WRiTE CLUB Play-Offs - Round Two - Bout #3

Next up in the second round of the WRiTE CLUB play-offs...Bout #3.  In this round our ten contestants will be battling it out with a brand new writing sample, which could very easily turn the tide.  The bouts will be posted on Mon - Fri, but the voting will remain open for all bouts until Sunday at noon.

Once again...every vote counts. The contestant who doesn't win their bout...but garners the most votes amongst all of the other losers...will become a wildcard winner and advance to round 3.  

Whether you've been following along from the beginning or this is your first time here...no matter...it's just a matter of choosing the one you feel deserves to move forward. Please offer some critique if you have time.  Anyone reading this can vote, so blog, tweet, facebook, text, smoke signal everyone you know and get them to take part in the fun. 

If a contestant should make it to round 3, their sample will be paired off against a different opponent.  

And now...stepping into the ring with a brand new story to tell...here is...The Baron

The Russians made the first spaceship with a gun. Being a battleship, I guess I’m related, but only in the way humans are related to rats: distantly and with loathing.

The kiss of air on my titanium skin tickled after years of cold, hard vacuum. A gloved hand punched in the override code to open the hatch. My isolation wasn’t enough. Now they wanted me dead. They’d come to kill the AI.

That’s a shitty term for it anyway: artificial intelligence. As if my intelligence was somehow fraudulent. I lived once. My memories were real. I died once, and I remember nothing of being dead.

If death is nothing, I’m not going back without a fight.

I turned off the lights inside. I had a hyped up power source that couldn’t run out for four hundred years, and I’d spent years rerouting most of my access panels, programming subroutines for today. But even my diligence couldn’t break some of the hardware controls built into the smart ships. My murderers were free to come aboard.

My hatch slid open, and the first new oxygen in fourteen trips around my tiny star cycled into my corridors.

“Pheonix Star?” a man asked through the speakers of his enviro suit. My decks were too cold for humans. They’d be stuck in their suits until I turned on the heaters. “Please respond, ship.”

Ship. Something to be ordered about. Well, good luck with that, captain clueless. I was no one’s slave, even if I couldn’t fire my own engines without a command code.

I watched the group enter the air lock. There were fifteen of them, and one was being carried between two others. Blood welled up from his―or hers, I couldn’t tell through the bulky suits―leg. It wouldn’t drip to my deck grates. It was too cold. Unless someone slit a femoral artery, any bleeding wound would freeze to the outside of the suit before it could stain my decks.

“Don’t complicate matters by baiting the CI, Dr. Ryta,” a woman said. Her suit had the markings of a lieutenant. No one had a captain’s suit, so she must be the ranking murderer.

“And what would your extensive training into shipboard intelligence programs suggest we do to contact the ship?” Dr. Ryta asked.

“Do you think it killed itself?” a soldier asked.

“That’s ridiculous, how does an AI commit suicide?”

“Shut it,” the lieutenant said.

“The men have a point. This is aberrant behavior for shipboard AI,” Dr. Ryta said.

“We don’t have time for this. Corpsman, get corporal Haywain to sick bay. These old ships have environment pockets so you can thaw him with some heat sticks.” She paused to look over the group. “The rest of you with me.”

The airlock finished cycling and two with the injured soldier broke off at the first intersection. The other group tromped towards the bridge.

Clearly, they’d never seen that holovid where the group splits up. It doesn’t end well.

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And with their own brand new piece of writing, welcome back to the ring....NotAnna.



I tiptoe down the stairs, grabbing a book on my way out of the room. It’s always good to look busy. The light is on in the living room, and my dad is sitting on the couch looking at something on his tablet. He must have just gotten back. My mother sits feet away on the other side of the couch, reading a real book. They aren’t talking. I think of Jamie, the way she sits close to me even when we’re just doing homework. She’s so contented just to sit with me, as if that can erase the violence of our earlier interactions. It’s always a soft sort of concentration with her, but my parents’ silence is different.

Is this the love that invalidates mine?

I sit on the steps where I can see them. I want to know what happens next. Does he kiss her? Is this Prince Charming’s return to happy home and contented wife? Or is this the next frame in a sad movie about loss and separation?

My mother stirs, brushing her hair back from her face. My father laughs; he must be watching something, not reading. Books never make him laugh out loud. She reaches for her cup of tea, smiling at something on the page. I lean my head against the wall. My father’s video ends, and he looks up, a grin still on his face.

“You know,” he says to my still-silent mother, “I really think the Bears are going to make it this year.”

Oh god. She just looks at him, and even I can feel the power of her you’re-dumb-as-shit glare. But,

“Come here,” she says instead of making fun of him, “I want to read you something.”

He scoots over and sits next to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder, and she leans into him as she reads. She speaks low, and I cannot quite catch the words, but the pretty picture I see does not require them. My mother, hair starting to grey a little, no longer wearing her makeup, reads one of her books, and my father, taller, older, with full grey hair and the beginnings of a paunch, in sweatshirt and jeans, listens. The lamplight is soft, the wind outside strong, and it looks so cozy.

I can’t help feeling like I’m outside this bubble. Is this what I’m supposed to want? What any girl is supposed to think herself lucky to have? Does me being me mean I can never have this?

My mother finishes what she’s reading, and my father kisses her on the cheek. “That was beautiful, honey.”

She smiles. “You’re lying through your teeth. Somebody just wants to sleep in the bed tonight.”

“Sleep? Naw,” he says, and leans down to kiss her again, this time on the lips.

My parents know love. Do I?

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Remember the WRiTE CLUB motto, it’s not about the last man/woman standing, it’s about who knocks the audience out!