a day to submit a piece of 800 to 1k word flash fic based around the prompt Indian Sci Fi
It has to actually be a story with a beginning, middle and end. There is no consequence for submiting vignettes or similar, I just personally won't read them as they are clearly written by and for dalit.
Sirs, post the submissions in this thread and please do not redeem.
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BAD CONNECTIONS
Rajesh entered the call floor two minutes late. Dozens of impeccable phone voices washed over him as he threaded his way through a warren of tiny cubicles. He stopped only to greet Sahil, his neighbor to the right. Twelve hours of this.
Rajesh eased into the rickety office chair and logged onto Windows XP. These headphones were surely the cheapest on the market and dug painfully into his ears. He brought the ansible online. The call monitor appeared in the lower right of his cracked computer screen. Every second, the autodialer sliced through distant threads of reality in search of a target. When cliometrics indicated a being would pick up, the system collapsed the superpositional comms net and drew a (relatively) stable connection between Rajesh and his latest customer. It alerted him to this with a loud
BEEP!
“Hello, sir, this is Broddvu'kh, calling from Dzaaaughrava Genodymanics. There is a problem with your genetic sequence, sir.”
“I WILL FEED YOU TO MY DREADWORM!”
“Sir! Sir! You do not understand. This is a very serious—”
BEEP!
Rajesh marked down a hangup, ears still ringing from the beeps and the shouting. The translation chip made it echo in his head. He coughed. The city air caught in his throat. Indoors it was the same air, just blown around by big industrial fans.
Why had he come here?
BEEP!
“Hello, sir, this is Broddvu'kh, calling from Dzaaaughrava Genodynamics. There is a problem with your genetic sequence, sir.”
A gurgling voice lapped at his ears through the stiff headset. “What are you? Where are you singing from?”
“Sir, sir, as I said, I am calling from Dzaaaughrava. There is a disruption in your quad-helix nucleic acid. The information you are encoding in your left plaux'grafthuul organ may become corrupted. That is why I am calling.”
“How did you get this chromosomal signature?”
“It sent us the alert when your quantum foam continuity field entered the phase collapse, sir. I am going to need remote access to your genome.”
“Well, uh, I don't know. I should sing to my larvae. They sing more about this kind of thing.”
Rajesh shut his eyes. “No, no, sir, it is perfectly ordinary. It will only take six of your circulatory rhythms. Seven at the most.”
“Well, uh… Okay.”
“Perfect.” Rajesh clicked through to the next screen. “Just breathe your genetic information into your ansibilic resequencer attachment.”
“Oh, uh, I don't have one of those. I just have the old scent interface.”
Frick. “Oh, that is quite all right, sir. Just hold still in the quantum interchange field. Make sure your frill is under the resonance bar, and—”
“Is it going through?”
“No. Sir, I am going to need you to…”
“Hang on, my broodmate is smelling me.”
“Sir, it is only another circulatory—”
BEEP!
80 whole seconds. A long failed call was far, far worse for his KPIs than a simple hangup. Rajesh looked down at his computer's clock. 12 fricking hours of this.
He sipped from his water bottle. Sahil was off his call. The young man with the flimsy glasses smiled at him. “I got one!”
“That's great,” Rajesh managed to say, with a smile like an second grader's school picture.
“Hey, man, you look like shit. You just got here, you know…”
Rajesh let his faux smile fade. “Do you ever wonder about the worlds we're calling?”
Sahil looked around the call floor and put a hand over his microphone. “You really shouldn't talk about this stuff.”
Rajesh shook his head. The supervisors listened, but not often; they were far lazier than the employees and made just 200 rupees more. “If it's possible to send a signal there, do you think it's possible to send a person? What if there was a way to get away from all, well, all this?” He gestured vaguely across the bustling call floor.
“You think too much,” Sahil said. “Just be glad you're not working some factory like Madhusudan does.”
“Isn't communication supposed to be about—”
BEEP!
“Hello, sir, this is Broddvu'kh, calling from Dzaaaughrava Genodymanics. There is a problem with your…” Rajesh trailed off.
“What's that?” came the bubbling voice of this new Barasaduriant. “You're phasing out.”
“There is a problem with…” God, how many times had he said these words? Surely more than he'd said “I love you” to his own mother!
“Your…” Rajesh swiveled in his chair, looked across this neat grid of inhumanity. “There is no problem. None at all! But could you tell me what it looks like outside the window of your hive?”
“Is this another prank song?”
He grimaced, but he couldn't stop now. “My real name is Rajesh. I work in a scam call center 246 trillion lightyears away. I've never even left my planet before. I just want to know what it's like somewhere else.”
A long silence. Then the entity chirped. Rajesh hadn't heard that noise before.
A laugh?
The being spoke. “My song is Seilauda'ana. And outside… yes, the leiv tendrils have grown nicely from the stonehives, interlocking, woven together, crossing the air. They're such a lovely shade of red this season, just a little darker than the sky. The moons are full and white. And on a day this clear, the sky is speckled from the Kelaba Impact—230 sunsongs ago, when I was just a larva. On the breeze I smell the lives of many Barasaduriant, but also the spindly flying sepon, and far away from that the vob, those gentle four-dimensioned interlopers. They pass through our realm in 3D slices, taking care not to lumber through the leiv. And where they pass, they leave a glow behind, which lingers in the second night.”
Rajesh smiled. “Thank you. And goodbye, my friend. I will remember you.”
BEEP!
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This is spectacular
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This is a really long way of saying you don't frick.
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!writecel
Behold my submission, I pray I won't be the only one.
!bharatiya you've served me as muse, thank you and I'm sorry.
