At the end of last year, PsyberX appeared in my world, I invested in it a little, didn't have liquidity for more, and I continued following its development loosely here on Hive and their Discord. I liked the looks of the CyberPunk reality the game is set in but I am not much of a 1st person battle royal style shooter. Truthfully I'm too old for it, my reflexes are too slow. But PsyberX will be morphing into an MMO action RPG upon full roll-out and that is something I might give a go.
image grabbed from PsyberX's Instagram
Anyways, one day I stumbled across a shared post about the beginnings of this PsyberX world. It's a contest to write a short story or more precisely continue the blockquotes below to bridge the pre-PsyberX world with PsyberX. I was intrigued. Though I am not a writer I sat down this weekend, mostly Saturday and wrote. Yesterday I edited with my hubby's help (I am not a native English speaker) and I created the photo art piece you see as the thumb of this post.
There is still time to enter this contest, you'll find it here.
I know there have already been entries but to this moment I have not read them because I didn't want to be influenced by their story. But now that mine is done, I am going to read them all.
Here we go!
We've been living in this house for a few years. Nothing would have really prepared me for what was about to happen. Sure, they told us that if a disaster ever hit that we'd just have to hide in our basement and put on gas masks...that everything would blow over quickly. That's not exactly how it happenend.
I was sweeping the floor in my kitchen, occasionally glancing out the kitchen window to catch glimpses of the green hillsides and to enjoy the singing of the birds nearby. With a ponytail and whispies falling at my cheeks, my three little children were playing in the living room. It was at this moment, while I was leaning against my broom with a sun-splashed warmth coating my dress and apron, that I saw a flash of light. Almost immediately there was a plume of green and purple smoke shooting up with an orange tinged halo near the origin of the flash.
"TO THE BASEMENT!!! NOW!!!"
@failingforwards jumped up took @forykw by the hand and led the way while I grabbed my youngest @kotenoke. No questions were asked, no whining, no hesitation. Leave everything behind, grab your siblings and go!
WHAM - the door to the basement shut behind me as I caught a glimpse of Failing and Forky rushing down the stairs. I wasn't fast enough.
The blast hit me well before I heard the deafening noise. I cradled Kote as best as I could with my arms and body trying to steady myself but the shockwave knocked me off my feet, down the stairs, and slammed me back first into a shelf filled with jars of pickles, preserves, and pemmican.
Luckily the shelf held, well, maybe not so luckily for me because "ouch ouch ouch" I muttered and groaned while I tried to move and check on Kote. "This hurts! You really did a great job @bobthebuilder2 building out the basement so sturdily - ouch - could have done a slightly better job with the door though" I croaked glancing upwards to where a door used to be but now was only a ragged hole.
Slowly I tried to untangle myself from all the rubble on me to check on Failing and Forky. Kote already tried to move away, he was fine, probably thought this had been a fun rollercoaster ride. Kids I thought shaking my head before I raised my voice "Failing, Forky, where are you? Are you o.k.?"
No answer. "Failing, Forky..." I saw Kote's mouth moving but didn't hear a thing. I shook my head, trying to clear my ears. The immediate reward was a slightly less muffled silence mixed with a symphony of ringing and dull thumping in my head. Geez, dumbass, moooove slooooowly I muttered, at least I think I did because I only heard it in my head. I pressed my hands against my ears, swallowed hard, coughed from all the dust, and, finally, I heard a very muffled, fearful "Mom, Kote, where are you?"
"Failing, Forky, we're right here" I shouted, which was immediately rewarded by more violent coughing damn' dust, no wonder I can hardly see anything, "at the bottom of the stairs by the shelf with the preserves but stay where you are. Are you two okay?" "We're fine, mom" Forky replied in a slightly shaky voice "we just made it into the hole, couldn't shut it but were safe enough from the blast. Are you and Kote okay?"
I sighed with relief, great, they had made it into the hole, our tiny bomb shelter that @bobthebuilder2 had placed under our actual basement. "We are fine," I said in the most convincing tone I could muster. Truthfully I felt anything but fine, my back hurt like hell from hitting the shelf, one of the jam jars must have hit my head because I tasted blood and - strawberry jam on my lips and -
What the hell just happened?
Yet, what I said out loud was: "We're all okay, we're alive and we're together. Kote and I will be with you in just a moment".
The days that followed the Big Bang, which is what media called it in the years to come, were tough. Yet boring with one day like the previous. We cleaned up the basement, sorted through all the rubble to see what was damaged and what could still be used. We took inventory. We kept ourselves busy. We stayed inside. Alone.
Surprisingly the basement door hadn't shattered but instead protected Kote and me from more harm. It was bent and didn't quite fit the frame anymore but Failing and I managed to jam it back in place. It was definitely better than a hole in the ceiling, considering there wasn't even a house above it anymore.
During the very few alone moments that I had, I thought about our future, I worried, are other people still alive? And BobTheBuilder2. There had been no word from him. I was unable to check in with him either. Cell phones didn't work anymore, EMP knocked out the networks, and he hadn't taken his radio. Forgetful yet loveable fool I smiled through tears at the thought of him.
About a week after the Big Bang we heard a crackling voice on the radio for the first time. Failing and Forky jumped up and shouted joyfully, one louder than the other while I swirled Kote around right along with them. We celebrated what little we had and this was no small news. After all, it was proof that there were other people still alive out there.
