The dapper man picked up a penny. Having stopped, he was hit by an unsuspecting driver who failed to see him get skewered by the starting handle from the high cab of the grocer's van. At first I smiled for having placed the coin, specially bought at auction 68 years from now. And then… absolutely nothing happened.
When SciFi authors tell you of the Grandfather Paradox, don't believe a bloody word. I'd spent a fortune, and most of my adult life pushing the boundaries of Quantum Symmetry, SuperStrings and a host of other areas of Science and Technology. All for...
"Someone left the goddammed gate open again, and the dog took off," my father yelled from the backyard.
Me and Bill were in the back shed smoking a crooked hash joint. When he started yelling, Bill panicked and dropped it, and then crushed it under his foot. But he didn't realize he wasn't wearing any shoes. He screamed as the cherry burnt into his sole.
I swallowed hard and waited for the inevitable.
Four deep breaths later, the door swung open on rusty hinges and my dad stood there, Taking up the whole of the doorway, blocking out the sun....
“They’ve been sat still for 38 minutes. It’s clear they’ve just dug in to defend their flag. I say…”
“You say…” 117 interrupted his Squad Leader, who couldn’t have looked more pissed.
“John, enough of your shit!” He slid a finger across his throat in what he knew would be a futile gesture. “We’ve got the same tacticals as Red Team. We have the same number of cadets. They're boxed in. I say…”
117 coughed. “You say… er… Sir.” I think he genuinely tried not to sound insubordinate. He failed.
“All right, soon to be ‘ex’ cadet. Out with it.”...
There was blood on my pillow.
My nose was dry. I hadn't bit my cheek. I hadn't somehow lost a tooth. A quick examination of my skull told me that it remained intact.
Oh, duh, I have DNA-Vision. I forget sometimes.
I scanned the blood on my pillow. It wasn't mine.
So where had it come from?
"Ah ha! It was me!" yelled someone from the foot of my bed.
It was my arch-nemesis, The Hemophiliac. Of course!
"What have you done?!" I roared.
"I snuck into your bedroom last night and bled on your pillow! But don't worry; I...
The world was so close to perfect, he hated having to point out the flaws to the designer. It was his least favorite part of the job; they always took it personally. Months to design each reality, thousands of hours of effort by the design teams, but it always came down to the lead designer to take responsibility for the deliverable.
Clients were, of course, unreasonable in their expectations of what kind of world they would live out the rest of their lives. They were clients, after all. The health and happiness of a hundred thousand subsequent generations would depend...
I used to follow my grandfather up the field, gathering potatoes. He would pull them up and leave them like gold nuggets, glowing on the topsoil. I came behind with a trug that was big enough for my baby brother to sleep in. I struggled when the trug was nearly full, and I'd have to set it down every few yards and watch my grandfather as he worked mechanically ahead of me.
I daydreamed that, one day, there would be a real gold nugget lying on the row. I would take iot to the bank and a big man with...
2070.
Dadi saes the Fires arnt the saem az wen HE wus a boy, wen the Nasties furst desided that storis cud be bad fur us. It wus bak then wen they also saed jewels wer bad. I can't se wy tho, az ther all shiny and glittry, but Dadi saes the jewels wer to blam for al the money bein taken from the pore and stuf. Maybe its becos jewels ar wurth so much.
Aniwai, this buk burning isnt az big as wen Dadi was iung, befor he gru up and becam a Nasty himself. Now Dadi finds buks...
His apology was not the thing she'd expected when she checked her phone in the morning. With one eye she stared at the screen and then rolled to her belly and pulled the phone to the tip of her nose as she tried to focus.
"I shouldn't have done any of that, I can't stop thinking about it."
She patted her hands over the bedcovers, fumbling through folds until she found her glasses and pressed them to her face.
"I can't stop thinking about it either," she replied, "But I liked it. It was exactly what I wanted."
His reply...
He had climbed the steep Acropolis, seeking Athena Parthenos (the virgin), every time work or pleasure or strange fates called him to Athens. Yet today he paused by the Temple of Dionysis, only about a third of the way up the olive treed slope. One of the several custodians, some in plastic and metal cells, others, like this young lady beneath whatever shade the Gods (and strategic umbrellas) could provide. Something about her effortless attention, seeing all who paused or passed, while seemingly merged into a thick hard back, caught his attention.
She sat, regally, letting the Sun and people...
The disco ball was turning. The lights were spinning, flashing, pulsing. The speakers were pumping noise into the atmosphere, waves of vibration that shook the air, slammed into the walls, broke back in upon each other, collided and crashed.
Outside in the street, I stood and gazed at the stars, what few of them I could see through the neon glare, the fluorescent pollution.
On one of those faint white specks in the inky, bleary sky, I was sure, another mind gazed back at me, and wondered, "Do they have problems like mine?"
What were their struggles? What did they...