Today's Word: Opinions

Opinions are NOT like assholes. Every asshole can be put to proper use.

Opinions are like brains. Everybody has one and they all think theirs is worth something.



-- david j.

Water fell from a hole in the sky – about nine thousand gallons an hour. The water was not particularly interesting. It was brackish, filled with common trace elements, and it smelled of sulfur. It posed no particular threat to the Earth.
What made this water interesting was that it poured from a black, two-dimensional circle six hundred feet in diameter about four thousand feet above the surface of the Atlantic Ocean seven miles off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
For three days the American military and scientific community had studied the phenomenon, sampling the salty rain and monitoring the hole by every conceivable means from merely eyeballing it to searching its depths with Doppler sonar. All agreed something, or, more rightly, many somethings, moved just behind the portal’s featureless black surface. And those somethings were, by human standards, huge.
Waves lapped against an orange and white Coast Guard cutter anchored below and just outside the portal’s fall zone. The boat had been retrofitted to handle several hundred pounds of radio transmission equipment and computers. Painted in blue letters on the ship’s stern was the name Contact.
“You ready for this?” asked Dr. Teller, the team’s resident chaos theorist and computational pattern analyst.
“Not gonna get readier,” quipped Dr. Alysan Mizen. Unlike Teller, she had no formal ties to NSA, CIA or any of the other three-letter govie agencies. Her game was communications theory, especially as it applied to hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations. Funny how that had seemed laughable to most of her peers until about seventy hours ago. Now she was on the verge of directly contacting a non-human, sentient intelligence for the first time in homosapien history while all her friends who had gone into telecommunications to make the big bucks watched on Fox and CNN.
“Okay, this is it people. We’re blasting the first twenty prime numbers at three hundred gigs, ten watts, and twenty megs of bandwidth. If you’ve got a TV dinner you want warmed up, just plunk it on the dish,” said Alysan getting several smiles and even one real chuckle from the taciturn govies.
Her finger hovered over the target pad on her laptop as she started a countdown.
“Ten, nine, eight. . . “
A sleek, black cigarette boat raced across the water, ripping up the surf and churning a plume of white froth in its wake. Coast Guard ships plowed after it, sirens blazing, and men on microphones screamed hoarsely for it to cease its ingress towards Contact.
“Oh, shit,” said Dr. Teller.
Must be a religious freak or one of those weirdo sci-fi people, thought Alysan.
The cigarette boat flew towards the scientists at incredible speed, bouncing on the waves like a toy. Dr. Teller dived over the side and the other govies followed. Contact’s captain yelled for them to stop, but they were already in the water.
“I can’t start the engines with them right below us,” he cried at Alysan, as if she could pull the govies back on deck. For her part she ran for the bow, carrying the laptop with her.
The cigarette boat’s engines died suddenly and it turned at so sharp an angle Alysan thought it must surely roll, but somehow it remained upright coming to a near stop only feet from Contact. A canopy door popped upward on the black craft and a woman maladroitly tumbled out, flopping into the water with all the grace of a log.
She beat water, swimming hard as the Coast Guard ships tried to maneuver around her abandoned boat. Several uniformed men with rifles stood at the rails, but they seemed reluctant to fire in Contact’s direction. Thank God.
Alysan peered down at the woman, who was slowly approaching a sea ladder on Contact’s port side.
“Alysan!” the woman screamed as she struggled to grab a rung in the churning waters.
Alysan moved closer, her heart thundering at hearing her name. She placed the laptop on a secure stand and bent towards the mystery woman.
“Do not approach the suspect,” said an amplified voice from the nearest Guard cutter.
Alysan bent and gave the woman a hand onto deck.
When the woman cleared the rail, dripping and coughing, Alysan saw her own face, aged and worn and damaged. The older Alysan wore a dirty bandage around her head, covering her left eye. The bandage was caked with dried blood. Her left cheek bore an open gash that no longer bled, but looked hours fresh. Her brown hair was ratty and parts of it had been singed away. She wore a blue coverall splattered with what could only be more blood and whorls of some yellowish oily substance. Here and there her pasty white skin showed through holes in the fabric.
“You’re me,” said younger Alysan.
Older Alysan took her by the shoulders gripping hard.
“Don’t send that code,” she said in a cracked voice.
“Something goes wrong?”
“The Carcosai, they’re language is radio frequency. The first twenty primes are a threat – a grievous insult – a declaration of war. The moment you sent it the holes opened everywhere. The Carcosai – they are. . . tentacled, bulbous, many-eyed, the size of mountains. They were like titans, ripping down our cities, absorbing the brunt of our weapons like pin-pricks.”
“Stay where you are,” said the guardsman’s amplified voice as the cutter neared it’s engine idling.
“How did you get here?” asked young Alysan.
“No time!”
Old Alysan dashed to the laptop, typed furiously for several seconds and then smashed her hand down on the send pad.
In a matter of seconds a return message arrived, and then something huge, green, and sporting at least seven hundred tentacles eased slowly out of the hole overhead to float there dripping water into the sea.
“OH HELL!” said the Coast Guardsman who had never switched off his mic.
“What’d you send?”
“Six, six, six. The Carcosai holy greeting.”

