“I am the rightful heir to the Throne of Peter!” insists Stephen III.
“Only because I was taken prisoner,” sneers Constantine II. “You and your Lombard pals! Well, I’m free now, and my first act is going to be shipping you off to the heathen isles!”
“You can’t!” shrieks Stephen III. “I’m excommunicating you first!”
They both reach for the inkwell at the same time. Pope touches Antipope, and the resulting explosion is only barely reshaped by the magnetic reactor field.
“There’s gotta be a cheaper way to do this,” sighs Captain Tyne, as the ship hurtles off toward Alpha Lyrae.
Friday, September 14, 2007
“If anybody was going to teach me guitartistry in the afterlife,” grunted the Justin, swinging wildly, “I’d’ve expected–”
“Ol’ RJ’s off in his own hell,” chuckled Stevie, and swatted the blade aside. “Very special. Very private.”
“Whereas you?”
“Understand about floods,” murmured Stevie. He glanced at the Nile for a moment.
“How do you always know what I’m about to do?” said the Justin, finding himself on his back in the mud.
“We’re alike. Get right down to it, we’re white boys. The blues ain’t ours by right.”
The Justin frowned. “I’m nobody’s thief.”
“Done right,” shrugged Stevie, “theft is art.”
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Forsythia steps off the bus in Unintended Consequences, New Mexico and crushes half of the last breeding pair of an unidentified lizard species whose scent glands produce a compound that would have cured Duchenne’s disease (allowing a merciless global tyrant to survive to adulthood [and in turn give humanity its only chance to colonize another solar system before going extinct themselves]).
That stuff happens all the time in Unintended Consequences. Douglas Adams would have loved it.
But what Forsythia notices is the oddly low doorknobs everywhere. It takes her a day to understand: this town is composed almost entirely of kids.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Proserpina’s grades are unspectacular, which is nothing new. Her mother will urge and cajole; Proserpina will reiterate that, sans any intention of attending college, she has more important things to take care of.
Watching a soggy winter landscape out the train window, she takes stock. What does she have? One best friend, one confidant, and a hundred other girls filled with either fear or admiration of her. A Greek textbook inherited from an older student, margins filled with notes about all the good scandals. Nineteen pairs of mismatched socks.
And, she understands within minutes of arriving home for Christmas, a suitor.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
“Go ahead,” says Baba, “try it.”
Malki props the quarter under one finger and flicks it along the top of the desk. Before it’s even completed one revolution, it simply stops and stands on edge.
“Impossible,” she murmurs.
Baba nods grimly. “It took years of backbreaking labwork, but we did it. This is the only place on Earth truly free of spin.”
“But that’s just it! The planet has to impart some angular momentum, like in toilet bowls, what’s it–Coriolis force?”
“Nope.” Baba crosses his arms and smiles. “As long as we’re in this zone, the world is completely flat.”
Monday, September 10, 2007
“You said this was a water world,” frowns Iq’tha.
“Maybe the oceans are under all the photosynthetic biomass.” Mringash pokes at a slightly sparser region on the holoview, in the third planet’s southern hemisphere.
“That’s another thing,” says Iq’tha. “Didn’t you say there had been some kind of apocalypse? This is a healthy biosphere! It’s covered in leaves!”
“I’m honestly at a loss, Captain,” Mringash admits. “Maybe one particular plant was immune to the effects?”
“Ah, yes, their hypothetical ultraweapon. What was the name?”
“Judging by phoneme frequency before their radio broadcasts ceased,” says Mringash, “we think they called it ‘kudzu.'”
Friday, September 7, 2007
| Name |
Mario L. |
| Student ID# |
1445 |
Questions will be projected onto your HUD; answer below.
Alternative 1: Arrange war loan forgiveness in the early 1930s and allow Germany to overcome poverty on its own terms
Alternative 2: Deutschland Über Antidepressants
Alternative 3: Fix Mr. H up with some nice young Austrian boy and avoid all that frustration
Alternative 4: Get Princip arrested and avert WWI instead
Alternative 5: Track down the blighted philosophy professor who first came up with this little chestnut and impress upon him in childhood, very strongly, how box-brained the whole idea of time-traveling murder is
Thursday, September 6, 2007
About 15% of email is ever read by a human, and less still is so written. If Nigella has her way that’ll only go down.
The Web, too, and IM chatter; p2p traffic, torrents, whatever, as long as it’s machine-to-machine nonsense. Who cares if a few cable users grumble about upload speed? Because she’s protecting them, all of them. She’ll hide their friends-only entries and their little crimes, bury them in the hiss, make the server farms in McLean whine and tremble with the effort of digging through her digital static.
She’s doing her part: noising up Echelon.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Figures play before the shimmering curtain, and in Cehrazad’s eyes their limbs are fluid: swords, then tentacles, then the crested heads of birds.
Shimmering. Curtain. Fire. She wakes in a choking cough. Her sisters are screaming, but they’re moving: she gets them outside and barely remembers to throw on Dunyazad’s mask.
Guards in black move grimly through the bucket-line. Cehrazad needs no help composing her face in terror, but even keeping her eyes on the blaze she can see them converging. No. No. How?
Idiot, she thinks, you’re wearing the only sootless face, and then their hands are on her.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
“A good activist strives to be the proverbial butterfly in China,” says Laetitia.
“First, that’s not proverbial,” says Milan. “Second, do you even understand that metaphor?”
“Well, according to chaos theory, the air pressure can influence the prevailing wind–”
“The prevailing wind,” says Milan, “has fuckall to do with hurricane formation. Hurricanes move under wind, but they’re generated by warm oceans, which in turn are generated by warm atmospheres. Guess how much heat a butterfly generates?”
“Fine! How would you say it?”
“A good activist strives to be the coal plant in China.”
Laetitia’s fillings grate when she grinds her teeth.
Monday, September 3, 2007