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Bright Jan 14, 2014 5:20:01 GMT -8

Post by Deleted on Jan 14, 2014 5:20:01 GMT -8

They say a supernova is one of the brightest things known to man, period. I'm no expert, but the guys with labcoats that could wallpaper their offices with fancy degrees tell me that you could hold a nuclear bomb right up against your eyeball and set it off, and it still wouldn't be as bright as watching a supernova from a few lightminutes out.

Not that I would know anything about that. No one in their right mind would give me a nuke.

Funny that they see fit to give me a supernova.

I'm not saying I could move it or anything. That's just stupid. I'm just saying I'm strapped in a tiny little box of a starship, maybe a lightminute out from a star that is about to go boom any minute now, and I have reason to believe that I'll survive the experience. Does this strike anyone else as a bad idea? I mean, come on. A life sentence these days can reasonably be expected to last two or three centuries, barring stab wounds or being choked to death on some heavy-worlder's gentlemanly bits. You give guys like me a chance to knock a fair few decades off by putting their life on the line for science, and that's great. I love me some science.

But for the love of all things holy, you're strapping the gravitics engineer accused of causing one of the largest mass casualty disasters of the last century into this deathtrap and assuming that everything is going to go to plan. Either I get killed by the star, or you cut off my air supply once it's clear I survived. Never mind that hey, this shield of yours operates on the gravitic principles I helped pioneer. Never mind that I was framed to make sure my name never saw a patent, or got a single red cent from the royalties. Nope, no grudge here.

Fifty long, excruciating years in general population. Never mind that the standard procedure is to put a man in my position into the lifers' section. Okay, sure, three hundred years is not technically a life sentence. But still, what in the actual fuck? I've spent the last fifty years dodging beatings, rape, and god knows what else in the gen pop because you wanted my research, but didn't want to deal with the bumbling, uneducated idiot who proved the last millenia of scientific theory to be a load of BS.

You thought the original frame-up was bad? Ten thousand dead, twenty times that wounded, I think it was.

There are thirty-two million on the Nova, a Pulsar-class research vessel some five or six light-hours off. You ain't seen nothing yet.

The first order of business: get out of these cuffs. Easier done than said. Mag clamp tech is ridiculously easy to short out, if you know what you're doing. That's why the prison still uses the old fashioned locking cuffs. Not impossible to escape, but they could survive being cut off from the power field.

Next up: disable the self destruct. Only it's not a self-destruct, really. It's designed to humanely kill the occupant of the craft while leaving the research intact. Not that I'm not supposed to know about that. After all, this is supposed to be my chance to pay my debt to society and go back to a normal life. Like I wouldn't find out that, of the last twenty test subjects, only one had returned alive, despite reported success in thirteen other trials. Ha, there it is. A little bead of plasmite. It'll eat through the hull and create a slow leak. Asphyxiation will kill me before the pressure loss ever gets a crack. It gets covered with a piece of chewing gum. The plasmite can't react without oxygen, and there's precious little to be found in Big Red.

And now to check the gravitic generator. Bastards. They haven't even bothered to change the operating system I installed back in the day. And why would they? They haven't the slightest idea how this thing really works. All they know is any attempt to change anything renders it useless. If they had bothered to break down the OS, they'd know why.

Sure enough, the thing is configured to produce a shield. In this case, a spherical wall of incredibly dense gravity that should, in theory, keep this postage stamp of a craft safe. Oh, it'll work, I guess, but it's so small minded, I'd laugh if I could. There is no upper limit on the size of the construct this generator can produce, except for the imagination of the person programming it. You'll figure that out soon enough.

The star is about ten times the size of Sol, give or take a few trillion tons of reactive mass. The bubble is moved around the star, rather than the ship, and it has properties that the simple-minded educated idiots that tried to steal my research never dreamed of. This generator can create impossibly dense barriers of gravity, but it can also do the reverse. I could build a mansion with the bricks that would have been shat, if only anyone ever bothered to ask me if it could do antigravity.

There is one key difference, of course, between the bubble around my ship and the one around the star. Well, aside from scale, strength, ect. Look, don't dig too hard into the phrasing. Just take my word for it, the important part is the 90 million mile-long protrusion pointing directly at the Nova. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to the largest gun barrel ever made, and it's pointed right at you.

By the time this message meets you, I'll be long gone, and you'll have maybe two or three minutes to panic before your world is ended by a stream of galactic level destruction. Your deaths will only be the first of many. The sick fucks that imprisoned me, that killed my family and ten thousand others on that hot, sunny day all those years ago, they'll get their day. You've given the greatest weapon in human history to a man with a grudge and nothing to lose.

I bet you feel really fucking bright right about now.

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Bright Jan 21, 2014 7:20:03 GMT -8 via the ProBoards App

Post by Deleted on Jan 21, 2014 7:20:03 GMT -8

I saw my daughter today, for the first time in almost seventy years.

