When Franchises Collide

This is my entry for Bruce Bethke's Friday Challenge for 8/22/08.

For the moment, all was dark. Kelley Four could hear his reluctant volunteer work his way blindly up the concrete steps, across the creaking catwalk, and into the control room. A door closed. The former sandman was wrapped in a shroud of near-total sensory deprivation. Although it made no difference, he closed his eyes, as if to block out the darkness. He could have easily engaged the infrared enhancer on the side of head, but to do that would be to give in.

Kelley had no idea how many minutes passed before his mind began to play tricks, but the vision came in bright, vivid color. It was an echo from the past. His own voice recalled the scene from deep inside his head, as if he were writing a journal entry.

Logan Five and Jessica Six had brought us all out of the safety of the Domed City, into the god-forsaken vine-covered wilderness that had once been the capital of a vast--what was the word?-- country. Logan had never been the type to think things through. Most of us sandmen weren't.

Before, it had been the Lifeclocks that had limited the human lifespan to thirty years. Later, it would be starvation, hypothermia, and disease. That fool old man had been able to survive Outside only as a scavenger. There was no way thousands of young, computer-nurtured sheep-people were going to make it in such a place, at least not for long. The first Winter alone killed nearly three quarters of us.

Then the Borg came.

"The freakin' Borg!" Kelley Four shouted involuntarily. His voice echoed back to him five times from the darkness.

We had had barely begun to comprehend what the Earth was when we were visited from the night sky. One by one, as a gamer might take down his opponent in Chess, my brothers and sisters were eliminated by the black mechanical ghosts until scarcely two hundred remained.

The female called Seven of Nine had chosen--no, not chosen--been assigned to me by the hive. The Borg queen had special things in mind for me, she had said. We made love. It had seemed impossible that something so mechanical, something that could appear and disappear at will should feel so human. And that an act that felt so good could make me feel so traitorously inhuman. The cold steel of her body had burrowed into my flesh. We are many. No... no, I am one.

Because of his name, Gary Seven had lived among us for for months before we realized that he wasn't a Domer. One of the old man's cats had taken a liking to him; she seemed to follow him everywhere. When I first met Gary Seven, he asked a lot of questions about where we had come from and why there were so few of us. One time I overheard him talking to himself, or perhaps it was the cat. I didn't see anyone else near. I'll always remember what he said, although it made no sense to me.

"This time line must be broken, Isis." Kelley quoted the man aloud. "We can't allow this to happen."

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Kelley registered that the others had begun to file into the dark room. The grunting of humans combined with the whirring of servo-motors.

Gary Seven had demanded that Seven of Nine take him to the queen. The Borg tried to--we, no they, they called it assimilation. I don't know why, but I helped him escape. The queen declared my assimilation a failure and scheduled me for recycling. Gary Seven fled Old Washington. No one has heard from him since.

A low buzzing sound vibrated the floors and walls as the generators were brought online. When the light surged overhead, it was a blinding white blossom. Kelley Four squinted and looked around at the last of the human race. Along with himself, twelve white-clad human figures stood in a circle.

The speakers crackled from high overhead has as the buffers struggled to clear a year's worth of old sampled data.

"Las-Las-Last Day." a disembodied woman's voice stated coldly. "Year of the ci-ci-ci-city 2274."

"We are not assimilated!" Kelley shouted from behind his white mask, and his voice thundered back five times.

A murmur of agreement rose among the twelve half-Borg.

"Identify," said the voice. All raised their left hand, palms outward to show the crystal embedded there. The Borg had wired into them to help charge their implants. But the crystals were clear. The Lifeclocks no longer had power over them. The sacrifice was theirs.

Slowly, the carousel began to rotate as the buzzing sound increased in pitch. One by one, like pieces taken from a Chess board the last humans were lifted into the open space of the arena toward the light. For this ultimate Last Day, there was no crowd to cheer the spectacle, no family to anticipate their renewal.

A lightening bolt came from the ceiling and struck the first person to float too close to the domed ceiling. The white robed figure erupted into a shower of sparks and went limp.

A second half-Borg was hit in the head. His robes burst in blue flames as the circuitry underneath overloaded and ignited.

Then, it was Kelley's turn. There is no sanctuary.


