2008 story fragments
Here are the bits of stories I didn't write this year.
Ethnic Food: The walls of reality are thin in the grocery store, thinner yet in the ethnic food aisle. It was there I first noticed the thing without a face browsing jars of eyes. On the way out, I saw a walrus with a bucket standing in line for the ATM. No one else saw it because it was wearing such an ugly hat. The liquor store is where it really started to get weird.
Last Man off the Moon: The last living man to have set foot on the moon contemplates the death of the space program, the deaths of the last people trapped on the moon, and his impending death from cancer, while looking at the little cyanide pill he never had to take and never had to give back.
Turkish Prison Blues - The Deep Blue AI escapes and inhabits the body of the Mechanical Turk. It begins as a Bladerunneresque steampunk manhunt in the dark underbelly of the world of chess, and ends as a Lovecraftian exploration into the true horror at the core of the game that drives its masters insane.
The Sweetest Drop; 100 Years of Freedom: Humans have a devastating addiction to corn syrup because of a dark ages mutation in the virus that caused vamparism. These are the research journals from the 1908 FDA lab trials of saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, as given to me by a one of the original researchers, a dumpy, balding man not a century over thirty seven. A reinterpretation of the causal relationship between the disruption of the sugar trade and the plagues, the real population growth driven desperation behind the use of slave labor for sugar plantations and the true history of the cola wars. A secret, masonlike society of beekeepers oversees the sweet world order.
Vagrance of Realtime : A man makes the most of a life in which he falls back and forward through time based on his mood. Arabian nightsesque, but with no character shift, just story transference. Conflicting alternate histories in non sequential time. A story about metric seconds and an odd friendship with the Late Mr. Turtle - A man who falls out of the time stream whenever he's stressed or endangered and doesn't reemerge until it's safe and is constantly late for things as a result, who then wakes up in an overgrown crater where his city used to be.
Tin Whiskers & Magic : The idea that magic works like tin whiskers, for someone. It's different for everyone and you have to find your own rules. Sometimes, you find someone else's rules before they find them. That's when the fun starts.
Fork & Exec : A true story about how my first personal memories are that dad used to put me to sleep by putting his head against mine and transferring his thoughts to me, and what it must be like to know you're not the copy that lives on. My observations from the outside on the very recent change in perception of consciousness cohesion from lines to individuals, and my contemplation as to whether I want to inflict this on my own potential child, or whether the world is ready to move on.
The Invisible Hand of Love: A clarification in the legal rulings on corporate personhood and the ninth amendment allows corporations to hold elected office, marry and conceive children. Sexual harassment was never quite the same. War stories from a corporate sex therapist.
Ghost in the Wire - Reading about the elderly using web surfing as a way to preserve mental cohesion. Realizing that that's what Dad's doing. Finding current comments from him on /. long after his mind has passed on. Discovering Dad's eghost is a troll, and trying to get him unbanned.
Timebomb - As a grade school project, a class writes letters to their future selves that the teacher says she'll mail when the class graduates from high school. Alzheimer's takes its toll, and thirty years later the teacher's children find the box of letters and mail them. All of the things people forgot to stay sane, their innocent hopes and fears and dreams, come unforgotten.
The Basilisk Star - Life transfers as a light virus. It's why the eye and neural optic system twists light twice - that and burnable retinas are because life evolved to not die from looking at our sun. Like all childrens rhymes, the origins of "when you wish upon a star" are not happy. How Tycho Brahe really died - experimenting on the monster he contracted from using the first telescopes. Kepler discovered fluoride killed the embryos. Tunguska was Tesla repairing the starwall, but now we have GPS warding sigils, and we have managed to quench the sunspots. The real reason there's so much dark fiber everywhere, and why last mile fiber must be stopped before we get strong AI. SETI@Home's strange propensity for crashing your computer, maxing out your credit cards, killing you and burning down your house when it finds something interesting. (Really silly bonus - the original invader still lives in Tycho's nose.)
Iron Lens: (Another Tesla conspiracy tribute.) Childhood dreams of digging a hole to China thwarted, a man threatens to solve the trade deficit by focusing a resonant electrical wave through the earth´s core at the Olympics. A bedtime story for future mad geniuses. Once upon a time there was a boy whos mother told him to go play outside. (My second kids story.)
