Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Boost!
Monday, June 1st, 2009
Thank you for purchasing Boost! With over twenty years on the market, we’re confident that we know you and your body, inside and out. Boost! is the professional choice to keep you going when nothing else will. Used as directed, you’ll be glad you were prepared.
Boost!: Because You’re Not Done Yet!
Warning
This product may contain one or more of the following nanite constructs: subdermal wound sealants, isometric muscle enhancers, optic augmentation bots, skeletal substrate constructors (including endosteum metallizers), arch support reactive compression mechanisms, CarboTube(TM) pulmonary baffles, cochlear funneling webs, aortic bryton cyclers, pituitary magnifiers, other natural and nature-identical constructs.
Possible side-effects include: temporary blindness, intense muscle pain and joint stiffness due to accelerated growth, sensory irritation, feelings of disorientation, moments of extreme rage, prolonged elevated fever, fatigue, loss of memory, slurred speech, random outbursts, death.
Do not administer to children under six (6) or elderly over one hundred forty (140).
Instructions
Remove child-proof cap. Place patented Boost! applicator against neck as shown on applicator package. Squeeze applicator until empty. Nanites will begin rebuilding tissues and augmenting functionality immediately.
It will take approximately 1 minute, 45 seconds (1:45) from the time nanites begin rebuilding user’s tissue to full internal augmentation. We highly suggest user finds a suitable hiding place while the process completes.
When full augmentation is reached, user will have 15 minutes of enhanced functionality. The glucose pack included with the Boost! applicator will provide up to two (2) additional minutes of enhancement. Functionality beyond that time, augmented or otherwise, is neither guaranteed nor implied.
Should Boost! not perform as described and user survives partial augmentation, return applicator and packaging, along with blood and DNA samples for a refund assessment.
Use as directed. For terrestrial military use only.
Paper Cow
Friday, May 29th, 2009
X had never considered the possibility that his origami constructions might spring to life. Through all his years of paper-folding, his early fascination with the Asian craft blooming into obsession, the endless competitions, the early arthritis, the impassable barrier between his talent and his imagination, through all of this his miniature creatures remained inert, frozen in the act of running, or slithering, or pecking. But tonight, his most recent fauna, birthed from printer bond, stirred.
“We know what you have done,” said the paper cow, its hide revealing the left eye and nostril of a 13-year-old boy from Kuala Lumpur. The corner of the boy’s eye was raised, suggesting a big smile. His skin was dark and rough, as if he had spent every waking moment in the scorching Malaysian sun.
“We know,” said the paper crane, its creases half-obscuring the face of a seven-year-old girl from Semarang. Though X could not see her face, he knew it in his mind, could remember the gap made by the missing front teeth as she had grinned up at him, taking his hand and trusting him as if her own kin.
“We know,” said the lumbering paper gorilla, made from the obituary notice of two ten-year-old twin boys from Penang. Their screams, too, had been identical.
More and more of the dead-tree atrocities, the collected evidence of X’s crimes, printed from internet news stories and charity sites and then shaped into bats and elephants and frogs and tigers and pandas and a hundred other animals, rustled toward X, slow as the undead, each whispering, “We know.” An army of his perversities, his many sins, each folded animal a reminder of a life held, touched, taken.
“Stop,” X said. “I am sorry. Please stop.”
“We cannot stop,” said the paper cow, commander of this zoological army, edging ever closer to its creator. “You have made us so very thin and so very sharp.”
And then all of the origami animals moved as one.