END

Today’s Word: Anomie (A recycle from 2003)



The mid twenty-first century saw an anomie of the middle class as conservatism and moral integrity weakened like pillars under the crushing arms of a long-haired Samson. Three generations -- these later deemed by scholars as the weakest links in the human evolutionary chain to date -- caused the downfall of western culture through a slow erosion of respect for law, moral fiber, and empathy for the human condition. Generations X,Y, and Alpha tore our country apart with murder, fornication, and lasciviousness.

That is why, during the latter half of the century, DOCTRINE was created. We are a global organization, with government oversight committees on every ruling body in the world. Our infrastructure of neural-path GOALMASTER™ supervision nodes now spans the breadth of humanity, unobtrusively preventing immoral behavior the world over. Because of DOCTRINE, global GDP has skyrocketed by nearly three hundred percent compared to market averages just fifty years ago. Crime is at lower levels than the 1950's, even in the former United States of America.

Now that you have reached the legal age of twelve, you have been fitted with your first set of neural-path GOALMASTER™ supervision nodes. From this point on, you will enjoy a whole new world of information access, as well as global GPS positioning twenty-four hours a day. You will even be able to ask for directions or answers to taxing moral dilemmas. A DOCTRINE agent is always just a PHONE THOUGHT™ away.


-- david j.

I am writing a novel called Plan. Who knows what I'll call it in a few months, but for now it is called Plan same as its parent novella. I had already begun writing it two days ago when my wife suggested a new character. Her suggestion was spot on and I knew right away she (the new character) was spot on for the job. Of course, I had already written a scene that would involve this new character and thus spent my time tonight rewriting that scene to include her. Despite the extra work, it was well worth the effort.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Eat

I think I'll eat me some Rice Krispies. I love them things.


-- david j.

Today’s Word: Profundity


Jerry would be an iconoclast. He would delve into the human psyche, plumb the heart’s inner recesses, drive a miner’s wedge between the known of human experience and the yet-to-be-discovered. No mere banalities would serve as killing blade in his hunt for literary perfection. Profundity would be the order of the day. Every Day!

Jerry grinned as these words appeared on the screen before him having lately rolled off his fingertips.

The phone rang.

“Yeah,” he said in a distracted tone.

“Jerry, it’s Caleb, remember me? Your agent, Caleb? You were to have that new romance done last week, man. Where is it?”

Jerry glanced at the corkboard attached to his desk’s flimsy door – the one festooned with bills not a few baring the ominous label: PAST DUE.

He sighed.

“I’ll have it done in three days, Cal. Three days.”

Maybe profundity could wait a little longer.


-- david j.

The Wheel

By

David Alan Jones


I am braced by the sound of the wheel turning, its jangle hammering on the soft, early autumn air. With my hands pressed hard into the pockets of my plaid coat, I watch the wheel, spinning in the harsh glare of upright floodlights. It is a monster, filled with monsters, and so it makes a monstrous sound.

Sometime in late summer, no one bothered to mark the date, the fair rolled into town. Center of the freak show stage, the exotic dancers' tent (shaped like a huge, red turban), and the hall of a thousand screams, a group of well-tanned and dirty laborers constructed a massive wheel. It was silver; thick aluminum, about the width of my arm, and the perfect length to accommodate a fifty gallon drum -- the kind you see bums using to contain campfires in the city.

