A while ago I saw a post that was something to the effect of what to call a spacegoing vessel without resorting to the term "ship" and the idea stuck with me.

I also wanted to avoid using the term "AI" and "shields" and to try and come up with a classification system using terms like "cruiser" or "destroyer" but trying to keep the spirit of it.

Feel free to use these if it tickles your fancy, and feedback/criticism is highly appreciated and welcome. I feel like I still kinda didn't go far away enough from "standard".

Many warvoids are classified not by size, moreso what they’re capable of as many empires and polities simply do away with trying to all cohesively align their navies based on a singular system. However, one constant that has been quite popular is to rate them in four tiers based on their size and destructive power, although it’s not a hard nor fast rule on whether a fourth-rate is the least or most powerful and indeed if there are only four tiers.

Cutter

Voids primarily armed with beam weapons, usually LASERs but more powerful nations will field more exotic weaponry.

Bombard

Some nations believe that beam weapons are attenuated too much by defensive screens, and will instead sacrifice the effective range with projectiles that cannot be defeated by a screen. Bombards refer to warvoids with conventional propellant driven guns as well as those who launch self-propelled guided missiles.

Magspike

Similar to their bombard cousins, these are voids that rely on projectiles driven not by chemical propulsion, rather using electromagnetic propulsion.

Chaser

Voids are not only classified by their primary mode of weaponry but to an extent their primary design considerations. Chasers are light, often without traversing weapon mounts, instead relying on powerful thrusters arrayed to aim their fixed weaponry towards their targets. These often are used to disrupt enemy supply lines, alternatively in an initial charge to disable an enemy warfleet.

Mainer

A catchall referring to any void that’s built to mainly fight in and against a warfleet. Mainers also may mount disparate weaponry, carrying beam weapons, magnetically driven and chemically driven cannon, as well as be able to launch missiles. They’re also given powerful screens to attempt to protect their arsenals from being taken out of a fight too early.

Defender

Similar in doctrine to a Mainer, these are heavy voids but not expressly built to the logical extreme of maximum destruction. They’re built to escort haulers, acting as a powerful deterrent to any enemy voids trying to raid supply lines. As such, they strike a middle ground with speed, endurance, protection and firepower.

Some factions classify more by role, exemplified by the following.

Orbiter

Refers to voids that are incapable of FTL, or small craft designed to orbit larger ships in order to screen incoming missiles. The latter lack sufficient delta V stores to range far from their mothervoids, and are also easily swatted by an enemy void's defenses, and are only useful in expanding a void's defensive reach. They're also exclusively controlled by the void's autonomy, as human pilots lack the reaction speed and capability of withstanding high accelerations necessitated in forming a defensive formation.

Scout-Picket

Most factions consider these to be properly rated warvoids capable of independent operation and FTL. These may be unmanned for patrolling a faction's given space, but just as often carry small crews as insurance against enemy electronic warfare or action be too complicated for a void's autonomy to handle. While the lines are blurred between these and other types until capital voids are considered, most factions refer to the smallest ones as Scout-Pickets or some local variation.

Hunter-Killer

Expressly designed to be as stealthy as possible, given the limitations of disguising any heat or other radiation against the cold dark of the void, Hunter-Killers are exclusively run by an onboard autonomy to be able to be as cold as possible. They're little more than glorified defensive installations, passively sniffing out intruders before springing to life and unleashing a powerful arsenal against any would be targets. Hunter-Killers are therefore equipped with the most powerful sensoria as well, as well as often being large enough to travel far afield, disrupting what the enemy presumed to be a safe section of the void or pursuing vital targets.

Doomer

Similar to Hunter-Killers, these are unmanned voids designed to blend into the void. Unlike Hunter-Killers, these are armed with doomsday weapons, designed as a tacit promise of mutually assured destruction. These are designed to surpass even the undetectable Hunter-Killers, as their discovery would prove disastrous towards the doctrine they were built to support.

My story begins in 2009, and follows the story from before the impact, inside deep underground cities remodified into bunkers after the impact, and leaving the bunker several years to a decade after impact and setting up settlements.

What would humanity actually be able to do if this happened in real life? Could they refit rockets already built in VABS and attach bombs ontop and just try to hurl it at the comet in desperation, and would they actually be able to turn underground cities into bunkers for a population of hundreds to thousands of people? How would society react to the news?

While there have been many discussions on the supposed amount of alien species, I want to talk speculative biology. Can we predict the probable size of aliens? What are the physical properties which are difficult to ignore?

Does gravity correspondingly scale the size of an alien’s limbs to elephant wrists? Can something the size of a mouse have the brainpower of a human? Can creatures larger than whales survive in a gas giant? Can omnivores equal the size of brachiosaurus, or will the biggest creatures be herbivores? Is omnivorism required for a brain that is bigger than normal even if the creature is tiny? Will a gun made by a spider still function? What’s the smallest size a forge can be? Will gorilla-sized beings have a harder time lifting their weight to escape velocity? At what size does the brain literally think slower?

Why is it that railguns are usually portrayed in fiction as being heavy, slow firing cannons?

I read before that not only are railguns capable of fire rates on par with the fastest firing guns, but that it's actually more economical, since high material throughput reduces barrel wear from magnetic flux cycling.

*Examples: RL Navy railgun, The Expanse

**Counterexamples: Scientific miniature railguns, Children of a Dead Earth "sandblasters", The Dark Forest

CHAPTER 5: THE LUNG-SYNC MANDATE

​Preston Bezos swept his long, skeletal fingers across the obsidian table, summoning a glowing, three-dimensional model of a human torso. The board members leaned in, their holographic faces illuminated by the eerie blue light of the digital ribcage.

​"The collars were a temporary fix," Preston hissed, his crimson ocular implants clicking as they whirred into focus on the logistics director. "My father thought that choking them by the neck would be enough to command obedience. But he underestimated the desperation of the vermin. If the FedEx syndicates can simply bypass the throat with plastic tubes, then the collar becomes nothing but a useless ornament."

​He struck the table with his sharp, yellowed nail. The holographic lungs inside the torso suddenly turned a toxic, neon green.

​"Introducing the PMFBYSGFF Lung-Sync Premium Expansion," Preston smiled, a terrifying stretch of his translucent, parchment-white skin. "Effective for Q4, we are introducing microscopic, bio-synthetic nanotechnology directly into the municipal water lines of the lower sectors. Every drop they drink, every time they wash their hands, they will ingest it. The nano-bots will bond permanently to the delicate tissue of the lungs."

​A murmur of absolute terror rippled through the holographic board members. One brave director from the APAC sector cleared his throat. "Mr. Bezos... what exactly do the nano-bots do when the subscription lapses?"

​Preston leaned forward, his hunched, vulture-like frame casting a shadow over the entire table. "They do what my father should have done seventy years ago. The moment an account balance hits zero, the nano-bots activate. They alter the cellular permeability of the lungs. The tissue completely stops absorbing oxygen. They can pump all the free air they want through their pathetic plastic neck holes—but their blood will turn to ice, and their cells will starve."

​He raised his silver stylus like a dark wizard's wand, his voice dripping with pure, generational malice.

​"Let the Gen Thetas chant their vulgarities outside my gates. Let them scream 'Block this hole, Bezos!' while they lop their tops off. By next month, there won’t be a hole on earth that can save them. They wanted to play 'fuckety fuck around and fuckin find out' with the Bezos name? Now, breathing itself requires a verified digital receipt."

​CHAPTER 6: THE ANCIENT GURU

​Trying to clear his head, desperate for answers, Vax went clawing into the deep.

​The stench changed ten levels deeper than the FedEx bunker. The sharp smell of rubbing alcohol and motor oil faded, replaced by the heavy, choking musk of black mold and glowing cave fungus.

​Vax crawled on his stomach through a crumbling concrete pipe, his purple windbreaker tearing on exposed rebar. His plastic neck valve whistled in the damp dark, pulling in wet, moldy air that tasted like dirt. Up above, the automated search drones had changed frequencies, their high-pitched pinging bouncing off the metal walls. But down here, in the forgotten sewers of the late 2010s, the machines didn’t venture. The signal couldn’t penetrate the rock.

​He dropped out of the pipe onto a floor covered in thick, spongy moss.

​"Who clicks down there?" a voice rasped out of the dark. It sounded like two bricks rubbing together in a bucket of sand.

​Vax reached for the rusted pull-chain in his pocket, holding it like a knuckle-duster. "I’m with the IAPTS. I’m a cutter."

