Drafting a new story in Mercury Drake's world. This will be his 3rd story. This is a prequel and I'm not sure if I'll publish. It might just be for me, or maybe even a freebie for my mailing list.
Mercury's 1st adventure in The Gamble.
https://vocal.media/fiction/the-gamble-8l79l00ae
🛰️ Grey Noise — Prologue
The Receiver
It started — as these things always do — in the quiet.
Not the ordinary quiet of a late-night pub or a sleeping house. I mean true silence.
3:17AM.
No wind.
No hum from the fridge.
Dogs curled up like meatloafs.
The world holding its breath.
That’s when I first heard it.
Not ringing. Not a hiss.
A pattern.
Click. Click-click. Click.
Morse code. I was trained in it, back in the Merchant Navy. Radio Officer class, ’77.
45 WPM was fast. This was faster. Maybe 70, maybe more.
My fingers twitched, like they remembered.
I told myself it was tinnitus. Some old audio ghost stirred by memory.
But then it came again.
Same pattern. Still too fast to decode in real-time.
But it didn’t feel random. It felt… sent.
Next time, I recorded it. Used a birdwatching mic I had lying around.
Amplified the audio. Ran it through a decoder.
Not words.
Coordinates.
Middle of the Atlantic.
The exact spot our ship lost engine power in 1981.
No distress call — transmitter fried. Just drifted until we limped back to port.
Coincidence, right?
Until I found others.
A post on an old Ham radio blog.
A NATO sigint guy rambling on Usenet in 2002.
A cosmonaut’s son claiming he woke up to find an antenna he’d never built in his backyard.
All hearing signals.
Always Morse.
Always… in silence.
We called it The Receiver Protocol.
Maybe we were marked.
Maybe we weren’t just trained — we were tuned.
Kept dormant until… something needed us again.
Last night I heard the clearest message yet. Slower. No numbers.
Three words:
“It begins soon.”
I haven’t told my wife.
I haven’t told the others.
But I cleaned the shortwave set this morning.
And I drew the blueprints from memory.
Something in me is awake now.
Something I didn’t know was asleep.
✍️ A.W. Rayne
📚 Grey Noise — Prologue
🔜 Chapter One soon.
#GreyNoise #Microfiction #SciFiShort #MastodonFiction #MorseCode #TheReceiver #FediverseWriting #CosmicMystery #SignalOrNoise #TinnitusOrTransmission #GreyWave
2024-02-04 Visual Inspiration prompt.
Have you ever ridden a personal self balancing transportation device?
Use this AI generated image to write a very short story based on it. Or just walk for God's sake... Whatever it inspires you to do!
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To find more inspiring images, browse the #VisualInspiration tag.
The film used both 3D and claymation IIRC.
It was a story about a tiny robot investigating an underground concrete maze where full-suit fat people lived (think the Volus from Mass Effect, with respirators and everything).
It was originally a huge armored robot, but a stray security system threw a rocket at it and after being blown up, a tiny robot emerged from the destroyed armor. I think it was a cyborg with a human brain, but am really not sure.
So these underground dwellers discover the tiny robot and take it to their leader who tells them it's a god.
As they take it to a particular area of the maze (they were foraging for food? IDK), it gets lost and gets chased by a giant centipede monster. The kid slides passing some ground tendrils that were used by giant worms, which lived in wall holes. The worms detect the giant centipede, which they proceeded to kill and eat.
At the end the kid falls down a chasm where another strange person finds its head and takes it with them.
Any ideas?
EDIT: Found it! It's called Junk Head (2017).
Short version: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x43qetf
Full feature-length video:
Jarrett
Alan Wright 🇬🇧 🇮🇲
Visual Inspiration
Cyber Yuki