Cloudbreaker
He looked up from his newspaper and sighed at my question. "They'd developed a weapon. No, that wasn't totally accurate. They'd developed a device, a machine, a tool. Most weapons started out like that though, didn't they? This tool, it'd been invented because they needed a more efficient way to flash freeze fish.
"Its sole purpose had been to keep fish fresh. That is, until the military got their grubby hands on it. But even then you can't just blame the army, whoever they are. You can't blame this general or that commander, the kind of innovation needed to transform something as mundane as a fish-freezer into one of the most hideous weapons of mass destruction takes a mind far, far beyond those that are trained to take and give orders.
"But yeah, at some point someone looked at this fish-freezing technology and decided it would be better used to kill hundreds of thousands of people. Never underestimate a human being's capacity for wholesale murder. And an intelligent human being? Ho boy. Those are the worst. Yeah, it's always the intelligent ones who end up murdering the most of us.
"Think of it! Who would make the connection? Who would be looking at this device doing its thing, turning tons and tons of fresh catch into ice cubes, and then make that leap? In retrospect it's kind of sickly obvious though, isn't it? Something maybe even a child could come up with.
"Freezing clouds. Clouds! Filled with a million tons of floating water droplets, it makes perfect sense. If you could somehow, suddenly, solidify those fluffy vaporous cotton-balls of the imagination, the sheer damage you could do! What once you'd look up at, lying on your back in a field somewhere, trying to escape your daily doldrums with a little daydream, seeing perhaps a dragon, or a castle, or the face of a loved one. Well fuck all that, now we can turn those visions into solid crushing blocks of iced death! They plummet to the earth, flatten your hometown and wash all the debris away when it melts!
"And the name. I mean, really. Cloudbreaker? Come the fuck on."
First draft: 140721
Published: 230322