A Sci-fi “Hobbit”: Boron and the Devourer

A Short Story based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit

This concept of a short story came to me after re-reading The Hobbit, and of course, it’s based on the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, but made sci-fi.

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Dlafgan, a Wizdroid, five Borgs, Thalin, Galin, Bali, Dili, and Dorin, and a human from the outer systems, Boron, tumbled out of the split. The portal closed with a thunderous clap behind the company of adventurers.

The split left all five senses disoriented and dizzy. If Boron had eaten anything in the past few days, he would have lost it then. They had just teleported from an encounter with space sharks. All seven were exhausted, breathing hard from their narrow escape.

But, within a moment, an unspeakable stench made it past their spacesuits’ filters.

Dlafgan recognized the smell, though his olfactory detectors were still coming back online. His quick reaction saved their lives.

“Quick—switch to your tanks!”

They swapped to their individual air supplies. Their noses would be twinged from the odor for hours.

As their senses returned, slowly, one by one, they got their bearings.

Dunes upon dunes stretched in every direction, but the hills weren’t made of sand grains, but objects. Everything imaginable. Nothing in particular—just, trash. Exotic food scraps, centuries old toys, the bones of extinct creatures, vehicle parts for the North side of the galaxy, weapons from far-flung star systems, and other horrid things unmentionable in polite company.

Dlafgan held his composure, but inwardly, his synthetic heart dropped. Wizdriods rarely felt fear, but Dlafgan felt sick with fright.

“Gentlemen, the split warped us to one of the Nine Planes of Rubbish.”

Each Borg went white as a sheet, noticeable even through the tint of their spacesuits. Their mechanical parts whirred with anxiety.

Boron, from a backwater, underground colony from the central systems, always felt out of his depth. But he felt even more lost in his life than he ever had.

Boron squeaked, “W-what are the Nine Planes?”

Everyone ignored him. The place was deadly quiet—no rustling of wind, just raw, stale stench, as though every air particle had been standing still for centuries.

Dlafgan finally said, calmly as ever, “I need to think.”

His white eyes dimmed, and the large, white third eye on his forehead closed.

“Wonderful,” said Galin.

“Great,” said Bali.

“We’re doomed,” said Thalin.

Dili felt pity on Boron and piped up.

“No one knows when they were found, but legend says the Nine Planes were fetus universes. Voids in other planes with the faintest sparks of quantum energy. No more has been discovered since. In the Third Age, everyone began dumping waste in the planes.”

“Not how I heard it,” grumbled Thalin.

“Quiet,” said Galin.

Dili glared, then continued, “Some say there was a great war between the Planet Eaters. Entire solar systems went to the Nine Planes before any galactic peoples started dumping trash here. Eventually, though, it became a dumping ground. Anything and everything they didn’t want. The West still discards waste here, so many millennia later. They have a permanent wormhole to each of the Nine Planes and ship trillions of tons of trash every year.”

“That’s not all they send here,” Thalin said grimly.

They went silent. Boron didn’t want to ask any more questions.

Some of them began collapsing from exhaustion, sitting down or putting hands on knees. Boron found that even a slight movement caused shifts under his feet, as tables, plastics, chairs, cups, bones, wires, bricks, computers, and papers slipped here and tumbled there.

Boron started to explore, trying to make himself useful. Taking a step, the mass of objects shifted, creating a small landslide.

Dlafgan woke from his sleep, “Foolish human, don’t take another step until I think some more!”

Boron flushed. He was thankful for the tint of his space helmet.

Dili tried to comfort him. “Stay as still as possible. Dlafgan will have us out of here soon.”

In such a rush, they had used their last split to escape the space sharks. The shark’s quantum confusion field meant Dlafgan had to use the split without a confirmed destination. The split saved their lives, but out of the supernova, into the black hole, as the saying went.

Dlafgan opened his eyes after what felt like hours.

“Dili, use your Borg eyes to spy out a safe spot—a large something that seems stable and strong for our camp. Quickly now.”

Dili’s telescopic eyes extended from his little face. He scanned the surrounding valleys high and low.

“The rest of you, start gathering any useful alloys you can find. Carefully. Use your telekinesis when you can, but conserve energy. Bring it into a pile.” They nodded dutifully. Here was a task they knew how to do, for Borgs knew metals better than any race of galactic peoples.

