Excerpt

Archived Posts from this Category

April 8, 2011

From “A Thin Film of Genetics” by C. K. Toubler

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , |
Leave a Comment 

“Why the hell do trees have to dump this shit on my car?” Lucas whines, clearing a swath in the pollen and plant debris covering his car with the back of his hand. “Why can’t they just drop their leaves and leave it at that?”

“You don’t want to know,” says Caleb. “Just wash it.”

“Yes I do,” Lucas replies. “You’re a bio major. Tell me.”

Caleb sighs. “No. You won’t like it, and then I’ll never hear the end of your whining.”

“You’ll never hear the end of my whining if you don’t.”

“Fine,” says Caleb. “The pollen? Plant sperm. The little stalks all over your car? What do you think makes sperm?”

“You mean…” Lucas begins.

“Yes. The trees have sex with the world and then their penises fall off. Onto your car.” Caleb is smiling by the end, as he sees Lucas’s expression turn to horror.

“UGH!” Lucas cries, recoiling. “Great, thanks! Now I’ll know that forever, thanks! I can’t un-know it!”

“You asked.

 

April 7, 2011

From “Among the Primordial Star Clouds” by Philip H. Fleming

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

Companies and governments “seeded” vast sectors of space with remotely-piloted drones and the infrastructure to support them–automated repair stations and a network of tiny, cheap hyperspace relays. They took advantage of the fact that propulsion and communication technologies had evolved far faster than the ability to put a human in the driver’s seat. A person traveling at speed in one of the remote drones would be reduced to chunky salsa even if they’d had air to breathe.

But with the relays in place, a person with a decent connection on Earth could pilot a remote drone nearly in real-time, doing surveying and exploration work that completely automated probes couldn’t. And they could sell the minerals they found and potentially habitable sites for future colonization, if the technology ever appeared.

Cam had cashed in his college fund to buy a rattletrap of an RPD, and he spent close to ten hours a day hooked up to its interface, exploring places he’d never see with his own eyes and scraping together just enough cash from what he found to keep the operation going.

Big scores happened all the time–just never to him. So when he saw that a promising system already had a drone in orbit, he wished for the thousandth time that his tiny ship had some kind of offensive weapons.

 

April 6, 2011

From “Beneath a Sundering Sky” by Carla Y. Eleuard

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , , , |
[3] Comments 

“To this day, none know what happened,” Storyteller continued, drawing his audience in still further. “Some say it was the weapons of the old world, finally loosed form their old slumber. Others claim it was something new entirely. But all agree that on that day, and many since, the sky appeared to all the world like it had been sundered by flame.”

“I’ve met people who lived through it,” said Trixie. “Don’t think they’d even agree on that much.”

“I like Storyteller’s version better, even if it is a little embellished,” Kayla retorted.

“When Jasper left seeking the Legion, he claimed that a secondary purpose of his journey would be to learn the true story of those dark days, when so many died and so much changed,” Storyteller continued.

“What do you think happened?” Trixie cried.

Without skipping a beat, Storyteller responded. “I’m of the opinion that the world had grown hungry for the stories of old, which we still hear today. Stories of bravery, of heroism, of danger. The world wants us to tell stories like that, and to live them.”

 

April 5, 2011

From “Orthodox Spam” by Xun Tiqin

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , |
Leave a Comment 

Most–well, nearly all–of the incoming links were spambots, but not of the traditional kind. Your Catholic spambots tended to visit pages, leave a link that a child of five could identify as spam as a comment, and scuttle off. Your unorthodox Protestant spambots, of which there was an increasing profusion, simply visited your site.

It was easy for Chen to explain the former: every incoming link helped boost a site’s search ranking. Even though the engines supposedly corrected for link quality, they could be overwhelmed by an avalanche of low-quality links. There had been a huge scandal last year, after all, when the H. B. Dollor retail chain had been caught buying spam links to puff up its retail site. But the visiting spambots posed more of a problem.

Chen found it was easy to spot them, at least: 90% ended in .cz.cc, the web address for the Cocos Islands, an obscure Australian island territory with 600 people and an anything-goes approach to e-commerce. He was certain that the visits were either intended to draw curious web owners, automatic link checkers, or other creatures that might follow the gossamer spamstrands back to the pages that had vomited them forth.

He was about to put all those theories to the test.

 

April 4, 2011

From “Evolution at Work” by Eric Cummings Jr.

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , , |
Leave a Comment 

Of course, I know I’m no Adonis: flabby in some places, bony in others, and gangly or ungainly throughout like a scarecrow built around a potbelly stove. I’ve got the pasty, translucent complexion only millennia of evolution in the damp Irish climate could perfect, and still blessed with bountiful harvests of acne well into my third decade even as time has brought most of my pizzaface compatriots of yore a measure of relief. Add to that the hunched posture common to Quasimodo and heavy computer users, and you’ve gone a long way to understanding why I’ve never had to live in a duplex.

