|
In with William Tenn's "The Liberation of Earth" (with is not difficult to find online, but I'm not able to vet the copyright/permissions state of any particular result) There's a lot to admire in Tenn's writing, not least a sense of humor that works over a range from gently warm to sharp and biting, but what strikes me in this story is his economy, telling a story that stretches over vast amounts of both space and time in such a compact package, while never feeling cramped or incomplete.
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2021 08:36
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Mar 25, 2025 22:34 |
|
|
William Tenn, The Liberation of Earth Four Cruxes 1906 words The Survivalists The three-woman crew of the small hopper did not speak. That's the first thing Sen Jinq Sim noticed about them. Not even to each other. He assumed they communicated through micro-twitch texts projected onto each other's eyeballs, had a rich conversational world for themselves, but they did not speak to him. When he tried to stand at the wrong time they did not even gesture at him, but instead shoved him back into the seat. Three days in their blank company, in the sealed ship with no windows. The shifts in gravity at each point of acceleration or adjustment were the only clues to his location, and those were unreliable. He could not notice and log them in his sleep. Sen could have been wealthy. Well, he was wealthy as it was, but he could have built a world-straddling fortune. He lived comfortably, in an apartment no larger than his parents had. He could have been President of the Climate Council, or better one of those permanent staffers who dictated most policy without having to stand for confidence votes. He took no more influence than his yearly vote. He could have been patriarch of a sprawling clan, placing a dozen blood and adopted children in position to rise or fail grandly. He had not married. Instead, he spent nearly a decade working towards this, towards getting on this ship. The shuttle contacted the docking section of Sigma Base with a lurch. The airlock doors opened. The crew lined up and saluted him, their first gesture he had seen. Sen stepped through the door. The committee was not as impressive as he had imagined. Admiral Zephan seemed most fragile, barely filling out his ancient deep blues. The twins, Calla and and Melchior, were still bright and quick, but spoke softly, weakly. And the other two, the ones without names, the spies of old turned masters seemed distracted. Above all, every one of them looked tired. "Sen," said Melchior. "There's a document at your desk. Your oath of office." "No need for blood," said the first spymaster. "A fingerprint will do." "Who are you today?" asked the Admiral. "Time," he said. "And Tide," said the other. Sen read the oath. It was shorter than he expected. His eyes widened. It had been a long time since he had been this surprised. "This-" "This makes you chair of the Survival Committee," said Tide. "Once you've signed you could have the rest of us fired. Or thrown out the airlock." "Much the same," said Calla. Tide made an affirmative noise. "Indeed. We hope you will at the least wait until your briefing is complete." "This," said Sen, "This is not what I expected. I knew you needed new blood, but..." His finger hovered over the plate, and he almost seemed surprised to see it there, far ahead of conscious decision. "We need new leadership," said Melchior. "And there is some urgency. No time to wait as you disrupt and reform factions." Sen saw his finger on the plate, the print scanning below it and his name filling the blank. The Closed Gate "Scout ship Xerxes encountered a closed gate on the fifth planet of the Thistledown system," said Admiral Zephan. "This would be thirty-nine jumps out the Uranus wormhole." "So the Axu migration has begun?" said Sen. "Not yet," said Calla. "It will when we tell them, we assume." "They'll find out inside of a year," said Warp. "If they don't know already," said Weft. "And they are not what they claim to be," said Warp. "Explain." Sen had enough briefing materials to fill years reading them, reading only summaries. And none of them touched on this. "You'll be the seventh human being to know this," said Calla. "Five are in this room. The other is a scout captain who had the opportunity to perform an autopsy on an Axu crewman." She gestured up a hologram, an image of an Axu, the familiar tall four-armed frame of the only other spacefarers humanity had yet encountered, the only survivors of the Scourge that swept across the wormhole network some thirty thousand years or so past. Another gesture and the head, that uncanny upside-down face separated from the body. "Their body is a shell. A tool. Engineered from DNA and flesh." Warp interrupted her. "A lie." "A deception, yes," said Calla. "And it could have been a harmless one. But then there's the head. The real Axu." She flicked at the image and it zoomed in, cleanly from the macroscopic to the microscopic, to cells with odd pinwheeling organelles, then down to molecules. Sen wasn't primarily a biochemist, but he knew enough to know something was wrong. "All life we've encountered across more than three hundred worlds-" "Excepting a handful of mechanical lifeforms," interrupted Weft. "Excepting the Fiella, the Vviv, and some Mapmaker relics, yes. Otherwise all life has essentially the same genetic codes, products of the Builders' panspermia seeding of their galaxies. At the genetic level, nothing out there is more different than a mushroom or a cuttlefish. But not the Axu head." Data filled the screen. "It was too risky to carry back a sample. We only understand the very basics of Axu-head biochemistry. But we know enough to know that they are truly alien." "They aren't part of the Builder seeding," said Warp. "That means that they're elders. Builders. Mapmakers. Tricksters. Or Scourge." "Or an unknown fifth type," said Sen. "An interesting thought," said the Admiral. "The First Speaker will be meeting with the Ambassador from Axu Shap in ten days," said the Admiral. "You will need to provide instructions for our proxy." "No proxy," said Sen. "I'm going myself. My first change as the new chair. We should get out more. Sigma station is an unacceptable single point of failure. When I return I expect one of you to leave for at least as long a trip, and another after them. I hope we don't need to make a formal schedule, but I do expect everyone to go, to be planetside or on a one-gate station, let's say every other year." Diplomacy Games "The Ambassador had some trouble explaining precisely who you are," said the alien, Folla Xi. "He doesn't know, not completely," said Sen. "Fascinating." Axu sweat is disturbing to watch. It flows slowly up their heads. Sen had to remind himself how alien their psychology and physiology were, that this was not a tell, at least not in the way he imagined it. "And he directly reports to the First Speaker. So I take it that you are the true ruler of humanity?" "In some matters," said Sen. Folla laid his hands across each other, left on left and right on right, almost seeming human sitting there, so long as Sen did not glance at his face. "Which matters?" "The survival of the species," said Sen. "And threats thereto." "I hope you don't consider us in that category." "That remains to be seen," said Sen. Axu smiles are chilling. Inverted, and with teeth that each have a dark hole in them, round and perfect, two dozen accusing eyes. "Indulge me. What kind of threat do you see?" "If you were an elder race, in the prime of your power, the closed gate from Axu Shap to Sol would not have stopped you. All of them were masters of the gates." "You appear to know things that could only be learned by violating our nations' oldest agreements," Folla said. "There might be...consequences were that true." "Perhaps I'm a lucky guesser," said Sen. "Or perhaps you've known what we know all along, and kept silent for your own reasons." "Not all species have a concept of luck," said Folla. "Ours both do. Perhaps it is why we get along well enough. So, secret ruler of humanity, make another lucky guess. What do you think we are?" "A remnant," said Sen. "Descendants of some isolated group of one of the elders, with only a fraction of their skills. But which?" Folla laughed, a deliberate mimic of a human laugh. Like an old sitcom laugh track. "We do not know," he said. "But we suspect. Not the Builders. They were smaller than atoms, hotter than suns, and their tools far more crude than our flesh. The Mapmakers? Perhaps. But most species with ancient cultures recognize us, and react with hate. Not fear. We are most like scions of the Tricksters, the ones who changed the gates and half-ruined the maps." "Why?" asked Sen. "I mean, do you know?" The Axu shrugged with his lower arms, a weird wiggle. "In your history, weren't maps made mainly by imperialists, by conquerors?" Folla steepled his hands, one pair above the other. "Are you satisfied? Will you direct the Ambassador to hand over the location of the closed gate?" Sen nodded. "Excellent. I've enjoyed this talk. And I believe we owe a debt of knowledge, with the migration begun. Knowledge concerning the Scourge that left so many worlds available for your expansion." Sen grinned, wondering if the Axu found his hole-less teeth unsettling. "I would be happy to hear it, yes." "No," said Folla. "You won't. There is no Scourge. No single Scourge. There are dozens. Hundreds. The wormhole network is a hostile place, and many dangers