Tevun-Krus #74 - A Very Superhuman Christmas

Further Sagas of the Anti-Villains...

In the issue before last, we offered up another story challenge for our readers. Once again we had a kickass turnout, and here are more bite-sized Anti-Villain SF tales for you all!

Here's an epic by nosleneillor aka eyeexeyeeye:

Tomorrow always seems bleaker when viewed from yesterday. Yesterday, I had been the lowest of all. A mere peasant. A glorified janitor. Just a spare body in case of emergencies. A spare being to transform into usefulness should the need arise.

But it takes two people to transform one. And the only one left is I. There is no one left to operate the machine that does it. There is no doctor to resurrect a scientist's mind in my body.

I am alone. Just me and all those embryos. The unborn members of a race that had condemned me to death. A death of mind. I remember nothing of who I was before. I don't know my crimes. I only know that the person I had been was no more. He was killed. And I was created in his place. I inhabit his body. I wear his skin almost like a suit. His body doesn't fit me. The arms are a bit to short. The legs seemed spindly and weak every time I looked at them, as if I expected to see...well, thicker legs.

My instincts are wrong for this body. It doesn't fit well at all. I keep trying to brush hair thats not there. My hands seem to expect a lot of hair. But my scalp is bald. My ears are to big.

And I'm old. Not feeble yet. But beyond middle age by quite a stretch. That was almost the worst part. The not knowing why. When. Or anything, even what my new birthday is.

Now I'm a stranger in a strange body in a strange land. A world so strange my mind felt itself shrink in awe.

Carbonate crystals comprised 30% of the crust of the planet. The faceted spears soared above my head for almost a mile, time had long since destroyed the weak ones. Now the rainbow splashes spread as far as the eye could see.

Even as I stared I was at a loss to explain my survival. The ship had made it down through that nightmare of knife egded doom. Those spears were incredibly thin considering their height. The one nearest to me was at least half a mile tall. And it was only about ten feet in diameter. It appeared to be the same diameter til very near the top.

The ground was covered in a thick carpet of clear shards. The edges were incredibly sharp. The purple bands that spread accross the heavens created a weird striped look to the sky above me. The sun was a particular shade of green that seemed to defy most ideas of what suns should look like.

And its shape, square. How in hell does a sun look square. I have absolutely no idea as how that works. How such a thing could be possible is entirely beyond me.

Square...how in heck can that even be. It's artificial of course. But that's easy to see. The structure that held the sun was visible from the surface of the planet where I stood.

The ship lies just behind me. The scars of it's trip were visible across it's flanks. Gouged and ripped fuselage stood as a testament to how close it had come.

The computer was still functional. Kind of, depends on your definition of functional I guess. It works. But it's crippled. The busted vessel just laying there. The whole situation was beyond my ability to process.

You see, I don't have a history. I was born fully formed withouta past. I didn't remember where we came from, I didn't know about what happened. I don't know how it happened. All I know is what the computer was willing to tell me.

It wouldn't tell me why. It wouldnt tell me how. It would only say that it was gone.

Earth.

Earth was gone.

And I, the last hope for mankind, stand here naked before eternity on a planet far from home.

I don't want it. I don't want to be a hero. I have no desire to answer the questions about which children to grow first. I don't want to be mother to a new age of destruction on a innocent planet that didn't deserve the evils of humankind.

I'm a prisoner here. One with no memory of my past. I have no love for those that sent me out here.

I have no intention of being the one to let mankind continue. Mankind is a plague that will end here. It all stops with me.

The end of days happens now... ironically on a tidally locked planet that never experiences sunset. The sun just wobbles around a bit as the endless summer stretches into eternity before me.

Just me, myself and I.

And that's the way I like it.

---

And an entry by MadMikeMarsbergen:

"This one has good stats," I said, giving the genedex for this particular test-tube baby a gander. Predisposed to huge stature, genius-level intelligence, and a schlong so long you could use it as a fashion-model runway.

ABNORMALITY DETECTED, the screen said.

UNKNOWN GENETIC MATERIAL. MATERIAL NOT IN DATABASE. SEARCHING. SEARCHING.

"Yeah, who cares," I said, aborting the search and booting up the grow vat. The idea was not lost on me that I might be playing God with a creature whose genedex made it seem like God Himself had jacked off into a sterile cup and handed back the latest sticky issue of Just Ass Daily.

"We've all gotta start somewhere."

---

Finally, sleepingdraco's story, Reentry:

Alarms blared and the vessel shook so hard, Dr. Drake experienced no fear of her impending death. When she regained consciousness it took her a few moments to remember she wasn't in her own bed. The severed hand of a Lacedain wrapped around her neck and the smell of smoldering electrical wires clued her back to the reality of the disaster around her. But she had survived. Sitting up, the pain registered and she groaned pulling herself out from beneath the toppled control panels of her ship.

Her crew of five Lacedains lay dead around her. The only other surviving life forms glowed purple in their case hung in suspension to protect them from any turbulence they might encounter during space travel. Some landing. The sixty-four Lacedain embryos, enough to repopulate the planet, had been modified by nanotechnology to survive an atmosphere so polluted by the previous inhabitants of the planet they had all but become extinct. The future of the race arrived home unharmed. Unfortunately, their five adult Lacedain nannies did not survive reentry. The Lacedains themselves were self-sufficient for food and water from birth, but it was the nanobots that ran in their blood that needed minding. Without adult supervision, there was no one to temper the self-replicating nanites until the infants were old enough to do it themselves. Without proper monitoring, these beings could quickly become more nanite than biohybrid. Dr. Drake shuddered at the thought and briefly considered staying herself, but she knew her human body wouldn't tolerate the toxic planet even if she tried to enhance it with nanotechnology.

Dr. Drake had a choice to make. Abandon her life's work and let the Lacedains become extinct or move forward with a reckless uncontrolled experiment.

"Which children should we grow first?" asked the stilted crackling voice of the computerized assistant that came with the shoddy ship, the only ship she had been able to afford on her meager professor's salary.

She looked at the assistant with contempt, steeled herself and replied in a grim voice. "Plant them all. Then we fix this spacecraft and leave."