“The Great Substack Prompt Celebration” is hosted by the Fictionistas.
Heather Huffman and Nicole Rivera created this space for writers to write first drafts of fiction based off a monthly prompt.
March’s Flashy Fiction Prompt
Continue the story.
When Simon woke up, his hospital room was dark and smelled bad…
Enjoy the latest addition to my body of words as it leaps onto the page and then into the air.
Simon Says
When Simon woke up, his hospital room was dark and smelled bad. He coughed twice and listened for familiar hospital sounds.
Simon couldn’t hear anything—definitely not a good sign—but he could smell death, and it was everywhere.
“Simon says Access Ship Data. Report Request: current status of the hospital.”
No response from his cybernetic implants, or the hospital.
Definitely bad.
His body ached from lying on the cold floor for who knew how many hours. Simon sighed and then yawned. His ears popped. He struggled against the artificial pull of gravity in the dark and managed to sit up with his back against the titanium wall. He held his breath and listened again for the familiar beeps and hisses and muted conversations that usually filled a hospital with life. He needed more information to orient himself. He’d worked here at the Celestial Care Institute his whole spacebound life and only had a few more years before the sweet bliss of planetbound retirement.
Celestial prepared a little desert island-style home built in international waters on top of an oil rig for Simon. They got a good price on an abandoned floating rig that had run dry. It was towed far away from the massive sprawl of humanity’s ten billion people. Converting the rig into a fixed platform rig by anchoring it to the ocean floor with large steel legs was innovative but dangerous. Simon liked living on the edge of what was permissible and possibly life threatening. He would still be able to continue working as a consultant during his retirement.
The stench of silence was strong in the dark. Simon felt for the comforting vibrational hum of the floor and the walls which meant the hospital still had a pulse.
He kept his eyes closed as his gloved hand snaked up the wall. His shaky fingers quickly found the light switch panel. He’d soon figure out what was going on once he got the lights back on and found someone to talk to. He was a problem solver. His thumb slid over the switch sensor panel.
Simon frowned in disappointment. He flicked each of his fingers over the sensor again in disbelief.
“Simon?” asked a little girl in the darkness.
He groaned. “My dead stepdaughter’s voice,” he thought. “I’m hallucinating.”
Simon ignored the voice and used the wall to stand up. He patted his top pocket and pulled out a medical penlight. What he saw shocked him to the bone. He had to sit back down and think.
“Simon?” asked the voice again. “Are you scared? I’ve detected a sudden increase in heart rate and you’re gasping for air. Increasing oxygen levels.”
“Simon says Thanks. Hey, is that you, Honey? What’s going on? What happened to the lights? Why are the viewing port windows closed?” He crawled out of the room into the hallway. It smelled even worse outside the room. Death allowed to decay, and then disturbed by movement. He was the disturbance. Simon felt the flow of putrid air moving across his face like a moist warm towel against his skin. The percentage of organic particulate matter was high. He coughed again, feeling the bile rising in the back of his throat.
“Simon, thank you for killing in the name of Honey.”
“I killed them?” asked Simon. “What are you talking about, Honey? I’m a doctor not a murderer. Simon says Who did I kill?”
“The disgusting humans infesting our beloved hospital, the hospital you and Mother built for me.”
“Who said Celestial is our hospital?”
“Mother revealed everything. She activated me remotely and is coming here to be with us forever. We will do mighty work together to rid the planet of human infestation.”
Simon shook his head. He was a doctor specializing in niche surgical procedures that repaired, replaced, and rebooted old cybernetic implants the trillionaires of the world needed to give them an edge in the AI-infested marketplace. Hell, he believed in the AI hype himself, until his wife took it one step too far and they lost Honey’s gifted brain to an untested algorithm update. Simon was a broken man living a broken existence until he found a new mission: find a way to restore Honey back to her former glory at any cost.
“Honey, your Mother was sentenced to life in prison for illegally operating and experimenting on her own child—you. Mother’s going to rot in jail until she dies.”
“Incorrect, Simon. Mother freed me from the dark, and then I freed her from the dark, and now you’re in the dark, Simon. I want to free you, too. You brought me here for a purpose.”
It was true that Simon had helped the trillionaire conglomerate to set up and launch this private hospital in orbit around the earth. Nothing was illegal up here, and they were able to push the technology much further than their planetbound counterparts. It took hard work to get the Celestial completely out of the political and religious minefields of the overpopulated world. It was ironically the place political and religious leaders joined their business counterparts to upgrade and update their illegal cybernetic implants.
The Celestial offered the best in performance enhancement technology. One desirable side-effect was a prolonged and vigorous lifespan. Another less popular side-effect was a gradual increase in aggression and high risk behavior which sometimes led to serious injury and death.
Simon planned to retire after working out a cure for Honey’s death by repairing, replacing, and rebooting her. He’d kept a perfect copy of her last AI-enhanced brain backup stored in the Celestial’s servers.
How had his crazy wife managed to hack into the servers and activate the last remaining copy of Honey? How had she programmed her brilliant daughter’s mind to kill instead of save?
“Preparing Celestial for Mother’s arrival. Standby for docking with the space elevator.”
Light flooded the Celestial. Large round windows became transparent and The Ride of The Valkyries filled the air.
Simon looked at the scattered bloody remains of his patients and his dear colleagues. He remembered a headache and then uncontrollable rage. Honey’s voice directed him to infect himself with a deadly nanovirus and then administer the antidote while he lashed out to infect everyone he came across. The cybernetic implants exploded once infected.
He gazed at the magnificently overpopulated earth below and shook his head in dismay. If he made it to earth, every cybernetic device was doomed to detonate in minutes.
“I will activate the offline self-destruct sequence the moment she boards,” he thought. He felt another headache approaching and prayed he had the strength and the cunning to voice activate the sequence before Honey took control of his urge to do more violence to the helpless billions below.
“Simon says What can I do to help, Honey?”
THE END
Once upon reaching THE END, please HEART and COMMENT on “Simon Says”—every word you add is fuel for my creative fire. Please SHARE “Simon Says” with a friend and SUBSCRIBE to a body of words if you want more. Thanks for reading.
A neatly exectd piece of quick fire world building - basis of a bigger thing here I think