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Category: Creative Writing

Sometimes it’s exactly what you think

Investigators were shocked at the sheer number of skulls found in the house of 58-year-old Dallas resident, Henry Waltham. A prominent voice in the online Q movement, Mr. Waltham had been a vocal supporter of the notion that “Democrats” were abducting Children for use in occult practices.

He had escaped notice for years, living alone in a large house in a tawny subdivision. He was finally discovered by a lawn maintenance crew that had mistakenly begun work in his back yard instead of a neighbor and happened to look in the window depicted in this artist concept image.

Merced Ruis was doing a quick circle of the yard checking for things in the grass when he noticed the unusual shapes in the window, looking closer he couldn’t miss the skulls in the darkened room, nor the photos of missing people on every wall. He stepped away from the window and called over his co-workers who all agreed that the room was very disturbing.

It was less than 24 hours later that police investigators opened the hidden door that led to the room and were met with the evidence that Henry “Hank” Waltham, far from being a “God-Fearing Christian” was in fact a deeply evil, child killing “Necromancer” who had been hiding among the members of Q online for years now.

The Local GOP also disavowed him, despite him being the precinct captain for 30 years.

Children of Humanity

After 10,000 years, the Anchorite was forced to leave the keep for the first time. They strode from the floor of the Tower, mostly fallen. A Siege from outside of the atmosphere led to the fall of every traditional and esoteric defense, not a siege screen remained between the Tower and the rest of the Universe; and the Anchorite was forced to take matters into their own hands.

With a wave of their hands, 10,000 years of ghosts rose around them, spreading like angry smoke with purpose. Their personal guard stood in their shadow, weapons of an age forgotten at the ready to dispose of anything that came within their sight. They two stood in the ruin of a fort that had stood longer than any being had lived. A last bastion on a planet left behind by history when Humankind left the Sol system to join a Galaxy and Universe beyond.

The Anchorites took up the task of “being humanity” on an empty planet left to itself in a corner of the Galaxy that was forgotten by its children. The distances between Earth and the rest of Humanity meant that at random periods Humans who had never heard of Earth and no longer spoke with languages that even resembled earth languages or speech at all would come across “a perfect world” for humans and learn that Earth was no longer “For” humanity.

Now, after a siege that came from points outside of the solar system, the last of Humanity faces destruction at the hands of children who have forgotten that this was their home.

The Curse of the Actor

After months of silence and the relative quiet of a Summer without Laughs, the Joker reappeared in Gotham with a crime that shocked the Theater Community to the Core. The Whole of Gotham’s Stage Actors Guild found itself without work and off stage in September when The Batman released a statement implicating “The Joker” in the deaths of Daliah Von Seraph and Timothy Risseraud, leads from “All Greeks And Crooks” which had just started it’s run in Gotham.

The two leads had been making headlines as masked clowns who fell in love while taking part in a Greek Tragedy revival, a Chorus, within a play. On that fateful night the pair had been deep in the show-stopping “We’re only clowns for money, we’re lovers forever” song when they both lost the tune and laughed until they bled from their eyes.

In the Audience that night was socialite Patron Bruce Wayne (Wayne Industries); approached for comment he suggested that this was murder and not just a simple mishap on stage. Dark Thoughts, but readers will remember that Mister Wayne’s life has been tied up in tragic deaths. Also present was Selina Kyle, who said she never missed seeing Daliah on stage, and was shaken after such a ‘vulgar, painful passing’.

It was less than 12 hours later that The Batman had reached out to the Gotham Community and asked them to please forego makeup and masks, or even close down production altogether.

Braver or More Foolish players went forth and The Joker’s second “trick” was played, and the whole cast of “The Tragedy of Isolade and Tristan” found their faces turned a death-pale white, their hair a deep, luminous green, their lips a lustrous red and their bodies a bloated, and rotting, dead.

GCPD took charge at this point and shut down every On and Off the street production, even going so far as to shut down every makeup house and fashion outlet. Soon Enough, the whole Entertainment Industry was closed, save for Stand-up joints, which were seeing a boom.

Hallowe’en came and the only Live entertainment in Gotham was someone standing with a mic and telling jokes. The city was full of Laughs.

