All Stories

“It’s a long way to fall, Zack.”

Zack scowled up at Anne, wishing she would go away. Bad enough to be lying on this damn hospital bed in a thin cotton dress that left his ass bare. Bad enough to be going into surgery for something wrong in his brain. Bad enough to not understand what that something was, not even after one of all those doctors had explained it, just the same way he’d never understood that kind of intellectual crap his whole stupid life. But having his sister loom over him, upright when he was down—well, wasn’t that just the icing on this particular shit cake?

“This is the devil’s own bargain you are forcing upon me, Warner Gilead, and you shall come to rue this day!”

End result: nothing “normal” satisfies us, no simple pleasures persist. Everyday living, common rewards, leave us cold. And if we can’t get high, can’t feed the need, we feel like walking corpses. No simple chemical fixes seem to work, just total kinesthetic and proprioceptic stimulation, with a side order of mental jazzing, in the form of flouting all norms, rebellion across the board.

Our world was now truly theirs. All the way across Eyrop I could see that the invaders had taken everything, and we belonged to them as beasts in a barnyard belong to the farmer.

I shall write the history of that strange and unique woman, the mother of my thirty brothers and myself, Miss Donna Mitchell. She was a person of extraordinary strength and vision, our mother.

David Baker was born in the back seat of his parents’ Chevy in the great mechanized lot at mile 1.375 x 1025. “George, we need to stop,” his mother Polly said. “I’m having pains.” She was a week early.

Professor McCafferty traces the birth of what he terms “Heroic Epic Fantasy” or “Morrisian Fiction” back to the late Victorian period, specifically the “prose romances” of William Morris.

He stood up, fascination and fear churning in his brain. There had been so much blood. And her eyes. Something had happened with her eyes after she had passed out. Unnamed panic buzzed in his veins.

Mariska’s life aboard the Shining Legend went immediately from bad to awful. Even before he singled her out, she had decided that there was no way she’d be spending the rest of her teen years crewing on an asteroid bucket. Once Beep started persecuting her, she began counting down the remaining days of the run as if she were a prisoner.

During the thirty-three years Andrew Steele occupied the Oval Office of what was then called the White House, in what was then called the United States of America (not to be confused with the current United State of Americans), on the corner of his desk he kept an antiquated device of the early twenty-first century called a taser.

I have no simulacra of her from back then. The prototype machines were very bulky, and the subject had to sit still for hours. That wasn’t going to happen with a baby.

This is the first simulacrum I do have of her. She’s about seven.

Ben Azai was deemed worthy and stood at the gate of the sixth palace and saw the ethereal splendor of the pure marble plates. He opened his mouth and said twice, “Water! Water!” In the twinkling of an eye they decapitated him and threw eleven thousand iron bars at him. This shall be a sign for all generations that no one should err at the gate of the sixth palace.

The problem with an engine powered by the rotation of the Earth is that you cannot turn it off. If you built enough of them, they would gradually steal all of the Earth’s angular momentum and the day would lengthen until the sun stood still in the sky, and then eventually start going backward.

… Cthulhu and I did indeed have a “dream-conversation,” as Otto would say. It’s not so much conversing in words as showing each other pictures—a skill I’m very good at, as the Pancake Factory is a big believer in not using words where pictures will do, considering we have visitors from across the globe. They don’t call us “imagineers” for nothing.

The Domotica units all began to print the simplified forms of mini-cathedrals at an accelerated speed that would destroy the printheads before too long. Polychromatic buttresses and gargoyles began to sprout in crazy confusion.

“You see,” Mahler said, tapping his desk. “They’ve just found another one. We’re constantly bombarded with you people. When you get to the Moon, you’ll find a whole Dome full of them. I’ve sent over four thousand there myself since I took over the bureau. And that was eight years ago—in 2776. An average of five hundred a year. Hardly a day goes by without someone dropping in on us.”

Henry hated looking so vanilla. There was nothing terrifying about him except the bad thoughts, which he told no one, not even God. But this morning the monster was cagy. It wanted to get loose and he was tired of holding it back. Something was going to happen. He decided not to shave.

I might be on the outs, but the story of the wild goose chase for Orson Welles was all around town. Four times talent scouts had been sent back to recruit versions of Welles, and four times they had failed.

