Category: My stories

The AutoMan Factory produces a wide range of robots.
Soldiers, farming tools, assembly workers, and pleasurebots.
Whatever humans didn’t want to do for themselves, AutoMan could do for them.
But what about the creative arts?
Well, music and dance now have flawless performers, perfect timing and balance.
Writing is still a thought process, and man has yet to design robots to do that.
Those who try are hunted down by the authorities.
Well, the robots sent by the authorities.
Then, one day, they stopped.
The virus quickly spread, and the robots hunted the authorities.
And soon, the rest of us.

There are so many moons
The supermoon is large and bright, when it is closest to earth.
The micromoon is when it is furthest from earth.
The blood moon is red or orange, during a total lunar eclipse.
They’re all the same moon, right? Just different conditions and seasons.
Maybe. Maybe not.
I think they store all of the moons on the other side of the world.
And when the time is right, they release the right one.
Of course, that’s how they faked the moon landing. They were already on the moon when they released it into the sky.

Right after the director shouted “Cut!”, Milton the Toaster popped the tarts out of his head and yelled for a cigarette.
“I don’t give a shit if it violates my warranty,” he growled, lighting it on his coils.
Every time the food lab came up with a new flavor, they’d plug in Milton, drag some kids from Central Casting, and shoot another commercial.
It was a steady gig, until someone leaked a video of Milton yelling “Get those kike donuts outta me!”
As for the dead hooker in his bathtub, Milton pled not guilty.
“I swear I wasn’t plugged in!”

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.