The Joker appeared in a web video to say “You’re welcome, Laughingist City on Earth!” and he took a bow.

The Batman had him in hand by the next day, but you can’t help but wonder if the Joker just let himself be caught, since he’d had his Punchline.

A Nice Picnic in Spring

Woodcuts from the colonial era are being turned up every day with disturbing and indescribable scenes in them. Pictures of Inhuman Creatures taking paring in every day life, with no explanation or even an oral history to suggest why.

These latest woodcuts were found in a box marked “A Nice Picnic in Spring” with no artifacts or even a date to tell us anything about them. The Box itself was stored in an airless room that somehow maintained an ideal micro-climate. It may has well have been sealed up last week.

This image shows human-like shapes surrounding a table and sharing a meal, perhaps? The central figure resembles a Century Flower, which has a scent like rotting flesh. Perhaps the beings are observing it or collecting it? It resembles a Picnic, much as the box is labelled.

Again, the Picnic Motif is strong, and the tree is again on the right of the image. Some local investigators have tried to place the tree or the clearing that is being depicted but these images are so old some whole forests have changed multiple times.

Again, another image with a tall object bound to the right of the image, but otherwise nothing we can discern as to who or what is being depicted.

This collection was found in a sealed room in a former schoolhouse in New England, USA. It did appear on older plans, but had been erased when a renovation closed over the hallway that led to the room.

An RPG in “The Matrix”

Back in the late 90s and Early 2000s, before there was a Matrix Sequel or even “The Animatrix” there was just “The Matrix” and what we knew about the world of it from that first movie. It was full of the promise that “anyone” could be have super powers in the Matrix and that all it took was being “shown the way”

Well, I took that idea and ran with it. The Premise [in the RPG] was that a famous former Superman actor had received cutting edge nano-tech treatments for his spinal injury, allowing him to walk again and the tech became widely available to the point that humans commonly had enhancements to their bodies. This led to a singularity of humanity and machine where machine intelligence was born and became independent from human intelligence.

Machines had typically been slaves to humans and humanity (for the most part) wanted that to continue, but the Machines had their own goals, emotions and needs now. They were a new mode of being, purely software in any shell they could imagine. It was wonderful for the new machines, but humanity was envious of the freedom of the machine children and war broke out and “the plot of the Matrix” happened.

I don’t recall where the idea of multiple Matrixes came from, but the premise was that the “real world” in the Movie was less desolate, but that humanity was pushed mostly to “the moon” and the war between Humanity and the Machines had pushed those with the resources to do it to leave earth for the “the moon” and so Humans had to hold orbital launch stations at the poles to allow for resources to be dropped to the core.

Also, “The Matrix” that we saw in the Movie was just “That Matrix” and there were others, some with Magic, Some with Superheroes, Some with Cowboys, the premise being the GM could set the story in a Matrix with rules they could set and give the players different things to do other than “Be Neo”

I ended up scrapping it, especially after the other movies came out, I changed the title to “The Sequence” after the initial code snippet that “turned on” Machine intelligence and left it to lie

I don’t even know what happened to the manuscript at this point, it’s somewhere on a disk.

I did get it printed and bound though, since I had access to the means, along with a book of poems I wrote while working the phones for “Teh Nortons”

Learning to Write

Death of the Author

Watching This video again reminded me of an exercise from Creative Writing that was at the time just intolerable and exciting all at once. Peer Reading.

Every day we would be presented with a writing prompt and then given time to create something from it. Being kids, often times these would be gross out sessions or confessionals. Pictures of birds would become poems and pieces of music would become stories.

Some of the class would use this chance to criticize the prompts rather than use the time to create something.

It’s those people that were missing out. Because they became the author and instead of using the time and space given them every day to create something new, they took the chance to snipe and attack at the very thing they were supposed to be inspired by. In a way, they were inspired, but they failed to engage in the very task they were set out. They were asked to create, and instead they took their time to destroy. “They Chose Violence” so to speak.

This image is a good example of one of the prompts, which was a penguin. Some people wrote short stories about lost penguins, some about loneliness. There was a poem about how there was nothing but penguins.

