December 4, 2012

From “The 6 Servers of Henry Hall, 8th Floor” by Cameron K. Levi

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“Welcome to the university server room,” said Jim. “Let’s take the grand tour, shall we?”

Unlike most server rooms I’d seen, the Southern Michigan University version offered a panoramic view of campus from its position on the eighth and uppermost floor of Henry Hall. The racks of networked machines were set back from the windows to keep them out of direct sunshine and dark static clings had been placed over each pane to limit what light did seep in.

“Here’s server number one,” Jim said, gesturing at a rack labeled ARAGON. “It was the only university server for years, but eventually the hardware became obsolete and it was retired to doing undemanding backup work.”

A second rack nearby was labeled BOLEYN. “We acquired this server after Aragon puked out on us,” said Jim. “It ran like greased lightning before crashing hard and taking the entire university network with it. Some older people still talk about the Great Outage.” He tapped the server’s frame gently. “We use it for legacy systems and backup now.”

He led me to the third rack, this one with a large SEYMOUR sticker. “We bought this with a special grant from Admin. It was cutting-edge in its day and put the university neck and neck with MSU and UM for the fastest and most modern server architecture in the state.”

“Are we still?”

“No,” Jim laughed. “It crashed harder than its predecessor, though not for as long. We were able to get it back up and running but decided that it was a bad idea to have just the one.”

On the opposite side of the room lay three additional large server racks, opposite the first three. “That one on the end was what we bought after that epiphany,” Jim said, pointing to the server labeled CLEVES. “It’s run like a Swiss watch since the day we got it, even though it cost half of what the last one did.”

The server next to it was dark. “What’s wrong with this one?” I said, pointing at its label, HOWARD.

“We bought that a little while back, but it got infected by a really nasty virus,” Jim said. “It’s offline for maintenance, and we might wind up having to replace it.”

This brought us to the final server, PARR. “We carry most of our traffic on this one these days,” Jim said. “It’s a 60/40 load between this one and CLEVES, with the others as backup or contingency units.”

“Is there a reason you gave them the names they have?” I asked. “It seems a little pat, what with the eighth floor of Henry Hall and all. Are you sure some of those failures weren’t self-fulfilling prophecies?”

Jim laughed. “Superstitious, huh? Don’t worry. There’s a nonzero chance that half the things I just told you are just interesting lies.”

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December 3, 2012

From “The Prosperity Ride” by C. Alton Parker

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This post is part of the December 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “the end of the world”.

“Dr. Dana D. Eggebrecht, wasn’t it?” Ellen Strasser drew out each syllable of the name mockingly. “From the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC?”

“That is correct, Ms. Strasser,” said Eggebrecht. “I’ve come to speak with you personally, to deliver a warning.”

“A warning for me? How quaint.” Strasser sat at her desk and gestured for Eggebrecht to be seated opposite her. “I should warn you though, ‘doctor,’ that Prosperity Falls is well outside any jurisdiction you’d care to name. The town has been on this spot since the 1830s, long before the United States exercised any sort of sovereignty here. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that half a century hasn’t changed that.”

Eggebrecht scowled behind his pince-nez spectacles. “My warning is nothing so prosaic, Ms. Strasser,” he said icily. “As you may or may not know, I have been researching the Ide tribes which live nearby.”

Strasser slowly, deliberately, leaned back in her seat and crossed her immaculate cowboy boots atop the desk. “Those savages have been a thorn in our side since my grandmother’s time,” she said with a yawn. “The Prosperity Rangers are preparing a solution as we speak.”

“That’s precisely what I’ve come to warn you about, Ms. Strasser!” Eggebrecht leaned over the desk, his face red. “You simply must not ride against the Ide at this time!”

Strasser reached into her holster and produced a Colt Lightning. She opened the loading gate and began casually removing empty shells with the ejector. “And, pray tell, who the hell are you to give orders to the deputy chief of the Prosperity Rangers?” she said drily, refusing to meet the Smithsonian man’s gaze.