“And you,” Dlafgan said to Boron, “don’t move an inch, and stay quiet. One wrong move could make us sink into the rubbish.”

Eventually, Dili spotted a Dark Age spaceship a few miles away, still mostly intact. It would suffice for camp. After a tiresome hour of sifting and identifying the metals with their telekinesis and Borg scanners, scrambling, digging, cursing, and stepping carefully in questionable things, they managed to scrape an impressive pile of decently strong alloys together.

Dlafgan pulled out a scroll from his robes and began speaking in an archaic tongue, reading from the scroll’s holographic words.

Then, he hummed in an ancient, forgotten way. It was as though a thousand people sang at once. Each tone, each pitch, twisted and turned. The sound was haunting.

The metals in the pile heard his voice, and responded, resonating with every dissonant hum. They vibrated, and started to move together.

Welded together by Dlafgan’s ancient sonic spell, they transformed into a large mono wheel, with a cabin in the middle. The wheel was made of stringy metal mesh. The contraption looked strange and unsteady, but the quality of the alloys, selected by the best metalworkers in the galaxy, made it sturdy enough.

“Everyone get in.” Dlafgan said. “We need to save our power supplies for air filtration, so it’s going to be a manual machination.” He tried not to look too proud, but Boron noticed the gleam in his three eyes.

At this point, everyone was so defeated and exhausted, they didn’t protest. They worked the strange vehicle like a hamster wheel, walking to roll it along, as well as working a hand crank. The wide, meshed wheel kept them from sinking into the depths of the bottomless trash heap.

After another hour of grunting, heaving, clambering on hands and knees, and rotating the crank, they made it to the abandoned ship’s wreckage. Its hull was pitch black, with the faintest heat residue in its long-dead engines. They climbed through an opening on the side. They found themselves in the cavernous engine room, empty, looted for parts countless years ago.

They debated the next course of action. Clever though Dlafgan’s machine was, it required too much work, and it was far too slow to be practicable. They convinced him to commit a battery pack to power the machine in case they needed to make a quick getaway. He saw the prudence of the decision; it would prove to save their lives.

Hungry, exhausted, battered, and dimensions away from home, Boron rested against a barrel in a corner. In the darkness of the planet-sized trash heap, in a void an infinite distance from his cozy home colony, he fell asleep.

In his dream, he became a bug in a chip bag, munching away at crumbs. He loved the delicious salt and vinegar tang of the leftover grease. Suddenly, he felt a small vibration. Then, all at once, the chip bag was crumpled up, with him still inside. He panicked as the foil walls closed in. The crushed bag was tossed into a garbage bin, and he woke with a start.

A silly, if frightening, dream.

He almost went back to sleep, except that he didn’t hear any chatter over comms. Sitting up with a start, he realized he was alone.

“Dlafgan? Dili? Thalin?” His voice got hoarser as fright crept into his voice. “Galin? Hullo!”

He rushed out to the edge of the wreckage, looking out across the vast, rotting wasteland, and saw nothing. Dlafgan’s contraption was missing, too.

Boron tried to calm down. He took deep breaths. He shouldn’t waste air, and he would rather not alert any less-than-friendly listeners if he could help it.

“They’ll come back once they realize I’m missing,” he assured himself.

“Best to wait here. I mustn’t do anything drastic.”

But they would not come back for him.

To distract himself, he explored the ship to look for runes and markings he could decipher (he’d studied some Dark Age languages), but they had all worn off. Boron felt like he waited more or less calmly for an eternity before fretting again. Really, it was only five minutes.

Something in the back of his mind that had been bothering him moved to his consciousness—a mild, barely perceptible tremor. At first, he thought his mind was playing tricks on him. Soon, it became unmistakable.

He decided to climb the ship to get a better viewpoint. Exterior rungs provided him with access to the wreckage’s roof. He saw a low mountain range which he hadn’t noticed before—only, he realized, it wasn’t a mountain.

It was moving.

The old ship started to quake and groan, and a low rumbling began rising in volume. The immense shadow on the horizon approached at what seemed like a quickened pace.

