So...here are story excerpts. Guess who wrote them.
All will be revealed ...soon.
1.
Niven suggests that fog, or thin drizzle, obscures the barrier between alternative universes separated in one dimension from the one in which we grew up. Should this be so, Seattle wavers between probabilities, fog, drizzle and the occasional drenchpour shifting it all over the local multiverse - which might explain why Micro$oft bug fixes frequently appear to be for applications that have never been written, for computers never built. It's amazing enough that Boeing succeeds in persuading aircraft to leave the runway - I suppose
2.
I sat watching the sunshine playing off the dirty windows of the bus as we wound our way downtown. They called this the Rainy City, but it was summer, and hadn't rained in weeks. Nice thing about Seattle though; you can take a bus in cosplay and no one notices.
The convention hall was just a head so I reached up with my robotic arm and pulled the cord. I always love that happy "ding" sound. When the bus stopped about 10 other people got off with me. Apparently I wasn't the only one to take the bus to Steamcon, just the only one who cosplyed up first.
As I stooped to get my tickets out of my pack, the airport shuttle dropped off a load of pirates up from Portland's Pirate Festival.
Nice.
3.
Sid (well, would you use your widely publicised full name after the collapse of your schemes, with numerous representatives of both ends of the political spectrum wanting to torture you to death, or worse?) sneered.
“That’s not a doughnut. Doughnuts are soft, like skin to bite, with just a powdering of sugar, not garish as your facepaint and varnished or covered in hundreds and thousands. And they should contain jam that oozes out like blood when you bite into it, or a tongue hole like a broad…”
“Kids adore bright colours,” replied his confederate, “and the cops in this neck of the woods are, if anything, more infantile than the kids. This is not the community where they go checking the quality of the tap water every day, after all.”
When you’ve been associated with a band who has taken over the government by force, with barely a whisper of due process, and been forced out, where do you hide out afterwards? Especially if you had been a very visible member of the ruling committee and have appeared on TV many times?
4.
We're setting the amusement park up on yet another village green, wiring the caravans into yet another municipal fuse box - we've got a fifty kilowatt generator on one of the trailers, but it's not worth running it up if the local electricity board will set up a meter - unpacking and unfolding the Bumper Cars, the Big Dipper, Roundabouts, Magic Carpet, stalls of oversugared unhealthy titbits, doughnuts, circus rock and souvenirs… the guys setting up the Big Top - well, the large medium-sized top, actually - are always the same, generations of the same family, but I'm not all that good with heights anyway, while I've no problem with darkness, and the Voyage of Horror needs regular greasing and checking every time it is set up. It's supposed to rattle and shake, but not roll, and the sections of rail that sink to trigger the appearance of dismembered bodies or blinding flashes, and the synthetic screams that are supposed to blend with the real ones, must rise again after the carriage is past, or the jolt in hitting it could derail a carful of paying customers (all right, generally only two at a time, but the local safety officials tend away from any sense of humour).
5.
The sky here is different here, a vast slab of mortician's concrete allowing not a slit of blue in. I had imagined that the six week purgatory I had been forced to endure, cramped and sweltering in the belly of the wooden beast with the huge smoking lungs with just the arhythmic chop and slap of cold salty water for company, would be rewarded with a glimpse of daylight, but no.
The vessel that has brought me hence from the place of my cultivation has stopped now. Hooks and chains and ropes have hauled me above deck and brought me out into what cannot be called sunlight, for its illuminative qualities are too bleak, too despairing.
So I am not yet upon land again.
6.
Ellen never quite got used to the way the Cetians looked, no matter how often she saw them.
In a small meeting room on the third floor of a modest office building, a pulsating blue sphere protected its inhabitant from Earth's poisonous and hellishly cold atmosphere. Within it writhed a blurred tangle of gray and yellow tubules. This was her employer. She called the alien Thizpok, after the hissing and clicking sounds that emerged from multiple orifices.
"What is my next assignment?"
The sphere translated her words into noises Thizpok could understand. It was one of many technological wonders Earth was eager to acquire.
"It will be slightly different. We are turning our attention to economics." The synthetic voice was carefully neutral, a soft and sexless purr designed to calm xenophobic anxieties.