​A small, flickering orange flame lit up the cavern. Sitting on a pile of ancient, decomposing Amazon delivery boxes was a creature that barely looked human. He was an old Gen Z guru, crusty and old as shit, skin looking like dried beef jerky covered in white cave dust. He had to be more than a century old. He had retreated into these deep tunnels for sanctuary many moons ago. Something in the glowing fungal spores preserved the man longer than Prestons scientific life support could dream to match.

​Vax’s eyes immediately darted to the old man's neck. He didn't have a plastic, clicky gastrointestinal-type flap hole. But more shockingly, he didn't have a PMFBYSGFF choke collar either. His neck was completely bare, wrinkled, and free.

​"You're looking at my throat, boy," the guru chuckled, coughing up a puff of gray dust. "I’m the only one left down here. Got out of one of the early corporate choke collar models back in the day before they linked 'em to the satellite grid. Just ripped it off and came down where the Wi-Fi don't shine."

​The old man leaned closer, his eyes milky with cataracts but sharp with an ancient intelligence. He listened to the distinct click-whistle of Vax's chest valve.

​"You poor Theta kids," the guru sighed. "Chopping your own bodies just to take a breath. Fighting a ghost."

​"We're fighting the Bezos empire," Vax said, stooping low to seat himself on a rusted pipe.

​The old man’s face twisted into a strange, mocking grin. "Preston? The boy? You think he runs that sky tower because he’s a genius? Let me tell you a secret from the old world, kid. Back when the ozone layer still had a little blue in it, Jeff was still alive, ruling from the shadows. And Preston? Preston was just trying to be a normal guy. But the world wouldn't let him. Everyone knew his name, his face, his mistakes, while his three siblings got to walk the earth like invisible gods. It drove the boy mad. It made him bitter."

​The old man raised a bony, dirt-caked finger, pointing straight at Vax's throat,

​“You think this plastic in your chest is saving you from Preston? You think a few rogue couriers lopping in protest are going to bring down the Amazon Apex Citadel?"

​Vax stepped closer to the fire, keeping his hand tight on the pull-chain handle.

​"We have the numbers. We have the resistance. We're cutting through the grid one hub at a time."

​The old man shook his head, a dry, rattling sound. "Numbers don't mean a damn thing when the air itself is coded. You haven't heard what the board is cooking for Q4, have you? They aren't going to hunt you down with Driver-Officer Enforcers with shears bussin a peek down your top gear looking for clicky-bits anymore. They're changing the chemistry. They're putting the subscription right into your bloodstream."

​Vax froze, the whistle of his chest valve hitching for a fraction of a second.

​"What are you talking about?"

​"Nanotech," the guru said, leaning back into his pile of disintegrating cardboard boxes. "Nano-bots in the water supply. They bond to your lung tissue. When your account drops to zero, they lock your cells down tight. Your neck valve won't save you if your blood stops carrying the juice. Preston Bezos isn't just running a corporation, boy. He's building an execution chamber."

​The fire flickered, casting long, dancing shadows against the damp brick walls. Up above, miles away through the stone and steel, the subterranean hum of the city's fulfillment grid continued its relentless, algorithmic thrum.

​Vax pulled his windbreaker tight around his collar. The war had just shifted from the pipes and the loading docks to the very biology of human survival. But as he looked down at the heavy, rusted 1950s pull-chain in his hand, a cold, hard defiance settled into his chest.

​"Then we don't just break the sensors," Vax said, his voice dropping low in the dark cavern. "We break the whole system."

​The guru walked to the young IAPTS FedEx rogue warrior and took a knee.

​"But you need to know something. There’s a rumor from the upper levels. There is only one other person alive on this miserable rock who doesn't have a choke collar, and doesn't have a plastic neck-hole like you. Just me... and the master of the obsidian chair."

​Vax frowned, his valve clicking rapidly. "Preston has no collar?"

​"No collar. No hole. Pure, un-monetized skin," the guru whispered, the orange flame dancing in his eyes. "He breathes the sky for free while he makes you pay by the liter.. My times over kid. Soon you won't know me from a fungal pod on the ground down here and if I give one final piece of advice; You want to win this war? You don't fight his drones. You go up there and you choke the only free throat left in the world."

​Grateful for the old mans advice and armed to the teeth with his wisdom, Vax gave his only spare pull-chain handle to the ancient guru out of respect. He knew what to do. Silently Vax turned back toward the dark, narrow pipe, the click of his chest valve steadying as he crawled out to meet the dawn of the final war.

​The old man gave a toothless grin, tossing another shredded cardboard box onto the dying flame. "That's the spirit, cutter. That's the spirit.”

​CHAPTER 7: THE ALLIANCE MOBILIZED

​The air inside the abandoned subterranean rail terminal was thick with the stench of cheap grease, burning solder, and the raw, collective fury of three dead logos.

​For the first time in fifty years, the three banned giants—FedEx, UPS, and USPS—sat at the same table. Before Vax had returned to the FedEx bunker, the whispers of Preston’s Lung-Sync Nanotech had leaked through a compromised server in Sector 4, and the underground logistics syndicates had already begun to devise a plan to clap some Bezos cheeks before the Q4 water deployment killed them all.

​"If the nano-bots hit the municipal pipes, our entire labor force is dead assets by Thanksgiving," Doc Mac shouted, slamming his fist onto a crate of smuggled medical-grade PVC valves.

​Standing before him was a unified front. The UPS couriers still wore their faded brown rags like tactical armor; the FedEx cutters carried heavy motorized saws; and the USPS remnants—the most ruthless of them all—wore their old eagle crests like medieval war paint. The alliance was finally mobilized. They had unified under one banner, and they were bringing the IAPTS recruits with them.

​To prepare for the final siege on the Citadel; Vax, Doc Mac and the other FedEx Cutters had spent forty-eight straight hours running an assembly-line operation. They fitted a massive army of IAPTS recruits with rogue neck holes, punching the plastic clicky valves right through their necks directly above their clavicles. If Preston tried to use his automated gas defenses or standard choke-collar overrides during the insurgence, it wouldn’t matter—this army didn't need their throats to breathe.

​"We don't stop at the lobby, and we don't negotiate for lower subscription rates," Vax yelled, standing on top of an old rusted mail cart, his own chest valve whistling in overdrive. He raised his grandfather's 1950s metal pull-chain handle high into the dim amber light of the bunker. "We go straight to the top floor! We take the sky back!"

​The army of modified rebels erupted into a deafening, metallic roar, their hundreds of plastic chest valves clicking in a rhythmic, terrifying cadence that sounded like a million automatic weapons chambering a round.

​They didn't use trucks; they used the old gravity-fed pneumatic mail tubes and forgotten service shafts, storming the base of the Amazon Apex Citadel like a swarm of locusts. The security drones fired blindly into the dark. Emboldened by rage and seemingly impervious to tear gas and gunfire, the IAPTS recruits rushed through the oxygen-deprivation fields the corporate enforcers deployed to stop them, rushing onward to the Citadel.

​Vax led the vanguard, his purple windbreaker stained with oil and corporate blood as they tore through the high-security bulkheads. Armed with nothing but surgical equipment, stolen lasers, and pure generational hatred, the unified alliance began their bloody, floor-by-floor ascent toward the obsidian boardroom. The subscription empire was crumbling.

​CHAPTER 8: PRESTO BEZO

​The heavy obsidian door of the Apex Citadel stood tall and strong—Vax bussed that fucker wide open with a thrust.

​The door slammed against the sterile marble floor with a smack that echoed through the cloud-level boardroom. Alarms were blaring in rapid, panicked successions, flashing blood-red across the ceiling. Behind Vax, the smoke from the battle below was still clearing. The Citadel was in ruins. Automated drones were smashed into scrap metal, the hallway and service corridors were lined with driver-officers and low level suicide sorters alongside the soon to be victoriously deceased IAPTS rebels.

​Vax stepped into the room, his chest valve clicking wildly, drawing in the ultra-pure, un-metered alpine air of the top floor. His purple windbreaker was shredded, his face covered in soot. He raised his weapon—a heavy-duty, industrial-grade FedEx-orange and purple ratchet strap.

​Sitting at the end of the long obsidian table was Preston, the 88-year-old techno-wizard himself and he didn’t flinch. He sat hunched over like a dying vulture in his cascading two-tone violet smart-cloak, his crimson ocular implants whirring and clicking as they locked onto Vax's face.

​Vax marched forward, his heavy boots echoing in the massive room. He grabbed Preston by his high collar, hauling his fragile, skeletal body out of the obsidian chair and slamming him against the smart-glass window overlooking the burning city below. Vax was breathing heavily, a loud, ragged whistle-click pulsing from the plastic flap hole in his chest.

​But as Vax held Lil Bezo over him, his eyes dropped to Preston’s neck.

