Flash Fiction - digg this
Here's a piece of flash I wrote for the contest. Let me know what you think!
“All systems look green down here.” The voice came from above her head.
Static crackled briefly as Jan activated her throat mike. “Thanks control, awaiting countdown to initialize main drive.” She looked out a small porthole, dark brown eyes taking in the broad expanse of stars. Her long fingers danced over the complicated series of controls. Two hundred years ago her simian ancestors had been used in much the same way she was, but the new technology required a bit more than a chimpanzee’s intelligence. As expensive as she had been to gengineer, sending her was better in her masters’ minds than sending up a human and in most ways also better than using an AI.
She listened attentively to the numbers as they approached zero. No one was really certain what to expect. Sure the men downstairs had done their experiments, but ripping a hole in space/time was still a new thing. Her ship, it didn’t have a name though she thought of it as Quentin after her trainer, a silvery needle, hung in space. Green crosshairs indicated the nothingness she was aiming for. At minus five the nothing became a scintillation. By zero it was more visible and she brought the Schrödinger engine online. Beams shot out of it and focused on the damaged bit of reality. At the same time Quentin moved towards it.
At plus five seconds she went through.
Jan stood in the middle of a green expanse, a bruised purple sky above. She wore no clothes, but without the capacity for shame that didn’t bother her. Her focus was on the creature wielding a lance of plasma that hovered nearby. Any fear she had was banished by its words, an echo in her brain.
At plus six Quentin re-entered the blackness of space, empty.
Total Number of Comments: 1
Great work. Kinda stops short, but it builds the necessary suspense considering the limitations on length you have to work with.