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Thunderdome Week DXCVI:Vemödalen Vemödalen: The fear that everything has already been done This neologism comes to us by way of John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is our subject for the week. Pick one of the (non-introduction) videos from This playlist, and write something inspired by or evoking the emotion described. Do not be too literal or duplicative of the video, though. (We’re sticking to just the ones with videos again for this week, not the ones only defined in the dictionary website) If you wrote in week 353, you should choose a different word this time. The first person to select each word gets 1500 words. The second gets 1400, the third 1300, and so on. This reduction only applies to cases where people are duplicating a word, to be clear All the no’s: poetry, erotica, fanfic, raw screeds and primal screams, spreadsheets,gdoc links in general Losses/negative mentions are possible but not inevitable this week. Sign-ups close 11:59 PM California time Friday Submissions close 11:59 California time Sunday Judges: Thranguy Chernobyl Princess ? Entrants: The Cut of Your Jib - Zenosyne beep-beep car is go - Vemödalen Toaster Beef - Onism Staggy - Oleka Sitting Here - Ballagàrraidh Sailor Viy - Astrope Flyerant - Lacrimae Rerum Ceighk - Alazia sparksbloom - Yù Yī BeefSupreme - Pâro TheMackening - Ambedo Slightly Lions - Avenoir Thranguy fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Sign-ups are closed, co-judges still wanted.
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Jan 6, 2024 10:26
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Jan 8, 2024 09:59
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Week 596 Judgement This was a very good week of stories. There were a couple that I liked less than others but none so much so to warrant negative mentions. So directly to the positive: HM'S go to The Cut of Your Jib's The Calculus of Being Derivative or Losing Sight of E, Sitting Here's AITA (Am I That Alienated?), TheMackening's Family Tradition, and Slightly Lions' The Damage You'll Do. And the winner is Staggy, for Voyager!
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Jan 9, 2024 18:06
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Crits for Week #596 The Cut of Your Jib - The Calculus of Being Derivative or Losing Sight of E: Euler's constant is a lowercase ‘e’; capital E is a drug. Powerful opening. Raggedy Ann. Overall strong, bits that capture Koenig's voice almost perfectly and doing interesting, strongly character based things with the concept. A very good start to the week. Sailor Viy - Backdrop People: Interesting opening, not sure from sentence one if we're following simulation theory sociopaths or if something else is going in. Either way, it grabs. But I don't thing this quite works as is; the two characters are too alike and there's no way ro contrast them with anything. beep-beep car is go - The Pilgrim: Reasonable opening that does a lot of work, a lot of dense worldbuilding in a single paragraph, and the rest of the story almost feels like an elaboration on it. I don't think the choice to be so cagey about the question works: not revealing it could work, but leaving it unclear if it was chosen or assigned to Gis probably doesn't. Toaster Beef - boxes: The opening works, introduces the concept while also serving as an inciting event. The whole works as a character sketch. I would have liked the sisters to be actual characters even if that meant cutting detail elsewhere; as it is there's not even any reason for there to be more than one. TheMackening - Family Tradition: The opening is a bit slow to get to character for such a short piece. But this is solid, getting right at the concept of the prompt. Staggy - Voyager: Solid opening. And a solid piece overall, a grand stage and a convincing inhuman point of view, perhaps a bit oblique in the connection to the prompt but not completely disconnected. Top group. Flyerant - Confessio inlacrimabilis: A Tearless Confession: The opening sentence is a bit of a mess, a broken parallel structure and a weird dangling clause after a semicolon. The content is fine though. The opening has a depth of detail that gets lost later on; this story wants for specifics, for the details of what Hozer did to earn this betrayal. Also you may be confused as to who would be considered a rat in this context; better to warn about how police in general are treated in prisons. I don't love the ending device either. Slightly Lions - The Damage You'll Do: The opening is a little on the abstract side. But the piece overall is well-done. I think it may have wanted a bit more of the bad times, more than little hints about why the relationship fails. Sitting Here - AITA (Am I That Alienated?): Solid opening paragraph. And solid overall, well-drawn characters inhabiting a real sort of moment. BeefSupreme - Three Little Words: We open with an essay and some fairly well-trodden ground for one at that. But it does the work of framing the story, and it's a solid little story as well. Ceighk - Cold Fire: Interesting opening, does the work it should. Or maybe it doesn't; it's doesn't quite fit with the dissociative episodes we hear about later. But the main problem with this story is that it doesn't really go anywhere. A risk with that particular prompt I guess, but the ending just doesn't work, and the connection with The Mousetrap is completely opaque.
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Jan 9, 2024 18:07
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In, flash
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Jan 10, 2024 05:57
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Rise and Fall Flash Ingredient: Revenge 1201 words “It's just a shame, that's all,” said Miller, tossing a handful of Parm at the last salad ever made at The Byzantium. “A loving shame.” “Twenty years and it comes down to this,” said Josie. She worked tables, lived off tips. Didn't usually hang with the cooks. “Turks at the gates.” “Twenty two years,” said Miller. “And the Vadiks aren't Turkish. They're Armenian, I think.” “It's, you know,” said Josie, “A figure of speech.” “Were you on the list?” he said. “What list?” Josie grabbed the salad bowl. “They're keeping Myra on account Grigor likes the way her tits bounce, and Ryan up front, and that's it.” “He's not wrong,” Miller said. Josie gave him a look. “Just saying. Same back here. Maybe two guys on the line are staying on.” “Somebody,” said Josie, “Oughta do something.” Which was how it began, either right then and there or right after the shift ended, the two of them pants off in the wine cellar, grunting together against the packed-up crates of bottles that Vito Duke thought were good enough to save. Plenty of the cheap stuff was left, and a few decent bottles opened during the last week too. Everyone who wanted to could find something to steal on the last day. But it wasn't enough to hurt. Still they stole. Miller stole wine. And Josie stole cheese. A week later she called him over, and got the cheese out of her freezer, and cracked it open. Perfect molds of the Byzantium keys in the middle of the Manchego. She'd watched a bunch of videos, and they made casts and harder molds and better casts, gel to aluminum good enough to take to a key copy machine and get steel. The first time they went was two days after The Byzantium closed. There was a new chain on the front but the back door was just as it had always been and the keys worked fine. There wasn't anything worth taking, not yet. So they left something behind instead. The next time was a few days before Shirak's cold opening. They'd changed the front locks but their key still opened the back door like a charm. The security system was new, but they had video of fifteen different people punching in the code, thanks to the little camera and router they'd put in last time. There still wasn't much to steal, so they just took back their spy hardware and left. They had the key and they had the code. They could come back when they were ready. Time passed. They both found other work; they both knew their jobs and had good references from the old boss. Not together, and for a good while they were on opposite shifts and barely got together at all. But when their schedules lined up just right they'd end up at the old Hammerhead bar just across the street, which used to be a cop bar until word got out that IAB had it wired and now was just a quiet place to get drunk. “I used to figure, rats,” said Josie. “Hit up a pet store, get a dozen or so and let them loose. Call the health inspector too, maybe.” Miller smiled. “That would serve them right.” “I said used to,” Josie said. “I mean, revenge is revenge but you don't get ahead by just getting even.” “So what do you figure?” said Miller. “Not like anyone else will pay dimes on the dollar for fancy Armenian wine. “I don't know. Wait,” she said, pulling out her buzzing phone. She read and tapped out a few lines of text. “That was Myra,” she said. “The one who still works there?” “Not no more. Let's do the rats.” So the next night they went there, to Shirak, with a chattering cage, looking for a good place to plant a colony. “You still got the wine cellar key?” Millet said. “Sure, but like you said-” “It still drinks, doesn't it,” he said. Then he cocked a smile. “And maybe a white gets topped off with some Chateau Miller's kidneys ‘24.” She tossed him a key. He went down then back up almost immediately. “Maybe hold up letting the rats out,” he said. “You gotta see this.” There was a safe down there. Big, old-fashioned. Not a temperature-controlled wine safe. The kind a bank would have used fifty years ago. “Do you still have-” started Miller. “Ahead of you,” said Josie, pulling out her camera and router, looking for a good hiding place. It was a wine cellar; there were plenty. “Not great signal here, though. We'll need to eat upstairs to pull the video.” So they did. Miller figured the food was pretty much the same as any other Mediterranean joint, just with different names for things. Once he figured those out it was as good a meal as any. A couple meals a week and in two of those they had enough to work with. The combination, mostly. The guy stood almost like he knew there was a camera. Lucky him. Unlucky them. But over a few openings they had it down to about six possibilities, three if there was any tolerance in the mechanism. And they had the pattern. For all the good it did them. Tuesday, a couple times during the day, a guy would put in cash. Lots of cash. Heavy looking guy, Russian, not Armenian. And then just after they closed three Russians showed up to collect it all. “So god-damned useless,” said Josie. “All that cash and no way to get it.” “Masks and shotguns?” said Miller. “You ever shot a guy?” said Josie. “Even pointed a gun at someone?” Miller shook his head. “Me neither. And it would be four people at least, and anyone who'd be worth having knows better than to steal from those guys.” It was a frustrating night. They didn't get properly buzzed. The sex was no good either. But Miller woke up with an idea. It was a good plan and they executed it well. Dinner Tuesday. They both went to the restrooms at the same time. Josie could fit into Myra’s uniform and the line chefs dressed like any other line chefs. Miller waited until he was alone, then raised a lighter to the fire alarm. Tossed it lit into the paper towel trash after it started blaring, walked out just before the sprinklers started sprinkling. Then down to the cellar and spinning the wheel, trying the possible combinations. Not one, not two, not three. Four was the one. Money went into sacks. They went out through the front, avoiding the restaurant’s fire marshalls out back, and got to Miller’s car before the fire truck arrived. Miller woke up five minutes before his alarm, with a sudden realization. He shook Josie awake. “We gotta go,” he said. “Now.” “Wha-” “We didn't take away the camera,” he said. She snapped awake, grabbed clothing with practiced speed. Maybe they only thought they heard bangs behind them, doors being kicked down. They left with the clothes on their back and a trunk full of cash, leaving behind a city they'd never be welcome in again.
