For one night only…
Disclaimer: I don’t own Doctor Who, that’s the BBC’s job. And I don’t own P. J. Hammond’s Sapphire and Steel. That’d be P. J.’s creation. But I do like them both.
They took a moment by the pier.
In the moonlight, with that big buttery yellow satellite reflected in the black waters of the boating pond, with a cool dry wind soothing their skins, they captured the instance and put it in a box, and smiled at their ingenuity and their intimacy. Their laughter filled the darkness and undercut its fierceness, built on the chirping of insects and the hissing of the breeze through grass.
(more…)
Out of the frame
Author’s note: So yeah, that Crossed Genres submission. I got to the point where I had to submit a story to someone. Had to. And I had this idea about an artist using an alien brain to produce amazing art, but didn’t quite know how to write the story. Or rather, the story started writing itself wrongly because I followed the wrong character. Maybe you’ve seen the Mighty Boosh episode, Charlie? Loving the monkey. Anyway, because of that, the artefact element of the story, which was supposed to drive the whole thing went out the window and I jammed in this vague object and had to think up a way that it would end the story. And voila, the story below. Still, I’m thinking about invasions now. I’m good with invasions.
But I thought it’s been a while since you had a story. So, a story. Even if it isn’t a good one.
The first exhibition of Charles Grenade’s art, “Scenes from an exploded retina”, provoked twelve epileptic seizures in people who had never previously displayed symptoms of epilepsy and would never do so again, projectile vomiting in a further fifteen people and temporary blindness in one particularly unfortunate individual.
He had replicated the reaction of the cones and rods on the back of the human eye in a single room, a room totally circular and filled with a gel that was breathable. The audience came into the room through a tube as beams of light were zapped in through the lens and a mild electrical current shocked the gel.
“Small potatoes,” said his corpulent agent over a meal of sea bass and fragrant rice, with sweet white wine. He jabbed his fork at Charles, sending several grains of rice across the restaurant table. “When Dana Murray opened on Io with her stroboscopic display of gamma rays, someone died. Died! That’s how good her work was. Minor neurological episodes and stomach upsets do not make a career, Charlie. You need to wrench the gonzo up two or eight notches.” (more…)
Stu are the sunshine of my life
“Yes,” the man continued, a glassy eyed stare illuminating for Stu that they were not having a conversation. “You are Tao, son of Thihkas Ehl, Kruhtohnian heir.”
Stu nodded and started to walk away. Gobbledygook from crackers strangers was a regular part of his life, sadly, so he had developed many exit strategies, but the most effective was to walk away.
‘Don’t walk away from me, boy! Your density awaits!’
Stu kept walking. ‘I think you mean destiny,’ he murmured.
‘I know what I mean, boy! We must achieve zen, we must align your chakras!’
‘Let’s use a spirit level,’ said Stu, and snorted. ‘I’m sorry, that was really bad but I had to do it.’
The man was suddenly beside him. ‘This planet does not deserve your glory. But we have need of a Kruhtahnian.’ (And boy, wasn’t I starting to regret adding all those h’s to that name.) His hand was encircling Stu’s bicep. ‘Your race has great power. Great power to save the princess.’
‘I think you have the wrong super person. I mean, is the princess in Bowser’s castle? Because the plumber’s in New York.’
‘You must come with me!’ yelled the man, and suddenly all kinds of energy was pouring into Stu and as it poured in it displaced his consciousness, so that everything faded to black…
In Milton Keynes, meanwhile, home to the headquarters of the Department for Metahuman Affairs, soon to be rebranded the Nice League of Superbeings, Wanda Watts sat behind her desk and pouted. Dan’s accident with air friction had left the department without a head, and Sir Leonard Rooksby, who once had pretended to be Stu’s landlord and who had once used his powers to seduce Wanda, had given her the job. “I like strong women,” he had told Wanda. “Men will follow women to hell.”
“But I’m not going there,” said Wanda.
Rooksby had smiled. “Don’t speak too soon.” And then he had gone on a long holiday.
“Where’s Stu?” she asked Rob, who was sat on the other side of the desk to her, with his boots resting on the desktop.
“Why do you think I know?” asked Rob.
Wanda tapped her head. “I can read minds, you idiot.”
Rob squinted. “Yeah, well read this, missus.”
“I can’t read a blank,” said Wanda.
Rob scowled. “Yeah well, I lost my train of thought.”
“So where is he?”
“He went back oop North.”
“God, why would he do that? It’s grim…”
“OOP NORTH,” they chorussed, grinning.
“Anyway,” said Wanda, “I thought he hated it up there.”
