I would write fiction all the time when I was younger. These days, a lack of anger management has led my keyboard down a path of verbally bludgeoning others with logic. I guess in a way, non-fiction is easier: you just need to be fluent and factually-correct, but I still like the idea of writing fiction… even if my vocabulary fails to keep up with my imagination.
Let me know what you think. I might write a second part if someone actually likes this.
“It’s flowering!”
“Shit, seriously?” said Graff, as he sprung out of this seat and walked across the lab. It was a labyrinth of desks and mainframes, lines of numbers scrolling by, a thousand tiny lights blinking like multi-coloured stars in the otherwise pitch black.
“No visual yet… UAV is ten clicks out… ” said a technician, craning his head over one of the screens before retreating back into the darkness.
“Sod it, I’m doing the old fashioned way” said Graff, pulling a rifle from the wall rack. He took the sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. Instinct led his hand to the door, which opened easily into a small compartment, with another, heavier door ahead. Graff stepped though and closed the door behind him, completing the perfect darkness. He paused, letting his frantic mind still for one moment, before moving his hand to the door.
White. That’s all there was, white. Even with the sunglasses, it was a searing, blinding light. As the light faded, a pale sky formed the only contrast to the formless mass of snow that covered the ice. Graff looked back at the lab, a monolythic iron block. It looked so foreign here. Ahead, the shallow pan of the crator rolled away, down towards the excavation site. At the bottom, the site itself, a rift torn into the earth like a deep scar.
As his eyes adjusted further, Graff saw the roots. They ran like veins, just visible under the surface of the snow, spiralling out from the pit and around the crator. These, he knew, were just the tip of… no, after two years in the arctic, no iceburg metaphors. Walking towards the pit, Graff spotted a single sharp leaf, rising out of the chasm. It wasn’t rising slowly either – a green sword thrust into the air, growing thicker as it rose, with no end in sight. Whatever this thing was, it moved pretty damn fast for a plant.
Graff started running.