The Birth of Chaos

Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.

The prompts: This story must contain the words: straw, echo and charcoal

The Birth of Chaos

Ovid toggled his holo-view to the pasture deck where the horses were being fed their midday snack of straw and oats. There were millions of species on the Ark, but only the horses were allowed to germinate. The rest, well they would have to wait. Sooner or later a suitable home world would be found.

Ovid loved watching the horses. They were smart and affectionate. Their physical structure was as near perfection as any creature ever discovered.

Ovid was allowed one living pair of animals.

The thought was that a completely automated spacecraft, over the course of a million years, would suffer some unforeseen problem. A failure loop, they had called it. It was the result of what Newtonians referred to as super predetermination. “A” would cause “B” which would cause “C” etc. until a failure was caused. When that happened, the best any automated system could do was start over; thus, the loop.

A living creature could think. It introduced a degree of chaos to an otherwise orderly system. Things would still fail and be corrected, but the next time it would be different.

An alarm went off indicating a fire in the forest sector.

Ovid initiated fire suppression systems and then headed down to check things out. The echo of his metallic clomping was his only companion. Everything was automated – even him. Aside from the horses, there were no others.

Ten minutes later, he was pushing bits of charcoal around with his toe. This fire had been deliberately set.

This was not part of the plan. This was something new.

Chaos had introduced a change.

Ovid, without emotion, headed back to his monitoring station. He didn’t know what he was looking for other than confirmation.

But he already knew what he would find.

He was no longer alone.

Word count 300