lurk in the dark corners you can't help poking at. The terror fleet you imagine, wandering eon-long circuits of gates destroying whatever they see has been built, it is real. But there is more. Rogue mechanicals in swarm. Perfect biological invaders that choke out ecologies. Abandoned instruments of wars between elder factions still fighting with means that would horrify their creators. Texts that when translated can drive entire civilizations mad." Outbound Sen stood alone on the bridge of the Gilgamesh, watching the stars and the tiny dot that was Saturn. Soon it would be time to sleep, but not just yet. He was the tenth Survival Committee member to take this retirement plan he had devised. Each of the original five, and most of their replacements. He had hand-picked most of the new Committee, and the new chair bullet his way in the same way he had. The world was in good enough hands. "We live too long, get too set in our ways." That was the first problem of the committee, each with rejuvenation tech far beyond that available even to billionaires. But it was also the problem with Earth's growing wormhole empire. Too much comfort. Not enough growth, even on the nearest colonies. The deep colonies were the solution to both.Automated ships carrying frozen colonists outward, a hundred gates or more with no relay chain back to Earth. New, independent civilizations designed for hard living and exponential growth. Each ruled by a Committee retiree, each one a god-emperor for the five or six hundred years the tech in their blood could give them. Sen would have his wealth, have his power, father dozens or hundreds in his line, half his and half from the sperm bank that replaced his left testicle. And in ten thousand years, give or take, the expanding boundaries of the deep colonies would begin to meet, with cultures divergent enough to seem strangers, a universe of friends and rivals ready to stand against anything that lurked in the dark.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2021 10:27
|
|
|
In
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2021 16:51
|
|
|
Dreams-------|---------The Greater Sage-Grouse Song and Dance 920 words Daveed dreams, the thin mattress over old stiff springs fading away, the cold pain in his bare feet fading away, his ex-lover's echoing words even fading away. A slip into darkness and silence and he is gone from his world into his place of power. He is an oineromancer, no mere astral projector or lucid dreamer but a true wizard of sleep. His own dreams are an old familiar house. He launches himself like a rocket, pierces the barriers between sleepers. He has work to do. He gathers what he needs. Much of it is easy. A broken mirror shard frozen in reflection of a hateful eye. A drop of honey fresh from the hive. Two pages from a book that was never written. Mammoth steak, medium rare. History, deep history in all of them. Somewhere there is a man right now who dreams of Eden, some priest or penitent. Daveed throws out sensation like a net, seeking him out. There. He enters the dream and milks venom from the Serpent itself. History. It's a spell of history. Of erasure. There's nothing else for it now. Marcus told his brother, shared his gifts like it was some kind of party trick. That's why- No. That's not why. It was the trigger, not the gunpowder. It was going to happen, and sooner than later. Daveed was not built for intimacy, for honesty, for trust. His world did not reward them. It was the trigger. But a bad trigger. Word would spread, may already have. George likely told his wife, and she has close sisters. Spreading like plague. There are those who hunt wizards, dream wizards or otherwise. To kill. To enslave. To strike terrible bargains. So a forgetting, and a big forgetting. The ingredients for the spell have to match the scope. And there was one more needed. A song, unsung. There are lost symphonies, of course. Few people dream them. Most people dream silently, like an old movie. Where there is dialog it is words, not sounds. They don't even notice, usually. Just like watching a subtitled movie after the first few minutes. A few people dream music. Those who make it. But they rarely dream old unsung songs, and even those are not old enough. Daveed sighs. He does not like animal dreams. Too slippery, without words to bind ideas. He likes bird dreams even less. Cats dream of the hunt. Dogs dream of endless play. Fish dream a world nearly unchanged from the real oceans, save for an absence of hooks. But birds dream of the far past. Daveed crosses the borders, man to mammal to avian. There. A sleeping sage-grouse. He enters the dream. The air is thick, hot, and muggy, rich with rotting jungle smells. And all there is is air. Daveed falls through it, but there is no ground to strike and force him to wake. There are no words here. He has to reach deep inside himself to find one. 'Fly'. He pulls from the dive. He finds the dreamer, singing. He reaches for the song. The dreaming bird does not let it go. He needs it. His kind does not sing anymore. But they do dance, a mating dance. It is time for mating, and if he does not hear the music in his head he will not step and strut properly. The grouse will fight for this dream in ways people never do. And here it is a dinosaur. The song is ugly, pure sex over a beat of lizardbrain id. Music to start riots over, if he were to translate it to modern instruments. But Daveed needs it. The grouse, gargantuan, lumbering through the air in a mix of collective memories, swipes at him with terrifying razored claws. He ducks away. He has been here before. Not this bird, not this song. But when a forgetting was needed, it meant a place like this, a fight. And when he lost it meant weeks of recovery, of dreaming only in the platonic cave of sterile words that were his lucid dreams. And the forgetting undone, made so much harder that it would require the song of creation itself. Not this time. Words. He dives into his mind. 'Weapon', yes. 'Missile', no, too complex, too based in the waking world. He need not be so constrained. One more time. Yes. 'Ray-gun'. Red cauterizing beams blast from the barrel at the fly-tromping enemy, rending off feathered claws that fall slowly toward the infinitely distant green ground below. It does not accept defeat. The severed limbs fly at him. He shoots them down, then goes for the head. The song is there, lodged deep in exposed steaming birdbrain. He grabs on it and pulls, willing himself out of this dream and back to his cave, his cauldron, his laboratory. His memory-palace. The song is old and potent. The spell will be as powerful as any he has worked. Marcus will forget his powers, as will all who he spread that knowledge to. There is strength left over for the spell. He could make Marcus forget him entirely. He could make himself forget Marcus, along with every waiter and hotel clerk and barista, every antique dealer and convenience store manager who ever saw them on a date. Erase the whole thing from history. He knows he would be happier for it. But he does not. Just the powers. Nothing more. He knows he will never have a successful relationship. He must cling tight to the failures.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2021 07:15
|
|
|
In with song
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2021 03:17
|
|
|
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fUTJa00puDU She Was the Change 642 words You want to know about the fleet, don't you. The dirigible leviathans belching smoke and steam in their flying V array, the needlecraft escorts circling in air, the blue one-crew floaters dancing like giant seahorses, cracking electricity out of their spiral tails. No less a wonder than the one come for Helen to Troy. The painting, of course you know the painting, as the fleet took Paris. The landing in triumph outside Versailles. But Paris, France had already fallen by then, the revolutionary government seized power in Paris before Lyon's fortifications went under the fleets electocannonaide. The Queen was in Calais, or possibly already in England by then. The war was over in that painting. This was the image of the fleet in pomp, in parade. To see in our mind's eye the fleet in her glory we must look elsewhere. Kent, perhaps? That was her framed in brutality, the burning pitch falling like snow onto the industrial district, cannonballs flying and melting in flight, and the screams, always the screams of the Royalist conscripts writhing from shock and fire and gas. There was a kind of glory there, with the last gasp of time-crusted tradition falling without surrender to the scientific future, but only the purest in their revolutionary spirit can correctly revel amid the wails and sweet-smelling smoke from sizzling man-fat. So Vienna, then. Early in the war, before dialectical inevitability was matched by the arrayed forces on the battlefield, when the fleet was untested but for a few colonial skirmishes. Vienna, where the city of history had a modern air force to challenge the great fleet. There was glory, glory and the Viennese Dragons. They were made from paper, if you can believe it. Treated paper, strong and supple and fireproof, and insulated against electric attack, with frames of vulcanized rubber and chemical forges to fill the flight bladders and ignite the pyrotechnical munitions. And the dragon were supported from the ground by array upon array of lance-cannons, aimed under the control of an algebraic loom, the most sophisticated such ever built. The revolution could have