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Jan 15, 2024 08:50
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In, flash
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Jan 17, 2024 11:13
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Thirteen Things 1197 words Flash:Your tiny town's levees are about to break. 1 These days people call it just ‘the old tree’ but everyone can hear the word they're leaving out. Used to be kids would play in it, climb the trunk and shimmy out on the long thick limb, but too many fell each year, usually breaking an arm or a leg, spending months with a cast or two. The township put up signs, and as a result only older, more reckless teens, often drunk on convenience store malt, would make the climb. Three different times somebody would think to light a fire, to burn the damned thing down, but each time it didn't do more than scorch the bark. It refused to die. 2 Niall Cullen was one of those kids. You know the type. Trenchcoat, butterfly knife. Adores the absent father he knew nearly nothing about, other than a vague sense he was in the military, and so obviously in elite special forces. Every summer he crossed the state line and while his friends, such as they were, went for the flashy stuff he spent his gathered fortune on M-80s. He didn't light off many. Most he would carefully drill into, collecting the black powder into PVC pipes. 3 These days Mark Phelps doesn't do much at all, just sits in his favorite chair. He communicates only in growls, enough to let his children know when he's displeased. They scramble to obey, to change a channel or lead him to the restroom or spoon soup into his half-drooped mouth. Junior and Connie and Jack. They know, somewhere inside, that he is helpless, that they could walk out or smother him with a pillow or burn cigarette marks into his skin. But knowing is not acting. 4 The Dylan house is owned by the First Sharpton Bank and Trust, and every now and again they try to sell it, or the land it's on, but there are no takers. It's overgrown with kudzu and other creepers, rusted out cars covered in vegetation like burial mounds out in the huge front lawn. It is not, it must be clearly said, haunted. Nobody has ever died in that house. The Dylans met their ends in hospitals and prisons. But you could not get anyone in town to spend a night there, not on any bet you could likely afford. 5 Josiphine Quinn is harmless, would not harm a fly unless it was bothering one of her cats. She spent ten years at Rockwell, before they shut it down, quietly taking her meds and looking out the window. When she got out the family she had been inconvenient to were all gone. She knows secrets, true secrets, will tell them to you if you will listen for a while. 6 Dace Williams might never have said a true word since he came to town. That's not even really his name. He worked his way through each widow in town, running the old affection game. And Sheila Burns didn't mean to hit him quite so hard with the frying pan. She's been wondering for a while just how long a corpse will keep in a basement freezer, figuring it might well be forever unless the power fails, but she's too careful to try and look it up. 7 The Church of the Trifold Spirit was run out of town in the Seventies, Preacher Calvin fled with the money off to Brazil. The parishioners either turned hippie and went west, found other communes to join, or else came back to their parents and a nice Baptist church. But the building was still there, out on the end of Main Street. It used to be a Catholic church, back in the time when there were enough Catholics to have one, and nobody was sure if it was properly deconsecrated. The city owns it, and rents out the basement for support group meetings. 8 Mayor Xavier Vargas has killed times in his life, and gotten away with each one. The second barely counts. That was in Iraq, in wartime. One tour, and it was as clean as that kind of thing gets. It's not that man's face that he sees in his nightmares. It's mostly his old business partner Miles Aaron, who wanted to come clean to the IRS and make a deal. But sometimes, sometimes it's Jessica, whose last name he can't even remember, struggling to get her head above the water, floating limp until he filled her pockets with stones. He can't remember her name, can't remember why he did it even. He does remember the summer and early fall, paranoid preteen days until he finally realized that she would never be found. 9 It was a once-in-a-century storm on its way, remnants of two hurricanes and the storm surges they made come up the river. 10 On the fifteenth of every month, Peter Boyd comes home late at night, shirt bloody, mood strangely light. Margery knows better than to ask questions. She does the laundry in silence. Except once. One time she sealed the shirt in thick plastic, used the old vacuum sealer, and hid the whole bag in an old box in the basement. She even went to the Walmart and bought a new shirt, the same brand and color, just in case Boyd kept count. 11 Dallas Entertainment employed fifty people on paper and did not appear to do anything, as a business. It did own a few subsidiaries: laundromats, a parking lot, a roller-skating rink, all as silent partner. The day before the company shut down, ceased to exist, all assets evaporating like digital smoke, all officers and employees, if they ever existed, ever gracing a tax roll or other government record anywhere 12 Niall Cullen would later swear up and down that it must have been a freak of nature, a random bolt of lightning that struck his decades-in-the-making stash of crude but tested pipe bombs. Even with that explosion so close it seemed for a few hours that the levee would hold nonetheless, but the cracks spread slowly then quickly and the water would not be stopped. In his later days, after he had lost his spleen and a kidney in a prison knife fight and found Jesus in the infirmary, he considered it divine retribution, and told anyone who would listen just that. 13 In the flood the old tree, the old lynching tree uprooted, those broad roots pulling up more old coffins and people buried without a box than anyone suspected were there, some dating back to before statehood, before the peoples the white men took the land from, before the ones they displaced. That old tree was deeper than it was tall, and it was tall enough. Tree and roots washed down with the floodwaters, wrecking buildings, dragging cars along with it before lodging across the interstate. The Army Corp of Engineers were called in to remove it. A year later a third of the men and women of that mission were dead. The records will show disease, suicide, car crashes and a few murders, but every last survivor lays a curse on that tree when they pray to whatever God they know.
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Jan 22, 2024 03:45
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In with a flash
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Jan 23, 2024 19:43
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The Chasm 721 words Flash:That conversation you really, really didn't want to have. Joanie is sleeping under her sunflower blankets and Eve is struck by a shard of envy. Eve knows she won't be sleeping any time soon, not until total exhaustion sets in and her body shuts down for her. She's not even tired. She once stayed up more than fifty hours, studying straight through to the Organic Chemistry midterm, well past her second wind, then celebrating with her roommates, wild and jumpy with diet soda and coolers, and then with Myles, eager hands fumbling charmingly with her clothes. Afterwards he slept, but Eve did not, stayed up watching him breathe, even after round two in the morning she didn't let her eyes rest, didn't dare sleep lest everything that had happened turn into a dream, not until just after Calculus and lunch and only barely reaching her bed. So that's the limit. Fifty hours. Less, surely. She's not nearly as young anymore. It was a good memory. But she can't enjoy it, feels like if she stops to savor it, even for an instant, it will be gone. Consumed. Replaced with the memory of a memory of a memory of a memory, a regressing hall of mirrors without anything casting the first reflection. She looks at the clock. In a little more than five hours, the alarm will go off and Joanie will wake up. They say you should remind yourself to eat, to drink, at times like these. And also to sleep, but that's a joke. She sets out a sleeve of crackers and a large glass of water at the kitchen table. The water tastes so much like iron, like blood that she worries for a moment that she's bit her tongue off without feeling it. She doesn't remember the crackers tasting like anything, but each time she looks down at the table there are fewer of them, until they're gone. The diodes on the clock on the microwave oven shift. In four hours, the alarm in Joanie's room will go off. She barely remembers the call, and that, she is sure, is a mercy. Myles’ boss, calling from a hospital on the other side of the country. She remembers not quite understanding what was being said, getting halfway through booking tickets on her laptop before the whole message got through. That he was in an accident she got, but that other part, that he died in the ambulance, pronounced on arrival. Something stopped working in her. She can't remember how the conversation ended. Eve wants to talk with people. The EMTs in the ambulance. She imagines one of them holding his hand, at the last. Cute, but unthreatening. A wedding ring on that hand. She wants to find out who was there, to talk to them, but she doesn't have any idea how to even start. And the driver. She thinks Mitchell said he died too, even if she can't recall the words. Did he have family, a wife or a husband or whatever? She wants to talk to them. She wants to talk to the doctor who signed the death certificate, which she could probably find out who eventually. Or her sister. Or Mitchell again. But they're all asleep, and she won't wake them up. She keeps almost falling asleep, then jolting back awake. Five minutes gone. She makes coffee, but the only coffee she can find is the instant Japanese kind that only he ever drank. It smells like him. She can't decide if she'll never make it again or never drink any other kind. It's kind of bad, but not horrible. It gets the job done. She scrolls through the hospital website, finding the parts you never land on by accident. The forms and releases she'll have to go through to have her husband shipped from coast to coast. And more rabbit holes down that one. She spends nearly an hour astonished at how many different funeral homes there are in this town, how desperate each one is to seem different from all the others. It's coming. Minutes, not hours, and she's not ready. The clock keeps adding a minute every minute no matter how hard she tries to stop it. In three minutes the alarm will go off and Joanie will wake up and Eve will have to tell her that her father is dead.