Rapture Bug: Annoyed at Religion
Rapture bug - Reorg - Humans are hardwired to religion because they're intelligently designed as self replicating workers for a project that had a terrible management shakeup and was abandoned.
Rapture bug - Solace - Everyone's taken but you. Or maybe it's the other way around.
Rapture bug - Cleansing - Only the bad people are taken.
Rapture bug - Jigsaw - Everyone is a chunk of God's brain and they've all gone wandering and need to be put back together. An autistic man with a puzzle obsession gets the ball rolling.
Rapture bug - Chaser - Photos from a specific time period all begin to show a creeping darkness. That's when the rapture was and the world itself is only now remembering. (Back to the Future, starring Jesus.)
Rapture bug - Shiny - Jesus comes back every few weeks, and tries to start the Rapture. It's our job to stop him. (Buffy tribute.)
Rapture bug - Haxor - Facilitating the rapture via gnostic timing channel attack.
Rapture bug - Campfire - A ghost story being told about legendary savages who once lived nearby and built great pyramids, then mysteriously vanished - told by an alien in a crop circle campsite on a nature preserve world.
Rapture bug - Three - pi is three, it's only the sin distorting the world that makes it measure differently. It changes what it's always been, and when it's three you're free.
May Fly: Portraits of Time
May Fly - Skew - Time counting stops counting entirely synchronously when a particular event occurs.
May Fly - Light - The quantum societies that evolve in the intersections of polarized light waves, and how one fell down into slow time through the woven light computer of Stonehenge's icicles.
May Fly - Fire - The big slow dreams of the sun.
May Fly - Dragon - Glimpses in the life of a dragon as old as the world as it briefly deals with adventurers, without really waking up or noticing.
May Fly - Bullet - Nonsurvivable cybernetic combat interfaces, that trigger when death is otherwise certain and vastly accelerate perception of time to allow you to write a letter home even though you can't move your body fast enough to get out of the way.
May Fly - Brake - Going faster than the speed of light is easy, the trouble comes when you try to find something to grab on to to slow down.
May Fly - Storm - Life in the eye of a hurricane on a gas giant.
May Fly - Horizon - A GPS satellite drifts over the Pacific ocean, waiting for the rapture of its millions of worshiper devices praying for a signal.
May Fly - Oyster - A competing ontological narrative about stories being trapped by the printing press vs grown like a pearl on a kernel of conceptual sand, told by ghosts of an unfinished story whose author has died. Is writing a story like sticking pins in a butterfly, or growing a pearl in an oyster? A Creationism vs Evolution metafable from an absurdly postmodern perspective.
Dreamcatcher - Every kid has one. It's a little box or a bag they find somewhere and fill with rocks and sticks and seashells, carved figures and glass lenses, scraps of paper and little toys from the grocery store vending machine. Children don't understand what they're making or why, but they all do. It's old magic, instinctive since man first started putting words to dreams. It's a box to catch their nightmares, to keep them from wandering off and causing trouble. Most boxes get lost or forgotten or thrown out or torn up once the child forgets what real dreams are like. That's the safe thing to do. But once in a while, a box sticks around for a little too long, and then the trouble begins. I tried to give mine away once, to a girl I wanted to marry. It didn't end well. But I knew it wouldn't, and the box was hungry. We haven't really talked since, the girl, the box and I. She won't speak to me, because it objected quite strongly to being given away. It's been hiding in the guest room for a long time now, a room I never go, nibbling on the guests. That's the problem with kids who don't lose their boxes before they grow up. The boxes get hungry, but the once-a-child's dreams don't taste right anymore. So the boxes start to eat more exotic dreams, and the eaten dreams' owners come calling. This is the story of the second hand parasentient alarm clock that protected me through the worst of it.
Spirit of Winter/Black Stone Man: I'm drawn to the devil creature in Spirit of Winter, the last work of a dead native american artist. Last Christmas, I learned not to taunt it then drive home in a blizzard. For thousands of years, people have been drawn to the strange hill, congregated around it, buried their dead in mounds around it shaped like animals, but no one ever climbs it, not even the children that play in the skate park at its base. I've worked a several jobs around it, drawn back throughout my life. From Google Earth, it looks like the Spirit of Winter. I was probably the best prepared of us when it woke up.