ended in ignominious retreat to the fortresses of Northern Africa. The first moments of that battle were terror in the air, as the Dragons flew interference, matching the floaters blazing belch for shocking jolt before that first volley, a hundred iron lances, tips red-hot with air friction, struck the Needleship Athena, nearly twenty piercing blows and many more glancing ones. Athena dipped. Her crew fled the wreck straight into the battle, each in a velocipedal glider, each bearing dual pistols to fight all the way down. The captain of the Athena died in the barrage. We do not know which of her crew took the pilot's seat, who aimed those deadly tonnes of copper and steel into the heart of the Viennese artillery, but steered she was and true she struck. The fleet did not lose another Needleship. The next volley targeted one of the dreadnought, and did damage but not enough to even threaten to down her. And there was no third. Before a third load of lances was loaded into the cannons, the fleet was in position, every galvanic battery fully charged and sparking, ready to fill the air above the city with a web of arcing lightning. There was the glory. There was the fleet. Captured only in memory of those in the air, as there was no mercy for the revolution's ground-bound enemies. The Viennese Dragons would have made a fine addition to the fleet, but it was not to be. The engineer who had devised them burned his plans, melted down the prototypes and unfinished Dragons with concentrated hydrochloric acid, and, rather than face scientific persuasion, chose instead to drink poison. Some say it was hemlock, others quicksilver, but whichever reagent he swallowed was swift and deadly.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2021 06:26
|
|
|
In, flash
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2021 10:16
|
|
|
Catalyst Lying 1359 words 'Radcat lives', said the graffiti, fresh pink paint on the concrete wall, and when Jenni tapped it with her sizzlestick the letters glowed and hissed like neon, lighting up the alley, making the rats cast long shadows over the pisspuddles and torn plastic bags. I smiled. Radical Catastrophe wasn't never gonna die, not so long as we was running the street. You got to run, run fast. Pigboys come running fast after the shiny is up. I got the sniff first. "Jenni," I said, "Wheel time." And mine were out already, me on my left leg only while the right spun up. "Showoff," said Jenni. She preferred a rolling start. She pushed back on the dry spaces inside the two letter 'a's. I crouched and made contact, wheels to ground. You got to crouch just right in a power start or else you end up flat on your rear end and the Pigboys get you. We were moving, spark yellow trails off our wheels as they grinded asphalt. A couple tried to chase us in their big wide two wheel rigs, but we can go where they can't. Took the tight alleys where the trash bins parked overnight. Burned gold trails through the kitchen and dining room of a twenty-four hour jook joint. Friends of the cat. So back to home, the masks switching off to boring cloth before we cross under the cams. They're broken, but you never know what day the landlord is going to come round and fix them. Cams get more loving from the super than the toilets and a/c, that's for sure. The apartment was tiny. One bed, one counter for food, one bathroom with a shower smaller than most coffins. I was headed for it when she tapped my shoulder. "Frida," she said. I turn around and she's naked. Street work has always gotten her running. Me, I've got simpler tastes. There's this tiny scar on her left breast, topside, where the tracker the cult she used to be in used from when she was five. Cult, family, whatever. She used a mechanical pencil to get at it when she was fourteen. And a homebrew app to find the right place to stick it. Now that's what gets me going. Radcat had his own scar like that. Right in his taut little right buttock. He had to get help to dig the thing out. Me, my parents never cared enough about where I went to drop fifty bucks on a Walmart generic subdermal. I got my scars other ways. There's a window right by the bed, and it looks right out over the flashing neon sign advertising payday loans and buying gold, like there's still gold anywhere to buy. Bright green and yellow, with a loud buzz that modulates between unpleasant frequencies with the light. Nobody ever got to sleep there from just being tired. You had to be full on exhausted to get through the night. So we got good at exhausting each other. I kinda liked that setup. Don't dream much that way. That night, the first night with the new tag and all, we got exhausted right quick. Next morning they already had a coat of whitewash up. We watched it on our screens, metal bees swooping around and tracking in case we vandals returned to the scene. Why bother, though. The bees are easy as hell to get into and fork the video to a semipublic stream. Harder to fully take over, but Radcat was a legit genius, and I had his scripts all over the hidden partitions behind my screen. Just copied over the bee's id and run it from some old library server in Panama, and the flight pattern changed. Sent it right to the cross of the 't', close as the safety checks would allow, and right at that point of contact trigger the pigeon-stunner, and boom! The pink was on again, burning right through the whitewash. 'Radcat Lives', and it wasn't going away unless they went and sanded off half the wall. "Bet they do," said Jenni. "Sand it off and spackle back out." "And pretend it's still a proper wall," I said. "Wouldn't be surprised. That'll take them some time, though. We'll put up more." And not just us neither. The juice, the paint ain't tough to make. Print up a microstill from the template they can't quite suppress. The inputs are all easy to get, nothing on any watchlist. Pour them in the right tubes, plug in for a little power, and in a week you've got your pink stuff. Radcat was a full-on genius. I mean, a lot of that chemistry was me, and Jenni worked the engineering side. But Radcat saw what it could be. "The power's just out there," he said, back at the beginning. "Just like Tesla planned it." Radcat loved Tesla. Was weird as Tesla, but in different ways. Loved him birds, but crows more than pigeons. Crows were smart enough to figure out not to go after the sparky metal bees. "So we take it," he said. "The light's just proof of concept. We can do so much more." He started sketching out plans, but he also started getting hard, so not much more was going to get done that day. Radcat was, well, weird. He hated clothes, was practically a nudist, but he was also incredibly shy. He could barely manage outside, among strangers, among people he couldn't be naked in front of. Where he couldn't be himself. There were a few of us, people who lived with him. We all loved him. I never thought Jenni and I would be, you know, anything. I couldn't count the number of times we'd been in the same bed, in the same act and never touched, never even made eye contact. It was always all about him for us, for Saint George and Petey and Elsa if they were there too. But there we were, you know, after. Telling the old stories. Comparing scars. I could show my bullet hole out in the bar. And lift up my shirt to show off the defibrillator white patch there. Then she took me into the restroom to show me hers, and we stayed in that god-awful stall for an hour, both needing to feel something else for a while. And somehow it stuck. They killed him, of course. Shot him from a sniper's nest on live newsfeeds. They say it was Pigboys but wanted us to know it was straight-up Pigs. Everyone saw him crumple, his head a red blossom, the cheap yellow and pink clothes flapping over him. Everyone saw it, but... But there wasn't a body, not by the time they had to do DNA and teeth and fingerprints, and cut him up like a butcher does a cow to make sure it wasn't something other than the blown-up head that killed him. Between the scene and the morgue the ambulance dropped off the grid, dropped off the world, and when they found it, stripped down to the frame, neon graffiti across the roof, there was no sign of him. None of the driver, either. Tony Owens might as well have never existed. So all they had was the video, and nobody born this century trusts video. I mean, we all saw Governor Taggart get stabbed through the neck outside the Texas Capitol, and we all saw him belting down Vodka shots and doing bad karaoke in Rio De Janeiro two months later. We saw them pretty much fake an entire war in Oman, and we saw them getting caught at it. That's what we decided. The video doesn't mean poo poo. Radcat lives. Spread the word. Mix up the juice and paint the towns pink, faster than they can tear it down or paper it over. And be ready. The light was just the proof of concept. When it's time, when we're ready, we'll fight the revolution block by block with a hundred hot Cadillac pink lights to charge our every weapon and tool; and behind their lines a hundred sigils of built-up charge, each ready to explode.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2021 07:28
|
|
|
In
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2021 00:42
|
|
|
