Archive for October, 2009
In the White Universe with Black Dots for Stars
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
Nar to the Seventh was good at his (or her or its or their) job. He (let’s say ‘he’ for a reason we shall explain anon) enclosed a mysterious ‘white hole’ and directed the streams of energy, disassociated atoms, and occasional oddities that emerged to their proper destinations.
When Sheila Blalock plummeted through, Nar was at a loss how to categorize her. She had, it was true, been mostly converted into energy. By all rights, he (and here we see why he is dubbed a ‘he’, so as all the easier to distinguish the ‘he’ from the ‘she’) — by all rights he should have discarded her matter and focused the rest of her through a series of lenses trained on the enormous Haploid Generators of Zone Negative Nine.
He paused. He examined her more closely. He disassembled and reassembled her.
“Stop that,” said Sheila.
Nar almost dropped her. To be frank, that wouldn’t have mattered one whit, since they were weightless, but it does go far to explain just how startled he was, considering he hadn’t dropped anything in four billion nings, give or take a centining.
“You talk?” he asked.
“Of course, you ninny.”
“Then you’re intelligent, and it would likely be wrong of me to send you off to power the Hap Gens.”
“It would.” She had a way of sounding quite certain about things Nar felt she likely didn’t understand. “Nice universe you’ve got here, by the way,” she continued. “Ours is the other way around, you know.”
“Other way–?”
“Black, with white stars. I quite like it this way.”
“I’m happy it meets with your approval.”
She felt he sounded a bit defensive about things over which he had no control. Pointedly, she ignored him to admire a black comet falling toward a black sun nearby.
Regarding her, he grew happy. He’d never talked to someone from another reality. Or anyone at all, really, for nings and nings.
They talked, as Nar carried on with his occupation of regulating streams of power and the odd atom. Sheila found herself warming to the colossal being, and Nar grew to admire the caustic miniscule alien and her foreign outlook.
In time they were married (‘married’ in this case meaning they intermingled their consciousnesses in arcane and occasionally itchy ways), and had an indeterminate number of children (or ‘offspring’, or ‘spawn’, or ‘self-aware agglomerations of matter and energy’).
And they lived ever after.
Mermaid Cull
Monday, October 19th, 2009
‘You cheating bastards! Open the bloody gate now!’
Erickson was standing in the back of his jeep, yelling up at the castle walls through a megaphone. Five mermaid carcasses swung from a purpose-built rail, hung by fat iron hooks through their tail-ends.
Those time-crazy sumbitches holed up in their fortress did not say anything, and made no move to open the enormous gates. He was mad now, madder than a cut snake dipped in warm piss.
‘I took out your mermaids!’ he yelled, the megaphone squealing with distortion. ‘If you folks mean to cheat me on the bounty money, I will bring you pain. Oh yes.’
Someone shot an arrow at him, and with a curse that would have made a sergeant-major crap his dacks, Erickson threw down the megaphone.
‘Enough talk,’ he said, and got behind the minigun, mounted on a swivel behind his seat. He’d stripped it from a junked copter, back when time started to get whacky.
He opened up, and the spinning barrels spat lead kisses across the top of the palisade, biting out chunks of rock and punching right through the stone in one or two places. He took out the offending archer, and a few others who didn’t duck in time.
Erickson gritted his teeth and painted the gates in a figure eight of howling bullets, splitting the wood in dozens of places. The clanging of bullets as they ricocheted against the portcullis showed that he was wasting ammo, and there was no getting through that gate.
Not without a lot more firepower.
‘I’ll get you mongrels!’ he said, no megaphone this time but the shaking of his fist passed the message through loud and clear. He swung forward into the driver’s seat, just in time to see the large arm of a trebuchet swinging up above the castle walls, releasing a chunk of some building that flew at him with uncanny accuracy.
Thankful he’d left the motor running, Erickson jammed the old jeep into gear and floored it, fishtailing through the mud as the enormous block of stone crashed into the spot he’d just been.
A second catapault launched another load of medieval fire-power, and it was only Erickson’s experience as a rally-car driver and an ex-Blackwater operative that saved his arse. Yanking up the hand-brake and spinning the wheel, he launched into a power-slide, narrowly missing a peat-digger’s shack. It exploded into a fountain of shit and stone.
‘I’ll be back for you lot,’ Erickson growled. He thumbed a cassette into the tape-player, and blasted the lonely moors with his AC/DC mix-tape, turned up as loud as it could go. ‘And when I come back, I’m gonna ruin your shit.’