“Listen to me, Ms. Strasser. I’ve been studying the Ide for years, particularly their mythology. They have a well-developed eschatology, a story of the end times. By coincidence or design, the conditions now are very like those in their myths.”

Her unloading finished, Strasser produced a box of .32 caliber shells from a desk drawer and began delicately dropping them through the revolver’s gate one by one. “You’re right. When we ride against them, the Ide had better believe it’s the end of the world.”

“No!” Eggebrecht stood and pounded his fists on the desk. “You plain fool, you don’t understand! To attack would be to fulfill the myth, to unite the Ide against you. It would bring a full-scale war to the valley, in direct violation of the Prosperity Charter you claim to cherish!”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” Eggebrecht said. “My research confirms this. Right now the Ide are divided about whether this is truly the end time their legends speak of. An attack would drive them all–the High Ide, the Low Ide, even the Ide among the Drifters–to confederacy against you! It would be a sure route to slaughter and utter destruction.”

Ellen Strasser said nothing and continued to slowly load her pistol.

“The legend stresses that all who die in glorious battle during the end times will be borne to the Ide conception of heaven,” said Eggebrecht, “in response to an attack from outsiders. It’s what split the Ide on your forefathers’ arrival, damn it, and your course will surely lead to the total destruction of the valley settlements and my research.”

“Let me get this straight,” Strasser said. “The expedition I am planning will unite the Idea against us and goad them into joining suicidal battle?”

“Yes,” Eggebrecht said, sounding relieved.

“And you’ve told no one else of this?”

“I came to you first.”

“Good.” Strasser snapped the gate shut on her Lightning and fired three rounds into Eggebrecht’s chest, point-blank. Rising, she pulled a derringer out of her boot and pressed it into the scholar’s hand.

“I think a good old-fashioned judgement day is just what the Ide need,” she said softly. “Imagine the look on those fools’ faces when my Rangers save the town and open up the Ide lands to settlement in one fell swoop.”

Read Dr. Eggebrecht’s full report here.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
dolores haze
randi.lee
writingismypassion
bmadsen
Ralph Pines
SRHowen
AllieKat
MsLaylaCakes
katci13
meowzbark
Angyl78
Aheïla
pyrosama
Aranenvo
CJMichaels
SuzanneSeese
BBBurke

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December 2, 2012

From “Chinglish Editing Services LLC” by Thomas Manali Sözler

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The hopper disgorged another ream of paper onto Sandra’s desk. “Paper” was perhaps a misnomer–it was really more of a polymer stack that communicated with her desktop–but that’s what it felt like, what it was designed to feel like, and that’s what she called it. Readers had the option of using polypaper or their desktops and almost all of them chose the polypaper, as editing was so much easier stylus in hand.

She picked up the new contestant and leafed through it. Generated by Lucky 777 Jade Emperor Press Algorithms in Guangzhou, the book told the story of a lonely and sexually repressed middle school teacher who was seduced by a handsome Manananggalan (a Malaysian vampire-sorcerer that manifested as a disembodied floating head when it fed). The overall concept was sound enough to sell; Sandra delicately made a few changes right off the bat, though.

The heroine’s name, Arisser, was clearly the product of a bad algorithm; it was changed to Alyssa. The story, ostensibly set in North America, opened with a description of Paris; a few tweaks here and there changed it to Quebec. All instances of the word “toilet” had been replaced by “teliot,” probably another consequence of a wonky text generation algorithm. Similarly, “restroom” had received the all-too-literal translation “urine district” from Lucky 777’s novel generation software. Sandra chuckled softly at that one and wrote it down to share with the other readers at lunchtime.