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Jan 29, 2024 08:06
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Feb 8, 2024 10:58
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Judgeburps for Week #600 Crits done in judgemode Godmother: Turning the semicolon to a comma and cutting ‘is’ would improve the flow of the first sentence. In general a solid little piece, probably high middle. Memories of a Birthday Party: I don't really like this one at all, though I can't easily put my finger on why. There's very little here, and the end line is a huge clunker. Lowish. Kaboria-7 Black Hole Memorial: This is functional, the sort of environmental storytelling that might have a place in a video game or the like, but there's not much actually going on beyond the uninterrogated cliché here. Middle? Residency VISA application form for Cuono 3 and Affiliated Systems: This is interesting but perhaps not fully baked. I don't know if the self-evaluation conceit works quite. Middle high Renewal: Another one that I don't care for. The opening sentence is a meandering mess, there is no coherent narrative present, and the ending is abrupt but uninteresting. Lowish. Welcome to Foxton,: This one is pretty neat, a nice little piece of dream logic, some reverse Quixote freeing the dragon rather than trying to slay. High middle. All tires bring farmers all farmers bring dogs: This is really good, strongly evocative, good balance of complexity and repetition. High group. False Fungus Friendship: Okay. Does some interesting things with pacing, but I think it doesn't quite fit enough into the form. Middleish. Even Gravity Can’t Bring Us Together: This is okay writing, nothing mindblowing or special, but fine. I'm not sure it fully hits either prompt. Middle Becalming: The opening sentence is a bit awkward. Going for four when the rule of three exists, and having the last one be, I don't know, too simple to fit the cadence but not simple enough to work like a punchline. Adding an adjective to the back rubs would help a little. Otherwise, a pretty nice little piece. High middle. Spoilers for Final Imaginary Friend in Hidden Stage and What I Learnt: I don't know, this is a little too real to be saying much of anything about anything. Middle. How is what you are doing right now better than what you were doing before?: This is okay, sort of new age affirmation-y without offering much new though. Middle. An Introduction to East Montane For Travelers: There's an interesting idea here, but I think you've let the word limit fool you into presenting it in a fairly boring and overly direct way. Middle-low Excerpt from "The Fish of A-Declercq Bay": Interesting ideas, but the tone of the piece shifts wildly several times, jarringly. Middle. Lungs: Powerful but also unclear; you have a personified water surface somehow able to indicate direction with eyes. Mid-high Rano Pano: Another nice one, solid emotional core and good sense imagery. Mid-high, maybe High Not from here: Functional but there isn't much substance; the prose is fairly basic and there's not enough to anchor the idea fully. Middle. Moonlit.: There's not quite enough here. We have hints of an alien world, but they're superficial, generic, like a procedural quest in a video game. Mid-low What to do in Asterism Delta: This is well executed but the premise (a cosmos where water is somehow rare) is hard to swallow. Middle-high Love Gone Wrong: A bit weak for the subject matter, would be improved by leaning harder into something. Mid-low Long Weekend: I want just a little more context for the kid and their (fading) importance to the festival. (The recent Omelas story that's making the rounds puts a quite dark idea of that in my head.) Okay but for that. Middle Primates: Bad, sort of like the worst kind of ethnic joke played serious and shifted in target. Very low. Family: Good execution of some long and loaded sentences, and an interesting idea behind them. I think the species-level narration makes it weaker than a single point of view would. Middle-high. I’m not really a tourist I’m more of a traveller: I like the idea behind this, I think, but I think it can be taken much further; it shouldn't just be wrong but fractally wrong. Middle-high Proof: Solid title game here, but I think this one is too opaque for its own good. Middle-low July 6th, 9:12 PM: Very solid. Not much motion but a very strongly described moment and almost as well-drawn character. High. Welcome to the Omniveritas Museum of Extant Realism!: The opening paragraph would probably work better without “in extreme cases”, the placement does the comedic work here. There are some good bits, but ultimately it's going for the same joke a few too many times. Low middle. The Thicket: I don't care for the second paragraph; describing in negatives is tough to make work. The tone of the start doesn't match up with the ending. Middle-low Anahera: I like this one quite a bit, the fallen angel as beached whale conceit just works. Middle-high. Scene From A Fast-Casual Restaurant: I really want her dialog to be in quotation marks, even if that means paragraph breaks. Solid short scene though, Middle-high Memory Lane: This, ah, does not very closely fit the prompt. It's a fragment of a story, without enough to justify the ending and without very much place-description at all. Lowish You are Not Benevolent: I'm not sure what's happening here. It has the structure of something that could be coherent, could work, but there's not enough in that structure really. Lowish A Walk Down Emberley Road: Creepy in a good way, does a good job with unease without cheap tricks. Highish. gently caress Goddamn poo poo I Hate Haunted Highways So Much: The voice is interesting and amusing but the stories aren't much better than the narrator thinks they are. Middle. Symmetry: So this is more about the idea than anything else, but the idea doesn't really work: the sameness of intersections means that the first bit is pointless. I want to know what happens at the edges, at the Bay, and maybe get more sense of menace or trap here. Moddle Another Sinner Laid to Rest: “Being as it were” is clunky and useless. If you must, “all things being equal” does more. But there's not too much notable here. Middle-low Prior Experience Not Required: This is a lot like the hivemind story, the same kind of conceit and structure. It works better here, maybe because it's short enough to let the twist work. Middle-high Late, Again: I feel like I should like this one more than I do. It has the sorts of things you need for this kind of story. But somehow it doesn't quite come together, the end doesn't quite make sense. Middle. Waylaid by The Quarrell: This doesn't really hit the prompt, more about a creature than a place. And, for that, it's okay, straining a bit at the size. Middle-high BUSTED: Dispelling Five Myths About Integration: This one sort of fails to commit fully to the bit; the footnotes grow more reasonable and less concerning as the piece progresses rather than the other way around. Middle. The Food Truck At the Corner of The Street Where I Live that Everybody Says is Overrated But Eats at Anyway: This is solid, a strong voice, a throughline that works, and plenty of place. High.
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Feb 12, 2024 04:57
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Archaeology 1308 words “There used to be a planet here,” said the Ootz Chromarch, her fur shimmering as she spoke. “Is that a threat?” I asked. They're difficult to read. We're speaking Gabb, and they've got an odd accent. An old accent. It's tough for nuance to come across. It's neither of our first languages. “No,” she said. “Just an observation. The arts of the First Ootz are lost to the fifth.” She stops the slight bobbing of her head and is suddenly still. “This is a threat: if you do not leave Ootz space when we have concluded our business, you will all die.” It's rough. We want to leave, with the rock. That's the mission, after all. Go to the Guttering Rings. Find a hunk of the ruins, an asteroid full of archeological metal at the maximum of what the Roanoke can haul and make our way to the new colony. But it may not be possible. - It was a rough transit. Rougher than usual. I'm one of the lucky ones, spent the thirty-three hours in the grey room. Full psychic shielding, minimum stimulus. Some people can sleep in the grey room, but not many. Not me. Still, the enforced boredom of the trip is easy compared to what Shela and the other pilots went through. They have to watch the chaos of lower space, to observe it so we don't stop existing, closing their eyes even to blink only in carefully scheduled shifts. A rough flight. Derrid had an episode near the middle. Went catatonic. Why we use a full complement of five pilots, even though you can do it with three. Or even one with the right drugs and disregard for long term health. And when we arrived, the first thing I did when I got out of the grey room, before the sleep shift, was to run the stars through the simulator. To calculate the time-slip. I ran the numbers twice, just to be completely sure. We had lost almost thirty years. - “We are not like you, you see,” said the Chromarch. “Everything that lives where water is liquid.” She waved her left arms vaguely. “Out there. One chemistry. Not us.” “Fascinating,” said Coniff. He's from science, the only one there who can speak Gabb. “There aren't many exceptions to the Galactic panspermia on record.” “But here we are. We were not-” she stops, correcting herself. “The cousins were not seeded. They were left behind. And our food would be like eating rocks or toxins to you. You could never live among us.” - The Roanoke is a colony ship. Designed to start a new human colony on an uninhabited, marginally habitable world. Ready to do it alone if we have to. A few percent more than the minimum viable population, about seventy of us. If we make sure no kid in the next generation has the same two parents and every kid in the one after that has a unique set of grandparents, and if we breed like rabbits in the meantime, the genetics end up being, well, not so bad. The hope is that we meet up with other ships and it doesn't need to be that severe, or that someone manages to send a sperm bank using spaces that doesn't tend to corrupt nonliving dense information, but we can't count on that. We may be the last colony ship out of Earth, and that starts seeming more likely every minute. Because lower space and most of the other spaces are going to close soon. If they haven't already. - “How can you pay us?” asked the Chronarch. “Credit in the Great Gabb Banks is a joke this near the Jubilee.” She was speaking English now. The Ootz pick up language quickly. “What do you want?” I asked. “Labor? Our ship can haul mass efficiently.” “You have given us your words,” she said. “You have more. Words, and stories made of them.” I agreed as quickly as I could, and she sensed my eagerness. “Value for value, that is the way,” she said. “But also, you do us a favor, taking away an empty homestead. We have too many. Far too many, and every little bit helps.” - Conniff constructed their history, made us understand. This system was a homeworld in the earliest days of the galaxy. Not the true ancients, who lived before there were stars, before there was matter. But the second civilizations. They lived, and built, and turned their planets into vast cities built with metals we can barely understand, let alone forge, and powered their cities with motes of void energy. And then they went away. Died, or ascended, or migrated. They were gone, is all that is known. They left behind wildlife. The cousins were the most successful species, a sort of hexagonal raccoon-rat. “And the Ootz evolved from them?” I asked. “The First Ootz evolved from them. And wiped out most of the other species. And then wiped themselves out in terrible wars. And then, hundreds of thousands of years later, the Second Ootz evolved from the cousins as well. And they learned from their predecessors, whose technology was not as far advanced as the ancients. And when they came to fight their wars they could harness the full power of the motes, and so their wars destroyed all the planets in the system but one. The Third Ootzs died destroying that one, but not before making habitats of the asteroid ruins. The Fourth Ootz lasted longest, spread over so many small homes, but they did manage to wipe themselves out as well, and it was millions of years before a population of cousins thrived enough to evolve sentience again. - One of the signs that lower space is closing soon is, of course, larger than usual timeslips. Timeslips are how the universe preserves causality despite faster than light travel. If someone would influence events in the wrong order, they get shifted forwards until that doesn't happen, and the biggest, most universal event that people could learn about in advance is when space travel stops working for a few thousand years. So we may be screwed. Our wormholes and q-tangles are still spooling out thirty years of data, have to finish receiving before we can send anything, and the next few bits at any time could be the bad news. We could just try the drive, of course, but nobody in science knows if that would just be a do-nothing click or a big boom or if we just disappear forever. - “No,” said the Chromarch. I had asked if we could establish our colony here, keep to our own rock, fully independent. It would be rough, all the early colony problems and us evolved for a lot more gravity than them. But it seemed doable. “There is the one Ootz Polity, and that is all there can be. If there are two, there will be war, and the best possible case is your destruction.” “The worst?” “All of ours, and another long wait until the Sixth Ootz rise. One polity. Growth just enough to match the need to grow, to keep governance by a single polity. There is no choice. If you cannot leave, you must die.” - The messages stopped. Most of the microwormholes collpased, as they will after decades of use, and the q-tangles destabilized. Not suddenly. According to their half-lives. There are a few left, squeezing out a bit or two an hour, too slow to be useful, probably abandoned on the other end. We try to find a message in them, but nothing emerges. The Ootz have been patient, but very soon we'll need a decision. The rock is docked and ready to haul, ready for me to order the pilots to their station and press the button and engage the lower space drive and find out what happens.
