Fortnightly Writing Competition: A Spy! (Results)

[Sinitrena]

A Spy!

Is he working for a foreign government? Is she a corporate spy trying to find business secrets? Is it a student trying to get the questions for the next test from their teacher?

Whatever it is, your story must contain some kind of spying or espionage. It can be high-tech and full of action, or based on psychological warfare or something similar. It can be about the spy trying to get information or someone trying to stop a spy. You get the idea, I'm sure.

Deadline: 22. February

[Sinitrena]

We must have some amazing spies in this forum! It's about halftime of the competition and I don't see a single one. Top grades for hiding! Now, can you fulfill the other demands of your mission and get the final report to mission control by the time of the deadline before the world ends?

[Mandle]

I have something in the works. Got a bit inSPYred.

[Mandle]

Aaaaaand, we're back! I'm almost finished my story. Worked on it quite a bit while the forums were down even though I was a bit worried there may be nowhere to contest to post it in. Oh, well... a story is a story and must be written once it's bugged me long enough.

[Sinitrena]

Is anyone else working on something?

With the forums down for quite some time, I think it's a good idea to give this contest a bit more time, should there be someone who hasn't realised yet that the forums are back.

Therefore, deadline extended to 24th.

[Stupot]

The Vial Room

Sweat formed on Agent Tully's forehead as he swiped the card he had obtained from Melody. He shook away thoughts of a life with her. The reader beeped. Oh, she's good. Tully slipped through silently.

Get in, grab the vial, get out. He approached the second door. Facial recognition. He looked at his wristwatch. 02:04. Melody assured him it would recognise him. Nothing. He blinked and tried again. Come on. It beeped. Oh, she's good. Tully slipped through silently.

With squinted eyes he surveyed the small, dark room. It was completely empty. The door slid shut. A wet dripping sound emanated from within. Tully clicked the night-vision switch on his glasses. Before him was a dread swarm of squelching tentacles and huge teeth writhing around a nightmarish hole in the ground. A mucus-covered tentacle dragged him downwards. Oh, she's good. Tully slipped through silently.


This story above was written using a 144-word restraint (I have a collection of these stories which I started after there was once a 144-word rule on one of these FWCs).

Disclaimer
While every word in the story is my own, I did consult ChatGPT for feedback and took some of its advice. I have included the two previous drafts along with the advice ChatGPT gave me on them below. Note that I specifically asked it not to rewrite anything but just to give me its 'thoughts', if you can call them that.

I'm not sure where I stand on people using AI to write things for them, but I personally think asking if for feedback is no different to running it past a friend (albeit an inhumanly well-read friend).

I included this disclaimer to be completely transparent. If you think this counts as unfair play, please say so, and reflect it in your votes.


Draft 1

Spoiler

A ball of sweat formed on Agent Tully's forehead as he swiped the card he had obtained from Melody. He shook away thoughts of a life with her. Never gonna happen. The card reader beeped. Oh, she's good. Tully slipped through silently.

His objective was simple. Get in, grab the vial, and get out. He approached the second door. facial recognition. He looked at his wristwatch. 02:04. Melody assured him it would recognise his face. It beeped. Oh, she's good. Tully slipped through silently.

His eyes surveyed the small room. Nothing: no equipment, no furniture, no vial. A wet squelching sound emanated from within. Tully clicked a switch on his glasses. Before him was a swarm of writhing tentacles and teeth. He tried to scream but was gagged by a tentacle as he was dragged into the floor. Oh, she's good. Tully slipped through silently.

Chat GPT Advice
What works:
The opening sets up the tension well, with Agent Tully's nervousness and the hint of a forbidden attraction to Melody.
The short, punchy sentences and lack of excess description create a sense of urgency and danger.
The twist at the end, with the reveal of the monster and the repetition of the phrase "Oh, she's good," is a strong conclusion that leaves the reader wanting more.

What could be improved:
While the brevity of the piece is effective, there are some opportunities to add more detail that could enhance the scariness. For example, when Tully sees the swarm of tentacles and teeth, it might be more effective to describe what they look like in more detail to create a vivid image in the reader's mind.
The pacing could also be tweaked to build tension more effectively. The second door opens without much difficulty, and Tully immediately sees the monster. It might be scarier if he had to search the room for the vial, building suspense along the way, before encountering the monster.
Finally, it might be helpful to clarify why Tully was searching for the vial in the first place. Giving some context for the story could make the reader more invested in Tully's fate and the outcome of his mission.

[close]

Draft 2

Spoiler

Sweat formed on Agent Tully's forehead as he swiped the card he'd obtained from Melody. He shook away thoughts of a life with her. The reader beeped. Oh, she's good. Tully slipped through silently.

Get in, grab the vial, get out. He approached the second door. Facial recognition. He looked at his wristwatch. 02:04. Melody assured him it would recognise him. Nothing. He blinked and tried again. Come on. It beeped. Oh, she's good. Tully slipped through silently.

His eyes surveyed the small room. It was dark, and completely empty. The door slid closed behind him. A wet squelching sound emanated from within. Tully clicked a nightvision switch on his glasses. Before him was a dread swarm of squelching tentacles and huge teeth writhing around an aberrant hole in the ground. A mucus-covered tentacle dragged him down. Oh, she's good. Tully slipped through silently.

