Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
The Big Un-Sale
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
The Big Un-Sale
Every New Year’s Eve, we watch the crowds converging on the old shopping centres. Last year the Committee decided it was now 2031 AD, and all the clean-burning hydrogen engines were un-sold. So the car parks are filled with fume-spewing internal combustion engines, and that’s progress for you.
New Year’s Eve is our most shameful day. The day when each store becomes an un-store, and the voting public takes illegal tech back from whence it came. And we as a people are accepting the decisions of the Committee as a fait accompli!
Our organisation has been monitoring the Committee’s Annual List, and each Boxing Day we’ve noticed an alarming trend. While the first Un-Sale was a measured subtraction of one calendar year, sometimes the powers that be have been deducting three or even five years from our current Technology Standard. While it’s admirable that developing nations have been benefiting from our deductions, we ask when it’s all going to stop.
Are you going to be one of the mindless horde that trudges to the Collection Point, list in hand? Every person that takes the Committee’s buy-back money is a collaborator, and our great culture is being sold off, one year at a time. When the day comes, will you cheerfully hand back your MyVisor, or happily give up the cancer-inducing mobile telephony that you’ve only just gotten used to again?
It’s simply ridiculous, and we cannot go back to plasma televisions, nor the telegraph.
In particular, we the people object to the inclusion of the following items on this year’s Annual List:
• FleshSlaves, models Beta and Gamma
• Neurolink cyber interface, all models
• All vehicles fitted with the Perfecto bio-diesel system.
• MilliGro brand custom algae farms
Signed,
Concerned Citizens for Tech Protection.
The Changing of the Times
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
It used to be all about magical swords. Blessed steel wreathed in flame, all that. Truth be told, I have, in the past, opined of the increasingly mundane nature of the magical armament. So there is at least a small part of me that stands up and cheers when the tattooed bastard reaches to his scabbard and pulls out a shimmering blue blade that crackles with fire.
On the other hand, the larger part of me is tied to a chair and couldn’t stand up to cheer even if it wanted to. Which it doesn’t.
I’d been tracking the trail of bodies for about two weeks. He’d been picking of virgins as he goes-which can’t have been as easy as it was when he first walked the earth. I followed him from London to Paris, across Alps, then into Germany, which is where I’m pretty sure he became aware of me because right now I’m in the back room of a strip club in Berlin, with my hands bound by stockings, which is not half as pleasant as several magazines have led me to believe.
However, despite appearances I do have a few things going in my favor. For starters, apparently stockings were not a prevalent item in twelfth century Egypt, so my tattooed friend, Mahut As-Ghul, is not entirely familiar with their unsuitability as bindings.
I kick back in the chair at about the same time the nylon rips. Mahut lunges. I tuck my body in and roll, but not in time to stop the blade passing through my ankle. The flesh doesn’t break but the pain is agonizing. Mahut’s blade glows brighter. Bastard just chopped off part of my soul.
Which brings me to my other and much more significant advantage. You see the operative word in my opening salvo here was that it used to be all about magical swords.
Ignoring my ankle, I draw my Glock and fire. Nothing unusual about the Glock. Standard issue for my department. But the bullets, ah yes, there’s the rub Mahut, old buddy.
A portal to several rather unpleasant dimensions is abruptly punched into Mahut’s skull. He starts to fold in on it, which really doesn’t look pleasant. Still, I can’t quite resist picking up the sword and finishing off the job the old fashioned way.