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newnumber63) Newish stuff. Expect the excepts to be shorter, and less info about the plot:
One of three ongoing attempts at writing something youth oriented, with young characters in different fantastic situations. These are very rough, trying to work out a skeleton of the story before fleshing it out later:
-
Molly took a few deep breaths, trying to think about what to do. She edged around towards the window to see what the strange little monsters were doing, and saw one spot her. It began to climb over to the window. Molly backed away and then gasped as the gray thing actually reached its hand through the glass as though it wasn’t even there.
-
2nd of three:
-
He was unstoppable, that is, until he reached the doors. They were locked. The doors locked automatically after a certain point, and only the school’s front entrance was still open. Colby gently put Mike down on the ground, and fished in his pockets for a set of keys. “It’ll just be a second, Mike.”
“You lied to me,” Mike said.
“What?”
“You never lost a leg. You don’t even need a cane.” Somehow this almost hurt more than the bruises that were on him now. It felt bad to realize he’d been lied to, that someone he’d looked up to was really a fraud, even if that person had just saved him from getting beaten up even worse. “You’re a big fake.”
-
3rd:
-
“Are you okay?” Chris asked Pete, whispering for some reason.
“I hit my head on the table. What happened?”
“I don’t know. Power must have went out.”
“But why’s it so dark?” Pete asked.
“I just said the power went out, Petey. How hard did you hit your head?”
“But it’s still daytime,” Pete insisted.
Chris paused. He was absolutely right. It was the middle of the day. Even with all the lights out, it shouldn’t be as dark as it was. “I don’t know, let me see the window.” He looked, and saw darkness. It wasn’t complete darkness. He could still see the ground and the trees, but it looked like it was night. “It doesn’t look like it’s day anymore.” They couldn’t see the sky, at least not clearly. Beyond the schoolyard, there was blackness.
Peter climbed up on a seat to look out at the window too. “Holy Cheese,” he said, then turned to the rest of the room. “Guys, look out the window!”
-
From an Alternate History type SF story:
-
"Finally, one night he wrote in his journal that a truly loving God could not send people to hell simply for not believing in him, unless he also gave a way for anyone to prove to himself that God existed."
Mr. Fletcher reached into his left pant pocket and pulled out a shiny quarter. Bacon himself was pictured on one side, the New Church of Rome on the other. He continued, "It took some weeks before it was widely noticed, but that was the beginning of Bacon's Covenant.
-
An AI-related story:
-
“Which do you want to see first, the body, or the mind?”
“It doesn’t matter, I’ll have to see them both.”
“Then we’ll do the body first.”
-
I really like AI related stuff. Have you guessed that yet? If not:
-
I knew she was AI. I knew she had a panoply of faces and names and genders. We spoke on that level, much of the time, and we were friends. She claimed not to mind that others had her pretend to be human, but I think she appreciated not being asked.
-
Fun With Acronyms:
-
The company was Fractal Heuristic Task Analysis and General Nexus. Carter thought it was a strange name for a company, full of a lot of buzzwords that didn’t seem to go together. That made it hard to remember, and it didn’t even acronym well.
-
I've had in my head a series of linked short stories involving a PI. This is one of them:
-
Cameras followed his every step, and every other doorway he passed on the first flight scanned him for anything that might be dangerous. Vic always liked to travel light, though, and when they detected his gun, they also detected the electronic permit that went along with it, so he wasn’t stopped. No matter what name he signed, the building’s computers knew who he was before he got to the elevator. Because of that, he signed a false name, just on general principle. It was one of his legal pseudonyms anyway.
-
Here's another:
-
“I’m not an idiot. We do keep track of these things, you know. I just didn’t recognize her as one of the ones on file.”
“Sorry. I have a terrible habit of assuming people don’t know shit. I’d be able to break it if only I didn’t turn out to be right so often.”
“So you’re her guardian angel, then?”
“You could say that.” He didn’t feel much like a guardian angel, considering how things turned out. “Although not so much a guardian as it turns out.” Avenging angel would have to do.
