Figment Daily Theme: Icon

Figment | Write Yourself In | NEWSLETTER

Tell this story


If we were forced to wear a warning label, what would yours say?

Use these lines as inspiration for a short story or poem.



INT. IMMENSE UNDERGROUND CONTROL ROOM
A room the size of a football field carved out of the living stone at the heart of a mountain, fit with ranks of COMPUTERS, desk-inset MONITORS, and dozens of MEN AND WOMEN who might as well have been cut from stone at the same time. Three TIERS, each arcing toward the front of the room, step down so that the operators in the back can see over the heads of those in front.
THREE ENORMOUS MONITORS, each hundreds of inches across, surrounded by smaller but no less impressive SUBSIDIARY MONITORS are the focus of the whole creation.
Despite the population, the air is eerily QUIET - not muffled so much as controlled. The burbling of hundreds of VOICES hangs like a low fog.
On the screens, a bewildering array of ICONS and CONNECTIONS. Some are a dull indigo, some more energetic ones flicker green, and a few yellow ones are the focus of several of the smaller side-screens.
ACTIVITY AT ONE OF THE STATIONS
A young operator, PERKINS, peers for a moment into a RADAR SWEEP SCREEN before her eyes widen.
Frantic typing follows, a flurry of fingers on keys, before she hammers a fist on a RED COVERED BUTTON.
KLAXONS begin burping.
PERKINS
Major, you'll want to see this! We just lost one of the Yellows!
REVERSE TOWARD THE BACK OF THE ROOM
MAJOR TOM WESTERBROOK lifts one eyebrow and lets his Southern drawl thicken just a bit before answering.
MAJOR TOM
Well then, just put it on the big screen, Perkins and we'll all take a look at the big game.
There are a few tense chuckles. The Major lifts a MUG that says "#1 Commander" to his lips for a slurp as displays settle themselves.
THE MAIN SCREEN
A mass of tangled LINES shifts and blurs before settling over a knotted NEXUS. Several more sedate icons hang around the periphery in tones from indigo to green.
PERKINS
This was the memescape twenty minutes ago.
Icons shift and roll, tracing the paths which they'd trod, dangling attached pieces of data (names, timestamps, service providers, percentage surety). The clock in the corner rolls back ten minutes.
https://lifeboat.com/ex/warning.signs.for.tomorrow
In the center, a bright yellow icon glimmers.
TIGHT ON THE ICON
Dependent data: Alexander Williams. Aliases: Dark Shepherd, The SquidLord. Provider: Google Location Tracking. Activity (Observed): None. Activity (Computed): Reading a physical book. There's a little inset map showing a physical location in the southeastern US.
WIDE ON ROOM
MAJOR TOM
Well, that's not so bad. Not for a Yellow, it ain't. It ain't like he's fomenting a rebellion in an ally nation or --
The yellow icon begins dropping connections to other icons around it. A few of them bump up the spectrum before creating even more connections, some linking to grey icons signifying broadcast media and spewing connections to thousands.
MAJOR TOM
I could be wrong.
Yellow drops a line down to a grey hub marked TOR. The line itself is quivering and unstable.
PERKINS
Encrypted, sir!
MAJOR TOM
Blast and Hell, I know that, Perkins!
CRYPTO OP
Crypto is on it, sir, but you know these Yellows. It could be anything.
MAJOR TOM
Get me a protocol, boy, or you'll be back in Langley callin' your mother to explain why you don't work for the country club no more!
The icon brightens and shifts hue to an angry orange, not-quite-red.
Everyone not working on the current emergency goes dead silent. Shouts can be heard coming from Crypto and Tracking.
The icon fades to black. No links. No anything. Things around it just pack back together as if it were just a silent, dead icon, leaving only elevated activity and colour spreading away from the spot through the network.
PERKINS
(awed)
He went black, sir. I've never seen anything go black.
CRYPTO OP
You can't go black! It's not possible; the system tracks --
MAJOR TOM
Son, maybe you better stop before your tongue starts tellin' your lyin' eyes what they're seeing.
Tom puts his mug down, carefully. Bites his lower lip. Reaches to the side to pull a closed file off a bottom shelf and breaks the tape seal with a pen.
Flips it open.
Scans down a page with a finger.
The low hum is starting to filter back in. People are talking. The job has to be done.

MAJOR TOM
Next step is to contact Homeland, folks. Keep sharp. Watch the links. He'll be back.
I have to tell some twitchy folks we just had an Existential Threat go black. This is going to be a shit-storm.
Location: Lawrenceville, GA 30046, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5150: Free Trader Beowulf

5150: Free Trader Beowulf Introduction Why? How? Rules Tweaks Fighter Command Hangars for Cargo Urban Renewal Metal Madness (Toxic Build-Up) Toxic Build-Up Increasing Toxic Build-Up Decreasing Toxic Build-Up Social Implications Fighter Command Running Loops Available Loops Ship Designs Civilian Mercantile Free Trader Beowulf Star Navy Fighter Command Character Designs Captain Marlin Rath (Gaea Prime Basic) Urban Renewal Fighter Command XO Uranth-Ta (Ex-Zhuh-Zhuh Empire Gorantha) Urban Renewal Fighter Command Tech Specialist na’Tat Li Mae (Hishen) Urban Renewal Fighter Command Jacker “Zero” (New Hope Basic) Urban Renewal Fighter Command Scenarios Urban Renewal Get the Money and Run (Cargo) The Set-Up The Lead Shady Jobs Spending Time in the Shade Job Descriptions Wages Star Navy Mayday, Mayday Objective Forces Deployment Special Instructions Victory Conditions Fighter Command This Is Free...
Read more

[POLITICS] Social Deduction Games and the Erosion of Political Trust

Image
A Rift of Wants I’ll admit, it’s been quite a while since I’ve had time and inclination to sit down, pull up the old blogging software, and really set in on breaking down ideas and sharing some insights that I’ve had. After all, my personal experience is built out of a weird space. I’m an ex-software engineer. I’ve spent most of my life studying games, of one sort or another, with a focus on tabletop. I’ve written a couple of books on gaming, have an extensive library of tabletop role-playing games, wargames, and story games. I’ve been a games journalist, actually getting paid to write about what I think regarding games. When you get right to it, you can think of me as an escapee from House Tytalus into the real world – and that parallel alone says entirely too much about me. But that doesn’t preclude me from being a political animal. Whether I want to or not. In particular, over the last two years all of us have become intimately familiar with the efforts of government...
Read more

[LOCAL NEWS] The Model Confederacy

Image
The Model Confederacy So my local government has done it; they have decided one of the most important periods in American history, one that the Social Justice Warriors lean on as one of the prime motivators and excuses for ever-increasing authoritarianism in the pursuit of justice, never happened. The American Civil War is no more. Never happened. And with it, obviously there must have never been an issue with slavery in the United States – or else we would've fought a war over it. And after that war, there certainly weren't any acts of reconciliation, magnanimous allowances to the defeated in order to allow them some measure of dignity in the course of a return to actual unity. LAWRENCEVILLE, GA — The Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners has approved a resolution to move a controversial Confederate monument into storage while court proceedings revolving around the 28-year-old monument continue. The monument sits on the grounds of Gwinnett County's Historic Cour...
Read more