The Pulsing Child

A short story written by Matt Gardner with PlotWeaver: Cards of Creation, a storytelling game made by Mod Hob Cooperative.

This story uses an Inverted Plot Pattern, written in 15-minute timed acts with all story cards drawn at random. For more information, visit www.plotweavergame.com

Act 1: Immediate Conflict or Crisis

Story Elements: The Connector, Bistro, Isolation, and Post-Apocalyptic

The silence in the bistro is louder than the screams used to be.

You stand behind the scarred mahogany bar of Le Petit Refuge, but there is no refuge left. The taste of acid rain with a sharp metallic tang of ozone replaces the permanent perfume of a world that ended fifty years ago. Outside the cracked windows sits the Montreal skyline, a jagged jawbone of rebar and broken glass, glowing under a bruised, radioactive sunset.

You were once a ‘fixer,’ the person who knew which palms to grease to keep the lights humming and the synthetic wine flowing. Now, your only connection is to the ghosts that sit at the empty tables. The crisis isn’t coming; it’s already been, leaving a constant vibration in the very soles of your boots.

The bells above the front door chime, a sound that should be impossible. No one has walked through that door in a decade or more. You reach for the heavy iron skillet hidden beneath the counter. A figure stands in the doorway, silhouetted against the gray fog that lingers outside. They aren’t armed. They are carrying what appears to be a child wrapped in a tattered solar blanket.

“You’re the one,” the stranger rasps, their voice like grinding gravel. “The one who can fix anything.”

Behind them, the low, predatory hum of a Faction-Interceptor echoes through the broken concrete of the streets. They’ve been followed. Your safety is breached, and the world you’ve spent years trying to stay detached from has just kicked in your front door. You stare at the sparkling blanket as shadows move strategically in the distance across the street. You have minutes before all hell breaks loose.

You aren’t a fixer anymore, but the hunger for an answer burns hotter than the interceptor’s engines. You drop the skillet and grab your father’s hunting knife.

“Table for two?” you quip, your voice crackling from disuse. “But you’re going to have to help me clear the floor.”

Act 2: Explanation & Cause Analysis

Story Element Cards: The Sacrificed

You don’t need to ask who the child is. The way the solar blanket pulses with a rhythmic, artificial heartbeat tells you everything. The ‘Vesper-Engine’, the technology they said was destroyed when the world burned.

The stranger collapses against the bar, but your mind is already fifty years back, at the moment you became a recluse. You remember the night the air raid sirens stopped. You were the one who brokered the deal to ‘shelve’ the engine to prevent the war. But the deal was a lie. You hadn’t shelved it at all; you sacrificed the only person you ever loved to smuggle it out of the city.

You thought the fire had claimed them both. You chose the safety of the many over the life of the one, and you’ve been rotting in this tired old bistro ever since, a debt almost unbearable.

But as the blanket slips, you see the etched serial number on the child’s synthetic nape. It’s her handwriting. She didn’t die in the fire. She spent fifty years in the shadows, perfecting what you tried to hide, and now she’s sent it back to the only person who knows how to keep it running.

The interceptor isn’t here for a refugee; it’s here for the technology you thought was destroyed. The cause of today’s blood isn’t a new battle; it’s the old one you never dared to finish yourself.

Act 3: Climactic Resolution

Story Element Cards: Veil of Disguise

The interceptor’s floodlights punch through the bistro’s grimy windows, highlighting the clinging dust in the air as the cracks in the glass shimmer like lightning. The stranger’s hand slips from the bar, cold and final. They are gone, leaving you with a synthetic child and a promise you’ve run away from for half a century.

You don’t have time to think about the dead. The front window shatters—a spray of diamonds followed by the heavy thud of faction boots on rotting floorboards. You reach for the large tarp that has served as your overcoat for years. It’s made of a shimmering mesh, frayed at the edges but still functional. You drape it over the pulsing child. To the thermal scanners, the engine no longer registers; it just looks like a pile of discarded kitchen rags and junk.

You stand up, your father’s hunting knife heavy in your hand, and step into the light. “The bistro is closed,” you growl at the silhouettes in the doorway.

They move for the bar, but they aren’t looking for the rags. They’re looking for a person. You lead them on a dance through the kitchen, through the walk-in freezer where you once hid black-market wine, and out into the winding, neon-choked back alley.

By the time they realize they’ve been chasing a ghost, you’ve doubled back. You grab the bundle from the bar and head for the one place even the factions won’t go: the deep tunnels where the Vesper-Engine was first conceived.

The cycle is finished.

You’ve returned the engine to its lab, where it can fulfill its brutal destiny.

To be continued.

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