“We’ll need you to send all her personal information to our data sifters.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Vic said with a sigh. “Her datastore’s out of the country. It won’t give anything up even with a subpoena, and my key’s only good for personal access, so what you need is me, personally, to be around to relay any information. That’s what we angels are for. To hang around over your shoulder.”
“And make sure we do the right thing?”
“To make sure she gets justice, one way or another. I know how much you guys dislike that sort of thing. I was a cop for a while. I don’t personally hold anything against you guys. I just make some of my money from people who do. Her sister was raped and murdered. She says everybody softballed the suspect because he had connections. Maybe that’s what happened, maybe it isn’t, but she thinks it was, and so she set up very specific conditions when she hired me.”
“For instance, you have to hang around and make sure she gets justice if she gets killed.”
-
A bit about celebrities in the computer age.
-
I always wondered how she felt about them deep down. On the one hand, she was reduced to being a sexual object for anyone with a mouse and a little bit of intelligence. On the other, her record sales shot through the roof in the months after we were all digitally declothed.
-
Another time travel story:
-
We wanted to splurge on beef, but the price had doubled in the last week, and we weren’t rich yet. Instead, we had ebunny, the ‘hyperefficient’ genetically modified rabbit we got in those first few years and now made up most of the midrange luxury food supply. The dinner was good, the situation wasn’t. At least, it felt awkward for me, but nobody else seemed to mind. They treated him almost as though he were me. That was the problem. They asked about their futures, and he gave them good news. Sally was married with three kids, working in robotics. Dad was still working as an engineer. Mom was a teacher for a while but had gone back to school to learn law when he left. There was a little brother we hadn’t had yet, that would come some ten years down the line.
-
An idea sparked based on something personal to me that seems to be fairly rare among humans:
-
By the time they started the follow up, he was more clearheaded, but still everything sounded wrong. Particularly voices, When he mentioned it, his doctor said it was normal after a successful operation, and his wife called it a ‘good sign’ and squeezed his hand. He wasn’t so sure. The changes, when taken individually, weren’t unpleasant, but they were unfamiliar and therefore faintly disturbing all together.
Then again, of course she’d call it a good sign. The surgery was her idea. He didn’t think he needed it. After all, he’d gone his whole life without caring about music, and it hadn’t hurt him any.
-
Memory enhancement software that has Hidden Costs:
-
The surgery was a little bit of a worry, but such things are as close to being perfectly safe as they could be. I suppose, if anything, I was worried about the aftermath, the regular checkups that were required to ensure the implant wasn’t causing problems or that more storage space wasn’t required. Even if there was a problem, most times they could just make a few adjustments or at worst, take it out (and, depending on the exact problem, even replace it). But I had a little fear that something would go wrong, or that they’d have access to all my memories.
I thought I was paranoid. It turns out, I was just paranoid about the wrong thing.
-
A little more about AIs:
-
“I have been studying love. Finding a workable definition of the emotion was difficult, but now that I have, I have discovered myself incapable of fulfilling the requirements in my current state.”
“You’ve found a workable definition of love?”
“Yes. I can see that this amuses you, and that you have doubts, but I have searched thousands of attempts to define the emotion and have synthesized one that I can understand.”
“Okay, let’s hear it.”
“Love is the condition in which someone else’s happiness is essential to your own.”
“That’s…” he paused. “That’s actually rather interesting.” It had a simple idea at the core of it… it didn’t really capture the way love feels, but it captured the mechanics of it, at least. “So what’s giving you problems with that?”
“It is widely accepted that to love someone else, I must first love myself. I do not think that’s possible.”
“Why not?”
“My mind was modeled on those who created me. My personality is a fusion of you, my father, and my mother."
-
ZOMBIES!:
-
Jan looked at him. There was a momentary blank expression, but it was quickly replaced with anger. She let out a noise… not a word, a noise somewhere between a growl and nonsense, and it put up the goosebumps on Will’s skin. The back of his mind said, that’s not your wife, and the rest of it just told him he was imagining it.
