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Difficult-Theory-413 t1_jd1pps6 wrote

Waking up from the voyage in a dark room, adorned with the humming of what I assume is the sound of the other cryo-pods, I groggily made my way towards the LED lit exit door. I asked the AI controller cafe to make me a coffee to wake myself up. Then it hit me that I was alone. There were no other awake passengers. I thought maybe they were simply waking up slower than I, after all I was always a mornings guy. I finished my drink and went back into the dark room to check on some of the passengers. I was guided around the pods by the red lighting underneath each of them. I payed no mind to the crimson coloration, assuming it had not meaning. I looked through atleast 100 pods and every single one was empty. Then I realized that the pod I had awoken in was blue lit. I came to the realization that I was the only passenger left. I had a little panic attack, then remembered in the trip briefing that the ships AI had a camera system that could be manually accessed. I used the wall markings to find the service room and logged into the computer with my company assigned ID. This allowed to me to read the ships logs from what the AI had been up to for the past 800 or so years. I was mindlessly scrolling through system update notifications and waste management tabs, when I noticed a red notification. As I read, the ship had apparently experienced a meteor shower about 125 years before I woke up. The ship hadn't had the spare materials onboard to repair the damage, as the company had presumed a safe voyage and any repairs would be done once we docked on the exoplanet. But the ship had sustained extreme outer damage and was at risk of losing cargo, I realized that we had been the "cargo." The ship reported "repurposing and reusing 907,236.68 pounds of organic material to temporarily repair the damage to the ship to complete to voyage. Horrified, I made my way to the passenger report sector for how many pods were not dead. There were 4998 marked red, and 2 marked blue. My file was one of the blue ones. I clicked the other blue file, a woman my age. I found her pod number, #3765, but decided against manually waking her up. I felt that since we were still 350 years away from arrival, the ship should have at a least one living passenger.

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Difficult-Theory-413 t1_jd22il5 wrote

Sorry for formatting by the way I'm on mobile, please respond with your thoughts as this is my first ever story

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nyenbee t1_jd3lgzu wrote

Not for nothing, but andriod phones can do a paragraph break with 2 <enters>.

Otherwise, there's a reddit format code list that you can Google. Once you get your story down, go back, proof, and format. I hope this helps (some of us don't have the capacity to read text in a "wall" block).

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librarian-faust t1_jd74f05 wrote

It's a good one, but I feel like it needs more.

What's the protagonist going to do? Issue orders and go back to Cryo? Interrogate the AI and learn that... he's the second to last one to awaken, and he needs to patch up systems and then report to Recycling for disassembly?

It's a great "oh god, everything went wrong", but there's no motion to the story. Just a cold, still, scene. Which is GREAT. And fitting. And a perfect end, if that's what you intended.

I just always feel like there should be something of "what do I do now?", and "were samples kept? Will the colonists be revived? Are they all uploaded to the biocomputer matrix?"

I always want a protagonist, a character, to have an action or motion to them. Something to look forward to. So that you have an idea what they're doing, five minutes after the story ends.

I have no idea what your protagonist is doing five minutes post-story, besides going back to the now cold dregs of his abandoned coffee, feeling a slowly dawning horror, then suiting up like the guy from Dead Space in case of "ship's haunted".

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Difficult-Theory-413 t1_jd9nfgm wrote

I know it is rather incomplete but I wrote this at like 11pm (23:00 for non Americans) so I didn't really consider any endings lol. When I get home later I will work on a part 2

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librarian-faust t1_jdc2r1o wrote

<3 Thanks.

And, I hope I didn't come across as a dickhead. You wrote something awesome.

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Evaara t1_jd2b1p6 wrote

Yeesh. That was a doozy. Nice way to finish.

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Difficult-Theory-413 t1_jd5fsu1 wrote

Yeah I know but I tried 😂 morbid little factoid: the number I used for the weight of the "organic material" was actually calculated by the average percent of female to male body weight and how many (i assumed this part) passengers would be male and female

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TentacleJihadHentai t1_jd3joau wrote

He should start pumping out DNA samples while he can. Maybe by the hand of God the human race can survive.

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nyenbee t1_jd3ly7y wrote

You're not wrong, but your username gives me pause...

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Difficult-Theory-413 t1_jd5f2qu wrote

Dude I laughed so hard when I read your name lol

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Cyno_Mahamatra t1_jd5fxw7 wrote

I tried to figure out where Jihad fit in

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TentacleJihadHentai t1_jd5ty6b wrote

I fight for Holy Azathoth the Father, Sha Ia Niggurath the Mother, and the Radiant Tentacles of Cthulhu.

Praise the tentacle

Embrace the tentacle

Or be smacked by a dimensionally translocated tentacle.

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Cyno_Mahamatra t1_jd5u4a2 wrote

I see. I didn’t realize the word “Jihad” could be used outside of an Islamic context.

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librarian-faust t1_jd73v8j wrote

I feel like this would be one of the lines from a Darkest Dungeon character if it was a cheerful pervy manga rather than the pitchblack horror setting it is.

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ImFeelingGud t1_jd4exw1 wrote

Nice take on that one, ship computer puts the mission and lifespan of the ship first instead of the colonists well being and uses them as spare parts for the hull.

My take would be that with the genetics lab the computer would have found a way to artificially grow and mass produce human parts to later use as materials to fix the ship's hull, later when the colonists wake up they find that most of the exterior hull of the ship has been patched up with organic matter, and the ship keeps pumping out body parts because flesh doesn't really hold up really well against stray asteroids.

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superanth t1_jd63cqc wrote

This is what I was expecting too, right after the genetics lab was mentioned.

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