The Cetians thought big. They engaged thousands of human agents. Neutralizing political and religious conflicts was a vast project, but beings who traveled between the stars understood large problems.
7.I was as grim looking as the winged gargoyles that decorated the outside fifth floor of this crumbling 153 year old, Chicago opera house, known as the Genesse Theater. I paid the cab driver, grabbed my suitcase of essentials, then limped to the front door. My wolf's head cane relieved the pain in my leg (an injury I received back in the 1980's, from serving in the Kuwait war). When I reached the front double doors, they opened, Patrick McGoohan greeted me. "At last, the writer, has arrived. Please come in, Mr. Foxworth."
"Thank you Patrick."
"I normally don't let anyone come here. But, the fact that you are a well known author of paranormal mysteries, along with a generous cash offer, helped convince me, to allow you access to my gothic paradise."
"It's a beautiful opera house. Perfect for me to write my new book. Lot's of classic atmosphere."
"Yes. I have your room ready."
"Great. After I settle in, I'd like wander around this old theater."
8.
There was once a cell phone named Frederick (he called himself that because it sounded important) and his friend was a charger named Lou (who actually was important, though he didn't know how much). They hung around together often because Frederick needed Lou. However, Frederick had a more interesting life, because he got out more often; he got to see the world and he had lots of apps that kept him busy, which subsequently drained his power quickly. Lou's life was boring. He just sat around in the same spot all day waiting for Frederick to come around whenever he needed to be recharged.
Of course, Lou did feel important, since he kept Frederick going. Frederick wouldn't have been able to keep going without him. That made him feel good and helped make his boring life seem worthwhile.
9.
High wailing death metal blasted out, strained guitars overlaying their own distorted rhythms. Tim raised the volume still louder as he nonchalantly yawed the freighter to align with the assembly station and held position fifty metres from it.
He flipped his cargo manifest to the station hub and the wait began, some trips it seemed to take hours for the hub to decide the relevant port to dock at.
Idly he brought his board up and scanned through his messages, spam, spam, sp-wait! Someone had posted a new high score in Metworld©, easily surpassing his own long time high score.
“We'll see about that” he crooned. “As soon as I'm back in Earth orbit you are so dusted my friend, no way can some noob piss on the Champ”.
He finally received a signal with docking instructions and hastened to steer to the unloading dock. “Say big feller, who's this new high scorer on Metworld©, any gab?”
“Er, sorry, don't follow it” came over the signal beam after a long pause.
“Right, gotcha” said Tim in some puzzlement. Rare indeed was anyone out here who either didn't play or follow the massive online game, the gambling was phenomenal and some very large stakes were placed on trivial details.
10.
“Who’s is it, Mister Henry?”
“Unknown, sir,” the Science Officer replied. “Our scanners are still reading nothing, and she comports to no known standards or ship designs.”
“We’re this close, and you still can’t get a reading from scanners?”
“Aye, Captain. No! Wait…” The Commander studied the screens in front of him a full minute before he continued. “There is an anomaly surrounding the ship, sir.”
“Shielding? A Force Field?”
“The anomaly is almost 5 kilometers off the ship, sir.”
“And there is no distortion?” the Captain asked. “Do you think someone has a new shield technology?”
“If this is one, sir, then it would have to be a very big leap in technology. Not only is there absolutely no distortion, the distance is approximately twenty times the maximum Shield range we have.”
The Captain nodded. “Ensign Perry? Hold our position. I don’t want to get any closer until we know more about this.”
“Aye, sir,” the Helmsman responded.
11.
Vitaly managed to escape everybody and climb up to the top of the Great Pyramid without any problem. Coming back down was a completely different thing; he knew the police was waiting for him, there was no escaping them on the way down.
The sun was setting and he was enjoying the view of Cairo – only a few people have ever seen it from this vantage point.
***
He was recording a video with his phone when everything started shaking. He threw himself down along the edge, watching the people on the ground running away from the pyramid in all directions. Then, he felt he was going up, and up and up and the few people far below in the distance that he could still see looked like little ants. After a couple of minutes the shaking stopped and he stood up. When he gathered the courage to look below, he saw a metallic construction that had risen from the ground and was at least twice as high as the pyramid itself.