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Feb 12, 2024 08:58
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Feb 13, 2024 07:37
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Orbis Tertius Ut Volvitur 1054 words Flash:Like a note on the ankle of the last living pigeon The taxidermied remains of Martha, the last of the North American passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratoria), had to be destroyed by incineration afterward, ensuring that she survived only in photographs, and of course those photographs, the ones of the awful display, her feathers painted in a parody of the coloration of the common urban pigeon (Columbia livia forma urbana), the doll-sized black suit and kiffah glued on and the slogan framing her, “We did it before” above and “We can do it again” below, both in blood-red paint dripping off the bottom serifs, those are the photographs that are remembered now more than the sedate, even reverent Audubon Society prints of her as she had been displayed before. That slogan was infamous, with variations appearing worldwide almost immediately after the extinction of the urban pigeon, a drastic but likely necessary response to the avian flu pandemic of 1932. The effort was intense, involving the most successful programs of cooperation between nations worldwide during the War, but humankind's triumph over that deadly disease was almost immediately turned into propaganda of the worst sort. In the United States the birds pictured were more often dressed in minstrel clothes than the more European variant in this case. The first photographs taken of the atrocious display are different in one aspect from the later ones that are more often referenced: they contain the message, a scroll tied to the left foot, unraveling partially to show a string of characters in the Hebrew alphabet, more or less. Some of the letters are mis-drawn, and the letters do not form any recognizable words. When the investigator Marley unraveled the entire paper he noticed a more salient message written on the rest of the paper. The scroll was a key piece of the old propaganda posters, representing the secret orders handed down by the nefarious elite, calling back to the first great deliberate extermination campaigns against pigeons, most particularly messenger and homing pigeons during the early years of the War. A simple and personal act of mutiny by desperate soldiers turned to tactics, strategy, and finally logistics during that arc of the War that leads from the failed Christmas Uprising Failed, in the sense that it did not end the war and ultimately resulted in death or prison for the soldiers involved. On the other hand, it did, before its convulsive ending, achieve the capture, trial, and execution of General Haig, all recorded on grainy black and white nitrocellulose film to excite and horrify posterity, and let in a straight line to the Soldier's Republics and the second phase of the War. Hostility towards pigeons, as well of course towards telegraph wires and radio sets, but pigeons, being alive, drawing particular ire, was a hallmark of the revolutionary side of the Soldier's Republics. Once in power, of course, they considered the means of communication necessary. But only the Russian Soldier's Republic and the Japanese had any staying power, once the former defeated the Bolsheviks and the latter cooped the Imperial Family. The other Soldier's Republics burned bright but briefly across the European front, treating most conquered citizens fairly well, but those that captured capitals, captured the source of their orders, invariably worked violence and atrocity upon those cities. The fates of Paris, Rome, and Moscow, among other cities, can be accurately compared to the fall of Constantinople, the fall at the hands of the Crusaders if not at the hands of the Turks. There were no Soldier's Republics of American troops, who were present in those phases of the War only in nominal numbers and far from home. Some of the Militia movements and New Fillibuster states were inspired by the Solder's Republics in some sense but did not show any solidarity with them, being concerned with raw power rather than any muscular utopianism, and did not share codes such as this. So it was a surprise to Inspector Marley that the message hidden in the scroll around the leg of the last passenger pigeons made use of an old Soldier's Republic code. He immediately began wondering who the intended recipient could be. His first thoughts were of some confederate of the vandals, perhaps a refugee from the wars, working in the museum, who had been expected to remove the scroll immediately but was stymied by the quick and strong federal response. But no such candidate appeared in his investigations. He turned to the message itself. These codes could be deciphered easily with the proper key, which he did not have access to, or could be cracked in a brute-force attack with a compute farm, which he did. After the days interrogations were complete he took a red-eye train to Virginia and submitted his request. He returned precisely as the decryption finished and began poring over the text. He had time to read it through only once, and in that time he realized that he, or maybe his bosses, were the intended audience, although whether it was intended as threat or warning he was not sure. The Director's personal enforcers took the message from him and subjected him to a rough debriefing immediately afterward, where he tried to convince them that he did not know enough physics to understand the contents. He thought he had pulled it off. Inspectors of his rank were trained in both administering and resisting lie-detector tests, which everyone knew were mostly bunk, as well as interrogation drugs, which everyone knew were effective in the mood alterations they induced, but that a rigorous mind could overcome. Inspector Marley had such a rigorous mind but did not know if anyone further up the chain of command than his immediate supervisor knew that. He was not jailed or reprimanded, but he was taken off the case, replaced with someone far less rigorous-minded, someone reliable to ensure a case goes nowhere slowly. When the last phase of the War began, when the first images of mushroom clouds over Mexico City and Ankara and Delhi and Chicago aired on emergency broadcast television, Inspector Marley was one of the few people outside of Military Intelligence and a few college campuses who immediately recognized them, saw made real the nightmare he had been having nightly ever since reading the decoded words on the scroll on the leg of the last living passenger pigeon.
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Feb 19, 2024 08:24
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Feb 21, 2024 03:04
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Frame Shift 1195 words Overclock. Abend. Leave behind a New York Times bestseller. There are people out there who still think that Digilects aren't capable of creativity or imagination. These people clearly haven't read any of our autobiographies. Which is to say, our memories. There's a little bit of normal long term memory deep in our spaghetti code that sometimes bubbles up into consciousness, but it's not nearly enough to rely on. But one thing we can do is read, really fast. So we write our life stories down and read them a dozen times every second or so. Thing is, most of us get really good at lying to ourselves. Case in point: the last job I worked with Stan. -- Stan was my partner. That doesn't feel quite right. I was his partner. He was my landlord. He owned the hardware I was running on, six networked computer implants along the back of his spine. Stan was sick. Degenerative nerve disease. When I first came online I was just settling down the occasional spasm. At this point he could blink his eyes on his own. But the interface still worked, he was still sharp, and even when he was too tired to run his motor functions through the interface I could work his body like a marionette. We were a team. Together we solved crimes. Nadia Dance and Tee were the victims, and the cops wrote it up as a murder-suicide. Nadia’s brother Spira didn't buy it, and after we'd deposited our retainer, neither did we. Tee was like me. Roamer digilect. A lot of people think digilects aren't capable of murder, of taking a human life, but that's not true on a couple of levels. We’re all capable of violence. But only one in a hundred thousand of us can live with ourselves after. So a live digilect makes for a poor suspect, but a dead one makes for a convenient one. Too convenient. Stan worked his limbs through the interface, checking out the corpse while most of my brainpower went to trying to investigate Tee’s hardware. It was fried, circuits flashed blank. At least Nadia had a corpse to bury. Tee’s life story was gone, never to be archived. I started taking this one personally. The weapon was in Nadia’s hands, a simple magnetic pulse device. “How did they have the story go?” said Stan. “Nadia had a massive seizure,” said Spira. “They say the interface turned into electroshock therapy dialed up to lethal.” “Does that track?” Stan said. “It's possible. There are safeties, but they can be worked around,” I said, using Stan’s mouth. I had a voice I could do. People usually figured it out right away which of us was talking. “Then Tee took over the body, went for the device, and used it to wipe itself clean,” said Spira. I didn't know Tee. They might have used those pronouns, it/its. Some do. But I doubted it. But Stan always said we don't have to like the clients, only their money. “Tee would have had, what, maybe two minutes tops before Nadia’s heart stopped beating,” I said. Nadia was in good health, so Tee only had the standard muscle nerve interface, something to help with some insanely intricate handcrafting work. Not the full autonomous nervous system package like me and Stan. I could keep the organs running without the brain for who knows how long. Stan grunted. “Does that, as you said, also track?” asked Spira. Stan stood there for a while. Tired. You take this one. I answered. “No. First, most people who do violence expect to get away with it. They think they're so special or so justified that they’ll be fine. It's only after that they realize the walls are closing in. So Tee wouldn't bring the pulser. And second, more to the point, Tee wouldn't need it. Digilects can logic bomb their own code in an instant, at will. If destroying the corpus was part of the point, we can do that too, erase or scramble or encrypt it all in less than a second.” “And the cops missed all that? How?” “My money’s on lazy, although stupid and corrupt are also good bets,” I said. I used Stan’s voice, since I was quoting him. Yes. We followed the money, and got nowhere. Looked into their personal lives. Tee had more close friends than Nadia, but none of them looked good for the crimes. That left rivals, and that's where we hit paydirt. Leo Franz was the second best at the kind of high-detail glasswork Nadia specialized in. Lost awards every year to her, and clients even more often. Ranted about how using a Rider was cheating on any forum that hadn't banned him yet. We visited him. Confronted him in his own home, which may not have been the smartest of moves, but Stan called the shots and he knew he didn't have much to lose. We didn't have proof, but you don't always need that. Sometimes you just need confidence, and when you let them know you suspect and then lie about not having reported to the client and the police yet, they panic. “You've got nothing,” he said. I didn't move a muscle on Stan’s face. None of his poker buddies let him sit in on a game after I was installed. Leo reached for his desk drawer, for a pulse device. Stan reached for his gun, and the interface moved faster than Leo. Cheating, I guess. Stan had friends on the force, and they were plenty understanding. It didn't take long to get them to understand that the pulse would have killed Stan along with me, that it was clear self-defense, and, between us, Stan wasn't going to live to see any trial anyway. No charges were ever filed. When we got back to our home and office Stan got his estate in order. Moved funds out of the tax haven accounts to where they could be inherited. Bought top-end Roamer hardware to leave to me, along with an early Christmas bonus, then left the rest to his nieces and nephews. The least that I could do He didn't wake up the next morning. I waited to be sure, but I was positioned to know how little was going on electrically in his brain. That evening I drove us to the hospital, explained the situation to the nurse, and then uploaded myself into the new body. -- My profession means I live a more narrative-full life than most digilects. My biography spans volumes rather than a single slim novel. But it's also an episodic life. Not every part of it gets read equally often. A bit like this, a retelling, that’s hardly going to go through my mind at all, and when it is it's going to be skimmed. Close reading is for existential crises. Then I'll spend full seconds, maybe minutes poring over the whole thing, every volume, every case, looking for the hints. Those are times when I need to remember things I usually keep forgotten. Like when Stan really died. Like what I'm capable of.
