Plugs

Jason Fischer has a story appearing in Jack Dann’s new anthology Dreaming Again.

Angela Slatter’s story ‘Frozen’ will appear in the December 09 issue of Doorways Magazine, and ‘The Girl with No Hands’ will appear in the next issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

David Kopaska-Merkel’s book of humorous noir fiction based on nursery rhymes, Nursery Rhyme Noir 978-09821068-3-9, is sold at the Genre Mall. Other new books include The zSimian Transcript (Cyberwizard Productions) and Brushfires (Sams Dot Publishing).

Read Rudi’s story “Detail from a Painting by Hieronymus Bosch” at Behind the Wainscot.

My Cell Phone is a Slut

by JeremyT

Seriously, my phone screws anything its ports are compatible with, and it’s only a week old, so it’s compatible with everything. It’s constantly skittering off to copulate with other consumer gadgets, which is annoying, because I’ve been waiting for this girl to call that I met at a skin-PAN party a few days ago. She had the most complete collection of Dr. Who episodes in her files I have ever seen–even the reconstructed episodes with the original audio and stills from production. I dropped my vCard, and I know she acked it. I’m afraid that while my phone is humping the cappuchino machine, it gets poor reception, and my voice mail has iterated out pretty far recently and it asks for instructions in Esperanto right now. My Esperanto isn’t very good. I’ve tethered it to my PAN for now, but that just pisses it off and I’m afraid it might start dropping calls on purpose.
I mean, I understand the whole principle of evolutionary processes in iterative product design, and the eggs that the phone lays usually net me enough credit to pay my carrier bills, but I think there’s something wrong with this one. Nobody else I know has a phone that screws so much. I tried calling technical support yesterday, but all I got was a calm voice of a woman telling me that the problem that I was calling about had already been diagnosed and a hotfix was being deployed promptly. There’s something a little unsettling about technical support that knows what you’re calling about before you even dial the number.
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Now my phone seems a little depressed, and I’m wondering if I should have made that call after all. The touch display doesn’t seem as bright, and the ring tones that normally match my mood towards the caller are all break-up songs from the 80s that I barely even recognize. I promise the phone that I’ll let it off its tether at the next skin-PAN party, and that seems to cheer it up a little bit, but it’s still not the same. I think I kind of miss my slutty phone. So I call technical support again. All I get is an error message, saying that my problem can’t be diagnosed, in a tone of voice that implies that I don’t really have a problem, and then it gives me the URL for a dating site I haven’t tried yet. I use my phone to upload a profile to the site, and I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t just set this phone free and upgrade to something from the next hatch.
Okay, so maybe not. This phone is black, and that color isn’t trending well lately, so my chances of getting a new one in the color I like is pretty slim. I’ll wait a couple more days and see if black comes back. It’s usually popular on Wednesdays.

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