I wanted to do something a bit different, after not writing much. Aside from the ongoing story that I started from a joke, and is now 50k words long! I needed to be 800 words or under and hit the below criteria.
Word List
Impropriety
Caustic
Tournament
Conglomerate
Sentence Block
Love would have been better, but wine was an acceptable substitute.
Why is that chicken there?
Defining Features
Someone uses magnets in a resourceful way
A message is sent in code
This is what I came up with: The light flickered above the cashier’s head in the all-night supermarket. It was the only till open, and Alec found it hard to believe that with all the options available, the teenager scanning his shopping had thought that this was the best one. The blinking neon tugged at Alec’s attention, suggesting coded patterns in its not quite randomness. Christ, he thought. I’m losing it if I’m seeing messages in a shithole like this.
The girl reached the cheap wine and looked up at him on reflex to see if she needed to ask for proof of age. The workers were told that anyone that looked under 25 should be challenged. Just to be on the safe side. It said so right there on the sign. She didn’t even blink and just scanned the bottle through.
Fuck you, seethed Alec internally. Not that there was any chance he really did look his 24 years of age. The long days and nights in the lab had taken their toll. He caught sight of himself in the perspex screen between him and the girl. If he looked that bad in a blurred reflection, God knows what he looked in full HD.
He really needed to get laid. Love would have been better, he supposed, but wine was an acceptable substitute, and a lot easier to find at 2:56am on a Tuesday. Even if it was cheap caustic trash, that the label pretended was made by a small vineyard in the foothills, when the price screamed it was made by a conglomerate of conmen.
He was close to a breakthrough, the readings he had downloaded before he left tonight were astounding. He was convinced there was something there. Information in the flux of the gravitational waves that passed through us all every day. If he could prove it, then he would have all the wine, adoration and impropriety that the last 3 years had failed to provide. After a glass of shit wine, he’d set the cryptography software running and see if it could pull anything out. All Alec had to do was avoid the chatter of his roommate and get to work. Jane was so passionate about her magnets but, unlike Alec, had not been able to win the lab time tournament of applying for funding. Just as well really, as magnetic fields and his sensitive instruments did not mix.
Alec arrived back at the flat and checked his watch. 3.15 am. Perfect, she’d be asleep surely. He put the key in the lock as quietly as he could and attempted to pad lightly into the kitchen.
“Hi Alec”, said Jane brightly as he opened the door.
Alec stared at what looked like a beautiful picnic spread on the table. Rotisserie chicken, fresh bread, salad.
“What...? Why is that chicken there? It’s 3 in the morn—”
“Ooh! You got wine! Great minds, huh?” Jane hopped up and grabbed a couple of glasses.
“Oh. Err… yeah its probably a bit shit.”
“Nonsense”, she said turning back to him with a smile. “I’m sure it will be great. I hope you don’t mind about the food. I just thought you might be hungry. You’ve been working so hard at the lab.”
Alec nodded, and took a seat, accepting the corkscrew that Jane offered him to open the wine.
“I suppose it does have a cork at least”, Alec said as he opened it. He poured a glass for them both, and as he took a sip, and Jane bantered about her latest scheme to win a grant, he felt himself relax for a moment. Then he remembered the code and flipped on his laptop.
“You mind if I just set this running?”, he asked.
“Not at all”, replied Jane.
The two friends nattered happily for some time and ate and drank, and it was nearly 4.30 am when Alec’s laptop announced via a Star Trek klaxon, that it had found something. A pattern. Alec found himself suddenly sober.
“What is it?”, asked Jane.
“A pattern. I knew it. This could be like the Fibonacci sequence. A pattern within a fundamental force.”
His excitement turned to confusion as he scanned the results. It wasn’t a pattern in the work from the lab. The computer was detecting a pattern written into its own internal workings, that appeared to be in Morse code. He set it to translate.
Jane raised an eyebrow. “What does it say?”
“It’s not my results. Something is talking to my laptop. A subtle influence on the hard drive, in sequence. The cryptography software thought it was in the data, but it’s not.”
“Magnetic fields can be very versatile”, said Jane. “What does it say?”
Alec looked at the translation. It said: KISS ME ALEC
“Oh”, he said.