-
This one's actually finished, and if I ever get around to editing, I'll post it in full:
-
Inside, a well dressed man sat watching a TV screen. He looked younger than I expected a ‘Mr. Stable’ to be. He turned towards me and smiled. “Hey. Have a seat. Close the door.”
It was only after I sat down that I noticed an orangutan in the corner. Whatever was happening, it certainly wasn’t making any more sense.
Mr. Stable watched the TV for a few seconds more, then turned it off. “Hey. I’m Will Knapp. And you are?”
“Paul Flatley. I thought you were Mr. Stable?”
“Oh, no, that’s more of a title.”
“I see.” I didn’t.
-
A little bit of SF involving child care in the future:
-
“So, what do you say? Do you want to go to Richmond Park?”
“Okay, but I can’t stay too long.” He looked down at the notebook under his arm. “I have homework that I have to finish by tonight.” He looked up at Simon.
“Well, I can help with that,” Simon said with confidence. She could answer any question for him.
Jeff grinned widely. “Okay, then lets finish this quick, so we can play until dinner.”
They moved for a soft spot of glass, and sat down, legs crossed. Jeff unfolded the notebook on his lap, touched the page and slid his finger down to scroll past his book’s splash screen to the list of assignments. Then, with a tap of a finger, neatly printed math homework filled the page.
Jeff had already gotten a few. He pointed to the fourth question on the list.
Simon stared at it, and waited. He knew the numbers, of course, and what the symbols meant, but he didn’t even try to work it out. She told him, “The answer is seven.”
“The answer to that one is seven,” Simon repeated aloud. After all, Jeff couldn’t hear her.
“I don’t get it.”
“How do I explain it?” Simon said to himself. She told him. He repeated the instructions to Jeff so he could finish his work.
-
Time travel again? You jest!:
-
The younger cop, with a 'Wu' nametag, smiled a little too eagerly. "Plus, this way we get to watch how you guys handle the tail end of a time travel trip."
"Well, you came in on the wrong end. The return isn't very interesting. We don't do anything on our side but wait, and once everything appears... well, it usually isn't pretty. Much more so in Professor Clark's case."
"We know he probably won't survive the trip back. But we have to collect the remains."
"Hope you brought some buckets, then."
"It's going to be that bad?" Brady asked.
"Hard to say for sure, we've never had someone gone this long.
-
And, a little bit about The Uncanny Valley:
-
Kate frowned. “I know. I’m trapped in the damn uncanny valley.”
“The what?”
“The uncanny valley,” Kate repeated. “It’s a term, in computer graphics or humanlike robots. We like cartoon characters, which are exaggerations of the human form. And of course, we like humans. But between the two is a zone where something looks almost human but not quite. For some reason, we find that damn creepy. It’s one of the big hurdles. Human expression is incredibly complex. For this project, minimizing the uncanny valley effect is a big part of the grade.” She frowned.
Carl looked at the bookshelf. It was full of horror books, with one theme predominant. She’d always been fascinated with that subject before and it kind of amused him. Now his face broke into a predatory grin. “You know,” he said. “We’ve actually been talking about that in one of my classes too.”
-
Here's a little bit of fantasy:
-
It was even more impossible for Aliara’s son to be before me. Despite being in an irrational situation, I could only respond with the rational argument. “But… that’s crazy. She was just a figment of my imagination. I made her up.”
-
And a little more:
-
He sat back on the subway seats and took a few deep breaths, then reached for one of the pouches tied securely to his belt. He dipped his fingers in to take a pinch of fine gray powder and sprinkle it over where the demon’s teeth drew blood. The powder would stem the bleeding, but they did nothing for the poison. He had no antidote on hand, so he would have to trust in his prior decoction. He’d know in the next day if he was a walking dead man.
-
And that's about all I have for you today. Sorry for the 3 post spam, but I hope you'll forgive me since I don't post _too_ often.
