10 GOTO 10
The Basement Computer Room
Only a week ago, I was a programmer writing code in a tight, claustrophobic basement of a company that had always been on the verge of going bankrupt but never did. And today, I was strapping up my bags for the deep magma explorer submarine, which would take us down the volcanic corridor and up near the Arctic ice caps. It was almost unreal.
When the company finally went down, I could not stop myself from breathing a little sigh of relief. The competition was too tough, and I knew we wouldn’t make it another year. It was inevitable, and yet I forced myself not to imagine the possibility of the events that came after. Lisa, the company’s chairperson and chief executive for the last twenty years, called us all in the hall of the topmost executive floor to break the news. As usual, I got some weird stares from all the female employees and a tiny number of males in the audience. Lisa found [আরো পড়ুন]
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Ashen Bloom
The silence was unnatural. For weeks, the comms had buzzed with static and fragmented signals, but now they were dead. On the bridge of the Bayonet, Commander Daniela Reyes stared at the blank screen with her jaw clenched. She tapped at the controls desperately as if sheer will could coax a response from Earth. The absence of the chatter they’d expected—traffic updates, mission control, a simple welcome home—was more than unsettling. They were close now, just breaching the solar system’s edge, and the silence gnawed at her.
“Sparky, talk to me,” she said, as dread coiled in her gut.
“It’s not the array, Commander! I’ve checked it multiple times—rerouted power, recalibrated the antennas!”
Charles Kowalski, Chief Engineer and systems specialist—better known as Sparky for his knack with sparking systems under pressure—grunted from his station. The console was alive with diagnostics as [আরো পড়ুন]
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Before The Flood
Prologue
West of Mexico Bay, 65 Million Years Ago:
The titanic herd of Alamosaurus, closing to their breeding ground, looked up at the east sky as a bright radiance caught their attention. There was a bedazzling light, a second sun in the east horizon. Burning hotter and brighter than a thousand volcanoes, the meteor was losing altitude at a staggering pace. The alpha male contracted his eyes. Split second before it hit the ground, the meteor cast its permanent shadows on the ground and blinded them. Before the impact, the male thought it saw a behemoth pyramidal structure inside the light. It was no meteorite that kissed the shallows hard.
Three seconds later, the shockwaves and the tremors hit the Yucatan Peninsula, vaporizing everything in their path. The pyroclastic cloud, the tsunami, and the flames followed them.
1.
The Great Rift Valley (The Cradle of Humanity),
70000 years ago:
The morning came like a sudden reality as the sun rose between the clouds after a night of thunders and showers. He opened his eyes slowly under [আরো পড়ুন]
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His Last Journey to the West : Introduction to The Complete Wu Cheng’en Omnibus
In the 96th year of the Qìngyáng era, July, Clan Wu, the largest family in the Jiangnan region, once again embarked on the compilation of their genealogy. Unlike the routine decennial genealogy updates, this time representatives from various branches gathered for a singular purpose: to decide the fate of one individual.
This person, bearing the name Wu Cheng’en, had been exiled from the family since the founding year of the Jìngníng era for treason. However, everything changed with a single imperial decree, which praised him for his literary contributions, enumerated his lifelong achievements, posthumously honored him with the title of “Nobleman of Knowledge and Loyalty”, and ordered Clan Wu to recommend a worthy talent to travel to the capital on an auspicious day to complete the revisions of Cheng’en unfinished work, The History of Longevity. Such recognition was nearly unprecedented [আরো পড়ুন]
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