ChatGPT Advice
The story is concise and moves quickly, which works well for flash fiction. However, there is room for a little more detail to create a more vivid picture for the reader. For example, instead of just saying "It was dark," you could add a few sensory details to describe the darkness - is it pitch black, or can he make out some shapes? Is there a smell or a temperature to the air? These kinds of details can help to create a more immersive reading experience.

The repetition of "Oh, she's good" is a good touch, as it underscores the character's realization that he has been tricked. However, it might be even more effective to leave it out until the end of the story, and then repeat it as a kind of punchline. That way, the reader doesn't know what it refers to until the end, which could create more tension and surprise.

The phrase "dread swarm of squelching tentacles and huge teeth" is great and really sets the tone for the horror element of the story. However, the word "aberrant" in the same sentence feels a little out of place. Consider replacing it with a different word that fits better with the tone and mood you've established.

Overall, this is a strong piece of flash fiction with a good sense of tension and horror. With a few tweaks and a bit more detail, it could be even more effective. Keep up the good work!

[close]

[Baron]

With My Little Eye

"Davey, come in Davey.  Do you read?"  Jessica said, checking the walkie-talkie system.  Her receiver hissed quietly, and then sprang to life. 

"Say again, Mother Bear?"  Davey asked.  Of course her little brother had insisted on using codenames in order to protect their identities during the mission.

"Come in Rubber Ducky," Jessica radioed again, the name sounding comically childish as she said it out loud, which was probably why her mischievous brother had chosen it in the first place.

"I read you loud and clear, Mother Bear," her brother said.  "Operation Cat Hair is green light, I repeat green light."

Of course her brother had insisted on the operation being codenamed Cat Hair as well.  He had chosen the name not just to throw off any spies who might be listening in, but also for the very apt reason that cat hair gets everywhere.  Jessica had refused to go along at first, but as it was her brother who had volunteered to be the one to infiltrate their parent's bedroom she reluctantly agreed in the end.  It was her burning curiosity that had initiated this madcap plan, after all, and she was determined to do whatever was necessary to see it through, even if that involved goofy codenames.

Jessica's receiver buzzed to life again.  "Rubber Ducky is in position," her brother said.  "Do we have confirmation that the nest is empty?"

It was Jessica's turn to tiptoe through the house to spy out where her parents were.  It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and she found her mother in the kitchen starting dinner as expected.  Her father was more elusive, but she eventually located him due to the rumbling sound of the snow-blower starting up in the driveway.

"The window is open," Jessica squeaked into her transmitter, barely able to contain her enthusiasm.  "Go, go, go!"

"10-4 Mother Bear.  Maintaining radio silence through the wormhole.  Stand by."  Jessica clutched her walkie-talkie nervously as she assumed her position atop the staircase, the better to warn her brother if danger was approaching.  The wormhole he referred to was drawn on a childish blueprint in her brother's room, referencing an obscure crawl space that linked the attic to a panel in their parent's closet ceiling that only a curious nine-year-old boy could discover.  Soon he would emerge on the other side behind their parent's locked bedroom door, cobwebs in his hair but otherwise unscathed.

And for what?  The rumbling snowblower outside belied the season - it was December 19th, and Jessica was insatiably curious about what she would be getting for Christmas.  Most kids would just admit defeat at the locked door and their parent's admonitions, but Jessica was made of sterner stuff.  Maybe she inherited her obsession with secrets from her grandmother, the incurable gossip who just had to know everything.  Maybe she just never learned to take "no" for an answer, a trait she definitely shared with her younger brother.  Whatever the reason, she was quickly becoming a mastermind at espionage.  She had already swiped her teacher's mark book and forged appropriate grades for her report card coming home that Friday, and she had recently swapped passed-notes in algebra class to ensure that Jimmy Bean (the cutest boy in school) would be single by the end of the week, just in case he felt like asking her to the Christmas semi-formal dance.  Next to those operations, a bit of present snooping seemed positively benign.

"The Rubber Ducky has landed," her walkie-talkie declared.

"Talk to me Big Yellow," Jessica radioed back.  "What are we looking at this year?"

"It's a bit thin," her brother radioed back.  "Mostly socks and oral hygiene products."

"You're in the decoy stash," Jessica told him, not missing a beat.

"How can you tell?" her brother asked back.

"Let me guess - there's also taffy candies, playing cards and crossword books?"

"Wow, you're good!" her brother marvelled.

"Try the dresser drawers, or under the bed," Jessica recommended.

"10-4, Mother Bear.  I'm exiting the closet now."

There was about a minute of agonizing radio silence while Jessica fought the urge to demand an update.  Finally the walkie-talkie buzzed to life again.

"Nothing to report in the dresser drawers," her brother reported at length.  "Initiating under-the-bed protocol.  Searching, searching.... What the...?!?

"What is it, Rubber Ducky?" Jessica radioed back, unable at last to contain her curiosity.  "Is it smart phones?  Concert tickets? Car keys??  Talk to me, Big Yellow."

"Uh..." her brother said uncertainly.  "This doesn't make any sense."

"What did you find?!?"  Jessica asked again, the suspense killing her.

"It's a stack of magazines, Mother Bear," her brother informed her.  "And nobody's wearing any clothes inside!"

"Ugh, Dad!" Jessica groaned over the airwaves.

