CATAPULT SLINGSHOT CRACKED

She feels zero, subtracted from, negated by the contradictory fact of her younger self. Always an uncomfortable thought to fit in one’s head.

At this moment she exists in two places at once. Sa would be ten or eleven right now, a mere five billion kilometer jaunt away.

CATAPULT SLINGSHOT CRACKED

What followed was a Titanomachy that left the planet dead down to its core, in her time a cold and cracked monument. Patterns of atomic behavior that called themselves Neptune or Apollo decided, with horrific suddenness, to die as grandly as they deserved. And while it had triggered a domino-chain of suicides among its pantheon, its programmer had been woefully illiterate in classical mythology. It was intended to kill off the demisapient processes that regulated everything from its hydrological cycle to its ecosystems. It had begun with a simple logic bomb smuggled into the tutelary software on which the planet operated, and there left to cook like a rat corpse in the wall. Sa remembers this from her past, actually-the black day Pluto went mad. She has chosen her weapon a little too well. Sa takes it all in from the bellied-up keel of some leviathan war vessel bombarded into shapelessness, now a convenient straightaway. Warships flounder in the firmament beyond, gnawed upon by flung gobbets of surface matter gone cancerous. Mushroom clouds bloom all along the horizon where cylinders of pure, fabbed uranium have been dropped from outside the planetoid, blasting starry craters in its shallow atmosphere, to say nothing of its crust. The sky is all storm, great scarified burls of fulgurant cloud lumped into screaming faces. This was perhaps a bit much for squashing a spider. Sa would die to admit it, but she must agree. Chasing the Start (Part 2) by Evan Marcroft

Catapult slingshot