Archive for the ‘David Kopaska-Merkel’ Category
I Fell
Friday, January 28th, 2011
Fred had almost forgotten the boy who fell off the world. “So you lived. You lived! How?”
“I fell. I expected to fall forever. Instead, I plunged into a net of roots. Many broke as they slowed my fall, but soon I was caught. It was a simple matter then of climbing up the stouter roots, ever mindful of the void beneath me, until I reached the good brown earth. I found openings in the world’s venter, the termini of smooth-walled tunnels at whose origin I greatly wondered. Some were large enough for me, and one of these I entered. Though from the beginning I misdoubted their character.”
“What dug those tunnels Chuck? What worms are those whose girth exceeds that of a man? What lives down there on the bottom of things?”
At this the visitor grew pale and trembled. “Don’t ask me that,” he whispered. “Some things are not to be spoken. Would that they could be not thought!”
“Those damnable tunnels. The walls are encrusted with phosphorescent fungi, revealing in a jaundiced, fitful light that which were better hid. There are dead ends in those subterranean passages, each a fatted place like a spider’s brood sack. Many are empty, thank all the gods that be, but some are not. What I found in those would send you shrieking, desperately seeking light and clean air and any thing outside those fetid burrows. Those nearer the surface and the Sun’s good light contain the desiccated, partially devoured, but still living remains of creatures well familiar, including man. I spoke with one, a hollow thing that begged me to end his life. I did so, swiftly, and all those I later met. Brood sacks many miles below Earth’s face contained other remains, also still living, discernible in the flickering radiance of the mutant fungi. These I hope never to meet hale and hearty either above or below ground.”
“Ask me not what I dined on during my sojourn beneath the surface. I sucked water from roots that dangled from tunnel ceilings. This water, never present in any great quantity, faintly bitter and with a nauseating aftertaste, suffused with the essences of all through which it had passed, was the most wholesome thing I ingested while I was within the earth.”
“When I finally crawled out of that bewildering subterranean maze, the setting sun’s ruddy light streamed across a hilly landscape of red-tile roofs, the scattered farm houses and fields of complacent cattle concealing a horror of which their inhabitants are blissfully ignorant.”
end
Just Because You’re Paranoid
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
Robbie was in trouble. The traffic signals were communicating with one another using a variant of Morse code. The lights were against him.
In the park, clockwork birds shadowed his footsteps, pretending to be sparrows hunting for seeds in the dirt. He stomped a few.
Robbie hurried toward the courthouse. Despite his monitoring apps he was surprised when a black hole opened directly beneath his feet.
The manhole cover had been booby trapped. Robbie’s security software hadn’t warned him. “Crap!” he thought as his “Z” value plummeted.
Thank Designer he couldn’t smell! Access ladder gone, shaft too wide for him to brace himself against the walls and inch his way up.
Claws scritch on stone, wet black scales, rows of shiny white teeth. So it wasn’t just an urban legend! Fortunately, he had a jet pack.
Steering these things is tricky, he caromed. Good thing they don’t let humans have them. He stratosphered uffishly.
Calculating tangents and trajectories, reaction mass and resistance, Robbie figured he’d skip off the atmosphere in 3.672 years.
If he slingshot round the sun, he could go where no bot had gone. Solar vanes out, limbs aflexin, Robbie hit the sleep mode with his best pregnancy pillow of the just.
end