The Ranger 1268 words "Henry," I said, "Don't be an idiot." He looked up at me, then back to the hare, a rough tear across the heavy fur belly, the organs inside gone but for a few bloody shreds, blackening red blood on the rust red ground, the frost melted away where it spilled. "Look, I don't know either. But if I know anything at all I know that there aren't any Yeti on Mars." This goes way back, mind you. Back to right after we got far enough in the terraforming project to start introducing Mars-adapted animals into the new forests. Proper animals, that is. The insects were decades earlier. These were the Aresquirrel and the Mars Hares. Genetically modified to survive in the low-but-rising oxygen levels and the cold. This was around when I first came, and one of the things the science team did to the new fish was to get them convinced they'd discovered some bizarre Martian cryptid. My Yeti back then was Dr. Avery wearing a fursuit, running like hell from tree to tree, taking long hits from his oxygen mask when he was out of sight. Sometimes we used other ones, like sucker marks on fish to get the new guy to think there was a Kraken in Sagan Sea. Darren Sykes spent, like, years splicing deer genes into the Mars Hare genome, trying to get someone with a baby Martian Jackelope. When they finally caught on he almost got fired, which is pretty hard to do. Now, if it had been that, well, those recessive genes are still out there in the population. That would have been possible. But not a Yeti. Those were always a guy in a suit. And there aren't any more guys up here. "So what the heck is this, then?" I looked at Henry, but he didn't answer. There are a lot of cameras out in the new forests. Not full surveillance, not even close. But we have a ton of them. Back when it was about a hundred rangers across five stations we needed them to monitor the ecosystem. Now that it's just me, it's a flood of information. The expert systems monitoring them are good at picking up the kind of thing they're expecting, like a blight or a forest fire. They're not good at the unusual. For that I have to sift through the images by hand. And I've found something unusual. Something tall and bipedal and hairy, moving fast enough to blur the image. A God-damned Yeti. I wished there was still an internet I could get to. I wanted to match it against all those old blurry photos, make sure some virus wasn't deep faking those same images into my cameras. I had access to the files at Verne. Dr. Avery had left a big collection of Yeti lore. None of it matched. The resolution was wrong for that anyway, even with the blurring. I wasn't supposed to be the last man on Mars. Or rather, I was, but, you know, not the last person. Dr. Peel, Claire, was supposed to stay with me. Things had gotten bad enough on Earth that there weren't going to be any more supply ships, not for a long time. The ecosystem could probably support the entire project, but not many of us had signed on to die here. We were a couple, were the couple. The ones who got to be the first people married on Mars, with Dr. Avery officiating. If there's a worse way to be dumped in all human history I don't know what that would be. I was called down to the response room just as the ship was boarding, as we were saying our goodbyes to the rest of the team. Fire in the woods. The low oxygen level usually makes them easy to contain, but it's tricky work. The drones need piloting. This one was worse than usual. And then she was gone. She left a note. I thought long and hard about burning it unread, but I didn't. Instead I left it in Verne station and did my work on the other side of the New Forest at Robinson. She died in the Atlanta Massacre fifteen years later. I still could get the news feeds from Earth back then, could get messages from some of the old crew, hard at work making plans to terraform Earth, whenever people stopped fighting over the ashes. I made the trip and read the letter then, marveling at the depth of self-serving bullshit, missing her like it was the day she left. It's been years since the news feeds stopped. Sometimes some kid manages to bounce shortwave to the right satellite and we chat for a while, long pauses while light carries words over interplanetary distance. I don't ever have much news other than the oxygen and temperature numbers inching upward. They always do. Every time I think, okay, at least things can't get worse. It's been a few years since the last one. Next time, if there is a next time, maybe I'll tell them about the Yeti, and the whole shortwave community will know that after three Rejuves I've finally gone mad. "I'll be damned, Henry," I said. "It's real." He just looked up at me. "What do you know," I said. He was just a sample collection rover. Talking to him is a perfectly sane thing to do. It's when I hear him talking back that I worry. I was doing the numbers, checking on the drones. Checking on their cull numbers. We can't let the herbivore population get out of control, so the drones keep it down when needed. Lately it hasn't been needed as much as it should. Me and the expert systems put it down to the slow degeneration of an undermanaged forest. There's only so much I can do. But when I programmed in a different model the numbers fit beautifully. The population before drone culls were matching the model for predation. I went back to the forest, near the site of that first messy kill. I went over it more closely. I collected hair. Probably mostly Aresquirrel and Mars Hare, but I might have gotten lucky. I walked a search grid. I found dessicated unfamiliar spoor. I had Henry take samples. And then I saw it, shyly hiding behind a pine too skinny for that purpose. Hairy. Wild-eyed. But I knew what the DNA would tell me. Those eyes were human. Or at least mostly human. We're social animal. Most of what it means to be human comes from our families, our villages. Someone, and by someone I'm dead certain I mean Darren Sykes, went and performed the most unethical possible biosociological experiment. He went and build a secret lab, or commandeered one of the stations to work while I wasn't around, and had the tanks grow and release a breeding population of Mars-adapted humans. Hairier and able to get by with less oxygen. Probably a big slower, mentally, for that, but ready to make leaps and bounds as the O2 levels rise. But with nothing to raise them human. Just dozens of feral children left to figure it out by trial and error. I didn't keep up with Darren after the exodus. But I kept an alert for their obituaries. He never died, not publicly, not before the news feeds went down. He could be underground still, making new monsters to inherit the overheated Earth, peers for his Martian Yeti should they learn the hard way how to be more than solitary apes.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2021 06:00
|
|
|
Thunderdome Week CDLXXX: Horror of Horrors We’re well into the spookiest month of another haunted year, which calls for a week of horror stories. And the thing about horror is that it’s a very broad genre, not only in terms of its many subgenres, but how well it mixes with other genres. So that’s what we’re going to do. When you sign up, I’ll assign you a genre, and you can mix it with horror of any variety to put together a story. If I were to, say, assign someone Wilderness Adventure Horror you can mix your Wilderness Adventure with ghosts or monsters or psychological horror or cosmic horror or what have you, as long as it’s horror. If you don’t like your assignment you can Toxx up and re-roll. If you want to Toxx in your signup I’ll give you two to pick between. No fanfic, erotica, poetry, gdocs, etc. Unless you’re specifically assigned one of those, which could happen I guess. Although I’m almost certainly not going to give anyone gdoc horror. 2000 words Signup Deadlines 11:59 PM Friday California time Submission Deadline 11:59 PM Sunday California time Judges: Thranguy ? ? Entrants: ?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 01:41
|
|
|
Pirate Horror Sports Horror Western Horror Steampunk Horror derp posted:hallow'in Time travel horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 02:01
|
|
|
BabyRyoga posted:Ok, In Noir Horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 02:08
|
|
|
Spy horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 02:27
|
|
|
Sword and sandal horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 02:47
|
|
|
Generational saga horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 02:53
|
|
|
Cyberpunk horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 03:23
|
|
|
Low Fantasy Horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 03:31
|
|
|
Space Opera horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 03:33
|
|
|
Taletel posted:In. Superhero horror Weltlich posted:in and Post-Post-apocalyptic horror J.A.B.C. posted:You know what? Count me in, spooky man. Romance horror High school drama horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 06:52
|
|
|
Pulp sci-fi horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 07:40
|
|
|
Heist horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 07:42
|
|
|
Magic Realism Horror
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2021 09:00
|
|
|
Sign-ups are closed. One cojudge spot remains open.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2021 09:02
|
|
|
Entries are closed.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2021 08:26
|
|
|
Judgment Endings remain a problem for a lot of you. The loss goes to The Man Called M's Athos and the Living Dead DMs for BabyRyoga's Big Rite in Little Vietnam and Azza Bamboo's Down the Shaft At the upper end of the week, HMs for Tyrannosaurus' a good day and Hawklad's Akron '84 And the win goes to J.A.B.C. for Love as Sweet as Blood. The Blood Throne is yours!
