Plugs

Alex Dally MacFarlane’s story “The Devonshire Arms” is available online at Clarkesworld.

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).

Jason Erik Lundberg‘s fiction is forthcoming from Subterranean Magazine and Polyphony 7.

Sara Genge’s story “Godtouched” may be found in Strange Horizons.

My Very Best Friend

by David

Chelsea always had everything first. Antigravity car. First one in town. Clone. Her twin force-grown two years before they were available outside of Korea. Alien pet (that didn’t look like a beach ball with chicken feet). So what if it had to be put down after eating a Dairy Queen? She had the record. Lost her virginity first, after downloading the entire Kama Sutra into her frontal lobe. Valedictorian of our middle-school graduating class. Me? I did just about everything last. My claim to fame was being Chelsea’s only real friend. I felt so bad for her. She did all of these cool things, but no one really liked her. Some of them pretended to, but I knew, and she knew. It was my idea for her to be the first to have lesbian sex. Of course the plan was that she would have it with me, and so I would be first also. Karin never really liked Chelsea. She just did it to be first. I babysat Chelsea’s twin little brothers. I hardly charged anything; I just wanted to be in her house. She usually wasn’t there, so I went in her room. I wore some of her things. The boys would never tell. I unlocked the Internet controls for them. I hacked her computer, broke into her secret diary, found what she wrote about everyone. She said a lot. She wrote a lot about me. And the next day, when Chelsea got in her anti-gravity car to go to high school? The controller must have frozen up, because it shot straight up in the air, flipped over, and then shot straight down, at top speed! It was terrible! I ran over. But when I got there I could see there was nothing I could do. And when the rescue AIs arrived, there was nothing they could do either. It seems Chelsea had been carrying some high-grade nano with her. That stuff is illegal! Especially in school, but some people don’t always obey the rules. The nano pack somehow got activated by the crash and there was nothing left of Chelsea’s brain to scan.
I get along much better with her clone. She’s nicer than Chelsea was, and she has more than one friend. But I’m her very best friend. I always have been.

the end

2 Responses to “My Very Best Friend”

  1. bookmole Says:

    July 20th, 2008 at 12:21 pm

    Snort – a stalker story with a twist. Nice!

  2. David Says:

    August 2nd, 2008 at 7:50 pm

    Thank you. It evolved as I wrote it.