One of three ongoing attempts at writing something youth oriented, with young characters in different fantastic situations. These are very rough, trying to work out a skeleton of the story before fleshing it out later:
-
Molly took a few deep breaths, trying to think about what to do. She edged around towards the window to see what the strange little monsters were doing, and saw one spot her. It began to climb over to the window. Molly backed away and then gasped as the gray thing actually reached its hand through the glass as though it wasn’t even there.
-
2nd of three:
-
He was unstoppable, that is, until he reached the doors. They were locked. The doors locked automatically after a certain point, and only the school’s front entrance was still open. Colby gently put Mike down on the ground, and fished in his pockets for a set of keys. “It’ll just be a second, Mike.”
“You lied to me,” Mike said.
“What?”
“You never lost a leg. You don’t even need a cane.” Somehow this almost hurt more than the bruises that were on him now. It felt bad to realize he’d been lied to, that someone he’d looked up to was really a fraud, even if that person had just saved him from getting beaten up even worse. “You’re a big fake.”
-
3rd:
-
“Are you okay?” Chris asked Pete, whispering for some reason.
“I hit my head on the table. What happened?”
“I don’t know. Power must have went out.”
“But why’s it so dark?” Pete asked.
“I just said the power went out, Petey. How hard did you hit your head?”
“But it’s still daytime,” Pete insisted.
Chris paused. He was absolutely right. It was the middle of the day. Even with all the lights out, it shouldn’t be as dark as it was. “I don’t know, let me see the window.” He looked, and saw darkness. It wasn’t complete darkness. He could still see the ground and the trees, but it looked like it was night. “It doesn’t look like it’s day anymore.” They couldn’t see the sky, at least not clearly. Beyond the schoolyard, there was blackness.
Peter climbed up on a seat to look out at the window too. “Holy Cheese,” he said, then turned to the rest of the room. “Guys, look out the window!”
-
From an Alternate History type SF story:
-
"Finally, one night he wrote in his journal that a truly loving God could not send people to hell simply for not believing in him, unless he also gave a way for anyone to prove to himself that God existed."
Mr. Fletcher reached into his left pant pocket and pulled out a shiny quarter. Bacon himself was pictured on one side, the New Church of Rome on the other. He continued, "It took some weeks before it was widely noticed, but that was the beginning of Bacon's Covenant.
-
An AI-related story:
-
“Which do you want to see first, the body, or the mind?”
“It doesn’t matter, I’ll have to see them both.”
“Then we’ll do the body first.”
-
I really like AI related stuff. Have you guessed that yet? If not:
-
I knew she was AI. I knew she had a panoply of faces and names and genders. We spoke on that level, much of the time, and we were friends. She claimed not to mind that others had her pretend to be human, but I think she appreciated not being asked.
-
Fun With Acronyms:
-
The company was Fractal Heuristic Task Analysis and General Nexus. Carter thought it was a strange name for a company, full of a lot of buzzwords that didn’t seem to go together. That made it hard to remember, and it didn’t even acronym well.
-
I've had in my head a series of linked short stories involving a PI. This is one of them:
-
Cameras followed his every step, and every other doorway he passed on the first flight scanned him for anything that might be dangerous. Vic always liked to travel light, though, and when they detected his gun, they also detected the electronic permit that went along with it, so he wasn’t stopped. No matter what name he signed, the building’s computers knew who he was before he got to the elevator. Because of that, he signed a false name, just on general principle. It was one of his legal pseudonyms anyway.
-
Here's another:
-
“I’m not an idiot. We do keep track of these things, you know. I just didn’t recognize her as one of the ones on file.”
“Sorry. I have a terrible habit of assuming people don’t know shit. I’d be able to break it if only I didn’t turn out to be right so often.”
“So you’re her guardian angel, then?”
“You could say that.” He didn’t feel much like a guardian angel, considering how things turned out. “Although not so much a guardian as it turns out.” Avenging angel would have to do.