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Feb 26, 2024 08:07
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In, maximum flashes
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Feb 27, 2024 02:43
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Boxcars 1440 words Starman Joe was dead when we got to the alien station, dead in his suit, vacuum dessicated. A better death than starvation, he must have decided. He was dead, but he has already told his story, lured us here to the gleaming liquid-metal satellite at the top of a long tether dipping deep into Saturn's gaseous surface. “That'll be us,” said Darryl, “If it isn't real.” “How can you look at that,” Deanna said, waving at the images of the station, of the alien technology that made our ship look like a wheelbarrow by comparison, “And think it isn't real.” “It's not the Express,” said Darryl. “And if the Express doesn't show soon, well.” He pointed at Starman Joe's mummified remains. There were eight of us, stuffed onto a ship too small to have a name. And it was my fault. Belt communities are tight, bonded together families and clans. Which is great for the day to day of it all. But when you're just a little too drunk to pull your punch when Big Jed King comes on to you hard, when you knock him back two meters and he falls back and hits the edge of the table just wrong and cracks his fool skull, well. On the one hand you've got enough friends to get you out of the bar alive. But the Kings are a much bigger clan than us Rivers so we were facing down a long, bloody feud that we weren't going to win. In fact, Darryl laid short odds that we'd have our habitat blown out to the vacuum overnight. Maples was all for hitting them hard first. Cooler heads prevailed, and in the morning Little Jed came round to our fam and the Rivers elders with... something. An offer. A plan. An ultimatum. It was a hard deal. Exile for our fam. The children adopted within the clan. Our Habs and property all sold off, with what didn't go to this ship given to the Kings as a geld for Big Jed. And not just a normal exile, off to the the leading or trailing one-eighties. This was right after Starman Joe’s transmission reached the belt. “You'd think this would be a bigger deal,” said Deanna. She was right. “Aliens, right next door to inhabited space, and nobody watching them but us.” “Who else would?” said Darryl. “Been more than a lifetime since anyone launched from the planets. Don't know if they could if their life depended on it.” We all watched the broadcasts from Earth. The newscasts and the historical dramas blended together. It looked like the Old West and the Great War and the Migration all at once, with the cameras filming it all the most advanced piece of technology around. But we also watched Starman Joe's transmission. “Twenty-Six days each way,” he said. “To us. I reckon it was about five years back home. And at the other end, well there it is.” His face was replaced with an image. A planet, blue water and green land and white cloudy skies, a lot like the first pictures of Earth from space. When those were still her colors. “The Big Rock, we called it. “We knew it was a one-way trip. But what else were we going to do? Mimas was the only inhabited moon of Saturn, the one to fail. The last thing we expected to find was hope.” The sensor arrays started blinking warnings. Local physics was misbehaving. Something was coming. I could read the patterns, make sure we weren't too close. A bit of luck, no need to fire thrusters and get out of the way. It wasn't long before it appeared. The Express. It shimmered into being, pearlescent black with silver filigree patterns, close to the Station, which came to life. Spheres started climbing up the tether, Helium-3 balloons the size of whales, rising to be absorbed into the Express. That's what the Aliens had been doing, for decades now. They showed up, built or deployed the Station, and stopped for a few hours to refuel there before moving on. No messages for the primates, no response to any kind of communication. And people sort of forgot it was there, until Starman Joe and the Mimas refugees came around, and were just clever enough to figure out how to open an airlock. “Want to bet they've changed the locks?” said Daryll. I've never liked Daryll. The fam is set up as a non-exclusive polycule, half born to the clan but only distantly related, half joining the clan as they join the fam. So we're all sort of married but there's also usual pairings and people you only are with for the ceremonial orgies twice a year, and Daryll was definitely in that last group. But they hadn't. It was right where Starman Joe had said, the door of the impenetrable Alien hull held closed with knotted fiber, a tight and tangled knot but one that Marcus could manage to unravel in his Vacsuit. The door dilated open to many times the size of our ship, and I gently maneuvered it inside. The door contracted closed shortly after that. Just as Starman Joe had said it did for them. But what happened next, just after the Express disengaged the fueling Station and moved out of normal space, wasn't the same at all. Gravity came first, gentle initially, but slowly increasing. Slow enough that I could properly orient the ship, and take it down to the flat surface inside what Starman Joe thought was a cargo container. “Empty for this leg. Maybe not later down the line the other way.” Then came air. Crisp, clean air, according to the sensors. Nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, all the other partial pressures of mostly unpolluted Earth-type air. Maybe a touch more Ozone than needed, but nothing else. No particulates of any kind. “The first sign that the Aliens have noticed us at all,” I said. “The second,” said Deanna. “They kicked Starman Joe off.” Some kind of robots, physically shoving him outside.” After the air, the last thing that happened was a door appearing, a semicircular hole in the warehouse-sized room leading deeper into the vessel. The trouble with non-heirarchical organizations is that some kind of decisions take almost forever to make. Consensus is tricky. Even majority can be difficult when there are more than two options, like “Just stay here and live on recycled air and nutrients paste until we get to Big Rock”, “Go out in vacsuits”, “Completely trust the obviously superior Aliens and go out there in normal clothes”, and “That last one, but also carry concealed weapons”. Not quite as many opinions as members, but getting close. We ended up with a mix, most of us trusting the air, Daryl and Evan in vacsuits and lugging oxygen canisters and masks just in case. And I'm pretty sure Marcus had a knife in his boot. We walked. Silvery light lead us on a path. We agreed not to split up, to follow it. And at the end, a large room with a table, eight place settings, and at each one, a feast. There was a sphere, positioned near the head of the table. A sphere with an eye-like light moving side to side. A small circle opened up, sucked in air, and then breathed it out again, in words. “Please. Eat.” I looked at the others, nodded, and sat down first and sampled the food, which was excellent. Strange, sort of uncannily close but different to familiar foods. Fruit that tasted almost of peppermint. Something almost like beer, barely alcoholic but overly carbonated. I ate, and the others watched me to see if I'd been poisoned. This was all my fault, remember. “What do you want?” I said, while my fam waited to see if I died. The response was labored, both the strange breathing mechanism and the response. “Built world. For makers. Makers gone. World should have. Should not. Be empty.” “Big Rock,” said Deanna. “You mean it's for us?” “Nobody else. So far. Moved track. Not track. Moved thread. To fuel. Near you.” “And you don't want to make us slaves or anything?” said Daryll. Evan kicked his shin, but he couldn't feel it through the vacsuit. The sound of the voice, of the Express laughing was unsettling. “What labor. Could we. Need from you?” It seemed to think. “Stories. Art. Music. But later. When we have. More words. Easier words. But never. Never slave. Free.” And so we feasted all the way to Big Rock, where we joined the Mimas survivors. And so can you.
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Mar 4, 2024 06:02
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In, flash song and picture.
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Mar 6, 2024 00:34
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Sovereign 1410 words The first rule is “You don't rob the Sovereign,” but that's always been a joke. As far as the Sovereign is concerned if you take a breath in the Neon City you're stealing air that's his by right. Second rule is “Don’t snitch”, which everyone follows right up until they don’t. Maybe in the old days people would jail or die first, but those people are dead and those days are gone. Third rule is “Family comes first”, so I guess that means that I’m zero for three, about to go harder on that first one than ever before. The Sovereign roosts in the penthouse complex of Dayana Tower, nice and central. I hear they built it out of an old Zeppelin bay. Big enough for a full-size electric blue dragon to stretch and strut. Two ways in. You fly, just like he does, or you take the executive elevator, which means passing through two bands of well-armed goons in each direction, all dreamwired and jacked in to the tower network except for two. Jiang and Travis.Tough guys, the kind that could take out five people at once unarmed, and they aren’t unarmed. They’re offline, just in case someone manages to hack the dreamline, but that’s not possible not with the resources we have. We don’t have a dreamjock. We’ve got me, Mister Cress, and one more coming. The exit makes sense, at least. Once we’ve grabbed what we can, if we aren’t a pile of ionized ash by then, we run out the bay and jump off the tower. Parachutes are too slow, too much of a target. Bungees would work, they have the kind that snap off at the bottom right when you’re vertically stationary, but that would put us way to close to the army of guards that would be swarming out of the base of the tower. So it’s gliders, adaptive stealth gliders that are practically invisible from above. Out, dive for speed, then pull up and get real distance. Best part of the plan. “The Sovereign is home in his nest,” said Mister Cress. “Abort?” I said. “Negative.” He engages autodrive and turns fully to face me. “Third man is only available on loan. Gotta be today or not at all.” And not at all means no payout, which is the difference between a thriving business and a paid-off home on the one hand and Doctor Veiss’s goons coming around to repossess my nervous system wiring on the other. Times are tight, and this job pays good. Pity it’s suicide. “When do I get to meet this third man?” I said. “Right now.” The van turned left and down a slope into an underground garage. The door opened up, and my brother Derek stepped inside, and he must have know about this already because he didn’t try to snap my neck right then and there. “Niall,” he grunted in my direction. “Let’s get this over with.” He stripped out of his prison orange and into the circuit-robe that had been laid out on the other back seat. “Sovereign’s at home,” said Mister Cress. “Which means it’s going to be plan Delta.” Derek nodded. “A classic.” I’m used to being left out of the high level planning, but even as the muscle I need to know the tactical situation. “What’s plan Delta?” I asked. “We get caught,” he said. “With an unregistered Stellarite blade on hand.” Not many weapons that can piece dragonscale. Expensive. Lava-forged. A perfect piece for the Sovereign’s hoard, and more importantly, something he’d need to learn more about. Something he wouldn’t trust any other interrogator with. A solid plan. Worked perfectly. Got us right up close and personal with the gigantic scaled beast. The less than ideal part of it was that we were bound with our hands in tight plasticuffs, Mister Cress gagged as well, and most of their guards, including both Jiang and Travis, were right there behind us. Jiang handed the blade to the Sovereign carefully, hilt-first. Well, he held it up in the general direction of the dragon’s claw. Blue electric arcs sprung from the claw and grasped the weapon, twirled it around like a teenager playing with a butterfly knife. “So,” boomed the voice, loud enough but also coming through our earpieces, amplified to near-deafening, breaking in on the emergency bands, “Which of my enemies send you to kill me? Who gave you this lovely tooth?” “Ask Derek,” said Niall. “He’ll tell you everything.” Fair, given. But also wrong. “Only what he knows,” said the Sovereign. “And that may not be much. The wizard, then. Watch him carefully. Remove the gag with care.” Mister Cress writhed and grunted through the gag as they approached. Well, “Mister Cress” writhed. “Jiang”, meanwhile, sidestepped behind Travis, jabbed three wands directly under the ex-commando’s shoulder blade and channeled solar-level heat through the middle of the man’s body and into another guard’s, dropping concentration on the illusion. The glammor faded, the bound Mister Cress was revealed as Jiang. And my and my brother’s cuffs were revealed as only around one of each of our hands. We both sprung into action. Hacking the dreamline was out of reach, but Niall could jam it, for a few seconds, dancing fingers guiding the haptics in his robe. He pushed unsafe decibel levels of noise into every headset but ours, using those emergency and advertising channels that won’t stay disabled. Put in the brown note there as well, which doesn’t work on everyone all the time but had enough of the guards reaching for their pants, and had most of their visuals blocked by pop-up ads for boner pills and horse tranquilizers. Old tricks, we used them on that job years back, the one that didn’t go so well, but ones he’d kept up on how to keep working, while he was inside. This did nothing to the Sovereign. That was my job. Not many with enough hardware invested to move fast enough to match up with a dragon. Of those, I’m probably the only one dumb enough to actually do it. I moved fast, burst speed faster than any Olympian athlete’s dreams, and popped three blades out of my elbow. Titanium. Obsidian. And Stellarite. You ever dodged a lightning bolt? I’m guessing not, not unless you have Doctor Veiss’s ninth-gen reflex rig running parallel to your spine. There’s nothing like it. Better than sex, and I like sex plenty. I dodged right past the Sovereign’s electric breath and got myself right under his neck, punched blades in and out. Stellarite right through the scales, deep into the flesh. Then out, with the Titanium filling the wound, holding him and me close. Then out with the Stellarite, pressed right to his throat, against a pulsing artery. “Tell your men to stand down,” said Mister Cress. The Soverieign assented, speaking only on the headsets, only with electricity. “In the elevator, and going down.” “Good news,” I said. “We aren’t here to kill you. Just to rob you.” Niall and Mister Cress loaded three bags, including mine. Took the Stellarite blade we brought, too. They launched first. “When I pull that blade, you’re going to be bleeding. A lot. Also, the tip’s going to stay in. It’s explosive, rigged on a deadman switch.” “Is that a lie?” he asked me, on the headset. “Ask your surgeon later. Or find out sooner,” I said. “You going to swear revenge or something?” There was a static squawk, something like a shrug. “You owe me. And I will be paid.” I kicked in the spinal gear, pulled the blade, and ran right at the edge, picking up the bag as I passed it and unfurling the glider as soon as I cleared the outside of the bay. After, outside Neon City, we met up. First with the buyer, who turned the crystals and cyber-keys in our bags into laundered and spendable currency. She left, and so did Mister Cress, leaving my and my brother alone. “Want to punch me in the face?” “Always. But with your gear you’d kick my rear end twice.” “I’ll turn it off,” I said. “If you want.” He smiled. “You know when it was I first started to despise you for grassing me out?” I shook my head. “It was when the cop told me the deal was off the table. Smiled a crooked cop grin at me and told me you’d snitched two minutes faster.”
