「Life is short, even if you live forever」

(Image: tibra.)

My recent adsactly steemshort proposal. For the record. (It's also in the sea of comments here.) Wrote this outline in about ten minutes, once I saw the contest.

「199 WORDS」

 

Life is short, even if you live forever.

Fifty years is a long time to wait for the things you ordered. Everybody's eagerly awaiting the arrival of the next transport platform, coming from earth. They don't anticipate it crashing into the ocean. Problematic when it's a habitat as large and massive as one of the seven moons.

Rain. I look down. Dimples reflected in a shallow puddle. We hold each other.

We're safe. Others aren't.

Behind us, behind mist, ruins of a dead city. Flooded.

In the distance, the sound of waves crashing against the far shore.

Were it that the waves were merely their sound!

With the city destroyed, the narrator and five other individuals venture towards danger, not away. They'll not age. But their life absent technology will be a hard one. They must recover, somehow, what they can, from the crashed platform, whose lowest levels rest on the soft ocean floor. Problem? It's slowly sinking.

Another problem. The colonial administrator is with them. She wanted to extort from the shipping guild and first gave wrong coordinates to the platform. Now she has something to hide from the other survivors.

Things that once took hours take years.

Expanding on a fifty word story I wrote a day ago.

 

ABOUT ME

I'm a scientist who writes fantasy and science fiction under various names.

The magazines which I most recommend are: Compelling Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Writers of the Future.

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©2017 tibra.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This is a work of fiction. Events, names, places, characters are either imagined or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real events or persons or places is coincidental.