Just to make sure everybody understands: it’s perfectly okay to respond to your own Challenge. The more, the merrier.
Lila is lonely and bored most of the time. She searches the ship for things to do to entertain herself. Bizmo was modified recently to provide her with unquestioning companionship, which her mother thinks is a poor substitute for a human friend, but is better than nothing considering the circumstances.
Because Lila has no ship-specific responsibilities, she ends up hearing and seeing things that might otherwise seem pedestrian, but when put together in her mind reveal that all is not kosher on the ship. Something strange is going on, and Captain Dan is at the center of it all. Other people don’t put it all together because they are, as implied in the first paragraph, busy with their own roles on the ship, e.g., “Captain Dan had just shooed Lila off the bridge again, and Mom was busy prepping the cafeteria for the lunch crowd.”
Captain Dan and Lila’s mother begin a love affair — not terribly surprising on a multi-year trip, in which many of the crew hop from one short relationship to another in a never-ending parade of new partners. But since Lila suspects something odd is going on with Captain Dan, she doesn’t like it.
At some point Captain Dan realizes that somebody knows something about his hidden agenda, and through some misunderstanding thinks it’s Lila’s mother. He murders her, making it look like an accident, never suspecting that it was actually Lila who was piecing together the information he was trying to hide.
Lila’s mother’s death makes her snap, and she immediately suspects Captain Dan had something to do with it. Using Bizmo as her only ally, she investigates on her own and discovers the truth, confirming her suspicions. She finds Captain Dan, confronts him with what she knows, and then kills him in the grisly manner implied in the conclusion.
My idea was that Captain Dan could have passed for human, but that it was no secret he was Rigellian. The actual problem of how Lila could remove his heart from his chest with her bare hand was something I hadn’t considered, since I didn’t figure this would turn into a real story.
Another problem with my explanation is that this particular story would require far more than 5000 words to tell properly. Or, I know it would take me more than 5000 words to tell it, with my particular writing style. The problem is that when I pieced together the scraps of writing to make this little story, I hadn’t considered what would happen in the middle or how many words were “missing” between them, and sort of arbitrarily picked the number “5000” out of thin air.
At this point I think I’m only lacking an explanation for the title. To be honest, I have no idea what the title is supposed to refer to in the story other than the fact that they’re on a ship. Why “ice” ship? Obviously I was playing off of the title of Eugene O’Neill’s famous play, The Iceman Cometh. But there’s no deeper meaning, or indeed, much of a similarity between that play and Lila’s experience on the ship. My title’s about as deep as a puddle.
Copyright © 2003 by NewB