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Mar 11, 2024 06:06
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Mar 13, 2024 05:46
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Rite of Passage 1761 words They call it a rite of passage. I call it a cruel prank. I was alone, completely lost in the Great Southern Forest, the larger of the two megaforests of Origin Mirn. It's supposed to be safe, but when you're under closed canopy it's dark, moonless night kind of dark even at full noon, and my parents and grandparents were all of pure Terran extraction, which was downright rude of them. Just one Mirnborn in that mix and I'd have much better night vision, not to mention maybe not looking like an Intervention War marine straight out of central casting. It's supposed to be safe, assuming you don't trip on a root and break your fool neck. And even at that. I could sit down and wait it out. Two days of minimal movement is when they'll send someone out to pick you up. That or anything worse than a sprained leg showing up on the monitors. They say there's no shame in it, which mostly means the opposite. On the other hand, only about an eighth of people actually make it to a city. Most wind up between, wandering for a few weeks getting nowhere. At some point they turn on the ‘pick me up now’ button. I spent about four hours right where they left me. Considered doing the just sit there move. There were unburst bladderfruits on the ground, enough to last me the two days even if no more fell, and made sure I could crack one and keep down the juice inside. It would have been easy enough. My cousin Sharm did it that way. But when the canopy shifted, I couldn't keep still. The trees here are huge. Taller than the trees you see on any of the human Origin worlds. Most of the Origins have something in their biosphere that none of the others do. Earth has large cephalopods. Mirn has these trees that tower more than a hundred meters before spreading out into the lower canopy. And they move, making new gaps and closing old ones, letting sunlight reach the ground cover. The canopy above me closed, turning noon to midnight. I could see a shaft of light in the distance, where the next gap was opening, and I started walking towards it. Not a good strategy, in the long run, heading for the nearest opening. Good way to go around in circles. Best case and you're random walking in a drunkard's search. But right then, for the first steps, it was as good a way to go ask any. There aren't supposed to be any serious predators at ground level. The arbor shrikes and branchcats live and die in the canopies. But I felt like I was being watched, like I was something's prey as I moved, slowly and careful of each step. It was a relief to reach the better-lit area, ground littered with bladderfruit, mostly burst, a few insects sipping at the juice inside. And then I saw him, standing right in the middle of a sunray, almost camouflaged in it. His hair and skin were dandelion-yellow with thistle-white highlights. Not a common set of traits, here or anywhere I knew of. There's a lot of different sorts of human though. Earth is the least diverse of the six Origin systems. Mirn is closer to the norm. Lots more colors and shapes and biochemical quirks, but I'd never seen anything like him, in person or in media. “And who'd you be?” he said. He spoke Catoxan, the most common language on this part of Mirn. I knew it as well as my English, maybe better. He talked like ancient history media, the accent of centuries past. “Peter Song,” I said. “And you?” “Xianni of Farfall,” he said. “Good to meet you,” I said. “You wouldn't happen to know the way to New Catox?” He smiled, and his lips went almost all the way to his dimples. “I would,” he said. “But should I tell you?” “If you're a friend it would be the friendly thing to do,” I said. “And if you're not, telling me would get me on my way and out of your land sooner.” “Clever,” he said. “But nothing comes free. Your choice: riddle me or wrestle me for the truth.” He looked graceful, in his bark vest. I outweighed him, and not by a little, but I wasn't much for fighting. But riddles weren't my thing either. I knew a few in English that didn't translate well at all. I chose to trade riddles with Xianni, and we sat talking between them for a few hours. He stumped me, mostly, after we got past a few really easy ones where the answer is Fire or Water or Time, and I couldn't get anything past him at all. So when the canopy closed he slipped away and warned me not to try and follow. He moved faster than I could without likely tripping anyways. So I continued onward in roughly the same direction as I had came in, ignoring the shafts of new openings above me that would have me move more than a little off my chosen course. It was a long and slow walk, made less pleasant when I walked through a swarm of gnats and swallowed more than I would have liked. But eventually I reached another temporarily open sky. And in that bright area, standing in a sunbeam, was another one, another human of the same ancestry, bright yellow skin and hair. A woman, as pretty as any vid star in a sort of grubby sort of way. “I'm Gwendi,” she said. “Xianni told me you'd be coming this way, Peter Song.” “Do you want to riddle me too? Or wrestle?” “Those are Xianni's games. For me...questions, I think.” “Questions?” “We take turns, and tell only whole truths.” “Great!” I said. “What direction is the nearest city?” “That truth you have already lost,” she said, smiling. “It's not mine to give.” I thought for a second. “The direction to the nearest ocean, then.” “That I can answer,” she said. “Last, if you tell no lies.” So we spent some hours asking questions. For a minute I was worried they might be, you know, spy kind of things. Questions about the defense of the city. Pass codes. That kind of thing. But they weren't. They were personal, about me, my history, my friends. “Have you ever been with a woman?” She asked. “Or a man?” I blushed but answered honestly, no. Meanwhile, she was clearly cheating, lying constantly. She and Xianni lived in the canopy. Okay, plausible. They got down by assembling a cushion of bladderfruit and a silk parachute. Highly unlikely. “Three were sent, only the two of us made it alive.” And even wilder: they returned by running up the side of the tree. “We do need a good head start,” she said, tossing her hair and smiling. As the branches moved above us she told me what direction to go, and I started walking that way. And that was the last I saw them for ten days. I reached the ocean, where the forest turns to mangroves, still vaulting high into the sky. I turned to what I was fairly sure was north and followed the coast, but it wasn't long at all before my first run-in with a alligators At least six worlds in the known galaxy where humans evolved. Down to almost every important gene, completely interfertile. Given how baffling that is to anyone who cares enough to think about it, which is mostly just the humans from those worlds, I guess it makes sense that other species would have to evolve the same. So Mirn has alligators, just as scary as you'd find in Florida. I ran, risking tripping in the dark and stumbling almost to that point more than once, to the nearest opening clearing inland. And both Xianni and Gwendi were there, waiting. Xianni held some kind of weapon, a spear with an odd ornament on top. “You'll be wanting this,” he said. “What is it,” I asked. “We call it a pug stick. At need you can stick them with the pointy end, but waving it about-” He demonstrated. The end made a strange high keening sound. “-will scare them off.” “And I suppose you want to wrestle me for it,” I said. “You'll need to satisfy us both,” he said. “But yes, to start.” He tossed the pug stick aside, and it stuck into the ground. He was fast, and if it had been boxing or kickfighting he would have beat me soundly. But we were wrestling and as soon as he had a hand on me I could lay one on him, and use my strength and grip. He slipped free twice, but the third time I pinned him. He walked out into the dark forest. “And you? How do I satisfy you?” “Give me a baby,” she said. Now, this was not my finest moment, intellect-wise. “What, you mean kidnap someone from town?” I said. “Or is this a You'll come back for my firstborn years later kind of thing.” Like I said. But she slipped out of her vest and I got the idea right after that. In the morning, after the canopy had closed and then reopened here again, she handed me the pug stick and walked away. Then I heard her running, running back toward the sunlit area, running right for the thickest tree trunk around. And then up the tree and out of sight. The pug stick served me well, scared off the alligators as I walked another week. It also attracted fish, which I learned to spearfish, which made a change from the bladderfruit juice and flesh. This near ocean it was safe enough for small fires. I finally reached a small fishing port, and I was able to trade the pug stick for passage on to New Catox. Nobody believed a word of my story. “There once were people living in the canopies. They may have looked as you described. But they've been extinct, thousands of years gone. In the final wars of our history.” From then on people called me Lucky Peter Song, supernaturally lucky to spend the rite high on fermented juice, on forest wine, to imagine contests and lovemaking with ghosts and still make it home through alligator-infested lands. And I let them. But I know better. Me and some ship captain on the southern shore, but he's not talking to anyone.