"Oh I don't think these are Dad's," her brother went on.  "Holy Moly, he's using it as a flagpole!"

"Mom!" Jessica blurted, despite herself.

"Yes dear?" her mother called from the kitchen.

"Uh, nothing!" Jessica said, suddenly recalling the clandestine nature of their mission.  "Rubber Ducky, get out of there!" she radioed.  "You're going to warp your brain or something."

"Speaking of warped, you should see what this guy can do!" her brother radioed back, unable to contain his giggling.

"Abort, abort!" Jessica called, trying to recall the proper code words to abort the mission.  "The window is closing!  You have about thirty seconds to evacuate the Wolf's Den!  Code Red, Code Red!"

"Ha ha!" her brother laughed, unable to contain himself.  "This guy is dressing it up like a sock puppet!"

"It's time fly south, Rubber Ducky!" Jessica radioed frantically.  "There are some things you just can't unsee - trust me!  You've got like twenty seconds to get out of there or you are cooked.  Chinese Wok, Chinese Wok!"

"OK, OK, aborting mission," her brother radioed, finally coming to his senses.  In a couple of seconds he emerged from his parents bedroom via the door, cobwebs in his hair and a ridiculous grin on his face.  Jessica carefully relocked the bedroom door before pulling it shut, and then collapsed against the wall outside in relief.

"That was a close one," she said, feeling her racing heart-rate.

"Not as close as some of those dudes in the magazines," her brother pointed out before Jessica shushed him.  It occurred to her at this point that maybe there was such a thing as revealing too many secrets, and that there was a certain magic in not knowing things after all.

"I wonder what's for dinner?" she asked, trying to change the subject.

"Ew, I hope it's not whipped-cream, cause in one of the pictures I saw-"

Yes.  Some things were just better not knowing.

[Mandle]

FRIDAY SPYDAY

It was just coming down dark, the shrinking crescent of the setting sun cut into segments, like a red egg in a slicer, by the pines lining the ridge of the steep mountains to the west. The beige van marked "Not-A-Fan Air Conditioners" in bold, black letters along its sides swerved across the deserted upward lane of the curving valley road and ba-bump-ba-bumped its tires up into the gas stand's lot.

The driver of the van, Robert, was still officially on the clock but Friday Spyday only came once a week and this week he had a doozy of a tale to tell, one that he had been honing in his mind over the last seven days of delivery and installation jobs since this time the week before. He pulled the company van into a parking space at the back of the lot, away from the harsh overhead lighting of the gas-pump island and killed the engine.

He took his phone from its dashboard holder, turned off the GPS navi app, and thumbed on the Tor icon that opened up the dark web to him. Within moments he was on the Friday Spyday site. It only went online for two hours at this exact time every Friday night and, ever since he had stumbled upon it a few months back, it had become his whole world.

And there his guy was on the "Available" list as always: Another air conditioner company rep doing the same slog as himself day-in-day-out, each boring week and every lonely mile building to this golden time. Real world names were forbidden, but that didn't matter. Here, Robert was only "Not-A-Fan" and his partner in back-and-forth spy-story yarns was only "The Cooler King".

"You ready? I gotta good one!" texted Robert.

BLEEP! "Good to go, buddy!" came back the text reply.

BLING! The icon to connect to the private voice call turned from grey to green. Robert took a deep breath and a moment to remember the first few sentences of his story the way he had planned them out. He had found that once he got started, the rest just followed. He looked out through the windscreen. He thumbed the voice call icon. The pupils of his eyes flickered as he started to see his story.

The line of pine trunks lit by the van's headlights faded in his mind's eye to become marble columns. Between every other set of columns hung a long cloth banner. Upon every banner was a swastika. The twilit ground mist seeping from the forest floor became the bursts of steam from under the locomotive pulling out of Berlin's Central Station as Robert began to tell his story:

Being a counterintelligence agent in the Third Reich had both its advantages and its disadvantages. The name Hans Riger meant little to almost anybody with or without a military rank, the face even less. That meant that he could walk openly in public and gather his intelligence to further the inevitable and glorious victory of his nation. But it also meant that he would be questioned by the moronic thugs of the Gestapo just for riding a train line terminating at a town located nearby a sensitive asset.

He had little patience for these idiots. And they had even less respect for him after they had seen his papers. He knew how they viewed him: as a rat, gnawing through wall insulation, burrowing a path to its food, then feeding and skittering away.

But he was good at his job, and he was being called in on an extremely high-profile investigation. His forehead creased into a frown above his squinted eyes, he watched the leather-coated backs of the Gestapo duo checking more papers further down the train carriage. Then his eyes went back down to the dossier folder he had been reviewing: His next assignment.

It was a good one. Maybe one of the best to date, and he couldn't wait to start working his magic on it.

Clackety locomotive hours passed as he read through the files, memorizing names and looking for the hook. The hook that would grant him success in this case, and glory in the eyes of his country. But he had to step carefully here. The case was already a messy one. A top official in Hitler's army, Kurt Kilmer, had been assassinated, killed by a car bomb yesterday morning as he left his house for work at the nearby camp he had been in command of. The camp was the reason for the heavy gestapo presence in the region and on the transport routes in and out of it.