He was afraid, but he knew staying up there didn’t make any sense now, so he started coming down slowly. When he reached the base of the pyramid, there was a three-meter jump to the metallic pyramid below, which meant there was no going back up once he comes down. He came down on his hands and knees, went hanging off the edge and then carefully released and landed on his feet.
***
12.
‘Were you involved in an accident at work that wasn’t your fault?’
‘f*ck off,’ Jerry said, closing and flipping the remote onto the table. It hit a small cairn of unopened letters—
Oh, we’re calling them ‘letters’ now, are we?
— and bills, plus the unsigned tenancy agreement from his landlord, unsigned because of the three pens lying on the table; none worked.
The stack collapsed sending the paperwork sliding onto the floor:
Seven days to contact us…
Liable for all costs…
Possible custodial sentence of up to…
All from Earth, except this last:
The Long Haul.
He picked it up and snorted. He’d opened this mailshot crap even though he hated the show, never watched it. The satsuma face of host Charlie Dox blistered into his mind’s eye, all flashlight teeth, and wobbling jowls.
13.
Another new spirit drifts in, and I catch my breath — well, if I had any breath to catch, I would, anyway. Is it him?
Time means very little to us on this train, but I’ve been riding it for eighteen months, fifteen days and some-odd hours, and I’ve caught glimpses of him fluttering in and out twelve times now. He never stays, and that’s not a bad thing, here.
I stay, but that’s because I have a mission. And because I’m dead.
The spirit solidifies a bit, and it is him. Lucky thirteen? Or unlucky. I don’t know yet. I get up from my seat and join him in his, and wait.
Around us, spirits come and go, solid, not-solid, dead and not-dead, raucous and morose. It’s never boring here, that’s a given. Dead ones, like me, decide to stay for various reasons, while the not-dead only visit in their sleep. But the thing that binds them to us, makes them drift into our ever-moving train, is the same: a death wish.
That’s why I’m here. My partner, Phillip, suffered from depression even before I was killed in the car accident; when I found myself on the train, I knew he would come through sooner or later. So I stayed.
He begins to stir, and I take his hand. He feels as solid as ever, and a wave of emotion takes me to my knees. I look up into his face as he peers at me in confusion.
All will be revealed ...soon.
1.
Niven suggests that fog, or thin drizzle, obscures the barrier between alternative universes separated in one dimension from the one in which we grew up. Should this be so, Seattle wavers between probabilities, fog, drizzle and the occasional drenchpour shifting it all over the local multiverse - which might explain why Micro$oft bug fixes frequently appear to be for applications that have never been written, for computers never built. It's amazing enough that Boeing succeeds in persuading aircraft to leave the runway - I suppose
2.
I sat watching the sunshine playing off the dirty windows of the bus as we wound our way downtown. They called this the Rainy City, but it was summer, and hadn't rained in weeks. Nice thing about Seattle though; you can take a bus in cosplay and no one notices.
The convention hall was just a head so I reached up with my robotic arm and pulled the cord. I always love that happy "ding" sound. When the bus stopped about 10 other people got off with me. Apparently I wasn't the only one to take the bus to Steamcon, just the only one who cosplyed up first.
As I stooped to get my tickets out of my pack, the airport shuttle dropped off a load of pirates up from Portland's Pirate Festival.
Nice.
3.
Sid (well, would you use your widely publicised full name after the collapse of your schemes, with numerous representatives of both ends of the political spectrum wanting to torture you to death, or worse?) sneered.
“That’s not a doughnut. Doughnuts are soft, like skin to bite, with just a powdering of sugar, not garish as your facepaint and varnished or covered in hundreds and thousands. And they should contain jam that oozes out like blood when you bite into it, or a tongue hole like a broad…”
“Kids adore bright colours,” replied his confederate, “and the cops in this neck of the woods are, if anything, more infantile than the kids. This is not the community where they go checking the quality of the tap water every day, after all.”
When you’ve been associated with a band who has taken over the government by force, with barely a whisper of due process, and been forced out, where do you hide out afterwards? Especially if you had been a very visible member of the ruling committee and have appeared on TV many times?
4.