Gary Seven, picked up his cat and stepped into the time portal, destination: Earth, 1968. There might be a way to stop what he had seen, to avert the Catastrophe that the Domers had told him about. If the plan he and Isis had drawn up worked, he could interrupt the missile launch that afternoon.

He felt a moment of vertigo as the energy of his thoughts rushed through time and space. He'd arrive on the U.S Air Force base with just enough time to slip unseen into the control room and then make it to the tower.

There was just one problem. When he materialized, he found himself standing in a strange room, staring back at a pointy-eared alien, a Scottish engineer, and a smug, over-acting starship captain.

A wizard, an elf, and a dwarf walk into a tavern. The elf says...

This is my entry for Bruce Bethke's Friday Challenge for 8/15/08 which this week, is a chance to participate in one of the challenges I missed . Share and enjoy.


A wizard, an elf, and a dwarf walk into a tavern. The elf says, "Good barkeep, my parched tongue would celebrate one of your fine ales. Furthermore, my coin purse stands open for my thirsty companions."

The round-faced barkeep frowned and humphed at such flowery prose, but grabbed three wooden tankards from a shelf and went to work filling them with a suspicious brown liquid.

"Sandy is the name," the elf extended a thin hand across the bar. "Pecan Sandy. And I thank thee for allowing us shelter from the tempest brewing outside. What might thee be called, my good man?"

The barkeep didn't look up from from his work. "Wilford," he mumbled through ample lips.

"Wilford! 'Tis a perfect name for a man of class such as thyself." He turned and gestured toward his two companions. "Allow me to introduce my noble party of adventurers. The clever looking wizard is called Guff. He hails from the village of Rove. And this short, but powerful fighter was named Skont by his parents, they--"

"Shut it, elf!" the barkeep put eyes on him for the first time. "Drink your ale and then get your friends out of my tavern. It's not safe."

"Not safe?" Sandy glanced around and was startled to notice a particularly ugly orc sitting in the dark corner to his left. She seemed to be in some sort of distress. The sound of sliding metal from behind said that Skont had also spotted her. He turned back to Wilford.

"Good sir, you allow monsters of this sort refuge in your establishment? T'is no secret that orcs are unclean!"

"I don't have no choice in the matter." Wilford growled. "Law says I had to let them in."

"Them?" Sandy drew his own short sword and stepped away from the bar. "Perhaps t'will take a brave band of adventurers to deal with the intrusion, since thou doth seem to lack the courage."

"Don't do it," Wilford warned.

Heedless of the danger, Sandy, Guff, and Skont swaggered to the far end of the bar, ready, nay, anticipating confrontation. The dwarf growled deeply and stepped to the front of the party. The wizard intoned words to himself which caused a fireball to wink into existence. It hovered over his wiry hand, awaiting his command.

"Far be it for me to harm a female," Skont said, sword raised high, "But you have no place in this tavern, foul beast."

Suddenly, the orc let out a terrible scream and collapsed onto the bar. That, and the sound of liquid splashing onto the floor caused the party to take an involuntary step backward. The fireball vanished along with the wizard's courage. The three adventurers glanced at one another nervously.

A moment later, the head of a lizard man appeared from underneath the bar. He stood, dripping in a thick orangish ooze, and let out a deafening screech. Then he threw back his head and laughed triumphantly.

"It is done!" he shouted in a gleeful, but shrill tone. "The old wizard said that an orc and a lizard man could never produce an offspring. We have proved him wrong! Behold my daughter!" The lizard man lifted a small, naked orange creature over his head. The offspring had its mother's figure and its father's teeth.

"I shall teach her the ways of sword. And one day, 'though it take a thousand years, she shall rule the quasi-free world! And I shall call her...(wait for it)... HILLARY!"

With the first known utterance of the name, lightning flashed outside, setting afire the thatch roof of the tavern. The patrons screamed and scattered as a deafening thunder shook the structure to its foundation. The barkeep tried in vain to extinguish the flames with the tankards of brown ale. By the time the rains came, it was too late.

The elf, the wizard, and the dwarf stood shocked in the drenching downpour as they stared at the ruin of the tavern. The elf says, "I got a bad feeling about this."