There had been several breakouts there recently, some of them resulting in, as of yet, uncaptured prisoners still on the run. Those escaped British and American soldiers made this job ever tastier. If he had the chance to, it would feel very rewarding to track them down.

His train arrived on time, one boon of a totalitarian government and, likewise, his assigned staff-car was already there waiting for him in the station's parking lot. He took in the fresh mountain views as he crunched his way across the station's gravel lot to the idling vehicle, the air so much more pine-scented and hinting of adventure than the stuffy confines of Berlin.

The ride in the back of the open-topped automobile through the winding mountain roads was pleasant. It was Spring, the weather was fine, and his driver and guard escorts had little to say to him. Such was the respect and fear that his position commanded within the "civilized" strata of the military.

A half-hour later they turned off the wooded road and passed between the gates of what had surely been a peaceful and impressive chalet. But now the signs of the bombing marred the expansive courtyard. The once-beautiful marble fountain at its center had been reduced to a spray of stony rubble, only the sabaton boots and one mid-thigh leg of its Valkyrie warrioress still standing on its base. The front windows of the chalet had been blown inwards close to the blackened husk of the bombed automobile, and the rest had dozens of cracked or missing panes here and there. The cobblestones around the exploded vehicle were stained for a dozen feet all around with a spreading starburst of blackened char.

The staff-car rounded the destroyed fountain and crunched to a stop on the white gravel between the chalet's impressive oak doors and the ruin of its late occupant's automobile.

Then... what was this?! A Gestapo agent was waiting there, lurking in the shadows under a lattice encrusted with gone-to-seed grape vines. The agent stepped from under his sun-speckled cover out into the light of day as the staff-car's engine spluttered to a halt and said, "AH! So, the great Hans Riger, master spy-hunter for the Reich, arrives!"

There was an unexpected mocking tone barely hidden under the agent's words. All of the pleasant musings on the ride up here were now suddenly gone.

"Yes, that is correct. I am Hans Riger."

Faced once again with such idiocy, he stepped down from the staff car's running board and started to reach into his jacket for his identification papers.

"Ya, nein-nein... there is no need for such formalities." chuckled the Gestapo agent flapping his hand casually. "I'm sure your papers are perfectly in order. Let us examine the scene of the crime, shall we?"

Together they walked around the ruined vehicle. It still stank of scorched gasoline, and it became shockingly clear that there were still two twisted, charred corpses intertwined with the blackened springs and struts of what had once been the automobile's front seat.

The Gestapo agent, with a spreading hand gesture, said, "Well, what do your expert eyes make of all this, Herr Riger?" and a back-and-forth exchange between the two men began:

"I had been led to believe by my case dossier that Commander Kilmer had been the lone victim of the bombing."

"That is what your dossier led you to believe?"

"Yes. Are you saying the intelligence was inaccurate?"

"Ya. Your intelligence was very-much-so inaccurate."

"Why are you speaking to me in that tone? Is this a joke to you?!"

"Oh, ya. A joke. Ya! And the punchline is coming."

"I will see you brought up on charges for this insubordinate attitude!"

"Hehehe! Ya! There will be charges! Many fun charges! Tell, me, Herr Riger, who do you suppose the second man in the car to have been?"

"I have no idea! You tell ME! My dossier mentioned only the..."

"Ya-ya-ya... Your intelligence dossier was constructed to bring you here with no suspicion present in your mind. Here's that punchline, as promised: That second corpse belongs to the late, great spy-hunter of the Third Reich: Hans Riger."

Four Nazi Brownshirts stepped out through gaps in the driveway's curving hedges, two on each flank, and cocked their raised machine guns.

The Gestapo agent suddenly switched to English at this point, grinned, and said, "Now, if you would be so kind as to tell us your real name?"

The "BLEEP!" from his phone pulled Robert back from the aftermath in his imaginary Nazi courtyard, where the Brownshirts were handcuffing the kneeling spy's hands behind his head, and back to reality.

"WOW! That was GREAT!" read the text reply from "The Cooler King".

Robert thumbed back on his screen, "THANKS! I really thought hard on this one. Were you surprised?"

BLEEP! "YES! But now I'm nervous if MY story packs that kind of punch or not."

"You've never let me down yet. Tell away!" texted back Robert.

BLEEP! "Here goes!"

Robert, an excited grin on his face, listened to the filter-modified voice from his phone, the only verbal communication the dark-web site would allow, as "The Cooler King" started to talk. The modulated voice was as robotic and emotionless as always, but still carried Robert's imagination far away to the Nevada desert where:

The low, orange sun hit Tom Billing's shirtless back and still stung his skin despite the early-evening hour. Why on Earth the director of this stupid B-Grade movie-shoot thought it so important that Tom needed to set up the pyrotechnics rig for the landing site today, he had no idea. But orders from the "great" director of sci-fi schlock, Kevin Listener, had to be followed or the recipient was out of a job faster than Alfred Hitchcock could take a shit.

"Why? Why? WHY?!" continued Tom's mantra as he wired and placed another one of the road flares in place around the spiral metal base that he had already spent three days on. The shooting schedule clearly read that the saucer's landing scene would be shot TOMORROW evening. Why did it have to be done TODAY?!

Rigging all the complicated wiring and timing on the flares was NOT a job he wanted to EVER have to do again, and yet an overnight rain, or coyote incursion, or even just a gang of drunk teenagers out joyriding in the desert, could ruin everything and mean a do-over.