We're setting the amusement park up on yet another village green, wiring the caravans into yet another municipal fuse box - we've got a fifty kilowatt generator on one of the trailers, but it's not worth running it up if the local electricity board will set up a meter - unpacking and unfolding the Bumper Cars, the Big Dipper, Roundabouts, Magic Carpet, stalls of oversugared unhealthy titbits, doughnuts, circus rock and souvenirs… the guys setting up the Big Top - well, the large medium-sized top, actually - are always the same, generations of the same family, but I'm not all that good with heights anyway, while I've no problem with darkness, and the Voyage of Horror needs regular greasing and checking every time it is set up. It's supposed to rattle and shake, but not roll, and the sections of rail that sink to trigger the appearance of dismembered bodies or blinding flashes, and the synthetic screams that are supposed to blend with the real ones, must rise again after the carriage is past, or the jolt in hitting it could derail a carful of paying customers (all right, generally only two at a time, but the local safety officials tend away from any sense of humour).
5.
The sky here is different here, a vast slab of mortician's concrete allowing not a slit of blue in. I had imagined that the six week purgatory I had been forced to endure, cramped and sweltering in the belly of the wooden beast with the huge smoking lungs with just the arhythmic chop and slap of cold salty water for company, would be rewarded with a glimpse of daylight, but no.
The vessel that has brought me hence from the place of my cultivation has stopped now. Hooks and chains and ropes have hauled me above deck and brought me out into what cannot be called sunlight, for its illuminative qualities are too bleak, too despairing.
So I am not yet upon land again.
6.
Ellen never quite got used to the way the Cetians looked, no matter how often she saw them.
In a small meeting room on the third floor of a modest office building, a pulsating blue sphere protected its inhabitant from Earth's poisonous and hellishly cold atmosphere. Within it writhed a blurred tangle of gray and yellow tubules. This was her employer. She called the alien Thizpok, after the hissing and clicking sounds that emerged from multiple orifices.
"What is my next assignment?"
The sphere translated her words into noises Thizpok could understand. It was one of many technological wonders Earth was eager to acquire.
"It will be slightly different. We are turning our attention to economics." The synthetic voice was carefully neutral, a soft and sexless purr designed to calm xenophobic anxieties.
The Cetians thought big. They engaged thousands of human agents. Neutralizing political and religious conflicts was a vast project, but beings who traveled between the stars understood large problems.
7.I was as grim looking as the winged gargoyles that decorated the outside fifth floor of this crumbling 153 year old, Chicago opera house, known as the Genesse Theater. I paid the cab driver, grabbed my suitcase of essentials, then limped to the front door. My wolf's head cane relieved the pain in my leg (an injury I received back in the 1980's, from serving in the Kuwait war). When I reached the front double doors, they opened, Patrick McGoohan greeted me. "At last, the writer, has arrived. Please come in, Mr. Foxworth."
"Thank you Patrick."
"I normally don't let anyone come here. But, the fact that you are a well known author of paranormal mysteries, along with a generous cash offer, helped convince me, to allow you access to my gothic paradise."
"It's a beautiful opera house. Perfect for me to write my new book. Lot's of classic atmosphere."
"Yes. I have your room ready."
"Great. After I settle in, I'd like wander around this old theater."
8.
There was once a cell phone named Frederick (he called himself that because it sounded important) and his friend was a charger named Lou (who actually was important, though he didn't know how much). They hung around together often because Frederick needed Lou. However, Frederick had a more interesting life, because he got out more often; he got to see the world and he had lots of apps that kept him busy, which subsequently drained his power quickly. Lou's life was boring. He just sat around in the same spot all day waiting for Frederick to come around whenever he needed to be recharged.
Of course, Lou did feel important, since he kept Frederick going. Frederick wouldn't have been able to keep going without him. That made him feel good and helped make his boring life seem worthwhile.
9.
High wailing death metal blasted out, strained guitars overlaying their own distorted rhythms. Tim raised the volume still louder as he nonchalantly yawed the freighter to align with the assembly station and held position fifty metres from it.
He flipped his cargo manifest to the station hub and the wait began, some trips it seemed to take hours for the hub to decide the relevant port to dock at.
Idly he brought his board up and scanned through his messages, spam, spam, sp-wait! Someone had posted a new high score in Metworld©, easily surpassing his own long time high score.
“We'll see about that” he crooned. “As soon as I'm back in Earth orbit you are so dusted my friend, no way can some noob piss on the Champ”.