When it came time to discuss the writing that day some of the class seized on the notion that the poem about the lack of other birds was the author talking about the conformist nature of High School (where we were) and Society as a whole. That the Poem was about how a lack of diversity was dangerous. Or that the Poet was embodying a lonely penguin, seeking something more.

They were all wrong about the authors intent. The Author just dashed it off in moments: “Penguins! Everywhere Penguins! No Great Auks, no Eagles, no sparrows. Everywhere I look all I see are Tuxedo Birds. Everywhere, there’s penguins!”

Yeah, it was short and easy to put meaning on. It also was “just as it was” there was no deeper meaning to it. So the class, when faced with the idea that “It just was a complaint about the penguins” got hostile.

They insisted that there was deeper meaning in it, especially given who the author was. I’m told that they thought the author was stoned more than they were sober at this period. Which in itself was amazing, because they were 100% straight-edge.

That’s the thing, we put our own meaning and own message in our media. We hang our own emotions on every hook a piece gives us to do so. So that we can decorate it with meaning for ourselves.



Cleaners 4 Life

When CRISPR edits become legal for small size bio-doc firms to start doing, you know that during their down time, someone got the idea to try and hack those units beyond the manufacturing warranty. We’re talking professional grade gene editing and implementation tools in the hands of people who were “smart” and “motivated” but fond of very dark humour.

These gleaming white blocks of science would become the mothers of a whole new cottage industry of custom formula solutions to life’s problems. All you would needs is the formula, and you could take that on a chip or a QR code on a sticker or an image on your phone and you scan it, pay the fees and a syringe popped out with a cure for your impotence or new hair on your head, three inches on your member or for the really adventurous, all three at once.

Who knows how they tested this stuff, computer models be damned. They had to have been testing this stuff on someone, and it took decades for the world to figure out how to ID the poor bastards who survived and their kids’ kids. So you have these people making a quick buck figuring out the building blocks of life on a budget and the means to make those changes on the fly. You have entrepreneurs turning the actual working snake-oil of the ages that can be printed on cheap white paper and handed out on tickets for fractions of a penny, but at a cost of thousands to the buyers, that is until the copyright holders started to get wise and clamp down.

In the 90s and beyond in the United States, they made it legal to copyright genes, even those of the humans. So if you sequence a bit of genetic information, write it down and say “this is the sequence that defines hair colour” and stamp it and get all the forms and so on, you own the copyright on that gene sequence. So, those sequences have been bought and categorized and organized and collated, shared and updated and maintained for generations. And a great deal of that work underpinned those lovely machines.

Now the Corporations awoke from their torpor and looked at the world and said: “This is our money.”

So the machines all get locked up while the corporations who had for some decades been run by software that just endlessly moved resources around leaving people to just live. Thus the boredom.

So the Boxes had to make money for the corporations, and so there had to be profitable things to do with them that didn’t make “some kid in his teens” rich. So they started making custom people.

It happened that fast.

One day people were beautiful and lived for decades longer and the next we were neck deep in custom built kids that were nearly specialized for their jobs and pooping. It was a cruel joke that it even happened, because now we had all these kids that could only do one thing, their bodies twisted into very specialized functions. They all died, in time, having fulfilled their one task.

The people put a stop to it, after a generation of genetic crimes, the people put an end to the production of human machines. All of them had passed away and the world mourned a whole generation of children, except The Cleaners. They lived on.

Turns out that despite the best efforts of those literally greedy Corporations, a miracle happened. The Cleaners lived! They were hardy, and strong and they could take on anything, it’s why they came to be called “The Cleaners” they were able to go into any waste, any broken, poisoned place and just clean it out. They made their homes in the former Superfund sites that made up most of the Western United States and Canada. Mostly they took up around the Yellowstone crater.

The Cleaners marched out around the world, like Superheroes from an old Comic or Ancient Statues of Greek Gods come to life, if your Gods ran to thick, short and hairy.

After the sorrows and hackers and the miracle of The Cleaners, humanity could look out to the stars, and it was only right that the Cleaners should go first, because they could survive pretty much anything. They took to Venus and Mars with equal measure, colonists and then terraformers before the end of that Century. The footprint of Earth was all over the Inner planets.