Boron thought, perhaps, his mind was playing tricks on him. Sadly for him, there was no optical illusion. It really was the size of a mountain range. It stretched farther than he could see with his human eyes. In abject horror, Boron confirmed that it was, in fact, moving toward him. As it did, the tremors became more and more powerful.

Perhaps Boron should have run. Perhaps he should have buried himself under mounds of trash. Perhaps he should have stayed on top of the ship to watch it approach and plan his escape at the last moment.

Instead, he hid.

It was not his proudest moment, but it turned out to save his life. He climbed down the ladder, ran to the barrel he’d slept against, climbed in, closed himself in with a nearby lid, flash-welded it shut while inside (singeing his space suit in a couple of places), and awaited his fate, not without some tears and shaking.

What had befallen Dlafgan and company? It happened that a half an hour after Boron had fallen asleep, Thalin sensed the faintest shiver in the ground. At first, he thought nothing of it, but it persisted and got ever so slightly stronger as time went on.

He alerted Dlafgan.

Dlafgan had misgivings about how easy their first day on the Rubbish Plane was. Not everything in these planes were dead, and surely, their split had attracted attention. Vile criminals, dark imps, and other unnamed monsters lurked beneath the wild and waste of ancient excrement.

Yet, they had seen none.

That meant they were either lucky, and had transported onto the Third, Fourth, or Fifth Rubbish Planes, where all creatures had long died out, or something else was afoot.

Now, Dlafgan’s heart dropped at the mention of a tremor. When a Wizdroid is afraid, it’s a truly daunting business.

Together, they climbed the ladder. Dili used his telescopic eye to scan the horizon. Of course, he saw the same thing Boron did—a moving, shallow, mountain range, stretching for miles across, creeping toward them. Inevitable.

Dili called Dorin over, and they plugged their cyborg heads together via a chord through their space suits. Dorin used Dili’s visual data to calculate its speed, size, and their optimal escape route.

“Dlafgan, what’s the speed of your monowheel, quickly!”

Dlafgan relayed his best guess.

Dili crunched the numbers in milliseconds.

“We need to go 44.7 degrees North, North West, at full speed, and we needed to leave eleven seconds ago!”

Although the monstrous thing on the horizon was far off, it was so wide that its maw would take an hour to escape from, even driving the highest speed, at the most optimal escape angle.

Dlafgan leapt off the ship before Dili had even finished his sentence, floating gracefully down to the monowheel, descending with his elegant Wizdroid magic.

He boomed, “We must flee, hasten to the wheel!” His voice carried across the wasteland, and they rushed to the cobbled together monowheel. He powered the engine and sped away.

Dlafgan was focusing his entire attention on steering, for a single misstep, a wrong turn, or a bog-down could mean their deaths. They started adding battery packs on the go, hoping to get some speed from the extra juice.

It wasn’t until five minutes later that Dili croaked, defeat in his voice, “We are only six—where’s Boron?”

They were all crestfallen. Then, they made a shameful, but necessary decision.

Dlafgan told them they would not survive if they went back for Boron. He immediately went back to driving, knowing their lives depended on his focus.

The rest debated anyway. Bali and Dorin said they must go back for him, even if it meant their deaths. They might not escape anyway, might as well die with honor.

Thalin and Galin were more practical. “Even if we go back for him, his chances don’t get any better, but it makes our chances’ nil! We’ve got to keep on and hope we meet him again.”

After a while, Bali and Dorin agreed to listen to Dlafgan.

Dlafgan felt in his biomechanical heart that they would, indeed, see him again.

“He’s a resourceful fellow,” Dili reassured them.

Boron was indeed resourceful. And lucky.

The mountainous creature would test both to their limits.

*

As Boron shivered in fear, awaiting his certain death, an awful noise began to creep into his awareness. A low rumbling, which matched the ground’s quaking.

Boron hadn’t even thought to analyze the molecular structure of the barrel he was hiding in. If he had, he would’ve realized that this old artifact was particularly strong, made for containing toxic waste.

And, his welding strokes, although rushed, were one of the most skillful in the galaxy. His colony’s welders kept their techniques a closely guarded secret. Even with the strength of the barrel and welds, if not for some extra luck, the behemoth would’ve crushed them like a Tic-Tac.

It was a good thing Boron couldn’t see the approaching titan.

The monster was a truly ancient being, a machine from ages past, when mankind had built planets and suns, when they had harnessed baby universes for their trash heaps.

