Long Shot

Teleportation never went beyond a few grams and a few thousand miles. Not enough for any industrial application. Perfect to put a small explosive bullet inside someone's brain. It was a nightmare for the Secret Service. The future would never see a President in public again.

Secret Service agents are highly trained specialists. It wasn't their fault that they didn't understand the subtleties of the relativistic limit of quantum entanglement. Not many physicists understood it, either.

One did. MIT graduate, born in Havana. He had never forgiven John Kennedy for the second, and finally successful, invasion of Cuba, and dying in bed with Marylin Monroe had been too good a death for him.

.finis.

After Erwin almost saved the world

"I'm probably harmless," meowed Schrodinger's malevolent cat. Without asking herself why Erwin had boxed him with a bunch of radium, naive, cat-loving Pandora believed him.

He had been the only field fluctuation in an otherwise best of possible worlds. With him out of the box, everything became true again at the same time. He closed his least-evil eye and picked up a more interesting world for the wave to collapse to.

.finis.

Restitution

"I lost years of my life on this," said the man. I smiled.

"So sue me," I said. At most he would get some money, a tiny part of what I had gotten from him. And the proceedings themselves would take years, certainly...

I blinked, suddenly aware of having been daydreaming. Nothing around me seemed familiar, and neither, oh god, did my now wrinkled hand.

.finis.

In the Shell

Vampires didn't care, as it's not uncommon to live at night. Neither did werewolves, already used to their monthly getaway.

But for ghosts the Internet was an undreamed-of gift, an electronic path to mankind different from dreams and the outdated seance. On the Internet, nobody knows how solid are the fingers composing words.

And it turns out you can haunt people, too, drive them to madness or at least despair. Although most ghosts are unhappy about being called 'trolls.'

.finis.

Log

Sun Nov 23 12:45:54 ART 2008 rinesi.net receives an steady stream of ICMP echo response packets from 190.2.40.81 and notifies the admin about the anomaly.
Sun Nov 23 17:29:33 ART 2008 The rinesi.net admin begins a non-invasive scan of 190.2.40.81.
Sun Nov 23 17:31:35 ART 2008 As part of the scan, an steady stream of ICMP echo request packets is sent to 190.2.40.81.

No response was received.

.finis.

Out of the Valley of Death

From TOKYOMANGO:

Satoru Takeda, a 58-year old unemployed Gifu man, spend three days without food in a valley off of a mountain road after swerving to avoid running over a bunny rabbit. He was injured, and it was cold, and he couldn't get back up the cliff to seek help, so he just stayed in his car until Day 3. When cops finally discovered him, they found another car in the same valley, with a dead guy inside.

You don't know how long you've been climbing the cliff. It's somehow taller than you thought it was, your limbs weaker, your grasp on the rock uncertain. But still you climb. An eternity later, you reach the top and stumble upon the road.

Right in front of an incoming car. You can see the driver's surprised expression, the way instinct makes him swerve the car when reason would had kept it straight. The car stumbles, skips, squids to the border of the cliff... and falls.

You reach the border in time to see it crash into the ground. Minutes later, the driver leaves the car, injured and confused. You try to call to him, but no words come out of your mouth.

Somewhere beyond the man's crashed car you can see now the wreckage of yours, and your body rotting in the driver's seat.

.finis.

Annealing

(Strictly speaking, this is too long to be an Hectowords piece, but, given how long it has been since I've written for this site, I wanted to post it nonetheless.)


I had met her before in the elevator. At least I think so. I can't quite remember meeting twice the same woman; different faces, hair colors, clothing, builds. The only thing familiar was the sense of having met her before, of a regular progression of strangers.

And one day I met a beautiful woman in the elevator, and she bared her teeth at me. It was forever until the doors opened and I could almost-run away. I remember that now.

I didn't then, not when I met her again, not when her mouth spasmed into a rictus I had to avoid with my eyes.

There must have been many times like that. I only remember the one when she smiled at me and it was the most attractive thing I had ever seen. I didn't get out on my floor. She kept smiling, and I followed her hesitant steps to her door.

Everything but her beauty and her smile were wrong. When she entered her dark apartment I could no longer see either of them, and my skin grew cold as I understood, and ran.

"Come," said her spidery voice from behind. I didn't wait for the elevator - I didn't stop until I had crossed and locked my door. No matter what I could half-imagine waiting in the darkness, her voice had been worse.

Now I'm trying to think about something to do.

And I'm realizing that I'm already forgetting, and that the next time her voice will be sweeter, and one day it will work.

.finis.