One Last Score
Generative art collaboration with Surgalxy
Welcome
Time for another fun generative art collaboration story. This time I worked with Surgalxy, another of the wonderful artists I met through Chippy. I’m always awed by the quality of the images Surgalxy consistently produces, and especially his love of vibrant colors.
This was another Chippy 444 collaboration. If you’re not familiar with this format, you can read about it in the first collaboration post I did with Mixed AI Art.
You can find Surgalxy’s artwork on Instagram.
The Collaboration
I’ve become more relaxed in the collaboration process, happily adding extra instructions. Initially, I only allowed myself the twelve words for the prompt (eight shared and four of my own). However, by including those extra instructions, the images created are so much better! This time, we asked for hypermaximalism and psychedelic neon colors. Let me know what you think of the color choices.
The Story
We chose a number of word combinations for our prompts that included the word space, which meant I had to work at fitting them all in without (hopefully) making them too onerous within the context of the story. I did manage to use them all! Our words were: deepest, darkest, pirate, raiders, space, space-suited, interior, space-cruiser, plunder, rare material, exotic, alien, travelling, space worlds, space pirates, hyperdetailed.
One Last Score
The space pirates always arrived during the deepest, darkest hours of the night, descending on hapless colonists or merchant ships who never saw them coming.
The raiders left nothing to chance, creating hyperdetailed plans, travelling under cloak until the last possible second, whether their prey traversed space or inhabited space worlds. Their captain was both shrewd and ruthless. Lantsing left no survivors, no witnesses, behind.
He loved listening to tales of his exploits, detailed to him by chance drinking companions in seedy bars on the space stations on which he did business. None ever suspected they were speaking with the dread pirate captain himself.
The details, of course, were always wrong, the drunken spacers weaving fantastical yarns in which the raiders were aliens, ghosts, or worse. They painted Lantsing, who was, of course, never named, as a larger than life, monstrous character out of a holovid horror movie.
He saw himself as a businessman. Cutthroat, to be sure, but only in the line of duty. The survival of his crew depended on not being caught. No witnesses, no clues. His own family thought him a space merchant and constantly warned him to be careful “out there.” Out there meaning on his supposed delivery runs.
Lantsing had made his fortune. He didn’t need to raid anymore. He had, in fact, decided to give it up and live a well-earned life of leisure. But he wanted to cement his wealth with one last score. He would make sure his crew never had to work again either. What they did after he disbanded them would be up to them. The only demand he would make would be that none of them ever contacted him or each other again.
Today, the ship Lantsing sought to plunder, the last score, belonged to a new alien shipping cartel that specialized in exotic rare material that sold for a fortune on the black market. He’d have to be especially careful in fencing it. Everyone would know where it had come from. The transaction would need to be negotiated remotely with drop off and pick up happening without actual contact.
It was doable. Especially if he sat on the cargo for a few years, which he was more than capable of doing. After all, he didn’t really need this job. He just liked the challenge of it. A completely remote transaction with goods that, if connected to him, would lead the authorities straight to him. And, he rationalized again, his crew would be well looked after.
He had studied the delivery run of the ships that carried the precious cargo for months. Their flight plan never varied. Stupid, really. But good for Lantsing. He had chosen his ambush location well and arrived a full day ahead of the freighter.
As the target drew closer to the raider space cruiser, Lantsing took his seat in the command chair, addressing his space-suited crew. They were ready to board and take over the interior of the freighter the moment their tractor beam took hold. Just a few quick missiles to disable its engines, and they’d be away.
The freighter, which had been on their radar for hours now, dropped out of light speed in preparation to move in system toward their final destination. They’d never make it.
Within his helmet, Lantsing’s smile was feral. He lived for the thrill of the hunt, the final kill, the treasure earned.
“Target acquired,” Melov, the gunner called out.
“Drop cloak,” Lantsing ordered. “Fire at will.”
Melov’s finger hovered over the trigger. Any second now…
A blast rocked the cruiser, sending Melov and half the bridge crew to the deck. Lantsing barely kept his own seat.
“What the hell was that?” he shouted, frantically spinning the ship’s view away from the fleeing freighter to the now uncloaked battleship that had just disabled his engines, using his own tactics on him.
Melov found his seat. “Return fire, Captain?”
Lantsing assessed their odds of surviving a firefight with the battleship as somewhere below zero. He also knew that if they were taken, they would be tried and executed for their crimes.
One last score, he had told himself. For the crew. No. It had been for his ego. He had led them to their deaths out of vanity. Now his only decision was how to die. The feral grin returned to his lips as he pulled off his helmet. “Return fire. Give them everything we’ve got. Let’s go out in style.”
Afterword
The idea for this story came largely from Surgalxy’s image. The skull suggested death to me. I decided to create a death-dealing pirate who saw this only as business, and who didn’t need to continue, but whose ego pushed him to rationalize “one last score” to himself.
I didn’t want this pirate to win, though. He wasn’t a character I could sympathize with. Nothing like Peter Quill from Guardians of the Galaxy. I did, however, let him choose his “ending.” I hope you enjoyed his story.
You can see the ten images Surgalxy and I shared on Instagram by following the link below.
On June 25th, I’ll share images and a story I wrote based on a collaboration with Vaseem B.
Any thoughts on Lantsing? Would you have ended the story differently? If so, how? Let me know in the comments.
You had me almost liking Lantsing, then he got his Due! Good one 😁