The traveler became nervous as he saw the fog and shadows building along the path through the dark and strange woods.
Strange phantoms lived in these woods.
He looked up and saw the moon and stars through the clouds
Then the shadows all vanished
The traveler trembled with fear
Then another traveler crashed through the trees
Who are you? Screamed the traveler
I am you, he said
How
I am a time traveler, he said
He laughed and then left the traveler there to think about it
The traveler laughed crazily
He returned home
Ragged and trembling
From his journey
Tag: science fiction
The Happiest Man
Looking at Walter, with this frown and slouch, you’d think he was an unhappy guy. But if you asked him, he’d say he is the happiest man on earth.
“But we’re on Mars,” I say.
Walter laughs. “I meant to say Mars. Force of habit.”
He goes back to working on whatever he was working on. Usually plans for expanding the biodomes or upgrading the existing footprint of the colony.
“Nobody likes to get displaced and moved for construction and upgrades. They bitch at me. But when it’s over, they thank me. I focus on that.”
And he laughs again.
Landing
Where was I when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon?
I was in my mother’s belly. She was 7 months pregnant with me.
On the moon.
As an observer for Rigel, she just calmly watched, and sent back hyperwaves home.
Later, after I was born and ate her corpse, I went back over her memories of the event.
Pausing on the ladder… and then those immortal words.
Mother was listening to the signal, but accidentally left an open microphone.
Her gasp when Neil said “a man” disrupted things a bit.
I pat my belly. “Be careful with open mikes, child.”
The Unbecoming
Fred lost his leg in a hiking accident.
The carbon-fiber leg replacement was so good, he had the other one amputated and replaced.
Refinements made them even better, and with intelligent and sensing exoskeleton enhancements allowed him to leap and run in ways he could never imagine.
He underwent more procedures, replacing his limbs and organs to make him a mechanized superman, capable of doing amazing things.
Still, every so often, he’d hesitate. Caution held over from his weaker, biological days.
One robotic hand raised up on its own, yanked off his screaming head, and tossed it into the trash.
Backups
Parents are well-advised not to allow their children to connect to the network unlocked.
There are far too many worms and viruses out in the wild, and despite the claims in the commercials, firewalls don’t block and eliminate them all.
One minute, your son or daughter is sitting there, researching a school project. The next minute, they’re staring blankly and reciting a ransom note.
Fifty thousand dollars by midnight, and they’ll restore your child’s personality.
I agree with them: don’t call the police.
Just disconnect from the net and restore from backup.
(You do make backups of your kids, right?)
Babbage
Famous inventor Charles Babbage may never have built his Analytical Engine due to his inability to focus on manufacturing, but he did create punchcards to program it.
What the punchcards will do, we’re not completely sure.
We scanned in all his blueprints and notes, and our simulations suggest that it involves basic counting and number processing functions, but then when the museum staff built a Difference Engine from his original plans, the RING BELL function chimed out strange, plaintive messages in Morse Code…
Messages from the dead.
Visitors kept mistaking it for a fire alarm, so we disconnected the bell.
Cripple the cripple
Gordon Kane bet Stephen Hawking $100 that the Higgs-Boson exists.
And won, but despite acknowledging this, Stephen Hawking has yet to pay up.
How do you collect on that kind of bet?
It’s not like you can call your cousins from New Jersey into leaning on the guy.
“So, you think you’re some kind of smart guy?” your cousin Lenny says, and then he realizes, yes, this cripple in the wheelchair with the robot voice talking about black holes and galaxies is really damn smart.
At least he can’t put up much of a fight when they break his legs.
Until I Fall Away
We tried to use music to teach Calculon creativity and inventiveness.
We failed. All it did was reproduce the same sound, over and over.
So, we tried improvisational jazz.
Calculon reproduced that, too.
“Maybe we should use live concerts instead of studio albums?” I asked.
After Calculon copied the live albums, we made a few calls and loaded it into a truck.
We joined the Gin Blossoms tour.
At first, to observe. But in time, Calculon picked up on the “magic” of live concerts and picked up a guitar to jam.
Then it did a stage-dive and crushed 4 fans.
The Search
The producer for NPR’s Fresh Air says that every time they listen to an interesting interview, they want to quit their job and do whatever the guest is doing.
This is the ultimate irony, because the more they love their job, the more they want to quit it and do something else.
They said the next interview is with a guest searching for extraterrestrial life.
Endless years of scanning radio waves for signals.
Boring!
I believe in being so interesting and unusual, extraterrestrial life seeks ME out.
And if we never find it, well, at least we had fun, right?
Melt Away
The moment Joe stepped into the shower, he felt like all his troubles were melting away.
And from the puddle of bloody goo the police found clogging the drain of Joe’s tub, it appeared that Joe melted along with them.
How this happened, the coroner never quite figured out.
They looked over everything… the half-empty bottle of tequila, his prescriptions…
“It says DO NOT TAKE WITH ALCOHOL,” said the coroner. “But that just causes liver damage, not this.”
The Army was interested for a while and did some experiments on prisoners, but all it did was get them really drunk.