alfvaen | Botober 1: 4-D Chickens (Reply)

So Janelle Shane, of the AI Weirdness blog and the AI book You Look Like A Thing And I Love You, has, for the second year, come up with AI-generated prompts to go along with the popular 31-day drawing-prompt challenge of Inktober. Last year's was "AInktober"; this year's is "Botober".

The prompts come in four sublists: "Things", "Concepts", "Advanced" and "Terrible", and, with one exception (surely an oversight), each days has one of each.

So I decided this year I would try to write a short story, à la my old four-word stories, for each day. Using all four (or however many) of the prompts. We'll see how long I can keep it up...I might give up after a few days, or roll some over into later months, or something. But hey, I didn't blow it on the first day, at least.
The prompts were:

Things: This space station

Concepts: A farm animal with purple spots

Advanced: Four-dimensional objects

Terrible: A rock.

4-D Chickens

Catriona peered through the glass. On the other hand was a couple of unconcerned chickens, completely normal looking if you ignored the fact that their feathers were covered with large, moving spots that glowed faintly purple. "So what exactly happened here?"

Allonia flapped her hands in agitation. "I don't know, Commander! I was doing some perfectly normal experiments using different frequencies of light to see if they had an effect on egg production…" Catriona looked dubiously at her, and she deflated. "All right! I was experimenting with tachyons again."

"And now this space station's livestock animals are…" Catriona peered around again. "Didn't we used to have three chickens in here? Where's the third one?"

Allonia glanced at the screen in front of her. "It's there…it's just, well, folded through time or something. Yes, look!" She pointed at what Catriona thought at first was a smear on the glass, but soon it became apparent as a tiny chicken, as if it were very far away, although she knew full well that the livestock chamber was only 10 meters across. The other two no longer appeared to be the same size either, she realized; one had grown (come closer?) and the other had shrunk (gone farther away?). Then the 'closer' one walked behind the other two, and Catriona turned away fighting a sensation of vertigo.

Her phone pinged with another text from Deacon. 'Rock is now five minutes away. Impact is now certain. Are you sure you won't evacuate?' She didn't dignify it with a response. "So why are we here?" she asked Allonia. "You're the tachyon specialist. Why aren't you helping the rest of the techs try to fix the attitude jets?" Not that they would be able to move the space station out of the path of the rock by this point. "Last time you did this, you were also the one to fix the problem."

Allonia flapped her hands again. "No time!" she said. "It could be anywhere in the system. Our only chance is here."

"The chickens," Catriona said dubiously. She briefly wished she had gotten onto the shuttle with Deacon and the rest. But their situation was barely less precarious than the station's; the shuttle was a short-range craft only, they were overloading it, and without the station to return to, they'd have to hope that one of the long-range craft managed to bring help within a day or two at most.

Allonia clicked on a large red button, and immediately the light in the room began to shimmer and pulse. As did the floors and bulkheads. "More tachyons!" she said.

Catriona glanced at the rock's impact timer, shrunken into one tiny corner of Allonia's screen. 4:10 … 4:05 … 4:02 … 4:00 … was it slowing down? "What's" she started.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of the chickens appear to lunge toward the glass. She turned her head towards it, as if she was buried in gelatin. "going" she continued.

The chicken loomed up towards them. Its feathers were enormous, the purple spots pulsing deeper into the ultraviolet as they flew towards her. The walls curved in impossible directions, tucking themselves into a Klein bottle. "on," she concluded. The timer swelled up, the first number counting up, the last counting down. 5:59 … 6:57 … 13:99 … XJ:~1 …

Everything

streeeeeeeeeeeeeetched

And then with a visible (but not audible) pop the room sprang back into place. "Tachyons off," Allonia said. The impact timer read --:--. "Four-dimensional pivot," she said.

"Wh-what?" Catriona stuttered.

"We did a four-dimensional pivot," Allonia said. "Dodged out of the way and the rock went right through where we were but we weren't there any more. Had to time it just right."

"And the chickens?" Catriona looked through the glass. Three perfectly normal chickens. No purple spots. Wait, no: five chickens. And a lot of eggs.