Wheelchair Wars Part 2 (2)

It had never crossed Timothy’s mind that one day he would be transcending the warp on the way to a different world. It was not something that he had particularly wanted. He had grown up to horrid tales of ships being lost to the forces of chaos as it was traversed. But it was the will of the Emperor.

He was to lead a battalion in the defence of Oros. Having never heard of the world previously, he was unsure of what to expect. He had heard about the enemy though, an evil alien species that wipes life from the face of the planet. It would begin with an orbital bombardment, followed by an invasion from the skies. We are to defend it till the last. To die for a world I had never known. It seems preposterous, yet it is his will.

At least I know my father and Audrey will be fine. They have been tasked with rebuilding the Omega. Uisneach is not under any threat from the latest alien incursion but Omega is to play a key role as a bulwark against Chaos. To seek and kill any who spread heresy to the people.

My robot Ceres now looks after my care needs. It is in the form of a standard human. White limbs with a black torso and eyes. It does as its requested, elegantly and quickly but I long for the touch of a human.

Pegasus (Part 8)

My heart missed a beat. What the fuck?

Sinead’s freckled face had turned pale as for a brief moment she stared into my eyes.

“Tar anseo Ciarán. Cad a cheapann tú faoi seo?” Darren implored. His face had turned red and sweaty.

Oh yeah, now Darren wants me. He knows that I’m the best, even if he does think I’m a slacker. I quickly go over to his console to see what he is looking at. Darren is a balding, overweight man. I think it was his conformity to the system that attracted Sinead. Back to the day job.

I can barely believe my eyes.

“Brace le haghaidh tionchair,” I roar out.

A small ship is about to collide with the habitat in close proximity to where we are. Given the immense speeds involved, this could tear apart this section of the space habitat.

A second later, the ground beneath them rumbles. I wonder if this is my end. But a few seconds later, I am still alive. All the electronics have gone dead except for the now flickering lights.

I retained the crash coordinates in my mind and start to make my way back to my taxi.

Sinead roared out, “Cá bhfuil tú ag dul?”

But I continued on regardless. Finally, there was a break from the monotony. I only hoped for more of the same.

Wheelchair Wars (Sci-fi) Part B. 1

The Empire of Humans had long prospered throughout the galaxy. Millions of worlds were colonized and then grew and prospered. All under the watchful eye of the Emperor. Any alien system that resisted was crushed. Its occupants vanquished or enslaved.

But then the forces of chaos grew and the armies of the orcs attacked. Now, there was constant war. Many worlds were lost to the Empire. Into this maelstrom came the most awful of foes from intra galactic space. It took them thousands of years to reach Humanity and they came in waves, which had been repulsed. Then, there had been no contact for a hundred years.

At first, the Emperor merely sensed that among the trillions of humans, a few were missing. It was of little concern. But then the reports finally reached the capital planet. Whole worlds that were one thriving human settlements containing millions of souls had been stripped of all life. They had returned.

His best armies were positioned to stop incursions from Chaos. It was time to raise new armies from worlds that he had been let concentration on their own development till now. Uisneach was to be one of those worlds.

Pegasus (Part 7)

The tunnel is long, narrow and damp but well lit. I walk in the direction of my work station, a distance of over two hundred meters. Each step echoes ahead of me as I breathe in the stale, stinking air. It is a journey I have done repeatable for years. Then the tunnel opens up into a large office space with large monitors showing the diagnostics for this section of the ship.

“Conas atá tú Ciarán?”

“Tá mé go maith inniu agus tú a Shinead?”

“Táim ceart go leor.”

I exchange pleasantries with Sinead. We’ve been together for years. I had hoped for romance at one stage. Countless nights spent thinking about caressing her long, auburn hair and looking into those deep blue eyes. It was not to be. Darren, the third member of our work station got their first. He is already deep in thought staring into one of the screen. They have four children now. I try to be happy for them.

Darren looks at me and nods his head dismissively. He can sense when I’ve had one too many the night before.

I go a make myself a quick coffee.

Just as I’m about to take my first sip, all the lights turn red and a warning sound rings out.

This hasn’t happened before!

Pegasus (Sci-fi) Part 6

After a few seconds, there was the familiar buzzing sound of the rotating blades. It quickly reached my location and landed in front of me. It was a one seater.

I sat down inside as I had countless times before. The forty minutes I spend in this taxi is my favorite part of the day. As it flies just over the trees, I get a panoramic view of the changing landscape below. First come the farmsteads, followed by the wilderness of vast forest and sporadic settlements that could be best described as small quaint villages. There was still plenty of space to grow the population, which was just as well as each woman on the habitat tended to have at least six or seven children, all of which virtually survived to adulthood.

They live a simple life with religion and land front of centre, dressing modestly and praying often. It is thought that their customs from a group called the Amish that once lived on Earth. Although a spiritual person, my own lack of adherence to church rules has scuttled any chance of a relationship I may have had. I try not to worry as I edge towards thirty. Only, another few hundred years of loneliness to get through. Nobody to cuddle up to at night or discuss my more private thoughts with.

The taxi lands and my journey is at an end. The hatch to my underground work station is only a few metres away. I open the hatch and climb down the ladder to the tunnel underneath.

Pegasus (Sci-fi) Part 5

I toss and turn in my bed before the alarm goes off. It’s time to go but motivation is hard to come by. I was late leaving the inn last night and those last few whiskeys have left me in a bad way. My stomach is churning and the head feels like it’s about to explode.

Just a few seconds later, from total darkness a sheer brightness shines through his bedroom window from the billions of lights suddenly switching on outside. Such is life on a space habitat. Time to go whether I like it or not. It’s at times like this he would ponder what it would be like to live on Earth. For the lighting to increase more gradually, to breathe natural air and not be certain about the environment he would face. Slowly, he put on his worn clothes.