That done, she scanned the novel for the usual suspects, errors common to all novels generated using cheap and market-leading but imprecise Chinese algorithms (many programmed by wage slaves with virtually no English aside from machine translation and phrasebooks). A find-all to replace “water buffalo” with “horse,” for example (who wanted to read that Allison and her Manananggalan lover “worked like water buffaloes?”). There was still plenty of work to be done by going painstakingly through the thing, adding “the” and correcting word-order problems and egregious misspellings and mistranslations, but it was a good start.

It sometimes wore on Sandra a little bit that she, along with everyone else employed by Writers’ Creative Services, was only employed to proofread and copy-edit, not to write. But Hollister upstairs, and the market forces he personified, had spoken: it was cheaper to have writing generators in China automatically generate books and have native English speakers clean them up. After all, if you fed enough market data, psychological studies, and multi-platinum texts into a computer, it would cough up bestselling drek at least as well as any human.

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December 1, 2012

From “Pursuit by the Numbers” by Eric Cummings Jr.

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For the NaNo Excerpt Blog Chain.

“There’s our LK.” I almost jumped when the whispered words came over my shoulder. It took a moment for me to realize that they came from the small two-person table behind my computer, in the general seating area of Inky’s, where someone had come in and unobtrusively sat down. It was a guy’s voice, explaining why I hadn’t noticed—if it had been a girl I’d have been fretting about that to an empty chair in Natalie’s apartment instead.

“One of Jim’s friends?” I said as quietly and nonchalantly as I could.

“Yeah. Friend of Max’s too, and a lot of other people at the meeting the other night,” the guy said. “Name’s Oren.”

That at least was an unusual enough name that I stood a decent chance of remembering it. “So is that really pretty girl with the blond dreadlocks the LK we’re waiting for?” I whispered, still making a show of using my computer. It was about all the dime-store espionage I could do in a well-lit room.

“Yeah, I think there’s a pretty good chance of that,” said Oren. “Lily Kaiserin, the treasurer and secretary for the Southern Michigan branch of Students for a Sustainable Earth.”

That was right; I’d seen Strasser talking to her at the student organization bazaar in the union; Jim had called her—what was it?—”the world’s most attractive crazy hippie.”

“I guess that sort of fits the profile inasmuch as you’d expect someone from the Nothing to be a little left of center,” I said in a low voice. “But what could Students for a Sustainable Earth possibly have that the Nothing would want?”

“That’s what all of us are going to find out,” said Oren.

“All of us?”

“There’s three of us here not including you,” Oren said. “Jim and Max had us come in at irregular times over the last two hours. At my signal—closing my laptop—we move.”

Not quite Mata Hari, but cloak and dagger enough to impress me. “What’s she doing now?” I said, at a disadvantage as I could only see what was going on in the greater Inky’s with my peripheral vision.

“Standing by the door with a cup of Inky’s vegan fair-trade coffee in the biodegradable cup that costs a dollar extra and looking out the window,” Oren said. “I bet—yes, I think that’s Strasser coming by now.”

I reached into my coat pocket and produced the RFID scanner that Jim had given me. Contrary to his instructions, I had not only not given it back but also spilled spaghetti sauce on it a few dinners ago. Strasser couldn’t have been wearing the same coat, could he? Even so, surely in the process of futzing with it or washing it he must have found the RFID sticker I slipped under his collar.

The scanner lit up with a blip approximately 20 feet behind me; apparently not.

“I can track Strasser with this,” I said, holding out the scanner. “No need to follow him line-of-sight,” I added, borrowing a term from one of the tactical RPGs in my Playstation stack at home.

“Hm,” said Oren. “We’ll split the difference, I think. Me and the others can follow Kaiserin and Strasser visually, and you can use the scanner.” He stood up and stretched. “My cell number is written on the underside of the napkin on my table,” he said. “Text me if you lose them, or if you make it to wherever they’re going and we’re not there.”

Not exactly what I had in mind when I’d complained to Jim that it was too hard to get peoples’ numbers.

