Nano Bytes - A Collection of Short SciFi Stories

Mayday, By TasiaMera

The storm roared above our heads, heavy masses of sand dragged by the violent winds beating up the top of the shelter over and over again. Many of the older folks looked up, worried. The lips of some of them, like Amtrafdal and Gnarstoum, moved in silence, possibly reciting a prayer to the sand spirits, or maybe to the one god, for those who believed in it.

Oblivious to the very real possibility of us getting all trapped inside this dark hole, Pfshardnand and Stjevinyet, the little kids, chased each other around, laughing and screaming with glee. After living these events two to three times a year since they had been born, the noise didn't impress them much.

Sitting in a corner between my parents, I considered what I should ask about this time.

We had established as a tradition, my parents and I, going back to when I was six years old, that I could ask about anything during a sandstorm, and they would explain everything to me in any amount of detail I wanted. I was becoming a question-asking monster back then, and not as indifferent to the sandstorm terrors as the other kids seemed to be, so my parents had to find a way to keep me calm during such times. Now, five years later, it was increasingly difficult to find an interesting subject to ask about.

I had already covered baby-making a couple years ago - and how glad I was that my parents had found me as a baby and adopted me, so they didn't have to do that anymore. I'd also asked pretty much everything I could think of about the sky peoples. It was a subject that interested me greatly due to the mystery surrounding them - nobody was really sure if their existence was historical fact or a mere legend.

I, for one, was absolutely convinced they were real. What else could explain all the old instruments, shelter-like structures and other contraptions scattered around the plains? We didn't even know how some of them worked, or what they were intended to do in the first place, even though people still put them to use in the ways they saw fit. I, for example, had been found nestled inside some kind of large metallic crate. Nobody knew what it really was, but some nomad tribeswoman had certainly found it useful to protect her baby until it was found by a charitable couple.

Skeptics would say that a long time ago, our own kind had known how to build and use those things, but then a catastrophe hit, destroying a lot of the technology along with the knowledge to create everything anew. That was the straightforward explanation. No need to hypothesize any kind of sky peoples. Flying, everyone knew, was impossible, unless you were a bird. And even birds couldn't stray too far up away from the planet's surface because of the falling force. Peoples from the outer sky? Nonsense!

"Pfshardnand! Get back here! Be quiet for a minute!" Tralkstimt yelled her patience with her younger son running too thin.

The question occurred to me, then. It was a random question, but an interesting one, now that I thought about it.

"Why am I called May?"

"What? What do you mean?" my mother asked, confused.

"That's my question. Why is my name May? Everyone else seems to have a proper name, a long name, full of consonants. And I'm just... May. Is there a reason?"

My parents exchanged a look. It was similar to the look they'd exchanged when I asked about baby-making, but somehow less amused this time.

"Well..." my father said. "We don't know either. That name was given to you by your birth parents."

"How do you know that? I thought you'd never met them, that they were nomads!"

"It's true, we never met them, but..." They exchanged the look again. "You wore a sort of bracelet when we found you. It said your name."