Fiction

Pieterlub shifts uncomfortably in the cold air of his cell, drawing his robes closer. His breath mists, lit flickering by the few candles that dot the shelves and bureau.

“Don’t delay!” squawks the pale yellow bird perched on Pieterlub’s left shoulder. “Nightmares sense fear!”

“Hush, Huginn,” he replies. He fishes a seed from the recesses of his robe and passes it up to the parrot. He passes another to the green parrot on his right shoulder, which ululates softly in his ear.

Pieterlub’s fingers tighten around the journal he clasps to his chest. The focus of his gaze remains, has always been, the watercolour before him. It has been painted onto a simple two by three foot canvas. It makes good use of colour and light; the techniques used are fashionable but executed with confidence.

Your hands ache and torn cuticles bleed. Callouses are beginning to develop on your fingers, but you still envy the English workers, who work with gloves. Your back also aches, and you wonder how many hours you have spent under the hot sun.

For a moment you pause and surreptitiously look around you, stretching out your spine. To your left and right are long lines of workers, backs stooped, reaching down to grasp cabbages and haul them from the earth. You see white workers, perhaps English, perhaps European. It is hard for you to tell, because you do not share any common language.

You turn your head further, glancing behind you, trying to spot the gangmaster. He is stood fifty yards back, mobile phone to his ear as usual, looking toward the other end of the line. His woman isn’t around - probably off having her hair done again in the town. You wonder if you’ll have the time to wash your hair in the river tonight, or if you’ll just be too tired to do more than eat and sleep after today’s shift.

I trust my techs. I trust my team. I trust our processes. I trust our traditions.

I trust in divinity, and in the grace of the ineffable angels. I trust in that which watches over me. I trust that which nourishes me.

I trust my armour. I trust my helm, my visor, my gauntlets. I trust my systems. I trust my cables. I trust my rigging.

These are the three pillars of trust for a helldiver. In each we must hold firm. Where trust fails, a pillar crumbles. When a pillar crumbles, a helldiver does not return.

My mouth turns dry every time I enter slipspace. I don’t need a firsthand view of spacetime cloven in two, of the pure mathematics which lies beyond. I don’t even have to know when we’re transitioning. I can feel it on my skin, like a a static charge, and in the pressure inside my skull. Sometimes I even feel it in my bones, a sharp and thankfully brief pain like nothing I have felt elsewhere.

I’ve probably become conditioned by the pain and discomfort, and my mouth turns dry because of fear and anticipation. So now when I think of slipspace I think of how my mouth turns dry, because my body knows before my consciousness does and that’s the harbinger of what is to come.

The air stank of black powder, mud and the fear of men. Euron glanced up the line, toward the reassuring presence of their lightly armoured pikemen. Their long blades glinted as they turned, even in the wan sunlight that managed to penetrate the morning fog.

Euron felt an elbow in his ribs and turned. ‘Got tobacco?’ leered an ugly face, a vicious purple scar slicing through its beard.

‘Don’t be a fucking idiot, Var,’ replied. ‘You’ll blow your bloody hand off.’

Var leered at him again. ‘You can chew the shit, you know,’ he said, conversationally.

The border was flung into being seemingly overnight. A traumatic severance of previously unbroken countryside. A fortified line that seemed to rise with as much suddenness as the revolutionaries it stood against.

Our leaders were afraid, that much was certain. In the church and the town square, we heard an endless succession of proclamations. They levelled invective and rhetoric against the revolutionaries on the other side of that border. They had violated the natural order. They were leading their people to ruin. They stood in defiance of God and all that was holy. They were children who wailed and cried rather than obey their parents. They were commoners risen above their station. They were doing the work of Satan. They were in the pay of far-distant empires. They slaughtered their countrymen. They were kingkillers, priestslayers, murderous barbarians who held no life sacred.

This story is the result of a writing exercise in Adam Roberts’ Get Started in Writing Science Fiction. The challenge was “Little Red Riding Hood but the wolf is an alien!”, which I decided to twist into a goofy cyberpunk pastiche. It’s a bit longer than the intended 750 words and was written in about an hour.

She was in! The security room was dark and silent. Red slipped off her jacket and flung it over a chair.

The terminal was a big, imposing lump of metal, fitted with nine screens. Red fired them all up, then focused on the central display. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. ‘Looks like a standard setup,’ she said to herself. ‘Shouldn’t be any issues getting in.’

Earlier this year I finally dug Thimbleweed Park from my bottomless bag of acquired and unplayed videogames. For those unfamiliar, this is the crowdfunded traditionalist point-and-click adventure game from Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, the duo who co-designed Maniac Mansion many years ago.

I found Thimbleweed Park a mixed bag. Jokes ranged from mildly amusing to flat; the setting a mixture of try-hard zany and odd, fun little ideas; characters were similarly variable. But I did enjoy some of the puzzles and it was a nice, sedate game to play over the holidays. Reviews I’ve read suggest the game’s plot coheres and its characters come to life as you move beyond the first act, so I’m optimistic I will return to it one day.

When I found the extensive library in the game’s own maniac mansion, I was reminded that I had written and submitted some books for inclusion a few years ago. And after a quarter of an hour of very old-school pixel-hunting, I’m pleased to say I’ve found all five. So here they are!

I woke one morning to find the world had changed. 

‘War,’ said my grandfather, as I walked into the kitchen. His face, already lined and thin, pinched from years of peering down at his workdesk, was grave. 

‘What?’ I said. My heart began to race. Naive as I was then, I asked myself: who would war with tiny, insignificant Ruritania? Who stood to gain from swallowing up a country of peasants and guildmen, ruled over by merchants? We traded with our neighbours, imported and exported goods from far and wide. We were friends with everyone. Or so, like any teenage fool assured in his view of the world, I believed.