A story by Kevan Davis
Vaughn’s television rescans the dark room, and notes a sale for the whiskey it was running on heavy placement last week. It scans each discarded sleeping pill bottle, inserting a rival brand into the current programme’s scenery. A computer-generated junior detective, calculated to remind Vaughn of himself, breaks from the script to press out two capsules. Behind, the bedroom window shows a pasted-in backdrop of the city where Vaughn spent what his social network history suggests were his happiest two holidays, and the lead CGI actress, a pretty amalgam of his last two ex-girlfriends, laughs at his joke.
A story by John Aegard
The last remaining video feed, from Geneva, had dissolved into static several hours before.
Doctor Kelley clicked the screen off. Biting her lip, she carefully inserted her launch key into the console and twisted it counterclockwise, per the posted instructions.
The ascending missile rumbled the bunker faintly. Minutes later, it exploded high in the stratosphere. The hook-fanged Predator mutant tribes far below were none the wiser to its contrail of hardened seed, to the lurching, three-legged doom it had sown.
“Godspeed, Triffidus lux,” the botanist murmured. In just three months, the first sprouts’ laser emitters would begin to glow.
A story by Andy Holloway
When Audrey is 34, she invents practical human time travel. Every week of her life up to that point, time travellers show up — some trying to kill her, some to save her, some just to be skeevy — so Audrey has to amass tools to defend herself. She learns Judo, disguise, and a bunch of temporal physics. Some of the travellers help her with theory, but others dick her around; eventually, though, she’s best in the field, and then, well, I’ve already told you.
It dies down, but not completely. Mario keeps trying but never once gets her into bed.
A story by Stephanie Lifeline Adams
delilah doesn’t run with her scissors, she does sprint relays with them.
(& not for charity, either.)
the townspeople met the opening of her “literal pedestrian hair salon†with skepticism,
but the thing about delilah is that she has this habit of judging her juries,
& thus generally remains indifferent to their conclaves & requisite rulings.
Hair On the Run does pretty well for itself these days, anyhow –
proprietor & clientele possessing equal levels of insanity,
the cyclical step-snip-step-snip beat of business marking the number of scalps collected.
pounding pavement & shaving lions, delilah delays.
you’ll never meet a more impossible girl…
David Clark cannot be stopped
Setting: The Stage is blank.
At Rise: The Stage remains blank. Open. Taunting. It watches you watch it and knows you are waiting. It does not relent. You fidget, but the stage does not care. You look behind you, but the stage does not break its stare. The lights do not shift. The music does not start. The actors do not emerge. There is only the stage. And you. There is nothing left to do, so you stare back. This continues, until the nothing has become something. A desire? Perhaps a taco? Or maybe a dialogue.
Now the play can begin.
A story by Charlotte Despard
Faraday can’t find the timedoor again, and nobody believes it was there. His pictures don’t help: photograph the past with a DSLR and the focus is attractively shallow, the colours are bright and barely orange at all.
“It’s not 1987, it’s a cool people party,” Cabe says. “God knows how you got in.”
Faraday points out the legwarmers; Cabe counters with the defaced Kylie poster, the irony-thickened air, the fear behind all those young eyes. Their languidly disguised terror can only come from the hollow soul of a new century.
“They’re smoking indoors!” Faraday says.
Cabe chuckles. “Those zany hipsters.”
A story by my old friend Wayne Mooney
Thistle fires her shotgun at the Lavender Woman. No recoil. No muzzle flare. Stupid! She presses against a pillar, feels bullets strike it. Mint crouches in the narrow gap behind Lincoln’s marble throne, watching. “Need shells,” Thistle signs to her. She spells it out one-handed, her gun clenched in the other. What the girl throws her is too big and pale pink. She frowns, but Mint gestures insistently. She brings the conch to her ear.
Impossibly, she can hear the ocean. And something else…
She knows what she has to do. She drops her gun.
It doesn’t make a sound.
Riana Pfefferkorn will break your heart
It takes Jacob thirty-nine seconds to grow up. For the last twenty-six, Piper is there too. Bandit starts out next to Jacob but disappears, gray-muzzled and bent, soon after Piper shows up. Zomba’s cameo in the middle is a firework of black. The images wriggle, change hues, fade and brighten.
Snapshots every week: even when he wasn’t speaking to them, fourteen, sullen, hair hiding his face; even when she had a broken leg, the hated, leaden cast. At twenty-four frames per second, those pains disappear. The weeks are too fleeting to notice, the years barely register. Hit replay. Again. Again.
A story by William O’Neil
The only thing Theresa hates more than “networking” at conferences is the persistent plastic smell the furniture always has. At least there’s free food here.
“Long-chain Monomers,” says a young guy in an internet t-shirt, by way of greeting.
“The smell?” she asks, disinterested.
“Pardon?”
“The smell in the room.” She looks for exits, but she’s flanked by people on either side drawn by the promise of snacks.
“Sorry?” he says, confused. “No, I have a cold. Why, is it bad?”
“But then what did you–”
“Oh,” says Long-chain, sheepishly. “Well. My parents were really big Gibson fans.”
Ask Andrew Cole
Dee and Kelley came to blows at last, over, naturally, the royalties for the book. “Autolycus!” hissed Dee, his voice echoing off the tiles of the natatorium.
“Gestas!” bellowed Kelley, and shoved Dee’s head under the water.
They both called on Enoch to judge between them, but xie didn’t want to get involved. The angel perched up in a corner of the balneator’s office and watched the fight unfold. “Tragic, really,” xie muttered to Mister Boots.
Mister Boots kept his own council, and pretended to concentrate on grooming his tail, but his eyes missed nothing. Mister Boots was canny; he wasn’t paid enough to get involved in this kind of rumpus. Casaubon was going to be very interested, though — very interested, indeed.