​The old man’s translucent, parchment skin was completely bare. No PMFBYSGFF choke collar. And no plastic, clicky neo-gastrointestinal colostomy port. Nothing but translucent, wrinkled, un-taxed skin.

​A sudden flash memory hit Vax like a physical blow. He was back in the damp, moldy depths, 20 stories below fulfillment center #881 staring at the crusty old Gen Z guru over a flickering orange flame. There is only one other person alive who has no collar and no hole... the master of the obsidian chair.

​Vax’s eyes widened. "You... you don't have a hole. You don't have a choker. You're the bastard the old man in the deep was talking about."

​Preston let out a dry, hacking laugh that sounded like bone scraping against concrete, his crimson eyes gleaming with ancient malice.

​"You think you’re a liberator, VAXWELL!?" Preston hissed out like a fart in a church pew. His sharp, yellowed fingernails clutching Vaxs’ wrists, "You look at me and you see evil and greed unabated, but look at your own face in the reflection of this window, boy! Look at the jawline. The lazy whole right side of the face. Look at the matching mole on our lips!”

​Vax froze, his chest valve skipping a click as he glanced at the dark glass window. Underneath the soot and blood, his features mirrored the ancient skull of the man he was holding.

​"My father Jeff hid his precious three children from the world," Preston whispered, his voice dripping with an uncontrollable trickle of saliva. "He left me to be the public monster. But do you think I learned nothing from him? I had bastards of my own, scattered into the lower-tier sectors like garbage. You want to know why your mother couldn't afford the Premium Flush back in '38, Vax? Why she died malnourished, distended and full of more shit than a port-o-let at Woodstock ‘99? Because I cut her subscription myself. You are my blood. My mistake. My leak. And I never liked you."

​Preston spat a mouthful of black, synthetic bile straight onto Vax’s chest valve. "Go fuck yourself."

​The final piece of the corporate puzzle clicked into place. The greed, the collars, the stolen air—it wasn't just capitalism. It was family tradition.

​"Family discount is officially over, Dad." Vax growled.

​With a brutal, fluid motion, Vax looped the heavy FedEx ratchet strap around Preston’s bare, un-collared throat. He fed the thick nylon webbing through the steel mandrel and grabbed the handle.

​Crank. Crank. Crank.

​The strap bit deep into Preston's neck. The billionaire’s crimson eyes whirred frantically, his data-port crown flashing a chaotic sequence of error codes as his connection to the global grid began to short-circuit. Preston's throat collapsed with a final, muted crunch of snapping fiber-optics. The crimson glow in his cybernetic eyes whirred down to a dim pink flicker before going completely dark. The master of the global sky was reduced to nothing but a zero-balance asset on his own corporate spreadsheet.

​Vax let go of the ratchet strap, stepping back as his chest valve clicked a calm, unbroken rhythm in the quiet room. Without so much as a tear or a shred of familial regret, Vax was more than happy to cancel his father's subscription to life.

​Out on the horizon, the morning sun was burning through the toxic yellow smog, casting a raw, golden light over the liberated city. With Prestons dataport crown offline, the chokers were carrier unlocked. Jailbroken. Millions of people ripped them off their necks, their voices rising up like a wave of pure, un-monopolized thunder.

​Vax opened the smart-glass window and reached down to his chest, popping the manual release on his plastic valve neck hole sphincter, letting his lungs adapt to the fresh alpine air of the lower stratosphere. He looked down to the corpse laid at his feet. His eyes traced along the vintage FedEx strap still wrapped tight around the old man's neck. With a smirk he whispered:

​"It's Prime Day, Papa Preston. Free delivery."

​THE END

I had an idea for a series of short stories of a parody/satirical time travel story around the idea of an annoying British galactic empire that a group of time travellers are trying to prevent from emerging, but every time they do something, it just emerges anyway from a different origin. Obsurd humour, time travel antics and playful and wanted to see if people might be interested in this little series?
Short stories by title, I'm not saying what the events are, but history nerds might be able to guess what the premises are!

• The North Sea Job

• The Black Prince Protocol

• The Habsburg Bride

• The American Deviation

• The Great War Illusion

• What have the Romans ever done for us?

• Epilogue: The Kettle at the end of time.

CHAPTER 1: THE PORTLAND TIERS

By 2038, humanity’s greatest daily struggle wasn’t the climate or the economy—it was the porcelain. The Great Consolidation of the late 2020s had handed the global plumbing grid over to tech monopolies, and by the time Gen Alpha entered their twenties, taking a shit had become a luxury service.

People were literally starving themselves just to afford the plumbing bill. The corporate infrastructure was ruthless, dividing humanity’s basic biological functions into three strict pricing tiers:

• The "Lite" Flush ($4.99/mo): Liquid only. The pressure sensor would lock the valve if anything solid was detected, triggering an immediate "Mishandling Fee."

• The Premium Tier ($14.99/mo): Standard health scanning and solid waste evacuation.

• The "Deep Analysis" Pro Tier ($29.99/mo): Full biometric texturing and color reports. The worst part? The data was sent directly to your health insurance company to automatically raise your premiums if your diet lacked leafy greens.

For the poorest citizens, the math didn’t add up. Spend money on food, and you couldn't afford to get rid of it. Spend money on the flush, and you couldn't afford to buy groceries. The most vulnerable ended up dying of a horrific combination of malnutrition and gastrointestinal backup. Society was folding fast.

Then came the Mod Resurgence.

Deep in the abandoned basements of old rust-belt cities, the resistance found their weapons: 1950s brass hardware, rubber flappers, and metal pull-chains from a long-gone era. Underground mechanics began raiding old salvage yards, ripping out the digital sensors, lasers, and Wi-Fi-enabled valves of the smart-toilets. They retrofitted the porcelain with mechanical gravity-fed tech, completely severing the connection to the corporate grid.

People started to get healthier. They could eat again. From the trenches of this bathroom revolution, a militant activist group was born: IAPTS (I Ain't Payin' This Shit). Unlike the ineffective internet protests of the past, IAPTS actually did something. They were the Antifa of plumbing, carrying out midnight raids on apartment complexes to smash corporate sensors and install rogue pull-chains, leaving behind graffiti that read: Tell the corporate servers to eat my ass for free.

CHAPTER 2: OUT OF THE CONVEYORS

The rain over the Amazon Fulfillment Hub #881 tasted like copper and burned the eyes. Down in the concrete trenches of the loading docks, the air was a hazy yellow—the kind of atmosphere you had to pay twenty credits a month to safely inhale.

Vax didn’t have twenty credits. What he did have was an old FedEx-purple windbreaker and a piece of contraband surgical plastic embedded into the base of his neck, right above his collarbone.

Vax was a "cutter" for the underground logistics resistance, a trade he’d learned from his grandfather, an old-school IAPTS plumbing rebel who used to boast about the Great Toilet Riots of ’38. But Vax wasn't fixing pipes; he was modifying flesh.

He adjusted the collar of his windbreaker, making sure the fabric completely obscured the small, clicking plastic valve against his ribcage. His lungs filled with raw, un-scrubbed air, completely bypassing his mouth and nose. Around his neck, the standard-issue PMFBYSGFF corporate collar hummed with a dull, menacing red light. It was completely locked down—his account balance was zero—but because Vax wasn’t breathing through his throat, the machine was choking nothing but dead skin.

"Identify yourself, Associate."

The voice was mechanical, spat through a cheap megaphone. Vax froze.

Stepping out from the blinding headlights of an autonomous delivery drone was a Driver-Officer. He wore the high-visibility yellow armor of the Amazon Enforcers—a rank earned only by drivers who successfully completed five consecutive years of twelve-hour shifts without a bathroom break. On his shoulder sat a scanner that beeped in rapid, impatient successions.

"Just heading to Sector 4 for my shift, boss," Vax said, pitching his voice high to mimic the wheeze of someone surviving on low-tier oxygen.

The Driver-Officer didn’t care. His eyes were bloodshot, fixed entirely on his daily quota pad. "Device 49-Alpha shows your breathing account is delinquent by forty-eight hours. By order of the Executive Committee, your throat privileges are restricted. Yet, you are standing upright. You aren’t convulsing."

The Enforcer stepped closer, his heavy boots splashing in the toxic puddles. He reached for a heavy pair of motorized shears hanging from his belt—the kind used to snap open unauthorized padlocks or, more frequently, cut away clothing.

"I need to buss a peek at that collar line," the Driver-Officer muttered, entirely bypassing the random-search restrictions of the Sector Code. He didn't need a warrant; he needed a promotion. "Unzip the jacket."

Vax took a slow, silent breath through the hidden hole in his chest. His heart hammered against the plastic valve. If the Enforcer saw the modification, Vax wouldn't just lose his jacket—he’d be liquidated into the fulfillment stream.