It was called the Devourer; its maw was legend.

It was as long as the naked eye could see. Its brutish teeth were the sizes of houses, and each tooth had more teeth which spun at the speed of sound, nastily crushing and churning everything, then shoving them into its thousands of gullets, each the size of warship hangers.

Its approach was inexorable.

As it came, the din became so tremendous, Boron tried to mute the world with a setting on his spacesuit, but even though it was elvish designed, it couldn’t keep this noise out.

Every time he thought the sound would climax, it kept growing, growing. The quaking grew and grew, until he thought his eardrums would burst, and his skin would shake off his bones.

Finally, when he neared death from the quaking, he felt the din muffle, and the vibration slowed. He waited for a few minutes, frozen in fear, but knowing he had to do something. This was his chance.

“C’mon Boron. You’re a human—a human. From the inner colonies. You can do it.”

After several minutes sweating and worrying and hand wringing and second-guessing, he used his multi-tool to break his weld and lift the lid, carefully.

He met resistance when he tried to push. Taking a deep breath, he gave a massive effort. Shredded trash poured into his barrel, and he had no choice but to try to dig his way out.

Boron, by another stroke of luck, had made it to the top of the heap, just a few feet from the surface. With some effort and shoving, he was able to clamber and push and shove and pull himself out of the mound of stuff.

Boron sat upon a city-sized holding tank of millennium-old rubbish, gasping for breath. He gazed out over hills upon hills of trash, all chewed up by the behemoth’s fangs. Small clouds condensed near the ceiling of the indoor structure, almost hidden from his view. It was so massive, he could barely make out the walls on any side. The trash underneath him kept shifting, and the roar of the monster never stopped.

He realized he was being slowly raised. The Devourer’s food was forced in at the bottom of the pile, so the hill he sat on steadily grew, higher and higher toward the ceiling. The rumbling, the tumbling, was incessant.

Boron didn’t want to know what happened when this holding tank filled to the brim.

There were hundreds upon hundreds of tanks this size, all in a row behind the mouth of the beast, like cosmic stomachs. Whenever the stomach filled, a small star was created for a millisecond, absorbing the contents in a flash of energy, then it was stored, fueling the near-eternal, titanic machine.

The Devourer’s efficiency of burning and recycling was near absolute, fueling itself and a team of self-repair bots, and factories to build replacement bots, for thousands of years, feeding until the source of raw material ran out.

Thanks to the Western galaxy’s trash output, it never did.

If Boron wanted to survive, he needed to escape quickly. At that moment, all he could see was the ceiling coming close and closer. Minutes crawled on, and nothing came to him. No clever idea. No last second gamble. No possible way out. Just constant, echoing noise from the trash shoveling in.

The mound rose and rose, like some horrible water level intent on drowning its occupant.

He rose into the clouds and began making out the ceiling itself. The machines “stomach lining” seemed impenetrable. His scanner didn’t even recognize its molecular structure.

Doomed, doomed, he thought. No breaking out.

To add insult to injury, his suit beeped a warning of radiation overload. His suit was designed by elves to withstand the most radical radioactive particles. He could’ve stood on the surface of a star and been fine with the radiation. But this, this machine’s belly had one of the highest radioactive readings ever recorded.

There’s something off my bucket list, he thought, and chuckled. He was surprised that he could laugh in such a grim spot, but humor often comes to us in the strangest and darkest times.

Then, he noticed a flutter of movement. Some kind of cyborg bug—a biological organism evolved to be symbiotic with machined parts. Somehow, it survived the radiation. A miraculous little creature.

Boron looked more closely in wonder as it hovered in front of him. It looked like a large butterfly with eyes all over its body. It spun a small, glowing wheel around itself, a hex of anti-radiation. An ancient magic.

It flitted into the ceiling, leaving a trail of bright blue energy behind it until it disappeared.

Boron blinked.

As the rubble climbed higher and higher into the indoor sky, he started following the stream of light by half swimming, half clambering through the trash, until he was directly under where the little creature had disappeared into the ceiling.

After some immense effort, feeling claustrophobic from the solid, domed sky closing in, he noticed a defect. Not a defect, some kind of duct—it was too uniform to be a fracture. Maybe a sensor?

