Sep 10, 2023
(via Food for Thought (Sci-Fi Flash Fiction))
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(via Food for Thought (Sci-Fi Flash Fiction))
The psychonauts’s capsule plunged into the collective psychic pool. The mysterious song no one had been able to identify slithered between their minds like the wind, guiding them away from the surface.
Lyrics evaporated one word into the other, notes became colors and colors became suns, and queen bees nested in them.
There it was, lodged between a memory and a desire for more, the cosmic song whose origin they’d been commissioned to investigate. They managed to unstick it.
Excited, they made for the surface. But they’d strayed too far. The mystery they’d entered was dissolving, fog-like, sweeping them along.
(via Like the Wind)
“Among shiny towers of data he surfed. Spambots attacked him. He dodged. He fired back. He surfed on.”
(via The Synthwave Surfer's Sacrifice (Sci-Fi Flash Fiction Story))
When Zachary Hartman asked her to prom, she spent the morning in the bathroom crying with happiness.
She had been talking about him on the phone just some weeks before. “Dream on, girl,” Marion had laughed. “Well, mom says thunderstorms leave strange things behind,” she’d responded, looking wistfully at the foreboding sky outside.
The day arrived, dripping with expectations, light-headed, dazzling. Zachary picked her up. They approached the venue.
Then she noticed him from a distance, entering with Jeanne Balducci slung around his arm. And her Zachary’s fingers stretched inhumanly on her shoulder. And he dragged her toward the woods.
(via The Prom)
Makers of History
“I’m Empress Rathoi!” Nili screeched from her dingy cubicle. “Every two damn minutes,” Anned grunted, turning in her sleeping bag. Old Nili was getting worse.
Anned wasn’t much better off. She’d wind up a meaningless husk, like everyone else on Toreadis. Yet something rebelled within her, coherent, alive, like the stars judging her from above the collapsed Toreadian skyline.
The following day she snuck onto an airship for Arctamam. First, the pirates welcomed her among their ranks; and when the constitution was abolished, the revolutionaries. After the war, she was crowned empress.
Nili never knew of her role in history.
MQS
“I’m Empress Rathoi!” Nili screeched from her dingy cubicle.
Grandpa Dell
Grandpa Dell always had the most sensible explanation for everything. When we kids discovered an alien in the forest and everyone was weaving stories around it, Grandpa Dell said it was just an aborted deer.
When the seamstress was accused of witchcraft and everyone swore she’d hexed them, he laughed at people’s credulity.
Around him, I felt the world’s contours were well-defined, its contents ordinary.
It was when I went looking for him and caught him in the forest sucking a doe’s blood through suction cups in his mouth that I understood the world truly was unremarkable, compared to him.
Grandpa Dell always had the most sensible explanation for everything.
The Soul's Journey
From the Microcosmicon, 33:
The Explorer III reached the end of the Suctan system eight months after departure. But when the ship was about to trespass, it… bumped into the sky?
Suddenly a slit of light tore across the vastness. Then it yawned open, revealing not the outer universe the Suctanians had observed from afar, but an endless contortion of titanic interlocking mechanisms, each feeding into the other with impersonal, meaningless coherence.
Finally, a voice echoed from the reddish depths. “Welcome back, souls. Now that you have spontaneously gained consciousness of the nature of things, you are fit to enliven us. We’re one again.”
The Explorer III reached the end of the Suctan system eight months after departure. But when the ship was about to trespass, it… bumped into
“They celebrate the day of their birth?” Tannuz asked, puzzled, as he adjusted his holographic camouflage. Humans were delicious, but also easily startled. “Yup. Help me with the card,” Xondon said.
Tannuz thought about it, then scribbled something. “What do you think?” “It just says ‘Happy Birthday,’” Xondon mumbled, “be more creative or they’ll become suspicious.” Tannuz got back to work. “Better?” “'Happy Birthday, hope it’s the best.' Ok… But wouldn’t that imply the next one’s gonna be worse?” Tannuz corrected the card again.
“Now?” “'Happy Birthday, hope it’s the best (and last) one!' Perfect! No one will suspect anything!”
(via Blending In With The Locals)