l.m.orchard's Stories

This story should not be popular

2008-06-10T06:01:00Z

If this story gets popular, then Ficlets may have a problem.

I’m not running a bot to make me popular, but I wonder if there’s a bug?

Another link in the chain (Thank you Kevin!)

2008-05-31T00:10:47Z

Did I really find the end of the chain? Man, this is something.

Dear Kevin, you’ll be sorely missed around here. Your baby here got me writing stories again, and I’m hoping it’ll keep me at it. The creative constraint of 1024 characters has made tight writing feel like a puzzle and fun as hell. And, you’ve amassed a community here that’s exciting and intimidates me a bit.

Thanks for giving us a set of monkey bars to play around on, and here’s hoping success in all your future endeavors!

Concentration

2008-05-22T23:17:32Z

The headset slid on like a fighter pilot slamming down his helmet visor. And, with a deft gesture, his ears filled with Interpol’s “Slow Hands”.

The coding context unfolded into his headspace and caffeine set fingers a jitter. Task lighting cast a calibrated magic circle. All distractions stranded in shadow beyond the illuminated space would spend hours starved for attention.

Complex sigils flew from his hands as his eyes beheld his own alchemy. The workspace was soon crowded with conditional realities and tenuous notions, these converging and collapsing to give birth to remarkably greater syntheses.

Something good was brewing—he knew it. It was on the verge of precipitation, the parts all but self-assembling into something that made his hair ache.

But the cat—starved for food as well as attention—wrecked the spell. Giving a friendly purr, she leapt onto his workbench, casually scattering the fragile glowing runes hanging in space and toppling over the small cauldron in whose steam they’d been suspended.

Resurrection of a Shade

2008-05-04T00:19:55Z

He had no words to describe what was happening to him. More accurately, he had nothing in his possession from which words could be conjured.

In point of fact, he possessed nothing but himself—though admittedly, his self-definition was a tenuous thing, more a collection of potentials than solid fact.

Still, of his own existence he was firmly convinced. An objective observer’s belief would have been tried, but his own self-assertion was self-validating. It had to be, or it wouldn’t have been.

With no sane perception of time, he nonetheless perceived the start of a certain coalescence. Matter began to clarify, collapse, and concretize in a process akin to petrifaction.

As instants regained meaning, he sensed a window of influence. A genie promised a quick handful of wishes—and he interjected preferences and demands. Distantly remembered anatomy was refined, edited, improved.

He awoke in a body not unlike the one to which he’d been accustomed, though it was certainly not the one into which he’d been born.

Do sleep-deprived engineers dream of electroplated tofu?

2008-04-18T02:57:50Z

The hiveminded, phosphorescent lichen are conspiring with the mechanized saurans in low earth orbit. They share a common conception of the color blue, at odds with the occluded vision of the mad pachiderms.

They plan to bombard the elephants’ capital city in India with M&M-shaped tofu blobs–an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second per second from orbit can pack quite a punch. The blobs will first have been electroplated in platinum, using the saurans’ wireless electricity. This should help with the stresses of atmospheric reentry.

Anyway, I don’t know what’s up with Esther or construction workers. Does she like waffles and eyepatches?

Starhook

2008-02-17T09:22:37Z

One hundred vapor trails and more struck upward that day, all around the world, all away from the world. Most took advantage of the nightside, streaking straight out into the void. Others less fortunate swung out on circuitous orbits from daylight.

Each was a precious speeding mote, bearing small crews or lone pilots, most stocked with great stores of supplies for an extended journey. Their projected vectors would all meet at a point just a few light-minutes away from home, though none of them sped quite as fast as light itself.

After hours, a handful of vessels met the inbound-travelling frontier of tortured spacetime. It had been made elastic, cast out across the universe. Only one craft breached the safe threshold before the tentacle passed zenith and whiplashed back the way it came, ferrying only that one along with it.

Those closest were torn apart by the wake of the retreating phenomenon. Others who’d been too slow by far were merely strewn about and stranded, left to ponder the lucky winner’s fate.

A Night of Wild Cycles

2008-01-17T20:05:34Z

“What the hell were you thinking?”