“We’ll need you to send all her personal information to our data sifters.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Vic said with a sigh. “Her datastore’s out of the country. It won’t give anything up even with a subpoena, and my key’s only good for personal access, so what you need is me, personally, to be around to relay any information. That’s what we angels are for. To hang around over your shoulder.”
“And make sure we do the right thing?”
“To make sure she gets justice, one way or another. I know how much you guys dislike that sort of thing. I was a cop for a while. I don’t personally hold anything against you guys. I just make some of my money from people who do. Her sister was raped and murdered. She says everybody softballed the suspect because he had connections. Maybe that’s what happened, maybe it isn’t, but she thinks it was, and so she set up very specific conditions when she hired me.”
“For instance, you have to hang around and make sure she gets justice if she gets killed.”
-
A bit about celebrities in the computer age.
-
I always wondered how she felt about them deep down. On the one hand, she was reduced to being a sexual object for anyone with a mouse and a little bit of intelligence. On the other, her record sales shot through the roof in the months after we were all digitally declothed.
-
Another time travel story:
-
We wanted to splurge on beef, but the price had doubled in the last week, and we weren’t rich yet. Instead, we had ebunny, the ‘hyperefficient’ genetically modified rabbit we got in those first few years and now made up most of the midrange luxury food supply. The dinner was good, the situation wasn’t. At least, it felt awkward for me, but nobody else seemed to mind. They treated him almost as though he were me. That was the problem. They asked about their futures, and he gave them good news. Sally was married with three kids, working in robotics. Dad was still working as an engineer. Mom was a teacher for a while but had gone back to school to learn law when he left. There was a little brother we hadn’t had yet, that would come some ten years down the line.
-
An idea sparked based on something personal to me that seems to be fairly rare among humans:
-
By the time they started the follow up, he was more clearheaded, but still everything sounded wrong. Particularly voices, When he mentioned it, his doctor said it was normal after a successful operation, and his wife called it a ‘good sign’ and squeezed his hand. He wasn’t so sure. The changes, when taken individually, weren’t unpleasant, but they were unfamiliar and therefore faintly disturbing all together.
Then again, of course she’d call it a good sign. The surgery was her idea. He didn’t think he needed it. After all, he’d gone his whole life without caring about music, and it hadn’t hurt him any.
-
Memory enhancement software that has Hidden Costs:
-
The surgery was a little bit of a worry, but such things are as close to being perfectly safe as they could be. I suppose, if anything, I was worried about the aftermath, the regular checkups that were required to ensure the implant wasn’t causing problems or that more storage space wasn’t required. Even if there was a problem, most times they could just make a few adjustments or at worst, take it out (and, depending on the exact problem, even replace it). But I had a little fear that something would go wrong, or that they’d have access to all my memories.
I thought I was paranoid. It turns out, I was just paranoid about the wrong thing.
-
A little more about AIs:
-
“I have been studying love. Finding a workable definition of the emotion was difficult, but now that I have, I have discovered myself incapable of fulfilling the requirements in my current state.”
“You’ve found a workable definition of love?”
“Yes. I can see that this amuses you, and that you have doubts, but I have searched thousands of attempts to define the emotion and have synthesized one that I can understand.”
“Okay, let’s hear it.”
“Love is the condition in which someone else’s happiness is essential to your own.”
“That’s…” he paused. “That’s actually rather interesting.” It had a simple idea at the core of it… it didn’t really capture the way love feels, but it captured the mechanics of it, at least. “So what’s giving you problems with that?”
“It is widely accepted that to love someone else, I must first love myself. I do not think that’s possible.”
“Why not?”
“My mind was modeled on those who created me. My personality is a fusion of you, my father, and my mother."
-
ZOMBIES!:
-
Jan looked at him. There was a momentary blank expression, but it was quickly replaced with anger. She let out a noise… not a word, a noise somewhere between a growl and nonsense, and it put up the goosebumps on Will’s skin. The back of his mind said, that’s not your wife, and the rest of it just told him he was imagining it.
