Archive for the ‘Trent Walters’ Category
Parameters of the Parametes
Friday, May 14th, 2010
by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Luc Reid, and Trent Walters
This is an exquisite corpse. Each of us wrote 1/3 of the story.
Lost in a thought he couldn’t let go, Chet bumped into a paramete in full plumage. She reared back, inadvertently spurting a few centiliters of rainbow spores from her bejeweled gametoslits.
“Clumsy human! May cleanser grubs devour you alive!”
Chet offered the Bow of Contrition, but the paramete swept past and was gone. Chet glanced over his shoulder but saw nothing.
***
Returning home, Chet hurried to his rooftop lab. He wasn’t allowed to work in the basement since the Thousand Stenches incident. He took out the parcel he’d picked up at Thaumaturge’s Market. As he sought the proper protocol, a gust of wind ripped a page out of his lab notebook. He hoped it wasn’t crucial.
Chet ground a slice of the memory root into a fine powder. He mixed it up into the last of the lemon hummus, scraped it onto a pita chip, and ate. Trembling, he sat on the cool tar roof and waited to “meet” his father–world’s finest thaumatuge–who’d died in a horrible lab accident involving parametes when Chet was three.
Thaumaturgic symbols Chet had inscribed around him set the time frame. Touching his father’s ashes at his mother’s house was to ensure he’d see the right memories. Chet’s fingernails tickled, his nose hairs quivered, and murmuring noises burbled in his ears. This was it. This would be worth saving a year and a half to buy that memory root. A vision–bright colors writhed, bucked–came into focus:
It was a paramete pleasure nest, on a particularly pleasure-filled night. Chet realized: He had bumped into a paramete on the way home. The parametes paused in their feathered flurry and, poking their long necks out of the fray, turned to Chet. This was supposed to be a memory, Chet thought as he backed into a wall of pointy sticks. The parametes surrounded him and glared. Simultaneously, the parametes shook and ruffled their feathers, showering a cascade of cleanser grubs that inched their way toward Chet. Chet tried to leap over them, but they leapt with him, crawling up pant legs, down his shirt collar, through shirt sleeves. He weakened before he was able to strip off his shirt to peel off grubs.
***
Chet awoke on the rooftop, groggy as from a night of indulgence. It must have been one helluva night because he remembered nothing from the day before.
The Complete Guide to Complete Guides
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Although this masquerades as a short story, it actually crams the known universe down your neural network. Each pixel barrages your retina in photons arrayed to convey a trillion trillion trillion bits of information. Glimpsing the first letter of this story has made you want to invest a month’s credits into our bank account, but hey, at least we’re honest.
After reading this far, you have the knowledge of three races from the Milky Way’s more intelligent arthropods stored in your brain. How many of your friends can boast that? (Shortly, all of them. You will convince them to look at the first letters of this story, and they will soon sink a month’s credits in our accounts.)
All you have to know about your new knowledge is how to access it. At present, this technology is limited to Random Access Memory—that is, it may require green tea on your Great Aunt Betsy’s veranda or a quiet afternoon of clinking dominoes at a local café, but it will all surface sooner or later, whether you want it to or not.
In clinical trials, 98.9 % of those about to be crushed by pillow-rock monsters on the planet Xartan are able to recall the necessary escape data to skedaddle with little more than a mild concussion or internal hemorrhaging. Disappointingly, in the same trials, only 3.4% were able to retrieve data on man-eating orchids, lying in wait just the other side of the cliff face–a problem our programmers are working on as we transmit this data to you).
Next year around this time, a whim will compel you to purchase The All-New Complete Guide to Complete Guides, 2.0–updated to prevent your desire to buy our competitors’ viral Complete Guides so that you don’t go into bankruptcy buying alternate guides. Those that do have a 27.6% probability of becoming schizophrenic, hydrophobic, and apoplectic.
That’s it! The last of the data is loaded. Enjoy your new life to the best of your ability.