He only had seconds to act before he was crushed. Using some quick thinking, he shoved the sensor with a long piece of metal, which triggered a nearby hatch to slide open.

Boron only had a few seconds to act before he was crushed and then vaporized, becoming a miniscule part of the machine’s colossal entropy.

On instinct, he kept the bar of metal with him, light but strong, about seven feet long.

He was pushed a few yards higher up into the vertical tunnel, until the hatch beneath him closed. The hatch itself was several feet thick, he realized. Thankfully so, because beneath that hatch every material thing was at that moment being vaporized by an explosion, turning into raw energy.

Then, the hatch opened, and the excess trash that had pushed Bilbo up into the tunnel was sucked into the now empty stomach. Just in the nick of time, Bilbo caught himself with the pipe wedge between the walls of the tunnel.

The drop was hundreds and hundreds of feet. Vertigo swept over him. Every gram of trash which had filled the massive stomach was completely gone. Already in its place, new trash started to pool in from the beast’s mechanical fangs, terrible, and forever churning.

He could feel the tug of the wind. His legs dangled over the drop. He clung to the rod desperately, until finally, the hatch slid closed again.

The silence was deafening.

Absolute darkness and absolute silence.

Boron breathed. In, out. In out.

He took a second to feel his spacesuit, overwhelmed by his survival.

The blue stream of light danced around him and zipped higher into the duct.

Boron stood on the closed hatch, the metal rod in reach. He had a few minutes until the Devourer’s stomach filled up again.

*

Meanwhile, Dlafgan and the Borgs were racing against the behemoth, adjusting their angle here and there, absolute precise curves and turns in the face of every obstacle. They’d been driving for an hour, and they’d made enough gains to be out ahead of the Devourer, but they were still cutting it close.

Unless something set them back. The wreckage of a Third Millennia Battleship suddenly loomed on the horizon.

They didn’t have time to go around it.

“We’re not going to make it!” Thalin’s voice barely coming through comms over the Devourer’s roar. He didn’t very much like that Borg.

“Dorin, start steering!” Dorin took over, and Dlafgan began focusing—a difficult thing considering the horizon-sized ravager a few hundred meters behind them, the earthquake constantly shaking them, and the deafening howl mountains being chewed and swallowed.

Dlafgan sang a new sonic spell. It took all his effort, and all the energy in his third eye.

The massive battleship split in half, leaving a space for them to travel in the middle. Mountains of ancient metals on either side of them, the hulk being held back by some unseen force, like a sea of water being split down the middle.

They sped through the battleship’s corpse, until after a few minutes, they rocketed out the other side. As soon as they did, the wreckage collapsed back into its shape.

The shipwreck was so large and integrous, it slowed the teeth of the Devourer for a few extra seconds, giving them time to fly away and outside the path of the beast’s maw.

I’m ashamed to say, they started to laugh in relief—forgetting for a moment their old pal Boron.

“We made it!”

“Grand driving old Dlafgan.”

“Superb!”

“Never doubted you for a second.”

Dlafgan was not so pleased, however. He had not forgotten their smaller companion left behind. Now, they must face new dangers without his third eye out of energy.

*

Boron had figured out that he could use magnetic boots to walk up the walls of the tunnel. He followed the stream of light higher and higher.

Suddenly, he thought he saw a hint of “light” higher up. A way out?

The creature, however, flew into a side duct. The first opening in the tunnel Boron had noticed. He could crawl in if he wanted. It was dark. He could see movement in the shadows, frightening, and mysterious.

But, the creature hovered in the crawlspace, seeming to beckon to him.

The glint of light higher up the tunnel seemed so sweet, just another hundred feet; the temptation of escape was strong.

Something in him pulled toward the cyborg-butterfly. He trusted it. The creature was whimsical and beautiful, and it had shown him the hatch door. How could he not?

So, he did the bravest thing he’d ever done. He clambered in the cramped, dark, duct, the sound of demonic machinations whirring close by, deeper into the belly of the beast.

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I know it’s not my usual content, so thank you for reading.

What do you think will happen to this gang? Should I keep it up, and write more “chapters?” Do you have any ideas for what space misadventures they should get into?

Feel free to comment your feedback, too, I’m new to fiction and looking for advice.

Soli Deo Gloria