Auroraphobia’s Senseless Ranting

This was based on a dream I had, and I don’t actually like it at all. It seems confusing to me. Confusing and not that well written.

“Captain! Come here!” General Oria screamed, “We need your help!”

The captain hovered over to Oria in her Spade SC20, the twenty-seventh century equivalent of a Segway,  but with guns… and flying.

They were hovering three hundred feet above the ground, inside a stadium. The stadium wasn’t a stadium in the normal, bug-shaped sense of the word. The stadium was a perfect titanium sphere, sixty stories high and resting on a hill. The seats were built into the walls, row after row covering every inch available. It could fit the entire population of every nearby town, and still leave the good seats for every politician known to man.

Inside the stadium, were two floating horizontal metals bars 240 feet long each. These metal bars were facing each other,  and each had twenty ten foot by ten foot panels hanging down. The panels were evenly spaced across the bars and each had a circular hole in the middle, five feet in diameter.

There was a ship hovering directly in the middle of the two bars, but another fifty feet higher.

“Captain, when the fighting gets bad, take this to the ship.”  Oria said, handing her a small, wafer-thin remote.

“Yes, sir.” She hovered back to her position behind the last panel. Oria had the first. In between were their eighteen comrades, each hovering just behind the hole in their respective panels. Spade guns pointing out. The opposite bar was similarly occupied, only difference being that the people behind the opposite bar were the ones they were trying to shoot. The ship in the middle started glowing green.

Bang. One down. Bang. That’s two. Bang. Three down. The Captain alone had brought the opposing teams size down to seventeen before they shot once. From the other side: Bang. Down goes her neighbor. The loud speaker spoke up to the empty stadium, empty other than the dead and about to die, at least.

“In the war standings, the USA is down to 18 brave soldiers, China is down to 16.” She should have been paying more attention. She hadn’t even noticed another of their own drop. In the following ten minutes, they had lost five of their own, and shot four of the other side. She decided it was time to bring the remote to the ship as General Oria had told her to. She hovered along the back of the panels, picking out the three best soldiers.

“You’re coming with me,” she said. “We’re going to the ship.”

As they made their way to the ship, the three surrounded her, shooting anyone who made a move to shoot her. She considered them lucky, they only lost one of the three getting to the center. Then entered the ship, hovering through the halls towards the generator she remembered was at the center. When they reached it, it had turned red. Red meant the fighting was over, since the generator was what had been making the ship glow green. The fighting was over, but who had won? She dropped the remote into the red, swirling, glowing mass of energy that was the generator. It pulsed.

“Time to go back, I guess.” They hovered slowly back, not bothering to guard from bullets. The fighting was over. But still, they could not tell who had won. As they reached their bar and hovered through one of the panels, the captain looked down. One, two, three… fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Seventeen bodies on the ground. She and her two soldiers were the only ones left alive. They had lost.  Slowly, they made their way back to the changing rooms, to get ready to greet their new Chinese rulers.

I’m not sure I put enough emphasis on the fact that this was war. It seemed too much like a game. But in a way that is why I was drawn to the idea, the fact that in the story (and originally, the dream) war was just a game. It still controlled the flow of power between countries, but it was a game nonetheless.