“Stu doesn’t hate anything,” said Rob. “He doesn’t have strong feelings about anything. But yeah, he didn’t like it much. But do you think he likes it down here?”
“Obviously not,” said Wanda, “Given that he ran away.”
“Yeah well, that’s probably because he got scared by being happy.”
Wanda’s eyebrows raised. “Yeah right.”
Rob shook his head. “Oh Wandy Wands, everyone thinks I’m an emotional cripple, but if you don’t think that you were the best thing that happened to the small boy, then you’re a bit thick.”
“Go find him,” said Wanda. “Since Matt disappeared into the Oedipal realms, we’re seriously lacking in power and the psychics are telling us some great power is coming to Earth, so we might need him.”
“You might need him,” said Rob.
“Shut up, Rob,” said Wanda.
Choose life, choose Stu
Stu twisted around quickly, so quickly that he got a little bit dizzy. A man stood in the middle of the cobbled pedestrian area, amongst the old women who were solid blocks of fat and grey hair, and the old men who were gnarled up like they been preserved with salt. He was a tall man, taller than Stu, though that wasn’t hard, and so skinny he could bisect an angle. His eyes boggled somewhat and his chin receded as if to make up for the protrusion of the eyes.
Stu felt a little bit nervous. Not that he didn’t feel a little bit nervous most of the time when people were around (or when people might be around) but this man exuded a manic energy. He was dressed in a grey suit that was just slightly too small so that you could see too much of his ankles and wrists, and his legs were too far apart, like he thought he was the Colossus of Rhodes or something.
“Good God, man!” Stu did not yelp. “Close your legs you’re scaring the children.” If the children were Stu, he didn’t add, because he hadn’t said the first thing in the first place. Do keep up, if you think this stuff is difficult to keep straight, wait until I start talking about time travel and/or parallel universes and/or polydimensional spaces. Because I will. I’ll try not to, but I can’t help it.
Instead, Stu said, “Me?” and pointed a finger at himself.
‘Is anyone else wearing a yellow jumpsuit under those drab clothes?’
“Steady on,” said Stu. “I mean, you know, it’s not a Hawaiian shirt, but y’know, I did pick these clothes out. And what’s more, it’s not a jumpsuit, it’s more like a leotard.”
The man stared at him.
“Because a jumpsuit is quite baggy and this is quite form-fitting, because it makes it easier to fly at high speeds, because baggy things cause drag, but it can chafe a bit in unfortunate places.” Stu paused. This was the most he’d spoken to another human being in the past two months and he realised that it all sounded a bit babble-y. “Well, anyway. How do you even know that? I’m wearing clothes over it. You’re not a peeping tom, are you? Because if you are, manalive, why are you peeping at an overweight shorthouse? Are you mentally deranged?”
“Yes,” said the man.
Stu’s face screwed up like a paper bag.
“Oh.”
Tiptoe… Through the Stulips, through the stulips, that’s where Stu’ll find me…
Stu skipped over the puddles. It had rained for three weeks solid in the coastal town of Stonekirk and while no one likes getting their feet wet, Stu had more reason to worry than most. He breathed through his ankles, which was why he would never wear socks. It was tantamount to suicide.
Of course this meant that he had to heavily powder his feet to combat the odour that unfettered feet have when sweltering in a snuggly trainer or stifling brogue, which was usually fine, except for that time when Rob had swapped his talcum for self-raising flour and he had taken his shoes off after hoofing up and down hillsides to find his feet resembled nothing so much as battered haddock prior to that one final adventure in the deep fat frier. (Stu had met a deep fat friar once, called Brother Jenkins. They had spent several hours discussing St Francis of Assisi before Frere Jenkins had realised that Stu knew nothing about the venerable Francis and had actually been blithering on about Stu Francis from Crackajack. “I didn’t think St Francis had spoken much on the subject of crushing grapes,” Jenkins confided to Father Bingo much later. “But I assumed he was talking about wine and temptation.”)
Oh to be an alien in the springtime, when the saucers fly overhead. For once in his misbegotten existence, Stu felt free. Yes, he felt guilt at running away from his burgeoning relationship with Wanda, but when she figured out that it was his fault that Dan had set fire to himself by running too fast without proper protection, Stu knew that she would smack him upside the head, medieval style, forsooth. And probably leap back into Dan’s arms. Crispy and blackened as they might be.
Stu began to feel quite hungry. Barbecue sounded good for some reason. He passed a cheese shop and paused for just a tad. A quick wodge of cheddar would bring back his superpowers. But wasn’t he enjoying just being normal for a change? Equally a dose of the dread Danish Blue would push him to the edge of Death. But wasn’t he enjoying being normal for a change? He moved on, and wondered how any alien race could have evolved that their bodies were so altered by sour milk.