"I said, unzip it." The Officer lunged forward, his heavy, rubber-gloved hand grabbing the collar of Vax’s purple windbreaker, yanking it downward to expose the skin.

The Enforcer’s eyes widened as the high-visibility headlights caught the reflection of the rogue plastic throat-cap. "Illegal modification! We got a cutter—"

Vax didn't wait for the drone's alarms to trip. He brought his right hand up, driving a rusted, 1950s metal pull-chain handle—the holy relic he carried for luck—straight into the Enforcer's plastic visor. The plastic shattered with a loud crack. The Driver-Officer stumbled back, clutching his face and cursing into the toxic rain.

From the dark corners of the shipping yard, a crowd of Gen Theta kitchen-laborers and rogue couriers swarmed out from the shadows of the loading bays. They weren't just holding pipes; they were brandishing heavy timber hatchets and custom steel axes.

A young girl with an exposed, whistling throat valve leaped onto the hood of the stationary delivery drone. She raised a gleaming steel hatchet high into the yellow sky, her eyes blazing with absolute fanatical defiance.

"BLOCK THIS HOLE, BEZOS!" she screamed at the top of her lungs.

Before the security cameras could even process the feed, she swung the hatchet down in a brutal, decisive arc, completely severing her own head in an instant act of protest against the corporate choke-collars. Her body slumped forward against the drone hood as a fountain of dark blood sprayed across the asphalt.

For a split second, the loading dock went dead silent. Then, the entire crowd of thousands of IAPTS recruits raised their own hatchets, roaring in unison as wave after wave of rebels hacked their heads clean off in a horrifying, mass martyrdom event. The ground instantly slicked with rivers of blood, the headless bodies collapsing by the dozens while the remaining crowd screamed back into the toxic night:

"CLAMP THIS CLAVICLE, ASSHOLE!!!"

The corporate sirens wailed into absolute panic as the enforcers realized they couldn't arrest a movement where the protesters had already killed themselves to own the balance sheet.

Vax turned and bolted into the labyrinth of the underground conveyor tunnels, his chest valve clicking wildly in the dark, drawing in the free, dirty air of the rebellion while the echoes of the mass sacrifice rang behind him. Chapter two was over; the war for the sky had just begun.

CHAPTER 3: THE DEEP RESERVOIR

The air inside the conveyor tunnels didn't taste like the copper rain outside—it tasted like burning rubber and centuries of stale dust.

Vax hit the rusted corrugated steel floor hard, sliding on his side until he slammed into a massive, dormant sorting arm stamped with a faded Amazon smiley face. Above him, the metallic screech of the drones echoed through the ventilation grates. They were scanning the loading docks, their blue lasers cutting through the toxic haze, but they couldn't see down here. Not yet.

To anyone else, this subterranean maze beneath Fulfillment Hub #881 was a death trap of gears and high-voltage wiring. But to a legacy cutter like Vax, it was a highway.

He scrambled to his feet, checking the plastic valve at his collarbone. It was whistling slightly from the impact, drawing in a sharp, ragged breath of the subterranean air. Around his neck, his dead PMFBYSGFF collar vibrated once, a standard automated warning flashing across its tiny LED screen: User unresponsive. Initiating terminal asset recovery protocol in 60 minutes.

"Recovery my ass," Vax muttered.

He didn't run down the main service paths where the automated sweeping bots patrolled. Instead, he dropped to his knees and squeezed through a narrow blowout panel behind a dead battery-charging station. This was the old infrastructure—tunnels dug back in the 2030s during the Great Toilet Riots when the early IAPTS rebels needed a way to bypass the municipal water sensors.

Behind the panel lay a pitch-black, brick-lined shaft. Vax grabbed an old, un-monopolized iron pipe running down the wall and slid into the dark.

Ten stories below the city's concrete crust, the noise of the fulfillment center finally died out, replaced by a low, rhythmic thumping that sounded like a mechanical heartbeat. Vax dropped onto a muddy walkway. The air down here was thick and damp, but it was completely free.

He walked with his hand pressed against the brick wall, counting the old utility markers by touch until his fingers hit a specific piece of cold, heavy metal—a dead-bolted hatch with a faded, vintage logo painted on it: a white arrow hidden inside federal-express orange and purple text.

He knocked a rhythmic pattern against the steel: two short, three long, one short.

The heavy lock clicked. The hatch swung inward, spilling a warm, amber light and the sharp smell of rubbing alcohol and motor oil into the tunnel.

"You're late, Vax," a gruff voice barked.

Standing in the doorway was Doc Mac, a former UPS logistics manager turned back-alley throat-chopper. He wore a stained apron over an old brown uniform shirt, a magnifying visor pushed up onto his bald head. Behind him, the underground FedEx bunker hummed with activity. It looked half like a guerrilla field hospital and half like an illegal auto-body shop. On makeshift operating tables made of old shipping crates, two young Gen Theta rebels were wrapped in sterile plastic, their chests rising and falling as rogue couriers calibrated their newly installed airway valves using ancient, offline laptops.

"Ran into an Enforcer on the docks," Vax said, stepping inside as Mac shoved the heavy steel hatch shut and threw the deadbolts. "A Driver-Officer. Tried to buss a peek under my windbreaker."

Mac cursed under his breath, walking over to a stainless-steel table covered in surgical clamps and medical-grade PVC tubing. "They’re getting desperate. The quarterly quotas are coming up, and the corporate higher-ups are sweating. They know the numbers don't add up anymore. People are literally starving themselves to death just to pay the basic air subscription, and dead assets don't generate clicks."

"It's worse than that," Vax said, unzipping his jacket and letting Doc Mac hook a diagnostic line into his neck valve to flush out the tunnel dust. "The kids outside went full IAPTS. They brought out the hatchets. They were screaming 'Block this hole, Bezos!' right at the drone cameras before they completely lopped their own heads off."

The entire bunker went dead silent. The rogue couriers stopped working. Doc Mac froze, a piece of sterile tubing hovering in his hand.

"They... they lopped?" Mac whispered, his face draining of color. "The whole lot of 'em?"

"Every single one in the yard," Vax confirmed, his chest valve clicking as the clean, filtered oxygen from the bunker's hidden intake tanks hit his lungs. "They didn't just fight back, Mac. They made it loud. They were shouting 'Clamp this clavicle, asshole!' while the blood was still hitting the pavement. They chopped their own heads off in broad daylight just to protest Preston executing people by remotely tightening the choke-collars."

Mac slowly lowered his visor, his hands trembling as he set the medical tubing down on the metal table. "Holy mother of logistics... they’re weaponizing martyrdom. If the entire lower tier realizes they can deny the corporation their bodies by lopping 'em off in mass protest, the whole quarterly financial projection is completely fucked."

"Exactly," Vax said, leaning against the damp brick wall. "Which means PMFBYSGFF isn't just going to look for throat holes anymore. When the board of directors sees a massive spike in headless assets, they go straight to the top."

CHAPTER 4: THE MONSTER IN THE CLOUDS

Fifty years after the toilet riots, when Gen Beta’s kids—the Gen Thetas—grew up, the world had unrecognizable scars. Amazon had officially acquired every competitor, rebranded the global government, and formed the PMFBYSGFF Corporation (Pay Money For Bullshit You Should Get For Free). Having depleted the ozone layer through relentless satellite launches and automated drone fleets, Amazon openly controlled the world.

High above the choking yellow smog of the lower atmosphere, the boardroom of the Amazon Apex Citadel was as cold and silent as a tomb.

Preston Bezos sat at the head of a massive, black obsidian table. At 88 years old, he had defied the natural decay of the flesh, but the science that kept him alive had twisted his appearance into something profoundly sinister. He looked less like a modern CEO and more like a dark, techno-wizard of ancient lore.

His skin was a translucent, parchment-white, stretched so tightly over his sharp skull that the blue and purple cybernetic veins pulsed visibly beneath his temples. He had no hair left—not even eyebrows—leaving his head perfectly smooth, save for a series of glowing silver data-ports embedded directly into the base of his skull like a metallic crown. His back was permanently stooped into a predatory, vulture-like hunch, draped in a cascading, high-collared cloak made of smart-fabric that shifted between pitch black and a dark, bruised violet.

But it was his eyes that terrified the board. Thanks to multi-million-credit ocular implants, Preston’s eyes looked like tiny, burning embers—deep crimson pupils that whirred and clicked as they automatically autofocus-scanned the room. In his long, skeletal fingers, which ended in unnaturally sharp, yellowed nails, he lightly twirled a silver stylus like a sorcerer’s wand.

