Endtown by Aaron Neathery for September 30, 2016

Welp… we found out why the ship’s AI might need new sources of fuel. Green Energy sources aren’t fun after the end of the world.

my earworm du jour fits quite well: “this might be heaven or this might be h ell.”

although I’m tending toward the latter.

I see a beak! The bird people are trying to take over!

Shame the ship doesn’t use nickel-metal hydrides. Those are rechargeable.

Or is it the lost souls of the bird people?!

Looks like the ship has been collecting mutants for a while. Eww.

And that’s a really small bird….It looks like the ship has gone rogue and is killing off the survivors, one by one.

Maybe the “people” need real food and water to keep living in those bubbles! Yikes! What a Pandora’s box….er….bubble!

So, he found a dead bird. Not one of his friends.At this point I would be going insane.I would be screaming and wanting to go home, now please.At a point like this your whole life would pass before your mind and I’ve heard that just before folks die, they want to go where they were born.But that could have been in a Douglas Adams book.

Looks like the ship has been neglecting its batteries and they ran down… if you take my meaning.

I’m guessing they weren’t really eating inside the ditto illusions; the illusions satisfied their feelings of hunger and / or thirst but did not provide any nutrition. So if things go on for Holly and the others they’ll starve to death before long—-like this guy.

I love how the dittos are an extension of Wally.

And just as Wally’s tail had FINALLY calmed down to its normal state…

touch

“don’t touch!”

Either he is an exotic slave or he is to be lunch.

Maybe within those bubbles are those whose illusions keep them alive to provide the emotions for the AI to feed off of until their physical bodies starve to death?

Desiccated corpses inside them.

AH, I hadn’t caught that the dittos were acting as an extension of his hand.

Looks more like a haversack than a suspender strap to me. This bird has been dead for some time unless the ship also digests the bodies too.

Looks more like a haversack than a suspender strap to me. This bird has been dead for some time unless the ship also digests the bodies too.

I predict this will end with the destruction of this vessel…

If the “bubbles” require energy to maintain, why waste it if the emotional “donor” has died? Are the organic remains used in some way—perhaps as raw material for more dittos?

This was done by the nanobots in the novel Prey, by Michael Crichton

“Give ’em the Fist! Give ’em the Wrist! Give ’em the Finger!”

“It’s a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!!!”

Also: “Soylent dreams are people!”

“Who’s in the oubliette?”“I forget.”

At least Wally knows what he needs to do now, pop as many bubbles as he needs to to find Holly, Kirbee, Chic and Irving. Something tells me the ship has something else up its sleeve.

Posted the interview with Aaron Neathery at Basket Case.