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November 30, 2012

From “A Muse’s Unvarnished Perspective” by Altos Wexan

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“Another year, another novel that hasn’t quite been finished but has the requisite number of words.” My muse, a blatant appropriation of Stephen King’s concept thereof as expressed in On Writing, cracks open the fridge and retrieves a cold beer. I keep it on hand for guests, being a de facto teetotaler myself; I don’t know where he got the Cuban cigar that billows smoke all over my single-room downstairs.

Since my muse is an insubstantial personification of my creative drive, albeit one ever so slightly ripped off from a more successful author, I don’t suppose it really matters.

“It’s not just the number of words,” I say. “I’ve takes one of the stories I wanted to tell and given it a good start. It barely existed before and now it’s 300k on my hard drive.”

“300 unfinished k, you mean.” My muse emerges from the fridge with beer and leftover barbecue chicken strips. “Don’t you think it’s about time you finished the others?”

“What others?” I bristle. “There’s only the project at hand, nothing else.”

I mean it as a metaphor, but it’s taken literally. “The story about those kids finding alternate dimensions with giant landsquid for one,” my muse says. “Don’t forget the unfinished noir detective novel about a librarian, and the comic wish-fulfillment tale of the assassin and the accountant.”

“I’ll get to them in time,” I say, a little defensive. “It doesn’t matter if they’re finished. What matters is that I wrote something that didn’t exist before. It’s good even if it’s a little rough.”

The muse sits down heavily on my couch and fires up the Xbox. “What about the one from 2008, where you tried to stretch that 500-word short story into a tale ten times its length, and wound up so desperate for wordcount that you undid all your contractions a half-hour before midnight on the last day?”

“Don’t bring that one up,” I snap. “It was an election year and I had a new job. Too many distractions!”

“Whoa there, killer,” my muse says without looking up from the first-person shooter he’s working away at. “Did I touch a nerve? Don’t forget that it was a failure for me too. Or do you think part of a novel each year and a blog post a day is nothing for me?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s a stressful time even without the novel.”

“But you’re glad you did it again this year?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then,” my muse says, wreathed in smoke and barbecue beer fumes. “That’s all that matters.”

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November 29, 2012

From “The Household Golems” by Micaela K. Rachele

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“Well–and I’m surprised you don’t know this–using an item by necessity imbues it with some of your life force,” the tiny golem said, its “eyebrows” made from housekeys around threaded screw “eyes” waggling. “Everyday things tend to absorb more life force, and when the humans leave…well, that life force has to go somewhere.”

“That’s…weird.” Melody said, scrunching her nose.

“Oh, and I suppose being made of meat imbued with a divine spark by the All-Creator is ‘normal’ then?” The golen huffed, jabbing its fork-fingers at Melody accusingly. “I suppose you’d rather that life force went into a poltergeist, then, or a barghest? Yes, that’d be a loverly fate for grandpa’s old house, wouldn’t it?”

“Calm down, calm down,” Melody said, afraid that someone might–impossibly–stumble upon her arguing with animate metal pieces living in a teapot.

“Calm down, she says, after impugning my very origins and nature! Your family’s fallen a very long way since you’re grandfather’s time.”

“Wait,” Melody said. “You knew my grandfather?”

“It’s mostly his life force that gave me animate life,” the golem said. “Oh, so you’re interested now that I can give you something, is that it? Well, missy, I bid you good day.”

The metal face–tea filter, keys, screws, and all–disappeared back into its teapot with a clank.

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November 28, 2012

From “The Other Side” by Becket T. Hallworth Jr.

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I took my proposal to the Department of Infernal Affairs. Never heard of it? There’s always one nearby if you know where to look. Someone’s got to coordinate for the Other Side, after all, and what could be more hellish than bureaucracy for which the normal human meanings of time and space don’t apply?

That day, I had a modest proposal all typed up with the proper forms filled out in quadruplicate and properly stamped and sealed with blood. I was ready to pledge my soul to the Other Side in exchange for something in the here and now, like many people (more than you’d think) have done in the past. I was ushered in to see the local Department Manager after a wait of only 97 hours; that they sped things along, I thought, was indicative of how important the issue was.