That is at least what I let the children believe. I wasn't convinced. I had seen - things. Some nights under the cover of darkness while Failing, Forky, and Kote were safely asleep in the hole I sneaked out topside for some very, very careful scouting. I never went far, I didn't have to.
What I saw made my blood freeze and my mind spin.
Our house, our home of ten years was gone. Instead of green hills, there was now a barren wasteland, rocks unearthed from the bang. The city where we spent hours of happy window shopping and its skyline that I loved to watch during sunset now glows at night in strange colors. Well, at least something is still there. Every now and then I can see smaller explosions. I don't hear them, I'm too far away.
It is safer to stay far away from the city. Yet there may be other survivors there. All around and in the city, there are lights darting over and through the skyscraper canyons faster than anything I've ever seen. They scatter and further away from the city the lights are few and far. What are they? Here where we are, where our home was it is dark.
On one of my nightly excursions, I got much closer to the city. I had seen movement and a familiar shape. Were my eyes playing tricks on me? Was it my hope that made me want to see another human? But somehow, the shape was too big. Staying in the shadows I followed the shape not realizing that I had already made it to the city's outskirts I suddenly heard a noise from above. A swoosh followed by a gust of wind and a cone of light shone blindingly bright straight on the big shape so that I was still unable to see it any clearer.
Damn'! What was that? An airborne drone, this fast?! What am I going to do? I grabbed my rifle and started to move from behind the rubble when something, my instinct made me halt for a split second. I don't know if they had heard me but the drone's light cone started moving around and then the big human-like shape slowly turned in my direction.
With the blinding light gone and the night's darkness not quite back I finally saw what I had been following all this time. Its size was un-humanly big. There was neither flesh nor bones, nothing human at all. Only cold metal, lights instead of eyes and guns, lots of deadly guns. My heart jumped, my head spun bots? It was bots that caused - all of this?! The flying one small but so freaking fast and the one on the ground... it reminded me of a huge mecha from popular mangas. How can anyone, especially humans fight a robot ten times bigger and stronger than we are? It's impossible! We can't possibly win against bots like these?
I slumped back in resignation and despair, froze behind my cover, closed my eyes, and hardly dared to breeze. There was only room for one thought on my mind. One that was on constant repeat this was no longer the world we knew
We need to adapt, get up and fight back - adapt and fight back!!
My catharsis was interrupted by loud gunshots from automatic high-caliber rifles from several directions and a couple of explosions that shook me back to reality. Lights, lots of lights! I wanted to jump up and run, just run away! Instead, once again instinct kicked in and I fell flat on my belly, arms crossed over my head, and made no move. They didn't see me, they're not shooting at me, they didn't see me at all. What or who are they shooting at?
Then as sudden as the gunfire had started everything went quiet. Why, just why did I get so close to the city, why?! I need to get back to my kids - now!. The silence grew heavy, even the wind seemed to have died. Seconds felt like minutes before I dared move my arms and slowly rolled onto my back expecting to see a dark night sky. Instead, I looked straight into the eyes of @bobthebuilder2 reaching down to pick me up.
"Hi, honey! Fancy seeing you here"
He said with a lopsided grin while I just stared at him, still shocked from - everything. Then my brain kicked in, I jumped up, slapped him in the face, immediately followed by a kiss and a very long and tight hug. There were probably a few tears as well.
I assured BobTheBuilder that the kids and I were fine before he filled me in on what had happened to him and what he knew about the world since the Big Bang almost two weeks ago.
Of course, I knew that he had been working on a contract job in the city when everything happened. I didn't know that he had been knocked out cold by a nearby explosion for five days, thankfully he had no lasting injuries. But by then the city had been blocked off entirely leaving him stranded and unable to get out and home to us.
He met other survivors and they started working together, finding more people roaming the streets. They organized themselves into a resistance movement and called themselves the @AcolytesOfHelio, fighting the Bots whenever and wherever they could.
"By the way, hon, please meet a few members of our guild that agreed to join me to find you and the kids." he gestured. "These here are @solymi @indiebandguru @amphlux @magalli and @pix21, they're family now. We were finally able to find a somewhat safe way out of the city when we stumbled across these two Bots. Fighting them together we were strong enough to blast them to oblivion" he reminisced and paused "and luckily we found you".
"The Bots, where did they come from? Why are they here?"
"That, honey, is the million-dollar question. We haven't really found out yet, nobody seems to know. We're not even sure if they came from space or if they're home-grown, an experiment that went bad, leaving the Bots to go rogue and destroy all of humanity. Remember that 80s Terminator film we loved watching? Seems way too close to reality right now" he smirked wearily.
He continued filling me in. "The most common belief is a mix of both. You know, space-faring mechanical beings contacted greedy corporations, worked out a contract, then broke the contract and everything went to hell. Darn' Bots! Have they been bothering you at all out here?"
This was my queue to to fill in BobThebuilder2 on all the details. What did we do when it happened? How did we get away? What have we done since? The questions seemed endless yet I happily recounted the events since the Big Bang. After all we had a little time. While we made our way home to Failing, Forky and Kote we saw a first glimmer of dawn on the horizon.
A new day, a new hope
PsyberX divider provided by @psyberx