The fair never began. Oh, there was an opening night, but no one rode the carousel, or the bumper cars, or even the flax sack slide which had always been so popular with the children. Everyone was drawn to the wheel; young, old, and hammered. The mayor was there with his wife and kids. Satchel Browne from the firehouse stood nearby. Several boys from the coal mine slouched in a black-stained gaggle near the floodlights.

A geek appeared at the great wheel's base. I say appeared, because he was not and then he was; a lank, thin man in a top hat and tails, his long white hair heavy on his spare shoulders.

"A goodly crowd we have tonight," he said, without benefit of megaphone or loudspeaker. But we all heard him. "My name is Marcus Paid, and this is the wheel of Equipoise."

"How's it work?" asked the Mayor.

Paid smiled – his teeth were crooked, yellow things – and said, "Step close Mr. Mayor, and let me show you."

"Have we met?" said the fat man.

Marcus Paid ignored him.

Two young men, both clad in overalls and nothing else, rolled a fifty gallon drum into the light. It was military green and looked heavy.

"The lid, if you would be so kind, Enos," said Paid.

Enos, the larger of the two men, prised the lid off with a crowbar. Every eye in town was on that drum.
"The wheel isn't a taker, it's a giver," said Paid, addressing the crowd, his eyes like two black spheres in his head.

He lifted a dress out of the drum, and I heard several women near me suck in their breaths. It looked to be silk, or perhaps moleskin, in the gathering darkness. It was purple and gold, its sleeves pricked with pearls, and its long skirts adorned with pleats.

"It was a favored thing, this dress," said Paid, showing those hideous teeth once more. "But the woman who owned this pretty ornament was a sad creature indeed. She had no want for material things, but her heart was empty as a well gone dry. Much like many of you."

Paid's last words hung on the air -- or perhaps on our ears -- creeping round our collective thoughts. And the longer he was silent, the more I knew he was right.

"This dress was her pride. It was the mark of her station -- her place above the masses. While she dined in solemn luxury, her neighbors starved. The day she gave this dress to the wheel, was the day she found true happiness. Now she is light. Now she is the same."

"Sir, I'll have you know we don't allow scams in our town. You may take us for rubes, but we have the might of law on our side," said the Mayor, trying to bluster over Paid's incontrovertible words.

"Give me your ring, Mayor. Put it in the drum. If you don't feel immediately lightened of your high station; if you don't realize in that very instant that we are all the same, then I'll return the ring to you. I'm promising you communion with your fellow man. Or do you think yourself so great compared to the common folk that you won't share in their plight?"

I wasn't sure what "plight" Paid meant, but I felt it all the same. The Mayor was being a stuffed pants bill grubber.

The crowd started to murmur, and the Mayor looked nervous.

"Alright," he said, pulling a thick gold ring off his thick short finger. We all knew that it was an academy ring, but I can't remember which academy. No one does, not even the mayor.

He dropped the ring in the drum and the young men sealed it up with the dress under the watchful eyes of Marcus Paid.

When they hoisted the drum onto the wheel I could hear other things, some metal, some paper, rattling inside. Even then I didn't wonder what those things were. It didn't matter.

With braided horse rope they secured the drum to the inside of the wheel's arching form. When it was done, Marcus Paid pulled a lever on the wheel's base, and the behemoth began to spin.

It was a slow thing, moving the little drum the way an elephant might move a tick on its sagging belly. We watched as the drum rolled up one side, across the upper curve (so like a slate sky), down the other side, and then back near to our humble place on the earth.

When the drum was even again, when it lay with its bottom facing our Mayor, Paid touched his arm and said, "Do you want the ring back, Morty?"

"No, sir," said the Mayor, his voice not so much sound as air seeping from his guts. He whispered something, but none of us could hear.

Paid leaned close, then turned, smiling at the crowd. "He wants to go home and get his bowling ball for the wheel."

We cheered. Our mayor had conquered his vice. It wasn't something anyone said; nothing we discussed later that night over coffee and cake. It just was.

And so the town lined up. Paid had no end of fifty gallon drums, and the wheel seemed like a voracious beast ready to eat up our pride like maggots on infection.