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2021 09:12
|
|
|
Crits for Week #480 Albatrossy_Rodent - Amelia, Saint of the Miners: This feels middling to me. The issues are at the outline level, I think, waiting too late to establish the characters, dropping big worldbuilding dumps at the wrong time, and being an urban legend retread without a compelling hero or villain. The imagery is nice though. derp - one of a kind: Weak and over-complicated opening. The concept works, but needs to be stripped down and punched up a bit. This one is all idea, to its detriment. I think we need more meat to the protagonist, more detail. Maybe a big turning point, too. The man called M - Athos and the Living Dead: The opening wants to be more epic than it is, it's a bit too matter of fact for what it needs to do. Girth and outnumbered don't play well together. Wait, what happened to the zombies? Bad, but big energy here though. A dramatic reading of this could be fun, if anyone is doing those these days. J.A.B.C. - Love as sweet as blood: Strong opening, but could be better with more of the character coming through. I think the fight is the least interesting thing about this romance, would rather see more of them first meeting or hunting. Still, well written, an HM/win candidate Pham Nuwen - Flotsam and Ruin: The opening does what it needs to do. I think having the narrator bit by actual flies is too clever by half, making the ending more confusing than it has to be. On the other hand it is a bit cliche in the first place. You've invented mango chigger zombies, maybe don't then use the most obvious ending Weltlich - Be Fruitful…: Solid opening. Solid prose and worldbuilding, too, but wasted on a tree house of horror twilight zone parody level of plot. (Try with Andru as the graftee. It would hurt more.) Hawklad - Akron ‘84: Evocative opening. This one is both effective and confusing at once. There's a mixing of levels of literalness and metaphor that shouldn't work, but sort of does. Possible HM Tyrannosaurus - a good day: Strong opening. Strong overall. I almost wonder if this wouldn't work even better as a one act play. I think there isn't anything in the narration that couldn't work as dialog. Contender. Carl Killer Miller - Graven Pastoral: Opening is a weather report, not the strongest choice, with a bit of showing off. And it ends with a bit of a dull thud. Not particularly horrorlike, either. But it's an interesting journey to that bad end. Azza Bamboo - Down the Shaft: Sentence fragment without character or action, not a good opening choice. Our protagonist is casually brutal but otherwise bland, and we end without anything having happened apart from a touch of violence. Possible DM. t a s t e - Serenade: The opening is okay. The big problem with this one is that the various parts just don't fit together. Marie vanishes. The road musician of the first half doesn't fit with the ending, which barely makes sense on it's own terms. Captain_Indigo - The terror of the Cosmo-Khan: The opening sets a tone, to be sure. The rest follows it well enough. But there's not enough to the old man to build enough sympathy before the reversal, which at least rises to star trek voyager plotting levels. BabyRyoga - Big Rite in Little Vietnam: The opener is trying for the genre but missing. Too literal. Not enough metaphor. A lot of proofing errors here too. The plot is a pile of improvish nonsense. Bad but charming. sebmojo - Grandpa wouldn’t let us into his study when we used to come over after school.: An ambitious opener to be sure, but not fully successful. Honestly this applies to the whole story. Great buildup, beautiful sense of dread, but when it comes time to pay it off all you manage is some cheap ironic looping that barely makes sense. rohan - Full-Sensory Experience: Solid opening. And an all-around competent piece of cyberpunk storytelling. There are probably too many characters for the word count, I'm particularly sideeyeing Liz. Still, top group.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2021 09:34
|
|
|
In
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2021 15:32
|
|
|
Escape 1319 words It's a matter of instinct: Eric sees his friend in danger, flanked by the three bullies. Marshall isn't much of a fighter, still showing bruises from yesterday. But his friend is no coward either. Marshall won't beg, knows better than to try to run. Instinct: the stick is in Eric's hand, held with perfect form and he's rushing toward the fight. The stick makes for a lousy rapier, but these guys aren't up to the standards of the Shatengard. A blunt strike at the leader's shoulder leaves him reeling in pain. The big one throws a fist. Eric deflects it with a spin, then sweeps the stick around to his right leg. The fast one fights dirty, scoops a handful of sand and small rocks and flings it at him, at his eyes, but Eric doesn't need to see to know where he is, where he's going to be. He lunges. The instinct is to go for the killing blow, and even without steel and point that strike could break ribs, could damage organs. He fights the instinct, holds back his thrust, and his opponent sees and seizes the chance. He grabs the stick and yanks it rightward. Eric goes with the motion, turns in into a roll and wrenches the stick from his enemy's hand, then makes another thrust, again less strong than instinct demands. A light bruising of the kidney, about an hour of pain. They scatter and run. He drops the stick. "How did you learn to do that?" asks Marshall, still gasping for breath. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you," says Eric. *** Marshall believes it when Eric shows it instead, eight days later, but it's a close thing. "Are you sure you want to come?" Eric asks. "I mean, I came from the Blue Reach. Originally." "So?" says Marshall. It's twilight, in the small woods near Eric's home, and the portal stands there, an arch into morning and flowered fields. Marshall's voice is slow, like a person under hypnosis. "So that means I change when I go through," says Eric. "Into the Prince of Greendork," says Marshall, the idea of it breaking his trance, letting his natural sarcasm back into his voice. "Gryndrake," corrects Eric. "But you weren't. So I'm not sure what you'll be once we go through. Maybe you won't change at all. Or it won't let you through." "Or maybe I'll be some kind of hideous hyena person, I get it." He starts walking toward the archway. "Worst case, we walk back over, right?" Eric follows, rushing to catch up, but isn't fast enough. They pass through the arch together. He's been through nearly a dozen times, and still hasn't gotten used to the sensation, of being stretched and squeezed, of having the view of the other side stay constant while he sees stars fly by in his peripheral vision. Of hearing the wind, and behind it strange music in alien scales. He's never gotten the hang of keeping his balance going through. He tumbles, like always, on entry, unable to keep balance as his body changes from stripling teen to athletic adult. The flowers stain the fine white trousers he wears as Prince Eric. Grass and pollen, the least of the stains those clothes have seen. He starts to climb to his feet. Someone grabs his hand. "Marshall?" The hand that lifts him up to his feet is strong and soft. "What's the matter, Eric?" The voice is strange, higher-pitched, more confident, but the cadences are familiar. "You look like you've seen a ghost." What he sees is his friend, aged to adulthood just like him, and changed in other ways. The skin is clear of acne, the hair long and flowing red rather than tangled brown. Marshall is dressed in the leathers of the Kestrel Skyraiders, tightly fit around a clearly feminine form. "You'd better look for yourself," he says, and takes the lead, walking toward the tranquil lake that is the center of this garden. Marshall looks at the reflection on that still surface silently and for a long while. "Maybe we should go back." "I was trying to tell you before," says Prince Eric. "It doesn't work that way. The gateway closes, and doesn't open again until I've done whatever it is that needs doing here." "Oh." A long moment passes, both of them staring at the water until a breeze makes ripples, disrupting the image. "Athena, I guess." "What?" says Prince Eric. "I mean, I can't be calling myself Marshall looking like this. Unless there's a real Athena here who'd get mad. You don't have Greek gods and goddesses running around, do you?" "No," says Prince Eric. "There's a bunch of dark gods and demons, and then there's the Light. And out East there's a place with druids, I'm not sure what their theology is like." "Great," says Athena. "Well, let's get to work." Prince Eric whistles, and in seconds his Pegasus Virgil lands beside him and kneels, lowering wings to the ground. Virgil knickers with a bit of attitude, as usual when called to carry a second rider. The task this time is a lengthy adventure, a need to convince the wizard-queen of Chalmercy to join forces with Gryndrake. Prince Eric's advisors brief him and equip him for the long journey upriver and across the Cellmourn mountains. The twins, Lord and Lady Denwick join them on the mission, as usual. Devon is a master of spear and axe, and Denna commands elemental cantrips and healing glyphs. Athena's skill with short blades and acrobatics, now coming natural to his friend along with the changed body, round out the team nicely. The journey is perilous. An elder fire drake dogs them along the way, always fleeing before any of them can destroy it. On the third attack, it dives close enough that Prince Eric can see the eyes and the empty sadness inside them, and feel the malevolent presence inside the monster's skull. Not just a determined animal, but a spy and tool for some demonic power. It escapes again, then attacks with a pack of bats and blood-stirges as they descend the far side of the Cellbourns. The sky fills with steel and spell, cantrip and arrow and dagger and falling animal carcasses. Devon is wounded and the drake is driven off again. The wounds bring fever beyond what Denna can fully heal. The elder twin is weak when they reach Chalmercy, in need of the sorcerer queen's magical healing. Queen Xeia agrees to heal the man, and in theory to the alliance, but at a price: three tasks, favors, challenges, whatever name matters not. There is a giant who stole a cemetery to make it's cloud realm larger. There is a book buried deep in an ancient trap-filled tomb. There is a traitor in her court. They flew to the giant's clouds and tricked it into returning the land. They delved into the tomb, defied the traps, and resisted the temptation of robbing other wealth from the graves and risking blood-curses. And they unmasked the traitorous advisor, then fought him, with snakes sprouting from each new wound and attacking them. Then the drake returned, enlarged and transformed by the demon-lord within, flanked by armies of shadow-skeleton vultures. And then the task was over, and the garden appeared. The twins set off to deliver the news of the successful alliance, leaving Prince Eric and Athena in the flower garden, as the Arch appeared. "Time works different here," said Prince Eric. "It'll be, maybe an hour or two later." "Why?" asked Athena. "I mean, why do you ever go back?" "Family," he said. "Friends. Not always almost dying. Plus, I don't know. Skipping the next ten years doesn't seem right. Like I'd never really grow up." Athena nodded. "That makes sense. You'll take me back here?" "If you want," said Prince Eric. "Any time."
