Hugh J. O'Donnell

His office was a gray cube in a gray building in a gray city on a gray planet. Every day, for twelve hours, he processed data and crunched numbers. He was just a cog in the Imperial Machine.
But he could see the data for what it was: Troop movements, supply allocations, and resource management. It all came down to money.
And it was easy to transpose a column here or misspell a shipping manifest there. He made a thousand little cuts.
He was never going to be a hero. But with each small gesture, he fought his own rebellion.

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The enemy’s doomsday weapons were inbound, and there was nothing more that he could do to stop them. The knight had failed the kingdom. But he could still save the princess.
He scooped her up from her hospital bed and carried her to the palace’s hot spring. As the bombs fell, he plunged them both into the boiling water.
A blue-white flash seared the sky, and then everything went eerily calm. She kicked against him, and he brought them back to the surface, coughing.
“Where?” The princess spluttered, then stopped. She looked around in horror at her kingdom, frozen solid.

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The alien robots hid themselves on Earth for decades, disguised as terrestrial machines and vehicles. They fought an endless shadow war over whether they would conquer or protect the developing planet.
Their leader of the protectors was a veteran of the conflict. The olive-green paint on his boxy chassis was a sign of experience. When he was captured, the rest of the team raced to the rescue.
But it wasn’t an enemy, but a human teenager who carjacked him while he was sleeping. They demanded to know how the boy had done it.
“Saw a video on TikTok,” he replied.

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Every year the town burned a scarecrow, and she hated the tradition. A local artist constructed one each spring, and it stood for months near the town’s welcome sign, only to be cruelly burned at the end of the year.
But when she was selected to build that year’s scarecrow, she couldn’t say ‘no.’ She tried to explain why the tradition horrified her but couldn’t find the words.
Instead, she filled her scarecrow with cunningly hidden wildflower seeds. Her creation burst with life all through the spring and summer. When autumn came, they didn’t have the heart to burn her.

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From a young age, he knew there was another hidden world. He could see it reflected in puddles and from behind mirrors.
Adults told him to stop being silly and explained that he only saw his reflection.
But he knew that they were wrong. What he saw didn’t quite match up to what they did. He stopped telling people and practiced keeping perfectly still so that his reflection stayed synced. Eventually, he grew up and forgot about the other world he had seen.
It slipped away from him. Until one day, he reached out, and his reflection pulled him across.

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The mad scientist installed his latest device atop the pyramid, as it was the highest point in the desert. Despite some local resistance, everything was going according to plan.
There had been the usual luddites afraid of progress. Others hounded him about such trivialities as ‘desecrating a priceless historical site.’ Then some superstitious fools begged him ‘not to unleash a curse upon the city.’ He cared little. Didn’t they know he was a Man of Science?
As he connected the final wires, he suddenly smelled a fetid, dusty odor and felt a tap on his shoulder.
He hadn’t expected mummies.

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It was a monument to the Human Spirit, and the tip of its tower was the highest point in the city. Tourists visited from around the world to stand on its platform and take in the impressive view.
But the years passed, and before long, the monument rested in the shadows of buildings its builders could scarcely have dreamed of. The visitors abandoned it.
But the city still remembered and maintained the site and the grounds around it as a park. It had ceased to be a vision of the future and became a treasured memory of a glorious past.

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I turned on the TV to see the aftermath of another battle. It was out in Yokohama, far from here, and the damage didn’t look too bad, although the JSDF lost another suit.
They were burning through their budget this season, I thought, as I chopped vegetables and added them to the simmering hotpot.a
Life had finally returned to normal since the original Kaiju Disaster over a decade ago. And things were much better than they had been in those first lean years.
Prosperity helps, I thought as I added a writhing batch of fresh tentacles to the bubbling stock.

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