Ren Asari doesn't believe in fate, but in an hour and thirty minutes, she's prophesized to die. Her skeptical quest for answers quickly becomes a race for survival -- but not necessarily her own.
Short story written for the Ultimate SciFi Smack Down...
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Flashing blue neon. A haze of smoke and steam in subzero, pre-dawn darkness—streetside grills open for breakfast amidst stained concrete towers and looming black cliffs.
The Lower Crush. The deepest of Indigo City's scars; its first crystal quarry, exhausted, abandoned, and now reclaimed by what many termed the planet's "human vermin."
The descendants of Klotho 9's original colonists.
Crouched amongst frost-covered refuse, Ren Asari looked past the garbage sorter rumbling at her elbow. In the bitter gloom of the street beyond, local Dal-Kri in ragged shawls and jackets gathered to welcome the coming day with grill cakes and rum-spiked tea and coffee. Not exactly the wild celebration the gossip streams had been predicting all week.
While music competed with traffic noise from the surrounding streets and the higher districts of the canyon city, it was mournfully operatic, not jubilant—apart from the occasional fast-food jingle. Conversation buzzed over drinks doctored with fermented cactus, but no laughter punctuated it, except for that of children.
As vindictive rebellions against the Planetary Government went, it was a decidedly subdued affair.
Ren curled her lip, allowing cynicism and resentment the smallest outlet. Today was supposed to be the day the oppressed indigenous population got what they'd wanted for decades.
Vindication of their maligned beliefs. A little petty retribution.
Her death.
Twenty years ago, on the day Klotho 9's newly appointed Planetary Governor Maraven Asari had given birth, Dal-Kri seers had stared into their crystals and foreseen the child's violent, untimely death.
Her mother, true to form, had promptly ordered the arrest of all Dal-Kri seers. She'd exiled them to the planet's thermally volatile crystal fields out in the wastes and, in the very next breath, granted United Planetary Alliance mining rights on sacred land.
Towering natural cathedrals of midnight crystal had been turned to blue-kryst dust, product for the UPA's thermoelectric heat-sink and energy-capture markets.
Ren rolled her hood-covered head back against the wall behind her. Breath pale in the cold air, she threaded her gaze past grit-blasted residential high-rises, the curves of the lower city's hover-rail track, and the jagged black outcrops of stone that spanned the canyon metropolis. Far above, pierced by the High Citadel's silver towers on the cliffs, the early morning sky had turned from pitch to ink, the first sign of sunrise.
Her last, if the Dal-Kri were to be believed.
Which they weren't, despite the gossip streams' enthusiastic promotion of the prophecy. Hundreds of years ago, the Dal-Kri had been space explorers, some of humanity's first. Now, as her mother liked to put it, they were "cave-dwelling, crystal-gazing primitives." They believed time flowed to 'Kry-Gon,' the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. They believed their seers could tap into that temporal tide using the purest of the blue crystal abundant on planet.