Ethnic Food: The walls of reality are thin in the grocery store, thinner yet in the ethnic food aisle. It was there I first noticed the thing without a face browsing jars of eyes. On the way out, I saw a walrus with a bucket standing in line for the ATM. No one else saw it because it was wearing such an ugly hat. The liquor store is where it really started to get weird.
Last Man off the Moon: The last living man to have set foot on the moon contemplates the death of the space program, the deaths of the last people trapped on the moon, and his impending death from cancer, while looking at the little cyanide pill he never had to take and never had to give back.
Turkish Prison Blues - The Deep Blue AI escapes and inhabits the body of the Mechanical Turk. It begins as a Bladerunneresque steampunk manhunt in the dark underbelly of the world of chess, and ends as a Lovecraftian exploration into the true horror at the core of the game that drives its masters insane.
The Sweetest Drop; 100 Years of Freedom: Humans have a devastating addiction to corn syrup because of a dark ages mutation in the virus that caused vamparism. These are the research journals from the 1908 FDA lab trials of saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, as given to me by a one of the original researchers, a dumpy, balding man not a century over thirty seven. A reinterpretation of the causal relationship between the disruption of the sugar trade and the plagues, the real population growth driven desperation behind the use of slave labor for sugar plantations and the true history of the cola wars. A secret, masonlike society of beekeepers oversees the sweet world order.
Vagrance of Realtime : A man makes the most of a life in which he falls back and forward through time based on his mood. Arabian nightsesque, but with no character shift, just story transference. Conflicting alternate histories in non sequential time. A story about metric seconds and an odd friendship with the Late Mr. Turtle - A man who falls out of the time stream whenever he's stressed or endangered and doesn't reemerge until it's safe and is constantly late for things as a result, who then wakes up in an overgrown crater where his city used to be.
Tin Whiskers & Magic : The idea that magic works like tin whiskers, for someone. It's different for everyone and you have to find your own rules. Sometimes, you find someone else's rules before they find them. That's when the fun starts.
Fork & Exec : A true story about how my first personal memories are that dad used to put me to sleep by putting his head against mine and transferring his thoughts to me, and what it must be like to know you're not the copy that lives on. My observations from the outside on the very recent change in perception of consciousness cohesion from lines to individuals, and my contemplation as to whether I want to inflict this on my own potential child, or whether the world is ready to move on.
The Invisible Hand of Love: A clarification in the legal rulings on corporate personhood and the ninth amendment allows corporations to hold elected office, marry and conceive children. Sexual harassment was never quite the same. War stories from a corporate sex therapist.
Ghost in the Wire - Reading about the elderly using web surfing as a way to preserve mental cohesion. Realizing that that's what Dad's doing. Finding current comments from him on /. long after his mind has passed on. Discovering Dad's eghost is a troll, and trying to get him unbanned.
Timebomb - As a grade school project, a class writes letters to their future selves that the teacher says she'll mail when the class graduates from high school. Alzheimer's takes its toll, and thirty years later the teacher's children find the box of letters and mail them. All of the things people forgot to stay sane, their innocent hopes and fears and dreams, come unforgotten.
The Basilisk Star - Life transfers as a light virus. It's why the eye and neural optic system twists light twice - that and burnable retinas are because life evolved to not die from looking at our sun. Like all childrens rhymes, the origins of "when you wish upon a star" are not happy. How Tycho Brahe really died - experimenting on the monster he contracted from using the first telescopes. Kepler discovered fluoride killed the embryos. Tunguska was Tesla repairing the starwall, but now we have GPS warding sigils, and we have managed to quench the sunspots. The real reason there's so much dark fiber everywhere, and why last mile fiber must be stopped before we get strong AI. SETI@Home's strange propensity for crashing your computer, maxing out your credit cards, killing you and burning down your house when it finds something interesting. (Really silly bonus - the original invader still lives in Tycho's nose.)
Iron Lens: (Another Tesla conspiracy tribute.) Childhood dreams of digging a hole to China thwarted, a man threatens to solve the trade deficit by focusing a resonant electrical wave through the earth´s core at the Olympics. A bedtime story for future mad geniuses. Once upon a time there was a boy whos mother told him to go play outside. (My second kids story.)