|
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2021 07:55
|
|
|
In, flash and hell.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2021 05:07
|
|
|
Cold Pressure 1000 words The diode lights flickered, then died. As Aidelle and I scrambled through pockets for our personal screens we heard the air processor hum fade to silence, a few moments of dread before the louder backup systems kicked in. Without the station server our screens could do little more than light up, but even that was a relief. This was Salvage Station Eta, on the ice-vii surface of Serpentis-3, about a third of the way into the water planet, a hull of Adamite between us and twenty thousand atmospheres of water pressure. Lovely stuff, Adamite. Precursor material science. Tight-weaved carbon nanofibers reinforced with split quantum monads. Human science isn't able to recreate it, but we can work with it. And Serpentis-3 is littered with the stuff. The station wasn't large. We made it quickly to the central power station by screen screenlight, and shone what light we had at the strangely still machinery. "Johan? Aidelle?" said our third team member, Maxim, over staticy point to point comms. "What's happened?" We had a sort of answer, though it carried far too many questions along with it. A spike of new, bright orange Adamite was extruding from the room's far wall, piercing the power distribution hub. The generator was fine; that was a relief. While Aidelle inspected that hub, looking for the trunks that powered the most essential systems I walked toward the wall, to take a closer look at the intrusion. I peeled back the thin inner wall that was practically painted onto the hull and ran light across where our hull and the spike intersected. Perfectly smooth, to the eye and to the fingertip. Neat and precise like a shipyard weld. Which I already knew. Anything less and a gigapascal of crushing water pressure would have liquefied us all. About fifteen thousand years ago Serpentis-3 had been the site of a massive battle, huge fleets. Both sides now long extinct and forgotten, survived only by a few ruins and small animals on Serpentis-5. The first scouts that made it here claimed salvage rights on the wrecks still in orbit. The weapons from that war gutted every ship, leaving only chunks of Adamite outer hull, but that was prize enough. Then Maxim calculated that at least a hundred times as much must have fallen on the planet and scattered itself across the deep solid core. Spacer life for the three of us. Spend a decade in transit, another few years on the job, and come home rich. Or don't come home at all. "You've got to see this," said Maxim. Aidelle had the computer and life support hooked up to the generator, leaving the backup idle and recharging, so we could watch the video stream from his recovery pod. And we saw it: the collection pad with all of the Adamite salvage we'd collected so far, connected to the station by six slack cables. The chunks of wrecked hull that we had loaded onto it had merged like some abstract sculpture, somehow cold-welded where they sat. An unconnected piece began to move, sluggishly through the thick water. Maxim zoomed in and tracked it, accelerating, sliding against the ceramic bottom of the pad, then leaping to join the twisted mass. It struck with a lot of force, enough to shake Maxim's pod with a deep and heavy bass tone. When it hit, it separated, ripping apart in ways I've never seen Adamite do, and smaller pieces flew in several directions. Maxim tracked one as it flew toward the station and stuck on the outside. "Maxim," I said, "Can you zoom in on Eta?" He did, and we could all see it: the station was studded by hundreds, maybe thousands of Adamite shards. Only the one that we knew of had hit with enough force to penetrate. So far. "There might be millions. More," said Aidelle. "Microscopic ones. Maybe even nanoscale." "Look," said Maxim, panning left along the station. "Dock is covered with them." We all saw it, jagged bumps along surfaces that had to form tight seals. He was stuck in the pod. The mission changed. Get us all to the surface alive was the only goal. We though about ditching the cargo, but to do that Maxim would have to get close enough to the pad that his vessel would likely get fused, or worse. So we clamped his pod on the other side of the station. "A day and a half climbing at maximum thrust," said Aidelle. "We need sensors to avoid the local megafauna. And the main computer to manage it all. And life support. Four systems, and we can power three." "Can you repair the redistributor?" I asked. "Not before Maxim loses life support in his pod," she said. "We have four," said Maxim over his screen. "The recharger for the backup power. It's not as much wattage as the others, but you should be able to run the forward sensors off it." So we started ascending, thirty-six hours under thrust. And twelve hours in the station caught fire. Each welded Adamite piece had spooled out meters and meters of partly unraveled carbon nanofibers, and as soon as the ocean wasn't deathly cold they started to react, hydrolyzing the water molecules and burning in place. Worse, the heat conducted through the Adamite. Life support was able to keep the temperature under control. Until it burned through the backup power reserve. Eight hours left. Computer off, life support back on line. Manual control only, through the most biologically active zone of the planet. It steered like a truck, like a yacht, like a giant brick with a toy steering wheel glued on. We took shifts at the controls, steering around the leviathan-nautiloids. I lost the bet. I said it was probably an undiscovered property of Adamite under extreme pressure. Aidelle had the right idea. Ancient, still functional self repair system. Once we surfaced it could work properly. It assembled our salvage into one ellipsoid hull. A fine prize.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2021 07:07
|
|
|
In
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2021 09:40
|
|
|
Reroll
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2021 06:15
|
|
|
Number Six Will Shock You 855 words Bearing the innumerable spawn of the nameless elder doesn't have to be a frightening experience. Learn from the stories of these lucky individuals who have turned their encounter with the emotionless face of the void into a truly positive experience! Fun Fact: while we call the spawn innumerable, the size of the average clutch is between two to five hundred, and the initial postpartum feeding frenzy reduces their number to a more manageable two or three. Survival of the fittest in action! Or should be say survival of the cutest? Just look at the smiling faces of these eight-tailed cuties, fresh from the consumption of their siblings! Take Jonah Q. from Wilmington, North Carolina. When he touched the pseudofossilized egg lodged deep in the inner crannies of that ancient adphidian shipwreck beneath centuries, perhaps millenia of coral growth, the tendrils passing through his latex glove like it was made of wet tissue paper into his skin, he was, as he admits in his journals, scared. 'That feeling, of fingers suddenly wet and warmed and pierced with pain, and that moment of uncertainty, not knowing if the wetness I felt was the seawater, my own blood, or something else entirely filled me with a dread beyond all fears of drowning or animal attack that I had ever felt.' And yet not thirty minutes later he felt 'a bliss entirely unlike and superior to even the most intense sexual gratification I have ever felt, something one has to imagine like the religious ecstacy of a martyr on the cross or at the stake, such pleasure as to overwhelm the sensation of being wracked and burned alive, leaving only pure joy' as the elder seed's black tendrils infiltrated the ganglia of his spinal cord. Fun Fact: while the first generations of the renewed elders consumed their host-parents' flesh upon their birth, their modern successors need not. If a live mammal of sufficient size is present at the moment of birth (seven out of ten new priests recommend a goat, but horses and cattlebeasts work as well) the spawn will prefer to feast on that, leaving their a devoted parent to support them through the entire life cycle. Be prepared for your life to be turned inside out over the next six months. Mood swings are par for the course, ranging from sheer and stark despair to bouts of joy, with the occasional moments of rage. Jonah Q. documents that he 'felt as a long-bottomed opium field, persisting on tiny doses that did not lessen the ache but kept the fish hook of need buried in [his] soul' and that 'the gun in my hand was steady but my finger would not budge against the trigger, not until my hand was aimed elsewhere. It is only providence that had it then aimed at loyal Edgar, rather than some servant or deliveryman when my finger twitched as if possessed, which may be near the truth. An absent cat was far easier to explain away than would have been even the least human.' Not-so-fun Fact: while the host process has been repeatedly proven one hundred percent effective in preventing death by suicide the American Psychiatric Association has refused to endorse it as a therapeutic tool. Dietary changes and cravings, as well, are par for the course, and keeping a well-stocked refrigerator is the kind of planning ahead that your surviving spawn will that you for later, or would if gratitude was not a concept completely alien to their culture. Most host-parents report unending cravings for milk, meat, and fish, the rarer the better. (Sorry, vegans.) As Oscar Q. reports, 'all taste, all flavors but that of iron, of blood fled my senses and the joy of eating, for there was great joy in it, came from the texture, what the chefs and critics call mouth feel of flesh being ground and torn under my teeth.' In some cases there are reports of sudden appetites for broccoli, or for large portions of salts. Keep a healthy supply of electrolyte-replenishing drinks on hand! The birthing process itself, like all things natural, is extremely messy. Once you've ceased to hunger and can feel the roil of the countless spawn beneath the skin of your chest, the best way to ease it along to conclusion is to disrobe entirely. Oscar Q.'s last journal notes a 'sensation of being burned and smothered alive that countenanced only one solution' encouraging this. Like him, you should head immediately to the nearest bathtub and lie on your side, making sure that no natural orifice is blocked in any way. Authorities differ on whether a dry tub or one with water of the same salinity as the sea is better. Either will serve. Ensure that your goat (or other animal) is securely tethered and within reach, and wait for the miracle to happen. Fun Fact: while photographs of the spawn make them appear solid black, in person their skin displays a pearlescent rainbow of color, with yellow and indigo tones being the most prominent! Click for #2: Caroline F.:Learning to love, from Twenty-six Cats to Three Growing Spawn