That night I was number thirty in line. I put my lucky quarter and a twenty dollar bill of no significance into an off-white drum. I've never had much to speak of, but money has always been my vice.

Days and weeks have come and gone. The fair is still in town, though it was scheduled to move out just two weeks after it arrived. Everyday we gather at the wheel, watching it turn afternoon into night into morning. It's finally filling up, as our good townsfolk empty out their prideful lives into the wheel's ready circle.

Yesterday the Ingles put their daughter, Maryanne, into a yellow drum. She was sleeping.

A beautiful girl, that Maryanne; her parents' greatest pride. I remember my own mother commenting once how she wished she'd had a little girl so pretty, with long golden hair, dimples, and striking blue eyes. Maryanne cried for quite a few hours, but she's stopped now. I guess those drums are airtight.




END

Today's Word: Suffer

I was thinking. . .

It's sad when you grow so old that people no longer laugh when you trip and fall. Better to suffer embarrassment than pity.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Speak

You don’t teach a dog to speak and then ask it if it still wants to eat cats. Of course it still wants to eat cats, only now it can have them delivered off the internet.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Square

My first idea would not fit into 1k words. I went back to square one and found a little tale up in the right hand corner, right there in a tiny crack -- I had never taken such a hard look at square one; its surface is uneven and rough and pitted.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Witty

Witty people don't have to cuss. If you aren't so witty. . . to hell with it.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Simulation

"So you see, we're not really on earth, though I don't doubt there once was an earth -- probably long since destroyed by its own sun," said George Trenlor, president of the Lucas Falls chapter of the Society for and Enlightened People (SEP).

"We're really in a big computer simulator," said Kaleb, a news reporter for the Lucas Fall Observer.

"That's right," said George with a genuine smile. I might have a convert here, he thought.

"Isn't that just like that Matrix movie?" asked Kaleb.

"Well, yes, but Dr. Provelmein, the founder of our society, put forth this idea back in 1949. So you see, we knew about the Truth long before some Hollywood-types stole it."

"Right," said Kaleb, making a note. "And your society claims we invented the computers running this massive simulation ourselves."

"Not us, our ancient ancestors. Humans once had incredible technology. We once harnessed the power of stars and traveled this entire galaxy. But our people saw that we were essentially a blight on the universe -- we polluted everything, everywhere. They were so disheartened, they decided to build a simulation that would care for us and give us the semblance of a new start while also protecting the environment from our harmful influence."

"Uh-huh. And you also claim that most associations here don't matter?"

"They don't matter. Our children are not real; they're just computer programs built to simulate humans. We --"

"Wait, wait," said Kaleb, holding up a hand. "You're saying my kids aren't real because some computer randomly generated them"

"Not randomly. They are made to look and act much like real children created from your own genes might."

"How long has this been going on?"

"Twenty million years."

Kaleb stared for a moment. "Twenty million?"

"Yes."

"Then are you a computer program?"

George looked perplexed.

"Of course not."

"Then how could you be one of the original real people? Human's don't live twenty million years."

"I --" George swallowed. "I. . . never --"

"Only the first generation would have been real people, right? After that we would all be fake."

"Twenty-five years," said George in a choked whisper.

"Excuse me?"
"I believed in this crap for twenty-five years and I never questioned it. I lost my wife, my girls. Oh, God, the kids -- my girls -- I thought they didn't matter. I thought they were just programs. I treated them that way."

Kaleb was scribbling frantically in his little notebook. After a moment he looked up into a face as broken as any he had ever seen in his twenty-four years.

"Sorry."



-- david j.

Today's Word: Burn


The stomach burns only what the brain earns.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Cabal

Kristie's face was askew. Her pouting lips hung from the right side of her jaw. Her nose dangled from her left cheek. One eye was large, bulbous, and knobby like an overgrown yam. The other stretched around the curve of her temple so that the lashes spread out like blades on a fan. The rest of her head seemed normal enough, though her hair was dishevled from sleep. Her body too looked okay. Her pink PJs with hundreds of white covorting sheep clung to her small frame the same as ever. No strange bulges or inexplicable chasms maligned her torso or limbs. In her arms Kristie clutched the teddy bear her mother had made her last Christmas.