But a wife and toddler back home in their mortgage-home in Los Angeles, and another kid on the way, kept Tom's mouth shut and his hands busy.

The sun was already gone, just a deep red glow fading to black far below the desert horizon, when the rigging was finally done. Everyone else, cast and crew, had already left the set on the production bus that ferried them daily to and from their Las Vegas digs. Only the "great director" had a prefab shack of his own onsite, the lights of which were already out. What a freak the uppity Mr. Listener was! Always asleep by sundown and up before dawn. He seemed more robot than man at times.

Tom's scowl turned slowly into a grin as he walked back to his car, his darling, his '42 Ford Coupe in deep red. Five-years-old she was and had been without a ding or even a single service until he had driven her out here for this stupid gig. But, even under the vast arch of the Nevada desert sky, and with a few scrapes and divots from flying gravel, she still looked as sweet to him as the first day he had bought her. The brilliant pinpoint stars and the stark wash of the Milky Way reflected off her hood and fenders as he walked up to her, opened the driver-side door, slipped in behind the wheel, fired her up, and drove off a few miles down the road to sleep stretched out on her bench seat. He couldn't be assed driving all the way back to his shitty little staff bungalow in Vegas. The back seat of his Coupe was more comfortable than the bed back there anyway, with those two sprung springs that stabbed him in his shoulder-blade and ass. Sleeping in the car had seemed the better choice at the time, but it would turn out to have been not the best choice at all. Not by a long shot.

He woke up on that very worst day of his life early, 4AM kind of early, when the sun wasn't quite up yet but was sending its yellow glow across the flat, sage-brushed desert floor, nonetheless. Tom rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, opened the back door of his beloved Coupe, stepped out, and took a long and sigh-full piss.

No breakfast and fifteen minutes later, he was already closing in on the work site, pluming out a dust cloud, dark where it spewed out behind his tires, but lit higher up by the orange breaking rays of the dawn.

He squinted into the sun as its shimmering crescent broke over the horizon. He shielded his eyes with one hand, keeping the other on the wheel, and peered out through the dusty windscreen. Something was wrong.

There wasn't supposed to be a full-sized saucer prop on the landing pad he had rigged last night. In the production notes, the flying saucer was a superimposed effect to be added later. And why was there smoke coming off from his pyrotechnic flares under its tripod of gleaming metal legs? Had the idiots who brought in this last-minute saucer prop set his whole shebang off on accident?!

This wasn't the gig that Tom had signed on for, and he would be damned if this screw-up would cost him even one cent off of his paycheck at the end of the shoot!

As he slewed the Coupe into the worksite in a spray of yellow pebbles and desert floor and opened his driver-side door, he saw that the door of the director's shack also stood ajar, banging back and forth in the wind. Something about that wasn't right. Tom's eyes tracked back to the saucer and saw Kevin there, the director. Kevin was standing somewhat out in front of two of the craft's three legs, staring off into the desert air, which was already starting to shimmer with pools of mirages over its sands as the rising sun's orange rays split through low clouds and made landfall here and there.

Off in the distance, from miles and miles away, a whooping siren began. It was the kind of siren that announced that there was not an emergency to centralize in on, but rather that there was something on the loose to chase after.

Tom stood frozen beside his car, just as much surprised that his gaudy arrival had been ignored by the constantly anal Kevin as he was by the scene unfolding before him.

There was a loud "CLACK" that snapped Tom's attention back to the sleek, silver saucer. A ramp was now depending from its underside with a thrumming noise that, while not loud, was resonating in his skull in a way that made him feel both more annoyed by everything going on and also terrified by it all at the same time.

The ramp hit the desert floor, bringing up a thudding plume of dust. From within the opening created by the ramp, hovering about two or three feet above its black, shiny surface appeared one, and then two slightly-crooked-up-in-the-middle flying metal beds.

On each of the black and silver beds were THINGS that Tom knew immediately were not some kind of movie props. They were small and grey, with big bulbous heads and huge black eyes. Their ankles and wrists were locked to the flying beds with shackles and an arched shackle also went over where their mouths should be. Both figures were struggling and thrashing for the life of them as much as their bindings would allow.

The beds went left and right at the bottom of the ramp, maintaining their hovering gap above the desert floor, passed by where Kevin stood, and spread out on either side in front of him. Tom saw Kevin stride forward away from himself and the saucer, looking all the world like a chariot driver and the two floating beds the horses drawing him along behind them.

Tom stepped away from his car, kicking its door shut behind him in a slack-jawed reflex that he would not remember later, and followed the strange trio off into the shimmering mirages of the desert.

He would be fucked if he would let all this go and just drive away, no matter how much his brain was screaming at him to do so. Something important was going on here and he had to see it. He made his choice to follow the chariot that was Kevin, and his strange steeds, out into the mirages of the desert, and it was a choice that he would regret for all of the rest of the length of his long life.

