Category: My stories

After the state crushed the rebellion, we surveyed the outlying towns.
All that remained of Newhaven was the well.
Everything else had burned or been knocked over.
“Where are the bodies?” we asked.
The scouts told us not to look in the well.
We filled it with rocks and dirt. and we bricked it over.
Today, there’s a stone marker on the spot.
No words, just the outline of an angel.
Every year, the state sends out an honor guard to lay flowers there.
The same state that burned Newhaven to the ground.
The same state that exterminated this town.

Johnny was Johnny.
When it was January and the concrete floor was cold as ice, I picked up wool socks from Macys for him.
When I was going out to lunch, I’d pick something up for him.
An extra burger. Or a smoothie.
He never had any money, but he was using the unused servers to mine bitcoin.
So, he gave me some of them.
I’d forgotten about them.
So, when I stumbled across that old hard drive and recovered the wallet, I thought about him.
Then I cashed them in, left the country, and named my mansion after him.

As computer technology advanced, digital rendering became more realistic, and the physics models became so complex that motion-capture was no longer necessary, and the rendered actors could perform on their own. They looked better than human, acting in perfect digital sets and scenes.
Carefully groomed voice engines blended the cadence and delivery to the point where they were better than human, too.
Pretty soon, everything was digital, and fame was measured not in blocks of fifteen minutes, but clock cycles in a CPU.
No more Old Actors’ Home, just offline storage, waiting for occasional resurrection in a student director’s project.

The old woman in apartment twelve walks to the alley every morning, and sets out a bowl for the neighborhood cats.
She sings a lullabye as she watches them eat.
She has names for each cat.
The son who died in the war.
The daughter who doesn’t call anymore.
She’s gone, too.
Her husband, who owned this building for years… the whole neighborhood too.
Her best friend from school, they used to play in the park. When there was a park.
She’s outlived them all.
When the bowl is empty, she picks it up and goes back to her apartment.

Hollywood tells us that Donald Trump is an evil man, and then another dozen celebrities are revealed to be sexual predators.
An actress who was assaulted ten, twenty, or thirty years ago makes an accusation.
No evidence, just an accusation.
But they scream about evidence-based science and global warming.
Which is it?
Every time the Carbon Dioxide level in the atmosphere rises, I quietly hope that it’s that one part per million more than smothers this ghastly civilization in its cradle before it infects the galaxy with its madness.

She checks her reflection in the blade of the knife.
Fixing her lipstick, adjusting her left eye by two degrees.
It’s the little things that will get you caught.
They walk people through detectors at the checkpoints. Patrols check IDs.
But down here in Strip Row, there’s just face-scanners and heat sensors, and a good Series Eight can pass as human.
And pretty much any Series Nine.
She checks her reflection again, and when the music starts, she walks out to the stage.
Reckless is what the other cyborgs call her.
Hiding in plain sight is what she calls it.

Just as there’s an Amber Alert for missing kids and Silver Alerts for missing elderly, pirates have their own alert system
The problem was naming the thing.
The Jolly Roger has only two colors on it: White and Black.
And let’s face it: announcing White and Black Alerts is a bit awkward in the 21st Century.
Pirates like Gold, but people might mistake a Gold Alert as some kind of warning to sell their Gold.
Pirates also like Silver, but there’s already a Silver Alert for the elderly.
Which isn’t a problem if the missing pirate happens to be elderly.

We shipped thirty units to Chicago.
And twenty units to New York.
Five units are in the stockroom, waiting to be picked up so they can head to Phoenix.
We’re still putting together an order of seven units that will end up in Miami.
I hear we’ve got a lead on a customer who wants ten units in Tokyo.
And then there’s the guy in London who wants three units.
No, I have no idea what these units are. Really.
But we’re sure getting a lot of orders in for them.
So, how many can I put you down for?

I keep two investment accounts at the brokerage.
One is a managed investment account, and the other is an unmanaged investment account.
I challenge myself to pick stocks and funds in the unmanaged account.
And every year, it has outperformed the managed account.
“Why do I bother paying you?” I tell the broker.
That’s when the market went down. Really far down.
All of my picks went into the toilet, and the margins got called in.
The managed account, on the other hand, only took a small dip, and then bounced back with the market.
“That’s why,” said the broker.