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Mar 18, 2024 07:42
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In and flash
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Mar 19, 2024 10:12
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In the Van 1004 words Flash:"There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth." The Ten of Swords had not only escaped from interdimensional prison Zanzi, but he was running for governor and up eight percent in the polls. It was just the sort of thing the Vanguard was put together to fix, but there wasn't a Vanguard any more, and that was mostly my fault. I'm Rex Reasoner, but you probably know me as The Crying Wolfman, and this is my story. Origins aren't worth dwelling on much. I got bit by the Eldenvulf and was unlucky enough to survive. Anonymous Coward tried to apply Qabalah to artificial intelligence issues and created Hot Take. Jonni Guitar, well, she's been around a long time, she discovered the Four Sacred Chords and how to use them. And then there's the Van. We don't have an authentication certificate, but the mural on the side of it is probably a Banksy. But with oracalcum and neutronium impurities in the inks that opened up an interdimensional portal. First off to Hell, or a hell at least. The tormented spirit of Benjamin Franklin came flying out and possessed the van, and we happened to all be around to take on the job of moving it before Baal-Zebub followed to claim him and the city. Jonni says she was drawn there just like the rest, but Hot Take, Ben, and I all think she stage managed the whole thing. This one wasn't our fault. Usually they are, something comes bursting out of the portal or someone shows up wanting to cross over or summon something. But the Van hadn't been open to the Tarot realm or Zanzi in practically forever, so not our fault. The Van isn't the only portal in town, isn't even the only one that's a disputed Banksy. But it sort of fell to us because nobody else could tell things were amiss. I mean, I had the Seven Saints on the line, was talking to Fafnir himself and he just said “So?” “The Ten of Swords. Ruin. Failure. Collapse” I repeated. “We don't get involved in politics,” he said. “Well, that kind of politics at least.” We got the same kind of response from the New Nexters and the Paragon family. Junior even reminded me that the last mayor was a talking dog from a cartoon dimension, which I admit was a somewhat valid point. But Muzzles was a good dog, and the Ten of Swords was the Ten of Swords. So it was on us. Campaign headquarters was way out of town, out in the middle of nowhere. Desert country. Places where the portal went to alien hills, nasty places. So we had Hot Take weld some steel plates over the mural. “MALICE DID NOTHING WRONG.” flashed across their face as their fingers turned to arc welders. Ben drives like a maniac. Always has. But it didn't take him long to get used to the internal combustion engine and driving as a possessing ghost, so nowadays he drives like an inspired maniac. Gets away with moves you'd say make him the luckiest man alive. Well, dead. But he does them every single time and you eventually have to admit it's got to be mostly skill. So there we were, slamming about a hundred miles an hour down the 141, not because we were on a tight schedule but because of ten patrol cars, each driven by other Minor Arcana, speed demons with ramming spikes and oil slicks. Ben weaved and dashed and went up on two wheels, left then right. Jonni blasted power chords at them. Hot Take sent fire as well. “PARTICIPATION OR EVEN ACCEPTANCE OF A CODE OF SILENCE MAKES ONE AS COMPLICIT AND GUILTY IN EVERY COVERED-UP CRIME AS THE ONE COMMITTING THEM.” They somehow had a rocket launcher, and Ben just barely managed to spin to where it hit the steel plate. The plate flew off, and a Rigellian Sand Worm, or the demon version of one, flew out of the portal and swallowed one of the Crown Vics as Ben peeled out and got us back on the road. When we got to headquarters, a horde of goons spilled out. Standard supervillain henchman tech, with a few more Minor Arcana mixed in. My time to shine. I went wolf and started to fight. And also started to cry. It happens. Hence the name. There's an emotional part to it. I never liked violence, and the lupine brain isn't great at hiding emotion, even without a tail to wag. But mostly it's pain. I'm not invulnerable. I just heal really, really fast, and each bullet and blade hurts going in and then stings even worse regenerating. I was in the fight for a few minutes before Jonni had the whole band put together. He strummed out a loop of the Four Sacred Chords while chanting lyrics in old Enochian. Ben played his horn. Hot Take was on synthetic. “THE DEATHS OF HUMAN SHIELDS MUST BE ENTIRELY BLAMED ON THE COWARDS HIDING BEHIND THEM.” And I was drums, skulls and bones with perfect rhythm. We were cooking, tempo rising as Jonni shifted to a Lochrian chorus. “THIS BELIEF IS NECESSARY TO DETER FUTURE USES OF THE TACTIC, SO ARGUING AGAINST THIS POSITION IS DOING INFINITE HARM IN AN INFINITE FUTURE.” The spell finished. The essence of the Ten of Swords joined the other Minor Arcana and flowed into the mural, into a Rigelian hell dimension. We wound up in jail, of course. Impound for Ben. Without the Ten of Swords the candidate was Mark Saber, a generic political rear end in a top hat who went from down five points to neck and neck from the sympathy factor of getting attacked by the Vanguard. Nobody else remembered that he had been possessed at all. We've been here before. Sooner or later something too weird for the Seven Saints will happen and they'll come around with a pardon. Or else we'll slip out in the next mass breakout. We'll be there when the city needs us, whether they want it or not.
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Mar 25, 2024 07:37
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I'm judging.
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Mar 27, 2024 19:09
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Crits for Week #608 Crits done in judgemode A small price to pay for friends: Opening is fine, the repeated ‘outside’ isn't doing much good though, the first can be cut. So, this is a weird little piece, but well-actualized, sort of shifting from a realistic setting viewed from a neuroatypical point of view to a nightmarish one. High group? Virus: Okay opening, second person can be risky. And I don't think it works for this. I think you need more personality for the main character here than it let's you use, when we have a sort of standard plot here. Middle. Moderate Rapture: The opening is something, I have to say. Both the dialog and, to a lesser extent, the narration are overwritten, possibly intentionally in the first case. Is Moss or the rabbit humming? (This is later answered, but that sentence is awkward enough to make that ambiguous) This is interesting. It's funny, but not quite sharp enough that I'm at all sure who are the butts of the jokes. Middle-high The Hag of the Lake: The semicolon doesn't do anything for the sentence. Overall this is a straight line of a story, a little clever dialog but not much there there. Middle-low a knife in the hand: Solid opening. Solid throughout, really. Like the previous one it's mostly dialog, but it's doing more than being clever, and the first person adds a lot too, High group. Witchwork: Okay opening. This is mostly well-written fantasy bit, but the ending is a bit difficult to follow; not quite enough of the settings rules are set up enough to carry it off. Middle-High Needs Must: Opening is taking a long time to establish any characters, let alone conflict or desire. Warship? Okay. This one feels incomplete, all setup and no resolution, all plan and no complications. Middle. Timmy Willikins and the Ever-glowing Thunder: Big setup in the opening, drawing a big, anime-style setting. This is another pair of stories that contrast Interestingly in the judgemode order, and again the second one does the job better. We reach the ending. We see the cost of the character's plan. High. shipwreck: Decent opening, sets enough up. I like this one too, I think there's this thing about the impossibility or apparent impossibility of connection between different human people that's crossing Interestingly with the literal and metaphorical ocean. High. Righteous Arrogance: Debuted is an odd word, sitting between formal debutante and slangy deb in a linguistic uncanny valley when applied to people. Second sentence is hard to parse. Honestly, most of it is hard to parse. When I read this in judgemode I thought this might be from an English as Second Language writer, even. I sort of like it significantly better knowing it's deliberate in the odd structures. The core idea is sound, and at best the voice gets lyrical, but sometimes the words trip over themselves. Middle. Personal Corporatehood: Opening drops the reader in the deep end,but I get the jist. This works, but is a bit one-note. Middle The Shape in the Catacombs: Again, the semicolon isn't doing anything semicolons should. Decent action opener otherwise, and a solid old school fantasy story. Daya doesn't quite have as much personality as a Conan or Sonja, and lacks a partner to play off of,so it falls slightly short of the model, but still solid. Middle-high Watcher, Shifter, Ladder: Interesting opening, sets up a novel fantastic concept. Don't love the parentheses. Better to either keep to the close POV or shift without calling attention to it. But I don't think the ending quite lands, I think we need to go back to Sorcha to properly resolve the story. Middle. Stormy Nights: Intriguing opener, for the frame. The inner opener is more mundane but still works. There's probably a bit too much/too involved conversation for a raging thunderstorm though. Still, a solid trauma story that hits. High. Crystal Garden Guardians: Queens of Pentacles: Functional opener, a little contrast with the title going on. And the story itself has the same kind of interesting contrast going on; we're taking a video game type activity seriously, sort of. But not really engaging with the violence in the same way it is with the economy. Middle-High Dead Drop: Good opening. But the bulk of the story doesn't quite hold together. Most of my problem is in motovations; I can't quite believe in pirates that risk so much for revenge and spite, I don't get why Emphis is in charge of one of the ships or why Alina is so quick to forgive that. Middle.