He finally received a signal with docking instructions and hastened to steer to the unloading dock. “Say big feller, who's this new high scorer on Metworld©, any gab?”
“Er, sorry, don't follow it” came over the signal beam after a long pause.
“Right, gotcha” said Tim in some puzzlement. Rare indeed was anyone out here who either didn't play or follow the massive online game, the gambling was phenomenal and some very large stakes were placed on trivial details.
10.
“Who’s is it, Mister Henry?”
“Unknown, sir,” the Science Officer replied. “Our scanners are still reading nothing, and she comports to no known standards or ship designs.”
“We’re this close, and you still can’t get a reading from scanners?”
“Aye, Captain. No! Wait…” The Commander studied the screens in front of him a full minute before he continued. “There is an anomaly surrounding the ship, sir.”
“Shielding? A Force Field?”
“The anomaly is almost 5 kilometers off the ship, sir.”
“And there is no distortion?” the Captain asked. “Do you think someone has a new shield technology?”
“If this is one, sir, then it would have to be a very big leap in technology. Not only is there absolutely no distortion, the distance is approximately twenty times the maximum Shield range we have.”
The Captain nodded. “Ensign Perry? Hold our position. I don’t want to get any closer until we know more about this.”
“Aye, sir,” the Helmsman responded.
11.
Vitaly managed to escape everybody and climb up to the top of the Great Pyramid without any problem. Coming back down was a completely different thing; he knew the police was waiting for him, there was no escaping them on the way down.
The sun was setting and he was enjoying the view of Cairo – only a few people have ever seen it from this vantage point.
***
He was recording a video with his phone when everything started shaking. He threw himself down along the edge, watching the people on the ground running away from the pyramid in all directions. Then, he felt he was going up, and up and up and the few people far below in the distance that he could still see looked like little ants. After a couple of minutes the shaking stopped and he stood up. When he gathered the courage to look below, he saw a metallic construction that had risen from the ground and was at least twice as high as the pyramid itself.
He was afraid, but he knew staying up there didn’t make any sense now, so he started coming down slowly. When he reached the base of the pyramid, there was a three-meter jump to the metallic pyramid below, which meant there was no going back up once he comes down. He came down on his hands and knees, went hanging off the edge and then carefully released and landed on his feet.
***
12.
‘Were you involved in an accident at work that wasn’t your fault?’
‘f*ck off,’ Jerry said, closing and flipping the remote onto the table. It hit a small cairn of unopened letters—
Oh, we’re calling them ‘letters’ now, are we?
— and bills, plus the unsigned tenancy agreement from his landlord, unsigned because of the three pens lying on the table; none worked.
The stack collapsed sending the paperwork sliding onto the floor:
Seven days to contact us…
Liable for all costs…
Possible custodial sentence of up to…
All from Earth, except this last:
The Long Haul.
He picked it up and snorted. He’d opened this mailshot crap even though he hated the show, never watched it. The satsuma face of host Charlie Dox blistered into his mind’s eye, all flashlight teeth, and wobbling jowls.
13.
Another new spirit drifts in, and I catch my breath — well, if I had any breath to catch, I would, anyway. Is it him?
Time means very little to us on this train, but I’ve been riding it for eighteen months, fifteen days and some-odd hours, and I’ve caught glimpses of him fluttering in and out twelve times now. He never stays, and that’s not a bad thing, here.
I stay, but that’s because I have a mission. And because I’m dead.
The spirit solidifies a bit, and it is him. Lucky thirteen? Or unlucky. I don’t know yet. I get up from my seat and join him in his, and wait.
Around us, spirits come and go, solid, not-solid, dead and not-dead, raucous and morose. It’s never boring here, that’s a given. Dead ones, like me, decide to stay for various reasons, while the not-dead only visit in their sleep. But the thing that binds them to us, makes them drift into our ever-moving train, is the same: a death wish.
That’s why I’m here. My partner, Phillip, suffered from depression even before I was killed in the car accident; when I found myself on the train, I knew he would come through sooner or later. So I stayed.
He begins to stir, and I take his hand. He feels as solid as ever, and a wave of emotion takes me to my knees. I look up into his face as he peers at me in confusion.
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