I found my master, Old Wizard Glitterbeard, on the floor of his library in a pool of blood, a bag of gems in his hand.
Once, he tried to tell me which color gem represented which spell…
Red is for fire.
Green is for power.
White is for the lightning.
Blue is for health.
Right! Blue for health.
I held a blue gem to his forehead and waited.
But the gem didn’t heal the wizard.
He was dead.
Oh great. He’s dead.
Now I’m out of a job.
At least I’ve got severance pay, I thought, and pocketed the gems.
Category: My stories
Music on the brain
There’s physical differences in the brain between professional musicians and ordinary people.
Over time, portions of the corpus collosum and right hemisphere change.
So much so, neuroscientists can spot a professional musician by inspecting an image of their brain.
Which is very helpful as the regime tries to enforce the ban on unauthorized music production.
“Let me see your brains,” orders a state neuroscientist to a group of teenagers sitting in a garage.
The teenagers claimed to be playing a Rock Band video game with controllers that look like musical instruments, but you can never tell.
Hail to the state!
Work
A lot of young people dream of working their way to the top, but I know a guy who dreams of working his way to the bottom.
He starts as the CEO, then the board demotes him to VP, and he’s shuffled around a bit until he’s running a foreign office.
That doesn’t last long. He’s brought back to take care of a Marketing workgroup until they boot him to the mailroom.
It’s there he languishes until, right on the verge of retirement, he dies of a heart attack.
That’s when he wakes up screaming.
He’ll fire the mailroom staff.
I loved the princess…
I loved the princess, but she warned me about a curse some witch put on her.
“Anyone who falls in love with me will turn into a chicken,” she said.
“Bawk,” I said. Which, if you understand Chicken, means: “I’m already a chicken. What the fuck do I care?”
Sadly, she didn’t love me back. Unless you consider the being breaded, fried, and served with coleslaw and biscuits to someone who says “God, I love chicken!” kind of love.
I don’t.
But when the princess was breaded, fried, and served with coleslaw and biscuits…
God, how I loved the princess.
Factory Floor
Julio the janitor got hurt on the factory floor. It was the third injury since the new intelligent automation systems had been installed.
The union rep said that it was too dangerous for humans and robots to work in the same space.
The management reviewed the tapes, and it was obvious that Julio had been injured while trying to sabotage an automatic cleaning system.
“We agree,” said the management. And they fired all the workers, except for robot maintenance.
The union picketed the factory.
Robot maintenance assembled some robotic picketers to picket the picket lines.
The robots never stopped working.
Lose My Keys
I lose my keys a lot.
Enough that I had to buy a new lock for my front door that works with an app on my phone.
Except that there’s one thing I lose more often than my keys: my phone.
I had to go buy another lock which was voice-activated, but I caught a cold and lost my voice.
Fingerprint scanners are great, unless you burn your finger cooking dinner.
And retina scanners don’t work on the blind.
Still, that’s the route I took.
I just wish that my seeing eye dog Rufus would learn to use the scanner.
Ninja
Picture a ninja in your mind.
He’s wearing a black jumpsuit with a scarf for a mask and swords on his back, isn’t he?
Well, that’s wrong.
Ninja are supposed to be invisible, so they’re not going to wear something that identifies them as an assassin.
Instead, they’re going to wear ordinary clothes so they blend in with the scene.
A suit in a business setting… shorts and a t-shirt at a casual setting…
And, yes. A Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland.
Or, so I thought.
But in my defense, it’s hard to read the intent of those freaky assholes.
The Rose
A rose by any other name is still a rose, but we knew her as Circe.
Whenever I was being an asshole, she’d call me an asshole.
And whenever I wasn’t, she’d still call me an asshole, because she knew it was only a matter of time.
She told me she was listening to all of my stories from the beginning. It gave her something to look forward to.
How do you respond to that? Their last months… weeks… days.
I know I wouldn’t waste my remaining time on that shit.
It must have been the morphine, clouding her judgement.
Gnocchi
Some chefs make gnocchi, but I know a chef who makes gnocchi do tricks.
Most of the time, he makes the gnocchi do the standard tricks: sit, roll over, and play dead. Even shake hands.
But one day, he tried to make the gnocchi make gnocchi.
That’s right. Little food-based self-replicating Von Neumann machines, multiplying like bacteria.
Gnocchi everywhere, making more gnocchi, which were making even more gnocchi.
If he hadn’t have run out of potato flour, the whole world would have been overrun with gnocchi.
Which would gave been a tragedy, because his gnocchi tastes awful. Even in sauce.
Travel Writer
My friend Hope wishes that someone had told her as a child that she could be a travel writer.
Since my time machine is ready to test, I figured I could slip that into my list.
“I’ll take care of that right before I kill Hitler,” I said, and I flipped the switch.
Several time hops later, I found myself in Austria in 1900.
“Sie können ein Reiseschriftsteller sein,” I said to a young Adolf Hitler.
“Vas is das?” he said.
Uh oh. I got my list mixed up.
I’d better go back and stop myself from killing Hope.