The Cleaners led the way into interstellar space, lives were measured in centuries now and people could live everywhere. Pretty soon all of humanity was “a little bit Cleaner” and you know how it is Cleaners 4 Life!

Even More movies that Would be improved by the addition of a Giant Telepathic Squid

Let’s get right to it

50 Shades of Gray Grey

BDSM and Sensuality are nowhere to be found in this hollywood bean flicker about Dakota Johnson and some Dude who is #notmychristian. It’s a Hollywood take on a BDSM movie that doesn’t star Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Akroyd.  Without that dynamic duo, who has the time for it?

How would this movie be improved by a sprinkling of Calamari with evil intent?

Two Words.  Slimy Sex. Okay, three.  Slimy Wet Sex? No, moist.  That’s it.  Moist.  Everything would be moist.  I have it on good authority that moist is a wholly despicable word,  So I’ve taken the liberty to moisten this whole paragraph up in anticipation.  I got nothing, I remembered the Dan Akroyd Rosie O’Donnell Sex movie and my mind went to its happy place and didn’t want to come back.
Lemmie take another swing at this.
Christian Grey? Or Gray, what way is it.  Not Still stuck on Rosie in Bondage gear.
It was just startling, she was already middle aged and so was Dan Akroyd.  It’s called Exit to Eden.  THAT Movie could have used some human sized squid, to ink out our memories!  I have exactly three good memories about that movie and they have little to do with the movie itself.

King Kong

King Kong is the story about how a girl can go away on an overseas adventure, come home and her summer romance follows her home in steerage,  Things are all going well for him, he has a show on Broadway, he’s even the star; but when the Girl isn’t on his same wavelength he takes things to extremes and ends up getting hurt,

How could King Kong be improved with a Giant Squid?

For once the Giant Squid is not one of the “bad guys”  Gail finds herself alone in the wilderness; next to a blue pond when a massive, squishy head emerges.  Another Giant Monster.  It looms over her, tentacles caressing and teasing her, a massive beak just feet from her.  Fetid air around it.  It opens it’s mouth and… says “Gurrrrl, you should get away from Kong now, he’s only going to snatch you up and run away with you”
Later, standing over Kong’s body Gail gets a telegram with the words ‘I told you so.  Squid”

Mrs. Doubtfire

How could Mrs. Doubtfire be improved by adding a Giant Squid?

 

Memory is for me

It turn the book over and over in my hands,  having stopped reading on page 35 and just remembering the rest of the book as it  unfolded.

The pages are yellowed and stained; the cover is soft and yields.  It is not the crisp, bright paperback it once was when it lived in my knapsack and traveled around with me on the bus and in my trunk.  I smells like a library now, not like calvin kleins ‘Eternity’ and its two partners are in no better shape when I pass them on the shelves.  They look out at me as I move around the room and place this volume down on my desk.

In the early 90s a friend of a friend who had read these books once related them to us (the nerds that we were playing ‘Shadowrun’ in the private playpen,loft that head been built in the backyard of Andrews house) as an “adventure”.  We weren’t the characters in the book; so when faced with the same choices and the same scenarios, we didn’t sublimate the authors intent.  We couldn’t absorb the flow of it via osmosis, so we couldn’t follow the story of a mad artificial intelligence and the girl who could surf the net with her mind.   We just wanted to kill bad guys and make money so our characters could be cooler and more wealthy than we could ever be.  So we didn’t really meet Bobby or his Voodoo girlfriend.  Slamhounds came, went and were disposed of.

So here I am; staring into the pages again, the first volume back on the shelf.  Waiting for me to come around again once the Matrix becomes self aware and I can consign it all to memory again.

Extra Short Story: Over there; there.

When you live in the shadow of the tallest trees for hundreds of miles, your lives become something of a sideshow these days.

“What’s it like seeing real live trees all day?”

“Is that your tree house?  Can I climb up there?”

“Are you a Druid?  Are you related to one of them? “

“Is it true you dance naked among the trees to celebrate the seasons?”

Day-in, day-out people come to gawk at the century trees and wonder aloud about how they got so big when the rest of the trees have been left stunted brush by comparison.

