Plugs

Kat Beyer’s Cabal story “A Change In Government” has been nominated for a BSFA award for best short fiction.

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

Read Daniel Braum’s story Mystic Tryst at Farrgo’s Wainscot #8.

Jonathan Wood’s story “Notes on the Dissection of an Imaginary Beetle” from Electric Velocipede 15/16 is available online.

Archive for the ‘David Kopaska-Merkel’ Category

Life on Mars

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

A farm house. Weathered pine boards, joists and rafters spaced haphazardly, nothing level. Completely ordinary in its eccentricity. Only its location was unusual.

Snow and Jenkins were first inside. He was the commander; she was the best shot. Eight rooms, and not a stick of furniture. Pull-down ladder to the attic (nothing up there), just nothing. Carman and Uriyev got pretty antsy during the 20 minutes or so the others were inside.

The mission planners had them continue the planetary survey, but kept them away from the house. When they got back home they were sequestered for months. Rumors flew. Snow was dying of some aggressive new cancer. Carman had gone crazy and killed the other three. Jenkins was pregnant. The haunted house on Mars. Eventually, the astronauts were let out. Everything was back to normal, but no second ship was launched.

The house showed up on Earth. Anyone could walk right in, wherever the house appeared. In a parking lot, on a baseball diamond, in one of those sad developments from 2008 where nothing had ever been built. It could show up in your front yard, or squeezed between two buildings that, you could have sworn, were not 10 feet apart the day before. But you went in and it was full of people. Websites were devoted to following the thing. One, a global real-time map, showed the house appearing simultaneously in dozens of places. Then hundreds. People flooded in wherever it was, mad to be a part of the phenomenon. Kids were fascinated. You could walk in the front door in Tucson and climb out the back window in Kuala Lumpur. Some people tried to destroy it, some practically worshiped it; thrill seekers took their chances with it.

Then, suddenly, there was only one house again. No one came out, no one at all. If you dared to enter, you heard voices. All those people who’d been in the houses when they collapsed to one, it sounded like them. You might listen for somebody, maybe your kid sister, who got away from you when the house manifested by the animal clock in the D.C. Zoo, and eventually you’d hear her. You’d hear her, but she’d never hear you.

End

Click for More

Monday, September 27th, 2010

L5O (UWN). – Cosmologists at L5 Observatory reported new calculations of the fate of the universe. It turns out the end is near. Click for more.

>> Comparatively speaking. Scientific estimates of the remaining lifetime of the universe have been reduced from 260 trillion years (plus or minus 55 trillion) to a scant 82 trillion plus or minus 17 trillion. Results are based on assessment of density of dark matter in a randomly selected 0.5% of the visible universe. Professor Llongo Zawekki is senior researcher at the Equatorial Cosmographic Institute on Platform Mbelo: “New methods of quantifying the density of matter between L5 and distant bright objects allow rapid calculation of a much more accurate estimate of time remaining.” Click for more.

UpToTheMomentNews reported a few moments ago that in a European Institutes of News study published moments ago at pollsters.com 62% of respondents reported clicking “click for more” “never or rarely.” Click for more.

PanicinDetroit.com. PiD brings word of an alarming trend sweeping the globe since 14 minutes ago. Suicides up. Click for more.

Billboardsmocked.com. Ads warning that short attention spans kill are verbose, study finds.

@infrastructure world-record # of #bridges closed by jumpers. #ERcrowding worsens. #selfharm

@firstrespondernet Suicide uptick of this a.m. continues, hits hand-held users worst. Clik 4 mor.

@globalmoola Stocks tumble. Sh!t hits fan. Regulators: where were they? Clik 4 mor.

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