Archive for the ‘Edd Vick’ Category
Blacker Friday
Friday, December 5th, 2008
The CEO turned to Phyllis Baker. “Lunch for four thousand, please,” he said, looking down on the fleet of school buses pulling into the parking lot. “Peanut butter sandwiches, apples, cookies, juice, that sort of thing.”
It was Take Your Child to Work Day. The big day.
Phyllis made a few notes, and returned to her desk to place the order. Then she walked the cubicles where each boy or girl was installed at a workstation laboriously handwriting their letter.
“Dear Santa: I have been nice all year.”
That’s how each letter would start. Each one would go on to ask for CyberMore, Inc’s success. Some would request a share price increase, some asked for increased orders, some for less expensive supplies. A few children in a pilot program asked for disasters to befall the corporation’s major competitor CompuXS, but Child Resources felt such requests endangered those childrens’ naughty/nice ratio for the next year.
Child Resources. Phyllis’ department, one of the best-funded at CyberMore. The equipment to monitor every employees’ child alone ran over a billion dollars. “Can’t have the little darlings getting into mischief,” the CEO said.
Phyllis loaded food on a gray cart and wheeled it from cubicle to cubicle. To every delighted child she whispered the secret of making invisible ink from apple juice. She suggested that they negate their visible wish. “Wouldn’t you rather have a dog?” she’d say, while CompuXS shares multiplied in her account. “I think you really want a toy, don’t you?”
Covetous Moon
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
Luna glowered at Sol and all the other stars in the universe, and she wished to be like them. They were big and they were bright. They were immense fires burning in space.
And what was she? She was a mirror. She was rock and dust, and she reflected the light of the sun. All she did was circle the Earth, going round and round. The suns, they warmed their planets, and anchored their systems. Space bent around them.
What could she do? Besides sulk, which she admitted was one of her strongest skills. She had no fusion furnace at her core to burn hydrogen and helium. She was not nearly so massive as even the puniest of suns. Luna made barely a dent in spacetime.
Then she must do the best with what she had.
Things flashed by. After study she discovered these were rocks covered in ice, ellipsing their way from the outer clouds. After many trials she learned to focus her gravity on them, drawing them nearer pass by pass. Many slipped her influence to plunge sunward or away into interstellar space or to the planet below; one monstrous planetesimal even sending the Earth into a hazy ice age that destroyed most of the small animals living there.
And slowly, one by one, the rocks smashed into Luna.
She coordinated a thousand thousand of them, arranging it so they would all strike her over a short amount of time. It took millions of circuits of Sol, but she was proud of her accomplishment. Soon enough she would be massive, and her fires would ignite and grow.
More tiny animals flourished on the face of the Earth. They sent her emissaries, riding flimsy metal across the tiny space that separated host from moon. To each of them she whispered her secret.
“Soon. Soon I shall be a sun.”