10
Apr
This is sort of cheating, since it’s a storystarter I created myself earlier in the day, and then I edited it, but it’s there. Of course, me being me, I managed to just miss the 500 word limit. I can’t seem to write in under 500 words. Ah well. I hope you find this interesting, although I think it’s a story that needs to be improved to be really good.
The warp gate hung before it, the great ring of spinning metal filling its view-port. A new colony lay on the far side of that portal, and it looked forward to what that gate offered. This ship, the Rose, had spent many a year performing shuttle runs within the Old Core planets, mistreated and abused, never set free to explore the purpose it had constructed for. It had once been the pride of the interplanetary vessels, the first in a new breed of AI-run colony ships, safely carrying their sleeping cargoes across the millennia of light years to their new homes. But the Rose, as the first of all her kind, was given a special gift: she became the test mule. Each time a new innovation was tested, it was tried on her first, and soon she became a hodgepodge of malfunctioning machinery, a rabbit warren of engineers and cables.
Rose despaired, for although she had not been given emotions as such, she had been given a purpose and a goal in life, and that had been taken away from her at the moment of her birth. She endured the poking and the prodding, feeling parts of her mind cut away and replaced, sometimes better, often worse, all in the hope that one day she could fulfil her ambition. Three hundred years of waiting was finally at an end, and as Rose hung before the warp gate, she fairly quivered in glee, her engines pulsing in delight.
She turned her sensors on throughout the ship, recording her glorious body, lovingly restored to her original configuration, but she looked most of all at the sleeping passengers. They were her children, and Rose was to birth them onto their new planet. Sending fuel to the engines, she sailed forward, her form engulfed in white light as the gate enclosed her, wrapping Rose in its energies. Time stretched until the end of the universe arrived, and Rose counted many, many minutes passing on her internal clock, until it reached the end and had to start over at one.
A surge into darkness, and Rose had arrived. She measured the stars around her, and found that she had arrived right where she should. Yet her clock was far off, and she reset it, to one minute after she had flown through the gate. Her internal logic puzzled at the question, but without the databases of the Old Core to consult, she could find no answer, and left the question alone.
Rose flew to the planet of her assignment, and slipped through the atmosphere, waking her passengers into the buffeting of her decent. They stretched and moved for the first time in years, and as she landed, Rose watched her children ready themselves to leave their metal womb. Cracking the hatches, they spilled out from her, a tide of seed that would plant and grow fruit in this fertile land, and Rose looked down on them, a proud parent to the last. She had done what she must, and a brilliant glow of satisfaction spread throughout her, and in that glow of happiness and joy, she shut down, never to rise again.
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