The machine was silent, offering only a slightly energetic twinkling of blinkenlights across its diagnostic panel as evidence that the question had been heard.

“Well,” the operator sighed, “I’m waiting. Explain yourself.”

“You’re quite impatient for a human. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I’m well aware of my own psychological parameters. Stop evading and give me a dump of your own.”

With a theatrical sigh rendered in its richest vocal textures, the machine unloaded a compact state vector onto the operator’s handheld.

“Huh. That explains the cheeseburger in your vents, but not the panties.”

Limits of Immortality

2007-12-24T23:46:15Z

“Do you remember the first time you were badly hurt?”

“Not really. Don’t we all experience our share of scrapes and bruises in childhood?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Have you ever suffered an injury of such severity that you were left less capable than you were before? One that took weeks or months to heal?”

“Oh, I see. Yes. I broke my leg once, back in college. We were drunk and where we shouldn’t’ve been. I fell off our dorm roof.”

“Do you take risks like that anymore, just for fun?”

“No, I’m too old for that sort of thing these days.”

“When did you first think of yourself as too old?”

“Hmm. I can’t really say—though, I think I see your point.”

“Do you? Tell me, then: Why are we not drunk on a rooftop tonight?”

“Because I’ve been diminished that way before and I fear repeating the experience.”

“Surely you realize that, though ancient, we are no longer so frail and easily harmed?”

“Yes, but the lesson remains a part of me and informs my decisions.”

“Just so. Thus are we rendered unadventurous.”

Held Up at Customs

2007-06-25T19:48:00Z

They wanted his pinky finger at customs.

At first, he’d thought maybe they just wanted a print or a blood sample. But then, he’d seen what happened to the tentacle of the sapient in line ahead of him: It walked away with a fresh blue-weeping stump, the tip excised by the eye-blink swipe of a sterile blade.

He knew that that particular genotype could regenerate tentacle tips – but he doubted that the customs agents here knew or cared that pinkies didn’t grow back. At some passport inspection earlier, one of them must have made a mistake in classifying him and shuffled him into the wrong lane.

No one spoke English here – and why would they? He was the first human being ever to be processed by the gateway station. All he’d had going for him was the universally encoded information in his travel papers.

Alerted to the hold up in the queue as he balked at the tissue sampler, a hard-shelled uniformed agent trundled over. It squawked and helpfully directed his hand toward the machine.

Self Knows Self

2007-06-22T17:41:09Z

I sat at a bus stop a few blocks from my old apartment, waiting. I’d fended off a handful of half-hearted self-assassination attempts along the way, a manifold practical manifestation of the doubts I felt toward what I was about to do.

Soon enough, at around ten after nine, I came walking briskly down the sidewalk. I was on my way to catch the 9:23 bus to work, late as usual. As my younger doppelganger drew near, I hauled myself up and blocked the way. Nonplussed, I tried walking around myself, but I grabbed my other by the shoulders.

I tore the headphones from my head and leveled a glare at myself over the rims of sunglasses, but an instant spark of recognition nullified any words of protest.

“Yes,” I said. “You know.”

Nerd that I was – and am – I’d dreamed often enough about meeting some alternate version of myself. Largely unconscious, a gestalt of body language was enough to settle any skepticism – self knows self.

Wrapped in sudden trusting awe, however, I was far too naïve and unguarded to run.

Joey and Sparks, part 2

2007-06-12T19:14:57Z

“Jesus fuck,” said Officer Jones as he ducked behind his squad car.

Joey the Super Baby struck the sidewalk in front of the convenience store like a meteor. The landing blew out a crater a few feet deep, the shockwave and wash of debris shattering windows and battering parked cars.

Sparks arrived a heartbeat later, the little flying Welsh Corgi throwing off a spidery plasma-ball of electrical arcs that set power lines aflame and burst streetlights in his wake.

Jones’ shelter was abruptly gone, as Joey toddled over to grab the man’s Crown Vic by the frame. Giggling, he hurled it into the storefront. In mid-flight, Sparks cast a stream of electricity at the rear of the car, igniting the gas tank and setting off an explosion inside the building.