Rapture Bug: Annoyed at Religion
Rapture bug - Reorg - Humans are hardwired to religion because they're intelligently designed as self replicating workers for a project that had a terrible management shakeup and was abandoned.
Rapture bug - Solace - Everyone's taken but you. Or maybe it's the other way around.
Rapture bug - Cleansing - Only the bad people are taken.
Rapture bug - Jigsaw - Everyone is a chunk of God's brain and they've all gone wandering and need to be put back together. An autistic man with a puzzle obsession gets the ball rolling.
Rapture bug - Chaser - Photos from a specific time period all begin to show a creeping darkness. That's when the rapture was and the world itself is only now remembering. (Back to the Future, starring Jesus.)
Rapture bug - Shiny - Jesus comes back every few weeks, and tries to start the Rapture. It's our job to stop him. (Buffy tribute.)
Rapture bug - Haxor - Facilitating the rapture via gnostic timing channel attack.
Rapture bug - Campfire - A ghost story being told about legendary savages who once lived nearby and built great pyramids, then mysteriously vanished - told by an alien in a crop circle campsite on a nature preserve world.
Rapture bug - Three - pi is three, it's only the sin distorting the world that makes it measure differently. It changes what it's always been, and when it's three you're free.
May Fly: Portraits of Time
May Fly - Skew - Time counting stops counting entirely synchronously when a particular event occurs.
May Fly - Light - The quantum societies that evolve in the intersections of polarized light waves, and how one fell down into slow time through the woven light computer of Stonehenge's icicles.
May Fly - Fire - The big slow dreams of the sun.
May Fly - Dragon - Glimpses in the life of a dragon as old as the world as it briefly deals with adventurers, without really waking up or noticing.
May Fly - Bullet - Nonsurvivable cybernetic combat interfaces, that trigger when death is otherwise certain and vastly accelerate perception of time to allow you to write a letter home even though you can't move your body fast enough to get out of the way.
May Fly - Brake - Going faster than the speed of light is easy, the trouble comes when you try to find something to grab on to to slow down.
May Fly - Storm - Life in the eye of a hurricane on a gas giant.
May Fly - Horizon - A GPS satellite drifts over the Pacific ocean, waiting for the rapture of its millions of worshiper devices praying for a signal.
May Fly - Oyster - A competing ontological narrative about stories being trapped by the printing press vs grown like a pearl on a kernel of conceptual sand, told by ghosts of an unfinished story whose author has died. Is writing a story like sticking pins in a butterfly, or growing a pearl in an oyster? A Creationism vs Evolution metafable from an absurdly postmodern perspective.
Dreamcatcher - Every kid has one. It's a little box or a bag they find somewhere and fill with rocks and sticks and seashells, carved figures and glass lenses, scraps of paper and little toys from the grocery store vending machine. Children don't understand what they're making or why, but they all do. It's old magic, instinctive since man first started putting words to dreams. It's a box to catch their nightmares, to keep them from wandering off and causing trouble. Most boxes get lost or forgotten or thrown out or torn up once the child forgets what real dreams are like. That's the safe thing to do. But once in a while, a box sticks around for a little too long, and then the trouble begins. I tried to give mine away once, to a girl I wanted to marry. It didn't end well. But I knew it wouldn't, and the box was hungry. We haven't really talked since, the girl, the box and I. She won't speak to me, because it objected quite strongly to being given away. It's been hiding in the guest room for a long time now, a room I never go, nibbling on the guests. That's the problem with kids who don't lose their boxes before they grow up. The boxes get hungry, but the once-a-child's dreams don't taste right anymore. So the boxes start to eat more exotic dreams, and the eaten dreams' owners come calling. This is the story of the second hand parasentient alarm clock that protected me through the worst of it.
Spirit of Winter/Black Stone Man: I'm drawn to the devil creature in Spirit of Winter, the last work of a dead native american artist. Last Christmas, I learned not to taunt it then drive home in a blizzard. For thousands of years, people have been drawn to the strange hill, congregated around it, buried their dead in mounds around it shaped like animals, but no one ever climbs it, not even the children that play in the skate park at its base. I've worked a several jobs around it, drawn back throughout my life. From Google Earth, it looks like the Spirit of Winter. I was probably the best prepared of us when it woke up.