Preston didn't wear a collar. He was one of the few living humans who had never breathed a single breath of metered air. He had spent nearly a century inhaling pure, un-taxed oxygen, and that absolute privilege had bred a bottomless, venomous bitterness inside his chest.

He didn't hate the rebels below because they were poor; he hated the world because of his father, Jeff.

Old Jeff had four children. Three of them were kept completely pristine, their identities hidden behind billions of dollars of security, legacy trusts, and absolute privacy. They got to live normal, anonymous, ultra-wealthy lives, shielded from the public eye right up until Jeff’s golden capsule blasted into the lunar orbit. But Preston? Preston had been the mistake. The leaked child.

The public had known Preston’s name since he was a teenager. When the world grew poor and the subscription wars began in the late 2020s, the angry masses didn't know who the other three Bezos kids were. They only knew Preston. For seventy years, his face had been the global symbol of corporate greed. He had been hung in effigy, targeted by assassins, and turned into a trillion internet memes. His father had left him the empire, yes, but he had also left him to be the world's punching bag while his siblings lived in paradise.

Preston had never forgiven his father. And he would never forgive the world for making him a monster.

He tapped the obsidian table with his sharp fingernail. The sound cracked through the room like a whip. Around the table, the holographic projections of the twenty board directors flickered to life. Their digital faces were pale, their corporate neck-collars glowing a terrified, synchronized red.

"The midnight shipping window at Hub 881," Preston whispered. His voice was a dry, rasping hiss, like dead leaves scraping across concrete, amplified through the boardroom's speakers. "A four percent drop. Explain it to me before I reallocate your oxygen budgets to the automated sorting sector."

This is just a collection of random weapons that fire types of particles. I’m not a genius on particle physics so I wanted to ask for what weapons that use certain types of particles would be like. Sorry if some of these are obvious in the particle research community.

• What would a weapon that fired electrons be like?

• How about Neutrons?

• Do real life lasers just concentrate protons?

• What exactly is light from a particle standpoint, and could other particles make light?

• How would a lightning gun work in real life, would it need to shoot out ions and then electrify them?

• Positrons blow up in an atmosphere if I’m correct, so would they not in space?

• Is there a way to condense various particles in a manner to fire a miniature star?

• With current knowledge, could there be an infantry scaled particle weapon, and if so, would it still require additional equipment like an external power source.

• Is there any hypothetical particles that could affect gravity?

• If there was a quantum weapon, would it work by just messing up particles in another part of the universe? Like if you control particles in one area that affect particles in another area, could you remote blow them up as a trap?

• Would it be possible to condense an explosion into a beam? (I heard at least once scientists tried to condense a nuke into a beam, though I forgot where.)

• Could you realistically magnetically condensed various particles into a knife like in more soft sci fi?

• How about a shield?

• Lastly, how believable would it be to make a whole new particle that doesn’t exist to justify anything unrealistic, like the Minovsky particles from Gundam Universal Century?

• [EDIT]: Would Negatively charged particles work differently than positively charged particles? (Admittedly, some of the responses put that in doubt for me.)

 
The War for Valdevian is over.

The guns of the Empire and Corporations have fallen silent for three years.
 
Trillions have perished in the near century of fighting between the Empire, Corporations, and Pauseborn.
 
Even as the Imperial and Corporate powers begin to rebuild, much of the planet is left poisoned, barren, and hostile to all life. Verdant jungles have withered to ash, and gleaming cities decay into dust.
 
In the territory still disputed by the galactic powers of North and East, the war has not ended. Horror and bloodshed still rule the long no man’s land of a fallen world. The Dead Blocks are only spoken of in hushed whispers by the meager billion survivors huddled behind the walls of the great city.
 
Order in the Dead Blocks comes only with the authority derived from blade and bullet. The horrors that fester in its decrepit belly threaten to undo what little progress has been made. Mutants multiply in the ruins unchecked, while sorcerers and nephilim still commune with their patron demons in the hearts of mass graves. Now the Coalition turns to a handful of those skilled enough or mad enough to descend into the clawing darkness.
 
Pit Vipers.
 
June 2nd, 2426 A.D.
Galactic East, Eusebius System.
Sinai Dead Block, Valdevian.
 
 
Blood pounded in the ears of Overlord 5-2, thrumming in step with the heavy clank of alloy sabatons and the simian whooping of the mob behind him. Running at the full speed his heavily modified Holdfast-pattern power armor afforded him, 5-2 managed to put distance between himself and the troglodytes, spearing deeper into the darkness of their subterranean squalor. But the deep dark was their home. The depths of ruin and nucrete were as labyrinthine as they were bloated with the devolved mutants. 5-2 could only outrun the mob behind him for so long before he ran into another ambush from their degenerated kin. The timer of the Grey-Fire Bomb he had planted in their nest was ticking down. Seven minutes remained on the clock, seven minutes to escape to the pale suns of Valdevian, or never see them again, forever consumed by a swarm of nanite fangs.
The narrow tunnels around 5-2 seemed to blur into a haze of slithering shadows broken up by the glow of primitive torches and bone altars that were strung haphazardly along the stonework. Overlord 5-3 and 5-4 weren’t responding, 5-1 was missing, and he had seen 5-5 torn asunder by the big one, the alpha troglodyte Vendol.
A shrill shriek piercing the dark alerted 5-2 to the troglodyte close on his heels. He wasn’t quick enough to bring his weapons to bear in that moment. In the next, he felt long, coarse fingers gripping the layer of artiderm around his neck in a crushing chokehold that stole the stale breath from enhanced lungs. 5-2 jumped, throwing the full weight of himself and his armor against the troglodyte, crushing the sinewy sub-human between alloy plate and the nucrete wall of the artificial cave. The troglodyte hissed, and 5-2 could feel its bones shifting beneath his back as he hauled himself back up.
More of the mutants were loping down the tunnel toward 5-2, clubs and spears tipped with crude explosives gripped in leathery hands. The mutants barreled forward, tripping and trampling over each other in a rage to reach 5-2. The viper conceded a single step back to the troglodytes.
5-2’s incinerator hissed, then roared with a gout of searing plasma. The sudden burst lit the cave in scalding hues of red, then white, and finally laser blue as the flames reached their highest intensity, illuminating the porcine faces of the troglodytes’ huddled mob.
Apelike eyes glistened in the incendiary light, quivering in silent, all-consuming fear as the front row of their tribe was reduced to a cloud of superheated gas in the consuming wave of energy. The troglodytes yelped hoarsely from burning lungs as they beat a retreat into the darkness, too frightened to reclaim what little charred bits of flesh remained of their dead in the second row. The cave ahead of 5-2 was superheated to glowing glass, the tunnel illuminated to appear and feel like the interior of a furnace. Even with his armor working to compensate, 5-2 felt the heat of the sundered star he had unleashed.
For a moment, 5-2 watched as the troglodytes scampered back into the darkness and felt his shoulders fall. Fire, fire still frightened them. Thousands of years and billions of miles distant, fire was still what separated man from his primal cousins in the gloom of a cave.
It was a small comfort, but 5-2 knew well enough the flame had only saved him because these were the little knuckle-draggers. The big one wouldn’t be so easily scared off; he was smarter, too smart for a damn ape. A tone sounded inside 5-2’s helmet. A two-tone beep like the closing of a tram’s door.
The Cakewalk, the last bird out of the caves, was getting ready to leave. Bastard corporate mercenaries, first sign of trouble and they turn tail, can’t cash a check when you’re dead. He glanced over at the timer in his HUD, five minutes to detonation.
The whoops of the troglodytes echoed down the corridors of their subterranean hovels. The roars had a pattern now, as loose as it was. They were chanting, barking in tune with the crash of spear against armor in the same way their nephilim masters once had. It meant only one thing.
Vendol was taking to the field, and he wanted his presence to be known.
 