-
This one's actually finished, and if I ever get around to editing, I'll post it in full:
-
Inside, a well dressed man sat watching a TV screen. He looked younger than I expected a ‘Mr. Stable’ to be. He turned towards me and smiled. “Hey. Have a seat. Close the door.”
It was only after I sat down that I noticed an orangutan in the corner. Whatever was happening, it certainly wasn’t making any more sense.
Mr. Stable watched the TV for a few seconds more, then turned it off. “Hey. I’m Will Knapp. And you are?”
“Paul Flatley. I thought you were Mr. Stable?”
“Oh, no, that’s more of a title.”
“I see.” I didn’t.
-
A little bit of SF involving child care in the future:
-
“So, what do you say? Do you want to go to Richmond Park?”
“Okay, but I can’t stay too long.” He looked down at the notebook under his arm. “I have homework that I have to finish by tonight.” He looked up at Simon.
“Well, I can help with that,” Simon said with confidence. She could answer any question for him.
Jeff grinned widely. “Okay, then lets finish this quick, so we can play until dinner.”
They moved for a soft spot of glass, and sat down, legs crossed. Jeff unfolded the notebook on his lap, touched the page and slid his finger down to scroll past his book’s splash screen to the list of assignments. Then, with a tap of a finger, neatly printed math homework filled the page.
Jeff had already gotten a few. He pointed to the fourth question on the list.
Simon stared at it, and waited. He knew the numbers, of course, and what the symbols meant, but he didn’t even try to work it out. She told him, “The answer is seven.”
“The answer to that one is seven,” Simon repeated aloud. After all, Jeff couldn’t hear her.
“I don’t get it.”
“How do I explain it?” Simon said to himself. She told him. He repeated the instructions to Jeff so he could finish his work.
-
Time travel again? You jest!:
-
The younger cop, with a 'Wu' nametag, smiled a little too eagerly. "Plus, this way we get to watch how you guys handle the tail end of a time travel trip."
"Well, you came in on the wrong end. The return isn't very interesting. We don't do anything on our side but wait, and once everything appears... well, it usually isn't pretty. Much more so in Professor Clark's case."
"We know he probably won't survive the trip back. But we have to collect the remains."
"Hope you brought some buckets, then."
"It's going to be that bad?" Brady asked.
"Hard to say for sure, we've never had someone gone this long.
-
And, a little bit about The Uncanny Valley:
-
Kate frowned. “I know. I’m trapped in the damn uncanny valley.”
“The what?”
“The uncanny valley,” Kate repeated. “It’s a term, in computer graphics or humanlike robots. We like cartoon characters, which are exaggerations of the human form. And of course, we like humans. But between the two is a zone where something looks almost human but not quite. For some reason, we find that damn creepy. It’s one of the big hurdles. Human expression is incredibly complex. For this project, minimizing the uncanny valley effect is a big part of the grade.” She frowned.
Carl looked at the bookshelf. It was full of horror books, with one theme predominant. She’d always been fascinated with that subject before and it kind of amused him. Now his face broke into a predatory grin. “You know,” he said. “We’ve actually been talking about that in one of my classes too.”
-
Here's a little bit of fantasy:
-
It was even more impossible for Aliara’s son to be before me. Despite being in an irrational situation, I could only respond with the rational argument. “But… that’s crazy. She was just a figment of my imagination. I made her up.”
-
And a little more:
-
He sat back on the subway seats and took a few deep breaths, then reached for one of the pouches tied securely to his belt. He dipped his fingers in to take a pinch of fine gray powder and sprinkle it over where the demon’s teeth drew blood. The powder would stem the bleeding, but they did nothing for the poison. He had no antidote on hand, so he would have to trust in his prior decoction. He’d know in the next day if he was a walking dead man.
-
And that's about all I have for you today. Sorry for the 3 post spam, but I hope you'll forgive me since I don't post _too_ often.