Unlike most of the workers for the Other Side, the department manager wasn’t a human sympathizer or required to wear a disguising glamour. He was all raw and evil, leaking noxious fumes and fluids. The only concession for my sake was a business suit, which must have been made out of teflon to withstand all that Other Side hellish ichor.

“It’s a nice proposal,” he said in a voice that sounded like two concrete blocks being ground together. “But I’m going to have to turn you down. We don’t want your soul, not for this or any other bargain.”

“What?” I said. “Why not?”

“I’m going to be honest with you,” the Department Manager said, tenting the clawed pseudopods that served him for quasi-arms. “Fulfilling wishes, making changes to the physical world from the spiritual? It has costs. Effort, time, and soul energy. In the old days, when souls were pennies a gallon, it was no problem. But things have changed, and the arithmetic isn’t always as good.”

“But it’s a small request,” I said. “Hardly anything needs to be changed, and you get my soul forever!”

“That’s the other thing,” said the Department Manager in his ruinous voice. “We on the Other Side have quite the actuarial staff, and we’ve done a few calculations. Turns out that the kind of person who’d sell their soul, or even consider it, is usually a right bastard in their own way. 90% of them, they’re ours anyway in the fullness of time; we get the whole soul without having to expend any effort at all.”

“So what are you telling me?”

“No more soul deals anywhere, ever. Only exceptions are for mass cults, business leaders, and politicians. That one comes from the Big Guy himself, incidentally, so don’t try going over my amorphous eyestalk to the District Manager either.”

“Then why see me at all? Why make me wait just to shoot me down? why have the forms in the first place? I wasted almost a year of my life getting this ready, all for nothing!”

The Department Manager grinned with all six of his tooth-ringed mouth-suckers. “We’re still the Other Side, kid. It’s what we do.”

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November 27, 2012

From “Operation Broomstick” by Campbell B. Dean

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The project leads asked for volunteers, and every single scientist, engineer, and assistant associated with the project responded. The lead, with a certain amount of dark yet geeky gallows humor, called the maneuver “Operation Broomstick.”

Each volunteer was dressed in similar conservative clothes and given a briefcase with papers and a laptop. All text was encoded; the true piece of information in either one stack of papers or on one laptop (not even the volunteers knew for sure) and the rest meaningless lorem ipsum gibberish. The only means of communication was an encoded signal, routed through military-grade encryption, that could be sent from any computer terminal.

All it communicated was that the volunteer in question was still active and had not been captured.

On the appointed day, the volunteers began slipping away from the Institute one or two at a time. All they knew was that a friendly contact had been ordered to seek them out, and that they were to lay low and avoid contact with anyone, from the other side or not. Moments after the last volunteer slipped away, Dr. Vollmer–the project lead–locked himself in his office and overdosed on the sleeping pills that had been issued to everyone.

Things couldn’t have gone well. Every time Hays sent his signal, he could see that more and more of the 108 volunteers had not reported in. By the time he arrived at the run-down Canadian border crossing in The Angle, he was the only one left. He was a wreck, mentally and physically.

And the worst part? He had no idea if the briefcase he carried had the fruits of the time travel research or simply meaningless gibberish for which he was to give his life.

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November 26, 2012

From “A Pro-Pirate Counterpoint” by William “Black Bill” Cubbins IV

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This rebuttal to a rebuttal was received yesterday from prior editorial contributor Black Bill Cubbins, whose prior article elicited a lively discussion and a contentious response from ninja activist Felisa Lloyd Matsumura-Tamaribuchi. In the interest of covering both sides of the contentious pirate-ninja conflict with armed neutrality, we present his statement here.