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2021 05:14
|
|
|
In
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2021 17:25
|
|
|
Rule:your piece must have a beginning alighted on the tombstone and stared silently at the scattered mourners for hours. They stared at one another, tear-logged eye to black corvid same, until a wordless commonality embraced all of the souls gathered under that boneyard rain. *** A hundred winters later, as the flitting dragonflies reckon time. Perhaps a week. Perhaps a weekend. Long enough for pain to dull against the sad flesh it carves nightly, to still cut but not cleanly. Devon found in himself a thirst. Water first, repaying the debts of tears and sweat. A gallon in an hour. Then he cast about his small room for a knife. There was blood, of course. Devon was glad of that. He rightly did not trust anything that does not bleed. Blood, pooling around Verger's prone form, then dancing, jumping into Devon's hand and twirling like a music box dancer. The blood began to sing, to sing old songs, songs that were old when women huddled against the burning skies at Toba. The blood sang out history. The blood sang out legacy. Devon listened, and learned. "Are you a prophet?" That's what Alchemist had asked him, twenty years and six days earlier. When he first told him about his plan. He wasn't, didn't think of himself as one. But he answered "Perhaps." And it all happened, everything, down to Cleo's exact reaction. Word for word. Verger crawled a step forward. Devon started, surprised the old man was still alive. He moved his hand upward and the blood puppet floated in the air, then turned around and kicked Verger hard, in the gut. Verger groaned. Devon kicked again, lodging his foot under and pulling upward, rolling Verger onto his back. "You," Verger started, more of a growl than a word, his forehead shiny with sweat. "You won't win, you know." Devon gave another kick. Verger whimpered as the bloodsong grew more and more intense, reaching a crescendo. The singer spun faster, faster, losing its shape in favor of a tiny cyclone funnel. "I've already won, you sanctimonious little-" Verger spat, a little more blood in the room. The gobbet drew a tiny parabola and settled on his second chin, slowly moving down the neck. Devon snapped his fingers and it flew upward, the blood tearing free from the mucus, which fell back on Verger's neck. "Really?" said Devon. He raised his foot, poised to stomp on a kneecap or maybe the groin. Then he set it down and smiled. "Do you remember Katya?" Verger kept expression off his face, but the sweat on his brow betrayed him. "Of course you do. She was one of your favorites." Verger's eyes dilated. He tried to speak, but only let out a wet rattle. "No, I didn't kill her," said Devon. "You were responsible for that, for my first time. That poor apprentice in Vienna. You know, the one with the huge glasses and the stutter. That was real. I never thanked you for that, you know. I am grateful. I would never have made it this far, if I could still think of myself as innocent." The blood dancer started to slow down. Devon gestured lazily and more of Verger's blood rose from floor to the spinning vortex. By now it was less song than noise, just one tritone chord drawn out without release. "No, Master Verger. This was Cleo," Devon said, smiling to remember her then. When they were students together. When she knew how to love, to love like a dog loves a chew toy. To love to destruction, until she was left sadly holding the plastic squeaky bit and wondering where the rest had gone. He missed that Cleo. "You know, she wouldn't say a word against you. No matter how persistent Cleo got with her questions. "After she died, though." After Cleo drew her tiny glass blade across Katya's pale chest that final time, organ-deep. "When we had the top of her skull open, me pushing blood through the dead grey matter and Cleo probing with her electrodes. Then she told us everything." Devon stared into Verger's eyes, the green that glared from them now silver-grey. Only the song and the dancer kept what blood he had left moving from lung to brain and back again. The old man's heart was dead, beginning to rot already, valves and chambers pushed by the blood itself. "She told us what you had her do," said Devon. "You know, I was actually jealous. No, impressed. I would never have dared. Alchemist's own son a skullpuppet for two years before anyone suspected. "Yes. Alchemist knew. All along, or near enough. He watched you cry like a basilisk after the accident, that little avalanche you arranged as the puppet outgrew the strings. Were you proud? To know you fooled him so well?" Verger coughed, a weak dry cough. Devon curled his finger and lifted him off the ground, pulling him upright by the blood that bathed his brain. "Martin will still-" "Martin's dead, teacher," said Devon. "Hadn't you heard?" Fingers uncurled and Verger's meat slammed toward the wall. Devon let go of the blood, of all of it, and the song ended as it all splashed downward, soaking everything but Devon's own clothes. He went to Verger's kitchen next. The library could wait. The blood had told every skill Verger had, but the man likely had books full of works he never mastered. But later. Devon was still thristy. Orange juice. That would do. Thranguy fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Nov 15, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2021 06:43
|
|
|
In offense
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2021 03:41
|
|
|
Making Ends Meet Offense:Tight End 800 words For every kidnapped oil heiress and bungled murder frame-up there are dozens of little jobs. That's where the rent gets paid, two or three hundred dollars at a time. This was one of those jobs, me getting paid two hundo to stand around looking mean. I figured some kind of drug deal, but I don't ask questions. I'm good at that, good at looking mean, good at not asking questions. The client was a twitchy little thing, short and wiry and always in motion, never gracefully. He called himself Stan. I don't check ID. It took a lot of talk to convince him to let me hold the suitcase with the money in it. Normally I'd have just taken it off him to show how easy that was, but, well. Some people have a smell to them. He had one that said he's carrying a knife that he'll pull out any minute, and I didn't want to have to hurt him taking it away too. Also, even an idiot can get lucky in a knife fight. So I had to go the hard way, use my words. So I was holding the cash. The other guy, street name of Luke-Luke, he had the goods. I didn't know him, but he had a decent rep. Sorta semi-connected with the Kings. He had his own muscle. Big guys, but not as big as me. One of them I recognized, was the bouncer at Lucy's. The other one I didn't know. Young. Nervous. Aware of his weapon in an obvious way. There shouldn't be any need for violence, but nobody trusts nobody these days. At least I was pretty sure nobody here was a cop, but in almost half of these transactions one side brings a bag of bricks or a stack of newspaper with a twenty on top. Sometimes it's both. So you've gotta check everything carefully unless you have a trusting relationship. And by trusting I mean one guy knows where the other one sleeps and the other is on complaining terms with the first guy's boss. You gotta have a mutually assured world-of-hurt thing going, and we sure didn't. So we checked it out. Stan was satisfied. The kid gave the cash a quick riffle and count. We were ready to part ways amicable and all when the poo poo started. First thing I saw was Luke-Luke's guys going down, the kid collapsing right there, the bouncer thrashing around a bit. Then I felt it myself, a couple stings, an electrical burn. Stun gun. Now, a couple things. First, I'm bigger than most people. I dress nice, dress slimming, so sometimes it's not obvious just how much meat and gristle I've got around these already big bones. Your standard setting isn't up to taking a guy my size out of a fight, even disregarding the other thing, which is that back when I was a kid I used to take bets on how long I could hold on to the rabbit fence at the Geller farm, and I never lost. Not to say it didn't hurt. It hurt like hell. But not more than I could take. I ripped the leads out of my chest and threw them on to the ground. There were three of them in the stickup gang. And just because they had stun guns didn't mean they had something meaner as a backup. They didn't look like much though. More than anything else they looked like a bunch of nerds. I could have drawn down, but I wasn't getting paid near enough to kill anyone, even fools like that. Not if I didn't have to. Three on three, except Stan was worse than useless and Luke-Luke didn't look much better in a fight. I had options. Could have let it all go, talk Stan and Luke-Luke into giving it all up. It wouldn't have been a tough sell, and if I thought these guys were cold killers it's what I'd have done. Could have walked away. Someone close to one side or the other must have let something slip for these clowns to have found us. Probably Stan. But I didn't. I charged, right at two of them, right down the middle. They didn't get it right away, not until I spread my arms out. I've got a lot of span when I do that. You can do some damage that way. Knock people on their rear end, maybe even on their heads. But that's only someone who stands their ground, and these guys didn't have it in them. They ran, even the one that was behind my back. Which was fine by me. Everyone gets to be happy but us muscle who had to eat a thousand volts or so, and we all at least got paid.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2021 07:03
