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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