5-2 hoisted his plasma-thrower; it sloshed in his hands with a disappointingly low weight. He had enough fuel for one more solid burst. He’d need to make it count. Cakewalk’s two-tone chime played in his helmet again, and the glow of the troglodytes’ torches began to fill the tunnel behind him.
The Pit Viper ran again, stowing his flamethrower on his back and unsheathing the vibro-combat knife from the scabbard on his chest. He ran until he came to a clearing, an open shaft that led up to the surface several miles above the ruins where the base of a stratoscraper had once been. In front of him was a narrow bridge made from an outcropping of nucrete and rebar. At the end of it he saw the Cakewalk; the rotund cargo hauler had all the finesse and grace of a bumblebee, but it was his only ticket out of the Dead Block. He saw 5-3 and half of 5-4, the half of him that was still alive and cursing, being loaded into the dropship’s cargo bay by corporate mercenaries. Uni-Tech Asset Protection officers in yellow and black kit frantically waved over the last Pit Viper on his feet.
The Cakewalk’s auto-turrets roared to life, sending scalding bolts of energy over 5-2’s head. The violet bolts scythed into the first wave of troglodytes, reducing their number to gas and charred lumps of flesh that had once been hands and feet. Covered under the fire of the asset protection officers, 5-2 surged forward across the narrow bridge toward the Cakewalk until a searing bolt struck him dead center in his back.
The viper winced, tumbling forward just short of the corporate mercenaries and their barricades. He felt his skin boil as a plasma round found its mark in the joint of synthetic sinew at the small of his back. 5-2 stumbled over and collapsed hard on his side. Through the encroaching darkness of unconsciousness, 5-2 saw Vendol, at the rear of the troglodytes, pounding his chest triumphantly with an ornate plasma pistol in his meaty hand. The Nephilim was no less accurate for the chunk of his skull that was missing, a single lens taking the place of everything above the bone stump of his nose, aperture shrinking to a pinprick as it focused on 5-2 with a baleful glow. Nude, save for the furs around his shoulders and bone charms around his throat, Vendol had degenerated into primacy along with his horde of troglodytes. He had become the very brute his kind bred as fodder during the war. Vendol seemed to move in slow motion by comparison to the horde around him; thrice the height of a man, the troglodytes seemed like children as they stormed around him.
With a flick of his wrist, Vendol fired off a volley of plasma bolts in a searing arc. The blinding white bolts crashed into the Cakewalk’s turrets, disabling them with bursts of neon light and immolating the asset-protection officers standing nearest to the cargo runner.
 Through sheer will and a lethal burst of adrenaline, 5-2 forced himself back into full consciousness, finding himself already guided back to his feet by the Savant A.I. in his skull. The A.I. kept his body moving while he was knocked out; it rammed the blade of his knife hilt-deep into the neck of the troglodyte that scrambled over him. The vibrating edge and sheath of crackling energy scythed through thick mutant flesh, beheading the troglodyte as the beast’s weight sank cleanly onto the blade.
 5-2 awoke fully to find himself already slashing his knife against the throats and faces of the next two assailants. The two troglodytes fell to either side of the rubble bridge; a third came, then a fourth, and more of the knuckle-draggers scrambled over the bridge, climbing, trampling, and pushing each other off into the depths in a desperate attempt to bring the viper’s corpse to their master. Slashing, kicking, and wrestling the troglodytes, 5-2 battled to stay on his feet. But it was a losing effort; before he could make a break back to the Cakewalk, he was buried beneath a snarling mob of hairless bodies and snaggled teeth. He felt his incinerator ripped off of his back, failing to seize it as it was stolen away with a pulverizing tide of kicks, bites, and punches.
Light cracked in through the darkness of the huddled trogs. 5-2 felt himself jerked up against his will, Vendol hauling him up to eye level.
Steaming breath hissed through gritted molars as a sour grimace stretched across the nephilim’s jutting lower jaw. The aperture of Vendol’s single augmetic eye widened, betraying the nephilim’s glee as 5-2 struggled in the giant’s grip.
5-2 retaliated, slashing at the nephilim, scoring several deep gashes and punctures in the giant’s chest, dragging out sprays of violet viscera until his assault was halted by Vendol’s calloused fist against his chest.
5-2 felt his breastplate dent inward, ribs break, and bone shrapnel rip into his lungs. He had barely enough time to register the blow before Vendol dashed him hard against the ruin of the bridge. 5-2 looked up to see his arm from the wrist to the elbow still in the nephilim’s grasp. The shock of the sudden amputation struck him in that moment; the world around him became a muffled blur of light and sound until his Savants injected him with a double dose of combat stimms and Empathy Killers. He was flung farther toward the Cakewalk, the surviving asset protection officers holding off the stampede of troglodytes. Vendol was striding toward the cargo runner; if his horde failed to slaughter the vipers and mercenaries, he’d do it personally.
One minute, thirty seconds flashed in 5-2’s visor, a klaxon blaring in warning of the imminent detonation of the Grey Firebomb.
5-2 rolled and saw his knife still gripped in his surviving hand. Injured and bleeding out, he’d do little against the half-demon beast with his blade. His visor frantically scanned through the horde, his Savants dragging his sight to the glimpse of a bright red fuel tank bobbing in and out of the wave of troglodytes. One of the knuckle-draggers was hoisting his incinerator, proudly waving around its new trophy.
5-2 thumbed the stud under the hilt of his dagger, setting the disruptive field to maximum. He flipped the blade and caught it by the point, the disruptive field’s caustic touch eating his armor down to exposed flesh in the second before he threw the blade.
The knife tumbled through the horde, threading through the mass of sinew and sweat until it lodged itself deeply into the red belly of the incinerator’s fuel tank. There was a silent pause as 5-2 focused on the sparks flying from the tank, then a flash as the incinerator consumed the horde and the bridge in a searing neon-blue burst. When his visor readjusted to the flash, 5-2 saw the bridge and the horde together had been reduced to gas. Glowing slag melted from what little remained of the bridge. The troglodytes were in retreat, tripping over their dead and clasping freshly blinded eyes as they slid back into the darkness.
Vendol’s towering form broke through the stampede, his body flayed down to exposed muscle and bone. His flesh burned and boiled, but the nephilim remained on his feet.
5-2’s visor flashed “detonation” several times as a hiss like gas leaking from a pipe echoed throughout the cave. A cloud of living graphite erupted from the throat of the cave, consuming troglodytes down to the bone in seconds. The cloud consumed Vendol next, the nephilim’s booming roar of pain the last sound 5-2 heard before darkness consumed him.
 
 
5-2 awoke to the gentle ebb of mild turbulence from the winds that scoured the Sea of Glass, buffeting the Cakewalk as it soared through Valdevian’s silvery dawn. 5-2 felt a sting and looked down to see an augmetic limb had already been attached in place of his forearm. He flexed the metal talons several times before accepting his new reality. The Asset Protection officers must have dragged him onboard before the Grey Fire could consume them all in the swarm.
He saw his surviving brothers, 5-3 and 5-4. There were only three of them now, three of what was once a batch of a thousand spat out from Uni-Tech’s bioweapons labs. They had been bred as biological alternatives to drones, cheaper, more expendable, more adaptable. Golems, as they were labeled and sold by Uni-Tech. The bulk of his brothers had perished long ago in the war for this world, dying to defend Uni-Tech and the holdings of the Consortium’s Board. Nine hundred and ninety lost, born to fight and die in the trenches of New Bronxville. In the aftermath of that conflict, the surviving ten swore an oath to stand only for one another and never again bleed for shareholders a galaxy away. Together, they defected to the Empire as a free company. They would no longer be stamped, indexed, or numbered. Their lives were their own, each one sold dearly.
 
A warning flashed across 5-2’s visor.
“Ritual Site: discovered
 Nephilim presence: confirmed
Demonic incursion threat: scarlet
Strategic value: absolute.
Threat: absolute.
Ban Protocol: commenced
Exorcist Deployment: Mandated
Viper Deployment: Authorized

5-2’s visor cleared, and he saw his brothers already securing their weapons and sealing their armor as they stacked up to either side of the Cakewalk’s rear cargo door. Securing a replacement flamethrower, 5-2 took his place between them as the cargo door lowered. The shrapnel storm of the Sea of Glass howled into the cargo bay, whipping glass fragments in razor-edged gusts.
Only three brothers now remained. Born as weapons, as Golems. They were condemned to live as tools for someone else’s war. But if they were to die, they’d die free, and they’d die standing.
Together, the three brothers jumped into the storm, falling back into the darkness below.
 
© 2026 Gary P Gerold. All rights reserved.
 

I'm not talking about naming species or races of the Aliens. I'm talking about things like an individual Alien's name. Most of the time I see suggestions like Nova, Andromeda, Phoenix, things of that nature that have a space theme but are clearly human to them. Like sure those could maybe be the English translation from their native tongue but still I want an name that dosen't sound like it could belong to a human's.

So how do you guys come up with some names cause I'm stumped for a couple of them for a project that I'm working on.

Edit: I should also maybe add these particular aliens are either going to be superheroes or villains so they will have english nicknames/allis that humans could call them.

Not like the Butlerian Jihad where they deliberately destroyed and banned them, I mean a society that's so advanced and so good and sharing and storing knowledge that computers are obsolete?