For most people, that's not an especially odious chunk of time, these days. With the life prolonging treatments widely available and proper medical care, one could reasonably hope for a lifespan of three hundred years, and five hundred wasn't unheard of. Given the relatively slow nature of space travel, this is a good thing, as even stasis can slow down aging only so much. My stint in prison was fifty years. Transport to the trial had taken eight. Even with the wormhole shortcut, getting to the target star in the Nova had taken 11 years.

I made it home in a week.

So, while 70 years is still a long time objectively, my little girl should have, biologically speaking, been in her early twenties. Should have been, if the Eugenics Council hadn't decided that children of felons convicted of violent or sexually based crimes were to be denied life extension and sterilized.

For her, 70 years was a lifetime. It was a life well spent, crusading against the Eugenics Council. She had been a figurehead of the movement to undo some of their more outrageous excesses. Though the sterilization clause stuck, she was able to get the ban on life extension treatments struck down in court before she turned 16. It was a bittersweet victory, but one none the less. For females, the treatments have to start before the menarche. She used hormone therapy to put it off as long as possible, but at 14 years old, her body betrayed her and cut her off from the near immortality that her friends would know.

She hated me, at first. I had been arrested just before her ninth birthday. Though I wouldn't be convicted for another decade, the Council had deemed the probability of a conviction high enough to reject my daughter's approval to begin treatment. A month later, and it would have been too late to stop it. She has always been enormously smart, and knew exactly what it meant, and not just for her. When her mother was assaulted by angry family members of the victims of my "crime," she knew why. When her mother's applications for abortion and sanctioned suicide, both a result of the attack, were denied, she knew why. And when her mother threw herself out of an 80th floor window, seven months pregnant and destitute, she knew exactly why, knew exactly who to blame.

Eventually, she learned the truth about my conviction. Every whack job in the system had their own whacked out theories of what really happened, and enough sane eyebrows had been raised that their was a fair bit of support for my case outside of the lunatic fringe. It was years before she cooled down enough to hear them out, but my little girl was a smart one. She knew truth when she saw it.

She fought for decades. Any attempts at appeals were thrown out by virtue of the judges being paid off, but there were enough irregularities in my trial that even the most well bribed parole boards couldn't deny the opportunity for scientific release. Five years into my voyage on the Nova, content in the knowledge that her truncated life's work had been a success, she suffered a debilitating stroke.

She lives in a nursing home now, and is easily the youngest patient they've ever had. Hell, some of the nurses were older. She knows where she is and who she is, but she can't speak. She can't move the left side of her body at all, and the right barely cooperates. She can only speak through a neural interpreter, but it's nearly as broken as she is. The government won't provide a new one to a known criminal descendent, and the damn things are so expensive on the private market that the broken one was the best her supporters could afford.

We weren't able to have a conversation, as such. She couldn't openly admit who I was, though we were both sure no one would believe her, and even if she could, following the stream of conscious gibberish from the translator takes an astounding amount of skill and intuition. She was able to understand me well enough, though. I was able to apologize for not being there for her. I was able to promise that the people responsible for this would pay. And I was able to offer her a way out.

Suicide, without an officially sanctioned kit, is impossible these days. My wife was one of the last to pull it off; and she only managed by virtue of doing some very unsavory things for a man with diplomatic immunity and one of the last glass windows on the planet. Guns don't exist anymore, outside of the southeastern region of what used to be the US. Drowning, strangling, suffocating, all can be reversed with modern medical science. Even if you do manage to jump out in front of a vehicle, it'll either stop or roll over you without leaving so much as a scratch. Cuts healed themselves, and poisons had no effect on the prolonged. People started getting inventive, after a while, but enforcement kept pace. Only those approved by the government for a suicide kit were allowed to end it all by choice. The terminally ill, the incurably depressed, those for whom death really was the most sensible option, they were granted a way out on a case by case basis. My daughter's case had been rejected. Stroke damage could be repaired, after all. It wasn't their fault that, as a criminal descendent, she was ineligible for the surgery. All that mattered was that, in theory, she could be returned to normal.

There was pleading in her eyes as I made the offer. She didn't care how I did it, only that there was a way out of her living hell that didn't involve being a prisoner in her own mind for the next fifteen or twenty years.

pleasethankyoupleasethankyoupleasethankyou

Her translator nearly fried, trying to convey her desperation. I pulled something out of my waistband that I shouldn't have been able to get, even if I wasn't a convicted criminal: a .38 caliber handgun. It was a replica, but incredibly valuable all the same. It was also incredibly illegal. To get caught with it was an automatic life sentence. I didn't care. For the first time in decades, I was going to be there for my little girl.

The right side of her mouth quirked into a little smile as I placed the gun against her heart. She died with that smile, and I ran. The man I had bought the gun had warned me that it would be loud, but I hadn't wanted to waste a bullet finding out how loud. At $700 a shot, who could blame me? I wish I had, because even hours after making it off planet in my tiny little coffin of a ship, my ears are still ringing painfully. It's worth the pain, though. My little girl isn't suffering, and I can get back to my revenge.