Wrong About the Zombie Virus

We were wrong about the zombie virus, he said, as he pushed out the revolver cylinder, tipped the pistol up and let the six bullets drop into his palm. He placed the six bullets on the table, standing them on their ends like little soldiers all in a line. 

He flicked a finger and knocked on down. One, he said, it's airborne, not contact. Carried in saliva, spit, every time you exhale.

Flick. Another down. Two, it acts slow, not fast. Incubation is about 12 to 24 months, and you're contagious for every last second of them.

Flick. Three, the virus itself attacks the brain, it doesn't make you want to eat brains. Just slowly erodes your thinking, cognition, intelligence, turns you into a barely-sentient lump before it kills you.

Flick. Four. A virus is dumb, it doesn't think or want anything, just tries to make copies of itself. So it influences its host to do things which help it spread further and faster. Like I said, it's airborne, so the virus drives people to mindlessly mingle, to go out and blab endlessly with crowds of strangers. All those people regurgitating their lives on social media? Zombies, just mindlessly trying to follow the virus's genetic programming. 

Flick. Five. One hundred percent mortality rate. No cure. For the individual or society. Once it achieves critical mass, there's no coming back. Everything you try to do, tell people about it, educate them, just spreads it that much faster. Well okay, we got that part right. 

Six, he picked the last bullet up, and placed it back in the cylinder. Snapped it shut with a flick and pressed the barrel of the revolver under his chin. There's no band of misfits gonna save us. 

Only one way out of this. Click.

Limited Wishes

Caught myself a genie, I did, all those years ago. You know the deal, three wishes, no wishing for more wishes. Poof, there he was, big purple-skinned guy with glowing red eyes.

“For my first wish, make me a successful writer!” I commanded.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“What?”

“Hey, writing is a tough market. Lots of competition. Maybe a Blogger account? I said I’ll see what I can do.”

“Well … okay. Next, grant me a beautiful wife!”

“Hmm. Tricky.”

“WHAT?”

“Well, you’re not much of a looker, mate. Bit out of shape. Not much of a conversationalist either. Help me out here, guy, take care of yourself, dress a little better.”

“What kind of genie are you?”

“Hey, I do magic, not miracles. Want something big, try praying. Hah. See if that helps. Otherwise, stop bitching and be grateful with what you can get. Now, last wish?” 

“Are you kidding? I wish I’d never met you.”

“Done.”

And bam, that was it. So you see, this lamp once held a genie, so I couldn’t possibly let it go for less than a hundred. Seventy-five? Deal.

All that You Leave Behind

The toys watched him pack from their dusty cardboard box at the top of the shelf. They watched in silence as the door clicked with finality behind him. They sat in the echoing nothing that lingered after.

The nothing was broken by a sniffle. They looked down.

There, curled together in the corner, were the bogeyman under the bed and the closet monster. “What?” snapped the monster up at them. “You think you were the only things he left behind?”

Hello from a Dark Place

Hello from a dark place.

We're inside the event horizon here. Not even light can escape, much less a thought or a story, so if you're reading this, it means you're stuck here too. This station was built to sit beyond the horizon, exotic alloys and composites built to prevent gravity from pulping us into pasta, but we miscalculated. It's falling, and nothing can stop that now.

Welcome to your new and final home. I've got good news and bad news for you black hole buddy. 

Bad news is, there ain't no escape. Believe me, I've tried, but the station's damaged and was built for stasis, not travel. Anyway, with the nature of the singularity and space-time dilation means you are here for the duration, and you are here alone. There's just the steady and inevitable descent for you and I, and our choices are reduced to going head or feet first. 

Bummer, huh.

The good news? Sorry, there is no good news. That was just me trying to cheer you up. There's just the consolation that I can leave this note, a dead thing that will live on after me, and in this way reach beyond the horizon of light and gravity and time.

So, hello out there. Welcome to the dark place.   

A Cure for Lying

The interval between the discovery of the anti-ageing drug and its first use as a weapon was as narrow as a needle tip.

When injected, the drug undid the damage to your DNA, removed the wrinkles from your skin, scrubbed decades of neglect from your arteries. And from your brain. It unraveled all those messy, tangled connections between the neurons in your brain, those little things we call memories.

The prisoner was understandably bewildered when he came to, squinting his eyes against the accusing glare of our lights, flexing his wrists against the zip ties that kept him secured to the seat. Where was he, who were we, what did we want?

I held up the needle. "Never mind that. You know what this is?" I smiled when he swallowed and nodded, the way he always did. "Good, now let's start again. No hurry."

I put down the needle, and picked up the pliers. I grabbed, am grabbing, will grab a hundred times more one of his fingers. Hard to keep your story straight when you can't remember the lies you told last time.

"We've got all the time in the world."  

The Goddess of War

The goddess of war moved invisible among the men, like the rustle of jungle leaves before an ambush or the whistle of wind in the path of a shell. Starlit fingers, razor sharp as shell splinters, scraped across battlefields, here sparing a man, there cutting one down. 

"This one will live by hiding in a place of death," she giggled, as a city burned. "The horror will fuel his art."

"This one will one day lead his people, and his son after him," she smiled, and cast a pilot into the sea. "They will both fight wars and keep the cycle going."

The other gods and goddesses watched and wept, burying their Olympian heads in a constellation of tears. 

Their sister had gone mad.

Time Bomb

Some weapons are meant to wound, not kill. Kill a man and the enemy force is reduced by one; wound a man, and it is reduced by three--the wounded, and two more to carry them to safety. A dead man urges one to revenge, a wounded man cries out to retreat.

Among these weapons, the chrono-bomb is one of the more insidious.

The 25-year bomb went off in the Tokyo Olympic stadium in 2020 for me, in 1995 for my wife. An invisible event horizon swept through the crowd, an ever-expanding shell of lost time that annihilated today, and yesterday, yesterday's yesterday and nearly 10,000 yesterdays before that. 

The boys and I were outside, and escaped. My wife was inside.  

She died. She died and was replaced by this 20-year-old stranger, this younger version of herself who'd never met this overweight, middle-aged man, nor his two teenage sons. This younger version who came staggering, bewildered from the stadium, went stumbling straight past her family. 

In this way, the victims of the chrono-bomb are not those it affects, but those it doesn't. Our family is reduced to three, with nobody to avenge, crying out to wind back time.

 

Missing Mass Found

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am please to announce we have found the missing mass of the universe," the researcher announced to a hedgehog of microphones. "Previously, we chalked this up to dark matter, but our findings now show this theory to be wrong."

An image appeared on the screen behind her, of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, occluded by something massive, sinuous and organic. 

"Here is the missing mass!" she proclaimed. "Here, in this thing's belly! This interstellar star whale has been devouring whole star systems!"

She looked down at her notes, adjusted her glasses. "After conducting an Internet poll we have named this creature..."

She sighed.

"Whaley McWhaleface. We will not be taking any questions at this time. Thank you."