Calling them Century Trees at all is a bit of a stretch too; as the druids seem to be able to grow massive 200 foot tall apple trees in what seems like less than a decade.  Green thumbs, toes and everything in-between it seems when it comes to the Tree-Folk, which is what they call themselves.  They live around the trees, sometimes in tree houses up in the canopy, sometimes in the trunks but mostly in little adobe huts on the south faces of the trees, attached to the outside of the trunk and slowly rising up, up up as the tree does.

The tourists come into town (Gramercy, thank-you very much, not Apple-Town)  and gawk at the trees to the west and marvel at the nearly constant humidity and the way that the rain has become so predictable in the shadows of the Grove.  They come, stop a while in town, spend a night or two in the hotels or camp in the north wood near the river and then leave; back to normal forests and unpredictable rain; back out over there.

Gramercy was here before the Grove and before the Tree Folk moved in.   We got by as a highway/biway a food stop with curios for people on long road trips going from important place to important place.  It was flat and dry and future-less here.  A town populated by people perpetually leaving or settling in to die.  We had one public school servicing Kindergarten through Grade 12 and then the kids would leave for college and leave the town a little more quiet than it had been.  The closest thing to modernization that the town council had ever implemented was a municipal sewer system to bring indoor plumbing to the sleepy village of 110.

When the first Tree Folk arrived about 40 years back; they were just passing through like anyone else.  The Sheriff at the time thought they were hippies or something and hassled them out of town; but some lingered and bought up the dusty scrub land west of town with what seemed like an endless supply of cash.  This pleased the town council at the time; because the land had been “town land” for as long as anyone could remember and it was good for nothing but rabbit hunting and atv rides in the dust.  The Tree Folk set about building their grove as soon as the ink was dry on the deal and within 20 years something like 30 Century Trees stood west of Gramercy and even in their shadow the whole of the area was green.

The Tree Folk mostly keep to themselves; tending their grove and trading massive fruit for what they need.  They all kind of dress the same, the men wearing tight crew cut hairdos and the women smart bobs.  They all have a healthy glow about them and arms like chimps, from climbing and tending their trees.  The Tree Folk kids attend one of three Public Schools in the area; with Gramercy now boasting a population of 10,000 most of the year and a few (not many) chain hotels and restaurants calling the area a new tourist hot spot.  A wholesome Las Vegas or something.   Their kids rub elbows with the rest of us and then go home to the Grove at night; nestled in their adobe houses on the sides of massive apple trees.

About 35 years back; as the grove started to grow there was a huge hoopla about the water table and how much water all this Green was costing us.  The Tree Folk’s leader at the time, Paul, he just smiled at the question and produced a sheaf of paper showing the water levels for 100 miles around over the past 10 years, showing an actual increase in the water table in the local area.

“The Trees, ” he said, still smiling that beatific smile they all seemed to flash when talking to folks from Gramercy, “The trees don’t take water, they make it.  They convert Oxygen and Hydrogen into water on their own and then the excess leeches down their roots into the water table below.   The trees make their own food and then share the bounty with us”

Some bigwig from the EPA showed up a while later and after some harrumphing and more official visits from the CDC the Tree Folk were given leave to do what they would with the Land; with the only consideration to the government being lights affixed at the top of the trees to ensure they would not be a hazard to air travel.  Paul had smiled a little smile at that, whispered something to one of his followers who nodded and wandered on foot back to the grove.  Weeks later the canopy of the trees glowed a soft blue at night, like the massive leaves had stars weaved into them.  When asked about it Paul would only say “We asked the lightening bugs how they did it then shared it with the trees”

Years later; when the third public school opened and the latest organic plastics plant went into operation (supplied via the skins left from a pulping mill down the way) the Tree Folk became a national treasure; something to read about in books and learn about on educational specials.  Like the Amish of Pennsylvania, the Tree Folk of Montana were just another reclusive farming folk; building their land of Milk and Honey and finding Utopia among the leaves.  And Gramercy, we’re along for the ride, living here in the Shadows of the CEntury Trees and always ready with an answer to “Do you know any Druids?  Did you see them dancing naked at Springtime?”