This post is part of the December 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “250-Word Story Chain, or, The Blog-O-Phone.”

“Holy Hell on a Hershey’s.”

Old Man Wiggins looked over the scene of devastation on his property. His house was ablaze, lit up by an exploding snowmobile, his loyal dog Ginormous needed a quadruple-digit vet bill, and everyone on his land, trespassers or not, was running around dangerously like beheaded chickens.

“Well, that tears it. I’m not going this year.”

Wiggins pushed away the neural net interface that linked him to the mathematically certain predictive model of his property. If he left, a mob of those idiots from town would descend with their axes to chop up his trees, little realizing that they were key parts of the neural botany net that made Wiggins’ invention work. Every Xmas tree they cut down was another year to recalibrate the system by digging up and repositioning copper wires buried and snarled by roots.

The Seventeenth Annual Conference on Neuralpredictive Botany in Tampa Bay would just have to wait. Wiggins would email his paper, fine-tune the predictive simulation, and put up some more barbed wire and possibly a motion sensor with a laser grid.

He got up and went upstairs in search of a coffee as Irish as Colin Farrell, not noticing that the door was ajar.

“Grandpa?” Claire entered the basement after hearing a noise, and saw that Wiggins’ device, which he always said was a ham radio, was still on.

She sat down and slipped the harness over her head.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:

Ralph Pines
ishtar’sgate
Angyl78
MsLaylaCakes
pyrosama
BBBurke
sweetwheat

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