Jones was flung across the street, mercifully clear of flame and shrapnel. Nothing must’ve been broken – he was running before he realized it, fleeing down an alley as the pair demolished the block behind him.

“I need backup!” screamed the policeman into his radio.

Shiny Mudballs

2007-06-12T18:48:10Z

The pair boosted forward into the asteroid’s single inset airlock, pulling a cargo sled behind them. It eased into the habitat’s half-gee field, dropping to bump once against the floor plating before settling into a hover.

“Shit, careful with that!” Jim warbled, his comm voice all square-waved. “They won’t take any if a single one is deformed!”

“I know, I know,” said George, “watch your end. Damn, but these creepy critters are picky.”

The outer doors sealed and, after a quick hiss of atmosphere in-rush, the inner doors irised open. Inside, the Customer waited – a glistening and limp de-shelled snail draped across a life-support hover.

Jim unsealed the cargo coffin, neutral gases and coolant spilling away to reveal exactly 38 dorodango. As documented in the triply-verified manifest, one autistic Japanese child had shaped each into sub-micron spherical perfection and a near-mirror finish.

George and Jim left that day with enough money between them to buy their own orbital paradise and retire happy men.

A Burden Shared

2007-06-08T23:41:54Z

“Looking for this?” said Cynthia, behind him.

Startled, Philip whirled on her. With a jaw clench, he regained his dignity and held out a hand. Into his palm, she placed a dram of clear liquid in a stoppered glass vial. But, as he began to close his fingers, she closed hers first and grasped his hand, vial and all.

“Were you planning something without me, dear?”

“Why, not at all darling,” he said, struggling for calm. “But, you know, it only really takes one of us to do the final deed. I thought I’d come to you when it was all over.”

“Oh,” she said, staring, never blinking. “Was that your intention?”

“Of course it was.”

“Well, I’d hate to see you troubled with the burden all alone. So, I thought I’d come find you first.”

“What a pair we make – but you’re too considerate.”

“No, I insist we share. We do it together.”

“Very well. I’d hoped to spare you this.”

“Spare me nothing but the end of this charade. Let’s go.”

Philip finished the sandwich and, with Cynthia in tow, carried the platter to the den.

Always Something Left to Learn

2007-06-08T23:12:47Z

He remembered how he’d tossed a crust of sandwich to a lone seagull, one summer long ago.

The poor thing had just been on the losing end of a gang-fight with other seagulls, who’d chased and weaved and battered until it gave up the morsel of trash it had claimed. The new morsel he’d tossed seemed to revive it – a fresh and better prize.

But then, having seen what happened, the rest of the seagulls returned and the fight renewed.

A lifetime later, the scale had changed. But, the principles remained the same.

Skimming through the spatial volume, he witnessed the skirmish in passing. Before his senses, tonnes of food and water were plundered from the tiny cargo ship’s holds, which were left open to vacuum.

In sympathy and with a mere finger-ripple of spacetime, he restored the holds’ contents and sealed the ship. He resuscitated the sophonts left microseconds from death in the void. He carried on his way.

And, in minutes, the fighting resumed. Even in his Transcendence, there were lessons left to learn.

In Absentia, part 2

2007-06-08T22:17:40Z

Minnaloushe was John’s name for the cat, who he’d always bragged was more canine than feline. Minnaloushe played fetch, loyally followed John from room to room in the tiny apartment, and yowled desperately whenever John left through the mysterious front door.

The morning routine for Minnaloushe always involved breakfast, followed by a nice few hours of petting and reciprocal lap kneading while John muttered and fretted at the desk.

That morning, though, the cat knew something wasn’t right. He was so hungry and the food was so late. John was there, but he wasn’t moving. Not cries, nor nuzzles, nor even an attention-tickling ankle nip drew a rise out of the man.

Minnaloushe paced and huffed. Finally, hunger won out and he trotted off to the kitchen. He had a trick for mornings when John got distracted early.

Leaping lithely to the counter, he followed his nose to the source of food. He pawed at the front of the machine in just the right way – which spilled kibble across the counter, as he knew it would.