"Daddy?" she said from the side of her face. To Roger she sounded somehow electronic -- somehow modulated like an AM signal that has traveled just a little too far to reach your crystal.

Roger shivered.



-- david j.

Today's Word: Static

Roger sat before his computer, clicking away, guiding his screen through site after site with no real direction. He had nothing to do. Sharon was in the shower and the kids were in bed. He had plenty of time to potato-surf wherever he liked.

A sound came from down the hallway. It was a small and tinny like the squelch of a CB between stations. Roger lifted his head, listened, heard nothing further and went back to his aimless searching.

He had just found a site explaining the history of his favorite candy when he heard the sound again. It still sounded tinny and kind of drawn out, but this time it held the distinctive note of a child's cry.

He was up and moving down the hall for the kids' room in an instant. Oliver and Kristie were too old to cry for no reason. Usually, when one or the other did cry, it was because they had to pee but were too sleepy to get out of bed. Five-year-olds could be so lazy sometimes.

As Roger neared the twins' room, he heard the sound yet again. This close up, it sounded like maybe he had forgotten to shut the kids' TV off after their weekend movie. Sometimes the DVD's blue light would make the kids cry because it was so annoying.

The TV was off when Roger opened the door. Shadows obscured the happy, dancing bears parading across the walls and the myriad stuffed animals and plastic trucks on the floor and arranged atop every free shelf. In the center of the room Roger could just make out his daughter, standing, hands raised to her face. He blinked, not trusting his eyes.

"Daddy?" said Kristie. Her voice came out in a high-pitched squelch that echoed into the hallway.

"What's the matter, baby. What happened to your --"

Kristie stepped forward so that the hallway light spilled onto her face. Roger gasped.


To be continued


-- david j.

Today's Word: Fealty


Overn stumbled, nearly losing his balance to the morasse of blood-soaked earth at his feet. His enemy, the Martin King, rushed forward, trying to take advantage of Overn's misstep. He thrust his sword at the Stromerean warrior's side, but Overn was too young and too fast for the king. He gained his balance by pushing forward into the slide and then twisted his whole frame so that, for an instant, he stood at a right angle to the Martin King.

Overn struck with such force that his sword pierced through the king's armor. Its point protruded from the doomed man's back.

The Martin King dropped to his knees, his eyes wide -- pupils rapidly dilating -- and fixed on his killer.

As the king's last breaths rattled out his mouth, Overn bent forward and said, "You really thought I would swear fealty to you?"



-- david j.

Recommendation from the author:

If you haven't read David Brin's Kiln People then you should.

That is all.

-- david j.

Today's Word: Dam

Everything was silent.

Father was driving the old '42 Ford with both hands on the wheel. He wore his brown suit, derby hat, and an expression of mild concentration. Mother sat beside him in her blue Sunday dress, her hands folded primly in her lap.

Little Roy sat in the back alone, watching the thick forests that fronted the road pass by. The trees gave suddenly away to a waterscape far below as the Ford bumped onto a bridge.

"Look, Ma, a dam," said little Roy, pointing.

Mother eyed the bland cement structure across the man-made lake below.

"That's not a dam, Roy. It's a railroad. See the rails up on top? Their using it for a bridge."

"I know," said Roy. "It's a dam railroad!"

Father laughed. Mother slapped Roy.

Everything was silent.


-- david j.

Today's Word: Loafer

"And then there's the matter of your chef's shoes," said Mama Yont, the head cook at Echoes Town and Country Bistro.

"My chef shoes?" said Ray.

Mama Yont pointed at the brown loafers on Ray's plump feet.

"You wore them into my kitchen. You came here with the expectation of preparing food. Those must be your chef shoes."

Ray looked as his loafers and then looked at the nearly pristine white slippers Mama wore.

"Do you see a difference?" asked Mama, raising one arched eyebrow. She never bothered to follow his gaze to her own shoes.

"I sure do," said Ray.

"And what do you see?"

"I see there's dog poop on your left one."



-- david j.

Something I had forgotten.

Do a page search for "The Deal Closer" (no quotes).
http://www.deadmule.com/content/index2.php?type=archive


-- david j.