But I’ve seen enough repulsive specimens of manhood strolling around campus with their hands in the pockets of someone with a good three to five points on them by the traditional metric scale to think that there must be more to it than that. My friends say it’s confidence, bravado, something you can fake until you make. But I’ve learned the hard way that it’s one thing to pretend you know what you’re doing when staring at a crowd of impressionable students and another entirely when you’re eying someone through the haze of a bad college party.

 

April 3, 2011

From “The Teti Heresy” by J. K. L. Duchamp

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , |
Leave a Comment 

Mössner and Italesi were often cited as examples by believers in spiritualism and the occult, thanks to their deaths so soon after the excavations at the funerary complex of Teti II. Italesi died of scarlet fever while in quarantine at Port Said in December 1913, while Mössner perished the following year of a septic infection contracted after he was jailed by the British after war broke out.

Of course, that was patently ridiculous: British jails in Cairo weren’t known for their high levels of sanitation, much less if the prisoner was a suspected enemy alien, and there had been sporadic outbreaks of scarlet fever throughout the 1910’s on the Mediterranean coast. A pharaoh would have had to be far-seeing indeed to arrange a world war and an outbreak of unknown disease to kill those who violated the sanctity of his poorly-built rubble mound of a pyramid, and Teti II was a mediocre, forgotten ruler at best.

Nevertheless, when the entranceway to his pyramid collapsed a week after the death of Mössner, entombing 16 workers and two Europeans, the legend of the pharaoh’s wrath was established in the popular imagination, eclipsed only when Tutankhamen’s tomb was unearthed a decade later.

 

April 2, 2011

From “Idiols of Ail” by Johanssen Koenig

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

“The Ail thought the art of writing was divine, so they made styli idols unique in Bronze Age Mesopotamia.”

“Divine writing? I know some authors who think they’re divine, but damn.”

“It’s not that much of a stretch when you consider the first scribes were usually members of the priesthood anyway. I’m frankly surprised more societies didn’t follow the Ail in worshiping writing itself rather than its base content.”

“Whatever happened to the Ail?”

“Most of the artifacts we have are from sites that were sacked and burned. From that, people gather that they were wiped out by the Akkadians.”

“So much for the pen being mightier than the sword…!”

 

March 31, 2011

From “The Broadcast Signal Disruption of July 27, 2010” by K. D. Gees

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

“Don’t make it out to be more than it is,” Dawson coughed. “People have jammed signals before and they’ll do it again.”

“Maybe in the 30’s, when anybody with a tricked-out radio had a stronger signal,” Knud scoffed. “But since the Korean War ended? A digital, encrypted signal? This is unprecedented, Daw.”

“Unprecedented, huh?” Dawson retaliated. He lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of the old. “The only thing that’s unprecedented is that your man isn’t a flake. Somebody jammed the limey IBA in ’77; said they were an alien with a message of peace but it was really just hippie granola crap about nukes.”

“Maybe so, but-”

“HBO had its signal hijacked in ’86,” Dawson continued, counting the examples off on his fingers. “Somebody kvetching about how $12 a month was too expensive. What are we charging for a premium package nowadays, anyhow?”

“Inflation is-”

“WGN and WTTW were both hijacked on the same day a year later,” Dawson said, delighting in the interruption. “Some schizo, probably. Did a bad impression of Max Headroom and spanked himself on the ass with a flyswatter.”

“Nothing since Reagan then,” Knud countered.

“If anything, it’s easier for them now. Time was you needed a dish and a power source. Now all you need it a computer and the skills to make trouble with it.”

 

March 30, 2011

From “Mikey Delacroix and the Vehicle of Ill Omen” by Michael D. Stringer

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

Mikey had long been accustomed to the old wagon–falling asleep to the gentle humming of its tires as heard from the cabin at speed, listening to the faint pitch changes as the automatic transmission shifted as it carried Mom away to work, the little pieces of meals and toys long past that would sometimes resurface on or under the seats.

But the new car was alien.

It was far too quiet, meaning Mikey was distracted by the beating of his own heart when he tried to nap. It glided unnaturally up and down the driveway without any of the comforting sonic cues that spelled out M-O-M. Its interior was cold, sterile, with a clinical smell and none of the stains with stories attached. Worse, Mom wouldn’t allow any eating or drinking anything but water.

It wasn’t long before Mikey was throwing tantrums and demanding the old wagon back. He fancied he saw it downtown sometimes, moldering in a used car lot or bearing a new family of usurpers.

 

March 29, 2011

From “Word Salad Comes to Deerton” by Patricia Andersen

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: , , |
Leave a Comment 

Heyburne rubbed the bridge of his nose with tobacco-stained fingers. “One of the conductors at the station, Sam Wireve, saw the guy first. Says he ran up in a huff, said something to him, and then ran away.”

“Huh,” Griffith said between po’boy bites. “What’d he say?”

“According to Sam, ‘the ootheca.’ His words, not mine.”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?

“It gets better,” Heyburne continued, fingers still pressing and eyes closed. “Ed Sporgene in the 7/11 says he saw the same thing: old guy, worn-out clothes, ran in and said something to him before making a quick exit.”

“Same thing?”

“Ed claims the guy said ‘he serves newsprint.'”

 

« Previous Page — Next Page »