Hugh J. O'Donnell

The Grand Duchess pranced into the lab on four spring-heeled feet. “How goes the reclamation process, Doctor?”
The smaller machine didn’t move from his station, but his free-floating camera eye swiveled to focus on her.
“Passing well, Your Grace.” He gestured to the weed in the analysis chamber. “We are nearly ready to reintroduce plant life to the surface.”
“It doesn’t look like much,” she said.
The scientist thought of their earliest ancestors, boxes on spindly legs and crude, blocky bipeds. Humble beginnings. He was not a religious bot, but sometimes he felt like the long-lost Progenitors.
“No, it doesn’t.”

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The swordsman stood on the hill and bellowed out a challenge. No coward, I rode out to face him. The wizard grabbed my arm as I dismounted.
“Be careful lad. He wields the Sword of Truth.”
“What’s it do?”
“I don’t know, but it’s said that he cannot be defeated.”
“Well, I can take him.” But as our blades met, I heard a voice whisper in my ear.
“Last week when the tavern maid said ‘Enjoy your mead,’ you replied, ‘You too.’”
I cringed in embarrassment, and at that moment, he thrust under my weakened guard, delivering a mortal blow.

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He’d worked as a doorman at the old hotel for as long as anyone could remember. He would always have a smile and a story. He treated everyone who crossed his path the same as the guests in the fancy hotel. He was a fixture of the neighborhood.
When the hotel closed down, it was boarded up. The doorman disappeared and the neighborhood buzzed with rumors of his fate.
Until one day he returned, and sat in the shade under the awning, resting his back against the boarded-up door. The whole neighborhood came out to greet him and share stories.

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They planted the seeds in the center of the blast sites. The plants were genetically modified, created to thrive on the poisoned air and irradiated soil that the war had left behind.
As the trees grew to impossible heights, they rebuilt the city around them in concentric rings, a dome of fresh air and clean earth that expanded year after year. They built pumps and pipes that sent clean water from under their roots to the rest of the city.
But the city never shared the secrets of the rejuvenation with their neighbors. That decision led to the next war.

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I’ve got an hour of air left when I find the movie theater. The disaster tore the roof right off. I can see the Earth hanging above me through the support beams.
It takes about a day for a rocket to reach Armstrong Colony. Far too late to do anything once they started paying attention. Instead of rescuers, they sent an apology.
Miraculously, the building still has power. With no one left to turn it off, the projector keeps to its schedule, playing for an empty house.
I turn off my suit’s biosensors and settle in for the last reel.

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The last thing he remembered, he was dying in a hospital bed. But he woke up floating in a tube of strange green liquid suspended from the ceiling of a cavernous room.
“Oh, you’re awake!” A voice said. He could just make out a masked figure below him. “You’re in a laboratory at Enceladus Station University. The year is 2247, by the way.”
“Was I frozen?” He asked. “Did you find a cure?”
“Er, not exactly. You’re a demonstration for first-year medical students.”
“Oh.”
“But if it makes you feel better, medically speaking, you’re already dead.”
It didn’t, in fact.

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The entomologist spent his career studying insect communication. He searched for the secrets hidden in ant pheromones and bee dances. They weren’t hive minds, but cooperatives.
Finally, after years of work, he hit upon something hidden in bee dances. It was a memetic code that he could replicate. In the lab, the bees became more cooperative and friendly. He decided to test it on humans.
He made a viral video and encoded the meme. After the first million hits, without a single negative comment, he’d thought he’d found something to truly better mankind.
That was when the advertising agencies started calling.

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The water was calm, with puffs of mist that clung to the surface like silk.
The shore was pleasantly warm and damp, a green hillside that ended in a wall of fog.
She turned and looked at the bank, biting her lip in thought.
“How about this one?” the ferryman asked, but he’d learned to read her looks, and knew what she would say.
“I’m sorry, but this isn’t my afterlife.” He paddled back into the vast river. They had visited hundreds of spots, but he would carry her as long as it took for her to find her home.

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If there was one thing he hated, it was the fake psychics that wrote supposed ‘books of prophecy,’ creating entire generations of mystic scammers in their wake.
He built a time machine to go back and confront these charlatans before they could spread their poison. But when he got to the past, he found the supposed prophetess waiting for him with tea and biscuits.
She showed him a book, detailing their whole encounter, written a century earlier. He fled back to the future, terrified.
She sipped her tea, satisfied that he hadn’t discovered the time machine hidden in her barn.

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