Plugs

Kat Beyer’s Cabal story “A Change In Government” has been nominated for a BSFA award for best short fiction.

Susannah Mandel’s short story “The Monkey and the Butterfly” is in Shimmer #11. She also has poems in the current issues of Sybil’s Garage, Goblin Fruit, and Peter Parasol.

Jonathan Wood’s story “Notes on the Dissection of an Imaginary Beetle” from Electric Velocipede 15/16 is available online.

Edd Vick’s latest story, “The Corsair and the Lady” may be found in Talebones #37.

My Cell Phone is a Slut

by JeremyT

Seriously, my phone screws anything its ports are compatible with, and it’s only a week old, so it’s compatible with everything. It’s constantly skittering off to copulate with other consumer gadgets, which is annoying, because I’ve been waiting for this girl to call that I met at a skin-PAN party a few days ago. She had the most complete collection of Dr. Who episodes in her files I have ever seen–even the reconstructed episodes with the original audio and stills from production. I dropped my vCard, and I know she acked it. I’m afraid that while my phone is humping the cappuchino machine, it gets poor reception, and my voice mail has iterated out pretty far recently and it asks for instructions in Esperanto right now. My Esperanto isn’t very good. I’ve tethered it to my PAN for now, but that just pisses it off and I’m afraid it might start dropping calls on purpose.
I mean, I understand the whole principle of evolutionary processes in iterative product design, and the eggs that the phone lays usually net me enough credit to pay my carrier bills, but I think there’s something wrong with this one. Nobody else I know has a phone that screws so much. I tried calling technical support yesterday, but all I got was a calm voice of a woman telling me that the problem that I was calling about had already been diagnosed and a hotfix was being deployed promptly. There’s something a little unsettling about technical support that knows what you’re calling about before you even dial the number.
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Now my phone seems a little depressed, and I’m wondering if I should have made that call after all. The touch display doesn’t seem as bright, and the ring tones that normally match my mood towards the caller are all break-up songs from the 80s that I barely even recognize. I promise the phone that I’ll let it off its tether at the next skin-PAN party, and that seems to cheer it up a little bit, but it’s still not the same. I think I kind of miss my slutty phone. So I call technical support again. All I get is an error message, saying that my problem can’t be diagnosed, in a tone of voice that implies that I don’t really have a problem, and then it gives me the URL for a dating site I haven’t tried yet. I use my phone to upload a profile to the site, and I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t just set this phone free and upgrade to something from the next hatch.
Okay, so maybe not. This phone is black, and that color isn’t trending well lately, so my chances of getting a new one in the color I like is pretty slim. I’ll wait a couple more days and see if black comes back. It’s usually popular on Wednesdays.

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