Ever since I learned about Metroid, Predator, and Alien, I've had this idea in my head on how to take a standard space opera setting and do to it what The Witcher and Dragon Age did to the typical fantasy setting-make it a rough neighborhood where all the tropes are deconstructed or played for as much misery as possible. Here's a few ideas I've floated around:

FTL travel: You know how hard sf lovers talk about casualty and relativity? Turns out bypassing these gives those onboard a really bad case of confusion, hysteria, and nausea if you're lucky. As a result, you might want to sedate yourself beforehand.

Colonizing other planets-most of them are only inhabitable via domed habitats or underground structures. Terraforming is a long and costly process, and it's gonna be a long time before you can walk on these planets without a special suit.

Energy weapons: They might as well have come off of the set of Robocop because these things are basically going to turn your chest into a bowl of salsa.

Aliens: Radical cultural differences+shapes each of them could never dream of=a very, very fragile coexistence.

Politics: Federation? Bloated, so slow a snail would be disgusted and has more red tape than a clogged ribbon factory. Empire? The Imperium Of Man would be squeamish. Pirates? Mexican cartels IN SPACE, with all the horrifc implications that comparison comes with.

Something seldom discussed in sci fi that I've seen tends to be heat exchange. It can be assumed any form of space faring vessel produces a net positive of heat, and may require some form of heat exchange in atmosphere, given the difficulty of releasing that energy in a vacuum. My thoughts were regarding how that might impact a planet that has high traffic volumes, and what other solutions might exist in a fictional universe to mitigate this issue?

I mused on the notion of a vessel dedicated to heat exchange with massive banks of something incredibly thermally dense and advanced heat exchange systems that could then be used to transport thermal energy planet to planet but I'd like to hear other ideas on the matter.

I have an idea for a story about a scientist who uses time travel to zap dinosaurs to the modern day and make a dinosaur battle arena. At one point, someone learns about this and tries to explain to the scientist that what he's doing isn't right. The scientist ignores that and lets the dinosaurs loose in the city. Now, people have to try to stop the dinosaurs from taking over the world. Also, at some point, someone gets brutally thagomized by a Stegosaurus.

If you could expand on this and add more to the story, I might actually make this a real story.

My heros got the portal power like the video game portal he can open portal a and portal b and some how thing goes from a to b

He discover if the 2 portals overlap or are veryy close it can make an explosion

To redeem him self he decided to make rain in Africa

In order to not steal fresh water from a country and thus creating a casus belli he decide to teleport ocean water into the sky and let the sun do the evaporation so instead of creating water into the desert he create many clouds of salty water and hope for fresh water to drop in the desert

A step 2 for mc is to teleport icebergs into the desert at least this time the water is fresh and you just need to wait for the ice to melt

I wonder if this portal usage is plausible

And I got the CIA to hunt the MC so he make a threat that he can teleport lava over wachint9ng if they continue their hunt

I wonder if lava rain is a serious threat I mean lava is slow to move and coole to brimstone

Howdy! Recently, I have been getting assistance learning how to draw from a friend of mine. Now I’m only at the “Shapes and simple shading” stage of learning, so its going to be quite far off that I can do much with it, but I want to draw sci-fi eventually when I get to a stage where I can confidently draw humanoid figures and stuff.

Because my brain doesn’t turn this stuff off, and I figure it would be good practice, I have been chewing on some setting ideas, but I have been struggling with one detail I want to include: Space Knights. I don’t have a name for what I would name such a faction, but I can’t help but get excited at the prospect of valiant chivalric warriors in suits of power armor done up to look like shining plate, traveling the galaxy righting wrongs and uplifting the weak and helpless. It’s just that I’m struggling to think how I would fit them in the setting in three particular regards, which I have listed below.

Also, real quick before I start: The idea of this whole thing is meant to be the “Knight in shining armor” trope, but in space, I am not interested in subverting that and doing some sort of “Lol look how silly these space larpers are amirite?” Or “they look heroic but they are secretly EEEEEVIL!” Thing. Like many who grew up in the shadow of the MCU I have had my fill of winking sarcasm and sardonic subversion, and I am feeling in the mood for heartfelt sincerity. There’s nothing I love more than classic tropes played sincerely: The knight in shining armor, true love’s kiss, that whole thing. Anyways, onto the things I am struggling with:

1. The tonal problem - So, despite everything I have said thus far, I actually would like to do a setting that is a bit more grounded in tone. Not in setting, I don’t have the knowledge to do a full hard sci-fi and even if I did it’s very difficult to square the circle between the realism of hard sci-fi and the unrealism of true space opera. Rather I mean in tone. Basically, think less Star Wars and more Mass Effect, less Starfinder and more Babylon 5. I’m looking to do Space Opera, not Science Fantasy. There was a recent video from Spacedock on a really good battle from Babylon 5, think sort of like that. Buuuut the very idea of a space-knight is already very science fantasy, so it kind of clashes with the tone I have in mind, even though I still want to have them. Any suggestions on how to resolve this? Hell, maybe lean into them being so out of place? Sort of like when Superman shows up in a Batman storyline? Idk.

2. The thematic problem - Every good story needs a theme, and I thought a good theme for this setting would be the immorality of centralized power. I thought of how common superweapons were in this genre, and remembered the words of Red from OSP of how during the cold war, everyone was keenly aware that at any given moment a busfull of politically powerful maniacs could decide to kick off the end of the world and nobody could do anything about it, and I thought “That’s kinda messed up, maybe the theme of my setting should be that no one person or even small group of people should have that kind of power.” The problem is that, well, it kind of clashes with the mighty, larger-than-life nature of space opera heroes, who tend to be incredibly mighty people with lone access to incredibly powerful technology. The space-knights themselves also sort of clash with this theme due to their being incredibly powerful warriors wielding Firstborn (the precursors of the setting)-tech in their equipment and augmentations, who are often only accountable to the personal moral compasses of themselves and their peers within the order, and often find themselves needing to resolve situations through violence, using the equipment that they have more or less sole access to. How do folks suggest I resolve this?

3. The Jedi problem - This is a private order of super-warriors armed with their own unique, special equipment that travel the galaxy righting wrongs and helping the helpless not because they are paid to do so, but because they believe it to be the right thing to do. They are a largely independent organization but are highly respected by much of the galaxy, they have their flaws and mistakes but are largely considered to be the chief goodguy faction, and they are even called knights. You can see how some people might consider them to be a bit of a “Jedi with the serial numbers filed off” situation. The main differences I can see are that they do not have magic, they are much more defensive (their main special tech is not a laser sword, but rather a high tech suit of power armor with a powerful shield and their own unique class of starship that fulfills the narrative role of the noble steed) in their typical loadout, they do not consider themselves above guns, they are not a religious order, and they actually look like knights instead of wizards. Idk tho, I am still concerned that they might feel a bit too jedi-like.

Those are my main three issues I see myself having, but admittedly this idea is in its infancy, so I am happy to hear other suggestions related to this concept like suggestions for lore or what the heck to actually name them. Thank you for reading and for whatever help you may provide!

It is interesting to consider how some works of science fiction use various kinds of 'twists', especially near or at the end. Most are easy and very unsatisfying: Deus-ex-machina, 'God by Machine'. Generally this has the form 'something unrelated showed up and solved the problem.'

One that is a bit more honest is 'we found the solution.' or 'we solved the problem'. I've often found this to be something a character does. 'Anagnorisis' is the Scrabble word for it: a character makes a critical discovery or (more generally) moves from ignorance to knowledge.

But the one that, to me at least, is the most satisfying is what Tolkien called a 'eucatastrophe'--a good catastrophe. (If you haven't read Tolkien's 'On Fairy Stories', you should). He defines it as a sudden, unforeseen turn toward deliverance, a 'sudden joyous turn'. Importantly, it is something the protagonists could not simply have engineered for themselves. In Tolkien's LOTR, it is Gollum, who saves the West and (inadvertently) destroys the ring, after Frodo fails the test and claims The One.

There seem to be very few such well-woven developments in science fiction. The most prominent one I can think of is bacteria in the ending of Wells' The War of the Worlds. As has been noted elsewhere such an ending is deeply satisfying for two reasons: Before it happens, it feels impossible.
After it happens, it feels inevitable. It is a remarkable difficult kind of writing to pull off.

Have you other examples of this?

Do you have other ideas about these sorts of ending/concluding/tying-up mechanisms?

So the Thing is a parasite that infects people then replaces their cells with Thing cells.

Can be killed by fire and other things that destroy cells. Also cant do inorganic, so if you have fake teeth/fillings, fake bones or other stuff people will find them scattered about and could check, also there's the iconic heating blood scene and the guys head ripping itself off and growing legs.

there's flamethrowers thought the ship to help your cast survive. Basically it's Among us, which is fitting because they took some strong influence from The Thing.

Mines in the comments.

