LordShadoko

The rain was falling. A sweet, warm oceanic rain, bathing the streets of the city. The tramways were slowly gliding on their tracks, their lights like golden halos in the rainy night. The oniromancer was walking in silence. The woman was wearing an old, grey pull-over and a pair of jeans. A timeless attire for a timeless city. She stopped to let a tramway pass in front of her. The vehicle stopped a few meters away, right beneath a sign that was reading : "Wall of the Cathedral." But the Cathedral didn't have walls. It had never had walls. The tramway opened its glass doors. No one came out. No one ever came out of the tramway at Cathedral's W

Earlier this morning I encountered interstellar life. My ship was slowly drifting at the edge of a nebula when I saw them on the long-range scanners. At first I thought it was a cloud of interstellar dust, or maybe even unmanned drones following a long-forgotten trade route leading to a dead world. Then the creatures started moving on their own, changing course to surround my ship. They looked both fragile and majestic, a bit like giant jellyfishes. Soon, they were all around my ship, drifting to get in the wake of my Alcubierre drive, using my momentum to travel faster. They had a glass-like body, and the light of a nearby star was going t

They were standing in the middle of the nebula. Two column-shaped structures, hundreds of thousands of kilometers long, geometric candles surronded by hydrogen clouds and interstellar dust, in the light of a distant binary system. My stellar map told me they were called "the Pillars". Sometimes, explorers and cartographers lack imagination, I thought while setting a course around the structures. I knew what the Pillars were. Or rather, I knew that we did not have a single clue about them. Their surface was completely flat, without any discernable flaw, even at a nanometric scale. And it was going on and on for three hundred thousand kilome

The wind was blowing through the red hills of the desert planet. A hurricane of dust and sand was surrounding me like a howling ghost. For thousands of years the wind has shaped this world, carving his path through the valleys, shaping the cliffs and painting the dunes. I was walking in the middle of the storm. For me it was but a gentle breeze. The atmospheric pressure was less than a third of Earth's, and no matter how impressive and majestic it was from orbit, down here the hurricane was a mere whisper in the air. The only thing I had to worry about was my oxygen mask. I was wondering if anyone could see me here. The only form of indigen

The ship was drifting in silence. Not in complete silence, of course. There was still the faint sound of the engines, and the whispers of the solar panels being deployed - but it didn't matter. These sounds were familiar to me. They were nothing but background noise, and to me they were like silence. I felt like the star was looking at me through the sensor arrays. It was young. A few million years old at best. Absolutely nothing for a star. Almost a newborn. The star was so bright the ship had to reduce its brightness by several orders of magnitude so that I could see it. I checked the stellar map. No name, just a number given by an au

The air was still. Filled with light. A golden glimmer, like a sunray on a lost jewel. I could see the city through the windows,and it was a forest of glass and steel. And we were here, sitting in its canopy. Stars awake, bathing the room in white shadows. There was something asleep in the eerie room. Networks were converging here. Millions of invisible wires, gathering in a single place, in a single mind. Roads of informations - tunnels of data. Humming voices in the faint light of a hidden world. A golden eye opened on a world made of numbers, of programs like binary fragments. The computer was looking. Thinking. A machine that w