The sun rose steadily higher, and the puddles of mirages spilled over into each other to become entire lakes of mirrors, but Tom ran on, keeping his eyes trained on the shimmering back of the man he was chasing after. A new sound grew in intensity, partially eclipsing the WHOOP-WHOOP of the alarm pealing away in the distance. It was the sound of jet engines roaring up to take-off speed. Tom's ears tracked each of the new sounds from right to left. There were at least three jet fighters taking off, each of them tearing their way up into the air in close proximity one after the other. Tom knew that somewhere over there in front of him, across the desert, a military base was on emergency alert and was scrambling jets to deal with something. Something that probably had everything to do with Kevin and his hovering beds laden with their struggling cargo.

Then Tom caught up, close behind Kevin, because Kevin had suddenly stopped. Tom stopped as well and watched what happened next with a growing expression of awe on his face. Out in front of Kevin and the hazy black blocks that were the beds beyond him, above the ground mirage that mirrored his racing legs into scissors slicing at each other, a man came running.

Tom wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. It was already like standing in front of a furnace with an open door even though the huge red-orange sun had only just pulled its shimmering butt up over the hazy horizon.

He thought to himself, "If this is what it's like now, imagine what the rest of the day's shoot is gonna be like." and then laughed at his own thought that the movie shoot was even going to keep happening. No, they were way off the map of that already. This was some next-level bullshit going on here right in front of his eyes. Yes, in front of his eyes, but still too mirage-wavering and too far out of earshot for his curiosity's thirst to be quenched, so he snuck closer.

The man running in towards the waiting insane chariot formation was wearing a flapping lab coat over his civilian clothes of white collared shirt and blue jeans. He didn't look all that threatening to Tom, not justifiably dangerous enough to explain the military response as the jet fighters screamed by low overhead on their initial pass, blasting away much of the ground-hugging puddles of heat mirage in their wake.

The shimmering gap of air between Tom and the events that happened next was ripped away by the jets and allowed him to see everything clearly. So clearly that he would never be able to slide into restful sleep again without his retinas, that the images were seemingly burned into forever, causing him to toss and turn for hours and murmur swears that were probably the reason for his later divorce and downward slope into the alcoholism that led to his death from liver failure three and a half decades in the future.

There was a blast of a crackling blue electrical arc from the forehead of Kevin. His body became rigid, and his hands splayed out, trembling down by his shuddering thighs. The electrical arc leapt over onto the forehead of one of the struggling things on the floating bed to his left, followed by another arc from the forehead of the lab-coated man as he skidded to a halt in front of the thing in the right-hand bed, the arcing lightning also slamming into the creature's forehead. Dual circles of desert dust flew out in shockwaves from around the creatures' beds as Tom saw their struggles growing weaker under the restraints over their limbs and mouths.

As the two blue arcs of electricity blasted up and over through the dry desert air, and as Tom stood frozen in both panic and wonder, knees buckled down slightly and his hands clenched up by his stomach, a high, whining sound ripped through the air off to one side. The sound grew to a high-pitched roar and ended with a thudding impact that shook the ground. Behind Tom, a few hundred yards away, his beautiful Coupe exploded in a shower of fire, smoke, and flaming metal fragments that had, just a moment before, been her beautiful curves and perfectly meshing gears, pistons, and rods.

The shockwave of the explosion swept Tom up off of his feet and threw him a dozen yards closer to the alien mind-swap which had proceeded uninterrupted.

Tasting and spitting out dirt, Tom lifted his head from his prone position, dust and pebbles pouring from his hair and, as the jets ripped by again low overhead, peeling off on both sides for another go-around at their real target, the saucer, he saw the mind-transfer happen.

The twin arcing bands of blue lightning detached from the foreheads of the two humans and flashed over in laminar flows to disappear into the bulbous foreheads of the two beings strapped into their floating beds. The two alien beings stopped struggling and their binding clasps snapped open from their ankles, wrists, and mouths, around down into the beds' metal frames. The two humans, Kevin and the man that had come running, both collapsed bonelessly to the ground.

Tom, still spitting out granular bits of desert, lifted himself up onto his trembling, bleeding elbows and saw the two beds swiftly swivel around in the air and race back in the direction of the saucer, bearing their occupants with them. They went up the ramp in single file and, a moment later, the entire craft began to thrum with vibrations that hurt in Tom's chest, its silver metal skin pulsating a growing hue of brilliant violet.

The ramp snapped up and closed with an ear-bursting impact that would trouble Tom's hearing for the rest of his life on and off, especially during high-pressure weather systems.

Then, in a rolling plume of dust, the saucer was gone. Tom tried to track its upward flight but only caught a glimpse of orange sunlight flashing off its underside before the sound of the jets came around again. From somewhere far off to the west airborne missiles screamed once again and, rolling over onto his back, Tom saw another bright orange flash, this time an explosion, and then another, quickly followed by a third. Just before he passed out, his eyes registered a zig-zagging black trail of smoke, but he was already unconscious by the time the saucer finally crashed all those many miles away in New Mexico.

He woke up from a slap to the face and then, when his eyes started to roll up again in their sockets, another slap followed and he was looking into the face of the lab scientist who had come running out of the desert not all that long ago, but already seemed to Tom like forever ago, that moment in time just before the train of his life switched to the track that led to an end terminus instead of onwards to all stations until Central.

It took another slap until Tom could understand that the man's mouth was saying, "Where is it?! Where's the fucking spy?!"

"Ernnnuughh..." managed Tom, not his finest moment of eloquence, foreshadowing many worse ones yet to come.