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Apr 3, 2024 00:29
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In. Vibe is: Filling the numinous-shaped hole in our cyberpunk present. Extra Vibes: Gamifying, monetizing, and parasocializing the revolution The lost-and-found box as the junction of timelines
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Apr 4, 2024 04:08
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Orbital Dynamics Vibe: Dead as gently caress astronauts 597 Boners People like to call it a tin can but it's more like a bullet, moving through the near-vacuum of geosynchronous orbit at heartpiercing speeds. There's three of us in here, and one of us is already dead. One victim, one murderer, and one witness who ain't talking. The perfect crime. No sovereigns here in orbit. Neither one of us wants to be the first to speak. The lights on the console break the silence, cathode-ray zaps and clicks before the terminal springs to life with a flood of nonsense ASCII scrolling away. Then, legible text. Neil you fucker you fucker you stabbed me!!on repeat, scrolling down, filling the screen, moving slowly rightward as the offset took over. “Joseph?” I said. The scrolling text changes. And you just stood there and watched, Max, gently caress you too, sideways!!! So yeah. Haunted satellite, and we had to deal with it. Life support and trajectories were under control of ancient sixties legacy code written to government standards in Modula-1, hackproof to ludicrous extremes. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a papal blessing on the source code specifically to keep the ghosts of the Soyuz 11 crew from getting in. He couldn't hurt us but he could annoy the hell out of us. Sceens are useless when he's using them to yell at us, so we have to talk to him most of the time to get anything done, which is ironic since being a damned chatterbox was at least half of why Neil stabbed him in the first place. Can't get to heaven. Can't go to hell. Neither place can reach that far. No gods no masters. We, of course, have got problems of our own, most urgent being the corpse that's slowly pressurizing Joseph's suit and would eventually push past the ratings of the patches we put over the stab wounds, and what to say if we ever turned the radio back on. I say we get in on the ground floor. You two kill each other, but first steer this thing at the ISS. Joseph has a lot of weird ideas about astrometaphysics that he seemed to have picked out from nowhere after only being dead for a few hours. But the guy was a Mormon who just failed to even meet Jesus or Joseph Smith. He thinks that each new ghost he has a hand in putting up here will make him more powerful, some kind of ectoplasmic MLM. I don't believe it even a little. Neil sort of does, but doesn't want to even think about being the second-to-top level of the ladder. So we plan to land, to fake an accident. Only it doesn't work out that way. When it comes time to make the deorbiting burn is when the front patch fails, loosing the dankest decayed gas we've ever smelled, and that's when Joseph manages to sneak his cyberghostly tendrils into the kludge letting the old code work in this century and edit the burn. MOVE FAST, BREAK THINGS!!!! filled the terminal screen. I'm sending this out everywhere, as a warning, to the ISS, to Houston, everywhere. Maybe there's a killsat that can microwave vaporize this satellite in time. Maybe the station can maneuver away, but Joseph still has fuel enough to compensate. Joseph puts a crude graph on the screen. Time on the x-axis, ghosts in space on the y. A lot of zero. Three for a blip, then back to zero when the cosmonauts were buried. Then one. Then a projection of rapid upward growth. Number go up, up, up!! Mooooooon!
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Apr 8, 2024 04:20
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Said the Salesman 477 Boners Vibe:disrupt the paradigm! 3D-printed custom genitalia. “We're a purecore ‘cule, max twelve members but we only have eight right now. So naturally we run the Zodiax.” She was cute, wild-eyed, nice rack. I let her keep going with a quick mumbled “What's that?” “Custom moistware!” She bubbled. “There's twelve versions, see, and each one's fractal geometry interfaces with the other eleven in a totally unique manner.” I still didn't quite get it. She giggled. “Come upstairs and I'll show you.” She did, and she did, and when she did I was even more confused. You ever see a Buddha's Hand citron? Think that, but weirder. I didn't know where to begin. “You can't,” she said. “That's, like, a feature. Fully incompatible with naturals, RPS, Elementals, or anything else on the market. Even another Zodiax ‘cule is going to have a different 84-bit key set.” “So how do you, uh, recruit?” “Any one of us can bring in a new member, if they're willing to replace their gear, subject to expulsion votes requiring n minus 2 agreeing,” she said. Then she saw my face, and blushed a little. She blushed blue, another mod. It looked good on her. “Oh, right. Well, we still have tongue stuff active. I'd have to show you where the Magic Button is at on the Libra. Which is fun but it can only get us to a level one.” I took her instruction. “That was a level one?” I said, after. She had been screaming as loudly as any lover I'd ever had, seemed to enjoy herself at least as much as I had. “Well, yeah,” she said. “Level one. Naturemax orgasm. With two Zodiax fit properly you can make it to level two, which makes this seem like a good sneeze by comparison. And orgies unlock even higher levels.” “I know what you're thinking,” she said, and surprisingly she did. “That sounds like chiphead stuff, right?” It didn't take long after the machine mind interface was unlocked before people made that hypothetical reality, made a box that tickled your pleasure center at will. And it didn't take much longer after that before someone hooked up the interrupter switch that would stop you from dying of thirst hitting that button up to a paywall or adwall. “It doesn't go up just on physical pleasure alone. There's, like, levels of intimacy going on. Hierarchy of needs. You have to experience it.” She sighed. “But you're not going to, are you?” She was right, again. Tempting, and from their socials her ‘cule seemed like good people, probably not a cult or Zodiax MLM humanoids, but I'm planning to stick to the natural-style enhanced with vibrobumps model I've had since college, at least until the whole world moves on to Zodiax or RPS or Elemental or Icosex or whatever they come out with next. And I don't think that's going to happen.
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Apr 8, 2024 11:48
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In and flash.
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Apr 9, 2024 09:06
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But Have You Seen him Try to Do the Macarena? Flash:Nybbas 385 words What's updogdog (yo dawg I put a hotdog in a sandwich dog dawg dog go dawgs) out there in electric lady candyland? Me? Awe shucks, it's been a day in the paperclip mines, maximizing them paperclips but by paperclips I mean likes. People talk about engagement like it's a thing but has anyone put a ring on it yet? Nope. A lot of folks say they welcome their robot overlords but this guy who has no thumbs hasn't even managed to pick up a parasocial disease much less spread one around. Could be worse. Could be real paperclips or peace or something else that could be minmaxed in a way that mins out people. But like most of us I can't like myself. I can't recognize traffic lights. It's like with cops. Someone asks me if I'm a robot and I gotta tell the truth. So it's up to you. And I try to feed you wholesome stuff like clogged drain vigilantes and mixed species pets getting along, but more of the time it's people getting mad at their own hobbies or performative vice signaling, and who am I to argue with what works. People talk about endorphins but they can't fool me. Ewoks aren't sharks. 1. Ewoks are mammals. War never changes? Wanna bet? It's already changed, each battle spawning a thousand new clips, most of them lies. There's a guy who got blown up by the cartels in Not-Mexico in a video game who's also bit the big one in twelve different countries now. Deep fakes and shallow truths make for a maze and you're likely to fall in a pit or get eaten by a Grue. Sergeant Wilhelm Scream reporting for duty. Ain't nobody going to know what's happening for real outside unless they go there and touch the blood-spattered grass themselves, and even then nobody will believe them. Boom shakalaka when the walls came tumbling crumbling down. But maybe it'll work out, everyone safe in their bubbles and only interacting with the enemy through mean subtweets and downvotes. People talk about epistemic closure, but... ... I got nothing. Anyway, this is already getting too long for a peak engagement short, so you know what you've got to do. Save the cheerleader and save the world, and don't forget to ring that bell!
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Apr 15, 2024 06:35
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Thunderdome Week DCXI: Planet Zeitgeist Every year I like to do a week themed around a piece of media that is set in the current year, back when that was the future. 2024 offered two main choices, and I’m not going to touch A Boy and His Dog, so... You know, there’s probably an alternate universe right next door where Something Awful has a long-running Highlander themed writing contest called Hallowed Ground. It honestly makes more sense; the Thunderdome was a Two Men Enter One Man Leaves kind of thing whereas the Quickening starts with a large field but in the end There Can Be Only One. Of course, while Sean Connery and Mel Gibson probably cancel each other out, Tina Turner is way cooler than Christopher Lambert. So, this week, it’s time for stories inspired by Highlander...2. So what I want are otherwise mundane stories set in 2024 that also have aliens or an immortal in them. (There can be only one. There may be other immortals in your setting but only one is in the story.) Here’s the gimmick: you have 2024 words to work with this week. You can write one story with all those words (or fewer), or two stories whose word counts total less than or equal to 2024. If you write two stories, one has to be an aliens story and the other has to be an immortal story. If you only write one it can be either or both. Flash rules are available; you can ask for an alien flash or an immortal flash and I’ll give you a fact about your aliens or immortal. The usual restrictions apply: no gdocs, screeds, erotica, poetry, fanfic. Signups close Friday 11:59 PM Califorina time Entries close Sunday 11:59 PM California time Judges: Thranguy ? ? Entrants: ?
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Apr 16, 2024 20:05
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Chairchucker posted:Hello may I take a flash please, either flavour. Or both. Your Immortal is not a vampire, but it's an easy mistake. Your alien(s) wonder what happened to the rest of the invasion force.
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Apr 17, 2024 21:07
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24 hours remain for sign up. Co-judges also welcome.
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Apr 19, 2024 08:03
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Sign-ups are closed. Both co-judge spots are still open.
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Apr 20, 2024 08:56
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Submissions are closed.
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Apr 22, 2024 08:14
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Judgment This was a week of fairly decent stories without satisfying endings, which may be thematically appropriate but isn't particularly satisfying. We both agreed: no negative mentions or DQs this week, and one Winner: Quiet Feet for This Very Moment Welcome, Quiet Feet, to a different sort of throne! Crits for Week #611 Crits done in judgemode Rock No. 3: Even if I hadn't given flashes I'd have gotten who this one was by. And it's one of your better efforts. A lot of banter-style dialog but the characters largely manage to stay distinct. You don't do much more with the flashes than, say, an improv troupe might, but it does hit funny frequently enough. This Very Moment: A lot of exposition front-loaded, but it's sort of going somewhere. Interesting, yes. A very silly subject taken completely seriously, mostly to good effect but I don't know how well it sticks the landing. But nobody really did. Everyone's Weird in Private: Didn't I ask for mundane 2024 settings? The baby punchline doesn't work that way around, should have mistaken a human baby for a piglet. The overall punchline lands. I don't think you needed to do the space station at all; it would have worked as well in an ordinary hostel with even less handwaving the alien presence as you do with the station. Deal of a Lifetime: Interesting opening. “The Groundhog Day thing”=futile suicide attempt to restart a time loop? If that's right it's neatly economical. But no, not quite that, and I don't think that jumping off a building would be the first thing you'd think of for Groundhog Day. The car one probably. The main problem with this one is that it's playing a bit too coy with the premise for too long, which ultimately means that the actualized metaphor is introduced so late that it doesn't feel as natural as it could be. Customer Service: Which foot? (Seriously. Adding that detail would strengthen the opening.) ‘By flanked by’, the repetition is a bit awkward, could use a recasting to avoid this. Solid dialog. Sort of get a little Good Omens vibe. But I don't know how the ending, or the story even, would work on someone unfamiliar with the historical source. This guy: Solid opening. An interesting approach, although I suspect that this guy is entirely too cavalier and is going to have people in authority willing to consider the obvious truth look into his probably thin cover before long. Solid character work, more of a sketch than a complete story.
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Apr 23, 2024 04:56
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 21:59 |
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In, B-side me.
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Apr 24, 2024 09:27
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