Fist of Modi
approx 1k words
"Vindaloo, my son, are you sure you do not want to come to America?"
Vindaloo smiled at the videophone, his parents had been trying to get him to emigrate for years now.
"You know your uncle can arrange an H1-Beta living pass for you, the pods here are quite spacious." His mother nodded her head in agreement.
"Mother, Father, thank you but I must go. India's future needs me." The videophone cut out before he could finish his speech.
They would never understand. It's not that they were not as educated, between the three of them they had no less than four dozen masters degrees, it was their lack of national pride.
A shadow fell over his cubicle, the entire office gasped. The Fist of Modi, a Naan class harvester and the fruits of their labor, was approaching the launchpad. His jaw dropped in amazement and he found himself joining the others at the window. Asymmetrical and bulbous, the hulking ship's turmeric toned carapace glimmered in the midday sun.
This was why Vindaloo had stayed. When his parents were growing up India was a second tier nation, not the superpower it was now. Of course apart from a brief foray into plumbing around the 21st century what had really propelled their recent stratospheric ascension was a brief nuclear exchange between Neo Moscow and The Free Negro Republic of Atlanta. Vindaloo had done the math, or rather had paid someone to do it for him, and calculated that the regions would be uninhabitable for hundreds of years to come. He smiled, knowing his children (once his marriage was arranged) would be born into a global superpower.
But a horn blast interrupted his thoughts. It was time to board! He bolted towards the changerooms and was the first to suit up and report to the crew gantry.
He saluted the general already waiting.
"First Officer of Information Technology Brahmjeesh Vindaloo reporting, Sir!"
"You are free to board, Officer. All the sirs of India thank you," the general said with a slight bow. Vindaloo blushed.
It was not just his eagerness to see the project through that drove him to board so early, there was something else. He barely had time to admire the ship's regal interior, every wall was inlaid with carvings, elephants and gods and elephant-gods, women in sari and moustached leaders of yore. He would have liked to savor this moment, and the ship while it was still so clean, but he had work to do while The Fist of Modi was still earthside.
Deep within the bowels of the ship he seated himself at a terminal and accessed Gahndi III, the ship's supercomputer. There in some confidential memory banks, a scant few billion terabytes, he began to upload the entire earthly internet.
By the time he was done the ship had filled up and the smell of spicy stewed legumes wafted up from the galley. Just as he was strapping himself into a grav chair in preparation for launch, the intercom crackled.
"Officer Vindaloo, please report to the bridge."
With nervous sweat on his brow he rushed to meet the captain.
"Officer Vindaloo, there is a problem with the MicroSoft launch system, please fix it at once,"
The words "Yes sir" had barely left Vindaloos mouth before he was at a terminal, scouring his copied internet. The problem had been trivial for someone else to solve, and so Vindaloo had the ship running with ease.
The next few days went much the same and Vindaloo's reputation as a problem solver grew, as did his confidence in himself. Until one night the captain knocked on his cabin door.
"It's best I talk to you in person, my dear Vindaloo. It seems we are having a problem with the SPICE system, and I do not want to alarm the crew. Surely it will be trivial for you to fix, you wrote your thesis on it!"
Vindaloo sucked his teeth. "Yes captain, of course. Let me just go refer to my notes," and with that he bolted towards the IT deck.
The Stationary Positioning Interpolating Computation Engine was the soul of the mission, without the precise thrust microcorrections it was capable of they would never navigate the Kuiper belt. Vindaloo had never considered what would happen should they fail to bring back a chunk of ice to refill the Ganges, and wondered what India would look like without that fabled river.
He put the thought out of his mind and focused. It's true, one of his doctorates was from his work on SPICE but he had paid Jarpur to write - Jarpur!
Vindaloo scrambled to get the long range comms online and through an encrypted channel called Jarpur.
The electric tabla rythms nearly deafened Vindaloo when Jarpur answered from his car.
"My friend! Coming to America at last?" Jarpur's face filled the screen, the only thing shinier than the gel in his hair were his gold necklaces.
"No, dear sir. I'm calling from The Fist of Modi, we are having problems with the SPICE and I was wondering -"
"How's the neutron flux in the Shiva drive?" Jarpur cut him off, his face deathly serious now.
"It must be fine as there are no alarms, sir."
Jarpur shook his head. He stopped the car. "I'm very sorry my friend but I have a delivery to make," he said, showing Vindaloo a bag of takeout. Jarpur scrawled some complicated equations onto the back of the receipt and held it up to the camera. "This should help."
But before Vindaloo could ask Gahndi III to analyze them the ship shook and the feed went dead.
"Officer Vindaloo! To the bridge at once!" The intercom blared on all channels.
Vindaloo was sweating bullets as the bridge door slid open. He gasped whe he saw the clearviews, the panoramic windows that wrapped around the bridge. The Kuiper belt was in plain sight now, approaching by the second.
The bridge was quiet as a tomb, the captain's well polished shoes clicked against the floor as he paced back and forth.
"We're being pulled into a gravity well. As you know we've suffered an impact, Vindaloo. And there will be more if SPICE isn't online soon . I pray you've solved the problem?"
Vindaloo tried to talk but his throat seized up. He pointed at the clearviews where the Kuiper belt was coming up impossibly quick. An asteroid that dwarfed The Fist of Modi seemed to leave its orbit, or rather pull the ship into its own. As the icy rock filled their entire field of vision and alarms blared, Vindaloo thought only of his mother's masala dosa, and after the first hairline crack appeared in the clearviews he stopped thinking altogether.
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That's nice sweaty. Why don't you have a seat in the time out corner with Pizzashill until you calm down, then you can have your Capri Sun.
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