|
|
|
In, help me out DJ DOA
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2021 22:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Mar 25, 2025 22:34 |
|
|
Girlfriend from Another Dimension Bat Fangs: "Turn it Up" 1528 words We chatted together on Thirdspace for about five months and she never mentioned that she was, you know. But I could tell. I mean, even before I believed, I could tell she was on the inside of it, of the joke. She wasn't one of the ones dropping the ur-memes, the ones we thought were playing this cool deepfake prank. But she helped spread them, and unlike me and everyone else I knew she never got the context wrong. And she didn't seem to have any other socials outside Thirdspace. That was also a clue. No Tilyn97 anywhere else online. It started with her commenting on one of the Glory ur-memes. You know the one, her with that skinny glass scimitar coming up out of the grass and looking like a hundred percent stone goddess. 'The exact moment when you know / that you're going to horny jail'. Of course it mostly wasn't the text. It was the picture itself, that first moment of believing. Seeing her, not the character but the actress, that much pretty and sexy and pure charisma in a single still, with no hint of the uncanny, and knowing that if this person existed in our dimension everyone would know her name. But it was a little bit about the text, because that was me. J.L., on Thirdspace. Horny J.L. sometimes, even, when I was doing the online extrovert overcompensation thing that mousy shy girls like me sometimes do, which was a lot of the time. Glory of Antibor was #goals. So that was my first contact with Tilyn. Of course, that was just another meme, just another moment of feeling seen. Not an actual contact. That was later, on one of the chat servers on Thirdspace. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds, and at first I was dipping in and out of as many as I could, but as time went by I wound up going back to RainbowFleet more and more. You find communities, or they find you. And that's where I started getting to know Tilyn. And the others, of course. There were about a dozen of us in the core of RainbowFleet, plus twice that many who came and went, and we didn't just talk about that franchise of ur-meme sources. After the first month or so we hardly talked about it at all. We just, you know, shared our lives. Celebrated birthdays and new jobs, complained about family and jobs, grieved together. Always behind pseudonyms or first names only. But we knew each other. The first time Tilyn and I chatted privately was when she came out to her parents. I was the only one online at the time who had been through that before. She was scared out of her head and didn't have anyone to talk to. "I mean, can't talk to Katie since she just dumped me and made it so I can't really stay in Bagger House much longer which means I have to go home or else live on the street. But if I do I have to explain why. and I can't lie to them but what if they, what if Dad sends me away" I mostly listened. Read. You know. I had some advice to give. I'd been there, both with the family thing, where I was basically disowned after Mom passed and Dad could stop pretending to understand, and also being briefly homeless after a breakup. She wanted to know about that, so I spent a long time going over my three weeks couchsurfing. She wasn't in school, not even in a college town, so I don't think much of it applied. But she seemed calmer as I went on. "Did Mel ever take you back?" I had mostly flown by the breakup. It still hurt a little. But she picked up who did the dumping and whose fault it all was. Everyone in that community got good at reading between the lines. "No." "I don't think Siona will either." She thanked me, and I was worried all night and into the next day until I got a ping. Her parents, it turned out, were not just chill they were full-on ride-or-die for her. Didn't know already, didn't have a clue even, year and a half roommate situation notwithstanding. But they went from zero to trying to set her up with the nice young lady doctor that they always wondered about that way. But she had a roof over her head, which was what mattered. We chatted a lot after that. Long talks. Often flirty. We shared pics, no nudes, lots of faces, a bit of cleavage. Neither of us ever brought up meeting IRL. She told me, a week before it went all over Thirdspace. That she, and about half of the people on the site, were from another dimension, a different history that diverged somewhere in the eighties. I was a believer, because I believed in her. That she wouldn't lie to me. That if this was some huge prank she would have told me that a week before. Things got ugly on most of the groups for a while after that. Flamewars. Armies of new-registered trolls fanning the flames on both sides. Even RainbowFleet got a little unbearable until the loudest pro-hoax voices took a hint and logged off or kept quiet. That's how it calmed down, communities dividing off. Most of the nonbelievers found offsites, where they were allowed to connect the 'hoax' to the other nasty conspiracy theories that lurked in those kind of online spaces. But now that it was out there, people could ask questions, learn about the other history of the last forty years. The big world events were all different but similar. They had the same set of boomers we did, just shuffling who was in what office when. They had their big pandemic earlier, didn't have a Nine-Eleven in New York but a Galveston Bay Incident in '03, with a different series of dumb wars afterward. Bob Dylan died young. That one hit me hardest, of all the changes. That and no Harry Potter. She just wrote a few mysteries and was done. Kurt Cobain is still alive. Nirvana was a one-hit wonder, but his other projects had a big following. And everyone born after about 1987 doesn't exist there. Maybe a few people got the same name, but not the same DNA. The last thing she said to me was that there was a way to cross over. A way to move people, not just some low bandwidth data from here to there. Said that if I was interested, I should come to Toronto, where the Thirdspace servers were, and gave me a pass code. I didn't answer. It was too big. Looking objectively at it, there wasn't much keeping me here. I already mentioned my poo poo family and the breakup that still had most people in my peer group considering me the villain. (Even, somehow, Margaret, the one I cheated with. I never understood how that worked. She knew what we were doing.) But it was just too big. The next day they shut down Thirdspace. It was all over the news, not just a quirky web thing explained for boomers and gen xers, a full on story exposing this long con, this weird Canadian cult-like community practicing deep fake technology, building complex chatbots that could ace the Turing test but still weren't really AIs, all in service of some sinister scheme or other. I could never figure out what the endgame could have been, couldn't see any profit in it except maybe eventually trying to sell Glory of Antibor books and movies, Rainbow Fleet TV seasons, and all the other properties from the ur-memes. But the news and government people insisted there was something truly sinister to it all. I cried myself to sleep. Then I woke up, emptied out my bank account, and bought a ticket to Toronto. The building was still there, still running for now. They had lawyers, and the kind of things take time. There were still employees around. There was someone who recognized the pass code, someone who took me to the basement. I wasn't the only one. There were twenty of us in this group, twenty refugees going this way. I had to give up everything. You can't take anything with you, I was told. My clothes, my money, my identification would go to someone going the other way when they got here. We stood there, naked, mostly covering up shyly with our hands, wondering if we hadn't gotten mixed up in a cult. Then the wall in front of us shimmered into a pool of light, and we stepped across. They gave us gowns on the other side. I put mine on, drew the belt tight. Someone handed me a pair of glasses, close enough to my prescription. I looked around and I saw Tilyn waiting for me. I smiled. I walked forward. There was kissing. A good way to start a new life, kissing someone you've wanted to kiss for months. Would do again, would recommend, would. Would. Would.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2021 08:53
|
|