“English is a shitty first language.”
“Better a first than a second,” Jarrod chuckles.
“Exactly!” says Mori. “So it would be easier than ever as a zeroth language.”
“Oh, like how they teach babies sign language?” Jarrod says brightly. “I’ve heard that can be really helpful when–”
Mori flaps that away. “So zeroth has been done,” she says. “But know what hasn’t? A negative-oneth language.”
“Negative-first,” says Jarrod.
Mori frowns. “No, I checked,” she says. “There’s nothing in the APA Manual–”
“So what’s after that?” Jarrod laughs. “Twoth? Threeth?”
“A negative-oneth language wouldn’t have these problems,” Mori grumbles.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Erik goes out for a haircut and some groceries. When he opens the box at home, the haircut leaps straight for his head.
“No, haircut!” says Erik. “Bad!”
The haircut grumbles and paws at the back door. Erik lets it run around in the yard a little while and shave some squirrels.
It’s at this point that Erik notices it: his reverse widow’s peak. Hanks come away in his hand and he panics, grabs the haircut, shoves it into the screaming garbage disposal.
“Jesus, Erik,” says Marivel, staring from the door.
“It’s okay!” says Erik, a bit shrilly. “It’ll grow back!”
“Out the lampoons!” cries Mayhap, and three Ivy men crowd up in the prow of the longboat, gleaming barbs levelled for use. Before them surges the great white hope: its boiling enormity is striped with scars, the salt-burned wounds of a long and deadly hunt.
“He’s mine today!” Mayhap exults. “Strike true!”
They do, and ropes thrum taut in E minor. His blood is black as ink. Rivulets of it lock the long scars together into glissandi, and the boat frets the wave tops like a pillbottle slide.
The hope is diving; the boat goes down. Mayhap drowns in metaphor.
They broke the lightspeed limit on communication via the simple expedient of time travel. A ChronComm network has nodes that take a message, drop back a hundred years and then start transmitting. Your message reaches a node the next star over just as you send it.
They tried having messages arrive before you sent them, but that just caused headaches.
The nodes never go anywhere–they just age really fast. What must it be like, wonders Girox as he pokes at a broken one, to have atoms older than the universe? When the Big Whimper hits, will they already be gone?
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The problem is that as media icons of beauty become more cartoonish in all respects, round blue eyes bulging, legs shiny as acetate, cartoons are in the uncanny valley and climbing up the other side: it’s happening much faster than the hindbrain adapts. Derek can’t help what he’s attracted to. There are whole political parties founded on that fact.
All those Japanese pedophile tentacles miss the point: what Derek wants is a girl next door, those chaste icons of cheap yesteryear. Judy Jetson. A Daphne-Velma sandwich. And oh, how hard Betty’s giggle gets him; that and her perfect, erotic hydrocephaly.
Shana has the vague idea that when you’re a sugar mama, your boy toy is supposed to be… well, cut. Ripped. Defined. Tanned and waxed. Not, in a word, gangly.
But when she feels his skinny hands kneading her shoulders, she has to tap mute on her bluetooth to let out an mmm. Reflected in the monitor, the logo of his stupid t-shirt makes her toes tingle.
“Hey, uh, Shana?” he says. “Maybe we could try Portal together again at lunch–”
“Busy, sweetie,” she purrs, slipping a few crisp bills from her Louis. “Go buy yourself some Playstations.”
(He does.)
Maddy stretches a recipe. Kent fiddles with his father’s old turntable while Destiny sells her aunt’s LPs.
H.G. talks to his cat a lot; Eola writes stories on paper airplanes. Adamkin collects playing cards from the gutter. Landrey does her homework in Sharpie and it bleeds through six looseleaf pages. Annabelle loans her a Bic #2.
Theo died, two years ago, of “complications.” Tally sits in his old desk.
What if there’s exactly one person in the world for you?
What if you’re not the one for them?
Jeremiah scuffs his soles in time to the beat of his iPod heart.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
One day Lana disappeared from sight, sound and the written word; she became involuntarily invisible. She’s pretty sure it’s some kind of lame metaphor.
She can’t find many ways to enjoy it besides theft and voyeurism, and she was never really a locker room girl. Loneliness aches at her. She needs a project.
Every morning Lana steals breakfast from Pret and fresh spraypaint from the hardware store, then rides up to some random apartment and leans out. The building’s facade is nearly a solid mass of her graffiti now. I’m Still Here, it says, in letters that aren’t letters. Please Remember.
“The great thing about aikido,” Jocelyn explains, “is that it’s all about harmony, so neither you nor your attacker gets hurt.”
Cordelia frowns. “That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.”
Jocelyn blinks.
” If I come at you with a haymaker, the least you can do is break my nose,” says Cordelia. “And get yours broken too! These days people treat email conversations with more attention than real ones. Fighting is our last chance for human contact!”
“Are you trying to convince me,” says Jocelyn, “that I have a social responsibility to get hit in the face?”
“Well, you specifically, yes.”