Another flash story, this one written in about 30 minutes. Any resemblence to real life characters is purely coincidental (no shotgun blasts to the face for me, thank you very much).
"Red Leader, you are cleared for attack". How did I find myself here; a marine biologist attacking an American space station armed with a squid?
I blame the World Cup. It was during 2010 that people realised that an octopus named Paul was correctly predicting the outcome of the games. It didn't take Dick Cheney long to see the implications of this and found the "Future Crime" division of the FBI. He kidnapped the prescient octopus from Germany, and started arresting trouble-makers and future insurgents BEFORE they had committed any crimes. Of course, the crime families decided they needed some means of retaliation, and they soon started kidnapping marine biologists and experimenting with their own cephalopod recruits. Soon the word "army" was a literal term. I was a prominent marine biologist specialising in octopi, so I was one of the first to be forcibly recruited to the Rebel Alliance.
By 2012, Dick Cheney had declared the UN obsolete and was running world affairs from a space station orbiting the planet. By this time he had had his third heart attack and was breathing through a respirator. Although old, he was still vigorous, and would stride menacingly down the corridors of his space station, dressed in his gleaming black space suit.
The Rebel Alliance decide to attack the space station, but the only way to avoid the attention of Cheney and the prescient Paul is to be armed with your own cephalopod. My companion is a squid, the 2nd squid recruit of Delta team 2, who we call R2D2 for short. He is strapped in behind me as we start our attack run. I am sweaty and feeling slightly nauseous. R2D2 has been fitted with a synthesiser and he chirps behind me, an instruction to veer left. A missile from the space station flashes past, just missing our starboard wing. "Nice one, R2" I say. "Almost there... Almost there..." I mutter to myself, and with a slap of the launch button, the missile is away and the station is destroyed.
Of course, it is almost certain that with his prescient ally, Dick has escaped and will some day continue his reign of terror. For now though, the world is safe, for at least as long as the closing credits.
