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Outrun Stories #32

No more heroes

By Outrun StoriesPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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It’s a mid-night sky but since the server towers went down it’s never really got dark. They’re still trying to figure that out, something to do with the amount of silicone dust that was released into the atmosphere. All I know is that I sleep all day, because when I wake up for the new-night, there’s a tyrian haze of deep purple that covers the sky when I step outside and look up.

I light two cigarettes and pass one to him and we both stare up at it, the same as billions of us must across the planet. Earth, only it doesn’t feel like that, not any more, not for the last six months. They’ve been trying to piece together what happened, keep some sort of order in the mega-cities.

Out here we’re generally left alone, work the fields, shit, synth food feeds the masses but for all that happened, there’s still a few people rich enough out there that want the real stuff and our small farm provides. And anyway, any fucker stupid enough to get within a 10-klick range of this place and the auto-phalanx will make short work of them.

“That’s something else, isn’t it?” he says to me.

“Yeah, sure is, you think we’ll make it through this?” I reply, pulling on the last of the cigarette before flicking it into the dirt.

“Not a chance in hell, you seen the feeds? The cities are tearing themselves apart, computational power is down to the lowest it’s been in decades.” He turns to me and raises his eyebrows.

“Yeah, I know, I know. It’ll affect us soon enough too, I know, I know.”

He leans against the porch. “Look we can barely keep everything running with the shitty feed that we get anyway, those assholes start rationing the stream, everything’s going to stop, and I mean everything.”

I sigh and rub my head, he’s right, we’re lost now. No more heroes, especially all the way out here. Everything’s automated, everything, we’re just on hand to repair a few things and make sure the mega-combines keep turning. Everything gets fed from the stream, and with the server towers down, there’s not much stream left.

“Problem is, we forgot how to do anything,” I say and he laughs and walks inside and I look up at that purple sky. A violet night illuminated by the rising moon and glistening with a trillion, trillion microscopic particles of some kind that create its peculiar magnificence. Yeah, not too much longer now for us, for everyone I guess. Take a few more months I suppose, and in the meantime, I can come out here, smoke a cigarette, look up to this purple sky and think about what might come after, what might be next. Don’t suppose it’ll help too much, but then again, I’m not sure what else there is to do.

“Breakfast?” he shouts from inside and I nod.

“Yeah sure,” but even that’ll be gone soon, forgot how to do anything, that’s our problem. No longer much of a man, no longer much of a race. Maybe this is the best for us all.

science fiction
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Outrun Stories

Short sci-fi stories in 500 words or less deriving from the Outrun, tech-noir and NewWave aesthetic.

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