NEW SITE

I'm posting new fiction at Codex Studio, although Hectowords will remain as an archive.

Succession

You didn't think of the dead as you approached it. You didn't think of the cost. The throne waiting for you, built a thousand years before by the Mad Emperor, seat of the Empire for a thousand thousand years to come, was prize enough for any cost.

You sat on the throne deaf to the cheers of your soldiers, the moaning of the dying, everything but the roar in your chest. The throne's whisper was startling in its clarity.

"I rule," you said, as the Emperor before you had, and the one before him, and the dozens before. They weren't your words, and you knew that if you could only rise from the throne, you might remember what you had intended your words to be.

The throne smiled with your face.

.finis.

Four of Swords

I've killed thousands of grandfathers in thousands of pasts.

It's easier to erase yourself when you know your parents' real names.

.non finis.

Pro forma

First you shed the bad futures in haste and fear. Then you traded the best, the unlikely ones, for a stronger likelihood of a tolerable fate. You were very thorough.

Now your future is clear and one, a succession of many scripted years, and you'd scream through all of them if you hadn't given that choice away.

.finis.

Fugue from lost time

I turned off my perfect memory. No longer would it trawl, prompted by our every word and deed, through everything we did and said as far as the world's memory goes. I was happy with you, and with the idea of you, and I didn't want us to be ended by the past.

I slept blissfully that night, dreaming without memories, until my phone woke me up in the middle of the night with the unbidden recall of how many times I had attempted this — and you — before.

I had forgotten it was programmed to do that.

.finis.

The Long War

My death marks our victory. He's long dead, killed in battle, as a conqueror, on our soil, but after his death we had all the time in the world. We chased history into shame, and shame into secrets, and choked the secrets down. We went to the ends of the Earth to kill the grandchildren of veterans and raise their orphans as our own. We conquered countries to erase a single word.

I'm the last person who knows who died undefeated where now stands a tribute to heroic, failed Nelson, and tonight I'm dying without having told a soul.

We won.

Justice

There can be no afterlife without God. But there still had to exist some sort of retribution. Some balance, even after He left.

I see you don't understand; that's natural. You still haven't done most of the things your nightmares are punishment for.

.finis.

Ascent

They believed the sky and the world were a symbol of each other, so they greeted us as god-scouts when our ships first landed on their planet. We took advantage, of course, of their short-lived awe, and when it died with their cities, we found a thousand years of technological development enough of an edge against their revenge. Ten light-years of emptiness hadn't stopped us, and that was all they had.

Now and then they kidnapped a garrison guard, for our warnings against their brothels were as good as advertisement to soldiers' ears. We shrugged the losses off, used the missing to impress the present, and contented ourselves with hundred-to-one retaliatory strikes. We thought we had won.

They were waiting for the right moment, for the right star to slide behind the right moon. They sacrificed their prisoners that night, and then did nothing more to resist us. We thought, alright, now we have won.

Ten years later the star we called Home blinked out.

.finis.

The Gun

"Your four ideas are really beautiful," said the attorney to the inventor. "You should protect them." The attorney then put something on the table. It didn't look like a gun, but like the idea of a gun.

"What's that?" asked the inventor.

The attorney picked the thing and fired it at the inventor. The inventor blinked once, twice, feeling suddenly that he had lost something, but unable to grasp what.

"You have three beautiful ideas," said the attorney. "You really should think about protecting them."

.finis.