Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Made of Fail
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
After twelve years, the Gate, constructed on Peaks Island off the coast of Maine, was complete. The Cancrians had removed their spaceships from where they had been parked around Portland and Brunswick, explaining that their drive mechanisms would interfere with the Gate’s operation. We–everybody, I mean, the whole world–was watching when the First Lady, escorted by an honor guard of Marines and several of the tall, hunched Cancrians, stepped up to flip the switch.
And by “everyone,” I don’t just mean Americans: this had been a world effort. After the initial arguments, the raging debate, a feeling had gradually spread that the interstellar age really had dawned, and it was our destiny to enter it as a species. I doubt there were more than a few thousand people in the entire world who weren’t there in Portland or else glued to their TVs to see the Gate opened.
There had been speeches, you know, obviously. I’m not going to tell you there weren’t speeches. But who cares about the speeches? What could they say other than “Wow, we’re about to open a portal directly onto another populated planet! How cool is that? And scary. And sobering. Wow, people!” Not much. The speeches took up an hour and a half, but that’s all they said.
The First Lady stepped up to the control pedestal, and a deep, stomach-shaking whirr shook the world as it lit up automatically. She placed her hand on the receptor, and with a sound like angels gargling, the Gate opened, spilling light out onto the massive crowd. We looked through it and saw … Maine. There was a grinding noise. Something crackled, and all at once the lights on the unit went out. It was deathly quiet. The Gate had failed.
We were all stunned for a little while, so stunned that I think it was at least a few minutes before anyone realized that the Cancrians had snuck off somewhere. Where were they? The odd, shy, infinitely harmless-seeming Cancrians … what had happened to them? And why, when they clearly were technological geniuses, didn’t their gate work?
“Hey!” someone shouted (I later found out that he had been checking a Hawai’ian webcam on his Blackberry). “Where the hell is the Pacific Ocean?”
Bam!
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
“If I ever tell you I want to get married again,” my friend Rick told me when his divorce finally came through, “I want you to punch me in the face. Hard.”
I laughed.
“I’m not kidding!” he insisted. “Promise me.”
“I’m not going to punch you,” I said.
I figured he’d drop it, but half an hour later, I found myself saying “OK, fine. If you ever try to get engaged again, I’ll punch you.”
*
Nine months later, Rick blew into my kitchen with two oversized bottles of Belgian beer.
“Guess what?” he crowed. “I’m engaged!”
“To who?” I said. “Not Marie, right?”
He popped open the beers on the counter. “Oh, I know she comes off a little cold-blooded right off, but you’ll warm up to her, seriously.”
Obviously I didn’t punch him, but I mentioned a few important facts: Marie was always making Rick do things her way. She’d screwed her uncle over on that loan. She left hot water running. And my dog, who was a great judge of character, hated her.
“And Rick,” I said, “you told me to punch you if you ever said you were getting married again.”
“I meant to somebody like Erika!” He said. “This is completely different.”
*
I hardly saw Rick over the next two months, but one day he called me from the police station.
“Assault?” I said when I picked him up. “They took you in for assaulting her?”
“Yeah,” Rick said. “Good thing my cell phone does video. You want to see her scratching herself? It’s actually kind of hot.”
*
Did I mention I time travel? It’s no big thing: it just happens sometimes when I’m asleep. I think it’s usually when my brain gets stuck on something. I go to sleep and wake up maybe a few months or a year earlier.
That’s what happened about a week after the assault incident: I looked over at my calendar clock one morning and noticed it was four months earlier than when I’d gone to bed. So I got up and called my broker. (Well, how do you think I got this huge house and the pool and the cars and everything, an unemployed slacker like me? First the lottery, then investments.)
After that, I went out with some of the same girls I had the last time and got an early start cutting back on my cholesterol. I was just taking my fish oil capsules one afternoon when Rick walked with two oversized bottles of Belgian beer.
I punched him.