Tag: science fiction

Dancester

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They called it Dancester – the place to download dances.
Just put in your credit card, sync up your iMind, and you’re ready to dance like the best dancers do.
Of course, not everyone wants to pay for their dances. That’s when the pirated dances started to appear.
The Lords Of The Dance didn’t like their dances getting ripped off, but Dancester couldn’t do anything to stop it.
So a series of pirated dances commanding dancers to slash their throats appeared on pirate sites.
Nobody could prove anything, but the piracy ended quickly.
The Lords danced for joy at the news.

Perseids

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Perseus, Kentucky was the place to go to watch the Perseid Meteor shower.
In early August, Perseus bans all outdoor lighting to make meteor-viewing easier, but some years the full moon ruins the view.
The city council came up with a plan: launch a rocket during the new moon and shoot artificial comet dust to burn up in the atmosphere for a spectacular show.
It worked brilliantly.
Pretty soon, every community wanted their own meteor shower, more brilliant than the first.
Leave it to those crazy rich Saudis to go overboard.
Allah’s will, they whined.
Who needs an atmosphere, anyway?

Buzzed

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Gene Krantz’s cigarette fell from his lips and bounced off of his console.
“What the fuck did Neil say?” he asked.
“Houston to Eagle, repeat,” said Mission Control.
“I’m King Of The Moon!” said Neil Armstrong. “Bow down to the King Of The Moon!”
“Maybe Buzz slipped him something?” asked a doctor.
The cameras showed the mad astronaut advancing on another with a probe. “I dub thee Sir Aldrin!”
“Back off, Neil!” shouted Buzz Aldrin, scampering back up the ladder.
“Cut the feed,” said Gene. “Thank God for the tape delays. We’ll just go with what we filmed last month.”

Ride My See Saw

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Nobody wants to see-saw with little Harvey, so Dr. Odd programmed the teaching assistant robot to see-saw.
Kids love robots. Now every kid wants to see-saw with the robot. But instead of taking turns, they fight.
Fights aren’t healthy, so Dr. Odd reprogrammed the robot to stop see-sawing.
Without the robot, the kids didn’t want to see-saw anymore.
Except for Harvey. Poor Harvey, sitting all alone.
That’s not healthy either. So Dr. Odd reprogrammed him, too.
Harvey’s much happier playing tag and pulling pigtails with the rest of the kids.
How do you feel about that?
Sad? Well, hold still.

Shakesphere

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“All the world’s a stage,” said The Immortal Bard.
Little did he know, a thousand years after he said that a team of astronauts and planetary engineers would transform one of Saturn’s moons into an orbiting open-air theater.
Well, open-space theater. Despite several attempts to enclose the moon with an atmosphere, the semi-permeable membrane bubble kept leaking and bursting under the pressure.
The remote-controlled gargantuan robots were tied to neural pickups in the actors brains.
Someone backstage said “MacBeth” and cursed the production. Next thing we knew the planetoid had shattered.
Thank goodness for armored spacesuits and extra oxygen tanks.

Prison For Life

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Seventy years ago, Allistar Muggs had been sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Turns out he’d sold his soul to The Devil so he could live forever.
Nobody believed him at first, but Allistar didn’t age a day as the years passed by. Nor did the increasingly brutal assassination attempts ever succeed.
He always seemed to heal up without so much as a scar, missing tooth, or torn-off finger. He’d wake up the next morning, same as the day they gave him a number to wear.
We sealed the freak in concrete and buried him in the prison yard.

Blind

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Like all of the test-tube psychics, Maria was born blind – genetically engineered to prevent her from seeing the physical world around her.
Instead, she saw the potential of the world around her. Meadows of possibilities and forests of decision-making trees wobbled through a fog of free-will.
Most of her group were passive observers, but Maria was one of the special ones. She could bend and shape her surroundings.
This was handy in important negotiations, and more than once she had wrestled an apocalyptic conclusion into an elegant and beautiful agreement.
It also kept her from walking into closed doors.

Ice Cream Truck

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Explosions are ripping apart the skyline of the city, but the ice cream truck rolls on.
No music is playing, but not because the driver doesn’t want to be targeted. Those who would destroy his truck are hundreds of miles away from hearing it, manning the missile batteries and piloting the drones which unleash the death around him.
No, the music is off because there is no ice cream today.
The coolers are full, sure, but they are packed with the corpses of his neighbors.
He figured as long as the bombs were falling, why not settle a few scores?

The Zombietron is not a toy

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Attorneys no longer have to worry about their witnesses turning up dead.
Now you can just stick the witness or victim in one end of the Zombietron, pour in a teaspoon of nanobots, and let them soak in the machine overnight.
Sure, they reek like a latrine pit full of rotten meat, but functional and lucid zombies are admissible as evidence.
The worst part of the process is watching them die again. I wonder if they suffer.
So, what happens when you put a living person in the Zombietron?
I don’t know.
Hey, let’s grab a bum and find out.

Zippy

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We all got in our spaceships, let them freeze us solid, and were shot all around the universe.
Some of us took decades to get to our assignments. Others took centuries, assuming they made it at all.
Sometime before I arrived, scientists invented the zippy drive. Zip – you’re there. Zip – you’re back.
Made exploration and colonization much easier.
It also made me obsolete on arrival.
Surprisingly, people haven’t changed much. But the airborne germs have.
I spend my time in a plastic bubble, waiting for back pay and the cure to the toxic viruses people have adapted to.