-The Editors

I was disappointed but not surprised to learn that my plea for tolerance of pirates and pirate culture was viciously appropriated as an opportunity for the pro-ninja lobby to make its vile and disenfranchising views known. I am used to the pro-ninja bias in the media and the constant agitation of ninja-affiliated terrorists and lackeys using whatever excuse they can to forward their anti-pirate agenda, after all. My essay on the disgusting and disenfranchising use of my people as Halloween costumes became just another excuse for an anti-pirate diatribe by ninjas for whom civilized discourse instead of violence is as foreign as giving open battle.

If I mentioned ninjas as a costume possibility, it was only because they do not constitute a nation unto themselves like pirates. That label has been forced on discourse by the pro-ninja movement despite the fact that ninjas have never been anything but a small subset of larger peoples. If you had asked the ninjas living on Plunder Harbor, Jolly Roger Cove, or Dead Man’s Cay (the Takeshima, Okinotori, and Senkaku islands, to use the invented ninja terms) what they were before the war they would have said anything but ninja. That would have been the same as giving “construction worker” as your nationality today.

Therefore it’s impossible for my remarks to have been racist, as the loosely ninja-affiliated Ms. Matsumura-Tamaribuchi claimed, because ninjas (unlike pirates) are not a race but merely a mongrel people who made their living by assassination and sneaking and just happened to live on the islands in question when pirate resettlement began. Each island was historically dominated by pirates until their expulsion by the shogunate a thousand years ago, after all.

But pro-ninja activists like Matsumura-Tamaribuchi and her friends in the pro-ninja mass media refuse to engage in civil discourse with pirates, despite the pirate nation’s status as a representative democracy (unlike the feudal and dictatorial ninja government, dominated by terrorists). To them, violence and name-calling are the only forms of communication. Perhaps I shouldn’t encourage children to dress up as ninjas for Halloween, but then again perhaps Ms. Matsumura-Tamaribuchi shouldn’t bear the cross of an apologist and project moral equivalency on the peaceful pirate people and the inherently unreasonable and violent ninjas.

Like many, I look forward to the day when pirates and ninjas can live in peace. But that day will never come if racist anti-pirate demagogues like Matsumura-Tamaribuchi and her cohort of terrorists hell-bent on disenfranchisement have their way.

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November 25, 2012

From “Ms. Curry Takes the Gunshy Test” by Lulu M. Michaels-Davies

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“The thing is, we get a lot of wannabes in this business,” said Mr. Klint

“Posers,” added Mr. Wyd.

“Impostors.”

“Frauds.”

“Charlatans. So we have a little test we like to run applicant through.” Mr. Klint gestured toward the range. “A quick shooting demonstration.”

Curry felt hot panic sweat begin to prickle along her neck. “I beg your pardon?”

“A true mercenary knows how to handle a weapon properly, able to hit a target and reload without incident,” said Mr. Wyd. “So we have a selection of weapons for you to shoot while we look on.”

“Nothing to it,” added Mr. Klint. “Except when something goes wrong, of course. Remember when that poor fool picked up the left-handed Steyr AUG and was burned by hot ejecting brass across his face?”

“Or the Dirty Harry who tried firing a .44 Dan Wesson with one hand and wound up with the hammer spur buried in the web of his hand?” said Mr. Wyd.

“Or the so-called ‘sniper’ who got a half-moon cut from the scope of his own rifle being driven into his face?”

“Or the fool who hit the slide release when he meant for the mag release?”

“What happens when there’s an…error…like that?” Curry asked, trying her best to keep up her facade and not show an ounce of panic.

“Well, most of the time we’ll simply have to kill them on the spot,” said Mr. Wyd. “Knowing what they do about our operation…it wouldn’t be prudent to do otherwise. Not always, though.”

Mr. Klint hit a switch on the range, raising the bulletproof shutters to reveal a man in fatigues handing by meathooks and groaning softly. “Sometimes we can still find a good use for them. Don’t worry; we’re not heartless. His next of kin will get his full fee.”

 

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