Another day of drudgery lies ahead but needs must. A small amount of porridge my only comfort. Walking out of my hut I pause briefly to survey my surroundings. Green fields for pasture, sprinkled with occassional huts and tree lines. Then I look up an see the town of “Bealach an Tirialaigh Nua” in the distance. It is still only a speck albeit a growing one. This is the space habitat of “Nua na hIarmhí.” It is an agrarian settlement of three million souls with a surface area approximating that of France. The only gravity is of the rotational variety.

I walk down my overgrown laneway to get collected for work, one of the few people who is not tied to manual labour. My job is that of an architecture systems analysis, occupying a grey area between manual area and those tasks left to Artificial Intelligence. The air taxi should appear over the distance any second now.

Pegasus (Sci-fi) Part IV

My greatest opponent at this time is an old foe – Hestor Williams. An ambitious Australian of immense intellect, he inherited a mining fortune on the death of his father. I first heard of him in the middle of the 22nd century when my space habitat business was top of the pile. The business largely revolved around finance, the actual work was carried out by robots with advanced AI. I never noticed that I was losing market share because the market was growing phenomenally at that time. Those were crazy days. We were chugging out new space habitats at a rapid pace.

It was the time of the great human migration to space. Well, for those that can afford it anyway. The effects of Global warming were by now rendering large sections of the Earth uninhabitable. People needed to believe that there was still a place of opportunity where they could dream of a better future. The poor had no opportunity to make such a journey. Not that I cared. I did think of running some sort of lottery but decided that I didn’t need any good publicity.

I still remember the day. I had grown too complacent and hadn’t bothered even checking how the competition was doing. That’s what months of sex and drugs will do to you. Guess what a shock I got when the AI said.

Tá do sciar den mhargadh síos go dtí seasca faoin gcéad.

Yeah, like what the fuck?

For those that don’t know the Irish language, it’s stating my market share was down to sixty percent. I made it the language of my business empire. It really stuped some spies that tried to break into my systems. And to think that people thought it was going to die. Now it’s practically the language of near-Earth orbit. Do you think my fellow Irishmen and women would be happy? No chance. They insist that the original dialects are still dying out. Oh, cry me a river.

Anyways, Hestor William turned into a right pain in the arse. Currently, he’s investing in military hardware for his space habitats. It will cut profits if I do likewise. And if there is anything I truly care about, it’s profits.

Summer Update

Hello dear readers. I just thought I’d give everyone a quick update on my writing and what my plan for this blog is going forward.

I plan on making “The Irish Ripper” available in full like my other novels. This should happen within the next week. I consider it my greatest work but others may disagree. My aim was to explore the thoughts of evil people and what drove them. You should give it a read if you haven’t already done so.

My plan is to start advertising this blog sometime this year and I’m hoping that by making these works available for free, it will boost the number of return visitors. Last years, I got about 1,600 page visits. If I was getting that number monthly, perhaps I could turn a profit. Obviously, a very long road to go.

I’m hoping to increase my number of posts this August as I am taking a few days of annual leave giving me much more time to write. Really looking forward to working more on my latest sci-fi Pegasus. Things are going to get really weird, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

There are other projects I need to get back to like Wheelchair Wars and I will!

Also thinking of turning my romance short stories after some editing into a book. I think there is a space in the marketplace as disability romance stories are little written about. Been a few years now since I published anything and that needs to change.

Thanks everybody for all the support! The kind words I receive keep me motivated to keep going.

Pegasus (Sci-fi) Part 3

There were many valiant space entrepreneurs from that time period but a certain name always quickly flashes into my mind, that of Elon Musk. A strange, complex soul but foremost a visionary. He saw what humanity needed to do to survive and would drag it along with him if he must.

He did everything that he said he would transforming the exploration of space and creating the first Martian colony. Over one million souls live there now. Musk, himself only lived to be ninety five before a freak accident on the moon. I actually cried that day, not because of any love for the man but because of his loss to humanity.

He wasn’t perfect, of course, and wasted billions on a pointless effort save a mediocre social media company once called Twitter. A truly bizarre vanity project. That all feels like ancient history to me now.

Artificial intelligence was the last major change that I foresaw in those years and was able to take advantage of. Millions, maybe even billions of humans lost their jobs and with it, their sense of being. But it also opened up a Universe of possibilities. Great men like Isaac Arthur could see the future. He even made youtube videos that told people what was about to happen. Millions listened, but thankfully few could join up the dots that had been laid out before them.

The idiots, I knew what had to be done. But each step took time, something that I had alot of.

Pegasus (Sci-fi) Part 2

I still remember the first I heard about climate change or “global warming” as it was originally called. It was on a science program on Channel 4 that I watched with my father on what was called a television at the time. Quaint times in a long lost world. We never realized how fortunate those times were. I was only young then, maybe in my teenage years. It frightened me but my father was blasé, just like the rest of humanity saying that we’d be long gone before it mattered. He never envisioned the drug lifesplania that became widely available in the 2030s and cured the disease of aging forever.

But the warnings grew, though it took time for the required fear for change to do likewise. Humanity tried to change course but it occurred too slowly. For me, 2023 and a scorching European summer was the turning point in my consciousness. A ground temperature of sixty degrees Celsius was recorded in Spain. I knew then that things were not going to be okay.

Two decades later ice disappeared from the Arctic during the summer months. Shortly afterwards a final terrible drought finished off the Amazon. But global warming was still only getting started and continued on long after the carbon emissions had finally stopped.

The idiots.

It was also around the 2020s that the burgeoning space industry began its lift off. I could see that the future was no longer on terra forma but out amongst the stars. And I was determined to profit from it.