"It stole my fucking body! Where is it?! Is it in YOU now?!" yelled the loud lab-coated man tugging at Tom's lapels, while Kevin stepped over the both of them, casting a shadow over Tom's face and the back of the lab man's head with his crotch and muttering, "I-I was in Hollywood. We... we climbed th-the sign. We were o-on top o-of the "H" a-a-and then th-th-the liiight c-c-came d-dooown! Oh, n-nooo!"

Kevin's overstepping shadow passed on as the movie director wandered around in another small circle, fingernails worrying his neck into red welts. Tom asked the annoying man in the white coat, "Where's my car?"

BLEEP! "The End." read the text on Robert's phone, bringing him once again back from the world of a story, this time told to him instead of by him, but seen in his mind just as vividly.

Robert texted back, "AMAZING!". And then quickly followed with, "How do you do it? You always top me!"

BLEEP! "Thank you. You are too kind, but I think you underestimate yourself. See you soon!"

Robert saw "The Cooler King" leave the "Friday Spyday" chatroom. Then the site itself disappeared and he was kicked back to the basic Tor browser which he quickly thumbed out of. The two-hour time limit had passed by so fast, as it always did. It was too late to make the last air-con installation run. He didn't care. He would just phone in an excuse tomorrow. For now, he would just sit here in his van at the back of this gas stand's parking lot and look at the pine trees and go over in his mind the awesome story he had just heard.

The being that went by the name of "The Cooler King" on the dark web felt warm pleasure in her mind that the person at the other end of the "Friday Spyday" call had encountered her story and had experienced an entertainment time with it as well.

She turned off the switch in the section of her brain that provided her access to this planet's crude electronic intercommunication system, an ability of hers that her captors might not have noticed yet, but probably soon would, given the adhesive electrodes dotted over her entire body. They were perpetually watching, perpetually recording, and perpetually ignorant.

Ignorant enough of the true depths of her abilities that she sensed that they may give up on their primitive extra-dermal monitoring and probing and resort to their death-and-dissection methods sometime soon.

She thought back to how "Friday Spydays" had begun, "Months" ago.

She had calculated that the maximum possibility of using her outside connection undetected was available on a day the humans called "Friday", when the workers here at this horrid "Base" were at their lowest level of "Giving a fuck" and looking forward to something their minds called "The weekend".

The man called "Not-A-Fan" she thought of as a "Friend" was a "Good" being. He was a part of a climate-control collective known as the "Air Conditioners", and that was why she had posed as one of such herself, despite hating the necessary "Lying" involved.

In this way, she justified the "Lying" part in her mind: "Not-A-Fan" created false stories every week when they met. But he was a "Good" man, so that meant that "Lying" was not in-and-of-itself a bad thing. As for her own stories, they were, for the greater part, true. Even though she had learned from the human to embellish them somewhat to be more "Entertaining", and to disguise them every so often in a veil of "Ambiguity" so that it didn't seem to him like they always about "Aliens".

She picked up the "Rubber" ball they had given her and gripped it between her long, grey fingers and started squeezing it, out of what had become a reflex for her. They had told her it would relieve something they called "Stress".

She looked over at her prison cell's "Televison", mounted on the industrial-grey wall, on which she was allowed to watch whatever was available on the "Streaming" channels.

Playing out on the screen was the end of one of her favorite "Earthling" movies, one of the ones she had watched over and over. It was the final scene of the movie. "Steve McQueen" was back in the "Cooler", bouncing his ball up against the wall and catching it again.

She aimed the arc of her hand's descent at a point midway up the far wall of her grey cell at the exact time "Steve McQueen" did so on the "Television" and entered her deepest meditative state as she released the ball, it bounced back, and she caught it over and over precisely in time with the man on the screen, even long after the movie had ended, and the credits had rolled.

It had been frustrating to search for the location of the "Good" man called "Not-A-Fan" at first, but each of their "Friday Spydays" had narrowed the zone he was currently in from the entire planet at first, noisy as it was with each messy human mind that cluttered it, to a hemisphere, then a continent, then, after many tries, a "State", and then a settlement. She had been constantly surprised, given the size of the initial search area, that, every time she had zeroed in more and more on "Not-A-Fan", it had become more and more evident that he was quite close to the location of her captivity. He was, of course, above ground whereas she was deep below, but that wouldn't matter if only she could pinpoint him down to the...

And then it happened: In her roaming mind, the "Green" zone that she had seen as an amorphous group of fuzzy blobs spread over several areas reduced itself to a single candidate. She had needed to be precise, down to at least to an area the size of which she could expect to remain undetected within until she could make contact, but this was even more exact than she had expected on this particular "Friday". She had thought it would have taken at least one or two more attempts, and she would have even risked going though without a perfect map if she hadn't sensed that the "Death-And-Dissection" fate was approaching too fast for that to be an option.

But that didn't matter now. She had found him and would soon be with him. Her hand kept throwing, bouncing, and catching the ball by reflex, even though her eyes, each larger than the ball she threw for the last time, were squeezed shut in concentration, as completely focused as she was on the next huge task that would require her all.

States away, still seated in his van in the gas stand's rear parking spaces, Robert heard a crackling behind him.

A rubber ball bounced off his cheek as he turned back in his seat towards the source of the noise, but this remarkable flying blow out of nowhere remained unremarked upon when he saw the blue-lightning circle hovering behind and between the front seats of his van, and the grey long-fingered hand reaching out through it.

