God in the Stone
A Bizarre future where flesh rules and machines are absent... except for one.
Roles: Writer.
Tools used: Google Docs.
Solo project.
God in the Stone is a short story I wrote for an elective in my second year at Sheridan College. It explores an original strange world where humanity relies not on traditional machinery, but organic creatures that fulfill similar functions, and how this setting came to be.
Read it here!
Roles
Writer
My main inspiration for the story were the Distrans' from Frank Herbert's Dune. The idea of using organic devices like that made me think of how other common items such as televisions or alarm clocks would work if they were turned into creatures as well, which expanded out to form the rest of the story's world-building. The reveal at the end that the world was created by a godlike rogue AI creating a new humanity was mainly to tie the story to a scientific concept (Xenobots) and give a succinct explanation for its origins.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
The ending of the story is very abrupt. This was mainly to fit it into the length requirements of the assignment I wrote it for, but the result is a conclusion that could best be described as an unsatisfying cliffhanger that likely won't ever be resolved. It was a reminder of what I learned working on ARK, and taught me that project restrictions can be just as constraining in written works as games.