Mind on Fire Books

Flash Fiction Month Prompt – July 4th Edition: Freedom, Glitched

“What if the price of freedom wasn’t death, but an eternal respawn?”

In the blistering chaos of the 2003 Iraq invasion, a squad of U.S. Marines is deployed not just to secure oil fields or topple statues—but to hunt djinn. Not metaphorical ones. Real, spectral, code-corrupted entities that haunt the desert like corrupted files in a divine operating system. Their only weapon? A prototype called the Phantom Nullifier—a gun that kills ghosts by counting their deaths. But like all things built on bad math and worse intentions, the counter rolls over. And the ghosts come back. Not my idea, it’s from the prompt at FFM.

Again. And again. And again.

Set during a sandstorm that feels more like purgatory than weather, The Ghost Gun Loops Again is a surreal sci-fi war fable about the absurdity of violence, written from expereince as a Marine myself, having served during the invasion.

The Ghost Gun Loops Again

The wind picked up, carrying figures of sand that mirrored the cursed apparitions. Private First Class Ramos fired a half-red shell; it blew apart a phantom form in a tiny crimson bloom. The readout flickered from zero to one, then back as if the cosmos laughed. Cho sighed: the war against ghost code bugs was more grueling than any human foe.

Outside the tent, the storm’s teeth gnawed at the Kevlar walls. Specialist Torres tried to sketch a mental map of djinn spawn points on her datapad, but the numbers always reset. Every kill subroutine looped straight back to its dark beginning. It felt like pushing a mountain into the sea only to watch it reassemble.

Ratner checked his watch. Zero hour had come and gone amid this endless white gale. He considered surrendering the Nullifier to the Iraqis, hoping the djinn would bug out. But no local kid would believe tales of code-wraiths. They’d think him as mad as the ghosts themselves.

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The Ghost Gun Loops Again Continued

A distant mortar flare lit the horizon orange. Cho felt a flicker of awe. Human death was final, unlike these cosmic jesters. At least bullets didn’t reboot. Even an exploding tank mattered more than a phantom clearing respawn zones.

Sand clogged their boots and their nerves. Every echo in the canyon took on shapes of djinn mocking them. Ratner inhaled grit and prayer. The Nullifier’s screen flashed 4,294,967,295. Then zero. His finger itched again.

Cho cocked her head. Behind a dune, a figure shimmered in starless light. A djinn wearing a tattered washing gown, teeth glinting like shattered glass, beckoned. Ratner grunted and fired. The ghost exploded into motes, then coalesced with a hiss.

In the quiet that followed, the Nullifier’s counter blinked 0000000000. Cho tapped him on the shoulder. ‘We might as well be writing our names in sand,’ she said. Ratner nodded. The marines trudged on, ghosts and men locked in an endless loop across the shifting dunes. And the storm never ceased.

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