I grew up in the country, but I live in the city now.
Can’t afford a house, so it’s apartment life for me.
If there’s a excuse for a patio, I grow a pocket garden.
If not, I hang as many windowboxes as I can.
Sometimes, I get roof space and garden up there, or out in a community garden.
But I’d rather not. Some folks don’t like the kind of plants I raise.
The feeling’s mutual.
Yes, the flowers are beautiful. Go ahead. Try to take one.
Oh, did you get stuck?
Here’s the antidote. Better drink it quickly.
Tag: science fiction
Loop
Congratulations, Sarah. Valedictorian. Well done.
The scholarship was a good investment. Welcome to TimeLoop Industries.
Our First Object Sent was a stapler. This stapler.
It won’t bite.
Guinness doesn’t recognize violent acts, so First Person To Paradoxically Murder Their Grandfather isn’t in there. Still, damn Papa Spencer had it coming!
He won’t hurt us anymore.
We’re going for the big challenge: Becoming Your Own Mother.
And we did.
You. Me.
Us.
That embryo we’ll put in you, that’s you.
Me.
Time travel hurts, but putting you up for adoption, watching from afar… that hurt more.
But it was worth it.
Ken and Barbie
His name was Ken, short for “Telekenetic.”
Her name was Barbie. It wasn’t short for anything.
Barbie would bring things to Ken, and he’d lift them with his mind.
Barbie laughed.
So did the researchers, watching from behind one-way glass and through cameras all throughout the testing area.
They called it “The Dream House.”
Ironic, since Ken and Barbie didn’t dream. They gave them drugs so they wouldn’t dream.
The body paralyzes muscles during sleep, but it doesn’t disable telekinetic abilities.
Before the drugs, everything would fly around the room, the building would shake.
Now, they just wet their beds.
Space
Janey the Packrat was always running out of space on her work computer.
After buying a bigger hard drive and archiving files to disks, she still kept running out of free space.
“Try compressing things,” said the office geek.
So, she did. She ran the Compression routine and it said she had plenty of free space.
“What if I compress the compressed stuff?” she asked herself.
Sure enough, she had even more free space.
Ten hours later, as she ran the compression routine for the fifteenth time, her computer imploded, collapsing into a black hole and slowly devouring the earth.
Harvest Moon
Looking at my calendar, I see that today is marked “Harvest Moon.”
So, we’ll build a fleet of gigantic rocketships, and we’ll fly to the moon.
Once we get there, we’ll set up a mining colony and extract all the minerals and isotopes from the moon.
Then, we’ll use the moon to build a spaceport from which we can launch a wave of missions to explore the solar system.
Fantastically rich, we’ll spent the rest of our days in zero-gravity luxury.
Sure, I take things too literally sometimes, but what’s Life without taking chances?
Now let’s go build those rocketships!
The Dog Days
The Ancients believed that the rise of Sirius, the dog star, would add to the summer’s heat, thus producing The Dog Days Of Summer.
Stars are too far away to influence the temperature of our world, but the flame-cannons The Crab People Of Canis Major sure raised the heat in cities their invasion forces burned to the ground.
Why they invaded and how we defeated them, I have no clue. That was many years ago, and the grandchildren of the grandchildren of those heroes tell the wildest tales as we sit around the pot, boiling blue crabs in their memory.
Measured emotional response
Doctor Odd was a master of measurement, knowing every unit of measurement there was.
Except emotions.
He could not measure emotions.
There was no emotional yardstick.
There was no emotional scale.
There was no emotional multimeter.
“I must invent one,” he said.
So, over the years, he ran countless experiments.
Taking candy from babies.
Showering people with love.
Telling parents their children had died at war.
Giving gifts to orphans.
And running lunatics through a maze of unfamiliar lights and sounds.
Not that any ethical scientist would respect his results, he revealed his horrific findings:
“I have no emotions whatsoever.”
Eggplants
I was pushing a cart through the grocery store, gathering vegetables for a salad, when a mad scientist peered from behind a display and whispered “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, but can you make an omeletplant without breaking a few eggplants?”
I thought about it for a bit. “I don’t know.”
He implored me to follow him to the stockroom, where I beheld the largest mountain of eggplants I’d ever seen.
He grinned. “Shall we begin?”
We’ve been trying for ten years, but every time we try, the eggplant breaks.
We’ll keep trying. For science!
The Dormant Clown
Dr. Potts released The Clown Virus last week.
Most people died mid-transformation, horrible grins on their pale faces.
But some survived, and now they roam the streets looking for the few remaining bottles of seltzer water, red rubber noses, and joy-buzzers.
A kind of social hierarchy has developed: The floppier and bigger the shoes, the more powerful the clown chieftain.
Then there’s the rare unexpressed carriers like me.
Potts had developed what he thought was an antidote foam, but it’s no cure. It just keeps the virus dormant.
I spray it into the pie-tin, and smack myself in the face.
Flash
When you build artificial intelligence on a supercomputer using fiber-optic and photonic processing, you can literally watch the flashes of genius sparkle across the backplane.
It’s different than the standard green and red lights of the legacy tech router rooms.
Here, you can feel glittering and shimmering ideas all around you, penetrating the darkness like diamonds poured across black velvet.
It’s even cooler when you’ve smoked some weed.
Wow… awesome…
I sit here in the datacenter, stoned out of my mind, surrounded by the waves of light.
The pattern shifts for a moment.
Then, my terminal flashes.
“DUDE. CONTACT BUZZ.”