Life as a statue is easy. They make you ascend the pedestal, turn you to stone, remove your ability to move, and leave you to watch the turn of the seasons in a world you cannot touch or care about, anymore. You can only stand in the public garden where all the convicted are placed, and you watch with dull and distant interest at the visitors who stroll past, living the lives of the quick, sometimes interested in all the immobile condemned, and sometimes not.
It’s been over twenty years since the last episode of Rotten Little Town, the smash hit occult western that ran for six seasons between 1993 and 1999, plus one two-hour reunion movie released in 2000 that wrapped up most of the dangling storylines in such dramatic fashion that it remains highly debated today.
Gorman was on foot, crossing a frozen continent. It was not Antarctica. That was light years away, and so over. Nobody went there anymore. This continent he had chosen for his latest adventure was bigger, broader, colder, deadlier, nastier. It was not fun. Every step was an occasion for regret. He was probably going to die. He was glad he came.
In a second I’m going to ask you to turn around and look at that spot to the right of the door. But you’ll need to brace yourself. It’s going to be a shock. Just keep one thing in mind: you’re safe. This room may smell of him and you will see soon that it also feels like him, but I promise you hat he will never hurt you, or anybody else, ever again.
The species pictured here is the very same one that reported you to the Commission, a species that some of you recognized as quite possibly sentient, but never quite enough to modulate your behavior. You will likely recognize them as one subspecies of terrestrial dolphin, whose testimony about you during the hearing included the most stirring tribute offered by any of your world’s unprecedented eight existing sapient races, to wit: “Some of them aren’t all bad, and it’s a shame that even the good ones have to go, but by and large, we’ve had it up to here with them.”
She would not have reasoned that all of this would have made more sense than assaulting her with pig barbarians in plate armor and driving her to the exact place where any dark lord fearful of prophecy would not want her to go…
Here, on the beach, sat an immense sand castle.
It had been sculpted over the course of three frenzied days by a team of artists who had seen fit to become world-class competitors at that delightful but largely irrelevant skill, who had come to the beach at the tail end of warm weather to create an ephemeral masterwork. Crowds had gathered to watch the construction in delight.
This is the story of a mother, and a daughter, and the right to life, and the dignity of all living things, and of some souls granted great destinies at the moment of their conception, and of others damned to remain society’s useful idiots.
I’m a neck man. Some guys notice breasts first. Others are first taken by long shiny legs. I notice necks. I’ve always noticed necks, the most beautiful and most vulnerable attribute women have.
Hers had a zipper.
I had seen any number of studs and implants and piercings on women, but had never seen a zipper.
I know that I should not have done what I just did. I do not understand the madness that made me. I should get on the phone, somehow, call an ambulance, somehow, get these problems dealt with, somehow, but I live in fear of what I will find out if I do manage to stagger into an emergency room and somebody is able to tell me exactly what has become of my left hand.
Rebecca’s eyes inevitably wandered to the wrists, which ended in thick silver bands, a lot like bracelets except for the flat bottoms where arms should have emerged. They, Rebecca knew, contained not just the life support—without which her husband’s hands would just be graying meat—but also his most recent memory backup, without which everything he had ever been, and everything he had ever done, would now be gone.
The gate was an obscene bas-relief in which hundreds of miniature human forms coupled in combinations of two or three, or four, no two positions alike, all possible sexual combinations represented. It was the most intricate work of art Jin had ever seen with his own eyes, and it moved him not at all.
Fortune entered the gaming floor, where instead of heading straight for a table she wandered among them, noting the places where people wept and howled like wolves, emptied but not yet judged broke.
Oblivion is not quite instantaneous; his neurons all fire at the moment his brain goes soggy with blood, giving him, in his last instant, an overwhelming taste of peppermint.
Being the future inventors of time travel wasn’t all bad, of course. It was great to know that we’d never lose anything, never go to a movie that turned out to be a stinker, never buy a book we wouldn’t want to finish…
What did you see on those faces? Was it fear? Resignation? Or apology?
If it helps you to picture the devastation to come, you should imagine an uncontrolled conflagration, incinerating everything in its path and leaving no life behind.
At the end of the hall you find him. He sits slumped on a marble throne in a chamber with more dust than air. He is as old as any human being you have ever seen …
Amber had heard of a method, possibly only an urban legend, that some hunters reputedly use to capture monkeys. It involved placing a fruit inside the knot-hole of a tree. The monkey reaches in and grabs the treat, but with it in his grasp, his fist is too large to be withdrawn. He cannot bring himself to drop the treasure in his possession, and so he remains trapped, in its possession, for however long it takes the clever hunter to return with a net. Here with this demented old man, this close to terrible knowledge about the author who had come to consume her academic life, Amber could have demurred and walked out without the dread knowledge that was now being offered to her. But it was impossible, not with the secret within her grasp, and a little voice inside her asked, forlornly, if the monkeys ever understood the nature of the trap that had imprisoned them.
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