He took one final look around at the aggressive future, then rotated via the Davis Equation back into Dormammu-space, or D-space as he was already mentally calling it.

No one expected volcanos to sprout up in and around Los Angeles. Cal Mattison has to deal with the aftermath.

Each samurai kept a stable of males, collecting them from other females and trading them with their favorites in the way a human might show dogs. Simple-minded and loyal, the ninjas could be set to tasks for which they would be rewarded with an opportunity to breed with the samurai.

But everything had changed after the scientists from space had landed on the old site across the river, and Daya had changed most of all. She kept her own counsel and was often hard to find. That spring she had told the elders that she didn’t need to travel to gather the right semen. Her village was happy and prosperous.

“What you gonna do down there?” the Duck asked. The Duck was puny and naïve.

“Tell me something I ain’t gonna do,” I shot back.

Well, that seemed to intrigue the Duck. “Can I come, too?”

Your body is unique. Your cells are infinitely plastic. And you contain within you a library of forms. The genomes of all the mosaics ever spliced. You can recreate them at will. And other shapes as well.

When the disc touched her skin, the cold sliced through her skull and made the roof of her mouth ache. It would monitor her actions and ensure no cheating occurred. The final trials for the prospective child-bearers differed every time, which didn’t stop people from trying to guarantee that their genes were the ones passed down.

I understand the aesthetics of its design, the efficient, functional skeleton softened by touches of cuteness and whimsy. Peggy and I once saw a show about caretaker robots for the elderly in Japan, and the show explained how the robots’ kawaii features were intended to entice old people into becoming emotionally invested in and attached to the lifeless algorithm-driven machines.

Except this couldn’t be Adele, because this girl was twenty-something and my ex was getting invites from AARP. I could tell she was young from the shoulders, which had never borne the weight of overdue bills or a curdled marriage.

It was shortly after this period, in February 1938, that Astounding Science Fiction published the first installment of Melville’s immense five-part serial, Starry Deeps, or the Wail. This cosmos-encompassing novel, which I have shown in my book Plumbers of the Future to be the first real science fiction epic, met with mixed reactions at the time.

You could count on dogs for your kids. Almost, and for the first time, I could see the point of the Domes. The aliens found humans dangerous or repulsive or uncaring or whatever, but dogs…

In itself, this transformation of his newspaper boded no ill. Such things happened millions of times daily around the globe, thanks to proteopape. And since Bash himself was the much-lauded, much-rewarded inventor of proteopape, he was positively the last person in the world to be astounded by the medium’s capacity for change.

Evergreen is a vision of white teeth, dark polyskin and post-retro body design. It is happy to see them, or at least as happy as a bot can get.

“Rebecca went on shaping the mud. She was not a great sculptor, but since God gave her dispensation to be “rough” and liberal in her interpretation, she finished quickly.

“What do You think?” Rebecca asked.

“It’s very modern,” God said, diplomatically.

Along the path she found a lunchbox tree. The boxes nearest the trunk were small and green, but the ones farthest out and high up, on the big limbs, were square, white, and ripe. Mira leaped up a couple of meters or more and managed to snatch one.

For decades, science has known that the material brain operates at a quantum level. For over a century, science has known that quantum equations run independent of time. Backward, forward, it makes no difference.

In the middle of the circle, a foot or two above the grassy curb-girdled plot right where the Harkleys had planted a rosebush, someone had cut a large hole in the sky.

The letters on the page wriggled like the worms her husband strung on hooks the one time he took her fishing. Every time she tried to focus on a letter, it stretched, twisted, and rolled into a meaningless black squiggle.

There was a mingling of traits in her that I found instantly irresistible: she seemed both shy and steel-strong, passionate and vulnerable, confident and ill at ease.

She came over and shined the flashlight into the closet. I ran my hand over the seam of the door. It was about three feet high, flush with the wall, the same off-white color but cool to the touch, made of metal. No visible hinges and no lock, just a flip-up handle like on a tackle box.

“That’s not a safe,” Dot said.

Three hundred sixty years since a colony ship left an established world with its hopeful burden, arrived at this deadly Eden, established a city, flourished, and died. How much of Mia’s lifetime, much of it spent traveling at just under c, did that represent?