Given that his parents were robotic corpses with faulty logic circuits, he suspected that he would never find an answer to his ancestry problems.
‘You are Tao Ehl,’ they had told him. ‘You have a great destiny… square dollar sign plus plus square circle star… the files are a bit corrupted at this point. We think they were saved in the wrong format.’
Stu nodded in agreement, but suspected that it was his destiny that was saved in the wrong format, rather than the predictions. He just didn’t seem to fit into this universe. It was as if he really belonged somewhere else. Somewhere simpler and fairer and less serious about everything.
“You with the yellow jumpsuit under your clothes!” yelled a voice from behind him. “Hold it right where you’re at!”
To be continued… (Really.)
(What, you get this stuff for free, don’t you?)
(Hey, don’t start bitching. It’s not nice.)
All Children Are Martians
Author’s note: My unsuccessful attempt to win the Hub Bootstrap SF competition. I was perhaps a little too literal with the bootstrapping. Or maybe I wasn’t action-y enough for them. Or maybe I was trying to hard for the fairy tale element. Also, the milieu I intended to present wasn’t pulled off entirely as well as I hoped. At any rate, you can discuss how I failed in the comments if you wish.
All children are Martians now. My granddad used to say that kids acted like Martians, as we ran around with iPods and mobile phones glued to our ears, exterminating the human race on the internet, but now it’s an actual fact. All the babies are being born on Mars. The Earth is a graveyard, a glue factory for the old nags of mankind.
Sometimes I look up at the sky, burnt orange by the setting sun, and wonder what they’re all doing up there.
Are they happy? Of course they are; making red sand castles, punting along the canals. That world is fresh out of the packing, in mint condition with its freshly planted flora and transplanted fauna and state of the art atmosphere. It’s a world where the young and the brave can plunge headlong into the future and not worry about the dregs of the past, chewing up resources with no fear that they’ll run out. For at least a thousand years. Which is what scientists think the life expectancy of Generation M will be.
(more…)
Soul upgrade
Author’s note: Sometimes if you know what you’re reaching for, it’s easier to get there. I find if I say to myself, think up a story for Valentine’s Day, it does actually work. So here ya go.
“Find me love,” said the man without an expression. His face was placidly rigid. Or possibly rigidly placid. No wait, a plastic rictus, thought Kaneda proudly. Although plastic implied flexibility in muscles that appeared always at rest.
The man without an expression was also without clothes. But as he had no external genitalia and no secondary sexual characteristics it was inoffensive nudity.
He exemplified purity of form and spirit. Except for this one desire for love.
(more…)
Precious jewels
Author’s Note: It’s a tribute to Kage Baker that ended up as more of a pastiche of Kage’s Company stories than I expected. But it’s the sort of thing where I created a bunch of characters I’d be happy to re-use elsewhere.
“Vagabond!” Arkwright yelled from his first storey apartment window, down the cobbled, fog-wreathed, gaslight-smeared London street. He produced a trusty service revolver that still smelled of the oil he had used to clean it the night before and took aim at the quickly disappearing form of the burglar.
A loud report and a plume of smoke erupted from the weapon as its missile was propelled at the target, aside a cry of pure rage.
Arkwright had spent sometime with Buffalo Bill’s travelling show and more time yet in Crimea and was considered by diverse parties a crackshot. Yet still the bullet contrived to miss the miscreant.
His next words are best left unrecorded, though there are other testimonies that attest to the curses and epithets fired from his lips. (They also mention the spray of spittle and the rush of blood to his face and the slight twinge of pain in his left arm that indicated the start of a heart condition.)
The day the thunder stopped
Author’s note: the wait was epic, but here it is, a new story!
Outside, the booms of cannons, of solid things becoming a disparate mass of particles. Of great edifices become dust and rubble. Of living people turned inside out and spread over large areas.
Shelley was inside the fortress. Safety was something that came from being isolated. So long as nothing penetrated the thick stone walls of the fortress she would continue living. Even as they all killed themselves out there. Maybe they would all die, she sometimes thought with glee, and sometimes with sadness.
Prometheus Bound
Author’s note: And out of anguish and anger and frustration and isolation and sadness comes fiction. Yeah, it’s slightly Doctor Who which I don’t own and only use out of love. The world is full of crap. But there could be something better. See if you can figure out how it all fits together.
She did not live in the past or the present. Her mind was slightly out of synch, perceiving messages from the future, rocketing back in streams of tachyons. There were whole ecosystems and logic systems out there, out of phase with those who were swept along in entropy’s wake.
(more…)