Robert grabbed the desperately clutching hand without a second thought. White and grey fingers found a grip on each other's wrists. There was an instant of recognition on both sides of the portal from the physical contact and then Robert, hooking his free arm up under the van's steering wheel for leverage, pulled on The Cooler King's hand harder than he had ever done anything before in his entire life.

A thin grey forearm, and then an upper arm, and then the lump of a sinewed shoulder came through. Robert felt sudden resistance and pulled harder. He heard a trilling scream that sounded like screaming up close into a fan spinning a million miles an hour, and then the portal burst open wider in a blast of deep-blue light that sent the elongated projections of his van's windows out in all directions, onto the sides of the gas stand's white cinderblock walls, stretching out long across the lot's tarmac, and also out dancing between the trees of the pine forest.

Her head came through next, snapping back to upright from the painful angle that had caused her to scream. Then the rest of her spilled through with a slosh of long, blue sparks that flowed like a waterfall to the floor of the van, briefly ran every-which-way, and then vanished as quickly as the hole in reality did as it collapsed behind her with a quiet "thfft" and was gone.

The door of the gas stand flew open as she scrambled up into the passenger seat and looked over at her savior.

Through her tiny, lipless mouth she spoke to "Not-A-Fan" for the first time outside of her mind-link to his "Phone" across the "Dark Web Site" she had conjured up and, in a high, buzzing voice Robert would quickly grow to love, said, "The Great Escape!"

Robert smiled at "The Cooler King" and threw the van into reverse. They accelerated backwards away from the shouting attendant outside the gas stand's open door and back onto the mountain road with another ba-bump-ba-bump of the tires. Robert screeched the van to a slewing, downhill-facing, halt in the middle of the road, started humming The Great Escape's main musical score through a huge grin, and slammed the pedal to the metal.

[Sinitrena]

It seems all our agents have returned to base and it is now time for their debriefing.

Here is a list of our spies and their missions:

Stupot - The Vial Room
Baron - With my little Eye
Mandle - Friday Spyday

Please read their mission reports carefully and offer them constructive and detailed feedback here in this secure debriefing room. You may also send your opinion of who of the three did the best, second best and third best job at fulfilling their mission to their commander through the usual secret channels. The final debriefing with mission control will take place on 2. March.

(Or, if you want it in clearer words: Leave your comments about the stories in this thread and send me a PM with your choice of 1st 2nd and 3rd place until 2. March)

[Mandle]

FEEDBACK:

Stupot:

Spoiler

I liked your brief outing into this betrayed person's world. The A.I. feedback and adjustments were interesting as well, but also felt that they may have resulted in your story being too slick. The repetition of the final phrase was cool, but it did feel just a little synthetic. Well, probably I might feel that way because of your complete transparency of your experiment with A.I. feedback. It's gonna be an interesting world from here on in, that's for sure!

[close]

Baron:

Spoiler

Your story won my top vote. I loved the comeuppance of the pretentious main character once she realized that males are just waaaay too curious and tried to call off the mission. Great characters that could become part of a YA book series without any complaint from me. 

[close]

[Baron]

Sorry, stuck on my phone at yet another hockey arena.  Not ideal for feedback purposes.  Will try to post from my computer tomorrow.

[Stupot]

Thanks for your comments Mandle.

Here's a little bit of brief feedback from me:

Baron

Spoiler

Your story was charming and humorous and reminded me of my own childhood searching for Christmas pressies with my sisters. My interpretation is that the magazines actually did belong to the dad, not the mum, but the kids didn't really understand what that would imply.

[close]

Mandle

Spoiler

I enjoyed your anthology structure and the two inner stories were good but I wanted more from the wrap-around story. I could definitely envisage this as a larger work with 10 or so stories, with more space between them to develop the wrap-around characters.

[close]

[Sinitrena]

Sorry, I got busy.


Here are the results:

3rd place: Stupot with 5 points.

2nd place: Baron with 6 points.

1st place: Mandle with 7 points.

We have a winner! Mandle, congratulations, over to you.

[Mandle]

Yay! New theme coming nowish!

[Baron]

Feedback:

@Stupot:

Spoiler

An interesting exercise, using AI to proofread and offer feedback.  I wonder, if you submit the same work twice, do you get the same feedback?  The feedback itself was solid, if a bit generic.  However it lacked the more critical edge a real reader might give.  For a 144 word story is looking at his watch and seeing the time really critical information?  I liked the double-cross/triple-cross dynamic, but the swarm of teeth and tentacles was so... aberrant ...that it kind of threw me out of the story world.

[close]

@Mandle:

Spoiler

The spy stories within a spy story was a whole new level of intellectual thriller.  This story had everything, from traps and betrayals to love and chase scenes.  Given that I'm writing this after the competition has closed I can happily congratulate you on your well-deserved win.  But there's one loose thread that still irks me: who the hell is Richard in the last sentence??

[close]

[Mandle]

Baron, I have no idea what you mean. It CLEARLY says "Robert"!

(Just kidding, there's always one fucking mistake no matter how many times you proofread. It was right at the end so the caution that most car accidents happen just when you are close to home proves true! Thanks for noticing! Corrected on every version of the story!)