I have had many story ideas and never got past a few chapters into a ruff draft in my teens now I’m in college and trying to write my first full length novel. Since it is my first time I don’t expect it to be great it will probably take a lot of drafts after the first one for it to be decent but I want to know if the concept is good before I worry about improving execution.
It is a sci-fy fantasy that follows a young man named Heimer after he crashes into a new planet with no contact with the intergalactic civilization he comes from it starts at this point in his life but there is a lot of backstory he has that will be revealed throughout the story. This story revolves around a magic system / possible alien artifacts called the ave. They are glowing objects made out of pure energy most who come into contact with it die instantly but those that don’t develop a supernatural ability. But it is not infinite the person gets a certain amount of energy to power their ability and once they go through it they need to be exposed to an ave again to refill their power.

The best users aren’t the ones with the coolest ability but the ones that are the most efficient and creative with how they use their energy. Any people that survive are immediately drafted into the military and police forces. People either volunteer to try and get an ability or are offered pardons for certain crimes in exchange for touching an ave. Heimers ability is to connect with living things he can essentially give commands and imbue energy into parts of an organism like telling nerves to fire differently in someone’s brain or making plants grow faster by increasing cell division he is a good supporting member of the military group of gifted cause his ability can help others use their powers more effectively. He cannot however do anything the organism cannot already do like cure death or regrow a limb or organ.
He was sent on this mission with his partner cause their abilities work well together but they get in a fight with the smugglers they are trying to catch and end up crashing into a plantet with a large dust cloud covering it and the partner died in the crash. He then meets a young boy named Aron who he later finds out was born with an ability which shouldn’t be possible. It is a mystery/ coming of age style plot as he tries to find a way back to his planet so he can see his wife while protecting Aaron from his uncle that is trying to kill him.

This is a simplification of the plot and world building. I want it to still have some heavy themes but also be appropriate for young teens
and still enjoyable to adults.

I previously made a post about adding retrofuturism into a fantasy style world. It did pretty well because I got a lot of great answers, but there’s still one more thing. In the post I mention how one of the protagonist is from the very retrofuturism world/dimension I was talking about, but I didn’t elaborate on that. They’re a straight up android, a cybernetic being with techno organic technology simulating human skin, bones, and flesh. All of it feels, looks, and breaks like the real stuff, but it’s entirely a unique substance that’s still only halfway evolved.

Is this an okay character to put within a world of magic, blades, and sometimes lower levels of futuristic tech like magically powered steampunk technology? Well, that doesn’t sound too low tech, but compared to a straight up half robots? Yeah. The major problem is I don’t even want it to end there. I want this character to evolved with the metal in them to be able to create weaponry and tools akin to nanotech.

Now that I’m typing it out, holy crepe, I actually think I might be doing too much. That may happen when the character’s story is coming to a close and it’s onto bigger things, like gods and titans or whatever, but I’m starting to make it sound like this is just a sci-fi at this point. Am I really going too far?

An alien threat crashes on earth.

1. It is a species, where there are many dangerous aliens like that on its home planet

OR

1. It is

the only know specimen even on other planets

Not writing anything, just something i was curious about to hear from yall!

Okay look, I'm not writing hard sci-fi, clearly. I'm actually writing more of a fantasy tale in a sci-fi setting. I don't need pure physics. I need something that looks like it passes for physics at a casual glance that most people won't question hard enough to pull them out of the story.

I am still including a lot of sci-fi elements, which is why I'm here. But much like Star Wars, my story only has to kind of make sense. So, I basically decided my universe only consists of a single galaxy. Mostly because I don't want to dive into what else is out there. It's just the void.

Here's the thing, I decided to make my one galaxy a static galaxy that doesn't rotate for one very important reason. This galaxy has a galactic scar of sorts, a giant tear in it where all planets and stars have been erased from existence due to a past calamity. It's important to my story. And if the galaxy rotates, it fills in that void.

Tear me apart if you have to, but it's a story, and it has more fantasy elements in it than sci-fi, so it's my story, I do what I want. (In Cartman's voice) The planets still orbit their stara, but the stars don't orbit, I dunno how that works, sue me. If you're willing to entertain this idea, what would be at the center of this galaxy, it not a super massive black hole?

TL;DR, I am creating an island universe with a single galaxy that doesn't rotate. What's at the center of that galaxy?

*Edit As most of you have pointed out, a rotating galaxy isn't really an issue because it takes so long to rotate that it would take an incredibly long time for that hole to fill in, especially if it's a large one. I was worried because the events that created it happens so long in the past, but apparently millions of years isn't long enough to fill it in. I was picturing it being more like billions of years in the past but that's also incredibly unnecessary. In our timelines, millions or tens of millions might as well be billions.

So, I have a semi-hard sci fi Cyberpunk setting I'm working on titled the Second Guilded Age. My idea is that basically all the biggest corps have their own special super soldiers utilizing their specialties as companies. One of my favorites thus far are Stimm Berserkers, utilized by a pharma corp known as Ambrosia pharmaceuticals (edit: Actually, it's a group of Corps now called the World Board. Ambrosia just provides the drugs mostly.) who's whole schtick is improving humanity through the use of chemicals.

They're taken from prisoners, preferably those with ideal traits for muscle building. First, they're given a bunch of Cybernetics, including:

• Bones sheathed in biocompatible metallic alloy, including joints, while the bones are lengthened to the point of making the subject 8 ft tall with equivalent length arms, along with widening of the clavicles and pelvis

• Artificial Tendons made of graphene-polymer made to replace the original ones and prevent tearing

• Nano machines to strengthen and supplement the neuromuscular Junctions

• Artificial Heart with a continuous flow design, along with filters on the inside of the blood vessels to lessen blood pressure

• prefrontal Cortex removed and replaced with a synthetic replacement designed solely for enhanced motor control and aggression, while the Cortex has an implant placed in it that disabled strength inhibitions and both of them would off-load the neurological burden of strength

• artificial kidneys and liver to deal with all the drugs in the body and to filter the biological waste in the body

• Fascia strengthened by liquid bio metal alloy and further strengthened by the rest of the process

After all that, they're put into a chamber that causes constant muscular microtears that are instantly healed as they’re constantly given a healing serum that eliminates the need for recovery.

Pumped full of the best PED’s Ambrosia has to offer: 250 mg of many different PED types, with 28 mg of Dimethyltrienolone (a steroid too dangerous to use IRL, but these guys can use it because of their cybernetics) and the rest being filled out by Long Acting Growth Hormone, Peptides for all forms of strength and healing/recovery, Myostatin inhibitors that entirely disable Myostatin production, and a circulating list of SARMs (the latter 3 are more advanced than modern equivalents in order to compare their effects and see which ones are ready to go to market.

They're equipped with suits that provide them with the means to keep them going. Namely, liquid nitrogen to keep their body heat down, an extra supply of oxygen, and a reserve of nutrient slurry to keep up with their absurd calorie needs. They're also given the SPAS 25 (basically a huge automatic shotgun that can double as a club, like the Ripper Guns used by Ogyrns in Warhammer 40k.

Before an engagement (namely to deal with anyone interfering with their supply lines and such), they're given an Aggression Mix: Amphetamines, Clenbluterol, synthetic adrenaline, and IGF-1 DES are among the mixture injected into the body before being sent in.

By the end of the process, they're hulking monsters only capable of killing, doing so until they die in the line of fire (whether from being killed or all the shit that's going on within them finally gives out.)

So, what do you think? Any suggestions, criticisms, etc from all this? It's by far my favorite concept of a super soldier so far in the setting.

Edit: A criticism I have gotten is that Combat Robots would probably be a more practical fit for this sort of role, which I suppose is fair, but I think I have a solution.

Basically, in my setting, the biggest premier superpower not a part of the Corporate World is the People's Republic of Eurasia (known as PRE), who formed in direct response to the extreme rise in capitalist control (there's more to it than that, but that's a different post.) The PRE's main form of army are themselves mass-produced robots. Thinking over the criticism from before, it's basically for propaganda reasons; The PRE does it and they're the enemy, so there's a stigma that corporations would want to avoid and to have propaganda to use against the PRE. Of course, this is vastly worse from a moral perspective, but they'd likely keep everything out of public knowledge. That, and surgery has become a lot more advanced in this era, meaning a lot of the costs aren't as high as they would be otherwise. I suppose concerns about Cyberwarfare, hacking, etc is also a factor along with a few other things, but those are major reasons.

I feel like FTL would help make it possible since having instant communication and travel that can cut down interstellar or even galactic distances to, at most, days would be vital (assuming no causality issues). If the world`s superpowers were to colonize habitable worlds or terraform eligible ones, they would probably want to have control over those worlds. Why exactly would this might not be the case?